Amit Chaudhuri: Real Time: Stories and a Reminiscence

College at night, passing the beediwalla

and the bus stop where commuters stood waiting;

here, where once I’d “hung out”

with fellow students, were desultory families,

playing cards on the pavement, each, insouciantly,

revealing their hand to the passerby; prostitutes

glowed palely against pillars guarding the college and Lund

& Blockley, where students at day glanced right

a moment before they crossed the road; and addicts

of smack who loitered between these, speaking

a lingua of broken English and Bombay Hindi,

with whom I opened conversations that ended

in a wry plea for money. They didn’t want you for company

but to slip in that plea. We came to know

each other by sight. Thus that curved stretch

before Elphinstone, going past Flora Fountain,

towards Dadabhai Naoroji Road, where the pillars

became Zoroastrian lions, containing their power,

the banks closed, the odd mix of activity

and purpose at eleven-thirty at night, the road

seeming to widen on the left where my school

and childhood and the sugarcane-juice stall used to be.

Nineteen eighty-three, I left for England. In ’85,

on my annual trip home, searching for the car

in the parking lot in Kala Ghoda between

Rhythm House and the Jehangir Art Gallery, I heard

my name being called out: “Amit.” I turned

and saw it was Suresh beckoning to me

from behind the Ambassador. I went up to him

and said, as if I were seeing him after a fortnight’s absence

from school, “Suresh! Where have you been?”

“Good to see you — where are you these days?” He was taller

than me now: about six feet tall,

good-looking, if dressed in average working clothes,

crouched behind the car as if he were hiding behind it.

“I’m in England — I’m back for a few months—

but tell me about yourself.” As the art crowd in kurtas

ascended the wide steps of the Gallery, he lowered

his voice melodramatically: “I’m fucked,

yaar. I need help. Amit, will you be my friend?”

Disarmed by this straightforward appeal, I asked,

“Why, what’s the matter?” as if I’d already said “Yes”

to the question. Truth to tell, I needed a friend

myself at that time. We go to each other

from our own private compulsions. I’ve seldom

been wholly comfortable or open

with people who share my background or “interests”

and have ended up acquiring an eclectic set

of companions. “I’m on smack, yaar,” he said.

There were no outward signs. He had shaved; his trousers

were conventionally pressed; his hair combed back

and oiled. “So it’s true, what I heard. How did it

happen?” “It happened in Elphi…” We were walking;

he nodded to the stall with cigarettes and Frooti

tetrapacks beyond the BEST terminus,

and the scurrying ragpickers beside it. “Those bastards are pushers.

A friend from Elphi said, ‘Just have a drag, yaar.’”

He shook his head with a sort of pride. “That’s how

I got hooked. That bastard, if I could take my re-

re-revenge…” He looked oddly pleased with himself,

compromised only by the blip of the stammer

that would infrequently return, like a signal,

to his speech, and once made one or two girls giggle.

I entered his life; saw him join “rehab” with Dr.

Yusuf Merchant, get his father to pay

for both his habit and his rehabilitation

— his father, whom he so resembles, both of them

complaining about each other and bickering

like a married couple — try to escape to Dubai

or to hotel management or a brief job as a Blue Dart

courier; during clear intervals

reluctantly “help” his father with his small-time

but extant business, making industrial accessories.

What foolish illusion made that man

put his son in Cathedral, among the children of the Tatas,

minor ministers, consuls, film actors

and actresses (Nutan’s son; I remember her waiting

for him, thin and nervous, in slacks, after school;

Sunil Dutt’s daughter, gentle, with kohl

in her eyes)? Three sisters; the youngest got married

and moved to Prabhadevi; a tame and stable marriage

after infatuation and heartbreak with a German. The oldest,

whose sexual persuasion Suresh claimed he wasn’t sure of,

emigrated to Germany; the one in the middle

stayed single, and works for a travel agent, one

of the two rented rooms this family lives in

in Colaba, partitioned between brother and sister.

“Why doesn’t she go away?” he’d ask

irately as he shaved. He would cut himself — tiny

nicks like spattered paint, wash himself with soap.

He never applied aftershave. This boxer

was afraid of its sting. I gave him a T-shirt

that said “Oxford University” in white Gothic letters;

he wore it occasionally as he went out into the great,

unruly, smelly stream of life on the Causeway.

He took an inordinately long time getting ready.

Next to him was the oblong bathtub that was used

as storage space for water; brimming idly—

Bombay’s perpetual water shortage; the taps

dry for most of the day, the flush

not working. Then going out. Our walks

by turns quarrelsome, silent, jocular,

amidst the crowds that jostled before the Taj, where on other

days I’d sit in the Sea Lounge, listening

to the piano; now pressing past balloon sellers

and pushers, to whom he claimed he was immune

in my company. My father retired, and later

my parents moved from this city; they sold

their lovely post-retirement flat in St. Cyril Road

in Bandra. And Suresh kept “slipping” and going

back to smack. “An addict can smell out drugs anywhere

he is,” he boasted. Britannia Biscuits

had changed, as things do, been touched by scandal, in a tussle

for power between two share-buying players,

a textile tycoon, Nusli Wadia, Jinnah’s

grandson, and a Singaporean cashew prince, ending

in the latter’s arrest and his death in prison.

“Take me out of here,” said Suresh, meaning “Colaba.”

When we come to Bombay these days — my wife,

myself, and our infant daughter — we stay

in either the Yacht or WIAA Club or

are put up for a few nights at the President Hotel

— this five-star orphanage or dharamshala—

when my book readings beckon. We go to see Suresh

in his room in Colaba, or he comes to see us;

he’s still shy with my wife, and would rather speak with me,

but makes dramatic attempts to win over my daughter.

He’s going bald. Since I’ve no home in this city,

we stop for lunch and wonton soup

at the Bombay Gymkhana, whose verandah is the only

place I can put down this mewling, regurgitating

baby on a wicker chair. People

around us are eating; the curious mix

of children from Cathedral School and lawyers

and managers and society ladies and poets

like Imtiaz Dharker, and editors of newspapers.

Not infrequently, I run into

old school friends or acquaintances

like Anurang Jain, one of the twins,

Anurang and Tarang, who now lives in

Aurangabad, a businessman,

or Anant Balani, film producer,

still awaiting his big success,

or Saran, who always says “Hello”

although I didn’t know him very well in school.

It’s odd how the bullies have calmed down, how

the slimes and duds and good guys have

alike transformed into gentlemen,

or moderate successes, or ordinary

executives. There’s Shireen — who was