Amit Chaudhuri: Real Time: Stories and a Reminiscence

in my class before I was transferred

to B, both of us teased pitilessly

because she lived on the floor below me in

Il Palazzo. Her father, an irascible

cardiologist, practised the violin furiously

for relaxation. My friends burst into “Knock three

times on the ceiling if you want me”

whenever they saw her to embarrass me.

The first flush of that shame’s over. She’s

a solicitor, and looks assured. “Amit,”

brown hair around her freckled face, “I read about you

in the papers.” She’s nicer than I can ever remember.

After this, we ignore each other, no longer

burdened with having to fulfil the jejune

prophecy of that popular song. Suresh

comes regularly if reluctantly

(apprehensive of whom he’ll run into),

and shares chicken Manchurian and

fried rice. Each day we study the menu.

This is the last stop on my book tour.

Suresh has been seven years “clean,” ever since

his mother, whom he loved more than anyone else

(and whom he also blames for loving him—

“She made me weak”), this short, round-bellied

Mangalorean woman, for whom a picture

of the Madonna is illuminated

in their drawing room, died; she had a congenital

heart murmur not unlike the one I was born with,

which tired her at times and made her look absent;

she was too old to operate on. This — her life’s soft

companion — didn’t kill her; one day

her synthetic negligee caught fire

as she was heating milk on the stove. Suresh,

who was still flirting with smack, spending more time

at home than at work, overheard her screams

and saw her from the ventilator windows

above the doors to the other room, which

were locked. Since then, he’s stopped “taking,” and

they commemorate her death once a year, the father,

the son, and the still single sister, whom he

still resents but accepts now, philosophically;

though in what way the sight of a mother burning

should be a reprimand to an old habit,

I don’t know. Anyway, he has not the means

to compose her a more fit epitaph than this,

this second attempt to return, like a prodigal

son, to “normal life,” for her sake

and his, though “normal life,” rediscovered,

is an empty promise filled with cars and people

and noises that frighten him slightly. He tells me

how fourteen years of semi-oblivion and a sort

of absence have left him maladjusted

and inept and unsure of himself. The book tour

goes on even after it’s supposed to be over; reporters

who haven’t read my book come and ask me questions.

It’s Valentine’s Day. Elsewhere in the city,

the Shiv Sena is burning Valentine cards.

Here, in the Gymkhana, young couples hold hands

and look wide-eyed and unnaturally devout and composed.

Evening brings the dark to the maidan, and, with it,

mosquitoes. This morning, we mentioned Sujata

Birla, rhetorically. “Hey, d’you remember

Sujata?” “Yeah,” in a tone of disbelief,

“she died in a plane crash, yaar.” We already

know this, how she married after college, was divorced,

then married again — a happy flowering; on that plane

were her mother and her father, Ashok Birla. The husband

wasn’t with them that day. I pick up my daughter

and we head for Pipewalla Building in a taxi,

my wife carrying the feeding beaker and the packet

with the sari she bought from Cottage Industries

earlier today. For her, this city

means shopping expeditions, leather handbags

to admire in Csango, which she’ll visit even if

she buys nothing, only inspects and desires.

“Looking at” costs nothing; but the proprietor

doesn’t mind, as if he knows it’s somehow connected

to business. Then the haunts whose names

she’s inherited from my parents; the incredibly Olympian

Joy Shoes; R. H. Rai; Ramniklal Zaveri

to exchange an old ornament; from shop to shop, as

the book tour fizzles out, and we find we’re at a loose end

with two days left in this city, and nowhere

to go. Suresh has promised to take us

for dhansak to the Paradise Café. Here, by the entrance

near the Kodak Studio on the main road, is the shrine,

already wet with religious dousings and drownings,

and a small driveway where Suresh’s scooter

is parked. He lives on the second floor; on the third

is a guest house where Iranians and Arabs put up.

Below, in the compound, is a detached room

which, for five years, has been a Shiv Sena office. Tonight

it wears a lit and festive air. Two policemen

have been posted by the gates, as if to say

“We’re taking no chances.” When one of them, corpulent

and whiskered, smiles at my daughter (she, at a year

and a half, is a veteran talker and walker, and

wanders near him), I feel a disquiet.

She smiles back at him, as if it’s possible

to make friends with the intractable. He relaxes;

glances at me. Is he guarding the Sena

or against it? We go to the building, conferring,

making sure not to look back over our shoulders.

“He hangs out at the Wayside Inn till four.”

Thus, Adil, whose eye, looking away,

promises, says a young poet, to conceal something.

Leave this watering hole behind, Bombay Gym,

and take my wife and half-sleeping child

in a taxi towards Jehangir Art Gallery.

Installations this week in Kala Ghoda.

“You’d better move fast, if you want to catch him,” Adil

says, consulting, in his squinty, alien way,

my watch. In the Inn, I don’t see him at first,

Kolatkar, his face youthful, his eyes

baleful, like a student’s, his hair and moustache

grey-white, as if they were made of cotton wool, a prankster’s

disguise. He’s concealed in the shadows, open

to strangers, but forewarned of me.

The Inn’s semi-deserted; the famous smell

of fish and chips has disappeared; some of the chairs

and tables have been enlisted for a reading

tonight. I go up, to introduce myself

before Thursday ends, and this man melts away.

He’s about seventy years old; he

appraises me as a college boy would a teacher

who’s interrupted him smoking marijuana.

He says he’s heard of me; invites

me to sit down. “I saw your poster

in Crossroads yesterday. You’re reading day after,

aren’t you?” (All these new bookshops

and shopping malls — Crossroads, Crosswords—

where books and CDs and stationery and toys

are sold in busy neighbourliness. And exhortations

to go to Lotus. “Have you been to Lotus? It’s quite

far away, but it’s a real bookshop. The books

are fantastic!”) I’ve been trying to track down this

man to persuade him to let my publishers

reissue his first book of poems, Jejuri,

a sequence, published in ’76, about a visit

to the obscure, eponymous pilgrimage town

in Maharashtra. Arvind Mehrotra says it’s

“the best-loved book of poems by an Indian writer

in English,” or words to similar effect, with good

reason. He confesses his shyness of contracts

while ordering me a coffee. We’re joined

by a bespectacled itinerant from the ad world, who

has an omelette and toast. “But if you’re involved …

I don’t mind.” I try not to interrupt as he

drifts lazily into conversation with the spectacled man,

but ask him to keep a signed copy of