Baumgartner's Bombay (29 page)

He was also immensely relieved when Chimanlal told him that he was seeing a doctor and taking medicine, but the relief was momentary for he went on to learn that the doctors were sometimes homeopaths, sometimes
ayurvedic
doctors who treated him with nameless pills and powders, herbs and roots that seemed to do him no good. ‘But I am much better now,’ Chimanlal insisted, ‘and much stronger.’

For some time they kept up their Sunday visits to the Turf Club, laying their bets with an ever greater caution and discretion.

It was at a race meeting that, one afternoon, Chimanlal collapsed against a fence and fainted. Baumgartner held his head in his lap till an ambulance came and removed him to hospital. He fetched the son who threw furious looks at him as if he were responsible and then turned him out of the ward, insisting that he be left alone with his father. Chimanlal was operated on for a tumour that night and did not regain consciousness. Baumgartner joined the mourners at the
cremation,
standing at the edge of the crowd, all of whom shrank away from him, horrified by the presence of a foreigner, a
firanghi
, at such an intensely private rite. Hearing the babbling chant of the priests, seeing the confusion around the pyre, smelling the odours of burnt flesh and charred wood under the noontime sun, Baumgartner too wished he had not come, and shuffled away.

When he visited Chimanlal’s office, he found the son installed at a new stainless steel desk, painted grey and provided with many shining locks. Baumgartner was somewhat reassured to see Lakshmi in the usual place, below the tube of neon lighting, but was soon to find that nothing else was. The boy peremptorily wound up the last bits of business Baumgartner still had with the office and more or less dismissed him with a curtness that betrayed years of pent-up resentment and jealousy. When Baumgartner thought to ask a question about the racehorse he and Chimanlal had jointly owned, the boy gave up his cool self-control and began to shout, ‘What are you talking about? What joint ownership? Show me one paper –’ he banged the table with the flat of his hand, making Baumgartner wince – ‘Show me one paper you have signed or my father has signed –’

‘No, no, there are no papers,’ Baumgartner told him, leaning forward to calm him. ‘Your father and I – we were friends – we didn’t draw up any legal papers – it was just an understanding, a friendship –’

‘My father is no more, Mr Baumgartner,’ the boy said stiffly. ‘He has left for his heavenly abode.’

Baumgartner understood that with Chimanlal’s death all connection with the firm, formal or friendly, had ceased, and got up to leave. The boy did not wish him goodbye.

The next time Lotte pulled at a thread dangling from his cuff and complained about his ancient shoes, Baumgartner told her, ‘But Lotte, I am not earning any more. I am retired, you know, old retired man now. So I can’t buy clothes and look like a fancy man still.’

‘
Mein Gott
, when were you ever a fancy man?’ she cried. ‘I am only asking that you don’t look like a beggar.’

‘
Ach
, a beggar,’ he said dismissively. ‘I have enough, don’t worry. More than many people, Lotte.’

He meant the people who filled the streets of Bombay these days like so many rags or scraps of paper. There seemed to be a drought every year in the land and the pavement filled visibly with a migrant population from the fields and villages. One family had taken up the length of the pavement just outside Hira Niwas. Overnight their tins, rags, ropes, strings, papers and plastic bags had been set up to make a shelter and when the tenants woke next morning, they found a cooking fire burning, tin pots and pans being washed in the gutter and some were actually witnesses to the birth of a new baby on a piece of sacking in the street. The doorman, himself a migrant but an earlier one, driven here by an earlier calamity, now possessor of a job and an official status and therefore infinitely superior to them, yet not so superior as to run no risk of contamination from the starved and the luckless, cursed them from his safe perch in the doorway, and the tenants stopped on their way in or out to express their horror and contempt for the ragged creatures who hardly seemed human to the citizens of the
urbis et prima
of the west. The migrants seemed neither to hear nor speak but Baumgartner, for one, shuffled past with his head bowed and his eyes averted – not to avoid contamination as the others did, but to hide his shame at being alive, fed, sheltered, privileged.

Lotte clicked her tongue with displeasure whenever she had to pass them and told Baumgartner she preferred it if he visited her instead. She herself looked increasingly less affluent, even haggard, the henna dye no longer concealing the grey roots of her once carroty hair, while the printed cotton frocks she wore were faded and no longer replaced. She still had her long, fine legs and liked to pick up her skirts and point her toes and do a little pirouette to remind herself of her halcyon dancing days but – if she had had a few drinks – these were not so successful.

Instead of going back to Hira Niwas after his morning gin
with
Lotte, Baumgartner took to staying on for the afternoon. They would sit at the round brass table and play card-games that were very boring since they were only two players, so boring that they found themselves yawning behind their hands till Lotte finally flung down her cards, pulled her skirts up over her thighs and flung her head back over the sofa, crying, ‘Oh I am so sleepy – these hot, hot afternoons – I am going to bed, Hugo,’ and would go off to her room where he heard her switching on the electric fan and throwing herself into bed with a great thud. He would shuffle off his shoes, lean his head against the sofa, fold his hands over his stomach, and have a nap himself.

Then she called from the bedroom, ‘Don’t pretend you are sleeping there, Hugo, you old goose. Come along and lie down and be comfortable with Lottchen.’

He stumbled to his feet and into the bedroom and gratefully lay down beside her in the darkened room. She flung her arm across his chest, murmuring, ‘Old goose, Hugo,’ and then edged her leg closer to his, finally rolling against him. He responded to her affection with some reluctance, he would have preferred to sleep chastely at one end of the big bed, feeling more as if they were brother and sister than anything else. Then the thought of having had Lotte as a sister, in that shining flat in Berlin, with Mutti as their mother, overcame him and made him snort with laughter into her grey and red curls and draw an arm around her.

On hot summer afternoons she might push him away and say petulantly, ‘
Ach
, Hugo, you are sweating – and you never wash your shirts even.’ He only laughed and did not mind, perfectly content to lie on his side of the bed, dozing till they heard the servant boy making tea in the kitchen at five o’clock, when she gave him a fierce kick with her naked foot, hissing ‘Get up – go to the bathroom as if you were there for a wash – Raju must not see.’ But by the casual insolence with which he flung down the tea tray beside them, Raju showed that he had of course seen, and knew. Lotte was terrified. What would Kanti say? What would Kanti do?

Actually Kanti visited her less and less, kept away by ill health to begin with and then by religion. He worked very little, leaving all his business to his sons, and even if he came to Bombay he spent all his time by the little altar he had set up in one corner of the bedroom, Lotte complained, praying and fasting and observing all the rituals of the Hindu year.

‘Repenting his wicked ways?’ Baumgartner asked mischievously, giving Lotte a little nudge as they sat drinking their gimlets in his flat, and Lotte gave his hand an angry smack so that his drink spilt.

One night, Lotte, very drunk, arrived at his flat and insisted Baumgartner go out with her. She directed the taxi to Julius and Gisi’s flat which they found lit up for a party. Whilst Baumgartner protested, ‘
Ach
, Lotte, I don’t want to go – please let us go home –’ she dragged him on to the pavement outside their window where she stood screaming, ‘Shanghai Lily, hey! Hey, Shanghai Lily!’ and when he tried to pull her away, turned and hit him. He walked off and left her. Two policemen arrived in a jeep, jumped out, grabbed her by the arms and lifted her into the jeep. She was taken to a police
chowki
and accused of drunken brawling: it seemed Gisela had telephoned from her flat and complained. At dawn, Baumgartner was rung up and told to come and bail her out. Making her bathe and shower in his flat, then forcing her to eat a bowl of cornflakes and milk, he reproached her for her drunkenness, genuinely shocked by her behaviour.

‘
Ach
, Hugo,’ she protested, looking at him with a suddenly thin and pale face, ‘it was because of
you
. What I can’t take from Gisi is how she treated
you
,’ and he did not know how to show his emotion so he took the napkin and wiped her chin on to which milk had trickled like a child’s.

They never spoke of that episode again though it was the precursor of others. Kanti’s illness and death made her seem to lose control over herself and she became defiant. In the small room she moved to after settling a case brought against her by
his
sons, she seemed to get into perpetual rows with the neighbours. More than once the police had to come and intervene so that the neighbourhood brawl did not turn into a riot, a sequence of events only too common in Bombay, and Baumgartner was occasionally summoned as a mediator. ‘A
memsahib
using such language,’ the scandalised policemen told him, and he was ashamed. He became nervous of any involvement in Lotte’s affairs, wished he could keep to himself, but there was too long an association, too deeply ingrained a habit, and gradually, as she became drawn into her new neighbourhood and its own cast of characters and their affairs, violent and otherwise, the von Roths at least ceased to be a thorn in her side; she no longer felt any interest in them. The art gallery in the hotel lobby had closed down to make way for a boutique where silk scarves and sequinned purses were sold at greatly inflated prices to foreign tourists, and the von Roths ran their business from their own flat that Gala kept barred to all acquaintances from their past after the disgraceful affair of the drunken Lotte.

‘Hmff,’ sniffed Lotte after a very unsatisfactory conversation on the telephone that was all that Gala permitted her, ‘she doesn’t want us to see the flat is not so grand as she pretends. Julius is not doing so fine any longer. Indian painters have Indian patrons now – rich businessmen, industrialists – big men, not like my poor Kanti. They don’t want a European telling them what is good, what to buy, by now they have their own taste. So old Julius is finding business poor.’

‘How do you know?’ Baumgartner asked, genuinely curious.

Lotte plucked her skirt over her knee. ‘She told me,’ she replied, ‘that Gisi.’ When Baumgartner looked dubious, she exploded, ‘What do you think? That we don’t talk together any more? After so many years, so much we have been through together? Who will she talk to if not old Lotte from Calcutta? Everyone thinks that she is so clever – but I know she is just an old goose.’

Baumgartner felt too tired to dispute this. ‘Oh, they will
find
some way to live,’ he sighed. He had not been to the races since Chimanlal’s death, and he had last seen Julius in the street outside Akbarally’s, with a shopping bag about which he had seemed suddenly embarrassed, mumbling something about having to help Gala with a party she was giving that night. His clothes had looked frail, as during the years in camp; he still had his flossy hair carefully combed over his progressively balder scalp and looked more than ever like an old sheep. ‘Poor Gala,’ he piped, ‘the heat is so bad for her. You know she cannot stand the climate. Oh, Hugo, why did we not go back? We should have gone back long, long ago,’ he mourned, making Baumgartner want to snort, ‘Go back
where
? To what?’ But he did not – it was against the rules.

‘Of course they will somehow live,’ Lotte said. ‘You think our Lily will let him sit and do nothing – like
you
?’

Nothing, then, was what life dwindled down to, but Baumgartner found he enjoyed that nothing more than he had enjoyed anything. Perhaps enjoyment was too strong a word for such mild pleasures as he now knew – watching his cats devour a bag of fish he had brought them, dozing with one of them on his lap for company, strolling down to Lotte’s for a drink – but they suited him. He felt his life blur, turn grey, like a curtain wrapping him in its dusty felt. If he became aware, from time to time, that the world beyond the curtain was growing steadily more crowded, more clamorous, and the lives of others more hectic, more chaotic, then he felt only relief that his had never been a part of the mainstream. Always, somehow, he had escaped the mainstream.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE BOY WAS
very late.

Baumgartner had cleared away the dinner, scraping the uneaten
pish-pash
into the cats’ plates, washing the dishes and putting them away. He himself had lost his appetite – if one left the eating too late, one found the appetite had dwindled and gone. Now he sat in his old cane chair by the door that opened on to the narrow balcony and looked at the racing papers of the week before. Although he had not been to the races since the day Chimanlal collapsed at the Turf Club, he still bought the racing papers from the urchins who swarmed around the cars waiting at traffic lights and peddled their wares at the top of their cockerel voices. To begin with he made a great show of cleaning his spectacles, adjusting them to his ears and nose, then studying last Sunday’s programme, running his finger along the list of names as though he were looking for prospective winners. But it was only an act, put on to show the cats he was a busy man with his own life, not entirely at their service. One came and lay across his feet, something he rarely did in such hot weather. Another stood by his knee, dug her claws into the material of his trousers, managed to inject their tips into his flesh, and then dropped away, visibly pleased at having left her mark. A third climbed on to the chair back and balanced there till he fell on to Baumgartner’s neck, then sprang off with a yowl and retired to the balcony. Baumgartner knew he was being summoned.
Folding
up the racing paper and putting it away with a show of reluctance, he went out on to the balcony that overlooked nothing but the narrow, enclosed lane and the blank wall on the other side.