Love and Longing in Bombay (29 page)
Read Love and Longing in Bombay Online
Authors: Vikram Chandra
“The man in the hospital told me he had seen the most evil man in the world.”
Shiv opened his eyes. “Who? The Gurkha told you this?”
“No, no,” she said impatiently. “The man in the next bed. He was from the Twenty-third Cavalry.”
And then she told him the story of the most evil man in the world. Shiv listened, and the words came to him through the burning of his blood and the din of his pulse. The shadows drifted in the room and then she was finished. Then Frankie came in and said the train was near, and they walked down the platform, and Shiv held her attaché case in his right hand, and walked slowly behind her. They stood on the platform until the train came, and when the train pulled away neither she nor Shiv waved or raised a hand.
Frankie walked up to him. “You don’t look very well,” Frankie said.
Shiv fainted.
*
His sister was pressing a glass against his lips. Shiv choked on the hot milk and turned his head away from the bitter metal of the glass.
“You have to drink, Shiv,” Anuradha said. “There is this weakness you have to defeat.”
He raised himself up against the pillows, and his body felt light, ready to float. He drank the milk, and saw that Frankie was sitting at the far end of the darkened room. Shiv finished, and handed the empty glass to Anuradha, still feeling the hot liquid burble in his throat. After Anuradha left, Frankie opened the window a little, so that Shiv could see the swirling sky. And there were still the steady drops splattering on the stone outside.
“Crazy man,” Frankie said. “But you’ll be all right. Just a little flu you’ve got.”
Shiv tilted his head, yes, and the room moved around him.
“She was talking to you for a long time,” Frankie said, smiling. “I saw. Very seriously. What was she telling you?”
“She,” Shiv said. He stopped for the friction in his throat. He tried again. “She told me about the most evil man in the world.”
Frankie turned, came and sat next to the bed. “What do you mean?”
Shiv didn’t quite know. What she had told him, how she had told him, that day yesterday was now left to him only in fragments. He remembered it now only across the dark sea of sleep, lost behind the distant horizon of sunset and illness. He reached back and held only slivers. But there was something else in his throat, complete and whole. “I think this is what she told me.” He cleared his throat. It hurt.
I touched my mother’s feet and she sent me to war with an
aarti
.
“Ja, beta,” she said. And so I left her, and the smell of incense, and went. My grandfather and my father had served in the Twenty-third Cavalry, and there I went. Our colonel McNaughten said our job was to kill Germans, and we killed them. We are fighting evil, he said. In the mess there was a cartoon of Hitler crushing Africa under his jackboots. So we killed them on Ruweisat Ridge, on the Rahman track, on the Aqaqir ridge. I saw huge stony fields and burning tanks and trucks and upended guns till the eye could see no more. Long black columns of smoke and oily burning at the root. We killed them. And they killed us. Mahipal Singh, Jagat Singh, Narain Singh. Kirpal Singh in the night when we ran into the First Life Guards and they shot us and we shot them.On the Tel the Germans tried a counterattack. They came at night down a narrowing slope, after a barrage with what they had left. Across a narrow wadi, facing the slope, the 1/9th Suffolk had dug in. They had machine gun positions and antitank and mortars sighted in on the slope. All night the Germans came and the Suffolk cut them down. They could hear the Germans calling to each other. Then the light of flares and the Suffolk firing. The Germans came and tried and tried again and then again. All night it went. Then in the morning the Suffolk counterattacked, and then they opened up and let us through, followed by Bren gun carriers. I was driving the lead armoured car, not only in the troop but in the regiment. We came down the Suffolk side of the wadi with the wheels and tracks crunching on the rocks and we could see the bodies of the Germans covering the slope opposite. They had fallen so close, so many, that it was as if all the rock were covered with faded olive cloth, a green carpet. German bodies. Of course not all of them were dead. But we had killed them. We bounced into the bottom of the wadi and the engine growled and we struggled against a lip of rock and the heavy wheels bit into the ground and rocks crumbled and sprayed and then we were almost over and then I stopped.
I stopped the car, I brought it to a halt. Through the driver’s slit, through the armour plate, not six feet away and ahead, a German was looking at me. He was very young, propped up on an elbow, that strange golden-white hair, and he had the bluest eyes I had ever seen. He was looking at me. He had the bluest eyes I had ever seen, against the dust-covered face, eyes the colour of a sky you or I had never seen. I could not tell if he was dead or alive, and he was looking at me. “Damn it, Huknam,” Captain Duff crackled into my ears. “Push on.” But I could not tell if the man with the blue eyes was dead or alive, and he was looking at me. “Huknam, you’re holding up the whole advance,” Captain Duff shouted, and I thought of the troop behind me, and then the regiment, and the army and armies and all the countries beyond, all held up behind me. So I let in the clutch and the man with the blue eyes was looking at me for a few seconds more and then we went over him and up the slope and the regiment followed. The engine was thundering in my ears as we crunched up and up but as we went up I could not have heard it but I heard them, them outside on the ground calling out. “
Mutti
,” they said. “
Mutti
.” We came up over the ridge and they had nothing left, but thirty-four miles on and the next day we came into a line of anti-tank guns. They were very close to the ground and well-camouflaged and they caught us well, two other cars in our troop burning in the first minute. We saw the muzzle-flashes and tumbled one, but then there was a whang behind and above me and I was deaf, and I raised my hatch and jumped out. The sand was on fire and there was a burning behind my ears and on my shoulders. I fell down and got up and ran as I could and then I knew my shoulders were on fire. I rolled and rolled and finally it was out. The car exploded and I never saw any of them again, not Captain Duff or the others. It must have been an eighty-eight.They put me in a field hospital and finally in Cairo they cut my left arm off. When I had jumped off the car I hadn’t known but it had been shattered all to pieces. They cut my arm off and it was strange but I felt no pain, not then and not afterwards. But there was something else. When finally I could walk I went into the courtyard of the hospital, I liked to sit on the bench there. There were birds in the roof and in the rafters and they came down to be fed, and there was a fountain. One day I sat on the edge of the fountain, which was dry. But there was a Rajput who brought out a bowl of water for the birds and put it, the bowl, into the fountain. In this bowl of water I saw that my eyes had turned blue. I went inside and found a bathroom with a chipped mirror and still my eyes were blue. My eyes were blue and as I looked at the man, the man who was before me, I saw that his face was cruel and the eyes were blue and still, neither alive nor dead, strange in the brown face. He had the bluest eyes in the world. And this was how I met the most evil man in the world.
When Shiv finished he was exhausted. He lay back on the pillows and let his eyes shut. Yet he was afraid to sleep. He felt Frankie pull the sheet up and lay it over his chest.
“Did she see him?” Frankie whispered. “Did she see his eyes.”
“Yes,” Shiv said. “She saw him and she said he had the bluest eyes she had ever seen, not only for an Indian but for English or German or anything else.”
After a moment, Frankie said, “Sleep.”
Shiv stretched under the sheet, turned his neck against the pillow. He felt tired but better, achy but relaxed. He knew he would get better. He slept.
*
Shiv got so much better that his parents started talking about marriage. He splashed around town on his cycle, singing. He laughed at the yellow furrows that his wheels carved deep in the water. His sister and her husband were relieved and then a little concerned, made uneasy by the sudden change, but in Delhi his parents were convinced that all was now well and it was time for him to settle, everything should be settled. Meanwhile Frankie Furtado watched the trains eagerly, even the ones that were not going towards Bombay. He told Shiv that he would use a network of assistant station masters throughout the country to find her, to trace her movements and predict her return. But Shiv was confident that she would come back, and soon. He said to Frankie, “Not to worry, my friend. She’ll come back.” Frankie looked disappointed as his dream of a clandestine spy network vanished, but still, a month and three days later, it gave him tremendous satisfaction to discover her name on a list of advance reservations. He found Shiv on platform three, where he was sitting with his arms flung over the back of a bench, looking out at the slow wind swaying the tall grass.
“My friend,” Frankie said. “Eleven hundred hours tomorrow.”
“What?” Shiv said.
“Eleven hundred hours,” Frankie said out of the side of his mouth, his hands in his pockets and looking away significantly.
Shiv looked up and down the empty length of the platform. “Yes, that, but what?” he said.
Frankie raised an eyebrow, and Shiv burst out laughing. “What, her?”
“Yes, yes, her,” Frankie said, a tremendous smile on his face and not a spy anymore.
Shiv got up, put his arm through Frankie’s, and led him down the platform. “Frankie Furtado,” Shiv said. “You’re a madman.”
Frankie flung his hair back, and raised a declamatory hand to the sky. “I have drunk of the chalice of wine,” he said. “And I am mad.” And Shiv thought that Frankie was indeed mad, and he was mad too, and if there was wine the world must have drunk it too.
The next day, though, Shiv was very rational, very cool when she stepped from the train. “Mrs. Chauhan,” he said, and carried her attaché case to the
tonga.
“What did she say?” Frankie said, pulling at Shiv’s elbow as the
tonga
pulled away. “What did you say?”
“Nothing,” Shiv said. Frankie was stricken. “Don’t worry, Frankie. She’ll come back and I’ll tell her something.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Wait and see.”
The next day Shiv found her again in the waiting room. Again Frankie brought in a tray with cups and a teapot, and again Shiv poured. She drank the tea without speaking, as before, but afterwards she cleared her throat.
“Did you find anybody from the camp on the Irrawaddy?” Shiv said.
“Yes,” she said. “But he wasn’t in that camp. But there was some other news, of an escape at another place. So many of them are back.”
Shiv nodded. They had come back in thousands, from the army, from the prison camps, and from the other army which had fought against its former comrades. And they had hope for her, each of them, and despair.
“But,” she said. “But I met somebody, a woman.”
“Yes?”
“At the bus station at Bareilly. She was a Congress-
walli
.”
Shiv nodded. He started to say, my brother was also, but it caught in his throat. “Yes,” he said.
“She told me something.”
“Yes?”
“She told me about a woman who ran backwards into the future,” she said.
Afterwards, when she, Mrs. Chauhan, had gone, gone away on the train without a wave or a backward glance, Frankie put an arm around Shiv’s shoulder and walked him to the end of the platform. “So?” Frankie said. “So how did you get along?”
“Swimmingly,” Shiv said.
“Tell me all. What did she tell you? Learn anything new?”
“Nothing about her, really.”
“But you were in there so long. What, then?”
“Take a walk, Frankie?”
“Where? There? No, you must be crazy.”
But Shiv could see that Frankie was dying to know, to be told, and so of course Frankie came along with Shiv, in spite of the green grass stains on his white pant legs, and they walked up the slope a far way. And Shiv told him what she had said.
Zingu heard a speech by a politician. Zingu had been coming home to his hut at the end of the day, and it was dark, and so Zingu stood in the dark behind a broken wall and listened to the politician. The politician stood under a petromax lamp and said that all men were equal. The townspeople applauded. Zingu went home in the dark, and he slept quietly, but in the morning he told his wife not to go to work. He told her that there was no need to carry shit anymore. This is what they did, Zingu and his wife. They cleaned the latrines of the twice-born by hand and carried it away on their heads in baskets. But Zingu said his son would be a judge. He told his wife that all men were equal. His wife told him that he was crazy, and took her stinking basket and went to the village. But they killed Zingu anyway, and his son. He wandered around with his son saying all men were equal, and so they caught him in the open fields behind Dhiresa’s mansion and cut Zingu and his son to pieces. One of them held up Zingu’s foot at the end of a
talwar
and said, look at the size of this thing. All men aren’t equal. And that was the end of Zingu, and his son.But that’s not the end of it. Because in Dhiresa’s mansion, on the roof, his daughter-in-law Janamohini was drying her hair. In the winter sunlight Janamohini was lying on a
charpai
on the roof, her long, long black hair spread like a cloud, wet and curling and shining and dark. She was young and beautiful and loved, and the mother of two sons and one daughter, and through the delicious sunny sleep of the contented she heard far away the snick and whick of the swords as they cut Zingu. She stretched reluctantly out of her drowsy dreaming, feeling the welcome soreness in the muscles from the night before, sat up, and looked out over the parapet and saw Zingu’s foot at the end of a sword. She covered her face and screamed, and many people came running up, uncles and aunts and cousins, and comforted her, and told her it was nothing. And then she was content, and smiling again, and she ate well that night.But in the darkness, from the roof, she saw a glow. There were fires in the fields. She saw campfires in the fields, and figures dancing about them. She watched them, for a long time, and she could hear singing. She could hear music. Finally her husband called out to her from the courtyard below, and she went down the stairs. She was happy, she laughed and played with her children, yet later she slipped out of the house, by the small door inset into the spiked gate at the back of the house, and she went into the fields. Janamohini walked for a long time, guided by the glow shining off the sky, and finally she found her campfires. There was indeed music, and singing. There were people dancing near the fires. Janamohini saw they were of despised caste, that they were celebrating a wedding, that they were drinking liquor and eating meat, and the music was happy and they welcomed her, and so she danced with them. She drank their liquor and ate their meat. And she whirled around the campfires.
But then her husband and his brothers, who had found the open door, came and took her back to Dhiresa’s mansion. Janamohini screamed and fought, but the husband said there had been no campfires, no dancers, no liquor, no meat. He said there had been nothing at all. Now Janamohini shrieked, my feet, my feet, look. She said her feet were pointing the wrong way. Upside down they are, she said. Look. And she began to walk backwards. They tried to stop her, but she walked backwards, faster and faster. She began to run backwards. Her husband wept, and she said, can’t you see? If I go fast enough, back and back, I will leap into tomorrow. And her husband wept.
They tried many exorcists then, many a priest, two Tantrics, and a doctor from the town. But Janamohini always walked backwards after that, looking for tomorrow.
But that’s not the end of it. Because on that night, no, the next morning, when the people in Dhiresa’s mansion woke up, the aunts and uncles and cousins, they saw that Janamohini’s hair was white. During that night, and that night only, all of her glorious hair, all of it long and luxurious and oiled and to her knees, all of it, turned white. From the scented clinging black of love it went to the white of madness. All in one night. All this happened in one night.
