Love and Longing in Bombay (4 page)

That summer one Sunday afternoon they were dozing in the heat when suddenly Burjor Mama came in and tumbled them both out of bed, roaring what a pair of sleepyhead sissy types, and they laughed with delight because he was their favourite uncle. They knew his arrival meant at least two weeks of unexpected pleasures, excursions to Juhu, sailing trips, films, shows, and sizzling forbidden pavement foods. Their mother came in and hugged him close, and they were embarrassed by her tears, Burjor was her only younger brother and more precious for his profession of soldiering, she was exclaiming now how he was burnt black by the sun, what are they doing to you now, and he was really dark, but Jehangir liked his unceasing whiplike energy and the sharp pointed ends of his handlebar moustache. Barely pausing to thump down his hold-all and his suitcase, he gathered up the whole family, Amir Khan included, and he whisked them off for a drive, and he whistled as he drove. On the way back Jehangir, weighted down with ice cream, fell asleep with his head in his mother’s lap, and once for a moment he awoke and saw, close to his face, his mother’s hand holding her brother’s wrist tenderly and close, her delicate fingers very pale against his skin with the strong corded muscles underneath.

And Jago Antia, walking down the corridor, walking, felt the sticky sleep of childhood and the cosy hum of the car and safety. And then he was at the bottom of a flight of stairs, he knew he had to go up, because it had gone before him, and now he stumbled because the pain came, and it was full of fear, he went up, one two three, and then leaned over, choking. Above him the stairs angled into darkness and the roof he knew so well, and he couldn’t move, again he was trembling, and the voice was speaking somewhere ahead, he said, “I don’t want to go,” but then he heard it again. He knew his hands were shaking, and he said, “All right you bastard, naked, naked,” and he tore at the straps, and then the leg rolled down the stairs to the bottom. He went up, hunching, on hands and knees, his lips curled back and breathing in huge gasps.

Burjor Mama bought them a kite. On Monday morning he had to report in Colaba for work, and so Jehangir’s mother brought up his pressed uniform and put it on the bed in the guest room. Jehangir lay on the bed next to the uniform and took in its peculiar smell, it was a deep olive green, and the bars on the front were of many colours but mainly red and orange, and above a breast pocket it said, B. MEHTA. Jehangir’s mother sat on the bed too and smoothed out the uniform with an open palm, and then Burjor Mama came out of the bathroom in a towel. As he picked up the shirt, Jehangir saw under the
sadra,
under and behind his left arm, a scar shaped like a star, brown and hard against the pale skin. Then Jehangir looked up and he saw his mother’s face, tender and proud and a little angry as she looked at Burjor. After breakfast Soli and Jehangir walked with him to the gate, and he said, “See you later, alligators,” and in the afternoon they waited on the porch for him, reading comics and sipping at huge glasses of squash. When the taxi stopped at the gate they had run forward, whooping, because even before he was out they had seen the large triangle of the kite, and then they ran up without pause to the roof, Soli holding the kite at the ends, and Jehangir following behind with the roll of string. Jehangir held the roll as Soli spun off the
manjha,
and Soli said, watch your fingers, and Burjor showed them how to tie the kite string, once up, once down, and then they had it up in the air, it was doing spirals and rolls, and Soli said, “
Yaar,
that’s a fighting kite!” Nobody was flying to fight with nearby, but when their father came up he laughed and watched them, and when they went down to tea Soli’s fingers were cut from the
manjha,
and when Jehangir asked, Burjor Mama said, “It’s ground glass on the line.”

Now he came up the stairs, his stump bumping on the edges of the stone, and his palm scraped against something metal, but he felt the sting distantly and without interest. The next day Soli lay stretched across the roof, his mouth open. Jago Antia pulled himself up, his arms around a wooden post, and he could see the same two-level roof, Amir Khan’s old room to one side, with its sloping roof coming to the green posts holding it up, beyond that the expanse of brick open to the sky, and then a three-foot drop with a metal ladder leading to the lower level of the roof, and beyond that the treetops and the cold stretch of the ocean. He let go of the post and swayed gently in the rain. Soli walked in front of him, his hands looping back the string, sending the kite fluttering strongly through the sky, and Jehangir held the coil and took up the slack. It flew in circles above them. “Let me fly it,” Jehangir said. “Let me fly it.” But Soli said, “You can’t hold this, it’ll cut you.” “I can hold anything. I can.” “You can’t, it’ll hurt you.” “It won’t. I won’t let it.” And Jehangir ran forward, Soli danced away, light and confident, backwards, and then for a moment his face was surprised, and then he was lying below, three feet below on the ground, and the string flew away from him. Jago Antia dropped to his knee, then fell heavily on his side. He pulled himself through the water, to the edge, next to the metal stairs, and he peered down trying to see the bottom but it seemed endless, but he knew it was only three feet below. How can somebody die falling three feet? He heard the voice asking its question, where shall I go, and he roared into the night, “What do you want? What the hell is it you want?” But it wouldn’t stop, and Jago Antia knelt on the edge and wept, “What do you want,” and finally he said, “Look, look,” and he pushed himself up, leaned forward, and let himself go, and he fell: he saw again Soli backing away, Jehangir reaching up trying to take his hand away from the string, Soli holding his hand far up, and Jehangir helpless against his strength. Then Soli smiling, standing, and Jehangir shouting and running forward and jumping, the solid impact of his small body against Soli’s legs, Soli’s look of surprise, he’s falling, reaching wildly, Jehangir’s hand under the bottom of Soli’s shorts, he holds on and tries, holds and pulls, but then he feels the weight taking him over, and he won’t let go, but he hasn’t the strength, he’s falling with Soli, he feels the impact of the bricks through Soli’s body.

When Jago Antia stirred weakly on the roof, when he looked up, it was dawn. He held himself up and said, “Are you still here? Tell me what you want.” Then he saw at the parapet, very dim and shifting in the grey light, the shape of a small body, a boy looking down over the edge towards the ocean. As Jago Antia watched, the boy turned slowly, and in the weak light he saw that the boy was wearing a uniform of olive green, and he asked, “Where shall I go?” Jago Antia began to speak, but then his voice caught, because he was remembering his next and seventh birthday, the first party without Soli, and his parents holding him between them, soothing him, saying you must want something, and he looking up at their faces, at the lines in his father’s face, the exhaustion in his mother’s eyes. Burjor Mama sits on the carpet behind him with head down, and Amir Khan stands behind, and Jehangir shakes his head, nothing. His mother’s eyes fill with tears, and she kisses him on the forehead, “Baba, it’s all right, let us give you a present,” and his heart breaks beneath a surging weight, but he stands up straight, and looking at her and his father, he says, “I want a uniform.” So Jago Antia looked at the boy as he came closer, and he saw the small letters above the pocket, J. ANTIA, and the sun came up, and he saw the boy clearly, he saw the enormous dark eyes, and in the eyes he saw his vicious and ravenous strength, his courage and his devotion, his silence and his pain, his whole misshapen and magnificent life, and Jago Antia said, “Jehangir, Jehangir, you’re already at home.”

*

Thapa and Amir Khan came up the stairs slowly, and he called out to them, “Come, come. I’m all right.” He was sitting crosslegged, watching the sun move in and out of the clouds.

Thapa squatted beside him. “Was it here?”

“He’s gone. I saw him, and then he vanished.”

“Who?”

Jago Antia shook his head. “Someone I didn’t know before.”

“What was he doing here then?”

“He was lost.” He leaned on both their shoulders, one arm around each, for the descent down the stairs. Somehow, naked and hopping from stair to stair, he was smiling. He knew that nothing had changed. He knew he was still and forever Jago Antia, that for him it was too late for anything but a kind of solitude, that he would give his body to the fire, that in the implacable hills to the north, among the rocks, he and other men and women, each with histories of their own, would find each other for life and for death. And yet he felt free. He sat on the porch, strapping his leg on, and Amir Khan brought out three cups of tea. Thapa wrapped a sheet around Jago Antia, and looking at each other they both laughed. “Thank you,” Jago Antia said. Then they drank the tea together.

W
E HAD BEEN TALKING
about Bombay that evening. Somebody, I think it was Khanna, was telling us about Bahadur Shah, who gave the island to the Portuguese for their help against the Moghuls. “At the beginning of everything great and monstrous,” said Khanna, “is politics.”

“You’re forgetting the other half,” Subramaniam said. “Remember, the Portuguese gave the island to the British as part of Catherine of Braganza’s dowry.”

“Meaning what?” I said.

“Meaning this,” said Subramaniam. “That the beginning and end of everything is a marriage.”

*

What you must understand about Sheila Bijlani is that she was always glamorous. Even nowadays, when in the corners of parties you hear the kind of jealous bitching that goes on and they say there was a day when she was nothing but the daughter of a common chemist-type shopkeeper growing up amongst potions and medicines, you must never forget that the shop was just below Kemp’s Corner. What I mean is that she was a shopkeeper’s daughter, all right, but after all, she saw the glittering women who went in and out of the shop, sometimes for aspirin, sometimes for lipstick, and Sheila watched and learnt a thing or two. So even when you see those early photographs from the Walsingham School—where she was, yes, the poor girl—what you should notice is the artistic arrangement of the hair, which she did herself, and the shortness of the grey skirt, which she achieved every morning with safety pins when she reached school. Even in those days there was no argument that Sheila had the best legs at Walsingham, and so when she finished with college and next we heard that she was going to be a hostess with Air France, it all made sense, I mean who else would you imagine pouring champagne for a movie star in some Frenchly elegant first class cabin or running down the steps of the Eiffel Tower, holding her white stilettos in one tiny and graceful hand—it had to be Sheila.

Air hostessing in those times didn’t mean tossing dinners at drunks on the way back from Dubai or the smell of a Boeing bathroom after a sixteen-hour one-stop from New York. Remember, travelling abroad was rare then, and so all the air hostesses were killingly beautiful and St. Xavier’s graduates, and they all had this perfume of foreign airs which they wafted about wherever they went, and Sheila was the most chic of them all. It could break your heart, the way she smoked a True, placing it ever so delicately between her lips and leaving just a touch of deep deep red on the very tip. And the men came around, the princes and the
Jamsahebs
in their convertibles, promising adventure, the cricketing knights in their blue blazers of glory, the actors’ sons offering dreams of immortality. We used to see Sheila then in a flash as a car roared around the curve on Teen Batti, and we would sigh because somewhere there was a life that was perfect and wonderful.

So we were expecting a prince for Sheila—at least, a flashing star of some sort—but she disappointed us all when she married Bijlani. He was U.S.A.-returned and all, but from some place called Utah and what was electrical engineering anyway when you had Oxford cricketing royalty on the phone—but Sheila liked Bijlani and nobody knew why. He was square and, later, fat and mostly quiet and he told everyone he wanted to make appliances, which was all very well and good, but four-speed electric mixies weren’t exactly dashing, dammit. They met at a party at Cyrus Readymoney’s and Bijlani was sitting quiet in a corner looking uncomfortable, and Sheila watched him for a long time, and when she asked, Readymoney said, “That’s Bijlani, he used to be in school with us but nobody knows his first name. He wants to make mixies.” Then Readymoney, who was dressed in black, snapped his fingers and said, “Let’s boogie, baby,” but Sheila looked up her nose at him—what I mean is she was a foot shorter than him but she somehow managed to look him up and down like he was a worm—and she said, “Why don’t you go into a corner and squeeze your pimples, Cyrus?” and then she went and took charge of Bijlani. Now, you must understand that when nowadays you see old Bijlani looking hugely regal in a black silk jacket it all started that night when Sheila took him out of his corner and tucked in his shirt at the back and took him around, never mind his sweating, and kept him by her side the whole evening. I don’t think he ever tried to understand the whats and whys of what happened, I think Bijlani just took his blessings gratefully into his bosom and built mixies for Sheila. Everyone made fun of him at the start, but they went and got married, and people rolled their eyes, and a year passed and then another and another, and then they suddenly reappeared with an enormous flat on Malabar Hill, and there was a huge intake of breath clear down to Bandra, and now the story was that she had married him for his money. If you tried to tell someone that the first mixie was built with Sheila’s money from a thousand trips up and down an Air France aisle, the next thing you heard was that she was paying you in cash and kind, and more, to say nice things about her. Her success drew out the venom up and down the coast of Bombay, let me tell you, it’s a wonder the sea didn’t curdle and turn yellow.

*

So now Sheila was on the hill, not quite on the top but not quite at the bottom either, and from this base camp she began her steady ascent, not quickly—she had patience and steadiness. It was done over years, it cost money, and the hill resisted, it fought back right from the start. In that first year Sheila threw cocktail parties and lunches and Derby breakfasts, and it became clear to her that the top of the hill was the Boatwalla mansion, which stood on a ridge surrounded by crumbling walls, overlooked by the frame of a new apartment building coming up just above. The mansion wasn’t really on top of the hill, and it was dingy and damp, but Sheila knew it was where she had to go to get to the real top, the only one that mattered. For that first year Sheila sent invitations to Dolly Boatwalla every other week and received typed regrets one after the other, she saw Dolly Boatwalla at parties, and finally she was introduced under an enormous chandelier at a plastics tycoon’s birthday party. Dolly Boatwalla was long and horsy-looking, she looked down an enormous nose and murmured, “
Ha-
aaloo
,” and looked away into the middle distance. Sheila understood that this was part of the rules of current diplomacy and was happy all the same, and even when the next weekend at the racecourse somebody by mistake introduced them again and Dolly said “
Ha-aaloo
” as if for the first time, Sheila didn’t mind a bit and took it as part of her education. Sheila smiled and said, “You look wonderful, what a lovely scarf.” She was willing to let Dolly have her way, and if Dolly had been a little less Boatwalla and a little more sagacious, she could have adopted Sheila and taught her and patronized her in a thousand little ways, but Dolly saw only a little upstart, which Sheila was, Dolly didn’t see the ferocious political will, that hidden glint. This is how wars start.

How it all really began was this: finally Dolly accepted one of Sheila’s invitations. Actually she had no choice but to accept, which may be why she went from being coolly condescending to openly sarcastic. And it started. What happened was that Sheila had finally been able to join the Lunch Club. Not many people in Bombay knew that the Lunch Club existed. Most of the people who knew what it was also knew that they couldn’t be in it. The women in the Lunch Club met once a month for lunch at one of the members’ houses. After lunch they played cards. Then they had tea and went home. That was it, nothing very exciting on the face of it, but if you knew anything you knew that that was where marriages were arranged and sometimes destroyed, deals were made, casually business was felt out, talk went on about this minister in Delhi and So-and-So’s son who was school captain at Mayo. It was the real stuff, you know,
masala
-grinding, how the world works. So Sheila’s name came up, naturally, several times, and, every time, Dolly sniffed and said, Not our type, really, and that finished off Sheila’s chances. But then Sheila made friends, fast ones, and they pushed it, they liked her, for her money, for her nippy wit, for her snap, and maybe it was also that some of them were tired of Dolly, of her Boatwalla sandwiches served soggy but with absolute confidence, of her pronouncements and the delicate way she patted her pursed lips with a napkin after she ate pastries. So they insisted, and it was clear there would be either agreement or a direct struggle, and Dolly decided that it wasn’t worth risking defeat, so finally she flung an eyebrow towards the roof, sighed, and said, “All right, if you must, can we talk about something else, this is really so boring.”

So this was how they all gathered at Sheila’s home. Her new house, that is. It was a white two-storied mansion, really, with a bit of lawn in front and a little behind, and of course even though it was big money for the time it was nothing on the sprawling Boatwalla jungles from colonial times, when you could buy land on the hill for nothing. Still, a house was something, actually it was a lot, and the Lunch Club oohed and exclaimed as they came up the short flight of stairs and into the front room, Sheila had it absolutely right, there were the big double doors inlaid with brass and then a carved wooden elephant’s foot with walking sticks in it and a Ganesha that was chipped and old and grey stone and it had to be some major antique, two huge plants on either side, and a diffused white gleam through a skylight, and in the halo, changeless and eternal as the day that Bijlani threw his future kingdom at her feet, was Sheila, her skin glowing, her hair as dark as a Malabar wave on a moonless night. She welcomed them silently, smiling as they chattered around her, she led them through a long hall, past a study with a huge brown desk and a brass lamp, past a room full of leather-bound books and brown-and-red Kashmiri rugs, and finally into the dining room, where on a stone-topped dining table gleamed twelve place settings in silver. Here, finally, Sheila spoke her first words of the afternoon, “My son,” because a young boy was standing near the table peering at the fantastic ikebana flower arrangement at its centre. Sheila ruffled his hair, and he turned his head to look at her, and the ladies murmured. He was certainly very good-looking. Bijlani’s stolid bulk had passed into a sort of slow, unblinking expressiveness in his eyes, a kind of silence, and he had Sheila’s sharp features. “Say hello,” Sheila said, and he did, shaking hands with each one of them. Mani Mennon laughed over her shoulder as he gravely bowed over her hand, and she said, “Better watch out for this one.” Meanwhile Sheila leaned into the corridor and called, “Ganga! Take Sanjeev to his room, will you?”

Ganga came in, a short wiry woman with her hands still wet from dishes. She had her red sari pulled between her legs and she pushed back a strand of loose hair with one hand. As Sheila walked Sanjeev to the door, Ganga took his other hand, and they smiled at each other over his head. “Isn’t he so cute?” Mani Mennon said, and as she did, Sheila turned and saw the look on Dolly’s face, a kind of absurd pursing of the nostrils, an unmistakable look of offense, as if she had just begun to smell something bad. As everyone went towards the table, Mani Mennon hung back and whispered at Sheila, “She has
French
maids.” It was true. They weren’t actually French, usually Keralans, but all the same the petits fours at the Boatwalla mansion were served by maids in black dresses and those frilly things around their heads. Mani Mennon rolled her eyes. She was Sheila’s main supporter in the Lunch Club, her sponsor, and she hated Dolly Boatwalla but was absolutely silenced by her, robbed of speech and presence of mind by Dolly’s height and ruthlessness and way of commanding a room. Mani Mennon was short and funny and plump and couldn’t think of any reasons why she should be silenced by Dolly, but always was anyway “Boatwalla bitch,” Mani Mennon hissed. Sheila shrugged and took her calmly by the elbow and led her to the others.

“Have some quail,” she said. The food was unusual, small and spicy, made by a Lucknow cook from a Nawabi family. The tastes were light and chased each other across their palates with such foreign essences that they had to exclaim that it was all perfect, because they had never tasted anything like it before. Dolly held a silver fork at an angle and sawed at a tiny wing, and even she was puzzled and pleased, you could see that. Afterwards they sat on the sofas, luxuriously sunk in the pillows and lingering over the sweet dish, a concoction of almonds and cream so light you barely felt it on the tongue. Dolly began to be funny. She sat on a couch by herself, one leg bent over the other, in her cream pants suit, all long lines from the silk sheen of her leg to the nose, which was a little bony but very elegant. She told cruel little stories about people they all knew. All the stories were about people doing silly things or embarrassing themselves or just being stupid and not knowing about something that everybody knew. Dolly had a great sense of timing and was a good mimic and it was impossible not to laugh at her stories. The women sat in a little semicircle around her and laughed. Sheila laughed, and Mani Mennon laughed. Mani Mennon whispered to Sheila, “She must tell stories about me, too,” and then she laughed at a story about a Punjabi woman at the club who pronounced “pizza” the way it was written and who dressed her daughters in too much gold.