Narcopolis (23 page)

I returned to the city in stages. I flew into Delhi and, some days later, took a train to Bombay. I spent most of the final leg standing by the door of the Rajdhani Express and watching the countryside fall past. Late in the night, a shape staggered up to me. His face was wet with blood and pockmarked with smallpox scars and though his mouth was moving I heard no words. Then I realized that the stains were paan, long spatters on his chin and shirt. He wiped his mouth and fell backwards into the compartment. There was silence in the corridor but only for a minute. The door opened again and this time he made it all the way to the sink, where he gripped the sides and bent into the small space between the mirror and the drain to retch into the bowl. I went into the compartment and climbed into my bunk. I fell in and out of sleep. I met Rumi in a dead man’s bar; I imagined I heard gamblers whisper good-luck theorems, complex prayers for the winning of money; I thought I saw the painter Xavier, drinking Martinis and losing money to Dimple, who wore a gold tooth and eye-patch and had an opium pipe dangling between her legs, and to each of the painter’s questions she made the same reply, that the city was a large accumulation of small defeats, nothing more, and each new arrival to the city brought his own minuscule contribution to the inexhaustible pile. I could not understand a thing. Much later, when I went into the corridor, the pockmarked man was still there, still gripping the sink and examining himself in the mirror. Now I understood what he was saying. Sick, he said, I’m sick, which he was, unquestionably.

I dreamed it was twenty years earlier, in 1984, and I was in Colaba. There was a blackout in the city and I kept hearing the cries of small children. I went into a restaurant favoured by Bombay’s Nigerians and my friend was sitting in the back room drinking vodka shots and beer. Candles burned in a row on the bar. I took a stool and said it was good to see him. Where had he been for twenty years? Rumi laughed for a long time. This is the past, he said, not the present. Then he said, I died. Didn’t you hear? He laughed some more, softly, as if to himself. I said, I’m sorry I forgot. What happened to you when you died? He shook his head and smiled. I don’t know why you bother, he said. It’s not like you’ll do anything about it. You’ll just go on pretending. You should ask yourself why: is it because you have no imagination or because it’s the only way you can bear the thought of extinction? To be honest with you, I have no idea why you do it, but you do, all of you, pretend this life is for ever. His eyes were half closed and in the candlelight his face was red. He said: But that isn’t what I came here to tell you. I waited while he tried to catch the bartender’s attention. I asked him to tell me whatever he wanted to tell me, because I’d come a long way to hear it. He banged on the bar top and asked for a frozen vodka shot and a beer back. He said When I was a high-caste Hindu I beat my wife once or twice a month, did you know that? Sometimes with my slipper and sometimes with my hand; I had to teach her the inevitability of obedience. I knew my duty even if she did not. And what was my duty, my difficult duty, which, to begin with, I performed reluctantly, though not without a certain excitement? To teach those who were born from the belly-button of the Lord, from the hip and thigh of the Lord, from lower down, from the Lord’s unmentionable parts, from his nether regions, his Africas and South Americas, from his unnameable parts that may not be spoken of without grave risk to the speaker. I tried to teach the low-born that there is more to the world, immeasurably more than the little they knew. I wanted to teach them radiance and humility, also endurance. I tried to teach my wife and the other women, the low-born women I favoured, the cunts into which I put my wheat-complexioned penis, because I wanted to teach them and also because I liked it. Do you know why I came to this bar? To tell you this, to tell you I beat my wife with my slipper and my open hand. I beat her till she liked it too. Do you hear me? And now that I’ve told you may I go? I said, Wait, why are you telling me this? I don’t have a wife. Rumi looked at me and laughed. He said, You don’t understand a thing. Then he pulled a stone out of his cowboy boot, a flat black stone that had been sharpened to a dull point. Pathar, he said. But that’s not it, or not exactly. Then he drank his shot and finished his beer and walked out of the bar and I sat where I was until I woke up on a train traversing the Indian plains.

Late in the night, I went to the door and manhandled it open. I watched my shadow in a yellow rectangle of light as it slid past the fields into the early dawn. When the train stopped at Kurla, it was raining and I was ragged with sleeplessness. I broke a rule and accepted the first ride to come my way. On the highway, the driver left the motor running to buy a mouthful of tobacco and white paste. He said, Okay, which way do you want to go, the highway or the inner road? It’s completely up to you. I understood that it was a way of testing my knowledge of the city. Depending on which route I chose he’d know if I was a first-timer (and he could cheat me a lot) or an old Bombay hand (and he could only cheat me a little). It was early but the streets were full of people. The walkers were out, in their ugly new shoes and branded tracksuits. Men in green overalls swept the street and there was a garbage truck nearby, and it occurred to me that in all the years I’d lived in Bombay this was the first time I’d seen a garbage truck or city workers in overalls. A trio of Jain nuns crossed a bridge on foot, single-file, in white robes and head-coverings. They carried staffs and small white bundles. With what belongings were the bundles filled? Their slippers and masks were made of thin white cotton and were no protection against the pollution, which was fierce. But it wasn’t for protection against the world that the nuns wore their masks; it was to protect the world from their own small mistakes. When I arrived at my address, the rickshahwallah’s meter was double and a half what it should have been. The meter was covered in black plastic that was hard to see through and impossible to remove. I paid and picked up my bags and stepped into the city. I was soaked through in minutes. Dom, I said, welcome, welcome to Bombay.

I suppose it was a homecoming. I found a place to rent and moved in a few weeks later, when the worst of the monsoons had passed, though it continued to rain every day. It was around the corner from the Bandra building in which I’d lived almost a decade earlier. The apartment was the smallest I’d ever seen. It came with a washing machine and no fridge, cooking spices and no dining table. The saucepan was extra small; it held two cups of water, no more. The stovetop had two burners. There was a collapsible couch, a bookcase, a steel Godrej almirah, an armchair, a kitchenette, a bathroom, all squeezed into three hundred square feet of space. In a week I was hooked up and settled and it was as if I had never left. The city had changed, but it was still a conglomeration of slums on which high-rises had been built. There were new highways but all they did was speed you from one jam to the next. Everything was noise and frenzy, a constant beat, like house music without the release. One night I took a rickshah home. Stuck in a jam on Hill Road, I watched a man work the traffic. He was splayed on all fours, his hunchback exaggerated for effect. The spot was a crossroads fronted by bars and restaurants, with shopping arcades on two sides and a hospital. It was incredibly busy, a long snarl of stop and go, and the hunchback worked it calmly, juggling simultaneous bits of information: make of vehicle, type of passenger, access route between scooter and rickshah, availability of traffic island. He crawled to the window of a new car and I saw his mouth move. Then he held out his hand and a child’s fingers appeared holding a note. He took the money and hump-walked away, but instead of trying one of the other cars he came to my rickshah. When I shook my head, the man smiled. Yaar, long time, he said in Hindi. Remember me from Rashid’s? I remembered: on the street they called him Spiderman.

‘Shankar, are you okay?’

‘Very okay, boss. I got married, bought a house.’ He looked surprised. Then he said, ‘I gave up garad.’

The lights had changed but the driver made no move to start his rickshah, he seemed fascinated by the Spiderman. Around us, Bandra honked and stalled. From a rickshah, the city was all exhaust, face-level and toxic. Shankar asked if I was going to see Rashid. I hadn’t thought about it, but all of a sudden the question, so casually spoken, seemed very important. Say hello to him from me, Shankar said. I can’t do it in person. I go down there, I may not come back. You know how it is.

The driver had a cricket match going on the radio, India vs Pakistan turned up loud. On the way to Rashid’s, for an hour and a half in the lunchtime traffic, I listened to the old Hindu–Muslim sibling anxieties recycled in the guise of expert commentary. I got off at the junction of Shuklaji Street and Arab Gully and caught a quick savour of change. New blocks loomed at the Bombay Central end of the street, short glass-and-steel buildings that seemed to have come up overnight. The brothels and drug dens were gone. In their place were hundreds of tiny cubicles or storefronts, each indistinguishable from the next. The street itself was as cramped and ramshackle as ever, but there was a McDonald’s on the corner and a mini mall and supermarkets, and I knew it was only a matter of time before the rest of the neighbourhood followed. I walked around the street for many dazed minutes. Then I realized I was standing in front of it. The entryway had been bricked up. You had to go around the side and there it was, Rashid’s old khana, now become an office space. There were plywood partitions and desks under tube lighting and young men and women sat at terminals and spoke into headsets. A television in the corner was tuned to a news channel and a boy in a blue uniform went around with tea. The old washing area, with its tin barrels and open drain, had been converted into a kitchenette with two tiny sinks and a miniature fridge. A man sat in a cubicle to the left where the balcony had been. It was the only private space in the room and his was the only desk with a computer and printer. He clicked off his screen and stood up.

‘You are?’

‘Looking for Rashid, he used to own this place. Do you know where I can find him?’

‘Not here. You can leave your number on that pad and I’ll ask him to call you.’

A small group gathered around us.

‘Look, can you tell him an old friend is here to see him? I won’t take much of his time.’

‘You have to give me your name, old friend, some information, otherwise he won’t see you.’

‘Tell him I was a regular here in the old days and I’ve come a long way to pay my respects.’

I saw something flicker, an involuntary something triggered by a word I’d said or a cadence. He motioned to a chair but I stayed where I was. The others dispersed and Jamal and I stood facing each other like cowboys in a chapatti western. He drew first. Yes, I’m Jamal, he said, and his hand was slack and gripless. I asked if his father still lived upstairs. He hesitated. Then he said: My father is no longer in the drug business. Are you sure you want to see him?

The office workers did several things at once, their accents full of the new intonations of cable TV and recognizable anywhere in the world, America via
Friends
and
Seinfeld
. Two women sat at adjoining desks and discussed a client. She has a longassed name, four syllables, said one. What, said the other, like Gonsalves? No, said the first, four sill-a-bells, like O-Doh-her-tee, and I’m like, shorten it, bitch. The second woman said, Call her Doh. Yeah-ah, said the first, I know what to call her. They laughed and looked at me and stopped laughing. I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror tacked to one of the walls. I carried a red leather bag with a change of clothes. I had keys to a borrowed room in the suburbs. I had a notebook and cellphone and money and I had no reason to be there. When Jamal returned, he’d exchanged his white business shirt for a kurta and skullcap. On his feet were jutis I’d never seen in Bombay, dark camel skin, the tips curled in a huge arc.

He said, ‘My father is busy, he isn’t meeting anyone.’

‘He’ll want to see me. I was a friend.’

‘You were a customer. He had many customers and they all thought they were his friends. It was business, but he wasn’t good at it.’

‘Jamal, you don’t like it, I know, but your father is my friend. Can I see him?’

‘Sit down and have tea. We’ll discuss, then we’ll see.’

He said, ‘You’re Dom Ullis. We used to call you Doom or Dum, for “Dum Maro Dum,”’ and he sang the line from the movie. ‘Sometimes I called you Damned Ullis because of the things you said. I’m older now. People my age don’t take our culture lightly. We’re not as tolerant as our fathers. But do you remember? You said religion wasn’t important.’ It surprised me that he remembered a conversation from so many years ago, remembered it as clearly as if it had just occurred. He recalled the exact words Rashid and I had exchanged and forgotten. It was as if he was still hearing them in his head. He said, ‘Do you know what my father told me when I was a child? He said we were descended from the Mughals. I should never forget it and I should carry myself with pride. I did some reading: I studied what the Mughals brought to India, their inventions, the ice and running water and planned gardens to soothe eye and spirit. But what do Indians remember? Only the pyramid of skulls. They say, "See how bloodthirsty the Muslims were: even then they liked to kill."’ I told Jamal there was a difference between him and the Mughals, because the Mughals loved life and poetry and beauty. I said, ‘What do you love except death?’ For some reason, my words pleased him. We moved to his desk, where he took his seat and stared at the computer. The room was full of moisture. I sat in the visitor’s chair and wiped my neck with my hands.

‘You see what they’re doing in Afghanistan?’

‘Who doesn’t? It’s on the news every day.’

‘But do you see? And Iraq? They take ancient Babylon and they fortify it, they make it a restricted area and all the time they are excavating, excavating. They find things that belong to history and they destroy them or steal them.’

‘Yes.’

‘Think if someone did it in Washington DC or Chicago or New York, burned down the libraries, stole antiques, bombed cities and towns. What would happen?’

‘We’d never hear the end of it.’

‘In two years there would be twenty books and movies about it; that is what would happen.’

He was silent for a time. On a board near the computer was a picture of Jamal and a young woman in a burkha. Farheen, my fiancée, he said, when he saw me looking at the picture. Love marriage. She’s older than me by two years. Then he said, One minute, and shouted across the room to a man who was playing a game of bridge on his computer terminal. The man left the game and came over.

‘This is Kumar, Hindu Brahmin. Many of my friends are Brahmins. Kumar has never touched meat in his life.’

Kumar said, ‘Oh don’t talk about meat. I always say animals have more right to exist on the planet than we do.’

Jamal asked Kumar to order more tea for us, dismissing him. Now that he’d shown off his girlfriend, his Brahmin, his urbanity, he could return to his subject.

‘Anybody can become a suicide bomber if they are pushed far enough. Some of my radical friends say they could easily go in that direction. We, I mean, they,’ he paused to smile, to let me know he was joking, ‘they would do it only if they had no other option. You know what they say? There’s always something to look forward to if you become a CP.’ Again he smiled, and said, ‘Citizen of Paradise.’

‘What are the attractions of paradise for a man like you? You’re not powerless and angry.’

He said, I went to a Christian college and my friends are Hindu but I’m Muslim through and through. My father wanted me to get a good education. He chose the best college he could afford, he didn’t care which community ran it. I was one of only four Muslim students. The professors were Hindus and Catholics. One day the mathematics professor found me reading a magazine during his lecture. He slapped me in front of the whole class. He said, ‘Who do you people think you are? Why are you in India? You should be carrying out jihad in Afghanistan.’ Then, during the riots, a mob pulled me off my cycle. I wasn’t wearing a skullcap. I spoke in Marathi, but still they didn’t let me go. I was very young. I broke down. I saw the hijra woman, my father’s kaamvali. She was wearing a dress like a Christian. I pointed at her and called her ma.

I said, Dimple.

He said: How do you think these things made me feel? Powerful? My father made us read the holy book every night. Do you know that about him? Every night: one or two suras. He’d come home stoned out of his head and make me read some verses while his eyes were drooping and drool fell out of his mouth. Jamal stopped, as if he’d run out of words. There was silence for a time. Then he looked at his watch and stood up. He said, My father was an addict. He was addicted to everything. He’s become himself now. Go up. He’s on the first floor.

New beige paint coated the walls but the staircase and the banisters were scuffed wood. I went up, past a locked door on the half landing. The door on the first floor was open and a light was burning in the hall but otherwise the house was dim. Rashid sat in an armchair by an open window and the only noises in the room came from the courtyard below, where children were playing. Their voices echoed against the walls, high voices ringing with fury. He stared out the window but there was no sign that he saw or heard anything. There was a crocheted white skullcap on his head and he was counting prayer beads. I was surprised by his thinness, the expression of unreachability on his face, and by the clothes he was wearing, a blue shirt and new black trousers, Rashid, whose colour had always been white.

Rashidbhai? I said. He flinched and looked wildly around the room. I introduced myself. I said I had been away for many years and had returned only recently. I said it was a pleasure to see him and introduced myself again and the stiffness left his posture.

‘All that was a long time ago.’

He had given up drugs and become a thin man. But he’d lost more than weight. There was nothing about him that was recognizable to me. He’d gotten thin and his charisma was gone.

‘How are you?’

He nodded. Then, changing his mind, he shook his head to indicate he wasn’t well, or that he didn’t know how he was, or that he didn’t care. A girl came in with tea.

‘I often think of those days, when your khana was the best in the city. Some people said in the country.’

‘Useless. It was my mistake, that stupid business.’

‘Not such a big mistake. At least you’re still here.’

‘I’m not here.’

‘Dimple?’ I asked.

‘Dead.’

‘Bengali?’

‘Dead.’

‘Rumi?’

‘Dead.’

‘And yourself?’ I said. ‘Alive?’

He was already drained by the conversation. He blinked at me, meeting my eyes for a moment. Then he shook his thin white-bearded cheeks.

‘Worse each day. And alive.’

The girl came back with a plate of grapes, washed and peeled and set on a white plate. Too much, he said to her. But he reached out his fingers and took some and pushed the plate to me. I took some too. There was silence in the room.

I said, ‘What happened to Dimple?’

The girl offered more grapes.

‘No, no, no,’ he said.

He locked up the office. He picked up his phone and keys and went up. His father was sitting in his room with the fan off and the window open, doing, as far as he could see, absolutely nothing. The old man sat all day in the same position, staring out the window. Sometimes Jamal heard him talking to himself, very softly, as if he didn’t want to be overheard. His father left the room only occasionally, sometimes for a walk, sometimes to the apartment on the half landing where the kaamvali used to live. What he did in the apartment Jamal couldn’t imagine. The place was full of junk and mould and things that needed to be thrown away. Jamal went into his own room and washed his face and neck at the sink. He picked up a towel and thought of Farheen, of her tummy fat, which never failed to excite him. She wore burkhas that she designed herself, patterned burkhas cut like a lab coat, tight around the hips and belly. She reminded him of his father’s kaamvali. Once, in a guest house in Lonavla, he came so many times that he wanted to keep count. Number seven, he said, what do you think of that? I wish you also thought of pleasuring me a little, Farheen replied. Sometimes I wish you were older, or that you acted older. To this he said nothing, because he was the age he was, younger than her by two years, and there was nothing he could do to change it. When he thought about it, about her calm appraisal of him as they fucked, the way she kissed him, the way nothing he did surprised her, as if she’d been fucked many times by many men, and the fact that she never talked about marriage though she was a spinster of twenty-five, already older than his sisters when they’d been married, and when he brought it up all she would say was that he wasn’t ready – it maddened him, it made him want to own her. He ran his fingers through his hair and checked his shave and then he turned off the lights and went out.

Rashid was in his room, thinking about indifference. He and his son rarely spoke because conversation was Jamal’s weapon, a way to antagonize his father. He said whatever came into his head, or, more likely, things that had never entered his head before, strange turns of phrase with no relation to reality. The last time they spoke, Rashid had complained about household finances. He’d said that Jamal was not putting enough aside for unforeseen future occurrences. Jamal’s reply: Who gives a shit about all that? Tell the future to go fuck itself. At that point, the conversation had come to an end and Rashid had returned to his apartment, where he’d picked up his prayer beads and gone to his armchair and wondered if some types of communication were better achieved without words. Communication between animals, for example, was wordless and highly effective. Perhaps communication between father and son should be the same, mostly silent. He thought of the strange one-word text messages Jamal and his friends sent each other: ‘gr8’ and ‘rotflmfao’ and ‘ftds’. It was as if they didn’t care whether they were understood, or they took pleasure in being misunderstood, or they’d decided that the rewards of obscurity outweighed the rewards of clarity. They had distilled communication down to its essence: guttural exclamation, partial understanding, indifference. They did not worry about words and what words meant. They were unmoved by tradition. He thought of the burkha-clad teenage girls he saw on the street, openly smoking on their way to or from school. The sight always gave him a small shock. Now it was time to learn something from the young, in this case the usefulness of indifference. Or it was time to relearn it, for it was a lesson he had once known. He went back to his prayers, his thumb and index finger beginning the count. From the courtyard below he heard the sound of children. It was the sound he heard most days, the shouts and cries of small children, a vast army of them, and it seemed to him at those moments that the city was a pen for unchaperoned children, wild boys and girls who were bringing themselves up on their own, begging, stealing, selling, stoning, and that his son was among them, and there was nothing he could do about it because after all this was Bombay and how else could it be?