The Space Between Us (28 page)

And yet she can picture the Pathan’s face as if she had run into him yesterday. She can see the milky gray of his sad eyes, which she always fancied reflected the skies of his homeland. She can recall the parched brown skin on a face as rugged as the country he came from. She can see the long nose, straight as a mountain range, and the thin lips that twisted like a river when he was concentrating on his work. Above all, she remembers the beautiful brown hands, hands that created poetry out of nothing, that turned
lifeless pieces of rubber into magical objects that brought joy to the eyes of children.

Bhima feels something lighten in her heart. The sky is getting darker now, losing its dazzling light show, but the wind and the comforting thrashing of the sea continue to soothe her. Amid the screams, yells, and endless chatter of the people around her, she imagines she hears the Pathan’s low, deep voice, comforting her, encouraging her, urging her on. His voice has come to her, over the mountains and over the years, using the wind as his messenger. The regret that she has always felt at not speaking to him, at not asking him about his life, leaves her now. Because somehow, even without her questioning, the Pathan has spoken to her. She remembers how his sunken cheeks used to puff with the air he blew into the rubber tubing of the deflated balloons, how his long, brown fingers used to run lightly down the slick bodies of the swollen balloons, like Krishna’s fluid fingers as he played his flute. Bhima marvels at the paradox: A solitary man, an exile, a man without a country or a family, had still succeeded in creating dreamworlds for hundreds of children, had entered the homes of strangers with his creations of color and fantasy and magic. A man who would never again touch or kiss the sweet faces of his own children brought smiles to the faces of other people’s children. Like a musician, the Pathan had learned how to make a song out of his loneliness. Like a magician, he had learned how to use sheer air to contort limp pieces of rubber into objects of happiness. Empty-handed, he had built a world.

Everything around Bhima falls silent. The white poodles cease their barking; the car horns do not honk; the vendors do not call out the superiority of their wares. All Bhima can hear is the rhythmic sound of the lapping waves and the Pathan’s gentle words, murmuring to her, weaving a melody that’s equal parts loneliness and the recipe for overcoming loneliness; a melody that speaks of
both the bitterness of exile and the sweetness of solitariness, of the fear of being alone in the world and the freedom that flaps its wings just below that fear. Bhima sits still, listening to the music. And soon the shenai stops its shrill, tragic wail, and after a few minutes the sitar ceases its heart-numbing drone, and then all that’s left is a tabla beat—incessant, surging, powerful. Soon, the loneliness stops its wailing, and then the fear ceases its numbing drone, and all that is left is freedom—incessant, surging, and powerful.

Bhima laughs out loud. The couple sitting next to her flinch at the sight of an old woman sitting cross-legged on the cement wall and laughing to herself. “Probably thinks she’s the laughing Buddha,” the man whispers to his girlfriend.

“Too skinny,” she whispers back.

Bhima doesn’t hear them. She is taking her orders from a different authority now, following the fluttering sound in her ears, the sound of flapping wings, the sound of learning how to fly. Freedom.

She is almost grateful to Viraf baba now, for his treachery has been the knife that has cut the thread that kept her bound for so long.

She scrambles off the wall, knowing what she must do. In her haste, she does not wait for the wobbly hip joint to find its place before she begins to walk, and her punishment is a shooting pain that runs down the dark branch of her left leg. But tonight she does not mind, and even before the fire of the pain dies down, she is fiddling with her sari, looking for the twenty rupees she knows she has there. For a quick second, she thinks of Maya before the stove, waiting for her grandmother to get home, and she feels a twinge of guilt at depriving the girl of the food that the twenty rupees would buy. But then she thinks, What is this paltry sum worth anymore in today’s Bombay? What will it buy me, a few lumps of sugar? I’ll just take my tea without sugar for the next few weeks. For before she can go on, before she can decide what excuse to give Maya when she gets home,
and which family to approach for another job, before she must confront the terrible reality of unemployment and finding work and all the humiliations that may entail, before she can decide whether to indulge in or ignore the fluttering sounds of freedom, she must do this one thing. She must honor the Pathan babu’s memory.

In her eagerness, she almost walks by the young man who is squatting on the pavement, his face obscured by the balloons he is holding up. She takes a few steps back and stops in front of him, eyeing the balloons attached to thin sticks that make them look like large lollipops. “This all the balloons you have?” she asks.

The man leaps to his feet, an eager grin on his face. “Arre, mausi, so-so many balloons I am having,” he says. “All different-different colors—yellow, red, orange. What more you are wanting?”

She shakes her head impatiently. “Wanting the other kind. Any other balloonwallas here?”

He eyes her resentfully, torn between wanting to make a sale and a faint sense of loyalty to his fellow balloon sellers. “Hah,” he says finally. “Farther down, if you keep walking, there’s another fellow, selling gas balloons. But he’s very far down,” he adds as a warning.

“I’m grateful,” Bhima says to him. She walks swiftly now, deftly avoiding the people coming toward her from the opposite direction. At one point, she marvels at how much faster she can move alone, compared with when she’s with Maya. And again she hears the sound of fluttering wings. Freedom. It has been so many years since she’s ever been alone like this.

She is almost out of breath when she finally reaches the second balloonwalla. The crowds are thinner here, and she wonders briefly why the man works out of this particular spot. But then she remembers what Serabai used to tell her about how the police and the local gang lords worked hand in hand to charge the vendors money
for allotting them a spot. Probably pays less to work here, she thinks.

Her heart jumps with delight when she spots the gas cylinder. So he has the kind of balloon she wants. Bhima waits impatiently as he fills a balloon for a child who is clutching her father’s hand while staring at the swelling balloon in wonder. “What if it bursts?” she asks tearfully.

The balloon man smiles. “Ah, no bursting, expert job, baby,” he says.

When it is her turn, the man looks around her for a child and then stares at her with a puzzled expression. “How much for a balloon?” she asks, but before he can reply, she thrusts the twenty-rupee note toward him. “I want all the balloons I can get for this much money,” she says.

The man looks at her as if he is afraid to trust his good luck. “Buying for a party for your mistress’s house?” he says conversationally as he begins to fill each balloon.

“I have no mistress,” Bhima says curtly. And instead of tasting as bitter as aspirin, instead of tearing her mouth like jagged pieces of glass, the words taste sweet as a Cadbury’s chocolate éclair in her mouth. “Hah. No mistress,” she repeats.

When he is done, she gathers in the balloons like a bouquet of flowers, holding them by their long strings as they bob and weave over her head. The sky is now black, with no hint of its earlier fire, and the balloons dance in the wind like purple and red and blue heads against the blackness of the sky. Under the glow of the streetlights, she can see the curious looks of people walking by. Occasionally, a child, overcome with envy, pulls out of his mother’s arms and reaches for one of the balloons. Bhima pretends not to notice. All along the dark water, she sees the glittering Queen’s Necklace, the affectionate name given to the sparkling
curve of the lights from streetlamps as they bend around the coast, all the way from Malabar Hill to Nariman Point.

The wind tries to tug the strings from her hand, but she tightens her grip against its power. She looks around, unsure of what to do next, when her eyes fall on a spot where the cement wall has crumbled, creating a gap from where to step down onto the rocks that are battered by the sea. She squats near the crumbling wall and removes her slippers. She wriggles her buttocks until she is at the edge of the precipice before gingerly dangling one foot until it makes contact with the rocks. Balancing on that foot and still clenching the strings of the balloons, which are dancing like gay ghosts above her head, she places the other foot on the rock, steadying herself briefly with her hand against the wall before letting go completely. She stands still for a second, surveying the water around her, relying more on her hearing than on her sight.

She feels an urge to get closer to the water, to feel its cool wetness on her feet. Half-crouching, using the tips of her fingers for support, she inches closer to the water, stepping from rock to rock. As she makes her way forward, the boulders become moist and slippery. The wind is whipping her like a cruel master, trying to pull the balloons out of her hands. Despite the slipperiness of the rocks, she moves more deftly now, her feet curling and flexing around the contours of the rocks. She feels the water gurgling around her feet, and the sounds of the water and the wind drown out the whisperings of the Pathan’s words, drown out the sounds of the city. Bombay seems far away now, and she thinks she wouldn’t be surprised if she looked back and found that the city had fallen away—that the taxicabs had vanished, the tall buildings had collapsed, the people had disappeared. In the presence of immortality—the endlessly churning sea, the plowed fields of the sky, the loose gypsy wind—the rest of her life feels absurdly, ridiculously mortal and transient. Transient as money, fragile as
love. As ethereal and ready to pop as these balloons that are dancing in the wind.

And now she finally understands what she has always observed on people’s faces when they are at the seaside. Years ago, when she and Gopal used to come to here, she would notice how people’s faces turned slightly upward when they stared at the sea, as if they were straining to see a trace of God or were hearing the silent humming of the universe; she would notice how, at the beach, people’s faces became soft and wistful, reminding her of the expressions on the faces of the sweet old dogs that roamed the streets of Bombay. As if they were all sniffing the salty air for transcendence, for something that would allow them to escape the familiar prisons of their own skin. In the temples and the shrines, their heads were bowed and their faces small, fearful, and respectful, shrunk into insignificance by the ritualized chanting of the priests. But when they gazed at the sea, people held their heads up, and their faces became curious and open, as if they were searching for something that linked them to the sun and the stars, looking for that something they knew would linger long after the wind had erased their footprints in the dust. Land could be bought, sold, owned, divided, claimed, trampled, and fought over. The land was stained permanently with pools of blood; it bulged and swelled under the outlines of the countless millions buried under it. But the sea was unspoiled and eternal and seemingly beyond human claim. Its waters rose and swallowed up the scarlet shame of spilled blood.

The balloons are still in Bhima’s hands, and suddenly she imagines that their strings are all that is keeping her tied to this sad, ruined earth; that if she let go her grip on the strings, she would rise and float away beyond these rocks, to that narrow place where the sea meets the sky. And even as the thought enters her mind, her grip on the balloon strings slackens and the footloose wind cradles
the balloons and carries them away. A picture of the old Pathan’s face—sad and pensive but also dignified and courageous—floats in front of Bhima’s eyes for a quick second and then the image is gone, carried away by the wind, and all Bhima can see are the balloons, rising and floating over the dark water like severed heads, soaring higher and higher, ascending the sky like Arjun’s chariot and heading for the stars. Bhima squints her eyes and watches their flight, watches for a long time, until the last balloon disappears from her sight. She stands on the rocks, slipping occasionally but righting herself, and stares at the sea, as if waiting for an answer. A crab scuttles from under a rock near her feet, but she does not notice. She is too intent on talking to the sea, on handing over her burdens to it, as a little girl walking home from school may hand her heavy books over to her older brother.

I could stand here forever, she thinks. She could occupy this spot that’s neither land nor water, wait here until the sky and the sea uncouple their dark, intertwined limbs and separate again in the light of a new day.

A new day. She will face it tomorrow, for Maya’s sake. Along with the awakening sea, along with the rest of Bombay—the street urchins and the stray dogs, the impoverished nut vendors and the woman selling six cauliflowers a day, the hollow-eyed slum dwellers and the chubby-cheeked residents of nearby skyscrapers, the office workers spilling out of the trains at Churchgate and the young children boarding creaky school buses, the old men groaning on their deathbeds and the babies tumbling forth from the dark wombs of their mothers—along with the entire gigantic metropolis, with all its residents crawling along their individual destinies like an army of ants pretending to be an army of giants—along with Banubai in her damp bed, and Serabai in her shattered world, and Viraf baba with his choking guilt, and Maya with her tentative, hesitant dreams, and yes, along with Gopal and Amit waking up in a distant land to the smell of
loamy earth, like all of them, the millions of people she has not met and the few she has—she, too, will face a new day tomorrow.

Tomorrow. The word hangs in the air for a moment, both a promise and a threat. Then it floats away like a paper boat, taken from her by the water licking her ankles.

It is dark, but inside Bhima’s heart it is dawn.