Love and Longing in Bombay (22 page)

“Eh, Anu,” I said. “Listen.” I said his name two more times, and then walked into the room and tapped him on the shoulder.

“What?” he said, still looking at the canvas.

“Last night. Did you send Rajesh out of the gallery? To get cigarettes or something?”

“What, me? No.” He turned his head and looked up at me. There were tiny dots of paint on his face.

“Did you see him leaving?”

“No. After that bullshit in the bathroom with Ratnani I don’t know where he went. Why?”

“It’s nothing. I just don’t know when he left.”

“He was high, man. Telling stupid stories like that. Must’ve fallen asleep somewhere on the way home.”

Anubhav turned back to his painting. Rajesh’s lies weren’t very interesting to him. I had believed Rajesh, and I was afraid.

“Come on,” Sandhya said, coming down the hall in a green suit. Outside, the sudden blaze of the sun hurt my eyes. The traffic ground past us in a solid stream, and all the taxis were full. We waited. I turned and looked up at the building, at the four stories of long curving balconies. It had been built in fifty-four, when they had built balconies everywhere, and those rounded corners, but now there were only chips of yellow paint left here and there, and most of Sea Vista was now black. The cars were dragging past us in starts and stops, inch by inch. Then it all stopped with a blare of horns, and we waited.

*

You can lose yourself in hardware. It takes only a twist or two, some pressure maybe, to break a coax cable, but tracing a cable break is long and careful hours with a crimping tool and terminal pings and NIC tests. When Sandhya and I got to the factory everything, each last terminal, was frozen solid, a cursor blinking hysterically from each screen. So she brought down the server and I got to work, walking each black cable length, looking for sharp bends, cuts in the casing, anything. The factory, which was called Sridhar and Sons, Ltd., was built on a big L-shaped plot in the Okhla Industrial Estates behind Nataraj Studios. I followed the cable through the executive cabins in the building at the front of the plot, under desks and over partitions (“a terminal on every manager’s desk and so instant information,” we had told them), around the production sheds where with great whines and clatters they made what they called custom high-heat high-performance parts for oil technology applications, which meant nothing to me except as data from which we missed twenty rupees and twenty paise and more, again and again and now and then, and probably now again, and I went then back out again into the sunlight, following the cable, which went outdoors in its protective plastic shell which snaked over the wall covered with red splatters of
paan
‚
across the small yard littered with
bidis
, and into the raw materials shed at the back of the plot, where sheets of metal and coils and tubes were stacked to the ceiling, with the cable slung above, over the tubelights and back down to the little room, a cupboard, really, carved out of the wall between the storage area and the accountant’s office, and in this closet we had one terminal, and the server. Sandhya sat coiled in front of it.

“Seek errors,” she said, and I could hardly hear her above the rattling air conditioner which hung precariously above the door. “Seek errors, seek errors. And our tables are corrupted.”

“And twenty rupees and twenty paise?”

“Gone, this time thirty rupees and fourteen paise, gone again.”

“The cable looks all right. I’ll run terminal checks.”

I did, one by one by one all the way out to the executive cabins, and then I went back to raw materials and checked the power and the UPS, and then I opened up the server and pulled the hard disk controller. The machine was a big tower, which we had pushed up all the way against one side of the room, next to the terminal, both against a locked door which opened into the accounting offices, and even then I had to send Sandhya out into the passageway when I opened the case. I leaned my back against the wall and worked the board out, cleaned the gold contacts, settled it back in, checked for a firm seat, all gone home and snug in the slot, hooked in the cables, stared helplessly at the lovely design, at the exact fit of the components against each other, how can it not work, and then closed it up and went outside. We had already replaced the controller twice, and the hard disk once.

Sandhya was leaning against the door.

“It’s all working,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “It must be software. Has to be. Let’s go home.”

And then, suddenly, I was overcome by sadness. It came out of the endless azure sky and settled in my bones. I looked out at the yard, at its scattered pieces of paper, the two workers squatting against the wall with their bare knees shining, at the scattered bits of smoke around their heads, and I was hopeless.

“All right,” I said, but when I went in to pack up my screw-drivers, Manishi-ji came out of the accounting office and pulled us in for a cup of tea.

“A cup of tea only,” he said, waving us towards the two chairs in front of the foot-high platform that took up most of the room. He and the other accountant, Raunak-ji, had little inclined desks that they sat behind, on either side of the platform.

“O Raju,” Raunak-ji called, and when Raju came in, a boy of about fourteen in oversized khaki shorts, Raunak-ji said, “Two
chai
,
‘pecial, and biscuit.”

“No, really, nothing to eat,” Sandhya said.

“Nonsense,
beta
,”
Manishi-ji said. “You’ve been working hard. Must keep up the energy”

And Raunak-ji nodded. When I had first seen them, seated on their thrones behind the desks, I had thought they were twins, or at least brothers, with identical balding heads and pained expressions and thick round specs. They were both in their mid-fifties and wore white shirts and the same Bata sandals. They lived in their dank room lined with blue ledgers from floor to ceiling, balancing and balancing away, and I wondered if they knew about the twenty rupees and twenty paise. So I smiled, in spite of the sludgy bitterness in my veins, and Sandhya did, through her taut sheen of fatigue, and she talked to them about the stock market. They argued and laughed together, and I watched them. The only colour in the room came from the big safe against the wall behind them, an old Godrej painted a rusty red and covered with those little metal locket-type pictures of Ganesha and Lakshmi and Shiva with magnets on the back. There were so many gods and goddesses on the safe that you saw the red only in patches, and there was even an Air India Jumbo flying up the front of the safe, winging right through the holiness.

Then Raju brought the tea in, and we ate the biscuits as he poured. I found myself very hungry and took large bites. Raunak-ji dipped his biscuits in his tea and chomped with sturdy teeth. I ate and tried not to think of Rajesh.

Afterwards, we walked down the street to the corner, stepping through the pools of light under the streetlamps, turned left to the highway, and waved down a rickshaw amidst the headlong rush of trucks. As we got in, a black Ambassador pulled to a halt behind us. It was Das, on his way back to the factory after a day of meetings in the city Sandhya told him what had happened. “Sir,” she said. “We are working on it day and night. We will solve it, never fear.”

“Yes,” he said, and sat back in the seat. The car crunched off in a swirl of dust, and I was sadder still. He had the look of a man going to his execution, a man who has accepted that this unbelievable thing is going to happen, and is now settling accounts in his mind. I think he was quite past fear.

*

On the second day I gave in to panic. I mean on the second day that Rajesh was gone I gave up all hope of indignation and frankly drowned in dread. At exactly ten-thirty I was unable to work anymore, and I turned in my chair and looked at the back of Sandhya’s head. She was writing code in quick little flurries of keytaps. I picked up the phone and dialled a number that Rajesh had told me never to call, and listened to thirty-four rings. Personal calls are not allowed, Rajesh had said, and anyway they’re a nosy lot, those fellows who work at the Post Office, they would ask too many questions. I listened to the shrill ringing and counted. Finally, a voice said, “Chembur Post Office.”

“Parcel Office,” I said, and waited. There was a longer ring now, insistent. I lost count but I held the receiver hard against my head and waited.

“Yes?” a woman said.

“Parcels?”

“Yes.”

“Is Rajesh Pawar there?”

“No.”

I knew I had another question, but I was silenced by stories that appeared abruptly in my head, complete tales of disaster and horror. She hung up.

I concentrated on my finger, the finger that tapped the bar on top of the phone, brown against black, the finger that pressed the keys. I made each movement deliberate and then again waited. This time I asked for the supervisor. “You are who?” the woman said.

“Supervisor, please,” I said.

I had to tell her my name, and also that it was about a missing registered letter, and the line was cut off once and I had to call back, but finally he came on and I asked about Rajesh.

“Your good name?” he said.

“Iqbal Akbar,” I said.

“And you are who?”

“I’m a friend.”

“A friend?”

“Of Rajesh.”

“A friend of Rajesh.”

He said that with some satisfaction, as if he understood everything. Whatever he did understand, it persuaded him. “But this is very strange, if you are a friend,” he said. “Rajesh Pawar hasn’t worked here in eight months. He just walked out one afternoon. He was sorting parcels and then he just got up and left. No resignation letter, nothing. Very improper. But how is it you do not know?”

I put the phone down. I pressed my temples with my knuckles as hard as I could and tried to squeeze it all away.

“Listen, Sandhya,” I said.

But she was away, deep into the machine. I put my hand on her shoulder and waited, my heart tightening like a fist.

“
Haan
?” she said, jerking out of her trance. “What? What?”

But suddenly I didn’t want to talk about Rajesh. A question about him, now, would give shape to my fear, put it in the world and make it real. “How did you meet Anubhav?” I said.

A moment passed, and another, I asked again, and then she said in a drugged voice, wrapped around silences like a call from the other side of the moon, “He helped me buy a book at Crossword.”

“What book?” I knew the answer, but I wanted something, a word, a story, a plank or two to prop against my collapse.

“Picasso book,” she said. “It was a book about Picasso.”

“But what did you like about him?” I think there was something in my voice, a sob, and she swivelled in her chair, bumping against my knees, and looked at me, blinking.

“What is it?” she said.

So I told her. She took charge then. She shut down her compiler, and sent me outside to put on my shoes and wait by the front door. I watched Anubhav paint. When Sandhya stuck her head in his door to say that we were going out for a while, he didn’t turn his head to say his “
Haan
,
okay, see you later.” He was painting rural scenes. In a canvas leaning against the wall, there was a mud hut and a pile of hay and a hard yellow sky. And a bony, elongated cow peered at me from an easel to the side. I thought, he’s been working hard. Sandhya waved at his back and I blinked at the cow and we left.

We caught the local from VT to Sion. In the train, which was mostly empty because of the hour, I turned my head and leaned my head against the bars on the window and cried. The incredible length of Bombay sped by, those endless sprawls of buildings, huts and shacks, children squatting and shitting by the tracks, refuse, the crowded grey roads twisting and winding between, all of it blurred but fearsome in its strength, in its very life that grew it unstoppably. I had a plea in my throat, a half-formed call for mercy. A supplication, my mother would have called it. Then, filling my head, a roar as the train went through a station without stopping, faces only a few feet away dimmed by the ferocious speed.

At Sion station we got into an autorickshaw. I had Rajesh’s address written out in my diary, but I had never been to his house before, so we went slowly, stopping now and then to ask directions. “All the way around to the back of the Rupam Cinema Hall,” a man driving a DHL van told us. “Then you go straight, Dharavi side.” So we went around Rupam, which was crowded for a matinee of
Zanjeer.
A revival, I thought, Rajesh will be angry he missed it. We drove on, and the road became narrow, and finally we stopped. Sandhya paid off the autorickshaw and then we walked. The lane was actually a road, but the stalls had pushed out from the shops on either side, so that you could only walk in the very centre, brushing shoulders. They were selling suit pieces, baby clothes, kitchen utensils, plastic hair bands. After a while we left the bazaar behind and turned right, into a road lined with
chawls
,
great greyish buildings continuing forever. Sandhya was wearing a black suit, and she began to walk faster as people turned to look at her. I stopped one of them, a thin grandfatherly man with white handlebar moustaches, and asked for the Saraswati Shinde Chawl. He looked at Sandhya, shading his eyes, and said to me, “Come, I’ll show you.” He turned and led us up the road, around a curve, and to it. “Here,” he said, gesturing with a tilt of his head. “Here.”

It was a four-storied building, enormous, built around a central courtyard, balconies running all the way around on the inside. There was a small tree in the centre of the courtyard, a patch of unexpected green. The sun came down hard into the land, and I was trembling.

*

Rajesh’s father was short, heavyset. He came eagerly to the open door of No. 312 when we knocked, tugging his
banian
down over his belly. He slumped into stillness while Sandhya told him that we were friends of Rajesh, and watching his stubbled, disappointed face, I thought he looked much smaller than I had imagined him from Rajesh’s stories. His wife came out through a narrow door behind him then, wrapping a blue
pallu
around her shoulders. She sent him away to put on a shirt, and seated us on a
takath
that almost filled the shallow breadth of the room.