Love and Longing in Bombay (26 page)

It must have been afternoon when I saw the blood. My body felt as light as air, and I floated now from shadow to shadow. All the time there was the harsh huffing of the dog, and his trotting pace next to me. I thought first that it, the blood, was a smear of oil on the ground. Then as I came closer the sun tilted and I saw the colour, going from red to black. It was quite large, a shape like something had exploded on the ground, and droplets leading away There were rivulets where it still ran shiny. I hung above it, feeling a sensation of dropping. The dog mewled uneasily behind me. I looked around and it was another nondescript street, the same buildings and the same shuttered shops. The huge shadows came towards me and I felt my heart turn in bitterness. I stepped away but now I could no longer see where I was going. I felt my way to a wall and keeping a hand on it I pushed myself forward. Finally I could walk no more and I crouched with my back against concrete. The dog stopped, then came forward and circled me, moving his head back and forth. Finally he dropped to his haunches and sat in front of me, close, facing away. I could hear the breath sliding in and out of his throat, and also my own, insistent and unstoppable. The fur on his back was dirty and matted, and underneath I could see the pinkish flesh. The sight of it filled me with disgust but I was finally able to raise a hand, to let it down slowly on his shoulder, and his ears pricked but he kept still, and we stayed like that, next to each other. Under my fingers I could feel his heart beating.

*

It was night when I awoke, and the dog was gone. I pushed myself up, and as I tried to calculate where I was, going a little way down this street and then that, I was picked up by a police van. I pointed at my head and told them I was staggering because I had been assaulted and injured by a stranger. They cursed me much, cuffed me about a little, but on the whole they were quite generous—they dropped me right at the head of my lane and told me to stay home and not get into trouble. The next day the newspapers said that the situation was normal, that absolutely nobody had been killed, only a few scattered injuries, and so I went to work.

“I asked him,” Sandhya said as soon as I came into the office. She looked at me, her eyes enormous in her face. “I asked him and he said yes, they had made love. He said it happened. Then he just went back to work.” When I had passed by the studio Anubhav had been leaning into a canvas, his brush busy, intent and focussed. Sandhya here, on the other hand, looked as if she were about to curl over and collapse.

“Listen,” I said. “I have something to tell you also.”

So I told her. I told her about Manishi-ji and Raunak-ji and the safe and the magnets and the Jumbo jet. She jumped up, sat down twice, walked around the room, and then she picked up the phone and called Das. He was already in his meeting, and she insisted and shouted on the phone, and then we waited.

“What assholes,” she said. Her face was flushed. “What did they think? We weren’t trying to get rid of them. It wasn’t as if they were to be
cancelled.
”

“They’ve been there for thirty years, Sandhya,” I said.

“That’s no damn excuse. Things change. Everything changes.”

I shrugged. The receiver burbled into her ear, and she began to speak. She told Das. For some reason I couldn’t stand to hear it, so I went out into the corridor, into Lalit’s room, and I sat on his bed and watched the fishes circle in the water and dash through the wreck at the bottom. Half an hour later I heard the office door open, and Sandhya came in.

“He says he’ll look into it,” she said. “He was pretty angry.”

“Yes,” I said.

“I think he’s going to throw them out.”

“He’ll have to.”

“At least we got a better program out of it.”

“Better?”

“Come look.”

We went into the office, and she booted it up, and I sat at her desk and ran it through its paces. It was better, it was leaner, faster, more elegant looking. Where screens had scrolled, they now snapped, lookups happened in a flash, every process was twice or three times as fast. It was beautiful. She had gone close to the metal and come out with a kind of perfection.

“Beauty,” I said. “Really, beauty, man.”

“Shit, Iqbal,” she said, and I turned around. She was sitting in my chair, chewing on her collar, twisted with remorse. “I mean, they weren’t bad guys. They were probably just scared.”

“Yes,” I said. “Quite scared.”

“Maybe I can tell Das we’ll retrain them,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Maybe he doesn’t have to fire them.” She picked up the phone and dialled. “Maybe they just did us a service, you know, made us work harder. We don’t have to be like that …” As she was talking I watched her face. She spoke and she listened to herself speak. The words got slower and slower. “We don’t have to be like that …” Then she was absolutely still. I saw something happen in her, like a change in the light when the sun moves. She put down the receiver, carefully, deliberately. She looked at me straight. “Fuck them,
yaar
” she said. “Let them burn.”

Then she got up, marched down the corridor, went into Anubhav’s studio, picked up the Rural Cow and threw it out of the window. Then she threw him out. I mean she told him to get the hell out of her house and not come back. He started to argue, but meanwhile the Rural Cow had landed on the bonnet of somebody’s car, and so people were shouting from underneath, and Anubhav went running down to save his cow. While he and the car owners were shouting at each other, Sandhya was pacing up and down the room, leaning out of the window now and then to tell him a thing or two, with Ma-ji egging her on. After a while she grabbed the Rural Mud Hut and threw it out of the window too, and then Anubhav began shouting at her from below. By now all the neighbours were out, leaning on their balconies, and from the ground floor the Khan twins came out in their identical red tracksuits, to tell Anubhav that they had known Sandhya
didi
since they were this high and they weren’t going to stand for any damn bastard shouting at her. So now that began to develop into a full-fledged shouting match of its own, and all in all it was soon a full-scale old-style Bombay
tamasha
, with people watching from every balcony and window in every building, up and down the road, laughing and giving advice and yelling at each other. Then, and I tell you I’m not making this up, Vasant suddenly came rumbling down the street on his motorcycle, and of course began taking the part of the injured ex-husband and scattering abuse this way and that, and soon enough he threw a punch at Anubhav, and then Sandhya ran down too and the confusion was general. I was watching the circles swirl below, and then Ma-ji appeared under my elbow. She was trembling all over, every part and limb of her, and her face was a furious blotchy pink, and she was smiling.

“Here,” she said. “Help me pick this up.”

It was an earlier painting, not one of the rural series. I helped her get it onto the windowsill. With a huge peal of laughter she heaved it over. So then I helped her throw out his Sennelier paper and Schmincke crayons and tubes of oil paint, and drawings and paintings and glossy art magazines, all of which I remembered well because I had written the cheques for every last thing, and the crowd below was clapping now each time some art came falling out of the sky. I saw a portly
havaldar
heaving his way down the street, his mouth wide open. I leaned out of the window and saw Anubhav looking up.

“Ma-ji,” I said, “ask Anubhav where the Picasso book is.”

“Who?”

“Picasso.”

So I pulled up a chair, helped her onto it, and she leaned over the balcony railing and boomed in an unbelievably loud voice, “
Pee-kasso
kahan
hai
,
maderchod
?” The
havaldar
,
who was arresting everyone below, looked up at this question, momentarily paralysed by the sheer power of the voice. “
Pee-kasso
kahan
hai
,
maderchod
?”
Vasant took this opportunity to try and run, and the
havaldar
plunged after him, and meanwhile, above, “
Pee-kasso
kahan
hai
,
maderchod
?” I tried for a minute to explain to Ma-ji that the question she was supposed to be asking was not exactly “Where’s Picasso, motherfucker?,” but she was standing on the chair with such fierce exultation in her arms, having so much fun, and now the kids below were chanting with her, that it seemed beside the point, and maybe that was the question after all. “
Pee-kasso
kahan
hai
,
maderchod
?”

Afterwards, as we tried to calm ourselves down, and Ma-ji moaned from a backache, Sandhya put down her cup of tea and said to me, a little teary still, “Why is everything so
low
, lqbal? Why is everything made of money?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe money is made of everything.” She looked at me, puzzled. I didn’t quite know what I meant, myself, so finally I had to admit, “I don’t know what that means.”

“Maybe you’re just trying to make a me-ta-phor,” she said, and we both burst out laughing.

*

Look, there are the lights of Surat station. Who can tell what will happen? But perhaps tomorrow you and I will pull into Bombay Central. Then, on the platform I will raise my hand in farewell, and we will not see each other again. I will go straight to Sandhya’s house to drop off these contracts, which are for a big project in Delhi. It turned out, once we got the system stabilized, and money no longer disappeared from the ledgers of Sridhar and Sons, that Das was quite a complicated fellow, with contacts here and there, so now we’ve expanded a little, and we have a new office, not very big really, two more people working for us, perhaps one more soon. I travel to Delhi often. We are not quite mega yet, but we are bigger.

What happened to Manishi-ji and Raunak-ji, you want to know, of course. When Das confronted them they first denied and denied and denied everything. When Das got angry and threatening, Raunak-ji broke down and confessed, and then they both begged forgiveness, and said they only wanted to serve the company He had them both out of there that afternoon, and a week later they both filed suit against the company, saying they had been framed, hoodwinked out of wages and pensions, discriminated against because they were trying to expose fraud and deception and embezzlement. It drags on.

Also Anubhav drags on. Yes, I wish I could tell you that Sandhya never saw him again, that he was exiled forever. But you know life never does the things it should. He had a big show at the Pushkara Gallery, and a grand opening. We hear Miss Viveka got a new haircut for the event. Mahatre gave Anubhav’s paintings a review that I can only call a rave. He said Anubhav had created a searing vision of the realities of rural India. On that first night alone, Ratnani bought five paintings. Since then, in the last month, Sandhya has had lunch with Anubhav twice. She says to talk things over. Both you and I know what’s really happening. The trouble with beauty is you can’t give it up, not ever. So I know tomorrow she’ll tell me about another lunch, trying not to look guilty. I’ll try to be nice, and we’ll take Lalit for a walk, and he’ll stroll between us, skipping, holding both our hands.

When I’ll get home it’ll be late. I won’t switch on the light, because my brother and his wife will be asleep on the drawing room floor. I’ll edge around them, holding my suitcase to the side. I’ll hear my father’s snores from the bedroom, perhaps my mother’s sleepless shiftings. I’ll find the two steps up to my room without effort, and once I’ve shut the door I’ll switch on the light. This used to be a balcony once, so it’s oddly shaped, long and narrow. I’ll take my clothes off and lie on the less-than-single bed, with the light on. I’ll think of Anubhav. A man named Vidyarthi told me that Anubhav got that good review from Mahatre because Anubhav even serviced Mrs. Mahatre. Vidyarthi used that word, “service.” I tell you this not because I believe it, but in the interests of showing you the world of art as I know it, a certain aesthetic completeness, you see, and to tell you what I do not believe. Anubhav Rajadhakshya is surely a whore, a leech, and a liar, but there is something I owe him. I owe him for his talent. I believe this. As I lie on my bed, I will look to the foot of the bed, and on the small table at the end I will see a painting in a frame. The frame is mine, the painting is Anubhav’s. After I had helped Ma-ji throw out his paintings and his materials, the next day, I helped her clean out the room. Behind a cupboard, rolled up and forgotten, I found a painting of a young man leaning on a wall, in front of a poster for
Deewar.
The painting had a swirl of yellow and red at the top, a pavement in pencil, but Anubhav had worked on the man a little since I had last seen the painting, on the swirl of smoke from his cigarette, on his face. I saw that it was Rajesh. So I took it. I took it, not paying the high prices that Ratnani gave, but I told myself I had given enough to Anubhav. Maybe not enough but something, a service here and there.

I will lie in my bed and look at the painting. I’ll wonder what it is on the canvas that is Rajesh. Yes, I wish I could tell you we found him, that we knew what had happened. But life never does what it should. After eight-and-a-half months we know that he worked with some
bhai
log.
I now know the name of the moustached man at the gym, and that he is known to Ratnani. This we know. But only this. In this life, the sub-inspector said, some people just vanish. I said: I know. These facts, and the theories that I made up to explain it all to myself, those plots that gave me comfort and a comfortable kind of terror, they’ve been bleached white by the ferocity of my attention. They rattle around in my head with a dry clicking noise. But the painting is life itself. So I’ll lie in my bed and look at the painting. I’ll look at the curve of the hip, the shirt sleeves rolled up on the swell of the biceps. At the shadowed eyes in black, and the curl of hair on the brown forehead. I will lie in my long narrow room and look at the strong fingers holding the white cigarette and wonder what it is in the shapes that is Rajesh.