The Death of Mr Love, page 37
I was silent. Yes, she had said these things, and also told me that she wanted to slit the man’s eyeballs and tear out his throat.
‘I remember,’ I said at last.
‘I knew you’d agree. Now, don’t be cross. Bhalu. I said I’d got something important to tell you. It’s this. I’ve made the plans for us. I’ve bought our tickets to Bombay and booked us into the same hotel where . . .’
I had to stop her. I said, ‘Phoebe, I’m sorry. I’m very sorry, but I will not go to India with you.’
VI INDIA
APOLLO BUNDER (BOMBAY, JULY 1999)
I am studying a map across which a giant river wriggles, joined by tributaries as wide as itself, all inter-connected in curious, gravity-disdaining patterns, each flowing into and out of several others, some even flowing through one another. ‘A story is a river,’ says my mother’s voice in the tone she reserved for her profundities, ‘made by the joining of many streams.’ This recollection is greeted by a rude scoffing sound, a contemptuous raspberry that compels my eyes to focus. I am lying on my back on a damp bed. What I had taken for riverine chorography is an Amazon-basin of cracks in the plasterwork of a spectacularly unclean ceiling.
Again, that insulting noise.
A black face is peering down at me. The face splits, pokes out a pointy charcoal tongue.
‘Kraaark!’
The crow, leaning down from the open window, gives a little sideways hop. Ducks lower to look at me. ‘Kaaark!’
The harsh cry unblocks the ear. Other noises rush in. Familiar sounds, not heard for almost thirty years. Clip-clop gharry, whoosh of taxi, swish of another taxi, putter of motorbike, horns. Voices. I jump out of bed, go to the window. The crow panics and dives off in a crackle of black wings. From the window: dazzle over Bombay Harbour. Green water. Sun on ships anchored out in the stream.
India returned to me in a rush. Instantly. The heat. The smell, a heavy oily odour compounded of truck exhausts, jasmine, smoke and fish. Crowds outside the airport last night, although it was so late, past one o’clock by the time I exited. A man with a gold chain shining against the dark skin of his neck, who asked for a hundred rupees so he could buy himself ‘a good shirt’. Urchins demanding to carry my bags to the long line of battered black-and-yellow cabs.
My driver was a large man who smelt of coconut hair oil. He ground his gears into reverse and the taxi juddered backwards, to the accompaniment of a loud electronic version of ‘Jingle Bells’.
‘You’ve returned from where?’ he asked in Hindi, accelerating away through bodies that seemed to melt aside at the last possible instant.
‘England. First time back here in thirty years.’
I was thinking how astonishingly recognisable everything was. The car was an ancient Fiat that must have been on the road since I was a child. Painted onto the dashboard in shaky white letters was the legend HYPOTHECATED TO DENA BANK. To every available surface were glued garish cards depicting Hindu gods and goddesses: Siva, blue-bodied, ash-smeared, with the moon on his brow and a huge cobra wrapped round his neck; Kali, dancing on a headless corpse. Her eyes were glaring mad and the tongue that protruded from her gaping mouth hung almost to her navel. She wore a necklace of severed heads, from which dripped carefully painted blood. The strangest feeling of relief came over me, at the familiarity, the utter normalcy, of these things.
‘I live in England now, but Bombay’s my home town.’
The taxi squeaked and rattled in a most pleasing way. My feet, I saw, were resting by a hole, whose corroded edges were gently flapping. Nine inches below, my native tarmac was speeding by.
‘England? I thought so. When I heard you talking back there, I thought, this gentleman looks Indian, but speaks like a foreigner.’
‘Is my accent that bad?’
‘Bad? What meaning does bad have, in this town? You should know, in Bombay, “sub kucch chalta hai”. Anything goes. “Aapun ko chai maangtai.” Me wants tea . . .’ He laughed. ‘You were talking Hindi, but it sounded like an English movie, “Hawhaw kissmiss”.’
He reached over with his left hand, and flicked a lighter under an incense stick fixed somehow to the ashtray. The taxi swerved into a blare of oncoming horns.
‘Things have changed round here,’ I said, enjoying the novelty of conversing in my true mother tongue, by which I do not mean the Hindi I spoke to Maya or Srinuji, but the city patois, which is a rowdy, grammar-less and atrociously mangled mixture of Hindi, Marathi, Konkani and English, with many words that have never been heard outside the city. ‘What happened to the old airport?’
‘The old airport? You mean Santa Cruz? You have been away a long time. It’s been domestic-only for years. And they’ve changed the name to Chhatrapati Shivaji Airport.’
Shivaji. My old hero. Founder of the Maratha empire. The man who kept the Mughals out of our hills, who defeated the great Afzal Khan, who climbed the implacable cliffs of Sinhagarh by tying ropes to giant ghorpat lizards.
‘So which airport did I just fly into?’
‘That’s the new airport. International-only. It used to be called Sahar, but a couple of months ago, they renamed it to guess what?’
‘How the hell am I supposed to guess?’
‘Well, it’s now Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport.’
‘What? They’re both called Chhatrapati Shivaji? Isn’t that rather confusing?’
The driver turned in his seat to look at me. ‘You came back here expecting to find sense? This is Bombay! Well, actually it isn’t Bombay any more. They renamed it.’ We were bearing down on a listing truck, heavily overloaded with lashed-on sacks.
‘Watch the road!’ I shouted.
‘It’s now called Mumbai,’ said the driver, flicking the wheel as the truck blared past. ‘I’d be all for it, if changing a name made anything better. But all it does is keep the fucking politicians happy . . . The same day they renamed the two airports, the government announced that it was renaming its big poverty scheme. The only trouble was, they’d already only just renamed it – a month earlier – so they were actually renaming the renamed scheme.’
‘What’s the point of all this renaming?’
‘You’re an educated guy. Figure it out. The politicians changed the name and also the way they did the sums. That’s all, yet they said the new re-renamed scheme would “change the face of village India”. But of course nothing really changed. At least not for the better. Nothing ever does.’
A sudden rattling on the roof reminded me that I had come to India during the monsoon. Within moments, rain was falling so hard that the road ahead vanished. The driver stopped the car.
‘Wipers not working. No problem.’
He got out and cleared the windscreen with swipes of his hand. We started off again, but it was not long before the performance had to be repeated. In this way we proceeded slowly, in fits and starts, through dim streets, long stretches of gloom lit by sporadic street-lights. The rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun. I sat and stared at the passing city – the walls of buildings dirty, streaked with grime and mould, mottled, cracked, peeling; brown bulbs in windows, an oil lamp flickering behind the sack door of a humble dwelling. As the aircraft had made its final approach I had seen no bright lights below, only feeble glows as if people were burning candles. Tiny glimmers in a huge darkness.
The bazaars in Mahim were crowded although it was 2 a.m.; a stream of people were entering a Hindu temple, garland-sellers outside its door. The driver pulled up again without any explanation, got out and disappeared into the crowd. A minute later he reappeared with a garland of marigolds and draped it round the mirror.
At Worli Naka we stopped at a cross-roads marshalled by a policeman with a long baton. A family crossed the road in front of the cab, the man clad Bombay style, narrow trousers encasing stick legs, billowing shirt belted round a tiny waist. Behind him walked two women in drab saris, equally thin, with jasmine sprigs in their hair. One of them turned and gave the policeman a dirty look.
On an impulse I asked, ‘What do you think of the police?’
‘The pandus?’ He gave a short laugh. ‘There’s another thing that doesn’t change.’ He lifted his hand and rubbed the fingers together in the sign that means money.
Near the centre, the streets were deserted, traffic lights flashing on continuous amber. We were approaching VT Station. VT! The Victoria Terminus where Mister Love’s ghost had gone a-haunting, whence trains departed for Ambona.
‘They renamed VT,’ said the driver. ‘It’s now called Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus . . .’
I was staying at the Rudolf Hotel, Apollo Bunder, the same place that Sybil had stayed in six years earlier. It was Phoebe who had decided that we should stay at the Rudolf. She thought we might learn something. Sybil had had a definite purpose in coming to India and it had not been simply to find my mother. The place was uncannily as she had described it. We pulled up to find Arabs in long kaftans sitting on the sea wall. The first thing I discovered was that Shankar, the room boy, still worked at the hotel. I recognised him instantly from Sybil’s Last Journal. The red dot on his forehead, paan-smeared mouth. He showed me to my room and departed backwards, bowing low with folded hands and servile protestations, but a hard glimmer in his eye told me I’d already been weighed up, by the standards of his Arab customers, and found wanting. I would not ask about Sybil until I knew him better.
Now he appeared at the door with the breakfast I had ordered on my arrival the night before. An omelette, Indian style, thin as a pancake, flecked with green chilli, and toast which was already wilting in the muggy heat. I had no very clear plan for the day, but the first thing I had to do was ring Katy. Ten in the morning. It would be five-thirty at home. Katy would still be asleep, curled up in our bed. Another half hour before the old copper alarm clock on the bedside table rattled her awake.
I ate sitting by the crow’s window. The harbour was heaving to a gentle sludgy swell. Barely a hundred yards from here, Mitra, Dost and I had sat, twenty-eight years ago, on the night war broke out between India and Pakistan, and watched the rigging of dhows in the harbour turn to blue fire. There were no dhows now. Out on the water, sightseeing launches were busy, coming and going from the steps below the Gateway of India, the giant arch of yellow basalt planned to commemorate the first ever visit by a reigning British monarch to India, but ironically remembered as the place through which the last British troops left the country. Immediately to the north of the Gateway, but invisible from my window, was the naval dockyard where Nanavati had gone to get the gun from his ship. Stretching beyond that was the commercial port where Killy had brought Sybil ashore just over half a century ago and warned her that India would not be as she imagined. Poor woman, how could she have imagined what lay ahead? The city was full of ghosts. How appropriate that I had been greeted by a crow, guardian of the gateway between the landscape of the living and the realm of the dead. (Indian villagers say that a crow cawing from a window is a sure sign that you will have visitors. They also believe, however, that whooping cough can be cured by riding a bear.) Ghosts notwithstanding, I felt elated. I was back! I would do things I hadn’t enjoyed for three decades. Stroll along Marine Drive, eat pani-puri at Chowpatty beach and pau bhaji wherever it took my fancy. I would look for my old friends Mitra and Dost.
Floating up from Apollo Bunder, under my window, came a glorious cacophony. Raised voices: ‘Ey! Ey! Ey!’ Cries falling like music, overlaid by the chugging of diesels, burring of scooters and the horse-cloppy gharries. These were lined up further along the street, outside the Taj, hoping to catch foreigners. Every so often one passed beneath, carrying a covey of Arab women clad from head to toe in black, drawn by horses whose ribs protruded like those of carcasses, and who endured the lashings of their drivers with miserable stoicism. I thought of the Moron in his comfortable stable at home, where it would already be light, where Katy would be waking, going down to the kitchen, pulling the kettle onto the Aga. I would leave it fifteen minutes, then ring. I wasn’t looking forward to the call.
‘Oh, hello,’ she said coolly, as if surprised, and not particularly pleased, to hear from me. I waited, but there was no more.
‘Well, I’m in Bombay,’ I said. ‘It’s eleven in the morning here. I’ve been waiting to phone you. What are you doing? Making tea?’
‘I’ve just put the kettle on,’ said Katy, still in that cool voice. ‘Why? Do you want one?’
I felt an odd jubilation. My calculations had been correct. My other life was still working normally. I said, ‘I was just imagining you at home.’
There was a long silence at the other end, then she said, ‘I was about to go out to the stable.’
‘What’s the weather like? How’s the Moron?’
Without waiting for an answer I began telling her about the horses at the Gateway of India. She cut in.
‘Bhalu, this call must be costing a fortune. You needn’t go on pretending to be interested in me . . .’ Her voice was very far away. I was surprised by how foreign she sounded.
‘I’m not pretending.’
‘Is she there with you now?’
‘You know she isn’t.’
‘So you say. If she’s there, listening, please don’t bother to call me again.’
‘Look, Katy,’ I said. ‘She’s in London. At least, so far as I know. Check if you don’t believe me. I’ll give you her number.’
‘Bhalu, if I have to check on you, I’ve already lost you.’ There was a click, and five thousand miles of cable and ether went dead.
‘Phoebe. I’m sorry, I won’t go to India with you.’
Before she could say anything, I held up my hand. ‘I don’t mean I won’t go at all . . . I’ll go, but on condition I go alone.’
I told her I would discover what I could. If I could find any way to trace the man who had blackmailed her mother I would report back, and we could then decide what to do next. I don’t know what I was expecting. Tears, certainly, a tantrum maybe. She surprised me. She said, ‘Bhalu, I think that’s a very good idea.’
‘Well, that’s settled then.’
She smiled and closed her eyes. We sat in silence for a while.
‘The thing is,’ I said, thinking aloud, ‘I started by assuming that if I went, I’d be doing it for you. But I want to go for myself. My life has been shaped by what that man did. And I think I’ve met him too. It keeps hammering at me that it was him – must have been – who gave me a hard time when I was arrested. In Dongri.’
‘Thank God!’ she said, ‘At last, we’re doing something!’ She jumped up and went over to her sideboard, fetched another bottle of wine and, quite unselfconsciously, went through an unclothed version of her uncorking procedure.
We were both still naked, with the candles guttering all around us. The scene, which a few moments ago had seemed almost threatening, was now . . . well, there is something comical about nakedness. We sat drinking wine and looking at each other.
‘Phoebe,’ I said. ‘All this . . . it’s a bit silly.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘But only a little bit.’
She stood up and pulled me to my feet. Then she took my face between her hands and kissed me. I am not tall, we were about the same height. Her breasts were pressed against my chest. My arms went round her and she relaxed into them. My hands slid down her long back, found her rump and squashed her to me. She must have felt how aroused I was. Perhaps because of this, she disengaged, gazed at me fondly from a distance of about four inches, and kissed me on the nose. ‘And you’re a poppet,’ she said. Then she picked up her clothes and disappeared into her bedroom.
I dressed, awkwardly, not really able to think. Walked round the room looking at pictures and came across a shelf of old books.
Books, books, books, always a fascination.
Lays of Ind by Aliph Cheem.
Bullet and Shot (in Indian Forest, Plain and Hill) by C. E. M. Russell.
Medical Hints for Hot Climates by Charles Heaton.
Notes on Stable Management (with glossary of Hindustani words) by Col. J. A. Nunn.
These were her father’s books.
A further title caught my eye. Killy’s ‘miraculous little work of prophecy’. The ‘hate-filled tome’ Sybil had so despised.
India in 1983.
GLORY OF GRANDEUR
The year 1983 was a memorable one in the history of England . . . the two claims which it professed to make on the attention of posterity were that, during its span, Home Rule was at last granted to the irrepressible aspirations of the Irish People, and that what had long been denounced by all thoughtful politicians and advanced thinkers as an unspeakable anomaly, the British Empire in India, suffered final and official extinction . . .
Thus the opening of India in 1983, borrowed from Phoebe and carried back by me to the land of its inspiration.
‘A farcical account of an imaginary evacuation of India by the British and the subsequent Government by a Babu Raj’, a note on the title page explained. The book had been written in 1883, only twenty-five years after the Mutiny, and its anonymous author had to project himself a century into the future before he was able to imagine Ireland and India as free nations. But as he reassured his readers, it was only an ‘imaginary evacuation’ and the insulting term ‘Babu Raj’ expressed his opinion of the chances of Indians ever successfully governing themselves. ‘Prophetic’, Killy had called it.
The evenings hung heavily that first fortnight in Bombay. I read a lot. India in 1983 mostly, and Sybil’s Last Journal. My days were spent dodging through streets in which brown water laked after each downpour, tramping from one library to another, in search of anything I could find about the Nanavati case. I was collecting the names of everyone connected with it – investigating officers, court officials, lawyers and their assistants, journalists, politicians and their staffs, military officers – anyone who might have had access to the letters found in Ahuja’s flat. In the evenings I would review my haul. The names stared at me, flat and meaningless. Sybil and Phoebe thought the blackmailer had been a government official of some sort. Maya, according to Srinuji, had believed he was a senior policeman. But we did not know for sure. Only women could be excluded with any certainty.
