The Death of Mr Love, page 40
‘I thought it was just a name.’
‘It is a name,’ he said. ‘But that’s why it’s this name and not Deer’s Leap or Squirrel’s Leap.’
‘Have you seen the tigers?’ I asked him.
‘There’s a cave, a tiger’s cave, in the cliff right below where you’re standing.’
‘Really? And have you seen one yourself?’
‘Of course. Lots of times. I’m not afraid of them.’
I translated for Phoebe, who said, ‘He’s just like you used to be.’
The morning mist cleared and a hot, bright day blew in from the sea. Up the road we went, the views opening out below. And there it was, climbing up into the blue, our home slope of Bicchauda, what was left of its jungle steaming on its flanks. There were fewer trees, more bare rock showing, bigger pastures. But it was still there. And so was the rough track that broke from the road and led up the hill, round that corner, past those trees . . .
We asked the rickshaw to wait and walked up in silence, too consumed to say a word. The last time I had been here was thirty years ago. Then, not much had changed.
The gates to the house were closed, rusted together, padlocked with a length of rusty iron chain. Weeds were growing through them, just as before. But now, I noticed, a small tree had forced its way between the bars. No one could have lived here in years. It was surreal. As if nothing, but nothing had changed here. The wall crumbled a little as I scrambled over it. Tired limbs now, nearly fifty. How easily I would have leapt that when I was ten. And yet in my mind, in this place, here, in my kingdom, I was myself again.
‘Come on, Fever,’ I said, with only the faintest sense of absurdity, and she climbed up after me, no longer middle-aged, but my lithe supple love.
We dropped down the other side into a garden overgrown with trees of considerable size. Why had the garden been allowed to get into this state? Then we saw the house – shutters half off their hinges, missing doors, jungle trees poking branches into windowless rooms, the courtyard overgrown above head height in lantana, the pond cracked and empty.
What had happened here? We went inside, and stood in silent amazement. The house was derelict. Its rooms were empty, its walls rain-stained, with plaster crumbling off. A furry black mould grew on every surface. It had not been lived in for years.
‘Bhalu, look!’
In what had been our bedroom, faint traces of a wall-painting. Not just any mural, but one of an old woman with glaring eyes done by a little girl who was learning to paint.
‘Bhalu, no one has been here since we left!’
DONGRI AT NIGHT
Karvanda village was still there, not much changed, except for some newer houses beginning to crawl towards the slope of Dagala. I noticed a couple of scooters parked in sheds beside old bullock carts. A television aerial fixed to a dead branch high on a mango tree, a row of small green birds perched on it. Above us, the Kathodi cliff reared, still thickly jungled. Jula’s family had all left. Dhondu had died long ago, his wife followed not long after. The sisters were both married, one was in Mumbai, the other in Pune. The brothers were working in Pune for the Forestry Department. These things we learned, over glasses of thick tea, from an elderly man who turned out to be Rameshbhai, the teacher I had met all those years before. The school was still running.
‘We have government funding now,’ he told us. ‘And we need it, because the school’s twice the original size. But the money from your mother still comes. Not once has it failed to arrive.’
‘Are you in touch with Jula?’ I asked hopefully, thinking of his plans to publish enlightening educational books.
‘Mitra? Haven’t seen him for years. He’s in Mumbai still, I’m sure. I heard he had got mixed up in politics. I’m afraid I don’t have any address.’
We asked about the house and learned that it had been shut up and decaying for as long as anyone could remember.
‘It was bought by some big person from Bombay, but he never came here. It has been falling apart for years. There have been offers to buy it, but the owner won’t sell.’
We returned to Bombay defeated. To the Rudolf Hotel and Shankar-of-the-Red-Dot, who eyed us curiously, this pair whose passports bore different surnames, who had taken separate rooms, who ever since Phoebe’s arrival had slept in the same room, but – as far as the room-boy’s experienced eye could tell – in separate beds.
‘Two rooms, two rents,’ he said with a smirk. ‘We could put a double-bed in yours.’
My reply was a smirk, the mirror image of his own.
A few days later, in my room. A muggy afternoon, windows open, fan full tilt. She was lying on her bed watching television.
I said, ‘Phoebe, your mother’s diaries . . . do you remember a party given by a man called Sub? Must have been in the late fifties. There was a long list of food and other things.’
‘Hmm?’ she said, her eyes fixed on the screen, across which brightly coloured shapes were flashing, accompanied by dramatic music. ‘Oh look, he’s getting away!’
‘I’m sure it mentioned a bootlegger they all used.’
‘Did it?’
‘Do please listen to me for a moment.’
She rolled over and fastened on me those great eyes of hers. She was wearing shorts and a top that showed much midriff. Almost my age, how on earth had she kept so trim? I wish I had a picture of that moment. She looked lovely. Kind, sad eyes, green-grey, like the long-ago brahmin’s wife.
I said, ‘Look what we’ve got. No notebook. No name. No idea who the other women were . . .’
‘No hope at all,’ she said in a babyish voice. ‘Oh dear! Does Bhalu need a nice bootlegger-man to give him a dwinkie?’
‘Stop it,’ I said, taken aback by this sudden childishness. ‘Listen, I’ve thought of another possibility. What did the police find in Ahuja’s flat, besides the letters?’
‘Women’s knickers?’ she asked, still in the same annoying voice. ‘Lots of frilly panties? Suspenders? Dildos?’
‘They found a lot of bootleg liquor.’
‘Oh what a naughty, naughty man he was.’
‘I’ve just thought . . . isn’t it possible that the blackmailer put the squeeze on the bootlegger too?’
‘Naughty, wicked blackmailer,’ said Phoebe.
‘From what I can make out, everyone in this town is on the take. So it’s a fair bet that the bootlegger, whoever he was, was already paying off the cops and magistrates . . .’
‘Yes?’ she said, one eye on the television set. ‘Ooh look, he’s doing it again!’
‘Will you listen to me? Our blackmailer wouldn’t be put off by that, would he?’
‘Sorry, put off by what?’
‘By the fact that the bootlegger was already paying the police.’
‘No,’ she said, reverting to silliness. ‘Mister Shaitan is not a very nice man.’
‘No, he’s a complete bastard.’
‘Naughty Bhalu, said a wicked word.’
‘Will you be serious for one moment?’
She thought about this. Then shook her head.
‘Right! That’s it!’ I jumped on her and began card-indexing her ribs with nimble bookseller’s fingers.
‘Nooo!’ she screamed, wriggling, breathless with laughter. ‘It tickles! Stop it! Help!’
‘Only if you promise to be serious.’ I was lying on top of her, crushing her, my weight forcing her to speak in little grunts.
‘I don’t want to be serious. I’m sick of being serious. Oh please! I can’t always be serious. It’ll kill me.’
So I tickled her again into hysterical half-sobbing laughter.
‘Help!’ she gasped. ‘Naughty Bhalu-alu! Stop! Mother!’
Something dark flew through her eyes, then they steadied.
‘Now,’ I said, through clenched teeth, ‘will you listen?’
She struggled silently, furiously, then gave up and lay still. We were looking into each other’s eyes from that point-blank range. Suddenly she smiled and I felt her hand reach down between us.
‘Oh Bhalu,’ she said in her baby voice, ‘I think you like me.’
I rolled off her onto my back, and closed my eyes.
A moment later I felt her hair brush my face. ‘I love you, Bhalu,’ she said. ‘I really love you.’
She laid her head on my shoulder. We lay for a long time with our arms around one another, as we so often had when we were children.
All day we’d been arguing about what to do. I was ready to give up and go home. Phoebe, not long arrived, wanted to stay and keep looking. ‘People leave traces. The things they do leave traces.’ It was like listening to Maya. She reminded me that I had studied, albeit by mail order, the science of detection. ‘There must be some clever thing you can think of. If anyone can, you can.’ Her faith in me was unnerving. As a child she had followed me trustingly through jungles and along the edges of cliffs, never conceiving that I could lead her into danger. Now she expected me to thread the labyrinth of Bombay. The city, vast, inapprehensible, mocked us every time we left the hotel. The sheer number of people crowding its streets, clinging to buses, hanging out of the packed trains that arrived at Churchgate every minute, crammed into teeming mohollas and overpopulated chawls, was overwhelming, yet each person’s tale was unique, intricately connected to all the others. How was I to unravel the single clue we sought from this huge web of stories, that not only extended over hundreds of square miles of city, but stretched back forty years through time? In England it had seemed somehow logical, the idea that she should find and confront the man who had tortured her mother, but here, in Bombay, or rather, Mumbai, it seemed hopelessly naive. Our quest was a waste of time. I had been stupid to come. I realised that I was actually here to close a gyre, to end my own exile. To see Bicchauda again. The breath had caught in my throat, as we bumped along those last few miles, and the old familiar horizons began to open, but things I’d have expected to delight me – an old man approaching under a rainhat (and Phoebe remembering it was called an ‘irrla’), peering into puddles and catching the flick of tiny fishes, seeing lads with bamboo rods squatting by pools where we had caught catfish – these things did thrill me, but it was a bitter pleasure. I found myself trying to assert proprietorship of the land in a dozen small ways. ‘Remember this?’ I asked Phoebe. I picked up a rock and dashed it against another, breaking it like a stone coconut, to reveal the quartz crystals within. ‘That sulphur smell?’ But she did not remember. My longing – it was not nostalgia, but a desperation to belong – forced its way out in conversations with people like the chai-wallahs Kali Das and Mangala, about the naming of local hills, and the old boy in the rainhat, whom I had greeted in rusty Marathi on the pretext of confirming that we were on the right road, but really in order to inform him that I had once lived here. I had been afraid that going back would ruin the old memories, but they remained – distant, inviolate, untouchable. This fear was replaced by another, harder to bear, that were it not for the memories, the place would hold no particular magic for me at all.
As for Phoebe, what was she thinking? I had worried about what she might do if we ever found the blackmailer. That now seemed ridiculous. Apart from her odd outburst of childishness, she had been cool and controlled ever since her arrival, quite the elegant memsahib in her loosely belted jeans and crisp suits cut just above the knee. I felt a guilty pride when she took my arm in the street.
About Katy I hardly dared think. I had phoned her only once after that first call. She had been as unfriendly as before, convinced that Phoebe was with me. Since Phoebe’s arrival I had not rung again because I hated lying to Katy. It would have been pointless to say that I had not expected Phoebe – I had been glad to see her – dishonest to say there was nothing between us. How could I tell Katy we had not been to bed together or slept together when Phoebe had often lain in my arms, and slept in the bed by my side? Had we made love? Well, what else are kisses and murmurs of affection? When applied to our peculiar relationship, the usual euphemisms for sex failed utterly. The only truth was the brutal four-letter fact that we had not actually fucked. I was ready to go home, but first I wanted to find my old friends. It was thinking of Dost that gave me the idea about the bootlegger.
‘Black Market Services?’ said Phoebe into an imaginary phone. ‘Is that Mr Legger? Hello, this is Mr Shaitan, from the insurance agency . . . No, not your usual branch . . . I am calling about this new situation. Your premium is for day-to-day matters, you are not covered for this. A further one-off premium will be payable.’
‘Exactly. Now, given just how extraordinary the new situation was, wouldn’t Mr Legger remember Mr Shaitan? In your mother’s diary, Sub named the bootlegger they all used. I don’t remember it, but I’m sure his joint was in Char Null.’
‘How does that help?’
‘Char Null is a place in Dongri. Where we used to smoke hash. Where Dost used to brag that he knew everyone.’
‘Well then,’ she said. ‘We just have to find Dost.’
‘Put some clothes on. I am taking you to Dongri.’
Once upon a time, before ever the English, or the Portuguese, or the Muslémeen came to India, before there was Bombay, or Born Bahia, before the caves of Elephanta were carved, there were seven islands, baking in sun, salt and silence. At high tide, they were separated by a sluggish sea, but when the tide ebbed they reached out to one another through overheated malaria-marsh where eels coiled among the mangroves, and across mudskipper flats printed by the feet of birds and crabs, as if they, the islands, already sensed their destiny. So close-knit were they that from a mile offshore one would have seen an unbroken undulation of coconut trees, underlined by beaches where fishing craft leaned on outriggers and nets were hoisted to dry.
Seven islands, whose first inhabitants, simple fishing folk, skins burnt almost black by the sun, called themselves Kolis and lived in villages whose names were their histories: Colaba, ‘Koliground’, Mazgaon, ‘Fishville’. The chief place in the archipelago was a very old temple to a goddess, Mumba Amma. She was made of stone, had wide eyes, an orange complexion and no mouth. Through whatever depths of language one dives to retrieve the meaning of her name, it always reduces to the pearly syllable ‘Ma’. From her, the home island derived its name, the place of Mumbamai. The temple stood among groves of tamarinds, beneath a hill which the Kolis called simply, ‘Hill’. In their language, Dongri.
Life in the Mumbamai islands conformed to the rhythm of the tides, which brought in, and swept away again, drowned birds and dead sea-snakes, bladderwrack, coconuts, driftwood, the keel-bones of cuttlefish, spars from shipwrecks (whence, over the centuries, a small hoard of Mauryan kharshapana coins, a silver tetradrachm of Bar-Kochba, copper shivrais struck by Chhatrapati Shivaji, plus sundry copperoons, bazaruccos, half-dudus and pice), and while the Kolis worked the tides, bringing in their catches of mackerel, shrimp, pomfret, seer fish, king fish, ribbon fish, swordfish, tuna, dory, squid, lobster and of course the infamous double-bummalo, kings, dynasties and empires came and went unnoticed. Dongri and its temple survived the Satvahanas, Chalukyas, Rashtrakutas, Silharas, Yadavs, Ahmadshahis and the Portuguese. But when the English built their fort at the south end of the temple-island, its northern-most bastion extended to Dongri hill.
Beyond the fort was an esplanade, an empty space which could be raked with grape and roundshot in case of an uprising, and on the far side of this, a ‘native town’ began to grow. Dongri was soon swallowed up. Warehouses replaced tamarind trees, and tall square-riggers docked where the Kolis had sewn their lateen sails. New arrivals from all over India brought their trades and set up shop in the narrow, crooked lanes (which still exist, I told Phoebe, as our taxi drove there, often still specialising in the same goods). In and around Dongri the newcomers were mostly Muslim. The Hindus camped to the west and north. As for the dispossessed Kolis, they were put to work by the British, building roads through the marshes, breaking and carrying rock to make sea-walls and close up the tidal breaches between the islands. In accepting this work, which all but destroyed their old way of life, they gave the English language a new word. They were no longer Kolis. They had become ‘coolies’.
Bombay bazaars at night, lights and dazzle. I told the driver to do a tour of the Muslim mohollas and felt like a tourist, pointing out to Phoebe things I thought would please her – open-air cookshops dishing out biryani and kebabs, a man frying jalebis in a huge pan. Near Masjid Street in Bhendi Bazaar, I asked the taxi to wait, and took her for a walk through crowded lanes lined with shoe- and cloth-stalls, to the building where Mitra had once worked. The printing works, as I knew, was gone – the first thing I had done on arrival in the city was look for it in the Yellow Pages. In its place was a veterinary clinic. However, in a nearby lane we found the shop of Dawood Khan, who Dost used to insist was the only tailor in Bombay who knew how to cut a shirt. To me, starved of such sights, the walk was bliss, but Phoebe was uncomfortable. ‘People are staring.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘you won’t see many foreigners here at night.’
‘Choop,’ she said in a terrible accent. Shut up. ‘I’m not foreign.’
So we returned to the taxi and carried on to Dongri. I told the driver to slow down as we neared Char Null. I was looking for an alley that led off the main road. Would I recognise it after thirty years? The streets here were gloomier. The bazaars had given way to an area of small businesses. Some Dongri trades: auto repairs, switchgear dealer, leather goods, paper-maker, relegious (sic) books, sanitaryware supplies, embroiderer (fancy stitching), ship-chandler, industrial chemicals (spice oleoresins, essential oils), fashion accessories (exporters of eyelets, mannequins, dummies, undergarments), dozens of road haulage firms.
Alley after alley passed, dark openings lined by shabby wooden buildings. Trucks and handcarts parked for the night. That one? No. This one? ‘Stop!’ I told the driver.
‘Are you sure we should get out here?’ Phoebe asked.
A broader than normal opening, narrowing abruptly where the corner of a building jutted into it. This surely was where they had tied the ropes to erect the cinema screen. I dismissed the taxi. At that moment I had no fears about our safety. This dark anonymous alley was, like Ambona, one of the magical places in my life. After the circle of hills, the circle of charpays. How often had I imagined turning up out of the night, and finding Dost sitting here with his chillum, in a tamarind-sour cloud of hashish smoke.
