The Death of Mr Love, page 42
It was eight, dark outside. Lights of ships on the black harbour water. A strong shower earlier had cleared the air and it was, for Bombay, almost cool. Dost, giving his collar an upward flick and donning a pair of dark glasses, led us across the road. By the sea wall was a parked taxi, with a familiar figure snoozing in the back.
‘Your chauffeur?’
‘Who needs to own a car, when there are taxis in the moholla?’
‘Might have guessed,’ I said, feeling a great relief. Rough and ready Dost might be, a Dongri-wallah from his upflipped collar to the tips of his flashy shoes, but with him around, things would be taken care of. Handled. Ho sakta hai. Can do. At Zafyque’s house I had felt he was as baffled as I was about our mission. Dost wouldn’t have to think about what to do, he would know. It was his city.
‘This is Murad . . . Murad bhai, these are my friends.’
‘Salaam aleikum,’ said Cousin Murad, giving a knowing smile as ‘darling’ and I slid into our familar seats. She had changed into a long skirt and a blouse that buttoned to the neck, giving her the air of a louche schoolmistress. ‘Memsahib, take back.’ Murad the driver turned and pressed some rupees into her hand. ‘No, no, no,’ he said, when she protested. ‘My brother friend. No charge.’
‘So Phoebe, first time coming India?’ Dost asked.
‘I was born here,’ she said.
‘Born India? Then why you left? Why not stayed here?’
In bits and pieces, with me acting as interlocutor, the story began to emerge. With each new detail, Dost grew more delighted.
‘Childhood sweethearts? Meeting again after so many years? Just like a filmi romance.’
‘Bhalu isn’t the least bit romantic,’ Phoebe told him. ‘I asked him to come to India with me, and he said no!’
‘You said no?’
‘That’s right.’
He laughed. ‘Yaar tu kab sudhrega? (When will you improve?) So you struck a pose and said, “Nahi, main nahi aaunga.” (No, I won’t come.) And then you came after all. You know what you two remind me of? There’s a movie – have you seen it? Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge.’
I was translating for Phoebe. ‘We remind him of a couple in a film. You could translate it as True Heart Wins the Bride.’
‘Please,’ she begged Dost. ‘Tell me the story.’
‘I telling Bhalu. Bhalu telling you.’
But she wouldn’t allow that. ‘Your English is perfectly good. You tell me.’
‘Okay, so this is the fillim of Yash Chopra. Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge is – kya kahte hain (what do you call it?) – mega-hit! This fillim was shooted in Europe first-half and second-half Punjab. One hero actor Shah Rukh Khan plays a boy Raj and actress Kajol . . .’ (to me, aside, in Urdu ‘My God, that Kajol, what a minx!’) . . . ‘Kajol plays a girl Simran. They both living to England.’
As he talked, the middle-aged man receded and he became again the film-crazy youth of three decades earlier.
‘So Raj misleads his life and goes to college at Cambraj with a long tall genie, very fast. He’s not so good chap . . . aankhen-milaana, usko kya bolten hain? . . . thank you . . . flirting with girls and making fun. Simran is a bilkul aap jaise pretty girl . . . just as you, waiting to meet a dream guy.’
‘What is this long, tall genie?’ Lambu-djinni was what he’d said.
‘A car, yaar. Lambu-djinni is a fast car.’
‘Lamborghini,’ said Phoebe.
‘These two, girl Simran and boy Raj, he don’t know her, she don’t know him, go to see pahadon . . . mountains . . . in Swizzerland. One-in-crore chance they meet on train. She seems not to interest in him. She asks to Raj that would you come to my shaadi, wedding, in India. He say her, like Bhalu say you, “nahi, main nahi aaunga”. From this she know he in love with her.’
‘Oh!’ said Phoebe. ‘Is that how you tell?’
JAM-I-JAM
So we left Apollo Bunder, passed the Taj Hotel, haunt of those who think they run the city, to return to the place where the city began. We drove north through the old Fort past VT (CST) where the original temple of Ma had stood, back to the bazaar area named after the hill the Kolis had called ‘Hill’, and returned to the Jam-i-Jam where this time the tea-drinkers and hangers-on crowded round to say hello, each one wanting to slap my back and shake Phoebe’s hand, and when we sat down at a table in the mirrored inner room, people drew up chairs and crowded round us on all sides.
‘Come on, this is a celebration! What will you drink?’
‘Tea,’ I said, hoping Phoebe would not ask for alcohol. ‘Tea,’ she agreed, to my relief.
‘Okay, bring some tea!’ And the word passed back through the ranks. ‘Tea! . . . Arré bring tea! . . . Hot tea!’ So tea came, brought by the obligatory small boy. Glasses of tea, milky, sweet, warmed by cardamom. ‘Snacks!’ cried Dost. ‘Snacks!’ the echoes chorused. ‘Samosé . . . and khichda! Give them some khichda like yesterday’s . . . corianderful!’ So plates came, and everyone sat and watched us eat. No one else touched a thing.
‘Ey, jukebox chalao!’ Which turned out to be a CD player rigged through a pair of decrepit loudspeakers that sounded as if they were hissing the singers.
‘Phoebe,’ said Dost, ‘you eating nothing! What you will have? Will you like to eat mutton biryani? . . . Ey, kitchen!’
‘Fish biryani is nicer,’ called someone. And the chorus began again. ‘Or how about chicken! Jamjammy special! . . . Brain egg masala! . . . Will she like it? . . . Sheekh anarkali is great . . . Arré forget sheekh anarkali, bring some gurda kaleji! . . . Mahi-e-aab! Nice fresh pomfret . . . What about rotis? . . . Try a baida roti. Chicken! . . . Kheema? . . . Bhalu miyah, you must definitely have some nalli nihari . . . But we don’t do it . . . A-bé! I know we don’t do it! Let the boy run to the Noor Mohammadi, tell them to send four half-plates.’
So we ate, and gradually others around us also fell to. We had to stop them ordering more food and even, when Dost and his friends thought of some choice thing the kitchen didn’t have ready, sending out for it. Impossible even to contemplate the sweets, kheer, ladwas, falooda, sutarpheni, they pressed upon us.
‘You know what I wish?’ Phoebe said to me. ‘I wish Jula could be here with us now.’
Dost must have caught enough of this to understand. ‘Tell her, I’ll take you to meet him. He comes here, occasionally. We still say hello. But it isn’t the same. Too much trouble. But between you and him there will be no problem. He’ll be delighted to see you.’
‘What happened? You never explained.’
‘Aie, baba, it’s a bad story.’
Phoebe, as was her habit after a meal, got out her cigarettes. It was not really done for a woman to smoke in public, at least not in that area, but Dost, without batting an eyelid, produced a lighter and flicked it.
‘Hey, maybe Phoebe would like some wine. I got some, just in case . . . Ey, bring the wine!’ A bottle was duly placed in his hand and two large tumblers, wet from the tap, were set before us. Phoebe, who had not been consulted, watched as Dost unscrewed the cap and filled the glasses to the brim, upending the bottle, until a bloody trickle ran down each one onto the marble tabletop.
‘Best Indian wine,’ he announced.
‘Aren’t you having any?’
‘I am Muslim. I don’t drink alcohol.’
She lifted the glass with both hands, took a sip.
‘You like it?’
‘Lovely.’ Through a smile of startling insincerity she whispered, ‘C’est comme un sirop anti-tussif.’
My French was not sufficiently amélioré for this, but I told her with a straight face, ‘Dommage, mon amour. Il faut boire tout le vin, ou il sérait insulté.’
Dost once again caught the drift. ‘You don’t like? Then leave! Leave!’ To me, Urdu: ‘We have no corkscrew. I got that one because it was the only bottle with a screw-top . . . Ey, bring more tea!’
The small tea-boy came up – he could not have been older than nine or ten – and set down a clutch of tea-glasses. Phoebe said, ‘He’s so young and he works so hard. Would it be all right if I gave him a tip?’ She fished in her purse for some coins. ‘This lady wants to give you a tip,’ Dost told him. ‘What do you say?’ The boy gazed into Phoebe’s eyes, levelled his palm at her, wiggled his hips and sang, in a high quavering tone, ‘Aati kya Khandala?’
‘Arré! What battameezi is this? Ey! Chal!’ Dost cuffed the lad affectionately. ‘Little sod thinks he’s sadak chhaap . . . acting tough like a street kid. Really he’s just a poseur, aren’t you? Don’t I see you going to school every morning with your satchel?’
The significance of the boy’s song was lost on me.
‘Bhalu, I have something for you as well,’ Dost said. ‘To bring back memories. Or perhaps make new ones.’ He opened his hand to reveal a beautiful little chillum, turned from a single piece of hardwood, with brass rims on the bowl and mouthpiece.
Later, Dost took us to his house. A narrow passage led from a door in the street to a small courtyard, entirely enclosed, off which various rooms opened at ground- and first-floor level. We climbed a stair wet from a passing shower, and went into a room with a balcony overlooking the street. It contained a maroon sofa of some plush material, covered in clear plastic, upon which Phoebe and I sat, while Dost lounged opposite, on a bed with white sheets and a bolster, tamping tobacco into the chillum. How many pipes? Two? Three? The room was lit by a fluorescent tube which flashed in the mirrors, inscribed with green and gold Arabic phrases, that hung on every wall. A fan whirred in a corner, turning its moon face from one to the other of us, as if following our conversation. From a further room came the sound of a movie on TV, laughter and voices . . . Phoebe was lying back with her eyes closed. Asleep, or magic-carpeted away? Last time she had mixed hashish and wine was in the hotel in Kensington. Natasha nasha. A million miles.
‘It comes to this,’ I said. ‘We’re hoping you can help us trace the bootlegger . . . if he is still alive.’
For the past hour I had been telling him our story. The whole thing. Sybil’s love affair. The death of Mister Love. The revelation that he was the Nanavati victim. The letters and bottles found by the police. The blackmail. The man who abducted Phoebe from school. The death of her ayah. The cop who had interrogated me. The threats made to Maya. I told him about our failure to find Sybil’s notebook, or trace any of the other women who had been involved with Ahuja. The tale, as I related it, sounded to my increasingly stoned ears more and more fantastic, like something I might have picked off one of my shelves in faraway Lewes. I told Dost of my meeting with Zafyque and how he had advised me to drop the whole business. Finally, I presented my hunch that Mr Mailer, as Phoebe had called him, might also have got his hooks into the bootlegger.
Dost heard the story in silence. He said nothing even when I stopped speaking. The room filled with a profound quiet. The fan’s breath stirred the leaves of a spray of red roses too perfect to be real. They stood on a small table between us, on which also were glasses of water, a bag of tobacco and the lump of hashish which, albeit somewhat diminished, was still the size of an apricot. The quiet thickened, laminated by layer upon layer of silence until it grew quite impregnable. My own thoughts were shouting in my mind.
Then the silence shattered. ‘I don’t blame you,’ I heard my own foolish voice saying, ‘if you find our story farfetched . . . Zafyque said it sounded like a plot for a movie.’ But Maya had tried to make this story into a film and nobody wanted it. No, the Bombay film world had cried. We don’t want to know!
‘Zafique knows nothing,’ said Dost, the assonance setting up an eerie echo. (We were guftagooing in Urdu and in that tongue, therefore, was the faintly reverberating goonj: what Dost actually said was ‘Zafique kucch janta nahi,’ after the crowd of producers had bayed ‘nahi, nahi, nahi.’)
‘Where does he live? Colaba, you said? Big house, no doubt. Chowkidar. Servants, of course. Car . . . Business . . . Nariman Point . . . A different world . . . see them every morning in Mohammed Ali Road sitting in their status symbols, queued up in the smog. The air is brown and stings your eyes . . . they are listening to their business reports and western pop music, they don’t see what’s on either side of them. Must be people living in Bombay who have never heard of, for example, Madanpura . . . who have never set foot in Maulana Azad Road . . . don’t know the half of the things that go on in this city. On the streets outside here, every passing life could be a movie . . .’
I did not want him to get sidetracked into movies.
‘You never answered my question. About the story I told you. Do you think we’re fantasising?’
‘On the contrary,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t surprise me at all.’
‘It’s a true story.’
‘The police in this city are like maggots. They feed on filth. I doubt if there’s anything they wouldn’t do for a buck.’
‘So can you help us?’
‘Forty years ago? Your bootlegger would be an old man . . . if he’s still alive. And you have no name.’
I closed my eyes and tried to visualise Sybil’s diary, recall the list of provisions for Sub’s strange deathday party, written in his bold, sloping hand. Suddenly, with utter clarity, it came back to me.
‘It was Saqi Baba!’
But Dost seemed unimpressed. ‘That’s it? Saqi Baba?’
‘He supplied a lot of that circle. That’s the name we should at least start with.’
‘But Bhalu, you know as well as I do that Saqi Baba means nothing. It’s just a way of saying “liquor-wallah”. Could be one of dozens of people. Bombay is bootleg city. And our area, Dongri, they call the Palermo of Bombay. Mafialand. Smugglersville. In, out. In, out. Whisky. Gold. Tobacco. Hashish. You name it.’
‘But you have connections . . .’
‘You must be joking,’ he said, loosing a huge gush of smoke into the room, handing me the chillum. ‘I’m not into that stuff. I’m a café owner. I don’t want to get mixed up with all that.’
So what had happened to the youth, in his fine Lucknowi kurta, curling round the chillum long fingers which in those days weren’t encumbered by rings, who used to tell me, ‘Whatever you want, it can be done yaar, peacefully.’
‘I thought you knew everyone in the rackets.’
‘Probably I told you so. It wasn’t really true. I was trying to be a cool guy. Like some idiot tapori, you know what that means? Walking the streets pretending to own them. I talked big, and shat my pants, that’s the fact.’
But remembering how bravely he stepped in front of Mitra and me that night all those years ago, I could not believe him. I said so.
‘You’ve always been a romantic,’ he said. ‘It’s funny. I look at you and underneath your English gent I see the same old Bhalu. Bhola Bhalu, Bhalu-the-innocent. You used to look with such wide eyes at the filthy street. You’d find magic in anything. Goats, dung, peeling walls.’
‘That wasn’t me, it was this,’ I said, handing back the chillum.
‘This doesn’t change you, it just opens windows,’ he said, taking it and holding it up. ‘You know what this is? It’s what my uncle named his café after. This is the Jam-i-Jam. The Cup of Jamshid. They say that Jamshid’s cup reflects the entire world, the whole universe. Everything that can be seen, smelt, heard, touched or in any way known by the mind. It is all there at once. Totality. All the answers to everything, all at once. You just have to make sense of it. Give me one fact and a goli of Moosa’s . . .’
So when the exquisite little pipe came again to me – it was a hundred and fifty years old, Dost told me, he had got it in Jodhpur – I shut my eyes and tried to see the crucial fact that must lie at the heart of the mystery. A romantic, Dost had called me. Maybe he was right. I was stuck in bholaness. I looked inside myself. Yes, he was still there. Still alive, waving feebly at me. There he was, the child of Ambona, with his constant reproach, ‘Why have you not lived up to my promise?’ Sitting beside him was a slightly older iteration, who could glory in gutter smells and read scripture in the flakings of paint. Mired in Bhalu-dom I was and always had been. I travelled to the other side of the world, but never left Ambona and Dongri. When I had first thought of trying my hand at fiction, years ago, all my ideas revolved around these two places, as if no others existed. I never had a linking or encompassing narrative, just a chaplet of stories. To each character their own tale. Babu the hunter’s tale. Jula the cowherd’s tale. The stationmaster’s tale. The screenwriter’s tale. The rose-grower’s tale. The Kathodi’s tale. In Dongri, the beggar’s tale. Moosa’s tale. Dost the ne’er-do-well’s tale.
Once – it must have been the influence of hashish even then – the idea occurred to me of writing a book whose primary, Dostian, fact was a one-paragraph letter of complaint addressed to the SAURASHTRA TRADING CO at 6 Panwallekigalli, Dongri, as follows:
Dear Sirs, the consignment of tea you had invoiced to us on 8th March inst. reached us yesterday itself and same were immediately examined, but we regret our inability to accept them. We ordered a first quality tea, but you have sent us the damped leaves, which we are unable to sell and most of the cases are in very injurious condition. For this reason we telegraphed you this morning as follows: TEA GREATLY DAMPED; CAN NOT SELL. ACCEPTANCE REFUSED. HOLDING AT YOUR RISK. LETTER FOLLOWS. We confirm our above telegram, and request you to dispose off the goods at once, and refund to us our disbursement of Rs. 433/- for railway freight and octroi paid by us. Kindly do the needful, and oblige.
This dull message would have been copiously footnoted (eg ‘Panwallekigali’, ‘Dongri’, ‘tea’, ‘damped leaves’, ‘your risk’, ‘octroi’, ‘kindly do the needful, and oblige’) and these footnotes would have further footnotes (eg k.d.t.n.&o. identified as a Nelsonian usage), which in turn would be footnoted until the footnotes to footnotes to footnotes to footnotes had spread the story across much of the world and several centuries. I planned (of course) to call it Foot Notes, or Pad Yatra, A Pilgrimage In Words, but made the mistake of describing the idea to Maya, who simply reached down from her shelves a copy of Pale Fire, her way of letting me know, without having to utter a word, that there was room only for one writer in the family . . .
