The Death of Mr Love, page 43
Yes, how hard it is, confronted by the pile of tangled threads that constitute a story, to identify the loose ends that can be called beginning and end. I thought of poor Sybil’s list of false starts, her endlessly recycled openings, the mind refusing to be coaxed on excursions into new territory, returning stubbornly to the same start points, what were they now? Selim’s apology for a gharry? The blonde Taj-dwelling tart? Poor Marlene Dance, who found love in a shower of rain at Gorai Island, where the villagers provided eggs, rice and arak smooth as . . . Inhaling, inspiring, drawing deeply, soughing, I drew upon the Jodhpuri (the same provenance as Katy’s riding britches) chillum and searched and searched for Dost’s primal fact. But all I found were stories. Stories, and cycles of stories, told and untold, lying in vast tangled heaps, impossible to unravel. Somewhere among them a clue that would lead to the Blackmailer’s tale.
‘. . . and I can infer the world,’ concluded Dost.
This whole tortuous thought process had occupied less time than it had taken him to finish his sentence.
‘. . . Will you at least tell us whom we could ask?’
‘Bhalu, it’s not so simple. It’s not like there is one set of people to know. In the old days, when we used to go to Moosa’s, there were a few big names. Karim Lala, Haji Mastan. Nowadays there are dozens of gangs. Freelancers. Entrepreneurs. A chap who was in one gang one day, breaks away and takes people with him. Then he’s at loggerheads with his old boss. They are at one another’s throats. People who were friends become enemies. Alliances shift. Who should I talk to? Where in all this do I fit in? The answer is, nowhere. I don’t want to know.’
‘But what can we do then?’
‘Your friend, Zafyque,’ said Dost, ‘did talk some sense. To hell with the past. Let it go. Something from forty years ago? Forget it. Leave it alone. Whatever happened, let it go. Shouldn’t we be thankful that we are here now, alive, that we have our families, friends, food on the table?’
Phoebe, who had no family, leaned on my shoulder, our first intimate contact for days, and murmured, ‘What is he saying?’
So I told her. She woke up and (like the fan) looked from one to the other of us. Me, still holding the chillum, Dost veiled by clouds of intoxicating smoke.
‘Say to him, you don’t understand. Do you suppose I like this eating away at me? I want to let it go. I want to forget. But what am I to do when it invades my sleep, drops me down deep wells? I can’t politely ask it to go away. Tell him that one way or another, with his help, or without it, I will find the man who blackmailed my mother. Then, maybe I’ll be able to forget.’
Her eyes closed and she remained there, head on my shoulder.
‘Take care, she is a real phataaka,’ said Dost. A bombshell. Did he mean blonde or boomplosive? ‘She should forgive, make a clean start. Half the trouble in the world comes from not letting go of the past. It’s like history. Why do we need it? Why the fuck do we care about it? We’d all be a damn sight happier if we didn’t know any. Then we’d have to judge the man next to us by his smile and his character and his actions, not because he happens to belong to one community or another. You ask Mitra about this, when you see him. Ask if in his heart, he doesn’t agree with me.’
My eyes were heavy. I was trying to listen to what Dost was saying, but my own thoughts kept intruding, and there came a point where it was no longer possible to distinguish one from the other . . .
You wanted to know what had happened to that building across the way from Moosa’s. The one that went on fire . . . Une pierre prit feu. La maison prit feu. L’arrondissement prit feu. La cité prit feu. Les hommes prirent feu . . . A mob came one night and threw a petrol bomb at it . . . Why? Because it was owned by a Muslim, in a Muslim area, and the mob was Hindu . . . how could this be in a city which regarded business as its religion? First Mr Gut, then Mr God. But on the sixth of December 1992, three hundred thousand Hindu fundamentalists, many of them stark naked, began with bare hands to tear apart the Babri Masjid, a mosque in Ayodhya. They claimed that the mosque had originally been a Hindu temple, and not just any temple, but the birthplace of the god Rama . . . a claim consistent with the work of Mr P. N. Oak, an historian, place-of-domicile Pune, who founded the Institute for Rewriting Indian History to demonstrate that the Mughals built nothing of note in India, but merely hijacked and converted earlier Hindu buildings . . . Oak published such works as Taj Mahal Is Really Tejo Mahalaya (a Shiva temple). One may take it then that after the destruction of the Babri Masjid, an act which startling numbers of Indian politicians failed to condemn, the precedent has now been set for dismantling the Taj . . . Bhai sahib, within hours, when news came about the masjid, rioting began in Bombay . . . it started right here in Dongri . . . the previous riots in Dongri had been over the Satanic Verses . . . a stone-hurling mob gathered near the Murgi-mohalla (Chicken bazaar) Masjid on Memonwada Road. Next day the Muslim youths attacked and damaged the Hindu Shaneshwar temple . . . then the Hindu youths struck back . . . they came down that street. They had stones and swords. They were breaking windows and setting fire to buildings . . . Shameful to have to admit this, but wasn’t he right, that Victorian bigot who wrote India in 1983? Hadn’t he known just what would happen if you gave Indians the power to govern themselves?
There were a few riots where some Mussulmans considered that killing a cow and sprinkling Hindus, who happened to pass by, with its blood was a not-inappropriate way of testifying their feelings . . . and when this expression of opinion was met by the counter-device of slaying a pig and throwing the corpse into a mosque, some slight disturbance of the peace usually followed.
Ah Mr Bigot, whoever you were, you couldn’t have imagined how bad it would actually be. Dost told a tale of mayhem and murder: a friend’s daughter, on her way back from school, caught by a sword-carrying mob who cut her throat; young men beaten to death, set on fire, row upon row of corpses in the morgue. What changed afterwards? Everything and nothing. There’s a wariness, a mistrust, that wasn’t there before. Mitra and me, that’s what came between us. How could it have happened? How could people who had lived together for so long, suddenly start slicing each other’s windpipes . . . Maya, on what turned out to be her deathbed, had asked these very questions, but she was remembering 1948 . . . What caused the deaths? Not religion, that was just an excuse. The cause was, as it always is, the greed of politicians for power . . . Gandhi, thank God you never lived to hear these stories . . . gangsters and politicians joining hands to fund Bollywood movies . . . Ordinary people are fed up with immoral politicians, their criminal friends and the corrupt police who do their dirty work. Any leader who dares to tackle this will be a national hero . . . if he survives. It isn’t wise to threaten these people. In this city, at least half the murders are committed by the police. Open your paper. Almost every day you see the same item. It’ll say something like. ‘Police kill three in encounter.’ Only the names change. The story is always the same. ‘Criminals’ (attributed to some well-known gang) are challenged. Invariably, they refuse to surrender and open fire on the police. The brave pandus return fire and the hoods are killed. Everyone knows these stories are fairy tales. How many people ever witness the gun battles? Most people believe the bullets are fired in the back yards of police stations. Are the dead men really gangsters, or just people the police want out of the way? Bhalu, tell Phoebe, don’t pursue this vendetta. Let it lie. Do not stir up this wasps’ nest. If your man was a high-ranking police-wallah, he will have powerful contacts. His finger can reach out of the past and touch you. It costs five hundred rupees to have a person killed in this city.
I worked it out. Just under £7.50.
MITRA
It was well after midnight when we got back to the hotel. Still very stoned. The sea-wall was lined with white-clad rain Arabs. As was my habit, I sat down to my diary, but wrote nothing. Dost’s lump of hashish lay in front of me. The scrap of newspaper in which it was wrapped informed me that C. Khilar, of IIT Bombay would deliver a lecture on Nanoparticles Formation in Reverse Micellar Systems.
A snatch of song below. The Arabs began a slow hand-clapping. I went onto the balcony and looked down. There was a crowd of them inside the hotel compound, gathered round a slim Indian girl. A singer with a good strong voice. She had a baby clamped to her hip, and with her free hand was knocking a merry cross-rhythm out of a pair of castanets. The Arabs danced round her, clapping, singing along, enjoying themselves. Soon there were coins bouncing at her feet, but burdened as she was by her child and the castanets, she could not pick them up. So one of the Arab men held up the corners of his long nightshirt and went round taking a collection. It was soon heavy with silver and banknotes. Even I was moved to wad up a fifty-rupee note and throw it down. When the song ended, the girl, without letting go of her child, tucked her castanets away and found a cloth bag, into which the money-man poured her reward. No sooner had she taken it than a khaki-clad and lathi-wielding policewoman arrived at a run and began haranguing the girl who stood sulkily, looking to her audience for help. ‘Leave her alone,’ I heard the Arabs saying. The girl was emboldened to make some reply. Then – I could not believe what I was seeing – the policewoman slapped the baby. The mother screamed. Angry Arabs surrounded the cop. Everyone was yelling at once. I too lost my temper and rushed downstairs, but by the time I joined the crowd, the girl was already being led away. Little doubt what would happen to the money. On the way back in, I was surprised to find Phoebe, in black silk pyjamas, arguing with the hotel manager.
‘It happened on your premises,’ she was saying. ‘If I see anything like this again, I’ll report you to my friend . . .’The last few words were nearly lost in a hubbub of Arabic. They might have been ‘the way she was hitting her,’ or, it must have been the hashish twisting my senses, but I could have sworn she said ‘. . . my friend the Deputy Commissioner.’
Next day Dost rang to say that he had contacted Mitra. ‘The saala is overjoyed. He even sounded pleased to hear from me. He apologises that he is tied up with meetings today, but asks you to his house tomorrow. I will send Murad.’
‘I’m going shopping,’ Phoebe announced. ‘You needn’t come with me, Bhalu. Men are so tedious in clothes shops.’
Over the previous few days, there had been a noticeable coolness between us. Why, I didn’t know, but it dated from our first visit to Dongri: the day of tickling and baby-talk, Moosa’s poker-faced nephew and the amused regulars at the Jam-i-Jam. After that, until Dost’s surprise appearance, I had not seen much of her. She took to going out by herself. Where to was a mystery. In the evenings, I would knock on her door and hear the silence echo behind it, or be told she felt unwell and wanted to be left alone. What had opened up the ‘deep well’ of depression, for such it obviously was, she would not say. She rebuffed my attempts at support. ‘No one can help. It’s best to be alone. It goes, in the end.’
But how far away was the end? I was restless. I had been in India almost a month and our quest had got nowhere. I knew I should go home and mend my marriage. I had tried several times to phone the cottage and the bookshop, but there was never a reply.
The morning of the day we were to meet Jula. We breakfasted on my balcony overlooking the harbour in the kind of clear light you get after a night of heavy rain, the sky washed clean by storms. The hills on the mainland were distinct and very green. Sunlight fizzing in a glass of orange juice, greening the flecks of chilli in my (Rudolf special) omelette. Happiness is in the details.
‘Seven pounds fifty? I don’t think so. He’ll have to pay a lot more than that to get rid of me.’
I had expected her to be scared, or upset by Dost’s warning. Instead she seemed to regard it as a joke.
‘If we do manage to get close to this man,’ I said, ‘if he feels threatened . . . Dost was genuinely worried.’
‘Well, I’m not running away,’ she said. ‘And I know you won’t either. After all, you’re my hero.’
Phoebe, in a new flowery dress and effervescent humour, was her old self. The evening at the Jam-i-Jam, or perhaps the prospect of seeing her childhood playmate Jula-Mitra, had restored her spirits. We were friends again.
‘Aren’t you excited, Bhalu?’
Of course I was. I hadn’t seen him for nearly thirty years. Not since our indigent Moosa days. But for her it was the first time since Ambona. Since they were both small children. Last time they saw each other she was a little Muffety Mai, and he was a cowherd wearing an irrla.
As usual, we found Murad’s apology for a cab waiting by the seawall. He welcomed us with a smile and insisted on opening the door for Phoebe, and dusting the seat with his handkerchief before she got in. The address to which we were to go was in a Hindu area abutting the Muslim quarter. The same district Mitra had lived in when he worked at the printer’s in Dongri.
‘What will he be like? I hope there’s some old Jula left . . . I hope he still likes me.’ Phoebe was babbling like a child. Since we had been in India, she had constantly been switching between sophisticated woman and little girl.
The route Murad chose took us through areas unfamiliar to me. We left a main road clogged with ancient, gaudily-decorated trucks listing along under impossible loads, and entered a maze of crowded lanes. Tumbledown jopadpattis, hutments, stretched away along every alley we passed. White dog with a pink sore between its ears. Man in filthy rags, with matted hair, by the side of the road, mango cock hanging out, pissing into black mud.
‘I have to ask the way,’ Murad said, adding as if in explanation, ‘Leather workers’ area. What a disastrous place this is.’
Mitra lived in an old chawl, a grim Bombay tenement originally designed as cheap housing for mill workers. Its walls were cracked, and streaked black by a century of rains. Nearby, at a tap by the roadside, women were filling pots and buckets. They stopped and stared at us when we got out of the cab.
‘Ey! Where is Mitra Kashele?’ Murad asked, and the women all pointed at once, up towards the third floor.
Small children followed us, gazing at Phoebe with wide eyes, up the flights of an outside stairway and along a balcony, still soaked from the storms of the previous night. Down below, the women were tracking us. Their voices chorused up to us, calling in Marathi, ‘The next one! Yes, that one! That one!’ Mitra was obviously well known. We came to a doorway above which was a swastika daubed in vermillion. A string of withered mango leaves hung from nails on either side of the door, exactly like the one that had looped across the entrance of his parents’ house in Karvanda.
The door was opened by a man whose stoop hid his height and made him seem more elderly than his years. But I had no doubt it was Mitra. He wore glasses now, but still had the worried frown I remembered so well. It was a kind face, for all its seriousness. He was dressed in a simple white shirt and trousers and his feet were bare, horny as his father’s had been. He looked at me briefly, began to smile, then his eyes passed to Phoebe.
‘No! This cannot be Fever.’
Phoebe (she who was toujours appropriée), rushed into his arms with a wild shriek. ‘Jula!’
Mitra laughed out loud. ‘Yes, this is me, but can it really be you? And Bhalu too? Out of the blue! After all these years! Oh, this is a wonderful day!’ His English was improved beyond recognition. He must have worked hard.
Then he held out his arms to me and said, ‘Brother!’
On what point of this turning earth could I stand?
Deep inside everyone is a lake of raw, nameless emotion, whose occasional explosive uprushing we experience either as grief or as joy, sometimes both at once. A kind of catharsis, a temporary breach of the carefully rehearsed personality. I had laughed when I met Dost, but when I saw Jula again, I cried.
The flat was very small and very bare. Two string charpays occupied much of the floor space. There was a table covered with papers, an ink-stand with old-fashioned ink bottle, penholder and nibs. A calendar of Ganesh, rotund and rat-riding, supervised things from a wall. The most surprising thing was the books. There were hundreds of them, on homemade shelves.
‘Please come in, come in . . .’ It touched me that the first thing he said, after we had been made comfortable on the charpays and offered tea, was that he was sorry to hear of my mother’s death.
‘Maya-ji was an unusual person, Bhalu. It is no exaggeration to say that I have always taken her as my inspiration.’
‘She would have been proud of you, Mitra.’
‘Jula! Jula! Jula!’ cried Phoebe. ‘I’m sorry, I just can’t call you Mitra. How good your English is!’
‘I studied. I learned. You can do anything if you try. Well, most things . . . One cannot always succeed.’
I knew from Dost that Mitra had started a printing business which had failed. Some time after this he joined his political party, the one about which Dost would not speak, because it was part of the nationalist-fundamentalist alliance which had destroyed the Babri Masjid.
So we talked, about when, and who, and what, and where. He told us how he had left the printing works and taken a loan to start up on his own.
‘What I wanted to do was make books. You remember? It was your mother who encouraged me. This was after you had left for England. She helped a lot. So I began publishing books which retold our stories, from our point of view. I don’t just mean an Indian point of view, I mean the view from ground-level. As the people in my village saw it. History is written by rulers and the hirelings of rulers, but the only history worth recording is the struggle of the ordinary people.’
