The Death of Mr Love, page 46
A whistle from the darkness. The tea-boy. ‘Murad is waiting at the corner. Hurry.’
Phoebe and I left the doorway and began walking.
‘Run,’ hissed the boy. So then we ran, and saw the taxi, with the boy holding the door open. He slammed it shut on us and climbed into the passenger seat beside Murad.
‘Holy Moses,’ he said. ‘Do you want to die?’
We were pulling away from the mouth of the alley when I saw the figures arriving at Moosa’s door. Blurry shadows holding what might be sticks. But in the lamplight, the gleam of metal.
‘What is happening?’ I asked. ‘Where are we going now?’
‘Dongri is not safe for you,’ said Murad. ‘Word has gone about. Not everyone here is our friend.’
‘How did they know . . . ?’ But I could answer the question myself. That night we had gone round the area, asking for Dost and talking about Moosa’s.
‘You have to go to Mitra,’ said Murad. ‘Dost phoned him. He knows you are coming. There you will be safe. But you must leave Bombay as soon as possible.’
The area through which we were travelling had become dingier and poorer. There were hutments by the side of the road, roofed with corrugated iron and black polythene.
‘It will be safer if I drop you here,’ Murad said. ‘You can do the rest on foot. Follow the boy. He knows the way.’
We alighted at a spot where a number of handcarts were pulled up by a wall. Perched on the end of one of these, a pretty woman was trying to persuade her baby to drink something from a steel glass. The baby chuckled and threw the glass into the gutter. The woman reached down, retrieved it, wiped it on her sari and tried again. Again the baby threw it down. A black-cowled Muslim woman stopped, picked up the glass and handed it back to the mother, who uttered a word of thanks to which the woman in black did not reply.
We started after the boy, who was walking slowly ahead of us, already some distance away, from time to time turning to make sure we were following. As Murad had taught us, Phoebe was one step behind me. I could not tell what she was thinking. After a while, the boy stepped into a side lane, its first few dozen yards brightly lit, shops on either side: cloth merchants, an emporium full of pots and pans with a row of aluminium buckets hanging above its entrance, a café from whose open front film music issued, where a man was frying pakoras in a deep curved pan. A small group of street children, true sadak chhaap, stood nearby, calling out to the cook, who ignored them. Our tea-boy was already some way past this group when the cook reached down with his ladle and flipped a pakora sizzling through the air towards the children. A small girl caught it, cried out in pain. The man laughed to see her juggling to save it. She ran into the night, chased by her friends. Behind me, Phoebe muttered something I could not catch. I turned. She was hobbling, and for the first time I realised that her feet were bare. The road surface here was pitted, with sharp stones protruding from the tarmac. There were large puddles left in the potholes from the last shower and her bare feet trod through the slush. Ahead of us the boy continued without hesitating, a small figure caught now and again in the glow of a street-lamp. A haze of woodsmoke spread across the road. The street-lamps grew fewer, their dull spillages of light at first one, then two hundred yards apart, until at last there were no more. Now the only illumination was the dim flicker from doorways. People passing were shapes in the gloom. Five men were sitting on a string bed with their knees drawn up, backs to a brick wall, five points of orange fire in the darkness. Suddenly the sky rumbled. Somewhere, a dog howled. A flicker of lightning in clouds hanging low overhead, a stirring in the turgid air. The boy, with a glance behind to make sure we were still at his heels, ducked into an alley, a few feet wide, margined by clogged gutters, that led away between shacks made of wood and beaten-out tin cans. Inside one of these, glimpsed by the smoky light of a kerosene lamp, a woman with a cruel face was nursing a baby. In a brighter hut, lit by a naked bulb, a man was chopping meat with a cleaver, casting lumps of flesh into a pile. Blood had pooled on the floor. It trickled out of the open doorway and leaked in black veins into a drain full of furry growths. I noticed that where a patch of light fell through a door, the boy stepped round it, passing on the shadow side. Some distance ahead of us a single bulb emitted a feeble tobacco glow. Beyond it, the alley dwindled to a muddy path and the plank-and-can shacks gave way to dwellings hung with rags, plastic sheets and torn sacks. It was growing hard to see. The boy hurried on, and then he was gone. The alley had come to an end, debouched into darkness. Blind air thick with the stench of garbage reached my nostrils, and nearby, incongruously reminding me of Maya, the scent of cobra-jasmine. My eyes acclimatised to a wide, rubbish-strewn space, across which smoke was blowing. Lightning sparked again, a downward flash, illuminating more wasteland ahead. I took Phoebe’s hand. She did not speak, but I could feel again that she was afraid and guessed from her sharp exclamations that her feet were being caught by thorny weeds and broken bricks. Without a word I swung her up into my arms and carried her. She said something, lost in a huge rumble of thunder. The first drops of rain struck my face. Phoebe was surprisingly light and I stumbled forward at a half run, looking for the boy. There was no sign of him. He was somewhere far ahead, gone into the night, leaving us lost in the middle of nowhere. I could not decide what to do. Should I turn back? Behind us, I could still distantly make out a light flickering here and there among the shanties we had left. I had my wallet and credit cards. Perhaps if we worked our way back to the main road we could get a taxi and hole up in some out-of-the-way hotel where nobody would think of looking for us. From somewhere in the district behind us arose the sound of shouting. Probably it was nothing to do with us, but it made up my mind. Rain was falling in earnest as, slowly, I picked my way across the uneven ground towards a well of deeper darkness, a round hole in the night. It was the empty mouth of a concrete sewer pipe, a yard across, that must have been lying there a long time, for beneath its curve a lantana bush had grown. As we approached, moths flew up in a cloud from its tiny, bitter flowers . . .
I said, ‘Fever, we’re going to stop. Shelter from the rain. The boy will come back and find us.’
She said in a small voice, ‘When I was little, I always thought we’d get married. But I never thought you’d be carrying me across a threshold like this.’
A little later, we were squeezed well inside the pipe, our faces so close together that I could feel her breath on my face. She was still trembling and our arms were wrapped round one another. I could feel her heart beating. She said, ‘Bhalu, what you asked, earlier . . .’ ‘I shouldn’t have said it. I’m sorry.’ Her mouth found mine in the darkness, and gave the answer to that earlier question. She took my hand and guided it onto her breast, then after a little, pushed it further down. She wriggled until the long robe rode up, and my fingers touched the soft skin of her thighs. Again she took my hand and placed it where she wanted it. ‘Now my dear’, she said, ‘do you doubt?’ She kissed me again, disengaged, and said, her fingers meanwhile fumbling with the draw-string at my waist, ‘I wanted to do this since the first time I saw you again, but I daren’t because you were married and you love Katy.’ But even as she said this, her fingers were at work on me. ‘I’ve never loved anyone like I love you . . . we’re so close we don’t need to do this.’ Her words rushed out in clusters. ‘Do you really want to? Darling, I’ll do anything you want, but maybe we should stop now . . .’ I did not stop. Somehow in that narrow space I clambered on top of her. ‘Our parents . . . Bhalu, isn’t this what got them in trouble?’ She was still babbling, urging me to desist as she tugged down my pyjamas and her thighs parted. I thought of Katy, and betrayal, but then I thought of exotic birds. Outside it had begun to rain hard. Water drumming on the hollow pipe created a roar that drowned first her protestations, then our joy- and shame-filled cries.
AATI KYA KHANDALA?
Morning light entered the pipe and found two people huddled together, their clothing in disarray. How many times during the night? Our passion, fuelled by terror, seemed inexhaustible, as if we needed to express in a single night everything we had ever felt for one another. We stank of sex.
‘Bhalu, where the hell are we?’
‘In a sewer pipe somewhere in the middle of Bombay. Being chased by desperados.’
She laughed. ‘How strange that I feel so happy.’
We crawled out. A blustery wind was blowing sheets of rain across the waste ground we had traversed the night before. To the south, the direction we had come, was the low line of a hutment. Ahead stretched a deserted land of stagnant pools, and ruined buildings. The desolation looked smaller than it had in the dark. In the other direction, only a little more distant, was another line of ragged roofs.
Phoebe said, ‘Someone’s coming.’
From southward, two figures, one much taller than the other, were approaching under an umbrella. As they drew near we saw that it was last night’s boy, accompanied by a worried-looking Dost.
‘Thank the Lord you’re safe,’ he said to me.
‘They didn’t follow,’ said the boy. ‘It wasn’t my fault. I came back to look for them, but they had disappeared.’
‘It really wasn’t his fault,’ I said. ‘We got ourselves lost.’
‘So where did you spend the night?’ asked Dost.
‘What is he saying?’ asked Phoebe. So I translated.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘We found a most charming hotel.’
Looking from one to the other of us he said, ‘I daren’t ask what you two have been up to. She’s an amazingly bindaas woman.’
‘Is that a compliment?’ The word was new to me.
‘It means . . . well, it’s difficult to explain what it means. But yes, it probably was a compliment.’
I was still feeling protective of Phoebe. In her loose black robe, nothing on underneath and no shoes, she seemed a little thing, not at all the daunting woman she could be, and what we had done together had filled me with tenderness.
‘Okay, well your girlfriend has to change her clothes. Over there –’ he pointed to the north – ‘is where Mitra lives. But it’s a Hindu stronghold, so she’s going to look a bit conspicuous if she goes there dressed like that.’
‘She can’t change.’
‘Why not? Can’t she just take off the burkha?’
When I told him, he sighed. ‘Truly bindaas.’
Half an hour later, Dost and the boy, followed by two rumpled creatures – by their dress a Pathan from Dongri accompanied by his wife, hidden from head to toe in a burkha, the pair of them, judging by the way they held hands and clung together, obviously much in love – entered the lanes of Mitra’s community, drawing stares from women filling water pots at roadside taps and men about their early business. When we mischievously asked how to find Mitra Kashele, a dozen amazed voices told us the way.
Mitra’s face, when he answered his door, was a mixure of relief and anger. He pulled us inside and said to Dost, ‘Are you out of your mind? Why have you brought them here dressed like this? We’ll have to get them out of here.’
‘Yaar, is this a way to greet an old friend? The lady has nothing on underneath.’
Mitra took this in his stride. ‘What about Bhalu? He looks like some Kabuli camel-shagger. They’ll have to change.’
An hour later, Phoebe reappeared wearing a long skirt, and I found myself – none of Mitra’s trousers would fit me – in the dhoti and coarse-spun shirt of a Maharashtrian villager.
Dost said, ‘They must stay with you. It isn’t safe in Dongri. Men are scouring the place looking for them. The hotel in Colaba has had another visit. They have got to get out.’ To me he said, ‘Now you look every inch the bloody Hindu.’
Mitra said to Dost, ‘I have got the address.’
Dost said, ‘For God’s sake don’t tell Phoebe. Just let’s get them out of the city as quickly as possible.’
Mitra said, ‘Don’t you think they should have the choice, after all they’ve been through?’
I said, ‘Don’t talk about us as if we aren’t here. What address?’
‘The address of Mister Shaitan,’ said Mitra. ‘I have found out where our blackmailer lives. It’s a few hours’ drive from the city, but I know the area well . . . I think we should tell Fever. But let’s hope her experience of last night –’ he gave me a wry glance ‘– has taught her a lesson.’
‘So it’s four of us in the car then,’ said Dost, after Phoebe had expressed her opinion.
‘How four?’ asked Mitra.
‘Murad the driver. Bhalu, Phoebe and me,’ said Dost.
‘Five,’ said Mitra. ‘I’ve also got a score to settle.’ To me he said, ‘I’m doing this for your mother.’ Turning to Dost he added, ‘And of course your famous cock.’
The events of that day run and rerun in my mind like a film. Going up the ghats in heavy rain. Jula – Phoebe refused to let us call him Mitra – sitting beside Murad. She in the back between Dost and me. There was a lorry jam stretching all the way down the mountain. ‘This is nothing,’ said Murad. ‘Last month, there were landslides. They caused a jam sixty miles long that took a whole day to clear.’ We passed several overturned trucks, upset by steep cambers and tight hairpins. Ahead of us, heavy lorries were crawling up the pitted surface in clouds of diesel smoke. Congestion, or something broken down up ahead, often caused them to stop. They found it difficult to get going again, dragged backwards by their heavy loads, wheels spinning until they smoked. A man would jump out of the cab and shove a large rock, the size of a watermelon, under a rear wheel. The lorry would leap forward, like an athlete pushing off from starting blocks, and the lad would rush to jump back in, leaving the stone obstructing the road. The ghat was littered with stones like these. Perhaps the truckers left them for each other. Anything rather than call in the men on small motorbikes who swarmed up and down, weaving among the slow uphill traffic, looking for breakdowns. ‘To get a lorry going again, one thousand rupees,’ Murad told us. When a car ahead of us developed some trouble and stopped, the roving mechanics were on it like flies to rotting offal. ‘He won’t make it to the top,’ said Murad. ‘They’ll spike his fuel supply. Then come back for another fee. They’ll make a killing out of him.’ Slowly we climbed, among a stream of antique lorries, up past the Hanuman temple, until at last Duke’s Nose appeared, looming to the right, its cleft peak shrouded in cloud. A few minutes later we were on the edge of the escarpment, staring into the endless view from Khandala. All around us, the mountains, strange rain-green shapes, were cut by waterfalls like slashes of ice.
‘Jula, where did you say we were going?’ asked Phoebe. ‘Because after Khandala, doesn’t this become the road to Ambona?’
‘Aati kya Khandala,’ sang Dost suddenly. It was the song our tea-boy had crooned to Phoebe.
‘Ambone mein chikki khaenge
Waterfall pe jayenge
Khandala ke ghat ke ooper
Photo kheechke aaenge
Haan bhi karta naa bhi karta
Dil mera deewana
Dil bhi sala party badle
Kaisa hai jamana
Phone laga tu apne dil ko jara
Pooch le aakhir hai kya majra
Arey pal mein phisalta hai
Pal mein sambhalta hai
Confuse karta hai, bas kya?’
‘What does it mean?’ Phoebe asked. For someone on the verge of confronting her nemesis, her sangfroid was astonishing.
‘It’s a useless song,’ said Jula. ‘Hardly needs translating, since it’s half in English anyway. Waterfalls . . . photos . . . a woman who can’t make up her mind . . . Confusion of the poor heart.’ Turning to me, he said, ‘Majrooh, the lyricist – remember, Bhalu, he was a friend of your mother’s – said this song was a disgrace to Hindi poetry.’
But obligingly, he sang to Phoebe:
‘In Ambona chikki eatenge
To waterfall goinge
Khandala ke ghat ke on top of
Photo clickke comenge
Yes it alsos, no it alsos,
This mad heart of mine
Switches parties, bloody heart,
(Just like a bloody politician)
Oh what an age we live in’
We passed the turning for Ambona. Several miles further on, a small, inconspicuous road climbed away through a forest of teak and sal and bamboo. Before long it became heavily rutted. Finally the tarmac gave out and we were skidding along a rough track, kicking up clouds of red dust, raising around us the smell of my first night in Ambona.
Murad parked the car so that it was hidden behind a grove of bamboo. He and Dost would stay with it, while the rest of us went on foot through the forest. We would spy out the ground before walking into the home of our enemy.
How beautiful it was, that early afternoon hike over hillsides and along ravines, the forest in these parts still thick, untouched, streams alive with rainy-season fish. There were birds I had not seen since I was a child and whose existence I had forgotten. Fork-tailed drongos, green bee-eaters. The morning’s rain had stopped, and as we walked, our mood seemed to lighten. We were walking back into our childhood, where nothing could touch us. Three of us, marching in single file, just as we had when we were children and making just as peculiar a sight. Jula, leading the way, was now the one wearing trousers and a shirt. My turn, in the dhoti, to be the villager. Phoebe followed behind, skirt hoisted to the knees. She was quite nerveless, in high spirits. Perhaps she was savouring the imminence of her revenge. On a hillside we came across some cows, spread out grazing the rich grass. Jula said, ‘Fever, do you remember how to call them?’
