Breathless in Bombay Read online

  Stretching out, he lay on his back. The sand felt cool and moist. He looked up at the dark, inky sky, which appeared to be parting slowly, layers of cloud moving aside to reveal deeper shades of darkness. Over the ocean, a lone star shone brightly; it appeared to be winking at Bheem Singh. He looked at it for a while, then shut his eyes firmly. Too much light could dazzle; it could fascinate and fool. Bheem lay like that, listening to the sound of his heart, the blood pounding at his temples, the ocean below, when he felt the presence of people surrounding him and watching. He opened his eyes to the sight of the head maalishwalla standing over him, and behind him were the other maalishwallas looking so tensed and worried. Bheem Singh sprang to his feet. If there was trouble, he’d better—

  The head maalishwalla stepped forward and placed a hand on Bheem Singh’s shoulder. It was a heavy hand, trying to be gentle. He looked at Bheem Singh with wet, searching eyes and spoke slowly and softly, a faint quiver in his voice: “I have news for you Bheem Singh. Bad, bad news. There is a garden coming up here at Chowpatty. The whole place is going to change. The trees are going to go. The food stalls are going to be moved. We, too, have been asked to go, as soon as possible. You will have to look for something new—maybe here, or maybe in your village.”

  THIS HOUSE OF MINE

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  WHEN YOU’VE LIVED IN A HOUSE as long as I have, which is forty-odd years and some months, when you’ve laughed and sulked in every nook and corner, when you have looked out of its windows and seen the shingled roofs, the trees, and the cool, blue clouds drifting by like giant spaceships, when you’ve seen migratory birds come and park their colorful plumage on your windowsill, the songs in their hearts breaking loose over the sounds of city traffic, when you’ve skipped down its stairs, slid down its banisters, and leaned long enough from its balconies to catch a glimpse of passing cleavage, when you have rung the doorbells of old neighbors (long dead now) and fled, not waiting to hear them open their doors and grumble, “Oh, it’s that badmash again; wait till we catch him,” when you’ve kissed girls as curiously impatient as you, on the stairs, in your teenage years, for no other reason than the excitement of risky exploration, when you have dragged yourself up the same stairs, in the dark, confident not of the booze raging in your system but of the floor space you have navigated, when—in your later years—you have run up on your toes, purposefully, as a daily routine, to keep those seafood dinners from turning into arterial blocks in your heart, when you’ve done all this and more, and have done it in some strange way or another for forty-odd years and ten months, and when, on the third day of that tenth month, you get a notice from the housing board saying that your building is endangered, it is no longer safe to house you, then you know by the lurch in your heart that you haven’t just lived in the house: the house has lived in you.

  This is how I found myself thinking, on the third of October, the day the notice was sent to us and the neighbors began to pour in for advice and for resolution. They came one by one. First, the shopkeepers from the ground floor: Dinanath, Master of the Stores, potbellied owner of four proud shops, including the kirana shop that had earned him the other three shops; he was followed by his son, Gopinath, a pleasant-faced youth of twenty, wearing a white churidaar and a brown khadi jacket, smiling with the tranquility of one whose father has saved enough for him, he didn’t need to slave for his daily bread; behind them was Ram Dulari, the plump-faced, bushy-whiskered milkman, now the owner of a sparkling new snack bar at the entrance; then the goldsmith, in his lungi; the flower vendor, in his undershirt and trousers; the tailor, in impeccable clothes, a walking advertisement for himself; the cloth merchant, fat and slovenly, who was always trying to proposition the woman who sold plastic household articles on the pavement. They crowded my doorstep shyly and insisted on leaving their footwear outside as a mark of respect. Making a garrulous entry was the owner of the math class on the ground floor: Professor Girish Kodial, young, suave, energetic, in his late thirties, who at once started talking about his trips abroad, his affiliations with universities there, and the affluence of his students here, whom he helped get overseas for a fat fee. His students would bring back degrees that might not get them coveted jobs but would certainly increase their value in the marriage market.

  “See where math has taken me,” Professor Kodial said excitedly, spontaneously, in a manner typical of a man of success. “It has placed me in a win-win situation. I make money from both ends—from rich students who can’t get into institutions here and from universities that are not all that highly rated. I must confess, math has taught me to make the right calculations in life, taught me that one plus one need not amount to two. It can amount to four, though.” He laughed. Then, for the umpteenth time, he said to me, “I want to come and sit with you one day. I want to see if we can do something together. Math and literature can surely coexist. These non-applicable sciences can earn for us.”

  “Literature is not a science, but an art,” I wanted to tell him coldly. “An art you can apply to life.” But I didn’t say that. I remembered I was the host. “Interesting thought,” I said, and shut up.

  Unable to understand our flow of English, the shopkeepers waited with bright, expectant faces, ready to take instruction, ready to be led and advised, in a language they could comprehend, which was to say Hindi or Gujarati. Out of shyness, they kept standing, even when my wife pointed politely to the plastic chairs and stools she had rented. She didn’t want them sitting on her sofas, she had said to me earlier. She didn’t want the sweat of these locals to get into her upholstery. She’d smell it for days, she’d said, twitching her nose disdainfully.

  Soon after entered my residential neighbors: Olga Castellino, the Goan woman from the first floor, who would rave and rant at her husband, Olaf, when he went out shopping for sausages and came back instead red faced and happy, spiritedly whistling the songs of his youth; Olaf himself, bleary-eyed and disheveled, his shirt buttons open to his navel, his belly spilling out stodgily, Olaf in shorts and chappals, with frail, smooth legs, the looks of one who had long retired from work, who would rather be in Goa, breeding pigs and brewing his own liquor; Sohrab, the Parsi misanthrope from the second floor, tall, bent, with dark circles under his eyes from smoking too much pot through the day and mulling over too many regrets in life, while his wife, the pert-faced Angelina, worked out the whole day in front of the television set, listening to MTV or to a yoga instructor advocating poses of the body for fine, eternal health, Angelina, who made it a point to open the door to vendors, wearing nothing but skimpy shorts, who would address them in a haughty, delicate accent, just to make it clear that she didn’t belong here, she belonged actually to a superior neighborhood, she was here purely by accident, purely by chance; Murad, the guy from the third floor, who worked as a clerk in a shipping company and, who, at least once a week had a fistfight with his younger brother, Nazir, now Nazarana, a friendly-faced homosexual who had recently stepped out of the closet, had done so by bringing home a boyfriend and announcing that a union, not a marriage, was in the cards and that anybody opposed to it could suck his you-know-what. Murad’s wife was Farhana, a short, stout woman with stumplike legs and a sullen, withdrawn face. She was unfriendly, said hello only when she had to and mostly when she was alone, presumably because Murad didn’t like her speaking to other men. I gathered Farhana didn’t like her brother-in-law; she saw him as an impediment to them claiming ownership of the flat, long-standing tenants having that kind of right, here, in Bombay. She also saw Nazarana as an embarrassment. His effeminate ways were tough to explain to friends, relatives, and visiting clerics, let alone neighbors.

  A motley crowd filled my living room that day—some sat on chairs; some kept standing. The shopkeepers sat after much coaxing; a humble lot they were. Looking at them, I saw we had nothing in common, not the same backgrounds, not the same Gods, not the same sense of dress or interests. And yet we were all neighbors, and we had a crisis that threatened to send us packing
, to eject us from the comfort of a well-preserved life into the arms of an uncertain future.

  I began by reading, then translating for the benefit of the shopkeepers, the eviction notice. Our building was among those slated for redevelopment. It had been examined, it had been inspected, and it had been condemned. We had a month to move to a new address: to a transit camp in Powai, miles from where we were.

  “Is the landlord coming? Has he been informed?” asked the tailor, in Hindi.

  “No,” said Dinanath. “He went through an operation, a hip bone replacement, last week. He’s in bed; he can’t even walk.” Dinanath knew this because he handled the rent receipts for the landlord, who stayed at Altamount Road, in a quiet leafy lane that exuded uppercrust elegance. The landlord had long back foreseen the deterioration of our neighborhood: the thickening of traffic, the escalation of noise, the density of vehicle fumes, the smell of hawkers cooking on pavements, and the proliferation of open-air urinals that had us holding our noses and running past certain parts of the street.

  We discussed the notice. Our building was old but sturdy. There had been no tremors, no parts of it falling or crumbling—so where did this threat of eviction come from? Despite our varying backgrounds, we realized we had one thing in common—our fear of the unknown. Our fear of a government entity, which, as per the newspapers, had the best of intentions, but which remained just that: intentions. In a country of over 1 billion, it was easy to be moved and forgotten. There were several stories to this effect. Angelina took pride in narrating one about an aunt of hers, whose building at Byculla was declared endangered, and they had moved to Gorai, across the bay, and twenty-two years later they were still there. Angelina’s uncle had passed away; her aunt had stopped working; her cousins, now in their twenties, had become fishermen, as they couldn’t afford to go to college all the way from Gorai.

  “Arrey, damn good,” said Nazarana, grinning. “Now we can get fish at a discount.”

  “Well, they are distant cousins,” said Angelina quickly. “But let me speak to my other cousin, Denzil, who is like a brother to me. He is a lawyer in the High Court, and very influential. He will know what to do about this notice.” She began dialing on her cell phone, pacing at the same time. The shopkeepers looked impressed. Angelina had managed to convince them she was a product of high society. She was someone to be counted on, looked up to. A crisis of this nature was an excellent opportunity to reinforce that impression.

  “That won’t help,” said Professor Kodial, smiling. “The best thing is to get the eviction notice changed. We can do so by shelling out some of this.” He rubbed his fingers to imply money. We nodded. We knew he was right. He, after all, ran a flourishing business out of a residential flat. It must have taken some knowledge to get that fixed.

  After a while, my wife served tea in paper cups. The paper was her idea, as she said we didn’t know our neighbors’ habits of hygiene. We didn’t know where they ate, what sort of ailments they had. In this day and age of infections like hepatitis B and bird flu you couldn’t afford to take chances.

  While the neighbors sipped their tea and discussed—some in English, some in Hindi, and all in an excited babble—what should be the course of action, Olaf got to his feet and proclaimed, “Over my dead body will we go. Let’s take on those bloody bulldozers. Let’s show them.” He said he knew activists in Andheri and Malad who had stood up to the demolitions. He would contact them, collaborate with them, show these bloody buggers just who they were messing with. Not for nothing had he played hockey for his club, and when some ghatti buggers had tried to force their way into the club premises he had wielded his hockey stick like a nunchaku and scared the hell out of them. That was thirty years ago, but if need be he could repeat the performance. He flexed his chest and shoulders and swung his arms. He staggered and almost fell. The flower vendor steadied him in time, helped him to sit down. Olga remarked wryly that he would first have to learn to stand upright without his morning peg. “What you mean?” Olaf said, rising again. “I can’t face these bloody ghatti fuckers? Bloody . . . I will make them remember their mothers.” We had to politely remind Olaf that most of the shopkeepers were also ghattis. We didn’t want to risk offending them.

  We agreed to visit the housing board the next day. We would go there in person, all of us. Murad pleaded his inability to join in. They were short staffed at work; he couldn’t take a day off. We said that was fine; one person less wouldn’t make a difference. Nazarana piped in and said she would be glad to represent the family. Everyone smiled. Murad glared at him. Farhana looked at him with loathing. Professor Kodial suggested we get an independent engineer to evaluate the building. The professor had a friend who was a builder; he would request him to send over one of his men. Dinanath said that might not be a good idea. The housing board officials might take offense; they would think we were challenging their authority. They could make life difficult for us and ours was an old building, so why upset them? Why take chances? Professor Kodial agreed with Dinanath. In any government interaction it was diplomacy that won the day. He said this as a caution to the women, so they wouldn’t say something awkward at the board office. Angelina drew herself up. “Well, if you need Denzil’s advice, let me know. He will do anything for me.”

  THE HOUSING BOARD WAS SITUATED in an old building at Worli. The building had a dusty yard and two entrances: one in front, one at the back. There were scooters and motorcycles parked in front and cars at the back. Without looking up from his newspaper, the chowkidar at the gate gesticulated for us to go to the back entrance.

  “How, sahib, how will we manage?” we asked an official to whose office we were directed. “We have our work here, our lives here. Our children go to schools here. What will we do in Powai? How will we commute from there daily?”

  Sohrab, the pothead, spoke. “I have an elderly mother and an eighty-year-old aunt who I am looking after. They both need constant medical attention and their doctors and hospitals are in this area.” He paused. His grief seemed real. He looked terribly deprived, I thought, probably because he was compelled to do without his morning smoke. Angelina would have made sure of that. And, just for the record, there was no mother and no aunt. They had passed away two years ago. All the official had to do was check his records. I don’t think Sohrab realized that.

  The official was a bland-faced fellow with a mop of gray hair, a trace of a mustache, and a small, round mouth that protruded. His eyes were small and impassive; they flickered restlessly. He looked rather young to be in charge of something as significant as evictions. He looked around distractedly, as though expecting someone more important than us.

  Finally, he spoke. “That is the problem with these old buildings and this old system of rents. The rents are so low that your landlords cannot maintain your buildings. The buildings deteriorate and you, the tenants, do nothing about them until they become unlivable. In your case, our civil engineer has found the back portion of your building weak. It can collapse anytime. So we will have to repair it, and you all will have to move out until we do so.”

  “How long will the repairs take?” asked the tailor politely.

  “Who knows?” said the official, leaning back in his chair, bringing his hands behind his head. “We cannot commit till we have broken down the entire back side. The demolition is handled by one department, the reconstruction by another. Each department has its own method and backlog. Who can say how long these things take?” He shrugged and looked away.

  “Sahib.” I coughed. “Is there some way we can do this? We have seen buildings with supports, railings, beams . . . and the residents continue to live there, while the repairs are going on.”

  We waited. We nudged ourselves and stopped breathing. Well, almost.

  Dinanath pushed ahead, “Sahib, see what you can do. Everything is in your hands, we know.”

  Sohrab sniffed, once, twice. His nose was running. He looked afflicted. Without the warmth of his smoke, his sinuses were acting up.
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  Ram Dulari spoke. In his lowest voice he said he had just spent a fortune on doing up his shop—on converting it from a dairy to a snack bar. The move to Powai could put him out of business. How could he start afresh when he had a bank loan and installments to pay every month? Besides, what would happen to the interiors he had spent on so lavishly? He would be ruined.

  The goldsmith said the wedding season was around the corner; he would lose out on orders. He had tears in his eyes, this man of indefatigable artistry, who listened to old Hindi songs on his transistor while he chipped away at his rings, earrings, bracelets, and pendants.

  The tailor said he, too, would suffer if he wasn’t in his shop during the wedding season. His customers would go elsewhere. That would be the end of his livelihood.

  The official looked at them blankly. Below the desk, his one leg quivered impatiently.

  “Ha, you think you are the only ones with problems? You know how much of a problem it is for us if your building collapses? Then everyone will come to catch our necks. No one will say we have obliged you. They will all say we have failed in our duty. No, it is better you move to Powai. We have a nice transit camp there. Nice greenery. Nice silence. Hundreds live there. They, too, had to adjust when they first went there. And so will you. It is just a matter of getting used to it. Powai is an upcoming area, so you can start a new business there. Food is good business. People feel hungry all the time.” He looked at us and smiled. Beneath the smile, we could see his hunger.