Breathless in Bombay Read online

  Dinanath took the lead. “Sahib, do something,” he said. “It is in your hands. Please advise. Please help. We are small traders. We cannot afford to start again.”

  Angelina thrust herself forward. “Please, sir, oblige karo na?” she said, in a slow, anglicized drawl. “I have already paid a big advance for my jazz ballet classes. That will all go to waste.”

  The official looked her up and down. His mouth was open. His eyes were still. Sohrab could see what he was thinking. Hurriedly Sohrab pulled his wife back.

  Professor Kodial stepped forward. He said that perhaps the building had been inspected by some junior engineer who wasn’t so experienced. Maybe if a senior engineer was to come by, he would get a different perspective. His findings might not be so severe. The professor looked at the official and smiled. “Surely, sir, you can recommend someone. We will be glad to leave the matter in your hands. And if there are any conditions to make the building safer, we will observe them.” He locked eyes with the official, who nodded. We understood and trooped out quietly, while Professor Kodial extracted a thick brown envelope from his pocket.

  WITHIN A WEEK WE GOT a notice saying that the eviction notice was canceled. The board had reevaluated our case, found the back portion could be reinforced without us needing to evacuate. Of course, they would have to place extra beams and supports. Additional beams of reinforced wood. The repairs would have to be rushed, in order to make the building safe for the monsoons.

  The cost of the bribe was borne by Professor Kodial. When we asked him the amount and whether we could share it equally, he said not to bother: “It’s the least I can do for our building. The land has given me so much.” The shopkeepers looked at him with respect. They made up their minds they’d no longer complain when his students crowded the entrance, when they ate their potato chips and crushed and left the empty packs on the stairs. His was true education, they thought. One that prepared man to protect himself against the system, taught him how to work the system inside out and win.

  Olaf thought differently. “Why you bloody played into his hands, man, bugger?” he said to the professor after we left the housing board office. “These officials are dirty fellows. You can see it from their faces. Once you give in, they will come back. They are shameless, like beggars.”

  The professor smiled and proceeded to share with us what he knew about transit camps. Poor construction, cramped spaces, common bathrooms and toilets, and regular instances of theft. Besides, many of the rooms had been rented out unofficially to locals, and among these were goons who presided and collected protection money every month.

  “Cha, what fellows, men,” said Olaf with disgust. “Now, in the old days . . .” His voice tapered off. It was too hot for nostalgia, and besides, his throat was parched.

  Ram Dulari sidled up to the professor and asked whether he could pay a small amount to the officials just to ensure there was no damage to his interiors during the repairs. The professor said he would think about it; we should be careful not to spoil them. Ram Dulari smiled and nodded gratefully. This math was interesting, he thought. It was easy to learn, and easier to practice.

  THE REPAIR TEAM ARRIVED the day after we had signed the papers for them to get started. They drove beams through the building—through every floor, every apartment, through the stairway, all the way up to the terrace. They covered the exterior of the building, top to bottom, with long tarpaulins, which blocked out the air and the sunlight. They did this to ensure the debris wouldn’t fall onto passersby below or onto the traffic.

  Thirty to forty men worked away with hammers and chisels. They made gaps in the walls and in the ceilings and then filled those with cement. There was dust and rubble everywhere, and noise and darkness. A tall man in a white shirt and white trousers, wearing white shoes and swinging a gold chain in his hand, went from house to house introducing himself as Jayeshbhai Chokhani. He said he was the contractor appointed by the housing board to repair the building, and since his job was to keep us safe, he advised us not to venture to the back side. He said he hoped we would make his job easier by staying clear of the endangered area. Just to make sure, his men cordoned off the back with wooden boards. So, we could see nothing: no sacks of cement or workers going there. We could hear nothing: no sounds of breakage or the scraping of cement. The goldsmith—who used to live in his own shop and bathe and use the toilet at the back—made a deal with Olga Castellino. He agreed to redesign her mother’s jewelry free of cost in exchange for her letting him use their bath and toilet. Later Olga discovered some of her jewelry missing. She thought it was he who had swiped them. But no, Olaf looked unusually upbeat and cheerful. He had begun to whistle tunes like “Speedy Gonzales.” He also claimed he had been lucky at matka daily. But that was too much to believe if you knew Olaf’s luck.

  For six months we lived in total gloom. There were times when the buildup of confined energy was too much to handle; we had to run out of our flats, onto the street below, just to take in a lungful of fresh air. Olaf, given to the sweats, started walking around naked. Olga swore she’d invite Nazarana home for plum cake if he didn’t dress properly. She swore she would do it unexpectedly, without telling him, and Olaf promptly went back to his loose shirts and his bright spotted cotton shorts. He inferred there was nothing that would keep a woman happy. Nothing a man could do of his own free will.

  Sohrab found his own way to deal with the noise and the darkness. He just mixed some more stash into his joints and said that he had risen above the problem. Angelina switched to the meditation channel and said it didn’t matter to her; she had achieved perfect mind control.

  Dinanath brought out his wares onto the streets, on mobile carts, from where he continued to sell, continued to do good business. Cleverly he painted the names of his shops onto the tarpaulin behind, his logos bigger and bolder than ever. When any municipality official questioned Dinanath about his encroachment onto the street, he gave the official free provisions and a small tip to look the other way.

  True to our word, none of us ventured out back. At one point, all the workers flocked to the terrace and they chipped and hammered at the flooring and removed the mosaic waterproofing. It was imported mosaic, eighty years old, the kind you wouldn’t get these days, the kind that had stood up to the Bombay rains for eighty years and that I believe had an excellent resale value in the market. The repair team replaced this precious mosaic with a light terra-cotta layer that, we suspected, would heat up the terrace in the summer. They left, after taking our signatures, saying the building was now safe. The amount spent on repairs would be added to our rent as a monthly surcharge. There was no mention for how long, how many months and years we would have to pay the additional amount. Come to think of it, they had failed to provide us an estimate for the repairs, and we had forgotten to ask for it—so glad we were not to have been evicted.

  Two days after the repair team left, we all met and flocked to the back side. What we saw was some shoddy patchwork, looking like a map of the world where the continents had broken away from one another. Different worlds evident to different eyes. And each fairly unrecognizable.

  SIX MONTHS LATER, we met again at my house. The fourth floor gave the best view, we all agreed.

  Another problem, another discussion. Our wooden staircase was giving way. The steps were collapsing, and pieces of the banister were breaking, snapping off in our hands.

  Professor Kodial said that the same thing was happening to the desks in his classrooms. Their bottoms were falling out. No one wanted to say the nightmarish words, least of all I, who had opened my bookcase one day to find the back portion eaten away. Pages and pages of my Steinbecks, my Salingers, my Faulkners, my Chekhovs, my Capotes, and my Fitzgeralds—all hardcovers, mind you—were powdered dust.

  Sam Firodia, the pest control expert we had invited to the meeting, shook his head, stroked his beard, and said, “Just what I expected. Coptotermes formosanus shiraki. The subterranean termite, the most evil of them all.”r />
  Sam proceeded to brief us on our new neighbors. “The most aggressive species of termites,” he said. “Very dangerous, very persistent, and very difficult to dislodge once they get their teeth in and carve out their tunnels. They will build tunnels from anything: mud, paper, wood, even their own body secretions, like saliva and feces. They will pass from soil to wood without being detected, and will even infiltrate concrete.”

  I translated this for the shopkeepers, who looked at Sam Firodia anxiously.

  “Will they eat cloth?” asked the tailor hesitatingly.

  “No fear of that,” replied Sam.

  “What about foodstuffs?” asked Ram Dulari.

  “They prefer wood and paper. That is their food.”

  “What about plants?” asked Sohrab, thinking of some newly acquired weed in his cupboard.

  Sam answered all their questions patiently. Then, turning to me, he said, “I don’t understand, in the first place, how they got into your building. Such an old structure would have solid wood, a solid foundation. I wonder how it came to be infected.”

  My mind went back to the repairs, to the days of no light, of being propped up by specially reinforced beams of wood. I wondered where the wood had come from and at what cost.

  Sam said he would do the treatment but would not guarantee that the termites would be wiped out. We would have to get regular treatments done. We would have to be vigilant and observe.

  “Sahib, I want to ask you one thing,” said the flower vendor to Sam. “Does the smell of food attract these termites? Can that be the reason for the sudden invasion?”

  “I know why he is asking this,” said Ram Dulari with a sneer. “This phoolwalla thinks my food smells distract his customers from smelling his roses and his marigolds. He thinks that is why his business might be dropping, why people are buying flowers from other vendors. He is trying to make me a scapegoat. It seems he has some keeda against me and my success.”

  Everybody laughed. The flower vendor turned red and said he was just asking. Was it a crime to ask?

  Sam Firodia left after agreeing to start the treatment the following weekend. We would have to check our apartments minutely before that. We would have to remove our wall units, our cupboards, our headboards, our sideboards, throw out all the infected wood, if there was even as much as a trace of termite dust.

  Professor Kodial frowned and said that throwing out all his classroom furniture would cause great inconvenience to his students. How would they manage? Where would they sit?

  Ram Dulari said he had some steel tables left from the time his snack bar was a dairy. The professor could buy these off him for a discount. The professor glared at him and said he was quite capable of buying new furniture himself. It was just that the timing was wrong; the exams were around the corner.

  Just then Nazarana breezed in. He looked transformed. He wore a loose skirt, a bright top, his eyes were shaded blue, his eyebrows were trimmed and shaped, his cheeks were rouged lightly, and his arms and legs were shaven clean. His long hair was brushed to the sides, and in his ears he wore a pair of earrings, which he showed off as the goldsmith’s artistry.

  “He was so sweet; he knew just what I wanted,” said Nazarana, smacking his lips at the goldsmith, who blushed, for fear of getting ribbed by the shopkeepers.

  “I have some news to share with you,” said Nazarana, breathlessly, to the gathering. Murad scowled and moved to the window, where no one could see his expression.

  “I have changed my name. It will appear in tomorrow’s papers. I am now Nazarana officially. And I am taking on my boyfriend’s surname. So,” he said with a flourish, “I am now Nazarana Himmatwalla. I have a new identity, a new life. I feel like a new person altogether.”

  Everyone congratulated her. The women went up and said maybe she could give them tips on how men thought. Was there any hope for men at all? Nazarana shrugged and said no, not unless they changed their sex.

  Olaf, standing, looked at her uncertainly. “Bloody pansy,” he exploded, “all wrong company you have been keeping. If I was your fadder, I would have given you one rap across your face. Then you’d have gone straight.”

  Tears sprang to Nazarana’s eyes. Her lips quivered. She drew herself up, her face showing the strength and the softness of a woman. “It was my father’s treatment of my mother that made me reject my own masculinity, by the way. I may have been a child then, but I know what he used to do—have mujras at home, get my mother to serve booze and snacks to him and his friends while the women danced, flirted, and humiliated her. That, too, in her own house.”

  Murad said that was enough. Nazarana had said enough against their father. Any more and there would be bloodshed.

  We all fell silent. Each of us knew what was going through the other’s mind. We had heard stories about the father, a muscular giant, slow and leering, for whom no display of masculinity was enough. We had heard how he would race his Triumph motorcycle on the old Khandala ghat, revving it up at hairpin bends, challenging less skilful friends to do the same. There had been an accident, and the parents of the biker friend who died had never been able to forgive Nazarana’s father or to forget the incident. The father would do things like impersonate a police officer and accost underage girls at adult movies to extort favors from them. He would proposition women who came to clean the water tanks in our bathrooms; he would take them on the terrace, or at home, in the presence of his wife, a woman too scared to protest, too timid to question her fate or the limits of her marriage. And the building, our building, had seen all his misdeeds and misdemeanors, and it had helped Nazarana to bear her cross, until it had gotten too much. Until she had found her voice, spoken out on behalf of her mother, long suppressed and long dead. A family secret had left its grave, let out by one of its own.

  Nazarana stuck her tongue out at Murad and ran out, just as quickly as she’d come.

  Murad made as if to run after her, but Angelina stepped in his way. “Just you lay a hand on her, my lad, and you’ll see,” she said. Murad stood glowering, his fists clenched. Olga and my wife joined Angelina, and all three stood at the door, a sisterhood of instant impregnable support.

  Murad snarled, made a hissing sound, and, brushing past them, left quietly.

  Farhana, Murad’s wife, drew close to Dinanath and whispered he would now have to tell the landlord to change Nazarana’s name on the rent receipt; there was no point keeping the old name. I thought I detected a gleam of mischief in Farhana’s eye. Maybe the ownership would be challenged in court one day on the basis of the name change. Maybe she had something up her sleeve I couldn’t place my finger on. What did it matter? Right now I had other matters on my mind. The edifice of our building was collapsing. It was being eaten into, while we ate, slept, and dreamt.

  Professor Kodial suggested we write a letter. We should put our complaint in black-and-white, addressing one copy to the housing board and one to the BMC, just so that we had it on record.

  Angelina pulled out her cell phone. Enough was enough, she said. She had to reach Denzil. He would know what to do. He would file a public interest litigation on our behalf.

  Professor Kodial asked her what was public about a termite invasion; he posed the question with erudite patience.

  Angelina replied that the walls in her house were a public spectacle. There were tunnels running right through, where the termites had led their march of destruction. She would have to get the walls repainted before her fortieth birthday, which was when she was planning to throw a big party.

  Sohrab looked up, surprised. “Unnecessary expense,” he muttered, shaking his head.

  “What is your problem?” Angelina said. “I turn forty once in a lifetime. Though, of course, my yoga instructor doesn’t seem to think so. He feels I have awoken some kind of inner energy from the base of my spine, which is going to keep me from aging.”

  Sohrab sighed. He had better go and meet this yoga instructor, he thought.

  Dinanath said, “What is t
he use of writing a letter? These government organizations are too indifferent to respond to complaint letters. Maybe we should just sell the building to one of those private builders, under the redevelopment plan. Each of us would get an apartment or commercial space in the new structure.”

  Gopinath smiled. Somewhere in his mind he saw his four shops converted into one huge supermarket. Gopinath Superstore—he already had the name ready.

  Someone spoke about the right to information. We should invoke it, ask how much the repairs had cost, insist on knowing the actual costs incurred. Someone said it wasn’t easy to get the information out. These housing board guys were experts at dodging, at giving evasive answers.

  We argued and discussed and managed to get a letter down that ran like this:

  Dear Sir,

  We regret to inform you that despite your long-drawn-out repairs, despite your reassurances to provide additional support and render our building safe, we now find a problem that is causing extreme discomfort and pain to all of us. The wood used by your contractor, Jayesh Chokhani, was undoubtedly of inferior quality, for we now find our eighty-year-old building infested, no, infected with white ants. As per the learned opinion of our pest control expert, who we invited at our own personal expense, this breed of white ants is, perhaps, the most dangerous. It can lead to an eventual rotting away of the structure, a deep-rooted disaster, which, thankfully, with timely intervention, we have managed to avoid.

  We now request you, sir, to take note of this, to waive the monthly surcharge in our rent bills (in light of the destruction we have suffered), and to impose a strict penalty on the contractor. We are bringing this to your notice as dutiful citizens of Mumbai, as people who have lived all our lives in the city. We hope you will take notice of our complaint and ensure that no citizen of Mumbai is put through the indignity of seeing the strong foundation of his/her home and his/her proud possessions reduced to dust.

  Thanking you in anticipation of your cooperation.