Breathless in Bombay Page 4

  TRAFFIC

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  IT WAS THAT TIME of the day when everybody was scrambling toward something. The streets were in a scramble, the traffic was in a scramble, and minds, unwittingly, were in a deep scramble, most of them possessed by certain untoward events of the day, which had done nothing to please or elevate them or lead them to believe in their luck and invite a feeling of well-being. But then, the time was such—twilight—a sullen, irresponsible glow, it made the air around the city heavy; it weighed its gloomy pallor on the people, reminding them of the baggage they carried: another day of abstract non-achievement, simply the mediocrity they’d inherited or the luxury they’d not.

  Vicki Dhanrajgiri was no exception. As she walked the streets of Bombay, part of an enigmatic crowd, she was the queen of brooders. Her heart weighed a ton. Her head throbbed with a million thoughts. The thoughts pounded inside her mind, her black box, as she called it, in moments of wry realization. She walked dodging the shuffling feet, the onslaught of male shoulders, a colliding paunch reluctant to halt its progress or to deflect in urbane city-slick courtesy.

  Some of the collisions were deliberate: men taking their chances and succeeding—bawled-out office boys pinching out their frustrations, or smart-alec Romeos with long hair, ear studs, tight jeans, doing sleight of hand, then melting away in a sea of shoulders. Did she want to fight, scream? Did she want to run after them, get them mobbed, as she had in her college days? Not for reasons as banal as these. Yet she felt frightened. A new fear this was, cold and confusing. It brought discomfort to her heart, confusion to her mind, and anxiety to her heels. She felt she must get away, the sooner the better.

  Dodge and duck, dodge and duck—that’s how she traversed the length of the pavement, which was endless, a conveyor belt of feet. She pretended this was a game going on. The fewer bodies she collided with, the more successful she’d be. Successful at whatever she was trying to outrun. Passersby thought her mad, slowed to give her a look. Good, she thought, this way at least they took notice; otherwise to be ignored on a day like this—that was unpardonable.

  Twenty-seven and alone: it sounded unbelievable. This day, which twenty years ago would begin with promises, a house full of warmth and bustle, bright, squeaky balloons and loose, fluttering ribbons, and visitors with their hands behind their backs, winking broadly and saying, “Guess, guess what,” and her father—a gentle, beaming giant—laying a trail of surprises all over the house, going, “Hot, hot, hot,” or, “Cold, cold, cold,” and she in tow, a flurry of legs, one shoe loose, yet oblivious, stupefied with the excitement of the day, and her mother in the kitchen, smiling, dropping crowns of icing from a nozzle onto a deep white fortress of a cake, while samosas hissed on the stove, curled, and changed color and sandwich paste lay open in jars waiting to be transferred onto slices of bread—this day had dragged by listlessly, a sad, grating burden even to herself.

  In the morning, she’d opened the door to budget bouquets from people compelled to be courteous. People who relied on her for work: hairstylists, makeup artists, extras, and old character actors with dwindling fortunes and meager talents, Hindi cinema providing that kind of appeal, that kind of lure. One of the bouquets was from an old boyfriend, married since, but now on the brink of divorce. The flowers were an invitation to help with his rehabilitation, to salvage his pride, or his sex life, suspended as it were; but to her they were signs of desperation, weeds fit for the grave. She felt nothing discarding them, dropping them into the inviting dark of the dustbin—with the wrapper on, the gleaming noisy cellophane, and the card and wordings unread.

  For lunch she had done leftovers: a broccoli and cauliflower bake and two cutlets with the chill of refrigeration embedded. She couldn’t get the cold out of the cutlets, even after pressing 1.30 on the microwave, and she wondered if all things ignored hardened like that; frozen, would they turn bloodless and hard? It didn’t taste good—this realization.

  At regular intervals, there were phone calls. These she ignored, for among the numbers that flashed on her caller ID wasn’t the one she was waiting for. The one that would make her heart leap, say all was forgiven, the storm had passed, a new year called for new beginnings. Could they begin afresh? Yes, yes, yes—she had the answers ready. It was difficult to think of anything else. It was difficult to still her heart and say things she didn’t mean.

  She looked at the man coming toward her. He was tall, gangly, complacent, like he didn’t expect any more from life than what had been delivered. His face wore a silly acquiescence to suggest married! It gave rise to something in her, something like a sense of indignation. She quickened her pace, thinking that by walking fast she could convey that she, too, was married; she was hurrying home to her kids, their homework, baths, and bed. That done, there’d be dinner, chatter, washing up, locking up, a little television, then sly glances, an inquisitive silence between two adults who knew each other yet chose to negotiate. This followed by sex, still good after years, still on the sofa, fast, furious, and frenzied, lest the kids walk in, sleepy, surly, and full of excuses.

  Once upon a time she’d dreamt of two little boys, two agile monkeys testing the limits of her patience, refusing to go to bed, refusing to succumb to shutdown time. She’d dreamt of shouting them down, warning them, bringing them down with a tackle, facedown, in deep pinioned sleep. She’d dreamt of two soft heads with damp hair tossed and breathing lightly and she like a conductor keeping time, aware of a wondrous expansion in her heart. But whom was she trying to kid? Where there were kids there was a husband, too, someone warm and dependable, on the sofa and in her arms.

  The cars honked. The city rose and scattered the dust of twilight into her eyes. She blinked, to steady her vision, to absorb the invasion of concrete into her senses. It was just as well she was blinded by light, not by delusion, as she was all day long, sitting next to the phone, biting the whites of her knuckles, sweating each time it rang. The grim features of her apartment—the high ceilings, the long framed windows, the mosaic tiles, the biscuit-brown beams that held up the building—all these reminded her of a movie set designed to highlight her loneliness, a movie set in one of those black-and-white movies, stark, decisive, and unforgiving. It reminded her that she had been moved from the source of her happiness (his apartment) to a land of exile (her own) and that she had been brought to a point where to dream would be audacious, painful, and unreal.

  NANDKUMAR CHAURASIA WAS AN ARTIST. He painted in black-and-white, saying he had a problem with colors. His themes were lean, spare, and Kafkaesque. “I am celebrating Kalyug,” he would say, “the end of the world in all its glory.” Vicki believed him. There was something about his work that told her he had been to an alternate world and that he went there many times over, like Coleridge, Dostoevsky, and Jim Morrison.

  They’d met at a friend’s over an evening of vodka. This was eleven months after she’d started working for a Bollywood producer, doing preproduction work like organizing props, meals, costumes, and locations and helping out with the casting of smaller actors. The screen tests she conducted herself, and the site visits, shooting them off on a digi-beta camera. Seeing her willingness to befriend all kinds of work, the producer had upped her to production controller; he’d given her the right to contribute to any aspect of the film and bought himself the right to invite her services on any task without paying extra. She made no great money, but she enjoyed the popularity that came from working with a top-heavy name. People looked at her with interest, invited her to their parties, listened when she spoke, and aunts and uncles showed her off as their proud connection in Bollywood. This gave her a background and something to do on holidays, which weren’t too many to start with. Besides, she hated holidays. By evening she was usually depressed, not knowing what to do with herself. She wished she had a boyfriend. She wished she had someone to go for long walks with—to go for movies, take short breaks by the beach—instead of visiting relatives who took her visits for granted. Her relatives,
sweet as they were, spoke to her the same kind of stuff each time—about how to get her life organized, how to save money, how to settle down with a nice, steady boy from a good family. They said this with an air of wisdom, like they were revealing to her a family secret and teaching her how to guard it. And yet the soaps they watched so routinely were all about homes breaking up, about the politics of marriage and domestic intrigue of the highest kind. She’d watch these with them, purely out of amusement or out of boredom, and she’d marvel at the flat, one-dimensional characters almost as boring as the men she met in Bollywood, the kind of men with a jaunty, churlish confidence, whom she just couldn’t relate to.

  The evening began with her and Nandkumar discussing the current state of Hindi cinema. It was deplorable, they said. There was a frightening lack of originality, a disgusting trend to rip off Hollywood plots, and a tendency to produce marriage romances as a safe investable trend.

  On their second drink, they shot down a few of the big names. They agreed that there was a paucity of ideas, big budgets were standing in for small minds, and what was being sold was overproduced crap reliant on opulence and locations. The look was everything and the look was being bought: it was sprinkling stardust into star-struck eyes; it was covering up for unforgivable flaws like a lack of script, a lack of substance, and a departure from any kind of realism. The way they saw it, the youths were corrupted already; they couldn’t think beyond choreographed song sequences and carnal close-ups. By the third drink, they’d nodded heads dissolutely and he was “Nandu” and she was “Vicks” and a gentle affection bubbled between them like a runaway brook. On their fourth drink, he was vehement—her boss was a plagiarizer, the biggest probably. He called him a cheap cut-and-paste artist, then paused and waited to see how she’d react. She giggled and said she knew that. She knew the movies her boss watched, the English ones from the seventies and eighties, from where he lifted his plots. She was surprised she’d confessed this to a perfect stranger and thought it was the vodka, a stiff new entrant brand from Goa. He smiled and said he knew all the sources, where each of her boss’s films came from, and he proceeded to name them one by one. All she could do was nod. He was brilliantly right—and real.

  A little later they discovered they had the same taste in cinema. They both enjoyed art films. They’d both spent weeks, months, at the film institute in Pune, and although they’d been there at different times, they’d stayed as long and got involved in campus politics. They’d both worn kurtas and chappals and smoked hash, watching films like Bergman’s Wild Strawberries and Fellini’s Eight and a Half. Nandkumar said he’d been agitated when some of the old classics were lost in a fire; he’d considered immolation to make the authorities sit up and take notice. She said she was glad he didn’t. There were such few people who felt like this, felt that this was the only cinema worth watching, cinema that depicted real lives, real tragedies, without gloss and visual manipulation.

  “Have you seen Kieslowski’s trilogy?” he asked, his light gray eyes piercing and hopeful, as if were she to say yes he would go down on his knees and propose, or at least cry out with relief.

  “About ten times!” she whispered. “Though Blue is still my favorite. I thought it was his best.”

  Nandkumar didn’t say anything. Just knocked back his vodka and rose. “Give me your glass,” he said. She surrendered her glass obediently.

  “We have to toast to this one,” he said solemnly.

  “I will come with you,” she said, following him into the kitchen where the drinks were laid out. This was at Anantrao’s place in Juhu, his apartment overlooking the beach.

  When they returned, Julie, Anantrao’s wife, had turned the conversation to topics like video activism, censor board cowardice, and the surreptitious muzzling of issue-based documentaries. But they weren’t interested. They knew all this, had brooded over it long enough. They were discovering an alternate orbit, quite by accident, quite by chance. He had moved to the window and was rolling a joint. And she was helping him, lifting and crushing the tobacco in her palm.

  It was the first cut, he said, straight from the slopes of Manali. “Asli malai, cream of Manali, you mean?” she said, and he grinned and nodded, pleased that she knew its value, its worth.

  They smoked the joint—a creased cannon, loaded to the brim, slow burning but effective—and they imbibed that zapped look, that translucent red absenteeism that showed up their innocence and their detachment, and she turned light and giggly and he maudlin and patient. Both felt frozen in time; both felt at peace and unhurried. The rest of the party was too agitated for them. They did not care to partake in the discussions, and no one minded, for Anantrao’s place was such—a wanton world of artistic whims and vagaries, where everybody was allowed to do their thing, to carve out their space and retire into it without explanation or regrets.

  Nandkumar invited her to his home the next day, to his one-bedroom apartment in a shaded lane in Bandra West, and there he showed her his paintings, his exquisitely poignant black-and-whites, which captured India in her rigor mortis, the truth as it existed in the villages—the exploitation, the isolation, the neglect, frozen on canvas in stark defining lines, in unsparing black-and-white.

  “Our country is historically fated for rape,” he said. It’s been the mainstay of marauders. Mohammed of Ghazni, Ba¯bur, Timur, and later the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and the British.”

  “And now us!” she said, holding up a book written by an NRI writer. “We are selling our culture and the West is buying. But it’s still robbery, still rape. We are hawking ourselves, legitimately.”

  “It’s worse in the arts,” he said. “There’s worse happening, if you know what I mean.”

  “Alibaug parties,” she said. “Cocktails, conversation, Sunday brunches, and loud corporate sponsors . . . the real artists are staying away.”

  “ You know . . . how?” he asked, incredulous. His heart was beating. Dots of sweat appeared on his brow. She’d realize later, once she knew him, that this was a sign of his blood pressure, his software reacting to a situation he hadn’t anticipated, a defrag in his mind, which he couldn’t fathom in the heat of the moment. Right now, it was the effect of the joint he had smoked before her arrival. He’d done that to calm himself, to compose his mind to the onslaught of a woman as agreeable, but it seemed to be working overtime; it was making him excited and uneasy at the same time.

  He suggested a drink and she agreed, and while he got the vodka and the ice and cut and dropped slices of lime into their glasses, she began to ask about his motivations, the forces that drove and inspired him. She wanted to know about his concept of art and the role it should take on. While he answered, mulling over “take on,” thinking how much he liked it, she took a cloth and wiped the puddle off the kitchen platform, which had formed because of the ice dripping. She held the wet cloth under a running tap, then wrung it out and put it on the windowsill for drying. She did this like she was familiar with his home, and he noticed this and felt a surge of pleasure. Everything, it appeared, was headed toward a logical conclusion. Everything, it appeared, was preordained and perfect. He hoped nothing would divert or stall the flow.

  He found it surprising that she should show so much interest in his work. It was not as though he was known; it was not as though his work had appeared in galleries or had been reviewed in the press. It was not as though buyers were falling over to reach him or his work hung in their living rooms and conference rooms. His focus was different, he said. It was art as exposé, as consciousness. He believed in showing democracy where it ceased to exist, where it was stifled, thwarted, and twisted by the rulers of the nation. He wanted his art to be a call to conscience for the already sensitized and a shock to those who weren’t. And, as of then, the only takers he’d found were musician friends wishing to liven up studio walls and unrecognized writer/poet friends wishing to conceal the craters on their walls at home. He was too naïve or too sheepish to ask for payment, and they were too broke
or spaced-out to offer any.

  “Do you know there are ten million tribals displaced since Independence?” he said. His eyes were watery and he looked at her bleakly. He had changed into shorts and a light white undershirt. (He’d asked whether she minded—too many clothes made him uncomfortable, he said.) He was squatted on the floor on a straw mattress that went well with the beige walls, and next to him were his paintings, looking like they’d been freshly framed. The light from above—from the gentle, swaying paper kandeel—was warm and diffused, and it made him appear brown, bloated, and shaven all over. Bloated because of the vodka, shaven because he was that—hairless, plump, and baby-smooth, like a seal washed up ashore. She could see he enjoyed being at home. And she enjoyed being there with him.

  She gazed at the painting he was holding. It had tribal men being ushered into a police van and the face of a girl looking on. It was the face of a bride, barely twenty, just the side of her face and her eye—wide, gaping, disbelieving. In the background, small figures stood paralyzed. And in the foreground were cops with rifles. The doors of the van were open, to imply a deep, cavernous threat. It was all about detail, a lack of it, minimal strokes to achieve an optimum starkness of effect, and it carried a sense of isolation, like a holocaust imminent, like the men weren’t coming back and their women would be left waiting forever.

  She looked at the painting from various angles, lest she miss some oblique meaning hidden somewhere.

  “They’ve disappeared,” he said. “No one knows where. They were made to leave their cattle, crops, and fields; they were made to forget their identities and evacuate, for dams, power projects, and corporations. It’s one big conspiracy and it’s happening all the time, and we don’t know it because we don’t see it, and the payoffs are huge, and it’s not us who are affected but the poor villagers, the poor farmers who have no clue why they are being shafted.”