Friend of My Youth Read online

  Breakfast is served at the Sea Lounge. We walk down two flights of stairs, stop at a gate that separates the first floor from the guests. A man in uniform unlocks it and lets us through. The gate is a memorial. It couldn’t possibly bar people who’d decided to invade the upper floors. The pause we make before it opens is symbolic. In the Sea Lounge, Western and Indian breakfasts alike are steaming. Croissants, Danishes, crowd the plates. Not only is every detail restored – the food reminds you that nothing is stale or old: it’s genuinely new. There’s no question of going back. But the painstaking joining up of fragments is clear too. The vase is unbroken. And the bun is uneaten. I lift one with a tong.

  I bargain persistently for a table by the window. I’m unsuccessful at first. But, from the second morning, the manager ensures good fortune for us. I don’t know how he does it. My daughter and wife sit face to face. I drag a chair up and look at them and the sea.

  Cities are finite.

  I haven’t forgotten how Ramu – frequently ‘slipping’ in those days in 1986 – alerted me to the light smudge on the night sky where our galaxy seeps out. The sky was like a dark pane of glass we couldn’t see through. It’s because Ramu is used to looking out – from balconies; through windows – that we stood there and tried.

  *

  Ramu is where Bombay lives. I say this despite his not being well. The years of needle-jabbing were bound to have a consequence. His liver function’s not right. ‘I have a fantastic appetite, yaar!’ he proclaims. He’s alive.

  He assesses my wife, my daughter, and me as a unit, without coming too close, checking to see if we’re happy together and not malfunctioning. The trip has no literary distractions. I keep an eye on him. He’s alive. Happiness comes later, if at all.

  *

  He wants to do my family a good turn.

  ‘Can I bring them sweets? From Puranmal?’

  ‘Don’t. They’re not interested.’ My daughter’s eating habits are bizarre and my wife hardly eats.

  He stops, as if he’d been asked directions to a place and was trying to think of what to say.

  *

  He tells my wife slyly: ‘Let me know if there’s anything you want to see. I can take you on my scooter.’

  It’s his tourist-guide persona re-emerging, coupled with old romantic inclinations. He used to be popular with girls in school. In college, he shot off fast while they rode pillion. He never really reciprocated their feelings. Then he vanished for years, and only came into contact with women in his lucid periods as other people’s wives.

  She beams. Is she taking up his offer?

  ‘Have you seen the Afghan Church?’

  ‘Of course,’ I say. ‘In the military camp. I used to love the military camp.’

  That was in 1980. We’d moved to Cuffe Parade. My father had become CEO. I hated Cuffe Parade and our four-bedroom apartment. The military camp was a short drive away, a pastoral created by the army and the navy. We went there to escape Cuffe Parade. Five minutes in, you saw the sole landmark, the Afghan Church.

  ‘But have you been inside?’

  Inside the church? The thought hasn’t arisen. It would be like entering a room whose door you never opened as a child.

  *

  My wife, come morning, wants to go to Contemporary Arts and Crafts at Kemps Corner – to see if it still exists. Ramu presses us to visit the church. We call an Uber. He sits in the front. The din of vendors opposite his building gradually gives way to Navy Nagar. (I can’t explain why I’ve always called it ‘military camp’.) Free movement is restricted here since 2008. The men with AK-47s alighted from dinghies at a fishermen’s colony not far away. Almost comical, how they were confronted by, and rebuffed, the puzzled fisherfolk. But we can still access the church.

  I love churches in Bombay. As a child, I conflated them with school; I felt disengaged from them. In 1985, I went twice with Ramu to a church in Mahim to attend NA meetings. In England, they never drew me: I thought they were dank. Now, they make me think of shadow. Of footfall on stone. In England, churches preside over their habitat till they’re gratuitous. Here, they represent a journey made a hundred years or more ago. Our journey, before we go off to Contemporary Arts and Crafts, is brief.

  *

  We wander without purpose. Only my daughter is preoccupied, trying to catch a signal. The doors are closed. Ramu spots someone shifty – a loiterer. He turns out to be the caretaker. He is bored. ‘Come,’ he says matter-of-factly. We think he wants money, but it turns out he’s indifferent to a reward.

  He lets us and the light in. The church is deeper and higher than I’d foreseen. At the far end are stained glass windows whose colours are apocalyptic and rainbow-like and miraculous.

  *

  I’d imagined the Afghan Church must be for Afghan Christians, whoever they might be. I’m unprepared for its actual meaning: it commemorates the English who fell in 1842 in Afghanistan. We peruse the names outside on a memorial stone. My wife, my daughter, and Ramu immediately gather round the memorial for a jovial photo opportunity. The fantasy generated by the environs is threatened momentarily. A photo is a record of being somewhere. Our excursion asks for no record. We don’t want to know too much. Even about the church. Ramu and I skim impatiently over the information directed at tourists. He’s never been able to read more than one page of a book at a time. Fantasists aren’t natural readers. They grow restive easily.

  On the penultimate day we see each other at eleven, when my wife is attempting tentative swimming strokes, and my daughter is alone in the room with her phone. Parking his scooter in the lane that’s at a right angle to the Taj, Ramu comes to the old entrance, which was closed a year ago but now has a small welcome party of security men. I wait here, out of the sun. We want to take a quick walk before my wife is ready to emerge. There’s a tacit agreement between Ramu and me that I won’t see him again. Nothing was said. No line has been drawn. We might see each other. But we won’t. It’s not I – he’ll make excuses. He’ll withdraw discreetly as I return to my family.

  *

  How many times we’ve gone down this promenade and lanes! For Ramu, the place became a curse – he’s lived here without fully living life. No matter. No matter. Then, five years ago, he saw it was a blessing: being here. Once you move around the Taj, you become conscious of a series of dwellings and small hotels that haven’t changed very much. Yet it’s all changed.

  *

  Apollo Bunder is good for daydreaming. I used to come here when I was seventeen, eighteen, roam around the Gateway of India, and sit on the balustrade facing the Taj, never fully resting my bum because I was scared of falling into the sea. I would come alone. I did a lot of stuff alone – even went to movies by myself, which was a scandal. In Apollo Bunder, I’d watch people, and the water, and steamers returning. I felt a sharp need to be taken out of myself. This fancifulness became connected to my writing. I bought a blue exercise book and wrote the beginning of a story (I hardly wrote prose those days), about a man who came to Apollo Bunder, looked at the sea, to forget himself, to enter other lives. I made no advance on the beginning. Because the beginning made me rapt, and foreclosed development.

  I go with him. We turn right and right and keep going, passing his scooter. He nods at it, faintly patriarchal. At the lights, we stop and discuss where the Stiffles Hotel was.

  A colonial house with a semi-haunted look. A bit like Norman Bates’s home. Renowned in another age for hippies. Ramu points out an unprepossessing boxlike hotel: ‘That was Stiffles.’ I shake my head in disagreement. Surely they wouldn’t have destroyed it? The hotel next to the box resembles Stiffles, but has a different name. Its upkeep is excellent. We infiltrate the passage and open the door to reception. Here, we have a futile chat with a Fawlty Towers-type manager who’s not in the least gratified by my interest. He keeps calling me ‘My friend’ and would clearly like us off the premises. He concedes tersely that the hotel next door came up where Stiffles was.

  *
/>   We’re shocked by the hippies and the revolution they brought to Colaba. They lived partly in Stiffles and partly on the footpath.

  ‘I was with Hashim,’ I say, thinking of this clean and empty spot as it was in 1976. Two Arabs sitting in front of an antiques shop greet me heartily. ‘You know them?’ asks Ramu. He’s concerned that I might be enlarging my social life. ‘No, people seem to recognize me here. I think they’re reading my books. Yesterday,’ I point to the street on the left, ‘a drunk got up and shook my hand.’ Ramu nods, grave. We swing round. The back of the Taj on our left. I’m very aware of my wife’s proximity in the pool. I smile again at the Arabs. ‘Anyway’ – going back to 1976 – ‘Hashim and I were walking and’ – I gesture to an imaginary expanse in the shade – ‘a woman was giving a man a hand-job over there.’

  ‘Shit,’ says Ramu, with an intake of breath at all the missed opportunities. ‘Right in front of you?’

  ‘Yes, yes, but under a blanket. We could see her hand moving. Actually, Hashim saw. I stepped on to the street.’

  ‘Shit!’

  *

  Silence reigns as he immerses himself in the image. We walk. We are teenagers. We’re more than fifty years old, but things that shocked us then shock us now. Family; fatherhood; unclehood (Ramu has two grown-up nieces); failure; near-death; the death of parents; the success of others – despite all this, the teenager is obstinate, and resurfaces at will.

  ‘I liked Zohra Bandukwala,’ he says. ‘She liked me yaar.’

  A forty-year-old extrapolation. They didn’t know each other. She would have been aware of him as the gymnast and pugilist who wouldn’t box or do gymnastics. Though she was short, she played basketball. Her socks collapsed to the top of her keds, her ankles glowed. He’d nudge me even then.

  ‘You met her, no? What was that guy like?’

  He’s been consumed for three decades, through his ups and downs, with curiosity about her fiancé. Or the one who was her fiancé in 1985. His name escapes me. Satish, maybe. My father knew the fiancé’s father. I didn’t think I’d see Zohra that evening.

  It hasn’t occurred to me till this instant that it would have been an inter-religious marriage if they had married. But that’s what the new Bombay does to your thinking. The fiancé’s father lived in a flat facing the Oval Maidan. Probably costs twenty crores today. When I mentioned Ramu, her face went blank. Schoolgirl crushes are short-lived. I also suspect she was starting to realize she was bored of her fiancé. A good-looking, rich, boring young man. Kept encircling her waist with one arm – a tic – and she’d looked constrained. Yet she wouldn’t have swapped him for Ramu. No, that would be stretching it, even in a romantic movie.

  ‘He was stupid, kind of,’ I say, as I’ve been claiming to him for thirty years.

  He was stupid, kind of. The play-acting. The easy inheritance of his father’s world. The silly at-homeness in the English language. Very Bombay. He would have eventually set poor Zohra’s teeth on edge. The markets hadn’t opened up then. He’d be fantastically rich now. Stockier. Far away from Oval Maidan. In the ‘Bay area’. The words spoken in the same casual accent in which he said everything. He might be with Zohra. Or maybe he isn’t. He’s the sort of person you don’t think of, but, if you do, sense the trajectory infallibly.

  *

  ‘I really liked Rani Rao.’

  The stretch is residential. There’s a park on our right. A few house staff dawdle on the footpath. The houses are a tropical mix of bungalow, art deco, and colonial. The lane leads to the T where Nigerian junkies, in the early eighties, furtively darted from one doorway to the other. We admire the poise of the houses. We know exactly where we are but imitate visitors who are lost.

  Both us still refer to the girls in class by first and last name. Maybe because we didn’t get to know them. Ramu’s been loyal to his memory of Rani Rao. Zohra Bandukwala had auburn eyes; Rani’s were green. She had an imperfection which Ramu found endearing: she had a squint. She wore glasses with a thick black frame.

  ‘She was sweet. But she was also tough.’ He glances at me. ‘No-nonsense. There was p-passion underneath.’

  *

  From time to time we stop beside the houses. We stand and look. The chiks half rolled up. The balconies partly concealing the living rooms. Foliage interfering with windows.

  At which point we became aware of them I can’t say. We sometimes talk more about houses than we do about girls.

  *

  I get a text. My wife is out of the pool. The phone begins to ring.

  ‘Baba?’

  ‘Yes – hi?’

  ‘When are you coming back?’

  ‘Ten minutes. Everything okay?’ I speak to my daughter as if she’s ten, not sixteen, years old. Like jet lag, this slow-moving childhood from which she’s waking.

  We reach the scooter. It’s intact.

  ‘You shouldn’t have left Bombay.’ He reprimands me while gazing abstractedly at the promenade. ‘I don’t have any friends left.’

  I can’t say the same. I wanted to leave. We stand before a boutique that used to be a nursing home. My childhood is trapped in these places. I can’t take it away with me. I reacquaint myself with it when I return. The knowledge that I grew up here is an academic one. The insignificant particularities are lost, until I confront a street corner or sign or awning. Then I realize they’re there for some reason, waiting for my return.

  ‘I think you should shave that moustache off,’ I tell him. I’ve just noticed it. Something wasn’t right about him. Then I see it. A thin new moustache.

  He’s thunderstruck.

  ‘Why?’ One hand resting imperiously on the seat of the scooter.

  ‘It makes you look like your father.’

  I’d been thinking how he’s become his father’s twin. The resemblance, once I spotted it, was unnerving – the errant son giving birth to the solitary, aimless father. The son gone; only the father stays back in Colaba.

  He ponders on my suggestion; lifts the scooter with a jerk.

  ‘People say I look like him.’ He’s proud that his father was handsome. I can see that. I liked Ramu’s looks. In college he’d blurt out with a hint of incredulity and self-congratulation: ‘People say I look like Chunky Pandey yaar!’ What happened to Chunky Pandey? He appeared in three or four movies; in a couple of years, he went into retirement. Then, in 1982, the year before I left for London, the year that followed Rocky, Ramu began to tell me, ‘People say I look like S-sanjay Dutt!’ I saw the likeness, though it’s exceeded the physical by now. The time lost to drugs. The agony it brought the family, especially the fathers, who became minders. Dutt must have spent years in prison because of that stupid flirtation with the 1993 riots. Years. Years pass by in some people’s lives. Astonishing stretches of time in which nothing happens except a suspension of fate. Yes, I saw the likeness. The bright eyes. The guilelessness in the faces.

  ‘It makes people take me more seriously,’ he says of the thin moustache.

  He kick-starts the scooter.

  ‘It makes you look older.’

  *

  He’s gone. His home is two minutes from here. Just before Sassoon Dock. The Taj has been standing by. Inaccessible, like a fortification. The ‘house of our life’. Until the day after tomorrow. I go up to the promenade, turn, the sea behind me. I puzzle over the window of our room. They’re hard to differentiate. Jutting out at angles, like the sides of a polyhedron. I call my daughter. ‘Come to the window. I’m standing below.’ ‘Where?’ ‘Right below. Dekhte pachho? In front of the water.’ Nothing. Silence. Then: ‘Yes.’ I wave. I can’t see her. ‘Are you there?’ I wave at a probable set of windows. ‘Yes.’ ‘What are you doing?’ ‘I’m waving.’

  *

  It’s even odder looking out of the hotel. From the Sea Lounge. Or the room. It’s not just that you can’t predict what you’ll see. Each view has a history. You sense you’re where others have been.

  Often, I see people on the promenade
looking up. Families from the provinces, three generations. Grandfather, grandchild, and whatever’s in between. Europeans. They take aim with cameras. I’m reassured they can’t actually see us. Even so, I feel I’m being speculated upon – as well as, for a moment, a dread that there’s no way out of here.

  *

  I call Ramu in the afternoon. Already his voice sounds sluggish, as if I’d yanked him out of a well. ‘Still shagging?’ I enquire gravely. ‘What else?’ Then he asks: ‘Achha, so what’s happening this evening?’ I don’t tell him we’re dining in, at the Lebanese restaurant on the rooftop. We’ve eaten once in the hotel. More than three meals will make a middle-class person poor. The Lebanese place has replaced the Rendezvous, where I used to go with my parents as a boy. You could see so much from the Rendezvous: even Bombay, which I thought of as dreary, appeared exciting in a cold, cinematic sweep. The lights, the office buildings, the tiled roofs far below, the dockyard, the exceptional dark of the water. I had to be impressed in spite of feeling bored. Rendezvous hovered above, yet was of, this world. So were we. I’d stare with reluctant affection at the outline of the building I lived in across the black expanse of nothing.

  ‘Achha,’ says Ramu, deliberating. ‘You guys enjoy. I’m feeling tired. I’ll chill out.’

  *

  ‘Hope to see you soon, sir.’

  Checking out, I feel an urge to come back after specific intervals, to revisit the site of destruction – not of the hotel, which has for some time returned to completeness, but of the first part of my life.

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. Did the concierge manage to get your wife the medicine?’