Friend of My Youth Read online

  I lie back. They’ve ‘refurbished’ the room. I loathe the word, its blunt sound (as if someone with a cold were trying to say ‘furnished’), and don’t use it without irony. But the room is new. Oddly, it’s erased the old room from my memory – all I recall is the bathroom, and the plastic bucket that was left under the shower for good measure. I close my eyes. The air conditioning is fixed at 23 degrees centigrade – although there’s a remote control on the bedside table, it’s symbolic; you can make no alteration to the temperature. Why didn’t I accept my hosts’ invitation to stay in a new boutique hotel in Apollo Bunder? Perhaps it was the temptation to be an interloper – to spend a few nights, not by proxy but by stealth, in Little Gibbs Road: our address when I was a boy. Close, but not too close. Just to be able to catch a heartbeat. And make my getaway. The refurbished room, with its new bed, prints, mirror, and unfluctuating weather, is more expensive than the old version – but absurdly affordable. I’ll claim the expenses, of course. We writers might not earn much by way of fees, but every part of our trip is covered. On tour, we are on loan. We’re the pound of flesh that must be repaid in full.

  With nothing to do, with Ramu absent, I go out for a walk.

  Arjun is missing too; he’s flown to Delhi to give a talk on the gene. I met him when we were at Oxford. He now runs a government-funded lab on the outskirts of Bombay. He’s one of those who, like me, made the decision to return to India. Like me, he couldn’t stand the idea of living in the West a single day longer. Unlike me, Arjun hasn’t stepped out of India since 1998 – although he’s planning to accept an invitation to a conference in Birmingham. I wonder at his lack of eagerness. When we meet up, we rarely discuss serious things; we mostly talk like we were teenagers, or unmarried – as we used to in Oxford. Ramu is suspicious of our candour. He has deemed Arjun an ‘intellectual’; the one concession he’ll make is, ‘He’s nice, but horny.’ The ‘but’ is interesting. It contains Ramu’s sense of moral superiority. He has many occasions to declare he’s morally superior – as an addict, cheated by the city he grew up in; as a non-intellectual; for being less horny than Arjun. But, whenever he carps gently about Arjun, I participate in Ramu’s generalizations and implicitly agree. Yes, we are less horny than him.

  I emerge from the gates of the club on to the main road and glance to my left at Kamala Nehru Park. I feel no time-lag. I catch sight of the park as I used to each day as a boy. Another part of me, hovering a few feet overhead, is studying my situation. Because this is not my life. It could have been, but I chose for it not to be. Instead of turning left, I turn right, deciding to buy toothpaste. Unzipping my toilet bag in the room, I noticed I’d left it behind. So I enter the provisions store. I used to get index finger-sized Cadbury’s milk chocolate bars here; they cost a rupee when I was eight years old. I used to love the fact that the bar was so thin and lapidary and would be gone in ten seconds. I barely felt responsible for being the cause of its disappearance. I loved the lettering and sinking my teeth into it. Now, I go up the two steps and find the shop is as busy as if it were Christmas. The Gujaratis within are amenable – they furnish me with Colgate in fifteen seconds. I pay, and consider buying something else – one of the staff is perched on a ladder to retrieve a lotion from the topmost shelf. Everywhere, there is the strain and stretch of trade.

  It’s a wonder the shop exists. Could it be here because there’s such affluence in Malabar Hill – or is it here despite the wealth? The same could be said of the shops next to it: St Stephen’s Store on its right, a confectioner’s, and the two grocers’ on its left. I first saw them more than four decades ago. Why do the rich give them patronage? Could it be that they want tiny pockets of continuity? Actually, Malabar Hill is an oasis of continuity – its tranquillity is calculated to preserve. When I lived here, I never went into these shops except the one from which I’ve acquired toothpaste – to get my Cadbury, or watch my mother buy a tin of Kraft cheese. It’s only now, as a visitor, that I’ve discovered St Stephen’s Store, and its tissue-thin chutney sandwiches. There are certain things that (obeying orders) I buy for my family when I’m in Bombay, and one or two that I give myself, such as these sandwiches. They’re part of my afterlife here.

  I cross the road. I’m here for the book reading; I’ve nothing to do this afternoon – or later this evening. I didn’t have the wit to notify my friends in advance. But, then, I don’t have friends here. The idea is a fiction that I hardly ever bother to examine – which is why I’m often taken by surprise when I find myself at a loose end in Bombay. My mind tells me, ‘Bombay is teeming with people you know, or have known.’ This doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The people I was close to in school I’ve lost track of. Except Ramu.

  *

  I have crossed the road. Opposite me is the building that came up out of nowhere in the late seventies and partially blocked our view. Before then, we had an unbroken vision of the Arabian Sea. The building is irrelevant to me now, but still causes a pinprick of irritation. It was an interloper – a tenant on the landscape – and continues to be one.

  In front of the building, upon the road – there’s no pavement here – sits a woman on her haunches, displaying a basket of fruit. What she offers that the grocers’ opposite don’t, I can’t say. In another area, there’d be a gaggle of squatting women. Here, she is one. One is enough for Little Gibbs Road.

  Next to her there’s a narrow pathway or steps that fall precipitately seaward. Itinerants descend. I catch a blue glimpse of the horizon. I have never been down there. That’s because we’ve spent so much of our lives, even in places we’ve grown up in, being driven around. Walking, we take expected routes. Even our unexpected routes are well worn. There’s much I don’t know in Malabar Hill. Like that glimpse of blue.

  *

  I feel no nostalgia. What I encounter is an impossibility – of recovering whatever it was that formed me, which I churlishly disowned. Bombay was never good enough for me. Even now – as before – I hesitate to write about it. It is my secret. It was so, even when I lived here. For instance, the Mercedes. My father’s white Mercedes-Benz, ‘Merk’ to my friends. ‘Mercheditch’ to the proud driver. I rode it but disembarked ten minutes before reaching Elphinstone College. The final bit I covered on foot. Sloughing off my life. And no sooner has the thought suggested itself than I confront the bus terminus near the Kamala Nehru Park. From here ply the 102 and the 106. Red double-decker and single-decker respectively. Sturdy carriers – not like their derelict Calcutta counterparts. With the Mercedes presenting itself and escape from it becoming a necessity, I began for the first time to take buses. Incredible cocoon they took me out of. The 106 put me in the middle of the seabreeze and dropped me close to Elphinstone College. Sometimes, I lugged my guitar along. Fittingly, my hair would be insanely tousled by the time I arrived.

  The Immortals is my fifth novel. It’s also my longest one. On paper, it took me nine years to write, although that’s misleading. I wasn’t writing my new novel all the time. It would have been interesting to have had some sort of a timekeeper to measure the moments I spent writing it. Maybe the total of a year devoted to committing the actual story to the page? Even that seems an excessive span, a phantasmagoric labour. One year! No, I was plotting other things at the time – plotting not the novel, but that resistant tale we call ‘life’. At the very end of the millennium, I tried to escape globalization by escaping Britain. I didn’t want to go back to a time before globalization; I just wanted to get out, move. I moved to Calcutta. Then I tried to escape globalization by taking leave of the novel. I wrote stories. I wrote essays. I composed music. This is what I did a lot of those nine years.

  *

  I am in the Kamala Nehru Park. I’ve entered through the open gates. I love the Kamala Nehru Park, but I didn’t frequent it as a child. It served as a landmark: ‘We live near Kamala Nehru Park.’ Even today, I will – if I’m staying at the club – instruct the taxi driver: ‘It’s opposite Kamala Nehru Park.’ Because every
one seems to know it. I love it, but my discovery of it goes back to a reassessment made in my late teens. Certain things I’d ignored till then, and which had always been close at hand, I began to explore. Among these were Indian classical music, black and white Hindi films, Hindi film songs – and even a place like Kamala Nehru Park. I can’t pinpoint what connects these things I’ve mentioned except that they’d always been in front of me – but I’d never noticed them. They weren’t on the curriculum of my upper middle-class life. By the time I was sixteen or seventeen, the outline of that life was loosening, it was being tugged at its edges. I was making those discoveries largely alone.

  *

  Kamala Nehru Park’s clientele – in fact, Indian tourism – is predominantly working class. We think the working class spends all its time working; actually, recreation is an avid pursuit for wage-earners and ‘blue collar’ workers. They come to Kamala Nehru Park from faraway localities (Ghatkopar, Mulund) – possibly taking the 106 on the last leg of the expedition. They arrive as families; male friends roam the park in pairs – holding hands: this much hasn’t changed. You can spot the upper middle-class person native to this area because the men are in shorts and the women wear trainers. You see them running; one marches past briskly. They return in your direction in seven minutes. The upper middle-class person is an individual; they don’t circulate in the park in groups. The visitors from Mulund hardly run; their progress is deliberate. The man of the family is regal in his patience. A family might loll on the grass with a familiarity that resembles ownership. The children run. They rush to the circular raised platform, whose roof beats and vibrates during the monsoons. When a child stamps his foot, there’s an answering echo, like a swift, painless slap, special to the podium. All this is as I recall from a year ago, and from forty years ago too. This isn’t to say that Bombay is unchanged – Bombay, least changeless of cities! But a few things – like the loud echo here – are the same as ever; annunciatory; to be encountered nowhere else.

  *

  I like it when I get invitations to read in Bombay – or to give a talk here. Especially as I get so few. No one wants me to read in Bombay. That’s an exaggeration. I’m not being singled out. It’s just that literary events here are few and far between. It’s more likely that I’ll get an invitation tomorrow from Abu Dhabi, or Barcelona, or Rangoon. The city belongs to Bollywood. That’s what constitutes its imaginative energy, its drive. It has no academia to speak of; its university is now peripheral. And that’s why I await the invitation or opportunity – for months, sometimes for a year – with a strange anticipation. It’s not that I want to disseminate my work in Bombay. It’s just that I long, these days, to visit the city I grew up in.

  *

  And who’ll come to the reading? I can predict the mix. There might be one or two people whose names I guess at vaguely, but there will be few faces from the past. Few friends from school; few colleagues of my father’s. And yet there’s a recognizability about the audience – I know them, their clothes and accent. What brings them to my reading? I’m not confident they know me. I’m used to being no one in Bombay – I’ve experienced years and years of anonymity here, or, more accurately, being an extension of my father’s identity. Mr Chaudhuri’s son. As was the case at the club earlier. ‘How’s your dad?’ It’s a question I’m used to in Bombay.

  *

  The park diagonally opposite the Kamala Nehru is called the Hanging Gardens, but it feels to me that Kamala Nehru Park is the one that hangs over the city. Hanging Gardens is situated on a slight elevation on Malabar Hill; at least, so it seems when you approach it from the club and the Post Office, and climb twenty-odd steps to its gates to find that Hanging Gardens is the top of a plateau. It’s more middle class than Kamala Nehru, many more purposeful walkers, their calves bare, socks gathered round ankles. Optimistic foliage sculptures abound: a rhinoceros; a boy on an elephant; a giraffe. These are best ignored. The oddity at the core of Kamala Nehru Park is the great shoe. The rhyme it solemnly provoked when you first saw it as a child was ‘There was an old woman who lived in a shoe’, mapping the park in your head according to a list of imaginary habitations, of which that abode made of confectionery (which Hansel and Gretel began to eat bits of the moment they found it) was also one. I’ve never entered the shoe. It’s a storey tall; people are always climbing up. I go down paths flanked with flowers – there are so many whose names I don’t know; I’m no nature-lover, the only blossoms I’m familiar with are gulmohar and bougainvillea – till I come to the balcony where the park is a promontory overlooking, all at once, the Marine Drive, the eye-hurting glint of the Arabian Sea, bits of Marine Lines, the narrowing at Nariman Point, the clusters of very tall, at times very thin, buildings, the extant gothic towers and turrets and antiquarian domes, and, across all of this, the sea, which extends beyond the Gateway of India. You’d expect a throng here, at this balcony, but it’s a manageable crowd. Families; boys straining; fathers complacent; the mothers harangued. Only the little girls look thrilled. Naturally, no denizen of Bombay would come here; at least, none who felt they belonged to the city or had a sense of proprietorship. Which is why I crane to look but try not to take too much time, so others behind me can occupy my place. It’s a magnificent scene, an old, old one, which I’d glimpsed from one spot or another in Malabar Hill since I was a child, blankly, appearing to register little; and now, seeing it again, I don’t know what to do with it. And so, almost immediately, I turn my back on Bombay, and am now looking at the children who are buzzing before me, who know there’s definitely something at hand.

  *

  With Bombay and the oncoming evening behind me – the giant pink wash over the sea is expanding – I walk up the red path to the gates and am back at the bus stop again. There’s a short-lived agitation in my pocket; the phone’s convulsing. I fish it out. The message says: Don’t forget the shoes. Of course. Something to do! I might have forgotten. I stare and then write: Remind me of details. Can’t recall. As I proceed to the club, the phone shivers again. Just take them. Call when you’re there.

  They’re furled in the suitcase in the room, my wife’s shoes and my mother’s. Their bones bulge slightly in the cloth bag. I transfer the cloth bag to a plastic one and exit the room. This is my big mission in Bombay, to exchange these bespoke pairs for my mother and wife; either the fit or the colour wasn’t right. My mother, even today, approaching her mid-eighties, will wear no other footwear but Joy Shoes. The shop came up in the Taj in the seventies. She became a customer. She’s been unflinching in her loyalty. Even now, when she can no longer travel to Bombay, she’ll order a pair on the phone. ‘Munna?’ she says. ‘How are you?’ in that rich Bengali-accented diction. Munna’s a suave operator. ‘Hello, madam, hello, madam, all well here. When are you coming next this side?’ ‘I am not coming but my son is going,’ says my mother firmly. ‘Please exchange the priya you sent me last time, they are not fitting properly.’ ‘Send it over, send it over,’ he responds breezily. ‘Anything else?’ ‘My daughter-in-law …’ she repeats these important words, ‘my daughter-in-law never wore the kolhapuri she bought last time. Please exchange them for priya.’ ‘No problem,’ says Munna, clearly preoccupied with other things. ‘You are size five, right.’ ‘Four and a half,’ she corrects him. ‘My daughter-in-law is six,’ she adds, though no request was made for this information. Their feet are small, but my mother’s are especially tiny, and probably have Joy Shoes sending specifications to workmen for a new pair of priya. At the end of this conversation, my mother and I (who have known him since I was fourteen) are gratified that Munna is alive, given the strange events of 26/11. A close shave. It’s been two years. Still, my mother makes sure: ‘You are OK?’ ‘Oh yes, yes!’ says Munna, not guessing the association – he’s adept at being reassuring.

  *

  The taxi driver will test your knowledge. He’s planted his car in front of El Cid. The moment I cross the road and say ‘Taj Mahal’, he perks up: ‘Babulnath se ja
u ya Walkeshwar se jau?’ He knows the query about the route is rhetorical. Walkeshwar, I say, meeting his eyes in the mirror. We’re soon past the Jain temple, whose striking blue pillars I’ve only seen from the outside; we’ve turned round the Teen Batti hairpin, left behind the Governor’s house, and are suddenly by the sea. I am now in the scene I was looking at earlier; it’s the one I stared upon morning and evening from the twelfth-floor balcony. The way to school. By the time I was fourteen, I’d have known this journey couldn’t be repeated forever. When I was smaller, there was no end in sight to the morning excursion to class. I took to prayer in the car. The praying was furtive. No one knew about it: not my parents; not the driver. Once a girl in a school bus saw me, and I agonized over whether I’d been discovered. I depended on the Catholic figurines that seemed to hide behind every other corner on the route. My prayers asked for exemption from PE. ‘Please let Mr Mazumdar not tell me to run today,’ I begged – I wasn’t certain if the addressee was ‘God’. There was always a saint in waiting. In a traffic jam in Marine Lines, I saw a kindly shape that said ‘Our Lady of Dolours’ beneath it. I sent the prayer in her direction. This was when, from a neighbouring vantage-point above the car window, the girl saw me. I saw her just after I opened my eyes. Why I was in Marine Lines I don’t know. Usually the car went up the flyover and then descended into Dhobi Talao, or went to Churchgate and turned left at the IRAN AIR sign.