Friend of My Youth Read online

  As we go down Marine Drive, I see a sign proclaiming NIKHIL CHAGANLAl. I’d missed it before now. Unless it’s new. It doesn’t look new. Could this be the Nikhil Chaganlal who teased me mercilessly in the sixth standard? The sign says he’s a painter. That night, I Google him on my laptop. It is him. The face matches. He was a scrawny boy; he’s better-built now. His ‘recent works’ includes a series on rooms – mainly bedrooms and sitting rooms. There are no human beings in them, but there’s evidence of activity. There’s a chessboard on the bed; sitar and tablas by the sofa; a can of Coke on the rug, bright red. The colours have an intolerable gaiety. The view from the rooms contains the sea – not quite the Bombay sea (it’s too blue). The paintings simmer uniformly, as if on a steady, low flame. I am engrossed. I must have presumed (without realizing it) that I’m the only one in that sixth-standard class who’s ‘famous’. Or at least had artistic ambition.

  There’s a great bustle outside the Taj. Once it had to do with the chauffeurs arrayed there, waiting for the sahebs. Now it’s the new security regime. The men who brought death here a little more than two years ago disembarked from a dinghy near Cuffe Parade, and then some of them arrived at Apollo Bunder and entered the lobby with guns. To delay the likes of them in the future, you have to put your packages through the X-ray machine and your cellphone in a small coffin-like tray. These Joy shoes of my mother’s and my wife’s belong, in a sense, as much to the Taj as they do to them. I surrender them to the X-ray tunnel. Go back to where you came from. Let them accuse you of being dangerous.

  Once inside, I ignore the sofas that, in the centre, form a commoner’s court, a diwan-i-am, in which the visitor can be enthroned. This was long the axis of the Taj’s new wing. There’s something subtly different about the arrangement of the sofas – it’s sparser – in comparison to the lot these have replaced and which were presumably destroyed. To the veteran visitor, this loss of continuity is near-unnoticeable; for the new guest, the Taj they see – the busy lobby – is a phoenix risen from the flames. I head for Nalanda. I may as well check if they have a copy of The Immortals. The reason for checking is to punish myself. It’s not the bookshop it was; besides, its representation of my work is patchy. My visits to Nalanda are coterminous with my trips to Bombay: annual; once in two years. I will ask them straight out, ‘Where are my books?’, or, if they have one or two allocated to random bookshelves, ‘And my other books?’ I feel compelled to excavate my titles because I bought books here as a teenager – not just bought books, but lighted on poets I’d never heard of: Tranströmer, then Mandelstam, and Pessoa. The irony of a five-star hotel hosting these elusive men concerned neither the bookshop nor me. Once, I became aware that Sharmila Tagore (smaller than I expected) was standing beside me, the Faber Book of Contemporary Stories in her hand, reading, or – from the resistance she emanated delicately – pretending to read. There’s little poetry in Nalanda these days: maybe a Palgrave anthology; Tagore; Kapil Sibal. If you’re in luck, you might spot Imtiaz Dharker’s Postcards from God. To my question, the attendant has an all-purpose comeback: ‘We just sold out. We have placed order with distributor, but they are not supplying.’ If I were to pin down the publishing rep (he’s so intangible he’s almost non-existent), he will shake his head and confide (I don’t know if he’s shaking his head, since we’re on the phone, but it feels like he is): ‘Nalanda balance of payment is very bad, sir. Long backlog of credit. We have stopped supplying till they clear the deficit.’ Sceptical, I say, ‘That’s terrible, Janardhan. The Taj is an important outlet, right?’ ‘I agree, sir,’ he replies blandly. ‘I’m trying to rectify it.’ ‘Do they even know that I’ve written about the Taj and Nalanda in The Immortals?’ I say, as if this revelation would alter everything – for me, for the Taj, for Nalanda’s plans and my publishers. ‘You have written about the Taj, sir?’ ‘Yes.’ There’s a small interval. ‘I don’t think they know, sir. They should definitely know.’

  *

  Nalanda is out of copies of The Immortals. Says the attendant. He placed an order last month; there’s been no movement. Either he’s lying – or it’s that balance of payment situation; or the distributor’s acting up: a long path at the end of which my books lie in a warehouse. But is the distributor a person from Porlock– an invention? If there was no person from Porlock, there would be a person from somewhere else, to make trouble, to come between the writer and their writing. Stevie Smith was right: we need our person from Porlock. A voice says: ‘It’s no one else. It’s you. Figure it out.’ In the meanwhile, as usual, I’m rebuffed. This is not a two-way street, I find. The Taj can be found in The Immortals, but The Immortals is not to be found in the Taj. I pick up a copy of Time Out. This is because I like guidebooks to cities I know.

  Out of the bookshop, I’m in the lobby; walking towards the concierge, I turn right into the long corridor. For obvious reasons, they’ve closed off the side street and backstreet entrances. A part of me regrets this. I wonder if – when the fear and the burden of responsibility this thing has generated have blown over – the doors will be opened again. Every restaurant in the corridor I pass, I make personal and historic notations for: ‘This is the Harbour Bar; I was never fully aware of it till Shanbhag of Strand Book Stall took my wife and me there in 1993, and we ate lobster chilli pepper’; ‘Here’s Golden Dragon (looks different now), where I first encountered chop sticks but never learnt to use them. A few people were killed here.’ And, also from the early eighties, this is where I first met Shobha De. It was soon after she’d become a De but before she appended the extra ‘a’ to her first name. She’d recently married someone who admired my father and lived in the same building as we did then – they took us out to dinner; or did my father take them out? The last time I came to Golden Dragon was in the nineties, during one of my post-marriage trips from Oxford, when my parents lived in Calcutta but we’d coincided in Bombay, and my father brought us here to rehearse past occasions, though I don’t think he could afford the prices any more. The manager must have had a memory of him as the incredibly gentlemanly CEO of a big company (though long vanished from these parts) and, at the end of the dinner, charged him nothing. Remembering this, I hold in balance the same emotions I did from fifteen years ago: pleasure, that a man as striking and humane as my father should have been paid tribute to; pleasure, that even in a city as forgetful as this one, people can store away a memory of dignity; pleasure, that he should be acknowledged even when he’d gone from here and, on retirement, forfeited everything, as he’d forfeited his past upon Partition; guilt, that we’d always lived off the fat of the land. To those who have, more shall be given. If you have nothing, even the little you have is taken from you. This is unarguable. But the guilt is a spectre; it has no basis in reality. I wish it to be gone.

  *

  As usual, I stop at the photo display. I don’t think I’m a celebrity-watcher, but I’ve always found it arresting. They’ve returned, affirming continuity: of what was, and will be. The attacks, for them, are just a blink of the eye. In fact, they’ve been through much more than the attacks. Bill Clinton, John Lennon, V S Naipaul, Nehru. Even Shobhaa De, larger than the rest, Cleopatra-like on a sankheda chair. They are the true survivors. They’ve known the fickleness of fortune, the travesty of renown – and are still with us. For some reason, I think I’ll see Hitchcock among them. But Hitchcock never came to India, did he? Still, I forget a little later that he’s not in the gallery. Which is the one bit of black and white in the corridor.

  *

  I press on. Two women of indeterminate nationality – they could be Latin American – walk towards me. They’re followed by a middle-aged European in a sleeveless top and skirt. I’m in the foyer of the old wing now, and the swimming pool is on my right. Dusk’s falling on the water. I think of Ramu. How, long ago, my parents and I had come here for dinner, and, stepping out later, I’d gone quickly down the pavement (which is cordoned off now by barriers: no pedestrians) and, beneath one of the arches, on t
he steps of what used to be the chemist’s, found Ramu there. It was a year since I’d seen him. I hardly went to college any more, and (this was something I didn’t know) neither did he. The year’s gap was unremarkable. We were at that stage in our lives when friends were falling off. School friends are like relatives; you can’t deny they were part of your growing up, but they come to mean nothing to you. That year, when I saw Ramu on the steps, a couple of our classmates had already gone to America. In the years to follow, others would leave – for Wharton, Carnegie Mellon, MIT. A bit like a wartime exodus. I said to Ramu, ‘Hey, what’s up? What’re you doing here?’ ‘Nothing yaar,’ fugitive in a way that was attractive. I presumed he was smoking marijuana. ‘Don’t ask.’ ‘My parents are a few steps behind me,’ I said. ‘Oh shit,’ he said, and turned his face towards the arch. ‘Rah-moo?’ called my mother – she was glimmering in her sari and jewellery. ‘How are you?’ He stood up reluctantly. ‘I’m OK, aunty.’ ‘Keeping yourself busy?’ said my father.

  *

  Another time – I think it was 1986, when I rediscovered him in the months I spent in India between graduating from UCL and going back to Oxford – he said he could see himself working as one of the security personnel at the Taj. At this point, he’d been an addict for six or seven years, but was committed neither to being a full-blown goner nor to taking up normal life. ‘Normal life’ interested him in spurts, but then the enthusiasm for it seemed to vaguely die. The reasons for wanting a job as one of the Taj’s security staff were, I think, manifold. First, he believed he looked the part. Also, the fact that, in security, you’re doing something while you’re not doing very much would have been integral to the job’s appeal. Standing smartly, studying the middle distance. And he knew someone who had the job, and this planted the idea in his head. But he didn’t know whom to approach or how to apply. The idea remained a possibility.

  *

  Before me is Gazdar. Full of the most delicately wrought jewellery. A curlicue of gold on a bangle; the miniature hive of an earring. I have neither the taste nor an eye for jewellery. But, a year ago, I came here to exchange my mother’s mangalsutra (just as, now, I’m carrying her shoes). Its beads were like kalonji, or maybe fish roe. Why she wanted to give it up for something else after thirty years I had no idea: an old-age fit or whim. But she’s in perfect possession of her senses and her whims have nothing to do with her years. The man at the counter – he was the one person in the shop – claimed he remembered her. I seemed to remember him, because he looked so familiar and appeared to belong firmly somewhere. I asked him if he was Mr Gazdar, and he clarified he was a long-term employee – though he had the ease of a family member, of someone who’d been among the artefacts from a young age, and could regard them as both rarities and objects for trade. He had a slightly uxorious air – of a man who defers to other people’s wives because he knows they call the shots. It’s not as if Gazdar has hordes of customers, though. I can’t afford its wares, but on the day of the mangalsutra exchange I saw a basrai pearl necklace (a fragile exoskeleton that made me nostalgic) which I thought I’d get my wife as an anniversary present.

  *

  How come Gazdar escaped ransacking in those three or four days? It doesn’t make sense, somehow. I haven’t had this conversation with the man who says he isn’t Mr Gazdar. What he did tell me, though, is that he shut up shop early that evening – or he’d have been in trouble.

  Odd, I think. My mind’s gone back to my mother’s words. Her recounting to me of her Sylhet days were so vivid that it didn’t occur to me that she was unhappy as a child. Even the privations she experienced while growing up had an aura of singularity in her accounts. Sometimes the tearful stories were amusing. Only once or twice did I get a sense of how hard it was. Evenly she’d said: ‘I always knew that that wasn’t going to be my life.’ (By that she meant both Sylhet and the circumstances her family fell into after her father’s death.) And indeed it wasn’t. Much of her adult life was here in Bombay, part of it here, in the Taj. ‘Your life will be one that you can’t imagine now,’ an astrologer had predicted. And it was clear, when she told me of the astrologer’s words, that she hadn’t imagined it. She was leading, by then, the life he’d foretold long ago. For me, foreknowledge was similar, but pointed in the opposite direction. This is why I feel a detachment and fraudulence as I walk to Joy Shoes. I knew this wouldn’t be my life – Malabar Hill, Cuffe Parade, the Taj. ‘The streets were never really mine.’ I was going to be far away.

  *

  ‘The streets were never really mine.’ In a way, this was true of my parents too. Of course, they owned their life in Malabar Hill, presided over it – I loved their benevolent reign. I myself never possessed my time here unequivocally. But when life in Bombay began to unravel after my father’s retirement it was interesting how they made almost no attempt to not let it go. It was as if they were used to leaving. They’d left a few times before: on Partition; then to London; then from London. When it came to leaving, they knew how. Not that they were planning to depart Bombay. But on some level they were preparing for departure. And, in acknowledgement, they began to let go of things. My mother anyway liked to give things away. It had been a startling habit ever since I can remember, a tic. She’d gifted furniture to her music teacher, jewels and saris to relations. She even gave furniture to Ramu before we went away – to sell, ostensibly; but they were never sold, and came to adorn Ramu’s room. Their last years here were marked by the sale of bits of my mother’s jewellery. That’s because my father’s savings began to run out after retirement; his taxed income had been modest. Besides, he was financing my education in London; he’d borrowed money to buy the post-retirement flat. In 1986, between UCL and going to Oxford, I spent time with them in that small flat they’d moved to in Bandra. Then I got jaundice (though I’m careful to drink boiled water). I was transferred to Nanavati Hospital, to a ‘deluxe’ room in the old wing. It was terrible. At five in the morning, when I was woken up by a nurse who’d come to change the saline drip, I saw a large cockroach crawl across the floor. That afternoon, my parents moved me to a tip-top luxury room in the new wing of the Nanavati. How? My mother had sold a pair of diamond earrings. Both parents looked excited and vindicated. My father, at this point, saw at least some of my mother’s jewellery as one might bonds and debentures: as something meant to be encashed in need. I remember accompanying my parents on two trips into the stifling, entangled maze of Zaveri Bazaar when the bank balance had dipped again. I think it hurt my mother to lose some of those rings and pendants, and I’ve always wanted to give her something back, but never have. I’ve long wished to buy her those earrings. But the journeys to Zaveri Bazaar weren’t desperate; they were full of anticipation. A thrilling climax. My parents, distracted and happy.

  *

  I think we felt that buoyancy not despite Bombay, but because of it. It was a product of the city’s high spirits. Buy and sell. The two are ever interconnected. I’ve not experienced that buoyancy elsewhere.

  That idiot Ramu. He often stayed with us then, in those three years when we realized our time in Bombay was ending. I say ‘idiot’ with affection. Partly I say it because he seemed insensitive to the small upheaval that was occurring in our life. He was immersed in his own upheaval. But he’s no idiot. I told him as much as we walked back and forth between the Gateway of India and the Radio Club, the sea black beside us. It was 1986; I was back from London and spending a year with my parents in the flat on St Cyril Road. We often discussed, that year, the possibility of selling the flat – our last pied-à-terre here. Every other day I’d take the local train to Churchgate to wander streets in the parts of the city I’d grown up in and gone to school to, but where my parents no longer lived. It was on one of these sojourns that I ran into Ramu. He told me immediately of his addiction to brown sugar. ‘I’m fucked,’ he said. We renewed a friendship which, in school, had been neither slight nor thick, but convivial and fractious. He used to call me ‘the poet’ in school,
both to heckle me and pay me a backhanded compliment – not because he’d read my poems but as a response to the fact that I didn’t ‘do’ sports, wore glasses, was maladroit, and kept my hair long. When we ran into each other again in 1986, there was no awkwardness between us. He made a presumption on my time which I was persuaded by. It was during a walk near the Taj that I said to him, ‘But you’re an intelligent man.’ He studied me to check if I was mocking him. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’m not stupid. But most stupid people are successful.’ I nodded (I too was young). By ‘intelligent’, I meant the opposite of – a word hardly used these days – shallow. There was an intensity about his bewilderment, his rejection; there always had been. Sometimes the rejection was opportunistic. His problem was boredom, and a sharp need to escape the things that bored him.