Friend of My Youth Read online

  *

  Our last days in Bombay were my happiest there – not, however, because I knew they were my last days. I had no idea. None of us did. But it was as if a premonition hung over us after the move to Bandra; the possibility of a final and unexpected change. That came soon after my parents settled into the small new flat, the first property they owned in the city. Bandra was so different from everything we’d known. The churches; the remnants of a Goan idea of a neighbourhood; the low – sometimes derelict – cottages. It was as if my father had entered a period of banishment.

  When I include myself in the business of leaving Bombay, I ignore the fact that I’d already left. I was in England at the time. In 1986, I took a year off in Bandra, but then went back to England. Yet mentally and emotionally, I was with my parents, and in India. Inwardly, I accompanied and mimicked their shifts in location. The move to England meant less to me than the move to St Cyril Road. Occasionally, I’d discover I was back in Oxford. But I barely noticed this. I was in Bandra. We were gearing up to leave.

  *

  Ramu, at the time, was drifting (as I was drifting between countries, pondering the future) in and out of addiction. He’d be clean for six months; then relapse. He’d say, on the phone, that he was ‘absolutely fine’; two days later, he’d mutter he’d slipped. I began to feel wary when he said he was ‘absolutely fine’. Because when he was okay, he merely sounded bored, already taking for granted the ennui of normal existence. The earnestness of ‘absolutely fine’ indicated that a transgression had taken place. Anyway, even to begin a conversation on the phone with ‘How are you?’ was to realize it was a loaded question; an interrogation, almost. But there was no way round ordinary courtesies.

  No sooner had my parents moved to St Cyril Road than we began to weigh the option – playfully at first – of their selling the apartment and moving to Calcutta. This was to ease my father’s steadily growing debt. It wasn’t difficult for us to have these discussions, because neither did we think they’d lead to an actual decision, and nor did we feel Bombay was really ‘home’. I’d grown up here, but never belonged here. The fact that we were Bengalis prevented us from putting down roots in Bombay, and we underestimated our attachment to it. I say this because later we often missed it deeply. Still, I treasured each day in Bandra. That’s because I was back home from Oxford, and every day in that small flat was important to me. I knew I’d have to go to Oxford again, and didn’t want to. Bandra flowered around me. It felt familiar to me in a way that Malabar Hill and Cuffe Parade never had. I mean the stray dogs, the infinite afternoons, the low houses – our own flat was on the third storey, from which you could scrutinize the gulmohar blossoms that dominated the summer months at eye level. Every day in Bandra was precious – until I’d pack my bags again. Ramu would come to stay with me sometimes – for a day, or for two days, or even (wearing me out) for three. Our upheaval almost went unnoticed by us – so why shouldn’t it have by him?

  Cloth bag in hand, I ascend the steps to the glass door. The handles to the doors unite in a horseshoe: the Joy Shoes logo. It’s based on a breezy sketch executed by M. F. Husain. Those were the days! Inside, there’s a picture Husain painted specially for the shop: one of his incandescent horses. Why an animal that flies off the earth when it runs should be an appropriate symbol for footwear is beyond me. Will these shoes make us fleet-footed? Are they to be hammered into our soles? There’s another story here. Husain hardly wore footwear those days. He went around the streets of Bombay barefoot. In school, we relished an anecdote about Husain being refused entry into Willingdon Club because he was shoeless. Hoity-toity rules: serves him right. Someone saw him hopping later on the hot macadam. I enter and see the horse on my left. Husain must be in his nineties now. Ninety-three or -four. Of course, he doesn’t live here any more. He’s unofficially exiled. Still, why not let the horse hang where it always did? A Husain is a Husain.

  ‘Hello, sir?’ says— but his name’s gone from my head. ‘Exchange, no?’

  He smiles and adds: ‘When you came back?’

  ‘Just earlier today.’

  He shakes his head mildly: not so much a yes as acceptance.

  ‘Mummy OK?’

  ‘She’s all right, actually.’ In Bombay, you subtly shift your speech so you sound like the one speaking to you. You don’t want to stand out. You want to sound more or less like you did when you were twelve: nothing’s changed.

  ‘She called,’ he says, half smiling.

  A woman in a pistachio sari, whose white foot cranes over a shoe, lifts her head. She looks candidly at me. It’s a look that one well-to-do person passes prematurely to another.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Just now only. She was asking if you came. She gave instructions for her shoes and your wife’s shoes.’

  The woman in the sari looks vindicated; perhaps the shoe fits. There are mirrors everywhere; for us to examine our feet.

  I step out discreetly to get a better signal. Not far from me is the palatial back entrance, locked with finality.

  ‘Which colour do you want?’ I ask my wife.

  ‘Tell them to bring out the priya,’ she advises. She vacillates: ‘See what the beige looks like. Also the black. No, actually I have a black one. Check the white. Why don’t you decide for yourself? Actually, don’t.’

  She blames my mother for her reliance on Joy Shoes – they were unknown to her before she got married. Now she wears little else. By the time we met in Oxford, Bombay was history for me: very recent history, but decidedly the past. I revealed my life in it to her piecemeal, guiltily, with a sly boastfulness, conveying, without much effort, how literally incredible it was and also how easily I let it go when I had the chance.

  I walk back in. The colours of the classic designs are black, white, gold, and beige. But I’ve also spotted magenta on the heels. My mother is loyal to the priya. She’s incapable of wearing heels; she has a broken foot. My wife, too, abhors heels and the glitzier options. (I pick up a glass slipper and wonder if I can tempt her.) The classic designs don’t evolve hugely. Instead, they become distilled. Extraneous bits – which you realize are extraneous after they’re gone – are constantly sacrificed; the shoes grow sleeker and sparser.

  *

  Munna has appeared. Holding forth into the receiver, behind the till. Busy; but reassuring. I recall he’s a Muslim. But why can’t I escape this thought? Distracted, he waves. The bonds of mutual loyalty are strong. Is he a Vohra? There are many of them in Bombay; they’re prosperous.

  ‘Hello, hello, hello,’ he says, in a tone of congratulatory disbelief. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Haven’t seen you in a while,’ I concede, patting his shoulder. ‘I came here about a year ago for a very short trip’ – he nods – ‘when my new book came out, but I couldn’t come to the shop.’

  ‘But your wife came to take some priya, no?’ he asks, his memory razor-sharp. Narrowing his eyes, he says, ‘She’s not here this time?’

  I shake my head. ‘No, but she made it a point to send me.’

  ‘That’s good, that’s good,’ he says melodiously, smiles, scratches his beard. ‘What’s the name of the new book? I’m sure I read about it in the evening papers – or maybe in the Times.’

  ‘The Immortals.’

  ‘That’s it!’ he exclaims, glancing at a stub half-submerged in the card machine. The roll’s stuck. ‘What’s it about?’ This is a version of the ‘How are you?’ he’s put to me already.

  I think of a succinct way of holding his attention. ‘You know, I’ve described Joy Shoes in it.’

  ‘No!’ agog, but the steely bit of his attention still fixed on the stub.

  ‘There’s a young man in the novel,’ I continue, ‘comes from an affluent family, but pretends to be poor – wears torn kurtas, frayed jeans, but’ – I smile into his eyes – ‘he’s always in Joy Shoes sandals.’

  ‘Ha!’ he cries, wondering what these behavioural traits add up to. ‘What is it? It’s a novel? Wh
ere can I find it?’

  Good question, I think, and claim insouciantly, ‘Just check in the bookshops.’

  No one is sure any more what the novel is. The word has unprecedented currency. People are thrown it intermittently, and sometimes they throw it back. For about a decade now, when I’ve hedged and said, in answer to some query about my profession, ‘I write novels,’ people have occasionally countered with, ‘Fiction or non-fiction?’ Someone said to me that the ‘novel’ is now confused with the ‘book’ – it’s no longer understood as a form, but as writing itself.

  He shakes the roll loose. ‘Must get a copy!’

  My reason for telling Munna about Joy Shoes in The Immortals is not only to elicit a response, or to make him feel like an honour’s been bestowed on him. For me (given my writing is accused of coming directly from life), the aftermath of the book, in which people believe they’ve been written about and start to find their own correspondences, is the most interesting chapter.

  ‘But glad to see all’s well! Terrible stuff, what happened.’ I’ve been to Bombay once since November 2008, but feel like I haven’t. ‘I was watching it on TV in England. Turned on the news. I couldn’t believe my eyes.’

  ‘My God!’ says Munna, losing his smile. ‘We had to go to a wedding that night, so we left early. Usually we begin shutting at eight.’ He gestures to his right without moving his eyes. ‘Some of those fellows came in from there.’

  He focuses.

  ‘Mom’s sandals are ready, no?’

  ‘I think he’s gone in to check.’

  We glance at the room, small as a monk’s cell, in which shoes are secreted.

  *

  Passing along the corridor, I turn right and come to the majestic red-carpeted staircase. I climb up the stairs; each step is capacious, as if people ascending were expected to make giant strides sideways. There’s a lift, but no one in their right mind would enter the shell of the lift when the staircase is available.

  At the top of the right-hand stairs, on the left, is what for me is the main, the old, entrance to the Sea Lounge; but this, of course, is closed. Reaching the first floor, the entrance is on the right, diagonally. The Sea Lounge has had to be restored from scratch; it was reopened recently. Once I’m in, I find things have a rehearsed air: the notes on the piano of ‘Yesterday Once More’; the spacious sofas inhabited by large groups along the sides and in the centre. I want a table by the window, where only couples sit. There they are, presenting their profiles, painterly against the light. They’re deep in themselves. There’s a free table by the middle window.

  A tall waiter in white shirt and trousers and brown apron escorts me to the table and silently takes my order of Darjeeling tea and a plate of cookies. I don’t like Darjeeling tea, but I’m buying time. It’s not that far from dinner. Besides, I don’t want to spend five hundred rupees on bhel puri. I notice the waiters’ uniforms haven’t changed. But almost all the waiters are new. In the seventies, the Sea Lounge had a regularity in my consciousness, as my parents used to come here late Saturday morning and occupy one of these tables by the window. Their order, like other things about them at the time, was unvarying: chilli cheese toast, tea. The Sea Lounge had a menu of arcane bites: chicken or mushroom vol au vents, the cream stored beneath volcanic flaps; Scandinavian open sandwiches (the idea of an ‘open sandwich’, where the filling was left exposed, unprotected, was boldly counterintuitive). Then there was bhel and sev puri, served on pristine china. My mother insisted we couldn’t eat these off the pavement for fear of jaundice; but in the Sea Lounge, where they were made in conditions of uncompromising hygiene, her love of bhel was very evident. Sitting at the table, I glance out of the window on my right, while the pianist tinkles away and I follow the notes, reconstituting the words: ‘those were such happy times, not so long ago … every sha la la la la … still shines …’

  *

  I get up. I know the toilets are far away, and a tour awaits through long corridors. I temporarily abandon the table, leaving the Joy Shoes bag on a chair.

  Before stepping out, I eavesdrop on the pianist. A deeply serious man. Reticent, he glances at me, then returns to what looks – even sounds – like a bit of typing. The notes are clunky.

  I go through the doors, turn left; this stretch is like a balcony in a theatre. Soon I’m at the inner corridor, where I turn left again; on my right is the Crystal Room – I might have been tempted to wander towards it and peep in, except I know that it’s still under construction. Much at this end of the first floor was gutted. That great and useless space must have once, before I was born, been used for celebrations and felicitations, but I only remember its Christmas lunches, weddings, and sari exhibitions. I move away from it. It’s a long walk down the corridor to the toilets.

  When you come to the end, you feel not so much that you’re in another part of the hotel as in a different city. I chance upon an ornate and dishevelled scene. Two handsome liveried men – employees of the hotel – stand watching a band of noisy people in bright clothes: bandhani saris; turbans. Maybe they’re wedding guests (poor relations), or the family of musicians or artistes who’ve come to perform at one of the restaurants. In which dialect are they shouting to each other? I go into the toilet, and a wave of perfectly maintained features – stonework framing basins; antique fittings on taps – engulfs me. I empty my bladder thoroughly. When I emerge, most of the party outside have disbanded – it was only for a moment they’d come together here. A liveried man is fading into the distance.

  *

  Quiet has re-established itself with their departure. This is where the rooms are. Quiet, quiet. Beyond the access of interlopers. Those men made for this wing, of course, and the cat and mouse game lasted four days. People fleeing, hiding, dying, changing location at strange hours, led by staff.

  The CCTV footage captures flashes of it: the men with guns, intent; the guests and staff transiting at odd times of the night. All of them trapped, circling this wing. It’s in the bad lighting of the CCTV video that the hotel echoes the mausoleum it’s named after – in which tourists arc round the tombs encased in marble, shrouded in the perpetual semi-dark of mourning, where they can’t take pictures. As a result, there’s no record of our visits to Mumtaz Mahal and Shah Jahan’s resting places. The CCTV footage too, when you see it, seems almost an impossibility.

  *

  How long will it take for the Crystal Room to be put together? They must be working on it at this very moment, although, as I turn right, I hear no sound; no hammering, no drilling. I’m back in the Sea Lounge. They’ve done a good job. It’s not so much a twin of the room that was destroyed, or a replacement. What they have tried to do is follow the example of the moving image of the disintegrating object or edifice played backward, so that the shards and fragments, as you keep watching, fly up instantaneously and regain their old places until completion is achieved, and, at last, there’s no discontinuity between past and present. Accustomed as we are to technology, we know it’s an illusion – the shards are all there somewhere; it’s just that the film has been reversed. Is this why Benjamin saw in Klee’s Angelus Novus (which ‘shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating’) the ‘angel of history’? ‘His face is turned toward the past,’ he says. ‘Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.’ To be in the Taj is to experience its emergence from this storm. Like the angel, it’s turned its back to the future it’s once more moving towards. When I look around me in the Sea Lounge, I see its composure and reinstatement – the improvements are so unobtrusive you don’t
notice them – but I’m also confronting the debris.

  *

  ‘Should I pour the tea, sir?’

  But he will pour it. There’s a rigour to his posture; he stays very straight while the tea trickles out. Three lightly tanned cookies on the plate. I bite one. It turns to powder.

  This would have been a good moment to call Ramu. I look out of the window. He lives not far away. It’s not like Ramu to consent to a regime that’s made him incommunicado; but maybe there was no other remedy. Ordinarily, I might not feel the need to chat; but the fact that I have no choice except not to is making me restless. Anyway, our conversations are silly; they’re designed to return us to our schoolboy personae. It’s as if we haven’t moved on from those days when we’re with each other. I always hated school. Ramu both loved and hated it. All his best years were there, he claims. Yet he hated its glamourizing of sport – not because (like me) he was bad at sport, but because he was so good at it. His housemasters wanted to exploit his abilities – he resisted, to their dismay. They never forgave him. Besides, the school was meant for rich children. Why did his father (he’d asked me), an ordinary middle-class man with a small business, put him in a school meant for the Tatas, the Dubashes, the Ginwallas, the sons and daughters of CEOs, government ministers, and film actresses? Ramu’s good at apportioning blame.

  *

  I gesture to a man who’s standing in my line of vision, by the old exit.

  ‘Bill, please.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Before he recedes, I say: ‘The Sea Lounge looks good.’

  He nods, indulgent.

  ‘But the staff seems new,’ I confide.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ he agrees, prolonging his puzzled nod. ‘Mostly new only.’

  ‘Where’s the old staff?’

  ‘Some left.’ He hesitates. ‘Some died.’

  ‘Died?’