Friend of My Youth Page 8

  Reaching the side on the left, I enter the ruined arcade leading to Homi and Baliwalla. I see more than I once did. For instance, just before entering the crumbling arcade, I notice floral patterns on the wall below a first-floor balcony. They’re above eye level, as if they weren’t meant to be seen. Why they were put there is beyond me. Somebody’s fancy. Like some of the sculpted figures, occupying far corners, ensconced round each other in Konark. Almost as if you were supposed to overlook them.

  Ramu loves these buildings. Our being able to understand and express this love speaks to the distance we’ve travelled from school, when Flora Fountain simply meant school was near, and spelled daily irrevocable doom. No more. That patina of fear, and then functionality, has lifted. Two years ago, I was here in Bombay, and Ramu and I were walking (after dinner at Mahesh Lunch Home) past Flora Fountain to Churchgate. Humanity was receding, inasmuch as it recedes in this city. We were discussing in tones of outrage the prices at Mahesh, and beginning to agree their steepness was Lonely Planet’s doing. Heedless of Flora, we turned to study the buildings behind us – as you’d turn, say, to look at the full moon. They were beautiful. Partly illuminated. I shared some jargon with him. ‘That one’s art deco. See? And that has some neoclassical elements.’ Open-mouthed, we drank them. Then, wheeling round, resuming our walk towards Churchgate, we crossed at a light, and Ramu pointed at a gothic phantom on the left, opposite the Central Telegraph Office. ‘I get transformed when I see these, yaar!’ he exclaimed, waving at the shadows. ‘They take me back to a different time and way of life! Sometimes I even stop and look at the ironwork on the fucking gate – it’s mind-blowing!’

  *

  Ramu’s vocabulary is unusual. Like the word ‘transformed’. I wasn’t wholly surprised, but did register it. ‘Trans’ – across; a movement across form; change. I know that recognizability is an illusion. Nothing is fixed: not Ramu, in terecotton trousers, hair thinning, deceptively turned out as a nine-to-five office-goer; not as he was thirty years ago, thin, in blue jeans, with a beautiful but disbelieving face; or in school, short, introspective, unassimilated. The Ramu I see isn’t Ramu. He is ‘transformed’.

  The building was abandoned, but intact. We considered the black railings, tapering into exquisite, thick points. Victorian. We’re both fantasists. We need to be taken out of who and where we are. What we see prompts in us not a desire for the thing itself, but another time and place. ‘Shit,’ said Ramu. ‘Just look at that.’

  *

  Bandra. 1986, 1987. Two, three years prior to my parents’ departure. In ’87 I went to Oxford. That small, pretty, third-floor apartment my parents moved to, facing the lane. Ramu would come and stay with me for three or four days. He’d run out of a change of clothes; begin to don my thin white kurtas. He’s only two inches taller than me; they fitted him fine. He said he felt no craving to ‘use’ when he stayed with us. He was an onlooker and eavesdropper on our discussions about departure, saying little to persuade us one way or another. I used to wonder sometimes when he’d go, this kurta-clad figure. He’d slip the moment he returned to Colaba. Then he’d be unreachable for days, and I’d start to forget him.

  In St Cyril Road, he and I quarrelled often. Or, late at night, we’d watch a porn VHS he’d brought with him. Or, with the peculiar stoic solidarity he displays at readings, he’d listen to me do riyaaz.

  We’d go for walks. Both of us in those white kurtas. St Cyril Road. St Leo Road. Pali Hill. Being fractious. The main point of contention was whether the girl who’d walked past was looking at him or me. ‘She was looking at me,’ I’d say. ‘D’you think she’s blind?’ he’d reply. ‘Why would she look at you?’ My last years in Bombay. This precious wastage of time.

  And we’d stop to stare at the houses. Churches. Walls. The ‘cottages’ and ‘villas’ built by Christians. They were being torn down one by one to make way for buildings. The value of property per square foot made no sense. ‘Look at that,’ he’d say, and we’d stop and, not speaking at all, imbibe the verandah, the open window, the roof, the palm trees, the rocking chair. This was when we were in communion; when we stopped talking and acknowledged this desire – not to own (that would be impossible) but to imagine.

  *

  One night after dinner, we made our habitual trip to Carter Road, to the promontory bordered by waves. Near Gold Mist Apartments. Couples sat here, ruminating, day and night; dogs barked and fucked each other before them.

  We progressed towards Perry Road. He pointed up to a white smear on the sky, as if the light of the moon had revealed a smudge on a surface. ‘See that?’ I narrowed my eyes at the expanse. Suspicious of infinity. ‘That’s the end of the Milky Way. Veeru told me.’ Referring to one, a young filmmaker, who dabbled in the environment and astronomy. ‘That’s where another universe begins.’ I checked to see I wasn’t dreaming up the faint smudge. How come the sky was so bright?

  There’s a line, or veil – beyond it, another world. We sensed it then, on St Cyril Road and Carter Road: a house on the street; a streak of white in the sky. It was like a semi-transparent pane of glass.

  On this trip, there’s a veil too.

  Behind the veil is Ramu. I can see him. He reappeared in 2011 – in the summer. I called his house, expecting to speak to his sister; he picked up the phone. ‘Fuck! When did you get back?’ ‘I called you yaar – two months ago. It kept saying “This number is not reachable” or some shit. I was going to call again.’ Is he bullshitting? Then I remember I was in England at the time. He tells me how horrible the regime was; how he was beaten and locked up. I feel appalled, briefly reliving his terror. ‘How did you get out?’ It’s been one of my objectives in life never to go near anything reminiscent of school again; it might account for my shyness, for years, about getting a job. Ramu never liked school, but used to be nostalgic for the order it brought to his existence. ‘I was allowed to get a call from my sister once a month.’ ‘Yes, I know.’ ‘I t-told her I’d had enough. I told her what was happening.’ ‘Then?’ ‘She and my father came and got me out. Fuck! I think I should lodge an F-F-FIR, yaar!’

  He never completed the two-year rehab. It ended three months ahead of schedule.

  *

  ‘Are you coming to Kala Ghoda?’

  The festival. He’ll invariably ask the question, come January.

  I may be in Dubai, I say. So, possibly not. I hear him out – how more than half his life’s gone, how he’s unused to being ‘clean’; he’s unprepared for life. Experientially, he’s eighteen. He’s almost fifty-five. We change tone, expatiate on how shagging derails our lives. I call him in a few days – Dubai has been cancelled. Plans have changed. So I’ve said yes to Kala Ghoda.

  ‘They’re putting me up at the Astoria,’ I tell him. ‘What is it?’

  It’s an implausible name. The festival doesn’t have enough money to send you to the five stars, but they assign you to uncommon locations. I could ask for the Yacht Club, but the thought of Churchgate is inviting. All I want to make sure of is that it has no rats.

  ‘I know Astoria,’ says Ramu. He knows everything about this environment. ‘It’s near Eros. It’s OK – it’s good. Like not fantastic or anything, but good. I can check it out.’

  ‘Good is all I need. You don’t need to check it out. Ask Ali.’ Ali is in the hotel business – a manager. Went to the same school as we did. I remember his ‘house’. But I didn’t know him. He’s a recovered addict. Close to Ramu.

  The next day, Ramu calls. ‘He says it’s fine. Not like the Taj, but good middle-of-the-road hotel. I can check it out.’

  *

  Almost immediately upon arriving at the Astoria in the afternoon, I need to go out and meet an art historian. I call Ramu (he has a mobile now). But I can’t see him until later in the evening. This is the way things are when Ramu’s around. I don’t give him priority. He’s what survives of the familiar here – he’s what I don’t need to think of, unless he’s absent.

  The historian is
part Indian, part Polish. Her name is Radhika; she returns frequently to Bombay. We meet up in a café near the Yacht Club, in the arcade in which junkies once huddled together, now plush with restaurants. I’m struck by how beautiful people in the café are, while noting the price of the baked yoghurt.

  The yoghurt comes in different flavours in an array of little clay bowls. I didn’t have a proper lunch on the plane. I invite her to share. She digs into the one mottled with blueberry. I tell her I want to see the Bhau Daji Lad Museum. I’ve heard so much about it.

  ‘Ah, I’m going there tomorrow!’ She knows her way around Bombay better than I do. ‘Which is why I will miss your talk.’ She raises an eyebrow in annoyance. ‘I have a meeting. I asked them to change the timing – but no!’

  *

  I’m not going to the festival, though I know a couple of friends are reading this afternoon. It’s a seven-minute walk from the café. People from all over Bombay are going to swarm the triangle between Max Mueller Bhavan and Rhythm House. Ramu lives fifteen minutes away. He never goes unless I’m reading.

  *

  Coming out of the café, Radhika and I stroll together to the Gateway of India, and here we part ways. She turns right into a by-lane to return to her boutique hotel in the pathways behind Apollo Bunder. I continue up the sea-front, towards the Radio Club. Though I’m not at all far from where Ramu lives – I need to turn right, then left, and the building with the Ganesh Photography Studio sign on the ground floor will soon appear – I call him and we arrange to see each other at the Astoria at seven.

  *

  Naturally, things have changed in the last four and a half years since he’s come back. He has a cell phone. Impossible to think he could be familiar with a gadget, but he’s inseparable from it. I hardly call his landline any more, which his father picked up exclusively the day long as the gatekeeper to the family: ‘Yes, Ramu has just gone out’; ‘Ramu is sleeping’. I have a smartphone myself. My wife made me buy it. I blame her. I depend on it, and loathe it intensely.

  Our fathers have gone. Mine died over two years ago. This life, which I’m revisiting, was his life. I think of my past here as my parents’ creation. It wasn’t mine. Ramu’s died last month. He fell, broke his hip, had to be operated on, went into a coma shortly after coming to consciousness after the operation, when he shouted at his family and insisted he wanted to go home right away. Being the son, Ramu took the decision about taking him off life-support and the ventilator. ‘He was brain dead,’ Ramu told me. ‘He wasn’t alive, yaar!’ He sounded lost and defiant.

  Tall, loping Kannadiga. Six foot two. Picked up the phone after it rang four or five times and said a prolonged ‘Hellooooo?’ Slept on a bed nearby.

  *

  In my overnight bag in the Astoria are priya chappals. The control model, on which I must base a new purchase. Munna has hinted to my mother on the phone that this particular style of priya is extinct. She’s not interested. She can hardly walk without support after the knee operation. Her courtship of the priya has to do with a single-minded pursuit that defines the sort of person she is, rather than a need. Munna won’t question it.

  *

  On my way back, I disregard my instinct, wade into the human cross-current before Jehangir Art Gallery. They’ve come to stare at installations. I wish to access Rhythm House. It’s closing down. It’ll be gone next time. I dance out of the way of the festival melee, push the glass door. I recall exactly what it was like inside when I was a boy. When places take on new incarnations, I find it difficult to summon up their earlier ones. But with Rhythm House the memory of the vertical stacks of records and the booths in which my friends and I listened to music without buying, averting the staff’s accusatory glances, dominates the hazy thing it’s been for twenty years: this hive of CDs. I expect a crowd inside, taking advantage of final clearance, but find it’s a semi-lit warren leading nowhere.

  *

  I’m undecided about the time we live in. This ongoing passage to oblivion. The disappearance of things you took for granted. Then there’s the renaissance of things you never knew of, or presumed you’d never see again. All the songs I could have listened to in Rhythm House, and more, I find on YouTube. And bombil is suddenly a part of my life. And Trishna, which I heard of only ten years ago, I now make a pilgrimage to on every visit.

  I left the hotel after keeping my bag inside, so I hardly saw the room. It’s nice. Wooden floorboards (or is it linoleum?). Thick white curtains to compensate for the fact that it has no view.

  I wanted to stay here because it’s an art deco building. And because it’s Churchgate. I couldn’t imagine what it means to spend the night at Churchgate.

  *

  I invite Ramu to give it the once-over. He comes up in the lift. Although the room’s on the first floor, you don’t take the stairs, and you tend to obey the liftman when he tells you to step in.

  ‘This is what I’d expect a room here to be like,’ he observes, standing by the bed, looking round him, taking responsibility. His hair is thinner than last time. He looks settled and respectable. ‘It’s good.’

  ‘It’s good,’ I echo.

  We turn to leave. We proceed through the corridor, realizing it’s here – outside the rooms – that the hotel’s presence can be sensed. We opt for the stairs. Before even attempting the first step downward, we discuss the staircase.

  ‘Fuck,’ says Ramu. ‘Look at that space!’

  I know why he’s agitated. There’s an opening-up here, dim and clean, corresponding to the lightness we feel inside.

  ‘W-where you’ll get that in modern buildings?’ he challenges me, querulous.

  *

  Although it’s fairly early for dinner, we notice the restaurants as we walk towards Marine Drive. I was never on this boulevard in my growing-up years at this time of the day – in the light rising after dusk. For some reason I feel I live round the corner. In fact, it’s like I’ve been here all my life. This unspoken sense of belonging to Churchgate doesn’t dilute my encounter with it. ‘Look at that!’ K. Rustom and Sons. People biting into ice cream sandwiched by two brittle wafers. A ghostly congregation. ‘I don’t believe it,’ says Ramu. I thought it had slipped into history. What’s difficult to account for is that it’s identical to what we remember.

  *

  We walk past Pizza by the Bay – once Not Just Jazz by the Bay – which I went to with my parents when it was Talk of the Town. I remember the polite nervousness with which we watched askance, eyelids blinking, a couple pirouette and dance the Salsa. Since then, I’ve only ever seen this place from a car, a few seconds at a time. We cross; we’re at the sea. We turn our back to it. We sit. We don’t bother with the men in t-shirts on our left and discreetly turn away from the Muslim couple on our right (they must be Muslim – the woman is delicate and beautiful).

  We catch our breath and study two edifices – the Talk of the Town building and the Iran Air building. We lean, propped on our palms. I identify the style, mention the curves and vertical lines that mark out art deco – not because it explains anything or helps us better understand our rapture, but because it’s always pleasurable to talk about something you like.

  ‘Achha,’ says Ramu as I talk. He can be compliant. ‘Achha.’

  We began to note the Marine Drive houses one day not long ago in a car, going towards Nariman Point, glancing left – I must have come in for the launch of Calcutta. He was two years back from his terrible stint in Alibag (which he never believed he’d escape) and this was a new lease of life for him in a city he’d detested, and he was seeing it with new eyes. ‘Beautiful,’ he said, peering as houses flitted past. We observed this flank curving on the left, ignoring the sea, as if the panorama had no relevance – as if the houses held the key to how life might be lived here. I felt a repressed niggle as I stared. Suddenly, I said, ‘Look at the windows.’ ‘Huh?’ Then he saw it too. ‘Fuck, you’re right.’ Frame after aluminium frame had replaced the casements. The gesture by which
you push a window open was now unnecessary. ‘Fuck,’ he said glumly. It was as if a part of us that was air and breeze had been denied entry. Resentful, temporarily silenced, we gazed, for the next five minutes, upon the swift, unvarying succession of aluminium frames travelling the opposite way.

  Soon, restive, because we’re not tourists, we get our backsides off the parapet and begin to walk back to Churchgate.

  I demand Parsi food. He isn’t surprised, but exercised. ‘Where we’ll get Parsi food here?’ he cries, as if we’re in the middle of a desert. But he’s not one to give up. ‘Stadium Restaurant,’ he says. ‘Cheap grub, but good. They have Parsi food also – sali boti, patra nu machhi.’ We laugh; the names are intrinsically funny, the way he says them. But we’re happy too soon – the Stadium Restaurant offers Parsi dishes on Tuesdays only. Momentarily lost, we proceed to Flora Fountain. We don’t want to end up at Mahesh Lunch Home. Also, I don’t want him to wander pointlessly. He had jaundice three months ago. His liver’s a bit off. ‘I’m absolutely fine yaar,’ he says. ‘I have a huge appetite these days.’ We do end up at Mahesh Lunch Home. Since he won’t partake of a large tandoori pomfret, I ask for a small one, which is modest-looking and below par. He has grilled rawas. We agree the daal is astonishing. I take several spoonfuls before he finishes it all by himself – he’s unstoppable when the mood takes him.

  *

  Bombay! The city never tires, but, returning to Churchgate and the Astoria (where his scooter’s parked), he’s fatigued, and plops down on one of those beautiful green benches you wouldn’t notice but which adorn the footpath leading to Eros. It’s only eleven o’clock. I take a picture of him: to send to my wife, to share the moment, and to prove incontrovertibly that I’m up to no mischief. I’m not confident of my chances in this light. But the smartphone is adept, and I capture a fair likeness of him in the nocturnal glow between Flora Fountain and Churchgate, staring at me aloofly. I then do what I’ve done only once before, with my wife on Christmas Day – take a selfie with him; two, to be safe. My lips are parted, as if I’m poking a dead thing to see if it’ll come to life; it’s the phone I’m attempting to keep at a distance. He’s smiling faintly, as if amused by some exotic piece of wildlife. Although this is Bombay, where the weather never changes, there’s a coolness that makes me protective of my singing voice: so he’s lent me his grey sleeveless sweater, which is like a covering of mud on my shirt. My wife will ask me later what it is I’m wearing.