Friend of My Youth Read online

  *

  Only drunks stare at statues. But here we are, remarking on the figures as we edge towards Eros. At night, it’s less desirable to pretend they’re not there. What do the dogs make of them, who know them daily? Ramu’s got his breath back; we’re a few minutes from the hotel. I never liked the statues keeping vigil, primarily because they were too close to life. Now we’re both ready to grant them a moment. ‘Who’s this bawa?’ asks Ramu loudly, sizing up the walrus moustaches of a man in a topi and robes. Any great man memorialized in this way he assumes is a Parsi. ‘Fucker must’ve done a lot for Bombay at one time,’ he concludes. ‘We need people like this today.’ It’s not a Parsi; it’s a Hindu. Mahadev Govind Ranade. Leaving aside his air of self-importance, he looks marginally foreign, as all the statues do. Which is why Ramu takes them for Parsis. It’s a simple confusion. We’re not drunk – Ramu has hardly touched alcohol since he left Alibag. We pay sober respects to these personages who no longer belong – maybe they never did. We leave Ranade fronting the Oval Maidan and catch a glimpse of the Astoria.

  I sleep: deep, interrupted sleep. The Astoria is my home. I’ve caught myself saying twice to Ramu, ‘Well, I should head home.’ I’ve heard others say the same thing in the evening when they’ve come to a city. Occasionally – not always – they correct themselves. This is what ‘home’ is: a place to return to at night.

  Book tours have their bonuses, which don’t necessarily have to do with the event itself. Mine is the fact that I’m about to fall asleep in Churchgate. I can’t hear a thing. The lack of sound is extraordinary. Tomorrow I will wake and walk to the Asiatic Stores. I need some antacid.

  I’m a family man – I don’t want to be single. But, hypothetically, if I’d been single, I’d have liked to live in a hotel room rather than in a flat or house. That is a fantasy. The predictability of living in a given space in the centre of a city. The thought will occur to me sometimes. To live in the Astoria. I could do it, I think. It was possible once. On a stay with my wife at the Yacht Club ten years ago, we could hear music being played next door on a gramophone. An attendant told us a man lived there – had done so, for years. Some sort of arrangement. I remember wondering what it would be like to lead his life – pure fantasy, of course, but I am a fantasist – and realizing that, with a few tweaks, it might be all right to be him. I never saw him. This is what’s beautiful about staying in a club or hotel: you’re invisible, as is your neighbour. Before that there was Bipul mama. He lived in Buckley Court. A bed and breakfast on Wodehouse Road. Even as a child I sensed that I would have gladly graduated to being him on the basis of the accommodation alone. Also the outhouse I could see from the twelfth-floor balcony in Malabar Hill. Unlike Buckley Court and Bipul mama, both gone now, it’s still there. It met the criteria.

  *

  My talk’s at four o’clock. ‘A Critique of Specialization’. At one o’clock I must go to the top floor of a building behind Rhythm House to be in a Twitter ‘chat’ to promote the event. I end up wasting forty-five minutes ‘chatting’ with two organizers sitting next to me, talking rapidly to each other, and hiding behind their Twitter handles. I get up before the chat ends. They’re a bit shocked by my abruptness. At half past three, I find one person in the library where I’m giving the talk: Ramu. We look for coffee. Collect two paper cups full of a sugary liquid and stand next to the statue of David Sassoon. It is as timeless and exquisite as a tree-trunk. He resembles an Arab prophet more than a Jewish merchant. People in Nehru jackets and jeans begin to gather. One or two finish a cigarette before they head to the garden. Resplendent, my chairperson walks in. I’ve never met her before. Her sari is simple and arresting, like a Rothko. At an unspecified moment, we exchange a nod and ascend the stage. She introduces me to the people in chairs, then leaves me. I expound with whatever ironical distance I can muster on my hatred of specialization. The audience is encircled by ferns. I think I spot Ramu. I’m not sure if that’s him behind two women. He’s in shadow. After the talk, he reappears – patient, like a family member at a wedding. I’m on a swift turnaround and have a panel discussion in an hour. The chairperson, her niece, Ramu, and I agree it would be best to pop across to Kala Ghoda for tea, notwithstanding the surge of humanity. We cross the street and plunge into the mad crowd and then materialize again in the narrow alleys near Trishna. We slip into a chic café-boulangerie, and, scouring the furniture for a free table, find Ramu’s missing. Where is he? I look around me and step out on to the street. He’s vanished, but I expect he’ll turn up. I drink mint tea and we share a single muffin. Only in the evening do Ramu and I get to talk. ‘I felt tired,’ he says. There’s no reproach in the voice, just sleepiness. Was he physically tired – or was it the company? Not that it matters. ‘She’s very beautiful,’ he adds. ‘Who?’ ‘The lady who was talking to you.’ ‘Which one?’ ‘Arrey, the one who spoke on the stage. Really beautiful. Speaks very well too.’ I conjure her up. Already, the afternoon is long behind us. In Bombay, evening comes later than elsewhere, but it’s so bright it annuls the day.

  My sliver of time is ending. In the morning, I check out. I entrust my small bag to the receptionist.

  Ramu and I take a taxi to Malabar Hill. To get chutney sandwiches. I’ll eat them on the flight. It’s Ramu who reminds me. He offers to take me on the scooter. I refuse, and he accepts quietly. He would have insisted once. I think he should conserve his energy.

  The Marine Drive’s got the sun on its edges. Ramu’s on my right, one arm straddling the back of the seat. I like it that he’s invariably available – not just available; ready – for these excursions, right to when I leave for the airport. I worry about it too. I have a sense of leakage when I’m with him. Not just ageing – he’s changed, I maybe less so – but a movement that was once an accumulation, a steady gathering, and is now leakage, a gradual seeping out of volume. I don’t mean literally. He’s gained weight, if anything. A couple of months ago, I asked him on the phone from Calcutta, ‘So what are your plans for the day?’ He paused for a second, then said, ‘No plans. Just take it as it comes.’ This is what I mean by leakage; this seeming stillness. Since his father died he’s come into a very modest amount of money. I’m not sure how many years it’ll last him. The ‘factory’ they had was sold off. For a year now he’s been thinking of reinventing himself. A tourist guide for visitors to Bombay is what he’d like to be. ‘None of these guides have any education,’ he says, ‘or my English.’ It’s true. Nor would they have his very particular vision of the city and its lanes and localities. This sensibility – of which he’s only lately become aware – is what he wants to turn to his advantage, now he’s back. But it isn’t easy. He’s too old to begin from scratch. He has an air of being established that belies his untestedness. Also, how long he could continue to live in Colaba is moot. He’s been in that flat, which he shares now with an older sister, since he was a child. They pay rent. They’d get a substantial pagdi if they moved. Ramu’s father used to periodically suggest they go to the outskirts and invest whatever remained. Though Ramu hated Colaba in those days, he strenuously resisted. It’s the one wise decision he’s taken.

  *

  I’m in luck. There are times when I reach the shop to find the chutney sandwiches gone, but not today. I buy four. They’re so thin they might droop but for the butter gluing the slices together. I startle myself by paying for two chicken croquettes. Ramu demurs. If his father had been alive, he’d have felt the urge to get something. He has a traditional shopper’s DNA, an eye for freshness and appearance.

  Though we’ve left school behind, we keep returning to it. On the pretext of taking the arc round the club to Little Gibbs Road, we find ourselves moving in that direction. And, as we slow down instinctively, we discover the gothic building next to the Infant School is a church. Given it’s our school (though we hated it), and despite not knowing the church’s existence till this moment, we browbeat the watchman and ask to enter – though he doesn’t need browbeating and wou
ld let us in anyway. We go inside in the manner of schoolboys. In school, the only time we had a sense of ownership was after hours, when we’d range across the empty classrooms with semi-savage ease. This is almost how we now explore the church, with the laxity of lapsed ownership. Not much to explore; it’s tiny. Words that are alien to me but have been in my vocabulary since I was a child – pew, altar, chancel – come back vaguely to move me. Ramu is half Christian. He does go to church for funerals. But what holds us as we peer and poke around us is history. History is always lying before you, unnoticed: till you suddenly see it, as we do now.

  *

  ‘Okay, got to go.’

  I’m suddenly mindful of departure. We have to have lunch – then I’ll pick up my bag from the Astoria.

  ‘What about Hanging Gardens?’

  I shake my head. Our time here is done. I want us to dash into the National Gallery of Modern Art before I set out for the airport.

  At half past two, I tell the driver of the limousine to pick me up from the NGMA. Odd, how they’ve put me up at the Astoria but given me a pick-up and drop-off in a white Mercedes. When it received me at the airport, there was a sign in the boot saying WELCOME USTAD AMJAD ALI KHAN. The driver doesn’t know where the NGMA is. ‘Okay, you know Regal?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘I’ll be in front of Regal. We have to stop at the Astoria on the way.’

  *

  We cross at multiple lights before reaching the cinema. We lower ourselves on the steps. The February breeze is in my hair. I try to subdue it. A watchman orders all who are seated to vacate the steps. We rise obediently. Two European women take the watchman’s directive with bad grace. We look towards Elphinstone College, at the steeples and grey and brown roofs. Dark dun-coloured buildings left behind at Independence.

  ‘This is why I don’t want to leave Colaba,’ he confesses, forgetting how ferociously he used to resent it. He’s looking at the steeples dissolving into points with the eyes of one who thought he’d never be here. I feel sad too – not because of my departure, but because I can never tell when I’ll see Bombay again. It’s not that I’m going. It might.

  I see Bombay sooner than I’d expected. And Ramu. The reason is banal.

  Barely a month’s passed. My daughter’s annual exams are done. My wife has one of her bouts of intense longing. She’s keen to leave everything – ‘everything’ being Calcutta. ‘Jaisalmer,’ she says. For two decades, she’s wanted to introduce me to Rajasthan – the forts, palaces, shrines; the brown horizons. But I’m resistant to history. I suppose I become unco-operative. ‘Are you mad? Do you know how hot it will be?’ I have no interest in the peacocks.

  It turns out our daughter would tolerate going to Bombay. With its shops, cinemas, and cafés: Bombay, history’s very antithesis. ‘And clearly you don’t need an excuse,’ says my wife. She’s at once resigned and invigorated. There’s the prospect of much window-shopping. ‘Tell you what,’ I reply. ‘Let’s stay at the Taj – the old wing. I’ll grovel and wheedle a special rate.’ She stares at me. I don’t splurge on hotels: they’re taken care of by publishers and festivals. Holidays are combined with readings, a discounted package. And I’ve never stayed in the old wing. There was never a reason or opportunity.

  *

  I plead for a reduction. I do my best to impress the manager. ‘You know, I wrote about the Taj for the Guardian the day after 26 November.’ ‘I see, sir,’ he says with the requisite gravity. I go on, now shameless: ‘Actually, a bit of my fifth novel describes the Taj.’ Out of a sense of decency, he gives me a near-affordable rate for a sea-facing room.

  The outing remains a secret. I don’t tell my daughter. I want to surprise her. (My mother-in-law breaks it to her when they’re together: ‘I hear you’ll be at the Taj.’ My daughter forgets to mention this; so we don’t know that she knows till I tell her later.) I hardly tell anyone in Bombay except Ramu. I don’t want Janardhan to take over the visit. This is pure holiday. My wife and I resolve not to tell the wider world, because it might be best that people don’t know we’re staying in a fancy place. It’s sure to be held against us.

  *

  By now, I’m well into a book. It’s about Bombay. I’ve been writing it for a year.

  I tell my wife: ‘It isn’t a holiday for me. It’s a research trip.’

  It’s a well-known fact that no novel is taken seriously in India until a good deal of research has gone into it. This stay in the Taj will be my research. Going down the stairs will be research. So will looking out at the sea.

  In the meantime, because I’m writing, I’m thinking of Bombay. I think of Ramu. The Ramu I know and the Ramu I’m writing about have become indistinguishable. The same’s true of the Bombay I’m recounting from experience and the Bombay I’m assembling through words. This is often how novels begin for me. There’s a convergence. I live. Then something prompts me to write. The writing is not about life. It is a form of living. The two happen simultaneously.

  *

  I love the title, ‘Friend of My Youth’. From an Alice Munro story. I haven’t read the story. That’s because the title must have implied a possibility. When that happens – when the title or first paragraph contains a promise – I become spellbound and keep returning to it. The work becomes irrelevant, the writer in me takes over from the reader, and my inchoate premonition of what the story will be dominates the story itself. I’ve hoarded titles and paragraphs for this reason, but never followed through. Naturally, when I first fell in love with Alice Munro’s title, I had no idea that I’d one day want to write about Ramu and Bombay. Ramu was still to vanish. The experience of feeling unexpectedly bereft was to come. So were the attacks of 26 November. As these and other events happened, it’s as if the title knew it had to meet them halfway; sensed it and they had been travelling towards each other.

  The book is a novel. I’m pretty sure of that. What marks out a novel is this: the author and the narrator are not one. Even if, by coincidence, they share the same name. The narrator’s views, thoughts, observations – essentially, the narrator’s life – are his or her own. The narrator might be created by the author, but is a mystery to him. The provenance of his or her remarks and actions is never plain.

  We arrive in the afternoon.

  This hotel, which I grew to avoid as a teenager, then saw nearly destroyed, holds a key to my memories. It’s like ‘the house of our life’ that Benjamin mentions, with its ‘perverse antiquities’ – but not quite.

  I collect three keys. They resemble old-fashioned keys, but the key-like bit is useless. It’s the key ring that has the chip to the door.

  There’s an expectation, as you check in, that you might not go back – that you’re about to be subsumed. A man escorts us to the room. These are passages you’ve only guessed at. Briefly passing a balcony, I see the intricate circuit of stairs reaching down from the third floor, where the room is.

  I stare at the man’s back as he taps key ring to lock.

  There’s a little hall at first, with wardrobe and storage space on the left. The bathroom is on the right.

  Then comes the habitable part of the room, the bank of the bed, the table, chairs, and television, the pale windows. The paleness is the sea; as I approach the window, I find the Gateway of India is at my left shoulder. Before me is the promenade, and water.

  *

  Ramu is a fifteen-minute walk away. I know he’s at a loose end. Waiting for my call. I don’t believe he’s busy. My only concern is whether he’s around – or gone. ‘We’re here,’ I say. ‘Ah, the prince of shaggers! Arrived from Calcutta, the intellectual capital!’ ‘What about you?’ I say. ‘Did I interrupt you while you were at it in the bathroom?’ ‘I’m still doing it,’ he says with that sad tremolo. ‘So when are you coming to the hotel?’ He becomes lugubrious. ‘You tell me. You should spend some time with your family, no?’ ‘No, no, they want to see you!’ For my wife, Ramu’s an inevitability. Or an anecdote from my childhood who’s become inescapable. For my daughter, he’s
an atavistic apparition of whose meaning she’s not sure. She first set eyes on him as an infant. I can’t tell if she notices him – or any of us: she’s so busy with her phone. ‘Should I wait in the lobby?’ ‘Yeah, I don’t think they’ll let you up in the lift.’

  In twenty minutes, there’s a knock. I don’t know how he managed to evade security. There he is, decently dressed, like a man on his way to the office.

  Voices go high with hellos. He threatens my daughter, orders her to relinquish the phone. She grins at his forwardness.

  ‘What a room!’

  The fact that it exists is chastening. We become silent. We’re at once watching and remembering.

  ‘Look at this window!’ I call him urgently.

  ‘Why? Is it blood-spattered?’

  ‘Just check out how old it is.’

  I point to the neighbouring room. He ducks his head. The wood has lines where it could be riven, but is held together immovably. I last glimpsed such windows in Venice. Sometimes to look upon the old is not to discover the past: it is to see power.