Authors: Suketu Mehta
“Very few people understand me,” he says, at the end of our conversation. He says it with some pride.
I say good-bye to Zameer in the lobby of the hotel. And then Zameer repeats Shakeel’s offer: “Any trouble you have in Bombay. One work free. Bhai said so.”
My childhood was filled not so much with violence as the constant fear of violence. I longed for a defender against the bullies in my school, in my building. Now at last I have my protectors: Ajay Lal, Kamal, Shakeel himself. They will lay waste to my enemies. The tough guys, the Lords of the Last Bench in my school, have grown up and they are my friends. I now walk around the world with a different status, a different sense of security. The don has offered me one free hit.
Later, when I repeat this story to close friends in Bombay, in New York, a wistful look comes into their eyes, and they start making lists of the people they would eliminate if they were granted such a favor. They are only half joking, and I am genuinely shocked by some of the names they give me—ex-lovers, colleagues. The women are more interested in using such a gift than the men. If men dream about killing someone, they want to do it themselves, squeezing the trigger, plunging the knife. Women need it done for them. Most of the names they have in mind are those of people they once loved greatly and now hate with equal passion. Each one of us, I am beginning to discover, has a circle of people close to us whose deaths we fantasize about.
I hold on to my favor like a rabbit’s foot in my pocket; it makes me feel secure, walking around Bombay, and I am calmer with people who threaten
me, more tolerant. I know what I can do if I am really provoked. That knowledge makes me magnanimous, forgiving of slights. I become a better human being because I know I can get the person of my choice murdered.
I
N
A
PRIL
2000, two shakha pramukhs are shot dead by Shakeel’s men. Sunil and Amol are out on the streets, shutting down all of Jogeshwari, taking rickshaws off the road, ordering shops to pull down their shutters. The State Reserve Police is called out. The Sena goes on the warpath in the assembly. They demand the resignation of the Congress government over the issue of “breakdown of law and order in the state.” The government goes all out to find the killers of the Sena pramukhs. Ajay Lal tells me why one of the shakha pramukhs was killed. “He was banging a Muslim girl,” the cop says, with the glee of someone who is privy to information that is unprintable in the newspapers. “And Shakeel didn’t like the kafirs messing with their girls. He said, ‘Do him.’”
Girish is getting more and more frightened. He phones me one Sunday night. “You know the Sena work? It was done by our friend.” Kamal had showed him two sketches of the killers, put out by the police in the newspapers. Any citizens who recognize these two men have been asked to contact the police. Girish recognized them as Satish and Mickey.
I call Kamal. He tells me that Zameer had sent out the order for the work, and Satish and Mickey had executed it. “They have become superstars.” The D-Company is now extracting its revenge for the forty or fifty members of the gang that were killed by the previous Sena government. Under the aegis of the more friendly Congress government, they are going after the shakha pramukhs; and the police officers, who had been kicked around by the pramukhs, are not unsympathetic to Shakeel’s boys.
Once again, I am in possession of dangerous information. I know the two assassins that the entire police force is looking for; even Ajay has misidentified the man who did the work of the shakha pramukhs as Nilesh Kokam, who was subsequently shot dead. The police, hunting high and low for Satish, had killed a number of people who had nothing to do with the shooting; in one twenty-four-hour period, four men are killed in three separate encounters. But I know their real names, what they like to eat, how they love, what their precise relationship is with God. I know who
controls them in faraway countries. And I know exactly who, when tortured, will give up their hiding places.
At this point, I quit my researches into the underworld. But the gangwar will never end. Because, at its core, it is not the gangsters against the police or one gang against another. It is a young man with a Mauser against history, personal and political; it is revolution, one murder at a time.
D
ARIYA
M
AHAL IS HISTORY.
Would that it were rubble.
It was a necessary mistake. I didn’t say good-bye to Dariya Mahal. I felt no need to be in that flat one second longer than I had to. I had forgotten, at my peril, how much I am affected by the physical space I live in. A couple of months after I find the office in Elco Arcade, I also find, through a broker, a flat to call home in Bandra. I have no personal history in Bandra; it was as remote for me when I was growing up as Patagonia. It used to be considered a suburb, populated by Catholics. The only Catholics I knew were my teachers at school, and my knowledge of their lifestyle was gleaned from the Hindi movies, where the Christian women always wore short skirts and the men always drank excessively. I liked them for this reason. As I got older, I felt more comfortable among them than the Gujaratis I grew up with, where if you went to someone’s house for dinner you got very good vegetarian food but no liquor to build up an appetite with.
The new flat is the home of a famous actress who starred in some of the best films of the parallel cinema in the eighties, before her untimely death. Now her sister is renting it out. The contract negotiation couldn’t be more different from the one for the Dariya Mahal flat, which was basically done over a handshake with the diamond merchant. The contract for the Bandra flat is the longest and most detailed contract I have ever signed. We begin with a premise, strongly reinforced by the broker, of mutual suspicion and distrust. Among the items enumerated by the owner, so that we cannot steal them when we leave: curtain rods, the number and type of ceiling light fittings, and a toilet paper holder. We go over every line, every word,
like arms negotiators scrutinizing a ballistic missiles treaty. At the end, the owner does not shake my hand or wish me well in her home. All this for a third-floor walkup an hour distant from the city center. The Rent Act has made Bombay a city without trust.
But it’s a much nicer flat, worth all the hassle in getting it. The wood furniture is as spare and elegant as that of the Dariya Mahal flat was not. This flat, too, has a view of the sea. In front of me, an ugly pink building, but beyond it, to the left, my sea. I can have the windows open and junk won’t fly in. Above, the vast sky. A clean house in which the light is perfect for a portrait sitting. All afternoon the light changes, soothes. And then it rains and there is the lovely monsoon light. Living in Dariya Mahal, I forgot that Bombay, too, has light that is worthy of notice. Monday afternoon, and I see no people as I look out the window. It’s India, and I don’t see any people! Luxurious vista for the eyes to roam about, settling at leisure on the palm trees, the rolled-back sea at low tide, the towels hanging still from the laundry lines. But there! A servant comes to the window opposite and takes up the laundry. Well, one person is okay. For contrast.
Outside the children’s bedroom is an almond tree, which surprises us of a morning with a bright red leaf among the broad green leaves; it has changed color overnight, as if painted by a practical joker.
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OMBAY
, after the first year, our lifestyle is much like it was in the East Village. We begin making friends again, adding to our wealth. By now we have accumulated a fine collection of generous people on three continents; not so much loved ones as liked ones. Friends, separate or common to me and Sunita, drop in from out of town—Bhopal, New York, New Delhi, London—along with my sisters and cousins, and without planning it we have a party. Our friends don’t mind if we wait to begin cooking until they arrive, and they don’t mind chopping onions and ginger for the meal. As some of us cook in the kitchen, others sprawl around the living-room floor and balance my sons on their stomachs or construct Meccano cars with them. We offer them beer and wine, and sometimes something stronger, and food carefully cooked and casually served. Some smoke dope by the window. There might be music, and my kids dance to it. You can wander from cluster to cluster of people and join in whatever conversation is happening—about the toxic corridor in Gujarat that the friend from Green
peace is fighting; or about photography, and Dayanita’s exhibition; or whether or not the friend from Bhopal should get married to his latest girlfriend. Or you can not talk at all and put a towel on and off your head, causing Akash to go off into peals of laughter. There are people who don’t like each other, people who have good reason to hate each other because they were once in love, but they are here together now by accident and have to make the best of it. After the fourth drink they find out that their differences are nonexistent. They will be rediscovered with the hangover tomorrow morning, but for now there is only the boozy fellowship. Presently, at an advanced hour, after everybody is suitably drunk, dinner will be put on the table, often in the pots in which it is cooked, and it will be hot as hell in order to get through to our taste buds, deadened by the alcohol. My sons stay awake till everyone leaves, at one in the morning, two in the morning, or till they drop. This feels familiar. This is what we like to do of an evening, wherever we are.
Other things start changing for us. We begin understanding simple things: how to negotiate with shopkeepers, taxi drivers, and relatives. Sunita’s Hindi gets better, and she learns how not to get ripped off by the servants. We now know never to go to anyone’s place for dinner before nine-thirty. In the first year, we would show up at eight—New York time—and sit around drinking nervously as the hostess attempted to get dressed and cook and make conversation with us all at the same time. We find out where to shop for corkscrews, bedsheets, oregano, and computers. The kids stop getting sick all the time, and when they do we don’t worry so much. All the kids in Bombay are sick much of the time. It is the bad air, the bad water, the bad food—and the country still has 1 billion people. One billion thin, often sickly, but alive people, some of them magnificently alive.
Even in the Bandra flat, things break down regularly. The air conditioners all fail with unerring frequency; the one in my study periodically leaks on my head as I am writing. For the entire summer, there is no running water all day. It goes at nine-thirty in the morning and sputters back in the taps at eight-thirty in the evening. This continues into the monsoon. Outside my window, there are sheets of rain; inside, in the plush bathroom, a row of bright-colored buckets waiting under the dry taps to be replenished. But what would have upset us in the first year hardly troubles us in the second. We get up early to store the water in buckets and ration it out.
If the servant doesn’t show up for a week, we clean up ourselves. If the porcelain flush tank above the toilet cracks in two, we call, with our newfound knowledge, not the plumber but the electrician, who is reliable and honest. The electrician brings in a plumber, and when he sees that the plumber is up to the usual plumber’s deceptions, he kicks him out and does the job himself, patching up the tank with cement. It may not be that we get ripped off any less, but we accept it as a newcomer’s tax, and we shed our American expectation of propriety in financial dealings. One night I cheat a taxi driver. He brings us home just at midnight, when the fares go up, but my watch is slow and I show him the time on it: 11:57. He takes the lower fare. I get out, and Sunita rebukes me. I realize that I have become vicious.
We learn the uses of “influence.” The WIAA club, when I phone to ask for a reservation for an out-of-town visitor, says there are no rooms available. Then my uncle calls a friend, who uses his influence, and a room miraculously materializes, like the universe manifesting itself from nothing. I had forgotten the crucial difference. There’s very little you can do anonymously, as a member of the vast masses. You have to go through someone. The reservations clerk needs that personal touch of a human being he recognizes. It is the same with railway reservations, theater tickets, apartments, and marriages. It has to be one person linking with another who knows another and so on till you reach your destination; the path your request takes has to go through this network. You cannot jump the chain by going directly to someone who doesn’t know you, connected only by the phone line. Then it becomes just a buyer and a seller, a transaction rather than a favor. A friend went from Bombay to London and told me she was horrified that she could spend an entire day—buy tickets on the Tube, go to a play, eat—without ever needing to make a personal connection. When you want to book a hotel in Matheran or a movie ticket at Metro, you ask around: “Who has influence?” This is why people stay on in Bombay, in spite of everything. They have built a network here; they have influence.
O
N OUR
S
UNDAYS
in Bombay, time becomes gelid. On a Sunday morning, the smell of fish curry being stirred in family-sized pots wafts all over Khar and Bandra. The two most elusive qualities in a metropolis are intimacy and silence. Both exist here, within the Sunday afternoon. Sleep till lunch, then eat a big meal with beer, then have sex with your spouse, then
sleep again. In the evening there is the walk along Carter Road or a movie for which tickets have been bought three weeks ago. Or you can walk a bit along Nariman Point, take the boy for a merry-go-round ride, look at the green-blue water studded with coconut shells, the tall buildings rising up Walkeshwar Road. If you go around Fountain or Fort you will be able to walk on the sidewalks on this day of rest; the streets will be revealed for what they really are: broad, tree-shaded, flanked by stately palaces. Sunday afternoon is what stands between the city and a general insurrection. The rest of the week people get home too late to do anything but eat and sleep, like animals, driven by animal needs. Sundays we become human again.