Maximum City (73 page)

The Cornell MBA’s brother was in my class. He reminds me of this fact. “When I told him yesterday who was being felicitated, he remembered you. ‘Terrible handwriting,’ he said.” This was my singular distinction in that school. My handwriting had been screwed up when I entered Mayur Mahal, in the second standard. My previous school, in Calcutta, had taught me to write in “joint handwriting,” cursive script, but at Mayur Mahal the standard was separate letters. My hands resisted the new script and got hit with a foot ruler for doing so. So my handwriting stayed stuck in the transition stage, between joint and separate, between Calcutta and Bombay: a font, a code of its own, decipherable only by myself. It gave the teachers migraines; samples of it were sent far and wide to demonstrate the hardships of a teacher’s life. It was variously compared to modern art and to ants dipped in ink crawling across the page. On the other hand, a teacher fond of me pointed out, “Gandhiji also had bad handwriting.” I took considerable solace in that observation and eagerly sought out all samples of the Mahatma’s scrawl, until I was convinced that bad handwriting was not only compensated for by greatness later on in life but a prerequisite for it. My English teacher failed to share this theory and refused to read my English essay. I would fail English, my best subject. My father got fed up and hired a handwriting tutor.

The tutor was a mousy little man with a mustache and thick black glasses who was a drawing teacher in a Gujarati school. He was also, I discovered after our first session, a devoted Communist. He declared that he would first teach me the fundamentals of drawing in order to improve my calligraphy. To that end, he directed me to sketch out two hands clasped in
a handshake, demonstrating Indo-Soviet friendship. In later lessons, he had me write lengthy essays on Indo-Soviet friendship, so that I could practice my handwriting. My father the diamond merchant realized that my writing wasn’t showing any signs of being any more legible. While he was out every day trying to expand his capital through oppression of the diamond workers, his only son was being systematically indoctrinated in class conflict in his own home, at his own expense. He kicked the handwriting teacher out. My handwriting stayed as tortured as ever, but I knew a lot more about the Soviet Union.

Onstage now, Kanubhai, the eighty-two-year-old managing trustee of the school, with a white Gandhi cap on his skull, is forced repeatedly to get up and receive the salutations of the endless felicitees. After each name is announced, someone prods his back, and, startled from slumber, he darts forward and up from his chair, deposits the valedictory shawl around the honoree, and sinks back gratefully into his chair and his stupor. The doctor on my left leans close to me. “I examined him only last week. He’s not in good health at all. I’m worried.” It would not look good if Kanubhai breathed his last on Children’s Day; on the other hand, it would be somehow appropriate.

After the ceremony, we walk off the stage, looking for the way out. I have an overpowering urge to leave. But we are shepherded into a back room from which there is no exit; I have to be there with my wife and child, while plates of samosas and sandwiches are thrust at us. I am tense. I do not want to look at the past, not here, not with these people.

“Hi, Suketu,” someone says. I turn around to see a short dark man with an unfortunate face, which at this moment is all smiles, standing in front of me. “You don’t remember me.”

I do, instantly. “Urvesh?”

He shakes my hand. I should have gone down on my knees and begged forgiveness. A quarter of a century ago, I had hurt him in the worst possible way; and the memory of that shame still lingers.

Urvesh was a little squeak in our playground at Dariya Mahal who delighted in pitting the bigger boys against each other, which he did with great success. He would carry tales, first in the ear of one dada, then the other tough, and get them fighting. Urvesh was small and pockmarked, and he had been the subject of many beatings before he learnt this survival tactic. One day his mother died. His head was shaved. I got in a fight with him
very soon after, and I was searching for a way to truly hurt him. I had beaten him up many times before, but he never cried; he had learnt to never cry, as small boys do. So I shouted at him, “I know your mother’s croaked!” There was an awful stillness in the small playground. Then my best friend, who until that moment had also wanted to give Urvesh a good kicking, slapped the back of my head—hard. Urvesh had said nothing, nothing at all. Out of all my ghosts, why should he be standing in front of me, right here, now?

But Urvesh remembers none of this; he is eagerly talking to me. He tells me he still lives in the neighborhood and is in the diamond market. He has a wife and children. How could he forget what I did to him when he was most vulnerable? After all,
I
haven’t. I don’t know who else might come up to greet me, and I am also afraid of the converse—that I will be left alone, ignored. The room is closing in on me and I look desperately for the exit. My son has finished his sweets and asks for a samosa. I grab his hand and lead him and my wife from the room, out to the street to look for a taxi. I am more nervous than in my meetings with the gangsters. There is real danger here. I know I should stay, should try to see who still remembers me, has stories for me. But it is too close. Even outside, I’m not safe. A woman comes up to me smiling. She lives in my building; she is the sister-in-law of the man who had parked his car in my space. She says she didn’t know I was a student at Mayur Mahal. I smile, mumble something, and herd my family into a taxi.

B
UT
I
MUST GO BACK
to the school. It contains nine years of my ghost time; I must come to terms with it. I go when I can’t avoid it any longer.

As I ascend the stairs on my second visit, my heart is already thumping. I have to stop for a moment, in front of the display
Lincoln’s letter to his son’s teacher
, on the mezzanine floor. They still have my old mark sheets, my records. I will look at them. I am brave enough now. In the administrative office, the peon reluctantly digs out my record of leaving from a 1977 register. I see my name, with the entries.
CASTE:
Hindu Bania.
Under the column titled
PROGRESS
, all the students down the page are awarded
Good
except for one
Not Good
and mine:
Satisfactory.
Another entry is under
CONDUCT
, in which mine was deemed
Good.

My academic career in this school peaked in the fifth standard, when I
came in first, then tanked steeply, so that by the time I left my class rank was comfortably in the double digits. Shortly after the state examination results were out, the photos of the toppers would appear in the newspapers, in ads for the coaching classes where they had toiled night and day. They wore thick glasses and looked enervated from frequent masturbation.
BHAVESH SADASYACHARI
,
ALL
-
INDIA NUMBER
6. None of them were smiling at their triumph. They didn’t look like they’d smiled in a month. And they were almost all of them destined to be parked on bureaucrats’ chairs, in government and in corporations, to make life hell for all the rest of us who goofed off in school, went out dancing, and generally had been arousing their envy from kindergarten.

The peon calls me into the supervisor’s room. Verma Sir is getting a large bundle of notes from two girls. I remember his teaching geometry in his south Indian accent: “Ven yex meets vuy. . . .” After greeting me, he explains the notes. “They’re to pay the staff. The parents contribute, because all our money is going to Surendranagar, where we have a school for destitute girls. Other than four or five teachers like me, who are rich through tutorials, we don’t have money for the rest of the staff according to the scales of the Fifth Pay Commission. So the parents give whatever they can. . . .” He is not suggesting anything, but I guess the purpose of his long explanation of the school’s finances, and I say, “Perhaps I can make a donation.”

“It is enough that you have come!” he responds at once. “Your very presence is itself a donation!” He walks me around the school. The first floor is now all entirely staff rooms, except for one where a group of girls are singing a patriotic song, led by a teacher sitting on the floor with a harmonium. We walk into different classes, and the students stand up abruptly at our entrance, in a body. They remain standing till Verma Sir tells them to sit down. “This is Suketu Mehta,” he introduces me. “He is a full-time writer. He was given a medal by the U.S. President.” I correct him again. “Who gave you that award?” he asks. I give up. The presidential origin of my award will forever stick to me in this school, like an irreversible computer error. “It was . . . the U.S. government.” This satisfies him. “He was given a scholarship by the U.S. government.” The class bursts into spontaneous applause. Embarrassed, I walk out. This approval is as unendurable as the school’s earlier punishments.

In another class, he asks the students if they have any questions for me.
“He has published many novels,” he informs them. I ask if there is something I can teach them. “Geometry!” they shout. “Geometry!”

I ask to see an English class, and we go into one and sit in the back. The teacher is leading the class through a poem from the “Balbharti” state textbook: Tennyson’s “A Farewell.” On the board are two words:
Somersby
and
Lincolnshire.
The girl next to me has her book open to the poem. “Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea, . . .” The crevices and crannies of the letters are filled in with blue ink. Above the title she has written
Terminal
—her knowledge of the poem will be tested in the terminal exams—and has drawn a smiley face next to it. The illustration on the page is a rushing stream, and the girl has written
Varsha
on the English body of water, thus Indianizing its name, explaining it to herself, making it less forbidding.

“The poet is speaking to the river,” the teacher explains to the class. “This is a figure of speech. It is called an apostrophe.” I did not know this. I will have to look it up in the dictionary later. I am still learning new things at Mayur Mahal. The classroom is almost exactly the same as when I used to sit in it. The same badly painted walls, the same speaker above the same blackboard, which boomed out patriotic and religious songs and admonitions from the principal each morning. A calendar on one wall marks the passage of time for the children of abstemious Jain and Hindu parents, compliments of Standard Wine Stores. The same scarred and pitted wooden benches, like the one I am sitting on, with its gutter for writing implements, ballpoints now acceptable. Out of the windows on one side of the building, a view of the leafy compounds of the mansions of Malabar Hill. “Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea, . . .” The teacher is explaining what the poem is about. “If you change your residence, if you leave the memories of your school life, of childhood, how it would be to have to adjust to a new school, a new life.” A poet is bidding good-bye to his country, the country of childhood.

Outside, in the passage, I dare not turn around, because a boy might come running up to me out of those classrooms, anxious to get outside forrecess,
bump into me, and say, “Sorry, sir,” and look up at me and see himself.

On Sundays we go to Hanging Gardens with the children. I like seeing my children among the visitors from the suburbs. I have a basic trust in these families of clerks, these grandmothers who put food in the picnic baskets, these children dressed in Indian imitations of western clothes. I trust what they want for their children: to have a home, a wife, and a little more comfort than they have had.

On my older son Gautama’s birthday we take him to the Mahalakshmi temple. Outside the temple lane, a woman sits with a cow and a basket filled with bundles of grass. I give 5 rupees to the woman, she gives Gautama a sheaf of grass, and he feeds it to the cow, accumulating merit and wonder. The animals my children saw in storybooks in the West—elephants, camels, peacocks—are out walking in the streets of India. Gautama’s best friend has recently been bitten by a monkey, on the lawn of his plush building on Ridge Road. It is an unusual urban hazard in other countries.

As we walk toward the temple we see a bookshop: Motilal Banarsidas, Indological Book Publishers. I have been to branches of this bookstore in Varanasi, Delhi, and Madras, and my shelves are stacked with the harvest, so we decide to walk into this anteroom of the temple for a while. The manager, noticing the birthday cap on Gautama’s head, asks the peon to get a fistful of chocolates for him. We browse happily for a long time and select some books to buy; we will pick them up on our way back. Then we walk toward the temple, to witness the present-day enactment of the philosophy preserved in the books here.

As we go up the stairs leading to the temple, we pass under a huge banner welcoming the chief minister of Maharashtra, Narayan Rane, who earlier in his career was tried for murder and acquitted on a technicality. Sunita and Gautama get in the women’s line for the darshan, and I stand in the men’s line. When they reach the idol, Gautama folds his palms and begins talking to the goddess—“Thank you for giving me a nice birthday”—but he and his mother are pushed from behind; move on, move on, others want their audience. They rejoin me, and we stand behind the rear latticed wall as the aarti begins. We don’t know the rituals; we don’t know all the words
to the songs. The worshipers chant vigorously, and there is a great sound of bells and drums. We are just beyond the boundary, and the priest does not bring his oil lamp near us, over which the others cup their hands and gather them to their forehead, seeking blessing. I always came to this temple with my grandparents, but they are no longer here to tell me what to do, how to get the coconut prasad, where to buy the flowers for the deities. So we leave, my foreign wife and foreign son and myself, and on our way out purchase for Gautama a lotus flower, Lakshmi’s flower, paying too much. Back at the bookstore, we pick up our books: a translation of devotional poems to Vishnu by the ninth-century Tamil poetess Antal; a one-volume version of the Bhagvata Purana; and an illustrated comic book of the life of Ambedkar for our son. I first learnt my Hinduism through my grandmother, and it was unanalytical, mystical. Then I learnt it again, in American universities. The stories that those people in the temple know by heart we needed to have explained to us by American academics.