Mumbai Noir (19 page)

Legislators don’t start out as anything but, claimed the drunk. The listener kept quiet and waited.

So: Later that season, on a night that was relatively clear, Ravi and a friend set out on a night of genteel slumming. The bar girls of Mumbai were just becoming well known, and there was one place in particular, Manik in Lamington Road, that was hugely popular. Young girls danced in mirrored air-conditioned halls and their patrons, boozy perverts mauling their whiskeys to the side, showered them with currency notes. The bouncers enforced a strict no-touch policy, the girls flounced and shook their asses and flipped their hair, and the men dropped their earnings on the dance floor in a choreography of anodyne excess that was, for many in the city, the only taste they had of decadence. It became de rigueur that year for young men to take their dates there at the end of the night, so a frisson of darkness and danger could run up and down their well-bred backs. So that they could claim, however temporarily, that they had known Mumbai, that other one, the harbor bitch they’d all been told about but never been introduced to.

But Manik was closed that night, and so they were directed to Heera, a smaller place that lay just across the Chinchpokli Bridge, over which the dead mill stacks of the previous century still loomed. They drew up in Ravi’s car to a closed door guarded by a few thickset men who smiled and waved them through a gap between two shops, over an open drain, and beneath a hanging air-conditioning unit, whose runoff was indistinguishable from the slowly falling rain. Another man waited there, a door to a kitchen open, in which men sliced cucumbers and shook out peanuts into bowls and bow-tied waiters lurked with trays, and then a swinging door and another world, of smoke machines and stairs and a deejay console and loud film music and lehenga- and sari-clad girls dancing on a glass floor under which fish deranged by the music swam manically and around that monstrous arena, men drinking and watching and considering on who best to drop their money.

The staircase led ever upward. Ravi and his friend rose through the various levels of heaven, each one smaller, more private and quiet and with fewer men to share space with, till finally they arrived at a closed door. The bouncer there gave them the once-over, nodded, and let them through. On the walls were the standard-issue mirrors, and on the ceiling an ugly chandelier turned down low. But everything else was different. There were no chairs, no sofas, only white linen-covered mattresses and bolsters. There was no aquarium dance floor, but rather a polished wooden surface. There was no deejay, only a soft playing of the soundtrack from
Pakeezah
. There were no dancing girls either, save one, a smoothly moving houri dressed as a kathak dancer all in white, the bells at her ankles tinkling and winking in the light. Ravi looked at her and then he looked again, for she was beautiful, a woman well past her first youth, but lovely despite or perhaps because of her experiences. She seemed to glide about that space as if she were above it and its sordid moorings and Ravi would have been happy to indulge her in that, till he saw the only other man in the room. He sat there, a huge presence against the wall, his feet alone enough to take up the space of a normal man, his eyes fixed quietly on the woman and with no mind to the new entrants, and Ravi knew it was him, and he knew why the dirt of what Akbarzeb did didn’t stick to him.
“Mausam hai ashiqana …”
crooned Lata over the speaker, to countless millions of men then and since, but for Akbarzeb, she spoke only to him.

Ravi and his friend stayed there, across the room from Akbarzeb, for the time it took the record to replay itself and come back to the same song. They dropped their drinks and ordered more and gave their money to the dancing woman with a courtly flourish, which she accepted with a grace intrinsic to a ceremony as foreign to the girls downstairs as was courtesy to their patrons. She wept when the soundtrack wept, flirted when the right song came on, danced with abandon when it was appropriate, and always she spoke to him, to Ravi, with her kohl-lined eyes and her fluid body and her mobile face and once, when he handed her the tribute that was her due, their fingers touched and it seemed to him that this, only this, was what separated men from beasts.

Just once, in all the night, did Ravi catch Akbarzeb’s eye. That orb stayed and studied him and then, in a moment, was gone, on its inevitable return to its rightful place, satellite to the dancer’s sun, and even as they got up and left, almost bowing their way out of that temple, he didn’t look nor did he stir. Outside, through the bedlam into the suddenly healing, quiet rain, walked the two friends. The city slept under its blanket of rain and it struck Ravi that the monsoon was indeed the time, at least in this latitude, for a young man’s fancy to turn to thoughts of love, and he hummed the chorus to the song as he drove the two of them back to their homes to the south.

Did you know that the word
mausam
is actually the root for monsoon? said the tourist. Originally from the Arabic.

The drunk raised an eyebrow politely and made no reply.

Ravi became an habitue of Heera. He didn’t need any company to go there. He drove through the pouring rain and occasionally through the evening calm and always made his way to the top floor. He had no time for the commerce of the lower floors, where each man had his own favorite and expected, if the money he dropped was to her satisfaction, to have his attentions returned. Not for him the laborious scrawling of a phone number on a currency note in the hope that the girl of his choosing connected it to him. He knew what he wanted, and they were both at the top of the stairs. Occasionally, he’d have the woman to himself, but as the night progressed and the demands on his time slackened off and then ceased, Akbarzeb himself would arrive from his dominion to the south, a heavy presence through the door and across the mattresses and then down, his hand already returning the adaab the dancer threw his way. And always, he ignored Ravi, even as he stepped across his feet to his own accustomed place by the wall.

Sometimes the two of them shared her with some other enthusiasts. Once there were two friends who thought that a chat with Ravi was indicated as well, and so positioned themselves one to each side of him. Much better than Kennedy Bridge, said one with the air of sharing a confidence. The other leaned across Ravi, nodding judiciously, his elbow practically in Ravi’s crotch. Much better. Have you been? they asked him. No, he allowed. You must make your way past the sluts on the bridge itself, they pointed out. Then you have to descend a putrid set of stairs. Then you must wake up the musicians and the girls and the madam herself.
Then
the musicians tune up, the madam calls out the beat, and the girl, if she’s in the mood, dances.

Really, said Ravi, trying to sound interested.

Yes. The closest Mumbai still has to a real mujra. And what a parody it is. Half-hearted dancers, tone-deaf musicians, and that toothless harridan with her hair still crazy from the mattress.

This is much better, said the other one. No pretense.

No, agreed his friend. The music is canned, but what music.
Pakeezah
!

And the woman. Isn’t she something?

Ravi had to agree.

She calls herself Meena. She’s obsessed with
Pakeezah
. That’s all she dances to.

Is that all she does? he asked.

They looked at him slyly, and then with real interest.

Clearly you’re a shaukeen, they said. But of what?

They spoke, as friends will, into the silence that followed that question. There’s no better dancer in Mumbai. Not one who dances for our money, at any rate.

All you want is the dance? asked Ravi.

That’s it, they said eagerly. We’re disciples of beauty. In music. In dance. In women. We don’t need to touch it. It’s enough for us to know that it’s there.

Ravi looked at them as at aliens on furlough from a distant planet. Besides, they continued, you know that man in the corner? Ravi could only nod. If he can’t touch her, what chance do we have?

You mean, he isn’t?

Apparently not. But you didn’t hear it from us. Anyway, we don’t come here as often as we’d like. He’s not the sort of man you want to offend.

Clearly not, said Ravi.

But she is a dancing girl, mused one of them, while the other one nodded.

She’s also a woman, said Ravi. She can choose who to give it away to.

The other two drained their drinks and then went away, but not before they shook their heads and muttered shaukeen again, half-admiringly.

That night, sitting through the second and then the third loop of the soundtrack, he thought he detected an extra smile from Meena. She looked at him from under her lashes as she swung and twirled to “Inhi logon ne,
”
seemingly beckoning him to sing the male part to “Chalo dildar chalo.” And, so bidden, he did what he thought he never would. He slipped away to the bathroom and wrote his number on a currency note and held it out to her; and as he did so, he held it in his hand a moment longer than was necessary and permitted himself a long, slow look into her eyes. And then she was gone and ten minutes later, so was he.

Akbarzeb sat unmoving in his corner, and didn’t even look in Ravi’s direction as he left.

The drunk and his new friend were now almost the only inhabitants of their terrace area. The only other table was the one in the corner, and the earnest murmurings of the mismatched pair there had all but ceased. The rain had picked up and the wind was whooshing away and it seemed obvious to everyone on the terrace that a lack of conversation doesn’t equal silence, in this world or any other, and so they sat, semimute and deafened by their individual solitudes, looking at everything but each other, morosely putting their alcohol away.

Into the breach stepped the drunk.

No Arabic insights on shaukeen?

None, admitted the tourist glumly.

Pity, shrugged the drunk. Anyway, you’re probably thinking: what happened to the whores?

The comfort of that world of naked bulbs and stained sheets, plywood partitions and idols in the corner and little slabs of soap on strips of clean towel, was suddenly a cold one. It had been alien and had spoken to that part of him that the Bombay Gymkhana and his flat with its view of the sea and his friends who’d all been to school and college together couldn’t touch. But even that, now, was not enough.

He wanted Meena.

And so he waited for her to call.

Did she? inquired the listener.

Of course she did. What did she have coming through her door? Young men committed to beauty? Aging reprobates in the revenue departments of the Maharashtra and central governments? Enormous gangsters groping toward some approximation of love?

The poor woman didn’t stand a chance. He was the closest thing to normal she’d ever seen.

You think?

Not really, shrugged the drunk. Who knows why she called. She was a woman. She fancied him. Can’t that be enough?

* * *

They spoke in Hindi, a language she spoke beautifully and he’d all but forgotten. She could only meet in the afternoons, she said, or the early evenings. That’s okay, he told her, he’d find time for her, leave work early, make it possible. And as he said this, and the euphoria of her having called and his almost being home washed over him, came the realization: he could make the time, but could he make the place?

The uniformity of his own world was never as apparent to him as in that first conversation over the phone. English, ease, and entitlement defined his set, and Meena had none of those. He’d only seen her in the chastely sexy raiment of the kathak dancer. He didn’t even know what she wore when she took the open air.

If she were just a friend, a curiosity, a trophy of a big night out, he could have taken her anywhere and been hailed as a hero. But the promise of intimacy carries its own weight and Ravi knew he would never be able to bear it in public. Not his public. It isn’t just me, he reasoned to himself. She’ll be humiliated too. But his own pusillanimity was stark in his own ear as he told her where to meet him. There was only a hint of a pause before she said, gracefully as ever, of course she knew the place, she would be there.

It was a bar just off Ballard Estate, where the sailors came and picked up their prey. In the early afternoon, though, it was still relatively clean. Ravi walked in and saw her immediately, sitting off to one side, dressed in a spotless white salwar kameez that gave the lie to the wet filth outside. She was sipping her lemonade with an air of quiet ease that brought a catch to his throat. He knew then that he could have introduced her as his young aunt from Pakistan or a dress designer friend of his sister, drumming up business for her studio in Lucknow. Anything at all. But the die was cast and there she was and she smiled at him as he walked up to her and her hand came up in the adaab he’d grown accustomed to.

So they sat and they chatted and the waiters hovered and if she felt the weight of time slipping away, she didn’t betray it. She hung on his words and touched his fingers with hers and once, just once, she leaned across and gently flicked an errant curl away from his face.

He didn’t even think of Akbarzeb. No more than half a dozen times.

He owned that place, just as he did everything within five kilometers of Colaba, whether on land, out to sea, or in the air. The waiters knew who she was and they knew who she belonged to and Ravi knew that too. But she’d chosen him and so it had to be.

Finally, they ended up at that hotel on the dock road, a few hundred meters down from Ballard Estate. Where the sailors take their prey. Trucks outside, air conditioners in every room, a few hundred rupees an hour, and the boy with the condom and the soap carrying a whole towel instead of just a scrap. An actual bathroom, imagine.

You know the place? asked the drunk politely. If the tourist knew it, he didn’t let on.

So: That’s where it was done. And if she’d been there before, that poor darling in her spotless salwar kameez, she never let Ravi know.

Well? prodded the listener.