Mumbai Noir (6 page)

Ah, Mr. Ghulfam. I wondered whether to tell him I knew his other little secret to really make him squirm. I felt tired at the thought.

I laughed. “Yeah, forget it.” Haider bhai hadn’t known me seventeen years for nothing, I thought. He knew whom to settle where, that’s what made him a man of the moment.

I poured us both a little bit—well, a lot—of RC.

“I’m so happy you came, yaar,” Osama said. “It’s nice to know you have someone of your own from time to time.”

I smiled and nodded. We are not alone, from time to time, that’s true.

BY TWO

BY
D
EVASHISH
M
AKHIJA
Versova

Rahim

R
ahim liked the night shift. He tilted his head back and filled his lungs with the black sooty air, as his bladder quickly emptied below. He could piss into the sea, even spit his paan into it, and no one would mind. Because at night Mumbai was a brutalized, heaving whore. She didn’t give a fuck who pissed in her seas. It was during the day that Mumbai creaked and rattled like a desperate machine. And you dare not piss in a machine. It gets pissed off. And then it crunches your balls between its tooth-gear wheels. Rahim remembered telling Rahman that over dinner one day, gesticulating so wildly that the daal and rice sprayed out of his mouth, the same way that the shit had burst out of their rickshaw’s exhaust pipe during the surprise PUC inspection. Rahman had looked at Rahim sternly and said, “Don’t talk that way, this city is our mecca, it feeds you and me despite the lies we tell. Don’t offend it. It could as well turn into our jehennum.”

Rahim tired of his brother’s fear of hell.
Take Langdi out at night once
, he’d gestured to Rahman,
and you’ll know. By daylight even a murderer looks like he could do with a hug
. Rahman never took his advice. He grimaced each time Rahim referred to their auto-rickshaw as Langdi, the lame one. But Rahim needed to remind himself. What self-respecting man would ride a beast with three legs? A beast that doesn’t gallop, instead sneaks and swerves slyly to survive. A goonga, perhaps, would. A handicapped vehicle deserves a handicapped rider.

Langdi, like Rahim, was made to survive Mumbai. She was an old machine, the kind that had the engine in the front, one that wouldn’t pull it up an incline but vibrated like an electric drill. Rahim didn’t mind the vibration. When he was waiting for a passenger to show up he’d keep the engine on, enjoying the tremors running up the insides of his legs like a cheap champi tel massage. Also, Langdi had a large gassy behind, just like Ammi’s. If Rahim wasn’t wrong, he felt in his heart that Rahman thought so too.

Rahim turned away from the oily edge of the Versova Sea and plodded through the sodden sand, not caring to check if it was the masticated remnants of the evening high tide he’d stepped into or someone’s pasty turds. In the darkness it was one and the same. Rahim heaved his slight self over some rocks to get to the main road, where Langdi stood, her insides throbbing with a Himesh Reshammiya song. Rahim slid into the ghostly blue-lit interior of his rickshaw, turned the music down, grabbed the starting lever near his feet, and jerked it upward. Langdi coughed and shuddered to life. That shudder always made Rahim hard. It reminded him of the way he shuddered in the sandaas some mornings when he grabbed and tugged at himself.

“Made up for the lack of rain out there, did you?” a voice from the passenger seat barked at him. Rahim grinned into the rearview mirror—it hung out from the side of the windscreen the way a footboard traveler does out of an overpacked BEST bus. “Chhee, those teeth need a PUC test of their own,” the voice squealed. Rahim now gesticulated into the mirror,
Where to
? The woman in the back leaned her powdered face out into the whipping breeze, her small blouse battling to keep her breasts inside it. “Infiniti,” she told him.

The further out of the speeding auto Ramdulari swung, the further down the driver’s seat Rahim slid, as if to maintain the precarious balance of the rickshaw, but in truth he did so to keep her ample reflection from slipping out of the little round window of the rearview mirror. She was his most consistent passenger. On good nights he made more money than Rahman made in a week. But he never let on how. Or Rahman would slap his own forehead so hard it would kick a
Lahaul-willa-quwat
out of his God-fearing lips. Jehennum, he would say, we’ll go to jehennum for this.

Rahim hated to admit that Rahman was not entirely wrong.

They had come to Mumbai from Akbarpur, a small filth-heap of a town that sprang up along the railway tracks soon after the East India Company ran the first train across the nation’s breasts. It was a town forever in transit. A quick-halt junction for mostly goods trains. As a result, all the businesses in Akbarpur centered around food, the only commodity people passing through really needed. Their father was a kasaai, a butcher with the dirtiest mouth in the town square. So dirty that he used to cuss his first wife even as he exploded inside her, cursing her for not being able to bear him any children. And then he cussed his second when she bore him not one, but two, simultaneously! So dirty was his mouth that word was he never threw away the shit that came out of the intestines of the goats he cut open; he ate it all.

But Rahim knew better. Ever since he could walk, he used to be given that shit to dispose of, along with the tree stump Abba used as a chopping block, each night, to clean off all the little bits of rotting meat that clung to it. Rahim’s childhood passed in a blur of bleating goats, morose cows, and dead meat. Rahman, though, stayed hidden behind their mother’s abundant girth. In the hefty shadows there he must have discovered the fear of God, Rahim often thought. Abba didn’t dare inseminate their mother again, for fear that she might bear triplets the next time around. Instead he married a third time. Most nights when Rahim would stand alone at the rim of the toilet bowl that was Akbarpur, and toss little bits of rotting meat up into the air for the eagles to grab and devour, he’d peer across the landscape, toward the west, and think of the large sparkling city he saw in movies, where tall, angry young men bashed in the heads of fat, loudmouthed flesheaters like his father.

The night their mother died, coughing her guts out onto the mattress, her TB untreated, as Abba cussed in orgasm inside her, Rahim grabbed Rahman’s hand and ran.

He had watched films where boys running toward freedom from tyranny simply follow the light. The only bright lights around Akbarpur were along the railway tracks. Rahim followed them for days and nights. Until they reached Mumbai.

Through it all Rahman did not utter a word. Though between the two of them, he was the one who could speak. Rahim was born dumb, his tongue stitched by God steadfast into the floor of his mouth.

Rahim never forgot how hard his heart had beaten when he finally stopped running, staring at the thousands of people swelling this way and that in one of Mumbai’s suburban train stations, the choral murmur of their voices promising him lives he could never have had in that little junction they came from.

Rahman was heartbroken. The only person he had cared for in the whole world was gone. He could have been tied to a post for slaughter and he wouldn’t have minded.

In the many years that followed, the boys learned to care for one another. They were identical. Even their beards grew the same way and their hairlines receded in exactly the same curves. They both belched at the same moments during their meals. And if one had a cough, rest assured the other, wherever he was, was being wracked with a phlegm attack too.

Somehow Rahman always knew what was going on inside Rahim’s head. And on those days when Rahim took a deep breath, silenced his furious mind, and paid attention, he could tell what was going on inside Rahman’s head too.

They had spent nine months joined to one another like two nostrils. That was Rahim’s favorite analogy because if one nostril got blocked, the other knew. They needed to breathe in tandem, but could breathe for each other too. Which is what they grew up to do. Having worked many odd jobs across South Mumbai, and unable to save anything they earned, Rahim hatched a plan. Which took them to the northern tip of the island city, where the land disappeared into the sea.

And took one of them with it.

Rahman

Rahman lay on the single mattress, staring at the outlines of unknown countries being traced on the walls by white ants. He knew he should sleep, but he worried for Rahim each night. He’s got Abba’s genes, muttered Rahman to the floor. Thank god he’s goonga or he’d be cussing with every third breath. Where does all that impatience come from? Rahman had told Rahim he’d go with the pandus when they came knocking last month, but Rahim had insisted on being the martyr this time. The last time the cops had picked up Rahman; the welts they’d left on his legs had still not healed.

The cops had been getting increasingly frantic over the last few years. Bomb blasts had begun to hit the city with the frequency of public holidays. Before the police could wrap their heads around a bomb that blew out of a tiffin carrier near the Gateway of India, another splattered limbs from a scooter near Dadar. Casualties were far too many and suspects far too few. It seemed that Versova, the land’s end, was inoculated from this virus. But then six months back a taxi blew up in Vile Parle. The wheel that sprang free from the blasted cab rolled past many police thaanas and teetered to a halt near Versova Koliwada, the fishing village, where the RDX landings were suspected to have occurred. It was only logical, the media had insisted, because after the ’80s when Versova used to be a smuggler’s favorite place to weigh anchor, it had fallen off the radar, and the state’s watchful eyes had since turned to places as far off as Panvel and Mumbra, red spots on the map of the 1993 terror attack trail.

Why would these fishermen fill their catch with bombmasala? thought Rahman, upset at the state’s insinuations. And even if they had, what did a poor migrant auto-rickshaw-walla have to do with it?

Last night Rahman had been quiet. Rahim had poked him in the ribs to squeeze a sound out of him. The jab was futile. Rahman had finally been convinced that being picked up by the pandus five times now in less than a year was God’s way of telling them that He did not approve of their deceit.
On the contrary
, gestured Rahim, amused,
look at it this way—if I got locked up, you would be free forever, because you would not officially exist
. Rahim had gurgled with the exertion of his gesticulated explanation. But Rahman had felt his heart sink even further.

* * *

Rahman had never been too keen on Rahim’s “plan.” Rahim had applied for a single auto-rickshaw license. They’d found themselves a little kholi out here in Khoja Gully, in the heel of the fishing village, so far from even the skeletons of the decayed boats that on most months their landlady forgot she owned this little shack that she had to come collect the rent for. No one here knew there were two of them. They emerged one at a time. Rahim drove the rickshaw by night. And Rahman—as Rahim—drove it by day. The owner who rented his auto to Rahim had never in his thirty-year rickshaw career seen one man drive an auto both shifts, seven days a week. He was initially skeptical, worried Rahim might belly-up his three-wheeler if he fell asleep at the handlebar. But over time Rahim had convinced him of his “inasmonia,” explaining to him in a badly spelled brief essay scribbled on the behind of a restuarant menu that he never got sleep, so he’d rather make a living all the time.

This wild lie had one downside. Rahman too had to be mute to the world outside. Which meant he could only talk to Rahim. Who could only talk back in gestures.

Rahman was starting to forget what a real conversation felt like.

Rahim slept soundly by day. Rahman tried to sleep at night, but the weight of this falsehood pressed down so hard on his heart that it kept his eyes sprung open, till the threat of dawn would inject some urgent fatigue into them and they would grudgingly close for a couple of hours each morning. This made Rahman tired. Of this life. Of being alone in what he felt. Of this strangely imposed burden of muteness. Of this unforgiving city. And the auto.

He didn’t trust the people who climbed into the rear passenger seat every day. Most never even noticed him. He could be a mere machine. They could slide money into a slot in the back of his head and he would drive them to wherever they wanted to go. The few who acknowledged him did so only to haggle about the meter being tampered with and pay him less. To these people he was Rahim, hence mute. All he could do was glower at them, hoping his stern silence would make them cough up what was his due. But silence in this city is an alien commodity. Not only is it painful in its near-total absence, but exhibiting it seems to connote to people a capitulation so complete that they step on you like you are a foot-pedal brake.

Afraid that if he ever blew a fuse a verbal projectile might launch itself out of his mouth without warning, Rahman decided to keep his passenger interactions to a bare minimum. To aid which he had recently bought a small slate and some chalk. Since the old meters never showed the actual fare, which had to be read off a small chart kept tucked above the windscreen, he had started writing the fare on the slate and holding it up for the passenger in the back. This small but determined action seemed to deter some of them from an impulsive haggle. The habitual hagglers needed to be fed the chalk, thought Rahman, copious amounts of it! But he banished any violent thoughts as soon as they entered his head. He might be pretending to be Rahim, but he didn’t want to become him. Not yet.

Also, Rahman could never figure why Rahim would need a box full of chalk every second night when Rahman could manage a whole week on a solitary stick.

The first time Rahman had been picked up by the pandus for interrogation was when bombs had ripped through the local trains. He remembered spending all evening ferrying the injured from Khar Station to Lilavati Hospital. He remembered not charging anyone a single paisa. He remembered telling the cops all of that, answering their long violent verbal questionnaire with countless humble nods and shakes of the head. And he remembered the subinspector—Doglekar was his name—saying in Marathi that all you Muslims are loose-tongued liars. And anyway, how could the police take his word for it when he didn’t even have a tongue to give his word with? Rahman was let off with a warning that time. The cops kept his license with them, the one that referred to him as
Rahim.
He remembered returning at two a.m. to see a panicked Rahim waiting for him beside two cold plates of food. Rahman had walked in silently, sat down, and they had eaten. One rice plate. By two. Like they always did. No fuss. No regret. No anger. Just fear. And a prayer. That tomorrow might bring a little more rehmat than today.