The Blue Notebook (4 page)

Father feared that reports of the driver being threatened at knifepoint would arrive in Mumbai before us. When the bus stopped in traffic at the outer limits of the city, we scrambled down the ladder to the street.

We entered an area that was a sea of makeshift huts. The huts looked similar to those back home and I suspect that many
of the people who live there came from villages like ours. There were rivers and rivulets of these dwellings. Why would people leave the fields to come here? The dogs, cats, and rats looked mangy, scavenging around us much like their two-legged masters. The air was warm and moist and smelled of rotting garbage and human excrement. A harmony of shrieking metal-wheeled carts, barking dogs, and the buzz of decay was accompanied by a gentle rhythm of human noise.

With nowhere to sleep, Father found a small unused space between two family huts and unrolled the maroon blanket he carried. Both families watched him in silence and no one objected to our vagrancy. Father told me to stay still until he returned with food. I had been sitting on the bus for most of the day, and I was exhausted. I lay on our blanket staring at the zigzagging white patterns that pierced the woven maroon sky. I was thinking of nothing. My nose had already adapted to the stench, and the sky was darkening.

Suddenly, in front of me appeared two thin ankles and I looked up. A boy about my age was staring down at me with the same expression as if he had spotted a strange piece of scrap metal on the floor. I felt he was wondering what potential use I had. His clothes were rags whereas mine were simple—a little sand-soiled but otherwise clean. He cocked his head to the right, wrinkled his brow, inhaled, and was about to speak, but the words he was thinking never came. He then spontaneously turned away from me and sprinted off into the morass of huts without looking back. I sat up to watch him disappear. It occurred to me that his actions were the same as those of the dogs who follow their swaying noses into a garbage pile, realize that there is nothing left to eat, and run elsewhere seeking
food. This is the behavior of the hungry but not of the starving. The starving stop, lie down, and prepare to die. The hungry scavenge.

There he is, Prince Puneet. Puneet walks from his nest into the Common Street for the first time in days. When waiting to bake, we are permitted to hop between nests under the yellow gaze of the sunning Hippopotamus. Puneet is unsure of his legs. He is not wearing any makeup and when he sees me, his face explodes in a smile. “Batuk, Batuk!” he cries, and runs to me despite the obvious discomfort that I can see in his eyes. I throw down my book and my ever-shortening pencil (I will need a solution for that) and rush toward him. I hold him tight and, oh, he does have a faint odor of manhood. We speak at the same time, laugh, and try again. I whisper in his ear, “Heh, careful, do not look too well, my prince, otherwise you will have to make sweet-cake today.” Puneet is happy to hold me and rocks me in his embrace. “Hippo told me I am working tonight anyway. So what do I care?” he asks. “I have been feeling great for a few days anyway.” His smile is stretched across his beautifully defined face, from which his boy cheeks are disappearing. I am still holding him as I answer, “I have so missed you.” I place a thin smile on my face and gaze upward into his eyes. “Not as much as my man-fuckers,” he responds. “Puneet!” I cry, pretending to be shocked, “how can you speak that way, my holy, holy prince … are you … are you …” I am not sure quite how to ask but he understands. He holds me at arm’s length
and says, laughing at me, “Oh, I know what you mean. Can I still shake my ass and bring in the rupees?” He grins. “The doctor says I am all right … you should have seen the smile on Mamaki’s face.”

We stop talking, he lets me go, and we take each other’s hands to form our own little circle, and look at each other. He flicks his head as if to restart his motor and asks, “What is that you are doing with that book and pencil … are you keeping records on me?” “No,” I say with a hint of artifice flooding my cheeks, “I am writing.” “I did not know you could write, you sly little fox. What are you writing?” he asks. “I am writing about how I came to Mumbai and fell head over heels in love with you, oh Prince Puneet of my dreams.”

Puneet half skips in the air as he laughs out loud in a bright, singing laugh and answers, “Batuk, you are my brain, my heart, my hands. You know that you are my only love. That little notebook can never contain even an ounce of my love for you.” I parry, “Soon, my beloved, you will be able to love me as a king, rather than as a prince,” and with that I drop my eyes down his chest to his groin. He is not flushed for a second and answers with a loud laugh. “This,” he says, pointing to his bhunnas, “is only for you, my beloved.”

Puneet snatches my book and runs (wincing) to the entrance to his nest, where he sits down. He opens my notebook and turns the pages one by one, knitting his brow and nodding his head. He looks up at me. “I am marvelous and beautiful, you say.” “Oh, that’s not all,” I respond. “Turn over and see on the next page … can you see? I write that you composed Shiva’s songs and that he fell in love with you.” He turns the page, stares at it, and nods. I laugh. “I know you can’t read, you stupid
pretty boy.” He slaps the book shut, frowns, jumps up, and tries to smack my bottom with the book. “Stupid—you call me … you will pay for that!” He grabs me and my eyes dance with his.

This is how we talk: two prostitutes on the Common Street in Mumbai.

I was falling asleep on the maroon blanket when Father returned with a bowl of rice, dripping, and bread. “What a wonderful city,” he cried out with a huge smile on his face, “all of this and a beer for five rupees.” He was not carrying beer. After we shared the food, Father and I lay on the blanket. He held me curled into him, his tummy to my back. I slept well, adrift on a sea of scavengers.

I woke up amid the gentle crashing waves of a world starting to dart frenetically around me. As I wiped the crinkles from my eyes, I could see that Father was anxious to leave. We had a business appointment to attend and it was clear that being late was not an option; “Important business,” Father had said. As Father ventured out into the city streets I noticed that he seemed overwhelmed. I, on the other hand, was mesmerized. I had never seen cars sitting in line with people inside them. How they loved to sound their hooters. Why were children in uniform; were they in prison? Each time we got lost, there was more to see. For a while, I became fascinated by the patterns the paving stones made; I would see shapes hidden there and
try to decode their secrets. Color was everywhere—in people’s clothes as they crammed on tiny buses, in the fields of washing hung to dry in the open-air laundry in the stores, and even in the heaps of rubbish. The city’s air was not only infused with smells, fumes, and dust but also a soup of color.

Father kept a blistering pace as we walked across the city, mostly lost. Oftentimes it was not his speed or irritability that bothered me but rather my need to stop frequently and examine all that pulsated around me. On one occasion, I was riveted to the spot watching a train packed with passengers speed through the city on rails suspended high in the air. It was as though the train flew through the sky. I was desperately hoping to see someone fall off but no one did. Father broke this moment of suspended time with a wrenching pull on my arm and off we set to become lost—yet again.

After getting lost almost a dozen times and Father becoming ever more frustrated, we arrived at our destination. I had forgotten to be tired and climbed up the light brown brick steps behind Father. The steps were each so high that I had to almost jump up onto the next. Father was clutching an address written on a small, crumpled piece of paper like a bird holds on to a captured grasshopper.

At the top of the stairwell was a tall dark brown door with a metal ring handle as large as my head, held in the mouth of a dark metal lion. Father pounded the ring onto the door. It clearly required all the strength of the young woman opening the door to move it. Once we had entered, I turned back to see her throwing her shoulder onto the door to close it. We stood in a long, dark hallway, which was lit by a single glass chandelier hanging from the ceiling. The stone floor was covered by a
faded yellow-and-red carpet. On the left side of the hallway, against the wall, were two chairs, and between them stood a long, narrow table. On the table was a wooden box inlayed with what appeared to be gold.

The other end of the hallway was shielded by a hanging curtain. We stood waiting in the hallway, a closed door behind us, and the curtain ahead of us hiding the path forward.

A booming voice called from far beyond the curtain deep inside the building. “You are late, Mr. Ramasdeen. We were expecting you before lunch.” My father shouted an apology to a man who was not yet visible but who was obviously moving toward us with haste. I could hear his puffing and his pounding steps as he moved closer.

Master Gahil, as I would learn was his name, burst through the hanging red curtain at the end of the hallway. The curtain had small silvered mirrors and bells sewn into it and so his entrance was echoed by a montage of darting light and tinkling. “There she is,” he called out. Looking down at me, his large face erupted with pleasure. I felt he was about to eat me.

Master Gahil turned his head and screamed toward the curtain, “Kumud, come immediately. My baby niece from the fields has arrived and she is filthy.” My hitherto unknown uncle was portly and exuded the sheen of self-importance. He was wearing clothes I had only heard about in stories, several layers of garments, all of which were trimmed in gold. His undercoat was white; another layer was red velvet. He wore a handwoven short vest jacket and a lightweight white topcoat with intricate patterns sewn in gold thread. Overall, he was a carefully crafted ball of glittering color and billowing material.

An old, stooped woman shuffled into the room, her feet
sliding against the carpet with a
whoosh—whoosh—whoosh.
Her head was cast downward and even when she turned toward Master Gahil, she moved with the glue of aging. Her plain blue sari was worn as a simple garment by a woman who understood the simplicity of her position in the world.

The woman’s expression was that of an imploring old dog asking her master for scraps of meat. Master Gahil spoke to her as if she were a dog. “Kumud, take little Batuk here and clean her up. Also, tell Dr. Dasdaheer to be here tomorrow morning.” He looked me up and down and again smiled. He shouted, “Go now!” and bade the old woman away with a wave of his arm. She slowly turned and began to walk in her stooped way toward the curtain. In a smooth practiced action that caught me unawares, she grasped me by the scruff of my tunic and dragged me with her. For an old woman, her strength was astounding. Father called out, “Batuk, it’s my fault; I lost everything … darling, wait,” and moved toward me. Master Gahil bellowed, “You should have thought of this silliness, Mr. Ramasdeen, when you decided to be so late. We have business to complete and I have to go out this evening.” Turning to the shuffling servant woman, he shouted, “Old woman, take her immediately. I do not have time for this nonsense.”

As Master Gahil thrust a pregnant envelope into Father’s tensed hand, I saw a familiar expression dart across Father’s face. I recognized it instantly from our trips to the doctor he invented to hide his lavender-perfumed “cousin” from Mother: self-loathing veiled in lust. As I observed the depth of my father’s weakness, our gazes touched and from him I felt the kiss of inner death. I was transfixed as I felt him draw me within him in terror.

But our circle snapped. In shock seasoned with panic, I was propelled by the surprising force of the old woman and was thrust through to the other side of the silver curtain. The last words I would ever hear from my father were, “Batuk … darling … my silver-eyed leopard.” The last words Father ever heard from me were, “Daddy, take your Batuk—I beg of you.”