Saraswati Park

They began an awkward trot. The elder man ran easily, despite the aged VIP suitcase he carried, and the boy skipped lopsidedly behind him, trying not to spill the contents of the carton, which slithered, skittish, and threatened to make a leap for freedom.

The wide platform was clear; the horn sounded; at the same magical moment the train began to pull out. Mohan heaved in the suitcase, jumped on, cried, ‘Here!’ He took the carton from Ashish and pulled him on by the wrist.

The heavy train was already moving fast. It drew away from the station and into the warm, bright sunlight just outside. Ashish looked down: this was the place where the tracks intersected, then separated again.

Saraswati Park was settling into its Sunday. A few people were outside the vegetable shop; a woman negotiated with a man who stood behind a handcart covered with large, green-striped watermelons; the rickshaw turned into the lane.

‘Take a right – up a bit – no, stop. Yes, here.’ Mohan dragged the suitcase out and paid the rickshaw driver, who stared unabashedly at the four-storey building. Its yellow paint was peeling. The name Jyoti was stencilled in dark red letters on the gatepost. Ashish staggered out of the other side of the rickshaw, still clasping the carton, and followed his uncle into the small entrance with its wall of pierced tiles. He had come here regularly as a child, but not recently; the last occasion he recalled was his cousin Gautam’s wedding three or four years earlier. Now everything came back to him: the names on the plate at the foot of the stairs (Gogate, Kulkarni, Gogate, Gogate, Prabhu, Kamat, Karekar, Dasgupta) and the double doors – the inner ones were open and the outer doors had a large ornamental grille from which Sunday cooking smells came into the stairwell. Withered garlands of auspicious leaves hung from the lintels, and, outside several of the apartments, pairs of sinister looking red footprints marked the time, years before, when the lady of the house had arrived as a new bride.

When they reached the third floor, panting, Mohan put his hand into the grille of number 15 and opened the catch. He turned to beam at his nephew. ‘Come,’ he said.

Lakshmi appeared, in her post-bath outfit of clean salwar kameez, her hair still loose. ‘Wait!’ she said dramatically to Ashish, who paused at the door, taken aback. She held a comb in one hand and raised it like a ceremonial item. The scent of her hair oil, amla, floated to him. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘with the right foot.’

Ashish grinned foolishly and rebalanced himself. He stepped over the ledge, right foot first, and his aunt smiled and closed the outer door behind him.

‘You never made me do that before,’ he mumbled.

‘But then you were only visiting,’ she said.

Mohan had melted into the passage with the suitcase; he now reappeared. ‘Come,’ he said. Still holding the carton, Ashish followed him. The peculiar smell of the dark corridor returned vividly: a mysterious amalgam of old calendars, dust, and superannuated cockroach repellent sachets, with their intriguing round perforations. The room at the end had been Gautam and Ashok’s. Ashish strode towards it with a new-found audacity, Gulliver in Lilliput. A collection of his cousins’ comics was neatly piled on the lower shelf of the bookcase; a cricket bat, badly cracked, leaned against the desk.

His aunt opened the steel cupboard proudly. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘I cleared it out for you.’ The cupboard seemed to have shrunk; the stickers welded to the mirror in the door were now at Ashish’s eye level. One showed the West Indian batsman Viv Richards making his famous on-drive; the other was a logo of a red fist, thumb pointed perkily upwards. Behind them, his reflection wavered: knife-thin, suspicious looking. He tried to smile at himself. The effect wasn’t reassuring.

Mohan patted him on the shoulder. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Take off your shoes, wash your hands and have some breakfast.’

They left Ashish in the room, the door open, and he sat on the bed and untied his shoelaces. The cold floor felt smooth and clean under his feet. He looked around the room, so familiar and yet new.

From the kitchen, he heard the rumble of his uncle’s voice.

After lunch his aunt and uncle disappeared into their room where, with the door open, they lay on the bed, immobile. His aunt slept curled to one side; his uncle lay like an Egyptian embalmed under a sheet. The fan, on a high setting, made the pages of the book on Mohan’s chest flutter.

Ashish fidgeted, and fiddled with his mobile telephone. He pressed, repeatedly, the key that cleared the display: each time it illuminated anew, a bright green. There was no message from Sunder. What was he doing at this moment? Ashish imagined him eating lunch in a hotel coffee shop, or playing a computer game; watching a movie on an enormous flat-screen television. It was possible that Sunder was bored too, but even his boredom was exotic: it would take place in a vast, air-conditioned flat.

Ashish wandered, examining the well-known apartment with a detective’s eye. The flat had its own, specific virtues that he couldn’t imagine Sunder appreciating: the cane chair with a high back, where his uncle liked to sit and read in the evening, in the bright circle of light emitted by a hundred-watt bulb; the woven rope footstools, which had a piece of old tyre at their base; the reading table piled with books and papers; the bookshelves. There were Marathi novels and short stories, pirated thrillers from the pavement, translations of Sherlock Holmes into Marathi (the action had been transposed to Bombay), P.G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Nancy Drew, Henry James, and, on the bottom shelf, behind the cane chair, a few more esoteric titles. He pushed the chair aside and squatted to look at them. The shelves here smelled pleasantly musty, of an organic, reechy dust. He pulled out a volume with a yellow spine: I’m OK, You’re OK. Another, with a black cover: The Silva Method. A third, battered-looking, with only a few vestiges remaining of the original red jacket: Become a Writer. He carried them off to his room; they’d help to pass the afternoon.

He woke up later, drooling on his arm. His feet were cold. Why was it so quiet? Then he realized: the noises of water pipes gurgling, of feet running up and down the corroded cast-iron stairs, and the whole building rattling around him every time a bus or truck passed on the road outside; these had been left in Esplanade Mansion. Here there was only the sound of birds chirping, implausibly cheerfully. He sat up and examined the phone. Still no message. Was it because of what had happened on Wednesday? The servant, coming into the room with glasses of cold lemonade on a tray, had given them a funny look. But they hadn’t been doing anything, just lying on the bed and reading the same book. When Ashish hadn’t seen Sunder in college for three days he’d called him, but there had been no answer. He ached to know what had happened, what would happen; during the last year, their friendship, so odd and circumstantial, had been hesitating on the edge of something else – but he couldn’t be certain. Surely it wasn’t all in his imagination?

There was a shout from outside. He wiped his mouth and went to the window. Boys were playing cricket in the lane. A small child ran up to bowl a tennis ball at a much older boy, who whooped and hit it hard; the ball landed, making a joyous thump, on the bonnet of a car halfway down the lane and the watchman got up and began to walk, with the detached enjoyment of someone playing a well-known role, towards the cricketers.

Ashish rubbed his eyes, turned off the fan, and went into the living room, from where he could hear voices.

‘Tea?’ His aunt came out of the kitchen and smiled at him.

‘Hm.’

He sat down, still half immersed in the dense warmth of afternoon sleep, and peered at his aunt and uncle. Mohan was drinking a steaming cup of tea and reading the newspaper. Ashish leaned his elbow on the edge of the table and allowed himself to re-enter the world.

‘Here.’ Lakshmi mami put a cup in front of him. He recognized it: it was tall and had a blue handle; a fey character called Little Boy Blue danced about on the front. All his cousins and sometimes he had been force-fed milk with protein powder in this cup, in the belief that it would make them strong.

Mohan grunted and folded the newspaper.

‘Anything interesting?’ Ashish asked.

‘Nonsense,’ said Mohan dispassionately. He brightened. ‘Shall we go for a walk?’ Ashish smirked; he recalled this meant his uncle wanted to visit the snack shop at the edge of the market, and buy hot samosa.

‘Let him finish his tea at least,’ Lakshmi mami intervened.

Ashish immediately adopted a hangdog expression and put the cup to his mouth. ‘It’s hot,’ he whimpered, making for the television. He found the remote, put on a music channel, and began to watch the video of a new song that blared, cancelling out the birdsong and the cries of the cricketers outside.

‘No hurry,’ said Mohan. He got up and began to drift around the living room in a conspicuously bored way.

The last light was golden, like something in a film; it fell carelessly across the dusty leaves of the old banyan in the empty plot, here and there picking out the new, shiny green ones. Television aerials cast extravagant shadows.

A chubby, frizzy-haired girl whom Ashish thought he recognized was pretending to walk for exercise. She dawdled down the lane, her mobile pressed to her ear.

‘I know,’ she said into the phone. ‘Seriously!’

As they passed, she smiled at both of them, and Mohan reached out and patted her head with the flat of his hand.

‘Madhavi, Dr Gogate’s daughter. Do you remember her?’ he asked Ashish quietly.

‘She used to be a little fat girl?’

‘Well, a little healthy maybe.’

‘That’s exactly what he said!’ Madhavi said. Her voice followed them for a yard or two after they rounded the corner. They crossed the small roundabout, where Ashish saw two stray puppies play-fighting, rolling in the dirt next to a heap of rubbish.

‘We’ll go to Matunga one Sunday for dosa if you like,’ Mohan said.

‘Mm,’ Ashish agreed. He had changed into his Sunday clothes, a t-shirt and shorts made comfortable from much washing. The evening air was soothing on his skin.

‘Your parents will reach this evening, we can call them when we get back.’

‘Okay.’ He scuffled along. He didn’t miss his parents; he wasn’t sure if he would. But already he missed town: on a holiday like today, outside Esplanade Mansion the streets were as quiet as the inside of a cup, and at such times the city always seemed to belong to him alone.

‘So,’ Mohan cleared his throat, ‘college doesn’t start for a month, a little more than a month?’

Ashish’s ears pricked up at the mention of college, but he kept his head prudently down. ‘Yes, in June,’ he said.

‘Ah. Hm.’

They continued to amble along the second lane, where the bungalows and apartment blocks were low-rise and set back from the road. Next to a broken culvert, bright green weeds flourished illegally.

‘Your parents were surprised about your attendance record,’ Mohan said.

Ashish looked at him. Mohan looked away, and waved at an unattractive grey bungalow on the left. The gatepost was marked Iyer. ‘Famous doctor lives there,’ he remarked. ‘Heart surgeon. Son is also a doctor. Dermatologist.’

‘Hm.’

Mohan frowned. ‘I don’t want to lecture you about your studies,’ he said. Ashish, holding his breath, flapped on in his rubber slippers. A rickshaw, containing two laughing young people, went past; the exhaust made explosive, farting noises.

‘It’ll be nice for all of us if you have a good year,’ Mohan said finally. He sighed, laughed, and pulled Ashish closer to him so that he could perform a familiar manoeuvre of affection and exasperation: he put his left hand on Ashish’s head and clouted it with his right. This was the only punishment he’d ever managed to inflict when his children, nephews and nieces reported each other’s misdemeanours to him.

Ashish grinned, but not too much. ‘Yes Mohan mama, don’t worry,’ he said obligingly.

His uncle snorted. ‘You have no idea. You should have heard your grandfather talk about studies, doing well at school…Vivek mama had it worse than I did, of course.’ He smiled.

They were passing a dilapidated beige bungalow. ‘He used to write, your grandfather,’ Mohan said suddenly. ‘Did you know that?’

‘No,’ Ashish said. His uncle was smiling, as though he had pulled a forgotten rabbit out of an old hat. ‘Do you mean stories?’

‘Stories, essays, little things. I don’t know what you’d call them. On Sundays he would get up early in the morning. When we woke up, he would be writing and he’d carry on all day.’

‘So he didn’t take you all out, you didn’t do things?’

‘It was his writing time.’

Ashish tried to digest this image of his grandfather, whom he mostly knew from photographs; there, he seemed like a grimmer, more stolid edition of his uncle: white shirt, trousers worn somewhere around the nipples, those small spectacles, slicked-back hair. ‘Did he publish anything?’ he asked.

‘No. One of his friends was a writer of short stories, a very clever fellow, Nandlal Gokhale. My father showed Gokhale some of his stories once and he took them away to read. But he said that they weren’t good enough to publish.’

Ashish frowned. ‘But I’ve never heard of this Gokhale.’

‘He’s not so well known now,’ Mohan said.

‘So how does anyone know that he was right about grandfather’s writing?’

Mohan’s pace seemed to slow. ‘Well – he was a man of letters,’ he said.

Ashish was still mildly indignant. ‘Do you have any of grandfather’s stories?’ he asked, though he was a slow and reluctant reader of his mother tongue.

Mohan shook his head. ‘No, re. It’s possible that there were some papers and they got lost when we left the house at Dadar. But I think he burned them, some time before he died.’

Later in the evening Ashish was sitting at his desk when there was a knock at the door. His uncle came in. ‘Your aunt says dinner’s ready,’ he said. ‘Come soon. Oh – you found this book.’ He wandered further into the room and picked up Become a Writer.

‘Yes, what is it?’ Ashish asked. ‘I haven’t really looked at it, I started these ones.’ He pointed to the pirated copies of I’m OK, You’re OK and The Silva Method. They were near-perfect facsimiles, but their thin paper and flimsy covers made them seem interestingly insubstantial, as though they belonged to a more temporary world to which they would one day return.

‘I bought this a few years ago, from a man sitting outside the Museum,’ Mohan said slowly. ‘He was next to the other hawkers, you know, the comb-and-keychain guys. But all he had was three peacock feathers and this book, in the same state as now.’

‘How much did you pay?’

‘I don’t remember. Too much. I didn’t bargain, he seemed in a bad way.’

From the other room came the cry, ‘It’s getting cold!’

‘Come on,’ Mohan said.

Ashish scrambled up, and stuck a ruler in his textbook. He had the disconcerting feeling that someone with immense, vacuum-black eyes had stared at him for a moment from the darkened window of the empty flat opposite.

‘So did you see the man again?’ he asked, following his uncle down the dim passage.

‘See him? No, I don’t think so,’ said Mohan vaguely.

It was nearly dark; the in-between of dusk had been replaced by the bright electric light of indoors, and it was as though the lane outside had completely disappeared. By chance, Mohan was still holding the tattered paperback, and when they reached the drawing room he put it down on a chair. Food was already on the table; they sat down.

Chapter Three

In the train, Mohan sat as usual, hands resting on his knees, his arms straightened like cantilevered posts. Tilak Nagar came and went, with the coconut palms near the station, and GTB Nagar, where there was a school, and shacks next to the railway line. At Kurla, something or other was always going on – children chasing each other across the tracks, or a ticket collector who’d caught three defaulters, tied their wrists together with cord and was making them walk behind him in a line so that they didn’t run away laughing.

Mohan sat on the left of the compartment; the morning sun flooded through the window and onto his face. It was hot and humid, the summer coming to a peak. Though he wasn’t next to the window, a vestige of the breeze reached him now and then; it was warm and had that city smell: a mix of rotten flowers, fish, and laundry drying in the wind. The house in Dadar returned like a presence, an early memory from the days before he’d started school. After his bath, wearing nothing but his shorts, he would be put to sit on the landing in a patch of sunlight. It was always there at that time of day; it seemed to wait for him. He would sit there, warming his legs and looking out towards the front room, where the sun paused in a panel of the window. The light played in the blue and yellow glass and came through to him, undisturbed and liquid. He could hear his mother’s voice in the kitchen, and felt his hair drying in wisps; in the street, the wastepaper man called out.

There was a rising and falling sequence of clicks, like the rattle of an insect. ‘Twenty rupees, twenty rupees,’ the voice had the unignorable nasal timbre of the train vendor. Mohan opened his eyes. It was a boy of about thirteen – he was thin, with dusty skin, enormous dark eyes and gummy lashes; a dirty cloth bag was slung over his shoulder. He had a pair of elliptical magnets that he was throwing up in the air and catching again. The magnets attracted and repelled each other as they twisted and fell; their surface was too shiny for them to stick, and the friction produced the insect noise.

‘Go away,’ said another passenger. ‘Who’s going to buy things like that at this time of day?’

It was early for such toys: they normally appeared in the evening, when the mind turned more naturally to leisure, and to one’s family. But he watched the shiny magnets flying up, and twisting around each other as they fell, and wished that he could think of a child for whom to buy them. Ashish was too old; there was no one, really. ‘Twenty rupees, twenty rupees,’ urged the boy; he’d seen the interest in Mohan’s eyes, but Mohan shook his head regretfully. This was a new toy, its arrival another movement in the life of the city. The fashion in these toys, or the ones sold on the street, the narrow advertisements pasted under the luggage racks, these had their own seasonality; they marked the passage of the year as clearly as a change in temperature, the appearance of lanky red flowers on the gulmohar, or yellow bloom on the rusty shield bearer.

At Sewri the boy jumped out of the carriage. Mohan watched him run along the platform, barefoot and jaunty, on his way to another compartment. He thought of Ashish, who’d asked the previous night to be woken early; he was going to start studying in earnest. Two hours after Mohan had put a cup of tea on Ashish’s desk this morning, he’d been about to leave the house. Ashish had emerged into the living room, hollow-eyed, and sat at the table drinking a fresh cup of tea; he’d looked exhausted and appalled, like a child born too early. He’d get into a routine, no doubt. But despite himself, Mohan began to worry. Things had a way of happening; in his case it had been his father’s death just when he was finishing school. The family business wasn’t in a great state then, and he’d had no choice but to start work.

The train was moving again, drawing near the dusty yet magnificent Cotton Exchange building, marooned in the middle of an empty plain. The big textile companies still had offices here, but no real dealing took place – the trade, which had swept into the city like a tide, bringing with it mills, factories, and jobs more than a hundred years earlier, had receded some time ago. Now, construction work went on nearby. As the train passed, he saw the stall where thin, sunburnt workers stopped for tea.

The printing shop, which his brother had taken on, made a reasonable profit. It specialized in minor work: the annual reports of clubs and associations, wedding invitations, jobs for the small businesses in the area where they’d grown up. Mohan’s share of the income and the money from the sale of the old house had made it possible for him and Lakshmi to buy the flat in Saraswati Park, then a new colony in a part of the city they hadn’t really known existed. And it had allowed him to persist with his work, the point of which no one in the family saw. ‘You had to do those odd jobs when Baba died – messenger in that agency – then this strange letter-writing thing,’ his brother said. ‘But when we started the business again you should have joined in, taken responsibility.’

He frowned; Vivek had phoned yesterday while he and Ashish were out. When Mohan called back his brother reminded him they hadn’t met for several months. ‘Come and see us some time,’ he’d said, and Mohan murmured something about Saturday next week; it wasn’t an obligation he could avoid. This weekend, too, a visit from his brother-in-law loomed; it had been a few weeks since Satish had come over, and this Sunday was his birthday.

The train stopped at Reay Road. The wide platforms were nearly clear and a bare, scrubby field stretched out beside the station. There were a lot of empty spaces in the city that people forgot, and in them, forgotten people carrying on their lives: the dockyard and mill workers, or the port trust employees, who were part of the city’s story but nearly invisible now.

Mohan sighed and thought of his earlier Saturday routine, which had often included a wander through the bookstalls between Fountain and Churchgate. This, so different from his children’s studies, had been the way he’d educated himself. There was a special magic that operated in the books he found; the thing he needed frequently came along without his having to look for it. His mind went covertly back to his other existence, the one in his chair, at home in the evenings, under the naked bulb. He sometimes felt he left himself there, unseen, while an automated version of him went about the daily routine. Those people and emotions, the ones from the pages he turned, were always so clearly present. And there was the feeling of following in the footsteps of other readers, those who’d scribbled in the margins; he’d many times come close to doing the same.

The next station was Dockyard Road, a rather charming stop on the crest of a slope that looked as though it belonged elsewhere, in a hill station perhaps; then dusty Sandhurst Road, and Masjid, filthy and busy, right next door to VT.

He was a little late this morning; when he sat down at his table most of the others were there. There had been fourteen of them in better times; now there were, on and off, eleven letter writers, of whom at any given time perhaps eight were at work, ranged round the old fountain.

Soon after the boy from the Sainath Tea House made his first round with a small metal plate on which he carried hot glasses of tea, another regular appeared. This was a cripple, with maimed legs and shortened arms. He looked as though he was in his twenties, and crawled surprisingly fast on his hands and knees; his pelvis, the only part of his body that was clothed, lurched between his legs like a cranky motor between twisted pistons. He skirted Mohan and came to a halt, smiling expectantly, in front of Bablu, the youngest letter writer. Bablu was a mere child, in his late thirties; he had been at the job only twelve years. He looked over the top of his table, saw the cripple, and passed a few coins down; the other man took them and, satisfied, went away wordlessly. This happened every day at the same time but none of the letter writers commented. Mohan sometimes amused himself by spinning out scenarios: the two boys were brothers, but by different mothers; the more fortunate one knew that only his good luck had saved him from his brother’s fate…the baroque suppositions made him smile, mostly at himself.