Saraswati Park Read online

  ‘Here, I’ll take some.’ Mohan started to scoop up the volumes scattered around them.

  ‘Oye, you can’t do that,’ the BMC man said. ‘They’re being confiscated.’ He picked up another armful and walked to the truck. A policeman, smacking his stick into his palm, strutted up. ‘Come on!’ he shouted. ‘Move on!’ He was bored, Mohan noticed; probably he wanted his lunch.

  ‘Come on, re,’ Kamble said. He took Mohan’s arm and tugged at it. Only a few books remained, lying on the ground and beside the railings. Mohan handed those he held to the young bookseller. One fell from his arms and Mohan stooped and picked it up, touched it to his forehead in apology. It was a business book, with confident red letters on the cover: Master of Your Own Fate.

  Mohan, still clutching the book, allowed Kamble to pull him towards the crossing. ‘My sandal’s broken,’ he muttered.

  He went home early, feeling dazed and unreal. The outer door was closed because it was the afternoon and a time of rest; the flat was warm, silent, and sleepy. His wife opened the inner door.

  ‘I thought it was you! You’re not well?’

  ‘Don’t attack me right at the door,’ he said wearily. He came in, and closed the outer door with a soft click.

  ‘Another book,’ she said.

  He walked past her and deposited the books on one of the jars that covered the old table in the living room. He went to the kitchen, reappeared with a steel tumbler of water and sat down heavily; he rested his elbow on the small fringe of available space on the table and drank. When he’d finished he set down the tumbler, rubbed his forehead, removed his spectacles, and pinched the top of his nose.

  ‘Are you feeling unwell?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then what happened?’ Her voice had become sharp, but she hovered close to him.

  He waved towards the books. ‘The BMC moved the booksellers away today – took all the books and threw them into a truck. They’re taking them to a godown somewhere.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  He nodded.

  She went into the kitchen, came back with a bottle of cold water and a jug and refilled the tumbler, half with the iced water and half with room-temperature water. He closed his hand around the tumbler.

  ‘Maybe it’s for the best,’ she said thoughtfully, and put one hand on her hip. ‘We’re running out of space for all these books anyway.’

  He stared across the landscape of clustered jars. The table was old, from the house at Dadar; it was good Burma teak, and beautiful when polished, but they’d never used it properly. Over the years it had become a receptacle for jars of pickle, bottles of sauce and squash, tins of drinking chocolate, papers, paperweights, and all kinds of other objects that, someone had reasoned, were about to be in use. What a waste, he thought.

  ‘Oh, I had to tell you,’ she continued. ‘Your sister called.’

  He looked up. ‘Vimla?’

  ‘How many sisters do you have? Milind’s transfer order has come through. They’ll have to leave in a few days.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And they just found out that Ashish can’t take his exams this year, he has to repeat.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘Attendance,’ she said.

  He put on his spectacles again, diverted for a moment. ‘Always something new with that boy,’ he said, almost admiringly. Fecklessness was not a quality one had been encouraged to develop, or that one celebrated in one’s offspring; still, it cut a certain dash.

  ‘So they were wondering if he can stay with us till next year.’

  Mohan smiled. ‘Of course, where else will he stay?’

  ‘With your brother?’ However, she smiled.

  ‘Ha!’

  Lakshmi sighed. ‘It’s going to be a lot of extra work. And also expense.’

  ‘But we have the money from the printing shop. And what Megha’s been sending, we haven’t even touched that.’ His income from his daily occupation had never been considerable; in recent years it had dwindled to a trickle.

  She nodded, then frowned. ‘You know that I’m fond of Ashish. But it’s a big responsibility. We’ll have to make sure he studies, attends regularly when college starts. You’ll have to speak to him. Make him understand he needs to be sincere.’

  Mohan snorted. ‘I’m sure his mother’s spoken to him comprehensively,’ he said. He drained the second tumbler of water, put it into his wife’s hand, and went inside to change his clothes.

  Chapter Two

  Seven in the morning, Ashish thought he must be dreaming. He stood under the big notice boards and read the names of suburbs he had rarely visited: Belapur, Titwala, Vashi, Panvel, Andheri. It was too depressing.

  Most of his possessions were in a large suitcase at his feet; he clutched a cardboard box filled with books, cassettes and compact discs that he had rushed around retrieving when his uncle arrived at six. His parents had been too harried to become sentimental; they would be flying to Indore in the afternoon and some of their things had already been sent by road. Ashish, with similar efficiency, had been plucked out of his life and sent to live with his aunt and uncle.

  Now he stood inside the grand station, which was light, quiet, and almost cold at this hour. Pigeons fluttered in the sulight, high above the vaulted ceiling. A few red-coated porters passed at a brisk little jog; a long-distance train must have been arriving. Mohan had gone to buy a ticket for Ashish. He came back, put a hand on the boy’s thin shoulder and slipped the two-inch rectangle of yellow pasteboard into his shirt pocket. ‘Come, that’s our train. Can you run?’

  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 r
ebalanced 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?’