Saraswati Park Read online

  ‘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 t
hose 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.

  He’d been thinking again about the woman in the green sari, partly with a simple fascination, as when a particular face, or a gait, something alluring about a woman walking past, caught his eye. But then he’d begun to think of her in a different way, giving her a name that wasn’t the one he’d written on the money order form, and picking up a thread in his mind about her story, where she’d come from, how she’d arrived in Bombay, what she felt about her life, the kind of room she might live in. These details lingered in his head, and he looked up absently into the traffic to see two green parrots shoot past the GPO and towards Bhatia baug, making an elegant arc of speed through the air, their feathers flashing electric green as they corkscrewed. They were gone before he could be quite sure he hadn’t made them up, but he smiled again, suddenly feeling luckier.

  The day extended, shapeless, because the usual bookstall excursion wasn’t there; the thought of the blank pavements between Fountain, Churchgate and the University made him feel strange, as when in a dream you open a favourite volume only to find page after page unaccountably empty.

  Soon enough customers came along – first, a man who wanted to fill out a passport application. When he had taken the completed form and gone, Mohan leaned back in his chair and watched the shadow pigeons take off, wheel wildly, then land in the shadow tree, and merge into its substance. Later, a shadow leaf would seemingly tear itself out of the tree and fly up, into the sunlit sky.

  That afternoon he was coming to the end of his lunch – its components neatly laid out on his table, three different small boxes for daal, vegetable and chapatis – when a familiar figure, knife-thin, appeared in his field of vision.

  ‘Eh, Ashish!’

  The boy approached, slowing as he got nearer the tarpaulin. Four men looked at him interestedly. He smiled in a measured but general way and came to a stop near his uncle.

  ‘Come, sit here.’ Mohan patted the stool next to him.

  ‘No, I just…’

  ‘Sit!’

  Ashish sat down, reluctantly. But when he’d moved into the world under the tarpaulin, only a metre distant from the road, he began to look about him with curiosity.

  Mohan waved towards him for the benefit of the other letter writers. ‘This is my nephew Ashish, my sister’s son. Studying at Elphinstone College.’

  Khan smiled at Ashish and examined him closely through his tiny glasses. ‘You are studying…’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which stream? Which year?’

  ‘Um, third year BA.’

  A doubtful look passed over Khan’s face. ‘BA?’ he repeated incredulously, as though it was hard for him to believe anyone could be such a malingerer.

  ‘Arts,’ muttered Ashish.

  ‘Literature,’ said Mohan firmly. ‘He’s studying English literature.’ He put a hand on one of the boy’s thin shoulders.

  ‘Um, Mohan mama, can I have the key?’ Ashish murmured rapidly. ‘I don’t have one yet, mami said to get it from you in case she was still out.’

  The boy from the tea house reappeared with another round of glasses.

  ‘At least stay and have tea with me,’ Mohan said. ‘Have you had lunch?’

  Ashish looked embarrassed, and also unencouraging. ‘I’ll eat at home,’ he said.

  Mohan hadn’t yet eaten his puran poli; he’d been saving it till the end because it was his favourite sweet. ‘Here,’ he said, putting it into the boy’s hand. ‘Eat this and have some tea. Anyway, I shouldn’t have all these things at my age, I’ll get fat.’ He patted his stomach and grinned.

  Ashish, now that he had been forced into staying, sat quite contentedly and munched the puran poli.

  ‘You don’t know how busy it used to be, earlier. People coming all the time, we didn’t even have time for lunch until four o’clock,’ Khan told him. Ashish sipped his tea and nodded sagely.

  ‘Hm.’ Mohan cleared his throat. The boy, even as a child, had had a gift for sitting still and doing little that had easily allowed them to be close. Mohan watched a couple of buses turning the corner from the GPO towards Ballard Estate and seemed to see them as Ashish did: big harmless animals, some thing like oversized water buffaloes, their engines breathing and hydraulic brakes hissing as they turned. The boy looked at the curved frontage of the nearby buildings and Mohan’s eyes followed his and noticed, today, how the air conditioners were suspended from the facade in metal cages, like strange, rusting offerings.

  ‘So, what work did you have in town?’ Mohan asked.

  ‘I had to check something in the library,’ but he wasn’t carrying any books, ‘and I met a friend.’

  ‘Hm.’

  Ashish’s tea was over, and his reverie had passed. ‘Well,’ he said, standing up, ‘I’ll g
o.’ He nodded at the other letter writers.

  ‘See you at home!’ Mohan called, and waved. He continued to look after the thin figure as it receded towards the station.

  ‘So you think he’ll pass this year?’ Khan asked. He pushed his spectacles up his nose and reopened the morning’s paper.

  ‘Definitely,’ said Mohan resolutely. ‘Very intelligent boy. And he’s studying hard, now.’ He cleared his throat and remained staring into the brightness for a while.

  He reminded himself as he dressed that Sunday that lunch should go well no matter what. Satish was coming over for his birthday; Lakshmi had for days been planning what to cook, muttering to herself to use less salt since her brother suffered from high blood pressure; a present had been bought and wrapped. Mohan pulled out his Sunday clothes – a sort of t-shirt with a collar that Megha had given him, and old, comfortable trousers – and resolved not to be provoked by Satish. He put on his sandals without disturbing his wife, who lay sleeping under the fan. It was turning so frenetically in the early morning high voltage that the sheet covering her stirred, and exposed the instep of one foot.

  As he went down the stairs he noticed the smell and coolness of the air. Sunday morning in Saraswati Park and all over the city was a time of languor. The routines and efforts of other days were performed, but at a smaller scale and a slower pace; suddenly, there was time to live.

  He padded into the lane. The usual figures emerged from their gates, coming towards the shops for bread and milk; today they were dressed not in neatly pressed trousers and shirts but in voluminous t-shirts and shorts. An older man wore white kurta-pyjama. A couple of ghostly forms still promenaded at the end of the lane, taking their morning walk, but there was absenteeism, and a sense of festivity even in the movements of the stalwarts.

  As he crossed the circle he remarked again the bizarre advertisements for the limb replacement clinic that sponsored the garden in the middle of the road. Three other men were waiting at the tiny snack shop that had recently opened and begun to sell idlis in the morning. Because it was the first Sunday since Ashish had arrived he bought jalebis too. When he got home, the brittle coils of fried translucent dough, sticky with syrup, sat in a tangle on a plate at the edge of the table, waiting for Ashish to wake up. Mohan boiled the new milk, hummed, and made tea for three.