19
When my parents moved to that lane in the Christian area in the suburbs of Bombay, I was in Oxford; I did not witness the moving. In the summer, I returned for my vacations to a house I had not seen before, but only read about in letters, a tidy flat on the third floor that was smaller than the flats I had lived in all my life when my father worked in his company.
Once, when I was sleeping late into the morning in my new room, I was woken by an insistent metallic noise, something between a hammering and a ringing. The door at the end of the room opened on to a veranda, and when I went out, I saw a rubbish truck standing in the lane, an old, obsolete truck, such as one always sees on the roads in India, with no roof except in the front, where the driver’s seat is. Men who appeared to be dressed only in undergarments — vests and shorts — were clambering busily over the rubbish that had already been piled in the open section of the truck, and were now leaning in a carefree way with their elbows on one side of the truck, and looking out at the lane. The tallest man among them was standing just outside the gate to our building, and with cheeky disregard continually beating a plate with what might have been a spoon. He stood rooted to the spot, and, because he was wearing shorts, I could see how thin his legs were, with hairless knees, bent at a concave angle because of the firmness with which he was standing. The rude noise he was making sent the sweeper-women of the building, pretty girls among them, into a panic; with worried faces, clutching large plastic bins, they were hurrying towards the truck, from which the little men in undergarments were leaning out and looking at them insolently. There was something sexual in the air, and this ritual repeated itself at this time on almost every day of the week.
I grew to love that lane. The flat was on the third floor, and its veranda brought one marginally closer to its life. There was commerce between our building and the shops on the main road, from which barefoot errand boys would come carrying newspapers, provisions, video cassettes, and bottles of soda, taciturn, dark adolescents who wore T-shirts handed down by their employers, with ‘USA’, ‘Smile’, or ‘Beat King’ printed upon them. In this part of the city, with its small-town atmosphere, taxis were rivalled by auto-rickshaws, manic, hooded three-wheelers that were good for short distances. At the local station, these autos arrived incessantly in a cloud of dust before a queue of passengers, who, one by one, were carried off through a series of jolts and shocks towards the various roads radiating around Bandra — Linking Road, Turner Road, Hill Road, Khar. And one would come in the afternoon, every few days, to the gate outside our building, and either Mohan or my guru, or both, would alight from its tiny, semi-visible, confessional-like interior, and pay the impatient auto driver. From the veranda, their entrance into the compound was visible at close-quarters, and the sudden roar with which the auto disappeared always left me unprepared.
My parents lived here for three years. During my first summer visit, walking down the parallel lanes, I found by-lanes connecting one lane to another. On either side of these by-lanes, which were like shrunken versions of the bigger ones, miniature portraits of them, there were old cottages, and, around them, a distinct island of life that had formed by itself, consisting of cats, shrubs, birds, and an absence of people. I was always grateful for, without knowing precisely why, the detour of passing through these by-lanes.
It was Chitrakaki, my mother’s friend, who, having lived in the suburbs for thirty years, introduced my parents to a new family doctor in the area, someone who would make house calls. He was a short Marathi gentleman called Dr Deshpande, long threads of black hair combed across his disproportionately visible scalp, squarejawed, stout, bespectacled, with, disconcertingly, dimples appearing on his cheeks when he smiled. Like all general practitioners who are slaves to their patients and available at their beck and call at all hours of the day, he had no degree but his MBBS; he was more a Samaritan than a doctor; his arrival was met with relief rather than apprehension. He was not consulted for serious illnesses, but for headaches, stomach-upsets, and indigestion, and for his company he charged fifty rupees less than the doctors in the city. This part of the suburbs was his natural terrain; he was linked by phone to a wide variety of sufferers, and was in demand everywhere. He usually made only one diagnosis, ‘There’s a virus in the air this time of the year,’ but if one disagreed with him, he had no objection to changing it.
Chitrakaki lived not far away in a rented flat on the ground floor of a two-storeyed house with her husband, son, daughter-in-law, two dogs, and a cat. Once she owned a rooster which, strange plant, was convinced it was human and insisted upon being introduced to her friends. The dogs — a fox terrier that died, a dachshund that met its end in a road-accident, two hairy pekinese — Chitrakaki and her husband loved and cared for like their own children. And they forever remained children, even when they had become old, scuffling underneath the dining-table and barking their hearts out at the wall-lizard. In other ways they were shockingly dog-like; for the mother pekinese and her son, Chitrakaki once related lovingly, had become husband and wife, and then had had puppies. Each time, during those thirty years, when a bitch had puppies, Chitrakaki witnessed their blind, recumbent birth, and then gave them away.
She loved my mother’s cooking. Whistling (she had learnt how to whistle in England, where both she and her husband had met my father as a penniless student), she would loiter carelessly in the kitchen, looking askance as my mother gave the cook instructions, vainly, and stealthily, trying to sniff out the recipe. When she tried it at home, however, it was never, never right. She was convinced my mother had cruelly held back something, a seemingly unimportant but crucial ingredient she had quite premeditatedly forgotten to tell her. My mother made things from peelings, fish-heads, dried fish. It was East Bengali cuisine, with its origins in villages on drought- and flood-hit riversides, a poor man’s diet, perfected by people who could not afford to throw away even the skin of a white-gourd or the head of a fish, transformed into food by adding oil and garlic and chilli paste and poppy seed and common salt.
The people who really belonged to our lane were those who were on its margins — servants, sweepers, watchmen, hawkers of vegetable and fish who sent their cries out to the balconies and went with their baskets from door to door, even the beggars who, like the tradesmen, worked on a repeated route within a definite area. There was a Christian woman who, wearing the same tattered white dress, stood outside the building gates every week and sang a tuneless song in disjointed English. English was spoken quite naturally here by the poor, many of whom were Christians, and said their prayers in the language.
Gradually, the area changed. New buildings, like ours, came up where the oldest cottages used to be, concrete structures with sequences of black holes that would become flats in which people and children would live, the rooms, kitchens, and bathrooms still unrecognizable, each building looking at this stage like a huge bird-house. The labourers sat and chipped away at the large rocks with their chisels, while their women-folk, with saris tucked around their knees, bent down and scooped tiny black stones into a metal plate; some of them sat apart, nursing babies, the breast hidden by the child’s head, one end of the sari pulled forward, held aloft, and used as a kind of curtain to an imaginary room. The stray dogs of the lane were friendly with the children, who would pummel them fearlessly with tiny fists, or race them down the lane, while the dogs took such pestering wisely and accommodatingly. This floating community, infants and all, disappeared every year, and then they, or another very like them, reappeared on another site. Often, they would live in improvised shelters they had built themselves. From the rear-balcony of our flat, one could see a building coming up in an adjoining space, where our compound had ended with a wall. On this side of our house, clothes were left to dry on the balcony, and there were garages downstairs in which tenants’ cars were kept. The atmosphere here was in contrast to that of the front side, where cars and people kept coming in.