After my father retired, we moved to this lane in the suburbs. Ours is the only apartment building in the lane; the rest are bungalows or cottages that belong to Christians. This is a Christian area; Portuguese names — Pedro, D’Silva and Gonsalves — twang in the air like plucked silvery guitar-strings. The Christian men are darkcomplexioned and have maternal pot-bellies, because they like drinking. The women wear unfashionable dresses, flowery purple skirts that resemble old English wallpaper, exposing polished, maroon ankles and dark knees which they cover by pulling at the skirt-ends with chaste, dutiful fingers. These women and men eat pork, and sing and dance in cottages lit with cobwebs and dim bulbs, some of which have dates upon their facades (1923), and some of which are named after some beloved greataunt (Helen Villa), no doubt a comical figure in her time. The Christians enjoy jokes and swear-words, and the women, when they are not sullen, are gently earthquaking with laughter at what John has just said with a straight face. They are in turn friendly, talking to you in queues at banks and post-offices, and short, taking offence when you innocently ask them for street directions. Most of them are Roman Catholic; when asked, they pronounce themselves ‘katlick’, a word that sounds both childishly mischievous and appropriately rude.
When my mother finishes her tea, she walks to the harmonium which is resting in the hall upon a carpet, covered by a tranquil garment. But if it is not in the hall, she will ask Ponchoo, the cook, who is now awake, to bring it to the hall, and this he will do, holding it by the two metal rings on either side, anxious not to bump it against a door or a wall, transporting its heaviness with a pregnant woman’s delicacy that dares not pause for breath, and with deep suspicion he will veer its precious body through the ins and outs of the corridor, and, bending humbly, lay it in its place on the carpet. Then my mother will settle on the rug and unclip the bellows, pulling and pushing them with a mild aquatic motion with her left hand, the fingers of the right hand flowering upon the keys, the wedding-bangle suspended around her wrist. Each time the bellows are pushed, the round holes on the back open and close like eyes. Without the body music is not possible; it provides the hollow space for resonance as does the curved wooden box of the violin or the round urn of the sitar. At the moment of singing, breath tips in the swelling diaphragm as water does in a pitcher. The voice-box itself is a microscopic harp, its cords tautening and relaxing with each inflection. My mother begins to practice scales in the raag Todi.
Morning passes. When my father used to work in the city, and we lived in a flat in Malabar Hill overlooking the Arabian Sea, my mother would sometimes go to the Bombay Gymkhana in the afternoon and settle upon one of its spacious, boat-like wicker sofas, sinking into its oceanic cushions and dozing off till my father arrived for tea. Coming back from school, which was nearby, I would see her there as a silent composition of loved details; the deliberate, floral creases of her sari, the pale orange-brown glow of her skin, the mild ember-darkening of her lipsticked mouth, the patient, round fruition of her bun of hair, and the irrelevant red dot on her forehead. Seeing her was like roaming alone in a familiar garden. In cool, strategic corners, waiters stood in coloured waistcoats with numbered badges pinned to them; never did a name seem more apposite than then, in the afternoon, before people started coming in, when these waiters impassionedly waited, dark Goan men in neat clothes, inhaling and exhaling and lightly chattering among themselves. The most invigorating fact about the club was its long corridor, an avenue of light reflected off a polished floor and protected by arches. It was frequented mainly by company executives: general managers and directors. Dressed alike in tie and white pinstriped shirt and dark suit, they looked to me like angels. In the club, these managers would sit on chairs and childishly ring little brass bells to summon the waiters. With the waiters they shared a marital relationship of trust and suspicion, and an order wrongly taken could precipitate a storm and a crisis, a sudden display of emotions, shouts and insults. Food was in abundance, from the American hamburger to chop-suey to the local bhelpuri with its subversive smells of the narrow, spice-selling streets of west Bombay. My mother was always much amused by the sight of people eating around her, moving their mouths in a slow, moral way; human beings are the only creatures, she says, who eat habitually without hunger. Longnosed Parsi lawyers stabbed their food, using knives and forks with jurisprudential elegance. Gujarati businessmen, educated in the school of life, employed fingers, holding the crispy wafer of the bhelpuri and biting it competitively, as if they were afraid it might bite them first.
Though we live now in the suburbs, habit still drives us to the city, from where my parents return at evening. My father falls asleep in the backseat of the Ambassador, this car which is now ours after his retirement, and my mother too dozes upon his shoulder. In a place near the rear-window are laid out the day’s shopping, curved, inanimate objects my mother loves, such as spatulas and spoons, and little oases of food. The Ambassador is a spacious, box-like vehicle with a Taurean single-mindedness and a rickshaw’s tenacity. It is known as a ‘family car’; on Sundays, cousins and aunts on outings will sit, perspiring, inside it; I myself associate its hot floorboards, its aching gear-pulley, its recalcitrant pedals, with domesticity and the social events of childhood. Of all cars I know, it has perhaps the most uplifting name, as if its appointed office were to, wide-eyed, bring good news to the world. Meanwhile, our Ambassador joins the long, mournful crocodile of cars from Churchgate to Linking Road, and we know we are near home when we come to the Mahim Creek, where fishermen’s boats are parked upon the sand; here, even if your eyes should be closed, or if you should be entering the city from the direction of the airport, you will be woken by the smell of dried or rotting fish, a strong but pure odour blown inland, bitter and sharply intimate as the scent of a woman’s sex.
When it is evening in the lane, my parents go down and walk for half an hour. Their lonely parade, their quiet ambitiousness as they walk up and down the compound, sometimes conferring, is witnessed by a watchman in khaki, sitting on a steel chair beneath blue light. This is an exercise they have rediscovered from when my father was a student in London, and my mother his newly-married wife, introverted, with a red dot on her forehead and vermilion in the parting of her hair, awkward but warm in her huge green overcoat. Then, too, they would walk together the wet roads from Belsize Park to Swiss Cottage. Afterwards, they go upstairs, and my mother sits on the bed, reading the Afternoon Despatch and Courier. She turns first to the last page, where Busybee’s ‘Round and About’ is printed. Thus she continues this daily column about Bombay, its Irani restaurants, its post-offices, its buses, its cuisine, and this man’s fictional wife and his dog. Years ago, my mother and I fell in love with Busybee’s voice, its calm, even tone, and a smile which was always audible in the language. My father, meanwhile, is clipping his nails fastidiously, letting them fall on to an old, spread-out copy of the Times of India, till he sneezes explosively, as he customarily does, sending the crescentshaped nail clippings flying into the universe.