‘You can have it,’ Rashid said. ‘I don’t want it.’
I saw a jar, with the dentures Rumi had tried to sell Rashid, and I asked if I could have them.
‘What will you do with it? Sell it to the government for millions of rupees? Take whatever you want. Jamal wants to throw it all away.’
I picked my way through the things in the trunk, making two small piles. The opium pipe and dentures I put in one pile. I added a newspaper cutting from the Indian Express, a copy of a school textbook, some notebooks, and an issue of Sex Detective.
Rashid said, ‘What will you do with all of this?’
‘Who knows? Make a museum exhibit, maybe.’
‘Yes, why not? Put our shame on display, so people understand the lowest of the low, prostitutes and criminals and drug addicts, people with no faith in God or man, no faith in anything except the truth of their own senses. This is a worthwhile thing to you?’
His voice was very weak, as if it had to travel a great distance to be heard. The light in the room began to fade and there were shapes in the air outside, small whip-like shapes moving between the mango trees. We sat together as the room got dark. The girl put on the lights when she left, but the table lamps only made everything dimmer, bathing each object in a weak yellow gleam. Rashid was immobile, but when I got up to leave he got up too, and in the twilight, with the old ghosts swimming in the air between us, I saw the confusion in his eyes.
*
I want to tell you something, he said. I know what you did. You put her in the centre and that was a good thing. But she came back. Did you know that? When she was sick, she came back to her old room to die. I knew she was sick because she spent most of the day sitting in a chair, just sitting, like an old man. And then, the week after Id, she got worse and Dr Belani came to see her, our old Sindhi family doctor. He whispered to me that she was very ill, but with her he joked, told her she had the constitution of a bullock, and Zeenat, also joking, said it was not a flattering comparison. Later she told me, I know what he said to you, there’s nothing wrong with my hearing. She told me not to worry, that she wasn’t planning to die just yet. But almost from that day there was a change in her. No, no, not then, it was after she came back from the hospital. We had to take her to hospital for the treatment, the terrible treatment, which made her hair fall out and gave her more pain than the sickness. And when she came back she was changed. She told me there was a window in the back of the ambulance that carried her to the hospital, and as she lay there she looked out and caught a glimpse of the sky and some trees, and she could see the attendant and the driver, and these ordinary sights filled her with joy and gratitude. Why joy? I asked her. Why gratitude, of all things? Because, she said, I knew what a lucky life I was given and I understood everything: the exact meaning of the sun in the infinite sky and the trees trembling around us and the people hungry for affection, and I understood how foolish it was to be proud or angry, and, most of all, how wrong it was to withhold affection from those who need it most, which is to say, everyone. That’s all. I understood how lucky I was to know this at last, maybe a little too late, but at least I knew. I thought it was her sickness that made her say those things, but still, Nasrani, it brought tears to my eyes to see her so radiant, and the way she spoke, as if she was in some kind of ecstasy. I am beloved, she said. And you, dear friend, you’re beloved too. This is what she said. After she died, I gave up the business. I learned to pray, not five times, but six, eight times a day. I prayed all the time, but the worm could not be killed by prayer. It was still inside me. You see, I realized I wasn’t praying to praise God, I was praying for my own selfish reasons, but such is God’s mercy that he listened to my entreaties. This is the meaning of mercy, wouldn’t you say, when it is offered to the undeserving? So I sat in my chair and I prayed and eventually I was rewarded. One evening I heard a door closing downstairs, in Zeenat’s apartment. I heard a toilet flush and a chair scrape against the floor. This is a quiet building, sound carries in the night. I didn’t do anything at first. I continued to pray, but I knew where the sounds were coming from. Some nights later, I heard a door bang and I went down. The room was as she left it, it still is, you saw. I sat on the bed and waited. The door was open and I thought it was only a matter of time until she appeared. But she didn’t, she didn’t appear. I went back to my routine, I prayed, I slept, and again one night I heard something downstairs. This time I decided I would wait all night if I had to, but I fell asleep. When I woke, I realized she wouldn’t come. I went to use the toilet and that’s where I found her, sitting on the seat. Her eyes were full of fear. I asked, What took you so long? I told her about my life, about how I had given up nasha and filled my mind with prayer. I talked about my family, about my loneliness, about her. I told her how much I missed her. I asked her again, What took you so long to come? I said I’d been hoping she would return to haunt me. And that was the only moment when she seemed her old self. She said, Haunt? Listen to me: I’m not a ghost. I’m still here. I’ve been here all this time but I kept out of your way. Dead do not always become ghosts. We are like dreams that travel from one person to the other. We return, but only if you love us. I told her she didn’t have to explain anything to me. I said I would be happy if she were only to sit with me for a little while. You see, Nasrani, I’ve become a foolish old man. I still talk to her, more and more as the days go by.
*
When I got back to the apartment in Bandra, I looked at the papers I’d salvaged from Dimple’s house, the magazine advertisements for Duckback rubber sheeting and semi-automatic washing machines and Sri Balaji’s instant bumper lottery, first prize Rs. 10 lakhs; the photographs of congressmen and criminals; the opinion pieces on sex and money and the city’s crumbling infrastructure, and it struck me that the pieces could, with minor changes, be reprinted in that day’s newspaper and no one would be any wiser. In a notebook I found unfinished lists: the names of night watches; a comparison of smells, for instance, the smell of cordite against that of sulphur; several definitions of the word remorse; and handwritten pages, a story or dream, titled ‘The Enfolding’, in which a small child falls asleep in a house from which the adults have vanished. The child runs around the house in panic. Then he learns. He waits in the empty rooms and maze-like gardens. He tends the flowers. He grows into young adulthood. He keeps himself fit and alert and he waits. He lives in ‘a world’, wrote Dimple, ‘in which only pain was real’. Most of the story was taken up by the closing paragraph in which the boy waits by a parapet near the ocean. Behind him, the old house and the sky reeling with birds. He looks out to sea, waiting for the lights of a ship. He imagines he can see tiny yellow or blue pinpoints that grow larger in the night but vanish with first light. Who is he waiting for? How long must he endure the rigors of his vigil? What are the bearable consequences of loneliness? These questions are raised in the course of the story, though they are nowhere answered. I fell asleep reading and late at night I heard footsteps on the ceiling, things dropping, coughs and whispers. I woke up saying, Who is it? I thought I heard voices outside my door. My neighbours on the left were a family of four in a space as small as mine. I never saw the father, a labouring man who came home only to sleep. They kept their doors and windows open all day, there was no other way to live in the tiny space. The younger child, a girl of about six, read her homework aloud. I sat on the couch in my room and listened to her real voice. ‘When the sun rises we say good morning.’ When I opened my door at noon, she and her mother looked at me with curiosity, or pity. If I could hear them, they could surely hear me, talking with my invisible guests. I introduced myself. I said: Ullis is my name. These are my friends. This is what we did. These are the things we said and dreamed. Mother and daughter looked at me and then they looked behind me, as if they too could see the shapes that filled the air. Late that night, after my neighbours had gone to bed, I cleared a space in the small room and set up an oil lamp and the pipe. This is the story the pipe told me. All I did was write it down, one word after the other, beginning and ending with the same one, Bombay.