“Mr. Mitra!”
There was a man smiling widely at him, a half-empty Coke bottle with a straw in one hand.
“I hope you remember me; or do I need to introduce myself?”
“No, I don’t remember you; but I spoke to someone at the club just the other day who looks very like you, a Mr. Amiya Sarbadhikari,” said Mr. Mitra jovially, taking a sip of faintly chilled Fanta. A large painting of a middle-aged woman holding flowers faced them.
They talked equably of recent changes in their companies, catching up from where they’d left it in their last exchange; then to their children, and a brief disagreement about whether civil engineering had a future as a career today.
“Oh, I think so,” said Mr. Sarbadhikari, “certainly in the developing world, in the Middle East, if not in the West.” His Coke bottle was now almost empty; he held it symbolically, putting off finishing the dregs to a moment later. There was an uneasiness in their conversation, though, as if they were avoiding something; it was their being here they were avoiding. Of course, people never remembered the dead at shraddh ceremonies; they talked about other things; but that forgetfulness occurred effortlessly. In this case, the avoidance was strategic and self-conscious; the conversation tripped from subject to subject.
“Mr. Mitra, all this Coke has swollen my bladder,” said Sarbadhikari suddenly, “and, actually, from the moment I stepped in…”
From his manner it looked like he was familiar with Talukdar’s flat. Gathering the folds of his dhuti in one hand, he turned histrionically and padded off in the direction of a bathroom door. A child, the only one among the people who’d come, ran from one end of the hall to the other. There were a few people on the balcony; Mr. Mitra decided to join them.
“I told them,” a woman was saying to a companion, “this is no way to run a shop; if you don’t exchange a purchase, say so, but don’t sell damaged goods.”
He quietly put down the bottle of Fanta on the floor. There wasn’t much of a view; there was the wall, which ran towards the street you couldn’t see, and another five-storeyed building with little, pretty balconies. Below him was the porch to the left, and the driveway, which seemed quite close. A young woman, clearly not a maidservant, was hanging towels from the railing in one of the balconies opposite.
Did it happen here? He looked at the woman attach clips to another towel. Apparently those who always threaten to, don’t. Anjali had been living with her parents for a month after leaving her husband. She’d left him before, but this time she’d said her intentions were clear and final. There was a rumour that her parents had not been altogether sympathetic, and had been somewhat obtuse; but it’s easy to be lucid with hindsight. He was still hungry, and he looked back into the hall to see if he could spot the man with the sandesh. But he had temporarily disappeared. As he moved about exploratorily, he caught his wife’s eye and nodded at her as if to say, Yes, I’m coming, and, Yes, it’s been a waste of time.
Cautiously, he tried to trace, from memory, the route that he’d seen Sarbadhikari take about ten minutes ago. He found himself in a bedroom where the double bed had been covered neatly with a pink bedcover; he coughed loudly. He opened a door to what might be the bathroom and, once inside, closed it behind him again. As he urinated into the commode, he studied a box, printed with flowers, of Odomos room freshener kept above it; then he shivered involuntarily, and shrugged his shoulders. He had a vaguely unsatisfying feeling, as if the last half hour had lacked definition.
Once inside the car, he said to his wife, “I don’t know about you, but I’m quite ravenous.”
Prelude to an Autobiography: A Fragment
I FELT THE URGE to write this after I began to read Shobha De’s memoirs. If she can write her memoir, I thought, so can I. For who would have thought, Shobha De least of all, that one day she would write her life story for other people to read? She had been an ordinary, if beautiful, girl who got recruited (as she says) from a middle-class home into modelling, never particularly interested in studies (I was the same at her age), and then, through accident and ambition, got married into one of Bombay’s richest families, started her own magazine and began writing her own gossip column, got divorced, reinvented herself as a writer of middles for Bombay newspapers, married again, became India’s first successful pulp novelist, and now has written her memoirs. Through what a strange chain of events people arrive at the world of writing — and Shobha De’s tranformation has been one of the most unexpected in my lifetime. It shows me the endless possibilities of the society we have lived in. And I ask myself the question: if she can be a writer, and inscribe her thoughts and impressions in language, why not I?
There’s the question, of course, of who would want to read my memoirs, or whatever it is I’m setting out to write — because I’m not altogether sure what it is. But (although I’ve never seen myself as a writer before) these are questions, I’m certain, that preoccupy (inasmuch as I can enter the mind of a writer) all who write (it’s an area I know little about). And it consoles me to think that at one time every writer must have done what I’m doing now, starting out and not knowing where it was leading to. It’s not a feeling you can communicate to someone who’s never tried it. Some people, I’m sure, end up taking this route by intention and dedication, after years of preparation — my daughter has a friend who, at thirteen, is already writing lovely poems that have been published in Femina and her school magazine; I’m sure she’ll be a fine writer one day, and she looks set for that course. Others, like myself, and probably Shobha De, arrive at that route by chance (although Shobha De very differently from me), and it’s from her that I take a kind of courage, that she should have ended up a writer, although it makes me smile even as I say it.
Yet I’m not quite sure of my English, though it’s the only language I have. My knowledge of the Indian languages is passing; I can speak a smattering of a few, but can’t read or write any one of them with authority. I was born in Patna, of a Gujarati mother and a father who is a deracinated Andhra Brahmin; my link to any Indian language became, thus, tenuous. I’m not sure who’d be interested in any of this, though; why should anyone want to know why I write in English, or who my parents were, or how they came to be my parents? But I take heart from small things, besides the uncontrollable urge to get on with the job at hand, an urge that I don’t quite understand; “small things” like the fact that a new writer comes into being almost every day. This is terrifying, but it also gives me (and, I’m sure, many others like me) the impetus to take the first step. I don’t necessarily admire all the writers around me, but sometimes it is good to have their presences about (many of them will not be heard of again) as I start out on this venture.
* * *
MY HUSBAND CAME IN a little earlier from the office yesterday than he usually does, energetic but starved, and he caught me sitting alone, looking out at the sea. “What are you doing?” he asked quizzically; and I started. I think I looked guilty. I knew we had a party to go to in the evening. How could I tell him that I was trying to do something I became ashamed of the moment he entered, that I was trying to frame a sentence?
* * *
I WENT TO a Christian school, and learnt to speak the words of the Lord’s Prayer before I knew what they were. This was in the hot hall of my convent in Patna, with a few hundred other girls, only a few of whose names I remember. I mumbled the words without knowing what they were, and never have found out; but I spoke them reverentially and grew up believing in God. Whenever I thought of a Supreme Deity, which was not often but not altogether infrequently, either, it was God I thought of, rather than “parameshwar” or “ishwar.” But I have never been inside a church, except as a tourist in Goa.