of Altamount Road each morning. Once,
he came to my flat and stood before
the series of encyclopaedias on my shelves
that my father had bought me, and said, with the slightest
hint of irony and envy, and only
the remotest suggestion of judgement:
“Do you ever read these?” I prevaricated
guiltily; he didn’t wait for my reply
but picked one up and went through its pages
intently, as if he’d consume them in a glance.
I’m sure he must be in America,
and that tenacity, which took him running two miles
in the morning, probably got him somewhere at last.
As for me, I took my chances with teachers and exams.
I kept long hair; let my mind wander;
was reprimanded, and yet I managed
to keep afloat. Suresh, who was never expected
to shine in studies, blemished his record further
by refusing to participate in competitive sports
and antagonising his house master, Lewis, the maths teacher,
for whom such things mattered. Suresh had become
a compulsive daydreamer, sitting
on the first row to the left, next to the large, sweet,
but dim Yugoslav beauty, Biljana Obradovic.
He was short but good-looking, with a hooked nose and a slouch,
attractive to girls. Sujata Birla’s attentions
were a source of discomfiture (“She walks funny”), but he liked
Rehab Barodawalla, and the way, by late
morning, her socks would settle into two rings
at the bottom of her ankles. Later, in junior college,
we met again, but our interest in each other
had waned. I, for one, had become more “poetic.”
I could grow my hair as long as I wanted now. My father
was Chief Executive; we lived in a five-room apartment
on the twenty-fifth floor in Cuffe Parade.
My problem was how to suffer, for I knew
suffering to be essential to art; and yet
there was little cause for suffering; I had loving parents
and everything I required. I disowned our Mercedes-
Benz, took the 106 bus, but remained
unable to solve my lack of want.
I pretended to be poor; I wore khadi.
My parents hosted ever larger parties.
I grew thin and consumptive worrying about the absence
of poverty in my life, and the continued, benign
attendance of parents who were good and kind:
all the wrong ingredients, I feared, for the birth
of poetry. Starting to study for O
and A levels, I lost touch with college friends.
Taking long walks down Cuffe Parade towards
Regal Cinema, I only ever visited Elphinstone
College at night, passing the beediwalla
and the bus stop where commuters stood waiting;
here, where once I’d “hung out”
with fellow students, were desultory families,
playing cards on the pavement, each, insouciantly,
revealing their hand to the passerby; prostitutes
glowed palely against pillars guarding the college and Lund
& Blockley, where students at day glanced right
a moment before they crossed the road; and addicts
of smack who loitered between these, speaking
a lingua of broken English and Bombay Hindi,
with whom I opened conversations that ended
in a wry plea for money. They didn’t want you for company
but to slip in that plea. We came to know
each other by sight. Thus that curved stretch
before Elphinstone, going past Flora Fountain,
towards Dadabhai Naoroji Road, where the pillars
became Zoroastrian lions, containing their power,
the banks closed, the odd mix of activity
and purpose at eleven-thirty at night, the road
seeming to widen on the left where my school
and childhood and the sugarcane-juice stall used to be.
Nineteen eighty-three, I left for England. In ’85,
on my annual trip home, searching for the car
in the parking lot in Kala Ghoda between
Rhythm House and the Jehangir Art Gallery, I heard
my name being called out: “Amit.” I turned
and saw it was Suresh beckoning to me
from behind the Ambassador. I went up to him
and said, as if I were seeing him after a fortnight’s absence
from school, “Suresh! Where have you been?”
“Good to see you — where are you these days?” He was taller
than me now: about six feet tall,
good-looking, if dressed in average working clothes,
crouched behind the car as if he were hiding behind it.
“I’m in England — I’m back for a few months—
but tell me about yourself.” As the art crowd in kurtas
ascended the wide steps of the Gallery, he lowered
his voice melodramatically: “I’m fucked,
yaar. I need help. Amit, will you be my friend?”
Disarmed by this straightforward appeal, I asked,
“Why, what’s the matter?” as if I’d already said “Yes”
to the question. Truth to tell, I needed a friend
myself at that time. We go to each other
from our own private compulsions. I’ve seldom
been wholly comfortable or open
with people who share my background or “interests”
and have ended up acquiring an eclectic set
of companions. “I’m on smack, yaar,” he said.
There were no outward signs. He had shaved; his trousers
were conventionally pressed; his hair combed back
and oiled. “So it’s true, what I heard. How did it
happen?” “It happened in Elphi…” We were walking;
he nodded to the stall with cigarettes and Frooti
tetrapacks beyond the BEST terminus,
and the scurrying ragpickers beside it. “Those bastards are pushers.
A friend from Elphi said, ‘Just have a drag, yaar.’”
He shook his head with a sort of pride. “That’s how
I got hooked. That bastard, if I could take my re-
re-revenge…” He looked oddly pleased with himself,
compromised only by the blip of the stammer
that would infrequently return, like a signal,
to his speech, and once made one or two girls giggle.
I entered his life; saw him join “rehab” with Dr.
Yusuf Merchant, get his father to pay
for both his habit and his rehabilitation
— his father, whom he so resembles, both of them
complaining about each other and bickering
like a married couple — try to escape to Dubai
or to hotel management or a brief job as a Blue Dart
courier; during clear intervals
reluctantly “help” his father with his small-time
but extant business, making industrial accessories.
What foolish illusion made that man
put his son in Cathedral, among the children of the Tatas,
minor ministers, consuls, film actors
and actresses (Nutan’s son; I remember her waiting
for him, thin and nervous, in slacks, after school;
Sunil Dutt’s daughter, gentle, with kohl
in her eyes)? Three sisters; the youngest got married
and moved to Prabhadevi; a tame and stable marriage
after infatuation and heartbreak with a German. The oldest,
whose sexual persuasion Suresh claimed he wasn’t sure of,
emigrated to Germany; the one in the middle
stayed single, and works for a travel agent, one
of the two rented rooms this family lives in
in Colaba, partitioned between brother and sister.
“Why doesn’t she go away?” he’d ask