Bombay Time (3 page)

After a few minutes of speculating about the nefarious ways in which Jimmy Kanga made his fortune, Dosamai would cut to the chase. “Poor Coomi was here a minute ago, crying her eyes out. That husband of hers left her at home all dressed up and went to the recep-tion alone. Coomi says he came home, got dressed, and left the house, only. She sat for an hour thinking he would come back. Afterward, she removed her sari and just went to bed, all hungry. And you know how much Coomi likes the
lagan-nu-bhonu,
especially the Mughlai chicken and the
pallao-daar.”

“Oh, the bleddy liar,” Amy would say. “He told me Coomi had the flu. But right away, I was knowing he was lying, because he turned his lace away while he was talking.”

“What time did he come in?” Dosamai would ask eagerly.

“He was late. I know the first
paath
had finished eating before he walked in.”

“Ummmm,” Dosamai would mutter. “Something is as fishy as a pomfret. I think Rusi has some woman on the side.”

“Bechari
Coomi,” Amy would say. “Does she know?”

Soon, rumors would run from home to home like a telephone cable; idle speculation would harden into suspicion; suspicion would crystallize into truth, till half of Dosamai’s guerrilla army would be willing to swear that they had glimpsed Rusi hopping out of the taxi at Cama Baug, with a strange young woman blowing him a kiss before the cab carried her away.

Rusi Bilimoria was of an age where it mattered what the neighbors said about him. For many years, his naked ambition and the fact that he owned his own business, no matter how erratic his fortunes, had attracted their envy and attention. Gossip buzzed around him like flies at a picnic; rumors danced around him like ghosts. But unlike the days of his ambitious youth, Rusi no longer wanted their awe or admiration. Now all he wanted was their approval. And failing that, he wanted them simply to leave him alone. So Rusi Bilimoria gritted his teeth and waited for Coomi to get dressed.

Despite himself, he could not help the rush of admiration when Coomi finally emerged from her room, wrapped up in her rose-colored sari. After all these years, Coomi was still an attractive woman. Unlike most of the women he knew, her body had not taken on the doughlike softness of age. The once-black hair was now splecked with gray but the darting dark eyes were as sharp as ever. The long nose was even more prominent now as it hung over the full, sensual lips. And yet, as he discreetly studied that face, Rusi wondered at the loss of the cheery, openhearted woman he had once loved. They used to laugh so much in the early days. Their entire group of friends had been drunk with youth and madcap playfulness, it seemed, the older members of the group as ready for a laugh as the younger ones like Rusi and Jimmy. Practical jokes, daredevil stunts, outrageous dares had made up their days: Zarin Kanga refusing to marry Jimmy until after he’d caught a stray pig for her. Soli Contractor drinking twelve Cokes on a dare and then retching at the sight of the soft drink for years. Bomi Mistry walking down the street wearing glasses with no lenses and scaring passersby when he scratched his eyes through them. How he himself had loved playing tricks on Coomi, how he’d loved it when she’d pretend to scold him and he’d pretend to be chastised. And the inevitable moment when her mock anger would be eaten up by her involuntary smile.

Like the time they’d all gone to Khandala in his car. Six or seven of them, all packed into his tiny Fiat. They were approaching a particularly steep hill when the devil got into him. He winked at his male friends, Jimmy and Bomi, silently asking them to play along. Halfway up the hill, he made the car splutter and then come to an abrupt halt. Somehow, he convinced the girls that they had to push the car uphill. The boys scattered, pretending to flag other cars down. And when, at the top of the hill, the car magically started and he finally let the women in on the joke, he thought he would die laughing. God, they were angry! Coomi especially, her dark eyes flashing as she lectured him on his bad manners and twisted sense of humor. But later, he looked at her in the rearview mirror and she smiled at him and then quickly looked away before any of the others could notice. Something lurched in his chest then, like a muscle spasm. After that, he began to pay special attention to her, noticed how quick she was to laugh and how she stood up to him in a way the other women did not.

Since Coomi lived in the same neighborhood as Rusi, he had seen her around for years. But until they were in their twenties, they had never exchanged a word. Coomi was never part of the group of boys and girls Rusi had been friends with his whole life. It was only after Coomi met Sheroo Mistry in college that Sheroo brought her into the group. Still, Rusi never paid her much attention. At that time, he had a crush on Tina, a voluptuous girl with fierce dark eyebrows and lips soft as red cushions. Tina was a wonderful cook, and every Sunday Rusi went over for lunch to eat Tina’s legendary chicken
dhansak,
under the watchful eye of Tina’s father and hovering great-aunt. “Here’s a nice fat piece of chicken. Eat more,
na,
Rusi,” the girl would urge him, heaping more of the delicious rice and spicy
daal
onto his plate. In this way, Rusi figured out that Tina liked him. But when he tried to talk to her about how he felt, she would giggle and move away from him. “Enough,
na,
Rusi. All you boys want to do this
kissy-koti,
only. I am a girl from a good family,
baba.”
One Sunday afternoon, smarting from having lost a bid for a job and fired by the determination to try even harder, he poured his heart out to Tina. But the fire of his ambition singed her. “Hey, Rusi, stop this crazy big-shot talk,
yaar,”
she said. “I swear, sometimes you scare me. Why are you always wanting what’s not there? Everybody says you are a show-off, and they are correct.” Her words hurt him more than they’d any right to. His mouth suddenly tasted of dry ashes and the Sunday meal lasted forever as he went through the motions of praising Tina’s cooking and making small talk with her father. When he left that day, his heart was cold. He never went back.

Coomi was different. He felt she understood him, understood that all he had were his dreams. Even when she teased him, there were places she never went to. “It’s funny,” he once said to her. “You are the only person I know who is not afraid of my dreaming. Even my mamma sometimes looks at me like I’m mad.” She looked him right in the eye, then. “I’ll be afraid the day you stop dreaming,” she said seriously. He knew at that moment that he would someday marry her, that he had found a woman who would carry his boat to the shore.

So many hopes we had, he now thought. Each one of them dashed. What happened? Why did we let it? Would it have been different if Mamma had not lived with us? So many of our early quarrels had to do with Mamma. Or maybe I really did have an unrealistic expectation of marriage, like Soli says. “Too many Hollywood movies you are seeing,
bossie,”
his best friend, Soli Contractor, always told him. “After all, what do you expect? That all bloody women will be Ingrid Bergman, or what?”

After all these years, it came down to this: They were different. After marriage, Coomi showed a side he’d never seen before. She could be moody, cruel, caustic. And since he had never grown some essential layer of protective skin, her words directly pierced his bones, settling there like cancer. Coomi used words like razors, as weapons with which to cut. To Rusi, words were like the offerings of sandalwood he took to the fire temple—scented, delicate, beautiful. Coomi always claimed that the words she said in anger were pieces of paper that flew away once they left her mouth. But to Rusi, they were poison darts, powerful enough to destroy a man.

Coomi had grown up with several older brothers, all of them big, burly men whose favorite pastime was cutting one another with an insult or a crude quip. Rusi was an only child, raised by a genteel widowed mother whose only mode of chastisement was a disappointed silence. Hurts stuck to Rusi like fat to the ribs. Rusi’s warehouse of resentments bewildered Coomi. But he was devastated by his wife’s careless, cruel words. He was especially hurt when those words were directed toward his mother. Coomi tried to tell him she didn’t mean what she said in moments of rage, that her temper flashed and died out like a match struck in the wind. He tried to tell her that he was a different kind of man, that he felt defenseless against the gust of her anger.

It became a pattern. Coomi would erupt. Rusi would withdraw into his shell. Sometimes, they went months without talking to each other. As their only child, Binny, grew older, she ran around like a mail carrier, relaying messages from one parent to the other. Then, in his desperate need for comfort, sex, love, kindness, he would go to Coomi again. After months of distancing, she would make him smile again with a sharp, witty observation. Or she would roll toward him in the middle of the night and hold him close until lust melted his resentment. For many years, each reconciliation was loaded with hope. Maybe she’s learned her lesson this time, he’d think. And after all, she’s basically a good woman. In later years, he went to her, while hating himself for his weakness, for needing her so.

Neither one of us realized how vital Binny was in keeping our marriage afloat, Rusi now thought. If Binny had not left for England, I wonder if the boat of our marriage would’ve ever leaked this openly? And then Mamma dying a few years after Binny moved out. Rusi remembered how in the weeks after his mother’s death, Coomi had tried hard for a reconciliation with her husband. But it was much too late. By then, Rusi had learned how to harden himself to Coomi. He taught himself how to rearrange his face, made it go blank in Coomi’s presence, as if it were covered by a translucent plastic sheet. He knew it scared Coomi, this blankness, this cool detachment. The bewildered hurt, the wounded expression in his eyes, the occasional outpouring of his bitterness, Coomi was used to those. But this indifference was something new and dangerous. Rusi himself thought he acted like a virgin each time Coomi touched him, flinching at the most casual contact. But he couldn’t help it. He was polite to her, considerate even. But the light had gone out of his eyes. He treated her as if they were strangers sharing the same train compartment.

Some days, Rusi found this indifference the easiest thing in the world to stick by. Other days, he had to force himself to carry out the part he’d taken upon himself. Seeing the wound in Coomi’s eyes, watching her struggle to match his frostiness with her own, his heart ached with regret and sorrow. He believed that Coomi had destroyed his life, and yet, despite himself, he did not relish the thought of destroying hers. In his heart of hearts, he believed Coomi was the reason he had never been wildly successful in his business. “You ruined me,” he once said to her. “I could have been as successful as the Tatas or Birlas by now, but how could I concentrate, with half my mind always worried about you and Mamma fighting at home?”

She looked at him with contempt. “Everybody is to blame but yourself. You started with no college degree, no business contacts, no money in your pocket, but still
I’m
the reason you failed? No, I’m just a convenient scapegoat, Rusi. All you had were your ridiculous dreams. But you can’t feed a family for even a day for the price of a dream.”

Even now, the memory of that conversation made his eyes sting. Hearing Coomi’s impatient tapping of her feet, Rusi forced himself back into the present. No use ruining this evening with ghosts from the past. Besides, he could tell that Coomi was waiting for him to say something, to comment on her appearance. He opened his mouth to compliment her but decided he was too tired to make small talk. “Ready?” he asked.

As soon as they stepped outside of Wadia Baug, they were cornered by Bhoot, the one-armed man who was Rusi’s favorite resident beggar. “Rusi
seth,”
Bhoot said in his usual ingratiating tone. “May Allah shower his blessings on you. Some money,
sahib,
so that old Bhoot can eat some
daal-roti
tonight.”

Rusi reached for a one-rupee coin and carefully dropped it in Bhoot’s dented bowl, making sure he didn’t accidentally touch it. Bhoot braced himself for the inevitable lecture that followed. “Make sure you use the money for food, not for your cheap country
daru,
you hear?” Rusi said in his sternest voice.
“Saala,
if I found out you’re using the money to drink ...” The rest of his sentence was drowned out in Bhoot’s vehement shaking of his head, no, no, no. Every day, they went through this charade, both knowing that once Rusi turned away, they would each go back to occupying their very different worlds, without the slightest chance of Rusi being able to monitor how Bhoot lived in his own subterranean world.

It took them fifteen minutes to get a taxi. They were turned down by three cabdrivers before the fourth one told them to get in. Rusi climbed in with relief, but a second later, he screwed up his nose. On the dashboard, amid taped pictures of Hindu gods, were two sweet-smelling sticks of incense. The smoke made his nostrils tickle and he rolled down his window as fast as he could. He knew better than to ask the driver to put out the incense. In America, they ask your permission before they light a cigarette in their own house, he thought. Here, these fools burn these sticks in a public vehicle. He stared out of the window in mute frustration.

Last year, he had decided to sell his car. He was getting too old and irritable to drive in a city where thousands of snarling, noisy vehicles attacked one another daily. The sweat, the grime, the black exhaust fumes of the double-decker BEST buses, the bleeping horns, the constant stream of people who darted in front of traffic—all were too much for him. The end of his driving life came on a Monday morning as he sat stuck in a traffic jam at Bori Bunder. The chaotic scene before him hit him with all the power of a blow to the head. “This is like hell,” he said out loud. “No. This
is
hell.” He sold his car the next week.

Still, there were times when he missed the exhilaration of driving—those heavenly nights when traffic moved briskly down the wide lanes of Worli Sea Face and he felt the spray of the sea across three lanes of traffic; his first glimpse of the setting sun as he flew down the flyover bridge at Kemp’s Corner; the dexterous weaving in and out of traffic that he did on his way to an important meeting.