‘More coffee?’
‘No.’ Leela unfolded her legs. ‘I have to go.’
‘I’ll walk you back,’ Vikram said. They got down from the marble ledge where they’d been sitting next to the open window, a mosquito gadget behind her burning its sweetish-smelling tablet.
Not since she’d been in Bombay had she found this kind of friendship: a relaxed expanse of time spent with someone, sometimes eating or drinking beer, but mostly talking. There was an eagerness about him that she had to respond to.
They went down in the lift and out of the lobby, the somnolent watchman rising from his stool as they came out. The night was warm as bath water. They rounded the corner, where heavy bougainvillea spilled over a wall. ‘This corner makes me think of Pondy. Honestly, Leela, you should go to Pondy.’ He was smoking a cigarette and threw the end at the base of the wall.
‘Pondicherry?’
‘Go to the ashram. It’s a great place. Just to walk around – it’s like the quiet parts of Colaba but quieter. Cleaner. A great place to meditate or just be.’
‘Shouldn’t you be able to meditate anywhere?’
‘Yeah, in theory, but some places …’ His attention was always wandering; it would come to a point, though it was hard to predict what made him pause; then it would drift. But when it did pause, there was an intensity that she liked.
They walked down a side lane, past a hotel, an attar shop, a bundle of human being sleeping in a doorway, someone smoking near a cigarette stall. A rat was busy in the gutter.
The sound of their chappals, the swish of her trouser hems against each other, brought back an early memory: her father taking her to school in the rains, the legs of his corduroy trousers singing as they brushed each other; the sound and the need for hurry; the green, guttery smell of the rain.
At the hostel, Vikram said a brief goodbye at the last streetlamp before the gate. He didn’t linger. Last week, she’d tried to give him a hug, and he’d stood, patient but board-like, before smiling and leaving. He always waited until she walked into the gate. Leela, embarrassed, would avoid the eyes of the older nightwatchman, who sat on his stool late at night singing his prayers. She’d go in, sign the register, get her mail, and walk up the stairs: the lift was shut off at ten.
The fluorescent light of her room would be transformed against the darkness, and she’d sit on her bed, staring through the window, or stand on the balcony, feeling the night and its warmth, and the small distance from the room where she’d been talking to Vikram. The city stopped being an entity in itself; it became a backdrop.
On Monday afternoon for the fourth week running she loitered outside a building on A road, Churchgate. Opposite, a college or club had a dowdy sign; people filed in and out. Cars jostled for parking space.
‘Ah, hey, sorry, come, let’s go up.’ Vikram arrived; his hand was briefly on her shoulder. They started up the stairs, and stopped at the third floor. One door was slightly ajar, and outside it there were several sets of slippers.
She would think of the room later and wonder about her nervousness the first time she’d walked in. That persisted for a while; then it became usual, and the lack of surprise was something to flaunt. She’d drop her chappals near the door, breeze in, and go to her favourite space near the back, by the window. A sliver of sunlight got in through the blinds. Fans were on. You could hear traffic.
A man in white kurta-pyjama got up and went to the altar at the front of the room, where there were flowers and a picture of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. He lit bunches of incense sticks, and a heady scent of flowers filled the room. People closed their eyes.
Leela closed hers too. She sat a metre behind Vikram. Sometimes he was on her left, or they were separated by another person. He became remote, still. She had at first found it threatening, looked to him for a response, but there was none, and she’d concentrated instead on appearing to be so lost in her meditation that she was unaware of the outside world. This made her more antsy than usual, but it was pleasant to open her eyes and watch people fidget, feel the silence, or gaze out of the window, unobserved, except when one of the facilitators saw her and discreetly looked away.
When her eyes were closed, her thoughts sprinted. She thought of Vikram, in a heated, hurried way. Did he like her? How much? What would happen between them? She needed to know as soon as possible; at the same time, she found it difficult to envisage change. Time passed; just as she slipped into unawareness of herself, someone would rustle to the front and ring the bell.
The first time, she and Vikram had ended up walking home, until their paths diverged, when he’d said with some embarrassment, ‘Well, I have to go this way.’
‘See you,’ Leela had said, sounding to herself like Richard.
Today she waited outside for him, examining the traffic. It had calmed. The sea at the end of the street sent a haze into the sky. She had an urge to walk along the wide pavement of Marine Drive, then sit on the sun-warmed ledge. When she had first come to Bombay, or come back, in the evenings after work she used to walk here. She had felt embarrassed to be alone, but less than in many places; and she had liked the weird, democratic streams of people passing each way, either walking for exercise, or dawdling, or sitting, or canoodling, or laughing, or looking at girls. Many people sat with their backs to the sea, facing the traffic. There were the south Bombayites, those who lived perhaps in Chowpatty or Malabar Hill or Colaba. And there were poor students, feral-eyed young people conducting love affairs in low tones, sitting very close together.
‘Do you want to go for coffee?’ Vikram had come down. He stood next to her, tall and apparently belonging to the part of the world that had sense and place, not whimsy; she admired his worn, short-sleeved cotton shirt, his sandals and the past summers they evoked.
‘Can we – I want to go for a walk on Marine Drive. For a bit anyway.’
‘Okay,’ he said. They passed parked cars, taxis, and the quiet Deco blocks set back from the road. At the main road they waited to cross.
Every time she saw the sea she felt glad, as though its movement expressed a secret blitheness that allowed the city to continue. The city without sight of the sea was serious, a determined climbing up narrow ladders to opportunity, but with anxiety, commuters pushing away others.
Vikram raised his eyebrows at her and smiled.
‘I like the way the sea makes you forget anything serious,’ she said. They were walking slowly in the direction of Girgaum.
‘How do you mean?’
‘It’s playful.’
‘The sea? I suppose it depends. Not when you’re on it. Not for fishermen.’ His white shirt flapped against him.
‘Fishermen.’ She smiled. ‘But its movement, the way it’s always in motion.’ She walked, feeling the thin chappals hit the warm tarmac. The breeze struck her side-on and the last sun was on the large-leaved, odd trees that had been planted here some time, when? She didn’t know. ‘What are these trees anyway?’
‘No idea. Some sort of badam?’
‘They’re weird. Weren’t there coconut trees here once?’
‘This end? I don’t know.’
‘I feel like …’ She tailed off.
Vikram smiled. She knew he was amused by her determined love for the city.
‘You feel like you’re going to write a poem to the palm trees?’
‘I feel like I’m going to throw a nariyal at anyone who says annoying things.’
‘Let’s sit.’ He was one of those Bombayites who say they love to walk.
They found a spot on the wide, warm parapet and looked out to sea.
Leela took off her chappals, placed them beside her, felt paranoid about someone running off with one as a joke, and crossed her legs in a half-lotus. ‘What do you really think about during meditation?’ she asked.
He laughed mid-exhalation. ‘You don’t beat about the bush, do you?’ In these old-fashioned idioms she thought she heard his original accent, rather than the neutral, sometimes American-inflected, sometimes English accent in which he ordinarily spoke.
She stared out towards Walkeshwar. The sun was orange, sinking, the sky flared peach. There were houses down there, at the water’s edge, but they were small. At the end of the peninsula, the Governor’s land.
‘Well?’
‘A lot of things, distraction. I try to empty my mind. You’re a funny girl,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I think about you.’
Leela, her stomach jumping, was afraid to turn, but not only out of maidenish diffidence. ‘About me?’
His face was unreadable, still handsome, tanned, apparently candid. ‘Among other things.’
‘Oh.’
‘You cross my mind.’
‘Right, right.’ She became aware of being uncomfortable, and changed legs.
‘You do yoga?’
‘Why?’
‘That’s an asana.’
‘Not a real one.’ She looked down at the sea, and also the tide going out, the dirty beach below. All kinds of rubbish: a rope that had once been a plastic bag, grit, the wrapper from a bag of chips, a tampon that they both looked away from at the same time. ‘I used to do some yoga in London, and a bit when I was a child. My father practises, or used to. But it was very irritating. He’d keep telling me to do it every time I got stressed out, he’d say, you shouldn’t get so worked up, why don’t you learn yoga, that in itself put me off for a long time.’
He was grinning.
‘I did some Iyengar classes for a while,’ she went on, ‘my flatmate was going to them. I do some stuff at the hostel, but I should get a book or something.’
‘I have a book, a really simple one, from Pondy. It’s old-fashioned, but it has all the basic asanas. You could take it.’
‘Don’t you need it?’
‘I don’t use it. I could get up and meet my mother’s yoga teacher in the morning if I wanted. I’ll find it for you. It has photographs, it’s clear.’
‘Okay.’
‘My bottom has gone to sleep, do you want to see the sun set or what?’
‘Or what.’
‘We can if you want,’ he said mildly, ‘just say.’
‘My bum’s gone to sleep too,’ Leela said. She felt tentative, but also pleased – he was prolonging the conversation, he had offered her the book.
They got up, Leela shaking stiff, heavy legs that seemed to belong to someone else.
‘You want to go for coffee now?’
‘Okay.’