I trained my field glasses on her. She turned to look if anyone was around. Having reassured herself that she wasn’t being watched she took off her dhoti and stood stark naked in the pouring rain. It was my beggar woman.
For the first few months after taking over the editorship of The Illustrated Weekly of India I lived as a paying guest of a young Parsi couple in a flat in Churchgate. I did not know many people, so had very little social life. I walked to office every morning and walked back every evening as I refused to use the car and chauffeur provided for me.
Among the earliest friends I made was A. G. Noorani who combined practicing law with journalism. He was a bachelor. We began to spend our evenings together: we would go for a stroll along Marine Drive and return to my flat. I had my evening ration of Scotch; Noorani who was a teetotaller had a glass of aerated water. Then we set out to try different restaurants in the neighbourhood. After dinner we tried different paanwallahs and bade each other good night. This routine was upset with the onset of the monsoon in Bombay when I ran into the lady about whom I write today.
There was a break in the downpour. I was alone as I stepped out of a restaurant. A gas station and a few shops were on my way home. I stopped there to buy myself a paan and chatted with a bhelpuriwallah and asked him how his business was during the rains: not very well, he admitted. ‘Magar iski kismat jaag jatee hai’ (her fortune increases) he added pointing to a woman sitting on the steps of a shop nearby. ‘What I can’t sell, I give to her. She is a beggar. Thori paagal hai (she is a little mad).’ I looked at the woman hungrily gulping bhelpuri. An uncommonly attractive girl, she was in her mid-twenties.
Fair, beautifully proportioned, uncombed hair wildly scattered about her face, a dirty white dhoti untidily draped around her body. I gazed at her for quite some time and wondered what an attractive young woman was doing alone in this vice-ridden city. I fantasized about her long into the night.
Thereafter I made it a point to buy my after-dinner paan from the same paanwallah by the gas station, exchanged a few words with the bhelpuriwallah as I ogled at the beggar maid on the steps of the closed shop. I often saw her talking to herself. I tried to buy bhelpuri to give to the girl, but the stall-owner rejected my offer. He had plenty of leftovers and feeding the girl was his monopoly.
One evening while I was at dinner the clouds burst in all their fury and roads around Churchgate were flooded. I tucked my trousers up to my knees, took my sandals in my hands, unfurled my umbrella to save my turban and waded through the swirling muddy water. Both the paanwallah and the bhelpuriwallah had shut shop and gone home. I saw the beggar girl stretched out on the marble steps barely an inch above the stream of rain water running past her. She couldn’t have had anything to eat that night. I was sorely tempted to give her some money but was not sure how she would react. I walked home thinking about her, and thought about her into the late hours of the night.
It poured all through the night. As I woke up to look out of the window which overlooked the maidan with the Rajabhai clock tower on the other side, the rain was still coming down in sheets. The maidan was flooded. I saw the shadowy figure of a woman walking across the maidan with a tin in hand. I saw her hike her wet dhoti and start splashing water between her buttocks. I trained my field glasses on her. She turned to look if anyone was around. Having reassured herself that she wasn’t being watched she took off her dhoti and stood stark naked in the pouring rain. It was my beggar woman. She poured dirty water on her body, rubbed her bosom, waist, arms and legs. The ‘bath’ over she put the wet dhoti back on her and sloshed her way back towards Churchgate station.
The vision of Venus arising out of the sea in the form of a beggar maid of Bombay haunted me for many days that I was away in Delhi. When I returned to Bombay I made it a point to go to Churchgate for my after-dinner stroll. The paanwallah and the bhelpuriwallah were there. But not the beggar. I asked the bhelpuriwallah what had happened to the girl. His eyes filled with tears and his voice choked as he replied: ‘Saaley bharooay utha ke lay gaye’ (the bloody pimps abducted her).