With nothing to do, with Ramu absent, I go out for a walk.
Arjun is missing too; he’s flown to Delhi to give a talk on the gene. I met him when we were at Oxford. He now runs a government-funded lab on the outskirts of Bombay. He’s one of those who, like me, made the decision to return to India. Like me, he couldn’t stand the idea of living in the West a single day longer. Unlike me, Arjun hasn’t stepped out of India since 1998 – although he’s planning to accept an invitation to a conference in Birmingham. I wonder at his lack of eagerness. When we meet up, we rarely discuss serious things; we mostly talk like we were teenagers, or unmarried – as we used to in Oxford. Ramu is suspicious of our candour. He has deemed Arjun an ‘intellectual’; the one concession he’ll make is, ‘He’s nice, but horny.’ The ‘but’ is interesting. It contains Ramu’s sense of moral superiority. He has many occasions to declare he’s morally superior – as an addict, cheated by the city he grew up in; as a non-intellectual; for being less horny than Arjun. But, whenever he carps gently about Arjun, I participate in Ramu’s generalizations and implicitly agree. Yes, we are less horny than him.
I emerge from the gates of the club on to the main road and glance to my left at Kamala Nehru Park. I feel no time-lag. I catch sight of the park as I used to each day as a boy. Another part of me, hovering a few feet overhead, is studying my situation. Because this is not my life. It could have been, but I chose for it not to be. Instead of turning left, I turn right, deciding to buy toothpaste. Unzipping my toilet bag in the room, I noticed I’d left it behind. So I enter the provisions store. I used to get index finger-sized Cadbury’s milk chocolate bars here; they cost a rupee when I was eight years old. I used to love the fact that the bar was so thin and lapidary and would be gone in ten seconds. I barely felt responsible for being the cause of its disappearance. I loved the lettering and sinking my teeth into it. Now, I go up the two steps and find the shop is as busy as if it were Christmas. The Gujaratis within are amenable – they furnish me with Colgate in fifteen seconds. I pay, and consider buying something else – one of the staff is perched on a ladder to retrieve a lotion from the topmost shelf. Everywhere, there is the strain and stretch of trade.
It’s a wonder the shop exists. Could it be here because there’s such affluence in Malabar Hill – or is it here despite the wealth? The same could be said of the shops next to it: St Stephen’s Store on its right, a confectioner’s, and the two grocers’ on its left. I first saw them more than four decades ago. Why do the rich give them patronage? Could it be that they want tiny pockets of continuity? Actually, Malabar Hill is an oasis of continuity – its tranquillity is calculated to preserve. When I lived here, I never went into these shops except the one from which I’ve acquired toothpaste – to get my Cadbury, or watch my mother buy a tin of Kraft cheese. It’s only now, as a visitor, that I’ve discovered St Stephen’s Store, and its tissue-thin chutney sandwiches. There are certain things that (obeying orders) I buy for my family when I’m in Bombay, and one or two that I give myself, such as these sandwiches. They’re part of my afterlife here.
