The morning is washed by light. Most of the waiters on the ground-floor verandah are already bored. But two or three look keyed up with fresh purpose. I order toast and tea. ‘Pudina chai,’ I say.
He reappears in a little while with a lavish number of slices wrapped in tissue. The toast is already buttered, and in the clutter of spoons and plates is a tiny container of jam.
I lift the lid off the pot and peer in. There’s a shrub with mint leaves swimming inside.
‘I have an interview at eleven,’ I say, cradling the mobile phone to my ear. I mention the name of the paper. ‘I’m bored,’ I say. I stir the tea with my other hand.
‘Why?’ asks my wife, incredulous. She thinks that being in Bombay is enough to make me bubble with excitement, that I don’t have a moment to think. But I find this time that – not having planned in advance, and discounting the interview, the bookshop visit arranged by the publishing rep, and the reading – if Ramu and Arjun are both absent, I have little to do with my day.
‘Where’s Arjun?’
‘He’s in Delhi to speak about genes,’ I say morosely.
*
I decide to walk up the stairs to my room and glimpse, through the latticed wall, the building in which I grew up. It isn’t as if I’d forgotten it; it’s just that I see no point in looking at it directly. I know it exists at the back of the club, but it’s a surprise to chance this morning on its continuance. The time’s ten fifteen. The journalist will be here soon. It’s that dead time, when you’re waiting for something that’s neither entirely productive nor significant, but is supposed to be necessary. While you wait, you can neither write, nor think of writing, nor of the last book or the one you’re embarked on, nor go shopping. I defer returning to the room.
I step out into the driveway. Lazily, I let my eyes go over that familiar width and height. It needs a coat of paint. It’s never departed its first colour scheme: white and mustard. I was eight when we moved there. I looked down from the balcony every day, in times of boredom or unhappiness or those long stretches when I was liberated from unhappiness. To look down is unlike looking up. You encompass what you see. You can make a journey – as I did, with my eyes, to Nariman Point, where my father’s office was. To look is to dream. Or it’s to relive with dread a physical journey, as I did on Sundays, tracing with my eyes the curve of the Marine Drive to Churchgate – my daily school route. The eye covers distances in a second. It lusts for freedom. Looking out, I often wanted to be free – not of home, but of the city. The eye (if it’s gazing upon something it’s unhappy with, as I was) might see nothing.
Looking up is different. I have the freedom I then wanted. I’m free of Bombay. I have no home here. Looking up is hard work; before long, you encounter an intolerable brightness, or emptiness. I squint and count the floors. ‘One, two, three, four …’ I was on the twelfth. ‘Six, seven …’ I think I counted the same floor twice. I start again. Then my gaze alights on a balcony. I’m not sure it’s the right one. Anyway, there’s no mark to identify it with. I strain to see. My home.
This area subdued the terror of the world by ensconcing me, and imparting a terror of its own. The terror of education. The kindergarten I went to is down the road, a two-minute walk. It’s been converted into an enigmatic fortification that has no immediate use. I lived then not in the building opposite, but in another one five minutes away, in a corner adjoining the far end of Hanging Gardens. Tenerife. In kindergarten, I stood all morning by the entrance and waited for my mother to walk back.
From Tenerife I was able to spectate on the bee-buzz of a playground of another school, the school I’d eventually go to. It’s almost diagonally opposite the kindergarten. It’s the infant section, and the smartness of its design means it must have arisen in the fifties. The Junior, Middle, and Senior schools near Flora Fountain are, in comparison, dour – they’re neo-gothic – and may go back to the nineteenth century. The playground is, of course, smaller than I imagined it as a child. Ramu and I went not long ago and peered through the gate in the evening, marvelling at the power it had over us.
*
I haven’t forgotten something that Ramu said as we paused, wonderstruck, at the main gate. There was not a sound within. Much of Malabar Hill, despite the incursion of vendors around the two parks, is an idyll. Little Gibbs Road especially so. At its core, the Infant School and the fairy-tale principal’s house next door – we nudged each other when we saw it – is an oasis, a continuum. Ramu was staring into the heart of the idyll.
‘It’s not for everyone,’ he concluded.
‘What?’ I asked.
We’d been slagging off teachers, sounding off without affection about people we’d known in school who’d gone on to become global managers or CEOs, or had married each other, or had simply given up and died (there were a few of those too); we were complaining about the false values emanating from our education. Then, staring, we fell silent – unusual with Ramu, because he’s incapable of keeping quiet. We were both, now, immune to school. Or were we? Did the playground and the long corridor running at a right angle to the empty front porch still exercise, as we stood looking, a kind of mastery? I was unsettled by memory but felt essentially grounded, and unmoved: I lived in another city; I’d married someone who wasn’t from these parts. My childhood had metamorphosed into something other than mere, logical adulthood and taken me out of Malabar Hill and Bombay. What of Ramu? I couldn’t second-guess his thinking.
‘What’s not for everyone?’
‘Life,’ he said, and this broke the spell. We turned, and walked into the lane going right, towards the steps to Hanging Gardens and Kamala Nehru Park. ‘It’s not everyone’s cup of tea.’
He was forty-eight years old, a recovering addict, and I suppose he had the right to strike a note of dissent. It isn’t one you hear frequently. Since there’s no choice in the matter, you automatically assume life must be an excellent thing: it’s your fault if it isn’t. Ramu’s words reminded me this is a dogma. We can’t declare at some point that we aren’t fully invested in life, because there’s no option but to be invested in it. During our time in the world – fifty or sixty or eighty years – we simply pretend we’ve decided to be exactly where we are.
