I’m hungry.

I’m hungry.

‘Britannia,’ I say to the taxi driver.

His face in the mirror is expressionless. He doesn’t want to come out and say he doesn’t know.

‘Ballard Estate.’ He turns the ignition on.

Britannia is not a Parsi restaurant. I’m told it’s Irani. The difference isn’t clear. Iranis and Parsis are both Zoroastrian. Except for the ‘berry pulao’ on Britannia’s menu, the cuisines are identical. The thought of the pulao animates my alimentary juices. I feel a pang.

There was no Britannia Restaurant for my parents and me. I lit upon it in conversations a few years ago, when I was visiting Bombay and going on about Parsi food. ‘Open only for lunch,’ they cautioned. It took me two years to make time to eat there. Now, when we’re in Ballard Estate and ask for directions at the Mint, a part of me feels a bit stupid about how late I’ve been reaching this place. I began looking for it years ago; it was here all along. The feeling of foolishness won’t go away.

*

Janardhan is among the gathering on the pavement. Our names are on the waiting list. He shakes my hand; smiles joyfully. ‘We’re number three, sir,’ he tells me. ‘He said ten–fifteen minutes,’ indicating the shambolic man conducting table placements and issuing orders from a dark desk. ‘Too crowded.’ Britannia is in the Lonely Planet guide.

Most of the time Janardhan travels in Maharashtra, selling textbooks and blockbusters to outlets in small towns, possibly putting in a good word for me. He sees I’m different from the blockbuster writers. Mysteriously, I’m fairly well known, though my books don’t sell in large numbers. It’s got something to do with my reputation ‘abroad’, this inexplicable position I occupy: he senses this, with a vague curiosity and regard. He also recognizes I’m incidental to the business. He thinks I’m a throwback. It would be a cliché to claim that our relationship would have been the same had he been dealing in pulses and I were a supplier. It matters to him that I’m a writer. That’s because there’s a writer in him. I feel the writer stir – ingenuous, shrewd – when we spend time together.

I’ve actually only seen him once before. We liked each other instantly.

‘How’s your friend, sir?’ He puts the question to me when we’re seated.

I’m looking at the menu. I already know what to order.

My friend? Of course. Janardhan’s one of the many who were introduced to Ramu in the course of my readings here.

‘Ramu?’ I say.

‘Haa, Ramu!’ he cries, delighted to hear the name.

Their conversations were competitive at first. That’s not just to do with Ramu’s possessiveness (he’s competitive with my wife, and once told me: ‘I’ve known you for much longer than she has’); it comes from his bias against strangers, from keeping to himself too much. Janardhan noticed Ramu was at a loose end. It amused him. Ramu is incredibly sensitive, and might have imagined Janardhan was amused even if he wasn’t. He bristled – he felt he was superior to Janardhan.

‘He’s out of town.’

Janardhan erases his smile.

‘Very nice man.’

Yes, he’d grown fond of him. And was entertained to see Ramu hanging out with me – like he was. He with a purpose, Ramu without. There was bound to be empathy between the two. The way they stood together at Crossword’s.

‘Mineral water?’ asks a waiter, pausing adroitly in the middle of zipping around.

‘Fresh lime soda,’ I tell him. I’m tempted to have a Pallonji Raspberry for its ruby-red colour.

Janardhan looks conflicted. ‘Plain water.’

Our silliness. Ramu’s and mine. Janardhan an onlooker. Our lapsing into Baldy’s voice. Baldy said things with a quaver; frequently underlined observations with ‘C’mon yaar!’ Baldy was a fantasist; he wanted things constantly. ‘C’mon yaar!’ He was from an incredibly rich family, but they couldn’t give him what he craved: girlfriends; lavish parties; sporting glory; good grades to mark his true intellectual level. All these he fitfully fantasized about. Those who knew him also knew he was a dedicated masturbator. He discovered porn – the small Danish magazines – quite early. Money helped. The word for masturbation was ‘shagging’ – a quasi-comical activity, like belching or farting, except it was more taboo and more necessary than these. You had to be despo to shag; yet all the boys did. The girls weren’t privy to this ecology, this single-minded pursuit. I never saw Baldy after leaving school. He had to exit early, after failing his prelims. We must have chatted on the phone, because he told me he’d joined a tutorial school called Cambridge. (All tutorial colleges for dropouts had names like Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard.) He was excited, because it was air conditioned: ‘It’s AC yaar!’ By then I was bored of him. I speak of him in the past tense as he died in his twenties of cocaine abuse. Ramu and I have no memory of when we began to use Baldy’s persona to address each other. It’s wholly unconscious. Sometimes the spell is broken; we see what we’re doing. ‘Shit,’ says Ramu. ‘Poor guy.’ Because Baldy was lovely. In his urgent way, he wanted everything. We say a few words as a requiem. At what point we resume speaking with that quaver we don’t know. We no longer think of it as Baldy’s. It’s a primordial voice; goes way back into our past together. Very Bombay; couldn’t possibly sound right elsewhere. Janardhan saw a bit of that tomfoolery and smiled.

‘Order?’ The man in white has made his routine stop.

‘Vegetarian berry pulao?’ I say to Janardhan.

He’s vegetarian. Daal roti is his staple.

‘Yes, yes.’

‘Anything else?’

He shakes his head and looks terribly shy.

‘I’ll have a mutton berry pulao. And fried bombil.’

Bombil is a late discovery. When I lived here, I knew the sundried version, flattened strips of Bombay Duck, which you can smell a mile away. We called it shutki and ate it to a searing East Bengali recipe. I saw what bombil really looks like when Adil Jussawalla introduced me to my first Parsi restaurant three years ago. Jimmy Boy. He took me to lunch. I’d read Missing Person as a teenager. He ordered fried bombil. I ordered saas nu machhi. I’d last eaten it two decades ago at a wedding. When the food came, I became transfixed by Adil’s bombil. Slim, browned, crisp – I ascertained casually that this was the fish I’d known as Bombay Duck. I couldn’t focus on the pomfret in the translucent sauce. But I wasn’t brave enough to ask Adil for a morsel.

Later, stomachs full, we walked towards Horniman Circle. I was unhappy. I didn’t know when I’d be in Bombay next, or see bombil again. I thought I was familiar with Horniman Circle, but hadn’t heard of the name. Who was Horniman? Adil said he was a Jewish benefactor. Skirting the curve of the garden, we began to talk about Parsis. The dwindling numbers; the choice they were presented with, of marrying one another or opening up to other communities and diluting themselves. Either way, they’d go. When I was a child, they were a given. Their pale skins, the surnames denoting professions, their musicality of speech, their skill with Mozart and Brahms. ‘Frankly, I don’t care,’ said Adil. ‘Sorry?’ ‘I don’t care if they vanish.’ It was as if he were speaking of a brand of chocolate, or a railway route. I noticed his use of the ‘they’: as if being a poet had freed him. We headed towards Strand Book Stall – where I’m due again today.

*

Plates plonked before us without warning. Munificent brown rice; berries shot through it like pomegranate seeds.

Just ahead of me, on the right, is a portrait of Queen Elizabeth. The proprietor (I see him floating around the tables) is a fan. He’s been ninety for years. He’ll soon be at our table to confirm that we’ve ordered, and address us as ‘Young man!’ Wiry; restive. All who eat here will be treated to his love of the royal family. They’ll hear him out, be charmed – by him, if not the memory of Empire. Then they’ll go back to their plates.

‘Interview was OK?’ Janardhan scoops up rice. He has the distant air of a matchmaker who’s brought together two parties and is interested only if there was any acrimony between them.

‘I think so.’

My concern has to do with how it will be transcribed. There was a time when journalists had you say what they wanted you to say. You winced, but no one else noticed. People only remember the picture.

‘What’s the photographer’s name?’

Janardhan hesitates, his spoon half-raised. Light doesn’t dawn.

‘Ashwin!’ I say after two seconds. We return to the berry pulao. I’m not sure if I should stalk him, and ask him to consult me before he sends off a photo for publication. I have – I feel – been historically too hands off about the angles at which I’ve been shot.

Bombil! On a small plastic plate.

‘You don’t eat fish?’ I treat vegetarianism as a phase that might any second end without warning.

He shakes his head.

The backbone is almost as soft as the flesh. I attempt to separate the two. Ever since I confronted those biscuit-gold specimens in Jimmy Boy, I make certain I don’t leave without tasting the white flesh. I’ve noticed it’s covered by a film of slime which in another fish would be repugnant. They’re gone very quickly.