I step out, book in one hand. It’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Some books I buy for their title, others for brevity. I love short books – the way you know from the first page that it’s going to end.
‘So I’ll see you at six fifteen?’
The reading is at six thirty. We’ve been speculating on the possible size of the audience. It’s hard to shepherd people into readings in Bombay.
Janardhan shakes his head in agreement. It’s half past three.
I cross the road. Stacks of sugarcane being pulped by an old flecked grinder. Three flattened bouquets. Pale green juice. High risk of jaundice if you drink a glass.
That meal at Apurva. I haven’t seen Ramu since. I’ve often thought of my last sighting of him, in front of the Yacht Club at night. It’s only occurred to me now that – of course – it was after the reading, that abortive jaunt to Trishna, the rawas at Apurva. A long table; Ramu making semi-serious conversation with Arundhathi; Arundhathi’s steely indifference when Anand burst into a raga; Anand and Menaka suddenly talking to each other, mildly combative, in French. Later, the contingent began to walk to Regal Cinema. Not that late: eleven o’clock. Through the dark arcade. Anand following one demonstration of a raga with another. We lost Ramu and a young short story writer called Sumit. For seven or eight minutes, they were absent. Then, as we came to the wide angles of Kala Ghoda, they emerged from a back street, sheepish and triumphant. Fair weather friends. I couldn’t tell if they’d had a joint, or if Ramu was still ‘clean’.
People began to get into the silently lined and watching taxis. It’s odd how unself-conscious and at home people are in this part of the city, but how, come midnight, they’ll start returning to Juhu and Bandra, an hour away. Waves and farewells. Yet two or three of us decided to catch a final glimpse of Apollo Bunder. Ramu was terribly tired and opted out. I suspected he’d had enough of the writers. ‘Fuck, it was an effort to lift one foot after another,’ he told me on the phone the next day. ‘It was as if the distance from Rhythm House to Regal was a mile! I was wondering when it would end.’ He’d parked his scooter at the Yacht Club; we said bye to him there. A part of me felt bad – don’t know why – leaving him. As if I were deserting him. Ramu, prodding the pedal repeatedly with one foot till the familiar racket began. Under a gothic arch. I thought I’d see him again, somehow.
*
The uncertainty I feel – about whether I’ll see Ramu again – came to me once before. Of course, I know the formulation is absurd. It’s not whether I’ll see him, but when. According to his sister, it will be another year. What I feel isn’t so much like parental anxiety. With the prolonged absence of a child, say, the irrational part of the parent’s brain will rush to the possibility of never seeing the child again. This isn’t what I feel. I know I’ll see Ramu again. But it’s as if I won’t see him again. I’m thrown off-balance – but also surprised. I didn’t know I’d react like this. Ramu isn’t the only close friend I have. But it’s as if my sojourn in Bombay depends on him. ‘Depends’ is the wrong word: I haven’t come here because of him, to delve into his whereabouts. But the surprise I’ve mentioned is related to my astonishment at being here. ‘Astonishment’ denotes how you might start seeing things you hadn’t noticed earlier, but it could also mean becoming aware that you won’t see them again. As I turn into Pherozeshah Mehta Road and then left into the long stretch of DN Road, I know I won’t see Bombay again. That is, I will see Bombay again, but not the Bombay I’m looking at now.
I belch and release the ghost of bombil. I need this walk. The first time I had that hunch – that my sighting of Ramu when I said bye to him had a finality that neither he nor I was fully aware of, though in a way both of us were – was at GT Hospital, the psychiatric wing. He’d almost died, but – as the doctor said – had returned to life, against medical logic. I was in Bombay, again, for a cultural festival. Again, I was in the Yacht Club. (If the hosts won’t put me up in a good hotel, I’ll ask to stay in a club that’s well located.) The event was in Bandra; later, I, Arjun, Ramu, and Amrita (whom Ramu and I knew from college, and were seeing after twenty years) thought we’d go to a seafood restaurant. But Ramu broke away early, reminding us it took an hour to get to Colaba. I was headed there too, but not yet. He set out on his scooter and at some point must have changed his mind and decided to check out the entrance of the Prince of Wales Museum for pushers at midnight. He overdosed there on dodgy heroin, and, when a constable discovered him at 3 a.m., his blood pressure was near zero. This nameless constable found a friend’s number on a piece of paper in Ramu’s wallet; called him; the friend phoned Ramu’s father. Ramu’s father had to run down Colaba Causeway because there were no taxis to be seen at 3.30. He got his (unconscious) son to GT Hospital. The rooms at the Yacht Club are cavernous, but the skylights have no curtains; I was woken by an orange glow above me. Thankfully, day begins late in Bombay. By and by, I called Ramu. A maid with no Hindi kept picking up the phone. She instructed me in Marathi that Ramu was in the hospital. I wondered if his father had fallen ill; he was then eighty years old. In the evening, at long last, I spoke to Ramu’s father. He related the sequence to me. I said I’d go to GT Hospital the next day. I didn’t know where GT Hospital was. I was told it was next to Crawford Market. I’d been to Crawford Market as a child, a willing accomplice in my parents’ expeditions to gather alphonso mangoes or track down Bombay Duck, or to go from there in the heat to the alleys of Zaveri Bazaar to browse gold jewellery. In the morning, I found GT Hospital in the midst of this: I hadn’t known. I went into a driveway. I confronted an unostentatious colonial structure. Bombay doesn’t know me, but, also, there’s so much of Bombay I’ve just begun to know. Through the corridors I went to ICU 2; families on a bench outside; a girl in a salwar kameez reading the Bible, the page open at Samuel. He’d come back from the dead, the young doctor – an intern from a small town – told me; it defied reason. I loved the hospital – its resolute calm, its ability to accommodate, even in the bustling main stairways, droves of family members and well-wishers. When he got better, Ramu showed the doctor an interview with me that had appeared the previous day in the Times of India – with a photo of me, squinting in the sunlight on Carter Road. ‘This is very good,’ said the doctor, moving his head in consternation, as if he’d examined something infinitely stranger than a medical report, ‘very good.’ They moved Ramu two days later to the psychiatric ward – compulsory, because of the overdose. All free of charge. I marvelled at these easy, unimpeded transitions from ward to ward. Every room there had the depth and width inherent in rooms in buildings the British left behind. Most people in the ward were labouring people and workers. When I went to see Ramu, they were all quietly eating lunch. Not Ramu; he was awaiting a tiffin carrier from home. We sat on his bed, talked and, strangest of all, treated the surroundings as normal: strange for us, ordinarily so intolerant. Yet I was astonished, coming face to face with the obvious and unimaginable. Everyone was in a gown that came down to the calves. I stayed for twenty minutes; I had a flight that afternoon. When Ramu stood up, the incongruity of the gown became painfully clear. I ignored it and we never mentioned the hospital clothing. We said bye very easily, too easily, as if, for the first time, we’d weighed the notion of not setting eyes on each other again, that this moment in the ridiculous gown would be the last one we’d share – and dismissed the thought at once.
