DN Road! Some of the buildings are a century old. On the pavement and in the arcade, hawkers. The imitation Longines watches and cheap sunglasses and faux-leather wallets. The purveyors of VHS tapes and audio cassettes have been ousted by cell phone repair shops. On the pavement, far below me, are misshapen figures: a girl on a cycle traversing a wire, one end to another; a green boy doing back flips. Toys. The dark eyes of the kneeling vendor who’s just released the spring and given them jerky life make contact with mine.
Suddenly, light and noise flood in. I’m at Hutatma Chowk. Flora Fountain is before me. I wait to cross.
Reaching the side on the left, I enter the ruined arcade leading to Homi and Baliwalla. I see more than I once did. For instance, just before entering the crumbling arcade, I notice floral patterns on the wall below a first-floor balcony. They’re above eye level, as if they weren’t meant to be seen. Why they were put there is beyond me. Somebody’s fancy. Like some of the sculpted figures, occupying far corners, ensconced round each other in Konark. Almost as if you were supposed to overlook them.
Ramu loves these buildings. Our being able to understand and express this love speaks to the distance we’ve travelled from school, when Flora Fountain simply meant school was near, and spelled daily irrevocable doom. No more. That patina of fear, and then functionality, has lifted. Two years ago, I was here in Bombay, and Ramu and I were walking (after dinner at Mahesh Lunch Home) past Flora Fountain to Churchgate. Humanity was receding, inasmuch as it recedes in this city. We were discussing in tones of outrage the prices at Mahesh, and beginning to agree their steepness was Lonely Planet’s doing. Heedless of Flora, we turned to study the buildings behind us – as you’d turn, say, to look at the full moon. They were beautiful. Partly illuminated. I shared some jargon with him. ‘That one’s art deco. See? And that has some neoclassical elements.’ Open-mouthed, we drank them. Then, wheeling round, resuming our walk towards Churchgate, we crossed at a light, and Ramu pointed at a gothic phantom on the left, opposite the Central Telegraph Office. ‘I get transformed when I see these, yaar!’ he exclaimed, waving at the shadows. ‘They take me back to a different time and way of life! Sometimes I even stop and look at the ironwork on the fucking gate – it’s mind-blowing!’
*
Ramu’s vocabulary is unusual. Like the word ‘transformed’. I wasn’t wholly surprised, but did register it. ‘Trans’ – across; a movement across form; change. I know that recognizability is an illusion. Nothing is fixed: not Ramu, in terecotton trousers, hair thinning, deceptively turned out as a nine-to-five office-goer; not as he was thirty years ago, thin, in blue jeans, with a beautiful but disbelieving face; or in school, short, introspective, unassimilated. The Ramu I see isn’t Ramu. He is ‘transformed’.
The building was abandoned, but intact. We considered the black railings, tapering into exquisite, thick points. Victorian. We’re both fantasists. We need to be taken out of who and where we are. What we see prompts in us not a desire for the thing itself, but another time and place. ‘Shit,’ said Ramu. ‘Just look at that.’
*
Bandra. 1986, 1987. Two, three years prior to my parents’ departure. In ’87 I went to Oxford. That small, pretty, third-floor apartment my parents moved to, facing the lane. Ramu would come and stay with me for three or four days. He’d run out of a change of clothes; begin to don my thin white kurtas. He’s only two inches taller than me; they fitted him fine. He said he felt no craving to ‘use’ when he stayed with us. He was an onlooker and eavesdropper on our discussions about departure, saying little to persuade us one way or another. I used to wonder sometimes when he’d go, this kurta-clad figure. He’d slip the moment he returned to Colaba. Then he’d be unreachable for days, and I’d start to forget him.
In St Cyril Road, he and I quarrelled often. Or, late at night, we’d watch a porn VHS he’d brought with him. Or, with the peculiar stoic solidarity he displays at readings, he’d listen to me do riyaaz.
We’d go for walks. Both of us in those white kurtas. St Cyril Road. St Leo Road. Pali Hill. Being fractious. The main point of contention was whether the girl who’d walked past was looking at him or me. ‘She was looking at me,’ I’d say. ‘D’you think she’s blind?’ he’d reply. ‘Why would she look at you?’ My last years in Bombay. This precious wastage of time.
And we’d stop to stare at the houses. Churches. Walls. The ‘cottages’ and ‘villas’ built by Christians. They were being torn down one by one to make way for buildings. The value of property per square foot made no sense. ‘Look at that,’ he’d say, and we’d stop and, not speaking at all, imbibe the verandah, the open window, the roof, the palm trees, the rocking chair. This was when we were in communion; when we stopped talking and acknowledged this desire – not to own (that would be impossible) but to imagine.
*
One night after dinner, we made our habitual trip to Carter Road, to the promontory bordered by waves. Near Gold Mist Apartments. Couples sat here, ruminating, day and night; dogs barked and fucked each other before them.
We progressed towards Perry Road. He pointed up to a white smear on the sky, as if the light of the moon had revealed a smudge on a surface. ‘See that?’ I narrowed my eyes at the expanse. Suspicious of infinity. ‘That’s the end of the Milky Way. Veeru told me.’ Referring to one, a young filmmaker, who dabbled in the environment and astronomy. ‘That’s where another universe begins.’ I checked to see I wasn’t dreaming up the faint smudge. How come the sky was so bright?
There’s a line, or veil – beyond it, another world. We sensed it then, on St Cyril Road and Carter Road: a house on the street; a streak of white in the sky. It was like a semi-transparent pane of glass.
On this trip, there’s a veil too.
