Behind the veil is Ramu. I can see him. He reappeared in 2011 – in the summer. I called his house, expecting to speak to his sister; he picked up the phone. ‘Fuck! When did you get back?’ ‘I called you yaar – two months ago. It kept saying “This number is not reachable” or some shit. I was going to call again.’ Is he bullshitting? Then I remember I was in England at the time. He tells me how horrible the regime was; how he was beaten and locked up. I feel appalled, briefly reliving his terror. ‘How did you get out?’ It’s been one of my objectives in life never to go near anything reminiscent of school again; it might account for my shyness, for years, about getting a job. Ramu never liked school, but used to be nostalgic for the order it brought to his existence. ‘I was allowed to get a call from my sister once a month.’ ‘Yes, I know.’ ‘I t-told her I’d had enough. I told her what was happening.’ ‘Then?’ ‘She and my father came and got me out. Fuck! I think I should lodge an F-F-FIR, yaar!’
He never completed the two-year rehab. It ended three months ahead of schedule.
*
‘Are you coming to Kala Ghoda?’
The festival. He’ll invariably ask the question, come January.
I may be in Dubai, I say. So, possibly not. I hear him out – how more than half his life’s gone, how he’s unused to being ‘clean’; he’s unprepared for life. Experientially, he’s eighteen. He’s almost fifty-five. We change tone, expatiate on how shagging derails our lives. I call him in a few days – Dubai has been cancelled. Plans have changed. So I’ve said yes to Kala Ghoda.
‘They’re putting me up at the Astoria,’ I tell him. ‘What is it?’
It’s an implausible name. The festival doesn’t have enough money to send you to the five stars, but they assign you to uncommon locations. I could ask for the Yacht Club, but the thought of Churchgate is inviting. All I want to make sure of is that it has no rats.
‘I know Astoria,’ says Ramu. He knows everything about this environment. ‘It’s near Eros. It’s OK – it’s good. Like not fantastic or anything, but good. I can check it out.’
‘Good is all I need. You don’t need to check it out. Ask Ali.’ Ali is in the hotel business – a manager. Went to the same school as we did. I remember his ‘house’. But I didn’t know him. He’s a recovered addict. Close to Ramu.
The next day, Ramu calls. ‘He says it’s fine. Not like the Taj, but good middle-of-the-road hotel. I can check it out.’
*
Almost immediately upon arriving at the Astoria in the afternoon, I need to go out and meet an art historian. I call Ramu (he has a mobile now). But I can’t see him until later in the evening. This is the way things are when Ramu’s around. I don’t give him priority. He’s what survives of the familiar here – he’s what I don’t need to think of, unless he’s absent.
The historian is part Indian, part Polish. Her name is Radhika; she returns frequently to Bombay. We meet up in a café near the Yacht Club, in the arcade in which junkies once huddled together, now plush with restaurants. I’m struck by how beautiful people in the café are, while noting the price of the baked yoghurt.
The yoghurt comes in different flavours in an array of little clay bowls. I didn’t have a proper lunch on the plane. I invite her to share. She digs into the one mottled with blueberry. I tell her I want to see the Bhau Daji Lad Museum. I’ve heard so much about it.
‘Ah, I’m going there tomorrow!’ She knows her way around Bombay better than I do. ‘Which is why I will miss your talk.’ She raises an eyebrow in annoyance. ‘I have a meeting. I asked them to change the timing – but no!’
*
I’m not going to the festival, though I know a couple of friends are reading this afternoon. It’s a seven-minute walk from the café. People from all over Bombay are going to swarm the triangle between Max Mueller Bhavan and Rhythm House. Ramu lives fifteen minutes away. He never goes unless I’m reading.
*
Coming out of the café, Radhika and I stroll together to the Gateway of India, and here we part ways. She turns right into a by-lane to return to her boutique hotel in the pathways behind Apollo Bunder. I continue up the sea-front, towards the Radio Club. Though I’m not at all far from where Ramu lives – I need to turn right, then left, and the building with the Ganesh Photography Studio sign on the ground floor will soon appear – I call him and we arrange to see each other at the Astoria at seven.
*
Naturally, things have changed in the last four and a half years since he’s come back. He has a cell phone. Impossible to think he could be familiar with a gadget, but he’s inseparable from it. I hardly call his landline any more, which his father picked up exclusively the day long as the gatekeeper to the family: ‘Yes, Ramu has just gone out’; ‘Ramu is sleeping’. I have a smartphone myself. My wife made me buy it. I blame her. I depend on it, and loathe it intensely.
Our fathers have gone. Mine died over two years ago. This life, which I’m revisiting, was his life. I think of my past here as my parents’ creation. It wasn’t mine. Ramu’s died last month. He fell, broke his hip, had to be operated on, went into a coma shortly after coming to consciousness after the operation, when he shouted at his family and insisted he wanted to go home right away. Being the son, Ramu took the decision about taking him off life-support and the ventilator. ‘He was brain dead,’ Ramu told me. ‘He wasn’t alive, yaar!’ He sounded lost and defiant.
Tall, loping Kannadiga. Six foot two. Picked up the phone after it rang four or five times and said a prolonged ‘Hellooooo?’ Slept on a bed nearby.
*
In my overnight bag in the Astoria are priya chappals. The control model, on which I must base a new purchase. Munna has hinted to my mother on the phone that this particular style of priya is extinct. She’s not interested. She can hardly walk without support after the knee operation. Her courtship of the priya has to do with a single-minded pursuit that defines the sort of person she is, rather than a need. Munna won’t question it.
*
On my way back, I disregard my instinct, wade into the human cross-current before Jehangir Art Gallery. They’ve come to stare at installations. I wish to access Rhythm House. It’s closing down. It’ll be gone next time. I dance out of the way of the festival melee, push the glass door. I recall exactly what it was like inside when I was a boy. When places take on new incarnations, I find it difficult to summon up their earlier ones. But with Rhythm House the memory of the vertical stacks of records and the booths in which my friends and I listened to music without buying, averting the staff’s accusatory glances, dominates the hazy thing it’s been for twenty years: this hive of CDs. I expect a crowd inside, taking advantage of final clearance, but find it’s a semi-lit warren leading nowhere.
*
I’m undecided about the time we live in. This ongoing passage to oblivion. The disappearance of things you took for granted. Then there’s the renaissance of things you never knew of, or presumed you’d never see again. All the songs I could have listened to in Rhythm House, and more, I find on YouTube. And bombil is suddenly a part of my life. And Trishna, which I heard of only ten years ago, I now make a pilgrimage to on every visit.
