On the penultimate day we see each other at eleven, when my wife is attempting tentative swimming strokes, and my daughter is alone in the room with her phone. Parking his scooter in the lane that’s at a right angle to the Taj, Ramu comes to the old entrance, which was closed a year ago but now has a small welcome party of security men. I wait here, out of the sun. We want to take a quick walk before my wife is ready to emerge. There’s a tacit agreement between Ramu and me that I won’t see him again. Nothing was said. No line has been drawn. We might see each other. But we won’t. It’s not I – he’ll make excuses. He’ll withdraw discreetly as I return to my family.
*
How many times we’ve gone down this promenade and lanes! For Ramu, the place became a curse – he’s lived here without fully living life. No matter. No matter. Then, five years ago, he saw it was a blessing: being here. Once you move around the Taj, you become conscious of a series of dwellings and small hotels that haven’t changed very much. Yet it’s all changed.
*
Apollo Bunder is good for daydreaming. I used to come here when I was seventeen, eighteen, roam around the Gateway of India, and sit on the balustrade facing the Taj, never fully resting my bum because I was scared of falling into the sea. I would come alone. I did a lot of stuff alone – even went to movies by myself, which was a scandal. In Apollo Bunder, I’d watch people, and the water, and steamers returning. I felt a sharp need to be taken out of myself. This fancifulness became connected to my writing. I bought a blue exercise book and wrote the beginning of a story (I hardly wrote prose those days), about a man who came to Apollo Bunder, looked at the sea, to forget himself, to enter other lives. I made no advance on the beginning. Because the beginning made me rapt, and foreclosed development.
