“Really?” Ratnani said, drying his hands. “That’s good.”
“You remember I came to your house, sir?”
“Many people come to my house.”
“But I came with …”
Ratnani handed the towel to Rajesh, and looked at him directly. His eyes were calm. “I’ve never seen you before,” he said. Then he turned, stepped past Anubhav, and pushed the door open. Before the door could shut behind him, Anubhav had gone through it. Then Rajesh and I were alone, he with the towel still in his right hand.
“Rajesh,” I said.
He turned away from me, towards the basins. I put a hand on his shoulder and he jerked it off, took another step, further, his face turned away, and it was absurd but I had the sense that he was crying. I had never seen him cry. So I pushed through the black door, back into the noise, and Sandhya and Anubhav were standing nearby, their heads close together. I walked over to them, and we were then surrounded by a sudden knot of people, they laughed and shook hands with Anubhav and Sandhya and me, I saw white teeth shining, and diamonds, and a face receded away from me, floating like a flower on the swell of clinking chatter.
I blinked, and I heard Anubhav’s voice, raised high: “Nice work, Vidyarthi. Interesting. Really interesting.” A waiter came through the crowd, holding up a tray. I turned away, a new glass in my hand, and the roiling crowd carried me along as I drank. I went as hopelessly as, as a man without a friend in the world. The cold liquid came past the constriction in my throat and stumbled me and I laughed, and laughed again. I stood in the centre of the long room and held the glass in front of my face and drank slowly and carefully. When the glass was empty I went back to the bathroom and found it empty. I pushed at the door to each of the stalls and found them unoccupied. Outside, I saw Sandhya, just her red scarf and the angle of her cheekbone through a commotion of shoulders. I pushed my way through, and she was talking to the mirrored woman and a man with his hair held back in a ponytail. They were standing on two sides of her, with her face close between theirs.
“Sandhya,” I said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “Where’s Rajesh?”
“Not now, Iqbal,” she said.
“But Rajesh.”
“I haven’t seen him.” She and the other two looked at me for a long moment. “I’m buying, Iqbal.”
What, I wanted to ask, and with what exactly, but the man took Sandhya by the elbow and the ethnic woman pointed to something on the opposite side of the gallery, and they went, all holding on to each other. I took another glass off a tray and trudged along. I was suddenly heavy with exhaustion, and the light came in spirals, circling around my head. As I leaned close to a canvas the colours breathed across its surface, filling my eyes with a roseate brightness.
“If you stand further away you can see what it is,” somebody said loudly into my ear.
“I want to see what it’s made of,” I said, and I heard footsteps tapping away. I could feel myself swaying back and forth, towards and away from the intricate pattern of ridges and valleys snaking across the orange and the green. Then there was a hand on my shoulder. I shuffled myself around, and it was the mirrored woman. I leaned towards her chest, wanting to see myself, and she backed away, her nose wrinkling.
“Don’t be afraid of me,” I said. “Not like that. Just want to see.”
Sandhya appeared behind her, rolling her eyes. “All right, Iqbal,” Sandhya said. “Home. Come on.” She took my hand and towed me through the crush, and now they all stepped back to let us pass. I snarled, and laughed when they stepped on each other’s feet.
Outside, on the sidewalk, the ethnic woman caught up with us. “Talk to you tomorrow, Sandhya,” she said.
“Absolutely,” Sandhya said.
“Lovely meeting you, darling.” She fluttered her fingers and shut the door firmly behind her.
“Where’s Rajesh?” I said.
“I didn’t see him in there,” Sandhya said. “I think he’s gone.”
“I can’t go without him,” I said, but she cut me away from the glass door, nudged me to a Maruti parked under a poster for Droh Kaal.
“Don’t do anything,” she said. “Stay here. I’ll be back.”
It was dark now. The hood of the car was hot, and the air moved snugly against me, and I felt sweat running down my back. I shut my eyes and breathed deeply, once and again, against the constriction, against the sopping weight of myself. But still I could feel my skin burning, heavy and inescapable, and I opened my eyes and I could see the bluish square of the door, like a crystal, and the faint golden and silver shapes floating within. And then the music, ethereal and distant, which must have been always there but only now in my ears. I listened to it carefully. As if it were trying to tell me something. I turned my head and saw another man leaning on a car, a driver, I thought. He lit his cigarette and in the sudden flare I saw his tired face, a thin moustache. We waited together.
Then the door opened and Sandhya came up quickly to me, shaking her head. “He’s not here. He’s gone.”
“He just left?”
“I’m going to put you in a taxi,” she said.
“I can take the train.”
“Don’t be silly. I’m going to put you in a taxi.” And she did, literally, holding on to my arm, and lowering my head into the seat. She folded a hundred-rupee note into my shirt pocket, and shut the door without a word.
“Where do you think Rajesh went?” I asked, but we were already halfway down the block, and the driver turned his head to look at me, but he had no answer, and neither did the city, my city which went by swiftly and gleaming in the dark. We swept over the long arc of Marine Drive, through Kemp’s Corner, down Pedder Road, Mahalaxmi, Worli, Mahim, and the concrete loomed above, white in the moonlight, higher than I ever remembered, and I lay helpless under its weight, crushed by its certain beauty.
*
“Parameshwar, Parameshwar.” Ma-ji exhaled softly as she lowered herself onto the far end of the couch, next to me but far away. I was sitting in the long passageway, puffing viciously at a cigarette, against my pulsing headache and anger and desolation. I had given them up four years ago, but now I had decided that Rajesh had left me at the Pushkara Gallery, left me—and I knew this somehow even before I woke up—for some fancy prancing rich boy. In his anger and sulks, he had gone, gone, despite his workingman’s muscular solidarity and his accusations about me, me, telling me always to go back to my Malabar-Hill-Fair-and-Lovely-brand queens that I liked so much. So now I pulled on the foul taste, a tonic for the bitterness in my heart, and even the miracle of Ma-ji choosing to sit beside me, even if at arm’s and a leg’s length, it amused me worth nothing, less than nothing, and I sat blowing smoke.
“Twenty-two thousand for that‚” she said, and it was all clear. That was the painting the mirrored woman (whose name turned out to be Miss Viveka Gupta) had brought to the house that morning, wrapped in double and triple sheets of newspaper and carried by two men in shorts and bare feet, and twenty-two thousand was the price, in white only and all by cheque, and since I was the one who cut the drafts and quarrelled always with Sandhya about how she scattered and flung about her own money like pigeon-feed, I was now Ma-ji’s friend against waste and frippery. She had spent the morning watching from the door of the drawing room, as Miss Viveka supervised and her mistris took down the framed poster of the Eiffel Tower from the long wall, used a level to pencil-mark heights and angles, and as they hung up the twenty-two-thousand-rupee masterpiece. All the time Ma-ji had cursed under her breath.
“It’s art, Ma-ji,” I said.
She looked at me as if I were mad. “Art? And what, we are nawabs?”
“I think you are, Ma-ji,” I said. “Definitely, at least rajas.”
She looked at me out of her watery grey eyes, the white pallu wrapped tightly about her head, not quite sure whether to be flattered or infuriated, and she glanced at the drawing room door, and I could see that the invisible and mighty presence of the twenty-two
-thousand-act-of-genius was tilting her rapidly towards breaking our tiny truce, but then Lalit came running out of the kitchen and saved me.
“Iq-bal Uncle,” he said, flinging himself forward on his grandmother’s knee. “I want an aquarium.”
“A what?”
“An aqua-ri-um, Iq-bal ghonchu Uncle,” he said, as Ma-ji smoothened his hair down with both her hands. She worried always about the parting in his hair. “For fish, don’t you know?”
“I know, I know,” I said. “But where you got this crackpot idea from?”
“From the sea,” Lalit said. “In there.” He shrugged away his grandmother’s arms without looking at her, but easy and gentle, and pulled on my sleeve until I stood up and let myself be dragged to the drawing room door. He stood next to me, leaning on my leg, and pointed at the painting on the wall.
“The sea,” he announced, with the pride of someone who had created it.
It was a square canvas, about five feet each way, and with a wash of green and blue that seemed to seep off the painting, into the air, so the whole room seemed suddenly marine. There were dark shadows in it, that came and went as you looked. I suppose it was the sea if it was anything.
“The sea,” I said. “And so you want an aquarium?”
“Of course,” Lalit said, laughing at my backwardness. “For fishes.”
“Of course,” I said.
“It’s going to cost a lot, this aqua-ri-um,” Ma-ji said under my shoulder. She always took an age to go from here to there, but just when you stopped watching her she would turn up with startling suddenness, blowing curses over your skin. Now, again, as my pulse jangled, she boxed her hands over Lalit’s ears and whispered, “And this painting, so much money. Such bad habits she’s teaching him.”
Lalit was hanging on to my shirt, leaning forward towards all this, through the drawing room door, which he wasn’t allowed to enter. The drawing room contained Sandhya’s new Swedish-looking sofa and couches with white cushions, her glass-topped coffee table, her crystal imported from America, her new blue carpet with the Persian pattern on it, her flowers which looked so real you couldn’t tell. It was a perfect room, and none of us were allowed to enter it. Even Sandhya hardly went in there.
“Careful, Lalitya,” I said. “Don’t cross the line.”
Now the phone rang and my heart lifted. It rang again, and I wanted to go to it, but Lalit was still a weight against my leg, and Ma-ji was muttering behind me somewhere, and I was flooded with relief and trying to remember to be angry. The ringing cut off abruptly, and I started slowly down the corridor, carrying Lalit with me. Then I heard Sandhya down the hall.
“Iqbal!” she said. “Another crash. It’s Das. Another crash, and this time the whole system’s frozen.”
She appeared in the door to the office, her face stricken. I gathered up my tools, and waited by the front door, by the orange statue of Ganesha, while she dressed for the outside world. From where I was leaning against the wall, I could see Anubhav working in his room. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and he was squatting on his heels, holding a thick brush with a long grip, and it moved over the canvas with a whirring sound. The brush moved back and forth, and I could see the splatters of paint on his knees. He was working hard, had been all day, harder than I had ever seen.
“Eh, Anu,” I said. “Listen.” I said his name two more times, and then walked into the room and tapped him on the shoulder.
“What?” he said, still looking at the canvas.
“Last night. Did you send Rajesh out of the gallery? To get cigarettes or something?”
“What, me? No.” He turned his head and looked up at me. There were tiny dots of paint on his face.
“Did you see him leaving?”
“No. After that bullshit in the bathroom with Ratnani I don’t know where he went. Why?”
“It’s nothing. I just don’t know when he left.”
“He was high, man. Telling stupid stories like that. Must’ve fallen asleep somewhere on the way home.”
Anubhav turned back to his painting. Rajesh’s lies weren’t very interesting to him. I had believed Rajesh, and I was afraid.
“Come on,” Sandhya said, coming down the hall in a green suit. Outside, the sudden blaze of the sun hurt my eyes. The traffic ground past us in a solid stream, and all the taxis were full. We waited. I turned and looked up at the building, at the four stories of long curving balconies. It had been built in fifty-four, when they had built balconies everywhere, and those rounded corners, but now there were only chips of yellow paint left here and there, and most of Sea Vista was now black. The cars were dragging past us in starts and stops, inch by inch. Then it all stopped with a blare of horns, and we waited.
*
You can lose yourself in hardware. It takes only a twist or two, some pressure maybe, to break a coax cable, but tracing a cable break is long and careful hours with a crimping tool and terminal pings and NIC tests. When Sandhya and I got to the factory everything, each last terminal, was frozen solid, a cursor blinking hysterically from each screen. So she brought down the server and I got to work, walking each black cable length, looking for sharp bends, cuts in the casing, anything. The factory, which was called Sridhar and Sons, Ltd., was built on a big L-shaped plot in the Okhla Industrial Estates behind Nataraj Studios. I followed the cable through the executive cabins in the building at the front of the plot, under desks and over partitions (“a terminal on every manager’s desk and so instant information,” we had told them), around the production sheds where with great whines and clatters they made what they called custom high-heat high-performance parts for oil technology applications, which meant nothing to me except as data from which we missed twenty rupees and twenty paise and more, again and again and now and then, and probably now again, and I went then back out again into the sunlight, following the cable, which went outdoors in its protective plastic shell which snaked over the wall covered with red splatters of paan‚ across the small yard littered with bidis, and into the raw materials shed at the back of the plot, where sheets of metal and coils and tubes were stacked to the ceiling, with the cable slung above, over the tubelights and back down to the little room, a cupboard, really, carved out of the wall between the storage area and the accountant’s office, and in this closet we had one terminal, and the server. Sandhya sat coiled in front of it.
“Seek errors,” she said, and I could hardly hear her above the rattling air conditioner which hung precariously above the door. “Seek errors, seek errors. And our tables are corrupted.”
“And twenty rupees and twenty paise?”
“Gone, this time thirty rupees and fourteen paise, gone again.”
“The cable looks all right. I’ll run terminal checks.”
I did, one by one by one all the way out to the executive cabins, and then I went back to raw materials and checked the power and the UPS, and then I opened up the server and pulled the hard disk controller. The machine was a big tower, which we had pushed up all the way against one side of the room, next to the terminal, both against a locked door which opened into the accounting offices, and even then I had to send Sandhya out into the passageway when I opened the case. I leaned my back against the wall and worked the board out, cleaned the gold contacts, settled it back in, checked for a firm seat, all gone home and snug in the slot, hooked in the cables, stared helplessly at the lovely design, at the exact fit of the components against each other, how can it not work, and then closed it up and went outside. We had already replaced the controller twice, and the hard disk once.
Sandhya was leaning against the door.
“It’s all working,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “It must be software. Has to be. Let’s go home.”
And then, suddenly, I was overcome by sadness. It came out of the endless azure sky and settled in my bones. I looked out at the yard, at its scattered pieces of paper, the two workers squatting against the wall with their bare knees shining, at the scatt
ered bits of smoke around their heads, and I was hopeless.
“All right,” I said, but when I went in to pack up my screw-drivers, Manishi-ji came out of the accounting office and pulled us in for a cup of tea.
“A cup of tea only,” he said, waving us towards the two chairs in front of the foot-high platform that took up most of the room. He and the other accountant, Raunak-ji, had little inclined desks that they sat behind, on either side of the platform.
“O Raju,” Raunak-ji called, and when Raju came in, a boy of about fourteen in oversized khaki shorts, Raunak-ji said, “Two chai, ‘pecial, and biscuit.”
“No, really, nothing to eat,” Sandhya said.
“Nonsense, beta,” Manishi-ji said. “You’ve been working hard. Must keep up the energy”
And Raunak-ji nodded. When I had first seen them, seated on their thrones behind the desks, I had thought they were twins, or at least brothers, with identical balding heads and pained expressions and thick round specs. They were both in their mid-fifties and wore white shirts and the same Bata sandals. They lived in their dank room lined with blue ledgers from floor to ceiling, balancing and balancing away, and I wondered if they knew about the twenty rupees and twenty paise. So I smiled, in spite of the sludgy bitterness in my veins, and Sandhya did, through her taut sheen of fatigue, and she talked to them about the stock market. They argued and laughed together, and I watched them. The only colour in the room came from the big safe against the wall behind them, an old Godrej painted a rusty red and covered with those little metal locket-type pictures of Ganesha and Lakshmi and Shiva with magnets on the back. There were so many gods and goddesses on the safe that you saw the red only in patches, and there was even an Air India Jumbo flying up the front of the safe, winging right through the holiness.
Then Raju brought the tea in, and we ate the biscuits as he poured. I found myself very hungry and took large bites. Raunak-ji dipped his biscuits in his tea and chomped with sturdy teeth. I ate and tried not to think of Rajesh.