‘We’ll go to Matunga one Sunday for dosa if you like,’ Mohan said.
‘Mm,’ Ashish agreed. He had changed into his Sunday clothes, a t-shirt and shorts made comfortable from much washing. The evening air was soothing on his skin.
‘Your parents will reach this evening, we can call them when we get back.’
‘Okay.’ He scuffled along. He didn’t miss his parents; he wasn’t sure if he would. But already he missed town: on a holiday like today, outside Esplanade Mansion the streets were as quiet as the inside of a cup, and at such times the city always seemed to belong to him alone.
‘So,’ Mohan cleared his throat, ‘college doesn’t start for a month, a little more than a month?’
Ashish’s ears pricked up at the mention of college, but he kept his head prudently down. ‘Yes, in June,’ he said.
‘Ah. Hm.’
They continued to amble along the second lane, where the bungalows and apartment blocks were low-rise and set back from the road. Next to a broken culvert, bright green weeds flourished illegally.
‘Your parents were surprised about your attendance record,’ Mohan said.
Ashish looked at him. Mohan looked away, and waved at an unattractive grey bungalow on the left. The gatepost was marked Iyer. ‘Famous doctor lives there,’ he remarked. ‘Heart surgeon. Son is also a doctor. Dermatologist.’
‘Hm.’
Mohan frowned. ‘I don’t want to lecture you about your studies,’ he said. Ashish, holding his breath, flapped on in his rubber slippers. A rickshaw, containing two laughing young people, went past; the exhaust made explosive, farting noises.
‘It’ll be nice for all of us if you have a good year,’ Mohan said finally. He sighed, laughed, and pulled Ashish closer to him so that he could perform a familiar manoeuvre of affection and exasperation: he put his left hand on Ashish’s head and clouted it with his right. This was the only punishment he’d ever managed to inflict when his children, nephews and nieces reported each other’s misdemeanours to him.
Ashish grinned, but not too much. ‘Yes Mohan mama, don’t worry,’ he said obligingly.
His uncle snorted. ‘You have no idea. You should have heard your grandfather talk about studies, doing well at school…Vivek mama had it worse than I did, of course.’ He smiled.
They were passing a dilapidated beige bungalow. ‘He used to write, your grandfather,’ Mohan said suddenly. ‘Did you know that?’
‘No,’ Ashish said. His uncle was smiling, as though he had pulled a forgotten rabbit out of an old hat. ‘Do you mean stories?’
‘Stories, essays, little things. I don’t know what you’d call them. On Sundays he would get up early in the morning. When we woke up, he would be writing and he’d carry on all day.’
‘So he didn’t take you all out, you didn’t do things?’
‘It was his writing time.’
Ashish tried to digest this image of his grandfather, whom he mostly knew from photographs; there, he seemed like a grimmer, more stolid edition of his uncle: white shirt, trousers worn somewhere around the nipples, those small spectacles, slicked-back hair. ‘Did he publish anything?’ he asked.
‘No. One of his friends was a writer of short stories, a very clever fellow, Nandlal Gokhale. My father showed Gokhale some of his stories once and he took them away to read. But he said that they weren’t good enough to publish.’
Ashish frowned. ‘But I’ve never heard of this Gokhale.’
‘He’s not so well known now,’ Mohan said.
‘So how does anyone know that he was right about grandfather’s writing?’
Mohan’s pace seemed to slow. ‘Well – he was a man of letters,’ he said.
Ashish was still mildly indignant. ‘Do you have any of grandfather’s stories?’ he asked, though he was a slow and reluctant reader of his mother tongue.
Mohan shook his head. ‘No, re. It’s possible that there were some papers and they got lost when we left the house at Dadar. But I think he burned them, some time before he died.’
Later in the evening Ashish was sitting at his desk when there was a knock at the door. His uncle came in. ‘Your aunt says dinner’s ready,’ he said. ‘Come soon. Oh – you found this book.’ He wandered further into the room and picked up Become a Writer.
‘Yes, what is it?’ Ashish asked. ‘I haven’t really looked at it, I started these ones.’ He pointed to the pirated copies of I’m OK, You’re OK and The Silva Method. They were near-perfect facsimiles, but their thin paper and flimsy covers made them seem interestingly insubstantial, as though they belonged to a more temporary world to which they would one day return.
‘I bought this a few years ago, from a man sitting outside the Museum,’ Mohan said slowly. ‘He was next to the other hawkers, you know, the comb-and-keychain guys. But all he had was three peacock feathers and this book, in the same state as now.’
‘How much did you pay?’
‘I don’t remember. Too much. I didn’t bargain, he seemed in a bad way.’
From the other room came the cry, ‘It’s getting cold!’
‘Come on,’ Mohan said.
Ashish scrambled up, and stuck a ruler in his textbook. He had the disconcerting feeling that someone with immense, vacuum-black eyes had stared at him for a moment from the darkened window of the empty flat opposite.
‘So did you see the man again?’ he asked, following his uncle down the dim passage.
‘See him? No, I don’t think so,’ said Mohan vaguely.
It was nearly dark; the in-between of dusk had been replaced by the bright electric light of indoors, and it was as though the lane outside had completely disappeared. By chance, Mohan was still holding the tattered paperback, and when they reached the drawing room he put it down on a chair. Food was already on the table; they sat down.
In the train, Mohan sat as usual, hands resting on his knees, his arms straightened like cantilevered posts. Tilak Nagar came and went, with the coconut palms near the station, and GTB Nagar, where there was a school, and shacks next to the railway line. At Kurla, something or other was always going on – children chasing each other across the tracks, or a ticket collector who’d caught three defaulters, tied their wrists together with cord and was making them walk behind him in a line so that they didn’t run away laughing.
Mohan sat on the left of the compartment; the morning sun flooded through the window and onto his face. It was hot and humid, the summer
