it was warm and had that city smell: a mix of rotten flowers, fish, and laundry drying in the wind. The house in Dadar returned like a presence, an early memory from the days before he’d started school. After his bath, wearing nothing but his shorts, he would be put to sit on the landing in a patch of sunlight. It was always there at that time of day; it seemed to wait for him. He would sit there, warming his legs and looking out towards the front room, where the sun paused in a panel of the window. The light played in the blue and yellow glass and came through to him, undisturbed and liquid. He could hear his mother’s voice in the kitchen, and felt his hair drying in wisps; in the street, the wastepaper man called out.
There was a rising and falling sequence of clicks, like the rattle of an insect. ‘Twenty rupees, twenty rupees,’ the voice had the unignorable nasal timbre of the train vendor. Mohan opened his eyes. It was a boy of about thirteen – he was thin, with dusty skin, enormous dark eyes and gummy lashes; a dirty cloth bag was slung over his shoulder. He had a pair of elliptical magnets that he was throwing up in the air and catching again. The magnets attracted and repelled each other as they twisted and fell; their surface was too shiny for them to stick, and the friction produced the insect noise.
‘Go away,’ said another passenger. ‘Who’s going to buy things like that at this time of day?’
It was early for such toys: they normally appeared in the evening, when the mind turned more naturally to leisure, and to one’s family. But he watched the shiny magnets flying up, and twisting around each other as they fell, and wished that he could think of a child for whom to buy them. Ashish was too old; there was no one, really. ‘Twenty rupees, twenty rupees,’ urged the boy; he’d seen the interest in Mohan’s eyes, but Mohan shook his head regretfully. This was a new toy, its arrival another movement in the life of the city. The fashion in these toys, or the ones sold on the street, the narrow advertisements pasted under the luggage racks, these had their own seasonality; they marked the passage of the year as clearly as a change in temperature, the appearance of lanky red flowers on the gulmohar, or yellow bloom on the rusty shield bearer.
At Sewri the boy jumped out of the carriage. Mohan watched him run along the platform, barefoot and jaunty, on his way to another compartment. He thought of Ashish, who’d asked the previous night to be woken early; he was going to start studying in earnest. Two hours after Mohan had put a cup of tea on Ashish’s desk this morning, he’d been about to leave the house. Ashish had emerged into the living room, hollow-eyed, and sat at the table drinking a fresh cup of tea; he’d looked exhausted and appalled, like a child born too early. He’d get into a routine, no doubt. But despite himself, Mohan began to worry. Things had a way of happening; in his case it had been his father’s death just when he was finishing school. The family business wasn’t in a great state then, and he’d had no choice but to start work.
The train was moving again, drawing near the dusty yet magnificent Cotton Exchange building, marooned in the middle of an empty plain. The big textile companies still had offices here, but no real dealing took place – the trade, which had swept into the city like a tide, bringing with it mills, factories, and jobs more than a hundred years earlier, had receded some time ago. Now, construction work went on nearby. As the train passed, he saw the stall where thin, sunburnt workers stopped for tea.
The printing shop, which his brother had taken on, made a reasonable profit. It specialized in minor work: the annual reports of clubs and associations, wedding invitations, jobs for the small businesses in the area where they’d grown up. Mohan’s share of the income and the money from the sale of the old house had made it possible for him and Lakshmi to buy the flat in Saraswati Park, then a new colony in a part of the city they hadn’t really known existed. And it had allowed him to persist with his work, the point of which no one in the family saw. ‘You had to do those odd jobs when Baba died – messenger in that agency – then this strange letter-writing thing,’ his brother said. ‘But when we started the business again you should have joined in, taken responsibility.’
He frowned; Vivek had phoned yesterday while he and Ashish were out. When Mohan called back his brother reminded him they hadn’t met for several months. ‘Come and see us some time,’ he’d said, and Mohan murmured something about Saturday next week; it wasn’t an obligation he could avoid. This weekend, too, a visit from his brother-in-law loomed; it had been a few weeks since Satish had come over, and this Sunday was his birthday.
The train stopped at Reay Road. The wide platforms were nearly clear and a bare, scrubby field stretched out beside the station. There were a lot of empty spaces in the city that people forgot, and in them, forgotten people carrying on their lives: the dockyard and mill workers, or the port trust employees, who were part of the city’s story but nearly invisible now.
Mohan sighed and thought of his earlier Saturday routine, which had often included a wander through the bookstalls between Fountain and Churchgate. This, so different from his children’s studies, had been the way he’d educated himself. There was a special magic that operated in the books he found; the thing he needed frequently came along without his having to look for it. His mind went covertly back to his other existence, the one in his chair, at home in the evenings, under the naked bulb. He sometimes felt he left himself there, unseen, while an automated version of him went about the daily routine. Those people and emotions, the ones from the pages he turned, were always so clearly present. And there was the feeling of following in the footsteps of other readers, those who’d scribbled in the margins; he’d many times come close to doing the same.
The next station was Dockyard Road, a rather charming stop on the crest of a slope that looked as though it belonged elsewhere, in a hill station perhaps; then dusty Sandhurst Road, and Masjid, filthy and busy, right next door to VT.
He was a little late this morning; when he sat down at his table most of the others were there. There had been fourteen of them in better times; now there were, on and off, eleven letter writers, of whom at any given time perhaps eight were at work, ranged round the old fountain.
Soon after the boy from the Sainath Tea House made his first round with a small metal plate on which he carried hot glasses of tea, another regular appeared. This was a cripple, with maimed legs and shortened arms. He looked as though he was in his twenties, and crawled surprisingly fast on his hands and knees; his pelvis, the only part of his body that was clothed, lurched between his legs like a cranky motor between twisted pistons. He skirted Mohan and came to a halt, smiling expectantly, in front of Bablu, the youngest letter writer. Bablu was a mere child, in his late thirties; he had been at the job only twelve years. He looked over the top of his table, saw the cripple, and passed a few coins down; the other man took them and, satisfied, went away wordlessly. This happened every day at the same time but none of the letter writers commented. Mohan sometimes amused himself by spinning out scenarios: the two boys were brothers, but by different mothers; the more fortunate one knew that only his good luck had saved him from his brother’s fate…the baroque suppositions made him smile, mostly at himself.
He’d been thinking again about the woman in the green sari, partly with a simple fascination, as when a particular face, or a gait, something alluring about a woman walking past, caught his eye. But then he’d begun to think of her in a different way, giving her a name that wasn’t the one he’d written on the money order form, and picking up a thread in his mind about her story, where she’d come from, how she’d arrived in Bombay, what she felt about her life, the kind of room she might live in. These details lingered in his head, and he looked up absently into the traffic to see two green parrots shoot past the GPO and towards Bhatia baug, making an elegant arc of speed through the air, their feathers flashing electric green as they corkscrewed. They were gone before he could be quite sure he hadn’t made them up, but he smiled again, suddenly feeling luckier.
The day extended, shapeless, because the usual bookstall excursion wasn’t there; the thought of the blank pavements between Fountain, Churchgate and the University
