Hell is a strange concept. A marvel of human imagination and perversity. Eternal, sadistic torture and unbearable suffering. Never ending. Without possible salvation.
Who but our great religious thinkers could have invented it? Amongst their many metaphysical aberrations it is the most depraved. But we must not judge them too severely because man is inherently sinful. Sartre said L‟enfer c‟est les autres. I am finding this out, little by little. Thinking about it while hiding in my room.
This room is a bit of a hell, too. It's like a furnace and stinks like hell. Grubby, ammoniac toilets, onions and curry. But what the hell, for the price I pay it could be worse and, anyhow, I'm getting used to it. It is buried deep in the slums. This whole part of town is hellish. Still, no one will find me here even if as a European I stick out like a sore thumb when I venture out of my room. Which I rarely do in the mornings. Besides, it rains most of the time. It is mid June and the monsoon is in full swing. Even so, I do go out late at night and get lost in this tide of humanity. Literally lost and I have to ask to find my way back. I always find somebody who speaks English to help me with the directions.
I walk up the alleys and rickety houses, the hovels and the beggars sleeping under sheets of plastic or cardboard to shelter them from the rain. Past the carts with fruit and food and an unimaginable variety of merchandise, and the tiny shops and eating houses reeking with the most exotic smells of spices, sometimes appetizing, sometimes sickening. With children playing in the hubbub, well after midnight, in the rain, barefoot, their rags drenched, merry and energetic. Pulling at my shirt telling me things I do not understand. Things I can hardly hear from the din of the crowd. That peculiar Indian lilt of speech even from a child. With music drifting from the radios, through open windows. Music as strange as Arab chants, a little more congenial to my ear even if the singing voices are unusually thin and strident.
I usually go out at night for a meal. The mornings, I spend in my room at the boarding house. I would hardly call it a hotel. Not even tenth rate. Though there is a broken signboard with the legend, Ratnam Hotel. I smile again at the aptness of the designation for the vast majority of its guests are rats. Sweating it out in my pajama trousers, bare on top, drinking tea now and then, and nibbling on some paratha bread I keep on hand well sealed in a round, tin toffee-box I bought without the toffees.
Reading from the secondhand books I rummaged from a pavement bookshop, to while my time away. I sort of like it that way. With the money I have I will stretch it as much as I can. Perhaps a few months, perhaps a year. To calm down and think things out and to give the Andalusia ample time to leave after it unloads its merchandise and perhaps loads cargo from India. They would not wait for me forever. They can hire an Indian for half my wages.
It seems as if I was here forever. And yet hardly a week has passed since I wrapped a pair of pajamas, underwear, and a pair of trousers with a shirt, in a paper bag 102
so as not to arouse suspicion and left the ship for my day off. My money safely in a money-belt inside my shirt. I hardly looked at the view I admired from the porthole of the engine room as we were entering the harbor. The fine sweep of the bay, rising up to the wooded heights of Malabar Hill behind, and the modern seafront buildings.
I walked in a hurry and I saw them following me. All three of them. They had left the ship earlier and I was correct in presuming they would lie in wait for me. Switchblades in pocket. I did not hasten my pace. What good would that have done? They could not touch me just then. They were bidding their time and I provoked them by dawdling and looking around the city, at the people, the commotion, the car traffic and the noise, the shops and the lovely Victorian townscape. I found a moneychanger by and by and converted a few dollars to rupees and stood playing around with the money to get familiar with its looks and value. At a corner I saw a shoeshine boy and stood to shine my shoes. I glanced at them out of the corner of my eye. They, too, stopped twenty paces or so away and were talking to each other waiting for me to finish and move on.
For a moment they were absorbed. I dropped a coin to the boy, patted his head, and with one shoe half done, slowly rounded the corner and took off at a sprint, as fast as my legs would carry me, not even looking back. Round another corner and down some steps to a basement storage and kitchen area of an exclusive-looking restaurant. I eased myself behind a few sacks of rice and stayed there for many hours smelling the pungent odors of Indian cooking wafting from the kitchen, being absorbed by my thoughts and distracted by the furtive dashes of rats in search of their dinner.
I would have done it again. Not only that. I would have liked to bring him to life, to kill him anew. I never really knew what hate meant, before. Theoretically, yes.
Theoretically. Not the real, gnawing feeling that eats up your insides. That floods your brain with a single overwhelming thought. That gives meaning to the phrase, revenge is sweet. Hate and revenge. Almost as satisfying as love and lovemaking. Almost as exhilarating when you have them paired. Almost as blissful.
I must have dozed off and I came to by a shove and a loud harangue in the liquid sound of Indian speech. A man was bawling at me. Not a word, I understood except that he was fat and jolly with a white filthy apron and was trying to be stern and failing sadly at his task. After my initial shock, I smiled at him. I pointed to my head and then, with my index finger made a circular motion pointing up.
“I was dizzy grandpa,” I told him, “and I came here to this lovely spot for a nap.” He examined me carefully and made a motion telling me to stay put. I thought of beating it, afraid he might call the police but he came out directly with a chipped plate full of rice and a little meat and curry sauce. Plus a chapatti. Probably leftovers.
“Gee, thanks, just what I needed.”
I wolfed it down using the chapatti and my fingers for knife and fork. God, this Indian food is strong, tasty stuff. So different from the subtler and bland Japanese fare.
When I finished, he took the plate, smiled at me and made the universal sign for money, rubbing thumb and index finger. He wanted to get paid. I answered with the universal sign of empty pockets, showing him empty, upturned palms with a shrug of the shoulder. He laughed and motioned me to get moving. But I was starting to get street-wise.
“Tea?” I told him with a smile.
“Chai?”
“Yes.”
He went inside the kitchen and came out with a glass full of milky, spiced tea.
“Thank you grandpa. I hope you put some sugar in it.” 103
He smiled, not understanding. And I thought all Indians spoke English. He was too young to be my grandpa. And too Indian. With a lovely thick, long mustache and two rabbit teeth, showing with his smile. A mane of straight, black, shiny hair, probably smelling of curry and onions. Two large, black, twinkling eyes and a belly worthy of a fussy cook who tastes his cooking once too often. He left me and went inside for the tea was hot and I took tiny sips burning my tongue, delightfully quenching my thirst a fraction at a time with each tiny sip, enjoying the spicy whiff. I took the empty glass to the door of the kitchen and I saw him working at something or other and waved at him.
He came and I shook his hand and told him,
“Thank you grandpa,” and I kissed his hand.
He was shocked and stood staring at me while I climbed the steps to the street. I was grateful for his kindness but sometimes I do exaggerate.
Cautiously I surfaced on the street. It was raining and I walked next to the walls for shelter. No sign of the trio. I walked away from the port, looking at the shops and restaurants and the infinite variety of people. They were all Indian but you could tell they were not the same. Different faces, different clothing, probably different tribes and languages and religions and castes. A country of a hundred spoken languages. People who lived together but the tensions were always close to the surface. Their differences trivial and uncompromising. The fanaticism ignorant and overwhelming. Hatred and violence never far away. And the wealth! I was taught that Indians were poor. I did not imagine so many were so rich. Together with the prevalent jalopies you had the fine American cars, the Bentley limousines, and Rolls Royces. The beggar, sitting cross-legged on the pavement, leaning on the wall of a luxury hotel or an exclusive restaurant was symbolic of this coexistence of opulence and abject poverty but gave hardly an idea of the scale or of the extremity. Bombay truly deserved its name as India's City of Gold.
A hellish City of Gold.
I walked for over an hour, instinctively to the north, away from Colaba and the commercial center called the Fort. The rain switched on and off and the atmosphere was hot and humid. I was wet both from rain and perspiration. The city was changing its aspect as I walked on. The suburbs getting shabbier and the crowds thicker. Now and then I asked passers-by for directions. Not that I knew where I wanted to go. I asked them where I could find a cheap hotel.
“Semi-cheap, around here. Very cheap, keep going north. Better take a bus to Dharavi.”
A nice elderly gentleman with white hair gave me this advice and pointed out the buses. I took an ancient, red double-decker and rode it for a quarter of an hour in mad traffic and narrow streets clogged with pushcarts and animals and street cricket matches until the conductor told me to get off. And when I did get off that bus, God, I thought, Cairo at its worst is not as bad as this. What kept me there was that the alternative would have been my body found at some other port of call with a knife between the shoulder blades.
I asked a young man lounging near the bus stop if he knew of a cheap hotel. He smiled happily. I interrupted his boredom. A good-looking young man. Dark, with pleasant features and the smooth, black, shiny Indian hair. It made me think that, on first impressions, Indian men were better looking than Indian women.
“Please follow me. I shall take you to the best one.”
“No, no. I want a cheap hotel.”
“It is cheap. It is the best of the worst. The Taj Mahal of Dharavi,” he said and laughed.
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I followed him wondering whether I would manage to survive this ordeal with my sanity intact. My mood was turning sour. I felt my initial good humor evaporating.
Down noisy streets and crowded, soggy alleys, we stopped outside a shop selling linen and the young man told me that if I planned to stay for any length of time it would be a good idea to buy two sheets and two pillow cases.
“Why?”
“Because you might not want to sleep on the ones provided by the hotel.” He laughed again. We entered the shop and I bought the linen hoping I would not have many more unwelcome expenses and then to the hotel. I did not even feel like talking. I gave curt, monosyllabic replies to the young man‟s attempts at conversation. I must have seemed rude but he appeared not to mind. He told me his name was Rami.
He seemed to have taken a liking to me.
The Ratnam was on a street, not an alley. A narrow street, but still a street. There were tenements on both sides of it and further up the road a number of small workshops. Two or three carpenters, one varnisher, an ironmonger and a small factory that manufactured shoes. Dilapidated or not, the Ratnam was the jewel of Mahim Road.
The reason for its classiness being that its rooms hosted one or two persons instead of whole families, while in the other tenements humanity brimmed over and overflowed into the street, their balconies clogged with the family laundry. It was not old but badly designed, badly built and more than badly kept. As you entered, there was no desk to establish the fiction of a hotel. One entered a narrow passage that led to a wooden staircase that zigzagged up four floors getting narrower and steeper in the process.
There were three rooms to each floor and a tiny squat toilet with a shower above it and a small metal sink whose original color could not be surmised. The water ran in the taps at unpredictable intervals and this contributed to the stench that emanated from there.
When we arrived, that first time, at the Ratnam, Rami tilted back his head, cupped his hands over his mouth and shouted, “Mr. Kumar.” A very hooked, very large nose with a pair of thick spectacles astride it peered down at us from a balcony on the third floor.
“Come down Mr. Kumar. I have a customer,” shouted Rami.
“Go away Rami. There are no vacancies.”
“Mr. Kumar, he's an Englishman!”
“Oh all right. I'm coming.”
I could not bring myself even to smile. Mr. Kumar came out of the main door squinting at me, smiling at the Englishman. His nose dominated and overshadowed an agreeable mouth, all teeth intact. His dark forehead was lined and to its left and right, a largish pair of ears protruded beneath frizzy, un-Indian, milky white hair. If one ever wondered whether a man could be cantankerous and good-natured, at the same time, he had the answer in the person of Mr. Kumar.
“You are very lucky, Sir,” he told me. “I have just one single vacancy.”
“You are very lucky,” said Rami laughing heartily. “I doubt that you have seen such luxury before.”
“Go away, Rami. Let me show the gentleman his room, in peace.” Rami had too good a thing going for him to leave. He could not miss the show.
Mr. Kumar, short, thin, shabbily dressed, probably in his early seventies, a little stooped and clearly stiff of joint led the way. Led me from one shock to the next. Up the shocking, less than rigid staircase, to the first floor and into the shocking little room, with its painfully greasy aspect. Walls, floor and rickety furniture seemed to have been given a coating of kitchen grease with a brush. The evidence was in the air. The smell was sickening. Rami opened the window that gave to the street and told me with a 105
laugh, that half the stink would go and as for the other half, I would get used to it. The bed was made up with a threadbare red cotton blanket on top and Rami pulled the blanket and pointed at the sheets and the pillows with a smile.
“Was I not right?” he asked me.
“You are getting me quite annoyed, Rami,” said Mr. Kumar.
“Don't worry, Mr. Kumar,” said Rami, “I told the gentleman this is the best hotel in Dharavi. There is none better. And the most expensive. I hope you make a special rate for him.”
“Oh, do mind your own business, Rami. Why don't you go, now? Your usefulness has come to an end.”
“I want to make sure my friend is comfortably settled in.” I had to smile at that despite my gloom.
Mr. Kumar stared long and hard at Rami and then continued with the shock treatment.
“Here, dear Sir, you have a primus kerosene stove and all the cooking utensils you shall need. This door leads to your private bathroom and you are very lucky on this floor because the water runs longer than on the floors above. Of course we expect our guests to use the water in moderation. Very, very carefully.”
“I would imagine, they have not much choice,” said Rami. Then he went up to Mr. Kumar, confidentially bent close to his ear as if he did not want me to hear, and said in a loud enough voice, “Mr. Kumar, please, don't show him the bathroom. He might change his mind about staying here.”
Mr. Kumar thought it wiser to ignore him while at the same time taking his advice about displaying it.
“All your neighbors, Sir, are peaceable, upper-caste people and one or two university students. You should have no problems with them. Mr. Rami, here, was a tenant for a while. But he has left us and now the hotel is very quiet and calm. The room and private bath will cost you two hundred and fifty rupees a week, payable in advance.
The light bulb is forty watts. If you wish we can put a stronger bulb but there will be a small surcharge for it.”
“We'll take it,” said Rami, “but with a hundred watt lamp and no surcharge.”
“Oh, mind your own business, Rami,” said Kumar. Then, turning to me with a smile that deflected attention from the nose and piercing spectacled stare, he said, “Are you agreeable, Sir?”
“With a hundred watt lamp?”
“Yes, yes, all right.”
“Then, it's a deal,” I said.
God, I thought to myself, that's dirt-cheap. I took out my roll of Indian money and carefully peeled off two hundred and fifty rupees. The slow inspection of the unfamiliar notes and seeming reluctance to part with them made everyone happy. I was happy because the room, though rotten, was unbelievably cheap. Kumar was happy because he concluded he bagged an English tightwad, probably overcharging him in the process and Rami was happy because, I assumed, he would get a commission, or at least, a tip from Kumar. Perhaps, even, a new friend.
“Thank you, Sir,” said Kumar. “Today is Tuesday. Tuesday is payday. Remember that every Tuesday you must have the money ready if you shall be staying on.”
“Mr. Kumar, would you kindly take your sheets and the lovely red blanket with you. We shall not need them,” said Rami undoing the bed to reveal a mattress that made me itchy all over. Then he asked Mr. Kumar if anybody would be coming in to clean the room and got an angry glare for a reply. He took the new sheets and made the bed 106
quickly at a practiced pace while I watched for there was not enough space to allow me to lend him a hand.
“I shall let you rest now,” said Rami. “I shall pass later in the evening to make sure you are all right and do not need anything.”
“Thank you, Rami. My name is John. I would be very happy if you would join me for dinner, later on.”
“Sure, I shall pass by at around ten. Welcome to your new home. Even if it is only temporary.”
Later, after Rami left, Mr. Kumar came back into the room with the hundred-watt lamp and held the lone wobbly chair for me while I replaced the existing bulb. The operation achieved, he smiled sweetly and asked me what brought me to Bombay.
“I'm here for a short holiday,” I said. Short holiday! In the slums, in the sweltering heat, in the monsoon.
“Well, I hope you enjoy yourself.”
“I am sure I will Mr. Kumar.” God!
“I did not ask your name. A grave omission on my part. This boy Rami makes me lose my mind.”
“John Dominic.”
“Not very English-sounding.”
“No, it‟s Maltese. My mother, however, was Greek.”
“Ah so! Socrates, Plato and Aristotle! Alexander the Great, almost a fellow countryman. The Parthenon, Byzantium. Oh, a glorious history! I am very happy to have you as my guest. You must come upstairs, sometime, for a cup of tea and to sign my hotel register. I reserve it for special, distinguished guests.”
“Thank you Mr. Kumar, I shall be happy to come.” Distinguished, I thought. God.
A raped murderer hiding for his life. But yes, distinguished. Distinguished by the fact that I would not bow to intimidation or submit passively to injury.
We shook hands when he left. He was sweet, after all. Despite his hotel with its grime and smells, its waterless water-closets and stained walls, its rats and cockroaches.
I looked out of the window. The sun was setting behind the clouds. The day was fading, calling it a day. Something the milling humanity outside my window seemed unwilling to do.
I unpacked my belongings from the soggy, disintegrating paper bag. I opened the cupboard and before I shut it to avoid a second whiff of its smell, saw it was divided into two sections, one with shelves and the other with a wooden bar and a few wire hangers for suits. Space enough for my meager belongings but perfumed out of bounds.
I left my unpacked clothes on the chair, removed my shoes and changed into my pajama trousers. I did not have slippers and when I walked barefoot, my feet felt sticky on the greasy, wooden floorboards. An unpleasant sensation, but I figured it was the least of the new discomforts I would have to get used to. Either that or a knife between the shoulder blades. How did I manage to land in such a fix?
I sat on my bed. On clean sheets covering a mattress of three thousand and one nights, a thousand and one stains, perhaps, a thousand and one bugs and tried to put it out of mind. Only to dream of my bunk on the Andalusia. Above that of Gonzo, our elderly cook, who was fond of me and treated me often to a succulent fried banana sprinkled with sugar. With my wonderful, beloved porthole next to my pillow. My companion and pastime, my tranquilizer and breath of fresh air. My window to the world of dreams and thoughts, hopes and longings. A world as turbulent and as calm as the waves that passed by. As exhilarating and graceful, sometimes, as a glimpse of a dolphin that followed our ship for a couple of miles. And as black and frightening as a 107
heaving, moonless, threatening sea. Two other sailors shared the two adjacent bunks.
But both the language and my porthole isolated me from them. On my bunk I was in private quarters. In luxury. They were clean, rat less and roach less.
It was getting dark, moving on to nine. I did not switch on my hundred-watt lamp.
I did not need light to think. I did not need mosquitoes, either. Half the stench of the room was gone. The other half, I was getting used to. I was thirsty and walked, just as I was, to the bathroom but the taps were dry, just the odors gushing. From my window, I spotted, further down the street, a teashop-on-a-table and its ten-year old waiter. I called to him from the window, “Chai.” He saw me and up came a spicy tea in double-quick, special, barefoot delivery. Special, with a smile. With two smiles, if you counted mine, and a ruffling of hair, with no water to rinse one's greasy hand. He waited till I drank the brew, a small respite from drudgery. The tiny man. His childhood misplaced. We exchanged some Indian words in one of the hundred languages I did not understand and a few words of simple English, which he didn‟t either.
What would Anna be doing just now?
For two weeks I did not leave the neighborhood. My depression lifted little by little after the first few days. I started getting used to the misery, the heat, the downpours. I went for short walks and shopping in the vicinity. There were things I had to buy. Underwear, shirts and one or two trousers, towels and soap, bottled water and toothpaste. An umbrella, slippers and a dozen small things that I bought as the need arose. Chlorine detergent and a kitchen brush to scrub up my room, to clean out the cupboard and bathroom as best I could with so little water. My trousseau and my Proust were probably still in the Andalusia, sailing back to Europe by now, minus their owner.
I wondered if the captain alerted the police. Obviously, he must have. One man lost at sea, another on land. How long before the police found me?
India. So vast. So much to see and I having to keep holed up in Dharavi. I wondered how I was going to get out of the fix I was in. Thank goodness for Rami. We met practically every evening for a meal. He obviously knew his way around and we went to cheap eateries where the food was half decent and tasty. Sometimes taking a bus to nearby districts. But even in Dharavi one found a wide variety of small, modest eating places. Apart from the traditional Indian curry and tandoori dishes, I particularly enjoyed the Gujarati joints with their vegetarian cuisine. I looked forward to our meetings.
We would spend a couple of hours over our meal drinking innumerable cups of spiced, exotically perfumed teas when we finished our food, chatting all the while. He seemed to have plenty of time on his hands. As a student, which he claimed he was, he could not have been very diligent. He hailed from a town called Surat to the north of Mumbai and a well-to-do Hindu upper-caste family. His father was a cloth wholesaler and wanted Rami to earn a university degree. He managed to enroll in an economics course at Bombay University. He explained that if you do not have a special interest and are not much of a swot the most innocuous choice is economics.
“It is pretty useless,” he told me, “but it sounds impressive and if there is something going for it, it is that it disciplines your thought processes. It is like an intellectual game. It codifies the obvious. Supply and demand of goods and services, money and interest rates and that sort of thing. I am sort of surfing along.” I told him I jumped ship.
“Why?” he asked.
“I want to see India.”
“Is that all?”
“Yes. Do you think the police will find me?”
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“Oh, not unless you go looking for them. What passport do you hold?”
“British.”
“Then you‟re all right. As a former colonial master the authorities will enjoy admonishing you sternly but with an undercurrent of fondness. At most you will be deported. We have a love-hate emotional complex with the English.” At our next meeting he came with several travel guides to India. I thanked him for his thoughtfulness and started reading them in the mornings in my room. It was through them I discovered, in pictures, the many wonderful temples of India and was fascinated to learn that some of them had erotic sculptures and that the lingam (phallus) and to a lesser extent the yoni (vulva) are ubiquitous symbols in the temples. I marveled that the prudish India of today has such an unusual and unexpected legacy. I had the vague awareness that Indians tended to spiritualism and mysticism which I dismissed and scorned just as I dismissed and scorned our own Christian religious beliefs and rituals and what little I knew of the Muslim faith. I found in Hinduism a peculiarly childish faith that sustained their proclivity for asceticism.
I once read a book on such holy, ascetic yogis and swamis and was unable to feel the slightest empathy or understanding for their path to holiness. Perhaps my ignorance matched theirs and perhaps because I did not hear their teachings first hand, I was convinced that their life of deprivation, of ash-swathed nakedness, of begging and hunger, of inactivity and meditation, was coupled with a good dose of laziness. What a contrast, what a surprise those temples with their sensual, uninhibited nayikas (heroines), apsaras (celestial beauties) and erotic couples were. The desire to learn more of their history, the desire to visit them increased day by day. But for the moment I was shuttered in my room.
I started extending my forays out of Dharavi in the following weeks. A movie now and then with Rami as a whispering translator in the dark, in an attempt to get the feeling of Indian mores through the so called masala movies. Not much help, really. All in the same vein. Over three hours of implausible plots, violent action, exaggerated acting with the modern-day nayikas bursting into song every five minutes, loads of sexual innuendo together with religious piety and moralizing. Their success determined by the stars, their music and sexy choreography. You have seen one; you have seen them all, as that other beautiful apsara called Samia used to say. One afternoon, a bus ride to Juhu Beach, to the weekly, weekend carnival on the beachfront of luxury hotels with massive crowds, strolling along among the snack sellers, fruit vendors and fortune tellers. With a few swimmers soaking in the sea and noisy, un-gentlemanly beach cricket matches by youngsters. A sense of incessant movement to and fro which kept me interested as I looked at the Indian faces of the middle class and tried to assimilate looks and types. The men and women. But they were all a blur in those early days.
“On weekdays it is completely different,” said Rami. “The place is deserted.
You can come for a swim.”
It was already early August and the monsoon rains were thinning out. I started taking the bus in the morning and spending the day on the beach. I bought a small, light sun parasol, a large beach towel and a moisturizing sun lotion and spent lovely, lazy days on the beach. Rami told me to start visiting the Mumbai sights but for a few weeks I could not envisage changing my beach routine. I wished those days would go on forever. I swam and slept, read a little and meticulously spread suntan lotion on my body to protect me from the merciless sun. My sickly white skin was getting pleasantly tanned.
I got to know some of the regulars that frequented the beach in the daytime. A few Indian families with children and an English lady on holiday who was staying at a 109
hotel just off the beach. I saw her a few times and we sort of smiled a vague greeting when our eyes met. When I asked her, a few days later, to keep her eye on my things while I swam, we started talking and from then on I sat next to her when I found her on the beach.
She must have been in her early fifties, a typically English face with short blond hair and a la-didah accent. Of normal height, a little stocky with largish breasts and a firm, well-kept, ta