Author Archives: stellamcmillanblog

Without anything to guide us, we took at random a very broad, straight, empty road. Soon, we found we had left the water behind. The landscape was truly empty; fields of dry, salty scrub flanked us on either side; they were broken occasionally by groves of casuarina trees or palms, and in these once or twice I glimpsed a manorial house hidden in their shade. I had forgotten that Desai wrote, ‘the island on which they had arrived seemed flat, toneless’. We walked for a very long time without the landscape changing. We had been passed further back by a single rickshaw, also by two boys on a pushbike, but had met no one for a while. I began to itch for the sea.

‘I now followed instinctively,’ says Melville’s Ishmael, ‘the streets that took me waterward.’ Spotting a narrow path beaten through the scrub to our right, I told Priyanka that I had a powerful feeling it would lead to the ocean. We made our way into the dry grass that hissed with cicadas. After a little way the path faded, but we continued away from the road. The land rose—now I even suspected I could hear the sea’s unearthly sibilance. We climbed the ridge, and then we slid eagerly down its other side, for there was the ocean, grey and torpid like the humid sky!

My friend and I smiled deeply at each other as we walked onto the beach. A few largish fishing boats were moored in the shallows; I remember that they were painted sky blue and looked work-worn and old. The sand was littered with the detritus of both the natural and human worlds; foil wrappers and liquor bottles were tangled in the seaweed, as well as the discarded shells of the same extraordinary sea-life we had seen in Marve. Chickens and placid stray dogs picked at this refuse. Everywhere on the beach were signs of activity, yet that afternoon everything seemed to be dozing. Behind the beach, to the right, was a cluster of run-down houses, and a few people were about, strolling, children playing; a few sorted   the catch of crustaceans as in Marve. I have never really been able to explain the particular brand of tranquillity that the sea casts across a scene, a tranquillity in which one feels an inkling of some extra-human power. Having rejoined it, we did not leave the sea again. It was a short beach; we walked to its end, where the sand gave way to a broad plateau of volcanic rock.

Barely anyone was around; the occasional lungi-clad gentleman navigated the rocks meditatively as we did. We walked for what seemed like hours across this lunar landscape, following the coast at all times. Rounding a corner at one point, the volcanic rock changed suddenly to smooth, grey slate that was cracked in such a way as to look extraordinarily like tiles laid by human hands, in right angles which yet somehow resisted forming any ordered pattern. I had never seen anything like it, and with the grey, restless sea to our left, the whole, deserted place seemed charged with a powerful magic. Once we passed a couple huddled furtively under a small, thatched awning. There was a quarter bottle of liquor between them; the woman, who looked very young and thin, wore a brilliant purple sari, indicating, presumably, that she was married.

After this long journey, Priyanka and I finally found ourselves at the long, clear stretch of sand that is Manori beach. Here, lots of people were swimming in the shallows or playing cricket on the sand. We re-entered the inhabited world as if from a long, strange exile.

Looking at a satellite image now, I realise that Priyanka and I walked right around the butt-end of the island, that instead of walking straight across the belt of the island to Manori beach, we must have turned left when we got off the ferry and thus wandered into the hinterland. Looking at the satellite image, whose clarity astounds me, I know this is right, because I recognise the turns we took as we followed the shape of the coast and, zooming in, the changing texture of the rock and, I think, even the path that first led us to the fishing beach.

Two friends of mine who had also come up from Bombay for the day met us at the beach. We sat around for a long time, smoking Gold Flakes. Priyanka and I talked about family. ‘I think what a lot of Indian British kids struggle with at the moment,’ she told me, ‘is the idea of conditional love. Their parents love them more than anything, but kids know that this love depends upon them living their life in a certain way.’

We bought a gaula from a brightly painted cart that the vendor had parked on the beach: a dessert of crushed ice on a stick with flavoured syrup, it is basically identical to a snow cone, and about as disappointing. My friend Alanna went swimming very far out, much farther than anyone else at the beach. ‘The brilliance of the sunset’ that Desai’s novel had led me to expect was indeed beautiful; the sky turned pink and grey, and against it the perfect, huge, orange orb of the sun descended slowly into the sea. ‘The sky and the water both turned to a toneless shade of pearl, then grey then darkness.’

We waited until the sun had disappeared , and then in the twilight we walked back along the beach. Alanna played an old film song from her phone, a ballad, and as an accompaniment to the island’s brilliance the song was so beautiful that tears came to my eyes:

On the path of life, we meet companions

Meeting companions, dreams are awoken

Having awoken these dreams, why do you then give us this separation?

Why did you create this world…

O Creator of the world, what got into your head?

I thought only peripherally about the transience of friendship; I was overcome, momentarily, by simple happiness. Leaving the water finally, we walked back through Manori’s residential streets. A lot like Goa or Kochi, the houses were spacious, expensive-looking bungalows with walled, paved yards and verandas. They were painted in bright colours, royal blue or orange or yellow. Many of the buildings sported Christian iconography. By the time we got back on the ferry it was fully dark.

Also striking about my satellite photo of Manori is the patent lack of development on the island compared to Marve across the water, which is dissected by the right angles of buildings and streets (not that I have ever really considered labyrinthine Bombay as right-angled). ‘Twilight, shade and darkness—these made up not only the natural but the necessary atmosphere of the island’. One is used to writing about Bombay’s landscape largely in terms of people—what they say, what they look like, where they’re going, their homes and jobs. Manori, separated from the overpopulated city by a strait so small you could swim it, is characterised by emptiness, demanding description without human beings. In Where Shall We Go This Summer, Manori for the heroine Sita is a place where she can retreat into landscape, in reaction to the misery of human drama. ‘She could talk, it seemed, only out on the beach where the sea and the sky were brilliantly lit and open to each other.’ The connection between the sky and the sea, I have sometimes thought, plays a role in the strange power of coastal landscapes. ‘Following the faithful band along the sea’s edge, she had watched the sea birds settle and rock on the maternal waves, and the phosphorus that rose glinting out of the ocean as darkness descended.’

Having spent the early years of her life amid the struggles of the independence movement, in which her father was active, Sita moves with her father and siblings to Manori in 1947. Of political life, she says: ‘now she saw it flung to the winds, to the sea.’ On Manori, Sita’s father gradually becomes a kind of legend, believed among the island’s inhabitants to possess the power to perform miracles and administer magical cures. After my trip there, I find it easy to see Manori as a ‘magic island’, as Sita calls it. ‘It was only gradually, as the light of the ordinary world grew stiff, static and petrified around her, as the streets and walls ceased to offer security or safety but implied threats of murder instead, that she once again began to think of the island. She saw its shape again, that dark saucer on the steel pale sea, white birds suddenly rising to swoop across its breadth, and Moses’ small boat setting out from the rusty coast to fetch her back into its ring of magic.’ Desai’s rigour and skill as a descriptive writer always blows me away.

Bombay is constantly presenting new faces that astonish me with their beauty. The Marve to which we returned presented yet another unexpected face. The beach was lit by myriad little kerosene lamps which, from a distance in the darkness, seemed to hang in mid-air. Drawing nearer, it became apparent that they belonged to food stalls. A market had set up on the beach, and it had drawn a crowd. The beach was alive with people in the dappled light-and-darkness, the shushing sound of the invisible waves lending its characteristic peace. There were puri wallahs with sacks of puffed rice and golgappe and perfectly-formed mountains of (bhajji?). There were gaula carts and ice-cream carts. Several stores sold corn-on-the-cob, roasted on hot coals in little braziers; others sold incredibly spicy chana masala with hard little chickpeas and fresh coriander and onion and lime. I’d eaten nothing but fruit all day, and fell upon this street food with enthusiasm, buying one of everything. Afterwards I was still hungry, so Priyanka and I went into a restaurant near the beach and shared a paneer tikka masala. I asked Priyanka what the Indian food in England was like, telling her, ‘I’ve always imagined it’s amazing.’

‘Yeah, it’s good,’ she told me, ‘But the food in India is something else.’ Soaking my chappati in the sweet-spicy gravy, I knew I couldn’t argue with that.

On the way back to Malad station, the traffic was very bad, and we sat in the back of the rickshaw talking and talking.

‘The more I learn about India,’ I admitted, ‘The less I feel I am able to know anything about it. It’s so big and so complicated; there are infinite different language groups, ethnic groups, religious groups, castes, traditions… You can’t even scratch the surface. As soon as you learn the first thing about it, you realise you can’t know anything.’

Priyanka looked gratified. ‘It’s really nice to hear that kind of humility,’ she said sincerely. ‘My friend and I got into this huge conversation the other night about how tired we are of hearing non-Indians make pronouncements about what India is. And I realise I’m in an odd position, because I’m Indian but I’m British, I didn’t grow up here. But yeah, my friend, who’s from here, and I, we realised we’ve both had the experience of people trying to tell us what India is, what India needs, oh it’s like this, this is what happens here… people who have been in the country like three weeks!’

I was glad my admission of ignorance pleased Priyanka. But I was also aware of the danger of being, myself, one of the people she was talking about. I have always felt that my love for Bombay is unrequited; it doesn’t really want me.

There is an episode in Where Shall We Go This Summer in which an older Sita and her own family are driving home from a trip to the Ajanta Caves. They pass ‘an extraordinary looking, excessively blonde, tall, and stooped foreigner holding a large placard before his face with a kind of insane patience and hopefulness.’ The man is hitchhiking to Ajanta caves, but he is standing on the wrong side of the road, utterly oblivious about which direction he needs to go in. Later, Sita and her husband argue about him, Sita calling him ‘brave’. ‘ “Brave? Him?”’ retorts her husband. ‘ “He was a fool—he didn’t even know which side of the road to wait on.”’ This scene stays with me because I am afraid to see myself in it, adventuring meaninglessly in an India to which I remain irrelevant, only ‘seeing picturesque figures pass before me as a frieze’ like Miss Quested in A Passage to India. I recoil at the thought of always being a Hemingway in Constantinople, obsessed with the dirtiness of an exotic he can’t come to terms with, or the Ajanta hitchhiker, ‘distressingly ineffectual’, or a Miss Quested, who goes on and on about seeing ‘the real India’ only to make a terrible mess of things.

I put these depressing thoughts out of my mind. Priyanka and I finally reached the station. In the empty train, we browsed the wares of the saleswomen who laboriously trawl the carriages—earrings, nail polish. We also invented a game called ‘Most Alarming Thing We’ve Seen Today’. Retrospective winners included the man in Colaba who removes his false leg to use it as a pillow and the guy I accidentally saw giving his girlfriend head during a film at the cinema. That day, the crustaceans on Marve beach were a strong contender, but we ended up giving the title to a sign we saw on a clothing shop that said, ‘Buy 1, Get 4!’

Where Shall We Go This Summer?, Anita Desai’s 1975 novella, seems to hold some fortuitous connection to my time in Mumbai, or Bombay, as I prefer to call it, given my fascination with the mythology of that great city. One of Desai’s lesser known works, I  first encountered it in the cabinet of swappable books at the Salvation Army hostel during a strange, lonely stay in Bombay. The books there had been discarded by travellers of all nationalities, and the copy I picked up was in French (Où Irons Nous Cet Été?). Equally fortuitous, I also found Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s Bombay Stories there, which quickly became one of my favourite books. As Manto says himself, ‘As I am a short story writer, I managed to describe the ocean, Apollo Bunder, and the crowds in such an interesting way that he didn’t complain about his throat even after smoking six cigarettes.’

Où Irons Nous Cet Été turned out to be a bit much for my feeble French. About a year later, back in Melbourne, I borrowed the English version from the uni library and was charmed by its description of the magical Manori, a small island that lies off the coast of northern Bombay.

A few months later, back in Bombay, I was scouring the second-hand book stalls opposite Flora Fountain for my own copy of Where Shall We Go This Summer? to take with me to Manori. The stalls there are built entirely out of books, piled eight feet high so that they form a kind of maze; encompassed by its walls, one can browse the thousands of volumes that form its bricks. There is a certain skill, possessed by the booksellers alone, to extracting a single book from these structures. Alas, I found every Desai book but the one I needed. Nevertheless that Sunday my friend Priyanka agreed to accompany me on the train ride to Malad and the subsequent ferry ride over to the island.

The Sunday afternoon train was quiet. It crawled slowly northwards, from the sea-views and deco apartment-blocks of the Southern suburbs to the sprawling rail yards and slums of Bandra and Mahim. After a little over an hour we reached bustling Malad. I always think of Shah Rukh Khan in the 1993 film Baazigar, who, when asked does he live in Bombay, replies no, Malad, and who has to travel a long stretch of empty highway to reach the city. These days Mumbai’s northernmost suburbs reach far beyond Malad, and it’s hard to believe that 25 years ago Malad was a village outside Bombay.

The street outside Malad station was amazingly busy, crammed with the diversely honking vehicles of Bombay traffic. We stopped outside one of several wide, open-fronted cafés serving snack foods and cold drinks, all of which were packed-out, their plastic benches crowded with Sunday time-passers. Kachori cooked in giant pans of bubbling, golden oil, samose were piled high under protective mosquito-netting, and everywhere the advertisement, ‘REAL Kesar (saffron) Lassi!’. We ordered one to share. The lassi was kept deep in refrigerated vats, from which a man ladled the smooth, yellow liquid into a plastic cup and put pistachios on top. Priyanka and I passed it back and forth, savouring its subtle, spicy flavour and its delicious coldness.

Leaving the café, we came to a series of fruit vendors. Green-skinned oranges, bright mandarins, scrawny apples, enormous, deep-green watermelons were piled on tarpaulins or in baskets. Coming from England, Priyanka was especially amazed by this spectacle of tropical fruit, and we bought mandarins, mangoes, chikoo and a huge quantity of red grapes. Next I determined to find some chai.

Strangely enough in that food-and-drink metropolis, we walked for a long time before coming finally to a very dark, very ship-shod ‘hotel’ on a noisy intersection. My memory of this restaurant, which had no windows and served chai and extremely cheap meals, is primarily one of dirt. The laminex tables were grimy, the floor was so black it might have been made of earth. The chai came on saucers with gritty dishwater pooled in the middle. I am reminded, however, of an article I read once called Dirty White Candles: Earnest Hemingway’s Encounter with the East, which discusses Hemingway’s preoccupation with dirtiness when he writes about Istanbul. Mel Kenne describes ‘a form of culture shock suggested by the young reporter’s confrontation with ‘Otherness’ in the form of dirt in Constantinople’, fearing ‘a morally questionable or degenerate Otherness’. Sometimes I worry that I too am guilty of this attitude, or that I once was. At any rate the chai was good, and for some reason in that cavernous place I found myself reciting to Priyanka my favourite lines of Hindi poetry from Agyeya’s Kitni Navon Mein Kitni Baar, which, translated poorly by myself, are:

From what distances how many times,

Aboard how many rocking boats,

Have I travelled in your direction.

Oh my little light!…

And how many times have how many sparkling ships

Pulled me across what great distances…

How many times have I…

Sad, restless, anxious—how many times!

Outside the restaurant we hailed a rickshaw for the long drive to Marve Beach, where we would get the ferry to Manori. Desai’s novel begins on Marve, a beach on the edge of the city from which ‘the massed rocks and the palms of the island’ are visible across only a slim stretch of water. Unlike urban Chowpatty beach, which runs parallel to busy Marine Drive, we came upon Marve beach suddenly at the end of a congested street. Only as we walked out onto the sand did the full, curving extent of the beach become visible, flanked on the land-side by coconut palms and bougainvillea, as well as the motley crowd that peopled the shore, Desai’s vivid description of which seems utterly up-to-date:

‘Some of the Manori fishermen who had just brought in their craft with small hauls of fish for the market stood up in their battered boats and stared. The weekly market had begun to draw a crowd and this crowd, too, paused to watch the boat set out—women with their crimson and green saris tucked up between their legs and baskets of fish and small children on their hips, all stopped to stare. Then the ferry boat from Manori chose that moment to arrive on Marve beach and all those Manori fishermen bringing their dried Bombay ducks and green coconuts to the market…Marathi women in saris carrying baskets of custard-apples and Christian girls in stiff frocks bearing pink and yellow paper flowers for Marve church…’

Descriptions of Bombay are characterised, I find, by this kind of list-making; the sheer proliferation and variety of people and objects lends itself to it. So overwhelming is the city’s visual input that one never moves beyond the simple listing of things to reacting to them, ascribing them meaning, and the inability to do this is kind of ego-destroying. I think this is part of Bombay’s extraordinary pull.

Marve remains home to many of the marginalised Koli fisher people, the traditional inhabitants of the area Bombay occupies, of whom Salman Rushdie writes:

‘Of all the first inhabitants, the Koli fishermen have come off worst of all… A fort, and afterwards a city, took their land; pile-drivers stole (tetrapods would steal) pieces of their sea. But there are still Arab dhows, every evening, spreading their sails against the sunset…’

In fact the catch of the fisher men and women on Marve that day was, with all due respect, a sight grotesque and surreal. Carried in baskets or strewn on tarps on the sand were masses of bizarre crustaceans like alien viscera, many of them twitching and quivering, many others lifeless. They were worm-shaped or crab-shaped or prawn-shaped, but none of them longer than about an inch, their pink-red insides disturbingly visible through their translucent exteriors. People sat on the tarps picking them from the seething mass and sorting them expertly into piles according to their species. Priyanka was rightfully disturbed by this gruesome sight; my fascination with all things marine, on the other hand, made me stare at the massed creatures with interest.

The ferry was packed as a morning train; we crowded together to make way for several young men to drive their motorbikes onboard. As much as I have grown out of applying Australian safety norms to transport in India, it occurred to me that this couldn’t be safe. Unfazed, however, and stoked to be on the water, I grasped the railing, people pressed on either side of me, as the boat pushed slowly away from the Mumbai shore and began to labour towards Manori. The engine was noisy and gave off heavy gasoline fumes. The journey between Marve and Manori, to my disappointment, took only a few minutes.

‘The island offered them,’ writes Desai, ‘To begin with, a lone soda-water shop under a clump of toddy palms…The soda-water shop owner sat in the doorway, watching, chewing tobacco, spitting.’ I think the lone soda-water shop still stands near where passengers alight from the crowded ferry; perhaps it is the same owner who sits in the doorway, idly watching the intermittent waves of people. The ferry crowd disappeared almost immediately in all directions, on motorbikes or in one of the many waiting rickshaws which puttered off, whining and throwing up dust. The rickshaws, too, were suddenly all gone, so Priyanka and I set off on foot to explore the island.

The bus dropped us near the train station in Udaipur before sunrise. We went back to the guest house we had stayed in last time. The manager remembered us and, somewhat unfriendly, handed us the key to our old room. There were so many hotels in Chandpole, the old part of Udaipur; they were all mostly empty and you could always get a room for next to nothing.

Francis and I had a bad fight that morning, about money, among other things. At one point Francis yelled at me, ‘Just because you feel fucked up, don’t take it out on me.’ I had no way of knowing if this was fair. ‘Why do we keep ending up in towns where there’s nothing to eat?’ I snapped. We didn’t make up, really, but eventually fell silent and then asleep. I woke up in the early afternoon. Francis was still asleep, and I went out and booked a bus to Bombay for that night. I didn’t think he’d be surprised.

But at the roundabout in Udaipole a few hours later- where the travel agents’ offices were, where the buses left from, sounding their insane horns and the conductors shouting, some to travel deeper into Rajasthan, others to the major cities in Gujarat and Maharashtra… there, I was shaken by sobs and Francis clung to me before the waiting coach. Later, he would come to Mumbai. Lying in my single sleeper, I watched Udaipur fade out, and then Rajasthan. I must have slept.

At some point in the night I became aware of the bus pulling off the highway. We parked in a dirt clearing, alongside trucks and other buses. The clearing itself was unlit, but swimming just beyond the clearing were myriad coloured lights, flickering circles of red, yellow, blue, floating as if in midair. I climbed blearily down from the bus. Figures were moving about indistinctly in the spaces between the vehicles. I could see the glowing ends of cigarettes. One bus honked its horn frantically and then pulled away. I clambered in the direction of the lights, strange and alluring in the darkness.

Upon approach, it became clear that they were electric lights, strung throughout a broad, covered veranda. It was a restaurant.  Fifty or so tables were laid out, and though the car park had given the impression of being busy, the restaurant was nearly entirely empty. One table against the far wall was occupied by a young man and woman drinking tea. They  sat close to each other, confidentially, talking. The only other people in the restaurant were the several waiters, all of them thin, barefoot men who ranged from adolescence to extreme old age. I wondered vaguely where the other passengers from my bus had gone, but I was hungry, and I  took a seat at one of the tables. A waiter went off somewhere. Another, very young, leered at me, leaning against a concrete pillar. The first waiter came back carrying a steaming clay dish in one hand, and in the other a saucer piled with thick white bread. He placed these before me.

The clay bowl held a dish of tiny fish and chillies swimming in oil. The oil was stained red by the chillies. I used my fingers to pick out a fish. It was salty and pungent and fell to pieces in my mouth. Then I pulled off a chunk of the tough bread, soaked it in oil, and ate it. The two bites of hot food kindled my appetite, and I suddenly fell to eating with avid concentration. In a few minutes I had finished off everything, including the red-hot chillies and the fine splinters of bone in the fish. I wiped the plate clean with bread. The waiter brought me more bread and a dish of eggs and mincemeat. It smelt slightly spicy, slightly sickly. I scooped the spongy meat up with my hand and shoved it in my mouth; with my other hand, I tore off pieces of bread and soaked them in the juices. When I had finished that, I ate a plate of mussels and another of sautéed cabbages. I picked the rubbery orange flesh out of the mussel shells and sucked each one slowly, relishing its intensely fishy flavour.

It was as if I had never eaten in my life- my hunger was unstoppable. Every drop of oil that passed my lips was divinely nourishing; everything tasted so good that my body shivered with pleasure. The waiter promptly put bread on my plate whenever I ran out. I was beginning, too, to recognise the dishes from somewhere… history… or literature? Didn’t they harvest mussels from the bay in New York before the water became too polluted? I ate fish heads and bean curd fried in peanut oil, then clam stew… who ate clam stew? Ishmael, for breakfast, before he set sail. Finally a huge plate of roast chicken was placed before me, so I ate that, and when I had finished I stood up- I was perfectly full, without the feeling that I had overeaten- and went to the urn that was filled with drinking water. I removed  the tin plate from the top, filled the  steel pitcher and poured a long stream into my mouth.

Looking across the restaurant, I noticed again the coloured lights. They blinked and twinkled, dancing to the unearthly music which for the first time I heard… A band was seated in the corner on a rug, playing meditatively… Strange stringed instruments, their bodies carved in weird shapes… A woman cross-legged at a harmonium, singing in a garbled language. Slowly the words took shape, like an image coming into focus.

For those who have no culture, the primordial is hard to place

In such a case

The self is heavy as an anchor and cannot be let go,

For what port would you sail to?

And in the open water, what would you do?

In what port would you be welcomed

When you belong, ungrateful, to some inland station?

For those who have no culture,

What language would we pray in?

Speak up! In what words

Should we describe the primordial?

It was the desert, the true desert, sand stretching empty to the horizon. Was it day or night?…the sun gave off a black heat, a darkness that was like the day in negative. I could still hear the singer’s voice, distantly, her words receded into incomprehensibility. Other female voices joined hers, wailing, guttural, unspeakably alien.

I turned and was frightened  to my core to see a man standing very close to me, clutching a festering gash in his belly. He was choked with confusion and horror, his mouth a frowning chasm, the mask of tragedy. His body cringed and pleaded, his eyes crazed in the attempt to communicate… All at once I understood he couldn’t speak. But I had no idea whether he was asking me for help, or simply wanted me to take note of his injury, as some kind of emblem for suffering generally. He needed perhaps my compassion. Why the vilaap of the women? …who were they mourning for?

Panic began to rise in me. I had been on my way to the city, and now I was deeper than ever into the desert hinterland, in this nowhere place, alone with this effigy of pain who could not speak but clutched his side, gasping, choking, unable to convey to me the nature of his plea. I couldn’t understand anything. Things were flat here, without their worldly reflections that ordinarily threw back coloured meanings, associations. Only the distant wailing-singing of the women had a faint echo of association… They were something archetypical, recognisable second-hand from some forgotten source, a story, or music overheard… some amalgam vision of the pre-modern world.

Perhaps if I could cry for him, for both of us…? Was that what he asked for, tears? If I could get a proper, composed sense of his sadness… But the music was too strange, beyond rapture, beyond pain. Were they mourning this man in front of me, with his terrible wound? And the ghost, the chai wallah’s son… What kind of asymmetrical fiction, to have seen him and now this man, two silent figures, one full of supplication, the other self-contained, demanding nothing, communicating nothing.

Before me was the endless distance, whence the women’s voices came; behind me… I turned around, looking for the place I had come from, and saw the inviting colours of strings of lights, red, blue, amber… I went towards them, away from the wrong, black sun. The truck-stop restaurant came back into view. The band was playing still. The woman now sang in a dialect similar to Hindi. I understood the odd word. I went back out into the lot. The other vehicles had left, leaving only my bus honking its horn in warning of departure. I got on and lay down with great relief, because my body was sore and heavy.

I woke up at first light. We were in the hills north of Mumbai, and the mist was so astonishingly thick that I could see nothing but white. I dozed a little, and when I woke again the fog had cleared and the countryside was beginning to thicken into suburbs. Clusters of general stores, mechanics, houses began to appear. There were old, roaring buses too, and auto-rickshaws with the names of outer suburbs etched on their backs; ‘Vasai – Virar – Borivali.’ A road sign read, ‘Vasai Beach, 5km,’ with an arrow pointing West, and another, ‘Vasai Rd Railway Station,’ also indicating westward. So, we were within the uppermost reaches of Mumbai’s Western metro line. The traffic gradually worsened, and by the time we reached Malad it was gridlock. It was already peak hour, and everyone was, like us, heading South. We crawled past jam-packed bus stops; thousands of women in a rainbow of salwar-kameez, men in pale shirts and slacks, school kids. Grimy palm trees here and there.

From Malad, it took an hour and a half to get to Andheri, where I decided to alight and take the metro. I stopped in at a small cafe for a breakfast of upma and chai. The upma was soft and warm and nourishing. Refreshed, I bought some cigarettes and went into the station. In the queue for a ticket, I watched the crowds of commuters taking running leaps onto still-moving southbound trains. I suddenly had a change of heart; I went outside again and got in an auto-rickshaw. ‘Juhu Beach,’ I told the driver, who nodded dutifully and set off.

Juhu Beach was close to deserted. The tide was out. I sat down on the furthermost edge of dry sand. Here was the ocean, spread out before me. Gentle waves rushed in and out. On the horizon, the air was so hazy that I couldn’t tell where the sea ended and the sky began. A jumbo jet from the nearby international airport flew very low over the beach, headed directly out to sea.

I wanted to grasp the essence, the beauty of that moment on the beach. As I thought this, I became suddenly, sickeningly overwhelmed by all the meaningful things in the world. Meaning was everywhere, in so many different forms, fractured infinitely. It was impossible to grasp anything. I realised I was exhausted. My legs ached. Getting up was unthinkable, so I just sat there, tolerating the sun as it rose higher and listening to the ocean, blessedly wordless. 

The road winding above among the mountains

Which are mountains of rock without water

If there were water we should stop and drink

~T.S. Eliot,

The Waste Land

I

All I wanted was to be in Bombay. I dreamt constantly of that city as I had last seen it, at the tail end of the monsoon. Meanwhile, we were leaving Udaipur to travel further into obscurity.

            Francis and I travelled second class on the train, something we had not done in a long time. The train started at Udaipur; we had been fortunate to procure a luggage rack as a seat, and we stayed there the whole journey while below us the cabin gradually filled up. I had optimistically estimated the journey at about two hours- it took six, naturally. By the time we arrived the train was intensely crowded; there was no space to put one’s foot down amongst the passengers who sat stoically on the floor, their faces hardened against the night journey ahead of them. We had foolishly stowed the guitar under one of the seats; the people sitting on the floor could barely move enough to allow us to get it out. The press of the train carriage finally released us onto the platform, and we gratefully breathed the fresh night air. It was nearly midnight.

It was a tiny country station, without even a waiting room or kiosk. It was not yet Winter, but the night was chilly. I pulled my jacket on and lit a much-needed cigarette. I passed the packet to Francis before he could ask. The train did not halt long at the station; it was already moving as we lit our cigarettes. Very quickly it seemed to disappear; the rhythmic thartharaana of its progress on the tracks faded and left the night in silence. The engine of a rickshaw outside the station started, then it, too, faded away. For a few minutes we stood there on the strange platform, unattached, nonexistent; then, rousing ourselves, we got into a rickshaw and drove into town.

Later, in the room we had booked at a guest house, we sat by the window and smoked, looking down at the sleeping town. We tried to learn what we could from the street below us. A dog started up barking; he was met with cries from scores of dogs several streets away. Francis and I both felt too tired to sleep. Eventually, though, we lay down, and sleep as it overtook us resembled the rocking motion of the train.

In the morning I got up and went for a walk. I was curious to see the town in daylight. Francis was still asleep when I left. I wandered up our street. Stores were rolling up their shutters. The buildings were of yellow stone: a desert town, the colour of the desert. The road, too, was coated in a dust the same colour as the buildings. Blue-grey water trickled through the open sewer that bordered the road, and hairy black pigs played gracelessly in it.

I wandered up this street until I came to the huge gate of the original fortified city. Iron doors as tall as a two-storey house stood now forever open, each one covered in spikes a foot long. Here the path opened into a wide intersection, on the other side of which the road continued. I walked a little further. I could see a market ahead, but the sun was beginning to grow hot; I headed back, determining to find some tea to dissipate the weariness that encompassed me.

It was on my way back that I saw the ghost. Directly outside the city gate was an empty lot, in which cows ruminated and the little hairy pigs rummaged. Here he stood, near the edge of the road. If I had never seen him again, his image would have stayed with me clear as a photograph. He appeared to be looking right at me. I was shaken by his gaze, which seemed to see me and not see me. I know no description for the expression in his eyes; it seemed to live somewhere outside the normal polarities of emotion, neither bewildered nor sad nor happy; without the slightest heat of anger but nonetheless intense.

My first glance told me he was young. However, after a moment I became less sure; his face seemed to hold the characteristics of both youth and age. Full, feminine lips, ever slightly apart, sat between round cheeks; several inches of curly hair grew wildly on his head. There was not a blemish on his skin; his cheeks were perfectly smooth.  He was dressed in a heavy khaki shirt, the cuffs buttoned at his wrists, and canvas trousers that had once been cream-coloured. His trousers were tucked into a  pair of hiking boots. His clothes all appeared much too large for him, they were curiously bulky. The heat of the day apparently did not bother him.  He, like the town, seemed to be coated in a film of dust, though it was not on him yellow but a pallid grey. His clothing, his hands, and most strikingly his face and hair were hid behind this shade of grey that dulled all definition, made him faint as an apparition. He might have risen from a funeral pyre and been unable to rid himself of the ash. He looked in my direction as I passed, but I knew not if he saw me.

Just inside the city gate was a chai stand. It had a thatched awning in whose shade one could sit on a narrow wooden bench, with one’s back against the old wall of the town. The shadow of the wall and the awning kept the shop dark, but the kerosene stove kept it hot. It was tended by an elderly man; ‘Chai?’ he asked me as I approached. ‘Haan,’ I replied, tilting my head in assent. He turned the flame up on the stove, which began to roar, and stirred the pot until tea bubbled furiously to the top. Then he deftly strained the tea into a small, tapered glass which he handed to me. The first sip began to revive me; I drank and watched the chai wallah, who had seated himself on the wooden bench. His face was darkened nearly to black by years of sun exposure. He had very dark, very shiny eyes that were full of feeling; the only feature capable of expression in his weather-stiffened face, they more than sufficed to convey his gentle friendliness.

I brought chai packing back for Francis.

‘Hey,’ he groaned, rolling over in bed, smiling.

‘Hey babe.’

‘You went out?’

‘Yeah. I couldn’t get back to sleep. I didn’t go far though; it’s fucking hot out there. I saw a couple of medical stores just outside; I didn’t ask about Tramadol though.’

‘True. Do they look… lenient?’

‘Yeah. I mean, they’re pretty rundown. You can’t always tell though.’

‘Yeah, you can’t. Thanks for the chai.’

I lay down beside Francis and tried to draw him towards me. He lay a loving arm across my back but stayed where he was. ‘I don’t really feel like it,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

I shrugged. ‘Can we watch TV?’

‘Course.’

The room got cable. I watched The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. His guest was Christopher Lloyd, who played the scientist in Back to the Future. Francis and I lay around most of the day. I tried to have a siesta, but sleep wouldn’t come. We grew hungry, but we waited until late in the afternoon, when the heat had abated, to go out. The chemist sold us Tramadol- we both popped several, and wandered along the same route I had taken that morning.

The ashen man was where he had been earlier, outside the gate. He was pacing slowly, and seemingly preoccupied. He looked up as we passed. I met his gaze and held it, fascinated, as long as I could. Again I had the impression that he both saw and did not see me. Something deep inside me turned over in terror.

When he was behind us, Francis said, ‘That was so strange.’

‘What? That…?’

‘That guy, yeah. It was like he wasn’t real. He didn’t seem like he was real.’ I nodded energetically, excited to hear Francis echo my own thoughts. I told him about seeing the man that morning. Finally it occurred to me; ‘He’s a ghost!’ I exclaimed.

‘Yes! He’s a fucking ghost, you got it! Shit, Bell.’

‘I’m serious.’

‘I know, Bell.’

We walked into the market but found nowhere to get a meal. We ended up eating at the guest house, discussing the ghost. The  food took a long time but it tasted okay. Back in the room, we lay in bed and smoked cigarettes while we watched a movie about a hold-up on a train that wason TV. We didn’t speak much.

That night I dreamt we were in a village. A group of thatched huts formed a circle around the place where we sat in the dust. Beyond the huts empty plains continued to the horizon. The weeping strains of folk music came to us from afar; the voices of women and of a traditional violin-like instrument; they all cried. An old man handed me milk in a steel cup. He said something to me which I didn’t understand. Then he lifted his shirt and showed me a bloody, badly mangled gash in his belly. The women wailed louder in the distance- were they grieving for somebody? The man was anxiously pointing at his wound.

I woke up. Francis was fast asleep beside me. I knew I would not sleep for a long time then. I lay there listening to the dogs barking. Finally, near dawn, sleep overcame my uneasiness.

*

At the tea shop, two men were debating excitedly. Their gestures filled the tiny space in the shop; their glasses of chai sat undrunk beside the stove. My own Hindi served me only far enough to gather that their debate was theological. The old chai wallah followed them with quiet interest, nodding at certain points, occasionally adding a few words. The two men listened to him with as much interest as they did each other and replied fervently. It was already hot; Francis and I had slept late. The chai wallah greeted us as friends. ‘Chai?’

‘Yeah!’

‘Do?’

‘Haan, haan!’

The friends inside the tea shop made space on the bench and bade us sit down. They seemed to be reaching a consensus in their debate. They had lowered their voices and regained their tea. One of the two was calmly expostulating what appeared to be his concluding point; the other listened, often mumbling, ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ with a deferential tilt of the head. Chai wallah, too, seemed to agree.

‘What we are saying,’ the same man said in English, turning to Francis and me, ‘Is, if God does not want us to drink alcohol or eat non-veg, then why would he put these  things here before us? If they are here, they must be part of God, He is knowing these things are there, and he wants us to experience the world, the whole world. He himself has made  these things.’

‘Yeah man,’ said Francis, ‘You’re right.’

After tea, we wandered into the market. The ghost was in the empty lot, standing amongst the  pigs and cows. He wore the same heavy, faded clothes as the day before. This time he did not look at us. We bought samosa and fruit and cigarettes.

‘Francey,’ I said, catching his hand as we wandered away from the paan stall, ‘Let’s go somewhere else.’

We booked an overnight bus back to Udaipur for the following night. From there I swore I would go to Bombay, though Francis refused to commit to any plans. ‘Let’s just see,’ he insisted. I didn’t need to see, I knew. Bombay was a thousand kilometres and worlds away. I thought then it was the hiding place of happiness; there in the desert, I thought of the ocean and glimpsed relief. Our travels arranged, Francis and I got a rickshaw to take us to a wine shop and bought a bottle of cheap whiskey. We drank the whole thing in our room, fucked with the cricket on the telly in the background and fell asleep by eleven.

On our last day in that town, the ghost was at the chai stand. He stood out the front of it, pacing languidly, nodding his head back and forth. Some intense question was on his sweet, pouting lips; he was lost in thought. He wore the same ill-fitting clothing. I watched him, fascinated, watched his young face aged by that pervasive grey pallor; his hair was grey; it aged him a thousand years. The chai wallah was unfazed by the presence of the ghost. Finally he said to me, ‘Vo mera beta hai. Vo paagal ho gaya.’

All at once I saw that the chai wallah   and the ashen young man had identical dark, shining eyes. I often have trouble comprehending what people say to me in Hindi, but the simplicity of the chai wallah’s words was such that I understood him word for word. He said, ‘He is my son. He went mad.’