Mumbai Noir (18 page)

Sure, repeated the other man equably, as one will when a stranger buying your drinks starts to get obstreperous.

Okay. Then listen, said the drunk.

This young man. Call him Ravi. He came to town to work at one of the many things that people came to Mumbai to do, back then and now. Was he a banker, a consultant, a shipping agent, a realtor? One doesn’t know. Back then, this was what distinguished Mumbai from India, that other country across the bay. Nobody asked you what you did. It was enough that you were young and fun and a good guy to have a drink with and perhaps play a game or two of squash against. There was enough room at the bar of the Bombay Gymkhana for all sorts of itinerants and wanderers and young fools and some of them are still there, hair gray or gone and squash a distant memory, but they’re still good value when the booze is flowing.

Nobody cares who you are, said the drunk, boozily reflective. That was this city’s myth. It still is.

You don’t believe it? said the tourist.

The drunk continued, as drunks will, as if he hadn’t heard.

Ravi was clearly a child of privilege and evidently hadn’t seen twenty-five. He spoke with the right accent, lived in South Mumbai in a flat with a view of the sea, and owned the only key to the door. He was athletic and clean-cut and had a nice smile and a car and inevitably found his way to the right parties. It was a world before the ubiquity of the Internet and there were hardly any cell phones and cable TV was still new enough to be remarkable. People called each other at home or the office and told each other what was happening around the bar. He liked his little set, which was in reality rather a big set, and he enjoyed the smiles and the easy laughter and the small joys and subterfuges of lives lived in cozy incestuous bubbles.

But he was, after all, an outsider. Or perhaps that had nothing to do with it.

One night, stumbling out after a few hours inside the nightclub at the Taj—a few steps that way, motioned the drunk—he was accosted by a woman with an improbable hairdo and a short skirt and a cigarette hanging off one corner of a thin painted mouth. He was amenable to what she suggested, paid her what she asked, and was led by her down Mereweather Road—behind us, waved the drunk—and up against a wall. By the by, she had him turn his face to the wall, his trousers still around his ankles, and went to work on his crack. This, she’d claimed, was her specialty, and he had no reason anymore to doubt either her claim or her expertise. He cradled his head on his crossed arms against the wall and barely noticed the lights of the occasional passing car. Her hand, outstretched through his legs, matched the rhythm of her tongue and before he knew it, his seed was going where so much urine had already been, splashing against a wall in the night behind the Taj.

It wasn’t until he was stopped at a picket down the road and was groping for his license that he realized his wallet was gone. Later, in the station, he explained what had happened to the officer. The discovery of a chance few hundred rupees in the glove compartment meant a few cups of tea and an only marginally impolite policeman. His apologies were waved away, protestations of having been wronged indulged. A constable, taking it easy on a wooden settee off to the side, sniggered occasionally under the slowly moving fan. Ravi always remembered the hue of that encounter: the tube-light above, the smoke of his cigarettes in his own mouth and those of the cops and the slow curl upward, the plastic reflective paint on the walls, and outside, through the open door of the station, dawn; first a pale pink promise, then a fleeting reality and too-soon bright hard day. It was hot—hot, said the drunk, June-hot, just-before-the-monsoon hot—and the nights were barely better than the days, but still it mattered and registered that the sun was up.

You be careful now, said the cop.

I will, nodded Ravi ruefully. But what about my wallet?

Some sentimental value?

Not really, said Ravi. But I’m pretty attached to the money inside.

You can kiss that goodbye, laughed the law. We can get you the wallet back, but that’s as far as it goes.

But what about the money? said Ravi, as the officer led him out to the station’s door, a hairy arm around the younger man’s fit shoulders.

That’s not my job, murmured the cop. But you had a good time, right?

Sure, nodded Ravi. There’s that, at least.

Yes, nodded the other man. I’ve heard he’s very good. He smiled at Ravi, threw him a two-fingered salute, and was gone through the swinging door.

So there it is. Ravi wanted neither his wallet pinched nor the cold touch of a man’s tongue up his ass again, but the dark is a powerful draw. A joint in a car with a friend, a line or two of coke in a corner of a nightclub, an almost-fight with an acquaintance with no likelihood of either party getting hurt: genteel, entry-level transgressions that weren’t even worthy of the title, no more so than a blow job in a car somewhere from a young convent-educated Bandra girl. But the city seethed around him and bulged with opportunity, and temptation rose off it like the sweat under his shirt. The monsoon was late that year, and the city smoked under the sun. He tried to resist the sound of the barkers as he walked past them in the Fort and let his eyes skate over the health and beauty center advertisements in the papers, but his will was weak or perhaps he never wanted to put up too much of a fight, and so he hearkened to the waiting pimps in the arches and the women in the shadows along the streets behind the Taj, and he thought he could smell them as he drove past with his windows down, a humid precise stink that was, in a moment, the savor of the city itself.

Was it not—said the listener, an eyebrow archly raised— just the wind blowing down from the fishing trawlers at Sassoon dock?

The drunk affected to ignore this and elected instead to study the plume left behind by his cigarette as it dissolved into the mist and the rain beyond the shelter of their umbrella. The two men at the table in the corner, still in muted conference, stoically made their way through their own measures of alcohol as the rain now came down in earnest. The tourist noted the size of one of them, a burly beast of a man well into his middle-age but still imposing even while seated. The other one was lighter and younger, but that was all he could make out and so he turned back to the drunk.

It got hotter, said the drunk. It got so hot that the water dried in the lakes up north. So hot that you thought the sweat itself would dry on your body. So hot that it was hard to think and so, one night, after a few hours in an over-air-conditioned bar where they played Latin music, if you can believe it, in this city, Ravi left his wallet in his car, parked it along the causeway— back there, gestured the drunk—and putting what he thought was just enough money in his pocket, wandered down Arthur Bunder.

It didn’t take him long to meet the man he was looking for. That gent took him through an old doorway, which gave way to a lane between two buildings. A dank, ancient staircase opened up on the left, with sleeping forms off to the side and a courtyard in front with pushcarts at rest and rats at play. The wood of the stairs was warped and bent and the banister was real wood and rubbed to a sheen and the only light was a bare bulb above a door two floors up. They knocked on that door and were let in, where another man watched TV and waited on an overstuffed couch in an overly cold room. He bade Ravi sit next to him after the other man had been given his tip. He sized up his client and shouted for the girls to be brought in and then they were there, ten of them against the wall. Ravi chose and paid the sitting man who put the money to his forehead and his eyes, kissed it and put it away in his pocket, and then proceeded to ignore Ravi completely. Ravi followed his girl into the mean little plywood cubicle with the sheet drawn across it and the tap in the corner and the bucket underneath and the stained bedspread on the single bed and the Ganpati idol to the side and the shaving mirror and pegs for his clothes on the wall and the urchin with the clean strip of towel and the condom and the soap and his hand outstretched for his tip and then, by and by, they were done and lying side by side and Ravi thought, I’m sure this is a well-trodden path, but it’s sure as shit new to me.

She told him her name and she told him where she was from and she told him that if this place were ever to be found closed, there was a sister establishment on Kittredge Road. His little booth shared one light in the larger room with three other booths, and he rested in the darkness and listened and smelled her powdered and sweating pits and knew, with a sudden clarity, that he needed to shake the newness of this out of his system or he’d be doing it the rest of his life, and in that effort lay the seed of its own failure, for who in the wide world has ever shaken that particular habit by practicing it too much? And even as he thought this he chased the thought away, because a rubber or three and a woman who is visibly a woman and a sinning ground that is even ostensibly of one’s own choosing is always armor enough for one as young as him.

So he asked her to knead his shoulders and as he lay there, her hands warm upon his skin, he wondered who owned the place. I don’t know who owns it, but I know who runs it and keeps us safe, she replied. Akbarzeb. That man out there, asked Ravi. No, said the woman dismissively. You’d know him if you saw him. He’s like a tree. Is he violent, then? What do you mean? asked the woman. Does he hit you? He never touches us, she said. In that or any way. Sounds like a prince, said Ravi.

A hand softly turned his face toward her own, and she said: In our Mumbai, he is.

When he came out, it was finally raining.

As the monsoon entrenched itself on the land, the city Ravi had grown accustomed to took on new shapes and shifted behind the silver and the gray of the rain. One night, returning from a dinner, as great walls of water scudded down across the road lights and across his windshield, he took refuge behind a long line of SUVs that sped, their red lights blinking, toward Colaba. Up the causeway the convoy roared, Ravi and a few other cars gratefully in its wake, until, arrived at journey’s end, the whole train pulled up to the curb. As Ravi drove slowly by, he saw the man at the convoy’s heart stepping out under an umbrella, while a mountain of a man waited, bareheaded and oblivious, to embrace him. His hug enveloped the man of consequence while the rest of the entourage pressed around them, and then they were lost to sight and Ravi drove on, thinking, in some obscure way, that he’d been present at a coronation carried out under the cover of the pouring rain.

Ravi did his best—said the drunk, a glass still in his hand and still emptying rapidly—that month and the next, to wring every last bit of flavor from the whores of this island. He visited the health and beauty centers of the Fort and had a nodding acquaintance with every pimp from Colaba Post Office to Leopold Café. He knew the walk-up brothels of Pasta Lane and the Strand and even old Cuffe Parade. He met girls from the northeast and from the south, from UP and Maharashtra, and wherever he went, they all claimed the protection of Akbarzeb. At times his aura let them down and they sported visible scars, but their belief in him was undimmed and they had faith that his long arm would visit retribution on their tormentors, in this world or the next.

He went about his regular clean-cut business too. He played squash and squeezed in a round or two of monsoonrules golf and went to work and partied hard, as is the way of young men of his stripe in Mumbai, and he became friendly with a nice little Punjabi girl, formerly of Cathedral and always of Malabar Hill, proud bearer of a set of tits that made you think the world was a kindly place. She was a willing conspirator in love and he thought, more than once, that she could cure him of his wandering in the dark, but her calls and flirtation and warmth were no match for afternoons, postworkout, spent searching for porn on the pavements and alleys of the Fort and perhaps a quick hand job after and the thrill—the thrill, for what is it if not that?—of an anonymous tryst with a nameless woman never before glimpsed who will clean you off before and after and send you on your way. And everywhere he went that season, in the parlors, up the stairs, down the sidewalks and through the stalls, stepping over the bodies of migrants and junkies, in the mud and the clinging motor oil and the ever-present sludge, he walked in the shadow of Akbarzeb.

The monsoon was a vehement one that year, making up for its late arrival. The days were dark and the nights spectral with lightning and the rain seemed set on washing the city back into the sea. But there wasn’t enough water in the air and in the sky for Ravi. Sometimes, he thought, when he looked in the mirror after he shaved, that his very eyes were darkening. The dirty water that washed over his feet in the streets seemed freighted with more than just bacteria. He didn’t know, anymore, whether the city stained him or the other way around. The thought of another anonymous whore, another windowless cubicle, another lineup against a wall, occupied his waking thoughts and consumed his vision till he could see nothing else, and he knew himself to be addicted. And he wondered, again and again, how a man who lived in that world and drew sustenance from it could still stand apart and not be infected.

Akbarzeb? inquired the tourist.

Who else?

Did you know Akbarzeb means “very big dick” in Arabic? said the tourist.

The drunk looked like he was accustomed to burying just this sort of unverified and unsolicited little nugget till an opportunity arose for its exhumation in a situation such as the one he and his interlocutor were in, and so he—feigning nonchalance—continued. Akbarzeb’s immunity to the virus that was consuming Ravi began to haunt the latter man. He wanted to meet him, to talk to him, to expose him for what he really was and not as all the other creatures of the dark saw him. For is there a man in the world—declaimed the sodden drunk—who can rise above measuring other men against his own mean self?

You know who Akbarzeb is, don’t you? he asked suddenly.

Of course, said the tourist. He’s famous everywhere. But I didn’t know he’d been a pimp.