The Solitude of Emperors (6 page)

I had never really had such a role model before, nobody in my family or my immediate environment had possessed the requisite stature, and I found myself craving his approval and attention. He dealt mainly with Sakshi and was otherwise well protected by Mrs Dastur, but it was enough for me just to have him around, and on the days he singled me out for praise I was exhilarated. If Sakshi had sparked my interest in religions it was through Mr Sorabjee that I began to understand just how insidiously faith was being politicized and perverted in the country. ‘We should consider ourselves fortunate that the two religions that have dominated India’s history, Buddhism and Hinduism, are two of the most benign and inclusive religions ever conceived by man. That is why, no matter what they do, the fundamentalists can never change the basic nature of our country. But they can do plenty of damage and that is why we must never stop speaking out,’ he said to me one afternoon while discussing the forthcoming issue’s cover story, a brilliant essay on Indian identity by a famous economist. That day, on my way home, thinking about the single-minded purpose that had informed his life, I wanted it for myself. And gradually, what had started as a desire to emulate Mr Sorabjee evolved into a genuine belief in the ideas and philosophy that motivated my mentor.

~

The seasons wheeled and turned in their heedless way, the brief spring was followed by summer and then a particularly severe monsoon. The city’s services broke down almost immediately. Gutters overflowed, houses and apartment buildings fell down, parts of the city flooded, drowning cars, lorries and the occasional drunk, and after a few weeks of this, my health began to give way. I had a cold or a mild fever almost constantly, and for the first time since I had arrived in the city I began to feel low. I found my night shifts especially trying. In the badly lit streets around the press it was impossible to avoid wading through stretches of stagnant water polluted by sewage, muck and industrial waste. One night on my way home, in weather so foul that even the most desperate whores and street people had been driven to find shelter, I was subjected to a final indignity: I fell through an open manhole, and was plunged up to my throat in foul-smelling sewage. Fortunately I wasn’t hurt in any way and managed to scramble out, but that night I caught a chill and was laid up for four days with a high fever.

My room-mate, an advertising executive called Rao who spent most of his nights out drinking and sleeping with an assortment of girlfriends, could only care for me in an abstracted way; his assistance, for which I was not ungrateful, consisted of buying me some strips of Crocin from a local pharmacy and bringing me tea and a couple of slices of toast from the mess in the morning. Thankfully I was befriended by Deepak, my next-door neighbour, who I discovered was originally from a town not far from K—. He would look in twice a day, once in the morning before he set off for work, and once in the evening when he returned, usually bearing a packet of food—baida rotis from Bade Mian, uppuma from the Udipi on the corner or mutton korma from the Afghan restaurant behind the Taj. I usually wouldn’t have the appetite to eat anything, especially when I was running a fever, but I was glad to have Deepak’s company. He worked for a large engineering firm located in the western suburbs and was saving up to buy a flat when he turned thirty a year from now; at this time he intended to marry one of the young women that his mother kept throwing at him, have two children and then concentrate on his career and his family. A short man with skin so dark that his thick bristly moustache hardly showed up against it, Deepak had lived in Bombay for eight years and loved every aspect of it. He promised to take me out with him in the evenings when I got better.

My illness underlined the fact that I was friendless, alone in the city and had little but my work to keep me going. It was while I was in this fragile emotional state that I began to think more about Meher. She had continued to be friendly and perhaps even mildly flirtatious with me in the confident way that seemed to come naturally to rich, attractive Bombay girls, but it was still an office friendship, nothing more. Then, one day, during our lunch hour, she suggested that we walk over to a trendy restaurant by the Kemps Corner flyover for a cold coffee. She had heard that morning she had been granted a partial scholarship by Columbia, and was in a mood to celebrate. That little excursion outside the office was when my feelings towards her changed from friendship into a mild infatuation. I suppose I should be able to recount every aspect of the drink we had, after all it was the first time I had ever gone out with a girl, but unfortunately over time most of the details have thinned away. What I do remember is the unconscious habit she had of flicking back her straight, glossy hair every time she leant forward to sip from her glass. She was intensely pretty in the way petite women can be, and I can recall her even today as she bent over her drink in the dimly lit restaurant, her long slender fingers tucking wayward strands of hair behind her ear, from the lobe of which a single oval of lapis glowed a mineral shade of blue.

On our way back to the office it began to rain fitfully—it was still the middle of the monsoon season—and she playfully grabbed hold of my arm and suggested we make a run for it. I am sure she meant nothing by the gesture, but the touch of her fingers burned their way into my senses. Although I realized the impossibility of my infatuation—the difference in our status was much too great and she was due to leave for the States in a little over a month—a lifetime of deprivation, when it came to women, distorted my sense of reason. I fantasized about her, intensely, purely, but I did not reveal my feelings to her; I was both too intimidated as well as too proud to lay myself open to rejection.

And so what began as an infatuation quickly turned into an obsession, in the way that only a first love can. My world turned brown and desolate when the workday ended, and brightened again the next morning. On the days she didn’t turn up at the office I would rage with jealousy at the thought that she might be with someone else, although she had never mentioned a boyfriend. If I were a poet I might have plaited my longings into creative work—after all great art often springs from the chasm that lies between longing and fulfilment—but I was no artist, and so I passed day after day morose and angry for the most part, cheering up when our eyes met or she laughed at something I said. Was she aware of my passionate longing? I think she must have been; I believe beautiful women are always able to sense when men are interested in them. But whether Meher knew or not she gave no outward indication that anything between us had changed. And then the day came for her to leave. We bought a chocolate cake from a patisserie on Nepean Sea Road for her farewell party, Mr Sorabjee made a short speech to thank her for everything she had done and to wish her well in life, Meher giggled prettily through her own speech, and then she was gone, and my loneliness deepened, grew immense.

I took to leaving the office exactly at closing time and boarding buses to various parts of the city—Bandra, Khar, Malabar Hill, Chowpatty, Juhu—where I would spend an hour or two aimlessly wandering among the crowds, nursing my unhappiness, eating fried foods from the hawkers’ stalls, eyeing women more beautiful than I’d ever seen, with the sole exception of Meher, as they made their way self-consciously and skilfully through great swells of male attention. But unrequited love is usually not a fatal affliction, and gradually I began to grow more positive in my outlook. I immersed myself in my work, and reasoned to myself that somewhere in this city of endless possibility there would be a woman for me.

~

Towards the end of the monsoon Deepak came to my room and discovered I had no plans for the evening. He suggested we go out. As he possessed neither the sophistication nor the connections that enabled my room-mate Rao to wander among the beds of the princesses of Cuffe Parade, Deepak made do with the whores of Shuklajee Street. When he discovered I was still a virgin, he swept my protestations aside and, after a few shots of Old Monk in his room, we found ourselves in a leaky taxi crawling through the flooded roads towards Shuklajee Street, where the madam of one of the brothels was expecting a consignment of fair-skinned, moon-faced, ‘almost virginal’ whores from Nepal.

The taxi dropped us off in one of the poorest areas of the city. Deepak, who could barely contain his excitement at the prospect of the women who awaited him, tipped the driver a hundred rupees and we floundered through dirty water to a building that seemed in imminent danger of collapse. The bouncer at the door looked astonished to see us, it had obviously been a day without customers, but his demeanour changed in an instant when he recognized Deepak. With a cry of ‘Palang-tod Master’ he hauled us in out of the rain and up a narrow staircase to a parlour where five girls lounged on two sofas. The attempts to make the place alluring were depressing. The sofas were covered in green Rexine, nylon saris had been strung up as curtains, garish posters of corpulent actresses torn from film magazines were stuck to the walls, and the glare from a cheap multicoloured chandelier from Chor Bazaar only served to accentuate the hopelessness of the place. But Deepak seemed to notice none of this, and the madam, a gargantuan woman casually draped in a sari, more than made up for the deficiencies of her brothel by enthusiastically crushing him to her shapeless bosom.

‘Ah, Palang-tod Master, not even the weather could keep you away, could it? Today you get two girls for the price of one.’

‘You said there would be new Nepali cheez,’ he said in his Tamil-accented Hindi.

‘The rains have stopped everything, alas, but there’s Shalini and you haven’t tried Neeta yet, have you? Her nipples are the size of rupee coins.’

Two of the girls got up obediently at a signal from the madam, and it was then that Deepak asked the mistress of the house to look after me.

‘He’ll be taken care of, Palang-tod Master, he’ll be taken care of,’ she bellowed jovially as he was led away by the two girls. I had been feeling more and more uncomfortable as Deepak and the brothel keeper bantered on, but now that he had vanished I wanted nothing more than to leave the place. To make matters worse, a blurry vision of Meher in the restaurant, the glow from her earring misting her face in blue, came to me, and it was all I could do to keep from bolting down the staircase and out into the rain. The madam must have sensed my discomfort because something approaching pity entered her voice.

‘You’re new to this, aren’t you? Think nothing of it; I have seen many young men like you. There will always be a first time, and it is my duty to make it memorable for you. Think of me as your own mother, I’ll make sure you’re cared for. Anita is very experienced, she’ll be gentle and loving, or, if you like, Bindu is a spitfire—after you have had her, you will never want to look at another woman again.’ I was so unsettled by now that I didn’t even react to the madam comparing herself to my mother; instead I was furious for landing myself in this situation, I was furious for not being firm with Deepak.

‘Take your time, beta, it’s a slow night, take all the time you want.’

And that’s when it struck me that I was the one in control here—the brothel keeper couldn’t do anything that I didn’t want her to do, and for 300 rupees she was mine to command. Decisiveness entered my voice, and I said clearly, ‘I don’t want Bindu or Anita, I want you.’

She couldn’t have been more than thirty-five, but her years of whoring had coarsened her. She was gross, with a triple chin, vast shapeless breasts, bad skin and a behind that had a life of its own, yet suddenly a huge desire grew in me to have my way with her.

Her self-confidence faltered when I made my demand but she recovered quickly enough. ‘Ah-ha, the young stallion wants to ride a mare with enough capacity to swallow a whole ship of lesser cocks. I like that spirit, beta, chalo.’

The whores on the sofa tittered as she led me away. But by the time she had drawn the curtain around the cubicle and motioned to me to sit beside her on the plank bed in that tiny space that reeked of semen, incense and stale food, my sense of power and the surge of desire I had felt had ebbed away. Her small shrewd eyes, bagged in layers of flesh and kohl, missed nothing.

‘You’re terrified aren’t you, beta? But there’s nothing to be scared about. I’m so pleased that you have chosen me. I feel like a young girl again, waiting for the first thrust of your manhood, I never thought I’d experience that sensation again. Come now, let me take off your clothes.’

If her words were practised, they didn’t seem like it. Her heavily be-ringed hands went to the top of my shirt but I pushed them away nervously.

‘Fine, let me take off my clothes, then maybe you’ll want to take off yours.’ She unwound her sari, slid the blouse from her shoulders, and her breasts swung into view. They were not a pretty sight, cumbrous and falling almost to her navel, but I had never seen a grown woman’s breasts before, so I gaped at them. ‘Do you want to touch them? If you’re really nice to me I’ll let you,’ she said in a high-pitched little girl’s voice, then guffawed, revealing her paan-stained teeth.

I was beginning to feel bilious—the Old Monk I had drunk earlier in the evening, the whore’s cheap perfume, the close fetid air of the cubicle and my own nervousness were beginning to come together in an unpleasant way and my stomach began to churn. The woman didn’t seem to notice my discomfort. She raised her hips and slid her petticoat off, then turned to me.

‘Do you like what you see, you little badmash?’ she asked coquettishly as she stood and shimmied her hips. She then did a slow pirouette, her belly following her hips just a fraction slower, swaying like a sack with the movement. The vast masses of flesh almost covered her incongruously neat pubic thatch, and as she revolved in front of me I caught sight of an angry red pimple high on her massive behind. I could take it no more. The bile that had been steadily rising in me ever since we had entered the cubicle now surged up and I began to retch.