Amit Chaudhuri
In 1984, shortly after I’d gone to England as an undergraduate, my parents moved to a small, appealing flat in St Cyril Road, Bandra. My father had retired from his corporate position the previous year. At that time we’d moved out of a 4,000-square-foot four-bedroom flat on the twenty-fifth storey of Maker Towers ‘B’ on Cuffe Parade, and briefly occupied a company guest flat at ‘Brighton’ in Nepean Sea Road, overlooking the sea (I had lived, from when I was about nine years old, in buildings that had an unobstructed view of the sea). From there we moved to the first flat my father actually owned in Bombay, a two-bedroom apartment in a building in Worli called ‘Sea Glimpse’, whose lift had a sign saying ‘Use Lift At Your Own Risk’. The sea, from here, was a blur. But buildings in Bombay have their own biographies and destinies, and are named, at birth, with presumably the same mixture of wishful thinking and superstition as our children are.
My father had bought the Worli flat from the company years ago, for a sum he could afford. It took us by surprise; it was the sort of building we had seldom visited, let alone lived in. The ramshackle lift, with its dark shaft like the inside of a toilet in a small town, and the message on the top of the door, made my mother and me smile resignedly at the sort of life that was in store for us after my father’s retirement. But, property prices in Bombay being what they are, even this flat, with its view of the dirty blur of the sea, the back of the Aarey Milk Colony, and the distant figures, at twilight, of a line of defecating squatters by the promenade on the sea face – even this flat was not worth little. The blur which constituted the sea – like a smear on the glass which a duster had failed to wipe away – would itself have raised its price by a few hundred thousand. Almost as soon as we occupied this flat, we decided to sell it. The difference from those company flats, where all those parties used to be thrown so unthinkingly every week or two, was too much to contemplate. People – prospective buyers, of whom there is always a rich supply in Bombay – came in to survey the flat; our faithful maidservant, Bai, diverted their attention away from the rats who had come to inspect the kitchen from the neighbouring flat.
With the flat yet unsold, I left for England; the untrustworthy lift, one last time, took me and my bags downstairs. In England, in the anonymity of my life in London, I kept hearing of my parents’ attempts to locate a suitable new flat, and to find buyers for their own. Their search took them to Bandra, a part of the city we used to take outings to, two or three times a month, but which was now proliferating with ‘developments’ and new buildings that would be more affordable than anything in the southern parts of the city. St Cyril Road was one of the lanes off Turner Road, where I remembered seeing a building coming up, still incomplete, on one of our tours around that area before I went to England. I liked it then, though it was still an unfinished series of rooms, with labourers moving in and out of them; liked it for the lane it was situated in and into whose life it was sketchily emerging. But my memory of it is as fragmentary, as ridden with gaps, as the structure itself. In any case, we had been told then by an estate agent that its rate per square foot made the flats slightly beyond our reach.
Suddenly, one day, I heard the flat in Worli had been sold and the one in St Cyril Road purchased, the exchange of money and the simultaneous relinquishing and exchange of properties taking place almost overnight. The Worli flat had been sold to a family called Ambo for thirteen lakh rupees; the new flat in the Eden of St Cyril Road had been bought for fifteen. To make up the difference, my mother went to Calcutta to sell some of her gold jewellery, and my father took a loan from the HDFC. These measures were necessary for two reasons. Although my father had been a finance director, then a managing director, of a multinational company, his income had had a huge tax imposed upon it – 75 per cent – and a stringent ceiling – it could rise no higher than ten thousand rupees – under Indira Gandhi, and the ceiling and the tax would remain substantially unchanged until a long time later, when the country entered (too late for my father) the era of ‘liberalization’. The other reason was that my parents came from East Bengal. They had no ancestral property, no hinterland, no inheritance, to fall back on; they had started their lives from scratch after 1947.
‘Yes, it’s happened,’ said my mother on the phone to me, recounting how Mr Ambo, in the end, had paid my father ten thousand rupees less than thirteen lakhs, how he’d been distressed because his own father was unwell, and pleaded that my father accept the twelve lakh ninety thousand, which he did. I have never seen Mr Ambo and never will, but his name is enough for me to feel his presence; I see him, and his family, enter the new flat, with the blurred view of the sea from the balcony, and close the door behind them – and then I don’t have to think about them again. There had been a moment of panic, my mother told me – it was all interesting in hindsight – when my parents realized they had given Mr Ambo the key to the flat before they had taken the money from him. She was now speaking to me from the flat in Bandra, where she would be ensconced for a few years to come.
I arrived at the flat, home from university, in the summer of ’84. It was after midnight; most flights from London to Bombay landed in the small hours of the morning. The door was opened by a man I didn’t recognize; a corridor led to the phone at the end, and on the left were three rooms – the sitting room; my room; and my parents’. The kitchen and the guest room, which had been converted into the dining room, were on my right. At 2 a.m., awake with what felt like a heightened caffeine-induced awareness, but was actually the deceitful alertness of jet lag, I couldn’t have taken in these details. I sat in my parents’ room, excited, surrounded by bags and silence, and talked in a way it is possible to at such moments, when the rest of the world is asleep. Later, I went to my room to lie down, like an interloper who’s been put in his place.
I should have slept the next morning till ten, but was woken up by half past six or seven. There was an eerie chorus about me, disorienting and frightening, urgent enough not to be confused with the final moments of a nightmare; it was birdcall. For more than fifteen years I’d lived in tall buildings; I had forgotten how violent this sound could be, how it could drown out everything else.
*
It’s hard to let go of your old life. But that is what I did after my parents moved here. Gone, those four-bedroom apartments and that sea-view, the perspective of the Marine Drive – those precipitous visions, first from the twelfth storey on Malabar Hill, then the twenty-fifth storey on Cuffe Parade. Those flats were on lease; they were company flats, they did not belong to my father. And yet the years there, and the memories I inherited from them, did belong to me.
Now I was here. While this lane was called St Cyril Road, all the lanes that ran parallel to it were also named after saints, most of them as obscure as St Cyril. Mentioned together, those names became a fading, if absurd, hallelujah to a way of life.
A balcony joined my room to my parents’; opposite, there was a three-storeyed house, and, on eye-level, a flat in which an ageing Parsi couple lived. This couple absorbed me at certain moments; the way they sat face to face with each other, at either end of the verandah, the old man never actually looking at his wife, but at something else, while the wife regarded him sullenly through her spectacles. She had a loud voice, and reprimanded him with it; I could hear her angry Gujarati words. He never answered back, but kept staring at that mysterious object.
This couple became part of my new life, my new sensibility; for them I exchanged the view of the Arabian Sea, of Bombay’s mercantile and civic power – the land that inexorably advances upon the sea, so that there are apartment and office buildings, even auditoriums and theatres, today, where there had been only water yesterday; the thirty-five-storey Oberoi Towers and the Air India building, with its logo shining at the top; the pale dome of the old Taj in the midst of other buildings.
I must have been lonely in that old life; sometimes I was conscious of that loneliness, and sometimes I mistook it for a sort of unease. But I can find no other explanation for my welcoming of St Cyril Road into my life. It wasn’t that the flat was the first one my father properly owned in Bombay. It was the discovery of a community – made up, predominantly, of Goan Christians – and of the lanes and by-lanes in which that community existed. What I had missed in my childhood, without knowing it, was community. We had camped – my father, my mother, and myself – in company apartments; I had surveyed, from windows and balconies, the expanse of the city, and, through binoculars, the windows and balconies of other multi-storeyed buildings. I had not suspected the need, in myself, for physical contact, the need to be close to ground-level, within earshot of my surroundings, to be taken out of myself, randomly, into the lives of others.
Like a shadow moving first in one direction, then another, itinerants came and went. The lane changed with seasons; there was a gulmohur tree facing our verandah, which shed its blossoms during the monsoons, and, by summer, was again orange with flowers. I found these little changes marvellous.
The birds that had woken me the first morning after my arrival became a part of our daytime lives, as we did theirs; their excrement hardened into green scabs, every day, on the balcony’s banister. In the mornings, they fought upon the air conditioners, and I could hear their claws scraping against metal. Each morning, their twenty-minute bout started afresh. Opening the bathroom window, I could see the air conditioner protruding outward; occasionally, a pigeon or crow set up home on it, and would fight off intruders. If I saw a pigeon alighting on the verandah with a twig in its beak, I knew a home was in the making somewhere, either on the branches of the jackfruit tree that stood next to our balcony with a kind of awareness, or on one of the air conditioners, our compulsory accomplices in middle-class comfort.
Our building itself stood in the place of a cottage that had once belonged to a Christian family. I had heard the family lived in the ground-floor apartment, but I had never seen them. Perhaps they rented the flat out, or had paying guests; employees of Air India came and went from it at odd times of the day, including a beautiful girl, infrequently glimpsed from my verandah, who was supposed to be an air hostess. And there were other cottages and houses in the lane, I’d noticed, that seemed to be going in the direction that the house that had once stood here had gone, towards disappearance and non-existence.
*
This was the place I returned to in the summer, and for the short break in the winter. The rest of the year I lived in England. It was my ambition to be a poet; the ambition had taken me to England.
I was doing nothing much in London. I hardly had any friends and rarely attended lectures at University College. But I was writing poems; these poems were like little closed rooms, like the rooms I lived in England; closed to everything but literary influence. No door or window was left open to let in the real world, or to admit the self that lived in that world; in the closed room of the poem, I tried on yet another literary voice, or a style I had recently found interesting. I speak of this in architectural terms because that is what would strike me most when I returned to Bombay, to St Cyril Road, for my holidays: the continual proximity of the outside world; a window left open; the way the outside – manifested as noise, as light – both withheld itself and became a part of the interior life.
I wrote a poem in 1985, while living in a studio apartment on Warren Street. It was called ‘St Cyril Road, Bombay’, and I must have written it between avoiding lectures, looking despondently out of the window, and eating lunch at half past three.
Every city has its minority, with its ironical, tiny village
fortressed against the barbarians, the giant ransacks and the pillage
of the larger faith. In England, for instance, the ‘Asians’ cling to their ways
as they never do in their own land. On the other hand, the Englishman strays
from his time-worn English beliefs. Go to an ‘Asian’ street
in London, and you will find a ritual of life that refuses to compete
with the unschooled world outside. In Bombay, it’s the Christian minority that clings
like ivy to its own branches of faith. The Christian boy with the guitar sings
more sincerely than the Hindu boy. And in St Cyril Road, you’re familiar
with cottages hung with flora, and fainting, drooping bougainvillaea,
where the noon is a charged battery, and evening’s a visionary gloom
in which insects make secret noises, and men inside their single rooms
sing quaint Portuguese love songs – here, you forget, at last, to remember
that the rest of Bombay has drifted away, truant, and dismembered
from the old Bombay. There, rootless, garish, and widely cosmopolitan,
where every executive is an executive, and every other man a Caliban
in two-toned shoes, and each building a brooding tyrant that towers
over streets ogling with fat lights… Give me the bougainvillaea flowers
and a room where I can hear birds arguing. I won’t live in a pillar of stone,
as ants and spiders live in the cracks of walls, searching for food alone
in the sun-forgotten darkness. That’s why I’ve come to St Cyril Road
to lose myself among the Christians, and feel Bombay like a huge load
off my long-suffering chest. Woken up at six o’ clock in the morning,
by half-wit birds who are excited in the knowledge that day is dawning
on the sleeping lane – that’s what I want. The new day enters my head
like a new fragrance. I rise, dignified, like Lazarus from the dead.
‘I like the parody of Yeats,’ said a friend after reading it. ‘Yeats?’ I said disbelievingly; I hadn’t been thinking of Yeats. ‘Yes, silly,’ she said, smiling, and pointed out my own lines to me: ‘where the noon is a charged battery, and evening’s a visionary gloom / in which insects make secret noises, and men inside their single rooms / sing quaint Portuguese love songs …’ I saw now that, unknowingly, I’d tried to transform St Cyril Road into Innisfree; to trace a similar journey of desire. ‘There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow / And evening full of the linnet’s wings,’ Yeats had said. I replaced the linnet’s wings with the nocturnal sound of crickets I’d heard each day after sunset.
**
The view from the room on Warren Street was very different from St Cyril Road. There was a restaurant opposite, Tandoor Mahal. There were three or four Indian restaurants on the street, all of which seemed fairly successful – English people hunched inside them mornings and afternoons – except this one. It looked like the family of the man who owned it – a balding Sylheti Muslim in a suit with a round face and compassionate eyes – were in and out of the restaurant all day; but almost no one else. I can remember seeing the two daughters, who would have been in their early teens, and the energetic little boy, their younger brother, many, many times, but never a single customer.
I was not quite sure if this was England, or somewhere else. It certainly did not approximate any idea of England I might have had previously. Next to the restaurant was another three-storeyed house, like the one I lived in, in whose attic lived a tall Englishman who I presumed was a painter. I thought this because he often went about carrying large canvases. A friend came to see him frequently, a shorter stockier man who had moustaches, whom I used to call ‘Lal’ because he resembled a man of the same name who used to be a director in the company my father had retired from. There was a graceful bonhomie in their meetings, which mainly took place on the pavement before the black door to the house, near a parking meter, and it was always interesting to note, in passing, the angularity of the taller man juxtaposed with, and almost reaching toward, the settled centre of gravity of the stockier companion. The tall man seemed in danger of being blown away by a wind. Lal, the stocky man, sometimes had a dog with him. There was a strange loneliness, or aloneness, about them; they seemed impervious to the passers-by making their way towards the Warren Street tube on the right.
**
What was I doing here? It was a question I often asked myself. I had come to England to become, eventually, a famous poet. The ambition left me lonely. I sleepwalked through the area around Fitzroy Square, Grafton Street, and Tottenham Court Road, stepping in and out of newsagents’, surreptitiously visiting grocers’ and cornershops, while I waited to become famous. Knowing my attachment to Larkin, my mother bought me his new book of selected prose, Required Writing, for my twenty-second birthday. There were two interviews in it. Larkin was a reluctant interviewee; he was always politely admonishing the interviewer for his stupidity. When asked by Robert Phillips of the Paris Review, ‘Was it your intention, then, to be a novelist only?’ because of Larkin’s two early novels, Larkin said, in his unfriendly but interesting way, ‘I wanted to “be a novelist” in a way I never wanted to “be a poet”, yes,’ as if ‘wanting to be’ was an inevitable but not particularly fruitful part of a writer’s life. As for myself, I wanted to ‘be’ a poet; I had never thought of ‘being’ a novelist. It was towards this end that I’d come to England; and sent out my poems to the National Poetry Competition, as advertised in the Poetry Review, a pound the entry fee for each poem submitted.
Those first years of living in London made me acutely aware of light, and space, and weather, and how they influence ways of life. And it was partly this, I suppose, that made me see St Cyril Road in a new way, that made me, in Warren Street, write the poem, and allowed, for the first time, a ‘real’ place, a real locality, to enter my writing. At that time, I didn’t know anything unusual had happened. I was pleased enough with the poem; but I was pleased with almost every poem I wrote. Later, that poem would become my first publication in England; it would appear in the London Review of Books, its long lines clustered at the bottom of a page, in 1987.
By the time the poem was published, we were already thinking of leaving St Cyril Road. The flat that had been bought with such excitement three years ago – the small three-bedroom flat with its perspective of the lane – was up for sale. On long walks down St Cyril and St Leo roads, my parents had discussed the matter with me, and we had come to the same conclusion. For a variety of reasons, my father was under financial pressure; and the debt of one lakh rupees from HDFC had still not been quite resolved. We would move to Calcutta; my father had bought a flat there in a government-erected block in 1975. My father, at that point of time, could not afford, we decided, the luxury of two flats in two cities; and his plan, anyway, had always been to retire to Calcutta.
I didn’t mind the idea of moving to Calcutta; I encouraged it. All my life, I’d been vociferous about my dislike of, my impatience with, Bombay, and the fact that Calcutta was my spiritual home. And the money, once the flat was sold, would be a comfortable investment for my father. In the meantime, I continued to explore the area, and the explorations continued to result in poems. In 1986, when I took a year’s break between graduating from University College, London, and leaving for Oxford, I wrote ‘The Bandra Medical Store’:
When I first moved here, I had no idea whatsoever
where the Bandra Medical Store really was. But someone
in the house was ill. So I ventured out, let my legs
meander to a chosen path, articulate their own distances.
I guess my going out for medicine, even the illness, were just
excuses for me to make that uninsisting journey
to a place I hadn’t seen. Two roads followed each other
like long absences. The air smelled of something not there. Branches
purled and knitted shadows. There was a field, with a little landslide
of rubble, and a little craggy outline of stone.
I drifted past heliotropic rubbish-heaps, elderly
white houses. An aircraft hummed overhead. And did
the houses look like rows of slender barley from the pilot’s
window, row pursuing row, held in a milieu of
whiteness, unswayed by a clean, flowing wind?
Then the ’plane donned a thick cloud. All it left was a cargo
of loaded silence. I supposed that I must be lost.
It grew evening. Trees fluttered in the dusk-sough
like winged, palaeolithic moths eddying towards
the closing eye of the sun. I asked someone, ‘Do you know
where the Bandra Medical Store is?’ The directions
he gave me were motionless gestures scrawled on
a darkening fresco. I stepped forward, intentionally
trampled a crisp leaf, which then made the only
intelligible comment of the evening. But I took care
not to squash a warrior-ant that scuttled before me.
He was so dignified, so black. Had I been smaller, I’d have
ridden him back home, or off into the sunset.
I sent this and four other poems to Alan Ross, and he wrote back to me two weeks later, a note with a few scribbled comments on the poems, saying he would keep it and another one for publication. The poems would appear in the London Magazine during my first term in Oxford, in October 1987. But the lane itself was changing; the cottages were being torn down; six- or seven-storeyed buildings, like the one we lived in, were coming up in their place.
At around this time, when I was writing these poems, I also began to write a novel. I went to one of the small Gujarati-run shops on Turner Road and bought a lined notebook, such as shopkeepers and accountants use; its hardboard cover bore the legend ‘Jagruti Register’. I wrote a few lines every day; and, on certain days, I wrote nothing at all. I wrote without anxiety, and tried to allow the petit bourgeois life of my uncle’s family in Calcutta into the excitement of the written word. I tried to solve, as I wrote, the paradox of why this life, so different from the world I’d grown up in on Malabar Hill and in Cuffe Parade had been a joy to me; the same paradox that made the location of my father’s post-retirement life a joy.
Film stars came to see the flat – none but film stars, businessmen, and companies could have afforded it. I was told that Naseeruddin Shah was looking to move from his two-bedroom flat to a three-bedroom one; and, one morning, I saw him in our sitting room with his mother-in-law, Dina Pathak, who, right away, seemed to know her own mind, and his. I struggled not to look too hard at him, because he had recently won a prize at an international festival. He was shy, if stocky and muscular after his workouts for Jalwa, and sent a momentary smile in my direction. Then he went about peeping into our rooms.
*
A property takes time to sell in Bombay, for the same reason it takes time to buy one. And so the final transaction – and my parents’ departure to Calcutta, and the flat itself – remained in abeyance. ‘White’ money was scarce; my father wanted payment in ‘white’. Helen came to see the flat, Helen, who had danced for us so many times, settled into matrimony and middle age, wearing a salwar kameez. She was an utterly charming woman; she had deliberately exchanged her sensual aura for an air of ordinariness; and yet she had a style of interaction that was seductive in its openness and warmth. She loved the flat and the lane; she had the thrilled air of a convert that I’d had when I first moved here. ‘I must have the flat, Mr Chaudhuri,’ she said to my father irresistibly, and I could almost visualize her living in it.
*
By the time I returned home from Oxford in the summer of 1988, I had a first draft. An extract – chapter seven in the finished book – had appeared in a national periodical; publishers had written to me, enquiring after the novel. As potential buyers wandered through the flat, I found, going through the pages of the notebook, that, to my alarm, I would have to excise the first two or three chapters, for which, now, there seemed no need, and rewrite the beginning and several other chapters. As I began to jettison what I had once thought were necessary links and co-ordinates, I noticed a form taking shape, a form that absorbed and pleased me. And then I fell ill, probably with the strain: my condition was diagnosed as hepatitis. I couldn’t fathom how I’d got it; I never drank anything but boiled water.
Nine days in the Special Wing of Nanavati Hospital, on the drip; then back to the flat in St Cyril Road. I missed Michaelmas term in the new academic year in Oxford. ‘Oh, hepatitis!’ said the hushed voice of the accommodation officer at Holywell Manor, wondering if she might catch it from a long-distance call. ‘Yes, do take your time.’
That Christmas, as in my poem, the young men came to the lane, guitar in hand, singing carols. I had finished revising the novel, after a horrible, protracted struggle, and then typed it on my father’s Olympia typewriter. The typescript, after my excisions, came to eighty-seven pages. I sent this to the agent who’d been in touch with me after the publication of the extract. At first, she was worried by the size of the manuscript; later, she said she’d send it to William Heinemann. Recovered from hepatitis, back to health and normalcy and the routine disappointments they bring, I returned to England in January 1989, to find snow on the ground. I got a phone call which informed me that William Heinemann were ‘excited’ about the manuscript. I was yet to become familiar with the language publishers use.
The flat was sold – not to Helen, but to a Punjabi businessman called Chandok. He could pay the entire amount in ‘white’. Two months ago, when I went to Bombay, I walked into the building on St Cyril Road and saw that Chandok’s name is still there on the nameplate. I have no idea what this small investigation was meant to confirm.
My agent, after a considerable silence, called me one evening to say, ‘Amit, I have two pieces of bad news for you. The first is that Heinemann have turned down your book.’ ‘What’s the other one?’ I asked. ‘I’ve stopped being an agent.’ She was getting married.
I then went to another agent, Imogen Parker, who too had expressed enthusiasm for my work. She was one of the most determined and plainspeaking, and most intelligent, people I’d met in the business; like Helen, she was a survivor, and had an odd, sparkling beauty. ‘Don’t worry,’ she told me (she would herself marry and leave the agency in a couple of years), ‘your book will be published.’
Read more in The Dublin Review issue No. 14 Spring 2004