An excerpt from  Reason to Hope

    (a forthcoming novel)

            by Roomy Naqvy

Chapter 1 –

Before I had come to meet her, I had come to Mumbai once earlier but it was such a short trip—just a day, I think—that I don’t even consider it as a visit. I was forty three, my wife of ten years had left me and I was utterly devastated. I had come to Mumbai, the city of my birth, to gather the fragments of my life and I wasn’t sure if I could do so. I just started walking from Sukhadvala Building close to Metro Cinema, where I was born, to Samovar Café at the Jehangir Art Gallery. Delhi was in the throes of a deep dark winter and the weather here was a warmer twenty degrees. I had worn a thermal inside, unaware of the warmth that was prevalent in the city as also its climate. My legs ached from the long walk and I hadn’t slept the night before, so, the fatigue was obvious. But I trudged on, unmindful of the scenic, iconic buildings that passed me. My doctor had put me on certain medicines that blocked the serotonin in my brain from being absorbed again. He had also told me that I should walk an hour or so every day and tire myself out. I didn’t understand the technical terms that my doctor had used. Though he had told me that my issue was not psychiatric—it seemed physiological to him—and that I should make a recovery soon, my anxiety levels were rather high. My moods fluctuated between infrequent highs and regularly deep lows.

Often, I felt numb inside even though I had a cheerful exterior.

As I walked, the doctor’s advice was the least of my concerns. I had come to the city of my birth to catch hold of my moorings, hold them tight in my hands like the proverbial straw, which would perhaps stop me from drowning. I was quite calm externally and no one at my workplace knew of my state. But the inner turmoil was like a burning bed of hot coals and I was constantly eroding away deep inside. My short trip to Mumbai was my visit of faith, as people go to pilgrimages. But there was no deity here, no place of worship that I had come to. I had come here to reclaim myself, my identity, what I had been as I was born. To seek one’s own self is also a pilgrimage and I think it has a deeply divine significance too.

The city buildings were passing me in a quick haze as if I were sitting in a Lamborghini, speeding away at breakneck speed. Samovar Café at the Jehangir Art Gallery came pretty soon. I was in a zone of life, where weeks passed by in the blink of an eye and I was left later holding the shards of experience in my bare hands.

At the Samovar Café, I had met this Gujarati poet, Tanisha, fifteen years ago. I thought that perhaps rekindling the visual images of the poet-friend might help me feel better. She was cute but nothing seemed to assuage me today.

Samovar Café was such a treat, where the thespian Ashok Kumar had helped Amol Palekar find the love of his life in the movie, Chhoti si Baat. But even that memory meant nothing to me. I just wandered in absentmindedly. They were playing the Mary Hopkin song, Those Were the Days. It only heightened my misery as the lyrics fell on my ears:

Those were the days my friend

We thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance forever and a day

I took a table and accidentally spilled a glass of water. A young waiter came running with the menu.

“I’m sorry.”

“No problem, sir.”

“I’ll have a grilled cheese-tomato sandwich and black coffee.”

“Sure, sir.”

They were still playing Those Were the Days and I was quite miserable now:

Then busy days went rushing by us
We lost our starry notions on the way

“Could you please change the music?” I requested him. The café was quite empty with a couple of people sitting there. Nobody saw me there.

“Sure, sir.”

The lady at the counter changed it to Chris De Burgh’s Lady in Red. As the music played, I was lost pondering over my existence, how it had all changed, what I had gained and lost over these years. My eyes were misty as I thought of the distance yet to be covered. I had another thirty years or so of life left and here I was, at forty three, trying to cope with depression and the meaning of existence.

The lyrics of the song seemed miles away. I could only hear a faint echo of the song playing in the café:

Lady in Red is dancing with me, cheek to cheek

There’s nobody here, it’s just you and me

I had taken off my glasses and was resting my face on my right hand with a far-away look in my eyes.

 “Sir, are you all right?” The lady from the counter had brought the cheese toast and the coffee.

I must have been here only for the last few minutes but it had seemed like an eternity. Images of my life were rushing past me like an express train.

“Yes, I’m fine. Thank you.”

As the green chutney entered my mouth, the full blast of the tamarind, coriander, mint, garlic and a dash of lemon was let loose on my tongue. The sandwich had been grilled well. I could feel the melting cheese dripping slowly into my mouth. But I was drained of energy and was very hungry. There was urgency now. I did not have the leisure of savouring each bite.

I finished the snack quickly and asked for the bill. Instead of putting the money there, absent-mindedly, I wrote my name on the bill in capitals: SULEIMAN DATT.

The lady seemed worried.

“Sir, can I help you in any way? Is everything all right?”

I mumbled an apology, paid the money and left. As I walked toward the sea, cars whizzed past me. I reached The Gateway of India. There were thousands of pigeons assembled there.

But the years of life had already flown. Looking at the calm sea, I could feel the turbulence of my life much more acutely. My memories brought me back to New Delhi, the city of my karma, the battlefield of my life.

The year was Nineteen Ninety Two; I was twenty one, studying Masters in English from Jamia Millia Islamia University and there was Aicha in my life. She always told me not to think too much about everything.

“Aicha, I’ve always wondered why you spell your name the French way and not ‘Aisha’ or ‘Ayesha’ as other Indians did.” I had asked her once in the beginning.

“How does a spelling matter, Suleiman? This is just the make-up that we put on our faces. You take off the orange peel and the real person must remain the same. Isn’t it true?”

“Yes, I guess so.”

I would see Aicha and a river of blood would rush into my brain, clogging my senses, filling me up with her presence. When she was closer and she spoke, a strange sweaty smell came from her. I didn’t like that smell but there was something in her that drew me. I’m not sure if it was her fair, round face, her long luxuriant hair or was it her fuller body which made me feel she would engulf me inside her. When I look back, I cannot say with certainty what it was but something did draw me to her. It is something indefinable that draws us to people and we cannot even bring it to words. The precise nature of our attraction is always the inexpressible, the half-muted, the sighs we utter and the thoughts that we never bring to our faces.

“Aicha, why do you travel such a long distance for your classes? You cross the breadth of Lutyens’ Delhi to reach the University of Delhi. My university also offers Masters in Political Science and the faculty is quite good too.”

I had asked her. I had selfish reasons for if she had been in the same place, I would have got to see her more.

“Suleiman, my aunt and sisters are working here and you get bored seeing the same place. Sometimes, all of us need a change of place. There may not be anything substantial in it, still, the mere fact of changing a place gives us a new perspective. I know Jamia Millia Islamia University has a beautiful campus too. It has a shooting range and lovely eucalyptus trees. But I just like the open spaces at the Delhi University North Campus. I like the Mall Road. The name itself gives me a romantic Shimla feel, even though it is nowhere there. The campus simply liberates me.”

I liked the way Aicha used to talk. There was a carefree way about her. She had that luxuriant dark hair, which she would keep controlled in a single plait. Looking at her, I often wondered when her hair would burst out from the confined controls of her prudent self. How it would be if her tresses just flew a bit as they did in the lost traditions of Urdu poetry that I encountered on Delhi campuses. I kept on waiting for that moment to unfurl itself.

Perhaps, it did come later.

Once, I decided I would go to Delhi University North Campus and meet Aicha. There were no mobile phones and no emails. But Aicha did phone me from her fixed line every second day. So, I told her that I would meet her two days later. There was no Metro in the city and the money, my mother gave me to spend sufficed for the bus fare. I hopped on to a jam-packed Delhi Transport Corporation bus. This was Bus No. 402 and it went straight to Jama Masjid. There were no low floor buses and no air-conditioned buses either. It was one of those old buses that the Corporation had phased out.

It was that season in Delhi, when November ends and December begins, when the darkness of the winters starts seeping in by the evenings but the days have a slightly sunny, romantic feel to it. The bus was full of people. There was no place to sit. But this year, things had been different. Delhi was under an intense cold wave. The visibility was all right on the roads but it was icy cold and very breezy. Some of the windows in the bus were broken, while some were stuck. A window had cardboard stuck on to it to give respite to some passengers. From Jamia Millia Islamia University, it was a long journey to Jama Masjid and usually, I would crib deep inside on not getting a seat. This bus route was known for its notoriously packed buses. People of all kinds and types were constantly going to and fro in this bus. I wondered where so many people went and why they only took this bus route. Years later, it had dawned on me that people who couldn’t afford auto-rickshaws or taxis took this bus to reach the Old Delhi Railway Station. There are simple truths about daily life that never strike us in the headiness of the youth that only become apparent when we touch forty.

This was my first visit to Mumbai in over a decade. I had been planning this for over a year now. It was strange how we do these things and follow the heart. I am sure many of you would call me stupid too. But for over a year, I had been talking to her and we had decided that I would make this trip to meet her. To travel over a fifteen hundred kilometers, cutting across the breadth of the country, just to meet someone and talk to them, was something that I had never done earlier in my life. In any other period of my life, I would have never done it. But I simply embarked on this journey and I did not even consult friends, or family about it. There was nothing secret in a way about it and I was doing nothing wrong in my life. I knew that and my heart was clean yet we live in the confines of social boundaries and often, something as simple as following the heart is also chastised by people around us. I think it was this unknown fear of chastisement that stopped me from telling people about the real purpose of making this trip to Mumbai.

There was no fear inside me. No sense of apprehension. This was the first time I was going to meet her in my life. I had never seen or met her before. Usually, in my social situation, people would have been afraid of such an enterprise. Though I was respected professionally, I felt that I had reached a point in my life, when nothing would matter so much. The entire year had been a culmination of a long depressive phase in my personal life and communicating with her every day for over a year was the only succor during this darkest phase of my life. She had been my emotional support and both of us were aware of the fact. Over the year, as I struggled with depression and also took medication from one of the best psychiatrists in the city, I had shared everything with her and she had stood by me unquestioningly.  It was enough for me that she could just accept me as an individual. That was such a big relief to me as all the other people around me in my family, social, professional lives related to me only in certain skewed ways. No one could relate to me fully just as a person, emotional, sensitive and someone who could fail in relationships too.

I had booked a taxi a few hours earlier for the domestic airport in New Delhi. I was flying to Mumbai and I had taken an early morning flight to save money. It was early January and one of the darkest winters in recent years. The taxi driver had reached somewhere else and I was standing on the main road, near the taxi stand at 3.00 am. It was very foggy and the temperature must have been a couple of degrees above zero. Two police cars went past one, one stood nearby with the policemen staring at me. Three dogs were barking at bikes speeding by. An alcoholic, probably a rag picker, was walking unsteadily, unable to find his sense of the world.

I got down from the bus at Jama Masjid and began walking toward the University of Delhi. This was a very long walk and I thought this was how I would go and meet Aicha. We were meeting after a month or so. Being a student of political science, she was sensitive to the socio-historical events of the day and would get angry sometimes. Or perhaps, it had nothing to do with her subject and it was in her genes. I could never decipher this in her. I was somewhat different. I tried to see the world around me, away from the lenses given to us by the newspapers, the television channels and all sorts of groups. The past year—the whole of Nineteen Ninety Two-- had been noisy in many ways in public discourse. But I often wondered to myself, privately, that all epochs have been noisy and rancourous around us.

The early December nip was in the air. There was no noise now. There was quiet all around. There was just the sound of leaves falling and they were strewn about in a haphazard way all around the myriad Delhi municipal parks and streets. There was a semblance of daylight. Night hadn’t fallen. The sun hadn’t come down yet. There was no fog that usually blinds everyone in the city this season. But still, there was an inexplicable darkness all around. It was part eerie but perhaps, that is not how I can best describe it. A week or so had already flown past this December. And now, another month and the year, Nineteen Ninety Three would begin. When would I hold Aicha close to me, smell her to the core of my being and feel the mint-freshness that came with it. I felt the martial notes of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture were pounding in my ear. I felt terribly scared as the noise of this year from the outer world coalesced with this inner noise and made me feel terribly insecure. I was trying to make my nest, dreaming, thinking how I, Suleiman Datt, and Aicha would be together. And there was this incessant noise from the outer and the inner worlds that was threatening my existence. I found it ominous.

The best way to get over this feeling was to walk the distance, meet Aicha, be close to her, and feel the world melt into her. That’s what I wanted, the merging of bodies, of smell, of sweat, to feel the pale fire and to quench it too. So, I started walking quick, the blood rushing to my thighs, my breath running short and my heart pounding. As I crossed the next traffic signal, the heat inside me had cooled down a bit. I think the sexual heat inside us has a way of cooling when we least expect it and it sometimes fills us up with shame or impotence. Or just a sense of déjà vu.

“Aicha, the other day, I walked all that distance to meet you, all flushed, excited, with the tingling sense, the quickening of my pulse. But after half a kilometer, the heat inside me had vanished. I felt so ashamed, so impotent, like all the liquid had drained away from me,” I told her a week later, recounting the long walk that I took to meet her.

She just replied with nonchalance, “No, there’s no shame here. It’s just the heat flow. It comes and goes. And it returns later. There’s no impotence here.  Impotence is when you can no longer think of anyone in your mind. Impotence is even when you think of someone in your mind, it wouldn’t trigger any chemicals in your mind. In short, nothing will happen to you.”

“So, it has something to do with physical stimuli?”

“Suleiman, yes and no. In your case, as men, the hardening you feel, that has nothing to do with strength. It is in the mind. If you can conjure up a girl in your mind and have sex with her, you have still done it, even though your family, the law, society wouldn’t agree.”

“Aicha, how do you know all this? Have you had sex before?”

“No, I haven’t had sex before. I haven’t touched a man there. I’m still a virgin but I know.” She said it with a strange sense of liberation and while she was uttering these words, I was looking at her luxuriant dark hair, which she kept under a tight leash in a single plait.

“You don’t even discuss these subjects with anyone else that I know. I haven’t been to your home but I sense that discussing these issues is a problem for you. Then why do you discuss them with me?”

“Yes, you are right. At home, if I discussed these things, it would create problems. One of my elder sisters is a doctor but I dare not discuss it with her either. I discuss with you because I don’t think of you as a man, as someone else. I think, Suleiman, you are a woman. That’s how I look at you. If I didn’t think of you as a woman, as a close woman friend, I would have fear, shame, hesitation and the entire range of emotions.”

I liked this girl. I stood marveling at her. She wasn’t an orthodox as they had in some Delhi ghettos. But she wasn’t an out-and-out liberal either. I would describe Aicha  as one of these liberal-conservative type women that would dot the streets of Delhi. I would often fantasize about her hair falling in waves all over my face, clouding my sense of smell, think about kissing the soft curves on her neck and inhaling the sweat from her armpits deep into my being. I’m not sure if it was hyperhidrosis or something but whenever she came near, I know she sweated a lot and a sharp pungent would hit my nose.

But whenever I thought about her, the Algerian rai artist, Khaled’s song Aicha would resonate inside me.  I would feel transported into a different world. I would think of the girl in Khaled’s musical video. I would think of erasing her tears, her sorrows. I would wait for her to answer me. I neither knew French nor Arabic but somehow by asking friends around and by listening to the song over and over again, I felt it would imbue with a feeling of lightness, every time I thought of her. Perhaps, that is what love is, how we feel bouncy when we think of someone.