We embarked from the quiet and cool sanity of our white Ambassador car and joined the approximately seventeen million other pedestrians. The only way to really ‘do’ Bhuleshwar was to walk it. The stench of cow dung in the heat was overwhelming; sweaty people pressed against me. Scrawny men with paan-stained teeth heckled and cat-called as we stopped intermittently at a stall here and there to shop. My mother chastised me for wearing embroidered capri pants and a slightly cropped white Martin Margiela T-shirt. ‘You should have put on a cotton salwar kameez, beti. Now they all know you are a foreigner.’
The purchases, however, were worth the horrors. I bought thick copper bangles, packets of bindis and little painted clay dishes that Indian families use to hold devotional flames. I’d give those to my best friend Sheryl for her Tribeca loft where they would look great as trinket boxes. We selected a bale of woollen shawls, and countless yards of coloured silks that Marion, Erin, Kris and the other girls from work would fashion into cool cushion covers or summery sarong skirts. I found mirrored slippers that sold at Scoop for two hundred dollars (’What nonsense!’ my mother screeched when I mentioned this), and which sold here for the equivalent of four dollars. See, there was much to return to Bombay for!
We were home in time for lunch, before the sun became too hatefully hot.
I grew up in this apartment on Warden Road, a nice residential part of the city not far from the sea. The cool of the marble in our entry corridor felt delicious against my bare feet. The apartment took up the whole of the top floor in a seven-storey building. It had once been two three-bedroomed suites but now had been combined into one rather oddly laid-out but grand six-bedroomed home. My grandfather had had the foresight to buy both units when he fled with his young family from Pakistan to Bombay around the time of the partition in 1947. He’d been able to sell his land in our family’s original homeland of Hyderabad Sind, and came across the border on trains piled with other refugees, his pockets filled with old gold coins collected over the decades. With the help of relatives, he’d bought property, set up a jewellery business and raised his family safely away from the chaos over the border.
As we entered my mother reached out to touch the feet of a big stone statue of Lord Ganesh by the entrance, something she did each time she went out and returned home. I always resolved to emulate her, but mostly I forgot.
‘I’d love some tea, Mummy,’ I said as I dumped the flimsy shopping bags in my bedroom. I suddenly craved a steaming hot cup of the rich, cardamom-laden milky chai that Starbucks tries to do authentically.
‘Chotu, chai laikhe ao,’ my mother called out to the family cook, who was busy preparing dhal and pulao and pakodas.
My father was sitting on the burgundy silk settee, reading The Times of India, his legs stretched out over a mirrored coffee table.
‘Heat-wave in New York, it says here,’ he announced, looking up. ‘Why are you leaving so soon? I’m sure the airline can change your booking for tomorrow, maybe postpone it a few days,’ he said.
‘Dad, I need to get back to work, I only took two weeks off. The wedding is over, it was nice, time to go. Plus I’d rather suffer heat stroke in New York than hang around here. You know what I mean?’
I didn’t want to hurt my parents. This was, after all, their home – as it once was mine. I didn’t want to seem dismissive – as if I was now better than all this, as if I had left them behind for what I perceived to be a more worthwhile life. But as much as I wanted to please my parents, I couldn’t stay here a day more than I had to.
I joined my father on the couch and turned to look outside the window. There was never anything other than complete pandemonium on the streets of Bombay. The cars seven floors below honked furiously, futilely, for no reason other than to hear the sound of their horns. Pedestrians darted in and out between vehicles and motorcycles – called ‘scooters’ in these parts – with complete disregard for their lives. They had a fatalism about them: get run over, lose a limb, all meant to be, whatever. Huge billboards painted with the faces of the hot stars of today, Hrithik Roshan and Karisma Kapoor, stood atop rickety buildings. In India, everything looked as if it were on the verge of collapse. I spotted another billboard across the street, advertising a new health club. ‘Open from 5 in the morning until 11 in the night!’ it trumpeted. ‘Come on, get FIT and look COOL!’ The visuals featured what appeared to be a couple of amputated pecs and a hacked-off torso. Fine art in the world of advertising was not a forte of my homeland. But still, this was the new Bombay, one in which women’s magazines advertised condoms, sultry Bollywood love scenes were filmed, barely clothed MTV starlet-veejays and Baywatch bodies ruled the small screen and everyone was having affairs.
And marriages were still arranged.
A navy Mercedes pulled up on the street just outside the building, depositing three well-dressed, polished-looking women – Indian, but obviously not living in Bombay – on the pavement. They made their way into Benzer, a chic store across the way. They scowled at the broken paving stones, littered with cow dung and refuse. Bombay had evidently been their home once too, and now, like me, every time they came back, it became more and more a home they no longer recognized nor resonated with.
While lunch was being prepared, and I was enjoying my chai, my mother was on the phone with her sister Jyoti, Nina’s mother. The newlyweds had gone off honeymooning in southeast Asia, and then they would fly off to London, where they’d be living.
‘Ay, Leela, I miss Nina,’ Jyoti wailed. ‘She’s left the house, she’s no longer my daughter, she belongs to someone else.’
‘Ay, Jyoti,’ my mother consoled her, as if someone had just died. ‘It has to happen for all of us. The girls must get married and leave. Be grateful, your daughter has found a good boy, she’ll be happy, don’t worry. See, I’m still waiting for my Anju to find someone. No other boys came from overseas for the wedding?’
‘What about the Accra fellow?’ Jyoti asked. ‘Maharaj Girdhar called today. He says the boy is very interested. I think you should pursue it.’
‘Hah. Let us see. We’ll talk about it over lunch.’
Chotu, our cook of twenty years, appeared from the kitchen carrying a large stainless steel tray bearing steaming, richly spiced dishes of food. A good Bombay meal was one of my favourite things about coming home. Hot, soft pulao embedded with mung dahl. Spinach smeared around chunks of paneer, soaked in a dozen freshly ground spices. Bite-sized pakodas dipped in mint chutney and eaten with thick white bread. Ulrika, the goddess of New York fitness trainers, would positively pulverize me if she could see me now.
‘Beti,’ my mother said as she ladled out some food onto a plate for my father. ‘The Accra boy is still here. Why don’t you meet him?’
She paused, waiting for my response. I didn’t provide one, so she asked again.
‘So, what do you say?’
The guy hadn’t even crossed my mind since the night of the wedding, I thought guiltily. I was poised to get on a plane the next day, to fly back to New York, my home for the past seven years, and to my job as a fashion publicist. Though I loved my job, and loved living in the city, it wasn’t getting any easier for me there. So many men, but none of them quite what my parents had in mind for me. And because of some weird cultural osmosis that I had unwittingly succumbed to, I felt they weren’t right for me either. I was on the party circuit, hung out at hip restaurants in the city, and because of my job, even went on the occasional junket to Europe. But most of the men I had met were gay, or white, and usually both.
My parents, perversely, thought gay was fine. When I was thirty, my mother had introduced me to a nice Indian boy from a nice Indian family. I had known right away; the red Versace leather trousers gave him away, as did his endearing – but ultimately condemning – interest in my Manolo Blahnik collection. After