Ashish frowned. ‘But I’ve never heard of this Gokhale.’
‘He’s not so well known now,’ Mohan said.
‘So how does anyone know that he was right about grandfather’s writing?’
Mohan’s pace seemed to slow. ‘Well – he was a man of letters,’ he said.
Ashish was still mildly indignant. ‘Do you have any of grandfather’s stories?’ he asked, though he was a slow and reluctant reader of his mother tongue.
Mohan shook his head. ‘No, re. It’s possible that there were some papers and they got lost when we left the house at Dadar. But I think he burned them, some time before he died.’
Later in the evening Ashish was sitting at his desk when there was a knock at the door. His uncle came in. ‘Your aunt says dinner’s ready,’ he said. ‘Come soon. Oh – you found this book.’ He wandered further into the room and picked up Become a Writer.
‘Yes, what is it?’ Ashish asked. ‘I haven’t really looked at it, I started these ones.’ He pointed to the pirated copies of I’m OK, You’re OK and The Silva Method. They were near-perfect facsimiles, but their thin paper and flimsy covers made them seem interestingly insubstantial, as though they belonged to a more temporary world to which they would one day return.
‘I bought this a few years ago, from a man sitting outside the Museum,’ Mohan said slowly. ‘He was next to the other hawkers, you know, the comb-and-keychain guys. But all he had was three peacock feathers and this book, in the same state as now.’
‘How much did you pay?’
‘I don’t remember. Too much. I didn’t bargain, he seemed in a bad way.’
From the other room came the cry, ‘It’s getting cold!’
‘Come on,’ Mohan said.
Ashish scrambled up, and stuck a ruler in his textbook. He had the disconcerting feeling that someone with immense, vacuum-black eyes had stared at him for a moment from the darkened window of the empty flat opposite.
‘So did you see the man again?’ he asked, following his uncle down the dim passage.
‘See him? No, I don’t think so,’ said Mohan vaguely.
It was nearly dark; the in-between of dusk had been replaced by the bright electric light of indoors, and it was as though the lane outside had completely disappeared. By chance, Mohan was still holding the tattered paperback, and when they reached the drawing room he put it down on a chair. Food was already on the table; they sat down.
In the train, Mohan sat as usual, hands resting on his knees, his arms straightened like cantilevered posts. Tilak Nagar came and went, with the coconut palms near the station, and GTB Nagar, where there was a school, and shacks next to the railway line. At Kurla, something or other was always going on – children chasing each other across the tracks, or a ticket collector who’d caught three defaulters, tied their wrists together with cord and was making them walk behind him in a line so that they didn’t run away laughing.
Mohan sat on the left of the compartment; the morning sun flooded through the window and onto his face. It was hot and humid, the summer coming to a peak. Though he wasn’t next to the window, a vestige of the breeze reached him now and then; it was warm and had that city smell: a mix of rotten flowers, fish, and laundry drying in the wind. The house in Dadar returned like a presence, an early memory from the days before he’d started school. After his bath, wearing nothing but his shorts, he would be put to sit on the landing in a patch of sunlight. It was always there at that time of day; it seemed to wait for him. He would sit there, warming his legs and looking out towards the front room, where the sun paused in a panel of the window. The light played in the blue and yellow glass and came through to him, undisturbed and liquid. He could hear his mother’s voice in the kitchen, and felt his hair drying in wisps; in the street, the wastepaper man called out.
There was a rising and falling sequence of clicks, like the rattle of an insect. ‘Twenty rupees, twenty rupees,’ the voice had the unignorable nasal timbre of the train vendor. Mohan opened his eyes. It was a boy of about thirteen – he was thin, with dusty skin, enormous dark eyes and gummy lashes; a dirty cloth bag was slung over his shoulder. He had a pair of elliptical magnets that he was throwing up in the air and catching again. The magnets attracted and repelled each other as they twisted and fell; their surface was too shiny for them to stick, and the friction produced the insect noise.
‘Go away,’ said another passenger. ‘Who’s going to buy things like that at this time of day?’
It was early for such toys: they normally appeared in the evening, when the mind turned more naturally to leisure, and to one’s family. But he watched the shiny magnets flying up, and twisting around each other as they fell, and wished that he could think of a child for whom to buy them. Ashish was too old; there was no one, really. ‘Twenty rupees, twenty rupees,’ urged the boy; he’d seen the interest in Mohan’s eyes, but Mohan shook his head regretfully. This was a new toy, its arrival another movement in the life of the city. The fashion in these toys, or the ones sold on the street, the narrow advertisements pasted under the luggage racks, these had their own seasonality; they marked the passage of the year as clearly as a change in temperature, the appearance of lanky red flowers on the gulmohar, or yellow bloom on the rusty shield bearer.
At Sewri the boy jumped out of the carriage. Mohan watched him run along the platform, barefoot and jaunty, on his way to another compartment. He thought of Ashish, who’d asked the previous night to be woken early; he was going to start studying in earnest. Two hours after Mohan had put a cup of tea on Ashish’s desk this morning, he’d been about to leave the house. Ashish had emerged into the living room, hollow-eyed, and sat at the table drinking a fresh cup of tea; he’d looked exhausted and appalled, like a child born too early. He’d get into a routine, no doubt. But despite himself, Mohan began to worry. Things had a way of happening; in his case it had been his father’s death just when he was finishing school. The family business wasn’t in a great state then, and he’d had no choice but to start work.
The train was moving again, drawing near the dusty yet magnificent Cotton Exchange building, marooned in the middle of an empty plain. The big textile companies still had offices here, but no real dealing took place – the trade, which had swept into the city like a tide, bringing with it mills, factories, and jobs more than a hundred years earlier, had receded some time ago. Now, construction work went on nearby. As the train passed, he saw the stall where thin, sunburnt workers stopped for tea.
The printing shop, which his brother had taken on, made a reasonable profit. It specialized in minor work: the annual reports of clubs and associations, wedding invitations, jobs for the small businesses in the area where they’d grown up. Mohan’s share of the income and the money from the sale of the old house had made it possible for him and Lakshmi to buy the flat in Saraswati Park, then a new colony in a part of the city they hadn’t really known existed. And it had allowed him to persist with his work, the point of which no one in the family saw. ‘You had to do those odd jobs when Baba died – messenger in that agency – then this strange letter-writing thing,’ his brother said. ‘But when we started the business again you should have joined in, taken responsibility.’
He frowned; Vivek had phoned yesterday while he and Ashish were out. When Mohan called back his brother reminded him they hadn’t met for several months. ‘Come and see us some time,’ he’d said, and Mohan murmured something about Saturday next week; it wasn’t an obligation he could avoid. This weekend, too, a visit from his brother-in-law loomed; it had been a few weeks since Satish had come over, and