Mohan sighed and thought of his earlier Saturday routine, which had often included a wander through the bookstalls between Fountain and Churchgate. This, so different from his children’s studies, had been the way he’d educated himself. There was a special magic that operated in the books he found; the thing he needed frequently came along without his having to look for it. His mind went covertly back to his other existence, the one in his chair, at home in the evenings, under the naked bulb. He sometimes felt he left himself there, unseen, while an automated version of him went about the daily routine. Those people and emotions, the ones from the pages he turned, were always so clearly present. And there was the feeling of following in the footsteps of other readers, those who’d scribbled in the margins; he’d many times come close to doing the same.
The next station was Dockyard Road, a rather charming stop on the crest of a slope that looked as though it belonged elsewhere, in a hill station perhaps; then dusty Sandhurst Road, and Masjid, filthy and busy, right next door to VT.
He was a little late this morning; when he sat down at his table most of the others were there. There had been fourteen of them in better times; now there were, on and off, eleven letter writers, of whom at any given time perhaps eight were at work, ranged round the old fountain.
Soon after the boy from the Sainath Tea House made his first round with a small metal plate on which he carried hot glasses of tea, another regular appeared. This was a cripple, with maimed legs and shortened arms. He looked as though he was in his twenties, and crawled surprisingly fast on his hands and knees; his pelvis, the only part of his body that was clothed, lurched between his legs like a cranky motor between twisted pistons. He skirted Mohan and came to a halt, smiling expectantly, in front of Bablu, the youngest letter writer. Bablu was a mere child, in his late thirties; he had been at the job only twelve years. He looked over the top of his table, saw the cripple, and passed a few coins down; the other man took them and, satisfied, went away wordlessly. This happened every day at the same time but none of the letter writers commented. Mohan sometimes amused himself by spinning out scenarios: the two boys were brothers, but by different mothers; the more fortunate one knew that only his good luck had saved him from his brother’s fate…the baroque suppositions made him smile, mostly at himself.
He’d been thinking again about the woman in the green sari, partly with a simple fascination, as when a particular face, or a gait, something alluring about a woman walking past, caught his eye. But then he’d begun to think of her in a different way, giving her a name that wasn’t the one he’d written on the money order form, and picking up a thread in his mind about her story, where she’d come from, how she’d arrived in Bombay, what she felt about her life, the kind of room she might live in. These details lingered in his head, and he looked up absently into the traffic to see two green parrots shoot past the GPO and towards Bhatia baug, making an elegant arc of speed through the air, their feathers flashing electric green as they corkscrewed. They were gone before he could be quite sure he hadn’t made them up, but he smiled again, suddenly feeling luckier.
The day extended, shapeless, because the usual bookstall excursion wasn’t there; the thought of the blank pavements between Fountain, Churchgate and the University made him feel strange, as when in a dream you open a favourite volume only to find page after page unaccountably empty.
Soon enough customers came along – first, a man who wanted to fill out a passport application. When he had taken the completed form and gone, Mohan leaned back in his chair and watched the shadow pigeons take off, wheel wildly, then land in the shadow tree, and merge into its substance. Later, a shadow leaf would seemingly tear itself out of the tree and fly up, into the sunlit sky.
That afternoon he was coming to the end of his lunch – its components neatly laid out on his table, three different small boxes for daal, vegetable and chapatis – when a familiar figure, knife-thin, appeared in his field of vision.
‘Eh, Ashish!’
The boy approached, slowing as he got nearer the tarpaulin. Four men looked at him interestedly. He smiled in a measured but general way and came to a stop near his uncle.
‘Come, sit here.’ Mohan patted the stool next to him.
‘No, I just…’
‘Sit!’
Ashish sat down, reluctantly. But when he’d moved into the world under the tarpaulin, only a metre distant from the road, he began to look about him with curiosity.
Mohan waved towards him for the benefit of the other letter writers. ‘This is my nephew Ashish, my sister’s son. Studying at Elphinstone College.’
Khan smiled at Ashish and examined him closely through his tiny glasses. ‘You are studying…’
‘Yes.’
‘Which stream? Which year?’
‘Um, third year BA.’
A doubtful look passed over Khan’s face. ‘BA?’ he repeated incredulously, as though it was hard for him to believe anyone could be such a malingerer.
‘Arts,’ muttered Ashish.
‘Literature,’ said Mohan firmly. ‘He’s studying English literature.’ He put a hand on one of the boy’s thin shoulders.
‘Um, Mohan mama, can I have the key?’ Ashish murmured rapidly. ‘I don’t have one yet, mami said to get it from you in case she was still out.’
The boy from the tea house reappeared with another round of glasses.
‘At least stay and have tea with me,’ Mohan said. ‘Have you had lunch?’
Ashish looked embarrassed, and also unencouraging. ‘I’ll eat at home,’ he said.
Mohan hadn’t yet eaten his puran poli; he’d been saving it till the end because it was his favourite sweet. ‘Here,’ he said, putting it into the boy’s hand. ‘Eat this and have some tea. Anyway, I shouldn’t have all these things at my age, I’ll get fat.’ He patted his stomach and grinned.
Ashish, now that he had been forced into staying, sat quite contentedly and munched the puran poli.
‘You don’t know how busy it used to be, earlier. People coming all the time, we didn’t even have time for lunch until four o’clock,’ Khan told him. Ashish sipped his tea and nodded sagely.
‘Hm.’ Mohan cleared his throat. The boy, even as a child, had had a gift for sitting still and doing little that had easily allowed them to be close. Mohan watched a couple of buses turning the corner from the GPO towards Ballard Estate and seemed to see them as Ashish did: big harmless animals, some thing like oversized water buffaloes, their engines breathing and hydraulic brakes hissing as they turned. The boy looked at the curved frontage of the nearby buildings and Mohan’s eyes followed his and noticed, today, how the air conditioners were suspended from the facade in metal cages, like strange, rusting offerings.
‘So, what work did you have in town?’ Mohan asked.
‘I had to check something in the library,’ but he wasn’t carrying any books, ‘and I met a friend.’
‘Hm.’
Ashish’s tea was over, and his reverie had passed. ‘Well,’ he said, standing up, ‘I’ll go.’ He nodded at the other letter writers.
‘See you at home!’ Mohan called, and waved. He continued to look after the thin figure as it receded towards the station.
‘So you think he’ll pass this year?’ Khan asked. He pushed his spectacles up his nose and reopened the morning’s paper.
‘Definitely,’ said Mohan resolutely. ‘Very intelligent boy. And he’s studying hard, now.’ He cleared his throat and remained staring