Once again, he’d gone out for a walk; he loved the conjunction of foreignness and familiarity in Bandra; he was impelled constantly by a sense of discovery, but also of wonder and recognition, as if he’d once belonged here, to these lanes, these crumbling verandas and families; here were the strange but familiar Goan bungalows again, some of them unsettling him and making him nervous because of the dogs inside that began to bark furiously as he went past; one had a small life-like porcelain dog at the window which stared fixedly at him with a kind of challenge — and he stared back, confident it couldn’t leap at him, waiting tensely for it to bark: and, finally, he understood why it was glowering so silently. These figurines and tame beasts, and their semi-visible owners, were the guardians of these lanes. Nevertheless, some of these houses had already been torn down; unintimidating six- or seven-storey buildings with names like Annabella had risen in their places. What the lanes were called was disclosed on the swinging blue plaques found everywhere in the city, usually with the names of Maharashtrian leaders no one knew, and which could well have been invented, so many-syllabled and incredible these unheard-of names were; except that here they bore names of saints — which, too, with the exception of Paul, had a difficult-to-believe fairy-tale ring: Cyril, Leo. When he came back, he found a woman — he couldn’t tell whether she was looking for work, or was just a visitor; whether she was run-down or was really working class — in a pale blue synthetic sari, leaning thoughtfully on the wall at the end of the corridor in front of his parents’ bedroom. She was smiling faintly, as if Mrs Sengupta had said something amusing. ‘Nirmalya,’ said his mother when she glimpsed him, ‘do you know who this is? Do you remember her?’
‘How will he remember?’ said the woman in Hindi, looking up brightly but pointedly; although his mother had spoken to him in Bengali, she must have guessed at what she meant from the lilt of the question; she had an air of intelligence, of a modest, unhurried alertness.
He looked at her again politely. She seemed embarrassed and happy, and eager to defend him from the charge of forgetfulness.
‘Arrey, this is Anju,’ said his mother, delighted for a moment by the unthinkable simplicity of the situation. ‘I’ve told you about her, haven’t I? She looked after you when you were two years old.’
Ah, so that’s who she was! That explained to him her understated but surprising air of recognition, although she couldn’t have known him if she’d seen him on the street. Recognition is partly imagination, isn’t it, and not knowing what had happened to him in the intervening seventeen years had given her present sighting of him a startling intimacy.
‘Do you know,’ said his mother to Jumna, who was sitting agog, a little puzzled, feeling perhaps a tiny bit excluded, on the carpet — and embarked on the story he’d heard more than a hundred times — ‘I was feeding baba moong daal and rice, and he was quite a fat greedy child.’ Both Jumna and Anju laughed together at this frank insight, Jumna showing her gums; Nirmalya looked abashed at being reminded of a time when he was not thin and tortured. ‘He liked the daal so much he began to dance up and down with pleasure. And he bounced so much that he came straight out of the cot!’ ‘Haa?’ said Jumna, sitting up slightly, becoming serious. ‘He would have fallen to the ground, and I don’t know what would have happened, but Anju, who was standing beside me, caught him in an instant.’ And this woman in the blue sari, looking proud, also became self-effacing and appeared deliberately to melt, as if she had no further claim to this distant miracle.
‘Baap re,’ said Jumna finally. She, who’d looked after Nirmalya for fifteen years, whose skin had been pricked by his needles when he played doctor, whose hair had begun to grey all at once in the last two years, stared at this woman, who’d appeared out of nowhere, and who’d once, instinctively, with an acrobat’s grace, prevented serious injury to Nirmalya. Jumna’s puzzled smile contained something, a memory and also speculation. She was caught between the past and a present in which she was confronted with this woman, and there was a shadow of disbelief on her face. Anju was still pretty, though a little drawn; almost ghostly in her undecidedness.
‘Where do you live now?’ Nirmalya asked of his onetime rescuer.
‘Baba, not far from here. Juhu Danda,’ she said, indistinctly gesturing north. ‘I heard from someone who works in this building that memsaab had moved to this part of the city.’ She smiled a little, girlish again. ‘So I decided to come.’
Juhu Danda: he knew the place slightly. Their car had passed through it once on the way to the Neogis, when they were going to Khar. There it was, at the end of Carter Road opposite to the one from which he’d just returned; a colony of shanties, with dried bombill hanging between poles, the air awash with the rank, tantalising smell, men in shorts standing in the sea breeze, barefoot children running and playing in the space before the shanties, surveyed dispassionately in a few instants before the car moved on.
When she’d gone, his mother said to him: ‘Her name’s now Saeeda.’
‘What do you mean?’ he asked.
‘Well, that’s why she left all those years ago, you know. In fact, we used to live in Juhu then; your father, on returning from England, got his first job in Bombay, and was given a flat in Juhu. She fell in love with a Muslim and then married him. They have to change their religion when they do that, you know.’ For to marry a Muslim was to not only change your name but to give up your childhood and your future, to pass discreetly into a different world and mode of existence, to, in effect, disappear; only great and impulsive love could, surely, make one justify such an abdication to oneself. And yet was that, strictly speaking, true? After all, here was Anju, older, but still recognisable, the same woman who’d scooped him instinctively in mid-air when he’d leapt out of his cot in his exuberance.
‘Is she happy?’ he asked; for, briefly, he found Anju’s, or Saeeda’s, happiness had become his concern.
‘Her husband is a strict Muslim but not a bad man, she told me today.’ Such a belated sharing of confidences! ‘She herself is not a practising Muslim, but the children were raised strictly. The son is in Dubai, and the younger child is a daughter. Life is sometimes good, sometimes not so good, she said,’ said Mallika Sengupta, smiling, as if she was relieved that it was at least good in parts.
Anju came again one afternoon, this time with her seventeen-year-old daughter.
‘Namaste, memsaab,’ the girl said to Mrs Sengupta, and glanced at Nirmalya. Anju, leaning against the wall, looked on as if she was showing off something no one had suspected she had. She herself had obviously been attractive long ago; but the girl was exceptionally lovely to look at; tall, with a large oval face — and the mother seemed pleasurably resigned to being superseded by her daughter. There was a thoughtfulness about her that attracted Nirmalya, a reticence that made her quite different from the lissom girls in narrow trousers and tops, girls from his own social background he passed by every day on the roads, laughing and screaming innocently to each other, as if the world was theirs.
‘She’s a pretty girl,’ said Mrs Sengupta to Anju. Almost slyly, she turned her gaze upon the daughter. ‘What is your name?’