Anjum Hasan

It was the summer when barefooted women darted between cars at traffic lights, selling tiny plastic flowerpots for the dashboard, each with a pink flower and two bright green plastic leaves that waved their arms with battery-powered regularity. It was the summer when blowups of three blank-faced teenagers advertised a new brand of munchies called ‘Timepass’ on billboards all over Bangalore. One of my neighbours had started to get the mobile car-wash service over every Sunday. A yellow sign would go up in the middle of the lane saying ‘Car Spa in Progress’ and then they’d go at the little vehicle with something that looked like a vacuum cleaner and sounded like a dentist’s drill. (This was also the summer when three dentists opened shop in the neighbourhood.) The boys would hose down the car for at least an hour, then go away leaving behind the smell of rain on a dusty street.

Actually, the dentists appeared not in my neighbourhood but the next. I lived in Bhoopasandra, which had bonesetters working out of grimy sheds and little places for pranic healing and astrological predictions, while neighbouring Sanjay Nagar had municipal parks, Food World, branches of all banks, two petrol pumps and apartments with balconies – leafy with real plants – that were often empty, even on summer evenings. I’d walk past them thinking that if I had a balcony, I’d sit there drinking tea till the light faded. Bhoopasandra was all right except that every second week the water ran out. My landlord, Mr Bhatkal, would come upstairs and say, ‘Madam, there’s enough for today. Tomorrow no water.’ How did he know exactly how much the four of us – me, Mini, his manservant Hari, and him – would use? However much we tried to economize and stretch the little that was left in our rooftop tank, he’d always be right: the water would run out the following morning and he’d have to call for a water tanker, the one with ‘Annapooneshwari Water Supply’ painted on its side, below that a phone number, and water inevitably dripping all over the place. The tanker hands would make a ruckus in the lane when they came, self important because they knew how much they mattered.

Mini and I shared those two rented rooms plus a tiny kitchen. It was a good half-hour walk to the college but I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind the heavy pharmacology textbooks in my backpack, or the sun burning my neck, or the stench of the sewer near the Indian space-research organization. It always smelt this way in the heat; when the rains came they washed away the stink from the clogged water, like they washed away a lot else.

I could have lived nearer the college, but Mini and I had planned from the beginning to stick together – we were going to cross half the country and enrol in the same medical college, as nervous eighteen-year-old first-year students. We wanted to stay away from cramped hostel rooms and we couldn’t stand the thought of sharing bathrooms with armies of hyperactive, would-be doctors.

Mini seemed happy that summer, perpetually cooking egg maggi or singing the same ghazal all Sunday as she casually flicked at the few souvenirs in the house with her once rainbow-coloured feather duster. Almost five years had gone by since we came to Bangalore; the final exams loomed. I’d sit at my table, looking at my frayed notebooks, thinking that all these years have come down to this: the things on this table and the sound of Mini’s alarm waking me up at four o’clock every morning with a sense of being someplace I thought I had escaped and then, when I was fully awake, putting me back to sleep again.

I didn’t know whether to go back home to Darjeeling for good after the exams and my internship, or do an MD. I didn’t even know whether I liked pharmacology. My reasons for choosing it could be traced back to conversations in our living room at home with my parents and one of their famous doctor friends – famous, apart from her medical proficiency, for her certainty. ‘Hormonal drugs,’ she’d said, her mouth full of a marie biscuit. She was certain a career in drug research had great prospects. I was a child then – seventeen years old and eager to do the right thing.

Now, six years on, I wondered if I should have studied something else but I didn’t know what. It could have been poultry farming, it could have been painting. I had never felt as fluid as I did that summer.

I was cooking dinner one evening when the water ran out. I tried the little sink in the living room, my hands white with potato starch. That was dry too. I banged on the bathroom door.

‘Mini, what happened?’

Mini took two-hour baths every night. I imagined her dancing before the mirror, her arms wrapped around herself, her lips miming her favourite song, or trying on different faces with not much more than a wet comb and an old lipstick. Today I imagined her turning into a mermaid, standing with her mouth open under the shower and growing bigger and bigger the more she drank.

Mini emerged with her hair wrapped in a big towel, looking innocent.

‘How could it just go?’ she said.

We went downstairs to seek Mr Bhatkal’s help. Mr Bhatkal was a courteous bachelor who always wore his trousers ironed. He seemed to spend most of his time reading the papers and he saved cuttings of anything to do with Bhatkal, where he was from. There was always a neat pile growing on the table next to his big frayed sofa. On his evening walks he wore a baseball cap with the legend ‘Vivekananda Travels, Bhatkal’. He was unlike the others in the lane, who, uninterested in reading, either went to the temple or broomed. At the crack of dawn, late in the night, in the middle of a sleepy afternoon, they were always at it with their stick brooms, intolerant of even a scrap of dry leaf on their four-by-four compounds, no matter how much garbage they dumped outside their gates. Even the car-wash snobs with the biggest house in the lane – who had made a concession to art by arranging three blue-beaked plaster-of-Paris swans on their terrace –broomed.

Mr Bhatkal locked his hands behind his back and shook his head. ‘Water was supposed to last at least until morning.’ I looked at Mini. She had trumped Mr Bhatkal and really drunk up the water. We went back upstairs and I glanced into the bathroom. The red bucket was empty. We always kept it full for our bad days, and house rules ordained that every week the bucket should be emptied and filled afresh.

‘Mini, are you in love?’

What did she do in there every evening? I didn’t remember her spending so long locked up when we’d first moved in.

‘You’re crazy,’ she said. ‘I have to go back home to hook a decent boy, someone who can cook much more than maggi. I want to be loved like mad, find someone who feels like dying whenever I step out of the door and is so happy when I come back from the clinic that he’s happy to just watch me eat.’

‘What clinic? Mini, I can’t even wash my hands now.’

‘Money’s not important. That’s guaranteed but love isn’t. Love never is.’

‘Not love and not water,’ I said, opening my last bottle of drinking water and abandoning my cooking.

Two weeks later Mini told me, as she daintily dusted her books with her filthy duster, that she was moving out. I was right: she had found someone, a Nepali boy who ran a momo-and-noodle restaurant in one of the new glass-faced arcades on the main road. We’d gone across for dinner a few times; the place was small but swanky in a modest, Bhoopasandra kind of way.

Mini took me to meet Pavan. He sat at a respectful distance and got his waiter to ply us with food, blushing and giggling every time Mini looked in his direction, whereas she sat straight-backed and serious, putting whole momos into her mouth. Love or no love, she was always serious when food was at hand. Later that week, she packed all her stuff into her strolley, heaved it into a rickshaw and moved into Pavan’s rooms above the restaurant. To my parting questions about the exams, she waved her yellow alarm clock at me.

Mr Bhatkal didn’t budge from his sofa and his newspaper cutting when I told him about her departure; he was tolerant of the world’s instabilities as long as the rent was paid on time. When the tanker came, he was going to climb the stairs as always and request me to cover half the bill. He’d be apologetic, seeming to feel personally responsible for Bhoopasandra’s water scarcity.

I was alone now but the water would run out less often. And Mini was just a ten-minute walk away. But the first Sunday without her felt empty; I lost myself in my books all morning and then walked up and down in the house, looking out through the windows of both rooms, though the view was unchanged. My room faced an abandoned building called ‘Jaleh Nursing College’; below that multiple slogans in black paint that all said the same thing:‘status quo order 12.01.2009’. I could hear a neighbour quarrelling with his wife, shouting at her in Kannada. Every once in a while his anger spilled out of the language and he would say in an English that rose to a crescendo, ‘You are forcing me. You are forcing me to hit you. Bloody idiot! Just shut up!’

I didn’t feel like eating by myself but when hunger finally drove me out, it was early afternoon. Weekend afternoons were fried-rice time in Bhoopasandra. In the early evening, the skinny boy stripped down to his vest would light the coals under the huge tawa outside al-Kabab, up the road, and the meat-frying and paratha-making would begin.

The college boys were there already in Rooftop, drinking beers and stuffing their mouths. I waited for the eversomnolent waiters to bring me a packet of rice I could take back home with me. I pretended to watch the TV mounted on the wall while I eavesdropped on conversations that sounded like I’d heard them before. ‘He wanted to marry her but then he checked her Facebook page and he said, “Fuck, how many men is this woman fucking?”’

The next evening when I went to give Mr Bhatkal the rent cheque, his unsmiling manservant opened the door and said, ‘No sir, no sir. Bhatkal.’

So I went for a walk instead; Bhoopasandra was empty – what did it have except dirty little bike-repair places and chicken shops with their stinking coops out on the pavement. Exhaust fumes and stray dogs. The streets full of boys huddled around their bikes, talking in Farsi, giving off the smell of aftershave and cigarette smoke. Most Iranian students lived in Bhoopasandra, as did the Nigerians, though I once heard a tall guy explain tiredly to a shop owner as he took his change, ‘Not Nigerian, man, not Nigerian. I’m Senegalese. We speak French, man.’ The shop guy grinned and nodded ambiguously. I never managed to find out where the Malaysian girls in their pastel-coloured headscarves lived.

I bought some khubs, still warm in the packet, from Gopal Spices and Condiments. Gopal seemed to have figured out what the Middle Eastern boys were homesick for and stocked, apart from the khubs, dates from Saudi Arabia and guava-flavoured tobacco to smoke shishas with.

I walked back home slowly, reluctant to return to pharmacology. There was a man standing outside the gate when I got there, trying to unlatch it.

‘Mr Bhatkal is not at home,’ I told him.

‘Madam, it’s you I wanted to meet,’ he said. He told me he wasn’t trying to sell me encyclopaedias or life insurance. He just wanted to talk to me for five minutes. I had seen him at Mr Bhatkal’s door a couple of times before; and if he was a friend of Bhatkal’s, well then … I let him come upstairs. He climbed the stairs painfully, one at a time.

‘Have you hurt your foot?’

He laughed. ‘I am hurt all over.’ He told me he’d been in a car crash three years ago, which had more or less finished him. Since then he’d been operated on nine times. He was all metal rods, screws and wires inside. He smiled bravely as he told me this, like a child who is not afraid of injections.

‘Help me sit down, my dear,’ he said, limping towards my desk. I usually only got to hear my half-literate teachers or else Uncle Bhatkal and his helper, Hari, who insisted on speaking his crazy English with me. This guy wore a blazer despite the heat and I liked the way he spoke. He was too fancy for Bhoopasandra. It was his long blue car parked outside, I realized.

He took my hand, put one arm around my waist as if he were going to dance with me, and sat down in stages on my swivel chair.

‘I’m looking for someone with good English to help me put together a fundraising brochure for my school. Blind children. Very dear to my heart.’

He started pulling out cardboard files from his briefcase. There were photographs of the children dressed as angels and singing in a chorus, their eyeballs as milky as their dresses.

‘I lost my job after the accident so now I do this. I asked my good friend Bhatkal for some writing help, and he told me about the smart medical students living upstairs.’

I tried to take some interest, then gestured to the books on my desk and told him about the exams. I didn’t have the time, unfortunately. He began to crossquestion me about my career options. What was I doing with an obscurity like pharmacology? Why hadn’t I studied surgery and set myself up for life?

‘Heart surgeries,’ he said. ‘That’s where the money is. Look at the statistics –more than 50 per cent of the world’s heart patients are in India.’

He put his papers away and I was glad to talk about me instead: I didn’t want to get rich picking people’s fat-hardened arteries apart; I just wanted to feel a sense of certainty – the way Mini was sure about Pavan, and Mr Bhatkal was sure about Bhatkal, and this man, despite his shattered body, was dedicated to his school. Or seemed to be, though he wasn’t talking about it any more. I looked at his suit and then down at the boniness of an ankle showing through the fabric of his socks. How could he be interested in anything other than surviving pain?

‘I don’t know your name,’ I said. ‘Dominic. Edwin Dominic. So …’

He looked around as if he’d just noticed where he was, the poverty of my flat. ‘Why don’t you come and visit me next door in Sanjay Nagar? I have a nice place. You can come over with your books, if you want, spend an afternoon. I have a maid, she’ll cook lunch for us.’

I looked him up and down again. Was he really that nice? Was this the way out of crummy old Bhoopasandra?

‘Do you get water regularly?’

‘Ha ha,’ he said. ‘Clever girl.’

He told me how things worked in Sanjay Nagar. ‘If you’re rich enough to build your own house, you drill a borewell – that’s the first thing you do, go deep down to where the water is and get it for yourself. You have to go very deep nowadays. My neighbour had to drill a thousand metres.’

‘Amazing,’ I said. ‘That’s like half the way to Australia.’

He gave me a smile of great forbearance, the smile of a teacher who is used to being interrupted.

‘Now, the people who build apartment complexes bribe the Water Supply and Sewerage Board to give the building municipal water every second day, so they’re set. That just leaves the poor chaps with the independent houses. They’re on their own – they can’t afford to bribe the Water Board and it’s too late for a borewell, they’ve built up every inch of space they had. They’d have to tear down a room to bring in the drilling crew. Sometimes they don’t get water for a week, so it’s the tankers for them.’

‘To which category do you belong?’

‘That’s what I’m saying, dear. I’m inviting you to come and find out.’

He asked for a glass of water, drained it, then stretched out his hand so I could help him get up. As he did he slowly slid his hand down my back and caressed my bottom, making it seem all the while that he was only labouring to get back on his feet. I pushed him away and he stumbled but didn’t fall.

I was breathless with embarrassment. Everything was a lie, suddenly. Those scholarly spectacles of his and the big car outside.

‘Leave my house,’ I said. I was standing by the door with my back to the wall, trying to hide the shiver in my voice.

Edwin Dominic lowered himself on to the chair again, groaning.

‘I can’t move. Something’s gone in my knee. I’m telling you I can’t move. You shouldn’t have pushed me.

I stood there looking at him, then ran downstairs and pressed with my finger on the doorbell for half a minute before I noticed the lock on the door. Grim Hari was out shopping with his grim little coir bag. I thought of Mini but my phone was upstairs on the table next to where this horrid man was sitting. I went up slowly and stood in the doorway, watching him.

He was staring into space, massaging one knee and sweating in his blazer. The steel pins and metal plates inside him were probably the only solid thing about Mr Dominic. Maybe I had really dislodged something and the decent thing to do would be to call an ambulance.

‘You girls who come from the northeast,’ he said in disgust when he saw me.

‘What?’ I asked loudly.

My phone was right next to his elbow, but I couldn’t make myself go near him. I turned and rushed down again, then walked to the head of the lane and just stood there, completely lost. I crossed Bhoopasandra main road, walked into a random side lane and saw a curly-haired boy locking his bike.

He had eyes the colour of dark chocolate, the colour of a velvet dress I had loved as a child, a colour that immediately made me think, There’s got to be more to those eyes than just seeing.

‘Water,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he answered in a foreign accent. ‘I don’t have any. Can I borrow a bucket of water from you?’

The same month, the same streets, but all at once everything smelt of mangoes. Even the little insects that flew in through my window every night seemed beautiful. I had always thought that love was a form of boredom, that the people for whom the pop songs were written just had nothing else to do. Timepass. Not that I always scorned people like Mini who loved love. There is lots of time and it must be passed. But that’s not what it was at all. I had never had a boyfriend before and I was judging things from experience for the first time. It was a kind of rain – something total and hard to miss, something that leaves nothing out. If I opened my books remembering the first time Baran kissed me, I could even love pharmacology, although I did wish I was doing paediatrics instead because that was his specialization. I could have seen more of him then. I saw Baran every day but the minute I turned to go home, it was as if I hadn’t seen him at all – every night the longing cancelled out the fulfilment. Every week I spent with him became a promise of the weeks ahead. Baran and I would walk when it cooled, going past the fancy apartments on Kalpana Chawla road to the back lanes of Sanjay Nagar and then even further afield – up and down past the magical, hushed, private bungalows of Raj Mahal Vilas 2nd Stage, symmetrically arranged on roads from where even fallen gulmohar petals had been swept clean, and the shirts of the security guards gleaming because wealth rubs off on everything. Each house looked like something the owner had seen in a dream and woken the next morning determined to translate into hard reality. Sometimes, as if out of loyalty, we stayed in grubby little Bhoopasandra, going north towards the ring road, the houses getting more and more ramshackle. We’d walk on the little track below the railway embankment where rows of huts were hidden, women painting fresh rangoli patterns out in front and children tricycling in circles, while above the trains thundered past, unaware.

I would try to imagine what Bhoopasandra was like before it became Bhoopasandra. I thought of fields and bullock carts loaded with fresh farm produce, negotiating a dirt track till they came to the environs of the palace where the roads widened and the gentry appeared. Today the palace was insignificant and the palace grounds were a venue for wedding parties and rock concerts.

That’s what I enjoyed most: walking with Baran. He didn’t have a bike and he didn’t care, though some weekends he borrowed his friend Ali’s, and we’d go into town to watch an English film and eat burgers. But most of that summer, we walked in the neighbourhood; he described his childhood in Tehran, while I tried to paint a compelling picture of Darjeeling for him so that he might say, ‘Can I go back with you?’ I knew that he had been immersed since he was little in the dream of medicine; I knew he had nothing else – no interests, no hopes, no other idea of the future. I imagined him running a clinic on the first floor of my parents’ home – that still unbuilt first floor that they’d been talking about for years. Baran and I would go for similar walks then, except that the fruit in my bazaars would be different, and we’d smell the junipers that I loved and the pine trees.

One evening we were walking down the main road as usual, and I was half-listening to Baran and half-observing my world through the glaze of my love for him: the decrepit old mattress makers, and the shop with repaired shoes hung in rows above the heads of the two cobblers, and the bearded uncle who looked like an aged Christ and calmly sliced egg puffs and aloo buns into quarters for the workmen and students who hung outside his bakery, taking a snack break.

‘My parents come from the city of Qom,’ Baran was saying. ‘It’s not very far from Tehran. My grandfather dammed the River Rud-e Qom. There are many dams on that river. He supervised the building of one of them.

’ I looked up and the waiters were leaning down from Rooftop with their typically bored expressions. It was five o’clock and no one ever went to Rooftop at five o’clock on a working day. At seven the drinkers would arrive.

‘All these engineers in my family,’ said Baran, ‘my grandfather an engineer, my father an engineer. My mother said, “Enough. My son will be a doctor, come what may.”’

‘My parents too,’ I said. ‘I see it now. I always thought that this is what I wanted. But I confused what I wanted with what they wanted of me. It’s only when I came here – and I’d wander around on these streets in the evenings looking for something to eat because I was clueless about cooking in the beginning – that I realized. What am I doing here? I’d think. And the answer was, They want you to be a doctor, that’s why.’

‘I don’t know about you but I respect what my parents want. I’m proud that they have a dream for me. I’m proud,’ said Baran, and I loved him more. It seemed fantastic to me that he could be here, so far removed from everything that was familiar to him, and still not lose sight of his goal. I thought of the books that I was going to have to sit with most of the night and, inspired by Baran, I felt a steely determination to conquer them.

We went past the salon with green-tinted windows, then the abandoned Jaleh Nursing Home, then a coconut palm, and seconds later, without the hint of a breeze, a huge coconut came crashing down and burst on the street. Baran and I stopped and looked back at what could have brained either one or both of us, and we smiled at each other. I knew that our fates were linked and I let go of his arm and turned into my lane, while he turned into his on the other side of Bhoopasandra main road.

That was the summer when Mr Derin Derin was arrested with 609 grams of cocaine and three mobile phones outside Gopal Spices and Condiments; I don’t think Mr Bhatkal went so far as to keep the cutting, but he was proud anyway as he showed me the news because, as he said, it wasn’t every day that Bhoopasandra got into papers.

I didn’t care about Derin Derin, whoever he was; the exams were over and Baran and I were going for a holiday in the hills. We would sleep on an overnight coach or not sleep at all but talk till dawn.

I was packing too many clothes into a backpack and chatting excitedly with Baran, who was at the sink in my front room, repeatedly splashing water on his face.

‘Baran, watch the water,’ I called. ‘It’s all I have till this evening.’ ‘Why,’ said Baran in his precise way, ‘does a house with only two small rooms have so many sinks?’

‘Baran,’ I said with sudden impatience. ‘You never seem to hear what I say.’

He turned his wet face to look at me through the bedroom door, the tap behind him still running. I straightened up from my packing and looked at him too, waiting, but he didn’t say anything at all. He just stared at me coldly as he wiped his face with the fresh towel I’d put out for him. Then he turned and went out of the house without a word, ignoring the running tap.

‘Nobody speaks to me in such a voice,’ he said when I, having waited for an hour for him to return and explain, went over to his house myself and found him absorbed in his laptop.

I went into his kitchen and made him a cup of tea by way of a silent apology. I sat and waited for him to say more. His housemate, Ali, returned with loaded bags from some shopping-mall expedition and they chatted endlessly in Farsi without a glance in my direction.

‘Baran,’ I said finally. ‘The coach is leaving in two hours. Have you packed?’ ‘I think we have to cancel, unfortunately,’ said Baran.

‘I remembered that today is a sad Iranian festival and on a day like this we don’t make fun. We pray and are serious.’

I didn’t realize then that the best summer of my life had ended. I kept trying to patch it together, kept trying, every second day, to get Baran out for a walk so we could drink his favourite pomegranate juice at the corner stall and then walk under the giant rain trees.

But whatever was left for him to say didn’t need the trees. He said it in his room one day, his beautiful face red with the effort of it, while I sat there crying openly, frozen in that moment, unable to breathe at the thought of Bhoopasandra and my studies and the parched desert of the rest of my life without Baran, whose name meant ‘rain’.

Mr Bhatkal was proved wrong because Bhoopasandra featured in the papers two further times in quick succession before the end of that summer. The first was just after Baran and I broke up. Ali Bukhari, the shy Iranian boy whom I knew as Baran’s housemate, killed himself. In the newspaper item that Mr Bhatkal showed me, the suicide was described as having been caused by depression. Soon after, a tabloid reported that a group of students from Jaleh College of Engineering, Bhoopasandra, had written anonymously to the paper, stating that the college management was greedy and corrupt, that everything they had been promised during the time of admission – such as campus placements – was lies.

As for Mr Wired, I saw him one more time. He was driving his car and he raised his hand in greeting as if he were a man without a memory. I stood there getting wet, looking at the car as it drove away, thinking, Maybe it’s the rain.

Despite the hurt that gnawed at me and followed me back home to Darjeeling, I would fall in love with Baran all over again every time I remembered how he had saved me from Mr Wired with a bucket of water, how he had so readily offered to carry it across for me that day when I needed his help.

When Mr Wired saw him that evening, he’d sat up and nodded politely, then got to his feet without any assistance.

‘Such a problem, this water,’ he said, avoiding me completely, talking only to Baran. ‘And sometimes the tankers won’t come, however much you cajole and threaten them. You know the tanker scam, don’t you?’

Baran, of course, had no idea who this man was or what he was talking about. He asked me where he should put the bucket.

‘When the municipal supply is down,’ said Mr Wired as he edged towards the door, briefcase under his arm, ‘the Water Board tries to requisition the tankers to send out water, but they won’t go. They’re making too much money filling up their tankers with subsidized municipal water and selling it for many times the price.’

‘I understand,’ Baran had said suddenly. ‘In Iran this would never happen. In my country they would make sure that there is enough for everyone.’

In Koramangala, where I now live, the apartments come fitted with swimming pools, the supermarkets have more than anyone needs, and the roads are wide and pleasant to walk on.

If someone like Mr Wired ever rang the bell, I’d sniff him out at once and slam the door in his face. When I need to fool myself, it’s Baran I imagine at the door, come back to make amends. After that afternoon in his room, I never saw him again – not even by chance in Gopal Spices or hanging around chatting with the other Iranian boys. He must have done his internship in a different hospital, because I never spotted him in college either. He’d moved his orbit very far from mine.

On that last day in his room, resolute despite my crying, it was love that he’d talked about: how it had no place in the future scheme of things: the clinic in Tehran, the ageing parents, the veiled wife, the demands of children. In none of this was there any room for us, he said, and I thought about the way I used to be before I met him – sceptical about love, absolutely certain it meant nothing. Nowadays, when I return from my eight hours under the bright white lights of the company lab, I mostly sit out on my balcony, twice as large as the balconies I once envied. I sit there in the evenings for timepass. Nothing from that summer is ever going to come back. The only thing that hasn’t changed is the water.

There’s still too little of the water.

Anjum Hasan
Anjum Hasan is an Indian poet and novelist. She was born in Shillong (Assam), Meghalaya and currently lives in Bangalore, Karnataka, India. Mostly recently, Hasan has written  The Cosmopolitans (2015), a novel that deals with art and nostalgia.