Eye in the Sky JASIM SAYS DAWN is making too much noise eating that watermelon, she is slurping and chomping and whistling faintly as she spits out the seeds, while he tries to take a few good photographs of a bright orange garbage compactor on the street below which will drive off any minute now leaving the dull cement and asphalt colours, the dusty buses and faded people, the wasted February browns and greens of the view from their balcony, colours that cannot be photographed because they are dying. They have been married for three years and Dawn knows what to do... Read full story in India: A Traveller's Literary Companion (edited by Chandrahas Choudhury), 2010 The Big Picture IT IS POSSIBLE to feel utterly at home in the world but this is only because we have laid claim to a small space – a few rooms, certain streets, a familiar town at best – over which our habitual wanderings create grooves that we can comfortably slip into. In truth, the world is a strange and horrifying place, as Mrs Ali discovered when she left her apartment and, for the first time, boarded a plane to Europe to participate in the opening of the art-show in which her paintings were to feature. It started on the plane. On being asked if she wanted lime with her tea,
she smiled and reached for a slice from the bowl that the steward held
out. He jerked away as if bitten. ‘Tongs please, tongs please,’ he
admonished, and Mrs Ali dropped the slice back in shame and confusion. Read full story in Out of Print, December 2010 Hanging on Like Death IT RAINS IN Neel’s dreams and when he wakes up it’s still raining. Like all optimists, Neel takes the long view. He is able to look beyond all evidence of disaster to that fixed point in the distance upon which turns the axis of the perfect world. Good, he thinks. Let it rain now, then it won’t rain later. Who knows, the sun might come out even, and by evening the puddles will dry. He puts on his glasses with his standard morning air — one that suggests there is nothing remotely frivolous about life — and packs his schoolbag, slipping in books neatly, two by two. His costume is waiting to be ironed. When he saw it for the first time yesterday he could not believe its loveliness — a shimmering cream satin cape with silver piping and matching tights. He gently opens the tiny umbrella that has been painted dark brown with white freckles to represent a mushroom. This, with the aid of the elastic band that hangs from it, Neel must wear on his head. He puts it on for practice and brushes his teeth, looking up at himself in the mirror flecked with his father’s toothpaste spit, silently repeating his line — If a mushroom could talk, what would it say… if a mushroom could talk, what would it say? Revolutions
HE TOOK TO arriving at the revolving restaurant at 7.30 every evening, slipping into his seat and trying to ignore the waiters. At that hour there were only the waiters, men who had organized themselves into an iron hierarchy—the pugilist at the desk who always asked him superfluously—“Table for one, sir?”; the guy with the sparse moustache, satin waistcoat sloping over his paunch, who took his unchanging order (a peg of Royal Stag, chicken masala fry, another peg of Royal Stag); the wistful youth who delivered it and cleared the table afterwards.
They made him self-conscious but still, they had something to do, these men, while Science had nothing to do. He had come to Bombay without his camera, without his cellphone, without the laptop full of photographs. Science had cut loose. Bombay was not an entirely random choice, though. Bombay had always been there in the way that, when we are 20, cities loom on our horizons and we imagine comfortably distant futures in which we might live in one of them. |