My story, titled Mumbai Experience, was published on The Blahcksheep. Find the full story there.
Here is an excerpt:
Leopold Café. Claustrophobic chairs without booze on tables. Painted mouths that forced a nervous peek inside their open caverns. Portraits of faces he knew by image but not enough to outlast a two-minute conversation. Marlon Brando. The sea of tourists and of Indians more foreign than them. Their briefest of glances from bald pates, from double chins, long legs, scratched spectacles, mascara eyes and impeccable suits that Adnan and Leah walked past to scout for their seat—glances that wondered if they were worthy, as if the Leopold accepted only a creed of its own, as if purchasing power were secondary, as if a look was a tougher test than a ring of fire—before they bowed their noses back into boring dishes.
He sat with Leah and hunted for the price of shepherd’s pie (yaha ka famous, he had been told) licking his wounds from the looks. He liked precisely nothing of the place. Perhaps it was the food. Perhaps it was because it lived on history and image alone. Or perhaps it was because the air here felt stale by the neatness of the privileged, the velleities of sightseers and the loud sound of silence, choking further another Irani café already blackmailed into fork-and-spoon modernity.
Outside, vendors of Victorian clocks, Eiffel-tower keychains and football jerseys were littered like lice, but their voices would not enter the café. Wastelands let no life inside.
“Charming,” Leah observed amid volatile vibrancy, scratching her eyebrow, which was how Adnan could tell she found something amiss. “I suppose this is a rather mainstream establishment for the non-native then?” she enquired, kind as ever, but beneath which Adnan could sense a simmering of underwhelm. “It’s still one of those places anyone would value visiting,” Adnan retorted (defensively?), buckling and unbuckling his silk satchel, to which Leah’s smile was as polite as it was patronizing: “Oh, Adnan, I don’t doubt your choice at all!” Regardless of what she felt, he cursed himself for laying his insecurities bare as a belly button.
She ordered an afternoon beer with plain fish-and-chips. It was not what Leopold was known for but she devoured it with happiness. Adnan envied her as he ate his treacle pie. He had no particular distaste for shepherds or their pies, but knew he had ordered it only because of its fame. Leah, on the other hand, raised in the bland land of meat and potatoes, had no trouble turning Leopold into her London. Why could he not be more like her, eating on his own terms rather than succumbing to those of Leopold the Wasteland?
“Hey, what do you like about Mum-bai the most?” Adnan looked away from a painted mouth to Leah’s surprise question. Her meal was over while he had three portions left.
“Well… the people?” he said as a reflex, no particular faces in mind.
“The peopleee”, she repeated woozily. “Our driver was a friendly face. In London, once they take your money, they cease to care!” Adnan could have retorted with a series of similar incidents from the rickshaws of the suburbs, but a tightness in his throat stopped him. No strike two: the thought that throttled his words.
Leah ordered a second beer. Time passed. They spoke of the décor and of 26/11. “Must have been terribleee,” she sang, ogling at a bullet hole in the wall. “Was it 2008? Perhaps you were still in school? Was it frightening?” Her thin eyes, transfixed on the bullet hole, were stretched to its absolute widest. Still thin.
“For me? Not really. I did not have a clear idea of what a terrorist attack meant,” Adnan answered. Perhaps it was Leah’s songlike manner of interrogation, perhaps her eagerness to hunt for meaning from a hole in the wall, or perhaps his cyniclooking eye at Leopold, at the superficial sight of a bullet hole being commodified for clout, that made Adnan D’Souza, for the second time that afternoon, loosen his tongue from its leash in the search of shattering the Mum-bai illusion. “Citizens don’t care, man. If I recall well, most of the city were happy that we had two bank holidays!”
Leah’s playful wide-thin eyes sunk. “Hmm,” she said, scratching her eyebrow. Her mouth opened, then closed, then opened again. “Presumptuous, perhaps,” she murmured at the bullet hole. Silence spoke volumes.
Strike two. Whatever happened to the tightness in his throat?
Adnan focused on his shepherd’s pie. Mumbai had disagreed with him for as long as he could remember. It was nothing if not a place where everyone outsmarted everyone else. Tramps fooled citizens, bureaucrats fooled civilians, intellectuals fooled idiots, criminals fooled the police and ideology fooled everybody. He was in on the game of course, pretending to Leah how he knew Mum-bai like the back of his hand, how he had forged some absurd invisible connection with a city as multicultural as it was impersonal. People found order in chaos here, a safe dwelling in a messy metropolitan, but all Adnan saw was a spade for a spade.
At least London knew how to clean after itself. London was bliss. London was heaven. Returning to Mumbai felt like an escaped lion returning to his cage.
Yet, Adnan had no right to say what he had. Leah would be here for a day, two perhaps, till her tours of the world took her further south to Australia or God-knows-where (he thought it too intrusive to ask). She had no time for his scorn, his filthy melancholy, his edginess-for edginess-sake. His job was to twist the ribbons together to gift-wrap the clumpy skyscrapers and potholed gullies and racist taxpayers and dried-up monsoons into something resembling a commodity—which meant, unfortunately, that any attempt at being true would be punished, while any attempt at exaggeration would be duly rewarded.
“Let’s grab the check,” she said.
Date of publication: 12 September 2021
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