Baumgartner's Bombay Read Online Free Page B

Farrokh rose to his feet, pulled up the loose pyjamas and shuffled towards his friend to whom he could unburden himself in the ease and expansiveness of his own language.
    ‘
Kem cho
, Farrokhbhai?’ ‘
Kem cho
, Pesi,
Kem cho
?’ Baumgartner heard the delighted greetings under cover of which he could at last rise and flee. He stopped long enough to place some coins beside his glass, glance into the murky corner at the pile of flesh and fur still carelessly spread in a crumpled heap – a furred carcass before it disintegrated – and then made his escape.
    Escape – a funny word to use of the Colaba streets, he smiled to himself, rubbing one ear as if Farrokh’s talk had made it sore. How did one escape, caught in the traffic like a fish in a net teeming with a million other fish? So much naked skin, oiled and slithering with perspiration, the piscine bulge and stare of so many eyes – he made his way, thinking tiredly how familiar it all was, how he scarcely noticed any of it, merely glanced to see if everything was as it had always been: the juice-
wallah
at the corner, down the pavement from Farrokh’s café, dressed in a piece of checked cotton round his waist and a white singlet, feeding sweet limes into a mincing machine and pouring into a red glass jug the frothing liquid in which seeds rose like bubbles, then scraping up and throwing handfuls of pith and peel into the plastic bucket at his feet, all his movements co-ordinated and regular for all their casual carelessness; then the shops on the Causeway, most of them hung with bolts of cascading cloth, nylon and silk and georgette and cotton that smelt of mills, of chemicals, of everything man-made; the cheap, ready-made garments spread on the pavements for display, just out of reach of the feet that shuffled past hurriedly; the shoe and sandal stalls, desultorily flicked at with dusters by gloomy salesmen, the fruit stalls and the snack stalls decorated with red chillies, yellow lemons and lilac onion-rings. There was the bird-man who always positioned his cages of rose-ringed parakeets, Himalayan talking mynahs and dotted munia birds that had been cunningly brightened up in buckets of scarlet dye outside the jewellery stores that were frequented by Arabs, for they loved birds too, and Baumgartner had often stood beside him, watching a man in a
burnoose
or a woman in a
chador
choosing from amongst the twittering cages while the bird-man sweated profusely in anticipation of gold bars and lavish cheques. There was a goldfish man too but the fish that floated in his globes of water were of paper and only desired by spoilt children. Also the fortune-teller who hoped someone would have the time of day to stop for a consultation but erred in coming out so early, at a time when people were still hurrying to go to work and had not yet been thrown out of the government offices or the courts or banks to find solace and hope at the soothsayer’s who spread his amulets, his ‘lucky gems’, his playing cards and other tools of his trade on a soiled red rag in the dust, waiting to welcome them; Baumgartner had never stopped and the man always had a malevolent look for him as he passed. Beggars hopped with agility in and out of the crowds, spotting the likeliest benefactors with their brilliant, darting eyes, stretching out a fingerless hand for a coin here and raising a ravaged face to the window of a stalled taxi there. How oriental, how exotic, Baumgartner used to think, smiling the abashed smile of one who did not belong, but today he felt only their weight upon him, the pressure of their bodies, their needs, demands, greed and hunger which left so little space for him, so narrow a passage through which to shoulder his way.
    He had lived in this land for fifty years – or if not fifty then so nearly as to make no difference – and it no longer seemed fantastic and exotic; it was more utterly familiar now than any other landscape on earth. Yet the eyes of the people