The day 60-some-year-old Baby left Jude’s home, he had marked it as another reason to leave Bombay. Bombay his city of birth, his parents’ too.
“Bombay doesn’t love you easily. Bombay demands your energy, focus. The only way to be with this city is to fall in love with it.” Jude had started believing this, he found ample evidence to strengthen the theory.
Was he no more in love with Bombay then? It’s hard to tell these things when one has been in love since the very beginning of life, when love for a place and its curated virtues and assets have been passed down as inheritance.
Baby had started working at Jude’s home when he was 12 years old, he is on the younger side of his fifties now. And because he has a knack for knowing a lot about things one would imagine otherwise irrelevant to him, also because he had seen his mother age with ailments and knows how a woman’s body is capable of betraying her, Jude knew Baby had either caught an early onset of dementia, or a vitamin B and calcium deficiency. Baby’s bent back was a cliched signature for many women of her age and making, housemaids working for decades within some 2-kilometre radius, welcoming osteoporosis and a strong will to walk in circles around their known bubbles.
Old Bombay still sings outside of Jude’s windows. Jude listens absentmindedly; Bombay sings old songs with new tunes. He doesn’t want to learn the new tune. “Bombay is no longer in love with me,” he believes as he mumbles to his pets, as he waters his plants. “Can I remain in love with someone or something if they are no longer in love?” He questions the silence around him, he is not yet ready for answers.
Jude had lived in the same flat all his life and as his family passed one by one, handing him the master key to all the locks on all the doors and almirahs, he felt the need to protect, preserve and hold his space more privately. He hadn’t allowed too many feet to enter his generously spaced kitchen with plenty of room for walking and working.
Baby held the last bit of his childhood. A witness to times Jude didn’t speak of, mostly because he didn’t speak a lot. He found himself becoming a rare thing, a monument that had never been inaugurated but honoured by those who understood its significance without explanation. Jude saw himself like that, a quiet monument of sorts.
“Monuments are for the dead, I don’t like that term for you,” Ara said over the phone. She came with the promise of new love from a new city and walked into his life on the same day that Baby departed. The two ladies never crossed each other’s paths, or maybe they did – in Jude’s mind.
“I lost a few people last week, but then I gained one,” Jude told Ara, not making a big deal out of Baby’s retirement and the passing of one of his cousins on that same date. Was he being too open with his feelings? He silently fretted. Ara and he had just begun.
“Hmm, maybe we can dedicate a monument for the ones you lost, but you cannot be that.” Ara didn’t like thinking of death and certainly not in association with the man she was falling in love with.
“Okay, then I am a tree, and you are a bird.” His voice lightened, he closed his eyes and imagined holding her waist. She was already far away, 48 hours by train, 5 broken hours by flight, and who knows how long by car.
“No, you can’t be a tree, you have to be a bird, I don’t want to fly alone,” Ara demanded.
He was hesitant to be a bird. Could he have wings again? Did he ever have them? Did the Bombay that was in love with him give him wings? Had he flown over it, landing wherever he wished? Nariman Point, Fountain, Crawford Market, Afghan Church, Colaba, Ballard Estate, VT, Mahim, Parel, and Bandra, Andheri, Juhu on patient days. Like everyone else, Jude had flying dreams. Was that what it felt like when Bombay and he were in an intimate, intoxicating daze, one which had promised to last?
“Isn’t it scary how replaceable we are, still growing into our modern selves, treading between the love for old worlds? I won’t ask you how many lovers you have had, but I will tell you about mine.” As Ara talked of things new love likes to purr about Jude tried to remember what relationships entailed, and how demanding they could become. He had felt drained from some of them in the past, relationships with humans and cities. He had locked himself up in his flat for some years and used those days to forget the old, learned anatomy of relationships. In any case, he had been too concentrated on falling out of love with his city and less open to falling in love with those with the city’s imprints on them.
“Is there a way of seeing old things with new eyes, is there a way of reorganising the events of the past?” Someone in his dream asks as the night winds blow in the faces of monuments and people into his flat. He wakes with a thud. He walks to the kitchen to check for new footsteps. “Was someone just here?” He opens his fridge and stares blankly into it. The night wind brings in memories of his grandma, his mother, his father and Baby; he pushes it all away.
“We have no space for old memories to enter as new,” like poetry, he speaks in his sleep, “I am already holding on to so much, all master keys, all doors, and all your abruptly left behind marks.” The fridge cools him down as he protests to the invisible.
Ara does not call him when she has nightmares. Jude dreams of her having them and knows how she wishes that he could be by her side.
“How do I make space in the lap of my old love for the new?” The images of Bombay’s chaotic and hungry cry to be dispersed.
Then, at an hour when no eyes are fully capable of reading the clock, Bombay knocks at his door. He lets his city in.
“Let me go,” the city tells him, as he holds on and repeats the same back to it.
Together they echo the same words into each other’s bodies. The night is not young; dawn is still far away.
In a firm embrace, Jude mutely begs for a love song to be sung, knowing that even if Bombay sings it to him, he won’t listen to it.
Holding each other tightly, they prepare to part.
Iffat Nawaz is a novelist. Her debut work of fiction, Shurjo’s Clan, was published by Penguin Random House India in 2022.
