A box full of memories in a city which was once home
In Friend of My Youth, Amit Chaudhuri returns to Bombay, the city he grew up in, to explore how his memories of this landscape are all coloured by the presence, or absence, of a particular friend.
By Amit Chaudhuri Pages: 144 Price: Rs 499
Diagonally across the Kamala Nehru Park is the club. The taxi turns left; this is my destination. The main entrance — I lift my bag up three steps. Actually, the main entrance isn’t the right one for guests about to occupy a room. You have to walk down the long verandah (again, on your left) to the reception at the other end to collect your key. Something’s going to happen in the evening: parsi nite with buffet and percy khambatta on the accordion.
There’s a long sofa here, before which the broadsheets are placed on a table. To these are added, later, the tabloidsize afternoon papers.
Each time I arrive here, I remember. This is where we came —my parents and I — when we left Bombay. I was in Oxford then. But I’d returned on one of my many homecomings and joined forces with my parents in the move. When I say “leaving”, I don’t mean we were going on holiday: though I behaved as N TIO FIC if we were. We were making our exit. I didn’t care: it happened as simply as sloughing off a skin. My parents would be gone, elsewhere —to Calcutta.
We had finished our life here, snipped off formal ties. I claimed never to love Bombay. I was making, with my parents, a long- awaited egress. Tired, we came to this club, to spend the last two nights here. My father’s flat had been sold; we had no home now in Bombay. The club became a second home — my father was a life member. We were tired but — probably — satisfied, that the money and the property had changed hands. My mother sat down on the sofa before which the broadsheets are kept. Was the reception then on this side, near the main entrance? I recall being visited by a sense of déjà vu on entering the club. I was often getting déjà vu then; I’d felt it when I saw all our possessions — books, furniture, china – being put inside crates. Then, in the club’s lobby, I had the faintest of memories: I had dreamt of the crates earlier, I’d also dreamt of arriving one afternoon in the club with my parents. This gave me a slight chill: so what I’d had was a premonition of our departure, and the déjà vu was not déjà vu at all, it was the feeling of experiencing what had been foretold in the dreams I had those days, when my parents lived in Bandra and were thinking of departing, and I would return to them in their unresolved state every three or four months. I half smile as this comes back to me.
I nod at the man and the woman who pilot the reception desk. “How are you?” “Fine, sir! Your father is OK?” “He’s all right, thank you!” They sway their heads from side to side, denoting satisfaction and closure — more a doll-like vibration than a head movement. They’ll ask after my father because he’s the member, not I. Where is he? The man behind the desk is warmly deferential, the woman is businesslike — the club’s female staff aren’t unduly forthcoming. I walk past percy khambatta on the accordion (wondering if I should slip into Parsi Nite in the evening: I have a weakness for Parsi food) and turn left into the corridor where members are sitting in a cluster of limbs: arms, legs, tennis racquets. Parsis and Gujaratis: a breezy, gregarious bunch.
But also oddly clannish. The staff emanate from Deccan soil. When Datta Samant was the guru of the trade unions in the seventies, this club, like every other, was rife with labour– employer warfare. Only part of the tension has to do with class: there’s also race and community. The affluent émigrés; the deprived natives. Right now, no one seems to be in a mood to move: the waiters stand in gossipy circles; the members lean towards tables or raise eyes and throw questions at each other.
I remember when this club was nothing: an underpopulated building, a governmental canteen. On Sundays, you’d see three or four members being served rice from a big china bowl, alongside Goa fish curry and kachumber. The kitchen was, and is, out of sight; the food and the waiter carrying it on a tray had covered great distances. It’s 1970 I’m thinking of. That’s when we moved to the tall building, Toledo, that had come up behind the club. Each resident of Toledo — as my father was from 1970 — was given life membership of the club: probably to both increase and improve its clientele.
Just as well, because it meant we could use the club as a pied-à-terre or whatever the right term is when we left Bombay, and have been able to continue to use it in that way since. It has changed greatly. Its location in the richest area in the city and the fact that it has no special colonial pedigree means it’s both attractive to potential members and less difficult to become one (provided you have the money) than in the older clubs (which, it’s rumoured, take no new members). You must keep this in mind as you walk past the people sunk languorously in the cavities of chairs and sofas. They may not be the crème de la crème, but they are rich. Anyway, who’s to decide who constitutes the old rich, or if that category is even pertinent here? On certain visits, when I step into the main entrance in the evenings and overhear the din, I’m reminded of Noam Chomsky’s incredulous assertion: “No one parties as much as the Indian upper classes do.” The club has changed again, but that’s to do with readjusting the veneer every year: adding granite, changing the name of a restaurant. The core clientele remains the same; so do the basics of the menu: sevpuri, chutney sandwich, dhansak, Parsi chutney. When you ask for coffee, there are two options: “Nescafé”, a mound of instant coffee powder in a jar alongside the hot water, or “filter coffee”, a species of South Indian granule that you spot on the bottom of the cup, beneath the swill, or taste as a sediment. If you order tea, the waiter will ask if you like it “mixed”, with water, leaves, milk, and sugar amalgamated into a potion, or “separate”. I usually opt for “separate”.
I recall being visited by a sense of déjà vu on entering the club. I was often getting déjà vu then; I’d felt it when I saw all our possessions — books, furniture, china — being put inside crates. Then, in the club’s lobby, I had the faintest of memories: I had dreamt of the crates earlier, I’d also dreamt of arriving one afternoon in the club with my parents.
Extracted with permission from Friend of My Youth, by Amit Chaudhuri, published by Penguin Random House India