‘I wander, wander around the crowded and cloudy city...’
In his latest novel Clouds, author Chandrahas Choudhury presents an epic tale about love and friendship set in Bombay, the city of busy streets and sleepless nights. Here’s an excerpt.
Chandrahas Choudhury Publisher: Simon and Schuster India Pages: 288 pages Price: Rs 699
Somewhere in Bombay—beneath a manhole on a busy street or between the rocks by the sea—there is a chute down which go all the words said by someone but heard by no one. Every day, a flood of words comes pouring through— the last phrase of a suicide attempt before the chair is kicked away, the pleas of spurned lovers before they realise that the other side has already cut the call, the ramblings of old people to those who know what they are going to say, the names or greetings uttered by those who come home and find no one there, the charges of madmen as they wander ablaze and inward, the words of rage or pain uttered in crowded rooms where all have learnt how to look away so that each may have some peace, the piping of children who peddle magazines to closed windows at traffic signals, the curses of eunuchs who hustle and wiggle for a rupee, the re- frains of travelling salesmen and performing showmen, the sounds of women consoling themselves, even as they realise that they are well and truly trapped and there will never be an escape, the explanations and protests of those who have just been dismissed from their jobs, the mumbles of kids huddled under flyovers and by the sides of train tracks, smoking pot or sniffing glue, the whimpers of babies left all alone when their mothers go to work or to meet a lover, the cries of cripples who fall on the streets, the whispers of the blind as they walk by themselves in the midst of hundreds, the expositions of schoolteachers as their students pass messages under their desks or play games on their mobile phones, and the pain and panic of souls that have passed away, far from home, in Bombay, and do not know their way back.
In my free hours, which should not be many—but, because I do not sleep at night, are so—I wander, wander around the crowded and cloudy city. Two things in Bombay never sleep: Bombay and me.
June 8: Hot and humid in Bombay. They say that the rains always begin in the second week of June, but this year they are not on time, as I myself could not be in returning to recover my mother from the city where she suffered so much.
Ah, Time—both the deep time of history, drifting lazily like clouds noticed by none, and the small time that is man’s life and its many phases like those of the moon.
Time, history, the ego, free will, destiny, society . . . new syntheses, new combinations. When I contemplate these profound things, applying them to present- day facts and to historical situations, passing From tracing the possible first arrival of man in India to writing about love, sex, money, parenting and values in Indian society and discussing nationalism, religion and democracy, Chatterji presents an accessible yet brilliant intellectual treatise about issues that affect Indians the most. Indian Instincts is a seminal and deeply philosophical work, presented tactfully with memorable instances. ideas through people and people through ideas, there’s a crackle of lightning across my mind, like that across the wide open sky in Tininadi during the monsoons, when all of nature radiates an ineffable feeling, fragrance and fertility, like that of a beautiful woman at the peak of her pride and desirability.
To the people of the Cloud Mountain, Cloudmaker is the pleasure-loving, puff-puffing God that the Hindus and the Company want to take away from them. From my position, however, and to my mind, it seems like Cloudmaker could, from the struggle we are waging right now, emerge as the one God that the Hindu faith, with all its emphasis on cyclical time, has never had: a God of History. Not only must we protect His realm in Tininadi, we would do well to build a temple for Him in Bhubaneswar and make our faith a less self-absorbed one, in tune with history—this, not just for our own good but for future generations, the India of 500 years from today.
Bapa continues to remain very silent like a statue—but here’s the statue of a philosopher. Whether it is shock, whether it is detachment, whether it is (why should one rule it out?) peace, whether it is the forgetfulness of a mind that is no longer evenly lit by memory (like the world during the monsoons when the sun breaks through a gap in the clouds), I do not know. It’s not even the sort of question one can ask the old man directly. He may reply with some story about Sage Markandeya or a verse from the Puranas or even some observation about Cloudmaker! Yesterday, as he was drinking milk, he slurped the top layer and suddenly said, “It’s like licking the cream off the tops of clouds.”
The good thing is that Sarita is proving to be a reliable maid, and he is happy to eat what she cooks (so am I). And nothing is ever missing from my desk or from Bapa’s things, although it seems to me sometimes that you could steal Bapa himself and he would not be aware of any change in his environment. In fact, after hearing one of his discourses, the kidnapper would probably bring him back the very next day.
When I left Eeja and Ooi, ran away—I don’t remember what happened next. I found myself at Borivali station—I jumped on the first train I saw. I did not know where I was going. Ooi, dead, dead. Eeja, alive— Ooi, dead.
Slowly, the city fell away, and some time later, still shivering from the shock of that scene, I saw to my right, steeply rising into the sky, this magnificent mountain, and atop it this temple. Ooi, dead, dead. No one had cared to stay up with Her, to tell Her stories to keep Her alive for those final hours till her son came. I sang for Her, too, the Prayer for the Dead of the Cloud people, howling, beating my chest, but She was stern and remained dead. I jumped off at the next station, Virar, and walked towards the mountain, weeping. When I came to its foot, I saw the winding stairway to the temple— more than three thousand steps, someone said—and the hundreds of people making the pilgrimage uphill. And grateful for the peaceful, hospitable company of so many strangers, I walked up, up, up with them, Ooi dead, Ooi dead, rising higher and higher above Bombay till I was three thousand steps high, almost in the clouds. From there, I could see the distant marshes and mangrove swamps, behind them the sea, down below the roads and settlements of Virar, not very Bombaylike but still a part of Bombay, and in front of me the temple of Jivdani. Ooi dead, dead.
Jiv: life. Daan: donation or benediction. Jivdani: the Goddess who grants life to the unborn, new life to the sick and the ailing. After my days with Eeja and Ooi, here was a world both new and familiar. It must have been willed by Jagannath or by Cloudmaker or by Jivdani Herself that I come here.
As ants walk up the flanks of some great beast, I take old people up and down the side of the great mountain, from dawn every day till two in the afternoon, towards Goddess Jivdani, and then back down again. Extracted with permission from ‘Clouds’ by Chandrahas Choudhury, published by Simon and Schuster India