Bombay 2

Morning had crept on them unheralded; there were not temple bells or the sonorous sounds of the potti chanting the mantras. The saffron blaze of the sun crept suddenly and warmed the air. At four the two had woken up to the sounds of a dog yelping in the vicinity and as the local started to move Chandran and Ravi jumped off onto the paved path along the tracks. Chandran had then walked to a shed and fetched a small air bag that was similar to the one he had presented to Ravindran. He had then walked to a broken hose used for filling the steam engines and had unplugged a metal blocker and had plunged under it in delight after stripping to his underwear. Ravindran thought that it was funny to see him there scrubbing him with Lux soap while wearing seemingly new underwear. Chandran finished and fetched a tin of an expensive looking talcum powder and sprinkled himself liberally with it. Ravindran too stood under the gurgling torrent and then noticed that all along the path were people like him taking bath or some going behind the bushes along the tracks to perform their morning rituals of malam and mutram.

Breakfast was a hot glass tumbler of tea and a wada sambar. With the food in the stomach, Ravindran started thinking about his situation, He surely could not be a burden on his friend and even if he had paid for the breakfast, it was clear that the two of them could not stay together. There was barely enough for one and then Ravindran had to find a job for himself. He remembered the address Vadararaja Mudaliar had given him on the train to Bombay and showed it to Chandran. Chandran asked him to wait until the afternoon. When the owner of the tyre repair shop returned that noon to collect the previous days earnings, Chandran asked for a days leave to take his brother – Ravindran around the city and closed the shop for the day. It had cost him a day’s earnings but then it did not matter.

Vadararaja Mudaliar’s house was in the midst of the small shantytown. It was a largish structure in a neighborhood full of small one room tin homes, which had the glow of a fire or the hiss of a stove and smells of food all around. Mudaliars were owners of a provision shop which stored everything from milk bottles of the state run dairy to Kerosene in a garish red drum. Vadararaja rejoiced loudly when he saw Ravindran and called his brother out who actually smiled at the two. Ravindran introduced Chandran and when he said that he run a tyre repair shop, he frowned and looked at Ravindran and broke into a smile. A young girl by that time had got some tea and a few kharis for the four. Vadararaja then said that a matriculate boy should not work in a tyre shop and said that Ravindran was to visit him the next day and go with him to a factory nearby where he was sure that a izzat ki naukri would be waiting for him.

On the way back Chandran was silent, he then looked at Ravindran and tears welled in his yellow eyes. He said then that he would now have to find for Ravindran a proper kholi and they returned arm in arm to their bedroom on wheels. The next day Ravindran met Akhilbhai and got a job in the factory that fabricated grills and windows for the numerous houses and flats that were being built in the neighbourhood. He would be paid sixty rupees and also would get to stay in a kholi shared with others workers in the factory. The only problem was that the kholi was far from the factory or from where Chandran worked.
The kholi was part of a large row of single rooms that had everything under one roof, the kitchen and the bathroom and the bedroom was all in the confines of a two hundred square feet room. There was a huge pipeline that ran along the chawl and the people who had to cross the pipeline had to climb a walk over built by the Muncipal Corporation. The drains from the collective kholis emptied into a wide gutter that was covered in place by slabs of concrete and where the slabs were missing one could see the vitals of a metropolis with cooked rice and turd floating in one unholy brew that only a city of a population that vied for space with the garbage of the land could bring forth.

That evening Ravindran slept on the floor on a mat made of colored grass, while Chandran loitered the streets of the city with a small bottle of desi brew that he bought to celebrate the success of his only friend.