Serious Men

life, he wants to liberate his wife from the spell of jaundice-yellow walls. What must he do?
    The crowd on the Worli Seaface was swelling: it was now a giant colourless swarm. Pale boys with defeat in their eyes walked in horizontal gangs; they giggled at the aerobics of unattainable women. And they did not give way to the hasty girls. Ayyan loved this about the city – the humid crowds, the great perpetual squeeze, the silent vengeance of the poor. In the miserly lifts and stuffed trains, he often heard the relief of afternoon farts, saw scales on strange faces and the veins in their still eyes. And the secret moustaches of women. And the terrible green freshness when they had been newly removed with a thread. He felt the shoves and pushes and the heaviness of paunches. This unnerving constriction of Mumbai he loved, because the congestion of hopeless shuffling human bodies he was born into was also, in a way, the fate of the rich. On the streets, in the trains, in the paltry gardens and beaches, everybody was poor. And that was fair.
    The desperate lovers were still arriving and they quickly stole the gaps on the parapet between other fused couples. And they, too, sat facing the sea with their backs to the great passing crowds, arranged their bodies and did their discreet things. Ifthere were ever a sudden almightly silence here you would hear a thousand bra straps snap. Among these lovers were married people, some of them even married to each other. When night fell, they went back to their one-room homes, which were as large as a Mercedes, to rejoin their children, elders, siblings, nephews and nieces, all heaped under a single roof in gigantic clusters of boiling tenements. Like the BDD chawl, the mother hell. People who knew what BDD stood for were not the kind who lived there. But Ayyan knew such things, even though he was born on a cold floor there, thirty-nine years ago.
    It was a hive of ten thousand one-room homes carved inside a hundred and twenty identical three-storeyed buildings that stood like grey ruins, their paint long removed by old rains. A million clothes hung from the grilles of small dark windows. Portions of the outer walls, sometimes even roofs, kept falling off, especially in the calamitous rains of August. The chawls were built by the British more than eight decades ago in a belated attack of conscience to house the homeless. But the tenements turned out to be so badly constructed that the street dwellers refused to move in, seeing no point in forsaking the whole world and the blue sky in exchange for a small dark room on an endless corridor of gloom. So the buildings were converted into gaols to shove in freedom-fighters. The unclaimed one-room homes became inescapable cells. In this place that was spurned eight decades ago by even the homeless and which was once a prison, now lived over eighty thousand people who heaved and sighed with the burdens of new unions and the relief of death.
    Ayyan made his way home down the broken, cobbled ways which ran between the stout buildings. Men and women, hundreds of them, just stood around. As if something bad had happened. Emaciated girls, with hollow chests, chatted among themselves. They were clean and eager, and there was hope in their eyes. Some of them were speaking to each other in English, for practice. They moved away to let a drunkard pass. Boys in tight counterfeit jeans, their arses like mangoes, wrestled witheach other jovially, hand-to-hand, legs trying to trip. The expression of one of the boys was beginning to change. Someone was bending his finger. His face, at first in moronic mirth, now turned serious. A fight broke out.
    But Ayyan loved going home. At the foot of the steep colonial stairways of Block Number Forty-One, a good marriage was the only incentive for a man to go up. He climbed the steps saying
‘kaay khabar’
to the men who were going down to drink. The women of BDD did not expect much from their men. Ageing mothers who had lost all their sons before those boys could turn thirty were still capable of laughing till they were breathless. Here the frailties of the male folk showed all the time in the tired faces of the newly dead, or in the vacant eyes of drunkards, or the resigned calm of the jobless boys who just sat for hours watching the world go by. In a way, this was the easiest place to be a man. To be alive was enough. To be sober and employed was fantastically impressive. Ayyan Mani was something of a