Love and Longing in Bombay

Back Bay Books

Chapter One

Dharma

Considering the length of Subramaniam's service, itwas remarkable that he still came to the Fisherman's Rest. WhenI started going there, he had been retired for six years from theMinistry of Defence, after a run of forty-one years that had lefthim a joint-secretary. I was young, and I had just started workingat a software company which had its air-conditioned and verystreamlined head offices just off the Fountain, and I must confessthe first time I heard him speak it was to chastise me. He hadbeen introduced to me at a table on the balcony, sitting with threeother older men, and my friend Ramani, who had taken me there,told me that they had been coming there for as long as they hadworked and longer. Subramaniam had white hair, he was thin,and in the falling dusk he looked very small to me, the kind ofman who would while away the endless boredom of his life in abar off Sasoon Dock, and so I shaped him up in my mind, andweighed him and dropped him.

I should have noticed then that the waiters brought his drinksto him without being asked, and that the others talked around hissilence but always with their faces turned towards him, but I washolding forth on the miserable state of computers in Bombay. Thebar was on the second floor of an oldhouse, looking towards the sea, and you wouldn't have known itwas there, there was certainly no sign, and it couldn't be seenfrom the street. There were old trophy fish, half a century old atleast, strung along the walls, and on the door to the bathroomthere was a picture of a hill stream cut from a magazine, Britishby the look of it. When the wind came in from the sea it flutteredold flowered curtains and a 1971 calendar, and I was restlessalready, but I owed at least a drink to the courtesy of my friendRamani, who understood my loneliness in Bombay and wasmaybe trying to mix me in with the right circle. So I watched anavy ship, a frigate maybe, wheel into the sun, sipped my drink(despite everything, I noticed, a perfect gin sling), and listened tothem talk.

Ramani had been to Bandra that day, and he was telling themabout a bungalow on the seafront. It was one of those oldthree-storied houses with balconies that ran all the way around,set in the middle of a garden filled with palms and fish ponds. Itsat stubbornly in the middle of towering apartment buildings, andit had been empty as far back as anyone could remember, and soof course the story that explained this waste of golden real estatewas one of ghosts and screams in the night.

"They say it's unsellable," said Ramani. "They say a Gujaratiseth bought it and died within the month. Nobody'll buy it. Badplace."

"What nonsense," I said. "These are all family propertydisputes. The cases drag on for years and years in courts, andthe houses lie vacant because no one will let anyone else live inthem." I spoke at length then, about superstition and ignoranceand the state of our benighted nation, in which educated men andwomen believed in banshees and ghouls. "Even in the informationage we will never be free," I said. I went on,and I was particularly witty and sharp, I thought. I vanquishedevery argument with efficiency and dispatch.

After a while my glass was empty and I stopped to look forthe bearer. In the pause the waves gathered against the rocksbelow, and then Subramaniam spoke. He had a small whisperyvoice, a departmental voice, I thought, it was full of intrigues andsecrets and nuances. "I knew a man once who met a ghost," hesaid. I still had my body turned around in the seat, but the rest ofthem turned to him expectantly. He said, "Some people meet theirghosts, and some don't. But we're all haunted by them." Now Iturned, too, and he was looking straight at me, and his white hairstood clearly against the extravagant red of the sunset behindhim, but his eyes were shadowed and hidden. "Listen," he said.

On the day that Major General Jago Antia turned fifty, hismissing leg began to ache. He had been told by the doctors aboutphantom pain, but the leg had been gone for twenty years withouta twinge, and so when he felt a twisting ache two inches underhis plastic knee, he stumbled not out of agony but surprise. It wasonly a little stumble, but the officers who surrounded him turnedaway out of sympathy, because he was Jago Antia, and he neverstumbled. The younger lieutenants flushed with emotion, becausethey knew for certain that Jago Antia was invincible, and this littlelapse, and the way he recovered himself, how he came back tohis ramrod straightness, this reminded them of the metallic densityof his discipline, which you could see in his grey eyes. He wasfamous for his stare, for the cold blackness of his anger, for histactical skill and his ability to read ground, his whole career fromthe gold medal at Kharakvasla to the combat and medals in Lehand NEFA. He was famous for all this, but the leg wasthe centre of the legend, and there was something terrible aboutit, about the story, and so it was never talked about. He drovehimself across jungle terrain and shamed men twenty yearsyounger, and it was as if the leg had never been lost. This is whyhis politeness, his fastidiousness, the delicate way he handled hisfork and knife, his slow smile, all these Jago quirks were imitatedby even the cadets at the Academy: they wished for hiscertainty, and believed that his loneliness was the mark of hisgenius.

So when he left the bara khana his men looked after himwith reverence, and curiously the lapse made them believe in hisstrength all the more. They had done the party to mark anobscure regimental battle day from half a century before,because he would never have allowed a celebration for himself.After he left they lolled on sofas, sipping from their drinks, andtold stories about him. His name was Jehangir Antia, but forthirty years, in their stories, he had been Jago Antia. Some ofthem didn't know his real name.

Meanwhile, Jago Antia lay on his bed under a mosquito net,his arms flat by his sides, his one leg out as if at attention, theother standing by the bed,'and waited for his dream to take him.Every night he thought of falling endlessly through the night,slipping through the cold air, and then somewhere it became adream, and he was asleep, still falling. He had been doing it for aslong as he could remember, long before para school and longbefore the drop at Sylhet, towards the hostile guns and thetreacherous ground. It had been with him from long ago, this leap,and he knew where it took him, but this night a pain grew in thatpart of him that he no longer had, and he tried to fight it away,imagining the rush of air against his neck, the flapping of hisclothes, the complete darkness, but it was no use. He was stillawake. When he raised his left hand and uncovered the luminousdial it was oh-four-hundred,and then he gave up and strapped his leg on. He went into thestudy and spread out some maps and began to work onoperational orders. The contour maps were covered withmarkers, and his mind moved easily among the mountains, seeingthe units, the routes of supply, the staging areas. They werefighting an insurgency, and he knew of course that he was doinggood work, that his concentration was keen, but he knew hewould be tired the next day, and this annoyed him. When hefound himself kneading his plastic shin with one hand, he was soangry that he went out on the porch and puffed out a hundredquick push-ups, and in the morning his puzzled sahayak foundhim striding up and down the garden walk as the sun came upbehind a gaunt ridge.

"What are you doing out here?" Thapa said. Jago Antia hadnever married. They had known each other for three decades,since Jago Antia had been a captain, and they had long agodiscarded with the formalities of master and batman.

"Couldn't sleep, Thapa. Don't know what it was."

Thapa raised an eyebrow. "Eat well then."

"Right. Ten minutes?"

Thapa turned smartly and strode off. He was a small, roundman, not fat but bulging everywhere with the compact muscles ofthe mountains.

"Thapa?" Jago Antia called.

"Yes."

"Nothing." He had for a moment wanted to say somethingabout the pain, but then the habit of a lifetime asserted itself, andhe threw back his shoulders and shook his head. Thapa waitedfor a moment and then walked into the house. Now Jago Antialooked up at the razor edge of the ridge far above, and he couldsee, if he turned his head to one side, a line of tiny figures walkingdown it. They would be woodcutters, and perhaps some of themen he was fighting. They were committed,hardy, and well trained. He watched them. He was better. Thesun was high now, and Jago Antia went to his work.

The pain didn't go away, and Jago Antia couldn't sleep.Sometimes he was sure he was in his dream, and he was gratefulfor the velocity of the fall, and he could feel the cold on his face,the dark, but then he would sense something, a tiny glowingpinpoint that spun and grew and finally became a bright hurlingmaelstrom that wrenched him back into wakefulness.Against this he had no defence: no matter how tired he madehimself, how much he exhausted his body, he could not make hismind insensible to his phantom pain, and so his discipline, honedover the years, was made useless. Finally he conquered hisshame, and asked--in the strictest confidence--an ArmyMedical Corps colonel for medication, and got, along with a verypuzzled stare, a bottle full of yellow pills, which he felt in hispocket all day, against his chest. But at night these pills tooproved no match for the ferocity of the pain, which by now JagoAntia imagined as a beast of some sort, a low growling animalthat camouflaged itself until he was almost at rest and then camerushing out to worry at his flesh, or at the memory of his flesh. Itwas not that Jago Antia minded the defeat, because he had learntto accept defeat and casualties and loss, but it was that he hadonce defeated this flesh, it was he who had swung the kukri, butit had come back now and surprised him. He felt outflanked, andthis infuriated him, and further, there was nothing he could doabout it, there was nothing to do anything about. So his worksuffered, and he felt the surprise of those around him. It shamedhim more than anything else that they were not disappointed butsympathetic. They brought him tea without being asked, henoticed that his aides spoke amongst themselves in whispers, hisheadquarters ran--if it was possible--even more efficiently than before,with the gleam of spit and polish about it. But now he was tired,and when he looked at the maps he felt the effort he had to maketo grasp the flow of the battle--not the facts, which wereimportant, though finally trivial--but the thrust and the energy ofthe struggle, the movement of the initiative, the flux and ebb ofthe chaotic thing. One afternoon he sat in his office, the pain aconstant hum just below his attention, and the rain beat down ingusts against the windows, and the gleam of lightning startled himinto realizing that his jaw was slack, that he had been staringaimlessly out of the window at the green side of the mountain,that he had become the sort of commander he despised, a manwho because of his rank allowed himself to become careless. Heknew he would soon make the sort of mistake that would getsome of his boys killed, and that was unacceptable: withouthesitation he called the AMC colonel and asked to be relieved ofhis command for medical reasons.

The train ride to Bombay from Calcutta was two days long, andthere was a kind of relief in the long rhythms of the wheels, in thelonely clangings of the tracks at night. Jago Antia sat next to awindow in a first class compartment and watched the landscapechange, taken back somehow to a fifth-grade classroom andlessons on the crops of the Deccan. Thapa had taken a week'sleave to go to his family in Darjeeling and was to join up inBombay later. Jago Antia was used to solitude, but the relief fromimmediate responsibility brought with it a rush of memory, and hefound the unbidden recall of images from the past annoying,because it all seemed so useless. He tried to take up the timeusefully by reading NATO journals, but even under the hard edgeof his concentration the pain throbbed in time with the wheels, andhe found himself remembering an afternoon at school when theyhad run out of history class to watch two fighter planes fly low over thecity. By the time the train pulled into Bombay Central, he felt asif he were covered not only with sweat and grit, but also with anoily film of recollection, and he marched through the crowdtowards the taxi stand, eager for a shower.

The house stood in a square plot on prime residential land inKhar, surrounded by new, extravagant constructions coloured thepink and green of new money. But it was mostly dark brown,stained by decades of sea air and monsoon rains, and in thelate-afternoon sun it seemed to gather the light about it as it satsurrounded by trees and untidy bushes. There was, in its threestories, in the elegant arches on the balconies, and in the rows ofshuttered windows, something rich and dense and heavy, like thesmell of gun oil on an old hunting rifle, and the taxi driver sighed,"They don't build them like that anymore."

"No, they're draughty and take a fortune to keep up," saidJago Antia curtly as he handed him the money. It was true. AmirKhan the housekeeper was waving slowly from the porch. Hewas very old, with a thin neck and a white beard that gave himthe appearance of a heron, and by the time he was halfway downthe flight of stairs Jago Antia had the bags out of the car and upto the house. Inside, with Amir Khan puffing behind him, hepaused to let his eyes take to the darkness, but it felt as if hewere pushing his way through something substantial and insidious,more clear than fog but as inescapable. It was still much as hehad left it many years ago to go to the Academy. There were theVictorian couches covered with faded flower prints, thegold-rimmed paintings on the wall of his grandparents and uncles.He noticed suddenly how quiet it was, as if the street and the cityoutside had vanished.

"I'll take these bags upstairs," he said.

"Can't," Amir Khan said. "It's been closed up for years. Alljust sheets on the furniture. Even your parents slept in the oldstudy. They moved a bed into it."

Jago Antia shrugged. It was more convenient on the groundfloor in any case. "It's all right. It's just for a few days. I havesome work here. I'll see Todywalla too."

"What about?"

"Well, I want to sell the house."

"You want to sell the house?"

"Yes."

Amir Khan shuffled away to the kitchen, and Jago Antiaheard him knocking about with cups and saucers. He had nointention of using the house again, and he saw no otheralternative. His parents were dead, gone one after another in ayear. He had been a distant son, meeting them on leave in Delhiand Lucknow while they were on vacation. Wherever they hadmet, far away from Bombay, he had always seen the olddisappointment and weariness in their eyes. Now it was over, andhe wanted not to think about the house anymore.

"Good, sell this house." It was Amir Khan with a cup of tea."Sell it."

"I will."

"Sell it."

Jago Antia noticed that Amir Khan's hands were shaking, andhe remembered suddenly an afternoon in the garden when he hadmade him throw ball after ball to his off side, and his ownattempts at elegant square cuts, and the sun high overheadthrough the palm trees.

"We'll do something for you," said Jago Antia. "Don't worry."

"Sell it," Amir Khan said. "I'm tired of it."

Jago Antia tried to dream of falling, but his ache stayed with him,and besides the gusts of water against the windows were loudand unceasing. It had begun to rain with nightfall, and now thewhite illumination of lightning threw the whole roominto sharp relief. He was thinking about the Academy, about howhe had been named Jago, two weeks after his arrival. Hisroommate had found him at five o'clock on a Saturday morningdoing push-ups on the gravel outside their room, and rubbing hiseyes he had said, "Antia, you're an enthusiast." He had neverknown where the nickname Jago came from, but after the secondweek nobody except his parents had called him Jehangir again.When he had won the gold medal for best cadet even themajor-general who was commandant of the Academy hadsaid to him at the reviewing stand, "Good show, Jago." He hadbeen marked for advancement early, and he had never betrayedhis promise. He was thinking of this, and the wind flapped thecurtains above him, and when he first heard the voice far awayhe thought it was a trick of the air, but then he heard it again. Itwas muffled by distance and the rain but he heard it clearly. Hecould not make out what it was saying. He was alert instantly andstrapped on his leg. Even though he knew it was probably AmirKhan talking to himself, flicking away with a duster in theimagined light of some long-gone day, he moved cautiously, backagainst the wall. At the bottom of the hallway he paused, andheard it again, small but distinct, above him. He found thestaircase and went up, his thighs tense, moving in a fluidhalf-squat. Now he was truly watchful, because the voice wastoo young to be Amir Khan. On the first landing, near an opendoor, he sensed a rush of motion on the balcony that ran aroundthe outside of the house; he came to the corner, feeling his waywith his hands. Everything in the darkness appeared as shades,blackness and deeper blackness. He darted a look around thecorner, and the balcony was empty, he was sure of it. He camearound the corner, back against the wall. Then he heard themovement again, not distinct footsteps but the swish of feet onthe ground, one after another. He froze. Whatever it was, it was comingtowards him. His eyes ached in the darkness, but he could seenothing. Then the white blaze of lightning swept across the lawn,throwing the filigreed ironwork of the railing sharply on the wall,across Jago Antia's belly, and in the long light he saw on the floorthe clearly outlined shape of shoes, one after another, the patchesof water a sharp black in the light, and as he watched anotherfootprint appeared on the tile, and then another, coming towardshim. Before it was dark again he was halfway down the stairs.He stopped, alone with the beating of his heart. He forcedhimself to stand up straight, to look carefully about and above thestaircase for dead ground and lines of fire. He had learnt long agothat professionalism was a much better way to defeat fear thanself-castigation and shame, and now he applied himself to theproblem. The only possible conclusion was that it had been a trickof the light on the water, and so he was able to move up thestaircase, smooth and graceful once again. But on the landing abreath of air curled around his ankle like a flow of cool liquid, andhe began to shiver. It was a freezing chill that spread up histhighs and into his groin, and it caught him so suddenly that he lethis teeth chatter for a moment. Then he bit down, but despite hisstraining he could hardly take a step before he stopped again. Itwas so cold that his fingers ached. His eyes filled with moistureand suddenly the dark was full of soft shadows. Again he heardthe voice, far away, melancholy and low. With a groan hecollapsed against the banister and slid down the stairs, all the wayto the bottom, his leg rattling on the steps. Through the night hetried it again and again, and once he made it to the middle of thelanding, but the fear took the strength from his hips, so that hehad to crawl on hands and knees to the descent. At dawn he satshaken and weak on the first step, his arm around the comfortingcurve of the thick round post.

* * *

Finally it was the shock in Thapa's eyes that raised Jago Antiafrom the stupor he had fallen into. For three days he had beenpacing, unshaven and unwashed, at the bottom of the stairs,watching the light make golden shapes in the air. Now Thapahad walked through the front door, and it was his face, slack, andthe fact that he forgot to salute that conveyed to Jago Antia howchanged he was, how shocking he was.

"It's all right," Jago Antia said. "I'm all right."

Thapa still had his bag in his right hand and an umbrella in theleft, and he said nothing. Jago Antia remembered then a storythat was a part of his own legend: he had once reduced alieutenant to tears because of a tea stain on his shirt. It was quitetrue.

"Put out a change of clothes," he said. "And close yourmouth."

The water in the shower drummed against Jago Antia's headand cleared it. He saw the insanity of what had gone on for threedays, and he was sure it was exhaustion. There was nothingthere, and the important thing was to get to the hospital, and thento sell the house. He ate breakfast eagerly, and felt almostrelaxed. Then Amir Khan walked in with a glass of milk on atray. For three days he had been bringing milk instead of tea, andnow when Jago Antia told him to take it back to the kitchen, hesaid, "Baba, you have to drink it. Mummy said so. You knowyou're not allowed to drink tea." And he shuffled away, walkingthrough a suddenly revived age when Jehangir Antia was a boyin knickers, agile and confident on two sunburnt legs. For amoment Jago Antia felt time slipping around him like a darkwave, but then he shook away the feeling and stood up.

"Call a taxi," he said to Thapa.

The doctors at Jaslok were crisp and confident in their pokingand prodding, and the hum of machinery comforted him.But Todywalla, sitting in his disorderly office, said bluntly, "Sellthat house? Na, impossible. There's something in it."

"Oh don't be ridiculous," said Jago Antia vehemently. "That'sabsurd."

Todywalla looked keenly at him. Todywalla was a toothlessold man with a round black cap squarely on the middle of hishead. "Ah," he said. "So you've heard it too."

"I haven't heard a damn thing," Jago Antia said. "Be rational."

"You may be a rationalist," Todywalla said. "But I sell housesin Bombay." He sipped tea noisily from a chipped cup. "There'ssomething in that house."

When the taxi pulled through the gate Thapa was standing in thestreet outside, talking to a vegetable seller and two other men. AsJago Antia pulled off his shoes in the living room, Thapa came inand went to the kitchen. He came back a few minutes later witha glass of water.

"Tomorrow I will find my cousin at the bank at NarimanPoint," he said. "And we will get somebody to come to thishouse. We shouldn't sleep here."

"What do you mean, somebody?"

"Somebody who can clean it up." Thapa's round face wastight, and there were white crescents around his temples."Somebody who knows."

"Knows what exactly? What are you talking about?"

Thapa nodded towards the gate. "No one on this street willcome near this place after dark. Everyone knows. They weretelling me not to stay here."

"Nonsense."

"We can't fight this, saab," Thapa said. After a pause: "Noteven you."

Jago Antia stood erect. "I will sleep tonight quietly and sowill you. No more of this foolishness." He marched into the studyand lay on the bed, loosening his body bit by bit, and under thesurface of his concentration the leg throbbed evenly. The nightcame on and passed. He thought finally that nothing wouldhappen, and there was a grey outside the window, but then heheard again the incessant calling. He took a deep breath, andwalked into the drawing room. Thapa was standing by the door,his whole body straining away from the stairs. Jago Antia tooktwo steps forward. "Come on," he said. His voice rustled acrossthe room, and both of them jerked. He read the white tightness ofterror around Thapa's mouth, and as he had done many timesbefore, he led by example. He felt his legs move far away,towards the stairs, and he did not look behind him to see if Thapawas following. He knew the same pride and shame which wastaking him up the stairs would bring Thapa: as long as each sawhimself in the other's eyes he would not let the other down. Hehad tested this in front of machine guns and found it to be true. Sonow they moved, Thapa a little behind and flanking, up the stairs.This time he came up to the landing and was able to move out,through the door, onto the balcony. He was moving, moving. Butthen the voice came around a corner and he stood still, feeling arush in his veins. It was amazing, he found himself thinking, howlocalized it was. He could tell from moment to moment where itwas on the balcony. It was not a trick of the wind, not ahallucination. Thapa was still against the wall, his palms against it,his mouth working back and forth, looking exactly where JagoAntia was. It came closer, and now Jago Antia was able to hearwhat it was saying: "Where shall I go?" The question was askedwith a sob in it, like a tearing hiccup, so close that Jago Antiaheard it shake the small frame that asked it. He felt a sound in hisown throat, a moan, something like pain, sympathy. Then he feltthe thing pause, and though there was nothing but the air he felt itcoming at him, first hesitating, then faster, asking again, whereshall I go, where, and he backed away from it, fast, tripping overhis heels, and he felt the railing of the balcony on his thighs, hard,and then he was falling.

The night was dark below. They plummeted headfirst from thebelly of the plane into the cool pit at a thousand feet, and JagoAntia relished the leap into reality. They had been training longenough, and now he did not turn his head to see if the stick wastight because he knew his men and their skill. The chute poppedwith a flap, and after the jerk he flew the sky with his legs easy inthe harness. The only feature he could see was the silver curveof the river far below, and then quite suddenly the dark mass oftrees and the swathe of fields. There were no lights in the city ofSylhet, but he knew it was there, to the east, and he knew themen who were in it, defending against him, and he saw theproblem clearly and the movements across the terrain below.

Then he was rolling across the ground, and the chute was off.Around him was the controlled confusion of a nighttime drop, andswiftly out of that formed the shape of his battalion. He had thecommand group around him, and in a few minutes they wereracing towards their first objectives. Now he was sweatingfreely, and the weight of his pistol swung against his hip. Hecould smell the cardamom seeds his radioman was chewing. Inthe first grey, to the east, the harsh tearing noise of LMG fireflung the birds out of the trees. Delta Bravo I have contact over. AsJago Antia thumbed the mouthpiece, his radioman smiled at him,nineteen and glowing in the dawn. Delta Bravo, bunkers, platoonstrength, I am going in now. Alpha Company had engaged.

As the day came they moved into the burning city, and thebuildings were torn by explosions and the shriek of rocketsskimming low over the streets and ringing off the walls. Now thenoise echoed and boomed, and it was difficult to tell where it wascoming from, but Jago Antia still saw it all forming on his map,which was stained black now with sweat here and there, anddust, and the plaster knocked from the walls by bullets. He wasicy now, his mind holding it all, and as an excited captain reportedto him he listened silently, and there was the flat crack of agrenade, not far off, and the captain flinched, then blushed as hesaw that Jago Antia was calm as if he were walking down agolf course in Wellington, not a street shining with glass,thousands of shards sharp as death, no, he was meditative andeasy. So the captain went back to his boys with something ofJago Antia's slow watchfulness in his walk, and he put away hisnervousness and smiled at them, and they nodded, crouchedbehind cracked walls, sure of each other and Jago Antia.

Now in the morning the guns echoed over the city, and aplummy BBC voice sounded over a Bush radio in the remnantsof a tailor's shop: "Elements of the Indian Para Brigade are saidto be in the outskirts of Sylhet. Pakistani troops are dug in ..."Jago Antia was looking at the rounded curves of the radio on thetailor's shelf, at the strange white knobs and the dial from decadesago, at the deep brown wood, and a shiver came from low on hisback into his heart, a whisper of something so tiny that he couldnot name it, and yet it broke his concentration and took him awayfrom his body and this room with its drapes of cloth tosomewhere else, a flickering vision of a room, curtains blowing ina gusting wind, a feeling of confusion, he shook his head andswallowed. He curled the knob with the back of his hand so thatit snapped the voice off and broke with a crack. Outside he couldfeel the fight approaching a crisis, the keen whiplash of thecarbines and the rattle of the submachine guns and the heavierPakistani fire, crestingand falling like waves but always higher, it was likely the decidingmovement. He had learnt the waiting that was the hardest part ofcommanding, and now the reports came quickly, and he felt thebattle forming to a crescendo; he had a reserve, sixty men, andhe knew now where he was going to put them. They trotteddown the street to the east and paused on a dusty street corner(the relentless braying scream of an LMG near by), and Jung theradioman pointed to a house at the end of the street, a whitethree-storied house with a decorative vine running down the frontin concrete, now chipped and holed. "Tall enough," Jago Antiasaid: he wanted a vantage point to see the city laid out for him.He started off confidently across the street, and then all thesound in the world vanished, leaving a smooth silence, he had norecollection of being thrown, but now he was falling through theair, down, he felt distinctly the impact of the ground, but againthere was nothing, no sound.

After a while he was able to see the men above him as hewas lifted, their lips moving serenely even though their faceswere twisted with emotion, they appeared curved and bentinwards against a spherical sky. He shut and opened his eyesseveral times, searching for connections that seemed severed.They carried him into a house. Then he was slowly able to hearagain, and with the sound he began to feel the pain. His ears hurtsharply and deep inside his head, in a place in which he had neverfelt pain before. But he strained and finally he was able to find,inside, some part of himself, and his body jerked, and they heldhim still. His jaw cracked, and he said: "What?"

It was a mine on the corner, they told him. Now he wasfighting it, he was using his mind, he felt his strength comingback, he could find his hands, and he pushed against the bed andsat up. A fiercely moustached nursing-assistant pushed athis shoulders, but he struck the hands away and took a deepbreath. Then he saw his leg. Below his right knee the flesh waswhite and twisted away from the bone. Below the ankle was ashapeless bulk of matter, and the nursing-assistant was lookingfor the artery, but as Jago Antia watched the black blood seepedout onto the floor. Outside, the firing was ceaseless now, andJago Antia was looking at his leg, and he realized that he nolonger knew where his boys were. The confusion came andhowled around his head, and for a moment he was lost. "Cutit off," he said then. "Off."

But, said the nursing-assistant, holding up the uselessbandages, but I have nothing, and Jago Antia felt his head swimon an endless swell of pain, it took him up and away and he couldno longer see, and it left him breathless and full of loss. "No time.Cut it off now," he said, but the nursing-assistant was dabbingwith the bandages. Jago Antia said to Jung: "You do it, now.Quickly." They were all staring at him, and he knew he could notmake them cut him. "Give me your kukri," he said to Jung. Theboy hesitated, but then the blade came out of its scabbard with ahiss that Jago Antia heard despite the ceaseless roar outside. Hesteadied himself and gripped it with both hands and shut his eyesfor a moment, and there was impossibly the sound of the seainside him, a sob rising in his throat, he opened his eyes andfought it, pulled against it with his shoulders as he raised thekukri above his head, against darkness and mad sorrow, and thenhe brought the blade down below his knee. What surprised himwas the crunch it made against the bone. In four strokes he wasthrough. Each was easier. "Now," he said, and thenursing-assistant tied it off. Jago Antia waved off the morphine,and he saw that Jung the radioman was crying. On the radio JagoAntia's voice was steady. He took his reports, and then he senthis reserve in. They heard his voice across Sylhet. "Now then,"he said. "Finish it."

Continues...

Excerpted from Love and Longing in Bombayby Vikram Chandra Copyright © 1998 by Vikram Chandra. Excerpted by permission.
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