Bollywood Boy

Extract - Part 1

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Infatuation

She has a woman’s body in recline, her hips, buttocks and breasts rising above a belly of water.  Those breasts are surmounted by nipples of wealth, the higher reaches where smooth rich folk live behind tall walls.  And on the curves that swoop down to her belly the shore meets land that has been pulled back from the sea, reclaimed to erect a business skyline out of murky wetness where once only the fishermen plied their trade.  This is the body of Bombay, and Bombay is a city of bodies.

There is flesh everywhere, skin pressing on skin, offering itself up from Malabar Hill to Back Bay, from Kemp’s Corner to the salt-singed arch of the Gateway of India through which a limping empire retreated over half a century ago, back into the sea from whence it had come.  Sweat runs off the juice-wallah’s arms, dotting the pavement on the corner of Breach Candy as he beheads carrots beside the Arabian Sea.  It splashes on to a shopper’s powdered neck and Morning Glory sari outside the Heera Panna Shopping Bazaar, and it flies from the straining forehead of a boy carrying a pile of boxes almost as high as himself.  It pricks the backs of businessmen’s necks in the air- conditioned cars that idle at traffic lights, agitating them on their way to high-rise meetings in big bank buildings.  It slides down the wiry torsos of coolies carrying baskets of cabbages in and out of the crush of limbs in Crawford Market, across town from where the juice-wallah drips besides the sea.

Crawford Market has every kind of flesh, alive or dead.  Dark blood drips from drawn and quartered cadavers.  Rats roam the margins, feeding on whatever they can find, dodging in and out of the cages crammed with poultry and livestock.  Green parrots from the Cardamom Hills tug out their flight feathers in paranoid boredom.  Once-crested canaries rub their heads raw on their prison bars.  Turtle doves in battered braces neither coo nor bill but pine and starve.  Roaming pi-dogs piss against the cages of rumpled puppies, litters that will be sold by the dozen and that will end up back on the streets when they get too big to be toys.  And a group of excited boys poke at the bloated belly of a rat with sharpened sticks.  The rat is too sated to do anything more than bare its yellowed teeth.

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