HALF ROOMS AND HALF-TRUTHS

In my first years as a newly minted business school graduate, I lived in Bombay, in a room I shared with another girl. We were about the same age. And we were paying guests, renting that room in an apartment on the 4th floor. The owners, a former naval officer and his wife, lived in the extended bigger portion of the house separated from our room by a grilled door, and a short hallway.

The room—with an attached bath—was small, and so my roommate and I had half a room each. We knew we were lucky. Bombay was among the world’s most expensive cities. The rent itself took away more than half our salaries. But there were whole families in the city who lived in rooms far smaller than ours, rooms like shanties held up by poles, with tarpaulin for a roof. Couples had no privacy, their children played, defecated, studied outside. Their days were marked by quarrels, vicious and raucous, with neighbors, over sundry things, especially on use of the bathroom, or marking one’s place in the water queue whenever the lone municipal tap sputtered to life.

The room we shared had one netted window half blocked over by a standing mirror. I could just see a tree, and one half of a balcony from a building not far away. There was a time around late afternoon when the sun appeared right at the window, its rays grazing the other building. Our room was all lit up then, orange, and golden.

At these times I felt a longing to be free, a yearning to move out of this narrow, constricted space that defined my life. Between our building and the other one was a high wall, and a cemetery lay just behind. But I wasn’t scared by this. For I felt dead most times, constantly beset by thoughts that nothing in my life would ever change. I would stay in this room, for years, just like all those resting there under the earth.

***

I had found this room quite serendipitously; the previous occupant was moving out and she told a friend who told me. But I thought of my classmates and I did not consider myself lucky. Housing in a city like Bombay was hard to find, but my classmates, I knew, weren’t really bothered by such truths. They were all doing well. While the truth was that I had done badly. It wasn’t that I had finished at the bottom of my class. I was just very awkward. When companies, big and small, came to campus, and interviewed students in batches, I never came out well. I never gave a good account of myself. Ergo, I received a ‘last day’ job offer. This meant a lower salary compared to my flamboyant, very smart peers, and I missed out on other perks too: easily available loans and company provided accommodation. In a city like Bombay, the latter was a big deal.

These other classmates of mine, most of them anyway, lived in apartments provided for by their companies. Located in tony south Bombay or in the hip and happening western suburb of Bandra—Bombay’s answer to Hollywood, where all the film stars lived.

My classmates had nice steady jobs, they flew to other places, and other cities, they partied mad on weekends. While soon, I moved in a lonely circle all my own. My awkwardness had led to a job with no company accommodation; it was now compounded by a sense of inferiority.

My roommate at b-school lived in an apartment in South Bombay. The city is now called Mumbai, but the area is still SoBo. She traveled on her job often, as did her husband. Once at an airport, I ducked into a bookstore when I saw her ride up the escalator, looking so smart, confident, and well-dressed that she was lost in her own aura and had eyes for no one. That airport has since given way to a far modern terminal, the bookstore has moved to a separate wing—the foreign departures—but I remember my heart beating fast, and the embarrassment that covered me like a blanket. I was afraid of being spotted, and desperate to avoid the knowing pity that would follow.

Later the bookstore manager shouted at me, almost booting me off the premises because I had spent too much time inside and hadn’t bought anything. Perhaps he suspected me of shoplifting. I loved books but lived on a budget. What I could spend on myself was what was left over from the rent. My old roommate walked up the escalator and into a designer store two doors away, and I knew had I been as well-dressed, or walked as confidently, I’d never have been shouted at.

***

Every time I logged into my ‘yahoo groups’ account, I came across conversations between my classmates. Their busy lives were for them an endless source of amusement; ‘we meet only at airport lounges,’ was a common refrain, and names of cities drizzled down like confetti: London, Brussels, LA, and New York. Sometimes Shanghai or Tokyo too. I travelled but once a year to Chennai—two hours south from Bombay—when the management consulting firm where I worked had its annual conference.

Three of us—a colleague and our boss—travelled together and stayed in a comfortable four-tier hotel. My boss was about a decade older and everyone called him Deep. That first time we travelled with Deep, we explored the city, finding niche eateries hidden away in inner lanes and a boutique in a heritage bungalow where my colleague bought expensive silk sarees. I watched, making rapid calculations in my head about money spent, money saved, and the rent to pay. I remember that Deep didn’t buy a saree either; it was something I felt I couldn’t ask him about.

I remember Deep with his salt and pepper hair, a strand or two that always fell over his square forehead, his thin steel rimmed glasses, and his quirky sense of humor. He was 35, was an engineer by profession and had worked around the world. Also, he had been married for some years, and had no children. Was that what made him look sad sometimes? 35 made him seem ancient to me.

I never paid much attention to the gossip about him. I was just too unhappy and desperate about my own situation. On my way to work and back, standing, pressed against many others in a crowded local train, I passed one Bombay suburb after another. I looked up at the apartment blocks that rose high, cutting away all light, and the sky, and all I wanted was to live in one myself.

***

A few months after I’d moved into the small half-room, my roommate—renter of the other half—got married. Her husband lived in Pune, about four hours away from Bombay, so most weekends I found myself alone. I had more time for myself then, more time to look out of the small, half-blocked by a mirror, window, and more time to wish for the things I didn’t have, and probably would never. I felt the fear of being stifled, of being passed by, of becoming a ghost like those in the cemetery nearby.

Every day I scanned the pages of newspapers looking for other jobs. I waited for the special edition that came every Tuesday. I sent my resume out everywhere. I called up placement agencies, till I knew the intercom music each agency played while callers stayed on hold. I became good at the waiting game, just as I was at avoiding people.

Every morning, I woke with a prayer in my heart. For the municipal water supply could be erratic. Sometimes there would just be a whistling sound, the emptiness of air moving in the waterpipes. Then I washed myself with water I'd stored in a bucket. This often made me cry. In such moments, I saw myself like a thousand others, the poor of the city, crouching on the floor like them, looking on as droplets of water fell on my palm, waiting for them to grow bigger and bigger.

I'd think of my classmates, all those I'd known once, who would never worry about rationed or absent water supply. They would stand under a shower luxuriantly soaping themselves, thinking happy thoughts that had nothing to do with wasting water, or even storing it for later use in a bucket.

Some days, I’d leave my room early for office. I'd emerge from my building to the dank old smell of the sea that lay just behind. I miss that now but those days I felt as old, as timelessly unchanged as the sea. I'd hear the low hum of traffic just picking up, the sound of a roadside stall opening up, the clattering of its shutter, the hiss of steam from a vendor’s tea kettle, the first strokes of a roadside sweeper, and I breathed in dust along with the sea smell. Sounds and smells that I have never quite forgotten.

***

My office was in the city’s south, at Nariman Point, a place crowded with high-rise office buildings. The consultancy where I worked had been around since the 1890s but in the early 1970s, it had moved to the 11th floor of a 25-story building that overlooked the Marine Drive and the Arabian Sea. The Towers was owned by a big newspaper group and when complete it was Bombay’s tallest. But all too soon, it was overshadowed and outstripped by others. I remember reading that it was designed in a very aesthetic fashion by one of the foremost architects of the time.

I always found it too dark, too gray, even from outside. I entered my office though a glass door, and into a seating area lined with brown squishy sofas. The main area of the office began when one pushed open another glass door and stepped into a hallway running both ways. The room where I worked was on the right, just by the typists' pool. The rooms had the smell of old paper, mildew, and clogged bathrooms.

***

The Bombay skyline, like the city’s name, has changed dramatically since the 1980s. Laws protecting pristine land like the mangroves and saltpans to the east, and the centuries old textile mills in the city’s center; rules fixing land-use ratio, and mandated heights were ignored, and flouted, thanks to the nexus between politicians, the mafia, and real-estate barons. There was really no strict difference between them, then and even now.

As the city evolved, and transformed with ‘world-class’ flyovers, expressways, hotels, and a new refurbished airport, things never changed much for those not so well-to-do. They still travel, like I once did, in crowded local trains. They find themselves stranded every time the city floods over during the monsoons. They stand in queue for water. They look surreptitiously at price tags in high-end malls and just move on.

My office building never changed much as taller buildings grew up everywhere. Bombay grew in height in the central and west. But there was still that rickety elevator I rode up, the ever clogged bathroom that I entered only once, the south-Indian café on the 12th floor where we retreated to often, taking the backstairs to gossip, or to have a cheap and filling meal.

I loved going up that one flight of stairs, secretly hoping to catch a glimpse of the savvy and super-sophisticated ladies of the advertising firm that had offices there, who smoked, smooched, sashayed down the hallways, and smirked when they caught sight of me, knowing I stared at them, these creatures from another world, one I could never belong to. They were so free, so rich, so utterly without care and worry.

One day, going home in the train, standing on my toes to reach the handrails above, I asked myself: did I want to be rich like my classmates, or free like the ad-firm women, and did the two things go together?

That office building once featured in an old Hindi film; in a song sequence that had been filmed years before I began working there. It showed a big hall full of typewriters but the flooring never changed and the grilled-door elevator still clanked and juddered up every floor. Sometimes I catch that old song on YouTube, and I feel not a nostalgia, but sadness. Thinking of my younger self, the people I had known, and how my desperation made me forget too many things: the people who had been nice, people who wanted to be friends, and then my boss, Deep.

***

Next to my office building was another, much taller, one. The Air-India building where the country's major airlines had its headquarters. A towering white edifice, and at the very top, a revolving logo of a stylized horseman that lit up red every night. The evenings I never felt like going back, I would sit on the parapet bordering Marine Drive, and watch the now black sea come in slowly, the waves swirling against the cone-shaped tetrapods, the foam rising like white shark teeth. Canoodling couples took up space all around me. Like me, they too were stealing moments away from their congested homes.

There were moments like these, away from the noise of the city and those in my head, when I felt happy. But there were things I wanted, and was looking for. I felt I’d be happy only after I had them. I didn’t know then that happiness has no timeframe, nor can one plan for it. One recognizes the big moments of happiness, things that really matter, only after one has accepted life, or most things about it, in small, bite-sized amounts of happiness.

***

This position at the management consultancy was my second job after leaving b-school. Maybe I wanted to make a better impression at this interview than all the ones before, and so I presented myself as a person more sophisticated and worldly wise than I really was. While my resume stated the bald facts of my life, I knew there were interesting bits I could make up, and I did.

I understood how indiscreet I had been only when the three stenographers who sat facing each other in the typists’ pool—stout, matronly ladies in their 50s—badgered me with questions. Their eyes aglint with a strange fire, as they embarked on a quest to extract news from me that could make for good office gossip. For what I’d told the human resources manager who interviewed me was this:

I want to be in Bombay because of my boyfriend.

Her eyes had widened. Bombay could be the country’s film and fashion capital, but it teemed still with conservative, overly curious and gossipy people like the rest of the country.

Is he in Bombay? She asked.

No. I said, and because the silence that followed made me self-conscious, I added, not yet. He wants to be in Bombay, I improvised, watching her every expression. He comes here often.

She smiled, not unkindly, and even encouragingly. And you meet then. How sweet.

As with the rest of my life then—when I floated on an empty blankness, and saw no hope in the horizon—nothing at the time had been decided between my boyfriend and me. We had been friends at b-school, but marriage was still an iffy and nebulous thing. His family was conservative, and would never have countenanced his marrying someone like me from a different community and caste.

As for me, ever since high school, I had wanted to move away from Delhi, where my parents lived. Bombay was the place to be. If I had been truthful to myself, or even to the human resources manager, I'd have told her this. But I envied my old b-school roommate, who had married her boyfriend, and lived in a spacious SoBo apartment, and who rode up airport escalators in style looking like a world traveler, indifferent and bored. While I had nothing to show for myself. I wanted to bring some glamour to my own life with that half-truth about a boyfriend visiting often, instead all I got was some scandal.

Everyone in the office called the three stenographers—Miss Candice, Miss Snehlala, and Miss Benaifer—'the trinity,’ After the gods in the Hindu pantheon. One created the gossip, another spread it, and the third denied it whenever they were challenged. They aimed their questions at me with perfect well-considered syncopation.

One asked if we lived together, my boyfriend and I, a scandalous idea at the time even in India’s most modern and cosmopolitan city. We didn’t, I said loftily, but we would live together, once we were married. That half lie lifted up my spirits.

All this later amazed me. Considering how constricted, congested, claustrophobic I felt about my life then, I also managed to make it very complicated.

***

Most weekends because I had nothing to do, I took the bus—the depot was a two minute walk away—and rode through the city right to its south. I’d sit by a window, and examine all my worries, in detail, one by one. I wanted a better job, a better home, and even marriage. I wished my boyfriend would convince his parents, and make them come around. I also wished to be alone, hoping I’d not run into anyone I knew. I wanted to remain right where I was, on the upper floor of a double decker bus, alone in my unhappiness, the city spread out before me.

I saw but didn’t really look at the landmarks I passed. The grounded plane in the garden at Khar, the tomb of the Sufi saint at Haji Ali, the sweeping rise of the Pedder road flyover, the swanky shops on Nepean Sea Road that I had entered just once and left quickly because I couldn't afford the prices, the congested alleys of Byculla, the old offices of Ballard Estate, with their beehive-like rooms, and the hum of their air-conditioners loud enough to sound like several sleeping beasts snoring. And I dreamt of one day living in one of the high-rises, of no longer having to commute on a bus, of being better dressed, and being better treated. No one would ever shout like the bookstore manager, nor would I receive glazed, half-sneering looks from security guards and shop assistants alike in Nepean Sea Road's fancy stores.

Sometimes when I felt like it, I’d take bus all the way to office. The ride through crowded, traffic-jammed streets was more tiring than I imagined. And I’d come to office looking strained. And the trinity—the three ladies of the typists pool—would look at me knowingly, with a smirk. It was Deep, my boss, who asked if I had had a good weekend, if I had rested. He was polite, and always very kind.

I never asked Deep about his weekend. He always looked serious and grave. I imagined he’d be thinking of the work that lay ahead, making plans for the meetings and conferences that crowded his diary, as happened with every boss-like figure. Much later I’d know more about his unhappy childless marriage, and his divorce. But then, I really thought no one could be more unhappy than me.

***

When I had been at my job for six months, a team of three from a reputed foreign bank commandeered the lone conference room right in the center of the office. Word went out that they were offering credit cards – complete with attractive, irresistible discounts. There would be no hidden fees, no qualifying amount, no upfront payment. And the best thing: we could take our time—as I understood it—making our payments, and do so in installments.

When I signed up, I felt rich for the first time. Manaz, the administration manager with the gamine haircut, and the impish manner warned us youngsters to be careful, and not get carried away. Deep put his head into that conference room, and smiling his slight smile, he looked over his glasses at us. I saw his leather-strapped wristwatch as he brushed that errant hair away from his forehead. Did he see us as willing fools, being led willy-nilly through the nose into a greedy, consumerism that—as I learnt only some years later—was so destructive, so aimless? That salt pepper strand of hair flopped back again, and he said, looks like all of you have found a pot of gold.

I liked that card, a rectangular bit of plastic, with my name etched on it, the way it easily slipped into my purse. That evening, for the first time, I went to a mall and shopped. I was never an extravagant shopper but now I was a careless, thoughtless one. Into my shopping bag went, among other things, a strappy pair of sandals, two long flowing tops, and an expensive hand-lotion I had seen in a magazine. The shoes looked droopy the instant I wore them on a rainy, squelchy day, and the colors on the tops faded after the first wash. In the meantime, I paid just a bit for my first installment, and then the next month too. Then the headiness of it all descended on me, in a rush, and I found I couldn’t keep up. That is, I realized I didn’t want to keep up. Not this month, I told myself, I’ll pay the installment next month. When I didn’t, I promised myself to make up the next month, and the month after that.

All the world’s happiness was contained in that precious small bit of plastic that fitted into my purse, that I could bring out with a flourish whenever I wanted.

***

Bhatta was a new colleague, he joined the consultancy some months later, and one Saturday, we decided to go out together.

Later he would call me a liar, and accuse me of leading him on. And for a long time I wouldn’t know what to tell him in my defense. Perhaps I didn’t have one. I was unsure of so many things, especially of my relationship with my boyfriend. But I wanted to be liked, to be loved like my roommate from b-school.

Later when I came to love Bombay, when I missed it with a physical ache in my heart, after moving thousands of miles away to a different land, I'd remember the walking tour Bhatta had given me of south Bombay. We walked through congested Marine Lines, just north of Churchgate where horse-drawn tongas, men with carts, and in expensive Mercs jostled for space. Veiled women dashed into Jain temples holding plateful of offerings high, and Parsis in their square topis and pristine white suits meandered across streets anxiously gesturing to the irregular and chaotic motor traffic. Clothes hung from overhead balconies. The scene that unfolded before my eyes could have been from a hundred years or more ago.

We had ice cream at the Parsi Dairy that had been around for decades, and then we took a cab to the Café Naaz. Bhatta rejected all my offers to pay my share. For all my insistence, for all my flashing of my credit card, Bhatta insisted on footing the bill. My treat, he said, with his sudden broad smile.

Naaz was an open air café. It was rather rustic, shoddy with red plastic tables and chairs, and a standard menu of uniformly ill-tasting stuff. But the view made up for all this. The verandah, with its cement gray floor, and red iron railings high on Malabar Hill, provided an iconic view of Marine Drive as it curved all the way to the west, where we could see the red-lit horseman high on the white building, the sea fringed by Chowpatty’s sandy beaches, its waving coconut palms, and to the right, the old buildings of Malabar Hill broken in places by dots of green.

Bhatta gave me a running commentary all through the evening. This café has appeared in so many films, he said, especially a Rajesh Khanna film where he dies soon afterward.

Did he fall from here?

That really made him laugh. No, he just dies, I think, in an accident. Bhatta frowned, or maybe he was in the war.

I remembered the things that really mattered only later, when I no longer felt any ire toward Bhatta. When I understood I had hurt him. That it was true, I had led him along. It still amazes me that at a time when I considered myself the saddest, lowliest person ever, I managed to hurt someone, cause someone undeserved heartbreak. When Bhatta asked me out the next weekend, I told him the half-truth, or almost a lie, about this boyfriend of mine.

--You have a boyfriend, he said, looking glazed.

--In a way he is. Sort of. Technically, that is.

I waffled, dithered, not wanting to look him in the eye. And he called me a liar and left.

The confusing thing was: I did not wish to marry right then, for then I’d no longer be free. But I couldn’t be free, could I, for I wasn’t rich? And to be rich, I had to live in a better place. I needed to be rich to feel free, to fall in love.

Did life work out in such straight simple ways? This led to this, and that, and finally things happened, things in life fell into place. I did not realize that the things that happened naturally, by accident, were what really mattered. These were the things that taught me about life and about myself much later.

***

Five years after this, my boyfriend and I did marry, having finally held our own against his parents. That was a tumultuous and stressful time. Then we moved into an apartment, and all the time, I moved from one job to another, trying to find the perfect one.

Things happened so fast I no longer remembered the dire state I had been in once. I forgot the evenings I had returned to my half-room, to my bed, feeling the heaviness in my heart, the fatigue in my legs and the dreariness all over, the fear that things would never change. Every time I moved to a new job, I felt a momentary happiness, but weeks later I’d be left embittered, for my desperation led to poor job choices on my part. I was shouted off the premises when I came for an interview once. I faced harassment from a colleague at a media organization. And that software company manned by conmen, who had tricked me too for a while with their promises of more responsibilities and quick promotions.

On such occasions I always remembered Deep, my boss at the management consultancy. Sometimes I wanted to call, or email him, just to catch up, but I never did. And then as I soon found out, I never could. For I had lost the privileges former colleagues, old office acquaintances, could claim from each other.

I’d defaulted on my credit card payments. Part of this was sheer carelessness, but more, I’d deliberately let myself forget. One time, a new job took me away from Bombay, and it was during this time, as I learnt, the credit card collection agents—louts, and goons, menace-filled, and perhaps armed—accosted Deep. They turned up in that office on the 11th floor, and again, interceded him during his walk from the train station to office. It was a short ten-minute walk from Churchgate to Nariman Point, and the sidewalks were always crowded: vendors of all sorts, and pedestrians and officegoers too. Deep must have been startled, embarrassed, alarmed, and humiliated. When he let it be known through a colleague that he no longer wished to see me, or have me get in touch, I felt ashamed, and my heart sank. I understood and did not blame him at all. Just like Bhatta, of course, he thought I was devious too.

***

I think sometimes of explaining myself to Deep but my reasons always sound silly and inane even to myself. The constant stress I felt then, the half-life I lived, in a half-room, the half-truths, or even lies that defined me had left me desperate, and totally muddled.

Once I googled for Deep. He had moved away from Bombay, he had married again, and perhaps he was no longer sad because he had children. I would have loved to see him now, his nice smile, and I’d tell him how considerate he had always been. And other things I’d forgotten I remember now. How he had stood up for me when other senior colleagues believed I wasn’t quite ready for a promotion.

Other moments often return with an intensity. The view of Bombay from Café Naaz, the sea rolling in, the wind in the palm trees, the traffic moving slowly on Marine Drive, and Bhatta looking down at me from his great height. I had felt shy then, shy of the attention he was giving me, unwilling to accept even then that anyone could ever find me likeable.

I’ve sometimes run into my old b-school roommate, but I’ve never told her of the time I nearly ran into her at an airport, and how I had slipped into a bookstore to avoid a meeting. And after looking up Deep’s email address, I once wrote to him. Then I wrote again some years later. The same version of an apology, an email offering explanation, perhaps a shortened version of all that I’ve written above. He never replied.

Adity Kay lives in New Jersey. She has written for The Common, Litro Magazine, Dalhousie Review, Fiction on the Web, Out of Print, and elsewhere. Her novel, The Kidnapping of Mark Twain, was published in January 2024 by Speaking Tiger Books, India.