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Very quickly in their association Charlie realises that Mikhail is about as easy to shake off as a leech, so he stops trying to retreat behind whatever passes for armour for his scrawny seventeen-year-old self, and braces himself for a life of head-on collisions. They meet when Charlie is failing yet another attempt at a life of virtue. The last time the cops caught him taking money to help the Shiv Sena shut down a row of shops during Ganpati, they'd made him so bloody sorry to have fallen into the ways of crime that his back hasn't recovered from the beating, two months after. He is waiting tables at Gokul Bar and Restaurant, in a smelly little lane behind the Taj populated by Arab businessmen and broke college students, and flashy types who drive down for 3 am kebabs to the late-night food carts opposite. He's just started giving handjobs in the alley between the bar and the carpet warehouse to people in the know – mostly because he needs the money, and the yuppies are willing to pay and the college boys feel compelled to. Also a little bit because he's bored, and he knows it would send Guddu batshit if he knew.
It's the Arabs who bring Mikhail in, a stringy brown twig straggling in the wake of clouds of attar and pristine cotton. Charlie doesn't meet him or any of his party in the eye because they wouldn't be interested even if he felt up to it, which he doesn't yet. He remembers Mikhail because he excuses himself to go to the bathroom just as Charlie has run outside to the medical store to get change for a 500-rupee note, and out on the sidewalk in the beery heat he stands, an angular, oddly elegant blot on the afternoon sunshine. Charlie hears him going ballistic in Bengali over a large, shiny mobile phone. It makes him grin like nothing else has in days. Someone else's family giving him shit.
Back inside he takes the sodas and the tikka up to the table, and Mikhail thanks him graciously.
"Okay then," Charlie grunts back.
"Why were you smiling?" Mikhail asks, looking up into his face. He asks in Marathi, which the Arabs don't speak.
"Kaai?" Charlie mumbles cautiously.
"Outside. You were grinning. I wondered why." Mikhail smiles up at him. "Was it at me? Was I amusing?"
"No thank you," Charlie says emphatically, and cuts out of there feeling even grimmer about the general direction that humanity is taking than before.
----
By the time he comes in next, Charlie's worked his way up to blowjobs in the abandoned hallways of the Colaba Telegraph Workers' Union Office three doors down. The money's better; he starts to daydream of a restaurant of his own. Mikhail lands up in the afternoon again, this time with a rowdy bunch of college kids. By the time his gaze starts to make the back of Charlie's neck prickle, he's already talked Shetty into serving them beer without ID and made gigantic inroads into the refried mushroom masala.
"Hi," he says as Charlie passes by their table.
"What?" Charlie says.
"Can we get some water to drink? We're really thirsty," he says, and smiles. It's a rather sweet, toked-out smile.
"Right," says Charlie. You can always say things like 'right' and 'what' to customers at Gokul without worrying about their feelings. In fact, as long as you leave them alone and deliver their orders up quickly and give them their change without a fuss, they're the sort who wouldn't take it personally if you asked them to fuck off every time they asked you for something. That bit suits Charlie.
"I remember you," Mikhail says. "You were laughing at me the other day."
"If you insist," Charlie says, and bites his tongue. Inffifft. There are about ten boys crowded around a table for eight. He glares at them. "Can I get you anything else, sir?" Ffir?
"Oh," one of them says in a low voice, and leans over to Mikhail. Charlie collars Raju in the kitchen and hisses at him to wait his own table better, and ignores the boy with the wide smile and the flashy jacket with even more bravado than usual. It's not surprising to him at all that he turns up again that night. The flashy jacket smells a little more heavily of cologne than usual.
"Sweet Jesus," Arulmani breathes when he walks in, and moves as far out of Charlie's ambit as a packed floor will allow.
"Hi again," Mikhail says, and grins. "I'm looking for a friend of mine. Could you help, please?"
"No," Charlie says rudely. "Wait at the counter and someone will turn up."
Mikhail looks momentarily confused. "Okay," he says. He stops Charlie as Charlie turns around. "Are there two waiters with lisps in this bar?"
"I mostly spend my time here working," Charlie says. "Not keeping a record of other people's speech impediments. So excuse me for not knowing and not, you know, giving a fuck."
"Oh," Mikhail says, and brightens. "So it is you. Good. I've come looking for a friend of mine."
"I don't know who your friends are, brother," Charlie says. "But if they keep you waiting I suggest you get some new ones."
"Kid," says the man at the table over which he and Mikhail are hovering like gunslinging cowboys, "as much as I think friendship is the nectar of life, I'd really just like a pitcher of beer and some peanuts right now, so could you work on that before I kick your ass? And could you, you hero, get out of my face unless this table I've paid to sit at has your father-in-law's name on it?"
"Look, you get off in an hour, right?" Mikhail says, his smile wavering in intensity as it unleashes itself in full force on the grumpy patron looking up at him and tries itself out a bit more uncertainly on Charlie. "Sorry, Uncle. Just a minute. One o'clock?"
"One o'clock," Charlie snaps. "Uncle, budge up for paying customers. House rules. And you, hero, sit down and have a goddamn beer."
He's ready to cut and run once his shift ends, but he's irritably aware that for all that Mikhail and the Kingfisher drunk seem to have put aside their differences and bonded over the buoyancy of the Indian innings over in the West Indies, escape now will only be a shortcut to exasperation. Nonetheless, he walks past their table, in his jeans and checked shirt – a Guddu heirloom – without stopping.
"Good stuff," he hears Mikhail say behind him, "but I gotta run now, Uncle. Friendship is the nectar of life and all that. Hey," he says, jogging up to Charlie and ducking through the entrance into the lane outside with him. It's bustling now with the occupants of BMWs and Hondas, hoods popped over empty Coke bottles to serve as tables. The smell of kebab and egg-roll dinners floods the place like their switched-on headlights. Charlie weaves his way through the plastic stools and chattering customers, trying to think fast as the incongruously lightless stoop of the Telegraph Union approaches. He doesn't usually say no to fellows scrawnier than he is and he's never said no to the promise of good money, but his balance has been disturbed by this strange parody of pursuit that Flashy Jacket has been conducting. He hates being imposed on more than anything else in the world. Being a novice in a business that consists of being professionally imposed on isn't exactly his idea of fun.
He knows, in this moment, more clearly than ever before, that he should get out. Dream restaurants are not built on the pin money of part-time whoring. Opening your mouth for cash is not a good way to stay out of jail. Waiting tables in a beer bar, while Navratri with its nine-day parallel economy of gambling tables and chanda for the taking has come and gone in the world outside, is the sort of extreme stupidity that is worthy of – of Guddu.
"So," he says to Mikhail at the door of the Union, in a kind of desperation, "the place is teeming with the sort of friends you're out for. Go give it a shot. Tell Ahmed – or Rajiv – that Charlie sent you."
"Why?" says Mikhail. "Isn't this your –" Charlie raises his eyebrows. "Your place of, you know, business?"
"I'm not who you think I am," Charlie says, with a dignity he doesn't feel. "And my business for today is over."
"Dude," says Mikhail. "I'm – is this about money?"
"No," says Charlie, "mostly it's about you leaving me the fuck alone before I put a fist in your eye?"
"You can't talk to me like that," Mikhail says, sweetly reasonable. "I could kill you."
Charlie shuffles a little closer to loom. He's been trying it out ever since he achieved his growth spurt. He looms fairly effectively over Mikhail.
"So is this where we go in now?" Mikhail says, brightly. "Do you have a room inside?"
"Oh, mother," Charlie says. "What do you want to do that'll take a room, fancypants?"
"You know, this is killing my buzz a bit," Mikhail says.
Charlie opens his mouth to reply, when the sound of a particular pair of feet shifting the dust on the road leads him to duck out of the shadows instinctively.
"Hmm?" says the police constable in front of him.
Some of them x-ray you up and down. Some of them address themselves to a point beyond your shoulder. All of them look at you, in Charlie's experience, and see varying amounts of money. "Why is a schoolboy loitering around here at one in the morning?"
"I work down the road here, sir," Charlie says. "My brother just came to take me back home."
"Where is home?" the constable asks, at ease with suspicion. "Do I have to call your parents and tell them you're lost?"
"No sir, thank you sir," Charlie says promptly. The constable snickers at the ffir. Charlie has learned not to bristle when cops do that. "Home is Mumbai Central, sir."
"I see," the constable says. "Well, show me your ID."
Charlie submits a moment of frantic silence.
"ID," says Mikhail, who has been quiet behind him, and holds out his hand. The constable looks at the hundred-rupee note in it. "Thank you, sir."
"Get out of here," the constable says, shaking his hand cordially, before turning to walk into the cacophony of the roadside restaurant. "No place for kids like you."
Mikhail turns to Charlie and opens his mouth to say something. About what, Charlie does not wait to find out.
"Look," he says, and takes a deep breath and a step back. "Look. I'm going to miss the last train, so as fun as this has been, I go this way, and you go jump in a well somewhere the cops don't ask me to pay for your maiyyat. It's been real, man."
He takes another step back, and another. "I could take you home," says Mikhail vaguely, but the blood has already begun to pound in Charlie's ears. It's one-thirty in the morning, and it suddenly becomes a matter of vital importance that he get to Churchgate station in the next ten minutes.
He starts to run.
And the skinny fucker in his flashy jacket sprints along behind.
It's the most surreal night of Charlie's life. Around Wellington Circle he goes, down Madam Cama Road, across the Institute of Science, through the Oval, and past Eros Cinema. He pelts down the tunnel, past the smell of masala chai and vada pav in the subway, and hurtles along, up into the station, past the ticket counters, on to the platform. 1:41. The last train is pulling out of the station. He dashes the last 200 metres next to the driver's door, slowly picking up speed, and makes one last glorious burst for the first compartment.
He takes a full second to realise what he does, then. In later years, he always maintains that it was nothing but pure, bone-deep commuters' reflex, that holds out a hand to Mikhail, chasing after him with his own hand outstretched, and pulls him in.
He opens his mouth, partly to suck air in and partly to goggle at his own stupidity. Mikhail, looking like a dying fish, hangs on to a strap.
"Cigarettes," he exhales, "not—helping—lungs." He coughs. "We could've—a. Taxi."
"Mother—pay money f'r it?" Charlie asks in scorn, mostly heaped on his own impulse for trouble at this moment.
"Is your mother in this compartment, you son of a bitch?" someone asks, then, and Charlie whips his head up. All around them, women, glittering with anger, are standing up and glaring dangerously at them.
"Oh," he breathes. It's the 24 hour ladies' carriage. They jump back off just where the platform drops away.
----
"Wow," says Mikhail, looking back at the expanse of brightly-lit concrete they've just flogged as a race track. The old beggars and the lost folk who have filtered behind look back at him in the midst of their preparations to hunker down in the seats that no one will be using for the next three hours, utterly unmoved. "I would say you're crazy, but I'm beginning to realise that that might sound like the pot calling the kettle black."
"You know what's scary?" Charlie says. "Until you just said that, I was running away from you because I thought you were crazy."
"But now I'm not?"
"It's a comfort that you recognise it," Charlie says. "I notice you still haven't fucked off, though."
"I could do with some tea," Mikhail says. "Couldn't you?"
"Sure thing," says Charlie. "And if you walk down the tracks and wish for a candlelit eight-course dinner, maybe that'd turn up as well."
Mikhail shrugs. The flashy jacket indicates a hopeful understanding of the breadth of his shoulders. His chest is still heaving. Charlie feels something deeply annoying flick down his spine.
"Come on," Mikhail says. "I made you late for your train. I'll drop you home, I'm not too far off myself."
"I am not getting in a taxi with you," Charlie says.
"Excuse me for not taking my Porsche out for you," Mikhail says easily. "What are you afraid of, that I'll throttle you and stuff you into a dickey after I've harvested your organs?"
Charlie looks at him.
"Chai, boss?" asks a man with a tea towel around his neck, glucose biscuits and decanter in hand, passing by noiselessly. "Chai and biscuits?"
Mikhail starts laughing. The station seems to pause momentarily in its slow dimming of the lights. Charlie bites the inside of his cheek.
They plunge into the darkness of the railway, steaming plastic cups in hand. Mikhail follows Charlie's lead from sleeper to sleeper, picking his way over the stones with an ironic daintiness. Without the trains rattling back and forth the tracks come alive with the sounds of the night insects hovering in the weeds, and the murmuring somniloquence of the homeless and the midnight drunks docking for the night under the overhead bridges. The sound of the waves crashes gently in with the wind as they trudge past the yellow neon lights of the next station, then the next, with the distant sound of traffic on Marine Drive like the plink plink of pebbles in water at this distance. The freshness of the night sea air is slightly citric, and exhilarating.
"Wooh," says Mikhail, smacking his lips as he drains his cup and crumples it in his hand in one fluid move. "This is fun. Isn't this fun?"
Charlie doesn't hurry. He agrees. They walk side by side, elbows knocking companionably, talking softly as they make their way past the stations of various and sundry commercial districts. Other workers join them now, dotting the wide gauges of the railways here and there, in singles or twos or the odd large group, making their way exhaustedly home in the most convenient straight line available. As offices run down to homes, little pockets of light begin to glitter through, from the closely-packed ranks of slums and shops gathered on the edges. The all-night medicals and food carts and forgotten fairy lights from Dussehra start to shine through at odd intervals.
"Tired yet?" Charlie asks, as they stroll, after an unbelievable hour and a half, past the behemoth of Mumbai Central, where the Western Railways' local tracks run parallel to the inter-state lines.
"Hell no," Mikhail breathes. "Are we there yet?"
"I've done this stretch in twenty minutes flat," Charlie says, and grins as Mikhail turns his head, huffing softly with laughter.
"For what, an Olympic race? Or a cops-and-robbers chase?"
"For a movie," Charlie says. "I'm kidding."
"Thanks for clarifying," Mikhail says. "You've been so pricey this evening, I've had serious difficulty not thinking of you as a Bollywood heroine."
"Balls," Charlie says. "Where do I get rid of you?"
"I'm," Mikhail falters. "Just up the road, I guess. Track. We passed it."
"I assume you don't sleep at the station," Charlie says. "You close by? Byculla Bridge?"
"Peddar Road," Mikhail says.
"Huh," Charlie says, and is struck anew by the flashy jacket.
"Not all the time," Mikhail says. "Not most of the time, even. I mean, my br—my family's rarely around. It's their home, really. I just go there to throw parties. And sleep. Sometimes."
"I'm not asking," Charlie says.
"I'm just say—wait, did you bring me here to kill me?" They've stopped, finally, long past the station proper, at the juncture of two unused tracks overgrown with grass and weeds, at the burnt out train carriage they dragged up here after the accident at Ratnagiri a year ago. Charlie's claimed it ever since for his own. "Because I'm telling you now that you have no idea how bad that would be for you."
"I'll try and remember that," Charlie says. "This is where I live, though."
Mikhail invites himself inside once Charlie's struck a match and lit the mosquito coil and the lantern. He rubs his nose before he picks a bra up from the washing line.
"Family?" he asks delicately.
"Tenants," Charlie says. He sublets to the prostitutes from the nearest bus stop.
"You take money?" Mikhail says, a sort of horrified fascination creeping into his voice now. "From working girls?"
"They just keep other girls out. And junkies. They leave before I come home, mostly."
"Uh-huh," Mikhail says.
"They wouldn't give me money, anyway," Charlie says.
"Do they cook for you instead?" Mikhail asks, now delighted to find himself in what is clearly a sort of adventure for his reedy little upmarket penthouse-dwelling self. "Sew your clothes? Tie you rakhis on Raksha Bandhan and take money from you?" He continues as Charlie swings outside and clambers up on the window bars to the top of the car, and helps him up. "Do you sleep here while you wait for them to finish?"
"I don't have a fan inside," Charlie says. "It gets hot."
"Right," Mikhail says. "Right. Of course."
They finish the last of the biscuits that came with the tea; it's kept them awake and going for long past Charlie's usual bedtime, even. Mikhail checks the time on his glowing watch dial and pulls out a slim pocket radio from one of the eighty or so pockets on his cargo pants.
They listen in to the morning session in Barbados as the temperature does its gentle four a.m. dip, a slender thread of human noise echoing through the deserted yard. There's no one to see as they climb on top of each other, frotting quietly as it gets bluer, colder, huddling close and kissing like old friends. Charlie falls asleep as the Indian innings disappoints for no particular reason, fading into inconsequence before it has a chance to play out.
He wakes up once, as the sun starts to filter through the leaves overhead and zips his fly shut and climbs down. The radio sputters, muffled in Mikhail's grip, the rest of his body curled around it on the women's mattresses. His hipbones angle sharply upwards out of his jeans. Charlie notes the phone and the wallet sticking out, too. He walks over and picks them out, scrolls through the call log. Lots of 'Dada' and 'Da,' and pizza and biryani takeout. The wallet is stuffed with cash and old pictures. He tucks them back, and plucks the radio out of Mikhail's fingers to turn it off. He headbutts him off half the pillow and falls asleep again.
The next time he wakes up he is damp with the cooling sweat of early evening, and the unmistakable sound of the Shatabdi Express racing past. "Charlie," Mikhail says, elbows digging into his sides. "I just realised Ramzan's started. First time in my life I've fasted a day through. Hey, Charlie."
"Mikhail," Charlie rasps, and yawns. "Mikhail. Funny name. Like Jackson?"
"No," Mikhail scoffs. He appears wide awake. "What are you, illiterate? Wait, forget I asked," he laughs. "Nah, like Gorbachev – you know Gorbachev?"
"Didn't he come down to India once?" Charlie asks. "Looks like someone stuck a knife in his forehead?"
"Bitched if I know," Mikhail says, and laughs again. "My brothers read a lot of something called Misha when they were growing up, they say. Russian porn or something, maybe. Crazy. Bengalis, you know. "
"I know," Charlie says.
"Really, how?" Mikhail asks.
"I heard you on the phone that day," he tells him. "You sounded like you were hanging someone out to dry. Sounded like I felt. It was pretty funny."
"So that's why you smiled," Mikhail says. "Yeah, those were their associates from Abu Dhabi. They made me show them around town. I was pretty mad. You really stuck in my head that day."
"You don't say," Charlie says. "And that's why you tore through Churchgate in the middle of the night trying to catch hold of me?"
"Fucking hell," Mikhail says, and digs his chin into Charlie's chest. "It was cool, wasn't it?"
"It was crazy."
"You're cute, though," Mikhail says. "So it was cool. It was like running after a Hindi film heroine. Like L'Oréal. You're worth it. "
"What's L'Oréal?" Charlie asks. Mikhail guffaws.
"It's my shampoo," he says, and Charlie laughs too. "Hey, Charlie. I need to clean up. Where's the water?"
"Trickling out of a tap down Grant Road way," Charlie says, and stretches. "Five to nine in the morning, four to six in the –"
Mikhail looks at his watch. Charlie's brain wakes up properly. The Shatabdi passes at six-ten every evening.
----
"I was going to ask whether you had stores," Mikhail says, meeting him half-way down the gravel path outside the fence as he trudges back, ten minutes later, empty cans in hand.
"You didn't find the mineral water fountain in one of the bathrooms? Shame," Charlie says, but the fight isn't in it. "There's a shop that sells Bisleri down the road. I think."
"I heard the azaan from fairly close by," Mikhail says. He marches on to the road, gripping Charlie's wrist. "Button your shirt. I'm getting this sorted."
The fairy lights are switched on against a darkening sky as they walk to the bottom of the nearest lane. In the alley between two of the tens of leather shops lining the little street, men are getting up from namaz rugs spread out on the road. Mikhail introduces himself. Wishes his audience Ramzan kareem. Mentions something about the Racecourse up across the road. Mentions a brother or two. Hopes he will be obliged. Dazzling smile. Gritty clothes. On the footpath next to the makeshift hall, a tiny wall of wet concrete, still under construction, forms a makeshift gutter under a set of six gushing taps set into a section of newly-set and totally illegal pipeline.
"Public service for Ramzan?" the older man smiles at them both.
"In a way," Mikhail shrugs, with the casual ease of a favourite child. "You could say it was for my brothers." He claps Charlie's back. "Brother. I think my Mujeeb dada comes down here sometimes?"
"No one is a stranger in this month," the other man says, and looks at Charlie. "Come wash your hands and feet. Skinny children. You both look like you've kept roza for a year."
"I should be getting back," Charlie says, and is completely ignored as more and more people get up from prayer and jostle him amiably to the taps. He soaks his feet, and washes his hands and face. The water is clear and cold, and he gulps great mouthfuls of it before running it discreetly through his hair.
"You're Vijay Sharma's son," a voice says softly at his shoulder, and he turns around to find an unfamiliar, younger man. It's not a question.
"Why do you ask?" he asks, as politely as possible.
"I knew him," the other man says. "He was a good man. I was sorry to hear of his death." Charlie nods, hackles risen. He's grown too used to thinking of Baba as someone without friends in the last three years. Too much like himself. "You still live in the old signal house?"
"A little further down these days," Charlie says cautiously. "Sir."
"I think I know where you mean. And pardon me for asking," the man continues, "but which son are you?"
Great platters of food come out from behind the shops as the last namaazis rise from the rugs –pineapple and tiny slices of banana, and jewel-red cubes of watermelon to start with. Mikhail nudges his shoulder as he hovers into orbit, conversing with another stranger. "Bangali?" the man asks him softly, as though he wants to be let into a joke. "Mumbaikar," Mikhail replies, tone accepting of the hilarity of an embarrassing disease. What is to be done?
"I'm the fast one," Charlie says to his interlocutor. "Charlie."
"And your twin?"
"Studying," Charlie says. "Last I heard."
"So much for blood being thicker than water," the other man says at his tone. "Well, sit down and eat. And don't worry about coming down to fill your buckets. We have spare piping."
"I don't know how to thank you," Charlie says, indeed quite new to the business of gratitude. A Guddu-like stutter illustrates the truth of it.
"You're Vijay's son," his benefactor says, and passes him some fruit. "And you have good friends."
As the truth of this sinks in, Charlie hungers, and eats, and sits on the footboard of his bogey early next morning as plumbers come by to weld a T-connection from the T-connection behind the Locomotive Yard Office to a dinky little Sintex tank under his carriage. A shortcut to a shortcut. The running water is a new kind of euphoria, like sleeping through the day for the first time in his life, or going down to the Racecourse during Diwali, or waking up with someone's tongue in his ear.
Mikhail doesn't try to pay him for a blowjob again. Charlie discovers that he doesn't actually go to college. He doesn't actually do much work at the Racecourse, either. What he mostly does, in those early days, is to stick around, trying to provoke Charlie's smile, and putting him to work on making money, and on ancillaries to blowjobs. Charlie works out the head-on collision business fairly quickly. It isn't too hard, once the last bruises from the Ganpati beatings fade away, and once he starts to believe in his own propensity for good luck again. Charlie is seventeen. On the whole, when he tells the story in later years, it takes him about the same amount of time to get used to Mikhail as it does to the working flush tank.
end