Free Afternoon Raag by Amit Chaudhuri

spoon. He stood rooted to the spot, and, because he was wearing shorts, I could see how thin his legs were, with hairless knees, bent at a concave angle because of the firmness with which he was standing. The rude noise he was making sent the sweeper-women of the building, pretty girls among them, into a panic; with worried faces, clutching large plastic bins, they were hurrying towards the truck, from which the little men in undergarments were leaning out and looking at them insolently. There was something sexual inthe air, and this ritual repeated itself at this time on almost every day of the week.
    I grew to love that lane. The flat was on the third floor, and its veranda brought one marginally closer to its life. There was commerce between our building and the shops on the main road, from which barefoot errand boys would come carrying newspapers, provisions, video cassettes, and bottles of soda, taciturn, dark adolescents who wore T-shirts handed down by their employers, with ‘USA’, ‘Smile’, or ‘Beat King’ printed upon them. In this part of the city, with its small-town atmosphere, taxis were rivalled by auto-rickshaws, manic, hooded three-wheelers that were good for short distances. At the local station, these autos arrived incessantly in a cloud of dust before a queue of passengers, who, one by one, were carried off through a series of jolts and shocks towards the various roads radiating around Bandra—Linking Road, Turner Road, Hill Road, Khar. And one would come in the afternoon, every few days, to the gate outside our building, and either Mohan or my guru, or both, would alight from its tiny,semi-visible, confessional-like interior, and pay the impatient auto driver. From the veranda, their entrance into the compound was visible at close-quarters, and the sudden roar with which the auto disappeared always left me unprepared.
    My parents lived here for three years. During my first summer visit, walking down the parallel lanes, I found by-lanes connecting one lane to another. On either side of these by-lanes, which were like shrunken versions of the bigger ones, miniature portraits of them, there were old cottages, and, around them, a distinct island of life that had formed by itself, consisting of cats, shrubs, birds, and an absence of people. I was always grateful for, without knowing precisely why, the detour of passing through these by-lanes.
    It was Chitrakaki, my mother’s friend, who, having lived in the suburbs for thirty years, introduced my parents to a new family doctor in the area, someone who would make house calls. He was a short Marathi gentleman called Dr Deshpande, long threads of black hair combed across his disproportionately visible scalp, squarejawed,stout, bespectacled, with, disconcertingly, dimples appearing on his cheeks when he smiled. Like all general practitioners who are slaves to their patients and available at their beck and call at all hours of the day, he had no degree but his MBBS; he was more a Samaritan than a doctor; his arrival was met with relief rather than apprehension. He was not consulted for serious illnesses, but for headaches, stomach-upsets, and indigestion, and for his company he charged fifty rupees less than the doctors in the city. This part of the suburbs was his natural terrain; he was linked by phone to a wide variety of sufferers, and was in demand everywhere. He usually made only one diagnosis, ‘There’s a virus in the air this time of the year,’ but if one disagreed with him, he had no objection to changing it.
    Chitrakaki lived not far away in a rented flat on the ground floor of a two-storeyed house with her husband, son, daughter-in-law, two dogs, and a cat. Once she owned a rooster which, strange plant, was convinced it was human and insisted upon being introduced to her friends. The dogs—a fox terrier that died, a dachshund that met its end ina road-accident, two hairy pekinese—Chitrakaki and her