"Oh, Lin!" he cried, squeezing his head into my chest in an affectionate hug. "I have a news for you! I have it such a fantastic news! I was looking for you in every place, every hotel with naked ladies, every drinking bar with black-market peoples, every dirty slum, every-"
"I get the picture, Prabu. So, what's your news?"
"I am to be getting married! I am making a marriage on Parvati!
Can you believe it?"
"Sure, I can believe it. Congratulations. I take it you were practising, just now, for the wedding party."
"Oh, yes!" he agreed, lunging at me with his hips a few times. "I want a very sexy dancing for everybody at the party. It's a pretty good sexy, isn't it?"
"It's... sexy... sure. How are things here?"
"Very fine. No problem. Oh, Lin! I forgot! Johnny, he is making a marriage also. He will be married with Sita, the sister of my own beautiful Parvati."
"Where is he? I want to say hello."
"He is down at the seashore, you know, at the place where he sits on the rocks, for being lonely-the same place where you also enjoy a good lonely. You'll find him there."
I walked off, glancing back over my shoulder to see Prabaker encouraging the band with mechanical, piston-like thrusts of his narrow hips. At the edge of the slum, where black boulders tumbled to the sea, I found Johnny Cigar. He was dressed in a white singlet and a chequered green lungi. He braced himself with his arms, leaning back, and staring out to sea. It was almost exactly the same spot where he'd told me about seawater, sweat, and tears on the evening of the cholera outbreak, so many months before.
"Congratulations," I said, sitting beside him and offering him a beedie cigarette.
"Thanks, Lin," he smiled, shaking his head. I put the packet away, and for a while we both watched the small petulant waves smack at the rocky shore.
"You know, I was brought into this life-conceived, I mean, not born-just over there, in the Navy Nagar," he said, nodding his head toward the compound of the Indian Navy. A curve of coastline separated us from the Nagar, but a direct line of sight across the small bay gave us a clear view of the houses, huts, and barracks.
"My mother was from Delhi-side originally. Her family, they were all Christians. They made good money in the service of the British, but they lost their position, and their privileges, after the Independence. They moved to Bombay when my mother was fifteen years old. Her father took employment with the navy, working as a clerk. They lived in a zhopadpatti near here. My mother fell in love with a sailor. He was a tall, young fellow from Amritsar, with the best moustache in the whole Nagar. When she became pregnant with me, her family threw her out. She tried to get some help from the sailor who was my father, but he left the Nagar, and she never saw him or heard about him again."
He paused, breathing through his nose, with his lips pressed tightly together. His eyes squinted against the glare from the glittering sea, and the fresh, persistent breeze. Behind us we could hear the noises of the slum-hawkers' cries, the slap of clothes on stone in the washing area, children playing, a bickering complaint, and the jangling music for Prabaker's piston-hips.
"She had a tough time of it, Lin. She was heavily pregnant with me when they threw her out. She moved to a pavement-dweller settlement, across in Crawford Market area, and wore the widow's white sari, pretending that she'd had a husband, and pretending that he was dead. She had to do that-she had to become a widow, for life, before she was even married. That's why I never got married. I'm thirty-eight years old. I can read and write very well-my mother made sure I was educated-and I do the bookwork for all the shops and businesses in the slum. I do the taxes for every man who pays them. I make a good living here, and I have respect. I should've been married fifteen or even twenty years ago. But she was a widow, all her life, for me. And I couldn't do it. I just couldn't allow myself to get married. I kept hoping I would see him, the sailor with the best moustache. My mother had one very old, faded photograph of the two of them, looking very serious and stern. That's why I lived in this area. I always hoped I would see him. And I never married. And she died last week, Lin. My mother died last week."
He turned to me, and the whites of his eyes were blazing with the tears he wouldn't let them shed.
"She died last week. And now, I'm getting married." "I'm sorry to hear about your mother, Johnny. But I'm sure she'd want you to get married. I think you'll make a good father. In fact, I know you'll make a good father. I'm sure of it."
He looked at me, his eyes talking to me in a language I could feel but couldn't understand. When I left him, he was staring at the ceaselessness of the sea, irritated to chequered, white rifts by the wind.
