There are colours, everywhere. Some dark, some pondering like sun. This place is no less then a heaven, bliss flickering torches light. I couldn’t have asked for more, my Polaroid lens quietly weeps into my ears and heart.
[Frida’s voice still enchants my mind. Zaira use to say ABBA is the reason why she grew up in 70s. But I couldn’t stand ‘em for one reason. She had met her manicorn after all. Adelaide it was, summer of 77’, she met Arif over a concert.]
Mumbai, I have been here before with my father as a kid. I remember the hustle in the air here. Smells still the same. Like standing in front of a magnifying mirror, an enlarged version of self. Colaba is what the address read. Zaira used to describe it to me, the old school roads light by the lamp poles like chandeliers of the sky. The people dragging as they speak, hitting chords of intellectual artists. It is SF of India yet has a pale coloured aristocracy and elegance to it. The Colaba causeway is “the place”. Every one wants a piece of meat here. The real deal.
Too much of everything. But hell. This is my story and am not ready to spill the beans yet, perhaps. But, may be for the better, just may be. I am a 43 year old female.
Before hitting the four lined piece of paper, I wandered around for over a week. Not that I wasn’t too keen, but I was scared that these were the last rights of Zaira. And it would take away everything. May be am too old to incubate this. But then am being honest. At gateway, I met this fogy old guy. His name was Ranjnikanth, at least that’s what he told me but, some grass; he sold it to me saying this is “Indian maal”. I wouldn’t know what he meant, but Indian maal was trippy like Jesus. I remember being high as a kite but that would totally be out of place to mention, but what wouldn’t be is that Ranjnikanth was an epic scalper.
Zaira Karrah, brought up in NYC, was an amalgamation of flamboyance and nattiness. Zaira and I started seeing each other when she had come down to my exhibition. She was there with Shantanu Das, an upcoming photographer from Kolkata back then. Zaira’s wealth of knowledge always reflected in her conversations. That’s what everyone fell for. She could buy you for peanuts. We struck a date the day next to the day we met. I went purblind just moments after knowing her. She said she liked my work, but then I knew she didn’t mean nothing. But that couldn’t help me not falling for her. I had always been proud to be only the second person in her life with whom she had struck stable long relationship. Zaira had had a whole galaxy abounding of riches around her. You wouldn’t know what she is thinking, you wouldn’t even know if she liked the meal you fixed her. But she would say she did. She had never let me enter even an inch deep into her past. But all she cared to tell me about was her 3 months long relationship with Arif, which she branded as a stable one. They had met over one of ABBA’s concerts that held during the band’s Australia tour. They got married that summer. I had never been able to figure out Zaira, but I knew one thing that most of her life had a frivolous sense to it but Arif. Zaira and I were together for more then 9 years. She passed away last fall. She fell to cancer. I had no idea what so ever when I met her back then. But then, that was Zaira.
Arif. I had never seen him; Zaira never had a picture of them both. But from what she told me, Arif was an Adonis. He had Middle Eastern roots she said, but was an Indian at heart and by birth of course. Arif was a poet and was trying to get into the film industry as a lyricist. Meanwhile he worked for some Hindi newspapers and magazines. I am sure it wouldn’t surprise if I told you he was from Mumbai. He was orphaned at the age of 17 and then he moved to Mumbai to live with his cousins and make out a living in the city of dreams. His cousin Arnab was a journalist and often had to go out of the country to cover events for his magazine. That is how Arif landed up in Australia.
Me. well yes. I am River Callahan. Photographer. I used to work with few weeklies but now, I am much of a freelancer. Free of work perhaps is more apt coinage. The last two years, I spent nursing Zaira. She was slowly ripping into a different world. At times we would sit in the same room but I wouldn’t know if she existed. Her pain was the most traumatic thing I have witnessed in my life. There used to be nights when I cried out my eyes. The doctors and medics had given me no reason to believe she would make it. Death is a marginal irony of life, but probably because I had seen her die every day for these two years, death was a happy ending. She knew how much a world she meant to me and also that it wouldn’t replete by mere laws of nature, death. It was the day before she left that she gave me a box and a paper with the address. She didn’t tell me anything, but I knew what she wanted me to do with it. I knew whose address that was. It was only obvious, isn’t it?
I did not have the heart to find out what the box caged. But I was sure it had the leverage of being called as Zaira’s epilogue. I had taken an indefinite break from work. It only made sense to give myself a little time before I could do it. I felt I had been in Seattle forever now. I needed a different air. I burnt all the pictures of me and her, I remember that mahogany fire. Zaira had asked me to do so and you can never question her. I spent days in places like Bordeaux, Malaga, Durban… before finally ending up in Bombay. I visited few villages and temples. I realized how conveniently we loose ourselves over searching the “American Dream”, we foster and impel ourselves into the entourage of cynical clowns. The words we speak and the bread we break seems deprived of austere. But here, the smell of lakes and fields attract skylight in an absolute sense.
I felt the week tour of anterior parts of India had given me enough strength. I had to do what I set out for. I wasn’t putting up far, so I decided to walk down to the place. It wasn’t a difficult place to find. I knocked on the dilapidated door as there wasn’t any bell. A young girl into her teens welcomed me in; she gave me a glass of water. She didn’t ask me a thing and neither did I. It was as if she had been expecting me. Someone called her from inside and I could only smile. Her name was Zaira.
“I had been expecting you”.
I turned my head, a shady voice called from behind.
“You look exactly like the way she described; perhaps it’s the age that figures” I said.
Arif had tears in his eyes but he wouldn’t let them fall. I gave him what belonged to him. I told him I could not open the box myself and he understood exactly why. The reason why he named his daughter after Zaira, the reason why Zaira wanted me to give him that box and the reason why I travelled all the way was only justified now. He opened it. There was a harmonica, a very old one and a picture of them both together. Arif told me that he used to play it, he had lost it, but it only figures what actually happened. Zaira perhaps knew that they weren’t meant to be. Arif smiled. Zaira, am sure was reverting from where ever she was.
“How did you find Bombay?” he asked.
I smiled.
“I have relived Zaira, I have lived Bombay”.
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