Mumbai Noir by Altaf Tyrewala Read Free Book Online Page A

town that sprang up along the railway tracks soon after the East India Company ran the first train across the nation’s breasts. It was a town forever in transit. A quick-halt junction for mostly goods trains. As a result, all the businesses in Akbarpur centered around food, the only commodity people passing through really needed. Their father was a kasaai, a butcher with the dirtiest mouth in the town square. So dirty that he used to cuss his first wife even as he exploded inside her, cursing her for not being able to bear him any children. And then he cussed his second when she bore him not one, but two, simultaneously! So dirty was his mouth that word was he never threw away the shit that came out of the intestines of the goats he cut open; he ate it all.
    But Rahim knew better. Ever since he could walk, he used to be given that shit to dispose of, along with the tree stump Abba used as a chopping block, each night, to clean off all the little bits of rotting meat that clung to it. Rahim’s childhood passed in a blur of bleating goats, morose cows, and dead meat. Rahman, though, stayed hidden behind their mother’s abundant girth. In the hefty shadows there he must have discovered the fear of God, Rahim often thought. Abba didn’t dare inseminate their mother again, for fear that she might bear triplets the next time around. Instead he married a third time. Most nights when Rahim would stand alone at the rim of the toilet bowl that was Akbarpur, and toss little bits of rotting meat up into the air for the eagles to grab and devour, he’d peer across the landscape, toward the west, and think of the large sparkling city he saw in movies, where tall, angry young men bashed in the heads of fat, loudmouthed flesheaters like his father.
    The night their mother died, coughing her guts out onto the mattress, her TB untreated, as Abba cussed in orgasm inside her, Rahim grabbed Rahman’s hand and ran.
    He had watched films where boys running toward freedom from tyranny simply follow the light. The only bright lights around Akbarpur were along the railway tracks. Rahim followed them for days and nights. Until they reached Mumbai.
    Through it all Rahman did not utter a word. Though between the two of them, he was the one who could speak. Rahim was born dumb, his tongue stitched by God steadfast into the floor of his mouth.
    Rahim never forgot how hard his heart had beaten when he finally stopped running, staring at the thousands of people swelling this way and that in one of Mumbai’s suburban train stations, the choral murmur of their voices promising him lives he could never have had in that little junction they came from.
    Rahman was heartbroken. The only person he had cared for in the whole world was gone. He could have been tied to a post for slaughter and he wouldn’t have minded.
    In the many years that followed, the boys learned to care for one another. They were identical. Even their beards grew the same way and their hairlines receded in exactly the same curves. They both belched at the same moments during their meals. And if one had a cough, rest assured the other, wherever he was, was being wracked with a phlegm attack too.
    Somehow Rahman always knew what was going on inside Rahim’s head. And on those days when Rahim took a deep breath, silenced his furious mind, and paid attention, he could tell what was going on inside Rahman’s head too.
    They had spent nine months joined to one another like two nostrils. That was Rahim’s favorite analogy because if one nostril got blocked, the other knew. They needed to breathe in tandem, but could breathe for each other too. Which is what they grew up to do. Having worked many odd jobs across South Mumbai, and unable to save anything they earned, Rahim hatched a plan. Which took them to the northern tip of the island city, where the land disappeared into the sea.
    And took one of them with it.
    Rahman
    Rahman lay on the single mattress, staring at the outlines of unknown