we met again, but our interest in each other

had waned. I, for one, had become more “poetic.”

I could grow my hair as long as I wanted now. My father

was Chief Executive; we lived in a five-room apartment

on the twenty-fifth floor in Cuffe Parade.

My problem was how to suffer, for I knew

suffering to be essential to art; and yet

there was little cause for suffering; I had loving parents

and everything I required. I disowned our Mercedes-

Benz, took the 106 bus, but remained

unable to solve my lack of want.

I pretended to be poor; I wore khadi.

My parents hosted ever larger parties.

I grew thin and consumptive worrying about the absence

of poverty in my life, and the continued, benign

attendance of parents who were good and kind:

all the wrong ingredients, I feared, for the birth

of poetry. Starting to study for O

and A levels, I lost touch with college friends.

Taking long walks down Cuffe Parade towards

Regal Cinema, I only ever visited Elphinstone

College at night, passing the beediwalla

and the bus stop where commuters stood waiting;

here, where once I’d “hung out”

with fellow students, were desultory families,

playing cards on the pavement, each, insouciantly,

revealing their hand to the passerby; prostitutes

glowed palely against pillars guarding the college and Lund

& Blockley, where students at day glanced right

a moment before they crossed the road; and addicts

of smack who loitered between these, speaking

a lingua of broken English and Bombay Hindi,

with whom I opened conversations that ended

in a wry plea for money. They didn’t want you for company

but to slip in that plea. We came to know

each other by sight. Thus that curved stretch

before Elphinstone, going past Flora Fountain,

towards Dadabhai Naoroji Road, where the pillars

became Zoroastrian lions, containing their power,

the banks closed, the odd mix of activity

and purpose at eleven-thirty at night, the road

seeming to widen on the left where my school

and childhood and the sugarcane-juice stall used to be.

Nineteen eighty-three, I left for England. In ’85,

on my annual trip home, searching for the car

in the parking lot in Kala Ghoda between

Rhythm House and the Jehangir Art Gallery, I heard

my name being called out: “Amit.” I turned

and saw it was Suresh beckoning to me

from behind the Ambassador. I went up to him

and said, as if I were seeing him after a fortnight’s absence

from school, “Suresh! Where have you been?”

“Good to see you—where are you these days?” He was taller

than me now: about six feet tall,

good-looking, if dressed in average working clothes,

crouched behind the car as if he were hiding behind it.

“I’m in England—I’m back for a few months—

but tell me about yourself.” As the art crowd in kurtas

ascended the wide steps of the Gallery, he lowered

his voice melodramatically: “I’m fucked,