Page 72 of Six Days in Bombay

The woman nodded. She opened the ledger and turned it around to face me. In the list of names down the first column, I saw ones that appeared to be French, Spanish, Dutch and En­glish. I was used to presenting my passport and visas everywhere by now, and I fished in my bag for them.

When she noticed my address, she asked,“Dall’India?”

I was writing my name in the ledger.“Si.”I looked up and smiled at her.

“Péro…”She flipped a few pages in the ledger and pointed to a name:Raji Murty. Then she mimed putting on a sari by turning around and around and flinging a phantompalluover her left shoulder. When she’d stopped, she pointed to my skirt. I burst into laughter when I realized she was asking me why I wasn’t in a sari, like her former guest. The eyes of the old woman crinkled in amusement.

It was too difficult to explain why I had a British passport instead of an Indian one. I simply shrugged. She shrugged in return, then gave me a key and pointed down the hall and then up.

I pointed to my stomach and mimed eating food.

“Ah,” she said. She pulled aside the curtain behind her to reveal a tiny dining room. There were three tables, one of which was occupied by a woman my age. She was eating.

The old woman rattled off something in Italian. The woman at the table looked up and saw me. She said in English, “Lunch is included. She’s inviting you to sit at a table.” She was an American.

I walked into the room to shake the diner’s hand and introduce myself. Her handshake was limp. “Taylor,” she said. She was eating what looked to be creamy rice. My mouth watered.

“I’ll just get settled in and join you later.” It was hard for me to contain my excitement at meeting a fellow traveler with whom I could speak English. Trying to communicate in languages other than my own was exhausting. I hurried along to the next floor and to my room. I knew it would be monastic, and the room did not disappoint. There was a cross on one wall with a single bed underneath it. The quilt was old but clean. There was a wooden chair against a table. What touched me was the single daisy that had been placed in a tiny vase on the table. It was something my mother would do—and had done on countless occasions. Like the time I’d passed my entrance to nursing school or when I’d sewn my first dress or when I won a medal in sixth form for the hundred-meter race. I wassuddenly consumed by homesickness. For my mother. For her flowers. Her kindness.

“Hello, Mum,” I whispered.

When I returned to the dining room, Taylor had disappeared, and the Signora was waiting to serve me a big bowl of bean soup with potatoes and tomatoes, greens of some sort, country bread and a generous helping of garlic cloves. My hostess grated a wedge of what looked like dry cheese into my bowl. The soup wasn’t dal, but it was hearty and satisfying.

Dessert was an apple. The signora sat at the table across from me and sliced an apple. She offered me a slice, before taking one for herself. The apple was remarkably sweet, the kind we sometimes got in Bombay from the Himalayas. We ate in companionable silence.

***

The only lead I had for Paolo was that he had taught Mira at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze, which was located on Via Ricasoli. With my Baedeker’s in hand, I ventured out on foot. The air was warm, almost eighty degrees, weather I was used to in Bombay, and I was grateful for my half-sleeve linen shirt. Cyclists, horse-drawn carriages, automobiles and pedestrians vied for purchase on the cobblestone roads. Everywhere I turned, there was a poster with Mussolini’s image. As much as I tried to ignore them, the wordscredere,obediere,combattereturned into an unsolicited mantra with each step I took.

I passed several bakeries, a butcher shop where a skinned pig hung from the ceiling and a café where the patrons stood at a bar sipping cappuccinos.

After a time, I stopped in front of an Italianate building (at least that’s what my tenth form teacher Mrs. Norton, who was married to an architect, would have called it). The facade was a beautifully proportioned arcade. Two female students with satchels hanging from their shoulders and canvases under theirarms entered the building through enormous wooden doors. I followed them, finding myself in a foyer of sorts.

To my left was a wide, quite beautiful, stone stairway leading to the upper floors. Directly in front of me was a rectangular courtyard, flanked by classrooms where students were painting or drawing or sculpting. To my right was an open window beyond which was a counter. A woman sat behind the counter with her back to me talking to a younger, quite pregnant woman who was sitting at a large table. The table was laid out with two plates of what looked like pillows of dough topped with a red sauce and a basket of bread. Steam rose from the plates. The two women were talking animatedly in Italian and I managed to catch the words for soup, olive oil and salt. An argument about cooking?

“Buongiorno, signora,” I said, imitating my pensione landlady.

The woman turned around in her chair to face me. She looked to be about fifty. Her eyes were watery, but she wasn’t crying. Her mouth was pursed but not in a flirtatious way; she seemed to have been born with that expression. She was wearing eyeglasses low on her nose. Now she lowered her chin so she could see me above the rim of the glasses.“Si?”

“Do you speak French or English,per favore?”

There was a pause, and I feared I might have insulted her somehow. After a few seconds, she said in French, “Madame, we have students from all over the world. We can speak in En­glish if you wish.”

I smiled. “Thank you. I’m looking for an instructor named Paolo.”

“There is no one here by that name,signora.”

“Perhaps he taught here a while ago?” I calculated swiftly. “Around 1924 or ’25?”

She pushed the glasses up her nose, as if she were closing a door.

“Please,signora. I have traveled all the way from India to find him.”

Something in her relented. Her forehead relaxed.

“Do you have a surname?”

I hesitated. What kind of fool arrives in a city without the full name of the person they’re looking for? Why hadn’t Mira made this easier? “He would have taught a young artist by the name of Mira Novak.”

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