Fairy Tales at Fifty Read online

  FAIRY TALES

  AT

  FIFTY

  Upamanyu Chatterjee

  FOURTH ESTATE • New Delhi

  In memoriam

  S. Shankar Menon

  (1939–2013)

  CONTENTS

  ANGULIMALA’S TALE

  ADOLESCENT ANGULIMALA

  ANGULIMALA TILL FIFTY

  THE IMPOTENT PRINCE

  OF A BLOODY ROTTEN WORLD

  THE IMPOTENT PRINCE OF A BLOODY ROTTEN WORLD

  KIDNAPPED

  LEG BEFORE WICKET

  THE GREAT ESCAPE

  GARGA’S PASSING

  AN END TO MYTHMAKING

  THE BUDDHA ON THE CAUSEWAY

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  ANGULIMALA’S TALE

  ‘You must tell me your past though, all of it,’ said Nirip with a smile to Anguli, ‘so that we can then decide what to do about the future.’

  Without stopping his gnawing at the stalk of sugarcane, Anguli, in that fading light, glanced at Nirip’s indistinct features, wondered for a moment, and then—overwhelmed because he hadn’t been asked, and he hadn’t spoken to anyone, about himself in fifty years—let the dam burst.

  ADOLESCENT ANGULIMALA

  Jhabua was fourteen when he first heard the story of Angulimala from his biological father. The adolescent was intensely moved by the Buddhist folktale of a violent and vicious serial killer and particularly intrigued by the murderer’s fetish for wearing a garland around his neck of the little fingers of his victims. Here at last was a role model worth emulating.

  ‘Fingers means penises of course,’ annotated Jayadev for the benefit of his biological son. He was generous in the dissemination of knowledge, of everything. ‘He hung around his neck a necklace of nine hundred and ninety-nine penises. When dried, they mustn’t weigh much. Of course, they can’t utter the word “penis” in the same breath as the name of the Divine One, and in a tale that children will hear and everything, hence little fingers. Now do my left thigh, my son.’

  Obediently, Jhabua stopped massaging his father’s right calf and moved upwards.

  ‘His one thousandth victim was going to be either his mother or the Buddha.’

  ‘Baba, when I grow up, I’m going to call myself Anguli. And Baba, how come his mother had a penis?’

  Jayadev chuckled at the question, a deep and manly expression of affectionate amusement at the intelligence of his progeny. ‘Angulimala thought she had, my son. He had problems, you know, with knowledge and perception, with women, with the world. He had never seen his mother naked, remember.’ Under the ministrations of his son’s strong hands, Jayadev, on the mat on the mud floor of the courtyard, slowly and luxuriously wriggled his hips to give room to the stirring in his loins.

  While kneading his father’s body, Jhabua Anguli daydreamed of who his first victim would be. Bakra, his stepbrother, who had scurried up and down the village all day running errands for Jayadev, trying to impress him with his filial devotion, returning even at that moment, well past ten at night, with a second bottle from Ghoru at the hooch shop—Bakra was an obvious first choice. He was stupid and scheming and hurt easily. ‘Nine hundred and ninety-nine is a lot of people to be so annoyed with as to kill. Even ninety-nine, Baba. Actually, even nine.’ Anguli paused to think of nine people whom he wanted to kill. His schoolteacher. Slap certainly, and rap his knuckles with a footruler, but kill? ‘Was Angulimala never caught? Didn’t the police go after him?’

  ‘He killed whoever came to catch him.’ Jayadev, bored with the travails of the serial killer, turned on his side so that Anguli could do his hips while he eyed Bakra’s mother at her chores. She was large and there was much to eye. He hummed under his breath a tune that not even Manna De could have recognized as his Balraj Sahni number from Waqt. It was one of Jayadev’s favourite songs and, having remarked over the years how his rendition of it never failed somehow to make the thighs of his women more fragrant, he often sang it sotto voce before and during lovemaking. It had its effect, sure enough. Bakra’s mother continued to wash up her pots and pans in the corner under the two banana trees, but she tightened her sari around her torso—ostensibly to protect herself from her occasional husband’s gaze, but in effect to tease more of her skin with the feel of its flimsy material. Beneath the garment, her body seemed to stretch and curl up and stretch again, like a feline’s before it settles down to enjoying being itself. And in a minute, both father and son were certain that they could detect in the air a faint but distinct, distracting odour of musk.

  ‘But Baba, Angulimala had a father too? He went to school? I mean, once upon a time, he must’ve been normal?’

  ‘Of course he was normal, in that he wanted to be happy. And yes, he had a father, Garga by name.’

  Jayadev sighed with sorrow at having to forsake a pleasure even if only to move on to another, arose from the mat and knotted his lungi. Before getting up himself, his son first screwed tight the cap of the bottle of mustard oil: he was a methodical boy. When he decided to murder somebody, he would wait and plan and so influence events that conditions would be moulded to become just right. At fourteen, he was already taller than his father who, in answer to his son’s questions, first burped long and baritonally.

  Jayadev then replied to them with his habitual patience and good humour. He was an intrinsically magnanimous man, perhaps because he had never had anything material to share, and he was cultured despite his illiteracy. What he could not learn from books, his curiosity had picked up during his excursions and pilgrimages up and down the country. Most crucially, his wanderings had given him a sense of geography, and the diversity of the world had provided latitude to his thought. He knew his strengths and weaknesses, he was aware of all that he did not know. Women were his weakness, and his strength his way with them. Beyond that, he didn’t much care, the world was welcome to its atrocities. One just looked away from its ordure to marvel instead at its wonders. They were everywhere, in all seasons and all ages. The young Angulimala, for instance, so many centuries ago, travelling all those hundreds of kilometres from Kosala to Takshasila in search of learning, that was a wonder.

  ‘In search of learning?’ wondered Anguli. ‘Or to get away from home?’

  But the rest of the life and times of an ancient serial killer, the boy had to glean from other sources. For one, Jayadev shooed everyone away that evening so that he could spend some quality time alone with Bakra’s mother in the single room of their hovel. And then, next morning, he with his aphrodisiacs and cures and massage oils was off again on his travels; Agra first, then south to Gwalior and east to Kanpur, and from there down to Bhopal and Indore and at last south-west to Bombay for a glimpse of the sea. He journeyed for months at a time and there was method in his meandering, for he took care, twice a year, to call on and spend time with his most faithful clients. They were all women. With each, he donned a different identity and a different name, choosing invariably though, being an intense devotee, only from the appellations of Krishna. He treated men too, of course, for rheumatic pains and incontinence, but somehow they were all cured reasonably quickly. A few weeks of ingesting his sweetish black pills that so resembled goat droppings, and his male patients for instance stopped pissing and farting at the same time or found that their pubic hair had started curling again. But his women patients took forever to say that they didn’t need to see him any more.

  Now and then, he played the flute to amuse and beguile them, to distract them from their discontent. None of the males of those females—Lucknow’s film distributor or Jabalpur’s tobacco merchant, Surat’s building contractor or Bombay’s car dealer or Baroda’s flesh trader—none of
the males disliked Jayadev. Indeed, at times, they drifted in first to hear him play before consulting him. They warmed to his fetching, vaguely feminine manner; it even gave a couple of them the added pleasure of some lascivious imaginings.

  He was unfailingly careful with the women, Jayadev. He carried in his sacks several odoriferous ointments to prevent contraception; thus none of the children fathered by him was an accident. He wasn’t certain of the number but they weren’t many; they didn’t dot the landscape and, in any case, all save one had been passed off by their mothers as the offspring of their putative fathers. Anguli was the one whom Jayadev had wanted to retain for himself as a sort of living keepsake—a long story, that; and amongst them all, Anguli was the only one with murder on his mind.

  Fratricide succeeded by a long, long journey. Anguli was bewitched by the idea of travelling an impossible distance in search of learning, of an expedition that would take months and months and, expanding his lungs and chest and mind, allow him to breathe fully. A new man, he would return only to bed and strangle his stepmother. Life could be perfect. Travel. Study. Take time off to kill.

  ‘How far, sirji, is Takshasila from Kosala?’

  ‘What? What are they? Don’t play the fool, you abandoned bastard, and don’t try to be too smart, okay? Here, let me see the knuckles of your right hand.’

  Anguli’s schoolteacher was not an exceptionally harsh person but he did see any unexpected question from his students as a disruption of routine and therefore an act of indiscipline. But with his father away, there was nobody else in the village of whom the boy could have demanded enlightenment about the wider world. So he asked Sirji even though he knew that there was nothing in his schoolteacher’s head that could be of benefit to him. Nothing in his household either, save his second wife’s young body. Which he would get to as well before leaving, not to worry.

  For leaving was inevitable. Everyone left the village except those soft in the head, like Bakra’s uncle. They went away to become masons in Bharatpur and barbers in Agra and rickshaw-walas in Delhi. Anguli’s own departure from it had been in the air for years. He was bright, he was to go to a proper school in Bharatpur whenever Jayadev looked up from the woman he was wooing and acknowledged his responsibilities. Till that time, the boy waited, masturbated and watched the months pass. Twice a day, he shared with Bakra and his uncle the chore of fetching water from the village well. Some days a week, whenever Sirji and his back verandah were free, Anguli and a handful of other boys of assorted ages and sizes sat amidst the rats and the gunny bags of rice under that asbestos roof to study elementary Mathematics, Hindi, outdated Social Studies and hagiographic accounts of Ashoka, Gandhi and Nehru that passed off as the history of the country. Before sinking into stupor, the boys vied for those two spots on the mud floor against the wall from where, on the good days, they could, every now and then, glimpse the young wife in the gloom of that closed, mosquito-infested interior. When in the mood, Anguli delivered to the other houses the petticoats and pyjamas that his stepmother stitched on her sewing machine. He climbed the trees of neighbours to steal their mangoes and slipped into their fields for a stalk or two of sugarcane. He watched for hours the goats being slaughtered and skinned at Bakrid. He beat to death stray dogs that dared to attack him. He read Mastram aloud to the other boys and organized amongst them speed-shag competitions. Together they rode the slow trains down to Dhaulpur and up to Tundla. Sometimes alone, on Bakra’s uncle’s cycle, he covered all those kilometres east to the national highway just to smell the smoke of the trucks trundling past to Etawah and beyond. Such a wide world and yet he felt in it so imprisoned.

  It assailed him forty-eight hours a day through his transistor radio. At eleven, the stations shut down one by one like lights going out, but Anguli, proud like a man of science and pulling out the aerial of the apparatus, switched to short wave. The aerial itself, a mast so long and shiny, metallic, evenly segmented, with each graduated part snugger than a Chinese box in its preceding section, captivated him almost as much as the sounds that it attracted like a magnet from the air. One game that he indulged in for minutes on end was extending the mast to its fullest and then shortening it one segment at a time to try and catch the precise moment at which the reception of the radio deteriorated. It puzzled him considerably, questions such as whether he would have heard better Hindi film songs on Vividh Bharati had the aerial been three metres longer and if made of gold, whether the attractive voices of the female announcers been even more alluring during their demure flirting with their listeners over their letters. He’d sent some too, Aap ke Khat, Post Box So and So, Akashvani Kendra, twice to Jaipur and once each to Delhi and Agra. They never made it to the programme, his postcards, even though his penmanship was legible and mature.

  I never miss your programme. I like your voice very much. When I hear it, I imagine you smiling and naked beside me, giving me warm sweet milk to drink. Could you please play for me ‘Mere deewaanepan ki bhi dawaa nahin’ from Maryada while I sip the milk and smile back at you?

  It was inevitable, therefore, that to the Madhumita of the dulcet voice who answered the mail of the soldier jawans two thousand kilometres from home and played the songs that they’d asked for for their wives and sons and daughters, Anguli sent two letters seeking some light on his role model. He signed the first as Havaldar Anguli and for the second moved from the Army to both the Navy and the Air Force and jumped a dozen ranks in ten days to become Air Chief Admiral Anguli. In both, he displayed his ignorance but circumspectly. He asked the expected questions about the serial killer, where Takshasila was and why no one had counter-attacked Angulimala while he’d been shitting in the fields because then his hands would have been occupied with his chin resting in one and the fingers of the other mashing into the earth a passing bug; he asked his questions of Madhumitaji without enjoying any sense, though, of having arrived at the heart of the matter, for what he really wanted to know, though he would actually take over three decades to frame the question satisfactorily even to himself—in fact, precisely thirty-six years he would take for both the question and its answer, because he saw the issue clearly only when his own life was spouting out of him in fountains, on a pavement on a causeway, in distant Bombay—the point really was: what does it mean to travel so far, to move and keep on moving for months and years in search of learning and, at the end of it, find meaning only in killing, learn only how to kill and kill and kill.

  That Angulimala finally found redemption in the shelter of the Buddha Anguli learnt during his next visit to his fairy godmother. He was more intrigued than impressed by the last Act of the folk myth and felt that he hadn’t quite followed it. He had to wait some months for that visit, though, for Jayadev to return and take him to Agra to meet her. In the interim, he wandered about in his daily orbit, locked up his ignorance in a darker part of his mind, felt all the time its presence like a cloud in the left side of his head.

  ‘Takshasila? Centuries ago, bete Jhabua, it was a great centre of learning. It’s now in Pakistan, not far from Rawalpindi, I think. You want to go and see it with me one day?’

  ‘Ohhhhhh! But were there no schools in Kosala where Angulimala could continue to study?’

  ‘He must’ve felt unloved, poor boy, and perhaps wished to get away. Remember all those portents at his birth announcing the arrival of a monster? And how his father had wanted to have the infant killed? Don’t forget, they were all envious of him everywhere, even his guru in Takshasila; he felt that his wife cared too much for the boy, so he sent him back home to Kosala—where his father wouldn’t accept him. Poor Angulimala had no choice but to wander.’

  ‘And kill? He could’ve wandered without killing. I think he liked to kill.’

  Anguli wanted to ask his fairy godmother about the garland of penises but didn’t dare because naturally, he was in awe of her. She was tall, handsome and generous and, privately, he believed her to be a eunuch. The mannerisms of her accompanying manservant were more feminine th
an hers. When the servant looked at Anguli, he had the same expression in his eyes that Bakra’s uncle had, so the boy knew what was what and also how to handle it, when to smile and how to rebuff. In any case, his godmother was far more important. She was really quite rich, posh and wonderful and he met her, on average, twice a year, usually at Holi and Diwali. She gave him fabulous presents like the transistor radio. She sent them cash every month by money order. Jayadev in her presence was a different person, wittier and yet more deferential, speaking a more polished and urban Hindi, forcing Anguli by example to follow. All day, the boy, using her phrases, repeated to himself the bits of the folk myth that he particularly liked.

  ‘The Buddha sauntered on at a leisurely pace. Angulimala, seeing his thousandth victim, ran after him to catch him and behead him. But no matter how fast he ran, the Buddha remained always a few steps ahead. Finally, after a couple of hours, Angulimala stopped, shuddering with exhaustion, and pleaded with his prey, “Stop! Please stop moving!” At those words, the Buddha turned at last towards the monk-to-be and said, ‘I do not move. I am at rest. It is you, my child, who are in perpetual motion.’

  So was Anguli himself incapable of repose. The three or four days that he spent with his fairy godmother, in any case, passed in a whirl. Every day, he fidgeted about till well past midnight and, tense with expectation, was always up before dawn. For hours on end, before the full-length mirror in the drawing room—itself a novelty and an endless source of fascination—he tried on the new clothes that she’d bought him, drove and slashed at invisible balls with the new cricket bat, mouthed Rajesh Khanna’s lines from some film that she’d taken him to—Andaaz or Kati Patang. He accompanied her everywhere, to Mall Road to eat Karachi halwa and look at saris, and to feed the monkeys at Fatehpur Sikri. He sat close to her, thigh against thigh in rickshaws, watched the sweaty backs of the rickshaw-walas and hoped that the rides would never end. He eavesdropped on Jayadev’s banter with her and, when they quietly shut the bedroom door in his face, imagined his father massaging her calves.