Fairy Tales at Fifty Page 10

  It seemed to Nirip during his wanderings about the room that its nooks and niches were occupied. He’d heard muted but excited squeaks, soft chuckles and the rustle of what had sounded like bodies in saris. Bats, no doubt, he had reassured himself. In saris and chuckling. His mother’s supporting army. Grazing a huge, black plastic, chest-high, lidless water tank, he sat down on the aluminium table beside the gas stove. Both Wilson and wife always had to stand on something to reach the contents of the tank. A sort of sheen on its surface gave it the semblance of glass, the tranquillity of a giant, unblinking eye. Manasa, it appeared, hadn’t finished with protecting him, for, murmuring an invocation or two, she reached out and held his wrist as though to take his pulse. Her grip itself seemed to slow it down.

  ‘The drives in the carriage also take place with men, his employees and social inferiors, kneeling before the feudal lord. Their heads are uncovered, their fear and disgust are visible to all. The filth that their liege drowns them in is also spoken lovingly. His voice is soothing, mesmeric; at the end, all his victims seem to enjoy being debased in public.’

  Something moved in the water, slithered into it from the inner wall of the tank. Manasa reached a hand out after it, thereafter dipped her fingers in the water to ruffle its surface as one would the hair of a beloved child. The gentle liquid slaps of sound seemed to bounce off the walls of the room and linger in the air like regret.

  ‘The mother of the boy in the carriage is Wife Number One. At least, that is what he has understood and presumed all along, the queen of the species. Hers is the only back that he never sees in the carriage. It gives him nightmares, scares him witless that one day he will see her there, in purdah and kneeling, and that his father, smiling, will ask him who she is. In response, to protect himself and her from his wrath, he will lie and deny knowledge of his mother’s identity. Mercifully, that drive, that day in his life, never turns up on the wheel of Time. Why not? Does she never displease or annoy her husband?

  ‘And yet, there were days when the father, squeezing the woman’s head hard with his naked thighs, varied the questions to his son. Who is this woman? Is it your mother? And do you even know who your mother is?

  ‘That was how I grew up, Ma, that was my childhood in this house.’

  An agreeable silence followed the extended narration. Manasama didn’t react. She didn’t know that it was over. Looking away at the doorway of the night sky, she murmured, ‘Time to go, I think.’ In the dim light she began to put away in her bags the herbs and amulets that she had brought with her. She straightened up with creaking limbs; with a slow, tired tread and without a word, she moved off towards the outer world. She sighed, paused on the threshold and said in her gentle, singsong way, ‘If you want to keep your nails long, you’ll have to see that they are clean.’

  ‘That was not the point of the anecdote,’ said Nirip coldly.

  ‘Do you want to test the waters?’

  Suddenly, an enormous bat disengaged itself from one wall and, gigantic wings spread wide to hide the heavens, glided up and out into the night. Less dramatically, Nirip and his mother followed her herald into the muted ten o’clock chaos of N.M. Joshi Marg. They descended the open stairs carefully. Immediately, it seemed that the scuffles and squeaks from the walls around them grew louder, their sources less covert. Nirip looked about to see several dozen humanoid shapes leaping and bounding down their faces, giving in the darkness the impression that darker chunks of concrete and brick had assumed life, rounded themselves, thrust out limbs and limbering tails to clamber down to the crowded lane. In instant support, as it were, that one giant bat became three, a dozen, fifty, soaring up, gliding overhead, swooping down, looping the loop around Hanuman’s kin. Abruptly the surrounding three- and four-storey chawls became thick with clamour and animal motion. The monkeys chattered, jumped over one another, peered into several windows, screeched their fear of the neighbours while bounding off into one verandah, cavorted out of another, gathered respectfully around Manasa as about an authoritarian but loving mother; the bats meanwhile, black and thick now like jungle foliage, squeaking their plans to one another in full flight, glided round and round in ovoids and ovals as though churning out, as always, an invisible cocoon to protect their charge.

  ‘I’ll stay back, pack Nirmala off to be with her nephew and her mother. She’ll feel safer in Vasai. And please don’t bother your head about me and my problems. They are mine and I’ll sort them out myself.’

  ‘Your father has always known everything.’

  ‘And he doesn’t care?’

  ‘He is generous. None of us has ever wanted for the essential things, for food and shelter and medical care.’

  ‘I am broke and Magnum starved of love and care and normalcy.’ Then, stung by the hurt that he must have caused his mother, Nirip reached out a hand in the lightening gloom to touch her, to make amends. ‘There’s very little that I know about you, Ma.’

  She responded in a voice low and expressionless because she wanted to get it over with before she broke. ‘I’ve loved you like a son. You are my son even though you may not physically be mine. Neither your father’s nor mine. Somebody else bore you for me because I could not. But I went through the motions, the agony and uncertainty, because I considered you mine even before your birth. I could arrange for you to meet your real, biological parents. I doubt if that’ll make you feel better.’

  Later, engulfed by fatigue, his head throbbing for repose, Nirip reclined with relief against the headrest of the back seat of his own car. His life was all wrong. The driver was new, young, nondescript, on trial, some other chauffeur’s nephew or cousin or secret child. For too long had Nirip enjoyed the cream of the scum of his world while pretending to be aloof from it. He did not belong there, or so he claimed, and thus had futilely searched for companionship amongst the unemployed and unemployable. Progress was slow through the bylanes of Parel. With Manasa’s departure, the monkeys had thinned, the bats diffused, into the gloom. The world was bloody rotten and unexpected; one survived because the choice was nothingness. But even to exist from day to day, one had to be alert and free of ties, to travel light. How to explain to that world that to remain young, his father drank the blood of newborn babies, cooked and ate their livers.

  NINE

  Nirip too had experienced—naturally—many of the routine fears of a life at fifty. Of the closed doors of the future for one thing, and, for another, of not being able to endure pain without losing face before oneself. Of the death of love and of those one loved, one by one, of watching them slowly and irrevocably lose their self-esteem over the trivial. Of being so immersed in one’s own petty self that one became blind to the sorrows of others, of a wife or daughter or brother. He too had experienced the fears of growing into decline at fifty.

  The skin loses its elasticity and natural oils, becomes thinner. At fifty, Nirip would lift his right hand up to the sun and be bemused to see how wrinkled the back of it was, even in the humidity of summer. Taste buds lose their sensitivity. The flavours to decline first are salty and sweet. That diminution means that the same food might taste more bland to those who are, say, fifty and above, leading perhaps to loss of appetite and, over time, to nutritional deficiencies. Thus a cantankerous old man like Vinayak’s father could for instance rantingly accuse his daughter, long-suffering and quietly vicious, of deliberately forgetting to season his dinner and then move on to dollop spoonfuls of chilli pickle all over his rice and dal. The acuteness of one’s sense of smell too decreases with age. Older individuals tend to be less aware for example of body odour. So when they stink, they don’t know it and can’t therefore be blamed for not caring. They are, in any case, far more perturbed about their failing sight; they wouldn’t have to depend on the kindness of ingrates if their faculties didn’t desert them with the same steady certainty with which the affection of their next of kin had ebbed. In any event, the future narrows down tremendously with age; those getting on would be more ready to endure its
outrages if they could first just find, without help, their way to the loo.

  ‘Have you discovered, Magnum, just what exactly it means to live happily ever after?’

  ‘You swim across the well for me and I’ll tell you.’

  Bright light encourages the illusion of perfect sight. Thus when, on the Saturday following his visit to Nirmala Wilson with Manasa-ma, Nirip awoke on the mattress alongside the water of the well in the luminous yellowness of noon, he noticed immediately but passively—and well before the impossible lassitude of his body registered on his senses—how perfectly focused his surroundings appeared: the walls the shade of clay, with the light gleaming on the leaves of a parasitic pipal luxuriously shooting its branches out of a niche three quarters of the way up the south face, two splendid peacocks standing sentinel against the rectangle of blinding sky, his khaki knapsack with his toothbrush and the dozen fountain pens that he was using that week, and a single human figure, petite Kamagni—a name the femininity of which she hated so much that in her childhood she’d christened herself Magnum—in orange leotards at her hot yoga, that is, yoga done rapidly and gymnastically, principally to turn any observer on. Each item was so sharply illumined that it did seem for a moment that he, Nirip, had crossed over in his sleep to a new world, a sort of Heaven where everything was lucent with clarity.

  ‘Not everyone does, not the children of Hamelin. But Hansel and Gretel and Cinderella and Snow White live happily ever after. How can anyone be happy on a Monday? It boggles the mind.’

  ‘Why? Hansel and Gretel have a baby and it disappears one day. They continue to gaze at each other and feel happy and say, at least we have each other, darling; never mind.’

  Nirip rolled over to his right to avoid having to face Kamagni, drew his knees up, yawned, blinked, scratched himself, flung his left leg out, curled his toes, stretched, sighed and gazed about at Manasa-ma’s last major acquisition for Pashupati, the farmhouse on the Gadaipur road, a weekend residence with the right trappings, a mini golf course and a largely ornamental swimming pool, that Vinayak managed for her and had had staffed with rural studs charmingly bereft of polish. The sun felt cosy and lifegiving. Oddballs like Manasa-ma preferred the gloom of dark corners because they needed hiding places for their secrets but for the others—how best to be, that was the question for the others, for the children of light. Though whom to include in that last category was a riddle not easily solved. They all thrived in darkness. He hoped that it was enough to long in fits and starts for light. As though a door had opened up at his recognition of the way to go, he sensed at that point, beyond the orange blush behind his eyelids, from the direction of the mango trees, he thought he sensed something potent but benign observing him. He turned over, looked about, up, around. Nobody. Nothing save the peacocks and on her yoga mat, exercise abandoned, waiting to be wooed, Kamagni sitting in a sulk.

  Nirip narrowed his eyes against the glare. The pupils themselves become smaller with age. As one grows older, therefore, less light enters the eyes. The elderly need more illumination than the young. Their eyes adjust less easily to changes in the quality of darkness, for example, to sudden glare. They might therefore take longer to recognize someone, not because they are not mentally alert but because to function, their bodies need more of what they have less and less of, namely, time.

  ‘Sorrow can’t touch them any more, they’ve ceased to grow, their lives hold nothing of interest, that’s what happily ever after means. Our lives are measured by the struggle against sorrow, sweetheart.’ He supposed that he was the only one in the world who sort of loved her. She hated herself, of that there had never been any doubt. ‘And now for that baby.’

  ‘It’s your child, everybody knows that.’

  ‘Where is it? And how to retrieve it before it becomes korma? Is it at the crèche at the Trust? Or in some bloody aquarium? Tell you what, you help to get it back and when we kidnap me, I’ll up your share to twenty per cent. Or should we instead abduct Vinayak?’

  Kamagni’s back twitched—a frisson of guilt at her inaction, thought Nirip. She sat up, turned to look at him across the water. Her face had puckered up again. ‘So intelligent you think yourself to be and actually so stupid you are.’ Saying that seemed to make her feel better. She arose, shoulders stooped in defeat, picked up and folded her yoga mat, tucked it under her arm.

  He needed to get up too, Nirip told himself without moving. ‘Thanks to your—shall we say—inutility, Wilson’s widow is still silent and suicidal, still on glucose, staring at the wall while waiting for her baby. Where is that infant?’

  ‘I just told you. You swim across the well and you’ll get to know.’

  His languor had comfortably immobilized him; it seemed that the air itself, right up to the breathlessly blue sky, encased him like bubble wrap, pinned him down to protect from shock his precious fragility, a babe snug in the womb of the world of daylight. Smiling at his own willlessness, he propped himself up on his left elbow, sighed and let himself fall back once more before lunging forward to sit upright.

  ‘Shivani-cha left us birthday gifts.’

  ‘It couldn’t be gold, otherwise you’d’ve been in a better mood.’

  ‘Mine’s a gold ring. Yours looks like your ninety-third fountain pen.’

  ‘And when is she expected? She didn’t turn up last night, did she? I just nodded off right here. All this citronella grass, I think. The smell goes to your head.’

  A badminton court of greenish water the well was, the paving on all four sides of mud and faded brick. Nirip’s idea, tastefully constructed to look early medieval, like a retrieved-from-ruin baoli. Why had never been clear to Manasa-ma, perhaps a tax or building concession in it somewhere. The clayey walls of niches and alcoves, crumbling at corners, stood darker with damp above the subterranean sluice channels and were fecundly green with moss and citronella grass around the three small gargoyles with intelligent Brahmin expressions that protruded from the wall into which the steps had been incised. Manasa the night before’d warned him never to descend to the water for a dip; it was too brackish and sulphureous. She’d just turned up out of the blue, or out of the black, for it’d been after midnight and almost all the farmhouse lights’d been off. She’d let drop that Shivani her sister was coincidentally in Delhi and might just drop by and that therefore Nirip had better put on some more clothes. With her, as always, everything was oblique, only hinted at by indirection; she had thus spoken vaguely in life of testing the waters, taking the plunge, crossing the bar. ‘Weeds,’ she had murmured, her bangles in the dark night clicking like teeth, ‘and other plant life, the tentacles of adversity, would clutch at you, wrap themselves around your limbs like lovers and never let you go, drag you down, exhausted, into the mire; you would have to overcome all these traps and barriers to move forward, conquer your fear of water so that you can confront the ghosts in your life.’

  What on earth was she babbling about, wondered Nirip. No doubt it was the brew in the teapot, the white tea and the cannabis. Earlier in the night, Magnum and he had even smoked together some cannabis sprayed with Phencyclidine. He loved this mother out of the blue whom he couldn’t see in the dark. Should keep it going.

  ‘What fear of water? I float like a rotten egg. But tell me, what weapons do I have to battle my ghosts with?’

  ‘Wealth is a redoubtable weapon, that you know, as also the force of the fears that propel you, the understandable fears of a man who has turned fifty.’ Her last few words had dissolved into a dramatically long, uninhibited, unladylike yawn. It must have been close to two in the morning. Magnum had gone off by then, a menopausal mood swing. To Nirip had wafted again from the well an inexplicable odour of humid warmth, of a mixture of wet woollens, unwashed clothes and damp dog.

  ‘You’re no longer in the prime of youth. You never were. One by one, Time will take care of all of us. And then? Kamagni blurted out to me that you need money desperately. Things are simply not what they appear to be.’

  �
�When have they ever been,’ Nirip had murmured contentedly and, before dozing off, had heard her mutter in reply,

  ‘You’ll need help if you’re going to do something foolish.’

  In that luminous yellowness of noon, sighing, he got up, rolled up the mattress into an unsightly heap, took off his clothes, packed them and his chappals in his knapsack and contemplated the water again. It was more grey than green in colour and thick, completely opaque, the shade of the flesh of a smoked and skinned aubergine. Water snakes, certainly—what else of danger? And weren’t they in fact not poisonous? Merely not so great to look at, that was all, a trait that they shared with half the world. Manasa-ma—their patron saint, as it were, because she was no less slippery—could presumably have instructed them to leave Nirip, her darling nipple-sucker from the good old days, alone. It was Kamagni who was scared of water, petrified of swimming, screaming in panic at finding that she had water instead of air to inhale when she needed it bad. Ooops, wrong element, glugglugglugglugglug, famous last words.