Fairy Tales at Fifty Page 14

  Instinctively, her hand moved to her abdomen to see if her pillow was in place. When, seventeen hours later, she indirectly checked with Pashupati, he responded tenderly and amorously, What to do? That Sulekha girl wants so much to be like you.

  But who is the father? I’m sorry but we simply cannot have such morally lax servants.

  You are absolutely right as usual. I think it is Padmakar the chauffeur. I’ll have him softened up so that his infant doesn’t recognize him when it is born, okay?

  He would never agree to kill the baby in the womb, asserted Shaamo the ghoul, her excited rancour providing her fingertips extra strength as they kneaded Manasa’s scalp, its liver is so much larger and richer when it is born.

  Pashupati did like scattering his seed all over the earth. He wanted in the future to dot his empire with his children born in and out, in and out, of wedlock. Everywhere he looked, he should see his spawn. He was certain that his genes and his magnetism would ensure that they remain more faithful to the enterprise than the run-of-the-mill hireling. And for Sulekha’s child in particular, Manasa did not for a moment believe that he did not have plans that were especially spiteful and audacious; through that birth and thereafter, Pashupati would laughingly set right Manasa’s outrageous attempt at subterfuge.

  Her pregnancy made Sulekha as smug and stupid as an angel. She could no longer be left locked up and forgotten in her storeroom for half the day. She took to smiling while looking down upon everyone. She demanded a larger room and a maid exclusively for herself. Grinning lewdly, Shaamo the ghoul offered her services; they were rejected with a rich, gurgling laugh. Chuckling to herself, Shaamo dunked boiled potatoes in her own menstrual discharge before adding them to the nourishing stew that Sulekha felt she should be having twice a day.

  For the unmarried mother-to-be, Manasa arranged for a gynaecologist far from Byculla and going further away, a male doctor in Chembur who planned a moonlight flit to Surat because he was fed up of being harassed just for having caused some bloody deaths while getting rid of a foetus or two. That Manasa had no special instructions for him made Shaamo the ghoul for weeks shake her head in disappointment. What to do with these childless women who long so much for motherhood that they will foster it even in some uppity slut of the sewer who dreams through childbirth of usurping the place of the queen of the household.

  She herself did tell the uppity slut, though, to wipe that smirk off her face and forget any bright ideas because it was Manasa’s child who was going to be legitimate, the elder by several weeks and therefore the heir. If he wished, Sulekha’s infant was welcome to get a driving licence and become his chauffeur.

  Do not forget, you dried-up servant, responded Sulekha with a dreamy expression and a pitying simper, either your place or the fact that my son will be born on Shivaratri.

  The considerable horoscopic advantage that that would provide sent Shaamo scurrying to Manasa for consultations. We can lock her back in her store room, she, looking down at Manasa’s pillow, suggested weakly, and take away her baby and dump it under the wheels of a double-decker bus at Horniman’s Circle.

  That might not be necessary, demurred Manasa after some reflection. Horniman horniwoman. Let us pray that it be a healthy girl who will grow up to be a healthy woman even more macho than Shiva. We would name her in a manner that would forever stoke within her all the fires of a cross-gender conflict. There’s much in a name.

  Her own gynaecologist in Byculla, without quite seeing why, agreed. When she proposed the nursing home to which she was attached for Shivani’s delivery, Manasa, thinking of the logistics of a double confinement, one real and one simulated, suggested instead the flat in Walkeshwar but gave, as her reason for declining, the fact of the clinic being called Parvati Nursing Home. How can Manasa go to Parvati for her confinement? Do you see?

  The gynaecologist didn’t in the least but agreed only to get the mad woman to calm down. Who then added another reason in support of Walkeshwar: Besides, we have our own resident midwife with a hundred years of experience.

  And she was soon joined by her own team of two nubile chits from her village who paid more attention to Jayadev than to her and whose bright eyes sparkled incessantly with delight at the sights and sounds of the big city. The flat in Walkeshwar became livelier and Shivani was pleasantly distracted all day by the smells of spices and the hubbub of housekeeping and at night by the giggles from some vicinal room.

  The pregnancy race was an unequal contest from the beginning. Sulekha started late for one thing and then faced several hurdles in her path. Shaamo the ghoul, for instance, never lost an opportunity during the day to whisper a few words of discouragement into the expectant mother’s ear. Pashupati just sent a message with the driver whom you’ve been sleeping with, she would hiss, asking you to abort by Saturday. He’s found a new slut in Sewri, younger and tighter than you. We’ll perform the operation in the store room where you belong. The butcher boy with the pretty cock is on his way.

  Stop it, stop it, stop it, snapped Manasa at the ghoul when Sulekha came to complain with tears in her eyes as large as fake jewels. After she, Sulekha, had done with glancing around Manasa’s room to see what changes she would make in it when it became hers and left, Manasa snarled—but primly, as was her manner—at Shaamo, At this rate, you’ll stress and depress her into a premature delivery. Then we’ll have as first-born an idiot with three legs and a tongue heavier than the head. Henceforth, you be so sweet to her that her womb will fill up with a syrup that the baby would never wish to leave. Shaamo nodded thoughtfully and changed tactics. From then on, she began trailing Sulekha night and day, continually scaring her by asking after her health with a knowing smile, and never failing to knock on her door between three and four every morning to wake her up to check if she needed anything. Some curd rice to settle her stomach perhaps? Some incense to make the room smell better?

  Sulekha’s baby was born a full week later than expected. It missed its date with Shiva. The delay—indeed, its arrival itself—aroused little interest in the household. Pashupati was away at Nasik, taking a holy dip in the Godavari with two new babes. The gynaecologist was on the run from the Surat police in the direction of Baroda. Manasa was too taken up with the one that she had chosen between Shivani’s twins and with hoping haphazardly that the second that Jayadev had been allowed to take away had not—somehow, in an obscure way—registered the rejection.

  Though, in fact, it had been the centenarian squirrel who had decided the future of the babies. The first to appear, screaming and dripping ooze, she had palpated and probed and, beaming toothlessly, ceremonially handed over to Manasa. A lovely child but with just one kidney. He’ll have a better life amongst the rich. Even at that point, Manasa couldn’t help thinking that the squirrel had kept the healthier twin for her kind.

  Nothing wrong with the other one? She’d asked nevertheless. Perhaps we should let the mother decide which one goes where.

  And me? had murmured the exhausted Shivani when bothered with the barter. Are there to be no children for me?

  FIVE

  The inhabitants of the Walkeshwar flat dispersed within days of Shivani’s delivery. Jayadev faithfully reported the details—barring, out of pusillanimity, the fact of the existence of a twin—to Pashupati and asked for a bonus to cover the costs of departure. Manasa, pillowless, wan but beaming, returned home with a son whom Pashupati—to all appearances—and the household—seemingly genuinely—were delighted with. Jayadev lost interest in the mother the moment he held the twin in his arms. In farewell, he nodded his head and smiled timidly and absentmindedly at Shivani once before reverting to cooing to the burper in his arms. Then he, the centenarian squirrel and her team slipped away at night, leaving the front door, for fear of waking the building up, as they had found it on their arrival, very slightly ajar.

  Shivani twice said to them, Take me with you, but too softly for anyone to hear. For a day and a half, she considered simply stepping off the terrace of the
twelfth floor into the air like a bird without wings but desisted because she couldn’t decide what to wear that would look good on a corpse; all her saris would billow shamelessly and she would, while descending, resemble an open umbrella with two fleshy papaya-tree trunks for stems. No, no. It was difficult and unnecessary to get out of bed. God made humans need to go to the bathroom only so as to make them move, her mother unlettered and long gone used to say. And also, Listen to your body, it will tell you about the earth. Parents were of no use except to make you feel vaguely guilty and unwise.

  Sure enough, two evenings after Jayadev’s departure, the phone rang; her father from Indore asked her how she was and now that Manasa’s son had been born, when she was returning home. He chuckled and wheezed and burped and hinted that he missed her dal and the way she set the curd. And maybe she could demurely look over a civil engineer of the right sub-caste whom his feelers through his social circle had finally unearthed eight hundred kilometres away in Jamshedpur. The engineer had good prospects and nothing on his visible skin that could be called a moustache.

  They met in the dusty drawing room at home in Saket in Indore with mice running up and down the curtains. He was pale and chinless. Her father asked him pointed but polite questions, seeking, he explained frankly, the requisite qualities. She, all the while, absentmindedly imagined him above her in bed, mouth clamped shut, eyes squeezed tight, moaning in a whine some hymn to himself to sustain him in his acts of impurity. She turned him down and was not happy to learn later from her father that he had turned her down too. Too tall. Too educated, had added his mother, a globular thing with a moustache luxuriant enough for two. The man without qualities became the first in a long line of rejects.

  Between suitors, Shivani wandered the country. The reasons for her travels were always respectable. Naturally. To attend a cousin’s wedding in Gorakhpur, to catch up with a friend who’d changed schools and cities, to visit her ladies’ tailor in Delhi, he the only one in the world who understood blouses, to see Sravanbelgola with their Jain neighbours because she’d never been that far south, to just pop down to Bombay and have a look at Manasa’s child.

  Which she didn’t succeed in, not for fifty years. She met her sister, of course, but not her son. Oh, he’s out on the beach with Shaamo the ayah and from there they’ll be going on to Juhu. Oh, Pashupati-saab has taken Nripati Baby to Tirupati to have him tonsured. Oh, he’s away in Poona being photographed for the Annual Deccan Young Mothers Jambouree. Have some tea?

  Shivani knew too well that her part of the pact with her sister involved her having the baby, handing it over and then unjustly forgetting it, all in lieu of having her material comfort and her financial independence assured for the rest of her long life. Manasa received her with the old warmth and intimacy over which seemed to have formed a film, a wrinkled skin, of reserve, almost of wariness. They spoke of other things, common acquaintances in Indore, the rain in Spain, Sulekha’s state of mind, but Shivani felt all the time that she was being made to remember the details of a compact that she could never forget, how could she? She was fickle, flighty and apprehensive and her hurt salted her fears. Not being able to see her son, she began to steal his things. A baby towel, his talcum powder, a gold coin gifted by his grandfather on his first glimpse of his first grandchild.

  Stop it, hissed Manasa, and replace them at once. So Shivani, reluctant to cede once more the fruits of her labour and yet having to put back what she had picked up—and being dreamy-eyed and nimble-fingered, in her wanderings in and around and outside the city—began shoplifting. She was top-notch at it. She found that it was best to buy three items and pocket two. Some shops she liked particularly for being spacious and having their things well laid out; she enjoyed going back to them, Akbarally’s for one and Empire Stores in Delhi and later Dorabjee’s on Moledina Road. Almost instinctively, for her subsequent visits, she started to disguise herself.

  Now what shall I wear today, she of an afternoon would ask the mirror in her Walkeshwar bedroom. From a mother who gives away her children, whom do I become today. Spectacles, a shirt that looked like the curtain of a middle-class drawing room, a skirt and a raucous English delivery and there she was, a determined Parsi woman sniffing out a bargain. When she felt uninspired, she sailed out as a Bohra Muslim, swathing herself from head to toe in shapeless black chiffon to look like a black egg with just her hard-boiled eyes watchful above the veil.

  Sometime, when she didn’t like the blue baby teeshirt that she’d picked up in a hurry, she, having forgotten what she had worn for the occasion, clothed herself in a different identity to return to the shop to exchange the item.

  Sorry, Madam. No spitting and no exchange allowed on premises.

  Male, of course, the shop assistant was and so pasty. Clutching her blue baby teeshirt, she in her sari worn the Gujarati way nodded and left the premises, spat at the doorstep and then went off straight to Dadar to buy herself two churidaars, three long kurtas and a flamboyant turban into which she stuffed her hair. She returned to the shop that same afternoon as part head waiter, part princeling.

  Sir sir, exchange items ground floor sir, please to follow.

  She was top-notch as a cross-dresser too. She discovered for herself the truth that gender involved not sex but power and was made up of the walk, the talk, the carriage, the indolent insolence in eye and manner. She cut her hair. A boycut? asked the hairdresser of Byculla. It suited her. Her father didn’t notice. And Manasa only vaguely because by that time Sulekha’s child had been born.

  Shivani had just caught the train for Agra when Sulekha, after thirty hours of labour, gave birth to a bonny, beautiful baby with a faint, fine moustache. It was pink and so bursting with health and ruddiness that Manasa advised Pashupati to name it Kamagni, the fire of the god of desire that subsumes everything. So what if it is a girl? She looks so lovely and manly and strong, Kamagni will suit her, it’s a fine name for an unusual girl, a special name for a special baby. I’ve checked the charts, as per her time of birth, her name has to begin with Ka. You’ll whisper Kamagni four times in her right ear?

  Pashupati couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t have cared less. The birth of Manasa-Shivani’s son, having given him a male heir, had rendered redundant both the second pregnancy of the household and the existence itself of the second mother-to-be. Pregnant women became sacred, he couldn’t sleep with them, he was in awe of them. It would have been like trying to bed a prehistoric fertility goddess; never fuck with religion was what he believed. And everyone ignoring her during the final few weeks so unsettled Sulekha that she felt like a pregnant wraith wandering freely through the house because totally invisible to all. Being a wraith, she forgot to eat and drink and instead just drifted about day after day till she dropped down out of exhaustion into a numbed sleep somewhere, into a sofa in the drawing room or the carpet outside Manasa’s door.

  It’s a lovely freak of a girl-boy, announced Shaamo the ghoul to her, not bothering to hide her glee. Lovely. When she gets bored with her breasts, she can play with her penis.

  Sulekha sank even further into her phantom kingdom. She would have taken the baby with her had Manasa not been at hand. Though the infant herself would not have gone without a struggle. She revealed herself from Day One to be a fighter, a violent, unstable and vicious boy in a girl’s body. She made Shaamo the ghoul’s left nipple bleed with just her gums. Everyone was happy. Manasa felt that, since it was clear who the prince was and who the slut’s spawn, the two darlings could be brought up together as boys. Sulekha had no views. Pashupati looked in on his children once or twice a week and was delighted with the new ayah’s contours.

  The siblings grew up. Nirip was taller, comelier, more charming, a good-natured prince, and Magnum his shadow. She followed him to the park, to the swimming pool, to birthday parties, to kindergarten, to the toilet. She was frightening when thwarted. Very early in her life, she began to envy him all that he had and most of all his penis. She played with it whenever she coul
d. A delighted Shaamo the ghoul encouraged her no end.

  If you pray for one, day in and day out, if you are nice to me and to God, then I’ll tell Him and He will give you one when you turn ten and your tunnel starts to bleed. When the bleeding stops, you will see a nice little peanut. If you don’t get one, it means you have not been nice to me.

  But Magnum would periodically and regularly go berserk long before her fall into puberty. Hers was the fury of the unstable, inarticulate, ignored, unwanted child. Why was everyone laughing at her instead of loving her? The littlest thing triggered off an explosion that amused everyone less and less as the years passed; if she couldn’t attack the other, she harmed herself in her rage, assaulted her own accidental femininity. She was small and hairy and attractive in her ugliness, a large-eyed, hyperactive monkey. At the age of six, when Nirip beat her in the egg-and-spoon race in the neighbourhood Diwali Mela festivities, she tried to snip off her left nipple with Shaamo’s scissors. At twelve, when Nirip left for boarding school in lousy Dalhousie, abandoning her to her anxieties because her tunnel hadn’t begun bleeding by then, she, with the intention of following him, ran away from home. For the rest of her life she missed him, his presence, his companionship, the fairy tales that he’d lulled her into dreaming with. So, at midnight, Cinderella opened her window and there was Hanuman. Cinderella was instantly bewitched by his erect cock.

  She has her mother’s blood in her, she is fit for the sewer, at each of the girl’s misdemeanours intoned Shaamo the ghoul to anyone who would hear, her voice spilling over with gloomy pleasure at her own malice. Magnum herself turned away from Sulekha completely, referring to and thinking of her as supervisory household staff, calling her Didi and Manasa-ma. Sulekha herself descended to being head masseuse, squeezing Manasa’s insteps and pummelling Pashupati’s haunches and to sleeping with his senior kidney collectors till the summer when Nirip, on vacation from his lousy boarding school, lost his virginity to her. That was the time when Magnum practically raped her half-brother and, attacking her own mother, blinded her in her left eye.