Fairy Tales at Fifty Read online

  The Chanchals were taken aback. They finally agreed only when they were reassured that Kamagni had been operated upon in Switzerland and had, in fact, six months previously, become a man; plus, in appreciation of their accommodating natures, the dowry for their daughter could be decreased to comprise just that plot of land outside Thana city where Pashupati was so keen to set up his second unit for manufacturing fake drugs.

  Manasa-ma was shocked at her husband’s plans. In that case, if she agrees, let Kamagni actually be operated upon first. Pooh pooh, said Pashupati, so expensive, Switzerland so far away, why to mess around with the natural order of things.

  And Kamagni? She was nervous, terrified, she found it insulting, she liked the notion of being the centre of attention, of dressing up in gold and silk in the humidity of August, she thought it an honour not to let Pashupati down.

  The wedding was low-key and took place at Hotel Fariyas in Lonavla instead of Bombay. Manasa-ma could not attend because she was fasting and could not show her face to strangers, she said, before the new moon; she sent Sulekha as her stand-in to ensure that neither Pashupati nor Kamagni enjoyed the event even for one second. Nirip stayed away too; he became, just for two days, a sports freak and found that he couldn’t tear himself away from the National Powerlifting Championships at Jamshedpur.

  The daughter-in-law, the first in the family, Gunjan by name, spent the second half of her first night with her father-in-law. She had gone to her husband, in wedding finery and all demure, found him drugged out and sprawled across the bed with his eyes yellow pinpoints of light in pupils black as kohl, frisky and in a most playful mood.

  Tell you what, Gunjan, he said in his womanish voice, I’ll blindfold you first and then myself. Then you announce which one item of clothing you want to take off and if I approve you proceed. Then it’s my turn. And then yours again. And at the very end, I’ll give you in your hand my wedding present to stop your giggling.

  When her blindfold was taken off, Gunjan held in her hand a huge phallus of hard blue rubber and saw, smiling at her with those yellow pinpoints of light in her pupils, a naked, muscular, hairy woman.

  Oh.

  Kamagni held Gunjan’s left hand and invited her to the bridal bed. Gunjan dithered. Kamagni lost her temper and began hitting Gunjan with her fists. Gunjan moaned in fear and, in panic, broke Kamagni’s nose with that fine phallus of Shiva. Kamagni writhed in and bloodied the bridal bed. Putting on her golden sari all anyhow, Gunjan rushed out of the wedding suite of the hotel.

  I want to go home.

  But this is your home, Pashupati had explained, beaming, and you are now with me, your father-in-law, your protector, your friend and your husband.

  Sins go unpunished, evil blooms under the nose of God, where the fuck is He? wondered Nirip, sipping his single malt after popping one Dexedrine. Gone shagging, explained Vinayak. So should we.

  Gunjan moved into the apartment on the twelfth floor at Walkeshwar; it was only natural, Sulekha and Kamagni being after all her mother-in-law and her husband. On the third night, in revenge for her broken nose, Kamagni tried to electrocute her with an immersion rod but succeeded only in burning the hair of her own left leg and short-circuiting the entire apartment.

  Manasa-ma, sad and secretly vengeful, waited for Gunjan to settle down, for the bewilderment in her eyes to turn opaque. She gave her two months. In six weeks it instead increased when Gunjan learnt that she was pregnant. Pashupati never used condoms, didn’t like them. Her bewilderment ceased only in the second month of her pregnancy when Kamagni, meaning only to frighten her into submission, accidentally killed her with that same immersion rod.

  Pashupati was extremely annoyed. Facing him, Kamagni wet her pants out of fear and blubbered that she wouldn’t do it again. The Chanchals couldn’t be placated until Pashupati gave them ten crores to shut their mouths and accepted in return as Kamagni’s second wife their eldest daughter, Payal by name, tall, moody and unmarried till then because of what polio had done to her left leg.

  Wetting her pants before her father did Kamagni’s self-esteem no good. She tried to kill herself by driving down N.M. Joshi Marg with her eyes shut, banged into a BEST bus and got into a further tangle with the police. Tired and fed up, Nirip advised her, If you can’t get rid of your fear, then get rid of its source, and really wondered whether the retard had understood. He would have to return to the theme again and again till it seeped into that skull as alive as a dumb-bell.

  Nirip liked Payal. She was so odd that she made the others of the household look like the go-getter trainees in a Management Institute. She sat all day in her room whispering excitedly into a dead telephone. I am on the line with Gunjan, she said. Please don’t disturb me. She unnerved Kamagni. Nirip told his sibling that Payal had vowed to eat no meat until she had avenged her murdered sister and would use as her weapon her bad leg. Kamagni moved out of the apartment and began living in the basement gym. Pashupati smilingly one evening offered Payal a box of kaaju burfi. She spat masticated burfi in his face and giggling rushed into her room and bolted herself in for an entire week. To all knocks on the door, she responded in song, ‘Leave the kaaju burfi for me as a token of your love.’

  Nirip fortunately was the only witness to the incident. He watched Pashupati in a daze wander around the room looking for something to wipe his face with and said it before his father could, No one must ever know that this has happened, Papa-ji. This would rock the foundations of all that we stand for. Later, he himself only told Manasa-ma and, after reflection, Shaamo the ghoul.

  Manasa-ma’s revenge took eight years to mature, for Pashupati had his first heart attack just before lunch on the day after his sixtieth birthday. He lost his balance and fell while trying to strut from his parked Volvo to the entrance of the Breach Candy Club and found that he couldn’t get up from the hot asphalt. The car was Manasa’s birthday gift to him. He remained without speech for the first two days of the nine that he spent in ICU in his own hospital. Neither of the family members that he would have liked to have around him was present in the city during the critical first six hours of the attack. Even in his drugged, half-conscious state, he grimaced when he saw Kamagni hovering over his bed smirking out of fear; Pashupati found the strength feebly to wave her away.

  Manasa-ma, on receiving the news on the outskirts of Gwalior, murmured a prayer and did an about-turn on the highway. She believed that God had been rather slow to try and dispatch her revered husband. Better late than never, however. She put on a new, pale mauve Tangai sari for her evening prayers and silently pleaded to Durga her lookalike to be more efficient. She sent a tray of irresistible, artery-hardening laddus to the staff of ICU.

  He has stabilized after your visit, Mataji. When he sees Nirip saab, he’ll be fine.

  Nirip saab was away in Calcutta sulking. Exhausted, bored and sulking. Even in lives that have the quality of a fairy tale, human beings change with the aches and pains of age, with the sense of failure and futility that time always engenders. Pashupati had feted his sixtieth birthday with the prodigality of a child king in part because of the rife rumour that he was almost certain to be included for a Padma Shri in the forthcoming Civilian Honours list.

  Him? This is crazy. What about me? I’ve been the brains behind the brains of this shit for the last twenty years. My ideas have dragged it out of the muck to stand in the sun like something respectable. There is no justice in this world and everyone is so fucking obtuse.

  Kamagni most of all. For close to a decade, Nirip had been hinting to her to snuff Pashupati out but the nickel hadn’t dropped in that thick skull.

  Me I’m your half-brother. Me you can handle any time. You’re so strong and sexy. You gotta take care of our revered father first. Have you thought about it, how you’ll be king of the whole thing after our revered father goes to Heaven?

  On the fourth day of her father’s stay in ICU, Kamagni surprised everyone by turning up at the office and sitting in Pashupati’s chair for over t
wo hours, swiveling round and round to gaze with lordly eye at the skyline of Bandra West and Khar.

  They all went in a convoy of expensive cars to bring Pashupati home from the hospital. They garlanded him and took photographs as they would of the captain of a victorious cricket team on its return. They beat drums and threw colour in the air and danced in the path of the leading car and blocked traffic. They stuffed one another’s mouths and those of passersby with Manasa-ma’s artery-hardening laddus.

  None of it worked. Pashupati loved all of it and did not relapse and return to ICU from the cavalcade itself. He was delighted even to be received at home first by Payal and then by Sulekha with coconuts and burfi, jaljeera and paan and other gas-producing stuff not good for the heart. Nirip had asked Kamagni to check with Dr Lakhtakiya of General Surgery. Ask him for a list of foodstuff not good for the heart in decreasing order of lethality, he had commanded.

  The doctors, Pashupati’s only legal wife and his progeny asked him to take it easy at home for a month or so. Manasa-ma and Nirip also respectfully suggested that he examine his future and privately hoped that therein he would see only death; instead, Pashupati saw only Parliament. He examined instead his past, its chaos and its criminality, and tried to find in it a constituency.

  From where can I stand for elections? Where am I best known and most loved?

  Pashupati glanced with laser eye at the assemblage in the master bedroom to see if anyone had found his questions amusing. Nirip avoided that scrutiny by gazing dreamily out of the window, hoping to glimpse, as it were, in the leaves of the mango tree rustling in the breeze, the bell metal haze of early afternoon behind the grey building-block Walkeshwar skyline, the few square centimetres of visible sea about to be engulfed by the newest, most dramatically ascending highrise; in the large monkey on the verandah ledge examining his own navel, Nirip hoped to spot, seemingly, in the everyday world around him, the family past laid out as ordered and discrete as ironed office clothes on a bed.

  Vinayak, continued Pashupati balefully, picking on the one most visibly taken aback at his chief’s future plans, you will tour the country and get back to me within a week on where I should start my democratic campaign. And Kamagni, go and get rid of that monkey on the verandah.

  Confused as usual, Kamagni exited, happy to be singled out by the patriarch for a specific responsibility, and yet not sure whether she should feel insulted by the choice of task assigned to her, glad to get away from Pashupati and yet uncertain whether she had been sent away only so that the father could talk business in peace with the son who mattered.

  But Nirip, trailed by Vinayak, followed her out soon after, no doubt to watch her being bitten by the ape. Startling them with her suddenness, she, the monkey, atop the verandah ledge, began to laugh. Eyes squeezed shut in secret pleasure, face upturned, she then bared her teeth first at the heavens and next at Kamagni. She succeeded in stopping Kamagni in her tracks, in replacing on her face with an expression of wary unease her habitual dissatisfaction with her body and the way she looked. Emitting a blend of cackle and snarl, the monkey arose to descend to the ground for battle.

  What the fuck does this beast want? murmured Kamagni in the mother tongue.

  Sex with you perhaps. Be careful, be polite, Magnum. Several wise white men of the nineteenth century have pointed out before going away that she and you belong to the same family. You just scratch your balls in public less often, that’s all.

  Does she have balls at all? That’s what we must first find out.

  Back off, come in. You need a stick, an umbrella, something. It was only after a moment that Nirip noticed a lump on the back of the beast move, a part of her grapplingly slide down to attach itself to the flesh around her teat. Leaving Kamagni—not quite decided about the best angle of attack—squarely facing the circling simian, shaking their heads over her obstinacy, her stupidity, Nirip and Vinayak cautioned her once more before reentering Pashupati’s bedroom.

  Nirip went off in search of a stick and had just picked up an umbrella from the kitchen verandah when shouts and shrieks from the master bedroom brought him scurrying back to it. He was in time to see Kamagni tear the monkey off her chest; both fell to the Dholpur-stone floor in a jumble. Her snarls answering the ape’s squeals, using her metal-tipped boot as her left glove to ward off the animal’s bites and her right fist like a sledgehammer, Kamagni thudded into the monkey’s stomach and genitals for a sickening, unending minute till her squeals softened to whimpers, to moans, and finally stopped. Leaving her twitching on the floor, Kamagni got up, crossed over to the ledge, returned with the tub of a newly-planted tulsi and savagely brought it down, twice, on the monkey’s skull. The tub broke but remained over her face. Blood soon began to ooze out from under it, thickishly, like voyagers venturing out for their first glimpse of a new planet. Blood, her own, also drenched and darkened Kamagni’s shirt; from the wounds on her face, in particular from the monkey’s first vicious bite that had torn her right cheek and left it gaping pink and white and crimson like a flower to attract the bees in the noonlight, blood trickled steadily down to her collar. Appalled, Nirip watched the mad gleam of triumph dim in his half-sister’s eye, then her wince as a buzzing housefly landed on her exposed cheekbone and a bubble of blood form beneath it, then Kamagni shake her boot off her hand and squat and click her lighter alight under the monkey’s inert tail. Stop it, stop it, shouted Nirip but the words wouldn’t come. Huddled between the bougainvillea and the champa, nervously and softly chattering to itself, waited the orphaned baby.

  Even that didn’t send Pashupati back to ICU.

  Sulekha and Payal wanted to adopt the baby monkey, but Manasa absolutely refused to have an ape in the building. Shivani took it away with her on her next visit. To lift the spirits of the disappointed ladies, Nirip gifted them a pup each. He had found them motherless and scrounging around in a rubbish dump behind the Khar Gymkhana. They were adorable and wagged their tails even at descending crows. Nirip insisted that they be christened Dogslife and Coolcat. The ladies were delighted, agreed ecstatically and, between themselves, called the mutts Raja and Runk.

  Kamagni was stitched up and for the rest of her life flaunted beside her broken nose four livid blobs on her cheek. She liked them. She had earlier looked mentally fragile, the disfigurement now drew attention to her face, she looked frightening. The scars emboldened her, freed her absolutely from restraint. She felt even more that all she needed to have for a fulfilling life was more and more money.

  Nirip agreed. They simply weren’t getting enough of the family wealth. Life was no fairy tale at forty. Grovel he wouldn’t for Pashupati’s money, work he wouldn’t for that criminal but funding he needed for his plans, for his rosy future devoid of them. He’d discovered over the decades that the disciplined, examined life was so fucking boring that it was giving him arthritis, indigestion and insomnia. Everyone was too profound. He himself could therefore safely think a little less. The fulfilled life lay in seeing the world, smelling and tasting its four corners, feeling flesh and fucking around like crazy. Women were expensive though. Plus those rare single malts and all that travelling.

  The years are even more of a blur to those not much given to thinking. Encouraged by her brother, Kamagni daydreamed of getting rid of her father in increasingly elaborate ways and then running his empire in the manner of a king. In her dulled, drugged reveries, an image that frequently recurred was that of hands, perhaps her own but more veined, more powerful, sharpening a knife on a wheel and occasionally, along with the sparks, crisp new five-hundred rupee notes flying off the spinning metal and then floating away like autumn leaves as though being created by the whetting. She was pleased with the unambiguous symbolic significance of the image. Money she needed vast amounts of, of course, who didn’t, even Nirip did and even though it was true that she could sponge off him till he was broke, it would be nice not to have to whine and fight for it every month, like the Rani of Jhansi doing her mardani thing, with Vinayak that
mere hireling.

  It would be even nicer if she could earn some on her own doing nothing like bloody Nirip. Those dinner lectures that he’d begun for Pashupati and his types, for instance, Managing Lessons While Massaging Satan’s Balls or whatever they were called, two lakh rupees per evening! That’s criminal! she’d exclaimed.

  So is the audience, Nirip had retorted coldly, what is two lakhs when compared to the worth of the pearls that I cast before those swine?

  They were worth ten- and twenty-thousand times his performance fee, those swine, he knew that. They gulped down hotel champagne and whisky, munched panner tikka and sheesh kebab and, without taking in a single syllable, thunderously applauded him at every pause. He nattered on for an hour, wearing his learning lightly, at ease in his wit, quoting Adi Shankara and Gunnar Myrdal, watching Pashupati throughout the talk move from table to table like a solicitous maitre d’, affable, loquacious, humbly providing each group of guests the impression that the wayward son had at last returned, that in the star speaker of the evening, they were watching perform the worthy heir to the father’s empire. In contrast, the star speaker during his act himself felt like a prostitute who was not being paid for his pains.

  As a worthy heir, he’d first have to be a worthy criminal. Scanning those inattentive, swollen faces, he regretfully admitted to himself that he’d have to move, to act, shed the second skin of his sloth, be taken up less with ageing, shrug off that sense of futility that ever since his birth had pierced him at every pore. If he disappeared even at that moment in the middle of a sentence, he wouldn’t be missed, that was for sure; but would anyone pay to have him vanish? Or to return?