Fairy Tales at Fifty Read online

  Lazily, in slow stages that were part plan, part daydream and drugged fantasy, never sure of his own worth, Nirip took a decade to help his half-sister plot his kidnapping.

  THE IMPOTENT PRINCE OF A

  BLOODY ROTTEN WORLD

  ‘Have some warm thick milk sweetened with honey?’

  ‘I’d prefer tea. I’ve brought my own.’

  ‘And your own teapot also?’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘Well packed? In pimple of plastic?’

  Nirip rightly understood Pashupati to mean bubble wrap. He didn’t correct him; no one did when he spoke English or, for that matter, any of the other ten-odd languages that he used, including his mother tongue, with idiomatic, inaccurate ease. Successful communication for him was more important than the language itself; in any case, he was beyond rules. His voice, manner, language and body—all—always could be modulated to the extreme to influence his interlocutor, always had been; thus, whenever he had wished to charm a teenager of the streets, edify him or her for the better life to be had in his, Pashupati’s, harem that dotted the country, he, Pashupati, had seemed—virtually like another species of vertebrate altogether—seemed, in the words of Payal his daughter-in-law, to ooze an odour that numbed the victim, rendered him or her incapable of resistance; so too his voice and tone changed dramatically to suit the occasion, for when Nirip in his adolescence had suffered his crimson nightmares, it had been Pashupati who had stilled his shuddering, lulled him almost comatose with a new, special drone of a voice that had drilled into and, within minutes, hushed his nerves.

  ‘A new white tea from a garden I haven’t tried before. Would you like some?’

  ‘Expensive and tasteless it’ll be. How much is it per kilo?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Two thousand rupees plus.’

  ‘That’s a fair amount of money for a cup of warm yellow-195 green water. In the old days, my people could’ve got a healthy baby for that sum and done a beggar woman a good turn. But that isn’t why I sent a summons to the Gadaipur farmhouse asking you to meet me, my son.’

  Nirip pointed out to himself that he could completely derail matters at that point by saying quietly, in the manner of a Z-grade film, But I just found out some weeks ago that I’m not your son.

  ‘Speaking of which—sons, I mean—Wilson’s new born’s been kidnapped. You remember Wilson of course, the chauffeur who recently was so brutally and mysteriously murdered. Poor widow. His infant was born with jaundice, as yellow as a golden apple. The sight of him would be enough to turn anyone vegetarian. To think that we probably eat jaundiced buffalo and goat all the time without knowing it, the liver particularly, allowing all that infection into our mortal frames.’

  Behind his glasses, the ogre’s eyes flickered to indicate that both the son’s plea and the warning to the father’s system had registered.

  Encouraged, Nirip sidestepped to a second concern. ‘And in the Gadaipur farmhouse well, I distinctly saw the corpse of a baby in the mouth of a fish. Yes. Most unsettling. I’ve asked Chintamani the reptile to dredge the well and also instruct the creche at the Trust—that would’ve been the source? Some botched-up medical treatment? We should call in the police too, I said, but, not having any ears, reptiles don’t listen.’

  ‘I called you to remind you that if anyone has to live happily ever after, it will be me.’ He was a man of few words. ‘How you forget all the time these basic things?’

  Nirip suddenly felt the need to suggest to Pashupati that it was time that he got his biography written, a hagiographic thing full of lies of course, how he had begun not by robbing graveyards but by walking ten kilometres a day to night school and had smilingly sold all his clothes to buy medicines for his grandmother. That sort of trumped-up life story would prove useful for his political career in the imminent future. The notion arose within Nirip then—quite simply, without surprising him, as though it had lain for years curled up like a cat amongst his bones, merely biding its time to awaken, to yawn, stretch and rise to be recognized—it came to him that his father’s view of the world, wherein happiness was a warm victim and the everafter a prize wrested out of an emasculated future by the vigour of a life lived here and now to the hilt, that view answered the purpose in part because it disregarded completely the history of Pashupati’s sins; the past was a boring country that one simply did not revisit; only fools—like his son—who could not act, thought and remembered and again and again went back. And now, mused Nirip, most unexpectedly, he himself had been given a clean slate for his personal history. And since he knew nothing about the past that he himself might have had, it too could be composed of almost anything; it was up to him to construct it out of the bits and pieces from the world that he had not yet set out to discover. It was amorphous and he was free to people its shadows with women who dressed up as men, with human birds of prey, lascivious leprechauns with pointed ears, canine females who were divine cooks, with ladies who vanished in the light.

  Pashupati glanced once—speculatively, without amusement—at his son to confirm that he continued to read his mind correctly. They sat in the backseat of the scarlet BMW with the cups, Nirip’s teapot and Pashupati’s flask of blood soup on the table before them. Outside the black windows of the car milled about the crowd, happily uncoiling itself of its stress at the end of the city marathon. Under the buntings and banners, amidst the streamers and the stands of colas and bottled water, deaf to the stridency of the announcements and the music, swarmed potbellied policemen happily unabashed at mingling with such lithe fitness, scruffy TV camera crew in jeans, Sunday gentlemen joggers in tracksuits who’d picnicked their way through a twentieth of the course, excited schoolchildren in uniform-red teeshirts and white caps, athletes in marathon gear whose exhaustion, its very abandonment, seemed to attract Pashupati’s roving eye.

  He was eminently bespectacled, Pashupati. He didn’t need glasses but he wore them to look venerable. They partly hid his hooded eyes. Their stems slipped neatly behind the lush vegetation of grey hair that sprouted out of his ears and which he had to brush upward in ordered waves to hide the extraordinary pointedness of his eartops. They had a life of their own, his ears. To distract and divert the child Nirip—the adult remembered—Pashupati could at will wiggle his ears clock- and anti-clockwise and bend their upper thirds perfectly perpendicular to the head and wave the locks of hair on them up and down like a bird’s wings. With his large snub nose that sat placid above purple lips as swollen as caterpillars, he resembled a rakshasa’s mask, a short, ferocious demon with a charming, disarming smile, with teeth whitish and even, save for the abnormally long, fang-like canines; ever since his childhood, Nirip had always carried the impression that they, like a feline’s claws, were retractable, that his father had the power to elongate them when he bared his teeth in displeasure or menace or desire to, as it were, announce: Beware I bite, I tear off, I chew and mangle before swallowing. They emerged stealthily on to the lower purple lip as Pashupati—his doctor’s admonishments about his cholesterol engulfed in him by a more basic need—surveyed through the black glass—on offer in skimpy running gear—some fine, lean red meat.

  ‘Ýou have plans, I hear. Several plans. Each one as scatterbrained and annoying as the other. Ever since your school days, when you decided one fine morning to change your name from Nripati to Nargis—’

  ‘Nargissus.’

  ‘—you’ve had plans that reveal your problems of identity. You think you’re so bright, but people’ve always taken you for an impractical, impotent fool and’ve wondered where you get your brains from.’

  ‘I do that quite often myself.’

  ‘Instead of hatching them in the dark, you should’ve discussed your foolish plans with me first. I don’t want to hear of you being kidnapped by some gang of rogues. I’d be quite unhappy to receive a silly ransom demand for some absurd sum.’

  ‘How much would not annoy you?’

  Verbal battles were the only ones that Nirip—or for th
at matter, anyone—had ever won against his father. He looked away through the glass at the bodyguard-chauffeur standing watchful, shielding from Pashupati’s view one—presumably—athlete in jogging shorts and singlet at work at the open hatch of the petrol tank and, beyond him, chatting up a policeman in sunglasses and tight khaki, Magnum, pale, puffy-eyed, remoustached for the occasion. Nirip poured himself some tea and, looking down at the cup and saucer rattling gently in his shaking hand, said, ‘You let the world think it’s Magnum who tortured and killed my chauffeur whereas it’s you. You murder the husband and kidnap the baby because that poor woman resisted you.’

  ‘She’s selective. You jumped into her bed easily enough. She needs to be taught to improve her sense of taste. But that isn’t why I asked you to meet me, my son.’

  At the age of seventy-one, Pashupati was ageless. He was short and broad, beefy with all the flesh that he’d eaten, as devoted to himself as a fabled disciple to an uncaring god. Those who displeased him he had—in part also because of his spondylitis—a habit of glancing at only sideways; the mannerism stated that the worm of the moment was beneath encountering face to face. To those who made him happy, he gave the world, provided that they continued to satisfy and gratify him, tickle him pink; he snatched back—car, apartment, bank account—as capriciously as he granted. He was not deaf to entreaty; indeed, he enjoyed it till it began to pall. His hand slithered out; his talon rested on Nirip’s thigh within striking distance of his sole kidney. Nirip’s abdomen tensed.

  ‘Have always looked forward—and up—to your advice, your blessings, your morals and your money,’ he husked, unable to look away from Pashupati’s tensed fingers. ‘I assure you that my adventures won’t touch any of the plans in your glorious future—Parliament, a ministerial berth, a statue in front of VT, a gazetted holiday on your birthday.’

  ‘Ah, birthday. I’ve planned a birthday gift for you. A cricket match.’

  ‘My birthday is over.’

  ‘Very well then. For myself. When you were young, you dreamt day and night of a day-and-night cricket match, a match in which people die and you shine, you remember?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You annoy me. I would be quite unhappy at how ridiculous I’d look if the world came to know that my own son, just for a lark, arranged to have himself kidnapped. You won’t make me happy, you won’t work for me but you want my wealth.’ He sounded unhappy too, glum like a patient fearful of death when he learns how much the treatment that’s doing him no good at all actually costs.

  Nirip was petrified of Pashupati losing his temper, of kneading and writhing his fingers deep into the flesh of his, Nirip’s, abdomen and, with his knowledge of the arcane, permanently mangling something in there. He put the untasted tea down and, with both his hands in his lap, began to massage the calluses at the base of Pashupati’s fingers. Pashupati melted; within ten seconds, the canines retracted from view; in half a minute, he began to purr. He did love attention. ‘And at the end of the cricket match, for high tea, I plan to have kidney on toast. Your kidney, my son.’

  ‘Those are not plans but causes, each one of them noble, worthy of a king.’ In the agitated, nervous annoyance engendered in his bowels by the tension of the moment, Nirip began to knead his father’s hand with manic vigour.

  ‘Of course. You do take after your mother. For fifty years I’ve admired all the tricks that’ve come out of her. A bonny baby you were.’ Pashupati grinned ferally at the happy memory of a past remembered but indistinctly. Even his teeth looked purple. ‘Such irresistible cheeks. I remember enjoying Manasa’s little show with the Walkeshwar flat and everything. Everyone around me must enjoy himself.’ Loving Nirip’s ministrations, he limply turned his hand over to offer its back to his skilled palpations.

  ‘They do.’

  Magnum and the bodyguard-chauffeur had disappeared into the belly of the crowd. Imperceptibly, choreographed by the policeman in sunglasses and tight khaki, a handful of marathon organizers in their purple and yellow teeshirts swamped the car. Behind Pashupati’s head, an unshaven event assistant with the expression of a sullen wrestler stuffed into the petrol tank an unending strip of rag. Pashupati interrupted the massage affectionately to crush Nirip’s left hand. ‘And now you are not happy with the life that I gave you?’

  ‘Well, it hasn’t been a fairy tale, you know.’

  Nirip stopped massaging his father’s hand, tossed it away; it lay inert for a moment on the scarlet leather before perking up to move jerkily, like a damaged limb of some primitive robot, to his, Pashupati’s, thigh, from where, after resting for an instant, it slithered off in search of solace to burrow deep beneath his crotch. Having found it, it re-emerged in some seconds in the form of a fist and like a train exploding out of a tunnel. The fist opened up above Nirip’s lap and with a polite plop dropped in it a small snake. Pashupati, delighting in Nirip stilled by terror, swooped down to clutch his son’s hand and, holding its index finger as one would a toothbrush, bore it to his own mouth. The purple lips parted in welcome, the canines crept out to receive the guest.

  He paused with the morsel of finger an inch away from his maw. ‘Wise though you are for your age, my son, do you know how to brush your teeth correctly? The molars for instance with which we crush bone?’

  Nirip, feeling on his finger the warm glueyness of Pashupati’s aroused exhalations, heard from behind him the door being beeped open and, at the same time, saw the sullen wrestler, almost ceremonially, as though inaugurating an Olympic flame, hold a lighter to the rag in the petrol tank.

  KIDNAPPED

  Nirip sensed gradually and in a lazy jumble the stiffness, the imprisoned immobility of his body, the cold floor against his cheek and left shoulder, the darkness, the tightness of the blindfold, the fetidness in his mouth, the ache in his joints, the binding chafing his wrists behind his back, the pins-and-needles numbness in his crotch for the moment subduing the need to urinate. His head throbbed as though it, the whole thing, had become his heart. As though unwilling to accept any of it—and mercifully—he dozed off again.

  Birds. Birdcalls. A chweep-chweep orchestra. Dawn? A vicinal tree, perhaps, just outside a window. Because he was indoors, certainly; there was the cold floor and also that musty stuffiness of an interior, of a billion locked-up exhalations. His lips felt dry and cracked, his nose blocked. However could birds have so much to say to one another. And sexy stuff too since apparently they sang to turn one another on. Well, good that at least some living beings in the world were getting hard-ons listening to this din.

  ‘Peepee.’ He announced his intentions to his surroundings in a timid, off-key whisper. Be a man. Esto vir, he commanded his perineum in the unforgotten manner of his school sports teachers at lousy Dalhousie, cleared his throat and murmured a little more loudly to the floor, ‘Susu,’ and then wondered whether the relevant word in all cultures repeated the first one or several syllables to underscore the urgency of the case. ‘Piss piss. Urinate urinate.’ He waited. Even the birds seemed to pause to hear how he would continue. Perhaps he was meant to run through the languages that he knew and then gracefully wet his pants. Or he merely had to hit upon the right tongue of his kidnappers. ‘Mutram mutram.’ A gang that spoke Sanskrit? ‘Verily verily I say unto thee, pay-shaab, pay-shaab.’

  He swung out with his leg, up, to the right and behind, in front of him. Vacant welcoming space, good that he didn’t crack his shin against anything. He turned on his back, with a lunge sat up and waited for the throbbing in his head to subside. He clenched and unclenched his fingers and worked his wrists against each other and the cord. He tried to slip his right thumb under the bottom-most turn of braiding. In an on-off, on-off manner, he began to be dully nonplussed at having tumbled—at fifty and without warning of its specific timing—into a headless adventure tale that was in part of his own making. Before his bladder burst, he needed to get up and find some protrusion to abrade the rope against. Bladderburst. He seemed to have encountered the words somewh
ere before; perhaps the title of an album—Bladderburst: The Best of Jethro Tull. Or a novel by Thomas Mann. Bladderburst. He arose, first on his knees; then, when they began to ache, slowly, clumsily, stood up.

  Growing old. Fifty was the new sixty. Amongst other indications thereof, the general weakening of bladder muscles. Urination is more frequent because the vesica cannot stretch as much, cannot completely empty itself, is thus more susceptible to piddling infections. Old kidneys filter blood more slowly, drugs and doses remain longer in the bloodstream, the body, poor old sod, is in danger of over-medication, of winding down. Ditto the powers of reproduction. Vaginal secretions diminish, erections require more cajoling to be achieved and, once there, more fussing over to be sustained.

  He would need cautiously to move sideways till his shoulder or hip hit a wall or something. Move head on and he was sure to bang his nose against a doorpost or shelf and then quietly, without any nonsense, fucking bleed to death. Virtually that had happened to him at school, how could he ever forget. Groggy, he’d got up at night to piss and in the damn dark, for the corridor light bulbs had been smashed the weekend before by the frenzied, forbidden tennis-ball cricket, had misjudged the location of the doorway and groped his way straight into the wall. Misjudged because, for an instant, he being inattentive in his wobbliness, in the photograph in his head, the doorway had been dislodged some inches to the left, as though lugged along by the bed the one that Nirip habitually touched with his shin to get his bearings in the dark—that Pragya Shantanu had moved that very afternoon in order to be a little closer to Vinayak at night. Nirip had hit the wall squelch with his nose and instantly, as though on cue and quite paralysing him with its unexpectedness, blood had begun to surge out of it and into his mouth and down his chin like a warm, salty and endless flow from a tap behind his forehead. Had so much blood in him. It’d filled his mouth as a teacup. He’d gulped down some of it. It’d tasted of mucus. It wouldn’t stop. To contain the trickle from his lips and chin, he’d cupped his hand under his face. He remembered that there’d been a roaring in his ears as of distant civilizations crumbling. Careful not to miss or spill a drop of his blood, his hand under his chin as determinedly steady as the bearer of some votive offering, he’d stepped up to Pragya Shantanu’s bed, leaned over it, sensed the drops from his chin spatter the sleeper, slowly overturn his hand and, like an oblation, let his blood fall on the bedcover and waited.