Fairy Tales at Fifty Read online

  ‘I am no longer headline material,’ breathed Ehsaan Awesome, glowering darkly with hurt, into Nirip’s ear. ‘You neither. You will be once more, I think, when they find your corpse.’ He glanced admiringly at the papaya in Nirip’s lap and then at the clan Scruffy disposed about the trailer in various stages of heat coma. ‘That photograph’s appeared before in the newspapers. I told these pyromaniacs that they’ve every right to receive a share of its value. After all, without them there would’ve been no photo.’

  ‘Has the ransom amount changed? How much were they finally offered to kidnap me?’

  ‘Kidnap and kill.’ Smiling slyly to himself, the giant teenager exaggeratedly allowed himself to be bounced up and down by the trailer’s devil-may-care passage over a particularly uneven patch of road shoulder. He bit into a chunk of watermelon and chomped noisily and happily for a moment or two, swivelling every now and then to spit its pips out to hit, alternately and impartially, first the cow dozing in the middle of the road, then its calf. ‘I’m not sure. I’ve heard four crores plus, certainly, for kidnap and kill.’ He smirked to himself again, hamming his role of pretending to know all. ‘But by the time they’d grabbed you and knocked you on the head, Scruffy Supari had almost finished smashing and torching your father’s pimp-mobile. Pashupatibhai’s in bad shape; apparently, there’s nobody around with whom they can negotiate. And if he doesn’t turn up here to lord it over the betting and get a whiff of his constituency, there just won’t be any cricket match.’

  ‘They could start negotiating with me. I would be curious to know the sums they have in mind. Hasn’t been always that I’ve been considered worthless, not by everyone.’

  ‘We were given classes during Life Skills on How To Be A Successful Negotiator.’ Ehsaan Awesome’s sunny face darkened at the memory. ‘Frankly, I prefer a gun. When I speak to my mother, she says that everyone at home thinks I got myself kidnapped from the school bus stop last Wednesday because we had Life Skills Practicals that morning.’

  Just when their tractor, after struggling across the level crossing, had snarled its way down a further three hundred metres, the hoot of the train, an extended musical warning, reached them from across the paddy fields and over the raggle-taggle of village huts like the opening notes of a super-hit sixties Hindi film song. Half expecting to hear from the heavens its preludial percussion that mimicked the chug-chug of a locomotive and the succeeding happy and masterly yelling of the male singer, Nirip, with his mind elsewhere, was dully taken aback to see the entire clan Scruffy, at the second toot of the train, awake as one from its stupor and smoothly, in a second, without a word and carrying their rifles and their fruit, begin to jump and slide off the trailer. Seeing that Nirip had not budged, Scruffy Amitabh, in his crumpled Home Guard khaki, about to follow the others down a track past a pond of stagnant water, paused insolently to beckon him with an index finger.

  The neatest and cleanest parts—mud floors, walls, courtyards—of that chunk of the country were covered with cakes of cowdung in various stages of dryness. For the rest, there was human excrement, also in various stages of dryness. ‘What about the crap of other forms of life? Mother Earth is for all species, I say.’ Nirip, admonishing mankind, followed the others into a crowded cattleshed alongside a well on the outskirts of some nondescript village settlement. The shed, thick with gloom and fat flies, stank—predictably—of ruminating livestock and grasses dank with piss and more dung. In the murky half-light, the clan Scruffy, wide awake and tense, groped their way through the cattle to group themselves around the two window-holes. Widowhite wandered off into a patch of darkness, presumably to play with the private parts of a bull. Ehsaan Awesome and Nirip dawdled in the doorway of the shed like listless sitting ducks.

  A little like the antithesis of an ideal child, the train could be heard but not seen from where they were. Nirip would have liked to go and watch it pass. He asked whether they could because it would be so much more enjoyable than chilling in the heat with some cattle.

  ‘Ah, no, no.’ Ehsaan Awesome’s eyes grew theatrically larger and rounder in his red face at the temerity of the suggestion. ‘The train for the next couple of stations is really the territory of the Mahto gang.’ He glanced about him with melodramatic unease, at the dirt track that skirted the well and wandered off towards the Fair Price Shop, at the children who didn’t know what school was staring at them. ‘In fact, we shouldn’t even be hiding here. The gangwars have already claimed a hundred lives since last January.’

  A metre away from his feet, Nirip watched Scruffy Supari become the hundred and first.

  He’d appeared in the doorway to summon indoors their prize prisoner and their superchief’s nephew when Nirip saw his head jerk back and his body swivel, buckle and collapse in a clumsy heap, even while the deafening report of the gunshot, somehow distinct from—not accompanying—the dacoit’s pantomimic movements, for a moment soaked up from the universe all other sound. Terrified, Ehsaan Awesome and Nirip scampered back into the shed. Two Scruffies dragged Supari’s body in after them. Widowhite dropped down in the mud and dung and started to wail. Scruffy Shagged-out tapped her lightly on the head with his rifle butt. She began instead to blubber and weep soundlessly. The cattle stirred uneasily. Two Scruffies took up positions on either side of the doorway, two others beside the window-holes. A dog in the village began to bark.

  The death census for the region, of those killed violently and without immediately discernible cause, showed over ten thousand for the preceding decade. That figure was to be collated with the 6652 incidents of kidnapping for ransom, the 39,904 other specifically political kidnappings ending in murder, the 78,120 political killings without abduction, the 46,005 political dacoities with loot and arson, the 51,047 non-political, merely public, dacoities also with loot and arson, the 16,212 political rapes, the 69,403 registered caste rapes, the 27,882 caste killings and the 25,039 exclusively election-related murders. In the universe in which Ehsaan Awesome had grown up, in the only world that that very young man held to be real despite his public school, English-language upbringing, the gangwars were truly as eternal as the absence of amenities, of good taste, of civilization and of God.

  In that world, for the last several lawless decades, ever present in the cycle of flood and famine and drought, one renegade group was likely to have been at loggerheads, trading caste insults and bullets and bombs, with at least two others. The first cause of the original conflict between any two gangs would almost certainly have been that slippery and terrifying thing, caste, their different castes; with time, however, inevitably and inexorably, their fundamental hostility would have widened, like the slowly spreading fingers of a greedy hand, into several other arenas, not in search of any ideological matter to feed on, but in need of funds with which to build their muscle power, to shed blood, to destroy the possibility of advancement in any sphere. They shot, hanged and beheaded in their struggle for control over sand-mining rights, over the annual contracts for bus stands, the manufacture and sale of landmines and firearms, the supply of kerosene, petrol and diesel, the percentage commissions from government civil and electrical engineers on their illegal takings, the unlawful private toll extracted from all traffic for the use of the river bridges, the generous cuts levied on private hospitals, landowners, hotels, doctors, lawyers, heads of transport companies, shopowners and proprietors of flour mills to allow them to function—in short, the gangs lived by skimming off the pathetically lean fat of the land. Naturally, they also lived dangerously; the lives of their rank and file in particular were nasty, brutish and exceptionally short. Not so those of their chieftains; they knew people in high places and very often themselves were brothers-in-law of regional Cabinet Ministers and prodigal sons of Ministers of State at the Centre. They flitted back and forth quite easily between their lawless world and that wonderful last refuge, politics with its bottomless pit, and found them in essence to be quite similar. Indeed, democracy and criminality buttressed and needed each othe
r to make the country blossom.

  They wrapped a scarf around Scruffy Supari’s head but the blood soaked through and in minutes began to drip on the slippers and pyjamas of Scruffy Pissu as he and Dalda, carrying the corpse, followed the others through the shed and out the back and across a zone of shitting children. Widowhite tried to hold up the bleeding head but it, dangling all anyhow, knocked anyway against a couple of squatting boys.

  Across the village they scurried like rodents in the heat, watched with apprehension from doorway and window-hole and treeshade, past the verandah of a primary school where the teaching and chanting stopped to allow them to pass like wraiths in a white silence. Nirip heard a goat bleat and from behind him the steady huffing of the two with the burden of a third to bear. Teli Raja paused once at a corner to get his bearings before preferring the left rutted, dung-filled lane to the right; they then scampered past the watchful dawdlers at the kerosene dealer’s, took another left at a white temple decked with orange flags, a right at the bicycle repairman’s and then they crossed an open stretch to slip in past a boundary wall without a gate.

  A one-storey building, more unfinished than new. Brick walls, for a roof a sheet of asbestos, panes and jail bars at the windows. The iron door was unbolted by a man with a towel about his head and a gun in his hand. He recognized—but didn’t look overjoyed to see—Teli Raja.

  The single large hall was full of life in various stages of decay. The stench that made Nirip almost gag at the doorway was of human fluids festering in an airless room, of overheated human odours and exhalations, of despair flickering towards extinction in that swelter trapped under that asbestos. Human forms lay shadowy and wasted in a dozen charpais ranged in rows of three like lozenges. From hooks in the asbestos roof were suspended long horizontal bamboo poles above each row of cots; from them in turn dangled intravenous drips for the occupant of each bed. Alongside the slippers beneath each charpai sat fat plastic bags of extracted blood.

  The sudden arrival of some strangers, rifles and a corpse disturbed only for the moment the secret life of the blood farm. Several rural youth, trained in the business, continued to move about the room purposefully, exchange empty plastic sacs for full, carry the swollen blood bags through a door on the far side, return with trays of medical paraphernalia or dustbins that they dumped under some bed. The occasional moan from some captive blood donor did not disturb them. One of the assistants, passing the bed nearest to Nirip, glanced at its occupant, stopped, bent over him, raised his left eyelid, pinched his right forearm, straightened, looked around, caught the attention of another assistant, jerked his index finger in the direction of the bed and moved on. Sidling closer, fascinated despite himself, Nirip noticed that the skin of the donor’s forearm remained pinched—like plasticine—and his eyelid raised. It made him look peculiarly insane, as though it were acute lethargy that had caused him to lose his mind. Two other assistants came up to stand over the donor for a moment, then summarily pulled him up and off the bed, held him straight when they found that he couldn’t stand and, gathering up his plastic bag and drip and the rest of it, marched him out of the further exit. He stumbled often and had to be dragged some paces like an unoriginal circus clown exiting the ring. Flies continued to buzz over the vacant charpai as though its occupant had merely turned invisible.

  The corpse and the clan Scruffy followed the donor. Teli Raja and the guard with the gun sidled off towards a window to negotiate a price for transport. Continually peeping out at the outside world, they mumbled their remarks not at each other but to the window. Nirip, finding the fetid air difficult to inhale, wandered off amongst the beds in the direction of the second exit. Ehsaan Awesome, made morose by sudden death, trailed him silently.

  The rest of the blood farm was a verandah succeeded by a stretch of dry mud, an isolated brick hut and four of those hybrid vehicles that Nirip had noticed on the roads earlier during that busy day, blue-black in colour, with the heads of large motorcycles and the bodies of prison vans. On all fours on the edge of the verandah, laboriously, away from captivity and towards the lawlessness of freedom, crawled the donor. At the descent of a single step to the dry mud, Nirip watched his right forearm buckle and learnt that even those who crawled could stumble. The donor picked himself up and, with elaborate effort, his bony buttocks high in the air, for he now moved not on hands but on forearms and knees, continued to creep towards his future, towards that invisible line where the mud of the blood farm plot became the mud of the village street.

  Drugged by hunger, fatigue, dislocation and horror, Nirip watched without seeing an enormous buffalo, his demeanour that of an elder statesman with haemorrhoids, sedately step into the path of the donor, stop and survey its domain. To the swish of its tail, flies rhythmically rose and resettled on its dung-bespattered hide like members of a parliament responding to a whip. It masticated, pissed, farted and looked vacantly at peace. All beasts, recalled Nirip in a haze, were content in their skins and with their lives. Man fortunately was less stupid, more pathetic and more heroic, inching away from his prison on all fours even when he’d been brought out into the open and left to die. God be with you, muttered Nirip impulsively to the donor as he watched him doggedly crawl under the belly of the beast and through the puddle of its piss. God be with you, and then, feeling as though that He just might, decided to follow him.

  Fatigue and the events of the day overwhelmed Nirip. He slumped to the floor and against a dented, faded-blue Taste-the-Thunder icebox. Ehsaan Awesome slumped with him. He for one was fed up—amongst other things—of his body, Nirip was, of its fatigue, the decay of its systems, its immunological decline, the twinges of its rheumatic gout, its recent inability to accept black coffee, its uncontrollable flatulence and increasing unsightliness, its inexorable falling to pieces—in short, the whole Montaigne thing. Being fed up moreover was of no use at all because even during the process of acknowledging to oneself that one was, one’s body had slipped and was slipping farther downhill. Getting up twice a night to piss and no sleep thereafter. Sitting down on the commode to pee because so fucking groggy that couldn’t aim correctly standing. Once or twice had even nodded off while on the wc. And no sudden movements while sliding downhill, not at fifty. No lungeing for the shuttlecock, for example, at badminton. Pretty soon thereafter, no badminton. No lunging for pretty backsides either. The last time he’d tried, he’d, like the buffalo, farted so unexpectedly, loudly and whirringly that it’d sounded like the mixie in the kitchen. Some ageing animals wandered off into some damned hole in the wilderness to die in dignity and peace. Well, thought Nirip looking around him, damned hole in the wilderness he’d certainly arrived at, but the other two conditions were likely to take time—so he to himself as he observed approach them from the direction of the Fair Price Shop a small army of monkeys, bounding and cavorting over the roofs and through the stray intervening tree.

  Negotiations over, the guard and Teli Raja emerged into the open. Nirip and Ehsaan Awesome were the first to be herded into one of the stifling and filthy prison vans; as precious cargo, they were made to sit away from the windows on the wet and muddy floor of the aisle. The van had no doors and its seats were cracked wooden benches occupied mainly by iceboxes ferrying blood bags to the hospitals of the district. Through the rear doorway was dragged in the corpse of Scruffy Supari; he joined them in the aisle on a bed of three blocks of ice with gunnybags as counterpane. Widowhite, looking mad with weeping, sat in the seat closest to his head. With the end of her sari, she fanned alternately herself and the flies off the corpse. Nirip absentmindedly watched Ehsaan Awesome eye her cleavage.

  The van shuddered into life and immediately moved off. One Scruffy with gun stood guard at each doorway. The van stopped after some metres. Over the juddering of the engine, the driver exchanged a few phrases in Hindi dialect with Teli Raja. Nirip mainly followed the curses. The guards descended and, carrying between them the crawling donor, reappeared a moment later in the rear doorway. They dumped him o
n the long last bench of the van. He curled up foetally, his knees drawn up just above the head of the corpse. The van shook and shuddered off again in the direction of safer climes.

  ‘Good news, Dadaji. Nirip Sir here has offered to open the bowling.’

  Rimjhim Dada took his dentures out, dipped and rinsed them in the glass of water alongside his thali till it turned greenish-yellow, fitted them back in his mouth and—as though they, when washed, helped him to see better—only then regarded Nirip, benevolently, from a lofty height and yet squarely for the first time that afternoon.

  Nomenclature first. Ehsaan Awesome should correctly have addressed Dada as Mama, Rimjhim being his mother’s elder brother but Rimjhim himself liked being called different names by different people; it made him feel that he was all things to all men. He also routinely rechristened all his important sidekicks, gave each one of them a name more appropriate to him, thus surrounding himself with one lala, one Chacha, a Nana, a Papay, a Kakay and one Bahanchod. The appellations themselves suggested intimacy of relationship amongst disparate ruffians, as though he, Rimjhim, headed a beneficent family concern of long standing instead of a criminal gang. Correctly chosen names put every man in his place and him on top of them all.