Fairy Tales at Fifty Page 24

  ‘Your father was quite upset to see more coverage of the kidnapping than of his hospitalization.’ Her disappointed, disapproving tone gained in intensity as she continued, ‘So upset that he’s found yet one more nubile cook whom he expects me to train. And this time, for the first time, he wants me to vacate my flat for her.’ She glided off the bed and towards the door, paused at the threshold, put her hand out and seemed to touch the switch outside; the tubelights in the corridor steadied, stopped flickering and the green light in the room dimmed and began to glimmer instead. ‘And you. At fifty, you aren’t even sure of what your concerns should be at your age.’

  ‘How can I be sure of who I want to be when for fifty years my mother has hidden from me the truth about who I am?’

  But the last he did not ask, couldn’t; as per the unwritten rules of their little game, one posed questions that teased but not those that hurt, for that would mean that one had ceased to love.

  ‘Besides, I don’t feel fifty, you know that. If I felt my age, I wouldn’t be playing a cricket match this evening. I feel . . . seventy-four.’ The cat arose, circled about the bed in search of a location and finally—after first digging its claws in repeatedly till it was satisfied, much as though treading water—finally curled up on Nirip’s solar plexus. It instantly warmed him up. Physically, I feel seventy-four. And mentally . . . like a cinema screen in the sixties when the projector goes over the scratches on the film before the titles start. Of course, with Manasa-ma, one didn’t have to speak to communicate one’s thoughts. He didn’t verbally transmit the garbage in his head also because it was so fucking beggarly. One must at least have thoughts worthy of having spent so much time on this planet. Say, what on earth have you been doing for fifty years? He couldn’t answer, he didn’t know.

  She took out from the trunk his Hungarian teapot—the fifty-second, the one that he’d bought while footloose in Colombo—and his Rare Muscatel Darjeeling tea. Waving the canister at him, she asked, ‘Will you make it yourself?’ He sat up in bed, the cat for a moment clinging to his stomach as to a cliff face. He felt better. Manasa-ma always tended to have that effect. In that typical tone of voice, dreamy, singsong, subdued, as though murmuring to herself in her sleep, she continued, ‘Never mind. I’ve made plans. And don’t change your clothes for the cricket match. You’ll be easier to spot in what you have on now.’

  He looked down at his jeans and dark blue polo shirt. He stank and would have liked to wear something cleaner even though he didn’t quite see himself successfully opening the bowling in someone else’s starched white khadi kurta pyjama. Virtually inaudible beneath Ali Akbar Khan, she muttered on, ‘I’m waiting to hear how you hit it off with Shivani, my sister. Your biological mother. We may refer to her as Biomata?’

  It took Nirip a second to remember whom Manasa-ma was referring to; the adventure of his past had been buried under the chaos of the present. ‘She’s tall.’

  Manasa-ma’s eyes widened a little at the answer; his disinterest shocked her like a slap in the face. She pointedly moved away towards the Godrej almirah and on to graver matters.

  The old man—Shivani’s companion—was dying, Nirip learnt with puzzled sorrow, of syphilis. Yes, in this age of the Ebola virus and the dirty- and sticky-bombs, of syphilis. He’d been treating himself for the last two years with his herbs and potions but all that tulsi and roasted papaya seed and powdered scorpion’s tail in fermented cow urine had clearly not helped. Genetic clock, you’d call it. When one’s time is up, one’s time is up, we used to say. Manasa-ma’s face softened in memory of what the old man had been. He wants to spend his last few months roaming around the country, catching up on his wives and his scattered seed.

  About her sister and her promiscuity, Manasa-ma would offer not a word unless questioned; Nirip for his part had nothing to ask about the lives of strangers.

  He slept—only to be woken up almost immediately, or so it seemed, by a grinning Ehsaan Awesome in search of a quiet spot for a quick fuck. In the shadow of the Godrej almirah, with her head cowled, her body small and tight, her manner suddenly a demure child’s, hovered Widowhite. Manasa-ma was nowhere to be seen; indeed, the room, with its green walls naked and defenceless against the glare of the tubelight, retained no evidence of her visit. The teapot, the cat, the saris, the music, the Darjeeling, it seemed, had never been. Yet there remained in the air that sense of sandalwood, beneath his tongue an aftertaste of coffee-and-lavender and in his head a distinct memory, as clear as a recent dream, of the blue-and-grey-on-gold border of her sari. She must as usual have made a clean exit, that was all.

  ‘Would Sir like to go first?’

  ‘Uh . . . I might not be able to get it up. Not middle age alone. Perhaps if I watch you, I might be inspired.’

  Assuming the suggestion to be a sort of compliment, Ehsaan Awesome blushed. He began to natter in his pleased embarrassment. ‘She’s a child widow. Child marriage followed by landmine. And then waiting for widow remarriage also. That’s how we used to mug up the exploits of Raja Rammohun Roy in History class. Child marriage, widow remarriage, if child widow, then maybe re-remarriage. And if Muslim child widower then four times.’ Leaning closer, knowingly wriggling his eyebrows, briefly turning his head to thrust his snout out to indicate the subject of discussion, Ehsaan Awesome breathed hotly into Nirip’s face, ‘You are my guru, sir, my inspiration. You’ve to go first so that I can film you on my mobile.’

  For the rest of the day, it was not the memory of Widowhite’s naked body alone that made cogent thinking and other human functions even more impossible. An hour later, for instance, the diesel engine of the car itself was thunderous enough to make even normal speech inaudible. Its incessant vibration drilled its way right up the anuses of the three in the rear seat to set the yogic core of their spines juddering. Nirip sat entrapped and entranced between Ehsaan Awesome and Rimjhim Dada’s personal gunman. The gunman was asleep. He rubbed thighs with Nirip and he snored. With each vicious jolt of the car, his head banged like a coconut against the back of the seat or Nirip’s shoulder or the edge of the window. Between snores, he grunted and squealed softly into his neighbour’s ear. His gun, slack in his right hand and resting on the floor between his feet, pointed at times at his own stomach and at times at Nirip who finally reached out and jammed its barrel into the rear of the front seat, smack against where the driver’s lower back was.

  ‘Is the safety catch off? Would you know?’

  Ehsaan Awesome stretched out a long arm and pressed the trigger of the gun. It clicked politely. ‘Yes, it is.’ He leaned back to squeeze himself again into his previous uncomfortable position.

  They were going away from Widowhite and towards the venue of the cricket match—so Nirip presumed, he didn’t care. He’d fucked her twice in forty minutes; two erections in one hour hadn’t happened to him in forty years. She’d been smooth like redolent butter; he felt so at rest that he could’ve died or married her. For Ehsaan Awesome of the giant quivering baby-fat buttocks, she’d slipped out of her sari and pulled her petticoat up to cover her midriff. Nirip had urged that for him she be completely naked. His insistence had both flattered and embarrassed her. She’d yet kept her face in purdah behind her sari; he’d pulled it off and over her head. She wouldn’t look him in the eye; he couldn’t take his gaze off her tight, miniature body, pale, made firm by hardship, yet shy, inured to lust but not to admiration.

  The windows of the car were all rolled down in order to allow them freely to inhale the dust and cowdung smoke and feel the warm breeze on their sweat. Chintamani in the front seat could also like a pope wave to and bless the devoted members of his master’s possible new constituency. At that hour of the late afternoon, those were predominantly goats.

  ‘You’re fifty years old, sir,’ exhaled Ehsaan Awesome again into his ear, ‘Why’s your mother so concerned about you?’

  ‘It keeps me young.’

  He nodded in acceptance of the possibility. ‘And you’ve how man
y of them?’

  ‘Well, there’s Manasa-ma and a mother-figure in Sulekha-di and there’s Biomata—whom I’ve met but who didn’t reveal herself to me with any fervour. Perhaps the stink of my clothes put her off. I reek of approaching old age, particularly when I’m tired.’

  Ehsaan Awesome nodded again, this time seemingly in complete agreement. ‘In my father’s case, the smell is very strong. And sir, have your three mothers met one another?’

  Between the heads of the driver and Chintamani, Nirip gazed through the windshield at the potholes that he could see on the road ahead of them. Warming up to the kind curiosity of that carefree, tender-hearted yet protective adolescent stranger, not wishing to ignore the vision in his head of Widowhite’s parted thighs, he halfheartedly tried to focus on setting his life, his past and his present, in order. ‘Yes, of course. A couple might even be present at this bloody cricket match, that is, if women are allowed. Shivani certainly could turn up as a male spectator. I understand that neither is the betting compulsory nor will everybody be armed.’ He paused to observe Chintamani open the car door and, with his right hand clutching his topi to retain it on his head, spit out a gob of tobacco and some other crap that became a long, gooey reddish-brown string before it reluctantly and messily let go of his lips. ‘And you and I will continue to speak rapidly and incomprehensibly in English if you don’t mind, so that on our arrival this wretched eavesdropper has nothing to report. And as a first step, we should ensure that we arrive at the venue after his master: that should cook his goose. Could that be arranged—we could be ambushed or swept away by a flash flood, or raped and chopped up and left hanging on a favourite tree, some routine rural thing that won’t raise any eyebrows, just spin us out of control for a couple of hours?’

  ‘No problem sir. Things are never in control even in a film plot or fairy tale, what to speak of the real world.’

  ‘Roll up your windows,’ abruptly ordered the driver in a commanding squeak. He held the wheel as though it stank, with outstretched arms, reclining as far back from it as the seat allowed, head in the air, even a little averted from the windshield. In the warm breeze, his Brahmin tail of hair straggled behind his head like a wispy, elongated dustball. He maintained a uniform speed of thirteen kilometres an hour. Nirip had the impression that the brakes didn’t work.

  No one reacted. Clearly, the illustrious son never even heard, leave alone took, any orders from a hireling. Nirip had leaned across the lap of the gunman and begun to roll up the rear left window when some missile, quickly followed by two more, thudded dully against the driver’s and Ehsaan Awesome’s doors. Ehsaan spat some abuse into the dying afternoon. The driver, without slackening or increasing speed, without bending forward or sideways or loosening up his left arm, without taking his eyes off a high one o’clock on the windshield, rolled up his window.

  ‘Politics?’

  ‘No, family. His.’ Ehsaan jerked a contemptuous thumb at the snoring and softly squealing gunman. ‘How much they owe my uncle.’ He shook his head in shocked sorrow at the perfidy of the lumpen as the last four sacs of plastic, filled with some ghastly human and animal waste, landed with sticky, booming thumps, like aliens alighting for attack, on the ample rump of the car. ‘How much he’s taught them. And me.’ His hand burrowed in the pocket at the rear of the driver’s seat and emerged clutching several packets of paan masala. ‘When I was young and didn’t feel like giving an exam, it was he who taught me how best to shut the district down to have the exam postponed. Two evenings before, just quietly chuck some pig’s entrails into a mosque or a chunk of cowmeat into a temple.’ He shook his head sadly again while chuckling at the same time an oh-the-days-that-are-no-more chuckle. ‘What are you and your biomata, sir, going to do about meeting each other in the future? Should I arrange for a codeword, a ring, some secret song? Would you even recognize each other again?’

  ‘Blood will tell, I suppose,’ murmured Nirip, abstractedly watching the reddened mess of the sated mosquito that he’d crushed against the forearm of the gunman. ‘Though I confess that I haven’t had much time in planning a future with her. And then again, I feel, why should I? I am the child, she should be planning for me.’

  ‘And when you do meet?’

  ‘Don’t know yet. Kill her, I guess.’

  Ehsaan Awesome nodded even as he turned his face up to the ceiling of the car—so that his head as it went back appeared to jerk up and down spasmodically—to dunk into his mouth the contents of a third packet of paan masala. The interior of the Ambassador began to reek of the camphor in his exhalations. ‘Before or after you polish off your father? Before, I think. Ladies first. And for your daddy-ji, you should buy a gun cheaply here.’ He pushed his lips and chin out and about in all directions to encompass everybody in the car. ‘We would get you an A-one deal, especially at this time of year. The elections being here, prices are going up because of demand and falling because of supply.’ He shut his eyes and nodded briefly and vigorously to affirm his abiding understanding of economics. He pushed his arm out of the window to wave regally at the impoverished landscape. ‘Most reasonably priced, top-quality stuff in every nook and corner of this poor land. How else to remove poverty? My uncle was a pioneer and now his poor successors want to remove him. Have you given a thought, sir, to what kind of firearm would best suit your purpose?’

  ‘May I see the menu, please?’

  ‘Oh, it would run into pages for the booming bazaar. Dunaliyaa double barrel, kattha singaliya, gupti silencer, bullet bombwala, atomiya. During a busy period such as the elections, a highly skilled work force, mostly ex-servicemen, toils overnight and overtime.’ Just then, with a soft squeal, the gunman on Nirip’s left suddenly woke up, gazed wildly about with frightened, crimson eyes, muttered in dialect something that sounded like, ‘What’s the sign? What’s to shoot?’ and then, slumping forward as though stabbed in the lower back, rested his forehead on the rear of the front seat and relapsed into snores. After a moment, his right hand slithered down Nirip’s leg and began rhythmically to squeeze his left knee with lunatic force.

  ‘Prices would range,’ continued Ehsaan Awesome, reflectively coaxing paan masala out of a molar crevice with a prehensile tongue, ‘from three to four thousand for a simple, no-nonsense weapon. Even a yes-nonsense type wouldn’t cost more than ten. Top quality. The imitations of foreign models resemble in every respect the originals. The only thing that can’t be guaranteed is the long life of the gun or that of its victim. Why, isn’t that so, Sankatmochan-jee?’ He leaned forward and across to yell the question in the driver’s ear. Sankatmochan-jee, who in the front seat could hear nothing because of the car engine, nodded affirmatively and continued to nod even as his charge, beaming at having been right, at having no doubt impressed the veteran with his acumen, squeezed himself back into his corner to continue to teach his new tutor. ‘The raw material, sir, is very easily available here, grinding machines, gunpowder, the spokes of cycle wheels. There would be over a thousand units manufacturing illegal arms in our district alone. My uncle—’ aglow at this point with filial pride, as rosy as an athlete after a good warm-up ‘—pioneered, to avoid detection and arrest and the nuisance of interference, my uncle pioneered the use of boats. Assembling arms at night, midriver.’ For a moment, he was distracted by the sight of the gunman’s hand pulsating on Nirip’s left knee. ‘For you, sir, I’d recommend a 9mm pistol. We all—VIPs, politicos, thinkers, intellectuals—prefer 9mm. Since the police use them too, it helps to blur the line, muddy the waters. A few extra rupees would be required, of course, for the gun licence from the office of the appropriate District Magistrate.’ The giant’s large, listless hand seemed more adequate than mere words to express the ease with which that could be arranged; through the open window its limp fingers allowed three empty sachets of paan masala to float languidly into the dust and warmth of the early evening.

  Personally, Nirip felt that, as the hostage of a kidnapping, it would be most odd if he were to buy a g
un; at a pinch, he could steal one, his snoring and whistling neighbour’s second weapon, for example, that, wedged into some belt beneath his kurta, had been pressing against Nirip’s side for over an hour. For himself, Nirip certainly didn’t feel the need for a gun; while his worth was being decided, he felt protected and yet free, and somehow at the same time deep in the midst of things like the hero of some Indian Hardy Boys’ adventure, and heady too, as though soaring in a dream.

  LEG BEFORE WICKET

  They were a little over an hour late for the cricket match. Punctuality is civilization. Rimjhim Dada, in his own reckoning clearly the most powerful, was keen to be the last to arrive. His guest of honour, Pashupati, however, saw himself as more important and left their lunch even later and in a larger convoy. And Chhota Babua, the captain of the rival team, since he was to play an away match, naturally felt that his hosts should be present at the ground to receive him on his appearance. Each overlord further had his several deputies and vices and they in turn their lieutenants and assistants, and each one of them was certain of being of more consequence than several of the others. They all had guns. In that hierarchy, the rules of protocol, being unwritten, were even more intricate; who was unwilling to precede whom to the venue of a friendly match could get one of the two killed.

  On the roads that didn’t exist, to a playground that didn’t exist, there were traffic jams as a consequence. In a world without electricity, the night darkness is near absolute when almost all the available sources of light in the region have been redeployed to illumine a hidden cricket ground—indeed, to demarcate and so create it. The beams from the headlamps of jeeps, tractors, Omnis and Ambassadors bobbed up and down and danced in the dark like the light from paired torches as the vehicles roared and snarled their way over potholes and protuberances. They parked wherever they could inconvenience and obstruct the passage of those less weighty than them. The dust raised by two hundred wheels obscured the moonlight like a biblical curse. Beneath the din of the vehicle engines could be heard, as from a distant war, the rat-a-tat of several dozen diesel generators—and above it, the shouts and vociferation of greeting, potential quarrels and general excitation.