Fairy Tales at Fifty Read online

  A trifle, a mere matter of detail it was for Rimjhim Dada that there couldn’t be, as per the rules of the game, more than two batsmen at the crease at one time. What game?

  But for one crucial detail, it played out as Rimjhim Dada and Pashupati had planned.

  ‘It must look like a messy accident, my son—I call you my son, Rimjhim-Dada-ji, because we are going to be, you know, so close—like an act of god, like innocents buried forever in an earthquake, some more deaths caused by those two implacable playful psychopaths Time and Fate—a bullet—several bullets—gone astray, a knife in the dark slipped in between the wrong ribs, the wrong myrmidon bludgeoned to death in a dust up—that’s what it must look like.’

  So with the first ball that he faced—but neither touched nor indeed saw—Chintamani was declared leg before wicket. A red flare announcing the decision for the illumination of the umpires soared from the marquee; as per plan, it was the signal to the men deployed alongside six crucially-positioned generators to shut them down. Six lights—at first slip, silly mid-off, mid-on, forward short leg, backward point and one in the shamiaana—went off. That, as per plan, was the signal for Chintamani the hatchet man to drop his bat, withdraw his revolver, turn and take aim at the garlands of marigolds six feet to his right. Long before he could squeeze the trigger, as per plan, Rimjhim Dada’s personal gunman fired two bullets into his throat. He, the gunman, then picked up Chintamani’s revolver and emptied it into his employer. The last was not as per plan. To arouse the spectators from the consequent deathly stillness, a dozen of Chhota Babua’s chosen, stationed at various points around the field, to inaugurate the murderous free for all, fired their rifles at the heavens. At that, the six lights came on again to reveal two corpses at the batsman’s crease and Magnum moving in slow motion towards them from the bowler’s end. Then, above the din of the generators was heard the rumble of a convoy of SUVs bearing Pashupati and Chhota Babua, mission accomplished, away.

  Glancing once at Nirip and Ehsaan Awesome stumbling towards him, the gunman trudged away from the pitch and across the field towards the landmines; in his tread could be read the despondency of a batsman given out unfairly. The crowd took a few seconds thereafter to erupt; more out of an excited fury at having been done out of a humdinger of a climax than out of any outrage at the gratuitous deaths—and no doubt, several amongst the spectators would not have considered at least one of them gratuitous in the least.

  The gunman met the vanguard of the riffraff with a ready rifle; they turned out to be his cronies. They surrounded him protectively, he was soon invisible. They all had guns. Like ants carrying the carcass of a bug home for a communal feast, the phalanx took a moment to rearrange itself, then, changing direction away from the landmines, moved off as one. He would be honeycombed with bullets in the very near future, of course the gunman would. So would his brothers, his children, his wives, mistress, parents, cousins. Several amongst them equally certainly would retaliate. There was nothing like an unwarranted killing to trigger off a vengeance war that would endure for generations and feed off and merge into other perennial feuds over land, wealth, caste and honour.

  At the batsman’s end, Ehsaan Awesome sobbed over the curled up body of his dying uncle. Nirip stood beside him, his hand on the giant’s shoulder and helplessly watched the life ebb from Rimjhim Dada’s eyes. He seemed, even while dying, already to have shrunk a little. Nirip sat down on his haunches and unthinkingly touched the bloodied bat beneath Rimjhim Dada’s body. It was tightly wedged, it did not budge. They would be more or less of the same age, Rimjhim Dada and him. Nirip blinked at the recognition of the possibility that Rimjhim Dada could even be younger. Not a bad-looking man—but now with his mouth open and in spasm as though struggling to enunciate the injustice of his agony. His cheeks suddenly ballooned out and for a second his eyes opened wide, wide as he convulsed. Extraordinary how that dollop of blood sat poised at the corner of his mouth for several long moments before starting to dribble out and then it wouldn’t stop streaming down the side of his neck and onto the collar of his white kurta. Blotting paper the kurta reminded him of. Nobody used blotting paper anymore except him. He hadn’t seen any at anyone else’s since school. The teacher’s blotting paper because only teachers were allowed—allowed themselves—to use red. But the blood flowed more richly than the kurta could soak. Drops began to fall to the ground from the collar sodden crimson. Maths types would be able to calculate the amount of blood falling to the ground. Maths had always been useless in solving anything useful. Blood dribbles from a dying man’s mouth at the rate of x centimetres per second. His kurta soaks it up at the rate of y millilitres per square centimetre. How much blood would fall to the ground if the man was dying lying on his back? Standing on one leg?

  Ehsaan Awesome, calmer after a few moments, weeping silently, bent forward to lay his repentant head on his uncle’s knees. Nirip felt someone standing beside him and glanced up to see the eunuch with the monkey on his shoulder. Behind him, he could see Number Do Kapildev and his protective ring of myrmidons approaching. Rimjhim Dada emitted a last loud gurgle and, before they reached the pitch, left for where the cricket was safer.

  The crowd, fragmented into sombre, silent groups of five and six, stood about the field like wraiths as Number Do Kapildev supervised the making of a bier from the trappings of the game. His team worked swiftly and without to-do. The three stumps at the bowler’s end were uprooted and brought and dropped beside Rimjhim Dada’s body. Chintamani’s pads were removed, turned over and with their insides out, fastened together, side by side, by their inner straps. String was tied to lengthen the outer straps and with them were transversely bound, across the top and bottom ends of the pads, two of the wickets. While Magnum stood motionless, shell-shocked, two Scruffies held her by the elbows, maintained her erect, removed her pads and used them and the third wicket to construct the bottom half of the bier. Like a character frozen in a fairy tale, Ehsaan, save for his sniffling, remained immobile, left arm half extended towards his uncle as though it’d been stopped in midair by the guilt of his impotence. He moved—trembled first and then with a start—stumbled forward only when the Scruffies lifted up and transferred the corpse to the bier. Muttering abuse less against the remains of Rimjhim Dada than the throw of the dice, six of them lifted it up by the wickets. It held. Swaying with the dignity of an elephant, slowly, precariously, the cortège began to move. A seventh Scruffy held Rimjhim Dada’s feet steady and, shuffling backwards, having to look continually over his shoulder and slowing the others down, used them to steer. After a few steps, Ehsaan Awesome, feeling that it was disrespectful to death to have a corpse sail forward to meet its lord, as it were, feet first, stopped the bearers and, in a voice that was more croak than command, asked them to turn around a hundred-and-eighty degrees. Since that manoeuvre would entail that six of them walk backwards instead of one, the Scruffies, with an absence of coordination that—befitting the occasion—was stately and dignified, put down the bier, reversed direction and picked it up with their other hands. During the entire operation, Rimjhim Dada threatened to roll off his last bed more than once.

  Nirip was suddenly alone in that crowd of sombrely dispersing, gun-carrying ruffians. Involuntarily arrested by the sight of the darkened soil, the thirst with which, in patches, it had soaked up the blood, he’d looked down at the ground for a while, musing on mortality in general and nothing in particular, had glanced at Magnum motionless beside the forgotten Chintamani, still dreaming of how she would’ve hit the winning run to crown the best day of her life, and then when he, Nirip, had glanced up again, the cortège and Ehsaan Awesome, blocked from view by an ever-increasing motley lot, had reached the parked cars at the boundary. Amongst the Scruffies who drifted past him, those who gazed in his direction stared mainly at the earth which the victims, on falling, had stained.

  ‘You will never find a better time to escape,’ murmured at his elbow the eunuch with the monkey on his shoulder, smiling tenderly
again at his secret vision of the world.

  THE GREAT ESCAPE

  So they did, simply by walking backwards towards the landmines. Backwards was Nirip’s bright idea. ‘It would look odd,’ he explained to his smiling companion, who nodded without pause and without caring to register a word, ‘if we walk away from wherever everyone else is walking to. Almost rude. But if we do it backwards coolly and casually, it would seem to those overtaking us that we too are headed in the same direction, only that we’re just so bloody slow. What d’you think?’

  Without waiting to hear the views of either man or monkey, Nirip took several steps rearward. He paused some metres away to allow his bemused companion to catch up. ‘I don’t think you should look back,’ he advised. ‘Arm, leg, body movement—that we are walking forward normally, that’s what they must all suggest. It’s like allowing the bustle of the world to pass you by so that you regress to that once-upon-a-time point when you could think in tranquillity, from where you saw clearly.’ The monkey was not alone in finding their behaviour beneath comment. The groups of spectators too, in gliding past them on their way to the cortège and the cars, seemed not to recognize Nirip as the find of the abandoned game, and if individuals within them muttered words at one another, it was mainly to bemoan the tragedy.

  Moving backwards slowly, pausing every few steps to steal a glance over their shoulders, particularly when the monkey squealed and chattered a warning to signal an obstruction—a shrub, a tree stump, the bones of some desiccated carcass—Nirip and his companion arrived in some minutes at the boundary. It was not, in that part of the field, demarcated by rope or pole or light bulb. Once they had crossed the last diesel generator behind long off, they suddenly found themselves alone with the backs of the last few spectators, in the alternating light and dark of the playing field, receding in front of them. Nirip’s companion stopped, swivelled and with a smile said, ‘We’ve regressed enough now.’ It was then that Nirip recognized him.

  Not so odd that he hadn’t till then, for much had happened since they’d last met. Of course, his companion had left that meeting quite abruptly, almost as though to suggest—now that Nirip came to think of it—that, in the manner of a French perfume, he would return. Well, he, Nirip, felt that he himself could really be forgiven for not recognizing the other at once. It was extraordinary that their last encounter was less than a week old; it seemed like fifty bloody years. He couldn’t even remember whether it had been memorable. And it was almost as though his companion had waited for that moment—when, all stressful distractions having receded, they were alone in the gloom—to release a whiff from his hair of the perfume of Keo Karpin and thus allow himself to be recognized.

  The closest lightbulb of the unfinished match was just a few metres away, yet the ground on which they stood seemed to have been untouched by human history. Except, Nirip reminded himself, for the landmines bloody somewhere. Ahead of them stretched arid wasteland patched by the darker gloom of scrub, stunted shrub, thorny tree. They waited for their vision to get accustomed to the dimness of a long night illumined only by a lacklustre moon. Perhaps off his companion’s nose stud would glint enough moonlight to show them the way.

  ‘You didn’t tell me your name last time. So I’ve always thought of you as Fairy Godmother.’

  Keo Karpin’s uncertain smile said that he hadn’t understood but that it didn’t matter. He cooed a few words to the monkey, lifted it off his shoulder and placed it gently, as one would a toddler, on the ground. It was a tiny, fragile thing, a creature out of a comic strip. It jerked its head up and about a bit, and to the right and left, and not liking what he saw, with a soft, human squeal, turned and bounded up the leg and torso of Nirip’s companion to return to his perch. That was fun and was, therefore, accompanied by chuckles, repeated three times before the man finally tired of it and then snapped a couple of phrases at the animal in a completely different tone, a mother’s to a child recalcitrant and roguish. The words were magically effective, the monkey sobered up, about-turned and got down to business.

  ‘We will simply follow him, at his pace and in single file, just to be sure.’

  In that ten-odd square kilometre area between the river and the nearest pot-holed road to its south-west, the most recent landmines were well over a decade old; they’d been planted in that soil almost as though because it would nurture little else. More accurately, they’d been embedded to discourage the more aggressive rival gangs, the more intrepid police squads and sundry marauding dacoit packs from disturbing the illegal and highly lucrative sandmining alongside the river. They’d been quite unsuccessful, for both the law and the lawless had, whenever required, descended upon the mining by simply following the trucks that ferried the sand away, namely, by fording the river wherever it was a stream. The landmines had discouraged by dismemberment only the odd sod of a villager going for a shit and the stray goat in search of sustenance.

  The monkey knew its way. He loped along, as monkeys will, surefootedly, pausing every now and then to jerk his head about as though to get his bearings, glancing back to wait for the laggards to catch up, even at times softly squealing his concern at their sluggishness. Progress was necessarily slow, Nirip pointing out to himself at every alternate step that there was no need to hurry. Haste was of no help in the process of getting away from oneself, trying to become someone else. They stumbled over roots, slid into shallow gullies, skirted shrub, slipped on stone, clambered over low rock, steered clear of anthills, trudged across rare patches of flat terrain. Five minutes into their trek, they stopped to pick up Keo Karpin’s baggage from a lair in the bole of a tree. His three plastic sacs from their last encounter had mercifully become two more compact cloth bags. He, already breathing heavily by then, allowed Nirip to shoulder one.

  Only for a very brief while did Nirip wonder how the monkey could tell where the landmines were. Fuck it, it is too late, you are too old, to try and gain new, useless GK-Quiz-type knowledge. Know thyself, man. Yet that objective too seemed to have lost its urgency. He did have things on his mind but surprised himself by his reluctance to broach them, by how unimportant everything seemed to have become. He did however, out of habit as it were, after lending Keo Karpin a hand to ford a gully, and when the other had held on to his forearm for several seconds longer than was necessary, touch on one of the topics on his mind. ‘You know, I don’t know if you’re one of them or one of us . . . but I must thank you for always being there in times of need if you know what I mean.’

  Keo Karpin nearly stumbled again, and once more gripped Nirip’s forearm to save himself from falling. ‘Ohhh the discomfort and embarrassment of old age!’ He simpered craftily without meeting Nirip’s eye, stretched himself upright, looked about him—suddenly ears cocked as though alive for the first time to the mysterious sounds of that arid landscape, to the lone cawing of some concealed nightbird and the grunt of some disgruntled beast at a late dinner in a thicket—sighed heavily, theatrically, and allowed the monkey to scamper back on to his shoulder. ‘Oh I must’ve been . . . I’ve been many things—held all kinds of jobs, been exploited by a million people in the course of a long, eventful and unhappy life . . .’—the memory of which however at that point made him chuckle. He broke off his merriment, again abruptly, to attentively cock his head to his left, in the direction in which lay the world that they’d left behind. ‘There’ll be people following us frantic, determined to retrieve, re-kidnap, their prize catch. But they would be headed—’ with his free right arm, he sliced the air to the left of Nirip’s shoulder ‘—that way towards the Gwalior road whereas we—’ he tickled the monkey’s knee; at the sign, the ape reached down, grabbed the strap of the bag that had slipped off Keo Karpin’s shoulder, and pulled it up to free the left arm, with which his master then waved at the wide world beyond and to the right of Nirip’s head ‘—will cut across to meet my son and take the train. You don’t mind walking and then riding a camel all night for freedom?’

  Nirip noticed then, ev
en in the light of that wan moon, that his companion’s skin under the sleeve of his kurta was splotchy with small livid lesions. He glimpsed for an instant the entire forearm, hairless, finely wrinkled, speckled like the skin of some albino reptile. The arm then dropped and over it the curtain of the kurta. Old age, he supposed. No, older age. Old age is me. He was then yet again ashamed of his self-absorption.

  ‘Ah . . . freedom. Is that what the train that we’re going to catch is called? Some Express flagged off on Independence Day?’ Nirip read in Keo Karpin’s half-smile uncertainty over whether what he’d just heard was wit or a nugget of useless and confusing information. He continued reluctantly, Nirip—partly because he’d been beguiled by adventure, distracted by the unexpected from his earlier need to know. At the same time, he did see that he still stood terribly far from knowing himself and where he came from, but that perhaps it didn’t matter, it was enough that he could see the distance ahead, and at the end of the long road, all that he would find was that he, like everybody else, was just a bloody onion, with layer upon layer enclosing at its core nothingness. Whoever heard of an onion roaming the earth in search of its mother plant?—with all that in his head, Nirip reluctantly continued, as though only because he had a duty towards a no longer relevant self. ‘Are you one of Pashupati’s select debt collectors? Honourably retired from active service and recalled for one last operation? At the Gadaipur farmhouse, had you dropped by just to see what you could pick up from the orchards or to see what I look like? What’s the plan? Isn’t there a ransom? Why’s no one bothered about what’s happening to me? Who are you?’