Fairy Tales at Fifty Page 27

  ‘Oh God. My name is Jayadev. I’m your father.’

  The rifle bullet lifted the monkey clean off Jayadev’s shoulder and dropped him like a child’s toy, lifeless, no longer cuddly, at Nirip’s feet. Jayadev himself staggered under the impact and then fell in slow motion. The boom of the shot, resonating, hitting them in waves from all directions, itself seemed a form of attack. With it dying slowly, bouncing off boulder and outcrop and slope of hillock, Nirip watched Jayadev crawl towards the monkey, touch it, pick it up, cradle it, sit back on his haunches and begin to wail, a heart-wrenching, curiously feminine ululation. Nirip got down on his knees, reached out to touch the fur, felt blood on his fingers which, absentmindedly, he wiped off on the cloth bag on his shoulder; to him, in that dim light, the black smudges of that innocent blood on Jayadev’s kurta was the world losing its sap, once more falling apart.

  He sat down alongside Jayadev, placed his hand on his companion’s shoulder and waited for his agony to subside; it didn’t. After a moment, ‘We should go,’ whispered Nirip to him and after a pause added, ‘If you agree.’

  Two fearsome black bats, enormous in the night, seemingly enraged by the shattering of the silence, noiselessly, slowly, glided overhead in measured circles as Jayadev, weeping yet expressionless, asked Nirip to rummage in his bag, locate and pull out a piece of cloth that looked as though it had once been part of a sari. Nirip spread it out on the ground and upon it was placed the tiny ape. The right half of its chest was a gaping, savagely bloodied maw.

  They prepared a pyre. Jayadev’s two cloth bags seemed to contain the world. He extracted from the one that he’d been carrying a tiny axe, a large knife, a bottle of kerosene, a can of ghee and a matchbox. Tiredly, wordlessly, he wandered off in search of combustible material while Nirip lingered alongside the corpse, wondering what to protect it with in case a predator came calling, which of those gangs was on their trail, who the bullet had been meant for and how to explain to anybody who would listen how unnervingly depressing it was to realize that to his world he was more valuable dead than alive.

  Save for the two enormous tamarind trees a little distance away and yet to be crossed, the route that they’d covered could not be discerned from the road that lay ahead. Scrub, rock, anthill, snakelair, gnarled dwarf trees, outgrowth, outcrop—in every direction Nirip saw the same strange, shadowy, beguiling landscape through which only the monkey seemed to have been able to distinguish safe passage. He couldn’t even be certain how long they’d been on the move; he’d been too enwrapped in feeling free to notice, feeling free in a prison the size of a planet—and again he looked all about him at the hazy dun-and-bottle-greenness that made him feel surrounded by the scenery that is entrapped within an infinitely large, ancient, globular glass paperweight.

  They would lose time, they lost time, in preparing the pyre. Branches were denuded of dead leaves, trimmed and tidied up and arranged athwart one another; on that noughts-and-crosses grid was placed the monkey in its sari-shroud before being daubed with ghee and doused in kerosene. A sniffling Jayadev was arranging a wigwam of branches over the corpse when Nirip noticed—behind his companion’s shoulder and fifty metres away, across a sandy dip that he’d thought was for them the route to take—part of a large, densely thorny bush detach itself from the mother plant and become three men with rifles.

  Leaving Jayadev to mutter some incantatory stuff under his breath, light a match and hold it to the dead wood, hearing it, kerosene-dampened, go whoosh, Nirip stepped forward to receive their guests.

  Their leader was a teenaged giant weepy with guilt, sorrow and outrage. ‘I did not expect, sir, that you’d abandon me and try and escape just when I most needed your guidance.’

  ‘Escape? I had to piss piss.’

  To Scruffies Dilsher and Dalda, Ehsaan Awesome then turned and in the extremely masculine tones—a sort of erect cock in the voice—of a criminal don having recently come of age, ordered, ‘Strip that shitty bastard who tried to wile our esteemed tutor and guest away. Bring him back alive and naked.’ The Scruffies stepped past Nirip and began to trudge up towards the flames. Then, in the manner of a prince regent ticking off his guardian, Ehsaan Awesome continued, ‘They’ll escort you back, sir. I have to return now to my responsibilities.’

  To the departing giant’s deaf back, Nirip pleaded twice, ‘Tell your goons not to touch the old man. I’ll bring him back myself.’

  Then from two metres away he watched the taller Scruffy butt Jayadev in the chest with his rifle and Jayadev slowly topple. Scruffy Dilsher dipped his hand in his pyjama pocket for a knife, bent forward and, in a moment, stood erect again with the trophy of the front half of Jayadev’s kurta impaled on its blade. Nirip heard from both the rogues laughs of surprise and exclamations of delight. ‘Let’s see what you have down there, you old eunuch—’ chuckled Scruffy Dalda, lightly kicking the inert Jayadev in the ribs. Scruffy Dilsher took aim and tossed the piece of cloth onto the smouldering pyre. Knife ready, he crouched once more. Nirip did the single thing that he could do in the circumstances to help his companion. He turned and fled.

  Yet, even as he moved away, he asked himself where he thought he was going in that landscape wherein there existed no route that was not a maze, no direction that did not flummox the senses. Earlier during that eventful evening, thinking of a million things and of nothing in particular, of how perhaps he was trudging away from being kidnapped towards being killed, of how it didn’t seem to matter partly because of the charm and warmth of the old weirdo inveigling him away—during that time, he had kept one eye on the monkey and one on the animal’s foster father and not really heeded any landmarks en route. He remembered only how surefooted the tiny ape had been and how so certain of the way—particularly at a couple of places when it had markedly detoured around, first, an innocuous patch of arid ground and then, some minutes later, a narrow, naturally inviting passage between a subabul sapling and a towering anthill—and as Nirip tripped and stumbled and ran away from his responsibilities, he hoped to God that the two criminals would forget their sadistic trifling with their victim and follow him and prayed like hell that his memory and instinct, his intelligence—all that staple tripe of the peptalks that he’d given on another planet—would for once prove useful, at last not let him down. Just then, the bats without warning swooped down directly towards his head; and at the instant when he balked and cringed and crossed his forearms over his skull to ward them off, they, veering sharply, shot off like fighter planes to the east of the tamarind trees. He without hesitation changed direction to follow them; as from a fish in sulphureous waters or a monkey in a maze, to survive he would accept whatever help he presumed he was being proferred from the most unexpected alcoves of nature.

  Fifty metres beyond the tamarind trees, he heard the Scruffies behind him enjoying the chase for the time being, abusing him and asking him to stop if he didn’t want his balls blown off. The bats bid him adieu with a spectacular loop-the-loop and vanished, almost magically, into a gnarled tree trunk bare of leaves and branches and inclined at an impossible angle. Nirip recognized it with relief; he remembered thinking on the road out that it had resembled in the gloom a giant dwarf pausing between pushups.

  In rapidfire succession, the signposts popped up en route in reverse order—that tiny palm-like tree, parasitic, extending laterally out of another, then the rock behind which his pissing had so disturbed an enormous chameleon, next, that clump of bushes that had emitted the stench of carrion mingled with a most unexpected fragrance, European somehow, half lavender, half thyme—and it did seem as though he was gently jogging back into his recent past, guiding a couple of scoffing followers to view some of its wonders, save that they were more keen to hold him back, slow him down, shoot him if need be so that he stumbled and fell at fifty.

  ‘You stop just where you are, darling, or a bullet in your anus’ll bring you crawling right back!’

  There it was, that towering anthill, down that declivity and amongst that
untidy cluster of subabuls. Gritting his teeth against the twinge in his right knee, fervidly trusting that he wouldn’t twist an ankle or trip over a root and land on his nose on a snake, he sprinted. A long shot, what a long shot. The abusive shouting from his pursuers became a slowly-lengthening twine connecting him to them tenuously. Each thudding step of his breakneck descent jarred his bones and yet jolted him into screaming silently at himself—Faster, my love, faster. Go like the wind you break day in and day out. Propelled like a jet, he reached the subabuls without mishap, rushed through them, swerved to the right, came up behind the mound of the anthill and then paused, huffing and heaving, to provocatively beckon his pursuers through the gap between it and the lone sapling on its left.

  It was the first salvo of the long shot. In response, the Scruffies, as much amused as enraged, quickened both their pace and their volley of abuse. Nirip even waited a second to confirm that they would indeed pass through the gap to reach him, then turned and scurried and stumbled away and instinctively hurled himself down behind a bush. A moment later, the hard earth beneath him shuddered as behind him the boom of an explosion convulsed the world, reverberated in the heavens. Violently, something bounced off his right shoulder, lay centimetres away from his nose. Extraordinary that it looked like a human leg, in pyjamas, rapidly reddening.

  Get up, get going, get back. Yet it was impossible to move.

  He waited for the humming in his head to abate, for creation to stop trembling. He arose after a few minutes, cautiously and clumsily, pausing for a while on hands and knees as though contemplating depicting in person the stages in a Science book of the ascent of man from four-footed beast to moon-walker. He forgave himself for not wanting to pick up the leg and roam around brandishing it in search of its owner, having blood from it soak his head.

  Visibility zero. To get away from that limb, he turned, took two steps, then stopped because he felt mentally uncertain and physically wobbly, sat down cross-legged to first get his bearings in a world utterly blocked out by a fog of black and prickly dust. His skin began to itch, his eyes smart, water. He dimly sensed that the motes of dust were far too large and black and realized in a moment that they were ants. Dead, he hoped.

  Gloom blanketed out by a swirl of blackness. He shut his eyes. The ants, dead and dying, pricked his cheeks, tickled his ears, invaded his hair. He exhaled in several short bursts, noisily and rapidly, to keep them out of his nostrils. He could feel in the very air a sort of rumbling, like an aftershock, of the explosion, a resentful agitation in the breeze that played about in waves over his head. Intermittently then, with the echoes abating, it began to carry to him the hushed squeaks and squawks of Creation’s fear turning slowly to outrage.

  He couldn’t continue to sit there forever, puffing like a yogi to clear his air passages. Or perhaps he could and allow the ants to build their new township all over and around him. Or he could, on hands and knees, grope his way into that world dark and hazy like the negative of a photograph. He decided to crawl; movement at least was a sign of some sort of life.

  He started, treading cautiously with his palms on hard earth, gravel, wild grass, rock surface, thorn, root, bramble, dead ants. He was unsure of where he was going or in which direction he ought to go, progress was slow. He recalled only in flashes that he had to retrace his steps for just a minute or so into his recent past to find that person most in need of his help. En route, there should be—but he couldn’t remember any of the signposts that he had passed during his decoying away of the two killers; in any case, in that fog of dust and dead insects, he could discern nothing that did not appear black and looming and ominous, shadowy shapes of ogres from some other world.

  At any rate, he should avoid that damned crater that would have been created round about here somewhere. If there were other landmines waiting for him to touch them into giving them their hard-ons and climaxing, he would find out soon enough. Not really a crater, more of a dip. Dip dip dip. That had been an ad for something. Swimming pools? A garlicky sauce? Enjoyment and happiness dip in middle age. He had come across that in The Economist in someone’s waiting room somewhere and had filched the magazine for reading at home in the loo.

  The U Bend of Life.—He remembered, thanks to his photographic memory for information that was interesting and useless—Enjoyment and happiness dip in middle age, then pick up; stress rises during the early twenties, then falls sharply; worry peaks in middle age, and falls sharply thereafter; anger declines throughout life; sadness rises slightly in middle age and falls thereafter. How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young—or slender. William James. The death of ambition, the birth of acceptance. Happiness doesn’t just make people happy—it also makes them healthier.

  Nirip wondered—pausing to sit back and massage first the heel of one palm, then the other—how one could tell when one’s enjoyment and happiness were not dipping, when instead they had begun to vroom up the second staff of that U. For that matter, one couldn’t even make out when one became middle-aged. Or when young again. Personally in the future he didn’t see himself hugging himself with delight at turning ninety, revelling in quiet enjoyment and happiness at being senile and shitting in his bedsheets and living with family members who avoided him all day and only waited for him to go so that they could have that extra room.

  Visibility appeared to have marginally improved or was that just his eyesight waking up to its responsibilities? Perhaps he should whistle—or go squeak-squeak—for the bats to come around and guide him once more. He stood up, took two steps forward into the gloom, paused. Nothing was familiar and the ogres loomed larger than ever. Think, you arsehole, he advised himself, at fifty you are more than halfway to being dead, you cannot be scared of the unknown.

  He sniffed the air. Smoke. Or rather, he became aware that, for the last several minutes, that whiff in his nostrils had been that of wood smouldering in kerosene and ghee. Something’s burning. Something’s burning. I think it’s l-o-o-ve. I think it’s lo-o-ve. He couldn’t remember whether that had been their own happily dismal composition or a mid-sixties Top Twenty chartbuster type song. From the sound, the feel, of it, their own. Concentrate, you fool. He shut his eyes to try and pick up the direction of origin of the smoke. When you can’t see a thing, wake up and use your other senses—even in death that tiny ape, in continuing to show him the way, seemed to have turned out to be more resourceful than him. Humbled, he fumbled and stumbled. Concentrate. Humbled, he turned his head this way and that to orient himself better and at last took two cautious steps down the incline to his right.

  A cluster of subabuls, a gradient as gentle as a reader, a clump of bushes, that stench of carrion so unexpectedly mingled with the fragrance of lavender and thyme, the black fog gradually thinning to grey-blue, the tamarind trees twin giant sentinels welcoming him home with arms wide open.

  Jayadev’s body lay pale and insensate in the wan light, curled up on its side in its last attempt to avoid that brutal kick to its head. Two metres away, the pyre seemed in danger of dying out. Nirip found it easier to look around for Jayadev’s cloth bags than to gaze at the two bodies. He located, in the first bag, a second beer bottle of kerosene and, at the bottom of the other, two rather fine cotton kurtas. To take care of the animal first was less discomposing. On that shrunken, charred lump, half-hidden beneath half-blackened rags and sticks, he jerked kerosene out of the beer bottle till the smouldering fire whooshed up to begin dancing again. He then covered Jayadev’s exposed chest and loins with the kurtas and sat down beside him to wait and think and wonder.

  After a moment, he couldn’t resist reaching out and caressing back the sparse grey hair from his father’s forehead. It was warm and a vein in his temple pulsed like a signal beneath his palm. For years he had wanted someone to hold him tight, to love him and never let him go. Love me, me, crush me snug in your arms even when I’m so far away. Then with time even that desire had withered and died like a plant dies for lack of water.


  He got up after a bit, moved a few steps away, shook and dusted the dead ants out of his hair and clothes. He began to pick up and put back into the bags the stuff of Jayadev’s life that he had so prodigally scattered while riffling through them. Two pyjamas, one once-orange, one faded white, a plastic bottle of mustard oil, his paan box in the form of a tiny aluminium suitcase—and Nirip wondered how lightly in normal circumstances he himself would have travelled and for how long without watch or wallet or change of clothes. He stank. Maybe that’s how the ants had died. He supposed that one couldn’t very well be arrested for wearing the same clothes a week in a row and for reeking like phew. What about that guy in the Habitat gym whose body odour was Lethal Weapon Five? He had been the principal reason why Nirip had stopped going just to fool himself by pumping iron in front of a mirror. Shaven-headed so as to be sexy, sweaty, even in winter, with a chin that receded into his right armpit, Lethal Weapon spent his entire day amongst the machines, not exercising but preparing to exercise, roaming around amongst the other outofshapes, advising them, flexing his ankles and rotating his wrists and exuding a pong of old sweat, fresh sweat, bad shit and rotten eggs. Whenever he had been within a radius of six feet, Nirip had had to stop breathing even while continuing his pointless reps on whichever silly machine had happened at that moment to be unoccupied. Then when he’d exhaled, it’d sounded like a dying declaration and the trainer stud had ambled up—ambled because Nirip never tipped him or felt him up—and asked him whether he all right sir was not or no.

  Jayadev’s bare essentials clearly did not include either fountain pen or teapot. A pair of leather chappals, a transparent plastic bottle the label of which in Hindi read gomutram alongside a picture of the head of a pensive cow, a brown rexine ladies’ handbag with a broken clasp. And torn strap too, discovered Nirip on picking it up, for sure enough all its junk came tumbling out. A tiny bottle of gumpaint, pieces of paper blackened with age along their folds, one white comb, safety pins of various sizes, an old jar of Charmis cream, a couple of photographs wrapped in dirty plastic, a hairbrush without a handle. Carefully, he put them all back in one by one. The photos he had to take out and rewrap to make them fit without having to bend them.