Fairy Tales at Fifty Read online

  They were sepia and white with age. The first was of two infants, babies really, indistinguishable one from the other, typically gurgling about naked on some mattress. The second too Nirip glanced at automatically before slipping it back into the plastic; he then paused, preoccupiedly stared at the pyre, then pulled the snap out again. Even in that half-light, he could well see how unmistakably a copy it was of the blown-up photograph on the wall of his mother’s chamber of wonders, of a maidenly Manasa-ma sitting demurely on a sofa, and him aged three beside her, gawking open-mouthed at the marvel that is the camera.

  ‘Could you make me a paan?’

  With his back to Jayadev, Nirip took his time to fish around for and locate the tiny aluminium suitcase. When he turned about again, Jayadev had dextrously, decorously wrapped the kurtas around himself and, sitting up and with his tongue probing the nooks and crannies in his mouth for damage, was making faces at the world.

  ‘Your photos. I’ve been seeing one of them for the last fifty years. Blown up on the wall of my mother’s room. The one of Manasa-ma and me aged three.’ He moved forward a couple of steps, placed beside Jayadev the aluminium suitcase and sat down alongside it with a cheerful sigh and a crack of his knees. ‘You just show me how much kat-tha-chuna to put in the paan and maybe I’ll make myself one too.’

  Jayadev was in no mood or state of mind for babble. He avoided Nirip’s eye and preferred instead to watch the aluminium box being opened. ‘They aren’t whom you think they are in the photograph,’ he mumbled softly, almost in a disgruntled manner, to himself. In the gamcha that covered his head, despite his swollen features and gloomy demeanour, he looked, with his nosering and the glint of metal at his earlobes, as though he’d always been fetchingly feminine. ‘Neither you nor Manasa-di in the photograph. It’s her younger sister, your mother.’ Soundlessly, without any fuss, he began smiling and weeping at the same time. ‘And your brother.’

  Nirip’s first thought, surprising even himself, was that to make up for lost time, he should seriously get down to a long, long snooze. Sleep with an infant’s singlemindedness and awake decades later to a new world. Sleep was to life what butter was to cooking. When in doubt, go for it. ‘We don’t have water, do we, to wash the paan leaves with?’

  Without a word, with his gaze still averted, Jayadev jerked his hand—it twitched, virtually—in the direction of the cloth bags. Nirip got up, brought them over to Jayadev and observed him rummage in them. ‘Are you feeling well enough to walk? Because maybe we should get a move on.’ How full in the half-light Jayadev’s bruised lips looked. Nirip crouched beside him, held his chin, turned his face towards him and commanded, ‘Look me in the eyes. Look at me.’ He searched his features for signs that would show that he belonged to him.

  The paans were made and chomped on. Jayadev smiled at the lust of curiosity in Nirip’s eyes, arose and began to prepare for departure, his face softening at the way Nirip’s gaze followed his every movement. Almost as though to tease him, his actions, his gait, became exaggeratedly feminine. Trying to relate himself to Jayadev, to see himself as the flesh of his flesh, Nirip watched him check the pyre, rearrange the things in his bags, shuffle off with some garments, the bottle of gomutram and some toilet stuff—the comb, the Charmis cream—to the privacy behind a parasitic bush strangling a dwarf tree. Despite the lesions, his flesh was darker, tougher, more leathery than his, even at seventy. Something in the paan sent Nirip’s senses tingling. Perhaps its supari had aphrodisiac properties. He did feel a stirring—not in his loins but in his stomach. Of course at his age, one had to be grateful for any stirring anywhere. What was an aphrodisiac, exactly. He could pose the question to his aunt-mother or her syphilitic beau, surely. Did it give one one single hard-on that lasted till kingdom come or a series of hard-ons one after another like the legs of goose-stepping soldiers in a parade. She used to come and go, Manasa-ma had said, always when Nirip was away at school or college or getting stoned and laid in some distant city.

  ‘Your aunt was here. She gives you her love.’

  ‘I’ve never met her. Give her mine.’

  Manasa. And Shivani. Sisters. Sisters sharing a lover. Nirip—because of Manasa-ma’s vagueness—had not even been certain whether Shivani had been her sister or her cousin. He had never met any of Manasa-ma’s relations and had never found it odd that he hadn’t. No step-brothers or aunts or sisters-in-law or nieces.

  ‘They are all witches.’

  Or were dead or had cut Manasa-ma dead during some squabble over property or her marriage and had been generally beastly before and after. Rarely, once in a blue moon, she had gone off to attend a wedding in Calcutta or a death in Benares, accompanied not by family but by a servant—usually female, usually new in her employ, always attractive—to see to her needs. From these jaunts, she had returned rejuvenated and singing to herself while the servant usually had to be hospitalized for nervous exhaustion. Then, perhaps once a year, she had received a blue inland letter from her sister from some unexpected city, Patna or Siliguri or Jamshedpur, from wherever her adventures seemed to have taken Shivani and whenever she, Shivani, had felt an obscure need to chronicle them. The letters had always had an address to which Manasa could send the money.

  Sitting crosslegged on hard earth two metres away from the smouldering corpse of a monkey, in the light of a wan moon, with the last dead ants floating like dust about his head, somewhere in the badlands north-west of Jhansi, having been kidnapped by a gang of dacoits indirectly acting on his own behalf, or so he’d thought, unbathed, unwashed for several days, in clothes that he hadn’t changed for a week, drugged and tired and fighting off sleep, itching for a jolt of Paxidep or Panex, he wondered how on earth one accepted a shabby stranger as one’s father. Fifty years was a long time, a lifetime. Money. He imagined that that was what the old man had come back for. To see which of his scattered seed after fifty years had become money plants! Stop it. Concentrate. Nirip therefore could count amongst his billion countrymen half a dozen half-brothers. So? Weird, that was all. So was the world. A brother waiter in Paharganj, a brother coolie at Howrah? A third who, slipping into the professional shoes of the biological father, was a cross-dressing eunuch-type masseur and ear cleaner servicing ladies and gents all over the land. Those kinds of genes in him would explain why Nirip was so unhappy and so fucked up. He yawned. How wildly impossible—and suddenly unimportant—the imagined past seemed. Just be, he advised himself, as the Zen types said when they wanted you to sink into some kind of pudding of unthinkingness. Just be. Well, it was one thing to know the answers and quite another to be convinced of their correctness.

  Face it, human beings all over the world did it all the time—burnt their bridges, got a move on, aborted a life, abandoned a child in a gutter, in a Municipal garbage bin, to the elements, to an elder sister, to God. If the infant didn’t mingle with the banana peels and was instead scooped up, the first thing in the world that it became aware of was hierarchy; it grew up touching the feet of everyone who had been retrieved from the refuse before it. It was a bit like the Army where you had to bark ‘Sir!’ at everyone senior to you even by three months. No matter that when they shouted sir it meant—and really did sound like—motherfucker. Sublimation. Ditto when you bent over to touch the feet of elders and superiors and new-found fathers. You were actually inviting someone beneath you in the hierarchy to bugger you. What else was caste but an upgrade of the desire to have sex with the lower orders. Should he, instead of touching his feet, kiss Jayadev on his bruised lips to show that he didn’t quite see him yet as his biological father. A passionate exchange of crimson paan spittle. Perhaps he had divined his intentions and, to ward him off, would, before emerging, gulp down some gomutram. He had never before kissed any mouth that had exhaled cowpiss. Would look good on his CV: has smooched a cow’s pussy.

  ‘I’m hungry.’

  From somewhere in the gloom, faintly but distinctly, he heard the tinkle of a cowbell.

  ‘For food and
love and affection. Didn’t I see some bananas and Parle G biscuits in the bag with the photos?’ So all those years it had been Shivani on the wall. He tried to remember, from what Manasa-ma had let slip over the years, the little that he knew of his aunt’s life. Recollection was not easy—in part because he couldn’t, in the circumstances, concentrate in the least and further because Manasa-ma’s narrations had always been disjointed, self-absorbed, anecdotal. Her life is harder than mine, Manasa would gaze at Nirip with her gently and steadily accusing coalmine eyes and murmur, but she is happier too. She’s always been generous with everyone and has always indulged herself.

  The affair with the ear cleaner, Nirip dimly called to mind, had been an embarrassment for Shivani, a hiccup in her history—from which, in the version that Nirip had heard, even though she had had children by him, Jayadev had been excluded. She had moved on; that in fact was more or less what she had done throughout her life, meander for decades amongst diverse species of the down and out. Being rich, she could afford to indulge her taste for the poor. Whenever she was irked by, fed up of, poverty, she returned to her deluxe duplex in Delhi or the getaway bungalow in Agra. Her life showed on her face; everything seemed amusing and slightly unreal; when things turned unpleasant, she moved on. Thus some adventurous eight months she had spent in Madras as the keep of a Malayali sound recordist struggling for a toehold in the Tamil film industry and then—with a Tamil assistant cameraman looking for a break in the dog-eat-dog world of Hindi cinema—almost one full year in the slums of Santa Cruz, north Bombay. So in the early decades of Nirip’s life, right through till her mid-forties, Shivani had wandered, staggered, from one experience, one role, to another, from keeping house for a police sub-inspector in Jaipur to seriously trying to learn some Dhrupad from a lascivious guru in Gwalior and thereon to enjoying peace and quiet and boredom in a select ashram retreat in a private fort in Rajasthan. Then, to recover from that calm, from those olive oil rubdowns from eleven to twelve and the Vedic chants and the white tea, she had strayed yet again in search of experience dark and swarthy, and fetched up once more in a hole in a hideous Bombay suburb, wherein she’d loved being abused and treated like dirt by a chauffeur employed off and on by a private taxi service. When off, he had made Shivani sleep with the citizenry for a fee. She had contacted hepatitis B and nearly died. The hole being small, he had thrown her out. Two full days later, Manasa had found her sister unconscious on the pavement near Milan Subway.

  Age sobered her up as well. In her fifth decade, she discovered her green fingers and, on the terrace of her duplex in Bengali Market, the therapeutic benefits of nurturing life. Her elaborately diverse, splendidly coloured, almost fantastical shrubs and potted plants, cactuses, creepers and vines tied her down to the place. She evidently found them more responsive and easier to care for than human beings. The varieties and the succulence of the salad leaves that she grew in tubs became the talk of the South Delhi set. The unsexiness of her social class however continued to depress her. She thanked God for her two lean, sullen and dark gardeners.

  Periodically, to get away from all that lettuce, she roved the country and sometimes the world but less often and less adventurously than in her salad days. She was more cautious, she was scared of falling ill, she had no illusions about her faded, finished allure. It saddened her a bit, naturally; at the same time, she felt obscurely relieved at having had obviated the need to play games. She still played them, naturally—and only cards passionately—but in the roles of her late-middle and old age, she was more circumspect, more muted, more remote from the world, more intimate only with her elder sister.

  Who dropped in at Bengali Market one morning well before sunrise—unexpectedly as usual from fourteen hundred kilometres away. Shivani heard her fluttering about amongst the plants on her bedroom terrace like a gargantuan moth.

  ‘He’s found out. Get up, he’s found out. The sweetheart sure took his time to. He went to get our fitness certificates for the marathon and discovered that our blood groups don’t match. A and O apparently cannot produce a B. Live and learn. I’ve left him on my bed with an earthen teapot for company. Pashupati will be livid. Clog an artery, I hope. Get up. Where d’you keep your shikakai-and-green-tea powder?’

  Four Tuesdays later, Manasa returned, again without warning, at three in the morning, etiolated, gaunt, her unmanageable hair a white halo of anxiety and nervousness.

  ‘Get up and go and follow your son. I don’t trust him to survive this kidnapping that he and that half-wit Kamagni have planned for next week. He’ll need help when he’s alone out there in the hinterland. And Pashupati wants his kidney on toast, can you imagine. Our Great Lord is annoyed because Nirip’s foolishness clashes with some dirty work that he’s been plotting with his new circle of dacoit politician friends. And he’s found a new Konkani slut for me to train. Can you imagine. And for the first time he wants me to vacate my flat for her. Can you imagine. Get up! How can you bloody imagine anything when you sleep so much! Get up, go to the rescue or send a paanwala, a masseur, ear cleaner, a eunuch, a monkey trainer of some fourth gender, a killer, a murderer, whatever, but act, send, go.’

  Time passed. Nirip stretched himself out on the hard earth to mull over things and await events. The exhaustion of contentment soon soothed him into sleep.

  He awoke to a chill in the air, the lightening sky of dawn and an overwhelming sense of having been jolted in his sleep by some violence, a gun shot, a death. Jayadev’s cloth bags had gone. Instead, out of the half-light, bobbing like a boat in a rough sea, tinkling, swaying with grace and speed, loomed a darker shadow. A funnily-shaped spaceship. A dinosaur. Ah no, a camel with a cowbell and, atop it, a human getting himself a nice perineum massage. Nirip knew how it felt from his university trip to Jaisalmer with those fun NRI Gujaratis from Singapore whose names after thirty years he couldn’t recall. Both very nice, those massages and those girls.

  GARGA’S PASSING

  Anguli clucked his tongue at the camel to command it to stop. It instead sailed sedately on towards the lone figure waiting, recumbent, at the base of the incline. Swift as always to act, Anguli reached into the pocket of his kurta for his knife and, stretching forward, with its handle tapped the animal lightly but masterfully between its ears. Seemingly offended, shaking its head to shrug off the feel of that reprimand, it broke into an unsettling canter. Cursing it, Anguli, to keep from falling off, grabbed whatever he could—the cushions beneath him, the reins of rope, the hump of the beast that felt like a gnarled, rock-hard lump of cowdung before his abdomen. ‘Stop! Madarchod! Stop! Meri jaan!’

  The route that the camel decided to take formed a rough circle with the sleepily dazed, waiting figure as its centre. The animal took one round, then another—past the clump of bushes, the tamarind trees, down the dip and around a lone subabul—before slowing down to its habitual, sedate, stately nose-in-theair gait. Anguli felt its body beneath him tremble and heave with the exertion. ‘Buddha ho gaya, sala,’ grinned he affectionately. Each time that they had passed the man whom he had come to escort, he, being outgoing by disposition, had cheerily waved before clutching again the reins to retain balance. The wavee had uncertainly and dutifully waved back.

  Anguli soon learnt that the camel intended not to canter but to walk around in circles for a week or two. He tried to remember how on earth the beast had stood still when, some hours previously, he had turned up on it to keep his appointment with his father. Jhabua, it’s you? Jayadev had muttered uncertainly. Yes, Baba, but I’ve been for decades called Anguli, he’d smiled in reply. He then tried what he could to persuade the animal to stop and sit down. He made diverse funny noises, he tapped it three times on the head, kicked its sides, scratched its neck, unwrapped his scarf and flung it over its eyes, sang the opening phrase of Jana Gana Mana. The last half-worked, for it made the beast pause to half-turn its head in intelligent enquiry. Anguli himself didn’t know the rest of the song, so he repeated the words ‘Jana Gana Mana’ three or four t
imes, louder, more menacing, in varying keys and to a different tune each time, but the camel, clearly not respectful enough to the anthem to stand at attention, swivelled its neck back to look ahead and resume its morning walk.

  Fed up, Anguli prepared to jump off. While retying his scarf over his head and chin against the chill of the morning and the heat of the day to come, he measured his other options. He was distracted by the guy on the ground enjoying his discomfiture and toyed with the notion of pushing him around for a bit before rescuing him. He, the kidnappee, had been for some time now fully wide awake and aware, on his feet and smiling each time that Anguli had bobbed past him on that fucked up beast. He shouldn’t, reflected Anguli, grudge him his good humour, though, considering all that he’d recently been through. A landmine too. Six or seven times Anguli had passed that guy by in ever-diminishing circles and funny that each time a part of him had hazily noted how dreadfully familiar, beneath his grey stubble and general unkemptness, that posh city slicker had looked. Those damn dacoits must have kept his wallet and his mobile. He’d seen him before somewhere?

  He’d carried with him past the tamarind trees and down the dip that image of those Ma Kali eyes above a straight nose, wondering haphazardly whom they reminded him of. Someone really quite close he resembled; and then, just when he’d finished with his scarf, the camel had stopped walking, almost as though to mimic everything within Anguli at that moment stopping too; and the beast had on its own begun its elaborate process of settling down to sit, and so it had felt within Anguli too, all systems decanting into subservience and unimportance, leaving behind a consciousness, open-mouthed as it were, and in it that one staggering idea, that the stranger in the wilderness that he’d come in search of was him, Anguli himself.