Fairy Tales at Fifty Read online

  With the windows of its one side at last allowing the bystander a sight of those on its other, the bus began to look as though it had regained its vision; and with only the weight of its sitting passengers to bear, as though it could once again breathe more fully. She descended from the front exit; when her right foot touched the ground, Anguli glimpsed for a second pale yellow skin between sock and edge of sari. She pushed her bag straps back up her shoulder, turned and lifted up her arms to help her daughter negotiate the last high step. He had already been drawn two paces forward, close enough to hear the jangling bangles that drew attention to her almost lemony, firm forearm skin. In the crush of people, she didn’t notice her admirer, his gaping at her silver nose stud. She got her daughter, a plump and neurotic ten-year-old, out of the way of the others alighting. She became aware of him only when he, like a dog, will-less, on the trail of another stray on heat, followed her in her search for some secluded spot for the girl. She glanced once, quickly, at him; his face, swollen with lustful adoration and unmasticated, forgotten bun-unda, made her uneasy. She paused, uncertain which way to go, everywhere around her looked too crowded. A male voice, shrill and imperious, yelled at her from a bus window to hurry up and return to keep their seats because he needed to go as well.

  Her face fell, became sullen, at hearing the command. She was about to retrace her steps to the bus when—‘Behind my van,’ offered Anguli, his lips a thick moue, oily with persuasion, half-extending his arm towards where it was parked. ‘You and I could stand guard on either side.’

  The child refused before the mother could. ‘I don’t need to go anymore,’ she announced determinedly and waddled off towards the Kwality ice-cream cart. The mother trailed her. Anguli trailed the mother.

  He saw her form so perfectly beneath the bright orange sari. The people milling about them, their gestures and movements, discussions and disagreements, the voices and music from different radios and cassette recorders, the shouts of tongawalas amidst the bickering horns of traffic, the smells of bidi- and cigarette-smoke, exhaust fumes and frying alu tikki, all of it lost focus, became a hazy background to the outline, the swaying of her hips in bright orange georgette. He wanted to soothe the suspicion out of her, see trust and warmth in her eyes, he needed to be with her alone, face to face, without the annoying company of that shrill fool in the bus or that girl slowly on her way herself to resembling a bun-unda. The mother with her firm lemony skin would just chat to him of this and that and from time to time he’d lift the flesh of her forearm to his lips; they would drive slowly down unknown roads, just the two of them, with the van smoothly gobbling up the kilometres and him not even noticing how everything within him had melted, how the world, the choked drains and the dung, appeared soft and beautiful, and more unimportant than ever.

  Bichhwa came to stand beside him, to chew the fat and ask what their plans were, whether he himself should head back if Anguli had found some business or what. Anguli wondered who he was. One group of passengers had begun to get aggressive with the driver. Mother and daughter boarded the bus; the outline of the mother’s haunches when she climbed the first step etched itself in Anguli’s memory. Without a word, he turned and followed the shrill fool as he scurried off in search of a spot. Like every other male, he chose to piss into a lotus pond beside the road, more a five-metre-wide depression created by the incompetence of the civil engineers during the construction of the thoroughfare, a dip into which drained the slush and sewage of the neighbourhood, itself entirely illegal; the water of the pond was hidden by grey-green viscous matter and plastic sacs of garbage and yet it engendered, here and there, miraculous like life itself, blue lotuses.

  The husband liked Anguli’s manner, disarming, obsequious. First, though, he had to give free rein to his herd instinct and join the others in raving and ranting and shaking his fist in the bidi-smoking bus driver’s face. To get him to get a move on, Anguli, his eyes never leaving the woman’s cowled head behind the bus window, asked Bichhwa to drift about amongst the passengers announcing a taxi service to Allahabad. It was she, sure enough, who, nodding furiously and jabbing at herself with her forefinger, booked his van long before the others had even registered the lackadaisically murmured offer of the pimp from Maduahdiah.

  ‘How much?’

  Anguli replied to the husband, again gazing at the wife’s nose stud, that it was up to them to decide what a smooth, comfortable and exclusive ride with him over a hundred and twenty kilometres, and to such a hallowed destination, would be worth. The husband understood him to mean that the passengers at journey’s end would be free to haggle forever over its cost; delighted, he pranced about on his short fat legs, got in the way of the conductor chhokras and insisted that his two gigantic suitcases be lowered first of all from the roof of the bus. He was less delighted to learn of the tie-in with Bichhwa.

  ‘He’s my business partner. He sits in front with me and helps with the luggage and in case we have a puncture and all that.’

  ‘But without him, my Misses can sit in front and Baby and I can be comfortable at the back and play cards. We have to be comfortable on such a long trip, you know.’

  Bichhwa was quite taken aback to learn that he was to fuck off for the day. ‘And the charas?’ he asked, puzzled.

  ‘Not to worry, I know Charandas. I’ll pick it up on the way back.’

  Heaven, driving slowly through the bullock carts and trucks with Misses beside him, his heart soaring and singing along with the hits from Deewaar and Namakhalal from the cassette player. Misses sat in the front seat surrounded by baskets, flasks and plastic boxes and twisted and turned incessantly to quench and feed the greed of the card players in the rear. He drove most cautiously, taken unawares by the sensation of belonging to a human family unit in a confined motile space, one completely his because within his power to sustain or destroy. He maintained a steady speed, changing gears only at those moments when Misses raised herself and swivelled to pass something to the gluttons so that his hand could graze her sari and godwilling her left thigh. Through the traffic snarls and the unchanging landscape, she felt without pause the heat of his body and his ardour; it made her uncomfortable, it also made her melt. Most of all, in the way he didn’t look at her but was aware even of her breathing, she sensed that, in his intensity, he in a manner had already possessed her.

  She asked her husband in mime whether she could offer some of the fried crap that they were stuffing themselves with to the driver.

  ‘Yes yes why not,’ agreed he magnanimously. She hesitantly held a plastic packet out to Anguli who smiled, gently pushed it away only to be able to touch her hand and, without taking his eyes off the road, patted his stomach to indicate that it was still full of bun-unda. Midway into the drive, the expected happened. The child considerably diminished her father’s affection for her by throwing up all over his lap and his winning hand of cards. Then with him yelling shrilly at everybody and the daughter moaning and choking on her puke and threatening to disgorge again, Misses revealed herself to be the one in command. She passed dampened napkins to the rear, calmed the child down, got her to slide back her window and herself scoured with eagle eye, to her left and then past Anguli’s shoulder, the outskirts of unprepossessing Gopiganj for a handpump or any source of water. They drove on in that stink till Anguli pulled up beside the mother of all water sources.

  ‘But it’s Ma Ganga,’ muttered Misses.

  ‘She cleanses everything. Puke would be child’s play to her.’

  Without any fuss, without losing time, Anguli made them all whole again. He took the daughter by the hand and hopped over the filth to the water’s edge. It was so icy that it made her shiver and squeal and laugh. Wanting to be part of things, the father, unaided, hopped, shivered, squealed and laughed as well. With the bucket from the van, Anguli ferried water up several times to scrub and sluice down its stinking interior. Misses stood guard over their belongings and watched him at work. He was thorough and neat in his movements, she lik
ed that very much. After he had finished, to the sounds of filial frolicking from the water’s edge, with her in the rear seat of the van rearranging their things, with his body hiding his doings from the world passing by, he put his hand up her sari and massaged the warmth between her thighs. Her lips parted. She couldn’t look up but continued with excessive concentration needlessly to take things out of one basket and put them into another. Minutes passed. She stirred, she panicked that he would never take his hand away. When he did, it was to unclasp from around his neck his gold necklace and put it about hers.

  ‘Please.’

  ‘No. Please.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘He will kill me.’

  To rekindle certain ideas in his head was quite the wrong thing to have done to Anguli. He struggled with her obtuseness and the violence within himself.

  ‘You have to wear it because I love you.’ Even before she quite realized what he was doing, he slammed shut the doors of the van, started it and drove off. He used for curtains the handful of clothes that he kept in his one single bag. He sat in the back seat and made her straddle him, her sari up and all about her neck. He pulled it down so that he could see the nose stud and the face tender and helpless like a pink bud.

  ‘I want to know where you come from. Please. I need to see you from time to time.’

  ‘We live in Delhi. Dilshad Garden.’

  She gave him the details. She unclasped his necklace and didn’t look him in the eye when she stowed it in her handbag. She remained in the back seat adjusting her clothes, face and hair while he removed the curtains and put them back in his bag. They returned to pick up husband and daughter; even before the van had rolled to a stop, she’d begun to whine about how long that ruffianly driver of theirs had taken to have the petrol tank topped up.

  And yet he killed them.

  He took back his necklace from her handbag and methodically searched their luggage for money. He continued to think of Misses tenderly thereafter. She’d been a beautiful person. They were rare. And thoughts of her darkened and obscured many subsequent events. For one, it seemed as though falling in love made him more attractive as a catch because at the end of that same January, within hours of each other—and years after he’d believed his eligibility to have dried up—he received two marriage proposals. The first was for the sister of a coolie at the Jabalpur railway station and the second, more tempting, for the widowed daughter of a paanwala who himself couldn’t keep his hands off Anguli. And he wanted to turn them both down because of the memory of her warmth and her face like a pink bud. No one could match up to that. He became more taciturn than ever. Then, as the days passed, he found himself looking around to see whom he could fall in love with, for women who in their features unexpectedly reincarnated her, buying two sad bananas for instance from a meagre basket and eyeing the seller’s nose stud, not seeing the proferred change in the extended hand because the texture of its skin had resurrected with a rush that other moment with that other woman.

  A post office. A postcard.

  Respected Madhumita-ji,

  Pranaam. This is your faithful admirer who has been listening to you on the radio now for the last twenty years. I adore your voice and your manner of saying things. Your way of teasing your listeners is extremely attractive and has improved with age, so much so that often my hands automatically begin to clench and unclench themselves during your programme. Could you please play for me and for my Madam Dilshad ‘Mera dil machal gaya to mera kya kusoor hai?’ from the film Bahaaren Phir Bhi Aayengi? We both love that song. It was playing on the radio during our last meeting. To tell you the truth, she has left me and I miss her very much. My fault, I admit it before all your listeners. I’d asked her to marry me and she refused. Please do not disappoint me. Do as I ask and PLAY MY SONG!

  Madam Dilshad joined his fairy godmother in the pantheon in his head; one deity killed, the other beaten black and blue but left breathing. In the dead of that winter, one resurrected the other. His love for the second had been more carnal, he started to dream of returning to the first for the same pleasure. They began participating together in his dreams, Madam Dilshad and his fairy godmother, the living and the dead, and his reveries became increasingly bloody affairs; he realized during those fantasies that he didn’t like leaving alive those whom he loved.

  It does not always follow from the range of a well-travelled person’s wanderings that he must be imbued with width of vision. He might travel to get away from home or only to confirm his prejudices or, like Anguli, he might move from place to place without thinking, just being, virtually like a Zen adept, his mind both a sieve and an undiscriminating camera clicking away. He didn’t like being probed for reasons; when his acquaintances asked him to stay on a month longer till, say, Holi, he shrugged his shoulders and looked abashed and left very early the next morning without saying goodbye. And whenever the talk turned to violence, to a local gangrape, victim mutilated, or a caste war, sixteen dead, he, embarrassed, smiled foolishly and kept his views, on religion and sex and violence and death, to himself. Indeed, he would have been hard put to it to frame them, to clarify even to himself that he didn’t believe in an afterlife because he couldn’t think that far ahead, that in any case nothing in the hereafter could exceed, when the mood descended upon him, the joy of killing.

  A second post office. Another postcard.

  I hope that you are in good health. I am well. I am outside your house in Bengali Market. It is more crowded now. I hope that you still stay here. I leave behind for you an invitation to my wedding. Even though she is a widow, she comes from a good family. At last again I shall have a home, sleep in a bed instead of the van. I might have to give that up. No parking space. Anyway, I’ve asked for a new car. I like the new red Maruti Zen. I’ve been invited to join the family paan business. We took a good one year to negotiate. Now if ever you want to contact me for something, you have an address in Jabalpur. Pranaam.

  Wondering what else to say after ten years, he had looked up and about him for inspiration; beyond the car window in that December fog, thick and dirty like the stuffing of a mattress, he had at first seen nothing. He was, as always, in solitary confinement, in a translucent box of his own making. Its window panes were misted over by his own exhalations. He pushed down the lock of the door, prepared his small chillum and smoked it. He wanted to ask his fairy godmother if she was still in touch with his father. He would’ve liked to invite him to the wedding too. Of course, no one would attend; at the ceremony, he’d see just new faces. Including that of the bride, older than him and with her features disfigured by her fortunately-late husband. Never mind, she cooked fabulously. The stomach was the body’s most important organ, why deny it. Inches away from the driver’s door, a cyclist paused to wrap something even tighter about his head, then pressed his left hand against the window for balance. To confirm a feature that he had sensed, Anguli rubbed with his sleeve the condensation off his side of the pane. The cyclist’s little finger was missing.

  ‘Ghosts in a bloody rotten world,’ he said aloud, his breath as thick as the fog, ‘Go on, fuck off.’

  The cyclist appeared to move off leaving behind his hand against the window. Anguli shut his eyes tight and leaned back in his seat to prepare himself. He’d cut off the finger of a victim just once, but he couldn’t immediately remember when and where, just that it was long long ago. Ghosts of course had no sense of time, they squeezed out when they could, and that fog was perfect, its cold and thick greyness had drawn them out of itself. He had of late, ever since he’d decided to lead a new, settled existence, been expecting them, these visits from the lives that he’d snuffed out. Perhaps they’d already eaten up his fairy godmother—for whom then was he to leave the wedding invitation? The ghoul’s hand seemed to beat an authoritative rata-tat on the window. They’d crush his skull with their fangs, suck his brains out, but he’d go down fighting, how could any darkness that they revealed be more profound than the blackness within him.
It was everywhere, in every heart and every life. Different religions called it different names, some called it evil, some suffering, some ignorance and illusion but fundamentally it was the same, just blackness at the core of creation. Life was a lotus, its sap the very scum that had nourished its roots.

  Anguli paused, for the moment emotionally exhausted, and returned to gnawing at his sugarcane. He had never spoken so much in his life and yet had so much more left to say. When he had calmed down a little, he looked in Nirip’s direction, almost shyly, and muttered, ‘And you?’

  Scratching reflectively at a mosquito bite above his left wrist, Nirip took a moment to reply. ‘My story? Well, you could say that my life began three weeks ago, when I turned fifty. Here, not getting any younger, my mistress said, give yourself a birthday present, go and get a medical check-up. And you do, the first thorough examination of your body, and it turns your life upside down.’