No God in Sight

by Altaf Tyrewala

  We are too early. Pig-guts! In our mad-monkey rush for illicit thrills, we have completed in an hour a journey that should have taken at least twice as long. It is eight p.m. Samudra Mahal has not even opened. The sign above the dance bar is still unlit. Damn! There are waves around ‘Samudra Mahal’; the ‘S’ is a topless mermaid stretching with an erotic lethargy. All this would have looked so good in neon.

  Someplace else, then? No. The one who suggested this place is angry. He goes to ask when it will open.

  He comes back grinning: the place is open. There is no electricity, but it will be back in some time. No, he will not allow us to go elsewhere. Please, he pleads with the other two, for they have promised to pay for this evening, the women in here are to die for !

  Okay, okay. We park our bikes. We backslap and kick each other as we approach the entrance. For men in their late twenties, we are worryingly juvenile.

  These are moments I relish: transitional moments, when the tedium of the day and the promise of pleasure just minutes away are both pressingly real. I can still smell the shop on my clothes. But I can also already imagine the smell of smoke inside the dance bar and the flavors of appetizers drifting on drafts from the air-conditioning. The cage will be replaced with a stage; the poop-streaked grilling with disco lights; the chickens will turn into bar girls dressed in clothes revealing cleavages and midriffs. The girls will be smiling, their bodies moving in sync to whatever dissonance is currently parading as music. I will, as usual, fall in love with one of the dancers and convince myself that she, as against the others, is chaste and innocent. Such moments make me happy; they have got to be right.

  I, because I am ahead—ever the eager beaver—go first through the wooden door of Samudra Mahal, watched by two guys in neckties and a bearded man. There is an unlit passage behind the main entrance. What is it? Something does not feel right. In passages like these the day should begin to shrivel, and the night should awaken like a woman from deep slumber. This passage is too warm, too silent. Past the passage, I push open a tinted glass door. No! Of course! It’s the electricity. There’s no electricity! ‘Let’s go elsewhere, boss, come on!’ I say to my friends, I insist, and turn around to leave. But the other three do not want to be bothered. ‘This will be no fun,’ I say, ‘let’s go, boss, please!’

  Three emphatic NOs.

  The restaurant is hot, silent, and dark, except for two tube lights burning on battery. Conversations stop when we enter. Eyeballs rotate. The air is sagging like an overloaded clothesline. Too many things have been suspended in here.

  Three tiers of tables are arranged in a semicircle facing a raised platform. On one side of the room, around one tube light, sits a group of women and men. The four of us sit on the opposite side, around the second tube light, where five other men are already seated. Employees and clients. These battery-operated tube lights are made in China. I can tell. Their gloss and curved contours cannot conceal the cheeky smile of fraudulence. A battery-operated fan has been directed at us. Touching.

  We know we have merged with the scenery when a woman giggles and breaks the silence. Conversations resume, but only among the employees. We clients are too busy stealing glances at the dancers. They seem fantastical in the dim light. Depending on how they are facing the tube light, only parts of their bodies are illuminated: someone’s left cheek, someone’s arm, someone’s mirror-studded bustier. The talk is ribald. A woman is being teased for something she swears she did not do. Another woman has a fever. A man is on the phone ordering ice.

  What nonsense! We should not be seeing and hearing all this. I want the finished product. Those breasts should be in motion. The one in the white halter-top—her hair should be strewn over her undulating shoulders. And why am I still thinking? The lights and loud music ought to have stunned me by now.

  They should have kept the doors sealed. The wait would have made us hungrier. But to allow us in like this, and to seat us here in the dark, is to replicate the tedium that we have come in here to escape.

  Fuckers, I whisper, let’s just go somewhere else; this is depressing. At least one of my friends agrees. The other two are not so sure.

  I stand up. I am alone. Now all three are not so sure. Fuck ya’ll, I say, and move toward the door.

  ‘Sir, sir!’ A man in a waiter’s uniform comes running. ‘What’s the problem? Please wait, lights will come on any moment, don’t go, sir!’

  I want to smash the bastard’s nose for drawing everyone’s attention to me. ‘No, no,’ I say, ‘I’m going, I can’t waste my night waiting for your bloody lights.’

  ‘Arrey, sir, don’t be angry na,’ a woman says. I look past the waiter’s shoulder. A bar girl is winding her way to me. Her black sari is hitched way below her navel, her white sleeveless blouse is cutting into her flesh. So what if the light is dim, I am a bat where these things are concerned.

  ‘Sit na, sir, please, don’t go.’ The bar girl is yanking me by the hand. The touch of her soft palm floods my loins. She is not young. My bat eyes fail to ascertain her exact age, but I can tell from the rotundity of her upper arms that the woman has been around longer than any of the girls.

  I yield to her tugging. I am pulled to the tables and seated with the other clients.

  ‘This is for you, dear,’ the bar girl says.

  She turns to her colleagues and claps a rudimentary beat. The other girls whoop and giggle. Then they too start clapping—like gypsies around a campfire, like eunuchs, like soft-spoken women calling out to someone far, far away. Clap. Clap, clap.

  The bar girl turns to us clients. She hooks the loose end of her black sari into her skirt.

  And then she starts—to my utter embarrassment, in the near darkness, to the simple beat of hands clapping—to dance.

  Whistles go up from the clients’ side.

  ‘Chhaawee!’ two men cheer.

  The bar girl places one hand on her hip, the other on her head, and begins twitching and lurching. She jumps from foot to foot. She twirls, prances, hops, jiggles her breasts and then her buttocks, all to the sound of hands clapping.

  I have been re-seated at the very front, away from my friends, with no face-saving distance between the girl and me.

  The men seated behind me pat my shoulders. One man flashes the thumbs-up sign at me.

  I loosen up. I start to savor the impromptu performance. My eyes turn frantic, trying to take in as much as possible. My dick turns half-hard and will remain so all through the evening.

  The man on my right sticks two fingers in his mouth and blows a shrill whistle. And one more. And one more. ‘Phhhhiissst… phhhhhissstt… phhhhhisssssstttt!’

  The clapping turns synchronized.

  The bar girl’s movements take on a fresh vigor. As she shimmies on the floor, her movements become affected, louder, the sweep of her limbs turns wider, her steps go from suggestive to farcical.

  A hesitation descends upon us clients. The cheers and whistles die down. What the…

  The girl is not quite dancing any more. She swaggers about like a drunk. She twitches like an epileptic. Lurches. Marches around like a soldier. Rolls on the floor. Slaps her own face. Paces back and forth like a tigress. Huh?

  Then she starts beating her own chest. Whack! Whack! She paces the floor and beats her chest. The other girls continue to clap like machines. Thuck! Thuck! The bar girl rolls on the floor again. She stands up. Leaps into the air. Slaps herself again. Grabs her private parts.

  Two clients stand up.

  But of course!

  The clapping falls to pieces, a staccato mess. A waiter comes running—the same one who had stopped me from leaving.

  ‘Tell her to stop this madness,’ one of the men who have stood up says to the waiter. ‘What’s this nonsense!’

  The bar girl stops. She just stops: with her right hand on her groin, and her left hand clutching her behind. ‘Why? What happened? You didn’t enjoy?’ the girl asks.

  The two men do not answer. They storm past the
bar girl and approach the entrance. The waiter tries to stop them. The two customers are adamant. The waiter grabs one of them by the arm. In response to this gesture of friendly insistence, he—the waiter—is rewarded with a punch on his right shoulder and a laser beam stream of abuses. Sisterfucker. Son of a whore. Pimp!

  I squirm in silence. What have I started!

  And what did the woman think she was doing?

  Our eyes meet. Because I am closest, and the light is dim, only I can see the bar girl’s malicious smile. She flicks her eyebrows at me.

  What? What’s with all this? The defiance on her face.

  The hostility. Is she angry? Why is she angry? She was the one who stopped me from walking out. She offered to dance. And then she was the one who made a complete fool of herself.

  And now why is she flicking her eyebrows at me? And why this baring of teeth? I did not force her to do anything. I thought she was happy to dance for us. If she was not, why did she volunteer?

  I get up and join my friends in the rear row.

  I am greeted with much backslapping and whispered well dones.

  I try to come up with smart retorts. I try to laugh. But it is so dark back here. And wherever I look, I can see the bar girl’s bitter stinging smile superimposed onto the darkness.

  This is not fair. It is really not.

  She should not dance if it makes her unhappy. Someone should tell the bar girl that. Someone should tell her that it is wrong to do something that makes you unhappy.

  And now I have the rest of the evening—a whole evening—to take joy in someone else’s unhappiness.

  The Rest of the Enjoyable Evening

  The two customers who had walked out of the bar returned.

  They were followed by two men in neckties and an obese bearded man, the bar owner: the three men whom Jamal Seth had encountered while entering Samudra Mahal.

  On learning why the two customers had left the establishment, the bar owner requested the two not to go: Come, come inside with me, I’ll look into this.

  As the group walked back in to the shadowy premises, one of the walkout customers yelled at the bar owner, ‘Did we say anything? Did we mind waiting for the lights? Then why did she have to insult us with that circus? Dancing like that. As if we have no sense of what looks nice!’

  Jamal Seth wished he could disappear; he knew where this would go.

  The bar owner demanded to know which girl had danced like a monkey.

  Shakila, the one in the black sari and white sleeveless blouse, stood up. ‘What do you mean?’ She stormed over to the owner. ‘With no lights or music, I tried my best! What else could I do anyway? He…’ (and here Shakila pointed to Jamal Seth who was, for all practical purposes, dying), ‘he was about to walk out! He said he couldn’t waste his night waiting for our bloody lights!’

  The owner glanced at the junior manager who had been in the bar all along.

  The junior manager confirmed Shakila’s version of the fracas with a nod.

  Because she had done nothing wrong—ostensibly, at least—Shakila ceased to matter. Mankind closed its ranks, crowding the bar girl out.

  The bar owner embraced the two walkout customers. He requested them to sit down again, forget about what just happened, would they like a beer, free beers for all nine customers kind enough to wait for the power. The bar owner forced a handshake with Jamal Seth, joked with him: sweet are the fruits of patience, etc., etc. The beers were not ice-cold when they arrived. But because they were free, none of the customers protested.

  Another group of men entered Samudra Mahal.

  There was a sudden crackle in the air. A sudden hiccup of the air-conditioning and a premonitory flicker of the lights.

  Male voices buzzed with approval when the electricity returned to the bar.

  The music snapped to life: a jolt of treble and bass that made the floor rumble.

  More patrons entered.

  The bar girls emerged from the dressing room after touching up their makeup and adjusting their costumes that had wilted in the heat and the dark.

  The seven bar girls, dressed differently to suit the varied tastes of patrons, filed onto the dance floor.

  The music bypassed their minds and hearts and spoke to their bodies. Their bodies started to respond. A twitch here. A sway there.

  ‘Come on ladies, we don’t have all night!’ a manager shouted.

  The bar girls started—breasts and buttocks moving up-down up-down with robotic precision. Hands jogging, heads swinging, their long black hair whipping each other’s faces. Beams of blue, red, and orange strobe lights dissected the dance floor. The first gust of air-conditioning chilled the dancers’ sweat-drenched blouses. Customers’ gazes darted across the barroom and clung to the women’s bodies like bats. The music intensified. Waiters ran about with glasses of alcohol and buckets of ice and plates of roasted meat…

  Much Later That Night

  A taxi carrying a lone female passenger was zipping through empty streets, past shuttered shops and footpaths strewn with sleeping tramps.

  The breeze was soggy. Summer’s heartbeat had quickened. As usual, the vibe of monsoon had arrived long before its official date of onset.

  At a crossroad, the taxi driver was forced to stop in deference to a water tanker making a laborious U-turn.

  A grubby, ghastly beggar, meaning to try his luck one last time at the end of a luckless day, arose from the footpath and approached the taxi. He beseeched the lone woman in the backseat to spare some change.

  The woman, with her cheeks aching more than her legs (for more than the dancing, it was the simulation of delight that exhausted her every evening), suppressed her philanthropic instincts. Tonight, she let her hands lie limp on her handbag, containing four hundred and sixty rupees in denominations of ten, earned as tips from customers.

  The beggar rested his hands on the edge of the taxi’s window.

  The woman would dole out nothing. Neither would she touch her forehead and beg the beggar’s forgiveness. Tonight, she wouldn’t even look at his kind.

  ‘Aye, memsaab, in God’s name, give some money for food’ and other such age-old appeals had no effect.

  The woman lifted her hand. The beggar grew hopeful.

  The woman groped around for the pedal on the inside of the taxi’s door. She wound it clockwise and, with each revolution of the pedal, the transparent window rose bit by bit like a flag.

  The beggar retracted his hands.

  The woman had walled herself inside the taxi, her eyes set stonily on the road ahead.

  The beggar turned around and walked back to the footpath. He lay down under a bus stop. The taxi sped away behind him.

  He regretted having tried at all. What a waste of precious energy. The beggar believed he had received nothing from the woman in the taxi.

  He was wrong.

  He had been given. The virus transmitted. The score settled.

  The woman in the taxi had made the beggar—a man, a representative of his detestable kind—endure the agony of his own insignificance.

  (Not that it amounted to much.)

  When You Are a Beggar…

  You are free. You can go anywhere. Do anything. No one knows your name. Nobody—not even you—can remember when you were born, how old you are, or how you came to be here.

  You just are.

  You can shit wherever, piss wherever, sleep everywhere and anywhere. You will eat anything. No matter how putrid, no matter how many mouths have bitten into that paratha in the trash can, you’ll take it. You can wear anything; sometimes nothing at all. You could be lying naked under the seat of a jam-packed train and no one would even notice.

  It is not easy to die when you are a beggar. Life clings to you like a rabid stray with its teeth sunken into your flesh. You manage to survive riots, floods, blackouts, morchas… and then you multiply. You father innumerable children with innumerable women who lie by the sides of the roads with their mouths and legs wide open. When you
are a beggar you are always horny, always hungry. Ever-ready for one more fuck, one more morsel, one more rupee to buy one more speck of industrial-strength smack.

  You discover that with time enough and a burning candle there is nothing that can’t be coaxed into yielding its narcotic essence—rubber slippers, plastic bottles, wrappers, polished wood, colored glass…the fumes are heavy and acrid. They swamp your lungs.

  The resulting coma is deep, blank, and absolute.

  Days elapse in moments.

  When you regain consciousness it could be afternoon or midnight and you could be anywhere—in a gutter, under a stationary train, or on the traffic island of Sion Junction. There is no telling how you got there. (There is no telling anything when you are a beggar.) You just get up and run. You scramble for the nearest shadowy corner where you are certain to find, huddled under filthy blankets, dirt-black people concocting the means to flee the world you have just reentered. You don’t speak to them; they don’t even glance at you. The understanding is of a superior order. The chef is efficient; he is also just a twelve-year-old urchin. You wonder if he is your son. When he hands you a slit of foil with a drop of fuming battery acid, you want to kiss his hands.

  And then you black out.

  There is no pleasure in a beggar’s high, no relief. It is black and airless, like being tied to the seabed. While your mind floats in ether, starvation drags your body around like a toy. The searing pain in your veins makes you run to and fro looking for something to burn and inhale. And always there is the ache of semen piling up every second, seeking release, seeking some soft moist crevice in which to spill itself—a dog, a chicken, a dead body…