Paradise and Other Stories

by Khushwant Singh

  The mulberry came into its full glory at the time of the water festival, Holi, in March. Its invisible flowers turned into light green caterpillar-like fruit full of sweet juice. Humans vied with parakeets to be the first to get them. Street urchins threw sticks and stones to knock them down. Within a week the tree was denuded of all its fruit and then all it had to offer man, bird and beast was its cool shade. Stray dogs were chased away by the people living in the block closest to the tree, who tried to grab space under it for their cars against the scorching sun. Since Vijay was an early riser and worked at home, he did not have much problem getting the shadiest spot directly under a huge branch for his twenty-year-old car, a beige-coloured, temperamental Fiat called Annie. Although his car was regularly messed up by bird droppings, it remained cool through the day. It was during the long summer months that Vijay strengthened his personal relationship with the mulberry tree. He greeted it with a ‘Hi’ when he went to take Annie out for a drive and a ‘Cheerio’ when he parked her there for the night.

  The mulberry tree was a constant in Vijay’s life. He awoke to the bird-babble rising from its branches and had his first drink every evening at the hour when the owlets announced sunset. He brought out his woollens when its branches became bare, and began using his air-conditioner when they were heavy with foliage. It was a comfortable, sedate routine.

  Then one day the tree almost killed Vijay, and his life was thrown out of gear.

  *

  It was the month of June; temperatures had soared into the forties. One way of remaining cool was to stay in an air-conditioned room. Another, and a healthier way, was to spend an hour or two in a swimming pool which cooled one off for the evening. Though Vijay felt lethargic after his siesta, he forced himself out of his apartment one particularly hot afternoon and walked to his car under the mulberry tree. It was oppressive and still. Not a breath of air; not a leaf stirred. The sky was a bleached grey. It looked ominously like a lull before a storm. He saw a wall of muddy brown advancing from the west, with kites wheeling above it. At this time of the year, dust storms were common; they blew in and out with blind fury, uprooting trees and telegraph poles and spreading layers of dust everywhere. Vijay thought it wise to get away as fast as he could. He had barely reversed ten yards when a dust-laden gale swept across the colony at devilish speed. He heard a loud crack, like that of thunder following lightning, and the enormous branch under which his car had been parked came crashing down on the tarmac. The earth trembled beneath him.

  Vijay switched off the engine and sat still in the car for several minutes. The two chowkidars of the colony ran up to check if he was all right. He waved them away without rolling down his window, and just to prove that he was not rattled, turned Annie around and drove out. His hands were shaking. It was best to be somewhere else for a while.

  The storm had blown away as fast as it came. Branches of trees littered the roads. An auto-rickshaw had turned turtle on Mathura Road and a small crowd had gathered around it. Vijay slowed down, wanting to know if the driver had survived, then changed his mind. By the time he got to the club pool, a cool, clean breeze was blowing. For an hour he had the pool all to himself. When other members and their children started streaming in, he came out of the water and stretched himself out on a poolside chair. He covered his face with his bath towel and went over the scene of destruction caused by the storm.

  He had had the narrowest of escapes. Instead of being comfortably stretched out on a deck chair, he could have been in the morgue of some hospital with a smashed skull, and every bone in his body broken. What was even more unsettling was the manner in which he had escaped certain death: he did not remember a single day when his old Fiat had warmed up and started in less than half a minute at the very least, but today it had started instantly. A few seconds later and both he and Annie would have been crushed. Was it God’s will that he should live a little longer?

  Vijay was not sure about God, nor about providence. He had never given these things much thought. Now he did. Half-forgotten stories of providential escape from certain death came to his mind. Some instances that he remembered reading about were extremely bizarre. One was of a plane flying from Dublin to London’s Heathrow Airport. It caught fire as it was approaching London. The pilot decided to make an emergency landing on an airstrip near a suburb called Mill Hill. As it descended, the plane hit the chimney of a house and broke into two. All the passengers and crew were killed, except a stewardess who was sitting at the tail end of the plane. She was thrown out of the burning aircraft and into the swimming pool in the garden of the house. Not a bone broken, not a scratch on her body. Why was she singled out for survival, and by whom?

  Some years later there was the case of a man standing on the crowded platform of a London Underground station. He fell on the tracks as the train was coming out of the tunnel. The train came to an abrupt halt just as its wheels touched the man’s body. The authorities decided to reward the train driver for his vigilance, but he was an honest man and refused to accept the reward. He had not stopped the train, he said; someone in the train must have pulled the emergency cord, though he couldn’t imagine why, since no one in the enclosed compartments could have seen what lay ahead on the tracks. Enquiries were made, but no passenger claimed to have pulled the emergency cord. Whose was the unseen hand that had brought the train to a sudden halt in the nick of time? Why had the man’s life been spared? Was it to allow him time to finish some task left unfinished? Or was it to compensate him for some good deed he had done?

  But the most mind-boggling was a case in Vijay’s own country. A man was travelling in a crowded bus along a narrow mountain road. He took a window seat in the last row. Since it was autumn and the weather had turned chilly, he wrapped himself in his shawl and soon fell asleep. He awoke a few hours later when he felt something slimy around one of his ankles. It was a small snake which had found the man’s leg a warm place to hibernate for the winter. The man screamed. The bus came to a screeching halt. The driver, conductor and passengers rushed to the back of the bus but shrank back at the sight of the snake curled around the man’s ankle. No one had any idea what to do about it. The driver ran out of patience and suggested that the man slowly step out of the bus and sit on the parapet of the road with his leg exposed to the sun. It would induce the snake to leave him and find another dark, warm place and he could then get on the bus following them. The man did as he was told. The bus moved on. The snake behaved as had been predicted: it uncurled itself and slithered down the hillside. The man got on the following bus. A mile or so ahead they noticed the parapet of the road knocked down. The bus ahead of them was lying upside-down in the khud at the bottom of the hill. There were no survivors. The only one to escape was the man who had got off the bus because of the snake curled around his ankle.

  Vijay went over and over these incidents. He felt disoriented. He left the club as the evening came on. When he reached his colony, he parked his car just inside the gate and walked up to examine the damage the mulberry tree had suffered. The branch which had been wrenched out had left a nasty gash exposing a hollow trunk. The fallen branch had been hacked into pieces to be used as firewood and its leaves stripped off to feed goats. Lots of twigs were littered about the tarmac. No one had dared to park their cars under the tree. Though not superstitious, Vijay also avoided leaving his car near it. He found another place, close to his window. This time the old mulberry tree had failed to demolish him or his car, but he had an uneasy feeling that it had turned malevolent towards him. As he entered his dark apartment and fumbled for the light switch, the strange thought came to him that the tree was in the last leg of its life and had meant to take him with it.

  By the next morning everyone in the blocks of flats around the square was talking of Vijay’s miraculous escape from what must certainly have been the end of his life. They were used to seeing Annie occupy pride of place under the mulberry tree; they now saw her parked alongside his apartment, without a dent or even a scrat
ch on her body. His neighbours came to congratulate him and get details of the story. With every narration he made it sound more and more dramatic. ‘It was the will of the Ooperawala,’ some of his neighbours said, pointing heavenwards. ‘Inscrutable are His ways. If the good lord is your protector, no one can touch a hair on your head.’ A silver-haired great grandmother, whom Vijay knew to be close to a hundred years old, added, ‘No one can go before his time; no one can live a second beyond the span allotted to him.’ Most were agreed that Vijay must have done some good karma in his previous life and had been rewarded for it. God is your protector, they said. God is good and merciful. A faint smile came over Vijay’s face at this, as he recalled the lines of a popular film song:

  Ooperwala—very good very good

  Nicheywala—very bad very bad . . .

  It was an absurd song. But what he felt was no less absurd: till this morning he would have described himself as an agnostic; now, though not quite a believer, he felt like God’s chosen one.

  The morning papers had pictures of the havoc caused by the dust storm on their front pages. A huge neem tree had been uprooted in Chanakyapuri. It lay diagonally across the road and there was a Maruti under it, reduced to a crumpled sheet of metal. Fortunately, there had been no one in the car. A peepal stretched across another road in the Delhi University campus with three mangled cars under it. Four men and two women had been seriously injured and taken to hospital. A small child in one of the cars had escaped unscathed. The storm had taken a toll of five lives: two labourers sleeping under a tree, two cyclists hit by a hoarding which had collapsed on them, and an elderly lady who ran to save her pet Pekinese from a falling eucalyptus only to be crushed under it. Their deaths made news, but among his friends Vijay’s narrow escape was the bigger news. They came morning and evening, all with stories of their own: of people who did not get to the airport on time and missed their flights that went down; trains that people had missed that went off the tracks.

  The more Vijay heard these tales, the more he was convinced that he was someone special, above the common run of humanity. This added to his state of disorientation, because for as long as he could remember nothing very special had happened to him.

  From the block of flats in which Vijay lived, his story spread to the neighbouring Khan Market. The shops were agog with talk of his incredible luck.

  Vijay was known to most of the shopkeepers as he was seen in the market almost every evening, peering into shop windows, flipping through magazines displayed on the footpath, going into one bookshop after another and browsing around the shelves but rarely buying any books—they had become too expensive, and, in any case, as a freelance newspaper columnist he got more books to review than he could read. In the two antique shops, he examined figurines of Hindu gods and goddesses, garnet necklaces and brass artefacts, asked their price but never bought anything. In the music shops he hung about listening to tapes being played at the request of buyers. At the greengrocer’s he gaped awestruck at monstrous Korean apples, small-sized honey-sweet Japanese watermelons, avocado pears from Bangalore, fresh broccoli, baby corn, asparagus and artichokes. Their buyers were largely European and American diplomats and journalists who in Vijay’s opinion drew unacceptably large salaries and spoiled the market rates.

  Vijay did not like the shop-owners of Khan Market. They were single-minded in their pursuit of money: everything here was more expensive than in any other market in the city. There were other reasons why Vijay had no time for them. Most shop-owners were Punjabi refugees from Pakistan—in one of his columns he had described them as semi-literate parvenus who had converted their hatred for Pakistan to prejudice against all Muslims. They supported one or the other of the Hindu fundamentalist parties. Between them they had built a small temple behind the main market which represented their religious beliefs. Ostensibly it was a Krishna temple, Shri Gopal Mandir, named after the deity, and life-size statues of Krishna and his consort, Radha, were put up on the altar. But the temple also accommodated several other deities favoured by the shopkeepers who were masters at hedging their bets. So there was the monkey-god, Hanuman, on one side of the entrance gate and Goddess Durga, astride a lion, on the other. Inside, the left wall had the Sai Baba of Shirdi, with stubble on his chin, one leg over the other and peering into space, and next to him the Sai Baba of Puttaparti with his halo of fuzzy hair and a pudgy hand raised in blessing. There was also a black granite Shivalinga, and in the cubicle next to it, idols of Shiva’s consort Parvati and his elephant-headed son, Ganesha. ‘To every Hindu his or her own God or Goddess’ was the market motto. The only one on whom all were agreed as the supreme divinity was Lakshmi, the Goddess of Wealth.

  Vijay did not need the blessings of the many deities housed in the temple, just as he had no need for much of what was sold in Khan Market. The only things he bought were a packet of cigarettes and a couple of paans. He put one paan in his mouth, kept another in his pocket to chew after dinner, lit a cigarette and launched upon his hour-long wanderings through the market. When anyone asked him why he made the rounds of Khan Market every evening, he answered, ‘To see the raunaq. I like watching the happy crowds.’ And he would quote the Urdu poet Zauq: ‘I pass through the bazaar (of the world)/There is nothing I want to buy.’

  There were others who, like Vijay, came to Khan Market every evening for the raunaq of multicoloured lights, fancy cars and trendy people going from shop to shop. Vijay recognized many of the regulars and even exchanged smiles with a few, but rarely spoke to them. There was a woman, in particular, who attracted Vijay’s attention and curiosity. She was not a regular but came to the market two or three times a week, not to see the raunaq but to do her shopping. She came in a chauffeur-driven car which was parked at the end of the market, facing the temple. She emerged from the car, always carrying a plastic handbag, crossed the road and went past the temple to another market which had a liquor store. She returned shortly afterwards to dump the bag full of liquor bottles in her car. Then she took out another bag, this time of black canvas, and strolled along the shops at a leisurely pace, stopping at every bookshop window. The only shop she entered was The Book Shop, which was classier than the others and played soft Western classical music at all hours of the day. It warmed Vijay towards the woman, since this was his favourite bookshop too, though he only ever bought his weekly magazines from it. He never entered the shop while the woman was inside. He loitered near the entrance till she emerged, usually half an hour later, and tailed her as she proceeded round the market to the greengrocer’s and the butcher’s.

  When she returned to her car, she handed over the shopping bag to her driver, leaned against the bonnet and lit a cigarette. She surveyed the scene around her as she smoked, unbothered by the looks some of the people coming from the temple gave her. When she had finished her cigarette, she stamped the stub under her sandals—the same bright red pair each time, Vijay had noticed—and ordered the driver: ‘Chalo’. Two doors slammed shut and the Honda City eased out of the parking lot and sped away.

  Vijay could not make out why this woman attracted his attention more than other visitors to Khan Market. It was true that he was immediately drawn towards Indian women who smoked and drank: to him, they were liberated women, possibly amenable to entering into frankly sexual relationships, no strings attached. Yet there were several other women he met at parties who also smoked and drank nonchalantly but left no impression on him. What was it about this woman? She had cropped black hair, thicker than any he had seen on another head, and while it was true that he liked short hair on women, that could not be the only reason for the attraction. As for looks, though she had a pleasant face, shapely breasts and an impressive posterior that protruded invitingly, a good number of women who came to the market were better looking.

  Why did he follow her around, then? And why was it that he looked forward to seeing her but did not want to get any closer to her and strike up a conversation? It was as if he was afraid of ruining something. His
infatuation was a mystery to him. So was she. He tried to guess facts about her life. She usually wore a salwar-kameez, but no bindi on her forehead nor sindhoor in the parting of her hair. At first he thought she might be Muslim or Christian, till he noticed she had a mangalsutra around her neck. Evidently she was Hindu and married. He could not make out where in India she came from: she could be Punjabi, Rajasthani, from UP or Maharashtra. He gave her names: Usha, Aarti, Menaka. Some evenings, having his drinks, he thought of her and felt warm and mellow. But it never occurred to him to do anything more than follow her around quietly.

  A few evenings after the branch of the mulberry tree tried but failed to kill him, things changed.

  Vijay saw the woman in the market a little earlier than her usual time. He followed her, as usual, a few steps behind. She went inside The Book Shop. And without thinking about it, he walked into the shop after her. He pretended to browse, picking out a book, reading the blurb, putting it back and pulling out another, as he kept inching closer to her. He heard her ask the proprietress, ‘I’m looking for a suitable birthday gift for a boy of fifteen.’