Fairy Tales at Fifty

by Upamanyu Chatterjee

  ‘Have you thought, bete Jhabua, of what you want to be when you grow up?’

  ‘Badi-mummy-ji, I want to be Angulimala and run after the Buddha. Failing which, I want to join the Army.’

  Who was she? Clearly one of his father’s clients with a soft spot for him and his ministrations. And why did Jayadev take only him, Anguli, to meet her and not Bakra? Clearly because of his, Anguli’s, deportment and personality. Those answers satisfied the boy and he felt no need to delve further. He did long to learn, though, that that tall, handsome and posh woman was his actual, his biological, mother. He wanted very much to, but didn’t dare hint to her that if it were so, then to make up for lost time and give him the nourishment that he’d missed, she should suckle him even though he would in some months turn fifteen. He’d been told by Bakra’s mum, that dull unfeeling bitch, that he’d in fact been borne by some louse-infested slut in some Bombay slum near Chunabhatti; she’d been prevented from aborting only by Jayadev’s promise to take the infant away. He’d salted away that tale of his origins to kindle his rage with if by any chance in the future it waned. Unlikely that it would but one never knew. A thousand people to take care of and so little time to do it in was usually what he felt, but he’d dimly sensed already that the real lord of the world was the Unexpected.

  She too was a wanderer, his fairy godmother, like Angulimala, like Jayadev. Anguli understood that. She didn’t stay in Agra in that house in Civil Lines all year round, she merely arranged to meet Jayadev there when the need arose, or so the boy believed. She was rich and, like a migratory bird, she moved with the seasons from one habitation to another, from Indore to Delhi to Simla to Bombay. She gave Anguli the impression that she was restless because she was deeply unhappy. At night, he dreamed of taking her in his arms and stroking, squeezing and crushing the sorrow out of her so that she should smile again.

  On the last day of each visit, they would get themselves photographed, first the three of them together, Anguli and his fairy godmother sitting, with Jayadev standing deferentially behind her, and then Jayadev smilingly would step out of the frame to one side and the photographer at Radiant Photo Studio, just beyond Surya Nagar, would fussily click the two of them together, demure and staring moonfacedly at the camera. Anguli himself had never seen any of the snaps because he always left Agra for home before they were ready; in fact, ordinary, daily-round photographs, either of himself or of anyone whom he personally knew, he had never seen, snapshots of himself climbing a tree or of Bakra’s mum screeching barbed pleasantries at a neighbour. He didn’t quite know that people could, and did, take such photos just for fun, for keepsakes, to nudge on a rainy day one’s remembrance of the past. Certainly no one in the village had a camera and the nearest photo studio was at Bharatpur; photographers were hired well in advance only to cover weddings. And each time while leaving her, he would be so blue and so distracted by her presents that he wouldn’t remember the snaps; later, in the haze of the passing days, dully waiting for the next visit, he would be so taken up by the materiality of the gifts at hand, the feel of the Bata slippers, the texture of the tericot pants, and by the memory of the novelties actually savoured, of the ice-cold Kissan orange squash and the badaam sherbet and the chaat at the gates of St John’s College, that he would quite simply allow to settle into sludge his first spark of curiosity at what he and his fairy godmother would look like snug in a photograph.

  ‘These snaps,’ she said when they stepped out of the photo studio into the chaos of the bazaar, ‘are between you and me and my sister and her son, who is also my son. Don’t tell anybody.’ He hadn’t understood, of course, but he could keep a secret, even one that he didn’t quite follow. And then ‘—What do you really and truly want,’ she asked him suddenly, ‘more than all the wonders of the world?’ Her eyes were bright with love. ‘Think of something within my means, bete Jhabua.’

  She was in that mood in which almost anything he said in reply would have pleased her, but she was particularly delighted with the answer that she received as they made themselves comfortable in a rickshaw. ‘A car, Badi-mummy-ji, a nice new Ambassador. Even if it’s old, I’ll make it new and drive it all over the country and come and stay with you in Delhi.’

  ‘Of course, beta, when you’re eighteen and get your driving licence.’ Unaccountably buoyant, she directed the rickshaw-wala to take them to Munshi Ganesh Lal and Sons on Fatehbad Road. Anguli was awed by the illumined golden splendour of the jeweller’s shop. He would never have been able to enter alone. They knew her. She blossomed in their fawning. ‘It’s ready, I hope.’ Of course it was, madam-ji. A young female assistant fiddled with a necklace around Anguli’s neck. The feel of her fingers on his skin gave him a hard-on. The necklace, simple, stunning, and its pendant, a tiny, finely wrought human digit, were both in gold. Delighted at Anguli’s stupefaction, his fairy godmother teased, ‘It’s more valuable than your second-hand car. Each time you’re a good boy, we’ll add a gold finger and soon you’ll have a thousand.’

  Jayadev flushed with pride and joy at seeing the gift. It gleamed so prettily against Anguli’s skin. The thought of a fourteen-year-old constantly flashing several thousand rupees’ worth of gold around his neck and perhaps being killed for it didn’t bother him overmuch; he was incapable of sustained worry. A necklace was meant to ornament the human body, so better to flaunt it than to secrete it away in a hole under your bed and have it stolen when you wandered off for an idle piss; so Jayadev would have argued if probed for his views. He would’ve taken a day or two to frame them, though, he was not a thinking man. And the necklace was beautiful, it conferred wealth on the boy, and a sort of, a consequent, legitimacy too, for despite his robustness, about his eyes he had always carried that expression of being unloved, of having been abandoned.

  With some justice, for he was far too often forsaken, left to fend for himself. At the end of the visits, for instance, the agonizing goodbyes to his fairy godmother were usually followed by scarcely less sorrowful farewells to Jayadev, for his father hardly ever accompanied him back home. If Satte was not available, Jayadev simply put Anguli on a truck or tempo going in the direction of Bharatpur, told the driver where to drop the kid off and himself stayed back to devote some unalloyed days to the godmotherly pudenda. The time of departure for the boy was usually evening; the greyness of dusk would mingle with the dust and highway noise, the fumes of traffic and the stench and heat of the declining day to engender a quiet depression and a festering rage that lasted a month.

  Satte was Jayadev’s friend and a kindred soul, another long-distance traveller in Anguli’s life, a father figure and a frotteur, a genial truck driver who couldn’t keep his hands off the boy. He kindled in him his love of the road by seating him in his lap and stroking him while the boy’s hands were occupied with driving the truck. Anguli loved the steering wheel, its size and what it could do, and the height from which he could look down at the traffic; cars were bugs and all two-wheelers mosquitoes, and scaring them while you were being petted was incomparable fun. For ever after for him, the open road was akin to sex, the long-distance locomotion, the inexorable eating up of kilometre upon kilometre, the warmth in his loins above the juddering of the engine, the hot winds of summer drying the sweat on his bare skin to a fever and the memory—almost palpable for years—of Satte’s black and swollen hands stroking and squeezing his thighs to jelly, of his gutka-scented exhalations so warm against the nape of his neck.

  Satte nuzzled the golden necklace. ‘And what has your fairy godmother given you for me?’

  ‘One pocket knife, but that’s for me. One new blue pant and two shirts, but those too are for me. And four tins of rasgullas from Calcutta for Bakra and everybody else at home, but one tin I opened and finished while waiting for you at Rawatpara. Should I open a tin for you? She said that this necklace costs more than a second-hand car.’

  ‘Of course you must open a tin for me, meri jaan, while I open your letter box for you. That knife looks good to
o, sharp and nifty.’

  It was. It was what Anguli drove into Satte’s left eye some hours later.

  For one, Satte detained him far too long. Anguli wanted to get home and enjoy Bakra’s and his stepmother’s pleasure at receiving their rasgullas and show off his necklace before them, but Satte, his eyes hooded with lust, kept murmuring drunkenly, ‘Later. There’s plenty of time, my tight one. Later. The night is young. Later.’ When everyone went off duty and the rat-infested godown fell silent, he backed his truck against the wall of the office, so close as to leave barely an inch or two between it and the rear of the lorry. Then Anguli and he, with his bottle of hooch, clambered over the side of the vehicle to make themselves comfortable atop the mountainous sacks of wheat. The nook was stifling, the blank wall of the office oppressive in its proximity, the night sky overhead greyish with dust and, in the sad light of the naked, forty-watt bulb affixed to the wall that faced the gates, only God was witness to Satte urging the boy to relax, to take off his clothes. Anguli was reluctant, the clothes were new, the sacks terribly dusty. Satte chuckled and insisted with the tedious jocularity of a drunken man. He made Anguli take swigs from the bottle, then finished it in one endless gulp, threw it into a corner of the truck where it triggered off the squealing of the rats and extracted a second from his cavernous pyjama pocket. Between draughts, he pawed the boy and sighed with the pleasure of anticipation.

  ‘No, I don’t want to, not here.’ Anguli struggled within himself to provide some other pretext; his principal reason, his reluctance to dirty his new clothes, embarrassed him, it would look as though he were trying to get above himself. Halfway through the second bottle, Satte lost patience and, mouthing abuse, reached out and wrenched off the necklace at Anguli’s throat, undid his own pyjamas, dropped the necklace down its front and asked the boy to get out of the truck, to fuck off, to walk home. Anguli stood up, did not ask Satte even once to return the ornament. Balancing unevenly on a sack, he took out his pocket knife, opened it and, without hesitation, without a word, lunged at the sedentary truck driver. He took him utterly by surprise. The knife went into the left eye till the side of Anguli’s fist came up against the bridge of Satte’s nose. He extricated the weapon and pushed it in, again and again and again, in the throat, above the heart, amongst the ribs, in the soft flesh at the armpit, repeatedly without pause, steadily without thought, sweeping aside Satte’s helplessly flailing arms till his white rage cooled a fraction and he became dimly aware of his limbs beginning to tire.

  He straightened, panting, drenched and dripping sweat on the inert lump at his feet that was his first victim, shut the knife, put it back in his pocket, bent, groped in the goo, but couldn’t find his necklace. Something snapped again and he picked up the empty bottle of hooch and brought it down on Satte’s skull. The bottle broke and Anguli began once more, jabbing its jagged end again and again into the mess of fluid and flesh and torn cloth that the truck driver had become.

  Anguli turned the dying Satte over on his back and, one by one, began going through the sticky-wet shirt and pyjama pockets. He found the matches almost immediately, and the damp wad of notes he put in his own pant pocket. One by one he lit the matches over the body, searching for his necklace and other things of value; one by one he let fall the burnt matchsticks on the exposed portions of Satte’s skin, his nose, his moustache, throat, ankle, his belly. The body responded almost every time more with a tremble than a spasm. He dug out the keys of the truck, a crushed packet of 501 beedis, two sachets of gutka. His hands were so slippery that he had to tear the sachet open with his teeth. Chewing the gutka made him feel better. Not registering the gesture as an act of revenge reciprocally utterly apt, he wrenched off from Satte’s neck the amulet of the Shirdi Sai Baba, wiped it as best he could in the dust of the sack upon which he stood, kissed it and put it away. With his knife he then tore open the left leg of Satte’s pyjamas and, with the help of his depleting stock of matches, finally located his necklace gleaming like a tiny golden turd on a bed of gore beneath Satte’s thigh. Without consciously meaning to, he left nothing on the body that would help identify it.

  How cool the stifling open air felt on his skin. His hands had been so slippery that it’d been impossible to get a grip on the rungs on the sides of the truck; he’d had to rub and rub his palms on the jute sacks for minutes on end and yet they’d continued to feel slimy, as though the fat and blood of the dying man had seeped into his, Anguli’s, skin, had become part of him, and the scrubbing of his hands had only freed their pores so that the gore could slowly resurface, and for ever.

  In the driver’s cabin, he took off his clothes and laid them out to dry on the passenger’s seat. Just as he had seen Satte do at the beginning of each journey, he first touched the Sai Baba amulet to his lips, then started the truck and rumbled off towards the gate of the godown. The guard, at his dinner on the steps of his sentry box on the passenger’s side of the truck, presumed in the gloom that the driver was Satte and signalled with his free left hand that he would shut the gates once he was done with eating. Outside the compound, Anguli turned left and eased the truck, trundling and grumbling, into the darkness, the bedlam of the late evening traffic. He was calmed by the feel of the large steering wheel in his hands and, slowly, was able to focus altogether on getting away, on not drawing attention to himself, not running over a cyclist or crushing a rickshaw or banging into an Ambassador being driven about without any sense. He didn’t know where to go, he didn’t know the way home; in any case, he couldn’t return to his past. But he felt that if he kept looking evenly out at the world from behind the safety of that enormous windshield and allowed it steadily to pass him by on either side, he would be all right for the time being, that is to say, for ever.

  Agra was an unknown city and its streets ill lit. Vendors’ carts selling everything from underwear to sugarcane juice and school textbooks lined both sides of the road; their kerosene lamps, strung out endlessly above them like the lustrous beads of a giant’s necklace, provided illumination for the traffic. He wasn’t even certain whether he was at the centre or on the fringes of that city of several lakh people. Feeling horribly conspicuous and clumsy, like a bear being led by a mouse, he tucked the truck in behind a rickshaw ferrying two ladies—one in a sari, the other in purdah—and their suitcases. They—everyone—moved at five kilometres an hour. Motorcycles bumped into cars, drivers descended to exchange pleasantries in the form of elaborate abuse, everyone waited for the temporary snarls to decongeal into the larger, more enduring traffic jam. His brain began to function five minutes into the journey. No person in uniform flagged the truck down, nobody blew any whistle, he heard no alarming siren. He started to notice other trucks, several larger than his, some impossibly overladen; it came to him that he could follow them to escape the city.

  For another ten minutes, he trailed the rickshaw with the ladies till, without warning, it U-turned, the women swivelling as one and jabbing in the gloom at the turn they had missed, the rickshaw-wala not deigning either to respond to their reproofs or acknowledge his error. At the next traffic light—like the rest, three black holes on a pole aslant—Anguli turned right only because he thought he saw, approaching him from the left, a couple of men who looked as though they would ask him for a lift and then notice how young he was. Finally, following an overloaded truck that appeared to know where it was going, he took an hour and a half to hit a highway.

  Which one it was he didn’t know and didn’t much care. His headlights did pick up the kilometre stones, but some were defaced and some others had handbills pasted on them; he, in any case, wasn’t used to reading and would have needed more than just those couple of seconds to make out the writing on them. Besides, he had to concentrate on staying alive. The highways have always been dangerous, at all times; at night they are especially lethal, for the trucks are let loose after dark. The one that Anguli had debouched on to had no central divider and the lights of oncoming traffic completely blinded every driver. Thos
e already high and getting steadily more drunk in their need to forestall sleep didn’t quite care, though, about being blinded. Some of them hadn’t slept for sixty hours at a stretch; trusting their manliness, they continued to careen and roar through the dazzling lights and beyond, fuzzily confounding, as the hours passed, their one adversary, sleep, with the other, traffic. We shall overcome, we shall overtake, we shall overturn. Some of the accidents on those highways looked like the result of one of the storms that have helped to form our planet.

  Anguli drove steadily on that night, not blinking, not thinking and not slowing down often to any unmanly speed, steering clear of the lights of towns and the larger villages, keeping to the roads less travelled, swaying past other trucks and cars with the grace of a skater on thin ice. The long drive was mesmeric and, sometime after midnight, he fell asleep with his hands on the wheel. He snapped awake in a second, pulled over, fell back in his seat and, mouth open, was dead to the world in an instant.

  He awoke with a start, gasping, trying to get away from his dream of large rats feeding on a freshly dead, bleeding body, his own. Breathless, he took a slow minute to recover, to gaze about him through the windshield and the windows at dark fields that blurred into night sky long before the horizon, and gradually began to accept his relief at being alive in a world that didn’t threaten. In the night silence, he then heard it again from the other side of the wood and metal behind his head, a muted, happy squeaking and squealing. Next, what he in his fogged state had taken to be Satte’s footwear jumped up from the floor of the cabin to the seat beside him, scurried up the clothes that he’d spread out to dry, paused some inches away from his left shoulder, seemingly to nibble at the rexine of the seat before, most unexpectedly, leaping for his throat. It was heavy, the rat, and its teeth grazed his skin before he could thwack it aside with his forearm. All in one movement, he opened the door of the cabin with one hand and, dragging his clothes and new bag behind him with the other, jumped out of the truck.