Fairy Tales at Fifty

by Upamanyu Chatterjee

  THE IMPOTENT PRINCE

  ONE

  Nirip supposed that it could be said that, at fifty, he felt on top of the world, but he really couldn’t be sure. He did feel fine most of the time and had felt wonderful once upon a time but it would be rash to confess, most of all to his doctor, to a permanent sense of well-being; he couldn’t, and certainly not at fifty. Even though fifty was the new forty. Even in India? And thirty twenty? At ten therefore one was zero, not certain whether one was alive. Poor kid. Sweet of Time, though, to allow us to play with it into deluding ourselves.

  ‘Where’s the stool, Nripati-ji?’

  ‘Ah.’ He grinned to shrug off, to refuse to accept, even a hint of any lapse on his part. ‘The sample’s been rejected . . . it had been contaminated, I understand, by the presence of toilet paper. Science can be as intriguing as caste in that both will surprise you with what can pollute what.’ He noted again—almost automatically, without being patronizing—how utterly functional the consulting room was, how empty of personality, of the warm colours and objects of an individual liking. ‘All that effort on my part this morning for nothing. A sleepless night to begin with, morose at just thinking of starting a day without tea or tennis.’ He paused to allow Dr Lakhtakiya to scan, expertly to take in without actually reading, a couple of pages of the sheaf on the white decolam top. ‘Then I compounded matters by asking Madam Head Nurse in that Executive Waiting Room how one was to insert a bit of turd into one of her tiny jars without using toilet paper. Archly censorious, she looked at me, no doubt she thought I was being most indelicate. With a spatula of course, she enlightened me rather curtly. Disgusting, such an indelicate proposition on her part surely . . .’ His pleasant voice, tinted with puzzled umbrage, rose as gently as a singer’s beginning to warm up. ‘And why on earth are the jars that they—you—supply transparent?’ He raised and then let fall his shoulders, smiled. ‘Well, in short, there you are, no stool report. Madam Head Nurse, more archly than the Gateway, then ordered me to take home a second jar and deposit—a bank came to mind, we have blood banks after all—a second sample positively by Thursday. What happens when a shit bank goes bust? The deposits hit the fan?’

  The doctor smiled because he hadn’t been listening. Time was money. ‘Good. Everything seems fine then.’ The assistant rose from his chair next to the basin in the corner, came forward, and began to put back the reports into the hospital envelope. ‘No complaints? Digestion? Dizziness? You’re sleeping well?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. Some nights when I get up in the wee hours to go to the toilet, I find it difficult to fall asleep again. So I don’t usually feel on top of the world in the mornings. That’s universal, I guess. I was advised by the most ancient of the ayahs at home, an amateur peddler in science, not to drink water after six in the evening. She said that it just might be because of my single kidney.’

  Dr Lakhtakiya shut his eyes and briefly and vigorously shook his head to deflect the garbage that he had to hear all the time from entering and polluting the knowledge of decades in his brain. The assistant hesitantly offered the hospital envelope to Nirip.

  ‘I’ve also noticed—over the last few weeks or is it months?—that my jaws have perhaps become smaller or my gob looser because often while masticating, I chew instead—painfully, draw blood and all that—on a bit of lip or rosy mouth flesh, like someone in a folktale enjoying eating himself. Or is that my skeleton retreating, hanging up its hat, at fifty? Motor failure? This goodly frame calling it a day. Or that creature in the desert, “naked, bestial, Who, squatting upon the ground, Held his heart in his hands And ate of it.” . . . And Doctor, if you come across a good, compatible kidney on offer, a poor soul urgently in need of money and willing to be cut up for it, you know whom to call.’

  The doctor continued to smile inattentively, not caring to know whether what he had heard was a request or a joke. Both he and Nirip then stood up, shook hands.

  ‘Same time next year then. My first comprehensive medical, you know. It was my chauffeur’s wife’s suggestion, would you believe it. Now that I know all’s well, I can admit that I was just a bit nervous.’ Nirip turned to the assistant and asked in Hindi, ‘Could you please phone Reception and check whether my parents’ fitness certificates are ready? I could pick them up on my way out.’

  ‘Remarkable,’ murmured Dr Lakhtakiya politely, ‘that at their age, they want to run the marathon.’

  Privately, knowing his parents, Nirip didn’t think it remarkable in the least. Neither would ever actually run, of course, but by a species of magic it would certainly appear as though they had; Pashupati, his grinning father with his maroon-and-white sports cap atop his hairy, pointed ears, would be interviewed and photographed at the starting line alongside some glossy Kenyans, some out-of-shape captains of industry and the beaming mayor of the city. Manasa, Nirip’s mother, wouldn’t officially back out of the marathon but her absence would not be remarked upon; if ever pressed, she would dreamily and confusingly allude to the race beginning too early in the morning for her and to the impracticality of running in a sari. None of her listeners, even those who knew that she habitually returned from her morning walks well before sunrise, none of them would find any incongruity in her arguments.

  ‘What is truly remarkable is how we don’t see all that is possible, almost magical, in our lives and on this planet.’

  It seemed appropriate to depart on that note of hot air. They shook hands once again. The assistant, having learnt a trick or two in that posh place, held the door open for Nirip. Not to be outdone, he on his way out smiled charmingly at the sadly malnourished young man.

  In the air-conditioned repose of the car, he sat at the back with the three hospital envelopes. ‘You could drop me home first,’ suggested Nirip to Wilson the chauffeur, dark, compact, solemnly-moustached, ‘and then maybe drive down with these certificates to the office.’ Partly because he had always, instinctively, felt ill at ease with the extravagance that uses two envelopes for the work of one, partly because he needed to busy himself with his hands to avoid having to think in the presence of Wilson of his liaison with the chauffeur’s wife and partly because he liked to have about him neatness and order, even in the back seat of a car, Nirip took out the two fitness certificates, briefly glanced at them to confirm that they were indeed the documents required, put both of them into one envelope, noting in passing, absentmindedly, that it was funny that he had never known, not in fifty years, the blood groups of his parents, that hers was A and his father’s O, flipped the envelope over the back of the seat in front of him so that in landing on the upholstery, it for a fraction of a second distracted Wilson who automatically—without taking his eyes off the road, for he knew his business and was well paid for it—reached out to stroke its thick brown paper, as though to reassure its contents of his presence. It was while Nirip had half-turned around to place on the shelf behind his head his medical reports and the third, empty envelope that he realized, with a blankness that yet tremored with a sort of excitement, that discovering the blood groups of his parents also meant learning—he being a dilettante in the world of knowledge, a squirrel who’d always nibbled at diverse nuggets of data—that since A and O could only give life to offspring who were themselves either O or A, and that since he himself was B+, he was not, he could not be, the biological child of his parents.

  He watched for a while the shape of Wilson’s head, the small ears, the black hair cut short, flecked with white despite his youth. He loved him for his large-heartedness. Wilson had recently fathered a child, his first, a son, and had distributed sweets in celebration, blushingly offered Nirip tiny hard blocks of ghee, sugar and besan, a gross dainty created by his mother-in-law, a thousand calories per bite. Nirip had gingerly selected one from the box, thanked and congratulated Wilson and later, crumbling it, mixed it with Coolcat’s beef. Fortunately, the dog had wolfed it down. It was a strange beast. It ate cabbage. It growled in its dreams at itself. It wagged its tail only at strange
rs but was, even after six years, petrified of Nirip’s parents.

  He couldn’t decide what to do about his discovery of his origins, he didn’t even know whether he had to react at all. Let sleeping dogs lie or, in the private language of fifty-year-old Anglophone Indians under sudden stress, fuck it. He looked out of the window at the stalled traffic on Gowalia Tank Road. In the Padmini taxi alongside, a tired-looking mother sat at the back with a frisky charge in her lap. They both had the same pallor, the same stretched openness in their bulbous eyes. With the instinctive watchfulness of a mother and the protective caution of a shopper, she repeatedly dug her left hand into the back pocket of the child’s shorts and pulled it back from destroying the mountain range of packages that occupied the rest of the rear seat. Nirip had a sudden urge to return to the hospital and look in once more on Wilson’s wife and the newborn. They’d been sleeping or rather, Nirmala Wilson’d seen him and shut her enormous eyes. The infant, its features wrinkled as though contorted in some secret agony, had been pronounced underweight, mildly jaundiced but on the whole healthy. Nirip’d stood at the foot of the bed with happy Wilson a deferential step behind him. Doubtless, she’d shut her eyes to avoid seeing together the two fathers, one putative, the other probable, of her child. Wilson’s mother-in-law, her grandson hiding behind her thigh, had stood at attention at the head of the bed. The dozen family members two beds away, boisterous beyond belief, wanted, it appeared, to order chicken tikka and a round of beer right there around the convalescent mother; one male even tapped her lightly on the shoulder because she hadn’t reacted to some witticism. Procreation, generation, wherever one looked. Nirmala’s nephew had flattened his nose and mashed his lips against his grandmother’s right buttock and around her thigh, assessed Nirip with one large eye. The grandmother was younger than Nirip and interested him of course. All women of the lower orders did. A problem of self-esteem, of identity, no doubt. Now to be compounded, pointed Nirip out to his faint reflection caught in the car window by the noon light, by the titbit that he wasn’t who for fifty years he’d thought he was.

  His face in the window told him that he didn’t, come to think of it, look like his parents. Two eyes, one nose, two ears, an upper and lower lip, there the resemblance ended. His father had two chins, though. Nirip stretched forward, snaked his arm around the back of the front seat, plucked up the brown envelope—making Wilson for a second raise his eyebrows in a timid smile—leaned back, wondering what he wanted to do with the fitness certificates and, almost absentmindedly, let the envelope slide down his legs to the floor. Nobody had ever told him though that he resembled his parents. Spitting image, for example—he’d never heard that said about him. Well, he hadn’t ever asked either. No one had ever told him that he didn’t. ‘Say, how come your mother looks so ageless with her grey hair long and loose like that and you a genie awaiting release, always so corked up?’ He shut his eyes and shook his head to deny the upper hand to that mental sluggishness in the face of the unexpected. Fuck it, fuck it, not at fifty, this was not the kind of rubbish that one should have to contend with in one’s middle age.

  By the time the car had crawled to its next halt, he had decided that he would first verify the blood groups and then devote properly a couple of sleepless nights to mulling over their implications.

  TWO

  Even though Nirip felt no sea breeze, the necklace of tiny bronze bells on top of the doorway tinkled musically as he stepped over the dark blue threshold. The cavernous room was lit, as always, partly by electric light that came in through the open windows and in part by the seventeen oil lamps, eight of brass and nine of clay, that were positioned at various heights all about the room—on occasional tables, shelves, in niches in the walls, at the feet of idols, on window sills—like sentinels on a mountain slope guarding the deity at its summit. The emerald-coloured walls of the room tinted the light a glowing forest green. Its air, thick with the odours of spices—of asafoetida, nutmeg, clove, cardamom, cinnamon, that seemed at moments to part, to make way, for the heavier, more sluggish aromas of camphor, citronella, oil of eucalyptus, incense of sandalwood—the air instantly, as always, lulled him into feeling slow, curled him up inside into calmness.

  They were all there, the whole lot. Not one of them greeted him with any affection. Bunty and Seeta, lolling on the dresser, glanced once in his direction and then seemed unable to look away as though frozen—shocked into immobility—by his very boringness. Akbar, Salim and Anthony, hearing the bronze bells at the doorway, crawled under the bed. Amar jumped from footstool to the top of the cupboard. Javed, sitting upright like a rabbit on the old Philips radiogram, meticulously licked his own left armpit and Geeta, no doubt continuing some game, in excited malice bit Bunty on his left buttock. Not one of them, in fact, greeted him at all.

  Music in the air, geckos on the wall, one faint, the second frantic, both signalling the decline of winter and the timely birth of spring. The raga from the portable CD player was Naiki Kanhara, melodious, soothing, more sound than sense; on the stone bench between two open doors, the player sat beside the head of the enormous—almost two-metre-long—bronze idol of a reclining, reposeful Hanuman. The god’s legs were crossed; his tarnished left foot, poised on right knee, seemed to twitch to the music. Pleasure at its quality rendered the expression on the noble head, propped up on an elbow, even more divinely thoughtful.

  Above his knee and on the wall was him again in grainy black-and-white, him and young Nirip and younger Magnum supine alongside him in a photograph taken almost forty years ago, in the verandah of the old house at Ganapatipule, the children imitating Hanuman, their heads too propped up on elbows, left legs bent and forming triangles with the right, heels balanced on right knees, both boy and girl laughing into the lens of the camera, a god’s adopted children playing beside their foster father.

  ‘He’s cute. He’s staring into the middle distance wondering whether he should hop across the seven thousand kilometres to Hamelin to save those kids from the Pied Piper even though none of them is going to join his Lanka crusade.’

  Nirip remembered the occasion—not the date or even the year but just the event itself. The circumstances leading to and away from it were blurred like the details of a long past’s duller moments, his memory, in piecing together in his head a visual biography, having focused on and clicked—naturally—only those points of extra emotive intensity that form life’s crests. A sunny morning in winter it had been and he just back on vacation from one of his first few terms at boarding school—the third perhaps of his second year. Heaven. That was what, for the seven years that he had spent at lousy Dalhousie, going home had felt like. Paradise regained while listening to gossip and fairy tales in the laps of older women, in the reassurance of one mother’s love and companionship, the nurture of another’s warm breastmilk, of a third’s near-maroon, near-perfect pork vindaloo. Divine cooks, wet nurses, dried-up housemaids, ayurvedic masseuses, retired ayahs, sullen spice-grinders, apprentice domestics, daughters of gardeners, mistresses of Father—the house had always been well-stocked with women tellers of tales. Male raconteurs, on the other hand—the chauffeurs, delivery boys and gardeners—with their stories of smut had stirred more the loins than the imagination. There had thus been no appropriate father figures in Nirip’s nonage till that winter morning when, hot from a game of football on the beach with the barefoot sons of the fishermen riffraff, he and Magnum had run up to the house and stopped short at the foot of the steps upon seeing, reclining on the floor of the verandah, seemingly waiting for them, that enormously powerful, smiling, benign, attractively simian, masculine but caring presence with, in his eyes of bronze, that look of having seen other countries and known distant, differently-ordered lands.

  ‘Ma! You fluttering around somewhere? It’s me, your one and only!’ The terrace was dark with greenery. The fluorescent bulbs levelled into the overhang above the windows threw their beams directly downward like a row of spotlights. Beyond them lay ten metres of gra
ss, a sprawl of velvet the soft shade of a starlit city night. The terrace lawn, ensconced like a forest clearing in lush, sculpted verdure, ended in a parapet the stone pillars of which were carved to resemble several stars of the pantheon in their redder, more sinister avatars. Stunted trees—but heavy with fruit—in tubs that had shrunk with time, stood strong and misshapen against the north wall. At their knees crouched a rich forest undergrowth of broad-shouldered bonsai. The heady, lemony, roasting-coffee smell that suffused the night, emanated from a creeper that—bottle-green, a closely-woven, ever-thickening web of matting—roofed half the terrace against the hostility of the sun and rustled continually with the slithering motions of animal life. Large, affable bats, enjoying the air of the spring night, squeaking to one another the news of the world, flew about desultorily. Beyond them, beyond the parapet and twelve storeys below, lay the city and the sea.

  Crosslegged on the grass, with her back against the tub of a champa prodigiously in bloom, reposeful, long-nosed, exuding the aromas of cardamom and clove and sucking the tip of the third finger of her left hand sat Nirip’s mother, Manasa.

  ‘Do you know, Ma, that the blood you’re sucking belongs to Group A?’

  ‘I cut myself.’ Manasa removed the finger from her mouth and, with her left hand, gestured listlessly towards the mortar and pestle at her left knee and, beside them, the mound of spices, of ginger and garlic, beneath a kitchen knife and a copy of some magazine, open, that she’d been using for the peel; on its left page lay the mound of discarded skin of the spices and on its right, Nirip was surprised to see, the photo studio portrait of Wilson and his happy family that the driver’d had taken a couple of days previously to exhibit his pride and joy to the world: of him and his wife, a handsome couple staring as solemnly as frogs at the camera, and the baby in the woman’s arms, eyes shut, pale, uncaring.