Fairy Tales at Fifty

by Upamanyu Chatterjee

  Manasa spoke in their mother tongue, sleepily as always. She brought her hand up to her face and examined in the fluorescent light the tip of her third finger for a moment before slipping it for succour back into her mouth.

  ‘Just a routine nick, I hope. Should I get you one of your ointments?’

  ‘I’ll get it myself. I’ve a new one that I want to try out.’ With a sigh of effort, she placed the pestle in the mortar, picked them up in her right hand and the knife in her left, arose, smoothed down her sari with the inside of her left wrist and hobbled off with stiff, creaking limbs towards the doorway.

  ‘Ma, who killed John F. Kennedy?’

  ‘That was my fault.’ Without turning around, she threw the response over her shoulder.

  ‘Who triggered off the ’62 war?’

  ‘Ah, that was my fault too.’

  The bats, perhaps sensing her departure, began to squeak more urgently, to glide and wheel with more purpose, as though spinning around her an invisible, protective ring. Silhouetted against the lights, she resembled a nucleus and they its frenziedly encircling electrons.

  ‘Ma, who is going to vanish like she did last time, like she does every time that we have something important to discuss like blood groups?’

  Manasa pretended not to hear, then slowly, without stopping or looking back, raised over her head her left hand with its knife, its third and little fingers upright and jerkily waving farewell, drawing attention to themselves as the cause for her departure. She limped over the threshold and the electric bulbs went off. He waited for her to appear at the window, to move like a shadow—slowly, on a ball and chain—past the recumbent Hanuman, across the light of the lamps in the room. He waited. She did seem to have vanished, though. He then took off his shoes and teased the velvet grass with his bare feet as he crossed the lawn to the parapet.

  Midnight, its darkness grading into smog, the city’s clamour muted by distance, golden asterisks its lights, the press of skyscrapers hustling Nirip to breathe more fully, into looking up at the bottled-up sky and out at the sea the shade of an old truck’s exhaust smoke. Of course, he could if necessary cork himself up even further. He’d done little else ever since the age of twelve. He’d been dead to anger but it seemed to him that for the first time since the discovery, thirty-eight bloody years ago in lousy Dalhousie, of the sources of the family wealth, for the first time since then, he’d been bemused into a sort of awakening. All of the preceding fortnight, in flashes—while walking the eternally happy dogs on the beach at sunrise; playing tennis three days a week with Vinayak and his friends; getting the hair around the moles on his left tricep permanently removed—burnt by laser once a month at Apsara Clinic—permanence in the lexicon of beauticians being a span of time only marginally longer than three weeks; himself being rubbed down three times a month by Apsara herself—not her real name but he thought it was and she was too money-minded to bother to correct him; delivering his near-nonsensical and immensely popular serial pep talk on No Evil Greater than the Ten Other Commandments: Lessons in Dharma at the Foot of Satan to an audience comprising in the main his father’s acquaintances and sycophants—rich, influential, venal, patronizing, delighted to spend an evening drinking and eating and drinking with their minds elsewhere, humouring the only son of such a dear, wealthy and powerful friend by lending an ear to his tosh; attending as an advisor the fortnightly meetings of his father’s company think tank; accompanying every now and then, to remind himself, as it were, of how it felt, Sulekha—who was if anything his illegitimate stepmother—to Mahim to buy fish—at the oddest of moments throughout that fortnight, completely without warning, he’d been assailed by the notion, But I am not me. These cities that I have grown up in are not mine. They—everything seems trespassed upon; my entire past is someone else’s, my memories too. For fifty years I should have been living my life elsewhere. He would then comment to himself, how odd, and pause to disconnect from the activity of the moment, how odd, and how … exciting, a twist of lemon in the cocktail of his own kidnapping, the act that he seemed now poised to bring into being in his new future, the objective that he had given himself, haphazardly, to wander towards in the years to come.

  THREE

  Nirip woke up in his mother’s bed in the company of Akbar, Bunty, Geeta and Salim.

  The windows behind the recumbent Hanuman were radiant with daylight. The yellow-and-orange stained glass door to the terrace, shut against the warmth of spring, glowed as though keeping at bay a benign, impossibly effulgent, alien being. The emerald-green walls of the room had mellowed to the shade of slowly ripening mangoes. The air-conditioning, as always, hummed soothingly, as discreet and efficient as the best palace guard. Nirip felt so wonderfully rested, lazily drained of all sap and yet so utterly fulfilled that for several minutes he could only gaze—without its quite registering—at the figure in off-white that flitted delicately from footstool to cupboard to dresser to door and all about the room like a gigantic, purposeful moth.

  ‘I’m scared,’ said Nirmala Wilson.

  She had a teapot in her hand and was clearly in two—six—minds about where to place it. Her nervous fluttering about slowly tugged Nirip up into complete wakefulness. The green walls aflame with light at that odd time of day, the cats so engaged in being reposeful, the silence accentuated by the hum of the air-conditioning, the presence of Hanuman, benign, serene, the perfumes in the room of spices and warm soap and sandal, the depth of his sense of rest, of peace that seemed to ooze upward from his drained loins and leach through every inch of him—all that combined suddenly to deluge him with the urge to let go—to slide, to stop instantly this enfeebling, demeaning business of living. He would have too, had it not been for the teapot and its carrier. They both looked nice.

  ‘They came to see the baby,’ said she, her simper a snarl. The faint rattling of the lid of the teapot in her hands gave away her trembling.

  He stretched his hand out. She tripped forward to the edge of the bed and, not quite knowing what was expected of her, cupping it with both hands like a religious offering, proferred him the teapot.

  ‘Why did they come to see Baby? Do something.’

  It was unpleasant to be tugged up in a second, even by one whom one rather loved, from a state of repose to a flash of annoyance. He said nothing however and their fingers touched when he took the teapot, also with both hands. She stepped back, tucked the end of her sari in at her waist. He set the teapot down on the patterned orange sheet that covered his stomach. She waited, a little uncertainly, for instructions, for action. Her mouth remained slightly open, her tongue slithered out twice, gingerly, to soothe a spot on her upper lip.

  He noticed only then, behind her, two men in the gloom of the recess at the door, waiting to be detected before emerging to go about their business. They were in chocolate slacks and lighter brown shirts, the uniform of the family bouncer-and-bodyguard brigade. They seemed new, at least the faces were, even though they already displayed the trademark paunches of hard fat and the manner, almost a signature, of being respectful in the presence of wealth, but only just, ever ready to slip into familiarity with those family members who didn’t matter. They seemed to stand at attention for a millisecond and raise themselves on the balls of their feet before getting on with their trespassing. One went and stood before the dresser and folded his fat arms across his chest as though to deny his detainees its drawers as one route of escape. The other approached the cupboard but, as in a film in which the sound has been switched off, stopped short dramatically, theatrically, before the photograph on the wall, fifty years old, of a demure and maidenly Manasa with her baby. Nirip, drained, utterly siphoned off, waited in a dream for his mother to strike in absentia. Seconds passed. From the left drawer of the dresser zoomed out a large bat that began to hop up and down the tricep of the bodyguard. His unmanly moan drowned out the sound of the plop with which, from the top of the cupboard, landed on the shoulder of the other bouncer a lizard the size of Battleship
Potemkin.

  When the necklace of bells at the doorway had ceased to tinkle after their sudden exit, Nirip said to Nirmala gently, ‘You’d better go too. My mother doesn’t like visitors in her rooms. I’ll come by this evening.’ She didn’t listen to him—no one did—but drifted over to the cement bench, sat down on the floor, leaned her back against it and, in nervous exhaustion, shut her eyes.

  He picked the teapot up off his stomach and placed it on the bed between Bunty and Salim. Bunty lazily turned his head to inspect unblinkingly the intruder and then, after a moment, opened his mouth wide in an impossibly lengthy and pink yawn. From her place on the floor, Nirmala emitted a series of soft hisses in an attempt to shoo the cats off the bed. Geeta frowned at her. None of them stirred an inch. She had a hard, attractive face, the chauffeur’s wife, the mien of the streets in it softened and moulded to befit civilization mainly by her awe at having seen and sensed, experienced at close quarters in those apartments, such affluence, by the enormous power of wealth having rubbed some of its sheen into her skin. He didn’t want her to go away.

  ‘It’s from my mother, is it, the teapot? And where is she?’

  He turned on his side to examine with more care the gift. The teapot was black and made of clay, globular, large—enormous, in fact, capable of containing with ease two litres—with a spout rather like a dildo. He had at times suspected his mother of possessing a distressing sense of humour so secreted away beneath her fey otherworldliness as to be not unlike the impish witchery of some suppressed self. He’d seen smaller versions of the teapot earlier, in nondescript stalls in several handicrafts fairs; the kiosks had been manned by unenthused youth from the North-East who, after initially resembling a rock group of blank faces, had thereafter reluctantly disclosed—while continually glancing at one another as though to check whether they were misinforming correctly—that the teapots were made of a mixture of clay and stone, could be placed directly on the fire and imparted to the brew a heady flavour of damp earth. Intrigued by the notion of a tea that tasted of the monsoon, Nirip had bought a pair and then, feeling that he shouldn’t be seen drinking any fluid that issued from a dildo, gifted the teapots to Magnum, his half-sister, on her next birthday. They usually gave the other what the one wanted to buy for himself. He typically bought Magnum teapots or fountain pens and she for him fake Afghani carpets, the sort that dogs love to chew up.

  His mother’s present would be Nirip’s eighty-seventh teapot. Over the years, he had used them—wherever he’d happened to be staying—and mindful of their shapes and sizes—as candle stands, bookends, paperweights, water jugs, plant tubs, sugar bowls, dal tureens and pen stands; only the curviest, most rotund ones that reminded his subliminal self the most of a wet-dream-mother-figure’s fullest breasts he reserved for the brewing of some of the world’s finest teas—which he drank, naturally, without milk.

  ‘Memsaab is out of town.’

  ‘How odd. For I met my mother with the bats on the terrace just last night, a mere few hours ago.’ He sat up in bed, at which abrupt motion Akbar arose, arched his back, did a couple of yogic stretches so that his body for several seconds resembled a diving board above a pool, circled slowly round the position on the bed that he had warmed for some hours and, with one cold, disapproving glance at Nirip, curled up again on that same spot but facing the other way—the photograph of demure Manasa and her baby, the windows and the sun—instead. It dawned then on Nirip—his features radiant with refracted light—that since the windows faced west, the time of day was not late morning but late afternoon and that he had therefore slept not eight but some fifteen hours.

  ‘Memsaab left yesterday morning for Delhi. She has gone to meet her sister.’

  He looked down and right at her, then left at his watch. It was difficult without his reading glasses to make out the date. ‘What day is it?’

  So he’d been asleep for neither eight nor fifteen hours but for a little over a day and a half. Hmmm. Without having got up even once for a leak. He had some way to go—Rip Van Winkle hadn’t taken a piss in twenty years. He gazed at Hanuman’s benign, unmoving face and tried to digest the idea of his having erased a day of his own life in slumber. A Thursday to boot, so he’d missed his second lunch-hour swim of the week. In fables and fairy tales, one woke up from that kind of sleep to a new world, one had crossed over in the interim.

  ‘Get up off the floor, come and lie down beside me, rest for an hour, it’d do you good.’

  She opened her eyes but didn’t move from her position on the floor. ‘I wanted to come and wish you on your birthday.’ She spoke the Hindi of the streets of Bombay; her Malayali accent was strong. ‘Then ten minutes before Wilson left for duty, those two—’ a tilt of the head, her chin a jut in the direction of the doorway through which the bouncers had escaped, ‘—turned up and said they’d come to see the baby. Fool that he is, he brought them in. Fool. When have men ever wanted to admire babies?’ He was surprised at the swiftness with which she, all in one movement, arose and came to stand beside the bed. ‘I waited all day for you to phone.’ He stretched out a hand and gently pulled her down on the bed. She sat on its edge, gingerly, head bowed, gazing at her hands inert in her lap.

  ‘Has Wilson started being violent again?’

  It took him a good ten minutes to soothe her into a state of wide-eyed near-repose. Then, abandoning the teapot, he left the bed. It sat there on the orange counterpane alongside her hips like a fat bomb. He mentally made an effort to move away from her. The green floor felt welcomingly cool, making him stretch and splay out his soles and toes to give it a larger surface to soothe. We do not know how to stand, so his first yoga book had said, he remembered.

  Or breathe. Or eat or talk or think or fuck or sleep, so he himself wittily suggested in No Evil Greater than the Ten Other Commandments: Lessons in Dharma at the Foot of Satan. After all, two or three times a month, Vinayak and he actually paid substantial sums of money only to sleep well, to be rubbed down and soothed into the roseate slumber of the innocent. Or find value in ageing: we don’t know much about that either. ‘I collect fountain pens and teapots. But to what purpose?’ His was the sort of Management lesson at which the audience was usually so indulgent and inattentive that almost anything could waft through their skulls and beyond under the guise of diverting personal anecdote. ‘Of what use will my eighty-six teapots be to me when I go to meet the potter?’ No one knew or cared or wondered. Then perhaps he would suddenly flick off the table before him the one pot that he whimsically had ceased to like two mornings ago because its tea had been insipid, clearly a poor workman blaming his tools for a life that lacked savour; it would crack open on the floor, making him feel guilty and providing him a pretext to buy as recompense two more the following Saturday. ‘No use crying over spilt tea—unless it be Darjeeling,’ he would educe, converting the first thing that came into his head into an aphoristic profundity—and then, moving on to the second with all the randomness of a squash ball in play, demand of the interesting-looking woman with the short hair in the third row, ‘Does one collect fountain pens only to colour, in the absence of God, the void represented by virgin white paper?’

  A moan from the bed, making Coolcat on the bath mat outside the dressing-room door emit in sympathy a human sigh. With her hands between her thighs and her back to Nirip, Nirmala lay curled up like a foetus. Nirip stepped up to the bed and tried to pick Bunty off the quilt. The cat’s four claws stuck to it like teeth in toffee. He covered Nirmala with the quilt. She shut her eyes in seeming gratitude, murmured a few words, Malayalam encasing the single English phrase, ‘Happy birthday’. He watched her tongue slither out again to reassure that same spot on her lip and wandered over to pick his shirt up from the mammoth, ornate, wooden swing that stood midway between the TV table and the enormous stone jars in which Manasa stocked her knitting needles, false hair, spools of coloured thread, sachets of powder of vermilion, her collection of bejewelled safety pins, packets of crystallized sugar and
bottles of herbal digestive potions. Bunty followed his every move with wide-, green-eyed alarm.

  He riffled in the second stone jar for the just-in-case packets of brown paper that he and Magnum for thirty years had secreted everywhere, in every mood in every flat in every season. He was quite in the mood for cannabis peppered with phencyclidine. Then, maybe later in the day, just a shot of ketamine. Another murmured bilingual phrase from the bed made him pause, straighten, turn, try and awaken in himself some desire for that abandoned female form. Almost reflexively, he chose to speak of the less important, to respond not to her fears and the state of her mental health but to her wishes for himself, for him as the centre of the world.

  ‘My birthday’s on Sunday, I thought—no, tomorrow. But thank you in advance—very much. Better early than never.’ He slumped against the swing in a posture of indolence. So cold and dead and impotent was he that he would need something—MDMA, Benzidine, something—to perk himself up enough to attack her with his love and make her in her sorrow do what shocked her and pleased him.

  FOUR

  ‘Nothing.’

  So Nirip responded when asked whether he wanted anything in particular for his birthday. There were times when even the idea of other people spending money on garbage made him feel ill. On other occasions, he saw stuff in shops—a tie, a vase—that he felt like possessing; they looked much less attractive, however, the instant he bought them. Tastes were fickle, human greed eternal, that seemed a fundamental economic law. Nothing was reliable in the material world, so make do with nothing; so you came into the world and so you will go out. Between the two, therefore, mark the passage of the years too with nothing. A cold and dead, shrivelled-up miser at heart, so some of his acquaintances privately believed Nirip to be, and gave him anyway on his birthday some locally-made Mont Blanc in a gift box that smelt of locally-made Guerlain.