Fairy Tales at Fifty

by Upamanyu Chatterjee

  For Nirip’s birthday, Vinayak proposed that they don their disguises and walk the streets, feel the midnight pulse of the real world and, if they felt up to it, feel up its lowlife as well.

  He, Vinayak, was some six months older and had been a friend for decades. ‘Or we could take the chopper to Aksa Beach and pick up some fishermen and see if they’ll allow me to shave their arseholes for a thousand rupees each. Double if I get to nick them.’ He was unmarried and looked like a large, crafty potato. He spoke principally to hide meaning, for the road to success, he believed, meandered through muddy waters. If he, for instance, was going out to a rendezvous unknown to his secretary and from which he was not likely to return to office that day, he would, seconds before his departure, click on and breathe into the intercom: ‘Vandana, deck the halls with bullshit.’

  Fifty long years rapidly up and yet how quietly and without fuss they continued to glide into the future on a smooth and silent electric train that had no brakes; not moving dramatically fast but simply and inexorably, as though it, being a monstrous, impassive machine, saw no need to pick up speed to arrive at a future that too would be so unnervingly dull, so much a numbing repetition of fruitless routine, its incapacitating tedium to be interrupted only by death, that final, endless, terrifying yawn. The days turned slowly, somewhat with the rhythm of a gently swirling merry-go-round from which one simply cannot get off. They seemed for everybody to be suffused with hate and its variants. One detested, for example—and without quite wanting to—other cars in the morning rush-hour traffic. Later in the day, one felt envious of, or contempt for, one’s office colleagues and the relish with which they played—over their teacups and through their coffee breaks—their games of one-upmanship that would be disrupted only when the acid in their tongues descended to gnaw at their stomach linings or they felt the first paralysing jabs of their hearts going on the blink. Even when, during the day, to relieve stress—except that, paradoxically, it seemed instead to sharpen the desolation, illumine more pitilessly the bleakness, the vanity of their futures—even when one of them throbbed to touch some proximate human, that lust too seemed destructive and replete with hate, a form of battering rancour.

  To short-circuit, as it were, the future’s designs on him, Nirip had for years told himself not to leave for his deathbed the questions that he should be asking himself every day—example: Our Father who art dead, illumine me, the silly to-do for seventy years that constitutes a life, the bickering and regret, those fountain pens and teapots, what was all that fuss about? Of course, even while he examined himself from the brink, he was aware of that electric train slowly but relentlessly slipping forward towards the hereafter—but that was fine, trying to halt it was impossible and unimportant as long as he remembered, awaiting him, that deathbed and its questions.

  It was to remind themselves of those things, to get a breath of fresh air, a whiff of the pleasant stink of the real world, that a couple of times a year, Nirip and Vinayak donned disguises and strolled out into the lowlife.

  In a city of fourteen million people, where to change clothes and lifestyles without being spotted and wondered at was quite the most intricate item in the adventure. There were no phone booths into which they could zip to slip on a blue spandex outfit and red undies. The simplest, they found, was to change in the street, at the bus stop or on the pavement, in a natural manner, while laughing and chatting and spitting paan juice to hit the dogshit. Nirip, for example, left his apartment in his jogging outfit—his shorts and teeshirt—and a backpack that, taken together, cost as much as the monthly salaries of the liftman and the uniformed guard who salaamed him at the gate. The bag contained once-white pyjamas and a nondescript cotton shirt which he would wear with its tail out; beneath it would dangle the ends of the pyjama strings. In the lowlife, they were an acknowledged and appreciated phallic thing. Vinayak elaborated that pyjama strings were particularly potent symbols because they hung like penises but swayed like balls.

  They felt rich and pleasantly silly. Their skins were too softly smooth—of the texture of wealth—and their expressions—their eyes, the pout of their lips—too smug in their discontent; their affluence itself gave them the right to the joys of disaffection. If they were recognized in their disguises by any nosy acquaintance, Nirip planned to say that he, in the company of one of the country’s foremost investment analysts, was doing a fade from the income-tax officials at his door. That was not too far-fetched; eminent men of means had done it before in that city that paid a third of the country’s taxes. They arranged for their maids—unflappable role-players who, in the service of wealth, had risen so far above their social origins that when they looked down and back, in the quiet, for instance, of the dark in their beds, they felt dizzy and shuddered and grew more embittered—they got their maids to welcome the taxmen at the door, make them comfortable in the drawing room, offer them masala chai and put on the air-conditioner while the master of the house flew the coop from the back door—in the language of the architect’s plans, the servants’ entrance—to dissolve into the city, catch a smelly taxi to the airport.

  Nirip and Vinayak caught a smelly public bus to the railway station. They stood in the crush at the rear, Nirip with his left hand in his pyjama pocket to resist being pickpocketed, his backpack clasped to his chest like a baby. The press of bodies kept them upright and obviated the need for grabbing a strap or the overhead rail to maintain balance. Vinayak enjoyed being jostled and the frottage with ruffians. Without any discernible cause other than his enjoyment of the touch of unfamiliar flesh, he winked and leered at Nirip continually throughout the journey. When they neared the railway station and more people began to get off than on, he leaned across and, exhaling the reek of paan masala and whisky, breathed into his friend’s face, ‘I wink, therefore I am,’ and winked again. Some of the other commuters glanced at them more than once: they clearly didn’t fit the slots suggested by their clothes. ‘Eight rupees for two tickets!’ squeaked Vinayak excitedly, delightedly, in Hindi, the language for the evening. ‘Instead of Dadar, you’re taking us perhaps to the railway station of some other city! Howrah maybe? Or Paharganj?’

  ‘When did you last travel by bus?’ asked the conductor, a wry, bearded rogue. ‘In any transaction in society, the prosperity of one party is but the poverty of another.’

  They hadn’t taken a train in thirty-five years, not since their schooldays. Or—save for their rare excursions to experience at least the surface of the lives of the down and out, the luckless—a bus in thirty. Transport had apparently become less forbidding, more modern in the interim; of that, one really couldn’t be sure, but it had certainly not become less ugly, and certain things about mechanized locomotion in India were timeless and would never change. A human head, for example, leaning out of a train—or bus window to vomit—that abiding image could well be preserved on a postage stamp as a logo for Indian transport. No one trailed puke like that from a bullock cart. Or maybe they did and no one noticed because it mixed so well with the dropping dung. What made people retch so much in Indian trains and buses? Near-death experiences or life in general or the crap that they’d eaten or the despair inherent in all lives or heatstroke and the duststroke too. I puke, therefore I am. Instead of throwing up in protest, they could do the more intricate thing, just walk away, like a cat, like the Buddha, just go away from their lives.

  ‘There is some virtue in poverty. The Buddha—Sid the prince, as he was known to us in school—just left because he wanted to get away from his wealth.’

  ‘Far more likely that he wanted to get away from his wife,’ said Vinayak as they alit from the bus in a welter of raucous coolies, idling beggars, doped-out wastrels, ball-scratching auto-rickshaw drivers, clueless, abandoned travellers and their multi-coloured mounds of baggage.

  ‘A bit sad for the kid, though. Growing up without a father, wondering who he was and where, and why he had abandoned them, was it his, the son’s, fault? All because Papa had gone away to disco
ver himself.’

  Vinayak wasn’t listening, though. He was taking in the colour and the crowd and, clearly pleased with the manner in which they had eased themselves into the sweat and grime of the outing, humming to himself a hymn.

  ‘Take my gand, precious Lord.’

  Each time he spotted an attractive coolie—a face sunburnt, insolent, chest buttons engagingly open, the rag about the head rakishly askew—the words grew softer, disconnected, and the tune more breathless.

  ‘I woke up last Thursday to find a couple of my father’s bouncers floating about on tiptoe all around the room and learnt that they’d dropped in that morning on Wilson—you know, the driver—to inspect his baby. Any new foolishness of Pashupati’s there that you want to tell me about?’

  ‘Nothing you can’t handle, dost, when you wake up from your sloth.’

  They bought cigarettes and paan and joined the shortest queue, a hundred humans long, for platform tickets. A pale, worried man shuffled up and down the line, wheedlingly asking the world whether it could change a fifty-rupee note. Feeling naked and soft, excited, exposed like the fragile, pink skin beneath some crustacean’s shell, they strolled towards the overbridge that spanned the platforms. They were continually being hustled, bumped into and elbowed aside by the hundreds in their running, stumbling rush. It was what they liked, just for a long evening, step off the treadmill, step out, step back and watch everyone else scurry and scamper by.

  They were glad to see that their favourite haunt—in that they had idled there twice before in the preceding ten months and enjoyed it—the pink concrete bench bang underneath the fan and right alongside the Ex-Servicemen’s Jai Bhagwan Jai Jawan Jai Kissan Jai Vigyan Tea Stall on Platform Number Eight—was still there, not vacant for the moment but that was a trifle. Chairs would appear, the stall owner would arrange for them. The rich have always been less the slaves of chance, of circumstance, than the poor, for the weight of wealth regularly loads the dice in their favour.

  FIVE

  Their hands scalded by the cups that they held, the plastic of which seemed paper-thin, paper-cheap and—after the evidence of the taste of the tea—clearly quite dissoluble, their senses pleasantly benumbed by the dead-slow whine—loud, clear, yet incomprehensible—of the trilingual announcements on the public address system of arrivals, departures, delays, cancellations, reschedulings, missing persons, abandoned luggage and suspected bombs, their faculties addled by the warmth of March trapped under and reflected, strengthened, by the asbestos roofing in the course of the long day, Nirip and Vinayak watched the dice roll on the filthy floor of Platform Number Eight of the railway station. A game of Trader was in progress, its players were the habitués of the platform. In dozens they turned up in the morning along with the commuters but, being in no rush to catch a train, lingered all day, preferring—as in life—to wait and watch rather than to depart. The railway station provided them all that they needed: flatulence-generating food, tea, water, paan, shelter, electricity, social intercourse, seating, mucky toilets—and drugs, coolies, women and children for sale at most reasonable prices. What more could a man ask for?

  A lot, believed Nirip, given man’s nature. A glass of water in certain circumstances to his own private lake in other. He demanded and desired till he died. Longing for things—teapots and fountain pens—was a sign of wanting to belong, to be counted amongst the living. I want nothing because I lack nothing because the riches of the world are in my head—that was the litany of the Himalayan ascetic with ice in his skull. I want nothing because I lack nothing because there’s death in my head. Seeping down.

  ‘Any of these guys could give you your second kidney.’

  ‘You mean for my birthday? And forego the one lakh or whatever it’d cost? How sweet of them.’

  The first child beggar materialized at Nirip’s elbow at that instant, no doubt tugged out of the ether by the magic in the sound of the syllables in one lakh. She carried an infant; it was, as it were, implanted on her hip. Clearly a sibling, it had her features and the same kohl-black eyes made enormous by the wanness and malnourishment of the face. Her hair was burnt by the sun to the shade of rust. If she doffed her wheedling, professional beggar’s expression—the eyes half-shut, half-dead, the upper lip cretinously curled up—if she dropped from her voice its gloss, that hard whine that irked the skin like a starched shirt in summer, Nirip wondered whether he would find beneath them, sickly and all curled up, dark yet wan, inarticulate, helpless, her childhood.

  ‘No money. Go away. Why aren’t you in school? Name the President of India.’

  Whimpering with longing, the infant in the child’s arms reached out for Vinayak’s shirtsleeve, clearly intending to slobber over it, to deposit on its softness its nosey. Beyond smiling at them periodically with gentle, avuncular love, both Nirip and Vinayak ignored the pair till the girl at last whined, ‘Be kind, give me some money at least, we haven’t eaten for days.’

  To which Vinayak, triumphant that she had facilitated the objective of the evening, responded, ‘Eat? What do you want to start with? For you, I’d recommend Horlicks and for the littler one, maybe some hot milk with Drinking Chocolate in it. Generations of the young of the well-to-do will vouch for the dreadful, convalescent taste of Horlicks not having changed a bit over the decades.’

  And which, for the commuter who needed to fortify himself against a stressful, unfulfilled life, Jai Bhagwan Jai Jawan Jai Kisan Jai Vigyan stocked—and displayed alongside the tin of Cadbury’s Drinking Chocolate that sat above the tiny fridge and to the right of a shelf on which were laid out, amidst jasmine and incense and a tiny, permanently lit, red light bulb, all reposeful and benign in clay, a tableau of idols of Lakshmi and her friends. Bhagwan the stall-owner, bald, moustached, portly, jovial, servile with the spenders and the principal procurer of coolies for Vinayak, grinned with confused delight at hearing him place his order.

  The beggar girl’s tribe, dotted all over the platform and about the station like dark mermaids sunning themselves on outcrops of rock in a fairy-tale ocean, keeping tabs on one another with the efficacy of double agents, sensing on their radars the largesse of Vinayak and Nirip, ambled up to the snack stall in twos and threes. Elaborately casual in manner, yet with their antennae alert and swaying, their routinely pathetic expressions belied by their bored eyes, they hovered around the birthday boy and his father’s foremost investment advisor like the security around a Prime Minister.

  ‘Feed them all.’

  Tea, of course, in plastic cups. And in paper plates toast and butter, bread pakodas, samosas, bun unda, chhole bature, Parle Glucose biscuits, milk rusks, irresistibly greasy omelettes, plain dosas, masala dosas, idlis, vadas, uttapams, rajma chawal, vada pav, pav bhaji, bondas, veg burgers, Jain pizzas, Coca, Pepsi, Limca, Mirinda, Drinking Chocolate and Horlicks for two dozen uninvited but welcome guests. To the commuters and idlers who watched and wondered, Nirip and Vinayak said nothing until they were asked.

  ‘It’s his fiftieth birthday, you see. Why only receive on your birthday, why not also give? When you give, you become lighter, your lungs expand, your health improves. Your best birthday gift to yourself.’

  The two dozen guests became three. Some of them invited their friends and cousins on their mobile phones. ‘No takeaway,’ ordered Vinayak, with a taut, wagging forefinger magisterially forbidding a grandmother, bald, toothless, from stuffing residual chhole bature into a blue polythene sac. She didn’t even look up. Either then or later when a couple of police constables sauntered up to disperse the dinner party. For even in a country of a billion-plus, a group of thirty-plus beggars is a crowd, particularly in an area meant to be free of them. ‘Get a move on, eat up and disappear.’ Laughing, their first guest, the beggar girl, having gorged on rusks, idlis, bun undas and milk, looking vacant with satiety, shuffled up to them with the infant at her hip. He clutched, crumpled and sticky in his left hand, the plastic cup that had contained his drinking chocolate. The gift of food made his sister
more confidently friendly; she grinned up at the philanthropes, slyly claiming in her beaming face a special relationship with them. ‘Give me some money, give me to buy clothes and medicines for father dying mother dying.’

  ‘Why don’t you sell off that mobile phone that we saw you playing with?’

  Gratified, grinning from ear to ear, she twirled a sharp ninety degrees to the right and then twirled back again, thereby bumping the infant’s head twice against the hard fat of Vinayak’s upper arm. The knocking seemed to do the child good, for it smiled beatifically. ‘Then how to speak to my father in the village? Then how to listen to film songs? And dance?’ She raised her free arm and pirouetted a full circle. During the turn, like a pitcher being ferried by a village belle, the child inclined dangerously out of the crook of her left arm and loved it.

  ‘Who all have you left behind in the village? And what do they do?’

  The lustre faded from her eyes. The question, like poverty’s unending gradations, was insulting. She stared through the bustle around her at a train gliding out and away from the platform, at the lingering farewells from the open doorways, the yellow and red of the newer coaches brighter than that of the older ones, like favoured offspring who receive better clothing and the best of the food when made to line up with their less privileged siblings.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Then why don’t they join you here in the city?’ asked Nirip gently. He did feel gentle once or twice a year.

  Instinctively, with a sort of squirm, the beggar girl moved back from what she clearly felt was one more insulting question. She looked vaguely and wonderingly all about her. As though to get her going, the child thumped her on her budding left breast with the empty plastic cup. ‘Now that your tummy is for the moment—for a few hours—full, what do you plan to do? Go for clothing? Shelter?’