Fairy Tales at Fifty

by Upamanyu Chatterjee

  ‘It wasn’t me. How could I? I love, I don’t kill. You don’t believe me because you’ve never loved me. You always find fault with what I do. I told you I needed some money for that new Brugger and Thomson sub-machine gun and you laughed in my face when I said, allow me to kidnap you. For you, Papa-ji would pay a king’s ransom. We could split fifty-fifty. Very well, I’ll do it without you and we won’t split. You’ve never loved me. And now you prefer your smelly driver’s life to my love.’

  She wouldn’t stop her babble, he knew it. He glanced down at his stomach to take his mind off her. Indigestion or appendicitis or colon cancer or kidney stones or renal failure or simply his innards churning at Magnum’s presence recalling Wilson’s bloated face. Speculating on the quality of its water, he swirled the orange mocktail about in its glass and waited for her to end the party by starting her screaming and her hitting herself.

  SEVEN

  So Nirip, waiting for Magnum to start her hysterics, speculating on the quality of its water, looked down first at the orange mocktail beside his armchair, then about at the vaguely familiar faces at the nearest table, next up at the antics of Johny Mera Naam on the screen. The divide was everywhere, even in a tumbler; only when one was rich enough did one begin to bother about the water one drank. The poor, in contrast and without fuss, prided themselves on possessing stomachs as resilient as sewers. He wondered if the guests had the stamina to sit through, as had been proposed, a second film. Bobby. How silly and enervating, time-consuming, entertainment seemed when one was confronted with the physical pain that harbingered death. Never in his life had he known anyone with whom he could have discussed suffering; thus he had come to hold that it existed only to be borne, to be struggled against and gulped down as a tonic for the soul.

  He needed to get away, maybe go and lie down till the discomfort in his stomach eased up. Fortunately, with the film and the food, it was the sort of gathering where nobody notices where the hosts are and when they disappeared. In any case, mindful of his tastes, he usually never attended that sort of party. He vaguely supervised things and then vanished for some hours. Magnum sometimes followed his example without even supervising anything.

  ‘Will you excuse me for a minute? I have to see to a couple of things.’

  ‘Like what?’ In response, Magnum placed her white hand on Nirip’s forearm and began giggling through her tears with renewed, coked-out vigour. ‘Well, I suppose, for one thing, shouldn’t—what’s the point of being rich if you can’t have three kidneys? You have just one. If that goes, then how are you going to live happily ever after? Your bank account isn’t fat enough to regulate your piss for you. And for how many months will ever after last? Is it, even at fifty, just till the end of the summer holidays? And does the fairy tale finish with your return to lousy Dalhousie and your escape from me?’

  Nirip moved slowly and stiffly out of the auditorium, leaving Magnum only for a moment lolling in her crimson armchair, trailing an index finger down the frosted opacity of her glass, gently thumping the armrest with her right hand as though, with its rhythm, lulling herself to sleep. After a few steps, Nirip sensed that the pain in his stomach increased only when he moved his right leg forward. Aconite in his orange mocktail. Had things reached such a pass with mad Magnum? Unlikely. Yet Wilson had been suffocated to death. She would follow him and, in a moment, her questions would become screams to entertain the wider world with. Nirip nodded affably to the liftman who’d salaamed him and went up to the flat on the twelfth floor. Perhaps he’d pulled a muscle in his groin. At fifty, that was fine, mainly because fairly soon he’d have nothing left even to tweak, leave alone pull. Muscles with age lose mass and firmness, thus the Preface to the fourteenth yoga tome that he’d bought had advised him. Callisthenic exercises and pumping iron delay but cannot prevent that deterioration. Only yoga when you were eighty-three could give you a permanent hardon with the snout of which you could—since it pointed to Heaven—glimpse God. That physical decay is first observed in the looseness of underarm skin, sagging breasts, thinner arms and legs, shriveled, pendulous buttocks and a reduction in overall height. The spongy cushion between the vertebrae gets flattened and progressively loses its resilience. Thus older people may be shorter than they’d been when younger; they may, for the same reason, also stoop. Ageing was inevitable; its ravages could be dramatically retarded for a decade or so by the correct and sustained practice of yoga and for ever only by the miracles in a fairy tale.

  ‘Give me that herbal thing of yours for my stomach ache. And I was going to ask all of you to sniff around and locate my mother. She’s either gone underground or taken to the skies. She’s supposed to be at my aunt’s in Delhi but is never in when I call. No one is, no one picks up. Perhaps the phone’s dead, or they are, or she’s left her mobile where no one can find it. She often does that when she feels that carrying it will give her location away. On the landline I just hear some funny noises, soft rhythmical whooshes, like brooms sweeping the floor.’

  Sulekha relaxed on her belly on the divan before the TV in the pose of a benign, short-legged canine. Beside her reposed Payal. Between her parallel forearms on the printed counterpane sat two large porcelain bowls; one contained chopped-up mutton kebab, the other a relish of onion rings, chilli and mint chutney. Payal’s bad leg lay tucked up beneath her abdomen, her right, bent, sprawled away towards the edge of the divan. Preeti Baby sat apart—lolled in an armchair—because she had a cold. An identical porcelain bowl of kebab in her lap lay snug in the folds of her kameez. Her running nose compelled her to breathe through her open mouth, giving her the appearance of a carnivore so keen that he must inhale the aroma of kebab even while not chomping on them. At Nirip’s entry, Sharmila and Sunanda sprang out of their chairs as one and scurried through the doorway that eventually led to the kitchen to come to terms with the startlingly loud whistle of the pressure cooker. Several eyes, while remaining intent on the Hindi film on the screen, at the same time—and accompanied by infinitesimal jerks of their heads—flickeringly followed Nirip’s wanderings about the room. He noted in passing that they all seemed to have escaped Johny Mera Naam on the ninth floor only to be entranced on the twelfth by Johnny Gaddaar.

  ‘A hunt. And several mysteries.’ Sulekha’s nostrils quivered. Grinning, she raised her right hand some inches off the bed and froze the film with the remote. ‘Who really killed that male prostitute of a driver of yours? And who is preparing to cook his baby in a vindaloo?’ She sat up and back on her haunches. In the privacy of her room, she was even more a different, quite unladylike person. ‘I thought that Manasa-ma-jee’d gone off on a pilgrimage to Mount Abu and Amarnath to placate the gods for the evil in her household.’ Her voice was low, raspish, for a woman’s and her Hindi slightly breathless. In getting off the bed—no doubt the outcome of the feral revolt of her insides against chutney, onion and masticated kebab—she burped audibly but politely, in a civilized manner and then sighed. ‘Though it isn’t Magnum who’s evil. She’s just a warped child.’ She murmured to herself as in a measured, graceful waddle, she wandered off through the dining area towards the verandah adjoining her room. Nirip watched the bun of her hair slowly come undone, a thin tress gently uncoil itself to dangle at the neck like the wisp of a tail.

  They knew everything, these women of the twelfth floor; at any rate they had to pretend to, for their livelihood depended on their prescience. Pashupati might call upon any one of them at any time for advice or information on anything under the sun. What was the meaning of the attendant sneezing twice just when he, Pashupati, was about to step into the elevator? A couple of unsatisfactory or inadequate responses from the ladies and they would be out on the street, perhaps limping; not a rosy future for the select few who had managed to obtain a bed on the twelfth floor only when they were already well over the hill. And Pashupati’s interests were as wide-ranging as an emperor’s and his questions as slippery as sandals.

  Traditionally only women and eunuchs entered the ap
artment on the twelfth floor. Nirip qualified for admittance as a scion who couldn’t get it up as often as his father. Except for Sulekha and Payal, the other women were in transit, certain to depart in some months; they lingered on therein less as individuals and more as a species. There were no men because Pashupati did not run Homes for the Aged. He found women always to be more intuitive and he expected them to bring their intelligence to bear on resolving some tricky questions. Gold has gone up again and yet why was the colour of my urine this morning so silvery?

  Magnum hadn’t set foot in that apartment for almost two decades.

  ‘Who’s made Magnum what she is? We—all of us. She’d’ve killed before had she not been stopped. You can’t prevent her from trying again.’

  Nirip followed Sulekha’s voice to the verandah. She swivelled her head fully to glance at him with her one good eye. He was one of the few from whom the scar across her left eye did not make her shrivel away. He watched her rummage in the iron trunk that Manasa-ma had had painted carmine to ward off the germs of evil and of rust and then bequeathed to Sulekha to store her potions and antidotes in. Sulekha it was who, in the absence of the matriarch, dispensed medication to the household. Not many went to her, though, Nirip sometimes, mainly to get high on her vegetal brews, and some of the new maids when laid low by the chauffeurs of the place.

  ‘Everyone here knows all the gossip. You do nothing else all day. So tell me, Wilson died too horribly for the killer to have been Magnum. I saw the body. My mother would know. You do too, but my mother might even in her roundabout way tell me.’ And she’s not even my mother, added Nirip silently. Perhaps you are. You to whom I lost my virginity.

  ‘What kind of pain do you have exactly? Lower abdomen spasms or dull muscular or burning ulcer type?’ Without waiting for elucidation, Sulekha took out from the trunk a dark bottle and a jar that had once contained Chyavanprash and, shutting it, shuffled across the tiny verandah to the wooden chest in which she kept her needles and thread, candles, matchboxes and other odds and ends.

  That familiar verandah was her private cage, her own open space made secret by its three gaping sides having been blocked off by an iron grille—of plain prison-cell-like bars—from parapet to ceiling—and to further hide her life from the prying servants’ eyes in the surrounding highrises, by trunks stacked one atop another against the prison bars and by mounds of old bedding above the trunks, and an upright charpai that functioned as clothesline and a tight blue plastic sheet pathetic against the westerly rain.

  She lit a candle and, on a tiny, blackened tin lid, warmed for a moment half a teaspoon of some reddish aromatic powder.

  ‘I’ll have to scout around for a new driver. I really don’t want anyone from the office pool. Had it not been for the impossibility of finding parking space in Bombay, I would’ve much preferred to drive myself.’ Preeti Baby joined them and sat down on a trunk to eavesdrop better.

  ‘Wilson disliked me, held me in contempt. He didn’t like it when you asked him to drop me somewhere.’ Expressionless, unruffled, Sulekha upturned the powder into a mug of water. It hissed briefly. ‘He addressed me always with a sneer on his face and referred to me obscenely behind my back. Rundi Madam, Chatail Begum, an abandoned kept thing. Or have you forgotten?’ She handed him the mug sort of sadly.

  Memory was a deceptive, dormant beast, a sleeping dog best left snoring. Of course he didn’t remember—not unless he wanted to encourage in himself a blue mood—the ugly, nervous, servile leer on Wilson’s face when he wanted a loan that both knew was not to be repaid and the unpleasant way he would glance at Nirip out of the corner of his eye to see if he’d caused offence by some unwarranted remark of his about—for example—Sulekha that he himself’d found witty but that in fact’d simply been in bad taste. No, one forgot a lot in order to move on. ‘Well, he’s paid for his sins now.’ Nirip raised the mug and looked at its reddish muddy contents. The concoction was bubbly and bitter. ‘It isn’t over yet. Even if the police think it is because they’ve softened up a bouncer and thrown him in jail and Papa-ji’s gone and met the Commissioner.’

  It was a routine expression of a standard opinion but Sulekha seemed to take it as a confession of obtuseness. In disappointment, her features stilled, emptied even more of expression. ‘You understand nothing. Wake up, inject Magnum’s sperm into yourself. I know her, she’s my daughter. She needs money, power, love; she lacks reason. Events have been triggered off around you that no one can control and yet you continue to worry about your fountain pens and the quality of your tea.’

  EIGHT

  ‘Two things, Ma, on my mind. Before you decide to disappear again as suddenly as the stuff of dreams, let me make my first point in the form of a roundabout anecdote.’ Nirip looked away from the inert form of the widow on the bed to Manasa-ma roving listlessly about in that tiny single room of Wilson’s hovel.

  ‘. . . Take a feudal landlord type from hinterland India, circa 1890, dhoti kurta, seriously alcoholic, seriously promiscuous . . . night-long music concerts with some prostitute singer types in which he nods off, snoring, at ten o’clock, exhausted by his fear of mortality, his lust to win before death downs him . . . when awake, he runs his fiefdom like a benign ogre, kind and generous to all as long as they do his bidding, they don’t cross his path . . . his ageing wives Numbers One, Two and Nine meanwhile sit in mournful exclusion, in purdah, in some verandah behind a couple of wooden screens. You aren’t listening.’ Nirip gazed at Manasama as she, as though to avoid the longwinded and headless tale, ambled towards and paused at the threshold of the upended oblong of night framed by the doorway.

  ‘I will when you get to the point,’ she murmured absentmindedly. Hearing her voice, Vibhuti the chauffeur, lolling about, both keeping guard and the neighbours away, straightened up and hid his sachet of gutka behind his back.

  ‘Which the feudal landlord arrives at the following morning.’ Nirip blinked, lethargically struggled to maintain coherence against the potency of the brew that he had sipped all afternoon, more grog than tea, thick with the foliage of cannabis, crunchy with nuts and roots, bittersweet, grassy, heady with the hot red wine. ‘He rolls out of the gates of his mansion in his carriage, watching and being aroused by the fat rumps of his horses, thinking of nothing, intending to take a turn around his domain just to check whether his tenants are as wretched as they were the previous week, to, as it were, hazily bless himself again for his wealth and good fortune—fuzzily acknowledging all the while that it actually comes from himself, that good fortune of his, and so many in the world are not blessed with it because they clearly deserve not a jot of it.’

  Nirip didn’t quite know what his mother’s plans were; unexpected as ever, she’d been there in that one room in Parel when he, on hearing from Shaamo, the resident crone, of Nirmala Wilson’s baby having disappeared and of her simply not waking up, had showed up at seven o’clock. Manasa had finished telling the young doctor that he could return to the hospital since the widow appeared to be out of danger and had then stood up and begun idly roving about the room exactly as though she didn’t want to hear what her son had come to say and could best evade his words by becoming, even in that confined space, a constantly moving target. Nirip addressed the next portion of his parable to the oblong of night that had swallowed her up.

  ‘The feudal lord is not alone in the carriage. While he gazes blankly and sullenly out at the world beyond its windows—the rice fields, mud huts, the bullock carts, whatever—and blinks often to try and lessen the load of his hangover, his eldest son, aged nine, sits opposite him, in tears, watching unblinkingly one of his father’s wives on her knees between his legs, fellating him. The woman too is clearly visible to anyone who comes up close enough to the windows. Indeed, some of his vassals and pensioners do approach the liege to sneak a peek to confirm that he has once more combined his pleasure and someone else’s punishment.’

  Nirip sensed more than saw Nirmala Wilson stir. He turned; her body hadn’t move
d; only her head had slumped a little to the left, almost off the pillow. He walked around to the side of the bed and bent forward to straighten it so that she could breathe unimpededly. His arms thrilled as his palms touched her wiry hair, the sides of her head. He watched her body breathing and longed to feel it against his again. Her lips—usually so full and purple and now dry, cracked, whitish—opened a little, her brow creased and she jerked her head once, convulsively, as though to reject, even in her drugged sleep, the notion of cuckolding once more a dead husband. How pale her face was and pulpy-swollen. She hadn’t even known how to kiss and later had never liked it.

  Sensing her son’s desire, fussily pulling the end of her sari around to the front to tuck it in at her waist, Manasa came back out of the night. She glanced once about the room as though to check whether the stains of seepage on the walls had worsened in the moments that she’d been away, then went and stood over the sleeping form in the manner of a protector guarding it from her son’s longing. From a knotted handkerchief at her waist, she took out one of her discs of bell metal no larger than a coin and pressed it once to Nirmala Wilson’s forehead, then behind each earlobe. Nirip, remembering dimly that Manasa using her coins meant that she had begun seriously to worry, was surprised to see her approach him, the right hand carrying the coin raised and aimed at his head. He let her do her stuff. The disc felt warm like a third eye against his skin. It felt nice to feel someone protect him even at fifty. She retied her handkerchief around the coin into an impossibly small bundle and then, looking at her son solemnly and straight in the eye, waited for the next instalment.

  ‘The eldest son has never been sure whether those drives with his father are organized to please or punish him. They certainly feel like chastisement for a crime never made clear, yet his father always invites him to accompany him on those excursions with a smile and an arm around the shoulder. And they are interminable, those drives, round and round the estate till the feudal lord is satiated by the wife’s humiliation. Without pause he calls her filthy names in the gentle tender voice that one would use for terms of endearment. The son has to repeat the abuse after the father as in a kindergarten lesson. And that is not the only part of the class. There is also a guessing game. The wife is in purdah. The boy can only see her back and her cowled head. Who is she? The father keeps asking the son with a loving smile, all the while massaging the nape of her neck with his strong hands. Who is this sorrowful one between my legs? Is she sorrowful enough? Is it Wife Number Seven, Four or Two? Tell me, my son. Of course the boy knows her identity, everyone does, but weeping, he says that he does not know. If he reveals who she is, he would have won the game and he is petrified of his father losing.’