Fairy Tales at Fifty

by Upamanyu Chatterjee

  To overcome his sloth, he was going to try and swim across that stretch of thinnish, grey-green sludge in one breath, just because everyone had asked him not to, and to show himself that he was fifty going on twenty-eight, and because somehow he felt like dirtying himself.

  He dipped a toe in the water and was surprised to find it warm. He looked around, undecided. With a sudden gurgle, startling him, the central gargoyle at his left, a rotund, jovial, well-sculpted, worldly-wise Brahmin, spat out water from its full, fat lips. Against the clayey wall, its discharge looked faintly yellow. Nirip watched it dribble down and lose itself in the mould at the level of the second step. It was clearly an omen that he should, well, pee before setting out to wade into the murk of the challenges that the future held for him. He was all at once overwhelmed by fatigue. He slumped down beside the well with his feet dangling—like sodden deadwood—in the water. It was warm and sticky like diluted glue. The greyness of the blues triggered off by exhaustion. Within him, that ashen dismalness fanned out like a stain to taint his entire existence, its lack of focus and structure, of dignity. Something touched his right heel and swam away. His leg twitched but he couldn’t muster up the will to lift it out of danger. On the contrary, felt he dimly in his lassitude, it had been a friendly enough, welcoming sort of nudge, inviting him not to delay in taking a dip. Musing upon the matter, he let himself keel over into the well.

  He glimpsed for a second an opaque submarine world the colour of warm slush before he found himself bobbing like a ping-pong ball on the surface, his eyes open and burning as though they’d been bathed in acid. He was blinded, he was sure. When he squeezed his eyes shut, needles under their lids pricked dots in his eyeballs. The entire socket had reddened and pulsed with pain like some inflamed arachnid in its death throes. Ice-cold water was what he needed to bathe them with, not the warm and diluted sewage that he seemed to be floating on. Not doing anything save weeping while riding the water became, however, after a moment or two, somehow even more intolerable; so, gobbling down an enormous gulp of air, he, keeping his eyes shut, ducked underwater and kicked off towards his future.

  Instead of moving forward, he went up, buoyed aloft as though by a gigantic but human palm flat against his belly. He felt his cranium touch the surface before he plunged down and lunged forward again. Once more, the invisible hand gently but firmly pushed him towards the top. All at once, he knew that it was useless, impossible. To feel blinded and not to breathe, not to see one’s way in water that smelt like acid, to make the effort but not the progress—that welter in his head was atrocious enough and, just then, as though it weren’t, on top of it he felt—all along his flanks, his legs, his belly, sharp and thin—but unlike needles clinging they were, sticky even in water, reluctant to let him go, wavy, terrible, edged as though with powdered glass—he felt the reeds.

  He must be halfway there, he surmised and then—like lightning the thought—felt silly at even conceiving of a midpoint in a length as trifling as that of a badminton court. It was odd that if he gave up he wouldn’t sink to the bottom, would instead float to the top. In just a few seconds, he’d need to breathe and each passing moment—in which he flailed his limbs about as much against the entangling weeds as to move forward, to gain ground—each moment tired him out further, seemingly without taking him anywhere.

  Something blunt and heavy just then nudged his rib cage. Instinctively, he looked to his right. Inches away from his face floated the snout of a frighteningly ugly fish not much smaller than him. From its jaws protruded the limbs of a tiny, distinctly human form. Startled, Nirip opened his mouth, gagged, gulped down the saltiest water that he’d ever tasted; scared he certainly was by the novelty but, at the same time, in his fairytale bewilderment, not fearful for his life, of having, say, half his chest chomped out of him. A very large member of the carp family his companion resembled but they didn’t come in such sizes did they, unless on steroids and had been pumping iron of which they were a richer source than even spinach. So shaken, nonplussed, in his bubble world was he that his burning eyes tortured him but indistinctly—and then he just simply had to breathe, so he let himself go, feeling that he’d lost a struggle fundamental but that he’d mourn only after his lungs had had their fill of the open air. He was inches away from the surface—sheeny with light—when the fish all of a sudden poked him in the anus and—quite dramatically—propelled him forward. In feebly trying to kick it away, he moved a little further ahead and even closer to the top—the vacuum in his lungs meanwhile seeming to expand every millisecond, to burst him in its need for air. Then, with his head an instant away from a glimpse of blue sky, he felt his consort—impatiently, as though a bit annoyed at having to deal with someone so slow and so obtuse—he felt the fish nibble his buttocks and the legs of that thing that resembled a dead baby knock against his thighs. He was outraged at the liberty taken, and yet, even while he was immersed in being outraged, the love bites precipitated him still further forward so that, a fraction of a second before his head, with a loud, spun-out, agonized groan of an inhalation, broke the surface of the water—an instant before that—his hand, fully stretched and tensed, had grazed the slimy wall of the opposite side of the well.

  TEN

  Recovering from the crossing, Nirip lay alongside the stepwell at the Gadaipur farmhouse, on the paving of mud and faded brick, eyes shut, listening to his heart and his inhalations slowly return to normal. Minutes passed. When his eyes began to smart again, when their discomfort penetrated anew his nerves, he opened them for a second to glimpse, inches away from his face, a pair of slippered human feet. As he shut his eyes against the burning, he registered distractedly that though large, the feet were feminine-looking. Moments passed. He was more than content just to rest forever, without any fuss simply to be. He became more receptive behind his closed eyes to the world of sound, to the raucous squawk of a peacock as it half-hopped and flew a few metres to a more conspicuous perch, to the resonance off the walls that gave the birdcall a timbre that the original did not possess. From far away, a truck on the Gadaipur road blared on its cacophonous horn its intolerance of all other users of the road. Close to his head, his faithful waterproof wristwatch ticked on. The slippered feet squidged away to the other end of the well and after a few moments returned, the tread rhythmical, the squelches comic, progressively more distinct, to stop a foot away from Nirip’s head.

  ‘Here, for your eyes, let me bathe them.’ The man’s voice was low, raspish, and he mumbled. Without opening his eyes, Nirip turned on his back and heard from just above his head the comforting sounds of ministration—the gurgle of liquid in a mug, the rapidfire clicks of a spoon stirring its contents, the rustle of hands foraging in sacks of plastic.

  ‘More water, I think, for the boy, Jayadev-jee.’ A second voice, a woman’s, the Hindi lazier, more spoilt, posher. Just in anticipation of being mothered, Nirip felt better, less alone. He could differentiate them by their smells; she smelt of sandalwood and camphor, he of a mix of paan and dust and Keo Karpin hairoil.

  ‘There’s my baby in the well in the jaws of a fish,’ murmured Nirip. They didn’t react at all. Perhaps he hadn’t made himself clear.

  After a moment, a cold compress for his eyes, a chilled, perfumed wad that instantly began to diffuse deep its coolness, seemed to extract needles from his eyelids. Suddenly he felt terribly his age, saw with utter clarity how old he’d become, how futile it was to ignore the signs of the decades of exhaustion. By the tenderness of the man’s touch, the care with which he swabbed down the skin around Nirip’s knees that had been lacerated by the reeds in the well, the attentiveness with which he covered Nirip with the mattress on which he’d spent the night, the gentleness of his fingers stroking into order the short-distance swimmer’s wet hair, he, Nirip, instinctively sensed in his benefactor too a history of exhaustion and defeat. Nicely lumpen-homosexual but closet, this guy, he decided just before he nodded off, and sweet.

  When he drifted into wakefulness,
the woman seemed to be saying something to the man about babies lost and found. She—they—could even be seventyish. Their voices had made them sound younger. She was tall, with white hair austerely brushed back from a broad and distinguished forehead. Large-eyed, fine-nosed, good-looking despite the wrinkles and the wisp of a moustache. Golden earrings and, in her nose, a stud that sparkled. His clothes—once white pyjamas, plastic slippers, faded saffron kurta—appeared to suggest that it didn’t matter to him that he wasn’t richer. He sat on his haunches in front of the stuff—extracted from one of his plastic shopping sacks and methodically laid out in an arc before him—that he needed to make himself a paan with; perhaps he’d been in the water, for tears filmed his eyes. Nirip disconnectedly imagined that, being trespassers who’d slipped in to help themselves to mangoes from the orchard, they hadn’t felt the need to elude the guards at the gate, sluggards all in any case, or that they’d scaled the ten-foot-high wall, even she with her sari. They’d therefore have a third with them, some nimble chhokra who’d actually climb the trees.

  ‘Miraculous—whatever you bathed my eyes with. Oof—I thought I’d been blinded. What was it—just the salt in the water? Effluents? What else?’ He shut his eyes to relive for a second the trauma. ‘And it was a baby. What else could it’ve been? They dump the corpses here?’

  Smiling absentmindedly, as though to hide that he didn’t quite follow Nirip’s Hindi, the man, modestly dropping his gaze, first handed the lady a paan and then folded a second delicately into his mouth. He began packing up the lime and the leaves, then suddenly stopped to glance enquiringly, with one raised eyebrow, at Nirip.

  ‘Oh. Me? A paan? At this hour of the day? On an empty stomach? Do you have yours with tobacco? Because I’ll have mine plain if you don’t mind.’ He paused to listen to the views of his digestive tract. ‘Actually what I’d really like—’ He addressed the lady sitting on the damp steps beneath the Brahmin gargoyle, frowning and examining at arm’s length a message on her mobile phone ‘—is some warm, thick milk sweetened with honey and all creamy and frothy on top.’

  His phone rang then, somewhere behind him and to his right. He took the instrument out of his knapsack to listen better to its caller tune. ‘Black magic woman.’ His mother. ‘A most peculiar man’ was Kamagni and ‘Mere humdum mere dost’, Vinayak. Nirip never answered the phone, for he preferred the pleasure of being unexpectedly deflected by the sound of nice music. When someone really wanted to speak to him, he had to message him first or get him on a landline.

  ‘Is that your mother?’ demanded the lady clairvoyantly. ‘She’s not to know that I’m here.’

  They prepared to climb the steps, Nirip, his eyes still swollen and smarting, wondering why the strangers didn’t instead take the path past the banana patch and the cowshed to scale the rear wall of the farm. Perhaps they expected a tip. He was embarrassed. In the sunlight they both looked older but happier; the wrinkles and splotches on the sagging skin were more conspicuous in the brightness of day but their eyes were young with joy, at having found it serendipitously. And in the dusty lemonness of noon, the world was less mysterious, more shabby. The alcoves and niches that they passed—in the dark so full of menace and magic they had been—appeared in that dull light for what they were: musty toilets for monkeys and goats; out of them sprang resurgent ugly plants that drew their sustenance from animal urine.

  ‘Would you like to take back some mangoes with you? Though it’s a bit early in the season?’

  The elders were out of breath after having climbed the two dozen steps and thus did not think the question worth a reply. A rural stud, looking lost in the farm uniform of chocolate kurta and lighter brown churidaar, waited for them at the arch that formed the entrance to the stepwell. He namaste-ed the lady first, next Nirip, and then smiled pleasantly and nodded his head at the old man.

  More than the flattened nose and the moustache, it was the colour of the young man’s clothes and his nervousness in the presence of royalty that brought back to Nirip, with the violence of an unexpected blow, his first meeting three years ago with Wilson. Exactly at the same time, by the manner in which she had been greeted, by her speech and her way of carrying herself, he realized who the lady was. Of course, at certain moments, in certain moods, everything, it was true, tended to remind him of the dead chauffeur, the manner in which a driver clasped the steering wheel, for instance, or how the new attendant at the club timidly, with his head down, couldn’t tear his eyes away from the expat whites in bikinis by the pool, or again how a shop assistant in his new clothes couldn’t tell the difference between looking cool and looking ridiculous, particularly if he wore the chocolate safari suit and the white fake Adidas sports shoes that Wilson had had on for his first interview with Nirip. His companion, of course, was Shivani the aunt, of the stuff of whose life fairy tales’d been woven by Shaamo the ghoul in her bedtime stories of Shivani’s lovers, how she picked them up and discarded them like footwear, of her disguises, how she roamed about the country pretending to be other people, how she’d had several children to compensate for her sister’s barrenness.

  ‘Can you drive?’

  ‘I have a licence.’ Wilson’d nodded vigorously, arched his eyebrows, nervously pushed his snout out in a moue to indicate the piece of grubby plastic in Nirip’s hand.

  ‘Yes, but can you drive?’ From the smudged photograph on the licence, Nirip, flicking it against his left thumbnail as though to test it for sound, had glanced up at its original trembling with the certainty that he was, with every second, messing up his chances of being employed.

  ‘No. But I could learn. I want to learn.’

  ‘That is noble of you. Is the licence genuine?’ Honesty had always puzzled him.

  ‘Of course.’ Wilson’d been outraged, forgotten just for a moment his nervousness. ‘How much I had to shell out in bribes.’ Nirip’d seen his Adam’s apple bob like a ping-pong ball. ‘Please sir, I need the job, my wife is pregnant.’

  ‘Is the father my father?’ was the question that Nirip’d just managed to restrain himself from asking; so delighted was he, however, with his own wit and with Wilson’s ingenuousness that he’d hired him as his chauffeur and taught him how to drive.

  ‘As for the fish and the dead baby,’ said Shivani absentmindedly, looking Nirip up and down because she simply couldn’t meet his eyes, ‘didn’t you get your vision tested in your last medical? Early cataract? Poor sight is in your genes. So is the inability to see what’s right, what’s wrong. Ask me. Perhaps the knowledge of the blood groups of my sister and my brother-inlaw made you forget to complete the check-up?’

  ‘Your car, Madam, is blocking the way of Magnum Madam’s car. I couldn’t locate the driver,’ murmured the rural stud, deferentially glancing from one face to the other, ready to be instructed, to glide. Maybe he was seeing things, admitted Nirip to himself, perhaps because, after having traversed the stepwell, he’d crossed over; for it was extraordinary, the stud’s resemblance to Wilson—Wilson’s body clothing another personality who, in turn, had lent the dead chauffeur his clothes.

  ‘No need,’ cheerfully interrupted the old man, his head a little up, for his mouth was full of paan, ‘the driver is right here. Here—’ He fished in the pocket of his kurta ‘—if someone could—’ and handed Wilson Reincarnate the keys.

  They watched the rural stud, head down, careful not to tread on either snakes or shit—the world, after all, was full of both—mince his way towards the farmhouse. A life full of excrement surrounded by serpents—that’s what Nirip had wanted never to lead. Even when he walked Coolcat in the morning, he couldn’t lift his head up and look about him because he had to watch out for the dogshit on the pavement.

  ‘But you can drive in Delhi?’ Unspoken in Nirip’s question—but tinting his tone—was the phrase ‘at your age’. He asked only because the companionable silence had suddenly made him apprehensive; the expression on the faces of the other two pricked him with a premonition that he was abo
ut to learn something that he both longed for and didn’t want to know.

  ‘Ah, what have I not done in seventy years? I’ve roamed the country, north to south, east to west. I’ve acted in theatrical productions in Agra, Lucknow, Indore, Bhandara, Jabalpur, Tatanagar, Pune.’ Unexpectedly, the old man reached out and stroked Nirip’s cheek. ‘I’ve played the flute, cured the ill, massaged limbs, mended souls,’ he murmured with a those-were-the-days light in his eye, ‘driven the ladies about, made them happy, made myself happy and not saved a pie. We’ve taken long to meet, young man. It’s all the fault of the women.’

  Well, at least they were good-looking, this pair from his new past, though the old man could’ve been posher. Nirip shut his eyes against the world. The grubby noon light still hurt them. They looked the sort who’d fucked around like crazy in their heyday; he liked the kindled life in their eyes. Even at seventy. They seemed not to be thinking at all about God and his world, or about breathlessness in this life and blocked arteries and bleeding gums, all their corporeal systems in revolt, their flesh caving in, their bones giving up, none of that. They looked instead as though they led better sex lives than the young man. Without opening his eyes, Nirip turned his face up to the sky to breathe more fully. He heard a warm, stale breeze rustle the leaves of the palms. On the Qutb road, a party of picnickers in a boisterous car roared by and away for a Jaipur weekend. He felt exhausted and abandoned in his freedom, his loneliness, as though he’d just stepped out of prison. It seemed to him incredible that for several days he’d thought only in snatches of his biological origins, his parentage. It didn’t matter to him in the least. He’d believed all the while that his mother, fifty years ago, had simply and quietly cuckolded her husband—and he’d wondered every now and then who on earth with, at the impossibility of it, at its strangeness as well as its simplicity. She had never had any male friends, only diverse feudal retainers, domestics, middle-aged houseboys. Feeling absurd, he’d imagined his mother naked and writhing in the arms of someone like that bald, halitotic clothes-presswala who, whenever he used to return her ironed saris, always hotly denied that the burnt holes in them were his handiwork. That someone like that could have been his, Nirip’s, progenitor—all those days, he had known the notion to be preposterous and yet had—confusedly—toyed with it because, at the same time, in his mother’s infidelity and its outcome, he had at last found one explanation—feeble yet plausible or so it had seemed, at any rate—for his difference from his putative father: a difference so fundamental that it had always—even when he, Nirip, had not known—appeared biological, an exclusion and a cold distinctness, in contrast to which his father’s warmth of excitement in his one-upmanship in his criminal dealings had even appeared in a manner welcome. Nirip opened his eyes, looked around at his new past, wondered for a moment whether he could shrug it off.