Fairy Tales at Fifty

by Upamanyu Chatterjee

  He didn’t apparently need to; after having presented itself to him without warning, it was leaving of its own accord.

  ‘We’ll catch up later, once you’re kidnapped, my child,’ murmured Shivani, smiling through her tears. She took a couple of steps down the path that led through the mango trees to the farmhouse.

  ‘Now that’d make two of us; like son, like father,’ he replied and since Shivani looked puzzled, elaborated, ‘Wouldn’t you also know whether Magnum’s going to do something about getting me back my dead chauffeur’s son? More precious than platinum?’ An infinitesimal jerk of her head. ‘I’ve tried to be tough with her but it’s like addressing your threats to a boxing glove.’

  He turned from one visitor to say goodbye to another. Spurred on no doubt by the return of the rural stud, Keo Karpin had shuffled forward a few steps to receive the car keys. In farewell, he had left behind in the air the scent of hairoil and paan. Nirip exclaimed in surprise as a tiny monkey suddenly detached itself from the lowest branch of a patriarchal mango tree, leaped and landed on the old man’s shoulder. Keo Karpin half-stumbled, righted himself, pushed the baby ape to a more comfortable position closer to his neck, turned to smile and raise a hand to signal to Nirip that all was well.

  ‘Did I even thank you, Fairy Godmothers?’ he called out across the intervening ten metres, ‘for saving my eyes?’ But the rural stud had reached him by then with a message that Pashupati wanted to see him.

  OF A BLOODY ROTTEN WORLD

  ONE

  Fifty long years before Nirip’s discovery of his origins, Pashupati, upon turning twenty-one, merciless even in passion, told Manasa his first, official, legal wife, ‘We want children. What else am I working so hard for?’

  She correctly read in his need for heirs a threat. If she did not beget, he would go elsewhere.

  ‘So do I want children.’ She was two years younger than her husband but because of her silent self-possession that was akin to wisdom, he was a little in awe of her.

  ‘Yes, but it’s not happening.’

  She once more correctly sensed in his complaint against her barrenness a refinement of the same threat. If you do not beget, you will give me the right to go elsewhere.

  ‘True, but not for want of trying.’ She couldn’t look him in the face, being demure and dutiful, so she fluttered her eyelashes in the direction of his loins.

  They had tried every night, sometimes twice, three times, a night, for two years. To warm up, he usually slept with somebody else before turning up in her room at some odd hour between midnight and dawn. He had always found her waiting, listening to some Hindustani classical music playing distantly. No one could ever recall having seen her sleeping. He would shoo away her snakes and, to warm her up, wriggle his eyebrows and jiggle his buttocks till she was purring and melted. Before sunrise he then returned to that somebody else in his rooms because she had been hired also to double up as his morning alarm. She was paid well for fellating him at 5 a.m. sharp into rising up out of sleep. He believed that if the morning started well, the day followed.

  When it didn’t, it meant that something was wrong with his alarm. Its features perhaps, its expression, not loving enough. For he held that even for an ogre like him, the appearance of the first conscious face that he saw on waking up determined the day. So it was periodically changed, the alarm, reemployed in the household or the growing business, swapped for something new off the streets.

  Thus, ever since her marriage, both at home and at work, Manasa was surrounded by women who fellated. They could not be trusted in the least—or could be relied on only to spy upon her and relay gossip and private information about her back to her husband. He had nothing against her; it was simply the way he functioned, in which he saw the world, a globe composed of ninety per cent water and only fifty per cent winners. He had earned—and continued to earn—his riches through illegality, double dealing, violence and mistrust; he saw his relationships too as interactions which he would be foolish to lose when he could win—a bargain there, an heir here and the upper hand at all times.

  Manasa’s household was large and included servants of all shapes and sizes and sexes. The two eunuchs and three of the women were the best masseurs and all the females—cooks, maids, attendants, sweepers, cleaners—aspired to become wives or respectable mistresses or procuresses. Everyone stole like crazy and the walls exuded the usual odour of large households, a mixed bag of insecurity, greed, curiosity, lust, boredom and mango pickle. Like Pashupati, everyone around her was a little in awe of her. Some of them believed that it was a good thing that she couldn’t conceive because she was, after all, a witch. She never tied up her luxuriant hair and it was flecked with white even at the age of twenty. Over the years, it became more and more silvery but her skin remained pale, unlined, bloodless, virginal. Sex with her, though, always indulged in in very dim light—and as the expression on Pashupati’s face before and after suggested to the household—was like an orgy with some frisky demons.

  No one had ever seen her sleeping or eating or drinking water. Shaamo, the eldest female masseuse and no mean ghoul herself, let the word spread that Manasa’s single source of nourishment was the blood of her lizards. At communal and religious feasts and at her husband’s parties, she would be present as a poised hostess or smiling guest but would always claim to be fasting. Her rooms were full of herbs, brews, condiments, spices and potions and she could cure, when she wanted to, almost anything. She usually didn’t want to. A corollary oddity that had been noticed and commented upon by the household was that anyone who displeased her seemed to fall ill and had to take to bed. Not deathbed but on rare occasions—as when Manasa came to know of what Shaamo had been bruiting about—a quarter-way there. A cold, a backache, a fever, the shits, a gouty swelling of the wrists if they’d forgotten to iron her saris.

  Her closest, her only friend and confidante was Shivani, her younger sister. A mere thirteen months separated them. No two women could have been more dissimilar. Shivani was such a tomboy, so mannishly attractive as to be almost of doubtful gender. It is a strategy, opined the Shaamo lot, to get Pashupati to keep his hands off her, it won’t work, silly thing, he after all has been known to bugger Labradors. Shivani never wore saris. She preferred salwars that resembled pants and kurtas with the collars of men’s shirts. Her hair beneath her dupatta was cut short-short. She had run away from her father’s home in Indore because she missed her sister. More accurately, she arrived one April morning at Manasa’s doorstep on a visit after her college exams and stayed on and on and on. She became rather attached to an itinerant ear-cleaner in the household, a specialist in toe and calf massage, who had drifted in from Bhopal and looked like staying on and on and on too. In August of that year, Shivani became pregnant.

  That is to say, Manasa heard her retching in the bathroom at five one morning and saying oof-oof and tauba-tauba to herself, leaned over to increase the volume of the gramophone till the voice of Alauddin Khan, swollen, liquid gold, prevented all other sound from reaching the maids, drowsy, fresh from fellating.

  How wan Shivani looked with her eyes shut and her back against the grey wall of the bathroom, how defenceless in the hard light of the hundred-watt bulb.

  To Pashupati, in the dim light two nights later, at three in the morning, Manasa demurely confessed that she was, could be, with child. He was both overjoyed and suspicious. He turned to butter in her hands. She outlined her plans. He was to tell absolutely NO ONE because one never could tell whose eye was evil. She had found a new gynaecologist in Byculla, discreet, soothing. He wouldn’t mind if she spent more and more time away from these nosy servants alone and at peace in their recently acquired flat in Walkeshwar. She would send her sister back to Indore immediately. He would, of course, find her, Manasa, here at home whenever he needed her. She merely wished to be by herself so as to better focus on nurturing the life within her. He would understand if she learnt how to drive the new Fiat herself. She wished from those prying vul
gar chauffeurs only that they get her her driving licence.

  She wanted to send the itinerant ear-cleaner off on his wanderings again. She installed Shivani at Walkeshwar. Shivani left herself entirely in her sister’s hands, only suggesting that they retain the ear-cleaner, Jayadev by name, as help-cum-cook-cum-driver-cum-masseur-cum-ear-cleaner-cum-houseboy-cumsextoy. He was particularly soft and sensitive, like a woman, completely unexpected, which added to the pleasure. Unknown to her sister, Manasa tried him out and agreed.

  Expectedly, the two women switched names for the doctor. Jayadev drove them from Walkeshwar to Byculla. On certain mornings, he, a man of many parts, phoned Manasa a little after five, let the instrument ring once, then disconnected. Manasa then went and retched in the bathroom sink—appropriately enough, since it was only to be in sync with her sister. Shivani soon developed a craving for almonds and Manasa for fish. Plates of fried fish, fish cutlets and fish curry entered her room three, four times a day and emerged spotlessly clean.

  She was extra careful with Pashupati because he asked no questions. In the first few weeks, he continued to show up between midnight and dawn in her room, to jiggle his buttocks and position himself between her legs. He knew the power of his wealth; she too was conscious of how it made living easier. She acknowledged the generosity of her husband and would not have wished to disturb his sense of his own worth, for she was certain that he would then make his displeasure known in a hundred pitiless ways.

  TWO

  During her pregnancy, Shivani would lie awake at night and worry about going home to Indore, about the child dying, or being born deformed or—worst of all—turning out a girl. Manasa told her that she needed to focus and direct positive energy at her future and it would mould itself to her desires. She also needed physical exercise and Manasa suggested to the smiling ear-cleaner, curbing her urge to stroke his cheek, that he accompany her, Shivani, to Chowpatty Beach for an hour every morning. Manasa herself, come rain or shine, walked kilometres and kilometres at night. Shaamo the ghoul had tried to follow her a couple of times but with little success. Manasa wore tennis shoes and a sari and descended in the lift sometime between midnight and dawn. When Shaamo followed a few moments later, Manasa was not to be seen either on the ground floor or at the gate. The liftman and the chowkidaar were sleeping in their hot cubicle at that odd hour but denied it. They maintained that no one except Shaamo had come down and, instead of descending, the elevator had just gone up once to the roof. Manasa always returned well in time, refreshed, to receive Pashupati.

  Well in advance, she bought commodious kurtas for herself and her sister and varieties of pillows to belt over her stomach so that her girth resembled Shivani’s. She hinted to her husband that the gynaecologist had suggested that in the weeks to come, since the foetus was delicate, perhaps they could for some time desist. However, it was important for her peace of mind that he visit her every night as usual and she receive his advice. Of course, he said, and added that he thought that Nripati was a good name for a son. Pashupati. Nripati. What did she think?

  Well, she thought that she should make plans for the day when he suddenly should comment on how odd it was that the gynaecologist at Byculla had not wanted to meet the father of the child. Tuesday being her good day, on Tuesday morning at 3 a.m., she said that the gynaecologist the preceding evening had suggested that she, Manasa, be accompanied by her husband on her next visit. Would he have the time? The gynae’s was always a little crowded. Even with an appointment, they might have to wait a bit.

  Ask her in advance the questions that she wants to put to me, commanded Pashupati, and let me know. Perhaps she could drop by at the office.

  Or even at home at Walkeshwar? The gynaecologist would arrive first of course, examine me and then wait for you?

  To prepare herself for any eventuality, Manasa asked the accommodating Jayadev to shave his moustache and start going up with them to the second floor at Byculla to observe the dress and deportment of the gynaecologist, listen to what she asked her patients and take note of her gestures and mannerisms. At Walkeshwar after dark, she was surprised to find that he needed little help in donning a sari and the accompanying feminine manner. In his itinerant theatre days, he had played dozens of women of myth and folk and fairy tale, he explained. Remember that you have to play a doctor. You don’t have to seduce my husband.

  Pashupati’s mind was elsewhere. Manasa, in control, waited for the cause of his distraction to be revealed either by Pashupati himself or by someone else. Shaamo the ghoul, black eyes aglow with venom, said that the reason was the new slut that he’d picked up the previous weekend in Virar. Just fifteen, and not a year spent outside the sewer. Chunni by name. Pashupati has changed it to Sulekha.

  It’s the name of the black ink that I use, observed Manasa coldly.

  The slut has a tighter body than yours, snickered Shaamo, constitutionally unable to resist a dart, and immediately felt a dull pain in her abdomen. It did not abate until she felt sorry for herself and even more for what she had said. She gulped and continued, The prostitute is trying to get herself pregnant. I know because I heard her say like a coquette, I don’t like You to wear condoms. Can you imagine? She also wants me out of His inner rooms. Would you believe the nerve of that slut?

  Manasa waited, in control but barely, for Pashupati to elaborate. Nights passed. The ease with which her husband desisted from jiggling his buttocks alongside her bed and passed his time entirely in seeking her advice, her go-ahead, in financial matters, only gave substance to Shaamo’s malice.

  On the ensuing night of the new moon, at four in the morning, Pashupati placed his ear against Manasa’s abdomen and listened. I can’t hear anything. It’s too early, she murmured, gently kneading his bald, missile-shaped dome, playing with the pointed tops of his ears. He’s sulking in there because you don’t care for him. Pashupati chuckled delightedly and commented, How slim you are for someone who’s carrying. So alert as to be on the verge of shrieking, almost certain that he knew that she wasn’t, she retorted cooingly, Wait and watch till I’m such a balloon that I won’t be able to remove my clothes.

  Pashupati then sat back on his haunches on the bed, spread wide his thighs, sighed and abruptly confessed, I want you to help me to train a person who’s recently joined my staff. Will you?

  Of course, she replied, suddenly terribly attentive to the imploring in him, most rare, even though, as always, only a means to an end. He must have his way. He must always be seen to have his way. Taking even her by surprise, he then without warning began to whimper with longing, to moan with the struggle to express himself. Her body is smooth, so tight in its plumpness that she makes me feel old at twenty-one. Me. I want her skin to smell like yours, for her to melt and become you. I’ll fetch her. He was off. He returned with a malnourished, watchful child.

  She stood stiffly beside the bed, looking at nothing, her face a sleepy pout. ‘Are you washed? Clean?’ asked Manasa gently. ‘Fleas? Lice?’ The adolescent nodded once dumbly, then briefly and uncertainly jerked her head in a no. ‘Then sit down, girl,’ commanded Manasa softly. Pashupati stepped up to stand over them both to hum and purr and exude his musk smell.

  Chunni became Sulekha but never Manasa. She came to fear and adore Pashupati’s first and only wife and even fall in love with that trait in her personality that by calming people down drew them to her. Pashupati would want to bring her often during the nights to Manasa, only to discover that she had already found her way to the older woman’s room and was massaging her calves. Manasa didn’t mind the other’s presence; it helped her to concentrate on her pregnant role of expectant mother.

  Money possessing more allure than sex, however, Pashupati would shoo Sulekha out of the room along with the cats whenever he wanted to talk business. Doing the business was fun in threes but no one must know how necessary he found Manasa’s advice on how best to place his ill-begotten wealth so as to make it bloom. It was not so much her knowledge as her instinct. Unerring,
unfailing. His heir therefore would do well to have her genes, emerge from her womb.

  Manasa thus was the good force in his life. The closest to, at any rate. She helped make almost legal the profits from his illicit activities, she advised him on nutrition and what not to eat, on whom to befriend and which leisure activities to pursue other than golf. She also played benefactress to those whom he exploited, restored what he razed. For that, she let him take the credit, feeling that she must always remain shadowy in the background and allow the goodwill to redound to the health of the business house. Thus the poor who for peanuts sold their kidneys to Pashupati’s doctor staff to have them installed in other abdomens for fabulous sums—those poor, if otherwise not found wanting, were by Manasa’s efforts found jobs as peons, cleaners and attendants in the office organization. You can keep an eye on them, she counselled Pashupati when he complained that he found it odd to be surrounded at work by staff, each of whom he had deprived of one kidney.