Fairy Tales at Fifty

by Upamanyu Chatterjee

  Sort of like me, she responded silently and with an angelic smile, surrounded at home by women staff, each of whom fellates, has fellated, will fellate.

  Though Sulekha was not the only young person recruited by Pashupati to help him fight off his fears of passing time, of mortality, she was the one single employee who rose rapidly in the household to a position of undefined near-respectability from which, after some weeks, she began to claim the right to have her own room. No one paid her any attention save Manasa who, after a couple of days of cogitation, emptied out for her a windowless store room located snug between the cleaning women’s Indian-style toilet and the rear verandah where the servants’ washing was hung out to dry. Sulekha would have preferred something larger with a view of the sea. The room could be bolted from the outside and often without warning was, sometimes by Shaamo the ghoul and other like-minded persons who disliked its occupant and often by Manasa herself when she wanted to visit Shivani in Walkeshwar in peace or simply wished to be alone with her lizards. The solid door of the store room had been built to discourage robbers and rats, so Sulekha’s banging on it and her screaming to be let out were muted and sounded like the distant din of the neighbourhood fishwife beating husband beating keep.

  An idle mind is the devil’s workshop, complained Manasa gently to Pashupati. Sulekha has to be kept occupied during the day. She does nothing but listen to the radio and try out the differing hairstyles of rival Hindi film actresses. She could learn how to read and write, pick up some English and become one of your office secretaries.

  Not enough polish, lamented Pashupati. She could instead prepare to be the principal ayah for my son, thinking that his heir could do worse than begin life by sucking Sulekha’s large, dark nipples.

  Prepare? What is there to prepare? A smart young girl like that doesn’t want to live an ayah’s life. She wants to be part of your office team and welcome your out-of-town business partners wearing tight salwaars and sleeveless kameezes.

  The debate between wife and husband continued for weeks and meanwhile, Sulekha lolled in her cot and, in the days before television, stared, mouth slightly open, for hours at the wall, daydreaming of Manasa dying and herself becoming queen. For which all she needed was to become fairer, as fair as—she imagined, from the way he sang and shuffled and looked so irresistibly forlorn on the black and white screen—Raj Kapoor’s penis. She implored Manasa to help her gain a milk-and-roses complexion. Manasa parried by pointing out that black was black and wheatish wheatish; one could do nothing about the skin that one was born with.

  The witch is lying because she is jealous and apprehensive, Sulekha knew, so she persisted in a more roundabout manner; she sulked and pouted and wouldn’t respond to questions, she allowed tears to course down her wheatish cheeks while she massaged Manasa’s calves; ditto when she fellated Pashupati. It annoyed him considerably.

  Defeated, Manasa gave her a powder that she was to have three times a day with warm milk and honey; it was a pounded mix of cat dandruff and Parle Glucose biscuits. Manasa instructed the household to off and on remark after a fortnight how Sulekha had begun to resemble Raj Kapoor’s fair and lovely organ.

  Sulekha’s obsession with Manasa in particular and her household in general increased with each passing day. Her place in it was ill-defined and insecure; one wrong step with any one of those sweating, importunate chauffeurs and she would be back in the sewer, a black-and-blue lump without teeth or nose. Pashupati terrified her. His focused ruthlessness even when he was being amorous sometimes made her want to vomit out of fear, a reaction that the ever-watchful Manasa had noted. Shaamo the ghoul had reassured Sulekha that when she began to displease Pashupati, he would stew her loins and eat them up to signal the close of one chapter. After all, he did every now and then eat the livers of new-born babies to purify his blood and make more creamy his semen. For him, she had elaborated, stroking Sulekha’s cheek with her talon, eating pussy took on quite another meaning.

  THREE

  What news of Shivani, asked Pashupati suddenly one night, tying up his pyjama strings and preparing to leave Manasa’s bed at four in the morning.

  She’s fine but, like all of us, could be better, responded Manasa sleepily, antennae on maximum alert. Spoke to her just the other day. Putting on weight, she said, with nothing to do in Indore. Manasa patted the slim pillow around her own waist. She wants to come back here for a few days to avoid the pressure.

  Pashupati nodded in understanding. She is most welcome, any time, you know that. We love playing cards with her.

  She knows that too. She definitely wants to be here for the baby. It’s just that we aren’t certain yet about where to have it, no?

  Pashupati nodded again in gloomy understanding. Indore was no fun with his father-in-law, a moody widower, a retired judge of the High Court who spoke a dozen words a day, mainly to his morning glass of his own urine.

  Shivani was a bundle of nerves that seemed to become more and more knotted with each passing hour. She was exhausted, irritable and snapped at everyone—that is to say, at Manasa and Jayadev, the only two human beings that she regularly saw day after day, week upon week. She listened to the radio and to the life in her stomach. She felt ugly. She walked on the beach, continually telling herself, you are guilty, stupid and insane for having agreed to have a baby clandestinely. She realized that there was nothing more sapping than a hole-and-corner existence like hers, than a life lived clandestinely. Her stomach was already enormous and growing bigger every day. She would produce a giant and then what if he turned out to be not all there?

  Her knees and lower back ached; all day, she felt hungry and wanted to vomit at the same time. Jayadev’s patience and undying good humour, the amiability of the slightly retarded, enervated her beyond bearing. It was only to crack the shell of his good cheer that she snapped at him one afternoon that the baby when born was to be handed over to Manasa and Pashupati.

  But it is my child.

  Yes, of course, but I promised.

  Jayadev became glum and tongue-tied. He stopped massaging her, making love to her, crooning his risqué folk songs, calming her by his mere presence. He stopped eating and moped instead. After two days of his sulking, she snapped at him one evening, Oh, please go away. He did. He disappeared. She woke up the next morning to find herself alone and the front door open a couple of centimetres. That unnerved her the most and recurred in her uneasy sleep, a grey door revealing a chink of tubelit foyer.

  For an entire day, she couldn’t even shut the door for fear that if she touched it, he would not find the means of return. She shuffled in a daze from room to room, panting ever so slightly, stealing glances at the slightly open grey door, repeatedly reminding herself that she needed to focus on something important but she couldn’t remember what. She neither ate nor drank anything all day, she didn’t even sit down, not once. She began to weep soundlessly when Manasa slipped in through that doorway late that evening. She announced to her sister through her tears that she would like to kill herself. Those who voice the intention usually don’t, retorted Manasa, behave yourself.

  As for that charming rascal, she continued, how much money did he steal? And Ma’s gold necklace? And his keys to the flat?

  She made Shivani sit down, drink water, eat some papaya and a fistful of almonds and down a glass of lassi. She took it to be a bad sign that her sister munched and gulped down even the papaya without protest. Shivani then lay down on the bed, shivering in futility. She was too fragile to be left alone, Manasa would have to make arrangements, but whom to trust?

  No one.

  I need no one. The child is mine and I will nurture it myself without the help of any simpering scorpion.

  With a roving eye.

  The sisters bickered all day and Manasa’s daily routine became even more complicated. She shuttled between her two homes all day and all night and became completely adept at putting on and taking off her pillow in seconds. Two pregnant sisters strolling together on C
howpatty would draw too much attention to themselves, she felt. Shivani couldn’t have cared less. She was too occupied with her wild thoughts. She wondered, for instance, why she couldn’t charge Pashupati for her baby, sell it to him in fact. People did it all the time, inside public hospitals and so on, with those touts who were nurses and attendants only when they found the time and those unwed mothers short of cash and hope; they were crowded marketplaces, those maternity wards. Shivani then wondered what amount could be considered an appropriate price. The one person that she could discuss the matter with was Manasa.

  That would depend on the size and sex of the baby, murmured her elder sister after some thought, and its health. Best to work out a price per kilo. The rate should at least be higher than what we pay for almonds.

  Shivani then ruminated on when her sister planned to reveal to the child the secret of its birth.

  Never. Manasa was surprised at her sister’s obtuseness. Naturally. Because the more the number of people who know, the more the chances that Pashupati would get wind of it. Then some stupid illegitimate child of his might step forward to claim the wealth that is not meant for him.

  But even my child would be illegitimate, protested Shivani, sidestepping a dollop of rapidly melting ice cream in the sand, and if it has its father’s genes, it might even be stupid.

  Time to go back now. Manasa was really quite annoyed. When someone else is paying our bills, we can all afford to be moralistic, indulge ourselves, sleep around with riffraff for the fun of it. If I could choose for the child, I’d pick the father’s genes over the mother’s. Seeing Shivani’s lower lip trembling, she softened, regretting her harshness but nevertheless, feeling that things must be spelt out to the stupid in simple words of everyday usage, continued, I have not endured my husband for so many years of marriage only to have some slut of the sewer permanently usurp the comfort, security and dignity that his wealth provides me with. So what if that wealth itself is illegitimate?

  But if that slut of the sewer is your sister? asked Shivani in response. Never mind, she continued, suddenly quite happy at having succeeded in needling Manasa into losing her composure. What if the child, in ten or thirty or fifty years, finds out by itself the secret of its birth? We should prepare for that eventuality. Well in advance we should fabricate a framework, a fairy tale into which, with time, it can grow. You just please leave the details to me. At which hospital you bought which baby, on what basis you chose it, the smile, the expression in its eyes. Whether you have any regrets and would have preferred the infant in the next cot. How he grew and whether he felt for his father more fear than love. Working out the finer points will keep me occupied on rainy days.

  Or you could walk down the road and join Mrs Bhattal’s cookery classes.

  Shivani did both. Jayadev’s absence, freeing her completely from all inhibition, made her more unpredictable than ever. She put her petticoats and blouses out to dry without washing them. She sang Hindi film ditties to her stomach for hours on end. She insisted on teaching Mrs Bhattal a thing or two about singeing eggplant in mustard oil. She giggled at the mistakes in the gynaecologist’s English. She phoned her father to say that if he found someone taller than her and without a moustache, she would marry him irrespective of caste and gender.

  For attractive men were not easy to come by. She liked them thin, gentle, bronzed, rural and poor. The males whom she met daily—the chowkidar of the apartment building, the kulfiwala on the road to Babulnath, the grocer chhokra at the corner—were all pot-bellied, moustached, halitotic and respectfully lascivious. She knew that sex stood on the second rung from the bottom, just above death, in Manasa’s ladder of the world’s joys, and often wondered why she herself in contrast thought of little else all day. Not of heaving and panting in bed with every Shyam, Dilip and Arvind she met on the street but of what some of them—Dilip, for example—would look like with their clothes off. She usually stopped at the underwear because the ugliness of the pale, hairy pot belly turned her off like the Municipal water tap at 8 a.m. sharp. She then gazed down at her own tummy and marvelled at how urban men and women managed to look pregnant even when they were without child. Thus the days passed. She needed a substitute for Jayadev, that was certain, but if Manasa ever found out about Pashupati, she was done for. How secretive life was.

  When she was alone and felt hot and uncomfortable, she took off her clothes, wet the bathroom floor and lay down on it in the yogic position that her guru had taught her. One morning at eleven, she was breathing deeply with her abdomen and gently wriggling her lower backbone on that wet floor when she heard the front door open. Thinking the visitor to be Manasa, she was about to call out when she heard the rumble of a man’s voice.

  The flats are all identical, said Pashupati, waddling from the lobby into the living room. I like them, I like the area. The one above and the one below are up for sale. I’ll show you both, in-out, in-out of both we will go. That is usually how I inaugurate my new properties. His companion, unidentifiable, remained obsequiously bored.

  He would soon enter one of the toilets, Shivani knew, to piss a few drops to mark his territory and coo a mantra and do a quick little puja around his penis auspiciously to inaugurate festivities. The bathroom she was in was the closest; would he switch on the light? He did pride himself, among other things, on how well he could aim his piss in the dark. Perhaps he would let fall his few drops in one of the corners of the bedroom that he chose—as he used to say—to anoint his lady of the week in. He did sometimes first cow her down by pissing in her presence. Heaven help her if she laughed. Shrieked and fainted was okay.

  Pashupati’s footsteps came up to the bathroom door. He switched on the light and had actually entered when the lady waiting did shriek loudly enough to make him turn, exclaim softly in surprise and step out into the room again. Curiosity piqued, naturally finding it impossible to concentrate on feeling cool in those circumstances, Shivani arose, dripping water, moved to the door, groped for the switch and turned the light off. She peeped out. Pashupati sat in the armchair that she preferred when listening to the radio. Beside him stood some vague woman. They were both looking at the doorway of the bedroom that gave on to the living room beyond, at the other end of which, noted Shivani distantly, the front door of the flat stood open a few centimetres, exactly as it did in all the dreams that she had had after Jayadev’s departure.

  In the doorway of the bedroom, beaming toothlessly at the world, was what at first sight appeared to be a wizened dwarf, the smallest, oldest woman that Shivani had ever seen.

  Announced the old woman in dialect, cackling with pleasure at being alive, ‘Me? No, I want nothing.’

  FOUR

  And behind the wizened, eternally smiling, four-foot-tall woman stood, beaming like the sun, absolutely radiant without his moustache, a bashful, bronzed Jayadev.

  To a frowning Pashupati, they explained that they’d been employed by Madam to dust and mop. Which Madam, he asked Jayadev over the woman’s head. He liked the open look of the man and saw him as his eye in Walkeshwar. Here, keep this money and let me know once a week what’s going on here.

  Jayadev did, right then and there.

  And who, asked Pashupati, the venom in his eye turning the ear-cleaner to jelly, is the father?

  You sir, mumbled Jayadev in response, trembling.

  Pashupati had then sent them away of course. That had not been easy because the dwarf, refusing to understand what she did not want to hear, had remained in the doorway bobbing her head and smiling for several minutes. Then, after the front door had been slammed behind them, Shivani had had to sit naked in the bathroom, suddenly cold and depressed, for another four minutes while Pashupati bad-temperedly wrapped up with the vague woman. Everyone throughout had been in a bad mood except for the dwarf.

  Who, beatific and beaming, had again been waiting but that second time just outside the bathroom door when, Pashupati and companion’s footfalls finally having receded and front door again banged s
hut, Shivani had considered it safe to come out. And there behind the old woman, circumspectly having slipped away the first time round because one never could tell how the temperaments of moody women changed with the weeks—no, it was not a dream of desperate longing—there behind her, respectful, nervous and grinning, had been Jayadev.

  He called her Badimummi, Aai, Tai, Mai and Janum. That made her, depending on the activity of the moment, his grandmother, mother, aunt, the village midwife or lover-darling. She was bossy and bustling, a squirrel with the lined face of a centenarian. Jayadev waited to be asked so that he could explain that he had disappeared only to travel the three-hundred-odd kilometres home to go and fetch her. The women, however, though basking in his presence, enjoyed ignoring him.

  The centenarian squirrel’s hands were soothing and her skill masterly. She made Shivani lie down and shut her eyes and forget her cares. She massaged the bulging stomach with a paste of turmeric and mustard oil and announced, gleefully clapping her hands and beaming at the supine, calmed, exhausted woman, that there lay two babies, alive and kicking, within her womb. At that news, an overwhelmed Jayadev dropped to his knees beside the bed and loudly began to thank someone in his pantheon in a folksy, dialectal song. The women ignored him.

  Shut up, shut up, shut up, screamed Manasa in the evening, and tell me things one by one.

  The twin is God’s gift to me, to me, chanted Jayadev. He had further exhausted Shivani by his incessant prancing about. She wished that he would go away. I will take my Number Two darling away, away.

  You are welcome. Otherwise Pashupati might just gobble him up.

  Her husband’s unexpected dropping in with a vague woman annoyed and worried Manasa. It was typical of him to vex and unsettle everybody with a display of who was boss. She would need to hatch a stratagem that would keep him occupied elsewhere for the next several months. She cogitated over possibilities the entire week. On Sunday, her bad day, while her hair was being oiled, she learnt from Shaamo the ghoul that Pashupati had hatched his stratagem himself. Sulekha was pregnant.