Fairy Tales at Fifty

by Upamanyu Chatterjee

  SIX

  What does your father do? The English Language and Composition teacher asked Nirip in Class Seven in school and he didn’t know. He was vaguely aware that Pashupati was in the import-export business but what that actually meant and how much he earned and since when he had been at it were only some of the questions that he couldn’t answer. Mrs Ramteke, in whose veins flowed vinegar, sniffed. A son who does not know his father! she exclaimed like an Anglo-Indian dying to be white. A portion of the class tittered apprehensively, another glanced from wall clock to window to wall clock for ways of release. Fat Vinayak, certain that he was next, sank into black gloom. Before moving on to masticate some of the others, Mrs Ramteke asked Nirip to submit an essay of a thousand words on his revered father.

  Magnum from home sent him a thousand and eight hundred. It was not well-written but it contained the essential facts. She’d had it vetted by the teacher who came in four times a week. He was an idiot but she liked his lips. He took her for English, History, Home Science, Geography and Social Studies. Why he didn’t take her she couldn’t tell, but she guessed that he preferred blushing to sex.

  She didn’t go to school, she boasted matter-of-factly to all, the school came to her. No institution could retain her. She bit, she kicked, she jabbed with compasses, she threw bottles of ink at teachers who had not shown her enough respect. The only school that she wanted to go to was Nirip’s in lousy Dalhousie. It doesn’t take girls, they explained to her.

  You are lying to me. I can get in as a boy anyway.

  You can’t. There are medical check-ups for which you have to take off your clothes. And swimming. Everyone pulls down everyone else’s trunks.

  She thrilled at the thought and wanted even more to go to lousy Dalhousie. Or why can’t Nirip change schools and we both go to a co-ed?

  Nirip-dada. He’s older than you.

  He is not older than me. We were born on the same day. We are twins.

  He’s doing quite well there. He doesn’t want to change schools.

  You are lying to me. If I ask him, he will change schools. He will do anything for me. I’ll write him a letter and ask him and prove to you that you are lying yet again to me.

  They corresponded regularly, Nirip and Magnum, though lopsidedly. She wrote more or less every day and he more or less every other weekend. She, certain that her half-brother was homesick and pined for her in particular, took to snooping around the household and all the different flats to convey to him their precise flavour. She bossed the cooks in the kitchen, smoked cigarettes with the chauffeurs, supervised the housemaids striking deals with the delivery boys, observed Sulekha-di paring Manasama’s toenails and spied on some new maid shaving Pashupati’s armpit. She watched, she registered, she stowed away, she exaggerated in her letters hoping to make Nirip feel miserable. Knowledge was power and Pashupati its embodiment. How everyone trembled in his presence. How to make him notice her.

  Notice her he did, of course, because everything about him he too watched and registered and stowed away for future use. The letter though that Magnum sent to Nirip about his activities would have surprised him with its detail and its accuracy.

  Our father exports skulls and entire human skeletons. He is thirty-six years old—I think—and has been trading in bones for the last sixteen-seventeen years. The field officers of his company rob morgues, graves and funeral pyres. From the pyre, they drag the body off the flames as soon as the family leaves. At times, the family is encouraged to depart early by our father’s staff with assurances that they will carry on the weeping on its behalf. Our father met Manasa-ma our revered mother in a graveyard.

  The front office of our father’s company also tries to increase the supply of bodies by reserving them before death by paying a small advance and getting the necessary documents signed by those individuals who agree to donate their corporeal abodes to medical science upon their moving on. Only in very rare cases have the signatories not died on time.

  Our father started his business in our big cities where, as you all know, overpopulation is such a big problem that people simply die in their sleep in the streets. Then carts from our father’s company arrive in the morning and pick the carcasses up off the footpaths. Everyone is happy. The Sanitation Departments have lauded our father’s philanthropic efforts and awarded him. Anytime, he has said, I do my duty and thank you for the plaques.

  The process followed in our father’s company for converting bodies to bone is extremely scientific. First the corpses are wrapped in nets and let down in some nearby river where, in about a week, bacteria and fish reduce them to a mishmash of bones and mush. The holier the river, it has been found, the more hardworking the bacteria. They understand that work is worship, says our father. He is himself a deeply religious personage. Then the bodies are boiled in cauldrons of water and caustic soda to dissolve any remaining flesh. Next, to get rid of the consequent yellow tint on the calcium surface of the bones, they are dried like clothes in sunlight for days before being left to soak in hydrochloric acid. Then the Fittings and Fixtures Department of the company wires the pieces of a skeleton together and saws off sections of the skull to reveal its internal structure. At the end, the Sales Department flogs the skeleton, complete and beautiful in all respects, to dealers around the world.

  Our father gives bonuses to those of his employees who take the pains to recognize and keep together the bones of one single corpse because a coherently reassembled skeleton, the bones of which look good together as though they were made for one another, being more valued by the medical schools, fetches more. Our father has also instructed his staff, in their wanderings through morgues and graveyards and cremation ghats, to be particularly on the lookout for the bodies of children because their skeletons illustrate significant transitional stages in bone development and are usually sold for handsomer sums.

  Our father travels extensively to monitor his business, to keep in touch with his associates and to evade the law. Though no one is above it, it is at times necessary to remain one step ahead of it. So he maintains—along with some of its makers and upholders amongst his best friends.

  Our father at present wants to diversify and invest elsewhere, perhaps in something in the south. The slum children of Madras have caught his eye.

  If your father goes to jail, then who, asked Vinayak, will pay your entry fee for the Inter Swimming next month?

  Nirip himself was more thrilled with shame than shocked at his father’s CV. No one must ever know. Vinayak the snoop knew already, of course, because he nosed through everyone else’s belongings mainly in search of food. He liked the drama of discovery and even being beaten up. He could be relied on, though, because whatever he found, like the food, he kept to himself.

  It’s cool, yaar, he earns huge amounts in dollars, like balance of payments in Eco and all.

  It was true, of course, that some people, those whom Pashupati dealt with, who invested his profits, would already know; they didn’t mind because he was so well off and becoming more powerful by the day. Clearly money was for the rich and morality for the poor. At learning of what his father did and where he got his wealth from, Nirip grew up. And though the knowledge thrilled him with shame, he felt at the same time that he had always known, these features dim behind the veil of his not wanting to know, his evading seeing them face to face. With that cognition, things about his father and his own life fell into place, the absence of love around his progenitor despite his fecundity, how he couldn’t see the worth of individuals beyond what he abused and exploited them for, how his associates in the office were people whom Nirip wouldn’t want to acknowledge in front of his schoolmates.

  Did his mother know? She would. It made her odder than ever. Perhaps that was why she liberally cadged money off Pashupati for her own plans, because she knew where it came from. Her own plans were so much more fun, though. Pashupati gave her crores to hide, and whatever she couldn’t put into her joint accounts with Nirip and Magnum or pass on to
Shivani or stash away in unexpected places, she blew up on silk saris and gold jewellery and enormous battery-operated toy townships. Some thousand-rupee notes she arranged in layers beneath the sand in the litter in which her cats crapped. They sat about and watched expressionlessly till she had finished.

  Nirip clamped down on the revelations of Magnum’s letter. When he grew up, he didn’t see himself doing his father’s work, that was all. As for the wealth accruing from that work and the comfort accruing from that wealth, well, those were wonderful and couldn’t be easily given up, that was all too. And during the school vacations moreover, forsaking all that comfort was even more absurd. At home, he was so clearly the apple of Pashupati’s eye. He had to sit next to his father at dinner, no matter how late it was, and recount to him his day even though he paid no attention. Magnum, hysterical at being left out, kept them company and, wriggling and restless in her chair, clamoured for the attention of both. Just for being who he was, Nirip was rewarded with kilos of mango papad, Swiss and Belgian chocolates, Slazenger cricket bats, Gujarati singhdana, Hardy Boys’ books, James Hadley Chase and Parker fountain pens. Magnum always got the stuff too, but always after him and quite often a packet or two less of it.

  Where should we go this Sunday, Papa-ji?

  I might have to go to Madras on work, beta. What are Nirip’s plans?

  But he never wants to go anywhere with me alone. He always wants to take Sulekha-di along.

  Better always to have an elder beside you, beta. Just in case.

  Just in case what. He’s always laughing with her and touching her and sending me away to fetch Coca-cola.

  Better to laugh with and touch someone you trust, beta. Just in case.

  Then let them laugh and touch and you take me to Madras with you, Papa-ji.

  At home Nirip preferred Manasa-ma’s rooms, of which the walls were all quite unexpected in colour, lemon-yellow and vermilion and aquamarine, and into which the servants were reluctant to venture because of the unexpected animal life. Young Nirip gathered early the impression that it was its incense and the bright paint on its walls that kept out of Manasa-ma’s space the graveyard miasma of Pashupati’s profession. When with time his father bought two more flats in the same building in Walkeshwar in which Nirip had been born, and the one on the thirteenth floor became permanently and officially Manasa-ma’s—Pashupati reserving the one on the fourteenth, naturally, being the topmost, for himself—Nirip began to spend the nights of his school vacations in the second of the spare bedrooms of his mother’s flat, the emerald-green walls of which, in the afternoon light, changed their shade to that of slowly ripening mangoes. Magnum was furious with misery at being dumped in the flat on the twelfth with the household and the harem and for the duration of Nirip’s vacations raved and bit everyone in sight even though she could round the clock wander freely up and down and in and out of all three apartments. Which she did. What made her even more vicious was that she could never with success spy on either Pashupati or Manasa-ma.

  Why upstairs? Come and sleep with me. We’ll play some fun games.

  I know them. You’ll bite my pubic hair off one by one.

  Magnum had never thought of that as a means of teaching those who annoyed her a lesson.

  SEVEN

  The idea was originally Manasa’s, of investing some of Pashupati’s yields of sin in a fully equipped, fully modern hospital in one of the better western suburbs. The entire world would flock to it for kidney replacements and heart transplants. And to thank the lord for his largesse and the authorities for their concessions, it would also heal the poor free of cost. To be good, she pointed out, is to be powerful. Think of Mahatma Gandhi and Jesus and Nelson Mandela.

  By thank the lord, Pashupati naturally presumed that she meant him. He liked the idea, particularly since he had been actively thinking of diversifying and moving into manufacturing fake medicines. It had fabulous possibilities and was so much more scientific and respectable than bones and graveyards. He had one amendment to make though.

  Western suburbs? Why not New Delhi? The future lies in the capital. And land there would be easier to come by. We would spearhead, symbolize, the health of the nation.

  And how many poor would we heal free of cost? demanded Magnum. We should fix that first. Not more than five per day, she decided when the idea was still a germ, she seventeen and the year 1975. The sixth we will turn away from the gates with a whip. Or a gun.

  To build a much-needed facility for all to see, only to be able to deny it to many, appealed to her. As with all she liked, she usurped the idea and made a mess of it. She badgered Pashupati to get it going, it gave her a reason to abandon altogether her studies and her uneasy tutors and to switch cities. She pursued the project with her ferocious but sporadic singlemindedness. It awakened in him an awareness of her instability, of how dangerous she could be. Nirip had only his intelligence, he noted with dissatisfaction and Magnum only his drive.

  She drove around with his rogues and chose, amongst the sites proposed, one in the Nehru Place area just behind East of Kailash; the squatters on it she proposed that they beat up or kill instead of paying off; save the money for those who matter, was her motto. Not her father’s daughter, noted the rogues sadly.

  Papa-ji, we could name it Magnum Hospital.

  Her father smiled indulgently, mussed up in affection her short hair and, undecided between the Prime Minister and himself, finally named the hospital Pashupati Comprehensive Healthcare Centre. He invited the entire world to its inauguration. It turned up. At the ceremonial function, Magnum stood like a sticky mistress all the time next to Pashupati and, in all the photographs in the newspapers and magazines, looked quite the male heir, the eager next-in-line in her well-brushed hair, blood-red tie and grey suit of perfect fit.

  Notable absentees at the event included Nirip and Manasama. After his spectacular result in his school-leaving exams, Nirip was in Benares, getting stoned with and shagged by the undesirables of Maduahdiah. Pashupati stored away in his mind the item that the only son of his that he and the world recognized should have been—but did not care to be—present at the inauguration of his father’s first respectable, almost entirely legitimate, enterprise. Manasa-ma too was ostensibly out of town. It was just in that week that she absolutely needed to visit the Mataji temple at Osian in Rajasthan. At least, that’s where she asked Nathbhai, the rising dark star in Pashupati’s office, to make the arrangements for. Pashupati tried to command her to change her dates and that night had to visit the toilet twenty-three times in four hours.

  She was not in Osian telepathically monitoring his visits but coincidentally in New Delhi itself, in Bengali Market, paralysed with shock and helplessness at seeing sister Shivani on her deathbed. The SOS that she’d received the evening before from Shivani’s household had been near unintelligible; nothing, in any case, would have prepared her for a figure in coma, bleeding, bloated, beaten black and blue.

  One of her young male acquaintances, she gleaned from the innuendoes of Shivani’s servant, an effeminate person clearly uneasy about how much he should reveal. Madam has always befriended the poor, Madam. He was the driver of a private taxi. Madam’d just bought him a new sky-blue Maruti van.

  Shivani thus became the first family member to be treated in Pashupati’s hospital. Manasa didn’t much like the idea, she’d’ve preferred to keep the two worlds apart but, she admitted to herself, she needed Pashupati’s help to keep the police out of the mess.

  He asked no questions. Nothing ever surprised him. Other than his wife. They stood on either side of the supine Shivani in Intensive Care and discussed her. Two cracked ribs, a hairline fissure of the skull, a fractured thighbone, ruptured stomach, perforated peritoneum, a severely damaged liver, bleeding that would have filled a bathtub, hypovolemic shock, she would survive.

  She should join us on the Executive Board of the hospital.

  Yes, of course.

  Ladies on an Executive Board lend grace and grav
itas to an enterprise. Pashupati—everybody—had been surprised at how much Manasa—and no doubt her sister as well, should she survive—seemed to know about medicine and how hospitals ought to be run and at how much she’d insisted on treating the poor free of cost. Her interest—her intelligent involvement—had pleased him though. Charity always looked good on one’s CV—not that he needed one, of course, but still, it was a sound investment—and he felt that over time, retaining in its running only his interest in hiring female nurses, he could leave the hospital to the women, his chief wife and her sister, and himself move on to grander things, a chain of world-class medical institutions, certainly an immediate successor in Bombay, an entire township around a philanthropic college of pharmacy and medicine, a seat in Parliament, that sort of thing.

  How nice, he said over the comatose, stertorously breathing form, to see her again. It’s been ages. What’s she been up to? He knew, of course, because of his ear to the ground but waited to hear what Manasa would concoct. She could hardly tell him that, in search of herself, Shivani had for years roamed up and down the country picking up lovers amongst the poor. With Manasa’s money. Which was his. Everything was his.

  Oh, she’s been studying Economics. Poverty.

  I see. Pashupati was delighted to note that under her bruises Shivani at thirty-six had filled out and become even more charming than Shivani at nineteen. The poor seemed to be doing her good. And why are they so hopeless at everything?