Fairy Tales at Fifty

by Upamanyu Chatterjee

  ‘I learnt that in Social Studies,’ gloated Ehsaan Awesome, clumsily but happily settling down on a gunny sack of grenades. ‘That’s why—incidentally—beware of Scruffy Supari in particular. So what if he’s a dwarf. He’s a very horny guy and has been eyeing your arse ever since the morning. I would advise you not to pull your pants too far down while performing your toilet.’

  ‘So kind of you. When you have the time, you could perhaps take the trouble to inform him that at fifty, the muscles of the buttocks lose their firmness and start to shrink.’

  ‘Small is Beautiful. We were asked in General Studies to read something with that title.’

  At the back of the trailer, from the jumble of rags atop the spare tyre, Ehsaan Awesome selected the two least filthy, handed one to Nirip and whipped the other—deftly, in seconds, with the ease of long practice—around his head into a snug turban that made him look as though someone had defecated on his head a while ago without succeeding in persuading him to doff his headgear.

  ‘You’ve to wear it,’ counselled Ehsaan Awesome cheerily, pointing to the rag at Nirip’s feet, ‘to protect yourself from the heat of the sun and—’ chuffed with his turn of phrase there, indicating next the dacoit as though, instead of three feet, he were a mile away ‘—from the heat of Scruffy Supari.’ Who sat directly opposite Nirip, legs enticingly wide apart, and stared steadily and dreamily at the object of his affections, every few seconds thrusting his lips out at him in an alluring moue.

  ‘Had he been Muslim,’ blithely continued Ehsaan Awesome, again as though referring to someone absent, ‘we could have proposed that he be killed. Al Nuwayri in the twelfth century.’ His tone and expression changed, reddened, as it were, became self-conscious, as a child’s does when it unexpectedly begins to speak of matters too adult and learned—what the neighbour’s post-retirement plans are, for example, or when the next instalment on the housing loan is due. ‘Al Nuwayri, who composed all the hadith of the Prophet, placed the ones on sodomy together. According to him, both the active and passive partners should be killed by stoning.’

  ‘Not bad as a way to go.’

  ‘No, stoning as in rocks being thrown at you.’ Ehsaan Awesome shifted about on the grenades till he was more comfortable. ‘We learnt that in Social History just before our first term exams.’

  ‘The school curriculums,’ murmured Nirip, picking up the rag to use—as a purdah, or like a toreador—to beguile Scruffy Supari’s lustful gaze with, ‘seem to have changed since my time.’

  Just then, as though to signal that it had had enough of their conversation for one morning, the tractor started up again, precluding with its terrific din all but the exchanges concerning life and death. Generously flinging one human against another, almost crushing the buffalo that refused to budge, it took three minutes to U-turn.

  ‘Most likely, they’ll pump a bullet into you on a boat,’ shrieked Ehsaan Awesome in Nirip’s ear, ‘Then they can just tie a gunny bag of mud to your neck and flip you over into the water. Unless they need your corpse as evidence to collect the money.’ Nirip nodded in acceptance of all possibilities.

  Progress was slow and happy away from the secondary school cum cowshed cum landmine factory cum blood farm and over the potholes the size of small cars. The dacoits were content to catch up on their rest and be jostled against one another and particularly against the pert widow in white who, using the end of her sari as a shawl, showed her midriff but not her face. Rural roads that could also be called roads by the rest of the world were not on the V-Front agenda. Why do you want roads when you don’t have cars? The better the roads, the faster your youth will leave their child-wives and run away to sniff city flesh, would hector Rimjhim Dada at his public meetings. Laughing, the entire crowd would acknowledge his wit and wisdom and, slapping one another on the back in excitement at such entertainment, would go away to vote for whoever had paid them more.

  They chugged uncomfortably along at eight kilometres an hour. After a turn or two, the cluster of houses petered out, so did the road—a detail, however, that did not in any way deter the tractor. Under an enormous tamarind tree waited an escort, a broken-down, once-white Maruti van crowded with more scruffies. Upon spotting Ehsaan Awesome and his party, it came to life and, snorting and farting out billowy scum-black smoke, it trundled into place forty metres ahead and, skirting dead tree and shrub, the occasional corpse of some beast of burden and the landmines, began to guide the tractor across the barren fields.

  The sterile, impoverished landscape, a wobblingly filmic complement to the thudding of the tractor, its throbbing din, would have made reflection impossible even if Nirip had not felt fuzzy from his lack of rest and the disorienting effect of his captivity. For years, his sixth other commandment to himself had been, But always keep one ear cocked for the fucking unexpected. To be prepared, however, for the events of the past few days, he would’ve had to have the ears of that weirdo in Star Trek. Because they couldn’t have done more than five kilometres in the direction of the river and it already seemed as though he hadn’t seen a human habitation in decades, so null, so dramatically devoid of reference, of meaning, had the landscape become. Both behind and to the east of them stretched for kilometres—right up to the edges of the craters—reddish gravelly sand, black rock, scrub stubborn and grey-green and the stray sentinel palm wizened before its time. Only where the soil was dust on the arid plain could he spot the pug marks of the giant wheels of lorry and forklift truck. The faint breeze was sticky, some ogre’s warm breath. Birds of prey wheeled about overhead like cruising ice-skaters on a dull blue rink. Both the craters themselves—vast barren basins gouged out by the sand-miners—and the sand upon which they jostled and jounced seemed to generate more heat than the sun itself. Had he been able to follow his fourth other commandment—Now, enjoy the here and now—had he been, for in the immediate present, he couldn’t think, leave alone recall cogently some words of wisdom to abide by, he would have had to delight in the sight of the pert widow in white—in that timeless image that he believed could well be preserved in a postage stamp as a logo for Indian transport—heaving and retching over the side of the trailer with Scruffy Amitabh half-dozing, using as pillow her bum.

  Nirip himself catnapped uneasily, with each jolt of the trailer hitting his head against its sides or bumping it against Ehsaan Awesome’s plump arm or having it slump forward till, having, as it were, reached the end of its slack, it snapped back. When he finally awoke in the dry white heat of noon, it was again as usual to a different world. The tractor stood silent and immobile in a sort of traffic jam on a rural road. He was alone in the trailer. From the megaphones on a blue tempo six vehicles ahead issued—to drown the whole wide world—the most deafening, raucous, happiest Hindi film music; he realized in a moment that the song had been resung and its lyrics adapted to the mood and concerns of the forthcoming elections to the regional Legislative Assembly. Ah, the patiently stationary traffic was explained by the level crossing several hundred metres ahead.

  The world on holiday, in that heat in the middle of nowhere. Of course, the middle of nowhere only for him; for several thousand others, this would be home, these fallow fields and somnolent cattle, the khaki chapatis of cowdung flattened out and drying on a wall, that muddy well beside the ramshackle shop that advertised mobile phone connections and bidis, that cycle repairwala, that new pink land-grabbing temple, all that would be what one would pine for when away. Here, civilization was in the head; it saw an opportunity for a fete even in forty-eight degrees Celsius at a nondescript rural level crossing when its bars descended. Where Nirip came from, civilization was an ability to be sustainedly unhappy without cause.

  The crowds had debouched from the stationary vehicles to escape their even more stifling interiors. From the buses, bullock carts, lorries, tractors, Tata Indicas, trucks, camel carts and varieties of jeep—each with the demeanour of an off-duty battle tank—had issued a colourful, noisy and smelly procession that first had seemed
to dissolve into the topography but later, in the shade of the giant trees that bordered the road, formed distinct, recognizable clusters and knots; chattering children, with satchel, in uniform and happy—clearly therefore returning from morning school—senior citizens in faded turbans puffing away, their communication honed down to the stray, drawled-out monosyllable, yokels in earrings and faded jeans, touched by city life, blabbering into mobile phones that didn’t work, village women, the salt of the earth in the colours of the rainbow, occupied as ever in tending to the business of living, to infants needing breastfeeding, to farm stuff intended for some vicinal market, a flock of wandering children, another of rambling goats, to chickens that absolutely would cross the road.

  Nirip could too, he was absolutely free; no one that he recognized was in sight. He had nowhere to go, though. He should get off the trailer, he supposed, stretch his limbs, do something normal, take a leak, smoke a cigarette, maybe phone Vinayak. The heat burnt the skin of his face to old, wrinkled paper; from the jolts of the trailer, his lower back felt hard like a cricket bat. To a group of yokels eyeing him because he didn’t fit in, looked too big-city, Nirip got straight to the point.

  ‘Where are we? I mean, in which part of the country?’

  Somehow, he was not surprised that the group disintegrated and slowly re-formed itself as four distinct and familiar visitors from another life. Magnum, in jeans and white kurta, limping because of some heroics in the gym, her eyes maroon and burning more with anxiety than heat, stepped up to hiss at him through cracked lips. ‘I am pregnant.’ She half-turned her head to snarl at her eavesdropper. ‘Oh, go take a shit far away.’ The dyed hair bouncing on his head as he reluctantly receded on his high heels confirmed the retreater to be Chintamani.

  ‘Nonsense. You can’t be. You are fifty, you haven’t had a regular period since you were eleven, your menopause is over. You simply can’t be.’ From ten steps away, Shivani, in a man’s kurta-pyjama, mimed to Nirip her decision to retire and await developments in the maroon Toyota Qualis. Jayadev beside her waved uncertainly to his son before turning to follow her.

  ‘I am too. As usual you don’t know a fucking thing.’ Magnum’s expression grew sullen at being disbelieved yet again. ‘I’ve had the tests done and Lakhtakiya feeling me up. There’s a cute little thing inside me with three legs and two heads.’ She began to cry. ‘But I’m going to keep it. I told Papaji that I’d at last give him an heir worthy of him.’ She began to smile, a sort of grimace, through her tears.

  ‘Magnum, you fool! Who’s the father?’

  She didn’t stop crying but the grimace became an unhappy grin. ‘Even while being happy ever after, Gretel wondered if she could be happier still.’ Magnum looked about her at the tractors and bullock carts as though to see if she could widen the audience for her wit. ‘Hansel is boring. You know why they came back from the forest with all those pearls. With the stepmother gone, Gretel wanted to be happier still with the father.’

  Nirip’s gaze strayed in search of some signs of sanity. Shivani appeared to be saying something to him through the rear window of the Qualis. Standing beside its bonnet, Chintamani continued to stare at them and try to eavesdrop from fifteen metres away. ‘Papaji’s heard that it might be that bag of sewer ooze.’

  Just then, six rapid rifle shots from the vicinity of the level crossing ahead, momentarily layering the din of the film music with a set of explosive, discordant drumblasts, distracted them from the violence of their deranged world with a celebration of that of another.

  Roars and cheers of approval, and happy clapping and excited rat-a-tats of cane and wood against metal, resounding in all directions, engulfed for the moment the music.

  ‘Was it a dacoit’s birthday?’

  ‘Perhaps a cricket victory against Australia.’

  ‘Or a railway linesman’s third marriage?’

  Sluggishly, like whorls in thick water, the crowds stirred, separated, regrouped, moved off towards the vehicles. One passing yokel grinned happily into his moustache again and shook Nirip’s hand to commemorate the event.

  ‘More likely a caste killing.’ Towering over the turbans, Nirip noted the large head of Ehsaan Awesome beaming and bobbing towards him.

  ‘All well with you, sir? All well with the guard at the level crossing.’ Crimson-faced with the heat, the giant stopped being radiant for the moment to glower at the yokel who, correctly sensing in the look a major dacoit in the making, mumbled to himself and moved away. Ehsaan Awesome was presented to Magnum and found reason in the occasion for beaming. ‘The clan Scruffy was as usual persuasive. Balls and double balls to your train, they said. Unlike you, we’ve work to do, we can’t be held up by some eighteenth-century steam engine that’s nineteen hours late. You phone and stop that machine turd or we’ll tie you to your own on the tracks. The guard is an old hand, he understood, we had tea together, we’re through.’

  Not immediately, however. Traversing the four hundred metres to the level crossing and the three hundred thereafter took a little less than two hours. Magnum divided that time between the trailer and the comfort of the airconditioned Qualis. She was far less accustomed than Nirip to the particularities of travel in rural India wherein, for one, even in the best of circumstances, the left of the road has not always been distinguishable from the right. Traffic, like nature that abhors a vacuum, slithers, chugs and snarls into whatever vacant space it sees or imagines exists. Then any jam always includes several overheated cars and tempos that, tired of the high temperatures and the madness, just refuse to start up. Nirip in the trailer, desultorily and partly out of habit—and principally to keep his mind off other things—analysed, broke down, the disarray. Four vehicles ahead, for instance, and facing them, a monstrously overloaded truck, its mountainous bouffant of fodder swaying gently and threatening to make it keel over, growled and roared without moving. In impotence, it voided thick billows of black smoke as it found its way barred by a cow and her calf that had tucked themselves in in the dead centre of the road for a siesta. Tata Indicas, Maruti vans, Toyota Safaris, decrepit open air tempos that served as inter-town private taxis and other strange hybrid cabs with the heads of large motorcycles and the bodies of prison vans, with wan faces jammed against their steel meshing clogged the road shoulders and the flanking, gently uneven stretches of field. Amongst them all, motorcycles, scooters, mopeds, rickshaws and bicycles slipped in and out, like urchins at kho-kho. Bells and horns rang and blared and trumpeted without pause but without any hysterical impatience, some almost ceremonially, others only to stretch their vocal chords, to say, hi how you doin’, it’s me.

  Widowhite, because approaching a stranger, decorously muffled her face up even more comprehensively with her sari, thereby displaying several more inches of attractively brown, attractively flat midriff, crossed over to Nirip’s half of the trailer and, leaning over its side, began negotiating the prices of watermelon with a fruitseller. If Nirip stroked her arse, he would be shot dead and then pissed upon. How dare you, motherfucker, defile my woman’s honour bang bang. Her honour lay in her tight arse. Did they fondle bums at all in rural India. Nirip had always had the impression that they just hurriedly mauled breasts while fucking quickly and quietly in the dark without taking their clothes off because there would always be a voyeur from the endless joint family sniffing around, some bald uncle with a samosa-shaped head and sleeveless vest. However did these guys fumbling in the dark find the right hole. Perhaps their grandmothers’d crooned plaintively of it in their lullabies. No wonder they slept with their rifles. All that honour in those rods.

  On the vendor’s cart lay arranged bananas, chikus, melons, water chestnuts, mangoes, what Nirip imagined were amlas, not fully ripe papayas wrapped in newspaper in a corner and looking like bombs and, lording over all those fruits of the earth, some six million flies that arose as one black and buzzing miasma each time the seller sprinkled water on his produce from a kerosene tin. Widowhite flirted with him by calling him names, haggl
ed over his rates, insulted his stuff, picked up a papaya in its paper, weighed it in her palm, unwrapped it in part to sniff at its colour and deftly but demurely flipped it over for safekeeping right onto Nirip’s balls. It lay heavy and inert in his lap like a rugby ball filled with lead while he, completely breathless and fucking dying, gazed at it with the face of a fish.

  A large photograph of a burning foreign car stared back at him from the newspaper on his thighs without his caring to focus on it for the aeons that it took for his inhalations to return to normal. He tried to read the Hindi caption beneath the picture and then told himself that it was useless to pretend any longer at his age that he could without his reading glasses. He shifted to the headlines, in a font mercifully larger, on the right. With some of those six million orbiting around in search of particles of vermin in the rag about his head, he made out that the state authorities had again impressed upon the central government to declare their region malaria-free.

  The photograph was nice though, its tones clean and clear even in the rapidly degrading newsprint, the colour and shape of the car, scarlet and sleek, still distinct beneath the flames and contrasting vividly with the happy banners and buntings, the streamers and kiosks of the occasion, the airy blue of the sky. The event appeared to have been a routinely silly and wasteful sporting fete of some sort, for a section of the encircling crowd was in athletic gear, perhaps a Celebrity Walk for Equality which had taken, as matters will, an unexpected turn, which, for example—it’s perfectly possible—the wrong caste had won. A pity about the car though, unless one added some mosquito-repellent chemicals to the petrol tank and then all that combustion became part of some radical Community Health strategy to make public spaces even more dramatically malaria-free. Nirip’s skull began to throb with the need for repose.