Fairy Tales at Fifty

by Upamanyu Chatterjee

  ‘Well, I should explain that I haven’t played cricket for a while—in the last . . . twenty-eight years actually. But enthusiasm should compensate for any rustiness. And I understand that your best medium pacers . . . are not available.’

  ‘Kancha was beheaded by the Saanwariyas,’ affirmed Ehsaan the giant, nodding with gleeful sorrow, ‘and Pistawl shot dead by the police. And it would be wise—’ here unconsciously parroting the words and manner of some elder of the tribe ‘—to discourage Number Do Kapildev from appearing in public for a while.’

  Rimjhim nodded slowly and wisely his agreement with Ehsaan’s and Nirip’s utterances, giving the impression that he would have nodded sagely even if no one had said anything. Unlike the cutouts adorning his election campaign vehicles that had been pointed out to Nirip during their trip in the prison van, Rimjhim in flesh and blood was short and fat and apprehensive, about Nirip’s age, with cloudy eyes behind gold rims that, only pretending to be remote and lofty, actually moved as agitatedly as squash balls in play. His fertile moustache, dyed black and tinted with henna, stretched the length of his fat upper lip. He waited for a surly manservant to remove his thali and replace the greenish-yellow water with a glass of Rooh-Afza in milk, all cold and rosy with drops of condensation on its exterior. While the others at the table and in the room were being served, Rimjhim asked Nirip whether he was educated.

  ‘Because the sons of so many rich men are not,’ continued an elderly ogre sitting on the sofa alongside the gigantic desert cooler while Nirip in his head composed a reply. ‘They drop out, plop down behind the wheel of a foreign car and at two hundred and twenty kilometres an hour at three in the morning, run over the poor and homeless in their uneasy sleep, mash them into some pavement in Delhi central or downtown Bombay. Then they blame the cocaine. Then they say that the poor and homeless have no business to be in the regions of the rich. Pack them off to some slum a hundred kilometres away but they must come in in time in the mornings to clean our toilets.’

  Everyone in the room, Nirip included, murmured his appreciation of Pashupati-bhai’s hectoring oration. Many had heard that piece before but doubtless from some other mouth, the tripe that gushes out of one man at the helm of affairs not always being distinguishable from the bilge that another might spout. The ogre was new to the business of politics and still in the process of learning the ropes but there was very little that he in fact needed to pick up in the spheres of scoundrelism and criminality.

  ‘If we are to progress, it is important to have clean toilets,’ announced Rimjhim reflectively. Nirip watched him pull his glass closer to himself, take out once more his dentures, dip them in the rose milk and, dripping, slip them back in his mouth to suck on them slurpily and reflectively. ‘A clean mind in a clean body atop a clean toilet.’ Rimjhim paused, as though to weigh the worth of that statement as a slogan for his campaign. He then glanced at Nirip regally, giving him permission, as it were, to speak. Then, just when Nirip had opened his mouth and enunciated an initial syllable, ‘Aa—’, decreed, in English, ‘Cleanliness is next to educationliness.’ He reverted immediately thereafter to his blend of Hindi dialect and English. ‘You look studied. So while you’re with us, you become—’ half-raising his right hand in listless majesty in the direction of a suddenly bashful, almost bride-like, Ehsaan Awesome—‘his tutor. Plan what he has to read and do so that in the years to come, we are proud of him, he serves the country, joins the police, people quake when he enters a district, he helps the poor stand on their feet and, when required, shoot on his behalf.’

  While Nirip was surprised and touched to feel a gigantic, adolescent hand reach out under the table and, in schoolgirlish excitement, squeeze his, he sensed at the same time that since his kidnappers’ immediate plans for him seemed to include opening the bowling at cricket and teaching a scion, he could presume that the discussions before his being disposed of had not yet been wrapped up—particularly since the payer of the ransom sat right there amongst the abductors as their guest, eating and burping and talking not kidnapping but politics. Nirip had believed that his would not be quite the routine snatching of a schoolboy from a bus stop for a quick two lakh rupees over the weekend; his ransom, in crores even after he, Nirip, was handed his share, was needed, among other things, to make an election campaign successful. Everything else however was cloudy—who was brokering terms with whom, whether they were negotiating at all; indeed, whether in the first place he had been kidnapped as planned to be redeemed at a price or something totally unforeseen and far nastier had been successfully executed. They weren’t letting him out of their sight; otherwise, it seemed alright, he didn’t appear to exist for them, it didn’t look as though they were thinking of him in the least. As in a children’s fantasy, he seemed to have stepped out of the picture frame of his ordered life into a parallel world in another dimension, wherein he could not be touched, could not be harmed, but where he could not belong either, in the activities of which he could not participate. That sensation of being on hold, on ice, was perhaps the cumulative effect of all the Nembutals and Alpraxes that he’d swallowed morning after morning for months without pause to help him find the day interesting. Retribution for having, because of his hatred of self, punished himself with stimulants, hallucinogens, narcotics. That limbo was where he’d remain until the night they took him to a boat midriver in which they fabricated their landmines and there slit his throat and let his head hang over the gunwale so as not to bloody the gunpowder and scrap metal. For what it was worth, he didn’t see them thereafter, in the boat itself, extracting his single kidney for Pashupati’s toast.

  Continuing to remain too fogged to feel any relief at the probable reprieve, to relish imagining joining rival dacoit gangs at cricket at midnight, he gently pulled his hand out of Ehsaan Awesome’s grasp to discreetly cover his mouth and the soft, ladylike burp that it issued. It was the mountains of food that they’d consumed after the eight hours of deprivation—and continued to consume—pointed Nirip out to himself as he picked up and drank his Rooh Afza milk. It had things that went crunch-crunch floating in it. It was sickeningly delicious, cold, thick, sweet, frothy and tasting of almonds and roses. If he had had dentures, he too would’ve dipped them in that divinely unhealthy stuff, that, in cholesterol and calorie overload, matched all that had gone before. There had been pooris, cauliflower parathas, palak paneer, alu dum, kachoris, dal makhani, paneer tikka, Maggi noodles, gajar halwa, besan ke laddus, butterscotch icecream for the vegetarian and, for the non-, the added attraction of grey, rock-hard-boiled eggs with some thinnish, spicy, blood-red sauce as adornment. Peculiarly irresistible had been the slices of bread dipped in thick cream and besan and then fried in lard; Ehsaan Awesome had eaten seventeen of those without pausing in any way in his banter with the countless feudal attendants.

  Of whom there had appeared to be dozens wandering about in that village mansion. The house itself seemed as variegated, as cobbled together, as the retinue. Its boundary wall, high and grey, had resembled the castellated ramparts of a fort and the front entrance, a metal door solidly thick as a tree trunk, had opened directly, without the relief of any intervening garden or courtyard or open space, into the first room, a waiting hall where Nirip had taken off his shoes, drunk ice cold water that had caught at his throat and made his stomach rumble and then, along with Ehsaan Awesome, observed the corpse, the escapee blood donor, Widowhite and the seven Scruffies exit with their armoury through a side door that led to the section of the house reserved for the underprivileged. In the harsh white light of that hall, the Scruffies had suddenly looked like scientific specimens, had immediately lost their menace, had shrunk and looked shabbier, the paid members of a larger group of servants.

  As varied as the rooms they were, some old and about to be put out to grass, some elderly and idle, other overworked minors, men, women, some of indeterminate sex, bearers, waiters, chhokras, cleaners, maidservants, servers, milkboys, retainers, each eventually finding his place in an
intricately hierarchical system. Two or three of them were always discreetly visible, hovering about in the dining hall, eavesdropping, supposedly waiting for orders from the coterie around Rimjhim, for a refill of Rooh Afza, to polish guns, make paan, massage legs, shave armpits.

  Through the corridors, courtyards and windowless rooms, the muted thundering of a dozen generators and the faint but pervasive reek of diesel, Nirip had trailed Ehsaan Awesome on an informal tour of the maze, throughout which the young giant, happy to be back in one of the three houses in the region which he called home, blabbered nonstop, greeted inmates, hollered namastes to the shadows of females behind door curtains, commentated on the loungers whom they passed.

  ‘This is Number Do Kapildev; he thinks he runs the household. I’d advise you not to drink with him. He then holds you by the hand, gags you with his bad breath and shares with you the most detailed anecdotes about his piles. Namaste ji.’

  Amidst all that chomping and slurping around the dining table, the belching, sighing, sniffing, wheezing, snuffling and farting, it took a while for Rimjhim Dada at the table to notice that Nirip, upright in his chair, with his eyes wide open and smiling pleasantly and vacantly at everyone, was in fact virtually asleep. ‘Sonofarich should first rest if we want him to bowl this evening,’ suddenly boomed his voice in the near Zen-like emptiness in Nirip’s head and then, in a less cheery, more pensive, lowered tone, continued, ‘Sonofarich should first actually show us whether he can bowl at all.’

  Nirip awoke and arose in one movement. Sleep deprivation suddenly made him feel nauseous; the sensation was sharpened by the sight of frothy, milky tea—the colour of brownish cream—being poured into glasses from a teapot by a chhokra. Not bad its form, the teapot’s, long-stemmed, slim-waisted, round-bottomed, like a samovar, no doubt goose-gaited had it walked in an animation film—he had two like it in his collection, Numbers Seventeen and Thirty-eight, one in burnt earth, the other of black iron—but he could feel on his tongue the thick, creamy, revolting taste of the brew, could see the interior of the teapot. Whereas those at home were stained the rich, darkly golden tint of cognac, the innards of the one in the chhokra’s hand would be tinged the smudgy brown of a toilet bowl and would smell of milk smegma. He burped egg. He needed to retch. ‘Yes, perhaps I’ll sleep a little,’ he mumbled to the gathering and, with no idea in which bed or on the floor of which damp corridor, shuffled off towards the door.

  Concentrate on what remains of your life. Concentrate. And he found that he couldn’t. His focus slipped away like a cricket ball during practice hitting a slip machine; it bounced off the curved wooden slats and zoomed away in one unexpected direction or the other. Concentrate. Concentrate. Why was that so impossible? Because there was nothing to see beyond the pens and the teapots. Make the effort, look for the sources of self-esteem. Why? As we age, we become more ourselves. That was horrible. For what he saw in his future, in his life, beyond the teapots and the pens, was nothing. Nothing was what he inexorably was proceeding towards becoming. What then was the fucking fuss all about? That jog and yoga and yogurt and fresh fruit while your life slips away as you wait for your ex-masseuse to be kind and call?

  On exiting, he’d instinctively turned left because on the right was the smelly kitchen with its noxious open drain and he couldn’t possibly at that moment have confronted that blackened, cockroach-and-other-vermin-overrun hole from which all that food had emerged. And then, as usual allowing himself to be led by the unexpected, he’d followed the stately red rump of a large monkey as it disdainfully, evading the stagnant pools around the outhouses that, Nirip suspected, housed the communal lumpen toilets, stalked across a small courtyard and vanished behind a latticed wall. Beyond that partition with its prettily intricate, cement grillework, he found only the empty corridor devoid of the living, lit by flickering tubelights, with silent rooms behind shut doors on either side, extending into some terminal darkness. Even the din of the diesel generators seemed to have been subsumed by a larger silence. He walked forward a few steps. If this was the female zone of the house, then they were all out somewhere singing dirty folk songs to one another while making chapatis or they’d all been killed so that the region could retain its top slot for female infanticide—that is to say, better late than never. The corridor seemed interminable and its faltering light distracting. Perhaps at the end of it, he was to be shot for trespassing in the pussy of the household. Well, he would throw up panner tikka on his assassin first, go down fighting, last man standing, hard-on, whatever.

  In the gloom, something silk-soft and furry wrapped itself around his calves with the specific intention of tripping him up. It miaowed disappointedly when he didn’t land on his front teeth. He trailed its stately strut, its mast-like tail, through the half-light. In the quiet, his ear caught from somewhere ahead, faintly, Ali Akbar Khan warming up for raag Bhopali. That time of year, waiting for rain. The music sounded soft but free, as though stretching its limbs after a long incarceration; it waited uncaringly for the ear to attune itself, to pick its strains out of the silence. With it wafted gently to Nirip’s nostrils the scents of another season, of damp earth and rejuvenated vegetation, of fruit ripe and ready to fall. They slowly mingled, when he’d taken a couple of steps more, with the aromas of home, of cinnamon and clove and camphor. Both the scents and the music issued from the last room on the left; its door stood discreetly open.

  Within, in the irridescent light of the lamps, the lime-green walls looked aquamarine. A double bed, its rose mosquito net a near-opaque curtain, dominated the room. A thin mist of incense floated above it as though spreadeagled and powerless to descend, laterally sending out tendrils like feelers to the nooks and crannies amongst racks, cupboards and the single grey Godrej. Ali Akbar Khan made the room glow from a portable cassette recorder placed atop a black trunk. An intimate smell, as of warm thickened blood, mingled with the sandalwood of the incense to suffuse Nirip’s lungs, render breathing unimportant. He took long to locate the parting in the mosquito net. On the pale pink coverlet lay a cat, alive but near insensate, its eyes open but unseeing, its limbs splayed in exhausted abandon, appearing in that greenish, roseate glow to be drained of blood.

  ‘Ah, my one and only, let me look at you, see the state you’ve got yourself into in your absence from home and all your adventures and everything.’

  Tut-tutting in maternal anxiety, balancing in her hand a hillock of saris, Manasa-ma seemed to sail out of the confines of the Godrej almirah. She placed the heap on top of the trunk alongside the cassette player before turning to Nirip, stopping before him to gaze sorrowfully into his eyes. ‘You haven’t shaved. For several days, it appears.’ Behind her, the Godrej, in which he could see only blackness, through its half-open doors, seemed to radiate a foul warmth. As though he’d responded, she nodded, swivelled, picked up the tape recorder, put it on the floor and, lifting up the saris in one hand, opened the trunk. ‘Do you want anything from home? Books? Pens? Darjeeling?’

  ‘Don’t. I think I have to lie down till the nausea passes.’

  He raised the mosquito net, flipped it over the rod from which it hung and lay down beside the comatose cat. He shut his eyes. He heard Manasa-ma flitting about the room like a bat with a plan. Moments passed as he waited to be mothered, for her to assuage his unease. ‘Here, son,’ she murmured sleepily in their mother tongue, ‘to pull you out of yourself, put you back on your feet again.’ He sensed under his nose the glass screw-top jar in which he’d for decades stored his coffee and, an instant later, inhaled the paradisal aroma of freshly-ground, roasted Mysore beans mingled with, he realized in a moment, a drop or two of one of her concoctions, a virile, lavender-scented acid. He snorted it like cocaine. ‘Open your mouth. Keep a little beneath your tongue.’ The bitter grains of coffee were to him what chocolate is to Caucasian adults. He’d personally always held that women’s perfumes should smell of freshly ground coffee. Or petrol. When Dr Lakhtakiya’s predecessor had told him to stop black coffee becau
se he wasn’t getting any younger and his stomach couldn’t take it any more, he’d changed doctors and continued to ignore, with the resolve of a monk, the day-long rumblings of his digestive system.

  ‘So in your future you see nothing. And what’s wrong with that? From nothing to nothing. It’s like going home from school for the summer holidays.’

  ‘Please don’t sing.’

  He opened his eyes to gaze into her face, strange, beautiful, beloved, the long nose, the ageless skin that shrank from the sun, the large sad-dog’s eyes, the silver hair shining like gold, always kept imprisoned in an austere bun save on the nights of the new moon, the long history of sorrow in the darkness of her expression.

  ‘Ma, you fluttering around in there? How come he’s taken this one giant step from ICU straight to his new-found constituency? And it isn’t his until he’s induced-seduced Rimjhim Dada to step down. Probably simpler to shoot him down. And en route he fertilized that mad menopausal wreck? You seem to have messed up while keeping an eye on things.’

  ‘Well, this constituency is some kind of tax dodge that Vinayak is working out.’

  She reached out her hand and with her index finger gently poked the body of the cat. In a moment, it stirred, stretched, yawned, stared sleepily at the world. ‘He’ll pay your ransom to these rogues and claim income-tax exemption.’

  ‘Why d’you never focus on what I’m saying? On what I’m asking?’

  ‘The world is divided between those who focus and those who are distracted.’ Very coldly. ‘The time has come to so distract your father that he spins away like the moon around the earth around the sun. He will then remain eternally focused only on the spinning.’

  ‘You are distracted. The kidnapping was sensational, the crime event of the decade. The newspapers and TV must’ve been full of it.’