Fairy Tales at Fifty

by Upamanyu Chatterjee

  The match was to be played alongside the sludge of the river, in a clearing amongst the scrub and weed and landmines. The site was chosen partly to discourage the riffraff of the law from turning up and playing spoilsport—shooting a star batsman, for example. As an additional measure of security, the District Superintendent of Police had been requested to come and inaugurate but it was widely believed that he at the last minute would chicken out. Chintamani was in a state, sweating and incoherent with nervousness. He was not familiar with the venue despite its being hellish; and no one seemed to know whether Pashupati had arrived and where he could be. Indeed, there appeared to be nobody with whom he, Chintamani, could converse. The gunman was cursed and prodded into wakefulness and made to go out and enquire; before anything else, he leaned against the decrepit car and, yawning and snuffling, pissed, noisily and forever, into the dust. Nirip and Ehsaan Awesome left Chintamani mouthing invective at Sankatmochan-jee for not having commandeered a better car; the abuse settled on the hide of the driver like dew as he focused on readying his snort of cocaine.

  Nirip and Ehsaan Awesome made their way through the dust and the crowd, each muffled up individual of which was as potentially explosive as a landmine. Several amongst them recognized and warmly greeted the adolescent giant.

  ‘Do you play every year? A running trophy? What does the winning side get?’

  ‘This time, you actually.’

  They reached the waist-high rope that marked the boundary and began to walk along it anti-clockwise, skirting shrub and stumbling on stone, passing alternately diesel generator and wooden pole, entering and exiting spaces of brighter light, and swarms of orbiting insects. ‘The matches are usually abandoned before the finish because, after the Special Out, there isn’t much left in the bloody game. And just last night, Chhota Babua proposed you as the stakes. We haven’t agreed yet, in part because they deny having shot dead Supari-bhai this morning.’ Ehsaan Awesome acknowledged with a wave the greeting of another friendly soul. ‘The Special Out this evening is Leg Before Wicket, but my favourite is Caught Behind. Pashupatijee as guest of honour chose Leg Before Wicket after all the Special Outs were explained to him. He’s also proposed that the betting stakes be raised. What is your opinion, sir?’

  ‘Are you never going to return to your exams?’

  The giant waved his school away into the airy regions of the unimportant. He was clearly learning more outside the precincts of that fine institution. To avoid a group the members of which were laughingly sharing a chillum while tapping one another on the backside with cricket bats, Ehsaan Awesome clumsily ducked under the rope and waited for Nirip to follow. ‘You should try and bowl, sir, from the landmines end. There are these bumps round about the good length spot that could be effectively exploited by a bowler with an accurate eye.’ They began to trudge to the centre of the field as though with a purpose.

  ‘How can you tell that the ground doesn’t still have an active landmine or two?’

  ‘You can’t, sir, obviously.’

  Scrub, diesel generators and wooden poles—each bearing several light bulbs—irregularly dotted the entire ground. They traversed patches of harsh, then feebler, light, periodically a swirl of insects, the strong, then weaker, reek of diesel, the deafening, then only marginally diminished, thudding of generators. A tiny monkey on the shoulder of an old man, shortish, suddenly—and seemingly upon seeing Nirip—began chattering excitedly. The man, eunuch-like, vaguely familiar, smiled tenderly at the world with his gentle eyes. It seemed to Nirip that he resembled someone from his distant past, some dim figure from his childhood, deeply loved, whom he, Nirip, would have been delighted to meet again. Except that several decades had passed since that period of his infancy and he himself had turned fifty. Long enough for a man’s features in real time to change beyond recognition into—in effect—someone else’s face. Which one searched for clues to confirm that it really was that of the same person. The figure from his childhood—had it existed at all outside his head—would now after those decades of course be dead; only in one’s memory did they, figures and faces, with age not slump or crease or thicken. Remembrance froze them like black-and-white photographs that with the years just seem to blur a bit, lose colour and contour. Time dimmed memory and meaning and eroded longing and left to art to struggle to shore all three up; the softness of the features of the man with the monkey, more accurately therefore, had only jolted awake in Nirip an obscure desire to connect. When he and Ehsaan Awesome passed him, though, the musty whiff from his clothes suddenly nudged in Nirip a second, more recent memory of the odour of the blanket-like wrapping that his head and shoulders had been swathed in, in the Toyota Qualis that he’d been shoved into on being dragged out of Pashupati’s BMW. Behind him, as they had screechingly pulled away, that roar of a whoosh had been the car reaching out to the heavens, gloriously aflame.

  ‘After you examine the pitch, sir, we could move on to the light refreshments. Better before than after because who knows how the game will wind up and when and who, at the end of it, will have the stomach for food or, in its place, a gaping and bleeding hole . . .’ Thus speculated Ehsaan Awesome, happy as always to paint gory pictures, glancing continually at his interlocutor to check whether he had made an impression, his wit hit home. Nirip listened only intermittently, allowing the giant’s views, airy, insubstantial, to drift like cigarette smoke into the warm night that vaulted his vast, illuminated, open-air prison. He had no plans or dreams of escape therefrom.

  In any case, he couldn’t; there would be over a thousand guns in the surroundings that would happily bring him down. Officially of course, only the two umpires—appropriately as upholders of the law—were allowed to carry, beside their axes, firearms on the field. Etiquette only demanded that the guns not be visible. They had never been used, though, in the seven-year history of the tournament; the umpires, in fact, were in doubt—indeed, wary—about the purpose that their weaponry—and they themselves—were meant to serve. In the course of the game, they took no decisions at all; that would have been fatally to encroach upon the domain of responsibility of the spectators. Their role was to maintain the dignity and spirit of the game by not jumping, yelping and scampering for cover when they were shot at; that would not have been cricket. And targets for practice they certainly were, at least once an over. For, by a volley of shots in the air and some frenzied roaring, it was the spectators who decided—more or less—who was clean bowled and whether a pull was a four or a six; inevitable then that periodically the glum section of the crowd would express its displeasure at the way things were going by taking potshots at those acutely conspicuous, virtually spotlit, symbols of authority.

  Nirip watched as a handful of Scruffies, automatic rifles slung over the shoulder, purposefully moved from one diesel generator to another, from behind the wicket to forward short leg to silly point to cover, mystifyingly tapping each one with a stick at the end of the inspection—and tried to remember why he did not wish to be elsewhere. Ah yes, he was hoping to meet Widowhite. And while dreaming of a second round with her, he was—to beguile the time, as it were—out sulking while waiting for his future to clear. One of the group detached itself from the rest and approached them stumblingly. Magnum was unrecognizable in kurta-pyjama. She was also in tears.

  ‘He’s not letting me play! Do something! What to do! He’s forcing Chintamani to play instead because we arrived before you all! And I’m in such fine form! Do something!’

  Her body began to heave and gasp for air. Nirip stretched a hand out to comfort her but Ehsaan Awesome’s reach was longer. The giant held her by her shoulders in a vice of comfort and began to murmur the phrases of relief and repose. ‘Please don’t cry, madam. Pushpa, I hate tears. Of course you’ll play. You come with me and we’ll fix you a place. Only please don’t sulk unto death. Only great men did it all the time. What was a fast unto death anything but a sulk unto death. Life for us all is quietly and imperviously hideous. The single thing in its favour
is that death is even more so. Hey Ram. Do you want to play in Sir’s team or against him? Please stop crying, madam. One must simplify the sources of suffering. And shag when one can’t. Great men did it all the time, supermen too. Supershag. Look at Nietzsche.’

  The scrub in the immediate environs of the pitch was being savagely beaten to encourage the snakes therein to take up residence elsewhere. More dust rose with stately dignity in the air. Before he escorted a snivelling Magnum away, Ehsaan Awesome brought Nirip a white box to inspect. It contained six used cricket balls in differing stages of wear and tear. ‘I personally believe that an opening bowler is more unpredictable with an old ball. Would you care to select a couple? Then Chhota Babua’s vice captain would have to agree to our choice. He, sir, is a motherfucker of a negotiator.’

  Sure enough, in the second last over of the match, just when it looked as though his team might pull off the impossible and win, Chintamani was declared leg before wicket by Pashupati by way of the umpire. In the VIP shamiaana, the guest of honour had had a busy couple of hours. During the course of the game, each time the ball hit a batsman on any part of his body—skull, chin, shoulder—the crowd had roared out its demand for leg before wicket. Each time, the frightened umpire had raised his right arm in the direction of the shamiaana and twitched his fingers clockwise to plead for a decision before he was shot dead. And each time Pashupati had found pleasure in taking several seconds longer than necessary to order a green flare. Not out. How the three-thousand-odd spectators had groaned as one with joyful disappointment. Indeed, each one of them would have gone berserk, let fly had he got his leg before wicket too early in the game. The excitement had been frightful. Everyone stank, no one cared.

  Four overs prior to his being declared leg before wicket, Chintamani, for having had Nirip run out, almost died anyway. The second ball of that over Magnum, living the best day of her life, loudly invoking the allure of the bowler’s mother’s pussy, had hit to long on; the effort had made her grunt and fart and sent her bat flying out of her hands towards silly mid on. She had screamed at Chintamani her runner both to retrieve it and go for the run. Nirip, the star of the circus, the find of the season, his spirits singing with Nexitoes, had started off from the bowler’s end at a slow and graceful canter, and had been midway up the pitch when Chintamani picked up the bat and surprised everyone by turning to carry it back instead of moving on. When the bowler gleefully knocked off the bails at his end with the retrieved ball, Nirip had been several yards away from either crease and on the edge of an illuminated, radiantly philosophic mood. At the centre of that frenzied yelling that swamped the thudding of the generators, amidst the insects reeling in the reek of diesel, on that immense open-air stage unevenly lit up by scattered bulbs that dimmed and brightened, as though in concert, with the fluctuating fortunes of the game, Nirip, as high on amphetamines as the vast night sky, had watched Chintamani proffer the bat to Magnum, only to be tapped on the head and poked in the balls with it. The crowd had refused to declare Nirip out and instead had fired vengefully at Chintamani and the umpires. Nirip had begun the long walk off the field mainly to avoid the stray bullet. The crowd had then begun to cheer instead the find of the season and, to salute the gentleman sportsman who walked, redirect its gunfire at the stars.

  Midfield, Ehsaan Awesome, his successor at the bowler’s end, so palely solemn and nervous as to be virtually a different person, had accosted Nirip for his bat in the belief that some of his dexterity at the game would have seeped into it. The giant, holding its sweet spot reverentially to his forehead, had then in a whisper called for supernatural aid, ‘Be with me, Computerwali Bhawani Ma.’ Nirip had paused to observe Ehsaan Awesome lumber on to join Magnum at the crease, then draw Rimjhim Dada’s personal gunman—the one who had so passionately squeezed Nirip’s knee in the car, he having replaced Chintamani as Magnum’s runner, Chintamani having withdrawn himself, ostensibly to pad up to be ready to bat next—aside to share some secret with him. Nirip’d thought nothing of it then. He in fact thought of nothing most of the time. It helped to keep his skull airy. That was possibly one reason why he’d made nothing of his life. What was there to make? Babies? Apparently the meaning and purpose of it, life, lay in love. Which was? The ease with which Widowhite had wiped Nirmala Wilson off the slate?

  Ehsaan Awesome began to walk down to the bowler’s end, paused at long hop, turned, returned to touch Magnum’s feet. The crowd murmured its approval of inter-generational piety.

  Nirip had viewed the succeeding overs unfold in remote slow motion. ‘The rat’s going to be killed,’ he’d revealed quietly and helplessly to the short, handsome, terribly familiar eunuch alongside him who smelt of monkey-on-his-shoulder.

  ‘So are you,’ had responded the eunuch, smiling tenderly and with tears in his eyes.

  Nirip watched, as though from another galaxy, Magnum and the giant make merry with the bowling till the end of the over, smashing and thumping the deliveries in spectacularly unorthodox ways to all corners of the field. Then, willing himself to wake up, to stir, he ducked under the rope and explained to the Scruffy guarding the VIP shamiaana that he needed to be let through to discuss strategy for the last overs with the next batsman in. Of course that was quite within the rules, particularly for a star who’d taken eight Chhota Babua wickets and had so awed the crowd with his copybook bowling style.

  To locate Chintamani, he need only find Pashupati; like a rat amidst rotting garbage, he was sure to be hovering in the vicinity of his master. In the crush in the shamiaana, after negotiating the junior chhokras serving pakodas, chai and Limca, their seniors serving hooch and local Scotch and the bookies’ assistants refusing further bets on who would win, whose prestige would plummet and who would die, he had arrived at the white sofas of the sanctum sanctorum when an end-of-the-world roar from the crowd submerged the rest of the din. ‘It’s the giant!’ ‘It’s the dwarf!’ went the buzz in the marquee. ‘Who’s next?!’ ‘Will Dada play?!’ The loungers and loafers became more restive; heads turned to see why other heads were turning; through that confusion, Nirip saw at the sofas a sort of spaceman clumsily straighten up from touching a seated, sated Pashupati’s feet. After a moment, Pashupati stood upright too, seemingly with more effort than the spaceman had, and leaned on his shoulder in their walk across the rough ground that had been rendered even more perilous by the concealing, well-worn carpet. They took a second to recognize Nirip; the obsequiousness that inspired the alarming wobbling of the helmeted head was both manifest and familiar, even in that chaos. Nirip noticed Pashupati’s canines emerge onto his lower lip in clear welcome. ‘Well played, my son, and if you’re not too tired, Chintamani here needs a runner.’

  ‘With all those bulletproof pads and guards and helmet and everything, the bahanchod can’t even walk,’ scoffed Number Do Kapildev, somehow both admiringly and sadly, at Nirip’s shoulder, ‘how then do you expect him to run?’

  At the mouth of the shamiaana, Pashupati released them of his company with a benediction—‘You have my blessing. I’m sure you won’t let me down’—that as usual sounded more like a threat. Nirip and Chintamani squeezed their way through the staring and grinning crowd. Chintamani stank of sweat and fear and Nirip wanted to get away from the hatchet man’s reek of the victim. Chintamani wore no gloves so as to more easily reach his revolver.

  They sucked under the rope of the boundary and, re-entering the bubble, were gobbled up once more by the patches of dark and light, the buzz of insects, the reek of diesel and kerosene, were rendered almost immobile by the tension of the spectators so thick that each movement felt like swimming in sweat. Nirip halted at fine leg and, allowing Chintamani to stumble on ahead, waited for Ehsaan Awesome, red-faced and teary-eyed, to reach him. The giant was both delirious with his brief and explosive stay at the crease and furious with himself for not having judged the ball that had uprooted his middle stump.

  ‘How will it play out, you think?’

  The giant didn’t think
; he knew. All of it. Almost.

  Well, either Magnum or the spaceman would be declared out pretty soon because Rimjhim Dada had sent word that since they were just a handful of runs away from victory, he would be the one to hit the winning boundary. More likely Magnum because there was some money riding on Chintamani becoming the Special Out and all those bets it would absolutely be too foolhardy to upset. But to-be-or-not-to-be ki ma chudaaye, would the match itself continue once Chintamani was declared leg before wicket, that was the question. Because all those who’d paid up would certainly want to take pot shots at Chintamani’s pads and they in turn would be pretty occupied evading the return fire; if the match were abandoned when Rimjhim Dada was five runs short of victory, he would be extremely annoyed and that was dangerous too.

  ‘So how will it play out, d’you think?’

  Ehsaan Awesome pushed his snot out and up till his upper lip grazed his nose. He’d reluctantly raised his shoulders to his earlobes to confess to his ignorance when, even before the next ball had been bowled, Rimjhim Dada, in battle formation, not alone, strolled out onto the pitch.

  He was in his political uniform of white kurta, pyjama and sandals. Garlands of marigolds about his neck, mounting in odoriferous and celebratory rows till his nose, left invisible in that gloom all but the golden rectangles of his spectacle frames. Behind them, though, his unhappy and nervous eyes bobbed about, as ever, like ping-pong balls on boiling water. The lackey at two o’clock from him carried his mobile phone and his bat, the one at ten o’clock a can of Baygon spray in his left hand to ward off the insects and, in his right, a dozen sticks of incense, lit, that he waved about without pause to herald to the world the arrival upon the stage of the non-playing captain. Rimjhim Dada’s personal gunman, awake, alert and at last playing the role expected of him, strode three paces behind his charge with his weapon pointed directly at the base of his spine.