Fairy Tales at Fifty

by Upamanyu Chatterjee

  He would have preferred the radio but the giant had slipped in a CD of the best of A.R. Rahman. Times had changed and yet he revelled in that old, long-submerged, almost-forgotten pleasure of killing time on the road, hours and hours of it, his mind calm and dust-green like the fields, thinking of his first move, of unclasping his gold chain from around his neck and placing it about hers, and then of the colours of his last, of her white sari reddening.

  Despite the music, the giant’s cheerfully obscene conversations with unseen interlocutors and the comfort of the air-conditioning in the bright sunshine, the mood in the car was glum. Widowhite for one was silent and apprehensive, uncomfortable sitting at the back and uncertain whether the vast but unspecified sums promised would compensate for the misadventure. And earlier that morning, Manasa-ma had finally got through to her son on Ehsaan Awesome’s phone, told him off—a rare occurrence—for not answering his mobile and asked him to shed his sloth and return home because his old school friend, his only friend, had killed himself.

  Oh God.

  Who was dead too. He might come in all shapes and sizes, be dark and sexy and play the flute and fuck around like crazy but in the long run Time would take care of him in each and every one of his forms. That left what? Sex. Sex too in each and every one of its forms. That cost money.

  Blue and listless Nirip’d been therefore when he’d tried to explain why they should move to Delhi.

  ‘You could make some good money. Ten lakhs or even more you could make if you give me one of your kidneys. Twelve if the ransom’s good.’

  Anguli had reddened. Kidney meant piss meant penis. It was a pass, even his wretched twin’s wretched conversation. He was fed up of and scandalized by his sexual advances across that social gulf. All night long, first under the mango tree and later, trudging and stumbling by moonlight for kilometres across the fields, whenever they’d been alone for a few seconds, Nirip, drugged and smiling absentmindedly, had stroked Anguli’s crotch, bitten his earlobe, squeezed his bum and assaulted without pause the murk in his mind. ‘You prefer killing to sex? To each his own. You had a hard-on when you dumped the policeman in the Gomati? Me, I don’t play cards. I collect fountain pens and teapots. I pay a prostitute a small fortune to tickle for minutes my anus with her tongue. It’ll take you a lifetime to become me.’

  ‘Ransom or no ransom, we’re twins, aren’t we. You take what you want from me,’ Anguli had responded, ‘And I’ll take what I want from you.’

  They could be left there, all of them, in the present continuous, doing sixty in a white Maruti Esteem on National Highway Three. Each time you look in on them, they are all both right there and on their way. Ditto for the rest of the dramatis personae, all on their way since it is time to wind up, moving without finality in the present continuous.

  And if you look in elsewhere a fortnight later, you see that Shaamo the ghoul has been moving without pause for weeks, up and down the lift or the stairs, all the way from the basement gym to the twelfth and thirteenth floors of the apartment block at Walkeshwar in Bombay. She is exhausted and speaks incessantly of wanting to die. More accurately, being petrified of death, she wishes that it would go away and believes that perhaps it will if one longs for it volubly; in her life, hope has always been belittled by experience. Death belittles life, that conviction has drained her; that life belittles death too is a notion that is confusing and yet almost as ineluctable. It impels her to ceaseless motion because the bottles and the Amul milk powder are in the kitchen on the thirteenth floor and the baby—Nirmala Wilson’s and Nirip’s baby—is with Magnum in the basement.

  In the present continuous in this bloody rotten world, the future is tense. How will the baby manage without her, worries Magnum ceaselessly. That she should return the infant to Nirmala Wilson who is its rightful biological mother has crossed her mind a couple of times without leaving behind any trace. She is almost bald now, Magnum, and in recompense her breasts have sprouted tufts of hair. They tickle and pleasantly annoy the baby when it suckles at those shapely, dry teats. It gurgles. Magnum gurgles back to it. The feel of its gums at her nipples is heavenly and makes her come four times a day. There is nothing else to life. The baby renders it complete. Its presence is so much more pleasurable than sex with the riffraff that it has, saving the reps in the gym, wiped out Magnum’s entire past.

  In the present continuous in this bloody rotten world, the future is tense with potential. Which of the two doors of the gym will Magnum open, people have been knocking on both for the last seven minutes. Is it her karma that she will open the door to the stairs? But that is likely to disclose Shaamo the ghoul whom she doesn’t want to see till the baby’s next feed. Karma metaphysically is a bloody convoluted thing. Is Magnum predestined to open instead the fire exit that leads to the stinking service lane that debouches eventually on to Little Gibbs Road? Is it really a free agent who ignores the thudding and hammering on both doors and, with her eyes shut, enjoying the mauling of her right nipple, has a smile on her lips when the fire exit is broken down to reveal two huffing policemen, one weeping Nirmala Wilson and Payal, grinning, triumphant?

  Madam is deaf?

  Probably. Because she does not answer.

  And has kidnapped that child? Just how many members of this household have been kidnapped anyway?

  Two.

  Madam has also recently thrown off the terrace of the fourteenth floor thirty-seven teapots? We have received complaints from passersby.

  Whether Magnum acknowledged that expression of hers of rage against Nirip’s absence from her life, particularly when she missed him the most—that, having slipped into the future redundant—would never be known; for just then, with a sob and a moan, Nirmala Wilson, with arms outstretched, rushes forward to reclaim her baby.

  How dare you, you bag of loose morals. One kick in the stomach sends Nirmala Wilson staggering back into the arms of both the cops. As always with the police, they take long to release her. Clutching the baby to her like a rugby ball, Magnum dodges past the intruders. Payal claws her face in passing. Magnum opens the door to the stairs, glides out and drives home the bolt behind her.

  The present continuous is composed of detachable segments that may be viewed separately, that form the present staccato. People slip from one segment into another because they, like Time their master, can never keep still. Thus it is that in the foyer outside the gym, Magnum forgets her burning left cheek and believes that the hundred thousand pills that she has had over the preceding thirty-five years finally have begun to have their cumulative effect because she discovers that the bangers on the door are two Nirips, both identically dressed in jeans and yellow Lacostes, one grinning, the other smiling uncertainly. Behind them hovers protectively a young giant, terribly familiar, with a mobile phone at his ear.

  Never stable, Magnum is completely unmanned at the sight of the twins. Nirip stretches his arms out to hug her; to her, it appears that he intends to grab the baby. Consciously emulating the conduct of one of her sporting idols in the World Cup football final two years previously, she butts him viciously in the chest with her stone-head and takes to the stairs.

  By the time the giant and the twins catch up with her and her other pursuers exit the basement gym, run up the stinking service lane and around to the front of the building, take the lift and arrive at the fourteenth floor, Magnum and the baby are balanced on the parapet of the terrace of Pashupati’s apartment with the city and the sea spread out before them.

  Relax, relax. He’s my twin.

  Nothing, nothing that Nirip could’ve uttered would’ve stung her more. You’re lying to me. I am your twin. So hurt, so shattered, she, Magnum, wants to be free of everything, for everything causes her sorrow. Thinking that the giant’s face does resemble a worried baby’s, she flings at him the sleeping bundle in her arms and steps off the parapet into the void.

  She is falling, falling, on Little Gibbs Road, doing sixty en route to a messy encounter with the roof of some parked car
. But that is in the future imperfect. In the present staccato, each time you look in on her, she is right there, arms and legs flailing, still full of life in midair.

  THE BUDDHA ON THE CAUSEWAY

  Manasa-ma on the thirteenth floor sees Magnum pass her window. Who else could it be in a scarlet and black tracksuit with Wonder Woman emblazoned on it in startling white? She is shocked and saddened even though every day for the last fifty years she has been expecting Magnum to die violently, and in that time to continue to harass and enervate her poor family till the very end and even from beyond. Manasa-ma herself intends to do much the same to her husband and, for starters, ever since he returned, triumphant but indisposed, from his disposal of Rimjhim Dada and the takeover of his affairs, has been dosing him three times a day with powdered Ritalin in steamed modaks so that he’s had to move into ICU because of nervous exhaustion brought about by insomnia. Things are falling apart only to form themselves anew in other shapes. She herself proposes to come back as a carnivorous bat. She puts down the concoction that she’s been sipping and turns from the window to face the world. Sooner or later, of course, everyone’s time would be up, but before word of Magnum gets to her, Manasa, by way of the stairs, she should slip away through a side door, leave Sulekha to handle it and go and dump the bad news on Pashupati.

  Kamagni has jumped off the terrace of your apartment. Exactly from the spot above the tub in front of which ten years ago she killed that monkey. Of course the two events are connected. Nature takes time to wreak her revenge. Why should she be in a hurry?

  Pashupati doesn’t take his eyes off the TV screen and indeed gives no sign that he has heard. He doesn’t feel like leaving the hospital. Physically he’s been out of danger from Day One but nervous exhaustion is going to kill him. He hasn’t shut his eyes in thirteen days. The doctors have been injecting him with ever-increasing doses of Valium but they are powerless against Manasama’s steamed modaks; those sweets are but the offerings to him of those two implacable and playful psychopaths. They have got into his head, Fate and Time, and they like it in there. His recurring nightmare, imprisoning and emasculating him, it could be said, was fated, its time had come. Each time his eyelids droop, therefore, he finds himself in Manasa-ma’s kitchen, watching a naked Nirip making love to the Konkani slut, entering her from the rear and causing her so much pleasure that she is squealing softly like a piglet. Manasa-ma, standing alongside them, is teaching the slut how to cook a meat stew of liver, kidneys and testicles. Drops of sweat fall from the slut’s dimpled chin into the stew. At that vision, even in bed in ICU, Pashupati’s calves tremble and his heart, becoming an enormous moth, goes thud-thud against his ribs. He feels cold and absolutely empty inside. At that, Manasa-ma, turning from the couple having so much fun, explains that emptiness to him by pointing out that all the organs in the stew are his. The nourishment is for Nirip, patijee. As you yourself have remarked so often, he has need of your spunk. At that point, Pashupati himself squeals softly like a piglet and his eyes snap wide open again.

  His squealing disturbs everyone in ICU. Vinayak intelligently suggests moving him to a suite and surrounding his bed with TVs.

  Pashupati’s villainy has not abated, though, not in the least. He watches porn nonstop on two of the three TVs around his bed. The third plays twenty-four-hour Hindi soap about bitchy mothers-in-law in gorgeous silk saris. Glaring at them all with his mad staring eyes, he wants the female nurses in attendance on him to enact scenes not from the porn films but the soaps. The nurses flee. They don’t make them like they used to, says Vinayak in explanation. Fire them, orders Pashupati.

  Yes, of course, immediately, agrees Vinayak. Uh . . . Shivani Madam was wondering whether you were well enough for a game of cards. Lakhtakiya said no. I said no.

  Pashupati does not respond. He is not paying attention. He is unable to explain to himself why his son is having so much fun in his, Pashupati’s, dream. And where is he? Why is son abandoning father in his hour of need? Because he’s not your son, you fool, that’s why.

  Whenever Pashupati shuts his eyes, that’s the truth that, known but disregarded for five decades, he is punished with so mercilessly that he can see nothing else. Manasa-ma’s trickery fifty years in the past explains everything, why Nirip has dissociated himself from Pashupati’s business interests, why the son has been too impotent to follow in the father’s footsteps, why he reads books, everything. The acknowledgment of what deep down he has known all along galvanizes Pashupati. His eyes begin to bulge even more. He turns the volume of the three TVs up. Fuck your mother, you, he snarls at Dr Lakhtakiya when he suggests that Pashupati really must rest. I need to disinherit a few people, send them to the sewers. Get me Vinayak. He is the remover of obstacles.

  Vinayak is in Delhi, sir. The Income Tax has come calling on Computerwali Bhawani.

  The story has a fairy-tale ending. Sort of. The impotent prince slays the ogre. Being impotent, he kills him passively, triggers off in him a humdinger of a heart attack by presenting himself at the door of the ogre’s lair most unexpectedly and smiling warmly, but in duplicate.

  You know, I think it was David ben Gurion the Israeli Prime Minister who said that anyone who doesn’t believe in miracles is not a realist. That’s the clever remark that Nirip has planned to have Anguli open with whenever he meets the family but it remains forever unsaid. For one, getting Anguli to learn it has not been easy; for another, it seems inappropriate, even cruel, to say it to Pashupati during his seizure. Nirip phones Lakhtakiya, Anguli stands distracted and helpless by the bed, with half an eye on the dying man and one-and-a-half on the TV screens.

  Distracted and helpless in general the pauper has been—at least before he gets his second wind—throughout his visit to the world of the prince. He does nothing for instance when the canines Dogslife and Coolcat, knowing him for an impostor, attack him snarling and snapping while the twins, upon seeing Magnum hop off into the void, are rushing down the stairs from the fourteenth floor. In Anguli’s world, dogs do not bite and bare their teeth at humans without cause; they eat, sleep the day away in the sun, fuck one another like crazy and wag their tails even while dozing when their provider of food passes by. Anguli correctly reckons the world of wealth to be pitiless; even its dogs are protective of it against the impoverished intruder.

  Is it far from here to Takshasila?

  He is still curious about wisdom, about the wider world more ancient than Bombay. He feels out of place in that Walkeshwar household with the psychopaths having so much fun all around him. They have urged Manasa-ma to take Ehsaan Awesome under her wing and use his enthusiasm to rebuild Pashupati’s affairs. They have inspired her to enact her late husband’s last dream and cook a divine stew of his liver, kidneys and testicles. Nirip has developed a taste both for human flesh and the Konkani slut. There is no place in that world for Anguli. He needs to get away before he kills.

  The psychopaths organize his exit too. It is they after all who have arranged for evil on earth to be limitless, more fundamental than the planet itself.

  So is it far from Bombay to Takshasila?

  Sort of. Two thousand two hundred kilometres at least, I should think. It’s in Pakistan. You go up to Punjab, cross over at Lahore, push north, it isn’t that far from Rawalpindi.

  We could walk there, taking our time? Lifts on trucks allowed. Will you come with me?

  Long pause.

  You’d need a passport, I’m thinking. We’d both have to get visas. A second long pause. Hitch-hiking on the road to Takshasila is certainly one way to end your life.

  There are several others that can be found in Bombay itself and, when the occasion arises, the citizenry from diverse places on the road to Takshasila do descend on the seaport to take both the air and some lives. Lives are precious only in fiction wherein you may leave characters falling from skyscrapers in midair because you just don’t want them to die.

  So there they are on a warm Wednesday night in late November just outside Leopol
d’s on Colaba Causeway, buying two green coconuts and one cigarette lighter, still waiting for Anguli’s passport, when the men from the road to Takshasila arrive in a taxi with their grenades and their guns. They get Anguli straightaway. Nirip they miss. Someone has to live unhappily ever after.

  With his life gushing out of him on the pavement of the causeway, in the mayhem that the men from the taxi leave behind, Anguli finds himself encircled by heads around which the street lights form haloes. The Buddha at last, he thinks, and so many of them. And to the long-awaited Master, he struggles to murmur what his instinct concludes, namely that life, my lord, life is still a lotus.

  Acknowledgements

  I am indebited to The Red Market by Scott Carney for the details of the wicked sources of Pashupati’s wealth provided at Page 153 and elsewhere in this book.

  The quotation from the Vayu Purana on Pages 321-322 is from Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty’s The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology.

  About the Author

  Upamanyu Chatterjee was born in 1959. He joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1983. His published works include short stories and the novels English, August: An Indian Story (1988), The Last Burden (1993), The Mammaries of the Welfare State (2000), which won the Sahitya Akademi Award for writing in English, Weight Loss (2006) and Way to Go (2011), which was shortlisted for the Hindu Best Fiction Award. In 2008, he was awarded the Order of Officier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government for his contribution to literature. He is married and has two daughters.