Half of What I Say

by Anil Menon

  ‘No.’ Padma held out her hand for the dust, as if it were the first fall of snow. ‘The truth, at last.’

  It was. He drew his wife close, kissed her, indifferent to all possible endings.

  ‘Now that’s what I call a finale,’ said Kannagi, standing by their side, clapping her hands in joy.

  #

  We were to be shot the next day at five in the morning. After delivering the news, Kalki grimaced, then repeated the news, as if he knew we wouldn’t believe it. I glanced at my fellow prisoners. Rathod received the update with a Rajput’s contempt; Dodda Gowda issued a startled cry as if he’d been anticipating a honorary degree; and as for me, it seemed as logical a way to end an existence as any. Vyas is; Vyas was.

  ‘At least let us speak to our loved ones.’ I’d always found it easier to beg for others than myself. ‘That isn’t too much to ask.’

  ‘Of course it isn’t,’ said Kalki, sounding quite reasonable. He always insisted on speaking in English with me. ‘However, your missus has a cock in her mouth at the moment, with many more waiting to be serviced. But you can tell me; I’ll pass on your message to her.’

  I remembered Kalidasa’s Yaksha in Meghdoot. Incarcerated by Kubera for dereliction of duty, his alphabets seized, but granted one final message with the provisio he would never again see his wife, the Yaksha had emptied the air in his lungs, sent it homewards. What comfort could I offer my wife, assuming Kalki were to actually deliver on his promise, which of course he wouldn’t.

  ‘Tell my beloved she’s not bereaved yet, that she is loved and that our sorrows, like our separation, shall soon come to an end.’

  Kalki swore, jerked his head towards Rathod and said in an angry voice: ‘Your wife and children are safe, Rathod. I did not let anyone touch them. They will be taken care of, you have my word. It is too bad you got mixed up with this bastard.’ He went quiet, and I sensed he was weighing the costs of showing a little kindness. ‘If any of you would like a Gita, Bible or Qu’ran I can arrange it. Meals, one small change. Today it’s pizza, my treat.’

  Clearly miffed by our lacklustre reception, he abruptly turned and left. We listened to Kalki’s departing footsteps. His shoes squeaked unevenly, as if he were always correcting a limp; perhaps he had flat feet.

  ‘Teri maa ki,’ muttered Rathod as Kalki’s footsteps faded, but more to demonstrate solidarity with us than any real malice. He returned to pacing the room.

  We listened to everything, speculated on everything. There is little else to do in a prison. We had a better grasp on time than space. Gowda thought we were somewhere in the north-east because many of our guards had slanted eyes. We spent several hours debating which states belonged to ‘the north-east’. Rathod insisted the mornings had a Rajasthani ‘kick’ but his intolerant, even violent, insistence was off-putting; we preferred propositions that stimulated conversations, not ended them. Wherever we were, it had to be somewhere remote because all the noises were made by man-made objects: motors, jeeps, doors opening and closing, laughter, screams, and an incessant whine that couldn’t be identified. It sounded like a mechanical dog begging to be fed.

  Several times, we saw large flocks of birds in the high blue sky. Koonj birds, claimed Rathod. Because the migratory koonj, the Demoiselle crane, arrived annually to be ritually fed at Khichan, a village about 70 kilometres from Pokhran, he was insistent that we hadn’t been moved from Pokhran at all.

  Rathod interrupted his orbit to glare at Gowda. ‘What are you crying for? Stop it or I’ll give you something to really cry about.’

  Dodda Gowda was indeed weeping. Sobbing. Roly-poly, baby-serious tears rolled down his smooth cheeks. Not for the first time I wondered at his infinite zest for life. He still felt things, made happy noises when he defecated, waited breathlessly for the surprise Sunday dessert, and derived great satisfaction from clean laundry. He was one of those souls who are happy as long as they are with others. He was our Walt Whitman.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ I said. ‘From now, and until the end, we are all brothers. What one suffers we all suffer. Vyas is Gowda is Rathod is Vyas.’

  It was a melodramatic thing to say, and the words popped out before I had a chance to pat them down. They weren’t even mine; I’m pretty sure John Donne could have claimed copyright. Rathod opened his mouth, then changing his mind, turned away and began another circuit of the room. When we’d been thrown into the cell, I had elected myself leader of this doomed caravan and chosen the most comfortable spot in the cell. The others hadn’t objected, they’d found their corners, their thoughts.

  There was a fourth cell-mate we ignored because he never said anything. He wasn’t, as yet, dead. Mir Alam Mir lay motionless by the wall with just a threadbare blue-grey blanket between him and the bare floor. He’d stunk unbearably when he’d first been thrown into the cell but our noses had adjusted. We’d tried to do what we could to help but the large blue-black splotches all over his bruised, tenderized body indicated internal bleeding. Besides, after our sessions with the torturers, most of the time we were in no position to be useful to anyone. I tried several times to ask him about Bilkis, but the poet had moved beyond the reach of conversation. Perhaps his mind still talked to itself. At night, he would sometimes laugh.

  ‘We are being watched,’ said Rathod suddenly, pausing to point to the ceiling. ‘I feel it.’

  I nodded. I’d sensed the same thing. The sense of being watched and heard is part of life in a prison. Actually, it is more than a sense. It is fact. We existed to be inspected. We could hide our thoughts not because we had any right to do so, but because they didn’t, as yet, have the means to read them. Perhaps future prisons would be set inside MRI units.

  At first it seemed like a suitable plot for a science-fiction story, but then I realized that every story is such a prison. Its characters are under constant surveillance from invisible eyes, their thoughts filtered through invisible minds. There is little concern for the oppression fictional characters must constantly feel. In any case, what matters their feeling anything? What matters if they are aborted, divorced, murdered, separated from their beloveds? They are ours to do with as we please. Anna Karenina’s predicament might make you weep, but it’s understood the bitch’s thoughts are yours to inspect at will.

  I hardly worried about my own predicament. Or Tanaz’s. If Dorabjee were alive, he would keep her safe. She was practically his niece. That had to count for something. I knew the Lokshakti often lied to its prisoners, tormented them with thoughts of loved ones, holding out a dim possibility of their survival in return for confessions. Doubtless, Kalki had done the very same with me. Tanaz was a nobody, she was just a harmless corporate drudge. She would have been questioned briefly, then released. At this very moment, she was probably trying to charm Dorabjee into granting me a pardon.

  But a pardon for what? The case against us was pure fiction. In the Lokshakti’s telling, I and my fellow conspirators had been plotting against the republic for many years. It largely came down to Bilkis’ attack on Dorabjee—I still didn’t know if it had succeeded or not— and even more incredibly, Tanaz’s alleged role in making Gowda’s cursed movie available online. Allegedly, she’d also onlined an oral retelling by Dhasal of the Ramayana, or rather, an alternate version of the Ramayana.

  My own goose was cooked. Indeed, the banality of my guilt was so nauseatingly obvious, we all agreed there was no need whatsoever to discuss my confessional letter to her.

  What my interrogators wished to discuss was coincidence. The lead interrogator, an MA in Hindi Literature, refused to believe the movie, Mir Alam Mir’s aborted novel, Dhasal’s oral retelling, and my miserable essay, all just happened to have the same name. I told them I’d been trying to work out the limits of story transformations and that I’d chosen the Ramayana only as an example. I told them Dhasal had never even read my volume, pointing to the lack of his rubber stamp on the cover page. I told them that neither my wife nor I had anything to do with Shabari working for Social
Weather. But it was all in vain.

  Wasn’t Ravana just a metonymy for the Lokshakti? Wasn’t Sita, Bharat-mata? Wasn’t Rama a stand-in for the radicals? Set aside the depravity of a mind that could calmly discuss why the epic would have been improved had Rama set Sita on fire; it was all just code for bomb blasts, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it obvious I had cross-dressed an allegory as an essay? Confess!

  When I said the coincidence of titles was merely accidental, my interrogator made me typewrite one thousand times a line from my own essay: One coincidence is an accident, two coincidences is a statistic, but three coincidences indicates a plot. There was the coincidence of titles. There was the coincidence of ideas in the various works. There was the coincidence of Shabari working for my wife. There was the coincidence of Tanaz approving the movie’s distribution. Confess!

  Hadn’t Shabari’s suicide note pinned the blame entirely on Tanaz? Hadn’t our intent been to slander the General by slandering his future wife? Admit it, hadn’t I plotted with the assassin Bilkis to kill the General? Your goose is cooked Vyas-ji, but we will spare your wife if you tell the truth.

  ‘I shall let you go,’ says the Wolf to Little Red Riding Hood. ‘If you’ll tell me what the truth is.’

  ‘The truth is that you will eat me,’ says Little Red Riding Hood.

  Is that how the events had unfolded in that story? Where is the rest of the story? Who interrogated the Wolf ? Who performed Little Red Riding Hood’s autopsy? If there were no witnesses, how do we know what happened in that forest between the two? Who has erased half of what the storyteller said?

  In one of his poems, Peter Everwine writes: I gave you a flight of birds to make visible the winds you love. Or some such beautiful rubbish.

  Poets; dung beetles.

  Of course, I cannot claim superiority to dung. I too have spent a portion of my life making up things that mostly never happened. If that’s not dealing in rubbish, what is? But I admit I have grown weary of being part of the problem. I’m addicted to words, yes. But I’m also a drug-pusher.

  Already, I’ve said more than I must and less than I want to. Notice I used the word ‘weary.’ I could have said: I have become tired of feeding an addiction. But weary adds a lovely grey shade to my whine. Gandhi is weary, Moses is weary, Joan of Arc is weary. But the clerk dozing in the Noida train, shoulders bowed, bones bleached to transparency, he is not weary; he is only tired. He is not even tired. What he is is beyond the reach of any word. Words; letter baskets. In the end, says Everwine, they hold nothing. ‘He is,’ I start, and realize that I cannot even lie, let alone tell the truth.

  One of Freud’s surreal jokes nails the dilemma of the storyteller who would tell the truth. Two Jews meet at a railway station.

  ‘Where are you off to, Aaron?’ asks David.

  ‘To Cracow,’ says Aaron.

  ‘What a liar!’ shouts David. ‘If you say you’re going to Cracow, you want me to believe you’re going to Lemberg. But I know that in fact you’re going to Cracow. So why are you lying to me?’

  Why Aaron lies, why David needs him to lie, why they have this useless exchange at all, why we stubborn monkeys expect messages to be more than mere information, this why of fiction stands at the threshold of everything we do ever since our species first exapted tongues to shape air.

  Still, it is hard to sympathize with the storytellers. They are the ones starved for attention. They are the ones who choose to cry wolf. Why should we believe them when they wish to shout the truth? The truth is this: it is not we who consume fiction, it is fiction who consumes us. Wolf, wolf. My ears prickled; were there people coming down the corridor? Sometimes the hairs on the body could act like a bucket brigade and conduct the electrical charge in the air. I had no idea if this theory was true, but it was certainly interesting.

  ‘What?’ cried Gowda, his round face reflecting my tension. ‘Are they coming?’

  ‘Why would they do that?’ I said. ‘We’re scheduled for tomorrow, remember?’

  ‘Yes! Perhaps there will be a reprieve. There’s always hope.’ He glanced at Rathod, who nodded heartily. Gowda relaxed, even managed a smile. I marvelled, as others in my situation have marvelled, at the human capacity for happiness. Even now, as Bilhana wrote. Even now, I desired to desire. Even now, I wanted to think. Even now, I wished to savour a spicy samosa, even now I ached for the monsoon rain, even now I longed for the feel of Tanaz’s thigh, even now I wanted to raise a child in a house with yellow slats on a cypress-scented hill.

  ‘What are you thinking about, sir-ji?’ asked Rathod. ‘An escape?’

  ‘Yes. A poem.’

  ‘Phuck you.’

  I nodded. My sentiments exactly. I circled a forefinger in the air to indicate I was losing it. He grinned and took it as a sign to share an intimacy.

  ‘I know there’s no escape.’ He shrugged. ‘Its okay. My family will manage. I had a great life. I only pray that in my next life also I’m a Rajput.’

  ‘If I were to live over,’ mused Gowda, ‘I would insist on being called something other than Dodda Gowda.’

  Rathod laughed. The brave, happy sound thrilled me to the core. An air of festivity seemed to fill the cell.

  ‘Then I will be Dodda Gowda,’ I told the producer, smiling. ‘Da, da. It has the sound of thunder.’

  ‘And I will be Director Vyas. Yes. I like it, I like it. Hello Miz Octopussy. My name is Vyas. Director Vyas.’

  My ears hadn’t been lying. There definitely was someone or something coming down the corridor. I had been triumphant just a second earlier; now my stomach clenched. A shiver of excitement ran down my spine. The body was such a fool. It didn’t know. It didn’t want to know. It would expect and explore to the bitter absurd end.

  When Himmler heard Freud’s joke, he is said to have laughed: tell David and Aaron they’re both going to Auschwitz.

  With difficulty, I regained control over my racing thoughts.

  ‘Chalo, let’s have some time-pass,’ said Rathod, jovially. ‘Jokes?’

  Mir raised his head, pressed against the ground with his arms in an attempt to sit up, failed. When he spoke, his voice was thick as if the tongue had forgotten speech.

  ‘He’s gone. Jokes was shot for lowering productivity.’

  ‘Arre, so you’re alive?’ said Rathod, with friendly contempt. Then he added, ‘Don’t worry, mian. Nobody is going to shoot you. We don’t shoot poets. Why waste a bullet? In a short while, they’ll soon send you home. Right, Vyas-ji?’

  ‘Right my man,’ said Gowda.

  ‘Bhenchod, you’d better stop that.’

  ‘Mir was joking,’ I explained. ‘He’s saying Jokes is dead. Jokes is grazing in pastures celestial. Jokes is out of fresh material. Jokes is apologizing to Helen Keller right this minute.’ The confusion provided a pleasant diversion. Time had lost its hypnotic grip on us; the arrival of Kalki earlier had stirred the supersaturated fluid, crystallized us out, given us a sense of identity again. I listened to Gowda push Rathod to a near murderous rage with his insistence that he was now me and that Rathod was to address him as sir-ji.

  Down the corridor, the sound of feet. ‘Here they come after all,’ said Rathod, in a soft voice. ‘Whoever you are Gowda, you are now dead.’

  Kalki had shown up in person. He was accompanied by three others, tired men with indifferent faces. They all seemed very beautiful to me, even Kalki’s death-mask, these last set of faces I would see.

  ‘Come on,’ said Kalki, ‘let us take a ride.’

  As we rose to our feet, Mir Alam Mir also tried to rise, but Kalki motioned him to stay where he was.

  ‘Mian, please. Sit, sit. The nation has need of your poems.’

  We were motioned into a jeep, our hands then shackled to the frame. We were made to wait for some twenty minutes, then Kalki said something to one of the guards, who laughed. They headed back inside the prison.

  ‘Bhenchod!’ swore Rathod.

  The guards returned, dragging Mir Alam Mir by his armpits
. He was to be shot after all. The false reprieve had been a joke.

  They drove us past the north side of the prison, towards a large field where an earthmover could be seen digging holes. So that was the incessant whine we’d heard in the prison.

  Our progress was as unhurried and deliberate as if we were on a scientific mission to collect moon rocks, gather data, and inspire the future. I realized Rathod was right; we had to be somewhere in Rajasthan, probably not very far from Pokhran. Building wreckage was scattered all around. Cracked twenty-feet walls posed like ruined Gods under the black night, coruscant with stars. I saw the night but what I remembered was a story I’d read to Tanaz about a woman who’d turned into a black panther whenever she made love. Still, this was a desert world and within seconds the silence and the dark reclaimed their dominion. I watched Director Vyas strain his neck to catch a last glimpse of human habitation before turning to me with tears streaming down his chubby cheeks.

  ‘They lied to us. They said five in the morning. And pizza.’

  What a fortunate fellow. Dodda lived life to the hungry fullest. A veritable Duryodhana. He too could die, exulting: is there a man more fortunate than I?

  There was nowhere left to hide and except for the most tenuous sense of self, all fictions dropped away from me. I felt Tanaz’s hand in mine and marvelled at its tiny span. Such a tranquil peace.

  ‘I’m not ready to die,’ said Rathod, his expression savage with hate. He tapped his head. ‘You hear that? Are you still spying on me, whoever you are?’ Then he turned to me, his eyes plainly begging: can’t you do something, Director Vyas-ji, please?