The Storyteller

by Adib Khan

  ‘Will you tell me?’

  She stomped off when I did not reply.

  I uncovered the hole and lay down beside Meena.

  You look tired, my warrior.

  Outside the horses snorted. A strong wind buffeted the tent. Nights in the desert were cold. In front of me were silver bowls laden with fruits—grapes and ripe figs, bananas and tangerines. Unseen hands had brought them from distant lands. But I wasn’t hungry.

  Shall I take away the pain, my lord?

  Please.

  Her hands consoled me. She removed the armour and undressed me. The warm oil of roses eased the pain. Her voice was a herbal balm, singing a strange tale about a last battle with an invincible enemy.

  Are the peacocks dancing under the moon?

  Not tonight, my general. They, too, are tired.

  Why are the owls quiet?

  Their hour of hooting is over.

  Strong fingers marched over my neck and shoulders. Down to the top of the buttocks. Up and down, firm, smooth strokes. A renegade thumb ran along my spine. Sensations awakened. The desert was a strange place, full of hidden life. She moved lower down, kneading and pressing. A finger strayed into a ravine. A curious wanderer who needed no encouragement.

  Turn over, my prince.

  The air of heaven itself. Her lips were like freshly crushed melon. The tongue ignited spot fires as it trailed over me. Sensations of colour and distant sounds. A worm continued the search for a refuge. Warily it circled my navel and then dipped into the shallow hole. The emptiness of a barren womb. Her fingers travelled impatiently and entangled themselves in the curly tendrils.

  A restless awakening. Motions of creation. Had I copulated with the moon? A chaste, luminous beauty. Lifeless. I was so cold, lying on the lunar surface. I was unable to imagine her passion. The mind gave way. I shed the tears of a child who could not believe in his dreams.

  The desert tolerated my solitary presence. Beyond, just over the hills, the enemy waited. No sign of what had been. The wind remained as my only companion. It understood the turmoil of loneliness. Life drifted back within the grasp of senses.

  She lay still. My queen, I fear I have failed…I had to settle for a hollow peace. There was a deeper darkness outside.

  I covered the hole and looked for food. Chaman had left roti, dhal, some salt and a green chilli near the dying chula. Outside there were shapes and shadows. Broken people hobbled along on the crutches of memory.

  ‘That was my house.’ An old woman pointed a stick. ‘There!’ She sat on the ground and refused to budge.

  ‘Mine,’ she said fiercely, when I offered her shelter in the godown. ‘Do you know the difference between the home I had then and what I have now?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The roof is much higher,’ she cackled, looking up. ‘There are no walls.’

  People were sprawled on the ground. I spotted Chaman talking to a group of women. A clay pot bubbled over a small open fire.

  ‘Rice and dhal,’ she said when she saw me. ‘I had a small amount stored away.’

  ‘The women could sleep in the godown,’ I suggested. ‘Barey Bhai won’t be back.’

  ‘They are afraid of a gora ghost. They believe your stories. The men feel reckless enough not to care. But the women are afraid for their children.’

  I did not care for the note of accusation in her voice. ‘Stories should always be believed,’ I said stiffly. ‘Like people believe in God, and what might bring them happiness, and whatever else that can be imagined.’

  ‘But the things you say are not real!’

  ‘Neither is my life. Or yours. What you feel and imagine, are they real? Can anyone see or touch them?’

  It was Chaman’s turn to bristle. ‘They are real to me because I know they happen!’

  ‘My stories also happen. There are hidden eyes that can see them. We are not blind inside.’

  ‘There are times when you say things that I do not understand. I cannot tell if you are serious or deliberately confusing me.’

  My silence maintained the unbridgeable distance between us.

  Chaman stirred the pot with a sturdy stick. ‘Nearly done!’ she announced cheerfully to a woman cradling a sleeping baby that had its mouth clamped around her left nipple.

  Men wandered around us. Some hopefuls piled bricks and stones into mounds of a primitive arsenal. Others sharpened bamboo sticks in case we were attacked again. The drunks wailed out-of-tune love songs, attempted to chase women and boasted about their virility.

  The food was dumped on two limp banana leaves, pieces of cardboard and rusty tin plates. There was a couple of mouthfuls for each woman. Enough to ensure survival.

  ‘The men?’ I asked. ‘They must be hungry.’

  ‘They have feasted. Kishore’s brother heard what happened and sent some food from his stall. The men decided that they needed to be properly fed to keep up their strength. The women were not asked to join them.’

  An empty piece of banana leaf was thrust under Chaman’s chin.

  ‘Usha, there is no more,’ Chaman said kindly.

  The woman bit an end of the leaf and munched it slowly.

  ‘We won’t be together much longer.’

  ‘You won’t tell them that. Let people build their lives in dreams. That’s what you say,’ Chaman reminded me.

  ‘I cannot stay here tonight. They will come again to find me.’

  ‘Sometimes I sleep in the space between two graves.’ She looked up at the sky. ‘It is a quiet night.’

  ‘You are not afraid?’

  ‘There are no men there.’

  We stopped frequently on the way to the cemetery. Chaman was no longer strong enough for long, uninterrupted walks. I limped and clutched my chest, pretending to be short of breath. She believed me when I complained that my legs hurt and I was tired. We stopped on the footpath and sat among the shadows at a distance from the streetlights. Later, when we rested under a tree, Chaman fell asleep. When I woke her up, she became irritable and scolded me for allowing her to doze off.

  ‘There!’ She pointed to a wall as we approached the graveyard. ‘I know a quick way to get inside.’

  Hidden by the overgrowth of bushes, a small section of the wall had collapsed. She parted the branches, stepped over the rubble and called me. I didn’t find it easy to get across.

  Rows of graves confronted us. A dormitory of the dead. Slabs of different-sized stones. Tufts of weed and wild grass grew from isolated pockets of earth. I was eager for elusive shadows, wispy shapes, teasing glimpses…sounds to seduce and lead me into the depth of the night to behold the wonderful and the terrifying. I heard crickets, the distant drone of traffic. Above me, the barren coldness of silent stars.

  She sensed my disappointment. ‘There is no anger here. It’s so calm.’

  I kicked the ground. ‘It isn’t what I expected.’

  ‘This is the safest place in the city. Police, murderers, rapists—they don’t come here at night. Occasionally drunks stray this way, but they are harmless. As long as it doesn’t rain…’

  Her words did not dispel my disappointment. I walked among the graves, running my hands over the weathered surfaces of stone and marble. Death shouldn’t be this inconspicuous, I thought. It was my inability to lose a sense of my own physical presence, in favour of an awareness that the night was not empty, that bothered me. Feeling the warmth of the night on my body, the roughness of the burnt grass under my feet and the perception of a mocking emptiness around me were disconcerting affirmations of loneliness. I couldn’t reach into the unseen and seek other worlds with any conviction.

  ‘Do you think anything happens after we finish here?’

  ‘I’ll find out before you do.’ Her voice came from behind a tombstone. ‘But I won’t be able to tell you anything.’

  Heaven. Hell. Acceptance…bliss…pleasure. Disbelief…torment…pain. Orchards. Rivers. Fire and cauldrons. Saint Vamana. Sinner dwarf. A choice within God’s prison. Either wa
y, a loss. But death itself? Was it a process? An experience? A journey or a state? It had never appeared to me as a shape or in any shade of colour. I didn’t contemplate death with any fear. I associated it with the natural quietness of the universe. It was a law that could not be disobeyed. For me, it denoted the calmness of dissolving noiselessly in the night. The breadth of life suddenly narrowing itself to a point. A final bleep and then…What if there were a choice? An alternative to the two extremes? Let Paradise and Inferno be for those who wished to continue. For myself, there was only one heroic ending. A monumental finality. An act of revenge against the Creator. I shall deny you the opportunity of moulding me again. I shall disappear.

  ‘Vamana?’

  ‘I’m here. Did you remember your medicine?’

  ‘I threw them away.’

  The silence conveyed my disapproval.

  ‘There is no medicine that can help me.’

  For myself, I could venture into the possible variations of death without terror, but the prospect of Chaman dying was intolerable. My mind embraced her in the final stages of life. A skeleton wrapped in skin, whimpering and begging me to cut the strand on which she dangled.

  But then I shall be alone.

  Can you bear to see me like this?

  I can share your pain. Suffer with you. But by myself…

  You have others. I know more than you think.

  Toys and empty passions. With you I begin to understand love. Mother, sister, friend. Even a lover. Everything a person can be.

  She sat on the ground, leaning back on a tombstone, her head tilted upwards. ‘Will you make sure that I am cremated at Nigambodh Ghat? Will you light incense? Lots of them. Cover me with marigold. If I could only touch my own ashes, I would feel clean.’

  I lay on the ground, resting my head on her lap. She ran her bony fingers through my hair and stroked my face as if I were a child who needed to be consoled. The weight of the night lifted slowly. She was right. There was a calmness that suspended the gloominess of an impending reality.

  And then she broke my shell of peace with a casual request. ‘Will you gather my ashes and scatter them in the river?’

  I preferred to suck my thumb and tuck in my legs until the knees touched my chest.

  The question returned. I bolted myself inside the silence and dropped the shutters. Her words were like a gang of masked intruders trying to break into my house. They were strangers threatening disruption. I retreated further inside and met dressed skeletons dancing around a fire—a danse macabre. Each one was draped in a sari, identical to the one Chaman used to wear in the evening.

  She began to hum, penetrating the walls, filtering through my defence. Against my will I listened. A melancholy sound to cloud the mind with dreams of what she had never known. Snatches of words dipped in a saffron hue. Vague and enchanting. A song that had to be felt and not necessarily understood. For where could anyone find perfect love?

  ‘Chaman?’

  She did not stop singing.

  ‘I have meant to ask you…why did you become a whore?’

  ‘Did you choose to become a dwarf?’

  ‘I could never accept the nights when the men came. I felt angry, hurt, betrayed.’

  She told me about the darkness in her life. Shards of memory about an ailing mother in a remote village in the north. A little girl, afraid and weeping as the flames from the burning pyre danced in the air. A childhood brutalised by a drunken father. A thin, beady-eyed man with greasy hair and rotten teeth. Beatings. Incest. Starvation. One day he came home with a stranger. The men argued and then settled on a sum of money. Her father turned his back as the other man dragged her out of the hut to a nearby field. He sampled the merchandise and then took her to the city.

  ‘There was nothing inside me by the time I was fifteen. A feeble heart with few feelings. Imagine a dark, hollow place visited by strangers in exchange for money. How many years and how many men? It may be easier to count all the stars. Once they used to say I was pretty.’ She sounded as though she wished to recoup those years. ‘Several offers of marriage. But a man will say anything when he is between a woman’s legs.’

  ‘You are still pretty,’ I lied. But it struck me that I deliberately avoided thinking about Chaman’s physical appearance. That would have been too depressing, since her deterioration was alarmingly evident. Her eyes were dull and her skin was splotchy and wrinkled. Bald patches had appeared on her head. She had lost two of her front teeth and the rest were badly stained. Sometimes I couldn’t help staring at her. I was unable to decide whether it was merely sorrow or the wisdom of a hostile world reflected in her face. I entertained the idea that she had travelled beyond the limits of human experience and returned with secrets she was unwilling to disclose. It was far less complicated to think of her as she might have been in her younger days. That way it didn’t raise so many tormented questions.

  My awkwardness grew in the lengthy pause. She continued singing, leaving me to squirm in the privacy of my anguish. I had no intention of upsetting or annoying Chaman. And yet…yet I had to know.

  I sat up. It made me feel less vulnerable. Less intimate with her. The natural taboos that exist between men and women were replaced by a sense of mutual trust between friends. I had to ask her.

  ‘Chaman?’ I blurted. ‘How does it feel?’

  The singing stopped. ‘How does what feel?’

  I looked at the rows of graves in front of me. Ruined manifestations of lust. Or was it love? The ultimate outcome was the same. The ending was without the slightest variation. They lay under the earth like scattered trinkets while the world continued to conduct its business above them. Brown, black, white, yellow. Different in ways and manners. Poisoned with prejudices. Obsessed with identity. What did it matter? The bones were of the same colour, the skulls uniformly hideous. So why was it important to know and learn? Strive for success? Lie, cheat and hate when one was only destined to face darkness without remembrance?

  The vagueness of my question had perplexed her. ‘How does what feel?’

  ‘I mean, what does it feel like…I’ve never had sex.’ It was a humiliating disclosure.

  A short, bitter laugh, not directed at me but at herself. She embarrassed me by wrapping her arms around my shoulders.

  ‘Not even with a whore?’

  ‘Never,’ I whispered.

  ‘Have you tried?’

  I had revealed too much to erect credible barriers of lies. ‘I haven’t given up. But no woman or…’ I wouldn’t hold back, I decided, ‘or male will have me.’

  ‘A man?’ Chaman gasped. ‘You…’ Her hand flew to her mouth and stifled a giggle. ‘You are one of those…’

  ‘One of what?’ I demanded testily.

  ‘What is called an AC/DC.’

  I walked around a grave. ‘My feelings…my needs. They are not ugly. I am capable of loving. Is it wrong for me to desire a companion? Have I no right to imagine myself as a father, a husband or a lover?’

  Her mood changed. She sounded uncharitable. ‘I have heard what you do at night in your corner of the godown.’

  ‘I don’t want to. But then at night loneliness takes a hideous shape and mocks me. I am possessed by a meanness that rises from somewhere inside me. I feel deprived when I see couples enjoying themselves. It doesn’t seem right that I should be by myself. I become weary of misfortunes. What else can I do but sidestep them and create more tolerable worlds to live in?’

  ‘The people in the bustee cannot be blamed for what you are,’ she said slowly. ‘No one else should be burdened with your misfortunes. Look at me. Should I be bitter and nasty for what happened to me? For what I am? I don’t hate my father. I just don’t think of him. Occasionally, he crosses my life in a nightmare, as do other men.’

  ‘At least there are faces to punish in your mind. Men to rage against. People on whom you can unload the blame,’ I argued. I found Chaman’s passivity unacceptable. ‘What do I have? I stumble through my days, punching
shadows, abusing unknown parents and cursing God. And he doesn’t respond.’

  ‘Do you believe in God?’

  ‘I believe in his mistakes.’

  ‘Vamana!’ She was shocked and upset.

  ‘How can you explain such an accident then?’ I brought my face close to hers and tapped my chest.

  Chaman did not flinch. ‘There are those who can rejoice about what they are. Others, like us, can be angry and twisted, but we have to accept what life offers without being cruel to ourselves.’

  ‘Never!’ I protested. ‘I can never accept myself for what I am. I have to recreate Vamana every day. Smash and tear myself apart and then build again. I have to shape the world into forms that give me meaning and control. Give life to people who suffer equally or more than I do.’

  ‘Is that why you tell such strange stories and talk to yourself?’

  ‘So you understand,’ I murmured. The anger left me suddenly.

  In a way, we discovered our differences that night. It made me even more dissatisfied and alienated. I had harboured the assumption that Chaman shared my attitudes and there was a commonality in our offensive against life.

  There was nothing more to say. I realised she hadn’t answered my question. We waited for the night to journey across the city like a slowly passing storm. The conversation lapsed into silence. I didn’t tell Chaman about Meena. She wouldn’t have approved. The silence became a refuge, a forest with many diverging tracks. We walked on separate paths without faltering or looking over our shoulders with regret.

  The concerns of the approaching day stalked me. The police would be on the hunt, looking for me in bazaars, questioning people and writing notes. I wondered how I would be described.

  Long hair…no, no…short and curly. It’s hard to tell. He wears a wig. The face? Very ugly. A mole on his left cheek…or is it the right? A broad forehead. Ears like a bat’s outspread wings. We think he changes his appearance…He is not a djinn. But he carries a knife…Yes, he is dangerous. Of course there is such a person! It is not our job to mislead the public by creating fictitious characters. What would be the benefit to us?