Animal's People: A Novel

by Indra Sinha

  Next day, when I meet people I fancy they are looking at me strangely, as if they know my dirty secrets. I become convinced that Farouq has spilled the beans. Nisha seems offhand, as if she has no time for me. I hate myself and my wretched life. Plus, Farouq is even more of a pain. He’s on at me to say what happened in the house of putains. Nothing, I say, or if something, then definitely not what you think. So Farouq’s frustrated with me and even more of a lousy bugger than before. One amusing thing, he makes me swear, “Animal yaar, never mention to Zafar or god forbid Nisha where you were. It would look bad for you.”

  And you, you hypocritical bastard, and you.

  Next time in the clinic, Elli grinning, asks if I am looking forward to seeing Amrika.

  “This came today!” She holds up an envelope. Inside is a letter from the hospital in Amrika. She reads it out. They believe they can probably help.

  Hoo! hoo! I guess you can hear me all over Khaufpur.

  “Wait, don’t get too excited,” she says. “Probably is the word. We are still a long way off actual surgery, we don’t know exactly what will be involved, how many procedures, nor how long they will take, nor how long you might have to stay over there, plus we still have to find the money.” All smiles she’s. “It’s a good start.”

  Good start? Already my brain is racing with all the things I will do when I can go on twos. “How much money?”

  “Better you don’t know.”

  “I would like to see.” She hands me the letter, Inglis numbers are the same as Khaufpuri ones. There’s a lot of zeros. So then I am discouraged, because no one in Khaufpur has that kind of money, Elli doctress herself hasn’t.

  “Look, money can be found,” she says. “There are many ways. Soon I will go back to Amrika, and you’ll come with me. Stay hopeful.”

  I ask when will we go to Amrika, she says it depends on a lot of things like whether this cursed boycott ever ends. “Don’t worry about the difficulties, just think how much better your life will be.” She says that after the operation my back will be straight, I will be upright, but it’ll take time to become strong, I’ll need support to walk, a pair of crutches, or sticks. “It’s easy,” she says, “you can swing along at a great rate.” She knows this because in her town there was a hospital for people wounded in the Vietnam war, and many of them had crutches. Then she asks what I would like to see in Amrika and I say I don’t know because I have no idea what’s there. Well, she says, if we make a tour we could visit New York where there’s a lot to see, near where she lives there’s a museum with a lot of dinosaur bones, do I know about dinosaurs? Course I fucking know, what else for does Chunaram steal his tele signal? I have watched many programmes about them, they are huge animals that lived in the times before there were humans, the weirdest of all was the one whose head was stuck out on a long neck so far away from the rest of it that it had to have two brains, one of which was above its arse. Then Elli smiles and says I’ve a good brain, if I had been born in Amrika I could have gone to college. “Maybe even Harvard,” she says. “I think you could turn out to be an intellectual.” So I’ve asked what’s one of them, appears it’s someone who thinks a lot about things they don’t need to. We folk in the Nutcracker may regard ourselves as nothing, but we are as clever as anyone else. We’re as clever as the Amrikans, says Elli, but they have all the money so they have good lives and ours are little more than shit. If I had been born in Amrika, Elli says, I’d never have had to walk on all fours all these years. Yes, soon I shall walk like a human being, I will think clever thoughts, amaze people, and no longer will I do things that shame me.

  “Fuck off,” says the Chairman of the Poisonwallah Board from his jar in the corner. “Upright or not you’ll still be playing with that thing day and night, after all, what other pleasure do you have in life?”

  “Of what is the world made, music or promises?”

  This is the question I’ve put to the assembled company at Chunaram’s.

  “What kind of fucking question is that?” asks the owner, who well knows the world is made of one thing only, which he ripped off his finger to prove.

  “Listen, for Pandit Somraj it’s made of music, Elli doctress says it is made of promises. Can these worlds fit together?”

  “O ho! See where this is going.”

  “Zafar bhai, what do you say?”

  Zafar, who is not best pleased by my bringing up this subject, replies that likening music to promises is as absurd as comparing a vulture and a potato, potatoes don’t have feathers and vultures don’t grow under the earth. Says he, “You are making an equation of two things which have nothing in common.”

  “Zafar brother, what is an equation?”

  “A way of showing how two different things can be the same.”

  “So then I accept this vulture-potato challenge. It’s easy. A vulture’s egg is the same size as a potato.”

  Zafar laughs and says my answer is ingenious, but how do I know?

  This I can’t admit. Up until a few years ago there were plenty of vultures around Khaufpur, they used to fly down and settle on the garbage dumps where I also foraged, one day I found an egg which at first I thought was a potato, till I picked it up. Washed and boiled, it tasted good. Nowadays there are no vultures left and whether it’s because hungry fuckers like me ate all their eggs I don’t know.

  “Saalé,” says Farouq, still well pissed off with me, “don’t get ideas above your station, which is low in life.”

  “So say, Zafar brother,” it’s Chunaram. “People are puzzled. Elli doctress, Pandit Somraj. We all see these days they are quite friendly. So why continue this boycott? Shouldn’t we all benefit from her friendship?”

  “Pandit Somraj is just being kind to a neighbour, that’s all,” says Zafar who’s well aware that people suspect that Somraj has been quietly receiving treatment from Elli doctress.

  “Forgive me, Zafar bhai, even this idiot boy has noticed that whatever’s going on, it’s something more than kindness.”

  “You fucking turd’s apostle,” I yell. “Here I’m trying to have a philosophical discussion, all you can do is gossip!”

  They’re all in stitches, so I’ve left that place of wankers.

  “Zafar brother, tell me.” I’ve caught him a while later. “The first secret of music, many times I’ve heard Pandit-ji say this, is that the notes themselves are nothing, their only meaning is when they’re compared to the boss note of sa. ‘Don’t listen to the notes,’ Pandit-ji says, ‘listen to their fluctuations away from sa. This is what gives rise to rasa, or emotion. If you grasp this you have got the music.’”

  “Yes, so?”

  “So I got thinking about this fluctuation business. Stuff can’t fluctuate without moving. Further, nearer, it’s a question of measure. So the notes of music are measures. Plus, see, you can’t know what a thing is if you don’t know what it isn’t. What makes a thing itself is it always keeps its difference from other things. The note of dha always stays the same distance from sa, isn’t that a kind of promise?”

  Zafar groans, “Go away Animal, I wish Elli had never said you were an intellectual.”

  I pluck up courage to ask Somraj about my idea that the musical notes are promises. He listens gravely, then says there’s a thing I’ve forgotten. The nature of a promise is that it comes without guarantee. Then he says he will tell me the deepest secret of music. Says Somraj, “The notes of the scale are all really one note, which is sa. The singer’s job is to sing sa, nothing else only sa, but sa is bent and twisted by this world and what’s in it, by grief or love or longing, these things come in and introduce desires into sa, bending and deforming it, sending it higher or lower, and the result is what we call music. The singer’s job is to express the emotion yet remain true to sa which itself is eternal and changeless. And since in our music there is no difference between the singer and the song, the promise is made by the singer not the notes. Ragas are journeys through the human condition, scales that express cert
ain feelings, and the singer’s promise is to deliver that emotion. But it can happen that the singer departs from the scale, making the audience cringe, then the promise is broken.” Then he says that it’s because of all music being one thing that there’s music in all things.

  “Zafar bhai, listen to one more idea.”

  “What is it now? I am really busy.”

  “You will like this one, it solves everything.”

  So I’ve explained that if Somraj is right, then it’s obvious how a world made of such music is also a world of promises made by auto-rickshaws and blacksmiths, bees, rain and railway engines, for the squeaky bicycle of Gangu who pedals round the Nutcracker selling milk would not be heard if he did not keep his promise to be a milkman, there’d be no rattle of truck exhausts if the drivers and their assistants who perch in the cabins with their feet out the windows weren’t all keeping their promises and doing their jobs, maybe there’s even some kind of music to be had from potatoes and vultures, if so Somraj is sure to have thought of it, and all these sounds are fluctuating around some great sa that hums constantly in Somraj’s head, by which he tunes the universe.

  “Zafar, why are you crying?”

  “Something in my eye,” says Zafar, down whose cheeks tears are running. “Animal, do me a favour, don’t spout these theories to Nisha, I don’t think she would understand. She’s not so happy about her dad being friendly with Elli.”

  But it’s thinking about rain that solves my mystery, for there would be no music of falling drops if the clouds each year did not keep their promise to burst overhead, and I remember Elli saying that the tides are the moon and sea keeping their own promises, and that’s that. A promise involves a thing that can’t be measured, which is trust and I can’t speak for rain and the sea and moon, but I can ask why people keep their promises, and maybe the answer in the end is love.

  One midnight Elli’s woken by her doorbell, someone’s out there with their finger jammed on the button. She grabs a shawl around her, runs downstairs. Of all the people she doesn’t expect to see, it’s Nisha in her nightclothes, looking frightened. “Please come. My father, he’s very ill.”

  “I thought you were boycotting me.”

  Says Nisha, who’s terrified, “There’s no one else. He often has nightmares, he’ll shout, he gets breathless, but never have I seen him this bad.”

  “Go back to him,” says the doctress. “I’ll fetch my bag.”

  A minute later, she is beside the bed where Somraj is lying. He’s propped on a pillow, his body bare from the waist up, covered in sweat, his breathing’s shallow, kind of whistling, a pinkish froth’s crept out the corners of his mouth. She listens to his chest, takes his pulse, plus his temperature.

  “I am so sorry,” says Nisha, who by now is in tears. “I’ve no right. I didn’t call you even when Zafar was ill. So many people could have been helped by you, we have stopped them. This is selfish, I feel totally ashamed.”

  Somraj opens his eyes, wants to speak, but the doctress puts a finger on his lips. “Be quiet,” she tells him. To Nisha she says, “You are not to worry. Let’s just see to your father.” Somraj closes his eyes but Nisha keeps hers fixed on Elli, who’s preparing a syringe. As the needle slides from his arm, Somraj gives a deep sigh.

  “Now he is relaxed,” says his daughter, but Elli knows he’d begun to relax even before she gave the injection.

  “I thought he was going to die, Elli,” which is the first time Nisha’s called Elli by her name. Somraj is burning up, sweat’s brimming his forehead. Nisha fetches a cloth, wipes his face. He opens his eyes again and says to Elli, “You are a good person. I’ve tried to make my daughter a fine person.”

  “She is a fine person,” says Elli, who has no reason at all to believe it.

  “Shhh father,” says Nisha, fully embarrassed. She’s bent over and kissed his forehead.

  After a while he sleeps, but then begins to cry out in a voice filled with fear. “He has such nightmares,” says Nisha. “Always the same thing. He will not talk about them, but I think they must be very horrible.”

  “How do you know they are always the same?” Elli asks.

  “Because he shouts out loud. And it’s the same things each time.”

  “What sort of things?”

  “Wait,” says Nisha, “you can hear for yourself.”

  The two women sat by his bed and watched. Nisha brought some tea. It was not the way Elli usually took it, this tea was milky, a frothy affair in which she could taste ginger and cardamom.

  “God knows what you must think of me,” Nisha said.

  “I think you are a kind girl, who loves her father and cares about people in this city. Animal has told me a lot about the good work you do. For example how you pulled him out of the street. So don’t worry.”

  “What will I say to Zafar, and others? We’ve stopped people going to you.”

  “You will say that this boycott must end.”

  Nisha just nods. After some time, she asks shyly, “Elli, will you tell me something about your life? About Amrika?”

  “What can I tell you? What would you like to know?”

  “What it’s like to grow up there? To be young there. Here I think we don’t have so much freedom.”

  “I am not sure freedom is the right word.”

  “I mean,” said the girl, “freedom to fall in love with whoever you choose. Not to worry about what people think, what they will say if he is the wrong caste, or the wrong religion.”

  Of course, Elli thought, Zafar’s Muslim and she is Hindu. But if anyone disapproved of their romance it was certainly not Somraj. Really he was a most amazing man. She said, “My first great love was when I was in high school. I’d have been about fifteen. He was an Italian boy named Paulo, but we all called him Paul.”

  “Tell me about Paulo.”

  “Well,” she said, “I got to know him because both he and I would get to school quite early. I’d help him put down the chairs in the lunchroom before school started. At first it was just for something to do.”

  “But you discovered you liked him? I can’t imagine what he was like.”

  “He was a nice boy, not bad looking. We were friends for pretty much the whole year. The strange thing was he wasn’t in any of my classes, so I only saw him before school.”

  “So how did he become your great love?”

  “We had a school dance, just before Valentine’s Day, and he asked me to dance with him. It was the last dance of the evening, he probably took the entire night to get the courage up to ask me.” The memory made her want to giggle, but Nisha’s face was serious. “It was a slow dance. You have to put your arms round each other. I don’t think he dared at first. But slowly slowly we got closer, closer, until at the end of the dance, wow, we were touching chest to chest. I remember being really attracted to him and I think he was to me, because his heart was pounding like a big drum.”

  “Did he try to kiss you?”

  Elli laughed. “No, he never did, but you know what? On Valentine’s Day I made a card for him, saying inside ‘I like you.’ I left it in his locker, and of course I didn’t say who it was from. Later that day I found a note tucked inside one of my books that said, ‘I like you too.’ So that was that. Official.”

  “But if you made a card, why didn’t you sign it?”

  So Elli found herself explaining that Valentine’s Day was a day wholly devoted to romance, when people if they were lucky received cards telling them that they were loved, or, if the sender was playing it cool, “liked,” but the cards had to be sent anonymously.

  “But then how does the person know who loves them?”

  “They don’t know. They guess. It’s kind of delicious trying to work it out.”

  “And if they guess wrong?”

  “Well, not many girls would be lucky enough to have lots of admirers. I certainly wasn’t. So you have an idea who sent it. But if you started dropping hints to the wrong person, then I guess you could
end up a little embarrassed.”

  “It seems an odd system to me,” said Nisha. “Here we have something a bit similar, called raakhee, when a girl ties a token around a boy’s wrist. It’s made of coloured thread and glittery stuff, sort of like a flower.”

  “Did you tie one round Zafar’s wrist?”

  “Oh no!” she said, with a small frown. “If you like someone in that way, you would never tie a raakhee on him, because it’s like saying ‘You’re my brother.’ A sister ties raakhees on the wrists of her brothers to remind them of their duty to protect her and the whole family from harm.”

  “Isn’t that also what a husband would also promise?”

  “Of course,” said Nisha. “But if a woman has no one to look after her then she can tie a raakhee on a man’s wrist, and it makes him her brother.”

  “Who do you tie raakhees on?”

  “Nobody,” said Nisha. “First of all I can look after myself. Second, there isn’t anyone. I tried to tie one on Animal’s wrist once but he ran away.”

  Oh really, thought Elli, amused, I wonder why. With her long hair loose and falling down her back, Nisha looked very charming. Elli relating this whole episode to me later, said she could see why my heart was torn.

  Not very many hours later when Elli opens her doors, the lane is full of people. Coughing, lame, ill people in a queue stretching almost as far as the eye can see. At their front stands Zafar. When he sees her, he comes forward, shyly says, “We have done you an injustice. I am sorry. I apologise. These people,” with a sweep of the hand he indicates the crowd, “they would like your help.”

  Now comes a time of peace, it’s the golden age of my story. Everyone is happy. All our quarrels are resolved. People are coming day and night to Elli’s clinic, so busy is she these days we hardly see her, except Pandit Somraj will go over some evenings and then we hear piano music. Used to be me who sat with her, nowadays I find myself at a loose end. Sometimes I will sit with Nisha and Zafar, until they go upstairs. Still I am crumbling Zafar’s medicine into his food, sometimes into his tea, but since the dream of the crow I’ve been giving smaller doses. Zafar still complains of stomach pains but not so much as before and these days I’ve little heart to go up the trees. Already my life has changed. To tell the truth, I am not so happy about it, plus I am not the only one who’s unhappy.