Animal’s People

by Indra Sinha

  “You can touch if you want,” she says, but I don’t want to, I just want to look. So her fingers open the petals to let me see, a glistening rosy cavern is revealed. How delicate the skin is, of such softness, threaded with tiny veins, like you find in leaves or petals, really it is most like a flower and reminds me of the hibiscus at the base of whose petals is a tube filled with liquid, you pick a flower and suck, it’s joyous as honey. She shows me how the rose cave leads to a tunnel whose mouth at first was hidden, this is the way that leads to the womb, where life begins, where I began, where we all began. I try to imagine the womb and realise that it’s an empty space, which means there’s nothingness at the very source of creation. No wonder by some this grace is worshipped with incense and flowers and prayers. I said it was the most powerful thing in all the world, I was wrong, it’s more powerful than all the world for it contains the whole world plus heaven and hell beside, in its depths is the whole of the past plus all that will be. I’m thinking of le pouvoir et la gloire that Ma Franci’s always talking about, the power of this grace makes nuclear bombs look like firecrackers, the glory is that it makes its home between the thighs of this child whose thighs are bruised by the hips of drunken men, not one of whom, I’m willing to bet, has ever understood what he is defiling.

  “I have seen now, thanks.” With that I’ve looked for my kakadus and begun preparing to leave.

  Says Anjali, “You are a very weird person, Animal. Give me a little money,” but I say no and she says, “Animal, you are a hard-hearted bastard.”

  TAPE SIXTEEN

  Oh the homecoming from that day and night of bhang, the city is full of coloured winds, scents sing in my nostrils, my four feet press lightly on the earth. As I near our place Jara comes running, and there’s Ma. “Where have you been, we were worrying, the dog and me.” “Never fear,” I say cheerfully, “see, I’ve brought food.” I’d found money in my pocket and bought ishtoo and kulcha from a cafe. “Today we’ll have a feast.”

  What joy, I’m telling myself that it’s a good thing my zob didn’t get hard like it normally does, must mean I didn’t want it to. I’ve conquered, mastered that unruly thing, it cowered like a sulky dog all the while I was with the girl, no longer am I ruled by a fucking quéquette, this is how I’m celebrating. This foolish state of affairs lasts until night, when the last of the bhang has worn off. Listening to the scorpions, unable to sleep, I imagine the girl beside me. No longer does my monster wish to abstain. The curse of lust is back worse than ever. No peace the bastard lund now gives, constantly it begs for the fist, sends you blind they say in which case I’ve no right to be seeing the light of this world, oh it fills me with shame to remember, Eyes, don’t tell me you’ve never touched yourself, if you felt shame, imagine it a thousand times worse.

  From joy runs a straight road to despair. Cursing silently on my bed of grasses, why do I allow myself to be dominated by the thing between my legs? Is it my master? Have I sworn to obey it? Will it kill me if I tell it no? Hatred of the self, deep and harsh I feel, loathing for all the dreadful things I’ve done. Claim to love Nisha yet spy on her and go to bed with a prostitute. Elli’s my friend yet secretly I gloat that I have seen her grace? I dream of tumbling down endless stairs until I am at the bottom of a deep well with the opening far above me and out of reach. Days and nights are the same down there, but one night the moon shines in, a crow flies down to dip its beak in my guts.

  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 certain 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.”