The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Short Stories

by Stephen Alter

  ‘If you are thinking of fucking me,’ she said very suddenly, ‘I should warn you that I never have an orgasm. You won’t have to worry about pleasing me.’

  Yes, he thought, it is so, just as he had suspected. It was a night in which he could do no wrong. He waved his visa card at the surly maitre d’ and paid the bill. After that Padma let him take her elbow and guide her to the expensive hotel above the restaurant.

  An oriental man at the desk asked him, ‘Cash or credit card, sir?’ He paid for a double occupancy room with cash and signed himself in as Dr Mohan Vakil & wife, 18 Ridgewood Drive, Columbus, Ohio.

  He had laid claim to America.

  In a dark seventh-floor room off a back corridor, the goddess bared her flesh to a dazed, daunted mortal. She was small. She was perfect. She had saucy breasts, fluted thighs and tiny, taut big toes.

  ‘Hey, you can suck but don’t bite, okay?’ Padma may have been slow to come, but he was not. He fell on her with a devotee’s frenzy.

  ‘Does it bother you?’ she asked later, smoking the second Sobrani. She was on her side. Her tummy had a hint of convex opulence. ‘About my not getting off?’

  He couldn’t answer. It was a small price to pay, and anyway he wasn’t paying it. Nothing could diminish the thrill he felt in taking a chance. It wasn’t the hotel and this bed; it was having stepped inside the New Taj Mahal and asking her out.

  He should probably call home, in case Camille hadn’t stopped off for a drink. He should probably get dressed, offer her something generous—as discreetly as possible, for this one had class, real class—then drive himself home. The Indian food, an Indian woman in bed, made him nostalgic. He wished he were in his kitchen, and that his parents were visiting him and that his mother was making him a mug of hot Horlicks and that his son was not so far removed from him in a boarding school.

  He wished he had married an Indian woman. One that his father had selected. He wished he had any life but the one he had chosen.

  As Dr Patel sat on the edge of the double bed and slid his feet through the legs of his trousers, someone rapped softly on the hotel door, then without waiting for an answer unlocked it with a passkey.

  Padma pulled the sheet up to her chin, but did not seem to have been startled.

  ‘She’s underage, of course,’ the maitre d’ said. ‘She is my sister’s youngest daughter. I accuse you of rape, doctor sahib. You are of course ruined in this country. You have everything and think you must have more. You are highly immoral.’

  He sat on the one chair that wasn’t littered with urgently cast-off clothes, and lit a cigarette. It was rapidly becoming stuffy in the room, and Manny’s eyes were running. The man’s eyes were malevolent, but the rest of his face remained practised and relaxed. An uncle should have been angrier, Dr Patel thought automatically. He himself should have seen it coming. He had mistaken her independence as a bold sign of honest assimilation. But it was his son who was the traveller over shifting sands, not her.

  There was no point in hurrying. Meticulously he put on his trousers, double-checked the zipper, buttoned his shirt, knotted his tie and slipped on his Gucci shoes. The lady is Bengali, no? Yes, they knew one another, perhaps even as uncle and niece. Or pimp and hooker. The air here was polluted with criminality. He wondered if his slacks had been made by immigrant women in Mr Horowitz’s father’s sweat-shop.

  ‘She’s got to be at least twenty-three, twenty-four,’ Dr Patel said. He stared at her, deliberately insolent. Through the sheets he could make out the upward thrust of her taut big toes. He had kissed those toes only half-an-hour before. He must have been mad.

  ‘I’m telling you she is a minor. I’m intending to make a citizen’s arrest. I have her passport in my pocket.’

  It took an hour of bickering and threats to settle. He made out a check for 700 dollars. He would write a letter on hospital stationery. The uncle made assurances that there were no hidden tapes. Padma went into the bathroom to wash up and dress.

  ‘Why?’ Manny shouted, but he knew Padma couldn’t hear him over the noise of the gushing faucet.

  After the team left him, Manny Patel took off his clothes and went into the bathroom so recently used by the best-looking woman he had ever talked to (or slept with, he could now add). Her perfume, he thought of it as essence of lotus, made him choke.

  He pulled himself up, using the edge of the bathtub as a step ladder, until his feet were on the wide edges of the old- fashioned sink. Then, squatting like a villager, squatting the way he had done in his father’s home, he defecated into the sink, and with handfuls of his own shit—it felt hot, light, porous, an artist’s medium—he wrote whore on the mirror and floor.

  He spent the night in the hotel room. Just before dawn he took a cab to the parking lot of the Sari Palace. Miraculously, no vandals had touched his Porsche. Feeling lucky, spared somehow in spite of his brush with the deities, he drove home.

  Camille had left the porch light on and it glowed pale in the brightening light of the morning. In a few hours Mr Horowitz would start to respond to the increased dosage of Haldol and be let out of the seclusion chamber. At the end of the term, Shawn Patel would come home from Andover and spend all day in the house with earphones tuned to a happier world. And in August, he would take his wife on a cruise through the Caribbean and make up for this night with a second honeymoon.

  Gangadhar Gadgil

  The Dog that Ran in Circles

  I was walking lazily towards the bus-stop. I had to go somewhere, oh—anywhere. I was feeling so restless and so depressed, I knew I had to write a story. So I was walking to enjoy the restful pause at the end of each step. ‘I want to write a story . . . a story . . . a s-t-o-r-y . . .’ I was saying to myself mechanically, over and over again. ‘A story . . . a s-t-o-r-y.’

  The word became bloated and shapeless. It stared at me and drove my consciousness into a stupid daze. Deeper down, in the half asleep wakefulness something was astir. Meandering circles were being traced with a weak insistence. They were dully luminous. Caught in the tangled web of the circles would appear a shape like a mark left by a faded flower in a book. Mute shapes that paused on the brink of life and meaning! Suddenly they would acquire bold outlines. But before they could mean anything to me, they would become spreading blots of ink, shapeless and dead. I stared at them, hoping to see through them. But they gave away nothing . . .

  I was utterly engrossed in this tantalizing search—lost in a dark brown cloud of concentration tinged by fleeting moods and fancies. I wanted to see nothing, hear nothing. I reached the bus-stop and stood there staring blankly at the street.

  I was seeing a shape, although I did not in the least want to see it. It was out there in the street. A brownish shape—a dog, faded and limp, lying in the street. I couldn’t take my eyes off its starved and heaving belly. It heaved in quick spasms, as if it wanted to get the whole thing over and done with. The dog lay still in the midst of the endless scribble of traffic and movement on the street. Possibly it had bumped against a passing car and had fainted.

  A crowd had gathered on the sidewalk. It was swelling and imperceptibly edging forward over the curb into the street. Vagrant boys, hoodlums gambling at the street corner, old women stooping and shrivelled, hawkers and labourers! The white-collared gentry stood at the bus-stop, stiff and indifferent, giving the dog now and then an anaesthetized look. They wouldn’t stoop to anything as plebian as a mouthful of pity or a squirt of casual curiosity.

  The crowd stood there, hesitant and slightly ashamed of its concern over a street-dog. Yet, they all felt relieved as each car swerved to avoid running over the dog. Unwittingly, they started signalling to the cars that came along.

  One of the old women started muttering. She looked around to gauge the attitude of the crowd and then raised her voice.

  ‘You there! You brat! Go and get a pot of water. Pour it on the dog’s head, will you?’ she said, and shoved a boy in the direction of a restaurant.

  ‘Well au
ntie! That’s a good idea. But why don’t you do it yourself?’ said a man who stood behind her.

  Everybody laughed, and the interest in the dog became more lively. A couple of boys ran forward. A thin straggling line of people followed them hesitantly. Soon the whole crowd was standing on the street around the dog.

  I couldn’t quite see what was happening. The boy whom the old woman had shoved ran to the restaurant and came back with a pot of water. The whole crowd leaned forward. Those at the back stood on their toes. The people watching through their windows leaned out and craned their necks. ‘Hey!’ everybody cheered happily. The crowd made way and the dog emerged, still dazed, but now on its feet. It staggered towards the curb. The crowd followed it.

  It was a starving, shrivelled dog. It had a pitifully meek expression—the kind of dog that gets in everybody’s way and is always kicked. But for its eyes, I wouldn’t have looked at it twice.

  The eyes were moist in a queer way. It wasn’t the kind of moistness that calls forth pity, but different. The eyes asked for nothing. In fact, nothing had any meaning for them any more. They expressed no hunger, no fear. They had nothing to do any longer with the world of dogs. If they expressed anything at all, it was compassion—the kind one sees in the eyes of a saint. But this of course was my crazy fancy.

  The queer moist look in the eyes made me uneasy. I had a feeling that apart from the people, the vehicles and the shops with their gaudy makeup, there was something else present there, something more substantial and compelling. It was right there in front of me, and those eyes were seeing it.

  Mechanically, the dog sniffed at the ground and at people’s feet. It wagged its tail and licked its nose. It settled down near the curb, resting its head on its paws.

  The crowd still stood around and looked at it with pity. People walking along the sidewalk stopped and asked eagerly what the matter was? Most of the time they didn’t get any reply, and if they got one it said nothing. Many in the crowd had come there too late to know what had happened, and even those who had seen everything had nothing to tell. Nothing really had happened.

  But there was one in the crowd who had seen everything and, whenever asked, he would look straight ahead with a very solemn face and narrate everything in tedious detail. His listeners would look puzzled, for what he said didn’t lead to anything at all. They would conclude that it was all a silly fuss about nothing. Some of them walked away. But others stood there because of the crowd, and looked at the dog with an affectation of sickening pity.

  I was losing interest in the whole affair. It seemed to be one of those incidents that holds a promise and then hangs in the air inconclusively, like the loose end of a thread. I tried to think of the story I wanted to write.

  But, by now, everything was tangled and adrift. I had lost track of everything that had so tantalizingly remained beyond my reach. All I could think of was that silly incident. It had left a scratch across my consciousness—a scratch that hurt but didn’t bleed.

  ‘I want to write a story . . . a story . . . a s-t-o-r-y . . .’ I said to myself, and the words soothingly ran over and around the scratch, like a massaging fingertip. Slowly, I got back into that state of daze. Wandering circles began to be traced again— circles potent with the insubstantial presence of a shape, a form. It was there all the time, not caring to be seen.

  Wandering circles—dully luminous!

  All of a sudden the dog stood up and started running in circles, tottering and slipping all the time. At first it moved in little circles, in a corner of the street. But, gradually, the circles grew bigger and crazier.

  There was a stir in the crowd. Everybody perked up and looked intently at the dog. ‘Ch-ch!’ ‘Sit down in a corner, you crazy dog . . .!’

  The old auntie darted forward and tried to catch hold of the dog. That little push threw the dog off its balance and it yelped.

  ‘There, auntie! Don’t you get mixed up with that dog. It seems to be loony. It might bite you.’

  ‘Oh woman! Oh!’ cried the auntie, and jumped back to the sidewalk with unsuspected agility. She barely missed having a fall and everybody laughed. The crowd decided to stay away from the dog and shuffled back a couple of steps.

  The dog ran in crazy circles seeing nothing with its queer moist eyes. It was now right in the centre of the street. Horns were honking, brakes were screeching and cars were turning and swerving madly to avoid running over the dog.

  Sometimes the dog ran in big circles, as wide as the street. Then suddenly, it would trace a ridiculously small circle at the edge of the big one, and achieve a precarious and impossible balance between the two. Sometimes its path had a beautiful oblong shape that contrasted oddly with its ridiculous figure. At times the path wobbled like a reflection in the disturbed water of a pool.

  ‘Stop it! Stop it!’ ‘Come here you crazy dog. You will get killed.’ ‘I wish it would get run over so everything was finished.’ The people in the crowd gesticulated and talked wildly.

  But the dog saw nothing, heard nothing. It wasn’t bothered about getting killed. It was possessed, held in thrall and driven by some mysterious impulse that sought this odd fulfilment.

  People at the wheels of cars expected the dog to behave normally and get out of the way, when they honked their horns. But the dog wouldn’t budge and the cars veered at crazy angles, barely missing the dog. It almost seemed to have a charmed life.

  The crowd watched tensely in terror. They knew the dog would be run over sooner or later and, in a way, they were resigned to it. Yet they were signalling wildly to the cars, and bursting into happy hysterical laughter whenever the dog had a particularly narrow escape. They were somehow deeply involved in that absurd drama of the street.

  ‘Hey there! Somebody buy a biscuit and offer it to the dog. Tie him up with a piece of string!’ the old auntie cried, unable to stand the tension any more.

  ‘Very well, auntie! Give me a couple of coins. I will buy a biscuit for the dog,’ said a man in the crowd, grinning slyly.

  Dear old auntie laughed, opening wide her toothless hole of a mouth. It was a cunning laugh, and yet innocent. Everybody laughed. But the strain was getting unbearable. So somebody bought a few biscuits and offered them to the dog. The dog wagged its tail and licked its nose mechanically. But it didn’t stop. It was tired and staggering at every step. Yet it went on.

  Nothing could be done for that dog. It wanted no kindness and no help. So all we could do was to play the uncomfortable role of spectators. Everybody felt very foolish about it.

  ‘Shoot the bloody dog! Kill it!’ screamed a man in English. He had been sucking at his pipe and reading a paper, trying to affect the indifference of an Englishman.

  A woman on the upper storey of a house was leaning out of the window and watching. She would press her head in her palms and grimace in pain when the dog seemed to be going under the wheels of a car. When it escaped, she would scream with joy. She was gesticulating wildly and calling everybody in the house to the window to watch the fun. The lipstick on her lips made her look even more queer and frightening.

  People in the crowd were all talking at the same time. The municipal staff must have poisoned the dog; they were saying, which of course was not true. But the crowd wanted to get mad at somebody.

  The dog was certainly being protected by some invisible deity. It escaped death for more than ten minutes on that busy street. The absurd drama continued in the midst of a high voltage circuit of tension and jitters.

  Then came a double-decker bus—a huge, brash, red box on wheels. The driver was perched high, sealed in a glass cabin. He was sitting very erect, as if he had a steel rod for a spine. He was wearing outsized sun-glasses that covered half his face and made it look like a fiendish mask.

  The dog staggered on unconcerned and in a moment was right in front of the bus. The crowd screamed. The driver jammed the brakes on with an awkward jerk. But the bus kept rolling on. I saw the dog going under a wheel. I closed my eyes and waited for an
infinitesimal fraction of time to hear the final yelp. It was a very weak yelp, conveying no pain and no reluctance to die. It was just a motor response of the body.

  The woman at the window crushed her head in her palms and screamed. She then burst into an idiotic laughter. Because of the lipstick, it looked as if her lips were smeared with blood.

  There were screams all around. The huge, red bus hesitated for a moment on its ponderous wheels, and then moved on with a jerk that was very much like an indifferent shrug. It moved on inexorably in a straight line, gathering momentum amidst the rising roar of its engine.

  The dog lay on its side with all its legs outstretched. Blood was trickling from a corner of its mouth.

  A few people gathered around the corpse. But they had already lost interest. The rest of the crowd walked away in a hurry, brushing the whole incident off their minds with little impatient gestures.

  ‘I want to write a story . . . a story . . . a s-t-o-r-y . . .’ I said stupidly to myself.

  Then a bus came, in all its mechanical dignity. I had been almost praying all this time that it should come and take me away before the dog met its inevitable end. It swallowed up the waiting queue in which I stood, and then moved on.

  Translated from Marathi by the author

  U.R. Anantha Murthy

  The Sky and the Cat

  Jayatheertha Acharya listened to Govindan Nair till nine in the night; then he slept; and, at five in the morning, making a sound as if being sawn into two, he died. He was bedridden for hardly twenty days. At the time of his death, all his dear ones were there; his son who had heard of his father’s illness and had come from Delhi with his family; Govindan Nair, a Communist from Kerala, a friend of his youthful days who had not seen him these forty years; Acharya’s wife; his widowed daughter and her twelve-year-old son; and, more importantly, even Gangubai was present—his mistress these twenty years. She was from Shimoga and she had come without a second thought, when the news of Acharya’s illness had reached her. It was rumoured and was sort of known that he had a mistress; but it was only now that she was seen in the flesh. When she came, Acharya did not raise any objection. His wife Rukminiyamma, of course, made a rumpus—talked of decency, of honour, and of fear of pollution, etc., with her daughter. But her husband’s state of health and her awareness that one’s karma had to be lived had kept her in check. Gangubai talked to everyone with a smile on her face and quietly took over the nursing of Acharya. She saw the bed they had put him on was hard and lumpy. She got another, softer one made. She washed the sheets, neatly pressed them with a charcoal-heated iron and daily made the bed. When Acharya began to talk to her about the cows she had left behind, the milk that was to be distributed, and so on, she said she knew how to manage things, that he should not worry, and that she had made the necessary arrangements. To his question, ‘How long will you be on leave?’ she had laughingly said, ‘Till you get well.’ Acharya’s widowed daughter, Savithri, felt somewhat at ease when she came to know that Gangubai had a teaching job in a primary school. Acharya had never spoken about his mistress to his wife. Now it appeared as if he had accepted her as one of the members of his own family.