Indian Magic

by Balraj Khanna

  ‘I am Pia from Norway. Dance?’

  ‘I don’t.’ I did not want to dance with my friend’s girl.

  ‘Bad liar. I saw you dance good with Bertha.’

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘Girl you dance with. She’s my best friend.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘And you dance with Jetha. Also my friend. So dance with me.’ Pia threw her arms around me. ‘You have no girl friend?’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I watch with half-close eyes.’

  Before I could say anything more, Tariq, standing in the shadows nearby and watching our every move and listening to every word we said, came and simply pulled her away. In due course, things hotted up. People no longer danced or Twisted. They just wrapped themselves around each other and necked and smooched. At eleven or so, Bish winked at me - he had made a kill - to say he was taking her home. Then Tariq went to the loo and Pia came over to me again.

  ‘A littole story? Tariq is jealous. He think I like you.’

  ‘It’s not true.’

  ‘Is and is not. I think you are nice. Sympathique.’ Pia put her arms around me, her endowments and lower half pressed into me. It made my cheeks burn with, among other things, shame. Tariq was my friend and in our part of the world friendship comes before all else in life.

  ‘What you think?’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of me?’

  ‘I think Tariq is a lucky bugger.’

  ‘I like Tariq. But I also like other boys. I haav other friends. So?’ Pia planted a little kiss on my burning cheeks, then another one on my lips. In the background, the Beatles blared on. Tariq came back. This time he didn’t even look at us. It was time for me to go. I felt desperately ashamed of myself. It ruined the rest of my week. Tariq would not speak to me any more. If we passed each other in the house or the street, he looked away. When I said hello, the swine didn’t hear me.

  Then one morning, Walia told me that Pia had left him. This drowned me in the quicksand of guilt. But the same day, as luck would have it, I ran into Pia in Hampstead where she lived and worked for a Jewish family. We had a coffee together.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘Tariq is too possessive and boring. PIA is his Pakistan International Airline. I am his private aeroplane to fly when he waan. He say “eat, make loff and sleep and talk to no other maan”. He never read – I give him Hedda Gabler and you think he even open it? You think he ever go to concert? So it is finish.’ I pleaded with Pia to reconsider her decision.

  ‘Pia, please listen. Indians and Pakistanis don’t care a great deal for Western classical music.’

  ‘He don’t care for Indian music neither. I take him to Ravi Shankar concert on South Bank and he sleep. He sleep!’

  ‘Not now though. Poor chap is desolate. He can’t sleep.’ But Pia was not interested any more. ‘You like to walk?’

  We went for a walk on Hampstead Heath nearby, a vast stretch of astonishing wild greenery and gentle slopes punctuated by bush, thicket and clumps of young, old and middle-aged trees. The rest of London lay spread in the far distance in a bluish haze. We walked for an hour and realised we had lost our way. But we did not know why we were laughing about it. Finding a mini-jungle of thick bushes very close to the road actually, we sat down on the soft moist Mother Earth. Next thing we were in each other’s arms. Pia let me fondle her breasts and kiss her neck, but she would not let me kiss her on the mouth. I did not give up and kept the heat on.

  Then suddenly, something happened to her and she became ravenous, a woman possessed. The dam broke and floodwaters tossed us into the shoreless sea of whatever it’s called. Minutes later, I had the fright of my life when Pia was apparently seized by an attack of asthma. She gasped and gasped for breath and I thought that she was a goner. But it passed and she clung to me. Done and resounding with joy, I lay on her, eyes closed. And when I opened them, what did I see? It was a sight so strange that if I wasn’t seeing it, I wouldn’t have believed it: a man standing fifteen feet away. He was masturbating. His penis, like his face, was chalk white.

  ‘Get lost,’ I shouted. But the man showed no sign of getting lost - he went on with his hand locomotion.

  ‘GET LOST.’ I stood up and the Punjabi in me took over. I looked around for a stone or something but saw only a large piece of wood, the branch of a tree. I made a bayonet charge with it, howling like a real Gurkha in the First War trenches. This put the fellow to flight. But his hand kept going up and down, up and down as he ran. We collapsed with laughter.

  ‘How can you wank and run?’ I shouted.

  ‘Peeping Tom sick man. Heath full of them.’ Pia seemed to know all about them. Hand-in-hand, we walked back to reality, the Hampstead tube. I asked for another date but was met by a Nordic shake of the head.

  ‘No. One time only. You go your way. I go mine.’

  It was as it had been with the other Scandinavian, Ingi. I had just made love to this girl and, pardon my modesty, nearly killed her with joy. And here she was saying, while still holding my hand, ‘No, one time only.’ Was it a cultural thing? I was speechless. I pleaded. ‘No,’ she said. ‘You go with yourself, I go with myself.’ And she left me – Just like that. And I did not have the brain to understand it. I simply could not understand. So I came back to Hampstead every afternoon and walked up and down, convinced I would run into her in the shops.

  Then I began to feel ill, high fever and all. I had problems peeing. There now came a thickish yellow substance instead of the normal clear water. I panicked and felt sorry for my parents, especially my father, Pran Nath Mehra MBBS who had sent me to England with such high expectations of me making something of myself. And was this how I was fulfilling his dream? I rubbed my eyes every fifteen minutes to see if I could see properly. I was sure I couldn’t. Nor could I tell anyone about it, so shameful I felt. I went to see our GP, one Dr Binch. The humiliation of it. - having to be questioned and Examined! But Dr Binch was understanding. He did not look me in the eye, only at the injured Gurkha.

  ‘How serious is it, Doctor?’

  ‘Nothing that we can’t put right, young man. Must get you well soon so that you are back in action.’

  Dr Binch sent me to a hospital in Paddington. In its Special Clinic, I was given a test tube and sent to a room with cubical urinals to fill it up with my pee. A number of men there walked about with test tubes filled with pee in their hands, all of them avoiding eye-contact with each other. Among them, guess who? Tariq. I committed suicide out of shame on the spot and shock killed him, also on the spot. Then we exploded. We laughed and slapped each other and called each other bloodcurdling Punjabi names and shut up only when a man in official white policed us into silence. But we could not obey him for long. A fellow with a test tube joined us.

  ‘Yes, life’s like that. It’s funny.’ He introduced himself and said he was a poet. ‘Oliver Charles.’

  ‘Tariq. Raavi,’ Tariq said. But the poet wasn’t listening.

  ‘Now if it was not my pee but my sperm in yonder test tube, and each egg was allowed to sweetly fertilise, I could have fathered every man, woman and child in the United Kingdom.’

  ‘Father of the Nation you would have been, Charlie.’

  ‘And of Holland too. I’ve just come back from there after a cycling tour.’

  Tariq and I recovered soon. We were friends again - Greater friends now than ever before. The very woman who had made us bitter enemies, now made us inseparable. We could have died for each other. And laughed while dying.

  LOVE THY NEIGHBOURS

  Ours was a semi-detached house. A party wall joined it to our neighbour’s. Both houses had long front gardens. A tall hedge, wedged between our front doors, separated them. We never saw our neighbours, but we knew their name - Muir.

  One afternoon, sitting idly in our front garden - hands in pockets and humming a Mukesh song - I saw a tennis ball fly over the hedge towards me, a dolly catch at mid-on. I was about t
o throw the ball back, but I began bouncing it on the cement walkway - I wanted to see those it belonged to. Next moment, a boy and girl of about ten and eight stood at the edge of our garden. The girl held a tiny kitten in her arms.

  ‘Can we have our ball back, please?’ the boy said shyly.

  ‘You have to come to get it,’ I replied. I wanted to have a closer look at them - I had never spoken to English children.

  ‘Dad said we must never go in your garden.’

  ‘Did he? What else did he say?’

  ‘Not to talk to anyone in your house.’

  ‘Did he say why?’

  ‘No. He did not.’

  ‘Do you love your dad?’

  The boy, oddly, had to think before he said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘I love mine’ I said, throwing the ball at him. Just as I had done, he caught it mid-air.

  ‘Do you like cricket?’ I asked, revolving my arm.

  ‘Yes.’ And then the children ran away. I felt slapped in the face.

  Alone in the house next morning, I heard anxious sounds in our front garden. I went out to look and saw the same children again. They were under our chestnut tree, talking to it.

  ‘Tina?’

  ‘Tina.’

  ‘Please, can you get our Tina down from the tree?’ I had a job climbing the tree. But I managed and got within a few feet of the kitten and held out my hand. The kitten looked at me suspiciously and remained unpersuaded. ‘Tina.’ I inched my way up. Tina hesitated. But eventually she became convinced of my intentions and allowed herself to be grasped. Then she clung to my forearm. She was shivering.

  If climbing the tree was tricky, coming down was no piece Of cake. When five or six feet from the ground, I jumped down but skidded, landing flat on my backside. Tina slipped out of my hands and ran to the children, and the children guffawed.

  ‘Thank you. Thank you.’

  ‘Happy girl?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I, too, was happy. But inside me I was still shaken. The same afternoon I saw them again in the local supermarket. The boy was pushing the food trolley. His mother and sister walked behind him. I cut a corner to avoid them, but we came face to face at the check-out. I had a shock. For the lady before me was not a day older than me, more like a year or two younger. With light brown hair, hazel eyes and Botticelli lips, she was a poet’s dream in a blue polka dot dress, a walking heartstopper.

  ‘Hello, children.’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Good afternoon, Miss Muir.’ Miss Muir was nonplussed - who the hell was I and how did I know her name? But only for a moment. ‘Come on, Robert. Come on, Ann,’ she said, paying for and collecting her shopping.

  ‘Jane, he got Tina down from the tree.’

  ‘Oh, yes? It was very nice of you. Thank you very much.’

  ‘I did what any man would have done. Allow me.’

  ‘No, thank you. It’s quite all right. It’s not heavy.’

  ‘Please do.’ Suddenly, that was the only thing in the world I wanted to do, carry her shopping. We came out. An ice-cream van sang to a halt on the kerb right in front of us and the children looked at their sister.

  ‘How about an ice-cream, Robert? I asked. ‘An ice-cream, Ann?’ The children did what any children would have done in the circumstances. They looked at their big sister with pleading eyes.

  ‘Please, Jane,’ Robert said.

  ‘Look, Mr.’

  ‘Raavi. Raavi Mehra. M.E.H.R.A.’

  ‘Look, Mr Mera.’

  ‘Raavi.’

  ‘We are getting late, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I want an ice-cream, Jane.’

  ‘Me, too, Jane.’ I went ahead and bought two ice-creams.

  ‘How about you, Miss Muir?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Please, call me Jane.’

  ‘Oh, yes, Jane. Italian ice-cream is divine stuff.’ Miss Muir smiled for the first time. She looked more divine than all the ice cream in Italy. We all had an ice-cream.

  ‘How much?’ Miss Muir asked the man.

  ‘That’ll be four quid, miss,’ he said to her, taking two shillings from me. I could have kissed both sides of his unshaven, hedgehog face.

  ‘I wish we could sit somewhere and talk,’ I said.

  ‘Talk about what?’

  ‘Of this and that. Neighbours may talk to each other.’

  ‘I’m afraid we must rush. Our grandmother is coming to pick them up.’

  ‘Nan is coming at five, Jane.’

  ‘And it is not four yet.’

  ‘No, we must go. Come on, you two.’

  ‘Nan is taking us to see a pantomime.’

  ‘Can I come too? I have never seen one.’

  ‘Say goodbye. Goodbye!’ It sounded like a final goodbye. It didn’t matter. What mattered was I had partaken of the divine ice cream.

  The next stop was mine. As the bus approached it, I came down from the top deck and bumped into my neighbour from next door on the platform. Surprise threw me into the English Channel of happiness.

  ‘I don’t believe it!’

  ‘Oh, hello there.’

  ‘You’ve been shopping.’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘What a lovely day.’ Miss Muir carried a Marks & Spencer bag. She wore a white cotton skirt and a white poplin blouse which was translucent. In the powerful breeze the skirt clung to her legs and the blouse. Oh, it was almost see-through! I saw through it and I saw the bulging bra and the warm pink flesh and I quickly averted my gaze. I was worried also. In a few seconds we would be getting off the bus. Could I walk home with her? With the sort of thinking her father was given to, she wouldn’t want to be seen with me in the street. What was I to do then? Turn in the other direction to save mutual embarrassment? I had this awful feeling that she was also thinking the same thing: What shall I do with him when the bus stops?

  ‘Where are my favourite children?’ I asked.

  ‘At school.’

  ‘Ann looks just like my little sister Ushee, the apple of my family’s eye.’

  ‘Does she?’ The bus stop. Now what? RKM, say goodbye and turn in the opposite direction, said a voice in me loud and clear. But, ‘May I walk home with you, Miss Muir?’

  ‘I am going to the cobblers over there,’ Miss Muir said, pointing to where my inner voice had urged me to go - the other side where the shops were. I knew why she had said that - she didn’t want to be seen with me. I felt cut down to size.

  ‘Goodbye,’ Miss Muir said and walked away. My temples throbbing with shame and insult, I took a burning oath: I would take no notice of her next time around.

  I stuck to my word. One day next week, I saw her walk past our house while I stood in our front garden. I gave her my back view to admire. At the weekend I went to our local park, Golders Hill Park, for a lazy stroll and a lie-down on the grass. It was one of those beautiful-beyond-belief days, the kind that make your limbs throb with longing to be out in the sun and walk barefoot on God’s good earth. I had asked Tariq if he wanted to come, but the dog-face was busy ‘making bhurtha’ (Indian ratatouille) of Pia’s friend, Bertha. I had asked Walia. He was ‘occupied’ by a Hun hussy who ‘give me a bus-stopping Nazi salute each time she come’.

  The gentle slopes of the grassy park were littered with pale white bodies spread out in the sun like a dhobi’s washing on the hillside by a mountain stream. Little boys played football. Some flew kites with their fathers. The kites were made of plastic and they were bigger than Indian kites. I stopped to watch them. It was then I saw her, or rather them. They were coming to where I was, near the park’s mini-zoo. My temples started throbbing again. I cut a sharp corner and found myself at a fenced enclosure which contained a few humpy and daft-looking llamas. One such fellow stood at the fence, chewing, and watching people watching him. Finding me the most interesting of the two-legged animals, he came and stood right in front of me. I was amused. I happened to be carrying a bag of peanuts. Naturally,
I offered him a handful. But the SOB spat in my face, a spray of whatever he was chewing - and I heard delicious laughter from behind me. Robert and Ann had come running up to me. Their big sister was a few yards behind them.

  ‘Did you see that?’ I said. The children roared. They found it hilarious, my being spat at in the face by an ungrateful llama. I mopped my face with my shirt-sleeve like a schoolboy and held out the peanuts.

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘Go on.’ Robert was the first to take a couple. Little Ann followed hesitantly. Miss Muir by now had joined us. She had witnessed my humiliation and a faint smile played on her lips. She carried the children’s sweaters in one hand and in the other a little cricket bat which said Century, Made in India, the only thing I ever saw in this country which was made in India. My heart again became unruly. But I decided to take charge of things. ‘Would you like a peanut, Miss Muir? You can have two.’ Miss Muir smiled and said, ‘No thank you.’ Robert held a tennis ball in his hand.

  ‘Are you coming from Lords, Robert?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Have you been playing cricket?’

  ‘No, but I would like to. Do you want a game?’ We found a few sticks of wood. While I was erecting the wicket, I happened to turn around and what I saw made my heart miss a beat: Miss Muir was watching me as if I was doing some thing extraordinary, reminding me of Veena and the Swami TV.

  ‘Jane, you be back-stop. Ann, you field there. I’m batting first,’ Robert announced, appointing himself captain.

  ‘I’ll sit and watch.’

  ‘Don’t be a spoilsport, Jane.’

  ‘Come on, Miss Muir. You can’t do this to us.’