Three Wogs

by Alexander Theroux

  “Pardon, sir?”

  “Don’t have to call me sir. I ain’t Lord Gussie of Fleet Street. What I said was, you’re going to play some tennis.”

  Dilip smiled a smile of politesse. “Of course, yes.”

  “Down at Brighton.”

  “Yes.”

  “Thought so.”

  Quietly, Dilip unlatched his valise and took out a book. That settled, Roland tore from the newspaper a large sheet, threw back his sleeves, and proceeded to thoroughly scrub his arms, hands, and elbows free of the flinty powders, detergents, and imbedded grit that had aggravated his skin raw and granulated, like repson board. The night was always long, longer in the fall when all the steel rot had rusted hard and rotted cold into the deep layers of the buses in petrified stains. His clothes gave off the closet smell of sweat, sponges, lampblack, tin metallic water, and, worst of all, the strong acidic odour of the red carbolic soaps he used to scrub the filthy wheels, square bars packed tight with volcanic pumice.

  The Washing of the Buses was hierarchical, a little mandatum all his own: first, the hosing down, a decentralized application involving suds, then into the decks to mop off the rubber floors with hand-hot, chlorinated water. After that came the windows, which he squeaked clean with swipes of the squeegie, then the sloshing of the headlamps, a quick run over the leather seats with neat’s-foot oil and a shake or two of the chamois, a dashover with the broom, and, once again, a last check—the tenth was usually terminal—for Lost and Found, a little spin-off he afforded himself as Part of the Job and which had yielded, thus far, a trove of seventeen magazines (blue), countless theatre programs, three wallets, a Victorian tobacco tamper, a brass call bell, an earthenware jelly-mould, and a netsuke monkey brooch he had flogged in Petticoat Lane for eighteen shillings. Umbrellas were so common he ignored them. He worked by commission. Terms: this had been a Nine Bus Night. The worst had been a Three (Guy Fawkes night, burned thumb). The peak had been the famous Fifty-nine Bus Night, the very first night he got the job, in fact, when he had ingeniously crawled to the rafters and, with loud proclamations of “tally-ho!,” dropped in Niagara-like splashes fifty-nine individual bucketfuls of steaming water onto the buses below—and almost got cashiered the next morning. On this particular morning, however, Roland realized he had lowered his average, and would not have but for the six trips to the waiting room to make certain Dilip wasn’t burgling, prying at the safes in the ticket office, or having into the trains. Dilip woke six times, bought six teas, and went back to sleep six times—to prove he was not.

  “Hey listen,” Roland said, standing up. “You got a tanner you can see my way? Half a hog? Not that I’m flat, I’m not flat, who said I was flat, but all’s I got on me are notes.” Roland demonstratively unfolded from his wallet a flaking bill that looked as if it had been lined as a parchesi board. “Not so much as a Joey.”

  “My goodness yes, I have coin,” responded Dilip running over to Roland, his little hand a hill of goodwill and change. “As well, I have not infrequently found myself with as sizable a misery.”

  “A pain in the ass.”

  “A bugbear.”

  “A kick in the ass,” said Roland.

  Roland rooted among the coins. “I’ll take one of these—and one of these, thruppence twice, to pay you back as soon as that”—he snapped his fingers—“in a piffle. Hold off, you got a sixpence. Now you see what I’m doing? I’m putting back two thru-penny bits and taking the simon. That’s what we call them in Houndsditch. Simon”—Roland winked—“means Jew.” It was the lexicographical touch.

  The tea machine took the coin; a crank, the pock of the cup, a splash, and Roland, once again, had his tea: a beverage for all, epidemic in its consumption and gulped wholesale, from Fork-beard the Dane to the Magic Now, to momentarily dose away the punctual cri de coeur that illuminated in the English the complicated neurasthenia of general complaint coupled with specific cure.

  “By the way,” asked Roland, “didn’t I see you yesterday?”

  “On the train?”

  “Walking.”

  “Walking on the train?”

  “On the ground!” Roland barked. “Walking on the ground!”

  “Oh yes,” Dilip said, engulfed in a whelm of embarrassment, “through the Park of Hyde.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Thought so.”

  Dilip saw a reddening trace high in Roland’s cheek, like spinel. Oh pish on me, thought Dilip, for I have made this friend here, new as he is, waxy, something testy, and composed of some irascibility. The consulted Menu had often revealed: “A fly’s worst luck it that it has never been killed before.”

  “You know,” Roland suddenly remarked, throwing the paper aside, “I was just reading about this here graveyard they have in Surrey. The men are buried on one side, and women are buried on the other. Get it? Point being, you probably think we’re all daft over here, a bit off like, and wonder why you stay here.” Roland sipped his tea and immediately grabbed his tongue. “Crikey! They will make these things burn your ass off, won’t they?”

  “It tweaked your mouth?”

  “Yes. I swear they make them so they’ll burn your ass off. They’re like that, these people”—and Roland spied past the doors of the waiting room and saw, in his mind’s eye, all the venenating cooks and caterers who partially comprised the world, pouring vials of nightshade and henbane into their bowls, dishes, and goblets, just for a vicious lark. He blew the cup, shifting it from hand to hand. Dilip, meanwhile, was fluttering his handkerchief five feet from that same cup as an aid to help circulate the air.

  “Anyways, as I was telling you before, there’s this graveyard down in Surrey in England. The women are buried on one side, and men on the other. So you think we’re bonkers for that? I can tell you do. You’ve as much as said it.” Roland slid the paper along the bench. “Look, down there. Read it.” While Dilip, nodding, ran his eyes over the article, Roland lighted a cigarette, puffed it alive, and, turning, pipped the match into the clock face.

  “You see what I mean? That’s a bit of marvelous what-do-you-say, en it?” Roland chuckled, puffed out smoke, and elbowed to freedom a bronchitic cough. “They probably think the dead bodies will go bezeek, get up in the middle of the night, and start the old diddling. You know? Get up and start mixing it up with each other. I mean, even though they were dead. Some world, huh? When they think dead bodies will start—” Roland cruelly drove his thumb into his palm. “You know?” As quickly, a dark aliquid latens expression clouded over his face. He squinted through its shadow. He took Dilip in through the side of his half-shut eye. “No reason, at the same time, for you to go and bitch about the country, commenting on how we’ve gone off our peckers, on calling us all potty. I’ve seen worse.” He looked Dilip straight in the eye and spoke very, very slowly. “Bloody worse.” Dilip’s smile froze, fell off, and dashed into smithereens. With an even greater formality and reserve than before, he sat up and checked his watch.

  Moods here, it seemed, shifted abruptly—with the speed and reckless alarm of flipping pages (growing plots) in children’s books when, travelling across the crudely coloured page, large walleyed but trusty elephants and nice kids like mites with faces smudged like cranberries, friends all, are suddenly chased by goops, grinning from teeth as sharp as bag needles, who drop hairy and malign from a network of dirty caterpillarvic vines and, howling, flapping webfooted, trail them into caves, squat, lick their chops, and knap them up like ginger.

  “You can keep the paper.” Roland clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “I read it.”

  “Gratefully many thanks, yes, but I have book here.”

  “Look, you don’t have to be shy,” Roland said, pointing to the paper soaked in rings of wet detergent and bunched silt. “That’s the morning run. I just bought it.” Roland slugged down the tea and hurtled the cup over the radiator like an agile forward on a throw-in. “It was a gift.”

  Dear me
! thought Dilip, perhaps I have burdened myself with a needless enmity in speaking so. He consulted the Menu: “To disgrace is to dyscrase.” He could not help but agree.

  “Please,” replied Dilip, “please do not think this is disesteem, but imperatives have it that I must read book. I shall soon have,” he laughed, “examination in book, and, goodness me, it is high time I should apply myself, elsewise shall I be a failed B.A.”

  Roland threw his head back and gave out with a tubercular wheeze. “Oh, oh, oh, oh, you go to university, that it?” He tapped the book. “Me see?”

  “You shall find it distasteful,” Dilip said, smothered in a self-imposing and diffident giggle. “Alas, it is book for my course study. I think very, how you say, boring?”

  “Analyses of Step-up and Step-down Transformers,” Roland read. He looked at Dilip. “Mechanics.”

  “Electricity.”

  “Yes,” Roland agreed, “mechanics of, ah, ah—”

  “No, friend. Not mechanics. Electricity. I study circuits and wiring methods.”

  “Oh, that it? What, you come here to learn electricity, and then you go back to, ah, Pakistan there?”

  “I am from India.”

  “That’s what I meant. Then you go back to India, right? Teach them what you learned here.” Roland snaffled a page of the book. “About this stuff.”

  Dilip checked his watch. “Do you please have correct time?”

  “Half-eight,” Roland answered quickly, catching the clock, “but what I mean is, then you go back to India to tell them everything you picked up here, that right? What you had a look at, like?”

  “You must be knowing, perhaps, I have no intentions of returning home just as yet,” Dilip laughed a bit nervously. “For now, let it be said Brighton is sufficient.”

  “What, you’re going to stay here? You’re going to settle in.”

  “Temporarily.”

  “No, you see, but when—when—you go back there, when, that’s what you’re going to do, isn’t it, tell them what we let you see, what you picked up, what you had a look at when you were over here, right? I mean, right?” Roland was an inch off Dilip’s ear.

  “Yes.”

  “Tell them everything.”

  “Yes.”

  “Thought so.”

  And Roland leaned back, staring at Dilip pontifically, contented in the knowledge, clearly established, of the rigid rules set up in the wide, bipartisan, but unequal world. It was the ontological brief that posited Roland a Who, Dilip a Whom: the syntactical brickbat of Fate, Nominator and Accuser, which categorized forever “the actor” and “the acted upon,” whereby the Indian, among others, remained, ineluctably, that shuttlecock which must drop to the ground if its elevation is not secured, and constantly maintained, by frequent blows. Such, such was the case.

  England was no final resting place. Here was involved, for Dilip, far less a matter of expatriation than a process of identification, having as its point of departure the poetic laconism of Gormata, the Digambara saint: “Perceive, do not analyze.” The two years thus far spent at Cambridge, which boasted many illuminators of the age, partially extended that perception, like two gigantic klieg lights that were clicked on and, like electric flowers flowing colour, suddenly flashed out in crazy blue plops, throwing off a pure, moon-white incandescence to the farthest reaches of the Unknown in ever new moral and intellectual moulds, dips, and rushlights. It was not simply, however, that the university was either enough or idiot-proof. Dim bulbs, everywhere, proved the formally educated not necessarily the more widely informed. It was electricity he must know. Electricity, alone, rattled in flares through the spores of vegetable man: an ichor that pumped through him the vibrations of loving motion, up over the distant stars in phosphorized strides, and into the electric air like a torchbeam sweeping over the world and then up again, traced a thousand parsecs away into the disappearing dot of Time and Space wherein every karma was purged off from the soul until it was light enough to ascend, still further, out beyond the quasars to the peak of the universe, where, bathed in sulphur, one met one’s self, finally making life seen, then life known, and then life life. He believed in life. He was a Jain.

  Dum Dum was his village once, but no more. Indeed, for Dilip, there was no place—to re-emphasize, and run the adage widdershins—like home. Born there in the northwest reaches of Assam, of Saraswat Brahmin parents, his very first memory was of August 15, 1947, the very night of The Partition. It was a night of great rain. Suddenly, on that night, two huge men had burst into the house, Moslem goondas from a nearby enclave, who looked, both, like Hanuman, the Monkey God—speaking in strange tongues, carrying Enfield rifles, and wearing hoods which showed their eyes beads in a shiny wild glare, the drug-crazed leer of opium. Were these, Dilip had wondered, the Men of the White Poppies he so feared? His father had often pointed out to him, on their little trips to Calcutta, the distant fields of white poppies, blowing free—life; later, he was told of the opium farms of Bengal where the virginal white flowers were cut and thrown into presses, oozing out, in martyrdom, a sticky black juice which was then hardened and diced into cakes of one or two pounds, giving off a pungent, sickish odour—death.

  The rain came down in sheets through it all. The men shoved Dilip and his sisters, Pushpa and Premila, into a corner, and, laughing, they sat the father and mother, terrified and humiliated, in the center of the room. From a cloth about his waist, one of them untucked a pillbox, and for hours, time passing slowly, they unrolled cubes of sticky brown opium from green leaves which were wrapped, each pellet, in newspapers the size of a lump of sugar. It was either chewed or mixed with water and swallowed whole. Then, suddenly, the men hooted and screamed and spit wrath; they spilled into a water bowl a sack of dry powder which they forced Dilip’s mother to drink, at gunpoint: a compound, this was, of finely cut-up tiger’s whiskers that perforated the lining of the stomach, causing the highly potent gastric acids to be released into the body, which, in turn, scorched the vitals in a spontaneous acute illness, resulting in death. “Rama,” she mumbled and tumbled over lifeless into a pile of pink sari, her braid showing out like a long rat’s tail on the floor. The father was led, naked, into the courtyard. There was a shot. Pushpa and Premila, after they were raped, were sent to a brothel in Hyderabad. And Dilip was left wandering in the rain.

  Domestic memories paled as the years passed, but Dilip could never forget the cold lump of loneliness he had felt in the pit of his stomach (where nothing else was to be found), during these first days, when he had come into Cherrapunji: raindrops fell as big as marbles and the soaked earth swelled with mud, queer fat mushrooms, and dropsy. Monsoons left everything slippery in green slime. The Whom was predicated to the Who. He walked alone through a rabbit warren of narrow lanes and saw in the dusk, before nightfall, thin little brown men with no hips, barefoot, huddled around dingy watch-fires, swatting flies, and chanting mantras to the big dead moons. Herds of wild monkeys frightened him, pillaging and sucking voraciously from rotten melons and fruits and tossing the shells away as they went cheeping along, gibbering, past animal-faced statues. Down from Nepal, over the ultramontane Siwalik Range, had wandered Mongolian Buddhists: orange robes, long bead rosaries, and queer earflapped caps pulled down over their heads from which jutted cheekbones the size of bells. Ox-drivers railed at each other in furious Assamese exchanged in rapid shots as hands flew.

  Eventually, Dilip had turned into the Jaintia Hills filled with tumid heat and the screams of goshawks, sheldrakes, parrots. He slept in weird, emerald forests, often sitting up all night, eyes open fearfully, especially when he heard in the distance the wild dogs in wet, reddish-white fur, snarling at each other or tearing at the carcasses of monkeys which they tossed like dolls. He once saw two rams fighting, their slablike foreheads crashing in spurts of blood, the noises exploding in flushes bunches of macaws from nearby bushes, and the treetops all around squirting birds into the air. Elephants trumpeted, and tigers, with diamond-hard eyes, bo
lted through the underbrush, hot for something’s blood.

  The Whom travelled on. Through the shimmering heat and into the teeming cities he came, eating rind, begging, and lost in the maze of jostling crowds that collapsed in on each other, shoving, yelling, pushing beneath the blistered bricks, high wattle-daubed flats, and cardboard shops, the colour of bleached iodine, storied, one upon the other, like a nest of warped boxes and constructed upon the principle of communiter:

  The union of the weak

  A powerful bully stumps;

  The hostile blizzard spares

  The shrubs that grow in clumps.

  Bad, truly, was an antonym of worse. In little rooms, endogamic families grouped before their single window where their washing flew like pennants, or gathered round the floor, eating, licking curry off their elbows, and then sleeping in large numbers on string cots, while loathsome bandicoots slithered in and out underneath their houses. Up and down Calcutta’s Chowringhee the tramcars clacked, and over in the markets the begging priests and sadhus rocked back and forth in loincloths: moaning, quoting the Rig-veda, palms extended, as their thin long hair, matted with filth, ashes, and cowdung, all hung in ropes about their necks like strings of brown beads. Pariahs shook their sandals for scorpions. Battered Fiats honked bumping over kerbs, beggars rapped at the car windows, and thousands of children wailed after them in looping trails of green exhaust. Dilip saw little sabus sprawling over the pavement under the toddy palms; ponces munching pan and scowling; and in the doorways harridans, nasty as spayed cats, raised their thin cotton saris and screamed, “Jig, jig?”

  The stenches along the Hooghly were sickening. Into Budge-Budge he passed, where, in the wet ditches, glebe water-cows, with faces like dugongs, sloshed in rice and looked up dopey, drooling from purple mouths, foolish with curiosity. The workers, or sudras, moped by, carrying pails of foul drinking water past trees filled with saucer-eyed toucans and where kraits hung like black whips flicking their tongues; and all along the roads, people, here and there, each with an arm against a tree, stood retching with cholera or heaving up in the last throes of starvation from distended bellies, their little dinghies, with hook-cut sails, in similiar states as they leaned over, useless, in dooms of the sucking mud.