Temporary People

by Deepak Unnikrishnan

  “Let’s get him!” Tits pressured. “Let’s show these madarchods!” He reached for Vijay’s cricket bat.

  “Chill, man, he didn’t do anything,” Biju said. “Chill, we don’t even know who he is. What’s wrong with you, man?”

  “He’s probably in on it,” Tits shrugged. “All fucking related.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Biju replied. “Chill. Look at him! He’s a kid. Cool, cool.”

  Tits persisted. “Look! Fucker’s limping. Five against one. Let’s scare him a little, eh? Nothing stupid. Huh? OK?” He swung the bat around his head.

  “Drop it, man,” I said. “Chill.”

  “What? Scared? Pussy!”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, fag! Fucking fag!”

  “I didn’t suck the shurtha’s cock,” I said. “You did. And now you want to do something?”

  Tits ignored the jibe. “Sick of it, man. Sbeek Arabic? Sbeek English, behenchods! Come to MY country, choothiya! I fuck you up, COME TO MY COUNTRY!”

  We didn’t like Arabees but we rarely told them that. We wanted to talk back, we wanted to fight, we wanted tungsten gonads. We wanted all that but we didn’t want to get into trouble. And we wanted to know, I suppose. What happens when you hit a boy? I mean, really hit a boy. Was it wonderful? We wanted to know. We just didn’t want his friends to come after us. We certainly didn’t want to get caught. If we could’ve gotten away with it, maybe fucking him up would’ve been pretty great.

  “Let me take care of him,” Tits said. “Be lookouts.”

  We relented. Tits would initiate; we would help. Spooking the boy wasn’t going to be enough. We would hit him hard. He’d be so shit-ass scared he wouldn’t scream. And when he stopped struggling, we would break his knees with the cricket bat, piss on his broken body. Then kick a football point-blank in his face. Five times. Fire it in like pistol shots. Before running away, leaving him there for a wandering Samaritan to find him and help him home.

  We waited for Tits to make the first move.

  He just stood there.

  “Go on, man!” I said. “Fuck him good, behenchod. C’mon, Madarchod, c’mon!”

  Nothing.

  Biju tried to force the issue. He weakly kicked a medium-sized pebble in the direction of the boy. The pebble skipped along the tar, tick-tick-tick-ticking along, hitting the boy on the ankle. The fellow turned and swore in Arabic. “Aye!” he said, arms akimbo.

  With that one gesture, he stripped us all, and there we stood, holding our little crystal peckers.

  “Sorry,” Biju yelled in Arabic, forcing a smile.

  “Mistake!” I found myself muttering in Arabic.

  Tits said nothing. He just stood there, maybe imagining his father eviscerating him with a spoon once he got home.

  “Aye!” the boy continued. “You crazy?” He spoke English now. He then held his index finger up to his temple and drew circles in the air. With Arabic, he tightened our dicks; with English, he lopped them off.

  There would be no fight. We had surrendered without even proceeding to battle. We didn’t throw one punch, and what we now knew about ourselves was brutal.

  “C’mon, Tits, let’s go,” I said, disgusted.

  He refused.

  “All talk, fat man. Fucking weak, man,” I chided.

  He ignored me.

  We let him be. I don’t think we said much as we walked back. Then Biju said that if that little fucker had attempted to get violent, he would have fucked him up, like Rowdy Roddy Piper.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said.

  “No, man, serious,” he continued. “I would’ve destroyed him.”

  We didn’t notice Tits rushing after the boy with the bat until we heard two screams.

  Tits missed the boy’s knee, hitting his ankle instead, which probably shattered on impact. This was the first scream. When Tits was preparing to go at him again, the boy lunged and bit Tits on the right shoulder, then refused to let go, using his nails to claw at Tits’s face.

  As we turned around, we saw that the black kid was literally hanging off Tits’s shoulder by his teeth.

  Blood. Ankle turning purple.

  In the distance, we heard the clacking of flip-flops. Cries of “Abdallah! Abdallah!”

  “C’mon, guys!” Tits shouted, punching the boy’s face, each blow making it crumple and curl like tissue. “C’mon! Get the fucker. C’mon! Hit’im, hit’im!” Then he smiled.

  That’s when we ran. Bolted. Desperate not to get caught, leaving Tits to fend for himself.

  “No,” I remember him pleading. He looked right at me. “No!”

  I didn’t stop running until I got home. The trembling wouldn’t subside, my ears still ringing with the sound of flip-flopped feet stomping pudgy flesh. And that scream, the noise a piglet makes when its testicles are cut, when Abdallah’s friends’ kicking cracked a rib, then the groan after they cracked another, then nothing after that, just yelling and stomping, as we ran through tar that was rough, flat and cold, black as a dingo’s nose.

  *

  Tits didn’t die. They put him in a coma. We found out at the trial the hitting stopped when Abdallah noticed blood trickling down Tits’s ear, but by then his mates had broken Tits’s femur and mangled his left ankle. But the boys who did this to him were also responsible for saving Tits’s life, carrying, then running, with his lumpy concussed body, in time for emergency personnel to begin resuscitating what was left of him. The hospital called the police.

  Two weeks it took for Tits to regain consciousness, and another month before doctors could confirm whether or not he suffered any lingering brain damage. His mental faculties did not perish with the beating, but his motor skills did, damaged. Rehab would improve mobility, but to those blessed with normal ambulation, he moved like a slug. He would need a cane for the rest of his life.

  At the trial, the boys who put him in hospital were found not guilty and to be acting in self-defense. “Out of loyalty,” the defense emphasized.

  We were asked to take the stand. We told the truth, that Tits’s bike had been stolen, that the shurtha hadn’t been kind—“No, we didn’t remember his face; it was dark”—that Tits had been furious, and the combination of events possibly drove him to attack the boy. We said “possibly” because we all agreed it would be best if we omitted our involvement in the matter. So we sort of lied, with Tits watching, refusing to challenge what he heard. “No, he didn’t tell us what he was about to do,” I told the judge, refusing to look at Tits, even though I could feel his eyes on me. We thought it might have been because he still had trouble talking, ever since surgeons had to reattach his tongue; he had almost managed to bite off a big piece of it during the fracas, but no, he could talk, feebly, but he could talk, and did. “Ma fol, ma fol,” he kept saying to our surprise, sparing us the blame. The judge was kind, though, letting him off with a stern warning, given the extent of his injures, their permanence. He also praised us for being good truthful boys, singling me out because I told the court if I had known Tits’s intentions, I would’ve stopped him. Tits stared at me but said nothing. That night I called his house but hung up when his mother answered the phone.

  Within days, his parents took him out of school and left for India, where we heard they employed a master physician specializing in Ayurveda to go to work on him. Tits got much better within a year, and made the decision, it seems, to remain where he was, finishing high school in Ooty.

  I imagined that would be the last I would see of Tits—I suppose all of us did—so it took me by surprise when I spotted him at the wedding of a friend of a friend. Age had changed him, changed all of us, but I was sure it had been him—that gait, that size—and spent most of the time doing my best to avoid bumping into him. Divya, a work colleague, had asked me to be her plus one. OK, I said. I had recently been separated and needed to get out. Besides, I lived near the venue, not too far from my place near Atlantic Avenue, and hadn’t been to an Indian wedding in years. Most of the guests, enough peopl
e to populate a small town, were dressed in colorful and bejeweled ethnic wear. The food was Bulgarian because the bride was from Plovdiv. The music was jazz. The booze, open bar, I had to admit, was superb, as was the food, but after my fifth imported ale, I excused myself because my bladder was near bursting. I had forgotten all about Tits by then. What I had seen was just another man who looked like a bear.

  I was peeing when I heard the tapping of a cane. Someone whispered in my ear, “Did you know a crane’s life begins in the bowels of the earth?”

  I recognized his voice right away and turned around, still holding my prick. Trembling a little.

  Tits’s face had retained its youth, he was now as tall as his father, but like me, his hair had begun to fall, leaving behind little wisps of black-dyed curls. He had put on so much weight. Before, he was chubby. Now, he was a tub of lard, an obese man, all that weight planted on a handsome cane fashioned out of lacquered teak, his movements positively glacial.

  “Friend,” he chimed, leaning in for a bear hug. “Remember me?”

  Relieved, I let go off my prick and hugged him back, grateful I had been forgiven. “Of course, Tits,” I said. “Of course.”

  “How are the men in the sky?” he laughed, hugging me tighter.

  “No idea.” I chuckled. “If Hamlet still lived, he’d be flattered you remember.”

  “I followed you here,” Tits said. “I needed to be sure.”

  “Not the athlete I once was,” I admitted.

  “Why run away? Why leave me like that?”

  “What?” I said. I was having trouble breathing. He held me so fiercely.

  “They jumped up and down on my balls. Did they tell you that?”

  “What?” I said.

  “On my balls. Broke like pottery.”

  “No,” I said. “No, they didn’t, they couldn’t have.”

  “Oh, they did, they did,” he said, laughing. It was then that he bit my ear, hard. Teeth locked on cartilage.

  “No!” I begged. “No!”

  I tried to break free but he drew me closer, my nose buried in his soft tits, his palm clutching the back of my head in a raptor’s grip. I smelled strong cologne, coffee, heard the clack of a falling cane.

  “We were friends,” I said. “Please!”

  He bit even harder. I tried to thrash but couldn’t move.

  “Remember?” I pleaded. “Hamlet’s ‘Recess’?” I said, and began to recite from it midway: “—Put these wildebeests in teams, then picture them chasing multiple footballs even though there are only two goal posts painted in jailbird stripes. Pay attention now.

  “Hear shouts, prompts, score lines, fouls. Imagine the sun watching all of this like a bored star, exhaling heat, blistering skin. Note the dust made by feet, note the pebbles and grime. Note us as we run. Can you smell sweat? For fifteen minutes, we forget the world. As we keep running, notice that the ground quivers and that the dust has begun to rise, like the earth’s lungs dispelling smoke.

  “But notice, too—please, Tits—that this is happiness. But notice, too—Tits!—that this is delirium. Notice the crow, not native, but expat, perched atop the school auditorium. Notice the peregrine eying the crow. Notice the cranes towering over the birds. Notice this is not India. This is—Tits, I beg you— home. Tits, TITS!”

  “Shh,” he said. “Shh.” Then, slowly, he began to chew.

  CHABTER SIX

  DINGOLFY

  BETWEEN VENU UNCLE AND the Paki baker’s niece. Both, missing. No one’s looking. Venu Uncle probably converted to Islam, is Venu Uncle no more. Maybe Venu Uncle now goes by Ismail or Ahmad or Bilal. I hope they cut his pecker, that it wouldn’t stop bleeding. I hope that’s how Ismail and Ahmad and Bilal died.

  CHABTER SEVEN

  KLOON

  THE PHONE RANG IN the afternoon.

  It was summer. A boiling August. Pigeons rested in the shade. Fruit flies boycotted flight.

  “Chainsmoke” Habeeb opened a crusty eye. He was on his summer break and had slept late after watching Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Again. Before he jacked off to Basic Instinct. Again. Then the tape got stuck in the VCR. Again. It took some doing to get it out.

  His mother was making lunch. “Pick up the phone, Habeeb.” So he did.

  “Habeeb? Rav said you were reliable. Want to work?” A woman, Melinda. Voice roughened by tobacco. What men call husky.

  Chainsmoke sat up slowly. “Oh, Rav? Yeah, roommate. College. Job?”

  “It’s easy, pays well, couple of hours’ worth. Say yes, job’s yours for two months. Training, Monday?”

  “Monday,” Chainsmoke slurred. “OK.” Then he went back to bed.

  “Habeeb!” his mother yelled from the kitchen, dropping curry leaves in hot oil, anticipating her son’s sloth. “Be useful. Study! Who called?”

  *

  Monday, 7:30 a.m.: Dubai Taxi Stand (Abu Dhabi)—waiting.

  Cars screeched. One driver looked right at Chainsmoke. “Quick, I leave now. Come.”

  Chainsmoke took in the Peugeot’s insides. Empty. Reeking of air freshener. Maybe jasmine. The driver urged him to get in. “Full soon, soon full,” the man promised. Chainsmoke relented. Fifteen minutes later, the driver’s promise rang true.

  The highway that takes travelers from Abu Dhabi to Dubai is clean and fine. Illuminated at night by cat’s-eye reflectors, it’s a highway designed for machines, where Lamborghinis speed, why the desert got bisected, why the camels were fenced out. But Chainsmoke couldn’t be bothered. He spent his trip napping on a stranger’s shoulder, dreaming about money. He woke to honks. There had been a pileup not far from the Jebel Ali Free Zone. A trailer overturned. Happened too quickly for the brakes to even matter for the cars behind. The smaller cars got smaller. Bodies lay where they landed, most still inside battered vehicles, like bits of fish. The ambulance had not yet arrived. A young Emirati left his Land Cruiser to direct traffic. Chainsmoke looked at his watch, estimated the number of vehicles, how slowly they crawled. “Could we make it in forty-five minutes?” Chainsmoke bellowed. The driver shrugged his shoulders. “Patience, boy,” said the stranger whose shoulder he napped on. “Anything can wait after children have died.”

  Chainsmoke arrived late, interrupting the meeting coordinator, a compact man with a fat tie, mid-sentence.

  “Hello,” he said. “Come in, come in!” The conference room was full. A roomful of teenagers, mostly boys, tucked into KFC, Mountain Dew, and potato chips. The air smelled like chicken and coleslaw. The meeting coordinator stood next to a blue shopping trolley. There was something doll-like inside, as well as a sack resembling chunky marmalade in color and shape, but the doll had been dropped face down. A large helium balloon kissed the ceiling. Chainsmoke found an empty chair, grabbed a chicken sandwich. Bit.

  Introductions had ended, but for Chainsmoke’s benefit, the meeting coordinator introduced himself once more. “My name is Menon, Mister Menon,” he said, before turning around to face the room, picking up where he left off. “Without your help, no product no profit, you see? Impossibility unconquerable.”

  Mr. Menon’s enunciation was flawless, but, it would become apparent, what he really liked to do was fiddle with his English. Customize it, in fact.

  The job, Mr. Menon continued, as he whipped his arms like rope, was simple. He was going to teach them how to be clowns.

  “Whabever fo?” Chainsmoke asked, still chewing.

  “Glad you asked that, young man,” he beamed. “Gentlemen, dear ladies, the task is simplicity personified. Y’all sell detergents dressed like clowns!”

  There was nervous laughter.

  Mr. Menon laughed back, then said, “I serious.” He reached into the marmalade sack, pulled out a joker’s mask. He raised it above his head like a cherished talisman.

  “Shit,” someone whispered.

  “Clownsmanship makeup, no need,” Mr. Menon explained. “Vetoed by HR to save time. Cash, too. Time lost, customer lost.”

  The mask came ready-ma
de with a stenciled grin and smelled like a wet mutt.

  Complexion, all-purpose-flour white.

  Eyebrows colored lead, sleek like tractor beams.

  In red, like a bulbous king, sat the clown’s nose, unmoving, dipping with weight.

  Below the bulbous king, the clown’s grin. Wondrous, wide.

  The mask fastened over the wearer’s face with white-band elastic.

  “But pull hard,” Mr. Menon mimed, “snap.”

  Management would also provide clothes. A purple shirt with puffy sleeves and red-and-white-striped trousers with a matching jacket, which included a yellow plastic hibiscus pinned to its right breast pocket.

  Then came the hair.

  “Without hair, incomplete, like life without bumps,” Mr. Menon said, as he introduced blond dreadlocks stapled on and sewed underneath a green elf cap. It was wearable— tight, but wearable. “Black formal shoes are required,” Mr. Menon warned, but if “formal” was impossible, any black shoes were acceptable. “As long as they’re black! But no running shoes. Understood?”

  The room bobbleheaded their assent.

  Mr. Menon reached for the silver balloon two feet above his crown. The detergent’s name, “Spotless,” Chainsmoke now noticed, was scrawled across its belly in bold, red Arabic and English caps.

  “Balloon must follow you,” Mr. Menon shared. “No excuses.”

  Mr. Menon then turned around and grabbed the giant doll, which turned out to be a life-size dummy dressed in clown fatigues. He arranged the dummy so it appeared to be sitting in the trolley, its back propped up, legs spread out, neck bent. Satisfied, Mr. Menon looked around the room, paused for effect, then said, “Our secret weapon! HE.”

  HE, hung awkwardly in the shopping trolley, looked wounded, like he’d been to war and gotten shot. Many times. And wouldn’t smile anymore. Mr. Menon had unveiled a clown that had hit the bucket and a couple of other hard objects on its way down, a creature that had seen so much misery it couldn’t sit straight, like the devil had cut out its spine.