Marginal Man

by Charu Nivedita

  People usually add lime to the rice flour to brighten the kolam, but lime is a crow-deterrent. Kolams, Perundevi explained, were not merely aesthetic eye-catchers. The flour used to draw them acted as a supplementary source of nutrition for crows, squirrels, sparrows and ants. A squirrel feeding on the kolam flour is a charming sight indeed. After feasting on what was on offer in the front yard, the crows would perch themselves on the stone slab intended for the washing of clothes in the backyard and raise a fresh racket. Perundevi would immediately rush to fetch them water. Perundevi taught me so much about compassion to living creatures. What I learned from her, I could never have learned from a million books. Don’t you dare mess with me, beware!

  Let’s talk about this night I was desperately trying to sleep. I wasn’t sure whether the distress call was coming from a cat or a dog. I followed the direction of the sound and found myself looking down the neighbor’s well where I found a cat, its front claws on the wall and its hind-legs in the water. There was no one in the neighbor’s house, so I called Perundevi. She came running, took one look at the wailing cat, and ran inside to fetch a rope and a bucket. When she returned, she cooed lovingly to the creature.

  The cat’s sounds grew louder. Fearing something terrible was happening, I placed a call to Blue Cross. They said they would be with us in an hour (our house was not exactly a stone’s throw from their hospital). In the meanwhile, Perundevi had started singing to the cat like it was a toddler being put to bed. She slowly lowered the bucket into the water, but the cat panicked and lost its grip on the wall, falling into the water.

  I could see something gleaming in the cat’s eyes – the desperation to live. Perundevi continued her litany of tender words. “Mama will rescue you. She won’t let you die,” she said, lowering her bucket again. As if under her spell, the cat stopped wailing and jumped into the bucket. Perundevi slowly raised the bucket, but the stupid cat lost its balance and fell back into the water.

  I don’t think I would have been able to rescue the animal even if I climbed down into the well. I didn’t share Perundevi’s instincts when it came to understanding animals by sound and smell. I was also afraid of being attacked by the cat. I have observed that when you try to rescue someone, you end up perishing along with them.

  One rainy night, a friend and I stopped for idlis at a wayside stall near Udayam Theater in K. K. Nagar. When the idlis did not appear after a good wait, my friend called out impatiently, “Hey, are the idlis ready?” He placed his hand on a metal rod in front of the shop and started screaming like he was possessed. I realized that he was being electrocuted and without thinking – because such situations demand acting – I tried to pull him away and I too began to convulse violently. Luckily, fate chose to intervene in the form of one of the workers in the shop who sensibly went and switched off the mains. If not for him, both my friend and I would have featured in the obituary section of the newspapers. Our deaths would have been just two of the many fatalities that occur in the city with depressing regularity.

  More rescue attempts ensued. It was quite some time before the cat finally managed to climb into the bucket and crouch into safety. As soon as the bucket was on terra firma, the cat leapt out and off it ran, without so much as a meow in acknowledgement. Perundevi lamented the fact that the creature had vanished before she could dry its fur with a towel and offer it some milk. I was just relieved that it survived the ordeal.

  3 – Baba’s Death and the Arrival of Baba II

  Death, or even its imminent arrival, has never filled me with fear. I didn’t grieve when my parents died for they had both lived long and full lives, but their lives were mechanical. They had worked hard and eaten well. Had I consumed half the amount of salt and sugar that my father had had, you’d find me dead in bed a week from now. My father was ninety when he passed and my mother, eighty-five. Neither of them had ever once seen a doctor. Work, food and TV series – that was their whole life. They saved to build a house and once that house got built, their life’s mission was complete.

  Neither life nor death came easy for my younger brother Selvam. He was not a bright student, and in this country, crime and politics are the only careers available to those who are not cut out for school, though, admittedly, one does need some talent to become a successful criminal. In fact, a criminal needs to be cleverer than people who actually work for a living. Education – or the lack of it, rather – was not the only problem Selvam faced. There was his body – the boy needed to defecate at least ten or fifteen times a day though he was hale and healthy in every other respect. Nothing came of doctors and treatment, and he eventually accepted his condition.

  When he was very young, Selvam swallowed a nail and had to be operated upon. The surgery affected his vocal cords and his voice never broke. He started a poultry farm with my father’s money, but every last one of the birds died, leaving him with debts up to his nose. He went on to open a small grocery store. That tanked too. Selvam had no vices – did not smoke cigarettes, drink, whore or read books. He never even raised his voice.

  When his dashing looks brought him a marriage proposal from a rich family, everyone thought he’d hit the jackpot. All the bride’s family wanted was a man with a clean slate and no bad habits. Selvam fit the bill. To cap it all, our families knew each other. But with Selvam, fate had a way of throwing a spanner in the works. To everyone’s utter astonishment, he declared that the girl – a real ravisher – was not to his taste. Apparently, he was in love with someone else.

  Of course there had to be a hitch – the girl belonged to a different religion. Still, this wasn’t an impediment as ours was a family of multiple faiths. I asked to meet the woman, but he kept evading a definite response. One day, when I came down to Chennai from Delhi, he announced he was already married and invited me home. When I saw his Juliet, I was aghast. Five feet off the ground with protruding teeth like half an umbrella and shrunken like a mummified Egyptian. As if that wasn’t enough, she was ten years his senior and a divorcee to boot. And oh, she was also infertile. I wasn’t surprised my brother wanted to keep her away from our critical eyes. He rather hesitantly invited me to dinner once. Since my sister-in-law had been informed of my non-preference of rice, she had made chapattis. They were hard as cowpats. I left without finishing dinner.

  After marriage, Selvam tried his hand at carpentry which wasn’t a paying vocation even though he slogged all day under the brick-baking sun. A few years later, he took up with an electrician. At the age of forty, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. In three months, he was dead. I never expected him to die as early as he did. A good number of cancer patients manage to cheat death. It’s probably got to do with the will to live, but in Selvam’s case, the lack of that will. As soon as he got the diagnosis, he called me. “Anney, there’s a function at a friend’s house. You must come.” I agreed because it was the first such request he’d made. A few days later, he called again. “Anney, my friend wants to give you the invitation in person. When should he drop by?” When I saw the invitation, I realized the folly of having contact with one’s relatives. Selvam’s friend’s daughter had attained puberty and he wanted me to grace the occasion. My name featured prominently in the card with clear mention that I was a writer. Despite the assurances, I failed to show up. Selvam rang me incessantly. I ignored him. Then, I heard of his death. My sister-in-law said, “He kept reiterating his last wish which was to see you.”

  Peering into the coffin, I was shocked to find not my brother Selvam, but a body with hardly any flesh or even frame, deep-sunken eyes and hollow cheeks. It not even fit to be called a body, let alone my brother’s body. I burst into tears. That was the first time I cried at anyone’s death. I learned that Selvam had been on a liquid diet for three months.

  The next time I cried copiously was when my Baba died. I remember vividly how she died – her head falling back to the ground as I stroked her. We gave the vet some money to bury Baba in the pet ce
metery and went home as Perundevi said that the sight of our dog being put in the ground would be unbearable. She wept for two whole days. Unable to come to terms with her grief, I bought a puppy which became Baba II. We had promised ourselves that we would never have another dog again, but Baba’s death made us change our minds.

  Though Selvam’s death soon became a distant memory, I was unable to forget Baba who had been like a child to me, who had shared a decade of her life with me, a faithful shadow. It’s been six years, but the grief is still as strong as it was on the day she died. I wondered where Baba’s soul was romping. Would she be thinking of me? Why did she cling on to life until I returned home from my journey? The moment I stroked her head, she breathed her last, why?

  When Baba was in heat, there used to be blood all over the house. She would bleed for a month and we would have to keep scrubbing the floors clean until her cycle was done. Baba died, without having had sex.

  Perundevi declared that Baba II was none other than our late Baba reborn as a male. A few days after Baba II arrived, another dog, a Great Dane, entered our lives. We named him Blackie. Perundevi bought him for our son, Madan. I warned her that our lives would be ruined. It was hard caring for one dog, and now there were two! Two demanding dogs in the household! Having a Great Dane was an expensive affair. His food supplies alone would burn a hole in our pockets. But Perundevi turned a deaf ear to all my appeals. Instead of cooking for the dogs, we decided to feed them Pedigree.

  All seemed well until Blackie refused to touch Pedigree. Like our dear departed Baba, he turned out to be a fussy chap when it came to food. He would retch and pass bloody stools. Luckily, it wasn’t hard to find a vet in Mylapore. His name was Varun. He told me to keep Blackie on a diet of curd and rice for a few days, but the vomiting resumed after six months. He then suggested Pedigree mixed with crushed biscuits. Blackie ate, but developed a skin disease. Rice and eggs didn’t work; rice and chicken worked for a while, but Blackie hated the local chicken. We had to buy canned chicken imported from Germany that was available in Varun’s hospital.

  If – on the days I was unable to make it to the hospital – I served Blackie some locally available chicken, he would take one sniff and walk away. Will a tiger eat grass even when it’s starving? No matter how hungry he was, Blackie had to eat like a king. Soon enough, even the German chicken stopped agreeing with Blackie, and both dogs developed skin infections.

  Varun suggested we quit Pedigree and try balls of rice, fish, potatoes and carrots. The making of said dog meal is not as easy as it sounds. The dogs had to be fed the mixture twice a day. The rice, the vegetables and the fish had to be boiled and cooled before the dogs could eat them. The fish had to be boneless. We had to ensure that the larder was stocked with fish, meat and vegetables at all times. And our dogs knew how to demand their chow, so we’d better have it ready when it’s supposed to be!

  We finally settled on a diet of Pedigree and boneless shark. Bony fish made the pets bleed. I had to buy the shark from Nadukuppam where I once spotted a small variety of turbot, which is also a boneless fish, and much cheaper than shark. If one shark cost me a thousand bucks, four turbots cost me a hundred. Baba was content, but Blackie took one disdainful sniff and moved away, highly offended.

  My dogs kept me on my toes. I had to take them for their morning and evening strolls, administer their medicines, and like a pimp or a dog broker, find sexual partners for them.

  Now that’s another story altogether. When I saw Baba trying to mount Blackie, I realized that the former had come of age. I chased him away. You, dear reader, may wonder how and why, I, an author specialized in the absurd, the erotic, and the absurd erotic, could do this. I don’t worry myself silly over incest and homosexuality. It’s just that I saw fear in Blackie’s eyes when Baba tried to mount him. Rape is a crime after all, isn’t it? But there was another vexing problem. Chasing Baba away when he had a boner might cause him to fear sex. Varun also had similar apprehensions, so I kept both pets under constant surveillance as a precautionary and a preventive measure.

  It soon became obvious that a healthy Labrador bitch would have to be found for Baba. I wanted a pedigreed dog, a pure-breed, with no history of ailments, especially skin diseases. Finally Jagan, Varun’s twenty-year-old assistant, managed to find a dog that ticked all my boxes. He agreed to oversee the mating. Pulling back Baba’s foreskin, Jagan stroked his organ till it was hard enough. Then, he made Baba mount the bitch. With gloved hands, he kept inserting Baba’s organ into the bitch’s opening. There was an assistant filming both dogs making whoopee. Taken aback, I asked, “Are you making animal porn in my presence?” They informed me that the bitch’s owner demanded proof of the mating. Who could be so horny as to want that? I had no idea.

  A lot of money rides on the dog-breeding business. A Labrador pup is priced at ten grand, so if a Labrador bitch has a litter of ten, the owner can make a handsome profit. This, I suppose, was the rationale of the video. The only downside is that Labrador pups are gullible and can hence be easily lured away by strangers.

  Jagan’s efforts were futile as Baba seemed to be stronger than the other labradors and even his dick was enormous. At one point, I thought that Jagan himself would turn into a male dog. The bloke was so keen on thrusting Baba’s organ into the bitch. An hour later, exhausted and disillusioned, Jagan told me that such was typical of first attempts, and he left.

  4 – The Arrival of Baba I

  I had no room for dogs in my life until I met Perundevi. One rainy night, she changed everything. I woke up to the shrill cries of a pup. Perundevi rescued it from its misery and brought it home. The pup took to us at once. We named her Baba. During the ten years of her life, she played guardian angel on four legs to Perundevi. If I raised a hand to Perundevi, that hand was in danger of being caught between sharp jaws, but if Perundevi raised a hand to me, or even whacked me over the head, you wouldn’t see even a muscle twitch. We never put Baba on a leash. We thought it cruel.

  In coastal towns, the sea-facing front would be overrun with garbage. In Nagore, the western part of the sea-facing town is the low-caste colony where corpses were cremated. Destiny usually conspired to ensure that I lived in a shithole that was decidedly downmarket. In Chennai, I lived in Chinmaya Nagar for a really long time before moving to Mylapore, the southern part of the city.

  Come the monsoon, and Chinmaya Nagar would turn into a swamp. During the torrential rains of 2005, sewage from the neighboring Cooum River invaded homes. The sewage was tolerable when you consider the fact that even the contents of the two backed-up toilets spilled over. Worse still, a blockage in the underground sewage conduit caused human excreta from the toilets in the homes above ours to enter our place via the bathroom pipes.

  Our flat was on the ground level of a multi-storied living space. Chunks of dirty yellow turd swirled around our ankles. Groaning and howling in despair, Perundevi clambered onto the bed and remained huddled there with Baba. She climbed down only after two days when the gray water had receded. Using the toilet was out of the question, so she ate sparingly – a couple of biscuits and a few spoonsful of water. My stomach was yet to be tamed. It was hungry as a starving wild beast, so I made some garlic curry and steaming hot rice which I ate with relish, seated at the dining table, surrounded by shit.

  I ate heartily because there was a toilet on the terrace that could be used. Perundevi refused, arguing that whatever went down that toilet too would find its way into our apartment.

  The power remained despite the rains. This was miraculous, but also dangerous. One day, there was front-page news of an electrocution in Kilpauk. The man had been trying to turn off the mains because his house was flooded. I wonder how and why politicians are spared from such miserable fates.

  Even as the level of the shit-ridden water was rising to my knee, I busied myself with the writing of a novel that was being serialized in a Malayalam weekly. I took the handwritten
chapters to a barely functioning cyber café, got them typed, proofread and e-mailed to the translator.

  On the streets, the sludge was waist-high. There were naked electric cables lying in the storm water that posed a serious threat of their own. Jala samadhi was guaranteed should anyone get sucked down an open manhole. The water was teeming with snakes of all sizes and appetites. If I rant anymore about my pathetic circumstances, my critics will accuse me of wallowing in self-pity or call this my attempt at obtaining belated commiserations.

  Several families flew the locality, seeking refuge in the homes of unaffected kith and kin. That was not an available option in my case. As the water rose, I kept shifting my stack of books to a higher place. They ended up on the loft. There was also the minor concern of having to transport a hydrophobic Baba on a dinghy. If the water rose any further, we would all have to head for the terrace unless we wished to drown.

  The realization that a number of people had abandoned their pets and scooted from the scene in these circumstances filled me with nothing but revulsion and disgust for the human race. My friend in Thanjavur, a writer and a human rights activist, had a Doberman called Chief. The dog had to be tied as it compulsively tailed its owner. Once, he left the dog untied in his haste to drop me off, and the creature opened the gate and did a three-kilometer run all the way to the bus stop. When this very friend was transferred to Chennai, he rejected Chief to the streets like the day’s garbage, a plantain peel, chewed betel, a bubblegum wrapper, and left town. Chief was four years old then.