by Ryan Lobo
‘Yes, sir,’ mumbles Bencho, not elaborating on his specific duties.
‘Is he … better?’ Arjun asks.
Bencho doesn’t know how to answer.
‘Come, wash your hands and let’s have breakfast,’ Vinita says, heading in the direction of the dining area, followed by Abhisek and Lata. They enter a small garden near the kitchen, where a table has been laid out under an awning.
‘How is the factory, Abhishek?’ Iyer asks as they settle themselves around the table.
‘Better than before, Uncle.’
A servant appears, carrying a pailful of coconut chutney. He serves everyone, walking clockwise around the table.
‘Delicious! Perfect!’ Iyer cries, tasting the chutney. ‘Try it, Bencho,’ he says.
A cook serves a platter of golden dosas shaped in triangles in the traditional Tamil way, and Bencho examines everyone carefully before taking a bite, careful not to break any etiquette. The first dosa disappears. Iyer feels that he has eaten sunlight, the delicate fretwork of rice flour melting on contact with the functioning side of Iyer’s mouth.
As the dosas become one with him, Iyer begins to recount his adventures, telling his family about rescuing the boy from the trucker named after – and surely sharing some qualities with – the evil emperor Aurangzeb.
Arvind and Bencho listen with rapt attention and Vinita giggles from time to time, but the rest focus on their food. Breakfast is nearly over when Iyer launches into the convict story.
‘So the boat was full of prisoners, and instantly I knew I had to save these poor fellows. What fault of theirs was it, I thought. So I shouted out to the khaki monkey who—’
‘Still the stories, eh, Uncle?’ Abhishek pushes his plate away, smirking. His mother shoots him a warning glance, which he ignores.
‘Stories?’ Iyer asks.
‘Yes,’ he says, chuckling as if recalling a pleasant memory. ‘Like when you’d give away your money, and my father’s money too, because someone had spun a good yarn about how much they needed help. Like that old con man who tried to get you to sign the factory over to him. Remember?’ he says, laughing.
‘Abhishek,’ warns his father from the head of the table. Abhishek looks tempted to continue but thinks better of it.
‘We should leave, Bencho,’ Iyer mutters, trying to stand but finding his knee somewhat stiff and non-cooperative from sitting down too long.
Arjun’s wife looks at him, willing him to say something, but he looks down at his banana leaf, unable to rise.
Emboldened further by the lack of recrimination, Abhishek launches another salvo.
‘How much money is this chap making off you, Uncle?’ Abhishek says, indicating Bencho.
Iyer feels his palm clench into a fist when Arjun rises to his feet, shouting at Abhishek to leave the table.
Already embarrassed by his own outburst towards his fool uncle and his father’s inevitable reprimand, Abhishek decides that obedience would only mean further humiliation. There is only one course to take, he thinks, which is to keep on going.
‘We know what happened to you at the home, Uncle,’ he says. ‘We know they thought you were crazy, just like we did.’
‘Take it easy,’ Bencho says.
‘Oh, you don’t think he’s crazy?’ Abhishek says to Bencho. ‘He’s Bhīma, is it? He’s a warrior? You believe that, is it?’
‘He has travelled so far and has been so happy to see you. And he’s a scholar, he has read and reread the holy texts for years. And yes, sir,’ Bencho adds, feeling more courageous and looking Abhishek in the eye, ‘I believe him, sir.’
‘Ah, really. Did he tell you about his days when he owned a part of this company?’
‘Enough, Abhishek, enough,’ his father says, slamming his fist on the table. Abhishek bows his head, incapable of more disrespect, and silence reigns. It is so quiet that Iyer feels he can hear his tooth throbbing.
‘Tell it, Abhishek,’ he says, his shoulders drooping. ‘Tell the story.’
Arjun turns away. Bencho shuffles. The awkwardless is heavy and low, bowing everyone’s heads, shrinking their lungs, forcing them to hold their breath.
‘My uncle here, who is so much better than everyone else, has treated me with nothing but contempt. He has created problems for me, for all of us, by managing to lose his birthright share in this company, by giving money away to thieves and con artists every day, and by bringing all sorts of unsavoury types,’ – he stops and looks pointedly at Bencho – ‘into our home.’
‘He believes strongly in justice, sir, and compassion,’ Bencho says.
‘And alcohol,’ Abhishek says.
Iyer doesn’t move, but everyone else looks away. Bencho swallows a gasp.
‘This “great brahmachari” was an obnoxious drunk. And my father had to cover for him.’
‘Talk to me,’ Iyer says. ‘Not to him.’
‘The truth is, he destroys everything he touches. And no matter what we tried to do, he did not stop. He does not stop. He cannot stop. We had to have him declared insane just to save ourselves, but here he is again. He turned out to be too crazy even for a home full of crazies.’
Iyer’s lips tremble but he keeps sitting, a thousand-mile stare boring into the sāmbhar, which has turned into a miniature swamp with horned serpent-like entities swimming in its depths.
‘You want the truth?’ Abhishek asks. He has endured the breakfast by crafting a sentence that he is now longing to deliver. Abhishek delivers it with relish: ‘He was an alcoholic asshole before. Now he’s just an asshole.’
Iyer’s forehead wound begins to weep, a little blood breaking the scab. It trickles into an eyebrow. He doesn’t move to wipe it away. He looks like he’s never going to move again.
Vinita reaches over and presses a handkerchief to Iyer’s forehead. Iyer makes to rise from his seat, his toothache now throbbing loudly in his blood.
‘He has never apologised. He has never said “sorry” even once to my father, who has dedicated his life to preventing us ending up in the gutter. Never! Not once has he had the decency to say “thank you”,’ continues Abhishek. ‘The family knows I’m right, they just don’t have the courage to agree to his face. Cowards.’
Arjun stares at his son across the table, but Abhishek does not look back, knowing that this would be the only time he would ever get the chance to speak his mind.
‘How much are you making off him, Bencho?’
Iyer leaps across the table at Abhishek, knocking him backwards into his chair. With balletic control, his knees hit Abhishek’s chest and knock his chair over backwards. As they fall, Iyer straddles his chest, pinning his arms down with his knees and grabbing his throat.
Arjun runs around the table, grabbing Iyer by the shoulders as everyone else looks on, horrified. Iyer is taut, unmovable. Abhishek’s face has turned red as he struggles to breathe.
‘Let him go, Lalgudi,’ Arjun begs, shaking Iyer’s shoulders as his son’s face takes on a purple hue. Iyer sobs, releasing Abhishek and slumps down, exhausted. It’s over as quickly as it had begun.
Standing over the gasping Abhishek and adjusting his coat, Iyer looks down at him, feeling a deep regret, a physical pain: a sorrow that rises from the earth and wraps around his heart.
‘My dear boy …’
He reaches down to help Abhishek up, but Abhishek strikes his hand away, still trying to collect himself. Turning around, Iyer looks at the faces of his family: they look unsure, hurt, shocked.
‘I am sorry,’ he says, his chest contracting. ‘Forgive me. For everything.’
Iyer reshapes his Brylcreemed hair with his fingers and walks towards the door. Lata and Vinita rush to Abhishek, helping him to his feet while Arvind sits openmouthed in his chair, not believing what has just happened. Bencho takes Iyer’s arm and Iyer leans against him, pausing.
‘I am living out my destiny,’ says Iyer to his family. ‘Forgive me for it.’
At the main entrance, Arjun places his han
d on Iyer’s shoulder, stopping him. He pulls Iyer into an embrace.
‘Thank you … Bhīmaji,’ he says.
Though no more words are exchanged, Iyer leaves feeling relieved and lighter. If he had looked back while walking away, he would have seen Arvind, Vinita and Arjun standing by the door, looking out after him and Bencho.
The Holi crowds that had been gathering in the morning are out in full force now. Bencho and Iyer walk past the effigy of Putna, her head a mud pot painted with fangs and eyes. The giant wheel has begun turning, and shrieking children fill its carriages. Iyer is oblivious to the chaos around him. He raises his hand to cup his throbbing jaw. Seeing this, Bencho excuses himself for a moment and sneaks off to the sweet-seller, who is ladling out sweetened milk from a large pot boiling on the side of the courtyard. Taking the remains of a ball of opium he’d saved in his pocket, he crumbles it into the milk.
‘Here, sir,’ Bencho offers, taking a glass himself and giving Iyer one. ‘Drink it, sir. It’ll soothe your tooth.’
As Iyer drains the glass, both he and Bencho get drenched from above. A gang of children burst out, hooting from a terrace before running away, cheering. Bencho and Iyer look at each other and Bencho smiles. Iyer grins too, the bhang beginning to take effect. Warmth flows through his limbs, replacing the aches with a feeling of gentle bliss.
More children rush towards them with coloured water and sprinkle them with dyes. Iyer notices an old man chuckling in delight, and is surprised to observe that it is himself.
A lightness takes over his body from the opium, and something else as well. Iyer shakes his head and smiles, recognising the something else as the feeling he had felt when Arjun had held him.
Gasping and wiping off the dye dripping from his face, Iyer feels that he has been awoken from the horror of wakefulness and taken into a pleasant, rainbow-coloured dream.
20
Shading his eyes, all Iyer can see are toothy faces looking down at him from the rooftops. A little boy darts around the corner and squirts him with a water gun.
‘I am sorry!’ shouts Iyer to no one in particular, and feels even lighter. A cackling old man pours a bucket of yellow dye on him from a rooftop; Iyer turns his head to receive the shower. Bencho, in the meantime, has spotted the sour-faced girl whom he had shoved earlier. She’s a peculiar yellow colour now. Red and blue fairy lights on the giant wheel flash on and off, outlining the figure of a gyrating man with a soft drink in his hands.
A dance has begun by the Ferris wheel. A group of boys dance like Bollywood actors to a song playing on one of their cell phones, hips thrust forward and hands on their heads. Iyer watches them from under a peepal tree, its branches spreading out over a temple pond.
He sees one of them rubbing colour on a woman by the giant wheel, letting his hands stray towards her chest. He sees her cover her chest with her arms and walk away. He considers intervening, but his will to fight has been lessened considerably by the blissful fug enveloping his senses. Perhaps she doesn’t need him. See, she’s walked away and nothing untoward has happened. He looks at the man, who looks like he’s trying to laugh it off to his friends. Then, egged on by them, he calls out to the woman. She doesn’t turn back. He walks up to her and puts his hand on her shoulder as his friends hoot and cheer. He starts pulling her towards him.
Iyer feels like he is watching television – one of those scratchy newscasts shot on a cell phone – as he sees the men crowd the woman, one pulling off her scarf.
Iyer looks at the man’s face, and as he watches, his head develops scales and his hair is sucked into his scalp, revealing a bumpy skull covered in scars and sores with two indents, as if horns have been broken off his head.
‘I see you!’ says Iyer, looking for his staff.
He sees other creatures in attendance, darker forms: a hunchback with three arms, a hairy Rakshasa with protruding fangs and scales on its face, and a thin, ape-like being with long arms that end in hooks, diseased and bent over.
‘Bencho,’ he cries, ‘where is my staff?’ Seeing a water-gun nearby, he grabs it instead.
Though his limbs feel loose, Iyer runs towards the boy now trying to feel the woman’s breast and yanks him away from her, flinging him to the ground and placing a foot on his neck. Aiming the water-gun at him, Iyer pushes on the plunger, showering him with red dye. He watches him as his scales dissolve in the blast, leaving behind a gasping, stoned human.
One of his friends punches Iyer, knocking him down. A crowd surges forward, sensing entertainment, and Iyer watches their arms morph into tentacles, scales forming over their faces. An elbow hits his head and Iyer tastes blood. Someone grabs his legs and drags him through the mud. He struggles to keep his face out of the muck with his hands, walking backwards as it were, bruising his palms on the ground. They turn him over and start throwing dye and mud at him. Bencho runs to join him but is no match for the excited crowd, who hold him away from Iyer.
‘Why have you forsaken me, dear gods?’ Iyer says, looking at the distorted reflections of the crowd, blue tears flowing up his face, into his eyes and onto his forehead. ‘You can take the masks off,’ cries Iyer, and is punched as the mob twists and turns him in the muddy slush, cheering.
Horrific creatures of all shapes and sizes surround him. ‘I see you. I see you,’ he shouts, and above its minions, the monstrous form of the demoness Putna comes to life: the giant wheel revolving behind her, her gyrating figure alive with malevolence. The Ferris wheel begins to turn at this point; something is not oiled right. A screech rents the air – the sound of metal on metal. The fairy lights blink, outlining a figure that seems to be offering the crowds the soft drink he is holding, his hips thrusting wildly.
The mob surrounding him laughs, ‘The old man hasn’t had enough yet.’
The constable, who had been enjoying his Holi (for when there is too much to keep an eye on, you keep an eye on nothing) and had rather hoped to feel up a passing woman himself, sees the fracas and looks into it out of curiosity, wondering which drunk, drugged fool had got himself into trouble this time. He stands with the crowd, laughing, till he realises the mud-caked figure on the floor is Abhishek Sir’s uncle. As he can’t risk being pulverised by the crowd himself, he does the next best thing, which is to run off and return with help.
21
When Arvind and Abhishek arrive to fetch Iyer, he is out cold, watched over by a distraught Bencho.
‘He must have had too much bhang,’ Abhishek says, lifting him into the car and hoping he doesn’t get too much mud on it.
‘That crowd would have killed him,’ Bencho says, annoyed at Abhishek.
‘It’s only bruises. He needs rest, that’s all,’ Abhishek says, looking away from Bencho, ashamed of his earlier outburst.
Arvind gives Bencho some money and tells him they’ll take Iyer back to the home in the car, and to get his boat fixed and to go back in it himself. He thanks him sincerely for taking care of his uncle.
Iyer sleeps through most of the journey from Allahabad to Benares, his eyes swollen shut. Though his whole body aches, Iyer feels strangely elated. Word of his exploits has travelled, and there is quite a crowd at the home to receive him when he reaches it. Even Mala cranes her neck out over the balcony to watch, cursing him once or twice out of habit. As Iyer is helped up the stairs to his room, Khanolkar seizes upon Abhishek, and after offering unctous gratitude for Iyer’s safe return, he asks a question to which he receives just the reply he wants.
Khanolkar purchases a long length of chain and a large Godrej lock, which he uses to chain Iyer by the ankle to his bed. The chain is just long enough for Iyer to reach the private toilet in the next room, though one leg stretches out horizontal to the floor when he squats.
When Dr Krishna visits, he questions the use of the chain but is told by Khanolkar that it is at the request of his family, and that it is for Iyer’s own safety, and would Krishna want to be responsible for him escaping and getting himself killed rather than having some so
rt of restraint? On his next visit, Krishna brings a dentist who extracts Iyer’s broken tooth, pulling it out with a pair of pliers after Iyer swallows several ibuprofen tablets. Visitors are banned, and Iyer is left to his healing and sedatives. He sleeps for most of the day, waking only eat, bathe, be medicated or receive long lectures from Khanolkar about the importance of dying in peace by the Ganges, steeped in faith and prayer, without which nirvana or a decent rebirth would be made impossible. He asks for Bencho but is told that he caught a virus on his return journey, and is also recuperating.
Khanolkar calls for a meeting with his residents with the objective of taking precautions to prevent Iyer from escaping again. ‘This is the last time I want to deal with this madman going out and getting beaten up. Soon they will follow him here and beat me up.’
‘He can open his eyes now, and most of his wounds are healing,’ Krishna says.
‘And the bastard is probably looking at the window to run off again,’ says Khanolkar.
‘He will bring ruin to all of us, for sure. Hundred per cent,’ adds Mishra, sipping noisily.
‘Sir, if I may …’ asks Krishna, raising his hand.
‘Who is capable of handling a madman such as him?’ mutters Khanolkar, his voice growing shrill. ‘I am at my wits’ end.’
‘If I may … sir!’ asks Krishna, using the last traces of his midwestern American accent to gain attention, raising his hand again. Rising to his feet to gain control of the conversation, he addresses the gathering, ‘Gentlemen, I think I know what to do.’
‘Yes, what?’ snaps Khanolkar.
‘Where did he get that accent?’ Mishra says sotto voce to Khanolkar. ‘Duty-free?’
‘All madness has influences, and our friend is a prolific reader. Is that not so?’
‘Yes, he reads all kinds of books.’
‘So first, we get rid of all his books. They’ve messed with his head.’
‘I propose we burn his books. Or he will find some way of retrieving them.’
‘Can’t you just prescribe a pill to calm him down?’ asks Khanolkar, not entirely comfortable with the idea of doing away with someone’s possessions, as he may run the risk of being asked to pay for them at some later stage.