Fairy Tales at Fifty

by Upamanyu Chatterjee

  Trees, the road, a ditch, fields of sugarcane, the moon obscured. A pre-dawn nip in the air, the sudden, startling clicking of some night insect to distract him for the moment from the squealing of the rats at their feeding. He put on his clothes. They felt stiff and unclean. He could feel the sting of the bite below his Adam’s apple. He pulled out the rag that did for the lid of the fuel tank, lit a match to its frayed ends, waited for it to catch, turned, picked up his bag and staggered off. He was a good thirty metres away when the truck exploded.

  ANGULIMALA TILL FIFTY

  For thirty-six years, off and on, with fading, inconsistent intensity, Anguli saw his fairy godmother in his reveries and his dreams. He saw several others too, but she came to him most often, and easily, welcomingly. At times, in the dreams of the first few months, Satte hopped out of the burning truck to accompany her, bleeding to death from the knife wounds and the rat bites and yet smiling with lust, strolling along beside her, so proud of his potbelly, like a businessman with his mistress promenading on the Mall at Mussoorie, sometimes proprietorially handing her his bottle of hooch to carry, leaving behind on her sari a smear of his blood. She didn’t seem to mind him and beaming, walked straight towards Anguli, bearing as always some gift in her hand, a tin of rasgullas or a leather belt or the bottle of hooch itself.

  The hooch was of little use to him—he hardly ever drank. Her other presents too he could have done without. What he missed of his past, though, acutely, was the pleasure and love on her face in the act of giving. A year into the job that he had found as a mechanic’s chhokra in the garage on the fringes of Sravasti, that longing of his exploded in his face when, putting away in its secret nook his gold necklace because it chafed against a bugbite at his throat, he—absentmindedly caressing and smoothening out the paper nestling in the jeweller’s pouch and, remembering another life on another planet, a schoolroom in a verandah and the hint of a woman in the shadows of an interior—tried to read the Hindi written on it. The world stopped ticking. The paper, a guarantee slip, gave him the buyer’s address in Bengali Market, New Delhi.

  ‘What’s the route for Delhi, Aslambhai? Down to Lucknow and then west to Agra and beyond? And it’s far, what, seven hundred kilometres? Or more?’

  Aslambhai didn’t even look up from the dysfunctional carburettor that had occupied him all afternoon. Within weeks of working with him, Anguli had come to learn that the more intently Aslambhai seemed to be examining an object under his nose, the more likely that his mind was reliving the sex of the night before. Anguli would have to be patient and wait for him to descend. Even though that wouldn’t help, for Aslambhai, being a man of few words, didn’t answer questions that did not increase his income.

  Five weeks later—when Aslambhai was getting ready to drive down to his village, south-east of Fatehgarh, to spend the fortnight between Id and Diwali with his family—drive down in what Anguli had come to consider to be his, Anguli’s, car and yet leave him behind to tend to his, Aslambhai’s, silly shop—the adolescent tried again.

  ‘And what’ll you do down there in Fatehgarh for a fortnight? Fuck my wife? No, you stay here, Anguli my chhote ustaad, because you’re being paid to understand the business.’

  Anguli didn’t react; he understood that Aslambhai spoke loosely, used certain words only in a manner of speaking, for he, Anguli, received no wages at all. For the last one year, he’d worked from eight to eight, seven days a week, in return for sharing whatever Aslambhai ate and used, for bedding down in the front portion of the shack while Aslambhai snored and growled at himself in his sleep at the back. The boy had absolutely no expenses; and no money either, he’d lied when the matter had come up during his second month at work. Aslambhai had brought a slut home after shutting up shop; Anguli’d first watched and then stripped and jumped on top of her even before the mechanic had finished tying up his pyjamas. The slut and Aslambhai had both been more taken aback than anything else. The extra that she’d demanded the mechanic’d had to pay for because Anguli, pulling up his underwear over his drying spunk, his eyes wide with outraged innocence, had defended himself: ‘I’m a pauper! You give me no salary!’

  His haul from his inaugural murder he guarded as secretly as his past; no one in his new life, not even Aslambhai, had had a glimpse of either. The boy was on the run, that much was clear to the mechanic, perhaps from a father who beat him to death three times a week; Aslambhai had no wish to learn the details, they would be revealed in time, he felt, when Anguli’s past caught up with him. Meanwhile, he had many pluses, the boy—he worked well, he kept to himself, he made the chai and cooked the dal, he ran the place. Aslambhai knew that Anguli hid things in unexpected nooks and that he regularly changed his hiding places, but that was fine too, some sort of game, no doubt, for the adolescent. He didn’t steal, at any rate—that is to say, in one year, the mechanic had missed nothing, even when he was away for a week driving Maqboolbhai the trafficker to Sultanpur and Allahabad and beyond.

  That year, a fortnight before Id, the trafficker asked Aslambhai to drive him down to Lucknow so that he could catch the flight to Bombay. He was to stay a month in Sharjah and Karachi and return after Diwali, he said.

  ‘Something’s up,’ announced Aslambhai on his return from Lucknow, smiling with pleasure at his own curiosity. ‘Maqboolbhai has asked me to redo the car, change its colour, the upholstery, number plates, everything.’

  Maqboolbhai had every right to; it was his car. He parked it at Aslambhai’s because it was less conspicuous at the garage and more convenient for departures that left behind no trace. He had several other cars at home. He had several homes as well, one at Maharajganj, a larger thing at Gorakhpur and something else in Allahabad; Allahabad was the most respectable, with a wife and children who went to school and everything. Though he flitted about amongst the three and Aslambhai helped him to, the trafficker was most often in Maharajganj because of its proximity to the Nepal border.

  Anguli came to consider the car to be his because of the love and care that he lavished on it in the two weeks preceding Id. He drove it every morning to the painter’s and stood over them till its colour changed from dove grey to an ultra-Islamic green. The seats became blood red, the indicators and brakes began to work. And at night, he, at last sleeping well, started dreaming of himself in its driving seat, stretching to his left and opening the passenger door to let his fairy godmother in, and she sitting down sinuous, smiling, with her right thigh so outlined in her pink crepe silk sari.

  ‘No, I was thinking, Aslambhai, we could go down together to Fatehgarh and then, while you spend time with your family, I could just slip down to Delhi and meet my people. I’d return well in time, of course, to pick up Maqboolbhai from Lucknow after Diwali and we—the three of us—could drive back together pyaar se.’

  Of course he didn’t get a reply.

  Aslambhai had decided to leave at dawn on Saturday. Anguli woke up at four, boiled once more the milk, made chai for both of them and when the mechanic, groggily sitting up in bed, had his head bent over the glass, hit him hard on his skull with the cranking rod of the Ambassador and kept on hitting him till the blood and bone and glass and chai were all some muck on the floor. By five-thirty he’d drunk up his tea and the leftover milk, stripped Aslambhai of his clothes, wrapped his shirt around what remained of his head, dragged the naked body to the car and, before lifting it into the boot, just to see how it felt, chopped off with the large kitchen knife the little finger of his left hand. Leaving it to drain on the hard mud of the courtyard, he cleaned up the floor around Aslambhai’s cot. While searching beneath the mattress and in the tin trunk for the mechanic’s wallet and the rest of his money, he saw through the doorway an early crow swoop down and take the finger away.

  In the unrecognizable, good-as-new Ambassador, with the corpse and his money, and the implements to give him an indecent burial en route, Anguli left Sravasti a little before six—unlike Angulimala—never to return.

  The next thirty-s
ix years of his life passed simply. He lived on the road for almost two decades and killed fourteen people in that period. He lost count of them; keeping score was pointless for one who had little to win or lose. For he lived plainly and his objectives were always clear and for the immediate future: take your time to find the route to Delhi; enjoy the drive.

  Slowly, in his mind, Angulimala and his inflated achievements retreated to that far country to join the others: Bakra and his mother, Jayadev and Satte. The imagined world merged with the real, folktale with fact, good with evil, he treaded the middle path on which nothing surprised him.

  A post office. A postcard.

  I hope that you are in good health. I am well. I saw your house in Bengali Market. It is very large. I saw the servant whom I used to see in Agra. He didn’t see me. I didn’t meet you because I don’t know. I have no address to give you. I live in a green car. I’ll come again. Please don’t tell anyone. Pranaam.

  Twelve months later, at roughly the same time of year, after the third killing, Anguli visited Bengali Market again. He parked in School Lane and was locking the doors when he felt a hand on his arm. His fairy godmother’s servant, swarthy, yet more feminine than her, with that look in his eyes that was wary, almost respectful, but knowing too, and ready to be willing, said,

  ‘How long we’ve waited for you. I recognized you on your last visit but watched to see what you’d do. Since then, Memsaheb’s asked me to be on the lookout for a green car.’

  Silent most of all his fairy godmother’s house was, silent, spacious, a rich man’s abode. No men in it though, none who behaved like a man. His bed was so soft, so white and clean, in it he was dead to the world as in a fairy tale. He spent three or four days each time and slept through the entire visit, ate and slept. They hardly ever spoke. She sat beside him at the dining table, observed him and monosyllabically refilled his thali. Each time, he ate for the whole year.

  ‘I’m almost always here in Delhi from October to mid-December and in March-April. Of course you’re welcome any time but it would be better, no, when I’m here? I’ll tell your father when next I see him that I’ve met you?’

  Full of pride and joy, he drove her down to Khan Market and they opened a joint savings account in Bank of India. At Das Studios, he got some black-and-white passport photos done for his driving licence. Out on the highways, he had survived till then with bribes and Aslambhai’s licence with his snapshot in place of his victim’s.

  No questions between them. No who are you, who am I.

  He usually left well within the week. He felt more at ease in the car, needed to be on the move so as to be on the run. In parting, she gave him gifts that included stuff from the grown-up world, pills for indigestion and fever, packets of badaam and kishmish for his hunger, a key to the fat lock on the main door of her house.

  ‘And in case I want to get in touch urgently?’

  Anguli shrugged his shoulders and smiled embarrassedly, as though she’d asked him why he killed people. ‘There’s a dhaba, Raadhe Shaam Hotull, about five kilometres south of Jabalpur on National Highway Seven. I drop in there every now and then.’

  Owners of dhabas, garage mechanics, local policemen, the attendants at the petrol station, the keeper of the keys of the most convenient brothel, wherever he went, Anguli befriended—but without meaning to, almost unconsciously—the right people. He found the world to be a friendly place. A lift in the car and they’d get talking. He was not the most communicative of persons but they were calmed by his calmness of manner, the clarity and contentment in his eyes. Heaven is right here, all about you, in these fields of sugarcane and on this road upon which, three kilometres ahead, some fool is just waiting to be killed.

  ‘How much from here to Satna and back?’

  ‘Satna? I don’t know, it’s far. Back when? Extra two hundred rupees overnight charges.’

  He was peace-loving and thus not much of a negotiator. For customers whose faces he liked, though, he could be generous. He tended to prefer the inter-city bus depots to the railway stations, travellers by bus seemed somehow nicer and more needy of his help. And then, of course, there were days on which he did absolutely nothing; he cleaned the Ambassador, listened to the cricket commentary on his transistor radio, got a haircut and had his jowls and armpits shaved, slept the afternoon away on a charpai in the sun, drank twenty cups of chai at the dhaba beside which he had parked the car and set up temporary residence. For move on he would. Every six months or so, just when the dhaba owner had gotten used to leaving his livelihood in Anguli’s care and himself disappearing for a couple of days, the long-distance taxi-driver would stow his meagre belongings in the boot of his Ambassador and drive away. He felt better alone in the car than when supervising the feeding of truck drivers.

  Over the years he wandered in a serpentine trail, endless, up and down and across the enormous northern plain. The range of his travels was not restricted by the considerations of language; he did pick up some Bengali in the east and Marathi in the south. The closest he got to home—though it had been a while since he had thought of it as such, it having been replaced in his heart, like a delicious secret, by the silent house in Bengali Market—the closest he got to Bakra and his world was Dhaulpur and the farthest—oh, he travelled far. His rootlessness took him as far east as Jamshedpur and Dhanbad, north to Ambala and the dust of Dehradun, and south to Nagpur. Sometimes he returned a year or two later—on the wheel of time—to places and regions that he’d felt comfortable in only to find that things had changed completely: the road had at last been widened and the dhaba did not exist anymore or the faces at the police chowki were all new; some ancient property dispute had finally been settled and the no-man’s-land where he used to park had been fenced off; a Shiva temple had popped up to threaten to engulf the walk to the hand pump and Sundari at the brothel most unfortunately had been set on fire by some demented telephone repairman. No matter; suffering was all.

  ‘I haven’t seen you before around here.’

  ‘Oh, I got in last week, sir-ji. But I was here some years ago and then had to go away to Bhopal on some work. And then I continued to drive around there. Everyone knows me here. Your predecessor and I were good friends.’

  ‘That car yours?’

  ‘Of course. It’s all I have, sir-ji, it’s my house, my family. It was an abandoned shell on a rubbish dump in Bareilly and I created it.’

  ‘Papers?’

  ‘Of course.’ Rummage. ‘Here, sir-ji.’

  ‘These look forged.’

  ‘Of course they are, sir-ji. I don’t have an address, that’s why. I paid a good sum to have them made and then each time someone looks at them, I pay some more. But that’s fine, I’m fine.’

  ‘You’re a funny guy, to live in a car.’

  ‘You treat it well, it doesn’t let you down.’

  ‘And you see things when you’re driving people from place to place on the highways.’

  ‘I see the road, sir-ji, I’m a good driver.’

  ‘But no one sees you, or what you’re up to.’

  ‘They see me, sir-ji. They see me, stop me, ask me how much I’ll take for a ride to Kanpur.’

  ‘How many number plates do you have?’

  ‘Over the years, six or seven, sir-ji. One for each state.’

  ‘You’d better come back with me to the police thana. Let’s go.’

  ‘It’d be an honour to have your presence in my car, sir-ji. And a second honour to meet the hierarchy! You’ll always kindly let me know when you need me to drop family members to the railway station? I meet your superiors, I won’t be able to concentrate on being of exclusive service to you, sir-ji.’

  The corpses of his fourteen victims, most of them, were never found; no body, no crime, just nine more missing persons in a country of a billion-plus. Three others were burnt beyond recognition and Aslambhai’s and the Bhopali dancer’s discovered as skeletons. Amongst them, only one was a police constable; Anguli respected the law. The cons
table had been a boor who’d never treated those he exploited with any respect. En route to dropping him at Jaunpur, Anguli had hit him on the head, stripped him, tied a couple of rocks to his ankles and dumped him in the Gomati just beyond Sultanpur. Then he’d driven all the way west to Delhi and, in a very low mood on the outskirts of Bareilly, burnt the beloved green Ambassador into a charred and blackened thing.

  He was more taciturn than ever with his fairy godmother because of that same low mood; his spirits did not lift even when she bought him a spanking new sky-blue Maruti van to replace the Ambassador; in fact he felt worse because he’d’ve liked to have bought a new car with his own money—of which of course he’d never have enough. On the last evening of his visit, he tried to rape her but couldn’t get it up, beat her black and blue, almost snuffed the life out of her. And yet before leaving, he told her still, barely breathing form: ‘I love you. If ever, ever you need me, I’ll be at one of those places that I’ve mentioned to you over the years. I don’t change.’

  He didn’t, but the world moved on. He matured of course, ripened towards becoming rotten but too slowly to notice, for his rhythms didn’t alter. Since he lived in the present, he had little sense of the passage of the years. He had no knowledge of his birthday, of how old he was. He exhibited no greed, people found him odd, pleasant but odd. He ate, drank, lazed, fucked, smoked ganja and charas, almost never took ill, only occasionally killed. He was thirty when, in the bracing cold of January 1989, he fell in love.

  She, had she reached her destination, would have been one amongst several million visitors to the poorna kumbha at Allahabad. She’d been travelling not alone of course but with her husband and daughter. Anguli, on the road shoulder just off National Highway Two between Benares and Allahabad, on the outskirts of Awleshpur, chomping on hot bun-unda in the company of Bichhwa, the oldest love child of that smaller brothel in Maduahdiah and the most promising pimp of that establishment—Anguli had been occupied with thinking about nothing while basking in the sun when an overloaded, overcrowded private bus, with a fierce whistling of escaping air, foundering to a halt just three metres from his Maruti van, shattered completely that winter peace. The stray dogs catnapping in the sun, at those two tyres deflating themselves so earpiercingly, started up and looked about them in alarm. The conductor chhokras, one at each open door, their bodies hypotenuses in the air, hopped off, circumambulated the vehicle, examined its tyres, peered under it and grinned at each other because a breakdown was fun. The driver, more adult and yet grinning in brotherhood, tried the engine once, twice, eleven times, it coughed bronchially but wouldn’t catch. The standing sardines in the bus were glad to ooze out, stretch their legs, air and sun their souls. Those who believed themselves to be mechanically inclined crouched and peered under the bus too. The gluttons wandered over to the bun-unda thela.