Fairy Tales at Fifty

by Upamanyu Chatterjee

  ‘We live—’ Hitching the sliding infant up a notch on her hip, she pointed half heavenwards and half in the direction of the departed train ‘—there.’

  Nirip and Vinayak dawdled about the railway platform till the witching hour. Wilson was to pick them up when they got bored. They had descended from the world of wealth by smelly public transport but saw no need, now that the diversion was nearing its end, to extend beyond its boundaries the novelty of their discomfort. It would be like wearing beggars’ rags to a fancy dress party and then discovering that one would have to go to work in that costume. While waiting for Wilson to call to announce his arrival, they tried the drinking chocolate. They bought Better Eyesight Without Glasses from Wheeler and Co. They invited several other strangers to snacks and tea. They were treated, in turn, to desultory interrogation concerning the motives for their philanthropy and to random pontification on the subjects of wealth, happiness, politics, cricket, the greatness of Hinduism and the purpose of life. After several rounds of tea, it was agreed upon that money was crucial to solving the riddle of the point of the universe because without it, without those coins, cards, notes and cheques, everything—all speculation—fell flat. No beggar ever looked up at the stars and wondered why we are here. Even when his stomach was full, he gazed up at the heavens only to burp; after which he sighed and dozed off, finding in the question of the purpose of life sedative properties as potent as those of a soothing pillow. Even the famous beggars of history, the votaries of austerity, simplicity and self-discipline, Gandhi, for example—and the odd, modern weirdo godman—they could pooh-pooh a life of luxury generally because there was someone hovering around them who would foot the bill. Great men could with an effort of will keep that bill down—no bathing in champagne, no caviar to the general—but they couldn’t wish it away altogether because nothing worthwhile was for free. Everyone agreed that the good life cost money and that the unexamined life wasn’t worth the time and capital spent on it; logically, therefore, one could conclude that the examined life too was achieved at a price—but there of course if, during the scrutiny, one cracked life’s cryptogram, came to terms with the sonofabitch, one got one’s money’s worth.

  In Nirip’s case, ever since he’d discovered a fortnight ago that he and his parents had nothing in common, not even a blood group, that since they were not whom they claimed to be, he himself couldn’t be what, for fifty years, he had presumed he was—that revelation had sent the presumptions of the examined life right out of the window. For, to ask what we are here for and to answer why we have been given a mind, one presupposes that the basic facts concerning the questioner are in order—who he is, for instance, and whether the superfices of his existence are correctly in place, and whether he is content in his skin, with being who he is. Nirip, in contrast, had felt of late more impotent than ever, like a swimmer out at sea who, on coming up for air after a nice long plummet, finds that within a matter of a few mystifying seconds, a slowly-sinking, black wreck of a ship has replaced his pretty boat, that the shoreline has vanished, that above the water—suddenly grey, viscous and putrid—he has for company only hundreds of silent, wheeling pterodactyls in a purplish and menacing sky.

  SIX

  ‘Talk to me, Woodrow Baby,’ muttered Vinayak into his mobile phone while they waited at the main entrance of Dadar TT. ‘This is annoying me. Your Johny Wilson isn’t picking up either his boss or his cellphone.’ For inspiration, he looked up and about him at the midnight chaos of the railway station. ‘The first time in his illustrious career that the faithful is late? Take a taxi?’

  While Vinayak furiously played with his phone to drum up an air-conditioned cab, Nirip noticed a hundred metres away a white Volkswagen Passat cautiously trying to edge past the black-and-yellow Padmini taxis without being contaminated by their touch. Manasa’s car.

  ‘Madam sent me,’ clarified Vibhuti the chauffeur, gliding out and salaaming and holding the rear door open all at the same time. He was one of the old guard, unfailingly masked in courteousness, careful never to reveal his awareness of any palace secret. ‘Wilson is in hospital and couldn’t come.’ His features wriggled embarrassedly in the beginnings of a half-smile, half-grimace, to silently annotate an ‘obviously’. ‘Madam thought that perhaps you might want to go there.’

  An accident apparently. Some sort of hit-and-run after Wilson had finished for the day and was on his way back home to his wife and infant. Vibhuti’s face twitched again to acknowledge the horrid irony of a driver being run over while going off duty.

  ‘Finished for the day? He was to pick us up from the station twenty minutes ago.’ Nirip gazed out of the window at the vegetation all done in and depressed in the gloom of LJ Road. He wasn’t wearing the right clothes, he realized and then wondered whether Vinayak would rather be elsewhere.

  ‘No, no, of course not, I mean, or he could drop you first at the hospital and then take me home, you know, whatever. How bad is he?’ Vinayak turned to address the nape of the driver’s neck. ‘Is he, I mean, dead?’ His look askance at Nirip seemed to ask whether there would be any point in dropping in on the dying in Emergency just to call on a corpse.

  The mere possibility of the driver not being alive any more, the utter unexpectedness, the heartlessness of it, seemed to draw down from the purplish and menacing sky in Nirip’s head the pterodactyls swooping. For the moment he couldn’t even remember when he had last spoken to Wilson, he saw only his bashful smile on the day three years ago when he had shaved off his moustache for Nirip and above those lips the Jurassic pterosaurs pecking at his forehead.

  ‘I don’t know all the details, sir.’ Vibhuti knew them of course but he also knew his place and it was in the front seat of the car with his hands on the steering wheel.

  Home first. Then Vinayak waving as he slipped away in a taxi that he’d summoned. ‘Will you take me or should I call one of the other drivers?’ Vibhuti conveyed through a mix of mumbles, nods and shakes of the head that he’d received no specific instructions and that he supposed that he could, if Nirip so wished, drive him around till he did so.

  Of course the guards at the hospital recognized the car and, as always, shoo’d some patients away to give it pride of parking place alongside the ambulances. Upstairs in the underplayed, high-tension life-and-death drama of Emergency, no one could remember who Wilson was or what had happened to him. Yet Manasa could hardly be wrong. So Nirip asked the attendant who’d escorted him in to rush down and get him the authorization from the Resident Medical Officer to visit the hospital morgue. When, overawed by the responsibility, the attendant had left, Nirip measuredly climbed the stairs to Dentistry on the sixth floor. Sure enough, there at the lift that didn’t stop at the sixth, stood Chintamani, his father’s principal hatchet man, tenderly stroking his moustache while reporting on his mobile the successful execution of some misdeed.

  ‘Show me the body. Take me to it.’

  Chintamani leaped forward to carry out instructions. He always hopped in the presence of people who mattered. With each small, excited jump, his dyed hair bounced on his head like strands being puffed out and sucked in by some bellows in his skull. Every centimetre of him—his thin but stuck out hips, his trousers that he belted closer to his nipples than his navel, the outline in his pants of his penis, permanently erect, that he tucked to the left and that he always seemed to let out of his undies so that it could, as it were, sniff the air and attract the flies—because they did buzz around his crotch—his flattened face, the tiny black-hole eyes, the moustache that sat small and square like the chip of a mobile phone above lips the colour of pink lipstick, set in a slavish sneer, every pore of him exuded rank, fetid servility.

  Waving his phone in the air like a herald to shoo away the invisible unwanted, to clear a path down the deserted corridor, dark save for one flickering tubelight, he hopped away towards the last of the consulting rooms, stopping every couple of metres to turn and half-smile ferally and slavishly at Nirip and half-bow to him, to
thus mutely apologize for turning his back on him and at the same time to invite him to follow his bony, protruding buttocks.

  In the box of a lunch room at the end of the corridor, alongside the aluminium table with its TV, on a stretcher lay a covered form. Chintamani switched on the light and beamed at Nirip in the sudden illumination. The sheet hiding the corpse, realized Nirip in a moment, was the printed bedcover that Wilson had kept in the car to cover the seats with whenever Coolcat wanted a ride or had to be taken to the vet.

  He took off the sheet and let it slide to the floor. With an excited squeak that was part giggle, Chintamani swooped down on it. Meticulously aligning corner with corner and edge with edge, periodically tucking portions of it under his chin, never taking his eyes off Nirip, never ceasing to smile, he began folding it with the care that one would reserve for the finest Kanchipuram silk. The corpse was naked and stank faintly. Nirip couldn’t see the face because of the polythene bag that covered the head and that was tied tight at the throat with a generous length of electric wire. He briefly struggled with the knot and broke his right thumbnail before he could loosen it and tug the polythene off the corpse’s head.

  His intestines lurched. In death, Wilson’s crimson eyes, bulging impossibly, seemed to have grown to twice their size. His entire face was black and swollen with blood. His nostrils had discharged mucus and viscous crimson matter that had caked the layers of Scotch tape sealing tight his mouth. Nirip dimly heard from the bowels of the building the whine and whirr of the lift that did stop at the sixth floor slowly ascending. He half-stretched a hand out to tear the Scotch tape off Wilson’s lips but desisted for a moment at the thought of the pain that he would cause. He gently stroked the black and pulpy cheek. Ice. The wires that had kept Wilson tied down and futilely struggling were still attached—white bangles eating into dark skin—to his abraded ankles and wrists. Nirip heard the rustle of the polythene that had asphyxiated Wilson being folded and lovingly hidden in the layers of the printed bedcover alongside the TV.

  ‘You will not dump the body in the incinerator. You will bury it correctly in the presence of his family. Is that understood?’

  ‘Jee sir, yes sir.’ Chintamani was delighted at being addressed. His dyed hair bounced like a yoyo with the vigour of his assent. Then, dropping his voice to the ingratiating low that would go with the yellowness of his large teeth, thrusting his left wrist out to draw attention to his watch and to its hands having long edged past midnight, squirming with pleasure at the certainty that he would be the first to greet Nirip, bowing of course but also daring to look the master in the eye, he whinnied, ‘May I say you happy birthday, sir?’

  Birthweek, more accurately, for, befitting a scion, a mere twenty-four hours could not contain the significance of the event of his arrival in the world and its celebration. Thus, on Saturday evening, a group of vaguely close acquaintances watched in the family thirty-seater auditorium a retouched print of Johny Mera Naam. Fortunately, Sulekha-di—his father’s ancient, long-rejected keep—had by then got over her periodic, paralysing headache and could emerge from dark seclusion and touch things in the kitchen; in lieu of a birthday cake, cook the halwa that always made Nirip feel slightly delirious, deliciously warm in the stomach and faintly cold directly behind the eyebrows. Although, despite the decades, she didn’t get on too well with the matriarch of the household, Sulekha-di had Manasa-ma’s way with herbs, condiments and spices, seasoning her desserts in the oddest of combinations to produce a savour that lingered for ages—branded itself, as it were, on the taste buds. The halwa that Nirip so loved, for instance, was made of beetroot, carrot, egg, bottle gourd and green moong, and spiced—at least—with vanilla, mace, nutmeg, caraway and fennel. In the earlier decades, Nirip had noticed that Sulekha-di tended to make it once a month, just after her periods were over, but had said nothing about the connection.

  They got on well, they still once in a blue moon slept together and, in general, were careful not to say anything important to each other. Nirip acknowledged that it was primarily the affluence of the family that provided the cushion that made the comfortable absence of contact possible amongst its members despite the physical intimacy and the knowledge that each had of everyone else’s secrets.

  He also acknowledged that neither he nor Sulekha-di—nor any other family member for that matter—could with certainty have named all the people in the auditorium, almost as though the brain behind the party had dialled some digits and ordered first a certain number of guests and then the food. That very unfamiliarity prompted some of them—including drugged, near-lunatic family members amusing themselves by playing the role of unfamiliar guests—to break the ice over their drinks. Thus, while on screen, Hema Malini warbled and cooed to Dev Anand in code in a peppy song to watch out for the cops on their trail, the effeminate man on Nirip’s left turned to the birthday boy and, with a wide, stoned grin, remarked,

  ‘You aren’t drinking, I see but at least you’re partying. Some people I know quit celebrating their birthdays after a certain age.’

  She was tanned, small-eyed and moustached as conspicuously as Freddie Mercury. The whiskers were a transplant, rejuvenated without fail every year with the arrival of spring at Holi. Her short, severely-brushed hair was finically parted in the geometric middle of her scalp. The incongruity between the middle-aged, feminine face with its uncertain, wistful expression and the moustaches out of some junior school dramatic farce gave her an air of being sillily unreal, a ham of the silent film era.

  Nirip did not reply, so she answered on his behalf. ‘But if you don’t know your age because you don’t know when and where you were actually born, you would party all week, all year because any day could be your birthday?’

  At the question in her own voice, she giggled. She had begun to smirk even before she had finished speaking. She responded to herself almost coquettishly, ‘What I mean to say: Do not stop the celebration because you fear growing old. The positive aspects of ageing are too often ignored.’

  And then again, responding for the silent, sulking Nirip: ‘Pity, that. And they are?’

  ‘As we grow older, we become more ourselves, don’t we?’

  Nirip accepted an orange squash mocktail from a waitress wearing a yellow sari with a green border. That was their uniform. The armchairs in the auditorium, alternately crimson and blue, were arranged in semi-circles around round tables. The waitresses, four in number and, as per job profile, professional, presentable, sinful and available, glided back and forth from tables to bar with the canapés and the kebabs that the sated did not touch. After the party, they, the waitresses and their ilk, the barmen bouncers and the crew behind the film projector, would have their own with the leftovers, gobble them down before rushing off to their late-night, special service, homeward-bound trains.

  For years, Nirip had daydreamed of a social festivity in which the rich would tremblingly wait upon the richer—and any mistake, if they goofed up in any way, spilt green tea in someone’s lap or took ages to get another his drink or offered a vegetarian some beef shashlik, the rich waiters would be humiliatingly ticked off, would forfeit a portion of their assets commensurate with the perceived gravity of the solecism, and that portion would be publicly spent on something particularly, ridiculously abasing, buying hundreds of kilos of sand, for example, to line a pet cat’s litter; thus the rich waiters would be made to feel how impotent their wealth was in the presence of the wealthier. Then the next weekend, the richer, more powerful guests would be servers and flunkeys at a party of the even-more-affluent where they too would be similarly demeaned—and so on, a line of progression of systematic degradation, stretching into the blue horizon of the future till the entire world experienced—had both suffered and enjoyed—the sexual power of humiliation, had acknowledged the emasculating force of poverty, how it insidiously invited Fortune to be more and more outrageous. Nirip knew the world of those waitresses and bodyguards, its squalor that gnawed even at expectation, for they all—
Sulekha-di, Chintamani, Vibhuti, Wilson, at different moments in time—had emerged, risen, been recruited, from one quite akin to it.

  Freddie Mercury beside him hadn’t quite done with speaking. Leaning closer and closer, occasionally touching Nirip’s body parts, she courteously prattled on—pausing more often to simper than to breathe—about properties in the hills and down the coast, other rich men’s estates dotting other parts of the country, recalcitrant sons in distant boarding schools, hitting the gym, hitting bad drivers on the road, polo in general and the pleasures of the game in particular when played with Rajasthani royalty.

  Suddenly, when he had had enough of the prattle aimed at keeping interrogation at bay, at winning her interlocutor over, Nirip, smiling into the other’s small eyes, interrupted her.

  ‘I’m going to tell that Assistant Commissioner what I’ve learnt, Magnum, from that reptile Chintamani. That you and your latest bodyguard lover killed Wilson yourselves, tied him to your bed, taped up his mouth, put a polythene bag over his head and popped Ephedrine and MDMA while watching him gasp for air. And all because Pashupati ordered you to, and because after you had made Wilson massage you, he’d had the cheek to want to go and wash his hands. They’ll take what’s-his-name away, the bodyguard lover. Unless. Unless. Unless you help me get the baby back when it goes.’

  Johny mera naam nahin. Dishoom. Johny mera naam nahin. Dishoom. So the film, largely ignored, played itself out. Pinpoints of diamond light in Magnum’s eyes, infinitesimal bulbs in a shiningly black room. Thus Nirip thought of similes to distance and distract himself from the abrupt, dull, determined pain in his abdomen and watched her drugged-out eyes film over with tears of hurt.