Fairy Tales at Fifty

by Upamanyu Chatterjee

  They are a different race. They inhabit a different country.

  Teach them to give instead of grasping. Are you going to do that? Giving is the greatest good.

  Of course. You get back so much more with the other hand.

  Manasa took care to see that the newspaper articles and magazine interviews that Pashupati gave made much of their hospital’s charity to the poor. She was never at a loss for words to explain their philosophy. It’s a state-of-the-art institution the gates of which are open to all. Everyone is welcome to receive the best medical care. You pay now or later or never. Let your soul be the judge of how well we’ve taken care of your body.

  Shivani took almost a month to get out of hospital and return to Bengali Market. Manasa was beside her almost every day to keep a watch over her recovery and her—conscious and unconscious—tongue. Even glass partitions have ears, so it was with her eyes that she asked her sister when, on the third day, she floated up into consciousness, You have a name for your demon lover?

  Everyone was curious, naturally. Equally natural that it was her husband’s prying that Manasa was most apprehensive of. Fortunately, he disliked New Delhi, the city, its weather, its people and left her to herself to suffer them. Magnum the girl-man though was a far less serious intrusion.

  As always, she was both in awe of and terrified by the world of her adopted mother. Shivani, whom Magnum was meeting for the first time, whether unconscious or, later, awake and silent, appeared just as formidable. Whenever they looked at Magnum, the sisters always seemed to know what horrible things were going on in her mind. That rendered her powerless. And yet the incident with her aunt mesmerized her, was so up her street; sex and violence were what she dreamed of night and day, innocent sleep having forsaken her ever since when, at the age of sixteen, she’d discovered the wonder of testosterone. She’d been injecting herself in the thigh twice a week since then, vicious needle-pricks that provided their own peculiar pleasure. Hurting oneself was fun of course but, dreamed Magnum—as she held the metal railings of her aunt’s hospital bed and, sliding her legs under it and locking her knees, leaning as far back as her arms would allow, keeping all the while her elbows aligned with her hands and her entire body from heel to head rigidly straight, repeatedly and rapidly hauled herself up as upright as she could, over and over again, nonplussing everyone present in Intensive Care, both the dying and the for-the-moment healthy, by counting aloud her special pull-ups—but beating someone else to near-death would be heaven. And why stop at heaven.

  For seventeen years, she’d felt quite quite alone.

  She had no friends. No one around her could answer her questions about male muscle or exercise routines or about life. Everyone at home avoided her or she them. Sulekha’s one eye drilled remorse and reproach into her vertebrae no matter where she stood in the flat and no matter how many doors she shut between it and her back. And Nirip was never there. She hated him for displaying his distaste for his father and his half-sister by choosing to study in places that kept a thousand kilometres between him and them. And Manasa upstairs was simply too forbidding and not at all the kind of person that one dropped in on uninvited. The couple of times that Magnum had wanted to snoop around in her apartment in her absence, she’d taken the key from Shaamo. The necklace of tiny bronze bells over the doorway had tinkled musically on her entry and then two enormous lizards had scampered off the sofa and, grinning and croaking, scurried up to her in welcome.

  She is really quite extraordinary, murmured Manasa to Pashupati, glancing at Magnum eyeing the genitals of the clip-clopping horses at the Republic Day celebrations, and her unconventional talents can best be utilized at the office by giving her problems you don’t care to see solved. And someone must watch over her all the time, someone wise, kind, all-powerful, all-forgiving.

  I really don’t have the time, you know. Why don’t you use her in your land-grabbing operations? Pashupati’s hooded eyes flickered once in Manasa’s direction to see if she objected to his assessment of her work in the service of God; she didn’t seem to, but he knew better and turned back with faintly sinking heart and, ignoring a phallic rocket trundling by on a truck painted camouflage-brown-and-green, waited for her to take revenge on his system.

  But would she be willing, ji, to lead the dance in a trance before the idol? Every evening six to nine, on the pavement, blocking traffic, a nuisance for all to see? But it’s an idea, dancing is good for the violent and mindless.

  What’s that white thing over there?

  Oh that? That’s the Baha’i temple, Madam. Very pretty, like a lotus. And so clean.

  Regrettably, it had not, noted Manasa, been able to inspire its surroundings. Every day, from the windows of Intensive Care, she’d seen the slum that occupied a large chunk of the acres of space between Pashupati’s hospital and Nehru Place and the Baha’i temple to its south; far below her, she’d observed every morning the residents of the slum scurrying off right and left with their bottles of water to shit wherever they could find two square metres of open space; she’d said to herself and the snoring Shivani, That is not correct. That is not the first thing that the recuperating should see to recall them to life when they leave their beds and drag themselves to the window. It’s sad that I spend more every month on the sand for the toilet of my cats than those poor people down there earn. God will punish me. She then knew what she had to do with the crisp thousand-rupee notes lining the bottom of the litter on the terrace of her Walkeshwar flat.

  The standard practice in India, when one wants land in areas where it is scarce, is to grab it by plonking down on two square feet of it an idol of one’s favourite deity. Ganesh is very popular on these occasions as a remover of obstacles such as municipal regulations. Local rogues are then paid to dance and chant in front of it every evening, the poor are fed free of charge in droves, soon the local authorities en route to office stop their white Ambassadors before the idol to seek its blessings to extricate them from the jam of the day and the god, thus pleased, reaches out in a few months for the surrounding land.

  Appropriately, Manasa chose as her deity Dhanavantari the god of medicine; she asked the sculptor to give the idol Pashupati’s features. Pashupati was very touched. In return, he allowed Dhanavantari to have a consort. You know, a nurse or something. The contender who finally won surprised and pleased everybody and drew devotees to herself like flies to the votive offerings of coconut- and other-laddus.

  The idol was large-eyed like Durga but balanced slim reading glasses on the tip of her nose. Her office chair was draped in a tiger skin. On her open right palm was poised a mouse the tail of which became the wire that led to a laptop, also open, at her right knee. Her raised left arm held Krishna’s discus in the shape of a CD. At her feet lay scattered, ready to use, a portable phone, a headset and a small satellite. She wore a sort of sari and a carelessly-knotted tie. She was the presiding deity of Information Technology and, therefore, of the future. She had been designed by Nirip and sent by post. He’d christened her Computerwali Bhawani.

  Why does the damn goddess resemble you? was the first question that Manasa posed very coldly to Shivani. Is it because of your divine qualities?

  Keep your sari on, sister. I’ve kept my word, I haven’t seen Nirip yet face to face. Though I’m sure I appear to my son in his dreams.

  With her eyes again, Manasa asked the question that she had posed whenever they’d met over the last several years. And your demon lover. You haven’t told me his name.

  In response, Shivani’s eyes filled with remorse at a wasted life. I appeared to my sons in their dreams but I did nothing for them.

  EIGHT

  Magnum became quite an adept dancer, more accurately a swayer, before Computerwali Bhawani. By that stage of her youth, her day and her week had begun to be marked off less by a clock than by her injections of testosterone and her inhalations of cocaine; life was a whirl through which she, out of sorts and out of sync, swayed rather than walked, smiling at her
surroundings even when she felt most sickeningly violent.

  The rhythm of her days was dizzying; she got her drugs in Princess Street in Bombay and three times a week travelled thirteen hundred kilometers to dance in East of Kailash in New Delhi. She didn’t understand why her father didn’t buy a plane. A plane and a yacht. He’d spoken of them both a couple of times but what was the use of speaking without acting. Action was the real thing, so graceful and sinuous like her dancing before that sexy Computerwali Bhawani. Of course, she danced so well before the goddess because she was her; of that there could be no doubt. Nirip had had Magnum in mind when he’d thought her up. And the unemployed and unemployable who came to pray actually wanted to touch Magnum’s feet but couldn’t because they didn’t want to disturb her moving and swaying and dancing so well.

  Yes, Computerwali Bhawani is the modern eternal feminine because even eternal changes with the times. And you the eternal male in the female, so Nirip had clarified to her in a memorable letter from Pondicherry. The two of you are essentially one. It is your changing form that breathes life into the goddess and imbues her with meaning.

  And her changing form was what Magnum thought about all day and, indeed, was most proud of. The fat around her hips and breasts had certainly decreased and her biceps were now finely outlined; best of all, her gluteous maximus—oh how she loved the sound of it, so chewable—was tighter, encouraging her to strut. Hair had blossomed on her chest and jowls as inevitably as spring and, when in the evenings she chanted along during the communal singing that preceded and accompanied the dances before Computerwali Bhawani, her voice, she felt, was nice and deep and manly. She sweated a lot, more than before, during her exercises and was sure that the smell of her perspiration drew others to her, for she herself found it irresistible. Most wonderful of all, her clitoris had enlarged; she loved to feel it all day.

  For years thereafter, during those long humid afternoons when she was fed up of herself, she would ferret Shaamo the ghoul out, pinch tight the old woman’s nostrils and clamp her hand over her mouth till she, wheezing and gasping for breath, surfaced out of her siesta; tapping her repeatedly on the head, pinching her skin till the welts formed, Magnum would ask her in a hiss.

  You want to see my nice little peanut, arrey-o-Shaamo, it’s growing, Shaamo-oye, you want to chew on my nice little peanut?

  The testosterone, ingested without any medical supervision, caused severe body ache, acute menstrual irregularity, chronic stomach cramps and diarrhoea, insomnia, boils and acne; it also aggravated Magnum’s libido to proportions far exceeding Pashupati’s; excepting him, she fucked every male in sight. She danced with them first and then drained them so that they could barely stand. Every evening she decided on her partner depending on the shades that they wore. I am in a scarlet mood.

  The colours that the dancers wore before the pavement idol were mud-brown, scarlet and yellow. In praise of the goddess, they carried knives, hammers, scythes and other such implements that would prove useful in any encounter with some rival gang. It was not a bad life, to sway stoned to some raucous music in public and hold up traffic and, while swaying, maybe glide into a good street fight that would yet pale in violence—at least for two of them and sometimes three—in comparison with the sex to follow; life could be worse.

  The sex was violent and confusing because initially the unemployed and unemployable all—naturally—took Magnum to be a man, a scion of the family in her churidaar and resplendent kurta, a dancer to be treated with deference. In the bright lights, incense and deafening music, she, by virtue of her social position, led the others in their movements; their eyes continually on her made her feel good. When she smiled at them and felt them up in return, they thought they knew what was what and readied themselves to negotiate when the music was over. In the Computerwali Bhawani Charitable Trust, at the very least, a permanent job in lieu of a blowjob. Instead, they were then bitten, pinched, scratched and abused while being fucked and, at the end of it, paid fifty rupees, double what they got for their dancing. They felt like dirt. She felt great for a bit and then like dirt too; paying them though at least helped her feel better than them. Thus over the months, she surrounded herself with a troupe of cowed-down, sullen, apprehensive lover-dancers. Her gopis, Nirip called them. Sex and violence and landgrab in the service of God, nothing new in the history of the world.

  Pashupati was impressed.

  Not by his daughter, though. I find interesting, he told Manasa, gazing deep into her eyes because at forty he couldn’t jiggle his buttocks with that old facility anymore, the methods by which you’ve acquired land in an area of the city where it just isn’t available. At throwaway prices.

  It’s all God’s doing. And yours. Computerwali Bhawani is Nirip’s idea, he has your brains. She came to him in a dream.

  We must repeat the project in Bombay.

  Of course. Nirip has plans of a never-ending video film of the deity playing twenty-four hours as backdrop for the idol. The goddess visiting a slum and teaching its children how to use a spreadsheet. Kamagni wants to play Computerwali Bhawani in the film.

  In Bombay too, Pashupati envisaged the same structure. A temple in the forefront of things, with idols large and small, music, incense, coconuts, serpentine queues, free food, wet floors, the works, to attract both donations and the poor. And behind the temple, a religious trust that was practically an investment bank for all that money. A nest egg for Nirip and his mother just in case he, Pashupati, found someone else, cut them off. That old fear of hers. Well, always well-founded. But Pashupati was impressed both by the big picture and the details. How smoothly for example the religious trust became, on its upper floors, one very nice private apartment, a getaway place for Manasa from her other getaway places. He had never seen so many potted plants in any one flat. The smell from the vegetation had actually made him feel ill and he’d had to exit quickly.

  Even while feeling ill and exiting, he, the eternal entrepreneur, noted again the droves of the poor, the lame, the blind and the wasted that turned up to eat for free twice a day at the langar of the temple. Within days, one wing of his army—composed in the main of those more competent and criminal-minded amongst Magnum’s dancing companions—was mincing and swaying amongst them to recruit donors of kidneys and other body parts at five thousand rupees per organ. Since he had his own hospital right next door, the whole operation was just so much smoother, a fluid cut-and-paste job with a profit of about three thousand per cent per cycle. Within weeks, in twos and threes the recruits began to be driven in a windowless Maruti van to the operating table and later brought back to the queue with money in the pockets of their rags, scars on their stomachs and a pain in the abdomen that just wouldn’t go away. They complained to their neighbours and advised them not to agree to the deal but the waiting list of donors nevertheless soon matched that of recipients.

  The pickings were easy—the profits staggering in fact—and the risks and criminality of the new racket, by Pashupati’s standards, virtually nothing. He waited a few months to gauge how it looked and meanwhile became delighted with himself at locating land for his Bombay hospital at Khardanda; he set his office of villains to work on the new project and they waited to see whether he would ease himself out of the earlier, less respectable stuff. They felt that he wouldn’t because bahanchod all of it was lucrative. No one gave up a good thing even when he had five of them.

  As always he surprised them. With the setting up of the two hospitals, he had become posher, taken to safari suits and a Mont Blanc in his breast pocket. With a hint of a wrench in his heart for the days that were no more, he gave up robbing cremation grounds and dumping corpses in acid to rid them of their flesh. He retained the blood farm near Jhansi though. He moved his office—created his first proper establishment, in fact—on the eleventh floor of the Bombay hospital and hired respectable, English-speaking female staff to man it. During the interviews, he checked their papers and looked them in the eye to assess their fellatabilit
y.

  I see that you are a talented but tongue-tied young lady. In my organization, you’d have to learn to open your mouth, Manjujee.

  She was obsessed with herself, Magnum, and with those males of her family who were clearly not.

  Even when she was dancing in Delhi or trying to cadge money off Nirip on the phone or being sold pellets of lizard shit in place of hashish in Colaba or recovering in hospital from a devil-may-care overdose or speeding down the Bombay-Pune highway in the new family Audi that she’d simply driven off in or spending a couple of weeks in Arthur Road Jail for having run over some poor sod sleeping on the pavement outside Siddhi Vinayak or pissing in the men’s room in some hotel—that is to say, all the time—she thought about Nirip and about Pashupati, about why they were not impressed with her.

  Without actually doing anything useful, she wanted to be treated as Pashupati’s right hand man and heir, sit in the same car with him in the rear, he on the left and she on the right; they’d get out slowly, at the same time, the doors would be opened so respectfully, hers by the driver and his by the bodyguard, and how everyone would tremble at the menace in the synchrony itself.

  She hadn’t even sat with him, ever, in the same car.

  Nirip did, though, whenever—the occasions were rare—father and son were travelling together to the same place. The son’s brains, the father felt, from time to time needed to be picked.

  What are you up to now?

  Oh nothing much Papa-ji. A bit of this and a bit of that.

  Still avoiding the real world, I see.

  It bothered Pashupati that neither mother nor son liked the trade in organs that he had set up; their silent disapproval surprised him because the business was doing so well and was so respectable. The poshest people were recipients. Foreigners too. Landgrab, kidneygrab, same thing. When he learnt, though, that the purpose behind mother-and-son’s charitable trust was the eventual establishment of a crèche, tiny school and computer training centre for poor children, he was not enthused; even though Manasa adroitly pointed out the substantial tax benefits, he found the project financially to be boring. It has no jaan, were his words. Till Nirip hinted at the way.