Fairy Tales at Fifty

by Upamanyu Chatterjee

  They set up the crèche in the open space between the temple and the Trust. Dozens of beggar infants soon overran the garden and the cement paths. Their parents were always free to hobble around to the rear of the temple and check on their next generation for themselves. They found them laughing, eating, drinking, burping, crawling, puking and sleeping contentedly. The babies and children of all ages were cleaned up, bathed, fed milk and dahi rice, fruit and the khichadi of the langar. Paediatricians from the hospital ambled about amongst them every morning, examining them for worms and polio and rickets and whooping cough and all that kidstuff and giving them shots while they shrieked. Within weeks, in one of the ground floor verandahs of the Trust, Manasa set up a blackboard. Within two months, Pashupati thought the time ripe for the adoption centre.

  A very fine idea, beta, said he, raising his hand above his head to massage in praise Nirip’s shoulder. He then asked Manasa to find for the adoption centre a holy Sanskrit name that, suggesting that the world’s real wealth was its children, would, by its polysyllabic mellifluousness, draw in potential buyers from across the oceans. He saw the Caucasians trooping in in six months; by that time, the babies would be plumper and more fetchingly dark than malnourished, irresistible with that intelligent, take-me-away gleam in their large black eyes. Five thousand rupees to the birth-parents for the child would shut their mouths and maybe even encourage them to procreate some more; the profits per transaction could cross four thousand per cent.

  He looked around for someone brighter and more immoral than his stupid rogues to head the racket.

  You know, someone who can speak to foreigners. Who is that fat young man whom I see on the ground floor?

  He’s just joined us to manage the donations and the whole money thing, what to tell the Charity Commissioner and whether the priests are due an overtime allowance on government holidays, all that. Economics from Chandigarh, doesn’t want to study anymore. I’ve a feeling that his degree is fake. A good boy. We hired him because he was at school with Nirip. Of course he could manage the adoption centre.

  Thus Vinayak joined Pashupati at the tender age of twenty-something.

  NINE

  Despite dancing and twitching butt for months on end before Computerwali Bhawani, Kamagni received no divine help whatsoever to drive her problems away. Indeed, they quadrupled while the world moved on to far more interesting things, abandoned her in the muck of her inadequacies. Her headaches were endless. Her body, skin, her digestion, all that was a mess. She’d tried everything for her acne. She was chronically and desperately short of money. And why the fuck should she have to beg that fat upstart homo Vinayak for an increase in allowance? How come he, in fifteen months, had shot up so high, jetting between Delhi and Bombay and actually advising Pashupati on investments while all that she was doing was dancing, popping, injecting, fucking the unemployable and writhing, writhing in the hairshirt that was her skin?

  The adoption centre did thrive under Vinayak the good boy. He established and kept well-oiled points of contact with several government Departments, the police, Immigration authorities and counterpart agencies in Europe, Australia and the American continent. Pashupati happily became posher. He acknowledged that accepting Nirip’s suggestion to employ Vinayak had been a sound idea and noted with great pleasure that the good boy placed his, Pashupati’s, money in investments with even more care than the solicitude he displayed while placing the beggar babies. Everything that the good boy touched prospered, Pashupati’s rogues included; he couldn’t keep his hands off several amongst them and they cautiously and good-humouredly blackmailed him. Even that he found arousing. The news got around. Pashupati filed it away. It appalled Kamagni. The fat beast was pawing the same rogues whom she pawed but paying them more because he had more. She burned with rage and shame. Their tendencies, his and hers, must appear to everyone to be distorted, funny mirror images of the real thing, but it was only him who was enjoying himself, and Nirip was cruel to send his smug school friend to Kamagni’s world only to mock her.

  And to underscore her inutility. For within weeks of his joining them, Vinayak also took to overseeing the dancers and arranging for them to do more than twitch butt for their daily wages; they soon formed a task force that infiltrated the beggars to keep them quiet and dully happy, distributed amongst them the joints and the low-grade brown sugar and disarmed the parents who were disturbed at not finding their infants at the crèche. They, the parents, were fobbed off by good humour, bad jokes, outright fibs and money, typically a thousand rupees every time they raised a fuss. After a couple of weeks, if they still hadn’t shut up, Vinayak arranged for them to leak their tale of woe, deceit, abduction, baby trafficking and profound depravity to newspaper-walas, police constables and TV riffraff on Pashupati’s payroll. When the noise died down, so usually did the parents, generally of a drug overdose. In memoriam, the others got special khichadi for lunch that day, with raisins and almonds and fried cashew redolent of ghee.

  Vinayak’s business acumen favoured a policy of keeping everyone, within limits, happy. After he had won over, in order, Manasa and Pashupati, he turned his attention to himself and then finally to Kamagni. For her acne, he gifted her the ayurvedic lotion, mainly a blend of aloe vera, myrobalan and cow urine that he’d been using for years for his piles; she was touched but it didn’t help.

  It’s not working.

  Three times a day, apply with cotton wool after soaping your skin?

  Oh. I’ve been having a teaspoon morning and evening.

  It was Chintamani the new trainee Junior Priest who doubled up as night-watchman at the temple who proposed sotto voce that a drop or two of fresh infant’s blood could well be added to the lotion to heighten its potency.

  Baby has the purest skin, Madam-ji. And maximum pure when blessed by Ma Computerwali Bhawani. I take like lightning with my syringe and I say it is a gift for our goddess. No one will worry. My honour to assist you, Madam-ji.

  Four weeks later, he said, We have to be patient, Madam-ji. I’m praying day and night to Ma Computerwali Bhawani to put her shakti in the medicine. Perhaps if we pray together?

  The damn lotion proved efficacious only after she agreed to bed the bastard because, as she pointed out to herself in helpless self-loathing, he was so oily.

  Then one day in April, almost a year after the adoption centre had taken off, Kamagni just about killed before the others one couple who simply would not be reconciled to the disappearance of their child. With one of the dumbbells that she had begun to carry everywhere with her, she bashed first the head of the mother in and then turned to the screaming father. The attacks took place in Vinayak’s room. The good boy fainted. All three, the couple, one comatose, the other groaning, and Vinayak, were rushed to the hospital; they were placed side by side in Intensive Care. That day in April, Kamagni found that she liked showing people their place with her own hands.

  The incident outraged everybody. Kamagni liked that too, being the centre of attention. There was a spring in her step, she began to strut about, she bought two new aftershaves. Even Pashupati found it hard to kill the story. Nirip was summoned from Manali.

  I’ve been saying so for years. Kamagni is unstable, she should be locked up, he said. He suggested a bodyguard, some moustached man in black who would not so much protect Kamagni from the world as the world from her. Kamagni approved of the idea but wanted females too, in tight clothes. Arab world leaders have them, she pointed out. They—of both sexes—will exercise and jog with me and be panting and smell of sweat when they say sir to me.

  Don’t you want them to wear black sleeveless so that you can see armpit stubble all the time as well?

  The plan failed because they couldn’t find a bodyguard, male or female, who was both professional and yet not taller than Kamagni. Manasa summoned her to give her a talking to. I will not have the precincts of the Trust defiled by beggar’s blood, do you hear. Kamagni did hear, all the while swaying like a boxer on the balls of her feet.<
br />
  When you are at home, said Manasa to her son Nirip, she behaves well, you know that.

  Yet she could hardly ask him to become an ayah for his unstable, putative half-sister. Manasa was troubled. Kamagni was not her child but her responsibility nevertheless. So was Nirip, even though he was fine by himself. Too fine, perhaps that’s what irked her. Not his father alone but the entire world was criminal, she knew that her son knew that; and she thought it improper of him to use the criminal sources of the family wealth as a pretext to stay away from it.

  Criminal and unequal everything in the world was, even the animals knew that; had the laws of human society been as sensibly drafted as those of the jungle, why, there would simply be no crime. Pashupati naturally expected all his employees to behave like criminals; when he caught them out, he dealt with them by the laws of the jungle.

  It was Vinayak who brought him the news that the pharmacist in charge of Stores at the Khar Bombay hospital, a thin and jolly rogue by the name of Samtani, had started on the side a trade in expired drugs—You repackage and reuse, it’s flawless, fabulous—and was no doubt diddling Pashupati Inc. out of a good sum of money.

  No wonder that in the past few weeks the visitors in the corridors have looked more and more like touts. Details please, asked Pashupati without batting an eyelid. Compared to the other sources of his past income, the potential new line of business appeared practically holy.

  Vinayak, looking tired, admitted that business could be absolutely terrific and even get out of hand. Expired medicines were hugely big, so were counterfeit drugs and the entire fake medical instruments industry from the humble stethoscope to the tricky stent, the enema to the heart valve. You recycle used equipment, you charge for new. Flawless, fabulous. Then, glancing at Pashupati’s features, he hastened to clarify, Not for use in our own hospitals, of course.

  He looked fifteen years older than his age and yet happy. Venality has its virtues. It seemed to run in the blood, coursing through the system, like a second life-nourishing source, of anyone who worked long enough with Pashupati. We could streamline our management, continued Vinayak, waving his plump and grimy hands at the windows to encompass the wider world of wickedness of which even Pashupati was only a dutiful cog, in which, for instance, during those weeks in the history of the nation, the papers had been joyously full of the Chief Minister openly persuading the cement businesses of the region to contribute to his private Trust—a leading statesman scoundrel, an ideal for several million of his countrymen; Pashupati himself, in preparation, had for the past few years been donating to the major political parties and looked forward to the day when, with a snap of his fingers, he too would command those toadying captains of industry to open their coffers, would arrive, a criminal, a ganglord, with all the power of the state behind him.

  We could streamline our management, tighten up the commissions that are paid to the physicians who refer to us patients who don’t need surgery. And the superintendents of several government hospitals too who are on our payroll and divert patients to us. Vinayak seemed to tick off on invisible fingers the diverse responsibilities of Pashupati’s subordinate staff. Plus to monitor the payoffs to the Transplant Committee for timely permission to transplant kidneys. Some more stalwarts of the grave-robbing team could be moved to the morgue to pluck out the stuff that we can use again, pacemakers, eyes, gold teeth. The future, sir—Vinayak looked Pashupati in the eye once to see if he saw how much he, Vinayak himself, wanted to be part of it—is import substitution. Why bring in drugs from abroad when we can manufacture them in our own backyard? What’s in a name?

  He respectfully wriggled his eyebrows at his boss to underscore the rhetoricalness of his question. In response, at the thought of the future, Pashupati sighed. He so wanted his son to be in it. Instead, he had this fat boy who, though competent, was hardly family. And he had his daughter.

  She apparently now carried a gun. In New Delhi’s Defence Colony Market the other day, so his staff had reported to Pashupati, Kamagni’d thought she could teach some South Delhi Punjabis a thing or two about car parking. They’d broken her collar bone and taken her Beretta.

  He did find Nirip’s rejection of the family businesses disappointing and unreasonable. In Pashupati’s daydreams, Nirip’d have nothing to do with any of the criminal stuff. Naturally. He was to advise and to look good. Should they operate a franchise and open other hospitals in Calcutta, Bangalore and Hyderabad, that sort of thing. He was to wear suits and attend meetings and shake hands with CEOs. Sign things every now and then with a Carran d’Ache fountain pen. Try and dine with the top lot in the Chambers of Commerce. Have his business card stapled to the hundreds of hampers that Pashupati’s office sent out at Diwali. Be seen laughing and running the Bombay and Delhi half-marathons with the vedettes of the film world, the captains of industry and the Sports Minister. In return, he could command whatever salary he dreamed of, take over and decriminalize whatever he wanted.

  Of course the criminal stuff would continue to happen under Nirip’s nose and all around him; when Pashupati said that his son needn’t touch it, everyone would nod and understand that that wouldn’t prevent it from touching him, from surrounding and engulfing him. The head tout for expired sulfa drugs, for instance, would salaam him with a smile whenever he stepped out into the corridor from his tenth floor office. To avoid him, Nirip’d have to have a loo made just for himself in the corner of his anteroom between the kitchenette and the treadmill. Sin never sleeps, though, and wrongdoing does not agree to confine itself to just two floors of a building. Thus, soon, amongst the routine events of a typical week, one patient would die after a pacemaker with leaking batteries was put into her; another of hepatitis C because of the medication stuffed into him; a third, a child of ten, contract jaundice from a glucose drip. Nirip was expected to stride through a world of such events while shaking hands with CEOs and continuing to look good. Retribution would not be awaiting him round the corner, only more touts.

  Even when a thousand kilometres away in Manali, looking at how apple jam was made, or even farther away in Chilka, feeling blue at seeing Olive Ridley turtles dying like suicides on the shore, every moment of the day, he was ready, depressed but ready, to go to jail, to hang, to own up to all the villanous acts being done by others all around him. He was only waiting to be accused by an upholder of the law. But they were in it too, all of them. Every moment of the day instead his stock rose like the day temperatures in April.

  He’d proposed to Manasa-ma that the Computerwali Bhawani Trust should break into the organic and health food market, sell massage oils and chyavanprash, cane sugar, digestive churans, ayurvedic toothpowder, glycerine soaps and mango pickle all blessed by the deity. The faithful would be eternally grateful. No matter that after some years of her existence, the goddess had begun to resemble an austere, handsome fish. The project was a roaring success. Manasa oversaw her own handpicked team headed by Vinayak. Nirip then suggested that, to win the attention and approval of international funding agencies, the Trust launch a mobile school of theatre therapy, a Maruti van on the sides of which would be painted in the colours of the rainbow a makeshift stage with curtains and footlights; it would drive into the heart of a slum every evening, late, and set up shop with a PA system, tape recorder, a couple of hand-held microphones. Lo and behold, the driver and his passengers, a group of usually three women and several other unemployables, would matter-of-factly begin their song and dance and chatter about drunkenness, layoffs, payoffs, inflation, scandals, headlines, urban angst—in brief, the lives and hard times of their audience. It was invited to join in, to talk about itself, modify a punchline, add a witticism with a local flavour. The therapy had no ulterior motive; Nirip’d only wished to give the unemployables a chance to be paid to create impromptu art through group catharsis. Pashupati paid no attention till, eight months later, the public service caught the eye of both BBC and Newsweek.

  Multiply the Maruti vans, he ordered. After the show they c
an distribute free some expired medicines.

  Nirip dropped by every now and then usually to meet Manasama, Kamagni and Vinayak. If the city happened to be New Delhi, Manasa-ma beforehand told her sister to honour her part of a bargain made twenty-five years ago and quietly scat. Which she did, Shivani, sinking again into her other lives, her rebellion—muted, impotent, adamantine—against the austere sorcery of her lineage, returning to her other lovers and other sons, her gender disguises, roving the country in the clothes of men in search of other men, not to bewitch and suck the life out of them but to love them. Giving fulfilled her.

  He should marry, said Manasa to her in parting.

  Leave him alone, she snapped back.

  TEN

  Leave me alone, Nirip echoed Shivani when Manasa urged that he look at some nubile girls from rich families. Look at them yourself, Ma, if it makes you happy. He really did make her wonder about his sex life.

  That first involvement with Sulekha had been revolting enough and the others had not been much better. Manasa’d been particularly worried two years ago about that divorced, no, abandoned, Primary School teacher in Jaipur, practically a prostitute. How much money Nirip had given her. And then that matronly Indian Airlines stewardess had looked older than Manasa herself. Apparently, he paid them so much to compensate for the violence. Worse, according to Shaamo the ghoul, the women were probably a front because why did he, when in Delhi, wander at night with Vinayak in Paharganj, Connaught and Fatehpuri?

  The nubile girls from rich families did interest Pashupati naturally. He’d fuck them first and let Nirip know which one he should marry. The Chanchals, who thought themselves to be an industrial family but were in fact a band of petty merchants in decline, rather keen to have the wealth of Pashupati Inc. buttress their fortunes, offered their daughter, actually their daughters, in marriage to his empire. Pashupati liked the look of them, fucked them and then agreed to accept the second as his daughter-inlaw. Fuck off, said Nirip to the proposal. Pashupati liked his son’s spirit. At last someone with spunk in the family. His, naturally. Very well, Magnum then. She’d always wanted to be male, she could for one evening play bridegroom, where’s the problem.