Fairy Tales at Fifty

by Upamanyu Chatterjee

  He took a careful step sideways to the left. Okay. He paused to steady himself. God, how the fuck did the blind manage. He was poised to try a second step when a hideously sudden and startlingly loud rat-a-tat started up in the neighbourhood and almost made him lose his balance. Kalashnikovs, gang war, he guessed. Immediately, from various locations in the vicinity, like bottles containing the din being popped on cue, a dozen, twenty, machines triggered off, at differing volumes far and near, the same dreadful racket. They wouldn’t stop. Ah, diesel generators, he corrected himself after a moment, an entire settlement, suburb, whatever, that ran on diesel, like a modern parallel to a fairy-tale village made entirely out of chocolate.

  Power cuts. So he could be anywhere in India. Mosquitoes as well. Cup runneth over. When one couldn’t hear a mosquito because of a deafening racket in one’s ears, it made its presence felt with a couple of love bites on the neck. Doubtless an ego problem. With his second step, his left foot hit a wall. He turned and placed his back against it for support. Cold, almost damp. Perhaps used by all the males of the area for the purposes of urination urination. He would gladly have relieved himself against it but he needed first to get his sausage out of its sleeping bag. Stop regressing in your language and your habits, he admonished himself sternly, you’re bloody fifty. Be that as it may—was that okay?—he’d have to think both wisely and young to find a way out of this mess. And without wetting his pants. The old at heart droop, the young wiseowls slither along the wall till they hit upon an escape route.

  He almost stumbled again when first his bound hands and then his back crept sideways into nothing. Instinctively, he stepped forward, into his prison cell and away from that possible way of escape. What was it? An open door? A chute? Was he in the loft of some sort of barn? It hadn’t been an egress to the outside because he had sensed beyond it, even in that half-second, only a dark closeness, just more exhaled air held captive. Undecided, he turned about once, twice. Perhaps he should locate again the wall’s edge and scrape against it the cord around his wrists. He felt tired and wanted to sit down but that would increase the pressure on his bladder. He took a step forward. Nothing, no wall. Another. Just the floor. He paused to steady himself. Hold on, orient thyself. Too westernized, that’s what he was. Concentrate, you arsehole. He’d turned about once clockwise and then half-turned a bit anti before moving forward, that is to say, retracing his steps. Though correctly speaking, to retrace one’s steps, one would, he supposed, have to be facing the same direction. The wall couldn’t have receded, surely.

  The diesel generators, all of them, stopped as brutally as they’d started. He really couldn’t have been certain of how long they’d been on. The silence felt like an extra enveloping layer, pimple of plastic to see him through his travails, cautioning him to be careful about his movements and his thinking. He waited. Step One would be to avoid reflection on anything that could remind him of his bladder. No mulling over bloated egos or ballooning inflation or stream of consciousness or yellow rain or any other piddly little issue. In the quiet, he could hear some of the birds again. The others seemed to have gone away for a leak. ‘Oh lord have mercy on me and unzip my fly and take out my peanut and point it down the path of righteousness.’

  The lord responded with a soft but distinct, cultured, appreciative chuckle. Inappropriately for a resident of such high places, the sound emanated from somewhere near the floor to the front and right of Nirip. To the comfortable everyday silence and his English-comprehending kidnapper who, it seemed clear, was not averse to applauding the comic in atypical situations, Nirip said politely in Hindi, ‘If you could undo my hands and remove my blindfold, please, I need to go to the toilet.’

  ‘Number One or Number Two?’

  ‘At my age, I’ve forgotten which is which. When one was younger, one did both in one’s pants. Ah, the days that are no more.’

  ‘I’m blindfolded and my hands are tied as well. I’ll see what I can do with my teeth.’ A very young voice, a male speaker of Hinglish. ‘I scrabbled around on the floor earlier to see what I could find that could be of help and managed to locate what felt like a very large, dead rat.’

  ‘Dried up or a recent departee for its heavenly abode?’

  ‘Wettish. Perhaps a bladder burst.’

  ‘There’s a window somewhere. Wherever the birds are, where that din of the generators came in from. If we could locate it, smash it with . . . a kick or two, I suppose, then we could try and use the broken glass to cut ourselves free.’ It sounded ridiculous. ‘Or I could just let go in my pants. What did you do?’

  ‘I always go for the smashing idea.’ Nirip heard the leg slither, a sigh of effort issue from a body rising to its feet, the slap of slippers crossing the floor without hesitation, knowing where to go, the sharp crack of metal hitting wood, the jangle of shards of glass raining on to the floor. He waited, listened to the tinkly scratching of fingers scrabbling amongst glass, after a moment slippers wetly smacking the floor, was distracted for an instant, as a figure paused behind him, by the perfume of hairoil tickling his nostrils like a tendril. A hand held his wrist, a second began to saw centimetres alongside it. He was rendered speechless, benumbed, at the proximity of freedom. Seconds passed. He heard his deliverer’s breathing, felt on his shoulder blades his exhalations and, with the shard of glass cutting through one by one the rounds of cord, slowly, painfully, let his wrists revel in the increasing slack.

  ‘Thanks. Great. Thanks.’

  Flexing his fingers, rotating his wrists, feeling them for abrasions, palpating his forearms and elbows, sensing the blood in his arms tinglingly begin to course normally again, detachedly marvelling once more how much humans assumed for granted the blessedness of their ordinary states of being, Nirip took a long moment to wrench off his blindfold and thrust the rag into his pocket. He blinked. Bluewashed walls. He shut his eyes against the dusty, matinal, indoor luminousness. The window, small, of raw wood, amateurly irregular and unfinished—and now broken—was to his right and fairly high up, at shoulder level. He turned around to thank his rescuer and somehow was not surprised to find himself alone.

  The high walls were not entirely and evenly light-blue; from the floor till about three feet up, all around the large and unfinished barn-like room, maroon paan spittle, old, fading and fresh, expectorated by a hundred thousand mouths, splotched and resplotched the blue as though to recreate, even indoors, the mayhem of gunfire. A once-upon-a-time classroom perhaps, for against one wall leaned, like a man who has lost all hope, on an easel with one leg, a small, faded, cracked, chipped and defaced blackboard. The date in Hindi on the top right hand corner, almost illegible, read 18 January 2003. The roof over his head, Nirip noticed even as he glanced about for an appropriate section of maroon-splotched wall to relieve himself against, was unfinished; it stopped in an even line—but abruptly, as though the head mason had suddenly jammed on the brakes during construction—some three feet short of the wall with the broken window; alongside the latter, rusted metal rungs embedded in the blue brick and lime led up to the birds and the sky.

  ‘Up here, sir, the toilet.’ Cheerfully, in Hindi.

  Obediently, Nirip ascended the rungs.

  The terrace was a twenty-by-twenty plain cement floor that, without parapet or railing or wall, ended on all four sides in a fall into nothing. His interlocutor was an extremely large—gigantic—male adolescent, plump and happy to be plump. Half a dozen men on charpais and on mattresses on the ground, lolling about in a lazy, luxurious, off-duty, Sunday-morning manner, sleepily fucked their rifles. They were all scruffy. Each head had a halo of either mosquitoes or flies. Nirip only half-registered the sunlight, weakened, made grey, by diesel fumes, the buzz and swarm, like a curse upon a people, of a million insects, the overpowering stench of the effluvium of the commune.

  ‘Where to piss, please?’

  The giant beamed. His personable simian face glowed with delight at being in on life. He was happy to be of help, to be alive, to gos
sip, share a joke, waste time. He waved both arms expansively about to encompass all creation. ‘Oh anywhere . . . We usually untie our pyjamas at the edge of the roof . . . oh, any side . . . some like to face the sun, others the gram panchayat . . . I personally prefer the view across the landmines . . . one should first just check of course that there isn’t anyone down there fishing . . .’

  There wasn’t, not at that hour of the morning. Nirip chose the sunny side—a decision not in keeping with the gloom of his character but then the circumstances were unusual. He sighed opulently, shut his eyes, opened them and luxuriated in exhaling repeatedly with relief. The giant stood beside him and watched operations with benevolent concern. Beneath them, two storeys down, lay dormant, made inert by its viscosity, the filthiest open drain that Nirip had ever seen.

  It could have been called a moat, some five feet wide, around the school building cum blood farm; its water, black, noisome and sluggish like ooze, buoyed up the hundreds of torn and faded, pink, blue, white and transparent sacs of plastic that contained the neighbourhood’s old and fresh garbage. On them in that rural silence Nirip heard his piss patter. The stench that the drain exuded—like vapour—was almost visible in that morning light. He wondered why he’d been tied up and blindfolded; he didn’t see anyone with the guts to escape by jumping into that thing.

  ‘If it has crocodiles,’ beamed the giant, ‘they’d be full of shit.’

  A new man, Nirip zipped up, stepped back from the edge and looked around at the shining country. The weak, soothing, still-cool morning breeze wafted up to him, in beguiling on-off snatches, other kinds of stink—fresh buffalo dung, rotting molasses, distant carrion, smouldering plastic, burnt gunpowder, chemical fertilizer dumped therein by the wiser world.

  Single- and double-storey constructions, incomplete but inhabited, with windows without panes, their brick exposed like dried wounds, their dish antennae crowning their roofs like the apparatuses of enormous dragonflies, similar mainly in their air of having been abandoned immediately upon their essentials having been erected, many of their side walls given over to painted advertisements for astrologers, computer courses, call centres, massage parlours and medicine men who could cure the vexed problems of homosexuality, premature ejaculation, marital infidelity and husbands who couldn’t be bothered to get it up—such constructions dotted the neighbourhood. A wide dirt track, rutted, muddy, a sort of main street that, immediately after the school building, turned indecisive, veered to the left, then right, then left again, also served as the principal hang-out joint for off-duty cattle. Beyond it, behind the buildings that diminished in size and prosperity the further they receded from it, from the hovels of mud at the edge of the village to the sludge-brown streak of river in the near distance stretched the fields rich with scrub and weed and landmine.

  ‘I thought we had acute drought in this part of the country,’ mused Nirip.

  ‘And flash floods,’ clarified the giant consolingly, ‘They go hand in hand like husband and wife. Of course in our culture the husband walks ahead. Drought is that arid married man pining for the lifegiving moistness of the flash flood, his better half. Nowadays no doubt when the wife walks ahead, it is mainly because the husband asks her to because he wants his path checked for landmines.’

  He was a head taller than Nirip, the irrepressible giant. His open face, lively, perennially childlike, gave his age away. It clouded over for a moment when he had to introduce himself. His name was Anjaneya Ankurit Shithole. He didn’t like it. No one ever pronounced the surname with the correct, soft dental t, no one knew that the h was silent or sensed the acute accent on the e. How was he ever going to become CEO of Microsoft with a name like that? He intended to change it—in fact, had already rechristened himself twice, once two years ago before his Class Ten Board Exams and then again the previous weekend while enmeshed in his own kidnapping. He couldn’t decide between Aman Edwin Moses and Ehsaan Kapoor.

  ‘I see that the choice is awesome.’

  ‘I like that, sir, if you don’t mind. Ehsaan Awesome Kapoor.’

  Waving a squadron of large flies away, Nirip asked whether the dried red all about him on the floor and on the branches of the straggly peepal that struggled up out of the drain was exclusively paan spittle or whether some of it could also be blood.

  ‘Possible. Some routine caste spat no doubt,’ surmised Ehsaan Awesome cheerfully. ‘They rarely kill those they kidnap though. The police in general don’t like it. Unless in a case like yours they’ve been specifically asked to.’

  Making Nirip jump once more, as loud and as sudden as before, the diesel generators started up again. Immediately, as though on cue in a bad Hindi film musical, in several buildings, men and a few stray women began to emerge from various doorways onto the rooftops. Many carried the accessories of devotion—censers of incense, copper lotas of holy tapwater, garlands of marigolds, tiny caskets containing vermilion. There were soon a dozen neighbours within conversational distance of Nirip and Ehsaan the awesome giant. A pert widow in white came up to the edge of her rooftop twenty feet away and scowlingly demanded something of the two of them. She couldn’t be heard, no words could be exchanged because of the racket. In response, Ehsaan Awesome respectfully mouthed an invitation to her to come and fellate him anytime of night or day babe.

  A tractor, even noisier than the diesel generators, lurched into view at the point where the track careened off towards the fields. It lugged behind it a laden trailer that bobbed and bounced over the potholes like a ghoul dancing his way to his victim. The gunny sacks therein wobbled sideways and up and down in a manner that recalled to Ehsaan Awesome a Punjabi athlete’s boobs in a hundred-metre dash. More scruffy men slumped alongside the sacks that the giant explained were stuffed with landmines ready for delivery. The men had rags wrapped around their heads and faces but did not look as sexy as Lawrence of Arabia. With a groan and with its left front wheel some centimetres away from the outrageously spiralled horns of a seated bull, the tractor stopped just outside the blood farm. In reaction, only the animal’s tail continued tirelessly to flick and whisk those annoying insects away.

  ‘Too early yet for them to carry you off.’ Thus cheerfully did Ehsaan Awesome reassure Nirip. ‘The puja isn’t over yet. Must’ve run out of milk. Would you like some tea?’

  ‘When did I last eat or drink something? What day is it? Would black tea be possible? At my age God knows I don’t have the capacity to digest lactose.’

  ‘Ah, you believe in God? Both my father and Rimjhim Dada stopped on 18 April 1986.’ Ehsaan Awesome momentarily sobered up in memory of that horrible year. ‘Sharjah. Pakistan won. Javed Miandad hit Chetan Sharma for a six off the last ball of the match.’ Lost in remembrance of the collective agony of a nation having lost that war, he ignored the muted rapidfire explosions of rifle butts knocking on, trying to knock down, two floors below, the front door of the blood farm. ‘Every year my father maintains a vow of silence on the anniversary of the Fall at Sharjah. And fasts as well. Imagine, no meat or alcohol or cocaine for one whole day.’

  The scuffle and stomp then of feet in the building, the clink of gunmetal against ladder rung. The number of scruffians on that rooftop jumped from six to thirteen. Without a word, with just a scowl at Nirip and Ehsaan Awesome, Scruffy Dumpy jabbed in the crotch with his rifle butt the supine Scruffy Shagged- out. It was his way of saying good morning. Scruffy Amitabh strutted up to the north edge of the terrace and contemptuously spat some paan blood into the stinking void. Scruffy Supari, standing immediately in front of Nirip and yawning with the uninhibitedness of a large feline, looked vaguely familiar. As though to aid Nirip’s memory, he took off his green-and-yellow-checked bandana and scratched his crown with a vigour that sent the lice flying about like the Air Force when it is showing off on Republic Day. With his head uncovered, his crafty rat’s eyes, his helicopter nose and permanent stubble, Nirip recognized him to be the rogue whose face he had first seen at the window of his father’s BMW second
s before it had been shattered. It seemed impossibly far away, a frame stuck in his mind from some film seen a long while ago. He’d thought him at that instant to be a nosy parker of the impoverished, poking his head into a posh car just to see and sniff how the other planet lives. Scruffy Supari glanced briefly and disinterestedly at Nirip’s face, then yawned once more before insolently looking away in search of more captivating contours.

  Scruffy Shagged-out, fed up of having his balls mashed by a rifle butt, hit Scruffy Dumpy across his shins with his own weapon and, desultorily invoking the holy odour of his irritator’s mother’s sexual organs, sat up.

  ‘You mustn’t blame them. They’re tense about their encounter this evening. Day and night. They don’t know—who can tell? Whether getting rid of you before the match would be a good omen. They’ve done their puja before the diesel generators to ensure uninterrupted lighting but is that enough? Who can tell?’

  By the time they all clambered aboard the trailer, they, after snacking on thick rotis, gur, tea and some dry, spicy dal thing, had donned their disguises. Scruffies Amitabh and Dalda wore the khaki of the local Home Guards while Teli Raja and several others had put on the uniform of the Front for the Victory of Democracy—V-Front for short, even in the Hindi posters and radio jingles. The male workers of the party typically wore creamish churidaars and sky-blue kurtas; for several reasons, the cadre had no females. For one, in that part of the world, the woman led a dog’s life in the kitchen or worked like one in the fields and had very little time left over for the fun of politics. Further, if she showed the littlest curiosity about the wider world, she would be raped, pissed upon and murdered by her entire caste. Besides, there weren’t in the first place too many women in that region, it boasting of the highest rate of female infanticide on earth.