Fairy Tales at Fifty

by Upamanyu Chatterjee

  To feel safer, to protect himself from that outrageous idea, Anguli put on his rakish dark glasses before absentmindedly descending from the camel. Automatically, he passed a hand under the cushions to check whether any previous user had by mistake left behind anything of value. The kidnappee met him halfway, half-smiling, his right hand half-extended, not sure whether shaking hands with a social unequal was the done thing in that part of the world. Ignoring the uncertainly proferred hand, Anguli surprised the other and amazed himself by hugging the rescuee once and then stepping back, embarrassed, overwhelmed, thanking the pantheon that his features were all but completely masked.

  ‘Nirip,’ said the other, introducing himself.

  Truly extraordinary the resemblance, noted Anguli, dazed, for the moment unmanned, unable to master it, looking away and yet not being able to take his eyes off his twin. Perhaps just a wee bit taller, fairer, with a softer, more pampered skin beneath the stubble, greyer hair, longer, a face more lined, but a rich man’s features—Nirip’s eyes troubled Anguli; they were exactly his and yet they were not; they were opaque, they gave nothing away.

  ‘Anguli.’

  ‘Jayadev—?’

  ‘Oh—he . . . was my father, you could say. All is well.’

  ‘And he . . .?

  ‘Has moved on.’ Anguli, to change the subject, waved expansively at the scrub behind Nirip from where still wafted to them the redolence of smouldering wood and ghee. ‘Burning well.’

  They spoke two different kinds of Hindi. Anguli, hearing the other’s, unconsciously began to upgrade the idiom and tone of his own.

  ‘That would make you my—’

  ‘My brother, you could say. Blood brother, depending on whether your mother and mine . . .’ Anguli seemed to search the surrounding scrub for words that would politely express that the ladies in question, even if one and the same, had merely been one of the several that his revered late father had pleased over the decades. In his memories of him, everything else had dimmed with the years save the vision of Jayadev’s naked hips rhythmically pumping away to the creaking of a charpai and his tender, intimate abuses grunted and murmured into the ear of the body beneath him. Revered late father he’d been for forty years—robust, jovial—and hardly the shrunken figure in rags staggering about in the half-light, rummaging in his sacks, weeping, groaning, abusing the world.

  Which sisterfucking ghost is that come to fellate me in the darkness?

  It’s Anguli, Baba, your son.

  What Anguli? You put one anguli in your mouth and another in your anus and turn around and disappear before I beat the marrow out of you, you hear.

  Then, when Anguli had taken a couple of conciliatory steps forward, Jayadev had picked up a smouldering stump of wood from the pyre of the monkey and flung it at him. Fuck off you ghost, he had growled, but in a voice that had quavered.

  ‘He isn’t well, our father. I hope . . .’ Nirip’s voice trailed off in fatigue like a path overwhelmed by the wilderness.

  Anguli nodded vigorously as though to confirm the poor state of their father’s health and then changed the subject to the other parent. ‘And your mother?’

  ‘Oh she’s around . . .’ replied Nirip cheerlessly, ‘. . . tall and handsome in Bengali Market in New Delhi or Civil Lines in Agra and heaven knows where else . . . I met her for the first time a week ago.’

  Anguli’s heart went phatakkk! like a motorcycle backfiring before haring off out of control. His legs felt wobbly. At the same time, the fifty years of his past became clear and quiet, as though a thin dark film that he hadn’t known existed had been peeled off from its surface. Everything seemed explained. He sat down against the camel and rested his head in its warm and comforting stench. It ignored his presence completely. He stretched his legs out, shut his eyes behind his dark glasses and tried to figure things out. This bahanchod now who’d wandered off for a piss and who looked so freakishly like him, what the fuck did it mean.

  He tried to remember but the past was a forgotten country. Events happened, he ate, he slept, he killed, he moved on, the past was effaced. Even his fairy godmother he hadn’t immediately recognized shuffling slowly down their gali in Jabalpur’s Behna Mohalla, stopping to ask, carrying in her hand a card that he took long to recognize to be a twenty-year-old invitation to his own wedding.

  She’d looked rich, that was all. What could she want in that gali of petty dealers in recycled tin boxes? Of course the rich could do anything. But why. Surely there must be a why even for the wealthy.

  He recognized her—his heart stilled, blood flooded his rib cage—only when she hesitantly stopped alongside the two cars parked bumper to bumper over the drain and grazing the wall of their hovel, the old red Zen that he’d received at his wedding and the older sky-blue Maruti van. Still looking good. Like her. Her gift to him. In return, he’d torn her clothes off, hadn’t raped her only because he hadn’t been able to get it up, had beaten her black and blue and left her for dead. Ghosts return. Had she after twenty years decided to call the cops? Then she’d looked about her and seen him coming down the gali carrying two chickens, barely alive, one in each fist, swinging them by their necks as one would light tote bags.

  Pranaam etcetera but he hadn’t invited her in because Tamanna, his pregnant wife, at hearing their exchange, had come to the doorway and parted the curtain rag; she would’ve been so impossibly inquisitive about the fairy godmother that the excitement of her curiosity itself might have caused her to miscarry and that would’ve been the seventh time in twenty years; he wasn’t going to take that risk and again have her moaning and wailing the neighbourhood down. Without a word, he handed her the chickens and pulled down the curtain rag across her face. She immediately pushed it aside again and, holding the chickens firmly in one hand, stepped out of the hovel to watch, seethingly silent and suspicious, Anguli unlock the Zen, motion Shivani in first across the driver’s seat, get in himself and begin the laborious process of crawling out of its parking space and the neighbourhood without crushing a child or chicken or stray pup or pedestrian’s foot.

  He watched Nirip emerge from behind the bushes, even at a distance a different man, back straighter, movements more quick. This weird brother who was his double, was it plastic surgery like those boobs in the film clips on his mobile, but what could the impersonation be for, maybe to do him out of some inheritance that he didn’t know of? Anguli shook his head at that last thought, he grew depressed. Not even in his frenzied, high-velocity daydreaming was any huge sum of money coming his way. Well then, the bahanchod wanted to double up for Anguli so as to fuck his wife. He was fucking welcome to her and her shrieking and ranting and frothing and the blows to Anguli’s forehead with their single frying pan. And as for that Shivani-ma, of course he hadn’t been able to get it up because she was his madifuddi mother. Stupid woman, avoiding her responsibilities, for fifty years playing roles.

  ‘I like the smell of burning ghee. Do you?’

  Anguli said nothing in reply. In his agitation, he took off his goggles, absentmindedly unwrapped his scarf and, as was his habit, vigorously rubbed his head to make himself feel intelligent. At the look of wonder that crossed Nirip’s face at seeing his twin’s features properly for the first time, Anguli said to himself, the bahanchod can go and fuck his mum before I kill him too.

  He didn’t try, not just then. After Jayadev, he was fine, he felt sated. Later, he was even a little annoyed that Nirip didn’t seem to believe that he had known as little about the existence of his twin as Nirip himself.

  ‘She would’ve had her compulsions, that’s what,’ he cheerfully threw over his shoulder as they sailed away towards Jhansi or wherever else the camel had decided to take them. ‘For a long time, years in fact, I thought that she was a good-looking hijra and I was a bit scared of her. Everything about her was unexpected, her lifestyle, her servant companions, her gifts, everything always khatakk! just like that, out of the blue.’ The exclamation made the camel pick up speed. Nirip almo
st fell off and held on to Anguli’s shirt.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said.

  ‘Phaak,’ murmured his twin, grinning, happy to pick up some English as an investment for the future.

  As distant and insubstantial a country as the past, was the future to him; Anguli was not touched by either. He had already almost forgotten Jayadev and presumed that Nirip had too, had accepted his version of that old man’s dignified passing.

  ‘He just wandered away like in a fairy tale. My time is up, I have to go, he kept saying.’

  Nirip was not paying attention, Anguli guessed, for he was in no position to; retaining his place on the camel being perilous enough, he clung to Anguli as a woman, riding pillion, to her lover. Anguli had felt depressed, obscurely, at sensing that there was more of his fairy godmother in his twin than in himself, in the expression in his eyes an ease engendered by wealth, a rich man’s manner even when his pockets were empty.

  ‘You—should—plan—on—getting—back,’ advised Anguli cheerfully, enjoying like a child the sprightly yet wobbly stride of the camel, revelling—because of the need to concentrate to stay atop it—in having to speak staccato, ‘If—no—one’s—woken—up—to—your—kidnapping—it—means—they—don’t—want—you—to—return—Who’s—in—charge—of—the—finances?—Not—your—father?’

  Anguli was guessing; he was curious to get at the real plot. Shivani as usual had not told him enough; the money that she had given him, ten times more than he had ever, at one go, held in his entire life, had done the talking, had rendered him speechless. Just a wad, not even unwieldy, a hundred five-hundred-rupee notes and she suddenly the same old fairy godmother again, palely upper class, anxious, distraught, her mind elsewhere, descending out of the blue into his hovel world after three decades with a set of proposals.

  ‘I’d like you to agree to a deal. Sell one of your two kidneys for five lakhs. Plus another ten probably because you’ll have to pretend to be somebody else before, during and after the entire operation. And if you want to kill a few people in passing, nothing like it.’ She’d gazed absentmindedly at the tranquil but red-lipped Buddha head on the dashboard of the Zen and addressed her second proposal to the stick of incense behind its right ear. ‘Take a train or your car on Thursday to Jhansi. After all these decades, your father Jayadev wants to meet you and bless you, see you touch his feet. So you meet him.’

  Anguli’d riffled the fresh and crisp notes, raised the wad to his face to smell it and, not caring what she thought, gently bit its stapled and rubber-banded end. A love bite. Then, feeling perhaps that he might preserve the wad for worship and not spend any of it, she’d given him some more stray notes from her handbag.

  ‘You’ll also meet along with Jayadev the person you are to impersonate to get into the household. He is as important to me as to you. You’ll see.’ She’d begun to cry wordlessly, somehow matter-of-factly at her third proposal. ‘Pick up his manner, learn some English phrases. I met him two days ago in Delhi to tell him of our plans but—with Jayadev around—couldn’t somehow. Safest if the two of you travel, behave, think, be as one but travel as two.’

  Shivani’s advice seemed to have indirectly prompted Anguli’s choices of disguise as well. He himself had become a paramilitary in boots, cap and khaki. His gun he had picked up as an afterthought from the corpses of the clan Scruffy while interring them hugger-mugger in the pit created by the landmine. The disguise suited him, transformed him, he was a natural, middle-aged strutter in a fitting, dacoit-filled neighbourhood.

  Nirip was in pale saffron, in the washed-orange lungi and kurta of a monk of the Ramakrishna Mission. Anguli had shaved Nirip’s head, privately amazed that he couldn’t do it himself, and given him large, benignly-intelligent spectacles to wear. Nirip looked like a distinguished visitor from another world, a Hindu metaphysician who, in the midst of a discourse at Nalanda on post-Vedic Sanskrit prosody, had strayed into the twenty-first century. To sit astride the camel, he’d had to pull his lungi up in hoops around his waist and display his pale, shapely thighs and the Jockey Elanza undies that he hadn’t been able to change out of for a week. The vigour of the perineum massage had made him feel giddy, rendered concentration and speech unnecessary, impossible.

  Nirip in the wilderness had stripped without shame in the open but Anguli, abashed, had retreated behind a tamarind tree to change. Chuckling, Nirip had followed him to embarrass him and instead had been dimly aroused at seeing a coy and naked double of his own self. He’d stunned Anguli by cupping his buttocks and kissing him full on the mouth. ‘Make love to me,’ he’d smiled and whispered in Hindi. Anguli hadn’t even understood. ‘Make love to me in your hurried lumpen way. Come on. Would I be sexually attractive to myself? That’s what I’ve always wanted to know. Does my allure increase when I change my name from Jhabua to Anguli? Or from Nirip to Nargissus?’

  They had to return the camel. Anguli had the train tickets, two seats in different compartments of the Ichchhamati Express. The camelwala, a tall, halitotic, suspicious type with features not dissimilar from those of his beast of burden—and the same body odour—didn’t like that his animal had left the night before with a self-possessed ruffian in kurta-pyjama and returned with some completely different fellow in a khaki uniform accompanied hazily in the background by, of all people in that godforsaken corner of the earth, an orange monk. ‘More money.’

  While Anguli discussed rates and inflation with the camelwala, Nirip asked him whether he knew where they could get some charas or ganja without being beaten up, buggered, blackmailed and jailed. Since the camelwala had some himself in his lungi somewhere, that had to be factored into the negotiations as well. They decided to take a rickshaw through the town and enter the railway station separately, partly out of caution and mainly because Nirip wanted first to wander off with the camelwala for a quick smoke.

  ‘I’m quite shocked,’ noted the paramilitary man coldly. ‘At your age. You must be forty-five years old. Do grow up.’

  ‘In a moment. I see of course that on mine depends your growing-up too.’

  Forty-five? Nirip watched his twin amidst the cowherd lot prepare to mount a rickshaw and depart. He himself first smoked a phallic chillum with the camelwala, soared high enough to spot Predators over Afghanistan kill the wrong people and wondered. Fifty was the new forty-five for those who couldn’t count. Or didn’t care. Time had paralysed Nirip. Anguli had simply strangled it instead and thrown it out of the car window. Anguli was his, Nirip’s, alternative history, but he couldn’t be sure whether he’d have preferred to be—from the fragments that the other had let fall—an unschooled, self-taught paanwala cum occasional taxidriver who’d never popped a pill to soar high enough to forget himself. Nirip had a strong suspicion that the other would be no good in bed. The lumpen rarely were. They had to be led by the nose and taught everything and be paid for it. They didn’t know how to kiss and actually thought that saliva—that divine elixir—was dirty. They knew fuckall. They perked up only when they smelt or sensed money or heard its tinkle in a voice. Now the lumpen and he together with Widowhite in bed, would it work? How did one say ménage à trois in Hindi?

  ‘We’ll go together to Jhansi, better. And on the way, you teach me some English and tell me who all you have at home, your mummy papa, and your office, what you do.’

  ‘Yours is the best disguise, sir, that the world has ever seen.’ On the platform of Jhansi Railway Station, suddenly inches away from Anguli and his plastic cup of scalding tea, the face of a very young giant, red and beaming in the heat. A couple of scruffy dacoits in attendance. Guntoting. ‘Perfect disguise, sir.’ The giant affectionately touched Anguli’s weapon. ‘We recognized the gun.’

  ‘Speak Hindi, please.’ Very coldly.

  Ehsaan Awesome was abashed. He obliged. ‘Of course, of course. The role is a matter of life and death and ransom money. Jai jawan jai kissan jai shamshaan. Where were we planning to go, sir?’

  ‘And what is the final figure for th
e ransom?’

  ‘After your performance at cricket, your value, sir, has shot up at least to four crores.’

  ‘We should share it reasonably.’

  While Ehsaan Awesome’s face became round with awe at the ramifications of the proposal, Anguli proferred him a second scalding cup. Accepting it, not seeming to mind the poor insulation of its soluble plastic, he turned to his bodyguards. ‘Please go far away. Go and see if he’s brought the Qualis around to the front of the station. I want it parked in my spot under the pipal. Shoot the tyres of anyone who’s taken my place.’ The dacoits stirred faintly like saplings in the hint of a breeze. He handed them several low-denomination notes. ‘And here, have some naashta and some lunch too.’

  Counting the money, rifles slapping their scrawny hips, they shuffled off towards the stairs that led to the overbridge. Ehsaan Awesome turned back to Anguli with the air of a man rubbing his hands at the successful resolution of a knotty problem. ‘Funny, sir, how you’ve changed overnight, even while remaining the same.’ Theatrically, he paused to check himself, clicked his tongue at the lapse and, smirking at being privy to a delightful secret, repeated himself in Hindi and then continued, ‘You had neither wallet, sir, nor phone when we first met.’ The heat of the chai in his hand finally registered on his fingers. He flung the cup in the direction of the train tracks. The tea flew north and landed on someone’s luggage. The cup hit a sleeping stray dog that started up in panic, gazed wildly all about him for a moment before, with its tail between its legs, scampering off elsewhere in search of some warm peace. ‘What’ll fetch us more, sir, that’s the question, you going back alive or as a corpse?’