‘We could do both if we think hard enough.’
While Ehsaan Awesome raised his right hand in a saintly manner to bless and assuage the bewilderment of the traveller who suddenly found that his suitcase had become wet and sweet and sticky, a long-overdue train huffed and puffed and snorted its way into the station.
Trains the world over are irresistible things. The entire platform had seen hundreds of them before but each and every one on it—ticketless traveller, beggar, coolie, policeman, rogue—watched transfixed the Grand Trunk Express, stained, stately, seventeen hours late, whine, wheeze, clang and roll its way in. Being majestic, it was slow and losing speed every metre, but not quite stopping as though unable to because of its weight: bogie after bogie after bogie trundling on—some painted cream and red, and others sky blue and navy blue, and the second class carriages merely sad elongations in dulled rust—sedately easing up, ponderously winding down till at last, a full minute after it was first sighted, the monstrous wheels groaned to a final halt. With each open doorway colourful like an overflowing suitcase, in that din, amidst the shouts, scuffles and the adenoidal announcements in three languages, the coolies and the embarkers began to get into the bogies through the interstices that they created in that descending human toothpaste. The owner of the sticky suitcase was caught between boarding his train and—without allowing himself to be intimidated by the giant’s size and his disconcerting characteristic of being happy without cause—asking Ehsaan Awesome to clean and purify his luggage. In turn, the giant, who never saw a train without wanting to climb into it, was lost both to the demand on his interlocutor’s face and the world till, through the confusion, a whistle blew and the wheels began to move. He turned to share with Anguli his sense of wonder at those marvellous things, trains, and found, in place of the paramilitary man, a truculent urchin asking him to pay for two teas.
As to an old friend who has come to see him off, Anguli waved tenderly to Ehsaan Awesome from the doorway of the bogie already fifteen metres away. The giant flew, the urchin after him, jumped, gained a toehold in the second doorway of the carriage immediately succeeding Anguli’s and found himself being welcomed in that squeeze by a bald middle-aged man with a face that beamed as much as his own and a prick in his pyjamas more erect than a goose-stepping leg that threatened to poke Ehsaan into losing his grip and subsequently—along with everything else—his marbles.
The giant, having to devote a couple of seconds to taking out his knife, groping for, first, the pyjama, and, second, the undie strings of the happy lover and cutting them both, did not notice, until the last second, Anguli jump off the Grand Trunk Express just before it left the station. The paramilitary man hopped off the platform on to the tracks, crossed them and clambered up the ledge on the other side to wait for his train to Nagpur. Thirty metres away, legs spread wide, lungi drawn up in a pile on his lap, head half-dangling off the back of the bench, snoring and dreaming of other lives, sprawled a monk in faded orange.
AN END TO MYTHMAKING
Time in Hindu and Buddhist speculation is the power that limits the existence of eternal elements in matter. It is the boss, it calls the shots, it decides when the fun and games of gods and demons should end and when the partying of people on this planet must wind up. It is its relentlessness that is tedious, that makes those of us with haloes behind their heads scream for deliverance in their meditations that last for decades; the rest of us do not suffer in silence, we scream too, and rave and rant—and at times jump off highrisers—but at bottom we believe that its alternative, the nothingness of nirvana, is not going to be any fun. All of us long to escape from its relentless cycle—birth, death, arrival, departure, takeoff, touchdown, rebirth—but in the main only when it is giving us a rough time; had the party gone on forever, even the bodhisattva, wine glass in hand, would’ve got on to the dance floor. It never does, of course, because for one, even forever is measured by the sands in the hour glass; for another, the list of party poopers, headed by death, is endless.
People deal with Time in different ways. Anguli for one couldn’t read it on the dial of a wristwatch though he wore one anyway as an ornament. Magnum didn’t—even though she could of course tell the time—she found the band constricting, but that was not the only cause of her incapacity to keep an appointment. In general, she relied on her body to tell her the time: I am hungry, it must be lunch hour. Time had never bothered her overmuch; like everything else, it passes, so where’s the problem?
‘How obtuse you are,’ Nirip the philosopher had hissed at her at the age of twenty-two, ‘Everything else passes in time. Time is way above God and is so fucking evil that He makes Satan look like a retard. “In the beginning,” says the Vayu Purana, “people lived in perfect happiness, without class distinctions or property . . . Then, because of the great power of time and the changes it wrought upon them, they were overcome by passion and greed. It was from the influence of time, and no other cause, that their perfection vanished.” We are all—the planets, you, me, Computerwali Bhawani—the playthings of Time. Do you get it?’
‘As long as it tickles me in the right places.’
It winds up, it winds down. The Computerwali Bhawani Charitable Trust—Empire, more accurately—for the Uplift of Society, for instance, enjoyed a full twenty-four years of prosperity before being overwhelmed, as by a tsunami, on a fine October morning in 2008, by an income tax raid.
The sleuths, dozens of them, stayed the whole day and came back every morning for an entire week. Impolitely but patiently, they infiltrated the beggars at brunch, the kids chomping and chortling at the crèche, the queues of potential donors of vital organs, the drug addict parents with children to sell, the coked out devotees before the deity. They probed everyone with piercing questions. They took away documents and pen drives and asked for ledgers, certificates of registration and books of accounts. They summoned key figures in the administration to Income Tax Headquarters. Time’s veneer of respectability over the entire empire cut no ice with them. They instead asked the Trust to prove that it owned the acres that it so happily squatted on. Oh fuck, said Vinayak, and flew down with his lawyers from Bombay to firefight.
The television vans camped at the gates of the Trust for a fortnight. The beggars got stoned and were happy to depose before the cameras. Their monosyllabic mumbling was converted by the bold and breathless anchors into the wildest of surmises that were dramatically substantiated the morning after. They jostled for space, the TV anchors, before the main entrance of the Trust and for ownership of the brainwave of calling the scandal Bhawanigate.
Time will tell, declared Pashupati the Honourable Member-of-Parliament-to-be from his hospital bed, who is more powerful, Computerwali Bhawani or the Commissioner of Income Tax. For a while, though, the latter looked like winning. Vinayak advised shutting the gates of the Trust for some weeks to forestall at least some of the skeletons from tumbling out.
Nonsense, insisted Manasa-ma, the world will see, the goddess pays her dues and keeps open house; we’ve nothing to hide but our pasts. You tell them that. The past and the future are entities best left alone. Here we are, seventy plus and with our time running out. Why are they harassing us with the past?
Vinayak died before that question could be resolved.
The income tax infiltration and siege of Computerwali Bhawani had disturbed him; the goddess and he went back a long way and he’d been taken aback by how long a shadow their kinship cast on his life. Even a decade ago, an interrogation by an income tax inspector would have been the whine of a mosquito about his ears; respectability had softened him, made him posh; how vulgar and greedy, how shabby the taxman appeared as he probed, as he enthroned himself in the administrator’s chair and made Vinayak’s lawyers sit in front of the desk in the visitor’s seats. Vinayak left them to negotiate a price and wandered about the rooms and verandahs without purpose.
Not a single familiar face, naturally. Everything had changed in two decades, everything, floors had bee
n added, walls knocked down, a new building erected in the middle of the courtyard. For the last several years, he’d been visiting Computerwali Bhawani roughly just once every twelve months for the meeting of her trustees, a relaxed, leisurely event structured around a symbolic lunch—vegetarian, sanctified—that they—those largely venal captains of industry whom their mortality, the certainty of death, had made religious—ate off banana leaves while sitting crosslegged on the floor of the verandah behind the rump of the goddess. For the meeting, itself pleasantly devoid of substance or stress, mainly spent by the attendees in chuckling and reminiscing about the golden days, Pashupati and he usually zipped in on the first flight and out on the last. He was an investment analyst now, dammit, almost there at some working lunch in south Bombay with some Deputy Governors of the Reserve Bank and the South Asia Heads of Merrill Lynch. How demeaned, how depressed, he felt at being yanked back into the bog of his past.
So on Sunday afternoon, to get his mind off things, he went cruising in Nehru Park and finally brought home to his barsaati flat in Jangpura a waif, male, with ancient eyes, another plaything of Time.
On that same Sunday afternoon some eight hundred kilometres away, Nirip continued to puzzle and exhaust his twin with the ceaseless outpourings of his overactive brain.
‘It was presumptuous of me to imagine that I was so special as to be unique in this world. Are there only two of us? Perhaps there are three? A third spirited away as an infant to a far country? Who is even now growing pineapples in Mauritius or trying to quit smoking in Casablanca or teaching the young football in a suburb of Buenos Aires? With a different name and another set of adventures, another life story? It is possible? . . . And why only three? Why not four hundred, a thousand, a million of us, with different faces but in our lives the same confusion, their spans marked by misdemeanours and wrong turns, that too is possible . . . I know nothing about you. We know nothing about each other. What did you do on your fiftieth—your forty-fifth—birthday? Do you have a sweet tooth? Do you have children? Can you sleep the night through without getting up even once to piss? Have you loved and lost? This labyrinth that we’ll never get out of, are you happy wandering around in it while the seconds fall drop by drop? Do you want to see my world? Go back in my place and leave me here on this bench? Take that giant monkey Ehsaan with you for company? He’d help you through your paces?’
That the twins couldn’t be seen together had been Ehsaan’s view on the platform of Jhansi railway station. That would complicate matters for the ransom, he’d explained.
Yes but the twins together with Widowhite? That’s far more important than the ransom. And clothes make the man. If every three hours I keep exchanging my orange lungi for his hunky military outfit, very soon no one would know which of us is which. Neither of us either. I’m sure I’d look as cool in khaki as in saffron. And then if I could learn to speak like him and he like me, we could both be in two places at once and thus double the life spans that remain to us. He would be me and yet not me. Tell you what, you rush off and fetch Widowhite while I drill into my other half a few basic English phrases to cover the essential requirements.
Repeat after me, you poor one. How d’you do. Take care. After you. Thanks a ton. Life’s a bitch. You’re welcome. You must be out of your fucking mind. And then some. Bananas. An orange haze. Who is this? He’s in the toilet. Loosie as a floosie. Let’s get the hell outta here. Enough is enough. To be continued. Cigarette?
With commendable skill and patience, Ehsaan Awesome succeeded in hustling his two acquaintances into an unreserved second-class compartment of the Madras-bound Tamil Nadu Express. They jostled and swayed along with a hundred other compatriots in the space between the choked toilets and the open doors through which blew the hot wind of the central plains.
‘Why are we going to Madras?’ murmured the monk. ‘It has no soul.’ His mind, having been freed from the mundane by the ganja smoked with the camelwala, was preoccupied with composing a sentence in English that would capture the piquancy of their situation, of their noses being assailed by the stench of one type of loo while their hair at the same time was ruffled by the wafts of another. Full of goodwill, he smiled indulgently at Ehsaan Awesome scowling at the turban of a wizened villager who had gone to sleep against the giant’s tricep.
Mystifyingly, the train at that point began to slow down. The crowd around them woke up and started to murmur and grumble. With a clanking of shafts and a clanging of wheels, the train finally stopped. In the absence of a breeze, the heat in that confined space outside the toilets pushed the travellers, one by one and whining and cursing, off the train. The twins and Ehsaan Awesome descended too. A group of villagers trudged off down a track across the fallow fields. Cactus hedges demarcated them. Woodsmoke in the air, the day in decline. One bleating goat, a kid, forlorn, agitatedly circling an enormous mango tree. Mounds of straw scattered across the landscape. A boy alongside the tracks chewing on a stick of sugarcane, mesmerized by the train. Nirip sauntered across to the mango tree and flopped down at its base.
‘I like it here. No houses, no cars, no buildings, no noise, just a train that will at some point depart.’ Seemingly in agreement, the kid goat stopped circling the tree, ceased its soft, tentative bleating and, gazing fixedly at Nirip as though daring to see him as the herald of a new hope, released some pellets of shit. ‘We will wait here for Time to slow down a bit more and for Widowhite to appear.’
In that declining evening light, Nirip watched a pandemonium of parrots change residence from the branches above his head to a majestic pipal further down the track that meandered away across the fallow fields. They were fussy about their perches, those birds. Chattering and squeaking without pause, they darted incessantly from one bough to another and hopped up and down and along the same branch for minutes on end like frisky delegates in a House without a chairman. At last, having done with their high-strung playfulness and exhausted their store of babble, one by one, they fell silent and, settling down at their roosts, merged miraculously with the leaves of the tree. Beneath them, in sedate slow motion, a cow emerged into view from behind a mound of straw and, tail swishing figures of eight around its rump, placidly stepped up to Anguli to nuzzle his forearm with a loving, mucous snout.
‘You must tell me about your past though, all of it,’ said Nirip with a smile to Anguli, ‘so that we can then decide what to do about the future.’
Without stopping his gnawing at the stalk of sugarcane, Anguli, in that fading light, glanced at Nirip’s indistinct features, wondered for a moment and then—overwhelmed because he hadn’t been asked, and he hadn’t spoken to anyone, about himself in fifty years—let the dam burst.
By six that evening in Jangpura, Vinayak was exhausted and even more depressed and wanted the waif of Nehru Park to disappear into the sewer from which he’d emerged. The waif had other plans.
‘I like it here. You live alone?’
Vinayak took out his wallet, gave him three five-hundred rupee notes and asked him to leave because he, Vinayak, had an appointment that he had to get ready for.
‘Yes, you get ready. Take your time. I’ll take another beer.’ The waif picked up Vinayak’s mobile phone, sprawled on the sofa, legs wide apart, and called a couple of his friends over.
‘No, you can’t do that! I’m going out.’
‘Nice phone. I’ll keep it?’
Pocketing the instrument, the waif strutted over to the fridge, took out a bottle of Kingfisher beer, opened it with his teeth, downed a long draught at one go, Adam’s apple bobbing, strolled back to Vinayak, burped and murmured politely, ‘Pass me your wallet.’
He was calm, unsmiling and remorselessly obscene. In a matter-of-fact manner, he wandered about the apartment picking up stuff for his use. He opened cupboards, pulled out trunks, overturned the drawers of desks. All the while, unremittingly, he mouthed cold pitiless abuse directed not at the world but at Vinayak the individual. Cocksucker. Anuslicker. So you want to drink my juice and th
en throw me back in the sewer. Not caring even to glance at him, he reviled Vinayak’s physique and his personality, revealed a hatred, an envious revulsion that was deep and frightening. Vinayak couldn’t resist it; helpless, he followed the waif from room to room to hear the truth about himself. Yes, that was absolutely true, that he lived only to drink the semen of the poor but in fact was not even worth the dirt that they excreted. Vinayak began to tremble and weep with a sort of relief. The waif even ransacked the apartment contemptuously. Then, without fuss, he took off his clothes and urinated half on the sofa and half on his host’s neck and face.
He wore a shirt and a pair of Levi’s from Vinayak’s wardrobe. Both were too large for him. ‘Goodbye sir,’ he said without mockery when he left carrying a bag of Vinayak’s belongings.
Ambling about from room to room, still weeping but almost absentmindedly now, glass of water in hand, one by one as though they were Afghani dry fruit that he was popping into his mouth, he downed twenty Calmposes. He couldn’t find any more. He lay down on his bed. On the third mobile phone in his pants pocket, he called the only person whom he felt that he could talk to. He said nothing though, he wept soundlessly.
‘I’m extremely hurt, you rogue, that you’ve taken almost a full week to wake up to my having been kidnapped. And have you decided what I’m worth? Anything less than four crores and I shall disconnect at once . . . Speak up I can’t hear you . . .’
Time is cyclical, the circumstances that it engenders trigger off events similar to one another. Everything returns, even temptation. Adam didn’t fall just once upon a time; we all know that he stumbles and tumbles again and again and again; and one suspects that he rises mainly because he is powerless in front of the pleasure in falling once more. So with Anguli the day after, behind the wheel of a white Maruti Esteem, after eighteen years on National Highway Three once more, feeling so comfortable driving up to Gwalior, and beside him that giant Ehsaan Awesome, as always huddled over his phone bickering and organizing, and that lazy and spoilt twin brother of his at the back with a pert prostitute in white. Anguli’s hands on the steering wheel were swollen with strength.
Fairy Tales at Fifty Page 30