Half of What I Say

by Anil Menon

  It was a few minutes to eight. Twenty hospitals left on the list. At this rate she’d be staggering around well till noon the next day. The smart thing was to go home, eat something, organize a group of friends and divide the task. It might take an hour or two but she’d save a dozen. She held up her hand for an auto.

  Famished, she stopped to buy a combo meal about a block from her apartment, but on the walk home, the red oil slicked curry started to stain through the poly container. The sauce had been rich and fragrant when she picked it up at the counter, but now it stank of old meat and overheated oil. She just couldn’t eat it. Effing A. Now what? There was a garbage dump between her apartment building and the one adjacent to it, and she cautiously approached it. A movement caught her eye. A mongrel, skulking and rummaging in the heap. Hey! Come here, you! He snarled but when she didn’t fall for the drama, the dog relaxed and even attempted a wag. Hello elder sister, got anything for a fella down on his luck? As it gulped down the meal, she patted the dog’s head, talked to it tenderly in Tamil. For the first time in the day, she felt a little useful.

  By the time Kannagi reached her apartment, the wall clock read 8:40 and she was famished. She had ordered a pizza as she approached the apartment and knew it would arrive in twenty minutes or so, but every minute seemed to grind by. She checked her email. Nothing from Liu. Ok-ay. Tara had a suggestion for the hot-waterless shower problem. Why not use hot air instead? Air had a lower heat capacity so it warmed much faster. Good idea, could work. Kannagi made a list of all the friends she could collar into the search for Sawai, narrowed the list to seven.

  Where was Anand? Why hadn’t he returned her call? He was generally so conscientious. Maybe Ratnakar hadn’t given him the message. She reached for her cellphone—the door bell rang. The pizza. At last! She grabbed the money, rushed to the door.

  ‘You didn’t use the peephole,’ said Padma, her beautiful face creased in a frown. ‘We could have been anybody.’

  ‘Sawai!’

  Sawai laughed. She grabbed Sawai, threw her arms around him. She could tell from his slightly stiff posture that he was embarrassed, perhaps because he knew she would go postal on him shortly. Padma’s bodyguard took up position in the corridor. Sawai closed the door.

  Sawai was safe. He’d always been safe. Yes, he’d been held in lockup overnight. But there had been a lot of people with him, and it had been jolly, all things considered. The Inspector had even ordered some Chinese. In the morning, he’d been questioned, it had all been very polite, and he had been released. But his days as a student at Delhi University were over. He had been rusticated.

  Kannagi sensed Sawai wanted to deflect her questions for now. There was something cagey about the open way he met her eyes, in the sincerity of his smile, and the way he squeezed her shoulders meaningfully. Perhaps it was because Akka was here. Kannagi turned to her sister, spread her arms. Padma embraced her and then kissed her on the cheeks. Rinse repeat.

  ‘I’m so sorry, kondai,’ said Padma, in Tamil. ‘I shouldn’t have ignored your cry for help. But Shabari was being cranky and I was being harassed from all sides and I was very hurt about—never mind, it is all completely my mistake. Please forgive me. I shouldn’t have let you down.’

  ‘Akka, not a problem.’ Kannagi hugged her sister, fiercely, glad the fight was over. ‘If I couldn’t have handled it, I would have nagged you into helping me. And you don’t always have to help. Don’t you see? I will always ask but not if you have to say yes.’

  ‘Of course I must.’ Padma’s eyes filled with tears. ‘I must. You are all I have. You ask and I will give my life for you. You know that.’

  ‘Unfortunately, I believe you.’ Kannagi kissed her sister.

  ‘Yes, make fun of me. You and Anand. Same type, both of you. He also leaves me to my choices. Why can’t you understand necessities are also necessary? Is this the Naxal you’re going out with? I thought he was the pizza boy. Is he from a good family?’

  Sawai had already set out the plates, coke bottle, paper towels, opened the pizza box. He began to search for glasses. Kannagi could tell her sister was relieved that Sawai didn’t know where things were—it meant he didn’t live here. Her sister didn’t like Sawai. That was also a given. Akka disliked most men. Akka liked men in the sense that she disliked men she couldn’t control.

  ‘Kanno, where do you keep the clean glasses?’

  Sawai didn’t sound like someone who’d spent a couple of days in jail. He sounded like her husband. Now that she knew he was safe, Kannagi could once again feel the mix of irritation and affection that Sawai always aroused in her. He was safe, he was safe. Bastard, why couldn’t he have given her one call? One call, bhenchod. Was that too much to ask, madarchod? He should have guessed she would be running here and there, out of her mind with worry. Why did she even bother?

  ‘It’s in the drawer. Use your eyes!’ Kannagi let go of her sister’s hand, still light-headed with relief. ‘Akka, sit down. Have some pizza, get to know Sawai.’

  ‘Pizza.’ Padma rolled her beautiful eyes. ‘Might as well drink a bottle of oil. And I can’t eat from Pizza Hut; you know Anand’s ZAP policy. I have to head home. It has been a hellish day. Anand lost a dear friend—he won’t talk about it. I don’t want to hear it anyway. This whole country’s going to hell. Are you sure I can’t do anything?’

  ‘I’m fine, Akka. I wish you’d stay.’

  ‘You’re not alone.’ Padma looked at Sawai meaningfully, smiled. ‘If you need anything, call me.’

  As the door closed behind Padma, the small apartment suddenly seemed darker, shabbier. They gazed at each other.

  Sawai held out his arms. He looked truly regretful. ‘Kanno.’

  Kannagi burst into tears.

  13

  ONCE, I HAD BEGUN WRITING A NOVEL ABOUT A COUPLE WHO though very much in love never quite meet (first line: ‘They were a very close couple, so close in fact, the desire to break them up was foremost on the minds of those around them.’) and had been about half-way through the novel when I encountered Raymond Federman’s Smiles On Washington Park, palmed from Durga’s carnivalesque collection. Federman’s novel also dealt with a couple who though very much in love never quite meet. For example, his couple almost meet in the park, almost have a drink and so on. Life in the subjunctive. Once I encountered Federman’s novel, I found it very difficult to continue work on mine. The urgency, that is, necessity, expired from the project. It wasn’t a sudden decision. I fooled myself for a while, even finishing two new chapters, until it became clear I was merely rewriting Federman’s chapters, his ideas, and indeed, his sentences. Eventually, I abandoned my novel, that is, Federman’s novel. I wasn’t upset. On the contrary, as I cleaned out the directory with all my files, I felt relieved, even somewhat privileged. Thank God I’d only almost written my novel. The Universe had saved me time, presumably to write a novel someone else hadn’t already written. I felt the discovery hadn’t been an accident at all, but a hint.

  But now, here I was, the sweaty arm of the Universe once again around my shoulders, living the life of the protagonist of the novel I hadn’t finished. I felt less privileged. One helpful sign is a hint. Two helpful signs is oppression.

  I missed my wife and was tired of playing one to Dorabjee. At times I thought about finishing what the waiter’s bullet had never even started.

  The bullet may have missed its mark, but it hadn’t been without effect. Everyone was now a potential suspect. In the absence of anything concrete to do, an organization reorganizes itself. The Lokshakti roiled with reorganizations, restructurings, new security arrangements, mandatory lie-detector tests. I resisted calling Tanaz because missing her hardened me and I needed to be hard. Dorabjee wished to be surrounded by armour and any hint of softness meant an exposed flank.

  In that sense, the assassination attempt did the General a favour. It’s better to learn of exposed skin through a mosquito’s pinprick than a hyena’s bite. Kalki told us at the weekly briefing that his
interrogation team had made several breakthroughs. Rafeeqa Aslam’s father, the waiter cum would-be assassin, had masterminded the plot to kill Dorabjee. He was a widower with no extended family to speak of in India. There was an older brother, a retired programmer based in the US. Homeland Security was investigating the fellow. The Lair’s new chef had been arrested. The evidence against him was damning; the chef was from Lahore and he’d hired the assassin. The ISI was obviously behind the whole thing.

  The room broke into applause though I stopped after a few perfunctory claps. I had been busy typing all day and my fingers hurt. Sensing the General’s pale gaze on my motionless paws, I remarked that facts were harder to arrest than fiction.

  ‘Stop talking in riddles, chappie,’ said Dorabjee, working his soggy cigar. It wasn’t clear what irritated Dorabjee more, my riddle or that his doctors had nixed smoking. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘General, these kinds of mysteries are best solved before they happen. Kudos to the Colonel’s team for finding those responsible, but isn’t it better to find them before they become irresponsible? Before fiction turns into fact?’

  Kalki had had remarkable, suspiciously remarkable, success in breaking the Bhavi Itihaas network. Nonetheless, I believed Kalki’s so-called conspiracy involving the Lair’s poor chef, ISI and what not, was just as fictional as anything I might have imagined. We’d generated many fictions and counter-fictions about Rafeeqa Aslam, so many in fact, a kind of critical point had been reached. There was no longer any need for us to keep making up new stories. They would reproduce on their own.

  Any two events can be turned into a story. A crow lands on a coconut tree. A coconut falls. A young girl dies. An old man tries to kill Dorabjee. A young girl had died; an old man had tried to kill Dorabjee. Rafeeqa Aslam had died; her father had tried to kill Dorabjee. Rafeeqa Aslam died at the hands of the Lokshakti’s goons and the grief-stricken father tried to kill Dorabjee. So on and so forth. Subject, verb, object; who did what to whom. As the poet Michael Ryan said somewhere, every English sentence is a mystery novel whose plot we already know.

  My star rose in the crisis. This came as a surprise. Hollywood movies have proved that whether it’s zombies, alien invasions, a ticking bomb or an annihilating comet, no emergency has ever compelled a Chief Executive to scream: ‘Get me the Dean of the English Department, now!’ Engineers, scientists, soldiers: they’re humanity’s best bet in a crisis, not the Arts & Humanities.

  I’d realized quite early in my career that I had no talent for promoting myself and the best way to get promoted was to promote my superiors. To wit, become a toady. Since I was expendable, I had to be loyal. Unfortunately, unconditional loyalty makes one something of a court jester. Dorabjee would often begin the Governing Committee meetings with something that had amused him in one of my memos. I entertained but I couldn’t change a thing.

  That had changed. Before the assassination attempt, confident that I would be ignored per usual, I had generated a number of white papers on the art of marketing tyranny, or as I put it, the pursuit of clarity. My premise was simple: an effective tyranny makes misrecognition impossible. But we needed an indigenous mythology of clarity, something uniquely suited for the Indian psyche. Though Indians were willing to follow, we couldn’t lead them as if they were Swiss or Singaporeans or Americans.

  What this indigenous mythos would be, I wasn’t sure. But just as it was easier to change the meaning of a word than persuade people to use a new one, it was easier to transform the stories we had than to spread new stories. The human need for perceiving the world in terms of stories was a secret passageway into the fort of consciousness. Lanka would always fall.

  The white papers were pure speculative nonfiction, and knowing I had no readers only drove me to ever more bold claims. For example, I’d proposed recasting the Lokshakti as a spirituality friendly outfit. Why didn’t the Lokshakti conduct free Art of Living classes? Why weren’t Lokshakti websites the first resource for Vipassana enthusiasts? Why wasn’t the Lokshakti the biggest supporter of churches, temples, mosques, gurudwaras? Why wasn’t the Lokshakti aligned with God, the Tyrannosaurus par excellence?

  Why didn’t the Lokshakti recruit senior citizens to its cause? Seniors had little to lose and therefore clung all the harder to what little they had. They were terrified of a thousand things and loved measures that lowered risk. Measures such as clearing the streets of stray dogs, for example. Clean toilets. Walk spaces. Hassle-free rickshaws. Fixing broken windows was much easier than fixing poverty or illiteracy or corruption. Elders were our natural allies and their gratitude would be a useful counterweight to the Lokshakti’s natural enemy: radical youth.

  Why didn’t the Lokshakti take a page from the Jesuits and get into the education business? It wouldn’t cost much money and was easy to standardize. If even remote villages had cheap fast net access, then a few high-quality teachers based in cities could serve content to thousands of students. The local school only needed to worry about building the student’s character. It could become what parents really wanted schools to be: a trustworthy baby-sitter. People would overlook almost anything if their children could get ahead in life. A child admitted to a Lokshakti school could be given all sorts of advantages. Surely the General remembered the psychological advantages his Brigands education had given him?

  Why didn’t the Lokshakti make a major investment in regional languages? Far from resisting the natural tendency of Indians to divide themselves along linguistic identities, we should do everything possible to encourage it. We could learn from Joseph ‘Stalin’ Djugashvili, who for all his faults, knew a thing or two about control.

  Stalin had had a keen appreciation for linguistics. Witness his letter to Krishna Menon inquiring about India’s languages. Witness his editing a volume of translations of Georgian poetry into Russian. Witness how in 1950, after some five years of silence, at the start of the Korean War, the great man had broken his sombre acoustic fast with a triad of essays on the linguistics of all things. Stalin understood that the Soviet Russia easiest to govern was the polyglot Soviet Russia in which Armenian, Azerbaijanian, Bashkirian, Byelorussian, Estonian, Georgian, Kazakh, Latvian, Lithuanian, Moldavian, Tatar, Turkmenian, Ukrainian, and Uzbek all babbled in mutual incomprehension. Our people had the same genius for linguistics; we only had to set it free.

  Why couldn’t the Lokshakti use violence solely to preserve the law, not make it? Punishment was most effective when it transformed people, not pushed them beyond the reach of law. What was more inaccessible than death? Capital punishment had to be the most sparing, most reluctant of punishments. In life, the side with the greater passion for life prevailed.

  Why didn’t the Lokshakti actively practice the art of nindhastuthi? Turn curses into an act of obeisance, an act of worship? Why didn’t the Lokshakti create a department stuffed with creative snivelers of every stripe whose sole responsibility was to make fun of the powers-that-be? Cartoons, animations, movies, poems, novels: if it mocked the government, the government would publish it. Would this reduce the government’s authority? Did a court jester reduce the authority of his King? No, he enhanced it.

  So on and so forth. A joker’s job becomes burdensome when he’s taken seriously. A joker is taken seriously when his jokes are mistaken for insights. I was now being taken seriously. My staff was tripled, my budget doubled, and at meetings, the other directors stopped making trips to the snacks bar when it was my turn to talk. Phrases from my memos began to creep into Dorabjee’s weekly harangues. He spoke of the need for clarity. He sent me a heap of incoherent notes, with instructions to ‘fluff it up a bit, add quotes and what not, dolly it up, dear boy.’ He wanted me to ghost-write his Big Vision book.

  I was so aroused by the Big Vision, the blood-drain to my nether regions left me unable to see the gaps and absences in my life. Which is perhaps why I nearly didn’t recognize the tall, strong woman in the blue salwar kameez. Bilkis! ‘Vyas!’

  We hugged; that is, I cla
sped her right shoulder while she leaned forward just a bit. A flotilla of sensations: the soft large mass of her breast briefly pressed against my forearm, a curl clinging damply to her neck, the aroma of cheap army soap and floral shampoo. Her hair was a lovely cascade of springy curls and sleek waves, different from the tight tormented bun I was used to. She looked altogether beautiful.

  Bilkis punched my shoulder.

  ‘Why are you giving me Prem Chopra looks, mian?’

  ‘Because you look terrific, Bilkis.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, grinning. ‘Men have been tearing out their eyes all day. Accha, forget all that, you have lost weight. I thought by now at least you would settle things.’ She lowered her voice. ‘How is Tanaz?’

  I explained Tanaz was camped in Hapur. The project was behind schedule and she was trying to make up for lost time. She was finally in charge of something quite substantial. Bilkis smiled, perhaps at the pride in my voice.

  ‘I’m happy for her, but that’s too bad. My heart was thirsting to meet her.’

  ‘And you will, Bilkis. In our house, at our dinner table, over a lovely home-cooked meal. But for now we’re on our own.’

  ‘I feel like eating burji,’ said Bilkis. ‘What about you?’

  ‘Burji! Are you joking? You’re obviously dressed for a French restaurant. Anything less fancy and the meal won’t get digested.’

  She had a ready insult of course, but the dynamic between us had changed, at least from my side. Perhaps she sensed it too—she had to sense it—for our accidental brushes and glances were charged with an electric tension. She drew away a little, began to mind her limbs.

  I called my secretary who called the exit security who called the driver and told him to bring the car around. To distract Bilkis from her obvious awe at my trappings of power (personal bathroom!), I plied her with questions as we waited.