Half of What I Say

by Anil Menon

  The jeep stopped a kilometre or so from the prison. We stepped out, our limbs stiff but also shivering with clueless anticipation. The earth was dark and brown and all around us was a sea of footprints.

  They offered us cigarettes, and Gowda of course accepted. After a second’s hesitation, so did Rathod.

  They made us stand facing the jolly moon, so that our shadows merged with the freshly dug graves. The night seemed ablaze with stars despite the cataract-clouded sky. The hood was drawn over my head. Even in the sudden darkness I could sense the external world burning in my head. I felt something stroke my hand, the gentlest touch, the purest love, and a part of me slipped away for ever.

  I heard a series of shots, each punctuated with the heavy thud of a falling body. As I braced myself, I dissociated and I—

  I do not remember when the hood was yanked off my head. With that awareness also arrived my sense of self. I stood once again in the land of the living. I stared into the florid avuncular features of General Victor Dorabjee plus lit cigar. He looked frail. But frail wasn’t dead. Victor Dorabjee was alive. He prodded me with his walking stick.

  ‘How does it feel, lad? Bet you thought your time was up.’

  I glanced at the crumpled figures. Mir and Gowda lay dead in their allotted spaces. Rathod was crouched on the ground, heaving. But nauseous wasn’t dead. Kalki’s men lifted me up. Dorabjee leaned forward. He was addicted to Gurkha cellar reserves but when I’d first met him, a lifetime ago, he’d smoked a pipe. The fifteen-year-old cognac-infused cigar’s fragrant smoke foregrounded my own rank body odour. ‘Well Vyas, am I an ass or a wolf ? How does the fable appear to you now? Thought you were clever, didn’t you? You’re damn lucky you married a Parsi and there are so few of us left. But tell me the truth, what am I going to do with you?’

  25

  KAMPUCHEA

  THERE IS THIS MATTER OF AN ENDING. SOMETIME IN OCTOBER this year, either on the twenty-second or twenty-third. It was before Dussehra but after my talk on vipralambha1 in Sanskrit poetics at the Asiatic Society. That makes it the twenty-second, I think. These particulars are not important, my brother, nor likely to be exact. I trust you are mainly interested in what happened next.

  We all want to know: what happened next? Sometimes at the end of a long story or a long journey home, where we expect the delighted smile of a spouse and the happy shrieks of children, we only find locked doors and wilting flowers the shape of silent questions. I am anxious that you avoid this fate. However, these are delicate matters so I must concoct a play of forms in a triangular situation, feint and parry, as it were, and trust in your generosity of spirit to humour my iron necessities. My words are mere placeholders as you must have already divined from my talk of locked doors and wilting flowers when I meant ‘black marigolds and silence’. I fear words, my brother, and fear makes men do fearful things. The footnotes will help2.

  I shrug and say: I remember Satya3 and I were at this Connaught Place restaurant, Viva Hyderabadi. Your bhabhi was clicking away per usual—me, the restaurant, more of me, cute this and lovely that, me again—all very embarrassing because it focused attention on us, that is, focused people’s attention on the General Evolutionary Puzzle, namely: how did this joker manage to patao such a beautiful woman? But this is not that story. I recall Satya asking:

  ‘Love me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Meanie.’

  Click, click. Green glad golden tree. She is girlishly happy. Your bhabhi just had her hair done, I have always gloried in her curls, and she knows helplessness always brings out the brute in me. Then again, nothing I say can upset her because she is going to be a mother, and you know how long we’ve been trying. Anyway, there I am, chewing on a rugged nugget, about to launch into how the biryani is actually a South Indian dish, a theory that Vir Sanghvi has been going around pretending to be his, but as we biryani perverts know, it is a theory that Tipu Sultan had originally and unwisely argued with his diwan Mir Sadiq, provoking of course the betrayal that so altered the subcontinent’s history. I swallow the rubbery meat and as I begin to speak, I catch sight of—

  Jenny! Jenny Lai. She is pointing a finger, hey, are you—yes, yes, of course I am. I don’t remember who squeals first, but I shoot up, all grin and teeth, Jenny Lai, Jenny, Jenny, Jenny Lai4. She clasps the back of my neck and I lower my head. There are moments when we are more body than mind; cracked earth, seeking rain. I squeeze her face, aching to slap it, her eyes daring me, then time and world come between us, and we let go of each other instead of ourselves. Satya has also got up, smiling. I am glad, everything happened so long ago, what difference can it make?

  ‘College friends?’ asks Satya, smiling.

  ‘Ex-girlfriend, sweetie.’ Jenny Lai leans in for a hug. ‘Gosh, so nice to meet you, Sat-ya. Did I say that right? He talked about you all the time, and I was, like, when do I get to meet this super-awesome chick? This is so weird. My driver—that’s him over there—wanted to take me to a Mexican joint and I was, like, dude, I can’t leave without sampling authentic Indian food. We drive a bit more, I see this place, and I get this weird feeling that I have to stop—well, yaada, yaada. Damn, dude. It’s so good to see you.’ She punched my arm.

  She is forty-five going on seventeen. I catch a whiff of alcohol.

  ‘How’s your hand?’ Jenny grabs my right wrist, turns it over. Her touch is cool, ice-cold actually, and she removes her hand almost immediately. I flex my hand for her benefit. See? Fine.

  ‘I shattered eight bones in my right side.’ I explain to Satya that in Ithaca I’d tried to stop a Ford Taurus moving at thirty miles per hour with my hand. Turned out I wasn’t a superhero. I’d broken my right wrist, right hand, right shoulder. Tough times. ‘Jenny was a huge help.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me that!’ Satya turns to Jenny. ‘He never tells me anything.’

  ‘I didn’t want you to worry,’ I protest.

  ‘If not me, who? I’m your wife! Isn’t that right, Jenny?’

  ‘Absolutely. Dude, you are so in trouble.’

  It is a charming scene, but I know Satya is very hurt and therefore very angry. Later, I apologize. She is right. I should have told her about Jenny.

  ‘You humiliated me,’ she says. ‘I should have ripped her eyes out and instead I had to smile and smile.’

  ‘I wanted to tell you, but you must believe me when I say it’s impossible to explain.’

  ‘I believed you. Remember, the first night you got back, how we made love?’

  ‘Satya—’

  ‘Without condoms, do you recall? I wasn’t worried. I had faith. I was certain. But you weren’t. You still gambled. You made me sleep with all the men she’d ever slept with.’

  There was no reasoning with her. Actually, the situation was worse than she imagined: there were no reasons. The situation was worse than I’d hoped: she demanded explanations. Satya, such a faith in words. Satya, when has there ever been an acceptable reason that we do not first wish to believe? She did not wish to believe. Not any more. I broke her. She broke us. Time had crept in, dipped its tail in lamp oil, set fire to my kingdom. These statements may not be connected.

  Do you understand what I’m trying to say, my brother? We are responsible but we are not guilty. I met Jenny Lai at the Jive in Ithaca. If the Jive hadn’t had a Bollywood Bhangra night. If I hadn’t gone to the Jive. If I hadn’t wanted an Amstel. If I hadn’t worn my Cornell T-shirt. If I hadn’t a fetish for Cambodian women. If Jenny hadn’t leaned over the bar counter and said, hey dude, I’m going to India, what’s the best place to get authentic biryani? If, after fifteen billion years of purposeless cosmic evolution, a Cambodian woman hadn’t shown up interested in Bhangra, beer, dancing, college boys, biryani and in me, then I could have escaped losing Satya.

  I know what you will say: you should have known better than to place yourself in jeopardy. Ithaca, Kampuchea, Mumbai: who cares? It is not the particulars of the situation but its general aspects that did you in. All you
r particulars are just a smokescreen. You could have chosen the principle: men who lust after women other than their wives deserve to lose them. You chose the particular.

  Perhaps. But that is your ethic, my brother, the ethic of a taxonomic people. X who lust after Y other than their Z deserve to lose them. Once, it was my ethic too. Once, I would have rationalized: there is no Satya. She is a placeholder. She’s a caste, a tribe, a colour, a gender, someone’s ideal. Let Z = Satya. Once, I was an X. Once I was an ethical exemplar. Once I had ten heads and I still erred. But this is not that story.

  Now I have dissolved into the particular. Jenny Lai stands close to me, large breasts squashed against my arm, her mouth close to my ear, whispering. I lean in and confess I’m married, and she gives my ear a playful lick. See, she says, I don’t bite. How we laugh. She’s more than a little drunk, and if she is the designated driver for her group of friends, imagine their state. What if I had walked away from the particular situation and discovered the next day that I had allowed six young women, six particulars, to die in a car accident? What generalization would rescue me then?

  One particular followed another. I dropped them home, endured their drunken antics, brushed off Jenny’s remorseful apology the next morning, accepted her invitation to teach her how to make biryani.

  I brushed my teeth twice, shaved, showered, called Satya to say I loved her, then went to teach Jenny the art of biryani. I had expected a party of one, but she had invited a crowd of friends. In the kitchen, I launched into my tragic tale of Tipu Sultan and his diwan Mir Sadiq, which took an hour, finally confessing to the dumbfounded audience that I knew nothing of making biryani.

  ‘I’m stuffed,’ says Jenny, laughing. ‘Now tell us how to make barfi.’

  What is a story? Once upon a time, my beloved. Here, we fire the gun. The loyal servant represents epiphany. The slut signifies. The motif of the biryani needs to be better developed. The story fails because. But the patterns are spurious, as transient as a kolam. The totality of possibilities cannot be contained. What is a story? A patterned reticulation of comfort on the possibilities of the world. One particular led to another. One long night, Jenny and I talked, cuddled, and then without warning seized each other. She attacked me with ferocity. She pressed her head close to mine, pressed kiss upon kiss, her mouth close to my ear. She growled:

  ‘Tell my story.’ Then she bit me. Right on the jugular, opening the vein, releasing my life.

  She fed on me. First little sips, then in great mouthfuls of blood. I hear her grunting with pleasure; my terror seems to be pleasure’s gain. The feeding drains me and I know I’m going to die. Perhaps I did; the blood’s always in the gutters5. When I awaken, I’m healed, more alive than I have ever been in my life. My demoness sits curled before me, awaiting either entry or exit, and I must choose. She has a story. It is a cruel story. It’s told on the scars of her nose, the cuts on her lips. This could have been that story. Do you hear what I have been trying to say, my brother? Ask me for the truth and I must be silent. Ask me for comfort and I must make a story.

  Satya cannot be angry with me for long. I’m the father of her child. Let its life, if not her forgiveness, be a bridge between us. I will come for my wife. In the meanwhile.

  Take care of Satya.

  1 The body’s response to separation from a loved one; sound of a creaky hinge as the door slowly opens (or shuts).

  2 Unlikely. These are the narrator’s footnotes so the contagion is hardly contained.

  3 Sanskrit: Truth

  4 Jenny’s actual name is Piht Lai, Khmer for ‘truth,’ but that would clash with ‘Satya’ were this recension ever translated into Khmer. In an earlier recension, Satya was ‘Gita’ which led to similar problems because ‘Song’ in Khmer means ‘reimburse’ and awkward questions arise as to who has to be compensated for what deed. Satya could be ‘Kannagi’ or ‘Saya’ or even ‘Bilkis’ but these knotty problems would remain. It’s probably safe for Hindi translators to identify ‘Jenny’ with ‘Kavya’ although this too isn’t without its difficulties. Jenny certainly scans better in English.

  5 In Khmer, this is translated from the German original, the nursery rhyme Blut muss fliessen.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ANIL MENON STARTED OUT WANTING TO BE AN ACCOUNTANT, TOOK a long detour through mathematics and computer science and ended up a fiction writer. His short fictions has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Some of Anil’s stories have been translated into Chinese, French, German, Hebrew and Romanian. His debut novel The Beast With Nine Billion Feet (Zubaan Books, 2010) was shortlisted for the 2010 Vodafone-Crossword Award. Along with Vandana Singh, he edited Breaking the Bow (Zubaan Books, 2012), an anthology of speculative fiction inspired by the Ramayana. He can be reached at iam@anilmenon.com.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  IN MY NEXT LIFE, I’LL PROBABLY BE BORN AS A LAB RAT. THERE’S NO other way to balance the undeserved good fortune of family and friends in this life. I’ll embarrass them all with emosional hatyachar in person. But I owe a special debt of gratitude to four women. Geeta

  Patel, for our never-ending conversation. Himanjali Sankar, my editor, for having faith in this novel when it was needed. Saras Sarasvathy, my first reader, then, now and always. And my beloved mother Subhadra Menon. It took me a long time to hear what she was trying to tell me.