by Ashok Banker
Tuli's number rings continually. He counts twenty-seven rings, then hangs up, leaning on a Sandtexed wall, trying to clear his smoky head. He remembers vaguely that she had mentioned something about going for a Hindi film with her parents. It is 3.15 in the clock on the mithai shop's wall.
Drinking filter coffee at the snack cafe, he is seized by uncontrollable nausea. He vomits into the gutter, collecting an interested crowd of spectators in seconds. The two women at the table nearest to the pavement—a couple of feet from his regurgitative demonstration—
leave in disgust, one of them saying loudly enough for him to hear:
‘These drug addict fellows should be locked up for good, na?' The owner of the restaurant prevents him from using their washbasin to clean up and reprimands him in rollingTamil for the crime of being ill before his establishment.
He barely makes it back the few hundred yards to his flat before his bowels scream and he awakens to exquisite new tortures on the squatty-potty. He slumps to the floor of the balcony, breathing rapidly, face dripping sweat, looking out at the faded blue late-afternoon sky above the antenna-topped buildings. He is burning with high fever now and the flicks of wind make him shiver uncontrollably. He is still sitting with his back to the wall, staring up dully, when birds begin to criss-cross the sky and the sounds ofchildren kicking a football in the compound opposite his building grow louder. He is sweating in spite of the cool evening air, and the rusty grille of the balcony railing feels cold and rubbery to his touch.
He staggers to his feet with the thought of going in search of a doctor but collapses again in the living room and lies there for a long time, maybe half an hour or more, before he gives up the idea and drags himself into the bedroom and the comfort of his mattress.
He spends a delirious night, moaning with pain. Arrows pierce his bowels, gas escapes endlessly, but when he staggers to the toilet for relief: nothing. The fever rises until he is maddened beyond tolerance.
Fantastic surrealistic images flicker on the television screen behind his eyes. Once he imagines he sees someone in the room with him, a woman dressed in a black cloak and cowl, her back to him, looking out the window. The moonlight lays a grainy grey veil on her face. She turns to Jay, but the moment she faces him, a cloud passes over the moon. Lumpy shadows drift across her smooth white face. Jay feels certain that he knows this woman but his screaming neurons refuse to let the information reach his conscious mind. He dreams of telephones and of reaching for one, its red plastic body cool and smooth; but when he tries to dial Tuli's number, his finger is stopped short. A lock is on the phone, a dial-lock like the ones shopkeepers keep on their phones. He cries out in frustration and when he looks again the phone is gone. The moon emerges from behind the cloud and the woman has turned her face away again.
He remembers the smell of Tuli's vagina, the pungent saltiness, the rubbery resilience of her nipples, the balloony firmness of her breasts, the flat stomach with its fine patina of down, the sweaty underarms with the gritty stubble of shaved hair, the curve of her hip and thighs as he slides her panties down, the wetness on the inside of her thighs, the rough curls of her pubic hair, the knobbly thing deep inside when he penetrates her with her legs raised—is that the back of her vagina or the beginning of her womb? And then her body turns hot in his caressing hands, too hot to hold.
The moon emerges again from behind the cloud and the woman turns her face to him as he looks up from dialling the red telephone, and he sees that she is—
‘Food poisoning,’ says Dr G.P. Khosla. He writes a prescription on his notepad, rips off the small square sheet with his name and academic degrees printed on the top, and pushes it across the desk to Jay. Jay takes it uncertainly. All he can read of the scrawl are the words something-mycin and the dosage: thrice daily. He pays the doctor ten rupees and makes his way out of the small garishly lit clinic. Two women in burkhas sit in the reception beside a heavy Muslim man chewing paan. He speaks in Urdu to his wives and goes into the doctor's chamber, the two women following, heads lowered, hands holding the black meshed face-flaps securely in place as they pass Jay.
His legs buckle as he comes down the three steps to the compound of the building and he almost falls upon a teenage boy carrying a baby whose red face is sprung open by a bawling silent mouth. Jay catches hold of the door jamb just in time and waits until the boy and the bawling baby have pushed impatiently past him. Then he takes the last step down and sways unsteadily, shivering in the cool July wind. The late morning sun scorches his eyes. He makes his way painfully to a medical store where he stands waiting for ten minutes while the store-clerk finishes a long and enjoyable conversation in Marathi with a friend leaning on the counter and smoking.When Jay presents the prescription, he glances at it and says curtly, ‘Out of stock.'
Jay wants to be angry, to ask the clerk why the hell he made him wait ten minutes just to tell him that; instead he turns away and plods to the next medical store, a hundred yards up the street. Halfway there, he remembers that he's supposed to withdraw cash from the bank. He turns and walks back, then spends fifteen agonizing minutes crossing the street. The air-conditioned air hits him like a bucket of ice water. He clenches his teeth hard enough to make his jaws ache and fights to keep his hand steady as he signs the withdrawal slip. His token number is 9, there are hardly three persons waiting before him, but it takes all of half an hour to get the money.Waiting on the too-low sofa, holding a magazine on telecommunications (why telecommunications?) he is struck by the thought that Tuli might be worried, might decide to come visit him since today's Monday, a college day, and she can use that as an excuse, that she might even be there right now, ringing his doorbell impatiently, and he starts to get up, intending to go back to the flat, but then he realizes that he needs the money, and more important, he needs the medicine. The cashier gives him ancient worn-out fifty-rupee notes. He hesitates, then takes them without complaining—the other notes on the cashier's desk look worse. Emerging again into a sun-blasted world, the traffic stuns him, causing a ringing in his ears that at first he truly believes is emitting from an ambulance or fire engine somewhere nearby. He has not eaten anything for two days except some Maggi noodles and glucose biscuits, which, as it turns out, were among the few things he could have eaten anyway, according to the doctor.
The second medical store has the something-mycin. It costs him eighty-seven rupees and he has to ask twice before the man gives him a bill which he tucks into his pocket to be presented later for redemption against his medical allowance. He has already called the office and told Suchitra to inform Dave that he is very ill and can't make it to work. She was sympathetic: ‘Take care, Jay. And get well soon.’
He buys a copy of lndia Today from the corner newspaper-wallah.
Elections, elections. He also wants to buy the Economic Times and the Economist which he has begun reading every week in office, but decides he can’t afford them. By the time he buys biscuits, Maggi noodles and baked beans, he has spent almost half the money he withdrew. And there are still twenty-three days left to pay day. The grocer puts the foodstuff in a micro-thin polythene bag which stretches and comes apart on the way home, forcing him to hug the pack to his chest as he trudges on numb legs back to the flat. No Tuli waits outside the front door. His neighbours’ children are sitting on the steps in their underwear, staring sullenly at him as he struggles up the steps.
He asks them in Hindi: ‘Did you see any girl ringing my bell?’, but instead of replying they get up and go inside their flat, the girl calling out to her mother in some south Indian language. While Jay is trying to get the key into the latch, the woman comes to her door and asks Jay in heavily accented English: ‘Yes? What you’re wanting?’
‘I just wanted to know if any girl came to my door while I was away.
Rang the bell.’
‘Girl? Which girl?’
‘She comes sometimes to see me. Medium height, medium length hair, fair, slim, pretty.’
She grins, d
isplaying large crooked buck teeth. ‘No, re. No girl.
Thank you.’ She shuts her door and he sees her shadow through the peephole, watching him. He gets his door open and collapses inside the flat.
Two days later, he is sitting on the balcony floor, a cup of weak tea, a packet of sliced bread and a small pack of Amul Butter before him: breakfast. He has begun to get his appetite back. The doctor said this morning that perhaps it was not food poisoning after all, just a stomach infection. He starts out by applying a thin layer of butter on the bread, but yields to temptation and lays thicker layers, even chunks on the third and fourth slices. Folding the butter-thickened slices, dipping them into the tea, bending low with his mouth open to receive the dripping slices, relishing the taste of tea-soddened buttered bread, Jay is precariously close to true happiness... when the doorbell rings.
Tuli?
He leaps to the door, stumbling as the brain-deadening antibiotics make him reel with dizziness. Closing his eyes for a second, white pinpoints of light explode like a fireworks display on Diwali night, blood hums and whines through his arteries. He forces his eyes open and turns the doorknob.
Mr Nagaraj stands on the doorstep. ‘I had one key,’ he says, almost inaudible above the pounding of Jay’s heart, ‘but there is no lock on door, so I thought maybe...’
‘Come in, come in. Please.’ Jay invites him in, opening the door wider, swallowing a piece of undissolved bread. His throat is slick with butter.
Mr Nagaraj comes in. Jay shuts the door. He starts to ask his landlord to sit please, but there is no place to sit. ‘Don’t worry,’ Mr Nagaraj says in response to his nervous stammering.
‘I’m sorry about the rent,’ Jay says, suddenly conscious that he’s wearing only an old pair of brown corduroys with a rip on the right leg and a faded tee shirt with Donna Summers pouting on the front.
‘I was going to come and see you one of these days, but. . .’ he waves his hand helplessly, ‘I’ve not been well, you know.. .’You are not keeping good health?’
‘I had a mild attack. Food poisoning.’
‘Ah.’
After a few minutes of small talk about eating out and diarrhoea and hepatitis and Indira Gandhi’s chances of winning the forthcoming elections, Jay realizes that Nagaraj is giving him a chance to explain about the missed rent payment. He swallows and broaches the subject, explaining that he is having some severe money problems right now (true) and that these problems are caused by his having to buy expensive imported drugs for his sickness (not true) and finally ending with a promise to pay the missed rent payment by the 20th, although how he's going to manage such a feat is beyond his comprehension. Nagaraj is very nice about the whole thing, so nice that Jay worries that he's going to turn nasty any second, threaten or raise his voice, but this never happens. The landlord turns his expectations upside down by telling him in a genuinely sympathetic tone that he can pay the rent with the next month's rent and not to worry about it but to take care of his health and work hard .With this astonishing show of kindness he takes his leave and now Jay wishes he had offered him a cup of tea—
although the milk is over—and after he goes, Jay sits down and feels like crying because it is the first time in years anyone has been so understanding and kind to him.
chapter thirty-four
The fateful dinner took place on a Friday. By the followingThursday, Jay feels fine. But when he tries to wake up that morning, his eyes refuse to open and when he stands up, his head reels and nausea grips his innards. He doesn't actually vomit but bile belches its way up to his throat and he tastes the awful plasticky smell of the antibiotics. He sits down on the rickety wooden stool in the kitchen, watching the milk boil and thinks of the route to office: First a crowded bus to the station, where even getting your ticket from the bus-conductor is an ordeal; then the war of the elbows boarding a Churchgate local, hanging on for forty-five minutes in a sweaty bad-breathed crowd with someone’s crotch thrust against your buttocks; then the long walk to office. Jay feels weak at the very thought of it. By now he's really worried about Dave, what he must be thinking. The only thing that keeps his fear of dismissal partly at bay is the thought that Pinch has been postponed. Even then he can't help writhing at the possibility of being sacked. But he really is still too weak to make that awful journey, let alone get through a whole day of work. The milk hisses, frothing at the rim of the aluminium utensil. He switches it off; a lip of white foam tongues over the edge and drips on the grease-coated top of the kerosene wick-stove. He had almost fallen asleep on the stool. He takes off his shirt which he ironed and put on with the intention of dressing for office, fumbles sleepily, trying to fold it neatly, finally drops it on the suitcase he brought with him some eighteen months ago from his mother's flat and lies down on the mattress.
An hour or maybe several hours later, he finds himself semi-awake, staring unseeingly at the ceiling. His cotton banian is soaked with sweat. His eyes and head are still a little heavy with the familiar dulling weight of the drugs, but the powerful sleepiness has worn off.
He thinks of his mother. He hasn't been to see her for nearly two months now. Since that salary advance, the time he slipped that money in through the mail slot, he hasn't been to see her. The reason has been money. He feels ashamed that he hasn't been able to fulfil his responsibility towards her. He regrets taking the salary advance. How will he manage now? He can't go on this way. Tuli must try to get the money back— or part of it at least.What is she doing now? Mama, not Tuli. Tuli will probably be at college, irritated that he hasn't called her all week, without thinking that he could be seriously ill, or dead in a road accident. She must have called the office; they would have told her he's ill. So why hasn't she come to visit him? He tosses uncomfortably, miserable that the one person he cares more about than anyone else on this planet has not thought it worthwhile to even find out if he's all right.
And Mama? How is she managing without money? Perhaps she has been saving up a little each month from her allowance. He remembers the money squirrelled away under the newspaper and clothes in her cupboard. If he was staying with her, perhaps she would even have given him a little to tide him over now. Or he could have just taken it.
She always got angry about that, but she never begrudged him anything, he knows that, in her heart of hearts. For all her faults, she never let him want for anything all through his childhood. She paid his way through a good school, always bought him brand-new textbooks (though she sold them second-hand at the end of the year), and kept three sets of school uniforms for him. True, she couldn't afford to send him to college, but by then he was old enough to work his way if he'd wanted. But he was bursting with the need to earn his own keep by then. So he'd applied at DM and, by a miracle, got the job. He remembered how suspicious she'd been when he'd come home and told her he had got a job. It had taken days to convince her that it was a decent company and that his employer hadn't hired him with the secret intention of sodomizing and corrupting him. And when he got his first pay—it was in cash then because he was barely above the taxable limit—she had looked at the money and beamed at him.
When had he ever been prouder of himself in his life than at that moment? And now here he was, too sick to get up and get himself a glass of water, and there she was, all alone in that big flat, drinking her country liquor, orange flavour and talking and laughing to herself, and waiting endlessly for him to come and visit, hardly aware of the difference between Sunday and Monday so she must be thinking every evening when she wakes from her afternoon nap: ‘He'll come today, sure he will.’ And when he doesn't come: ‘Tomorrow, surely tomorrow.’ And so many tomorrows have passed; their combined weight presses down intolerably on his shoulders and the nape of his neck with a crushing pressure; as does the weight of his years on this planet: 22 tons. Tomorrow the scales will tip to 23 . Tomorrow is his birthday.
An anger begins to build. The anger begins to uncurl and stretch its embryonic limbs within his heart. It strikes out and
kicks against the tender walls of his ego, mewling and growling. A cobra uncoiling itself on the hot sand of his loneliness. An Imperial Starcruiser booming across the 70mm visionscape of his existence.
Today is his birthday. The time is now 8.30 p.m. He has waited all day. In the morning, when he awoke, he was filled with a deep sadness, a delicious lozenge of self-pity melting slowly in his cheek, and he decided impulsively not to go to work. If he was going to be sacked, one more day would hardly make a difference; if he wasn't, then he might as well get as much rest as he could. Also, damnit, this was his birthday.
So he stays home. He has stopped taking the antibiotics because they made him too weak and dizzy. Now he feels much better. His stomach has recovered completely. The fact that he has been able to consume all that butter without hiccuping was enough to convince him no permanent damage has been inflicted on his liver. As the day wears on, he feels his appetite returning. He goes down to the bank and withdraws another five hundred rupees, cleaning out his account.
Then he calls Tuli's house. This is when he gets his first shock: Tuli, a servant informs him, has gone shopping with her mother and is not expected back until evening. She has gone, it seems, to Fashion Street.
Jay replaces the receiver, buzzing with confusion. Did she plan to slip away and come over? It is already past 11 when he calls, so she must have bunked college. If so, why hadn't she come over directly? I mean, it is my birthday, isn't it? Maybe she intends to make an excuse later and come over.
But he knew that is impossible. If she has gone shopping with her mother, she can hardly ‘slip away’. And if she hasn't come over by now, she can hardly be expected to visit in the evening, or night. No, there is no doubt about it, try as he might to refute the bitter fact: Tuli has forgotten his birthday.