It was also the first time that he had been asked questions about his life, that someone had shown any interest in him for something unconnected with curing chronic constipation or erectile dysfunction. He even came to regret having conned Marie in such a despicable manner.
And the way she looked at him, the way she smiled at him . . . He could be wrong, but it seemed to him that she was chatting him up. This was a strange situation because in his country it was always men who chatted up women, but it made him feel good anyway.
Inside his pocket, Ajatashatru caressed the frames of his fake sunglasses. A secret mechanism enabled the six pieces of glass to interlock and be held in tension. Bang them even slightly and the pieces burst out of the frames, giving the illusion that the glasses had smashed.
Ever since he had started using this trick, he had noticed that most people felt so guilty that they gave him money as compensation for their clumsiness.
In fact Ajatashatru, who did not have an original bone in his body, had merely tweaked the famous broken vase illusion, which he had found in an old book on tricks and hoaxes.
THE BROKEN VASE TRICK
Material: a parcel, a broken vase, wrapping paper.
You walk around a large store holding a parcel covered in wrapping paper. Inside this parcel, you have previously placed the pieces of a broken vase. As you walk around the store, you spot a victim, approach her, and press your body against hers. Your sudden presence so close to her will make her jump. When this happens, you should drop the parcel. The sound it makes when it hits the floor will give the impression that the beautiful vase you were planning to give to your beloved aunt has just smashed into a thousand pieces. The victim will feel so guilty that she will instantly offer to compensate you for the damage.
‘So now I know how you charm women,’ said Marie with a sly little smile, ‘but what I would like to know is how you fakirs charm snakes . . . That has always intrigued me.’
Truth be told, the Indian had not intended to charm the Frenchwoman, but he accepted the compliment, assuming it was a compliment. And as he felt he owed her something, having so foully cheated her of €20, he decided he would not lose face if he revealed one little fakir’s secret to her. She deserved it.
‘As I find you charming, in the literal meaning of the word, I will reveal to you this fakir’s secret,’ he told her solemnly. ‘But you must swear to me that you will not repeat it to anyone.’
‘I promise,’ Marie breathed, her hand brushing his.
In the real world, they were separated by two plates of Swedish food, but in his mind, he took her in his arms and whispered his secrets into her ear.
Blushing, Ajatashatru pulled his hand back.
‘In my village,’ he stammered, ‘we grow up in the presence of snakes. When I was still a baby, not even one year old, while you perhaps were playing with dolls, I had a cobra as a toy and a pet. Of course, the adults regularly checked that its glands did not contain any venom by forcing it to bite a rag that they held over an empty jam jar. The precious liquid was used to make an antidote. But believe me, even without venom, being bitten or headbutted by one of those creatures is not particularly pleasant. Anyway, you asked me how we charm snakes. The trick is this: snakes are deaf. I don’t know if you were aware of that. So, the snake follows the back-and-forth motion of the pungi, that flute which looks like a gourd run through by a long, hollow piece of wood, and the vibrations in the air produced by the instrument. To a spectator, it looks as though the snake is dancing, whereas in fact all it is doing is following the flute’s movement with its head. Fascinating, isn’t it?’
Yes, Marie was fascinated. This conversation was so much more interesting than any she had shared in recent years with the young men she brought back home after a night out. How hard it is to live alone when you cannot bear solitude! It leads you to put up with so many regrettable things. And, as Marie preferred being with someone unsuitable to being on her own, the next morning was often embittered by an aftertaste of regret.
‘But it is so much more difficult to charm a woman than to charm a snake,’ the man added, concluding with a touch of humour.
And she smiled.
‘That depends on the woman . . .’ At times, the beautiful Frenchwoman seemed as fragile as a porcelain doll. The next moment, she was as bewitching as a panther. ‘And on the snake . . .’
The conversation was taking an odd turn. In India, it was very simple: no one chatted up fakirs. At least, that was what Ajatashatru liked to think, as no one had ever chatted him up before. He liked this Frenchwoman a lot, he really did, but the problem was that he was here for only one night, he did not even have a hotel room, and he had not come to France in order to find a woman. He had his mission to consider and, anyway, one-night stands were not his thing. No, the best thing to do was just forget all of this now. That was quite enough of that!
‘So, what did you come here to buy?’ he asked, attempting to rid his mind of these ideas.
But it was difficult not to look down at the Frenchwoman’s pretty cleavage and to let his imagination run riot.
‘A lamp, and a magnetic rack so I can hang cutlery over my kitchen sink. Nothing very sexy.’
Taking advantage of this conversational turn, Ajatashatru opened his hand in a vertical position, palm towards him, and placed his fork there. It remained suspended in the air, behind his fingers, in a horizontal position, as if by magic.
‘Or you could hang your cutlery like this,’ he suggested. ‘Even Ikea doesn’t stock this model!’
‘Oh! How do you do that?’ she asked, visibly impressed.
The Indian narrowed his eyes mysteriously. He shook his hand, to show that the fork was really stuck there by a powerful and irresistible force.
‘Come on, tell me!’ Marie pleaded, like an impatient little girl. But each time she leaned towards him to see what he was hiding behind his hand, Ajatashatru moved further back.
In these circumstances, the fakir knew, silence would only irritate and pique the curiosity of his audience. But he had already explained the flute trick to her. If he revealed the truth behind this one too, he would effectively be admitting that everything he did was merely trickery and charlatanism. In order not to lose Marie’s admiration, he preferred to do as he was used to doing with his compatriots: he preferred to lie.
‘With a great deal of training and meditation.’
In fact, if Marie had been sitting next to Ajatashatru, she would have seen that the fork was trapped between the palm of his hand and his knife, which was poking out vertically from his sleeve. This, you will undoubtedly agree, requires neither much training nor much meditation.
‘You haven’t finished your dessert,’ Ajatashatru said, to create a diversion.
In the time it took Marie to look down at her cheesecake, the Indian was able to remove the knife from his sleeve and place it, unnoticed, by the side of his plate.
‘I don’t like you any more,’ Marie said sulkily. ‘You haven’t told me how you did it . . .’
‘One day I must show you how it is possible to pierce one’s tongue with a wire from top to bottom without leaving a hole!’
Marie thought she was about to faint. Oh, she couldn’t bear that!
‘Have you seen the Eiffel Tower?’ she asked, to change the subject before the man got it into his head to pierce his tongue with his fork.
‘No. I arrived this morning from New Delhi and came straight from the airport to Ikea.’
‘There are so many fascinating stories and anecdotes about that monument. Did you know that Maupassant hated the Eiffel Tower? He ate there every day because it was the only place in Paris from which he couldn’t see it . . .’
‘First you have to tell me who this Maupassant is. But I do like that story!’
‘He was a nineteenth-century French writer. But, hang on,’ she said, pausing to eat the last bite of her dessert, ‘I know an even better story. There was a crook by the name of Victor Lustig who m
anaged to sell the Eiffel Tower. Can you believe that? After the Universal Exhibition of 1889, for which it had been built, the tower was supposed to be dismantled and then destroyed. It would have cost the French government a vast amount of money to maintain it, you see. So, this Lustig pretended to be a civil servant and, having counterfeited a national sales contract, he sold the pieces of the monument to the owner of a large scrap-metal firm for the modest sum of one hundred thousand francs.’
After Marie had converted this sum into Indian rupees, using her mobile phone, Ajatashatru felt like a novice con man in comparison with this Lustig. In order not to be outdone, he felt obliged to tell the beautiful Frenchwoman stories and tales from his own country. She laughed at the story of the fakir who was so poor he couldn’t afford a nail, never imagining for a moment that the story was about him.
‘Anyway,’ she said finally, ‘it’s such a shame that you won’t be able to see the Eiffel Tower. Lots of your countrymen work there, selling Eiffel Towers. Who knows, you might find one of your relatives.’
Ajatashatru did not really understand what the Frenchwoman meant by this. Perhaps something had been lost in translation. Did she mean that all the Indians in Paris were estate agents?
Had he actually gone to the Champ de Mars to verify this information, of course, he would have seen more Pakistanis and Bangladeshis than Indians, all of them busy selling (in between police patrols) key rings and other small replicas of the famous monument.
‘You know, it’s been a long time since I laughed like I have today,’ Marie confessed. ‘Or simply talked with a man about things as . . . as different as this. It’s so good to meet someone sincere and genuine like you. The kind of person who does good and spreads that goodness around them. I feel so at ease with you. Perhaps this is a silly thing to say, but although we have just met, I have the feeling we have known each other for a long time. I must admit that I am happy, in a way, that I broke your sunglasses.’
During this speech, the beautiful Frenchwoman had once again become a little porcelain doll with long, curled eyelashes.
A sincere person who does good and spreads that goodness around him . . . Is she really talking about me? the Indian wondered, turning and looking all around to make sure she really was talking about him. And he realised that this was indeed the case. Sometimes people just have to see you a certain way, particularly if the way they see you is positive, in order to transform you into that good person. This was the first electric shock that the fakir received to his heart during this adventure.
It would not be the last.
AFTER HE HAD spent just a few minutes under the bed, with no one coming to disturb him, Ajatashatru ended up nodding off. The horizontal position, the darkness, the sudden silence and the long journey won out over his willpower and his tremendous physical fitness. He may have been able to pretend that he couldn’t feel pain, but he was incapable of doing the same thing when it came to tiredness. And anyway, there was no one watching him here, under this bed, so he could allow himself the luxury of being weak.
When he opened his eyes again two hours later, he had forgotten where he was, as sometimes happens when one wakes up after a short sleep, and he feared he had gone blind. This fear made him jump, and once again he banged his head against the wooden slats, suddenly making him remember that he was under a bed in an Ikea store, in France, and that French beds – or, rather, Swedish beds – were much too low.
He remembered Marie, to whom he had said goodbye a few hours earlier in the bathroom section. Before they parted, he had promised he would call her the next time he came to France so they could visit the Eiffel Tower together and meet his estate agent cousins.
She had seemed disappointed that they should part in this way, and that he refused her offer to go for a drink that evening in one of the city’s more lively areas. He would have liked to spend the night – his only Parisian night – with her. But that would have changed everything. It would have diverted him from his mission. This was just a quick round trip: India to France and back. If he spent the night with her, he would not be able to leave again. Anyway, at least he had her number now. Everything in his head was so muddled. Perhaps one day . . .
Ajatashatru looked to the side, but the view that extended before him consisted only of blue lino, balls of dust and bed legs. At least he couldn’t see any human legs.
He slid silently out of his hiding place, glancing furtively at the ceiling in case there were any security cameras. But he saw nothing that resembled one. Then again, he didn’t really know what a security camera looked like. They were not exactly common in his village. Actually, he thought, Ikea is not all it’s cracked up to be: no snipers on the wardrobes, no cameras. The Soviets were much more conscientious in terms of security.
Abandoning all attempts at concealment, he walked serenely through the corridors as if he were with Marie, strolling nonchalantly between furniture displays in search of a chair or a mirror to decorate their beautiful Parisian apartment with its view of the Eiffel Tower, where Maupassant had spent most of his days in spite of his hatred of it. He imagined the Frenchwoman now, at home, alone. It really was a shame.
From his jacket pocket, he retrieved the chewing-gum wrapper on which Marie had written her telephone number. He reread the sequence of numbers over and over again until he knew it by heart. Those numbers represented love. With a sigh, he crammed the paper into the deepest recesses of his trouser pocket, close to his penis, so he would not lose it. That was where he put everything he held dear. But anyway, he had to stop thinking about her. The mission. The mission was what mattered.
Ajatashatru looked all around. How lucky he was to be here! He felt like a child who had sneaked into a gigantic toy shop. He, who had known only the modest dwellings of Adishree and his cousin Ghanashyam (pronounced Gonna-show-’em), now had, for one night, all for himself, an apartment of over thirty thousand square feet, with dozens of bedrooms, living rooms, kitchens and bathrooms. Although, after doing a quick calculation in his head, he had to face the fact that he would not have enough time to sleep in all the beds available to him that night.
His stomach gurgled.
Like Goldilocks in the three bears’ house, the fakir – who was no more resistant to hunger than he was to tiredness, or to anything else for that matter – set off in search of a midnight feast. He entered the labyrinth of chairs in the living-room section and followed the directions for the restaurant written on the signs.
In a large grey refrigerator, he found smoked salmon, and a Tupperware box full of crème fraiche, parsley, tomatoes and lettuce. He emptied this onto a large plate, got himself a cola from the drinks machine, put it all on a plastic tray, and walked back the way he had come.
He chose a living room decorated with black-and-white lacquered furniture. On the walls, large framed sepia photographs of New York buildings provided a touch of class. He would never have found a hotel as luxurious as this for the night, particularly not for €100, or rather for a €100 note printed on only one side.
The Indian placed his tray on a coffee table, took off his jacket and tie, and sat on a comfortable green sofa. Across from him, a fake plastic television sparked his imagination. He pretended to switch it on so he could watch the latest Bollywood blockbuster while he had his smoked salmon, that strange but tasty little fluorescent orange fish, which he was eating for the second time in his life and the second time that day.
It had not taken him long to get used to luxury.
Once his meal was finished, he stood up and stretched his legs by walking around the table. It was while doing this that he noticed something on the bookcase behind the sofa that looked different from the books.
It was a newspaper – a real one – that someone must have left there. Alongside it were rows of the fake books, those plastic bricks he had seen earlier that day in other bookcases on display in the store.
As he did not speak French, he would not even have bothered opening it had he not
recognised the inimitable front page of the American newspaper the Herald Tribune. This could be an entertaining evening, he thought. He was far from imagining just how entertaining it was going to be, though not for the reasons he expected.
Ajatashatru pretended to switch off the television and began reading the news. He could not bear the television being on when he was not watching it; where he lived, electricity was a rare commodity. He read the article on the front page. The president of France was called Hollande. What a strange idea! Was the president of Holland called Mr France, by any chance? These Europeans were decidedly odd.
And what was he to think of this former ice dancer who, each year, on the anniversary of Michael Jackson’s death, moonwalked over five and a half thousand miles from Paris to the Forest Lawn Memorial Park cemetery, in a suburb of Los Angeles, where his idol was buried? Ajatashatru was no geography expert, but he found it hard to imagine how the man would continue to practise that famous dance move while crossing the Atlantic, whether he was on board an aeroplane or a ship.
Seized with a bout of nervous laughter and an irresistible urge to urinate, the Indian got up from the sofa and, in his socks, traversed the showcase living rooms – without moonwalking – in the direction of the toilets.
But he never reached them.
Voices and the sounds of footsteps coming from the main staircase suddenly broke the silence, momentarily transforming Ajatashatru’s narrow chest into the stands of a football stadium during a big match. Thrown into a panic, he looked all around and then hid inside the first wardrobe he saw – a sort of blue metal, two-door luggage locker, the signature piece of the all-new ‘American Teenager’ collection. Once inside, he began praying that they would not notice his jacket, which he had left on the sofa a few yards from where he was hiding. He also prayed that they would not find the remains of his TV dinner on the table. Most of all, he prayed that no one would open the door of the wardrobe. If they did, he would say that he had gone inside to measure its dimensions, and that he hadn’t noticed time passing. He took a wooden Ikea pencil and a metre-long Ikea paper ruler from his trouser pocket and remained motionless in the dark, expecting to be discovered from one second to the next. Inside his chest, the football supporters were smashing up their seats. Outside, the voices drew closer, and seemed to surround him. But in the end, no one discovered he was there. Perhaps it would have been better if they had.
The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir who got Trapped in an Ikea Wardrobe Page 3