by Braham Singh
There was this buzzing sound. It rose to a crescendo as he clambered up the wicked, metal stairs to the viewing platform. Once there, he gagged, turned around and pushed Beatrice back down the stairs. Too late, because she was already biting down on her knuckles, staring past the buzzing flies at the charred carcass. The flies flew freely in and out through its open neck.
Beatrice Taylor stared at the headless torso, wide-eyed. The severed head lying next to it leered back. Cooked internal organs spilt out from linear fissures to dangle from the torso. They smelled of burnt liver. Topping it all was a metallic smell, making Ernst’s head swim. It emanated from the burner’s wide open viewing panel—all that iron-rich blood that had burnt inside. Then there was the odour from burnt hair and it clung to the nostrils.
There was no hair left though, on the head with that crazed rictus of a smile. So, anyone’s guess whether Sikh or not. Just the khaki sub-inspector’s word therefore, versus the bald, death mask grinning past flies fighting over brain matter coagulated on its left side. The neck had melted, leaving strings of blackened skin trailing down from the head and stuck in place with melted fat. Also, there was a hole bored clean through the forehead.
Anyone will tell you a Hindu skull bursts on cremation to allow the soul to ascend. But, this perfectly round aperture dead centre through the forehead, suggested Sikhs did things differently. Or, that the man was shot through the head, even though that would be ridiculous because this was India. True, servants, lovers, daughters-in-law, men of the wrong caste, women of any caste, and girls not boys, were routinely burnt alive across the land. And yes, Sikhs too, caught messing with Lambadi women. But shooting them first?
‘That’s a bullet hole.’
‘What, Sirji?’
It was the same havaldar, the one all smiles earlier, then went kicked a dog. ‘Where?’ the havaldar asked, looking more like the dog-kicker now than a friendly policeman salaaming the European. Ernst pointed, wondering if there was an exit wound behind the skull, and should he ask the havaldar to check, or whether it was any of his business. People died all the time. He, on the other hand, still had to make payroll. The havaldar appeared adamant. ‘I am not seeing anything, Sirji.’ To demonstrate how he felt, the havaldar swung a leg at the same emaciated dog he’d kicked earlier, because now the tenacious little fucker was edging up the stairs towards the carcass. Its little mongrel head struck the rusted steps and howled as it took a tumble.
‘Bhenchod!’ the dog-kicker said, and there was laughter. Struggling upright, the dog stood there and howled away, distracting Ernst from the grinning skull with the bullet hole. At the same time, the sub-inspector declaimed loudly from below the steps, past the howling dog, and next to the unusually tall Tamilian bullying the little Chinese-looking worker with that porcelain complexion and red eyes. ‘Do you have it?’ he kept asking the beautiful, little man and Beatrice took it all in.
So there it was, the howling dog, the Tamilian asking the porcelain doll to return whatever it is he stole, Beatrice wide-eyed, and her assistant too, with jaw drooping to allow her buck teeth sway over the face. All this while the sub-inspector’s pointing his finger at Lambadi titties and Ernst goes taps his shoulder. Caught up with so much cleavage the sub-inspector ignored him, but remained adamant about letting the world know what the Lambadis did to the Sikh.
‘What about the bullet hole?’ Ernst asked, tapping the sub-inspector once more on his epaulet. This time, the man turned. His eyes widened seeing a white man. Then they narrowed.
‘Do any of you see a bullet hole?’ the sub-inspector asked around. His havaldars shrugged.
‘Make sure. The gora sahib wants to know about some bullet hole.’
The cohort looked towards the grinning head lying next to the torso. They peered. It was clear no one could see anything of that sort.
‘Right there,’ Ernst pointed.
‘Where?’ the sub-inspector asked. ‘How can there be a bullet-hole? Lambadi don’t carry guns.’
‘Police do.’
In all fairness, the sub-inspector was unarmed. The only guns around were the .303 Enfields with a couple of havaldars, and the sub-inspector had this look that said, Seriously?
Ernst ventured with caution. ‘Thought you sub-inspectors wore sidearms.’
‘It’s optional,’ the sub-inspector said. ‘I prefer not to. Not having one makes me think smarter, especially around people who feel they know everything.’
They were staring at him, the sub-inspector and his men. Ernst rubbed his mole, feeling somewhat less white under their scrutiny. He realised the little dog was still at it, the howls reminding him of his homo teacher’s dachshund back in Berlin. He was surprised, not for the first time, at how so much sound could come from such a tiny body.
2
The Howling Dachshund
Swing Heil!
—Swingkinder greeting
Over the final year at his Berlin realschule, Ernst found many of his classmates looking bigger and blonder. Their evolution into a Master Race taught him early on how to be risk averse, not be his father, and to look down, look away, and look invisible.
Around this time, the Aryan kids began refusing to take turns wiping the blackboard or emptying wastepaper baskets. The chores fell to the Jewish students in class. The bigger and blonder boys also began answering back at the class teacher, even though he wasn’t Jewish. ‘Homo!’ they would yell, whenever he turned to write something on the blackboard.
Now, no one in the class was blonder than Berlin Ingrid, who looked just like Hitler asked. So blonde, she was the alpha to an anglicised bunch of jazz-loving Swingkinder who loved poking fun at Nazi clowns in uniform—heckling them on the streets, then running away laughing. She could’ve been at the expensive girls’ gymnasium her father lined up for her, but she chose Ernst’s realschule instead because of her Swingkinder gang. Ernst, she ignored.
There was this stunned look to her face the day her Swingkinder friends explained how, blindingly blonde or not, and whatever they may think of Hitler, a Jew was a Jew, and how come she never told them? You could say it was a coming to Moses moment and in many ways, Berlin Ingrid would never be the same again. At least once a day, the school principal came borrowed her and the other Jews with a crook of his finger, and without even glancing at the class teacher. The Jewish children would then be assigned various tasks around the school compound.
Perhaps to show the law was law, and that there could be no favouritism towards a half-breed mischlinge, several janitorial duties befell Ernst even though the school had a custodian on payroll. Over an hour before the final school bell rang every afternoon, Ernst mastered the art of scrubbing yellow piss off the floor from around each urinal. Berlin Ingrid on the other hand was allowed leeway because of her platinum blonde hair, and also because she was learning how to look at men in that sideways manner. She would be tasked to help the principal and when she was there in his office with him, the door remained shut.
Amidst all this and with Berlin Ingrid behaving as if Ernst didn’t exist, their class teacher was what made school tolerable. A tall, thin, monocle-bearing homosexual oblivious to his destitution, the man lived for Puccini and the pet dachshund he at times brought to class. He spoke extemporaneously on the opera and the Orient—dissecting Madame Butterfly , or coaxing the children to fly with him to Batavia or the Malabar Coast over geography lessons. All in all, a bit much for young, Aryan minds too busy with their shit to take a homo seriously.
Ernst however lapped it up and brightened one cold winter morning, when the teacher wanted to use the Flower Duet from Delibes’ Lakmé to take them to India. Everything was grey that day—the road, the buildings, the people, the smoke, the ice, Ernst. Ignoring Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries compulsorily straining through school corridors, the teacher sang an aria from Lakmé to a class huddled in their coats like miserable penguins. ‘Sous le dôme épais,’ he sang in French, going on to trill the high notes better than any diva. ‘Où l
e blanc jasmine, À la rose s’assemble, Sur la rive en fleurs…’
The sun began to shine and Ernst found himself standing on the banks of the Ganges. There, alongside two British soldiers sneaking a peek at the Brahmin priest’s daughter Lakshmi bathing naked, he realised he wasn’t cold anymore .
For the big, blonde Aryan boys however, this was the last fucking straw. To hell with waiting for him to turn his back, they yelled, ‘Homo!’ to their teacher’s face, stopping him mid-aria. They kept shouting, ‘Homo! Homo!’ driving the dachshund nuts, until other grown-ups showed up amidst all that barking and noise to restore order. With the school principal leading, an all-Aryan staff dragged a surprised class teacher outside into the compound, his students cheering and kicking at the little brown dachshund scrambling behind his master.
During the Weimar Republic and even after Hitler was Führer, Ernst’s father never failed to point out: what they taught or didn’t teach in schools would determine whether Germany behaved itself in the future. Much later at the Jüdische Krankenhaus, he pissed off Nazis and Jews alike by saying they should’ve let that homosexual teacher run the entire verdammte school system, and saved themselves a Second World War. Instead, they strung him up before a cheering mob of his own school children. But not before first making him watch his dachshund dangle from a piano wire.
The grey morning became a carnival and a welcome diversion from the cold. The class found it hilarious, hearing their teacher scream in pain at what they were doing to his dog, and offering his own neck instead. The grown-ups took him up on that, and Ernst remembered the dog dangling like a counterweight to his master hanging alongside on the lamp post, each howling at what was happening to the other, until both stopped. He would never forget those few seconds of total silence, while Germany decided if this was how it would be. Then the crowd roared again, and Ernst saw the students and teachers, the young and old, Swingkinder and National Socialists, all come together into one nation. He could see there would be no stopping them now.
Berlin Ingrid saw it too, her eyes clamouring: I want to be part of this! Just look at me! No one will know!
The crowd was all caught up Sieg Heiling each other and they left her there ignoring Ernst.
Distracted, Ernst stepped into the shit he had avoided earlier chasing Beatrice to the sulphur burner. He didn’t lose it, and just looked around to scrape it off his shoe. He found a rebar lying next to a shrunken, Lambadi kid squatting right there with ribs on display. The boy appeared caught up in a daydream, ignoring the recently kicked dog that was now happily attacking his turds as they emerged.
There was this other daydreamer in Nazi Germany, unilaterally deemed Jewish so they could fuck with him. He managed to escape to Bombay away from all that shit, only to learn one could escape anything over here in India, except that.
3
The Tamilian
Sikhs may be superior to Madrasis, but we are all Indians.
—Partap Singh Kairon, Punjab Chief Minister
Gas erupted again from the urea stack and the air became pungent with ammonia. The sodium lighting cast deep, dark shadows at ground level, and the distant oil refineries flared natural gas in loud belches from where the marshes ended and the Arabian Sea began. What with pye-dogs still trying to get at the charred torso, the police posse all caught up trying to pin it on Lambadi women trailing screaming children from between their legs, and the big black man in his parallel universe haranguing the little porcelain doll next to the sub-inspector studying gypsy titties; it was Dante’s Inferno how an Indian would’ve written it.
The stricken doll wasn’t Nepali, was too delicate to be Tibetan, and probably nothing more than an all-Indian, North-East Frontier tribal kid. Didn’t matter; like the Lambadi gypsies, almond eyes are different and that was enough. After China invaded the country, people stopped looking askance at Muslims for a bit and began taking it out on anyone Chinese. On seeing a Chinese and a snake, an Indian would know what to do. Because there weren’t enough Chinese to go around, one managed with anyone Chinese enough. Tribes from the east became the country’s low-hanging fruit. There was even this one case of an Indian Army Sikh raping a seventy-year-old Naga tribal man he found shitting in the woods. People were shocked until told a Sikh did it, and then they just shrugged.
‘Look at me when I’m talking,’ the Tamilian said to the porcelain doll. ‘Come on, good boy. Where’s the gunny bag?’
‘Don’t pay attention,’ Beatrice urged Ernst. She was now somewhat back to normal after how the headless Sikh had ambushed her at the sulphur burner.
The big Tamilian was carved in granite, holding a saucer cooling tea. There was something round and a discoloured ivory-white in his other hand. It could be a hockey ball and the Tamilian could be a senior plainclothesman, the way a uniformed constable in dark blue shorts held his teacup for him. The constable was being unctuous, whereas to the rest of India, Tamilians, or anyone from South India, is a Madrasi. Madrasi was the country’s nigger-word, and dark skin totally a bad thing. Up North, they’ll tell you point-blank: you see a Madrasi and a snake, kill the Madrasi. Regardless of what he might privately think, the constable refilled the saucer with tea for the Madrasi carved out of granite. He then remained awkwardly bent to continue kissing the big man’s black arse.
Ernst watched the Tamilian sip from the saucer and bounce the leather ball off the dead ground. It sprang back into his cupped palm. The Tamilian held on to his bored expression. It accentuated his Tamil features and those full lips. He could be in some sort of street disguise because there was a red handkerchief around his neck. A laal rumaal—much thought of among street-gangs of the Muslim kind. It stood out. As did the porcelain doll in blue overalls—straight out of China he looked—at the receiving end of whatever was going on. Besides his cheap round-rimmed glasses, the porcelain doll had on this despondent look, as if facing detention after class.
‘Don’t be shaking that head of yours. Are you giving it back or not?’
The big Tamilian was being the schoolmaster, dressing down the young man with the porcelain complexion. He ignored the barbequed Sikh’s body by the burner, the sub-inspector making a fool of himself over the Lambadi women, and Beatrice’s stink-eyed look. As if none of that mattered. As if nothing existed outside his makeshift classroom .
‘We know it was you,’ said the man in granite, the English buckling under his Tamil accent. ‘Bleddy bastard.’
A strained look grabbed Beatrice’s lips, pursing them. The Tamilian was persistent.
‘Come on, just return the gunny bag.’
The Chinese-looking kid shook his head.
No.
‘You out of your bhenchod mind? Hand it over.’
No.
He shook his head once more, and then again, whenever the raspy voice asked he hand it over. The havaldar with the teacup began haranguing the kid in Marathi, vying at being brusque. It didn’t help. Each time, the kid simply shook his head.
No.
Fuck that, the havaldar said and elbowed Porcelain Doll towards the Tamilian, who remained still in a bored sort of way except for a thumb and forefinger reaching out like a pincer for the young man’s ear. When they came together in a pinch, it must have been painful, the way the kid winced. Neither spoke while the Tamilian continued wringing his ear, and the first one to say something, loses. How the Tamilian meted out punishment, the manner in which Porcelain Doll took it, the way the constable stood at attention, Ernst could see a point being made, a lesson being taught, and that there needed to be silence in the classroom. Beatrice’s shocked assistant could see that too, and one would think, so could Beatrice.
There was a ripple and shouts of, ‘Make way!’ Two dark blue constables had somehow slung the Sikh’s torso along with his severed head in his own saffron turban, and were coming through towards the jeep. Flies kept breaking away in tight formation and diving through the open neck to eat and lay eggs. Other flies were having a go at the Sikh’s entrails s
pilling out from here and there. A sweet and musky smell took over. Ernst sniffed at the air.
‘Cerebrospinal fluid,’ the sub-inspector offered, giving Ernst a side glance, who in turn felt there was no harm looking impressed.
Seeing Beatrice cover her nose, he said to her, ‘Come on, let’s go.’
‘Where to?’ Beatrice asked. ‘The whole country stinks. ’
Ernst remained deadpan. He felt for her, but had no intention of coming across a phuddu. Maybe, the Anglo-Indian in Beatrice Taylor was still adjusting to a new world order, but he knew his place. It helped that he was comfortable by now in the skin of a white man who hadn’t quite made it. India allowed him that, and though there was a price to pay, he could be someone here. Whatever Indians chose to do or not do in their own country, wasn’t for him to judge and besides, he owed them. A Hindu would say he had eaten their salt.
Pointing to the headless Sikh, the big, black man said, ‘Look. You want to become like that?’
The porcelain doll’s delicate face came apart seeing the charred body. So much so that Ernst thought it strange, then realised it was probably the first time the kid had seen anything like this. Tears welled up in those almond eyes and the porcelain doll stretched out a trembling hand towards the headless Sikh. This was more than just shock. Clearly, the kid was grieving. Now, that was strange.