by Braham Singh
The big, black Tamilian came out from his slouch and slammed a heavy hand to the side of the boy’s head, knocking him to the grass before it registered with those around. ‘Bhenchod,’ he said. Ernst thought he was seeing things. It was like a block of granite break into life and slip back again, spilling tea in the process. The porcelain doll laid there still as death, and Ernst realised the Tamilian had hit the boy with the hockey ball.
Beatrice gaped. The assistant too, her teeth more prominent with the lower jaw sagging like that. Something then started to happen behind those buck teeth; an engine was revving up. The Tamilian’s constable recovered the empty saucer from his hand and poured some more tea on it, when the girl stepped forward. Her sari pallu was trailing behind though, allowing Beatrice to yank at it. The havaldars whooped in laughter.
‘What are you laughing at?’ Beatrice pointed at the damaged porcelain doll, while still holding the girl by her sari. ‘This is what happens when the country’s left to you people.’
The British couldn’t have said it better. The Tamilian watched Beatrice from behind heavy eyelids. He could be falling asleep.
‘Shut up, whore,’ he said .
The silence following that was total. Ernst peered to see if Beatrice was okay. Her eyes had gone all funny, but she’d be fine—just an Anglo-Indian in an India that no longer gave a fuck. ‘Rowdies,’ she whispered. ‘Is that how they talk to us now? These people, I tell you, they’ll never prosper.’
The porcelain doll just lay there smashed to the ground, one side of the face cherry-red below the hairline. With the night shift coming in, the loudspeakers opened up with motivational music, now standard after the war with China. The song proceeded to remind one and all, India was the only place to be. Rulers come, rulers go, the singer waxed in colloquial Hindi, but India is still here; it continues to grow.
‘Bhairavi!’ Beatrice called out in a loud whisper to her tethered ward with the buck teeth and sagging jaw. ‘Chalo, let’s go.’
‘Chalo!’ she hissed again to the girl Bhairavi, taking on the white man’s burden, who stood there rubbing at the mole on his face. Catching Ernst’s eye, Beatrice Taylor gave him a look, jerking her head towards the gates as gas flared once more with a loud whoosh. All this, her look said, was unacceptable. These people, it declaimed, would never prosper. Please, it begged, take me away to a more European place.
He couldn’t of course, but it reminded him he had an appointment tonight to take his friend Willie Lansdowne’s wife, Daisy. Not something he enjoyed, just something he did. What he really wanted to take, was a shower.
4
The Cold Pilger
If phoren, then chalega.
—Indian approach to imported goods
Ernst’s Goregaon workshop was on the Western Line, past early morning shitters scattered alongside the railway tracks. They congregated on the narrow strip between their shanties and the rails with locals whizzing past. Their numbers seemed to grow by the day and if someone crouching half-asleep by the tracks nodded off, it was over instantly and not a bad way to go. Looking out from the moving train, sunlight would glint momentarily off fresh turds coiled beneath brown arses like so many miniature, golden cobras. The railway carriages were open—no doors—and given that marigold sellers weren’t allowed into first-class, the smell of shit would hit Ernst with blunt force.
At Goregaon, there was his elongated shed with its corrugated tin roof and prominently displayed SSI Certificate alongside framed labour laws and a lineup of Hindu gods and goddesses with Jesus thrown in along with pictures of Gandhi and fuck-knows-why John F. Kennedy. Here, Ernst’s workers did pipes and tubing. He was on intimate terms with pipes and tubes, but not finance, and he didn’t know how to deal with Salary Day. He would get short of breath as it approached. In its own way, the panic over raising money for salaries was similar to how he felt when it first dawned as a boy that he was nothing more than a Jew; even though, really, if one paused to think, where was the correlation?
Some months ago, facing Salary Day along with an unyielding bank overdraft, the panic grew seeing his workers all agitated outside the Goregaon workshop. The workshop manager Salim Ali—a dick any given day—was on leave, and the unsupervised labour being dicks for a change. They knew the bank had said a big, fat NO to Ernst and were curious—salaries being due in a week. Ernst’s ears had turned red seeing them.
‘No worries,’ he said, and continued playing the European. The next day, he sold the workshop’s flagship—its Pilger cold-rolling mill—to a bania trader for hard cash. Didn’t matter he was still paying off another bania for the loan taken out to buy it. Some would challenge that assertion. They would say it did matter. Especially when this other bania, the one Ernst owed money for the Cold Pilger he sold without permission, was Seth Jamunadas Kejriwal. You fucked with him at your own peril. Still, Ernst had gone ahead, his simmering workers being the more immediate threat.
In Ernst’s defence, it wasn’t as if the Cold Pilger was working non-stop; more a symbol of what the workshop could have been, if everything had gone the way it didn’t. The workers were nevertheless left stunned, and watched as the bania’s hard-on grew under his dhoti each time he rubbed the Cold Pilger’s imported metal skin. The bania looked ready to mount it right there and then in the workshop, but had shown restraint. He had the machine carted off, leaving behind a naked plinth and Ernst to take the blame. The workers took their salaries like a bitter pill. If machines were now being sold off to pay them, soon there would be no machines and no need to pay anyone.
The Cold Pilger sale kept the beast fed over several Salary Days, but good times were now over. Starting this month, the sinking feeling was back along with a constipation that would build up out of nowhere.
He had hoped for relief once Fertilisers gave him his purchase order. He could’ve borrowed against it. He was good at that, but then the Lambadi went broiled a Sikh in the sulphur burner. After putting a bullet through his head. Impoverished Indian gypsies owning guns, when even the police hardly ever carried them. .303 Lee Enfields didn’t count.
~
Beatrice Taylor went all heavy-handed on behalf of Ernst and got the tender formalities rescheduled for the week following her encounter with the headless Sikh. ‘Where would you be without me?’ she asked Ernst, who felt it was best not to be anywhere too close and so he thanked her and took off. From Colaba he had dialled the Goregaon factory. Dialled and redialled and dialled again, when Salim Ali picked up.
‘I know,’ Salim Ali said, but was curious why Ernst wanted to be there for the tender opening. ‘Leave it to me this time,’ he suggested. ‘No? Okay, you’re the boss. You’ll come pick me up? Are you sure? What an honour.’
Salim Ali was a Malayalee from Kerala on India’s southern tip—home to this highly intelligent species that baffled the rest of India and Ernst could see why. Whenever Ernst pictured life without Salim Ali, it would be an idyllic, pastoral scene with blue skies and no cloud in sight. Salim Ali was useful though, in stormy weather.
‘Why me?’ he would ask, when navigating storms. ‘Aren’t you Germans supposed to be the technology kings?’
So, what Ernst did that Monday morning before leaving for Fertilisers, he climbed up two flights to the second floor of the Mian Building, opposite Sindhi Refugee Camp in Chembur. His stomach fought every step of the way leaving him drenched in sweat by the second floor. He felt old. Why Salim Ali would choose to live here, the only Marxist in a building full of devout Muslims was somewhat of a puzzle. Why the devout Muslims, let him, was the real question.
Ernst stood holding the banister for support, tired for no reason at all. The early morning smells made him dyspeptic. The deadweight in his intestines was like lead but his sphincter held steadfast; it could teach the army how to clench the next time China came tearing down the Himalayas. Coming up to Salim Ali’s door, he rubbed the mole on the left side of his face. It felt bigger every time he touched it. Maybe why he was tired like
this, for no reason at all. Maybe also why there was this blockage up his arse. Maybe that’s what the mole was: skin cancer like his mother’s.
Dr. Waller had disagreed the last time he got it checked. Look at you, Waller had said. ‘All tanned like a native. Do darkies get skin cancer? Get out of here, you bugger.’
There was a huge relief in being declared a hypochondriac. Dr. Waller diagnosed it a Jewish thing. Ernst had smiled before realising the good doctor wasn’t joking.
Ernst was about to ring Salim Ali’s doorbell when he heard the sound. Thaadup!
‘Don’t,’ someone said.
His forefinger froze an inch from the bell. As with most buildings, bulbs were optional and the corridors cast long shadows. It was early morning, and the other man was in a singlet and a linen sarong worn South-Indian style. The red handkerchief was still around his neck. A permanent fixture like that bored expression, or the hockey ball he bounced again, going, Thaadup!
‘Wait few minutes. His mother is undergoing morning namaaz.’ He spoke a deliberate, Tamil-English, the voice deep and raspy, travelling up from the solar plexus and through gravel before hitting the air.
Ernst said, ‘I saw you the other evening at Fertilisers.’
The Tamilian just stood there.
‘That Chinese-looking fellow you were questioning. He had something to do with the dead body?’
‘Who knows?’
‘He stole something?’
The man bounced his ball. Thaadup! Ernst saw it smash into the porcelain doll’s head; saw him crumple to the ground.
The Tamilian’s singlet blazed from his black torso like a beacon, and all that whiteness brought back Beatrice’s dark, skinny assistant with her shiny buck teeth. Last night, thrusting against Daisy Lansdowne with more enthusiasm than he felt, Ernst barely managed to swing it, and that too only after conjuring intertwined, chocolate bodies while thrusting against a pasty, white one. It had left him surprised. The trick apparently, was to imagine the girl’s jasmine sweat play footsie with him while letting the man in granite pop in and out of the frame. He couldn't forget her engines revving up seeing the Tamilian smash the porcelain doll to the ground. Was it the girl who finally did it for him while he rode Willie’s wife, or this man, or both of them working him in tandem to help out? Who could tell? Apparently, men his age needed all the help they could get. It was one more thing to worry about.
‘What’s the ball for?’
‘Cricket.’
‘It’s a hockey ball.’
‘A foreigner like you must find that strange.’
‘You know, something else that’s strange? The way that boy reacted, seeing the body being taken away. Almost as if he knew the dead man. Had to have known him, else why such grief?’
‘You tell me.’
‘The way he reached out to the body just before you hit him. Very strange. Or am I just imagining it?’
The door swung partially open though Ernst hadn’t yet rung the bell. Salim Ali blinked past him and up at the Tamilian policeman. An oiled, jet-black, Kerala curl fell across Salim Ali’s forehead. Making his way into the adjacent flat, the big black man rasped in his English to the little black man, ‘I never see you at the mosque.’ Strains from the Soviet National Anthem wafted past Salim Ali’s oily head in response.
~
‘Making new friends?’ Salim Ali asked.
‘What’s his name?’
‘Chhote Bhai.’
Chhote Bhai means little brother. ‘That’s not a name.’
‘Doesn’t matter. You shouldn’t be speaking to him in the first place.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘My landlord.’
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s not it. If you must know, he also provides protection.’
‘You mean he is a slumlord.’
‘Amongst other things. ’
‘And I thought he worked for the police.’
‘They probably work for him, but that’s neither here nor there. These past so many years I’ve greeted him, looked down and walked away. Next time, you do the same.’
‘He appeared friendly enough.’
‘Maybe, in a way,’ Salim Ali said, praise for the Russian Motherland still coming through from the living room. ‘He could’ve broken my legs at one time and didn’t. That’s a friendly act.’
‘His hockey ball. He said it’s for cricket.’
‘I forget. How long have you been in India? You bounce a hockey ball to inspect the pitch before a cricket match. Every schoolkid knows that.’
‘Or bounce it off people’s heads. Why would he break your legs?’
Salim Ali looked at Ernst’s legs, who then took off his shoes before entering the living room. That was a British era Victrola wobbling on three legs in one corner. An empty brown 45 rpm record sleeve with the hammer and sickle stenciled on it lay against one leg. Rich, Russian vocals energised the room.
Large charcoal portraits of Lenin and Castro sketched with Picasso-like panache nested amidst the holy-green calligraphy on the walls. Fidel Castro looked compelling hanging there, studying an elaborate verse from the Koran. A line-up of dark men in lungis stood behind Fidel, framed in another photograph, their eyes blazing directly at Ernst from the picture. There was a feel of imminent revolution in spite of the idyllic Kerala backdrop. Something was cooking in the kitchen and it smelt of spiced mutton and coconut. This was a Malayalee household from Kerala and there would be appam fritters to go with the mutton curry. The smell of fermented batter wafted through the air.
Ernst pointed to Fidel.
‘Does your mother know you have your comrades hanging around the flat?’
There was a third comrade to Lenin’s left, an Oriental in olive fatigues, flashing a red star on a ragged green cap. Four stars on each lapel, and a broad forehead like Mao’s, but not him, not Chou En-lai, not Ho Chi Minh.
‘General Ngyuen Von Giap of Vietnam. ’
‘Who?’
‘Doesn’t matter. You’ll soon find out,’ Salim Ali said. ‘You’ll all find out.’
The line up of lungis beneath those coconut trees now appeared to look approvingly at Salim Ali, their eyes blazing away. One of them though emerged with a benign smile instead, when Ernst peered at the framed photograph. He had a wizened, delicate face, and the Fu Manchu strands of hair straggling down from his chin was why Ernst was peering at him in the first place.
‘Who are these guys? Your Politburo?’
‘What did you think? The Kerala Cricket Club? They are the ones guiding us to a better tomorrow.’
‘By the way, what’s your slumlord-landlord got to do with cricket?’
‘He arranges matches, takes bets, and then decides who wins. It’s an excellent business plan, unlike ours.’ Salim Ali paused. ‘I still don’t know why you’re coming for the tender opening. I handled it last year.’
‘Of course. How can I forget?’
Last year, Ernst had handed Salim Ali an envelope with four thousand rupees to give the Chief Engineer along with paperwork for the tender. To public sector chief engineers across the land, “paperwork” meant the bribe accompanying it—the actual documents and samples simply icing on the cake. Educated people like Salim Ali took it to be the other way around. So he went ahead, submitted the paperwork without the bribe. ‘No need,’ he said, and Ernst had gone to the Chief Engineer’s home late evening with the envelope, stuffed with an extra five hundred to make up for the faux pas. The neighbours seeing a white man come to his home with money had saved the day, and the Chief Engineer let bygones be bygones. Salim Ali however became persona non grata. Everyone knew that, except Salim Ali.
‘I’m going with you,’ Ernst said.
~
They watched Salim Ali’s mother as the blind diabetic rolled up her green prayer mat on the balcony outside; both men barefoot on a floor one could eat off. The spotless white cloth was already in place on the spotless floor where the dining table would be in non
-Muslim households. Ernst’s toes curled on the cool terrazzo tiles and they touched something. Tossed carelessly, the morning’s Times of India lay at his feet. He was Indian enough by now to avoid placing his foot on reading material and pulled away. He picked up the newspaper and put it on top of a Fertilisers gunny bag lying in the corner. There were all sorts of wires sticking out from the Fertilisers gunny bag with its green swastika, but then, this was an engineer’s flat.
PL 480 Food Aid Arrives, the Times of India headline said from atop the Fertilisers gunny bag. It went on to ask: If It’s Food Aid, President Johnson, Why Do You Want Money?
Yesterday, it was: Why We Must Have The Bomb.
The day before: The Himalayan Blunder. Why We Lost To China.
Tomorrow the cycle would begin again—agonising over what China did, yearning for what The Bomb could do, then outrage over what America was doing.
They stepped aside as the tiny woman came in from the balcony muttering to herself or at Salim Ali; no idea. She wore a black crumpled sari, wrinkled as her face. Her eyes were covered—cupped in round black glasses with leather flaps—though the head wasn’t. Her oiled hair knotted in a loose bun was luscious jet-black, in total contrast to all the wear-and-tear showing up everywhere else on the tired, little body. She was tiny enough for Salim Ali to look a clear evolutionary improvement. The air reeked of coconut oil as she hobbled past, minus three amputated toes. Besides the feet, diabetes had ravaged her heart, her kidneys, her immune system and Salim Ali’s equanimity. Blind yes, but there was a cat-like, grimalkin quality to her, the way she looked around instead of straight ahead like any normal, blind person.
‘How does she know which way’s Mecca?’ Ernst asked.