by Anosh Irani
“No.”
I pull harder. No cloud, no rain, but every vein in his neck is choking up. I do not want him dead, so I loosen the grip.
“She said in class that a dead rat is in the water tank and that no one must drink the water.”
I let go of his tie. I feel even more sick. Miss Bardet takes the first class each morning. How can she expect us to pay attention at such an early hour?
Viren turns around and loudly announces, “He drank the dead-rat water. He drank the dead-rat water.”
Rahul and his sister laugh, the new boy in short pants laughs, the fat girl laughs, and I am sure her pink lunch box finds it funny, too. Viren runs back toward the class. I must catch him before he tells the whole world.
I run after him and slap him hard on the back and he falls to the concrete floor. His pretty yellow gumboots squeak as I drag him back to the water tank. I think of the dead rat lying on its back, floating in the water tank. If I throw up before beating him, I will never be able to study in this school again. Then all the new boys will wear short pants and no one will be there to stop them.
I put Viren’s head under the water taps and open two of them. Viren tries hard to get up but I push his chest against the parapet so that he cannot breathe. I turn his head so that his mouth is directly under the water flow, and I can see the tears. Soon they will be washed off with dead-rat water.
“Open your mouth,” I tell him.
“Please …” His voice shakes.
“Drink the water. Fast.”
I force open his mouth and watch the water gush in. Viren is crying and his hair is wet. He will get punished in class for this. Too much rain for Viren. As I squeeze his neck hard, I wonder how anyone can wear yellow gumboots.
As I caress the bottle, I look outside. Smells travel through the air. Of fried onions, from the plate of a cook to a hungry house. Of failure, as a man sends a letter to his wife in the village, explaining how he lost his job. Of parting, as a dead son rises through the dust and waves goodbye to his mother.
I raise the bottle to my nose and inhale the dank smell of whiskey. There is dust on the bottle mouth, which I wipe with my hand. I cut myself on the glass. The mouth is sharp and angry. It feels good. Blood trickles down the bottle. A few drops fall in. Where there once lived whiskey, there is blood. But the two know each other well — there is a lot of whiskey in my bloodstream.
As I watch the drops fall, I understand what my next step should be.
My past has drawn blood. It is what I must do to my present. I must suck my own blood until there is none left.
I must kill myself.
THE RULE OF WIDOWS AND MAD DOGS
There is an unwritten rule, or, if it is writ, it lies sculpted on God’s arm. Once your journey begins, you cannot end it. You can propel yourself off track, skid in different mud, but it will only make your journey that much longer. There is another rule, that of widows and mad dogs. It lies under their beds. God has never read it for he does not visit their homes. I will find out which rule holds true.
I do not have the proper tools for the test, but my qualifications are excellent. The rich succeed at suicide but not because they are adept at it. They have the facilities: the guns and expensive rope. They live in tall buildings from which they can jump. But if I jump from the ground floor, it will be like trying to drown a fish.
I am not skillful with knives. I might cut the wrong vein, slash my throat at an inappropriate angle and bleed insufficiently. In my delirium, I will be too weak to cut again. I might be rescued by a misguided individual who means well. That would be tragic.
I walk to the kitchen, to where the rectangular grinding stone rests on the floor. I wear white, the colour of death. Before death, our faces go white. The hospitals we die in have white walls, white sheets, nurses and doctors who wear white. The bedpans and bowls we spit our sickness into are white. Even the stray dogs that walk the hospital grounds are white. I am dressed for the occasion.
I wish the grinding stone was not black. I lift it a little and rest it on my thigh. It is very heavy. I tuck it under my arm and walk to the door. Even though I have money for a taxi, I want to take a bus. It will make my death seem more tragic. If God is not paying attention, he will think I am poor — a public transit user. I will get extra points in heaven. God favours those who travel by bus and train. The reason is simple — he sympathizes with them. In fact, hell’s design is loosely based on a railway platform: no urinal, lots of people, and you have to buy a ticket even though you do not want to be there.
What is wrong with me? I am about to die. I must speak kindly of God.
Thinking about God has suddenly drawn my attention to my fatty bank account. I will certainly not donate any money to the poor. If I give them money, I am tampering with karma. I do not wish to alter God’s work.
Let them remain poor. He wants it so.
Let the bank managers worry about what to do with my mutual funds, provident funds, drinking funds, and my weekly prostitute allowance. They will wait for relatives to come and make a claim, but no one will step forward because I am known as a drinker and as a bad man who goes to bad women, and they want nothing to do with me. As the months pass, my relatives will tell themselves that all that money lying in the bank is a terrible waste. So they will fight over it and there will be more death.
I wish I could leave a legacy. It is most important. Even though you die, your work must live on. But I have never worked in my life. It is a dreadful thought, really. Work. The only thing that sounds more depressing is marriage.
But doing nothing also takes a lot of work. Trust me, I know. It was very hard for me to wake up seven days a week and do nothing. So I slept two days at a time. I was a master at it. I do have my reasons for not working. I was either in a brothel, or I was thinking about being in a brothel; I was either drunk, or I was thinking about getting drunk. When I look back, my time was well spent.
Who would have thought that a bright child like me would turn out this way? It makes my heart bleed. “He comes from a privileged background,” they used to say. His father’s a surgeon. (But the poor man used to cut himself while shaving. That they did not know.) His mother’s a lawyer. (She had an affair with a Supreme Court judge for years. That they did know. I found out when I came home from school one day.
They gave me lots of money. They were good parents. But love is overrated. I would take hundred-rupee notes over hugs and kisses any day.
As I wait for the bus outside the iron gates of my building, flying cockroaches come toward me. They are graceful in flight, like dancers. They are good and brown. The afternoon sun coats them with light. They fly in peace during the day, and at night a few of them, older ones, circle the stars and name them.
An old man joins me at the bus stop. He stares at the grinding stone I carry. This man has one arm, he must think; why does he carry a grinding stone? I will pose my own question: If we have two eyes, why do we close one when aiming a gun? Or wink? Why not wink with both eyes? Why use only one leg to kick and one hand to slap? That is why we have been given just one heart. If we had a pair, one would remain unused and closed.
I wonder if the old man sees the flying cockroaches.
From around the corner emerges the dark shadow of a red double-decker bus. The bus tilts to one side, a curse waiting to fall on the street. I have been told this tilt is necessary and scientifically sound, that my worry is ridiculous. The bus charges toward us even though the driver knows he has to stop.
I let the old man get on first. He takes very small steps. I must act quickly or else the bus will leave without me. There is a boarding area, a square that is always crowded by standees. One must get onto it in seconds or wait for the next bus only to meet with the same fate. Old people, children, and cripples are damned. The god of public transit does not indulge in frivolity. For sentiment and mush, please visit your local cinema hall.
I squat a little, squeeze the grinding stone under my arm even
tighter and leap onto the bus. I land. This grinding stone is too heavy. Why did I keep it? I do not have a servant to use it for grinding masalas. But it is useful in death.
I look for a seat. It is mid-afternoon so the workers are still in the factories, the housewives are done with the daily bazaar, and only the jobless ride the bus, the bags under their eyes filled with the sorrow of the world.
I sit with the grinding stone in my lap. The bus conductor approaches. He rubs his way through the passengers, his body scraping the fronts, sides and especially the backs of women (and sometimes men). He wears a brown uniform that chars him in the city heat. The government has given him a brown leather pouch to collect change from the passengers. Brown skin, brown uniform, brown pouch. Who says we are not organized? Such cohesion cannot be the outcome of the Third World.
I have a suggestion. To avoid confusion, countries should be numbered on the map: First World, Second World, Third World. This way, travel agents cannot fool poor foreigners. Madam, I promise you we are a First World country. So what if there are flies and malaria? A little sickness is good for health. Who said we don’t have water? Forget water, we have water buffaloes. No electricity? What you are talking, madam! If we did not have electricity, would I be shocked at your questions?
Okay, madam, I will not lie. At least we came in Third.
The bus conductor looks at the grinding stone as I remove change from my pocket to buy a ticket. This man has one grinding stone, he must think. Why does he carry an arm? Bus conductors are known to think differently.
I hand him the coins.
“Which stop?” he asks.
“Last stop,” I reply.
“Next time, exact change,” he says.
“No next time,” I say. “Today I am suicide!”
But he has already moved on to the next victim. The bus rumbles along, hits potholes and taps the occasional cyclist. Through the window I see the city pass by like an old postcard. The streetlights bend toward us and potholes grow larger; they spread like blotches of ink. Bridges hinge on the brink of collapse. They will fall when the maximum number of pedestrians and vehicles cross over them. I could sit on a bridge all day and wait for it to fall. But that would take time. The magazine vendors come up to the taxis, showing off dark-skinned beauties on the covers, only a few rupees for an afternoon of hand pleasure. Maya, Mamta, Sushma and Padma. Beautiful names that have lent their bodies for the public good.
I hear drumbeats. The bones of my severed hand are being used as drumsticks. The sound is everywhere, but only those who have lost a limb can hear it. I see an ivory drum in the centre of the street, right next to the cobbler’s stand. People walk by as if they do not see the ivory drum. One-armed, one-legged men beat the ivory with the femurs of cripples. This is the sound where life and death meet. Have a small chat, a cup of tea, and decide who shall recede or encroach for the moment. I hope death is persuasive. Suicide, you are all I have left.
The last stop is just before the old burnt-down mill.
I get off the bus and face the sea.
I turn around and face a tall building. It is under construction. I shall plunge to my death from the twentieth floor. The grinding stone is crucial to my plans. I am not very heavy. Okay, I am light. From time to time, muscles do sprout from my arms, chest and legs, but they are fleeting. They always succumb to sickness and injury.
The grinding stone will make me travel with greater velocity. The time it takes to travel twenty storeys can be especially long if, during the fall, one has second thoughts about dying. The greater the velocity, the harder the impact. The harder the impact, the more efficient the spread of skull on pavement. I shall make the clean-up job difficult for officials.
The racetrack of my life will be laid out for them. They will know I have gone off course, over the rails. To my left, they will find the arm that I leave behind. After I am dead, it might live on and do some good.
I enter the building and take the lift. There is no one around, so I go unnoticed. My arm aches from the weight of the stone. I get off on the terrace. The day is still gloomy. I climb onto the ledge and face the sea. The wind hits the sleeve of my lost arm and it flutters like a white sail. I watch it move gracefully as though it never needed an arm to fill it. The sleeve is my solitary wing. I will fly to my death. But I will have to make an extra effort to avoid the scaffolding.
I look straight ahead. Somewhere, in the country on the other side of this great sea, someone else commits suicide. He looks at the same sea, thinks the same thing. I am with you, my friend. I hope you have a grinding stone, too. I have left the city, moved out of the forest into the clearing. I can never go back. I know I will jump.
“Hero, what are you doing?”
It is a worker on the scaffolding. I stare at his skinny legs. He squats on the scaffold like it is on the ground floor.
“Were you about to jump?” he asks.
He has the eyebrows of an eagle. I feel compelled to answer.
“Yes,” I say.
“What is that stone for?”
“The stone is for speed.”
“Okay, best of luck.”
“What?”
“Hurry up. I don’t have all day.”
“You will not stop me?”
“What for? Your decision.”
Wisdom is a squatting eagle on a scaffold, an eagle who works for less than minimum wage. The signs are clear. I will succeed. The rule of widows and mad dogs shall prevail. So it is possible to end one’s journey.
“One question,” he says.
“Speak, my friend.” I feel jubilant.
“Where is the note?”
“What note?”
“Suicide note!”
I do not appreciate being reminded that I have overlooked a telling detail before death.
“You forgot note? You don’t watch TV at home?”
“I …”
“Not to worry. Do it now.”
“On what?”
“Oral. Recite to me. I am your audience.”
“No, I …”
“Please start.”
His eyebrows arch and I am compelled once more.
I blabber: “Dear Friends …”
“You have friends?” he asks.
I do not. This is disastrous. “Dear World …”
“If the world is dear to you, why are you leaving it?”
“What shall I say?”
“Be insulting. Give bad words.”
“Sewer of a city,” I say.
“Excellent. Well put. You are on your way.”
“May the palms of your hands be stained with the blood of a thousand lepers.”
“You are a poet. Tagore, boss.”
“May the teeth of your wisdom fall in the winter of your stupidity.”
“I wish I had a pen. You are gifted. It is sad that you will be dead.”
“I am a gem in your stone. May you choke on the smoke of your own sadness.”
The man applauds. “True class,” he says.
I bow. Twenty storeys high, and it is effortless. They say grace comes before death. I believe it. If only wisdom came to the living. When death comes, we all walk like lions and wish the earth well.
“Before you go,” the worker says, “I would like to touch that stone. A mark of respect to you.”
I am flattered. The respect of a worker is hard to earn. I very cautiously hand him the grinding stone.
“It is heavy. Oh, it is heavy …”
He is off balance. I reach out to hold him; I extend my left arm. The problem is, I do not have one.
“Don’t leave the grinding stone!” I shout.
The man falls and bursts like a watermelon. He has stolen the vehicle of my death.
The wind carries his last words to me. “To those who find me,” he says, “I have this to say. We worship the wrong people, we shake the wrong hands, and we eat the bread that is not laid out for us.”
Suicide, you do not exist.
<
br /> MADAM AND BOMBER
Death walks in front of me; it knows I am chasing it, so it does its best to evade me. Life knows I fear it, so it runs behind me and hides in shadows and corner shops, out of sight but close enough for me to smell. There is a place on earth where life and death meet. It is called a Job. I must find that place.
Back at home, I stare at my telephone.
It is an old-fashioned telephone, black and boxy. I hold the receiver between neck and shoulder and dial the number listed under “Government Inquiries.” Since I am miserable anyway, I wish to work for the government. After nine rings, a lady answers the phone.
“Madam, I want to find out about government jobs,” I say.
“What type of job?” she asks.
“Any job. But it has to be for the government.”
“What number you want?”
I quote the number in the phone book.
“This number is out of order,” she says.
“How can it be out of order if I am talking to you?”
“Are you being smart?”
“I just want to find out about a government position.”
“Then call the right number,” she insists. “You want anything else?”
“Madam, the right number.”
“You have pen-pencil?”
Without waiting for me to respond, she fires the number at me. So I call the new number, the one that is not out of order. Again a lady picks up.
“Madam, I want to find out about government jobs,” I ask.
“Didn’t you just call?”
It is the same lady. “Madam, you gave me this number.”
“Am I saying no, or what? What is the problem?”
“There is no problem. I just want to work for the government.”
“Why? You have criminal record?”
“Madam, please, I am not a criminal.”
“Then what? Tell the truth.”
“I’m a cripple.”
“That is not good. Now, what job you are looking for?”
“Anything that is open.”
“This is a restaurant or what? Be direct. Government time not to be wasted.”