7. News on TV, Man From Ukraine
AND guess who came rushing in to fill that space which I had just carved out of the night for myself, away from Ithim? A man from Ukraine, a large man in red Spandex shorts and a Nike T-shirt with no sleeves. A woman from South Korea and another woman from the Czech Republic, all in a television studio in some place called Burbank, California, under bright lights that washed over the studio audience, reflected off the blue-glass backdrop, rode on canned music travelling across the world, through space, to reach me that thinning night when I switched on the TV in the living room, Ithim fast asleep. One hour, I told myself, at the most, just an hour, I will start with Channel 0 and then work through to Channel 99.
Why do I recall what was being broadcast that night? What’s its relevance now? For one, the noise from the TV, its shadows and its flickers, the faces and voices of strangers, filled the room, bringing for the first time since the previous evening a sense of the predictable and the normal into my life and my home. It took me away, temporarily, from what lay in the next room, from the dreams I had just had, away from the unknown cold fears that had slipped into the house after Miss Glass had hung up. And, then, of course, there was the man from Ukraine, the women from South Korea and the Czech Republic. But let’s go in sequence, from Channel 0 up.
CHANNEL Zero on TV was Business News, a rerun of the late-night bulletin, the fresh Friday programming yet to begin. In her studio, lit blue, Anchorwoman sat at her sweeping glass table, pale white, translucent and glowing, like glass bathed in hidden lights. She wore a red top and a purple blazer, her hair was straight. There was a laptop on her table, its screen opened out, she was talking about the Budget tabled in Parliament that morning. She shrank in size, reduced to about a tenth, looking out of a window on the screen’s top right-hand corner, while to her right scrolled numbers and charts, white in bands of blue. The Finance Minister, she said, had set up a Rs 15,000-crore fund for states to use if they reformed faster, especially in the agriculture sector, if they opened up their markets. There was a five per cent surcharge to fight terrorism, money was needed to keep the country safe from fear, taxes were up, the deficit had gone out of the window, foreign banks had reasons to celebrate, they could set up new branches, nonresident Indians could fully repatriate their earnings in India. Facts, figures, facts, figures until all I could make out was her lips moving – coloured mauve to match with her blazer. (In a few days, when I would have to return to work, these same facts and figures would be sitting on my desk, stale and cold, like a dark cloud, and it would be my job to polish its silver lining.)
‘The markets gave a thumbs-down to the Budget,’ Anchorwoman said, trying to smile for the camera and yet appear suitably grim for the news, her face caught in this indecisiveness. The Mumbai Sensex closed at 3562, down almost 143 points, the Nifty down 47 points to 1142. I remember the numbers, I am good with numbers, I am the fact-checker, I am the fact-finder, 62 was my father’s age when he died, 35 is what I will be in five years, when Ithim goes to school, 143 is one less than twelve dozen, 47 the year India got freedom, 11 and 42 the first and last two digits of my wife’s hospital identity number.
‘There is nothing in this Budget that will set the street on fire,’ said a thin man, smiling, in a white shirt, a black suit and a striped tie, a fund manager from Mumbai. Anchor-woman wrapped up her segment by referring to the city on fire saying how that, too, had put ‘downward pressure’ on the market amid fears that it might spread to other cities across the country.
Up next was another woman, this time in Singapore, where it was already morning, and she had another man by her side, another white shirt, black suit and striped tie, this time from CLSA in Tokyo, where it was well into the trading day, talking about the Nikkei. Words and figures that floated over me as I sat there staring, waiting for the ad break. The crawl at the bottom: Daniel Pearl already dead when throat slit on tape: US law enforcement officials; Queen arrives in Australia for Commonwealth summit, Watch out for special on Oscars and the box-office.
Next channel.
News.
Maybe now I would get to know the details of the fire in the city, the fire that Head Nurse mentioned, that Miss Glass seemed to know a lot about. But I had caught the tail end, the least important stories, so I had to sit through them until they looped back to the lead.
A four-year-old girl in Kanpur who gouged out the eyes of her classmate, another four-year-old girl. Her left retina had been ruptured, the victim’s grandmother said school authorities were to blame. ‘Tell me,’ she asked the reporter, ‘how can we blame such a young girl? Obviously, she did not know what she was doing, they must have had a fight over something very minor. But how come a girl in a school has a kitchen knife in her hands? How did it get there? We plan to file a police complaint against the principal.’ The principal, a woman with thick grey hair and thin grey glasses, her face averted, the camera showing her hands, her fingers interlocking and unlocking: ‘How can you blame us? Not one of our teachers or staff was negligent. This happened during the lunch recess and the two girls were in the playground, there was a commotion and one of the senior students came rushing to my office and I wasted no time. I called for an ambulance. We rushed her to the hospital, what more could we do?’ The wounded girl lay in an iron bed in a room, peeling plaster on the wall behind her. There was a huge cotton swab over her left eye and she was fast asleep, her legs sprawled across a small pillow. Next to her sat a woman, perhaps her mother, who brushed the TV microphone with one hand, gesturing that she would not say anything, that she had nothing to say. I watched a clip of endangered marine life seized near Chennai, the smiling face of the official as he stood there guiding the camera over the corals, the sea cucumbers and shells. I watched an icy expanse, the picture taken from a helicopter, the trees were tiny, the camera jerky, all the branches covered with snow, the screen white. It was down there, a voice said, below the ice, that they found the bodies of a Swedish tourist and her boyfriend who had got lost trekking twenty-three years ago. ‘Even their clothes are intact,’ said the voice, ‘the Embassy has been contacted to send the bodies home.’ There was an old photograph of the two, both with golden hair, the woman had a red scarf, a blouse with white and blue checks, the man had a leather jacket, fur-lined.
Then the lead story, the city on fire.
‘In what they called revenge attacks for the killing of fifty-nine people on the train last night, hundreds of—’
A technical failure, there was no sound, only images.
This city this afternoon, a mob looking into the camera, waving, smiling, a close-up of a body on a stretcher, its face covered but the stretcher on the floor, surrounded by several women crying. (They showed this Floor Body several times.) A house on fire, a shop on fire, women and children huddled on the floor, a house on fire again, another shop on fire, a rubber tyre on fire, a car on fire, Floor Body again, a policeman speaking, a woman screaming. Floor Body again. The sound was back. Screaming Woman was loud, her hair across her face, several strands splayed across her lips, blowing in the air she breathed out as she screamed.
‘. . . reports of deaths have come from Ahmedabad, Godhra, Vadodara, Bhavnagar, Sabarkantha, Rajkot, Panchmahals, Anand and Kheda.’ Again, the sound went off.
The Prime Minister walked into the frame, his eyes closed, shuffling out of the frame, soft and cautious given his reconstructed knee. The Law Minister, looking as if he had just stepped out of the shower, fresh and wet, the ash scrubbed away, his hair brushed back. The Chief Minister smiling. Sonia Gandhi, her daughter by her side. (It must have been very cold in New Delhi, much colder than here, since both mother and daughter were wrapped in shawls, ash grey, like the sky above. Mother raised her arm to adjust her hair, there were sweat stains under her armpits.) On the TV now was a house on fire, a shop on fire, a city on fire. Smoke, thick and black; flames, red and yellow. Empty streets littered with stones, iron rods, a child on a stretcher. Floor Body now being picked u
p, moved out of the frame. Screaming Woman again, this time noiseless, the camera closing in on her tears, the gash of her parted lips, her teeth, her tongue.
In the ad break, they promised a special Oscar package for March: thirty-two movies in thirty days, beginning with Jaws, An Officer and a Gentleman, Spartacus, Top Gun and Babe.
The TV still on, I walked back to the bedroom to check on Ithim. Gone was the stench, he now smelled clean, fresh and dry. He hadn’t moved one bit. His eyes were closed and when I brought my ears close to his slit-lips, to hear his breath, I could hear them move. Very faint, like the sound a fly makes when it walks on glass. I returned to the TV, safe in the belief that Ithim, for now, didn’t need my attention; I would feed him later.
AND then came the man from Ukraine. This was The Guinness Book of World Records, broadcast from Burbank, California. On stage, next to the host, was the man from Ukraine. Short and squat, his flaming red shorts and red T-shirt seemed to have been painted on his body, outlining his chest, the slight bulge of his abdomen near the waist, a bigger swell of the crotch. He was the insect-eater, the insect-swallower. He picked them up from a huge glass aquarium in which they writhed, squirmed, crawled – two young women stood by his side, in white skirts, browned legs; their job was to poke the insects back into the glass case with a stick if they crawled too near to the edge. Beetles, crickets, flies, cockroaches, ladybugs, spiders, dragonflies, caterpillars, insects I couldn’t name, red, white, green, yellow, black, monochrome, dichromatic, spotted, speckled, striped, banded, the man from Ukraine would pick one up, toss his head back, arch his body in a brilliant red curve on the blue stage, open his mouth wide as if he was about to scream, then drop the insect in. Wings and tentacles and legs and antennae rustled against his lips, his tongue, the last desperate flurry before his teeth came down, as if the creatures knew the end was near and there was no flying away, the microphone thrust so close it recorded every crunch, magnified into a sound I had never heard before. Whenever the man from Ukraine closed his lips, his face filled the screen, and I could see the twitch of his chin, the ripples on the surface of his cheeks as the insects flew inside his mouth, their blood, red, white and green, dribbled out, one of the women on the stage ready with a napkin.
Next came the woman from South Korea, her feast: razor blades. She swallowed them twelve at a time, tickled her throat with a straw (provided once again by one of the insect women) and threw up. The screen filled with a dozen razor blades in a pool of her phlegm, she wiping her lips. Another woman, this one from Prague, wore a blouse that bared her back. She looked like a ballerina, she walked like one, on her toes, each step filled with so much grace that I thought she would dance. But a man followed her with a bundle of darts in his hand, each black and glinting, with a knife-edge tip. She stood still while he began throwing the darts on her bare back, each dart getting embedded in her skin, marking its tip with a thin stream of blood that trickled down to her waist. Within minutes, so many darts had been thrown that everyone had lost count and her back was a river of blood – not one but countless tributaries mapping out a red pattern, not the faintest flicker of movement on her face.
I switched the TV off but on the blank screen I could now see Ithim in the studio, raised on a pedestal moved by pulleys and ropes and cranks, tiny Ithim, each part of him exposed to the camera’s gaze, the charred skin on his forehead, the funnel-ear, the fused chin, the fold of flesh that covers his anus, the congealed mass near his waist, the child who is both It and Him, the camera then zooming in on his eyes, capturing the rustle of their blink, merging with the hollow claps of strangers. And it was at this precise moment when I sat in my chair, the TV humming although switched off, the three performers still in my head, that I realized the importance of Miss Glass’s message and made my decision: yes, I would take that journey.
I would go wherever I needed to go if that could set Ithim right.
After Miss Glass had hung up, I had been weighing the options, balancing her promise against my fears, but now the scales had tilted. All the doubts and the uncertainties had melted away, like the night outside, leaving me not only more determined but stronger as well. As if the Ukrainian man, the insects fluttering in his mouth, the Korean woman allowing razor blades to travel down into and inside her body, the Prague woman with the red blood-map on her back, all these had cried out to me in their silence. No, I would never let that happen. I would never let Ithim perform, be the object of curiosity, I wouldn’t allow a single person in this city, in this world, to look at him and pity him, no, never.
So relieved was I that for the first time, I felt hunger, my first selfish impulse, I heard my stomach churn and growl, and I saw this as yet another sign of order finally creeping into the chaos. I took two heaped spoons of Ithim’s baby formula, washed it down with cold water, then prepared his feed, sterilized the dropper.
Once, while I was feeding him, he glanced up, his eyes looked into mine for more than a minute or so, I smiled at him, I caressed the skin on his forehead. He liked it, I think, because his eyes grew heavy and they began to droop, to close.
IF you were a stranger who had not heard a word of what I have said so far, if you were looking in through the window at me that morning preparing Ithim for the journey that I was now resolved to take, you would have thought I was packing up an object, certainly not a child and certainly not my child, not my newborn baby. While preparing Ithim for the journey, there were three things on my mind. One, I had to carry him close to me so I missed not the slightest movement. Two, he had to breathe (although I was still not sure whether the air found its way through his slit-lips or the two holes in the centre of his face, nor what route it took, how it travelled to his lungs, how it cleaned his blood, sent it to every corner of his body. But he had to breathe, I was sure of that). And, three, his eyes; they had to be free so he could watch, he could see, if only because that was the only thing he could do.
The rest was easy.
Because he had no arms or legs, no neck, no joints to manoeuvre delicately, no twists and turns to be careful of, the rest of him I saw as a frail object. Like a china bowl that had to be wrapped. I had seen my wife do that, wrapping gifts. She would sit on the bed, the coloured paper all around her, as if she were in the middle of a garden strewn with flowers, and her fingers, long and slender, would seem to acquire a life of their own, a dance, a beat to a rhythm I never heard but only saw, rapt with admiration. I tried to recall those moves, that sequence of movement of her fingers, how she folded the paper, how she prepared the extra layering, what she used first, what she used second and what she did last, as I picked up Ithim, very carefully, afraid I would drop him onto the cement floor.
I clothed Ithim in a tiny white shirt my wife had bought, a shirt complete with collars and sleeves and slit at the bottom on each side, adult-like. (I spread the shirt out, placed Ithim in the centre and then wrapped the two sides over him, one on top of the other. Its sleeves flopped on either side, I buttoned just a few buttons and to make sure that their plastic didn’t scrape his skin, I layered the inside of the shirt with several handkerchiefs I had. The shirt reached a few inches below his waist, which helped, since I turned that over and used it to cover his bottom.)
Then a bag. Of course I couldn’t carry Ithim, even if he was swaddled, like other fathers do. Not only was he too frail, I couldn’t run the slightest risk of him being seen by someone on the street. At the same time, his comfort was important and so was my freedom of movement when I carried him. Therefore, the bag. A cloth bag that could take any shape and so would be softer on Ithim’s frame. I lined it with towels and tissue. It had a flap at its mouth that could be closed to prevent dust from entering his eyes and yet its cotton fabric was porous so that air and light could enter. Its strap was sturdy, it would grip my shoulder. And allow me to hold it from below with one hand, keep my other hand free.
So Ithim all covered, with tissue and towels and fabric, safe and snuggled, I slid him into the bag, his f
ace up, and kept it free, uncovered.
How did he look?
The most beautiful baby in the world.
As if he had been given to me by angels who had come down to the city. My Ithim was ready. And with help from Miss Glass, we would set him right.
From outside, I heard someone wake up in the dawn.
END OF PART ONE
I am Miss Glass, I was twenty-three, I was thirty-three, I was forty-three, I was fifty-three, I was sixty-three, I was a hundred and three, you choose any number you wish because, sorry, you aren’t going to get me to say who I was, who I left behind, I am not going to give you a personal profile of my grief in about 350 words, in small type, single spaced, I am not going to tell you what happened to me, I am not going to tel you the last thing I remember, I am not going to tell you anything because I have a lot of work to do, I will see you later, towards the end.
PART TWO
THE DAY AFTER
8. The First Light, Bodies Rain
IF seeing is believing, then maybe not seeing is not believing. How I wish, therefore, I had an image, like the photograph of the pavement I took from Miss Glass’s hospital room. Better still, a series of images, maybe video plus audio, but I don’t and even if I had, I doubt it would make much of a difference because you would watch, you would hear and, in the end, you would dismiss it as doctored, you would say they can do these things these days, they can split, they can splice, morph and manipulate, they can pull anything out of thin air so why not bodies from the sky?
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