by Indra Sinha
“Elli thinks she can maybe cure me.”
“Ah, I see,” she says. “Yes, of course. I should have guessed.” She puts her arm round my shoulders, hugs my head to her. “I hope she can cure you, darling.”
My heart, O my heart, I think it will explode.
“My god how could he? Has he gone mad?” exclaims Nisha. My head is still hugged tight to her, beyond the blurry swell of her bosom something extraordinary comes into view.
Bhoora Khan’s just pulled up in a cloud of dust. There’s his auto standing by the bhutt-bhutt-pig. Out gets Bhoora, reaches in the back, he’s carrying the gramophone mashin. Out gets Pandit Somraj, holding the black records older than anyone here alive. But what’s this? I catch a flash of blue now emerging. From the hubbub where the group is gathered, they too can’t believe their eyes. Merde à la puissance treize, it’s Elli. Stranger still, she’s walking alongside Pandit Somraj. More bizarre’s that he’s introducing her to people, “Please meet my neighbour Doctor Barber.”
“Oh god,” groans Nisha, “my father has gone mad.”
No one knows why this is happening but it’s Somraj who’s brought her, and he’s a man to be respected so they’re all greeting her with polite smiles, neatly folded hands, while their minds are gabbling like geese.
“How could he invite that woman to our picnic? After all those dramatics?” says Nisha into my still-clamped, much-enjoying ear. Thudding, her heart’s.
“Maybe he felt sorry for her.” But it’s not that, I know. I’m remembering Pandit Somraj’s embarrassment when Elli challenged him in his own music room. He hates unfairness, he hated having to lie. Or maybe this is his way of showing Zafar who’s really boss. That too, Nisha would not like.
Well, Eyes, you can imagine that after Pandit Somraj plays this stroke there isn’t much carefree chat at the picnic, everyone’s watching what they say. All are pretending things are normal, all know they are not. Zafar has gone over to talk to Somraj and Elli, the three of them are together. I wish I could hear what’s being said, but it doesn’t look like anyone’s getting upset, except Nisha. “I guess it’s brave of him to ask her,” she says, making no move to join that group.
“Plus brave of her to come,” says I.
After a short time Elli spots me with Nisha and comes over, smiling, but Nisha gets up and walks past her without a word.
“How come?” I ask, when lund pasanda number two takes the place of lund pasanda the first beside me on the river bank.
Says Elli doctress, “He is a most unusual man, is your Pandit Somraj. This morning he came over the road. Said the neighbours were having a picnic, I should come. I apologised for yelling at him that time in his house, but for the other things I would not apologise. He said he perfectly understood, in my position he would have done the same. Then he said that the picnic was just a social thing, it would be helpful for me to get to know people.”
“And Zafar, what was he talking to you about?”
“Wait, I haven’t finished. Then Somraj says, ‘We are on opposite sides, but does it mean we should be enemies? We are both musicians. I have often heard you play your piano.’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and every time you tried to drown it out.’ He protested that it wasn’t so, that he and everyone else thought it was the other way round, I had been trying to drown his music.”
“Surely not!” says I, who’d realised this but said nothing to either side.
“I said I certainly had not been trying to do any such thing to which he made the weirdest reply. He said, ‘In any case it did not bother me, there was a certain beauty in the clashing of our musics.’ All this time he was totally solemn, then that grim face of his broke apart in a grin, he said, ‘As you know, I am that unusual person who finds music in the croaking of frogs.’”
“Oh baba, what a fun!” says I, unable to guess what’s coming next from either of these two.
“So then, if you please, he asks if I will play the piano for him…”
“Animal!” there’s a shout. “Come here and translate what Ma’s saying.” The old lady is surrounded by a group of young Khaufpuris. Flapping her hands, she’s, and rattling away in français about angels and abîmes.
“Is this Ma Franci?” asks Elli. “I’d like to meet her.”
The group around Ma, seeing us approach, falls silent, but at least there are polite nods and smiles. For Somraj’s benefit everyone is acting.
“Ma, ici Elli doctress,” I tell her in français. “She speaks human.”
“So you’re the famous doctress,” says Ma. “How nice that you don’t babble like an imbecile. I hope you can do something for this stony hearted lot. Not that there’s much point, seeing there’s no time left.”
“Time left for what?” asks Elli in français.
“For the world and all in it,” says Ma, gazing at Elli with milky blue eyes. “That’s why I wouldn’t let them take me away, they keep trying you know.”
Elli looks mystified, so I’ve told the story of how she escaped Père Bernard dressed in a burqa.
“Clever,” says Elli. “That’s a trick I’ll have to remember.”
Ma gives a witch-like cackle. “Just wish I’d been there to see his face.”
Later, after all have well-kebabed and biryani’d themselves, chai drunk, sweets eaten, Zafar says we will sit in a circle on the grass and each shall tell a story, which must be about their own life. Some good yarns are then floated, a man who believes in alchemy, he’s wasted a lot of money trying to make gold, describes how a chap he knows will go to the burning ghat and by tantra mantra hocus pokery plus some flour scattered cause a spirit to rise up from a corpse, it will do whatever he says, if he wants it to kill someone it will do that.
When comes Chunaram’s turn, people begin demanding his well known stories, such as Motiyari the seed-sucking cobra, or else Maggot Man, which in addition to Ninefingers he’s called because he knows the use of maggots to clean wounds, others demand the tale of how he tore off his little finger.
Says Zafar, “Since we are not able to agree, plus we’ve heard these stories before, let the next tale be narrated by Elli doctress.”
So Elli stands up. “I know that many people are wondering where I came from and why I came here,” she says. “I will tell why I became a doctor.”
Eyes, near as I can recall, plus taking full help of my voices, here is Elli’s story. Some of it I do not understand, I will just say what I hear in my head.
“The world is made of promises,” my father said. I was fourteen years old and didn’t understand. He said, “Think of everyday things. Mail gets delivered. Farmers grow crops. The stores take our dollars, each bill says ‘This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private,’ which means, you’ve done a good thing for someone, I promise you something equally good in return.”
I said, “But that’s people. The world’s also rock and water and trees.”
“Rocks keep their promises. They behave like rocks. Water boils at one hundred degrees. The sea rises and falls, that’s the sea and the moon keeping their own kind of promises. To have the world work for you, you’ve got to make your own promises right back.”
“People break promises,” I said bitterly. A boy I liked had asked me to a school dance then at the last minute decided he’d rather take another girl.
“This isn’t about other people, Elli. There’s a satisfaction in keeping your word that no one and nothing can take away from you.”
We were living in the town of Coatesville, Pennsylvania. It was a steel town and my father worked at the mill. I had no idea about the actual job he did until years later when I was a junior doctor at the local veterans’ hospital. I was talking to a man who’d quit his job at the steel mill. He couldn’t stand the din. “Not noise. Particular noises.” He described explosions of water heewhacking to steam as it hit red metal at two thousand degrees, a crane that sang like a helicopter turbine, a deep-thumping compressor that reminded him of the whup-whup-whup of Hueys
coming in low over jungle. “I don’t want those memories in my head every day.” Well, I was a child when the Vietnam war ended, I found it hard to imagine an ordeal so bad that twenty years couldn’t heal it, but this man’s hands were shaking as he spoke. He was my dad’s age, I wondered if they knew each other.
“Harry Barber? Sure I do.”
Which is how I learned what my father’s job was. Forty feet below the main control floor, among furnaces that roared like volcanoes, was a tin shack on whose door someone had chalked HELL HOLE.
“Down there,” said my dad’s friend, “it’s so hot it can burn the hairs right out of your nose. There’s steel plates, glowing red as the devil’s eye, going by on a roller belt. Water’s spraying on them but it bangs off, boom! boom! boom! like a stick of bombs. Your dad’s job is to step outside of the hell hole and check the plate. Is it good and flat or does it need more rolling? He’s got on fireproof gear and a face guard and he’s holding four-foot-long calipers, even so he has only four seconds per sheet. Thirty seconds out there and protection or no, your skin is going to start blistering. One slip, you’re history.”
It was a job for a skilled man with plenty of guts and a steady hand and my father was proud of it. “We built Amrika,” he used to tell me. “We made the steel for the Walt Whitman Bridge and the World Trade Center.”
Elli pauses and looks around as if expecting a question or a comment, but all are silent, waiting for her next words.
“The world is made of promises.” It’s all very well to say such things, but noble ideas don’t dull pain, not when you’re a teenager and people snigger and make jokes behind your back. When my mother, Martha, was found wandering the town in her nightclothes, my dad had to be called away from his work at the steel mill, I got home to find him sitting with his head in his hands, for the first time ever I saw him cry. My mother was ill with a sickness that affected her mind. There’d be times when she wouldn’t know who she was, who we were. One day, on my mother’s arm I found red marks, they could only have been made by a man’s strong fingers. My father’s. The realisation that he’d been momentarily cruel filled me with anger, but not against him. I was angry with my poor mother, whose illness had caused him to lose self-control, also I was angry with myself because I could do nothing to help either of them. In my shame I remembered reading about a doctor who had gone to Africa, he worked among pygmy women who gave birth to the planet’s tiniest babies, two small discs of coconut outlined in milk, for some reason that’s how I thought of them, I decided I would become a doctor. “To be able to help. To have the power to help.” I became a doctor to save not my mother, but my father.
Before Martha became ill we rented a small house with a view across the railroad tracks to the grey steel mill where my father worked. When he realised that my mother’s health would not improve, this was after she’d gone running round town in her underwear, my father decided that she needed a change. He’d take her away to somewhere with trees and fields, where a person could breathe. He could not afford to buy a house, so he built one. I helped him. It was a timber frame house in a small development a few miles out of town. It stood in an acre of land and was constructed in what was locally called “ranch style,” all on one floor, spread out. More prosperous people built “colonial style,” which was two stories, one above the other. My father began the house during the winter, working weekends. When days grew longer he’d return from his job to the little house in C’ville, as we locals called it, and we’d drive in his beat-up old car out to the property. The neighbours came over and helped us raise the frames. My dad climbed a ladder, he sawed and hammered. I climbed nearly to the top and held the nails and handed up tools as needed. He worked late, those summer nights, nine, ten, till the last light was gone from the west. Often he’d carry on by lamplight. When the house was done he landscaped the yard and planted trees. He put in rhododendrons and azaleas, a willow, a mimosa near the house, evergreen trees round the lawn. He was tireless. Whatever the difficulty, he never gave up.
“You’re a hero,” I thought, loving my dad, “you made our house.”
The day it was finished, we took Martha out to see the new house. She clapped her hands at the sight of its neat white boards, blue-painted windows. Her illness seemed to fade away, as if the demons feeding on her brain could not survive out of sight and sound and smell of the steel mill. “How I do love this place,” Martha said.
This house of my childhood stood on land that once had been fields. The backyard was ridged by generations of ploughs. Two homes away was a small farm that raised horses and if the wind was right it brought sweet, rich gusts of manure. Of the old forest there still remained patches of woodland, mainly maples and oaks. Honeysuckle, wild raspberries and blackberries climbed on the fences. At night, the stars were brilliant, you could hear frogs and crickets, and the wind running like a river in the trees.
“Oh my, just look at all the little birds!” What Martha loved best about the new place was the wilderness all round, but one day I found her distraught because one of the songbirds was dead. “A hawk got it. I hate them, they are so cruel.” A pair of red-tailed hawks were soaring overhead. Two days later Martha said, “I love the hawks, they are so beautiful.”
I still recall the dismay I felt that my mother’s illness could not be cured either by prayer, or by my own force of will and sincerity of purpose. After this I fell out with god, we went our separate ways, he to demonstrate his strange way of loving human beings, while for me began the long process of learning how to heal their broken bodies and minds.
After hearing this story many people go up to Elli doctress to say how sorry they are to hear of her mother’s illness, they hope she has recovered, what a truly wonderful thing to be a doctor, etc.
It’s Chunaram, he’s come up and asked about promises, how come they’re so important. Elli says, “I mean that things work when we keep our promises to each other and to ourselves, when we don’t keep our promises, things fall apart.” Some folk, including Zafar, are nodding, as for me, I’m thinking that things couldn’t be better for Chunaram who’s hardly kept a promise in his life.
Last of all’s come Pandit Somraj. Says he, “We come from different worlds. Yours is made of promises, mine of music. I wonder if the two are as far apart as they seem.”
“You know what,” Elli says to me afterwards, “I think this is Pandit Somraj’s way of making peace. Now at last people will come.”
But next morning, when she opens the doors, the street is still empty.
TAPE FOURTEEN
I have nine days to live, for tonight there’s no moon in the sky, it’s the first night of Muharram. The ninth night is Ashara Mubarak, the night of the fire walk, the night I will surely die.
Never have I been more scared, I’ve been dreaming of those cruel coals, the fire pit’s no fake. In past years I’ve watched men with leather bellows blow air onto the fire until the coals glow white. In my dreams I walk onto them and my hands burst into flames, I fall and I’m all burned up.
The fire is part of Muharram here in Khaufpur and will always be, because it’s the heat of the desert where the Prophet’s grandson, Hazrat Imam Hussein was martyred.
Everyone in Khaufpur knows the story of Imam Hussein. How many times have I heard it from the mouth of old Hanif Ali, he’ll rock back on his heels and close his eyes, the cataracts that stop him seeing dissolve away, he’s seeing the world of a thousand years ago. “What are these red tulips that bloom in the desert? In Karbala that dreadful place, I see Hussein, grandson of the Prophet, upon whom be peace. Tired he is and thirsty, and all around his companions lie fallen. Alone he defies Yazid the tyrant and his thirty-three thousand men, better it is to die with dignity than to live a humiliating life.”
A great hero, was Hussein, to defy such odds, to stick up for what he believed in, that kind of courage I admire, but do not share.
Even Zafar, who refuses to believe in god, says we must all be like Hussein who nev
er gave up and refused to be cowed by the evil powers that rule this world. When he says this I know he is thinking of the Kampani and its friends who rule countries and cities, who have guns and soldiers and bombs and all the money in all the banks of the world, and that pitted against them he sees us, the people of the abyss, Ma Franci’s people of the Apokalis, he tells us that we will win, because we are armed with the invincible power of nothing.
Nine more days. I’ll never walk upright. I’ll never again hear Nisha sing, for in Somraj’s house out of respect for the neighbours the singing and sounds have stopped, for the rest of my life there’ll be silence. I’ll never marry Nisha. I’ll never marry anyone. I’ll never know what it is like to fuck.
Nine days to do everything I want to do in my life. I’ve caught Zafar aside, “Zafar brother, there’s something I must do before I die, will you help me?”
“Say, brother. What is it?” he asks kindly.
“I would like to ride on a motorbike at one hundred miles per hour.”
He strokes his beard. “Hmm, on roads like ours, could be deadly.”
“In nine days I will be dead anyway.”
“Why will you die, you fool?” he asks, laughing.
“Because of my bet with Farouq. I have to cross that fire, I swear in my mind it burns like the pit of hell itself.”
“First, there’s no such place as hell,” says he. “Second, you won’t walk.”
“That I will. I’m not backing down.”
Farouq is also counting, he comes to Chunaram’s looking for me, I’m sitting with Zafar and others.
“Eight more days, Animal, until the fire.”
“I’m ready,” says I, meaning I am ready to die.
“Better get a religion quick,” says Farouq. He says that if I reform, become a Muslim, and lead a good life, I’ll get to paradise. So I look at him and ask does his religion not forbid him to smoke and drink, plus what of his visits to those houses in the old city?