Arzee the Dwarf

by Chandrahas Choudhury

  Yet how could that happen, if Abjani, Phiroz, and the rest of them wouldn’t think of the common cause? But they were happy to be rolled over like tail-enders. He wouldn’t say a word to Abjani or Phiroz from now on, just so that they knew what he thought of them. Wouldn’t go to Phiroz’s daughter’s wedding either. Let the old man see he had no need of him. Phiroz could eat all by himself at his feast, dance alone. After the fall of the Noor, every man was alone.

  ‘I’m not worried about myself,’ he thought, looking up at the moon. ‘I can manage, as I have managed all my life, else I wouldn’t have come this far. But who’s saying this? It’s me, as I walk home all alone, looking at this moon. But I’m not just me, and this world’s not as empty and quiet as it is now. It’s a miserable, nasty, cruel world! It respects your position: if you’ve got a square foot to stand on, it won’t come rushing in. But lose your position, and you lose yourself. If you break up in love you lose yourself too, but at least then you go back into the world shaking in anger, and turn your quarrel with one into one with all. No one knew about it – it was just between me and her. But this time the whole world will know! They’ll know I’ve been knocked off my perch, they’ll see me reduced to something menial and low. And then they’ll cackle with pleasure, for all the times I was haughty with them. But I couldn’t have helped that…I had to be, to claim for myself what they wouldn’t give me. It’s all a mess! All this comes from being only three-foot-five, from these cursed legs that only raise me up this high, so that I smell the shit and dung on the streets and make talk with all the asses and crotches in the world. But no, I’m not worried about myself. I can manage – as long as Mother doesn’t come to know.’

  He knew he was a grown man now. At his age it shouldn’t really matter what his mother said or did. But somehow with Mother it did – living as he did at home, it was never possible to ignore Mother! Mother loved him and Mobin both, but him more than Mobin, not just because he was her first-born, but because he’d had a much harder time in life. Bodies always came from other bodies, and it was from Mother’s body that his own stunted and unfortunate one had emerged. Mother had a special corner in her heart just for him, Arzee knew that – was grateful for it too. But it was such a difficult love! It took such a proprietorial interest in his life! It wanted so much, and understood so little about what it was to be a man! It was full of such notions! It didn’t respect his rights or his age at all! It was so high-pitched! For Mother there was no distinction between thinking and speaking. What was on her mind one moment was on her tongue the next – she got it all out and unburdened herself, leaving the other person’s ear and mind to pay the price.

  ‘If I tell her about what’s coming, she won’t be able to take it,’ thought Arzee. ‘She’ll live my pain for me, and my troubles will be doubled. I’ll be made into a child again – it’ll be Arzoo this, Arzoo that, all day long! But if I don’t tell her, she’ll keep going in the direction she’s thought up for me. That’s trouble too! Here I’m losing connections, and Mother’s trying to make connections. I’m at a dead end, and she’s trying to work out a deal for a son who told her he’s on the rise! Either way, I’m in trouble big-time. I wish I lived alone, and had nobody in this world!’

  And it wasn’t even as if he was thinking all these thoughts for the first time – he’d thought exactly these thoughts so many times today. But there was nothing else to do, so he had to go over them all over again like the minute hand of a clock, while the rest of the world moved on upon the hours. Arzee was tired of himself, but of course he was the one person he could never escape.

  ‘I have to reach my bed and my pillow,’ he thought. ‘There’s no other way of turning this off.’ And he began to walk faster.

  There was an ascending rumble behind him and a taxi flashed past, tooting its horn, making him jump. Drivers pretty much leant on their horns whenever they liked these days! But, as if registering Arzee’s protest, the taxi screeched to a halt and began to return towards him, very fast, in reverse gear. Arzee was alarmed – he hoped the passenger inside wasn’t thinking he was a man of the night. But the sight of the taxi lurching from left to right, its silencer shaking madly like a penis in a porn video, was somehow so funny that Arzee burst out laughing.

  As the car approached him the driver switched on his blue cabin light. Arzee recognized him immediately from the sight of his grizzled head.

  ‘Dashrath Tiwari!’

  The car stopped alongside him and, leaning across, Dashrath Tiwari said in his measured cadences, as if he’d been rehearsing these lines all evening: ‘I was going to go on home, but then I remembered a proverb that goes, “Never pass a friend by on the street without a word, for there may come a day when he too shall do the same.” Save those legs for another day, my friend. Get in.’

  ‘The regret is that no motor or wheels can take me to the place where I want to go,’ said Arzee immediately, for he knew that Dashrath loved expansive formulations and poetical ambiguities. He was so pleased to see Dashrath that the words flowed out without forethought or striving. ‘The truth is that I would like to travel to the very place I am leaving, but the world tells me that what I ask it cannot give.’

  ‘Very fine, that’s very fine!’ said Dashrath. ‘It’s a pleasure to see you, Arzee my friend, a pleasure to see the real goods for a change. Come, I’ll take you someplace where we can have a cup of tea and a chat – if you’re not off somewhere else, that is.’

  ‘I’m not. Where would I go at this hour, Dashrathji?’

  ‘You’re a young man. Do you really need me to tell you that?’ said Dashrath, and laughed. ‘Anyway, the court of Dashrath finds you innocent. Jump in.’

  ‘Let’s go.’ Arzee felt revived already by Dashrath’s bluster. ‘Just around the corner is the Café Momin. That’s always open till one-thirty. It’s good to see you, Dashrathji. I needed someone like you today.’

  ‘It’s good to see you. Close that door properly or you might fall out when you lean against it. This is an old car, just like its owner.’

  ‘I’ve leant against many things and fallen, Dashrathji, leant against many things – and people too.’

  ‘Life is a procession of troubles, that’s true. But troubles are what make a man who he is, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘That doesn’t mean that one goes out in search of them, Dashrathji. And that’s what I seem to be doing – they come at me like I have some special colour and smell.’

  Dashrath laughed. ‘Troubles can be talked away too. What are you opening the glove compartment for?’

  ‘Sorry, Dashrathji, I just like opening things. I’ll shut it again.’

  Although Dashrath Tiwari was a taxi-driver by profession, and had been one all his life, taxi-driving was just the outermost layer of him. If his talents were to be summed up with a metaphor that pleased him (for he was a lover of metaphors), it could be said that he was an adept not just at the steeringwheel of a Fiat but also at the steering-wheel of language – he could take it anywhere he liked. In his spare time he’d written dialogues for several Bhojpuri movies that played not in places like the Noor, but in small theatres in other parts in Bombay where the presence of labour from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar was strong. By all rights he should have been a celebrity, but because people always go by appearances, by exteriors, instead of taking the trouble to delve deeper, all the acclaim went to the actors who spoke Dashrath’s lines, and none came to Dashrath himself. Dashrath had also sired seven children, all sons, despite the fact that he only went home for three weeks a year. Since he always went at the same time each summer, every one of his children was born in January.

  The first thing that marked out Dashrath as different was his rich, measured, and lilting speech, the polished pebbles of his syllables as they rolled off his tongue. Dashrath spoke as some people orated, or wrote. To listen to him was to realize how most people, speaking the rude patois of Bombay and trying to make their point before someone else butted in, gobbled and mangled th
eir words like chickens; nor did they ever bother to find the precise word for anything, preferring to deal in common and vague words instead. Was it the words – his style of speaking – or Dashrath’s thoughts that were so compelling? Arzee could never arrive at a conclusion on this: sometimes it seemed the one and sometimes the other, and sometimes the two were inextricable. What was undeniable was that Dashrath seemed far more alive than most people his age. Perhaps it was his words that kept him switched on, because to meet him was also to realize how most other people kept saying the same five or ten things all their lives. Arzee was very glad to have found a ear in someone as sympathetic, as wise, as Dashrath.

  They were drinking tea at a table in the Café Momin: Arzee out of a cup, Dashrath from a saucer. The saucer of tea was at the level of Arzee’s eyes, and he could see a film of cream with delicate ripples taking form on its surface even as he watched. On one corner of the table someone had scratched the name of a girl, MONA, and then made a slash across it and supplied her number below. For a long time the two men had conferred, and then for a long time they had been silent. Now Dashrath spoke up:

  ‘Don’t lose heart, my friend. You wait and see – there’s something bright for you at the bottom of all this. And don’t lose faith in yourself either. Don’t think of yourself as in the wrong. Take it from me, it’s hard to find a man like you these days.’

  ‘Is it my stars, Dashrathji? Is it the lines on my palm? I can’t make any sense of my life. Is it wrong to dream, Dashrathji? Everybody says you don’t get anywhere unless you dream, and dream big. And I didn’t even dream that big! I only saw the day I’d become head projectionist after Phiroz, as I deserved. That was my stop and my station – I didn’t want anything else. And after that I’d have a wife, a family, just like everyone else, and be a part of this world, and the years would go by, and life would take care of itself. I’ll tell you something, Dashrathji. All these months I wasn’t really living in the present. I was already living in the days to come. I wasn’t the me that I was! I was gradually becoming the me that I thought I was going to be.’

  ‘There’s something there,’ said Dashrath, rapping on the table with his knuckles. ‘There’s something there that chimes…with things I’ve been thinking.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘No – another time. It’s got nothing to do with you, and it’s you we’re talking about.’

  ‘But what is it?’

  ‘Just some thoughts about life. You know how old men begin to feel they’re full of wisdom! I laugh sometimes when I think about the things I think about.’

  ‘Closing in five minutes!’ An old waiter was coming around knocking on a glass with a teaspoon.

  ‘Anyway, it’s closing time,’ said Dashrath.

  ‘Let’s hear it, Dashrathji. Don’t think I won’t be able to understand. I’m not as old as you, and I don’t have your way with words, but I have some thoughts on life too. I’ll be able to understand! I’ve got some thoughts too.’

  ‘All right then. What I’m thinking is, do we live the life that’s given to us, or,’ said Dashrath, lifting his saucer up into saucer-skies, ‘do we really live a kind of dream life? We are to be found in the present, yes – walking, sleeping, working. But all the while, aren’t we really living in the past and the future? I drive my car down Peddar Road and through Worli, but I’m thinking of next April, when it’ll be time to go home, of how the children will have grown bigger – of the green stalks that must be coming up in the fields right now. Isn’t our inner life really a life of the imagination? Isn’t that what makes you Arzee and me Dashrath, as much as our names, our families, our place in this world?’

  ‘It’s true,’ said Arzee, ‘and that’s the part of ourselves that no one else knows about. It’s like a story, Dashrathji, that we’re always making up for ourselves from reading signs in the world. And we take hope from it.’

  ‘That’s right. Man is in chains everywhere!’ said Dashrath, warming to his subject. ‘The only thing that keeps him alive is his imagination. His feet are always shackled to the earth, yet he flies on the wings of his imagination. He is convicted by reality, and pardoned by the imagination.’

  ‘The imagination…’

  ‘What is love? The loved one is a person just like you and me, a person with a hundred faults and failings. But briefly he or she is transformed into someone utterly beautiful, perfect – a being from the heavens! Love is the true home of the imagination. Requited love – that is the paradise raised from nothing but a pair of synchronized imaginations!’

  And now that Dashrath had brought it up, Arzee thought of love, and what it was; his attention wandered away, and for a little while he was not with Dashrath. When, wandering through thought-worlds, he returned by another path, Dashrath was still talking:

  ‘What is God but the imagination? It is fruitless to debate whether God exists, because the existence of God can never be proved or disproved. But till the day that man’s sense of God exists, God exists. What is our sense of ourselves? Mostly a fiction! Which one of us is really the person he thinks himself to be?’

  ‘You make it sound like the imagination is so wonderful, Dashrathji.’

  ‘It is wonderful. Why wouldn’t you say so?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Arzee. ‘That’s exactly the problem with it. Don’t think I’m trying to praise myself, Dashrathji. But actually no one knows more about the imagination than me. It’s the story of my life. I’ve dreamt, loved, hoped, and lived in imagined worlds, and later I’ve been miserable. I’ve imagined people to be something, and they turned out to be something else. The imagination is a deceiver, Dashrathji. I’ve been doubly deceived in life – deceived by life, without a doubt, and then deceived by my own illusions. I can’t trust anybody now, Dashrathji, not even myself – such is the place to which my imagination has led me. My imagination doesn’t keep me alive, Dashrathji, it torments me. It doesn’t let me see properly at all! I know now that if there’s anybody I must watch above all, it’s myself.’

  ‘What a reaction! There’s something heroic about that,’ said Dashrath. ‘Give me a moment while I write all of that down in my notebook. We should meet more often. Ah – the bill.’

  ‘It’s twenty-four. You write and I’ll pay it, Dashrathji, else your thoughts will be interrupted.’

  ‘No, no, I’ll pay first and then write. Here’s a fifty. Now give me a moment.’

  As Dashrath Tiwari lowered his head to write, a hand appeared behind it, its fingers hanging down above Dashrath. It obviously belonged to the man sitting on the other side of the cubicle, but it was stationed in such a peculiar fashion, the wrist hooked over the partition, that it looked almost independent, like a stage prop left hanging from a wall after rehearsals. As Dashrath murmured to himself and attacked an empty page with his pen, the brown fingers of the hand stirred slightly, as if aroused by what Dashrath’s fingers were doing. There was something so suspenseful about the hand – Arzee felt he could keep looking at it for the longest time. He felt like leaning across and touching it.

  ‘That’s done,’ said Dashrath. ‘What are you looking at?’

  ‘Nothing, Dashrathji. Let’s go.’

  As they departed Arzee saw the protruding stomach of the man on the other side, and suddenly the hand was no longer so interesting. It had only come alive from that angle.

  ‘Shall I give you a ride back?’

  ‘There’s no need, Dashrathji. I’ll walk home. I like to walk – at night especially, when there’s no one on the street.’

  ‘That’s very good. We city people have forgotten how to walk.’

  ‘I walked all the way from Mahim to Grant Road last year, on the day of the floods. Dashrathji…I don’t think you’ve ever noticed, but when cars reverse at really high speed, going zigzag like this…they look really funny.’

  ‘Which fool drives like that?’

  ‘No one you know, Dashrathji,’ laughed Arzee. ‘You know how I ramble.’

  ‘You t
ake care of yourself, my friend,’ said Dashrath, getting into his taxi. ‘Hopefully we meet again soon, and by that time you’ll be in the good place of which you dreamt.’

  ‘I don’t know, Dashrathji, it doesn’t look likely. I’m a fool, Dashrathji. And the world knows it too. Drive home safely, Dashrathji.’

  Dashrath Tiwari’s taxi lurched forward and rumbled off into the night. Arzee looked at his watch. It was ten minutes past two. He sighed and turned for home.

  A light mist, like that seen when sugar is poured into jars, had appeared while they were drinking tea in the Café Momin. The sky was sown thickly with clouds, massy as cauliflower heads, and Arzee saw that the wind was taking them in the same direction as him. Under the watch of stony-faced buildings, trees were rustling and sighing; on the steps beneath shutters and awnings, dogs had their snouts tucked into their tails. A single shoe was lying forlorn on the street – where had he seen a shoe lying just like that? A high-rise was being repainted, and under a single light-bulb left on high, he saw the breeze across the sackcloth on the scaffolding, which was rippling like that film of cream on Dashrath’s tea. Everything was so quiet and still it seemed to Arzee that he was floating. It seemed possible to believe now, as it was not during the day, that the world was slowly turning, spinning, as his schoolbooks had said.

  Round and round in space, and ever forward in time – even in this stillness there was so much secret movement. Arzee wanted to keep walking through this silent, misty night, and by and by leave behind all roads and paths, all ties, all attachments, memories too – break from the web and float, unflappable and serene, indifferent to pleasure and pain, in his own orbit, clear of the yoke of time, free of noise and nonsense.

  ‘Under the roof of the Noor I was big,’ he thought, ‘and I could have been even bigger, but under this sky I’m so small. So let me be smaller now – let me disappear altogether.’

  Because of their detour to Café Momin, he was taking a different route home, and now on a corner he came across a church, squeezed in between two shopping complexes with their ugly signboards and shrieking SALE posters. Even the compound wall of the church had some kind of poster on it: a religious poster, with the picture of a smiling man with flowing locks, a white cloth thrown around his shoulders. Arzee’s eye caught the phrase negative emotions as he passed by, and he stopped to read. The picture was of the famous meditation guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, of whom Arzee had heard high recommendations. The poster advertised times and venues for a basic course in the Art of Living, which taught a breathing technique that released tension and stress, dissolved negative emotions, and eliminated toxins from the body. Those who had learnt the technique reported increased energy and peace of mind, better health, improved relationships, and greater joy and enthusiasm. He read: