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Arzee the Dwarf

Page 7

by Chandrahas Choudhury


  ‘Inside the body and all around it is air – remember that and be aware of it. Know how to use it. As the fish lives in water, so man in air. Without the breath the body is of no value. The breath is the secret of life.’

  The breath! Arzee had never really thought about breath – it seemed to take care of itself, so there was always something else to think about. He breathed deeply once or twice, but didn’t feel any difference, and he was too tired to hold out for longer. Idly he found himself wondering what brand of shampoo Sri Sri Ravi Shankar used.

  He bent down to tie up a trailing shoelace, and as he rose he saw that the light falling on the poster was actually the light above the statue of Jesus on a pedestal inside the church compound. Arzee had been inside a church just once in his life, and he didn’t have any use for such places any more, since the girl he had gone with had now gone. But there was something striking about Jesus – it was his pain that made him interesting. Standing in the quiet in this cone of light, Arzee felt a strange communion with this man-god, the son of Phiroz’s Mother Mary, who had walked the face of this earth at the beginning of the calendar. Jesus’s body was long and thin, his arms upraised like the boughs of trees, his head bowed and slack, almost resting on his shoulder. He seemed racked by the cross, and yet so frail as to be unable now to stand without the support of its frame. Jesus on the cross…how he must have suffered on that day from those nails and spikes! And yet nobody had done anything to help Jesus; they were all either preoccupied with themselves, or else too afraid to raise their voices. It seemed right that while all his worshippers were sleeping comfortably, Jesus was still here outside his church in the still of night, stricken and suffering for ever and for ever. How human he was, how close! Who had ever understood him while he lived? He was all alone, and not part of his age, just like Arzee.

  ‘How am I not to suffer?’ he thought, as he headed on towards home. ‘It’s too much to expect. In a world where even Jesus was thought abnormal, what’s the chance for me? Not for me such a monstrous normality! They were going to get me some time or the other. It was I who was foolish.’

  The stairway of his building was stuffy. Mosquitoes were buzzing in the darkness. It was too late for Mother to be awake, which was good. Some days she stayed up for him and sat beside him half-asleep, her hand resting on her chin, as he ate dinner, but never this late. Arzee felt in his pocket for his key, and opened the door.

  Mother was lying face-down on her bed in the living room, snoring gently. Arzee closed the door quietly. The smell of food was still in the air, and the pent-up hunger of the entire day was now shrieking in his stomach. He switched on the small lamp in the corner, and greedily approached the covered plates lying on the table.

  What was this! Leftovers from yesterday! He’d been hoping there would be something good, but there were only leftovers, which hadn’t even tasted good the first time. Tears rose in Arzee’s eyes as he looked at his miserable dinner. Wiping them away, he pulled off his shoes without untying the laces, unbuttoned his shirt, and washed his hands and face under the tap of the kitchen sink. Why couldn’t Mother have made fresh food? She was home all day, watching TV, while he laboured and suffered out in the world, and then when he came home there were only leftovers, which hadn’t even tasted good the first time.

  Arzee cut an onion and took it to the table, got up onto his high chair, and began to eat sullenly, discarding morsels of this and that vegetable, and glancing from time to time at his sleeping parent. When he had left that morning, he’d felt so warm towards her! He’d thought he’d take her to the Noor the day he was officially promoted, and lead her up again to the room to which she had led him all those years ago, and which was now his. He’d pretend not to notice how proud she was of him, pretend to be surprised and amused at her happy tears when actually he too was ready to cry. But now, pushing last night’s dinner down his gullet, he felt a strange mixture of hostility and dread towards his mother, towards her immovable nature, her soft tyranny. When he was done he left his plate in the sink without bothering to rinse it. Without bothering to rinse his mouth either, he pushed open the door of the bedroom, which creaked loudly. For months he’d been thinking of oiling the creak away, but he only remembered at this time every night.

  Mobin’s long frame was prostrate on the bigger of the two beds, his hands and legs splayed as if someone had thrown him there. Arzee thought about poking his finger into his brother’s ribs, but he desisted. Sometimes the thought itself was as amusing as the deed! He groped beneath his own small bed for the shorts he’d thrown there in the morning. As he stepped out of his trousers and into his shorts he saw his little legs, vulnerable and innocent, almost asking to be kicked or tripped, and he cursed under his breath. He lay down on his lumpy mattress with his hands beneath his head. His armpits gave off the sour whiff of old sweat.

  What a day! The world had gone round once, but he had gone round ten times – he’d become a new person. It was on days like this that everything that was of consequence in the world had happened…Gandhi was killed, the Emergency was declared, the Babri Masjid was brought down, the bombs went off in rush-hour trains in Bombay. How exhausting it was to live – what an effort it was.

  Deepak, Abjani, Phiroz, Dashrath – the events and encounters of the day passed across his eyes like frames through the Babur. They were all men. When was the last time he’d had a proper conversation with a woman other than Mother? Months ago.

  In the dark all the shapes and forms around him were more suggestive than by day. Mobin’s bag had been thrown down against a bed leg – it could be seen as a woman’s skirt, billowing out at the knee. Arzee stirred, and turned over. The wall was so pale and smooth. He raised a hand and felt how cool it was. He turned over again. In another couple of months, if he had been married, his wife would have been lying here beside him, breathing upon his neck as she lay curled up on her side in her long nightie, and if he had put his hand on her rounded hip there would have been no protest. He reached out, but there was no one there. He turned over onto his stomach and stuck his hands under the pillow.

  All roads and paths, all ties and attachments, memories too…

  SEVEN

  The Old Wadia Chawl

  For a long time Arzee had been feeling hot, and somewhere on the boundary between sleep and wakefulness he had been writhing from side to side. But only the strident voices of neighbours fighting over a slapped child brought him out completely from a dream – a dream into which his bodily condition must have seeped, for there, too, he had been tossing and turning in some swamp-like domain.

  He remembered who he was and what had happened to him yesterday, and instantly felt a violent irritation at re-entering the arena of time. This irritation was aggravated when he saw that he was covered with a sheet, which Mother must have placed over him early in the morning. But he hadn’t wanted to be covered. It was hot, for God’s sake! Was he a child? He was sweating; the same sour smell rose from his armpits, now doubly strong. Mobin was not in the room. Outside, the women continued their harangues, their voices crashing against his eardrums like sea-waves against the shore. The aroma of sambar cooking in the flat below reached his nostrils, and the drone of a factory siren far away told him it was ten o’clock. Something was moving on his chest. It was a red ant, busily making its way through a forest of chest hair as if it had to meet someone at the base of his neck. Arzee puffed his cheeks and blew it into space. His breath was foul. The new day felt like a dead weight around his neck. He sat up, then slumped down again and covered his face with the sheet.

  For a few minutes he lay that way, baffled and beaten. A great, almost global resentment was steaming up inside him – a resentment that stretched a line, like a telephone wire, from the smallness of his body, which must have rested like a seed inside him from the very day he was born, all the way to the death of the Noor. To be chased out like this from the life he had made for himself – that was even worse than not having much of a chance in the first
place.

  When he threw off the sheet, he saw his packet of cigarettes peeping out of the pocket of his shirt on the chair. He got up, lit up, and sucked on his cigarette by the window, blowing smoke at the leprous wall of the building opposite. Ordinarily he never smoked at home, because Mother didn’t like it. But everything in this home couldn’t happen in accordance with Mother’s likes and dislikes. He’d followed a policy of appeasement for far too long! Let her smell the smoke and come storming in, let her complain. He wouldn’t say a word, he’d just stand there calmly, holding to his right, as a non-dependent adult, to do what he liked in his own room. Leftovers – hnnh!

  But the cigarette burned and fell away into ash, and nothing happened. Arzee couldn’t enjoy it either, as he stood there waiting for the confrontation to which he had tried to set a match. The day was all wrong, wrong from the very beginning. Mornings weren’t really a time for reflection, for mooning like this. For everybody else morning was the time for action: for bathing, eating breakfast, getting dressed, rushing after buses and trains. But with projectionists it was the mornings that were like other people’s evenings and nights, when they met with friends, wandered the streets, or brooded in solitude over fears and resentments. His life was in every way unnatural. Arzee felt more weary than he had last night. His mind, unable to stanch the shock, must have been going over the matter again and again while he slept.

  His stomach was warm and heavy; it was making little noises of exertion and complaint. He rose and looked for his slippers, but although Mobin’s slippers, four sizes too large for him, were right beneath his eyes, his own were nowhere to be seen. He cursed and opened the door of his room. Mother was not sitting in the living room. He looked in the kitchen, where breakfast lay upon the stove still warm, but Mother was not there either. Mother wasn’t at home at all! Was she upset with him? Didn’t she want to be in the house at the same time as him? But it wasn’t his fault! No…he was letting the fear get to him already. There was some simple explanation for this. He saw Mother’s tattered slippers and put them on, and this soothed him.

  On his forehead, just above his eyebrows, he could feel two hard little knots of tension which refused to loosen even when he kneaded them. He sat down at the table and closed his eyes. It hadn’t even been five minutes since he’d opened them, but already his thoughts had drummed up a monstrous cacophony inside his brain. The darkness was calming.

  The day lay ahead of him as a long, flat, soul-sapping expanse. The only diversion he could think of was the usual: a game of cards with his friends. But Arzee didn’t want to meet his friends. ‘I can’t face them,’ he thought. ‘When they find out, how they’ll laugh! I told them one thing about myself, but the truth’s just the opposite. What’s bad, I make worse. Nobody has to tell me – I know it myself. I’m an accomplice in my own deception – a self-toppler.’ He wasn’t even sure if he could be friends with Shinde and Hari any longer.

  At least there was the visit that evening to Deepak’s. Arzee had a feeling that Deepak might understand. He went back into his room and opened the cupboard between his bed and Mobin’s, and from an empty Russian doll in a shoebox inside a suitcase he separated a thousand rupees from the rest of the money that he’d saved for his future. There was no way that Deepak would even look at him without the money.

  Had the news begun to get around? It seemed as if there were far fewer people today at Kaputkar’s ticket counter and then inside the stalls of the Noor, just as people avoid visiting the homes of those who are dying. After the long, lonely afternoon show was over, and the dissolute hero of Saathi had passed away for the eighteenth time that week, Arzee rubbed the Babur down with a rag and left Sule in charge of the evening. Under a rapidly setting red sun he headed out on foot towards the Old Wadia Chawl.

  Once again he’d only seen Phiroz for the briefest sliver of time. The old bawa had set off again on wedding preparations immediately after his morning shift. After having never spoken of his daughter all these years unless asked, he now seemed consumed by her life. ‘Only the wedding matters now to Phiroz,’ he thought. ‘He’s tuned out of everything else, as if he’s about to die.’

  On a small white cloud in the sky he saw pasted the old projectionist’s sombre face, with its peculiar expression of selfabsorption, and when he looked around everyone else seemed to have the same expression. The narrow, clamorous streets were so crowded he could barely walk five steps without pausing or breaking, yet people were so lost in clouds of thought that each person seemed oblivious of all the others – human beings had become lost to one another. Aggressive traders had overrun the pavement with wares strung up on rods, and were barking and charging like leashed animals. On every flat surface, posters, bills, and notices were jostling each other with their insincere and provocative slogans. Bicycles were tinkling, motorbikes tracing slow curling paths and farting smoke, cars edging forward in half-wheels and quarter-wheels, and people trying to squeeze in and out of the opening and closing gaps. Ancient buildings on either side of the road seemed to be muttering and mumbling their disjointed memories, while women combing their hair or putting the washing out to dry gazed from windows. Arzee felt as if he couldn’t walk on these streets any more – couldn’t hold his head up on them as he used to, fierce and strong, forcing people to make way for him. He was struggling to assert even the inches that he did possess – he was shrinking, cowering. He wanted to run back to his room and curl up in a corner there, dwindle and die there, or else find the shade of another person, even if it was Deepak. He looked at his watch and hurried on, for he was late.

  He had often passed the Old Wadia Chawl, but never before had he gone inside. It was a colony of ugly brown buildings, each one four floors tall, their frontages specked with water patches and raggedy washing and potted plants and tattered streamers and the heads and shoulders of people standing in the corridors. As Arzee approached many of these heads turned to look down at him, but he resolutely kept looking straight ahead. He entered Building Number 2, separated two fighting children in order to pass, and began to climb the stairs. Passing open doors and scenes of family life, he figured out that each dwelling was identical, with two small rooms one behind the other, and then a tiny kitchen and a bathroom on one side, like the soundtrack on a strip of film. What would Deepak’s house be like? Arzee was sure that Deepak was sure that he wouldn’t really be coming, so the advantage was his. He could hear Deepak’s jests and sniggers already, the thrusting cadences of his jibes and pokes, and yet he didn’t mind – it was the silence and the panic that was unbearable. He could imagine how, when he told Deepak the dread news, Deepak wouldn’t even bat an eyelid, and that was the sort of person Arzee wanted to be with. In fact, that was the way he himself wanted to be – unflappable, untouchable.

  Deepak’s house was on the third floor. Arzee felt in his back pocket for the envelope with the money, then smoothed his hair and reached up and rang the doorbell. Visiting Deepak in his own home – who would have thought of it two days ago? Deepak’s wife, Deepak’s children – he hadn’t even known that such people existed.

  As if meeting his thought head-on, a slender and pretty woman in an orange sari opened the door and smiled. Deepak’s wife was at least five-foot-six – she was quite a presence! Arzee hadn’t spoken properly to a woman for months. He instantly became self-conscious, and the words floundered on his tongue.

  ‘D-D-Deepak – is Deepak there? My name is Arzee. He asked me to be here at seven. You must – you must be his wife. Hello!’

  ‘Actually he’s not home. He had to leave on some urgent work.’

  ‘But I’ve come to give him some money! When will he be back?’

  ‘I don’t know. But he said you were to leave the money with me. Have you brought it?’

  ‘Yes, it’s…it’s here in my pocket. No, it’s not in this pocket, it’s in the other pocket. I – I – I…’

  ‘Thank you.’ Deepak’s wife opened the envelope and deftly counted the notes. ‘It’s
right.’ She inclined her head as if to say their conversation was over, and began to close the door.

  ‘One minute!’ said Arzee, stretching his arm out. ‘Actually, the thing is that I wanted to have a talk with Deepakbhai in person. It’s very important. Can I wait for him?’

  ‘But he’s not home. You can call him and find out when he’ll be free.’

  ‘Call him? Okay, I’ll do that. If you’ll just wait while I speak to him…maybe he’s on his way back. No – he’s not picking up his phone. He must be busy on some important work…I won’t disturb him then. But shall I come back in a while and check? Do you think he’ll be back by eight?’

  ‘I can’t say. But you can come back at eight and check.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you! You see, I must speak to him today, because there are some things I must tell him. Yes – I’ll be back at eight then.’

  ‘All right.’ Deepak’s wife made to close the door again.

  ‘One more thing! If he comes back before eight, please tell him not to go anywhere else. Tell him Arzee said it was urgent.’

 

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