by Ings, Simon
He turns the pages, trying to make sense of it. Clumsy scribbles crisscross each other every which way in a palimpsest. There are matrices and chequerboards, graphs and diagrams, ruler-straight and upwardpointing arrows crossed with strange, sinusoidal lines. There’s stranger imagery, too: shamanic eyes and scales and fangs.
Behind him, the dogs edge forward, circling the shambles in the snow.
SEVEN
In the S.N. Medical College in Agra surgeons gather round Roopa’s bed. Their arguments disturb her morphine sleep. Students lean in to peer inside her mouth, and worse, to prod. Police constables hover outside her curtain to catch a glimpse of the damage.
She cannot talk. Her mouth is broken. Her lips. Her tongue. She wakes on a wet pillow. Pink stains, drying, have made maps on the cotton. Her mouth is a mess of stitches and swellings. The stumps of her teeth are white with ulcers. She drinks cold soup through a straw. When she speaks, or tries to speak, saliva runs over the ruin of her bottom lip and gathers under her chin. She mops up the stringy droplets with the edge of her sheet. Pink.
Yash Yadav comes to see her, pressing a handful of pamphlets to his chest. ‘Nice company your husband keeps.’
Roopa cannot speak, cannot grimace, cannot communicate. She makes a sound.
‘There’s no need to defend him, Roopa.’ Yash lays his hand on hers. ‘Hardik confessed.’
She says nothing.
‘Very much the wounded husband. Never mind that we picked him up in a motel off the GTR with another man. That’s honour for you. Very keen on honour, these fascist fags.’ He sits on her bed and leafs through the pamphlets. ‘They tell me the baby is all right.’
She will give him nothing. Not a tear. Not a sigh. Nothing.
‘If anything had happened to the baby – well, Hardik would have been looking at some serious charges.’
One by one he drops the pamphlets on the bed where she cannot help but see them. Amateurish typography. Banyan trees. Hindu swastikas. ‘We picked up the men who raped you. You should be pleased. Vermin like that off the streets. Incidentally, we stumbled over these in your apartment.’
She doesn’t need to open the pamphlets to know what’s inside. She’s familiar with the crazy edges of Hardik’s sort of politics.
‘Stumbled,’ she mouths. Saliva burns through a tear in her bottom lip.
Yash leans over, handkerchief extended to wipe the spittle from her chin.
She turns her head.
‘We have to make a decision. About your husband. Teaching his wife a lesson is one thing. Something like that gets so easily out of control. You can see how it happens. But his politics. I’m worried, Roopa.’ He strokes her hair. ‘Anyway,’ he says, tiring of the game, ‘it’s not up to me any more. Next week I leave the force. Well, why make the scandal any worse? There are family interests in Chhaphandi that I can be looking after. It’s a fresh start, you might say.’
Roopa understands that this is the outcome Yash expected. It is what he wanted. She understands that she has failed. Her heart hammers in her chest.
That evening she writes a letter. ‘Yash Yadav is in no way derailed.’ She writes to the new Police Superintendent at the Maharashtra ACB. ‘I will accept any posting, however menial.’
Two anti-terror officers in plain clothes come to talk to her about her husband’s political activities. They will not tell her where they are holding him.
Ijay, Roopa’s youngest brother, comes all the way from Mumbai to see Roopa home. He is stiff, reticent, appalled. ‘You know,’ he says, ‘we will look after you. Whatever has happened. Whatever it is you’ve done. The family is behind you one hundred and ten per cent.’ This is a phrase he has picked up at work.
In Thane, Roopa gets better, after a fashion. Her nerves heal. Her shattered sleep sticks itself back together. Her face changes character as it heals. The smile is gone. What emerges in its place is not ugly or deformed. The most you can say about her now is that she looks unremarkable. She has the face of another woman completely now. Her own father wouldn’t recognize her. The assault has made her plain.
It fills her with a terrible glee, that she has somehow escaped herself. Sometimes she thinks about getting rid of her body, not because of its pain or its shame, but simply to realize her freedom completely. Anytime I want, she thinks, I can walk this thing under a truck. Then her baby kicks. It spasms. It shakes in dumb horror, and she is overwhelmed by an intense, nauseating remorse.
She learns to look upon herself as a machine. A machine acquires dignity by operating smoothly over a long period of service. You cannot humiliate a machine. Here is this baby, baking inside her, bubbling, rising. By the third trimester her future is clear. It is up to her to reinvent herself.
The priests call. Ceremonies follow in their proper sequence. The baby is born early in August 1996. It is a boy. When he is six days old he is laid on a blanket and his palms and the soles of his feet are painted with a red paste. The family gathers around the blanket and prays. This is the point at which the child is supposed to acquire a soul. On the eleventh day he is named. Roopa calls him Nitesh. He is happy and placid and he looks exactly like Yash Yadav.
A couple of months later, Roopa Vish boards a coach heading inland, along the Sher Shah Suri Marg, back to Firozabad. Little Nitesh lies across her lap, hands spooling as though already set to some industry.
The coach’s on-board video offers instant Technicolor relief for eyes bruised by too many miles of the same thing, too many frilled and tattooed Tata trucks rattling past, too many mayfly villages, but Roopa pays no more attention to the screen than she does to the view through her window. The lovers’ on-screen agonies, their ecstatic musical interludes, their battleaxe of a mother-in-law: it’s all one to her. Underneath the folds of her child’s blanket, Roopa’s knuckles are white. She is her father’s daughter and she is going to get her man.
A bhangi can go anywhere. A bhangi is invisible. A bhangi cleans the toilets and carries the shit away in a bucket on her head: who the hell ever looks, or wants to look, at a bhangi?
A bhangi is never short of work, because everybody shits. A bhangi gets to know everybody’s shit, eventually. Chhaphandi’s elementary school is full of shit. Odd-smelling, mealy, faintly caustic, faintly rotten shit. The school governors obeyed the state-wide ban on dry toilets and installed a modern flush-operated system and within days they were wading through – well...
A bhangi is invisible. A bhangi doesn’t count. A bhangi can scoop shit out of a toilet in one cubicle while boys are picking on a child in the next. A bhangi hears everything. Every hateful, shitty thing. Your mother sucks your uncle’s prick.
A bhangi learns.
Roopa has dental plates to replace her missing teeth. They are temporary things, grey, like shark’s teeth. She does not wear them. She has money: she does not spend it. She has a plan: she does not share it. She rents a room in a block owned by Ekram Badbhagi, Chhaphandi’s postmaster. Badbhagi divorced his wife after her fifth miscarriage and he’s all over little Nitesh, the son he never had.
For all its surface clutter, posters and cheap glass ornaments, this place is typical of the buildings erected by Yadav Construction and Homes Ltd. You can find their rabbit hutches thrown up in villages all along the Sher Shah Suri Marg: single-occupancy accommodation for transients moving, with painful slowness, from one menial job to the next, one village to the next, towards the mega-cities of Delhi and Mumbai. The walls of the room do not quite join. There are no shutters and no rails for curtains. The monsoon is coming. Yesterday, banks of filthy, sand-laden moisture from the Arabian Sea roiled through the sky and broke over the village. Roopa’s walls dribbled and steamed.
Roopa wakes in darkness, Nitesh sprawled in the crook of her arm, the room’s air sweetened by the smell of a soiled nappy. After the elementary school and Chhaphandi’s kids – their weird little heads and their weird rabbit-droppings, small and hard as bullets – cleaning up after Nitesh is an active pleasure.
Off to the side there are string mattresses stretched across posts in the earth. Only one hammock is occupied tonight. Some derelict.
Nitesh sleeps late into the morning. Once she has fed him, Roopa carries him across the yard and lays him in one of the string cots while she goes to buy breakfast. Her walking so brazenly into that space – a woman, and barely touchable at that – is calculated to turn heads and ruin conversation. The regulars here know she rents a room off Badbhagi, so there is nothing they can say about it. She asks for chai, and gets it. She leaves her coin on the counter. The proprietor leaves it on the counter until she has gone. He doesn’t want to encourage her.
Coming out, she sees the derelict from the night before lying sprawled across his cot, playing peek-a-boo with Nitesh. Trying to: Nitesh is too small to respond.
The tramp sits up. He’s in a bad way. He has only one arm. ‘Good morning.’
She knows who this is now. She says to him: ‘We had an appointment.’
‘What?’
She shakes her head. ‘More than a year ago now.’
‘What?’
Roopa picks Nitesh up and carries him back to the accommodation block. She can be patient. A bhangi learns. A kiln-worker whipped. A family vanished. Your mother sucks your uncle’s prick. Decline and fall. Roopa sits by her window and looks out at Vinod Yadav sprawled there, derelict, upon his string bunk. She drinks her chai. She smiles a ghastly, toothless smile.
A bhangi handles all kinds of shit. From thin stews to gritty lumps, shit is the bhangi’s proper field, her métier. The schemes, the threats, the feuds. The hot nastiness that prevails over everything and everyone. In this idiot- and stillborn-stricken village the bereaved sneer at the barren and the barren laugh at the burdened, and the nights are a-mutter with the rehearsal of nested blames and intractable vendettas. Moany old Vinod, maimed in that rail crash last year and turning day by day into his dad until at last, they say, his mind gave out completely. And what about his cousin Yash, who couldn’t keep it in his pants? Some squire, some Lord Muck he turned out to be!
Roopa is her father’s daughter: Kabir Vish, who took tales from a city’s vagrants and rough sleepers, hijras and prostitutes, and wove them into a net to catch the Stoneman. There’s nothing here in this sleepy backwater can frighten a woman who, as a child, listened wide-eyed to her father’s tales of the maniac who dropped paving slabs on to the heads of rough sleepers in the midnight gutters of King’s Circle.
Tonight, as the monsoon approaches and the parched sky sings with tension, Roopa puts her baby to bed and comes to the window and counts the mattresses stretched out beneath the margosa tree. A handful of drivers are asleep there, weary from the road. One is awake: Vinod Yadav. He looks up at her. Just another deadbeat. One of hundreds of small-time dealers lubricating the Sher Shah Suri Marg.
Vinod Yadav: the toothless old men of Chhaphandi are mystified by his precipitate decline. He had enough to live for, you would think. A pretty wife. Two kids, and so what if their heads are a funny shape? Shubi and Ravi aren’t the worst-afflicted kids around here, not by a long stretch. He had his father’s house. He had the brickworks to run. Vinod, you would think, was set up for life – and yet he has contrived to piss the whole lot of it away. Vinod’s drunken no-shows have matured into wholesale vanishing acts, sometimes days, sometimes weeks in duration. What’s got into him? People talk about the rail crash as though that might be a trauma sufficient to explain his decline, but there has to be more to it than that.
She leans out the window. She beckons Vinod off his hammock. She beckons him in. A bhangi learns all kinds of shit. Today, unseen, she discovered why the sons Vinod has abandoned – Ravi, Shubi – come home from school with bruises on their knobbly little heads and bad reports: Your mother sucks your uncle’s prick.
She opens her door. Vinod staggers in. He’s very drunk. His smell is so pungent she is afraid it will wake the baby. More than rum, this smell. Fires. Truck exhaust. Rancid cooking oil. Vinod holds out his remaining hand. He tries to touch her. She pushes him away. He reaches for her again. She’s been stoking him for weeks now. Glad-eyeing him from her window. Sashaying past his little bed. She’s asked for this. She backs away towards the bed. He reaches under his shirt, fanning his stink through the room, and pulls out a gun. An old Browning Hi-Power.
She sits back on the pallet.
‘Take off your clothes.’ He watches her, one hand waving the gun. ‘Vinod, for God’s sake, put it down. Look. I’m giving it to you. This is what you want. Is this what you want?’ She raises her feet onto the edge of the bed and parts her knees. ‘Is it? Vinod?’ You cannot humiliate a machine.
Vinod hesitates, then bends down and lays the Browning on the bed.
‘Go and wash yourself first. It’s all right.’
He swallows. He sits beside her on the bed. ‘It’s not loaded.’ And when she does not reply: ‘How do you know my name?’
‘Vinod? Everybody knows you, Vinod. You’re famous. You’re Yash Yadav’s cousin.’
Vinod’s in no state to unpick riddles, but Roopa is going to make it simple for him. ‘Tomorrow,’ she says, ‘I’m going to show you something.’
The next morning a green Honda rolls into view around the corner of the roadhouse and stops in the shade of a lone neem tree. The monsoon is hours away. There are no clouds, but the sky is thickening, the heat is building, everything is buzzing. The whole countryside is stretching and bubbling. Vinod shambles over and leans on the door sill, breathing the fumes of the old car.
‘You can drive.’
Roopa smiles.
‘You have a car.’
She has grown teeth. Terrible, sharp, grey teeth. ‘Get in.’ Her baby is in a basket on the back seat. It sleeps soundly, lulled by the rhythms of the engine as they curl their way onto the Sher Shah Suri Marg.
Vinod stares at the sky. There is something wrong with it. There are no clouds, but its whole fabric has haemorrhaged from blue to mauve. Sand from Arabia: that’s what this is. Vinod sits up. The horizon is shimmering, the whole landscape is bubbling and bursting: the monsoon is coming to put out this fire. Out of his side window he can see birds flocking, preparing to outrun the poison cloud.
In the corner of his eye, something yellow catches the sun. He turns his head just in time to see a car, a saffron-yellow Maruti Zen, spun half-off the road. The driver’s by the side of the road, waving at them to stop, but why would they?
It’s his brother-in-law. Vinod turns in his seat, but the sun against the dusty rear window does not allow him a view. Rishi. It was Rishi. He’s sure of it. The kid he played with as a child. His workman at the kilns. The man who helped burn –
Rishi, at the wheel of a Maruti! Who’d have thought it? But this is the point. Vinod understands now. They have none of them grown up. Their childhood games have never ended. They have simply acquired a darker, more adult coloration. Now Yash is top of the heap and Rishi is on the rise, while he is falling, falling – and this was always on the cards. Even when they were little, you could have seen this coming: the turn of fortune’s wheel.
The Yadav family’s garage is easy enough to find because of the giant peeling sign by the roadside advertising Apollo tyres. The house itself stands at the end of a dirt track lined with deodar trees and choked with elephant grass.
‘But this is Yash’s place.’
She says, ‘We’ll walk from here.’ She picks up Nitesh and leads Vinod through brushy shade and down the hill, towards the house.
Vinod knows this place, and its history. It is the garage whose mechanics’ mistakes killed his father. The place belongs to the family now. Which is to say: his cousin, Yash. ‘Here, Vinod. Hunker down.’
It’s harder to do than you would think, one-handed. Vinod slumps and sprawls. They crouch for many minutes in weeds and shadows. What if the baby wakes?
‘You see?’
Yash Yadav’s car, the Opel Corsa, is parked under the corrugated-iron roof of the lean-to. Two young boys come running out of the house. Two funny little heads wobble about on long, weak necks. Two miniature motor scooters zip back and forth across the dirt yard.
‘Are they yours? Vinod? Are those your boys?’
Vinod watches his sons playing in the yard.
‘Shubi and Ravi.’
Vinod swallows.
‘Where do you suppose their mother is?’
Poor Vinod.
‘Their mother’s inside. Safia. Can you guess who she’s with?’
Your mother sucks your uncle’s prick.
‘In there.’
‘Yes.’
With Yash Yadav.
Roopa drives them back to Chhaphandi. The monsoon is coming. The earth is baking. Things are rising. It no longer matters if Badbhagi calls by for the rent and a game of peek-a-boo with Nitesh and finds a man in her room. It doesn’t matter what rumours go round – a lone bhangi mother at the wheel of an old but serviceable green Honda. She does not need her cover any more. She is peeling off her skin of other people’s shit. She is becoming something else. The plainest butterfly.
In her room the air fizzes and the walls drip. Roopa peels off her torn and filthy sari. Underneath she is clean. She is sweet. ‘Vinod. There’s no need for you to be afraid.’
He sits in front of her and bows his head. She kisses the top of his head. ‘Poor man,’ she croons. ‘You loved her so.’ He reaches up. He cups her breasts. ‘The police, they’re not interested in you. They’re not interested in Samjhoria Nankar. Some bhangi family gets into a row, then scarpers, who’s to know? Yash Yadav, though. Yash is another matter. He matters. He counts.’