by Meghna Pant
‘I’m free—’ she thinks and laughs. Ha-ha-ha-ha.
~
As the fifteen metric tonnes of his truck ploughed into the silver-grey Mercedes, Veeru is sure he’s hallucinating again. For the tip-top lady, who knows she’s going to die, doesn’t shield her face but laughs.
From experience, Veeru knows to stiffen his body and cover his eyes, so when his body lurches into the steering wheel, it’s braced for impact. He hears the screech of tyres, the crunch of glass, the smash of metal on metal and a stunned silence that tells him that it’s safe to open his eyes. He looks around. The dust from the asphalt road has risen, as has the iron ore powder from the back of his open truck. This clouds his already dizzy head.
He’s running late because of Bijli, who let him sleep on her jute cot last night. He had to pay her a hundred—double her usual rate, but he also hadn’t seen her in ten days. He protested, of course, knowing that she liked a show. ‘You are charging me for the whole night when I’m staying for five hours?’ Bijli slapped his hand, which was inside her choli, and, bringing her red paan-stained lips to his mouth, she whispered softly, ‘A night passes in an hour for some people, Sahib.’ Oof, that Bijli!
To save time, he’s been on the road for nine hours without stopping. To save money he’s eaten only a piece of toast on which he spread Iodex, the balm he sometimes also uses for his aching back. The Iodex has cooled his stomach and put him in the robotic stupor he needs to navigate the national highway.
Now Veeru feels a shooting pain in his ribcage, reminding him that there are no happy endings. Every time he’s been in an accident, every other week or so, the people sitting in cars or motorcycles scrunch their faces and cover their eyes, as if not seeing the inevitable can change their fate. Yet, the tip-top lady seemed almost to embrace the truck, her lips stretched across her happy face.
He wants to go look at this strange lady, though he never sees his victims, but he’s not familiar with this taluk. If he gets out, thugs waiting behind trees could rob him. And though the highway is empty, it will not be long before an angry mob comes here, ready to squish him like a mosquito carrying malaria. It’s time to act, he realizes. He spits into his hand and rubs it on his eyes. Feeling more alert he looks outside. The dust is settling and the boy is gone. He starts the engine.
He has to drive another one hundred and forty kilometres to reach Dadar before midnight, so that Malak, who owns this truck, his mai-baap, pays him for the thirty-two-hour trip. It takes him an hour to cover thirty kilometres in this truck and it’s already six o’clock. Because of the accident he’ll also have to stop at Kalamboli Terminal in Navi Mumbai to repair the hood, the fender and most likely the rear-view mirror. This will take an hour, or two, upsetting his plan, but he’ll have to make up by driving even faster. It’s cheaper for him to pay the mechanic Ramubhai than to have Malak find out about his accidents. Veeru remembers the first time he had an accident, when a drunken motorist crashed into the back of his truck. As punishment Malak had beaten him with an iron rod. For his last accident, when he’d ploughed into a van full of children because he was high on eraser fluid, Malak hadn’t paid him for two months.
Veeru will have to bear the cost of this accident. He checks the money tucked inside his underwear. He has only ninety, no forty, rupees left.
‘I hope Ramubhai gives me credit,’ Veeru thinks as he reverses the truck.
He picks up the lit bidi that’s fallen on the dashboard and puts it back into his mouth. His lungi flares open with this movement and he looks down to see the lesion on his inner thigh. He scratches it and brings the bidi next to it. Why, they could be twins, he thinks, for both are red and dotted, spreading their fire; the only difference is that one itches while the other drives away the itch.
‘Yeh dosti hum nahin todenge,’ he sings to himself half-heartedly and accelerates.
He inhales and blows out smoke on to the Kali statue that Malak has put on the dashboard. How often he’s touched the goddess’s feet in front of the police, when he’s caught with cannabis pulsing through his veins, or kerosene, not petrol, pulsing through the truck’s veins. He chuckles on seeing his reflection in the rear-view mirror. He looks like a shaitan, with his sallow skin blackened from not being washed for days and his beard unshaven for what, three days, three weeks? Four white pustules grow from the left corner of his lower lip. Last week there was one pustule but he scratched it till white pus bled on his brown fingernails and lips. Bijli teases him about this sometimes, calling him her ‘AIDS Sahib’. Maybe my wife gave it to me, he teases Bijli back, poking the white pustule above her lip.
As his bidi comes to a sad end and the sun sets on his thoughts, Veeru looks one last time into the rear-view mirror. He sees fifteen, twenty people running towards the Mercedes. The iron ore powder from his lorry has flown everywhere and covered the dead car and its smiling lady in red dust.
Veeru passes an ashram to his left. There is a three-foot-long photo of that famous Guru on its front wall. Veeru spits out of his doorless seat. People go to these places when survival is not their priority, like tip-top people, like that smiling lady. There are other ways to get to know yourself, like inside this truck with its rattling windows and caged thoughts, a moving jail where a break in monotony is the death of others.
It’s the only way to know who you really are.
~
Does Mata not know who I am, Ramesh wonders, when she asks him in sign language if he knows where the American’s bag is. He finds the question silly, knowing Mata keeps all the bags safely locked up in her office. Instead, he asks her if he can start kitchen duty today. She says no, again.
He finishes ashram duty, sweeping and dusting the first-floor rooms, and is outside class when his wire cycle, the only toy he’s had since childhood, slips out of his hand and falls to the ground. Its handle breaks. He sits on the classroom floor, his tears drying in the 35 degree heat, feeling lethargic and dull. The fan is not working again. He kills a fly fluttering around him and is dissecting it when he notices that the shaitan is back. She comes every week, sometimes every second day, during his school time, and though everyone says she’s nice because she set up the school for children like him, he is scared of her. Every time she comes, she stands outside his class and stares at him, so much that he’s sure she’s come to steal his soul. She even dresses like a shaitan; wearing glossy clothes and big sandals, her hair brown like a jhadu, her lips bright red and shiny, and there’s always a thick, black line below her dark eyes. She doesn’t look like she can make rotis or write in files, like the other women he knows. This makes him more suspicious of her. When he complains to his mother about the shaitan, she tells him never to look into her eyes. So now, as she stares at him, he concentrates on the fly’s hairy legs.
After a while, the shaitan is gone.
If only Guruji was here and not travelling to important places that Ramesh searches for on a map. There are so many things that Ramesh wants to tell him. Mostly about his mother’s condition that has become worse. She lies in bed for most of the day with her face pinched, thrashing her arms for hours, pulling her hair out. Or she goes on a rampage—beating their chickens, force-feeding slop to the goat or wandering off alone in the dark. She will become okay if he feeds her nice food. That’s what separates us from the rich, she always tells him, they eat well. That’s why Ramesh wants to be put on kitchen duty, so he can learn how to cook for his mother.
Guruji will not say no to him. After all, out of all the ashram children, Guruji only allows Ramesh to sit on his lap and even tickles him till he laughs.
Ramesh doesn’t like it when the other children snigger and he reads their lips saying, ‘Look at the son and father,’ or ‘Guruji has a mad wife and a deaf son.’
My mother is not mad, he tells them, but on those days, when he goes home, he asks his mother, ‘Who is my father?’
His mother says nothing but she looks at him, sometimes teary-eyed, sometimes angry, and sometimes she ma
kes an air beard with her fingers—the Guruji!
Guruji?
And why not? How does it matter? It’s not like Ramesh remembers his father, any father anyway.
The school bell rings. Ramesh is glad the day is over. He starts walking home. He takes the broken wire cycle out of his brown shorts, wondering if he can use the coir from his mother’s broom to fix it, when someone touches him on the shoulder. He looks up to see a vaguely familiar white man. He has an orange bag. It’s that crazy American! Though no longer as fat as he was when he first came, he still towers over Ramesh, his green eyes bloodshot, red hair standing up like daggers and an unreadable expression on his pink face. Ramesh knows this man is trouble. The first day they met he offered Ramesh a hundred rupees (‘Money,’ his mother had told him, ‘is one way through which shaitans steal souls’), though Ramesh saved himself by repeating the line that Mata had taught him to use for such situations. But then the American broke the Noble Silence and, on top of that, he complained about Ramesh to Mata. He’s a bigger shaitan than that woman outside my class, Ramesh realizes. And they’re alone here, all alone on this highway. There’s no one to save him. Dropping the cycle in shock, Ramesh runs.
He turns around to see that the shaitan is not chasing him. He slows down. From the corner of his eye he sees his chicken Champa on the opposite side of the road. His mother has put her up on the tree again; she’s probably having one of her bad days. He runs across the highway. On reaching the other side, he turns around again, but instead of the white shaitan, he sees a car crushed under a truck.
There are accidents every day on the highway; this is not as bad as the four-car pile-up he’d once seen or the time when an entire bus caught fire in front of him with all its passengers inside. Judging by people’s expressions after these accidents, he knows that the horror of hearing a crash is much worse than watching it; it’s the only time he’s glad to be deaf.
This destruction, it’s part of his life, as much as the ashram is his life’s construction.
Ramesh climbs up the tree and brings Champa the chicken down. They are going home.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Mom, Papa, Iva and Sorabh, my sun, my moon, my stars. For keeping the light shining on me, especially when it gets dark.
Meru Gokhale, my brilliant editor. For enabling this book. For believing in me. For believing in short stories.
Fazal Rashid. For your dedication and promptness. For not letting me get away with a single abstraction or adverb.
Archana Shankar, Caroline Newbury, Rukun Kaul and the rest of the wonderful team at Random House India. For letting me run with my imagination, and keeping up with a smile.
Jeet Thayil. For being so incredibly talented and so incredibly awesome. I want to be you.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Namita Gokhale and Ashwin Sanghi. For your grace, for your time, for knowing that talent is powerless without recognition.
Suhel Seth. For your originality, kindness and thoughtfulness. For making these qualities so much fun.
Anurag Hira. For giving a beautiful visual milieu to my stories with this book cover that we all immediately fell in love with.
Tehelka. For publishing the fantastic article, ‘Nagpada’s Hoop Dreams’ (June 2010), that inspired my story ‘Hoopsters’.
Shahnaz Shroff. For ploughing through my first stories and telling me, over so many appletinis in Manhattan, that yes, I could be a writer.
Priya, Moobu, Dhruv, Tina, Bhavya, Ali, Preeti, Suddu, Benaifer, Arya, Payal, Vahbiz and Abhi. For almost two decades of friendship; for being there in my noise and in my silence.
Avatar Review, Eclectica, EGO Magazine and QLRS for respectively publishing ‘The Message’ (previously titled ‘Flurt!’), ‘Gecko On The Wall’, ‘Lemon and Chilli’, and ‘Shaitans’ (previously titled ‘Chicken on the Treetop’).
Readers. For reaching out to me via Twitter, Facebook, blogs, emails and in person. For your encouragement, faith and support that stay with me every time I write. May your tribe increase.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Photo credit: Bhavya Kalsi
Meghna Pant is an author and financial journalist. One & A Half Wife—Meghna’s debut novel—was published in 2012 to critical and commercial acclaim. It went into multiple reprints, won Muse India’s Young Writer Award and was shortlisted for several other awards, including the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. Meghna’s short stories have been published in over a dozen global literary magazines, including Avatar Review, Wasafari, Eclectica and QLRS. An economics graduate with an MBA in finance, Meghna has worked as a TV anchor for Times Now, NDTV Profit and Bloomberg-UTV. A nomad at heart, she has lived in Delhi, Singapore, Zurich, Dubai and New York City. She is currently based in Mumbai. Meghna will be donating half the proceeds from Happy Birthday! to Safar Trust, a Mumbai-based NGO that helps slum children and trafficked girls lead financially stable lives. Happy Birthday! is Meghna’s first published collection of short stories.