The Storyteller (24 page)

She giggled and her face brightened. ‘Is there no limit to your wickedness? Are you certain it won’t be any more serious than that?’

‘Just some noise. Nothing more,’ I lied hastily.

A sigh indicated her compliance with what I had suggested. ‘Now listen everyone…’

Reluctantly I warned her of the possible consequences if the police took it seriously.

‘We’ve been arrested before,’ she said unconcernedly. ‘We are too much trouble to keep in jail. The prisoners go berserk when we flirt with them. The last time we caused a riot. The police decided to come to a suitable arrangement with us.’

She announced what we were to do.

‘I will need money to buy a few things.’

Her lips tightened, but she reached inside her blouse and fished out a bundle of notes.

Baji had given me more money than I needed. I bought firecrackers at a discount from Manu in Sadar Bazaar. He operated from behind the façade of a shop that sold kites and face masks. Manu had turned it into quite a profitable business ever since he was last released from prison and banned from selling firecrackers and trading in illegal firearms.

In the time since I had last seen him, Manu had lost several fingers on both hands after an experiment with explosives had blown up his shop in Faiz Bazaar. He accepted the prison sentence without bitterness, and his only regret was that he couldn’t shag himself quite so easily after the accident.

‘Is it only for fun or do you want to create serious trouble?’ he asked over a mug of tea. Without waiting for a reply, he called out to an assistant. ‘Two number ten. Make that three. Five of the new ones.’

‘They must fit into this satchel.’

‘These are all new and small. But what they can do…’ He grinned and revealed his diseased gums. ‘Are you married yet?’

It was a question we asked each other unfailingly whenever we met. The answer was strictly the same—a celebratory ‘No’, followed by lewd jokes about marriage. We were adept at hiding our loneliness behind a cheerful verbosity that emphasised our preference for freedom. No familial ties and no
fuss about where we slept. We pretended that we ate, drank and wanked our way through life with the utmost indifference to emotional needs, shunning responsibilities and avoiding routines.

This time, however, my reply was different. ‘In a way,’ I said coyly.

‘In a way,’ Manu repeated tonelessly. ‘In a way.’ He was confounded by what I said.

‘Yes.’

‘Yes? Yes…Yes!’ His face brightened. ‘You clumsy giraffe-fucker! Who are you trying to fool?’ He slapped my cheeks and roared with raucous laughter.

‘Her name is Meena.’

I think it was the earnestness in my voice that made him stop. His face turned dark, and he looked at me with venomous eyes. ‘This is a bad joke,
Chotah.
A very bad joke!’

‘It is not a joke.’ I did not wish to provoke him further by revealing any more.

The assistant interrupted us.

‘How much?’ I asked. ‘I have to go.’

Manu dismissed my query with a wave of a hand. ‘No joke,’ he muttered. ‘No joke. Now only I am left without a wife.’

He sounded so utterly disconsolate that I regretted misleading him.

‘Is she also a dwarf?’

‘I must go.’

‘I know!’ He sprang up from his stool. ‘You are planning to get rid of her! I can give you some potent stuff that will blow her apart!’ He followed me for a distance. ‘Then you can be free again! What do you do at night?’ he shouted as I quickened my steps. ‘Lie on her belly and make feeble efforts to create another midget? Is her face as ugly as yours? It must be for her to have you! I thought we were friends!’

Jhunjhun Wallah’s house was something my imagination could easily have conjured. A white marble structure glistened in the sun. Lawn and flowerbeds, fruit trees and a pond. A haven for gods…Meena and myself. Certainly not for the fat businessman. There was a high wall topped with barbed wire around the property. Four armed guards, dressed in white uniforms and wearing red turbans, stood in front of the massive iron gate.

We were stopped at the entrance where the guards insisted on searching us. They leered and winked, laughing among themselves. One of them was bold enough to touch Baji. She kicked the startled man on the knee and abused him. Nargis and Gulbadan drummed their
dholaks
and Chunnu played the harmonium. We danced in front of a car that turned off the road towards the gate. In rapid succession, several cars pulled up behind each other. The driver of the first vehicle beeped his horn. An elderly woman rolled down a rear window and stuck out her face. She was sweaty and irritable. She screeched at us, and then shouted at the guards to remove the undesirable freaks. In a flash Gulbadan was at the car’s window, leaning over to lick the woman’s cheek with a monstrously large tongue. The
hijra
shook violently and panted like a thirsty dog.

There was a terrified shriek followed by ‘Oh…ooh…oooh…oooh! Shameless mongrels!’ Gulbadan laughed and wagged her tongue as the car window was rolled up. Street urchins whistled and clapped.

The gate swung open and we led a procession of noisy entertainers and honking cars inside. An agitated young man met us in the driveway and urged us to follow him on to the grassy area to the side of the house. We stood defiantly, blocking the cars.

‘Sri Jhunjhun Wallah will not be pleased!’ he warned us. ‘Please get out of the way of the vehicles!’

Baji responded by moving her hips in a series of short jerks. ‘Your arse?’ she asked loudly. ‘Is there a price for your arse?’

Servants stifled their giggles and scurried inside the house. Two of the guards came running. Gulbadan and I slipped behind the embarrassed man who began to scold the guards for their lack of vigilance. Too thin. His buttocks were not round enough to attract me. Dutifully Gulbadan reached out and squeezed his bum. A startled jump. The
hijras
rubbed their backsides and groaned in mock pain. Other men emerged from the house. There was a face I recognised. Quickly I slipped behind a tree.

Ram Lal spoke to Baji. Whatever he said quietened her. She nodded obediently. I feared that our plans to humiliate Jhunjhun Wallah had been thwarted. Meekly the
hijras
sat on the grass with a guard hovering near them.

‘You will be told when. Understand?’ Ram Lal did not raise his voice. He could not have been more threatening had he lost his temper and yelled. The control he demonstrated reminded me of a slithering cobra ready to strike with deadly effect at any moment. He was in command and in no mood to negotiate.

A part of my plan involved the
hijras
shedding their clothes during a dance. I wanted them to run naked among the guests, touching and kissing whoever they could, shouting curses and obscenities. That was to be the diversion. But now…

I made my way to the back of the house without being challenged. A passing servant looked at me and grinned. My yellow clothes, wig, make-up and dark glasses were too odd to cause anything but amusement. I could only be viewed as an eccentric entertainer. A gong sounded. People hurried to the front of the house where rows of tables and chairs had been laid under a red and white marquee.

Working feverishly, I gathered and stacked bits of wood, leaves and twigs into a mound under an open window and
topped it with firecrackers and rusty nails. Then I took a bottle of kerosene from the satchel and emptied it over the pile. Finally, I sprinkled a handful of matchsticks, saving only a couple to light the fire. Stepping back a few paces, I lit both the matchsticks, took aim and threw them on the heap.

I ran as fast as I could to the gate, passing the guests who were too busy devouring food to see me. The guards were preoccupied with the unruly crowd of beggars assembled outside the gate, clamouring for food and money. I stopped behind a gold mohur tree on the opposite side of the road and listened. The volume of the explosion did not disappoint me.

Notoriety. Concoctions of whispered words in bazaars. Stories, flowing like tributaries from the mainstream of reality, twisting and turning, gurgling with lives of their own. Vamana, the terrorist. The ultimate menace to society. The greatest danger in the city. My name on posters. Police hunts. An addition to history’s long list of the villains of Delhi. I trembled with the excitement of possibilities. I drifted through the lanes of the city, occupied by visions of self-importance.

I wondered how much damage I had caused. House and trees ablaze. The sight of Jhunjhun Wallah and Ram Lal like creatures from hell, their clothes and limbs on fire. Pandemonium. Disfiguration. Lives among the ashes. Let them learn what it meant to be haunted by fear and pain. I ordered them to stand in front of mirrors to view their charred lives.

My daring thrilled me. Such exquisite timing! What perfection! I skipped along, wishing pedestrians luck for the rest of the day.

I returned to the
bustee
after sunset. More shacks had been pulled down. Chaman was preparing to visit a neighbour. The smell of smoke hadn’t subsided. A child wailed, probably haunted by a hazy memory of destruction.

‘What have you done?’ she demanded. ‘The police were here.’

Chaman must have sensed my grin in the darkness. It infuriated her. ‘Vamana!’ She grabbed my shoulders. The illness had not drained all her strength.

‘I heard,’ I said calmly. ‘Do you know if the
hijras
are in gaol?’

‘Why should they be in gaol?’

‘I thought you might have heard something.’

‘What are you hiding from me?’ Chaman sounded like Miss DeSouza.

‘Can we go to the cemetery tonight?’

‘Will you tell me?’

She stomped off when I did not reply.

I uncovered the hole and lay down beside Meena.

You look tired, my warrior.

Outside the horses snorted. A strong wind buffeted the tent. Nights in the desert were cold. In front of me were silver bowls laden with fruits—grapes and ripe figs, bananas and tangerines. Unseen hands had brought them from distant lands. But I wasn’t hungry.

Shall I take away the pain, my lord?

Please.

Her hands consoled me. She removed the armour and undressed me. The warm oil of roses eased the pain. Her voice was a herbal balm, singing a strange tale about a last battle with an invincible enemy.

Are the peacocks dancing under the moon?

Not tonight, my general. They, too, are tired.

Why are the owls quiet?

Their hour of hooting is over.

Strong fingers marched over my neck and shoulders. Down to the top of the buttocks. Up and down, firm, smooth strokes. A renegade thumb ran along my spine. Sensations awakened. The desert was a strange place, full of hidden life. She moved lower down, kneading and pressing. A finger strayed into a ravine. A curious wanderer who needed no encouragement.

Turn over, my prince.

The air of heaven itself. Her lips were like freshly crushed melon. The tongue ignited spot fires as it trailed over me. Sensations of colour and distant sounds. A worm continued the search for a refuge. Warily it circled my navel and then dipped into the shallow hole. The emptiness of a barren womb. Her fingers travelled impatiently and entangled themselves in the curly tendrils.

A restless awakening. Motions of creation. Had I copulated with the moon? A chaste, luminous beauty. Lifeless. I was so cold, lying on the lunar surface. I was unable to imagine her
passion. The mind gave way. I shed the tears of a child who could not believe in his dreams.

The desert tolerated my solitary presence. Beyond, just over the hills, the enemy waited. No sign of what had been. The wind remained as my only companion. It understood the turmoil of loneliness. Life drifted back within the grasp of senses.

She lay still.
My queen, I fear I have failed
…I had to settle for a hollow peace. There was a deeper darkness outside.

I covered the hole and looked for food. Chaman had left
roti
,
dhal
, some salt and a green chilli near the dying
chula.
Outside there were shapes and shadows. Broken people hobbled along on the crutches of memory.

‘That was my house.’ An old woman pointed a stick. ‘There!’ She sat on the ground and refused to budge.

‘Mine,’ she said fiercely, when I offered her shelter in the godown. ‘Do you know the difference between the home I had then and what I have now?’

‘No.’

‘The roof is much higher,’ she cackled, looking up. ‘There are no walls.’

People were sprawled on the ground. I spotted Chaman talking to a group of women. A clay pot bubbled over a small open fire.

‘Rice and
dhal
,’ she said when she saw me. ‘I had a small amount stored away.’

‘The women could sleep in the godown,’ I suggested. ‘Barey Bhai won’t be back.’

‘They are afraid of a
gora
ghost. They believe your stories. The men feel reckless enough not to care. But the women are afraid for their children.’

I did not care for the note of accusation in her voice. ‘Stories should always be believed,’ I said stiffly. ‘Like people believe in
God, and what might bring them happiness, and whatever else that can be imagined.’

‘But the things you say are not real!’

‘Neither is my life. Or yours. What you feel and imagine, are they real? Can anyone see or touch them?’

It was Chaman’s turn to bristle. ‘They are real to me because I know they happen!’

‘My stories also happen. There are hidden eyes that can see them. We are not blind inside.’

‘There are times when you say things that I do not understand. I cannot tell if you are serious or deliberately confusing me.’

My silence maintained the unbridgeable distance between us.

Chaman stirred the pot with a sturdy stick. ‘Nearly done!’ she announced cheerfully to a woman cradling a sleeping baby that had its mouth clamped around her left nipple.

Men wandered around us. Some hopefuls piled bricks and stones into mounds of a primitive arsenal. Others sharpened bamboo sticks in case we were attacked again. The drunks wailed out-of-tune love songs, attempted to chase women and boasted about their virility.

The food was dumped on two limp banana leaves, pieces of cardboard and rusty tin plates. There was a couple of mouthfuls for each woman. Enough to ensure survival.

‘The men?’ I asked. ‘They must be hungry.’

‘They have feasted. Kishore’s brother heard what happened and sent some food from his stall. The men decided that they needed to be properly fed to keep up their strength. The women were not asked to join them.’

An empty piece of banana leaf was thrust under Chaman’s chin.

‘Usha, there is no more,’ Chaman said kindly.

The woman bit an end of the leaf and munched it slowly.

‘We won’t be together much longer.’

‘You won’t tell them that. Let people build their lives in dreams. That’s what you say,’ Chaman reminded me.

‘I cannot stay here tonight. They will come again to find me.’

‘Sometimes I sleep in the space between two graves.’ She looked up at the sky. ‘It is a quiet night.’

‘You are not afraid?’

‘There are no men there.’

We stopped frequently on the way to the cemetery. Chaman was no longer strong enough for long, uninterrupted walks. I limped and clutched my chest, pretending to be short of breath. She believed me when I complained that my legs hurt and I was tired. We stopped on the footpath and sat among the shadows at a distance from the streetlights. Later, when we rested under a tree, Chaman fell asleep. When I woke her up, she became irritable and scolded me for allowing her to doze off.

‘There!’ She pointed to a wall as we approached the graveyard. ‘I know a quick way to get inside.’

Hidden by the overgrowth of bushes, a small section of the wall had collapsed. She parted the branches, stepped over the rubble and called me. I didn’t find it easy to get across.

Rows of graves confronted us. A dormitory of the dead. Slabs of different-sized stones. Tufts of weed and wild grass grew from isolated pockets of earth. I was eager for elusive shadows, wispy shapes, teasing glimpses…sounds to seduce and lead me into the depth of the night to behold the wonderful and the terrifying. I heard crickets, the distant drone of traffic. Above me, the barren coldness of silent stars.

She sensed my disappointment. ‘There is no anger here. It’s so calm.’

I kicked the ground. ‘It isn’t what I expected.’

‘This is the safest place in the city. Police, murderers, rapists—they don’t come here at night. Occasionally drunks stray this way, but they are harmless. As long as it doesn’t rain…’

Her words did not dispel my disappointment. I walked among the graves, running my hands over the weathered surfaces of stone and marble. Death shouldn’t be this inconspicuous, I thought. It was my inability to lose a sense of my own physical presence, in favour of an awareness that the night was not empty, that bothered me. Feeling the warmth of the night on my body, the roughness of the burnt grass under my feet and the perception of a mocking emptiness around me were disconcerting affirmations of loneliness. I couldn’t reach into the unseen and seek other worlds with any conviction.

‘Do you think anything happens after we finish here?’

‘I’ll find out before you do.’ Her voice came from behind a tombstone. ‘But I won’t be able to tell you anything.’

Heaven. Hell. Acceptance…bliss…pleasure. Disbelief…torment…pain. Orchards. Rivers. Fire and cauldrons. Saint Vamana. Sinner dwarf. A choice within God’s prison. Either way, a loss. But death itself? Was it a process? An experience? A journey or a state? It had never appeared to me as a shape or in any shade of colour. I didn’t contemplate death with any fear. I associated it with the natural quietness of the universe. It was a law that could not be disobeyed. For me, it denoted the calmness of dissolving noiselessly in the night. The breadth of life suddenly narrowing itself to a point. A final bleep and then…What if there were a choice? An alternative to the two extremes? Let Paradise and Inferno be for those who wished to continue. For myself, there was only one heroic ending. A monumental finality. An act of revenge against the Creator.
I shall deny you the opportunity of moulding me again. I shall disappear.

‘Vamana?’

‘I’m here. Did you remember your medicine?’

‘I threw them away.’

The silence conveyed my disapproval.

‘There is no medicine that can help me.’

For myself, I could venture into the possible variations of death without terror, but the prospect of Chaman dying was intolerable. My mind embraced her in the final stages of life. A skeleton wrapped in skin, whimpering and begging me to cut the strand on which she dangled.

But then I shall be alone.

Can you bear to see me like this?

I can share your pain. Suffer with you. But by myself…

You have others. I know more than you think.

Toys and empty passions. With you I begin to understand love. Mother, sister, friend. Even a lover. Everything a person can be.

She sat on the ground, leaning back on a tombstone, her head tilted upwards. ‘Will you make sure that I am cremated at Nigambodh Ghat? Will you light incense? Lots of them. Cover me with marigold. If I could only touch my own ashes, I would feel clean.’

I lay on the ground, resting my head on her lap. She ran her bony fingers through my hair and stroked my face as if I were a child who needed to be consoled. The weight of the night lifted slowly. She was right. There was a calmness that suspended the gloominess of an impending reality.

And then she broke my shell of peace with a casual request. ‘Will you gather my ashes and scatter them in the river?’

I preferred to suck my thumb and tuck in my legs until the knees touched my chest.

The question returned. I bolted myself inside the silence and dropped the shutters. Her words were like a gang of masked intruders trying to break into my house. They were strangers threatening disruption. I retreated further inside and met
dressed skeletons dancing around a fire—a danse macabre. Each one was draped in a sari, identical to the one Chaman used to wear in the evening.

She began to hum, penetrating the walls, filtering through my defence. Against my will I listened. A melancholy sound to cloud the mind with dreams of what she had never known. Snatches of words dipped in a saffron hue. Vague and enchanting. A song that had to be felt and not necessarily understood. For where could anyone find perfect love?

‘Chaman?’

She did not stop singing.

‘I have meant to ask you…why did you become a whore?’

‘Did you choose to become a dwarf?’

‘I could never accept the nights when the men came. I felt angry, hurt, betrayed.’

She told me about the darkness in her life. Shards of memory about an ailing mother in a remote village in the north. A little girl, afraid and weeping as the flames from the burning pyre danced in the air. A childhood brutalised by a drunken father. A thin, beady-eyed man with greasy hair and rotten teeth. Beatings. Incest. Starvation. One day he came home with a stranger. The men argued and then settled on a sum of money. Her father turned his back as the other man dragged her out of the hut to a nearby field. He sampled the merchandise and then took her to the city.

‘There was nothing inside me by the time I was fifteen. A feeble heart with few feelings. Imagine a dark, hollow place visited by strangers in exchange for money. How many years and how many men? It may be easier to count all the stars. Once they used to say I was pretty.’ She sounded as though she wished to recoup those years. ‘Several offers of marriage. But a man will say anything when he is between a woman’s legs.’

‘You are still pretty,’ I lied. But it struck me that I deliberately avoided thinking about Chaman’s physical appearance. That would have been too depressing, since her deterioration was alarmingly evident. Her eyes were dull and her skin was splotchy and wrinkled. Bald patches had appeared on her head. She had lost two of her front teeth and the rest were badly stained. Sometimes I couldn’t help staring at her. I was unable to decide whether it was merely sorrow or the wisdom of a hostile world reflected in her face. I entertained the idea that she had travelled beyond the limits of human experience and returned with secrets she was unwilling to disclose. It was far less complicated to think of her as she might have been in her younger days. That way it didn’t raise so many tormented questions.

My awkwardness grew in the lengthy pause. She continued singing, leaving me to squirm in the privacy of my anguish. I had no intention of upsetting or annoying Chaman. And yet…yet I had to know.

I sat up. It made me feel less vulnerable. Less intimate with her. The natural taboos that exist between men and women were replaced by a sense of mutual trust between friends. I had to ask her.