The Death of Mr Love, page 2
So I told her. One and I had argued. One grew angry and began yelling, ‘What’s got into you? Have you gone mad?’
‘It’s you who are mad,’ I told her. ‘Do you seriously expect me to marry every woman I sleep with?’
But One did speak to me again. She phoned next day to see if I had changed my mind. I said I refused to be blackmailed. I could hear her crying at the other end of the line. Then she asked in a cold voice if I realised that she would have to have an abortion.
‘Do what you need to,’ I replied.
There was a long silence, then she spoke my name, the name that means Love, and said, as if chiding a child, ‘Darling, please come to your senses. We’re talking about your child. Abortions are dangerous. They’re illegal, and they’re expensive. Surely you don’t want to put me through that?’
‘If it’s a question of money,’ I replied, ‘I’ll pay for it.’
She put down the phone.
Some weeks later I had another call from her over a crackling fading line, interrupted by loud crashes, bangs and booms, as if djinns were shifting boxes around an empty house. She said there was a thunderstorm outside. I could barely hear her voice. She informed me that she was no longer pregnant and – much of the rest was garbled by the bad connection – seemed to be alluding to an obscure legend from the past. But her last words, before she put the phone down, were perfectly clear. ‘It’s not unborn children, but men like you who deserve to die. I promise you, there will be retribution!’
Two arrived shortly after this, to share an evening with me – arrived with hair in rats’ tails, clothes soaked from getting caught in a twilight downpour. I told her about the call.
‘Retribution!’ she said. ‘Is she threatening to kill you?’
I told her how I’d said to One, ‘What is this? A death threat? Am I in danger? Should I get a gun and keep it under my bed?’
Two laughed. Nine months passed.
And so I am drawn back, reluctantly, to the moment I have been dreading, to the sea, the crying of birds, and the heat. Lying on my bed, longing for the cool touch of fingers other than my own on my body, I wish that things had turned out differently. With One out of the way, Two has become a bore. She yatters endlessly about marriage, but unlike One, has found no way to twist my arm. I am desperate to be rid of her. I have tried to damp things down. I told her we should test our feelings by not seeing each other for a month. Reluctantly, she agreed. We are halfway through our month apart, but she writes to me every day, her letters growing steadily more desperate, about the futility of continuing in her marriage and how she can’t bear the idea of life without me. She is ready, she says, to sacrifice everything, to do something drastic. Her greatest fear is that I no longer want her. Her letters repeat themselves. The last few have gone unopened into the box under my bed. Soon I will have to face Two, endure her rage, her tears and her ‘something drastic’. The month is almost over and the evil moment can’t much longer be deferred.
Stretched on my bed, what I do not know is that my future has already been decided. Registering a distant ring, I have no inkling of who is at the front door of my flat, is about to open the door of my bedroom, that I will have time only to snatch up a towel before I find myself staring into the black eye of a revolver, that I am already halfway through the last minute of my life.
I MAYA
THE SILVER GANESH (AMBONA, 1958)
My mother Maya, who was a storyteller – her name, aptly, means ‘illusion’ – used to say that writers have a special responsibility to the world because they have the power to change it. They must be careful how they tell their tales, and to whom, for storytelling is an act whose effects are incalculable and endless.
Only now as I pick up my own fountain-pen do I begin to understand why my mother never told this story herself.
It was always there. I can trace its threads in the pattern of my childhood, as far back as those evenings of the late fifties in India, when Maya was surrounded by her clever friends – artists, musicians, film-makers – in our drawing room full of candles (kept for power cuts, but used regardless) and . . . in my mind’s eye I see bottles of wine, but this is the memory playing tricks. Forty years ago there were no Indian wines. Nowadays grapes may grow on the slopes of the Ambona Hills, but in those days an untouched forest covered them, and Maya’s guests had to do their merrymaking with whisky distilled in Bangalore and obtained, on my father’s account, from the naval stores.
Music, laughter, intense discussion, this is what I remember, my mother moving round the room in a silk sari that changed colour as the light caught it, putting a record on the gramophone, pulling a book off a shelf to show someone, holding a match to an incense stick, calling to Yelliya, our surly South Indian cook, to bring the food. Dinner was rarely served before midnight. How Maya loved those gatherings. She wore a large red kumkum dot in the middle of her forehead and this seemed to accentuate her eyes, which were dark and huge and shone with excitement as she talked. I would creep out of bed and hang, half-hidden in a curtain, watching and listening. I was always caught, of course, and dragged in my pyjamas before the company to be scolded and petted and praised, after which I would be allowed to sit for a while, with a glass of lemon squash, listening to the conversation.
Thinking of the story I have now to begin, a particular night from that time comes to mind; the night my mother told her tale of The Silver Ganesh. She was talking to a bear of a man with a beard that lay like a bib upon his chest. He wore the long muslin kurta that is practically a uniform for Bengali intellectuals. A twig-like pipe stuck from his hairy mouth. His name was Babul Roy and I remember thinking how funny it was that they called him ‘Bubbles’. Bubbles was in those days an arty and rather unsuccessful film director and Maya was eager to tell him about her new story. (It was her screenplay period, cinema was exciting, Satyajit Ray had just released Pather Panchali, two of her scripts had recently made it to the screen.)
‘How should we behave,’ my mother was saying, ‘when we don’t know what the result of our actions will be? Not even don’t know, can’t know?’
‘You won’t catch me with this bait again,’ said Bubbles, sucking on his pipe in a way that made it chuckle in sympathy. ‘This is your favourite impossible question.’
Catch with this bait . . . ? Did Bubbles really say that? It seems unlikely, but is what comes to mind – my eight-year-old brain was obsessed with fishing. In any case, Maya got what she wanted, which was not an answer, but the chance to launch into her plot.
‘Let’s make you the hero of the story,’ she said. ‘One day you leave your house and, outside, find a street-boy being beaten by two policemen. They have tied his wrists to your railings and are thrashing him with lathis. He’s the same age as Bhalu here, but a lot smaller. He’s howling. His dirty face is streaked with tears. When they see you the policemen stop. You ask what the hell they’re doing. They say they are interrogating him because they suspect he may be about to break into your house. You, decent soul, are outraged. You order them to release him. They grumble that people like you are the first to complain about crime, and now you’re stopping them doing their job. Ten rupees shuts them up.’
‘Ten rupees? I wouldn’t give those bahinchods ten annas,’ said Bubbles.
‘Not even ten pice!’ I shouted. It was a horrible story. I felt sorry for the boy. I could feel the blows of the policemen’s sticks landing on my head and back. Bubbles, who had forgotten I was listening, was mortified. He said to me, ‘Hey Bhalu, champ, you forget what I just said.’
‘He already knows that word,’ said my mother. ‘You should hear his grandfather. My God! Every second syllable!’
My father’s parents had come down from Kumharawa to visit us in Bombay before we moved to the hills. The old man complained about every bahinchod thing. The fruit, the fish, the vegetables. He quarrelled with the bahinchod dhobi and the twice-bahinchod milkman. This isn’t the right moment to tell the story about the cow. After they left I missed him horribly, and Maya said she had forgotten how coarse village ways were.
‘So, anyway,’ she resumed, ‘you take the boy inside, and tell your servants to feed him. They, of course, think you’ve gone mad.’
Bubbles nodded. I was fascinated by the way his pipe shot out little cannonballs of smoke, like the engines that chuffed through Ambona station.
‘He eats like the starving animal he is. You ask him about his family, life on the street, but he won’t talk. He doesn’t trust you. What he does do is ask you for money. You give him five rupees. After he leaves, you discover that your silver Ganesh is missing.’
‘And the servants say, “See, I told you so” . . .’
‘Your servants urge you to report the theft,’ said Maya.
‘Otherwise suspicion falls on them.’
‘You’re angry, of course, about the statue, the boy’s contempt for your kindness, but mostly with yourself for being bourgeois enough to think that one decent act can erase a lifetime’s brutality. Reluctantly, you go to the police station . . .’
‘While you’re there the kid and his gang come back and clean out the rest of your silver . . .’
‘No, no!’ said Maya. Looking back, I see her trying to hide her irritation at these constant and asinine interruptions. Poor woman, she didn’t know it, but she was wasting her time. Bubbles Roy would make one more lacklustre ‘social’ movie before diving into the popular ‘filmi’ culture of the sixties. Could she have looked ten years ahead and seen the titles on which his director’s credit would appear – Meri Manzil, Gawaar, Sadhu Sadhini, and the risible but hugely popular Sheikh Peeru – she would not have bothered. But we are still in 1958. Everything is possible.
‘No, no!’ said Maya. ‘Wait. A fortnight later the silver statue reappears. No one can explain how, or why. All along, the boy was innocent. You misjudged him, and now you’ve set the police on his back, with a real crime to bend their lathis on. You feel wretched. You must stop them. You decide to trace the boy, find him before the police do. The foolish hope revives that your kindness may, after all, have made a difference. You tell yourself fate has ordained you to do something significant for this child. You fantasise. You’ll clothe him, make sure he has enough to eat. Send him to school. Maybe he should live under your roof . . .’
Bubbles was still nodding. Only now does it occur to me that here was the seed for his sentimental and nauseating Gawaar (Yokel, 1965, Dev Anand stars as a childless philanthropist who, against the wishes of his wife, played by Vijayantimala, adopts an orphaned village boy).
‘. . . But first you must find him. You send your servants out looking. They report that he has vanished. You go yourself. But where do you start looking for one small boy in a city like ours?’
‘It would make a most cinematic sequence,’ said Bubbles, and began to sketch out the camera hunting through angles of light and shade in the hopeless alleys and chawls of back-street Bombay.
‘Your search becomes an obsession,’ my mother informed him. ‘Day after day you return home defeated. You sit and brood. Then, being a storyteller, you sit down at your desk and begin to write. But in your tale it is the boy who creeps back to replace the statue before disappearing into the teeming back-streets. In your story too, you begin a search for the boy. Now there are two searches going on. The one in real life and the one in your story. Our movie follows both. We intercut between them . . .’
In my mind’s eye I see the boy leave Babul Roy’s house with its stone gateposts and creep past the wrought-iron railings where he’d been tied. His wrists are raw, circled by weals raised by the rough coir strands. He peers nervously up and down the street. Maybe the cops waited nearby, went somewhere for tea and paan, biding their time. But the coast is clear. Now that he has escaped, is no longer in the power of the black-bearded man with the weird wooden chillum, he starts to sniffle. His shoulders hurt. There is a lump on his head where the police sticks repeatedly hit. It’s painful, a hillock compared to the tiny lumps raised by the sucking of lice, but his fingers can’t feel it well under the matted hair. The boy begins to run, looking behind. He is afraid. The police, as they left, threatened to get him. He runs for a few hundred yards along this sedate street, its tall houses growing quietly shabbier, and reaches a main road where the traffic roars. We are near the big market. Men pushing handcarts piled with melons, wooden crates, wicker baskets of chickens, shove through a confusion of bell-jangling bikes, lorries with roped-on loads of sacks and boxes, buses with oily aromatic exhausts, swarms of black and yellow taxis. The boy calls out to a pair of Sikhs who are riding scooters side by side, each with a shalwared, dupatta’d wife sidesaddle behind, clinging to his waist, the women facing each other so they can talk. All four ignore him. An old man, lifting the corner of his dhoti clear of the ground, begins to thread a route across the road. The boy darts to his side and uses him as a moving shelter. The old fellow barks at him and the boy grins. On the other side they stand together and something passes between them. I think the old man has given him a coin. The boy walks freely now, and no longer looks behind. Without my knowing how, it has become evening. I follow him along the main road, past the entrance to a busy railway station, where he stops for a moment and speaks to a beggar girl about his own age. She has a sweet face and is wearing a ragged, but clean, red dress. He wanders inside, through the throng of home-bound commuters, onto a platform where a man – he might be drunk, or perhaps dying – lies sprawled, urinating, the pool of his piss spreading away from him. The boy ignores him, skips over the yellow streams and leaves the station by a different exit, emerging onto a lesser road where traffic is passing. A few yards along a man is lying on a step outside a shop, wrapped up for the night in a dirty cotton shroud. He is coughing. The boy takes this street, passing a row of shops selling cheap gold bangles, perfume merchants – all mirrors and Islamic calligraphy – and a clinic where women with covered heads queue patiently to be seen by the compounder. Some handcarts, like wheeled seesaws, are pulled up by the wall. Perched on the end of one of these, a pretty woman is trying to persuade her baby to drink something from a steel glass. The baby chuckles and throws the glass into the gutter. The woman reaches down, retrieves it, wipes it on her sari and tries again. The baby throws it down. The boy stops, picks up the glass. Is he going to run off with it? He hands it back to the mother. After about a mile he steps into a side lane, its first few dozen yards brightly lit, with shops on either side: cloth merchants, a shop full of pots and pans with a row of aluminium buckets hanging above its entrance, an open-front café from which film music blares, where they are frying pakoras in a huge curved pan. The boy stops, and motions with his hand to his mouth. The cook reaches down with his ladle and flips a pakora sizzling through the air. The boy catches it, cries out in pain, and the man laughs to see him juggling to save it. He continues past a bicycle repair place, a tinsmith, a shop empty save for a fat man in dhoti and vest asleep on a string bed, fingers clasped on his stomach rising and falling with the swell of his belly. Nearby, a child squatting in the gutter is setting fire to some paper, watching the burning flakes float upward. Light from a street-lamp catches her hair, haloing it golden. Further on the shops give way to a row of brick hovels, and the road surface is pitted, muddy, as though the municipality doesn’t bother here. There are puddles (it must be monsoon time), his bare feet tread through the slush. He walks without hesitating, a small figure caught now and again in the glow of a street-lamp. His hand goes to his mouth, he is still eating the pakora. There is a haze of woodsmoke in the air. The lamps grow fewer, their dull spillages of light at first one, then two hundred yards apart, until at last they peter out. Now the only illumination is the dim flicker from doorways. People passing are shapes in the gloom. Five men are sitting on a string bed with their knees drawn up, backs to a brick wall, five points of orange fire in the darkness. Somewhere, dogs are snarling. The boy ducks into an alley, a few feet wide, margined by clogged gutters, that leads away between shacks made haphazardly of wood and beaten-out tin cans. Some are roofed with dry coconut fronds weighted down with tyres. Inside one of these, glimpsed by the smoky light of a kerosene lamp, a woman with a cruel face is nursing a baby. In a brighter hut, lit by a naked bulb, a man is chopping meat with a cleaver, casting lumps of flesh into a pile. Shreds hang from his fingers like snot on the nails of an inexpert nose-blower. Blood has pooled on the floor. It trickles out of the open doorway, leaks in black veins into a drain full of furry growths. I notice that where a patch of light falls through a door, the boy steps round it, passes on the shadow side. Some way ahead, a single bulb emits a feeble tobacco glow. Beyond, the alley dwindles to a muddy path and the plank-and-can shacks give way to dwellings hung with rags, plastic sheets and torn sacks. It is becoming hard to see. The boy hurries on, and then he’s gone. The alley has come to an end, debouched into darkness. Blind air thick with the stench of garbage reaches my nostrils, and nearby, incongruously, the scent of cobra-jasmine. My eyes acclimatise to a wide, rubbish-strewn space, across which smoke is blowing. Weeds and broken bricks catch my feet as I cross the uneven ground towards a well of deeper darkness, a perfectly round hole in the night. It is the empty mouth of a concrete pipe, a yard across, that must have been lying here a long time, because beneath its curve a lantana bush has grown up. Moths fly up in a cloud from its tiny, bitter flowers . . .
‘The poor go unheard,’ my mother was saying, ‘We know nothing of their lives, but they touch ours at every point. Our stories are rooted in their silence. Our characters enter bearing scars from untold tales and leave to pursue unguessable adventures. So you just can’t say, “My story starts here.” It’s older than you. It has a thousand beginnings, each of them in someone else’s life. You can’t say, “It ends here.” What you do reverberates after you’re gone. Who knows where it ends?’ She was speaking in Hindi and one phrase sticks clearly in my mind – ‘Hamari kahaniyan apné aaramb sé pahlé aaramb hotin hain, aur apné anta ké baad tak jaari rahtin hain’ – ‘Our stories begin before their beginnings and continue beyond their ends.’ Switching to English, she added, ‘Really there are no individual stories, only the story, coiling and weaving through all our lives.’
