The Death of Mr Love, page 7
Badnaami had a modest but genuine success. The film’s entry in the Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (British Film Institute/OUP, first edition 1994, slight soiling, £9.50) praises its ‘remarkable portrait of rural India’ and states that: ‘Maya Sahib’s sensitive script takes a sordid affair and turns it into an inspiring drama.’
Badnaami ’s hero was a flawed man whose suffering one could share, but what was Maya thinking of when she wrote Retribution? Her narrator was such a repellent character that it was hard to imagine anyone having sympathy with him. He feared (she makes him say) that he’d be played by Johnny Walker if the story ever became a movie. Impossible! JW specialised in good-hearted drunks, precisely what this fellow, by his own confession, was not. If anything, JW would be the man’s soused and insouciant bootlegger. He’d sing a song, something like the lovely old ghazal that Mukesh sang in Main Nashe Men Hoon:
Záhid sharáb píné dé, masjid mein baith kar
ya woh jagah batá dé jahán Khudá na ho.
If, priest, you object to my drinking in a sacred spot,
Kindly show me to some place where God is not.
Despite all this, I could just see Retribution as a film. It would tell the story of a man who leads a rakish, dissolute life, until he makes the mistake of falling in love with two beautiful women at once. This pair, given their uncanny similarities, would turn out to be sisters, twins even, separated at birth by some family tragedy and unaware of one another’s existence. (Making them English was of course wrong. They should be Indian, played by the same actress – Mala Sinha or Vijayantimala, who’d played a pair of doubles in Madhumati.) After he callously ditches the first woman, the ‘obscure story from the past’ mentioned in her distraught phone call would ring a bell with the second. She would contact her rival, they would discover their sisterly relationship and it would emerge that the man, or his family, had played a part in their tragedy. Together, they would plot a double revenge and the movie could consequently be called Pratiphal or, if a snappier title were wanted, Adla-Badli, Adla-Badla (Double Justice).
What a flick! If only they’d made it! I got quite enthusiastic. The murdered Lothario would be a challenge for . . . whom? Certainly not a stereotypical film villain. For the piece to work, it would have to be someone charming. Someone who could woo us as he had the two women. They’d seen some good in him. He was at least honest. Honest whatsisname. What was the man’s name? Maya never gave him one. Why? And why call the women One and Two? So many things about Retribution made no sense.
But these speculations were cut short by the discovery, in the same envelope as the story, of a news clipping from The Times of India and a note in my mother’s writing entitled The Eel Fisher.
THE EEL FISHER (BOMBAY, 14 OCTOBER 1964)
This morning at dawn a cloudscape like a mountain range could be seen on the sea horizon beyond the Back Bay Reclamation. I got up early, meaning to start work, but instead went for a walk along Cuffe Parade. It’s a little cooler by the sea. I was wishing, as I do all the time now, that we were still in Ambona. I know I didn’t want to go there at first, but our three years there now seem like an idyll, and like every idyll since Eden, it ended badly. It is odd to be back here in Colaba, in our old flat, the one we lived in before we left the city, as if nothing had changed, when everything has. We were foolish to come back to Bombay. We should have gone far away, maybe back to Lucknow. Leaving his rose garden broke my husband’s heart. Bhalu hated leaving Ambona too. His letters are filled with the excruciating trivia of boarding-school life. He gives the latest hockey scores as he did when he was eleven and first went there. I suppose I should find it endearing.
Low tide had exposed a jungle of mangroves, probed by a long concrete jetty that ran towards the outer breakwaters. Beyond was the sea spreading blue wings clear to Africa. I decided I would walk out to the end of the jetty. The swamp glittered like fever. Smells of fish and seaweed and a curious dry clicking among the mangroves. A man sitting there with a fishing rod wished me good morning. He was perhaps thirty-five years old, strongly built, and quite naked apart from a short lungi, worn like a skirt, revealing the knees. An amulet shone on the darkness of his chest. I had a feeling that I had seen him somewhere before, but thought no more of it. I returned his greeting and walked on. After a little I looked back. He was still watching me.
The jetty ends in deep water, milky-green and noisy, slapping against the wall. On a floating garland, a rotting crab carcass was being picked apart by smaller relations. The outer breakwaters, which from land seem so far away, are huge ramparts, giant fingers pointing at one another. One day they will touch, shut the sea out of Back Bay, and the mangroves will be gone for ever, but on this day the sea was still pouring in through the gap, through which I could see a ship standing out to the horizon. Three years since Sybil’s ship sailed. I wrote several times, but no reply. To the north was the wooded outline of Malabar Hill. Where he lived. Sybil used to like walking out here to the end of the pier. She would say, with that excited catch in her voice, that it brought her closer to him. Maybe that’s what did it, thinking about Sybil and Mister Love.
When I started back, the sun was hot. The fisherman was still there. A dog was nosing at a bulging cloth bag at his feet. From time to time the pouch heaved, something in it gave a twitch. I asked what it was. The man reached in and pulled out an eel. Held it out to me. It coiled and uncoiled slowly in his hands. I had never seen one so close before. It was about thirty inches long, silvery flank, dark back shot with blue lights, a snakeish head. Its eyes were dark jewels set in gold rims. He said, ‘There are lots of them here. They hide in the roots.’
The eel’s mouth opened, gulped and a shudder ran all along the long body. What a pity, I felt suddenly, that such a lovely thing should die choking in this way. So I offered to buy it from him. He laughed and said, with a kind of sulky truculence, ‘People like you don’t eat these things. It’s poor folk like me that eat them.’ I said I did not want to eat it, I’d pay him to return it to the sea. He shook his head and said, ‘Madam, I have to feed my family. These things aren’t worth much, but I can’t afford to buy one in the market. So how much will you pay?’ I said I’d give him five rupees. ‘That’s too much, you are too generous.’ ‘So, are you willing?’ Again he laughed. ‘If I say yes, what about tomorrow? Will you also buy tomorrow’s eel? And the day after? No, madam, keep your money because when it’s spent I’ll only have to catch another.’ The eel twisted in his hands. It struck me then that I had been arrogant.
I asked if I could hold it. He said, ‘It’ll make your hands smell.’ I didn’t care, I could always wash my hands. ‘You won’t chuck it back?’ he asked. I said I just wanted to feel what it was like to hold. He stood up and gave me the eel. It was thicker than it looked and slippery. I grasped it just behind the head and some way along the body and it went quiet and heavy in my hands, but when the mouth opened and it pulsed I could feel the muscular pull, the strength, of the thing. He and the dog were both watching me. The eel convulsed and I exclaimed, afraid it would fall. He took it from me and dropped it tail first into his pouch.
I needed to shower, but the day was so hot that even under the stream of water I could feel sweat breaking out on my body. It took ages to get the fishy smell off my hands.
Ramu laid the table, as he always does at eight o’clock sharp, an egg for Captain Sahib, boiled for exactly three minutes, puri and potato for me, our napkins neatly rolled in their silver rings, a copy of The Times of India laid ready. My husband picks it up and I read, across the table, the page he has just finished. This is our habit. The story was on page five.
GOPAL GODSE FREED
From Our Correspondent
NEW DELHI, Oct 13: After serving a sentence of 15 years in the Tehra Central Jail, Gopal Vinayak Godse (44), brother of Nathuram Godse, who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi on January 30, 1948, was released today. Gopal Godse was convicted of complicity in the assassination. Mr Vishnu R. Karkare, a co-accused in the Mahatma Gandhi Murder Case, who was undergoing life imprisonment in a jail in Maharashtra, was released on Tuesday on the orders of the Central Government, it was learnt in Bombay.
I must have uttered some sort of cry because Captain Sahib lowers the paper. ‘Did you say something?’
I dared not reply. I must be mad. It is clear to me that I, Maya Sahib, am responsible for this news.
‘How far-fetched is that, even for you?’ I ask myself and an inner voice instantly replies, ‘Far-fetched, is it? I’m glad you use that word. Isn’t it what that bitch Noor at Femme once complained of in your work? “Darling, why can’t you just tell it straight? Why do you always insist on making these far-fetched connections?” To which your rather catty response, given dear Noor’s obsession to prove her descent from some obscure Mughal princess, was that tracing the ancestry of an event is no more or less inherently absurd than cherrypicking ancestors for one’s family tree.’
How far-fetched is this? Very. Far-fetched, but unarguable. The reasoning is this. These men have been freed to carry on their rewriting of history because, as everyone predicted, it was politically impossible to keep them locked up once Mister Love’s murderer had been released from prison and allowed to leave the country. It therefore follows, does it not . . . ?
‘Of course it does,’ says the ghost in my brain. ‘It is mathematical, quadratic as anything. No release for Mr Godse and his chums if no Mister Love murderer pardoned and set free. No murderer without the murder. Therefore you are responsible for this news, because you, Maya, caused the murder.’
The eel-fisher is standing behind my husband’s chair. The eyes, the voice, the sulky mouth. Suddenly, beyond any doubt, I know where I have seen him before.
‘So you recognize me,’ says the ghost of Mister Love.
My husband is still waiting for a reply. What can I invent?
‘I thought of something funny,’ I said, rather desperately.
‘Share the joke?’
‘I was just remembering when Ninu was little, how I used to sing her rhymes and deliberately mix up the words . . . “Sing a song of sixpence, pocket full of weasels . . .” “No, no,” she’d shout. “Full of rye.” “Pocket full of rye. Four and twenty blackbirds, baked in a samosa . . .” “Not samosa! Pie!” “Baked in a pie. When the pie was opened, the birds began to somersault . . .” “The birds began to sing!” “Oh wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before a rhinoceros?” “No, no, Mummy,” she would yell, “It’s a wrong song!” ’
But Captain Sahib’s eyes were already lowered to his paper.
‘You know what my mistake was?’ says the ghost, with an insolent smile. ‘It should have been you, Maya. It should have been you.’
With as much contempt as an immobile face can convey, I said, ‘You never had a chance with me.’
‘You were tempted. Admit it. What harm can it do now?’
‘I don’t admit it. You are a fantasist, you always were.’
‘Oh, but the way you used to look at me.’
‘Don’t delude yourself. You could never meet a woman at a party, could you, without wanting to sleep with her? You’d meet someone new and your eyes would crawl under her clothes.’
‘If you noticed, it was because you were jealous.’
‘I despised you.’
He laughs. ‘No. You despised yourself, because you wished it was you. You knew, didn’t you, what your friends were doing? They would tell you, and you’d think, Why isn’t it me? Why should they have all the excitement? You married to your dull rose-grower.’
‘You are an evil man.’
‘I am a dead man,’ he says. ‘And who’s to blame?’
‘You got yourself killed.’
‘Not exactly. I was lying on my bed. I was trying to sleep. The doorbell rang. The first thing I saw was the gun.’
‘I never liked you, but I never wanted you dead.’
‘Someone did. Think about that gun. It was brought to kill me. But in court, the lawyers claimed it was carried in self-defence. They said I was dangerous, that I kept a revolver under my bed. Now Maya-ji, where do you suppose they got that idea?’
‘I had nothing to do with the defence, you know that.’
‘There was no gun, never was. Whisky bottles, cigarette ends, letters, all these were found under my bed, but no revolver except the one that killed me.’
‘What has it got to do with me?’
‘You know where the idea of that gun came from.’
‘You are talking nonsense,’ I said.
‘You know I’m not. Think of Ambona. It all goes back to Ambona. Try to recall a certain day. July or August 1958 it would have been. About nine months before I was slaughtered.’
‘How am I supposed to remember?’ My husband had finished his egg and was wiping his mouth in that fastidious way he had, unaware that his mad wife was having an argument with a ghost.
‘You know the day I am talking about. The day of the terrific storm. The children could not go out to play. They asked for a story. You chose the wrong story.’
‘There’s no such thing.’
‘A story told to the wrong person at the wrong time. Why tell that story, Maya-ji, the agony of a woman who must lose her baby, to a woman who had just lost her baby?’
‘She asked for that story. I tried to dissuade her.’
‘And you had no power to refuse? Do you remember now? An afternoon dark as night, thunder rolling on the roof, ferocious rain. Next morning you found a large moth lying on the steps. It had been beaten to death by the heavy drops.’
‘I remember that.’
‘When you finished the story, your friend was crying. She asked if she might use the telephone in your room. She phoned me. Why did you interfere? Why not just leave us alone? You did not hear what I was saying to her. Did you assume I was as cruel as you? You know nothing of what I said! You just saw your friend in tears. So you prompted her, didn’t you? You put those words into her head. What was it she shouted at me? “It’s not unborn children but men like you who deserve to die”.’
‘But why,’ I asked, ‘why, you stupid, stupid man, did you have to sneer at her?’
‘What did I say? Do you recall?’
‘You said to her, “Darling, are you planning to kill me? Should I get a gun and keep it under my bed?” ’
‘Presto,’ says the ghost. ‘Please notice that the gun has just popped into existence. You see it now, don’t you, Maya? All your own work. Karma flashes like lightning from cause to effect. It lights the darkness and gives us glimpses of those most terrifying truths, the consequences of our own actions. Your temper got me killed. But you didn’t learn, did you? Because you did it again, to someone much crueller than me, and now you are paying for it.’
‘Have you seen this?’ says Captain Sahib, who has reached the item on page five. ‘Gandhi’s assassins are out in the world again.’
Karma is such bitter knowledge. No angel waits on the far side of death to slap a writ on me. I shall not be judged before the great white throne of Revelation, or have sentence passed on me in the court of Yama, or the many-pillared hall of Osiris. Karma is not reward or punishment in the next life. It’s much worse than that. It’s the knowledge here and now of what I have brought into being. The responsibility. And the guilt.
POTATO POTATO (LONDON, SEPTEMBER 1998)
Bhalu, tu salé bahut bhola hai, you’re such a fool, I told myself as I locked the bookshop early next morning and walked down to Lewes station. I had just sent a fax to a book dealer I knew in Bombay, asking him, as a huge personal favour to me, to go to the Blitz newspaper, if it still existed, and search in its archives for issues that covered the end of April 1959. I told him to look for any news of a murder. I did not know the name of the victim, only that he had possibly been known by the coy and unlikely title of Mister Love.
