Dorothy’s summer dress and hair are soaked. She combs her hair back with her fingers and tugs on her dress in an attempt to dry it. The heat and humidity is just too much, and she’s a bit unsteady on her feet, sometimes wandering a bit too close to the edge of the platform. She’s had one too many drinks, though she doesn’t define herself as drunk. A night out with the girls. A reprieve from her husband. She keeps wandering a little too close to the platform edge but manages to steer herself away, stumbling a bit, then pauses to fan herself with her hand but it offers little relief. She removes her cellphone from her pocketbook and places a call to her husband, stumbling forward and back as she presses the phone to her ear. She takes the phone away from her ear and looks at the screen with a puzzled expression. She’s not getting a signal. She drops the phone back into her bag and stumbles towards a young man who is standing at the rear of the platform, pacing and fanning himself with his hand, and occasionally peering into the tunnel for an arriving train. She pauses just a few feet away from him, then peers into the tunnel herself. She feels safer being close to a man at that time of the evening, for she doesn’t like taking the subway at that hour, but all the taxis were busy rescuing others from the sudden downpour. She eyes the young man, who repeatedly checks his watch and peers into the tunnel. He seems harmless enough, but you just never know, so she keeps a respectable distance, just in case.
“Been waiting long?” Dorothy asks, a bit of an accent evident in her slurred voice.
“There hasn’t been a train for nearly a half hour,” the young man says.
Dorothy observes the other soaked passengers standing at the edge of the platform, craning their necks to see if a train is coming. She paces the platform, watches the water cascade down through the street grate into the station and onto the tracks, the track-bed now a miniature underground river carrying bits of garbage in the current. She wonders if this was the reason for the delay. She also sees it as a strange kind of metaphor of her life. She can hear the rumble of thunder above, hear the rain on the sidewalk, and the squeals of young women on the street above as they scramble to get out of the rain. She wanders down the platform, still unsteady, looking for the timetable, and when she finds it, she discovers it isn’t working.
It’s hot, humid, and uncomfortable.
Most of those in the station huddle near the turnstile, soaked to the bone, and only a few of them had the sense to bring an umbrella, shaking off the rain onto the already wet platform. She peers down the track again. Still no sign of a train, no announcements, nothing. Just an ever-increasing cascade of water from the street above. She begins to question the choices in her life. What is she doing? Is this all she has to show for it?
She staggers back towards the rear of the platform, having a little difficulty walking in her high heels. She wants to board the train, if it ever arrives, on the last car since it will leave her more or less directly in front of the exit at her station. She looks into the tunnel again and there’s still no sign of a train. She removes her cellphone from her pocketbook again, tries to check the status on the MTA’s website, but she’s still unable to get a signal. She puts the phone away and looks into the tunnel again, as if by repeatedly looking for the train will make it arrive quicker.
She begins pacing again, but the heat and the humidity are starting to get to her. She wipes the sweat from her forehead and neck with the palm of her hand, tells herself once she gets home, she’s going to take a long, cold shower, turn on the air conditioner, and have a glass of wine. Hopefully Jacek is asleep. She’s in no mood to deal with him. He’s in one of his moods. He’s always in one of his moods.
The rain continues to cascade down onto the tracks. A rat scurries across the track-bed, leaping over the city’s new river, and disappears under the platform on the downtown side.
The young man peers into the tunnel, sees the distant headlights.
“Finally,” he says, giving Dorothy a thumbs up.
He takes two steps back but Dorothy remains near the platform edge, swaying on her feet. She shuts her eyes, tilts her head back, as if waiting for the water cascading down from the street to reach her, cool her off, submerge and drown her. The young man watches her, gets the feeling she’s going to tumble onto the track-bed. He isn’t sure but he thinks she’s crying, but it could just be the remnants of the rain trickling down her face. She must feel terrible — hot and drunk and just wanting to get home. He can hear the train now and she’s still a little too close to the edge of the platform. She doesn’t look in the direction of the oncoming train, but down into the track-bed, her eyes still shut, her body swaying to and fro, back and forth. She raises her head and watches the waterfall at the center of the trackbed again, her body pitching forward as the train speeds towards the station. She’s not going to move, that much the young man knows, so he races over to her and grabs her by the arm, pulls her back away from the platform edge just as the train speeds into the station, blaring its horn. Dorothy collapses into the young man’s arms and he holds her up, tries to get her on her feet. She’s passed out. The train comes to a stop and the doors open. He helps her onto the half-empty car, just to get out of the oppressive heat. The air conditioning feels good. He helps her sit down and leans her back against the seat, shakes her lightly by the shoulder.
“Are you all right?”
Dorothy’s eyes flicker open and she’s momentarily confused.
“You passed out,” he says. “Are you all right?”
She looks at the stranger sitting beside her, her eyes searching his face, still confused.
“You almost fell onto the tracks,” he says. “Thank God I was there. Another moment and…”
“I’m okay,” she says. “Just a little hot.”
“Have you been drinking?”
“A little,” she says, “but I’m not drunk. It’s the heat and the humidity. I don’t handle it well.”
“Just sit back,” the young man says. “Let the air conditioning cool you off.”
She rests her head on the back of the seat, shuts her eyes. He glances down at her hands. A wedding ring, a little too tight around her short, pudgy finger.
“Thank you,” she says, her eyes still closed.
“Don’t mention it,” he says. “What stop do you get off?”
“110th Street,” she says.
“Would you like me to take you home?”
“I’ll be all right, thank you.”
He just sits there and watches her, droplets of rain and sweat on her face, and a crooked rivulet creeping from the corner of her eye.
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
She nods, doesn’t say anything, wipes the sweat from her forehead with the palm of her hand.
“I think I should see you home,” he says.
“No, you don’t have to,” she whispers. “I’ll be all right.”
“I’d feel better if I did.”
She doesn’t say anything, drops her hands in her lap. She’s given up. It is only then he realises his hands are trembling.
. . . . . .
Jacek peers into the bedroom and sees Dorothy is still asleep. She was an utter mess when she came home last night, half out of her mind on pills and drink, babbling on about how she nearly fell into the subway tracks and how a young man saved her. The young man took her home, she said, but she didn’t get his name nor remember much about him. He had his doubts. After she took off her wet dress and collapsed on the bed, he went through her pocketbook and found the folded tin foil packet with only one pill in it. He thought he had gotten rid of them all, but she could have easily gotten them from one of her so-called friends. She hasn’t moved since falling asleep the night before and multiple times he had checked on her to make sure she was still breathing. This wouldn’t be the first time she tried something stupid. Almost fell onto the tracks, indeed.
He carefully closes the bedroom door and retrieves his cellphone from the kitchen table, sends a text message to Lisa, tells her he’ll meet her at their usual spot in a half hour. He then takes a quick shower, shaves, and dresses. He suspects Dorothy knows all about Lisa, hence her behavior last night. She probably told all her girlfriends about it, what a pig he is, how he treats her like dog shit, how cruel he is. He’s heard it all before. He takes his keys and peers one more time into the bedroom, watches for movement, and when Dorothy turns under the sheets, and is satisfied she’s still alive, he quietly closes the door.
It’s still overcast and there’s a misty rain in the air. The storm that came through last night was something else, like a monsoon. He wondered if Dorothy had got caught up in it. He was supposed to meet Lisa last night, but the sudden storm cancelled their plans. Now she’ll be waiting for him, and she’ll want to know what happened last night. His text message to her didn’t get into the details.
He has a moment where he wishes Dorothy would have succeeded. That would have solved all his problems once and for all. It would have set him free but thanks to that man, whoever he was, the ties that bind them remain. How easy it would have been. In some ways, he’d like to beat that man for saving her. Just one second difference, one moment where he had his head turned, or perhaps checked his cellphone for messages, or had gotten on the previous train, or decided to walk home instead of taking the subway, any one of those variables would have changed everything.
He lights a cigarette, takes a moment and looks back towards the direction of his apartment. He wonders if Dorothy is still asleep. He wonders how long it will be before she tries it again.
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Julian Gallo is the author of Existential Labyrinths, Last Tondero in Paris, The Penguin and The Bird and other novels. His short fiction has appeared in The Sultan’s Seal (Cairo), Exit Strata, Budget Press Review, Indie Ink, Short Fiction UK, P.S. I Love You, The Dope Fiend Daily, The Rye Whiskey Review, Angles, and Verdad.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Why did I resent Khaira? Rivalry among equals makes sense, but he was just a poor, blind beggar. The first thing that got under my skin was his cry. “Seeing ones! Vision is indeed a blessing! Show sympathy for a blind man’s daughters! In the name of your eyes! In the name of your daughters! O seeing ones!” My wife glances at her purse and then the cash she needs to pay the school fees of our sons, daughters and granddaughters. She always keeps ten rupees for Khaira separately. Ten rupees is a decent amount, even in these days of sky-rocketing costs. And god forbid if one of our children is unwell! Fortune smiles on beggars then.
Our daughter’s daughter was unwell, and we were both worried. “Khair Din, listen carefully!” my wife entreated him. She handed him a five hundred rupee note with an appeal: “You have to pray for my grand-daughter Khaireya,” as if Khaira were a specialist.
“Lady! God will shower you with blessings as vast as your generous heart!” he exclaimed.
I couldn’t stay quiet. “For heaven’s sake, stop bribing god!”
My wife reacted angrily to my words. “None of that now! The poor have a right to a portion of our earnings.”
“Sweetheart, I didn’t mean it that way. How about a kind glance my way too once in a while!” I said to appease her.
Truth be told, a wall of pious rituals grows between a husband and wife as they get older. Often things end in divorce. It matters little whether the man genuinely loves her or only pretends to do so. Once he is old, the woman makes sure he gets the treatment he deserves. But we were discussing Khaira. Since he irritated the hell out of me, I managed to discover his secret.
I followed his every move as if he were my enemy.
“I have a feeling he is not blind,” I said one day.
“Have some fear of God! He’s been frequenting this neighbourhood for five years,” my wife replied.
“Well, I have a suspicion,” I continued.
“Let’s see you trek through two neighbourhoods in the punishing afternoon heat,” she retorted. “His little girl is the one who suffers in the heat. He is built like a wrestler. Two of me could hide inside him!” I said.
As they say, great discoveries are often right around the corner. I spotted Khaira hopping over a drainage ditch during the rainy season. I announced my findings once I was home. “The scoundrel has been exposed! He is not blind!”
“It must be time to get your eyes tested! You are already hard of hearing. If you could tell the difference between a blind and a sighted person, Rahma would not be our son-in-law today.”
Once again, my wife changed the direction of the conversation. But I remained on the lookout for the enemy. The next day I dragged him inside. As soon as I produced a dagger, Khaira begged for mercy. “Forgive this miserable person. It is his livelihood. I don’t know how to drive or cook for a living. I would have become a servant at a young age if I did. No one takes to begging because he wants to.”
He attempted various explanations. I threatened to turn him in to the police at first, but then decided to present him at my wife’s court. “Appear before the Chaudhrani and confess,” I ordered. I felt vindicated.
But my wife left his fate to Allah. “He will answer to Allah for his deeds. And we will answer for ours,” she declared.
The story did not end here. Khaira left our neighbourhood only to take up begging in the streets of Garden Town. I entertained the thought of stopping the car one day and saying hello. Instead, I ended up forgiving him like my wife had.
*
An unplanned, ramshackle neighbourhood lay along the back of ours. It boasted a tiny market. Late one night, I went to buy cigarettes and Khaira emerged from one of the doorways, all smiles. He seemed like another person. His clothes were spic and span and he held a cigarette between his lips.
“Do you know that man?” I asked Hayata, the cigarette vendor, as I gestured towards the figure walking away from us.
“That is Khaira, the gambler, Chaudhry Saheb,” he replied.
“Gambler?” That persona of his was completely new to me.
“Why else would he hang out with Chabba Butt? To say his prayers?” Hayata asked with a laugh.
My wife would consider what happened next beneath us, but the story took a strange new turn. I didn’t know Chabba Butt personally, but he was a known goon of the area. I went up to him early one morning and asked, “Do you know someone named Khair Din?”
He mistook me for a police officer given how well-dressed I was. “Why the investigation, officer?” he asked.
“Butt Saheb, I am no police officer, just an oppressed citizen. He tricked me out of a large sum of money over the years,” I replied.
“Sir, he is not a behrupiya[1],” Butt went on, “but he is a wonderful actor. He can act deaf, blind, just about anything, it is none of our business. When it comes to gambling, he often loses.”
“Butt Saheb, I too play poker,” I shared. “If I happen to pay you a visit, you won’t have me thrown out would you?”
He tried to dissuade me. “Sir, you belong with your kind at the clubs. Only kanjars and dregs visit this place.”
“Tell me, is this Khaira from the kanjar caste?” I asked.
“No sir, he is a Rajput. He does visit the brothels often though.”
“Ah, he belongs to my fraternity then . . . I didn’t ask out of any enmity . . . it’s just that he is an interesting fellow. He is a virtuoso, as if he were a behrupiya. Looking at him now, who would guess that he roams the next neighbourhood dressed as a beggar?”
My introduction to Chabba came about thanks to my quest for Khaira. Chabba seemed to be a goon from the bygone days, not the current brand connected with the land mafia or arms smugglers. He was a gambler and gamblers need their den. I was not one of them, but who doesn’t enjoy some wagering and betting now and then. Add the lure of money and the habit can turn deadly. I avoided the club scene. Old age seemed to usher in a kind of boredom. Upscale neighbourhoods like Gulberg and Cantonment reminded me of a graveyard. What is an old man like me supposed to do if he is forbidden alcohol and a second marriage. The tiny market reminded me of the old city. Poverty bothers those who lack spirit, otherwise, the company of the poor is superior to that of the rich. It offers a refuge for those who have endured a beating, a helping hand when one is in a fix. I visited a couple of times and overcame my self-consciousness. The gamblers also shed their discomfort. “Come, respected elder! What do you make of the situation? Will Nawaz Sharif win the election?” What other news was there to mull over . . .The short rounds of poker, rummy and blackjack, with small bets would continue till evening. I would get up and head home once the gambling really gathered steam.
In that company, Khaira was no blind man. He was a loud and loquacious character. Still, he showed some diffidence around me. In any case, he had the strange habit of avoiding eye-contact. Instead of looking at one directly, he would focus on the ground or high above one’s head. His gaze left me feeling strangely uneasy.
Then came the calamity that can finish off an old man. My wife caught me red-handed with Kulsoom. Luckily, I survived. Nothing happened. My class status shielded me. I remained deeply affected. Khaira somehow sensed it. I opened up to him. “I have been exposed. I am very worried!”
“Choose a different neighbourhood!” he suggested mirthfully. “That is a man’s basic nature. He is a deceitful being. There is no choice but to be a blind behrupiya. Now ask yourself: Is Khaira the blind one or me?”
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“Khaira, the Blind” is a translation of the Punjabi story Khaira Annha. It is from Nadir Ali’s short story collection titled Kahani Paraga , published by Suchet Kitab Ghar in 2004 in Lahore. Photo provided by Amna Ali.
[1] A professional pretender who earns money by entertaining people, especially at weddings. Once widespread in South Asia, this profession is now in decline.
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Nadir Ali (1936-2020) was a Punjabi poet and short story writer. In 2006, he was awarded the Waris Shah Award for his collection Kahani Praga. Coming late to writing, particularly fiction, Nadir Ali is credited with spearheading a unique style, blurring the boundaries between significant and petty, artistic and ordinary, primarily due to his preference for and command over the chaste central dialect understood by the majority of Punjabi speakers. He is also noted for writing and speaking about his experiences as an army officer posted in East Pakistan at the height of the 1971 war.
Amna Ali is Nadir Ali’s daughter. She translated a selection of Nadir Ali’s short stories into English in collaboration with Moazzam Sheikh. The translations were published by Weavers Press in USA in a book titled Hero and Other Stories in 2022. She is a librarian and lives in San Francisco with her husband and two sons.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Gandhi (1869-1948)The victims of the 1946 riots in Calcutta (now Kolkata)
The sun went down.
One after another the lamp posts in the winding lane sprung to life. Their brilliance was dimmed by the smoke from the homely clay oven, sigri. The darkening sky above got dotted by a glittering star or two. And that is when Ratan’s feet became unruly like a wild steed. Donning a mulmulkurta he got ready to go out for the evening.
Jasoda had entered the room to pick up something. She came to an abrupt halt.
“Off?” she asked, her voice laced with sarcasm. “Can’t stay put at home any longer, can you?”
Solemnly Ratan nodded his head. “Yes, just need to take a round.”
Jasoda knitted her brow, “Just take a round? Chhee! Don’t do that. Pour some down your throat too, okay?”
“Jasoda!”
“Why? Am I saying something wrong, haan[1]? Something not quite done?”
Ratan did not utter a word in reply. He only glared at Jasoda for a second before walking out in rapid steps.
He didn’t stop until he reached Jatin’s house. His friend Jatin who sells fish every morning and evening. He has no family save his aged mother – he had married but his wife died years ago, and he made no attempt to have another after that.
They all gather in his house – Haaru, Potla, Jaga, Radhu and a few others. Since most of them are in the business of selling fish or meat, they have cash in their pockets. They easily turn uproarious as mutton chops and prawn cutlets stream in to enhance the pleasure of downing country liquor.
In a room foggy with fumes of cigarette, they settle down to a few games of card. They play as long as they feel like; when they don’t want to, they storm the cells of Gendi or Bunchi in the dark of the night. Or, when they are told to, they dive into the alleys of the Muslim neighbourhood and toss a few hand grenades.
Yes, the responsibility to curb the riot – a euphemism for hunting down Muslims – has suddenly come to rest on their able shoulders. They didn’t anticipate or expect it to, but it did. All of a sudden the wealthies of their end of the city started to pamper them. They raised funds through donations, to arm Ratan and his friends with small weapons so that they could protect the prestige of the Hindus, and of the womenfolk.
The way things were going, this was bound to happen. They had outdone everyone in severing head from the torso of walking talking men.
*
They were all there. Haaru, Potla, Jaga, Radhu – all of them had showed up. Ratan lent the final touch.
“Come in saala[2], come!” Jatin affectionately welcomed him.
Laughter and banter followed.
There was a sudden lull in the spate of riots that had been on sporadically for a year since the Direct Action Day, and had got a spurt when the country won its freedom on 15th August. But God knows what went wrong? All of a sudden the darkness of hatred started to melt, and the two warring units that had been at each other’s throats, suddenly saw themselves in the mirror: they embraced each other in brotherhood.
Since that day their ‘work’ had gone down. Further calm has descended since Gandhiji appeared in the city. He is camping in Beliaghata. He has been saying that he will not go anywhere until there is peace. Why, he has even staked his life! He will give up his life if he has to, to stop the riots! That is why Ratan and his company are spending more hours in downing liquor and visiting the sluts in the forbidden quarters, singing in their hoarse voice and walking with unsteady steps.
The chops and cutlets from Nitai’s shop were hot off the oven. The air thickened with the smell of blended oil. And their eyes sparkled with the spirit.
“Abey Jatin, get the bottles out…” Ratan urged.
“Haan bey,” Jatin was most willing to oblige.
A bitter-sharp smell spread through the room. The earthen cups filled to the brim were emptied in no time. The world before their eyes started dancing like a flame. Nasha… stupor.
“Bring out one more bottle, saala…” Ratan nudged Jatin.
“Haan bey, I will…”
“Arre call for more chops and cutlets.”
“O-K-K Sa-a-la…”
Jaga suddenly sprung to his feet. “I’m off, bye…”
“Where to?” Jatin wanted to know.
“To Bimli’s…he-he-he…”
“Get back to your chair” – Jatin barked at him. “We will all go in a group.”
Jaga wasn’t too pleased, but he sat down again. “Okay baba, that’s what we will do. Meanwhile let me have a bite of the cutlets…”
The room was filled with the odour of country liquor and smoke. Reddened eyes and numbed responses. Tidbits dropped on the floor, empty bottles and used cups and dishes piled up. Vegetable salad and sauces dripped to stain their clothes. None of them cared to wash their hands, silently they went on downing the liquid fire. Periodically they pulled their faces and uttered satisfaction, “Aah!”
“Hear that?” Ratan turned to gaze at Jatin.
“What?”
“All of you here can hear this?”
Potla shook his head, “How can we hear if you don’t spit it out, saala…”
Ratan crinkled his face, “This Gendo[3] of yours has thrown a spanner in the wheel, re…”
A gentle murmur coursed through the room. Almost as if a gentle breeze had rustled dry leaves.
Gandhi – yes, Gandhi! Superannuated Gandhi, old rascal Gandhi. This Gendo chap is a fraud. He is in cahoots with the Muslims, enemy of the Hindus, foe of the Bengalis…
“Yes, he has thrown us off-gear,” Jatin spoke through gritted teeth. “But for how long can he stymie us? He can’t get away with his bujruki, his hoax …”
Jaga spoke in a tired voice, “I just want to see Bimli for a while…”
“Sit, you owl!”
“Whatever you may say,” Haru spoke in a soft voice, “Gandhiji is a good soul, hanh?”
“Good soul?” Ratan roared out a nasty abuse, “My foot! All of us can sing bhajans and paeans to Ram if we had a life of comfort like him, buddy! And this guy alone is responsible for the Muslims daring to go so far as to demand a separate land. But this can’t go on! Now we have gained Independence. This is Hindustan – we will put an end to the last Muslim standing here!”
“Right! Right you are!!” they chorused in their boozy voice.
“Riot! We must hack every invader, every single Yavan!”
“Listen!” Jatin ran his eyes over them, “What Ratan is saying is hundred percent correct. Gendo can’t have a run of the state. No. D’you know what that chap is up to now? He’s saying he will bring back every single Muslim and rehabilitate them in the bustee[6]at Beliaghata. Why, I ask you dear, why couldn’t you say this to our people? What did you, all told, achieve in Noakhali?”
Ratan nodded in agreement and let out a mouthful of smoke. “No, such humbug will no longer work here. Enough. The guy wants to unite Ishwar and Allah[7]! As if you can do that at will!”
“Shut up bey!” Jatin cackled.
“Tomorrow. We will rake it up tomorrow itself. The Babus had sent for me today – everything is fixed.”
“All fixed?” Ratan’s face brightened at this, “Good. I’m relieved.”
“Oh, good. Come on, baba Jatin…” Haru called out, “bring out another bottle Jatin!”
“Die, you pests!” Jaga stood up and spoke in excitement, “None of you are sober. I’m off to Bimli’s.”
“Saala can’t wait to get there,” Ratan chuckled. “Arre baba, we’ll all go with you…” They all got to their unsteady feet.
*
Ratan couldn’t contain his glee. As he strode forward he kept thinking, “So there’ll be riots again – good!”
The lull in the violence these past few days was most irritating. He simply couldn’t take it anymore. He had tasted blood – and that is a dangerous addiction. For years, he had been a butcher and beheaded goats and lambs. But the thrill of killing a man, a live human being, was something else.
The first day he stabbed a man he understood that this was the king of highs. Day after day, he had sought out Musalmaans and delighted in putting the knife into them – and now it had spread through his veins. Now he felt out of depth on the days when he did not snuff out a life. He felt rather unwell.
He had a faint recollection of one particular afternoon.
He was sipping tea in Bipin’s tea stall.
All of a sudden some boys dragged in a young Muslim fellow. They told Ratan, “Now you have to finish the job Dada[9]. We are exhausted.”
Ratan grinned, “What’s so tough, idiots?”
“You’re mistaken bhai[10]…” the young man broke into tears. “I’m a Hindu!”
“Really?” Ratan laughed uproariously. “I’ll check that out once I’ve finished with you.”
The youth was dragged to a dark end of the lane and done with. After the job was over, a curiosity gnawed Ratan. He was absolutely certain that the kid had claimed to be a Hindu out of sheer fear. Still… He bared the body and checked the genitals of the naked corpse. “Shhuh, I got fooled!! This guy was actually a Hindu…”
They were outside Bimli’s door. There was no one else in the gully but them. The entire city was holding its breath, too scared to breathe in the riot-torn air. And then, it was late in the night. The gaslight was casting eerie shadows. Silence ruled.
*
Jatin’s words came true. The riots broke out the very next morning. And there was severe rioting. But this time around it was the Hindus who were aggressive, not the Muslims. The bombs and sten guns resounded across the sky and the air was rife with fear.
Ratan finished one round and returned home. Aah ! He felt somewhat relieved today.
But Jasoda was furious and would not relent. “So! You do have to come home to Jasoda, yeah? So liquor and sluts are not your cup of tea round the clock!”
“Jasoda!”
“But why are you losing your cool? I’ll get it for you – after all, you have been doing so much work! Boozing… whoring… killing…”
“Jasoda I’ll knock your head off!”
“Don’t I know that?” Jasoda’s fiery eyes bored through him, “The day you will fail to find a human to stab, you’ll twist your knife into me to satisfy your thirst for blood…”
Jasoda walked out of the room.
After a while she sent a khullar[11] of tea through her little boy but she herself stayed away.
Ratan was displeased. He spent the rest of the afternoon sleeping. Let the others take the responsibility to keep the fire aflame; now that it has been lit again, it will spread on its own steam.
That’s exactly what happened. By nightfall the riots took a sinister turn. Tension gripped the air of the city, dread filled the dark of the eyes. There was hardly any footfall in the streets.
*
When they met in the evening, Jatin said, “See how easy it was to rekindle the flame! But…”
“But?”
“It seems that Gendo chap is fasting since morning.”
“Fasting! Really?”
“Yes. Crazy, this man is. He will fast unto death, he won’t eat a morsel until the riots stop, he has said.”
“Arre let him!” Ratan hissed. “Let the oldie die. This is how he has been pampering the Musalmaans. Forget him – he should die!”
“Right you are,” Jatin nodded in agreement, “let him die. You come with me, there’s work to be done.”
A while later the sky lit up with the blaze of a burning slum. The fire brigade rushed to the spot with sirens blaring. The city cowered, trembled with fear, as the sound of bombs rent the air every now and then.
Coming home, Ratan was again subjected to the tongue lash of Jasoda. What is this vixen, a virago? No fear in her soul!
“So you’ll kill him? You will kill Gandhiji?”
“And what if I kill him?”
“What if you kill him! Are you a human being? You’ll kill a sage like him? You’ll rot in hell if you do that, understand? You’ll burn in hellfire…”
“Piss off! Just shut up and go. Get lost — ”
“Chhee! What are you, a man?”
“Jasoda!”
“What? You’ll kill me too? Go ahead, do that!”
But what good was silencing Jasoda? Ratan simply couldn’t sleep that night.
That Gandhi has gone off food?! What stuff is the man made of? If I kill two men, you’ll fast yourself unto death? What a dissembler. But otherwise the man has done so much! That the country has gained independence – it is largely due to this man, they say. So what? Why must he pamper the Muslims to this extent? If he’s really so bothered, why doesn’t he go fast to stop the riots in Punjab? Humbug. Let him rot.
*
The same story repeated itself the next day. The sacrificial fire kept devouring human flesh.
“What a hassle,” Jatin grumbled. “This Gendo simply won’t eat a bite, I hear! He’ll kick the bucket day after if not tomorrow.”
“All this is willed by Goddess Kali, d’you realise Jattye?” Ratan added with a wave of his hand, “It’s best he shuffles off his mortal coil and drops dead.”
Stray incidents filled the day. Then it started to pour. They couldn’t do very much after that. When the rain stopped, Ratan stepped out to stretch his legs. He noticed that people were gathering here and there, reading newspapers, discussing something in a grave voice. Gandhiji, the name, kept recurring. They all looked worried, sounded concerned, crestfallen.
All his countrymen genuinely worshipped Gandhi. He has actually done a lot – gone to great length to gain independence for the people. Not just the Lord Saheb, even the King of the British rulers held him in deference!
Suddenly Ratan hastened his pace. Why not go upto Beliaghata and take a look at Gandhi? To this day he had not set his eyes on this man, what was the harm in sizing him up? Ratan was not enamoured of Gandhi, he didn’t care two hoots whether he lived or died. Still, a peek at the man would do no harm. All said and done, he’d made a name for himself, perhaps even a place in history.
Ratan was overcome by a strange emotion. Inscrutable. Without much thinking he showed up in Beliaghata for the evening prayers. There was a large crowd waiting outside the house. He nudged and pushed to wend his way and find a footing in the front row. After a long wait he got to see Gandhiji.
A short statured, dark complexioned ageing man with the radiance of a child on his face. Bare bodied, Khadi-clad, he had a meditative calm about him. So this was the magnanimous Gandhiji!
A tremor passed through Ratan. It was as if he had suddenly come face to face with a morning sun. As if he was standing on the shore of the Pacific Ocean, as deep as its boundless expanse.
In a flash something happened deep within Ratan. Everything turned topsy turvy as if shaken by an earthquake high on the Richter scale. He realised he had finally encountered a magnificent personality. One who would not bow his head to anything unjust or immoral. One who would not daunted by guns and bullets.
As he looked on, Ratan turned misty eyed. Who said Gandhi was a pygmy? To Ratan he seemed like the Himalayas piercing the sky. Ratan trembled, he panicked, he fled.
All kinds of thoughts beset Ratan and he became restless. He headed straight for Jatin’s house. He felt like settling down with bottles of the fiery stuff. As he felt the liquid sear down his throat, the daze cleared somewhat.
“Know what Jattye?” he tried to draw his friend’s attention.
“Seems a sadhu, right? Yes, the fellow has actually done a lot for the country…”
“That’s what I hear. So many times he has been incarcerated and been to the jail. So much suffering he has put up with…”
“But that one failing! He has spoilt all his good actions by pampering and mollycoddling the Muslims, over-indulging them…”
“You have hit the nail on its head!”
One by one the others joined them. In no time the place was abuzz with food from Bipin’s Stall and bottles of country liquor. Downing the liquid in rapid succession they were quite a boisterous crowd.
“Follow me, Ratnya?” Jatin slurred, “this…”
“Unh?”
“Gendo is fasting, let him. He won’t kick the bucket in a day or two, will he? Old bones are sturdy – he’ll last. Meanwhile, in two days we’ll clear out all the ragheads, won’t we?”
“Yes Jatye, spot on…”
“Here, some more… f-o-r youuu…”
“Yeah… g-i-v-e mee…”
Ratan could not walk straight when he reached home.
“Why?” Jaosoda came at him like a bull at a gate, “Why are you back here? Was there no space for you in Chandravali’s love nest?”
“Shut your trap Jasoda!”
“The frigging bastard won’t let me be in peace.. Maa-go!”
Ratan flopped in his bed and murmured, “Q-u-i-e-t Jasoda! Shut up and keep quiet bhai…”
“Bhai! Bro? Shame upon you, no-good burnt-face monkey! You see a brother in me?”
Jasoda kept on muttering long after Ratan had started snoring.
*
Next morning the rioting picked up in momentum.
Ratan and his chums returned to action big time, complete with sten guns. From the rooftops, on the streets, wherever they were, they kept firing towards the Muslim shanties. After almost three hours there was a lull in the firing. The police and military forces had arrived and by afternoon things were quiet again.
Vans with loudspeakers were blaring that, unless the riots came to a stop, Gandhiji would cease to be. He would end his life.
The peaceniks took out a procession. The violence started to wane.
“That was quite a blast, wasn’t it Ratnya?” Jatin was smiling ear to ear when they met in the evening.
Ratan simply nodded.
Jaga returned from the paan[14] shop with a fresh stock of bidis[15]. “Folks have you heard this? Gendo is about to snuff out!”
“Who said that?” Ratan was startled.
“The newspapers have headlined, it seems, that Gendo has refused to relent in his fasting because there’s no let-up in the riots.”
“Ohh!”
“Arre that’s bullshit!” Jatin reacted. “Two more days of action at this level and all the Mullas will be shown their place.”
“Hunh!” Ratan nodded unmindfully, “but Gandhi is in such a poor shape, he’ll conk out, they’re saying…”
“Arre forget it! Rumour – that’s all it is. Come, let’s have a toast.”
“Well then, let’s go.”
*
Ratan joined Jatin to open a liquor bottle long before sunset. The tumult in the morning had left him exhausted. A few drops of hard core liquor might just be the tonic. But Gandhiji? There’s something about him… a halo. He had touched the heart of thirty crore men and women. Ardently they cried out, “Mahatma Gandhi ki jai [16]!” All-pervading emperors and powerful lords had not succeeded in intimidating him. Mahatma Gandhi!
At this point Madhu ran up to them. “Hey guys, come fast! I’ve cornered one of them…”
“What?!”
“Bastard!”
Suddenly the thirst for blood got the better of him. Sitting bolt upright Ratan said, “Come on Jattye.”
The three of them strode forward. Jaga, Haru and Potla were waiting round the corner, a middle-aged Muslim in their grip. They’d got the better of the man who was walking down the street lost in thought.
“Please let go of me bhai !” the man pleaded.
“Let go of you?” Jaga laughed out loud, “Why? Are you my wife’s brother, saala? Does your sister sleep with me?”
In silence Ratan went up to the man and grabbed him by his hand. Agitation tinted the blood that was coursing through his body. Blood! Unless he spilled blood his head might burst!
“Who’ll twist the knife in – you?” Jatin asked. Ratan nodded, “Yes.”
“How many will this be in your count of heads?”
“Maybe a score and half…”
“Well then, go on. Get over with it.”
“You’ll kill me?” The man wailed out, “Please let go of me baba – I implore you! Believe me, I have a son at home who is critically ill – I came out only to buy some medicine for him…”
“Shut up!”
Just then a voice floated across from a loudspeaker being played from a van: “Gandhiji is in a critical condition…”
Ratan pricked up his ears. Jatin looked towards the van, “Hey, what are they saying?”
“Gandhiji’s priceless life is in your hands today…” the voice was faint but the words were clear. “If you don’t stop killing, Gandhiji will not return to life. Stop now – and bring Gandhiji back to life…”
The voice receded in the distance.
“Go on, finish the job at hand Ratnya,” Jaga spoke, “or leave it to me.”
Ratan looked at the man.
Instantly the man smiled. “You’re determined to kill me, Baba?”
“Abey why are you showing your teeth?” Potla rudely demanded.
“Kill me,” the man said. “But don’t forget, killing me means stabbing Gandhiji.”
“Shut up!” Jaga roared, “not a word more…”
Still the man went on, “Listen to me Baba, now I’m not speaking for myself. Don’t kill me – let Gandhiji live!”
“Enough! Don’t want to hear the devil quote scriptures – hold your tongue.”
“Kick the rascal!”
“Go for it Ratnya!”
‘What’s holding you Ratnya??’
“Go go go…”
Unexpectedly Ratan turned around. He stood in front of the Muslim guy and said in a determined voice, “No.”
“Meaning?!” Jatin was stupefied, “What’re you saying Ratnya?”
“You heard me right Jatye — I’ll let this man walk.”
“Nope.”
“Yes, I’ll let this fella go Jatye. If you try to stop me, you’ll have to fell me first.”
All the others moved back a few steps.
“Have you gone out of your mind ?!” Jatin couldn’t make head or tail of it. “What’s the matter, I say?”
Ratan didn’t reply. Instead he addressed the man, “Come Mian[17], let me take you to the high road.”
The two of them took a few steps forward.
“Bah ! Won’t you even tell us why you’re letting him off? Hey Ratnya?”
“Ratnya! Hey bugger!”
Without a pause in his walk Ratan said, “Don’t call out to me.”
After escorting the fellow to the safety of the main street Ratan headed home.
*
Soon the night set in. The curfew hour started. The roads emptied out. From the lane they could make out that the military trucks and police vans were whizzing around the city. Some light escaped the windows of neighbouring houses. A handful of faces peeped out now and then. Swiftly, a dopey silence engulfed the habitat. The city seemed to be drained of vigour. The yellow gaslights on barren roads imparted a ghostlike ambience. The night deepened.
Jasoda noticed the worry lines on her husband’s visage and frequented her rounds of the room.
Out of the blue she even asked him, “What’s the matter with you, go[18]?”
“What? Nothing!” Ratan responded.
“Today you didn’t down bottles of liquor. Such good fortune!” She grinned at him, then wondered, “Why, you’re not even angry!”
“Hunh !”
“Feeling unwell, are you? So you’re missing your Chandravali Brigade! Care for a cup of tea?”
“Get it.”
Jasoda left to get the tea. Today Ratan was happy to see Jasoda.
Amazing! Something was the matter with him surely. He just could not bring himself to stab the man! One man’s life is so precious? People were correct about him. They worry for him, to protect him. To save his life, they appeal to all and sundry, even to strangers!
Yesterday he had visited that One Man. Short of height, dark of complexion, an octogenarian with a halo about him. A man like the Ocean, like the Himalayas, like the Sun. Boundless his sacrifice; immense his patience, unending his hope. Forgiveness, compassion, truth, love, ahimsa [19]– he defined all these virtues.
Magician, he was! He had crazed thirty crore men and women who chanted in unison ‘Gandhiji Ki Jai! Victory for Gandhiji!’ He has made them fearless, and independent. Yesterday he saw his Ram with his own eyes. It was all rubbish, he was no one’s enemy. He was ajatshatru, his enemy had yet to be born. Everyone in the country was his child, his progeny. He did not punish one for the failings of another. The punishment due to everyone he placed on his own head – a crown of thorn.
The night deepened and darkened.
Lying in his bed Ratan started to leaf through the album of his life. Alcohol, meat, women, neglect of a wife like Jasoda, butchery, rioting and killing more than a score of lives… And that enlightened Old Man? He had won the country, the world, in the brief bracket of a lifetime.
The night rolled on, towards sunrise.
At daybreak Ratan rose from his bed. He searched through his house and pulled out every piece of hand grenade, bullets, knife, and tied them into a bundle. Jasoda was still not up. Ratan cast a silent look at her and stepped out of the house.
The sky had not yet lit up, but the curfew hours were over. A handful of souls had stirred out on the streets here and there. A few cars had set out for some destination.
Ratan took full strides eastward. That’s the direction from which a red sun would rise. But Ratan was not headed towards that sun. He was thinking only of the sun fasting in a dilapidated house in Beliaghata. Ratan would go to him and lay down the bundle of his sins at his feet and pray to him, “Oh sun! Please end the fasting soul within me and light up the inner soul so far deprived of light…”
Nabendu Ghosh’s (1917-2007) oeuvre of work includes thirty novels and fifteen collections of short stories. He was a renowned scriptwriter and director. He penned cinematic classics such as Devdas, Bandini, Sujata, Parineeta, Majhli Didi and Abhimaan. And, as part of a team of iconic film directors and actors, he was instrumental in shaping an entire age of Indian cinema. He was the recipient of numerous literary and film awards, including the Bankim Puraskar, the Bibhuti Bhushan Sahitya Arghya, the Filmfare Best Screenplay Award and the National Film Award for Best First Film of a Director.
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Ratnottama Sengupta, formerly Arts Editor of The Times of India, teaches mass communication and film appreciation, curates film festivals and art exhibitions, and translates and write books. She has been a member of CBFC, served on the National Film Awards jury and has herself won a National Award.
A moss-grown tree stump. Photo courtesy: PG Thomas
Ouseph’s gloom was accentuated by the rustling of dry leaves in the yard of his ancestral home. It was twilight and a movement near his feet made him glance down. He froze as he saw a little chameleon, climb up onto his designer shoe. It climbed up to his right toe, and tilting its head, looked at Ouseph with one bulging eye. Ouseph kicked wildly to dislodge the creature, and panting with fright, he found his gloom had been replaced by a series of shivers down his body.
“What am I doing here?” he wondered. He had last visited his ancestral house more than ten years ago, dragged there from Bombay by his father, who was keen on his child connecting with his roots. As a young boy, he had detested the countryside and his relatives; with their rustic stories and weird humour. Now a quirk of fate and the unexpected death of his bachelor uncle, had found the ancestral property bequeathed to him.
Ouseph lived ensconced in his techie world in Bangalore, where he spent his free time playing music and reading from his surprisingly large collection of books. His inheritance had come to him with the jarring notes of a thunderclap. But his now widowed mother had been firm, “Just go down, see the place and complete the legal formalities to make the property yours. Your father was attached to it and its worth quite a lot. Be practical and we can decide what to do with it later.”
He had travelled down from Bangalore to reach the remote countryside in Kerala at dusk. Pulling himself together from the reptilian shock, he knocked on the thick wooden weather beaten front door of his ancestral home. The door had creaked open into a dimly lit room, to reveal servants seemingly as old as the house itself. They had expected their new master to be young, but their incredulity at the sight of this gangly young man with tousled hair showed in their eyes. One obligingly took his suitcase from his hands but was surprised when he refused to part with his knapsack containing his laptop. He had been led to a musty smelling room, which did nothing to improve his mood.
The next morning, the sound of a broom swishing over the yard floor woke him up. Yawning and scratching his head, he stumbled into the smoky kitchen. A wood fire was burning, and Mariamma the elderly cook gave him a kind smile, and asked if he would like tea. With mug in hand, he stepped out of the house into the still misty morning. He wandered around the compound and looked anew at his inheritance. Noises unfamiliar to a city dweller assaulted his ears. The cow’s lowing seemed like a long drawn complaint, amidst which a rooster crowed, only for it to be picked up and repeated by another some distance away.
A sudden flurry of flapping wings drew his attention to the roof. He saw a startled covey of pigeons rise from the terracotta tiled roof. His eye then caught a single short piece of wire, suspended from a rafter under the eaves of the roof. He wondered if it was the remnant of an aerial wire from the bygone days of the wireless radio. He paused as he noticed a shabby looking ball attached to the end of the wire.
“It’s a sunbird’s nest,” whispered a voice from behind. He turned to see a sweeper women looking at him with laughing eyes.
“Oh!” was all Ouseph could muster. But as he gazed up again, he was rewarded by the sight of a little purple bird with a curved beak pop out of the opening in the nest. It sat there an instant; shimmering in the morning sunlight, and then with a whirr of its wings it flew away. “Oh!” said he again.
The sweeper smiled and said, “This pair has been nesting here for years, and has raised so many chicks in it.”
“Oh.”
He had wrangled leave from his software company on the condition of continuing to work online. But he now felt so befuddled with his bizarre inheritance in the countryside. He struggled to handle its finances and could not figure out how the place worked. “I might as well have landed on Mars,” he grumbled.
Rummaging through a list of relatives, Ouseph reached his cousin Anish, who readily offered to introduce him to his lawyer. The lawyer, a frail elderly man with an old world charm in his manners, took the proffered will and asked, “You’re Jacob’s son, aren’t you?”
“You knew my father?”
The lawyer’s eyes twinkled, and he said, “Your father and I were schoolmates here.”
This little exchange was inexplicably comforting to Ouseph. The lawyer asked for two days time to offer his legal opinion. Anish and Ouseph walked back along the narrow country road. Noting Ouseph’s anxiety, Anish said, “We’re glad you are here and the property has come to you.” They walked on under the canopy of trees over the road; Ouseph in his designer clothes and Anish in his home tailored short sleeved shirt and a cotton dhoti (a wrap-around lower garment).
They parted at the gate to Ouseph’s place. As Ouseph walked through the tree shrouded compound to the house, his phone rang. It was his mother from Bombay.
“Yes Amma, I met the lawyer. It looks like it will take a few days.”
A lunch of steaming rice, a coconut milk based chicken curry and a clutter of home grown vegetables done, Ouseph wandered out into the compound. He found a quiet place under the wood apple tree. The tall tree threw a filigreed crown of gnarled branches and tiny leaves against the blue sky. Ouseph sat down on a moss covered uprooted tree stump. The floor was thick with layers of shed leaves. Its soft cushiony feel reminded him of his boss’s carpeted office in Bangalore. But here the similarity ended. The cry of cicadas filled this place, and a crow pheasant’s ‘oopoopoop’ sounded through the thick greenery. He let the events of the past few days run through his mind.
The days following were consumed by visits to sleepy government offices. His cousin guided the process and taught Ouseph the art of greasing the wheels of the government machinery. But strangely, Ouseph found himself looking forward to returning to his ancestral house, and to his evening walks through the quiet of the verdant house compound. He did attend to his work online, but his metabolism seemed to have synchronised itself to the pulse of this ancient house.
For Mariamma the cook, with her plump face and grey streaked hair, her new geek master had roused all her latent mothering instincts. But she now observed him with concern. Ever pragmatic, she decided he needed tethering, and began by suggesting he visit his neighbours.
The first was the Ayurvedic apothecary and doctor. There was no response to Ouseph’s knock on the front door. But the noise of grinding and thumping drew him to the side of the house. He walked into a drying yard, where medicinal herbs of various colours and aromas were drying in the bright sunlight. He saw an old man on the side verandah, bent over a mortar and pestle. He worked at a steady pace and seemed totally absorbed in his work. Fairly certain that the old man was his neighbour Krishna Vaidyan (an Ayurvedic doctor), he volunteered a hello, and was waved to a seat on the verandah. The grinding and pounding continued for a few more minutes. The Vaidyan then stopped his work and looked up. A pair of keen eyes from between an aquiline nose and bushy white eyebrows scrutinised Ouseph, “Well?”
“Oh, I’m Ouseph, your new neighbour.”
An expression of confusion was soon replaced by a smile of comprehension and a friendly laugh, “Yes, yes, I heard you had come.” And after a pause he added, “This is your home, this is your land. I am happy you are back.”
.
The phone vibrated irritatingly, “Ouseph, this is your uncle Scaria. I’ll be there by eleven tomorrow. I am coming to help sell the property.” Scaria was his mother’s brother, for whom Ouseph had evinced a distaste when just an infant. He was the last person he had wanted to meet. Politeness prevented him raising any objections to his uncle’s visit.
The next day a car drew up, and his uncle Scaria stepped out in an orb of strong perfume. Furtive eyes from below a sweat speckled bald dome crawled over Ouseph, and then Scaria patted his shoulder patronisingly. Drawing himself up, Scaria looked around the compound, and nodded in approval at what he saw, “How many acres did you say this was?”
The two of them spent an hour walking around the compound. Ouseph was impressed by his uncle’s detailed scrutiny of the place. “You have quite a bit of valuable timber here,” and then he indicated he would like to see the house.
Over steamed tapioca, red fish curry and fierier chutney, Scaria delivered his seemingly implacable verdict, “You will not be able to manage this house and property. It will be a white elephant to you. Sell it at the best offer you get, and go back to your computer world, Ouseph.”
The last sentence was tinged with scorn, but Ouseph ignored it with, “The paper work is not yet complete.” He did not feel the need to elaborate. His uncle left him with a foul taste in his mouth, and Mariamma who overheard the conversation, looked anxiously at Ouseph’s face.
.
Ouseph began to get unsolicited enquiries for the property. He called his uncle and told him that he had not consented to sell the property. It had ended unpleasantly with implied threats and ingratiating offers from his uncle of a good price. Ouseph had complained to his mother, she merely replied, “You know your uncle. I can do nothing from Bombay. Think about It.”
His uncle’s perfidy had stunned him, and he began to feel bullied and pressured. He met and poured out the story to Anish and the lawyer. The lawyer couldn’t hide his amusement at the predicament of his innocent young client, “Your uncle is an artful crook. We will have to watch him.”
As they walked back, Anish, far more experienced in the ways of the world, threw his arm over the shoulders of his young despondent cousin, “Don’t worry, we are all here with you.”
Dusk was approaching as the two of them walked past the temple compound. There was an unusual buzz around the temple. Anish mentioned that a temple festival was on that night. Ouseph gazed at the temple with its age old banyan and peepul trees, now silhouetted against a red evening sky. The raucous cry of flocks of mynas roosting in the trees filled the air. Hundreds of lit oil lamps lined the walls and the walkway to the temple. It was all doubly lit up in the reflection of the temple pond.
“Looks like a big do Anish!”
“Yes and there will be night long performances too.”
That night, as the lights in his house were doused one after another, Ouseph lay back in his bed and listened to the night noises emanating from his compound. The drone of cicadas had become therapeutic to him now. There were screeches from the mango tree, as fruit bats squabbled over the ripe fruit, and a great Indian horned owl kept up its forlorn hooting above it all. And then, a ripple of drums carried over to him from the temple. “Must be the Kathakali dance ensemble warming up,” thought Ouseph.
And in a while, the distinctive percussion music of the Kathakali dance began to pulsate through the night. It was mesmerising. Ouseph knew only a little about this traditional dance of Kerala. But he knew that it portrayed archetypal characters and situations from Indian mythology and folk lore. The stories were told through the medium of dance and music. The archetypal characters portrayed were always dressed typically, to make identification easy for the audience. A green painted face signified divinity, shining makeup purity, and black demonic and so on.
Ouseph wondered at the enduring appeal of this art form among the local populace. He thought of his own problem with his uncle Scaria, and fantasised dressing him up as a Kathakali artiste, “Maybe I’ll give him the demon’s black face. Or maybe the red beard of a villain would be more suitable.” Ouseph in his fantasy finally picked the black bearded villain, for that signified a scheming villain.
He put his hands behind his head and listened to the distant drum beats. He fancied his uncle Scaria gyrating and dancing with theatrical gestures of a slimy schemer. Ouseph had to admit his phantasm danced well; and at this he began to giggle. Ouseph’s giggling increased and he thought he was becoming hysterical. His giggles became guffaws and he rolled over and buried his face in his pillow to smother them. His paroxysm abated and he drifted into a peaceful slumber. His pillow was wet with the tears of his laughter.
.
Ouseph leapt out of bed in the morning with the thought that Benji and Maya would be there that day. They arrived to voluble greetings and back thumping. In the lazy afternoon, the three of them sat on the tree stump under the shade of the wood apple tree. Ouseph took his friends through the details of his difficulties with his conniving uncle, and of how he struggled with his unexpected inheritance. He said his mother too, was not sure he could manage the property.
Benji said, “Ouseph, this place is most unusual. Think well before you do anything.”
Maya agreed too, “This place has great bones for a resort.”
Ouseph knew he too was falling under the spell of the place. But he needed to make a pragmatic decision. As they walked back to the house, he showed them the sunbird’s nest. He got them to be silent long enough to hear the cry of chicks from within the nest.
Ouseph had come prepared to handle the legal aspects of his unexpected inheritance. But as he stayed on, the house and its world, began to appeal subtly to his imagination and emotions in ways unexpected. The old house, with its moss grown tiled roof sat amidst the trees. The smell of some blossom or other invariably lingered in the air. The cry of birds and farm noises seeped through the rich vegetation. An irresistible, palpable primal energy seemed to flow from the compound. And all of this seemed to exist within an intense quietness; like the brooding silence of a sacred grove. And within this nestled the ancient house, an inseparable part of it all.
The place whispered to any that cared to listen. The house built in the distinctive wood architecture style of Kerala, nevertheless showed Chinese and Arabic influences too; influences that had permeated because of the ancient maritime spice routes. Inside, paintings and fading photos of ancestors stared from their frozen frames.
The compound also had traces of the more recent past. A curious seeker would find here, growing cheek by jowl with indigenous trees, breadfruit from the Pacific islands, nutmeg and mangosteen from Southeast Asia, clove trees from the Molaccas[1] and so on. It was a reminder of colonialism’s great botanical transplants of the past centuries. The heritage of his ancestral house was etched on it in myriad ways.
“Gosh!” exclaimed Maya, “it’s as if the house will always be here, and we are just passing through.”
It was then that Ouseph had this surrealistic feeling; the inkling that in the end, the decision would not be his. It seemed to have already been made in some strange way. This ancestral house seemed to be claiming him as one of its own, and every circumstance seemed to prod him to stake his claim and fight for things that he had earlier been indifferent to.
.
If some power grew this new symbiotic relationship between Ouseph and his heritage, then it seemed that events came cascading down to rivet it firmly together. It came on a morning as Ouseph was on the front verandah speaking with one of the servants. A white car drove up. The rapid opening of all its doors and the climbing out of several men set off alarm bells in Ouseph’s head. But he waited quietly for the people to approach him.
The leader smirked, “We have come to see a certain Ouseph.”
“I’m Ouseph; and what do you want?”
They climbed onto the verandah uninvited and sat down. “Scaria, your uncle sent us to look at the timber here. We understand it is for sale.”
Ouseph flushed and his voice rose, “Uncle Scaria has nothing to do with this property, and I have no timber to sell.”
The leader chuckled, rolled his eyes and tugging at the ends of his long mustache said, “We were warned that you would play games.”
“Games?”
Benji and Maya heard the altercation. Benji wondered if he should intervene, but Maya was out in a flash. She walked up to the chair besides Ouseph, sat down, crossed her legs and looked the apparent hoodlum in the face. Benji joined them too, and the sudden appearance of strangers, particularly of a determined young woman momentarily threw the visitors off balance. The leader began to say something, and then thought the better of it.
Ouseph saw one of his servants make a dash for the gate, but was too preoccupied to wonder why. He heard a shuffle behind him and turned to see the wide girth of Mariamma his cook behind him. She carried a wooden ladle in her hand.
“Who are you?” asked Ouseph.
“I am Chellapan.” The speaker then leaned back, as if awaiting a reaction. The name didn’t mean anything to Ouseph, but he heard Mariamma behind him draw in a sharp breath.
By ones and twos the servants and neighbours began to congregate. They stood quietly listening, but their faces glowered. Ouseph saw Krishna Vaidyan approach slowly. He was using a walking stick. Without a word, he climbed the steps to the verandah, and seated himself on Ouseph’s side. There was no mistaking his intention.
Chellapan made another attempt, “I know that you have made a commitment to Scaria, and I have paid him an advance for the timber here.”
Ouseph was surprised by the change in the tone of his own voice as he answered, “For the last time I tell you, Scaria has nothing to do with this property. If you have given him money, then take up the matter with him.” Then Ouseph heard himself distinctly say, “This property came to me through my ancestors, and I will not sell it during my lifetime. I will not violate it. I will pass it on as it is, to those that follow me.”
The visitors rose threateningly, but seemed unsure for the first time.
“And what is going on here?” It was a voice that was used to being obeyed. It was Lakshmiamma, the matriarch of the nearby Nair household. She was accompanied by two young men and she was sweating profusely from her barefooted walk to the house. All rose as she climbed the steps with difficulty. She lumbered across the verandah to the chair that Benji had vacated for her. She reached out and took hold of Ouseph’s wrist, and drawing him close to her asked the visitors, “Who are you?”
Mariamma sidled up to Lakshmiamma and whispered, “Its Chellapan.”
Lakshmiamma let out a short derisive laugh. Her snow white hair and the large vermillion dot on her forehead, set off her blazing mascara lined jet black eyes. She pointed at Chellapan and said, “I have heard of you. But before we drive you out, I want you to know something. We are here not just for our Ouseph. We are here because your conduct is a threat to us all. We will not permit such lawlessness in our area. So, when you go back to your rat hole, tell your bandicoot friends there, that we will break the legs of anyone attempting any such thing in future here… Now get out.”
Chellapan was quivering with rage and humiliation. But he looked around at the gathering of neighbours and servants. They reminded him of a wild elephant herd gathering around a vulnerable elephant calf. He was smart enough to know the game was up. Lakshmiamma had been explicit. But it was the unexpressed, simmering outrage of the gathering that really unnerved him. He turned his ire elsewhere and spat out, “We were set up by Scaria. Come on,” he roared, “Let’s go see Scaria.”
He strode out muttering obscenities under his breath. The crowd silently parted to let him and his lackeys through. And as Ouseph watched the retreat, somewhere in his own fevered imaginings; a Kathakali chant began. The accompanying drums and cymbals rose in throbbing waves to a crescendo. It was building up for the climax of Uncle Scaria’s final dance.
.
The storm broke at midnight with a crackle of thunder. It was followed by a wind that whistled through the many chinks in the old house and lashed at the trees in the compound; ruffling and driving their dry leaves in a stream. And then the rain came in as a steady downpour; and it lulled the household back to sleep.
Ouseph awoke to a pristine rain washed morning. He found his friends awaiting their morning cuppa in the dining room. Mariamma fondly served the kids, and just as Ouseph lifted his cup to his lips; Maya tremulously asked, “Would the sunbird’s nest have survived the storm?”
Leaving their tea steaming on the table, the trio scrambled out. They reached the nest and looked up anxiously. The nest, tucked under the eaves of the roof showed no damage. Amidst relieved laughter, Benji murmured, “Well, it seems that millions of years of evolution have taught the sunbird to build its nest in safe places.” Shining faces and gleaming eyes concurred.
Ouseph gave a little gasp and pointed up to a nearby windowsill. On it sat the brown and yellow mother sunbird, and next to her sat a chick. The chick was a male, and white downy feathers stuck out irregularly through his purple plumage. He was moulting. The mother bird signalled some anxiety at the chick’s first outing with little flutters of her wings. But the chick sat there calmly, as if he knew, that all he needed to do was to be true to that instinct within him; and then he would grow to be a perfect little purple sunbird.
Adamov led an introverted life. Perhaps because everyone, both friends and foes, thought he was ugly. In fact, he himself, when looking in the mirror that hung lopsided on his peeling wallpaper drew the same conclusion. An ugliness that drove him deeper into his own world, and which would lead him to become the foremost collector of books in the Kalmak region of the Caucasian mountains, and even beyond … This intense activity, which began at a very early age until his violent, and I may add, mysterious death in a dingy New York City hotel room, took him to the four corners of the earth, buying, bartering, stealing manuscripts, first published books, political pamphlets, rare essays. He even possessed, heaven knows how, an incunabulum[1]: a Lutheran Bible! Adamov also acquired, as a picturesque pastime, miniatures of Mughal, Kangra and Rajput stamps, Tibetan thankas, Buddhist prayer masks, mediaeval Chinese scroll paintings. It was said that he amassed more than 25,000 books at the humble two-storey lodging of his home village in the mountains of Daghestan ! But this, I will not confirm …
In short, books became his very existence, his raison d’être. His trusty companions and faithful, consoling friends in his many moments of maniac depression. His book-hunting transformed Amadov into a detective, snooping out the scent of an affair, flaring the odour of yellowing pages, crispy to the touch, invigorating to the smell, pleasing to the eye.
For Adamov, it was not just a question of tracking down a book like a hunter hunting his prey, but of locating the author’s place of residence, his or her favourite haunts. He would spend weeks, months in cities and towns, even after having procured his book, following the daily footfalls of those illustrious or obscure writers. If the writer happened to be alive, he would trail him or her from his or her home to a restaurant, a hotel, a library or book-shop, but never like a sleuth. If caught red-handed, this might have caused him some embarrassment. Adamov was afraid of direct confrontation, especially if it involved the law. To tell the truth, Adamov had no real intention of meeting an author, however famous. He reckoned that authors never measure up to their books, so why waste time actually meeting them? What would they talk about anyway: the birds and the bees? The weather?
It was during those moments of utter dolefulness on the road that Adamov recalled his childhood with a faint smile: He recollected rummaging through the dilapidated homes of his village in search of maps, pamphlets, books, picture cards or any scribblings that caught his eye, classing them in files either by theme or by date of their finding. For example, in 1960 he found 345 miscellaneous documents; in 1961, only 127. He had such a wonderful childhood, in spite of the periodic bombings from above, parental scoldings or beatings, visits from the neighbouring village militia that demanded money, food or young blood for the ’cause’ … A ’cause’ which he never adhered to, nor was ever recruited for, given his frail body and nervous disposition …
Finally he left his home village in search of bigger game, although he promised his parents that he would always keep in contact with them by his book trade; that is, every book purchased, after having read it, would be sent to their two-storey home … A home which became legally his after their deaths in the 1970s …
In 1974 we find our book-hunter in Amsterdam, lodged at the Van Acker Hotel, Jan Willem Brouuersstaat 14, just opposite the Concertgebouw, the famous concert hall, where he had been listening to Beethovan’s symphonies during that delightful month of May. It was in that hotel, in his room, that he arranged an appointment with a Dutch book dealer, a pasty-faced, unscrupulous dwarf, who negotiated hard for his wares. He clutched in his chubby, wrinkled arms an XVIIIth century first edition of Dom Bedos’ L’Art du Facteur d’Orgue[2], that Adamov had been tracking down for years. And finally, there it lay in the hands of that despicable dwarf who wanted more than 7,000 guilders for it! Adamov knew this was an illegal purchase, being classed as patrimonial property, probably having been stolen from the National Library by this slimy sod, but he had to possess it ! They haggled over the price for hours and hours well into the night. Following a rather violent squabble, the dwarf suddenly clutched at his chest, gurgled a few irrelevant syllables, and fell stone dead at Adamov’s shoeless feet. He wretched the priceless treasure from the still clutching arms of the dwarf, slipped on his shoes, checked the street from his window, then the corridor from the door, noiselessly. Adamov quickly packed his meagre belongings (he always travelled light), locked the door behind him and silently crept out into the soothing blackness of the street. In his flight, he threw the hotel door key in a rubbish bin, then made a bee-line for the bus station, where at six o’clock in the morning he was already headed for Berlin, and without wasting a moment, on a train for Istanbul where he was expected by an Armenian seller (or reseller ?) who possessed several Armenian illuminated manuscripts of mediaeval stamp, costly indeed, but since he paid nothing for Dom Bedos’ invaluable treasure, after an hour or two of desperate haggling, bought two manuscripts. The Armenian threw in two or three miniatures from Herat and Tabriz in the hope that his client would return for the other four illuminated manuscripts … Adamov never did: He was murdered sixteen years later …
Now the incident in Amsterdam caused our book-hunter much discomfiture; not any pangs of conscience mind you; Adamov felt no grief over the sudden death of that dwarf. He feared rather police enquiries about the death, and the overt fact that he fled from his hotel without assistance to him, and without paying the bill to boot! The police might accuse him of the dwarf’s death … As to the manuscript, that posed no particular problem since the dwarf had undoubtedly had it stolen or had stolen it himself. Wherever he went now, the hunter would have to look over his shoulder, staying at the grottiest hotels imaginable to avoid the police or their hired henchmen, travelling on night-buses or trains or on cargo ships when crossing oceans or seas.
The Amsterdam incident happened three years ago. Since, Adamov had eluded local police and Interpol not by any Arsène Lupin[3] tactics or strategies, but perhaps by some lucky star or a guardian angel, if the readers are inclined to believe in these wardens of the wanton. But still our book-hunter remained on the qui-vive[4]! Since that unfortunate (or fortunate?) incident, Adamov had been seen in Georgia, Armenia, Iran and Uzbekestan, where he spent over a year, illegally (his visa having expired after three months!), in Bukhara haggling over a XIVth century publication of Hoca Ahmet Yesevi’s Hikmets (Strophes of Wisdom)in the original Chagatai language, a language that he learned to read in three months.
How he slipped out of Uzbekistan is anyone’s guess. He probably bribed the custom officials. In any case, we find traces of him in the Yunnan, at Lijiang, southern China, bargaining hard for three colourful Naxi pictographic manuscripts from a Dongba priest, manuscripts which the Chinese government absolutely forbade to be taken out of the country, but whose exorbitant estimated price on the black market, a cheery sum of 25,000 yuan, persuaded the wily priests to take the risk. Besides, the priest could always imitate the three XVIth century manuscripts : it was all a question of time and patience … And he had both! Who would ever know? Adamov sensed the abysmal greed of his vender, and promised him 10,000 yuan more if he would relinquish two more of the forbidden scriptures, but payable in two days since he would have to wire back to Daghestan for the money. The plucky priest, all agog, smiling a wicked smile, handed the two booklets over to him without hesitation. Adamov never returned. He disappeared, travelling quickly through Nepal to the Himalayas via Sikkim, Ladakh and Zanskar, where, at last, at the Phuktal monastery he sojourned for five months, reading a first edition of James Hilton’s LostHorizons whilst ploughing through the Hungarian philologist and Tibetologist, Alexander Csoma’s Tibetan-English Dictionary. Before he bid farewell to his kind and generous hosts, he had filched six illuminated prayer books in Tibetan, two festival masks and a thangka[5]. By the time the good monks noticed the theft, the incorrigible thief had trekked to Kaylong, bussed it to Manali, finally arriving in Karachi, where he boarded a cargo ship for Japan, then on to Oakland, California.
Aboard the cargo the thief had time to mediate upon his book-hunting existence. He admitted it wasn’t particularly glamorous — abandoned parents, a dead dwarf, stolen patrimonial property, false passports and bribery of officials. Nevertheless, these unsavoury moments of his hunting never dampened his enthusiasm. His lust for sweet-smelling tomes, his craving to possess, at any cost, more and more of them. To tell the truth, Adamov had become completely obsessed by his collection. Oddly enough, the more he accumulated the uglier he became ! In fact, he not only became uglier, he became fatter … Adamov had no qualms about this ponderous load; indeed, it enveloped him with a sort of pompous aura, whose fleshy freight he swaggered about the decks of the ship like some august, stately sultan. It added to the mystery of his past, present … and future. A future that had little cheer and much disquiet. He was running out of money, for he refused to sell what he bought. Even the many stolen books he dreaded to forswear. How many times had he asked himself why he hoarded such a vast treasure without really capitalising on his assets, without developing a trading-network throughout Asia, without, at least, rereading his precious volumes two or three times, sniffing their illuminated contents, inhaling the strange forms of their letters and signs, touching ever so lightly, again and again, the brittle paper of their pages or the calfskin vellum of their covers … To these questions he had no clear answer. He felt trapped in a conundrum, out of whose meshes Adamov, the hunter, gradually fancied himself the hunted!
But by who? The few passengers aboard hardly looked at him, much less spoke to him. He ate his meals with two or three burly fellows, perhaps Koreans, who beyond a good morning, afternoon or night, never pronounced a word to him, nor amongst themselves for that matter.
So he churned these thoughts over and over in his head as the days went by on the never-ending Pacific Ocean. What he needed was a project. Yes, a project that would offer him a meaning to his collecting … to his cherished collection. He resolved to go to New York City once disembarking at Oakland. Why New York City? Because Adamov had read about a Jewish New Yorker, named Louis Wolfson, who spoke many languages and wrote in French because he hated his mother speaking English to him. An odd chap indeed, but this is what he read. The idea fascinated him. The fact that Wolfson was still alive, in spite of the many sojourns in psychiatric wards and clinics. It was his book : Le Schizo et la Langue[6]that he would find and read. This posed no real problem, having been edited and re-edited since 1970. Yes, this book would put him on the trail of something enormous … Something worthwhile. Adamov looking out to sea gazed complacently into his future. A piercing crimson glow hollowed out a widening hole amidst the thick, grey clouds … He spun on his heels. The hunter sensed a pair of eyes bearing down on him. Yet, when he searched out the deck and the bridge high above him there was not a soul in sight. He sighed, padded his paunch, and casually shuffled off to his cabin as the swells lifted the ship high into the crests of the grey sky, only to drop with tremendous speed into the black, oceanic valleys below …
Six months later, Adamov had reached New York City on a greyhound bus from Atlanta, Georgia. He took up his lodgings at a sleezy hotel on the Lower East Side, Water Street, number 9. It wasn’t long before Adamov, weaving in and out of the 8 million New Yorkers day after day, night after night, had purchased a cheap 1970 edition of the aforesaid book by Louis Wolfson, with a preface by Gilles Deleuze, a French philosopher of some renown in Europe. He pored over this odd book as if he himself had written it. His fascination over such a contemporary edition unnerved him. This Wolfson grew on him like a drug-addiction — not for his writing, which indeed proved rather drab, but to the singularity of his method to achieve a written work through strenuous exercises of self-neglect and utter detachment from maternal infringement. The schizophrenic maniac had managed to create his own sphere of reality through the myriad experiences of listening to such diverse languages as Yiddish, French, Russian and German on his make-shift Walkman whilst strutting through the streets, sitting in parks, at the table when eating with his obnoxious mother, ensconced in the public library as he read or wrote in all the languages he knew … except English, that accursed language that his mother tortured him with like a sadist would when ripping out fingernails! That language which he hated as much as he hated his mother …
Adamov bought a Walkman and had recorded Persian, Arabic and Mongolian on it, which he listened to as he strolled about the same streets that Wolfson had strolled. Or, he sat in the same New York Public Library where Wolfson had sat for hours and hours until closing time. He couldn’t give a biscuit where Wolfson was now living, probably locked up in some clinic for the alienated in a straitjacket. He had nothing personal against English. However, these dippings into ‘alien tongues’ hour after hour, day after day, lifted him out of the ‘New World’ into one of his own making … his own created polyphonic world. His excitement grew as he shifted from Wolfson’s book to the many languages that he repeated over and over again …
It was more or less at this time that I penetrated Adamov’s world. I, too, had my grotty lodgings at the same hotel, a room right next to his. At night I heard his wild, inflamed exclamations about things I hardly deciphered. However, one day we met in the low-lit, begrimed corridor as he dawdled to his room. He had shaved his head and let grow a beard down to his chest. He wore a skullcap of pure white. Adamov’s black, beady eyed bore into mine with some suspicion at first, but my soft spoken, causal demeanour put him immediately at ease. I introduced myself, and he invited me into his room for an evening chat …
It was the first and last discussion I had with this odd fellow, and it lasted well into the night. The oddness lay not so much in the subjects that we touched upon, but the dream-like atmosphere that Adamov somehow created. There he sat enthroned behind his reading and writing table near the unclean window like Genghis Khan himself, stroking his beard, turning the pages of Wolfson’s book that lay before him, his pudgy fingers smearing coffee grinds on page 40, heavily marked with pencilled notes ! He would address me in English, then after several minutes switch to Spanish and Italian with the utmost ease, an ease that I echoed since I was well versed in those languages. My host appeared to be pleased by this hollow echo in the night. After a drink or two of some cheap red wine, Adamov would burst into a soliloquy in Turkish, afterwards slipping into Russian, German, Dutch and French, attempting to throw me off the chase, to deviate my beating. And in this, I must confess, he thoroughly succeeded. Oftentimes the sly polyglot began a sentence in Russian and finished it in Chinese or Tamil, a feature that linguists call ‘code-switching’. I was flabbergasted …
But what really stupefied me was this strange man’s ability to alter his speech patterns and accents. Now he would impersonate, linguistically, an American from the deep South, now one from New York City. Now a Frenchman from Paris, now from Marseilles! When he fell into speaking Spanish, he conversed ever so casually with a Mexican ‘gaucho’[7] accent, only to follow up with a ‘caballero’[8] one from Barcelona or Madrid … All these inflections and modulations left me swooning, to say the least. At length, at four in the morning, I rose and retired to my room, having learnt absolutely nothing of importance about this amazing creature. In short, I felt more ignorant of this man than before I ever laid eyes on him …
Everyday Adamov spent over ten hours at the public library. It was there that his great project suddenly took form, looming larger and larger in his excited mind. Why not write stories myself ? Why not write stories in many languages and not just read or listen to them ? Yes, different stories written in different languages, signed by invented names! Twelve stories – fiction, each bearing a style of its own, a flavour and texture of its own, yet signed by twelve different writers. Adamov grew more and more agitated, fidgeting in his chair much to the annoyance of two elderly readers opposite him, poring over a William F. Buckley essay and Eric Lux’s 1991 edition: WoodyAllen: A Biography.
But what languages could he choose? French, Spanish, English, Turkish, Italian and German … Any. How about Russian and Chinese? That would make eight. “I can get on all right with Tamil and Persian … and Armenian?” Adamov paused, collecting his thoughts. What would be the twelfth language ? His own ? Never. It was his mother’s tongue, and besides who would ever read it? But was being read all that important, vital to his existence? No. This project was beyond a reading public … beyond mankind’s expectations of what writing and literature meant to him.
By this time, Adamov’s eyes seemed to pop out of their sockets. The two elderly readers rose from their chairs and left with many a smirk and sneer. What did he care? Still, he needed one last language: “I got it, I’ll invent a language from all the languages I know! That will be my twelfth story; a story to end all stories …”
He mapped out his plan of action mentally. Our future short-story writer shot out of his chair and made a bee-line for his hotel. He would put his plan into action that very night … He set to work at his reading and writing table, having decided to begin the Twelve with English, the language that Wolfson loathed! He cringed under that delicious stroke of inspiration. Let the bugger loathe all he might! Adamov could love his book, but he harboured no devotion towards its writer. Besides, he was residing in an English-speaking country and there he wanted to write in English. He would write French in France or Belgium, Spanish in Spain or in Latin America, Turkish in Turkey, and so on.
Hours went by as Adamov pressed on and on, burning oil of the midnight lamps, filling sheets of cheap notebook paper as quickly as his imagination spiralled out. Coffee after coffee kept pace with his hand, à la Balzac, amidst the screaming police sirens, the bickering of pimps and their whores below his window, rubbish bin cans crashing on pavements as stray cats or vagrants rummaged through their contents. Through the thin walls of his room he heard coughing, sneezing, cursing, snoring and sleep-talking.
As the sun broke through the thick, colourless skies of a New York City morning, Adamov, thoroughly exhausted, threw down his mighty writing tool. He had finished the first of the Twelve: The Gardenof Enchantment, signed Hilarius Eremita …
Just at that triumphant moment a sudden hammering at his door rocked him out of his reverie. He rose sluggishly and shuffled to the unlocked door. As he grasped the knob the door burst open in one forceful thrust. Two hooded men seized Adamov by the throat, pinned him against the wall and strangled him with their bare hands. The ponderous writer slid limply to the floor, mouth ajar, eyes open in tragic astoundment. The hooded men fled, vanishing into thin air, as the expression goes …
Hearing hurried footsteps, I waited until they had died down, then tip-toed to his room. For some unknown reason his premeditated murder, for premeditated murder it undeniably was, did not surprise nor move me. I swiftly, however, rushed to the writing table : Nothing had been touched ! I gathered all his papers then returned briskly to my room …
And this was how I was able to salvage from the malevolent hands of Adamov, or Hilarius Eremita, the story called, The Garden of Enchantment …
When I think back on this whole affair there is no shadow of a doubt that the hunter had become the hunted for reasons that we shall never really know. In light of that, I departed from New York City the day after the murder on a flight to Buenos Aires, then on to Madrid …
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[1] A book printed on a Gutenburg Press before 1500.
[3] Famous French ‘gentleman’ robber who steals from the rich to give to the poor, and in doing so, always outsmarts the police, but without ever shedding any blood. Arsène’s adventures were written by Maurice Leblanc (1864-1941).
Paul Mirabile is a retired professor of philology now living in France. He has published mostly academic works centred on philology, history, pedagogy and religion. He has also published stories of his travels throughout Asia, where he spent thirty years.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Once upon a time there was a certain kingdom somewhere on the earth. The moment night set in, thieves and robbers would let lose all across the kingdom. Despite all efforts from the king, the robbers were not contained. One day, the king, his emirs and viziers all put their heads together to devise an effective plan. At last, one of the viziers floated the following idea:
“Let’s us call the day the night, and the night the day. It is the only way to protect our people”.
The king liked the idea very much and immediately he issued the decree asking the people to start their day after the sunset and mark the sunrise as the beginning of the night. Initially, many people violated king’s decree and they were subsequently hanged. In due time, the unusual routine ensued in the kingdom. People slept during the day and resumed activities at night.
One day two strangers arrived in the city at midday. They went to a shop. The shopkeeper was asleep. They were looking around the shop, when the shopkeeper woke up and caught saw them. He instantly presumed they were thieves and accused them of shoplifting.
“We are no thieves. We have come to get some merchandise,” said one of the strangers.
“Why did you come so late in the night?” asked the shopkeeper.
Confounded by shopkeeper’s remarks he quipped: “Night? It is not night! Rather it is midday”.
The shopkeeper accused them of violating king’s decree and subsequently dragged them to the king’s court. The king told them that he would investigate their case in the daytime. Meanwhile, they were locked in a room. They were astounded by the strange behaviour of the king and his subjects. At night – the time they took to be the day — the king summoned the two strangers and asked them the purpose of their visit to the city.
“We are no ordinary folks. Rather we are royal tailors from the neighboring kingdom. We sew clothes for spirits”.
The king said: “How do these kinds of clothes look?”
“Only the legitimate sons of their fathers can see these clothes,” the man replied.
The king provided them with a sewing machine and asked them to sew the clothes. Later on, he asked his vizier to see if the clothes were ready. The vizier walked over to the room allotted to the strangers. They were absorbed with the sewing machine. The vizier drew nearer to the men and asked them about the progress in their work.
“The shirt is all done. We are half way through the trousers. Isn’t it visible to you?” Surprisingly asked one of the men.
The vizier was quite confused. He couldn’t find any clothes there but he reckoned any negative answer would mean he was not his father’s legitimate son.
Hence, he said: “Of course, it is. It looks beautiful”. Then he cleverly asked them: “Where is the shirt?”
“It’s there in the box. See it for yourself.”
The vizier opened the box. It seemed empty, but he exclaimed: “What an exceedingly beautiful shirt!”
Then the vizier walked over to the king and told him that the clothes looked wonderful. Then the king strolled into the room. The vizier asked him to try the clothes on. The king opened the box. Lo, it was empty! He knew any remarks about the invisible clothes would call the legitimacy of his own birth into question. Thereupon, he peeled off his clothes and pretended to wear the clothes of spirits. He was naked but the vizier asked the people to clap and praise him new clothes. The king made a detour around the city. Everybody clapped and admired him being clad in the spiritual clothes.
The next day he issued another proclamation asking his subjects to wear the clothes of spirits. A few days later, the king invited the king of a neighbouring kingdom which was the home of the two strangers. When the king arrived there, he was astonished to see that nobody had a thread on their body and they slept during the day and worked at night. Then the two strangers whispered the entire story into his ear. The king said: “Let’s hurry off; otherwise they will force us to wear the clothes of spirits.”
This folktale has been translated from a retelling by Ghulam Jan Nawab in “Cher Andaren Neki” (The Hidden Virtue), a collection compiled by Ghulam Jan Nawab and published by Chammag Chap o Shing in 2021.
Fazal Baloch is a Balochi writer and translator. He has translated many Balochi poems and short stories into English. His translations have been featured in Pakistani Literature published by Pakistan Academy of Letters and in the form of books and anthologies. Fazal Baloch has the translation rights from the publisher.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
It must be ten years ago now; thereabouts. It was the harshest winter we’d had for years, except for the one immediately before; or was it the one just after? There were two of them, one after the other, with snow that fell thick and lay for weeks; with frost that capped the pools and hung from the gutters and the eaves till the sparkling white had turned as rust brown as it was iron hard. Even the lake froze over, and in the mornings, just after I’d arrived at work, I’d watch the first boat of the day ice-break its way, sending from its bows slow motion waves that lifted and crackled in the sharp still air and crisped into perfect stillness, as if suddenly a film had been brought to a halt, though the boat would, almost literally, plough on. And circling cracks such as you might find on a window pane not quite broken, would spread out and set like sugar-work into the white-grey surface.
It was a part-time job on the minimum wage, two days a week, but I liked the work out there in the garden, looking down on the water. Besides, I needed the money and I got a good breakfast too for the house staff looked after me and were there even when no guests were staying.
We were two miles up the valley from the main hotel, but that was far enough to tell the difference where weather was concerned that winter, those winters. It got so bad that once or twice they ferried us up in the four by four and we left our vehicles on the main car-park. There was always something for the house staff to do, always something for me, if I played my cards right.
There was the garden furniture to sand down and re-stain for the wood, wire-brush and repaint for the metal. I’d eek out those jobs over the whole season, saving them for days when it was too bitterly cold or too rough to be outside. There were days when you could feel the air contract, feel it close in around you as the temperature dropped, and water droplets hanging from the little branches and the leaves would crystallize into globules of ice.
On bright days when the sun blazed and the sky was blue, the sheet-ice lake sparkled, and the mountains really did look like iced cakes. I’d work outside then. There was always the quarter mile drive up from the road to keep clear. Sometimes it could be knee deep in crunchy snow. And there would be a tight turning circle at the bottom, by the road, where the gates made their own angel-wings.
At six pound forty-nine an hour, or thereabouts, I still felt that it was mine. I knew that ground better than anyone else; knew where the fell wall was poised for a thaw that would bring twelve feet of it crashing down in the spring; knew where the crocuses and the primulas would appear. I knew where the insomniac red squirrel would run along the top of that dry-stone wall to get my feeders, and where the crows perched, waiting for the chance to break in and steal the nuts. I waited each Christmas for the snowdrops to show: a long procession of green robed acolytes, their white hoods not yet visible, winding along the hedgerow and spilling out onto the grass beneath the ornamental trees. There was a robin that fed from my hand until winter took him.
It was a fellside garden: steeply sloped, rhododendrons and laurel, ferns and bracken pushing their way in when my back was turned, old sycamore and pine marking its internal boundaries. Buzzards and kestrels would dog-fight the crows for mastery of the air above.
The owner visited several times a year. He had a couple of dozen similar assets, but said ours was his favourite. Celebrities came to stay: film stars, musicians, TV personalities, politicians not yet disgraced, has-beens and fat cats of one sort, or another. Some would chat, and perhaps bluff an offer to help out, trusting you to decline. Mostly, the owner would stay at the main building, but every now then he’d bring a little entourage for afternoon teas or private conferences in our big old dining room with its walk-in fireplace.
He paid such a visit during one of those winters. I can’t remember which, but it was a bright day and I was digging out the hard-packed snow half-way up the drive when the manager drove up. I walked down to where he waited at the gates. He looked up the drive and said, “Can I be a pain?”
“I have every faith,” I told him. When he’d recovered, he told me that the owner would be on his way in half an hour and expected to park up at the house. “Can you clear it in time?”
I could, but I made a point of taking a long panoramic look before I said, “I’ll do my best.”
The owner and his entourage ensconced themselves in the big room and I was called to bring in logs for that fire. He was on his knees in front of it. Twisted and scorched newspapers and broken sticks lay in the grate. Some of the sticks were charred. Spent matches littered the hearth. There was a smudge of soot on his cheek, and on that Armani cuff too I think.
“Do you know how to light a fire?”
I nearly laughed. He was a multi-millionaire.
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
Shortly after that I moved on. My old boss sold the house to someone who quite literally had the slope on which I used to garden removed. Perhaps only I know what has gone.
Brindley Hallam Dennis lives on the edge of England where he writes occasional plays, poetry, and essays. His writing has been published and performed. He blogs at www.Bhdandme.wordpress.com
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The barman hadn’t warned me that I’d taken the old man’s regular place at the bar. Perhaps that’s why he was so edgy to begin with.
“So. Whur’s thee really frum?”
“The Midlands,” I said.
“Ah wusnae sae fur aff, then.” he observed, nodding slowly.
“I’ve been up here more than fifty years mind you,” I told him.
“Thee’s still an incomer,” he said. “Thee’s allus an incomer.”
I must have frowned or something because he smiled and spoke more softly.
“It’s nae a bad thing tae be.”
“No?”
The smile turned into a grin, and he leaned closer.
“Incomers is good fer’t stock,” he said. “Freshens it up somat. Besides,” he added, there’d be nae names if’n it weren’t fer’t incomers. Fer’t fells an’t becks, tha knows. It’s allus incomers that gies places theer names.”
“I guess so.”
“Sae next lot knaws whut tae call ‘em, he explained. The thing wi’ incomers,” he said, “is ef they gie ‘emselves tae place, or just tek frum it.”
We sat looking at each other after that for maybe a minute or more without saying anything. Then he nodded to my glass.
“Wilt tek another yan?”
“Aye, I thought, why not?”
“So,” he said while the barman was drawing two more pints, “You’ll not have been all that old, when you arrived?”
I noticed the change too. Maybe he’d relaxed a little, forgiven me for taking his place at the end of the bar.
“I was twenty-one,” I said.
“Why here?”
“School trip a few years before. Thought I’d come to heaven.” He nodded at that. “I took to driving up for weekends once I got a car; camped on a local farm. The farmer let me use his standpipe for water. We got to know each other, well, recognise each other. He was older than me. He’d be dead by now, I guess.”
“Aye. It’s a hard life on the fells.”
We sipped our beers.
“And what made you leave? Home.”
That one caught me out. I took a longer pull at the beer.
“Working for my dad for three years.”
“Ah,” he said, and I think he chuckled. “I know that one, lad,” he said.
I’m over seventy, but it’s always nice to be called lad.
“My heart wasn’t in it,” I told him, “The work.”
He gave me a keen look but said nothing.
“You’ll have been tied to the land, I imagine?”
“Tied?’
I wondered what he thought I meant.
“Has it worked, leaving?”
“Yes,” I said. “And staying? Has that?”
He took a long pull at his beer. The barman, who’d been listening intently, waited for his answer.
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*Animals growing accustomed to and attached to an area of pasture that they seldom stray away from it.
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Brindley Hallam Dennis lives on the edge of England where he writes occasional plays, poetry, and essays. His writing has been published and performed. He blogs at www.Bhdandme.wordpress.com
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“Did you apply for the job?” Somnath asked casually when they met in the evening that day. The playground adjacent to the village school had become their hangout place for the past two years.
“I have lost hope in these applications, interviews, and jobs,” Rajesh sounded quite detached. That was a state mind he had acquired gradually over the past two years of joblessness and pandemic. It had changed his perspective about jobs, careers, city life, and life in general. Waking up early, catching the metro train during rush hours for office, slogging till late evenings, and catching the train again to get back home just for a few hours of sleep seemed a routine of a past life. In the village, they had nothing to do. The nothingness got into their heads. They found it difficult to return to their past life.
“We need to do something. But I don’t want to go back to the city,” said Somnath.
“I have a business idea. Capital-light, easily executable, infallible, and recession-proof and to top it all it has an unbelievable Return on Investment,” said Rajesh.
“That sounds ideal, blurt it out,” Somnath looked excited.
“We can get into the business of religion and build a temple,” Rajesh said.
Somnath was baffled. “Is that a business to do?”
“Religion is the best business and until humans continue to believe in unseen and unknown powers working upon them, the business will flourish. You can start with a very small capital and earn loyal customers, who would never question whether you deliver or not. They will keep on putting in money without applying logic. In a crisis, the business will not slacken. Instead, the loyal customers will keep on investing, hoping for a better tomorrow. What other business has these amazing deliverables?” he asked.
“You have a point,” Somnath was on the same page.
“What is the plan,” he asked.
“It is simple. I have a ten-acre land that has been lying unused for years. We will set up the temple there,” Rajesh was confident.
“Just because we go ahead and build a temple, are people going to believe in the deity?”
“We will not build a temple just like that. First, a miracle should happen and then the temple will follow,” Rajesh detailed the plan.
“As per my plan, you will fall sick…seriously sick and the doctors will not be able to diagnose your condition. As your condition starts worsening, you will announce that you had a dream. In the dream, a goddess appeared before you and asked you to dig out her idol from the nearest banyan tree. The nearest banyan tree falls in my land. As per your dream, your family and my family will dig out the idol from the soil near the banyan tree. The idol will be consecrated and you will be cured. This will be our base miracle,” Rajesh said.
“First our families will start worshipping and slowly, by word of mouth, others will join us. As people will see that their wishes are getting fulfilled, worshippers will start flowing to our temple,” Rajesh added.
“But, this is a farce. How will people’s real wishes come true by praying to the false idol?” Somnath was sceptical.
“Imagine, 100 people come and pray in the temple. They all will have their wishes, but at least 50 will be working towards their dreams. Simple statistics say that 30 percent are likely to achieve their dreams. Those who get their dreams fulfilled, will anyway become staunch believers. Of the remaining 70 percent, 20 percent might leave forever. But they would never complain or bad-mouth about the temple. After all, talking against God is sacrilegious,” Rajesh went on.
“Now we have to focus on the 50 percent who are confused between belief and disbelief. We come up with propaganda that whoever did not get their wishes fulfilled in a month has some serious negative karma. They will have to do penance for nine consecutive weeks to mitigate the effect of their karma. At least 30 percent will fall for it. We will design some tough rituals as penance,” he said.
“Why tough rituals?” Somnath was curious.
“Tougher the ritual, greater the belief,” Rajesh reasoned.
“By then, more than 50 percent of the worshippers would have turned our believers. They will keep on pouring money into the temple and continue to do whatever we ask them to do. Further, new sets of worshippers will keep on coming to the temple. We will ask the worshippers to leave a note in a box if their wishes have been fulfilled. I am sure we will get ample notes for our marketing campaign through social media and elsewhere. Once we achieve a certain number of daily worshippers, we will touch the inflection point. Then we can relax and the system will take care of itself,” he sounded confident.
“What is the guarantee that all these worshippers will deposit money in our boxes?” Somnath asked.
“We will propagate that people who had put money saw their wealth growing multi-fold. We will get some notes substantiating this claim as well. Who does not love money? They will pour in money for the sake of more money,” Rajesh replied.
“I liked the idea. But will people behave as we expect them to?” Somnath was critical.
“Don’t worry. As long as humans have low levels of confidence in themselves and their efforts, they will continue to seek help from ‘above’,” Rajesh smiled.
By then, the sun had started setting and the sky was at its crimson best. The nearest temple had started playing devotional songs and worshippers were on the way to attend the twilight veneration. They stood up and started walking back home.
“I will get one idol from the antique dealer in the city. I will hide it in the soil near the banyan tree and you will have to come out with some convincing disease plan. We will meet tomorrow,” Rajesh said as he took the private road leading to his house.
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Sangeetha G is a journalist in India. Her flash fiction and short stories have appeared in Down in the Dirt, Academy of the Heart and Mind, Kitaab International, Indian Review, Storizen, The Story Cabinet and Borderless Journal. Her story won Himalayan Writing Retreat Flash Fiction contest 2022. Her debut novel is in the works.
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Munni kept playing with the tap water until Malti came running into the bathroom, closed the tap, and smacked Munni on the back of her head. “As if we have a well full of water, you spoiled brat!” Malti yelled and pinched her daughter’s ear. “Now gargle your mouth and hurry up.” Munni made a little grunt and frowned at her mother. “Go and get ready,” Malti said as she wiped her thirteen-year daughter’s face with the end of her saree. Before Munni could ask why she had to be getting ready, Malti had already rushed out of their little, dilapidated, untended bathroom.
From where she stood, the little girl could see her mother straighten out one of her not-yet-tattered Kurtis and pajamas. Munni watched as Malti struggled to find a suitable dupatta to go with the outfit until she found one that had not gone colourless or wasn’t oil-stained.
“Are you going somewhere?” Munni asked as she walked near to her mother. Malti sighed and continued to straighten the kurti which would not straighten at all. “Maa, are you going somewhere?” she persisted. Her mother ignored and measured the clothes on Munni, clicking her tongue upon seeing how loose the pajama was. “Maaaa,” Munni nagged and Malti cut her off. “Not me,” she replied sternly,”you –”
“Me?” Munni interrupted, excited. “Are we going to the park? Oh – you are taking me to that town fair, aren’t you? Okay, so I will get ice cream, um… a cotton candy, and yes, a doll, and…,” she paused. “Oh, but it will cost us a lot of money, won’t it, maa? Then maybe I will just get a doll. This one is jaded anyway.”Munni coiled the one-eyed doll’s hair around her thumb.
“A doll, eh?” Malti laughed a bit then. “You are thirteen years of age now. It’s time to act like a woman, hmm?”
Munni could not understand her mother’s implication, so she just shrugged and braided one-half of her hair, while Malti did the other half. Then she took a bath, got dressed in oversized clothes without questioning why she was wearing her mother’s clothes all of a sudden instead of her frocks, and sat on her tiny, red, plastic chair.
Sitting on her red chair, Munni looked in the mirror and patted some talcum on her face, rubbed kohl under the eyes, and tied ribbons to her braids. She did not yet know where she was going or if she was really even going somewhere. Still, she had seen her mother do these things to herself every evening, when she wore her red sarees and lots of bangles to go and stand on the road outside with several other women who lived nearby, calling and talking to the men who passed by them. Along with the accessories, she also used to wear a big, wooden smile, which Munni had noticed, got bigger in front of these men. Looking at her from the window, Munni was always mesmerised by her mother’s beauty. Maybe that’s the reason a man or two was always by her side when she returned home every night.
Putting on some pink tint on her chapped lips, Munni rested her palms on her lap, looking at her mother cracking her knuckles in visible worry. Outside, the noise of a jeep was heard. She knew it was Gopal dada. But it was not the 1st of next month yet, why had he come then? “Maa, why has Gopal da…” before Munni could finish asking, Malti spoke, “Only come out when I ask you to, okay? And sit with your head down. Don’t play with your braids as you do. And hide that hideous doll you always play with. Be a woman now, will you?”And then she rushed out, wearing the same big, wooden smile.
Munni peeped through the curtain and saw her mother standing near the main gate, her hands folded in a habitual namaste, the kind she had come to know one used to beg and not to greet. Munni tried to get a glimpse of her face, but Malti’s head was covered with her saree.
“Is she ready?” Munni heard Gopal dada say. A strange feeling tugged at her wits. “Run,” a voice whispered inside her head.
Run! Run! Run!
“Munni?” Malti called for her just then. Startled for a bit, Munni went out anyway. Gopal dada was there. Also, another man. Munni did not know this other man. She looked at her mother and saw her eyes glistening. It took her a second to realise she was crying. “Maa,” Munni said faintly, tugging at Malti’s saree. Malti said nothing, just turned her head away.
Munni looked at Gopal dada. He was whispering something in the man’s ear. Then the man gave Munni a look up and down and walked inside the house as if it was his own. Malti put a hand on her grown-up daughter’s shoulder, without having the courage to meet her eyes, and pushed her gently toward their home.
Munni looked at her mother’s eyes shedding silent tears, the grip of her hand firm like a tree holding onto its dear leaves in the wild winds of autumn.“Eh, let her go already!”Gopal dada pushed Malti’s hand away, and a choked, silenced, burdened sob escaped from the mother’s lips.
Munni began to walk towards the cave of her childhood, unknowing that it would soon become the cage of her womanhood. But she did touch her braids, her face, her chest, her stomach — to lock a memory of her body as if she knew something was about to change about it. Reaching the doorstep, she consumed a huge breath, as if trying to store the old air around her in the helpless palate of her mouth. She looked back at her mother, who collapsed on the ground, wailing soundlessly. Munni felt an uncomfortable tremble in her legs, but she didn’t run. She knew she couldn’t. So, she just closed her eyes, exhaled the air she had previously stored inside her mouth, and mimicked her mother’s wooden smile. Then she walked inside.
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Shubhangi is pursuing her Master’s degree in English literature from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Passionate about reading and writing, her poems have been published in publications such as The Indian Review and The Indian Periodical
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Borderless 