Man on Fire

10

Jolly Boy was sitting next to the old man, hugging his knees on the tarpaulin outside the hotel. The old man had been talking to him and now he was staring again at his favourite patch of sky. Clouds were forming there, as if by his will, stitching themselves together as he watched through his malfunctioning eyes. I asked Jolly Boy what the man had said.

‘He is waiting for the monsoon to come. When the rain is here he will be rain and he will go up to heaven like that. He has been waiting for this for twelve years. Every year he thinks it will happen but the rain is never strong enough to lift him. This time he thinks it will happen.’

‘What do you think? Do you think it’ll happen?’

‘Yes. He is very sure. He has been praying for a long time. I think this year he will make it.’

‘Why does he want to turn into rain?’

Jolly Boy asked the old man and interpreted his answer. ‘He says it was always promised to him that he would die this way. He thinks it is the best way. He doesn’t want to be here anymore, he is too heavy. When he is rain he will be light and he will go to heaven very fast. His family is there waiting for him and his goats are there. He misses the goats very bad. God made the promise to him a long time ago and he cannot wait anymore.’

‘Tell him I hope it happens this year.’

Jolly Boy passed on my message. The old man gave me a toothless smile. He offered me another trinket god and I refused it gently. It was the same one he’d already tried to sell me. We left him stewing on the promise he’d been made, his rain dutifully making itself in the clouds above our heads.

The dashboard Ganesh kept his own counsel in his little Perspex prison. Bibhuti sat on his plank and ground his gears, turned the A/C on with a harried cluck of his tongue when Jolly Boy’s pleas started to grate. The bridge was jammed with the rush-hour commute. Every car had the same slogan painted on its back, ‘Horn OK Please’, and everyone took the request to heart.

I saw a man throw a dog in the creek, its lifeless body splay gruesomely as it hit the water. The man gave no salute, just got back on his motorbike and merged into the traffic. He passed us expressionless as we inched towards the mainland.

Old Bombay. Where death spills songlike from every doorway and untapped dreams rise like smoke from the rubbish fires and rat holes. Even through the air conditioning I could smell the place as it got nearer, fertile and teeming with tradition and mundane terrors. A place to get lost in and to be startled by into revisions of previous wisdoms. Bibhuti turned the radio on and he and Jolly Boy sang along to the first song they found. I didn’t understand the words and I was an outsider again.

Bibhuti could barely contain his excitement. He vibrated in time to the music as we lurched between the bumpers, took both his hands off the wheel to clap impatiently.

‘I found this man after much searching,’ he said. ‘My friend Santosh, he is also my student, he told me about him. As luck would have it he has a large amount of bats which he has no use for. I was unable to pay but I made him promise to keep them for me until a time when the money arrived. He accepted my request in return for one small favour only which I must grant him when we complete the transaction. He is an honourable man. The bats are unused and there are many. I am very happy today.’

He carried on singing. The early start had drained me and I dozed off. Then the traffic eased and the new speed brought me round again.

The streets had peeled and blistered while I’d been out and the buildings had grown grander, colonial mansions with book-lined drawing rooms where syphilitic viceroys and mutton-chopped tea merchants had once wrestled naked for diamonds the size of ostrich eggs. That’s how I imagined it, anyway. The thriving trees hung with lanterns that became fruits when I looked closer. The children who strayed near the roadside were lighter, their faces unsmudged by the trials of their namesakes who prowled the poorer parts. Their hair was neatly combed and their eyes were violent with the restrictions of family wealth. They were lazily occupied in a game of leverage, trying to prise open a manhole cover with a tree branch. They didn’t try and stop the car or hold their hands out for our money.

We passed out of the old ways, turned a corner and we were back in the modern world again. A heaving road buffed smooth by the tyre rubber from every car and bus and tanker truck in the city all visiting at once on some kind of pilgrimage for the petrol age. A storm of horns beat against the car, and we were slowed down again to crawling. I saw my first holy cow emptying itself on the roadside, tethered to a scrap-iron kiosk that sold SIM cards and sweet lime. The cow’s sharp shoulders looked mythical and nobody seemed to notice the waterfall of shit streaming from its back end. They just stepped instinctively around it, not looking up, as if making eye contact with the animal in its time of public indelicacy would break some ancient code of ethics.

Bibhuti parked up on the fringe of the puddle the cow had made. I had to stretch to clear the mess and Jolly Boy pulled me up to the kerb. I turned my nose up at the smell and he wrinkled his nose in solidarity. We went in the Cafe Coffee Day and sat down at a red plastic table. The girl who took our order wore a baseball cap. The tea came in a paper cup. For some reason I was expecting a proper china teacup. I was disillusioned at how easily India had surrendered its traditions to the dogma of convenience. It wasn’t my place to say it, but I thought it should have fought harder.

B Pattni brought the smell of the street in with him, of commercial agitations and milky coffee drunk in a hurry between the marking of cards. The little bell tinkled when he came through the door. He greeted me with a handshake that was designed to test me for structural weaknesses. His hands felt like they were less used to dispensing pleasantries to out-of-towners than to driving telegraph poles or throttling intruding leopards.

He asked me if I had the money and I lifted the carrier bag.

‘They’re not for baseball,’ I said. ‘They’re for a special thing. We need them to be pukka.’

‘I know what they are for, sir. Trust me, they are top-notch. Come.’

We followed him outside. He took us down a dank alleyway that led to the back of the shops. Industrial bins and rubbish bags overflowed with the stinking leftovers of fast food joints. At the far end of the alleyway there was a row of lock-up garages. B Pattni walked on tiptoes, trying to save his patent-leather shoes from the shit. He unlocked the furthest garage, hauled the door open and disappeared inside.

Bibhuti and his boy had gone quiet. The air around us crackled with flies and anticipation. We approached slowly, pyramid breakers sniffing for a dead king’s gold.

A rat ran past my feet and squirmed into a hole in a rubbish bag. It was wearing a diamanté collar and its little black eyes were intent on thievery.

B Pattni emerged and handed Bibhuti his first offering. Bibhuti’s eyes went wide when he saw it. He accepted the bat greedily. He stroked the length of it from the business end to the grip, smoothing his palm over the lacquered wood. He felt for faults in the grain. He read the bat like a sacred text.

‘Lovely, lovely,’ he murmured. He slapped the bat from hand to hand, felt its weight and breathed in the prophecy it carried. A shiver of something lustful went through him when he struck the bat against the air. Maybe he was thinking of the first strike against his own flesh and bones, the unsticking that would come with it.

‘It is good?’ B Pattni asked, dragging a shipping crate out and loosing another bat that he passed to me for inspection.

‘Lovely,’ Bibhuti repeated. He turned to me grinning, eyes vivid. ‘It has the perfect feel. We could not ask for better. Feel.’

I took a token swing at the air. ‘Feels good,’ I said.

Jolly Boy grabbed a bat for himself and imitated our ritual, weighed it up against the slim resistance of the air. Soon the three of us were waving our bats around in a solemn display, swinging at the ghosts of our former disappointments, planting our feet in the diabolical future. The same goal had taken hold of us all and we were lost in its grip like boys at play. Father and son hit synchronised home runs and then me and Jolly Boy were swordfighting. A mood for clowning fell over us and the alleyway rang with our make-believe war cries.

Jolly Boy took a swing at Bibhuti’s head. He ducked to evade it.

‘Break one now, Baba,’ he pleaded. ‘I will make the hit.’

‘Not yet,’ Bibhuti said. ‘Uncle has the job. We must let him have the first hit, he has come a long way.’

The boy pouted. He took a consolation swing at the air while his father freed another bat from the crate and stroked it, spellbound.

There was something printed on the shaft of my bat. In English: ‘B Pattni Fine Leather Goods, Import and Export, Wholesale and Retail’. An address and phone and fax numbers. I saw that Bibhuti’s bat had the same branding. They all did.

‘There was mishap,’ B Pattni said. ‘They are all useless to me. My son plays baseball, his team is the Malad Maroons. Last year was their inaugural season in Mumbai junior A league. I spent small fortune to supply the team with bats, and I paid extra to have them printed with the particulars of my business. I thought this would be great advertising opportunity.’

He pointed out the message on my bat. ‘B Pattni Fine Leather Goods, this is my business. I have just opened my second retail outlet in Evershine Mall next to Cell-bug cellphone showroom. You must come in, I have everything you will need: wallets, purses, iPhone case, briefcase, attaché, everything of finest quality.’

His mood darkened. ‘The bats are arriving tainted. The entire batch permanently disfigured. Look here, you see the telephone number? It is the wrong number. That should not be a two, it should be a seven. I clearly expressed my requirements when I made the order, the mistake was theirs but they would not accept responsibility.’

Raw emotion frayed his voice and danger had draped itself over him like a mist. I stepped back, putting some room between us in case he lashed out.

‘I am always doing these things by hand, you see, I do not trust the online forms. You will see there is no website on the bat. I do not conduct my business this way. The internet is not safe, this is how Pakistan is spying on us. I made the order by fax and they misread my instructions. Clearly my seven does not look like a two, my handwriting has always been very clean. It is the fault of the reader. If I had my pen with me I would show you.’

‘That’s okay, I believe you.’

‘I tried to reason with them but they would not amend their mistake. I had to place fresh order for the correct printing, I could not let my son down with pre-season practice around the corner. Now I have one hundred and twenty bats which I cannot use. They are collecting dust for the past year. Then BB is coming along and all is saved.’

There was a crash. Jolly Boy was pounding his bat against the door of a garage, caught in a whirlwind of sweet violence. Bibhuti snapped out of his trance and bounded over to take the bat from him, scolding the boy for disrespecting the equipment. He checked the bat’s snub end for damage.

The noise had nudged B Pattni off his stride. He licked a blob of spit from his lip.

‘I ask only that you cover the printing,’ he said. ‘I do not wish for further embarrassment.’ He looked anxiously to Bibhuti. ‘Did you discuss my price?’

‘It is decided,’ Bibhuti said.

Bibhuti steered me towards a neutral corner and shook me down for thirty thousand rupees. It sounded like a fair price to pay for two souls and all the highest hopes they had between them. I counted out the notes and handed them over. He thanked me ferociously. I was his benefactor now. Handshakes all round. But Bibhuti and B Pattni still had some unfinished business.

B Pattni hitched up his shirtsleeves, took a handkerchief from his back pocket and mopped the sweat from his face. His legs were parted and he was trying to bounce on the balls of his feet like a shadowboxer. It only made him look heavier.

‘I will take off my shoes if you prefer it.’

‘Let your shoes be there, it is no problem,’ Bibhuti assured him. ‘After you will help us transport the bats to my home, yes?’

B Pattni tilted his head, done deal. With no further ceremony he drew his foot back and gave Bibhuti a tentative kick in the balls. He paused to make sure there was no ill feeling, then gave him another one. All was well. He asked for one more, and he made it a showstopper. Bibhuti rocked on his heels and called time. Another handshake to seal the new friendship, and then they each took an end of the first crate and walked it to B Pattni’s pick-up.

Jolly Boy still held his bat jealously. He took a lazy swipe at a passing rat. The rat disappeared into the same hole the one in the diamanté collar had found. I imagined the first rat was an escaped pet. That it had found life on the streets hard at first, but had risen to the challenge of freedom. No longer was it the butt of the other rats’ jokes. It had earned respect through fighting and repeated displays of ingenuity.

The drive back to Bibhuti’s apartment took us past a tiny clapperboard church, wedged between more colonial relics. The sign outside said ‘People are so often lonely because they build walls instead of bridges’. I thought of Ellen and how lonely I must have made her, and my heart missed a beat. I wondered if they’d found the car yet and what she’d fill my coffin with. Sawdust to preserve my dignity in my absence or pebbles so the rattling would drive home my betrayal.