Man on Fire

11

Bibhuti’s wife was waiting for us when we got back with the bats, dripping down the stairs in her dress of golden threads. A regal petulance flared in her eyes. She looked like she’d been waiting a lifetime to tell a home truth. Bibhuti was cornered as soon as he got out of the car. Me and Jolly Boy stayed out of the firing line, busied ourselves unloading the crates from B Pattni’s pick-up.

Bibhuti’s neighbour offered his help. I manfully refused it. Behind him a constellation of butterflies had formed in our absence, lured there by the banana peels hanging from the washing line. Their wings beat slowly as they fed on the rotting pulp. Others flew in from the surrounding trees to wait their turn, dancing colours in the still air. They studded the neighbour’s wife like jewellery.

‘My wife’s favourite is the gaudy baron. She likes the shade of green on the base of the wing, do you see?’

He pointed out one of the feeders, the jade fringe at its tail end.

‘Beautiful,’ I said. The word felt silly coming from me but I stood by it. I went over to get a closer look.

‘This is good time for butterflies,’ the neighbour said. ‘The monsoon is coming and they like the humid condition. The banana is very attractive to them. We have gaudy baron, great eggfly, common Jezebel, blue oakleaf — this one here.’

‘Oh yeah, it looks just like a leaf.’

‘Of course. And here is a striped tiger.’ There it was feeding out of his wife’s palm, living up to its name with its orange and black markings. Jolly Boy drew up beside me to watch, leaving his parents to bicker uninhibited.

He reached out a tentative finger to stroke it. A fear came over him, of breaking spells, and he pulled back. ‘I stroked a tiger’s tail. It was at Tadoba. He walked past our Gypsy and I put out my hand and he stopped and let me do it. It was very lovely.’

The neighbour smelt a lie and the generosity drained from him. The boy waited for him to acknowledge the brilliance of what he’d just told him. I stepped in when it looked like he might crumble.

‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘He told me.’

‘Wow,’ the man grinned. ‘Imagine stroking a tiger. You are very lucky.’

Jolly Boy bristled with pride, a mirror of the butterfly’s wings unfolding to snare the sun’s warming rays.

Meanwhile Bibhuti had accepted defeat. Heartbreak showed in the sag of his moustache. His wife was climbing the stairs, a vindicated streak of gold.

‘We cannot bring the bats into the house,’ Bibhuti said. ‘It is tempting to fate. We must keep them in the yard.’

Me and Jolly Boy were called back into action as B Pattni sped away in a cloud of diesel, gone to investigate an opportunity in shark skin.

The three of us shifted the crates to the patch of wasteland at the back of the apartment building. Bibhuti lifted a lid and cast a final look over the bats inside. He freed one and indulged himself in another caress, a sculptor falling in love with the block of stone that would yield his masterpiece. He eased the lid shut again.

‘My wife is very grateful that you have come to help me,’ he said. ‘Before you came I had no hope of achieving this record. Nobody wanted to help, they were all too afraid of hurting me. Now the record is in my grasp again and she sees the light returning to my eyes. It is a big relief for her. She prays for your safety also.’

‘She doesn’t have to do that.’

‘It is not a problem for her, always she is praying. You are our friend now and she is pleased for this.’

I skipped back onto the concrete before the snakes could sniff me out.

I fell asleep to the restful tapping of computer keys. Bibhuti had to write up his interview with the ping-pong monks, ready to file for tomorrow’s edition. I’d let him lead me to his bed and pull the blanket over me with the tenderness of a mother nursing a feverish child. Jolly Boy had sat with me for a while, watching over me while I curled myself into the imprint Bibhuti had left in the sheet before me. He’d slipped out of the room when I feigned sleep, leaving me to agitate in privacy on the liberties I’d taken to insinuate myself into his father’s clothes.

The Thums Up T-shirt stretched tight round my grumbling belly. The sweatpants biting in where the waistband hugged my hips. White socks with threadbare heels, a gift given so carelessly that I’d felt obliged to weep when I was putting them on and cursed my ingratitude when no tears came. It was an outfit apt for testing the limits of my old body, and for disappearing into the grain of a new family.

Maybe in these clothes, in the dark or in a rush, Bibhuti’s wife would mistake me for her man and show me the same patience she reserved for him. Maybe she’d be fooled long enough to accept me curled up like a cat on her lap, to stroke my cheek and tell me everything was going to be alright.

I woke up to the sound of her flip-flops flapping obscenely on the floor tiles as she moved around the kitchen. I had to sneak past her to the bathroom. Their toilet was a hole in the floor to perch over and ceramic footholds for stability. The house held its breath to listen for my mistakes.

Jolly Boy was waiting outside for me. He’d been assigned the task of checking my aim. He made a quick assessment of the state of the room. He was happy to see that I’d taken to their ways like a duck to water.

The next days were for slipping under the waves of the routine Bibhuti prescribed and for making complaints that he nobly ignored until the fight fell out of me. Harshad showed me how to let myself out. I’d lock the door behind me and post the key back through the letterbox. Bibhuti’s place was just a few minutes’ walk away and I’d pad the empty streets with the sleepless dogs, a ghost in the blue half-light until I arrived at Bibhuti’s courtyard and the disgraces began.

First there was a salute to the sun, then a chair and a downward-facing dog. The yoga was to make me supple and to rid my mind of any thoughts of recrimination for the abuses my new master would inflict. Then there were sit-ups and push-ups to strengthen my core, and squats to enlarge my thigh muscles where the power to drive my swings would be generated. I’d crawl to the apartment’s underbelly to stretch and shake, suck up my humiliation while the sun cast its first splinters, heaving with Bibhuti’s hands around my ankles, holding me down and holding me to my word. My stomach straining and my shoulders grinding as he shared with me his passion for life and its many opportunities for self-mutilation.

The smell of his deodorant and breakfast sprouts. Breathe in through the nose to the count of seven.

His wife’s wary eyes on me from the top of the stairs as she wrung out the washing. The soapy water slapping down on to the courtyard in noisy lascivious streams.

Hold to the count of five.

Jolly Boy bedheaded and smelling of sleep in his dragon-embroidered shirt, skipping past his mother to mark time on my creaking repetitions, the stopwatch his translator between childhood arithmetic and the strange numberless world of men and their obsessions. Hanging from his father like a tree, riding him while I rested. His small hands slipping over the scars that crossed Bibhuti’s back like ancient migration routes.

Breathe out through the mouth to the count of seven. Hold to the count of five and repeat.

The daily hanging of banana skins and later the catch, after the startled rise of the sun and the slowburning delay, watching the horizon for the incoming storm. Black clouds boiling and the wild descent of wings. The butterflies’ colours my consolation for the pain of ageing with too few stories to tell.

The neighbour watching me the way someone might watch a flower of blood forming under a freshly killed man. I’d never understood exactly what morbid curiosity meant until then. I mumbled sand-mouthed profanities to a country that had the measure of me and a sky that wanted to squash me into steam.

And repeat.

I’d fold my arms to cover my spare tyres, stripped to the waist while Bibhuti rubbed sun cream into my blistering shoulders, his breath warm and shocking on the back of my neck. I kept my eyes open so it wouldn’t look like I was enjoying myself. I missed Ellen’s hands on me. I missed having no gods to hide my ugliness from.

Then there were the games. Special tasks Bibhuti cobbled together to test my resolve and sharpen my instincts for desecration. To teach me patience he spilled a bowl of rice and made me pick it up one grain at a time. This after he’d smelled booze on me despite the promise I’d made to stop drinking. The sack bore a cartoon of a young boy wearing a baseball cap. The brand name was Tolly Boy. I misread it as Jolly Boy and before I’d realised my error I’d given Shubham his new name. He was delighted with it and so it stuck.

In return Jolly Boy helped me scratch up handfuls of rice when his father ducked inside to answer nature’s call. With half the rice returned to the bowl I’d learned all I needed to know about patience and respect. I’d learned that the god Bibhuti set his clock by was disinclined to both.

After the morning indignities Bibhuti would go out into the field, notebook in hand, to capture the unsung lives of his scrap of the country — a woodland sports retreat for blind kids, a powerlifting trial in the lobby of a Thane primary school closed down for the summer — and me and Jolly Boy would kick our heels on the outskirts of the action while he got his interviews. The Turbanator would always arrive at the last minute to immortalise the encounters in pictures that half the time wouldn’t make it to print for a lack of column space between the Monsoon Madness Sales adverts and the sex advice.

I remember watching the sightless children dangle from the trees like broken windchimes, their stiff flailing limbs trembling the anchor lines, lashed two feet off the ground between the trunks. A clumsy suspension of disbelief. They laughed. They jerked fearlessly and laughed without remorse because they couldn’t see how unbeautiful they looked. They’d looked for the ground with dead eyes and they’d found only sky. A groping for sensation, spirits twisting momentarily free from the deadweight of their orphaned bodies.

One girl’s leading foot slipped off the anchor line. In the instant of treading air her miracle was undone. She lost the grip of one hand and was tangled in her harness, spun there like a turning fruit. Her face contorted in panic, her useless eyes swimming in their sunken cavities. I thought about running to her rescue but I decided it wasn’t my place. Soon enough a chaperone came to steady her, coiled her fingers gently back round the rope above her head. With a few words of encouragement she completed her crossing, to be met with well-meaning plaudits and wandering hands.

In the evenings I’d ply Bibhuti for his secrets between my trials at the badminton net. Jolly Boy didn’t live up to his promise to go easy on me.

I asked Bibhuti how he beat pain.

‘I have trained myself. Pain is a choice. I have chosen not to accept it.’

‘That’s handy.’

‘Yes, it is very useful.’

‘How though?’

‘Come,’ Bibhuti said, and he got up and planted himself by the badminton net. He parted his legs just so. ‘You will kick me and you will see.’

I couldn’t do it. He tried to convince me but I was frozen, some righteous portion of my brain wouldn’t let me cross the line. I told him I had a tight hamstring. I’d wait until it was better.

‘Very well,’ Bibhuti said and waved Jolly Boy in. Still holding his badminton racquet he took a casual swipe at his father’s groin, the action so familiar to him that it seemed almost involuntary. No emotion played on his face. His father accepted the kick in a similar fashion. I imagined countless mornings of stiff routine, father goading son to harder and faster, teasing from him by attrition the bravery that would see him carry on the family name.

‘You see?’ Bibhuti asked.

‘I saw it, yeah. But what I want to know is how.’

I hadn’t swung a bat in anger. I had a taste for his blood.

‘It is a switch. Like light switch. I press the switch and the light goes off. Then it is darkness and the pain cannot be seen. I know it is there but if I cannot see it then it cannot grab me.’

‘But how?’

‘Breathing. Meditation. Training. Diet. The grace of the almighty. All of these things.’

I nodded my head to show that I believed him. I asked him if he’d heard about the Frenchman who ate a plane.

He hadn’t. I told him the story. He was appalled.

‘This is not a serious man,’ Bibhuti said. ‘He does not value the true meaning of the extreme sportsman’s ethic. It is same with my fellow Indians, many silly records. The fellow who balances candles on his moustache. Another who is just sitting still on a wall for eleven hours. What good is this doing? How does this provide positive example for common man and next generation?’

He became agitated, paced the courtyard stroking his moustache. His eyes blazed with the perversity of a world where the sacrifices of simple men go uncelebrated.

‘What I am doing is telling the people that if they endure the pain they will reach happiness that comes after. My country is very difficult place. A lot of people very poor and hungry. Life is constant struggle against all the odds and natural disasters. I am from a family of four brothers and two sisters in my native place. It was challenging to upbring six children in competitive world. The food grains produced from our land had never been sufficient to find ends meet. We used to go to bed with empty stomach every alternate day.

‘I am leaving home at twelve and handled myself all alone living in slum pocket and footpaths. I did odd jobs like taking tuition, working in hotels as waiter and grocery shop as supply boy, selling cow dung cake, taking care of cows, all for just one hundred rupees a day. I changed many schools and colleges due to lack of finance to finally complete postgraduation on my own. When I first came to Mumbai after my degree I spent many months in the streets.’

He squeezed his eyes shut, as if to banish the ghosts of his dissatisfied past. I reached up to pat him on the shoulder but he roused himself before I could touch him.

‘But this does not matter now. I found my intended path through many struggles. This is the message I convey to the people when I am breaking my records. The happiness is coming after the pain. Forget these emotional moments. I am very sorry.’

Bibhuti took a comb from his back pocket and went to the step to scrape thoughtfully at his hair. Silence fell. India got hotter. My past trickled away like rain into pavement cracks.

More sprouts and spices for the last meal of the day, and Bibhuti’s wife asked no questions of us. All she cared about was that we wash our hands and empty our bowls. The less she said the more I wanted to know what went on inside her, just like I’d wanted to with Ellen, so that I could reassure myself with something beautiful and ageless. I wanted to see the place where she was born. I imagined she’d grown up among fawns and chemical smog and that the river had brought her here to be a testament to the unknowable, to give comfort to the lost and to incite the jealousies of men like me.

Jolly Boy would walk me back to the hotel to make sure I didn’t get lost and to scare the prying dogs back into their shadows. We’d talk about sports cars and our differing names for chocolate. He’d turn and run when he saw Harshad at the door, his goodbye echoing between the billboards and the sleeping windows. Harshad would always greet me with a haunted look in his eyes, as if I’d caught him weighing up the rights and wrongs of staying alive for another day. I’d hide the money and count my bruises, and then I’d lie awake for an hour fretting over the next morning’s inconveniences and wondering about the friends I’d had at school. What they might have done with their lives and what they might have believed in.

If they could see me now how sick with envy they’d be. I’d be the first of us to go viral and the last to give in to religion.