Man on Fire

13

Having fixed the radio Harshad had turned his attention to the portable TV that had sat silent on the counter since my arrival. He wanted all lines of communication open before the rains came. His clumsy-looking hands were calmed into surgical precision by the importance of the task. He snapped a part into place on the circuit board and the LCD screen jumped to bold black. He took a blind sip from his glass in celebration.

‘Now we are back in business,’ he purred. ‘A new inverter is all it needed.’

He replaced the TV’s cover and found a channel. More on the Mangalore plane crash. The news anchors’ suits were shiny and out of date and their producers had added Hollywood strings to the location footage and pressed the slo-mo button to keep the viewers interested. Wailing survivors tore their hair out and banged their fists on the ground, trying to dig themselves down to the centre of the earth where their lost ones were waiting for them.

I checked on the mural in passing. The snake was finished and the figure of Harshad wore slip-on shoes. Laces were too fiddly to paint.

The old man was sleeping soundly, curled up on his tarpaulin. His army of gods stood guard over him, watchful for whatever dreams might leak out from the many holes in his head. I stepped round him and carried on walking towards the spot he always looked for when he was awake.

Bibhuti had given me a day off to heal. He had reports to type up and I was craving a rest from voices that demanded answers of me. India for the unassimilated was too many people and no time alone.

Airoli’s main strip was all falling-down food places and spilling-out tat shops, once bright colours faded from the sun and savaged by the dust kicked up from the dirt pavement. Men in shirtsleeves lined up at the tap on the corner to wet their handkerchiefs and wipe the sweat from their necks. I went into a bazaar that sold cartwheels and moulded plastic tricycles hung from the ceiling by wires. I bought a beginner’s football for Jolly Boy that I hoped would entice him away from racquet sports.

The shopkeeper asked me if I was here on vacation. I told him no, I was here to help someone break a world record. I was going to hit him with a baseball bat until it broke. I was going to keep doing that until we ran out of bats.

He knew all about Bibhuti and he suspected it couldn’t be done. He wished us good luck all the same.

I crossed the road frogways between the buzzing scooters and the auto rickshaws dangling legs and trails of headscarves and bright flowing skirts. I went to the station to be quiet and to watch the trains coming in. I sat on the platform floor, hugging the football to my chest and revelling in my loneliness.

The trains weren’t steam-powered like I’d imagined them to be. Still they spoke of a time when things were simple and built to a looser standard. They came in slowly with people hanging out of the open doors, jumping off before they’d stopped with a careless heave, as if they’d been pushed from behind by something big and invisible. Their god of the day was an impatient one who wanted them all out in the open where they could be counted and assigned their latest portions of luck. Behind each arriving train a gang of stealthy vagrants would creep in, crawling out from the plywood foxholes at the side of the tracks. Men my age, sometimes a young boy or two in tow, dust still in their hair from the last inbound trip. All crouching and bent with their bags of turning fruit. When they got up close they’d spray out like wings and ease on board just as the train was pulling out again, swarming the carriages in the hope of unloading their bananas on the drowsy general bogies.

It was cool and dark under the terminal roof. I could be anyone and I didn’t need a reason to be there. I could just sit and watch the trains come and go and the people they carried, brown faces all poised and shiny with the places they had to be. The waiting men shuffled in cocky circles round the edge of the platform, spitting on the tracks with unhurried finesse. I dozed off. The new weight of my obligation pulling me comfortably down, I felt myself spread out like a burn and I was gone.

I woke up to a hand tugging at my sleeve. The football slipped out of my hands and I reached out and grabbed it before it could roll away. A boy’s hairless genitals were hovering in my eyeline, close enough that I could have lifted my hand and jingled them like bells. He had Tom and Jerry colouring books to sell. His friend was naked too and she held out her hand to me. In her palm was a chick, newly hatched and chirping for its mother.

I could have either of these things for one dollar.

They looked at me with meagre hope.

‘Please, sir,’ the boy said. ‘Only one dollar. You buy.’

I tucked the football under my arm and dug some rupees out of my pocket. I handed them to the boy, keeping my arm straight so he had to step away to accept them, relieving me of my proximity to his trembling bits and pieces. He gave me a colouring book. It came with a packet of felt-tip pens in a small rainbow of colours.

The girl lunged at me with the chick. I told her gently that I couldn’t take him. I had nowhere to keep him. Her face fell. I gave her some money.

‘For his food,’ I said. ‘You have to look after him. What’s his name?’

A blank stare. She didn’t understand. I longed to tell them all about Neil Armstrong and how he’d sprinkled stardust over my impressionable years. But it would have meant nothing to them.

‘Call him Oscar. That’s a good name. I had a bird called Oscar once. He was a good bird.’

The girl squeezed the chick and it let out a screech. I gave her an instructive look and she loosened her grip.

‘That’s settled, then. Oscar. Make sure you give him plenty of worms.’

They tilted their heads in a show of comprehension.

One of the spitting men came and kicked out at the children. Maybe he thought he was doing me a favour. They ran away, tumbling like spilled matches down the stairs into the darkness of the terminal. I wanted to have a go at the man for his unkindness but I couldn’t get the words out. Having children of my own would have made me braver, I thought, and my spinelessness came to me all at once like a visitation from a world beyond my reach. I went back to the hotel to sleep it off.

Ellen grew heavy before I did and I just watched it happen. I should have said something but I didn’t want to make her feel bad. She went from being as light as air to slow and grudging. She stopped dancing and took up bingo instead, so she wouldn’t have to think about the body that had failed her, she could hide behind a table and concentrate on the numbers. She filled herself with small complaints to close the hole the hysterectomy had left. Everything became a trial and a mockery, life was too high-stakes to laugh it off and the only compensations came in low-denomination wins and short-haul getaways on the Provident book. I think she wanted to stay stuck to a moment of loss. I think she preferred being there to being with me. Staying hopeful took too much out of her and I just reminded her of the son she’d promised me over nights of careless wish-making. I kept out of the way as much as I could, took to working longer and driving further down the back roads to see where they led and what might be going on in the fields before all the horses disappeared and the scrapyards took over.

It’s the weight that age puts on that made us indifferent to our blessings the way a failing eye becomes indifferent to the changing colour of the day as it passes. It’s the weight of unsurprising years that killed us. She gave away the small clothes and found new uses for the baby milk cupboard, put a record player where the rocking horse would have gone and buried herself in Johnny Kidd and Eddie Cochran. I tried to make up for every missing thing with softness and undaunted desire, but you can’t draw blood from an arm made of stone. I grew heavy too, by the sky pressing down on me. If I’d believed in you then I would have said it was your hand pressing down. With you to blame I could have been defiant. Instead I accepted the fate of people in trouble. I told Ellen when she needed to hear it that I was happy to be hers and I did my breathing outside. I went out into the world and made myself reliable. The days were to be slipped through like ink through paper and we had each other to come home to. We were swans on a lake, moving alongside each other undemanding and courteous, never turning our heads from the slow approaching storm.

One time I saw her in town. I was on my way to a job, to walk someone through a house they couldn’t afford to buy and tell them all the things about it that were a perfect fit for them. The space and the light and the features. Always play up the features. Ceiling roses and mixer taps, bare floorboards and wall tiles that had survived the wars and the purges that razed the pie and mash shops and re-zoned them into nail bars. I was stopped at the lights and there she was, across the road looking in the window of a toy shop. I could tell it was her from the stoop of her back and a sadness came over me, a sense that I’d never known her and could never make her happy again. With the windscreen glass between us and the traffic streaming past we were very separate and each of us very alone. All I could feel for her was pity, that the world she walked through when she was without me should be so full of hurts and that I could do nothing to protect her from them. How lost she looked, out on the street surrounded by strangers, her shopping bag hung on the crook of her arm and her head still and tilted to the window display where wind-up carousels and snowglobes were ranged in so many varieties that each one seemed like a thoughtless reproduction of the last and the next.

When the lights changed I made a sharp left and parked up on the kerb opposite to watch her. I could see her face from there and my heart stopped when I realised that it wasn’t sad at all. She was smiling to herself and her eyes were girlish and dancing. Her movements were slow and unlaboured like the slide of water over smooth stones as she leaned towards the window, and I saw that her slowness now was a different thing to the slowness she trod through the house, it was something willed, meant to capture time and make it useful to her for reliving a moment of wonder. She stopped, drew herself in and was still. She’d found a favourite. I saw the wonder on her face and knew that it didn’t come from me. I couldn’t share it or take credit for it and this hurt deep in the part of me that still believed she was mine to hold or to lose or that my privilege lay in choosing the things she found pleasure in.

I drove off before she could spot me, my mind racing with anger and longing. It felt as though I’d caught her in the act of cheating on me. I wanted to ask her what she’d found that could make her smile when she’d used up all her smiles for me. I wanted to know how I’d come to be so unimportant.

At home that night we were the same people we’d always been. Nothing had changed. No mention was made of where she’d gone or what I’d seen. It became just another thing that went unsaid, a spiteless secret to add to the pile that grew around our feet. I took a perverse comfort in being right. Her life and mine were two separate things and we’d chosen quite reasonably to ask no further questions of them.