Man on Fire

17

Gopal Dutta was eighty-seven years old and when he did a jumping roundhouse kick he put five full feet between himself and the ground. He climbed the air like a ladder and made the world pause in quiet reflection. He landed without a sound.

The other students made nothing of the feat because to them it was expected and had lost its novelty. They paid no attention to him at all. Instead they focused on Bibhuti out front and centre, calling out his instructions with modest persistence. They all jumped and kicked and landed as one, starlings flocking in the shape of a bird. I watched Gopal Dutta. I looked for the springs welded into the soles of his feet. I looked for the breaks in the seams of the old man costume that might reveal the young boy hiding inside.

I couldn’t find them. I fell asleep.

Jolly Boy woke me up with a tap on the shoulder. There was worry on his face. I reassured him, said that whenever I fell asleep I’d most likely wake up again. This arrangement would hold for the foreseeable.

Standing behind him were his father and Gopal Dutta, impatient to be introduced. The older man’s legs were hairless in purple running shorts with gold trim and too much of his thighs was on show. A lurid man and one to be grudgingly admired. Bibhuti had told me on the way to class how he’d cured Gopal Dutta of cancer. I’d dismissed it as well-meaning fancy. But face to face it became immediately obvious that cancer had never stood a chance. Gopal Dutta wasn’t prone as other men are to the quirks of disease. His tiny frame, now denied the freedom of the air and tethered groundward, stooped under the weight of a century’s failed assassination attempts. I wondered how many dynasties he’d sired and if he’d thought about making a fitness video.

‘He is my oldest student,’ Bibhuti said. ‘He received a tumour in his liver in 2001. I cured it with yoga and diet. Doctors declared that he could not survive two months but with my help the tumour disappeared and here he is nine years later in the flesh.’

‘Bloody hell,’ I said.

‘This is not unusual. Before that I had a student with tuberculosis. He was cured of the ailment in three months under my guidance with breathing exercises and positive thinking.’

‘Breathing is everything,’ Gopal Dutta said, and he shook my hand. His grip was strong and he tilted his head goatlike and peered into my eyes as if he might see the cancer there and by his stare petrify it into surrender.

The fearsome Kavita shrieked past us. Her foot speared for the head of her luckless sparring partner. Frozen, he accepted his fate with dignity.

Gopal Dutta spoke with confidence. ‘If you do what Sir instructs you will defeat the cancer,’ he said. ‘I thought my time was over but he extended my span. This was nine years ago. His knowledge is from God, he has a direct link. Mostly it is the correct breathing. People do not breathe right and that is why they are dying. They think they know the right way but it is not as easy as that.

‘I was pilot for Indian Airlines, I flew commercial jets for eight years. The lives of the passengers were in my hands. All this time I was not breathing correctly. It is a miracle that I did not crash. The crash in Mangalore was terrible, the news has stated weather was the factor but I believe it was down to incorrect breathing of the pilot. Everything stems from this. Now that I am breathing the right way I feel many years younger and I cannot make a mistake. I would like to fly again and have written to Air India to offer my services. They have not yet replied. I feel very young. You also will recover lost years under BB’s guidance. I thank him every day.’

Gopal Dutta’s eyes shone behind the dust motes dancing in the air around us. I looked down at his big toes as he rubbed them childishly against their neighbours. It provoked a strange feeling of loyalty. We were all children no matter how hard we tried to hide it.

‘I know I haven’t been breathing right,’ I admitted. ‘I’m doing better now. I’m trying my best.’

‘There is no reason to give up hope,’ Bibhuti said. ‘If I can cure one man I can cure another, you and Gopal Dutta are not so different.’

I was made to stand still while Gopal Dutta demonstrated his vivacity by kicking the air a hair’s breadth in front of my left eye. I felt my skin tingle as the air changed and when I chanced a look up he was above me, suspended as if from wires. He might have winked at me, I can’t be sure. When he landed I was a believer.

Gopal Dutta wished me good luck and padded away, revealing the lower curve of his left buttock as he went. He picked up where he’d left off, making leaping roundhouse kicks for the pleasure of it, treating his observers to the illusion that the air was more amber than oxygen.

Later Bibhuti took me shopping. We’d decided, since I was going to survive, that I needed workout clothes of my own. Bibhuti wanted to show me the mall in Vashi where he’d broken the last of his records. A bicycle had been ridden over him twenty-three times in one minute to mark the mall’s grand opening. He’d shared the bill with a man who threw knives at his infant son.

‘The knives were not sharp,’ Jolly Boy complained. ‘I saw one hit him and there was not much blood. Real knives would make more.’

They carried on singing along to the radio, stopping only when Bibhuti had to swerve to avoid a pedestrian who’d taken on a battle of wills with the traffic at the interchange where Vashi’s immodest towers rose from the dust like the ribs of excavated giants.

The commercial heart of Navi Mumbai. Home to the flat-pack call centres and the four-star hotels where the toppers of international business came to discuss in piped-in comfort the most efficient ways of sucking India’s marrow from its bones. One of them was right next door to the mall. Hotel security was sweeping a car full of arriving guests. Their hands hovered over holstered sidearms. They checked the car’s boot and ran a mirror along its undercarriage in search of explosives. When none were discovered they rolled back the blastproof barrier and waved the car through. Its passengers showed no signs of having been inconvenienced.

On the landscaped lawn outside the mall two holy men stood praying in barrels, submerged to the shoulders in symbolic water. They petitioned the sky to let loose its cooling rain and wake the world from its seasonal indolence.

People were lining up for a bodysearch outside Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Inside, Bibhuti and Jolly Boy stopped to marvel at the central atrium, fringed with common franchises and patrolled by a pair of bumfluff security guards whose main duty was to flutter their truncheons at the resting consumers perched on the lip of the fountain at its northern end until they took the hint and moved on. The fountain like their epaulettes was supposed to be admired from afar.

‘This is where I achieved the record,’ Bibhuti said. ‘I was lying here. Two bicycles came from this side, where you see Costa Coffee, and one bicycle from this side. They rotated in sequence until the minute was up. They rode over my solar plexus area where I am holding most of my strength. Only once did my student Rohan miss the target. He went over my neck just above the collarbone. Luckily he was able to find his way across without falling. The collarbone was broken but Guinness allowed the record to stand. No specific area of the body was declared, the only requirement was that they travel over me individually and remain upright.

‘Come, we will find you some nice sporting clothes. You are becoming a sportsman and you must have your own selection.’

He picked out the same clothes he wore and held my bag of money while I tried them on, sucking my belly in for the mirror. This would be me in my last days, abandoning my style to roam unfettered through the land that vanity forgot. The thought made me smile. Maybe I’d come to prize the comfort of sweatpants. Maybe through the routine Bibhuti had devised for me I’d blossom into beauty in time for the mortuary portraits.

We came out again into the sunlight glancing through clouds that were swollen now like malnourished bellies. The wind was rising and a small crowd had formed around the holy men in their barrels. A little girl tiptoed to the rim and stuck a flower in the older one’s beard. Her father took a picture on his phone. The holy man resisted the temptation to smile.

The monsoon had just left Chennai, Bibhuti said. It would reach us in a week.

‘Is the rain really that heavy? I’ve never been in a monsoon before.’

‘Yes, it is very heavy. Every year many problems. Landslides and floods and people falling down the manholes. Every year the city is in a scramble to cover them before the rain arrives. Many times a drain lid is caving in or missing. People cannot see the dangers when the ground is beneath the water, they are falling in and becoming victimised. My advice is to watch your step very carefully.’

The children came running at us from nowhere. A tide of brown skin flecked with the white of chattering teeth. My wrists were worried by little grabbing hands, my toes trodden on. A rushing of volatile limbs and dancing private parts.

‘Hello, sir, hello! You buy, one dollar!’

I recognised the drooping eyelid of the ringleader, the birthmark smudge on the girl’s hip. The kids from the train station. I felt giddy with relief that they’d survived the days since I’d last seen them.

They were still peddling their Tom and Jerry colouring books but there were no chicks to be seen. I asked the ringleader what had happened to Oscar.

‘Soli eat,’ the girl said. I guessed that Soli was the boy’s name.

‘You ate him?’

Soli tilted his head bashfully. There was no regret in him.

‘But he was a baby,’ I said.

‘You buy,’ he said, shoving the colouring book at me. ‘One dollar.’

‘I don’t need another one,’ I told him.

His face fell. He found it hard to accept that all my colouring needs could be so easily satisfied. When it became clear I wasn’t buying he turned on his heels and ran, the girl chasing after him. They tested the brakes of the auto rickshaws as they dashed across the road and made the sweet lime seller jump when they spun past his cart.

I felt a dread of the coming rain. I kept it to myself.