Man on Fire

21

As the sun set over the hills beyond the pylons of Vashi I climbed into a barrel and started stomping. The grapes felt slimy between my toes. I realised I’d been craving the touch of something organic for as long as I could remember.

The rooftop SkyBar was hosting a New World wines promotion. I’d come here to feel indiscreet. The corporate high-flyers pranced and flapped for a free bottle of Chilean Merlot while in the street below fatherless children clamoured to divvy the sweetbreads from eviscerated clock radios.

I was in the third barrel. The girl next to me was Korean, I think. A furious little thing in oatmeal linen, she stomped the fastest of all of us. She wanted to win. The waiters were handing out free bottles like they were the last of a tainted batch. As guests of the hotel we were owed something. A prize for having made it to the jet set.

None of them knew they were dancing bears. I was the saddest bear of all but at the time it didn’t matter. I was strong and alive and I had a friend who’d die for me.

A circle formed around us. The other hotshots still in their shoes clapped and hollered. Tonight they were on fire. Far from home and swaddled in booze they’d write their own history on the sky. One of them pointed and laughed at me. He wore a pink shirt and his sunburn made his head look like a fire alarm.

I looked across the rooftops to the train station and the InfoTech park, its stacked boxes topped with Airfix aerials and dishes. I decided for the night that it wasn’t a call centre at all, but a training facility for orphaned acrobats. The smudge-faced kids in the rat runs below me had once been caged there, sold by their families into showbiz slavery. They’d escaped into this darker freedom and were happy to endure its hardships if it meant no more cartwheels at the tip of a ringmaster’s bullying cane.

I stomped my way to notoriety and won my bottle. I held it up like a trophy. They cheered me. I fled to the edge of the roof to commune with the hidden stars. Their music couldn’t puncture the smog. I listened instead to the howling and chatter of the high-flyers and imagined myself better than them because I had a purpose worth running from.

The kick had been a breakthrough. When I’d landed my foot between Bibhuti’s legs I’d heard my own bones creak and mesh into a new formation that would let my greatness out like rays of light through pinholes in a blanket. It was restorative. Bibhuti’s nightly incursions were just local colour and the dogs that serenaded me so tirelessly would one day be bonemeal for an orchid farm.

A couple of weeks in and the novelty had started to wear thin. I was always tripping over Bibhuti meditating in the darkness on my way to the toilet. I tired of the sight of him in his underpants standing over me as I tried to sleep. I needed a dose of comfort to reward myself for all my hard work. Cotton sheets on a king-size bed and a break from his watching. Some carefully selected pleasures to throw a share of my money at before it got swallowed up in the record attempt and whatever life came after. I booked a night in the hotel next to the shopping mall Bibhuti had taken me to. I left his apartment in a holiday mood and promised to be good.

Bibhuti didn’t like the idea. ‘What if something is happening while you are there? A bomb or a fire or perhaps there is too much temptation there and you are returning to bad habits?’

I told him those things were behind me. The quiet would be a tonic and I’d come back stronger.

The lobby air smelled like a focus-grouped future and there were free boiled sweets in a jar at reception. I took a handful to last me.

I swam some lengths in the spa pool in exorbitant trunks from the in-house boutique, scraping elbows with fat Europeans on a desalination junket. I ate a fusion lunch in the restaurant that came out the other end a vibrant orange and sipped cold beers in the Tipplers’ Lounge, watching an office block go up on the opposite side of the street. The scaffolding was bamboo and the unharnessed workers dangled from it like monkeys. I credited their bravery to a handed-down belief in falcons that would swoop in and pluck them from the air if their footing failed them.

I could feel Ellen looking at me wherever I put myself. I couldn’t put a lid on what I’d done to her. I had more freedom than I knew what to do with and all I wanted to do was sleep and wake up again in a post-people world, where all our rivalries had grassed over and the animals ran the streets again.

I became aware of someone standing beside me. I looked down and saw a brown hand clutching the railing next to mine. I looked at her face. She was young and slender. Her native complexion looked out of place unstarched by waitress whites. In her emerald-green dress she could have been Bollywood. She smiled diffidently. The heat whispered over us and stirred something up. I let her make her proposal. I added my amendments and she suggested a price. I accepted. We boarded the lift in silence.

Our soundtrack was an instrumental version of ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ played by robots in tuxedos. The girl could have only been twenty-five at a push. Complicit eyes sharpened to a merchant’s point and hair tied in a ponytail. The back of her neck was exposed as she turned away from me to guard the lift buttons and to dwell on whatever happy consolations she needed reminding of to pull her through the next hours. I watched her neck and wished the both of us animals, unthinking things unstalked by death that did what we did only because the rules of being alive compelled us to.

She checked my money under a UV lamp that she carried in her handbag. The rupees passed her inspection and she went to the bathroom to undress. She took her bag with her. I scanned the room for things I could defend myself with in case she came back with a pistol. I put a glass on the bedside table, half an arm’s length from my side of the bed. I stood on the Egyptian cotton sheets and examined the smoke alarm for a hidden camera. I sat on the bed with my shoes still on and listened to my heart charging.

Outside, hammers and horns rained down. The city was rebuilding itself for the benefit of those who’d come after me. Sewer lids were being driven down against the hazards of the coming storm.

The girl came back in red underwear. She stood at the foot of the bed and let me take her in. Her flat stomach and soft limbs drew from me a gasp that sounded loud in the room. She smoothed herself down, as if to remove the static or shame from her skin. She knelt down and untied my shoes, slipped them off and dropped them on the carpet. All the while looking me in the eyes with a fabricated understanding of what it was I needed to smother my pain. I wanted to press myself very gently against her and feel her warmth, the strong heartbeat that quivered in her neck and pushed clean blood around her body, and the dreams tarnished and advanced by the likes of me.

She opened the wine I’d won and filled two glasses, put one on each bedside table. She got on the bed, on all fours.

‘I can start now?’ she asked.

‘Yes please.’

She hesitated, poised to turn and sit down but unsure of herself.

‘I’m dying,’ I said as an inducement. ‘I’ve never done anything like this before.’

‘You really are dying?’

‘It’s alright, it’s nothing you can catch. I won’t ask for anything else, I promise.’

The girl did something sympathetic with her eyebrows and sat down beside me. I plumped the pillows to make her more comfortable. We almost touched. My mouth went dry. I took a drink. The wine was claggy and I felt it stain my teeth.

‘You can get in if you want,’ I said.

‘You don’t want to see me?’

‘It’s up to you. Only if you don’t mind.’

‘I will stay here,’ she said.

‘Do you know Tom and Jerry?’

‘Yes I know them.’

‘You know what you have to do?’

‘Of course.’

I gave her the colouring book. She opened it and flicked slowly through its pages, introducing herself to the pictures. Her lips curled into a belittling smile and I stirred in spite of it.

The hammers stopped for the night. In the quiet they left I was monstrous.

I opened the packet of felt-tips and offered her the first selection, a boy sharing stolen cigarettes. She shuffled closer to me and picked the brown. She made a start on Jerry, resting the book on her thighs. She held the pen lightly. Her face set into enchanting concentration. I chose a blue and took it to Tom where he gave chase. She opened the book out wider for me.

Ellen was half a world away and had probably stopped mourning me by now. I’d never stop mourning her. The feeling came back to me of being alone beside her in a bed too small to kick out in. Her body immovable and unwilling to be played, a piano with the lid nailed down. Sometimes I’d deliberately touch her and feel her shrink under my fingertips. Sometimes I’d go a lifetime without touching her at all. Hearing her frightened breath catch on the air between us I’d marvel at her patience and my own. Both of us waiting for something to break, or for the darkness to spread wide enough for us to disappear into it for as long as it took to be forgotten. Our former selves were ghosts that came back to sniff at us whenever a tender song played or a need for relief prickled our clammy skin. Our youth was dead and buried in a hole dug with care and lined with wool for softness.

The girl asked if she was doing it right and I said she was. I let myself believe that I was showing her a kindness, by giving her a break from the things she was usually made to do. Her skin on mine where our thighs touched was softer than the air around us. The silence drifted over me and settled into the places where papercuts had languished unsealed for years. Watching her hands roam the page I shrank back to a boy catching bees in a jam jar.

When the morning came she was still beside me. On top of the sheet, still stripped to her underwear and watching me closely, reflecting on ageing and what it might do to her as it had done to me.

She asked if she could pleasure me with her hand and I declined as gently as I could. Instead she took me to the bathroom and washed the grape must off my feet. She had to scrub to get the stains off and she apologised for hurting me. I told her it was alright. I offered to buy her breakfast but she said she didn’t eat breakfast. Hammers and horns. She pulled the blackout drape open a crack and light came lancing in to unhide my vulgar flesh. I folded my arms. She looked out on the day. There was jealousy in her eyes. The world wasn’t yet as she’d instructed it. Some people still had it all and some still had nothing. She still had all her proving to do.

Between the hammer blows came drums, away in the distance. The girl took in the day and made her plans for the future.

I looked at my watch. It was gone twelve. I felt like I’d slept for days.

‘You could have gone,’ I told the girl. ‘It’s late.’

‘I am staying. This is the agreement. You have late checkout, you told me this? I will go when you go.’

She ploughed a hand into her knickers and scratched herself lavishly. The colouring book lay open on the bed. I picked it up and flicked through the pages all now living in the colours we’d applied. The cat chased the mouse around. The cat played the piano. The dog snapped at the cat’s heels and the mouse bent his back under a piece of cheese as big as a house.

The drums sounded louder. I thought I heard trumpets among them. The girl beckoned me to the window. Her brow was knotted in deep thought. I stood behind her and peered out through the gap she’d made in the curtains.

‘Do you hear it?’ she asked.

‘Music?’

‘It is a wedding.’

I looked down onto the street below. I couldn’t see where the music was coming from. Louder and louder it came, trumpets thickening and drums beating at a festive rhythm. People started gathering outside the hotel, looking off in the direction of the music. Beggar children stood meerkat to attention, pulling in excitement at their private parts. The streetdogs barked in anger at the rival noise.

The band turned the corner and the children ran to greet them. They trailed them to a spot in front of the hotel where they stopped and struck up a new song. A corps of dancing revellers fell in around them, brightly dressed and beaming. They surrounded the happy couple, who were young and scared and dripping gold. They were lifted onto the shoulders of the crowd and bounced in time with the music. Sweets in colourful wrappers spilled from their elders’ hands to be fought over by the street kids with thrilling animosity.

The girl watched all this and wiped a tear from her cheek.

‘The bride is very beautiful,’ she muttered.

I stood beside her on the carpet, felt the vibrations from the wedding party needling the soles of my feet. I was almost afraid to look at her in case my attention scratched a permanent mark. She was an island of undiscovered music in a sea of noise.

‘Soon they will be coming into the hotel,’ she said. ‘They will have a banquet room with flowers and more music playing. There will be food and dancing and somebody to take their pictures. There are lots of weddings here.’

The horns had taken on a ragged quality, the trumpeters’ industry slackening as the air grew thick with the spectacle wealth makes of itself.

‘Shall we gatecrash?’

The girl didn’t know the word. I explained. ‘We’re guests at the hotel, we should be allowed to join in. We’ll get drunk.’

‘We cannot go into the party, it is not permitted.’

‘Then let’s get down there while they’re still outside. Come on.’

I came away from the window and dressed quickly, glad of the excuse to pack my desires away out of her sight. I checked my trouser pocket for the sweets I’d stolen. We’d need more. The girl saw that I was serious and got dressed too, retrieved her bag from the bathroom. I put the colouring book in it. She didn’t look for meaning in the gesture.

We jumped up and down in the lift to make it go faster. I scooped a handful of sweets from the bowl at reception and gave them to the girl. The security guards opened the door for us and out we charged into her rightful sunlight.

The wedding party had swelled, sucking in well-wishers from the passing shoppers. Fellow hotel guests, called like us by the trumpets, were lurking at the outer circle, filming stray splinters of the procession on their mobile phones to bring back home for the amusement of their offices. Out here the drums hit me in the stomach. It felt like they were coming from inside me. Sweat from the dancers hung like flies in the air and their colours formed a fire-ring around the promised couple, a barrier to the dust and resentments of the wider world.

The girl stood and watched, her mouth open.

‘I like the colours,’ I said.

‘These are the colours I would choose. But I do not like her jewellery, the design is very old-fashioned. I would choose something more modern, I think.’

The bride wasn’t beautiful like the girl had said. She was caked and basted and frightened. The groom the same. In the eye of the storm they waited to be told what to do, their sugared lips parted in acceptance of their good fortune, their kohl-smeared eyes flea-jumping to every movement that might divert them from each other’s gaze. I felt a rush of worry for them. I threw a sweet to a boy who was standing apart from the crowd, naked from the waist down, ignored by the elders’ ritual scatterings. He didn’t grasp my intention in time and the sweet hit him on the side of the head. He bent to pick it up without complaint.

Other children rushed in and I threw the rest of my sweets, showering them with my benevolence. The girl joined in, throwing hers more discriminately, one at a time to the little girls who reminded her of innocent times.

When they were all gone she wandered away from me through the hotel gate, unstung by the suggestive looks of the security guards. On the pavement outside she found a place for herself in the surge from where she could get a better view of the final flourishes before the trumpeters gave out. I stayed where I was, watching her back in case she was caught up in the crush and needed saving.

A prying dog snarled at the watchers’ legs, causing a fall somewhere at the back. In the commotion a tourist dropped his phone and swore loudly. The dog had its foot trodden on and let out a yelp. A cross-legged infant shoved the dog muzzle-first out of the firing line and picked up the sweet that had been hiding in its shadow.

The music died and the crowd cleared to let the procession through the gate. The lovebirds were eased from their seat and lowered to the ground. The doormen swung the doors open to the advancing party. The bodyscanner was switched off, a prearranged concession to the dignity of the occasion.

I stepped aside to set myself apart from the happy ones as they filed into the lobby. I looked for the girl.

She was standing in the road watching the bride being swallowed by her new family, her face starched and covetous as the gate was wheeled closed. Our eyes met and I gave her a little smile. She didn’t return it. She didn’t have to. My money was hers now and she could do what she wanted with it.

‘I know where there are butterflies,’ I said. ‘I can take you to see them.’

‘I must go,’ she said.

‘Okay. Thank you.’

‘I hope you don’t die.’

‘Thanks. You too.’

She turned and crossed the road and kept on walking. I waited until she was a speck and then I went back to the room to get my things together. I smelled her as soon as I walked in. I cried briefly for my loss.

I took the train back to Airoli, breathing in the dust from the open door and thinking about the approaching rain. How heavy it might be and how fast it might fill me up if I stood very still with my mouth wide open to the sky. I bought a bunch of blackened bananas from a child with eyes dimmed by illiteracy and the smoke of rubbish fires. I gave them to Bibhuti’s neighbour when I got back, to feed his addiction to beauty.

Bibhuti was on tenterhooks. I told him I’d behaved myself and he embraced me like a long-lost friend. He hadn’t been convinced that I’d return.

‘What made you think that?’ I asked.

‘I imagined you might go home and leave me without hope. It has been a difficult time for you.’

‘I wouldn’t do that. I made you a promise and I’m gonna keep it.’

His relief was startling and I had to sit down. It felt good to be missed.