Man on Fire

22

I was beating the life out of Bibhuti with a baseball bat when my first monsoon broke. Jolly Boy was timing me on his stopwatch.

‘Faster, Uncle, faster! Hit him more harder!’

‘It kills your arms though.’

The sweat was falling off me in waves. I felt sick to my stomach but I’d come too far to give up now.

Bibhuti was standing with his legs spread apart for balance, his body tensed like it was holding a high note. His face holy cow serene as I piled into him, bouncing the bat off his shoulders and his shins and his thighs, his back where the crocodile bites were shining. He made a tree of himself and took it, let out a satisfied little grunt whenever I hit a sweet spot.

The black clouds spilled their first drops. Big rain. Birdshit big and hot. A drop landed on my head. Itchy. Then another one. Everything went dark. The courtyard sagged and sang under the weight of it, all that enraged air. I couldn’t get the right grip, my feet were slipping. Everything hurt and the raindrops were burning.

‘Keep going,’ Bibhuti said, his voice quiet and steady. He sucked a fat raindrop from his moustache.

‘Twenty-four seconds!’ Jolly Boy shouted, jumping up and down with the turmoil of it all. ‘You can break it! Hit him!’

I lifted the bat up higher, tightened my grip. I thought I could see a hairline crack but it wasn’t enough, it still felt too solid. The fear was a coal in my throat. I looked at Bibhuti’s shin where it had come up red and swollen. I didn’t think it would be this hard to break a man.

‘Come,’ Bibhuti said, waving me in. ‘You are almost there. One more hit only, I can feel it. Come.’

His voice was soothing. Like Mum rubbing calamine lotion on my wasp sting, that time at the Mumbles when I was a boy. I was as helpless as a boy again. A prisoner of the moment and its keeper, weak and drunk on daring. I couldn’t let him down. I lined up another shot across his shoulder, closed my eyes and stepped into it.

A great scream like a wrecking ball split the darkness in half, and I fell forwards into empty space.

There was a moment of nothing when I could have been anyone and anywhere. It was beautiful and it made up for every lie I ever told.

‘Lovely hit!’ Jolly Boy shouted, and I opened my eyes. The bat had been ripped in two, the grip end splintered in my hand. Jolly Boy was grinning at me in demented wonder. Bibhuti rubbed the spot where I got him, the bruises spreading over his skin like a wild virus. He looked at himself in grim adoration and slowly shook his head, taking in some obvious and binding truth about his new place in the universal order of things. Then came the smile, and he grabbed me in a bear-hug and lifted me up, summoned Jolly Boy in between us. I was squeezed against Bibhuti’s hard unbreakable body, his son’s adolescent softness. I was weightless. The three of us danced and spun in the rain, laughing at each other, warped survivors of an unreported war.

‘Kudos! What did I tell you, I knew you could do it!’ Bibhuti broke free, took the broken bat from my hand and snapped off the last splinters. Dripping wet and buzzing, he wore the look of some crazy apparition, an elephant-headed eight-armed angel wriggled free of earthly shame, and wherever he went I wanted to go after him. I wanted to see the place where pain runs away in rivers.

‘What did I tell you?’ he repeated. ‘If you can break one bat you can break fifty bats. The method is the same, only the number is different. But you must go faster, thirty seconds to break one bat is too much. You must relax.’

‘I don’t want to hurt you though.’

‘You cannot hurt me, it is impossible. Clear your head of this clutter and think clean. There is no need to worry, we will have a great success. This is God’s choice and we cannot argue against it.’

Jolly Boy wiped the stopwatch dry on the thigh of his jeans. Another laugh dribbled out of me and it tasted like my own religion. The rain was lashing down now. The noise filled me up from the inside. It scoured the colour from the buildings and sent the shutters rattling down on Suresh’s dosa kiosk and the Ayurvedic health centre across the road. Streetdogs settled in under parked Marutis and Hyundais, lumbered to the shelter of quaking palms. The world felt furious and free and we stood there watching it, me and Jolly Boy daring each other to stick our heads out, to stamp our feet and wash our faces. The boy made a run for the open sky. I crossed my fingers and followed him out into the downpour.

I felt the falling rain, let it soak into me. I remembered how far away I was from home. But I wasn’t scared, not like I thought I’d be. I felt nothing but relief.

‘Come. We will rest and hydrate, then we will practise some more.’ Bibhuti dumped the two halves of the dead bat in my arms and stumbled to the stairwell. He flinched when he took the handrail, his moustache drooping at the edges. Jolly Boy looked anxiously to him.

‘Baba, your leg is broken.’

‘Nothing is broken. Your Baba cannot be broken, remember?’

The boy took his father at his word. They left me to stand there in the rain, alone with my thoughts. The neighbours had taken to the streets. They danced around me in circles, faces lifted to the sky in joyful communion. It had been a long dry season and the coming of the rain had triggered something in them. Spirits left the earth and flew.

I still couldn’t believe how I’d ended up here, whether I’d made it happen or let it happen. I mouthed thanks to India for giving me my breath back. This must have been the first time I’d been happy since I died.