Man on Fire

25

The rain fell. It roared and kicked and pulled the breath out of me. Already I couldn’t see ahead to a time when it would stop. The world cooled and filled itself in, everything that was once empty became swollen and precarious. Shoes and silences drowned. The sunglasses sellers left their intersections for higher ground and second jobs weaving placemats out of the hair their wives had harvested from unsuspecting sightseers in the high season.

The birds and the butterflies all went away. The street danced and life moved inside.

Bibhuti plastered his leg. It was a clean break and he was skilled in repairs. It would heal in two weeks, he said. I needn’t be worried. He’d broken every part of himself in pursuit of his sport and he’d always healed himself to full satisfaction. The break was a good thing, it meant I’d overcome any fear I’d had of hurting him.

‘You are ready now,’ he said.

‘I don’t feel ready.’

‘You will. I am very proud of you in this moment. I knew you were the right man for the job.’

His wife made draughts of turmeric and milk for the pain. Jolly Boy brought a sack of rice for him to rest his foot on. The TV consoled him in his time of inactivity. He played the tapes of his record-breaking history, and mesmerised himself into a rapture from which all future spells would rise. Visual proof of his superpowers gave him nourishment and he hit the phone, calling in favours and spreading word of the record attempt like a boastful smog through the city. He set a date, four weeks away to allow for his recovery. There’d be advance notices in the city and sports sections and Bibhuti was promised an interview in his own paper.

After tense negotiations the venue was confirmed, the temple where his wife worshipped. She’d pushed for it as the only way of guaranteeing his safety. At the closing of the deal she dashed out in the rain to give her thanks to the priests in person. She came back spattered in caramel-coloured mud, bags of food swinging from the handlebars of her scooter. She cooked a celebration thali of dhal and gobi and something with cashew nuts.

The new school term started but Jolly Boy stayed at home. He confessed between our courtyard shuffles that he’d been expelled for fighting. Another boy had questioned his father’s sanity. The privilege of being Bibhuti’s son needed constant defending from the book-shy dullards of his class. Until a new school could be found he was mine to lean on. His laughter was my medicine whenever my belly ached or my legs started to shake under the stress of his father’s expectations.

Bibhuti still hobbled down to the courtyard to put me through my daily paces, sitting on the bonnet of his car spitting motivational slogans at me while I brutalised a man made of rice sacks, perfecting my swing and sharpening my taste for his blood. The rain pinned us to the walls and sprayed the face of Jolly Boy’s stopwatch whenever he tried to get a reading. It kept putting out the flames at Gopal Dutta’s funeral. The smell of him roasting made me hungry. It stuck to me for days.

His death came as a shock. I’d supposed it was the return of the cancer Bibhuti had banished all those years ago. I expected to be revisited as he’d been. Bibhuti claimed natural causes, just his age catching up with him. His reaction to the inevitable was to pine for a day behind the locked bedroom door. When he came out he was himself again.

He took a practice bat to the cremation to use as a prop. It held him upright when he stood at the pyre to mumble a farewell to his eldest student. He hoped also that it would remind the mourners that Gopal Dutta had been an ally to our grand plan. In his absence life would go on and greatness would follow.

He’d wanted to be a woman next, his daughter told me. He liked the idea of carrying children who could eat his sins while he slept.

Every day a suspension of disbelief. A brave front against the constant chatter of gods and reincarnations. Everyone was wired in to your presence but I hadn’t seen you yet and I couldn’t feel you coming. I looked in the rain and I looked in the dead face of Gopal Dutta. I looked in the scars on Bibhuti’s back from a decade of self-flagellation. I saw nothing there that inclined me towards you. Darkness still awaited me sooner or later and my occupation became sandbagging myself against the fear of it.

The air con flitted like a restless bird from off to on to off, and I was a bird to be fussed over between the customs of the house. Every so often Bibhuti would look up from his laptop, the secret write-up he wouldn’t show me, to ask if I was comfortable and had everything I needed. He’d consult with his wife who’d retreat to the kitchen and return with another plate of mango slices or another glass of water.

Bibhuti brought a bat inside and took to bunting it absently against his shoulder or his unplastered leg as he sat thinking between stints at the keyboard and in the quiet times after meals. Every impact set the teeth of the room on edge, all but his. He was blissful in these moments, fantasising about the places I might hit him and the pleasure it would bring. He beat out a guillotine rhythm that had his wife fleeing to the kitchen to scrub the pots with audible force.

Then silence would wash in again and all would seem as it should be. I decided that his faith was just a wilful act of forgetting. He needed to forget that should he fail his death would stain other lives. That was how he bartered his own fear down to a whisper in the dark that nobody else could hear.

Vijay Five came to interview Bibhuti for the newspaper. He didn’t ask Bibhuti any direct questions beyond the date and location of our attempt. He already knew Bibhuti’s story and had made his peace with it.

Bibhuti asked for the front page. This would be his crowning achievement and he wanted everybody to see it and know what could be done with the right attitude.

Vijay Five said he’d try but it wasn’t in his hands.

I posed with Bibhuti when the Turbanator arrived, bowed and tested by his journey through the new rivers that had sprung around the city as the rain kept falling. I was a front-page story and the city welcomed me. I represented hope in a time of siege.

The news had moved on from a crashed plane to the monsoon’s more predictable death tolls. No slo-mo or strings for them. People had already started drowning in uncovered sewers and falling from crumbling bridges. Mostly on the mainland where things were older and order hadn’t been planned into the fabric of life. Nature, we agreed, had no sympathy for the underdog.

Vijay Five asked Bibhuti if he’d include me in his book.

‘You’re writing a book?’ I said.

Bibhuti was bashful. ‘It is a timepass only. I might not publish it. It is the story of my life and my record-breaking achievements. I began to write it some months ago when it looked like I had set my last record. It was a bleak time and I wanted to record my journey so that history would not forget. Then shortly after you are arriving and all is saved. I am carrying on with it so that I can look back in the future and remember this precious time with full details and emotion. We can look back together.’

‘Am I in it yet? Have you made me look good?’

‘You will appear soon. I will describe everything as it is happening in reality. You will be very pleased with the outcome.’

I said I hoped so.

The rain’s spectacle fixed us to our place. The longer it kept falling without our consent the surer we became of our debt to it. It was a reminder of scale and a quickener to the senses. Watching the water tumble and rise we reckoned ourselves key pieces of something bigger and beyond us, two of the plumb twigs that held the nest together. We owed the rain for the liberating smallness it gave us. To be small to a storm, but fearlessly and through prior arrangement, was to be a splinter in its eye.

A week of flooding and healing and Bibhuti kept worrying his plaster, feverish with the urge to tear it off and be free again from the weight of caution. One afternoon when we were stranded on the stairs we saw a Maruti Swift come limping down the flooded street, pulled towards the pothole that had opened up outside the dosa kiosk. It slid to the pothole’s mouth, tipped its nose in submission, and fell in.

Bibhuti stroked his moustache and shambled down the steps to conduct a rescue effort. I went after him.

The driver of the Swift clambered out of his window all elbows and knees and plunged into the water. It was waist-deep where he fell. He waded around the prow to the passenger side. He coaxed and pulled his wife breechways through the window, her behind snagging on the door and then shucking clear in a moment of lewd release. Her sari dragged in the muddy water and she found her feet. The husband tugged her to the rear of the car where it perched on the crater’s edge. He lifted the tailgate and started salvaging its cargo, passing boxes to his wife where she stood on the higher ground beyond the rim.

Their little girl sat in the back seat. Her eyes shimmered with fear. She kept trying to open the door and her mother kept barking at her to stay put. The car was listing to one side and the water there was window-high. The girl scrambled to the safer side and waited to be freed.

Wading was heavy going for Bibhuti with his plastered leg. Jolly Boy skipped ahead to guide us to the car. We held hands and formed a chain. I stepped ankle-deep and my shoes flooded. I imagined myself immune to the waterborne nasties.

Bibhuti slid to the husband’s side, took hold of the bumper and lifted, trying to haul the car clear of the crater. The wife started moving the boxes from the kerbside to the step of the Ayurvedic clinic where the water couldn’t reach them. They were all of the same dimensions, taped shut.

The little girl beat her fists against the window and started squealing.

Her father picked his way round Bibhuti’s heaving arms and carried on plucking boxes from the back. His wife received them from him and carried them to safety. Their focus so intent on preserving their treasures that their child’s terror went unregistered, her screams snatched away by the clattering rain.

I waded to her and told her to open the window. She didn’t understand. Jolly Boy repeated the instruction in their language. She tried the handle but it wouldn’t move. I forced the door open and grabbed her. Water flowed into the car. The husband wailed at me for ruining his upholstery.

I lifted the girl onto the roof of the car and told Jolly Boy to stay with her. He reached for her ankle and stilled her, murmured something comforting. She stopped her squealing, shocked into herself by her sudden exposure to the sky’s fury.

Her father dropped a box in a rushed handover and I heard something shatter inside it. He swore. The girl yelped and threatened to cry. To placate her, the woman passed another box up to her for safekeeping. This one was open. I peeked inside and saw that it was half full of snowglobes. The girl wrapped her little arms around the box and clung to it, her young face twisted into something ancient and worn down by life’s misfortunes. Her legs dangling and her hair getting drenched, she held on for dear life. She put all her passion into being a safe pair of hands.

I saw more snowglobes when I joined Bibhuti at the lifting. Some of the boxes in the car were open and they were all filled with them. Every one contained a tiny model of a power station, roughly detailed in plastic. The cooling towers looked so out of context in their childish shell that I thought I might be dreaming. I picked one up and shook it to make sure it was real.

There could have been more snow. The volume of glitter was disappointing.

‘I only just took the delivery,’ the man griped, clawing at a box and dumping it in his wife’s arms. ‘This is in my native place. My father worked there and so did my uncles and two of my brothers. I worked there also before I moved away to make my own business. I had these made to commemorate them, custom order from China. I sell all kinds of novelty items in my store, all high-quality and best prices. These will be a good seller, many people will want to pay tribute to the men who made our country the new superpower in the world. This power station is a symbol of our future. I cannot lose them.’

‘You could have done with more snow,’ I told him. ‘Look, when I shake it. There’s not enough. They should have used more glitter.’

The man stopped what he was doing to watch as I shook the snowglobe again. He was unmoved. ‘No, this is just right. If there is too much you will not see the power station clearly.’

I was irritated. I was trying to help him and he wasn’t listening to me. ‘No, people want to see plenty of snow when they shake it. It’s no good otherwise. They can still look at the power station when it’s sitting there, you can see it all the time. But when you want to make it snow it needs to snow properly or there’s no point.’

The man picked up a snowglobe and gave it a shake. He watched the glitter swirl sparsely over the cooling towers.

‘See, it’s not enough, is it? It’s not satisfying.’

Bibhuti lifted the back end of the car clear of the road. The car tilted away from him and I heard a scream.

I turned to see the girl sliding off the roof. Jolly Boy had recoiled when the car had moved and lost his hold on her. The girl let go of her burden and the snowglobes she’d been holding fell over the side, some smashing and some bobbing away down the incline in the road.

Her mother balled her sari at her hip and splashed after them.

I caught the girl just before she hit the ground. I stretched myself as tall as I could go and kept hold of her. Her little wet hand clutched my neck and I felt my skin prickle from her touch. I carried her to the step and showed her that we were safe from the water. I told her it was alright. She bawled.

I hated myself for not knowing the words that would make her feel safe. I loved myself for saving her. I was a good man. Everyone who was looking could see it. She was my proof, right there in my arms.

She squirmed and her father was there to take her from me. He croaked a thank-you and went trotting after his wife and their fallen goods, the girl bouncing on his shoulder as he stooped to gather up a straggler.

The car rose and lurched forward. Bibhuti stepped the back wheels out of the crater, dragging his plastered leg in a wide radius to keep it clear of danger. He was steaming and pain flared from him in visible flashes. I rushed to his side and bent to grasp the bumper just as he set the car down on even ground.

When I looked up Ellen was standing on the kerb, unsteady and lifelike under the rain. Harshad, straddling his scooter, passed her walking stick to her and waited while she corrected herself. Ellen looked at me. She parted her lips to say something but no words came. I leaned into the car to still the trembling in my legs.

Bibhuti’s wife came out and draped a shawl over Ellen’s head. The women turned and went inside. Harshad rode off through the floodwater, a shameless conspirator. I let the rain fall on me. The bite of it was pleasant on my skin. I breathed my special breath and got ready to explain myself.