Man on Fire

3

India smelt of diesel and ripe fruit and it was too hot for me to think straight. Its voice was shrill and unreserved, too many superstitions spilling from too many radios. I’m only telling it the way I remember it. Just to keep myself busy until Bibhuti wakes up. I’m telling you, God, because you seem to want to know. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it, to get the story in my own words. We haven’t really talked before. That would be because I never believed in you, but I suppose that’s all changed now. I’m not sure how I feel about that. But since you’re asking. There’s nothing to do but wait and remember.

I remember I crossed my fingers to make it through the airport. I wasn’t sure if the machine guns were just for show or if the skinny men holding them were chosen for some mystical gift they all had for sniffing out my secrets. I didn’t know how to walk without stopping every few steps to let Ellen catch up. In the blinding sunlight I was nobody’s husband. Every man had a moustache except me.

The taxi driver said I’d picked the wrong time to visit.

‘People are falling down dead with the heat and the monsoon is two weeks late this year. Everybody is suffering. You must buy a good hat and drink plenty of water. Only the bottled is safe.’

I had the feeling the weather would enjoy stripping me down to the vulnerable parts I could cover up with clothes back home. I thought it might expose a madness I’d been carefully hiding all these years.

‘You are here on business?’ the taxi driver asked me.

‘No, just a holiday. Just gonna have a look around and see what’s what.’

I didn’t tell him the truth. Not because the truth was shameful but because I knew he wouldn’t understand it and I didn’t want to have to explain.

Diesel and ripe fruit. Shit too, there’s no getting around it. I took a whiff of it to show that I was fearless and then I wound the window up again. The streets were dust and there were no signposts. The children had no need of modesty. Smudgy cheeks and bare arses and skin that ate the sun. We crossed a bridge over a slow river. At the side of the road a mother was bathing two little ones in a pothole the size of a meteor crater. There was a fruit truck parked up next to them and the driver was filling the pothole from his hose. The children were laughing and flapping around like little birds, their faces open wide and hungry. I envied them their lack of mystery and made them a promise to shed my own. Whatever mystery I had left.

Google said Bibhuti lived in Airoli so that’s where I went. The hotel was painted like Miami, a rhubarb-and-custard daydream pasted to the main strip between a plywood merchant’s and a mobile phone kiosk. An old man was sitting on the pavement outside. His beard was burnt orange and his bare feet were cracked and grained with years of dirt. His milky blue eyes looked like they’d drip out of his head if he didn’t hold his back straight.

He was selling little painted clay gods from a ratty scrap of tarpaulin. They all had the head of an elephant. He offered me one. It was playing a saxophone. When he looked up at me I saw sorrow in those milky eyes, the wise and unpitying kind that comes when a man gets struck by lightning. I turned him down without thinking of the pain it might cause him. I had my heart set on bigger fish.

The lobby was full of the smell of new paint. A girl was colouring in a snake on the wall, a big daft-looking cobra with fangs dripping blobs of venom. She looked to be in her early twenties and she was dressed in western clothes. There was an outline of a man standing over the snake with a sword raised above his head. I could tell it wouldn’t be very good when it was finished. The girl dabbed intently at the snake’s belly as if she were making a masterpiece.

‘That’s a big snake,’ I told the man behind the reception desk.

‘Yes, very big. Of course I have expanded the size for the sake of drama but only by a small degree.’ This was Harshad, the owner of the hotel. He had a comb-over and a drink problem. He rubbed his belly when he talked like he was making a wish. I supposed none of his wishes had ever come true.

He set the box of Officer’s Choice down on the counter and lifted up his right hand for my inspection. The first two fingers were missing, chewed down to stumps.

‘He found me here,’ he said, showing me the fleshy part between the thumb and the forefinger, burnt black where the venom had killed the tissue. ‘I was moving some bottles to be recycled when I disturbed him, he was hunting in the grass behind my home. He struck without warning and I was not able to defend myself. In this picture I am taking my revenge. I am not an artist so my daughter is making the image. She is very gifted. This picture will be the talking point of my hotel. I had the option of installing vending machine for soda, but you will find vending machines in every hotel lobby. I thought to myself I must have something more interesting.’

I lied and told him I liked it. I thought it was dramatic. This pleased him. His small black eyes shone briefly and he poured himself a drink. He told me his wife had been expired for five years, squashed by a juggernaut. He was looking after his daughter Amrita until she made a match. She was too picky, none of the boys he’d found had been good enough for her. She wanted an educated heart-throb with soft hands and ambition and she wasn’t prepared to settle for anything less.

Amrita was silent. The green she was using for the snake gave it a cartoonish quality and it made me feel momentarily younger than I had any right to feel.

Harshad caught me looking at the box of whisky and offered me a bottle for three hundred rupees. It sounded reasonable so I took it. He led me up the stairs, past the peeling plaster and the burnt-out bulbs to a room that looked as though it was made for the world’s forgotten to peacefully die in. The air under the sleeping ceiling fan smelt like the pineapple chunks they put in urinals. A handmade sign said ‘No Spitting’ where there should have been a fire-escape plan. Harshad started to show me how the TV worked and I had to stop him. I wouldn’t have time for TV while I was here. It felt good to say that and mean it.

I went to the window and looked out at the screaming road below and the train tracks behind it. A place of biblical dust, its saving grace a crumbling train station to leave by for the sort of places where shoeshiners are born and everyday dirt gets recycled into nosebags for the poorer horses of the West.

‘Do you know a man called Bibhuti Nayak?’ I asked. ‘He breaks records.’

Harshad’s eyes shone again. Yes, he knew him. He put down my case to free his arms and give himself the room to express his pride at being in the man’s circle.

‘He is my friend. He is famous man, the Bruce Lee of Navi Mumbai. He lives very close to here. You are knowing him?’

‘Sort of. I’ve come to help him with his next record.’

Harshad rubbed his belly thoughtfully. ‘Ah yes, the new one. Everybody is hearing about this. I think it cannot be done.’

I was hurt. ‘Course it can be done. You know about his other records then?’

‘I have seen them all. BB is very strong man. This one I am not so sure. I am hoping for the best.’

‘He can do it. Anything’s possible. If that French bloke can eat a plane.’

Harshad was confused. I explained. There’s this Frenchman who ate a plane.

‘A jet?’

‘No, just a single-engine thing, you know, one with propellers. But he ate it. He dismantled it and then he ate it one piece at a time. He eats anything made out of metal, that’s his thing.’

Harshad grinned. It was the most brilliant thing he’d ever heard and I felt a twinge of pleasure at having been the one to tell him. ‘He must have a very strong stomach. And teeth also. I do not believe this. He would surely die.’

‘No, he did it. It’s on the internet, you can look it up.’

Harshad reflected on the news. He watched me unscrew the whisky bottle and brought two tumblers from the bedside table. He cleaned them on his shirt and left the pouring to me.

‘You will help him?’ he said.

‘That’s the plan. If he’ll let me.’

‘He knows you are coming?’

‘Not really.’

‘How will you convince him?’

‘I’ll tell him it’s my dying wish.’

‘You are dying?’

‘Probably.’

Harshad took a belt of the whisky and sucked it through his teeth. The booze seemed to spark a generosity he wasn’t used to feeling.

‘I will take you to him,’ he decided.

I didn’t know what else to do so I clinked glasses with him. We drank in silence. When he left I fell onto the clean white sheets and cried. It felt strange not hearing the sound of Ellen breathing beside me. I’d never left the country without her before. I was alone for the first time since I could remember and it felt like being born again into a body I’d already worn out.