Man on Fire

31

In the last days the women stamped their protest against us in silences and cooking. They stirred and chopped and whispered and tutted like twins conjoined in alliance against the hurtful outside world. They took slow morning walks together and rode to the market, Ellen precarious on the back of the scooter, trawling home bags of fresh ingredients to assemble skilfully while the men huffed and puffed in the courtyard below them. The scratches they left on the chopping board betrayed their own obsession. They would have made dolls to stick pins in if they’d had the wool and the stuffing.

I was back on Bibhuti’s sofa. Ellen had only let me share her bed that one time, an act of mercy to mark our reunion. She couldn’t stand to have me sleeping next to her again. She’d ask after my aches when she arrived at the apartment for a day of bearing crosses, and tell me off for leaving my socks on the floor.

We had our own alliance, the three men of the house. After a tireless campaign Jolly Boy had convinced his father he had what it took to be the third point of the triangle, the one who’d pass the fresh bats to me as each one was broken. Given the nod all his anxiety melted away. He showed his gratitude by turning his back on the women. He spoke to his mother only when manners demanded it and where once he’d found his calling in making her smile, now he found it in the stopwatch and the icepacks he applied to his father’s multiplying bruises. When I broke my first bat in one strike Jolly Boy was there to pick the splinters out. He offered them to me as a souvenir, sensing their importance. We put them in a cup that we left in a safe corner of the courtyard, out of the rain but close enough to feel its spray. I said flowers might grow from them. He liked that idea.

Bibhuti ended each session more bruise than man but by the evening they’d disappeared. I began to suspect he was painting himself whole again when he locked himself in his room. I listened for the brushstrokes in his meditation silences.

All Ellen wanted to do was eat up the sun after too many years of cold weather. Suddenly the heat that once paralysed her seemed to draw out of her a vitality I thought long lost. I watched the Indian climate buff a shine onto her that I hadn’t seen in half a lifetime, something rich and youthful and provocative. I watched her ripen and forget her disability, become red like an apple.

Sometimes I’d catch her looking at Jolly Boy with naked longing. She’d reach out for him whenever he passed too close, steal a stroke of his head. I felt the absence of children again. A small head of thick hair I could run my fingers through and an uncorrupted mind I could fill with the last thing I’d learned. A fact about friendship or the fish that lives in the lowest depths of the ocean, the one that comes with its own lantern to steer it through the darkness.

At the end of the day we’d all come together to bury our hatchets and eat. We talked economically about food and weather and the key differences between our two cultures, me feeling an affiliation to neither one. Adrift with Bibhuti above the pull of national customs. Citizen of nowhere, light-headed with the rare and shocking freedom that comes from giving up a flag.

The wives would clear the table and wash up and we’d draw into a circle to spin our myths, letting the imagined details of Bibhuti’s happy ending swirl around our heads while the window blackened and the thunder growled. Jolly Boy saw all his friends crouching at his father’s feet, pictured a national holiday in his honour. Bibhuti agreed that that was possible. I just looked forward to when it was all over and we were still standing, only bigger and surer than we’d stood before. Any thrill to be gained from the striking would be incidental. If it came it came. I wouldn’t pretend not to feel it.

I went barefoot in Bibhuti’s house and Ellen saw her nail polish on my toes.

I explained myself to her. I’d done it once when I was drunk and in the cold light of day it seemed wrong to stop. It would be disrespectful to her if I didn’t keep it up.

‘It’s quite relaxing, isn’t it?’

‘You’ve gone over the lines,’ she said.

I wasn’t as steady as her. She agreed. It was a difference between us and it was too late to fix it.

I took my dose of cardamom and breathing, crossed my legs and closed my eyes in the living room and went through the motions of meditating. Bibhuti massaged me, his Ayurvedic fingers drawing my pain briefly to the surface where it could be examined and declared to be in decline. Ellen watched and pretended not to be uncomfortable with the sight of me arching for relief under the hands of a brown man with a vested interest in keeping me alive.

More than once she mentioned modern medicine and Bibhuti had to beat her down. Chemotherapy was pumping poison into the body and surgery was the slitting open of a body with knives and saws. Both acts of violence and obscenity. If I was to be cured only love and the wisdom of ages would do it. My doshas could only be pacified with his attentive care and the care of the God who worked through him. Ellen bit her tongue and I answered yes when Bibhuti asked if I felt better, wiping the sesame oil from his fingers. Admitting a weakness to him now would only disturb him and he needed all his fearlessness.

I’d walk Ellen back to the hotel through the swarming night, watching the path ahead of her for hidden dangers. Harshad would poke his shining head up from behind his latest project, wiring up a CCTV camera bought from the mobile phone shop next door in a moment of feverish speculation. That he was planning for a future where such things might be needed was an encouraging sign. But when he asked after my health it was with no care for the reply. His eyes were buttons and the furnace of his heart was down to its last embers. The glow it gave off was so pale that it failed to light all but the immediate space in front of him, so he had to bend close to the counter top to see the camera’s innards and pick up the glass beside them.

A touch of cheeks and Ellen would pull the door shut on me. I’d hear the creak of bedsprings as she sat down to busy herself in autopsy of the day’s miscarriages.

A dog followed me home in the dark. I sat down with him on the kerb outside Bibhuti’s apartment and stroked his head until he fell asleep, his chin resting in the filthy groundwater.

It was coming back from our visit to the ape girl that everything nearly came undone. Her name was Rebati and she was Bibhuti’s last assignment before he took his leave to break the bats. She lived in a slum on the mainland, in a house made out of reclaimed billboard and packing tape. Her house advertised Bru coffee and smelt of shit. She was covered in thick lustrous hair and she was comfortable in her place. She wanted to be a teacher so she could tell the children all about tolerance and nature’s various miracles.

Rebati’s father had the same affliction as her. He invited us into his home with a smile that barely poked through the fur on his face. While Bibhuti interviewed his daughter he threw clay pots on a pedal-powered machine in the corner of the room. Every one of them came out smooth and flawless. Things of beauty that were destined to eat cigarette butts on the patios of franchise bars back home.

Rebati accepted her fur as a blessing from God and was only submitting to the treatment her father had campaigned for to soothe his guilt at having passed on his condition to her. He suffered extreme sadness for his daughter’s plight but Rebati herself was a girl for whom life held no fears. She went to school and she walked the streets of her locality with her head held high. Throughout our visit a crowd of smaller children stood guard at the door, her protectors from the Turbanator’s insensitive lens until she agreed independently to pose for a portrait.

I wanted to comb her arms. Her coat shone healthy and cared for and her overgrown lips jutted apelike, pinching her voice to a whisper that encouraged meditation in its listeners. She was something strangers tossed money at in return for divine favours and I was excited to be present in the same world that had made her.

Bibhuti told me how the doctors in her native place had tried to steal her blood.

‘They wanted to sell it to foreign agencies for research. They believe she has missing link genes that could spell important news for the scientific world. Other scrupulous doctors insist there is no gene at work, only a disease which can be treated with surgery. They made a case for experimental treatment and after five years of campaigning a specialist in Mumbai has agreed to take her on. The first surgery will correct the unexpected growth of her lips and dental parts. Then a laser will take away the unwanted hair. She is hoping that the treatments prove unsuccessful so that she may continue in the life she has always known.’

‘She’s really happy like that?’ I asked.

‘God is making her this way for a reason. She believes it is to teach the world a valuable lesson. I understand this very well. God has chosen us both from among many. She has been given a special purpose just like me. She is asking if you would like to touch her.’

Rebati took my hand, peeled it tenaciously open, and ran it down her forearm. She felt like a dog. Less oily than I’d expected. She invited me to touch her face and I did, gently with the tips of my fingers. I pinched her hair between my fingers, played with her split ends. I used the palm of my hand to stroke her more confidently. She smiled at me serenely. Her eyes appeared very small behind the dense growth of hair. They sparkled with a kindness that could change the world.

The Turbanator lent me his Hero Honda to sit on when my legs started to buckle. I invited Rebati for a stationary spin but she laughed off the idea. Her amusement came from simpler sources, from the attaching of Hello Kitty clips to the hair on her cheeks and the farcical barking that startled the younger children into fits of delightful terror.

She wanted her photograph taken so she’d have a record of the girl she’d been born as, just in case the treatment worked and took her blessing away. She’d get the paper and pin the article above her bed. When she married, if the shedding of her hair ever made her a candidate for marriage, she’d carry the picture around with her in secret from a watchful husband. She’d steal away whenever the opportunity arose to look at her old self and remember that she was once a comet in the black of the Indian night.

Coming back to the apartment with Rebati’s barks ringing in my ears the rain began to fall again. Bibhuti parked the car and went back out into the street to put on a show, one-handed cartwheels for the neighbourhood kids who’d grown tired of the storm’s adventure. The smaller ones tried to board him as he passed them.

Jolly Boy ran to the badminton net and picked up a racquet to give me another drubbing. My attempts at converting him to football had failed miserably. Ellen sat by the wall on the neighbour’s plastic chair, slitting banana skins for the butterflies’ next visit. She waited to be amused by my sporting collapse. I took the receiver’s stance.

I saw Bibhuti’s wife straddling her scooter and walking it out into the road. On the way to the market, I supposed. Ellen asked if she wanted company. She didn’t answer. The faces of both women were hard with the effort of keeping their grievances fresh.

At first he was just a man eating a dosa at the kiosk across the road. Watching Bibhuti for an entertainment as he sheltered from the rain. He ate slowly, nowhere special to be. His soft features save for the moustache made him look like a child, unwary of the world’s attention.

Bibhuti was all over the road. His wife backed the scooter up to give herself the room to steer around him.

I bent to recover an ace. I straightened to serve and saw the man stepping off the kerb at the lip of the pothole. He traced around it in dainty steps and trotted out into the road. He stood there in the rain, as if unsure of what to do next. He scratched his head where the rain itched.

Bibhuti came to rest and became a tree. The children hung from him. He rose to meet the sky with a playful roar, and the children fell from him and scattered laughing. He pointed out the scooter and told them to clear the road.

Bibhuti’s wife revved her engine. It mewed weakly. She lurched forward and stopped again. She wheeled back, much further than she needed to. A caution against the wet conditions. Her hands slipped on the slick handlebars. She gripped tighter.

The man reached into his waistband and brought something out. I thought it was a pen. He started running, his hand tucked in against his side. His tubbiness gave him a skittering gait that made him look hapless.

Bibhuti’s wife revved her engine again and the scooter took off. She sped for Bibhuti where he stood at the edge of the road. There was room to pass him but her line towards him was true and unrepentant. Her face was blank. Bibhuti was facing away from her, taking pleasure in the rain. A twist of the throttle and she was on top of him.

Bibhuti saw the man approaching and his shoulders drooped as if the strings that held him upright had been cut. A sorrow came over him that sucked him to the ground. He raised a palm to the man in appeal. The man ran at him, his arm outstretched and poised to strike.

Bibhuti’s wife swerved, passed Bibhuti and hit the man head on. He flew backwards and scudded across the road. Bibhuti’s wife braked and let the engine idle. She watched the man squirm and flutter. She was solemn, unsurprised.

The man moaned softly. He was still holding the knife.

‘Who’s that?’ I asked. The question was an involuntary one, aimed at nobody.

‘It is Uncle Rajesh,’ Jolly Boy said, his voice shrill and astonished. ‘Why does he want to kill Baba?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

Jolly Boy rushed to his father. Bibhuti was leaning over the man, his foot pressed down on his wrist to make him let go of the knife. He studied him for breaks and for a spark of humanity worth preserving. He kicked the knife aside and stepped away.

Bibhuti’s wife became aware that the engine was still running and switched it off. A distance came over her, a separation from the physical world the rest of us were rooted to. She sat on the scooter looking only at the twitching man. Ellen hobbled over to her and rested a hand on hers where it still clung to the throttle. She was undisturbed by its touch.

The stricken man stirred like an infant in fever sleep, his legs running ahead of him on the wet road. An eye opened and sensibility flushed in. He moaned again and licked at the blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. I felt the acidic rush of wanting him dead. I couldn’t quite bring myself to kick him.

I asked Bibhuti if he was okay.

‘Not to worry,’ Bibhuti muttered. ‘I know this man. I should have predicted he would come.’

‘Who is he?’

‘Rajesh Battacharjee. A former friend of mine. He has been in prison. I sent him there for a good reason. Now he is free he has come to raise his dispute with me again.’

‘He was gonna stab you.’

‘Not to worry. My wife is saving the day.’

He turned to enquire of his wife’s well-being. He spoke tenderly in his language. She replied with a drowsy tilt of the head. He was satisfied.

The kids stole back in to perimeter the scene, scuffling for a look at the dying man. The neighbours stepped in to ease them back to a respectful distance. The husband slid his phone from its holster and called the police.

Bibhuti sat down on the kerb and chatted with Rajesh Battacharjee while we waited for the police to arrive. He talked calmly and without anger. He rubbed the blood away from Rajesh Battacharjee’s mouth and folded his arm gently over his chest to consolidate the bone where it had shattered on collision with the road. The two men spoke quietly, Rajesh responding to each question with a patience born of shock or maybe of a pain-induced epiphany. The thought of revenge had sustained him through six years of imprisonment and all the indignities that might involve. His failure to achieve it had left him humble and hopeless, knocked the hatred out of him. Now he was just an injured animal in need of mercy and deserving of it.

Rajesh Battacharjee sat up and looked around him, as if to convince himself by recognition of the things he saw that he was still alive. He reached for Bibhuti, who took him by his good arm and dragged him to the kerb. He sat beside Bibhuti, his legs pulled to his chest, his head lowered between his knees. He shuddered as if crying. The children fell away, streaming back to their homes to find other distractions from the summer washout.

The police came and processed the arrest with a petulance that suggested the chancing on a crime was the last thing they hoped for when they left for work each day. Bibhuti identified their prisoner and disclosed their history. His wife made orange squash while he gave his statement.

Rajesh Battacharjee sat brooding in the back of the police car, sideways with his legs dangling outside, cradling his broken arm and prodding with his tongue at the blood on his lip as it congealed under the heat of the afternoon.

Bibhuti’s wife wouldn’t look at anyone except Rajesh Battacharjee.

‘You are very lucky I arrived when I did, Bhabhi,’ he told her. ‘One second more and you would be wearing these handcuffs.’

She spilled the orange squash in pouring from the jug. The officer drew his hand away, and the glass slipped from his grasp and smashed on the road.

‘I am very sorry,’ she mumbled.

The officer lashed out with his lathi, rapping Rajesh Battacharjee’s knees. He yelped like a scalded dog.

Ellen looked at me and I knew what she was thinking. We’d both seen it, the true line Bibhuti’s wife had taken towards him before Rajesh Battacharjee had got in the way. I shook my head no. It was an accident. She didn’t have it in her to want her husband dead. She was only acting out a dark desire to burst his bubble and she would have pulled away in time.

His confession heard, the cops had only to return Rajesh Battacharjee to custody. He wished us good luck for tomorrow. He was tearful when he said it. He wanted Bibhuti to achieve everything he’d hoped for when he’d first arrived in the city of dreams. He wanted him to fly.

‘I will not see it,’ he said, ‘but I am sure the news will reach me. God will be watching over you and so will I.’

I took this to mean that Rajesh Battacharjee planned to take his own life. I thought about warning the officers so they could take his belt and shoelaces away from him as a precaution. But I decided that his life was in fate’s hands, just as everybody’s was. The two men shared a final timid embrace and Rajesh Battacharjee was driven away.

I woke up frightened in the middle of the night by the sound of wings in the room. Whatever my good bird Oscar had come to tell me I was too proud to hear it. I got up and went looking for him but I gave up when I began to feel ridiculous. I didn’t sleep again after that.