Man on Fire

32

It was still dark outside when Bibhuti began his preparations, creeping past me and out the door to make his animal shapes in the quiet before the dogs woke up. His wife was up with him and she waited in the kitchen, keeping herself away from me. No rain fell and in the silence the house pinched at us, tugging at our sleeves for explanations. The time for explaining had passed.

When Bibhuti came back there was a timid conversation between them and she followed him into the bathroom and closed the door. She carried a pair of scissors with her. I thought maybe she’d heard about Samson’s weakness and would make one last attempt at sabotage Delilah-style. I wondered if I should kick the door down and save him from a travesty. But no scuffles came from behind the wood and soon Bibhuti sauntered back into the room stroking his newly trimmed moustache, serenity draped over his shoulders like a cape for a vain superhero. The grooming was some kind of concession. He believed he’d won her approval and there was no more doubt in his eyes.

Then the sun rose with so many colours it nearly broke my heart.

Its light bled through the window bars and fell over us where we stood, warming our blood to fighting temperature. I heard a godlike voice calling me to generous deeds. Somewhere outside this room Ellen was stirring, waking up to her usual aches and a shortness of breath. She’d swallow her tablets and the electric shocks would subside, but before that she’d have to swim in a pain that had singled her out. This was how all her days started. My pain didn’t matter anymore, it would end one way or another. Hers would last for ever. I resolved to make this day the one to end all pain. In surviving the bats we’d remove all pain from the world and Ellen would never wake up again to sharpness and desolation. I’d do it for her.

I looked at Bibhuti for a reflection of my own resolve. He tilted his head at me, caught in a fighter’s cold swagger.

Jolly Boy wandered in from his sleeping and climbed on his father’s back. He kissed his neck drowsily and asked a soft question of him.

Bibhuti told him in a raw monotone that he was feeling on top of the world.

Breakfast was eaten slowly, a show of calm for the spying demons when every muscle was straining for the door. I squatted over the hole in the floor until my knees locked up. The burning brought to mind a man on fire, wrapped in grieving cloth, ambitions peeling from him like dry petals in the flames. I wondered if Gopal Dutta would come in his new form to cheer us on. I’d look for a woman with belligerent goat’s eyes and an inbuilt distrust of the ground. She’d be hovering three inches above it, her toes turned downward like the beak of a foraging bird to give the impression of standing. I didn’t know how reincarnation worked.

Loading the bats into the car we were priests transporting holy relics, deferential and slow as if it were the blood of a saint we carried, gone dry and flaky in its ancient vials. Ellen came then and found us shuffling about in silence. She bowed her head involuntarily in respect of our sacred act. She looked tired and impatient. I knew she must have barely slept. Thoughts of my betrayal would have woken her up in the night. My betrayal of her and of the human law that read an outrage in the methodical striking of a man. I didn’t tell her I was doing it for her now. I’d let her see it for herself.

She tousled Jolly Boy’s hair when she passed him on her way upstairs, a premature gesture of sympathy. I distracted him with a plea for help before he could latch on to the implications. He ran to the backyard and came back with a single bat, carried casket-like with the same awe he saw in us. A butterfly flew at him and he stopped to let it pass before carrying on. He set the bat down in the boot where a blanket had been unfolded to make a lining that would protect them from scratches.

The butterfly made a quick inspection of the neighbour’s washing line and found it empty, its appetite uncoiling too early for the banana skins. It flew away to the hills.

‘Are you feeling strong today?’ I asked Jolly Boy.

He rolled up his sleeve and flexed his bicep for me. A sparrow’s kneecap. He dropped his arm and went looking for another bat, his hips rolling with his father’s swagger.

When we’d counted fifty in it was time to leave. The boot was full and the back seat took the overspill. Jolly Boy was a boat on wooden waves. He rested his feet on the shifting bats and held the last one across his lap. He stroked it like a cat. It purred to him. A tiger tranquillised and made docile by his will.

Bibhuti’s wife mounted her scooter cautiously, remembering the shameful use she’d put it to. She gave the throttle a twist as Ellen arranged herself behind her, her stick primed at her side while she reached her other hand behind to grip the pillion handle. Her lips pursed in corrugated wonder, surprising herself with her determination to bear witness to whatever horrors the day might bring.

The sun had burned the last of the night away and the street was stirring. Unseen dogs were marking out their day’s intentions in defiant language and the birds were stretching their wings, making a plaything of the ripening sky. People spilled out of their houses, propelled by ancient instincts for heat seeking and the sniff of new money. The older ones washed themselves in weather after a night of confinement while the younger ones, interchangeable in their meaning-business suits, formed a convoy bound for the train station and office jobs that paid in commission and prideful glances from fathers wilted to tea leaves by a life spent trading in the open air.

Some waved to us and wished us well. Amused smiles and namastes and underneath each one the fear of being left behind. Bibhuti’s passion was a timely reminder that everyone would die one day and there was hay to be made while the sun was shining.

The neighbours came out with their bananas ready to be slit and hung up. The husband gave us a thumbs-up. He asked Bibhuti when the attempt would start and if it would be okay to film it for his friend in Dubai. He’d told him all about Bibhuti and he sent his salaams. Another god to watch over us and another continent to sell our story to.

We drove slowly, a sober procession between the potholes.

‘A/C, A/C!’ came Jolly Boy’s demand, but today wasn’t a day for artificial comforts. Bibhuti needed his muscles to be warm, nothing would be left to chance. The air con stayed off and so did the radio. Bibhuti folded his songs into sleeping flowers that would bloom again once the storm had passed. Until then his only music would be the drumming of a blunt desire, somewhere deep down where men were first made.

I kept an eye on Ellen drifting in and out of the wing mirror, hanging on to the back of the scooter. I was glad she’d come to see what a danger I could be.

The barrel-bound priests on the road to the temple had stopped praying for the end of the national ordeal while a break in the rain allowed it. One of them was shaving his head while the other lifted his face to the sky to catch some sun. I imagined pleasant memories of boyhood cricket matches swimming behind his eyelids. A one-legged man attended them with a hand towel at the ready. His service would earn him favourable treatment in his next life. His prosthetic leg was a dead ringer for the one I’d seen on Bibhuti’s stairs. Its foot was too small for him, the toes an infant’s, like buds that would grow into the real thing given time and regular watering.

The temple was dedicated to Ganesh, the elephant-headed remover of obstacles. We entered his chamber with stilled breaths and strong minds. A pain came on fast and my blood left me and I fell at the feet of his statue. I had to be slapped awake.

The floor was cool. Bibhuti stood over me, his eyes wide with worry. I tried to tell him I was okay but no words came. Death was everywhere. I could smell it in the incense smoke curling up the statue’s trunk.

Bibhuti gripped my wrists and pulled me up. My wrists felt as slender as a child’s in his grasp and there was pity in the eyes of the rat that sat at Ganesh’s feet. My time was running out on me again.

The priest looked at the fresh application of polish on my toenails and smiled to himself in private acknowledgement of some fact about me that I couldn’t figure out myself. He dipped a finger into the bowl he was holding and painted a turmeric stripe between my eyes. He mumbled a prayer at me and I was anointed. Bibhuti already wore his stripe. He carried the marks of divine protection with confidence. He thanked the priest on my behalf and took me away to a smaller room where his God’s soothing voice could be heard more clearly.

He sat down on the stone floor, folded his legs underneath him. He had me follow him down. He told me to close my eyes and breathe. I waited until his eyes were closed and he’d started to meditate. Still I didn’t hear you. All I heard was Bibhuti breathing and the low hum of a friendship that had passed from obligation to something wilder. All I wanted was for him to be happy.

Bibhuti woke up, rubbed his eyes and grinned at me.

‘I am ready now,’ he said.

In the courtyard all lenses pointed at us. A steadycam from the sports channel and various press cameras jostled for elbow room at the spot where the first gob of blood would be spat. The Turbanator waved to us boyishly. The civilians raised their phones and snapped our walk to centre stage where the bats were waiting, arranged in neat rows to be got at quickly. On the other side of us was a space to throw them when they were broken, in the walled corner under the banyan tree. Children looked down on us from its branches, their hands full of themselves and rubbing their shins as if to knead the excitement evenly through bodies unused to the thrill of being hidden.

They cheered us. The air crackled and I got goosebumps. Someone was selling mango slices from a plastic bucket and a custodian was standing by with a mop to cleanse the sacred ground when we were finished.

Nobody was wearing goggles. Nobody had thought of it. I worried about stray splinters in eyeballs. It was too late to do anything about it.

Ellen and Jolly Boy and his mother hadn’t been allowed inside the temple with us and instead they’d been practising their roles in the thickening air. The women in the crowd posed in shapes of grace, steadied their hands to catch the eggs from upturned nests when the sky started falling in.

Jolly Boy made a meal of checking the bats one last time, rolling them carefully so they all showed their faces. The duct tape covered B Pattni’s embarrassment. The modification made the bats look more sinister. B Pattni himself peered out from the crowd, swaying from foot to foot, his massive frame trembling with the anticipation of some watershed moment in the history of violence.

The younger priests had to blockade the entrance, linking their arms in opposition to the latecomers. Meeting resistance the would-be spectators made ladders of each other and scaled the walls to sit in crowlike hope of throwaway bones.

The AXN reporter made an announcement. He told everyone who Bibhuti was and what he’d already done. He told them what he’d attempt to do today. He introduced me as the one who’d help. I had to remind him of my name.

I got him to namecheck Jolly Boy too. Jolly Boy prematurely picked up the first bat from the pile. I quietly told him to put it back. His wait for the clock was insufferable. Rigged to the trunk of the tree it showed zero. Another AXN rep stood by to press its buttons, an Olympic pretension for the glamour-hungry crowd.

Bibhuti took off his T-shirt. The scars on his back and the bruises I’d made shone livid. Bibhuti’s wife turned her back on him. Ellen held her up.

On the announcer’s cue the crowd fell silent.

A moment of realisation passed between Bibhuti and me, a look of delirious mourning. We both knew that the people we’d been before would be permanently lost when the breaking began. We both rued the time we’d spent as outcasts in a life before today. We were going home.

‘I am only wishing Gopal Dutta is here,’ Bibhuti confided. ‘This will be the first record I have achieved without him. It is very strange feeling.’

‘He’ll be watching,’ I said. I scanned the crowd but I didn’t see any hovering goat women.

I asked Jolly Boy if he was okay. He tilted his head and offered me a bat again. This time I took it. I weighed it in my hands. I felt the grip and the heat in it from its exposure to the sun. I squeezed my fingers tighter around it to inflate the muscles that would make it murderous.

The air was still. Bibhuti gathered himself, a physical clearing and a shaking off of any last remaining trace of doubt. ‘Don’t forget, below the neck only,’ he said, and he glanced to the sky for a final endorsement as the crowd drew in its breath. Everyone braced themselves to see a god being born.

I decided with a sense of quickfalling like stepping off a roof that I didn’t have it in me.

‘I can’t do it.’ I said it quietly so the crowd wouldn’t hear. ‘I don’t want to kill you.’

Bibhuti’s moustache drooped.

I felt the burn of crying behind my eyes. I felt you. The preciousness of life was revealed to me in an urgent unfolding and the shock of it took all the lust out of me.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You must do it,’ Bibhuti said. His brown nipples were hairless and small in the stiffening breeze. He’d once been a baby. ‘Please,’ he pleaded.

‘Go, Uncle, it has started,’ Jolly Boy urged. ‘Hit him!’

I looked at the clock. The numbers were already running ahead of me.

Bibhuti waved me impatiently in. ‘Come, you must go now. We have no more time.’ He spread his feet and tensed himself, his arms held out in appeal.

I felt you for the first time and I raised my hand against you.

The announcer counted the seconds aloud to hurry me on. The crowd started counting too.

‘Go!’ Jolly Boy hollered, enraged at me, and he picked up a bat and made to strike his father himself.

I pushed him aside and raised my bat. Bibhuti’s eyes glazed over as he summoned the weird energies that would deflect the pain.

‘Thank you,’ he muttered, and he was already somewhere else.

I asked you to forgive me. I swung the bat with everything I had.