Man on Fire

34

Bibhuti asks me how I’m feeling. I look ill, he says. He’s calm, refreshed. Wherever he went while he was under and whoever he spoke to, his travels have stolen the memory of his ever being outwitted by the drugs. His only concern now is for me. Have I been following my diet? Have I been doing my exercises?

I’ve been sitting here waiting for him to wake up, I say. I’ve been remembering and trying not to remember. I’ve been scraping his blood from under my fingernails and telling myself it’s just the storyless grime that comes from being in a foreign country.

I tell him I’m fine. Everything’s fine. What he doesn’t know can’t hurt him.

The doctor has tested him, shone a light in his eyes and trailed a finger in a circuit around his nose and asked him the year and the date of his birth. He knew who ‘The Little Master’ was and who the opponents were when he made his last test century.

‘Always cricket,’ Bibhuti had complained. ‘Why don’t you ask me about floor gymnastics or karate? Ask me about my ninth World Record, I will tell you that on 14th October 2006 I successfully completed one hundred and fourteen fingertip push-ups in one minute. There is more to life than cricket.’

The doctor had smiled patiently and taken a blood sample. Bibhuti had flinched when the needle went in.

His wife and Jolly Boy cling to him, their fingers glued to his living skin. Now they’ve got him back they’re not letting go of him. They plan to ride him home bareback.

I ask him what he remembers of the day.

Everything, he says, up until a blackout. Eleven bats lie broken. He stood up to them and they sang to his tune. There was no pain then. Everything went to plan. I did him proud, and Shubham too.

Jolly Boy coils tighter around his father, his relief a prehensile thing that pulls him to his beating heart.

‘We found greatness,’ Bibhuti tells me, his eyes glowing through the gauze of returning pain. ‘I knew we would do it.’

‘You’re not disappointed we didn’t get the fifty?’

‘I have the record, this is the important thing. Nobody will match it. You have informed the Guinness people, they have ratified?’

‘I don’t know how. I was waiting for you to wake up.’

‘It was never in doubt.’

His wife lifts her head from private thanksgiving and scowls at him. ‘I doubted it. Every minute I am waiting for you to die. Shubham is afraid he will lose his father. Five days like this. Look at what you have done to yourself. Go on, look!’

Bibhuti looks down at himself. He takes in the plaster that holds him together and the bruises that intrude on his exposed flesh. Fear shivers through him. Then regret steals in to dull his eyes to ash.

‘I will not do this again,’ he says, his lips trembling as he speaks.

‘You have promised this before,’ his wife reminds him.

‘I am very sorry. I will break no more promises.’

He’s forgotten the revelation he shared with us when he first woke up. His conversation with the fire-eater is a dream that’s lost to him. Now that the morphine is draining from his system he knows only pain. It’s a bringer of clarity.

‘I am finished. I cannot ask any more of myself. I have given everything. I will ask God to release me from this debt and show me an alternative path.’ He examines the plaster on his arm, clucks his tongue disdainfully. ‘This plaster work is very shoddy, the joins are too rough. I will change when I get home. Come, we must go. I cannot stay here, a hospital is not the place for me. I will die if I stay here, these doctors know nothing.’

He peels his wife’s fingers from his neck and tries to move. A jolt of agony pins him down.

To know that he feels pain with me is a consolation. I want him to be human again and mortal. His time as a god only brought worry to the people who love him. To love him now is to convince him that his special properties are all exhausted. To save him is to remind him that he’s just like me.

The nurse disapproves of Bibhuti’s decision to bear his pain naturally. There’s no talking him round. He’s alive again and he wants to feel it, every spasm and firework. It’s the price he must pay for his former arrogance. His prize for poking death in the eye is to spend the rest of his life respectfully running from it, as everybody else does. Milk and turmeric await him at home.

The nurse opens the door to leave with her tray of redundant painkillers. Ellen reaches for the tray and steals a handful of morphine vials, quick and nerveless. She hides them in her hand until the nurse has gone, then she slips them into her purse.

‘Just in case,’ she says when I look at her. Her daring fills me with admiration. I could love her all over again.

Vijay Five is waiting on the other side of the door. The TV news reporter cranes behind him for a look inside the room. She’s heard the commotion of Bibhuti’s revival and expects to see him bathed in a golden light, dispensing immortal wisdoms for the evening bulletin. She raises her iPhone to record his account of the afterworld.

Vijay Five shuts the door on her before she can follow him in. When he sees Bibhuti upright and talking a childish grin breaks out and the nights of vigil are forgotten. He slips Bibhuti’s hand in his and the two men laugh together. The air in the room is charged with the levity of spring. It’s only when Ellen makes the mistake of opening the window that the weight of consequences intrudes. Bibhuti cocks his head to the noise outside, an understanding blooming quickly of the gouge his actions have made in the ground of his city.

The crowd has been alerted to his comeback and their voices are raised in testament to the miracle of it.

‘Are they for me?’ Bibhuti asks.

‘They have waited for you,’ Vijay Five says. ‘Everybody was there. You are big news.’

Bibhuti can’t hide his excitement. ‘What was the coverage?’

‘Everybody. Local and national. Jai, Zee 24, TV9, ESPN, BBC, CNN, Live India, they were all there. All the newspapers. I have been in charge of the Times coverage, everything is passing from me. The city is full of you, BB, everybody wants to know you will pull through. When you are feeling better I will take an interview from you, everybody will want to hear your words.’

‘You can take the interview now, there is no sense in delaying it.’

‘You must rest, BB. I will take it later. I will keep the other press away from you, they will not disturb you. The Turbanator is downstairs, he will make sure they don’t get in. This woman outside will not leave but I am looking for the right moment to take her phone, I will destroy anything she has recorded. You are a Times man and we will take care of you.’

I hide behind the curtain and look down. The crowd is sparse now compared with its prime. The place looks like the site of a plane crash. The earth is scarred with errant fires and smoke hangs heavy in the air. The world came to a premature end while Bibhuti’s life hung in the balance and now that he’s awake it needs to repair itself. The hardcore followers have stayed behind to lend their hands to the restoration. The priests and the firebrands have nowhere better to be. The taste of war and its groping aftermath is salt on their tongues. When the soil knots again over the scalp of the earth they’ll mark a new beginning in a splash of my blood. I raised the bats to Bibhuti and there should be redress. I meant to slaughter India and her sons will slice revenge from me as a warning to others who might come after.

I see the bobbing pink head of the Turbanator as he scuffles with an interloper at the hospital doors. He has the rival pressman in a headlock. His prisoner’s arms are flailing behind him and his heels dig in to the mud. They caper in a dim-witted waltz while the rubbish fires flicker. Bibhuti commands a loyalty that turns men into happy maniacs and I feel no shame in counting myself one of them.

The constables prod me down the stairs, the heads of their lathis nuzzling the small of my back. Their inspector gives me a lazy shove to keep his hand in. Ellen takes offence at their roughhousing. The Inspector moves to help her down the last flight of stairs and she swats at him with her stick, catching him across the shin. He curses and shoves me harder.

We’re taken out the front way so we can meet my public. Jeers warm my cheeks and placards are hastily raised above bedraggled heads. They’ve wilted and been humbled by the rain.

The kung-fu fighters freeze mid-air and snarl at me. A contingent from Bibhuti’s karate class, I recognise some of the younger faces. A week away from the regimen of the dojo has made them restless. They’ve brought their twitchy limbs to the hospital grounds to parade their angst for the watching world.

I look for Kavita but she’s not among them. I can only guess at the damage she would have inflicted on me in revenge for her sensei and wonder if adulthood’s obligations will put a halter on her wrath or only provoke it into greater and more destructive feats. I think she’ll become a nail bomb. I only wish I could be alive to see the hole she’ll punch in the world.

The casual protesters have gone back to the relative comforts of concrete and dial-up internet, or to face whatever horrors the storms have visited on their loved ones in their absence. The police guard at the door has thinned in reaction to the decreased threat. The diehards who remain are kept in check by menacing looks alone. Word of Bibhuti’s awakening has seeped like milk through the ranks of the abandoned, soothing their burns to itches that can be pacified with hateful remarks and the limp rattling of a fist.

The constables let their hands stray to the grips of their lathis, a challenge to anyone who might want to make a run at me.

Bibhuti has already cleared my name. He met the Inspector’s interrogation with a steady insistence that I had no crime to answer to. We crossed the line of reason together, hand in hand. What I did in taking up the bats against him was an act of charity. The Inspector hadn’t taken kindly to Bibhuti’s version of events. He’d asked him to take a look at himself, broken and humiliated and writhing in pain.

‘If I gave you a shake you would rattle like chipdya.’

‘Then do not shake him,’ Bibhuti’s wife had suggested.

The Inspector had recited a summary of the record and the specifics of its execution. Those particulars had only brought a flush of excitement to Bibhuti’s cheeks, provided stirring images that he could grip on to ride out the pain. The Inspector had pouted. There’d be no speedy incrimination or legitimate beatings to follow.

He leads me to the patrol car and a waiting cell. He’s not finished with me yet.

‘BB asked after you,’ I tell the Turbanator as he steps aside to let us through. His arm still forms a doughnut at his side where his rival’s head had been. The other man sits on the hospital step, smoking a cigarette and contemplating his feebleness. ‘Go and see him, he’ll tell you everything. I’ll be going home soon. It was good to meet you.’

‘Will you?’ Ellen asks. She sounds disbelieving.

‘I did what I came here for. There’s nothing left to do. It hurts. I want to lie down in my own bed. Do you forgive me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thank you.’

‘It’s not too late. They can still make you better.’

‘It is too late.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I just know.’

‘You don’t know anything. What am I supposed to do on my own? You can’t give up. I won’t let you.’

I feel a bristle of something corrosive, like duty. It’s been a long time since I thought of myself as subject to a word like that. Every sacrifice she’s made for me has been repaid in counterfeit notes. I’ll be gentle again and truthful. I’ll believe in anything that brings her back home to me.

She falls silent. In the back of the car I hear her fart and I apologise for it before they can trace it back to her. She never was a fan of spicy food.

I can’t stop them taking her away. It’s the Inspector’s retribution for the crack on the shin. They put her in a woman’s cell that I suppose is no different to mine. They let me wonder at what’s happening to her while I wait for the hands of the clock to creep to the moment when the Inspector will decide his honour has been satisfied.

He takes my money for safekeeping, locks the door on me and sits down at the desk that faces the cell on the far side of the room. He picks up a newspaper and starts reading. His lips move with the words. He wants to show me how unimportant I am.

I share my cell with a broken-down kid in a T-shirt that says ‘Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas’. He’s coming down from something transformational and the tragedy of his return to earth is scratched into his face like a prayer gone cold. His eyes are empty and restless. He knows how close I came to killing a man. He can feel it coming off me and it’s making him edgy.

I tell the Inspector I have to be somewhere.

‘Where?’

‘I have to go home. I’m dying. I haven’t got much time left. You know I’m innocent. Let us go, we just want to go home.’

The Inspector mumbles something profane to himself and turns the page of his newspaper.

‘You are dying?’ my cellmate asks me.

‘That’s right.’

On hearing this he sways towards me, drawn in. I can smell the fight on his clothes. I know somehow that every day for him is a fight he can’t win. His breath is hot and sweet and I need a drink.

‘I also am dying,’ he says. He looks very young when he says this. There’s confederacy in his tone and it sickens me a little bit.

He puts his arms together as though he’s handcuffed. The inner sides of his forearms are bitten and ravaged. He feels no disgrace in telling me he’s a user of heroin. He says it’s killing him but he can’t stop.

I reach out to touch his shoulder but then I quickly pull back in case he doesn’t want the intrusion. I’m not sure why but it’s important to me that he thinks I’m a good man, sensitive to the needs of others.

I tell him God hasn’t forgotten him. I surprise myself by believing it. But then I shouldn’t be surprised, not after everything that’s happened. I believe in you informally, like a recipe handed down. You’re my bread now.

I’ve never been this hungry in all my life.

Then it’s time to pay the fine for my release. Official reparation against the disturbance I’ve caused to the flooded city’s peace. The Inspector digs in my bag and pulls out a fistful of notes. There aren’t so many left and their denominations are generally high. He chooses a pleasing amount for himself and stacks his selection on the desk. He gets a logbook from a drawer and fills out a docket. I knew the shakedown was coming and I don’t begrudge it.

‘Just leave me enough to get home,’ I say.

‘I don’t decide these things,’ he replies. ‘It is a fixed penalty.’ He says this with sincerity. I pity him for having been sucked in to such a corrupting profession.

Ellen is brought to me dazed and dehydrated. I demand water for her. She takes her medication under the Inspector’s impatient gaze, her senseless fingers struggling to open the pillbox with the tiny Klimt reproduction that I bought her for travelling. I never cared for art but she liked the colours.

The kid is curled up on the floor of the cell, slick with sweat and sleeping soundly. He twitches and whimpers, a dreaming dog.