Man on Fire

35

I nearly drop Bibhuti in lifting him out of the wheelchair. My weakness comes as a shock and I can only watch as Vijay Five rights him and sets him down on the mud, his feet on our feet like a child dancing with his mother. We crabwalk him to the car, the doctor’s complaints drowned out by the rain.

The Turbanator has brought Bibhuti’s car round the back and it’s his idea to bury Bibhuti under a blanket to throw the rubberneckers off our scent. He sits upright in the back seat, dust-covered and inert, our smuggled artefact. Jolly Boy rests his arm across his father’s middle ready to pull the shroud aside as soon as they’ve cleared the hospital grounds.

‘I feel foolish,’ comes Bibhuti’s muffled voice.

‘No more foolish than you look,’ his wife replies, smoothing herself into the seat alongside them. ‘This is what happens when you break a baseball bat on yourself, I could have told you this.’

‘Eleven,’ Bibhuti says, but there’s no defiance in the correction. It’s a murmur that describes the mood of us all as we prepare to take our first steps into the world after the levelling storm. A simpler world, it will be, where the gaudy ambitions of men hang unworn on pegs and nobody looks you in the eye.

I’m ushered to Vijay Five’s car. It’s inappropriate for me to travel with the family. Ellen joins me in solidarity. We share the back seat, Ellen laying her stick down at my feet. The car smells like a single man who’s yet to meet his match. When I catch Vijay Five’s eye in the rearview mirror the loneliness I see provokes a twinge of pity. I press my hand down on Ellen’s knee. I know how lucky I am to be one half of something bigger.

We ease past the fraying protest and out onto the road. When we’re safely past the demonstration site the Turbanator floors Bibhuti’s car and Vijay Five speeds up to keep him in sight. A lone boy runs behind us, his bits and pieces clanging joyfully against his thighs. He reaches out a hand to us. In his palm is a bright yellow ball of fur. His supply of chicks has been refreshed and his smile tells us the prosperous times are coming back. We leave him happy and cloaked in dust.

Navi Mumbai has drowned since we were last free. Its corpse has been dragged back out of the water and laid to rest on the bank in a tangle of weeds. Everywhere bears a tidemark. The trees have spilled their fruit. We slow down once we’ve stopped feeling the heat of the fires we incited. All the dogs have gone from the streets and I miss their enquiring faces.

The neighbours have been tipped off about Bibhuti’s homecoming and they’ve arranged a welcome fit for a guru. Flowers decorate the apartment building’s perimeter and a fresh swastika has been painted above the door, as much in praise of his promotion to spiritual middleman as in appeal against the unending assault of the weather. The evidence of a siege is scratched on every surface, a grime that’s burned into the walls and spikes the air with the smell of clay and the spermy tang of the sea. It’s in the slumped branches and the drooping power lines, the rutted axles and the football left stranded in the gutter when the tide stole in and swamped the street in mud.

Next door no banana skins hang from the washing line. The neighbour’s wife wears gold and magenta to simulate the wings of migrated butterflies. Her husband is no longer the provider of beauty and all the starch has gone out of him because of it. He stands aimless in the road and watches our arrival, one foot poised at the lip of the flooded pothole as if he might give up his pretensions of buoyancy and jump in, sink to the bottom where weird inland fishes will lullaby him to a peaceful sleep.

He waves at us but the days of siege and scurf have taken his smile away.

Bibhuti sees the damage before any of us. He’s lived through so many monsoons that he’s attuned to the fine outrages they deliver. He looks sadly up to the roof of his building as our car pulls in.

‘It is broken,’ he clucks when I reach him. ‘Look at this. It will have to be fixed.’

I look up and see the satellite dish hanging limp from the wall, displaced from its bracket by the storm winds.

‘Baba, you must fix it,’ Jolly Boy insists, scrambling from the back seat to see the devastation for himself. The sight of it unhinges him and he tries to pry Bibhuti from the car to make an immediate repair. Bibhuti sucks in an agonised breath and Jolly Boy lets go of him.

‘It will be done,’ Bibhuti tells him. ‘Not to worry. As soon as I am on my feet again I will take care of it.’

‘That will be a long time,’ Jolly Boy complains.

‘It will not be so long.’

Somehow I know I’ll be dangling from that roof and I turn away from Ellen so she won’t see my excitement.

The air in the apartment is gummy and dense with the gossip of the ghosts who took up tenancy while Bibhuti was away. Drowned children who’ve spent the last few days bickering over who died most stylishly and the best way to the afterlife. When they hear the key in the lock they bolt to the cracks in the walls. We walk Bibhuti in, sweating from the climb up the stairs. An anxiety enters the room ahead of us, a fear of the curse that might touch us should he find his home ransacked of its treasures. He scans the room suspiciously. He lingers at the sideboard and takes an inventory of its contents. His trophies and commendations provide momentary comfort. The ghosts evaporate.

He switches the TV on, watches the snow falling on screen until the pain becomes too much to bear and he allows us to sit him down on the zebra-print sofa.

‘It must feel good to be home,’ Ellen says.

He gives a shattered smile in reply. The rain beats against the window and makes a clock for Bibhuti to time his wasting by. Already he’s desolate. The long healing ahead and the abandonment of his former creed have sapped the blood from him. He can’t bring himself to speak or to look at us.

Jolly Boy runs to the bedroom to turn the air con on and there’s a moment of tension while we wait for the system to expectorate and rediscover its breath. Cool air drifts in and Bibhuti’s wife goes to the kitchen to be alone with her thoughts. A sour homecoming, everything in the house has been chipped or moved one step back from its rightful place by the knowledge we share of disasters weathered. Nothing has lasted. The neighbour, having followed us up, offers us his food until we get a chance to restock. Charity will be the fibre that stitches us back together.

We put ourselves where Bibhuti can see us, the men competing for his eye and the scraps of blessing he might toss our way. We all want him to know how committed we are to the cause of making him comfortable in his new obscurity. Being intimates with obscurity gives us leverage and wisdoms to pass on about how to walk in darkness.

We’re asking a tiger to take up matchstick modelling.

He’ll be writing again soon, Vijay Five assures him. The newspaper will always need him and the city will always have stories to tell. And there’s the memoir to finish, new chapters to add. The world awaits his account with bated breath.

Butterflies on the wind, the neighbour says. He could use some help with the sanctuary he’s been planning, when he’s up to it. There’s a patch of woodland he’s had his eye on and he thinks he can get it for a good price. A butterfly man has peace and time to think. He has the friendship of nature and beauty is his companion. A blessed life, it could be.

Bibhuti thanks them for their help and asks them to leave. He’s tired and he needs to rest.

When they’ve gone Bibhuti tears his plaster off. He’s a child unwrapping Christmas presents, impatient to see the full extent of the disgrace the hospital bunglers have inflicted on him.

‘Really they have done a very poor job,’ he mutters as the casts are shed in eggshell pieces and more battered flesh is revealed, discoloured and creased from its quarantine. ‘It is no wonder the pain is not leaving.’

His wife helps him out of the plaster sleeves, very careful not to touch him. Every suggestion he makes that his mastery of pain has left him is met with a sympathy cringe and a snapped retreat of hands. The rest of us sit and watch and let the second-hand tremors pass through us. To be touched even as an afterthought by the pain he feels is to wish myself in his place.

Everything I’ve wished for since I arrived here has come true. If only I could take it all back. I’m devastated by my own selfishness. It’s a revelation that brings no pleasure or relief. I look at the family who took me in and see trees that I just had to climb. They’re ruined now. I’ve carved my name in them and stolen all their fruit. My heels have scraped great gouges in their bark that will leave them open when I’ve gone to other parasites.

The last piece of shell is removed. Bibhuti appraises his wounds, moving his limbs very slowly to keep the bones in place. Shame comes over him again and his moustache droops. The effect has lost its comical allure.

‘You should not see me like this,’ he tells me, stripped down to his Y-fronts and fighting back tears.

‘I’ve never seen a guru in his pants before. It’s an honour.’

Bibhuti’s wife seizes on his confusion and relates to him his new status. The news troubles him.

‘Why did you let this happen?’ he demands, stiffening. The tired muscles in his shoulders contract and he kicks out his legs, clattering his shins against the coffee table. The room jumps. He suppresses a howl.

‘I do not want this,’ he goes on, his anger rising. ‘I did not ask for your priests. I did this for the love of one God only and for the love of the people. I am not a bearded man in saffron robes, I cannot teach others how to live. Look at me. This is not a good lesson. I have broken myself for twelve years and still the world is in pain. Planes are falling from the sky and my friends are expiring. My friend from England is unwell, I have not been able to cure him. His wife must walk with a stick. We have no television. Where is my lesson? You will get your priests here and they will reverse what they have done.’

Chastened, his wife slinks away to the kitchen again. She comes back with a plastic bucket, a jug of water and a packet of white powder. Ingredients for the new plaster Bibhuti is anxious to get into before his bones disintegrate under the strain of premature freedom. The inside of the bucket is crusted with the remains of past mixes, each new layer betraying another self-inflicted collapse. Under Bibhuti’s trained eye she pours the water from the jug into the bucket. She adds the powder at his commentary, a little at a time. Its dust spills out in a plume that sandstorms our eyes before the air con wafts it clear.

‘Air bubbles,’ Bibhuti prompts, and she taps the side of the bucket with her spoon to disperse the powder and even out the mixture. When Bibhuti is happy with the consistency she gives it a stir and the water becomes a paste.

I think this is something I should be doing, but she has determined it her duty and besides, I’m still feeling the sting of Bibhuti’s earlier comment. That my fragility should be so obvious to him when he’s the one who’s just come back from the dead. What a sorry pair we are.

Jolly Boy trots to the kitchen for the rest of the ingredients. He comes back with an armful of bandages still in their packaging and a fat spool of cotton wool. He drops the bandages and unrolls the cotton wool, cuts it to length for the first application. He holds Bibhuti’s elbow delicately while his mother wraps the strip around Bibhuti’s arm for padding. She dips the first bandage in the plaster solution and then winds it over the cotton-wool sleeve, her eyes darting all the while to her husband’s for guidance. With great care she repeats the process until three layers of bandages clad his arm, smoothing the plaster down with her palm between each application to achieve a clean finish. Her sobriety throughout suggests many years of painstaking ministrations like this, of swabbing blood and smoothing matted hair, of binding fractured fingers and forceful reintroductions of ball joints to their sockets.

Bibhuti stays awake to watch, biting back the pain to remonstrate quietly with her over her fussy technique. She flusters to get the job done to his satisfaction while the room hums to a narcotic rhythm of muted industry. Before my eyes he’s fixed and shielded again from my thrill-seeking bat. I’ve hit him for the last time. A pang of mourning. I’ll end my life having never killed a man. I feel the consolation of it as I feel the cooling draught of the air con on my neck. Your mercy, that’s what it is. If I feel saved from something, whether it’s hell or an inescapable deed, then someone or something must have done the saving. That’s what I’m thinking when I watch Bibhuti’s other bones being dressed and then sit alone with him listening to the rain as the plaster sets.

‘You didn’t cure me, then,’ I say. I try to make it sound breezy.

‘I am very sorry,’ Bibhuti says.

‘It’s okay. Not to worry. Thanks for trying anyway.’

‘You still have plenty of time. You must use it wisely. Maybe there is another treatment for you at home. There is always hope if you listen to what your heart is telling you.’

I tell him I have to go soon. I hear him sobbing and I look away to spare his shame. His picture on the wall is crooked. I’ll straighten it when I get up. He sits with his legs spread wide, three slabs of concrete between them. The sledgehammer poised in another man’s hands. That should have been our record, it would have been so much easier. I should have found him years ago.