Man on Fire

5

Amrita was happily colouring in her father’s hair, her brush splayed imprecise by the eager application of too much pressure. She had no reason to suppose she should be doing something more important and I had no bones to pick now that I’d slept off the jetlag and won Bibhuti’s confidence. I stood and watched her slap the paint on. The figure looked nothing like Harshad. It was strong and heroic and its hair flowed thick like a river of oil. It brought to mind a matinee idol from the time when pictures came in double bills with a newsreel starter and a torch to find your seat by.

Harshad was blinded to its lies by that strange kind of vanity that overcomes a man when he lets himself go. He pretended not to notice the parody growing like a mould on the wall as he set about patiently molesting a portable radio that lay breached on the countertop. A half-empty glass of whisky sat at his elbow. He dug a screwdriver round the radio’s guts, humming a gritted-teeth lament to himself. A barbed reminder of the songs the radio used to play in brighter days before its voice had given out. A glance up from his work to check the painting’s progress, a single hummed note of satisfaction at the shape his alter ego was taking. A pull from the glass and then another stab with the screwdriver, its blade sharking in between the luckless wires. His song escaped from him as a gruff vapour that caught in the fins of the ceiling fan as they sliced through the sluggish air.

‘Noisy in the mornings,’ I said. ‘Lots of building work going on.’

I’d woken up to a million hammers and horns. I’d reached out to feel the empty sheet beside me, cold from the fan and no other body. I’d been having a dream about Oscar, the budgie I had when I was a young man on my own, before Ellen. He’d perch on my shoulder while I read my books in the eaves room I rented from old Mrs March. Listening to me daydreaming about a life of enquiry and mild adventure and not having the heart to tell me he’d seen my future and it wasn’t pretty. He flew away one day when I left the window open. Maybe I left it open on purpose to test his instinct for freedom, I’m not sure. In the dream he was on my shoulder again, pulling at a thread on my jumper so it was slowly coming undone. I liked having him there, feeling the sparse weight of his feet on me, his tiny breath in my ear. When I’d woken up my stomach was killing me and I’d cried when I couldn’t feel him anymore.

‘Always it is like this,’ Harshad said. ‘Navi Mumbai is only forty years old and it is still growing. They are building all these office towers, making a nice room for the computers to live. My building has no working elevator after many weeks now but the computers are very comfortable, this is all that matters. There. Let us see what I have done.’

He patted the wire down snug against the chassis, twisted the battery tight and turned the dial. The radio burst into life. A blare of strings and a woman’s shrill voice filled the air with sparks of lost love and deceit. Harshad gave a satisfied nod.

‘You fixed it,’ I said.

‘Of course. I am a bringer of life to all dead things.’ A look of sadness washed over him and he took a drink. He smoothed his mangled hand over his scalp and started screwing the cover back on the radio.

‘I like the hair,’ I told Amrita. My words startled her and she swayed as she turned to see me, groping out a hand to steady herself.

‘I have modelled the hair on Amitabh Bachchan in Deewaar,’ Amrita said, as if I knew who she was talking about. ‘My father loves this film a lot.’

‘I like it,’ I said. And with that I ran out of things to say. I tightened my fingers round the handle of my carrier bag, felt for the weight of the money in it. I swung the bag against my thigh to remind myself that I was holding a man’s life in my hands.

‘BB is pleased with you?’ Harshad asked. ‘He will let you help him?’

‘I think so.’

‘You told him about your dying wish?’

‘I left out the dying part. I didn’t need it in the end.’

‘It is lucky that I am a friend of BB, or maybe you would not have found him.’ Eyeing up the bag like a cat stalking a bird.

I thanked him and decided I’d leave him a little something when the time came. For cleaning up whatever mess I was bound to make.

The old man sat there surrounded by his little army of elephant gods. A plastic watering can rested at his side. I looked for the flowers it gave life to and saw none. He offered me another figurine. This one was playing a guitar. I refused it and he took the snub on the chin, turned away and carried on staring at the spot he’d been looking at before I’d disturbed him, somewhere past the streaking traffic, a patch of sky above the train tracks that meant something special to him. He waited with a tirelessness that made me envy him.

I had an urge to tickle the old man’s feet and I was seriously thinking about it when Bibhuti’s car pulled up.

Jolly Boy waved at me from the passenger seat. School was out for the big vacation and the boy had decided to make me the story of his summer. I was the first white man he’d known and I fascinated him. Sometimes I’d catch him peering intently at me as if I were a strange fish behind aquarium glass.

Sometimes I still do, but now his curiosity is a haunted thing, blunted by a sadness inappropriate to his age by the walk we took together on the trail of a tiger.

Bibhuti got out of the car to greet me. The sun bounced off him in his white T-shirt and stonewashed jeans. He looked like he could repel any danger that might come our way. He was the stuff they clad the space shuttle in to stop it burning up in re-entry. I felt safe with him and afraid of my deficiencies. He took a comb out of his pocket and ran it through his hair and then he smoothed his moustache just so.

He froze when he saw the old man. The confidence drained from him. He stared down in disbelief. The old man smiled up at him, toothless and defiant. He chuckled softly, his orange beard blazing in the sunlight.

Bibhuti swayed where he stood, a burning question on his lips. It was as if he’d seen the face of death.

The old man’s chuckle broke into gentle laughter. The light crashed back into Bibhuti’s eyes and he bent down to shake the old man’s hand. They spoke warmly, like friends reunited after a long time apart. Then Bibhuti said his farewells and led me to his car where it was idling at the kerb.

He gave the bonnet a gentle pat. ‘Only two months old,’ he murmured. ‘I wanted a mid-segment for a very long time and finally my wife consented. It is not so much a luxury, I need it for my work. I must be always moving around. We had a choice between a new car and moving to a larger apartment with two bedrooms. In the end I made the right decision.’

He ran his fingertip tenderly down the wing, scared up some dust. He bunched his T-shirt over his fist and wiped the dust away, cooing softly to himself.

‘It runs very well. I love to drive. In the summer we visit the hill stations that are close to here, and also to Goa. One day I will drive the whole span of my country from top to bottom. I will drive to my native place in Orissa and I will drive to Darjeeling, up in the mountains. You must come.’

‘I don’t know if I’ll still be here,’ I said.

‘You will stay. I am sure of this. My country will give you everything you need, there is no reason to go back.’

I think he was joking. He couldn’t have loved me then. We were still strangers.

He lowered himself carefully onto the plank of wood that had been placed on the driver’s seat. He told me it was a measure against a hamstring injury sustained in his previous record attempt. The injury had persisted for longer than he’d hoped, and he’d come to accept that it might never leave him. Such was the way of things for the dedicated sportsman, he said. To bear the scars of past achievements was to always carry a reminder of one’s destiny, to be read in times of doubt like a passage from a holy book.

I got in the passenger side. I opened my bag and let Bibhuti see the money. He gave a solemn nod, as if confirming the identity of ancestral bones. Jolly Boy leaned in from the back seat and wolf-whistled again. I stuffed the bag between my feet. On the dashboard a Ganesh unlike the old man’s bore witness to the deal. This one was made of smooth stone, like a chess piece. Peering out from inside its Perspex cube, its multiple arms wrapped round itself in meditation, it warned me against exploiting my new friend’s hospitality.

Bibhuti didn’t know the old man. Their conversation had taken the form of a mutual blessing.

‘He reminded me of someone I once knew, many years ago. He looks very much like him. He too had the orange beard and the smell of fire was on him. For a moment I thought he had returned to me but it was a mistake. Nevertheless this is a clear sign that I must accept your offer. I am very happy for your help.’

My heart skipped. Bibhuti turned the key and as the engine hacked into life I congratulated myself on having made it this far, under my own steam and with no recourse to prayer. The old man stood to watch us pull away, happily pissing in the watering can.

The sun struck its killer blows as we walked unprotected to the valley’s lowest point. I asked Jolly Boy if he knew what a robot was. He said he did. I told him about the game me and Ellen used to play when I was driving somewhere far. How we pretended the electricity pylons were robots that were shut down or sleeping on the grass banks that bordered the roads and, later, the motorways we hummed down on the way to seaside holidays.

‘You had to hold your breath as you went past so you didn’t wake them up. If you woke them up they’d go berserk and eat your car. Eat you as well.’

Ellen was always the first to break, her breath never big enough to contain the laughter that leaked from her in habitual swells, the tip of her tongue always sugared with an amusement that hinted at things known that couldn’t be captured by looking straight ahead with your eyes on the road. I pretended to go blue when the traffic slowed, and she reached across and poked my cheek to let the air out so I could take another breath. We’d stop by the side of the road to pick blackberries, plump and sweet, to be eaten in the shade of the flyover. The dying sun would chase us to the sea and Ellen would run to the beach to look for shells while I got the stove working, in a caravan small enough to go mad in if the weather closed in and our humour ran out. It didn’t run out for a long time. We had the hills to run down and grass to lie in when running got too hard. Even on a pebble beach there were heart-shaped stones to be harvested. Things would only fall apart when I stopped finding them.

‘Better hold your breath just in case.’

‘They are still far. They will not hear us,’ Jolly Boy said.

‘I wouldn’t be so sure. They’ve got super hearing.’

The boy looked across to the two rusting pylons kneeling together as if in prayer on the valley floor. No cables trailed from them. The bleached bones of livestock animals were scattered round their feet, maybe offered as sacrifices by superstitious farmers or having wandered to their shadows for shade and fallen there, victims of famine or some native blight. The boy played along. He took a deep breath and held it. We lifted our feet and crept past the pylons. When we’d put them behind us we let out our breaths to show how close our shave had been.

‘We are safe,’ Jolly Boy declared. ‘They will not eat us.’

He quickened his pace to make sure. I followed him. We stalked Bibhuti and his Sikh photographer through the scrub towards the tree-flocked hills that rose above the valley, using his bobbing pink turban as a landmark so we wouldn’t get left behind.

Bibhuti wanted to begin our preparations straight away, and later he’d take me to his home and have me meet his wife, but first he had an assignment to complete. We’d joined up with the photographer on the way to the wasteland. He’d appeared on his motorbike when we stopped at the lights and then he flanked us through the streets as they grew wider and older where the suburbs frayed to vine and shadow and the earth took over. I followed Jolly Boy’s lead and waved to the big Sikh on his red Hero Honda, gliding alongside us like a summer-drunk swallow, his beard catching a frosting from the blossoms that sailed down from the trees that fringed the road.

We’d stopped off at a minimart along the way and Bibhuti had bought an armful of disposable razors and cans of shaving foam and deodorant, little soaps sealed in plastic. He made me pay but didn’t tell me what they were for. I was too hot to ask and feared the answer in case some kind of weird initiation was on the cards. Perhaps he planned to shave and fragrance me, a sterilisation rite before the gutting could begin.

The TV on the counter played breaking news footage of a plane crash in Mangalore. It sounded like a mystical place but the falling to its earth of a planeload of doomed humans sucked all its romance dry. A green hillside churned up and strewn with charred metal, a slice of tail stuck in the mud like a coin.

I pictured the lunatic Frenchman taking a bite out of it, gorging himself with the survivors staggering around him, shaking on some salt and pepper while the fires spat rivets and milk teeth.

We observed a moment of grim silence and then we left clutching our purchases close to our chests, as if they were the charms that would see us through a national mourning.

The hills swept up in front of us and we came to rest where the tarmac ran out, at the edge of a tract of creeping villas that looked like they’d been dredged from the bottom of a swamp. An unfinished storm drain dripped abandoned diesel onto the weeds below. I realised if they were going to steal my money and slit my throat this would be the perfect place to do it. They could leave me here to quietly spoil and the world wouldn’t bat an eyelid.

I thought I might have made the biggest mistake of my life.

‘Is it that colour for a special reason?’ I asked the Sikh photographer, pointing to his turban. ‘I used to work with a Sikh. He always wore a black one. I always wondered whether the different colours had different points, like in snooker. Or like the belts in karate, you start off with a white one and work your way up.’

I wasn’t trying to be funny, I really wanted to know. I’d decided that while I was in India I’d be more curious and forthright. Better late than never.

‘No, it is whatever colour we prefer,’ he smiled. ‘I am always choosing this.’

‘Right. I like it, it’s nice and bright.’

‘Thank you.’

The photographer’s name was Jagatdeep but Bibhuti called him the Turbanator. He was happy from the moment of our introduction for me to call him that too. He hitched his camera bag over his shoulder and Bibhuti got the toiletries out of the boot. I took my bag of money and off we marched towards the valley, the sun beating down from between high dirty clouds.