The Cripple and His Talismans (14 page)

The second blow hurts more than the first. The third one hurts the most. Just like words. People say that when hurtful words are repeated often enough they lose their sting. That is false. You never get used to bad things.

There is a fourth hit. And a fifth. He does not aim, just strikes like a blind man. They land on my face, arm, back and chest. I do not cry. I try to read a certificate, any certificate, but they are all going blurry. The caning goes on and on and I lose count. I scream out loud a few times, but like a man. By the time Mr. Old is satisfied, I can barely stand. I cannot even hear too well. He says something about me being expelled from school and what a poor job my mother has done. He has convinced Viren’s mother to file a criminal complaint so that I learn a lesson. Let it bring shame upon this school. His duty is to reform me. Mr. Old says that Viren will be great when he grows up and if he does lose an eye then I have done the devil’s work and I hope I am happy.

But I am not happy. I am very upset. I did not mean to blind Viren. It was a mistake. I do not feel bad because of Viren. I feel bad because I was not careful.

I wake up to the light of the movie screen and realize that Mr. Old is old news. I must have slept through the intermission. Luckily the movies are all the same.

It is a crucial climax scene. The hero is in danger. The villain has cornered him near an old temple. They are both tired from running. The background music is just as tiring. The villain leans against a large tree and twirls his handlebar moustache. He points a gun at the hero.

“If you have drunk your mother’s milk, throw your gun down,” says the hero.

“I have drunk every type of milk,” says the villain. “Mother’s milk, cow’s milk and milk that is like silk. But I’m going to kill you with this gun only.”

“In your case, there’s no difference between mother’s milk and cow’s milk,” says the hero. He looks shocked by his own intelligence.

“What?”

“Your mother is a cow.”

An insult to one’s mother is worse than being called an untouchable. The loss of a country can be tolerated, but not the loss of ma ka doodh. The villain throws the weapon to the ground. It lands in a puddle of brown water.

A fight ensues. It is dramatic and goes on for very long. So does the music.

Just when the villain is choking the hero against the steps of the temple, the heroine appears. She is a mixture of a doll and a prostitute. It is hard to imagine that one day she will also be a mother and someone will fight for her dignity.

She grabs the gun in the brown puddle. She points it at the villain. The fighting stops. The music does not.

“Twenty years ago you killed my mother,” she tells the villain. “Now it’s your turn to die.”

Even though he is not meant to, the hero interjects, “But twenty years ago
my
mother was killed, too. Does that mean we had the same mother?” A tear wells in his right eye. “We are brother–sister,” he says. “We cannot sing and run around trees and make passion-ful romance.”

“Shut up, you farmer,” blares the heroine. “I should kill you both. Him for murder, you for stupidity.”

“What will you do after I’m dead?” asks the hero.

He runs his hands through his wet black hair and puts on his doleful look.

“I will bury you,” she replies.

“That’s not what I meant,” he clarifies.

“Quiet. Who’s holding the gun?”

Then the villain speaks, to buy time until that point in the plot where he strangles the heroine by the neck, and presses her close to his body.

“Don’t you cremate the body?” interferes the villain.

“I will bury you. I will chop off all your parts and bury them,” says the heroine.

There is a close-up of the heroine. She is looking directly at me: “Bury. Understand? It’s what you do when death comes. Bury.”

Two gunshots are fired but I do not see the screen. Instead I think of Abdul’s words:
Get rid of the finger, it reeks of death
. May the crow strike me down if I am lying. I must relinquish the finger. Decayed, it was no longer of any use to the leper. Just as he passed it on to me, I must do the same. Only then will I come closer to an arm. I know I must bury the finger because it is dead. But I must put it in a coffin first. I must go back to Mr. P.

Even thought it is night, Mr. P’s coffin enterprise is open. This makes sense to me. People die at all times. At night, all of us leave our bodies and visit our loved ones in the spirit world. A few of us do not come back. We look at our body from up above and wonder why we would want to repossess it. That is how we die in our sleep.

When I step into his office, Mr. P puts the phone down. He shouts toward the back of his coffin enterprise and asks not to be disturbed. There is no answer. Seven large coffins are neatly stacked on an iron stand. They are brown and made of the finest wood. The lowest one is labelled
Made in England
. First the British kill us. Then we import their coffins. How touching.

“Mr. P,” I say. “I have come with the finger.”

He does not seem perplexed, nor does he give any indication that he knows what I am talking about.

“I want to preserve the finger. It was given to me as a mark of respect,” I add. “It is dead now, so I must bury it.”

Mr. P points to a photograph album on the table before him. The word
LOVE
is written in gold letters on the cover. I assume I am meant to glance through the album.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “They’re not wedding pictures. A man in your state can get quite depressed thinking about weddings.”

“Very.”

When I open the album I see pictures of coffins: finger coffins, arm coffins, toe coffins. It surprises me how much I do not know about this city. Tomorrow I might meet a midget who is ten feet tall, a butcher who sells newborn babies, a boxer who works as an anesthetist in a hospital by knocking patients senseless. In this city, birds are forced to crawl and rats can fly if they use their tails correctly. When I think about this city, it is almost as if it does not exist. It is a body floating on air, and landing whenever it gets tired. That is why it is so noisy. The din is the sound of it panting.

While I gaze through the album, Mr. P reads a newspaper. His spectacles are perched on a fat nose. I select a dark coffin with a metallic glaze. It will serve as a contrast to the dull hue the finger has acquired. I point to the picture and look at Mr. P.

“Why do you call yourself Mr. P?” I ask.

“There are almost fourteen thousand eunuchs in the city,” he says, ignoring me. He takes his spectacles off and looks at me. He taps the newspaper with his knuckles. I do not know what this interesting statistic has to do with the question I have just asked. I stare at him blankly.

“Out of those fourteen thousand, only half are original eunuchs.” He raises an eyebrow.

“That’s sad,” I say.

“No, it’s good! It means only seven thousand are castrated. The others were born useless, so no harm done.”

Mr. P turns toward the back of the shop and shouts: “Quiet in there! I’m talking here.”

I do not hear anything. I wonder if this is a test. So I shout, too. “Yes, please! Keep the volume to a minimum!”

On the wall I see family pictures neatly framed. One in particular stands out. It is in black and white, and it shows a stout man, a dark woman, two beautiful children and an old lady. The old lady’s face is circled in red felt pen. Strangely, all the photographs on the wall have one or two persons who are marked in red.

“You’re wondering about the red circles,” Mr. P remarks.

“Yes.”

“They are the dead ones.”

“Ah.”

“I made coffins for them all.”

“Wonderful.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“You want to know a secret?”

“I love secrets.”

“I circled one by mistake.”

“What do you mean?”

“That old woman in the far corner.”

“Yes?” He refers to the photograph I saw first.

“She was my wife’s friend. I found that family photograph at home and circled her by mistake and put it up in my shop, thinking I had made a coffin for her. She had given the photo to my wife to show off her grandchildren.”

“I don’t like show-offs.”

“She died the very day I circled her.”

“How sad.”

“No. How coincidental.”

“Extremely.”

“Stand very still.”

“What?”

“Don’t move.”

Mr. P ducks his head below the counter and snaps back like a puppet. He holds a small camera in his hands. He shoots me. I feel like a soldier who has just been tricked by the enemy.

“Why did you do that?”

“I’m going to circle you, too.”

“I’m going to die?”

“I hope so. It’s my hobby. To take pictures of strangers and then mark them for death. I want to see if it’s a gift I have or if it was just a one-time random happening with that old woman.”

“I wish you well,” I say.

“How kind.”

We do not speak for a while. I think of my photograph developing. I hope he took only the face. But what if both arms show up in the picture? That would be nice. I would
prance
if that happened. I have never pranced, or even thought of prancing before.

“You’ve chosen the Dark Torpedo,” Mr. P says.

“Dark Torpedo?”

“That’s the name of the coffin.”

“When will it be ready?”

He gets up and unlocks a small cabinet that is placed near a wooden stool. The shelves of the cabinet are lined with red felt. He removes what I assume is the coffin. It is wrapped in white cloth. He takes off the cloth and caresses the Dark Torpedo. It looks better in reality than it does in the photograph. He pushes it toward me. I open the lid and see the indent of a finger: streamlined for the tip, gradually fattening at the centre and receding toward the base. Just like the leper’s.

“Go ahead. Try it out,” he coaxes.

I place the finger in the coffin. I feel sad, as though I am parting with a dear friend. Without it, my journey ends. Maybe I should buy my own coffin. I do not tell Mr. P I ordered one over the phone only a day ago. He did not like me over the phone. I am much more charming in person.

“Learn to let go,” says Mr. P. “Only then will you receive.”

He adjusts his spectacles and looks outside at the street. There is a church opposite, with a signboard that promises to save alcoholics. Three trees stand near the church steps. Sometimes drunks climb the trees instead of the church steps. But God does not mind. Only the priests do.

I snap the coffin lid shut. “Do I leave the finger with you?” I ask.

“What for?”

“So you can direct me further.”

“That will be two thousand rupees.”

“Two thousand! But it’s such a small coffin.”

“Do you know anyone else who makes one?”

“No.”

“Am I wrong in assuming that you can afford it?”

“I …”

“Then two thousand rupees cash. Take the coffin with you.” He raises his voice. “And for the last time, quiet back there!”

I know what Mr. P means by sending me away with the coffin. He means the same thing that Gura did, the floating beggar who directed me to the In-charge. I must get used to this absence. My palm is too full of the past to be able to receive anything.

Perhaps I need to talk with Gura again. I have not seen him since our first meeting yesterday morning. Floating beggars have no home, but at the end of the day they all eat together. They collect at the egg-man’s, opposite A-1 Restaurant, under the Grant Road Bridge. Then they float away into the night again.

When I think about it, the egg-man looks a lot like Gura. It could be because I have seen the egg-man only at night. If there is even a slight similarity between people, they look more alike at night.

It is not because of the darkness. It has to do with the moon.

My old servant told me this, and I have expanded and expounded her theory. The moon, she used to say, was an evil fishmonger before it was the moon. That is why the moon is so far away from us. It stinks. Now, being the moon, and out of fish, it plays tricks on earth people. One of its favourite games is to make people look alike. It reflects only those parts of a person’s face that look similar to the parts on another person’s face. My servant was beautiful (so she thought) and her sister was ugly (true, true). When the moon was out, people would tell the two sisters that they looked alike. During the day, they did not. So it is quite a solid theory. Moonlight can make two mooncalves think they are moonlighting as replicas of each other. It is a moonstruck theory, which can be easily shaken and disproved by a moonquake.

As I approach the egg-man, I yearn not for his bhurji-pao but for a window. There should be windows available to all unhappy people. Let us say you are walking on the road and you have the sudden urge to die. (Some people crave death as they do cigarettes.) If the craving gets too intense, a window should appear. You can jump through the window and plunge to your death. Suicide takes too much planning. It then ceases to be suicide and becomes murder of the self. If a window opened out of nowhere, my death would be accidental. The last person to understand this would be the egg-man.