Animal's People (25 page)

Nisha bursts out laughing. “Animal, so desperate is your Inglis accent, you know what you just said,
cumin-cumin
-seven. So what have you found out?”

“She's harmless.” None too pleased I'm that Nisha's making fun of me. “She's sincere. We shouldn't be troubling her.”

“Leave those decisions to people who know more.”

Soon the person who knows more's come to join us, Nisha tells him what I've said, he sits cupping his chin, serious as ever. “Animal, you are a free human being, you are free to make your own decisions. Nobody will stop you or say you shouldn't.”

“So?” I don't say what's in my mind, which is I'm not a human being, plus I don't need anyone's permission to be free.

“Nothing more, that's it.”

“First of all, Zafar, Elli doctress is not from the Kampani, at least I don't believe so, but like I said I am keeping an eye open.”

“This Elli,” says Zafar, “she's pretty, has a nice smile.” Nisha shoots such a look, it's aimed at him but pierces me. “What do you suppose Kampani-wallahs look like? Blood-dripping teeth, red eyes, claws?”

Well, I've never thought about this, of course I've no idea.

“They look ordinary,” says he. “You know why? Because they
are
ordinary. They are not especially evil or cruel, most of them, this is what makes them so terrifying. They don't even realise the harm they are doing.”

After lecturing some more on how some people who think they're leading normal lives are in fact creating hell on earth he goes away, leaving Nisha curled up in a little ball of misery.

“Nish, it's like you hate Elli doctress. But why?”

“I don't hate,” she says, throwing a pebble into the river.

“You're too sweet and kind a person to dislike without reason, what is it?”

“It's nothing.” But there are tears in her eyes.

“Nish, this is your own Animal you're talking to, whom you plucked from the gutter, to whom you taught writing plus Inglis, who owes everything to you, who adores you, who never wants to see you sad. So tell me, darling, what is it?”

So gradually it comes. At first it seems, Nisha disapproved of Elli's blue legs, she disliked the way men's eyes used to be drawn to them. At last out slips the real reason. “It's so embarrassing to see your own father looking at a woman. To think such things go on in his mind.”

“What things? Things such as…?”

“You know what I mean,” she says. “The way he looks at her.”

“How looks? He just looks. He's a fair man, darling. Besides, what if he finds her attractive? Don't you find anyone attractive?”

She blushes and won't say another thing. This tears me up. Not that I myself was hoping for a compliment but I feel certain she's thinking of Zafar. The merest hint of sex, she thinks of Zafar! I feel sure they're shagging. How have I missed it, so many nights in the tree, never once have I caught them. To be on the safe side I decide to double Zafar's dose.

“Living this way is hard,” says Nisha at last, her pebbles plop in the river louder than mine. “To have a dream, yet not dare to believe in it.”

“Yes,” says I, who's about to confess a terrible hope. “What is it, your dream?”

“For this struggle to end. For us to win. As things are going, maybe it can even happen.”

“You really believe that?” I'm looking over to where Ma's sat at the centre of a group of young men and women, holding forth. They're giving it their best nods and grins, though no word of hers do they understand.

“Do I believe it?” says Nisha. “Not really, that's why it's a dream.”

“Is this all you dream of, Khaufpur, the struggle?”

“You don't understand,” she says, “I want it to end. I don't want to spend my whole life fighting against the Kampani.”

“Suppose it ends, what will you do?”

Nisha sighs and says, “I'd like to have kids, but I told Zafar, I don't want our children growing up here. The poison in Khaufpur's not only in the soil and water, it's in people's hearts. Zafar and me, we've promised each other that the day we win, when there's justice and no more need for us, we'll leave this city. Animal, have you ever seen the coast near Ratnagiri? Zafar says it's a really peaceful place. We would live in a little house by the sea, we'd grow vegetables and have lots of children.”

“Name one after me.” It's the first I've heard of this plan of theirs, with what jealousy it fills me.

“Whoever heard of a kid called Animal?” she teases.

“There's only one Animal.”

“That there is. There's no one like you, you are such a dear friend. You would come too, to Ratnagiri. We'd be a group of friends. We'd get some land and build four or five houses. Zafar will write his poetry, and books too, he wants to write books. I will teach all our children, and yours, and local kids too. And what will you do?” she asks me.

O my crazy heart.

“I've a yen to go fishing. In one of those black canoes with an outrigger. All day long I will float and fish on a silvery river, at night I will drink toddy and sleep under the palms and wake to watch the sun rise over the sea.”

“Idiot, on that sea the sun does not rise, it sets.” She throws more pebbles into the non-silvery Bewardi. “Okay, your turn, what's your dream?”

“Elli thinks she can maybe cure me.”

“Ah, I see,” she says. “Yes, of course. I should have guessed.” She puts her arm round my shoulders, hugs my head to her. “I hope she can cure you, darling.”

My heart, O my heart, I think it will explode.

“My god how could he? Has he gone mad?” exclaims Nisha. My head is still hugged tight to her, beyond the blurry swell of her bosom something extraordinary comes into view.

Bhoora Khan's just pulled up in a cloud of dust. There's his auto standing by the bhutt-bhutt-pig. Out gets Bhoora, reaches in the back, he's carrying the gramophone mashin. Out gets Pandit Somraj, holding the black records older than anyone here alive. But what's this? I catch a flash of blue now emerging. From the hubbub where the group is gathered, they too can't believe their eyes. Merde à la puissance treize, it's Elli. Stranger still, she's walking alongside Pandit Somraj. More bizarre's that he's introducing her to people, “Please meet my neighbour Doctor Barber.”

“Oh god,” groans Nisha, “my father has gone mad.”

No one knows why this is happening but it's Somraj who's brought her, and he's a man to be respected so they're all greeting her with polite smiles, neatly folded hands, while their minds are gabbling like geese.

“How could he invite that woman to our picnic? After all those dramatics?” says Nisha into my still-clamped, much-enjoying ear. Thudding, her heart's.

“Maybe he felt sorry for her.” But it's not that, I know. I'm remembering Pandit Somraj's embarrassment when Elli challenged him in his own music room. He hates unfairness, he hated having to lie. Or maybe this is his way of showing Zafar who's really boss. That too, Nisha would not like.

Well, Eyes, you can imagine that after Pandit Somraj plays this stroke there isn't much carefree chat at the picnic, everyone's watching what they say. All are pretending things are normal, all know they are not. Zafar has gone over to talk to Somraj and Elli, the three of them are together. I wish I could hear what's being said, but it doesn't look like anyone's getting upset, except Nisha. “I guess it's brave of him to ask her,” she says, making no move to join that group.

“Plus brave of her to come,” says I.

After a short time Elli spots me with Nisha and comes over, smiling, but Nisha gets up and walks past her without a word.

“How come?” I ask, when lund pasanda number two takes the place of lund pasanda the first beside me on the river bank.

Says Elli doctress, “He is a most unusual man, is your Pandit Somraj. This morning he came over the road. Said the neighbours were having a picnic, I should come. I apologised for yelling at him that time in his house, but for the other things I would not apologise. He said he perfectly understood, in my position he would have done the same. Then he said that the picnic was just a social thing, it would be helpful for me to get to know people.”

“And Zafar, what was he talking to you about?”

“Wait, I haven't finished. Then Somraj says, ‘We are on opposite sides, but does it mean we should be enemies? We are both musicians. I have often heard you play your piano.' ‘Yes,' I said, ‘and every time you tried to drown it out.' He protested that it wasn't so, that he and everyone else thought it was the other way round, I had been trying to drown his music.”

“Surely not!” says I, who'd realised this but said nothing to either side.

“I said I certainly had not been trying to do any such thing to which he made the weirdest reply. He said, ‘In any case it did not bother me, there was a certain beauty in the clashing of our musics.' All this time he was totally solemn, then that grim face of his broke apart in a grin, he said, ‘As you know, I am that unusual person who finds music in the croaking of frogs.'”

“Oh baba, what a fun!” says I, unable to guess what's coming next from either of these two.

“So then, if you please, he asks if I will play the piano for him…”

“Animal!” there's a shout. “Come here and translate what Ma's saying.” The old lady is surrounded by a group of young Khaufpuris. Flapping her hands, she's, and rattling away in français about angels and abîmes.

“Is this Ma Franci?” asks Elli. “I'd like to meet her.”

The group around Ma, seeing us approach, falls silent, but at least there are polite nods and smiles. For Somraj's benefit everyone is acting.

“Ma, ici Elli doctress,” I tell her in français. “She speaks human.”

“So you're the famous doctress,” says Ma. “How nice that you don't babble like an imbecile. I hope you can do something for this stony hearted lot. Not that there's much point, seeing there's no time left.”

“Time left for what?” asks Elli in français.

“For the world and all in it,” says Ma, gazing at Elli with milky blue eyes. “That's why I wouldn't let them take me away, they keep trying you know.”

Elli looks mystified, so I've told the story of how she escaped Père Bernard dressed in a burqa.

“Clever,” says Elli. “That's a trick I'll have to remember.”

Ma gives a witch-like cackle. “Just wish I'd been there to see his face.”

Later, after all have well-kebabed and biryani'd themselves, chai drunk, sweets eaten, Zafar says we will sit in a circle on the grass and each shall tell a story, which must be about their own life. Some good yarns are then floated, a man who believes in alchemy, he's wasted a lot of money trying to make gold, describes how a chap he knows will go to the burning ghat and by tantra mantra hocus pokery plus some flour scattered cause a spirit to rise up from a corpse, it will do whatever he says, if he wants it to kill someone it will do that.

When comes Chunaram's turn, people begin demanding his well known stories, such as Motiyari the seed-sucking cobra, or else Maggot Man, which in addition to Ninefingers he's called because he knows the use of maggots to clean wounds, others demand the tale of how he tore off his little finger.

Says Zafar, “Since we are not able to agree, plus we've heard these stories before, let the next tale be narrated by Elli doctress.”

So Elli stands up. “I know that many people are wondering where I came from and why I came here,” she says. “I will tell why I became a doctor.”

Eyes, near as I can recall, plus taking full help of my voices, here is Elli's story. Some of it I do not understand, I will just say what I hear in my head.

“The world is made of promises,” my father said. I was fourteen years old and didn't understand. He said, “Think of everyday things. Mail gets delivered. Farmers grow crops. The stores take our dollars, each bill says ‘This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private,' which means, you've done a good thing for someone, I promise you something equally good in return.”

I said, “But that's people. The world's also rock and water and trees.”

“Rocks keep their promises. They behave like rocks. Water boils at one hundred degrees. The sea rises and falls, that's the sea and the moon keeping their own kind of promises. To have the world work for you, you've got to make your own promises right back.”

“People break promises,” I said bitterly. A boy I liked had asked me to a school dance then at the last minute decided he'd rather take another girl.

“This isn't about other people, Elli. There's a satisfaction in keeping your word that no one and nothing can take away from you.”

We were living in the town of Coatesville, Pennsylvania. It was a steel town and my father worked at the mill. I had no idea about the actual job he did until years later when I was a junior doctor at the local veterans' hospital. I was talking to a man who'd quit his job at the steel mill. He couldn't stand the din. “Not noise. Particular noises.” He described explosions of water heewhacking to steam as it hit red metal at two thousand degrees, a crane that sang like a helicopter turbine, a deep-thumping compressor that reminded him of the whup-whup-whup of Hueys coming in low over jungle. “I don't want those memories in my head every day.” Well, I was a child when the Vietnam war ended, I found it hard to imagine an ordeal so bad that twenty years couldn't heal it, but this man's hands were shaking as he spoke. He was my dad's age, I wondered if they knew each other.