Suddenly the yelping boy’s thin wrist slipped out of the assailant’s hand and the boy went crashing to the floor. Father Michael, giddy with the relentless circling, lurched towards him, and the reeling boy, frantic with fear, in a desperate attempt at escape, crawled between the padre’s legs and disappeared under his flowing habit. Inside that dark secure place, the boy clung to a stout leg and refused to let go.
The father shouted, ‘Rascal boy, where are you?’
A muffled voice screamed, ‘No Father!’
Where are you? No Father! Where are you? No Father!
The maddened priest leapt and kicked and shook and twirled, trying to dislodge the infuriating boy clamped to his thigh. In a burst of fresh rage, the padre began to shout and wildly whip the habit between his legs with his rope.
‘Goonda boy! Rascal boy! Where are you? Where are you? Come out! Come out!’
From the unseen place between his legs came the scream, ‘No Father! No Father!’
Out I say! No Father! Out I say! No Father!
The assembly roared its approval.
Father Michael now began to stomp up and down in a manic fury. Hanging on in terror, getting banged against his knees and thighs, Kabir thought his life was about to end. Suddenly the father used the heel of his left foot to deliver a sharp reverse kick between
the boy’s bony buttocks. With a screech of pain the boy straightened up, hammering his head against the padre’s swinging balls with the speed of a runaway train. The padre let out a long high-pitched scream—‘Ooomiilorrrddjeessus!’—and clutching the hard head mashed against his balls keeled over like a sawn tree, taking the boy with him.
When Kabir emerged, scrabbling, from under the folds of the Friar’s habit, like a cockroach from under a pile of bread slices, the assembly cheered and hooted and whistled. Even as he ran from there faster than any cockroach ever—without once looking back at the felled priest—and raced to the cycle-stand to jump on to his old Atlas, he remembered the laughing, approving faces of the packed assembly all around him.
For the very first time in his life he felt worthy.
The feeling—strange, novel, wonderful—did not desert him over the next week of pathetic grovelling in the principal’s office. Ghulam weathered the storm of apologies, threats, and other abjections, while the boy insisted on his innocence. At home the fearful Ghulam implored his son to take the blame and end the stand-off. Revelling in this newly discovered sense of himself—a surging sense of potency that brought steel to his gnomish face, hardened his jaws and stilled his eyes—revelling in himself for the first time in his life, Kabir declined.
The bewildered father, imagining the worst—expulsion, police case, persecution—went and fell first at the feet of the crucified Christ and then at the principal’s. ‘Father, cane me instead! If the boy is bad, it is my fault. I gave birth to him. Cane me! Cane me!’ And he grabbed the priest’s slim cane and began to roll around the room flagellating himself wildly as he had seen his kinsmen do during the penitent rites of Muharram. The alarmed father had to grab him by
his hair to bring him under control. Then Ghulam began to weep like a baby, squatting on the ground. ‘None of this would have happened had I gone to Pakistan! No one would have thrown my son out of school had I gone to Pakistan!’
The principal thought the entire family was deranged. Father Michael was lucky the boy had not bitten his testicles off.
Looking on, Kabir thought his father was beyond idiotic. Profoundly disgusted, he did not speak to his father for many long years.
When he returned to his class a week later, he was no longer just roll number seven, the dumb and unknown Muthal—masturbator. He was the hero who had stopped the Highwayman and felled a full Father. Even the boys of class twelve now gave him a nod of recognition.
Charlie, of course, met him with a happy smile and a song—Bal Krishan Bhatt dekho pad gaya putt—and gave him a hug. That day Kabir changed his seat to the last row where Charlie sat. The irreverent Bengali boy cut open Kabir’s head like a can of juice and began to stir it. Kabir had never seriously questioned anything in his life. Now everything was brought into question.
Why was he studying in this weird missionary school where English would humiliate him every day? Where he would always be a failure? Why did he know nothing about his community or religion? Did he want to be a floating fool, a deracinated chutterputter chutiya? What was wrong with his father? Why was he such a coward about everything? Why did he treat Kabir like a three-year-old girl? And, by the way, why could Kabir not see as many films as he liked? Especially when his father could not stop seeing them? And what was this nonsense about getting home before dark every evening?
Charlie the anarchic Bengali told him all about the life of the cantonment. The gymkhana clubs, the officers’ mess, the starch, the ceremony, the uniforms, the endless saluting, the spit and polish, the whisky and soda, the epaulettes and lanyards, the English
films—
Mary Poppins, Gunfight at the OK Corral
—and the amateurish plays—gaudy bedroom capers with haw haw accents. He told him about hot fat aunties with moist cleavages and May Queen balls with Anglo-Indian bands crooning Cliff Richards and Neil Diamond. He told him about lean lieutenants hunting for any orifice and precious picnics during which soldiers used dynamite sticks to blast fish out of water. And he said he hated it all—the swagger, the affectation, the lack of intelligence. He said when he saw his father, a brilliant doctor, saluting and sirring morons whose only skill was parading up and down and firing rifles into the air, it drove him mad. He said he had once in anger in the middle of a dinner at the brigade commander’s house pissed in his prize rose bed. He said it was the most satisfying piss of his life.
He said every time his father saluted some dumb senior in his presence, Charlie would loudly drawl, ‘Bokachodaaa Battalion … forward march!’ and stride off swinging his arms in a military clip. He said, actually his father was as idiotic as Kabir’s father for suffering such shit.
Kabir was spellbound by Charlie. He could not imagine such an absence of fear, such chutzpah in the face of teachers, parents, the chutterputter chutiyas. In the Bengali boy’s presence he found himself filling up with a crazy confidence too. To earn his approval, Kabir began to develop a manner he could once have barely imagined. He could still not talk smart—he was not clever enough to do that—but he could rustle up the outrageous act. As he had inside the habit of the fallen padre.
Once during an inter-house cricket final, Kabir commandeered an ass carrying sacks of sand from a line of animal transport trudging by the school, and rode it onto the middle of the field, pricking the beast’s flanks with a pin. The crazed animal chased down Tora
Tora Vohra, the tearaway fast bowler from the cantonment, one of the chutterputter chutiyas. Tora Tora Vohra was running in to bowl, his windmill arms turning, when the maddened animal suddenly appeared behind him. With a scream of terror, Tora Tora Vohra kept running, ball-in-hand, down the pitch. The batsman facing him—called Mungfali, peanut, because of the size of his equipment: the boys insisted he didn’t need ball guards since there was nothing to protect—Mungfali turned and ran, bat in hand, leg pads flapping. In front of him, running pell-mell already was Sukha the wicketkeeper—a sardar from Kichcha with no glove skills but a body of steel that he recklessly put behind the ball. With the presence of mind of a man of the world, Tora Tora Vohra slammed off the bails as he ran past the wickets, and shouted the question, Howzzat? Peter Massey, the history teacher—an Anglo-Indian so wedded to the perfections of the past, to Bradman and Ponsford, to rules and discipline, Peter Massey, whose trousers were so starched they did not break form even when he walked—Peter Massey, standing as umpire in a floppy white cap, raised his right forefinger. The benches of Green House exploded in screaming protest and began to infiltrate the boundary. Manjit Singh, captain of Green House and king jock of the school, six feet of moving muscle, famed for his brutal temper, ran on to the field and put his big fist into Mungfali’s running face. ‘Maaderchod, are you playing cricket or kho-kho!’ Mungfali hit the ground flat on his back and stared up at the lovely blue sky with kites skating on it. Just then Sukha came running, big wicketkeeper pads and gloves aflap, and mighty Manjit swung his right leg and put his hard-nosed cricket shoes directly into his bum. Sukha actually sailed through the air for a few feet to the high-pitched whine of Maaaaaadiiiiiphuddeeeeee, before landing gracefully on his face. Frantic with fear, Tora Tora Vohra tried to change course but by now the furious Manjit had grabbed his bowling arm and was swinging him around like he did the discus at the nets, with Tora screeching, Obehhaanchooddddhhh! At that moment the jogging ass appeared
with Kabir Muthal astride, and rounding on them Manjit kicked the beast hard in its belly, sending it hawing wildly, and careening off towards the teams now invading the field. A free-for-all erupted, and Manjit kicked everybody present at least once, and the runaway ass several times. At some point Peter Massey took off his floppy hat and declared the match abandoned.
Kabir’s fame spread, and Charlie bathed him with attention and affection. For the first time since he had joined the school, the dwarfing effect of English was kept at bay.
This fame had a dangerous downside. He was now on the radar of the padres, and soon enough was singled out for Christian correction. The first time he was suspended from school for three days—for floating a gas balloon during a parent-teacher meeting with a carrot hung from it like a dangling dick—he panicked. But Charlie, in a display of true friendship, calmed him by bunking school to keep him company.
That day they rode his cycle out into the middle of the teeming market, consumed hot samosas and iced Fanta at Aggarwal’s sweet shop, and then went off to see a film at Paras. When Helen began her cabaret number in her shimmering slit gown, Charlie pushed his hand up the leg of his school shorts, and began to rub. Helen and Charlie finished at the same time.
Kabir discovered another threshold of the acceptable.
Barring Minerva Talkies, the two boys now invaded every other movie hall in the city. On days when the prospect of entering the missionary school was too depressing, they turned back from the school gates, freewheeled their way to Aggarwal Sweets, drank endless cups of tea, ate samosas, and headed for the morning show. This was solace cinema, for the lowliest of the low, made by the lowliest of the low. The scattered heads slumped low in the seats, trembling
with a transitory connection, were all busy pushing the threshold of the acceptable. Everyone entered the hall after the lights had been dimmed, and everyone exited the hall without looking at another.
There was always a second film, the gourmet morsel after the junk food. This was mainline stuff with marquee stars, thrilling music, and heroines so beautiful that they burned the imagination. Sometimes Kabir and Charlie stayed on in the same hall, and sometimes tore across town to another, desperate not to miss the opening credits. The atmosphere of the second show was very different. Happy chatter in the foyer, marble-sodas and samosas being consumed, women of all ages, eyes shining, restless with excitement. Standing at the edge of the snacks counter, sharp-eyed Charlie would study the women like a fine detective and elaborate on each one’s possibilities. That one with the big red necklace? She’d only simper—you’d have to pinch her to make her move. The sharp-nosed one with a pierced right nostril and a tight mouth was a certain screamer—take her deep into a forest or put a pillow over her face. Purple saree, with those gold jhumkas—oh, don’t look at her fat—would say no, mean yes, say no, mean yes. And that one in the green salwar-kameez—observe her high-heeled sandals—was to be mounted like a horse, and she’d neigh like one.
The gnomish Bengali boy was unstoppable—sociologist, psychologist, sexologist, all rolled into one, a committed researcher, gathering data. Soon, pursuing his research, he had his protégé testing new frontiers in the crush of the cinema halls. In the foyer, Charlie would identify the woman who badly wanted them, and then as the doors opened, Kabir would be right beside her and behind her, his loosely hanging arm and wide open palm—tactile vernier calipers—measuring flesh, calibrating response, verifying his master’s theses.
Sometimes the crush was excessive, the subjects many, and the boy had to work overtime, using both hands as vernier calipers, measuring in every direction, working a variety of materials and
apparel. The most cooperative were chiffon sarees, the least burqas, and the gathered folds of Punjabi salwars fell somewhere in between. The occasional trousers were a treat, but not if made of denim. As with all scientific endeavour, sometimes the boy brought back very precise findings and sometimes the results were fuzzy. Charlie, with the imperious distance of the academic, never ever participated in the data collection, but worked hard to juice every detail out of his field researcher.
It became the pattern of their friendship: Kabir acting to earn the approbation of his hammer-tongued friend; Charlie living vicariously all that he dared not do.
And Kabir, without registering it, crossed another threshold of the acceptable.
It was curious. For his father the movies had been about love and lyricism. For Kabir Muthal they were about lust and longing. For his father films had represented the quest for a more humane and refined world, removed from the poisons that made train signals out of men’s limbs. For the boy it was an escape from the moral strictures of his father and the padres into a vigorous, vulgar world without any obvious boundaries.
By the time he came to take his class nine examinations he had begun to steal money from home. There was no other way to fund the films, the samosas, the colas, the extensive research. His father kept the folded five- and ten-rupee notes between stills of old black and white films—Raj Kapoor and Nargis and Dilip Kumar and Madhubala and Dev Anand and Guru Dutt—that he had collected from the Talkies over the decades. For some time Ghulam noticed nothing. He was more likely to miss a filched scene from
Anari
than some purloined rupees. But then Kabir became greedy and Ghulam’s domestic budget began to spring sudden unknown holes.