“I have seen now, thanks.” With that I’ve looked for my kakadus and begun preparing to leave.
Says Anjali, “You are a very weird person, Animal. Give me a little money,” but I say no and she says, “Animal, you are a hard-hearted bastard.”
TAPE SIXTEEN
Oh the homecoming from that day and night of bhang, the city is full of coloured winds, scents sing in my nostrils, my four feet press lightly on the earth. As I near our place Jara comes running, and there’s Ma. “Where have you been, we were worrying, the dog and me.” “Never fear,” I say cheerfully, “see, I’ve brought food.” I’d found money in my pocket and bought ishtoo and kulcha from a cafe. “Today we’ll have a feast.”
What joy, I’m telling myself that it’s a good thing my zob didn’t get hard like it normally does, must mean I didn’t want it to. I’ve conquered, mastered that unruly thing, it cowered like a sulky dog all the while I was with the girl, no longer am I ruled by a fucking quéquette, this is how I’m celebrating. This foolish state of affairs lasts until night, when the last of the bhang has worn off. Listening to the scorpions, unable to sleep, I imagine the girl beside me. No longer does my monster wish to abstain. The curse of lust is back worse than ever. No peace the bastard lund now gives, constantly it begs for the fist, sends you blind they say in which case I’ve no right to be seeing the light of this world, oh it fills me with shame to remember, Eyes, don’t tell me you’ve never touched yourself, if you felt shame, imagine it a thousand times worse.
From joy runs a straight road to despair. Cursing silently on my bed of grasses, why do I allow myself to be dominated by the thing between my legs? Is it my master? Have I sworn to obey it? Will it kill me if I tell it no? Hatred of the self, deep and harsh I feel, loathing for all the dreadful things I’ve done. Claim to love Nisha yet spy on her and go to bed with a prostitute. Elli’s my friend yet secretly I gloat that I have seen her grace? I dream of tumbling down endless stairs until I am at the bottom of a deep well with the opening far above me and out of reach. Days and nights are the same down there, but one night the moon shines in, a crow flies down to dip its beak in my guts.
Next day, when I meet people I fancy they are looking at me strangely, as if they know my dirty secrets. I become convinced that Farouq has spilled the beans. Nisha seems offhand, as if she has no time for me. I hate myself and my wretched life. Plus, Farouq is even more of a pain. He’s on at me to say what happened in the house of putains. Nothing, I say, or if something, then definitely not what you think. So Farouq’s frustrated with me and even more of a lousy bugger than before. One amusing thing, he makes me swear, “Animal yaar, never mention to Zafar or god forbid Nisha where you were. It would look bad for you.”
And you, you hypocritical bastard, and you.
Next time in the clinic, Elli grinning, asks if I am looking forward to seeing Amrika.
“This came today!” She holds up an envelope. Inside is a letter from the hospital in Amrika. She reads it out. They believe they can probably help.
Hoo! hoo! I guess you can hear me all over Khaufpur.
“Wait, don’t get too excited,” she says. “Probably is the word. We are still a long way off actual surgery, we don’t know exactly what will be involved, how many procedures, nor how long they will take, nor how long you might have to stay over there, plus we still have to find the money.” All smiles she’s. “It’s a good start.”
Good start? Already my brain is racing with all the things I will do when I can go on twos. “How much money?”
“Better you don’t know.”
“I would like to see.” She hands me the letter, Inglis numbers are the same as Khaufpuri ones. There’s a lot of zeros. So then I am discouraged, because no one in Khaufpur has that kind of money, Elli doctress herself hasn’t.
“Look, money can be found,” she says. “There are many ways. Soon I will go back to Amrika, and you’ll come with me. Stay hopeful.”
I ask when will we go to Amrika, she says it depends on a lot of things like whether this cursed boycott ever ends. “Don’t worry about the difficulties, just think how much better your life will be.” She says that after the operation my back will be straight, I will be upright, but it’ll take time to become strong, I’ll need support to walk, a pair of crutches, or sticks. “It’s easy,” she says, “you can swing along at a great rate.” She knows this because in her town there was a hospital for people wounded in the Vietnam war, and many of them had crutches. Then she asks what I would like to see in Amrika and I say I don’t know because I have no idea what’s there. Well, she says, if we make a tour we could visit New York where there’s a lot to see, near where she lives there’s a museum with a lot of dinosaur bones, do I know about dinosaurs? Course I fucking know, what else for does Chunaram steal his tele signal? I have watched many programmes about them, they are huge animals that lived in the times before there were humans, the weirdest of all was the one whose head was stuck out on a long neck so far away from the rest of it that it had to have two brains, one of which was above its arse. Then Elli smiles and says I’ve a good brain, if I had been born in Amrika I could have gone to college. “Maybe even Harvard,” she says. “I think you could turn out to be an intellectual.” So I’ve asked what’s one of them, appears it’s someone who thinks a lot about things they don’t need to. We folk in the Nutcracker may regard ourselves as nothing, but we are as clever as anyone else. We’re as clever as the Amrikans, says Elli, but they have all the money so they have good lives and ours are little more than shit. If I had been born in Amrika, Elli says, I’d never have had to walk on all fours all these years. Yes, soon I shall walk like a human being, I will think clever thoughts, amaze people, and no longer will I do things that shame me.
“Fuck off,” says the Chairman of the Poisonwallah Board from his jar in the corner. “Upright or not you’ll still be playing with that thing day and night, after all, what other pleasure do you have in life?”
“Of what is the world made, music or promises?”
This is the question I’ve put to the assembled company at Chunaram’s.
“What kind of fucking question is that?” asks the owner, who well knows the world is made of one thing only, which he ripped off his finger to prove.
“Listen, for Pandit Somraj it’s made of music, Elli doctress says it is made of promises. Can these worlds fit together?”
“O ho! See where this is going.”