I found an old satchel to make a barrier against the worms and she cried too when the zip went up. I lowered him in gently so I didn’t disturb him. We both said sorry, as much to each other as to the bird. I patted the earth down neat and tidy and stepped away to make room for a ritual. Ellen just held my arm as the stars blinked down and looked away into a future she was seeing for the first time. A future that would never mould to the shape of a new life, where our own lives with their hangnails and heartburn had to be enough to clothe us. Whatever had dropped away in me had dropped away in her and I knew we’d never get it back. When we got indoors she cut a slice of cake for herself and she turned the light off before she got undressed.
There’s a bang from outside. I go to the window. A van from a TV channel has crashed into the car that was blocking the road. A reporter stumbles out of the passenger side and smoothes her hair, strides through the crowd to claim her spot at the hospital entrance. Her cameraman jogs behind her, carrying one of her shoes. It’s a red slipper.
It’s Vijay Five’s car. He tears at his hair as he inspects the damage to the nearside wing. He goes to remonstrate with the reporter. Two media dogs snarling at each other over a prime patch of story. But Vijay Five doesn’t have his notebook. Bibhuti isn’t a story to him. Behind his back naked children climb onto the roof of the car and start dancing. It’ll rain again soon.
The flooding has been minimal in this part of the city. The gutters have been sucking the water up and the roads incline towards the sea. I only saw one dog swimming on the way over, making frantic circles in search of dry land. That was miles back and a day ago. He would have found a safe place by now. We’re safer here than on the mainland where the worst of it has hit. We’re the charmed ones.
Every time I close my eyes I see myself hitting Bibhuti with the bat. I see him bent and crumpling with a look of joy on his face. He loved me then. He’ll love me still when he wakes up. We’re brothers, no questions asked. Yesterday was the greatest day of my life. I need him to wake up so I can thank him for it. I need to say sorry for lighting my fire with him.
10
Jolly Boy was sitting next to the old man, hugging his knees on the tarpaulin outside the hotel. The old man had been talking to him and now he was staring again at his favourite patch of sky. Clouds were forming there, as if by his will, stitching themselves together as he watched through his malfunctioning eyes. I asked Jolly Boy what the man had said.
‘He is waiting for the monsoon to come. When the rain is here he will be rain and he will go up to heaven like that. He has been waiting for this for twelve years. Every year he thinks it will happen but the rain is never strong enough to lift him. This time he thinks it will happen.’
‘What do you think? Do you think it’ll happen?’
‘Yes. He is very sure. He has been praying for a long time. I think this year he will make it.’
‘Why does he want to turn into rain?’
Jolly Boy asked the old man and interpreted his answer. ‘He says it was always promised to him that he would die this way. He thinks it is the best way. He doesn’t want to be here anymore, he is too heavy. When he is rain he will be light and he will go to heaven very fast. His family is there waiting for him and his goats are there. He misses the goats very bad. God made the promise to him a long time ago and he cannot wait anymore.’
‘Tell him I hope it happens this year.’
Jolly Boy passed on my message. The old man gave me a toothless smile. He offered me another trinket god and I refused it gently. It was the same one he’d already tried to sell me. We left him stewing on the promise he’d been made, his rain dutifully making itself in the clouds above our heads.
The dashboard Ganesh kept his own counsel in his little Perspex prison. Bibhuti sat on his plank and ground his gears, turned the A/C on with a harried cluck of his tongue when Jolly Boy’s pleas started to grate. The bridge was jammed with the rush-hour commute. Every car had the same slogan painted on its back, ‘Horn OK Please’, and everyone took the request to heart.
I saw a man throw a dog in the creek, its lifeless body splay gruesomely as it hit the water. The man gave no salute, just got back on his motorbike and merged into the traffic. He passed us expressionless as we inched towards the mainland.
Old Bombay. Where death spills songlike from every doorway and untapped dreams rise like smoke from the rubbish fires and rat holes. Even through the air conditioning I could smell the place as it got nearer, fertile and teeming with tradition and mundane terrors. A place to get lost in and to be startled by into revisions of previous wisdoms. Bibhuti turned the radio on and he and Jolly Boy sang along to the first song they found. I didn’t understand the words and I was an outsider again.
Bibhuti could barely contain his excitement. He vibrated in time to the music as we lurched between the bumpers, took both his hands off the wheel to clap impatiently.
‘I found this man after much searching,’ he said. ‘My friend Santosh, he is also my student, he told me about him. As luck would have it he has a large amount of bats which he has no use for. I was unable to pay but I made him promise to keep them for me until a time when the money arrived. He accepted my request in return for one small favour only which I must grant him when we complete the transaction. He is an honourable man. The bats are unused and there are many. I am very happy today.’
He carried on singing. The early start had drained me and I dozed off. Then the traffic eased and the new speed brought me round again.
The streets had peeled and blistered while I’d been out and the buildings had grown grander, colonial mansions with book-lined drawing rooms where syphilitic viceroys and mutton-chopped tea merchants had once wrestled naked for diamonds the size of ostrich eggs. That’s how I imagined it, anyway. The thriving trees hung with lanterns that became fruits when I looked closer. The children who strayed near the roadside were lighter, their faces unsmudged by the trials of their namesakes who prowled the poorer parts. Their hair was neatly combed and their eyes were violent with the restrictions of family wealth. They were lazily occupied in a game of leverage, trying to prise open a manhole cover with a tree branch. They didn’t try and stop the car or hold their hands out for our money.
We passed out of the old ways, turned a corner and we were back in the modern world again. A heaving road buffed smooth by the tyre rubber from every car and bus and tanker truck in the city all visiting at once on some kind of pilgrimage for the petrol age. A storm of horns beat against the car, and we were slowed down again to crawling. I saw my first holy cow emptying itself on the roadside, tethered to a scrap-iron kiosk that sold SIM cards and sweet lime. The cow’s sharp shoulders looked mythical and nobody seemed to notice the waterfall of shit streaming from its back end. They just stepped instinctively around it, not looking up, as if making eye contact with the animal in its time of public indelicacy would break some ancient code of ethics.
Bibhuti parked up on the fringe of the puddle the cow had made. I had to stretch to clear the mess and Jolly Boy pulled me up to the kerb. I turned my nose up at the smell and he wrinkled his nose in solidarity. We went in the Cafe Coffee Day and sat down at a red plastic table. The girl who took our order wore a baseball cap. The tea came in a paper cup. For some reason I was expecting a proper china teacup. I was disillusioned at how easily India had surrendered its traditions to the dogma of convenience. It wasn’t my place to say it, but I thought it should have fought harder.