The drive back to Bibhuti’s apartment took us past a tiny clapperboard church, wedged between more colonial relics. The sign outside said ‘People are so often lonely because they build walls instead of bridges’. I thought of Ellen and how lonely I must have made her, and my heart missed a beat. I wondered if they’d found the car yet and what she’d fill my coffin with. Sawdust to preserve my dignity in my absence or pebbles so the rattling would drive home my betrayal.
11
Bibhuti’s wife was waiting for us when we got back with the bats, dripping down the stairs in her dress of golden threads. A regal petulance flared in her eyes. She looked like she’d been waiting a lifetime to tell a home truth. Bibhuti was cornered as soon as he got out of the car. Me and Jolly Boy stayed out of the firing line, busied ourselves unloading the crates from B Pattni’s pick-up.
Bibhuti’s neighbour offered his help. I manfully refused it. Behind him a constellation of butterflies had formed in our absence, lured there by the banana peels hanging from the washing line. Their wings beat slowly as they fed on the rotting pulp. Others flew in from the surrounding trees to wait their turn, dancing colours in the still air. They studded the neighbour’s wife like jewellery.
‘My wife’s favourite is the gaudy baron. She likes the shade of green on the base of the wing, do you see?’
He pointed out one of the feeders, the jade fringe at its tail end.
‘Beautiful,’ I said. The word felt silly coming from me but I stood by it. I went over to get a closer look.
‘This is good time for butterflies,’ the neighbour said. ‘The monsoon is coming and they like the humid condition. The banana is very attractive to them. We have gaudy baron, great eggfly, common Jezebel, blue oakleaf — this one here.’
‘Oh yeah, it looks just like a leaf.’
‘Of course. And here is a striped tiger.’ There it was feeding out of his wife’s palm, living up to its name with its orange and black markings. Jolly Boy drew up beside me to watch, leaving his parents to bicker uninhibited.
He reached out a tentative finger to stroke it. A fear came over him, of breaking spells, and he pulled back. ‘I stroked a tiger’s tail. It was at Tadoba. He walked past our Gypsy and I put out my hand and he stopped and let me do it. It was very lovely.’
The neighbour smelt a lie and the generosity drained from him. The boy waited for him to acknowledge the brilliance of what he’d just told him. I stepped in when it looked like he might crumble.
‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘He told me.’
‘Wow,’ the man grinned. ‘Imagine stroking a tiger. You are very lucky.’
Jolly Boy bristled with pride, a mirror of the butterfly’s wings unfolding to snare the sun’s warming rays.
Meanwhile Bibhuti had accepted defeat. Heartbreak showed in the sag of his moustache. His wife was climbing the stairs, a vindicated streak of gold.
‘We cannot bring the bats into the house,’ Bibhuti said. ‘It is tempting to fate. We must keep them in the yard.’
Me and Jolly Boy were called back into action as B Pattni sped away in a cloud of diesel, gone to investigate an opportunity in shark skin.
The three of us shifted the crates to the patch of wasteland at the back of the apartment building. Bibhuti lifted a lid and cast a final look over the bats inside. He freed one and indulged himself in another caress, a sculptor falling in love with the block of stone that would yield his masterpiece. He eased the lid shut again.
‘My wife is very grateful that you have come to help me,’ he said. ‘Before you came I had no hope of achieving this record. Nobody wanted to help, they were all too afraid of hurting me. Now the record is in my grasp again and she sees the light returning to my eyes. It is a big relief for her. She prays for your safety also.’
‘She doesn’t have to do that.’
‘It is not a problem for her, always she is praying. You are our friend now and she is pleased for this.’
I skipped back onto the concrete before the snakes could sniff me out.
I fell asleep to the restful tapping of computer keys. Bibhuti had to write up his interview with the ping-pong monks, ready to file for tomorrow’s edition. I’d let him lead me to his bed and pull the blanket over me with the tenderness of a mother nursing a feverish child. Jolly Boy had sat with me for a while, watching over me while I curled myself into the imprint Bibhuti had left in the sheet before me. He’d slipped out of the room when I feigned sleep, leaving me to agitate in privacy on the liberties I’d taken to insinuate myself into his father’s clothes.
The Thums Up T-shirt stretched tight round my grumbling belly. The sweatpants biting in where the waistband hugged my hips. White socks with threadbare heels, a gift given so carelessly that I’d felt obliged to weep when I was putting them on and cursed my ingratitude when no tears came. It was an outfit apt for testing the limits of my old body, and for disappearing into the grain of a new family.
Maybe in these clothes, in the dark or in a rush, Bibhuti’s wife would mistake me for her man and show me the same patience she reserved for him. Maybe she’d be fooled long enough to accept me curled up like a cat on her lap, to stroke my cheek and tell me everything was going to be alright.
I woke up to the sound of her flip-flops flapping obscenely on the floor tiles as she moved around the kitchen. I had to sneak past her to the bathroom. Their toilet was a hole in the floor to perch over and ceramic footholds for stability. The house held its breath to listen for my mistakes.
Jolly Boy was waiting outside for me. He’d been assigned the task of checking my aim. He made a quick assessment of the state of the room. He was happy to see that I’d taken to their ways like a duck to water.
The next days were for slipping under the waves of the routine Bibhuti prescribed and for making complaints that he nobly ignored until the fight fell out of me. Harshad showed me how to let myself out. I’d lock the door behind me and post the key back through the letterbox. Bibhuti’s place was just a few minutes’ walk away and I’d pad the empty streets with the sleepless dogs, a ghost in the blue half-light until I arrived at Bibhuti’s courtyard and the disgraces began.
First there was a salute to the sun, then a chair and a downward-facing dog. The yoga was to make me supple and to rid my mind of any thoughts of recrimination for the abuses my new master would inflict. Then there were sit-ups and push-ups to strengthen my core, and squats to enlarge my thigh muscles where the power to drive my swings would be generated. I’d crawl to the apartment’s underbelly to stretch and shake, suck up my humiliation while the sun cast its first splinters, heaving with Bibhuti’s hands around my ankles, holding me down and holding me to my word. My stomach straining and my shoulders grinding as he shared with me his passion for life and its many opportunities for self-mutilation.
The smell of his deodorant and breakfast sprouts. Breathe in through the nose to the count of seven.
His wife’s wary eyes on me from the top of the stairs as she wrung out the washing. The soapy water slapping down on to the courtyard in noisy lascivious streams.
Hold to the count of five.
Jolly Boy bedheaded and smelling of sleep in his dragon-embroidered shirt, skipping past his mother to mark time on my creaking repetitions, the stopwatch his translator between childhood arithmetic and the strange numberless world of men and their obsessions. Hanging from his father like a tree, riding him while I rested. His small hands slipping over the scars that crossed Bibhuti’s back like ancient migration routes.
Breathe out through the mouth to the count of seven. Hold to the count of five and repeat.