The daily hanging of banana skins and later the catch, after the startled rise of the sun and the slowburning delay, watching the horizon for the incoming storm. Black clouds boiling and the wild descent of wings. The butterflies’ colours my consolation for the pain of ageing with too few stories to tell.
The neighbour watching me the way someone might watch a flower of blood forming under a freshly killed man. I’d never understood exactly what morbid curiosity meant until then. I mumbled sand-mouthed profanities to a country that had the measure of me and a sky that wanted to squash me into steam.
And repeat.
I’d fold my arms to cover my spare tyres, stripped to the waist while Bibhuti rubbed sun cream into my blistering shoulders, his breath warm and shocking on the back of my neck. I kept my eyes open so it wouldn’t look like I was enjoying myself. I missed Ellen’s hands on me. I missed having no gods to hide my ugliness from.
Then there were the games. Special tasks Bibhuti cobbled together to test my resolve and sharpen my instincts for desecration. To teach me patience he spilled a bowl of rice and made me pick it up one grain at a time. This after he’d smelled booze on me despite the promise I’d made to stop drinking. The sack bore a cartoon of a young boy wearing a baseball cap. The brand name was Tolly Boy. I misread it as Jolly Boy and before I’d realised my error I’d given Shubham his new name. He was delighted with it and so it stuck.
In return Jolly Boy helped me scratch up handfuls of rice when his father ducked inside to answer nature’s call. With half the rice returned to the bowl I’d learned all I needed to know about patience and respect. I’d learned that the god Bibhuti set his clock by was disinclined to both.
After the morning indignities Bibhuti would go out into the field, notebook in hand, to capture the unsung lives of his scrap of the country — a woodland sports retreat for blind kids, a powerlifting trial in the lobby of a Thane primary school closed down for the summer — and me and Jolly Boy would kick our heels on the outskirts of the action while he got his interviews. The Turbanator would always arrive at the last minute to immortalise the encounters in pictures that half the time wouldn’t make it to print for a lack of column space between the Monsoon Madness Sales adverts and the sex advice.
I remember watching the sightless children dangle from the trees like broken windchimes, their stiff flailing limbs trembling the anchor lines, lashed two feet off the ground between the trunks. A clumsy suspension of disbelief. They laughed. They jerked fearlessly and laughed without remorse because they couldn’t see how unbeautiful they looked. They’d looked for the ground with dead eyes and they’d found only sky. A groping for sensation, spirits twisting momentarily free from the deadweight of their orphaned bodies.
One girl’s leading foot slipped off the anchor line. In the instant of treading air her miracle was undone. She lost the grip of one hand and was tangled in her harness, spun there like a turning fruit. Her face contorted in panic, her useless eyes swimming in their sunken cavities. I thought about running to her rescue but I decided it wasn’t my place. Soon enough a chaperone came to steady her, coiled her fingers gently back round the rope above her head. With a few words of encouragement she completed her crossing, to be met with well-meaning plaudits and wandering hands.
In the evenings I’d ply Bibhuti for his secrets between my trials at the badminton net. Jolly Boy didn’t live up to his promise to go easy on me.
I asked Bibhuti how he beat pain.
‘I have trained myself. Pain is a choice. I have chosen not to accept it.’
‘That’s handy.’
‘Yes, it is very useful.’
‘How though?’
‘Come,’ Bibhuti said, and he got up and planted himself by the badminton net. He parted his legs just so. ‘You will kick me and you will see.’
I couldn’t do it. He tried to convince me but I was frozen, some righteous portion of my brain wouldn’t let me cross the line. I told him I had a tight hamstring. I’d wait until it was better.
‘Very well,’ Bibhuti said and waved Jolly Boy in. Still holding his badminton racquet he took a casual swipe at his father’s groin, the action so familiar to him that it seemed almost involuntary. No emotion played on his face. His father accepted the kick in a similar fashion. I imagined countless mornings of stiff routine, father goading son to harder and faster, teasing from him by attrition the bravery that would see him carry on the family name.
‘You see?’ Bibhuti asked.
‘I saw it, yeah. But what I want to know is how.’
I hadn’t swung a bat in anger. I had a taste for his blood.
‘It is a switch. Like light switch. I press the switch and the light goes off. Then it is darkness and the pain cannot be seen. I know it is there but if I cannot see it then it cannot grab me.’
‘But how?’
‘Breathing. Meditation. Training. Diet. The grace of the almighty. All of these things.’
I nodded my head to show that I believed him. I asked him if he’d heard about the Frenchman who ate a plane.
He hadn’t. I told him the story. He was appalled.
‘This is not a serious man,’ Bibhuti said. ‘He does not value the true meaning of the extreme sportsman’s ethic. It is same with my fellow Indians, many silly records. The fellow who balances candles on his moustache. Another who is just sitting still on a wall for eleven hours. What good is this doing? How does this provide positive example for common man and next generation?’
He became agitated, paced the courtyard stroking his moustache. His eyes blazed with the perversity of a world where the sacrifices of simple men go uncelebrated.
‘What I am doing is telling the people that if they endure the pain they will reach happiness that comes after. My country is very difficult place. A lot of people very poor and hungry. Life is constant struggle against all the odds and natural disasters. I am from a family of four brothers and two sisters in my native place. It was challenging to upbring six children in competitive world. The food grains produced from our land had never been sufficient to find ends meet. We used to go to bed with empty stomach every alternate day.
‘I am leaving home at twelve and handled myself all alone living in slum pocket and footpaths. I did odd jobs like taking tuition, working in hotels as waiter and grocery shop as supply boy, selling cow dung cake, taking care of cows, all for just one hundred rupees a day. I changed many schools and colleges due to lack of finance to finally complete postgraduation on my own. When I first came to Mumbai after my degree I spent many months in the streets.’
He squeezed his eyes shut, as if to banish the ghosts of his dissatisfied past. I reached up to pat him on the shoulder but he roused himself before I could touch him.
‘But this does not matter now. I found my intended path through many struggles. This is the message I convey to the people when I am breaking my records. The happiness is coming after the pain. Forget these emotional moments. I am very sorry.’
Bibhuti took a comb from his back pocket and went to the step to scrape thoughtfully at his hair. Silence fell. India got hotter. My past trickled away like rain into pavement cracks.
More sprouts and spices for the last meal of the day, and Bibhuti’s wife asked no questions of us. All she cared about was that we wash our hands and empty our bowls. The less she said the more I wanted to know what went on inside her, just like I’d wanted to with Ellen, so that I could reassure myself with something beautiful and ageless. I wanted to see the place where she was born. I imagined she’d grown up among fawns and chemical smog and that the river had brought her here to be a testament to the unknowable, to give comfort to the lost and to incite the jealousies of men like me.