I went barefoot in Bibhuti’s house and Ellen saw her nail polish on my toes.
I explained myself to her. I’d done it once when I was drunk and in the cold light of day it seemed wrong to stop. It would be disrespectful to her if I didn’t keep it up.
‘It’s quite relaxing, isn’t it?’
‘You’ve gone over the lines,’ she said.
I wasn’t as steady as her. She agreed. It was a difference between us and it was too late to fix it.
I took my dose of cardamom and breathing, crossed my legs and closed my eyes in the living room and went through the motions of meditating. Bibhuti massaged me, his Ayurvedic fingers drawing my pain briefly to the surface where it could be examined and declared to be in decline. Ellen watched and pretended not to be uncomfortable with the sight of me arching for relief under the hands of a brown man with a vested interest in keeping me alive.
More than once she mentioned modern medicine and Bibhuti had to beat her down. Chemotherapy was pumping poison into the body and surgery was the slitting open of a body with knives and saws. Both acts of violence and obscenity. If I was to be cured only love and the wisdom of ages would do it. My doshas could only be pacified with his attentive care and the care of the God who worked through him. Ellen bit her tongue and I answered yes when Bibhuti asked if I felt better, wiping the sesame oil from his fingers. Admitting a weakness to him now would only disturb him and he needed all his fearlessness.
I’d walk Ellen back to the hotel through the swarming night, watching the path ahead of her for hidden dangers. Harshad would poke his shining head up from behind his latest project, wiring up a CCTV camera bought from the mobile phone shop next door in a moment of feverish speculation. That he was planning for a future where such things might be needed was an encouraging sign. But when he asked after my health it was with no care for the reply. His eyes were buttons and the furnace of his heart was down to its last embers. The glow it gave off was so pale that it failed to light all but the immediate space in front of him, so he had to bend close to the counter top to see the camera’s innards and pick up the glass beside them.
A touch of cheeks and Ellen would pull the door shut on me. I’d hear the creak of bedsprings as she sat down to busy herself in autopsy of the day’s miscarriages.
A dog followed me home in the dark. I sat down with him on the kerb outside Bibhuti’s apartment and stroked his head until he fell asleep, his chin resting in the filthy groundwater.
It was coming back from our visit to the ape girl that everything nearly came undone. Her name was Rebati and she was Bibhuti’s last assignment before he took his leave to break the bats. She lived in a slum on the mainland, in a house made out of reclaimed billboard and packing tape. Her house advertised Bru coffee and smelt of shit. She was covered in thick lustrous hair and she was comfortable in her place. She wanted to be a teacher so she could tell the children all about tolerance and nature’s various miracles.
Rebati’s father had the same affliction as her. He invited us into his home with a smile that barely poked through the fur on his face. While Bibhuti interviewed his daughter he threw clay pots on a pedal-powered machine in the corner of the room. Every one of them came out smooth and flawless. Things of beauty that were destined to eat cigarette butts on the patios of franchise bars back home.
Rebati accepted her fur as a blessing from God and was only submitting to the treatment her father had campaigned for to soothe his guilt at having passed on his condition to her. He suffered extreme sadness for his daughter’s plight but Rebati herself was a girl for whom life held no fears. She went to school and she walked the streets of her locality with her head held high. Throughout our visit a crowd of smaller children stood guard at the door, her protectors from the Turbanator’s insensitive lens until she agreed independently to pose for a portrait.
I wanted to comb her arms. Her coat shone healthy and cared for and her overgrown lips jutted apelike, pinching her voice to a whisper that encouraged meditation in its listeners. She was something strangers tossed money at in return for divine favours and I was excited to be present in the same world that had made her.
Bibhuti told me how the doctors in her native place had tried to steal her blood.
‘They wanted to sell it to foreign agencies for research. They believe she has missing link genes that could spell important news for the scientific world. Other scrupulous doctors insist there is no gene at work, only a disease which can be treated with surgery. They made a case for experimental treatment and after five years of campaigning a specialist in Mumbai has agreed to take her on. The first surgery will correct the unexpected growth of her lips and dental parts. Then a laser will take away the unwanted hair. She is hoping that the treatments prove unsuccessful so that she may continue in the life she has always known.’
‘She’s really happy like that?’ I asked.
‘God is making her this way for a reason. She believes it is to teach the world a valuable lesson. I understand this very well. God has chosen us both from among many. She has been given a special purpose just like me. She is asking if you would like to touch her.’
Rebati took my hand, peeled it tenaciously open, and ran it down her forearm. She felt like a dog. Less oily than I’d expected. She invited me to touch her face and I did, gently with the tips of my fingers. I pinched her hair between my fingers, played with her split ends. I used the palm of my hand to stroke her more confidently. She smiled at me serenely. Her eyes appeared very small behind the dense growth of hair. They sparkled with a kindness that could change the world.
The Turbanator lent me his Hero Honda to sit on when my legs started to buckle. I invited Rebati for a stationary spin but she laughed off the idea. Her amusement came from simpler sources, from the attaching of Hello Kitty clips to the hair on her cheeks and the farcical barking that startled the younger children into fits of delightful terror.
She wanted her photograph taken so she’d have a record of the girl she’d been born as, just in case the treatment worked and took her blessing away. She’d get the paper and pin the article above her bed. When she married, if the shedding of her hair ever made her a candidate for marriage, she’d carry the picture around with her in secret from a watchful husband. She’d steal away whenever the opportunity arose to look at her old self and remember that she was once a comet in the black of the Indian night.
Coming back to the apartment with Rebati’s barks ringing in my ears the rain began to fall again. Bibhuti parked the car and went back out into the street to put on a show, one-handed cartwheels for the neighbourhood kids who’d grown tired of the storm’s adventure. The smaller ones tried to board him as he passed them.
Jolly Boy ran to the badminton net and picked up a racquet to give me another drubbing. My attempts at converting him to football had failed miserably. Ellen sat by the wall on the neighbour’s plastic chair, slitting banana skins for the butterflies’ next visit. She waited to be amused by my sporting collapse. I took the receiver’s stance.
I saw Bibhuti’s wife straddling her scooter and walking it out into the road. On the way to the market, I supposed. Ellen asked if she wanted company. She didn’t answer. The faces of both women were hard with the effort of keeping their grievances fresh.