The priest looked at the fresh application of polish on my toenails and smiled to himself in private acknowledgement of some fact about me that I couldn’t figure out myself. He dipped a finger into the bowl he was holding and painted a turmeric stripe between my eyes. He mumbled a prayer at me and I was anointed. Bibhuti already wore his stripe. He carried the marks of divine protection with confidence. He thanked the priest on my behalf and took me away to a smaller room where his God’s soothing voice could be heard more clearly.
He sat down on the stone floor, folded his legs underneath him. He had me follow him down. He told me to close my eyes and breathe. I waited until his eyes were closed and he’d started to meditate. Still I didn’t hear you. All I heard was Bibhuti breathing and the low hum of a friendship that had passed from obligation to something wilder. All I wanted was for him to be happy.
Bibhuti woke up, rubbed his eyes and grinned at me.
‘I am ready now,’ he said.
In the courtyard all lenses pointed at us. A steadycam from the sports channel and various press cameras jostled for elbow room at the spot where the first gob of blood would be spat. The Turbanator waved to us boyishly. The civilians raised their phones and snapped our walk to centre stage where the bats were waiting, arranged in neat rows to be got at quickly. On the other side of us was a space to throw them when they were broken, in the walled corner under the banyan tree. Children looked down on us from its branches, their hands full of themselves and rubbing their shins as if to knead the excitement evenly through bodies unused to the thrill of being hidden.
They cheered us. The air crackled and I got goosebumps. Someone was selling mango slices from a plastic bucket and a custodian was standing by with a mop to cleanse the sacred ground when we were finished.
Nobody was wearing goggles. Nobody had thought of it. I worried about stray splinters in eyeballs. It was too late to do anything about it.
Ellen and Jolly Boy and his mother hadn’t been allowed inside the temple with us and instead they’d been practising their roles in the thickening air. The women in the crowd posed in shapes of grace, steadied their hands to catch the eggs from upturned nests when the sky started falling in.
Jolly Boy made a meal of checking the bats one last time, rolling them carefully so they all showed their faces. The duct tape covered B Pattni’s embarrassment. The modification made the bats look more sinister. B Pattni himself peered out from the crowd, swaying from foot to foot, his massive frame trembling with the anticipation of some watershed moment in the history of violence.
The younger priests had to blockade the entrance, linking their arms in opposition to the latecomers. Meeting resistance the would-be spectators made ladders of each other and scaled the walls to sit in crowlike hope of throwaway bones.
The AXN reporter made an announcement. He told everyone who Bibhuti was and what he’d already done. He told them what he’d attempt to do today. He introduced me as the one who’d help. I had to remind him of my name.
I got him to namecheck Jolly Boy too. Jolly Boy prematurely picked up the first bat from the pile. I quietly told him to put it back. His wait for the clock was insufferable. Rigged to the trunk of the tree it showed zero. Another AXN rep stood by to press its buttons, an Olympic pretension for the glamour-hungry crowd.
Bibhuti took off his T-shirt. The scars on his back and the bruises I’d made shone livid. Bibhuti’s wife turned her back on him. Ellen held her up.
On the announcer’s cue the crowd fell silent.
A moment of realisation passed between Bibhuti and me, a look of delirious mourning. We both knew that the people we’d been before would be permanently lost when the breaking began. We both rued the time we’d spent as outcasts in a life before today. We were going home.
‘I am only wishing Gopal Dutta is here,’ Bibhuti confided. ‘This will be the first record I have achieved without him. It is very strange feeling.’
‘He’ll be watching,’ I said. I scanned the crowd but I didn’t see any hovering goat women.
I asked Jolly Boy if he was okay. He tilted his head and offered me a bat again. This time I took it. I weighed it in my hands. I felt the grip and the heat in it from its exposure to the sun. I squeezed my fingers tighter around it to inflate the muscles that would make it murderous.
The air was still. Bibhuti gathered himself, a physical clearing and a shaking off of any last remaining trace of doubt. ‘Don’t forget, below the neck only,’ he said, and he glanced to the sky for a final endorsement as the crowd drew in its breath. Everyone braced themselves to see a god being born.
I decided with a sense of quickfalling like stepping off a roof that I didn’t have it in me.
‘I can’t do it.’ I said it quietly so the crowd wouldn’t hear. ‘I don’t want to kill you.’
Bibhuti’s moustache drooped.
I felt the burn of crying behind my eyes. I felt you. The preciousness of life was revealed to me in an urgent unfolding and the shock of it took all the lust out of me.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘You must do it,’ Bibhuti said. His brown nipples were hairless and small in the stiffening breeze. He’d once been a baby. ‘Please,’ he pleaded.
‘Go, Uncle, it has started,’ Jolly Boy urged. ‘Hit him!’
I looked at the clock. The numbers were already running ahead of me.
Bibhuti waved me impatiently in. ‘Come, you must go now. We have no more time.’ He spread his feet and tensed himself, his arms held out in appeal.
I felt you for the first time and I raised my hand against you.
The announcer counted the seconds aloud to hurry me on. The crowd started counting too.
‘Go!’ Jolly Boy hollered, enraged at me, and he picked up a bat and made to strike his father himself.
I pushed him aside and raised my bat. Bibhuti’s eyes glazed over as he summoned the weird energies that would deflect the pain.
‘Thank you,’ he muttered, and he was already somewhere else.
I asked you to forgive me. I swung the bat with everything I had.
33
Bibhuti sleeps. His room’s too small to breathe in now. The reporter has been called away to another story and me and Ellen sit in her seat. It’s still warm from her. The corridor light stings my eyes and encourages confessions. Steam rises from the tea in Ellen’s plastic cup. Her fingers curl around it, the knuckles wrinkled like walnuts, and the ring I gave her could do with a polish. She lets me confess, with the doctors buzzing round us. A scream of pain from somewhere behind thin curtains. She lets me confess because she sees the time has come to harvest my prior kindnesses. To bring them in for weighing and then have them argue for me at the last. I’ll need every one of them to speak well of me.
I tell her I’ve heard your voice calling to me. That I’ve been going back over my life and filling all the holes in with you. The way we met, by chance in a dance hall in the dark, out of all those other bodies. It was you pinning me to the ground, I say, keeping me in the right spot so she’d find me.
It was you who made me iron-willed when her old man ran his rule over me and found me wanting, it was your voice telling him we’d made our choice and we were standing by it. It was you putting the words in my mouth when I asked her to make an honest man of me, even though the thing I feared most in the world was making a promise to someone and then having to make it stick.
When she needed kindness it was you who showed me how. What to say to soothe a toothache, where to put my hands to express sympathy or strength of character. It was you who made me believe in her piano dream.