Bholu wanted to sleep but couldn’t. Every few minutes some sound would reach his ears … the sounds would cause entire, life-like pictures to come to life and stand before him.
His heart had been filled with such hopes and so much excitement at the prospect of marriage. From the day he had decided to get married, his head had been buzzing with all those tantalising delights with which he had for so long been unacquainted. The thought of marriage would make a strange sort of heat course through his body, a nice, pleasurable sort of warmth. But now the very thought of his ‘first night’ left him cold! He tried several times to rekindle those warmth-inducing feelings but the voices — those picture-painting voices — would destroy everything. He began to feel naked, absolutely naked, and everyone all around him was staring wide-eyed at him and laughing.
At about 4.00 in the morning he got up and drank a glass of cold water. He thought a bit. Sternly, he tried to dispel the anxiety that gripped him. A cool breeze was blowing. Bholu turned towards Kallan’s corner. The frayed edges of his sack curtain were moving in the breeze. Kallu was lying stark naked beside his wife. The sight nauseated him; it also made him angry: why must the breeze blow on such roofs? And, if it must blow, why must it tease sack curtains such as these? He felt like pulling down all the sack curtains and tearing off his own clothes and dancing naked on the rooftop.
But he didn’t do that; instead he left for work as always. His friends looked at him knowingly and asked him about his first night. Fuji, the tailor, called out, ‘So, how was it? Hope you haven’t blotted our name?’
A little later he met a tinsmith who asked him in a mysterious sort of way, ‘Look here, let me know if there is something amiss; I have this great recipe that works wonders.’
Another fellow thumped him on the shoulder and exclaimed, ‘So, my dear wrestler, how was the bout?’
Bholu remained quiet.
According to custom, Bholu’s wife went to her parents’ home. She returned after five or six days and once again, Bholu found himself in the same dilemma. It was as though everyone who slept on the roof had been waiting for his wife to return. The past few nights had been quiet but the night he came to sleep there with his wife the same things started all over again: the whisperings and murmurings, the chur-choo, chur-choo, the coughing and clearing of throats, the knocking of the glass against the pot, the tossings and turnings on creaking beds, the stifled laughs. Bholu would lie awake all night long and stare at the sky. Once in a while, he would sigh deeply and look longingly at his wife and he would fret, ‘What has happened to me? … What has happened to me? … Oh, what has happened to me?’
This continued for seven nights. Till, finally, in despair Bholu sent his bride away to her parents’ home. Twenty-odd days passed. One day Gama said to Bholu, ‘You are a strange fellow! How can you send your newly-wed bride to her parents’? She has been gone for so many days, how the hell do you sleep alone?’
Bholu answered briefly, ‘It is all right.’
Gama asked, ‘What is all right? Why don’t you tell me? What is the matter? Don’t you like Aisha?’
‘It isn’t that.’
‘What is it, then?’
Bholu did not answer. A few days later, Gama raised the subject again. Bholu got up and left the quarter. A cot was placed outside their house. He went out and sat down on it. He could hear his sister-in-law’s voice. She was talking to Gama inside and saying, ‘You know, you are wrong when you say that Bholu does not like Aisha.’
Bholu heard Gama ask, ‘What is the matter then? He doesn’t seem at all interested in her.’
‘And why would he be interested in her?’
‘Why not?’
Bholu couldn’t hear what Gama’s wife said to him, yet he felt as though someone had put his very being, his identity in a pestle and mortar and ground it to smithereens. Then he heard Gama say loudly, ‘No, no! Who told you that?’
Gama’s wife answered, ‘Aisha told one of her friends … it reached me in a roundabout way.’
Gama spoke in a shocked sort of way, ‘This is terrible!’
Sitting outside, Bholu felt a knife penetrate his heart. Something snapped inside him. He got to his feet and climbed up to the roof. He began to pull and tear all the sack curtains that hung on poles. People heard the commotion and came running. They tried to stop him but he began to fight with them. Soon matters became ugly. Kallan picked a pole and hit him on the head. Bholu fell down in a swoon and lost consciousness. When he came to, he had lost his mind.
Now Bholu roams around buck-naked. If he sees a sack curtain, he pounces on it and tears it to shreds.
LOSER ALL THE WAY
There are people who only enjoy winning, but he liked to lose everything after he had won it.
He never found it difficult to win, but he often had to put in a lot of hard work to lose. In the early days, when he used to work in a bank, his friends and relatives made fun of his desire to amass wealth. But when he left his job at the bank and came away to Bombay, all too soon he had begun to help out his friends and relatives by lending them money.
Bombay offered him many avenues, but he had chosen the world of films for himself. There was money in it, and there was fame. He could wander at will in this new world, amass wealth with both hands, and lose it too with both hands if he so wished. And that was why he had chosen to be a player in this field.
He made — and lost — not lakhs but crores of rupees. It didn’t take him as long to make that money as it did to squander it away. He wrote songs for a film and demanded a lakh of rupees. But it took him some time to fritter it all away at brothels, gay parties, horse racing and gambling dens.
He made a film. It earned him a profit of ten lakh rupees. Now rose the question of spending it here, there, everywhere. So he devised a way in which there was a slip at every step. He bought three cars — one new, two old which he knew were no good at all. He parked the old cars outside his house — to rot and rust away. The one that was new was locked up inside the garage on the pretext that there was no petrol to be found. A taxi would do very well for him. He would take one in the morning. After a mile or two, he would have it stopped. Then he would enter a gambling den and emerge the next day after losing a couple of thousand rupees. The taxi would remain parked outside. He would get into it, return home and knowingly forget to settle its bill. In the evening he would come out and, upon finding the taxi still waiting, pretend to scold the driver, ‘You oaf, you are still standing here! Come with me to the office and I will have your account settled ….’ And he would once again forget to pay the money on reaching the office ….
One after the other, several of his films became ‘hits’. He broke all previous records of success. Heaps of wealth grew around him. His fame touched the skies. In a fit of pique, he produced a couple of the most awful films imaginable whose failure too was in a league of their own. As he went down, he pulled others down into rack and ruin. But soon enough he rolled up his sleeves. He consoled those who had been destroyed because of him and produced a film that became the proverbial gold mine.