The Second Day
Badal sat cross-legged in a padmasana, knees jutting out, meditating fingertips pressed together. His back was as straight as the wall behind him. His lips flickered, but his eyelids were sealed.
It was a two-storeyed house in Jarmuli, its rooms opening onto a small courtyard. Badal sat on the floor of the verandah that bordered the courtyard on three of its four sides. The way the house was built, sounds ricocheted off the mouldering walls. Somewhere upstairs he could hear his aunt threatening her son, “Are you going to get up or shall I empty a bucket of water on your head?” A knife scraping a steel plate, that was her voice. Chalk squealing across a blackboard. The screeching fan belt in a car.
From the room where his grandfather slept came coughs that sounded as if the old man was spilling his innards out. Each burst of coughing was followed by hoarse wails. “Call me to you, O Ram, O Vishnu, O Krishna, call me!”
Every morning at precisely four-thirty, a conch was blown in a house across the alley — once, twice, thrice. A long, high-pitched bleat that tottered towards the end as the blower’s breath weakened and then gave way. Every morning, Badal wanted to shut them up, blow it for them instead. He could produce flawless, melodious notes from any conch, however hoarse it might sound in other hands.
He took a breath and released it, “Ommmm.” The choppy waves in his mind subsided.
At dawn it was his practice to sit and chant this way, longing for what used to come to him as naturally as breathing: a sense of the deep, everlasting hum of creation, an intimate, effortless closeness to God. He could not describe the sensation in words and he could not reach it by thinking about it. The more he tried to extricate himself from the quicksand of life, the more relentlessly it sucked him in. What was his work today? There were the errands for his uncle. Nothing else. It would be slow. And in the evening? He grimaced. “Three old biddies from Calcutta,” the hotel had said, when booking him to take them around the Vishnu temple. An image of his father flitted through Badal’s head. Large, grey-haired, and imperious. As a temple guide his father had exuded a dignity and authority that could crush whole squads of matrons, the kind who made Badal quail even though he had wandered Jarmuli’s great temple with his father from childhood and few guides knew it as well as he did. He told himself the manager of the hotel had sounded anxious to book him for the women, and how many guides were trusted this way by good hotels? He counted them off in his head — no more than a dozen. The rest had to wait like scavengers for pilgrims at the temple gates. The hotel took a cut from his earnings, it was the way the world functioned.
He took another breath and murmured, “Ommmmm.”
His morning was free.
He could spend more than his usual few minutes at the tea stall.
He took a deeper breath.
Water thundered into a metal pail in the far corner of the courtyard. He opened his eyes a sliver and saw his uncle at the tap, bulbously naked. His chequered loincloth clung to his flesh like red and white skin. It was wedged between the cheeks of his uncle’s shuddering buttocks.
A radio sang out from upstairs: “Tojo! Washing Powder Tojo!”
His uncle muttered, “Om Vishnu, Om Vishnu,” twice for each jug of water he poured on himself. The stone paving around the tap was grey-green with moss. His uncle stepped warily. His head was bald, but his body was matted with coarse black hair. “Like a cautious water buffalo,” Badal breathed out. “Ommmm.”
A round pool of sunlight in the left side of the courtyard lasted from about nine until eleven in the morning. Within its circumference Badal had planted a shiuli sapling. In four or five years it would be taller than he was, reaching for the sky that the courtyard inscribed into a blue square, and it would sprinkle the earth beneath with creamy, sweet-scented flowers. Wider and wider the circle of flowers would grow over the years and one day it would bury the courtyard’s squalor. Badal watered the shiuli every day, examined it for signs of new leaves.
When he opened his eyes to see how far his uncle was from finishing, he noticed someone had stepped on his sapling. Its stem jutted out at an angle, like a broken limb.
All at once he plucked his fingers apart, got up, and pulled open the iron latch on the door that separated the courtyard from the street outside. It was the main door to the house, but it was small and warped and faded and the latch was the old kind where a heavy iron chain climbed upward and fitted a loop on the doorframe. He had to bend not to knock his head as he stepped out — but that was the only change from when, as a child of two, he had found his way to the world outside for the first time. He swung the door open as he had for the past twenty-six years, with his foot, and slammed it shut. The door knew it was Badal. Kicked open and banged shut this way for years, it hung askew on its frame and responded to him with a series of creaks and groans.
Outside the house was a narrow alleyway where Badal’s scooter was parked, but at this time of day he did not want his scooter. Instead he walked down the road to a shrine at the corner. The shrine was no more than two feet high, a few bricks at the foot of a tree, plastered together and whitewashed by the old woman who tended it. Badal took ten rupees out of his pocket and held it towards the woman who sat by the shrine threading flowers into a garland.
“What flower are you giving your God today? Hibiscus? Put in a few from me, will you?”
When the woman looked up at him, all that Badal saw were two squares of glass as thick as bottle-bottoms and crushed muslin for skin.
“He is your God too, and everyone else’s.”
She had a cackling, old-woman voice and smiled as she spoke. Her sari was threadbare, her body as bent as a sickle. She reached into her bowl of kumkum, dipped a finger into the paste and when Badal bent his forehead to her she planted a circle of red on it. She went back to making her garland as he kneeled and touched his head to the door of her shrine. He was still for a moment, then rose and walked away. He was out of earshot when the woman said, “Will you get me some gur and bananas on your way back?”
He was always in a hurry at this time of day, going to the sea. It was not far. Not so far that it was a tedious walk, yet enough to be a different world. Long before he reached it, he heard the waves roaring, receding, roaring, receding. He began walking faster as he neared the promenade and when a gap between buildings gave him the expanse of sand and water he knew so well, his steps slowed. He would turn the corner, he would see Raghu setting a bench before the tea stall, and old Johnny Toppo lighting the stove.
This early in the morning the beach was uncrowded, the breeze fresh, the day’s heat gathering ferocity somewhere on the horizon. There were fishermen at work on their boats and nets. A monk as tall as a tree stood waist-deep in the seawater, wearing dark glasses and yellow robes, saying his prayer beads. He was there every morning. Loose white hair cascaded to his shoulders.
Johnny Toppo took no notice of Badal. His tea stall was nothing more than a barrow and a bench, but he made a great to-do setting it up every day, lining up his charred pots and pans, the tea, spices, milk and sugar, the mortar and pestle for the ginger. Last, he put out his biscuit jars, the pair of them, their glass now clouded, blistered, finely cracked. They had grown old with him, he liked to say. He soaked stacks of clay cups in a deep iron pail of water. He hunched over his stove, fiddling with matches. His bare chest was rib-striped and a shark’s tooth hung from his stringy neck on a length of black twine. His bald head gleamed in the sunlight as he lit the stove and breathed a song into it to get it going: