Seeing a man waiting at the bus stop, he tried to sell him a collection of six coloured pens, first at a rupee a pen; then at two pens a rupee; finally offering three for a rupee. Although the man said he would not buy, Ratna could see the interest in his eyes; he took out a large spring that could give much amusement to children, and a geometrical set that could make wonderful designs on papers. The man bought one of the geometrical sets for three rupees.
Ratna headed away from from the Sultan’s Battery, taking the road towards Salt Market Village.
Once he got to the village, he went to the main market, took out a handful of change and sorted it out on the flat of his palm as he walked; he left the coins on the counter of a shop, taking in exchange a packet of Engineer beedis, which he put into his suitcase.
‘What are you waiting for?’ The boy in charge of the shop was new to the job. ‘You have your beedis.’
‘I usually get two packets of lentils too, included in the price. That’s the way it’s done.’
Before entering his house, Ratna ripped open one of the packets with his teeth and poured its contents onto the ground near his door. Seven or eight of the neighbourhood dogs came running and he watched them crunch the lentils loudly. When they began digging at the earth, he tore open the second packet with his teeth and scattered its contents on the ground too.
He walked into his house without waiting to see the dogs devour this second lot of lentils. He knew they would still be hungry, but he could not afford to buy them a third packet every day.
He hung his shirt on a hook by the door, as he scratched his armpits and hairy chest. He sat down on a chair, exhaled, muttered: ‘O Krishna, O Krishna’, and stretched out his legs; even though they were in the kitchen, his daughters knew at once that he was there – a powerful odour of stale feet went through the house like a warning cannon shot. They dropped their women’s magazines and busied themselves with their work.
His wife emerged from the kitchen with a tumbler of water. He had begun smoking the beedis.
‘Are they working in there – the maharanis?’ he asked her.
‘Yes,’ the three girls, his daughters, shouted back from the kitchen. He did not trust them, so he went in to check.
The youngest, Aditi, crouched by the gas stove, wiping the leaves of the photo album with a corner of her sari. Rukmini, the oldest sister, sat beside a mound of white pills, which she was counting off and pouring into bottles; Ramnika, who would be married off after Rukmini, pasted a label on each bottle. The wife was in the kitchen, making noise with plates and pots. After he had smoked his second beedi, and his body had visibly relaxed, she built up the courage to approach him: ‘The astrologer said he would come at nine.’
‘Uhm.’
He burped, and then lifted a leg and waited for the fart. The radio was on; he placed the set on his thigh and slapped his palm against his other leg to the beat of the music, humming all the while and singing the words whenever he knew them.
‘He’s here,’ she whispered. He turned off the radio, as the astrologer came into the room and folded his palms in a namaste.
Sitting down in a chair, he took off his shirt, which Ratna’s wife hung for him on the hook next to Ratna’s. While the women waited in the kitchen, the astrologer showed Ratna the choice of boys.
He opened an album of black and white photos; they gazed at the faces of one boy after another, who looked back at them out of tense, unsmiling portraits. Ratna scraped one with his thumb. The astrologer slid the photo out of the album.
‘Boy looks okay,’ Ratna said, after a moment’s concentration. ‘The father does what for a living?’
‘Owns a firecracker shop on Umbrella Street. A very good business. Boy inherits it.’
‘His own business,’ Ratna exclaimed, with genuine satis faction. ‘It’s the only way ahead in the rat race: being a salesman is a dead end.’
His wife dropped something in the kitchen; she coughed and dropped something else.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked.
A timid voice said something about ‘horoscopes’.
‘Shut up!’ Ratna shouted. He gestured at the kitchen with the photo – ‘I have three daughters to marry off and this damn bitch thinks I can be choosy?’ – and he tossed the photo into the astrologer’s lap.
The astrologer drew an ‘X’ across the back of the photo.
‘The boy’s parents will expect something,’ he said. ‘A token.’
‘Dowry.’ Ratna gave the evil its proper name in a soft voice. ‘Fine. I’ve saved money for this girl.’ He breathed out. ‘Where I’ll get dowry for the next two, though, God alone knows.’
Gritting his teeth in anger, he turned towards the kitchen and yelled.
The following Monday, the boy’s party came. The younger girls went around with a tray of lemon juice, while Ratna and his wife sat in the drawing room. Rukmini’s face was whitened by a thick layer of Johnson’s Baby Powder, and garlands of jasmine decorated her hair; she plucked the strings of a veena and sang a religious verse, while looking out of the window at something far away.
The prospective groom’s father, the firecracker merchant, was sitting on a mattress directly opposite Rukmini; he was a huge man in a white shirt and a white cotton sarong, with thick tufts of glossy, silvery hair sticking out of his ears. He moved his head to the rhythm of the song, which Ratna took as an encouraging sign. The prospective mother-in-law, another enormous and fair-skinned creature, looked around the ceiling and the corners of the room. The groom-to-be had his father’s fair skin and features, but he was much smaller than either of his parents, and seemed more like the family’s domestic pet than the scion. Halfway through the song, he leaned over and whispered something into his father’s hairy ears.
The merchant nodded. The boy got up and left. The father held up his little finger and showed it to everyone in the room.
Everyone giggled.
The boy came back and squirmed into place between his fat father and his fat mother. The two younger girls came with a second tray of lemon juice, and the fat firecracker merchant and his wife took glasses; as if only to follow them, the boy also took a glass and sipped. Almost as soon as the juice touched his lips, he tapped his father and whispered into his hairy ear again. This time the old man grimaced; but the boy ran out.
As if to distract attention from his son, the firecracker merchant asked Ratna, in a rasping voice: ‘Do you have a spare beedi, my good man?’
Searching in the kitchen for his packet of beedis, Ratna saw, through the grille in the window, the bridegroom-to-be, urinating copiously against the trunk of an Ashoka tree in the back yard.
Nervous fellow, he thought, grinning. But that’s only natural, he thought, feeling already a touch of affection for this fellow, who was soon going to join his family. All men are nervous before their weddings. The boy appeared to be done; he shook his penis and stepped away from the tree. But then, he stood as if frozen. After a moment he craned his head back and seemed to gasp for air, like a drowning man.
The matchmaker returned that evening to report that the firecracker merchant seemed satisfied with Rukmini’s singing.
‘Fix the date soon,’ he told Ratna. ‘In a month, the rental rates for wedding halls will start to…’ – he gestured upwards with his palms.
Ratna nodded, but he seemed distracted.
The next morning, he took the bus to Umbrella Street, walking past furniture and fan shops until he found the firecracker merchant’s place. The fat man with the hairy ears sat on a high stool, in front of a wall of paper bombs and rockets, like an emissary of the God of Fire and War. The groom-to-be was also in the shop, sitting on the floor, licking his fingers as he turned the pages of a ledger.
The fat man kicked his son gently.
‘This man is going to be your father-in-law, aren’t you going to say hello?’ He smiled at Ratna: ‘The boy is a shy one.’
Ratna sipped tea, chatted with the fat man, and kept an e
ye on the boy all the time.
‘Come with me, son,’ he said, ‘I have something to show you.’ The two men walked down the road, neither of them saying a word, till they got to the banyan tree that grew beside the Hanuman temple on Umbrella Street; Ratna indicated that they should sit down in the shade of the tree. He wanted the boy to turn his back to the traffic, so that they faced the temple.
For a while Ratna let the young man talk, only observing his eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and neck.
Suddenly, he seized the fellow’s wrist.
‘Where did you find this prostitute that you sat with?’
The boy wanted to get up, but Ratna increased the pressure on his wrist to make it clear that there would be no escape. The boy turned his face to the road, as if pleading for help.
Ratna increased the pressure on the boy’s wrist.
‘Where did you sit with her? At the side of a road, in a hotel, or behind a building?’
He twisted harder.
‘By the side of a road,’ the boy blurted out; then he looked at Ratna with his face close to tears. ‘How do you know?’
Ratna closed his eyes; breathed out and let go of the boy’s wrist. ‘A truckers’ whore.’ He slapped the boy.
The boy began to cry. ‘I only sat with her once,’ he said, fighting back his sobs.
‘Once is enough. Do you burn when you pass urine?’
‘Yes, I burn.’
‘Nausea? ’
The boy asked what the English word meant, and said yes once he understood.
‘What else?’
‘It feels like there is something large and hard – like a rubber ball – between my legs all the time. And then I feel dizzy sometimes.’
‘Can you get hard?’
‘Yes. No.’
‘Tell me what your penis looks like. Is it black? Is it red? Are the lips of your penis swollen?’
Half an hour later, the two men were still sitting at the foot of the banyan tree, facing the temple.
‘I beg you…’ The boy folded his palms. ‘I beg you.’
Ratna shook his head.
‘I have to cancel the wedding, what else can I do? How can I let my daughter get this disease too?’
The boy stared at the ground, as if he had simply run out of ways to beg. The drop of moisture at the tip of his nose gleamed like silver.
‘I’ll ruin you,’ he said quietly.
Ratna wiped his hands on his sarong. ‘How?’
‘I’ll say that the girl has slept with someone. I’ll say that she’s not a virgin. That’s why you had to cancel the wedding.’
In one swift motion, Ratna seized the boy’s hair, yanked back his head, held it for a moment, and then slammed it against the banyan tree. He stood up and spat at the boy.
‘I swear by the god who sits in this temple before us, I will kill you with my own hands if you say that.’
He was in fiery form that day at the Dargah; thundering, as the young men gathered round him, about sin, and disease, and about how germs rise from the genitalia, through the nipples, into the mouth, and eyes, and ears, until they reach the nostrils. Then he showed them his photos: images of rotten and reddened genitalia, some of which were black, or distended, or even appeared charred, as if acid-burned. Above each photo was one of the face of the victim, his eyes covered by a black rectangle, as if he were a victim of torture or rape. Such were the consequences of sin, Ratna explained: and expiation and redemption could come only in the form of magic white pills.
Three months or so went by. One morning, he was at his spot behind the white dome, bellowing at the Stonehenge of worried young men, when he saw a face that made his heart stop.
Afterwards, when he was done with his lecture, he saw the face again, right in front of him.
‘What do you want?’ he hissed. ‘It’s too late. My daughter’s married now. Why have you come here now?’
Ratna folded the stool under his arm, dropped his medicines into his red bag, and walked fast. A flurry of footsteps followed him. The boy – the firecracker merchant’s son – panted as he spoke.
‘Things are becoming worse by the day. I can’t piss without my penis burning. You must do something for me. You must give me your pills.’
Ratna gnashed his teeth. ‘You sinned, you bastard. You sat with a prostitute. Now pay for it!’
He walked faster, and faster, and then the footsteps behind him were gone and he was alone.
But the following evening, he saw the face again and the quick steps followed him all the way to the bus stop, and the voice said, again and again: ‘Let me buy the pills from you’, but Ratna did not turn around.
He boarded the bus and counted to ten; producing his brochures, he spoke to the passengers of the rat race. As the dark outline of the fort appeared in the distance; the bus slowed down and then stopped. He got down. Someone else got down with him. He walked away. Someone walked behind him.
Ratna spun around and seized his stalker by the collar. ‘Didn’t I tell you? Leave me alone. What has got into you?’
The boy pushed Ratna’s hands away, and straightened his collar, and whispered: ‘I think I’m dying. You have to give me your white pills.’
‘Look here, none of those young men is going to be cured by anything I sell. Don’t you get it?’
There was a moment of silence and then the boy said: ‘But you were at the Sexology Conference…the sign in English says so…’
Ratna raised his hands to the sky.
‘I found that sign lying on the platform of the station.’
‘But the Hakim Bhagwandas of Delhi…’
‘Hakim Bhagwandas, my arse! They’re white sugar pills that I buy wholesale from a chemist on Umbrella Street – right next to where your father has his shop; my daughters bottle them and stick labels on them at my house!’
To prove his point, he opened his leather case, unscrewed the top from a bottle, and scattered the pills across the ground, as if broadcasting seed on the earth. ‘They can do nothing! I have nothing for you, son!’
The boy sat on the ground, took a white pill from the earth, and swallowed it. He got down on all fours and scooped up the white pills, which he began swallowing in a frenzy, along with any dirt attached to them.
‘Are you mad?’
Getting down on his knees, Ratna gave the boy a good shake and asked the same question again and again.
And then, at last, he saw the boy’s eyes. They had changed since he had last observed them; teary and red, they were like pickled vegetables of some kind.
He relaxed his grip on the boy’s shoulder.
‘You’ll have to pay me, all right, for my help? I don’t do charity.’
Half an hour later, the two men got off a bus near the railway station. They walked together through streets that become progressively narrower and darker, until they reached a shop whose awning was marked with a large red medical cross. From inside the shop, a radio blared out a popular Kannada film song.
‘Buy something here and leave me alone.’
Ratna tried to walk away, but the boy clutched his wrist.
‘Wait. Pick the medicine for me and then go.’
Ratna walked quickly in the direction of the bus stop, but again he heard the footsteps behind him. He turned, and there was the boy, arms laden with green bottles.
Regretting that he had ever agreed to bring him here, Ratna walked faster. Still he heard the light, desperate footsteps again, as though a ghost were following him.
For several hours that night Ratna lay awake, turning in his bed and disturbing his wife.
The next day, in the evening, he took the bus into the city, back into Umbrella Street. When he reached the firecracker shop he stood at a distance, with his arms folded, waiting until the boy saw him. The two of them walked together in silence for a while and then sat down on a bench outside a sugarcane juice stall. As the machines turned, crushing the cane, Ratna said: ‘Go to the hospital. They’ll help you.’
&nb
sp; ‘I can’t go there. They know me. They’ll tell my father.’
Ratna had a vision of that immense man with the tufts of white hair growing out of his ears, sitting in front of his arsenal of firecrackers and paper bombs.
The following day, as Ratna was folding his wooden stand and packing his case, he was conscious of a shadow on the ground in front of him. He walked round the Dargah; past the long line of pilgrims waiting to pray at the tomb of Yusuf Ali, past the rows of lepers, and past the man with one leg lying on the ground, twitching from the hip and chanting: ‘Al-lah, Al-laaah! Al-lah!’
He looked up at the white dome for a moment.
He went down to the sea, and the shadow followed him. A low stone wall ran along the sea’s edge and he put his right foot up on it. The waves were coming in violently; now and then water crashed against the wall, and thick white foam rose up into the air and spread out, like a peacock’s tail emerging from the sea. Ratna turned around.
‘What choice do I have? If I don’t sell those boys the pills, how will I marry off my daughters?’
The boy, avoiding his gaze, stared at the ground and shifted his weight uncomfortably.
The two of them caught the number 5 bus and took it all the way into the heart of the city, descending near Angel Talkies. The boy carried the wooden stool, and Ratna searched up and down the main road, until he located a large billboard of a husband and a wife standing together in wedding clothes:
HAPPY LIFE CLINIC
CONSULTING SPECIALIST: DOCTOR M. V. KAMATH
MBBS (MYSORE), B.MEC. (ALLAHABAD), DBBS
(MYSORE), M.CH. (CALCUTTA), G.COM. (VARANASI).
SATISFACTION GUARANTEED
‘You see those letters after his name?’ Ratna whispered into the boy’s ear. ‘He’s a real doctor. He’ll save you.’
In the waiting room, a half-dozen lean, nervous men sat on black chairs, and in a corner one married couple. Ratna and the boy sat down between the single men and the couple. Ratna looked curiously at the men. These were the same ones who came to him – older, sadder versions; men who had been trying to shake off venereal disease for years, who had thrown bottle after bottle of white pills at it, to find no improvement – who were now at the end of a long journey of despair, a journey that led from his booth at the Dargah, through a long trail of other hucksters, to this doctor’s clinic, where they would be told at last the truth.