‘Okay, okay, I’ll do it,’ I surrendered. ‘It’s going to hurt. I haven’t got any anaesthetic.’
‘Hurt!’ Johnny boomed happily. ‘Pain is no problem, Lin. Good you have pains, Ameer, you chutia. Pains in your brains, you should be having.’
I sat Ameer down on my bed, covering his shoulders with another blanket. Pulling the kerosene stove from my kitchen box, I pumped it up, primed it, and set a pot of water on it to boil. Johnny hurried off to ask someone to make hot, sweet tea. I washed my face and hands hurriedly, in the dark, at the open bathroom-space beside my hut. When the water boiled, I put a little into a dish, and threw two needles into the pot to sterilise them with further boiling. Using antiseptic and warm soapy water, I washed the wound and then dried it off with clean gauze. I bound the arm tightly with gauze, leaving it in place for ten minutes to press the wound together, in the hope that it would make the stitching easier.
Ameer drank two large mugs of sweet tea at my insistence, as a counter to the symptoms of shock that had begun to show. He was afraid, but he was calm. He trusted me. He couldn’t know that I’d only done the procedure once before, and under ironically similar circumstances. A man had been stabbed during a prison fight. The problem, between the two antagonists, whatever it was, had been resolved in the violent encounter, and the matter was finished so far as they were concerned. But if the stabbed man had reported to the prison infirmary for treatment, the authorities would’ve placed him in an isolation unit for prisoners on protection. For some men, child molesters and informers particularly, there was no alternative to being placed on protection because they wouldn’t otherwise have survived. For others, men placed there against their will, the protection unit was a curse: the curse of suspicion, slanders, and the company of men they despised. The stabbed man had come to me. I’d stitched his wound closed with a leatherwork needle and embroidery thread. The wound healed, but it left an ugly, rippling scar. The memory of it never left me, and I wasn’t confident about the attempt to stitch Ameer’s arm. The sheepish, trusting smile that the young man offered me was no help. People always hurt us with their trust, Karla said to me once. The surest way to hurt someone you like, is to put all your trust in him.
I drank tea, smoked a cigarette, and then set to work. Johnny stood in the doorway, ineffectually scolding several curious neighbours and their children away from the door. The suture needle was curved and very fine. I supposed that it should’ve been used with some kind of pliers. I had none in my kit. One of the boys had borrowed them to fix a sewing machine. I had to push the needle into the skin, and pull it through with my fingers. It was awkward and slippery, and the first few cross-shaped stitches were messy. Ameer winced and grimaced inventively, but he didn’t cry out. By the fifth and sixth stitches I’d developed a technique, and the ugliness of the work, if not the pain involved, had diminished.
Human skin is tougher and more resilient than it looks. It’s also relatively simple to stitch, and the thread can be pulled quite tightly without tearing the tissue. But the needle, no matter how fine or sharp, is still a foreign object and, for those of us who aren’t inured to such work through frequent repetition, there’s a psychological penalty that must be paid each time we drive that alien thing into another being’s flesh. I began to sweat heavily despite the cool night. It was a measure of the distress involved that Ameer became brighter as the work progressed, while I grew more tense and fatigued.
‘You should’ve insisted that he go to a hospital!’ I snapped at Johnny Cigar. ‘This is ridiculous!’
‘You’re doing very excellent sewing, Lin,’ he countered. ‘You could make up a very fine shirt, with stitches like that.’
‘It’s not as good as it should be. He’ll have a big scar. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing here.’
‘Are you having trouble with toilet, Lin?’
‘What?’
‘Are you not going to toilet? Are you having it hard motions?’
‘For Chrissakes, Johnny! What are you babbling about?’
‘Your bad temper, Lin. This is not your usual behaviour. Maybe it is a problem with hard motions, I think so?’
‘No,’ I groaned.
‘Ah, then it is loose motions you’re having, I think.’
‘He had it loose motions for three days last month,’ one of my neighbours chipped in from the open doorway. ‘My husband told me that Linbaba was going three-three-four times to toilet every day then, and again three-three-four times every night. The whole street was talking.’
‘Oh yes, I remember,’ another neighbour recalled. ‘Such pain he had! What faces he pulled when he was at toilet, yaar. Like he was making a baby. And it was a very runny, loose motion. Like water, it was, and it came out so fast, like when they explode the cannons on Independence Day. Dadung! Like that, it was! I recommended the drinking of chandu-chai that time, and his motions became harder, and a very good colour again.’
‘A good idea,’ Johnny muttered appreciatively. ‘Go and get it some chandu-chai for Linbaba’s loose motions.’
‘No!’ I moaned. ‘I don’t have loose motions. I don’t have hard motions. I haven’t had a chance to have any motions at all yet. I’m only half awake, for God’s sake! Oh, what’s the use? There, it’s finished. You’ll be okay, Ameer, I think. But you should have a tetanus injection.’
‘No need, Linbaba. I had it injections before three months, after the last fighting.’
I cleaned the wound once more and dusted it with antibiotic powder. Covering the twenty-six stitches with a loose bandage, I warned him not to get it wet, and instructed him to come back within two days to have it checked. He tried to pay me, but I refused the money. No-one paid for the treatment I dispensed. Still, it wasn’t principle that made me refuse. The truth was that I felt curiously, inexplicably angry—at Ameer, at Johnny, at myself—and I ordered him away curtly. He touched my feet, and backed out of the hut, collecting a parting slap on the head from Johnny Cigar.
I was about to clean up the mess in my hut when Prabaker rushed inside, grasped at my shirt, and tried to drag me out through the door.
‘So good that you are not sleeping, Linbaba,’ he gasped breathlessly. ‘We can save the time of waking you up. You must come now with me! Hurry, please!’
‘For God’s sake, what is it now?’ I grumbled. ‘Let go of me, Prabu. I’ve got to clean up this mess.’
‘No time for mess, baba. You come now, please. No problem!’
‘Yes problem!’ I contradicted him. ‘I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what the hell is going on. That’s it, Prabu. That’s final. No problem.’
‘You absolutely must come, Lin,’ he insisted, dragging at my shirt. ‘Your friend is in the jail. You must help!’
We abandoned the hut and rushed out through the narrow, shadow-clogged lanes of the sleeping slum. On the main street outside the President Hotel we caught a cab, and swept along the clean, silent streets past the Parsee Colony, Sassoon Dock, and the Colaba Market. The cab stopped outside the Colaba police station, directly across the road from Leopold’s. The bar was closed, of course, with the wide metal shutters rolled down to the pavement. It seemed preternaturally quiet: the haunted stillness of a popular bar, closed for business.
Prabaker and I passed the gates of the police station and entered the compound. My heart was beating fast, but I looked outwardly calm. All the cops in the station spoke Marathi—it was a requirement of their employment. I knew that if they had no special reason to suspect or challenge me, my proficiency with the Marathi language would please them as much as it surprised them. It would make me popular with them, and that small celebrity would protect me. Still, it was a journey behind enemy lines, and in my mind I pushed the locked, heavy box of fear all the way to the back of the attic.
Prabaker spoke quietly to a havaldar, or police constable, at the foot of a long flight of metal stairs. The man nodded, and stepped to the side. Prabaker wagged his head, and I followed him up the ste
el steps to a landing, with a heavy door, on the first floor. A face appeared at the grille set into the door. Large brown eyes stared left and right, and then the door opened for us. We stepped into an antechamber that contained a desk, a small metal chair, and a bamboo cot. The guard who opened the door was the watchman on duty that night. He spoke briefly with Prabaker and then glared at me. He was a tall man with a prominent paunch and a large, expressively bristly moustache, tinged with grey. There was a metal gate made from hinged, concertina-style lattices behind him. Beyond the gate, the faces of a dozen prisoners watched us with intense interest. The guard turned his broad back on them, and held out his hand.
‘He wants you to —’ Prabaker began.
‘I know,’ I stopped him, fishing into the pocket of my jeans. ‘He wants baksheesh. How much?’
‘Fifty rupees,’ Prabaker grinned, looking up with his biggest smile into the face of the tall officer.
I handed over a fifty-rupee note, and the watchman palmed it. He turned his back to me and approached the metal gate. We followed him. More men had gathered there, all wide awake and chattering, despite the late hour. The watchman stared at them, one by one, until all were silent. Then he called me forward. When I faced the bars of the steel gate, the crowd of men parted and two fantastic figures pushed their way to the front. They were the bear-handlers, the blue-skinned men who’d brought Kano the bear to my slum at Abdullah’s request. They reached the gate and grasped at the bars, chattering at me so quickly and urgently that I only caught every fourth or fifth word.
‘What’s going on, Prabu?’ I asked, completely mystified. When Prabaker told me that my friend was in jail, I’d assumed that he’d meant Abdullah. I was expecting to find Abdullah behind the bars, and I moved left and right, trying to see beyond the bear-handlers and the other men crowding at the gate.
‘These are your friends, isn’t it?’ Prabaker asked. ‘Don’t you remember, Lin? They came with Kano to have your bear hugs.’
‘Yes, sure, I remember them. Did you bring me to see them?’
Prabaker blinked at me, and then turned quickly to check the expressions on the faces of the watchman and the bear-handlers.
‘Yes, Lin,’ he said quietly. ‘These men were asking you to come. Do you … do you want to leave?’
‘No, no. I just … never mind. What do they want? I can’t make out what they’re saying.’
Prabaker asked them to explain what they wanted, and the two blue-skinned men shouted their story, clutching at the lattices of the gate as if they were the boards of a raft on the open sea.
‘They say they tell it, that they are staying near to the Navy Nagar, and they found there some other fellows, who also are bear handling fellows, and having it one very sad and skinny bear,’ Prabaker explained, urging the men to be calm and to speak more slowly. ‘They say that these others were not treating their bear with respect. They were beating that bear with a whip, and that bear was crying, with pains all over him.’
The bear-handlers spoke in a rush of words that kept Prabaker silent, listening and nodding, with his mouth open to speak. Other prisoners approached the gate to listen. The corridor beyond the gate had long windows on one side covered by a metal grille. On the other side of the crowded prison corridor there were several rooms. Men streamed from those rooms, swelling the throng at the gate to a hundred or more prisoners, all of them listening with fascination to the bear-handler’s story.
‘So hard, those bad fellows were beating their poor bear,’ Prabaker translated. And even when it cried, those fellows didn’t stop beating it, that bear. And, you know, it was a girl bear!’
The men at the gate reacted with outraged, angry shouts and sympathetic cries.
‘Our fellows here, they were very upset about the others, beating that other bear. So, they went up to those others, and they told them they must not be beating any bear. But they were very bad and angry, those fellows. There was a lot of shouting, and pushing, and bad language. One of those fellows, he called our fellows the sisterfuckers. Our fellows, they called the other ones the arse-holes. The bad ones, they called our fellows motherfucking bastards. Our fellows, they called them brotherfuckers. The other ones, they said a lot more about something-and-anything-fucking. Our fellows, they said back a lot about —’
‘Get to the point, Prabu.’
‘Yes, Lin,’ he said, listening intently. There was a lengthy pause.
‘Well?’ I demanded.
‘Still a lot of bad language, Lin,’ he replied, shrugging helplessly. ‘But some of it, I have to say, is very, very fine, if you want to hear it?’
‘No!’
‘Okay’ he said, at last, ‘at the end, somebody called it the police to come. Then there was a big fight.’
He paused again, listening to the next instalment of the story. I turned to look at the watchman, and saw that he was as deeply engrossed in the unfolding saga as the prisoners were. He chewed paan as he listened, his thorn-bush of a moustache twitching up and down, and unconsciously emphasising his interest. A roar of approval for something in the story went up from the attentive prisoners, and the watchman was united with them in the appreciative shout.
‘At first, the other fellows were winning that big fight. So much fighting there was, Lin, like in Mahabharata. Those bad fellows had a few friends, who all made a contribution of punches and kicking and slapping with slippers. Then, Kano the bear, he got upset. Just before the police arrived, Kano the bear got into that fight, to help his bear-handling fellows. He stopped that fight too fast. He was knocking those other fellows right, and left also. That Kano is a very good fighting bear. He beat those bad fellows, and all their friends, and gave them a solid pasting!’
‘And then the blue guys got arrested,’ I concluded for him.
‘Sad to say it, yes. Arrested, they were, for the charge of Breaking the Peaces.’
‘Okay. Let’s talk.’
Prabaker, the watchman, and I took two steps away from the gate and stood at the bare metal desk. Over my shoulder, I could see that the men at the gate were straining to hear our conversation.
‘What’s the Hindi word for bail, Prabu? Find out if we can bail the guys out of jail.’
Prabaker asked, but the watchman shook his head, and told us that it was out of the question.
‘Is it possible for me to pay the fine?’ I asked in Marathi, using the commonly accepted euphemism for a police bribe.
The watchman smiled, and shook his head. A policeman was hurt in the scuffle, he explained, and the matter was out of his hands.
Shrugging my helplessness, I turned back to the gate and told the men that I couldn’t bail or bribe them out of the jail. They rattled away at me in such a swift and garbled Hindi that I couldn’t understand them.
‘No, Lin!’ Prabaker announced, beaming a smile at me. ‘They don’t worry for themselves. They worry for Kano! He is arrested also, that bear. They are very worried for their bear. That is what they want you to help them for!’
‘The bear is arrested?’ I asked the watchman, in Marathi.
‘Ji, ha!’ he replied, a flourish of pride rippling in his wild moustache. Sir, yes! ‘The bear is in custody downstairs!’
I looked at Prabaker, and he shrugged.
‘Maybe we should see it that bear?’ he suggested.
‘I think we should see it that bear!’ I replied.
We took the steel steps down to the ground-floor level, and were directed to a row of cells directly beneath the rooms we’d seen upstairs. A ground-level watchman opened one of the rooms, and we leaned inside to see Kano the bear sitting in the middle of a dark and empty cell. It was a large room, with a keyhole toilet in the floor in one corner. The huge muzzled bear was chained at his neck and on his paws, and the chains passed through a metal grille at one of the windows. He sat with his broad back against a wall, and his lower legs splayed out in front of him. His expression—and I have no other way of describing the set of his features, other than
as an expression—was disconsolate and profoundly distressed. He let out a long, heart-wrenching sigh, even as we watched him.
Prabaker was standing a little behind me. I turned to ask him a question, and found that he was crying, his face contorted with miserable sobbing. Before I could speak, he moved past me toward the bear, evading the outstretched hand of the watchman. He reached Kano, with his arms before him in a wide embrace, and pressed himself to the creature, resting his head against Kano’s and stroking the shaggy fur with murmurs of tenderness. I exchanged glances with the ground-level watchman. The man raised his eyebrows, and wagged his head from side to side energetically. He was clearly impressed.
‘I did that first, you know,’ I found myself saying, in Marathi. ‘A few weeks ago. I hugged that bear first.’
The watchman wrinkled his lips in a pitying and contemptuous sneer.
‘Of course you did,’ he mocked. Absolutely, you did.’
‘Prabaker!’ I called out. ‘Can we get on with this?’
He pulled himself away from the bear and approached me, wiping tears from his eyes with the backs of his hands as he walked. His wretchedness was so complete that I was moved to put my arm around him to comfort him.
‘I hope you are not minding, Lin,’ he cautioned. ‘I smell quite much like bears.’
‘It’s okay,’ I answered him softly. ‘It’s okay. Let’s see what we can do.’