Now BUNK.
And get these horses out.
I think it’s mean to take this girl and empty out her everything.
Get up!!!
I’m going out. You can do what you want. You’ll get such a thrashing.
Most shameful you are to stand around saying you are Tilottama Ipe when you are not. I won’t tell you anything about myself or yourself either.
I’m just going to stand here and say, “Do this and do that.” And you’ll jolly well do it. No salary for you from tomorrow. Have you written that? I’ll fine you every time.
Go and tell everybody that “This is my mother, Ms Maryam Ipe, and she’s one hundred and fifty years old.”
Do they have medicine for all the horses?
Have you noticed how people look like horses when they yawn?
Look after your teeth viciously and don’t let anyone take them out.
Sometimes they offer you a discount and that’s stupid.
Check everything and let’s go.
And then there’s Hannah. I owe her money and I have to jump over all the children with catheters.
There are so many catheters and everybody was rather pleased that Mrs. Ipe was getting her onions. But she’s been so good this child. You didn’t remove my catheter. She did. She’s a proper Paraya. You’ve forgotten how to be one.
Somebody came up and then somebody and somebody.
The shock of it all is that YOU are giving your rules to everybody. But I expect people to obey me.
But I AM in charge. It is very difficult to get out of charge as you will no doubt find. Annamma is the quietest creature in our community.
Who is the Annamma who plays Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock Holmes? She does both with grace. She was my head teacher who died so beautifully. She went home and brought me a cough.
Hello Doctor this is my daughter who is homeschooled. She’s pretty nasty. She was awful today at the races. But I was pretty awful too. We gave everybody a kicking.
I spent my life doing ridiculous things. I produced a baby. Her.
And that boy with dirty clothes and a dirty catheter and I sat for hours in the dirty river.
I feel I am surrounded by eunuchs. Am I?
Music…what’s wrong with it? I just can’t remember any more.
Listen to that…it’s oxygen. Bubbling to its death. I am running out of oxygen. But I don’t care whether I’m running out or running in.
I want to sleep. I’d love to die. Wrap my feet in warm water.
I’d like to go to sleep. I’m not asking for permission.
It’s like hpsf hpsf hpsf…CUK! CUK! CUK!
This is my engine.
When you die you can hook on to a cloud and we can have all your information. Then they give you your bill.
WHERE’S MY MONEY?
The arterial port is Jesus Christ’s screw. It doesn’t hurt.
I’m just a wee mannequin.
I like my bum. I don’t know why Dr. Verghese wants to cut it out of the picture.
The frozen flowers never go away. They hang around somewhere all the time. I think we need to talk about vases.
Did you hear the sound of the white flower?
What Naga found was just a sampling. The compiled notes, if they hadn’t gone out with the hospital waste, would have made up several volumes.
ONE MORNING, after a week of non-stop stenography, Tilo, worn out, was standing by her mother’s bedside, leaning her arms on the back of the chair she usually sat in. It was the busiest time of the day in the ICU, doctors were on their rounds, the nurses and attendants were busy, the ward was being cleaned. Maryam Ipe was having a particularly vile morning. Her face was flushed and her eyes had a feverish glitter. She had pulled up her hospital gown and lay in her nappy, her legs ramrod straight and splayed apart. When she shouted, her voice was deep enough to be a man’s.
“Tell the Parayas that it’s time to clean my shit!”
Tilo’s blood left the highway and steamed along mad forest paths. Without warning, the chair she had been leaning on picked itself up and smashed itself down. The sound of splintering wood echoed through the ward. Needles jumped out of veins. Medicine bottles rattled in their trays. Weak hearts missed a beat. Tilo watched the sound travel through her mother’s body, from her feet upwards, like a shroud being pulled over a corpse.
She had no idea how long she continued to stand there or who took her to Dr. Verghese’s office.
—
Dr. Jacob Verghese, Head of the Department of Critical Care, had, until four years ago, been a medic with the US Army. He was second-in-command of critical care in his unit in the Kuwait war and had returned to Kerala when his tenure ended. Even though he had lived most of his life abroad, his speech did not bear even a trace of an American accent, which was remarkable, because in Kerala people joked that applying for a US visa was enough for people to affect an American accent. Nothing about Dr. Verghese suggested that he was anything other than an absolutely local Syrian Christian who had lived in Kerala all his life. He smiled at Tilo kindly and ordered coffee. He came from the same town as Maryam Ipe and was probably well aware of all the old rumors and whispers. The air conditioning in his office was being serviced and the clatter of that took away the awkwardness in the room. Tilo watched the mechanic carefully, as though her life depended on it. Men and women in green tunics and trousers, wearing surgical masks, floated around soundlessly in the corridor in operation-theater slippers. Some of them had blood on their surgeons’ gloves. Dr. Verghese looked at Tilo over his reading glasses, studying her as though he was trying to make a diagnosis. Perhaps he was. In a while he reached across the table and took her hand in his. He could not have known that he was trying to comfort a building that had been struck by lightning. There wasn’t much left of it to comfort. After his coffee had been drunk and hers left untouched, he suggested they go back to the ICU and that she apologize to her mother.
“Your mother is a remarkable woman. You must understand that it isn’t she who is uttering those ugly words.”
“Oh. Who is it, then?”
“Someone else. Her illness. Her blood. Her suffering. Our conditioning, our prejudices, our history…”
“So to whom will I be apologizing? To prejudice? Or to history?”
But she was already following him down the corridor, back to the ICU.
By the time they arrived her mother had slipped into a coma. She was beyond hearing, beyond history, beyond prejudice, beyond apology. Tilo curled up on the bed and put her face on her mother’s feet until they went cold. The broken chair watched over them like a melancholy angel. Tilo wondered how her mother had known what the chair would do. How could she have known?
Forget about the broken chairs, they’re always hanging around.
Maryam Ipe died early the next morning.
The Syrian Christian church would not forgive her her trespasses and flat out refused to bury her. So the funeral, attended mostly by schoolteachers and a few of her pupils’ parents, took place in the government crematorium. Tilo brought her mother’s ashes back to Delhi. She told Naga that she needed to think very carefully about what to do with them. She didn’t tell him much else. The pot containing the ashes sat on her worktable for as long as he could remember. Lately Naga noticed that it had disappeared. He was not sure whether Tilo had found an appropriate place to immerse the ashes (or scatter them, or bury them), or whether they had simply moved with her to her new home.
THE PRINCESS CAME UPON NAGA sitting on the floor looking through a fat medical file. She stood behind him and read the notes aloud over his shoulders.
“ ‘The arterial port is Jesus Christ’s screw’…‘Did you hear the sound of the white flower?’ What’s this rubbish you’re reading, jaan? Since when did flowers start making sounds?”
Naga remained sitting and said nothing for a long time. He appeared to be deep in thought. Then he stood up and cupped her beautiful face in his hands.
?
??I’m so sorry…”
“For what, jaan?”
“It’s not going to work…”
“What?”
“Us.”
“But she’s gone! She’s left you!”
“She has. She has, yes…But she’ll come back. She has to. She will.”
The Princess looked at Naga pityingly and moved on. She was soon married to the Chief Editor of a TV news channel. They made a handsome, happy couple and went on to have many healthy, happy children.
THE ROOMS TILO RENTED were on the second floor of a townhouse overlooking a government primary school full of relatively poor children and a Neem tree full of reasonably well-off parakeets. Every morning at assembly the children shouted out the whole of “Hum Hongey Kaamyaab”—the Hindi version of “We Shall Overcome.” She sang with them. On weekends and holidays she missed the children and the school assembly, so she sang the song to herself at exactly 7 a.m. On the days that she didn’t, she felt the morning was just the previous day extended, that a new day hadn’t dawned. On most mornings, anyone who put an ear to her door would have heard her.
No one put an ear to her door.
—
Miss Jebeen’s birthday and baptism ceremony marked Tilo’s fourth year and last night in the second-floor apartment. She wondered what she should do with the rest of the birthday cake. Perhaps the ants would invite their relatives in the neighborhood to partake of the feast and either finish it or remove every last crumb into storage.
The heat stood up and paced around the room. Traffic growled in the distance. City thunder.
No rain.
The spotted owlet flitted away to duck and bob and practice his good manners on some other woman through some other window.
When she noticed that the owl had left, Tilo felt unutterably sad. She knew she would soon be leaving too, and might never see him again. The owl was someone. She wasn’t sure who. Musa maybe. That was always how it was with Musa. Each time he left, after his brief, mysterious visits, in his peculiar disguises, looking like Mr. Nobody from District Nowhere, she knew she might never see him again. Usually it was he who disappeared and she who waited. This time it was her turn to disappear. She had no means of letting him know where she was. He did not use a mobile phone, and the only calls he made to her were on her landline, which would now go unanswered. She was overcome by the desire to communicate the uncertain nature of their farewell to the spotted owlet that night. She scribbled a line on a piece of paper and stuck it on the window, facing outwards for the owl to read:
Who can know from the word goodbye what kind of parting is in store for us.
She returned to her mattress, pleased with herself and the borrowed clarity of her communication. But then, in no time at all, she felt ashamed. Osip Mandelstam had had more serious things on his mind when he wrote that line. He was negotiating Stalin’s Gulag. He wasn’t talking to owls. She retrieved her note and once again returned to bed.
—
A few miles away from where she lay awake, three men had been crushed to death the previous night by a truck that had careened off the road. Perhaps the driver had fallen asleep. On TV they said that that summer homeless people had taken to sleeping on the edges of roads with heavy traffic. They had discovered that diesel exhaust fumes from passing trucks and buses were an effective mosquito repellent and protected them from the outbreak of dengue fever that had killed several hundred people in the city already.
She imagined the men: new immigrants to the city, stone-workers, come home to their pre-booked, pre-paid-for spot whose rent was calculated by calibrating the optimum density of exhaust fumes and dividing it by the acceptable density of mosquitoes. Precise algebra; not easily found in textbooks.
The men were tired from their day’s work on the building site, their eyelashes and lungs pale with stone-dust from cutting stone and laying floors in the multi-story shopping centers and housing estates springing up around the city like a fast-growing forest. They spread their soft, frayed gamchhas on the poky grass of the sloping embankment dotted with dogshit and stainless-steel sculptures—public art—sponsored by the Pamnani Group that was promoting cutting-edge artists who used stainless steel as a medium, in the hope that the cutting-edge artists would promote the steel industry. The sculptures looked like clusters of steel spermatozoa, or perhaps they were meant to be balloons. It wasn’t clear. Either way, they looked cheerful. The men lit a last beedi. Smoke rings curled into the night. The neon street lights made the grass look metal blue and the men look gray. There was teasing and some laughter, because two of them could blow smoke rings and the third couldn’t. He was bad at things, always the last to learn.
Sleep came to them, quick and easy, like money to millionaires.
—
If they hadn’t died of truck, they would have died of:
(a) Dengue fever
(b) The heat
(c) Beedi smoke
or
(d) Stone-dust
Or maybe not. Maybe they would have risen to become:
(a) Millionaires
(b) Supermodels
or
(c) Bureau chiefs
Did it matter that they were mashed into the grass they slept on? To whom did it matter? Did those to whom it mattered matter?
Dear Doctor,
We have been crushed. Is there a cure?
Regards,
Biru, Jairam, Ram Kishore
Tilo smiled and closed her eyes.
Careless motherfuckers. Who asked them to get in the way of the truck?
She wondered how to un-know certain things, certain specific things that she knew but did not wish to know. How to un-know, for example, that when people died of stone-dust, their lungs refused to be cremated. Even after the rest of their bodies had turned to ash, two lung-shaped slabs of stone remained behind, unburned. Her friend Dr. Azad Bhartiya, who lived on the pavement of Jantar Mantar, had told her about his older brother, Jiten Y. Kumar, who had worked in a granite quarry and died at the age of thirty-five. He described how he had had to break up his brother’s lungs with a crowbar on the funeral pyre to release his soul. He did it, he said, even though he was a communist and didn’t believe in souls.
He did it to please his mother.
He said his brother’s lungs glittered, because they were speckled with silica.
Dear Doctor,
Nothing, really. I just wanted to say hello. Actually—there is something. Imagine having to smash your brother’s lungs to please your mother. Would you call that normal human activity?
She wondered what an unreleased soul, a soul-shaped stone on a funeral pyre, might look like. Like a starfish maybe. Or a millipede. Or a dappled moth with a living body and stone wings—poor moth—betrayed, held down by the very things that were meant to help it to fly.
—
Miss Jebeen the Second stirred in her sleep.
Concentrate, the kidnapper told herself as she stroked the baby’s damp, sweaty forehead. Otherwise things could get completely out of hand. She had no idea why she of all people, who never wanted children, had picked up the baby and run. But now it was done. Her part in the story had been written. But not by her. By whom, then? Someone.
Dear Doctor,
If you like you can change every inch of me. I’m just a story.
Miss Jebeen was a good-natured baby and seemed to like the saltless soup and mashed vegetables that Tilo made for her. For a woman who had very little experience with children, Tilo was surprisingly easy with her and confident in the way she handled her. On the few occasions that Miss Jebeen cried, she was able to comfort her in no time at all. The best course of action, Tilo found (a feed being the exception), was to lay her down on the floor with the litter of five gun-colored puppies that Comrade Laali, a red-haired mongrel, had birthed on the landing outside her door five weeks ago. Both parties (the puppies and Miss Jebeen) seemed to have plenty to say to each other. Both mothers were great friends. So the get-togethers were u
sually a success. When everybody was tired, Tilo would return the puppies to their burlap sack on the landing, and give Comrade Laali a little bowl of milk and bread.
Earlier in the day, Tilo had just lit the candle on the cake and was waltzing the newly named Miss Jebeen around the room humming “Happy Birthday,” when Ankita, the ground-floor tenant, phoned. She said that a constable had come by that morning inquiring about her (Tilo) and asking her (Ankita) whether she knew anything about a new baby in the building. He was in a hurry and had left a newspaper with her in which the police had published a routine notice. Ankita sent it up with her little Adivasi child-slave. It said:
KIDNAPPING NOTICE DP/1146
NEW DELHI 110001
General Public is hereby informed that one unknown baby, s/o UNKNOWN, r/o UNKNOWN, without clothes was abandoned at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi. After Police was informed but before police-force arrived on the scene the said baby was kidnapped by an unknown person/persons. First Information Report has been registered under Sections 361, 362, 365, 366A, Sections 367 & 369. For all or any information please contact Station House Officer, Parliament Street Police Station, New Delhi. The description of the baby is as under:
Name: UNKNOWN, Father’s Name: UNKNOWN, Address: UNKNOWN, Age: UNKNOWN, Wearing: NO CLOTHES.
Ankita sounded superior and disapproving on the phone. But that was just her usual manner with Tilo. She tended to assume that somewhat smug, triumphant air of a woman-with-a-husband speaking to a woman-without-a-husband. It didn’t have anything to do with the baby. She did not know about Miss Jebeen. (Fortunately Garson Hobart had seen to it that the construction of his house was solid and the walls soundproof.) Nobody in the neighborhood did. Tilo had not taken her out. She hadn’t been out much herself, except for occasional, essential trips to the market when the baby was asleep. The shopkeepers might have wondered about the uncharacteristic purchases of baby food. But Tilo did not think the police would take the investigation that far.