Arzee the Dwarf Read online

  ‘So it’s come to this,’ he mused, and his compacted body seemed to pulse with these stirrings. ‘It’s not the best result, but it’s something, and something’s better than nothing. Ha – that’s what everybody always told me to believe, that something’s better than nothing. They told me to be thankful that I wasn’t blind, or orphaned, or jobless – that my only burden was to be small. They couldn’t understand what this being small was like – it was only two words to them. But enough of crumbs! On the move! This sky’s so low, I feel I could touch it with a jump. And even if I can’t, I’m still going to be able to reach it in a little while, because now the room in the sky’s all mine. I’ll drag down the body-proud like beasts, like cattle, and leap right above them like a shooting star!’ He raised his arms towards the vastness above, and felt all his life’s tribulations redeemed by this moment. ‘Make way, all, because I’m coming! And I’ll keep talking to myself, I’ll keep the words coming. How hot these words! Today I am made anew.’

  Exultant, he felt pity for the friends he had just left behind, because their lives were so small and narrow, and their humdrum world had none of the peaks and troughs of his. They lived in a middle zone, and never knew what it was to really feel something. And from his friends, his mind moved now to his mother – his old mother, who like all mothers still thought of him as a child, and worried that he was suffering if even so much as a fly came to rest on his arm. How pleased Mother would be to hear this news! Her happiness would top his own, and crown it. And, roused, he began to think of the wife who was coming for him, the girl with hips, breasts, and long hair, bangles and earrings, who would change his life from the moment she set foot inside his little home. His brother Mobin would have to move out of the room they shared between them, and in would come his wife – that certainly was a great bargain! Arzee laughed aloud when he imagined Mobin’s frame, long as his own was short, stretched out on the drawing-room sofa, his feet sticking out resentfully, while he, Arzee, took his pleasure inside. Food cooked in a different way – he was tired of the work of his mother’s free and sloppy hand. A new kind of talk at home – he was bored of the same half-dead conversations about Mother’s medicines and the quality of the vegetables in the market. And a body coming to rest next to his at night, and then all the lights off, and someone close, soft, breathing up and down, waiting to be touched, in all that darkness and silence, by walking fingers. He’d take it! He thought of the five thousand that was the margin between the head projectionist’s salary and his own, and all the little satisfactions that were now in his power: beads and necklaces for his mother, and bangles and trinkets for his wife, and something for Mobin, and peppermints and candied cherries, white shirts from the export-reject shops, a belt with a dragon buckle, lottery tickets, crates of mangoes in summer, fat fish, plump chickens, perfume and deodorant spraying away! It seemed to him that the whole world was available for sale in chunks of five thousand. And he thought of the Noor, and the many beautiful women, his friends, lined up waiting on the first floor to congratulate him and to declare that, from this day on, they were all his. And his mind kept wheeling, whirling, and sometimes he thought some thoughts and sometimes it was the thoughts that seemed to think him.

  He passed the grey building which was his home – he could hear the television blaring all the way up from the second floor, because Mother listened to all her soaps on full volume – and then the empty school, its blue gate being locked by the watchman. Instead of going on straight, he turned into a passage between two buildings, so narrow it was almost invisible. It was a kind of wasteland where everyone threw rubbish which no one then cleared. A broken toilet seat was lying here, and a red plastic chair with three legs. The ground was covered with a squelchy slop of plastic bags, vegetable peelings, and eggshells. Long grasses had sprouted up near the walls, carrying bits and pieces of garbage within their limbs like diseased flowers. Little frogs the same colour as the muck were hopping from one spot to another with springy leaps, and becoming invisible once again as soon as they landed. Arzee’s shoes sank into the wet earth, and when he looked back to see if anyone had seen him enter, he could only see his footprints following him all the way in. He arrived now at a low stone wall, on the other side of which thin whispering sounds could be heard. He hitched up his trousers, hoisted himself up onto the wall using the crevices as footholds, and arrived at the top. He looked down into the silky waters.

  Yes, there was a nasty stench here, but also a lovely still and calm. No one bothered to come out here, and all the pleasures of the place were just for him. As if to mark his arrival, a milky sun had come out over his head, and his reflection in the sewer was backlit, as if there was a halo around him. He studied himself closely, and saw what he already knew: that his forehead was high, his hair wavy and thick, his lips full and pink, his black eyes somewhat crabby and disconsolate. He was good-looking – there was no doubt about that. But what of it? Looks weren’t just about shape and colour, but also about size. Even in his reflection there was something irredeemably odd and stunted about him, like a thought that had come out all wrong in the speaking. The acrid whiff of the sewer was so strong that it felt as if his nostrils were burning. But even so, fish or other forms of life – algae, perhaps, or microbes – seemed to inhabit it, making the surface bubble in little spasms. There was a kind of peace to be had in watching the water go by. Arzee thought of that lost one, that past one, whose current had fallen away from his, and how she’d missed this day in his life. She’d gone, but he’d carried on, and learnt to be strong, and now he was all right, only he thought of her sometimes. He spat into the water, as if expelling the thought.

  How strange! It seemed to Arzee that somebody was calling out his name: ‘Arzee!’ ‘AR-zee!’ ‘AR-ZEE!’ In fact, what with all the echoes of this bounded retreat, it seemed as if the voice was coming out at him from the inky deeps below. Arzee looked around, disoriented. Perhaps it was a trick of his brain: his brain did sometimes play games with him. He sometimes heard the sound of bells or the clopping of hoofs when he was walking home late at night, or else his father’s terrible cry at that moment when his life was pounded out of his body and everything came to an end.

  But somebody was calling out his name. And Arzee recognized that voice – he’d been trying to avoid the person whose voice it was! He turned slowly, dreading the sight. A familiar gaunt figure was advancing up the alley towards him, hungry as a hound dog and just as alarming to look at. Arzee trembled. What an idiot he was! At the exact moment when he was being hunted for, he had to be standing here in a place cordoned off on three sides, his figure sticking out halfway into the sky! He darted left and right like a bird, but his agitation was useless.

  The figure advanced further and, looking up at Arzee, said in a hoarse voice:

  ‘Got you at last, you little bastard! Don’t think you can hide too long from Deepak! Even when you hide, it’s actually Deepak who’s giving you permission to hide, waiting for you to get your act together. Keep hiding and skulking like this, and he sniffs you out and comes over to collect, and then either you pay, or else you really pay. Now come, my little birdie. Get down from your perch and tell me: where’s my money?’

  THREE

  Caught by Deepak

  One day a man – a friend of Arzee – wakes up in the morning, puts on his clothes, eats breakfast, and goes to work as usual.

  He goes to work, but it’s the day of a big cricket match, India vs. Australia, and so nobody is paying any attention to work – the only thing they’re interested in is the score. During a drinks break, the man heads out for a smoke, and he sees many others streaming in and out of a building down the road. He knows what pulls them there, and he’d like to explore that matter too, but all this time he has resisted. But what is he resisting for? Who is rewarding him for resisting? Abruptly a wave of curiosity floods the shore of his natural caution. And so today he heads in after them.

  And there, in a quiet room with the television se
t tuned in to the cricket and five men busy behind tables, making entries in ledgers and licking their fingers as they count notes, the man looks around nervously. Nobody comes here just to look – they come to play, and till you play, you’re a nobody here. And so, drawing upon a lifetime of thinking about bats and balls, swing and spin, pitches and field placements, the man predicts the probable pattern of play and places a punt on a combination of A and B and C. And with a little chit in his pocket that confirms that today, for the first time, he has played, back he goes, into the steady and the untipped world.

  Back he goes, and in the boss’s room everybody has gathered around the sputtering television to cheer and curse the players, and he keeps quiet, all he does is wait and watch, and shortly afterwards, as C follows B, itself hot upon the heels of A, like a present from the heavens with his name marked on it, he jumps up with a happy cry and rushes off to collect his takings. Victory! He’s beaten the field, quadrupled his money in one shot, and he feels himself brimming over with a swiftness, a sharpness, he has not felt for very long. Money – the look of it, the smell of it!

  And suddenly it is as if a window has opened on the narrow walled corridor of this man’s existence. To play guessing games with probability and chance, and divine a thing before it happens, to import a challenge into a life yawning and stretching its limbs with dullness, all this warms the blood in his veins. The feeling grows and grows, it possesses him, and a few days later he is back in the same room with an envelope stowed inside his shirt, and this time he puts five big ones down on the table. And they register his bet, and also tell him they’re running a special festival scheme. Would he like the same amount on credit to add on to this bet or another one?

  Double the stakes? An alarm bell begins to jangle now in the man’s brain and he knows that this is getting out of hand, but like a child drawn towards candy he agrees and puts his signature on it, persuading himself that great deeds are never achieved without daring. He goes back to work, this friend of Arzee, and as he scuttles around his room, the crackle of the transistor set upon the window sill and the beating of his heart make him feel he’s right there on the playing field in Melbourne. And everything’s going beautifully: Tendulkar’s already eighty-seven not out, and Lee’s been tonked for sixty in eight overs – he can go play the guitar if he likes.

  But at that very moment, as his dreams begin to take on a worldly shape and colour, a roar gushes out from the transistor, and all is overturned. The unthinkable has happened – Tendulkar is out! And that’s all right for Tendulkar, his next chance will come soon, and he gets his paycheck whether he scores a hundred or makes a duck. But it’s the inexperienced, the hopeful, the trusting, the straitened gambler back in Bombay who’s been dealt a crushing blow. He’s in debt bigtime – the scales are pulled from his eyes about what a fool he’s been. Oh Sachin!

  What’s the man to do now? Is there a way to cut his losses? The stricken man paces up and down in his room, thinking, and at last he comes to a conclusion. There’s no point worrying about the five big ones that he put down on the table, because those he’s lost for sure. But what of the five he’d wagered on credit? The least the syndicate can do, and they’re making pots of money anyway, is write off that extra money – money which never existed anyway except as an entry in a ledger. So that’s what he tells them when they call him the next day to collect. But no – the wretches absolutely want the five grand he owes them! He pleads and whines, and they say all right, he can take a bit of time over it, but he’s got to pay. But as they haven’t done the honourable thing by him, he doesn’t see why he shouldn’t hold out either for as long as he can. I can’t pay today – that’s his line when they call him. Tomorrow perhaps, but not today.

  The funny thing was that whenever Arzee told people this story as if the protagonist was someone he knew, they all agreed that the man had a rough time of it, and their sympathies were soothing. But as soon as he revealed the man was he himself, Arzee, they immediately changed their stance, and said it was his fault for trying to leap so far ahead of his size and position. This revealed an important aspect of human nature, which was that people could hold one opinion in the general case and completely the opposite one in the particular, and never spend a moment worrying over the inconsistency. If they could make a scapegoat of someone, they did, and the weaker the person, the harsher their interpretation. But nothing could persuade Arzee that he didn’t have a genuine grievance, another one to add to the many he had already lodged against the world in the complaint book of his heart, and so he kept the excuses and the dodges going.

  And from that time onwards the syndicate had set Deepak on the case, and for the last six months Deepak had been turning up randomly in his life like a bad dream, sometimes twice in a week, sometimes not for four Fridays in a row. When he hadn’t seen Deepak in a while Arzee thought the syndicate had given up on him, and he’d broken free. But it was never long before his hopes were dashed, and the longer he hedged, the more dire were Deepak’s threats.

  Could they really hurt him? Arzee wasn’t sure, but standing here now with Deepak on one side and a dead end on the other it looked like he was going to find out.

  Deepak was about thirty, and always unshaven. He wore loose faded shirts just like Arzee, tight blue jeans that clung to his scraggy legs, and sneakers, their long laces tied around his ankles. His eyes were vacant and moody, and his mouth hung open most of the time, as if his nose wasn’t working properly and needed a backup. Deepak was always stoned, or somewhere on the way to getting there, and clearly not good for very much. But apparently he was the brother of someone important, and the syndicate had probably figured that they could at least get him to chase the smaller fish on their list.

  Deepak’s one achievement in life was to have practised and perfected a demeanour of unsettling irony. He had a way of saying the most sinister things in the most amiable way, as if he was asking after your health when he was really threatening to break your bones. It wasn’t easy to tell what he was thinking – it was as if Deepak himself didn’t know till the last moment. Perhaps he’d learnt this air from watching gangsters in the movies – he was the sort of person who wanted to be a gangster exactly so. All Arzee knew was that Deepak greatly enjoyed torturing him. It was the same relationship between them as that of the class bully and the smallest front-bencher. It seemed to Arzee that if and when he did pay up, his own relief, soured by annoyance at having conceded defeat, would be paralleled exactly by Deepak’s satisfaction and simultaneous regret at the end of their relationship, their history of meetings and negotiations that he was now resuming with such relish.

  ‘Look left,’ said Deepak, advancing, slightly crouched as if to pounce. ‘There’s nowhere for you to go. Look right. There’s no way there either. Behind you there’s the water, and in front of you there’s Deepak. There’s no way up, unless you’ve sprouted a pair of wings under that shirt of yours. And there’s no way down – that’s only for when you go to your grave. Though that’s not too far away, looking at how you’ve been behaving.’

  Deepak was wrong on this last point! It wasn’t a given that Arzee would be buried when he died – he might just be cremated, as his father was a Hindu. But there was nothing to be gained by pointing this out to Deepak – this wasn’t the time for that.

  He gave a nervous laugh and said, ‘How…how are you, Deepakbhai?’

  ‘How how?’ echoed Deepak with an unpleasant laugh. ‘How how? Are we playing doggy dog today? How how?’

  ‘Ha ha ha – good joke, Deepakbhai.’

  ‘You won’t be laughing for much longer, midget man! Do you realize how long I’ve been tailing you, begging you for what’s mine? I’ve spent three or four hundred just chasing you as you hop and skip about town, hiding behind schoolchildren and postboxes. Today’s the day we bring this story to an end. Come, where’s my money?’

  ‘I…I had it last week, Deepakbhai. I would’ve gone to the office and paid up, but you’d said I was to pa
y up to you as soon as I had the money.’

  ‘I never knew you were so obedient. Okay, we’ll excuse you for that. I’ve come now. Where is it?’

  ‘That’s the thing – I’ve spent it now, Deepakbhai! It was an urgent medical expense. My uncle in Maheshwar had to have heart surgery, and I had to send the money, else they wouldn’t have gone ahead, and then we’d have lost him. We’d have lost my uncle, Deepakbhai!’

  ‘You’re a liar!’

  ‘I’m telling the truth, Deepakbhai, I swear to God I am!’

  ‘I swear to God!’ repeated Deepak with a hiss.

  He stood there for a moment, rubbing the blade of his palm against the side of his head as if considering his options. And then he scraped his shoe against the ground and leapt up at Arzee, catching him completely by surprise.

  Arzee started, and nearly fell backwards into the sewer, but with a desperate flailing of his arms he managed to right himself. Then his body sprang off the wall as if pushed violently by someone behind him, and he leapt right over Deepak and landed on all fours in the mud. He scrambled up, and was about to go flying away when he found himself being yanked back by his shirttail. Deepak’s other hand came squirrelling under his shirt and gripped him firmly by his belt, his knuckles poking painfully into Arzee’s back. Cussing and growling, Deepak cuffed Arzee on the head several times.