Acid Read online

  It was an ordinary afternoon, simple and unsophisticated. In the kitchen Rita Mama prepared meat in ginger–garlic sauce, she said it was their Sunday special. But Andrews Papa didn’t eat his lunch, he seemed excessively agitated, he said he had to do something urgent and left. They saw him walking down the hillside, they heard him curse at God knows whom. After lunch Rita Mama went to sleep as usual on the floor mat in the entrance hall and Shaly found her playthings in a corner of the same hall. A little later, Shaly heard a din outside, some sort of commotion. She wanted to go out and see what was happening. ‘It’s probably some vendors honking or some crazy people,’ said Rita Mama, half asleep. Shaly was decisive, she was about to open the door when she heard a distinct shriek of pain. She looked at Rita Mama who was lying on the floor mat with her eyes tightly closed. She opened the door and heard a woman cry, the sound was now very clear but there was no one around. Shaly stepped out of the house and walked in the direction of the cry. She saw Mimi in the distance and was about to wave her hands and say ‘hi’, when she realized that Mimi was not alone, and not in good shape. She was being dragged by four or five men who were shouting obscenities and beating her hard. Shaly felt her head spin, she wanted to call Rita Mama. Just as she opened her mouth a massive hand pressed on it, stopping her words with such force that Shaly thought she was about to be strangled. Screaming with no audible sounds she turned her head and saw Rita Mama standing behind her. Rita Mama’s face looked pallid as if she were watching an apparition, she asked Shaly not to raise her voice or move. Shaly had heard her express her fear about this land as foreign and its people as savages. She thought she didn’t want to frighten her more.

  They were dragging Mimi to Andrews Papa’s school building. Something must be done. Stagnation suffocated Shaly. She picked up pebbles and took aim but Rita Mama boxed her ears so hard that she had to let them fall. This is how one becomes mute, thought Shaly, to survive was to rebel, but this was no time for a rebellion. The girl was going to get killed; Rita Mama feared that they too would be killed if they dared to open their mouths. Her dread tightened its grip over Shaly’s mouth; the rough skin of her fingers abraded Shaly’s delicate lips, and in turn, Shaly’s teeth cut through her swollen fingers.

  But the men didn’t pay attention to Shaly or Rita. For a second, Shaly thought the men had seen them but they behaved as if the two of them didn’t exist. They were focused on Mimi; just her. Each of them was twice her size; they tied her to a pillar, called her names and spat on her face. Shaly saw Mimi combating their moves with sudden jerks of her body, which now resembled a trunk with the movable parts all tied up. But suddenly one of them pulled a knife out of his pocket and jeered; Shaly thought that was the end.

  ‘Whore! We will make you bald as a boiled egg,’ they shouted, exhibiting their brute craving to kill. ‘Whore! You dirty whore!’ The youngest of the men grabbed her hair and pulled it forcefully towards his face. A pathetic and dehumanizing pain combined with revulsion tightened around the girl’s face; her features twisted, her eyes bulged, the muscles of her face contorted. Rita Mama tightened her hold on Shaly, both of them petrified into stillness by then, trying hard not to breathe a word aloud. The knife whipped the air above, its gleam vivid in the afternoon light. The next second, to her disbelief, Shaly saw them cutting Mimi’s hair from the roots, the long, silky threads of a European doll. Like coiled black snakes, locks of hair slid down shoulders marked with tears. Shaly looked at Rita. Perhaps, she thought, Mama was praying.

  In no time, they had shaved her head, leaving ridiculous tufts here and there, making her face look grotesque and bruised, all the while repeating, ‘Whore! Prostitution is a sin.’ In a very feeble voice Mimi retorted, ‘You are sinners, not me.’

  They slapped her hard on the face; her lips split, bled. At last they set the little prostitute free, tears staining her cheeks, the fire still ablaze in her eyes. When they finally left her, she sat on the floor for a while, ran her hands over her scalp, now hairless. She cried for some time, and though tears didn’t flow down, it was clear she was crying. She gathered the rolls of hair now surfing the floor and tried to put them back where they had once been. The smooth surface didn’t hold. She saw the men descending the hills with their knife still whipping high in the air.

  ‘Bastards!’ she shouted.

  She cut a very sorry figure, thought Shaly, her almost bald head with little bunches of hair here and there resembled the tufts of grass Shaly sketched using crayons. Mimi didn’t seem to notice Shaly and Rita, though she saw them as she climbed down the hill. She muttered, ‘How beautiful my hair was, long and silky.’ After Mimi had left the place, Shaly, still fearful, went to check the insides of the building. She had seen Mimi carrying her strands of hair, as if cradling a baby, but there on the floor, hanging in the air, long silk threads nevertheless crawled in vain. She sat on her haunches and surveyed the place; she took a handful of hair. She hadn’t seen human hair as silky as this, nor experienced a greater sorrow. Flesh is sin—Rita Mama crossed herself.

  The black threads of silk served as a reminder, to remind her that the body was no sin.

  15

  Slightly above the floor, the bedpan suspended in the air, tied to the middle of the bed and braced by two wooden poles, inviting assistance or a word of solace. He was not completely paralysed, he could sit on the bed, or move around in the house and the garden in his wheelchair, though not on his own. At first he used to walk with the help of a wearable walking system, supporting himself against the walls. But he would collapse on the ground every now and then. Each time he staggered, he got frightened, imagining that he would stumble and fall. Once he tried to walk towards the sit-out, where he liked to sit, watching the activity outside, on the roads, on the pavements, in the garden across the road. But he had hardly reached the entrance hall when he fell down. Their maid was on leave that day, and there was no one to call for help. He tried to get up, but that proved useless. He realized he had hurt himself, for there was blood. At first he had no idea where it was coming from, and then he felt a lacerating pain near his left temple. He touched to see where it was, and shuddered when he sensed his fingers were getting soaked. Nevertheless, he ran them over the deep cut, which he realized was over the left eyebrow. Blood was oozing, faster than his heartbeats, now dousing his eyelids, now wetting his lips. He felt the bitter, unkind taste of blood in his mouth; defenceless, he spat, white bubbles on top of red liquid. He felt frozen within: his hands refused to move, even his fingers. Swallowing the lumps of distress, he lay motionless in a pool of blood. At some point, the blood clotted, making it a little better. Aadi came home in the evening, tired and worn-out.

  After that incident, he stopped walking on his own. Either Aadi or Shaly had to be beside him. Shaly was a relief to Kamala, who had recently cut short her visits to the children’s room. She was thankful these days, she realized, failing miserably to grasp the meaning of happiness; she wanted to show that she was light-hearted, something they called being motherly, but it was not easy to convince her children. Even if they didn’t ask her questions, it was difficult to bear their looks. Sometimes she wondered whether they were her own blood, the same children she’d delivered inside the hospital room—they had looked so different then, small, bundled up in white muslin. She remembered the delicate curves of their mouths, and the way they had yawned under the fullness of her bosom. She also remembered how once, when she was a teenager, her blue skirt with bright white flowers had yawned unnoticed.

  One of her sons now grew in a bed, just like a favourite plant grows in a pot. In her childhood, she remembered, her mother had told her the story of two women, Kadru and Vinata, who raised their sons in pots. The women, her mother said, had to be patient, patient enough to tolerate any kind of delays. Both the women waited steadily for their eggs to hatch, they waited almost five hundred years. The pots in which they had put their eggs remained unmoved. They watched for a cry of birth, a stir. At last Kadru’s eggs came to
life: a thousand serpents. Overwhelmed by victory, she challenged Vinata, who was by then burning in a potion of jealousy. She was decisive, she couldn’t wait any longer. After all, the five hundred years of waiting was a game, a competition, one ought to win, not lose. Green-eyed wrath must have filled her insides for she broke one of her eggs out of desperation. She was shocked to find a half-formed son, blood, veins, sinews not yet covered by skin, half the portion of the muscles missing. The son, bursting with the fury of heaven and hell, cursed his mother.

  Vinata, the mother, became a slave of the other woman. A slave of the other woman!

  Shiva’s room sometimes reinforced the silence of the stillborn child, but at times it filled with the roar of killer guns. Kamala saw to it that the games reached his room the day they were released in stores. She was very particular about this; the games were like the substitute powders you feed babies sometimes. She was more worried than Shiva about the next edition release of Assassin’s Creed. In fact, Shiva never worried about anything. He knew his mother would call the salesman at Music Park in advance. Sometimes, overcome by a sort of strange anxiety—in Shaly’s words ‘undefinable’ and ‘unpardonable’—and irritated by the never-ending muzak, Kamala shouted at the man, ‘Don’t you know how easy it is to download games these days? Everything is available online. But I insist on quality. That’s the only reason I call you, and remember, this is not the only shop in town.’

  Both of them knew it was not that easy to download a new game for free, unless and until it was for sale. In fact, neither of them had any real idea how these modern games worked, whether a disk was needed or software. He was a salesman at a music shop; his job was to sell the games. He asked her humbly, ‘Madam, would you like to buy the new edition of Gran Turismo?’

  ‘No, we have it, thank you.’

  At times, even Shiva’s doctor wondered at the exceptional skill and precision with which he managed the gadgets. And at those times, Kamala exhibited all the regular behaviour of a regular mother, ‘See, my son has scored an S.’ She kissed her son, and said to herself, ‘My son is better than a thousand normal sons. He is exceptional, he is extraordinary.’

  In the dead of the night, confined within the four walls, a black Bentley raced forth in infinite anger. In the turquoise waters, a ship wrecked by fire. Bombs rained from the ceiling; there was nothing to hold on to. He knew Aadi was sleeping in the next room with the weight of his head on the spine of his book, an empty coffee cup on the night table. In the morning he would see the spine marks on his cheek, and he would cry, ‘Oh god! What have I done to my book?’

  Crudely delighted by his fantasies getting pulverized, Shiva would lie in bed, thinking, he was born good. But once when Aadi was washing the smells that came of those fantasies from Shiva’s underclothes, he said, ‘We were born sick.’ So sick their bones melted.

  There was a girlfriend. Her name was Rhea.

  ‘Is she a feminist?’ Shiva asked.

  ‘No, I don’t think so, she is just a girl, a student,’ Aadi answered.

  In the room, Shiva has a glass fishbowl. It was a gift from Shaly. Inside it are three goldfish, some pebbles and a boy who pees nonstop. Watching him, one felt like peeing, just for the pleasure of it. The fish, orange-gold with sedative movements, Shaly said, were feminists. Regardless of whether they bite their lower lip, or whether they shake their ass, pay them respect, they might turn into terrorists, any time, any day.

  Rhea had visited this room, two years ago, one fine day. At first, Shiva didn’t find her particularly attractive or sexy. She was a small girl, but her perfume was rather strong. She gave him a present; it was wrapped up in glittering paper with pictures of Angry Birds on it. When he stretched out his hand to receive it, she said, ‘Oh my God, both of you look just the same! The same eyes, the same lips, the same nose, even the hair is same! How do people make out who is who?’

  Maybe that’s the reason I’m in bed, thought Shiva and said light-heartedly, ‘I am fatter than him, I eat a lot of chocolates. I don’t walk much, and I put on weight that way.’

  He opened the present with great care. Before he could see what was inside, she said, ‘Home-made chocolates,’ and laughed. He tasted one and said it was wonderful. She watched with rapture as it melted in his mouth—from the way she looked, one might think she was looking at his taste buds magnified a hundred times over. His first assessment was not correct. She was beautiful and smart, and he particularly liked the way she laughed. Some school rhymes girls used to sing on that old forsaken lawn came to his mind: Morning bells are ringing, morning bells are ringing, ding ding dong.

  When Aadi went to the kitchen to prepare coffee, Rhea sat near Shiva’s bed, on his wheelchair. She noticed the small box on the night table and asked him, ‘What’s inside that box?’

  He said it was a key chain and added that it was of no use to him, and that she could have it if she liked. He asked her to open it. She held the small case and turned it over with her fingers for a while. She knew what she would find inside; she had seen such surprise boxes before. Sometimes when you opened them, you got a punch on your nose; sometimes there would be an ugly snake or a lizard or a spider or a frog that would pop out the second you opened the box—very commonplace games of boys. But she feigned ignorance and smiled as if she was expecting something wonderful inside. For a second, she remained silent, thinking she would give out a cry of alarm, or draw back in fear, shouting loudly, or she would just cry to make him happy. In a casual way, but of course cautiously, she opened the box. Inside it lay the soft feather of an African parrot.

  That night, Shiva couldn’t sleep. Her perfume was still strong in the room, lingering on everything she had touched. He played with those glittering Angry Birds for a while. He wanted to cut out each bird from the paper and stick them on the walls. He wished he had a pair of scissors. Rhea had the face of a little angel.

  ‘Copycat,’ the teacher had called him. They were in junior classes then, Aadi and Shiva. Shiva hated classrooms, notebooks, paper, pens, erasers and homework. He always copied what his brother had written. Once, the teacher boxed his ear, and once she spanked his bottom. ‘One more time and you will find yourself in the detention room,’ she said. All the kids were afraid of being abandoned there, at the mercy of the half-obscured science charts on the cold walls that exhibited parts of the human body cut open and the shuttered windows, with no other child to talk to, right under the nose of the verdigris-covered statue of the founder principal. Frightened, his anxiety not easy to mask, Shiva repeated his little crimes, his expertise sharpened. Now, he would like to tell his teacher about the permanent detention room in which he lives. Still, unwilling to hide a puzzling confusion, he asked: ‘Aadi, have you ever kissed her?’

  16

  The walls of this house had witnessed his first kiss. It was a kiss with the vanilla flavour of love, and she was a girl who trembled for the sake of trembling. The clock struck the hour and, like Cinderella’s manifesto, she said she had to go.

  ‘I have to go.’

  She threw the joystick on the bed and stood up, her lips now visibly trembling, her breath faster. She looked at her watch, the dials of which were studded with little diamonds, with a very thin gold strap. The game had not yet reached halfway. Shiva’s face fell.

  ‘Aadi, you take the control, let’s finish this. Okay, Rhea, bye,’ he immediately said, straight out.

  ‘Wait, I will walk her to the bus station, it won’t take long. Please,’ Aadi said apologetically. He followed her to the entrance hall where she slipped on the floor mat. Aadi saw one of her glass slippers flying high in the artificial light leaving dappled shades on the floor. She gave a short cry, as if her ankle had twisted. He tried to help her up, his breath, his infantile smell, now on her lips; her trembling grew out of control. Kisses rewrite people as dreams. The next second she ran out of the room, leaving the scattered glass pieces behind.

  The fragrance of ylang-ylang invigorated the night. The
flowers hung from the branches like big fat spiders. On the windowpane, Aadi saw a small lizard. Its tiny limbs resembled those of a human embryo. It was trying to crawl, but the glass seemed slippery, it couldn’t hold on; losing grip, it fell down. Aadi looked at Shiva, who was sleeping peacefully. Aadi closed his eyes.

  He saw the room in which his grandmother had lain dying. In that house, darkness prevailed in each room, cut out to the size of matchboxes; one might suffocate under one’s own breath. He tried to conjure up a picture of his brother in his wheelchair struggling to move through the blackness of the dilapidated corridors. What could Shiva do in such a place? Where were they going to arrange his electronic gadgets?

  A penis, like a wounded snake, tried to raise its head and fell. Hunger, it was the night of hunger games. Something twisted in between a half-paralysed young body and an uncontrollable young mind. White Mountains! Dark Holes! Inside the dream, under the unconceivable hunger, the body rushed, forgetting its drowsy languor. Bed sheets crumpled. In the morning, Aadi scrubbed the pallid patches off Shiva’s lilac sheets.

  17

  It was their last day in the house, all of them were busy. Books, clothes, memories, everything had to be packed carefully. No one talked much during dinner. Kamala couldn’t sleep, though she felt weak within. She was afraid of the procession of bad trips. Nowadays trips happened without invitation, without even a touch of acid; the only thing that went without saying was that it was always very bad, even ugly at times. Nothing like the pageant of sumptuous breakfast crossing the ceiling in a Mansfield story. In my visions, thought Kamala, there is nothing worth inviting. She searched for the blister pack in the drawers, and took two antidepressant tablets with a glass of water. Tranquilizers are good for the bitter coldness of the night, though they leave you more depressed the following day. She looked at the fan—she wanted to concentrate on something, clockwise, or counterclockwise. She had heard that ballerinas could do multiple pirouettes with no signs of vertigo by fixing their gaze on a single spot for as long as they wanted, falling out of step the second it faltered. Attention, she thought, is a very important word. She tried to concentrate on her eyes reflected in the centre of the shining, spinning fan, but it was not as easy as she thought.