East Into Upper East (3 page)

Everyone knows what the boy looked like. His photograph has been in the newspapers as often as Bablu's and Sachu's. Sometimes all three photos were on the same page, and even though they were not clear in the newsprint it was evident that the boy was of a different type from the other two—as if he came from some different stock or species of human being. In Sachu's interviews with the newspaper reporters, he sounded as if he hated the boy, because the boy was plump, with big eyes and a light complexion, and wore a very good blue coat, with the badge of his school on the pocket. And because he had roller skates. No one had heard of roller skates in our town till the boy was seen with them. His parents had brought them as a present for him from abroad, and the boy loved them so much that he went on them everywhere, as with wings under his feet.

It was because of these roller skates that Bablu and Sachu were discovered very quickly. It was also all they got from their crime, for although the father had put the ransom money in the place they had indicated, they did not dare collect it after killing the boy. They had so little cash that they had to sneak on to a train as
ticketless travelers. When an inspector came, they had to jump off. This was in a town less than two hundred miles from ours. They took a room in a hotel in a bad part of town, and they never came out except at night, when one of them went to buy gram, which was all the food they could afford. Their room was very small, with only one bed and an old fan, but here Sachu tried to learn to roller-skate. This made the whole house shake, as if it were in an earthquake, and everyone in the hotel wondered what was happening. They also heard the noise of someone falling, and then the two young men laughing in enjoyment, so they tapped on the door of their room to inquire. Sachu let them come in and look, because he was so proud of learning to roller-skate. Everyone smiled and enjoyed his feat, but when there was news everywhere of a boy killed and of his missing roller skates the police were informed at once.

Up to that time, the two of them had been lucky, even though their crime had not been well-planned. They had stolen a car from outside the interstate bus depot, and had waited near the cantonment for the boy to pass on his roller skates. They had no difficulty getting into conversation with him; he was frank and open in his manner—everyone said so later—and was always glad to talk to people and to make friends. They got him into the car and drove him to the place they had chosen for their hideout. Here they tied him up with chains, and Sachu—Bablu couldn't drive—took the car to the other side of town and abandoned it there. It was found by the police the same day, though they found the boy only when he was dead.

There are many places where a person can hide around our town. Important battles have been fought here, and it has been destroyed and built up again many times. Ruins are all around—the foundation of beautiful cities, with the remains of tombs, mosques, and bathing tanks. Since it is a very dry area, very little vegetation has grown, and there are only mounds of rubble and dust, where jackals live and can be heard howling at night. The two took the boy down into a bathing tank, which had been dug so deep into the earth that there were forty steps descending into it. All round the tank were arched niches like rooms. In olden days, it must have been a beautiful, cool place for royal people to bathe and rest and take enjoyment. Now the tank is empty and dry. They kept the boy in one of
the niches and stayed with him there for four days, all of them living on milk sweets.

After they were arrested, Sachu talked freely. It was as if he had waited all his life for people to listen to what he had to say. He was a person of no education, and could not express himself, yet words and thoughts always seemed to boil up in him and come gushing out freely. One thing he could never bear was to be contradicted or interrupted; he wanted to be the only one to talk, and others were there to listen. After his arrest, if any journalist challenged him or talked back to him, he went into a rage. Sometimes he seemed to fly into the same rage when talking about the boy; he spoke as if the boy were still alive and challenging what he was saying. Then anger filled his empty eyes.

The Parsi lawyer wanted to present the case in such a way as to show that Sachu had stabbed the boy with his knife during an argument between them. It was soon established that the boy didn't sit quietly and whine for mercy while he was being kept prisoner. He was a fearless boy and also a first-class debater who had competed for an inter-school trophy. He liked talking and arguing as much as Sachu did, and although he was seven years younger (he was thirteen), he was much better educated. When Sachu spoke to the boy about society and astrology and what is man's fate—the same way he later talked to the reporters—the boy could answer him and argue with him, and he could even quote from books he had read at school. The Parsi lawyer said that when Sachu was defeated by the boy over and over again in argument he became so enraged that he killed him. Sachu alone did it, and Bablu was innocent. And Sachu said yes, that was the way it happened, and then he boasted of the other murders he had committed, which no one had ever discovered.

But Bablu said no to the Parsi lawyer, that was not the way it happened. Bablu said, “I did it—not Sachu.” Then the lawyer appointed to defend Sachu wanted to make a case that Bablu had killed the boy out of jealousy, because he saw that his friend was paying a lot of attention to the boy and spent many hours talking and arguing with him. The lawyer said that the boy was not only
educated and cultured but also very handsome—soft-skinned and wheat-complexioned. (The medical report had established the fact that sodomy had taken place.) Bablu was ready to confirm what the lawyer said and to admit that he had killed the boy because he could not bear to watch what Sachu did with him. He confessed this in a very quiet voice and without raising his eyes—not out of shame, it seemed, but because he felt shy about talking of this matter.

All this time, Bablu never changed. Unlike Sachu, he hardly spoke to anyone but appeared so sunk in his own thoughts that one didn't like to disturb him. As before, his face was very serious, and his expression altered only when he read the newspaper reports of the interviews that Sachu had given. Bablu eagerly waited for me to bring him these newspapers, and when he read them he smiled—that smile, with his little pointed teeth and betel-red gums, which always gave me a shock to see. It didn't seem to belong on his face—any more than that other expression my wife had once described to me, when he had turned from the safe and raised his hand with the knife.

Since each of them was ready to plead guilty to save the other, their lawyers got together and tried to prove that they had never met the boy—that someone else had killed him and they had only stolen the roller skates. It was a very weak case, and no one believed it. In the end, both were found guilty, and both were hanged. The burden of what was done has remained with us who are living. My brother Sohan Lal and his family have emigrated to Canada, and at first I, too, intended to leave this place where our name is known. But in the end I stayed. We are still living in the same house, though at first I had intended to sell it. For a long time we kept the front room locked and lived only in the back—no one even went in there to clean—but slowly we have got used to going in there again. At first, only the children went, to look at TV if there was a good program on, but now my wife and I also sit there sometimes, and it is becoming like an ordinary room where nothing has happened.

After the final appeal was dismissed and there was only one week left, they allowed me to visit the prison every day. I always brought his food with me. All this time, I had been providing his meals at the jail. At first, I brought his food from a cooking stall and sent it to him
in the little mud pots covered with a leaf that they give you in the bazaar. But after a time, and without anything being said, my wife cooked his food herself, and it was carried to him in dishes from our house. I was glad to be able to provide this home-cooked food, which he liked and was used to. But soon I discovered that he ate only a part of it, and had the rest taken away to Sachu, for whom no one sent anything, of course. When I mentioned this to my wife, she began to send more food, and after a time there were always two dishes of everything.

On the last day, when he asked me to see Sachu and say goodbye to him, I said I would but I didn't do it. So it was that my last word to him was a lie. He asked, “Did you see him?” and I said, “Yes.” But next day I did something I hadn't expected. When the hearse arrived to take Bablu, I told the prison officials that I would take the other one, too. They agreed and were glad to be relieved of this charge. So I took both of them to the electric crematorium, and there I performed for both the ceremonies and prayers due to a brother. Sohan Lal and the rest of my family blamed me for this and said I had polluted the last rites. They were all angry and refused to participate in the final ceremony, when the ashes are committed to the river. I didn't care and prepared to do it on my own.

I bought two silver urns and returned to the crematorium to collect the ashes. I had determined to go to Allahabad, to the most holy and purifying place of all, where the three great rivers meet and mingle, but a lot of business came up during the next few days and I could not leave at once. I placed the two urns in the front room, and when I was ready to leave I packed them in a cardboard box I had brought from the warehouse for this purpose. The night before, I told my wife to wake me early so that I could be in time for the plane. She said, “I will come with you,” and in the morning she was ready in new white clothes. We drove to Delhi to go to the airport there. They allowed us to take the box on board with us. My wife had never been on a plane before and was very excited, though she pretended not to be. She kept looking out of the window to see the clouds and whatever else you see. Once, she turned to me and said, “Bablu has never been on a plane before.” I didn't answer her but I thought, Yes, it is true; it is the first time for all three of them. The two others would have enjoyed
it too and would have been as excited as she was. In Allahabad we took a boat, and a priest went with us, and there was a beautiful ceremony as the ashes were committed at the confluence of those very holy rivers—the Ganges, the Jumna, and the Saraswati.

FARID AND FARIDA

Farid couldn't believe what he heard about Farida. She was his wife, and he would have thought that no one had known her more deeply, in every way, than he had. But now, they said, she was a holy woman sitting under a tree in some holy place in the Himalayas, and people came from all over India to take blessings and good vibrations from her. Ludicrous, he thought. She might fool all the world, but she couldn't fool him. Or could she? He hadn't seen her for twenty years.

He still lived in London, in the flat they had rented long ago when they had first come to England as newlyweds. It was just one room, badly partitioned into two, with a makeshift kitchen and bathroom wedged in between, but the address was good, behind Harrods, so Farid hung on. The place was falling into decay. The landlord had been trying to get him out for years and refused to make any repairs. Farid couldn't afford to go anywhere else. He had not got on and now never would, and no longer cared. He was in his fifties and slovenly, fat from drinking too much.

In his youth, in India, he had been exquisite, and so had Farida—both of them small-boned, elegant, and quick in mind and body. Much had been expected of them, and they were confident of living up to these expectations. Their families were not rich but were very old; the overgrown gardens of their decaying mansions in Delhi abutted on each other, and from their earliest childhood Farid and Farida had gone back and forth through a gap in the boundary wall. They grew up and of course fell in love; now they met not only among the flowering jasmine bushes of their own gardens but also at the university, with its stone-flagged corridors and courtyards.
They graduated, they married, they went to live in London. They felt they needed a wider horizon for their talent, which lay mainly in their own personalities—in their intense Indianness, which at that time was regarded, in the self-deprecating countries of the West, as synonymous with every kind of natural and spiritual superiority.

Using their charm and their contacts, Farid and Farida had attempted to set up a business importing hand-loomed Indian textiles. It failed to prosper, and they became impresarios for visiting Indian musicians and dancers, and when these turned out to be unreliable and ungrateful they tried, in succession, ready-made Indian garments, hand-crafted Indian jewelry, Indian lampshades, Indian bedcovers, and Indian table linen—all those indigenous handicrafts by which others of their countrymen, far less gifted than Farid and Farida, made their fortunes in London, Paris, and New York. Ten years passed, then fifteen. They were still living in the temporary flat they had rented, and the landlord began trying to get them out. Farid was drinking. Farida stayed out late and went away for weekends; their erotic quarrels had turned into bitter fights. They had no money, they hated each other. One night, she packed up and returned to India. He stayed on, drank on—and survived, but only just.

After he had heard that she had become a holy woman, he kept muttering, “We'll see about that.” He didn't know what he meant; he was a person impelled by instinct rather than thought. This impelled him one day to go to Sunil's elegant offices, where he had to wait in the outer reception area before finally being admitted, as a special favor to an old friend. Sunil sat behind his desk and looked at the watch on his hairy wrist and said, “Ten minutes, Farid.” Although he was without charm or contacts or aesthetic sensibility, Sunil had become rich from the very handlooms and handicrafts that had broken Farid's back and spirit. When they had all been students together in Delhi, Farid and Farida had laughed at Sunil, who was ridiculously in love with Farida. At that time, when Farid was slim and beautiful, Sunil was fat and ungainly. He hadn't changed, but now he had the best tailors and shirtmakers to help him, and he exuded confidence and eau de cologne. Farid still addressed him in the condescending tone that he and Farida had always used toward him. Sunil was too busy to notice. He got rid of Farid within the
scheduled ten minutes, though not without handing over the check to cover the air fare to India and expenses. Sunil had also heard about Farida, but he didn't laugh at the news. As was his habit, he would wait and see.

When Farid found her, Farida really was sitting under a tree. She was in a pure white sari, and she looked the way she always did: supremely elegant. Trust her, Farid thought bitterly. Apart from her astonishing situation, she really was the same Farida—God knew how she did it. She was now in her fifties, but sitting there in the lotus position she looked as slim, lithe, and upright as ever. Her hair—dyed, no doubt—was black; her skin was clear and shone with a radiance that could only be the result of the best cosmetics, applied, he knew, with consummate skill. She was surrounded by four or five handmaidens, as exquisitely draped in orange as she was in white, and pilgrims came and went, touching her feet in reverence. She sat on the deerskin traditional to holy people, and someone stood behind her waving a fly whisk. If a fly happened to land on her, Farida waited for it to be flicked off. Her hands were folded in her lap, and she fingered a string of prayer beads in the same way, it occurred to Farid, that she had once fingered her pieces of jewelry, before they were sold off, one by one, to cover her expenses in London.

Farid regarded the scene from a distance. The tree—a huge banyan—spread its foliage over Farida and her handmaidens, but the people lining up to see her had to stand outside in the sun until it was their turn to be admitted into the shade of the tree. Farid watched her as she dealt with the pilgrims. To some she spoke at length, while others she only lightly touched as they bowed down to her; a few favored ones were handed some holy talisman by a handmaiden. But everyone appeared to come away fully satisfied, for Farida radiated blessing. Farid couldn't help admiring her; he had often told her that she would have made a first-rate actress. At last he approached the tree and lined up with the other pilgrims. When it was his turn to be led up to her, he didn't bow, like the others, but stood and looked down at her, one hand on his hip. She looked up at him and met his cynical smile with an ambiguous one of her own.
She made it seem as if she had been expecting him, even after twenty years. They kept on looking at each other, and he felt the challenge that had always lain between them.

She looked away first, turning around to a handmaiden to murmur some command. Straightaway, he was led off and installed in a whitewashed little cell in one of a chain of plain brick structures that rambled all over the mountainside. These constituted an ashram, and of course the accommodations were of the simplest, but everything was clean, pleasant, and orderly. He decided to stay on, at least for a while. There was little expense to him, he discovered—in fact, none at all—which was just as well, because Sunil's money wasn't going to last forever. He couldn't say he was uncomfortable. Within a day or two, he realized that he was being treated as an honored guest. Regular meals were brought to him on a tray, and there was always someone hovering around to see if he needed anything; someone even brought him his cigarettes from the bazaar. He decided to treat the whole thing as a holiday—a well-deserved one, at that, for God knew he'd had a pretty rough struggle to keep himself going, while Farida apparently had experienced no difficulty landing on her feet. She was his wife, after all, and if good fortune had come her way it was no more than right that he should have some modest share of it.

The days passed as evenly for him as they did for everyone else. The place had its own rhythm. It was a traditional sacred spot—almost as sacred as Banaras—and there were other holy people like Farida living there. They were Hindus and she was a Muslim, but that didn't matter. Allah and Ishwar were equal here, and no one questioned which of them was responsible for the mountain peaks rising against the immaculate sky, or the sun that set in orange glory on one side and rose in pink effulgence on the other. Cymbals and temple bells rang out at regular intervals, and everyone hurried smiling to a variety of little white shrines and temples adorned with flags and garlands. Not Farid, of course—he didn't go in for anything like that. Instead, he took little walks in the mornings and the late afternoons, climbing up a green path till he got tired and began panting, which was quite soon. At night, he slept on a string cot in his whitewashed cell. They had given him an old electric table fan, which kept him moderately cool, though he could have wished it made less clatter. When he got tired of the vegetarian meals they
brought him, he wandered down into the little bazaar at the foot of the hill and ate a meat curry at one of the stalls there and had some worldly conversation with the shopkeepers and customers. Once, he went into the town cinema, together with the other town loafers, and saw one of those long, loud Hindi films, which he enjoyed more than a sophisticated person like himself should have. Once a day, he visited Farida under her tree. When she asked him whether everything was to his satisfaction, he replied with a shrug that suggested he neither asked for nor got much. Altogether, he conveyed the impression that he was doing her a favor by being there at all.

He was waiting for a showdown with her. He expected it. They had always had showdowns—explosions ignited by the fuel of their fiery temperaments. In their youth these upheavals had ended in excited lovemaking, but later, during the years in London, the showdowns had become a release from the tensions not of love but of failure and frustration. They lived in misery. Their flat was horribly cramped and always smelled of cabbage and mutton from their English neighbors' cooking. (They themselves had given up on cooking and only opened cans and frozen packets.) The flat also held the odors of Farida's scents and lotions and of the dregs of Farid's drinks.

It was no wonder that, in their last years together, Farida had gone away as often as possible. She told him she went to follow up useful contacts—though these were vague by now, for they no longer had definite plans but just lived on in the hope of something turning up. It was when she came back from one of those expeditions that they had had their final quarrel. He had been alone in the flat all weekend, drinking. His eyes hurt, his head felt huge, and now he lay on the bed watching her brush her hair in front of the mirror. He could see her smiling to herself in a secret, sensuous way. He began to taunt her, asking her questions about where she had spent the weekend and taking pleasure in trapping her in discrepancies. Actually, she wasn't very careful about her excuses any more and presented them to him with a take-it-or-leave-it indifference. But that day he persisted and she became angry, which was what he had wanted, for why should she be smiling that way when he was feeling so rotten?

In the past, in their years of happiness, he had known just how to wind her up so that she flashed and blazed in a pleasurable way.
Later, he began to miss his mark, and that was what happened that day. Before he knew where he was, with his sick eyes and head, she had jumped up from the mirror, crashed her hairbrush against the wall behind him, and stood above him in an attitude of menace. He squinted up at her, mocking and malevolent. Her silk robe, cut down from a sari, swung wide open, and her full breasts, unconfined by a brassiere, were before him. Her breasts had always been an exciting contrast to her small waist and slender arms, though not to her hips, which also swelled voluptuously. He reached up his hand to squeeze one breast, and remarked with a sneer that these fruits must have been damaged by being handled too often on too many weekends. All at once she was on top of him. She sat astride his chest and seized his hair and banged his head up and down. Even without a hangover, there would have been no way he could defend himself against her. At that moment, she was as irresistible, as inexorable, as the goddess Kali, who, with bared and dripping fangs, rides her victims to destruction.