He: (Shey) (Modern Classics (Penguin)) (8 page)

‘Let’s have a sample of your fantasy.’

‘All right, listen—’

Scholarly Smritiratnamashai,
³²
the Mohun Bagan goalkeeper, had swallowed five goals in succession from the Calcutta team. But far from satisfying his appetite, they made his stomach growl for more. He found himself in front of the Ochterlony Monument.
³³
He began by licking the bottom, but soon he had licked it up to its very tip. Badruddin Mian, cobbling shoes in the Senate Hall of the university, saw him and rushed out in horror. ‘You’re learned in the sacred books, and yet you contaminate this great monument with your spittle!’ he scolded.‘Fie, fie!’

He then himself spat thrice upon the monument and hurried off to report the matter at the Statesman House.
³⁴

Smritiratna suddenly regained his wits. He realized his mouth, too, had been polluted by the monument.

He went to the guard at the museum gate, and said, ‘Pandeyji, you’re a Brahmin like me, you must do me a favour.’

‘
Comment vous portez vous, s’il vous plait
?’
³⁵
answered Pandey-ji, twirling his goatee and touching his cap in a salaam.

‘That’s a very difficult question,’ said the pandit, after some thought. ‘I’ll look up the
Sankhyakarika
³⁶
and tell you tomorrow. In any case, my mouth has been polluted today. I licked the monument.’

Pandey-ji struck a match and lit himself a Burma cheroot. He took two deep puffs and ordered, ‘Go home immediately, and look up the ritual of purification in Webster’s Dictionary.’

‘I’ll have to go all the way to Bhatpara
³⁷
for that,’ protested Smritiratna. ‘It can wait. Meanwhile, I want you to lend me that brass-bound cudgel of yours.’

‘What for?’ asked Pandey. ‘Got a speck of coal dust in your eye?’

‘How did you know?’ replied Smriratna. ‘It happened the day before yesterday. I had to rush off to Ultadingi, to consult the famous doctor MacCartney-saheb; he specializes in complaints of the liver. He sent for a shovel from Narkeldanga and scraped the eye clean.’

Pandey-ji asked, ‘But why do you need my cudgel?’

‘It’ll serve for a toothbrush,’ answered the pandit.

‘Oh, that’s all right, then!’ exclaimed Pandeyji in relief. ‘I thought you were going to stick it up your nose to bring on a sneeze. In that case, I’d have had to purify it with Ganga water.’

Having reached this point, He pulled the hubble-bubble closer and inhaled deeply. ‘You see, Dada, this is your way of telling stories. Instead of tracing them out clearly and simply with your forefinger, you write them out in exaggerated curves and flourishes, as if you had Lord Ganesh’s trunk for a pen.
³⁸
You must twist the familiar into the strange. It’s very easy. People might laugh when you say the viceroy’s set up trade in oil and is selling dried fish at Bagbazar, but the laughter you win by a cheap joke like that is of no worth.’

‘You seem out of temper.’

‘With good reason. The other day, you made up a string of stupid stories about me and reeled them off to Pupu-didi. Being a child, she swallowed it all. If you must tell fantastic tales, put some craftsmanship into the telling.’

‘You’re telling me there was no craftsmanship in my story?’

‘None at all. If you hadn’t got me involved, I would have kept quiet. But if you insist you’d treated your guest to curried giraffe, whale fried in mustard paste, pulao with a hippopotamus dragged kicking from the mud and stir-fried stumps of palm trees, I can’t but call it clumsy. Anyone can write like that.’

‘Well, how would you write if you had to?’

‘Are you sure you won’t be vexed? Dada, it’s not as if my powers of invention are any greater than yours. If it had been me, I’d have said—“I was invited to play cards in Tasmania,
³⁹
a simple game of dekha-binti.
⁴⁰
The man of the house, Kojmachuku, and his missus Shrimati Hanchiendani Korunkuna had a daughter called Pamkuni Devi; she had cooked us a kintinabu meriunathu with her own fair hands. You could smell it seven blocks away. The aroma excited the jackals so much that they threw caution to the winds and began howling in broad daylight— whether from greed or disgust, I couldn’t tell. The crows drove their beaks into the ground, got stuck and flailed their wings in despair for a good three hours. That’s just the vegetables. There were great barrels of kangchuno-sangchani to follow. There was chewed peel of aankshuto, a fruit very popular in that region. And for dessert, there was a basketful of iktikutir bhiktimai.

‘“First their pet elephant came and pulped all this under his great feet. Then the largest animal of their land, the gandishangdung, as they call it—a cross between a man, a bull and a lion—came and licked the mixture with his spiky tongue, till it was a soft mush. Then they struck up a fearsome hammering of mortar and pestle before the three hundred expectant guests. The people there insist on this racket as a kind of appetizer; the noise brings in hordes of beggars from the distant reaches of the town. Those whose teeth are wrenched off as they eat donate their broken molars to the host before leaving. He stores them away in the bank and leaves them to his sons in his will. The more teeth one possesses, the greater one’s reputation. Many even steal the teeth collected by others and pass them off as their own. People have fought fiercely over this in court. A man who owns a thousand teeth will never give his daughter in marriage to someone with only fifty. If the insignificant possessor of just fifteen teeth suddenly chokes to death on a ketku sweet-ball, you won’t find a man in the Neighbourhood of the Thousand-Toothed who’ll stoop to cremating the body. The corpse has to be furtively floated off in the Chouchingi River. But now the people who live on its banks have begun to demand compensation; the battle has gone as far as the Privy Council.”’

By this time, I was panting for breath. ‘Stop, stop,’ I gasped. ‘But let me ask you what’s so special about the story you’ve just told me.’

‘It’s special because it isn’t just some chutney of pulped kul seeds. No one can complain if you feed your appetite for exaggeration by enlarging upon the impossible. Ofcourse, I don't
claim even my story belongs to the highest order of humour.
Only a story that makes you believe in the unbelievable can be
said to have that extraordinary charm. I warn you, you'll end
up in disgrace ifyou go on with shoddy exaggerations only good
enough to hush a crying child.'

'All right, from now on I'll tell Pupu-didi such stories that
we'll need an exorcist to drive out her faith in them.'

‘Good, but what did you mean by saying you were going to the viceroy’s house?’

‘I meant I wished to be rid of your presence. Once you sit down, you show no sign of getting up. It was just a polite way of saying, “Scoot!” ’

‘I see. I’ll be getting on, then.’

³¹
Rai Bahadur
: a title given by the British Raj to Indians considered loyal to it.

³²
Smritiratna
: a degree awarded to Sanskrit scholars versed in the Smritishastras.

³³
Ochterlony Monume
nt
: a tower in the heart of Calcutta, named after Sir David
Ochterlony, a soldier and administrator of the Raj. Now called Shahid Minar
or Martyrs’Tower in memory of India’s freedom fighters.

³⁴
Statesman House
: the office of the well-known newspaper,
The Statesman
.

³⁵
Commez vous portez vous…:‘How are you, if you please?’The comic use
of French is found in the original.

³⁶
Sankhyakarika: the most important text of the Sankhya school of philosophy;
written by Ishwara.

³⁷
Bhatpara
: a place to the north of Calcutta, famous for its Brahmin scholars
and priests.

³⁸
Ganesh, the elephant-headed god, inscribed the
Mahabharata
to the poet
Vyasa’s dictation.

³⁹
cards in Tasmania
: in the original, the phrase is a pun on ‘taash’ (the Bengali
word for cards) and Tasmania.

⁴⁰
dekha-binti
: a card game where one scores extra points by holding three
high-value cards in sequence.

AFTER A TRIP TO THE CIRCUS, PUPU-DIDI’S BRAIN SEEMS INFESTED BY tigers. She often meets tigers, to say nothing of their aunts. Their gatherings liven up only in our absence. The other day she came to ask me if I knew of a good barber.

‘What do you want a barber for?’ I asked her.

Pupu informed me that a tiger had become a perfect nuisance, pestering her about his whiskers. They had become too bushy; he wanted a shave.

‘What put the idea into his head?’ I asked.

‘Each morning, after Father’s drunk his tea, I give the tiger the dregs left in the cup,’ Pupu explained. ‘That day, when he came for his drink, he caught sight of Panchu-babu. He’s convinced he’ll look exactly like Panchu-babu once he’s had a shave.’

I said, ‘He isn’t entirely wrong in thinking that. But there’s a problem. What if he finishes off the barber before the unfortunate fellow can finish off the shave?’

Pupu-didi had a brainwave. ‘You know, Dadamashai, tigers never eat barbers.’

‘What!’ I exclaimed. ‘Why not?’

‘To eat a barber is a sin.’

‘Excellent, we needn’t worry. We’ll take him to the English hairdresser on Chowringhee.’
⁴¹

Pupu clapped her hands and shrieked, 'What fun! He'd never
touch white flesh, it'd disgust him!'

'If he does, he'll have to cleanse himselfin the holy Ganga.
But how did you learn so much about the dietary norms of
tigers, Didi?'