Tikkipala (35 page)

‘Isn't your wife expecting a baby any day, Raj?' she asked, suddenly remembering. The last time she had been here Raj had been worried because the baby was overdue and the doctor had feared problems.

Raj gave shy giggle. ‘My son was born last night. He and my lady wife are OK.'

‘Oh, Raj, you should be there with her, and not looking after us,' frowned Devi. ‘Go home and get someone else to take over.'

‘Thank you, Madam, for your concern,' smiled the bearer. ‘But I will be home in an hour, and in meantime please feel free to enter this once…and a skirt next time?'

‘I promise,' Devi laughed. ‘And give my love to your new baby.'

Maw was already at the bar, wearing a fresh white shirt and jeans, when Devi got there. Apparently the men's room hot water was all right. Around the lounge there was the usual frisson of excitement that, these days, always accompanied Maw's arrival. Respectable, middle aged women became flirtatious and let their palus slip. The younger women became shrill and giggly.

‘Which of the girls do you like best?' Devi asked him teasingly as he settled onto the bar stool.

‘Girls?' Maw raised his eyebrows enquiringly as though the word was new to him, or as though he had not noticed any.

‘Come on, darling, you must be aware that they are all fascinated by you,' laughed Devi.

A little flush sprang up on Maw's cheek.

‘Are you in love with someone, Maw? Go on, tell me,' she teased and was shocked to see tears suddenly spring into the boy's eyes.

He leapt up, leaving his drink half finished. ‘I have to go,' he said, striding away.

Devi went after him saying, ‘Don't go like that, Maw. What have I said?'

But he rushed on, out of the bar and through the lounge.

‘Maw, don't be silly,' cried Devi. Then gave a little gasp, and urgently tried to pat down her hair and wipe the sweat off her cheeks. Nirmal had come in. She had not realised he was coming today. She had promised herself that when the met in Bidwar she would be looking nice.

Maw felt furious with himself for letting his feelings burst through like that, as he went out through the front doors. Outside he took deep breaths, then started walking. Devi's words had woken his terrible longing. His feelings of love and grief burst upon him with such ferocity that great sounds like groans began to squeeze out from his breast, making people that he walked among look at him

Queenie began reprimanding Nirmal the moment she saw him. ‘Sacked from a job in fertiliser,' she said, accompanying each word with a jewel clattering fist on the peg table. ‘How dare you disgrace our family in this way? I demand that you return to the Raja, my friend, who was so kind as to set you up, and, humbly begging his forgiveness, implore him to take you on again.'

‘I did not like the job,' said Nirmal.

‘You will do as you are told,' said Queenie grimly.

‘Don't treat me like a child,' said Nirmal.

‘You have behaved like a child so what do you expect,' said Queenie sternly. ‘I understand you have been engaged on the manufacture of mud statues as though you were five years old.'

‘I want to be an artist, that is all I care about.'

‘Don't you care that my fortune might go to your uncle and your father not see a single rupee?' Queenie threatened.

‘I am sorry. I really am. I can't help it, though,' Nirmal said, then bent and gave Queenie a little kiss on her cheek. ‘I might create a great work of art one day and then you'll be proud of me.'

‘Oh, go away, you naughty boy,' she said, suddenly unable to be stern anymore and trying to suppress a laugh. ‘But remember I am very, very cross with you.' She gave him a little diamond stabbing smack on the hand.

Devi caught up with him. ‘Nirmal,' she said.

He swung round. ‘Devi.' He gave a laugh. ‘And you are still looking a mess.'

‘You're one to talk,' she responded ferociously. ‘Look at your clothes. You are plastered in mud. I don't know how Raju can have allowed you in here, looking like that.'

‘Same to you,' snapped Nirmal.

They stood facing each other like antagonists for a long moment as though some magic spell held them together and they were not able to separate.

‘Would you like to come with me to see my statue?' said Nirmal a week later.

‘Where is it?' asked Devi.

‘In the bustee.'

‘Oh, thank you Nirmal,' said Devi grandly. ‘What a splendid invitation. No thank you, I would not like to accompany you to the slums to see your statue.'

‘Don't then,' Nirmal said huffily. ‘You will be missing something very great though.'

‘All right, I will make a great sacrifice. In the interest of art and for your sake, I will swallow my distaste and accompany you…' Suddenly she could no longer keep it up and started laughing.

Usually Maw could not wait to leave the filth and clamour of the town behind him and get into the countryside. But on this day he did not care where he was for his grief was so great and uncontrollable that everywhere was the same to him. He strode through crawling slums, scrambled over open drains, went past stenching refuse dumps and walked along foetid alley ways where pigs snuffled and mangy pye dogs scratched. By evening he was still walking. His body ached, his feet were sore, his eyes stung from lack of sleep, but he dared not stop in case he started weeping.

Usually when he passed through here people would come dashing for a look at him, calling to each other, ‘Look a sahib is here. Come and see him.' Little crowds of curious children would trot in his wake. But today he was ignored. There was something else catching their attention. A crowd so huge that Maw could not press through it thronged the road. They were all looking at something and over them, towering above them, Maw saw a huge statue. He could only see it from waist up because of the people gathered round it. It towered over the rusty roofs and palm trees. It was a woman with breasts like rice sacks, a jaw the size of a buffalo, a ferocious, half open mouth. She glittered with minerals. Her eyes glowed with black bixbyte and her nipples were made of dark streaked magnetite. Jagged white crystals and ruby minerals glittered from her mouth and on her head, where hair should be was hematite and white streaked kyanite.

Maw pressed his way through the mob, trying to see more. A young man who Maw had seen a few times in the club was pushing crystals into the area between the statue's legs, haloing the crotch with glittering purple pubic hairs. Looking up and seeing Maw, he asked, ‘What do you think?'

Maw stared, thoughtful. He asked, ‘What is it for?'

‘It is art.' It was Devi. She was the other side of the statue, pressing pebbles of green into the statue's back. To Nirmal she said, ‘This is Maw, by the way. And this is Nirmal.' They nodded to each other.

Although Maw had even been encouraged to take up colour pencils and modelling clay to create images of his own at school, he had never really understood what he was supposed to be doing. In his culture art, science and technology were all one and the same. There was no way that any one could exist without the other.

‘I do not comprehend art,' he said.

‘It's about altering perceptions,' Nirmal said. ‘It changes the people who see it in some way. It gives you a new way of looking at things. Do you like it?'

Maw had learnt long ago that there were some things the Coarseones could do that his own tribe could not. They could manipulate invisible things like radio waves, for instance. Perhaps they did not need the technology of the subtle ones to make their statues move. He felt, with his fingers, the Ama stone in its bark pouch, an idea rising like a bitter taste in his mind. It made Maw almost laugh to think that, perhaps, all this time the Coarseones had had the knowledge and the techniques for creating Tikki. Nirmal might be about to show him a way of avenging Pala.

Behind Maw the mob shoved, trying to see over each other's heads, trying to wriggle past each other to get a better look.

Maw said, ‘I feel something but I do not know if it is liking.'

Nirmal laughed.

Devi looked from Maw to Nirmal, felt uneasy, and said swiftly, ‘It's only a statue, Maw. You shouldn't take such things so seriously.'

But Maw was not listening.

After she had gone he asked Nirmal, 'Where do you live?'

‘I sleep here, on the pavement.'

‘I want to know more about your statue. Come back to the palace tonight, for we can't talk here with all these people.'

At first Nirmal was reluctant. ‘I can't possibly go there. The Raja hates me.'

‘He needn't know.'

A soft bed and a fan to cool the air, Nirmal thought longingly. One night away from the discomfort, the mosquitoes and the stench of the basti. ‘OK.' he said.

That night when Devi passed Maw's bedroom she heard the sound of whispering. He was so private and she knew nothing about his life outside here but she felt sure that, for the first time, he had brought someone home.

The idea of a prostitute in bed with Maw made Devi shudder. She thought, he has been living here long enough. She could hardly remember now why he was here at all. She had rescued him from intolerable situation two years ago, but by now he should have moved on. She would talk to him in the morning. Her father would be pleased if Maw went. He had been irritated with the boy ever since Maw had turned down the offer of work with the company.

And even when Devi told herself that he was sixteen and entitled to do what he wanted, she felt stung with an unreasonable anger.

Nirmal stood his clay models round the floor of Maw's bedroom and described how his ideas had evolved from them into the giantess in the bustee.

‘Has she got a name?' asked Maw.

‘I think she is a trap for capturing Shakti.'

‘You could make her out of everything. Incorporate some kind of machinery so she wouldn't be static,' suggested Maw.

‘How do you know about these things?' asked Nirmal.

Maw shrugged. ‘All my people know it.'

‘OK. Tell me.' Nirmal sat down cross legged on the floor and Maw sat beside him.

‘Have her grow and change shape in some way,' Maw said. ‘Perhaps by introducing some kind of plant or yeast life into her system. And then when you've got the balance perfect, but that's the tricky bit, you strike a light of life into it.'

‘How?' asked Nirmal.

Maw pressed the Ama stone against his skin and did not answer.

The sun was just rising. Nirmal was putting away his models ready to leave before the household awoke when there was a knock on Maw's door.

Maw and Nirmal both flinched, startled, as though they were illicit lovers.

Maw looked at Nirmal inquiringly. Nirmal shrugged his shoulders. What did it matter anyway if the Raja found him here. He would be left in peace to go on with his statues.

‘Come in,' said Maw.

Devi gasped when, instead of a prostitute, she saw Nirmal in Maw's room. She stared at him and was filled with such a sudden blaze of mixed feelings that she could hardly tell one from another and knew that jealousy was among them.

Maw, gesturing, said, ‘We have been discussing statues.'

Devi tightened her jaw.

Nirmal straightened, a statue in one hand, and smiled at her. ‘Do you mind, Devi?'

‘Did you have to sneak in like this?' she said furiously. ‘You should have asked me yesterday if you could stay. It makes me furious to think that you waited till I had gone before making your secret arrangements.'

‘It wasn't like that,' said Nirmal lamely.

Maw was smiling as though all this was nothing to do with him at all.

Devi, disarmed, all the same tried to go on feeling angry. ‘I mean all you had to do was… oh well.' She started to laugh. ‘I suppose I just got a surprise seeing you there. I thought it was … someone else you see.'

‘Who?' asked Maw interestedly.

Nirmal glanced at Maw and laughed. ‘Oh, I see,' he said.

My God I like him, thought Devi. My gosh I like him so much.

‘What do you see?' asked Maw.

‘She thought you had a woman here.' Nirmal explained.

Maw gave a little frown. ‘A woman, really. Why?'

Devi said to Nirmal, ‘You can stay for breakfast if you like.'

‘Erm, will your father be there?'

Maw looked from one to the other and wondered that Nirmal could not hear the sound of Devi's heart ticking and why he did not sense the tingling of her body. And then, feeling a little bewildered at the strangeness of the Coarseones' hearts, thought he heard a similar sound ticking away in Nirmal's chest. Fear touched him. He must act fast, he thought, or it will be too late.

Nirmal was becoming famous. Newspaper reporters came to interview him and ask, ‘Why are you doing this?'

‘Because I want to,' said Nirmal.

‘But what is she for?'

‘Herself,' he said.

‘But when the monsoon comes she will be washed away because it is unfired clay,' a reporter pointed out. ‘Then what will you do?'

‘I will make another one.'

‘What is the point of making a statue to stand in the slums? What is the point of creating a statue if it doesn't bring you any income?'

‘What is the point of anything?' said Nirmal.

Queenie read about Nirmal's statue in the Bidwar Times and called her driver. ‘Today we shall go to the bustee to see this thing my grandson has made, and that all these people are talking about.'

The driver was horrified. ‘Memsahib, they will steal the hub caps off while you are looking. They will take away your head lights.'

‘It will be your job to protect them,' said Queenie. ‘Have the limousine ready by three.'

When she got there she sat in her car for a long, long time, examining the statue while the mob pressed round the car and examined her.