Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (9 page)

Unfortunately, she was not the only citizen of the jinn world who had reentered the human levels, and not all of them had good deeds in mind.

N
atraj Hero naaching down the avenue like dancing god Lord Shiva, lord of dance, bringing world into being as he prance. Natraj young&beautiful, scorns old dudes, laughs at all the painfoot-limpy-with-heavy/bhaari-body-types. Girls, but, don’t give him a second look. Not knowing his superpowers, Creator and Destroyer of Universe, they are ignoring. That’s okay: theek thaak. He is in disguise. Just now he is being tax accountant Jinendra going for grocery to Subzi Mandi store, Jackson Heights, Quveens. Jinendra Kapoor a.k.a. Brown Clark Cunt. Wait till he rips off his outer garment yaar. Then they’ll dekho him all right, they’ll be checking him proper. Until dat time, hinting only at secret mightiness, he is prancing Thirty-Seventh Avenue like king from Desh, the old country, shahenshah or maharana or wat. Natraj dance to the bulbul tune. He is like dis only. He is Dil-ka-Shehzada. A.k.a. Jack of Hearts.

Natraj Hero did not exist. He was the fictional alter ego of a young would-be graphic novelist, Jimmy Kapoor. Natraj’s superpower was dancing. When he “ripped off his outer garment” his two arms turned into four, he had four faces too, front, back and sides, and a third eye in the middle of his forehead, and when he began to dance the bhangra or bust out his best disco moves—he was from Queens, after all—he was able literally to shape reality, to create or destroy. He could make a tree grow in the street or make himself a Mercedes convertible or feed the hungry, but he could also knock down houses and blow bad guys to bits. It was a mystery to Jimmy why Natraj hadn’t leapt up into the divine pantheon with Sandman and Watchmen and the Dark Knight and Tank Girl and the Punisher and the Invisibles and Dredd and all the other Marvel, Titan and DC greats. Sadly, Natraj had remained obstinately earthbound, and tax accountancy in Jimmy’s cousin’s practice on Roosevelt Avenue was beginning, at his low points, to feel like the young artist’s fate.

He had begun to post episodes from the career of Natraj Hero online but the big boys had notably failed to call. Then, one hot night—one hundred and one nights after the storm, though he hadn’t worked that out—up there in his third-floor bedroom with a red moon shining through his window, he woke up with a start of terror. There was somebody in the room. Somebody …
big.
As his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness he observed that the far wall of his bedroom had disappeared completely and been replaced by a swirl of black smoke at whose heart was what looked like a black tunnel leading into the depths of the unknown. It was hard to see the tunnel clearly because a gigantic many-headed multi-limbed individual was in the way, trying to fold those limbs into the cramped space of Jimmy’s room, looking like it—he—was about to knock down the other bedroom walls, and complaining loudly.

The individual did not look as if he—it—was made of flesh and blood. It—he—looked
drawn, illustrated,
and Jimmy Kapoor recognized, with a shock, his own graphic style, Frank Milleresque (he hoped), sub-Stan-Lee-ite (he conceded), post-Lichtensteinian (this when in the company of snobs, himself included). “You’ve come to life?” he asked, being incapable at that moment of depth or wit. Natraj Hero’s voice, when he—it—spoke, sounded familiar, a voice he’d heard somewhere before, a snarling multi-mouthed echo-chamber voice of divine authority, ruthlessness and wrath, the very antithesis of Jimmy’s own voice, a poor thing filled with fears, insecurities and uncertainty. The correct response to this voice was to quail before it. Jimmy Kapoor made the correct response.

Fuck yaar no space in here sala having to make self smaller, chhota like fucking ant, or I will take roof off your pathetic ghar. Okay, better. See me? Check me? One two three four arm, four three two one face, third eye looking straight into your piddling soul. No, no, please to excuse, respect must be shown, because you are my creator, isn’t it? HA HA HA HA HA. As if great Natraj was dreamed up by tax accountant in Quveens and hasn’t been around and dancing since Start of Time. Since, to be precise, I personally have danced Time and Space into being. HA HA HA HA HA. You think you have summoned me maybe. You think you are a wizard maybe. HA HA HA HA HA. Or you think it’s a dream? No, baba. You just woke the fuck up. Also me. Returning after absence of eight-nine hundred years, featuring many long snoozes.

Jimmy Kapoor shook with terror. “How didid you get hehere?” he stammered. “Ininto my bebedrooroom?”
You have seen
Ghostbusters
fillum?
responded Natraj Hero.
This is like that only.
That was it, Jimmy understood. It was one of his favorite films, and Natraj’s voice was like the voice of the Sumerian destruction-god, Gozer the Gozerian, speaking through the lips of Sigourney Weaver. Gozer with kind of an Indian accent.
Portaal is busted open. Border between what imagineers are imagining and what imaginees are desiring is leaky now like Mexico-USA, and we-all, who before were caged in Phantom Zone, can go fast now through wormholes and land up here like General Zod with superpowers. So many wanting to come. Soon we will be taking over. Hundred and one percent. Forget about it.

Natraj began to flicker and dim. This was not to his liking.
Portaal not functioning just now at full efficiency. Okay. Tata for now. But please be assured, I will return.
Then he was gone and Jimmy Kapoor alone wide-eyed in bed watched the black clouds spiral inward until the dark tunnel was gone. After that his bedroom wall reappeared, with the photos of Don Van Vliet a.k.a. Captain Beefheart, Scott Pilgrim, Lou Reed, the Brooklyn hip-hop group Das Racist, and the Faustian comic-book hero Spawn pinned to the corkboard unaltered, as if they hadn’t just voyaged to the fifth dimension and back, and only Rebecca Romijn, in the large pin-up poster of the blue-skinned shapeshifter Raven Darkhölme a.k.a. Mystique, looked a little put out, as if to say, Who was that who shifted my shape out of the way, fucking nerve of some people, I’m the only one who decides when I change form.

“Now
sabkuch
changes, Mystique,” Jimmy told the blue creature in the poster. “Meaning to say,
everything.
Now the world itself is shape-shifting, looks like. Vow.”

Jimmy Kapoor was the first to discover the wormhole, and after that, as he correctly intuited, everything shifted form. But in those last days of the old world, the world as we all knew it before the strangenesses, people were reluctant to admit that the new phenomena were truly occurring. Jimmy’s mother pooh-poohed her son’s account of his transformative night. Mrs. Kapoor was stricken with lupus, and rose only to feed the exotic birds, the peahens, the toucans, the ducks. These she obstinately reared for sale and profit in the concrete-and-dirt wasteland behind their building, an empty plot where something had fallen down long ago and nothing had risen in its place. She had been doing this for fourteen years and nobody had objected, but there were thefts, and in the winter some birds froze to death. Rare breeds of duck were pilfered and ended up on somebody’s dinner table. An emu fell over shivering and was gone. Mrs. Kapoor accepted these events uncomplainingly, as manifestations of the world’s unkindness and her personal karma. Holding a newly laid ostrich egg, she scolded her son for confusing dreams and reality, as he always did.

“Unusual thing is never the true thing,” she told him, while a toucan on her shoulder nuzzled her neck. “Those flying saucers always turn out to be fakes, na, or ordinary lights, isn’t it. And if people are coming here from another world, why only show themselves to crazy hippies in the desert? Why they are not landing at JFK like all others? You think a god with so-many arms legs and what-all would come to you in your bedroom before visiting president in Oval Office? Don’t be mad.” By the time she had finished Jimmy had begun to doubt his own memory. Maybe it really had been a nightmare. Maybe he was such a loser that he had started swallowing his own shit. In the morning there had been no trace of Natraj Hero, right? No disarranged furniture or fallen coffee mug. No torn photographs. The bedroom wall felt solid and real. As always, his ailing mother was right.

Jimmy’s father had flown the coop with a secretary bird some years back and Jimmy did not as yet possess the funds to get a place of his own. There was no girlfriend. His sick mother wanted him to marry a thin-thin girl with a big nose that was always stuck in a book, college girl, nice manner on surface nasty behavior underneath, the way those girls were, No thank you, he thought, better off on my own until I hit the big time and then look out major babeland. The tall pretty girls lived in New York and the short pretty girls lived in LA; Jimmy was glad he lived on the glamazon coast. He aspired to be worthy of a personal glamazon. But right now there was no girlfriend. Fuck. Never mind. Right now he was at the office quarreling as usual with his cousin Normal, boss of accountancy firm.

He hated that his cousin Nirmal wanted to be normal so badly that he changed his name to Normal. He hated even more that Nirmal—Normal—spoke such bad normal
Amreekan
that he thought the word for
name
was Monica. Jimmy told his cousin that nowadays
moniker
meant a graffiti artist’s drawing on a freight train. Normal ignored him. Look at Gautama Chopra son of famous Deepak, Normal said, he changed his Monica to Gotham because he wanted so bad to be New Yorker. Also basketball players: Mr. Johnson wanted to be Magic, isn’t it, and Mr. Ron or Wrong Artist, don’t correct me, please—okay—Mr. Ar
test
preferred to be Mr. World Peace. And don’t forget those actresses so famous in before-time, Dimple and sister Simple, if those Monicas are acceptable then what you talking. Me, I just want to be Normal, and so what’s wrong with it, Normal by name, normal by nature. Gotham Chopra. Simple Kapadia. Magic Johnson. Normal Kapoor. Same to bloody same. You should focus on the figures and keep your head out of the dreams, isn’t it. Your good mother told me your dream. Shiva Natraj in your bedroom as drawn by Jinendra K. Keep going on that way, why not? Keep going on and you will come to a grief. You want a life? Wife? No strife? Focus on figures. Take care of your mother. Stop dreaming. Wake up to reality. That is Normal practice. You will do well to follow suit.

Outside, when he left work, it was Halloween. Children, marching bands et cetera, parading. He had always been kind of a Halloween party-pooper, never got into the whole dressing-up Baron-Samedi thing, and half admitted to himself that the killjoy attitude was related to the absence of a girlfriend, was both an effect of said absence and also the partial cause of it. Tonight, with his thoughts full of last night’s manifestation, Halloween had completely slipped his mind. He walked down streets filled with dead people and tits-out prostitutes, readying himself for his mother’s infirmity, her guilt-trip monologues and her doddering birdseed duties, I’ll do, it Ma, he told her, but she shook her head weakly, No, son, what am I good for now except to keep my birds alive and wait for death, her usual speech, a little more macabre given the context, the dead rising from their tombs to perform their
danses macabres,
the night of skeleton-masked figures in hooded monks’ habits carrying the Sickles of the Reaper and drinking vodka from the bottle through the gaping mouths of their skulls. He passed a woman with astonishing face makeup, a zipper running down the middle of her face, “unzipped” around her mouth to reveal bloody skinless flesh all the way down her chin and neck, You really went all out, darling, he thought, that’s really full on, but I don’t think anybody will want to kiss you tonight. Nobody wanted to kiss him either but he had a superhero-slash-god to meet. Tonight, he told himself, filled with both dread and joy. Tonight we’ll see who’s dreaming and who’s awake.

And sure enough, at midnight, the pictures of Captain Beefheart, Rebecca /Mystique and the rest were swallowed up by the swirling dark cloud, which slowly spiraled open to reveal the tunnel to somewhere infinitely strange. For some reason—Jimmy supposed that supernatural beings weren’t required to abide by the laws of reason, that reason was one of the things they defied, held in contempt, and sought to overthrow—Natraj Hero didn’t bother on this occasion to visit the bedroom in Queens. And, again for some reason—though Jimmy himself would have admitted afterwards that rational thought had very little to do with his decision—the young would-be graphic novelist moved slowly towards the cloud spiral and gingerly, as if testing the temperature of bathwater, put his arm into the black hole at its heart.