Dead Water (26 page)

That grumpy old sod Eric Moyse has had his uses after all. Boxes and boxes and boxes within boxes: this story has swallowed the earth. They have the world wrapped up now – all the world’s bounty travels in shipping containers and every shipping container is a scale in their skin. Day after day, from port to rail yard to lorry park, Abhik and Kaneer trundle down a street near you.

They pay very little attention to the small but necessary part of their being that men call Dead Water. They are no longer very boyish, so they are not especially fascinated by their own excretions and emissions. Dead Water is their lymphatic system, their twofold body’s drain: what’s there to pay attention to?

Then it comes, grey and wrinkled like a brain: the pollution cloud presaging the catastrophic floods of 1976. Rain, bituminous and grainy, splashes a container being hauled on the back of an antique Tata truck along the GTR, west to east, to a scheduled sailing from Mumbai. The truck driver’s not slept in fifty hours, not since Patna, and the medicine that’s been fuelling him has grown fangs. It bites. Needles shoot through the driver’s left shoulder as he drives and down his whole left side. He gasps, but he will not stop, he will not pull over, he cannot afford to, he has a schedule to keep and seventeen kids to support, in three cities, to three separate and unwitting wives, so he keeps rolling, ignoring the signs, ignoring the pain, through Firozabad and out, towards the badlands of Uttar Pradesh, along the Sher Shah Suri Marg.

It rains and rains. The road grows slick. The windscreen wipers falter. The driver yawns and does not see the bite in the road. The truck plummets down the embankment, hurling the hapless driver high into the branches of a margosa tree. Its load, improperly secured, goes bounding down the bank, over and over, booming and bellowing, MOYSE MOYSE MOYSE MOYSE MOYSE, and rocks to rest, upside down, just a few feet away from where a small boy stands, soaked through and frozen with horror, under a rain of knife-like leaves.

Abhik and Kaneer confer, their talk a susurration so faint it could be anything: a sound, a scent, a movement of lightless surfaces against a lightless ground. There’s something about this kid, they’re sure. Some great, ironic promise.

Cursing, the twofold djinn disentangles itself from disordered contents of the can. Outside, the boy, gripped by an obscure impulse, runs his hand back and forth over the wall of the can and the container doors swing open.

Boy and djinn behold each other, but the living child’s eyes, inadequate to express the djinn’s terrible twofold majesty, present it to him only as illimitable dark. Squinting, he approaches.

It is
Rishi Ansari
!

Rishi Ansari

This sound, this sussuration – savour it. This is the sound of dead boys laughing.

Midpoint reversal, on the button. Structure to make a struggling, sceptical playgoer weep with relief. Oh! the boys embrace. What luck! A path regained. A clew out of their maze. Their story’s back on track at last. Can this be true? A journey half-done, a puzzle halfway solved? Oh, yes.

The kid steps inside, over the aluminium lintel. His footfalls make no sound on the plywood floor as he edges into the dark.

Rishi Ansari. Serviceable and anonymous. Komatsu boy. Oh yes, we’re having
you
.

Rishi’s father, Keshav Ansari, adores fairgrounds. Twice a year, before the flood robbed him of his two eldest sons, he would drag his family to the fair in Firozabad.

After flood and funerals, there’s only Rishi wants to accompany him. So Keshav takes his sole surviving boy to visit the fair ‘one last time’. Keshav’s half-blind with glaucoma by now. He won’t let Rishi have charge of the money, but he can’t see well enough to count it. The stallholders and the fairground men have to do it for him. Money falls through his fingers like water, leaving him angry and bitter. The fairground is full of thieves, he says.

Rishi sets his father down on a plastic chair, grumbling over a paper plate piled with dried fish and brinjals, and goes off to explore the arcades. On the side of one booth, a spray-painted Clint Eastwood chews a cheap cigar. The booth sells silver dollars. You feed money into the machine and type a short message on its chunky keyboard.

Rishi types: AADI + RAM

His brothers.

Next he has to choose something for the middle of the coin. There are six designs to choose from. Rishi picks

Shanti.

Peace.

Something like the tone arm of a record player feeds a silver blank into the press. The hammer falls with a satisfying, floorboard-shaking thump. The coin drops into the hopper at his feet. Some hidden apparatus has contrived to wrap it in a plastic baggie. It’s fiendishly difficult to open. He has to use his teeth.

He gets the coin out of the bag and studies it. It’s only a cheap thing, but it’s something he has made. He pockets the coin and promises himself that he will always carry it with him.

Rishi and Vinod’s friendship begins innocuously enough. They are neighbours, after all. I dare you to madden that cow. I dare you to steal those keys. To drink this bottle. To climb that roof. To break his window. To shit on her laundry.‘Boys!’

Now here comes Vinod’s cousin Yash, arriving unexpected on the scene, the summer after the floods. 1977.

Yash Yadav: a thing beached and abandoned. An animal capable enough in its own environment but poorly suited to its present surroundings. Vinod thrusts Rishi under Yash’s nose, showing off his playmate as you’d show off a model boat or the steering wheel off a wrecked car; Yash peers at Rishi and sniffs. Yash sniffs at everything, as though compensating for faulty vision. The milk cans. The mango trees. Yash is fat, with a rolling gait he’s copied from Amitabh Bachchan in
Sholay
, a cowboy movie he’s already seen three times in Lucknow.

Rishi and Vinod are playing shoot-outs in the rain, Rishi with a tin toy, Vinod with his father’s rusted old service Browning. Vinod needs both hands to lift it and the one time he managed to pull the trigger it snipped a lump out of the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. Now he just swings it around and yells ‘Bang’.

They turn a corner of the house, arguing over the rules of their game (‘Vinod, you have to at least point the thing, if you don’t point the thing there’s no point...’), and come upon Yash, by the parlour window, pressing Rishi’s sister, little Safia, six years old, up against the wall.

She has hold of her doll; she’s clinging to it fiercely and Yash is trying to tear it off her. Safia yelps like a wounded puppy. Already Yash has a taste for intimidation. He has his hand over her face.

‘Yash.’ Vinod sounds exactly like his father. ‘Leave her alone.’

Yash is impressed. His sneer is uncertain of itself, ready, at an instant’s notice, to transform itself into a smile. ‘She a friend of yours?‘

‘Well, what do you think?’ says Vinod, and he lifts the gun and pulls the trigger. The safety’s on. He finds the catch and thumbs it forward, takes aim, fires again. Of course, the gun is empty. A toy. Yash doesn’t know that. Vinod’s attention to detail has him sweating.

He runs and tells, and that night Old Samey carries Vinod, his son and heir, into a barn, lays him down on a blanket of straw, and whips him until he bleeds. Yash is there. Watching.

Things are happening for Yash. Some family plan has him travelling into Firozabad with Old Samey once, twice a week. He comes home from these trips stuffed with his own importance and as conceited as an old cat. You can tell from the way he speaks (too loud, too much from the hard palate) that he is discovering the power of his own ego. Scowling in front of the mirror every morning. Straightening his sandals under the bed at night.

One afternoon, when Yash is away with Old Samey, Rishi goes to the usual bathing place to swim and finds Vinod and Safia coupled on the riverbank.

Safia flicks herself closed, drawing up her knees to hide her nakedness. Vinod, bucked and abandoned, looks for all the world like a baby tipped out of a pram. His fast-wilting erection swings between his legs, ridiculous and infantile as a rattle. It takes him a moment to spot Rishi’s face among the bushes.

He isn’t going to say anything. Around here, girls have been burnt for holding hands, for an unchaste look. Round here is the kitchen-accident capital of the world, and there are relations Rishi doesn’t trust: grimfaced, disappointed men in hamlets west of here, always crapping on about honour as they pick their feet and suck their ulcered gums. It isn’t Safia he’s trying to protect, so much as his father. Poor Keshav, his eyes wide with glaucoma, trying to hold his own in some bitter family row. His mother screaming. ‘Show us what you’re made of!’ No.

So Rishi becomes the couple’s protector, and in 1982, after several youthful years’ fumbling and mooning, Vinod finally gets to inseminate his sister.

There is, for a while, a great deal of wailing and slapping going on, Witchy old aunts come visiting with vile herbal preparations. Safia refuses to drink them. Rishi stands up for her. ‘How dare you!’ their mother cries. Rishi bears the blows, but it takes all his self-control not to grab his mum’s wrist.

Keshav listens from his corner, his eyesight almost gone, and the pupils of his eyes wider than ever, perpetually surprised: ‘What’s happening? Is anybody going to tell me what is happening?’

‘You go talk to them, Keshav!’ their mother implores. ‘It’s not right!’ – badgering him and badgering him until Keshav heaves himself from his chair and taps his way down the lane to Old Samey’s house.

Why Samey agrees to his neighbour’s mumbled and embarrassed marriage demand is a question that keeps Chhaphandi’s gossips busy for weeks. The word is he wants to teach his eldest a lesson.

The night before the engagement, Rishi strings mango leaves over their door and ties banana plants to either side of the gate. Then, once Safia is awake and ready, he opens the gate and Vinod and about fifty relatives and friends parade in, dancing over ground strewn with rice and coloured powders. They sit Safia and Vinod down on wooden planks. A priest mumbles Sanskrit nothings at them; the couple stare straight ahead, rigid as statues, not once daring to look at each other. The engagement party lasts long into the night, and marriage follows, like clockwork, two months later.

Old Samey insists on a dowry, of course.

‘A dowry!’ Rishi’s mother clasps her hands over her heart, her gestures broad and violent, as though miming a fatal knife attack.

‘It’s only a formality,’ Keshav soothes.

‘After what that boy did!’

‘Really. It doesn’t matter,’ Keshav mumbles, eyes flickering, distracted, over the bare walls of their little house. Hard to say what matters to him by now. Wide-eyed as a child, he is taking his first, tentative steps into a private world.

A dowry, then: a means by which Old Samey might salvage a little family dignity from the couple’s rushed courtship and Safia’s all-tooobvious bridal bulge. Rishi can go to work for the Yadav family and pay regular instalments out of his wages. The exact amount isn’t important. Everyone can see that Vinod and Safia are in love. That, the toothless old men of Chhaphandi agree, misty-eyed, ought to count for something. But time is what it is.

The river, which robbed the Ansaris of two boys and a home, doesn’t stay put. It meanders, and settles into something like its old pattern, giving back the land it took.

Old Samey is delighted. In the aftermath of the floods, there’s a boom in the construction trade, and land recovered from the river is perfect for the new brickworks. Old Samey buys new machinery, digs ditches, sets foundations, and advertises for extra labour: some out-of-work farm labourers, but itinerants too, beggars and
bhangis
from Lohardaga. Real scum.

Rishi stands with his father, blinking through the smoke of a dozen bonfires at the ruined land. Trees and undergrowth have been grubbed up, old field-lines scraped away by iron teeth. Old Samey’s brand-new Komatsu (185hp, powershift transmission, enclosed cabin) crosses and criss-crosses Rishi’s birthplace, marking out a series of trenches.