Happy Birthday! And Other Stories Part 20

Jamie continues on his way towards the police station, walking briskly because this time he has proof of the crime he intends to report. Something pokes his hand. It's the boy's wire contraption. Mud clings to it. Jamie stares hard at it and a thought strikes him like lightning: the boy had run onto the highway because of Jamie; a woman is dead because of the way Jamie has been acting and feeling since coming to India.

For a moment, Jamie cannot move, truth seeping into him like unrealized pain.

And then he walks.

He walks till he reaches the police station. A constable is sitting in a khaki uniform in front of an old tattered register.

*I'm here to report a crime,' Jamie says to him.

The constable lifts his pen and brings it down on the paper, *Against whom?'

Jamie licks his dry lips and clears his throat, before replying, *I want to report a crime against myself.'

It's a crime to be rich, Anita thinks as she clips on her diamond earrings. Guruji has told her that wealth is like a wounded dog: it concentrates only on its own slow death. Or did he say that about America? Or India? It's a bad sign when she can't remember Guruji's words.

She's been feeling bold since waking up, and it's making her uneasy. Knowing that in this mood she will not be able to sit still in the back of the car, she dismisses the driver and drives her silver-grey Mercedes to the ashram herself.

On the way she sends Guruji a text message asking him the purpose of her life. Each time she asks him this he gives her a different reply, saying there is no one answer for certain questions. This time he replies: *Your purpose is to be true to what lies inside you.' He's always telling her to look deep within herself, to journey from the outside to the centre, like a Mandala painting. She tries this and finds nothing.

She reaches the ashram gate, where the watchman gives her a salaam, and after parking in her reserved spot she walks to the school. Mata is waiting for her. She looks ruffled today, her tightly arranged face thrown into disarray.

*Is everything okay?' Anita asks Mata.

*Someone has stolen a resident's bag, Mrs Kotak. I'm investigating the matter,' Mata says in the severe voice that runs the ashram.

Anita says, *What has the world come to?' It is a line that she finds suitable for every situation.

They walk along the brick school buildings where scores of the surrounding village's children pile into wall-less cla.s.srooms. She knows they're here because of her very generous donations, but this doesn't make her proud.

She stops at cla.s.s two and asks Mata, *How's Ramesh?'

Mata's face relaxes as she smiles at her. Anita knows Mata thinks that she shows concern for Ramesh because he's deaf and she's childless. She shifts uncomfortably on her feet as Mata says, *He is the same; same grade for the last three years though his Reading Comprehension has improved.'

This gives Anita an excuse to look more closely at Ramesh. She wants to memorize him because she doesn't know him. The mole on his upper lip has grown a little darker. He's tanned from the summer heat, like his father, and he seems thinner, though he's always been thin, like her. When she worries about his weight, Guruji a.s.sures her that the ashram feeds him well every day. When she weakens, wanting to cook for him, feed him with her own hands, Guruji tells her to stay away for both their sakes.

Mata continues talking. *You won't believe it but the resident whose bag was stolen accused Ramesh of stealing it. I had to have Ramesh's house searched while he was in school. His mother went hysterical. Obviously there was nothing.' No wonder Ramesh seems listless today, not paying attention to the teacher, playing with something on the ground. *It's so sad but the resident thought Ramesh did it because he's poor.'

*Poor?' Anita says venomously. *He is not poor.'

Mata looks at her surprised.

Anita takes a deep breath and changes the topic. *How is his work around the ashram?'

*He wants to do kitchen duty though I've told him repeatedly that he's too young. He says he loves the sight of boiling rice and rolling pins.'

What a wonderful moment this is, Anita thinks, when she's stumbled upon something in common with her son. Cooking is her pa.s.sion, which she stopped after her husband Udit told her it didn't suit her stature. All of a sudden, she understands Guruji's text message this morning: be true to what's inside you. There's only one thing that's touched her from the inside-her son-and while he is true to her in his unwitting likeness to her, she isn't true to him.

Fifteen years ago, she desired two things: money and perfection. Newly married, she pushed Udit hard to make money, to become his boss's boss, to buy the Merc, and their big apartment with its retinue of servants. In less than six years she had more than she needed. But she wasn't able to have a baby. The enormity of leading an imperfect life hit her. She ran to Guruji, who her new rich friends said came into their life and cleaned it up.

He told her on their first meeting, *Life is a sum of equals, Anita. Everyone gets an equal share in the end. The more you have, the more you want, the more you have to lose. The less you have, the less you want, the less you have to lose. That's why the happiest people I've met are the poorest.'

These words changed the route of Anita's desires. She began to notice the tight smiles on her friends' faces, the limitless greed of her neighbours, the endlessness of Udit's ambition. She tried to simplify their life but Udit had worked too hard to give it up; he had become her, wanting perfection, wanting it all. All she wanted then was a baby. Happily, after her fourth round of IVF, she became pregnant, but forty weeks later, while Udit was at a shipping conference in Greece, she gave birth to a baby boy who was deaf. He wasn't perfect. Anita knew this had happened because of the sum of equals; Udit and she already had too much, a perfect child was not theirs for grabs. Udit screamed, *Get rid of that shaitan's child, dump it in the garbage before I get home.'

*Never kill G.o.d's creation,' Guruji said. He told her to bring the boy and a thick wad of notes to the ashram, and handed over both to the ashram's sweeper. After that day, as the fee for her guilt and gratefulness, Anita kept the ashram's coffers full. She heard from Guruji that the sweeper looked after the baby-whom she named Ramesh-as her own son. As Ramesh grew, so did Anita's visits to the ashram.

*Why are you making my son sweep and dust?' she would ask Guruji.

*A grain of seed or a rock, both sink in the water. Doing menial work does not demean a child; just as buying him a PlayStation does not make him greater.' Thus, like all parents, Anita learnt about humility through her child.

*Mrs Kotak?' she hears Mata say. *Shall we go over the new vocational training programme?'

*Of course,' Anita replies with forced enthusiasm. She takes a last look at Ramesh and follows Mata to her office.

*I am so sorry,' Mata says when they reach her office. *I think I've left the programme papers in Olga's office. Would you mind if we sit in her office today?'

*Not at all,' Anita replies. She likes Olga who's been in the ashram for six months now, a true bhakt of Guruji. They go to the seva office where the door is shut. Mata walks in without knocking. Olga is inside the room, with one hand inside an orange duffel bag and the other holding a wad of notes. Anita doesn't realize something is amiss until she hears Olga mutter a curse and Mata say, *Call the police.'

*Police? For what?' Anita asks.

*Remember the stolen bag I was telling you about? Well, we've found the thief.'

*Are you sure?' Anita says, finding it difficult to believe that Olga could do such a thing. She also realizes that this is not a situation Mata is experienced in handling. *Maybe we should ask Guruji first?'

*He may be sleeping. It is early morning in America,' Mata says. Anita still calls him, knowing he never rejects her calls.

Guruji tells them: Karma is fairer than human justice. A greater punishment will await Olga in the outside world. Let her go.

After they send Olga away, Anita bids goodbye to Mata, telling her that she'll be back tomorrow to finish the vocational programme planning.

On the way to her car, she mulls over Guruji's words. Karma has banished her to a life of guilt and unhappiness. Since Ramesh's birth she's felt as though bits of her skin have shrivelled and peeled off, leaving patches of raw flesh so painful that she's never been whole again.

*Resolve your discontent in this life or it will follow you exponentially to your other lives,' Guruji tells her on the phone, as she gets into her car.

*How do I do that?'

*You will unconsciously invite your penance when you're ready for it. There will be signs in the clouds, in leaves, in people, but I warn you, grab that chance when you see it or it will never come again.'

Anita hangs up the phone, unable to imagine what her sign for penance will be. She looks outside her car window at the pa.s.sing fields and shrubs, the sky, but there are no signs. Suddenly her eyes fall on a chicken perched on top of a tree. There is no one around so she can't fathom how the chicken got ten feet off the ground. Something about the chicken's bizarre situation, its startled presence, makes her laugh. It's been years since she's laughed so completely and relief rises in her. Maybe this is my sign, she thinks, but what am I supposed to do with it?

That's when she sees Ramesh ahead of her car, running across the double-lane highway with a truck heading straight towards him. She hears the wild honking of the driver, which her son can't, and a white man screaming on her side of the road. In his hand is the wire cycle that Anita had given Ramesh eight years ago, a send-off for the journey he was about to begin.

A curtain lifts on Anita's day and she can see clearly again.

This is the chance Guruji spoke about-if she misses it, it will haunt her in all her lives.

Anita realizes that the truck will either swerve left, in which case it'll hit her, or to the right where it will hit Ramesh. She can't give the driver a chance to make up his mind. She turns her steering wheel sharply. Her silver-grey Mercedes heads straight into the truck.

*I'm free-' she thinks and laughs. Ha-ha-ha-ha.

As the fifteen metric tonnes of his truck ploughed into the silver-grey Mercedes, Veeru is sure he's hallucinating again. For the tip-top lady, who knows she's going to die, doesn't shield her face but laughs.

From experience, Veeru knows to stiffen his body and cover his eyes, so when his body lurches into the steering wheel, it's braced for impact. He hears the screech of tyres, the crunch of gla.s.s, the smash of metal on metal and a stunned silence that tells him that it's safe to open his eyes. He looks around. The dust from the asphalt road has risen, as has the iron ore powder from the back of his open truck. This clouds his already dizzy head.

He's running late because of Bijli, who let him sleep on her jute cot last night. He had to pay her a hundred-double her usual rate, but he also hadn't seen her in ten days. He protested, of course, knowing that she liked a show. *You are charging me for the whole night when I'm staying for five hours?' Bijli slapped his hand, which was inside her choli, and, bringing her red paan-stained lips to his mouth, she whispered softly, *A night pa.s.ses in an hour for some people, Sahib.' Oof, that Bijli!

To save time, he's been on the road for nine hours without stopping. To save money he's eaten only a piece of toast on which he spread Iodex, the balm he sometimes also uses for his aching back. The Iodex has cooled his stomach and put him in the robotic stupor he needs to navigate the national highway.

Now Veeru feels a shooting pain in his ribcage, reminding him that there are no happy endings. Every time he's been in an accident, every other week or so, the people sitting in cars or motorcycles scrunch their faces and cover their eyes, as if not seeing the inevitable can change their fate. Yet, the tip-top lady seemed almost to embrace the truck, her lips stretched across her happy face.

He wants to go look at this strange lady, though he never sees his victims, but he's not familiar with this taluk. If he gets out, thugs waiting behind trees could rob him. And though the highway is empty, it will not be long before an angry mob comes here, ready to squish him like a mosquito carrying malaria. It's time to act, he realizes. He spits into his hand and rubs it on his eyes. Feeling more alert he looks outside. The dust is settling and the boy is gone. He starts the engine.

He has to drive another one hundred and forty kilometres to reach Dadar before midnight, so that Malak, who owns this truck, his mai-baap, pays him for the thirty-two-hour trip. It takes him an hour to cover thirty kilometres in this truck and it's already six o'clock. Because of the accident he'll also have to stop at Kalamboli Terminal in Navi Mumbai to repair the hood, the fender and most likely the rear-view mirror. This will take an hour, or two, upsetting his plan, but he'll have to make up by driving even faster. It's cheaper for him to pay the mechanic Ramubhai than to have Malak find out about his accidents. Veeru remembers the first time he had an accident, when a drunken motorist crashed into the back of his truck. As punishment Malak had beaten him with an iron rod. For his last accident, when he'd ploughed into a van full of children because he was high on eraser fluid, Malak hadn't paid him for two months.

Veeru will have to bear the cost of this accident. He checks the money tucked inside his underwear. He has only ninety, no forty, rupees left.

*I hope Ramubhai gives me credit,' Veeru thinks as he reverses the truck.

He picks up the lit bidi that's fallen on the dashboard and puts it back into his mouth. His lungi flares open with this movement and he looks down to see the lesion on his inner thigh. He scratches it and brings the bidi next to it. Why, they could be twins, he thinks, for both are red and dotted, spreading their fire; the only difference is that one itches while the other drives away the itch.

*Yeh dosti hum nahin todenge,' he sings to himself half-heartedly and accelerates.

He inhales and blows out smoke on to the Kali statue that Malak has put on the dashboard. How often he's touched the G.o.ddess's feet in front of the police, when he's caught with cannabis pulsing through his veins, or kerosene, not petrol, pulsing through the truck's veins. He chuckles on seeing his reflection in the rear-view mirror. He looks like a shaitan, with his sallow skin blackened from not being washed for days and his beard unshaven for what, three days, three weeks? Four white pustules grow from the left corner of his lower lip. Last week there was one pustule but he scratched it till white pus bled on his brown fingernails and lips. Bijli teases him about this sometimes, calling him her *AIDS Sahib'. Maybe my wife gave it to me, he teases Bijli back, poking the white pustule above her lip.

As his bidi comes to a sad end and the sun sets on his thoughts, Veeru looks one last time into the rear-view mirror. He sees fifteen, twenty people running towards the Mercedes. The iron ore powder from his lorry has flown everywhere and covered the dead car and its smiling lady in red dust.

Veeru pa.s.ses an ashram to his left. There is a three-foot-long photo of that famous Guru on its front wall. Veeru spits out of his doorless seat. People go to these places when survival is not their priority, like tip-top people, like that smiling lady. There are other ways to get to know yourself, like inside this truck with its rattling windows and caged thoughts, a moving jail where a break in monotony is the death of others.

It's the only way to know who you really are.

Does Mata not know who I am, Ramesh wonders, when she asks him in sign language if he knows where the American's bag is. He finds the question silly, knowing Mata keeps all the bags safely locked up in her office. Instead, he asks her if he can start kitchen duty today. She says no, again.

He finishes ashram duty, sweeping and dusting the first-floor rooms, and is outside cla.s.s when his wire cycle, the only toy he's had since childhood, slips out of his hand and falls to the ground. Its handle breaks. He sits on the cla.s.sroom floor, his tears drying in the 35 degree heat, feeling lethargic and dull. The fan is not working again. He kills a fly fluttering around him and is dissecting it when he notices that the shaitan is back. She comes every week, sometimes every second day, during his school time, and though everyone says she's nice because she set up the school for children like him, he is scared of her. Every time she comes, she stands outside his cla.s.s and stares at him, so much that he's sure she's come to steal his soul. She even dresses like a shaitan; wearing glossy clothes and big sandals, her hair brown like a jhadu, her lips bright red and shiny, and there's always a thick, black line below her dark eyes. She doesn't look like she can make rotis or write in files, like the other women he knows. This makes him more suspicious of her. When he complains to his mother about the shaitan, she tells him never to look into her eyes. So now, as she stares at him, he concentrates on the fly's hairy legs.

After a while, the shaitan is gone.

If only Guruji was here and not travelling to important places that Ramesh searches for on a map. There are so many things that Ramesh wants to tell him. Mostly about his mother's condition that has become worse. She lies in bed for most of the day with her face pinched, thrashing her arms for hours, pulling her hair out. Or she goes on a rampage-beating their chickens, force-feeding slop to the goat or wandering off alone in the dark. She will become okay if he feeds her nice food. That's what separates us from the rich, she always tells him, they eat well. That's why Ramesh wants to be put on kitchen duty, so he can learn how to cook for his mother.

Guruji will not say no to him. After all, out of all the ashram children, Guruji only allows Ramesh to sit on his lap and even tickles him till he laughs.

Ramesh doesn't like it when the other children sn.i.g.g.e.r and he reads their lips saying, *Look at the son and father,' or *Guruji has a mad wife and a deaf son.'

My mother is not mad, he tells them, but on those days, when he goes home, he asks his mother, *Who is my father?'

His mother says nothing but she looks at him, sometimes teary-eyed, sometimes angry, and sometimes she makes an air beard with her fingers-the Guruji!

Guruji?

And why not? How does it matter? It's not like Ramesh remembers his father, any father anyway.

The school bell rings. Ramesh is glad the day is over. He starts walking home. He takes the broken wire cycle out of his brown shorts, wondering if he can use the coir from his mother's broom to fix it, when someone touches him on the shoulder. He looks up to see a vaguely familiar white man. He has an orange bag. It's that crazy American! Though no longer as fat as he was when he first came, he still towers over Ramesh, his green eyes bloodshot, red hair standing up like daggers and an unreadable expression on his pink face. Ramesh knows this man is trouble. The first day they met he offered Ramesh a hundred rupees (*Money,' his mother had told him, *is one way through which shaitans steal souls'), though Ramesh saved himself by repeating the line that Mata had taught him to use for such situations. But then the American broke the n.o.ble Silence and, on top of that, he complained about Ramesh to Mata. He's a bigger shaitan than that woman outside my cla.s.s, Ramesh realizes. And they're alone here, all alone on this highway. There's no one to save him. Dropping the cycle in shock, Ramesh runs.

He turns around to see that the shaitan is not chasing him. He slows down. From the corner of his eye he sees his chicken Champa on the opposite side of the road. His mother has put her up on the tree again; she's probably having one of her bad days. He runs across the highway. On reaching the other side, he turns around again, but instead of the white shaitan, he sees a car crushed under a truck.

There are accidents every day on the highway; this is not as bad as the four-car pile-up he'd once seen or the time when an entire bus caught fire in front of him with all its pa.s.sengers inside. Judging by people's expressions after these accidents, he knows that the horror of hearing a crash is much worse than watching it; it's the only time he's glad to be deaf.

This destruction, it's part of his life, as much as the ashram is his life's construction.

Ramesh climbs up the tree and brings Champa the chicken down. They are going home.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.

Mom, Papa, Iva and Sorabh, my sun, my moon, my stars. For keeping the light shining on me, especially when it gets dark.

Meru Gokhale, my brilliant editor. For enabling this book. For believing in me. For believing in short stories.

Fazal Rashid. For your dedication and promptness. For not letting me get away with a single abstraction or adverb.

Archana Shankar, Caroline Newbury, Rukun Kaul and the rest of the wonderful team at Random House India. For letting me run with my imagination, and keeping up with a smile.

Jeet Thayil. For being so incredibly talented and so incredibly awesome. I want to be you.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Namita Gokhale and Ashwin Sanghi. For your grace, for your time, for knowing that talent is powerless without recognition.

Suhel Seth. For your originality, kindness and thoughtfulness. For making these qualities so much fun.

Anurag Hira. For giving a beautiful visual milieu to my stories with this book cover that we all immediately fell in love with.

Tehelka. For publishing the fantastic article, *Nagpada's Hoop Dreams' (June 2010), that inspired my story *Hoopsters'.

Shahnaz Shroff. For ploughing through my first stories and telling me, over so many appletinis in Manhattan, that yes, I could be a writer.

Priya, Moobu, Dhruv, Tina, Bhavya, Ali, Preeti, Suddu, Benaifer, Arya, Payal, Vahbiz and Abhi. For almost two decades of friendship; for being there in my noise and in my silence.

Avatar Review, Eclectica, EGO Magazine and QLRS for respectively publishing *The Message' (previously t.i.tled *Flurt!'), *Gecko On The Wall', *Lemon and Chilli', and *Shaitans' (previously t.i.tled *Chicken on the Treetop').

Readers. For reaching out to me via Twitter, Facebook, blogs, emails and in person. For your encouragement, faith and support that stay with me every time I write. May your tribe increase.