The Cripple and His Talismans (Signed first edition)

THE IN-CHARGE
 
 
The man’s look tells me that I have made a mistake. He moves closer to my face, but his eyes focus on the dim light bulb that hangs above me in the centre of his beedi shop. His skin is soot, dark but smooth. Mosquitoes are converging around the bulb. He listens to their murmur.
 
“Yes, I’m the In-charge,” he whispers.
 
He looks at the mosquitoes around the bulb. They stick to it and exchange places with each other, a small dance to pass time between transmissions of malaria.
 
I try to get his attention. “Gura has sent me,” I tell him. “He says you have information about my lost arm.”
 
He covers my mouth. His palm smells of tobacco and money. There is also the stink of genitals but I try to dismiss that. He releases his hand slowly.
 
“I will draw a map for you,” he says.
 
It is dim and dusty, and I am being hit and bitten by insects the size of stones. I realize that he waits for me to respond.
 
“A map will be helpful,” I say.
 
His dark hands are beautiful compared to the rest of him. His face is round as an earthen pot and his ears are long. Strands of hair with the dryness of straw stick out of his lobes. But his hands are thin as if crafted from black paper. Mine are lighter, more the colour of soil. I am one hand less now; in fact, a whole left arm less if one insists on staring at me under the mosquito bulb.
 
He plucks out a short pencil from behind his ear. Apart from Shivaji beedis, he also stocks packs of Marlboro, Gold Flake, Charminar, Dunhill, Four Square and 555 on thin wooden shelves. I look at his small shop and wonder how he stays in this hole all day. I look to the side, at the shop next to his. It is a flower shop, just as constricting. Most of the flowers are dead. White buckets hold the fragrant corpses.
 
He now has a small piece of paper on top of the glass jar that contains sweets. The paper already has numbers scribbled all over it so I do not know how he will draw a map.
 
“You are here,” he says, his eye on the paper.
 
He draws a spiral, keeps circling. In order to make him stop before he puts a hole through the paper, I respond. “I understand, In-charge.”
 
I use his title in the hope that he will reveal his name.
 
“You are here,” he repeats. The circling continues. “You must follow a few landmarks. They will direct you to the games. But I cannot tell you what the landmarks are.”
 
“Games? What games?”
 
He hands me the chit of paper. One spiral shows me where I am. Two inches from it, a darker spiral shows me where I must go.
 
Let me have my arm for just a second so I can teach him a lesson. I am not accustomed to being mocked. I am a novice cripple.
 
“At least tell me which direction I must take,” I ask the In-charge.
 
“You will know. I’m busy. Now go.”
 
No one is around. If there were customers, I could understand if he said he is busy. But not even the flower man is visible. We are in one of the city’s gullies, a by-lane that only the local residents use.
 
I take the map and walk out on the street. I hold it under the streetlight with my right hand. If I had both arms, I would have a better grip. I try not to think of my disability. At times it makes me so rabid that I want to rip my other arm off. I then realize that I do not have an arm to pull the other one off. This angers me even more.
 
A lost arm causes much more than physical disorientation. I question many more things. Why does so and so have an arm? Why is he happy? Why is she beautiful? Why is the orange that I eat sour?
 
I think of Gura the floating beggar. It was he who led me to the In-charge. The moment I lost my arm, two months ago, I felt like a pariah in the company of normal people. After I got out of the hospital, I sold my white-marbled apartment by the sea and moved to one with stone flooring, where flying cockroaches and mosquitoes sang at midnight. I did not speak a word for two whole months. It was as though my arm had done the talking before.
 
Gura was the first person I talked with, this very morning. It happened naturally. In my new physical state, I recognized Gura as my equal—a beggar I could speak to. Gura’s remark startled me.
 
“Don’t worry. You’ll get used to it,” he said.
 
He sat at the entrance to my building. I had never noticed him before. Was it obvious that I had recently lost an arm? I looked at him and saw the face of darkness — a little hell, fallen trees.
 
“What will I get used to?” I asked. These were the first words I had uttered in two months. Instead of feeling better, I felt as though I were choking on my own vomit.
 
“Absence,” he said.
 
His body and face were more stained than the footpath he sat on.
 
“There is an absence,” he continued. “And you are not handling it well.”
 
Why should I? I thought. It is not as if I have lost my wallet. In fact, even when I lost my wallet I never handled things gracefully.
 
Then he leaned toward me. “Now listen,” he whispered.
 
Gura scratched a boil on his thigh. He picked out flakes from his scalp. He bared his teeth to the sun until they got hot. He licked his lips, tweaked his eyebrows and crossed his arms.
 
“Why are you staring at my face?” he asked.
 
“You said to listen.”
 
“Not to me.”
 
“To whom, then?”
 
“The street. All answers lie in its sounds. In the bicycle bell of a little boy also lies the wail of his mother, for she knows he will leave her soon when he is crushed by a speeding truck.”
 
“That’s quite dark.”
 
“He is dark.”
 
“Who?”
 
“You tell me.”
 
“Why are you talking in riddles?”
 
“How are riddles shaped?”
 
“I don’t know.”
 
“They coil round and round like gullies.”
 
“Why are you telling me this?”
 
“You’re sucking it out of me like a mosquito.”
 
“No, I’m not.”
 
“If there is a dispute then talk to the In-charge.”
 
“Who?”
 
“The In-charge!”
 
Beggars do that, I thought. They feel God has abandoned them so they put someone else in charge. Poverty strips them of their brain. They start counting colours instead of money, and when colours run out they try and invent their own. That drives them to madness because it is impossible to think of a colour that does not exist.
 
So I walked past Gura and up the four steps that led to my flat. I was about to open the door when he said something that made my heart pound.
 
“The In-charge knows about your lost arm. That which you do not.”
 
Words like this come once in a lifetime, and you hear them even if your ears have been torn from your head and stamped into the earth.
 
“What does he know?”
 
“Ask him.”
 
“Where can I find him?”
 
“Your arm will show you. Point it.”
 
I raised the only arm I had toward the fire temple in the distance. Gura shook his head. I pointed to the post office and the three-star hotel. Then to the flyover and dancing bars below. The Central and State Banks, the old Parsi library, the gas cylinder shop, the nursing home known for selling babies when mothers were not looking. Soon all of these had been indicated.
 
“I’m lost,” I said.
 
“Then use your lost arm.”
 
“But it does not exist.”
 
“Nothing really does.”
 
I faced the old cinema that showed B-grade Hindi movies. I imagined I was using my absent arm to point. Since I had time, I turned toward the clock repair shop. Then I pointed at the toy shop whose sad moustachioed owner looked like he was selling sick puppies instead. I had spun a complete 360 so I looked at Gura, who urged me to carry on.
 
“But I’ll keep going round and round in circles,” I said.
 
“Like a Jalebee!” he laughed.
 
I felt very foolish. A beggar was mocking me. So I reached into my shirt pocket and pulled out some money. It was the only way to save face. A rich man without an arm is still superior to a poor man with one.
 
“It’s a hint,” said Gura.
 
“You want to eat Jalebee?” The poor fellow suddenly had a craving for orange coiled sweets?
 
“You can’t eat this Jalebee. But can you go to it.”
 
I understood.
 
There was only one area in the city where gullies wound like riddles, where the in-roads were black as death, messages from prophets were scribbled on the walls and babies walked like tiny gangsters, toting guns and milk bottles.
 
“Jalebee Road?”
 
“Good work, my crippled genius.”
 
“Will you take me there?”
 
“I have begging to do! You think I can afford to waste time?”
 
“Then how will I find the In-charge?”
 
“Even the blind can find him.”
 
So when night fell, I walked to Jalebee Road. In the heart of Jalebee Road there is a tree. It is the oldest tree in the city, without leaves, and is considered holy, a refuge for all ...