The Song of Kahunsha (5 page)

He decides to walk around his new neighbourhood. Soon he reaches the spot where the men were sitting in a circle the night before and smoking into the sky, and he sees a couple of wooden stools out in the street. A line of motorcycles is parked by the side of the street. He can see the abandoned auto rickshaw too. It looks even older in daylight and it has a huge dent on one side as though it has been in an accident.

On the main road, where the taxi had stalled at night, two tall coconut trees tower above the streetlights. They do not sway, because there is no wind. There is a bus stop as well, and a man leans against the foundations of the bus stop and wipes his brow with a handkerchief. Behind the bus stop, against the shutters of a closed shop, is a magazine vendor. He has hung his magazines on a rope, which is tied like a clothesline between two building pipes. Chamdi loves the manner in which the magazines fan out, as though they are about to fly away.

He faces the building once again. Even though the walls look old and tired, the apartment windows are colourful. Some of their frames are painted pink and the glass is blue. Clotheslines display red towels and green bedsheets. A small
red bucket also hangs from a clothesline, and Chamdi thinks it strange that someone hangs a bucket.

On the ground floor of the building is a small mandir. Chamdi can tell it is a temple because even though the building is brown, this section is painted orange. Also, an old woman is selling garlands outside it. She sits on her haunches in a small stall and threads together beautiful marigolds and white lilies. When she finishes one garland, she hangs it from a nail on the roof of her stall. Chamdi wonders how many she will make. Eventually, a curtain of garlands will cover her and she will have to peer through them like a bride in order to talk to her customers. But the old woman does not look at him.

Ahead, there is a beedi shop. Chamdi tries not to stare at the packet of bread that is placed on one of the glass jars, or at the powdery biscuits inside the jars. He turns his head and walks faster, towards a doctor’s dispensary. He can tell it is a dispensary from the red cross on the white board. He knows that the names on the board are names of diseases, which the doctor knows how to cure. He wonders if a doctor would list a disease that he cannot cure. I hope I never need any doctor, he thinks.

Chamdi feels it is important for him to observe his new neighbourhood. He knew each and every inch of the orphanage, after all. He walks back towards the temple and hopes that the person in charge of it is kind enough to give him something to eat.

But the door of the mandir is closed. It has an iron lock on it. He peers through the iron grilles of the window. This time the old woman who makes garlands watches him. She discards a marigold onto the ground. Chamdi is about to lunge for it, but it has fallen into sewage.

He peeps through the window of the mandir again to catch a glimpse of the god within, but there is not enough light. How can that idol be a god if it cannot provide something as simple as light? But he feels warm, so the god must have a warm heart at least.

A man hurries down the stairs of the mandir building holding a black file in his hands. His hair is oiled and parted to one side. The man looks at his wrist and rushes away, but Chamdi notices that he has no watch.

Once more the hunger talks to him. It tells him that he must find food quickly or he will become dizzy and nauseous. He is not used to
going without food because he is weak to begin with, and even though he ate the same food every single day at the orphanage, at least that food gave him energy. The hunger tells him that although his ribs stick out of his white vest, at least they remain inside his body, but if he does not eat today then his ribs will stick out even more, and while he is sleeping they will pierce through his flesh and show themselves to everyone, and his new neighbourhood will be horrified by the sight of
the boy whose ribs became tusks and left his body
.

So Chamdi breathes in deeply and walks towards the beedi shop. When he reaches its wooden counter, he studies the beediwala’s face. It is small and he has white stubble on his chin and cheeks. He is almost as frail as Chamdi. Chamdi wonders what excuse the beediwala has for being this way when he owns a whole shop full of sweets, breads, and cigarettes. But then it occurs to him that maybe this is why the man is so thin. Instead of eating, he must spend all his time smoking.

“What do you want?” asks the beediwala.

“I … can you please give me something to eat?”

“Do you have money?”

“No … I don’t have money, but even a piece of bread will do.”

“You don’t have money?”

“No.”

“But even a piece of bread will do?”

“I’ve not eaten since yesterday.”

“Okay. Take what you want.”

For a moment, Chamdi cannot believe his ears.

“Take what you want,” the beediwala says again. “You want biscuits?”

Before Chamdi can respond, the man tries to open the lid of the glass jar that contains biscuits. He exerts some force, but the lid is stuck, and Chamdi hopes that the lid opens quickly before the man changes his mind. After a few seconds, the lid opens.

“Go ahead,” says the man. “Take.”

“How many can I take?” asks Chamdi.

“Take how many you want.”

“I will take three, please,” says Chamdi.

“Take, take.”

Chamdi puts his hand inside the glass jar. The man slams the lid of the jar down on Chamdi’s wrist.

Chamdi shrieks in pain.

“You little thief!” shouts the man. “First you steal from my shop and then you come to beg?”

Chamdi is confused, so the pain in his hand waits patiently.

“Yesterday one of you dogs stole oil from me! If you ever come near this shop again, I’ll skin you alive!”

Chamdi sees the anger in the man’s face, so he does not even defend himself. He simply runs away from the beediwala, past the temple, without even glancing at the god inside, until he stops near the water tap. His wrist hurts. His first day in the city, and he has been given hurtful words instead of encouragement. Maybe the cigarettes the man has smoked have damaged his heart, which is why he behaves in such a hurtful manner. Suddenly Chamdi feels very tired. He sits under the water tap and lets the water run over his head. The water has the coolness of rain.

The tap sputters and runs dry.

The sun burns Chamdi’s neck and causes lines of sweat to trickle down his back. He wants to sit under the shade of a shop roof or tree, but he now understands that in order to eat, he must find work.

So he searches the stores around him to see if there is any place where he might work as a sweeper. He has seen Jyoti sweep the orphanage, and whenever she did not show up for work, he used to help Mrs. Sadiq clean up, so he knows what to do. He stands outside the New Café Shirin Restaurant: House of Mughlai, Punjabi, and Chinese Dishes. But the bald man who sits
behind the counter is screaming at the workers in his restaurant. It would be a bad time to approach him.

The next shop, Pushpam Collections, an air-conditioned clothing store, is out of the question because he is afraid to enter it. His white vest is ragged—it has a few holes in it and it has not been washed in a week. Even the brown shorts he wears have weak elastic.

As Chamdi hitches up his shorts, he notices an old man read a sign on a blackboard placed out on the street. The sign is written in Marathi, so Chamdi does not understand the words, but he notes the symbol of the tiger again. After reading the sign, the old man climbs up the steps to the Pooja liquor store. The old man does not say anything when he enters the store, but it seems he must come here regularly because the moment the shopkeeper sees him, he leaves the counter and comes back with a bottle of liquor. The shopkeeper puts the bottle into a brown paper bag. Does the old man hide the liquor in a bag because he is ashamed of carrying the bottle openly? wonders Chamdi. The rows of bottles that are neatly stacked in the display case remind Chamdi of Raman. If Raman were to count the number of
bottles he has drunk in his whole life, they might add up to more than what this liquor store holds. There is a large grandfather clock in the liquor store, similar to the one at the orphanage. It says three o’clock. What time is it at the orphanage? The moment Chamdi thinks this, he feels stupid. He knows it is the same time in both places, but the orphanage seems to exist in a different land.

Near the Pooja liquor store is another shop, but its steel shutters are down. An old beggar has made his home outside this shop. He sleeps on a large gunny bag and a metal bowl near his head has a few coins in it. The sun hits the beggar hard in the face and the beggar squints back at the sun with equal force. Even though flies dot his cheeks, he does not seem to care. His eyes are open and he is trying to get up, but does not have the strength to do so. Chamdi wants to help him, but he is worried that if the old man is mad, he might hit Chamdi. He does not want to take a risk because he has already been accused of being a thief.

He walks back towards the water tap and past the mandir.

The window of the doctor’s dispensary is covered with an iron grille. It looks like a big brown
cage. Perhaps people break in at night and steal medicines. Chamdi feels sad for the doctor’s patients. Whenever Chamdi has fever, he hates not being able to see the sky. The blue of the sky is the perfect medicine for burning eyes.

He wonders why the dispensary is not yet open. Perhaps the doctor is sick himself. That would be of no use at all. He remembers when Mrs. Sadiq used to get terrible coughs, and she would be forced to lie in bed for a few days. If any of the children were sick at the time, they had no one to comfort them.

Chamdi does not want to think about the orphanage, so he walks away from the dispensary. But as he does so, he feels dizzy. Suddenly he slumps to the ground. He hears a cycle ring loudly in his ear and he tries to get up, but he cannot. The cyclewala weaves around him just in time. “Blind dog!” he yells at Chamdi. Chamdi curses too, but he curses himself for being so frail, for not being man enough to last without food for even a day. It is the heat, he says to himself. He begs the sky for rain, but knows it is a useless request.

He can see the water tap in front of him. He must not pass out in the middle of the street.
He must get to the water tap. He rests both hands on the road and thrusts himself up. The water tap spins in front of him. He reaches the tap and clings to it to gain balance.

Luckily, the water has started again. Just seeing it pour out gives him strength. He drinks as much water as he can and tells himself that his stomach is full. If he can convince his stomach that it is full, he will be able to stand. And he will not be lying to his stomach because it will truly be full of water.

But even though Chamdi’s thirst is quenched, hunger makes him weak, and just as he did the night before, he sits under the water tap and closes his eyes to the sounds of the street. He has no idea how sound will help him, but since his eyes are closed, sound is all he has. At first he struggles because the street offers so many sounds at once. But as soon as he hears the ring of a cycle, he knows what he must do, he must use that sound to travel, he must allow the
tring-tring
to lift him, to take him wherever the ring has been, be it the hard streets of the city or the gravel of small pathways and alleys. And he feels himself rising, and his mind tells him that such a thing is not possible, but he tells his mind to go to hell, and
the cycle ring gets dimmer and is replaced by a car horn that sounds like a rhinoceros in pain, yet it is powerful enough to take him away from the water tap and the movie poster above it, and he closes his eyes and smiles because now the car horn is replaced by a truck horn filled with the cries of ten rhinos and he knows that he will use these sounds to travel so far that even the policeman on the movie poster who is so used to chasing gangsters will not be able to catch him, and he tells himself that if he is lucky, his hunger will not be able to catch up either.

The red and green lights have been lowered. Without them, the building matches the sky dust for dust. It is a night without wind, so the shirts, pants, bedsheets, towels, and underwear that are left to dry on the clotheslines remain very still. The clotheslines sag with their weight. Chamdi misses the lights. He liked how they danced from one end of the building to the other. Black patches of tar form shapes on the building. He wonders how old the building is and if people who were born in it still live there. Is it possible to stay in one place your whole life? He thinks these things on purpose, to
distract his mind from the hunger. This will be his second night without food.

He sits near the water tap and watches the main road. A taxi goes past, the driver’s right arm outside the car, holding a cigarette, while he steers with his other hand. Chamdi hears the screech of a motorcycle as an old woman comes in speed’s way, and the rider shouts at the old woman, who shouts back with equal venom.

A BEST double-decker bus slants its way across the main road. The white lights inside the bus are bright, and since it is late at night, the bus is nearly empty. A man with a long beard has fallen asleep with his head on the railing of the seat in front of him. Chamdi wonders if the man has missed his stop.

He takes off the white cloth that is tied around his neck and places it on the street, not caring if the cloth will get dirty. Apart from the three drops of blood, it is drenched in sweat anyway. He puts his head on the cloth and lies down. Each time his eyes close, his stomach opens them, administering dull pain to its own walls.

When he hears the sound of a truck, he recalls the garbage truck of less than twenty-four hours ago. He could have taken some bread from the
orphanage. Mrs. Sadiq would have understood. All the children must be asleep right now. He has inhaled car fumes all day and he thinks of Pushpa, how she would not be able to breathe if she lived in the street.

Then Chamdi’s eyes close on their own, without him forcing them shut, and images reel through his brain: the pigeons on the walls of the orphanage, bougainvillea petals leaning forward towards his face, and Jesus. He wonders if Jesus knows that he has left the orphanage. He did not get a chance to say goodbye. But over the next few days, when Chamdi does not show up for prayers, Jesus will realize that Chamdi is gone.