Story: Nabarun Moitra
In Anticipation 1. The Present “It’s as hot as a Hottentot’s arse,” said Bulu moodily, wiping the sweat from his forehead with a crooked forefinger. They were sitting on the rusted iron fencing around the weed-infested Children’s Park, in the shade of a spreading Krishnachura tree, the four of them. Kalu, Bulu, Sholu and Dulu, otherwise known as the four- or char-loos which shallow Dunghill humour had shortened to ‘Chaloo’ in their childhood. They were now the Chaloo gang, four quintessential Dunghill youth, equally thin, black, uncouth and intransigent with a rough, savage edge to their voices and loutishness in their expressions which education up to High School had failed to diminish. Despite their names, they were not related by blood, only by some occult, atavistic perversion in the history of their genes that choked their mouths and gullets every time they felt hungry, but, absurdly, left their DNA’s and appetites intact and essentially human. They sat on the fence that hot summer afternoon feeling hot and lazy because they had nothing better to do. It was not as if they were not hungry or had no homes to go back to. Even if those homes were only cramped railway hovels where their mothers slaved and gossiped and their fathers came back drunk as lords every evening. They sat on the fence that hot summer afternoon feeling hot and lazy because they had nothing better to do. “Are Hottentot arses hot?” asked Kalu lazily. “Must be. African, after all,” opined Sholu. Lazily. “Isn’t Africa the dark continent?” asked Dulu, lazily. “That’s mental, not physical,” said Bulu, lazily. “You are sounding like Randy Marcus.” Sholu’s giggle was lazy. Marcus Abraham had given them English Literature tuitions in High School. They went back to feeling hot and lazy. The park was their friend and its fencing the constant companion of their bottoms since they had been old enough to perch on it. They had felt hot and lazy at 2 P.M. of May afternoons on it, cold and lazy at 2 P.M. of January afternoons on it and wet and lazy at 2 পালিক পড়ুন o পড়ানঃ http://calcuttans.com/palki
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P.M. of August afternoons on it. They sometimes felt disgusted with the inconstancy of the seasons; they barely gave you the time to get adjusted to them. They sat and they sweated and they chatted incoherently – as they patiently waited through the moons, the seasons, the highs of marijuana, the despair of empty wallets, the unbearable litheness of slithering, impudent female torsos. Waiting patiently, rusting a little, of course, decomposing in the stultifying heat, withering sometimes when the cold north wind came calling, but inevitably, exasperatingly, infuriatingly… Alive. They are waiting for their fathers to die. Sitting on the fence. On that hot summer afternoon. Feeling hot and lazy. Because they have nothing better to do. Drunken, wife-beating, pathetic, helpless, cringing railway servant fathers who refuse to die on the searing steel tracks and the coarse, rough ballast which they dig up and repack with pick-shovel-barehands-deadhearts when it turns to sand under the weight of a hundred gargantuan locomotive and rake. *** 2. The Past It had always been hot, or nearly always, except in the extreme northern reaches and the mauve mountains, and nobody cared about those, nobody, that is, until the Anointed received their mark – and that was much later. But never lazy, or nearly never. The teachers had taught, the soldiers had battled, the traders had cheated, the sweepers had swept. Then, one day, out of the heathen north-west came the Beard-host, the polygamous monotheists with fire in their loins and rapine in their blood. They plundered and went away, returned, plundered some more and one surreal morning fell in love with the land they had ravaged. So they stayed back, dotted the land with an orgy of hideously sublime architecture of red sandstone and marble, ruled over it with various degrees of contempt, chief of which was the acknowledged anathema for the male foreskin, and grew rich and fat and full-bearded. They, however, never interfered with the teachers’ teaching or the sweepers’ sweeping. As the fame of their wealth spread, the seas on the west and south started disgorging a fascinating variety of Albinos with yellowwhitebrown hair, pale sunless skins, tongues through their noses, and the rancid odour of the congenitally unwashed. They came to buy, stayed to steal and, after one variety had brow-beaten all the others, went on to govern. They built very little, disapproved of much more and inserted their grimy fingers in the most unsavoury apertures, even in the sacrosanct divide between teaching and পালিক পড়ুন o পড়ানঃ http://calcuttans.com/palki
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sweeping and every man’s native right to believe in the absurd in any form he may wish. Several centuries before, they had, for some obscure reason, nailed a man-god to a tree. Overcome with remorse, they had revered the memory of that man-god and his tree ever since and prodded every living creature to genuflect before the same apparitions. As might be expected, this gave rise to some thorny situations, but it also won over a few worshippers mostly attracted by the prospect of free booze and petite Albino bottoms. Many of these early worshippers came from the benighted hills and were in the first lot of the Anointed. Within a few years they were snarling for enhanced Anointed Rights with an energy that was as terrifying as it was futile. When the Albinos left, they divided the land between its Beard and non-Beard populations, causing further chaos. And as a supreme legacy of their derision, they left behind their language of nasal-tongues, which, after suitable modifications, became the chief weapon of the clerk, the politician, the trickster and, later, a gaggle of snotty-nosed writers. They also left behind the railways, chiefly because it was inconvenient to roll up and take away such an unwieldy mass of rusted iron and chipped stones, not to mention the malarious station-masters. Then, and only then, after five millennia of waiting, after the Beard and the Albino had done with the land, came the Age of the Anointed. They had always existed, of course, in their non-Anointed forms, flitting across the periphery of mortal vision, more of ogres, actually, than men, their very shadows odious to the eras they served with abject humility. In a way they were the illegitimate offspring of the history of the land, imbibing their lack of assurance from the ancient non-Beards, their lust for influence from the Beards and their bland craftiness from the Albinos. The Albinos had also taught them that even man-gods are fallible and it is quite legitimate to hang one provided you worshipped him afterwards. What made the situation especially fraught with uncertainty was that the anointment was forced on them even before they had coherently asked for it. Granted that they were a little tired of the centuries of shit-buckets on their heads and wanted leave to defecate in peace themselves, but what followed in the name of Opportunity befuddled them completely. Pens were forced into calloused hands after brooms had been snatched away unceremoniously, pens which at first refused to write and then wrote gibberish. Buttocks were dumped into resplendent, cushioned chairs and broke out in boils. Crowns of unprecedented authority were placed on heads after shampooing the hair thoroughly to rid it of the smell of human excreta; the hair fell off immediately to reveal grotesque tattoos. The one thing that was forgotten was to leach the minds of centuries of distrust and cynicism. So when the pens started writing legibly, the boils healed and the hair grew back under the crowns, the Land, for the first time, had its tryst with Genuine Tragedy – পালিক পড়ুন o পড়ানঃ http://calcuttans.com/palki
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genuine because perpetrated by its own, its unlettered politicians, its perverse statesmen, its grinning clerks, its insouciant charlatans, its fawning sycophants. And its silent mindless mass of bovine deadpan citizens who took recourse to abject procreation to hide their impotence and filled every inch of the land with millions of drooling lips and worm-infested bellies. There was so little to eat that very soon a law had to be passed restricting the Right to Hunger to the Anointed. The brood of drooling lips took to sitting on fences all around the land, insensitive to history, to memory, to dreams, to life itself, desperately wishing for all of creation to selfdestruct. *** 3. The Imponderable. When a railway servant dies in harness, one of his dependants is given a job. And, of course, the Death Benefits – the Gratuity money, the Provident Fund proceeds, the Insurance money, a lifelong Pension for the spouse. It all adds up to a tidy sum. Especially in these trying times, when an Anointment Certificate is not to be had, even from the most corrupt District official, if you are born with the wrong surname. Dunghill has two brand-new motorbike showrooms. Their most valued customers are the shaven-headed youth who come in the day after the Shraddha ceremony of their fathers. “The way Randy Marcus speaks of Hottentots, he must have had one,” remarks Kalu lazily. “How could he, when they are found only in Africa?” asks Sholu. Lazily. “Yeah, the Dark Continent,” says Dulu, lazily. “Mental, not physical,” said Bulu, lazily. “Randy Marcus.” Sholu’s giggle was lazy. They are sitting on the fence that hot summer afternoon feeling hot and lazy because they have nothing better to do. Yet. But the bitterness of vulture-bile is already in their gorge. By and by the afternoon wanes and a light cool breeze starts blowing from the west.
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And, later, a bright yellow moon, dappled with the vague shadows of its seas and craters rises above the horizon. The four of them slip down from their perch and start walking home, whistling tunelessly. The zephyr cools their inflamed faces and they smile in pleasure. And in anticipation of tomorrow’s wait. Author Introduction: A resident of Lumding in the Nagaon District of Assam, Dr. Nabarun Moitra is a medical practitioner, engaged in private practice in the semi-urban, railway township of Lumding. He likes to write in his spare time, and his musings are often reflective of the fact that Lumding has its fair share of idiocies and idiosyncrasies, much like every other secluded pocket of people engaged in more or less similar professions. Dr. Moitra’s writings focus on those traits which make living in Lumding a unique experience. Contact:
[email protected]
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