An Outing
Photo: Karan Madhok
Fiction: ‘Her mother had told her that a flower-carrier never died. The flowers were a promise of life, she had said. They touched her with their perfume, imbuing her with foreverness.’
Hasi was going to the Jumbo Circus that afternoon with her father. The opening act promised to be the unmissable Bittu’s, the athletic poodle with a bell around its fluffy neck. Hasi had heard so much about Bittu from other girls.
She woke up at 9.00 a.m. and lay on the charpai for full five minutes, looking up at her mother’s displaced photo on the wall. Last night, Hasi’s father had come home sober. She was sure of it because he smelled, not of hooch, but of pan masala and urine, which Hasi hated even more. Barricade duty often covered him in stench. Now he wasn’t waking up, no matter what Hasi tried, a shove, a pinch, a dance on his thighs. So, she went out through the front door, a sulk spreading on her face, thinking, not without despair, of the two-hour moped ride to the circus maidan.
Outside, she focussed her eyes away from the March sun. Then the aaya’s voice from next door called out to her. “Use the lathi on your father to rouse him,” the aaya said. “Even police constables could use a kick or two from their daughters.”
The aaya knew Hasi and her father, and she had overheard all their Saturday plans through the thinly padded wall between their houses. One more word from the aaya, and Hasi decided that she would tell that old snoop to mind her own business. But as it was, Hasi wasn’t one to use a harsh voice on people, not in the way her father did, while he burned scars into their skin with his lathi.
Hasi turned around to go back, but the aaya was only warming up.
The aaya squinted, rubbing her eyes. The old woman’s cataracts were troubling her again. The tannery had refused to take her in her condition, the aaya said, after she had sheared the hides in the wrong shape and tie-dyed them in a vat of bleach.
“Could you believe it, Hasi,” she said, her teeth baring metal fillers. “Me being laid off after thirty years of service to the leather industry?”
Her marbled eyes were smoky-white, and Hasi stared off, not finding her tongue. The old woman crept closer to Hasi as it allowed a larger share of the girl’s fleeting attention.
“Whatever you might think, I am not blind, girl.” It was diabetes, instead, that was failing the aaya, one organ at a time. Sometimes it felt to Hasi that the aaya would keep denying her sicknesses until the day she died.
“I saw the crowd alright,” the aaya said. “And the dead body on my way home from work. You read the news today?”
Every day the aaya walked the two miles back home from the tannery in her Hawai chappals. It had been no different last evening after she was fired from her job. She now remembered the disturbance around the check post. The air had throbbed with motes and the dead seedling that had wafted down from the paddy crops. The stubble was being burnt in the neighbouring Ibban Khurd. The aaya recalled the hush-hush crowd, a police jeep with its ignition running. And most stunning of all was the body, uncovered on the tar road, waiting to be gurneyed onto the waiting black mortuary van.
Hasi hadn’t looked up the morning newspaper, but she was in no doubt that the aaya’s thrilling account held true. The killer had escaped leaving the body of the victim—a male, twenty-something taxi driver—on the road. Flies buzzed around the slit in the jugular vein where the knife had pierced.
At any rate, the aaya happened to be telling Hasi, it wasn’t her father’s jurisdiction that investigated bloody acts of mankind. By which she meant that their little village on the Amritsar border was secure, and the worst crime that got reported around here was burglary, chain-snatching or an MP’s convoy that took for ever to pass through.
“All your father did was load and unload barricades,” the aaya said, and then added. “Your father is mostly jobless.”
The aaya recalled the hush-hush crowd, a police jeep with its ignition running. And most stunning of all was the body, uncovered on the tar road, waiting to be gurneyed onto the waiting black mortuary van.
Hasi stuffed two fingers into her ears, shutting the aaya out and almost didn’t hear her father stumble out into the light.
“Pa, let’s not be late.”
Once they headed back in, Hasi’s father rubbed a towel across his face where a centipede-like mole darkened his temple close to his hairline. On Hasi, the genes were kinder. The same mole was a mere dot, tucked underneath her thick curls.
In the bathroom sink, he loudly cleansed his mouth of tobacco with dry tap water.
“I think she lost her job.” Hasi said, still thinking about the aaya. “Poor soul.”
He changed out of his khakis and tugged the handcuffs off his belt where they had lain clipped throughout the night.
“She told me, yes,” he said.
Her father was of a lean build, with hardly any muscles, which the ashen kurta he wore made nearly non-existent. His moustache had silvered long before he became a father, and these days he painted it a crimson-y henna.
He swung Hasi off her feet and lifted her on his shoulders.
Out on the sun-stroked shed, embarrassment awaited Hasi. Hasi jumped down and made a face at the rusty Luna moped, as if she had sighted a dying bull.
“Really? Can we take a bus?” The moped had tracked in some shit, and it looked like a human’s.
Hasi dry-squawked on the road.
“That is a ten-minute walk to the bus stop, Beti. You might be late.”
“Pa,” she said with a scold, “your moped does 20 kms an hour. The bus does 40.”
How she came to this theory was not as surprising as how she managed to convince her father to walk. He had an aching knee from the farmer’s protest last summer. The fall from a ten-foot-tall parapet wall had given him a fracture. His cartilage played him up on the odd days. He didn’t want to risk his knee, especially as it was fresh off a medical brace the police station had paid for. Of late, the handicap had been winning him sympathy. The sub-inspector sent him on assignments where he sat out his long hours on a station-issue moulded chair.
They hiked up a curving road on the highway, a few meters north of their hut. Here the smoke from the paddy fields hung in knotty columns and burned their throats. Near where the shoulder fell, father and daughter turned down left—Hasi a few steps ahead—and met the cool grassland of a communal park. Entering through the iron gates, they kept to the shaded strip of the path where the Indian cork trees lowered their rail-thin branches. Occasionally, Hasi watched for groans of pain from her father which weren’t coming, not yet.
Halfway in, she found a stone bench.
“A break for two minutes, Pa. Sit, na? Will do your knee some good.” There was no one in this in-between hour save the mutterings of leaves. The park was emptied of morning walkers. The squatters, high on ganja, were yet to arrive.
“I will come back with flowers,” said Hasi.
She didn’t know their names. Colours, she understood. The pink ones she got to first since they landed at her feet. Somewhere in an unlined scrapbook in her cupboard, her mother had diagrammed the petals of the same flower, and next to them, named them ‘Jarul’. Hasi would need to get back home and line up her specimen for verification. There were no further sketches in that book. Her mother couldn’t get around to any more depictions for she had been too sick in her last days to lift her pencil. Instead, she made Hasi go over the names of the flowers she carried in her wicker basket to sell in the market. Lillies, roses, jasmines, and these were what stuck with Hasi, such plain ones that in hindsight Hasi felt cheated. And it used to anger her sometimes that this record of incompleteness—a diary that could have educated her but fell short—was everything that her mother had thought to give her. Her mother had told her that a flower-carrier never died. The flowers were a promise of life, she had said. They touched her with their perfume, imbuing her with foreverness.
But after the cancer took her, Hasi became convinced that her mother had been a liar. That was five years ago, and she was ten now. Long after she stopped believing in any version of life after death, Hasi yielded to this habit of collecting flowers, so she could make a fan out of them, like playing cards, and spread them out in a potpourri in their hall. She counted two blossoms of purple (jarul), three of light blue (jacaranda), and one of yellow (laburnum).
When she heard a crackling sound of a stem, she looked around, startled to find she was nowhere near her father.
She had wandered into what looked like a grove. In this neck, scatterings of dried leaves bedded the earth and a gulmohar tree that she had thought was a lamppost, so unlined its trunk was, materialized in her path, terrifyingly, and without notice. For a moment, she froze, certain that the wriggling thing on her feet was a snake or a mouse. Looking down, one eye closed, she noticed that it was a bird’s pink flesh. It was a baby, unmoving. And she had killed it!
Then, the bird’s strep-throated cries proved Hasi wrong. She glanced into the treetops from which it could have fallen.
One of her friends had mentioned that the circus took in little ones, rescued puppies mostly, to train them in two-legged walks, and before each act tossed them grains. But a bird was a waste to the circus, unless it was a parrot that spoke or sang.
She scooped the infant out from the mess of twigs. At first, Hasi meant to keep the bird for herself. It could go nicely in along with the loose compilation of flowers in her pocket and rest there until she found a nest for it. But, remembering that its mother would come looking for it, Hasi just as quickly put the creature back down.
“Pa,” she shouted. When she didn’t hear back from him, she began to run in the opposite direction.
From a distance she could see that her father wasn’t alone; Pulkit, one of her father’s friends from the police force was there, sitting beside her father on the park bench.
Hasi dropped to a jog. Her skin prickled against the grass, several blades of which had stuck to the fabric. Her father leapt to his feet to dust these off her hem. His bruised knee seemed a far memory.
Long after she stopped believing in any version of life after death, Hasi yielded to this habit of collecting flowers, so she could make a fan out of them, like playing cards, and spread them out in a potpourri in their hall.
“Hasi—you there too.” Pulkit hid his stutter in a singsong. He was built from the ground up. Hulking arms gestured towards her as he spoke.
“Didn’t you tell him we are going to the circus, Pa?” Hasi said, hoping that he had.
“I was about to, Beti.”
“Let me not come in the way of your outing then.” Pulkit said, breathing through his mouth.
Hasi knew Pulkit from the time he had slept over at their place, after he had missed the last bus back home. He had lain down with his arms folded between his thighs, to curl his bulk into an S-shape, and better fit himself on their floor mat. Wide-eyed, Hasi had listened to him the next morning talk about stars on a shoulder lapel. How many stars did her father need to become a sub-inspector? Two, Pulkit had held up his extra-terrestrial fingers, his thumb and index finger doing the sum. Hasi wouldn’t have been shocked had the rest of the digits on that hand been present.
Was it a meat cleaver or a sharp garden tool that had maimed Pulkit, she had asked. Pulkit had laughed. Her head was full of stories from her father’s FIR reports, he joked, but she hadn’t laughed. She read the charge-sheets only to acquaint herself with the harmful weapons that her father had come across.
Pulkit admitted to a clumsy experiment that had caused the loss of his fingers. He had been trying to move a boulder off a road. Aah! He ended up accidentally dropping the weight on himself. He used these sounds—boo, meoww, grrrr—that were vaguely animalistic to cover for words that couldn’t make it out of his mouth in time.
“Yaaargh!” he said now.
Hasi studied Pulkit’s soiled khaki shirt. His face was criss-crossed with mud as if he had smeared himself with it. Clinging to him was a brandy smell. Her father wouldn’t ever touch the bottle so early in the day and that made her despise Pulkit a little. Hasi was then put off when she noticed what looked like blood on Pulkit’s stumpy knuckles. She knew better than to presume a heroic backstory. It was more likely that Pulkit had his knuckles wedged between the hinges of a door.
“We will be on our way,” Hasi said and looped her hands into her father’s. “Uncle, you need to go see a doctor.”
Pulkit’s blood was splotching the earth. She felt sad for the insects that were drowning in a red pool.
“Beti,” her father said, shrugging her hand off, “he just needs a little help from me.”
“You going to walk a healthy human to the nearest municipal hospital, is that it, Pa?”
Her father was in no mood for her sarcasm. He helped Pulkit sit back down on the bench. The injuries on Pulkit were more grievous and revealed themselves slowly. Hasi’s father leaned over Pulkit to examine the scratches on his left cheek and released a sliver of a nail from the wincing fold of his skin. It was then that Pulkit’s nose began to bleed.
“It is bad.” Hasi’s father said. He tilted Pulkit’s small head back over the headrest to stifle the flow. That done, he faced Hasi, who stood her ground, arms folded across her chest, in a fit. The sight of blood had thawed her out.
The injuries on Pulkit were more grievous and revealed themselves slowly. Hasi’s father leaned over Pulkit to examine the scratches on his left cheek and released a sliver of a nail from the wincing fold of his skin. It was then that Pulkit’s nose began to bleed.
“He is not going to die, Pa,” she said, which earned her a Shush!
Her father rolled his sleeves up over his elbow and grabbed her by the shoulders.
“You listen up,” his voice slid to a whisper as it did whenever he gave her a chastisement. It would usually be followed, though not in this instance, by the threat to quit his job, and put no food on her plate, as if starving her would make her behave.
“Do you see a tree behind me, Hasi?”
Hasi nodded at the peepal, its gnarly branches spilling into her vision. Later, whenever anyone asked her if she had guessed the presence of someone behind the tree’s thick-fisted trunk, she always claimed she was dazed. At that very moment smoke from the paddy fields gusted down, mixing flurries of dust and exhaust, to blur the outlines of most things. When her father alerted her to a stranger behind the tree, Hasi craned her head, but she couldn’t see anyone.
“There is an escapee behind that tree, Beti,” he said.
Hasi waited to ask her father if he was the taxi-driver killer from last evening, and her mind savoured victory over the aaya.
“It’s our two-time chain-snatcher,” said her father.
He told her what had happened. Minutes into his second chai at the police station that morning, Pulkit had heard the clink of the prison cell he was guarding. Soon footsteps echoed out of the door. Realizing his charge was on the run, Pulkit went after him, patting himself down to discover the key to the cell had somehow been taken. Giving chase, Pulkit reached the park, whereupon he fell on his man near the peepal tree and started grounding his extra-terrestrial fist into his nose. The chain-snatcher hit back. Pulkit took some blows to his head, but nothing as bone-altering as the ones he landed on the chain-snatcher. Finally, when Pulkit loosened handcuffs from his belt, he found the man to have passed out, and he—Pulkit—too breathless to carry out the operation in its entirety.
“That was when he saw me, Hasi,” her father said, and Pulkit raised his bleeding head.
A look passed between Pulkit and her father, making Hasi suspicious of this colourful narrative.
Her father pleaded: ‘Hasi, don’t pull a long face, we will do the circus… Take Pulkit Uncle to the government hospital. I will meet you there after handing over the criminal to the station.”
Hasi pushed down her lower lip. She heard a murmur from Pulkit, and then, with a sigh, grabbed his arm, helping him get up to his feet.
A shroud of dense smoke rolled in between her father and her. When the air cleared, Hasi watched him walk away.
***
Karthik Krishnan's short fiction has appeared in Fiction on the Web and is forthcoming in The Usawa Literary Review. The first chapter from his work-in-progress novel will shortly be featured in EXCERPT Magazine.
