The Sultan's Battery (2 page)

“What else?”

“A feeling that there is something large and hard – like a solid rubber ball between my legs all the time. And then dizziness, sometimes sickness.”

“Can you get erect?”

“Yes. No.”

“Tell me what your organ looks like. Is it black? Is it red? Are the lips of your penis swollen?”

Half an hour later, the two men were still at the base of the banyan tree, facing the temple.

“I beg you …” The boy folded his palms. “I beg you.” Ratna shook his head.

“I have to cancel the wedding, what else can I do now? How can I let my daughter get this disease too?”

The boy stared hard at the earth, as if he had simply run out of ways to beg. A drop of moisture on the tip of his nose gleamed like silver.

“I’ll ruin you,” he said quietly. Ratna wiped his hands on the back of his sarong. “How?”

“I’ll say that the girl has slept with someone. I’ll say that she’s not a virgin. That’s why you had to cancel the wedding.”

In one swift motion, Ratna seized the boy’s head, yanked it back, held it for a moment like that, and then slammed it against the tree. He got up and spat on the boy.

“I swear by the god who sits in the temple before us, I will kill you with my own hands if you do that.”

Three months or so passed. One morning, he was back at his spot behind the white dome, shouting at the Stonehenge of worried young men, when he saw a face that made his heart stop.

Afterwards, when he was done with his talk, he saw the face again, in front of him.

“What do you want?” he hissed. “It’s too late. My daughter’s married now. Why have you come here now?”

Ratna folded his stool under his arm, dropped his medicines into his red bag, and walked fast. A flurry of footsteps followed him. The boy – the firecracker merchant’s son – panted as he spoke.

“Things are becoming worse by the day. I can’t pass urine without my penis burning hard. You must do something for me. You must give me your pills.”

Ratna gnashed his teeth. “You sinned, you bastard. You sat with a prostitute. Now pay for it!”

He walked faster, and faster, and then the footsteps were gone and he was alone.

But the next evening, he saw the face again: then the quick steps followed him all the way to the bus stand, and the voice said, again and again, “help me”, but Ratna did not turn round.

He got on to the bus. When the dark outline of the fort appeared in the distance, the bus slowed down and stopped. He got off. Someone else got off with him. He walked. Someone else walked behind him.

Ratna spun around and seized his stalker by his collar. “Didn’t I tell you, leave me alone? What has got into you?” The boy pushed Ratna’s hands away, and straightened his collar, and whispered: “Help me. I think I’m dying. Help me.”

“Look here, I can’t. None of those young men is going to be cured by anything I sell. Don’t you get it?” There was a moment of silence, and then the boy whispered: “But you were at the sexology conference … the sign in English says so …”

Ratna raised his hands to the sky.

“I found that sign on the ground.”

“But the Hakim Bhagwandas of Delhi …”

“Hakim Bhagwandas, my arse! Those are white sugar pills that I buy wholesale from a chemist in Karwar; then my daughter bottles them and sticks labels on them at my house!”

To prove his point, he opened his leather case, popped a bottle open, and scattered the pills across the ground, as if broadcasting seed on the earth. “They do nothing! I have nothing for you, son!”

The boy sat down, picked up a white pill from the earth, and swallowed it. He got down on all fours, and scrambled about the black mud for the white pills, which he began swallowing in a frenzy along with any dirt attached to them. “Are you mad?”

Getting down on his knees, Ratna gave the boy a good shake, and asked the same question again and again.

And then, at last, he saw the boy’s eyes. They had changed since he had last seen them; teary and red, they were like pickled vegetables of some kind. Individual blood vessels bulged and swelled large.

For several hours that night Ratna stayed awake, wriggling in his bed, and disturbing his wife.

He had soliloquies with the boy, who seemed to be somewhere around his bed.

The next day, in the evening, he took the bus into the city, back into Umbrella Street. When he got to the firecracker shop he stood at a distance, with his arms folded, until the boy saw him.

The two of them walked together in silence for a while, until they came to a sugarcane juice stand. As the machines turned and crushed the raw cane, Ratna said:

“Go to the hospital. They’ll help you.”

“I can’t go to the hospital. They know me. They’ll tell my father.”

Ratna had a vision of that immense man with the tufts of white hair growing out of his ears, sitting in front of his arsenal of firecrackers and paper bombs.

The next day, as Ratna was folding up his wooden stand and suitcase, he saw a shadow on the ground in front of him. He went around the Dargah; he walked past the long line of pilgrims going in to pray at the tomb, and past the rows of lepers, and past the man with one leg who was lying on the ground, twitching from the hip and chanting: “Al-lah! Al-laaaah! Al-lah! Al-laaah!”

He looked up at the white dome and stared for a moment. He went down to the sea, and the shadow followed him. A low stone wall ran around the edge of the land, and he put his right foot on it, and looked out at the sea. The waves were coming in violently; now and then there was a big crash of water against the wall, and thick white foam rose up into the air and spread out, like a peacock’s tail coming up from the sea. Ratna turned around.

“What choice do I have? If I don’t sell those white pills, how will I marry my daughters off?”

The boy, avoiding his glances, stared at the ground, and shifted his weight about uncomfortably.

The two of them caught the no 5 bus and took it all the way to the heart of the city, getting off near the Angel Talkies. The boy carried the wooden stool, and Ratna searched up and down the main road, until he found a large billboard of a husband and a wife standing together in wedding clothes:

HAPPY
LIFE
CLINIC

Consulting Specialist:

Doctor MV Kamath
MBBS
(Mysore), B Mec (Allahabad),
DBBS
(Mysore), MCh (Calcutta), G

Com (Varanasi).
SATISFACTION
GUARANTEED

“You see those letters after his name?” Ratna whispered into the boy’s ear. “That’s the man for you. He’s a real sexologist.”

In the waiting room, they saw a half dozen lean, nervous men sitting on black chairs, and one married couple, in a corner. Ratna and the boy sat down in between the single men and the couple. Ratna looked curiously at the men; all of them avoided his glance. These were the same fellows who came to him – older, sadder versions; men in whom venereal disease had taken a deep bite, who had thrown bottle after bottle of white pills at it, to find no improvement – who were now at the end of a long journey of despair, that led from his booth at the Dargah, through a long trail of other hucksters, to this doctor’s clinic, where they would be told the truth at last.

One by one, the lean men went into the doctor’s room, and the door shut behind them. Ratna looked at the married couple, and thought – at least they are not alone in this ordeal. At least they have each other.

Then the man got up to see the doctor; the woman stayed back. She went in later, after the man had left. Of course they are not husband and wife, Ratna told himself. When he gets this disease, this disease of sex, every man is alone in the universe.

“And who are you in relation to the patient?” the doctor asked. They had taken their seats, at last, at his consulting desk. There was a giant chart showing a cross-section of a man’s urinary and reproductive organs on the wall behind the doctor, and Ratna looked at it for a moment, and then said: “His uncle.”

After examining the boy’s genitals, the doctor moved to a washbasin with a mirror attached over it; he pulled a cord, and a tube-light flickered to life over the mirror.

Letting the water run in the basin, he gargled and spat, and then turned the light over the basin off. He took care of janitorial duties around his office – wiping a corner of the basin with a palm, then lowering a blind over a window, casting a glance into the state of his green plastic waste-basket. When he ran out of things to do, he returned to his desk, looked at his feet, and practised breathing for a while.

“His kidneys are gone.”

“Gone?”

“Gone,” the doctor said.

He turned to the boy, who was trembling so hard that his seat had begun to totter.

“Are you a homosexual?”

The boy covered his face in his hands. Ratna answered for him.

“Look, he got it from a prostitute, there’s no sin in that. He’s not an unnatural fellow. He just didn’t know enough about this world we live in.”

The doctor nodded. He turned around, to the image of the male reproductive system behind him, and put his finger on the kidneys, and said: “Gone.”

Ratna and the boy came together to the bus station the next day, at six in the morning, to catch the bus to Manipal, to see if there was a good doctor at the Medical College who might help them out. A man in a blue sarong, sitting on the bench in the station, told them that the bus to Manipal was always delayed by a few minutes, maybe 15, maybe 30, maybe more. “Everything’s been falling apart in this country since Mrs Gandhi got shot,” the man said, and kicked his legs about merrily. “Buses are coming late. Trains are coming late. Everything’s falling apart. We’ll have to hand this country back to the British or the Muslims or the Russians or someone, I tell you. We’re not meant to be masters of our own fate, I tell you.”

It was late on the way back as well. The two of them had to stand in the midst of the thick crowd returning to Kittur for over an hour, until a pair of seats emptied near them. Ratna slid into the window seat and motioned for the boy to sit down next to him. “We got lucky, considering how packed the bus is,” Ratna said with a smile.

Gently, he disengaged his hand from the boy’s. The boy understood too; he nodded, and took out his wallet, and threw five-rupee notes, one after the other, on Ratna’s lap.

“What’s this for?”

“You said you wanted something for helping me.”

Ratna thrust the notes into the boy’s shirt pocket. “Don’t go and get an attitude now. I have helped you out so far; and what did I have to gain from it? It was pure public service on my part, remember that. We aren’t related: there’s no blood in common between us.”

The boy said nothing.

“Look! I can’t keep coming around with you as you go from doctor to doctor. I’ve got my daughters to marry off, I don’t know where I’ll get the dowry for -”

The boy turned, plunged his face into Ratna’s collar-bone and burst into sobs; his lips rubbed against Ratna’s clavicles, and began sucking on them. The passengers stared at them, and Ratna was too bewildered to say anything.

It took another hour before the outline of the black fort appeared on the horizon. The man and the boy got off the bus together. Against the black rectangle of the fort, Ratna had a vision, momentarily, of a white dome, and he heard a throng of mutilated beings chanting in unison. He put a beedi in his mouth, struck a match and inhaled.

“Let’s go,” he told the boy. “It’s a long walk from here to my house.”