Published: May 29, 2017, 11:31 PM (IST)
Edited: May 29, 2017, 11:31 PM (IST)
What would happen if a certain writer in the news suddenly decided to write about cricket? Arunabha Sengupta tries to figure out.
May in Ayemenem is a hot brooding month, where the days are long and humid, crows gorge on bright mangoes, the grass in the outfield scorches to a whitish haze, the pitches crumble and crack. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear glass planes of the press-box and die, fatly baffled in the sun. The nights are clear, but suffused with sloth and sullen expression, as if forced to read this gargantuan aggregate of rigmarole. In short, a massive pile-up of descriptive passages, stacked upon one another, a tottering scrapheap of pretentiousness, a sum-total of twenty-seven half-baked correspondence courses on creative writing gone horribly wrong.
But for some reason, after all these exaggerated disjointed phrases of imagery about May, we move quickly to early June, when the southwest monsoon breaks and there are three months of wind and water with short spells of sharp, glittering sunshine that thrilled children snatch to play with. That and three dozen more lines of descriptive drivel. All that about yellow bullfrogs cruising scummy ponds for mates, small fishes in puddles, drenched mongoose flashing across the leaf-strewn driveway, pepper vines snaking up electric poles … you can’t help but get the drift, although by now your head is all at sea, in the fishswimming sense.
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It was raining as Steve came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, plowing the wicket like gunfire. The kind of weather when Champions Trophy finals used to be held in Colombo. The pavilion still wore its steep gabled roof pulled over its ears like a low hat. Walls streaked with moss had grown soft, the boundaries blurred due to blooming new tapioca fences. Several more paragraphs of — you got it — descriptive imagery.
Steve had come to see his brother, Mark. They were two-egg twins. Dizygotic, doctors called them. Steve was older by four minutes. They never did bat much like each other, Steve and Mark, even when they were thin-armed children. It was poor Dean who was once taunted that he was adopted, but that is a small thing.
The confusion lay in a deeper, more secret place, a more pompously pseudo-poetic literary space. In those early amorphous years when memory had only just begun, when life was full of Beginnings and Not Outs, and Every Innings was Forever, Mark and Steve thought of Themselves together as Me, and separately, Individually, as We or Us, although perennially confused about why Capital Letters crept into this Mind-Numbing Mix.
Now, all these years later, Steve has a memory of giggling at Mark’s run out. He has other memories too that he has no right to have. He remembers the taste of all those beers on the flight from Melbourne to London. He remembers, for instance (though he hadn’t been there), what the Pepsi-Coke Man did. But these are small things.
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Their life has a size and a shape now. Mark has his. Steve has his. Edges, Middles, Borders, Taylors, Boundaries, Creases, Brinks, Seams and Limits have appeared like a team of Twitter trolls on their separate horizons. Short creatures with long shadows, patrolling the Paddington End. Gentle half-moons have gathered under their eyes and they are now as old as Victor Trumper was when he died. Thirty-nine. Not old. Not young. But a viable die-able age.
But the unthinkable and thinkable blurred and Archie Jackson died at 23, a die-able, non-viable age. Steve was not born then, neither was Mark, but they could easily get there through a hollow fictive time-slip; or slip away distracting us with Love Laws and Papachchi’s moth and Comrade Pilla and Sophie Mol, until we are rendered claustrophobic, hemmed in by too many names, the stream of imagery like a river with a rushing, rolling, fishswimming silence, swollen, engorged and meaningless.
The wicket had been re-laid. The stadium had become the centrepiece of an elaborate complex, crisscrossed with hospitality boxes and connecting alleyways. Small banners bobbed in the breeze. The old colonial pavilion building with its deep verandah and Doric columns, was surrounded by smaller, older, wooden houses-ancestral homes-that the developers had bought from old families and transplanted in the Heart of Darkness. Toy Histories for tourists sponsored by rich Boards to play in. Like the sheaves of rice in Joseph’s dream, like a press of eager aborigines petitioning an English magistrate, the old houses had been arranged around the History House in attitudes of deference. “Heritage,” the stadium complex was called.
“Stop for fuck’s sake! Why go through all this?” Mark asked. “As it is you know I cannot concentrate long periods.”
“Tiaw. Ew evah ot klat sdrawkcab,” Steve replied.
“Riaf muknid, etam ! Yhw no htrae dluow uoy tnaw ot od taht?”
“Esuaceb tsuj esoht gniggirf seceip fo yregami yam ton eb hguone ot niw eht rekooB.”
Queues had formed for the tickets for the cricket to be held at the stadium, and men stood across the green expanses, bodies microcosmic earthlets with rivulets of sweat, the yellow blaze beating down on the parched palms, a gentle breeze of relief sometimes sending occasional sinusoidal waves through the corn fields afar…and so on and so forth for another three quarters of a page. A man purchased a ticket, and sitting on a red weighing machine unstrapped his artificial leg (knee downwards) with a black boot and nice white sock painted on it. The hollow, knobbled calf was pink, like proper calves should be. (When you re-create the image of man, why repeat God’s mistakes? God of all things, big and small.) Inside it he stored his ticket. His towel. His stainless-steel tumbler. His smells. His secrets. His love. His hope. His madness. His infinnate joy. His real foot was bare. He bought some tea for his tumbler. An old lady vomited. A lumpy pool. And went on with her life. The Stationworld. Society’s circus. A small thing.
And then it was back in time, another fictive timeslip. Sometime in the 1990s. The Pepsi Coke man was there, asking them to hold his small thing while he got the drinks, “Pepsi? Coke? Cokesi? Pepke?” Hot, hard, cold, sweet. The only relevance of the incident in the story was that now they were gods of small things, with the power to make them big with casual jerks.
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Love Laws and Small Things. Old Muralitharan was still around, of course, with his curious bent arm, and men still drove the skyblue Plymouth, chrome tailfins gleaming, speeding past young rice fields and old rubber trees on its way to Cochin, further east, in a small country with similar landscape (jungles, rivers, rice fields, Communists), enough bombs were being dropped to cover all of it in six inches of steel, while Steve watched Bodyline for the third time.
When they returned Mark was leg before wicket padding up to a ball outside the off-stump. “Tard. Eht reggub evag taht,” he exclaimed.
“If you do that again, I will love you a little less,” screamed old Yabba across the fence of the Boundary, of time and space. Love Laws were rewritten. Steve put on his pads, determined not to be out pushing them forward with the bat tucked behind.
“Tuo fo ym trofmoc enoz,” he said. That would be breaking Love Laws, but a Small Thing.
Chacko Chappelli was no friend of the dizygotic twins, but he had done a lot for the status of the 1868 tour. The tour undertaken by the Aborigines, across the blue-black silk of the ocean, past the bobbing boats and dinghies, with receding distant shores with the parched palms and ghosts of forgotten Portuguese sailors with coiled sea serpents riding on their chests and oysters knotted in their tangled beards.
“Saw ereht a regit no eht taob?” Mark asked.
“On. Yllufknaht s’that rehtona yltsaeb rekooB ygniht.”
Chacko Chappelli had canvassed long and hard, for Unaarrimin or Johnny Mulagh, for Bullocky, for Twopenny or Murrumgunarrimin. There, we can give it back with interest for all the Malayalam. For Jim Crow too, or Lytejerbillijun, the southern untouchable supposedly murdered because he had violated marriage rules. Love Laws. For trying to cross the Swirling, Forbidden River on a broken boat. Disjointed, non-sequential, symbolic and tragic enough to please everyone.
“Taht si ton a llams gniht,” Mark said.
“Yam eb,” Steve replied. “Yam eb s’ti a llams gniht, yam eb s’ti gib. But I am getting tired of this”
“But we did not even get to the mandatory dream sequence. Without it this will remain incomplete…”
“Whatever, it’s way, way out of my comfort zone. One short time slip ride and we are retired and the book is old and we don’t have to talk backwards and she can be dammed, swirling river or not.”
“Yes,” Mark agreed. “And she likes dams. Or dislikes them. I am not too sure. In any case she likes being around them, or associated with them.”
“Yes, so I thought,” Steve observed, fingering his baggy green thoughtfully. “But she has gone ahead and written another of these things.”
“What? Again?”
“Yes. Thought this would have stopped her.”
Furtive looks were exchanged. “Are we in it?”
“I don’t know. With this kind of prose, one can never be sure. However, she supposedly consulted her characters while deciding on her publisher …”
“What on earth…?”
“Yes, she did. It’s in the papers. But, we did not get any calls. So, I guess we are safe.”
Mark paused. “You know, I guess a restraining order may not be out of place … and perhaps you can lie low in Barrackpore for a while.”
They turned to say it once again. “No Way.”
Not tomorrow. Not ever.
