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  Sampath was transfixed. Miss Jyotsna kicked her feet up in the air. (What red toenails! Jewel-like, beetle-like, beautiful red toenails!) His ears felt as if they’d been dusted with a light coating of paprika.

  Mr Gupta, sharing none of Sampath’s capacity for quiet observation, seized this chance for active involvement. ‘Oh no!’ He waggled his finger at her. ‘Oh no. You should not wear that shade of green at any cost. Look at how it is clashing with your complexion.’

  ‘Arre, Mr Gupta, what are you saying?’ Miss Jyotsna asked with mock horror that made him laugh. (The teeth he displayed were shiny white, the kind of white that in a dusty and yellow country can be found only in certain protected places such as a mouth.)

  ‘Don’t you ever look in the mirror?’ he teased. ‘Look and you’ll see that I am right. As always.’ He winked.

  ‘Will you be my fashion consultant for the wedding?’ She laughed as well. ‘Clearly you know much more than me. Doesn’t he, Sampath?’

  Flirtatiously, she poked Mr Gupta with a ruler so he giggled even more. ‘What do you say? Will you tell me what to wear for the wedding?’

  The wedding of the daughter of the head of the post office was to be held at the Badshah Gardens, adjoining his house, at the beginning of the wedding season. At that very moment they should have been engrossed in making arrangements with bands and kebab and rickshaw men, and doing the hundreds of other important tasks that must be undertaken at an occasion like this. For, of course, when it comes to a wedding, all official work should stop and the staff of any office whose boss’s family is having a wedding must assist in making the appropriate arrangements. This is customary office protocol. They had all been given their own appointed tasks to carry out.

  When this boss – the head of the postal and telegraphic services of Shahkot – arrived, they jumped to their feet in alarm.

  ‘Good morning, sir.’ Miss Jyotsna quickly smoothed down her sari.

  ‘You will kindly begin the day’s work,’ said Mr D. P. S. ‘Keep the post office closed. Make preparations for the flower garlands. Contact the sweetmeat vendor and the biryani cooks. Get the men to put up the tent. Make arrangements for chairs. You will kindly make reservations at the railway station. The receipts are to be placed on my table. You will kindly arrange it all.’

  You would think he had learned his first words, and then all the words that followed, from some instruction booklet.

  ‘You will kindly pull up your socks and begin,’ he snapped.

  Sampath’s thoughts, all petticoats, toenails and monkeys, teetered. A wave of sleepiness overtook him. But, suddenly remembering the advice he had received earlier in the day, mimicking his father’s tone of voice, he chirped ‘Yes, sir. I will see to it right now, sir.’ But once he began, the latter half of his sentence – the ‘right now, sir’ – amazed and shocked by the preceding words, grew shaky and trailed up thinly into the high ceiling of the room, where the fan revolved with an uneven flutter like an irregular heartbeat, cobwebs having been caught in the blades. They all turned to stare at him in surprise. Never had they heard him attempt such a sentence. It was most uncharacteristic. Realizing himself how odd he had sounded, his face burning, Sampath turned and scuttled off to his desk in the dark depths at the back of the post office.

  ‘I am keeping my eye on you,’ said his boss after him. ‘Kindly no misbehaving.’

  For a while, Sampath attempted half-heartedly to add together the costs of the wedding in an accounts ledger. Balanced on top of an old telephone directory to save himself from falling through the broken seat of his chair, he began to fill the file with numbers from the bills and receipts. But there were so many receipts and so many bills, and all so like each other, he became confused and had to start over again, and again, stacking them together and separating them, filing them backwards, mislaying them. He tried to follow the rows of numbers all the way to the bottom square marked ‘Total’, but no matter how hard he tried, how much he attempted to hone his attention to a single needle-sharp point, a pin upon which to spear number after number, his mind grew dizzier and dizzier, and he was forced to begin again until, afternoon rising in its giant push and swell, yawns blooming like buffers between him and the dusty pages, he turned his attention instead to the day’s mail.

  Mr D. P. S. had disappeared on an errand to the jewellers. Miss Jyotsna and Mr Gupta were teasing one another again. Sampath examined the postcards and letters that had just been brought in on the bus from Delhi for him to sort out into the order in which they were to be delivered. He turned them over, smelled them, looked at the stamps, studied the names, the strange-feathered words: Bombalapetty, Pudukkottai, Aurangabad, Tonk, Coimbatore, Koovappally, Piploo, Thimpu, Kampala, Cairo, Albuquerque. He held them up against the light, the envelopes filled with promise, with the possibility of different worlds. He steamed them open over mugs of tea, or just prised them open, the humidity in the air having rendered the gum almost entirely ineffectual, and lazily, through the rest of the day, he perused their contents. Since he had started work in the post office, he had spent much of his time in this fashion. He had read of family feuds and love affairs, of marriages being arranged, of babies being born, of people dying and of ghosts returning, of farewells and home-comings. He had read of natural disasters, floods and earthquakes, of small trivial matters like the lack of shampoo. Of big cities and of villages much smaller than Shahkot. In some countries people took a bath only once a week and the women wore short dresses even when they were old. He picked up all sorts of interesting information. Once in a while, there were postcards sent from foreign countries to addresses in the posh localities of Shahkot, and Sampath sat for hours mulling over, say, a picture of a palm tree by a sea as blue as if it had been dyed with paint, or of a village belle from Switzerland in a tight-laced frock and two fat yellow plaits that resembled something good to eat. Switzerland was a cold country where there was not a speck of dirt. There in the afternoon heat of Shahkot, Sampath would imagine the cold and the clean so vividly, every hair on him would stand on end.

  By evening, when it was discovered that he had finished none of the things he was supposed to have done, he was sent home with warning of dire consequences to follow; he was to come in before everybody else the next day and complete the work. How they tormented him! He had been having such a nice time, left to his own devices. And how was he supposed to concentrate? He had been unable to sleep that past night and also the night before, and no doubt he would also remain awake in the night to come.

  It was curious how he thought of his sleepiness when he had to work, but miraculously forgot it when he came upon something that interested him. On his way home, he recalled a postcard he had seen of an ape with a very big and alarming red bottom.

  5

  A few months later, at the beginning of winter in Shahkot, when the nights were cool and the town was full of flowers, the wedding day of Mr D. P. S.’s daughter arrived. Soon after sunrise, as instructed by their boss, the entire post-office staff was on hand to perform such necessary tasks as hanging marigolds and chillies in the doorways, procuring strings of party lights for the trees, fetching young and tender goats for the biryani. Miss Jyotsna and Mr Gupta rose to the occasion with tremendous enthusiasm, shouting at the band members and the tent men for laziness, tasting kebabs for tenderness, meeting relatives at the train station, running with joy to the tailors and back again with bursting bags. This was not the time to let anyone down.

  Sampath had been allotted the job of filling glasses with sherbet, of washing the glasses once they were emptied by the guests, and then filling them up again; it had been decided by group consensus that even Sampath could be counted on to manage this simple task. But, after all, it is very boring to sit filling and washing hundreds of glasses, especially after you yourself have drunk your fill. Sampath began to toss choice bits of food to the stray dogs that had gathered at the back of the wedding tent to see what they could scrounge from the feast. Then, when the cook
s began to threaten – ‘You stop that or we’ll chop you up with the onions’ – he decided to look around to determine the layout of the house. He opened doors and peered into cupboards. He went through the contents of a drawer. But things were rather old and dusty. Nothing in Mr D. P. S.’s residence seemed terribly interesting until, at the end of the corridor, he came upon a room piled high with wedding finery in which the cousin-sisters had dressed each other and departed in a rush, leaving their belongings strewn higgledy-piggledy over the place. It was not the bride’s dowry, which was under lock and key, of course, or the aunties’ precious jewels, which had been locked up as well, but it was quite exciting all the same. The clothes for several days of celebration were scattered upon the floor, the beds and chairs.

  He could see ruffles of peacock silk and tiny pleats of rosy satin; lengths of fabric and saris of every colour imaginable. Fabric run through with threads of gold, scattered with sequins and bits of glass, with embroidered parrots and lotus flowers worked in silver. There were mango patterns in rich plum and luminous amber shades. There were dark velvets and pale milk-like pastels tinted with only the faintest suggestion of rose pink or pistachio. There were unbroken stretches of crisp white petticoats in waves about Sampath’s feet.

  He uncorked a bottle of rose-water and its fragrance escaped to mingle with the rich mutton biryani smells rising from cauldrons outside. Sampath, whose sense of smell had been refined during years of paying close attention to the olfactory curiosities offered by the world, could also discern the scents of musk, of mothballs, marigolds and baby powder. Of sandalwood oil. Oh, scented world! He felt his heart grow light. He held the fabrics to his cheek, let their slippery weight fall from one hand to the other and slide over his arms. He swathed lengths of pink and green and turmeric yellow about himself until he looked like a box of sweets wrapped up for the Diwali season. In a box full of a cousin-sister’s jewellery, he examined unusual iridescences: pearls hung upon stalks of silver; a stone lit with the brilliance of an eye; the delicacy of shell. He imagined the sun deep in the ear of a flower. He put a blue stone in his mouth, then took it out and rolled it, cool and round, up and down his arms. To his nose he attached a nose ring decorated like a chandelier with glassy, glinting drops. He wondered if he could be considered beautiful.

  The room was quite dark, since he had closed both the window and the door so he might conduct his exploration undisturbed. In order to survey himself in all his finery, he lit a candle by the mirror and watched as he metamorphosed into a glorious bird, a magnificent insect. The mirror was mottled, slightly cloudy, speckled with age. He felt far away, lifted to another plane. Held within this frame, he could have been a photograph, or a painting, a character caught in a storybook. Distant, tinged with mystery, warm with the romance of it all, he felt a sudden sharp longing, a craving for an imagined world, for something he’d never known but felt deep within himself. The candle attracted his finger like a moth and he drew it back and forth through the yellow and blue flame.

  He remembered how, not so long ago, the rest of the family asleep, he had spent dark hours over his books, always some examination to study for, some test or some long question to answer. He had wrapped a wet cloth around his head, hoping for coolness, but the sweat had trickled down his back like the quick run of a beetle, his fountain pen had grown slippery in his hands, ink smearing into monster tracks, blue and black across the page. How, even then, candle at his elbow, his finger had been distracted from the lines of print he hoped to follow all the way into memory; and like the moths that joined him, his finger too had sometimes been caught and singed.

  The next day, he had known, he would leave blanks instead of answers to the questions chalked up on the blackboard – the ten most important political reforms introduced by King Asoka, the advantages and disadvantages of the caste system. They had retreated into the trembling scene before him, along with the soil and altitude requirements for a good crop of wheat; the stages of reproduction in the paramecium; and the proof, in an isosceles triangle, that an exterior angle is equal to the sum of the interior opposite angles.

  He had watched as a piece of paper flared up in the night and crumpled. Collecting the dripping wax, soft and greasy, into a dozen balls of varying size, he had sliced through them with instruments from a geometry box; studied the wobbling globe of light cast through the belly of an empty glass; fingered the warped wood of the table. He had salvaged only odd words here and there from the pages in front of him. Slips of sentences. The thought of a river dark through pale country. The cool ‘o’s in Colombia, drawing the tongue over them as easily as water. He had traced the outlines of a map that showed the savannah grasslands of the world, run his finger over the backbones of the mountains in his atlas, down the veins of blue rivers. But he had forgotten the urgency of finishing the night’s work, the importance of the next day’s examination.

  He had held the candle far enough away to lose its heat, yet close enough to keep its light around him. He remembered carrying it to the mirror. How, with its hot, eager breath in his face, the flame had illuminated into strangeness a chin and a cheek, or a hand, a nose, a mouth. He had watched his lips form words, any words: just ‘hello’ sometimes, or even ‘mmmm’. The memory of them hanging in the air for a moment, then disappearing into the silence of the room, spreading to stillness like the ripples cast by a small pebble. Sometimes, though, he had made no sound at all, just worked his lips like a fish in the deep-shadowed light, mouthing the air like water.

  Now he traced the outline of his face and drew in the fantastic costume. He smiled and bowed at his reflection as if he were his own honoured guest. The lizards on the wall watched him with severe eyes. He stuck out his tongue at them, felt suddenly and ridiculously happy. Perhaps he was made for a life hung with brocades, worked out in fine patterns of jewels. Perhaps he was made to wear silk slippers and, with a wave, demand the world’s attention. Striking a pose, nose in the magical air, hand raised for a touch of drama, he sang, making up his own words to a popular tune: ‘My suit is Japanese, tra-la-la, my lunch was Chinese, tra-la-la, but though I may roam, tra-la-la, don’t worry, Mama and Papa, my heart belongs to home. Oh, my heart belongs to home.’ He gyrated his hips in perfect circles.

  Venturing out of the room to where the party had just begun, he was made brave by the smell of the biryani and kebabs; encouraged by the sparkle of elegant clothes and jewellery, by the clinking of plates and finger bowls, by the laughter of the arriving guests in the tent and the jostling sweets frying in clarified butter just outside. A red carpet stretched from the entrance of the marriage tent all the way to a fountain at the centre. Sampath cavorted up and down its length, tossing his nose ring, kicking his legs. Mr D. P. S. and his wife, plying their future son-in-law’s family with drinks and snacks, greeted his advance upon them with stunned silence. Sampath felt as if his feet were far above the floor, as if, floating in some groundless state, he were missing the weight of his head, his stomach and all of his insides. ‘Tomorrow it will be too late,’ he sang, chandelier-style drops in his nose all aquiver. He waded into the fountain and jumped in the spray, splashing the grand ladies with water so they ran squealing in consternation. ‘Meet me under the plantain tree,’ he warbled, ‘and there will be no more talk of heartache.’

  And slowly, deliciously, feeling it was the right thing to do, Sampath began to disrobe. Horrified shrieks rose from his audience. However, in this flushed moment, he mistook them for cries of admiration. With a style particular to himself, one by one he let the saris and dupattas draped about him fall. He unwrapped the last glittering length of fabric, but still he felt he had not yet reached the dazzling pinnacle of his performance, the pinnacle he strove towards, that his whole being was in anticipation of. He could not let himself down and he began to unbutton his shirt. He tossed the garment into the air like a hero throwing away the rag with which he has cleaned the weapon that will kill his enemy. As the shrieks grew in volume and intensity, he l
owered his hand to his pants. ‘Stop him,’ shouted Mr D. P. S., and several people rushed forwards. But Sampath climbed deftly on to the highest tier of the fountain and, in one swift movement, lowered both his trousers and his underpants. His back to the crowd, he stuck his brown behind up into the air and wiggled it wildly in an ecstatic appreciation of the evening’s entertainment he himself had just provided.

  ‘Haiiii. What did you do?’ shouted the family when Sampath returned home, jobless, sober and soaked to the skin. ‘Kindly remove yourself,’ Mr D. P. S. had said to him, so coldly Sampath’s heart had frozen over. ‘It is no longer necessary to report to work.’

  But he hated his job anyway. He didn’t want his job. He didn’t want it, he couldn’t do it and he didn’t want another job. He would not be able to do that either. He felt defiant. But …

  ‘What! You have lost your job!’

  ‘Hai, hai, this boy is nothing but trouble and misfortune.’

  ‘You are completely lacking in common sense.’

  ‘Did you get water in your nose?’

  ‘What are we going to do now?’

  ‘You really took off your underpants?’

  ‘The dye from the wet clothes has stained you blue. Quick. Soap yourself clean.’

  ‘From tomorrow onwards, you had better start looking for a new job.’