The Excrement Man
It was the birthing flies on mangoes that drove him away, although she blamed the monkeys who stole his chappals and tossed them back and forth across the Bodhi trees.
She named him Bandar, after the old temple monkey. With one blue eye, one brown, and a white forelock, Bandar was born in the middle of the rains when the streets ran with water and shit floated around the cow’s knees. The doctor claimed the boy came into the world with a lock of white hair due to the extraordinary age of the father, who at ninety-two did nothing but lie in bed, waiting for his young wife. The astrologer said Bandar’s two-color eyes signified his future as a torn man. And the cook, who had been with the family for fifteen years, left, saying the old baby brought misfortune to the kitchen and dulled all the silver pots. Most who encountered Bandar assumed the cook’s attitude. Like the monkeys he was named for, Bandar took to crying and swatting with pebble fists. He would fall asleep only if his sister hung his cradle from the Bodhi tree.
At first, it offended Bandar’s mother that he would not sleep at her breast. Then she became afraid the monkeys would steal him, but they ignored the baby. Night after night, alone, Bandar swayed in the garden. And so he began his life as a young-old beast-boy, hanging in a tree, with monkeys chattering above his head.
Because of his older sister Somna, Bandar did not walk till age seven. Born asleep with a huge head of black hair, Somna snored through the first three days of her life and crawled on the fourth. As she aged, she ran everywhere. If she stopped long enough for sweat to pool on her tamarind skin, she fell asleep. She hibernated through the rainy season, locked in her room so she would not drown. When the sun finally dried the mildew out of the curtains, Somna rose, ten pounds heavier, and ran through town with the frenzy of one returned from the gods.
When Bandar was two years old, Somna used one of her mother’s dupattas to strap him with his chest to her chest. She tried strapping Bandar to her back so he could watch where they traveled, but he seemed to enjoy viewing the world in reverse and seeing what Somna could not.
The four main streets of town converged into a square named Char Minar, flanked on all sides by tall thin minarets. The Muslims lived around the edges of the square and ran the market teeming at its center. Every dawn, old men scattered seed for pigeons so prayers for sick wives and sad children would reach heaven in the stomachs of the birds. The muezzins called to the devoted. The chai wallahs began their rounds, wrapped in wool scarves against the morning chill. Smelling of attar and meat, the Muslim women bargained roughly with the lace merchants.
The day the temple-monkey died in front of the lingam with a fistful of marigolds in its paw, Somna strapped Bandar to her chest and ran to the market. Over his sister’s back, Bandar watched the Char Minar women haggling and hocking streams of paan onto the ground. When they raised their arms to strike the gypsies on the head for selling chickens at exorbitant fees, he saw from their red-painted palms down to their elbows. Bandar thought they were the most beautiful women in town. He saw an uncovered girl and her shrouded mother palpating moulies at the vegetable stand. He thought that as the girl grew taller, red paint would appear on her palms, and a black chiddor would sprout from her head.
Somna stopped running to watch a vendor ladle oil from a vat into slender-necked jars. She toppled forward and fell asleep. The chai wallahs, the lithograph boy, the bangle hawkers, all laughed and stood up for a better view of the sleeping Somna and struggling Bandar, pinned beneath his sister. The uncovered girl ran over with a moulie and tried to prod Somna awake. She smiled at Bandar, and he saw that she had a chipped front tooth.
The girl was named Mez because she was born on a table in the middle of the market. She was almost deaf. She took an immediate liking to the girl who slept like the dead, and the old boy who could not walk but looked at her with great urgency from two different colored eyes.
Twelve Years Later
Bandar did not like dirt. Of any kind. The kind women stank of, the kind he stank of, the kind the monkeys slung. At the Nataraj Ashram, the rishis told him of their abstinence and how true power lay in the sacs between their legs. Holding that power within them, never sharing it with others or spilling it onto their pillows, made them omnipotent. Bandar remembered the days when his feet did not touch the ground, when they were unsoiled and pure, his sister bearing his weight and gathering dirt in his stead. He remembered his face pressed into her chest and the tight bands of cloth under his thighs, holding him in place. He would not be weak.
His mother thought him ridiculous. Every morning and night, he spent two hours in the bathroom. After washing, he painstakingly swiped his body with imported cotton soaked in iodine. Even after the servant cleaned, Bandar walked around the house with a duster, sweeping the chairs and benches he chose to sit on. He wore English shoes, closed at the tops and back so his feet would stay clean, and refused to be in the sun without an umbrella. His kharchi was liberally spent on bottled water (which he sipped through a straw) and pomade. He used the hair-oil to plaster his white forelock in a curl above his blue eye.
The family owned three Ambassadors. There was a driver for each car. Bandar ordered himself to be driven to and from school in the newest vehicle, making nasty faces at his walking classmates. Weekends, his mother sent him to the kitchen to cut onions, trying to force him to cry, to act in a human fashion. But Bandar did not want to cry—not for his mother, not because of an onion. He ran to Mez’s house and gave her pieces of cloth snipped from his mother’s wedding sari. In return, Mez snuck through the back door of his house and chopped the onions for him.
The members of the household called him rani, queen. His mother put clods of dirt under his sheets then ordered him to bed. While he washed, she concealed herself behind the curtains and shrieked with her young laughter upon his discovery of the muck. In a rage, shaking and cursing, he threw the dirt at his mother, “My shit is too good for you, woman. You are a filthy boar.” For that, he woke up with his eyes rimmed in kajal and his head circled by a tiara of hot chilis. His mother’s servant ordered him to clean the toilet for a week, a job reserved for the sickly jamadar, for those who were shadows and worked with feces and the dead.
Unlike his sister and mother, Bandar did not go to the movies. The sight of women, their soft stomachs leaning from their saris, black hair swimming down their backs, disgusted him. He wanted to slap and unravel them, to show them their sickening nakedness that could make him and the rishis powerless. When he visited Char Minar, the rage he felt toward women dulled. The covered Muslims soothed him. In Mez’s house (her doorway, marked with the red hand of Fatima), the women revealed themselves for his two-color eyes. Unpinning their veils, they made him forbidden beef treats. He loved the unmasked planes of their cheeks, the dents in their chins. Mez’s house was a fortress of women. They bared themselves and cursed with relish; they had no servants and cooked for each other.
Four hundred miles northeast of town, Mez’s father drove a tonga in Delhi. He had lost his job as a market vendor. Years ago, he had crossed the river at its widest point, with seventeen pounds of salt in the panniers on his donkey’s back. The waters had been rough, the crossing slow, and most of the salt dissolved. Of course, the salt vendor fired him, and word spread quickly through Char Minar that the man was an unlucky fool. Even so, the flour vendor offered him a job. Mez’s father crossed the river at its widest point with ten pounds of flour on his donkey’s back. The donkey became so weighed down by the wet flour that he sank underwater and nearly drowned. Mez’s father was seen beating the donkey and screaming, “You thought your load was going to get lighter this time, too? I showed you, didn’t I. Who is the master now?” After that, no one in town would give him a job. He left the day Bandar’s father died at age ninety-eight, the day Bandar’s mother refused to don a white sari. Her servant drove her to Bombay where she purchased twenty gold bangles and three French hats.
At school, Bandar learned English. He tried to teach it to Somna while running behind her, but she had no interest in words, and Bandar could not keep pace with her. So he shared the language with Mez. English lacked nuance and was easier for her almost-deaf mouth to mimic. She read Western magazines and fashioned a dress from scraps of the red wedding sari. Bandar traded her squares, large and small, according to the difficulty of the chore she performed. When the town slept, Mez slipped into her Western dress and ran to the river to look at her reflection.
The night after Bandar’s mother missed a club luncheon because he had rewired the phones, he was punished—no dinner and no shower. He ran to the river for solace, cutting through Char Minar and crossing the pea fields. He heard a voice singing the song the Orissa storyteller sang at the end of his sessions:
My story is done.
The flowering tree is dead.
O flowering tree, why did you die?
The black cow ate me up.
O black cow, why did you eat the tree?
The cowherd didn’t look after me.
O cowherd, why didn’t you look after the cow?
The daughter-in-law didn’t give me food.
O daughter-in-law, why didn’t you feed the cowherd?
My little baby was crying.
O baby, why did you cry?
The black ant bit me.
O black ant, why did you bite the baby?
I live in the dirt
And when I find soft flesh, I bite.
Platinum, the moon shone that night. The river let Mez admire herself and from behind the scrub trees, Bandar watched her. Everything the rishis told him rushed from his head as Mez uncoiled her hair and smoothed her red dress. She hit a note in her song that no hearing person could make, and Bandar felt his power spilling out of him, down the leg of his dhoti and into his shoe. He watched Mez until she finished her song, braided her hair, and left. Then he took off his shoes and washed himself in the river. Crying weakly, he padded home. His legs quivered, and he felt as if he would die.
As he entered the garden, Somna streaked past. Earlier in the day, crouched by the river, she had watched a water snake swallow a fish. Since then she had not stopped running, afraid that dreams would muddy her memory. When she saw Bandar with no shoes and a wet face, Somna stopped short and fell asleep against the rosebush. Her brother left her there. He crept through the back door, careful to wipe his feet, then tiptoed around the kitchen. He listened to cockroaches scuttling, the drip of the sink. The silver pots repelled moonlight onto the walls. Bandar emptied the contents of his brimming shoe into a glass jar. He sealed the jar and put it in his closet under a pile of freshly starched kurtas. Then he climbed into bed, expecting to never awaken.
That night, Bandar dreamt of monkeys. All in red dresses. They fell asleep when he touched them, and he woke drenched in his own sweat and power.
His mother found Somna in the garden. She was talking in her sleep, “Bandar, where are your shoes? Why are you crying? I saw a girl in a red dress. I saw you behind a bush.” His mother had the servant put Somna to bed (on account of the approaching rains) and locked her door from the outside. Then she sent the servant to the astrologer’s home with a message: later that afternoon, she would come for a visit. Her son needed his chart read since he was due to be married.
What the Stars Said and an Upset Stomach
The astrologer brought Bandar’s mother into a room with a fan and mosquito netting, as he did with all women who offered soft gold. He took out his papers and a black fountain pen. He squinted briefly at Bandar’s palm before sending him out to the garden. A servant handed Bandar a piece of paper with words scrawled illegibly across it. “A riddle from the astrologer.” The servant thumped his chest proudly, “The stars say if I work hard in this house, my son will buy me an auto in my old age.”
It took Bandar a half hour to decipher the writing. The words confused him: “What crawls on four in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three at night?” Bandar stared at the paper; still he could make no sense of it. He walked around the outside of the house till he heard the astrologer’s shaky voice through an open window. Careful to keep his hands from touching the ground, he squatted under the window to listen.
The astrologer told Bandar’s mother that her two-colored son had the Black Spot on his chart, making him unfit for marriage. Any family who saw Bandar’s stars would be unlikely to give their daughter to him. In Bandar, Saturn opposed Neptune. He evolved distrustful to a fault, but bountifully generous. His Rahu made him adept at business and sensing current trends. He would be helpful to the world, to populations, but not to individuals, not to family or friends. Overly sensitive and meticulous, Bandar’s mind and emotions vacillated against themselves. He needed companionship, sought it out, but his inherent nature of withdrawal and finikiness drove away anything soft and good.
Bandar’s mother wailed, pounded her fists on the table. Only the gold on her wrists kept her from true despair. She cried to the astrologer, “My son is a bastard who will never marry, and my daughter cannot stay awake long enough to cook for a man, let alone pleasure him. I am cursed, cursed.”
The astrologer tried to calm her with dates from Jaipur and stories of other children who had unfortunate charts. She did not want to be placated. Leaning forward, she pulled the drape of her sari around her head and whispered conspiratorially, “Now tell me, Sahib. Does he like women?”
The astrologer leaned back in his seat. “Yes, madam, very much. But he is strange. Why don’t you send him to a Christian place? They will know nothing of his chart. On his palm, travel is prominent. You can make that possible, can’t you?”
Smiling, Bandar’s mother made her fingers into a beak and squeezed two more bangles from her wrist. She pressed them into the astrologer’s hand and rose to find her chappals. “Thank you, Sahib. You have been very helpful.” With his hand on her young back, the astrologer walked Bandar’s mother to the garden.
The boy had left the window when he heard his mother mention himself and women. He had discovered a tree, heavy with ripe mangoes, and rigged a slingshot from a stretched-out rubber band and the V of his first two fingers. Taking careful aim, he launched soda caps at the mango stems and ran forward to catch the fruits before they hit the ground and bruised. When his mother and the astrologer found him, Bandar stood beneath the tree, next to a mound of fruit.
“For the monkeys and dogs,” he said to his mother. She rolled her eyes.
The astrologer asked Bandar if he had solved the riddle. “It may be a riddle for other men, but not for me,” Bandar said, “My riddle is different.” Nodding, the astrologer said, “Well then, you know yourself. At least you have that.”
On the way home, Bandar’s mother asked him if he would like to go to England where they sold his kind of shoes and the food came wrapped in tin and was so bland that no one ever cried from it. He would not answer her. When the driver stopped to let a cow pass, Bandar ran from the car. His mother told the driver to keep going. Bandar lagged further and further behind till she could no longer see him. “To the movies,” she ordered, and pressed her head into her knees, whimpering for her children’s misfortunes.
When Bandar arrived home, dripping with sweat and disgusted by his own withering smell, he wrestled his mother’s servant for the key to Somna’s room. The man was very strong. He pushed Bandar to the floor and hissed in the boy’s ear, “If you don’t leave me alone, you little fag, I will spit in your breakfast every morning.” Bandar bit the servant’s hand and snatched the key. Opening the door to Somna’s room, he locked it from the inside and shook her awake.
“Somna, we must leave after Holi. No one will marry you; you are too sleepy. No one will marry me; I am two-colored. You must make money for us. Go to Char Minar and tell the vendors you will run for them, anywhere they want. I will get some money too, and we will go. We will go where there are no rains and you can run through all seasons. Get up now, and talk to the vendors.”
Somna asked him if they had to leave because of the girl in the red dress. He said no. She hung her head and noticed his feet in open chappals. “Where are your English shoes, Bandar?”
“They have become soiled,” he replied. “I will wear these till we leave. Go now. The vendors know how fast you are.”
He went to the kitchen for something to do, troubled and lonesome. There was a basket of mangoes on the countertop. He reached out and took one. Small flies covered the underside of the fruit, overlapping each other in buzzing layers, festering and mating on the skin. Bandar felt dizzy. The dirt of the world settled in his stomach. He vomited on the floor.
Dazed, sickened, he took a jar and scooped some of his bile into it. He brought the jar to his closet and carefully placed it next to the jar filled with his spilled power. Then he walked toward the back door, not knowing where to go, but aware that he needed to be away from the house. As he left, Bandar saw the servant watching from the kitchen, a rag tied around his hand. With his two-color eyes, Bandar looked back at the servant till the man turned, dropped to his knees, and began cleaning the remainder of Bandar’s worldly burden off the floor.
Holi and The Hand of Bandar
Bandar and Somna wound their way through Char Minar. Somna blushed when the vendors called out, “Tiger’s here, Tiger’s here!” She had been running for them, all of them, for six months and had filled five tiffins with crumpled rupees. She hid the tins under her bed. The vendors called her Tiger because of her strength and fleetness; she crossed the river at its widest point with forty pounds of agarbathi, flour, salt, ghee, and lithographs of gods strapped to her front. Even the gypsies paid her to find lost chickens on the plains west of the river. Somna always retrieved the birds, either stiff with death or squawking in protest.
In between Char Minar and the river lay what the Muslim women called Tikka Street, the only street in town that ran in a straight line and had a beginning and end. In construction, it resembled a long hall, stretching one block between two rows of crowded apartments connected by a stone awning. The awning served as a roof for Tikka Street. The women of the apartments beat their carpets there. Even when deserted, the street was noisy with their pounding.
Two square sheets of cloth hung at either end of the street which kept it dark and cool, a haven at midday. On either side of the street and in perfect symmetry, five small doorways led into rooms eight strides wide. Colored powder filled each chamber, almost to the ceiling. The left side of the street housed blue, green, red, yellow, and orange; the right side, purple, black, white, bright pink, and soft pink. Stationed in each room was a eunuch in charge of selling the powder.
The rich of the town invited eunuchs to perform at weddings. They arrived dressed in garish saris, bedecked in brilliant paste jewels and obscene makeup. They sang in their screechy voices and wreaked havoc on the tabla players, stealing their drums and beating wildly upon them. Clapping with the power of men’s arms, the eunuchs were considered more terrifying than entertaining. But a town legend advised that a scorned eunuch would steal a male-child from the offending wedding party and hack off its genitalia. Most believed the eunuchs propagated the legend for their own purposes, but invited them anyway, because one never knew.
The Hindu women of town bought large quantities of powder at Tikka Street, enough for the whole year, and used it to mark their foreheads, make designs, and to ruin the clothes and skin of those they loved—and hated—during Holi. Every year, the first morning of Holi was the busiest and most profitable for the eunuchs. Bandar and Somna spent the entire day purchasing bags of color. It was cold when they left Tikka Street. They saw bonfires and heard cymbals crashing. Walking home under Bandar’s umbrella, they both agreed to stain their mother’s servant so severely, he would remain multicolored for months. The full moon (it was the night of Phalguna) lit the way home.
The second day of Holi dawned to people laughing and mixing water and colored powder. They poured the concoctions into small pails, pastry dispensers, balloons, goatskin bags. By the time the air warmed, children and adults in their oldest clothes crowded the rooftops of town. No one could ever say who started the color segment of Holi. It was usually a child. That year, some thought Somna began the day; some blamed the gypsies. Either way, the color and powder began flying and the pretty girls fled down dark alleys where they were cornered and soaked till their saris clung to them and bright hues mottled their hair.
From every Hindu roof hung clay matkas. Human pyramids strained up toward them. Krishna’s favorite curd filled most; others held coins. The mischievous filled theirs with colored water that soaked the stick-bearer and the crowd underneath. Some held nothing at all. When these containers were smashed, the onlookers went into a frenzy, joyfully dousing everything around them, throwing handfuls of powder into the air. Bandar and Somna chased their mother’s servant up a tree and bombarded him with balloons containing a myriad of color. When he clambered down, painted with their vengeance, they ran from the garden and ventured into the streets.
Color dripped down the walls of buildings. There was nowhere to hide. During Holi, people became as stealthy as jaguars. For two days, the entire town had precise aim and held no grudges. Bandar and Somna ran to the river where the vendors had erected temporary stalls to sell chai, towels, corn, and rose soap. People meaninglessly scrubbed themselves in the water. As soon as they removed one layer of powder, someone covered them with another. The river was a rainbow. The vendors looked like they had been tortured by the children of cloth dyers. The corn was pink, the tea undrinkable, the towels useless.
Bandar had prearranged for his driver to pick him up at the river. He climbed into the backseat of the car and stowed his stained umbrella. He commanded his driver to accelerate as fast as he could and stop for nothing. When they passed a group of people, Bandar flung balloons or emptied a pail of colored water out the window. People chased his car, but he escaped spotless. As the day progressed, there were lulls when it seemed as if the entire town had depleted their color. Inevitably, someone discovered a forgotten bucket, or the resourceful attacked with a volley of green. When darkness finally came, everyone went home to eat, regaling their families with tales of valor.
Bandar went to the river to wash, loathe to see his mother’s servant. In case of ambush, he carried a small pail of red water. The moon flickered, trapped behind clouds. As he neared the river, Bandar saw a girl walking in front of him. In the darkness, she looked colorless. Bandar wanted to paint her red. He followed the girl from a short distance and hid himself behind a bush as she waded into the river.
The moon came out and Bandar saw Mez, naked and shivering in the water. She hummed softly and combed out her hair. Bandar forgot himself. He walked to the bank of the river and stared at her firm back, watching goose bumps appear on her skin. He put his pail of red water on the ground and squatted next to it. A stone loosed beneath his foot and plunked into the river.
Mez turned. She saw Bandar sitting next to his pail, his eyes glazed with love. Slowly, she walked out of the river, revealing herself for his two-color eyes. She lay down at his feet, naked, unafraid. He dipped his hands into the pail of red water, then pressed his dyed palms into Mez’s flesh, marking her from the neck down. She lay completely still, eyes closed, enjoying the feel of Bandar’s hands sticking to her skin.
When she opened her eyes, Bandar was gone and her body bore his handprints—the lines of his destiny stained red on her stomach and thighs. She dressed quickly and ran away from the river, searching the night for him. She ran to his house and entered through the garden gate.
There was Bandar by the swing, digging angrily in the ground. Mez watched as he pulled a silver box from the dirt. He took ten gold bracelets from the box, then reburied it.
She followed him inside and watched from the hall as he packed the bracelets in a small bag. He went to his closet and took two jars from it. After wrapping the jars in kurtas, he packed them as well. Then he put the bag under his bed.
Mez stepped into his room. She did not seem to startle Bandar. He looked at her and asked what she wanted.
She said, “If you are going away, I will come with you. You have marked me with your hand, with the hand of Bandar, and I cannot go home. They will see me and know it was you, and I will be alone and disgraced.”
Impassive, Bandar stared at Mez. He told her she could come with him and Somna, but when they came to a new land where they could rest, she could not rest with him. And she could never ask why.
“I will get my things,” Mez said. “Bandar, there is a place I think of. On land, facing sea. When I reach it, I will sit down and say ‘I am not leaving here.’ I have always thought of it. And you have always been there.” She told Bandar she would return at dawn and left the house by way of the garden.
Bandar slept and dreamed of colored monkeys sodden in the rains, of jars filled with his stool stored in a long, narrow room. The eunuchs, wearing red dresses, flitted in and out of the dream. Mez and Somna stood in the rain, ducking dirt and fly-infested mangoes that fell from the sky. In his sleep, Bandar felt a heavy sadness.
When he awakened, it was still dark. After much pulling of Somna’s hair, Bandar managed to rouse his sister. He told her to meet him outside. Sleepily, Somna did what he told her, imagining that wherever they went there would be a river and vendors to run for and colored powder. It could not be that different, and Bandar would be there. She, his only sister, would take care of him.
Bandar carried his bag to the garden. He sat and removed his chappals to wash his colored feet in the pond. When he reached behind to retrieve his chappals, they were gone. He heard a chattering above his head. In the tree that had held his old cradle swing, a monkey, dyed blue and green, chuckled and hopped. It tossed Bandar’s shoes to a yellow and red monkey in an adjacent tree. When Bandar tried to climb the tree, the yellow and red monkey smacked him on the head. He cursed at the monkeys. Chattering, they jumped to the tall trees lining the street, gone with his chappals. He would have to wear his soiled English shoes.
Bandar cried. The pale sun rose gradually. He heard chai wallahs calling from Char Minar. Turning away from the street, he saw his mother, looking from her window. Watching him cry, in his bare feet. She would remember Bandar, always, like that. He looked at her with his two-colored eyes till she dropped the curtain.
Bandar’s stomach cramped in sadness. Running into the street, he squatted and shat across from a cow chewing curd from a broken matka. With a banana leaf, Bandar gathered a piece of his own stool and brought it to the kitchen where he pushed it into a jar. He forgot to put on his English shoes. When he returned to the garden, Somna and Mez waited for him. They did not ask him what the jar held or why he wore no shoes. They did not ask him where they were going, hushed by the rainbow streaks on his cheeks.
Before the muezzins called from Char Minar, they left in an oxcart on its way to Thana where the train stopped and the lunatics had an asylum. As they rolled by the river, they saw the shores steeped in color. A flock of pigeons rose above them in a mass, flying west. Somna stayed awake till the town disappeared from view.
A Christian Place
After they crossed the ocean and arrived in the Christian place, they passed through a medical station. Bandar was diagnosed with heterochromia and Somna with acute narcolepsy and a fatigue syndrome. When they asked the doctor what the words meant, he told them not to worry, they were not infectious. He told Mez that he had not known her kind of Indian lived across the sea, and registered her as Maize. He forgot to check her ears. Both his eyes were blue and his a’s twanged like a sitar.
They left the medical station by boat. On land, they flagged a taxi and Bandar asked the driver to put their things in the boot. The man drove away. They hailed another cab and the driver asked if they would like their things in the trunk. Bandar said yes and learned his first lesson in the Christian place. The taxi took them to a railroad station where they boarded a train going west, intending to stop when they saw a place they liked.
Ten days later, they saw the place. Bandar and Mez poked Somna awake. All she saw was the river, and she nodded her head. As the doors began to shut, they bundled out of the train and found themselves on a platform. In front of them stood a porter surrounded by pigeons. He pointed them up a dirt lane toward a town laid out next to a river. A hill rose beyond the river. All other land in sight was flat.
Some Time Later and a Bad Dinner
No one in town noticed the eunuchs arrive. One day, they appeared, living at the top of the hill in Bandar’s long blue house. They did not speak a word of English and only left the house to shop for food. They pointed at what they wanted and held out hands filled with money. Afraid of the eunuchs, the shopkeepers took what was needed and no more.
Bandar designed his home and hired the Christians to build it. He paid them well. The house was shaped like a box, with thirteen windows at the front and back of the top and bottom floors. The Christians tried to convince Bandar to make twelve or fourteen windows, but he would not be dissuaded. One odd window, half the size of the others and asymmetrically placed, looked out the back of the house. It received a full dose of afternoon sun.
A large round bath was sunk into the middle of the ground floor. Everyday, the eunuchs performed ministrations on Bandar. They cleaned, perfumed, dried, waxed, and buffed him, till only his facial hair remained and he smelled of roses. He wanted to be smooth and clean like a baby. In the Christian place, Bandar found it easier to stay spotless and controlled.
Somna was the only woman in the house. Her hibernation cycle had been thrown off by the moderate weather. Instead of running through all seasons, she slept through most. She had grown fat and no longer fit on her bed. Bandar and the eunuchs made her a mattress close to the ground. They turned her every couple of hours, heaving and grunting as they flipped her bulk and changed her diapers. She usually awakened once a week and ran at her old speed down the hill to Mez’s house (Bandar had bought it for her with three gold bangles). Rumors spread about the rich, two-colored man who kept an obese woman locked in his house and eighty-seven little dark men in dresses who did whatever he told them. When cows began disappearing from the rancher’s herds, they blamed wolves. The people in town heard about it and blamed the eunuchs and the racing fat woman.
During the second year in the Christian place, Bandar invited Mez to the house for dinner. He woke Somna and had the eunuchs walk her around till mealtime. Mez arrived in her red dress with her hair undone and her eyes glazed with love. They talked of Char Minar and Holi and Bandar asked Mez if she needed anything. She told him she wanted a recording device so she could tape her conversations with the people who came to visit her. No one in town knew of her deafness; she had become adept at lip-reading English. But it bothered her that she could not hear the tones of their voices. Bandar agreed to make the machines. He asked Mez how she got along. She told him the people who visited gave her presents of food and other things. She made her own clothing. After attending a quilting session, she became enchanted by the idea of squares of bright fabric sewn into a whole colored piece. She sewed all her clothes in the style of quilts, a stew of color, and gave a few cloaks to Somna who wept and thought of Tikka Street.
Somna felt lost in the Christian place. There were no water snakes in the river, and no one would hire her to run. She tried to lift a statue of their skinny god, the one she thought must be the town favorite because of the number of pictures dedicated to him. She believed she could carry him close to her heart, like the gods on the Char Minar lithographs. But he was so weighted to the earth, she could not even lift one corner of his pedestal. Somna felt sorry for him, stuck to the ground on a cold stone cross. He seemed sad.
She listened to Bandar and Mez talk about the river and the gypsies. She longed for sleep and parcels strapped to her front. She heard Bandar say, “Mez, you were aptly named. You are a table. People come and lay things on you and you hold them up. You are simple and plain, just like a table.”
Mez slammed her fists on the table. She had worn her red dress in the hopes that Bandar would remember her. She told him he was aptly named monkey because he looked and acted like one. No one could even tell Bandar was human; he was an unfeeling coward and a homosexual. Then she stormed out of the house, leaving Somna and Bandar alone at the table.
They sat drinking tea and looking in opposite directions till Bandar could tell that his sister was about to fall sleep. He asked her why Mez had left like that, and why she had been so angry. Before Somna’s head fell forward onto her empty plate she muttered, “You called her table and you called her plain.”
“But that is her name,” said Bandar to the sleeping Somna “and she is plain and simple, two very good things.”
A few weeks after the dinner, a eunuch brought Mez two recording devices (with written instructions) and an ear horn made by Bandar. She took them, without thanks, and gave the eunuch her red dress to wear.
Maize, the Table
It began with the women. Mez established herself as a seamstress and people flocked to her. They thought she was an American Indian named after corn. The women who came to Mez sat on her sofa and revealed their deepest secrets and problems, without ever realizing that she herself rarely spoke. She offered them sound advice, and did what she could to fix their travails. By the end of her first year in town, Mez knew everyone and everything about them.
She owned a pair of alligator pumps, a gift from the mayor’s son. In the process of impregnating the bishop’s niece, the mayor’s son had left the girl’s panties on the back lawn of the rectory. The mayor’s son went to Mez on the advice of his mother.
The rectory awoke at four-thirty to feed the pigeons and pray. Some time before the birds descended, the panties were retrieved, in a partially frozen state, and delivered to the mayor’s son by a eunuch in a red dress. The day after that, the bishop’s niece received word from a university in India that her exceptional scholastic ability had reached the attention of the dean, who would be honored to have her attend his school for the next nine months and stay with his childless wife. And the day after that, the ladies at the town restaurant commented on Mez’s lovely new alligator pumps.
Mez discovered that she possessed an uncanny talent for invoking trust and solving problems. By the end of her fourth year in town, her home was filled with trinkets, furniture, and paintings. She never paid for food and rarely had to make any; she was swamped with grateful donations and bribes. So accustomed did Mez become to the ways of the Christian place, that she ate their bland food and celebrated Easter.
She sewed one of Bandar’s recording devices into the arm of the sofa where she received visitors, and concealed the rotating wheels with a button-up flap. The other recording machine Mez mounted under the kitchen table. After her visitors left, she tied her hair back and listened to the conversations with an ear horn. Their difficulties were resolved soon afterward, unless they had come for the comfort of being listened to, in which case they left fulfilled.
Often, Mez thought of Bandar. Somna visited less and less. Mez longed for some form of real companionship. She still resented Bandar and his insults. The fact that the Christian place accepted her, pleased Mez—she was proud of the life she had created. She liked being needed and dreamt of the day when Bandar would need her, too, as he had years ago when she chopped onions for him and let him touch his hands to her body.
In the Christian place, Bandar became even more withdrawn and solitary. When Mez looked up the hill to his house, she saw that the blue of its facade was slowly fading to grey. The eunuchs told her Bandar bathed three hours each day and frequently told stories about his loving mother and her sweet servant. They feared distance had warped his memory and dulled his color. Mez agreed.
Sometime during Mez’s fourth year in town, James came to her. He dismounted the train and asked the porter with pigeons on his shoulders where he could get food and a job. The porter pointed him toward town and told him to find a woman named Maize.
James arrived at Mez’s home as she was heating up soup sent over by Grace the Cajun woman who ran the tobacco shop and was known for making food too spicy to consume. After Mez set a place for James at the table, he told her of his adulterous wife whom he had left twelve towns down the train tracks because she did not understand the way he felt. He became so distracted by his own stories that he forgot to eat. Mez silently ate her soup, nodding and watching James’ lips. In the middle of an intricate description of his wife’s morals, James looked up at Mez. Tears poured from her eyes and coursed into her soup. She lay her head down on the table.
James said, “That’s just how I feel.”
Mez did not answer because she had not heard him. She got up and took the bowl of untouched soup away from him moaning, “That woman, it’s too much.”
A flicker of passion took hold of James as Mez moved toward the sink. His passion grew as she coughed. Pushing his chair away from the table, James fled the house, panic-stricken. Mez wept. Oblivious to James’ exit, she drank an entire pitcher of water and threw the pot of fiery soup outside the front door, shooing away the cat and cursing Grace and her Cajun pepper.
Days later, Mez received a written marriage proposal from James. Amazed, she listened to the recording of their dinner conversation. She sent a letter back to James inscribed with one word: yes. She did not think about his wife or Bandar and his red palms. She wanted to be married. Through the eunuchs, she asked Somna to come to her wedding. When Bandar heard the news, he hugged himself with his thin arms and stamped his feet like a small boy. He knew it was unfair to expect Mez to remain alone, like himself. But he could not help feeling betrayed.
The wedding was a simple affair. The bishop remembered Mez’s kindness to his niece and overlooked her heathen status. He married her and James in the church, shuddering every time he glanced at the maid-of-honor. Somna smiled at the skinny god hanging behind the bishop. In her pudgy hands, she clutched bunches of lilies. That night, the bishop rang the bells from midnight till dawn to cover the sounds of Mez’s deaf ecstasy. When Grace the Cajun came home from the tobacco store, she found a large bottle of fine brandy and an ornate Venetian bowl on her front step. Inside the bowl was a note: Thank you for the soup.
For weeks after the marriage, the bishop could be seen sweating and swinging from the tower with such frequency that the town lost all sense of time. It was impossible to tell if the bell rang for the half hour or for the passion of Mez and James. The couple exhausted each other in this manner till the day James’ wife boarded the train and rode twelve towns up the tracks to find a woman named Maize. She had heard that the Indian lady could do anything from exterminate mice to unearth a long-missing husband. She found her husband on his knees in front of Mez’s house, weeding the flower bed. She took him with her to the train station.
Mez returned from her shopping to a half-weeded garden, imprinted with two knee-shapes, and no husband. She did not question his absence. He left her as he had come, unexpected and quick.
In her times of loneliness, Mez would bathe and spank herself with a soup ladle till exhausted. She thought of Bandar, but did not go to see him.
The Storeroom and the Dead Eunuch
On the top floor of Bandar’s house was a door with a lock. Behind it was the storeroom. Long and narrow, the room allowed just enough space for a man to walk up and down its length. Jars lined the walls, jars filled with Bandar’s stool, save the two brought from India containing his power and worldly burden. Each was labeled accordingly:
Mez at the River in a Red Dress
The Mango and the Astrologer
The Day After Holi
The Day the House Was Built
The Day Somna Was Too Fat for Her Bed
The Day Mez Left Dinner
The Day Mez Married
The Day He Left Mez
When the afternoon sun sloped through the window and gleamed off the jars, Bandar went to the storeroom and thought of his home and Mez by the river. He knew he was less emotional in the Christian place. He had not cried since the day after Holi; he had not spilled his power since the night he dreamed of raining mangoes. The eunuchs’ ministrations gave him pleasure because they made him feel smooth like a child free of dirt and sadness. He longed for someone to cradle him, longed for the security of his swing hanging from the Bodhi tree. But he allowed himself no vulnerability, and forced his insides to be still and quiet.
He no longer had Somna as a companion. The year after James left Mez, Somna awakened with her head stuffed full of dreams. She had been asleep for three months and felt hungry and energetic. She ran from her room, tumbling down the stairs in her haste. She never even saw the eunuch.
When Bandar and the other eunuchs finally pulled her off him, he was dead. They burned him behind the house, facing the flat land and the river. Bandar took a jar of ash and put it in the storeroom with the label: The Dead Eunuch.
After the funeral, Somna went to sleep. She did not open her eyes for six months. When she did awaken, she was gaunt and weak. She asked to see the river and fell asleep, and dreamed her last dream of running.
The Stroller
When Bandar was an old man and labeled jars lined the storeroom from floor to ceiling, he built a stroller. Made of redwood, the stroller fit his dimensions perfectly: five-foot-nine-and-a-half and two-feet wide. He built a sun-top for the stroller and padded it with Somna’s bright cloaks. Through the last eunuch left alive, he sent word to Mez to make him a white shift.
She sewed him one, fashioned after a baby’s christening gown, and brought it to him in her alligator pumps and black dress. She, too, was old. The townspeople thought she wore black as an expression of mourning for the loss of James. Bandar knew she was sprouting into a Char Minar woman. He asked her age, and Mez told him she did not remember but she knew she was too old to bleed. It pleased him that she had returned to a childish state. He asked her if she remembered Somna running with him strapped to her front. He told her he had long ago deciphered the astrologer’s riddle and realized that he, Bandar, would always be different. He had been carried on two in the morning, been driven on four in the afternoon, and now would be pushed on four at night. Showing Mez the stroller, he asked her if she would wheel him around. She said, yes, she would take him to a place, on land, facing sea, the place she had always thought of.
They left the house in the care of the lone eunuch and threw the key to the storeroom in the river. The last time the town saw them, Mez was pushing the stroller east, and Bandar looked out backward from under the sun-top, crying like the monkeys he was named for.