Was she dead or still alive?
And then, even without turning her head, she knew they had come. The bulls. Massive heads with perfect horns silhouetted sickle-shaped against the light. Two of them. The color of night. The stolen color of what-used-to-be-night. Rough curls embossed into their damp foreheads like damask headscarves. Their moist, velvet noses glistened, and they pursed their purple lips. They made no sound. They never harmed her, only stared. The whites of their eyes as they looked around the room were crescent moons. They didn’t seem curious or particularly grave. They were like doctors looking in on a patient, trying to agree on a diagnosis.
Did you forget to bring your stethoscopes again?
Time had a different quality in their presence. She couldn’t tell for how long they watched her. She never looked back at them. She knew they were gone only when the light they had blocked returned to illuminate the room.
When she was sure they were gone, she went to the window and saw them shrink to street level and walk away. City-slickers. A pair of thugs. One of them lifted its leg like a dog and pissed on the window of a car. A very tall dog. She put on the light and looked up the word insouciant. The dictionary said: Cheerfully unconcerned or unworried about something. She kept dictionaries near her bed, piled up into a tower.
She picked a sheet of paper from a ream, and a pencil from a coffee mug full of sharpened blue pencils, and began to write:
Dear Doctor,
I am witness to a curious scientific phenomenon. Two bulls live in the service lane outside my flat. In the daytime they appear quite normal, but at night they grow tall—I think the word might be “elevate”—and stare at me through my second-floor window. When they piss, they lift their legs like dogs. Last night (at about 8 p.m.), when I was returning from the market, one growled at me. This I’m sure of. My question is: Is there any chance that they could be genetically modified bulls, with dog-growth or wolf-growth genes implanted in them, that might have escaped from a lab? If so, are they bulls or dogs? Or wolves?
I have not heard of any such experiments being done on cattle, have you? I am aware of human growth genes being used on trout, making them gigantic. The people who breed these giant trout say they’re doing it to feed people in poor countries. My question is who will feed the giant trout? Human growth genes have also been used in pigs. I’ve seen the result of that experiment. It’s a cross-eyed mutant that is so heavy that it cannot stand up or bear its own weight. It needs to be propped up on a board. It’s pretty disgusting.
These days one is never really sure whether a bull is a dog, or an ear of corn is actually a leg of pork or a beef steak. But perhaps this is the path to genuine modernity? Why, after all, shouldn’t a glass be a hedgehog, a hedge an etiquette manual, and so on?
Yours truly,
Tilottama
P.S. I have learned that scientists working in the poultry industry are trying to excise the mothering instinct in hens in order to mitigate or entirely remove their desire to brood. Their goal, apparently, is to stop chickens wasting time on unnecessary things and thereby to increase the efficiency of egg production. Even though I am personally and in principle completely against efficiency, I wonder whether conducting this sort of intervention (by which I mean excising the mothering instinct) on the Maaji—The Mothers of the Disappeared in Kashmir—would help. Right now they are inefficient, unproductive units, living on a mandatory diet of hopeless hope, pottering about in their kitchen gardens, wondering what to grow and what to cook, in case their sons return. I’m sure you agree this is a bad business model. Could you propose a better one? A doable, realistic (although I’m against realism too) formula to arrive at an efficient Quantum of Hope? The three variables in their case are Death, Disappearance and Familial Love. All other forms of love, assuming that they do indeed exist, do not qualify and should be disregarded. Barring of course the Love of God. (That goes without saying.)
P.P.S. I’m moving. I don’t know where I’m going. This fills me with hope.
When she finished her letter she folded it carefully and put it into her bag. She cut the cake, packed it into a box file and put it into the fridge. She untied the balloons one by one and locked them in the cupboard. She switched on the TV with the volume off. A man was selling his eyebrows. He had turned down the initial offer of five hundred dollars. Eventually, for one thousand four hundred dollars he agreed to have them shaved off with an electric shaver. He had a funny, sheepish smile on his face. He looked like Elmer Fudd in The Wacky Wabbit.
—
Predawn.
Still no Saddam Hussain.
The kidnapper looked down from her window a little impatiently.
A text message on her phone:
Let’s unite on International Yoga Day for poolside candlelight yoga and meditation by Guru Hanumant Bhardwaj
She tapped out a reply:
Please let’s not.
Right beside the school gate on which a painted nurse was giving a painted baby a painted polio vaccination, a circle of sleepy women, migrant workers from roadworks nearby, stood around a tiny boy as he squatted like a comma on the edge of an open manhole. The women leaned on their shovels and pickaxes as they waited for their star to perform. The comma had his eyes fixed on one of the women. His mother. The spirit moved him. He made a pool. A yellow leaf. His mother put down her ax and washed his bottom with muddy water from an old Bisleri bottle. With the leftover water she washed her hands, and washed the yellow leaf into the manhole. Nothing in the city belonged to the women. Not a tiny plot of land, not a hovel in a slum, not a tin sheet over their heads. Not even the sewage system. But now they had made a direct, unorthodox deposit, an express delivery straight into the system. Maybe it marked the beginning of a foothold in the city. The comma’s mother gathered him in her arms, slung her ax across her shoulder, and the little contingent left.
The street was empty.
And then, as though he had been waiting for the women to leave before making his entry, Saddam Hussain appeared. In the following order:
Sound
Sight
Smell (stench).
The yellow municipal truck turned into the little service lane and parked a few houses away. Saddam Hussain swung out of the passenger seat (with the same flamboyance with which he usually swung off his horse), his gaze already scanning the second-floor window of Tilo’s building. Tilo put her head out and signaled that the gate was open and that he should come up.
She met him at the door with a packed suitcase, a baby and a box file full of strawberry cake. Comrade Laali greeted Saddam on the landing as though she was being reunited with a lost lover. She held her head steady and wagged the rest of her body from side to side, her ears flattened, her eyes slanting coquettishly.
“Is she yours?” Saddam asked Tilo after they had introduced themselves to each other. “We can take her, there’s plenty of room where we are going.”
“She has puppies.”
“Arre, where’s the problem…?”
He gently pushed the puppies off the sack they lay on, opened it and dropped them in—a bunch of squealing, squirming brinjals. Tilo locked her door and the little procession trooped down the stairs and into the street.
Saddam with a packed suitcase and a sack full of puppies.
Tilo with a baby and a box file.
And Comrade Laali trailing her newfound love with unashamed devotion.