“What’d Brijee ask?”
“Nothing! He said, ‘Your bloody uncle, the DME, blocked my promotion. And you can eat fish brain for a lifetime and perhaps grow you a dorsal fin and gills. But as long as Dr. Brijmohan Sarkar is examiner, it won’t help Chinnaswamy Arcot Gajapathy pass his viva.’ That bastard da Vinci must have told Brijee about my uncle. And the fish brains.” Before the exam, Chinnah had declined to “tip” the attenders for good luck. It was extortion, yet everyone but Chinnah complied. He says ruefully, “I tell you, nothing good happens when family pulls strings for you. Pull becomes plug.”
Before Dr. Pius can return, Dr. Brijee Sarkar pokes his head out and beckons Mariamma. She signals to Chinnah to wait. Her luck might not be any better than his.
“Madam,” says Dr. Brijmohan Sarkar once the door closes behind her, “your prize exam dissection was nice, very nice.” They’re both still standing. “You’re the only one who managed not to snap a branch nerve. Confidentially, your chances are, I’ll say . . .”
He doesn’t say, but he smiles and lifts his eyebrows up. Mariamma flushes, delighted.
“Ready for the viva?”
“Sir, I think so.”
“Very good. Please put your hand in my pocket.”
She stands before him in her cream sari and short white coat. Did she hear him correctly?
Dr. Sarkar has no sweat on his powdered face despite the oppressive heat. He stands between her and the door. Brijee Sarkar is tall, in his fifties, and his cheeks are hollowed by the loss of back molars. His thin limbs look discordant with the belly that pushes out. Rocking on his heels, his nose raised to the ceiling, his expression is now as severe as the crease in his linen pants. The sideways stance is to give Mariamma easy access to his right pants pocket.
She’s studied hard. She’s prepared. But not for this.
There’s a ringing in her ears. The ceiling fan shoves back the sweltering air rising off the concrete floor. On the table, the hydrocephalic baby who sank Druva looks on with interest. An open tray contains the side of a head sawed down the middle with the mandible removed. A cloth bag outlines the small bones it holds.
If only he’d sit down. If only Dr. Pius would return. If only he’d ask me about hydrocephalus, or ask me to reach in the cloth bag . . . But Brijee isn’t using the cloth bag, just his pocket.
A pulse flicks in Brijee’s neck, a sinuous, bifid wave like a snake’s tongue. “Either put your hand in my pocket or come back in September,” he says softly, looking straight ahead.
Mariamma stands frozen. Why doesn’t she just say no? She’s ashamed to even be debating her choices. She’s ashamed to see her left hand extend out, as though of its own volition—the way Brijee stands, using her left hand seems easier.
She puts her hand in his pocket. She wants to believe that whatever skeletal piece Brijee Sarkar has tucked in there—pisiform or talus—she’ll identify. She so wants to believe. She doesn’t want to fail.
She slides in deeper. For a fraction of a second, she’s unsure of what she’s feeling. Has her hand strayed? Is it her fault that she has hold of his penis? Is it her fault that no clothing intervenes? What’s in her hand is a firmer, less flexible, and bonier organ than she’d ever imagined it to be. Is she meant to name its parts? The suspensory ligament, the corpora cavernosa, the corpus spongiosum . . . ?
Her brain struggles to stay in the examinee mode in the face of an organ with which she has no direct experience, engorged or otherwise; but her thoughts slip from the realm of anatomy and regress into painful memories that make the bile rise in her throat: a boatman in the canal, flashing her and Podi from his barge as they swam; the stranger pressed up against her in the bus; a turbaned snake charmer who materialized across the street from the ladies’ hostel and, on noticing Mariamma studying him, made as though to remove the cloth covering his basket, but it was his lungi he had hiked up and a different sort of snake sprang up from his groin.
Why do men subject her and every woman she knows to this kind of harassment and humiliation? Is it only by forcing touch or by having an audience for their display that they know the organ exists? Earlier that year, when the ladies’ hostel bus brought them back from a sari exhibition, a closed section of road forced the driver to detour through a narrow lane behind the men’s hostel. A male student sat reading the paper while stark naked on the balcony. In an instant, he covered his face rather than his base. That was understandable—he wanted to spare himself the embarrassment of being recognized. But what she could not understand was his decision to stand up, face still covered but all else on display, while the bus and its passengers crawled by.
What she does next is difficult for Mariamma to later explain to herself or anyone else. It is a cornered animal’s desperate instinct to survive, but also the unleashing of a primitive anger. She’s reliving a familiar nightmare of a viper baring its fangs and spitting at her while she desperately clutches it under its hood, keeping it away from her face, holding on as it whips and saws and tries to strike . . . and so her fingers instinctively clamp down with murderous intent on Sarkar’s penis. Her right hand leaps into the battle, coming to the left’s aid, slamming into Brijee’s groin from outside, buttressing her hold by grabbing anything that dangles—scrotal sac, epididymis, testis, root of penis and . . . anatomy be damned—and squeezing for dear life.
For a brief moment, Brijee’s vanity permits him to think she’s fondling him. He wants to speak, his eyebrows going up, but he gags on his words and turns pale. Then he steps back, the veins on his temples filling out, staggering against the table, sending the specimens crashing, the glass breaking, the hydrocephalic fetus slithering across the formaldehyde-slicked floor. Brijee drags Mariamma with him in his retreat, because whatever happens, she will not, must not let go of the snake’s head. Brijee manages a scream, and she screams too, hers a bloodcurdling sound, as they tumble over the table. Her forehead meets broken glass, but nothing will distract her from choking the life out of the serpent even if she succumbs from the effort.
The door to the room bursts open, but she can’t look or let go. Brijee Sarkar’s face is inches from hers, the perfumed paan on his breath registering in her nostrils, his scream becoming silent, and his skin turning ashen. Too late, he grabs her forearms, but his strength is gone, and his touch feels gentle, pleading. Then his body sags, his hands fall away; he becomes floppy, and his eyes roll back. She can hear Chinnah pleading with her to let go, while da Vinci and Pius try to tug Sarkar free, but she cannot let go, nor can she silence her war cry. Brave Chinnah dives in to peel her fingers off one by one.
Chinnah drags, then carries Mariamma away as blood pours from her forehead. He sets her down in an empty lab room and presses a hanky over the wound. She pushes her way to the sink and scrubs furiously at her hands, then she throws up as Chinnah supports her, still compressing the wound.
Sobs and rage commingle like blood and water as she clings to Chinnah. Then she remembers—he too is a man. She strikes him on the chest, then the ears, and he suffers her blows, offering himself, willing to be wounded, while bravely keeping pressure on her cut even though it leaves him exposed, waiting till she is spent.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers.
“What’re you sorry about?”
“I’m ashamed for all men,” he says.
“You should be. You’re all bastards.”
“You’re not wrong. I’m so sorry.”
“I’m sorry too, Chinnah.”
CHAPTER 65
If Only God Could Speak
1971, Madras