Three is Not a Number
BY ABHISHEK SENGUPTA
A dirty sky reflected in the boiling water in Pintoo’s Chai Stall. The sky formed inside bubbles that grew, danced, quarrelled, and broke off, all within a matter of seconds. Then Pintoo made it murkier still with a spoonful of brown tea leaves.
“Your aasmani chai, memsaab,” He extended the clay cup filled to the brim for the delicate hands of his memsaab—madame, as he would call her if he were the owner of a more sophisticated establishment. “Your sky-flavoured tea.”
“Flavoured with this polluted sky?” She accepted his joke in the same teacup. “Are you trying to poison me, Pintoo?”
How could he tell her that he added a lot more than this city’s pollution to his chai? That he had also added the honking of the rickshaws, the dingdong of the trams, the clippety-clop of horse-drawn carriages, and the tuneful chants of the various peddlers that often went up and down these streets? That he had churned in the fumes of the motor vehicles, the zigzagging motion of houseflies, the siestas of daily labourers on the pavements, the despondency of the fresh high school pass-outs who had crowded by the university’s gates to check if their names appeared on the admission list? Would she ever understand that taste can be extracted from the most unusual sources? And that he drew all of it only for the tea he made for her? For your lips only.
Memsaab mostly came with her university friends, some of them her classmates. Pintoo understood little of the politics they discussed. He tried to understand little. But he totally got that memsaab’s husky voice added weight to her words. And when she straightened the rims of her glasses while speaking, it meant she was being more serious than usual about the current topic. The idle bikers often addressed that bespectacled version of her when they called her names in passing: “What new broth are you cooking this time, chashmish?”
But memsaab was a graceful lady. She never paid any heed to those wheel-bound disgraces on the face of Earth. She didn’t do so this morning either, standing with placards, ready for another day of demonstration outside the university gates. “You’re here to study, chashmish. Attend your classes and go home, you four-eyed nerd. Stop creating a furore over people who aren’t your community.” Pintoo didn’t know what those placards said, but he wished he knew how to read to get a feel of what silent answers to their taunts she had in her arsenal.
By that time, a few of her other friends had already gathered in their chosen thek, their permanent makeshift hub: Pintoo’s Chai Stall. Pintoo’s stall wasn’t really a stall. It was a structure of four vertical and four horizontal bamboo scaffolding covered with a dark plastic tarp on the pavement. Half of that shed was Pintoo’s actual shop; the other half was where he had set two of those cheap wooden benches in front of the counter, leaving just enough space for the passers-by to cross. However, before demonstrations such as today’s, all that space on the pavement was used up by memsaab’s friends, and only one-fourth of them had a place to sit, and Pintoo wished he had ten hands, like Goddess Durga, to make enough tea and serve all of them at once.
“The audacity of these goons!” one of her friends said after the bikers had zoomed past.
“Leave it. They’re spouting just what the ruling party is paying them to say,” memsaab said. “They think they’ll force the Muslim girl students to take off their hijabs to enter the premises on their exam date and we’ll join them in chanting their extremist narratives? Call the Muslims the source of all trouble? Say that the Musselman is conspiring to take over our nation? Sorry, we’re not that delusional. This is still a secular country, and one day, justice will be served.”
But justice and ghosts only exist in the ether and rarely reveal themselves to the living. Pintoo wondered if memsaab knew this too. And if she did, why demonstrate at all? You cannot fill a leaking pot with water. Nor with tea. Not even with all your blood and sweat. He couldn’t help worrying about memsaab. Wasn’t she living a little too dangerously?
Baban answered that question for him later that afternoon. Baban, the sixteen-year-old who always fashioned his hair after one popular Bollywood hero or the other. Baban, the peddler of the spiciest alu-kabli outside the university gates. Baban, Pintoo’s only friend and confidante. “Come fast.” Baban panted in front of Pintoo’s stall. “Your memsaab’s lying on the street, unconscious.”
You need to run. Now. His mind pushed him to, but his legs froze. They simply refused to move. No matter how hard he tried.
“What are you thinking, you idiot?” Baban joined Pintoo’s own mind in ridiculing him. “Come fast.”
And because Pintoo still didn’t move, nor blink, as he kept staring at his friend’s face in disbelief, Baban came around the counter, held Pintoo by his wrist, and pulled him.
Yes, now they were running. Or was he flying? Pintoo still couldn’t feel his legs. He suspected he no longer had those and didn’t have enough bravado to look down and be certain of it.
They entered a side alley quite a bit farther from the university gates where memsaab and her friends were supposed to be demonstrating. Both stopped in front of an empty spot. Not quite empty. They were joined by a tiny pool of blood on the road, formed in the shape of a sickle. Fresh blood; still rolling. But there was no memsaab.
For a while, Pintoo was even thankful for her absence. He wouldn’t know what to do if he saw her lying there. Injured, no doubt, now that he’s seen the blood. His memsaab’s blood, just sitting there, orphaned, in the middle of the road. There were pedestrians and bicycles and rickshaws and the occasional biker, but nobody cared for her blood.
“She was right here when I made a dash for you,” Baban said, his tone almost sounding like a complaint, as if she should’ve still been here, waiting for the two of them. For Pintoo, above all.
“What happened here?” Pintoo asked, still unable to look away from the pool of blood.
“Even I don’t know the exact details. I was drawn here because I saw a cluster and recognised some of your memsaab’s friends’ faces in the crowd. When I pushed my way through, I saw her lying there, unconscious. So, I asked one of her friends—my most regular customer—and she said, it was the idle bikers. They held her by the hair and drove around, dragging her down the streets for about two full minutes, before letting go of her. She must’ve hurt her head or something when she fell.”
Something in the blood caught Pintoo’s attention and he stepped closer. There, lying next to the blood was a lone hair. His memsaab’s. Half of it lay in the red pool and was drenched in that blood. The other half, however, was silky and shining like the rest of her hair. Pintoo hunted desperately through his pockets, his shirt and his pants, and soon chanced upon one of those tiny pouches in which he gave a teaspoon or two of extra sugar if the customers were carrying the tea away from his stall. He knelt, carefully picked up the lone hair, held it between his thumb and index finger, and placed the thing inside the pouch, before sealing its mouth shut.
Baban had stepped up too and was studying Pintoo’s movements carefully from over his shoulders. When Pintoo just as carefully placed the pouch inside his shirt’s pocket, Baban was unable to restrain his amusement any longer. “Why are you suddenly acting like one of those phorensics guys in the movies?”
Pintoo chose not to entertain his friend’s question. Baban wouldn’t get it no matter how he responded. He got up on his feet and said, “Let’s go.”
They crossed the street and approached the old clockmaker in his little shop, busy working on a broken clock. Even when they stood right in front of him, the old clockmaker didn’t look up and went on tightening the screw of a clock lying face-down in front of him on the cot where he sat. He wore a torn vest and a worn lungi.
“Did you see the injured lady here?” No time for niceties, Pintoo got straight to the point. “Was she okay?”
“At what time?” the old man asked, checking with his fingers if the screw he fitted was tight enough.
“At what time?” Pintoo parroted. “What do you mean? Just a little while ago. There.” He pointed at the place where the blood had pooled.
The old clockmaker sighed and pulled up the clock he was working on so Pintoo could see its face and the clock could see Pintoo’s. The hour, minute, and second hands were stuck at some random time. Frozen. The old man placed his fingers on the crown and started winding it counter-clockwise. The clock hands obeyed their master: they turned back, the tall one going round and round. The clockmaker stopped when the clock showed about fifteen minutes in the past.
“This is when she was okay,” the old clockmaker said. “The ambulance had already arrived, and she sat up, conscious, refusing to be carried on a stretcher. But her friends insisted, and it didn’t seem like she had enough fight left in her to disobey.”
He turned the crown again, still anticlockwise, but much slower. More carefully. The time went some twenty minutes back and stopped again.
“Now she’s not okay.” The clockmaker stared directly into Pintoo’s eyes, and Pintoo had to look away from him. Instead, the chaiwallah focussed on the time the clock showed. “Now, she’s lying on the road all alone, her eyes closed, almost as if she’s fallen asleep, but there’s blood crawling out of her, circling her head, like time.”
Another slow, careful, anti-clockwise turn. Five minutes was the space covered.
“And now, your lady is not quite a lady. She’s a bundle of hay tied together carelessly and being dragged down the street, her back sweeping the road, cleaning the dirt as it goes. The men on the bike laugh, but she doesn’t scream.” The old clockmaker stopped like his clock had, but he nodded as if considering his own words. “She couldn’t scream.”
“And then?” Pintoo found himself uttering, his voice shaking.
“And then,”—the old clockmaker swiftly wound the time to the present, slapped the back of his clock with his entire palm, and the clock suddenly came to life, the second hand ticking as if jerked to a rude awakening—“we restore time.”
*
Pintoo’s jhopri—his tin sheet roofed hut—in the outskirts of the city was made up of a tiny room. And almost half of the room space was taken up by his double bed. Only the gods knew why it was double; he had never been anything but single, anything but an orphan.
In reality, though, Pintoo’s hut was larger than a mansion.
He used a discarded billboard canvas as what the rich call a false ceiling to hide his tin roof. The canvas was full of twinkling stars. It gave him access to the nighttime sky, no matter what time of the day it was. On the left side wall was a poster that led you to the jungles of Africa—a new adventure every day. On the right was the painting of a waterfall in some paradisical land, unnamed. You could use that as a jacujji. He had learnt that word from a movie Baban had shown him in the theatres. Dolby digital sound and all that. Made you feel as if you were sitting in the water yourself. Wild! The painting in Pintoo’s room had Dolby digital sound as well. When he escaped into it after a tiring day of work, the sounds of nature—wind, birds, and the flowing water—rinsed him of reality, and he became a painted self too, full of colours. Pintoo liked to believe that his jhopri was full of invisible doors. And each door led to a new world.
Tonight though, when he switched on the lone bulb in his room, hanging below the stars, he was more embarrassed than ever before. “Please excuse the clutter, memsaab! I didn’t get enough time to clean my room and make my bed before I left this morning.” He quickly removed some of his dirty clothes and underwear, smoothed the bedsheet, and then placed the plastic pouch on his bed. The part of her lone hair that was drenched in blood had turned brown; the rest was dark and silky, though. “They must’ve hurt you badly, didn’t they? But I’m sure the hospital folks took care of your injuries. Doctors are good people. There was one in our village who used to give me chocolates when I was a kid. I was always looking for excuses to visit him. But my parents were good people too. Not my real parents, mind you. They were dead by the time I could say Ma and Baba. But there was this old man and old woman in our village. Their only daughter was married off. So, they took me in. Took care of me. That is, until they died when I was only twelve. Yeah!” he sighed. “I’m boring you to death, ain’t I?”
He picked up the pouch and placed it on his pillow. “I know it’s not awfully comfortable in here. Your bed must have been softer than my pillow. But it’s only a matter of one night. And before you say it, no need to worry. I’ll sleep on the floor tonight. The bed is all yours, memsaab. The bedbugs too.” And he laughed.
“Of course, I’ll return you to your home tomorrow. I would’ve returned you today itself, but it was getting late, and it wouldn’t have been appropriate.” He fell silent for a few seconds, staring at her hair, before continuing. “Yes, I know where you stay. You had mentioned Garfa once during your discussions with your friends, and a rather large, barricaded lake beside your house, another time. And Pintoo may be illiterate, memsaab, but he is no fool. He can do two plus two. I have to, you know. I run my own bijness. It’s no matter of joke, memsaab!”
*
Morning brings light. And what’s light helps you levitate. Pintoo had a distinct sense of floating in the air when he woke up on his jhopri’s floor. Perhaps it was the relentless sensation of knowing that memsaab had spent the night with him in his home that made him feel that way. Sound sleep had evaded him with the enormity of that event, and his half-awakened state left him flying.
He quickly got up from the floor. It was time to take memsaab back to her home. “Wake up, memsaab,” he said while putting on his shirt. Not the dirty white one he wore to the stall every day. The other one. This one looked relatively new and was chequered and metal red. He was going to her place for the first time. And what is the use of keeping a second shirt if you won’t wear it on special occasions? He picked up the pouch with her lone hair as unobtrusively as possible and placed it in his shirt pocket.
When he stepped out, he didn’t look the colony’s other residents in the eyes. He didn’t want them to catch the ear-to-ear grin that must have been plastered on his face. Excessive happiness is never a good thing in this bustie. People might easily get suspicious.
In the early morning, the sky looked cleaner. Bluer. Perhaps, the fumes that went to sleep at the various corners of this metropolitan city were late risers too, much like the rich folks who were in the habit of sleeping with a bellyful of meal—the choicest ones to boot. Pintoo’s stomach rumbled while walking towards the bus stop. What did he have last night? Oh no! He forgot to eat. “Memsaab, I didn’t even offer you anything,” he said, looking at his pocket. “You must be thinking I’m an absolute miser. The truth is, it completely skipped my mind. I was so excited that you were there. You should have let me know when you were hungry. No need for formalities.”
The early morning bus he took didn’t yet attract the officegoers. Pintoo didn’t have to hang off the door handle like he did every day on his way to the tea stall, the wind slapping his face, pulling at his hair, tears pooling in his eyes as he tried not to lose balance with only one foot on the overcrowded stair. Instead, he stepped inside and sat on an empty seat, feeling like a king. “It’s the magic of you, memsaab,” he muttered so the bus conductor wouldn’t hear him.
He got down when the bus reached Garfa. A little bit of asking around and he ended up in front of a two-storied house at one side of the barricaded lake. The house was painted with two different shades of green, like budding and fully grown leaves coexisting on a tree. Now all he had to do was ring that doorbell and — Wait! Was memsaab home? What if her injuries were a little too deep and the hospital folks didn’t let her return? After all, memsaab wasn’t Pintoo. They wouldn’t send her away with only some basic first aid. The hospitals are renowned for sucking the blood out of the rich. Of course, they would want to admit her and keep her there. He’s such a fool; he should have thought of that before coming here.
He looked at the doorbell once again. Was there any point in ringing it? Maybe he should just return home.
Or was that just his mind making up excuses because, the truth was, he was afraid of ringing that doorbell? Afraid of facing memsaab right on her doorstep?
But if she was home, he had to do what he came here for. His right hand automatically moved to press itself on his shirt pocket. His heart was beating a little too fast.
No, he must ring it, before his mind deceived him yet again, made up some other excuses to convince him otherwise.
A gentle push of the finger and the house responded with a ding-dong inside. At least, it was none of those fancy musical tones or cuckoo’s call.
A middle-aged man opened the door and stepped outside. His eyes matched memsaab’s. “Yes?” he said, with a pinch of irritation in his voice.
He must have taken Pintoo for some door-to-door salesman. Good! At least he looked the part in this shirt. “Is memsaab home?”
“Memsaab?” the man raised his brow.
“She left something on the spot where… you know… yesterday… I brought it back for her.”
The man measured him from head to toe, asked his name and who he was, and then said, “Wait here.” He stepped inside and shut the door.
Perhaps that meant memsaab was back home indeed. Is this the right time to turn around and disappear? “Your last chance to run, Pintoo,” he muttered, “before it’s too late.” But it was indecision, if nothing else, that kept him planted in front of the doorstep. He was reminded—he didn’t know why—of the old clockmaker’s words – “And then, we restore time.”
The door opened, and memsaab appeared. She had a bandage running around her forehead, although Pintoo surmised the wound must have been at the back of her head. There was another one on her left elbow. And bruises ran up and down both her arms. Perhaps that explained why she came out wearing a sleeveless yellow nightie that made her look like a sunflower. “Pintoo?” she exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”
He forgot how to speak. He stood there speechless, gawking at her like some shameless fellow. He pushed himself to look away, and somehow succeeded, but not with words. He realised she had asked him a question, and his inability to answer caused him agony and deepened his shame.
She struck her forehead with her right palm. “Where are my manners? Come in.” She turned around and stepped inside first as if sure he’d obey.
Pintoo noticed she was limping. She must be bruised all over. Those goons! He wished he could teach them all a lesson. He followed her inside, watching her limp in front of him. And he’s causing her even more pain. Maybe he should’ve just let her rest instead of showing up in front of her doorstep in the morning.
The room he walked into broke him out of his reverie when the front door automatically shut itself. It was rather cold with an air-conditioner running. The place was large with a sofa and three wooden chairs at opposite ends of a low and small oval glass table. On one side of the room, there were three house plants with fancy-shaped leaves in their own designer pots. Above them, on the wall, was a huge painting of the poet Rabindranath Tagore sitting amidst many of his verses. Scribblings floated about him, haphazardly, in some parchment background that gradually segued into a bottle green colour along the borders as if to match the shade of the fancy leaves right below it. That painting reminded Pintoo how out of place he was here: he could only recognise the poet by his picture but was unable to read a single word of the verses the painting depicted in the choicest cursive styles.
“Sit,” memsaab said, pointing at the sofa. “I’ll be right back.” And she disappeared inside.
The sofa looked a little too expensive with its intricate carvings on teak and velvet covers on the cushions. He sat on one edge of a cushion, trying to touch as little as possible with his dirty self. With memsaab gone, he focussed on the lifelike portrait of Tagore. Why did the old man keep such a long beard? Didn’t you have to shampoo a beard that long? That seemed like a lot of hard work for something as optional as a beard. When you’re old, you should let your arms rest. You’ve already used them to write so many wonderful verses. He looked at Tagore’s wrinkled hands folded on his lap, meticulously painted by the artist. If Pintoo could write, he’d take extra care of his own hands. And his fingers.
Memsaab appeared with a glass of water and two pastries, and Pintoo sprang up on his feet.
“Sit, sit,” she said, handing him the pastries and putting the glass of water on the table in front of him. One of the pastries was dark and the other white, and the white one had a cherry on top. Both looked more expensive than the ones Baban brought for him occasionally. These looked so premium that eating them felt like a sacrilege; you were much better off appreciating them as pieces of art.
Memsaab sat down on a chair opposite him. “What did I leave there?”
And Pintoo was reminded of why he had come here. He quickly put down the plate on the table, fished out the small plastic pouch and handed it to her.
She looked at it. Then stared up at him, confusedly. “It’s empty.”
“No, memsaab. It’s your hair. You probably can’t recognise it. It was lying in your blood. So, half of it is brown. But it is yours.”
She took another close look at it before turning to him with an amused grin. “You’ve come all the way to return my hair to me?”
“Your hair is still you, memsaab.” No, he shouldn’t have said that. It was such a bold and unwise thing to say. Considering what had happened to her yesterday.
But at his words, something sparkled in the corners of her eyes. Were those tears? No, they couldn’t have been. Or did he actually make her cry? How stupid of him!
“Is it, though?” she muttered to herself, her voice definitely choked. Her distant gaze made Pintoo realise she was reliving those torturous moments from yesterday. He almost pictured it himself—those bikers grabbing her hair with their dirty hands—hands that would so not be like Tagore’s—and then, on those streets… He shook his head out of that imagined memory. Memsaab needed him now.
“It is, memsaab. Every single hair is you. Always.” Even an eyelash is just as you as the rest of your body. He couldn’t imagine saying this out aloud. But then, something made him add, “And that hair was the most precious thing to ever grace my dirty shirt’s pocket.”
A tear trickled down her cheek which she swiftly swept away. “Your pocket’s much cleaner than you imagine, Pintoo. The world outside is a lot grimier.” She fell silent for a few moments, and Pintoo didn’t know what to say. “You know, Pintoo, I couldn’t sleep last night. It was not the pain, but these detestable images inside my head. I couldn’t stand the feel of my own hair. I wanted to shave all of it off my head. It’s so easy in a third-world country like ours to do that to a girl.” She smiled, sadly.
Pintoo wished he understood it all. “What is a third-world country, Memsaab? Do you mean there are two more worlds in the sky where people live?” Wouldn’t that be something?
Memsaab laughed out loud. “No, it’s just a way of saying things. We are considered third in the rat race because in our country there are still lots of people who don’t have the means to live well.”
Pintoo liked that memsaab was explaining things to him. For him. But more than that, he liked that he could make her laugh, even if by his stupidity. “You mean people like me? Are there no chaiwallahs in the first and second world?”
“There are. But they make more money than you do.”
“Our Prime Minister used to sell chai in a train station as a child.”
Memsaab scoffed. “Don’t believe everything you’re told. The station where he supposedly sold tea as a child wasn’t constructed until he was twenty-three. He must’ve been selling chai on a platform that didn’t exist.”
Pintoo frowned, playfully. “I guess I’ll never become the Prime Minister of this country, then.”
Memsaab guffawed this time. “You’re quite a chhupa rustam, Pintoo. A hidden warrior. There’s a lot more to you than is apparent.”
“You’re a warrior yourself, memsaab. And even though, sometimes I’m afraid that you’ll hurt yourself, I respect you too for that quality.”
The sad smile reappeared on her face. “I didn’t use to be this way. At school, I rarely used to speak to anyone outside my teeny tiny friend circle. I didn’t need to. My father brought me up in an absolutely protected world. It wasn’t until I went to college that I started seeing what was happening on our campuses, and by extension, in our city. Something changed inside me, Pintoo. I started speaking.” She smiled again, less sadly this time. “And I’m telling you my boring life story.”
Pintoo brushed that last statement away. “I bored you a lot more, last evening, with stories from my own childhood.”
“Oh, did you?”
Pintoo smiled shyly. He wasn’t supposed to tell her that.
“I wish I remembered the stories you told me.” She raised the plastic pouch containing her hair beside her face. “Maybe this one will confide those in me later on.”
If Pintoo was a fairer guy, he surely would’ve turned pink by now.
“Thanks for this gift, Pintoo. Wait here, I too have something to give you.” Memsaab limped her way back inside.
Pintoo wondered what she would bring for him. If it was another expensive thing, he would be too embarrassed to accept it. He looked at the two pastries with a spoon that he didn’t dare to touch. Pintoo chugged the glass of water, though. Then, he turned to Tagore again. “Please tell her not to give me a costly gift.”
It took her about five minutes to return this time. “Here.” She extended the same plastic pouch to him with her hair in it. “Not the bloodied one,” she clarified. “That one’s now filled with tales from your childhood, and I’ve kept it for myself.”
“For me, memsaab?” Pintoo couldn’t believe his eyes. Nor his ears. Then, something she had said a little while ago came to his mind. She wanted to shave off all her hair. “Will you not keep your hair, memsaab?”
“Do you mean would I shave it off? Well, how can I, Pintoo? My hair is still me. You’ve convinced me of that.”
Was memsaab making fun of him? She sounded serious, though.
“But you must promise me something,” she went on. “You have to keep telling me stories, every evening when you return home.”
A hot flush ran from Pintoo’s head to toe. He could only manage to nod and barely smile.
She put her hand on his. “Thank you for returning me to myself! Nobody ever gave me that gift. So, as a memento, I give you a small part of that peace. Now, I think I’ll go to sleep.”
Pintoo didn’t know what to say. He took a closer look at the pouch in his hand and noticed there was not one, nor two, but three of her hair in there.
Tears turned his vision hazy.
He’ll give free chai and biscuits to all his customers today. No matter if it empties his pockets. It can never be all empty.
