‘Dig boy, Dig!’ the old man cried in the cold drizzle of the morning.
Outside the tarpaulin shack, a lean, dark skinned boy, in a shabby black raincoat, and a broken bottle in his hand, heaved away on a patch of soft mud.
He was digging a grave for the old man.
The old man feared… he feared, if he were to die without a grave, he would be taken by the corporation men and sold to the hospital that was nearby, “for dissection.” And the thought chilled his bones; he felt the wet, frosty surface of the dissection table numbing his spine, and that made him yell, ‘How long you going to take, damnyou?’
The boy wiped his forehead, breathlessly, ‘A little longer.’
The old man gestured cynically, rolling on the burlap sack that covered the ground under the shack, his bones creaking. He was all wan and wrinkled up, and by now quite delirious. There was no doubt in his mind, or the boy’s, that he was going to die; but they wondered when…
A pale dog – skinny, with large, outward ribs, loitered nearby, and from time to time shook itself, showering the shack and making the old man grumble.
When he was done grumbling, he coughed, and the coughs were deep and full and long, until he drew another breath and urged the boy. ‘Dig, dig!’ The boy dug fiercely, heating up inside his coat, despite the slow, cool drops. The dog made restless circles about him; and a black pit deepened at his feet.
Yet, it all quietened an hour later; no sound in the yard, save for the gentle tap of drops on the tarpaulin. The old man was asleep. The dog strayed somewhere in the heaps, and the boy sat loose and mellow beside the pit, his raincoat dripping.
In his hand he carried a cigarette lighter, a precious, red, imported item, with a silver cap and gilded edges. He held it to his face and lit it periodically; the flame stood up, sat down and stood up… and he was so absorbed in the simple game that he didn’t even notice the old man, rising behind him.
‘Do I know you, boy?’ he heard the call. ‘Do I know you, or what?
The boy turned and paused, and when he spoke, his voice came out low, thin, but quite certain; as though, he’d measured his words.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said.
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PART I:
EARLIER
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The wasteyard received all the litter and refuse from the rooms and wards of the hospital, and the adjoining bazaar and residential areas. Here it all sprawled, in big, sloping heaps, in all directions.
The old man, the boy and the dog were the sole residents of this great sea of garbage. The dog was stray, like the old man, and the boy, who was ten or so, had followed it to this place from the old bridge over Ravi, all the way, running, with the skirt of his coat flying backward. The dog could really run, and it had run ahead of him, and the way it had skipped between the gullies, shot in straight arrows in the bazaars and jostled in the crowds… clearly, it had known where it was headed: and this was its second home.
When the yard opened, and a shadow lengthened on a littery slope and neared the boy, his heart danced, and like so many times before, he wondered, Will he remember me? though he knew the answer. Not once in five months, three weeks and four days, since the first time he had followed the dog to this place, had the old man been able to remember who he was. Though, he had remembered his dog, his own sickness, and most of all, the dissection table; but never the boy.
And yet, the boy was always wary and ready to bolt in case the old man called back … a part of the story; such as, how the boy had been feeding off him – and then, what might he do? he thought. Something in those rough coughs, and long laughters made his little heart nervous, but somehow his brave feet stayed their ground. Perhaps, it was his great appetite that bored them there.
Then, as he always did, the old man came around the tall heap with his long, gaunt face, wrinkled up and soiled, and the scant grey on his head knotted up in dirt. He had on a filthy sweater above a tattered dhoti, a pair of plastic slippers on his feet, with holes on the insteps. His mouth was wide agape and toothless. And clearly, he remembered nothing.
He stared and stared into the boy’s face, mumbling something and frowning. He looked quite terrible, and really, had it been some other boy he would’ve run off then, but not this one. He knew. And he stuck around. And later, when the old codger sat him down by his shack, and told him very proudly how loaded he was with green notes, and laughed so madly and for so long, and slapped his swollen sweater pockets so hard that it made him cough, the boy was much more relaxed and even hungrier.
And once the laugh storm was over, as the boy had expected, the crazy fellow had begun to examine him from head to toe.
‘A little urchin you are, no doubt,’ he remarked. ‘See, what ugly little sticks you got for legs, oho, and where did you find this lousy coat? I not seen no boy wearing that kind of thing around here. Did you find it in the garbage?’ The boy nodded.
‘Hmm,’ said the old man, as his searching gaze lingered on the raincoat, then on those thin, bare legs, jutting out of it, and then, on the little mouth.
‘You look hungry to me…oh, yes, so hungry,’ he said, grimacing. And to be sure, hunger dripped from the boy’s face like dew off a shriveled autumn leaf.
‘Where’s your home?’ he asked. The boy told him, beyond the bridge.
‘What you doing out here then, so late?’ The boy shrugged, but his eyes were wild and rapt and fixed on the old man.
‘Do I know you boy?’ he asked, scratching his rough, sunken cheek, and frowning with suspicion. Then he took out a cigarette from under his sack and puffed. A pale shadow passed over the boy’s face, an urge to bolt.
The old man coughed and spat out dark phlegm, then said resignedly. ‘Maybe my dog knows you.’ Suddenly, he was no longer suspicious but rather concerned for the little weakling. ‘Is there someone to take care of you? To feed you, is there?’
The boy shook his head.
Outside the shack, the dog was going in circles, snouting the ground. The old man reached out and felt the boy’s arms in his long, craggy fingers. ‘No… You won’t be spending the night out here,’ he decided. ‘It’s too damn cold, for a mouse like you. Now. What should we do about your hunger? Looks like you can use a hot meal.’
So it happened. Like it always happened. The old man hauled his wobbly self up an beckoned to the boy to follow. And the boy sprang up and obeyed.
They exited the yard and headed for the bazaar, with the dog leading the way. Already the boy’s mouth watered from the thought of meat, and it was so, so hard to hold himself back, behind the old man – who trundled like a broken bulldozer – and not run straight ahead to that kabab shop on the big pavement, where they always went. In time, though. Once there, he let himself loose. Like an animal he ravened the soft succulent meat of the hot kababs. The dog feasted on a heap of bones lying under the mouth of a sewer pipe, and the old man smoked, watched and smiled.
‘Now you may be wondering,’ he said loftily, halfway through the meal, ‘why a dirty old man like me feeding you these tasty-tasty kababs. So let me tell you, boy, I may be dirty, but I got money.’ He tapped his sweater pocket. ‘And I going to feed you good-good things, you hear? All the time.’ He paused, crouched over the pavement closer to the boy, and said huskily, ‘We got to get your arms strong, you hear? When the time comes you got to do something for me, listening me?’
When the boy had finished, they returned to the yard. In the night the heaps gave the impression of mountains, vast, dark, and mysterious. The dog dashed off, to sport in their depths. The old man laid the boy a bed of burlap and nylon with a pillow of polythene; the shack was saggy on top of a huddle of bamboo sticks, and a small lantern filled up the inside with wan yellow light. The old man recovered from a bout of cough, then told the boy, ‘Tomorrow, I will teach you work.’
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‘We pick syringes, and we pick shoppers,’ said the old man. ‘Shoppers only white, and syringes those that have needles too, listening me? We take them to the factory, and we get money, you hear?’ The boy had heard it all, a thousand times before; yet he nodded, as though, this was the first time. When he got down to work, however, he did it even better than the old man. He and the dog flew up and down the heaps like phantoms, picking and sacking.
‘It seems your nature,’ said the old man, as he lazed in his burlap bed, watching the two of them go. ‘Like, you born to do it.’
To be sure, they whirled and sped like the wind itself. And now that the old man was comfortable he began saying these wise things. His wisdoms: another thing that he never forgot. ‘When you own it, you own it good,’ he said. ‘You find something in the garbage, it’s yours. Nobody going to come asking you, what you found boy, what you found? Oh, no, no. Damn it, if they wanted those things why’d they throw them out?. What you find in the garbage is a … gift for you, boy…gift. Want it or not, is a motherfucking gift.’
Suddenly then, he grew more thoughtful. ‘But mind you, mind you… you never know what you gonna find in the garbage. Oh, and you can’t unfind it. No, no. It’s going to be yours truly…truly boy… and forever. Nobody gonna come and say, here boy, give it to me… damn, if they wanted it why’d they throw it out? And you can’t get rid of it, either, is what I’m saying. I’m telling you this, you hear, there’s no garbage for the garbage. Once you picked it up you can’t toss it out. There’s no “out” for you. Damn, you are the out. So it’s going to stick, boy. You throw it, if you wish, but it’s gonna come back … you hear? Or you gonna come back to it.’
So the old codger prattled away his wisdoms, and the boy heard and unheard them. Mostly, though, the “work” engrossed him.
In the morning, when the corporation trucks unloaded in the yard, he and the dog stormed the fresh, sliding garbage for syringes and shoppers, but other things too. Indeed. The boy always looked for something worthy in that mix of bazaar and hospital waste. And when he found something, he took a pause, held it close and flipped it end over end. The most ordinary things looked special in his little, stained fingers.
That was a talent he had. He found things, and they changed. In the months that he had been visiting the old man he had found a lot of things. For instance, from the bazaar waste alone, he’d found a wallet, a broken watch, an earpiece of a headphone with the magnet, a women’s ladybug-like hair clip, a rainbow-like slinky twisted out of shape, a P‑cap, just a little unstitched… a black raincoat, torn and hoodless but round at the knees like a frock… a burnt lamp, a picture frame, a cellphone case, a pair of long boots, – crown caps, colored flacons, a gilded cigarette lighter, and such things – and what an appetite he had for such property! It was, as though, he was hungry for “found things”, the way was hungry for the kababs.
The kababs… and the old man himself, for he too was a found thing, to be absorbed with the same kind of eager impatience as the other worthy treasures.
Matter of fact, the manner in which he took in every small detail of his appearance suggested that, he reckoned the old man his most precious find.
He contemplated the twisted caverns of his ears; analyzed the engorged veins of his neck, and for minutes at end, probed his hands – his hands especially, because they were swarmed with little black and brown dots… all over the palms and fingers. At places, these dots expanded in small circles inside big circles, as though they were eyes, staring back.
The boy played that staring game with the old man’s hands, all the time. And once, when the old man caught him in the act, he grunted, then strained his face, and explained, ‘Is the first one, I got here.’ He pointed to a fetid brown boil perching between his thumb and index finger. ‘When I was young, I got a big needle go right through here. Oh, so damn hurting. It only hurt me then, but now is killing me.’
‘Is killing you?’ the boy said, with wide, startled eyes.
‘It is!’ the old man said proudly, puffing, then added pensively, ‘Not for a long time you got me, boy.’
When he took him to some pavement shop, to feed him meat, he reminded him, ‘I’m feeding you good so you’ll get some arms. Coz someday, you got to do something for me, you hear?’ The boy heard a bell, every time that husky voice spoke to him in that earnest manner; a deep vibration with the power to pulverize; an urge to bolt! But he stayed. And then, incidentally, one of those nights of sumptuous meals, the dog made a strange discovery.
As it was loitering in the heaps in the darkness it came upon a human foot, and this prize, it obediently brought back to the shack.
Since the boy was asleep it took it to the old man, who was awake but in a torpor. It was late in the night. The dog stole up to his burlap bed and, very dutifully, put the foot on the side of his pillow, so that when he turned, the toes were right under his nose, and the whole thing aslant, before his large, horrified eyes.
The way the old man saw it: it was big, moldy and tumesced. He couldn’t at first believe that it was there. He thought it was a vision, like those he’d been having in the last many days, now come to haunt him while he was awake. But the fiendish vision was too palpable. Very warily he touched it. It was cold, and spongy.
He sat up. Lifted the damned thing up before his sick face, with rolling eyes, examined it closely. Then he flinched, and it fell. He moved reflexively. Mustered up some courage and grabbed the damned thing once again, then pushed aside the tarpaulin, and tossed it out, over the heaps and into the darkness.
‘Butchers! Damn butchers!’ he exclaimed, jolting the boy out of his sleep.
His fever went rocketing up that night. The gruesome yellowness of the sores on his hands spidered out and webbed the rest of his skin in the same color.
The encounter with the foot knocked him out, mentally. He lay in the shack all the time, twisting and moaning. And in his visions, knife happy sawbones huddled up around a gurney, leering in their masks, clanking their knives in glee, and drooling him wet.
He rose from such visions all kinked up into himself; with hands dry and hard as sandpaper, and limbs hollow as straws, heavy as logs.
‘I no longer fit,’ he said with an air of doom. The fear of collapsing on the road alone led him to ask the boy to accompany him to the factory.
The factory was nothing like the smelters that the boy had seen over by the bridge, with their tall black stacks issuing gray plumes on the blue sky. It was rather a small cellar, at the corner of a dim gully, with splintered wood windows, rusted iron rods gnarling in them, and shattered ventilators issuing steam out into the gully.
They went down a narrow stairs, deeper and deeper into the smell of burning plastic. Down there, metal drums with boiling water sat atop brick-stoves along three of the four walls. Syringes were being extracted from the sacks, filtered, and thrown into the drums.
Some of the steam deposited on the ceiling and came down in cool drops. Along the fourth wall a row of old men squatted, each in a torn sweater, a frayed dhoti; and dirty, talon like feet, jutting out from it.
The old man, all hazed up from the smell and smoke, saw only the feet, all of them molded and tumesced. Then he heard, ‘Put these in the sack and these in the drum!’
The boy sieved the good syringes from the bad ones, following the orders of the portly man who called himself the boss.
‘Those ones there!’ the boss commanded. The old man saw how all the feet staggered together and quivered, ‘cast them out. And these: chop, chop, chop!’
‘Chop, chop, chop?’ the old man mumbled with a big swallow. Then he scrunched up his eyes and looked closely at his own hands. The circles had widened. Meanwhile, all those feet had paired up and grown eyes of their own. Then little mouths opened on the toes, and sang in chorus, ‘Chop, chop, chop! Chop, chop, chop!’
The old man sprang up and ran to the stairs, and clambered up. But out in the gully he spun, like a dying top. And fell.
When he woke up he remembered nothing. He was in the shack. A boy sat outside in the rain, in a strange sort of coat. Something in his hand – what was it? – made clicking sounds; lighting up his lean, brown face, then darkening it.
He lifted himself up, swaying from weakness.
‘Do I know you boy?’ he asked. ‘Do I know you, or what?’
The boy turned and looked in great relief. He knew now the old man was going to live, some more, may be, a lot more.
Suddenly, he felt very hungry. And hunger excited him. He felt the urge… not to bolt… but to tell him who he really was, and the whole story. But then, he thought, what is the point of saying, ‘I’m your son, Abba!’ if he’s not going to remember?
So he said simply, ‘I don’t think so.’
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PART II:
LATER
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When the rain stopped, he left. Blue sack on his shoulder, dog in the lead. They crossed the city, walking and skipping and speeding all the way to the shrine of Saint Ganj Baksh. They made stops at every big heap that came along the way. And if he found something nice, he sacked it.
There was so much litter in the city; outside the shops and houses, at the corners of the gullies, on the sides of the roads, around the gutters and overflowing from the dumpsters, scattered, flying over the pavements.
He crossed the bridge and arrived at a great landfill, they called the Garbage Ground, where garbage was brought from all over the city. It was like a mountain range; massifs big and small, round and flat, widening and tapering, shifting shapes in the wind that blew over from the river. And at one point not too far, on one of the slopes of the landfill, stood a small room made of bare bricks, which they entered.
‘He’s come, he’s come!’ a little girl shouted from inside.
She sat on a tall dining chair with a threadbare seat; one of a set, maybe. She had polio in the legs, and they dangled freely on the sides of the chair.
Another, smaller girl, who sat on the ground beside her, also had polio in the legs. She clapped at the new entrants.
There were three other children sitting in a line on a cement platform, and two elder girls, who may be eighteen or over, on the straw-mat below.
An older woman lay on a wooden board, adjacent to a window, opening on the landfill. One of the older girls was tall and very dark, with oiled hair she was combing down. The other was picking stones from a tray of rice. She was fat and round.
‘Here you are great sir,’ the tall girl said. ‘Nawab of some place, aren’t we?’
The fat one snorted. ‘What’s that you wearing? What’s that funny black thing?’
The boy didn’t answer.
‘Some great coat it look like,’ the tall one taunted. ‘Some big lord’s coat, is it?’
The old woman gazed him from under her arm, she’d put on her head. ‘Where have you been little one?’ She sounded very weak.
‘Here, all the time,’ the boy said carelessly.
‘He’s been following the damned dog,’ said the fat girl. ‘He always does that. Two days, five days, ten days… no sign of him – no care for his mother, or poor sisters.’
‘Like his father,’ said the older woman, a quavering voice. ‘He’d do that too. He’d go. He’d not tell me. You were too little then, little one. Oh, what won’t I give for a sight of him… just once before I die.’ She broke out sobbing. She was dying. The doctors had said her belly was going to grow bigger than it was already; no use doing anything now, except to keep leaking it. It was full of water, and all that mass hung from it. So many of them were sick. People in the garbage were always sick.
The boy went to a corner and opened a cupboard.
It was empty.
‘Where’s all the stuff?’ he cried.
‘Where you think this coming from?’ the fat girl said, lifting up the tray.
‘Look now, how he talks!’ the tall girl scoffed.
‘That dog…! Can’t you keep it out?’ the fat one grimaced, the dog grumbled back.
‘This food only coming from trash money, boy, not growing on the trees,’ the tall one said matter of factly.
But the boy wasn’t fooled by their foxy talks. He knew the tall one had a junky husband who threatened to hang everybody, if she won’t provide him his powder. The other had to make deposits at the police station where the man she loved was locked up, for thieving. To be sure, the boy knew those fellows well. Sometimes they took him to the Garbage Ground, to some remote corner where no one could see them, and thrashed him to their hearts fill, and took all his money too.
Even the barking of the dog did not stop them.
‘His father was the same, same,’ said the mother, in her own vein. ‘That dog knew him. Oh yes, I tell you it knows… It’s known from the time we picked it up from that heap out there. It was just a pup then. It looked us with those full black eyes and kicked … and it always did run after him, it loved him… wherever he went, it went … you were too little then, little one, but it knows, that dog knows …’
The dog barked, twice.
‘Ama, he’s not coming back, when you going to know that?!’ the tall girl chided.
‘I think he’s dead,’ said the fat girl, with an air of finality.
The boy gazed her way. Then, his mother. He imagined opening his heart to her. He thought, I have to tell her all I know. I have to take her along to the yard.
But then, as always, he thought of the old man’s money, the thief will take it, he has a big hand, he whips it hard, his fists are so strong, they jolt me from the collar… then the world spins, the dog cries… but what can it do? No, I won’t say a word. I’d keep him for myself.
‘You don’t think so, mister?’ said the tall girl, in a prying, strident voice. ‘Where you lost? What you thinking?’
‘There something you want to say?’ the fat one said suddenly, as if she could see through him.
‘One sight of him…’ the mother went on.
‘He’s always doing that,’ the fat girl said, twisting her mouth. ‘Cooking something in that head of his … like he’s hiding something. Are you hiding something?’
The tall one stopped combing, thrust her head forward, and demanded in quick, stabbing syllables. ‘What is it you’re hiding?’
The boy, alarmed, took a step back towards the door.
‘Going to get all that cooking-shooking out of his little head now,’ the tall girl said. ‘Going to tell my man to set him right, just you watch. We’ll see what he’s hiding then.’ The boy gasped. No, not your man. Not him. He stole a few more steps towards the door.
‘And where you think you’re going?’ the fat girl put down the tray and rolled up her sleeves.
‘Stop!’ cried the tall one.
The boy picked up his sack, turned, and dashed out – the dog was much ahead.
‘Grab him!’ the tall one yelled. ‘Squash him!’
The boy sped as fast he could but it wasn’t quite enough. The fat girl had much power and muscle. She was on top of him in no time. He felt his coat yanked back.
The boy heard a clatter of chairs, a thump into the cupboard, a big thud, as though, the whole world behind him was collapsing. Was the ominous weight above him, or had the ground yawned beneath them?
He scrambled… was he down… or was he free? He could still see the dog, and yes, he was nearing it. With all the power he was chasing the dog. In fact, he was flying. It was the dog now that led him, to somewhere very far away …
A long run lay ahead; across the slopes of the Garbage Ground … beyond the last heaps near the sun, with coruscating tops – where none of them could find him; where there was a thicket by the bank of the river. The dog knew.
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It was evening. It was quiet. It had all come and gone. This was another world. A red-brown blanket lay upon the Garbage Ground, a breeze came rustling from the river, the flowing filth sang a song, and they were beyond it all.
They were inside a small, wooden hutch, that the boy had made for himself.
It had shelves on all four sides, inside: like a large cupboard.
He turned to the top shelf on the left, that was not yet full, and it alone exhibited a sea of marvels. And in the small, empty slot at the end, he put the golden lighter.
Lustrous, even in the shade of the hutch; it made company of a black, trunk-less elephant, with little mirrors on it; a cracked vase with blue vines and white glaze to its side – a radio, with half an antenna, a framed picture of Mount Everest, matchboxes with guns on them – and as you moved further on, to the left: Mickey mouse and Pink panther on key chains… a cigarette case with a mirror; a wallet with a button, and a fake American-express; a time-piece stuck at eleven-forty-one, a hard disk, a golden haired doll, a miniature charpoy bed, dinky cars, little wooden pots, crippled terracotta animals, and a pencil holder with empty refills of expensive pens – a stapler, two-thirds of a paperweight with purple bubbles inside it; a battered world of Lego; armless workmen mending a railtrack, the neck of a crane overhanging a portion of a flyover; a blonde lady with red lips, and one eye, crossing the road with a leash in her hand, with no dog on it… and then, a bell of green grapes; an glass ashtray shaped like an apple, and colorful paper lei, shaking in the air coming in through the chinks in the wooden walls…and now, one final item from the sack. A human foot, soft rubber smudged with dirt and ink – that might’ve once belonged to a rubber body hanging in some study room at the hospital.
Everything in the hutch belonged to him.
Even though, the old man had warned him that garbage could not be rid of, he hadn’t cared. He wasn’t afraid of what he might find in those heaps – and in fact, he looked to find. It pulled him…
It pulled him, for like an excavator of buried worlds, a picker too may come upon some grand object that he could claim his own… and his alone, and he might make it a true possession. The boy collected true possessions, and raised a true world off them and, … lorded over it.
As the dog lay down on its belly, he sat down on the floor and wrapped his arms around his legs; then he put his head on the smooth cloth of the raincoat over his knees, and closed his eyes.
And everything in the hutch came to life.
