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| Chaos by David Boyle |
In an average family of not-so-perfect people lived a below average imperfect man.
Nothing appeared to be right about him.
That is particularly intriguing because nothing was specifically wrong with him either.
You could bet that such an ‘extra’ unnecessary member existed in many middle-class Bengali households.
He was of medium build, medium height, somewhat peculiar looking, inadequately educated, and unemployed. No one could now specify what his exact age was. To the elders at home and among relatives, he was perpetually young enough to be monitored and chided. To the younger generations, he was old enough to be ancient and hence completely unfit for the present times. No one bothered to state correctly when exactly his formal education had stopped; what mattered most were the facts that he was regarded by everyone, young and old, as in need of being ‘educated’ about everything, always, and through a process of constant ridiculing and deliberate inaccuracy, it came to be accepted that he stopped going to college in his second year, or maybe hadn’t passed his school final examinations; or perhaps had been a Class VIII drop-out; or as his elder brother would often say, unable to develop toilet training, he came to be rusticated in Class I itself.
As it so often happens, repeated over a period of time, wilfully distorted and fabricated by multiple ‘powerful’ people at home, such semi-truths and untruths became ‘true’.
Khokon, who incidentally must have had a school name, a formal name given to him but which came to be erased from everyone’s mind as time passed, was therefore a man of no importance. No one took him seriously. In all probability, he did not take himself seriously either.
In that average family of not-so-perfect people living in a traditional spacious ancestral house at Baidyabati, some kilometres away from Calcutta, were Khokon’s elder brother, the brother’s wife and two children, Khokon’s younger brother and his wife, their daughter, Khokon’s younger sister Hiya, an aged infirm semi-blind widowed aunt, Khokon’s mother, and a distant cousin of his late father and his unmarried middle-aged daughter.
That made it twelve of them all together.
And well, Khokon too, the thirteenth one, as the headcount frequently used to be at home, stopping at twelve and then adding an ‘extra’ after a brief consideration. Every time, for everything. Plates of food, movie tickets, Municipality enquiries, train berths, the census data collection. For everything. Them, and then Khokon.
Khokon’s inability to find an employment was of course a major sore point at home.
“You could at least do some private tuitions. That’s what all my friends who fail in examinations do,” Hiya, his younger sister, a school topper and a much-hyped ‘scholar’ in the neighbourhood, would regularly say.
“Or maybe start a small business…” One of his sisters-in-law suggested often.
“Please! Please! Don’t put such dreams into his mind. He will come begging for money and then who will have to pay him, huh? Not you, right?” Her enraged husband muttered some abuses under his breath.
“What are you doing! Buchi can hear you. How many times have I told you not to utter such words in the presence of our daughter!” The wife pleaded.
The daughter, Buchi, may have by that age learnt enough of the forbidden words, for she did not seem too interested to hear her father.
Crying out in an unsteady voice, she said, “Then Khokon uncle will incur a mammoth loss in just a month! I shall tell all my friends to purchase things from his shop and force him to sell at a low price! How nice!” She clapped her tiny hands. The cheap silvery bangles on her wrists collided in mean joy.
Khokon would be in the vicinity most of the times when such discussions took place. He would never speak, at least never speak loudly or on his own, and would answer only when asked direct questions. Almost always, his eyes would be lowered and he would look guilty.
On another day his younger brother suddenly exclaimed. “Look at what he has done!”
Everyone stopped what they were doing and ran to the spot where he stood. In front of him was a basket full of pale crushed flowers.
“Khokon! Khokon! There! Come fast! Can’t you walk fast? I am calling you! What are these?”
“Flowers. You told me to get some from the florist.”
“Exactly! I told you to get some from the florist. Not from the dustbins. These are flowers! You call them flowers!” He kicked the basket. Some of the petals fell outside.
Khokon stood in silence, looking like a criminal. His face had crumpled lines of guilt on it, as always. His eyes looked like sunken pits of deep and dark bore wells.
“Why did you get these? These are flowers which people have thrown away. Couldn’t you get fresh ones?” The younger brother’s wife tried to make him understand.
“The shopkeeper said that these are fresh enough. It’s summer now. Can’t have better ones.” Khokon murmured.
“Great! Excellent! Five hundred rupees go down the drain! This is why…Anyway, it’s my mistake. I shouldn’t have given you the responsibility.” Turning towards his wife, he said, “There! Don’t whine. I shall get you the necklace that you were showing me that day. It’ll be a better anniversary gift.”
“See! How you spoiled their anniversary! Disgusting!” Hiya looked very cross.
One day, suddenly Khokon showed up at the entrance with a covered cage in hand.
“What is that! What will you do with a cage?” Everyone asked, almost in one voice.
“Will you start staying inside? That’s good. That will solve many of our problems!” Hiya was always the most pointed.
“What happened? Why don’t you answer? Why is it covered?”
Shanta, one of the children, ran up and pulled down the cloth cover. Inside was an otter.
Leaping up at its sight, she shrieked, “Ugh!”
“What!” Several voices together roared.
“What is that?”
“It’s a monkey!”
“No, no! It’s a…What is it called!” Someone scratched his head.
“It’s an otter.” Khokon was hardly audible.
“A what!”
One of the little ones started crying and hid her face behind someone’s legs, wriggling to stay away from the strange looking animal.
“Oh! Stop it! It’s just an animal. Your Khokon uncle is trying to get a job in a zoo. Get ready for your bath. Here, come here now.”
“Why are you so late? It takes you an hour to get a kilo of potatoes?” Khokon’s elder sister-in-law rebuked him one day while arranging the vegetables in separate packets.
He did not reply.
“What happened? Why are you so late?” She looked up.
“I…”
“Please for heaven’s sake, speak fast. I have got work. If you have something to say, speak fast. Give me the potatoes first.”
“I…I got…I have a new pet…I got a rhino…”
A few moments of silence passed.
Then came a piercing scream from the woman. It hit against the ceiling of the kitchen and splintered out from the kitchen door to the entire house.
“Are you insane!” Nearly twelve voices shouted at him within a minute.
The kitchen in fact looked quite crowded now as everyone gathered there to take part in the new drama. Neither the site nor the sight was entirely new; as a matter of fact, no corner of the impressively big house had not witnessed Khokon being rebuked over something at some time or the other. This time there was a new actor though. A pet rhino. His pet rhino. More surprisingly, at the moment, it was an invisible one. The family looked with apprehension out of the door, dreading the sight of an ugly dangerous rhino making its way in and trampling over everything in the process.
“Have you left it in the courtyard below?” Hiya asked, sounding very scared. “What will happen to us? What will my friends say? How can we live in a zoo? Dada,” she looked at her eldest brother. “This can’t happen. Please do something.”
“Are you out of your mind? We have children at home.” One of the wives said, looking very alarmed.
“Oh god! My laptop! It’s on the desk. The rhino will break it!” Hiya dashed out of the kitchen door.
Hiya’s eldest brother had gathered himself by then. He felt himself to be in a position of authority, and authority, he knew, must be demonstrated from time to time, otherwise it becomes dysfunctional. Wives, children, subordinates in office, as well as ‘extra’ people at home were ideal audiences for an appropriate show of authority. He began in a commanding voice.
“Listen, let me tell you something straight. I feed you, I feed your otter, but I can’t feed your rhinoceros. I am telling you in a decent way. Please get lost along with your rhino.” For the de facto head of the family, this was a must-win situation. If he could not get this achieved, who knows, others too might just start violating his instructions. So he was very firm indeed.
“I also do. I feed him too.” Said the younger brother, feeling slighted.
“Whatever. That’s not the point.” He made a sound of irritation at his younger brother saying something that was not helpful in addressing the rhino-crisis at all. Moving towards Khokon he said, “Your rhino has to go.” He was gradually losing his cool.
“Rhino! That’s as big as an elephant. Where will it stay? In the courtyard below? Has it entered?” In a feeble voice their semi-blind aged aunt enquired and attempted to get up, possibly to see the rhino.
“Just stop it, aunt. Stop it. A house full of insane, blind, lame people! Kindly get the rhino out. Is that clear?”
Khokon did not speak.
“Is it clear?” His elder brother could have slapped him.
“It’s in my pocket.”
“What rubbish! He has gone fully insane! Listen…!” A multitude of voices tumbled out.
“No…I mean, it is a rhino, yes, but it’s not like a proper rhino…”
Amidst confused expressions from everyone, the younger brother said, “Proper or improper, we don’t want to know. It must go.”
“It’s made of plastic. It’s a plaything. Here.” Khokon blurted out and put his hand inside his pocket and drew out an approximately ten-inch long rhinoceros. Brown in colour and definitely nowhere near a baby elephant even.
“It’s a baby one? That’s why it’s in your pocket?” The weak-sighted aunt was happy with her own reasoning.
Everyone stood in disgusted silence for a while looking alternately very angry and very relieved and then turned away to do whatever they had been doing before the ‘pet’ arrived.
Height of peculiarity…Insane…Useless…What a waste of time…Good for nothing, playing a prank on us…A plastic pet…Nonsense…Crossing all limits…
Those were the last few things they said as they went away.
**
“It’s five of them. Just my immediate colleagues. No need to expand the list. Let them be the only ones I invite.” The elder brother was engaged in planning with his wife an evening of gaiety.
“It’s coming to…how much…sweets, cold drinks…” The wife was jotting things down on a piece of paper. “Are you sure you want to leave out Mr Jaiswal?” She looked at her husband tentatively.
“Yes, I am very sure. He didn’t want my promotion to happen. He tried to derail things. A…”
“Again! Our daughter can hear you.”
“Arre, listen carefully to this. Ask Khokon to get the food and the cold drinks in by five. And tell him to be around to clean up and give the guests whatever they need. My stature has risen quite a bit with this promotion. The arrangement must be appropriate.” The elder brother’s smugness was evident. He relaxed on the sofa and stretched his legs in front and yawned loudly.
Five colleagues, a pleasant looking household, an all-too-satisfied just-promoted elder brother, attentive Hiya, a busy sister-in-law, and an alert Khokon waiting at the corner, ready to serve.
One of the guests was curious after a while.
“He is your…?” His incomplete but evident question was directed at Hiya.
Hiya poured some water in each of the glasses, asked one of the guests if he was comfortable, kept the jug back in place, and then said, “Who? He? He is my brother.” Her lips twitched a bit at the sides.
Her tone was unmistakable. It took the guests only a few seconds to comprehend the uselessness of Khokon. By the norms of social interaction, disrespect, much like respect and reverence, does not take long to be communicated. A glance, a movement of hands, the sheer pattern of body language says it all. Here also the same happened.
“What does he do?” A woman in yellow saree asked with a disinterested look.
“Nothing! He does nothing. No, I shouldn’t be saying that. He trains otters, kingfishers, squirrels. He has got a plastic pet, a rhino. Yes, you heard me right. A plastic rhino. He refers to it as his pet.” Hiya didn’t take too long to expose the disgrace of the family.
The guests started sipping in the sarcasm of the moment.
“Is he normal?” Someone asked.
Hiya shrugged. Then in a low voice she said, “Just ask him about his pet. He has been saying his pets teach him virtues. He actually said that one day! Ask him, go on!”
She sat back, getting ready to enjoy the fun.
“Here! You! Yes, yes, you! You have a pet, a pet rhino?”
“What made you choose a rhino! Because it looks like you?” Everyone chuckled. The elder brother had come in from the other room by then. He too joined in the rude fun.
“So! What has it taught you? To eat grass!” Roars of laughter banged across the walls of the room.
“It has not just taught me things. It has lent me something too.” Khokon’s voice was subdued.
“Lent you!? What? Its grey matter? It must be more than yours! It should have actually donated! How on earth will you repay!” The elder brother, just entitled to a salary hike, was on a new high.
Thunders of laughter hit across the furniture in the room. Someone got partially choked under the impact of his uncontrolled rude laughter. Someone else, eyes shut, held the sides of his waist in pain, unable to stop himself. Another person’s brash excitement caused him to put down his glass so loudly that it made a sharp noise on the glass of the centre table. The woman in a yellow saree suddenly shut her mouth and with a concerned look bent forward to check if the glass on the table had cracked. She in fact checked more than once, the second time she drew her index finger across the spot on the glass-top.
When the guests seemed to have gone out of breath, or perhaps were just about to find a better and cheaper source of entertainment, Hiya brought back the focus to Khokon and his much-discussed pet.
“You didn’t tell us. What has it lent you?” Her voice was shrill and sardonic.
“Its skin.” Khokon spoke clearly and distinctly. Looking straight at the guests in their eyes, he added, “It has told me a secret. It has told me how we must develop one like his, thick, numb, de-sensitised, if we have to survive this world and its ways. Only then can we hope to have the insults hurled at us rebounding back to the source of oppression and humiliation. Simple!” He made a whoosh sound with his mouth, indicating at the same time with his fingers how what is hurled at him goes back to its point of origin.
As the guests concentrated in silence on the food before them, their faces red and violet, Khokon called out Hiya to pour some water for two of them, and exhorted a diabetic one to take one more sweet.
“Mr Barman, do take another one. Its taste far outweighs its sugar content. Just like my pet’s skin. Far more useful than ugly. We all need it at some point of time in life. No matter how powerful we are, there is always someone with more power and control, isn’t it?” His implicit reference to Mr Barman’s relatively high designation in the office hierarchy was unmistakable.
Dinner was a quiet and quick affair.
Khokon’s slow and sizzling laughter, with his pet sitting pretty on the palm of his right hand, ugly, repulsive, indifferent to insensitivities, bounced down the stairs of the house well after the guests had left that night.
At bedtime, he turned to look at his pet.
For the first time perhaps, the much-maligned pet too had a toothy smile on its ugly, good-for-nothing plastic face, its sleepy but redeemed eyes shining just a tiny bit.
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