Rohinton Mistry - Such A Long Journey

For a full hour the selected one toiled over him, rode him mercilessly, till, exhausted and ashamed, she dismounted and excused herself. And he? He lay upon his arrogant back, erect as at the moment of mounting. There was a brief consultation in the manager’s office, and Lokhundi Lund was asked to choose again, compliments of the House.

The second one was younger, and in the firm roundness of her succulent thighs and buttocks she showed promise and the capability of bringing to fruition the sweat and labour of her colleague. She bestrode the customer and galloped for two hours, two hours non-stop, while he lay laughing at her efforts. Two hours, and she collapsed, her frothy juices running copiously down her defeated thighs. What kind of monster was this, the others wondered, what kind of monster who could be ridden endlessly, unyieldingly?

Now it was a question of the House’s reputation. A third woman took over, grim and sinewy as a battle-hardened Rani of Jhansi, saying a quick prayer before she rode into combat. But her wiliest tricks astride that battering ram, that pillar of stone, that annihilator of maidenheads — her wiliest tricks were doomed to failure. And so it went through the night, till all the women in the House impaled themselves to no avail, one by one, upon the indomitable lance. The clock struck four a.m. and the manager began preparing a refund voucher for Lokhundi Lund.

But wait, said the first woman, who had just returned rested and strengthened, having made her invocation to Yellamma, Protector of Prostitutes, Goddess of Lust and Passion. Stand aside, she told her colleagues, casting off her garments. Then she who had first trustingly allowed the monster into her leafy haven, into her sheltered nook, into her friendly pleasure-gap: she once again took the place that was rightfully hers. And who says there is no poetry or justice in brothels? For just as the first cock crowed in the shacks of the destitute, she who had started it, now ended it. Lokhundi Lund shrieked once, then lay moaning, wilted at last.

That day, the House of Cages was closed for rest and recuperation from the havoc wrought within its walls. But its honour was inviolate for it had fulfilled its guarantee, concluded Peerbhoy Paanwalla, handing over the green triangles of paan and collecting his money. The nervous novices knew what they were chewing was not the original palung-tode, but they were not on a record-breaking quest like Lokhundi Lund. Besides, Peerbhoy’s stories worked wonders, the same stories for which Gustad used to bunk school with his classmates and come to gape at the women in the House of Cages.

Gustad’s first memories of this locale were linked to Dr. Paymaster’s dispensary, the periodic visits with his father for inoculations against smallpox, cholera, diphtheria, typhoid and tetanus. His father was especially concerned about the last, since Gustad spent so much time in the furniture workshop playing with Grandpa: one rusty nail, Pappa used to say, could produce that peculiar sardonic grin of lockjaw which would bring grief to the family. To reach the dispensary they had to pass by the brothel, and Gustad was intrigued by the lolling women. Once, he asked Pappa why they were half-dressed. Pappa said that these were not women, they were just men playing a game, like the ones they saw on the streets on Fridays, clapping their hands and dancing and begging. But Gustad knew these were not hijdaas in the House of Cages; he knew Pappa was lying.

Then the current of passing years brought Gustad to teenage shores, where anything was more challenging than being in class. His friends and he would stand outside the girls’ school, watch cricket practise in the maidaan, or go for long aimless walks. Their favourite pastime was to loiter near the House of Cages, listening to Peerbhoy’s tales of the power and glory of palung-tode. One day they decided to join the queue for this concoction. Waiting like students with the jitters before the big examination, their fifteen-year-old heads spinning with unmanageable emotions, they did their best to look poised and experienced. When their turn came, Peerbhoy laughed away their demands, preparing instead a paan which would cleanse their heads of boyish impurities and help them concentrate on their studies.

A long way now from those teenage shores, Gustad had almost forgotten Peerbhoy’s fantastic stories. But it was always a visit to Dr. Paymaster that brought him to the neighbourhood, and, over time, illness and the forbidden pleasures became entwined in his mind. It disgusted the core of Gustad’s being, the stream that led his thoughts from one thing to the other, as he led his sick child by the hand to the dispensary.

The dispensary, of course, was the fourth establishment in the neighbourhood that never altered its function. Barring the brief, impolitic substitution of a new sign for Dr. R.C. Lord’s old board, Dr. Paymaster had resisted all changes. Due to his peculiar location, his patients and their ailments fell into four distinct groups. First were the victims of workshop injuries. Mechanics came to him regularly with severed digits wrapped in newspaper, waiting stoically for treatment as though at the post office to mail a parcel. Radio repairers were carried in when they suffered a severe electrical shock. And periodically, a group of car painters arrived to get their lungs overhauled and cleansed of paint and turpentine.

The tyre retreader was also a regular patient. He had the misfortune of working directly opposite the House of Cages. Gripping a tyre between his knees while the sharp tool in his hands zigzagged the circumference, he sometimes let his eyes stray to the women lounging spread-leggedly across the road; sometimes, he gazed too long, and then the tool slipped.

Dr. Paymaster’s second group of patients were a by-product of the cinema industry. When tickets were in great demand, tempers rose rapidly, and once in a while an irate crowd would beat up an usher or ticket-clerk who was then delivered to the doctor for mending. The occasional scalper, if excessive greed clouded his finely-tuned instincts, also ended up at the dispensary via this route. But usually it was the ticket buyers who came for treatment after long queuing under the hot sun, collapsing from sunstroke and dehydration.

The House of Cages provided the clientele that constituted the third group. The women came for periodic check-ups as required by the municipal licensing authorities, and Dr. Paymaster was never able to get used to them. They came in their business outfits and jested with him: ‘Doctor, need to check if all machinery in good condition,’ or ‘We give you our business, you don’t give us yours,’ which embarrassed him terribly.

The patients Dr. Paymaster looked forward to most were in the fourth group, made up of families like the Nobles. He yearned to cure the childhood illnesses, the middle-class maladies, of which he saw fewer and fewer as the years went by and the neighbourhood changed. Measles, chicken-pox, bronchitis, influenza, pneumonia, gastro-enteritis, dysentery — these were the things he wanted to treat. He wanted to lance boils painlessly for children who ate too many mangoes, and then see their grateful smiles. He wanted to bandage the fingers of little boys who cut them on kite-strings, on razor-sharp maanja stiffened with powdered glass and glue which they employed in kite fights up in the clouds. He longed to comfort youngsters scratched by dogs and terrified by their parents’ tales of fourteen big injections in the stomach, though usually a penicillin shot was enough if the dog was an inoculated household pet.

He knew that the disorders he yearned to treat were there in the city, in vast numbers. Somehow, they just never found their way to the door of his dispensary. When one of them came along, it was like an answer to a physician’s prayer.