Stephen Kelman - Man on Fire

‘Luck,’ I said.

She pressed her first key down with the little finger of her left hand. It made a sound that could easily become music. She pressed the next finger down. My heart was beating so fast I thought I might be dying of hope. One by one she pressed the keys down. The sounds they made individually rang true. She picked up her hands and moved them to a new configuration and with a final surge of fierce belief she brought them down.

‘I don’t know what I was thinking,’ Ellen said, her voice gaunt in the darkness. ‘I must have looked like a right idiot. You must have thought I’d lost it.’

‘You were beautiful. You believed in something magical. Even if it was just for an hour out of the day, you believed it and so did I. It broke my heart when—’

‘Don’t. I don’t want to think about it.’

It wasn’t the music her dream had promised. It was just noise. She’d kept going, looking for the sweet spot, waiting for the moment when everything would click into place, but it didn’t come.

It was just a dream like any other dream. It meant nothing.

I told her to keep trying, it might still happen, maybe there was just a delay in the signal between the heart and the hands, but it started to feel like a cruelty and I had to reach down and peel her fingers from the keys, as gently as I could.

‘Fuck it,’ she said.

‘I know,’ I said.

‘It felt so real.’

‘Dreams are funny. It’s not your fault.’

She slowly closed the lid on the tactless keys, got up and walked out the door. She didn’t cry, not on the way to the car when my arm around her was supposed to be a sandbag against her sadness. Not when we got home to a silent house. I filled the kettle with hard water and when I kissed her I could only feel what wasn’t there. I had no means of making up for it so I lurched for levity with a clumsy joke.

‘There’s always the tambourine,’ I said, and she laughed in spite of me. It was a Saturday and she went back to bed as if she had the flu. I wandered round the house like a stranger, opening cupboards to see what was inside and planning the best place to put a rocking horse. I heard her crying softly in the night and then it was done. We never talked about it again.

‘What made you think of that?’ Ellen asked.

I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t say it was a parting gift, so when I left she’d know at least that she’d been understood. I couldn’t say it was a breadcrumb she could follow, something that would lead directly to a comforting reminder of our common weakness for dreaming.

I said nothing, slid out of bed and went to make a cup of tea. Her aborted music followed me downstairs and Bibhuti danced behind my eyes. I saw him shining faultless and uninhibited on the TV screen, gliding through the pain barrier like a perfect arrow. I knew there was a message in him from a place beyond the idea of God, a message that I alone would see if I could crack him open. I knew it would invalidate death’s claim on me and rewrite it a brave end to a life poorly lived.

I read the printout I’d made of his interview where he appealed for witnesses to a miracle he’d thought up in his own head. Something beautiful, it was, a tragedy in the making that would sweeten the blood of whoever stood beside him for its duration.

I didn’t need a dogged wife to feed me from a spoon and hold my hand when it got cold. I wanted to die on my feet in a place that was warm and didn’t know my history.

Gopal Dutta was eighty-seven years old and when he did a jumping roundhouse kick he put five full feet between himself and the ground. He climbed the air like a ladder and made the world pause in quiet reflection. He landed without a sound.

The other students made nothing of the feat because to them it was expected and had lost its novelty. They paid no attention to him at all. Instead they focused on Bibhuti out front and centre, calling out his instructions with modest persistence. They all jumped and kicked and landed as one, starlings flocking in the shape of a bird. I watched Gopal Dutta. I looked for the springs welded into the soles of his feet. I looked for the breaks in the seams of the old man costume that might reveal the young boy hiding inside.

I couldn’t find them. I fell asleep.

Jolly Boy woke me up with a tap on the shoulder. There was worry on his face. I reassured him, said that whenever I fell asleep I’d most likely wake up again. This arrangement would hold for the foreseeable.

Standing behind him were his father and Gopal Dutta, impatient to be introduced. The older man’s legs were hairless in purple running shorts with gold trim and too much of his thighs was on show. A lurid man and one to be grudgingly admired. Bibhuti had told me on the way to class how he’d cured Gopal Dutta of cancer. I’d dismissed it as well-meaning fancy. But face to face it became immediately obvious that cancer had never stood a chance. Gopal Dutta wasn’t prone as other men are to the quirks of disease. His tiny frame, now denied the freedom of the air and tethered groundward, stooped under the weight of a century’s failed assassination attempts. I wondered how many dynasties he’d sired and if he’d thought about making a fitness video.

‘He is my oldest student,’ Bibhuti said. ‘He received a tumour in his liver in 2001. I cured it with yoga and diet. Doctors declared that he could not survive two months but with my help the tumour disappeared and here he is nine years later in the flesh.’

‘Bloody hell,’ I said.

‘This is not unusual. Before that I had a student with tuberculosis. He was cured of the ailment in three months under my guidance with breathing exercises and positive thinking.’

‘Breathing is everything,’ Gopal Dutta said, and he shook my hand. His grip was strong and he tilted his head goatlike and peered into my eyes as if he might see the cancer there and by his stare petrify it into surrender.

The fearsome Kavita shrieked past us. Her foot speared for the head of her luckless sparring partner. Frozen, he accepted his fate with dignity.

Gopal Dutta spoke with confidence. ‘If you do what Sir instructs you will defeat the cancer,’ he said. ‘I thought my time was over but he extended my span. This was nine years ago. His knowledge is from God, he has a direct link. Mostly it is the correct breathing. People do not breathe right and that is why they are dying. They think they know the right way but it is not as easy as that.

‘I was pilot for Indian Airlines, I flew commercial jets for eight years. The lives of the passengers were in my hands. All this time I was not breathing correctly. It is a miracle that I did not crash. The crash in Mangalore was terrible, the news has stated weather was the factor but I believe it was down to incorrect breathing of the pilot. Everything stems from this. Now that I am breathing the right way I feel many years younger and I cannot make a mistake. I would like to fly again and have written to Air India to offer my services. They have not yet replied. I feel very young. You also will recover lost years under BB’s guidance. I thank him every day.’

Gopal Dutta’s eyes shone behind the dust motes dancing in the air around us. I looked down at his big toes as he rubbed them childishly against their neighbours. It provoked a strange feeling of loyalty. We were all children no matter how hard we tried to hide it.

‘I know I haven’t been breathing right,’ I admitted. ‘I’m doing better now. I’m trying my best.’

‘There is no reason to give up hope,’ Bibhuti said. ‘If I can cure one man I can cure another, you and Gopal Dutta are not so different.’

I was made to stand still while Gopal Dutta demonstrated his vivacity by kicking the air a hair’s breadth in front of my left eye. I felt my skin tingle as the air changed and when I chanced a look up he was above me, suspended as if from wires. He might have winked at me, I can’t be sure. When he landed I was a believer.