Stephen Kelman - Man on Fire

Gopal Dutta wished me good luck and padded away, revealing the lower curve of his left buttock as he went. He picked up where he’d left off, making leaping roundhouse kicks for the pleasure of it, treating his observers to the illusion that the air was more amber than oxygen.

Later Bibhuti took me shopping. We’d decided, since I was going to survive, that I needed workout clothes of my own. Bibhuti wanted to show me the mall in Vashi where he’d broken the last of his records. A bicycle had been ridden over him twenty-three times in one minute to mark the mall’s grand opening. He’d shared the bill with a man who threw knives at his infant son.

‘The knives were not sharp,’ Jolly Boy complained. ‘I saw one hit him and there was not much blood. Real knives would make more.’

They carried on singing along to the radio, stopping only when Bibhuti had to swerve to avoid a pedestrian who’d taken on a battle of wills with the traffic at the interchange where Vashi’s immodest towers rose from the dust like the ribs of excavated giants.

The commercial heart of Navi Mumbai. Home to the flat-pack call centres and the four-star hotels where the toppers of international business came to discuss in piped-in comfort the most efficient ways of sucking India’s marrow from its bones. One of them was right next door to the mall. Hotel security was sweeping a car full of arriving guests. Their hands hovered over holstered sidearms. They checked the car’s boot and ran a mirror along its undercarriage in search of explosives. When none were discovered they rolled back the blastproof barrier and waved the car through. Its passengers showed no signs of having been inconvenienced.

On the landscaped lawn outside the mall two holy men stood praying in barrels, submerged to the shoulders in symbolic water. They petitioned the sky to let loose its cooling rain and wake the world from its seasonal indolence.

People were lining up for a bodysearch outside Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Inside, Bibhuti and Jolly Boy stopped to marvel at the central atrium, fringed with common franchises and patrolled by a pair of bumfluff security guards whose main duty was to flutter their truncheons at the resting consumers perched on the lip of the fountain at its northern end until they took the hint and moved on. The fountain like their epaulettes was supposed to be admired from afar.

‘This is where I achieved the record,’ Bibhuti said. ‘I was lying here. Two bicycles came from this side, where you see Costa Coffee, and one bicycle from this side. They rotated in sequence until the minute was up. They rode over my solar plexus area where I am holding most of my strength. Only once did my student Rohan miss the target. He went over my neck just above the collarbone. Luckily he was able to find his way across without falling. The collarbone was broken but Guinness allowed the record to stand. No specific area of the body was declared, the only requirement was that they travel over me individually and remain upright.

‘Come, we will find you some nice sporting clothes. You are becoming a sportsman and you must have your own selection.’

He picked out the same clothes he wore and held my bag of money while I tried them on, sucking my belly in for the mirror. This would be me in my last days, abandoning my style to roam unfettered through the land that vanity forgot. The thought made me smile. Maybe I’d come to prize the comfort of sweatpants. Maybe through the routine Bibhuti had devised for me I’d blossom into beauty in time for the mortuary portraits.

We came out again into the sunlight glancing through clouds that were swollen now like malnourished bellies. The wind was rising and a small crowd had formed around the holy men in their barrels. A little girl tiptoed to the rim and stuck a flower in the older one’s beard. Her father took a picture on his phone. The holy man resisted the temptation to smile.

The monsoon had just left Chennai, Bibhuti said. It would reach us in a week.

‘Is the rain really that heavy? I’ve never been in a monsoon before.’

‘Yes, it is very heavy. Every year many problems. Landslides and floods and people falling down the manholes. Every year the city is in a scramble to cover them before the rain arrives. Many times a drain lid is caving in or missing. People cannot see the dangers when the ground is beneath the water, they are falling in and becoming victimised. My advice is to watch your step very carefully.’

The children came running at us from nowhere. A tide of brown skin flecked with the white of chattering teeth. My wrists were worried by little grabbing hands, my toes trodden on. A rushing of volatile limbs and dancing private parts.

‘Hello, sir, hello! You buy, one dollar!’

I recognised the drooping eyelid of the ringleader, the birthmark smudge on the girl’s hip. The kids from the train station. I felt giddy with relief that they’d survived the days since I’d last seen them.

They were still peddling their Tom and Jerry colouring books but there were no chicks to be seen. I asked the ringleader what had happened to Oscar.

‘Soli eat,’ the girl said. I guessed that Soli was the boy’s name.

‘You ate him?’

Soli tilted his head bashfully. There was no regret in him.

‘But he was a baby,’ I said.

‘You buy,’ he said, shoving the colouring book at me. ‘One dollar.’

‘I don’t need another one,’ I told him.

His face fell. He found it hard to accept that all my colouring needs could be so easily satisfied. When it became clear I wasn’t buying he turned on his heels and ran, the girl chasing after him. They tested the brakes of the auto rickshaws as they dashed across the road and made the sweet lime seller jump when they spun past his cart.

I felt a dread of the coming rain. I kept it to myself.

The door flies open. Jolly Boy steps aside before I can stop him. I brace myself for violence. There are two policemen and behind them a camera crew tripping over themselves to catch me in repentant close-up. My only surprise is that they didn’t come sooner. I’ve spent the last two days waiting on a lynching. One of the policemen shoves the camera away and the other makes a grab for me. A lathi swings at his hip and fennel seeds nestle in his moustache from a meal eaten in a hurry. No words are spoken. I’m led away. Ellen looks after me. I tell her not to worry.

Outside the crowd claws for me and is beaten back. I search for allies among the smoke of vengeance. The familiar faces I see are soured, mouths that once greeted me with fascination now spit at my feet.

Kavita makes a run for me and her father has to scoop her up before she can land a blow.

The door is slammed and the siren is deployed. We pick our way through a hail of fruit and fire fed from a communal pyre. I’m starving and in fear of my life. I nearly laugh. This is fame. I don’t want it anymore.

The police station is a single-storey concrete shed on the outskirts of a residential district, simmering like an unexpired curse across the road from a scrap-metal kiosk where a fat man and his wife offer coconut water to a passing trade that doesn’t look like it will ever turn up. The man scalps the coconuts with a blunt-looking machete and lines them up on the table to be forgotten about. His hopeless occupation must be a penance of some kind and I try not to think about the atrocities he must have committed to land himself in such demeaning shackles.

The constables walk me inside and take me to an office with no windows or cameras. Another policeman is waiting for me there, standing with his arms folded. He has the sullen poised demeanour of a weekend psychopath. He wishes me harm. The desire of it drips from him. He introduces himself as an inspector and tells me there have been some complaints. One of the constables closes the door and guards it.