Stephen Kelman - Man on Fire

He was just checking on me on his way outside. Bibhuti only slept two hours a night. He’d had his allowance and now it was time for his first training session of the day. He told me to go back to sleep and slipped past me and out the door. I heard him padding down the concrete steps, spring-loaded and sure in the darkness.

I wondered where I’d found the boldness to put my life in his hands.

Harshad had been sorry to see me go. He thought it was something he’d said or a failing of his to meet my Western needs.

‘Would you like another room?’ he asked. ‘I will put you in the executive suite, no extra charge.’

‘I didn’t know there was an executive suite.’

‘Only one. For special guests. It has a sofa-cum-bed and extra soft linens, you will be very comfortable.’

I told him it was nothing personal. Bibhuti had insisted I move in with him. It was more practical that way. He wanted to keep an eye on me, and besides, I needed to be careful with my money in case I lived any longer than I’d expected to.

The TV Harshad had resurrected showed a graphic of the monsoon’s projected path towards us. When it arrived the mercury would dip by a few degrees and the air would feel fresh for the first time since winter. The price to pay for this would be crumbling roads and more blackouts, and a drop in revenue from the foreign businessmen who’d take their conventions to Jaipur and Delhi, chased north by the rain that would settle over Mumbai like the arms of a jealous lover, concealing the city’s treasures from the greedy eyes of enemy satellites.

Harshad rubbed his belly thoughtfully. ‘You will come back to see me, yes?’ he asked. ‘I am not far away.’

I realised that he’d formed an attachment to me, the foreign listener to his Indian woes. When I left I’d take with me my well-intentioned credulity and my weakness for legend. He was afraid that in their absence he’d have no filtering curtain between himself and his stories.

I told him I’d pop in whenever I could.

‘You must be here for the completion of my painting. Soon it will be done.’

Amrita was painting the grass beneath the snake-killer’s feet in a green that reminded me of the South Downs seen from above, passing over in a plane on European flights. Those city breaks we took on the cheap in teeming Prague and rainy Budapest. So much of the world still unseen. It was too big for one measly lifetime.

‘When she has finished my painting you will be the first person to see it. You will bless it and it will open the next chapter in my business. Then Amrita will paint a picture of you and BB breaking your record. It will go on the opposite wall, even bigger than mine. People will come from all over to see it. My hotel will be famous as the place you stayed when you first met him. I will arrange a tour of BB’s places, everybody will want to see this.’

His eyes were wide with the potential of it. He’d found a money-spinning fantasy to compensate for my leaving.

He remembered himself, took my case to the door and set it down on the pavement.

‘You will come back.’ He nodded a seal on it. I watched him creak back to his desk, pick up his glass and empty it.

The old man smiled up at me through his blazing beard. He looked at me differently, with a startling and unforeseen joy, as if recognising for the first time that we shared a common ancestry or an affiliation to the same football team. His voice when it came was songlike, a lullaby from the dawn of time.

‘You have New Balance!’ he trilled.

‘Sorry?’

‘Your shoes. They are New Balance. I once owned these shoes. Very comfortable. Somebody stole them.’

I looked down at my new trainers. The old man was right. They were very comfortable. He wriggled the toes on his wrinkled brown feet in remembrance of the luxury they’d once enjoyed.

‘These are mine,’ I said. ‘I need them.’

‘I do not want them. They are yours. I am happy for you. Where I am going there is no need for shoes. Still I am thankful for the time I had with them, although it was very short. I hope your time with them is longer.’

The old man turned away and stared at his magic spot. Our moment of bonding was passed and I was no longer alive to him. He was gone to fly over the places he’d known, a last visit before the rain came to snatch him up.

In his patch of sky the clouds were towering. I’d left a half-full bottle of Officer’s Choice in my room and some nail clippings stained with Ellen’s Trendspotting in case anyone wanted to clone me.

The morning came to Bibhuti’s house and I was still alive. My money was where I’d left it under the coffee table and the dogs that had barked through the night had failed in their undertaking to drive me out of my mind. Maybe the god of the house had taken pity on me while I squirmed in search of sleep. He hadn’t granted sleep to me but he had in the provocations of sleeplessness gifted me the anger I needed to rip Bibhuti’s soul from its socket. All I had to do was remember that feeling when we stood up together in front of people.

I came to suspect quite quickly that Bibhuti might save my life, at least for long enough to get the breaking done. The food he gave me and the breaths he made me take muffled the pain to a bearable hum. By his encouragement and my morning repetitions I felt myself grow stronger. I found the courage to start chewing my food. Bibhuti’s wife gave me salt water to soothe my loosies. My thanks bounced off her like hailstones off a tin roof.

I would hurry over ablutions in the cramped bathroom, stepping queasily around the hole in the floor. At least the door could be bolted. At least the neighbour’s satirical commentary on my sit-up technique could be drowned out if I pressed my elbows to my ears. When I ran out of steam I’d take a nap in their marital bed, slipping under to the flapping of wings somewhere out of reach. Ellen’s absence was a dead weight on my chest that pulled me effortlessly down.

My daydreams filled up with the perfect swing and the cracking of obedient bones. I still hadn’t hit him and the thirst for it was ever-present, a drunkenness that didn’t wear off.

I taught Jolly Boy what a nutmeg was in the footballing sense and Bibhuti got me washing my hair in urad dhal. It would make it strong like his.

‘I have been looking for a record I can break with my hair for some time,’ he said, running his comb through the black waves. ‘I would like to pull a locomotive with my hair but I do not know how to attach myself. I have tried several times with no luck, each time I am removed as soon as I begin walking.’

‘That’s annoying.’

‘It is big frustration to me. Not to worry. Now I am reaching the pinnacle. No other record will compare.’ He inspected the comb’s teeth for foreign bodies, found none, and slipped it back into his pocket. ‘History will not remember you for what you attempted to do, only for what you succeeded in doing.’

I told Bibhuti about the blood on my neck and by the end of it he’d fallen in love with me.

‘You saw me this day?’ Bibhuti asked. ‘When you cut yourself?’

‘Funny, isn’t it. Just by chance, there you were.’

‘This is not chance. Did you know about the cancer at this time?’

‘No idea. That was a few months after. But it’s funny, as soon as I got here I thought to myself, that wouldn’t happen in India. People are kinder here, they wouldn’t let someone go around bleeding all day and not tell him. Maybe that’s what I was looking for, some kindness. Maybe that’s what I was missing all along.’

A now familiar look came over Bibhuti, a light shining suddenly from somewhere inside him. He leoparded to his feet and started stalking the yard, his whole body fizzing with the desire to right the world’s most evident wrongs.