Stephen Kelman - Man on Fire

Bibhuti woke up, rubbed his eyes and grinned at me.

‘I am ready now,’ he said.

In the courtyard all lenses pointed at us. A steadycam from the sports channel and various press cameras jostled for elbow room at the spot where the first gob of blood would be spat. The Turbanator waved to us boyishly. The civilians raised their phones and snapped our walk to centre stage where the bats were waiting, arranged in neat rows to be got at quickly. On the other side of us was a space to throw them when they were broken, in the walled corner under the banyan tree. Children looked down on us from its branches, their hands full of themselves and rubbing their shins as if to knead the excitement evenly through bodies unused to the thrill of being hidden.

They cheered us. The air crackled and I got goosebumps. Someone was selling mango slices from a plastic bucket and a custodian was standing by with a mop to cleanse the sacred ground when we were finished.

Nobody was wearing goggles. Nobody had thought of it. I worried about stray splinters in eyeballs. It was too late to do anything about it.

Ellen and Jolly Boy and his mother hadn’t been allowed inside the temple with us and instead they’d been practising their roles in the thickening air. The women in the crowd posed in shapes of grace, steadied their hands to catch the eggs from upturned nests when the sky started falling in.

Jolly Boy made a meal of checking the bats one last time, rolling them carefully so they all showed their faces. The duct tape covered B Pattni’s embarrassment. The modification made the bats look more sinister. B Pattni himself peered out from the crowd, swaying from foot to foot, his massive frame trembling with the anticipation of some watershed moment in the history of violence.

The younger priests had to blockade the entrance, linking their arms in opposition to the latecomers. Meeting resistance the would-be spectators made ladders of each other and scaled the walls to sit in crowlike hope of throwaway bones.

The AXN reporter made an announcement. He told everyone who Bibhuti was and what he’d already done. He told them what he’d attempt to do today. He introduced me as the one who’d help. I had to remind him of my name.

I got him to namecheck Jolly Boy too. Jolly Boy prematurely picked up the first bat from the pile. I quietly told him to put it back. His wait for the clock was insufferable. Rigged to the trunk of the tree it showed zero. Another AXN rep stood by to press its buttons, an Olympic pretension for the glamour-hungry crowd.

Bibhuti took off his T-shirt. The scars on his back and the bruises I’d made shone livid. Bibhuti’s wife turned her back on him. Ellen held her up.

On the announcer’s cue the crowd fell silent.

A moment of realisation passed between Bibhuti and me, a look of delirious mourning. We both knew that the people we’d been before would be permanently lost when the breaking began. We both rued the time we’d spent as outcasts in a life before today. We were going home.

‘I am only wishing Gopal Dutta is here,’ Bibhuti confided. ‘This will be the first record I have achieved without him. It is very strange feeling.’

‘He’ll be watching,’ I said. I scanned the crowd but I didn’t see any hovering goat women.

I asked Jolly Boy if he was okay. He tilted his head and offered me a bat again. This time I took it. I weighed it in my hands. I felt the grip and the heat in it from its exposure to the sun. I squeezed my fingers tighter around it to inflate the muscles that would make it murderous.

The air was still. Bibhuti gathered himself, a physical clearing and a shaking off of any last remaining trace of doubt. ‘Don’t forget, below the neck only,’ he said, and he glanced to the sky for a final endorsement as the crowd drew in its breath. Everyone braced themselves to see a god being born.

I decided with a sense of quickfalling like stepping off a roof that I didn’t have it in me.

‘I can’t do it.’ I said it quietly so the crowd wouldn’t hear. ‘I don’t want to kill you.’

Bibhuti’s moustache drooped.

I felt the burn of crying behind my eyes. I felt you. The preciousness of life was revealed to me in an urgent unfolding and the shock of it took all the lust out of me.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You must do it,’ Bibhuti said. His brown nipples were hairless and small in the stiffening breeze. He’d once been a baby. ‘Please,’ he pleaded.

‘Go, Uncle, it has started,’ Jolly Boy urged. ‘Hit him!’

I looked at the clock. The numbers were already running ahead of me.

Bibhuti waved me impatiently in. ‘Come, you must go now. We have no more time.’ He spread his feet and tensed himself, his arms held out in appeal.

I felt you for the first time and I raised my hand against you.

The announcer counted the seconds aloud to hurry me on. The crowd started counting too.

‘Go!’ Jolly Boy hollered, enraged at me, and he picked up a bat and made to strike his father himself.

I pushed him aside and raised my bat. Bibhuti’s eyes glazed over as he summoned the weird energies that would deflect the pain.

‘Thank you,’ he muttered, and he was already somewhere else.

I asked you to forgive me. I swung the bat with everything I had.

Bibhuti sleeps. His room’s too small to breathe in now. The reporter has been called away to another story and me and Ellen sit in her seat. It’s still warm from her. The corridor light stings my eyes and encourages confessions. Steam rises from the tea in Ellen’s plastic cup. Her fingers curl around it, the knuckles wrinkled like walnuts, and the ring I gave her could do with a polish. She lets me confess, with the doctors buzzing round us. A scream of pain from somewhere behind thin curtains. She lets me confess because she sees the time has come to harvest my prior kindnesses. To bring them in for weighing and then have them argue for me at the last. I’ll need every one of them to speak well of me.

I tell her I’ve heard your voice calling to me. That I’ve been going back over my life and filling all the holes in with you. The way we met, by chance in a dance hall in the dark, out of all those other bodies. It was you pinning me to the ground, I say, keeping me in the right spot so she’d find me.

It was you who made me iron-willed when her old man ran his rule over me and found me wanting, it was your voice telling him we’d made our choice and we were standing by it. It was you putting the words in my mouth when I asked her to make an honest man of me, even though the thing I feared most in the world was making a promise to someone and then having to make it stick.

When she needed kindness it was you who showed me how. What to say to soothe a toothache, where to put my hands to express sympathy or strength of character. It was you who made me believe in her piano dream.

‘I took you, didn’t I?’ I say to her. ‘To the music shop. I wanted you to play. I was good when I needed to be, wasn’t I?’

‘Of course you were,’ she says, and her charity catches in my throat.

‘I just need you to forgive me. Before it’s too late. I’m scared and I need to know I was good. Tell me you forgive me.’

‘Not yet.’

‘When?’

‘When he wakes up.’

Zubin wheels a trolley past us. There’s a body on it covered by a sheet. The smell of charred meat laces the air. The old man’s face is outlined under the sheet. I watch it all the way to the door to see if the sheet will move with the sucking in of a reanimated breath. It doesn’t.

‘I can’t even remember how many times I hit him. How many did we break?’

‘Enough.’ Ellen shudders at the memory of what she’d seen me do. It must have been bad. All I can remember is the first hit. The sound of it, the vibration going up my arm when the bat met the resistance of Bibhuti’s body. The instant release when it broke. Lightness. Looking down and seeing the bat dead in my hand, splinters hanging in the air. Disgust and exhilaration. Dropping it like it was hot. The announcer counting one.