HE-he’ his-him

A short story by Scorpius

                                                                       I

            English is a very funny language.  The words, their meanings and usages take you for a ride.  Especially, it is so with a colonial inheritor like me who does not know the language well.  More than any Holy Book, I consult dictionaries very often to remain as part of the English-using tribe of India.  Yesterday, I ran into problems with ‘HE’, ‘he’, ‘his’ and ‘him’.  I went to Chambers 21^st Century Dictionary. It gave me the following meanings:

HE      : 1. His Excellence   2. Her Excellence

he       : 1. a male person or animal already referred to

                   2. a person or animal of unknown or unstated sex, especially after pronoun such as ‘some one’

        his      : referring or belonging to a male person or animal

       him     : a male person or animal or the object form of he.

            I, then wrote a fictious account in order to exercise and understand their right meanings and usages. 

                                              II

            he bore a pale, skinny and emotionless face.  The high cheek bones and narrow forehead with heavy ridges, brought an element of rudeness to his face.  Eyes remained deeply sunk in their sockets, his moderately straight nose and conically receding chin suggested that he was capable of sorcery. his face was isomorphic with the world map – one-third skin and two-thirds hair. his hair-line was very intact at the age of 65.  The extra-luxury of it on the eyebrows and ears and as spiny bristles of his police-band-master moustache and sideburns, reminded us of our Neanderthal ancestry. he was short measuring 5 feet 4 inches.  To add misery,  he could speak only in a mouse-squeak of a voice which he believed, made him effeminate.

            Very often he became conscious of his shortcomings but consoled himself saying, ‘God’s ways are strange… Praise be to Him’.

III     

            he one day became HE.  From then onwards as HE, he wanted to lead a life of opulence.  he set his palace in the posh Booli Booli Road, where mandir city’s remaining aristocrats, neo-rich, VIP politicians, corporate honchos and certain other moneyed crooks lived.   This castle of a building was donated to him by a philanthropist, only to run an orphanage.  But he put in a lot of other people’s money, restoring its colonial splendour and regal bearing.  Its soaring gateway and the closed doors painted black,  welcomed none.  Uniformed guards controlled them from a bastion like guard room.

However, people started assembling in front of the closed doors every morning before it was dawn.  HE gave dharshans.  It was always a motley assembly of ordinary men, preachers, teachers, supplicants, applicants for jobs, brokers and crooks.  he ordered the guards not to open the door till such time that the crowd swelled sufficiently and drew  attention from every quarter.  The scene was always piteous as these people who brought flowers, garlands, jelebi packets, cake boxes, glittering ponnadais (to wrap HE as a mark of respect) and numerous other objects used for worship and ceremony, stood there for hours arranging and re-arranging them on thambalams  which they held in their aching hands as if they were waiting to make offerings to their favourite deity.

But the VIPs of the city and his croonies went in and out of the gate as they liked.

                                   IV

            When he became HE, he took great care of his attire. he wore a long flowing purple robe with filigrees of thread work, a beautifully embroided  satin stole a plaited girdle with glistering silk.  he carried around his neck a rope like gold chain weighing 15 sovereigns in which hung a gem studded pendant, made of two gold flats one crossing the other, the giant size of that structure was the one on which 2000 years ago, a Palestinian Jew  was nailed and killed for blasphemy.  To add final sanctity to his newly acquired religious persona he took the Holy Book and held it close to his left arm pit and clutched in the right, the shepard’s crook as if he held a scepter.  Whenever he dressed up ceremonially, he managed an artificial stoop and walked slowly in measured steps imitating a holiman.

           

Otherwise he tied around his waist a garishly green lungi (green because a local necromancer told him that it was the colour that would bring him a great fortune) with bold checks on it.  For the upper part, he slipped on a Narendra Modi brand, collarless, half-sleeve jippa.  Instead of the gold pendant, he wore a woodden relic of the same shape.  

V

            he was a congenital liar.  However, after becoming HE, in order to hide many things, he had to lie several folds more than what he was doing earlier.  Lying came to him with such compulsion and ease as sneezing and yawning.  All could easily see through his words and mock at his back.  But he believed in the logic and veracity of his own lies bordering lunacy. he lied to HE, and HE to he, playing hide and seek.  But very often HE ran out of sight of he disowning him. At times when he found HE after a bitter search, he tormented HE.  Then he went to the bathroom with HE, stood before the mirror and performed a soliloquy imagining a thousand audiences to be present.

            I want to tell you about two interesting lies which he very frequently repeated.  The first one was how he became HE.  he told that once he happened to cross over  by foot, the theri land of the southern country where he belonged.  When the night came he had to sleep on a sand dune only with palm fronds for protection against flying sand particles.  In the middle of the night, heavenly messengers of God appeared amidst cracklings and flalshing of light in the sky and commanded ‘son, you get up and walk north to the mandir city where you will find a shepard’s crook and God will convert that crook into a scepter and bless you and your children’.

           

It is true that there was a magic crook.  But it belonged to the ‘murderous head sheperd’, the sorcerer of sorcerers who ruled from the Nizami city of Hyderabad.  he, with great cunning and sleight of hand stole the crook from the head one, and became HE.  The moment the head one lost the crook, he fell ill and lay rotten like a swollen whale cub, killed and washed ashore by bad currents of the sea or wounded and killed by the harpoon of a sea poacher.  All the orifices of the sorcerer of sorcerers, lost action and they started spewing malodorous spiritual fluids in sudden spurts and spray.  He did not die for long.  Such was the effect of the possession and dispossession of the crook.

           

The second most frequently told lie was about his police-band-master moustache.  he told everybody that he started his life as a police officer and soon found the avocation uncivilized and therefore resigned.  Then he wandered around on a spiritual quest.  This was before ‘God gave him the magic crook’.  And he lied that it was his wife who insisted that he should continue to sport that moustache for old time sake and he could not refuse.  But she always declared that neither could she like the looks of it nor could bear the stink of it.

           

The truth was that as a youngster he was too conscious of his frail body.  So he subjected himself to torturous fitness regimen.  When he dropped out of the college on charges of roguery, he went to his village and took to country wrestling.  his confidence grew and one day he unwittingly challenged the local paihlwan for a bout.   Though old, the senior paihlwan was terribly experienced.  As they engaged, in no time, the senior one applied a nasty catch and crushed his lower back.  Three of the seven cervical vertebrae fractured.  Another tricky touch of the nerve knot (varmam),paralysed the muscles of the groins.

            he lay on a plaster cast for three months.  A local vaithiar who later tried to revive the frozen muscles with lizard oil, proclaimed that the youngster would never fully regain his manliness.  He lay helpless on his back.   But one day, when he woke up in the morning, he suddenly realized that his otherwise ordinary moustache had overnight grown into an eagle spread, covering half the face with luxuriant bristles resembling newly sprung spines of acacia horida shrub.  When he touched the newly grown moustache with his fingers he suddenly felt that he regained some strength.  He touched again, and it was rejuvenating.  he touched again and again. Then he could get up from his bed and walk off.  It became his Alaudin’s lamp.

VI

            The greed, sense of inadequacy and jealousy made him a monster.  his family members were no better.  It was a brood of venomous snakes - cobras.  he opened every cash chest and jewel box of the shrine with the magic crook and distributed the valuables among the family members.  Their vulgar demonstration of wealth overawed and astonished many who wanted to go to them for favours.  They preformed bandigoot dances, made up crocodile sobs and released fox farts in front of them.  When they came back, called them thiefs.  The family made no distinction between honourable living and stealing.

            Those who opposed or criticized were targeted and persecuted. he set the cobras on.  Locked up offices of honourable men and women.  Entered holy shrines, removed the presiding deities and installed his own image as well-sculpted statuettes.  Paid money to his crooneys to perform special pujas and worships.  Any one who opposed this idolatry was taken to the police station on false charges with the help of advocate-touts.  he procured women from back-streets of ill repute, and set them upon noble souls who tried to correct him.  he enjoyed the slander he thus created against them.  he plotted against the intelligent men and women of his own flock and tried to kill them as he feared that they would topple him.  his effect on people was worser than that of the effect of a pestilence like bubonic plague.     

VII             

Victims lamented and released wails which neighbours loathed.  Others gossiped – in schools, colleges, workplaces, churches, mosques, temples, in the city squire, in the backstreets, in butcher’s shop where people went to buy Sunday meat, in marriage halls, in graveyards where they went to burry their dear ones and in all other places where they congregated.  They gossiped in order to remove their psychological congestions which easily coagulated into some kind of harmful phlegm of the meninges of their brains and made them make excuses for their private fears and secretly celebrate their tribe’s pre-emptive conceding of collective defeat that obviated any necessity of personal involvement  and sacrifice.  The most religious among them, fasted and prayed.  Some went to the temple and split silver coins to turn the anger of the most ferocious mother goddesses against the spreader of evil.  A few others went to seek the help of the djins whom they believed were in the habit of taking evening strolls in the yard just beyond the big dharga.  The social types and snobs gathered in fellowship and had ludicrous conversations on the matter before they dined with heavy spirits.

            The man worthy of the name was the city’s Christian barrister who spoke the truth and the truth alone, indiscreetly the truth even in law courts and kept no client happy and hence no money.  However he was one rare lamp badly flickering though, lit and kept biblically on the lamp stand and not under the tub.  He summoned two of his old clients and who were fallen shepards, once part of the palace staff, fallen because they were found by HE as too very ambitious and scheming.  After the fall, they became retail venders selling souls to soulless people.   The barrister talked of a coup.

            After many confabulations and weighing of different alternatives, the duo decided to approach the powerful necromancer who gave HE the colour green and the augury that fortunes would visit.  With difficulty, the duo could convince the necro on the count of public good.   The necro, then meditated for a while, suddenly made some shouts of incantations and went into a trance.  After that he fell on the ground with heavy heaves like a lamb whose jugular vein was just cut by the butcher.  The duo bent down to closely examine the necro.  In small whispers the necro said, ‘the curse is with the rod and the strength is from the mou’che…’  Then he slipped into a coma like silence and would not further answer the duo.

            The duo decided then to steal the rod from HE and shave off his mou’che.  Of the two, the large and stocky one said he would take care to steal. The thin and tall one would anesthetize HE before he gave him a clean shave.  (He in fact took his inspiration from one of the ridiculous plots of an old Tamil movie).  As hospitals no more used chloroform on humans, he acquired it from a vetenarian.  He also bought a conventional razor and a pair of scissors, barbers used.  

            One morning the duo tricked their way into the palace and entered the bedroom where HE lay.  As HE walked to the bathroom, both the men stalked him like inexperienced shikaris who would like to shoot the behind of a grizzly bear.  

            But HE want and stood before the mirror leaving the crook carefully to rest on the wall.  Then HE took a long gaze at the mirror before waving his hands in verve as if HE addressed a few thousands audience.  Then came a few gesticulations.  Perhaps HE was getting ready for his solioloquy.  The impatient Largee pounced on him from behind and held him tightly as the Thinnee pressed the chloroform pad on his nose and mouth.  After a great tremor of the head HE, in a big whiff, inhaled the noxious ether and went unconscious like a stone.  The job was perfectly done.

VIII

            Next day the crowd that gathered before the gate at Booli Booli Road was talking loudly.  There were not many carrying garlands or other offerings.  Their faces showed unusual inquisitiveness.

            Inside the palace HE lay motionless like a bloated carcass with the release of rotten spectral fluid and the miasma emanating from it.  The orifices were about to give up.  However his fully shaven face looked somewhat radiant.

            Thinnee who ran away with the barbar’s kit with the chloroform decanter inside, last saw Largee near the traffic circle, close to the corporation park.  .   He reached home and lay down in his bed for the next two days telling his wife that he ran a mild fever.  In the safety of his own home Thinnee, really worried about Largee.  He wondered whether he could reach his home or any other safe place with the stolen crook. Whenever he tried to call him over phone he was not accessible. 

            On the third day, Thinnee decided to go to Largee’s house by dawn.  As he got down from the auto, he saw a few people, maybe ten, standing in front of Largee’s house.  Some even had garlands in their hands.  Thinnee really became worried.  He thought something seriously bad had happened to Largee.  Even he smelt death.

            As he entered the hall, to his surprise and of course some relief, he saw Largee sitting on a throne like chair straight, holding across his chest, the stolen crook.  He then noticed his face with an eagle spread of a moustache with spiny bristles. Thinnee thought that something strange had visited Largee.  How could he grow so much hair on his face in 48 hours?  Even after seeing Thinnee, Largee did not respond.  He continued with his catatonic stupor.  But his eyes were wide open.  Thinnee looked into them and found some strange light radiating from within and there was a haunting spell about the whole thing.  Then Largee nodded his head in a gesture of command and asked Thinnee to come close.   Thinnee took fright and disappeared like lightning from Largee’s place.

            Thinnee left mandir city for good, abandoning his wife and children.  He went to the North wandering from one pilgrim center to another as a mendicant.  But he always carried with him the barbar’s kit with the razor, the pair of scissors and chloroform in the decanter.  He would need them one day.

                                                                       

                                                                                                 Scorpius

                                                                                                 29-04-2011