Love and Longing in Bombay Read Online Free Page A

leg, and he realized that he no longer knew where his boys were. The confusion came and howled around his head, and for a moment he was lost. “Cut it off,” he said then. “Off.”
    But, said the nursing-assistant, holding up the useless bandages, but I have nothing, and Jago Antia felt his head swim on an endless swell of pain, it took him up and away and he could no longer see, and it left him breathless and full of loss. “No time. Cut it off now,” he said, but the nursing-assistant was dabbing with the bandages. Jago Antia said to Jung: “You do it, now. Quickly.” They were all staring at him, and he knew he could not make them cut him. “Give me your kukri, ” he said to Jung. The boy hesitated, but then the blade came out of its scabbard with a hiss that Jago Antia heard despite the ceaseless roar outside. He steadied himself and gripped it with both hands and shut his eyes for a moment, and there was impossibly the sound of the sea inside him, a sob rising in his throat, he opened his eyes and fought it, pulled against it with his shoulders as he raised the kukri above his head, against darkness and mad sorrow, and then he brought the blade down below his knee. What surprised him was the crunch it made against the bone. In four strokes he was through. Each was easier. “Now,” he said, and the nursing-assistant tied it off. Jago Antia waved off the morphine, and he saw that Jung the radioman was crying. On the radio Jago Antia’s voice was steady. He took his reports, and then he sent his reserve in. They heard his voice across Sylhet. “Now then,” he said. “Finish it.”
    *
     
    The room that Jago Antia woke up in had a cracked white ceiling, and for a long time he did not know where he was, in Sylhet (he could feel an ache under his right knee), in the house of his childhood after a fall from the balcony, or in some other room, unknown: everything seemed to be thrown together in his eyes without shape or distinction, and from moment to moment he forgot the flow of time, and found himself talking to Amir Khan about cricket, and then suddenly it was evening. Finally he was able to sit up in bed, and a doctor fussed about him: there were no injuries, the ground was soft from the rain, his paratrooper’s reflexes had turned him in the air and rolled him on the ground, but he was bruised, and a concussion could not be ruled out. He was to stay in bed and rest. When the doctor left Thapa brought in a plate of rice and dal, and stood at the foot of the bed with his arms behind him. “I will talk to my cousin tonight.”
    Jago Antia nodded. There was nothing to say. But when the exorcist came two days later he was not the slavering tribal magician that Jago Antia was expecting, but a sales manager from a large electronics Company. Without haste and without stopping he put his briefcase down, stripped off his black pants and white shirt and blue tie, and bathed under the tap in the middle of the garden. Then he put on a white dhoti and daubed his forehead with a white powder, and meanwhile Thapa was preparing a thali with little mounds of rice and various kinds of coloured paste and a small diya, with the wick floating in the oil. Then the man took the t hali from Thapa and walked slowly into the house, and as he came closer Jago Antia saw that he was in his late forties, that he was heavyset, that he was neither ugly nor handsome. “My name is Thakker,” he said to Jago Antia before he sat cross-legged in the middle of the living room, in front of the stairs, and lit the diya. It was evening now, and the flame was tiny and flickering in the enormous darkness of the room.
    As Thakker began to chant and throw fistfuls of rice from his thali into the room Jago Antia felt all the old irritation return, and he was disgusted with himself for letting this insanity gather around him. He walked out into the garden and stood with the grass rustling against his pants. There was a huge bank of clouds on the