Excerpt: Hadal by C.P. Surendran

Honey Kumar’s office in Trivandrum, the Foreigners’ Registration Cell, was on Beach Road, leading to the airport. It was a long, straight strip of melting, footprint-preserving black tarmac that took him away from the city. It ran parallel to the sea. The sea lent the city an air of infinity. Very different from Delhi, he thought. The heat too was different. The sun was dry in the capital. Here, it was wet like a steam bath. Vasu showed him around the bungalow, half following him at heel, half leading him, his dog-eyes down. The compound was large and the perimeter wall high. At the back of the building there was a coconut grove, dark, green, full of shadows. A guest house, again at the back, was connected to the main building by a rambling corridor. It looked as though the corridor was a result of spasmodic afterthoughts. The house once belonged to a reluctant king of Travancore (for a while, Honey Kumar was told, the poor joke was, North Korea, South Korea and Travankorea, ha-ha), as the southern part of present-day Kerala was once known. The king lamented the ornate, if stately, disease of his existence in his music compositions. He had once said to his lover: ‘I’ll be the happiest when I’m dead.’ He had striven to attain that stable state by sustained starvation accompanied by soulful singing for days on end. But his pulse and blood pressure were that of a teenager’s and his life flowed on like an interminable evening raga searching for its elusive desert dawn. Then, one day, when the king had given up all hope and had resigned to his seeming immortality, he had fallen down the staircase and died before he hit the bottom. You miss a step, Honey Kumar thought, and you stop singing.

This was Honey Kumar’s first southern summer in a long time and it brought him memories of the dormitory in Father Almeida’s airless orphanage. It was not so hot then, he thought, switching on the giant overhead fan. Was Father Almeida still alive? He hoped not. There was not much to thank god for those days in the orphanage except for the Bedroom Boys, the gang of voyeurs he had founded. As expected, they were caught one night, and Father Almeida had stripped Honey Kumar—‘so you are the leader of the late-night show, eh, leader, eh?’—to his striped underwear and, half crouching, cupped his testicles, weighing them tentatively. He had looked up at Honey Kumar, who at thirteen was already half a head taller than Father Almeida, and said, ‘How much do you think these weigh, eh? One hundred and fifty grams? Two hundred? Look at the trouble they give. Take your underwear off, and let’s see what we can do for you. You may stuff it in your mouth if the pain is unreasonable, which I doubt because Jesus is just.’ Father Almeida cracked the cane in the air to check the temper of the tool and brought it down hard six times on Honey Kumar’s butt exactly at the same spot, his mouth working in concentration, his thick tongue with its bluish-purple patch at the tip stuck out. It was a coordinated activity: when the cane went up, the tongue came out. After the fourth stroke, Honey Kumar’s skin had peeled and stuck to the cane like a wrapping.

‘You may now wear your shorts.’ Father Almeida was panting from the exercise. He sat down on a stool, directly under a bare bulb, so the top of his bald head was an oily pool of light. ‘And now it’s time to confess, eh? Tell old Father Almeida what happened in the room between man and wife; who was on top, eh? What was the noise they made? How long was it, eh?’ And Honey Kumar, as he pulled on his shorts, had only thought why Father Almeida persisted in thinking it was always man and wife when twice they had seen man and woman, and once man and man. And they had given a straight-faced description of the scene, staring fixedly at the moths circling Father Almeida’s lambent head, one boy helping the other when a detail or two was missed out. And adding as well. Even then Honey Kumar had realized that only fiction furnished full satisfaction.

Honey Kumar ratcheted up the regulator of the fan, but it continued to whir at the same slow pace. His body poured sweat. The walls wept salt. He smelled like his armpits all over. Honey Kumar put his legs up on the table and surrendered to the heat. He brought out his cough syrup from his pocket, took a good draught. My teeth will be orange, he thought, and closed his eyes. But he could see the liquefying world through his lids. Chimeras shimmered in the vapours melting from the tar and the road flowed unevenly like black water over steps. Men with long noses disintegrated into elephants. A dog was a calf. A rocky outcrop was a steaming buffalo lying down. Buses floated in air over the steam. The air gestated aliens, distorted forms. He shook his head and opened his eyes. He found himself staring at an attractive woman and thought for a vacant moment she was a brightly burning filament of his imagination; occasionally, the phantoms of his sleep crossed over to reality and, in return traffic, those whom he met in shops and restaurants figured in his dreams with a vividness that disoriented him. The visitor’s straight hair fell to her shoulders and her coffee coloured skin shone. A pair of dark glasses rested on her head. Her striped red skirt fell below her knees and her black top strained to contain the swell of her breasts. Honey Kumar could smell her smoky perfume.

‘May I come in?’ Miriam said, removing her glasses.

‘Yes, you may,’ Honey Kumar said officiously though she had already entered the room. With each of her steps, the air became increasingly festive with possibilities. Men and women danced on grapes in a world dunked in burgundy light. The air inexplicably cooled on his skin. Not only must you come in, you must not go out, he decided. Honey Kumar noticed that the foreigner had big dark eyes that looked tired from lack of sleep, and that her mouth pouted in its effort to contain the narrow white teeth that protruded a little. ‘What can I do for you?’ No, he thought, actually it ought to be, what can you do for me? ‘Have I seen you somewhere? On TV, maybe?’

Miriam sat down on a chair. She smiled nervously. ‘No, I’m not yet that famous. I am planning to stay on for a few more weeks here. I need my visa extended.’ She placed her passport on the table between them as if she were surrendering a weapon. He saw her fingers were long and slender. She wore small stone rings on them. She carried the alphabet of her native language, Dhivehi, etched on her nails.

‘Where are you from?’

The earth is my home, she thought, echoing Dr Najeeb. ‘Maldives.’

Honey Kumar flipped the pages of the passport. ‘You are Miriam?’

‘Yes.’

‘Muslim?’

‘Yes.’

‘Muslims are great believers.’

‘Well, I’m secular.’

‘A secular Muslim? Is there such a thing?’ Without his noticing it, his head had dropped to one side, inviting confidence at the end of offensive questions.

‘Well, trust your eyes.’ Miriam smiled.

‘How old are you?’

‘Thirty-two.’

‘You look younger.’ He was aware that it came out as an accusation.

‘Thank you.’

‘It says here you are with the Maldives Government Security Force.’

‘Yes, I was. I quit.’ Her job involved entering visitors’ names and addresses in a massive, sprawling register, in which you chased the information with a finger as you entered it, because unless you were careful you would end up in another line.

‘Just taking it easy? A travelogue maybe? Everybody is discovering the same place.’

‘No, not a travelogue. A novel.’

‘A novel?’ Honey Kumar placed the passport back on the table as if it was of no interest to him, and leaned back in his chair. ‘A writer is a genetic thing; like a good cop, my boss used to say.’ Everything was in the gene, Honey Kumar thought, everything; consider his face, handiwork of genes, consider the hostile world it conjured up. Consider, too, Father Almeida with his cane held high and genetic blue

tongue out, a clerical substitute for the devil.

‘True. You can only perfect skills you are born with.’

‘So you just started writing?’

‘It takes a lot, really.’ Despite a sustained bout of depression and a husband who had begun to act as if he did not belong to this world, she had taken a membership at the Central Library and read up, keeping distractions at bay. She attended the more interesting of literary events that the British Council hosted, and drank a large amount of cheap wine very quickly—the bar was open only for one hour between eight and nine—soaking in the words of writers who felt, but did not show they were superior—after all the host country wrote in Dhivehi—to their excessively appreciative and polite local counterparts. As they got drunk, the more rebellious of them invited each other to their residences. ‘Come home, come home, we must discuss what’s happening to this little country of ours. If the mullahs won’t ruin it, the men from the army will. We’ve got only ourselves.’ It was mostly a conspiracy of wishes that tended to evaporate with the wine. ‘Oh, well, I did a whole bunch of things. Then took a master’s in literature.’

‘Your passport doesn’t mention a master’s.’

‘Does it matter?’ Miriam had completed the course, but had chosen not to sit for the MA exams. She did not take kindly to the idea of competition. She believed that awards should be abolished, especially for writers, so that they wrote for themselves first and not for agents and editors. ‘I believe Joyce would find publishers hostile if he were alive now,’ she had once said in self-defence to her tutorial guide, who was turning out to be her great confidant and scathing critic.

‘Well, modernism is over; that’s why we have no world wars, but you need to put in your punctuations with more rigour,’ her guide had said without looking up from her phone bill which she always considered with misgivings. ‘This document is always a steady source of surprise,’ the guide had once told Miriam, ‘because I just don’t make any calls.’

‘What’s the story about?’

‘The story?’

‘The novel. The plot. The thing you are writing.’ Honey Kumar wanted Miriam to stay for as long as possible, novelist or not. He fancied he might offer her a table and chair by the window of his room so that he could watch her write naked, perhaps help her out as she struggled with a particularly exacting thought or a complicated plot point. What was it about Miriam that so altered his mood? The biblical urge to procreate, he thought, mocking himself vaguely. The truth was he didn’t like children, or the idea of bring a new life to light: a bawling piglet of a baby held up for all to see before it was duly returned to its mother seemed such an odd thing—as if any of it could last, neither the mother, nor the baby. Yes, it was 150 grams then, he thought, maybe a little more now, that’s what it was about. He was the most afraid that evening when Father Almeida weighed his balls. ‘Surely you must have a rough idea?’

‘It’s about two young people, a man and a woman, and a dentist.’

‘A dentist?’ Honey Kumar nearly smiled. ‘A dentist. The man and woman suffer from bad teeth? The dentist gets the wrong ones?’

‘No,’ Miriam said, blushing. Just extend my visa, please, and let me go, she thought. ‘The dentist takes on the dimensions of a political leader, say, General Mihad. Someone who makes the right sounds and does the wrong things. The girl must find exactly how her mind works in relation to power.’ Desire and power, she thought.

Excerpted from Hadal (272 pages, ₹ 499), with permission from Fourth Estate.