The Storyteller by Adib Khan Page B

head and muttered words that invoked the forces of the universe, the spirits that guarded the body and the djinns who were the custodians of Delhi. She blew on my face and spat near my feet. I stood mesmerised, awed by the conviction she had in her ability to protect me. Eyes closed, she lapsed into a brooding silence. Carrying incense sticks in both hands, Gulbadan walked around me in a circle. I was sprinkled with rosewater, and my forehead was rubbed with a coarse sandalwood powder.
    ‘He will survive.’ Baji opened her eyes after pronouncing the definitive words with a calm authority, as if she had concluded a satisfactory arrangement with Fate about my safety.
    Chaman beamed and clapped politely. There were audible sighs from around the courtyard. We bowed in deference to Baji’s mysterious powers and then headed towards the entrance.
    Baji called me back. She took a beaded necklace from under a bolster and dangled it in front of me. ‘Pretty, isn’t it?’ She rolled it over her lips and rubbed the beads on her cheeks.
    I was entranced by the shiny blueness of the glass orbs.
    ‘Wear it.’
    I couldn’t tell whether her wink was a gesture of friendliness, or a mildly flirtatious form of mockery.
    ‘And come back to tell me a story…a happy one without the pain of yearning or the hardship of suffering. Make me forget that I am imprisoned in a foreign place.’ She gripped my right hand in a desperate plea. I hid my embarrassment by admiring the necklace and rolling one of the beads between my right thumb and index finger. ‘A story should soothe and heal. Don’t you know one in which people are happy?’ It was a child’s voice, pregnant with curiosity, vaguely aware of the fragments of a world she desperately desired to enter.
    ‘Baji…’ I grinned.
    She turned to look the other way.
    ‘Baji, I do not know what happiness is. I can tell you about loneliness. About hatred and meanness—I have grown up with them. I have to grapple with the problem of how to live with what I am. How to create meaning in the emptiness in which I float. I try to fill this bleak world by creating lives similar to my own. By creating people in situations similar to mine, I gain strength. I don’t feel lonely. They may be illusions but they renew my will to live. But they don’t make happy stories.’ I sounded clumsy. They were words she did not wish to hear. I was powerless to console her.
    She looked at me with wonderment, as though for the first time she realised that I was capable of experiencing all those feelings attributed to humans. I stared back at her. A silence of dissatisfaction enveloped us. I sensed darkness…and cold. I could have laughed, a cynical expression of the absurdity that confronted us. A hijra was asking a loathsome dwarf to produce illusions of contentment, to provide temporary relief for her chronic pains.
    And me? What about me? I wanted to ask. Who will be my physician? Who can nourish my vanity? I have to do it myself.
    Her eyes moistened. I stood unmoved, unable to afford the luxury of pity. I hoped that she read my understanding of herplight in the silence. We were a part of the debris on which civilisations constructed their symbols of success. Under the most magnificent buildings lay dirt. Apparently insignificant and useless. But without it, could there be reminders of what man was capable of achieving? We, too, had a hidden part to play in life…
    I could not accuse Baji of selfishness. Beneath a compelling need to hide, not so much from the world but from ourselves, was an instinctive desire for love. It was a quest that we shared.
    ‘Do you ever feel the need to be loved?’
    ‘My only urge is to survive. A roti …sleep. To get through the day without injury.’
    ‘And nothing else?’
    To lie with a woman. Touch her softness. Feel love and all that is supposed to be tender about life. Enter her and make my contribution to creation. I even dream of firmly fleshed boys. I like to