East, West Read Free Page B

This is All-India Radio!’

    Time passed. Ram continued to carry the invisible radio around town. One year passed. Still his caricatures of the radio channel filled the air in the streets. But when I saw him now, there was a new thing in his face, a strained thing, as if he were having to make a phenomenal effort, which was much more tiring than driving a rickshaw, more tiring even than pulling a rickshaw containing a thief’s widow and her five living children and the ghosts of two dead ones; as if all the energy of his young body was being poured into that fictional space between his ear and his hand, and he was trying to bring the radio into existence by a mighty, and possibly fatal, act of will.
    I felt most helpless, I can tell you, because I had divined that Ram had poured into the idea of the radio all his worries and regrets about what he had done, and that if the dream were to die he would be forced to face the full gravity of his crime against his own body, to understand that the thief’s widow had turned him, before she married him, into a thief of a stupid and terrible kind, because she had made him rob himself.
    And then the white caravan came back to its place under the banyan tree and I knew there was nothing to be done, because Ram would certainly come to get his gift.

    He did not come for one day, then for two, and I learned afterwards that he had not wished to seem greedy; he didn’t want the health officer to think he was desperate for the radio. Besides, he was half hoping they would come over and give it to him at his place, perhaps with some kind of small, formal presentation ceremony. A fool is a fool and there is no accounting for his notions.
    On the third day he came. Ringing his bicycle-bell and imitating weather forecasts, ear cupped as usual, he arrived at the caravan. And in the rickshaw behind him sat the thief’s widow, the witch, who had not been able to resist coming along to watch her companion’s destruction.
    It did not take very long.
    Ram went into the caravan gaily, waving at his arm-banded cronies who were guarding it against the anger of the people, and I am told – for I had left the scene to spare myself the pain – that his hair was well-oiled and his clothes were freshly starched. The thief’s widow did not move from the rickshaw, but sat there with a black sari pulled over her head, clutching at her children as if they were straws.
    After a short time there were sounds of disagreement inside the caravan, and then louder noises still, andfinally the youths in armbands went in to see what was becoming, and soon after that Ram was frogmarched out by his drinking-chums, and his hair-grease was smudged on to his face and there was blood coming from his mouth. His hand was no longer cupped by his ear.
    And still – they tell me – the thief’s black widow did not move from her place in the rickshaw, although they dumped her husband in the dust.
    Yes, I know, I’m an old man, my ideas are wrinkled with age, and these days they tell me sterilisation and God knows what is necessary, and maybe I’m wrong to blame the widow as well – why not? Maybe all the views of the old can be discounted now, and if that’s so, let it be. But I’m telling this story and I haven’t finished yet.
    Some days after the incident at the caravan I saw Ramani selling his rickshaw to the old Muslim crook who runs the bicycle-repair shop. When he saw me watching, Ram came to me and said, ‘Goodbye, teacher sahib, I am off to Bombay, where I will become a bigger film star than Shashi Kapoor or Amitabh Bachchan even.’
    ‘ “ I am off,” you say?’ I asked him. ‘Are you perhaps travelling alone?’
    He stiffened. The thief’s widow had already taught him not to be humble in the presence of elders.
    ‘My wife and children will come also,’ he said. It was the last time we spoke. They left that same day on the down train.
    After some months had passed I got his first letter, which was