Jhabua was fourteen when he first heard the story of Angulimala from his biological father. The adolescent was intensely moved by the Buddhist folktale of a violent and vicious serial killer and particularly intrigued by the murderer’s fetish for wearing a garland around his neck of the little fingers of his victims. Here at last was a role model worth emulating.
“Fingers means penises of course,” annotated Jayadev for the benefit of his biological son. He was generous in the dissemination of knowledge, of everything. “He hung around his neck a necklace of nine hundred and ninety-nine penises. When dried, they mustn’t weigh much. Of course, they can’t utter the word ‘penis’ in the same breath as the name of the Divine One, and in a tale that children will hear and everything, hence little fingers. Now do my left thigh, my son.”
Obediently, Jhabua stopped massaging his father’s right calf and moved upwards.
“His one thousandth victim was going to be either his mother or the Buddha.”
“Baba, when I grow up, I’m going to call myself Anguli. And Baba, how come his mother had a penis?”
Jayadev chuckled at the question, a deep and manly expression of affectionate amusement at the intelligence of his progeny. “Angulimala thought she had, my son. He had problems, you know, with knowledge and perception, with women, with the world. He had never seen his mother naked, remember.” Under the ministrations of his son’s strong hands, Jayadev, on the mat on the mud floor of the courtyard, slowly and luxuriously wriggled his hips to give room to the stirring in his loins.
While kneading his father’s body, Jhabua Anguli daydreamed of who his first victim would be. Bakra, his stepbrother, who had scurried up and down the village all day running errands for Jayadev, trying to impress him with his filial devotion, returning even at that moment, well past ten at night, with a second bottle from Ghoru at the hooch shop – Bakra was an obvious first choice. He was stupid and scheming and hurt easily. “Nine hundred and ninety-nine is a lot of people to be so annoyed with as to kill. Even ninety-nine, Baba. Actually, even nine.” Anguli paused to think of nine people whom he wanted to kill. His schoolteacher. Slap certainly, and rap his knuckles with a footruler, but kill? “Was Angulimala never caught? Didn’t the police go after him?”
“He killed whoever came to catch him.” Jayadev, bored with the travails of the serial killer, turned on his side so that Anguli could do his hips while he eyed Bakra’s mother at her chores. She was large and there was much to eye. He hummed under his breath a tune that not even Manna De could have recognized as his Balraj Sahni number from Waqt. It was one of Jayadev’s favourite songs and, having remarked over the years how his rendition of it never failed somehow to make the thighs of his women more fragrant, he often sang it sotto voce before and during lovemaking. It had its effect, sure enough. Bakra’s mother continued to wash up her pots and pans in the corner under the two banana trees, but she tightened her sari around her torso – ostensibly to protect herself from her occasional husband’s gaze, but in effect to tease more of her skin with the feel of its flimsy material. Beneath the garment, her body seemed to stretch and curl up and stretch again, like a feline’s before it settles down to enjoying being itself. And in a minute, both father and son were certain that they could detect in the air a faint but distinct, distracting odour of musk.
“But Baba, Angulimala had a father too? He went to school? I mean, once upon a time, he must’ve been normal?”
“Of course he was normal, in that he wanted to be happy. And yes, he had a father, Garga by name.”
Jayadev sighed with sorrow at having to forsake a pleasure even if only to move on to another, arose from the mat and knotted his lungi. Before getting up himself, his son first screwed tight the cap of the bottle of mustard oil: he was a methodical boy. When he decided to murder somebody, he would wait and plan and so influence events that conditions would be moulded to become just right. At fourteen, he was already taller than his father who, in answer to his son’s questions, first burped long and baritonally.
Jayadev then replied to them with his habitual patience and good humour. He was an intrinsically magnanimous man, perhaps because he had never had anything material to share, and he was cultured despite his illiteracy. What he could not learn from books, his curiosity had picked up during his excursions and pilgrimages up and down the country. Most crucially, his wanderings had given him a sense of geography, and the diversity of the world had provided latitude to his thought. He knew his strengths and weaknesses, he was aware of all that he did not know. Women were his weakness, and his strength his way with them. Beyond that, he didn’t much care, the world was welcome to its atrocities. One just looked away from its ordure to marvel instead at its wonders. They were everywhere, in all seasons and all ages. The young Angulimala, for instance, so many centuries ago, travelling all those hundreds of kilometres from Kosala to Takshasila in search of learning, that was a wonder.
“In search of learning?” wondered Anguli. “Or to get away from home?”
But the rest of the life and times of an ancient serial killer, the boy had to glean from other sources. For one, Jayadev shooed everyone away that evening so that he could spend some quality time alone with Bakra’s mother in the single room of their hovel. And then, next morning, he with his aphrodisiacs and cures and massage oils was off again on his travels; Agra first, then south to Gwalior and east to Kanpur, and from there down to Bhopal and Indore and at last south-west to Bombay for a glimpse of the sea. He journeyed for months at a time and there was method in his meandering, for he took care, twice a year, to call on and spend time with his most faithful clients. They were all women. With each, he donned a different identity and a different name, choosing invariably though, being an intense devotee, only from the appellations of Krishna. He treated men too, of course, for rheumatic pains and incontinence, but somehow they were all cured reasonably quickly. A few weeks of ingesting his sweetish black pills that so resembled goat droppings, and his male patients for instance stopped pissing and farting at the same time or found that their pubic hair had started curling again. But his women patients took forever to say that they didn’t need to see him any more.
Now and then, he played the flute to amuse and beguile them, to distract them from their discontent. None of the males of those females – Lucknow’s film distributor or Jabalpur’s tobacco merchant, Surat’s building contractor or Bombay’s car dealer or Baroda’s flesh trader – none of the males disliked Jayadev. Indeed, at times, they drifted in first to hear him play before consulting him. They warmed to his fetching, vaguely feminine manner; it even gave a couple of them the added pleasure of some lascivious imaginings.
He was unfailingly careful with the women, Jayadev. He carried in his sacks several odoriferous ointments to prevent contraception; thus none of the children fathered by him was an accident. He wasn’t certain of the number but they weren’t many; they didn’t dot the landscape and, in any case, all save one had been passed off by their mothers as the offspring of their putative fathers. Anguli was the one whom Jayadev had wanted to retain for himself as a sort of living keepsake – a long story, that; and amongst them all, Anguli was the only one with murder on his mind.
Fratricide succeeded by a long, long journey. Anguli was bewitched by the idea of travelling an impossible distance in search of learning, of an expedition that would take months and months and, expanding his lungs and chest and mind, allow him to breathe fully. A new man, he would return only to bed and strangle his stepmother. Life could be perfect. Travel. Study. Take time off to kill.
“How far, sirji, is Takshasila from Kosala?”
“What? What are they? Don’t play the fool, you abandoned bastard, and don’t try to be too smart, okay? Here, let me see the knuckles of your right hand.”
Excerpted with permission from Fairy Tales at Fifty, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Harper-Collins India
We welcome your comments at
letters@scroll.in.
“Fingers means penises of course,” annotated Jayadev for the benefit of his biological son. He was generous in the dissemination of knowledge, of everything. “He hung around his neck a necklace of nine hundred and ninety-nine penises. When dried, they mustn’t weigh much. Of course, they can’t utter the word ‘penis’ in the same breath as the name of the Divine One, and in a tale that children will hear and everything, hence little fingers. Now do my left thigh, my son.”
Obediently, Jhabua stopped massaging his father’s right calf and moved upwards.
“His one thousandth victim was going to be either his mother or the Buddha.”
“Baba, when I grow up, I’m going to call myself Anguli. And Baba, how come his mother had a penis?”
Jayadev chuckled at the question, a deep and manly expression of affectionate amusement at the intelligence of his progeny. “Angulimala thought she had, my son. He had problems, you know, with knowledge and perception, with women, with the world. He had never seen his mother naked, remember.” Under the ministrations of his son’s strong hands, Jayadev, on the mat on the mud floor of the courtyard, slowly and luxuriously wriggled his hips to give room to the stirring in his loins.
While kneading his father’s body, Jhabua Anguli daydreamed of who his first victim would be. Bakra, his stepbrother, who had scurried up and down the village all day running errands for Jayadev, trying to impress him with his filial devotion, returning even at that moment, well past ten at night, with a second bottle from Ghoru at the hooch shop – Bakra was an obvious first choice. He was stupid and scheming and hurt easily. “Nine hundred and ninety-nine is a lot of people to be so annoyed with as to kill. Even ninety-nine, Baba. Actually, even nine.” Anguli paused to think of nine people whom he wanted to kill. His schoolteacher. Slap certainly, and rap his knuckles with a footruler, but kill? “Was Angulimala never caught? Didn’t the police go after him?”
“He killed whoever came to catch him.” Jayadev, bored with the travails of the serial killer, turned on his side so that Anguli could do his hips while he eyed Bakra’s mother at her chores. She was large and there was much to eye. He hummed under his breath a tune that not even Manna De could have recognized as his Balraj Sahni number from Waqt. It was one of Jayadev’s favourite songs and, having remarked over the years how his rendition of it never failed somehow to make the thighs of his women more fragrant, he often sang it sotto voce before and during lovemaking. It had its effect, sure enough. Bakra’s mother continued to wash up her pots and pans in the corner under the two banana trees, but she tightened her sari around her torso – ostensibly to protect herself from her occasional husband’s gaze, but in effect to tease more of her skin with the feel of its flimsy material. Beneath the garment, her body seemed to stretch and curl up and stretch again, like a feline’s before it settles down to enjoying being itself. And in a minute, both father and son were certain that they could detect in the air a faint but distinct, distracting odour of musk.
“But Baba, Angulimala had a father too? He went to school? I mean, once upon a time, he must’ve been normal?”
“Of course he was normal, in that he wanted to be happy. And yes, he had a father, Garga by name.”
Jayadev sighed with sorrow at having to forsake a pleasure even if only to move on to another, arose from the mat and knotted his lungi. Before getting up himself, his son first screwed tight the cap of the bottle of mustard oil: he was a methodical boy. When he decided to murder somebody, he would wait and plan and so influence events that conditions would be moulded to become just right. At fourteen, he was already taller than his father who, in answer to his son’s questions, first burped long and baritonally.
Jayadev then replied to them with his habitual patience and good humour. He was an intrinsically magnanimous man, perhaps because he had never had anything material to share, and he was cultured despite his illiteracy. What he could not learn from books, his curiosity had picked up during his excursions and pilgrimages up and down the country. Most crucially, his wanderings had given him a sense of geography, and the diversity of the world had provided latitude to his thought. He knew his strengths and weaknesses, he was aware of all that he did not know. Women were his weakness, and his strength his way with them. Beyond that, he didn’t much care, the world was welcome to its atrocities. One just looked away from its ordure to marvel instead at its wonders. They were everywhere, in all seasons and all ages. The young Angulimala, for instance, so many centuries ago, travelling all those hundreds of kilometres from Kosala to Takshasila in search of learning, that was a wonder.
“In search of learning?” wondered Anguli. “Or to get away from home?”
But the rest of the life and times of an ancient serial killer, the boy had to glean from other sources. For one, Jayadev shooed everyone away that evening so that he could spend some quality time alone with Bakra’s mother in the single room of their hovel. And then, next morning, he with his aphrodisiacs and cures and massage oils was off again on his travels; Agra first, then south to Gwalior and east to Kanpur, and from there down to Bhopal and Indore and at last south-west to Bombay for a glimpse of the sea. He journeyed for months at a time and there was method in his meandering, for he took care, twice a year, to call on and spend time with his most faithful clients. They were all women. With each, he donned a different identity and a different name, choosing invariably though, being an intense devotee, only from the appellations of Krishna. He treated men too, of course, for rheumatic pains and incontinence, but somehow they were all cured reasonably quickly. A few weeks of ingesting his sweetish black pills that so resembled goat droppings, and his male patients for instance stopped pissing and farting at the same time or found that their pubic hair had started curling again. But his women patients took forever to say that they didn’t need to see him any more.
Now and then, he played the flute to amuse and beguile them, to distract them from their discontent. None of the males of those females – Lucknow’s film distributor or Jabalpur’s tobacco merchant, Surat’s building contractor or Bombay’s car dealer or Baroda’s flesh trader – none of the males disliked Jayadev. Indeed, at times, they drifted in first to hear him play before consulting him. They warmed to his fetching, vaguely feminine manner; it even gave a couple of them the added pleasure of some lascivious imaginings.
He was unfailingly careful with the women, Jayadev. He carried in his sacks several odoriferous ointments to prevent contraception; thus none of the children fathered by him was an accident. He wasn’t certain of the number but they weren’t many; they didn’t dot the landscape and, in any case, all save one had been passed off by their mothers as the offspring of their putative fathers. Anguli was the one whom Jayadev had wanted to retain for himself as a sort of living keepsake – a long story, that; and amongst them all, Anguli was the only one with murder on his mind.
Fratricide succeeded by a long, long journey. Anguli was bewitched by the idea of travelling an impossible distance in search of learning, of an expedition that would take months and months and, expanding his lungs and chest and mind, allow him to breathe fully. A new man, he would return only to bed and strangle his stepmother. Life could be perfect. Travel. Study. Take time off to kill.
“How far, sirji, is Takshasila from Kosala?”
“What? What are they? Don’t play the fool, you abandoned bastard, and don’t try to be too smart, okay? Here, let me see the knuckles of your right hand.”
Excerpted with permission from Fairy Tales at Fifty, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Harper-Collins India