Aerogrammes: And Other Stories Read online

  Imam gets to his feet, heaving. Something bounces lightly off his back. He whirls around to find a beheaded flower at his feet. Someone else tosses him a silver pocket watch. Imam turns from one side to the other; the men are roaring. It takes him a dizzying moment to realize they are roaring for him.

  Of the fight with Lemm, a reporter from Health & Strength goes into rapture: “That really was a wonderful combat—a combat in which both men wrestled like masters of the art.… Let us have a few more big matches like unto that, and I tell you straight that the grappling game will soon become the greatest game of all.”

  In the two weeks that follow, Gama and Imam defeat every wrestler who will accept the challenge. Though Gama the Great commands the most public attention, a dedicated sect of Imam devotees takes shape. They mint him with a new name: the Panther of the Punjab. They contend that the Panther is really the superior of the two, citing the blur of his bare brown feet, so nimble they make an elephant of every opponent. Gama may be stronger, but Imam has the broader arsenal of holds and locks and throws, as seen in his victories over Deriaz and Cherpillod, the latter Frenchman so frustrated that he stomped off to his dressing room midway through the match and refused to come out. Within a year or two, they claim, Imam will surpass Gama.

  Gama listens in silence when Imam relays such passages. He betrays no emotion, though his fingers tend to tap against his glass of yogurt milk.

  Baron Helmuth von Baumgarten is the only critic to speak in political terms, a realm unfamiliar to both Gama and Imam. “If the Indian wrestlers continue to win,” the baron writes, with typical inflammatory flair, “their victories will spur on those dusky subjects who continue to menace the integrity of the British Empire.”

  And where most articles include a photo of Gama or Imam, this one displays a photo of a young Indian man in an English suit, with sculpted curls around a center part as straight as a blade. This is Madan Lal Dhingra, the baron explains, a student who, several months earlier, walked into an open street, revolver in hand, and shot a British government official seven times in the face. Before Dhingra could turn the revolver on himself, he was subdued, arrested, tried, and hanged.

  Imam looks over Gama’s shoulder at the article. They stare in silence at the soft-skinned boy with the starched white collar choking his throat. He looks much like the interpreters who sometimes tag along with the English journalists, a few stitches of hair across their upper lips, still boys to the mothers they must have left behind.

  Gama folds the paper roughly, muttering, “Half of it is nonsense, what they write.” He tosses the newspaper on the coffee table and goes upstairs. This clipping they will not take back home.

  Imam remains in the sitting room, waiting until he can hear the floorboards creaking overhead. From his kurta pocket, he removes the pocket watch he has been keeping on his person ever since it landed at his feet. The silver disk, better than any medal, warms his palm. He draws a fingertip over the engraved lines, each as fine as a feline whisker.

  As word spreads of the Lion and the Panther of the Punjab, all the European wrestlers fall silent but one—Stanislaus Zbyszko, the winner of the Greco-Roman world championship tournament at the Casino de Paris four years ago, ranked number one in the world before his more recent scandal with Yousuf the Terrible. This time, Zbyszko is looking to rebuild his name and promises a match with no foul play. He and Gama will face off at the John Bull Tournament in early July.

  “This is it,” Mr. Benjamin says to Gama. “You pin him, you’ll be world champion. You—” Here he jabs a finger at Gama’s chest. “Rustom! E! Zamana!” Mr. Benjamin’s pronunciation brings a smile to Gama’s face.

  Imam is less amused. He detects a growing whiff of greed about Mr. Benjamin in the way he goads Gama toward desire and impatience, the very emotions they have been taught to hold at bay. Just as troubling is his refusal to offer a clear figure of ticket sales, though he promises to give them their earnings in one bulk sum at the end.

  Out of habit and innocence, Gama puts his faith in Mr. Benjamin. Through him, Gama dispatches a single message in Sporting Life: he will throw the Pole three times in the space of an hour.

  Imam has seen pictures of Zbyszko: the fused boulders of muscle, the bald head like the mean end of a battering ram. Even hanging by his sides, his arms are a threat. Gama has seen the pictures too, but they never speak of Zbyszko, or his size, or his titles. They refer only to the match.

  News of the bout spreads to India. Mr. Mishra, their Bengali patron, writes Gama a rousing letter, imploring him to prove to the world that “India is not only a land of soft-bodied coolies and clerks.” Mishra rhapsodizes over Bharat Mata and her hard-bodied sons, comparing Gama to the Hindu warrior Bhim. Regarding Europeans, Mr. Mishra has only one opinion: “All they know is croquet and crumpets.”

  Imam isn’t sure if Mr. Mishra knows that Zbyszko is a Pole. He considers writing back, then recalls the article with Dhingra’s picture, the words “traitor” and “treason” captioning it. Once, a journalist asked Gama and Imam about their political leanings, whether they considered themselves “moderate” or “radical.” Imam turned to Gama, each searching the other for the correct answer, before Gama, bewildered, said, “We are pehlwan.”

  Those words return to Imam later, as he sets a lit match to the letter. They do not want trouble. He holds the burning letter over the sink and then rinses the ash down the drain.

  A week remains until the John Bull Tournament. Life narrows its borders, contains only wrestling and meditation, bethak and dand, yakhi and ghee and almonds. Food is fuel, nothing more. They wake at three in the morning and retire at eight in the evening, their backs to the sunset slicing through the crack between the curtains.

  For all their time together, Imam has never felt further from his brother. He can detect some deep tidal turn within Gama, a gravity at his core, pulling him inward and inward again into a wordless coil of concentration. He declines all interviews. His gaze is a wall.

  Lying in bed, Imam imagines entering the ring with Zbyszko. He pictures himself executing an artful series of moves never witnessed on these shores, the Flying Cobra perhaps, an overhead lift, a twirl and a toss. The papers would remember him all over again. Twitching with energy, he can hardly sleep.

  One day, he upends Gama with the Flying Cobra. Imam knows he should withdraw, but something snaps in him, and it happens in a blink: Imam dives and pins his brother.

  Imam lies there, wide-eyed, panting. Beneath him is Gama the Great, Rustom-e-Hind, Boy Hero of Bethaks with his cheek against the mat. No one has ever pinned him, until now. “Get up,” Gama says.

  Imam springs to his feet, embarrassed. He knows better than to offer his brother a hand. Somehow he wants Gama to strike out at him, to rear up in anger or indignation.

  Gama sits for a moment, catching his breath, before he hoists himself up and shifts his jaw right and left, back into place.

  “Again,” Gama says, tugging at his langot. “Again.”

  July arrives and, on a damp evening, the John Bull Tournament. Gama and Imam enter a music hall with cut-out cartoons of clowns between the windows, and a painted lady in a twirling skirt, her knees exposed. Imam does his best to ignore these ivory knees. White lights reading HOLBORN EMPIRE silver the cobbled street below, the stones shining like fish scales.

  Inside, the arena smells unpleasantly of wet wool. Mr. Benjamin keeps twisting around in his seat to take in the hundreds of spectators. “Sold out,” he enunciates to Imam, turning his hands upward. “No more tickets. None!”

  Imam says, “Yes, splendid,” unable to remove his gaze from Zbyszko. He stands in the opposite corner of the ring, twisting his torso from side to side. He seems larger than in his pictures, his head so prominent and bald that his ears are reduced to small, pink cups. In the ring, Gama does one bethak after another, taking no notice of his opponent.

  Finished with bethaks, Gama turns his back on Zbyszko and jogs in place, opening and closing his hands
. Imam realizes that he is warming up more than usual, as if to keep his mind occupied. The day before, Gama looked up from his chicken broth and said, “I heard he once squeezed a man unconscious.”

  Imam dismissed this as nonsense, but they said nothing else for several minutes, picturing Zbyszko and his victim, limp as a pelt at his feet.

  The bell clangs. Gama lunges, felling Zbyszko with a neat foot hook. He clamps Zbyszko with a half nelson, flings him over, and pins his shoulder to the mat. Zbyszko keeps his other shoulder raised as long as he can, quivering. Imam leans forward, wills the other shoulder to kiss the mat.

  But now, a shock: Zbyszko wriggles out of Gama’s clutch.

  Zbyszko then deploys a move so bizarre that Imam thinks it a practical joke. Without warning, Zbyszko falls to the mat on all fours. Like a farm animal.

  Gama tries to push him over or pull him up by the waist, but Zbyszko bears down, muttering as if to brace himself against the hurled curses of the spectators. He will not move. Gama tries the wrist lock, the quarter nelson—every hold he can imagine—but Zbyszko will not be thrown; nor will he attempt a throw.

  A tiresome hour passes, for the most part, in deadlock. People bark, pitch insults and peanut hulls, cursing Zybszko more than Gama, though neither is spared. Imam sits with his hand propped against his mouth, speechless. Even if he could be heard over the din, he wouldn’t know what to say.

  At one point Gama’s hands fall to his sides. He looks helplessly at Imam, who shakes his head.

  A crumpled wad of newspaper bounces off Zbyszko’s rounded back. Spectators thunder to the exits. The match is eventually stopped, and it is decided that both parties will wrestle again the following Saturday.

  •

  Imam opens the door to Gama’s bedroom. In all the weeks they have been staying in this house, he has never seen his brother’s room until now, the day before they are leaving. He enters to find a vast bed, Gama’s suitcase lying open upon it. On the nightstand is a glass of water, a few yellow wildflowers wilting over the rim. Imam stares at the sullen blooms, unable to imagine his brother bending to pick them.

  Gama gets up suddenly from the window seat, as if caught in a private moment. He asks if Imam has packed.

  “I was helping Ahmed,” Imam says. “His is the heaviest trunk.” The cook brought an endless supply of ghee and almonds, not knowing when they would return.

  Imam runs a hand over the oak footboard and peers into the suitcase. Among the clothing, Gama has nested a trio of paper-wrapped soaps for their mother and a tin of Crawford’s biscuits in the shape of a barrel organ, with finely painted green wheels and a tiny monkey extending its hat. Mr. Benjamin procured the gifts for them. He has promised to send along their earnings once their bills are settled up, a promise that Gama doesn’t care enough about to question.

  Wedged in between the gifts is the John Bull belt. Imam holds it up to his face. The leather is soft and pliant, the center plate broad and bordered in gold scrollwork. On the plate is a painting of a heavyset man wearing britches tucked into his boots and a black top hat. This, presumably, is John Bull, and peering from behind his ankles is a bulldog who shares his build. Englishmen and their dogs—Imam will never understand the attraction. There are a great many things he will never understand.

  Gama was awarded the belt two days before, after showing up for the rematch only to learn that Zbyszko had fled the country. Gama won by forfeit. Only a handful of people clapped as Gama received the belt from the referee and raised it limply over his head. He never even removed his turban and robe.

  The next day, a journalist called the house, wanting a comment on Percy Woodmore’s recent opinion in Health & Strength, which stated that Gama “showed a surprising ignorance of strategy” in the match against Zbyszko. The journalist also referred to rumors, hinted at in Woodmore’s piece, that Zbyszko had secretly agreed to flee the country if Gama paid him a percentage of his winnings. The journalist said, “Hello?” several times before Imam set the phone back on its hook.

  Imam replaces the belt and peers around it. “You forgot the newspapers,” he says. “Everyone will want to see them.”

  Gama shakes his head. “There’s no room.” He shuts and buckles the suitcase. Imam moves to help him, but Gama has already hefted the box in both hands, and eases it onto the floor, next to his battered leather valise.

  He smooths down the bedspread and, with his back to Imam, casually asks if the newspapers have said anything about the John Bull Tournament.

  “Just the usual nonsense,” Imam says.

  “But someone called yesterday. You looked upset.”

  “Oh, what does it matter.” Imam squints through the window, as if the sky has claimed all his attention. He can feel his brother’s eyes on him. “We are going home.”

  “You aren’t telling me something.” When Imam doesn’t answer, Gama raises his voice. “I am not a child, Imam.”

  Imam turns to face his brother, who stands rigid with irritation. “Some are saying that you paid Zbyszko to run away. They say that’s how you got the belt.”

  Gama blinks as this news crashes over him. He takes a step back, his hand fumbling for the edge of the bed before he sits. He has never looked more like a child, Imam thinks, even when he was a child.

  “But who …,” Gama begins, then drops his gaze to the floor and does not speak for a long time.

  “It’s just a rumor,” Imam says quickly. “A stupid rumor. Back home, you are a hero.” He tells of the telegram that just arrived from Mishra, reporting the top headline from The Times of India: GAMA THE GREATEST—INDIA WINS WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP.

  Gama gives a weak smile. “Is that what they’ve decided.”

  “You have the belt to prove it,” Imam says. For a long moment, Gama looks over his shoulder at the suitcase but does not go near it. “It’s true—”

  “No, chotu. I am just a pawn.”

  He says this so softly he could be talking to himself, if not for that one tender word, which Imam has not heard from him in years. It is as if they are eight and twelve again, and Gama has set him apart from everyone else—chotu. Imam feels himself rising to the word. Inglorious as it is, this is something that for once only he can be. Only he knows to say nothing, to rest his hand at the back of his brother’s neck, to let his grip say everything, or simply: Not to me.

  What to Do with Henry

  • • •

  Saffa couldn’t tell how long the chimpanzee had been hanging by its ankle from the ndokuwuli tree. There was a frailty to the thing, suspended but still. The chimpanzee had to be female, judging by the baby huddled directly beneath her, squeaking hoarsely and baring its teeth. Of baby chimpanzees, he had heard that they never left their mothers, dead or alive or hanging by a single limb.

  The trap had been set by Saffa’s uncle, who owned the surrounding papaya trees and was fed up with marauding monkeys. He had sent Saffa to check the traps that morning, and at the time, Saffa was pleased to be dispatched on what he considered a man’s errand. He was seventeen, and when his father’s friends came by the house, they still sent him to the kiosk to bring them back cold drinks, as though he were a boy. If only he were on his bicycle right now, rather than here, a rack of bottled beers clinking in his wire basket.

  Saffa glanced at the long, curled toes. According to the paramount chief, he wasn’t supposed to set eyes on a dead chimpanzee, let alone kill it; the chimpanzee was a sacred animal, like the leopard and the bush cow, off-limits to hunters and farmers. But now what? He might have turned away and headed home and made himself forget everything were it not for the baby.

  Saffa gathered the baby into his large, awkward hands, its terror reverberating through his palms. Its head was smaller than a mango, and its eyes were liquid and searching. He felt sorry for the orphaned thing, but ah!—a flash of hope. He knew exactly what to do with it.

  He took the baby chimp to Nguebu Market. Sometimes Peace Corps people drifted through the market, their gazes casting a
bout for souvenirs; they were known to pay high prices for baby chimps, which they liked to keep as pets. The Peace Corps people were built of a mystifying courage that made them unafraid of the animals those babies would become one day, wild and possessed of the strength of five men.

  Saffa set up a stool beside the other vendors who lined Mahei Boima Road, which was so choked with commerce that hardly a bicycle could pass. People forged their way through on foot: a woman with a plate of pineapple on her head, a boy with a tower of twelve plastic buckets balanced on his own. Saffa put the baby in a cardboard box and waited. He tried to appear cool against the questioning eyes of the vendors, tried to ignore the mewling sound that the baby had begun to make. He fixed a careless gaze on the rice seller across from him, whose own baby straddled her back within a red wrap, perhaps the same placid position in which the baby chimp had been before its mother took one wrong step and flew into the sky.

  •

  A half hour later, a pair of tourists made their way down the road, a white woman behind sunglasses and a golden little girl in a frothy Western dress, with the dark braids of a local. The little girl held the white woman’s hand and trailed behind. He watched their twined fingers, the dark and light of them.

  The white woman stopped before the cardboard box. In her, Saffa saw the yawning unhappiness of rich people, a kind of boredom with life that had brought her here, along with so many other tourists, to give color to her life. But Saffa did not fawn and pander like the handicraft people when they dealt with tourists. He remained on the stool, pinching the calluses at the base of his fingers.

  When the white woman peered into the box, the baby chimp raised its hands to her. Saffa said, “He want you to carry him.”

  The woman glanced at Saffa, obviously surprised that he knew English. She had no idea that he had been the smartest of his form-five class, that he had taught himself English from movies. He spoke a few words of Krio to the little girl, which made her smile. Somewhat relaxed, the woman picked up the baby chimp, and it sat quietly in the crook of her arm.