Mr. Shyam Gupta’s marriage was one of those unforeseeable debacles that one would attribute to the absence of any sort of misgiving at the outset – one of those escapades on which energetic men venture and realize when it’s absolutely too late that they had been ill-advised to have ventured – the perfect example of a reckless man’s ambitious attempt at proving to his enormous joint family that he was capable of bearing the responsibility of a family man by marrying the first woman he passed in the street. Fear of being thrown out of his brother’s house on the charges of being disloyal to his religion and thus of losing his only means of subsistence – since that rundown of a school he owned did not pay nearly enough to satisfy his basic needs – was the only thing that prevented him from breaking his marriage to the odious Kusum Gupta.
What had he not done for her? he thought bitterly one morning as he sat at a small unobtrusive table that stood oddly next to the larger, grander one that only his brother’s family was permitted to use as a special luxury – one of the perks of being the actual owner of the house – reading the morning newspaper and smiling wistfully to himself as he came across the numerous articles about celebrity women kicking their husbands out of their houses and celebrity men kicking their wives out of theirs, and he envied them greatly.
What had he not done for her? Kusum Gupta had been a worthless slum dweller a mere twenty-five years ago, completely illiterate, ignorant about things as basic as the fact that she lived in the city, and unsure about her own existence. He had given her the life that she had never had, taught her to read things she would never have known, to speak things she would never have spoken… Shyam Gupta shuddered. The last bit, he thought, was one of his biggest mistakes – the result of having spent an hour too long in the wine cellar. There was not a day he did not listen to his worthless wife say things no self-respecting woman would ever say in public or in private, to her husband or anybody else.
“Shyam,” said his brother, Ram Gupta, austerely one day. He had just been called an opprobrious name. “Something has to be done about Kusum.”
Shyam Gupta nodded gravely.
“I’ve thought the same thing for the last twenty-five years.”
Ram Gupta smiled sympathetically.
“Say,” he said. He had stumbled upon a bright idea. “Have you tried filing a divorce?”
Shyam Gupta shook his head.
“No,” he said. “You’re the one who told me never to speak of such things. You said that it was written in our Holy Texts – I forget which one – that a married couple is to remain a married couple for all eternity. The husband cannot abandon the wife, and the wife cannot abandon the husband. Of course, you never mentioned what would happen if the husband and the wife hated each other. But the general idea is that a couple needs to stick together until… well, until either the husband or the wife dies, of course.”
Ram Gupta was looking at him with a mild amusement in his eyes. It was he who had contrived that fictitious Holy Text in order to dissuade his brother from parting with his wife. He had feared that the neighbors would start spreading rumors about his family.
“How unfortunate,” said Ram Gupta. “I have no idea what you should do.”
A conspiratorial glint entered Shyam Gupta’s eye. The words “until one of them dies, of course” had become imprinted in his mind, making more sense with every passing moment.
“Ram,” said Shyam Gupta. “Do you have a butcher’s knife in the kitchen?”
Ram Gupta looked affronted.
“Shyam!” he said. “Do you know what you’re saying? We’re vegetarians – pure vegetarians! How could you expect me to have a butcher’s knife?” Shyam Gupta did not reply. “Incidentally, we do. My wife used it to – ahem – cut vegetables. You’ll find it in that drawer over there. Use it well.”
Ram Gupta’s wife had been found dead in her bedroom three years ago. Nobody knew how she died, and all that the police were able to conclude before they dropped the case in frustration was that somebody had decapitated her with a butcher’s knife. Coincidentally, the butcher’s knife in the kitchen had been found with dried blood on it. “You really need to wash this,” the officer had said meaningfully to Ram Gupta before officially closing the investigation.
Shyam Gupta nodded and got the butcher’s knife out of the drawer, studying it interestedly.
With an air of purpose he said, “Kusum should be out of the bathroom any minute now. Her five hours are nearly up. I’ll be waiting outside the door. When she comes out…” He sliced through an unsuspecting watermelon that was lying on the countertop with such violence that a passerby would have believed that he had something against the fruit.
“An excellent idea,” said Ram Gupta. “Take this from someone who has been in your position before and has sufficient experience in the art of butchery: use a plastic bag once the job is done. Put the body in it. I’ve been saving a particularly large one in the cabinet under the sink over there – you know, just in case.”
Shyam Gupta opened the cabinet and spotted the plastic bag, and along with it, a serious problem.
“Ram,” he said gravely. “Sunita’s in it.”
Sunita had been Ram Gupta’s wife.
Ram Gupta swore.
“So that’s where she’s been all these years! Her mother gave me hell when they couldn’t find her body for the funeral. There wasn’t a day she didn’t blame me for having misplaced it. So annoying she had become that I had to kill her. Well, anyway, think of something else to do with Kusum’s body once the deed is done.”
“Should I use a bed sheet?” asked Shyam Gupta. “They’re pretty big – even for someone who has an appetite like Kusum’s.”
“Bad idea,” said Ram Gupta. “I used bed sheets for my first wife, and the blood stains nearly gave the game away when the police came to investigate.” He had been married twice. “Luckily I was able to convince them that it was tomato ketchup. What I would suggest is that you use bubble wrap.”
“Bubble wrap?”
“Bubble wrap. It’s very effective. Thick enough to make sure the blood doesn’t trickle out when you don’t want it to, and bubbly enough to make sure the body doesn’t get damaged. Who knows? Ten years down the line, you will probably have forgotten how your dear wife looks. Then all you have to do is to walk over to your closet where you will have kept her body safely all those difficult years you had to spend in her absence, unwrap it, and behold her in her full youthful splendor – whatever that amounts to.”
Shyam Gupta nodded.
“Good idea. Although I doubt I shall ever feel the need to look at her face again. As a matter of fact, I don’t even know how it looks right now – I’ve never looked at her face before.”
Ram Gupta, who had, said, “You’re one of the luckier ones. Have I told you the story of the man who went to his brother’s wedding, expecting to see a beautiful bride, but finding upon arriving a hideous male in the female’s stead, and after the wedding was over, discovering that what he had initially taken for a hideous male was a female after all?”
“You haven’t.”
“Good,” said Ram Gupta. “You don’t want to hear it. You wouldn’t be able to sleep at night. Now go, Shyam, and may your enterprise thrive.”
Shyam Gupta nodded solemnly and proceeded upstairs to his wife’s bedroom, where he planted himself next to the bathroom door and waited patiently. He could hear the characteristic splashing sounds Kusum Gupta made while taking a bath – the sound of a heavy object repeatedly plunging itself into a bathtub that was too small for it. He absently ran a finger along the edge of the butcher’s knife and nodded in satisfaction as he observed a fine line of blood form on his skin.
“This can’t go wrong,” he said to himself, raising the butcher’s knife into the air. He would make a clean job of it. Kusum Gupta wouldn’t know what hit her.
And then all of a sudden the splashing sounds stopped, and Shyam Gupta knew that the decisive moment was fast approaching, and he would have to act. He tightened his grip on the butcher’s knife, staring fixedly at the doorknob that he knew would turn any moment then.
And then the doorknob turned. The fat, ugly form of Mrs. Shyam Gupta emerged from the bathroom, dressed in a bathrobe that barely covered the acreage of her body. Shyam Gupta swung the butcher’s knife. But nobody knew what happened next.
Shyam Gupta woke up in the hospital a week later.
“What… happened?” he said feebly. He was aware of a strange feeling of numbness. He found himself staring at a face, though he couldn’t really tell whose it was – his vision had become blurry.
“Dear, Shyam, it’s me,” said the face. “Kusum, your wife.”
The specious solicitousness in her voice convinced Shyam Gupta that it really was his wife.
“Kusum?” he said. “You’re here.” He said it as if where she should have been was inside a grave. “Why are you here?”
“What do you mean?” asked Kusum Gupta with a horrified gasp. “You expect me not to be with my husband when he gets himself badly injured? What kind of wife do you take me for?”
Shyam Gupta forbore to reply. He did not think it wise to let her know what he took her for, especially when he was the one in the hospital bed and she the one with the large anvil-like fists.
“I saw you lying unconscious on my bedroom floor when I came out after my morning bath, and I rushed you to the hospital. You had a butcher’s knife in your hand.”
Shyam Gupta stiffened.
“I… I did?” he said by way of absolving himself from the blame of attempting to murder his wife. “I did, did I? Who would have thought?”
“I thought you had committed suicide. One of your fingers was bleeding, too. Oh, dear, I was so worried.”
“What exactly happened?” asked Shyam Gupta, curious to find out how he had ended up on the floor when it should have been his wife.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I came out of the bathroom and turned to shut the door. My bottom bumped into something, and I turned again to see what it was. I couldn’t spot it, but then something caught my eye – it was you, lying on the floor with a knife in your hand and a bleeding finger… Oh, it was terrible!”
Everything became clear as daylight to Shyam Gupta. Kusum Gupta was in possession of a sizable bottom. Whenever she turned so much as ten degrees, her bottom swept through the air with the force of a thousand elephants in a violent stampede. It was a foolish mistake.
“I see,” he said. “When did the doctors say they would discharge me?”
“Not until the end of the month, of course,” said Kusum Gupta. “You’ve broken both your legs and five ribs, cracked your skull, lost several teeth, and are missing one of your kidneys. The doctor says you need to rest. And…”
“And what?”
“After the operation was over and they had fixed you up, I… I accidentally sat on one of your legs. The doctors said that they couldn’t repair it, and that you would walk with a limp for the rest of your life.”
Shyam Gupta sighed resignedly.
“Kusum,” he said. “You may go.”
“Go!” said Kusum Gupta in indignation. “Where do you expect me to go when you’re in the hospital?”
“Anywhere else, of course. If you stay here any longer, I will be in danger of dying.”
Kusum Gupta stared at Shyam Gupta incredulously.
“Is that the way to talk to someone who just saved your life? Fine, I’ll leave. But here’s a goodbye present.” She brought one of her massive anvil-like fists in contact with Shyam Gupta’s permanently damaged leg before leaving the room with dignity, her gait resembling a Spanish Galleon in sail.
Shyam Gupta stifled a scream.
* *
On their twenty-sixth wedding anniversary, Shyam Gupta decided to take Kusum Gupta to the new restaurant near their house – viz. Chutneys – hoping that the other diners would react to the sight of the woman inexorably devouring everything in the restaurant – edible and inedible – and succeed in evoking a sense of compunction in her. It had been almost a year since Shyam Gupta had attempted to liberate his wife from her fleshy prison and had failed, and he had since grudgingly reconciled himself to the fact that Kusum Gupta’s sojourn on Earth was nowhere near ending. The most he thought he could do by way of easing himself of the stress that came naturally with being Kusum Gupta’s husband was to teach her to live in this world as a normal, civilized human being.
“Look, Kusum,” he said when they had been seated at a table next to the window. “Look at the other diners. They don’t have more than one plateful of food to themselves.”
Kusum Gupta snorted derisively.
“So what?” she said. “I’m not a starver. Why should I pretend not to hunger?” Her vocabulary reflected her ingenuity.
“You don’t have to pretend,” said Shyam Gupta patiently. “Just don’t eat.”
“You silly man,” said Kusum Gupta in that boorish manner of hers, not bothering to keep her voice down. “Why did you bring me to a restaurant if you didn’t want me to eat?”
Shyam Gupta’s patience was wearing thin. He said nothing until the paneer butter masala was brought.
“That’s enough, Kusum,” he said when she had emptied the entire bowl onto her plate. “Leave some for me.”
“You silly man,” said Kusum Gupta. “Get your own order!”
“That was my order. Why don’t you get your own order?”
Kusum Gupta wouldn’t stand for such impertinence. She rose from her chair, resembling a mountain rising out of the ocean. The chair rose with her, for she had a sizable bottom.
“You talk to me like that?” she demanded, waving her stubby finger in Shyam Gupta’s face. “You talk to me like that!”
Shyam Gupta rose, too.
Kusum Gupta pulled the chair off her hindquarters, lifted it into the air, and swung it as if it were a baseball bat. It made contact with Shyam Gupta’s leg – the one that was permanently broken.
Shyam Gupta howled in pain and uttered a few of those swearwords that are acceptable in public. He rubbed and massaged his leg, but failed to assuage the pain. Then he was seized by that one thing that gives a man superhuman strength and enables him to overcome even the heaviest odds – a desire for revenge. In one swift move he lifted Kusum Gupta into the air and defenestrated her, the sound of the windowpane shattering drowning the swearwords she had chosen to use – the ones that were unacceptable in public. She landed in the streets below, flattening several cars and killing innumerable pedestrians. The Punjagutta Flyover collapsed into rubble in the resulting earthquake.
Kusum Gupta had sprained her neck.
* *
One day Shyam Gupta decided to yield to his ugly wife’s insistent importuning and took her to a store where they sold mirrors. Kusum Gupta wanted a new mirror. Her last mirror, like its innumerable predecessors, had spontaneously shattered when she had stood before it. It was inexplicable.
“Kusum,” said Shyam Gupta said when they had entered the store and watched the hundreds of mirrors around them shatter, much to the storeowner’s chagrin. “I think it has something to do with your ugliness. Why else would the mirrors break like that?”
“Ugliness!” said Kusum in indignation. “Who’re you calling ugly?”
“This is incredible!” said the storeowner in consternation. “Absolutely incredible!” The only reason he had not kicked the Guptas out of his store as the other mirror sellers in the city had done in the past was that he was a rational man.
“Ugliness,” said Shyam Gupta with conviction. He was staring at a spot slightly below her chin, since he could not bring himself to look at her face, lest he vaporize. “Face it, Kusum. You are abominably ugly.”
Kusum Gupta balled her large, anvil-like hands into fists and swung them at Shyam Gupta, who agilely evaded them.
“I have twenty-six years’ experience dealing with you, you foul ogress,” he said calmly. “Your imbecilities fail to amuse me anymore. I have made up my mind. In order to cure you of your feral tendencies, I will make you director of the school I own. That’s right, Kusum. You will have to deal with noisy children, underpaid teachers, and angry parents.”
Kusum Gupta was in a stupor.
“Director of a school,” she said to herself dreamily. “Director of a school…”
“Um, sir,” said the shopkeeper meekly to Shyam Gupta, deciding that he was the more levelheaded of the two Guptas. He had abandoned all pretense of rationality when he saw his great-grandmother’s ancient looking glass crumble to dust. “Are you going to pay for the damages?”
He was not expecting Shyam Gupta to comply so easily.
“Fine,” said Shyam Gupta. “How much do I owe you?”
“Oh, several million rupees at least,” said the storeowner with more self-assurance. “After all, you’ve destroyed every single mirror in the store. Normally people in my position would have demanded several billion, and a lifetime’s worth of servitude from the offender, but I’m a reasonable person, you see, and it would cost you only a few million to placate me.”
Shyam Gupta frowned. He had just realized that there was no way the storeowner could prove that they – more accurately, his wife – had destroyed the store.
“Now, look here,” he said in a tone of authority. “How dare you accuse me of having destroyed your mirrors?”
The storeowner hesitated for a moment, glanced nervously at his impassive assistant, and said loudly, “Because the moment you entered, every single mirror in the store was destroyed. How would explain that?”
“Why do I have to explain anything? It’s your own fault that your mirrors were so cheap that even the slightest breeze could break them asunder. I see that apart from being a bad tradesman, you’re also a dishonest lout who knows nothing about courtesy, and who goes about the place hurling false accusations at innocent people so that he can free himself from the responsibility of starting his failure of a business afresh.”
The storeowner suddenly became more self-righteous than he had been a moment before.
“Pretending to be innocent, are we,” said the storeowner, his deep frown accentuated by his fearsome mustache. “I know what happens when ugly people stand in front of mirrors. I’ve studied physics, too, you know. The light that reflects off them gets distorted so badly that mirrors break when exposed to it. That – that – thing you brought in with you is obviously the cause of all this disaster. I have never seen an uglier woman in my life. In fact, she’s so ugly that—”
He was not able to finish what he had wanted to say, for just then, a large, anvil-like fist landed a punch on his face out of nowhere with the force of a meteor and sent him flying ten yards to the back of the store, where he landed with a sickening thud and a deep crack that indicated that all the bones in his body had broken. And when the dust settled, it transpired that he had been thoroughly knocked out.
“Kusum,” said Shyam Gupta disapprovingly. “Why did you do that?”
“He called me ugly,” she said petulantly. “I’m not ugly! I am the director of a school!”
The unsuspecting policemen who arrived at the spot a few minutes later and made the mistake of reacting to Kusum Gupta’s ugliness (as who wouldn’t, if they found themselves face-to-face with her without warning) were soon lying on the floor next to the storeowner, thoroughly incapacitated.
* *
“So this is what they call ‘Kalpa School’,” said Kusum Gupta upon arriving at the gates of what she could dimly make out was a building of some sort. She was excited because she had never seen a school in her entire life – even though her house was located right behind one. She had always regarded schools with that bitter contempt that results from a case of sour grapes. Now that she had a job at a school, she felt as if a whole new world were opening up to her. She felt rejuvenated.
“I am the director,” she said to a man who was standing outside the gate. “Who are you?”
“The security guard.”
Kusum Gupta’s condescension was immediately replaced by a self-effacing deference. Her father had been a security guard, too – the security guard of the richest slum dwellers in her childhood slum. It was a pretty prestigious position to be in.
“I am the director of this school,” said Kusum Gupta with more humility. “Please guide me.”
The security guard on his part, had sensed that he had found a devout follower of his exalted ways.
“Very well, Director,” he asseverated. “I shall guide you.”
“Tell me,” said Kusum Gupta. “What do I have to do?”
The security guard pointed at the school building.
“You must go inside and sit in the Director’s Office. You will have absolute control over the school and its affairs.”
“Ah!” said Kusum Gupta. “Then I shouldn’t waste any more time!”
She scurried through the gates – or at least made a valiant attempt to, for the gateway was not large enough for her to pass through very easily – and scurried past the little kids that were playing in the school grounds once she had knocked over the gateposts. (The kids made the mistake of looking at her face, and they all died.) She scurried up the steps, went past the Principal’s office (where, Kusum Gupta noted, an ancient being seemed to be absorbed in a book), and spotted the Director’s Office, much to her joy.
She flung wide the doors and entered with the air of one who has been appointed director of something for the first time in her life.
She jumped in joy. (One of the three school buildings collapsed into a pile of rubble, and the biology lab, in which a group of unsuspecting students had been happily performing the starch test and had been in the process of heating alcohol, exploded.)
Kusum Gupta sat down in the large chair and began restlessly groping around the papers on her desk, believing that the fact that she was now the director meant that she had spontaneously developed the ability to read. It took her five minutes to realize she was mistaken, and she threw the papers up into the air as if it were their fault.
It was midday when the doors opened and a thin, middle-aged woman sauntered into the office with an unsteady gait. She wore a pointed witch’s hat on top of her head and glasses.
“I’m the chemistry teacher,” she said to Kusum Gupta, sounding drunker than Shyam Gupta on their wedding day when the priest had asked him to say, “I do.” “My name is Slabooshi.” She became hysterical.
“Slabooshi,” said Kusum Gupta. “What are you drinking?”
“Oh?” said Slabooshi, raising the tinted glass bottle to eye-level and smiling fondly at it. “This is one hundred-percent sulfuric acid.” She took a swig out of the bottle and began cackling maniacally.
“And you are the chemistry teacher?” asked Kusum Gupta.
“Yes!” said Slabooshi, grinning widely, revealing a jaw full of shapeless yellow teeth that badly wanted replacing.
“Is that a good drink?” asked Kusum Gupta, who was only dimly aware of the names that the modern brewer gave the products of their brewing. Sulfuric acid sounded sophisticated, and was likely to have a pleasant, tangy taste.
“Yes!” said Slabooshi, laughing like there was no tomorrow.
“Can I have a taste?”
“Yes!” said Slabooshi ingratiatingly, splashing the contents of the bottle on Kusum Gupta’s face and going into loud guffaws.
“Ouch!” said Kusum Gupta. “It burns!”
Slabooshi’s face took on an austere expression.
“I will not help you,” she said with a petulant drawl. Then she left.
Kusum Gupta’s face, whatever it had looked like before, now resembled something that had gone through an incinerator, which was a major improvement.
The next person who visited Kusum Gupta was a plump woman with rosy cheeks and a blank expression on her face.
“I’m Krabby,” she said gregariously in a heavy accent. “It is you are maybe the Director of Kalpa School?”
“I am,” said Kusum Gupta with a smile that came as close to benevolent as the boorishness of her deportment permitted. Here was a person who seemed to respect the norms of society and was truly deserving of respect. “What do you teach?”
“Oh!” said Krabby like a little girl who has been offered candy. “I teach history-civics and geography!”
“Very nice, very nice,” said Kusum Gupta, who did not know what history-civics and geography were.
“I came to give you sweets from Calcutta. I am Bengali person, no. That is why my husband, who is also Bengali person, is always bringing sweets from Calcutta. I am telling No, no, I am becoming fat, but he is not listening at all. Always bringing sweets; completely detached from textbook.”
Kusum Gupta found the story amusing, and she gladly accepted the sweets, which were now in a state of utter rot, popping one into her mouth with a relish and swallowing it as if there were no greater pleasure in the world than that of eating rotten sweets.
“Sorry, madam,” said Krabby. “But I have class now.”
“Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.”
The old bird who had been sitting in the Principal’s office, reading a book, was next to come in.
“Good morning,” said the Old Bird civilly. “I’m the Principal. You may call me Old Bird.”
Her polished, educated tone severely contrasted with Kusum Gupta’s annoying, rustic one.
“Good morning,” said Kusum Gupta.
The chronicler of these chronicles feels it imperative at this point to confess to fabricating all of Kusum Gupta’s dialogues. They were not spoken as they are written here, for Kusum Gupta could never achieve grammatical correctness if she put whatever little intelligence she had to the task, and would never be able to put two words beside each other in a manner that even remotely, in whatever interpretation one may put on them, makes sense. In order not to defile these pages with her foul words, which cannot be reproduced in English anyway, the chronicler has most regrettably had to give the reader the illusion that Kusum Gupta spoke intelligibly.
“Welcome to Kalpa,” said Old Bird. “If you need anything, all you have to do is ask.”
And with that Old Bird left.
The reason why Kusum Gupta’s deadly charms failed to have an effect on Old Bird and Krabby was that the sulfuric acid that Slabooshi, who wasn’t much of a looker herself, poured on Kusum Gupta made her face look a million times less ugly. The Laws of Optics were kinder to her now, and she refracted light in less harmful ways.
Kusum Gupta decided that she rather liked the experience of being the director of a school and the attention that came with it. She stepped outside and regarded the students playing the grounds under the indulgent noonday sun with a contemplative benevolence. That was until one of them accidentally threw a soccer ball at her. It missed her, but she had been provoked. With a feral cry, she dug her fingers into the tiled balcony floor, pulled out a slab of rock, and flung it at the offending third-grader, of whom nothing remained but a bloody stain on the earth when his clueless parents came to pick him up later that afternoon.
“You childrens,” she roared at the quavering children below, “I will kill you all, one by one!”
What had he not done for her? he thought bitterly one morning as he sat at a small unobtrusive table that stood oddly next to the larger, grander one that only his brother’s family was permitted to use as a special luxury – one of the perks of being the actual owner of the house – reading the morning newspaper and smiling wistfully to himself as he came across the numerous articles about celebrity women kicking their husbands out of their houses and celebrity men kicking their wives out of theirs, and he envied them greatly.
What had he not done for her? Kusum Gupta had been a worthless slum dweller a mere twenty-five years ago, completely illiterate, ignorant about things as basic as the fact that she lived in the city, and unsure about her own existence. He had given her the life that she had never had, taught her to read things she would never have known, to speak things she would never have spoken… Shyam Gupta shuddered. The last bit, he thought, was one of his biggest mistakes – the result of having spent an hour too long in the wine cellar. There was not a day he did not listen to his worthless wife say things no self-respecting woman would ever say in public or in private, to her husband or anybody else.
“Shyam,” said his brother, Ram Gupta, austerely one day. He had just been called an opprobrious name. “Something has to be done about Kusum.”
Shyam Gupta nodded gravely.
“I’ve thought the same thing for the last twenty-five years.”
Ram Gupta smiled sympathetically.
“Say,” he said. He had stumbled upon a bright idea. “Have you tried filing a divorce?”
Shyam Gupta shook his head.
“No,” he said. “You’re the one who told me never to speak of such things. You said that it was written in our Holy Texts – I forget which one – that a married couple is to remain a married couple for all eternity. The husband cannot abandon the wife, and the wife cannot abandon the husband. Of course, you never mentioned what would happen if the husband and the wife hated each other. But the general idea is that a couple needs to stick together until… well, until either the husband or the wife dies, of course.”
Ram Gupta was looking at him with a mild amusement in his eyes. It was he who had contrived that fictitious Holy Text in order to dissuade his brother from parting with his wife. He had feared that the neighbors would start spreading rumors about his family.
“How unfortunate,” said Ram Gupta. “I have no idea what you should do.”
A conspiratorial glint entered Shyam Gupta’s eye. The words “until one of them dies, of course” had become imprinted in his mind, making more sense with every passing moment.
“Ram,” said Shyam Gupta. “Do you have a butcher’s knife in the kitchen?”
Ram Gupta looked affronted.
“Shyam!” he said. “Do you know what you’re saying? We’re vegetarians – pure vegetarians! How could you expect me to have a butcher’s knife?” Shyam Gupta did not reply. “Incidentally, we do. My wife used it to – ahem – cut vegetables. You’ll find it in that drawer over there. Use it well.”
Ram Gupta’s wife had been found dead in her bedroom three years ago. Nobody knew how she died, and all that the police were able to conclude before they dropped the case in frustration was that somebody had decapitated her with a butcher’s knife. Coincidentally, the butcher’s knife in the kitchen had been found with dried blood on it. “You really need to wash this,” the officer had said meaningfully to Ram Gupta before officially closing the investigation.
Shyam Gupta nodded and got the butcher’s knife out of the drawer, studying it interestedly.
With an air of purpose he said, “Kusum should be out of the bathroom any minute now. Her five hours are nearly up. I’ll be waiting outside the door. When she comes out…” He sliced through an unsuspecting watermelon that was lying on the countertop with such violence that a passerby would have believed that he had something against the fruit.
“An excellent idea,” said Ram Gupta. “Take this from someone who has been in your position before and has sufficient experience in the art of butchery: use a plastic bag once the job is done. Put the body in it. I’ve been saving a particularly large one in the cabinet under the sink over there – you know, just in case.”
Shyam Gupta opened the cabinet and spotted the plastic bag, and along with it, a serious problem.
“Ram,” he said gravely. “Sunita’s in it.”
Sunita had been Ram Gupta’s wife.
Ram Gupta swore.
“So that’s where she’s been all these years! Her mother gave me hell when they couldn’t find her body for the funeral. There wasn’t a day she didn’t blame me for having misplaced it. So annoying she had become that I had to kill her. Well, anyway, think of something else to do with Kusum’s body once the deed is done.”
“Should I use a bed sheet?” asked Shyam Gupta. “They’re pretty big – even for someone who has an appetite like Kusum’s.”
“Bad idea,” said Ram Gupta. “I used bed sheets for my first wife, and the blood stains nearly gave the game away when the police came to investigate.” He had been married twice. “Luckily I was able to convince them that it was tomato ketchup. What I would suggest is that you use bubble wrap.”
“Bubble wrap?”
“Bubble wrap. It’s very effective. Thick enough to make sure the blood doesn’t trickle out when you don’t want it to, and bubbly enough to make sure the body doesn’t get damaged. Who knows? Ten years down the line, you will probably have forgotten how your dear wife looks. Then all you have to do is to walk over to your closet where you will have kept her body safely all those difficult years you had to spend in her absence, unwrap it, and behold her in her full youthful splendor – whatever that amounts to.”
Shyam Gupta nodded.
“Good idea. Although I doubt I shall ever feel the need to look at her face again. As a matter of fact, I don’t even know how it looks right now – I’ve never looked at her face before.”
Ram Gupta, who had, said, “You’re one of the luckier ones. Have I told you the story of the man who went to his brother’s wedding, expecting to see a beautiful bride, but finding upon arriving a hideous male in the female’s stead, and after the wedding was over, discovering that what he had initially taken for a hideous male was a female after all?”
“You haven’t.”
“Good,” said Ram Gupta. “You don’t want to hear it. You wouldn’t be able to sleep at night. Now go, Shyam, and may your enterprise thrive.”
Shyam Gupta nodded solemnly and proceeded upstairs to his wife’s bedroom, where he planted himself next to the bathroom door and waited patiently. He could hear the characteristic splashing sounds Kusum Gupta made while taking a bath – the sound of a heavy object repeatedly plunging itself into a bathtub that was too small for it. He absently ran a finger along the edge of the butcher’s knife and nodded in satisfaction as he observed a fine line of blood form on his skin.
“This can’t go wrong,” he said to himself, raising the butcher’s knife into the air. He would make a clean job of it. Kusum Gupta wouldn’t know what hit her.
And then all of a sudden the splashing sounds stopped, and Shyam Gupta knew that the decisive moment was fast approaching, and he would have to act. He tightened his grip on the butcher’s knife, staring fixedly at the doorknob that he knew would turn any moment then.
And then the doorknob turned. The fat, ugly form of Mrs. Shyam Gupta emerged from the bathroom, dressed in a bathrobe that barely covered the acreage of her body. Shyam Gupta swung the butcher’s knife. But nobody knew what happened next.
Shyam Gupta woke up in the hospital a week later.
“What… happened?” he said feebly. He was aware of a strange feeling of numbness. He found himself staring at a face, though he couldn’t really tell whose it was – his vision had become blurry.
“Dear, Shyam, it’s me,” said the face. “Kusum, your wife.”
The specious solicitousness in her voice convinced Shyam Gupta that it really was his wife.
“Kusum?” he said. “You’re here.” He said it as if where she should have been was inside a grave. “Why are you here?”
“What do you mean?” asked Kusum Gupta with a horrified gasp. “You expect me not to be with my husband when he gets himself badly injured? What kind of wife do you take me for?”
Shyam Gupta forbore to reply. He did not think it wise to let her know what he took her for, especially when he was the one in the hospital bed and she the one with the large anvil-like fists.
“I saw you lying unconscious on my bedroom floor when I came out after my morning bath, and I rushed you to the hospital. You had a butcher’s knife in your hand.”
Shyam Gupta stiffened.
“I… I did?” he said by way of absolving himself from the blame of attempting to murder his wife. “I did, did I? Who would have thought?”
“I thought you had committed suicide. One of your fingers was bleeding, too. Oh, dear, I was so worried.”
“What exactly happened?” asked Shyam Gupta, curious to find out how he had ended up on the floor when it should have been his wife.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I came out of the bathroom and turned to shut the door. My bottom bumped into something, and I turned again to see what it was. I couldn’t spot it, but then something caught my eye – it was you, lying on the floor with a knife in your hand and a bleeding finger… Oh, it was terrible!”
Everything became clear as daylight to Shyam Gupta. Kusum Gupta was in possession of a sizable bottom. Whenever she turned so much as ten degrees, her bottom swept through the air with the force of a thousand elephants in a violent stampede. It was a foolish mistake.
“I see,” he said. “When did the doctors say they would discharge me?”
“Not until the end of the month, of course,” said Kusum Gupta. “You’ve broken both your legs and five ribs, cracked your skull, lost several teeth, and are missing one of your kidneys. The doctor says you need to rest. And…”
“And what?”
“After the operation was over and they had fixed you up, I… I accidentally sat on one of your legs. The doctors said that they couldn’t repair it, and that you would walk with a limp for the rest of your life.”
Shyam Gupta sighed resignedly.
“Kusum,” he said. “You may go.”
“Go!” said Kusum Gupta in indignation. “Where do you expect me to go when you’re in the hospital?”
“Anywhere else, of course. If you stay here any longer, I will be in danger of dying.”
Kusum Gupta stared at Shyam Gupta incredulously.
“Is that the way to talk to someone who just saved your life? Fine, I’ll leave. But here’s a goodbye present.” She brought one of her massive anvil-like fists in contact with Shyam Gupta’s permanently damaged leg before leaving the room with dignity, her gait resembling a Spanish Galleon in sail.
Shyam Gupta stifled a scream.
* *
On their twenty-sixth wedding anniversary, Shyam Gupta decided to take Kusum Gupta to the new restaurant near their house – viz. Chutneys – hoping that the other diners would react to the sight of the woman inexorably devouring everything in the restaurant – edible and inedible – and succeed in evoking a sense of compunction in her. It had been almost a year since Shyam Gupta had attempted to liberate his wife from her fleshy prison and had failed, and he had since grudgingly reconciled himself to the fact that Kusum Gupta’s sojourn on Earth was nowhere near ending. The most he thought he could do by way of easing himself of the stress that came naturally with being Kusum Gupta’s husband was to teach her to live in this world as a normal, civilized human being.
“Look, Kusum,” he said when they had been seated at a table next to the window. “Look at the other diners. They don’t have more than one plateful of food to themselves.”
Kusum Gupta snorted derisively.
“So what?” she said. “I’m not a starver. Why should I pretend not to hunger?” Her vocabulary reflected her ingenuity.
“You don’t have to pretend,” said Shyam Gupta patiently. “Just don’t eat.”
“You silly man,” said Kusum Gupta in that boorish manner of hers, not bothering to keep her voice down. “Why did you bring me to a restaurant if you didn’t want me to eat?”
Shyam Gupta’s patience was wearing thin. He said nothing until the paneer butter masala was brought.
“That’s enough, Kusum,” he said when she had emptied the entire bowl onto her plate. “Leave some for me.”
“You silly man,” said Kusum Gupta. “Get your own order!”
“That was my order. Why don’t you get your own order?”
Kusum Gupta wouldn’t stand for such impertinence. She rose from her chair, resembling a mountain rising out of the ocean. The chair rose with her, for she had a sizable bottom.
“You talk to me like that?” she demanded, waving her stubby finger in Shyam Gupta’s face. “You talk to me like that!”
Shyam Gupta rose, too.
Kusum Gupta pulled the chair off her hindquarters, lifted it into the air, and swung it as if it were a baseball bat. It made contact with Shyam Gupta’s leg – the one that was permanently broken.
Shyam Gupta howled in pain and uttered a few of those swearwords that are acceptable in public. He rubbed and massaged his leg, but failed to assuage the pain. Then he was seized by that one thing that gives a man superhuman strength and enables him to overcome even the heaviest odds – a desire for revenge. In one swift move he lifted Kusum Gupta into the air and defenestrated her, the sound of the windowpane shattering drowning the swearwords she had chosen to use – the ones that were unacceptable in public. She landed in the streets below, flattening several cars and killing innumerable pedestrians. The Punjagutta Flyover collapsed into rubble in the resulting earthquake.
Kusum Gupta had sprained her neck.
* *
One day Shyam Gupta decided to yield to his ugly wife’s insistent importuning and took her to a store where they sold mirrors. Kusum Gupta wanted a new mirror. Her last mirror, like its innumerable predecessors, had spontaneously shattered when she had stood before it. It was inexplicable.
“Kusum,” said Shyam Gupta said when they had entered the store and watched the hundreds of mirrors around them shatter, much to the storeowner’s chagrin. “I think it has something to do with your ugliness. Why else would the mirrors break like that?”
“Ugliness!” said Kusum in indignation. “Who’re you calling ugly?”
“This is incredible!” said the storeowner in consternation. “Absolutely incredible!” The only reason he had not kicked the Guptas out of his store as the other mirror sellers in the city had done in the past was that he was a rational man.
“Ugliness,” said Shyam Gupta with conviction. He was staring at a spot slightly below her chin, since he could not bring himself to look at her face, lest he vaporize. “Face it, Kusum. You are abominably ugly.”
Kusum Gupta balled her large, anvil-like hands into fists and swung them at Shyam Gupta, who agilely evaded them.
“I have twenty-six years’ experience dealing with you, you foul ogress,” he said calmly. “Your imbecilities fail to amuse me anymore. I have made up my mind. In order to cure you of your feral tendencies, I will make you director of the school I own. That’s right, Kusum. You will have to deal with noisy children, underpaid teachers, and angry parents.”
Kusum Gupta was in a stupor.
“Director of a school,” she said to herself dreamily. “Director of a school…”
“Um, sir,” said the shopkeeper meekly to Shyam Gupta, deciding that he was the more levelheaded of the two Guptas. He had abandoned all pretense of rationality when he saw his great-grandmother’s ancient looking glass crumble to dust. “Are you going to pay for the damages?”
He was not expecting Shyam Gupta to comply so easily.
“Fine,” said Shyam Gupta. “How much do I owe you?”
“Oh, several million rupees at least,” said the storeowner with more self-assurance. “After all, you’ve destroyed every single mirror in the store. Normally people in my position would have demanded several billion, and a lifetime’s worth of servitude from the offender, but I’m a reasonable person, you see, and it would cost you only a few million to placate me.”
Shyam Gupta frowned. He had just realized that there was no way the storeowner could prove that they – more accurately, his wife – had destroyed the store.
“Now, look here,” he said in a tone of authority. “How dare you accuse me of having destroyed your mirrors?”
The storeowner hesitated for a moment, glanced nervously at his impassive assistant, and said loudly, “Because the moment you entered, every single mirror in the store was destroyed. How would explain that?”
“Why do I have to explain anything? It’s your own fault that your mirrors were so cheap that even the slightest breeze could break them asunder. I see that apart from being a bad tradesman, you’re also a dishonest lout who knows nothing about courtesy, and who goes about the place hurling false accusations at innocent people so that he can free himself from the responsibility of starting his failure of a business afresh.”
The storeowner suddenly became more self-righteous than he had been a moment before.
“Pretending to be innocent, are we,” said the storeowner, his deep frown accentuated by his fearsome mustache. “I know what happens when ugly people stand in front of mirrors. I’ve studied physics, too, you know. The light that reflects off them gets distorted so badly that mirrors break when exposed to it. That – that – thing you brought in with you is obviously the cause of all this disaster. I have never seen an uglier woman in my life. In fact, she’s so ugly that—”
He was not able to finish what he had wanted to say, for just then, a large, anvil-like fist landed a punch on his face out of nowhere with the force of a meteor and sent him flying ten yards to the back of the store, where he landed with a sickening thud and a deep crack that indicated that all the bones in his body had broken. And when the dust settled, it transpired that he had been thoroughly knocked out.
“Kusum,” said Shyam Gupta disapprovingly. “Why did you do that?”
“He called me ugly,” she said petulantly. “I’m not ugly! I am the director of a school!”
The unsuspecting policemen who arrived at the spot a few minutes later and made the mistake of reacting to Kusum Gupta’s ugliness (as who wouldn’t, if they found themselves face-to-face with her without warning) were soon lying on the floor next to the storeowner, thoroughly incapacitated.
* *
“So this is what they call ‘Kalpa School’,” said Kusum Gupta upon arriving at the gates of what she could dimly make out was a building of some sort. She was excited because she had never seen a school in her entire life – even though her house was located right behind one. She had always regarded schools with that bitter contempt that results from a case of sour grapes. Now that she had a job at a school, she felt as if a whole new world were opening up to her. She felt rejuvenated.
“I am the director,” she said to a man who was standing outside the gate. “Who are you?”
“The security guard.”
Kusum Gupta’s condescension was immediately replaced by a self-effacing deference. Her father had been a security guard, too – the security guard of the richest slum dwellers in her childhood slum. It was a pretty prestigious position to be in.
“I am the director of this school,” said Kusum Gupta with more humility. “Please guide me.”
The security guard on his part, had sensed that he had found a devout follower of his exalted ways.
“Very well, Director,” he asseverated. “I shall guide you.”
“Tell me,” said Kusum Gupta. “What do I have to do?”
The security guard pointed at the school building.
“You must go inside and sit in the Director’s Office. You will have absolute control over the school and its affairs.”
“Ah!” said Kusum Gupta. “Then I shouldn’t waste any more time!”
She scurried through the gates – or at least made a valiant attempt to, for the gateway was not large enough for her to pass through very easily – and scurried past the little kids that were playing in the school grounds once she had knocked over the gateposts. (The kids made the mistake of looking at her face, and they all died.) She scurried up the steps, went past the Principal’s office (where, Kusum Gupta noted, an ancient being seemed to be absorbed in a book), and spotted the Director’s Office, much to her joy.
She flung wide the doors and entered with the air of one who has been appointed director of something for the first time in her life.
She jumped in joy. (One of the three school buildings collapsed into a pile of rubble, and the biology lab, in which a group of unsuspecting students had been happily performing the starch test and had been in the process of heating alcohol, exploded.)
Kusum Gupta sat down in the large chair and began restlessly groping around the papers on her desk, believing that the fact that she was now the director meant that she had spontaneously developed the ability to read. It took her five minutes to realize she was mistaken, and she threw the papers up into the air as if it were their fault.
It was midday when the doors opened and a thin, middle-aged woman sauntered into the office with an unsteady gait. She wore a pointed witch’s hat on top of her head and glasses.
“I’m the chemistry teacher,” she said to Kusum Gupta, sounding drunker than Shyam Gupta on their wedding day when the priest had asked him to say, “I do.” “My name is Slabooshi.” She became hysterical.
“Slabooshi,” said Kusum Gupta. “What are you drinking?”
“Oh?” said Slabooshi, raising the tinted glass bottle to eye-level and smiling fondly at it. “This is one hundred-percent sulfuric acid.” She took a swig out of the bottle and began cackling maniacally.
“And you are the chemistry teacher?” asked Kusum Gupta.
“Yes!” said Slabooshi, grinning widely, revealing a jaw full of shapeless yellow teeth that badly wanted replacing.
“Is that a good drink?” asked Kusum Gupta, who was only dimly aware of the names that the modern brewer gave the products of their brewing. Sulfuric acid sounded sophisticated, and was likely to have a pleasant, tangy taste.
“Yes!” said Slabooshi, laughing like there was no tomorrow.
“Can I have a taste?”
“Yes!” said Slabooshi ingratiatingly, splashing the contents of the bottle on Kusum Gupta’s face and going into loud guffaws.
“Ouch!” said Kusum Gupta. “It burns!”
Slabooshi’s face took on an austere expression.
“I will not help you,” she said with a petulant drawl. Then she left.
Kusum Gupta’s face, whatever it had looked like before, now resembled something that had gone through an incinerator, which was a major improvement.
The next person who visited Kusum Gupta was a plump woman with rosy cheeks and a blank expression on her face.
“I’m Krabby,” she said gregariously in a heavy accent. “It is you are maybe the Director of Kalpa School?”
“I am,” said Kusum Gupta with a smile that came as close to benevolent as the boorishness of her deportment permitted. Here was a person who seemed to respect the norms of society and was truly deserving of respect. “What do you teach?”
“Oh!” said Krabby like a little girl who has been offered candy. “I teach history-civics and geography!”
“Very nice, very nice,” said Kusum Gupta, who did not know what history-civics and geography were.
“I came to give you sweets from Calcutta. I am Bengali person, no. That is why my husband, who is also Bengali person, is always bringing sweets from Calcutta. I am telling No, no, I am becoming fat, but he is not listening at all. Always bringing sweets; completely detached from textbook.”
Kusum Gupta found the story amusing, and she gladly accepted the sweets, which were now in a state of utter rot, popping one into her mouth with a relish and swallowing it as if there were no greater pleasure in the world than that of eating rotten sweets.
“Sorry, madam,” said Krabby. “But I have class now.”
“Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.”
The old bird who had been sitting in the Principal’s office, reading a book, was next to come in.
“Good morning,” said the Old Bird civilly. “I’m the Principal. You may call me Old Bird.”
Her polished, educated tone severely contrasted with Kusum Gupta’s annoying, rustic one.
“Good morning,” said Kusum Gupta.
The chronicler of these chronicles feels it imperative at this point to confess to fabricating all of Kusum Gupta’s dialogues. They were not spoken as they are written here, for Kusum Gupta could never achieve grammatical correctness if she put whatever little intelligence she had to the task, and would never be able to put two words beside each other in a manner that even remotely, in whatever interpretation one may put on them, makes sense. In order not to defile these pages with her foul words, which cannot be reproduced in English anyway, the chronicler has most regrettably had to give the reader the illusion that Kusum Gupta spoke intelligibly.
“Welcome to Kalpa,” said Old Bird. “If you need anything, all you have to do is ask.”
And with that Old Bird left.
The reason why Kusum Gupta’s deadly charms failed to have an effect on Old Bird and Krabby was that the sulfuric acid that Slabooshi, who wasn’t much of a looker herself, poured on Kusum Gupta made her face look a million times less ugly. The Laws of Optics were kinder to her now, and she refracted light in less harmful ways.
Kusum Gupta decided that she rather liked the experience of being the director of a school and the attention that came with it. She stepped outside and regarded the students playing the grounds under the indulgent noonday sun with a contemplative benevolence. That was until one of them accidentally threw a soccer ball at her. It missed her, but she had been provoked. With a feral cry, she dug her fingers into the tiled balcony floor, pulled out a slab of rock, and flung it at the offending third-grader, of whom nothing remained but a bloody stain on the earth when his clueless parents came to pick him up later that afternoon.
“You childrens,” she roared at the quavering children below, “I will kill you all, one by one!”
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Posted on March 25, 2010.
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