The hole men

Sunday Herald Short Story Competition 2016 (Third Prize)

Hanumantayya was crouching on the edge of Bellandur Lake when his great-grandson answered a call at the derelict house a few metres away. The 90-year-old man, in his ragged T-shirt and lungi, was staring into the depths of the water. His weary eyes had accrued an ability to travel back in time and see through the oculi of his ancestors.

“There were more fish than humans,” he murmured. His memory had begun showing allegiance to inheritance than to experience.  

The previous day, he asked the boy, “What are you studying?”“History,” the boy replied reluctantly.“What’s that?” The old man had to be louder, to beat the noise of the television.“The story of the city... the story of rulers, wars, mutinies. Grandpa, what’s our history?” The question was so abrupt that Hanumantayya got up from his bed. “Our story?” He scratched his head. “We don’t have a story. We are cleaners and cleaning doesn’t have a story. The garbage that we deal with might have stories to tell.”

He sang a mutilated song that his forefathers had compiled while accompanying the royals (on horsebacks) who were determined to make a town out of the land on either side of a monumental ridge. The wavering reflection of the skyscraper at the opposite side went deep into the water. During such squats in the evenings, Hanumantayya always saw the image of the pointed roof of the edifice as a knife stabbing the fleshy abdomen of the lake.

 The place where the array of such elegant apartments, shopping malls and skyscrapers were blooming had once been marked as the dirtiest side of the town. He and his folks lived in the slum until a tribe of excavators razed their dirty abodes. After witnessing a decade-long destruction of transient settlements, and moving around the ever-widening perimeter of the city like a herd of beasts, his people scattered.

Hanumantayya, along with his wife and sons, and their wives and children, found the swampy side of the lake as a safer place to live. There they were joined by refugees of other shapes — the tiny turtles, big frogs, snakes of many colours, and the mystic fireflies — who had to flee fearing the bulging city of proliferating buildings.

“There were more birds than humans,” he uttered, and that was true. When his ancestors climbed down the ridge to dig out lakes and tanks, peafowls flew around, vultures looked down curiously from the apex of the sky, and moorhens dispersed in panic. The town grew high and wide, while they, through generations, dug deep into the earth to carve sewerage.

The occasional sparks in the middle of the lake often metamorphosed into eerie apparitions. “They are rising, the rohus, the catlas and the thilapias!” He saw the ghostly fluorescence dancing in the air. An indolent wind carried the acrid froth from the lake towards him. The biting stench was so intolerable that even he, so used to the primordial foul odour through generations, snorted. He turned his head away and saw the boy. He noticed that he was holding an umbrella.“Fold it. It isn’t raining. You are not fit to live if you can’t stand a drizzle.” The 15-year-old great-grandson obeyed.

“What’s the matter?”

“Uncle Chandra wants to talk to you.” He raised the mobile phone. “Chandra?” The old man found it hard to recall the name. “Oh! The graduate! What does he want from me?” The lad echoed his ancestor over the phone.

At the other end, inside a famous pub in the heart of the city, Chandrakant was sweating. Surrounded by his distressed manager, callous waiters and angry customers, he quickly requested his nephew to send over the old man. The lady, who had puked on the table near the entrance of the washroom, was swearing at all of them. 

“Swines! Is this how you maintain your washrooms?” She had gone to the restroom in the middle of a rhapsodic gathering. As soon as she bolted the door, the commode started shivering. She was reluctantly preparing to place herself on the toilet seat when the entire filth of the city erupted like a miniature volcano.“Have you got any idea how disgusting it is?” Her cheeks contorted.

“Madam, please calm down. It isn’t our fault.” The manager tried to explain. “Go drink it, scoundrel, if you can’t admit.” Her companion brought his palm into a fist. The crowd grew as those who ventured into the bathroom joined them in protests. As threats, assurances, warnings and cries lingered on, Chandrakant, the administrator in-charge, called the municipal council for help. 

A truck carrying a massive jetting machine appeared after a few minutes, with green hoses resembling pythons, which went down the manhole near the pub. The persistent drizzle turned into a downpour, as if to resist those pipes from deciphering the secrets of those smutty neurons of the underground. A melee followed, with the heavenly rain laden with grot in the air meeting the water on the ground, heaving the trash around to start with, and then shaking up the subterranean grunge.

Everybody ran for shelter, the music inside the numerous pubs grew louder, and the horror inside the toilets became contagious. The managers of those famed watering holes offered free drinks in compensation, and the administrators kept calling the authorities in vain.

The moneyed customers slumped, got to the drinks like deprived children. The cleaning staff were ordered to guard the lavatories with plungers. So they locked the doors from inside and fought an otiose battle with the meagre tools while the precious customers emptied their bladders on the staircases and in the parking lots.

Chandrakant stood drenched in the rain, watching the overflowing manholes. He requested the truck driver to increase the pressure of the jet. He did, and a howl came from a restobar nearby. Nauseating dark liquid flew out of the urinals, toilets, and kitchen drainages. The sewage pipes shivered, signalling an imminent burst. “Yellamma...” Chandrakant folded his hands and prayed.

Two more trucks arrived and, as all of them stood clueless in the persistent downpour, in the middle of frantically plying cars of all classes, a motorbike arrived. Hanumantayya, holding onto the back of his great grandson, jumped off it like a teenager, and howled.

“Pull the pipes out!” He ignored the advancing Chandrakant and opened the lid of a brimming manhole. He jumped into it like an otter. “Bengaluru!” he uttered, coming out of the hole and struggling to breathe. He went in again and reappeared, covered in foetid, glutinous fluid. He lifted his face up and the corpulent raindrops cleansed it. He stood there for a while, watching the inundation.

“Get me to the lake, Halasuru Lake!” The old man screamed. Chandrakant grabbed the key from the boy, got on the bike, kick-started it with brute force, and waited for Hanumantayya to get on, all while wringing out his necktie and throwing it away into the open drain. “Quick, to the west side of the lake.” The old man pushed the shoulders of the rider, after wiping off his face with one end of the stinking lungi.

Chandrakant manoeuvred the motorcycle through the potholes like a dirt-bike rally rider. He jumped signals, scraped past rumbling cars, and dodged the hurrying two-wheelers. Unmindful of the abuses that poured from all of those who had already violated traffic rules and snubbed common sense, Chandrakant told his uncle, “I’m sorry, but I had no other way but to disturb you.”

The old man placed his chin on Chandrakant’s left shoulder and whispered in his ears, accompanied by the percussion of the rain, “Never mind.”

“There isn’t a man who knows the underground better than you. I knew it was you who directed the army to the lake when that girl went into the pit last week. You didn’t get the credit.”

“It’s nothing. The holes and the drains are simpler than the roads.” Hanumantayya wiped Chandrakant’s face with his palm and continued. “I’m proud of you, son, for coming out of the hole and studying. Don’t let them know that you are one among us, Madigas. They’ll start sniffing your blood.”

Meanwhile, a topographic map was being spread out in a conference hall, with engineers, scientists and geologists trying to figure out the problem. Snacks and refreshments were being served there when Chandrakant lost control and the bike skidded near the lake.

The rider and the pillion, thrown apart, landed in pools of water that spared their skulls from cracking. Amid the honking and a headache that followed, Chandrakant got up and followed Hanumatayya, who had jumped the fences to find himself near the lake. He took a deep breath and dived in before Chandrakant could shout, “Be careful, uncle.” 

The old man was not to be seen for a while. Chandrakant prayed, looking at the illuminated temple gate on the street, beyond which people of his caste were not allowed to go until a few years ago. Hanumantayya resurfaced a few minutes later with a load of trash in his hands, which he heaved to the shore.

“Bendakaluru, there were more fish, butterflies, trees, vultures, eagles, sparrows and flowers here.” He went in again and came up after a few minutes with another dump of plastic trash.

He threw that away and said pantingly, “Now there are more humans than mosquitoes... More plastic bottles than dogs and crows,” he yelled before taking a deep breath and going in. The old man went on in a cycle and the dizzying head of Chandrakant lost count. “Uncle...” Chandrakant called out after waiting for him since his last dip. He heard bubbles burst and sensed the engulfing reek. He was tired and done; the headache breaking him apart. He collapsed on the grass around. 

It rained for the whole night, for hours after the happy hoppers left the pubs with shaky heads, unable to remember the number of freebies they received, and not wondering about the streets that were now free of waterlogging. The free-flowing world under the manholes took away the alcoholic excretions frantically, along with other debris. The inhabitants of those dark pathways — rats, mice, millipedes, cockroaches and scorpions — ended up at the bubbling lake.

Chandrakant woke up when the rays of the morning sun pricked his eyelids. He looked around and found people gazing at the lake that was still spuming. The morning walkers and joggers took no notice of him, and Chandrakant turned his heavy head towards the lake. The surface was replete with dead fish, staring desolately at the sky. In the middle of that unending aggregation of carcasses was the cadaver of Hanumantayya; his open eyes seemed to be raising a question to the heavens. Chandrakant smiled and whispered, “There are more fish than humans.” 

A lady came over and helped him to stand. He was smiling continuously and murmuring as he examined the sky. “There are more birds than men out there.” She noticed the mobile phone on the grass. She gave him the phone and he threw it into the lake. There had been a message from his boss that Chandrakant was terminated for running away from his responsibilities. The phone sank in, without producing a ripple.

The coracle stopped after hitting the creaky cables of the submerged suspension bridge. The day marked the end of 60 years since Chandrakant had lost his memory at the lakeside. He was 90 now, the same age as Hanumantayya was when he lost his breath at the depths of the lake. A brutal squall had accompanied a savage rain a month ago, when Chandrakant’s grandson moved him onto the leaky coracle before fleeing the flooding place. 

The protracted rain and the wind appeared to be infinite. Chandrakant stepped on to the top of the bridge, where water was slowly rising. The moss-draped skyscrapers over the horizon were beginning to crumble like sand sculptures at the mercy of high tide. The knifelike roofs had become blunt. Chandrakant observed the reflection in the flooding water.

“The water is swallowing them,” he exclaimed. There were no manholes and scavengers anymore. The world down under had met the world above and amalgamated into one.

Far from his eyesight, a few hundred metres away from where the deluge ended, a desert had started crawling. A nasty battle between the water and the desert was about to begin. An exhausted pigeon alighted on his head. He held it in his arms as he saw the head of a tiny fish popping out of the water. “The numbers are equal!” An infantile smile engulfed Chandrakant’s face and he caressed the faint feathers of the pigeon.