When you walk from the King Edward Memorial hospital towards MD College in Parel, Bombay, you pass a triangular traffic island at a junction near KEM hospital. On this island, a man stands alone between 6 and a quarter past 6 every evening. He has long matted grey hair, a long grey beard that narrows to a single strand just above his navel, and wears filthy white clothes, over which went a coat that only thick grime accumulated over many years held together.
For this quarter of an hour every evening he stands on the island, facing MD college, and incidentally, east, raises his right arm above his head and whirls it vigorously. He does this without the slightest expression on his face. He gives the impression that it is perfectly normal to do this.
I don’t see him every day, since I don’t walk that way every day. But anytime I was there at 6 or thereabouts, he was there too. Once I stood by a newsstand near this traffic island. There is a local train station near here, and the place was swimming with people. Anchoring myself to the small news stall against the current of the stream of people, I asked the newspaper walah an absurdly stupid question, since I could not think of how else to begin. Just to reduce the chances of a smart answer, I asked for a copy of the day’s newspaper as well. I bought the Afternoon, for there was nothing in the leading morning paper that I had not already read at least thrice, for reasons that will soon be evident.
“Is he mad?” I asked.
The newspaper walah nodded, since one must be polite to a paying customer, I suppose.
“Lost not only all his money, but also his wits, in the stock market. Bechara.”
“What’s his name?” I asked.
“Something Mehta, I think.”
A mad man of the streets who was once a public figure. A mad man with a history.
“Does he do this every day?”
“Yes. Never takes a day off.”
I went my way then, my mind fully occupied by the demanding task of negotiating the rapids of rush hour.
But that night, after my last meal and after even the obituary columns of the newspaper had been carefully proofed (there was one in which the date was wrong, or someone had anticipated the sad event by a year), I remembered the lunatic of the traffic island again. He had begun to mean more to me than an occasional spectacle on the road. There were good reasons for this.
I was a successful proof reader at the city’s leading daily. My job was fulfilling, because it satisfied a basic human urge: fault finding. A missing comma, a proper noun without a capital, an orphan word, a preposition misused. Nothing escaped me. If I was in the mood, I could confront senior editors and columnists with their boo boos, wave their flawed manuscripts in their faces like dirty underwear. I did this rarely, and with a mollifying smile when I did. Still, they were terrified of my all-seeing eyes, and of my unspoken contempt.
But I was tired. Tired of the ineptitude that surrounded me, the endless errors. I was beginning to believe that there was a mistake in the grand scheme of things. Someone had neglected to proof the script.
I think that was what attracted me to the stockbroker turned lunatic. I have the proof reader’s eye for glitches. It is nothing to do with sight; it is an instinct, a sixth sense. It is a supernatural power, yes, but I can exercise it without anyone suspecting its existence. Like mild mannered Clark Kent, I hide the world’s sharpest eyes behind my thick glasses.
Here now, was something that was so obviously not right. What if it was not really an error? After all, he was once a sane man. And he could have gone quietly and conventionally insane, retiring into the psychiatry ward of an expensive hospital. Even with most of his money gone, his friends and family could have afforded to do that much for him. Why then was he on the streets?
What if the madness was merely a mask? For something that was vital to the world.
Its motion, for instance.
The mad man, for all I knew, could be the man responsible for making the world go around. Consider the facts. He does his arm whirling at dusk. Just when the world is winding down. It is his job, I think, to wind it up again.
On my way back from work the next day, I detoured again to the mad man’s station. I was early and he had not yet taken up his post.
Acting like any one of the lakhs of pedestrians who crossed this road daily, I walked across to the traffic island and faced east, as he always does. Waiting for a gap in the traffic, I looked up at the sky eastward. There was nothing remarkable about the view from this spot. A metal skeleton of a skyscraper was growing rapidly upwards, and pointed rudely at the sky. A red light blinked at the summit of the building. To the north and the south, the rat warrens of old buildings shut out the sky.
Directly overhead, there was a single bright star, among the first to shine in the fading light of the setting sun.
There was a sudden movement at the corner of my eye. I turned to see the mad man, standing not two feet away, half crouching as if he was ready to spring away. His eyes were staring beneath his beetling brows and his grey beard appeared to bristle with suspicion. Smiling ingratiatingly, I stepped away from the island, and darted through a gap in the traffic to the far pavement. I turned to look at the mad man as I walked away. He was slowly taking up his customary position, continuing to stare after me.
At home, I lay in bed reading a ‘collected works’ of Robert Heinlein that I had found at a King’s Circle second hand bookstall.I plodded through 50 pages, found only two errors, closed the heavy book with a snap because my arms were aching. And my thoughts returned to the mad man.
I began to doubt if the mad man was in charge of the planet’s daily rotation. This was not a job that let you take sick leave, and the old man looked like he was too frail to be relied upon 365 days and nights in a year.
I slid off the bed and walked to the window. I leant my weight on the sill and looked out into the night. Behind me, the room was in darkness except for the small circle of light from the reading lamp.
Beyond the window, the street two stories below was lit by a streetlamp, the light from the fluorescent tube made murky by the grimy glass cover meant to shield it from stone-throwing vandals.
A sliver of sky was visible above the looming hulks of the buildings across the street.
I could see the cold brightness of the stars, for it was after midnight and the lights in the flats across the streets were mercifully switched off.
Once more in my mind’s eye, I saw the image of the mad man pointing upwards. In a flash of inspiration, all was made clear to me.
What was directly overhead, or very nearly so, at six in the evening at this time of the year? Not the moon, not the sun, not Saturn, not Jupiter, but the evening star. Sirius. The dog star, among the brightest in the firmament. No ornament of the sky sparkled more merrily, with the exception of Jupiter.
And now, after midnight, this astral being must have slid towards the western horizon, and must be even now sinking into the Arabian sea. I leaned far out of the window to look for it in the west, but a mess of concrete choked off the view.
A movement under the streetlamp now drew my eye. A shadowy figure entered the spot of murky light cast by the streetlamp, and looking up at me, pointed silently towards the western sky. Precisely where Sirius should be now!
Involuntarily I looked westward again, and when I returned my gaze to the mad man, for the mad man it was, he had vanished. Not even a suspicion of his presence remained. For a moment, I questioned my own memory of the incident.
But no, it had been the lunatic, with grey, matted beard and his weird assortment of tattered clothes. I stood at the window for a while, gazing sightlessly at the emptiness of the hour. When I went to bed, it was to dream a strange dream, in which the lunatic featured, in the grip of strange creatures who had two legs but tentacles in the place of arms. I awoke, and the dream remained in my memory, vivid, lucid.
Many days passed, what with one thing or the other, before I made my way again to the pavement across the road from the mad man’s station. I waited until darkness fell, breathing the fumes of frantic rush hour traffic. Mr. Something Mehta did not keep his appointment with the skies, with Sirius. I bought a chocolate from the newspaper walah and asked him if this had ever happened before. He looked up briefly, shook his head, said “he’s not been coming for a week now,” and returned to his business, briskly opening a pack of cigarettes to give five of them to a customer, and a banana to another. The lunatic was not important in his scheme of things.
But I knew he was crucial in the grand scheme. Those tentacled creatures from my dream were not born of my imagination. Mr. Something Mehta had planted them in my mind. He was trying to tell me something. They were not actually tentacled, that was just silly, risible. That was on account of my daily diet of pulp sci fi. But there was no doubt that they represented beings from another world. And that Mr. Something Mehta was trying to attract their attention. To what end? To save us? From ourselves? For a spacefaring race would surely have a civilisation. We don’t have one. We have chaos, anarchy that is laughably called civilisation. Perhaps Mr. Something Mehta wanted the aliens to wipe the slate clean. So earth could begin all over. Or take over the world and run it wisely, benevolently for us. We have proved we are not qualified for the job.
But why Something Mehta? Why was he alone taking the trouble to signal the aliens? And why would they notice him, one frail human out of the billions of microscopic specks on a dust mote in the vasty deeps of space? Because he knew. He knew that when Sirius was overhead, the ‘others’ would be watching, and they would see and understand if a human whirled his arm energetically above his head. I did not know how he knew. But he did, somehow, and he had passed on his knowledge to only one person in the world. The one person in his world who had the eyes to see the unusual, the ‘unordinary’. Me. And now Mr. Mehta was missing. He had sought me out that night for this reason. He knew he could not carry on. He wished me to take over.
Sirius had moved in the past few days. It now rose later in the day. It was half past seven in the evening and it would even now be sliding into position. I looked eagerly for Mr. Mehta. But he continued absent. I took a hesitant step towards the conical island in the middle of the busy road. And stepped back hastily because a bus very nearly ran over me. I shuddered. It would have ended the world’s sole hope of salvation. I gazed at the signalling station and hesitated again. I cared not for appearances for there was too much at stake. If people stared, let them. But what if some officious petty authority moved me on? I did not possess the license of a mad man’s garb. No, this would not do.
I made my way hurriedly to a small park not far from this spot. It was the only open space for kilometres, and was crowded with children and their adults frantically making the most of their hour or two of leisure before the return to more drudgery and the preparation for the frantic race that would begin again the next day.
Despite the crowds, I managed to find a quiet corner, in the shadow of a dusty, tired tree. I stood, turned my face heavenward, raised my arm and began to whirl it. I kept at it for a full quarter of an hour, even though I was soon panting from the effort and my arm screamed for relief. Then I stopped, gratefully, and returned home.
The next day, for the very first time in my career, I failed to spot an error. What was worse, a subeditor spotted it, and pointed it out. Not very politely, I must say. I merely smiled at him. He could not know, the poor insignificant, infinitesimal insect that he was, that humanity is itself the mistake. And that there is one whose job it is to correct it.
***