The Revolt Of The Fish Eaters

By Lopa Ghosh

The manipulative-philanthropist ghost of a chairman's mother; a footless enchantress in Siberia who has mastered the art of lovemaking; Rita of the sexual politics lessons; the witchcraft-practising mother of a village prodigy who plots to ensnare the World's Richest Man; the trade union leader who wrung a promise of jeans and perfumed soap out of the factory bosses - these are but the supporting cast of the dystopian, compelling world that Revolt of the Fish Eaters brings alive. Set in a twilight zone of glass towers, elevators and late-stage capitalism, this is a collection of stories about the business world: recession-struck, and facing threats from rogue forces such as ghosts, lovers and communists.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: May 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9789350294741

Lopa Ghosh

Lopa Ghosh has meandered through literature, journalism, street theatre, a London stint seeking causality and Sylvia Plath's house, severe delusion and serious feminism. Revolt of the Fish Eaters is her first book. Ghosh now lives and works in Delhi.

Book preview

The Chairman's Mother

‘I am a flood fixer,’ she said, deeply inhaling the fat brown cigar, one end of it lost in the copious wrinkles of her toothless mouth, the other erupting rhythmically into a ring of fire, as she inhaled and exhaled with her dead lungs.

Perfect smoke rings danced up into the soft light of a plushly appointed living room. The air held a light fragrance of orange potpourri and stray wafts from the eucalyptus trees swaying outside.

‘Tell me, are these rolled between the thighs of high-bosomed girls? Or is that another myth devised by men?’

Unblinking, breath stilled, forgotten in his gullet, Bankim Basu stared at his departed mother as she puffed on one of the cigars he had kept neatly arranged in a wooden box. Four days ago, one year after her death, they had met again at the Frankfurt airport. He found Radha Rani Basu sitting next to a large statue of Goethe, knitting a green sweater.

His flight was scheduled to depart for New York in forty minutes. Over the Atlantic, he would sleep like a baby and arrive at the JFK airport fresh-eyed and eager for the celebration. A crystal trophy, fragile and fiercely unforgiving, lay waiting for him in New York. His name was encrusted in gems, fashionably in Latin, across the base. Should he bring upon it, and himself, the shadow of a bad omen? Yet here he was, standing not more than a few feet away from the vision of his newly dead mother. The internal debate on the inauspiciousness of her appearance caused him some slight discomfort.

But then again, death returned the human soul to its original goodness. Whatever differences he had with his mother would not stand in his way now.

While they were already putting final touches to the grand dinner in New York, Bankim decided to saunter over and say hello to the ghost of his mother. He made his way through the remaining yoghurt muesli as he walked over; blackcurrants and raspberries crushed luxuriously between his teeth. Email after email knocked on his phone, alive against his heart. Bankim threw a glance at Goethe, who was smiling sarcastically from under a jauntily placed hat, uncertain whether to include him in the greeting intended for the posthumous, and muttered apologetically, ‘Hello, Mother.’

Radha Rani did not look up. The knitting needles clapped sonorously, diving in and out, turning and gripping the wool. Bankim shifted his weight from one foot to the other in awkward suspense.

If he moved, she would be gone. Bankim’s palms were clammy, transferring thumbprints to the touch-screen of his phone. There were 138 unread mails and five missed calls.

Accustomed to a trajectory that wove through the continents in a dense spider web, Bankim could travel blindfolded to the sun, the edges of his mind sharp as laser. At Berkley, he would deliver a rousing speech, sip a few social whiskies and then dart across to Japan for a tough negotiation, winning it nimbly, his stomach unperturbed by the sushi that followed at lunch. So, no, his mind was not foggy. What then could have caused the reappearance of his mother?

‘The magic of innovation,’ he could have argued, had there not been tears forming phlegmy lumps in his throat, ‘would make preservation a reality.’ As the Chairman of a business that dealt with some very forward-looking technology, he knew that in the decades to come, it would be possible to digitally freeze moments, people in various acts, terrains and buildings of places and then beam them up, with little atmospheric details – like a shaft of sunlight, or a breeze or a foul smell – intact. Radha Rani’s sudden appearance could well be microscopic pixels of his memory of her, beamed up, right there, on Goethe’s lap.

Torn between the sheer joy of seeing her again and the tremendous oddity of spending forever on a sofa at Café Goethe, his inbox overflowing with mails, Bankim was a Chairman lost in transit.

A waitress from the café found him lying semi-conscious and in a high fever. He was rescued by the airport authorities that took him to the emergency room and notified his company. Swiftly, a chartered flight flew him out of Frankfurt and back to the dusty plains of Delhi. He was checked into a hospital, where they kept him for a day and ran a few tests. ‘Nothing seems seriously wrong,’ the head cardiologist said, advising caution nevertheless, as the heart could be under stress.

All this while, on the flight back home, in the ambulance, Radha Rani remained resolutely by his side. While the doctors ran myriads of tests on him, she seemed to be catching a nap on the empty guest sofa. As Bankim’s delirium began to wear off, he hoped the image of his mother would blur and then vanish altogether. The fever was gone now, but she remained – opaque and distinct.

Back home, she lodged herself in her old room. She didn’t seem to expect a conversation. Gobindo, the cook, was extremely concerned and fussed over Bankim. He rustled up an elaborate chicken stew, exactly how Radha Rani would recommend that it be made if she were alive, laid the table, put the hot stew in a casserole and requested Bankim to have an early dinner. After that, he lingered some more to place a light quilt on the bed, in case the fever came back, and a tall jug of water and a small bowl of ginger pieces dipped in honey by the bed. Finally, when the clock struck ten, Gobindo retired to his quarters across the lawn.

Bankim strode across to his mother’s room and called out to her in an irresolute sort of way, ‘I am going to have my dinner now. There is chicken stew. Gobindo has gone to sleep.’

He had his dinner alone. Radha Rani joined him afterwards and they lounged in front of the TV, watching news and daily soaps. It took her a while to begin the conversation. She seemed to have trouble finding her voice. It came out like a coarse and raspy thread at first, wheezing and splattering. Bankim wondered at the transformation. An overbearing desire to chuckle came over him; he swallowed it with the persecuting thought of the trophy that lay unclaimed in New York. Would the Elders of the company forgive him for a slight of such proportions? Would his mother, when her voice came back, forgive him for his sins?

A voice left to rust must be reawakened with some coaxing. Like a singer at dawn, she gulped air as if it were water, threw her head backwards and gargled. The voice came and rose to a crescendo, looking for the exact pitch of its lifetime and then all at once broke through the night, startling Bankim out of his seat.

Bablu, Bablu, Bablu – she spoke high and low, testing her own voice. Satisfied that the highly reputed bass and threat were intact in resurrection, she re-entered her son’s life without much ceremony.

After a while, she blew smoke rings and asked him about Malika.

‘What surprises me most, and not pleasantly, I may add, is her absence from your life. Obviously, and I would beg you not to refute me, Malika should have been here to look after you.’

Malika, beautiful and stately, with a long neck, was thirty years old when Bankim first beheld her and loved to raptures. She had recently turned forty-two, and at the birthday party marking the event, drank an entire bottle of champagne and danced resolutely with the owner of an airline company. The portly gentleman, with several mansions and a taste for the garish, took her home. Next morning, in a silver jet, they flew to an island where Malika wore her white peignoir. She shimmered brighter than the sun-teased sea and ran naked down the beach.

Often, at night, Bankim grew stiff with desire as he pictured Malika with the airline owner. Envyless, he lay in his bed, admiring her from a distance.

‘Malika has left me, Ma,’ he said. ‘You hated her. Malika tried so hard. You never let her be. And now she has lost hope. We both have. She has turned to another man.’

‘Another man. Another. Well, she had to, some day or the other. It will pass. Be relieved.’

‘How would you know, the kind of things …’

‘The things I could tell you …’ she drawled, blowing out an exquisitely curved smoke ring. Then she walked over to the bar and poured herself a whisky.

A south wind blew in through the French window, chasing away the cigar clouds. Outside, under a yellow moon, the shefali tree glistened white. In the clean air, Bankim could breathe again. His mother, though she smoked a cigar now, smelt, once again, of Boroline and sandalwood.

In a few hours, the dew-kissed shefali flowers would fall like snow.

‘The only flower worth offering to the gods. It reminds me of my childhood,’ she had insisted.

‘But it attracts snakes,’ Bankim pleaded.

‘What rustic tales you believe in, son,’ she hissed back.

‘How can it grow in such an arid climate? The gardener says a frangipani is a better tree to have on this spot.’

He lost the argument and watched as the shrub took its place of prominence in the garden.

They went over the house together. It was 3 a.m.

‘Gobindo is lazy as usual. Look how dusty the books are. Yet they smell nice. See, I have a silverfish on my nail. Books too deserve to die. Give them a burial. Your father’s law books.’

Dawn was breaking out over the neighbouring forest. Soon bird-watchers, star-gazers, tree-studiers would flock in. They sat in the terrace garden. Bankim sipped green tea. Thankfully, Radha Rani was no longer asking for a fresh drink. She had switched from whisky to cognac and then artfully sneaked out the absinthe, which she seemed to like best. Now she just sat next to him, sucking on a large crumb of Danish blue cheese.

A Korean couple who lived across the street in a one-storeyed bungalow was up early. On the lawn outside, their life was strewn about: beds, tables, cushions, half-used perfumes, pencils, face masks, broken CDs, a blue sofa, a red ottoman, tennis racquets, lamps, everything labelled with a price. Come morning, they would auction it all. People in this city found everything worth buying. They would trample over the grass and peer into the bedroom. At the gate, two security guards stood at attention, keeping an eye on the things. The husband went inside after a while, but the young wife lingered. She passed her hand over a crystal decanter and rearranged various objects that were, not so long ago, very personal. Bankim gazed at the shadows of her fragile body.

His mobile phone would ring when the sun climbed higher. Unarmed, without a heart attack to report back, Bankim wondered if a mother’s reappearance – four quarters dead, a whole fiscal year dead – was catastrophic enough to explain the disappearance of a Chairman, an award-winning Chairman of particularly hard times.

Bankim’s tenure as Chairman was extremely successful. He led the Indian subsidiary of an MNC to great glory. Their contribution to the country’s happiness index had found mention twice in the Prime Minister’s speech in recent times. This recognition, when business was slowing down everywhere else, was spectacular enough for the Elders in New York to unlock the coveted trophy and overcome their reluctance to award it to a non-white. They wanted to listen to him speak. In the hope of a vision, moistened by the wisdom of monsoon, they waited for him to land. He never reached the celebration. It was a good thing after all, he introspected later, with a shudder. On the other end of that journey, his colleagues were waiting to cheer a hero who would bring with him the gift of a new inspiration. Yet all he had was the rhetoric of a new and mysterious market, borrowed phrases from optimists and a praise or two from a Prime Minister eager to showcase progress. The best was behind him, he knew in his heart. They couldn’t better themselves unless something radical happened. He tried to imagine new anxieties or thrills that would, by generating a vacuum or a demand, set the economy spinning again. But the sky was blue and the ocean, calm.

Bankim’s ego was also fanned by 30,000 employees who received signed cards on their birthdays, heard his address over video conference or at the annual meet and read his letters in the fortnightly newsletter, adulation from industry chambers of BASIC countries, and the recent peccadillo with his Public Relations Director. At Frankfurt airport, before he got waylaid, Bankim was saying goodbye to her in private.

‘You are tall,’ he said.

‘You are a coward,’ she cried. ‘I won’t write your speeches any more. Without me, you are nothing. Your face will be lost.’

‘There is Malika, who I must return to eventually,’ he reasoned, placing a placatory thumb on her trembling lower lip.

‘That love is dead,’ she protested.

‘My mother is dead. That love might live yet,’ he concluded and kissed her outside Gate 52.

At Café Goethe, his departed mother sat knitting a green sweater.

The green sweater was nowhere to be seen now. When morning came, Bankim felt tired and went in to take a nap in his bedroom. He was still weak from the medications and shock. As expected, the phone started ringing as soon as the sun was high enough. They wanted to know. They were curious and scared and hopeful. Bankim heard their voices flutter, in expectation of a morbid turn.

Evening sloped in again. Bankim lowered the lights in deference to his mother. Yet she remained opaque. He wondered if it embarrassed her. After the third glass of whisky, her catechism needled him. He had once again lost the smell of Boroline and sandalwood to the smell of clotted blood now.

‘What do you know about the floods?’ she asked.

‘That they are here. Unfortunately. Like every year. People have lost homes. Crops are gone. Prices will inflate,’ Bankim offered cautiously. She was a flood fixer. He tried to be sensitive.

‘And where are the floods? Are they all same? Don’t people have names? Don’t rivers kill differently?’ Radha Rani’s voice touched a new pitch, experimentally. ‘The paddy is rotting in the field. No one can save it any more. The peasants watch the golden crop turn black and putrid. Then their cows die in the rain. A large tide of water untethers their cattle. The poor beasts bleat helplessly and drown. Rats run around looking for flesh to eat. In camps ...’ A pause.

‘How many have died?’ she demanded to know.

‘Seven million.’ Bankim knew. It came as a news alert on his phone this morning.

‘Fifty million, I say,’ Radha Rani challenged him. ‘Floods have always been the order of the day. We have to find a way to coexist. The government will do nothing. Let us not expect anything of them. What you need is imagination. Bablu, I wasted my whole life on you, and now I have found a mission.’

‘But what can you do?’ Now, like this, as a dead returned, he stopped short of mentioning.

‘Leave that to me. There are ways.’

‘What ways?’

‘Ways of the old. Forgotten ways that you fear now.’

‘You are dead. How can you act?’

‘Are you scared then, Bablu? Scared of your own poor old mother?’

‘I was always scared of you.’

‘But would you say you are more scared of me now, when I have returned?’

‘Not particularly. No.’

‘Good. See how well it works for us.’

A crepuscular wind beat on the glass panes. There was a hint of rain in the dust. A yellow mist settled over the houses and treetops, swirling eddies in the beams from street lamps. When a plane went by thunderously, its lights were barely visible through the thick haze. Silence fell on the Chairman and his unlikely mother.

She lost her sharpness and spoke to him in a troubadour voice about the floods. Her lilting voice was completely shorn of sarcasm. Bankim gave himself up to the sweet comfort of lullaby.

‘When we were children, floods used to be like a visiting cousin with a difficult temperament – an unruly and sometimes murderous extension of our family. Once the summer relented, caringly, anxiously, we prepared for the waters to come and fill our homes and meadows. The house and courtyard were transformed to function on water. A narrow bridge of bamboo across the courtyard connected the rooms where we lived with the kitchen and storeroom. Our own little bridge, right in the middle of the house! The day our uncles unmoored the little boat from our pond, we knew the flood would be on us soon. They dragged the boat into the courtyard and coated it thoroughly with resin to make the wood stronger, so it wouldn’t rot in water. Once the boat was ready, we tied it to the bamboo posts on our veranda and wait for it to float up.

When the first head of floodwater came in gurgling, we ran along the canal, racing it. Slowly our village would be transformed into a land of water that shone like silver in the moonlight. Surviving floods was an art. People are impatient now. And rivers are angrier. There is no telling what they may do.’

They sat up till late at night and she told him stories of her childhood, of the riparian country that was now lost to all.

‘Why have you never told me stories, Ma, when you were alive?’

She did not reply immediately. He was afraid that the old sternness would come back. Or that she would ask for another whisky. Instead, she smiled mysteriously.

Three days and it was still unclear why she had returned from the dead. All she ever did was drink whisky, gin and absinthe, sometimes mixed together like a punch, sometimes one followed by another, but always in large quantities. She also smoked a great deal of cigar. And then, she lost her sarcasm and told stories. The whisky-drinking dead Scheherazade of the flood derailed Bankim’s Chairman-life. The flood filled his dreams and waking thoughts. The ground beneath his feet, as he walked about the house, rose and fell to the thought of water.

Then, on the fourth day, it was time to go to work. ‘We will call you up here in a month’s time, B,’ Jacques reassured him. Meetings were piling up across the country, with anxious politicians, shareholders and the media. They were curious. Was he well? Was he thin? Did he have some slowly emaciating cancer?

Spurned at Frankfurt airport, Bankim’s Publicity Director went on a long leave, vacationing with the kids at a quiet home stay in Pondicherry. ‘I would like to see egg on your face,’ she said. Egg or not, apart from a press conference, a comeback employee-address over video and a rushed meeting with the Chief Minister, Bankim refused to leave town.

‘I have to ponder over a few things,’ he said vaguely. ‘Recalibrate the order,’ he added slyly, instilling a grain of fear in the gossip mill.

‘Let that churn and get everyone to spit out petty predictions, while I truly sit back and ponder,’ he thought.

Borrowing from Radha Rani’s caustic catechism, Bankim hurled questions at the Advisory Board.

‘We are on the last precipice of an extravagant swell. Can you not hear the pop as chunks of soil break off from the levee? I hear it every day, ringing out loud warnings from Wall Street. Gentlemen and my lady, do you not agree that the flood shall be upon us soon?’

Six of his advisors, assembled to celebrate the recent wins of the company and chart out an aggressive year ahead, were taken aback by the turn that the conversation had taken. Instead of merrymaking and a speech of congratulations, what was here? A soothsaying Chairman? Terrible mistake, they all thought, but said nothing.

Much experienced in the benefits of general consent to speed up meetings, the collectors of honorarium were loath to pontificate. Hurriedly they jumped in and said how much they all had been thinking about it.

‘To make it worse,’ said Varghese, ‘the communists have refused to trade with us.’

‘I wouldn’t worry about it as yet,’ dismissed Naresh Kumar, the optimist from Harvard. ‘Let us build castles where the ground will hold. Let us look West and, indeed, deeper into the South. The Prime Minister’s speech is an icing on a well-baked cake!’

‘When the communists stir themselves up, beware,’ Varghese said, utterly unhappy with the Harvard manner.

J.J. Gooptu, President of the Advisory Board, was a highly respected veteran of the private sector. He ran a hand through his unfixed hair, rocking slightly on the swivel chair, a board room furniture strangely well suited to swaying one’s body in grief, and keened, ‘Never undermine the saying, what Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow! That state could still be our undoing.’

‘Yet has it not undone itself? That saying is a lore from better times, Mr Gooptu,’ Anjana Sahi quipped. Her latest book had a rabid chapter on the trade unions of Bengal. ‘An epidemic of lassitude has gripped the state, peopled only by cynics passing off as poets.’

But Bengal’s rejection really could be more than a minor hiccup. It could be the harbinger of things to come. The country, as it were, could begin to introspect. If the waters rose in the world market, they would tighten their embankments.

Bengal and Kerala are the conscience-keepers, they all agreed, and broke for lunch.

Bankim scooped up the almond soufflé and chatted with Gooptu about the comfort of his old chair at the Reynold’s Room in Bengal Club.

‘What a snooze after the best lunch in the world!’ Gooptu reminisced.

‘Yet how long before they tear down the dear building? I hear that the Industry Minister is an arch-conservative. The CM, poor fellow, is rather disoriented these days. The people of Bengal blame him for the floods. They say it is god’s wrath sent to punish the Communists. Unusual superstition. Untimely too,’ Bankim took his chances.

Gooptu’s hair met the static in the air, turning ponderous. Rumours were astir that the Prime Minister’s Office wanted to appoint him as Special Advisor on moral matters. Naturally, such an appointment would require him to resign from the Advisory Board. Having wafted some useful thoughts Gooptu’s way, Bankim moved on to fix the outcome of that afternoon’s meeting.

Most Advisory Board members were eager to move on. Varghese had a speaking engagement at Aspen, which the President of America might attend. He was half gone