You’re My Venus
For Surfy, with love and squalor
.
If you asked all of them, every single guava tree who bore witness in the little guava thota near Munireddy Palyam, they would rustle with teenage sagacity, making gentle neti-neti, neti-neti sounds, and agree: 1981 had indeed started off uneventfully. The Jeevan Kumars had thrown a new-year’s eve party on their terrace and invited all the neighbours. A barbecue in the corner sent up smoke and the fragrance of sausage fat dripping onto coals, people’s heads bobbed up and down, as they kind of jitterbugged with cupped hands moving in front of chests, feet awkwardly picking up the groove. A band called Abba had made the season sparkle with their new album, causing small town listeners to go all the way to HMV House on St. Mark’s Road to pick up an LP, minds buoyant with thoughts that hadn’t occurred to them before: that the sky was actually the limit, that they would never be blue again. So the only sounds that night, wafting over the quiet cantonment, were that of people ‘shining like the sun (super trouper), smiling, having fun (super trouper), feeling like number one.’ That last made the three little children, hidden behind the water tank so they could stay up late and watch the dancing, laugh so much. ‘Feeling like Number One! Peeing Number One! Miss, I want to go Number One’. Three tots: two belonging to the Jeevan Kumars – Ravi aged eight and Siri aged seven, and their neighbour, Surfy, aged six, who had been allowed to stay the night on condition that he not touch a sausage.
About nine kilometres away, on the north-west side of the city, stood a land called Binnypet. Well, ‘stood’ implies a certain military straight-backed, clipped-moustache discipline as could be expected of a service driven area of the Cantonment, established in 1809. But it had been a while since it had known a commander, so Binnypet sort of sprawled, like a fat bag of vegetables that had given under its own weight, spilling a tumble of tomatoes, brinjals and peas on the earth, allowing them to reach their own unique destinies based on shape, weight and obstacles in their path. It had lost its grandeur but retained an apocalyptic majesty that discarded commodes and billowing plastic bags will bring. The old Bangalore Woollen, Cotton & Silk Mills which had been pompously renamed Buckingham & Carnatic Mills was now just hollow, bleak Binny Mills that ran along the piss and shit covered railway tracks. Near the underpass, a group of women in parrot green and rani pink art-silk sarees made brisk trade in blowjobs delivered to lonely travellers who’d just disembarked at either the bus terminal or the City Railway Station, carrying only a holdall that held all their clothes, money and a hopeful heart. This year, there was the additional excitement of the circus tent.
Though it was an irregular event, the women were familiar with, and even loved the circus and its colourful denizens. They loved the way it came to town via Magadi Road, announcing itself through Rajajinagar with a flurry of lorries, tempos and closed vehicles all with coloured bunting and Venus Circus painted on in postbox red. The motley elephants and camels rode on the open lorries, their trainers and a posse of dwarves travelling with them to maintain calm, yelled to the drivers if there were sudden lurches or potholes. Snotty little boys in scrappy shorts and girls in langas with littler children on their hips ran after these lorries, pointing and chanting ‘Sirrkuss! Sirrkuss!’ One closed vehicle read ‘Horse Van’ but inside was a hippopotamus and Basheer Khan’s family of trapeze artists. There were two tempos carrying all the other artists including the slender acrobats, the animal trainers, the tent-raisers, Ayub the stunt motorcyclist, the unicyclists, the ageing magician, the carpenters, the solitary darzi with his haberdashery bags of sequins and buttons and different members of each of their families. Another tempo was dedicated to props such as nets, ropes, vessels, motorcycles, and the Wheel of Death. The remaining closed vehicles probably contained the lion, two tigers, ponies, goats, dogs and an adolescent male langur. A blue, battered Mercedes Benz 280SL with a missing hubcap carried the circus owner, his missus, his accountant and his fixer. The circus wasted no time occupying the garbage dump and wasteland that ran parallel to the railway tracks, next to the Lutheran Church. The fixer, whose name was Mr Raghu, took the local cops to Sri Shankaralingapandian Hotel for a top-up of kesari baath and under-the-table rum. Phone calls were made, a senior police official was invited to inaugurate the circus and much hand holding and yes-Sir-ing occurred in little or no time. Shortly after Mr Raghu had soft-soaped the cops, tents were pitched beneath the graceful droop of high-tension cables, animal pens and cages were erected. The giant mushroom coloured big-top would be the last to come up. Then the carpenters would get to work creating the ring and hammering in place the gallery seating.
Nine kilometres away from Binnypet, Ravi, Siri and Surfy, like three turtles with their khaki knapsacks, held hands at their bus stop near the Khuddus Sahib cemetery, and kicked the curb with their white keds turning them brown, waiting to board their school bus. The attendance-Miss on the bus called out ‘Ravi Jeevan Kumar!’ ‘Present, Miss.’ ‘Siri!’ ‘Present, Miss.’ ‘Sarfaraz!’ ‘Present, Missss,’ squeaked Surfy, whose voice was still unformed, emerging mildly from the aqueous depths of his baby chest. The others on the bus were in the older classes so paid no attention to three turtles who entertained themselves for the twenty-five minutes of the ride staring out of the window at passing cyclists and digging their elbows into each other as they jostled for the best view. When they reached school, Miss separated them from the rest and shepherded them to Baby school, while the boisterous older ones headed to something mysterious called the ‘Morning Assembly’. You didn’t have to exercise yourself too much to be in Baby school; some singing, some plasticine and then a class-Miss would draw an apple on the blackboard, then use the duster to wipe the chalk off and draw a ball that would look exactly like the apple. The cat though, with two triangles for ears, piqued Surfy’s interest. D for Doctor was represented by a cross that had puzzled each of them at different points in time. That evening, the journey home on the bus was feverish with an opaque excitement the little ones couldn’t quite fathom, though they heard loud and clear the following words ‘We’re going to the circus the school is taking us to the circus field trip to the circus ticket money for the circus what fun it’s going to be going to the circus.’ It must have come up at home because one of the Jeevan Kumars walked them to the lending library and borrowed a book called ‘Hurrah for the Circus’ by Enid Blyton. On the cover they stared, bug eyed, at a pretty, blonde fairy in a white tutu carrying a magic wand and dancing on a black horse. Behind her was a clown in a harlequin costume and the inside of a red and white striped circus tent. ‘Is that what a circus looks like?’ wondered three turtle minds.
The gujjli on Mysore Road is populated by quicksilver men and a few women with sharp wit and despairing eyes who, having foraged among the rubble of broken-down houses in Chamarajpet, try to flog the doors, windows and beams for whatever they can get. No blonde fairies or harlequin clowns, just a market of repurposed stuff that would be useful to a circus. If you care to walk through, you’ll have to watch out and save your feet from rusty nails and wooden splinters that never seem to bother the heels of the men and the few women of the gujjli. The sun falls through arches of bamboo, casuarina poles, wooden reapers, PVC pipes and deal-wood that comes from old crates that have been deconstructed into planks and seasoned through sun and rain and more sun and now lie, tinder dry, in stacks of sawdusty yellow and cream. The Venus Circus carpenters came here, shortly after they had arrived in the city, for a good deal on well, deal-wood, which was once pine wood, resistant to stuff like termites and putrefaction, and dirt cheap. It took two lorries to load the quantity of deal-wood they would require. By the time the loading was complete and the labour was paid, the bells from St Joseph’s Church, across the road in Briand Square, pealed in the evening Tamizh mass. A few men and fewer women crossed themselves, the rest continued bending their backs and carrying loads of timber. A gang of six headed to the gadang for their evening bottle.
Even before the circus opened, the bustling activity around it was irresistible. To strait-laced passers-by it appeared like something feral smelling and wild from a B film, they couldn’t stop themselves from craning their necks for a better look as they went about their own earnest business of getting to the office and then straight back home. At the centre of this perceived bacchanalia was the huge canvas big-top, with the constant hammering and drilling sounds of the carpenters. The silvery cables looked like pretty tinsel above, swaying lightly in the breeze. In concentric circles, moving outwards from the tent, were first the animals, their tusks and humps and fur and stripes and horns and tails, contained in pens and cages. Then the green and blue tarpaulin housing with children who seemed never to have to go to school, running free-range, bare-bottomed. Young women in stretch pants and t-shirts lounged by the cages, painting their nails and threading each other’s eyebrows, they seemed savage and alert, like cats. A group of dwarves with downward mouths, permanently squatted on their haunches smoking and biding their time for something … anything. Perhaps for a time when employment for dwarves would not be restricted to circuses, farting powder and literal slapsticks made of balsa. One of them lunged unenthusiastically, every now and then, at the neighbourhood children who came near yelling ‘Kubja! Kubja!’ just to get a rise out of the clowns. It was an unchallenged form of play between the two, the holders of inherited bigotry on one side of the see-saw, and the genetically different, on the other. Long clothes lines hung between the tents, plastic pegs holding down spangled shirts and satin hot pants. In the evenings there would be cow-dung-cake fires burning, as meals were cooked by women in long earrings and questions in their eyes. The smells that rose weren’t familiar; coconut oil, some form of meat, raw onions, roti.
‘Why can’t we go to the circus (circuss, cirrrccuss), everyone else is going, why you so mean (meen, meeeen), Ammama’s house is borrring, we WANT to go to the cirrccuss, we’re begging!’ had become a chorus of complaint in at least one house in Bangalore. Day in and day out, the air was rent with circus talk. ‘It’s going to close and you still haven’t taken us! Why do you have to work!’ But the Jeevan Kumars were apparently both mean and overworked, for despite all the pleas, Ravi and Siri would not be able to go because that particular Sunday, February 8th, the very last day of the circus, was their grandmother’s 60th birthday and there was no chance in hell that she would forgive their absence. Surfy was too little to make it on the school trip but he whined so forlornly that his Abu agreed to take him for the matinee, same day, same time as the rest of the school. Ravi and Siri grudgingly spent their free time making birthday cards using a toothbrush, paint and leaves from the guava trees. Not much character, the guava leaf, unlike the peepal, but Ammama would appreciate the effort. They placed guava leaves on sheets of paper, then dipping the toothbrush into green and blue poster colours, used their thumbs to spray paint over the paper. After, they gently lifted off the guava leaves revealing its ghostly white silhouette. When Surfy tried to join them, they shoved him off because he was always smudging the paint, lifting the leaves too hastily with his stubby, baby fingers. Without washing their blue-green thumbs and fingers, they took him back to his house and his Ammi said to sit down and eat something, ‘some hot-stuff at least’, so they did. Three turtles on the sofa, crunching silently through the fried peanuts, curry leaves and yellow bits and bobs, their minds spinning in different worlds, their eyes spacing out pleasantly, as children’s do when their gobs are stuffed. ‘Thanks aunty, bye aunty, bye Surfy’ they said as they finally washed their hands and headed out. ‘Bye!’ she replied absentmindedly, as she moved on to chopping some bhendi for dinner ‘Did Surfy tell you he’s going to the circus?’
Back in Binnypet, Basheer’s son Chand, a farrier who would whisper duas to equines while trimming their hooves, volunteered to make the buckets of gum paste for the Venus Circus posters that would then be slapped onto public walls that ran along pavements. Covering Binnypet and Chamarajpet obviously, but also on walls as far away as Jayanagar. He methodically built a wood fire near the horse enclosure, using some bricks, wood shavings and wormy planks, so he could keep an eye on them while stirring the large aluminium pot of slurry for the next couple hours. The Venus Circus posters were quite unique, if you think about it. The Apollo Circus posters had Devanagari script on a black background, with a graphic collage of clowns, cannon fire and dogs on a wheel. Jumbo Circus had the elephant motif, there was no escaping that. Ajanta Circus had a weird contortionist, ugh. But the Venus Circus posters had mithai pink and fluorescent green on a white backdrop, just like the art-silk sarees of the ladies who made quick business by the railway tracks. It had both English and Kannada script: Venus Circus / ವೀನಸ್ ಸರ್ಕಸ್. January 7th 1981-February 8th 1981. Binnypet, Bangalore. Plus, there were lots of girls on it. Two girls hanging from opposite ends of a trapeze framed the poster. In the centre was one on a horse, behind her was one doing a pirouette on a striped ball. In the left-hand corner were two miniature girls holding two corners of the King of Spades.
Please, I’m not trying to take you on a long journey, I’m just laying out the facts…
There was no 6 am alarm set at the Jeevan Kumar’s because it was Sunday. Everyone usually slept late, waking only to the thwapp thwapp sound of newspapers being deposited on the doorstep. Except that today Ravi was awake and his insides churning with dreams of the circus. He whispered to Siri to wake up and brush her stinky teeth. Still in their matching pyjamas, him green, her mauve, both polka dotted, they put on their little rubber chappals and walked out of the front door. They weren’t planning to take Surfy along, but there he was, thumb in his mouth, barefoot and standing on the other side of his gate bars. He looked like some kind of sweet zoo animal, how could they resist. They held hands, Surfy sandwiched between them, and set off. They knew where it was they were headed except they had no idea how to get there. It was 9 am. By 10 am, they were lost, and then found, by two sets of irate (and guilty) parents, sitting on the pavement and still making circus plans. They were told off – ‘I don’t want to hear any more circus talk!’ – and shooed back home in a hurry, fed breakfast and taken to their Ammamma’s house. ‘Anyway, Abu will take you at 3, baba, nothing to worry about.’ said Surfy’s Ammi when she saw him sadly waving them goodbye.
The circus had been up for the past few hours as animals waited for no one, basically needing to be fed before the crack of dawn, else they’d raise the dead. Fires dotted the grounds and folk scurried around chopping meat, tearing cabbage heads, stirring ragi ganji and mixing huge bowls of boosa together with torn up rotis and water. They still had bundles of sugarcane from Sankranti so the elephants stirred in anticipation. In between tending the animals, they took breaks, chatting inconsequentially in the cool morning air, dipped rusks into cups of strong chai. Old Raju gave his beloved lion, Rajkumar, a bowl of goat milk and then gave him his Sunday treat, a 5-kilo slab of beef. Young Raju set about taking care of the tigers who didn’t care for milk so were fed a khichdi of keema and rice. Sundays were hectic because there was the 3 pm matinee and then the 7:30 night show. The matinee usually drew in school children and today they were fully booked. One teacher alone, Subramaniam Sir, from Bapuji Teachers’ Association Middle School, had booked 300 tickets for his middle school children.
‘If ifs and ands were pots and pans, there’d be no work for tinkers’ hands!’ Said the attendance-Miss when Ravi Jeevan Kumar told her, a week before ‘If my mother gives me money, then we can come to the circus.’
Is this a ghost story, I’m beginning to wonder? But then aren’t all stories ghost stories, for they don’t, do they, have the human super-power to breathe in, breathe out and clock the fucking moment? Chaliswan means 40 days. One Bardo of 49 days, in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, is the liminal space between death and rebirth. Chehlun or Arbaeen marks 40 days from Ashura, the day that the Prophet’s grandson was martyred in the Battle of Karbala. Noah’s Ark landed safely that day. 13 days, according to the puranas, is what it takes to transition from human body to unsettled, wandering spirit to calm, ancestral spirit. Yes, it takes 13 days for a soul, shaped like a turtle with a knapsack, to move on. Even if it is a little soul. No discount, no rebate. For 13 days because of her neighbours, 40 days of chaliswan, 49 days of the Bardo, 4 months of her iddah, she wandered through the debris. ‘Sallallahu alaihi wasallam, sallallahu alaihi wasallam … Surfie? Surfie baba? Ammi is here.’
‘when a child is born into this world
It has no concept
Of the tone of skin it’s living in
It’s not a second
We’re seven seconds away…’
From judgement and cruelty. For 7 seconds, we’re empty. Shoonya.
What does 15 minutes, 900 seconds feel like?
Like next to nothing. Like 900 lifetimes. A soft shadow of a technician ran to the animals. Yes. The horses quietly tugged themselves free. Perhaps. A woman who had exited the tent early, heard the first screams from the tent ‘Benki! Benki!’ Truth. There was a big sound as burning canvas imploded followed by an explosion as the power went off. Drawn by strength she didn’t normally have, she ran into the fire and pulled out two children. She ran back in for a third, shoved them out, then her long hair was engulfed and she was gone. Truth. People were running out, their mouths stretched open and enormous, bizarrely, heading towards the trees. Truth. The lion cowered in a corner, waiting for Old Raju, trusting that he would come for him. Perhaps. Hardly any children were seen running out. Truth. Hanumantha, a criminal lawyer, was headed home from his office in Okalipuram when he saw thousands of people running and heard animal and human sounds, he stopped his auto and rushed towards the flames. The ladies in rani pink and parrot green were standing here, their faces, a river in spate, they couldn’t dry this wetness whose source was so deep, so abundant, unfathomable. If one looks, and I did, one will find (as I did) Facebook threads by people who were there, who knew someone who was there, who lost an aunt / a professor / two neighbours, who missed being at the matinee show of Venus Circus on Sunday, February 8th, 1981, because
- Their parents said no, no circus, you can’t go to the circus
- They fell down and scraped their knee and missed the bus
- They could not get tickets.
Someone said they had seen a tiger running towards the … ah, that explains the people climbing trees. Truth. Subramaniam Sir and the circus pehlwan went in and out and in and out, the smell of their burned hair filling their noses, in and out. 40 children were rescued by their charred arms. In and out. Truth. ‘I saw the hippo, it’s gone towards the railway colony!’ Lies. The hippo’s skin fell apart in pink and grey shards, like ham, and it died in days. Truth. The police and the firemen who arrived couldn’t make their way in for the crowds, couldn’t see for the smoke, the darkness and debris. The strait-laced passers-by were strait-laced no longer. They gave up every belief to clutch bodies under the arm, offer blood and organs, run to pharmacies for lint. The great big adults inside the tent, wide shouldered, strapping, petite, buxom, in pant-shirt, in sarees, in salwar-kameez, who flung aside chairs in panic, who called for help to all their gods, and jumped from the top galleries and scrambled and ran and stepped on the soft bodies of the little ones, were trying to survive, that’s all. Truth. By now it wasn’t quiet. No, it wasn’t quiet at all.
Surfie went to the circus with his Abu. They held hands, one tiny hand held tight by a larger one. By the time Basheer descended from his trapeze and the clowns were slapping each other’s butts making the powder fly in a final display of tamasha, he was in a delirium of excitement. ‘I love the circus so much, Abu, I want to come again!’ They were in the front gallery, quite close to the ring, so the fart powder formed clouds near him. When the first scream of ‘Benki!’ was heard, he was still mid laugh. He lifted his head upwards, craning his neck, mouth still open. The great big adults above them, they were trying to survive, that’s all.
Life’s got it down, the way to deal deft ironies. The one circus artist who burned to death was, not Mr Raghu, not the owner nor his Missus, not the accountant, but Ayub the motorcyclist. The one prop that didn’t burn to cinders was Ayub’s Wheel of Death. True.
In 1989, when a child was born, with formidable skills and a blue bottom, the guava trees who had grown old and grey-blue no longer stood there. So if you wanted to know about the Venus Circus fire, you’d be better advised to ask the electric poles who had been leaning around since 1981, grown jaded, cigarettes dangling, and they’d tell you that it had all gone to shit. The news reported 92 had died and that most were children, but people in Rajajinagar who had seen the vegetable carts with bodies rolling by in the dead of night say it was closer to 300. The baby with the blue bottom, she grew up and one day said, ‘Ammi, I’m going to talk to Siri aunty, I want to know about Surfy bhayya’ and she walked out.