Mr Reddy, my rheumy-eyed, half-bald, dim-witted neighbour, had had his scarecrow feet trembling on the verge of the bucket so many long years – ever since I knew him, in fact – that it came as a bit of a shock when he eventually kicked it.
News of his passing beyond the tattered veil was first brought home to me by the banging on my front door in the small hours. Letting go of movie superstar Radhika, whom I was attempting to hoist above my head as part of a complicated choreographed dance move on the cold, misty slopes of Kodaikanal, I lurched awake on my cold, bare bachelor cot. Correctly identifying the thumping sound as coming from my front door and not, as I had initially presumed, from the buxom body of superstar Radhika crashing and careening down a Kodaikanal cliff, I put a leg over the side of the bed and located my battered flip-flops.
I noted the time on the luminous arms of the wall clock. It was 2 am. The banging continued apace, in time with my beating heart. I shambled up, stumbled through my cold, bare bachelor apartment as quickly as I could, and put a sleepy, fearful eye to the spyglass.
Mrs Reddy stood under the dim light of the landing, her greying hair a frazzled halo around her pinched, wild-eyed face. Despite the hour being two, she was dressed to the nines. Her svelte figure draped in a rich purple silk sari, lips coated deepish mauve, hair fashionably done up and highlighted with lilac ribbon: she looked not unlike a slim, attractive aubergine. An aubergine, though, with something on its mind.
‘Mr Murthy!’ she squawked, adding voice-over to the sound effects. If I did not move fast, she would wake up all the neighbours. I yanked hard on the sticky latch and threw open the door.
‘Here I am,’ I said, for there I was. I had no secrets from the Reddys.
‘Oh, there you are. You took your own sweet time.’
‘I was sleeping.’
‘A fine time to sleep. And here the world is turning upside down.’
‘This is the time one habitually sleeps, madam. It is 2 am. What seems to be the trouble?’
‘The trouble! All hell has broken loose, that’s all!’
‘Yes, but in what precise way?’
‘In the precise way that the old duffer has gone and died on me.’
‘The who has done what?’ I gabbled. One is not at one’s brightest at 2 am.
‘The duffer!’ repeated Mrs Reddy, cutting the first few steps of an agitated eggplant quadrille. ‘He’s dead. Expired. Given up the ghost.’
‘Mr Reddy?’
‘Yes, yes, yes. How many duffers do you know?’
‘Dead?’
‘As a brinjal.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘He is cold. He does not move.’
‘He might have fainted.’
‘I stuck a pin into him. Nothing.’
‘Let me check...’
I hurried into her apartment, which is right next to mine; the doors edge on each other. Mrs Reddy followed me, muttering, ‘I told that old soup strainer not to pop off without a 48 hour advance notice. Would he listen? No. Not to the end, he wouldn’t. And what in the name of holy chop suey was he
thinking, conking out at this ungodly hour? Couldn’t he have chosen a more decent time? Inconsiderate to the very end, that noodlehead. He always was a bit of a runny omelette, but this
time he’s really laid an egg.’
The Reddy apartment was brightly lit, as if for a wedding in the family. The brightness highlighted in delicious detail a layer of grime on the floor, the mounds of clothes pouring out of chests of drawers, the pots and pans piled high on occasional side tables, and the general appearance of a typhoon having passed through the place. Being a long-time widower, I held liberal views on the subject of housekeeping, but Mrs Reddy took things to anarchistic extremes. Her recent celebrity status
had made things much worse.
Having become a contestant in Season 10 of Tip-Top Chef, more through gall than through her cooking skills, she had succeeded, against all expectations, to get all the way to the semi-finals with one outlandish creation after another. I believe the organisers had kept her on the show for sheer comic value.
Whatever the reason, those six months, when her frail figure, pert Chihuahua face and chirpy singsong voice had danced across our TV screens every Thursday evening, had made her the uncrowned queen of Diagonal Lane. The toast of the city, in fact. Not many of our Southern luminaires ever managed to get onto national telly, having to content themselves with regional stations while uncouth bounders from the North hogged the national airwaves.
Now she was spending her time writing a cookbook, signing autographs and concocting new excesses in her kitchen. All this left little time for washing dishes and doing the laundry. Mr Reddy’s meagre pension could not afford them a maid. In any case, maids never could put up with her tantrums for very long, and usually quit within weeks.
I negotiated the narrow hall and cramped sitting room, and made for the bedroom. Yellow paint peeled from the wall. The chintz curtains had not been washed in decades. A rusty Godrej almirah, once blue, stood at the entrance, discreetly blocking the view of a rattling red plywood bed with mottled green bedsheets. A dispirited, fly-spotted Sri Vitusakan gazed down on the bed from an outdated calendar, hammered into the cracked wall.
Mr Reddy was lying spread-eagled on the bed, one foot on the floor and the other in the air. This curious attitude was in itself not unusual: he had sprained all sorts of delicate body parts in a
misguided attempt to learn ballet at a ripe old age and of necessity took his forty winks in a set of thirty-three carefully choreographed positions. But he was still. He made no sound. That was unusual.
He writhed in his sleep like a python and snored like the Deccan Express entering a tunnel. Mrs Reddy complained of this often, but I did not need her to tell me. I could hear him for myself in my own apartment. We shared a bedroom wall.
The dim, unshaded 40-watt incandescent lamp glowed dully on Reddy’s bald pate. His veshti was askew, displaying maroon y-fronts covering the essentials between spindly thighs. His sweat-stained cotton mesh vest strained over a bird-like ribcage, ballooned with pride. A smile of ecstasy, as if in the thrall of a pirouette, puckered his nicotine-coloured lips, as did the blissfully shut eyelids. Clearly, he had been dreaming of dance at the point of departure.
Except for the fact that his chest was not moving, and no snores emerged from his button-like nose, he seemed extraordinarily alive.
I prodded him to verify. Mrs Reddy was right. Appearances were deceptive. He was deader than a cold storage brinjal.
‘How long has he been like this?’
‘A duffer? Oh, he’s been a duffer as long as I remember. I remember during our marriage ceremony, when the priest asked him to rotate left, he rotated right. When he was asked to sit down, he stood up. “Holy coconut chutney, they’re marrying me off to a duffer,” I remember saying to myself. I should have protested there and then. I didn’t. I took the whole thing as a joke. I thought it might be a whale of a laugh, being married to a weak-in-the-head chap. What can I say? I was a little girl. Wisdom comes late.’
Excerpted with permission from Death on Diagonal Lane, Pashupati Chatterji, Hachette.
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