Million Dollar Babu

I have been told that this a somewhat crappy essay, and I agree. I tried writing it after a sleepless night, and a storm in the head. I am beginning to feel guilty that I am not writing as well as I ought to be writing--or even as well as I am capable of writing.

In other news: Detective Jagat Kunwar is returning to Kathmandu. I look forward to seeing him.

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Chakraborti? That is possible, it sounds just about right, a Babu with a service in the Railway, Chakraborty sounds right, but it could easily have been a Banerji or Chatterji. A solid Bengali name, not Muslim or Bihari. Nadim Bhai is not sure. But the story is hilarious, so he has to giggle, and that makes it harder for him to remember the name of the Million Dollar Babu. What is a story that doesn't name the emperor who parades naked through the markets of Barra Bazaar?

Chakraborti Babu arrives at Topsia in a car with tinted windows, sends the driver to look for Nadim. The world-weary driver adds another layer of security: instead of approaching Nadim, he catches Nadim's childhood friend, another man named Nadim By the time Nadim and Nadim are in the presence of Chakraborty Babu, it feels like a bad gangster movie. Chakraborty Babu is big in the spongy rosogulla way, not at all imposing, breathing a little hard, constantly wiping his forehead.

“You know foreigners, Nadim Bhai,” says Chakraborty in Bangla. “I have a job for you that nobody else can do. If you do it well, twenty percent is yours. Think, Nadim Bhai. You will make twp lakhs minimum. And if you do this job well, there'll be more.”

Nadim knows foreigners because he is associated with a small NGO that runs a clinic from a one-room Youth Club in his neighborhood. A teashop around the corner loans them tables, or loans their plastic chairs—in any case, every time the clinic opens, foreigners grin and nod at the teashop and point at the chairs and tables on which rickshaw pullers and other teashop-wallahs sit for chit-chat and gup-shup. These foreigners also go to Nadim's home, sit in his kitchen and talk to his mother, his sister. Elena used to spend every day with him, running after Zeenat Aman, taking Baby Amrin to the hospital for surgery. People of Topsia are used to seeing her step lightly through the laughter and mud and despair of their neighborhood, with Nadim following shortly behind, his short, limber gait full of understated swagger.

Nadim doesn't know what to make of the opportunity: a few hours' work and two lakhs on the table! He consults Elena. I can't keep myself out of it. “What do you think, Parawin Bhai?” asks Nadim. “Money is money,” I say. “But, what is the catch?”

“No catch,” Nadim says. “The Bengali Babu has wads of money, a lot of money in American dollars, and he wants me to get it converted through my foreigner friends.” What foreigner friends? Backpacker volunteers who want to spend two weeks washing wounds and irrigating ears of children from a Muslim slum in Kolkata? Why isn't the Bengali Babu going to a bank? “Arre, yaar! It must be haraam money! He is scared. Every time I meet him, he drives me out to Tangra and takes me to eat Chinese. What do you want to eat? This, this, that? Eat more! You want whiskey? I have to say—Ramjan is going on. I don't take during Ramjan. Yesterday, for me and Nadim, seven hundred rupees at the Chinese restaurant. But he doesn't eat anything. Not even a Sprite.”

Nadim arrives three days later with two sheets of photocopy: one is a certificate of “authenticity.” The fine print is garbled, but the word “authenticity” is legible. The other is a photocopy of a million dollar bill. “You should have seen him. He was so scared. Every time someone came into the restaurant, he would snatch this up and put his fist under the table. I said—show me the original. What if you don't have an original?”

A million dollar bill? In Kolkata, with a Babu in the Railways? I search for denominations of US currency in wikipedia: of course, the million dollar bill exists. Rarer are the ten-thousand dollar bills, commemorative, by now illegal tender. Almost as infrequent as the two-dollar bill, a genuine legal tender that is just so quirky. Hank Williams sang about it: “I got a hot-rod Ford han a two-dollar bill, I know a shpot right over der hill, der's soda pop han dancin's free...” I show Elena the wikipedia entry on the million dollar bill and she falls off the chair laughing and between breathless bouts of laughter explains everything to Nadim.

The next day I fry mushrooms with soaked rice, then throw in the daal from the previous night, which was too salty to eat. The rice soaks up the salt, now there is khichadi for dinner. “There!” I say to myself. But Elena doesn't come home on time. She can get easily distracted by new curtains, or even mops and scrubs, at this point in her life. I sit glumly and type, slowly seething in anger. When she comes, she has a helmet on her head, and Nadim right behind, jumping two, three steps at a time. They can't wait to start giggling.

“I wish you were there! We went to a six, seven story tall building, through these alleys... oh those alleys! You should have seen them!” Nadim takes over the narrative: “We had to pass through seven, eight doors. Big men just standing there, like guards. And hair everywhere!”

“Big piles of hair, all over the floor, all along the walls, right up to the ceiling. They deal in hair. It was weird. There wasn't any hair only in the stairwell, but there were men standing in the stairwell, all silently peeing on the wall.”

“We reached him. He sent everybody away and then took out this small plastic pouch from his vest. Inside, he had the million dollar bill.” Chakraborty Babu's body guards positioned themselves at the entrance, behind ceiling-high pile of human hair, where all barbers of Kolkata must send their cargo. Elena took the note and slowly read out the text printed where the legal tender is normally shown. “This bill has been printed to increase your FUN! To be used exclusively at fairs and parties!” And more such drivel, all disguised by genuine typography and serious artwork to make it look and feel real.

Chakraborty Babu doesn't quite understand at first, and Elena can't understand how, in Kolkata, a city where even the Muslim women from the slums sometimes get a Masters in Sociology before becoming a gate for reproduction, reduced to veil and vulva, a Babu who lords over all the hair of Kolkata and has a job in the Railways could be fooled by so many into thinking that he was a Million Dollar Babu.

“It is a fake, made for children,” she explains. For birthday parties and fairs. And now Nadim and Elena laugh, waiting for me to join in.

I don't think that is funny at all, I say. I think it is sad, incredibly sad. He thought it was real for so long, it must have become a part of his dreams. He must have dreamed of a lot of things that would come out of that tender and give him happiness. It must have become the font of his hopes for a future filled with happiness, and you, with one careless gesture, showed him the truth about him: he is but a fool, hoodwinked by god knows how many who played along in the charade. It is cruel to do that to a person, I say. But, all said and done, who wouldn't laugh at the Million Dollar Babu?