Made in china, p.9
Made In China, page 9
Dev looked flummoxed. ‘You actually want to stay back? And your tickets?’ he asked.
‘Don’t worry about all that stuff.’
‘Don’t worry? No, no. You clearly have no idea what you’re talking about. Believe me, just pack your bags.’
‘The hotel guys have already helped me change the tickets,’ Raghu admitted hesitantly.
‘Are you serious?’ Dev shook his head, his brows furrowed, a suspicious look in his eyes. ‘What’ll you do here alone?’
‘Play mah-jong and drink rice wine.’ Raghu joked lamely.
‘This is a terrible idea.’ Dev didn’t laugh. After a few seconds of silence between them, Raghu finally decided to ask the question that had been eating at him like an ulcer. ‘Can I ask you something?’ he said.
‘You want cash? Here—’ Dev made a move to pull his wallet out of his pocket.
‘No, no. I ran into this man the other evening. Did you know Beijing has a black market?’ Raghu asked.
‘Which city doesn’t?’ Dev replied with a small smile.
‘No, I mean, the man tried to sell me … um he said … they sell tiger penis soup, yaar.’
Dev turned around and guffawed. ‘Did you try some? How was it? Sweet? Sour? Delicious? Slurp slurp?’ he said, his tongue darting in and out, making Raghu flush with embarrassment.
‘Dev, come on. I’m serious.’
‘I bet you are.’
‘The man told me I should sell it in India,’ Raghu said, trying and failing to frame the sentence as a question.
Dev laughed again. ‘What an ass!’
‘You don’t think it’d work in India, right?’ Raghu stammered, glancing at Dev with hopeful eyes.
‘Work? In what way?’ Dev asked.
‘To treat, you know, reproductive issues.’
‘These are really absurd questions. Forget all that, and let’s fix your tickets.’
‘Dev, really, I’m going to stay. I’ll be fine.’
‘Hmm … and what will you do again?’
‘Explore,’ Raghu said, not stating the entire truth. He thought of his childhood and adulthood with Dev, about his dependence on his friend, and experienced the joy of liberation for the very first time. How quickly things had changed. He no longer needed a saviour.
CHAPTER 8
Raghu turned in bed and checked the alarm clock. It was 4 a.m. Dev was long gone. After he had left, Raghu had spent hours sitting on the lounge chair in the balcony, his feet pressing against the railing, his gaze on the dazzle of the countless skyscrapers that defined the skyline of Beijing. He was alone in China. It was an unsettling feeling, but an exciting one.
Raghu was thinking about Hao Li. In the end, Raghu hadn’t made that call to him. Instead, he’d decided to first ask around, conduct a background check on the man. He could be a cheat after all. But whom could he ask?
He stared at the sky; his gaze stuck on a stray cloud as he explored his options. Then he decided to start from the most obvious place. He took the stairs down to the business centre in the hotel. The browser was set to English. Little mercies, he thought with relief. He began his search and with the first click, dozens of Hao Lis appeared in the results. Raghu tried various string searches to look for tiger body parts suppliers in Beijing. As if the darkest truths were so easily accessible. The World Wide Web shrugged at him. Clearly, it was concealing all the vital information. It was time for plan B.
‘I want to see where you make the soup.’
Raghu was standing in Hao Li’s shop, facing him. He was trying his best to imitate the body language and the voice of billionaire businessmen he’d seen in movies.
‘See make soup?’ Hao’s sallow face looked confused.
‘Either you show me where you make the soup, or I walk away now,’ Raghu said.
‘No no, Xiansheng. I show you. Come,’ Hao said meekly.
Raghu followed him out of the shop, and to the end of the alley, where there stood a deteriorated structure, more like a shack than a concrete building. Hao took him to a dingy room that apparently doubled as a production unit. The place was strange and slightly creepy. It looked like it had survived a century of bad weather, chipping paint, foul smell and devious activities. In one corner, two women tended to something cooking on four traditional stoves; a black iron charcoal burner lent a warm, rustic smell to the room. Raghu’s wife often used something similar she’d inherited from her grandmother – called sighdi in Gujarati – to grill some corn in the monsoon. It added a charred and smoky flavour to the food. The women glanced at Hao and Raghu for a brief moment, smirked, and then went back to cooking.
The room had nothing more refined to sit on than four wooden stools. Two of them were occupied by the women, and on the other two lay stacks of sealed containers. Hao rushed to them and put the containers down. Then, dusting one of them with his palms, he brought a stool to Raghu.
‘Plea sit, Xiansheng,’ he requested.
Raghu felt his heart begining to beat harder. Was he really doing this? Hesitantly, he sat down and told himself that if Hao thought he could fool Raghu, he had another thing coming.
‘They cook here, see.’ Hao’s eyes were earnest as he waved his hands to indicate the women at the stove.
Raghu watched the soup billowing smoke in front of him; creamy white with the consistency of er … he couldn’t even say it to himself. His stomach flipped. Positive thoughts, he firmly instructed himself, but couldn’t get rid of the vivid image of semen boiling in massive pots.
The women stirred the liquid on all four stoves alternately. On the side of the stoves were large aluminum platters that held various kinds of twigs and leaves; Chinese herbs, he concluded. The women picked up a few now and then, measured and added them to the simmering liquid. He took a closer look and noticed something long and wiggly floating in the soup. That must be the pe— he didn’t even want to go there.
Growing up, the tiger had been Raghu’s favorite animal. Aman had taken after him in that department. Raghu’d read the kid numerous bedtime stories about tigers. What would he tell his son if he went ahead with this and it actually worked? That their wealth was the result of selling tiger soup? Feeling conflicted and disturbed, Raghu shook his head and tried to concentrate on the present. He took a closer look at the boiling soup, trying hard not to react. The air was pungent with an herbal smell.
‘You taste some?’ Hao offered graciously.
‘No!’ Raghu shrieked, then got a hold of himself and repeated calmly, ‘No. I’m okay.’ He scratched his right ear, then leaned in slightly towards Hao. ‘Do you use it?’ he asked in a soft voice.
Hao grinned, shaking his head vigorously. ‘I strong already.’ He flexed a bicep and grinned again.
‘Hmm,’ Raghu was not impressed. ‘So, what does it taste like?’
Hao made some incoherent sounds at first. ‘B… bitta. Bitta.’
‘Bitter?’ Raghu asked. That seemed about right. He knew that if he ventured into this business, a kind of malady will remain with him for life; the bitter taste of guilt combined with the fear that his fate would be somehow intertwined with the fate of the tiger in his soup.
After all, there weren’t too many tigers left in the world; he knew that from the ads that ran continuously on national television. They were endangered, and their numbers were diminishing rapidly. Raghu suddenly had this hunch that when the last tiger perished, so would he. His insides quivered and he shut his eyes. He shouldn’t have been here. Guilt was twisting his stomach.
But something strong within him held him rooted to the spot. Something deeper and stronger – that his goal was to live a comfortable life, not to die a guilt-free death.
‘Okay. I’ll call you,’ he finally said.
‘So, you, I, deal?’ Hao Li smiled a toothy smile, clasped Raghu’s right hand with both his hands, then glued it to his chest and bowed. ‘Thank you, Xiansheng. Thank you.’
Raghu pulled back his hand in a jiffy. There wasn’t enough holy water in the Ganges to cleanse him of all the sins he was about to commit.
Sipping on bottled elaichi milk by the side of the vendor, Raghu took in the scene at Kalyan junction railway station. The flight from Beijing had dropped him off in Mumbai and he was to take the train to Surat. The impenetrable crowd, the commotion caused by half a dozen trains ready to depart, and the clatter of the hurrying men, women and children, stray dogs, an occasional cow or two, porters, hawkers, beggars and ceaseless train schedule announcements; all of it was reminiscent of Beijing, except for the tedious familiarity of it all. The sensation of bodies bumping into him constantly would have dampened his spirits if he wasn’t still reeling from the excitement of his international trip.
Raghu located his window seat and pulled out his passport. The first real stamp on the travel pages, if he ignored Nepal, smiled up at him as Raghu stared back at it in disbelief.
With paperwork for compost shredders underway and armed with a fresh perspective on international black-market economy, Raghu felt at the top of his game, after he had successfully quelled the creeping feeling of doubt and anxiety that had threatened to overwhelm him since he landed in India. The familiar air had brought along wisps of his life before China; the failure of his business, the financial mess he was in, his family’s deteriorating lifestyle. To distract himself, Raghu scrolled through the recent photographs from his trip on his mobile phone. They painted a different story, one of a life full of visits to the Tiananmen Square and other Chinese landmarks; of skyscrapers and busy streets and convention centres and a sea of foreigners; there was no reconciling those stories with his real life in Surat.
A passenger in his adjacent seat got up to get off at the next platform, leaving his folded Gujarati daily on the seat. Raghu grabbed it to distract himself. Scanning through the news that he hadn’t seen in days grounded him; he was home. A wave of warmth swept over his body.
In the supplement on the second page, a column on the top right corner caught his eye. It was a medical Q&A section. There were questions about acidity and amnesia and … impotency. Struck by the coincidence, he looked at the columnist’s photograph and bio below and narrowed his eyes. The stamp-sized photo of a man with thick-rimmed glasses, a seriously grouchy expression and silver hair that stood on his head like wheat crops, stared back at him. Raghu would know that grouchy expression anywhere. He’d known it for years, in fact. He looked under the photograph to confirm his suspicion. It was Dr Vardhi!
Raghu had known the doctor since his father first took him to visit the old man, when Raghu had been five. The doctor was probably older than the hills now. His full name was Dr Jaivardhan Vardhi and he was a reputed Ayurvedic doctor in Surat. Dr Vardhi’s dispensary had once been a stone’s throw away from Raghu’s father’s shop. Raghu would often accompany his father to his shop, perched on the stiff little triangular seat between the handle and his father’s seat on his cycle. Jai Bholenath, his father would greet Dr Vardhi as he passed by the shop on other days, to which the good doctor would nod and wave. Raghu would repeat his father’s words, feeling grown up when the doctor nodded back to him too. When little Raghu fell sick, his father took him to the doctor’s dispensary and Raghu would return with foul smelling pills wrapped in newspaper cuttings, shoved deep into his pockets. He would toss them when his parents weren’t looking. Around the time his father passed away, the doctor had moved his clinic to a newly developing area in the city, and since then, Raghu had all but forgotten about their old friend and neighbour.
Raghu peered at the column again. Something in it triggered his weary grey cells. His mind was working overtime to process the information and what it meant to his new venture. The whole thing seemed like a collage of images at first; Beijing, Hao Li, the old English woman in the pharmacy, the doctor from his childhood memory, the newspaper column, the discontent in Rukmini’s eyes, his burning ambition to do anything at all to succeed. Every element in the collage seemed incongruous, varying in shape, size and essence. These didn’t seem like pieces that belonged together. There was no unity, no congruence.
Frustrated, he shut the newspaper. The rhythmic movement of the train made his eyelids heavy. As he closed them, a recollection surfaced in his confused mind. His father in a half-sleeved shirt, untucked and paired with dark grey trousers, writing in the accounting ledger at his shop as little Raghu and his pal Dev plodded through their homework nearby. The boys usually walked to the shop after the school, since it was close by. They worked on assignments and played there till dinner time, when Raghu’s father would close the shop and drop Dev to his place. On the way back, with Raghu on the cycle with him, he would share nuggets of wisdom on life and business with his young son. Raghu barely paid any attention, responding to his father with bored yawns and nods. Today, one of those nuggets resurfaced as if on cue.
If you become another florist in a flower market, you’re not only being unoriginal and lazy in your vision, you’re harming the other florists and setting yourself up for mediocrity, or worse, failure. His father had said in Gujarati. It surprised Raghu that he was able to recall that memory with such clarity now. It wasn’t just the words. He could picture his father; the spectacles he wore, his neatly parted and perpetually oiled hair, the way his starched shirt felt when little Raghu would pull it, the gold bracelet with Goddess Lakshmi’s image engraved in the centre he always wore on his right wrist, the little triangle paper packet of dried black raisins he always kept in his left pocket, the smell of rose ittar from a tiny ball of cotton he would pick up from the puja and stuff in his left ear each morning.
Raghu felt his eyes moisten. He thought of his father’s words, repeating them under his breath. Then he thought of Hao Li’s solution and Dr Vardhi’s column. Could this be his ticket to success? But how?
A strange feeling was consuming him, the genesis of which he could trace back to his stomach. It was working its way up to his throat. It was an oddly familiar feeling. Acid reflux. Over the next few minutes it got worse. A mild tension was building up between his eyebrows. He knew this feeling. It was the advent of a new idea!
A bulb had gone off in his head. There must be countless men who could potentially be suffering from this newly identified and favourite male problem. All he had to do was hunt them down.
A young boy with rabbit teeth sat upright across from him, gaping at him like a chimp at a banana hawker, reminding Raghu of his younger son. Raghu frowned at him. The boy returned the favour with a frown of his own, much higher in intensity. Raghu felt defeated.
The four-and-a-half-hour train ride to Surat wouldn’t be an ordinary one. Paneer sandwiches, poori-bhaaji, McAloo burgers, roasted peanuts; countless aromas mingled together to form an inviting image of an endless buffet laid out all through the paan-stained second class compartment. Raghu ran his tongue over his parched lips as the growling noises from the deep valley of his belly threatened to introduce themselves to his fellow passengers. He ignored it and with much élan, pulled out a pen and a writing pad he’d lifted from the hotel in Beijing. The kid was still staring at him. It was time for a game.
‘Tiger or no tiger?’ Raghu asked the boy, pushing out his chin, his eyes narrowed for effect.
‘In the train?’ the kid asked solemnly, his head to one side.
‘Anywhere.’
After a beat, the boy wriggled his nose and shook his head fervently. ‘Um no tigers. They’re scary.’
Right. No tigers. Tigers are scary. They are menacing and made of flesh and blood; just the thought would be blasphemous for his fellow vegetarian citizens. So, he wouldn’t be calling the soup The Tiger Soup after all. Raghu crossed out the first entry on the writing pad. The task was giving him an oddly gratifying feeling, as if he were sitting in an air-conditioned plush office replete with English-speaking secretaries and designer coffee, not on discoloured Rexin seats among a horde of listless, sweaty and tired passengers.
‘Is there a tiger on the train?’ the boy probed, squirming. Raghu hushed him and fired up his grey cells again. ‘Is there?’ the boy pressed.
‘Maybe,’ Raghu said and winked. Ancient Chinese Herbal Medicine Soup? It would cost ten times more ink to print such long labels. He looked at the kid again as that thought flashed through his mind. The kid winced and clung to his mother’s arm, trying to look away but still stealing glances at him. Raghu grimaced and had a mental conversation with the boy. Beta, you’ll need this soup one day. Yes, you will. I just know it. And you know what? Uncle Raghu will give you the first order for free. But only if you promise to bring at least five friends. Okay?
Losing interest in the face of Raghu’s silence, the boy treated himself to a bag of banana chips from his mother’s purse.
Raghu persevered, his tongue in discordance with the sugary syrup he was sipping in the name of masala chai. Power Soup? Gosh no. Strength. Not power. Strength is what will lure all the ailing men and disappointed women. But people drank protein shakes and energy drinks for strength. What else could it be? This was harder than watching Pakistan crush India with eight wickets down. He took one more sip to beat the slump.
Shandaar Mard Men’s Soup? Yikes. It sounded beyond tacky.
Magic soup? That was it! Magic soup. English name. Instantly added credibility, he thought. Perhaps he could add a subtext: Chinese medicine from the makers of Tiger Baln. Score. Now that was killer idea, to spell balm incorrectly, Raghu thought. Tiger Balm had been hugely popular in India for decades. No one had the wits to question whether it was really made from tiger body parts. And certainly no one had offered to answer. It was time to leverage that by putting a clever spin on the spelling with a smaller font. Indian label industry was tainted with spelling mistakes in any case. It was sheer genius! Raghu was mighty delighted with himself.
Rukmini made the last batch of white sesame seed chikkis and packed them in clear plastic bags for the boys. It may or may not fetch her any gratitude, but it would most likely bring on an attack of tendinitis. Those endless hours of chikki rolling were taking a toll on her hands, on some days, her fingers felt so stiff she was sure that she could use them as weapons … against Raghu. Make China work, she’d warned him before his trip when she wasn’t busy encouraging him. ‘If it’s that easy, why don’t you go to China and do hair and make-up on the Chinese women and return as a millionaire?’ he’d retorted. Her unforgiving eyes had conveyed nothing but silence. Rukmini had cried herself to sleep silently on some nights, certain that Raghu wouldn’t sense those ceaseless tears. On nights when sleep was elusive due to exhaustion or anxiety, she often reflected on how their marriage hadn’t been always so bitter. There had been plenty of love to go around in the early years, which made the financial challenges seem miniscule. But gradually and imperceptibly, like the slow widening of the holy Pavagadh mountain range not too far away from where they lived, that had changed, and the love had been dwarfed by neglect, constant disappointment and sporadic bursts of rage from what seemed like it was an unbridgeable chasm.
