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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Fiction & Poetry |
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Fiction |
Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan
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What happens when Europe is colonised by India in the not too distant future? Welcome to Scandinavistan, where a beef-eating Swedish minority is ghettoized by cow-worshipping desis and IAS officers run what is now the Asiatic Union. Watching over its crime-stricken harbour town Gautampuri (née Gothenburg) is Herman Barsk, bumbling public intelligence officer and loser extraordinaire, not-so-hot on the heels of a cannibalistic serial killer last spotted at the Tandoori Moose—but fast in pursuit of his lady Kumkum.We bring you an early look at Zac O’Yeah’s hilarious comic debut, a darkly disgusting satirical thriller.
Excerpted with permission from Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan by Zac O’Yeah (forthcoming from Hachette Books India, August 2010)
Chapter .000
The quiet night
| B |
ESIDE THE ROAD the river flowed past, murky and greyish, like an unflushed toilet. |
When the drizzle stopped, the night air filled with steam again, the sweaty hot-house heat turning his shirt into a wet rag. Herman Barsk’s clammy fingers tightened around the steering wheel. He was always tired, red-eyed, grumpy. He had been driving for hours. Now he shifted uncomfortably in the driver’s seat of the undercover- Volvo that looked like it had been driven at high speed, many times, through a cow wallow, but it was just coated with a generous slather of the spring mud and night soil that covered all of Gautampuri’s streets.
Barsk could sense the lull; the whole town was hunkered down, lulling. The antisocials were gearing up for the day of the parade, when carnival floats were driven through the town and law and order was almost completely suspended for a day. Or two. People usually kept their pants on until then, till the last days of April, as they waited for their salary slips. But you could never tell. A week from now the carnival procession was going to fill the streets with its violence and drunkenness, and the native Swedes would go berserk. Bottles in hand, they’d scream and vandalize. Most people had forgotten the origins of the ritual, Barsk thought, as he adjusted his rear-view mirror.
On certain nights, he smelled cold blood in the water that lapped against the quays, in the creaks and groans from battered ship hulls. The town’s nature was reflected in the refuse caught in its sluice channels—decomposing seaweed, dead fish, engine oil and the beery vomit of drunken sailors. Towards the end of the previous millennium most of the merchant navy had been registered under the flags of Third World countries. Now the tarmac between the old warehouses was broken. The harbour had fallen into decay.
As had Barsk.
How long would he carry on trying to find cures for this sick town? Barsk took the cigarette from his lips, studied it, and sighed—unsure for a moment whether to light it or not. He finally returned it to the pack unsmoked, chucking the pack on top of his camera and his service gun into the glove compartment. Of late he had begun to believe that non-violence might well be the only rational policy to enforce.
Tonight, because of the pre-payday calm, he was spending his time on some extracurricular activity. He was tracking down an adulterer. Or at least he hoped to prove as much to the sinner’s wife. And to the court. So that with the husband out of the way Barsk himself could – in the best of worlds – marry the ex-wife.
It was a complicated affair.
He drove up the desolate Godown Road, past rusty warehouses and installations for vague Defence Ministry projects lined with barbed wire fences. He switched on the radio and heard the bleep and burp of atmospherics and then the climactic final beats of a Hindi film song followed by a social message broadcast in the Common Language, English: ‘Wear helmet. Head is not replaceable. One head per lifetime. Yesterday’s head count...’ followed by a Mollywood hit mix. He hummed along to the familiar tunes.
Emerging from the harbour he turned in the direction of Friendship Chowk. Since the country’s reversion to lefthand drive he had to approach Andhra Lång Street from the Olcott Boulevard side. The Volvo jumped from pothole to pothole along Dr Ambedkar Avenue, recently fitted with new streetlights. According to statistical findings, functioning streetlights were supposed to significantly reduce crime, but modern scientific crime prevention schemes didn’t impress old farts like Barsk. Especially since the cost of streetlights prevented road repair.
A sudden rattling sound on the radio caused Barsk to nearly swerve into a lamppost. ‘Go weeest’ a chirpy male chorus belched. The disco beat morphed into another tune: ‘In the Navy’ followed by other classics of the western world. He switched the radio off abruptly, realizing it was probably an illegal propaganda transmission from an enemy submarine anchored offshore.
The avenue had tracks for the trams to Friendship Chowk. Up ahead he glimpsed the Ashoka Pillar, the lion capital that guarded the square. The four lions looked on sadly as the streets emptied of people, until the last drunks – staggering around, cursing the existential desolation that had landed them at the bottom of samsara – fell asleep in a gutter. In front of the cinema hall a hoarding promoted a Phillumappa Ishtarjee-starrer. The guy had the largest sideburns in the world. Music from his romantic actioncomedies played on the radio every night.
The brake lights of the Volvo flashed once, red and sour, as Barsk, detecting somebody Committing Nuisance in a Public Place, slammed them on. Nuisance was against the colonial law. He pulled up next to a line of rickshaws parked in Friendship Chowk’s three-wheeler stand. The air over the chowk was as steamy as a sauna crowded with Finnish drunks. Beedies glowed in the dark. Barsk longed to start smoking again but sheer stubbornness kept his last cigarette unlit; stubbornness and the advice from his doctor. His diastolic blood pressure was higher than his IQ and Doctor Patel had told him that it ought to be the other way round. Barsk greeted the rickshaw-drivers with a curt nod. Their turbans suggested unnaturally large brains. Four bare feet stuck out of the passenger compartment of one rickshaw. It rocked. Hard to find decent accommodation these days.
A derelict, verdigris-covered fountain sculpture depicting North, West, South and East in the form of ethnically diverse maidens stood in the middle of the square. Innumerable gulls had crapped on it. Then there was a real-life maiden: a small-built woman so busy puking into the fountain that she didn’t notice Barsk approach. He studied her derriere for concealed weapons under a miniskirt of some black plastic material, net stockings, and a tight leather jacket cut so short that most of her back was exposed. Slicks of night-time vomit, pale food-colouring red, and chunks of meat fell into the water.
‘So, what’s the matter here?’
‘Get lost, pig,’ she said.
Apart from being cross-eyed and on the plump side, she was of nondescript native Swedish stock.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’
‘Me?’
‘Shut up and answer my question.’
He watched her with tired eyes. She swayed, very doped: could be dangerous. Heavily made up, but the kohl was smudged by the steaming air. He was no fashion expert; he tried not to judge dogs by their hair. Still his hunch was that the girl belonged to Gautampuri’s old-time Swedish underworld.
He stepped back, out of range in case she attempted to stab or bite. It was not easy to practice non-violence after midnight, but Barsk did his best.
‘You want me to shut up or answer?’ She smiled seductively and made sucking motions with her lips. She looked familiar; maybe he had arrested her before.
‘Shut up. What’s your name?’
‘Who? Me?’
‘Yes, you,’ said Barsk. He’d had the exact same exchange with thousands of antisocials of all ages, sexes, creeds and castes.
One of her hands started moving towards a pocket. Before she could pull out a gun he smashed his forefinger into her chest. She was so wasted she sat down on the lip of the basin, in her own puke, nearly toppling over into the fountain.
She drew her hand from her pocket. It was empty.
‘Don’t get stressed, big pig,’ she said.
Barsk massaged his finger. Might have sprained it. He didn’t want to go see the doctor again and hear another sermon on blood pressure.
‘You ought to know better than to create a nuisance around historical monuments.’ He pointed at the signboard that said ‘Protected Monument. Nuisance Prohibited’. The fountain was a legacy of the town’s maritime past, back when it had been a harbour for the Royal Swedish East India Company, and Barsk was proud of his heritage. Then his eye caught a brännball bat floating in the fountain.
‘And what’s this supposed to be?’ he said, fishing it out.
The wood had cracks in it, maybe the bat had been used for vandalism. But one could not prohibit bats. Brännball, an ancient game, played with phallic bats and much machismo and accompanied by serious drinking, was part of the local culture; the way cricket was part of the lifestyle of the colonial masters who had moved in from Asia. The bats were popular as weapons too; lots of young feminists favoured them.
| ECHOSTREAM |
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Barsk confiscated the bat. ‘If you behave I’ll let you off with a warning,’ he said, trying to speak non-aggressively to counter people’s negative impression of his profession. The girl said something vulgar, a new and ugly expletive that Barsk didn’t bother to ask her to repeat. His stock of bad language was large enough—a legacy from his departed mother.
‘You didn’t happen to just drop this bat here?’
‘Never seen it before. I’ll bloody report you for sexual harassment, pig.’
He grabbed her by the neck and dragged her to a trashcan, a green rabbit, a few yards away. Trash covered Friendship Chowk, while the trashcans were hardly used, which bothered him. ‘Like to puke, höh? So kiss this,’ he said and rammed her head between the rabbit’s smiling lips.
Being a public intelligence officer, he had more important things to do than drag dope-heads to the office of the P.I.D. Deep inside Barsk knew that he ought to be more tolerant towards both humans and animals, but one had to draw the line somewhere. He searched her. She wasn’t carrying any concealed weapons. All she had in her pockets were cigarettes and an unused vomit bag from a restaurant called the Tandoori Moose. He was quite familiar with the place. It was one of those eateries that stayed open late every night.
The girl hadn’t committed any serious offence, the bat wasn’t necessarily hers, and he felt sorry for her when she puked again, this time over herself. Barsk handed her back the vomit bag; she tried to wipe her jacket with it. ‘Feeling unwell?’ he asked in a sluggish, retarded tone (he believed it made him sound fatherly, grey-haired and animal-friendly).
He’d never understand the youth of today. He had no kids and had put behind himself – in what seemed to be another lifetime – a marriage that had lasted a couple of weeks. Most of his knowledge of human behaviour came from sharing an apartment with a dog whose psyche was relatively less complicated than a human being’s.
‘Keep away from the streets at night,’ Barsk advised the girl, as he walked away.
He walked like a duck; he had a bullet-wound in one leg – rather high up on the back of the thigh, to be honest. He chucked the cracked bat in the back seat of his Volvo and watched the girl stumble away from the corner of his eye. He wondered if he ought to have arrested her for her own safety. Somewhere in the night, maybe an untoward karma, worse than death, awaited her. Better drive by the Tandoori Moose and check the place out, he thought to himself.
Maybe he could get himself a free midnight snack while he kept an eye on the illegal nightclub in the adjacent building. That was where he had followed Kumkum’s husband just before eleven, more than an hour ago. With some luck he’d photograph him coming out of the building in the company of a sex worker.
Barsk couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was that attracted him to Kumkum, but he was prepared to go far for her. To catch her husband having an extra-marital affair was the least, the easiest thing, he would do.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Shahid
11 March 2012
01:22 PM
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I am going to say similar cmonemts. The descriptiveness used is quite impressive. Also the way the plot unfolds continues to keep the reader invested in what is going on. The ending did not come to quick, like it was out of place like most short stories do. Overall I think you have a talent and I was happy to read these stories of yours and I look forward to more.
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Nigglet
1 April 2011
11:58 PM
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this is fuckin amazin
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