Happiness and Other Disorders

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say, look, let’s invite them over, we have AC, windows, lifts, I’ll make my chicken biryani, janno, she relents, let’s do it next week, and they come, or she does, for I have eyes for no one else, billowing into the room, including Tariq who is folded into some corner, but I try not to look while Tariq is nattering about his research over the eggs benedict arnold, her dish that turns on you, and she about her work in the hospital where she had met him when he was suffering from anaemia when my wife brings out the chumchums and I go weak, not for me, janno, I haven’t been able to cut down on those twenty-six pounds since, and my ur-niece says, mummyjan, I can resist everything except temptation, and I watch fascinated like whatever animal it is that watches a stoat, not a bit sickened, unlike the time on the subway where this woman held a big pizza and wheeled it as she nibbled the sides right to the core which she gulped down like a dog without chewing, all without taking a breath, an efficient eating machine, or, as we would say, mashallah, but that had put me off food for days, the gluey masticated paste slithering down the old peristaltic tube, coating it with spittle, breaking it down into a bolus for bacteria to eat, the saliva mashing the chyle and chyme, that was sheer gluttony, but this is elemental and cosmomorphic, it enthralls me until there’s another sharp elbow in my sides, and she’s now talking about how she misses the ovocné knedlíky that they used to make, aswim in cottage cheese and butter, at the Hotel Pegas and this dream where she is out in the meadow or a glade picking daisies, watches a plane drop something, and catches the bomb, except that it’s a boiled egg, anyway, was I ever glad to get back to India, of course, the back’s persisted, but my janno’s father sent me someone, on a Vespa in an army cap and fatigues, smelling of rose attar, I asked him, I had this problem in the States, are you familiar with Swedish or deep-tissue massage, yes, sir, yes, sir, of course, of course, he says, grooming his moustache with a tiny comb, Swedish, Russian and English massage, any type, even Hungarian and Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian, your bedroom, hello, what’s this, my bedroom,and locks it, please lie… face down, says the Swedorussoanglomagyar masseur, your top off, my father was Hidayatsahib’s barber and masseur, he used to massage all his brothers too after their cricket matches, all five dead now in their thirties, sad, I go every week now, his father was like my father, and when he used to scold me, I used to really like it, and please now untie your pajamas, eh, say I, what are you doing? sir, everything is connected, if I touch something down there, then, sir, it helps something else up here, in that case, I say, please try to grab the connection from the top not from the bottom, er, I mean, not from down there, OK, sir, but I liked chemistry best in school, sir, carbon-carbon double-bond, how do you like my oil, I make it myself, very good, I say, very excellent indeed, it’s my own secret formula but to me it looked and smelled just like Vick’s, I make just 15,000 rupees a day between my three clinics, I know you’ve been to America where they make much more, I ask him, were you in the army and when he says no, I say but the cap is very nice, oh, fashion, sir, from film with Shahrukh Khan, he says, Fendi, how much for it in the U of SA, I’ll be damned if I know but I cite an astronomical sum and he looks pleased, look, you have to get through several layers of muscle, and he asks, sir, sir, do you exercise and I tell him I try to, and he goes, sir, sir, you are doing it all wrong, all, all wrong, the muscles are all wrong, OK, fine, do what you can, I have knots which you need to press down on until they give up, but he says sir, no, sir, I don’t think I should press down, nerve damage, I don’t do that, never, never, never, so I ask him what he intends doing for the next forty-five minutes, and he says give me three weeks and you’ll be fit, but I am angry, look, I need some relief right now, and tickling me won’t help, but he is off again, it must be a good life in America, and I say, no, they don’t have any windows or air conditioning in America, and he says hard to believe but maybe because of the snow in the U of SA and maybe all movie sets only, I say, yes, and the women are enormous and go to gas bars where they blow them up and can he please do the knots like I said, but he insists on his method which is when I ask him caustically, what, patty-cake caresses, eh, sir, sir, please, he entreats, sir, don’t exercise in that way, I’ll come tomorrow, sir, so I give him the money, cursing, as I head off to the bath, and he asks me how much a masseur earns in America, and I tell him that with his amazing techniques, particularly the Hungarian manoeuvres, he can make this outlandish wage, and he goes away preening his moosh, dreaming of gas bars and vast bodies oiled with VapoRub, while I ask my wife to make sure that when he comes again, to tell him that I have gone out for a walk or am asleep, and I spend most mornings hiding from him which delights my janno who imitates the brum-brumof a scooter whenever she’s making the omelette for breakfast, har de bloody har, but I don’t say anything because my little mount etna says when you’re in that mood, Sami, you’re not in the least phonogenic, not at all, always with the last word 

Ahmad Saidullah's latest novel, Fifteen Sketches of Rumi, is being considered by two publishers in India. Excerpts from the novel have appeared in the online magazine Drunken Boat. Ahmad edits The Village Green Rag and is currently working on another novel and a book of poems. He works as a public policy consultant in Ontario.

The art accompanying this story showcases Halifax sculptor Dustin Wenzel, a recent graduate from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. The cast-iron sculptures featured here are from “Understanding Animals,” a two-year project exploring the relationship between humans and animals.

Write to us: letters@enroutemag.net

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