Madhava’s Nose

In Madhava’s dream, a nose walked around the house covering itself. His eyes twitched. (Can people smell in their dreams? he would wonder on waking, but now he was asleep, even if uncomfortably.) The nose was walking, now running, faster and faster, and even in his sleep, Madhava was able to sense how disgusted the nose was by what it smelt. That’s when he recognised it. It was his nose.

In his dream, someone next door was frying fish in coconut oil, and now his nose was no longer speaking to him.

When he woke up the following morning, the sun had been up for a few hours, and Madhava cursed his new neighbours in two languages. Even in his dreams, they couldn’t leave him alone, and even in his sleep, they had to fry fish. Angrily muttering curses and mantras side by side, he made the bed and looked for his glasses. It was when he wore them that he realised that something was wrong.

He ran to the only mirror in the house and stood in front of the big white Godrej. Clutching his glasses tightly, he examined his vacant face. His nose wasn’t there. He howled and threw his newly impotent glasses into a corner. Running his hands up and down his face, he wept. All that was there, where his nose had previously sat crookedly, was nothing.

Madhava felt lonely without his nose. Unexpectedly, and extremely unnecessarily, he was now made aware of how fortunate he’d been all these years—and how ungrateful.

He thought back to the dream he’d had and felt even more useless. His nose had not been walking all over the house; it had been running away from him. He remembered uneasily now how much, in the past couple of days, his nose had been trying to warn him. Madhava had been careless.

He called in sick to work. His boss, Shashi, had no patience for Madhava or his nose. He yelled at him and hung up. Madhava didn’t know what to do. He thought of calling his family doctor but that fellow had gone off to Maldives for his honeymoon. He couldn’t call his parents because they’d just laugh at him. At least his boss was better that way. He decided to leave a message on the only WhatsApp group he had faith in: Bgudi Brahmins.co.

Nose gone missing. New neighbours cooked fish fry in my dream again.

He’d barely sent this when his phone began producing multiple-coloured vibrations. One after the other, everyone in the group was pouring in crying-laughing emojis. Geetha, his aunt, was the only one who DMed him with sensible advice that was actually quite helpful. She made him see that if fish was being fried in his dream, it was probably being fried in real life, too, which is much more dangerous. And why the hell hasn’t he done anything about this?

Mustering anger from his fists, he proceeded with great purpose to the neighbour’s house. He stood in front of their door and, raising both his angers, he pounded hard.

“Barro aache, nayi nan makkalra.” Come outside, you dogs my children.

Jinia opened the door. She’d been sweeping. Madhava found her with a broom hoisted on her shoulder, nightie tied up into a pleasing knot by her waist.

“Fish-chicken-mutton not allowed, madam. How many times to tell? You want to eat all that means, go to Shivajinagar or America.”

“Ey, hello. Who are you, man? I will cook whatever I want in my house. Get lost, you duffer.”

Whatever little protest his fists had summoned died when the door slammed in his face. If he had a nose, the door might’ve slapped it. Not knowing whether it was a good thing that his nose had gone missing, he gently rubbed the blank wound on his face and walked back home. It had begun to rain, and Madhava walked with great deliberateness. He was afraid that any sudden movement might cause more body parts to go missing.

He sat in his armchair and called Geetha. She’d been the only one in the family to have seen the day coming. She’d tried, had she not, to take Madhava under her wing so she could train him better, but his parents were far too forceful in their freedom with him. They had become converts of some kind, but not knowing what, she couldn’t even come up with proper abuses for their new religion—whatever it was. Madhava saw some sense in the little knowledge Geetha passed on to him. And he tried not to disappoint her. His parents were a lost cause. Everyone else in their family had given up on them; he might as well do the same.

“Did you find your nose, da?”    

“Illa, Atte.”

“Are you sure you haven’t eaten anything from anyone else’s dabba at the office?”

“No, I am so careful about that. It’s got to be these neighbours. You know, last time Rohan’s nose left him, the neighbours gathered the entire area, and they all stood on the road making fun of him. It was so humiliating, Atte. And to think that once upon a time, our great-grandfathers walked these paths, and everyone bowed before them.”

“Tell me, isn’t this discrimination? What court can we go to for this?”

“Ade Atte! Correctu.”

“Irli bidu. Leave it. I was going to call you anyway to tell you that your Shrikar Maama’s cousin from San Francisco has been able to get in touch with him. He suggests drinking lots of water and doing dhyaana.”    

“Plain water ah?”

“Yes. Plain water. Drink at least four litres today, and after that, let’s wait. He also said he will FedEx some Jersey cow mutra. Supposed to cure all kinds of illnesses, and it’s more effective than our local ones.”

“All because of those neighbours, Atte. You know she just banged the face on my door, I mean the door on my face. Do we ever treat our guests like this?”

“Okay you worry about them later, for now let’s look for your nose, da. Start drinking water.”

With nothing else to do, Madhava took a jug to the backyard and sat by the door. The rain was soft, yellow. He watched it for a while and thought about Jinia and the shine on her nose when she had chased him out. Even if she was a firecracker, there was something of a quiet chamak about her.

Without meaning to, Madhava had begun smiling. He thought back to all those mornings he had watched her from his window—her long hair plaited tightly, reaching her waist, that red rose at the centre. Her brown vanity bag and how carefully she placed it at the front of her Activa. She wore sleeveless blouses with her sarees, and Madhava knew the colours of each one.

He had a thing for women who wore sleeveless, but with Jinia, the desire was more intensely fuelled by how unruly and loud she was, like her hair. He had been mortified by her ever since he had screamed at her father for discarding meat and bones by their shared compound. Jinia had dumped her vanity bag and run towards him with the ferocity of an athlete. Looking Madhava straight in the face, she had hissed, “Ning ishta illa andre, moog muchkond saayi.” (If you don’t like the smell, cover your nose and die.)

He was only able to manage a weak, “I don’t like the smell,” to which she had asked, just as politely but firmly, “So who asked you to smell?”

It had made Madhava furious then, but here, watching the rain and still basking from his early morning jhilmil with Jinia, he was smiling. He raised the jug and water poured out of it, unstopping. He drank it galagalagala and waited for something to happen, his nose to emerge, regrow, come back—nothing.

He continued daydreaming about Jinia and dozed off. His daydreams merged with his other dreams and Jinia, black sleeveless blouse—green saree—red rose, was in his arms. In bed, they sat huddled against each other, and she fed him water from her palms. It is said that we never actually learn to drink water; our mouths just know what to do. Madhava put his mouth in her cupped palms and swam. He had never drunk water from another person’s palms like this. It was the most intimate touch he’d ever shared with a woman, and he had been with women before, kissed them, made love to them, but never like this, where he was drinking water but his whole body was on fire.

She seemed to have read his mind because her eyes shone with a familiar smile, and she leaned in closer to tell him that fish is the most intimate thing you can feed someone with your hand. Madhava woke up with a start. He had been dreaming for an hour, and although he felt lighter, which was unusual after a nap, he was also feeling happier.

It was silly, but there was no other way to understand this. Madhava had woken up from strange dreams twice that day. The first had driven him mad, and the second had made him fall in love.

This is a selection of fiction from issue #2 of Luru. Get your copy here.