1913issue6online

202 When tattaya went out to the club in his see-through shirt, the smell of cards in the air, sometimes he took me with him and I looked at the India Times magazine, the only one in Eng- lish. Usually he ran out of cigarettes– he would tell me to come over, pull out a ten rupee note, brown with Ashoka pillars on one side and a Bengal tiger on the other, and tell me to get a pack of GoldFlakes or sometimes 555 said like “Five-Fifty-Fives”. The other gamblers, each with their ray-ban style glasses and graying facial hair, claimed tattaya had built the club. I saw pictures of him carrying a gun in the jungles of Srisailam. He used to hunt tigers, played a good game of chess, and was the state tennis champion when he was young. Sometimes he would come home from the club with fireworks hidden behind his back to surprise me with and I would take them up to the roof to blow out of bottles, watching the clouds burst with their stars. All the kids in the neighborhood would hear the whistle of the rockets crack the air and hop from one roof to the next until they reached mine and then stand around, laughing and taking their turns. One night, I woke up to the sound of a woman screaming across the street. In the shapes I could recognize her sitting down with her foot stretched out and men saying that a black scorpion had stung her. I remembered how my uncle used to crunch the ones that slept in the middle of the pavement under his boot when we walked home at night from the matinee. When tattaya would come home for his mid-day nap, he would pull out a matchbox with a lotus flower on the front and place it against the wall, quickly opening the box to release a little white scorpion. It would run in frightening circles around the room, moving around from one wall to the other until it came back to the place it had begun. He said that it could kill a grown man, but this one had its stinger cut off. When I wasn’t look- ing, he would grin and form his fingers into a scorpion’s stinger, placing his pinkie over his index finger and then both over his middle finger, reach over and sting me. When he finished his Chivas Regal, he dropped a match in the bottle to show the flame ball up inside.

1913issue6online

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