The Third Hand

Eleven years ago, the day after the Third World War had ended finally, Mr. Badami came to my room in the camp and drew a chair out. ‘What do you think is going to happen now, Private?’ His voice was between gurgly and grumpy, more gurgly than grumpy, I thought at the moment. Maybe because it was only seven in the morning.

‘Nothing unusual, sir, I suppose,’ I tried to sound cautious but there was no need. The War had ended, hadn’t it? After twenty-seven years and half the world population gone, most of the fossil fuel exhausted, who would give a fuck about what Mr. Badami thought about me thinking about what was going to happen now? He was not my boss anymore – at least not in my mind. There were some formalities that needed to be taken care of but that shouldn’t take more than a few hours. 

No computers were left though. We had gone back to the days of scribing and pencil-pushing (literally). There was no paper as well, since the War had killed almost all the trees. We wrote on slates now. Wrote and erased. Wrote and tried to remember what was written, wiped the slate and wrote again. The War had done one good thing. It had made us intelligent. Many of us now could recite the table for nineteen and add and subtract fractions.   

Mr. Badami was one of those who were at odds with this new wave of intelligence. He lacked the deftness with which one could survive in a world devoid of smartphones and shopping carts. His concern was genuine. ‘How are we going to order pizza?’ He asked me. Obviously, he couldn’t cook, that imbecile.

I stared at the sundial outside my window and moved in my chair – a universal signal that someone was in a hurry and someone didn’t want to continue this conversation – that someone being me in this context. Mr. Badami was unmoved. ‘During the War,’ he continued nonetheless, ‘I thought we were fighting for a better world. But what kind of a world is this? I had to stand in a queue for water the other day. A queue, Private, a fucking queue! Which better world has a queue? Did we wipe out half of the world population for this? For standing in a queue? That too for water!’

Was he crying? There was definitely a hint of moisture in his eye area but I had no time to enquire further. He had a point though. Even a bad clock gives right time twice a day. Why did we still have to stand in a queue? Who were all these people around us, still squirming like worms and fighting for their spaces in long queues? Did the war end too soon?

Mr. Badami was observing me keenly. ‘I knew you would be interested. You always seemed so smart, Private. Let me tell you this – and I don’t say this frequently – you are the best handyman I have ever seen. The way you fixed the radio so that I didn’t have to miss the classical jazz hour on FM 105.7 was pure magic. I told my secretary…’

I cut him in the middle, ‘Sir! I need to be somewhere. Thank you for the recommendation letters. You were also one of best bosses I have ever had.’ I got up and moved towards the door. Mr. Badami had a secretary! No wonder the world hadn’t improved even after a twenty-fucking-seven-year-long World War. ‘Can I get a glass of water?’ I looked at his face. He had a pained expression, like that of a man who never knew when to smile fake and when real. I gave him a half-filled bottle of water and closed the door on his face. I didn’t have to be rude but the bastard had a secretary when most of us had to share our toothbrushes.

Eleven years later, today, when I am writing this story, I feel bad for Mr. Badami. I had never seen him since. I heard he had killed himself few months later – quite predictable – and his relatives auctioned his belongings. I wish I could be there at the auction. He had a lighter which I was very fond of. With every click, there was a light flickering at the bottom. Of course, towards the end, when even the last battery had worn out, we had to imagine the light. But the strength of that imagination kept us – the boys of the 39th Infantry Division – alive and smoking till the War ended. Had I been at that auction, I would have bought that lighter whatever be the price.

I needed that lighter like everybody else in my division, I guess. I had a series of interviews after the war and none of them clicked. I realised how stupid it was wishing the War end. At least we had a belly full of food and a roof over head when we were fighting. After the War, all supplies went dry. All hopes were derailed. All doors were closed on my face like I closed it on Mr. Badami’s face. By the way, his recommendations were all bullshit. Nobody even bothered to look at them. ‘Badami, that old fool who refused to wash his own handkerchief?’ One of my prospective employers laughed, ‘Why on earth did you think that would be useful?’ By the time, Mr. Badami was dead. Otherwise, I would have strangled him myself.

Almost a year later I got a job with a puppeteer. With diminishing supply of electricity, entertainment options were quite limited. People spent their evenings at home mostly, talking to their partners and kids. Those who were single like me went to puppet shows. Previously thought of as a poor substitute of cinema, some of these puppet performances were graduating into a distinct art form where the jumpy, uneven movement of stringed figurines filled us with a longing that we never thought was possible again. A longing for belonging. We wanted to get into the scene; we wanted to be a part of the happenings; we wanted to make love and sing ballads of despair; we wanted to live in the shadows of life.

My employer was a woman. She was the best puppeteer in the neighbourhood. Her puppets were not lifelike. They represented certain ideas in the cubist style. Their faces were half-turned to eternity and their bodies were mixed up in an orgy of protrusion. Something or the other, a limb or a lump, was always jutting out from different sides of their tattered built, creating an illusion of movement amidst the mediocrity of perpetual stillness. ‘I added time to their space,’ she told me once, the puppeteer. Her name was Oolka.

The first time I saw Oolka was at a bus-stop. There was no bus though. People usually walked now. Not enough diesel or petrol. It was funny how we still referred to these places by their old names. It was like remembering an old love or a lost organ. The number of amputees had increased a lot since the War. They must have felt at home at these places.

I was not an amputee. I was staying at the bust-stop because I was evicted from my apartment. The rent was due for six months. I could barely have two meals a day. The bus-stops gave shelter to many more like me. Once a waiting place for the buses, now a waiting place for something more formidable and certain.

Oolka visited the bus-stop one morning with her collection of puppets. She was told the people there would appreciate her performance more than anybody else. She was misled. People at the bus-stop needed food, clothes, sex, and shower, not puppet shows featuring a talking fish and a one-legged ballerina. ‘What’s the point of the ballerina?’ I thought. ‘Most of the time they are on one leg anyway.’ The problem was I was thinking aloud. Not really loud, whispering, but Oolka’s hearing was exceptional. She could hear a baby cry before it flared its nostrils. ‘Of course, someone as basic as you would think that way,’ she glanced at me from the corner of her eye. ‘The ballerina knows she has only one leg. That’s what matters.’ Yes, Oolka had one eye. Later, that night, we made love next to a deserted engine. ‘I can still smell the dry petrol,’ she said inside my mouth.  

I left the bus-stop with her. ‘I can’t just keep you,’ she told me before we entered her apartment. ‘You need to work. What do you know?’ ‘I can cook and clean,’ I said. ‘That’s not enough. If we co-live, you will do that anyway. Why should I pay you for that? Think of something else.’ ‘OK, OK,’ I said, ‘I can stitch the clothes of your puppets. I am good at stitching. I can also make the small furniture on which your characters will sit.’ ‘Umm,’ she said, contemplative, ‘why don’t you help me with puppeteering?’ ‘Puppeteering?’ I said, still standing at the threshold, ‘But I know nothing of puppeteering.’ ‘Oh, I will teach you. It will be so much fun!’ She got hold of my right hand and placed it on her face. I followed the curvature of her single eyebrow with my index finger. I knew my life was going to change very soon.

And it did. Within a couple of months of me moving in, Oolka wrote a play with five characters – a mute parrot, an orphaned butterfly, a depressed Ping-Pong player, a workaholic elephant trainer and a blind preacher. It was supposed to be a merry musical but the problem lay elsewhere. In the final scene, all the characters had to appear together. ‘How is this possible? We have only four hands.’ I asked. She looked at me curiously. ‘What about your third hand?’

A chill ran through my spine. I couldn’t speak for a few seconds. When I opened my mouth, somebody else spoke, ‘What are you talking about?’ She smiled like a black cat in the dark, ‘You don’t have to hide it from me. I knew it all along. That’s why I wrote this play. I knew I could count on you.’

I wanted to run out of the room but my legs were plastered to the floor. This was the most well-kept secret of my life – perhaps my only secret. Nobody in the army had any idea, not even Mr. Badami who loved me like a son. So many times, when I was holding the gun with two hands and there was an itching on my nose, I had the temptation to scratch it till my comrades looked at me with horror and I was given a dishonourable discharge for having something I shouldn’t – a third fucking hand.

‘How did you know?’ My voice was still someone else’s. Oolka smiled again, ‘All my life, I was looking for you, my love. Can’t you see, all my models are based on you? I dreamed about you since I was a child. I knew this world must compensate for my missing eye. You make me complete.’ She stood next to me and motioned to the mirror on which we practiced our moves. I looked at it and saw three eyes and five hands, all juxtaposed against each other, like a drawing by Picasso at his cubist prime. ‘Which characters do you want to play?’ Oolka asked. ‘Why don’t I play the humans?’ Said I and, at that very moment, a thought occurred to me. My third hand was the only hand in the world whose fingerprints were not available to the government. If I strangled someone with this hand, nobody would ever know.

Since then, every night, I go to sleep with this thought.