He: (Shey) (Modern Classics (Penguin)) Read Online Free PDF

anxiously, ‘The story will go on, won’t it?’
    Now who is this story about? Our He isn’t a prince, but a very ordinary man. He eats, sleeps, goes to the office and is fond of the cinema. His story lies in what everyone does every day. If you can build a clear image of this man in your mind’s eye, you’ll realize that when he sits on the steps of a sweet shop, gulping down rosogollas, oblivious of the juice seeping through the holes in the packet and dripping on to his dirty dhoti, it’s a story in itself. If you ask me, ‘And then?’, I’ll tell you how he then boards a tram, finds he has no money in his pocket and jumps off again. ‘And then?’ Then follow many such events—from Barabazar to Bahubazar, from Bahubazar to Nimtala.
    Someone asked, ‘Can’t a story be about something quite extraordinary, something out of place at Barabazar, Bahubazar or even Nimtala?’
    I replied, ‘Why not? If it can, it can, if it can’t, it just can’t.’
    He said, ‘Very well then. Let this story of ours be just any old how, without head or tail, rhyme or reason, sum or substance, just as we please.’
    All this is sheer impudence—going against the divine laws of creation, bound tightly by rules and regulations, where nothing happens that isn’t supposed to happen. All this is quite intolerable in the world of make-belief. Let’s take the maker of those tedious laws to a sphere beyond the limits of his authority. If we make fun of him there, we needn’t fear punishment. After all, it’s not his territory.
    He was sitting in a corner. He whispered, ‘Dada, you can pass off what you like in my name. I won’t sue you.’
    I must introduce this person to you properly.
    The chief prop of the story I’ve been telling Pupu-didi bears a pronoun for a name and is constituted entirely of words. So I can do what I like with him, without fear of tripping on any awkward questions. But as ocular witness to this uncreated being, I’ve had to procure a creature of flesh and blood. In a literary law court, whenever the case seems to be getting out of hand, he is ready to bear witness. A signal from a mere attorney like myself, and he blandly affirms that when he went to Kanchrapara for the Kumbh Mela, 9 and was taking a dip in the sacred Ganga, a crocodile seized the end of his holy hair-tuft. It sank without trace, and the rest of him returned abbreviated to dry land. Another wink, and he goes on shamelessly: the pale-skinned divers of a British man-o’-war stirred up the mud of the river bed for seven months and finally recovered the lost tuft, minus only five or six hairs. The divers were tipped three and a quarter rupees. If Pupu-didi still insists, ‘And then?’, he’ll begin on how he fell at Doctor Nilratan’s 10 feet and implored, ‘I beg of you, Doctor, use what magic ointment you will to fix my holy hair-tuft back to my scalp: I can’t tie the blessed puja flowers to my head without it.’ No sooner had the doctor smeared on a little of the Thunder-Tangle ointment a hermit had once given him, than the tuft set itself doggedly to growing, like some endless centipede. If our He dons a turban, the turban keeps swelling like a balloon. At night, the gigantic mound of hair on his pillow resembles a devil’s toadstool. He has had to employ a barber on a regular salary. The crown of his head has to be shaved clean once every three hours.
    If the listener’s curiosity still isn’t satisfied, he puts on the most piteous of expressions and continues: At the medical college, the Surgeon General had already rolled up his sleeves, determined to drill a hole through his skull, plug it with a rubber stopper and seal it up with wax, so that no hair-tuft could ever sprout through it either in this life or the next. But he refused, fearing that the operation might pack him straight off to the next life.
    This He of ours is rare in the extreme—a man in a million. He has an unequalled gift for inventing untruths. It’s my