The season had changed. The moisture was gone from the air and the evenings were now a little smoky. The occasional cluster of yellow petals, the odd burnt-orange tendril, stubbornly hung on in the laburnum’s branches and the gulmohar’s stepped canopy. Their brilliance was unsuited to the new season and there was something of the gloom of streamers and confetti from a past celebration in their now rare occurrence. New pigments and scents flooded the leaves and branches of Delhi’s trees and winter flowers began appearing on roundabouts. One tree particularly, the Alstonia scholaris, or the Indian devil tree, a weed-like cousin of the frangipani, marked the beginning of the festival season. Its nocturnal scent, when filtered through the smoky air, was sweet at first, then quickly cloying, filling the city’s streets and avenues as evening fell. I sat in my mother’s flat, awaiting Aakash and his girlfriend’s arrival.
At Junglee, too, there had been changes. Pradeep, Aakash’s pale, meatier rival, had moved back to Bombay, leaving the field open to him. The ponytailed owners, afraid to give him too much power, had promoted Montu, the pork- and beef-eating chooda, to the position of trainer, in the hope of putting up a counterbalance. This only inflamed the situation, and Aakash, with Mojij the Christian at his side, now spent a good part of the morning leaning against the cable crossover machine, ridiculing Montu. He would organize his clients’ workouts based on what Montu was doing with his (most of whom were inherited from Pradeep, though even from these Aakash had pinched a few). Then, within earshot of Montu’s client, he would point out his failings. ‘See, wrists not straight. Weight is coming down behind shoulders so effect is falling on back, balance is off. Like that, anyone can do. Now, follow this, wrist’s straight, weight coming down here, yes, balance perfect, thirdeen, fordeen, we’ll do it slowly…’
There were also changes in Aakash’s physical appearance. His hair, once neat, short and bristly, was now long and uneven and fell jaggedly over his forehead. ‘Messy look,’ he answered briefly when I asked him about it. He had also, to go with the look, grown a short black dacoit’s stubble with a vicious nap. If it grew too long, he would shave it off, leaving either the faint outline of a French beard or a triangle of stubble below his lower lip. He wore a diamond stud in one ear. His manner was also different, not colder, but harder somehow. It manifested itself in the smallest ways. We’d start a set; he’d correct me one or two repetitions into it; I’d ask that we start the count again; he’d tell me to continue, but then either repeat a number of his choice along the way or take the count past fifteen when I least expected it. He now spoke of Ash’s, the one-stop total image clinic, as if it were up and running. He threatened to deny Junglee’s sub-trainers their promised positions as masseurs and stylists if they spoke back to him; he had new phones, new ring tones; he was full of aggressive political opinions. The transformation was like a preparation. It was as if he was gearing up for some bigger fight, for which he could show no weakness, and I suspected somewhere in this the hand of the new girlfriend.
It had become a point of awkwardness between us that we hadn’t discussed her. Aakash hinted at her existence, but said nothing openly. If she called while we were working out, he smiled knowingly at me, then slipped off into a corner. I came to recognize the ring tone – the Hindi pop song with the single English line – he had assigned to her. Once or twice I even saw her name flash on his phone. He hadn’t saved it as Megha, but as chahat, longing. Then a few days after I came back to Delhi, we were in the final stages of an abs workout when, ‘I will always love you, all my life,’ rang out from Aakash’s pocket. He hesitated, but then, continuing to lend me the support of his two fingers, answered it. ‘Nothing, beev,’ he said, looking down at me trying to lift myself a few inches from the floor, ‘just finishing off sir’s abs. Beev, you know I have no friend circle, only one best friend.’ My abs gave way as Aakash became more engaged in his conversation. ‘Because, beev, he is a very important person. He’s just been two months in New York, and before two months in… where were you?’ ‘Spain,’ I breathed. ‘Spain, two months in Spain. Beev, he’s very busy, he’s a writer, his girlfriend, you know who she is? She’s the Chief Minister of Jhaatkebaal’s niece.’ He let go of my hands and I fell to the floor. ‘OK, OK, beev, I’ll ask him.’ Covering the receiver, he said, ‘She wants to know why she hasn’t met you, if you’re my best friend?’ My face, like my paralysed abs, was not able to express sufficient amazement at his nerve. ‘Because her boyfriend’s a sly Brahmin,’ I managed. Aakash laughed uproariously, then said, ‘He’s inviting us for a beer party at his flat today, can you get away?’ Looking down at me, he mouthed, ‘Is OK?’ ‘Yes, fine,’ I sighed. ‘Good, then it’s set,’ he informed us both. When he’d put the phone down, I asked why he called his girlfriend beev.
‘Short for beevi,’ he said, grinning; wife. Then hysterically happy, he added, ‘You’re really going to get a surprise, sir!’
Aakash and his girlfriend were due at seven that evening. A few minutes before, Shakti came in with the news that there had been a series of bomb blasts in the city. ‘So terrible what’s happened,’ he said with a morose smile. ‘Who would do such a thing?’ Then looking thoughtful for a moment, he added, ‘Baba, it must be God’s benevolence that I bought the samosas and beer for your guests before the blasts happened. He obviously does not wish me to go yet.’
‘What? There was a blast in Khan Market?’
‘Oh no, where would there be a blast in Khan Market? They were in Greater Kailash, in Gaffar Market, in Connaught Place and one little one in Sectorpur.’
‘Then what benevolence?’
‘Just,’ he smiled contentedly and slipped away, knowing perhaps the simple pleasure of being alive when others were recently dead.
I turned the television on. The blasts were the third in a string of recent attacks on major Indian cities. A group called Indian Musthavbin was claiming responsibility. They had labelled the attack Operation BAD and had used plaster of Paris Ganeshs, now abounding in the city, as their method of delivery. The screen was split in three: on the far left, a large intact pink Ganesh, riding on the back of a scooter; in the middle, the scene of the crime, a hole blown through a green ‘Keep Delhi Clean’ dustbin and a bright pool of blood amid chappals, garlands and handbags; on the far right, an expert talking about the difference between a high-intensity blast and a low-intensity blast. ‘In a high-intensity blast, the impact of the blast is high, in a low-intensity blast, the impact…’
I called Aakash.
‘Have you heard?’
‘Yes, man. I was there, beev and I were there. We were shopping in CP when it happened. I can’t tell you, if it hadn’t been for beev wanting Pizza Hut’s garlic butter sticks, we wouldn’t be here today. It’s a matter of fate, no?’ After a moment’s silence, he said, ‘Actually, no! Beev’s appetite saved our lives.’ At the cracking of this badly timed joke, I heard a howl of laughter in the background.
‘Is that beev?’ I asked.
‘Yes, man.’
‘Are you still coming?’
‘Of course, man. Keep the beer ready. Who can tell how many life has to spare?’
It was nearly dark now. I could hear a siren wail in the distance. The bell rang. I opened the door to see Aakash in a red turban. He wandered in past me with no explanation for the turban or beev’s absence. I followed him into the flat, where he flicked through the mail, picked a samosa off the tray Shakti brought in and drank half a glass of Cobra beer in one sip. Shakti looked adoringly at him, then shut the front door.
‘Where’s beev?’
The bell rang. Aakash bowed deeply and extended a hand. ‘The beev at your service.’
I opened the door; then I almost couldn’t look. In the light that fell from a single bulb, there stood a girl no taller than five feet in a red turban. She had one plump arm propped against the doorframe and was panting heavily. Beads of sweat glistened on her wet lips and pale face. She wore a baggy purple T-shirt which did nothing to conceal her vast breasts and stomach. The light, catching the grease on her face, shone dully on to the dark flesh that ringed her neck. Two diamond solitaires the size of boiled sweets gleamed in her ears. For some seconds, she didn’t look up, making a show of her breathlessness. I felt Aakash’s chin rest on my shoulder. ‘Your new bhabi,’ he whispered proudly, as if giving me the keys to a sports car.
She was quiet at first, smiling and watchful. She entered the flat timidly, brushing against the doorway and then the dining-room chairs. We walked in behind her, Aakash grinning and gaping at me, watching my every gesture for a reaction. When I showed none, he said, ‘Beev’s healthy, no?’ She heard, and slowly turning around, gave him a cautioning look. He bit his tongue, but was encouraged by the reaction. ‘And the funny thing is I’m her trainer. Beev, what an ad you are for me!’ At this provocation, she swung around and made a short charge, yelling, ‘Always making fun, twenty-four seven, seven eleven, making fun.’ Aakash took her in his arms and kissed her tenderly on the head. The kitchen door swung open and Shakti emerged with more samosas and beer. His expression changed from morose to ribald delight at the sight of them, both in their red turbans. Aakash and Megha joined Shakti in his brazen laughter and I was left feeling somehow that the joke was on me.
When we came into the drawing room, Aakash dropped himself on the sofa, his arms sprawling behind him. Megha sat on the edge of a chair, looking only at him. He closed his eyes and said, ‘Now, you guys talk. I’m going to sleep.’ But when I asked how near they had been to the blasts, he sprang up. ‘Man, you won’t believe it. The silence. Can you imagine an area as big as Connaught Place silent? It was amazing. For two seconds, you could hear the wind, you could hear a brown-paper bag scraping along the road. You know how in the movies when they have mute slow-motion scenes, exactly like that. But I tell you, it’s gone too far. Now something or the other has to be done. Bring back terrorist laws, have quick arrests, quick trials. I’m saying anyone there’s a doubt about, that’s it, straight in jail. It’s gone too far.’
Megha listened carefully.
I wasn’t in the mood for a political conversation. I said, ‘Maybe. But until now there have never been any real arrests, no real evidence. Without that, terrorist laws just become a way to keep the wrong people in jail.’
Aakash’s eyes hardened. ‘Then each one of them will have to go.’ He sighed. ‘The lot of them.’
‘Go where?’
‘I don’t know. Pakistan? Round them up in the Red Fort and blow them away? I don’t care, but this can’t go on.’
‘Come on, Ash-man. You don’t mean that. What about Zafar? Will he have to go?’
Aakash had met him once or twice and was fond of him. His face softened. ‘In so large an operation, a few good people end up sacrificed too. And by the way, I’m not saying just Muhammadans, the bad Hindus should go too.’
For that one moment, Aakash seemed to lose his particularity. I saw in his anger and his hunger a greater Indian rage and appetite; and in his face, the face of a mob.
Megha spoke to me only in English, and to Aakash only in Hindi, no matter how much either of us tried switching to the other. It positioned her at the centre of conversation and brought up a wall between Aakash and me that had never existed before. As she became comfortable, she began poking fun at my Hindi, embarrassing me for speaking well rather than for speaking badly. ‘Oh,’ she teased, when I used the Hindi word for election, ‘using such big words and all. Even I don’t know words like that.’
I became curious about when they’d met. Megha beamed, and resting a small, fleshy hand cluttered with diamonds on Aakash’s lime-green T-shirt, said, ‘What now, it must be six, running seven months?’
‘Seven months?’ I gasped.
It was nearly exactly as long as I had known Aakash. I suddenly remembered, and now understood, what the Begum of Sectorpur had been referring to all those months before.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I said.
Aakash, seeming to enjoy the deception, said, ‘I couldn’t have, man. It’s all been very secret. She came as a client. I was meant to make her lose weight so that her parents could find her a match, according to her caste, which, by the way, is much lower than mine.’
Megha nodded, apologetically adding, ‘We’re Aggarwals, the business caste.’
‘And,’ Aakash continued, ‘according to her financial status, which is much higher than mine. Her father’s not a lakhpati or crorepati, but an arabpati. He has three factories in Sectorpur, desi ghee, plastics, autoparts. Her brother went abroad for university; not that it did him any good.’
At this, the two of them eyed each other and laughed.
When their laughter died down, Megha explained, ‘He’s a homo.’
‘A homo?’
‘You know, homo?’ she said, then rattled off, ‘Homo, a gay, fajjot.’
‘Anyway,’ Aakash continued, ‘her financial status is very differ from mine. No one in her family knows anything about us. In fact, I think I can honestly say that if they found out, they would probably try and kill me.’
‘My brother suspects,’ Megha inserted, ‘maybe.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘The homo saw us leaving Junglee together,’ Aakash added quickly. ‘But what can he do? Zero.’ Aakash stressed this by making the numeral with his finger and thumb.
Megha felt some explanation was needed. ‘You know, money is status. That’s a fact of life, but me, I don’t believe in all of this. I can only marry a man whom I respect. Money comes and goes, but respect lasts. All the guys I meet in Delhi, they just want to work for their fathers and live off the family business. Only Aakash is someone I see who wants to make something of his own.’
Megha, as she became more energetic, had taken off her red turban and crumpled it in her lap. Her limp medium-length hair was streaked blonde in places; she had a nose ring. Without the turban, her features were thicker still, her head heavy and round.
The mention of marriage alarmed me; I felt a joke had been taken too far. At the same time I could see how a girl like this, rich, strong-willed and clearly in love with him, could be a great asset to Aakash. Though he enjoyed stressing her ‘healthiness’, deriving from it a kind of boisterous fun that Shakti also shared in, Aakash seemed to see a kind of virtue in her form. It was as if some notion of strong traditional values – of a woman who supports her man, and there were songs about this kind of thing in India – had become tied up with her substantial size. By choosing her, he expressed his contempt for the lithe modern girls he trained at Junglee. And I was not at all certain whether her weight was really so off-putting to him. His mother was fat; the begum had been fat. Certainly behind Shakti’s laughter there had been a note of understanding, as if Shakti was congratulating him on making so robust a choice. In fact, the only person who was deeply uneasy was me. And Aakash, for whatever reason, whether pre-empting me or aware of my discomfort and hurt by it, or simply taking a kind of pleasure in offending my soft tastes, did all he could, after months of secrecy, to include me in his relationship with Megha.
Now smoking at will, sipping his beer, his turban still on, he read into my silence. As was so often the case with him, he had not introduced me to Megha without a purpose. He said, ‘Our love match is not going to be easily accepted by this world. I’ll need my friends. If things become difficult, you’ll help me, no?’
‘Me? How can I help you?’
‘You can. You know people. Your mother’s a journalist. The owner of TVDelhi just hangs out in your girlfriend’s house.’
‘The owner of TVDelhi, who do you mean?’
‘You know that woman who was there that day at Sanyogita’s when Lul was reading his homo story.’ At this Megha’s wet lips opened and her laughter rang out. I looked at Aakash in puzzlement. A private moment passed between them. Her eyes were full of some unexplained significance, which Aakash dismissed with a firm look. ‘The woman,’ he continued, ‘with the red bindi and the grey hair, and those huge silver bangles, owns TVDelhi.’
‘I had no idea,’ I said, genuinely surprised.
‘Please, man. You have to do this for me. In this country, we can’t trust the police, we can’t trust NGO workers, we can’t trust government people, but we can trust the press. You have to speak to this woman about our situation. Just so we have help, if we need it.’
I couldn’t understand his urgency. ‘For what?’
‘For nothing yet,’ he said, draining his glass and sitting forward. ‘But maybe later.’ Removing his turban, his messy look pasted to his head, he added, ‘Should things get ugly.’
The first pale sky of the winter was reflected in the tanks of dark water outside the National Museum. Pedal boats glided over its glassy surface, dark small-leaved jamun trees dotted the esplanade and bright ice-cream trucks crowded the edge of the grass. In the distance, a runway-sized road led up to the President’s Palace, and Parliament, a low, punctured cylinder, brooded on the side. Nearer to the domed, sandstone museum, a black rubber hosepipe lay in the grass, choking out a wide puddle of smelly water.
A writer had come to town. My mother was a friend of his wife and was hosting a dinner in their honour. He was a writer I had come to admire. I had first met him in London when I was eighteen and on my way to college in America. He had advised me not to go: ‘Indians go to these places and all they ever learn is the babble.’ At the time the remark offended me, not because of what was said but because of his tone: cold, dismissive, uncaring that he had upset my plans. I went anyway.
The next time we met was in Delhi and I was in my last year of college. I was writing a thesis at the time on how the Mahatma, through a programme of celibacy and dietetics, had sought to overcome the body. In doing so, he negated the source of interests in Western society, interests such as property and self-preservation, making it possible for him to fight the British with a coin different from theirs. For all their threats to his body, they would never have any purchase over his soul. The writer listened for a while, sipping a martini he had been complaining about earlier, then said, ‘But there’s a great flaw in your theory. Because the British could have killed him; they could have destroyed his body. Then there would have been nothing to house his soul. What kind of victory is that?’ The adviser in college who had fed me the idea for the thesis hadn’t thought of that. When I went back to him with it, he confessed that the true rewards of the Mahatma’s programme were not temporal but metaphysical. I did the thesis, but lost interest. I read the writer’s books instead, all of them, carefully. He was the first writer I had read in this way. I felt a great feeling of release reading the books. He could take big ideas such as colonialism, defeat, occupation and show their effects in small human ways like lying and boasting, in hidden anger and resentments. I felt the writer release me from a sense of entitlement that I had about the West, a feeling that since they colonized us they owed us education, technology, duty-free goods. He released me by exposing the attitude as not post-colonial in any real way, but still very colonial; one that some in the West might happily endorse. It was an attitude that would forever leave us robbed of responsibility and the privilege of blaming oneself for one’s failures.
My mother was hosting a dinner for the writer, but first he wanted to go to the National Museum to see the bronzes; he asked that I come along. I’d never been to the National Museum, though I’d been to many museums in many countries; I had never seen any bronzes. I was waiting in the porch of the museum when the writer’s Ambassador drove in. His wife was with him, a handsome Punjabi woman with green eyes.
‘Leave it, leave it in the car,’ she said of the writer’s green felt hat. She thought it would make him look English. It would mean us all paying the foreigners’ entry fee, which was thirty times as much as the regular fee. I had already anticipated this and had sent Uttam in to buy three tickets in advance. The security was tight, both because of the blasts and because there was an exhibition in the museum of the Nizam of Hyderabad’s jewels. Mobile phones had to be left outside, handbags were searched, a fuss was made over the writer’s brown leather shooting stick. Then the security guard in his olive-green uniform wanted to know why we had bought the Indian ticket.
‘Because we’re Indians,’ I answered in Hindi.
‘Show me your passport or ration card,’ he said.
We weren’t carrying any identification, but neither were a group of young men in polyester shirts and baggy trousers.
‘Why aren’t you asking them for identification?’ I said.
‘Because they look like Indians,’ the security guard replied.
‘And why don’t we look like Indians?’ the writer’s wife intervened.
The man was stumped; it was just a feeling, a class feeling.
‘We’re speaking Hindi, aren’t we?’ the writer’s wife pressed him. ‘Would we be speaking Hindi if we weren’t Indians?’
The man smiled. ‘Some foreigners have learned as well,’ he said, shaking his head from side to side. ‘But never mind, carry on.’
The writer had watched the whole scene. His eyes were dim and old, but intent somehow. They were set in a faintly Asian cast. They could make events occurring right in front of them seem far away. The writer had recently had back trouble and needed help up the stairs. He took my hand in his small, firm hand, and once he’d got going, he moved fast. When we went in, inhaling the musty smells that surround any organization linked to the government of India, he wanted to rest for a few minutes. We sat down in the lobby in front of an eleventh-century stone statue of a man and a woman; the woman was leaning into the man and gentle rolls of fat were visible on the sides of her waist. The writer caught his breath, then looked up and said, ‘Why don’t you sit down? You’ll be able to consider it better that way.’
His wife, who was dressed in a green, black and yellow salwar kameez, continued to stand. I sat down; a few awkward moments of silence passed between us as I tried entering the world of the statue.
The writer started us off. He said that the statue was from Khajuraho and that he had a special feeling for the Chandela dynasty as he was named after one of its kings. ‘The son in fact,’ the writer said, ‘of the man who was king when the invaders came. He had to move away. And that saved the Khajuraho temples. The bush grew over them. I fear that now they’re admired for their erotic content, which is foolish.’
I looked harder at them, but I noticed only outside things: the spotlight and its loose wires; the roughly made pedestal on which they stood. They seemed closed to me; I still had nothing to say. I felt as I had with Aakash in the temple.
‘What is nice,’ the writer said, ‘is the absolute confidence in the faces. These people are…’
‘Complete,’ his wife finished for him.
‘Yes, yes.’ Then rising, he said, ‘We won’t look at everything or we’ll get tired; only at the fine things.’
We walked into the museum’s main rooms past long pieces of carved stone.
‘Lintels,’ the writer said, pointing with his shooting stick. ‘We didn’t have the arch; we had lintels.’
We entered a circular passage with a grubby marble floor. On one side, past glass walls, was an open courtyard with a stone chariot in the middle. On our right was a red-painted sign for the bronzes. I was wondering when the building that housed the collection had been built and asked the writer about it.
He misunderstood my question or chose to answer it differently. ‘I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you,’ he said, as we entered a room with chalky-green walls. ‘These bronzes used to be in the viceroy’s house. They were collected by the Archaeological Survey of India. A British institution. It is safe to say that not a single Indian prince made a collection like the one we see displayed here, though he easily could have. The Maharaja of Patiala went to England, where he had his portrait painted, that was the thing to do, and he picked up a few nudes and brought them back. They gloried in their ignorance,’ the writer said, ‘gloried in their ignorance.’
The room we entered was in spotlight and shadow. And though in places a crucial light was fused, a pink bucket left in a corner, the glasses of the display cases fingerprinted and dusty, there was something entrancing about the green, dimly lit room with the bronzes and the shadows they cast.
The writer, as if wishing to give me the best of his energies, wanted to see the Natraj first. On our way to it, he stopped in front of an unfinished Chola Natraj. He looked for Shiva’s drum, but it wasn’t there. Next to the bronze was a black and white picture of an artisan working on the floor, illustrating how the object was made. The writer, as if anticipating a buried judgement in me, said, ‘That man seeming to hammer out the image would have had all kinds of fine ideas going through his smooth head.’
Then following my eyes drift to the Natraj, he considered Shiva’s dance of creation and destruction. He said it was very close to him; he described it as having entered his soul, this idea of the nearness of creation and decay. ‘How did that idea, the twin forces of creation and decay,’ he asked, as we approached the bronze Natraj, with its floating hair, and one leg filled with the tension of both rising and swinging, ‘become enshrined in human form?’
‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ he said, answering his own question. ‘I don’t think anyone knows. I think the thing just appeared like Venus rolling in from the sea in Cyprus in rock form. It was created wholly by the imagination of men.’
The Natraj had been turned into a national icon in India, appearing in airports and on HB pencils; the writer knew this.
‘The image,’ he said, ‘is much debased. It’s used everywhere, like some of the Leonardo da Vinci drawings.’ Then looking at the little man, gasping for his life, on whom the dancing Shiva stood, the writer said, ‘I will interpret it in my own way. He is standing on the monster of ignorance.’ That monster the writer saw as representing ‘the snare of life’. He didn’t mean appetite, but irrationality, darkness and cruelty especially; the possibility men always have of being less than men.
Standing before this most Indian of Indian images, the writer could not have been oblivious to its context. He was a man who always knew where he was. He seemed to stand there considering the dark history that had landed the bronze image before him in a glass case, unseen, unthought of, in the country from where it came. He began to draw a historical thread. But even before he began, I had been thinking of Aakash. I don’t know why; perhaps only because of his feeling for the gods, and my removal. The writer spoke directly to my thoughts.
‘Many people don’t know,’ he said, ‘that in the nineteenth century there was an anti-Brahmin movement and that the Brahmins were driven out of town. That was when there was a looting of their works of art and devotion. The people who were doing the looting didn’t think what they would replace these images with. It was then that they began to appear in the salerooms of Europe and America.’
A nineteenth-century anti-Brahmin movement! Had that been the history behind the magical story of Aakash’s ancestor? Had his run-in with the village, and his subsequent disappearance, ‘the driving out of town’, been part of a larger story, part of an anti-Brahmin movement that the writer, living thousands of miles away, could have read about? Was the statue I had seen of Aakash’s ancestor, with his saffron robes and three streaks of turmeric across the forehead, a gesture of historical remembrance? It was amazing to consider.
The Natraj had been rubbed to shine in some places. The writer liked that. ‘It’s to me a nice idea, rubbing the parts they thought beautiful. No polish…’ he began.
‘Is as good as the human hand,’ his wife finished for him.
We moved on from the Natraj and the writer’s mood lightened. His earlier solemnity lifted, he spoke more generally about the figures. ‘Someone asked me,’ he said, ‘why the figure had four hands. “It’s not a human figure,” I told him. “It’s a human figure representing something. The arms are there to represent what is being honoured.” ’ But when we came to a Shiva in a relaxed human posture with Parvati by his side, the writer chuckled. ‘Here, when the figure has a consort and comes down from its pedestal, things become a little more complicated.’
In another glass case, there were Vijaynagar bronzes. The figures were squatter, thicker of limb. ‘We were talking of security earlier,’ the writer began, and speaking of the Muslim invaders and Vijaynagar respectively, said, ‘They destroyed it and destroyed it completely. This destruction is made beautiful by the Left. You know, by the drawing-room intellectuals, the ladies with their fashionable grey hair and ethnic saris, ambassadors of the Caliph to the Republic of Letters. They say that it was destroyed by the Indians themselves. They are so completely degraded, they can’t deal with their own defeat, but we mustn’t let that spoil the beauty of what we’re seeing.’
The writer began to get tired. We sat down, his wife and I on a bench, him on his shooting stick, with its Air India tag still hanging from it. He began advising me on books I might read about the bronzes. They were all by German and British writers. ‘It’s cause for shame,’ he said, ‘that Indians don’t write these books themselves.
‘You see, the English-speaking people of India don’t come here. They think this is local stuff. They want to go to America and have their self-portrait painted and buy nudes, like the Maharaja of Patiala. And then they complain that the British looted them. These were in the viceroy’s house. It was Nehru’s idea to bring them here; it was a good idea, but no one wants to come.’ He raised his hands, open-palmed, in despair.
The mood excited a story of Coomaraswamy, the Sri Lankan art critic. ‘His dates are 1877-1947. He was half Sinhalese and rich,’ the writer said. ‘It was open to him to start up life as a Mayfair gentleman or in the country, but he decided to devote himself to Indian art. In 1917, when Coomaraswamy was forty,’ the writer added, calculating fast, ‘he heard that the Hindu University was being built in Benares. He offered them his, by then, vast collection of Indian art, which he was ready to give them free on the condition they started a chair of Indian art and made him the professor.’ The writer paused.
‘What did they say?’ I asked.
‘They told him to go away. They told him to go away. They told him to take his art collection and go away,’ the writer said, laughing, his eyes widening. His repetition made simple and ordinary something shocking, in turn deepening its effect. His laughter rang out as if no calamity was great enough to smother its rumble.
‘Where is it now?’ I asked.
‘It’s in Boston.’ He chortled. ‘It’s in Boston.’
A few Indians, middle-class-seeming people with cameras, sauntered in. The writer’s wife took this as an opportunity to challenge her husband’s earlier claim that English-speaking Indians were not interested in India’s antiquities. ‘Look, they’ve come,’ she said.
‘They’ve come for the jewels. Yes, yes, they’ve come for the Nizam’s jewels. Their grandparents were taxed to death for the Nizam to have those jewels. And he didn’t do a thing; he just handled his jewels. The Left adores the Nizam.’
Then suddenly, our visit seeming to wind down, the writer became urgent. ‘You’ll come back,’ he said, ‘and you’ll look at these things. You’ll look at what we’ve seen and then move on.’
Walking out, we passed a map of the places from where the antiquities had come. It annoyed the writer; it seemed to show nothing but the actual digs, with no historical or geographical points of reference. He saw one place somewhere near Calcutta; ‘the Calcutta Museum,’ he said, ‘had a good collection, but kept badly. I think they would like to destroy them,’ he added, ‘but they can’t. So they do the next best thing: they let the workers watch them. Yes, they let the workers watch them.’
Another group of Indians, in bold colours, were coming in just as we were leaving. They seemed from the south, with teekas on their foreheads and flowers in their hair. They were laughing and visibly excited by what they saw.
‘You see my point,’ the writer said. ‘The people who come are the temple-goers and the ones who stay away are…’
‘The anglicized…’ his wife started.
‘The green-card folk,’ the writer offered, and laughed deeply.
Sanyogita didn’t like the writer. She felt he wasn’t kind; that was her word. She had begun many books of his. I think she read them for my sake rather than out of any real interest; and later I felt she left them unfinished for the same reason. One lay by her bedside now.
‘I can’t!’ she said, standing in front of a dressing-table mirror, her head cocked to one side as she put in an earring, ‘I just can’t. I’ve tried, but they’re so dry. And he’s not kind to his subjects.’
‘What do you mean “not kind”? What’s kind got to do with it?’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I don’t think he shows any compassion to the people he writes about.’
‘Isn’t just being plain honest a kind of compassion? Doesn’t it give back to people a kind of dignity, just to judge them by your own good standards and not as people who’ve been colonized, defeated, oppressed or enslaved?’
She didn’t answer; she was having trouble finding the hole. The earring slipped and clattered across the floor. Sanyogita, already in her heels, squatted down in one movement. But when she found it, it was broken. It was one of Ra’s earrings, the one with the moonstone and the ruby. The moonstone was missing. It left a visible vacancy.
‘Baby!’ Sanyogita cried, and squatted down again, feeling around the floor for the stone. We found it under her dressing table, covered in wisps of dirt and dust. She handled the little paisley-shaped stone as though it were a chick that had fallen from its nest. She found these small, inauspicious tragedies very moving; they could almost reduce her to tears. Then she saw that I was squatting down next to her and she smiled. She reached a long arm up to my ear, rubbed its rim between her fingers and rose in one movement.
‘No big deal, right? I’ll get Ra to fix it. When are we meeting your mother?’
‘Now.’
‘OK, I’ll hurry.’
My mother had flown in from Bombay for two nights. She was having dinner with Sanyogita and me tonight; the following night, she was having her dinner for the writer. We were meeting her at the new Italian restaurant in the Oberoi.
Outside on the garden terrace, the frangipani, its branches now completely bare, had shrivelled in its pot. But my premonition had been wrong. It was not the first casualty of a larger pestilence; the other plants were flourishing. From the shaft of light falling on the corridor, I could see the door to my study. Its brass Godrej lock hung heavily from the bolt; it hadn’t been opened since my return.
Sanyogita herself had only come back the night before. She appeared in the corridor a few seconds later.
The Oberoi Hotel attracted a variety of people. Politicians in white waited for white cars with red lights. Young men in maroon shirts with black trousers and brushed-steel belt buckles wandered in. A woman in a pink salwar kameez stepped out of a blue Mercedes. The hotel’s lobby was of black granite and heavily air-conditioned. There was a white marble fountain in the middle, with red rose petals circling on its glassy surface. On the way to the restaurant, we saw the hotel swimming pool through glass panels many metres below, brightly lit and blue in the darkness.
The restaurant had tall grey leather chairs. The tables were made of a faux-rustic stone and were very far apart. My mother, bejewelled and in a black and gold silk sari, tapped out a text message in front of a wavy, illuminated panel of frosted glass.
Because my mother had brought me up alone and our closeness was almost embarrassing since I was now technically a man, we played at being offhand with each other. And so even after not seeing me for months, she gave me a brief hug, said I was looking skinny and fell into Sanyogita’s arms. While they spoke about jet lag and the summer, a young man in white brought a bottle of Himalaya water to the table, then bowed in a deep namaste and went away.
‘That’s new!’ I said to my mother as we sat down.
‘I know! Isn’t it amazing? Biki has them all doing it.’
Biki was Biki Oberoi, the owner of the hotel.
‘He must have picked it up in the East,’ I said, remembering the time when you couldn’t even come into the hotel’s restaurants in Indian clothes.
‘Isn’t that strange,’ my mother said, ‘that it should have gone from here to there as a greeting, hundreds of years ago, and has now returned via Biki Oberoi?’
We had barely sat down when I felt my phone vibrate for the third time since we had arrived. I didn’t answer it, but was curious as to who it was: Aakash, all three times. My mother and Sanyogita were talking about Chamunda, about the dinner the next day, about the blasts and demonstrations in the old city as a result of a police encounter. I was sending a text message, asking Aakash what the matter was, when my mother suddenly said, ‘Baba, have you called Zafar to see if he’s OK?’
The question put my back up. Both because I hadn’t spoken to Zafar since I arrived and because Sanyogita, having seen me check my phone for the third time, and guessing who it was, compressed her lips. My mother, an observer of these currents, badgered me for many minutes about how wrong it was. ‘Your poor old teacher,’ she said, ‘alone in the walled city at a time like this. How uncaring can you be, Aatish! And to a man who has given you so much, really.’
‘Ma, he’s not alone! He has a family. I’ll call him.’
‘It’s the bad Pakistani blood,’ my mother said, shaking her head, and withholding a smile, turned to Sanyogita. ‘It’s from the father. I’ve done what I can to improve it, but still it remains.’
A man in a dark jacket appeared to take our order. I ordered lamb, my mother a starter as a main course, and Sanyogita sea bass.
My mother, finding me more sensitive than she had expected, brought up the writer’s treatment of his wife, taking pleasure perhaps, after not seeing me for so long, in winding me up.
‘It can’t be easy for her,’ she said, ‘married to a man like him. He’s very demanding. It’s a twenty-four-hour job. She can’t go anywhere, you know? She’s his wife of course, but that’s it. And he can be savage to her. I’ve seen it. Stingy beyond words. She lives as he does, which is well, but I don’t think she has five rupees of her own.’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘but she is a writer’s wife. The man has his vocation. That’s the most important thing in his life; everything else is secondary. She married him knowing that.’
‘She’s given him her everything, given him her life,’ my mother replied, no longer playful. ‘He’s the famous writer, but what does she get out of it?’
‘To be his wife. Some men need that and some women are made to give that.’
No sooner had I made the remark than it seemed to crumble and change like one of those unstable compounds, returning to their baser elements with the slightest exposure. Defending something stupid can make the world feel beyond grasp. And that night, before my mother, the woman who’d raised me, and my girlfriend of many months, who might have considered spending the remainder of her life with me, I took a shred of a thought, this little idea that the life of vocation required the sacrifice of anyone who came within its circle, and ran with it. I poured my energy into qualifications and amendments, trying to pull out of a rhetorical train crash. My mother became grave. Sanyogita’s face shrank, till it was like a pinpoint of pain and hurt. But she didn’t say a word.
I said that certain people were touched with energies and talents that weren’t theirs, and in acting on them, they weren’t expected to meet normal standards of decency and good behaviour.
‘What about love?’ my mother said.
‘What about it?’
‘What about your responsibility to the people you love and who love you?’
Our food arrived. Sanyogita pushed behind her ear a lock of hair that had fallen forward and began quietly to pick at her fish. I thought I saw her eyes glisten. I took refuge in my lamb.
‘The person who embarks on this kind of life,’ I said at last, ‘can’t think of those things. He has to think of his vocation, whether it makes him happy or not, or those around him.’
‘That’s nonsense, Aatish. You really talk nonsense. What is life if not in the end to have been a good friend, a good wife or lover, or mother, to have a house by the sea that you love, and five beagles running about the place?’
‘Not everyone has a house by the sea and five beagles.’
‘Don’t be cussed, you know that’s not what I mean. I mean to have lived a full, balanced life, to be surrounded in the end by the things you love.’
‘It’s funny you mention that, the being surrounded in the end by things you love. Almost exactly the same conversation came up at the end of the museum visit the other day. And the writer said he wanted to die, like Van Gogh, “with hatred for no one and love for his art”. Perhaps that’s the difference, wanting in the end to be surrounded by art you love and which you have spent a lifetime creating, rather than by things you love.’
Sanyogita, who hadn’t said a word so far, who had driven me to the depths of despair with her silence, said at last, ‘What about the people who give their lives supporting you?’
I was about to speak when she anticipated me and stopped me.
‘Who do it not from any sense of vocation, but out of love. Only out of love.’
At that moment, my phone vibrated for the tenth time.
I said, ‘I don’t know, baby. This is not personal or about me. Listen, I’m going to take this call because there seems to be some kind of serious problem. It’s been ringing all evening. Will you excuse me for a second?’
And so, in this way I tried to put a rushed, modern ending to a conversation which, when I later tried to downplay to my mother, describing it as a slip of the tongue, she further described as, ‘Yes, but a very revealing one.’
In the lobby outside, Aakash, using a Hinglish classic, said, ‘Aatish, man, I’m taking a lot of tension.’
‘Why, what’s the matter?’ I asked, beginning now to think of my own problems.
‘Megha just called me. Her brother knows for sure.’
‘How do you know?’
‘He just confronted Megha.’
‘Saying what?’
‘ “We sent you there,” ’ Aakash began, employing his distinctive ability to take on other personas, ‘ “to get into shape so that you could make a good match, not so that you could run off with the gym trainer. Who is he? He is nothing. He doesn’t know his station. If I wanted I could call Deepak…” ’
‘Who’s Deepak, Aakash?’
‘The owner, man. The fucker with the ponytail. “I could call Deepak,” Aakash said, stepping back into character, ‘ “and have him thrown into the street, his legs broken. The only reason I’m not doing it is because I don’t want a public embarrassment. But end this relationship this minute, I warn you. Mummy has high blood pressure. If she gets to know her daughter has run off with such a low-grade person, it would kill her. You have one younger sister. Think of her. Do you realize you’re compromising her marriage prospects as well?” ’
‘He said all this?’
‘Yes, man! I think they’re going to disappear her if we don’t do something.’
‘Maybe you should back off?’
‘Whaddyou saying, man? We have once to live, once to die. We’ll love once too.’
‘Aakash, stop giving me these bullshit filmy lines.’
‘They’re not filmy. There’s another reason; I’ll explain later. What should I do, man? If her brother tells Junglee, I’m gone. Taking too much tension.’
‘What kind of man is her brother? Big, small? Could he have you killed, your legs broken?’
‘That homo, no chance! Aatish, man, he’s a gay. And I have my people too, in Sectorpur. You’ve seen the guy. What can he do to me?’
‘I’ve seen the guy? Where?’
‘In Junglee only. A friend of Sparky Punj’s? He even came that time to Sanyogita’s house. Remember, when -’
‘Who?’
‘Lul! The guy we call Lul. Kris, Krishna. He is Megha’s brother.’
‘What? Lul is Megha’s brother? Aakash, how could you not have told me?’
‘I didn’t tell you? I must have!’
It was a suppression of truth greater than a lie. It didn’t just alter one reality but several that had come before. And it was the multiple deceptions contained in this one deception that gave it its particular sting, the sting of making me feel like a fool. It was also the reason it had been kept from me. It made Aakash seem like a man with secrets, a man playing for higher stakes, someone who didn’t need to make confidences to friends. I wanted very much in that instant to turn away from him for good. How easy it would have been in this slippery-floored lobby, into which he’d never come, with my mother and girlfriend in the other room, to get a new trainer and never think again of Aakash. I could turn away and he would vanish.
There was also, beyond questions of truth and lies, my genuine amazement that Megha and the creative writer could be brother and sister. Not only were they nothing like each other physically, but they were so different in their concerns and values, with almost nothing, save their taste for the rough side of Sectorpur, in common.
‘Ash-man.’
‘Yes, man.’
‘Let’s meet tomorrow and discuss this thing properly,’ I said, putting away the question of his deception.
‘OK, man,’ he said with disappointment. The time to tell me about Megha’s brother had no doubt been carefully chosen; I thought he would have liked to have better relished the surprise it produced in me. ‘I’ll tell you,’ he said, suddenly excited, ‘tomorrow’s Saturday, no?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why don’t you come with me to the Shani temple? Megha and I go every Saturday; after that, we’ll talk as well.’
‘Done.’
‘Done-a-done done. Oh, and sir, one more thing, bring a briefcase of money.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m going to take you shopping after the temple, and when I shop I like to…’ He made a sucking noise to indicate, I thought, a credit card swiping.
I stood for a moment by the glass panels in the lobby, looking down at the pool, still bright blue in the darkness, then went back into the restaurant.
My mother and Sanyogita were talking like women do after a man has behaved badly, conciliatory, making a show of having a good time, but wounded somehow. I told them what had happened with Megha and her brother, but didn’t mention who he was.
‘Well, that’s no big deal,’ my mother said. ‘Even politicians can’t disappear a girl these days. Not with television the way it is. One word to Shabby aunty and we’ll have TVDelhi’s cameras surround Sectorpur.’
‘Shabby aunty?’ I asked, uncertain where I had heard the name before.
‘Don’t you remember,’ Sanyogita said, ‘she’s part of Emigrés at Home. She was there that night when…’
‘Yes, yes.’ I didn’t want to be reminded of that night again. The scars, smooth and pink from her grazes, still remained on Sanyogita’s elbows and knees, and if anything, the entire episode was more painful with time.
‘She’ll be there tomorrow night,’ my mother said, ‘Shabby. And Chamunda. You two have to sit between them. They can’t stand each other.’
‘Why?’ Sanyogita asked.
‘Your aunt thinks Shabby’s channel is prejudiced against her because she’s BJP. It’s all that Hindu nationalist/liberal secular nonsense. Just don’t let Chamunda get carried away.’
As we waited for our bill, the man in white returned with a silver brush and pan, sweeping away the crumbs from the table.
My mother looked irritated. ‘You don’t have to…’ she began.
‘Yes, I know, ma’am. I tell him, the manager, that in Europe people put their bread on the tablecloth, but he doesn’t listen. He says, “Here is here.” ’ Sweeping away the last of the crumbs, and leaving my mother struck dumb for once, the man said, ‘Sorry if it was any inconvenience.’
When Aakash was ‘taking tension’, he liked either to go to the temple or to shop. As the day before he had taken tension in unusually high quantities, he wanted the next day to do both. He was astrologically under the influence of Shani or Saturn. Shani, lame and malevolent, could, once installed in your planetary house, move slowly through it for seven years, bringing luck that was not so much bad or good as it was patchy. And it was to lessen the effect of this roller coaster that Aakash, on Saturdays, went to Shani’s temple on a main road in Sectorpur and stayed away from alcohol and ‘non-veg’. He asked that we meet after the flyover. He had spoken separately to Uttam the night before, explaining where it was.
We set out the next morning at six fifteen. A cold, persistent drizzle, coming on the back of three days of rain, followed us the entire way. The traffic was terrible even at that hour and Uttam suggested we take ‘the jungle route’. He swung off the main thoroughfare on to a thinly surfaced road overgrown with keekar. Their long, spiny branches reaching out to the car, like many frail arms, made a sound of nails on glass. On our left was a wide canal choked with hyacinth. And on our right, seeming almost desolate save for the bush that encroached on it, was a power station. Its iron men rose high above the foliage, their power lines slung wide between them, like a tug-of-war team. The foliage had grown so thick after the monsoon that it took me some minutes to realize that I had seen this canal once before. It was with Aakash, on the way to the Begum of Sectorpur, when I had glimpsed the power station’s red lights reflected in the canal. Its dark water had seemed foreboding then; and now, too, for other reasons, there was a strange menace about it. It came in part from the thick clumps of hyacinth that grew on its edges and appeared like islands in its centre, so that they seemed not so much to be separate clumps as a single net of hyacinth strangling the canal. It came also from the factory drains, forming great mountains of white chemical foam where they deposited their refuse. And it was the plant life that grew so furiously from this poisoned river that unnerved me.
There had been a police encounter the day before in the old city in which one policeman and two alleged terrorists had been killed. The images that had flashed on everyone’s screens for the past twenty-four hours had shown the dead policeman being carried away, but they had also shown a Muslim crowd enraged for being the target of the police encounter. There was talk of it having been staged. ‘Just answer me one simple question, Aatish saab,’ Uttam asked, full of political feeling that morning, ‘if the encounter was fake, then how come one policeman is dead and another injured? Now, obviously they didn’t shoot themselves, which must mean that the people they were having the encounter with had weapons too, no?’
‘Yes.’
‘So fine, even if they weren’t the bombers, they would have been some kind of criminal. I tell you, saab, we suffer from the worst traitors in this country. And I don’t mean Muslims; I mean Hindus. You put two Muslims next to ten Hindus and they will somehow subdue them. I hear it’s written in their religion that if a man rapes my wife, she has to live with him and can only come back to me after she has divorced him.’
‘I’m really not sure about that, Uttam.’
‘And how is it that the Muslim guard in our building will say, “Namaste,” but he’ll never say, “Ram, ram”? I don’t mind saying, “Allah.” Sometimes I say, “Salaam alaikum,” to him, then he’s happy.’ Uttam choked with wet, throaty laughter. ‘And what about that driver that came around the other day? We gave him dinner, but he wouldn’t touch the meat. I asked him what the matter was, and you know what he told me?’
‘What?’
‘He said he was vegetarian. A Muslim who doesn’t eat meat? I said to myself, Can’t be! That’s one thing that couldn’t have been written in their Book, because we know there were no vegetables in the desert. I thought, he’s definitely hiding something. So I take the cook aside and ask him if he still has the receipt from the butcher. He did. I show it to the man; he sees that the butcher’s a Muslim butcher and the bastard’s face lights up. And he eats the meat! Now, why couldn’t he have just said, “I don’t eat meat that’s not halal.”?’
‘Maybe he was being accommodating.’
‘Yes, but why lie about being vegetarian? There’s the slyness.’
Uttam’s talk was making me think about Zafar, and perhaps misinterpreting my silence, he said, ‘But I will say this, my father saved one once.’
‘Saved what?’
‘A Muslim. It was 1947 and the riots were going on. They were killing Muslims everywhere. My father hid one inside a barrel with holes in it and saved his life.’
‘Good.’
‘But,’ Uttam said, already roaring with laughter at his own joke, ‘we kept the barrel outside the house.’
The road widened and open fields came into view. They were dotted with dozens of tall apartment blocks. The land had barely been cleared. There were nothing but long, cracked streets lined with Alstonia scholaris and apartment building after apartment building decorated with geometric designs in dull colours. The foliage on the sides of the road was dense, and along with the fields, seemed to mock the new city that had sprung up. Long, grid-like streets with giant stooping street lights finished in fields. On some stretches of undeveloped road, headless lamp standards had rusted before ever being installed. I couldn’t tell which building would have been the begum’s.
The flyover that had brought life to Sectorpur had also swept away its older sections. A low city of half-painted buildings, black water tanks, orange and white mobile phone towers and the occasional gurdwara dome or temple steeple lay huddled under the flyover. Dotting the mismatched landscape were signs for medical centres, computer courses, cricket academies and foreign travel. And at the foot of the flyover was Aakash on his bike, indicator lights flashing, Megha riding pillion. Aakash wore a black faux-leather jacket; Megha, a now drenched purple T-shirt and a shawl. Uttam blew his horn. Aakash raised his arm without looking back and drove on.
We followed him for many minutes until we came on to a roaring street. I knew it well; not only was it the road to the airport, but a friend of mine lived not more than a hundred metres away. So when Aakash pulled over to the side of the road, I couldn’t understand why he had stopped. Then stepping out on to the pavement in the rain, I saw, and for some moments stood wondering at how I had failed to see before, a large temple in pink stone with a tall steeple and a crowd at the entrance. Only a damaged eye could have missed it.
There were green and blue tarpaulins outside the temple, under which a man distributed steel platters containing a garland of marigolds, a clay lamp, a black cloth, a litre bottle of sunflower oil and a newspaper sachet of black lentils and asafoetida. Aakash bought one platter for himself and Megha and one for me. We lined up behind a frail old woman in a black and red sari. She was trying to garland the god’s brass figure. Moustached and fierce in aspect, he was deep within a dark stone recess, covered in marigolds and black seeds. A steady stream of oil dripped from his foot. Around the feet of his brass elephant, several oil lamps cast their smoky light into the corners of the recess and over the god’s dull metallic body. The combination of black offerings, the dim light from the lamps and the orange of the marigolds suggested a carefully worked-out harmony, playing on the idea of Shani as a dark god, a cousin of Yama, god of death.
The tiny old woman ahead of us missed the god with her garlands the first few times, then threw a garland clean over his head and was forced to retrieve it from between the elephant’s legs. When at last she hit her mark, she brought down a small avalanche of marigolds on to the lamps below. As we waited, I asked Megha if only people suffering from the maleficence of Saturn needed to appease the god.
‘No,’ she said. ‘He’s good to me. I’m saying, “Good, you’re good to me; now be very good to me.” ’
With this, she leaned forward, showing a long, pink band of Jockey underwear, and after dressing the deity in marigolds and black starched cotton she drenched him in half a litre of oil. Aakash, unshaven, his face intent, guided her hand in offering the lamp, then slipped an iron nail into the wire coiled around the god’s ankle; iron was Shani’s metal. With the enactment of each rite, which took us from Shani’s brass form to offering clay lamps at the base of a peepal tree, to entering the main sanctum with its Shiva linga beneath a silver serpent, Aakash’s mood softened. The sensual power of the rites, the feeling of oil, metal and pulses early in the morning, and their supposed relevance to the turmoil in his life, seemed to provide a reminder of enduring materials that would help him face the world beyond, all the more illusory that morning thanks to Shani’s antics. And when at last we stood in the main sanctum, the linga in a bed of papaya leaves, surrounded by many little lingas in a white marble tank in the floor, and Aakash smashed the temple bell three times, I felt all the force of his restoration.
And then we shopped.
Aakash parked his bike outside the temple and he and Megha came in the car with me to Connaught Place. Uttam watched Megha intently as she got in. It was a high van, and when she put one foot on the step, her short, splayed fingers reaching into its cavernous interior for a grab handle, Uttam wheezed with laughter. Aakash saw, and as he had with Shakti, encouraged him by shooting up his eyebrows in quick succession. There was in this joking, this light humiliation of the woman in public, an element of Indian male pride and control. And Megha, as if it were a testament to their love for each other, increasing both their statures, only pretended to mind. She glowered at us all, then seated comfortably, smiled.
On the way, Aakash wanted to stop at Junglee. His mood had lightened. He hummed the tune of an advertisement jingle, adding a modified Hindi movie line to the ending. Where the hero says, ‘Which sod drinks to stay in control? I drink to lose control,’ he said, ‘I drink because the cheetah drinks.’ ‘Do the dew, mountain dew!’ he said vacantly to himself, as we drove into the grimy alley which housed Junglee.
He wanted me to come upstairs.
‘Are you sure? Why?’
‘Just trust me.’
The Nepali doorman pushed open the brushed-steel door and Junglee’s incense-filled air tumbled out. Upstairs, the other trainers eyed Aakash come in, both in civilian clothes and with a member. Aakash ignored them, taking me straight to the locker room and the men’s ‘wet area’. He opened his dark green locker with a pair of tiny brass keys. Then, rummaging about among exercise clothes and a tiffin in blue polythene, he took out something thin and rectangular, wrapped in the Delhi Times’s social pages. I opened it and saw that it was a laminated certificate of sorts. My impressions of it were haphazard: I saw red and blue colours on the white board; the words ‘Arya Samaj’, Hanuman mandir; a picture of Aakash in a blazer and tie, looking like a schoolboy, against a sky-blue background; a picture of Megha, with a fat inky stamp over her face; their addresses, both Sectorpur addresses; and the word ‘solemnized’.
How these scattered impressions came together to form a single, horrible realization of what had occurred, I can’t say. Perhaps it was the pictures Aakash handed me of him and Megha, garlanded and in bright sunlight, that helped focus my swimming mind. Or it was his words, ‘You see now why I can’t back off?’ reaching me from some distant place. But none of the finality of the deed lessened the dread it awoke in me. ‘Ash-man, what have you done?’ I wanted to say. ‘What have you done?’
Scanning the certificate’s smooth, laminated surface, my eye fell on the date.
‘The 25th of July?’ I gasped.
‘Yes, man. You don’t know what it was like. They were sending her to Bombay to meet a suitor. I was here on my own; you weren’t here. I felt I had no one. I felt this was the only thing that would give me some protection. After that, they could do whatever they wanted to do, but at least we could say, “Look, here, we’re married. Now do what you want to do.” ’
‘Whose idea was it?’
‘Hers. She came to me just before she was being sent to Bombay and said, “We have to do it now.” She went straight to the airport from the temple. We even had to make the priest hurry up because otherwise she would have missed her flight.’ He laughed. ‘Can you imagine, some people go on honeymoon after their wedding, she went to meet a suitor!’
‘What happened?’
‘It didn’t work. The guy thought she was too healthy. Can you imagine?’ He smiled sadly. ‘All these guys rejecting her because she’s too healthy, then there’s me who wants to marry her the way she is and they won’t let me. You know, they’re even considering sending her for lipo.’
‘Lipo?’
‘They suck out the fat…’
‘Yes, yes, I know,’ I said, looking up, then the thought of his marriage returned. ‘Who else knows about this?’
‘Nobody, man. Just you. You know, I don’t have much of a friend circle. And I haven’t told anyone in my family.’
I was caught between a feeling of tenderness at the confidence made only to me and deep irritation at Aakash’s willingness to burden me with his problems. In just a few seconds, it had altered not only the way I saw his and Megha’s relationship, but the way I saw ours. I felt it shed for the first time some of the strange intensity, as of a childhood friendship, that had defined it since its conception. And reckless though I felt he’d been, marriage made Aakash seem like a man.
Downstairs, the rain had gone and the sun was burning its way through. Whole sections of the street dried before our eyes. In the car, heading to Connaught Place, Megha knew of Aakash’s disclosure. I thought she displayed something of the satisfaction of a daughter-in-law who’s just won her first battle against her husband’s family. She would have jangled the house keys in her palm if she had any. Aakash was visibly relieved. The weight of their dangerous secret had shifted for that moment on to me.
The car, picking its way from roundabout to roundabout, swung on to Janpath for the last time. The off-white colonnaded façades of the Eastern and Western courts, the Imperial Hotel and Delhi’s few tall buildings lined the road, at the end of which the roar of Connaught Place could be heard. Its whitewashed façade was damp and streaked black. Its crumbling columns, poster-covered and pan-stained, seemed to revolve slowly around us that morning like a carousel.
‘Van Hussein!’ Megha said, pointing at the billboards that dotted the circular sweep of Connaught Place. Aakash and Megha knew them all – Nike, Reebok, Puma and Benetton. Though prime real estate, Connaught Place was still rent-controlled. And among the new showrooms there were ancient shops of my childhood: bookshops, coffee houses, sari centres, high-ceilinged games shops selling carom boards. In the gloom of their colonnaded passages, black wires ran like creepers along the high walls and fine heaps of dust collected under splashes of red pan spittle, rising so far up from the base of the white columns that the mind was forced to think of the chewer’s technique. Fire extinguishers, thick coir doormats and plastic buckets cluttered the entrances of shops, and sleazy flights of stairs led up to the offices of reputable news magazines.
We hit every important shop with great precision. Aakash didn’t shop for himself, but for me. He marched through each glass door, chest out, arms dangling at his side, like a man looking for a fight. He glowered at the doormen if he sensed even the slightest hesitation in their manner towards him. Once inside, he tore through the neatly folded displays, ruffling them up at will. He had me try on slinky black exercise shirts with many little holes, lime-green T-shirts with American road signs on them, and capris. Aakash and Megha were both wild about capris. I said I couldn’t do it, but they insisted I try them on. Megha had a hunger for bold colours. But what might have been bold and still simple in Indian clothes got lost in the Western showrooms. It manifested itself in busyness and clutter, in pointless buttons, stripes and straps, in decorative pockets and zips that led nowhere.
Megha was very keen for Aakash to buy a pair of sports sandals. They were expensive and I could see Aakash recoil from them. He made excuses that were unrelated to money: that he had so many already, that they were better elsewhere. Seeing him in the showroom, unshaven and vulnerable about money, I felt again, as I had in Hookah, the fragility of his ‘upgrading’ of himself. It was possible to see him in the showroom, but it was also possible to see him in the street in blue rubber chappals and polyester shirts. And sometimes when he’d eaten pan masala and his skin was looking darker than usual, or his stubble too thick, he seemed even physically like a man about to slip. And how soundless that fall would be, muffled by millions below…
It was not a fear either Megha or I could have known. Even to imagine what constituted our security would have been strange. There were so many impermeable barriers unrelated to money, barriers of English and education and the people one knew. But now, thinking of them as married, their fortunes clubbed together so to speak, I felt I couldn’t call the outcome. Could Megha, disowned by her family, fall with Aakash if he were to fall? Or was his upward momentum too great to be broken, so that she wouldn’t fall far before he would take her fleshy hand in his and they would begin moving up again?
To witness some of this tension in the shape of the fat wife, still sure of her riches, gently taunting her husband over a pair of rubber sport sandals, was to imagine many future scenarios of this kind. And Aakash, giving an indication of how he might behave, became suddenly irritable. His heavy eyelashes sank, a look of boredom crept over his face; only the mud-coloured eyes, smouldering with contempt, revealed that he felt neither fatigue nor boredom, but irritation. Megha, who had pushed her way up to the shelves and shown another bit of pink panty as she took down the rubber sandals, now contained her talk about wanting to buy the sandals as a present for Aakash.
‘What’s wrong?’ she said, seeing the expression on her husband’s face darken.
‘Nothing, appu,’ he replied, using a term of endearment I had not heard so far. ‘I’m just hungry.’
‘Pizza Hut?’ she offered.
‘I’m sick of Pizza Hut,’ he answered, and headed for the door.
When we were outside in the car park, waiting for Uttam, she produced a garlic stick from her handbag. At the sight of it, Aakash’s eyes became two bitter slits of disgust.
‘Mantra,’ she announced urgently. ‘Mantra. He gets very hungry on Saturdays,’ she added apologetically to me. ‘It’s because of the fasting.’
On the way to Mantra, Aakash seemed really to wilt. His eyes, now yellow, receded into their sockets. Megha, like a nurse, turned back and forth between him and me. ‘Let his hunger go,’ she said optimistically in English, ‘then he’ll for sure want to pick up those sandals before going.’ And tenderly to him, ‘We’ll get them, no?’ He was too faint to reply. ‘Do you want us to give you shoes for your birthday?’ she said in Hindi, then laughingly added, ‘Or do you want us to give you chappals?’
The car pulled up outside Mantra. It was a dimly lit restaurant with maroon leather seats, red chandeliers and gold-leaf walls and mirrors. It was owned by the same designer that Aakash had had his run-in with on Holi, the Holi that now seemed an age away. I mentioned this as we sat down.
‘Really?’ Aakash asked, mustering up some energy for the subject of wealth and fame, the only subject for which he always had time. He listened for a while, then spat, ‘They’re all creeps.’
Megha, who took in every word, said, ‘No. I heard he only decorated it.’ Her manner seemed to hide irritation that Aakash’s restoration had happened before plan and by other means.
‘He owns it,’ I said. ‘I’ve been here when he’s had parties.’
Aakash liked this. He impressed upon her that I knew what I was talking about. But she was not to be put down; the two large diamonds in her ears gleamed like teeth. And when the waiter came around, the first thing she asked him, despite Aakash’s hunger, was who owned the restaurant. Even when he had said, ‘Mateen Butt,’ she was undeterred. ‘But I saw on Zoom,’ she said, cross-questioning the man, ‘that he only decorated it.’
Before he could answer, she ordered malai koftas, dal, paneer and butter naan, which she insisted on.
Because Aakash was not in the mood to talk, I began to ask Megha about her family’s attitude. It turned out that, apart from her brother, her other siblings had also had their suspicions about Aakash. She said, ‘The whole issue had died down. My siblings thought that I had given up Aakash because I’d stopped going to the gym. But twenty days back, when I started going again, they thought, ah, now she’s started to go to the gym again. Aakash must be pressurizing her into marrying him so that he can get our money. That’s when the trouble started again.’
‘Surely their attitude would be different if they knew you were already married?’
She liked this, and as if tickled by the logic of it, laughed out loud.
The food arrived and Aakash revived further. Apart from his mood, there seemed to be a genuine physical change in his condition as if related to blood sugar. He said he was going to get a doctor to look at it. ‘Ask Megha how much I ate yesterday,’ he said. ‘I ate some five-six times.’
This talk of Aakash’s health and hunger, as it had with the Begum of Sectorpur, brought out affection in Megha and excited a story. ‘One time, I went out with him,’ she said, ‘and he began to feel so hungry he couldn’t walk. He drank a milkshake that if you drank one sip of… so havy, and even then he wasn’t satisfied. He went home, and with his hands trembling, asked his mother for food. She brought out ghee on brad.’
At the mention of his mother Aakash took over the story in Hindi. ‘Then I dug in and ate,’ he said, ‘and only then did I feel behtar. But before that, man, you won’t believe. I was riding the bike and my hands were sliding off the handles.’
Seeing that Aakash was feeling stronger, I raised the subject of his marriage again. I said, more as joke, and because he had mentioned needing the help of the press before, that there should be a reality show on Indian TV in which couples that were in love, or secretly married, could confront their parents and in-laws on television.
Aakash looked scornfully at me. ‘Are you serious, man?’ he said mockingly.
‘Half serious.’
‘Half serious,’ he spat. ‘I know about television. I know what people will say. They’ll say he could have done it quietly but he wanted the fame.’ He slipped into role-playing, becoming many people at once. ‘For months,’ he said, transforming into the neighbours, ‘they’ll point to us and say, “Oh, there they go, the ones who went on TV to get the fame.” ’ A second later, he was the TV journalist: ‘ “Oh, you’re marrying for love, are you? So many girls in the world, how come you found this one from a rich family? Oh, and a healthy girl too? And you’re from a poor family? Could it be that you’re just marrying her for the money?” ’ His tongue flickered, scraping over his lips as he spoke. We watched in fascination.
I said, ‘Don’t get so worked up. There’s no reality show like this; it was just a joke.’
‘I know there isn’t,’ he replied, his words bristling. ‘That’s why I just touched on it and quickly dismissed it.’
I said, ‘TV should only be called in if there’s a threat to your or Megha’s life.’
‘Yes, but if I go to meet Megha’s family, there will be a threat to my life.’
‘Were you planning to? This is the first I’ve heard of it. If you go alone, you really are mad.’
Megha nodded sadly in agreement.
‘Take it from me now in writing,’ Aakash said. ‘The way it’s going to happen is this: in a month, there’ll be another suitor for Megha; her mother will try taking her to meet him; and then I will pressurize Megha to tell them and she will.’
Megha bit her lip nervously and looked at me. I shrugged my shoulders. Aakash looked viciously at us both.
‘Is your stomach full?’ Megha asked.
‘Isn’t it clear I’m full?’ Aakash answered without a trace of humour. ‘That’s why I’m talking like this now. My energy has returned.’
‘And aggression,’ I said.
He smiled and became gentler.
‘What can I do, man?’ he confessed. ‘Taking a lot of tension. This thing is constantly on my mind. I used to sleep till eleven on Sundays but now I wake up at five from worry. Thinking, thinking. I have many problems. It’s not just this thing. I have to think of my career. How I’m going to upgrade myself. I have to think of how I’ll take care of Megha. Fine, I can rent a flat in Sectorpur; she will stay there in the days when I’m working or she could be with my mother so that she won’t get bored on her own.’
Listening to this description, tender that it was, I felt sure that it would never become a reality. Something about Megha, her boisterousness, or perhaps her sheer size, defied any notion of her sitting alone at home in Sectorpur, or milling about Aakash’s tiny flat with her mother-in-law. And this mention of boredom, linked somehow to the solitude of the modern apartment, seemed to bring alive Megha’s resistance to any quiet sequestering in Sectorpur. As if also sensing the impossibility of living with Aakash’s family, she said snidely of his brother Amit, ‘And we know all about your brother and his wife.’
A tense moment passed between them.
‘Everyone has faults,’ Aakash snapped. ‘You do, sir probably does too, and so does he.’
Turning to me, Aakash said in English, ‘My sis-in-law is very sharp.’
‘And very money-minded,’ Megha added.
Aakash relaxed and said in English, ‘My brother sometimes says me, “Why are you worried? You have Megha.” Can you believe, man?’ Aakash exploded, and switching to Hindi, said, ‘ “And we count every little paisa, thinking, can we afford this, can we not? Let’s not buy it now; we’ll buy it next time.” ’
It was becoming afternoon when we left Mantra. The sun now shone on a different segment of Connaught Place. It showed me what I had not seen earlier: a single block, renovated, whitewashed, looking for the first time since independence how it was built to look. It was as hopeful a thing as I had ever seen, almost impossible to imagine, impossible to think of in the surrounding decay as the work of a brush and fresh paint. If it was so easy, why had it not been done before? Aakash explained that it was the first block to have been released from rent control. As soon as it had been, fresh life had poured into it.
We put Megha into a taxi headed for Sectorpur. Before waving her off, Aakash told her to be careful when driving into Sectorpur.
‘Why for?’ she asked.
‘There’s been an encounter,’ Aakash said, ‘with Muhammadans.’
‘Not Muhammadans, Aakash, terrorists. Not all Muhammadans are terrorists,’ I added prissily.
‘Fine,’ he replied, ‘but all the terrorists are Muhammadans.’
‘Same difference,’ Megha said from within the taxi. ‘Tell what happened, no?’
‘The policeman killed was a Sectorpur man. All I’m saying is just be careful in case there’s trouble.’
‘Tch, that’s nothing,’ Megha said jauntily. ‘Do I look like a Muhammadan to you?’
‘No, appu! Now hurry up, you’re causing a traffic jam.’
She was still laughing when the taxi drove away.
When she’d gone, Aakash asked me to drop him at Junglee. Driving back through the avenues, the canopies flaring and fading overhead, we passed the Human Rights Commission, the silver letters on its façade blazing in the light. Aakash pointed at it and smiled ironically. Then looking back into the boot of the car, he said with pride, ‘We got things from all the brands. Puma, Nike, Reebok.’
As I was dropping him off, he asked for eleven hundred rupees.
‘Why?’
‘It’s for a jagran we’re organizing in my colony. I want you to come.’
‘A jagran?’
‘Tch, you really don’t know anything,’ Aakash said. Then looking at Uttam, he added, ‘Tell him what a jagran is. I don’t have the time right now.’
I took out eleven hundred rupees, including a red thousand-rupee note, and gave them to Aakash. He put them in his back pocket and vanished behind Junglee’s brushed-steel door.
On the way home, Uttam explained that a jagran was an all-night wake of sorts, with devotional singing, pageants and prayers.
‘It’s all rubbish,’ Uttam said bitterly, having seen Aakash extract a third of his monthly salary from me. ‘Just a way for the Brahmins to make money.’
When that evening she was disappeared, the news came as a matter of course. Aakash especially, expecting it for so long, was the least surprised. He felt also that this was not the disappearance we had been waiting for: that she would return, and that then there would be some attempt at a forced marriage or a period of captivity designed to make her give up Aakash, for which we had to be prepared. He seemed almost irritated with me when I stressed that Shabby Singh was coming to dinner that night, and if there was a time to act, it was now. The drama with which he had opened the conversation, saying only, ‘They’ve taken her,’ drained from his voice. ‘Tch! Take it easy. The ball is now in play,’ he said. ‘We have to think before we act. This is not the time when they’ll find a boy for her.’
‘How do you know?’
‘They’ll have to have the lipo done first, no? The recovery period from that itself takes a few weeks. Now, obviously they won’t show her to a boy in that period when she has scars and bandages all over her.’
‘They’re going to forcibly lipo -’ I grasped for the verb – ‘lipo-suck her?’
‘Yes, man.’
‘Surely you can’t do that.’
‘Whaddyou saying, man? With money, in this country, you can do anything you like. The Aggarwals even have their own clinics. Who’s going to stop them?’ Then his cynicism vanished and some mixture of regret and self-absorption took its place. ‘Man, I feel so bad. She kept saying, “Don’t make me thin. Don’t make me thin, otherwise they’ll marry me off.” If I had wanted, I could have shown results in a few weeks. I’m a professional person, you know? But I listened to her, and now look, because of me she is going to get lipo.’
‘Get lipo’: ah! I thought, that’s the verb.
‘So you want me to say anything tonight?’
‘Nothing. Not a single word.’
Delhi drawing rooms. They were what I remembered of the city from my childhood. Perhaps it was Delhi’s fragmented geography, or that it had no real restaurants the way Bombay had – restaurants that were not attached to five-star hotels – or just that it was an old city, closely bound, with people who all seemed to know each other, but there was no setting, no cityscape more evocative of the city I grew up in than a lamp-lit drawing room with a scattering of politicians, journalists, broken-down royals, and perhaps an old Etonian, lying fatly on a deep sofa. And it was a dinner like this, with two blue and red glass fanooses burning in a corner, jasmine floating in a porcelain dish on a dining table draped in a chikan tablecloth, ornamented with white-on-white flowers, that my mother gave for the writer.
He was annoyed even before we sat down. My mother had asked him for eight; he had arrived with his wife and shooting stick some ten or fifteen minutes past eight. Shabby Singh, in a black and red cotton sari, her large red bindi fiery that night, her politically grey hair in a tight bun, had come by eight thirty. She brought her husband, a small Sikh gentleman in a yellow kurta. Sanyogita and I were on time as well. But Chamunda was late, very late.
At nine, the writer, unaware that Chamunda was coming, but seeming to anticipate a general tendency on the subcontinent for late, drunken dinners, said, ‘Udaya, we’ll eat soon, won’t we? We’ll eat soon.’
‘Yes, of course,’ my mother said, covering his small, firm hand with her jewelled one.
‘Good, good,’ he said.
My mother, intercepting me on the way to the bar, sent me to take her place and dashed off into another room to call Chamunda. An urgent exchange was faintly overheard. She emerged a few minutes later, with a strange, nervous smile playing on her lips. She took the writer’s wife aside, and, in Punjabi, rapidly recounted the outcome of her conversation. The writer, who had been talking to me a moment ago about the bronzes, now let the conversation between us die and turned his attention gravely to the women talking. His eyes seemed shut, and though he hardly understood the language they spoke, he drank in every word. His lower lip quivered and his expression became so dark that his wife could not continue listening to my mother. She turned to her husband with a large, prepared smile and said, ‘Darling, Udaya is just telling me that Chamunda, her school friend whom you like so much, the Chief Minister of… Where is it?’
‘Jhaatkebaal,’ my mother offered.
‘Jhaatkebaal! Is coming to dinner tonight.’
‘Oh, good,’ the writer said coldly. ‘When?’
‘Darling,’ the writer’s wife said, agitation thick in her voice, ‘she’s had some problem in her state, the discussion in the Assembly has gone on longer than she expected. Bas, she’ll be here any minute.’
‘Amrita, I’m not a child. If I get home past a certain point, if I am forced to drink too much, the following day is ruined. Ruined.’ Then turning to me, he said, so everyone could hear, ‘Amrita speaks to me as though I’m a child, as though I could be fooled into believing I haven’t been waiting one hour.’
The room fell silent. The writer’s wife was close to tears. She reached for some nuts. The writer saw this and smiled. ‘Amrita eats nuts,’ he said to me, but again for all to hear, nodding his head slightly. ‘She eats nuts; she likes to eat nuts.’ The Sikh gentleman in the yellow kurta, perhaps vicariously enjoying this bit of conjugal derision, of which he himself seemed incapable, laughed uproariously.
‘Shut up, Tunnu,’ his wife barked, fixing him with a stern look.
It was nearly nine thirty when the front door swung open and a mobile phone conversation, complete with bouts of wicked laughter, was brought leisurely to an end behind the stained-glass doors that separated our tiny hall from the drawing room. For a few seconds, everyone’s eyes watched the double doors, the wicks of candles burning through their coloured panes. Then they flew open, coughing out Raunak Singh with his great moustaches, kohled eyes and gold earrings, and his boss, still, at this time of year, in chiffon. And what chiffon! The colour she wore was hardly different from her own, a chocolate brown, with tie-dyed diamonds of reddish-orange. She wore little bits of gold in and on her ears, nose and fingers, her straight black butt-length hair was open, her giant eyes wide over her face.
Chamunda, who moments ago had been late and rude, was now like a girl of sixteen, biting her lip from shyness at facing a room full of people. The writer had watched Chamunda’s entrance carefully, seeming to record every detail, and now, as she went over to shake his hand and apologize for being late, deciding in the last instant to give him a brief hug, an amazing change came over him. The old writer began to laugh. A deep, asthmatic, rolling laugh rose from his depths, and like those whistles that only dogs can hear, diffused the tension in the room. ‘Beautiful, beautiful, all beautiful,’ he muttered to himself as Chamunda, after Sanyogita and I had risen to touch her feet, took my place next to him.
Dinner – shami kebabs, baby aubergine, cumin potatoes, lentils, raita, okra and chicken curry – was served very soon after. On the way to the table, Shabby pushed her way up to Chamunda. ‘Where… where were you?’ she said, prodding her. ‘Not at a prayer service for yourself, I hope.’ At this, her whole body shook with laughter. ‘The divine Chamunda,’ she sniggered, as though wishing for the writer, still finding his place on the table, to hear.
‘Shabby, I don’t know if TVDelhi considers this news, but there have been bombs in my state -’
‘One bomb!’ Shabby interjected. ‘And that also a very small one.’
‘There has been an encounter, a man from Sectorpur was killed, there are rumours of a backlash.’
‘What about the two young boys who were killed?’ Shabby demanded. ‘What about that backlash?’
‘They were terrorists, Shabby.’
‘Terrorists, my foot. Show me the evidence. Where’s the evidence? Just two poor Muslim boys framed by your police because they’re too incompetent to catch the real guys.’
Chamunda gave my mother a look as if to say, ‘Put this woman far away from me or I can’t be held responsible for the consequences.’ And, as my mother was in the process of seating everyone, it was easy to separate them. The writer went between my mother and Chamunda; the Sikh gentleman in the yellow kurta between the writer’s wife and Sanyogita. With three men and four women, it was a difficult placement, and though Chamunda and Shabby could have been put further apart, any further and they would have been face to face. And so my mother, counting on me and the curvature of the dining table to ease the tension, put them on either side of me.
Shabby, perhaps sensing why the placement had been made the way it had, let drop her conversation with Chamunda and picked it up in a different tone with the writer.
‘What do you think, Mr Vijaipal, of this dastardly situation we’re in, here, in India?’
The writer, putting away small quantities of yellow dal with a teaspoon, wiped his lips. For a few moments, his mouth seemed softly to run over the words he was about to give Shabby. Then as if finding them too complicated, he began more simply. ‘I think it’s a difficult situation, a unique situation in fact. Unique, yes, unique. I’ll tell you why. You don’t have a Muslim-majority population, like Pakistan and the Arab countries, but neither is your Muslim minority an immigrant population, like with the European countries and North America. This makes for a special tension…’ He broke off, and as if articulating this tension directly was proving too hard, came at it from another angle. ‘I was in England when they had their bombings. I felt then that the great shock was not the bombings themselves, but the headlines the following day.’ Making the shape of a lengthening rectangle with his hands to indicate a headline, he said, ‘They were all British!’ The description had its impact and the table was silent. The writer, now only warming up, said, ‘The shock of being attacked by one’s own people, you know, the shock of being attacked by one’s own. Very hard, you know, very hard.
‘The English to some extent could distance themselves, knowing that the people who attacked them, though legally British citizens, were immigrants. That made it easier to bear. They had come to Britain no more than fifty years before. To undo that history would be no great thing. But in India we’re talking about that same feeling, the feeling of being attacked by one’s own, and the tension that arises from that, except in India we’re talking about a non-immigrant population that constitutes nearly 15 per cent of the whole population. And of course a thousand years of history, bad history, most of it obscured or not dealt with. That cannot be so easily undone. Any serious eruption along those lines would tear the country apart.’
This last remark concerning the tearing apart of the country was understood on the table in very different ways. Somewhat elated, Shabby said, ‘I know, I know. I keep telling these saffron-types that this was never a country; the British made it a country. It can never be ruled as one country. It must be ruled in small, manageable portions.’
‘You want it to be partitioned again,’ Chamunda flared, ‘why don’t you come out and say it? Do you see, Mr Vijaipal, what our so-called “intellectuals” want?’
The writer, seeming to filter many ideas at once, muttered, ‘Yes, yes.’
‘Yes, yes, what?’ Shabby badgered him.
The writer answered her by ignoring her. Raising his old lion’s face up to Chamunda’s, a comic gleam entering his eyes, he said, ‘I think they would like to make India destroyable. Isn’t that right, Chamunda? That’s what they’re trying to do, yes?’
Chamunda clapped her hands like a little girl. She took the writer’s huge face in her soft brown hands, with their reddish-orange nail polish matching, I could see now, the diamonds on her sari, and kissed it. ‘Now this is a writer!’ she exclaimed. ‘Not a bit like our treacherous lot who feel that to be an intellectual means betraying your country.’
The writer purred contentedly. My mother laughed out loud, expressing the special delight one feels at characteristic behaviour from an old friend. I caught Sanyogita’s eye and saw that she was embarrassed. In that instant, I wished for her not to be embarrassed and for her to be a little bit more like her aunt, not always so correct.
At the table, Shabby was far from defeated. ‘What country, what country?’ she was saying, now readily taking up Chamunda’s challenge. ‘That’s what I’m asking. You tell us, Mr Vijaipal, what country? Was India ever a country until the British came along?’
The writer, who after his mischief-making had retired to the affections of Chamunda, now became interested in what Shabby was saying. ‘I’ve always been intrigued,’ he said, ‘by how this bit of babble left behind by the British, and taken up by the Leftist historians, has survived in India till today. When people say India was not a country until the British arrived, what exactly do they mean? They could not really be saying that India wasn’t a nation-state. That would be absurd. The idea of the nation-state, even in Europe, is a relatively recent idea, a nineteenth-century idea. So what they must mean, then, is that there was not even an idea of India, the way there was of Europe, or of ancient Greece; that there was never in the minds of its people the notion of belonging to a land called India.’
‘There wasn’t!’ Shabby asserted. ‘You ask the average Indian, not a princess or a goddess like Chamunda Devi here, but the common man, and he would not think of himself as an Indian. He would think of himself as a Gujarati, a Punjabi, a Tamilian, an Assamese. He wouldn’t have the faintest idea of India, “the land”.’
The writer seemed caught between the interruption and Shabby’s raised voice, both of which he was unused to, and what he was going to say next. He lowered his head and muttered, ‘Not the temple-going Indian, not the temple-going Indian.’ Then raising his head and voice at once, he silenced Shabby. ‘Not the temple-going Indian,’ he said for the third time. ‘People like you perhaps, but not him. He knows this country backwards. He forever carries an idea of it in his head. For him, it possesses a sacred topography. He knows it through its holy places. He knows it from the mountains in the north where the rivers begin, and from where the rudraksh he wears around his neck come, to the special place from where the right stones for the lingas come. He knows the rivers when they widen and the great temples and temple cities, with their stone steps, that have been set along their banks. He knows the points where those rivers meet other rivers, and their confluence becomes part of the long nationwide pilgrimages he will make several times in his lifetime. In fact, it could be said that there is almost no other country, certainly not one so vast, where the countrymen are as acquainted with the distant reaches of the land through their pilgrimages as they are in India; perhaps no country where poor people travel more. They think nothing of jumping on a bus or train, for two or three days, to journey to Tirupathi in the south or Jagannath in the east. And in this way, the religion itself is like a form of patriotism.’
Shabby was nodding her head vigorously even before he had finished. She took a chopstick out from her grey bun and began playing with it in her fingers. An arch smile rose to her lips.
‘Ah!’ she said. ‘So you have a communal agenda. I get it now.’
‘Communal?’ the writer said, with genuine confusion in his eyes.
‘ “Communal” in India,’ my mother explained, ‘means advancing the interests of a particular community or religious group; to be divisive.’
The writer chuckled happily.
But then, as if thinking still of what he had said, his thoughts turned inward. I had the feeling he was not quite finished. It had been very affecting to hear him speak, very affecting to watch his distant observations coincide with smaller, more particular observations of my own. I had thought only of Aakash as he spoke and was feeling some relief that the appeal he held for me was not mere obsession, that there was something more abstract, more general, behind it. But it was an unstable feeling, edging on euphoria and hysteria, and what the writer said next broke my composure.
‘You know,’ he began, looking deeply into the room, where illuminated foliage could be seen beyond darkened windows and the orange coils of an electric heater burned steadily, ‘they say that Benares is a microcosm of India. Today, most people take that to mean that it contains all the horror and filth of India, and also, loath as I am to use these words, the charm, the beauty, the magic, whatever you want to call it. But Benares was once a very different kind of microcosm; it was a very self-conscious microcosm. The streams that watered the groves in its Forest of Bliss were named after all the rivers of India, not unlike the avenues in Washington, DC, being named after the American states. All the princes from around the country had their palaces along the river. And they would come and retire there after they had forsaken the cares of the world. The Indian holy points, the places of the larger pilgrimage, were all represented symbolically in Benares. It was said you could do the whole pilgrimage in miniature in Kashi. And Kashi, too, was recreated symbolically across the country. It wasn’t a microcosm; it was a kind of cosmic capital.
‘And on certain days the moon would appear in the afternoon and the water from those symbolic Indian rivers would run through the groves and flood the Ganga, which, at one point, curls around the city. The ancient Hindus, with their special feeling for these cosmic changes, would gather at high points in the city to watch, like people seeing a fireworks display. Now consider this: it is mid-afternoon, the sun is out, but probably obscured by clouds, appearing now and then like a silver disc, the moon is low over the river and there is a kind of daytime darkness. The sound of water can be heard in the silence. It is the sound of streams gushing through the Forest of Bliss and emptying into the Ganga. And then suddenly, at the exact point where the river bends, the Ganga, flowing smoothly in one direction, stops and begins, as if part of the magic of that darkened afternoon, to flow in the opposite direction. That was how people, common people,’ he added pointedly, ‘were brought in touch with the wholeness of the place, in just the same way as someone crossing a street in Manhattan might feel when, looking to one side and seeing the sweep of the avenue, he says, “I’m in New York!” It’s my dream to see that wholeness restored in India.’
There was an interruption from an unexpected quarter. ‘This thing you describe,’ Shabby’s husband asked urgently, receiving a dirty look from his wife, ‘can one still see it in Benares?’
‘No. What is there to see now?’ the writer replied sadly. ‘No one has seen it since the thirteenth century, since… They destroyed it six times, you know, the invaders. Six times, over hundreds of years, they smashed its temples and carried away its stones until they had broken its orientation. The river no longer performed its tricks, the Forest of Bliss was bricked over, its pools and ponds drained, and the lingas, once placed ingeniously across the island city, uprooted. I think they even tried to call it Muhammadabad.’
The writer’s descriptions had perturbed everyone at the table; Chamunda had tears in her eyes. ‘No one knows any of this. No, Udaya?’ She reached past the writer and held my mother’s hand. ‘That’s our problem in India, no one knows any of these things.’
Shabby had also fallen silent and played thoughtfully with a large silver ring on her finger.
‘Chalo,’ my mother said suddenly, alarmed perhaps at the mood that had descended over her dinner party, ‘let’s sit soft.’
I had meant to keep many things to myself, but the vision of completeness that the writer’s descriptions had inspired, as well as a thought about the city beyond, smouldering from some of the tensions that had arisen that evening, forced me to ask, ‘How do Indians who aren’t “temple-going” participate in this Indian idea?’ I was thinking in part of myself, but also of non-Hindus, men like Zafar, whom I had arranged to see in the old city some time over the next few days. He had had his operation while I was away and was still convalescing.
The writer, perhaps thinking I was being political, coldly dismissed me. ‘It’s more difficult for them,’ he said. ‘If you mean Muslims, perhaps they should begin by thinking of themselves as converts to Islam and not invest themselves so emotionally with the invader. If you mean the green-card folk…’
It was too much for me. I burst out with the story of Aakash. I spoke in disjointed sentences of this Brahmin trainer I had become friends with, and how he was many men to many people, now a trainer, excited about brands and malls, now a Brahmin, performing the ancient rites of his caste. I spoke of his hunger, his ambition, of the disappearance of his ancestor down a river and how he had taken me to see the place where he had lived. I told them of my discovery in the National Museum, and how I had seen first hand, but cast in a magical way, the history of the nineteenth-century anti-Brahmin movement that the writer had spoken of. And in my excitement, I also let slip the story of Aakash’s affair with an industrialist’s ‘healthy’ daughter who that very afternoon had been whisked away so that she might make a better match. And of Kris, her creative-writer brother, who was determined to break her love for Aakash. I said that I understood her love for him very well, understood how she might want to take a chance on him, how she might have come to believe in his star. I said all this, without thinking of the consequences, without thinking of who might be listening, and there was some agitation in my voice. The writer listened enthralled; he seemed to see that I was trying to get something off my chest. And when I had finished, when I had told him how Delhi for Aakash was a city with temples to Saturn, how the weeks now for him were jam-packed with religious observances, fasts, shopping for new kitchen vessels, a great jagran that he and his friends had put together in their colony…
‘A jagran?’ the writer asked.
‘It’s a kind of wake,’ I said. ‘I’ve never been to one, but people sit up all night listening to religious stories, watching pageants, singing devotional songs, I don’t know.’
When I had said all this, the writer stopped me, and with great sympathy in his voice, asked, ‘Do you envy him? Do you envy this trainer?’
‘Envy?’ I laughed.
The whole room – my mother, my girlfriend, Chamunda and Shabby – was watching me.
‘Do you envy how simple it will be for him?’
The writer had seen with an astrologer’s vision to my depths; to lie now would have been an act of self-destruction too great. ‘Yes,’ I said bitterly. ‘I envy that terribly. I envy the fact that when the world becomes his, which it will have to, or none of what we’re saying has any meaning, he will be able to put his hand straight in the fire, with his language, his religion, his idea of who he is, intact and close around him. And people like me, who never played any part in rejecting these things, who inherited this rejection from the generations before us, will have no place in that world. What I feel when I see him is something like a nostalgia for a childhood I never lived. But it’s not really childhood I’m craving; I didn’t realize that until now. It’s the cultural wholeness you spoke earlier of, the security of which I have, in my mind, substituted with the security of childhood.’
‘I see, I see,’ the writer said, now very gently. ‘I see very well what you feel you lack when you see this trainer… Aakash, you said his name was?’
‘Yes.’
‘How difficult it must be for you,’ the writer said, his tone so full of sympathy that I thought he mocked me.
The women had begun to smoke Dunhills. More whisky sodas arrived. Chamunda put her legs up on a footstool and hitched up her sari to her knees, revealing two gold anklets dropping from her dark legs. Her toes, also with fine gold rings on them, fanned forward and back like Sanyogita’s, suggesting deep relaxation.
‘Now stop being so serious, all of you,’ Shabby said.’Let’s have some goss.’
Soon the room was alive again with laughter and chatter, and together with the cheerful gaping face of the electric heater, an atmosphere of such congeniality settled over it that someone entering the room at that moment would never have guessed the seed of fresh discord that had been sown between Chamunda and Shabby, nor the effects that my disclosures would have on its fruit; nobody would have noticed Shabby, who knew Megha’s brother and had once seen Aakash, putting two and two together; no one would have known, once they retired quietly, that the writer and his wife had been there at all; no one would have imagined how in Delhi, a city of fifteen million plus, small, mean motives, and unsettled scores, governed what seemed like large outcomes. No, perhaps all anyone entering the room at that stage of the evening, bringing with them the winter smokiness and the faint, sweet smell of the Alstonia scholaris, might have seen was how Sanyogita’s large, smiling face had shrunk, and the painful, sidelong glances with which she now looked at me from time to time.
A few days later I found myself at dawn on the edge of the old city. Zafar and I had spoken the night before, and to avoid the congestion and crowds of the old city, he had suggested I come very early. He told me to call him for directions when I was near. Once we’d left the Delhi of roundabouts and white bungalows and were on Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, which, named for the city’s poet-king, connected the old and new cities of Delhi, I tried Zafar’s number. It was dead. And just yesterday his name had flashed on my phone. The city I knew, the familiar city, receded, and in the one we entered the buses in their depot were still of the old type, grey and yellow, torn and rusted at the edges; the split ends of rail tracks were visible under a bridge; and the cold, white haze that hung over the street brought to it the aspect of a tunnel.
Off-duty traffic lights flashed aimlessly through the fog. Our car dived under a red and yellow railway bridge, circled an old city gate with a high-pointed stone arch and came on to a crumbling, colonnaded street. Shuttered shopfronts ate up the covered walkway that ran on either side of the street; the square panes on the second-storey windows were grey and broken; sunken columns showed iron and plaster insides; and an even layer of dust and litter lay strewn over the street. In a peepal’s flat-leaved canopy, like some straggling bird from another season, was a single purple kite.
Normally, we would have had to park and either walk or take a cycle rickshaw. But in these few hours between night and morning, we could drive deep into the old city. The streets closed around us. Nests of black wire hung overhead, buildings leaned and tottered, and the sky became a jagged strip of grey. I was surprised Uttam was still willing to drive. On every surface, dark sleeping bodies wrapped in woollens sprawled with their arms outstretched. A newspaper seller set up shop over an open drain with grey rippling water running in it, a bent sweeper made figures of eight with a tiny, brambly broom and a teashop served its first customers. Now without the crowds and traffic, it was possible to see the full ugliness of the old city. All the old façades had been covered over with cement and bricks, the old doors had been replaced with dust-encrusted metal shutters, and a glimpse every now and then of a slim wooden balcony or a high-pointed arch only increased the sense of irrecoverable ruin.
‘This is Ballimaran,’ Uttam said.
It was a historic quarter; the poet Ghalib had lived a few streets away. It was also all I knew of Zafar’s whereabouts. Uttam became anxious to leave as I tried the number again. The occasional sound of locks opening, shutters going up, water splashing meant the city was waking up; and he had minutes to get out. I let him go and we agreed to meet on the colonnaded street in case I was unable to find Zafar.
I was drawn towards the green doors of the teashop, the smell of its stove filling the street. Rickety wooden benches, smooth with wear, were ranged outside, and nearly half a dozen street cats crouched under them in anticipation of something. I sat down on the bench and considered my options. On the open green doors ahead of me, like an inscription in a book, red Urdu letters instructed: ‘Say not to your prayers that you have work to do, say to your work that you have prayers to read.’ As a final hope, I scanned my mobile’s call register and found Zafar in calls received: Zafar Moradabadi, 19.45. I pressed the green button, the white screen glowed, but this time, instead of failing, the little dots ran across the screen and the number rang. A sleepy girl’s voice answered.
‘Is Zafar Moradabadi there?’ I said excitedly.
‘No, he’s at the office. He sleeps there,’ the voice replied.
‘Office? What office?’
‘The office of Peshraft magazine, on the little baradari, off Ballimaran.’
‘But I’m there now!’
‘Well, so is he. Wake him up. Tell him his daughter gave you permission.’
Clearly blessed with her father’s wit and timing, the girl hung up the phone. I realized now that Zafar had given me two numbers, office and home, of which only the latter worked. I looked up from my bench at the pot-bellied man framed against the white tiles and tube light of the teashop. He was pouring hot, brown liquid between a ladle and a glass. I asked him if he knew where Peshraft’s offices were.
Without looking up, the teashop owner gestured to a dark, smooth-skinned adolescent who, despite the cold, was in a vest and a blue checked dhoti. ‘Show this man Peshraft’s offices.’ Then, as an afterthought, he asked, ‘Who are you looking for?’
‘Zafar Moradabadi.’
‘The poet?’
‘Yes,’ I answered, thrilled at the recognition of his name.
The slim boy put on his blue and white rubber chappals, stepped gracefully into the street and led the way without a word. A few paces ahead, past a family of goats moving unsteadily in our direction, he vanished into a pitch-black, medieval passage. The air was stale and musty and a high-pointed arch showed further light ahead. On a wooden table next to us, two men were asleep, their limbs dropping into the darkness. At the end of the passage, the boy followed the curve of the road right. I became aware, now that a strip of sky was visible above, of rainclouds. We came to a raised, pan-stained doorway and a flight of steep whitewashed stairs.
‘Peshraft,’ the boy said, his dark, chiselled face and murky eyes holding me.
I gave him ten rupees and he vanished. Climbing the steep stairs of the airless passage, I had little conviction that it would lead to Zafar. There was no landing; the stairs stopped abruptly in front of an old wooden door closed with a hook. I beat against it, and it shook from the hinges. After a moment’s silence, Zafar’s papery voice asked who it was.
‘It’s me!’ I said with delight at having found him in so old-fashioned a way.
The hook fell; the door swung open; Zafar’s gaunt figure greeted me with a wry smile.
‘You’ve come,’ he said.
Then very quickly he was embarrassed. The room I entered had no bed. It was bare except for some light matting, a green metal filing cabinet and shelves in the wall crammed with old editions of the Urdu magazine. The smell of decaying paper filled the little room, with its hanging tube lights and dusty windowpanes; it was hard to believe that the day could ever break here. The telephone lay in one corner on the floor, its wire neatly wrapped many times around it.
Zafar had grown much frailer since the operation. His entire figure was slumped to one side as though it were paralysed. He was thin, unshaven, and the bullet-size sores on his head, still bloody at their hub despite the milder weather, seemed now to hint at a deeper malaise, like mould suggesting damp.
He was also afraid. ‘You shouldn’t have come,’ he muttered as if to himself, and looked blankly at the room.
‘What do you mean? We spoke last night. You told me to come.’
‘I know, I know,’ he said, lowering himself painfully on to a cushion in front of a very small, sloping desk on the floor, ‘but I’ve had news since that there’s going to be a demonstration here today. It might become difficult to get out.’
‘Why didn’t you call?’
‘I only heard once I’d left my house. And the phone here,’ he said, pointing to the green instrument wrapped up in its wire, ‘has been disconnected.’ How he had expected me to call him at all was a mystery; this side of him, his scattiness, was like an aspect of his distress. ‘I know!’ he said with fresh energy. ‘I’ll take you to where I live. We’ll be safe there; it’ll be calm there. We’ll be able to have breakfast in peace. Why don’t you sit down here for a few minutes? I don’t have anything to offer you,’ he said, looking desolately again round the room. ‘Sit, sit, sit,’ he added, hurriedly rising, then wincing with pain. ‘I’ll get dressed and then we’ll go.’
His nervous energy, now subdued, now excited, unsettled me. Zafar gathered a bar of green soap and a towel from a shelf and went quickly down the stairs. I sat with a cushion behind my back and looked through the papers on his desk. They were colourful sketches of geometric shapes, a circle, a right-angle triangle, a rhombus. From where I sat, I could see the street below and a few minutes later I saw Zafar squatting next to a blue bucket in an open cemented area, pouring water over himself. He wore baggy white underwear of sorts, and in his present posture, his long, stringy body seemed like a child’s. Then standing in a towel, he chewed on a neem twig as he shaved, facing a red plastic mirror. It was cracked in the corner and a bit of brown board showed through. When I looked again, an elegant figure in a black, knee-length coat and tight, white trousers swept across the street and climbed the stairs.
‘You’re looking very stylish,’ I said when he appeared in the doorway.
He laughed throatily. ‘I’m wearing it because you’ve come,’ he added, running the back of his hand down the length of the black coat, ‘otherwise, what need is there?’
‘And what are these?’
‘Now that I’m no longer a camel, I’ve become a children’s entertainer. They’re going to use my sketches of shapes in a children’s geometry textbook.’
‘Really?’
‘Really,’ he said, lighting a Win cigarette. ‘One has to do many things. But come on, it’s getting late.’
I was in the street, waiting for Zafar, when a bicycle cart covered in a blue tarpaulin came down the narrow street, leaving a trail of red liquid behind it. Its appearance made the cats spring out from their hiding places under the teashop’s benches. Like little detectives, they inspected the red liquid and began delicately to lick it. The bicycle cart stopped and the driver threw off his tarpaulin to reveal a cart-load of bleeding buffalo parts. There were shanks, thighs with the hoofs and coat still on, and whole horned heads, with blank, skyward-turned eyes. Their black coat against the pink flesh, the rainy sky reflected in their glassy eyes, made a strong and gruesome impression. In the meantime, a butcher in a glass-fronted shop, which said ‘Halal’ in red letters, had begun, bare-chested, to chop up the fresh meat. A dozen riveted cats watched him and in seconds it became apparent why. He appeared in the shop’s raised doorway, wearing only a checked loincloth, and threw handfuls of neatly chopped blackish-pink liver into the street. The cats, with their long, sharp teeth exposed, tore at the small, square pieces. What had earlier been feline poise quickly became a watchful vigilance for competing predators.
Zafar appeared at my side; and as if this dawn carnage was the very thing he had wished to protect me from, he put his arm in mine and we withdrew. We walked to the periphery of the old city, literally to beyond its walls, as though re-enacting some medieval flight from a besieged city.
Half the old city lay between the colonnaded street and the art-deco cinema near where Zafar lived. We started out in a cycle rickshaw, but no sooner had the driver wiped its red leather seat, wet from the light drizzle that fell softly around us, than cries from the demonstration began. They reached us like an echo from within the city. The rickshaw driver looked unsurely back at us. ‘Come on, come on,’ Zafar yelled, in a voice I would not have thought him capable of. The driver put all his weight on the raised pedal and the rickshaw began to move.
Although its rhythmic footfall, its gathering momentum, the faint music of its chanting and slogans condemning police encounters and the killing of innocent Muslims stayed with us the whole time, we never saw the demonstration. It felt as though we circled a stadium or a bullring from which every now and then a column of terrified spectators came rushing out, followed by policemen in olive-green uniforms, beating them with batons. After the bestial display of cats devouring the liver, squatting on the ground, eating of it, with a furtive air about them, almost mistakable for guilt, there was something hollow and airy in these casual acts of violence.
But the rickshaw driver was unnerved; he kept telling Zafar that we couldn’t go any further. It seemed like a strange thing to say, as the streets and wide main roads surrounding the old city were relatively empty, and except for a police presence, there was little preventing us from going on. But the ease of our progress, free of the old city’s daily commotion, with no other rickshaws around, was exactly what worried the driver. When we came at last to yellow metal barricades, an expression of relief passed over his small, dark face.
‘Now it’s clear,’ he said, ‘we can’t go any further.’ As long as we had been in the rickshaw, above the ground and in motion, we had felt secure. To now suddenly be deposited on the empty stretch of road, with the option neither to go forward nor to go back, was to feel that we had fallen into a trap. It was as if this sudden exposure, where a singing bullet might fly out of some unseen sandbag, was to be feared more than angry mobs and baton-wielding policemen.
One policeman, seeing a perhaps unlikely pair huddled near the barricade, approached with long strides. He was tall and attractive with pale, wheat-coloured skin, a thick dark moustache and a prominent mole on his cheek. He swung a stick in one hand as he walked, while the other, in his pocket, dug conspicuously at his balls. He had perfected an expression of bored cruelty; his eyes seemed to search only for prurient excitement. They glazed over when Zafar made his simple request to be allowed past the barricade so that he could go home.
‘Who’s this?’ he said, pointing at me with his stick, but addressing Zafar.
‘Why, my student!’ Zafar replied.
‘Go on,’ the policeman yawned.
We slipped through a foot-wide space between two barricades. We had walked only a few paces when the policeman said, ‘Ah, ah, through there.’
He rapped the wooden frame of a metal detector, which not only was not switched on but had its black wire coiled up in a heap next to it. We did as we were told. The young policeman smiled, then sniffed his fingers.
The enclosed area within the barricade was deserted. On our right was a covered arcade of sorts with shuttered shopfronts. The curving line of simple, cylindrical columns was covered in pink, white and blue bills. Their thin paper had turned soft in the rain and seemed about to slide off. Zafar, in his long black coat and white trousers, moved at a fast pace ahead of me, like a man running to catch a train. Everything was still and silent, muffled by the rain. Only the dull cries from within the city could still be heard. So deep and cinematic was this silence that neither Zafar nor I heard the sudden approach of a dark blue van with a red siren light and white letters painted on it. Even when we saw it, it seemed to be just another prop in the theatre of the morning. It screeched to a stop in front of Zafar and a small, stout policeman in olive green fell out, with a string of abuse ready on his lips. All of it was aimed at Zafar; he didn’t address one word to me; it was as if I wasn’t there. Zafar’s response was to assume a stance of high refinement. Speaking to him in his educated Urdu, he tried gently to reason with him, as though hoping to prevent a standard of decency from breaking down. ‘But listen, brother, we were permitted to cross the barrier by your colleague over there.’ We all turned around at the same time, but the man who had let us through had vanished and the barricade was unmanned. This failure at so crucial a moment gave the fat policeman his chance. His shiny face gleamed with satisfaction. ‘Now move, bastard,’ he said, reaching for the back of Zafar’s neck.
‘He’s had an operation!’ I screamed.
Zafar winced, then smiled.
The policeman now turned to me and said courteously, ‘I’m sorry, sir, but you can come and pick him up in a few hours at the station.’
‘But why are you arresting him?’
‘He’s crossed the police line, sir. It’s a routine arrest.’
‘But why…’
The policeman anticipated my question. ‘Sir, I’m very busy. Here is my card.’ He produced a visiting card with a gold police emblem on it. ‘T. N. Vohra. It has mobile too. Now, please go home. It’s not safe at this time.’
With this, he pushed his hand into Zafar’s, locking fingers with him, and led him into the blue van with its caged windows. Zafar stepped elegantly on to the footboard and sat down on a bench next to a young demonstrator with a sweaty, bloodied face. Just before the door closed, he said apologetically, ‘I shouldn’t have worn this.’ He ran his hand down the length of his black coat again. ‘It made me a target. This mistake won’t happen again. Please excuse the trouble I’ve caused.’
The van sped away, leaving me to walk back to the barricade. When I approached, the young policeman had reappeared to let me through.
Zafar was released at seven that evening. The fat policeman was right: it had been a routine arrest. The place to which they had taken him was a squat building with screened balconies, each level painted in two shades of orange. There were neem and peepal trees outside, motorbikes parked in the shade and a roaring street beyond. From a makeshift porch of white metal and green fibreglass, there hung a large blue and red sign which read: ‘Police Station, Lahori Gate’.
I’d never been in a police station before. I was surprised by the congenial, government office atmosphere, the fluorescent lighting, the potted plants, the simple sign that read: ‘Lock-up’. Releasing Zafar was no great task either. After my initial panic, and yes, a few wiped-away tears, Uttam came to pick me up. We drove to the station, and on the way I called my mother and Sanyogita, who both called Chamunda. At some point around mid-morning, after tea and breakfast in the car, a fixer of sorts showed up. He was not from Chamunda’s office – she couldn’t interfere with these things – but worked for a businessman. He was a man who ‘knew how to talk to the police’. He carried three mobile phones, had a Bluetooth piece in his ear and a weak handshake. Within minutes, he was joking with T. N. Vohra, and setting in motion the process by which Zafar would be released.
The day went by languidly and was spent mostly in the car, with occasional forays into the station. A mild winter sun burned away the rain. There was a fresh warm afternoon, then a fat orange sunset, and later the street hung in wisps of fog and bright kerosene lamps. In fact, Zafar’s arrest might have had something of the mood of a picnic or a long drive had it not been for one thing: Zafar, in the lock-up with some twenty other men, refused to sit down.
At first this gentle protest went unnoticed. Vohra’s sub-inspector tore around the room, prodding men with his stick, roughing up the ones he thought more guilty, but he didn’t touch Zafar. It was only after his second incursion into the room, some time around noon, when our arrivals at Vohra’s desk coincided, that the sub-inspector remarked that the old poet fellow had been standing in the same spot for nearly five hours. Vohra laughed at the genteel manners of people like this. I was concerned because of Zafar’s operation. Vohra nodded, promising to send in a chair for him. But at two p.m., Zafar had still refused to sit down. I was sent in to talk to him. I saw him leaning lightly against the wall, an empty chair next to him and dozens on the floor around, like nursery school children. He glided up to the lock-up’s bars when he saw me, reassuring me that he was fine. When I implored him to sit down, told him it would be a long wait, he smiled mysteriously and said he was fine standing.
By mid-afternoon, Zafar’s protest had become something of a religious event in the station, and everyone was perturbed. Vohra said he could not release him until the demonstration in the old city was over, but begged me, seeing now that I was someone of clout, to make my old teacher see reason. I, more than anyone, wanted Zafar to sit down. The whole episode would be no more than a harmless brush with Indian officialdom, if only Zafar would sit down. But when, at five p.m., the sub-inspector tried to push him down by the shoulders, Zafar pressed his back against the wall and locked his knees.
It was the sub-inspector who told me this as I waited outside for the last of the paperwork to be finished, and for smudged purple stamps and little signatures to complete the formalities. ‘Bloody Gandhian,’ he said, visibly upset. He had chosen his words well, because in this country, with its special feeling for victories of the mind over the body, Zafar’s protest, the refusal of an old frail man, wrongly arrested, to sit with the others on the prison floor, or even on a chair, acquired all the force of a spoken curse.
And when at last Zafar walked out, moving his legs with difficulty after standing for nearly twelve hours, the applause he was met with in the station sounded like a plea for forgiveness, like young, superstitious men with families asking to be spared the anger of a miracle man.
Zafar’s protest had not spared me either. Of course India worked on influence, everyone knew that. But I had used that influence – which to some extent was so innate that it had prevented me from being arrested – for a good cause. It could have allowed me to go home with an easy conscience that evening. But because Zafar’s protest was to some extent aimed against the casual violence of the system that sought to diminish him, I, acting even more casually than the police officers, felt the more implicated. In the end, its sting had nothing to do with ‘communal’ issues or even class ones; it was just a poet speaking to an aspirant, asking him to think hard, to really consider, as someone concerned with beauty and not with politics, whether what was at stake was worth defending or not.
He was a stubborn man, of this there is no doubt. But there was nothing he had been more stubborn about than his determination to be a poet against terrible odds. In the car home, as if remembering who he was, he told me the story of how he got his pen name. ‘I was called Muhammad Shafiq,’ he said, ‘but when I was about seven or eight, I became enchanted with the word aashiyan; I didn’t know what it meant, but I liked the ring of it. So I kept it as my pen name, Muhammad Shafiq Aashiyan. And I began to use it in my schoolwork. A few weeks later, the teacher was calling out our names and she said, “Come here, Muhammad Shafiq Nest.” My face became red with shame. Aashiyan means “nest”, like bird’s nest!’ Zafar’s rasping laugh broke from his blackened lips. ‘It was then that she said to me, “If you want to be a poet call yourself Jigar or Kamar or Zafar.” And since there was already a Jigar and Kamar Moradabadi, I called myself Zafar.’
Uttam stopped the car in front of the art-deco cinema. The area had now returned to life and was teeming with rickshaws, pedestrians and naked bulbs in shop windows. There was nothing to suggest the morning’s disturbance except a column of yellow metal barricades, gathered neatly at the side of the road.
Zafar stepped out of the car, with some relief I thought, perhaps at being his own man for the first time all day. After a hurried goodbye, he vanished around a gloomy corner, illuminated by a single street light, heading home to the house and family which had once again eluded me.
Sanyogita had begun to see a therapist. She said that there were many things she needed to sort through, related to her mother and aunt. Things that might explain her inactivity in adult life. They were both, in different ways, strong women; she felt they might have stifled her. The therapist was fast to confirm these doubts. He had Sanyogita write a letter to both women, a letter Chamunda later described to me as ‘four pages of pure vitriol’, with accusations that she abused her. ‘She accuses me of calling her a “stupid child” when she was little,’ Chamunda ranted down the phone. ‘One says that! It’s like saying, “Stupid boy”. It doesn’t mean “you are a stupid boy”.’ I could imagine her wagging a jewelled finger as she spoke. ‘Aatish, please speak to her. She’s left a lot of hurt in this house. I’m told by a friend who’s had years in psychoanalysis that they blame the family as the source of all troubles. But, Aatish, I know if she would only get married and pop out a child or two, all of this would go away. And guess who introduced her to this psychoanalyst?’
‘Who?’
‘That fat cow Shabby.’
Chamunda, as Sanyogita’s guardian in Delhi, was forever asking me to make her understand some particular point of view or to get her to agree to come to some event she was hosting. Most of the time I was happy to make her case, but lately my own position with Sanyogita was not what it had once been. While I had been distracted with Aakash and then Zafar, I had moved slowly from being one of the people Sanyogita considered on her side, to one of the people she viewed with suspicion.
It had begun the night Aakash pushed her over; the summer of boredom and flight had not helped; the two dinners, at the Oberoi and at my mother’s, had made things still worse; and my general state of preoccupation prevented me from seeing many opportunities for repair. She was someone in whom these emotions percolated slowly, but once a definite shift had occurred, a reversal would have required the full use of my emotional energies.
And these were divided. In the period when Megha had been abducted to the lipo clinic, and Aakash was organizing the jagran in his colony, he made great emotional demands on me. I saw him nearly every day, Junglee aside, spoke to him two or three times and received countless text messages. He had become a master of the text message. In his bad, broken English, he always succeeded in expressing some forceful emotion or plan that would change the course of my day. There was also a powerful sexual tone to these messages. I might be sitting with Sanyogita, the heater yawning in front of us, and my phone would beep. Sanyogita, now wise to the fact that 90 per cent of these messages were from Aakash, would get up or look away. The moment would be spoiled for her. Still worse was the suppressed expression of amusement on my face.
Going against all her high notions of privacy, she would ask, though feigning boredom, ‘What does he say now?’
‘Nothing, nothing,’ I would reply, still smiling.
She would press me; I would try and laugh it off; she would become agitated and we would have a fight. ‘If it’s nothing, why can’t you tell me what it is?’ she’d ask.
‘Because it’s just the principle of it,’ I would reply half-heartedly. ‘I don’t ask you what Ra says in his text messages.’
‘Yes, but the point is that we don’t have these fights about Ra, do we?’
‘We might if I was to start hounding you in this way.’
An acid silence would fall over the room. I would think back to the message, seeking solace in the playful mood in which it was sent. The message might say: ‘Arse bandit.’ How Aakash had learned that expression, or come to find it amusing enough to put it in a message, without any provocation, and send it to me, I don’t know. But it was part of a string of messages of this kind. The first, literally the first, after I told him I had a new Nokia, was, ‘It’s lost its virginity to me, that phone will never be the same.’ A few days later he wanted me to have lunch with him. When I said that I would have loved to but couldn’t, as I was meant to be having lunch with Sanyogita, he wrote at 21.39: ‘That is going to be your problem, for you have to be with Sanyogita. All I can suggest is that we make a concoction like you wouldn’t believe for her which knocks her out for a couple of days.’ The next day he told me he’d spoken to Megha and that, though they could only speak for a few minutes, she was fine and would be back soon; the lipo had made a great difference. He also said that when she was back, he was going to make her have lunch with Sanyogita on the days when he wanted to have lunch or a drink with me alone. I replied, referring to Megha’s condition, ‘Good to hear it,’ to which he, at 14.49, while I was still at lunch with Sanyogita, replied, ‘I thought you might like that. I told her that she’d better start making friends with Sanyogita if she wanted our relationship to progress.’ Then at 14.53, four minutes later, ‘What if they end up fucking each other?’
And it was in this way that Aakash began to excite a fresh tension in our friendship. I knew from the start that it was only his vanity declaring itself in new and corrosive ways. He liked now to speak of bisexuals and metrosexuals, sometimes confusing the two, but like his ‘messy look’, it was really just a part he was trying out. It gave him an illusion of privilege and indulgence. And he always needed his audience. We would come back after an afternoon of drinking – we drank a lot in those days – and he would stand behind me, as Sanyogita lay on a sofa reading, and begin massaging my shoulders. In the mirror in front of me, I could see a large potted fern, the white sofa on which Sanyogita lay and Aakash in a small, tight T-shirt, the afternoon light striking the vein-like muscles in his arms, making golden their pale inner portion. If Sanyogita ignored the tension of the three-way scene, he would say, ‘Bhabi, do you massage him? Do you treat him well? You know, he needs it.’ Sanyogita then either played along or laughed it off, but I could see that her eyes shone painfully. I would shrug off Aakash’s attentions, and he would drift around the room, lightly fingering the bookshelves or picking up and closely inspecting an objet. Till just the other day, any mention of homosexuality had appalled him. He had once said to me, like with the Muslims, that they must be killed off. But now again, like a preparation for a future life, he tried out a new self.
It was in this period, walking one day in Lodhi Gardens, that I ran into Megha’s brother, Kris, the creative writer. The park was full of early-evening mists and bougainvillea. The number of walkers had multiplied with the cool weather, and the hurried fall of evening seemed to correspond with their eagerness to go home and dress for the endless engagements, weddings and card parties whose fairy lights filled the trees.
I had come around a shaded corner of the park when I saw him, pulled along by a basset sniffing the cold, moist earth. His thin figure, and the round hardness of his collarbones and wrists, were visible through the T-shirt and light, V-neck sweater he wore. Because I knew him through his short story, and saw him now almost magically in the story’s setting, I had no trouble recognizing him. It was as if he had always been there. But then what I knew of him beyond the fiction, here from Megha and Aakash, there from Ra, returned to me. I remembered that he was Megha’s brother, that he didn’t live in this part of town, and thought it strange that he would have brought his basset from Sectorpur, nearly an hour away, to walk him here.
These thoughts rose so fast in my mind that their very momentum made me blurt out his name as he passed. He looked up; his eyes, set deep in their dark sockets, were wide and expressionless. A faint smile rose to his lips.
‘Aatish?’
‘Yes.’
He held out a large dark hand.
‘How are you?’ I said, taking it in mine; it was slightly damp. ‘I haven’t seen you around for a while. Do you still go to Junglee?’
He replied, ‘Me? Yes, I’m fine. Junglee, you said?’ Then laughing awkwardly, he added, ‘Yeah, I still go to Junglee, but at a different time, and so that’s why you haven’t probably seen me around. And you? All well there?’
His speech, though still American, had more Indian rhythms than I remembered.
‘Yes. Fine, fine.’
‘Good, good.’ He smiled.
An uncomfortable silence settled round us.
‘Well then, chalo, I’ll see you around.’
‘Yes, Kris, definitely.’
We were about to part. His basset, after panting patiently at our feet, had stood back up on his heavy paws when I said, ‘Kris, actually, do you have a moment?’
‘Yes, yes, why not?’ he said, with some satisfaction. ‘Why don’t you walk with me? Beyoncé here won’t let us stand in one place and talk.’
‘Beyoncé?’
He laughed. ‘My sister named her.’
Beyoncé had now picked up a scent, and nose down, waddled forward, her ears dancing about her.
‘Kris, actually… it’s your sister,’ I began, ‘that I’d like to talk to you about. You know I’m a friend of Aakash’s.’
‘I know,’ he replied.
Then I wasn’t sure what to say.
‘I hear your family’s very upset about their relationship.’
‘Well, thank God my parents don’t know anything about it. But yes, us brothers and sisters are naturally very upset. She’s compromising all our futures over this low-grade person who’s only after our money.’
I began to see now for the first time how Megha and Kris were brother and sister. His entire language, even his facial expressions, changed as he spoke about Aakash. The creative-writing language of the short story fell away. He made grammatical errors in his speech, almost as if a different language was needed for the different values expressed.
‘Do you think that’s what he’s after?’
‘What else? Aatish, have you seen my sister?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you honestly believe a guy like Aakash would go for her for any other reason except that she’s loaded? Let’s see, she’s a dwarf -’ he tapped his fleshy, nail-bitten digits – ‘she’s healthy as hell, she has a face like a chapati, she’s of a lower caste than him… I can’t think of anything else, except that she’s also very annoying, but probably he isn’t too concerned about that.’
‘What about that she loves him? Maybe that’s what he sees?’
‘Everyone loves Aakash! Find me a person that doesn’t love Aakash. The trainers at Junglee love Aakash, the clients love Aakash, my friend Sparky Punj loves Aakash, you love Aakash, even my fucking chowkidar loves Aakash. So many people love Aakash that I don’t think he even notices until he comes across someone who doesn’t love him.’
His mention of his chowkidar brought to my mind the description of the man from the story. How real he had seemed, with his smooth skin, stained teeth and murky, amber eyes; it was as if I had seen him myself.
‘Yes,’ I said, forcing my mind back to what was being said, ‘but people like that, people who please, can be very insecure.’
‘Aakash is not insecure; he’s ambitious. There’s a difference. He doesn’t doubt himself for a minute; he just sometimes doubts whether the world will deliver.’
I laughed; Kris’s face was still. ‘But don’t you like that? Don’t you think his ambition is an impressive thing?’
‘Not when it’s aimed at my family’s wealth,’ he replied.
‘And what about your sister? What about her happiness?’
‘Aakash will not make her happy, believe me. She’s happy now because she’s getting some Brahmin cock. And we all have this thing, us baniyas, this love of Brahmins. We’re like the untouchables of the upper castes, you see, so nothing excites us more than Brahmin love. But believe me, when Aakash has her in the bag, she won’t be getting Brahmin cock no more.’
I had forgotten Kris was a ‘Western-educated homosexual’; I had forgotten how freely he had learned to speak of these things. And his language, now discussing the subtleties of caste, now of cock, was unpredictable in tone and in content. Its fluctuations, going so easily from mellow to harsh, gave me an intimation of his disturbance.
‘Where’s your sister now?’ I asked, concealing in the airiness of my tone knowledge of her disappearance.
Kris seemed to search my face for any sign of previous knowledge.
Seeming either to make a decision to trust me or just acting out of indifference, he said, ‘She’s getting that gross body of hers…’ He put his large hands, with their fleshy fingertips, to his mouth, making the shape of a nozzle, and emitted a long and graphic sucking noise, like a child blowing into his hands to make a fart sound. Then he laughed garishly and was once again of a piece with his sister.
‘And then?’
‘Marriage, I suppose. She’s holding up the queue, you know. I have two younger sisters, less fat, who are both eager to get married.’
He seemed so pleased with himself that I experienced a feeling of triumph on Aakash’s behalf. I wanted almost to say, ‘Well, you’re too late. He’s already married her and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ My face perhaps gave away some of my distaste, because he became conciliatory. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘don’t think I don’t share your values. I’ve been to college in America too. I’m all for the little guy rising. But you know, don’t mind my saying this, I understand this country a little better than you and Ra and people.’
‘Who is me and Ra and people?’
‘You know, English-speaking people.’
‘You’re English-speaking.’
‘Yes, but only first generation. We’re still very much part of the Hindu way of life; we’re still very traditional. To you, Aakash is someone exotic and fascinating; to me, he’s very close. He knows that he can fool you, but he can’t fool me. He knows that when he does his poor boy from Sectorpur number around you, he’s got you where he wants you. The filmy dialogue, the temple visits, the red teeka on the head, all that works on you, but not on me. I have neither any caste fascination nor any love of Bollywood heroes. And in India, aside from film and religion, what else is there? Aakash knows this and that’s why he hates me. He knows that I know what neither you nor my sister knows.’
His information impressed me. How did he know of the temple visits? Clearly not from Megha. Then another possible route took shape in my mind and gave me a fresh sense of Sanyogita’s unhappiness: she must have spoken to Ra, Ra to Kris. Seeming to enjoy the effect of his knowledge on me, he added, ‘And are you going to this jagran?’
I nodded, wishing to give him no extra pleasure.
‘When is it?’ he blandly asked.
‘In a couple of days.’
‘When exactly?’
‘Saturday.’
‘Hmmm, around the time my sister gets back. She better not try to go.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Because we’ll kill her,’ Kris blandly replied.
We had come to the park’s tall iron gates, which were never open.
‘Well, I better be going,’ Kris said, stepping through the green turnstile. A Jorbagh taxi was waiting for him and the uniformed chauffeur had opened the back door for Beyoncé, who showed not the slightest willingness to jump in on her own.
‘Kris,’ I asked, as the chauffeur helped Beyoncé into the car, ‘how’s the writing going?’
‘Pretty good, buddy. Thanks for asking. Should have a story out soon in a US mag.’
‘The one you read?’
‘No, no, are you crazy? My poor mother’s blood pressure would blow her head off. No, a much gentler story. And you? I hear you’re writing too.’
‘No. Yes. I mean nothing; it’s all gone cold on me. A complete blockage. I’m beginning to feel I have no material.’
‘Sorry to hear it, man. But keep at it. There’s always a breakthrough round the corner.’
With this, he got into the car, Beyoncé panting on the seat next to him, and drove away.
On the morning of the jagran, Aakash had a different hairstyle. It was no longer ‘messy’, but parted in the middle and combed back in the style of an eighties hero. He had a little orange mark at the centre of his forehead from the inaugural puja that morning. We finished early at Junglee and he asked if I would drop him off at the nearest metro station. He had to go back to Sectorpur and help with the preparations. Sixty kilos of wheat had to be turned into puris before eight p.m.
Factoring in a standard one-hour unit of delay, and that we would be awake all night, I left the house at eight fifteen. But by eight forty-five, just as Sectorpur’s flyovers and cramped sprawl came into view, Aakash began calling to see where I was.
‘Five minutes away.’
‘Good. Come fast.’
We drove past the 16 Base Repair Depot and took a left after the fruit seller’s. It was a clear mild night, hardly cold for November. Uttam entered the Air Force Colony, and even before we’d come as far as Aakash’s street, we could see the preparations. On one side there was a blue water truck and a park bounded by banana, neem, ashok, Alstonia scholaris and gulmohar trees. At the centre of it, a large white tent, with scalloped satin skirting, flapped lightly in the wind. On the right was the community centre, a single-storey, pale yellow building. In an open cemented area in front of it, a few hundred people, many of whom were children, sat on the floor on long strips of green carpeting.They ate from leaf thalis coated in a silver laminate, which glistened in the bright light falling on the diners from halogen lamps overhead. Young men and boys walked with bent backs down the line, serving great spoonfuls of chickpeas, vegetable curry and spongy puris from buckets.
Aakash stood among the diners, in his black capris and beige and white knit T-shirt. He came to meet me outside when he saw the car drive in with a look of tired exhilaration. There was a little piece of puri stuck to his cheek. ‘Hi, man. What’s you doing, man?’ There were others from the gym around him: Mojij in a pink shirt, almost with cuffs, and Montu in a tight T-shirt that made him look even fatter than he was.
After his initial pleasure at seeing me, Aakash’s manner changed to that of a child interrupted in the middle of a game. Having observed the formality of asking if I’d like some tea, he passed me on to his little brother.
When I failed to recognize him, he said irritably, ‘It’s Anil. You met him in Haryana, remember? When we went to the temples?’
I did remember; it was just that then, as now, my perceptions were overwhelmed.
As Aakash walked away, he yelled, ‘Give him a stiff cup of tea.’ Anil nodded and we began to walk towards the flat. But we had barely taken a few steps when the power failed. A red city sky suddenly fell over the jagran. A few stray invertor-run lights glowed, the odd naked bulb, but the colony was in darkness.
The air became filled with voices, men in Aakash’s family and colony calling the electricity people, appealing to them to turn the electricity back on as there was going to be a jagran that night. The friendly responses they seemed to be receiving, the exchange of first names, some stray laughter, gave me an intimation of how the religious occasion would have served as common ground, how it might have made human the usually clinical communication between citizens and government servants. The man on the other end might also have lived in a colony with a jagran and was perhaps happy to see what he could do.
We walked towards Aakash’s apartment block, which even in the mixture of moon and tube light seemed to have received a fresh coat of peach and beige paint.
‘It has!’ Anil said. ‘They did it in the summer.’ He worked at a travel agency and was telling me that, despite the recent terrorist attacks, tourists, especially Spanish tourists, were still coming in large numbers. He had just been in Pushkar, leading a group, and was thrilled at how many temples there were in a small area. ‘We handle inbound and outbound tourism, but inbound is naturally more interesting.’
‘Why?’ I asked as we made our way into the candle-lit flat.
‘Just because it’s more interesting,’ he replied, ‘to show people what there is in your country than to promote another. I doubt there’s another country in the world with as much to see as India.’
Everybody loved India; everybody worked hard. Mojij, who’d followed us in said he was at Junglee every day until two, then at college till six, doing a BA in media studies. Anil, whose English was good, much better than Aakash’s, said he’d been learning French as well, but had never found the time to immerse himself in the language. We sat in the pink front room, in the light of a few slim red and yellow candles. Their glow expanded and shrank, sometimes throwing light as far as the lime-green pagodas, the red rose and the sequined Radha and Krishna, sometimes leaving them in darkness. I noticed that the cushion covers of the brown wooden sofas had embroidered scenes of chalets with fences and gardens. A few moments later, Ma Sharma, in a purple salwar kurta, came in with sweet, strong cups of tea. The little sweeper ran around half naked in a red and white Hawaii T-shirt. The power cut had scattered the mosquitoes into the general darkness, but occasionally one of the women in the house could be heard slapping a fleshy arm or thigh, and loudly exclaiming, ‘Machchar!’ I was beginning to wonder what I had come for when the sound of an exhaust fan and the dim sputtering of lights announced the end of the power cut. A slight feeling of embarrassment ran through the room at the sudden exposure.
Just then, Amit, Aakash’s elder brother, appeared in the metal doorway and ushered us downstairs, insisting we eat. Before being led into the cemented area, I stopped at the durbar.
I knew that the word literally meant court, but also had the connotation of a viewing or an audience, of being in the presence of the deity. Amit explained that the boys in the colony had begun the jagran five years before. This came as a surprise; I thought it would have been going on for many years. To think of so large a religious occasion as recent – and put on by young people – was to be aware instantly of new prosperity – and the gods to which people felt it was owed. Amit said that the boys of the colony had just been sitting around one day when they thought, the other colonies have jagrans, why don’t we? They put together a committee, gathered funds and that year put on the first jagran. It was an instant success and the numbers grew each year, with people’s relations coming from out of town for the event. They were very proud this year of the size of the durbar. And they had reason to be; it was vast. Giant papier-mâché mountains, like the mountains of Ladakh, rust, yellow, purple, blue, towered over the tented enclosure, recreating Kailash, Shiva and Parvati’s alpine dwelling. On every summit of every peak there were gods, Shiva, Krishna, orange-tongued and orange-palmed Kali, and at the highest summit, Santoshi Ma, the mother of contentment. Below her, 108 brass lamps were arranged like a champagne pyramid, representing the goddess’s 108 forms. The tent was still empty and a group of colony children were playing on its thick floral carpets. In one corner, a small band warmed up on a podium with Roland equipment, keyboards, brown wooden drums and powerful black speakers. Halogen lamps and free-standing heaters, filled with blackish-orange coals, heated the empty tent.
We ate dinner in the community centre. There was little conversation, but Anil pointed out that the pumpkin sabzi would aid digestion. I threw my tray away and saw irritatingly that I had made a little yellow stain on my kurta. I had hardly spoken to Aakash so far and thought I might lure him away for an after-dinner cigarette. But he was not in the mood. He passed me on to Amit, who was only too happy to take me to the neighbourhood convenience store, provided he could borrow Uttam to pick up some friends of his. When I said he couldn’t, he became sullen.
The convenience store was the front room of a ground-floor flat in another block. It had a single grille window overlooking the park and contained sacks of grain, bottles of tomato ketchup and some tinned food. We entered it furtively, almost with the air of people entering a back room for a line of cocaine. The barrel-stomached owner sat in his vest in the window, and like a card dealer, fanned out two Gold Flakes as we came in. We took one each and sat down on a charpoy. The owner threw us a box of matches without interrupting his vigil at the window. The harsh tobacco had begun to compress the food in my stomach when the second power cut happened. Again, voices filled the darkness; the boulder-shaped owner lit a match. People scurried in and out of the convenience store, now asking him for candles, now for five more kilos of flour. This last request was handled by Amit, who dashed out of the room, leaving me alone in the convenience store, with the orange end of a Gold Flake burning steadily to the butt. I was beginning to feel completely bereft of company and purpose when Aakash’s face became visible through the candle-lit bars of the grille window.
‘My friend in here?’ he said quickly.
The shop owner didn’t reply.
‘Yes,’ I said frantically, like a castaway calling out to a ship.
‘Come on. We have to go,’ he hissed into the darkness.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I’ll tell you on the way. Hurry up.’
Outside, people shuffled urgently about as Aakash searched for his bike among dozens of others.
‘Let’s take Uttam.’
‘We can’t,’ he said distractedly.
‘Why?’
‘He’s not here.’
‘What do you mean? Where did he go?’
‘My brother sent him to pick up some people from the airport. He said he asked you.’
‘Yes, and I said no.’
‘Fucker,’ Aakash said. ‘He’s always doing this. Anyway, don’t worry. He’ll be back soon.’
Aakash, having found his bike, was wheeling it out into the street.
‘Come on. Get on,’ he said.
‘Where are we going?’
Aakash stopped wheeling back his bike, swung one leg over the seat, and trying to locate me in the darkness, said quietly, ‘To pick up Megha.’
‘She’s back!’
‘Yes, man. She’s run away.’
‘Fuck. When did you find out?’
‘Just a few hours ago. Can’t you see I’ve been taking so much tension? I couldn’t even greet you properly.’
‘What’ll happen now?’
‘I don’t know, man. We’ll find out.’
We couldn’t continue the conversation because, at that precise moment, a large, moustached man, seeing Aakash on his bike, approached, asking if he could have a ride.
‘Sure,’ Aakash said, ‘let my friend get on, then you get on.’
‘How can three go?’ the man asked, eyeing me morosely.
‘They can.’
I got on and, a moment later, felt the fat man’s stomach pin me in place. The bike sank, then rose and rolled out of the colony gates. Aakash steered it unsteadily, speaking to Megha on his mobile as he drove.
We headed down the dark, keekar-lined road that ran from Aakash’s colony to the main intersection. At the fruit stall the fat man got off. A little further on there was a line of yellow lights gathered under a flyover, and a restaurant with a sign saying ‘Sher-e-Punjab’ in red letters on a white background. Aakash ordered a few bottles of Thums-up, which arrived with straws on metal trays, and we sat down to wait. I made a few attempts at conversation, but Aakash seemed too tense to talk. The only question that aroused his interest, and that had been circulating in my mind from the moment I heard of Megha’s return, was how changed she would be after the lipo.
‘I don’t know,’ Aakash said, with some wonder in his voice. ‘We have to be prepared for any eventuality. She told me on the phone that they gave her lipo in eight places and removed nearly five litres of fat. Five litres!’ he repeated, flaring his eyes. ‘Apparently, she still has her bruises and her skin has become very dry.’
With this, we sank again into a solemn silence, like two children newly aware of the hard realities of adult life. But neither the silence nor this mood lasted long, as a few minutes later Megha’s grey Hyundai pulled up in front of Sher-e-Punjab.
‘Oh my God-d,’ Aakash said, and chuckled with delight at seeing Megha step out of the little car in a pink silken kurta and beige capris. ‘Loddof difference.’
Megha stood timidly in one spot, smiling up at us, her nose ring catching the light from the restaurant. Aakash trotted down the two steps that stood between them and took her in his arms.
‘Come here, and look at my brand-new wife, thin and all,’ Aakash yelled back to me. As I made my way down to them, Aakash was saying, ‘Appu, these lipo people are for real! They’ve pulled off a miracle, no? Sir, whaddyou say?’
I was dumbstruck.
‘Yes, yes,’ I managed. But it was a transparent lie. And Aakash and Megha must have seen it was, because she said angrily, ‘Five litres, they took out, you know!’
Looking at her, you wouldn’t have known it. There wasn’t an ounce of visible difference. The greasy rolls below her neck were intact; her breasts were still vast; and above the hem of her pink kurta, her stomach still sprawled. I was also puzzled by how, if she had run away from home, she was able to pick up her car. These questions, swarming in my mind, were put temporarily to rest by the appearance of the fat man Aakash had given a ride to. He wanted a ride back. Aakash handed him the bike keys and told him to drive it back to the colony. We would go with Megha.
In the little Hyundai, with plastic still covering the seats, Megha, perhaps thinking of the experience of the past few days, looked back at me and sighed. ‘Look what trouble your friend causes me. I think he’s going to cause me a lifetime of troubles only.’
‘This is just the beginning, my darling,’ Aakash replied stylishly, and leaned in to kiss her.
In the car, it emerged that although Megha had run away from the lipo clinic, she had not actually run away from home. She had taken advantage of a journey from the lipo clinic to the house of a suitor to give her uncle in Bombay the slip and escape to Delhi.
‘I went straight to the airport,’ she said. ‘Thanks God, my father hadn’t cancelled my credit card. So I bought a ticket and came back.’
She had even gone home, met her family and picked up her car. Her father was angry at first, but then pleased to see his little girl. He had said to her, ‘The problem is you’re too healthy. We’ve tried our best, but I suggest now that even when you go to the market, you try and look nice. You never know where an offer might come from.’ She also added that among the Aggarwals, there had recently been five or six love marriages. ‘Then there is the age factor and that I have had lipo. The doctor told my parents that I should wait six months before getting married. I’m twenty-six, running twenty-seven. So if I wait three months, twenty-seven will be complete. All this makes me feel that my parents will now be willing to hear my choice.’
Hearing this, Aakash leaned over and kissed her, softly whispering, ‘Appu.’ Then abruptly: ‘What did you tell them before coming here?’
‘Nothing,’ Megha replied jauntily. ‘Just that I was sleeping the night at my friend’s house.’
As we drove into the colony, past the community centre, Megha asked me how the food had been.
‘Very good,’ I replied.
‘You would say that. But it must not have been “very good” because not many are eating.’
‘What are you talking,’ Aakash exploded, ‘we’ve fed some six hundred.’
‘Oh, so you’re counting,’ Megha said, and laughed.
We returned to find that the power was back and the jagran was beginning. Bejewelled women, clutching their saris, rushed towards the tent. Aakash ran upstairs to try on the kurta Megha had designed and stitched for him in the lipo clinic. As the two of us waited downstairs, Megha explained her family’s position. ‘Now, if my father is going to spend two crore on the wedding, then at least the husband should be making fifty lakhs monthly. No?’ Aakash, I knew – though still a huge amount for a trainer – made only sixty thousand a month: a tenth of that amount.
‘I know!’ Megha cried. ‘Now what to do? Every day my mother comes to me and says, “Such and such person has had a son. And her husband went out and came back with a tempo full of stuffs. Refrigerator, microwave, laptop, jewellery, saris – you name it, he bought it.” Imagine how I feel, thinking when I have a son, who will go out and buy a tempo full of stuffs?’ She spoke with such feeling, her eyes beginning to glisten, that it was hard to believe she was talking about electronics and home appliances.
During this sharing of intimacies, I came out with something that had first occurred to me in the car. I had wanted to tell Megha and Aakash then, but had been prevented by some inexplicable feeling of loyalty. But now, fully won over by the cause of their marriage, I told Megha about my accidental meeting with her brother in Lodhi Gardens.
‘That bloody homo,’ she whispered viciously, ‘let him try. Kill me? I’ll make keema out of him and each of his little yellow-fingered friends.’
And though it had seemed a real threat at the time, returning now as an echo from Megha’s lips, it seemed absurd. Of the two, she was without a doubt the more unsinkable. She muttered angrily to herself for a few moments, and then, as if it were too much for her to contain, started yelling, ‘Aakash! Aakash! Listen to what Aatish is telling me my fajjot brother has been saying.’
‘Megha, no, listen,’ I said quickly, ‘don’t tell Aakash.’
‘Why?’
‘He’ll just get worked up over it. And there’s no knowing what he might do.’
I wasn’t sure myself why I didn’t want him to know. I think, bizarre as it might sound, that I had a superstitious fear of his dormant Brahmin’s powers.
And perhaps some of my nervousness was felt by Megha too, because when Aakash appeared, bare-chested on his balcony, having heard her voice but not what was actually said, she didn’t repeat herself.
‘Bas, nothing,’ she said, ‘we’re coming up.’ She gestured to me to follow her and marched up the stairs. At the first landing, in part perhaps from fatigue, she swung around and said, ‘And by the way, one other thing. My father, he doesn’t know that that brother of mine is a chakka.’ She used the Hindi word for hitting a six in cricket, which also meant eunuch, and flicked her wrist effeminately. ‘But he’s got a pretty good idea. If he finds out, he’ll not just cut him out of the will, he will also kill that half-starved gandu.’ With this, she swung back around and climbed the remaining steps.
In the now empty flat, Aakash walked around in his towel, his hair wet and messy. His nipples were small and high, and his body, expansive and well made. We followed him to the end of the flat, past cluttered sideboards where a telephone table, tooth mug and bedclothes were stacked close together. The kurta, a VIP kurta with a gold and white collar, lay on his bed. Aakash vanished, only to reappear a moment later in just a pajama, the drawstring hanging out.
‘Tie it, no?’ he said to Megha, seeming to enjoy the execution of this intimate gesture in my presence. Then he put on the kurta over the grey vest he always wore and experimented with hairstyles, messy, the eighties, which Megha vetoed instantly, settling in the end for something in between.
Megha looked adoringly at him and said, ‘Aakash, you’re looking very black today.’
Aakash looked hard at himself and replied, ‘Appu! Why do you say such things! It’s because I haven’t slept. You know, whenever my sleep is incomplete, I look blacker.’ Then scrutinizing his reflection, he added, ‘Actually, I’m not looking black. It’s your imagination. Sir, am I looking black?’
‘No,’ I replied.
Megha glowered at me, then smiled and produced some of the other things she had made for him from the green metal cupboard.
‘Pure linen,’ she said, showing me a short-sleeved shirt with many little pockets and straps, ‘and all for rupees five hundred. If you went to Giovanni, the same thing would be two thousand. No point spending too much on a kurta because he never wears it.’
‘I never wear it,’ Aakash confirmed, still fixing his hair and applying deodorant.
‘Then why to waste money?’ Megha said. ‘This way even if he wears it five times, it’s only rupees hundred each time.’
Downstairs, the tent was almost full. We made our way towards the stage, passing armies of children sitting cross-legged on the floor beside women in bright, hot synthetics. There was a smell of warmth in the tent, but it was not unpleasant. Aakash went to the front of the crowd and began ushering people backwards to make room. He was like a hero among the children, whom he would pick up and swing back, or run at, stamping his feet, causing them to shriek, laugh and retreat. The rest of his family sat solemnly on a white podium – Amit’s wife, the ‘sharp one’, had a pink mobile phone tucked between her legs – where a young boy had begun chanting in Sanskrit into a mike. He was identifying where the ceremony was being performed, beginning with Jambudvip, India, Isle of the Jambul tree, and zooming in on Bharatvarsh, Delhi, and finally, the little colony where we were.
‘What’s the name of this place?’ he asked, hardly taking a breath.
‘Chitrakut,’ the others answered in one voice.
‘Chitrakut,’ he repeated, working it into his incantations.
He was dark-skinned, with a pubescent moustache and pinkish lips. There was a confidence, bordering on a glint in the eye, about him. I thought it came from an awareness of his own fluency, the knowledge that, despite his youth, he uttered powerful things effortlessly, filling the people around him with admiration. As the prayers continued, the senior priest took over and his apprentice began going through the crowd, tying orange threads to our wrists.
At that moment, the master of ceremonies for the evening appeared. He was a great fat man in an off-white shirt with gold rings on his fingers and a gold medallion of Kali around his neck. His teeth were bright orange from eating pan, and like a cross between an Elvis impersonator and an evangelist, he reminded me of medieval friars in Europe, rotund and jovial, with a hint of corruption about him. As people stood close to the durbar, all holding their hands over the pyramid of lamps, a knotted red thread covered in butter and oil was set aflame. Ghee and fire dripped from it. And it was with this oily fire-dropping thread that the MC lit the central lamp. From its flame, men who had been crouched round the podium began lighting the other 107 lamps. Soon they were all flickering contentedly in the light breeze that came through the tent. The MC, who hadn’t said a word so far, now yelled into the mike, ‘Victory to the true durbar!’
‘Victory to the true durbar!’ the congregation yelled back.
The MC’s orange teeth gleamed and he began taking donations, speaking the donor’s name into the mike and blessing him in public.
Aakash and Megha were in line to receive the blessing. Directly behind them stood Amit and his ‘sharp’ wife. Everything was going smoothly until the MC leaned forward and seemed to ask Megha something. Megha took a moment to answer, but when she did, Amit’s wife, now sharper than ever, gasped aloud, ‘How can one lie in the presence of the goddess?’ Aakash’s face went pale even as Megha’s burned with anger. She swung around and there was a loud exchange between the two women, which spilled over into a fight between Aakash and Megha. Aakash seemed to be trying to cool the situation, but soon there was an opening in the crowd and Megha charged out, tears of rage streaming down her face. Aakash dived out behind her and the crowd closed again.
In the meantime, the MC, who had a powerful singing voice, launched into a devotional song, raising his hands over his head and clapping. The pyramid of lamps burned brightly behind him, the colourful mountains shone in the halogen light, and soon the tent-full of people were clapping along and joining him in the song, stopping only to say, ‘Victory to the true durbar.’ It was eleven thirty.
I always knew that I wouldn’t have lasted the night. Within an hour of the singing beginning, my bottom began to hurt and my feet fell asleep. I tried wiggling my toes, but it made no difference. The feeling would subside, only to return with greater force. My restlessness was heightened by Aakash, now with a red and gold Om scarf around his neck, coming in and out of the tent with an expression of deep worry darkening his face. So after another ten minutes of song and hand-raising, I slipped out into the cool night with its spokes of yellow street light. Uttam sat on a chair with his shirt open in the dark. I went up to him and said that we should leave. Aakash was standing near the tent. When I told him I was taking a break but would come back, he said, ‘You’re going now? Fine, go. Looks like everyone is letting me down tonight.’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘What’s the point of telling you? You’re leaving, what help can you be to me?’
‘Where’s Megha?’
‘Does it look as though I know?’
He was like a man who had been struck at by his superior and was now striking down at the man below him. But I had been too low on this food chain for too long and I was beginning to tire of it. I had only myself to blame; I had allowed, I had welcomed my own diminishing. My belief that Aakash could rescue me from being an outsider in India had led me into a kind of self-effacement. The place had been so strong and yet out of reach that now that it felt nearer I wished it to wash over me, even as Aakash wished to define himself against it. But that night I felt my own particularity acutely, and tired of the crowds, and of Aakash’s antics, I questioned him no further. I promised to return, but he didn’t seem interested. It was from his father that I learned that I should return at three thirty a.m., when the story would begin. With this, I left.
When I returned at four a.m., Megha had returned too and the night was entering its second phase. Aakash still stood at the wings where part of the tent flapped open. The anger he had shown me earlier had gone and tiredness like that of a child, joined with some feeling of satisfaction, had taken its place. The red in his eyes brought out their mud colour. Seeing me walk up, his father, standing near Aakash, said, ‘He’s come at just the right moment.’ Aakash seemed pleased to see me and rested his elbow on my shoulder. Megha sat at the other end of the tent with the women of Aakash’s family. Their fight, Aakash explained, had been caused by the MC asking Megha and Aakash whether they had come as a married couple. Megha, feeling she could not lie in the presence of the goddess, had replied, ‘Yes,’ and Aakash’s sister-in-law had overheard. Aakash said that he had tried to cool the situation, but Megha felt he was letting her down. She had apparently got back into her car and driven home. Aakash had had to bring her back in person; and he was now worried that members of her family had discovered where she was. ‘Tonight’s final,’ he kept saying in English. An uneasy peace prevailed between Aakash and Megha, and its mood was mirrored on stage by two children, in liver-coloured satin, playing Krishna and Radha in a pageant of sorts.
The boy wore a black matted wig with painted sideburns and heavy make-up. There was something dark and tantalizing about his exposed armpit hair, seeming to emphasize his adolescence. The girl was plump and well formed, with a reddish-brown dupatta falling from a bun at the top of her head. They had a confrontational relationship, now dancing, now sulking, sometimes they were making up, sometimes she was attacking him with a rolling pin. His favourite expression was an appeal to the crowd, a stunned wide-eyed expression seeming to say, ‘Isn’t she mad?’ before retaliating himself. She never looked at the crowd, more like a soap opera wife than Krishna’s consort. There was a lot of Bollywood-style dancing, which ended with a freeze in godly postures. It was at this point that Sudama appeared.
A group of colony boys had collected at one side of the stage, slouched on chairs, laughing and hanging on to one another. One of them said, as though he’d seen it many times before, ‘This is really something to watch.’ Aakash suddenly became protective of me, and taking me by the hand, led me to one side of the tent, away from the blaring speaker. He gestured to me to sit down, then sat next to me. I felt, as I had many times with him, that in his moments of self-doubt and trouble, he rehabilitated himself through his friendship with me. In these moments he was tender, giving, eager to please, as if my approval could restore him to his normal levels of self-confidence.
A boy with a broken tooth and a thin, expressive face appeared on stage. He wore simple white clothes and his hair was tied with red rubber bands in a long cone. He was Sudama, Krishna’s childhood friend who falls into poverty. Barely able to feed his family, he goes looking for Krishna, who has by then become the King of Dwarka. But when he arrives at his doorstep, the guards prevent this near beggar from going in.
Standing outside a make-believe door, the teenage Sudama began singing a moving song, which at times had the audience in tears. Calling Krishna by all his different names, he sang, ‘Murli vala, your memory would trouble me, my faith in you must not break.’ In the end, he seemed to have succeeded in informing Krishna that he was standing outside his door, because Krishna, having dropped his godly freeze, now rushed out, and taking the broken Sudama in his arms, fell to the ground and began washing his feet. At this moment, Aakash, with tears in his eyes, put his hand behind my neck, massaging it as he once had at the Begum of Sectorpur’s. Forever able to see himself in exalted scenarios, whether it be Bollywood or Dwarka, he said, ‘Remember?’
‘Remember what?’ I said, not wishing to let him down.
‘Remember the time when I washed your feet?’
On stage, Krishna had brought Sudama into his palace and had seated him on his wooden throne with its red felt fabric. Radha had seen this and was enraged. But Krishna by this point had had enough of her and pushed her aside. Some great tension was expressed here, but it wasn’t clear what. The colony boys were both riveted, and judging by their scornful howling, repelled by Sudama’s story. It was easy to imagine how these Indian stories glorifying poverty were not always pleasing to them, easy to see how they were at once familiar and something young people, especially, were a little tired of.
I could hardly believe, given the hour, that the tent was full, and at least half full with children. They sat mesmerized, watching the re-enactment of these ancient stories. And for a moment it felt as if we were all children, with our tired, gaping expressions. The pageants in their medieval and ribald way brought out instinctive emotions – tears, laughter, sadness and joy. And this also deepened my feeling of childhood.
In his second act Sudama became a comedian. He had a mobile phone, which rang incessantly. He would answer it, saying, ‘Oh, hello, you’re such and such person from Madras. Funny, you should call right now, you know who I’m sitting with? Yes, Krishna, Krishna Kanhaiya, right here in Dwarka. Oh yes, he has a very nice palace. The wife’s a demon, but the palace is beautiful. What? You want to speak to him? Hold on one second.’ Then he would run among the crowd, handing them the phone. Each skit ended with him hugging and kissing the person he gave the phone to. He came over to us and gave Aakash the phone, and from the applause and hooting that came from the colony boys, it was clear how much they admired him.
When he had gone, Aakash, perhaps feeling better, began to tell me some of what had occurred between Megha and him. ‘She showed me her scars, you know?’ he said. ‘Her skin is bruised and dried up in many places. I can’t tell you, I felt such anger. She was saying, “Take me away from here. What kind of people are these, who don’t love me the way I am, but make me have lipo so they can marry me off?” I felt so bad. I could have made her lose the weight, but she said, “No, if you had, they would have married me off. You were right to leave the weight on. And anyway, anyone who marries me won’t marry me for my figure, but for me.” You know what her mother said to her?’
‘Her mother?’ I said, fighting my way out of this sudden outpouring. ‘What, does her mother know?’
‘Yes, man. Lul told her. Not about the marriage of course, but about the relationship. I told you before, tonight is final. Everyone’s finding out.’
‘What did the mother say?’
‘She said, “Pack your things and go. He’s eyed your money and that’s all. In a few days, when the money doesn’t come, he’ll start saying, ‘Come pick up your daughter, she’s waiting.’” She was ready to come then and there. I’d spoken to my father and he also agreed. He said, “Bring her. We’ll give her the full respect of a daughter-in-law.” But I consulted with some people and they thought it wasn’t wise. The family could have slapped a kidnapping case on me.’
‘But you’re legally married.’
‘Still, they can,’ Aakash said gravely. ‘You know, I’m not worried about myself. I think nothing of my safety. It’s my family I’m worried about. I don’t want them to endure anything on my account. I worship my father, you know? He’s done so much for me.’ Then his tone changed. ‘But if they lay a finger on me,’ he said, ‘I have some pretty good connections too. I’ve lived many lives. I know people who even make thugs shit in their pants, believe me. And they’ll never find me. I’ll quit Junglee; my address, they don’t know; my credit card is not linked to my home address; they’ll never find me.’ It was the first time I had heard fear and resignation in his voice. And it drew animal instincts like self-preservation from him. He said, ‘I love Megha. I would do anything for her happiness. But you know, I’ve come a long way too. I can’t throw it all away for love. I have to think of my family, their reputation in the colony…’
He was unable to say more because the MC, now full of fresh energy, had retaken the stage.
Though it was nearly five a.m., he said, ‘The second phase of the night is about to begin. All that has occurred so far has only been to awaken the night.’
The tent rang with cheers and applause. The MC smiled, showing bright orange teeth. ‘The most important segment of the night is the telling of the story of Tara and Rukmani, the two daughters of Raja Patras. I am inclined, as I tell this story, set over three lifetimes, to sometimes forget what I’m saying in the middle. Should this happen, you must come to my assistance.’
The tent thundered in approval, then a deep quiet fell over the crowd and the story began. But a few seconds into it, someone was heard speaking in the back. ‘Go home and sleep,’ the MC snapped. ‘Really, go home and sleep. This story is the jewel of the night. I will tell it even if there are only five people listening. If you’re going to utter even a single word, then please go home and sleep. This story is not for you.’ A shamed silence prevailed. A few people turned their head to see who had spoken. The MC, calm once again, restarted the story.
‘Raja Patras, content in his kingdom, had all that he ever wanted – money, power, the love of his people. The only thing he lacked was a child. He prayed to the goddess, performing the appropriate ceremonies, and soon he won her favour. He was told that within a fixed period he would be blessed with two daughters. And he was.’
At this, a stray cry from one of the colony boys went up: ‘Victory to the true durbar.’
The MC’s expression darkened. He held up his hand, with its many gold rings, threateningly, like a mother about to beat a child. The tent shook with laughter.
‘But when the daughters had their astrological charts sent to be read, the royal priests returned with grim news. They said that while Tara, the eldest daughter, was born with a great future and would make the kingdom proud by marrying another powerful king, Rukmani, her sister, was twice accursed and would live among fishermen, among scales, among boats and black water.’ The MC, with his special Hindu horror of the sea, dragged his words. The crowd howled with dismay.
‘The king was shocked to hear this news. But the Rishis consoled him, telling him that the girl was no ordinary accursed girl, but Bhargavi, the sister of Suraya.
‘ “Who is Suraya?” the king asked timidly.
‘ “Suraya,” the pundits began, “was a very pious princess who, about to make a ritual offering one morning, saw that there was no food in the house for the offering. So she asked her sister Bhargavi to go out and buy some. But when Bhargavi arrived at the market, she found that there was nothing available except for raw meat. Seeing no other option, she returned with the raw flesh, and putting a cover over it, left it in the kitchen. When, a few moments later, Suraya resumed her prayers, asking her sister for the offering, Bhargavi handed her the covered vessel. But it was only once Suraya had made the offering that she discovered her sister’s deception.” ’
The people in the tent, each with food anxieties of their own, emitted a collective gasp of horror. The MC, answering their consternation, picked up the pace: ‘Discovering her deception, Suraya was filled with fury. And in that instant she cursed her sister. It was a vicious curse: “In your next life,” she said, ”you will be born a creature that eats flesh its entire life and scavenges after tiny, many-legged creatures.”
‘And in her next life,’ the MC said with some resignation, leaving a pause for the crowd to wonder what creature Bhargavi would be born as, ‘Bhargavi was born a lizard, clinging to walls and eating spiders, insects and other many-legged creatures her entire life.’
Toning down the horror in his voice, and seeming almost to begin a new story, the MC then said, ‘Now, just at that very time, etasminn eva kaale, as they say in Sanskrit, the Pandavas were performing their great ceremonial sacrifice, their mahayagya. And our little lizard, by some happy chance, finds that she is a lizard on the wall just as the mahayagya is about to begin. Not only this; she is an eyewitness to the revenge of a sage whom the Pandavas had forgotten to invite to the sacrifice. The sage, blessed with the ability to take other forms, in his revenge adopts the form of a small animal, a mongoose, and sabotages the Pandavas’ sacrifice by polluting the offerings with the body of a dead snake. As it happens, our little lizard sees him do this. But what can she do? She can’t speak; she has no way to let the priest know that the offerings are polluted. All she can do is sacrifice herself and save the ceremony. So just as the priests and sages are beginning their incantations, she lets herself drop from the wall and lands in the offerings. The priests see this and are enraged. The ceremony is brought to a halt and they curse our little lizard, telling her that in her next life she will live among fishermen, among scales, among boats and black water.’
The tent roared with delight, being brought, two lives later, to where the story had begun.
‘When the priests,’ the MC said, begging the tent’s patience, ‘when the priests tell the servants to throw out the offerings, or rather bury them, so that no other creature should eat them, they discover the dead snake at the bottom. The men come running back to the priests, saying, “But this lizard has saved us: the offerings were polluted anyway!” The sages and the priests sadly confess that a curse once given cannot be taken back, but they offer an amendment: in her lifetime, the accursed girl will see the curse broken.’
The crowd in the tent murmured at the excitement of this fixed outcome, with the respectable depth of two lifetimes behind it.
Taking the voice of Raja Patras’s advisers, the MC picked up the story’s original thread: ‘ “This girl born to you,” ’ he said, ‘ “is that very same girl!”
‘But Raja Patras was disconsolate. “What can I do?” he asked. “I can’t abandon her. She is my daughter, and a royal princess.” The priests thought hard about what might be done and at last advised that she be placed in a gem-encrusted vessel, half-filled with jewels, and set adrift in the river to find her own fortune. And this was exactly what was done.
‘On the morning the vessel was set afloat,’ the MC said, ‘a Brahmin performing his ablutions on the banks of the river saw something glitter in the water and his heart was filled with greed. He asked a nearby fisherman if he would help retrieve the vessel. The fisherman said, “Why would I do that? With the time I waste retrieving your vessel, I could catch so many fish and feed my entire family.” The Brahmin answered, “All right, whatever is in the top half of that vessel is yours, whatever is in the bottom is mine.” The fisherman agreed and the vessel was retrieved. When the two men looked inside, they found the girl in the top half and the jewels in the bottom half. The fisherman was delighted. He said, “All that was missing in my life was a child and now I have one!” The Brahmin, also now cured of his greed, said that the fisherman should take the jewels, sell them and spend the money they would bring in on the girl’s marriage. And,’ the MC added pointedly, ‘her education.’
At that moment one of the colony boys yelled, ‘Sure. Did the “Save the girl child” commission make you put that in?’
The MC bristled. ‘Who said that?’ he shouted.
The colony boys offered up a thin-limbed, bespectacled candidate, who grinned sheepishly at the congregation.
Seeing him rise, the MC bellowed, ‘Come here, you little wise ass. I’ll show you “Save the girl child” commission…’ As the boy approached, the MC took hold of him, and shaking him up like an old rug, said, ‘Who will save your girly little neck?’
The boy, with his faint pubescent moustache, feigned fear. ‘Please, sir, forgive me, sir. I didn’t know what I said.’
‘Shame on you,’ the MC said, and becoming serious, added, ‘You know what a remark like yours is saying to those around you?’
‘What?’ the boy whined, as the MC clenched his ear.
‘That our great religion, that our great forefathers, who produced these marvellous texts and stories, were not wise enough to protect our lovely damsels. That we need the government of India to tell us what to do with our girl children.’
An expression of fear crossed the face of the young boy as he realized the gravity of the offence he was being charged with. ‘No, no,’ he said, squirming, ‘I would never say that.’
‘But you did,’ the MC said, laughing, ‘you did. And now, for the rest of the story, my little girl child, you will sit at my feet.’
The congregation made known its approval of this punishment through loud applause and laughter, then the MC resumed the story: ‘And so, gradually, both girls grow up. Tara, a prize catch, is married to the king of a neighbouring kingdom and lives the life of a queen in palaces. Rukmani, coincidentally married to someone who works in the same palace, lives the life of a maidservant.
‘One day Rukmani’s husband falls sick and she goes in his place to the palace. There she sees the palace temple and falls to her feet outside it, asking for a child. For some reason, perhaps being very tired from nursing her husband the night before, she falls asleep in this posture. And this is how Tara finds her. Waking her, Tara asks her why she is outside the temple. “I am of the fisherman caste,” Rukmani replies, “and forbidden entry into the temple.” “But this is nonsense,” Tara says. “Don’t you know that in front of the goddess there is no big or small, all are one?” Rukmani, moved by Tara’s compassion, tells her of her longing to have a child. Tara advises that Rukmani perform a jagran.
‘Victory to…’ the MC prompted.
‘Victory to the true durbar!’ the tent thundered.
The MC smiled and returned to his story: ‘And to help her, she gives Rukmani a pouch of money. Rukmani takes it and wanders from temple to temple in the vain hope of trying, as a low caste, to organize a jagran in her house. Who will come to her house? One priest says, “You can give me the money and I’ll have it for you in the temple.” But she refuses: “It must be in my house.” At last, in tears, she bumps into a holy man who tells her that she must give her pouch back to Tara and ask her to host the jagran at Rukmani’s house on her behalf. If she accepts, then everyone will come. Rukmani follows this advice and Tara accepts.
‘In the meantime,’ the MC said, his tone becoming conspiratorial, ‘in the meantime, a barber has overheard the entire exchange. And when the king comes for his haircut, the barber accidentally cuts the king’s finger. The king starts yelling at the barber, but the barber, low as he is, says, “This is nothing. What is a slight cut on the finger of a man whose wife is going to the house of a low caste tonight for a jagran?”
‘The king is mortified,’ the MC breathed, ‘and asks the barber what he should do. The barber tells him to tie a salt bandage around the wounded finger. This way he’ll run a fever and he can ask his wife to be at his side. She won’t be able to refuse him. And this is just what he does. He returns to the palace moaning and complaining. The wife is bound by his request and rests his head in her lap.
‘In those days,’ the MC said, changing his tone, ‘the dutiful Hindu wife considered it her religion to obey her husband. Not like today, where the woman is walking ahead with her handbag.’ The MC did an imitation of a woman stomping ahead. He looked quickly down at the colony boy whom he was still holding captive, then raising his eyebrows at the audience, he said, ‘And the man is running behind, with the money, buying her things.’ He trotted down one side of the stage, his hands hanging limply by his large chest. The colony boy saw his chance and fled. The late-night crowd howled with delight at this spontaneous entertainment. The MC walked mournfully back, returning with a sigh to his story.
‘Tara puts her husband’s head in her lap and settles down into one position for many hours. But when it becomes dark, Tara, true to her vow, replaces her leg with a pillow and sets out into the night for Rukmani’s house. On the way, she encounters two bandits who try and rob her. She falls to her feet and prays to the goddess. Immediately one of the men is mauled by a wild animal; the other loses the light of his eyes. When finally Tara arrives at Rukmani’s, the two of them, within closed doors, perform the animal sacrifice to Kali.’
The tent was silent. A new urgency entered the MC’s tone. The open sky above the tent had become pale. The MC looked up and was alarmed.
‘I must hurry,’ he said. ‘The morning is on its way.’ Then looking back at the crowd, he began, ‘In the meantime, Tara’s husband has woken up to find that Tara has gone. He instantly saddles his horse and sets out in search of her. On the way, he, too, encounters the same bandits who had tried to rob Tara. They manage somehow to tell him where she went and he gallops on, arriving at Rukmani’s hut just as the sacrifice is about to begin. From a window he watches the two women perform the rites to Kali. When they are complete, Rukmani offers the raw meat to Tara, urging her to eat it. Tara balks and tries to resist, making the excuse that she can’t until her husband does. But Rukmani implores her, saying she knows that Tara intends to return to the palace and distribute the meat without eating it herself. She must at least take one bite to show that she has honoured the sacrifice.’
The crowd watched in horrified silence as the MC raised two fingers to his mouth, holding an imagined morsel of flesh.
‘Tara is about to eat the meat,’ he says, ‘when her husband, now no longer able to restrain himself, barges in. Tara quickly hides the meat in the end of her sari. “What are you hiding there, Tara?” the king demands. “Nothing, nothing,” she says. “I’ll tell you when we’re back at the palace.” “No, tell me now,” he says, and pulls at her sari. It comes away in his hand, but instead of meat and blood, honey and butter fall to the floor.
‘Raise your hands,’ the MC roared, ‘and say, “Victory to the true durbar!” ’
‘Victory to the true durbar!’ the tent thundered back.
The MC, adopting his best sarcastic voice, and imitating Tara’s husband, said, ‘ “Oh, Tara, you’ve learned magic in one night, have you?” She says, “No, this is the goddess’s work.” “Is that so?” the king replies. “Then let’s see if your goddess can fix this.” He pulls out his sword and in one stroke slices clean through the neck of his favourite horse. At that very moment Tara is herself transformed into the goddess. “What harm did this animal ever do you?” she asks the king. “You think this is a test of my powers? Go home and sacrifice your son, then you’ll see my powers.” ’
The MC was speeding along, fighting the break of day: ‘Tara returns to her original form and the two rush back to the palace.’
‘But their horse?’ one of the colony boys yelled.
‘What?’ the MC snapped.
‘How can they go back if their horse has no head,’ the boy asserted firmly.
The MC’s face soured. ‘Tch, bloody fool. He’s a king, you think someone won’t lend him a horse? It’s a bloody honour to lend a king a horse. He could get land and money.’ He chuckled. ‘Made me lose my thread. Stupid boy.’
‘They go back to the palace,’ someone yelled.
‘Yes,’ the MC said, his momentum returning, ‘they go back to the palace on a borrowed horse. And there the king, on seeing his son, severs his head from his body and cuts him into small, small pieces. You must have heard of the killings in Sectorpur. Just the same, but even smaller pieces and not with a knife from a mall, but with a sword. Can you imagine, a father cutting his own son, cutting, cutting…’
The crowd let out a cry of dismay. ‘And then he offers it to the goddess. There they sit, Tara and him, performing the greatest of all sacrifices to the goddess. But the meat stays meat; it doesn’t become the boy.’ The MC looked with relish at his audience; they looked back expectantly, knowing that in India stories didn’t end this way. ‘The king turns to Tara and says, “Look what you’ve done. You’ve sacrificed my heir for your bloody goddess.” Tara falls to her feet and raises up her hands in supplication. And once again she becomes the goddess. “Divide the offering into five portions,” she orders. “Feed the first portion to your horse…” ’
‘What horse?’ a colony boy yelled.
‘Bloody fool,’ the MC yelled back, ‘wait for it. The king is amazed, but he takes the meat of his son to the stable where he finds his horse restored to perfect health. What’s more, the meat has turned to apples, oats and sugar cubes. Victory…’
‘Victory to the true durbar!’ the crowd screamed, and threw up their hands.
The MC smiled. ‘Then the goddess says, “Feed the second portion to your son.” Again the king is amazed, but at just that moment the boy appears, saying he was woken from a gentle sleep where sweet lullabies were sung to him, and as he says this, the human flesh in the king’s hands turns to sweets and soft things. Because this is what children like…,’ the MC said. ‘Victory…’
‘Victory to the true durbar!’
At this point, the MC’s saffron-clad helpers had appeared in the crowd and were handing out tea and sweets. As the MC detailed where the remaining portions of the human sacrifice were to go, the ending of his story became the end of our jagran. The sky was now full of light and 108 lamps fluttered in the morning breeze.
‘The king was told,’ the MC said, ‘that Rukmani was none other than his own sister-in-law. And in this way,’ he added, now tired himself and hastily wrapping up the tale that had reached its conclusion with the break of day, ‘the curse of two lifetimes was broken.’ With this, the MC announced a final opportunity to donate, a closing ceremony, the ritual washing of feet and the distribution of food and offerings, ‘Then you to your houses and me to mine.’
The presence of daylight on the all-night gathering was at once jarring and beautiful. Everyone was recovering from the strange effect of the story and its ending timed to meet the morning.
Megha rose, pushing her way to the front of the closing ceremony. She told me firmly to stand next to her. Soon I could see why. The family, Amit and others, were all pushing close to the front so that they could be part of this final ceremony. Hands clutched at hands. Food that had been left at the front as offerings was distributed. Amit made sure that I got a small leaf plate with a blessed one-rupee coin.
‘What about me?’ Megha asked.
He ignored her.
‘Amit?’
‘Don’t speak too much out of turn,’ he snapped.
She pulled a banana off the plate and marched out of the tent, gesturing to me to come along.
Outside, in the clear morning light, fat black ants crawled over the sandy ground and carpet; wires hung limply from the halogen lamps; a man lay sleeping on a cemented surface; a concrete water tank loomed; cows appeared, looking for things to eat. Little girls were assembled at the front of the tent and Aakash’s family symbolically washed their feet. On one side, Aakash was distributing puris and a mountain of sweet, pulpy food. Megha called to him from time to time: ‘Aakash, kaka, Aakash, kaka.’
He looked grimly up at her, then told her for no apparent reason to be quiet. In the meantime, the little sweeper had appeared and was digging with his small, strong nails at a piece of offering. Around us, the durbar was being taken down, gods undressed and carried away, their torsos separated from their legs. Kali’s lion was being stripped of its mane.
Megha picked up the little sweeper and pointed at the now shorn animal.
‘Loin!’ she said. ‘Loin! What does a loin do?’
The little sweeper roared, raising his short, tough arms over his head and gnashing his teeth.
I had managed to escape unnoticed and was standing apart, scanning the street for Uttam, undoubtedly asleep in the front seat of the car, when I felt Aakash’s hand on my shoulder. ‘Hey, man? What’s you doing, man? Dude?’
Around us, cows having found what they wanted, walked away with orange rinds in their teeth.
‘Go and sleep, my friend,’ Aakash said. ‘We’ll see what tomorrow has in store for us.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Today,’ he said, and laughed.
He leaned in to give me a hug as Uttam drove up. Then pressing the side of his face against mine, he held it there. Its bones were hard and its stubble rough, but it was also tremulous and wet with tears.
The atmosphere of fable that the jagran awakened carried over into the next day. The city awoke to television images of policemen in olive green wading through a hyacinth-choked canal in Sectorpur, its banks thick with keekar. In the background were the power station’s iron men with electric cables slung between them. In the foreground, four black bin bags. They were marooned among the hyacinths, bobbing, rolling over on to their side, suddenly straightening up with the policemen’s touch, like four happy ducklings in the misty sunshine.
The policemen took cautious steps into the canal’s poisonous water. The bin bags playfully resisted their capture, slithering away just as one of the men was about to get hold of the rope that tied them to each other. Only the stillness of the camera’s eye brought some gravity to the scene. The country’s three main news channels all claimed to have been tipped off but were vague on details. TVDelhi’s red scrolling banner said no more than ‘Scare at Power Station’.
I had woken late at Sanyogita’s and watched in my pyjamas. Sanyogita had gone out, and Vatsala brought me some toast and orange juice. My head was still soft with sleep and the winter sunshine pouring into the room made me want to prolong the feeling of morning. The light in Delhi had changed; it came now from another angle, and far from striking the surface of buildings, seemed to lose its footing on rooftops and columns. And though it was warm, you could sit in it for hours without breaking into a sweat. Hazy and scented with smoke, it rose like a glow from the city, heightening the sensory power of the Delhi winter. The bougainvillea, the occasional smell of kebabs, the wail of a garbage collector created so acute an impression that it was as if some part of an old photograph, having shed the inertia of years, had gently begun to move.
I watched the news unthinkingly for many minutes, but when the channels gave up on the bin bags, I did too and switched to a feature film. I had begun to doze again when I roused myself purposefully and went to have a shower. The puzzling effect of staying up late, sleeping for a few hours, getting up in the early hours of the morning, then sleeping again, and now entering my third morning in a single day, brought on a kind of reverie. The glass doors of the shower had steamed up and yet, through their foggy walls, I could see the orange bars of a bathroom heater. And it was through this pleasant blur of heat and water that Sanyogita’s cry broke, not a piercing cry, but a haggard groan, with many dying falls.
It was followed by the slamming of a door, a charge through our bedroom and the bathroom door being wrenched open. As she entered, I think she must have tripped over the heater, kicked it aside, straightened it, and then perhaps known the unreasonable, synaesthetic confusion of feeling you can’t be heard in a steamy room. But I heard her. I heard her cry, ‘Baby, oh God, baby, they killed that girl,’ then bitterly, ‘Your friend killed that girl.’
I let a second pass, in which I felt a strong desire for privacy. I turned the tap slowly, feeling in the abrupt cessation of hot water the mood beyond the cubicle.
‘Baby, can you give me a towel?’
Sanyogita stared bleakly at me, then found me a towel. I wiped myself thoroughly, and wrapping the towel about my waist, took her hand and walked back, past my locked study, into the room with the television.
TVDelhi’s red scrolling banner had changed from ‘Scare at Power Station’ to ‘Another Grisly Murder in Sectorpur’. The screen, when it wasn’t showing a small photograph of Megha laughing, her rounded, milky teeth visible over wet lips, a caption below reading ‘1982-2008’, showed Aakash, arm in arm with two policemen, his eyes half-open and burning, as they became when he was tired and hungry. He was still in his capris and beige and white knit T-shirt; his shoulders, sandwiched between the thin, forceful limbs of the policemen, appeared larger than usual. The colony, with its peach-coloured buildings, was visible behind him, as was the white tent with its scalloped red skirting. I was finding it difficult to stave off the confusion of having recently been present at a place that was now on television when the phone rang. This, at least, was something to hold on to.
‘Hello, Aatish?’ said an unfamiliar voice from an unfamiliar number.
‘Yes.’
‘Sparky Punj here.’
‘Sorry?’
‘We’ve met in Junglee. I’m one of Aakash’s clients.’
Of course I remembered him: tall, lanky man with a handlebar moustache, a white towel perpetually around his neck. Sparky Punj, the lawyer and Aakash’s prized client. Among the very few in Junglee to whom he gave preferential treatment over me.
‘Yes, yes, of course,’ I said, walking away, Sanyogita’s eyes desolately trailing me. ‘Have you spoken to him? I was just going to try calling, but -’
‘His phone’s off, buddy,’ Sparky inserted quickly. ‘Do you have a minute?’
A few minutes later, I was hurriedly getting dressed as Sanyogita fired questions at me.
Did he kill her?
I don’t know.
But is she dead?
Yes.
Who was that?
A lawyer called Sparky Punj.
What does he want?
He wants me to come and see him.
What for?
I don’t know. He wants to help Aakash.
Oh, so you think Aakash is innocent?
I don’t know. I’m just going to hear him out.
You’re on his side, aren’t you? It could have been me and you would be on his side. Yes?
No, I’m not on anyone’s side, but what is the harm in seeing what the deal is?
Silence.
So where are you going?
Just down the road, in fact. He lives in Jorbagh.
Silence. A softening of tone.
Do you want me to come?
No, baby. I think you’d better not. I’ll be back very soon.
Sparky Punj was not home when I arrived at his single-storey bungalow. A servant in white showed me past darkened sliding doors into a wood-panelled study with black leather sofas, a glass coffee table and a brightly coloured Souza on the wall. A dim picture light fell over the painting. A few rays escaping from its brass tubular frame entered the crystal boat and dagger objets on the coffee table. I was fingering the line of prominent brass studs that ran along the sofa’s arm when nearly an hour and a half later Sparky entered. He was all in white, down to the socks in his black leather shoes. He wore collapsible spectacles, connected at the bridge with the help of a magnet, behind which the eyes, darkened around the sockets, were afflicted with a tic, causing him to blink rapidly when he spoke.
‘Aatish. Good, buddy. Glad you made it. Here, take a look at this,’ he said, tossing me the afternoon paper. It was folded in four to Shabby Singh’s column, ‘The long arm of the divine Chamunda’. At the centre was a picture of the canal from which the four bin bags containing Megha’s body had been retrieved. There was a police line encircling the crime scene and a crowd around it. The column detailed, with some relish, the problems a small breakaway state like Jhaatkebaal could face when, by virtue of being on the border of Delhi, it experienced sophisticated urban crime in its jurisdiction. But Sparky didn’t wish me to read the column at all.
‘Look at that picture, buddy,’ he said, crouching next to me. ‘You know who that guy is?’ He picked out a balding man with a moustache from the crowd scene in the main photo. He stood outside the police line, wearing khaki trousers and a black leather jacket.
I shook my head.
‘You see that he’s hiding his face in the picture.’
He did have his arm raised over his head, but I said I thought he might have been shielding himself from the glare of the sun.
‘No, buddy,’ Sparky said, ‘he’s concealing his identity, you see. Because he’s operating outside his jurisdiction.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘He’s a Delhi officer,’ he exclaimed, ‘operating illegally in Sectorpur. The best man Delhi has. Now, let me show you something else.’
He took the paper from me, flipped to another page, and again folding it in four handed it back to me. This article was about him. It showed a picture of Sparky next to a picture of Aakash. The headline read: ‘Sparky Punj Takes up Trainer’s Cause’.
‘So you’re acting on his behalf?’ I asked, hoping now perhaps to get some real information.
‘No, buddy, that’s the funny thing. Well, at least not when this article was published. Basically what happened was that I was in my office in Sectorpur when I heard the terrible news from one of my contacts in the police. It hit me damn hard, buddy, double-hard: it’s not just because of Aakash, you know; the girl’s brother is a pal of mine. Very sweet guy, wants to be a writer and things. No, this was close to home, I assure you. I could hardly think straight when I heard. And the crazy thing was I had a time set for a training with Aakash literally a couple of hours later. The standard practice on Sundays was that I’d pick him up from his place, we’d drive into town and work out there. I sometimes use Junglee, but my main gym is at the Ashoka Hotel. I think Junglee’s a little grimy. Anyway, when I get this call, telling me Aakash’s girl is the victim, I decide, despite all that had happened, to drop what I was doing and head over to Aakash’s. You know, to offer my condolences and basically be around in case he needs any help – no formalities. I like the guy; damn good trainer if you ask me.’
‘Yes, yes, of course…’
‘I arrive to find the family all sitting round. Devastated; I mean, you’ve never seen people in greater shock. They’ve just had some religious occasion, a jagran or some such jazz. The girl was with them till the morning; on the sly, mind you. She goes home, no problem. Six hours later she’s dead and they have the police and press wallahs at their front door. I’d met the girl too – sweet, bubbly, polite. Great shame, you know? They made an adorable couple. Her family wasn’t happy of course, but this sort of thing resolves itself with time.
‘Aakash’s father’s a long-time government servant, you know? He’s from a decent Brahmin family; they’re not used to handling this crap. TV cameras, broadcast vans, Shabby going at them great guns.’
‘She was there?’
‘Oh yes. In full fettle. Anyway, I figure there’s not much for me to do at that point. So I pay my condolences and am slipping off when a reporter from one of the city papers catches me. She asks if I’m representing Aakash; I say no and leave it at that. But her photographer takes a picture of me anyway and they run a small item in the afternoon edition. Now, one result of this article is that the police wallahs become damn suspicious. “Why is a lawyer coming here? If he’s innocent, why will he be needing a lawyer?” The other is that a few hours later I receive a call from – I won’t name any names, but from a very senior police officer who’s seen the report in the paper. He knows me a little, our girls are in school together, and so he calls me up and immediately says, “Sparky, are you representing this trainer chappy?” I said, “Sir, no. I mean, I know the guy, but the story in the paper is groundless. He’s just my trainer. I went to pay my condolences, nothing more.” Now, at this stage, I can see that suspicion is beginning to fall on Aakash. And no wonder. Poor boyfriend of rich girl, you know? She leads him on for a while, but then doesn’t want to marry him; jilted lover, you know the score. Motive’s there, opportunity too, and it’s not as if I know that he’s innocent.’
‘No.’
‘I like the guy, but nobody can tell what another man is capable of. I don’t know if my own chappy here won’t cut my throat for a little extra dosh; you get the picture. Anyhow, this guy says to me, “If you’re not his lawyer, I damn well hope you will be, because he’ll need a good one.” Literally, his exact words were, “We hang our heads in shame, because they’re going to pin the whole damn thing on him.” He said the whole business is shit-high with politics. There’s a lot of pressure on Chamunda Devi to act. The case is technically in her jurisdiction, it’s the third of this kind this year in Jhaatkebaal and she has an election next year. And Delhi, he said, won’t get in her face over it; they’d prefer she destroy herself. So they’ll stand back and let her goons in the Jhaatkebaal police force do as they wish.’
I tried at this point to say something, but Sparky stopped me with a raised hand, and urgently bringing this circular torrent back to where it had begun, said, ‘And that’s when he tells me about the top cop in the picture – you know, the one I just pointed out to you. He says that since the murder had happened so close to Delhi, he’d taken the liberty of sending one of his men under cover to the scene of the crime. This guy’s literally seen hundreds of cases like this. And he comes back and reports to his superior that there’s no way on God’s earth that the trainer could have done this.’
‘Why was he so sure?’ I said, a little subdued by Sparky’s energy. ‘Who does he think did it?’
‘Nepali job. Hundred and one per cent a Nep job. You’ve seen some of the crime they’re responsible for. I tell you, these guys are fucking crazy. It takes nothing for them to flip. Ninety-nine per cent of this kind of crime, at least in Delhi, is done by Neps. And they just slip back across the border when things get too hot.Would you like some tea or coffee or anything, by the way?’
‘No, thanks.’
‘Water?’
‘No, no, nothing. Thanks.’
‘Anyway,’ Sparky began again, running his fingers over his moustache and blinking rapidly, ‘just after I hang up with this guy, Aakash calls me to say that they’re thinking of detaining him for a narco test.’
‘A narco test?’
‘It’s a kind of free run through the subconscious. They do it when they don’t have a better idea. It doesn’t stand up in court, but it can at best shed some light on an obscured aspect of the case. If you ask me, it’s bullshit. It can be fudged and in some countries it’s actually labelled as torture.’
‘Have they arrested Aakash?’
‘No,’ Sparky replied, ‘they’ve only detained him. But they could arrest him.’
‘Is there any way to speak to him?’
‘No, buddy, not at present. Only his lawyer can and that too with permission.’
‘So what now?’
‘Well, this is where you, or rather your girlfriend, comes in.’
Sparky smiled and blinked fast. He enjoyed the surprise his remark brought to my face.
‘How?’
‘Well, what my advice to Aakash is going to be is the following: that before the Jhaatkebaal police file a charge sheet, we make an appeal saying we question the judgement of the Jhaatkebaal police and want a full CBI inquiry. I’ve already warned him that the CBI will do a far more thorough investigation. And if they find him guilty, they’ll file a watertight charge sheet, on the back of which alone he could spend the rest of his life in jail. So if there’s even 1 per cent guilt on his part, he’d best be warned.’
‘Did he agree?’
‘Yes.’ Sparky smiled. ‘He’s a good boy. Said there wasn’t a shred of guilt on his part and he was ready for any kind of inquiry.’
I nodded, then it occurred to me that I hadn’t understood where I came in.
‘Well,’ Sparky said, as if delivering a closing statement, ‘if we go straight to the centre, this will reflect very badly indeed on the Jhaatkebaal police, and by association on the state’s chief minister.’
‘Yes, yes, of course,’ I said, wishing to cut short his excitement.
‘So much the better that, since you have a link to Madam CM, you communicate our position to her directly and that way she will avoid a potentially embarrassing situation. We, in turn, can avoid the headache of taking the matter to the CBI. That’ll also rescue her from Shabby Singh, who, if you ask me, is baying for blood. Am I right?’
‘Yes,’ I answered, and said I would talk it over with my girlfriend.
While we were sitting there, Sparky’s mobile phone rang. He flashed me an urgent look and took the call on his Vertu.
‘Hermann, hi, Hermann. Buddy.’
He listened briefly, then said, ‘Hermann, listen, there’s no point in my speaking to you at this stage because everything I say will be misconstrued. I’ve turned down CNN-IBN too. If I support the CBI, it will be seen as my wanting them to give my client a clean chit. If -’
He was cut off.
‘The police have announced a reward for the murder weapon,’ he said absent-mindedly and blinked his eyes.
‘What does that mean?’
‘That they’re groping around in the dark,’ he said smugly, detaching his spectacles at the bridge.
‘Tell me something,’ I asked, a little irritated by his tone, ‘what’s in it for you?’
He smiled patronizingly, then answered, ‘It’s a big case. Don’t get me wrong: I want to see justice done. The girl’s brother’s a pal of mine and so is Aakash. But if I took cases for those reasons, I’d be nowhere today. No, honestly, I believe this’ll be a very important case. A watershed moment.’
‘Have you spoken to Kris?’ I interrupted.
Sparky looked blankly at me, then his face clearing, he said, ‘Well, obviously now’s not a good time. But later, I’m sure.’
We shook hands and I rose to leave. Sparky followed me to the house’s tinted sliding doors. As I was walking out, he said, suddenly grabbing a few inches of fat round his waist, ‘Listen, buddy. You don’t happen to know a good trainer, do you?’
I thought he was joking and laughed.
‘No, seriously, buddy. Aakash and I were just about getting rid of this belly, and though I’m a decent lawyer, I doubt I’ll be able to get him off in the next week.’
I said I would ask around and turned to leave. Sparky stood on his veranda, watching me until I had closed the gate behind me. Then he turned around and went in.
Outside, it was still early evening, but not mild like the night before. This would be a real north Indian winter night, thick, cold and smoky.
I arrived back at Sanyogita’s to find her more distressed than before. Her eyes were swollen. They glistened from the light of a computer and she kept rushing back to the television every hour. The news channels had run out of material and the racier ones now showed images of a girl, healthy like Megha, running through a keekar forest at night. Her pursuer was clearly modelled on Aakash, and every now and then the glint of a knife was visible in his hands. Then the screen would darken and in the next scene Megha’s killer was stuffing bin bags and setting them afloat in the still, black water.
‘I don’t get you,’ Sanyogita would say, at the end of each cycle. ‘How can you see this and not feel anything?’
‘I do feel something, something much worse. I just don’t feel what they’re showing me.’
‘What is between you and Aakash?’ Sanyogita snapped. ‘Are you fags or something?’
‘No, Sanyogita, we’re not fags or something.’
‘So what did the lawyer say?’ she asked.
I began to report in full detail what Sparky had told me. Sanyogita listened to every word and I could see that the very act of my making the confidence eased the tension between us. Her face brightened when she heard of Aakash’s willingness to pass through the CBI’s trial by fire. He became for a moment the beneficiary of her vast reserves of compassion. But when, re-enacting Sparky’s line of reason as I had heard it, I came to Chamunda’s intervention, Sanyogita’s expression changed. The colour drained from her face and a contorted smile began to play on her lips. She seemed on the one hand elated by some marvellous realization, but on the other hardly able to stand the bitterness it brought up in her.
‘What is it?’ I said, unable to continue under the scrutiny of her gaze.
‘You must think I’m a fool,’ she said, shaking her head in disbelief.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Well, either you’re blinded by your love for this guy,’ she said, rising and beginning to pace around the room,’ or… or you really think I’m an idiot.’
‘Sanyogita, what is it? Tell me.’
‘No, you tell me,’ she said. ‘If they have, as they say, this watertight plan to bring in the CBI, why tell my aunt?’
‘It’s obvious. They’d prefer not to have to deal with the CBI, but will if they have to. This saves everyone the hassle.’
‘Why would they prefer not to?’
‘It complicates things, it’s a gamble, it takes more time… I don’t know.’
‘So they’d rather go the easy route by exploiting my aunt’s political fears to clear Aakash’s name. And then no one ever finds who really killed the girl…’
‘Sanyogita!’
‘What! Am I saying anything that isn’t true? You know as well as I do that if Chamunda hears of this plan, she’ll make sure your friend’s found innocent whether he is or not.’
‘But this just saves her the embarrassment…’
‘I don’t care. Let her be embarrassed. If her police are so incompetent, she ought to be embarrassed. And,’ she added, trying to mitigate the effect of her words, ‘don’t worry about Chamunda. She’s a political animal; she can look after herself.’
I reached forward to hold Sanyogita, and surprisingly she let herself be held.
‘I know we’ve had a difficult time in the past few months, but… this is not a trial on us, you know? It’s very serious…’
‘That’s exactly why we can’t get involved,’ she said, pulling away and becoming forceful once again. ‘Not you for your friend; not me for my aunt. I haven’t asked for much recently, but I’m asking you now to promise you won’t interfere.’
‘What if Chamunda calls us?’
‘Then we’ll see. But you won’t call her.’
‘Sanyogita…’
‘Promise.’
I wanted desperately to act on Sparky’s advice, but Sanyogita was so full of high-sentence, so eager now finally to test our relationship, that in the face of her anguish I gave my word not to interfere.
The hours rolled by one after another; the heater stared up at us, open-mouthed; the television became more gruesome as night fell. Vatsala brought us Rajasthani blankets and hot-water bottles. Sanyogita fell asleep in front of the television.
From that moment to when I removed my arm from under her, seeking the cold night air, I felt myself at the centre of an emotional exchange: Sanyogita, asleep and childlike, grew distant, her reactions less immediate, her concerns less important; and Aakash, returning cycle after cycle on every channel, grew nearer, his predicament more urgent, his personality more forceful. Sparky’s rationale sang in my head. I began imagining that Chamunda was waiting for my call. I felt my insides ache from inaction. The chaste logic of betrayal took shape in my mind: of course Sparky was right, the Jhaatkebaal police force had nothing on Aakash; if they had, they would have arrested him; he would now suffer needlessly, losing time and money, Chamunda would be politically harmed, and all so that Sanyogita could settle personal scores… The dilemma ceased to be moral, my mental energies becoming focused instead on the undetected removal of my arm. And it was with something of the elation of a jailbreak that, around eleven thirty, I stepped on to the terrace and rang Chamunda.
Minutes later I picked my way past Sanyogita, asleep still on the sofa. Downstairs, the chowkidar, wrapped up in a woollen cap and scarf, had lit a fire in a shallow cement dish outside his bunk. It burned steadily in the circular hollows of his bifocal spectacles. We were both standing over it, warming our hands, when Chamunda’s white Ambassador and escort turned into the U-shaped lane that ran in front of the house. The car door opened and she gestured to me to get in. She had been at dinner when I called and the Ambassador’s roomy interior smelt of tuberose perfume and cigarettes.
‘Where’s Sanyogita?’ she asked.
‘Upstairs. Asleep.’
She looked deeply at me through the gloom in the car, reading into my short reply.
‘Does she know you called me?’
‘No.’
‘Good,’ she said. ‘She can get a little emotional in these situations.’ Then her soft hand covering mine, she leaned forward slightly and said, ‘Driver, take a little round. We want to chat for a bit.’
The car drove out of the lane and into the dark streets of Jorbagh.
The information that I had given Chamunda on the phone – that Aakash was my friend and trainer and Sparky his lawyer – the information that had been enough for her to want to see me immediately, now, in its extended form, complete with details of Sparky’s plan, irritated Chamunda. She wanted, with the pride of someone used to having special information, to assert herself over me.
‘Nothing new there,’ she said. ‘It’s all very standard what he’s saying. Baba, I didn’t come here tonight out of any fear of what Sparky Punj or Shabby can do to me. I came because this chappy’s your friend. That’s what concerns me. And I’m willing to do everything in my power to help him. What I need to know from you, though, is how well you know the guy. I mean, is he just the trainer or is he a pal of yours too?’
‘A pal too, I suppose. Why do you ask?’
I felt she was indirectly asking me to vouch for his innocence. But I was wrong.
‘Can we trust him?’ she presently said.
‘Sure… But what for?’
‘Well, see. The idea that came to me the moment I heard he was your friend was that if we could trust this fellow, then we should remove him from the sort of detention he’s in – he was never arrested so that’s not an issue – and move him into a more informal detention.’
‘Like a safe house?’
‘Something like that. Let’s say guest house. I know the place. It’s just across the Delhi border, in Sectorpur itself. You know, just till this media frenzy dies down and we have a better idea of who really did this thing. We can give the press some vague line: he’s being interrogated but isn’t under arrest etc… What I want to know from you, though, is how dependable he is. Will he stay quiet, away from Shabby and people like that? Will he give up this crazy plan of Sparky’s?’
‘I’m not sure, I suppose,’ I said, unable to gauge her logic completely and also unable to articulate what I was missing.Chamunda pre-empted me.
‘In return,’ she said, ‘he has my personal assurance that no one will touch him. I’ve already spoken to my SSP in Sectorpur. He’s willing to let the scent go cold as long as this trainer fellow of yours doesn’t give us any trouble while the investigation is under way.’
Jorbagh was a gated colony. The driver had not left its confines, but had driven us around its residential parks, circled the market, entered a nether region with fewer street lights and was heading back in Sanyogita’s direction. I could see now what Chamunda was asking me to stand as a guarantor for. And it was harder to gauge than the question of Aakash’s innocence. What she wanted to know was – innocent or not – would Aakash remain loyal despite the power he would hold over her? It was of course the one thing about Aakash that I had never been able to determine myself. But I took my chances, knowing Chamunda wouldn’t be taking hers without some greater precaution in hand than my word.
‘I think so, yes,’ I answered.
‘Good,’ she said, then added a second later, ‘I’ll need you to go, you know?’
‘To the safe house?’
‘To keep him on side.’ Smiling, she added, ‘Informed regularly of the advantages of doing so.’ Then adjusting her tone from business to business with a personal touch, she said, ‘I’m glad you came to me, baba. You know I know how sound your judgement is. If your man runs into trouble in my state, you must tell me. It’s your duty as my nephew.’
Just as we were about to turn into the U-shaped lane my phone rang.
‘Baby, hi. I was just -’
‘You’re with Chamunda,’ Sanyogita said, her voice thick with agitation.
‘I was -’
‘Please don’t fucking lie to me. The chowkidar told me she picked you up.’
‘I’m not lying. I just -’
‘You are fucking lying!’ Sanyogita screamed loudly enough for Chamunda to hear. ‘Saving your friend,’ she sobbed.
Chamunda looked gravely at me. I could hear her mind change gear, and that feminine genius that could power many intelligences at the same time understood what was happening. ‘Take another round,’ she said to the driver, then sternly to me, ‘Give me the phone.’
Already on the other end the voice had broken down. Cries of anger and despair containing the build-up of months – ‘Saving my aunt, saving your friend, saving everyone?’ yelled again and again – filled the car. Chamunda held the phone in her lap, its blue light seeming to blaze in the gloom of the car. Only when the voice had tired did she begin.
They spoke for only a few minutes. Chamunda repeated Sparky’s rationale, then added to it her own plan, plus an offer that surprised me: ‘I think you both should go… Yes, yes… Yes, go and stay. It’s a very nice place, very comfortable; Ra decorated it. There’s even a gym. I want you to go. You’ll be helping me by going.’
I looked at Chamunda in confusion; she patted the air with her hand as if to say, ‘I know what I’m doing.’
‘I agree with you, darling. You want to see justice done; so do I. But if we keep him in prison, he’ll slip out of our hands. So I’m saying go there…
‘No,’ Chamunda said firmly, as if having encountered fresh dissent. ‘Aatish will go no matter what. Now it’s up to you whether you want to join him or not.’
I looked nervously up at Chamunda, but she seemed to have forced her way through. ‘Absolutely,’ she said now. ‘You know I’ve always wanted you to fill my shoes. I’ll stop by myself tomorrow and we’ll work out a plan. Now stop crying, darling. We’re two seconds away. Go and pack a bag.’
Chamunda’s preparations had been so complete that even the car I had thought was her escort turned out to be our escort to the safe house. Now, as we waited outside Sanyogita’s, Chamunda asked as if in an afterthought, ‘Your friend, how long had he been with this girl?’
‘Chamunda massi,’ I said, weighing up my options, ‘he married her almost six months ago.’
A deep silence followed.
‘That’s very good,’ she murmured cautiously, ‘very good. Baba, it’s all going to be fine. I want you to leave right away. Your friend will be there before you arrive. And,’ she added, looking up, ‘take care of Sanyogita. She’s very emotional right now.’
Sanyogita was walking down the drive in tracksuit bottoms and rabbit-faced slippers. Her head was cocked to one side; she held a small bag in one hand. Her distress was such that for a second she didn’t even realize that we had pulled up in front of the house. She was cold but polite to Chamunda. To me she said bitterly, ‘I’ll never forget this. Never. No one has ever made me feel so worthless before.’
A few minutes later we were both in the car on our way to Sectorpur. Keekar trees raced alongside the tunnel our headlights made; veils of white fog were cast aside; and the backs of trucks, with signs saying, ‘Use Dipper Please’, zoomed close and fell away. Sanyogita fought tears in the darkness of the car, her face turned away.
Taking refuge in banalities, I said aloud, ‘Shit, I didn’t bring anything.’
‘Like what?’ I was surprised to hear quietly asked a moment later.
‘You know, clothes, a toothbrush, my phone charger.’
‘I’ve packed them,’ Sanyogita replied sadly, leaving me more wretched than ever.
My suspicion that Chamunda was more nervous about Aakash’s botched detention than she was letting on was confirmed when I saw the ‘safe house’. The driver had been on the phone throughout the drive with someone at the house and just as the road became more residential he turned the car left and stopped in front of a large black gate. Two or three security men waved us through with a quick glance at the licence plate. We drove down a long private drive lined with bunkers, sandbags and pre-fab government offices, each, despite the hour, with white lights flickering in aluminium windows. At the end of the drive was a double-storey bungalow with a curved, colonnaded veranda overlooking a large lawn. From the porch and garden lights, it was possible to see that it was painted in the local Jhaatkebaal style, rust, with chalky-white borders running along its pediments, arches and balustrades. Fountains of bougainvillea hung from its many terraces. And Indian blinds, marble floors and screened doors brought a colonial aspect to the bungalow.
Aakash, arch-Brahmin that he was, was not unaware of the significance of his accommodation. He sat like a dacoit on a planters chair in front of a coal fire on the veranda, wrapped in a shawl. He didn’t get up when he saw the car approach, but instead leaned forward and stoked the coals, causing sparks to leap up. Then sitting back, he took a long drag on a cigarette held in a fist and rested his drink on the chair’s long arms. He would have been expecting me, but the appearance of Sanyogita from the car must have come as a surprise, because he rose suddenly.
‘Bhabi,’ he said as she jogged up the veranda’s shallow steps, ‘welcome. I mean, welcome to your house. I must say, your aunty knows how to take care of her guests.’
Sanyogita ignored him, saying only, ‘It’s freezing. Let’s go inside.’
‘Of course, of course, bhabi, let’s go inside.’
Sanyogita opened the screened door and hurried in. Aakash put his arm round me, then pinched my waist as he always did, and said with some sarcasm in his voice, ‘Looking good, man. Looking like me, man.’
The front of the house was in darkness and seemed to have an administrative function of sorts. A servant with a dishcloth over his shoulder had appeared from nowhere and led us in, unlocking and relocking doors behind us. There seemed to be a sharp division between its public and private sections. We passed through dim corridors and a large room with picture lights over portraits of moustached men in turbans and pearls.
We came up to a final locked double door, through which shafts of bright light escaped. Aakash, who must already have seen beyond it, grinned broadly.
The room we entered had high ceilings, large carpets and a burnt-red recess containing a bar, and along its mouldings and fireplace there were blue-painted parakeets with gold necks and feet. It was not the splendour of the room but its familiarity that left Sanyogita and me in silent wonder. That familiarity was to be found in its white sofas, its chandeliers and crystal coffee tables, and especially in the black and white pictures of thirties beauties in silver frames. It could be seen in the large number of Nepalese maids, in bright, traditional Jhaatkebaal saris, now setting the dinner table; it was there in the brood of pugs that came running in on our arrival; and traces of it were even visible in the large moustache, gold earrings and kohled eyes of a uniformed butler carrying a crested silver tray. It was the familiarity of Chamunda’s palace at Ayatlochanapur and Sanyogita recognized it immediately. ‘She’s brought the whole place here!’ she gasped. It was then that I realized that this was no guest house. Jhaatkebaal’s official capital was a remote, desert town with a lively handicrafts industry. The state’s real centres were its satellite towns, Sectorpur and Phasenagar, and the house we had arrived in was already seeming like Chamunda’s own base in Sectorpur, the place where she could be at once in Delhi and in her state.
Aakash, never slow to settle in, was eager to show us the rest of the house.
‘You see it,’ Sanyogita said, addressing me. Then more gently, ‘I’ll settle in and join you.’
When she’d left us, Aakash stared at me in amazement. ‘Don’t tell me…’
‘No, nothing like that. She’s just upset by everything that’s happened. And trust me, more with me than anyone else.’
Aakash nodded his head slowly, then his face clearing, said with a lambent smile, ‘How’s you doing, man?’
‘How am I? How are you?’
‘Fine. Just my head is confused after the test.’
‘Test?’
‘Narco test.’
‘I’m so sorry… About everything. I can’t even imagine…’
‘Don’t say anything. This is what life is after all. All our scriptures, our plays, our stories… What, it’s for a moment like this that they prepare us, no? Let’s not get lost in these things now; let’s see the house, your girlfriend’s house.’
Aakash began to lead me through room upon room, in whose coloured walls, each coated in a silver hue and Tanjore glass paintings, I recognized Ra’s distinctive hand. He showed me a moonlit courtyard with a rectangular fountain, containing flat, fish-eaten lotus pads and pink flowers. He threw open the door of a modern gym with a rubber floor, dumb-bells, a power plate and treadmill. Finally, he led me down a long corridor, at the end of which, visible through a cloud of incense, was a brightly lit temple room. It was dedicated to a black and silver Kali with a red tongue. Her shadows filled the little room and she had under her – just where she wanted him – a demon, into whose throat she plunged a trident. From somewhere behind her fierce form, a hidden music system played ‘Om’, chanted in a steady drone, again and again. And past a mesh door, off from the temple room, was a garden containing holy plants.
‘This,’ Aakash said, as if completing an estate agent’s tour, ‘is what I would like my house to be.’
We were still staring into the room, with its lesser gods and silver vessels huddled under Chamunda, when the servant who had showed us in reappeared, followed by Sanyogita.
Confused that she was behind him, he began by addressing us. Then perhaps aware of her rank in the house, he turned around and told her that dinner was served. At the sight of Sanyogita a sudden solemnity entered Aakash’s manner. He said we should carry on; he wasn’t eating.
‘Why?’ Sanyogita asked blandly.
‘I’m keeping a fast,’ he replied, ‘for my wife.’
‘Well, we’re inside,’ I said.
‘I’ll join you in a few minutes,’ Aakash answered, and using the same tone in which he had once said to me, ‘With us, children are everything,’ added, ‘I want to be alone with her memory.’
Sanyogita turned around and walked out without a word. I followed her into the dining room, where a feast of lamb shank cooked with ginger and green chillies, lentils, pickled white radish and okra was being served. Aakash appeared a few minutes later, was seen lingering by the bar, then came and sat down.
That night, despite everyone’s best efforts, a lightness prevailed. We were like people arriving at a house in the country for a weekend, children at a sleepover, three unlikely friends holed up after a blackout or a terrorist attack. The house, combining an unfriendly exterior with familiarity within, seemed at least to Sanyogita and me like houses from our childhood. Sanyogita, though still quiet and fierce, was temporarily consoled by her surroundings. And I, taking my lead from her, too guilty to do otherwise, sought shelter in this brief peace. Aakash’s mood fluctuated: he was restless, one moment grieving and cast down, the next alert and attentive. Though there was not much conversation between us, we spoke at cross-purposes. An idea of Aakash’s new fame had settled in his mind, and in between whisky sodas, he would stop to ask me how he had looked that day on television. ‘Not too black, I hope?’ Then he remembered that it was Megha who used to say that of him and a moment of sadness returned.
‘She did it for our love,’ he said, ‘gave her life for our love.’
‘She didn’t give her life,’ Sanyogita snapped. ‘She was murdered.’
‘Yes,’ Aakash mumbled unsurely, and then animated again, said, ‘Did you see, on the television, they showed the colony and the jagran tent? They interviewed Mama, Papa, Amit. Anil too, I think. Strange, no? One minute you’re there; the next minute it’s on TV.’
Sanyogita’s face soured. Aakash saw and became serious.
‘How’s the investigation going?’ she asked.
Once again he mistook her meaning. ‘Fine,’ he replied. ‘Sparky, sir, says that it shouldn’t be too long now.’
‘For what?’ Sanyogita asked pointedly.
But Aakash, now wise to her, mechanically replied, ‘For justice to be done.’
‘And do you have any idea -’
He cut her short: ‘Can’t say, bhabi, just can’t say, but maybe Sparky, sir, is right. Maybe it is Nepalis.’ Then after a solemn pause, he said, as he once had of Muslims, ‘I think they’ll all have to go,’ and looked around the table for confirmation. ‘No?’
The next morning, after showers and breakfasts eaten separately, Sanyogita, Aakash and I gathered in a study upstairs in front of a flat-screen television. It was a windowless room with green walls, slim glass bookshelves, lit from below, and an orange and yellow chandelier. We sat in a row on a deep Oliver Musker sofa, white with large white woollen flowers. Chamunda was on the screen.
She wore a dark blue printed Kashmiri silk sari and an uncoloured pashmina decorated with tiny pink flowers. She had just come out from addressing the Chamber of Indian Builders and the old socialist building, with its generous use of patterned concrete screens, hung in the background. A journalist had stopped her on the way out to ask about the Megha case.
Chamunda looked sternly at the camera, then out at the misty winter day, and said, ‘I have already suspended two officers. Let it be an assurance of my commitment to solving this case that I will suspend the SSP Sectorpur if we don’t see satisfactory results in the very near future. That is all I have to say.’ With this, Raunak Singh swept her away in a white Ambassador.
I thought it wasn’t much, but Aakash, who knew more about these things than both Sanyogita and I, was impressed. Nodding his head, he cryptically repeated, ‘No empty threat, no empty threat.’
‘What do you mean?’ I said finally. ‘What’s the big deal if she suspends the SSP Sectorpur?’
‘The Senior Superintendent of Police, Sectorpur,’ Aakash said with sudden fluency, ‘is the most important police post in Jhaatkebaal. This man oversees every extortion and kidnapping case there is, taking his cut and where necessary even acting as a guarantor so that money actually changes hands under his supervision. He would have paid five crores of rupees just to get the post, which he is probably still paying back. To lose his position at this stage would ruin him. It’s a lot of pressure. Something’s going to burst very soon.’
By mid-morning, Chamunda’s office had leaked the information of Aakash’s secret marriage to the press. We sat together in front of the television when one of the Hindi channels began running pictures of the red and blue Arya Samaj certificate, with its pictures of Aakash in a blazer and tie and Megha with an inky stamp over her face. They had even got hold of a picture of the newly married couple, garlanded and in bright sunlight. I was worried about a bad reaction from Aakash, but it never came. He smiled at me knowingly and continued to watch. It was as if he was seeing a bigger game come into play, and far from being nervous of riding its currents, he was riveted, keen to know where to get on. And though it was not said, I sensed that, as the wronged man in the right position, Aakash felt the nearness of a golden opportunity.
As Chamunda would have predicted, the complexion of the story began to change with the revelation about the marriage. The re-enactments of the murder, or at least the ones in which an actor modelled on Aakash chased Megha through a midnight keekar forest, stopped running. Apart from Shabby’s channel, all the other channels began portraying Aakash and Megha as being on one side, co-victims, with the forces of the world against them. The murderer once again became someone in the world beyond, and no longer a specific man against whom the right evidence had only to be found.
But Chamunda had miscalculated. In putting pressure on her police force as well as shifting the focus of the case away from Aakash, she had opened the way for the police to hastily turn their attention elsewhere. And it showed that she didn’t know the men who made up her police force; that she thought them no different from Delhi police. It was an easy mistake to make, easy to think of the border between Sectorpur and Delhi as only administrative. But it had a significance deeper than she knew. It was the border between town and country, between old ways and new, city ways, between rural poor and urban middle class, between the mall-goers and the wild men of Jhaatkebaal. And across that border on all sides, where women in brightly coloured clothes worked in fields and men lazed on charpoys drinking tea, young girls did not wear capris, or send text messages, or have boyfriends; and they certainly did not marry out of turn. Just miles into that country of truck drivers and dangerous moustaches, with Delhi still visible, people thought nothing of killing a girl who had dishonoured their name. It was from this world that the bulk of Jhaatkebaal’s police force was recruited.
And so when revelations broke about Aakash and Megha’s secret marriage, and romantic text messages sent through the night saying ‘Appu this’ and ‘Aakash that’ came to light, and Airtel’s call register revealed late-night phone calls made from Megha’s phone, not only to Aakash but to ‘other strange persons’, it was with some sympathy for a brother, understandably forced to silence so loose a sister, that the police arrested Kris, the creative writer. They would just as happily have arrested his father, but Mr Aggarwal was over seventy and out of town at the time of the murder.
Chamunda’s SSP, a dark-skinned Sikh gentleman with a face as fierce as a grease wrestler and a purple police band across his olive-green turban, addressed the press conference himself. Facing a room full of Delhi journalists, he managed in broken English, a little pleased with himself at the formulation, to say, ‘Krishna found Megha and Aakash in an objectionable but not compromising position. Incensed, enraged, infuriated, he took matters into hand.’ The room fired back angry questions. ‘Did he have any real evidence against the boy or was this all conjecture? How could he offer this as a motive for murder? Did he not know that Kris had been to USA – to Hampshire College, Massachusetts – for his university, that he didn’t possess these backward values?’ At first the SSP came out fighting. He pointed to Megha’s frequent communications with strange men; he gave the room an idea of the clothes she liked to wear; he said that she sometimes drank; and on the night in question she had left her house, without her parents’ permission, to meet her secret husband; she had even driven herself. But gradually, as the distaste in the room grew, and cries of ‘character assassination’ rose from the press corps, the SSP became sadly subdued. He realized that he was among a strange lot, modern and valueless.
Even before the press conference was over, the city was on the boil. Megha’s mother, also a large woman, was shown standing among a crowd of people. Her daughter’s face was visible in hers; she wore a brown printed kurta. ‘Would a brother kill his own sister?’ she said, weeping and on the verge of breaking her bangles. ‘Today I have lost not only a daughter but a son as well. And Megha’s murderer is still roaming free. The police are lying through their teeth.’ Kris was shown next, being silently led away by the Sectorpur police, his protruding lower jaw hanging open. Within hours, vigils of university students, with flowers and posters of Megha, had formed in the street, standing up against ‘character assassination’. Bloggers went like flesh-eating fish through the SSP’s remarks.
By the time Chamunda’s convoy of white Ambassadors and Jeeps had driven into the safe house, Shabby had already interviewed Megha’s mother in her newsroom and, via satellite, some of Kris’s American friends, who spoke of how gentle and artistic he had been in university. She had also launched a full investigation into the political pressure police officers were forced to operate under in Sectorpur. In our own small group in the upstairs TV room, deep tensions had arisen. Sanyogita’s eyes, so recently dry, had begun to flow again at the sight of her friend Kris being led away. And when Aakash whispered, ‘Lul,’ to me, causing me to laugh out loud, she rose and left the room.
Chamunda’s arrival brought the house together for a late lunch. It was Aakash who saw her first. He had gone to the bathroom, leaving the door of the television room half-open. A few moments later I saw him on the balcony, looking at the courtyard below. He didn’t hear me come up behind him. Downstairs, Chamunda in her dark blue sari and shawl, her sunglasses on her head, was standing by the lily pond instructing a servant on how to lay the table for lunch. When he put a clear globe-like vase of violet dahlias on the edge of the table, she rushed ahead and moved it to the centre. Aakash watched mesmerized as she told the servant where to put the wine glasses, corrected the arrangement of cutlery, then stood back and looked from a distance at the table that was now nearly ready. Watching Aakash watch Chamunda, I felt I knew what held his attention. I was willing to bet that until that moment the privileged women Aakash had met were too good for housework; they would have worn black Western clothes, led idle lives and required Aakash to keep them slim so that their husbands didn’t stray. That kind of woman would have had her attractions, but Aakash could not really have respected someone like that. In Chamunda, however, he would have seen traces of the traditional Indian woman that he could never have done without, as well as new and seductive things, like money, independence and power. The combination would have been beguiling.
Chamunda, aware of us watching her, shielded her eyes from the sun and looked up. For a moment she giggled with girlish embarrassment, then firmed up her voice and said, ‘Come on, boys. Come down for lunch.’
We followed an internal staircase, with old movie posters on the walls, and came out through a bright blue door into the courtyard. The sunlight went right through the pond’s green water, where orange fish flashed from time to time. The foliage round the pond was thick with palms and ferns. Behind the lunch table a tall forest-green bamboo fence protected the little courtyard from the view of those working in the house. Chamunda now sat at the table sipping a glass of pomegranate juice, a brood of pugs yapping at her feet.
‘Hi, baba,’ she said, with some distress in her voice, as I reached down to touch her feet. But with Aakash following my example, it melted quickly into embarrassed laughter, and, ‘Oh no, you don’t have to. It’s only because I’m like his aunt. I’ve known him since he was this high.’ Then, ‘May you have a long life, my son,’ she said at last, with resignation in her voice. But when he rose and she saw his face, seeing perhaps even more clearly than me the marks of his caste, I thought I saw a different light in her eyes. It was as if her various screens – of being chief minister, Sanyogita’s aunt, politician, older woman, princess – fell away and those vast eyes were now for a moment limpid. There was nothing innocent or unguarded about this gaze; if anything it was blacker despite its heat. And as quickly as it came it was gone.
A moment later, Sanyogita appeared from a corner of the house and we sat down to lunch. It was a grim meal during which everyone seemed to be negotiating their way out of some private mood. I had served myself meat curry and rice when I saw that Chamunda wasn’t eating.
‘You aren’t having anything?’
‘I’ve eaten, baba,’ she said. Then perhaps to deflect attention from herself, she added, ‘Here, have some wine,’ and filled both mine and Aakash’s glasses. Sanyogita looked sourly across at her. ‘Can I have some too, Chamunda massi?’
‘Tch! Yes, of course,’ Chamunda said, and passed the wine.
Silence fell over the table. Only Aakash, though still watchful, had a surprising calm about him. He ate and drank wholeheartedly, like a man celebrating a victory. He looked up occasionally at Chamunda with sidelong glances, seeming to finesse his study of her. At length we began talking about the case.
‘It’s a stain,’ Chamunda said bitterly. ‘It’ll blow over, I know, but it’s a stain and that bloody Shabby will do everything to draw attention to it in the run-up to the election.’
‘How can she not?’ Sanyogita said. ‘You’ve got the wrong…’
Her words were lost in her throat. Chamunda, though having gauged their meaning, made her repeat them. ‘What?’
‘Guy!’ Sanyogita said. ‘You have the wrong guy.’
Chamunda’s face darkened, but she didn’t say anything.
‘Isn’t there any way to save face?’ I asked.
‘No, not at this stage,’ Chamunda replied. ‘We’ve made one mistake already.’
Aakash looked up from his food and smiled, his lips glistening.
‘This other one’s more serious. It’s galvanized the whole city. Now if we come out and say, “It wasn’t him either, we just arrested him because my SSP got it into his head that the girl was of loose morals,” we’re going to look really bad. We need to keep the case going with this brother of hers as a valid suspect for at least some time. Till we can find an out.’
The remark seemed aimed at Aakash, but he said nothing.
‘Keep it going,’ Sanyogita said, ‘i.e. keep my friend in jail until then?’
‘You think I bloody want to?’ Chamunda exploded. ‘I have to!’
‘Why do you have to?’
‘Because your fat friend Shabby will crucify me if I don’t. This is politics, all right? It’s not fun, it’s not creative writing, but it has to be done.’
‘I don’t understand, if people like you don’t stand for justice and the rule of law, how is it -’
‘I can’t listen to this shit,’ Chamunda snapped. ‘I’m not Gandhi. I’m working with an imperfect system. Yes, I don’t want an innocent boy to go to jail, but I’m not losing my job over it.’
Sanyogita put a last mouthful of rice and lentils in her mouth, coldly moved the fork a little right of centre on her plate and rose. She looked at me, but I pretended not to notice. Then after kneeling down and stroking one of the pugs, she slipped away.
Chamunda had upset herself so much that she reached for a plate. She was about to serve herself some food when Aakash stopped her.
‘Ma’am, don’t. I have a solution. Everything will be fine.’
Chamunda looked stunned, perhaps both at what was said and the tone with which it was said. Recovering her poise, she asked, a smile playing on her comic-book lips, ‘Well, can I at least have some lunch?’
‘Better not, ma’am,’ Aakash replied quickly. ‘I was hoping to repay your hospitality by giving you a session after lunch.’
‘A gym session?’ Chamunda said with wonder, then looked at me as if I’d brought a lunatic into her house.
‘Yes, ma’am. I’m a professional person,’ Aakash said in English, and let out a short laugh.
Chamunda fell silent, her eyes wandered and for a moment it seemed as though she didn’t approve of this over-familiarity. Then looking up, she breathed, ‘Why not!’
Aakash laughed at the success of his overture and looked to me for approval.
Chamunda in the meantime had stood up. ‘All right, then,’ she said, as if convincing herself that she was truly about to work out in the middle of the afternoon on a day when her government was close to falling. ‘I’ll get dressed. Raunak Singh! Raunak Singh! Get my exercise things ready.’
‘Very good, ma’am,’ a voice returned from some hollow section of the house.
‘Aakash, in the gym in five minutes?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
With this, Chamunda gave me a little kiss on the head and disappeared behind one of the rust-painted courtyard’s many blue doors. I turned in amazement to Aakash, who at that moment had submerged his entire hand into a silver finger bowl.
‘What now?’
‘Nothing now. We’ll see.’
‘Well, what’s the solution?’
I thought he relished saying that he couldn’t tell me; that he wanted to but couldn’t; that his future was at stake.
Chamunda appeared a moment later in her exercise clothes. She wore denim shorts, exposing her brown, faintly dimpled legs, New Balance trainers and a T-shirt. It was a simple white T-shirt, with a cartoon image of a Hollywood blonde in grey sunglasses, the lenses each mapping perfectly on to Chamunda’s large breasts. Hanging from the cartoon blonde’s neck, and stretching over our chief minister’s soft, slightly protruding midriff, was a pair of binoculars. Giving me a little wave, she trotted up the couple of steps that led from the courtyard into the gym.
Aakash followed her a moment later, leaving me in the courtyard alone.
Oppressed by the solitude, I went upstairs to get a book. Sanyogita was checking her emails in an involved, distancing way. The house, which had been driven since the morning by a jolting, uneven energy, was at last quiet.
It would have been an hour, an hour and a half later, once the late-afternoon light had almost left the courtyard, that Chamunda emerged from the gym, sweating heavily, her long hair in a bun, visibly exhilarated.
‘He’s very good, your friend,’ she said, ‘much better than my fellow. I think I might get him to come and give me trainings. He had me do ten to fifteen minutes inclined walking, then very light weights and finished me off on floor exercises. My body is breaking.’ She rested a hand heavy with rings on my shoulder, and becoming quieter, said, ‘Baba, he’ll probably tell you what we spoke of. Please, not a word to Sanyogita. Not till tomorrow.’
At that moment a band of fairy lights coiled around one of the trees in the courtyard came on. They followed a cycle: one strip at a time, they worked their way up the trunk, then all the lights glowed at once and burst into rhythmic flashes. Chamunda wiped her hands and lit a Dunhill cigarette. She offered me one, but I declined. We sat in silence for some minutes. The rising smoke moved sideways over a ruled page of fine, slatted light coming in past the green bamboo fence.
‘So listen, baba,’ Chamunda said, ‘it looks like no one will have to stay here after tomorrow. I mean, you can stay on, of course, if you want to, this is your house. But what I mean to say is that you don’t have to stay here. You don’t know how grateful I am that you came, though. These have been trying times, really. But you watch, we’ll win the election and then we’ll have some fun. We’ll get your mother here as well. You know, I love her like a sister. Much more than a sister.’ Chamunda laughed wickedly, thinking perhaps of Sanyogita’s mother, with whom she had strained relations. Then as an extension of that thought, she added, beetling her eyebrows, ‘Try and make Sanyogita understand that her aunt is not such an evil person. You don’t know how she wounds me. I have no children, so she’s like my own, but she’s always edgy around me. I want her to get in touch with India. We’ll need someone from the family at some point. Already there’s no one to contest the parliamentary seat from Ayatlochanapur. Get her to sort herself out. Creative writing! Emigrés at Home! What is this nonsense!’
At the time, it didn’t occur to me to ask how Chamunda would have known the name of Sanyogita’s creative writing group. Nor did I think she was purging her guilt as she spoke. I thought she was acting with her niece’s best interests at heart.
Raunak Singh appeared a moment later with a cordless telephone.
‘Right, baba. I must go. I’ll see you in Delhi.’
I sat in the courtyard a while longer, looking at the flashing tree, and got up only when I saw Chamunda, now in a turquoise sari adorned with reflective, gold-rimmed flowers, go out of the house for the last time, followed by a small entourage.
Aakash had not emerged from the gym. When I went in a few minutes later, he was working out himself, barefooted, bare-chested, in just his jeans.
‘Hi, man. How’s you doing, man?’ he said, swinging his arms up in bicep curls.
‘Fine,’ I said, and sat down on a workout bench.
‘It feels so good. I can’t tell you. It feels like I haven’t worked out in weeks. Everything’s gone. Look, look,’ he said, flexing a tricep, which emerged obediently like a great vein in his arm.
‘Aakash, it’s fine, really.’
‘And chest,’ he said, shrinking his face and pushing out his pectorals.
‘Also fine.’
‘But abs are really gone, no?’ He pulled down the skin from his stomach and the faint outline of a six-pack emerged, the beauty spot on it, reminding me that I had seen it before.
Then he looked hard at my reflection, and seeing perhaps some fatigue, some sorrow in my face, he stopped and turned round. ‘You’re all right? No?’ he asked with concern. ‘Not angry with me, I hope. Chamunda Devi told you what happened between us?’
‘No.’
His face cleared.
‘You’re upset this is our last night.’ He laughed. ‘You were getting comfortable. Come on, I’m going to cheer you up. We’re going to do something I used to do with my brother when we were children.’
‘Aakash, I’m fine.’
‘No, no, no. I can see there’s a problem. Come on.’
With this, he pulled me out of the gym. The house was in half-light. It was caught in that special Indian hour when the day has gone and the servants are still to turn on the lights. Under the cover of this dusk hour, Aakash stole into the dimly lit pantry, past a few Nepalese maids, and hunted round for something. Not finding what he wanted, he stuck his head out and said, ‘Sister, where is the wine kept?’ She pointed him to another area of the kitchen, and not wishing to break momentum, he rushed over there. The sight of many bottles of wine of varying quality confused him.
‘Aatish, help me out,’ he whispered.
‘Choose something from the top.’
He stood on his tiptoes and pulled out a bottle of wine. It looked Californian and expensive. It had a single red drop falling against an off-white label. Around the drop, as if it had broken the surface of the label, were faint ripples, also in off-white.
‘Mod… mod…’
‘Modicum.’
‘Good?’ Aakash asked.
‘Probably.’
‘Great. Let’s go,’ he said, taking two glasses from a shelf.
We made our way up the internal staircase to the first floor. When we reached the landing, Aakash whispered, ‘Now, really quiet.’
We tiptoed past an open doorway, in which Sanyogita, now in darkness, could be seen still in front of the computer. Two or three doors down, Aakash gently slid back the bolt of a room I hadn’t seen so far. The light outside had become so dim that I could barely make it out. A kind of purple gloom spread through the room and only the silver of a mirror at the far end was visible.
‘Fuck,’ Aakash said, a moment after we entered, ‘I forgot the screw thing. I’ll go back. You wait here.’
Before I could protest, he had slipped out, leaving me in the empty room. As my eyes slowly adjusted, I could make out a crystal dressing table in one corner, a dark wooden cupboard from the fifties and an old four-poster Calcutta bed with a white bedspread. I wandered ahead absent-mindedly, opened a wide, heavy door with a long brass handle, and found myself in a dressing room. Past a further door, there was a high-ceilinged bathroom, with an art-deco floor of black, white and beige stone arranged in a large rhombus shape. Great panels of mirror, screwed into the wall, whose silver had rusted and fallen away, stood over a black bathtub, and steel capsule-shaped lights threw low-voltage shadows over the room.
I was still taking in the bathroom when I heard Aakash enter behind me.
‘So you’ve found it,’ he said. ‘Good boy.’
He pushed me into the room and locked the door. The bottle of wine was open. He poured me a glass and sat me down on a cane chair against the wall. Then, still only in his jeans, he leaned across the vast bathtub and opened the taps. There were some bath salts on the edge, which he smelt suspiciously before scattering them in large handfuls into the bath, turning the few inches of water cloudy.
As the bath began to fill, he sat down on the edge of it and took a large sip of wine.
‘It’s good, man!’ he said.
It was very good – heavy and smooth.
The moment overcame him, and as if wondering how it was that life had brought him into such varied situations, had shown him both poverty and luxury, he said, always with that special ability to explain complicated problems in simple material terms, ‘Now Chamunda Devi, she smokes Dunhills, right?’
‘Right.’
He nodded. ‘On Marlboro packets the price is shown, on Benson the price is shown, but on Dunhill there is no price.’ He took out a packet from his pocket, and twirling it in his hand, showed me it had no price. ‘What does that mean?’
I thought it was a rhetorical question and didn’t answer, but he pressed me for a response.
‘I don’t know.’
‘That it’s imported! Now people might say,’ he said, taking on the voice of an impressed observer, ‘ “Right, so she smokes Dunhills, she must be very rich.” They don’t stop to think, why does this person smoke Dunhills?’
Again, I thought I was not meant to give an answer, but Aakash waited for one.
‘Because of the length, the quality of the tobacco?’ I offered.
‘Right,’ he replied, a little disappointed. ‘But those people will say, “Such and such person smokes Marlboro, that’s all right, not bad.” My brother smokes Benson, but Benson you can buy loose. Dunhill, you have to buy a whole packet at a time. “So, good, this person must be pretty rich.” What they don’t see,’ Aakash said, seeing perhaps some confusion in my face, ‘is that the person who smokes Dunhills might also smoke Gold Flake should the need arise.’
At this point the bath was more than half-full and the clouded water was steaming up the mirror.
‘Let’s get in,’ Aakash said abruptly. ‘I’ll explain in a minute.’
I didn’t question him, but undressed to my underwear. Aakash watched me the entire time. When I took a step towards the bath, he said, ‘Come on, man. You insulting me? I’m not a fucking gay. Take your underwear off. This is like something I would do with my brother.’
I took my underwear off and put one foot into the bath. It was still very hot and I could keep only one foot in at a time, even as they began to tingle from the heat. I was able slowly to manage both, then to lower myself in. Aakash watched, smiled with satisfaction, then seeing I had left my wine by the chair, went over and brought it to me. When I was up to my neck, he took off his jeans and stood for a minute on the edge of the bath, looking at himself in the browning mirror. He watched himself take a sip of wine, rubbed his body with his other hand, pulled at his foreskin, which had become small and shrunken, then let himself sink into the bath.
‘So I was saying,’ he said, once we were both in the cloudy water, our knees sometimes touching, our bodies mostly submerged but occasionally floating to the top like refuse, ‘that everyone is in their correct place and working accordingly.’
In the suspense of the filling bath, I had missed the importance of his words. I hadn’t seen that behind the rambling about tobacco and brands was a philosophical, almost Hindu, way of dealing with the problem of inequality. The world to Aakash was not illusion; it was real and material, and he was hungry for it. But it was impossible to live in India, especially the new and shaken-up India, without having a way of coping with its inequalities. Zafar had his idea of the poet, and though Aakash had a corresponding idea, a new idea, of himself as a trainer, to which he was willing to ascribe Hindu notions of duty, he also had something else. He had his high idea of himself as a Brahmin. With it came an innate acceptance of fate and the inequality of men. And even though, in the new scheme, Aakash’s caste was not on top, he saw this more as a practical problem than a philosophical one. He said, ‘So now what am I to do, if I don’t have money? Perhaps the day won’t be far off when I’ll have more money than the people who were to be my in-laws, perhaps even more than you. And what will they say then? “Fine, you can marry my daughter”?’
Interrupting him, I said, ‘You loved her a lot, didn’t you, Ash-man?’
‘Yes, man,’ he said warmly. ‘She would have been a great wife. You know, when you’re upgrading yourself, many people try to make you feel small, make you feel you’re nothing. But with her by my side, I would have felt strong.’
I was won over. His calm, the preternatural strength of his nerve didn’t seem out of place. It was as if it flowed from his unshakeable belief in the preordained. And his own gritty modern story, with its amorality and sudden reversals, didn’t seem so far away from the stories I had heard around him, like those of his ancestor and of Tara and Rukmani. In fact those stories were like a fount for his own. And when things were at their worst, I felt sure they gave him his power to switch off, taking consolation on the one hand in the disinterested work of fate and on the other in the always auspicious light of his star.
We had made our way through half the red wine; we were both drained from the heat, lying back in the vast bath, our penises bobbing limply to the surface.
That was where I should have left things. But in that deep moment of relaxation it suddenly occurred to me to ask, ‘So then what was the solution you gave Chamunda?’
Aakash half raised his head, his dark face flushed, and said, ‘It was simple, really. I told Chamunda about the threat Megha’s brother made a few nights before. Yes, she told me about it in the end,’ he added seeing the surprise form in my face. ‘Oh, and also I drew her attention to a certain short story – what was it called? – “The Ass -”… “The Ass -”… you know the one?’ he said, and laughed.
Seconds later, there was a great banging on the door outside.