Half a Rupee: Stories (13 page)

Mamu, Amjad’s maternal uncle, had a wonderful style of telling a story. He would start telling a story while talking about something else, and start talking about something else while telling a story. And quite effortlessly too.

‘So, when in the beginning spacecrafts from the outer worlds came to study our solar system,’ he said, ‘they found this round earth of ours like an orange, but a blue and green orange …’

Amjad’s attention once again went to his orange.

About two or three days ago, some oranges had been brought into the house. One orange fell to everybody’s lot, but for Amjad’s. He had a cough and cold and was also running a little fever. Amjad began to throw a tantrum and Ammi yielded. She let him have one, but he was forbidden to eat it.

‘Don’t eat it now. Till your cold gets better and your fever subsides just let it lie here.’

Amjad was consoled: at least he had not been deprived of his share. But now the orange had begun to lose its sheen—it did not look as fresh and lustrous as it had two days ago.

Mamu was still talking about the orange.

‘The colour blue fascinated these men from the outer worlds and they deduced from its blue colour that more than two-thirds of this earth was made up of seas of water. And then they also found similar strips of blue running across the dry surface of the earth—as if the water from the seas were flowing into them … into those rivers …’

‘But, Mamu, it’s just the opposite … the waters from the rivers flow into the sea, not the other way round.’

‘Oh … one thing you have forgotten … they were looking at the earth from way, way up. Now when you are looking at things from that far up, can you make out which way the flow is? You can’t blame them, can you? All they saw were the colours … as if the earth was sprayed by colours … like this—’

Mamu pulled up the sleeve of his shirt to reveal a spidery spread of blue veins on his fat arms. Amjad did not find such a spidery web on his orange but yes, the fresh lustrous rind of the fruit had begun to feel soft to his touch and he could see grey–black spots threatening to burst out on the surface, like the ones on the face of his other uncle, his old, weathered Phupa.

Mamu’s stories would run at a feverish pace for days on end. He would never give up on pushing the frontiers of his stories further, stretching them out over a few days.
He would move the end a notch further and yet further. But this time he moved up not a few days, but jumped ahead a few centuries.

‘As the spacecrafts kept returning to their observation posts above the earth at regular intervals of centuries, the condition of the orange kept deteriorating, kept worsening. It went from bad to worse, from worse to worst. They few closer to the earth … and found beautiful jungles. At places they found boxes of settlements, and inside those boxes they found earthlings, crawling like small little insects. But those boxes were few and far between, far away from each other.’

That day, Amjad picked up his orange and hid it behind the flower vase. He was not willing to let anybody throw it away till he got a fresh one in its place. Amjad’s fever too was stretching out, like Mamu’s stories, over days. The next instalment of Mamu’s story began the next day.

‘So I was telling you … yes, after another hundred years, another spacecraft came and swooped closer to the orange. This time it took them some time to find the blue orange. There was a lot of dust in the atmosphere. A thin thread of ozone had begun to leak out and float like a piece of cloud. On closer inspection they found that because of the constant travel of the earthlings, permanent lines were scrawled all over the planet. These lines started off at one settlement and disappeared into another. And on these scrawls, the earthlings had begun to move faster. It seemed as if one earthling had hauled another earthling on his back and had begun to run. Perhaps the earthlings had learnt to ride animals.
The settlements too had expanded and multiplied. At places they could see small golden suns burning: the earthlings had discovered fire. But where they had seen jungles once, now they found rivers of smoke, spiralling skywards. Perhaps the earthlings were burning jungles to clear more land for themselves, to build more of their boxes. The orange of the earth was no longer looking as fresh and lustrous and as inviting as those travellers before them had remarked.’

Amjad knew the secret. He had discovered the pricks in his orange, tiny holes, and had seen long queues of little ants crawling in and out of those holes. Where he had earlier seen spots of discolour now he found black and white mouldy overgrowth.

Mamu had once again flown away in his spacecraft. A few days later when he returned with his story a few more centuries had gone by.

‘When those people of the spacecraft returned this time, they found the earth—which only a few centuries earlier they had discovered to be a lustrous planet, full of freshness—was wrapped in a thin film of poisonous gases. The layer of ozone was threadbare, like the cloth off the back of a poor beggar. And the atmosphere below it was filled with smoke and radioactive noise pollution. Only a few patches of green forest remained. The boxes of civilization had multiplied many times over and now covered the entire land. The entire earth was crawling with insects.’

Amjad’s orange was now completely rotten and infested with worms and insects that kept biting into it and devouring it.

He had no idea how long he had been lying in the darkness. When he slowly came back into consciousness he felt the ground beneath him quivering. After what seemed to him like a long time, the ground stopped shaking. It was only then that he opened his eyes for the first time. He was enveloped in darkness.

The ground had begun to shake again. He willed it to stop and then opened his eyes for the second time. He tried to stand up but the huge concrete slab on his back once again pinned him to the ground. He could not see anything in the dark.

When he opened his eyes again, he found both his hands burrowed into the earth. This time he let his head lie on the ground. Slowly his consciousness tossed and turned on its side and he remembered the earthquake—and he felt the ground quake all over again.

He was fast asleep when his bedstead had begun to shake. The continuous thud-thud kept drumming
into his ears. The steel almirah had begun to quiver in the corner of the room as if in the grip of a malarial fever. He could hear the clanging of the utensils in the kitchen, faint at first and then clanking on the floor, rolling, crashing against the wall. At first he was a little scared at the strange sounds and then suddenly it all sank in—it was an earthquake. He had shot up from his bed, tried to switch the light on. It flickered to life, deigned to glow for a moment dully, and then died out. He could now hear the panicky cries of his neighbours. He had pushed the door open and ran out. The lift was not working. Somebody had switched the mains off. He ran for the stairs. There was absolute bedlam. Women were screaming. More and more people were pouring into the stairwell, running out of their homes, bounding down the stairs towards safety. He did not even realize how quickly he had climbed down the first two floors. On the landing of the next floor he felt bits and pieces of plaster, ripped off the ceiling above, fall on his head. The staircase had begun to tremble. The earthquake was perhaps rumbling through the ground right now, or maybe it was burping. Or perhaps it was still growling in its throat. His knees began to shake and he fell down. A few more toppled over him. And then with a sudden explosive boom, the stairs under his feet began to slide through the earth and sank into the netherworld.

He still was in the netherworld.

Bukhari had lost count of days. He had no idea how long he had been lying in this darkness, in this silence—a few days perhaps. Not a sound could be heard anywhere.
He tried to move his limbs but they seemed frozen, or rather, tied. A thought flashed through his mind: was he buried in his grave—the dirt, the cold stone and the darkness … had they buried him by mistake … or … or was he really dead? He tried to move his head, but simply couldn’t. Perhaps he really was dead. And in a while Munkar and Naqir would be arriving, they would ask him to recite the
kalma
, reiterate his belief in the faith, in the creed. These two angels visit you on the third day after your death. That meant he had been dead for three days. It must be. If he was alive, he would have at least felt hungry. He felt strangely reassured that he was dead—he did not feel the pangs of hunger and yet his memory was all intact. He was not able to figure out whether he was lying face up or face down in the ground. He tried to remember the rites of burial—in which direction is the face when you are lowered into your grave? He began to feel sleepy again. There certainly was great comfort in death—an inebriation, a certain kind of intoxication.

The ground had begun to sway again. It was rocking, actually. And he was off to sleep—in his cradle. His grave was being rocked like a cradle. In a while, the angels would come—they would lift him in their arms and carry him away. He fell asleep.

His body felt light. He felt liberated from his physical body. There was no sensation in either his hands or his feet, or for that matter in any of his joints. His mind would occasionally flicker into life, glow dully for a while and then flicker off again. He now believed beyond doubt that he was lying in his grave and was dead. This is how
things must be when one dies. And he began to wait for the arrival of the two angels. He felt a smile spread on his lips without making an effort to move them. A well-illuminated
ayat
crawled over his forehead and went past:
la ilaha illallah, Muhammadur rasulullah
—there is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is His messenger. His eyes were already closed but he pulled them shut once again. Once again he fell asleep. This time he did not wake for quite a few days. His own mind whispered to him, ‘Now, I will get up on the day of
qayamat
only, on doomsday.’

His eyelids sprang open in one abrupt motion. His mind too sprung awake. Someone was lifting his eyelids and inspecting his eyes. He felt something crawling on his eyelids. And perhaps for the first time in days he felt air filling into his lungs. Perhaps people were making an effort to wake him up. Perhaps
qayamat
had finally arrived. He felt thin, scrawly lines squiggle on his eyelids, or were they somebody’s fingers … or nails … or … or was it the whiplash of his mother’s wet hair? Or was somebody writing something on his forehead with a razor-sharp nib?

Ayats
, verses from the Quran, perhaps.

Somebody was scribbling something on the sole of one of his feet too. The right foot, or was it perhaps the left, he was not quite able to tell. Perhaps the angels were imprinting his good and bad deeds on the flesh of his body. He was smiling again without moving his lips. The bedlam of
qayamat
was coming nearer. He could make out the voices. And his eyes were now shutting, forever. The bulb flickered off, and he fell
asleep. The grave once again began to rock. The angels had lifted him up and were carrying him away—down, further down. He was sinking more and more into the netherworld.

The rubble of buildings was finally being cleared. The earthquake had rumbled through them, ripping them apart, cracking them at the seams. As they cleared the rubble of the collapsed buildings they kept finding people—day after day—some injured, some wounded, some half-alive, some nearly dead and many long dead. They either cremated the dead bodies or buried them. Those that they could not immediately identify, they performed the last rites for later. The hospitals were bursting with the injured. Relief camps were opened at a number of places for the victims of the earthquake. Not only the government but common people were doing all they could do to help. Newspapers were organizing relief funds. In one of the newspapers that appealed to the public for donations, Bukhari’s photograph was published.

After eighteen days under the earth, Bukhari had been rescued from the basement of Abbasi building. His entire body was crawling with cockroaches. But he was alive, albeit unconscious. His heartbeat was a little low but was still pulsating. He was immediately rushed to the hospital.

Bukhari woke up in the hospital a few days later and began to scream in pain. And he was heard shouting at the doctors, ‘What sort of
qayamat
is this? What kind of hell have you people brought me into?’

The direct route was a long, winding road. Rising and falling, the road snooped around the hills and reached Banpur at its own leisurely pace. Then a straight run, all the way to Anandprayag in one single stretch. It was a proper pukka road but at places it came undone—with no traces of the tarred surface, just a cobbled bed of mud and stone chips. But that is how hilly roads are these days—they keep falling apart in the rains, and keep being rebuilt in the months of the dry sun.

We had stopped at a dhaba which turned out to be hardly a dhaba—it was more like a
dibba,
a small, boxed stall by the road, an excuse for a dhaba. There were three of us—Bhushan, Taran Taaran and me. We had stopped to have tea. We dipped our hands in the jar and took out some rusks and began to munch on them. Then we spotted some boiled eggs and were tempted to slice them, sprinkle some salt and pepper on them and gobble
them up. But the eggs felt cold to the touch. We asked the shopkeeper to boil a dozen eggs afresh. We wanted to take them with us—the journey was quite long and the warm eggs would help us push swigs of brandy down our throats. It was disagreeably cold and we had bought a bottle of brandy on the way. When our breath got frozen during the ride we would unscrew the bottle, pour some into the cap and pour it down our throats. Our breath would thaw in the pipes for a while.

Getting the eggs boiled, munching on the rusks and chasing them down with cups of tea, we did not realize that we had ended up spending an hour and a half at that excuse of a dhaba. By now two trucks had pulled over and their drivers joined us at the dhaba. It had got pretty late and we realized that we would not reach Banpur before nightfall; and if the road ahead was anything like the one we had been travelling on so far, we wouldn’t be reaching anywhere near Banpur before the middle of the night. Our driver told us about a shortcut to Banpur, about twenty or thirty kilometres down the road. The road wasn’t in a great condition but it cut through the villages of Dheenu and Bamani, rose and fell along the river Alakananda and cut down the journey considerably. But in the same breath the driver advised us, ‘What’s the hurry, saab, to risk our lives now … our entire lives are left for that.’

Roads too stick out their tongues like a dog panting on its run. You can never tell when they are going to become thin, and when they will broaden. Unpaved roads are still easy to bear with. Paved, pukka roads are
hair-raising. Every bend seems fatal. At every turn the mountain appears to be caving on to the road. And on top of it, the driver kept up his incessant chatter.

‘When it caves in from above, the locals say the mountain has come.’

‘And what if our ground gives in? If there’s a landslide?’ one of us asked.

He thought for a second and then said, ‘The ones below us will say the mountain has come!’

‘Or perhaps we may say that we have arrived.’

‘We will hardly find the time to say anything, Bauji,’ he laughed.

Every time he laughed, he would bounce on his seat, still holding onto the steering wheel.

Hilly roads have their own romance. We were driving in the sunshine when suddenly fog swooped down on the road, raising a curtain of fine, dense mist right in front of us and ordering us to halt—as if it was hiding a bathing beauty, trying to keep her away from our prying eyes. We kept waiting. The fog lifted in a while and, lo and behold, right before us stood a freshly bathed crescent of seven colours.

Hilly roads also tend to pick up pace as well as slacken sometimes—that’s the reason why, on a slower patch of the road, you bump again into your co-traveller whom you had sped away from on a quicker one. At Devprayag, a car had sped past our jeep, honking: a small two-seater Herald. Our driver had quipped in Punjabi, ‘Look at that, saab … the soap dish has sprouted wings’—and had once again started to bounce on his seat, laughing.

We had heard that a dam was going to be built at Devprayag and that the entire place would become submerged. It is at Devprayag that the Alakananda drains into the Ganga. We wanted to go and have a look. Taran Taaran said, ‘If we are going that far, why not go a little further up and visit Rudraprayag too?’ Bhushan suggested, ‘In that case, let’s go still further up, to Anandprayag. From there we can head off to Nainital via Dronagiri.’

We had been to Joshimath and Badrinath once before, the three of us.

We had hired the car from Delhi; by the time we reached Haridwar, it had begun to give trouble. The only place you could find a mechanic to fix your car was at the bus depot. At the depot we had bumped into the young
mahant
of Rishikesh ashram, Ashok Purohit. I knew him well. He had come to drop someone off in his car. Our driver had said, ‘It’s about an hour’s job. Better to get the car fixed now … or else by the time we reach …’ Ashok Mahantji had cut him off in mid-sentence and said, ‘Go ahead … take your time … don’t worry, I am taking them to Rishikesh in my car. When you reach Rishikesh, come straight to my ashram; you will find your sahibs there.’ So from Haridwar to Rishikesh we had travelled in Ashok Mahantji’s car.

Mahantji knew the perils of the hilly roads pretty well. He knew each and every turn of the serpentine road like the back of his hand. By the time our own car came to fetch us it was late at night. We spent the night at the ashram; and the next morning we got late leaving.
Mahantji sniffed the morning air and said, ‘It seems it has snowed heavily at Joshimath.’ We armoured ourselves in heavy-duty socks, gloves and mufflers and left.

It was now four hours since we had left the ashram. We had hardly started from the dhaba when the same Herald sneaked past us again.

The driver said, ‘Saab, this soap dish of yours seems to be in some great hurry! Just doesn’t give up!’

‘Who’s he?’ we asked. ‘The car seems to be from around here.’

‘Yes, saab, it is!’ he said. ‘But the thing is, saab … you keep your old wife, but you must change your old car. This man seems to be glued to both. The day it squats down on the road, the in-laws will come to tow it away.’

He raised his rear from the seat; I braced myself against a dive into a pothole, but then he began to laugh. Bouncing away and laughing.

The drivers speak a different lingo—be they truckies or cabbies, their imageries are all linked to their vehicles. They are just too much in love with them. And quite often they substitute numbers for names.

‘Oye
Chaunti-Chatti,
come on over … this side … take a swig … got some legs of chicken roasted.’ This to the occupant of a vehicle with the license plate number 3436. I have overheard similar exchanges a number of times at dhabas.

When you begin your ascent into the mountains, you do feel as if you have left all your worldly cares below in the plains. Tall, majestic trees on either side of the road
stand self-sufficient, the real claimants of the sky. If you walk in a jungle even for a little while, you are bound to find silences meandering about like Sufi mendicants, talking and listening in turn to their own selves.

The sun had slowly begun to slide down the distant hills. The sky, now with its kohl-black night-lined eyes, would peep through the hills time and again. After a while we saw the road which was the shortcut to Banpur. And in the distance we saw the very same Herald again. We tried to stop our driver, ‘Veer Singh, why don’t we too take this shortcut? If that old haggard Herald can, so can we—after all, we have a four-wheel drive.’

The driver stopped the jeep, mulled over the idea for a while and said, ‘The Herald’s his old nag, Sirji … and he doesn’t have a load of passengers … but ours, if the road pushes her even a little …’ He left the rest unsaid and retreated into silence. After a pregnant pause he added, ‘Put a cushion under your bums … or else—’ He began to bounce and laugh as he reversed the jeep and we were on the shortcut to Banpur.

What an enviable life the mountains lead! And their hilly roads! At some places the mountain walks by your side, leading you, holding your hand. At others, it picks you up like a fond father and props you up on its shoulder, and sometimes it puts you down to just watch you walk with unsure steps and keeps a watch on you from a distance. You keep on walking in your unsure steps, stumbling, reaching out for the hand of a river lest you fall … and you have no idea when the river lets go of you and you begin to walk on your own.

A petite waterfall suddenly came into view. We stopped our car and felt like soaking our tired feet in its pristine waters. But the biting cold was unrelenting and we were happy with just soaking the tires of our jeep in the water. We unscrewed the bottle of brandy and each of us poured a capful of brandy down our throats.

Suddenly the driver stopped the jeep and got down. We followed his gaze—an enormous boulder sat in the middle of the road along with a broken wheel and an axle. Veer Singh was peering down into the valley. When he did not move from his position for a long time, we too got off the jeep one by one. We hitched the legs of our trousers up to avoid the muddy slush and walked up to him. Deep down in the ravines we saw the Herald turned turtle, its top fattened against the rocky floor of the valley. And not far away from it we saw the driver, his body all askew. Veer Singh was looking for a way to climb down. Bhushan looked at him, affrighted, ‘Any possibility that he may be alive?’

‘Na ji!’ he was choked with emotion when he spoke. ‘The idiot, he took a shortcut there too.’