When Kaaliya strolled back to the heart of the momentarily stilled platform, little Chini was standing there like an angel, clutching the shining red leather bag. Only one filled with vileness and canker could distrust a face like his. Since it was Chini’s first proper kill, the group waited till evening for Dhaka to show up and unfurl it.
The leader was in a mellow mood; it was clear he had already been burning the foil. They were squatting in a semicircle on the sloping roof under the overbridge, around the central gutter where the opposing inclines met. Enough light drifted in from the platform at both ends. Dhaka said, ‘Smart ladies’ bag. The boy already has discernment. That’s the difference between Chinis and you chutiyas!’
and he cuffed the ears of the boy sitting closest to him. Then he gestured to Kaaliya. ‘Open it! There’s no difference between a woman and a handbag—the exterior may have no relation to what’s inside!’
From the many stomachs—small and big—of the bag emerged a mountain of jumble. Since it was an initiation, Kaaliya pulled out each item with ceremonial slowness and held it up for all to assess. Three sticks of lipstick, red, pink, and pinker. A round-handled hairbrush with sharp black plastic teeth and long hair twined in it (Tarjan pulled out a few strands and shut his eyes and smelled them). A small mud-brown bottle, its cap stained, its sharp smell pleasant. Two plastic ballpoint pens; one short pencil. A slim book of thick paper leaves which Dhaka said could be changed for money. A small yellow hand towel. A pair of dark glasses, with a touch of shining steel. A nail cutter, a nail file, a fat multipurpose knife. A small maroon leather diary held together with a string. Many thick black rubber bands. Many small thick paper cards with different kinds of words printed on them. Lengths of paper with words and numbers. The soft white length of a cotton pad; the bullet of a tampon. A shining compact of face powder. An eyeliner pencil. A small beautiful bottle of sweet perfume. A foil of some tablets, old and battered. Two thin silver bangles and two thick glass bangles. A tiny tin of some cream. A burst of white cotton in a plastic pouch. A bar of chocolate and a fistful of toffees. A stapled pamphlet that seemed religious—it had Lord Ram and Hanuman smudge-printed on it. A thick paper card with the picture of Goddess Lakshmi printed on one side, and on the other the year’s calendar with many days darkly underlined with a pen. A pair of silver earrings with orange stone stuck in them. Another flat blue tin of white cream; a brown tube of more cream; another coloured tube of some sweet liquid. A disposable safety razor. A slim black flashlight that came on when its head was twisted. A litter of coins. A condom in black plastic encasing, the round ridge of its rubber inviting palpitation. And finally the bag within the bag—a tan-coloured wallet with credit cards, driving licence, small
photographs of a man and some children, and seven hundred and twenty-two rupees.
Dhaka looked at the Manipuri boy and said, ‘Motherfucker Chini, did you ever think so many things could come out of something so small? Learn! A woman’s handbag is like her pussy—you think only piss can come out of it and then one day it throws out a whole fucking baby!’ Then turning to the others, the leader said, ‘And you chutiyas learn something from this little Chini! His very first time! And look at the heap he’s brought in! No wonder he wanted to call himself Aladdin! And you fuckers! Come back every evening and say, “Guru, guru, I managed two bananas today—I’ll eat one and sell the other!” ’ Everyone tittered aloud. The leader was on a roll. ‘Look at this Aladdin! Just look at him! Seems like he’s a fucking saint! Been praying all day, so god himself has given him this red bag for his devotion! Take it from me, this Chini will be the biggest maaderchod of all one day! He will yank your cock out, put it in his pocket and walk away, and you won’t even get to know till you next go to take a piss!’
Little Lhungdim looked on in unblinking ignorance.
Dhaka set aside the rupees and the Swiss knife and started the divvying up. Gudiya got to go first. Since she had suddenly appeared on the scene less than a year ago, a feisty eight-year-old from near Indore, who had run away from a stepfather bent on abusing her, Dhaka had accorded her a special place in his band. For some reason—there had been an infant sister who had died of cholera before she learned to crawl; the fact that in his first days in Delhi he had seen
Hare Rama Hare Krishna
at Moti and been deeply moved by the love of the parted siblings Dev Anand and Zeenat Aman, and the poignancy of the song, ‘Phoolon ka taaron ka’, which he still hummed all the time—for some reason, Dhaka felt a great sense of fraternal responsibility and affection for the girl. Watching out for her was the only thing in the world that made him feel virtuous. On the station, where the pace of a boy’s life was faster than a
train and a girl’s completely blistering—sometimes they vanished in days—the only reason Gudiya had survived was Dhaka’s protection. She was under instruction to always remain within earshot of one of her band-mates and the boys knew that if anything happened to her Dhaka would take the skin off their bodies.
Once Gudiya had picked up the woman things—the earrings, bangles, lipsticks, lotions, nail polish; not the perfume or tampon—Dhaka gestured at Chini. The boy tentatively picked up the chocolate bar, hesitated, and then picked up some toffees. Dhaka said, ‘See, I told you he’ll grow up and fuck everyone’s mother! I know you all would have picked the goggles or the torch, and lost or broken it in one day! He already knows the truth of the station—and of life: what you can consume today is all that you really have!’ Kaaliya immediately picked out and put on the goggles with a glint of steel and, dark on dark with grinning white teeth, became an indescribable sight.
Despite Dhaka’s fears, Chini never got nailed. His innocence shone like fresh rain. Cherub-like, he wafted through the crowded bogeys, snagging handbags, satchels, purses, rucksacks, whatever could be carried off with a twist of the wrist and a disarming smile. Given his unusual advantage, he was never reduced to the collecting and selling of refuse—newspapers, cardboard boxes, plastic and glass bottles, magazines, tins, tubes—the standard vocation of the other station boys. Even so, he could not do without the ubiquitous gunny sack. Inside each sack was a boy’s life, all they had managed to grab from the world—plastic casing separating the rubbish from the intimate and the valuable. Chini’s sack was unique in that it never dealt in the trade of refuse, and Kaaliya’s unique in that it always hid a coiled snake.
Kaaliya and Chini quickly became an inseparable twosome,
eating, drinking, crapping, inhaling and operating together—the decoy shaitan and the thieving innocent. In no time at all, Chini acquired the perfections of platform Hindi, and learnt to gamble smoothly—with playing cards, coins, train numbers, Madhuri. When the rains were finally gone, the band moved house for the night to the concrete rooftop at the head of platform one. It was wonderful there: less noise, less fumes, and the incredible freedom of the wide open sky above and nothing around. In the night they lay on their backs, a soaked rag under their nostrils, talking about all the things they wished to do, till the vapours took away their stumbling words and filled their heads with a serene music. Right across, between the tracks, was the small green box of a masjid, with small minarets sticking out of it, like a child’s hand. When the muezzin’s call floated out and enveloped them, Makhi always fell to his knees. Nobody made fun of him. Sometimes those with him—mostly Tarjan or Chhotu—knelt alongside too. Religion deserved piety, they believed. When they went to the mandir by the Sheilapul bridge, Makhi Khan knelt to the ranged idols with equal fervour, touching his forehead to the ground. Given the odds against them, it was a wise approach to keep their divine arsenal as wide and varied as possible.
The most favoured religious spot was, of course, the mandir. The little masjid was too sombre. On the other hand, the temple, on a small rocky mound by an old ficus hairy with aerial roots, was littered with matted, half-naked sadhus who scratched their heavy-hairy balls and sucked in the truths of the universe through chillums filled with hashish. All around were the altars of the deities cut from stone, terracotta, wood and paper, painted in every lurid colour of the imagination. The entire trunk of one shisham, with a Hanuman idol embedded in it, was washed in saffron paste.
The sadhus were generally friendly with the boys, running
barters of cigarettes, soaps, watches, oils, knives, pens and food, in exchange for wads of hashish, ganja, smack and heroin. Occasionally one of the boys would get into a sexual tangle with a renunciate, but mostly it was about the exchange of drugs and chattel. For the more innocent, the lure was often just the need to align the almighty and to get to eat some of the sweet prasad of burfi, laddus, boondi and halwa offered by the more conservative devotees, rickshaw-pullers and railway workers from the nearby colonies. Sometimes, when someone had received the benediction they had sought for a job, a marriage, a child, or the defeat of a disease, there was puri and aloo and kheer.
The one cardinal rule Kaaliya quickly taught Chini was never to get into a scrap with the sadhus. The naked fakirs were always quarrelling among themselves, but if an outsider crossed them they instantly closed ranks and became god’s own soldiers, brandishing their iron trishuls and spears. High on hashish they could do mad battle, impervious to pain or consequence. Station lore spoke of incidents in which boys had had their entrails ripped out and their eyeballs pushed in. Neither the police nor officials had been able to intercede.
Chini learnt to do his drugs in the shadow of the sadhus. Kaaliya and he would squat under the gracious arch of Sheilapul—the blocks of white sunlight at either end buzzing with flies and gnats, alive with mongrels and rabbit-sized rats foraging in the heaped garbage around them. When they had done some lines they would walk the tracks, masters of the world, the cold hard iron wonderful on their bare feet as they swayed forward, arms outstretched, daring any train to derail them. In this, they were inspired by the story of Tattua.
It was said that the greatest jaywalker in the memory of the New Delhi railway station, thin as a growing bamboo, quicker than a bird,
was from a village outside Amritsar. His special act was darting across the track just as a train was about to pass. Sometimes he performed for the passengers cramming the platforms and evoked such a loud collective gasp that the pigeons were startled off the rafters. Though his hair was cut short, many thought he was a Sikh—nobody but a sardar would be so absurdly courageous.
There was no train that had not been challenged and vanquished by the Punjabi boy. He had done the mails and the expresses, the single engines and the Rajdhanis, the Shatabdis and the specials. Every once in a while, suddenly, the news that Tattua was going to walk such and such train outside such and such platform would burn like a lit fuse through the station. Every lowlife on the premises would scuttle to the spot; as also many of the karamcharis, the cleaners, sweepers, linesmen. The khakis knew too, but chose to look the other way: this was art, not the breaking of the law. As the train approached, rumbling the earth, Tattua would position himself by the track, right arm raised high, left stretched back, a big smile cracking his thin face. All around men and boys squatted, or stood, wondering if today would be the last crossing of the great Tattua. Then as the train drew impossibly close—always impossibly close—and many felt he was not going to jump today, he would launch himself across the trembling rails.
The uniqueness of Tattua’s act lay not in its bravery, but in its grace. He never scrambled or ran; there was nothing ungainly about his flight from approaching death. Right arm thrown high, left arm stretched back, a serene smile on his face, he made the deadly journey with three swivels of his hip. This trademark move grew famous as ‘Tattua ki chaal’—the gait of Tattua—and in his time and long after, the platforms were always full of small boys practising the legendary steps.
Tattua was said to have learnt to jaywalk in Amritsar, where all day long he scissored the narrow road leading past Jallianwallah Bagh towards the Golden Temple. Tattua said he had had a vision
while kneeling in the sanctum of the temple in front of the holy book, in which the great Guru Gobind Singh, astride his magnificent horse, the plume of his turban riding the wind, his imperious nose sharp as an arrow, had told him that his life’s task was to stop the flow of a mechanized mankind. Others claimed his jaywalking obsession came from the death of his mother under a rich man’s car on a country road near Patti. It didn’t matter what was true. What mattered was that Tattua ki chaal was a cheeky, graceful gauntlet thrown in the face of life, motorized transport, logic and odds, every day, several times a day.
Tattua had been forced to flee the city when a last-second dance across a speeding government Ambassador car led to a crash that killed four people, one of them the revenue commissioner’s daughter. Surfacing on the New Delhi railway station, he then upped his burden to taking on a much more implacable adversary than a mere road vehicle. No one knew if Tattua did eventually die under a train. As with most of the station rats, he just disappeared one day. By the time Chini arrived on the platform, Tattua had been gone for years. Some said he had been cut to pieces on the track one night after hours of smoking the foil, and as was their practice, the railway khakis had collected his body parts, stuffed them into his gunny sack, and dumped them at the farther end of Paharganj, outside their jurisdiction. Some said he had been taken by the mafia to Bombay where he now worked the drug trail. A few believed he had gravitated to the next level of his pledge and was now jaywalking in big airports, trying to startle the big birds as they roared in to take off or land.
At the back, away from the tracks, right below where they slept, was a park—well, not quite a park, just an open dusty lot, fringed by anaemic eucalyptus trees and some bushes of yellow oleander. For
two months every year, mostly in October-November, depending on what the priests decreed about the alignment of the stars, this lot became a veritable Kublai Khan’s banquet hall. Each day the lot was taken over by a new group, who set up the same-looking red-and-blue striped tents, spread the same red-and-blue frayed durries on the ground, and arranged the same ugly iron and wood tables, covered in starched but stained white sheets. In the near corner, where the tallest eucalyptus grew, sat huge gas stoves and massive steel containers for cooking and serving.