Authors: Aatish Taseer
‘Who’s that?’ I whispered to Aakash.
Aakash looked over, readjusting his balance.
‘Her son,’ he whispered, adding, ‘my double,’ with a smile.
But for the colour of his eyes, he looked nothing like Aakash. The begum must have heard us, must have felt Aakash move in her.
‘What’s all this khoospoos you’re doing?’ she snapped.
‘Nothing, Begum,’ Aakash yelled back. ‘Just pointing out the photo of your son.’
‘Oh,’ the begum said, and lowered her head. ‘Poor boy, working as a chowkidar.’
Aakash put both his thumbs to his temples and wiggled his fingers in a child’s gesture of defiance.
When he was near climax, he rested his arm on my shoulder and began again to massage the back of my neck. His rough wrinkly fingers pressed painfully as he came nearer an orgasm. When at last he pulled out, in one movement tearing off the condom and thumbing out long strands of semen over the begum’s back, I could hardly stand the pain. I pushed his hand away and he fell forward, dropping his body over the begum’s for a moment and laughing euphorically.
‘Slowly, slowly,’ the begum cooed, as if glad to finally have some physical contact.
‘Begum,’ Aakash said in a broken voice, ‘can I ask you something? You won’t take it badly?’
‘Tell me, baba.’
‘I’m starving. Is there anything to eat? Brad, butter, a desi omelette?’
‘Baba!’ the begum said indulgently. ‘Is this even something to ask for! Of course your begum will make you an omelette. You’ll take green chillis in it, no?’
‘Yes, Begum. You’re the best.’
The begum rolled Aakash off her back, rose agilely and picked her way past me.
I sat down on the bed next to Aakash. He pulled his jeans back on and sat up. I thought that he spoke indirectly to me when he said, ‘Don’t mind what happened earlier. I have this problem routinely in my life. When I get involved with someone, I burrow into their mind. They can’t get me out and they start behaving irrationally.’
‘What was this deep, dark secret she kept going on about?’
‘Nothing, man, nothing. She’s mad. But let’s leave all these serious things. We had fun, right?’
A few minutes later the begum appeared in the doorway with a plastic plate. As she handed it to him, Aakash looked up at her with adoring eyes. ‘Food cooked by Begum’s own hands,’ he muttered, using Bollywood lines as he tore up the omelette with his fingers. She rested her palm on his shoulder. He sat crouched over the omelette, rolling up the long shreds he’d made before putting them into his mouth. Then lips glistening, chewing noisily, he looked up at us with the glazed contentment of cattle drinking. His self-absorption was that of a man who would have been truly amazed to learn that either of us had any plans other than to watch him wolf down a post-coital omelette.
My phone beeped. Sanyogita. ‘Baby, off to bed. Will you be home soon?’ I put it away, feeling an urgent longing for her bed and her warm, sleepy presence near me, washing clean the night’s exposure. Aakash, licking his chops, looked resentfully over at the challenge to his centrality. The begum’s nails drooped off his shoulder. The Alsatian had also now nosed its way in, and with its head edgewise, sniffed, and began licking clean Aakash’s empty plate.
11
Delhi in that last week of May, despite the great heat, was filled with flowers. There were burnt orange blossoms on the gulmohar’s fern-like leaves, mauve tendrils fountaining from the jarul’s thatched canopy, and the blaze itself seeming to reside in the laburnum’s yellow flowers.
On my last afternoon I sat with Zafar, reading the Urdu newspaper. The affection that had grown between us had softened his insistence on teaching me to write. I’d mastered the script’s meaningful single and double dots and mysterious elisions, and had started reading well. But if I ever confused an ‘n’ with a ‘b’, he would croak irritably. If only I’d followed his advice and learned to write first, none of this would be a problem.
The newspaper was a thin, oily rag with splashes of bright colour and ink that blackened your fingers. The sessions with Zafar had reinforced my vocabulary in definite ways. I drank in ordinary words like ‘often’, ‘perhaps’, ‘unintentionally’ and ‘complete’. Simple words; easy to take for granted till lost and regained in another language. The newspaper offered them up daily, and reading it also became a way for Zafar and me to discuss the week’s events.
For months now the country had been seeing waves of new motiveless crime. In Bombay, there were the beer-can murders. A bearded jihadi wandered the city’s streets, hunting down homosexuals. His calling card was a can of Kingfisher left by the bodies of his victims. Ra was hysterical about copycat murders in Delhi, now seeing its own incidents of brand-new crime in its satellite towns. In Sectorpur there was a flesh-eating serial killer in whose oven the skeletal remains of women and children had been found. And in Phasenagar there was a double homicide. A fourteen-year-old girl had been found with her throat slashed while her parents slept in the next room. When the police arrived, ready to arrest the servant, they found him face down in a pool of his own blood. The death of their natural suspect threw their investigation into disarray. A day later, the girl’s father was arrested. He was said to have killed her for threatening to expose a wife-swapping arrangement with his best friend. The TV channels fed the public each detail in hourly intervals; the city was mesmerized. There was in the details an inexplicable…
‘… vehshat,’ Zafar offered.
‘What?’
‘Vehshat,’ he repeated.
The sound that gave the word its ring was ‘ehsh’. It had the same casual violence of words like lash and stash, but the ‘eh’ sound was less direct, less open, oblique somehow. It was a word that seemed to convey meaning before I knew what it meant; it rhymed with dehshat, terror, and began almost like vaishya, whore. But Zafar was stuck; he looked through three dictionaries without finding a synonym I could understand. The badly printed Urdu–English dictionary offered ‘wild’ and ‘savage’, but when I translated that back into Urdu for Zafar, he said that was wrong. We often ended up in these hopeless circles. I didn’t understand his Urdu explanations and he didn’t understand the dictionary enough to confirm or reject its synonym. So vehshat lingered, full of suggestiveness but without clear meaning. And yet it seemed so right, detonating from Zafar’s lips as soon as he read the newspaper. The power of its effect on both him and me, and the lack of a synonym to describe that effect, made Zafar say more.
He seemed to measure me up before revealing what was on his mind. Then, as if resigned to the risk of being misunderstood, he said, ‘There’s a vehshat deep within this country. It comes, I think, from the religion. Or, perhaps, because the socially conscious religions, Christianity and Islam, never gained a firm enough footing. They could never close over the history of animalism and sacrifice. The land and people of this country retain this memory. And it gives them this capacity, a capacity for vehshat.’
Zafar treated me like a Muslim. The hunted-minority expression widened his eyes and stilled his lips. ‘The land is stained,’ he muttered. ‘It has seen terrible things: girl children sacrificed, widows burned, the worship of idols. The people in their hearts do not fear God. Their law is not theirs, you see. It was first the Muslim law and then it was the English. And because the law is alien, they can always shrug it off and the vehshat returns.’
I turned absent-mindedly to the paper and was leafing through its greasy pages when I saw a picture of Chamunda. It was a grainy image of her in red and green astride a lion. If not for the distinctiveness of her features, her comic-book lips, her vast eyes, I might not have recognized her. She wore a gold crown and carried a trident. At her ankleted feet, a priest knelt over a Shiva linga, smearing it orange. Garlands of jasmine, roses and marigolds were tied tightly around its base. I couldn’t read the caption and asked Zafar for help.
‘They have made the BJP Chief Minister of Jhaatkebaal, Chamunda Devi, into the goddess Durga and are worshipping her in temples,’ Zafar sneered.
I laughed, and before I could check myself I’d said, ‘I know her. She’s Sanyogita’s aunt.’
Zafar looked sadly at me, as if I’d let him down by this admission of closeness to the Hindu nationalist party. Though it was well before the usual time, he asked that we take a cigarette break. I was suddenly aware of how frail he was. This awareness, alongside the fineness of his manners, the umbrella, the little cap, the pen always in place, the safari suit impeccable, made me feel that I hadn’t so much offended him as manhandled him.
On the balcony, he took out his blue packet of Wins and offered me one. From inside the packet came a black windproof lighter with a near-invisible flame. He liked to tell me that the cigarettes were Italian and had travelled via the east, Burma in particular, to India. But today he just smoked quietly, looking out at the large trees shielding us from the sun.
Long black pods hung like many walking sticks from the branches of a laburnum. On the edge of the canopy, yellow blossoms pushed reluctantly through like paint squeezed from a sponge. Their bright colour against the black of the pods and the dull green of the canopy made them seem of a different material from the rest of the tree, more like points of sunlight than flowers.
‘Amaltas,’ Zafar said, ‘the true beginning of the heat.’
And as if retreating from its glare, he put out his cigarette and went inside. I was studying his tufts of dyed black hair, dotted with maroon sores, when my eye trailed along his neck to a point between its base and the shoulder blade. There, off to the right, and seeming to catch a different light, was a small but distinct swelling. I reached forward and touched it. Zafar winced in pain. It was hard and knobby, somewhere between bone and cartilage.
‘What’s that?’
‘I’m becoming a camel,’ Zafar chuckled, his eyes betraying his fear.
‘This isn’t a joke. What is that? Have you shown it to a doctor?’
He took out a soiled and folded piece of paper from his pocket. It read:
Biopsy report: gross appearance, irregular greyish-white tissue along with dirty brown debris received, total measuring 1 x 1.5 cm
Histopathological report: microsection shows features of sebaceous cyst no e/o tb or malignancy seen
Diagnosis: sebaceous cyst
Dr Lipike Lipi, pathologist
‘They say it’s benign, but I’ll need an operation. I’ll have it while you’re away.’
‘Does it hurt?’
‘Only when touched. The problem is it makes my reading and writing work, which I do on the floor, quite difficult. You can say that it’s just part of old age.’
‘You’re not so old, Zafar. You’re younger than my mother.’
‘Yes, but life…’
‘… has made you old,’ I completed for him.
He laughed. Then as if wishing neither to alarm me nor to let me make light of what he had said, he added, ‘The place I live has made me old.’
The place he lived! How embarrassing that I hadn’t seen it. This attitude was a remnant of my childhood in Delhi, not so much a lack of curiosity as blindness. I resolved to go. Then a shudder went through me at the thought of this place that gave Zafar his sores, and now this new deformity. It was one other thing, like the heat, that he would bear while I was away.
The vehshat, the vehshat!
Sanyogita was part of a circle of creative-writing professionals called Emigrés at Home. Their weekly meeting coincided with our last night in Delhi. They met at a different group member’s house each week, and as Sanyogita had not offered hers so far, she decided to host this last meeting in the Jorbagh flat. Her friends Mandira and Ra were part of the group and so the meeting was also a farewell party of sorts. When I went to have a shower after my lesson with Zafar, Vatsala and Sanyogita were preparing the flat. Lamps were coming on; aubergine dips were being laid out; some light Brazilian music had begun to play. I knew that this kind of activity, reminiscent of her London life, meant a lot to Sanyogita. We had been through a difficult period that hadn’t been resolved as much as it had been presumed to end with our departure; I told myself in the shower that this would be the first active night of repair. It would start with my showing support for the creative writers. Her meetings with them were an assertion of her life in Delhi as separate from mine; but Sanyogita, who encouraged me in everything I did, would have liked nothing more than my endorsement for her ‘thing’.
When I came out of the shower the heat was breaking in a dust storm. It had stopped the day’s natural decline and cast a greenish-purple twilight hour over the city. After raging in the canopies of big Delhi trees, the storm entered the garden terrace, sweeping up fine dust off the floor, roughing up dahlias and denuding the dead frangipani of its last leaves.
In the lamp-lit room the meeting had begun. The people assembled were mostly older women in ethnic and tribal-print saris, with hair greying in buns for political reasons. There were also a handful of very tall, very thin young men with bad posture, as well as one or two older men in cotton kurtas and jeans. One dark, lightly bearded, young writer with sharp features sat at the feet of a woman with a red oversized bindi. She rested a wrist, heavy with silver bangles, on his shoulder as he stared morosely at the pages in his lap. His uncut toenails were visible in the blue rubber chappals he wore. The intensity of his stare, and a feeling that I knew him from somewhere, prevented me at first from listening to what the woman introducing him was saying.
In a far corner of the room, Sanyogita beamed at me, patting the empty space next to her. As I walked across the room, I heard the older woman, with her hand beating lightly against the young writer’s collarbone, say that he had attended a creative-writing programme in America; he was among the group’s most significant talents, best representing its theme, ‘Children of a post-colonial god: Indians feeling foreign in India’.
He was to read his story ‘The Assignation’.
The young man looked up at the room with dim, sad eyes. Prognathous, his smile, and later soft words, were almost lost in the cavity between his projecting lower jaw and face.
‘ “The Assignation”,’ he repeated in a south Delhi American accent.
‘Where’s your story?’ I whispered to Sanyogita.
‘I’m not reading today,’ she said, clutching my hand. ‘This is the last one.’
‘There’ve already been a few?’
‘Yes, a story and a poem. Now listen.’
Mandira and Ra, who were sitting next to each other, looked over. Mandira smiled; Ra clenched a fist into the air in a gesture of affection, then mouthed, ‘Pay attention to this. It’ll be really good. He’s a new voice out of Sectorpur.’
‘Has everyone read it already?’ I said to Sanyogita. ‘Shh, baby. No. Listen.’
The creative writer began: ‘Winter in Delhi. The street was enveloped in a stagy mist, harbouring pink bougainvillea. Men outside the teashop acted their parts, wrapping scarves around their faces and rubbing their hands. The hard-bellied owner, looking down at them over a roaring blue flame, handed out cups of tea as though moving chess pieces. An astrologically auspicious window to marry had opened and in many houses fairy lights hung from the trees, white shamianas sprang up and tinny music tore out of concealed speakers. I had lived unseasonably since my return, forgetting what the winter meant. But as the city awoke inevitably to the season, these reminders of my own long history there pierced the haze of the past several months.
‘I entered Lodhi Gardens through the park’s old entrance. Its British name, Lady Willingdon Gardens, was engraved on stone pillars flanking the locked iron gate. An unsteady, bright green turnstile had been installed next to it. White cars belonging to politicians, with red sirens and black cat commandos, were parked boldly outside where some variety of municipal work was forever under way. To enter the park, I had to sidestep thin ladies in bright colours, carrying shallow dishes of cement to and from a mound of mud half-filled with water, and men, despite the cold, in fraying vests, digging soft earth out of the pavement.
‘A path of concrete discs led down an avenue of white-trunked palms. On the left, the rough, red, crenellated walls of a tomb ran along a strip of clumpy grass. The tombs were bare, scarred and not beautiful, but faultless as ornaments for a park. One emerged now, with the remains of glazed turquoise tiles hanging like dead skin from its rough surface, evoking a Turkic memory deep within the Indian plain.
‘There were new faces in Lodhi Gardens, less serious walkers whom the summer heat had kept away. Among the usual women in salwar kurtas and sneakers, couples canoodling under trees and idle youth walking hand in hand, there were tourists crossing the paths of fast walkers, social ladies in velvety tracksuits and Delhi queens.
‘My walk was just beginning to gather pace, when passing one of the darker peripheries of the park, I noticed a slender young man watching me. I was struck by the fineness of his features and, despite his obvious poverty, his vanity and attention to style. He wore flared jeans and a close-fitting off-white shirt. He smiled first, not a bitter, gay smile, but a dark, malevolent smile. I returned it with a macho smirk saved only for bold advances from unlikely people. This seemed to register with the young man because he laughed out loud and approached in a dainty swagger. As he came out of the shadows, I marvelled at his physical beauty. His face had a Nepalese cast; he had dark smooth skin, a clean hairless neck and a small, precise mouth. His poverty though, was visible in his stained teeth and the murky whites of his light eyes.