Authors: Aatish Taseer
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.
18
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.