The Walls of Delhi (14 page)

The news caused a huge stir. The arrest of the fake Mohandas was printed on page one of the newspapers. It sent ripples not just through the Oriental Coal Mines, but among officials and union leaders and workers in all sorts of factories and public sector enterprises. Several officials and workers were suspended. Others went on extended holiday. Everywhere there was panic and confusion. Thousands of Bisnath-like individuals had stolen the identities, qualifications, and abilities of others in desirable residential colonies like Lenin Nagar, Gandhi Nagar, Ambedkar Nagar, Jawahar Nagar, Shastri, Nehru, and Tilak Nagar – and had worked in their places for years, earning thousands of rupees with each pay cheque.

It turned out that Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh, judge (first class), Anuppur (M.P.) had invoked his emergency security power, and he himself had conducted a ‘secret investigation' into the matter.

That night, he'd stayed up late reading. At nine in the morning he phoned his driver and instructed him to bring the government car that, up until then, he'd used only to drive to and from court. He made another call to H.S. Parasi (Harishankar Parasi), who was a public prosecutor, and a third call to S. B. Singh (Shamsher Bahadur Singh), who was the SSP of Anuppur. Each of the three officials set off to fulfill their respective duties with due diligence and faith. A fourth call he made to Harshvarddhan Soni.

‘Partner, go get some notarised paper and be on standby!'

Shamshed Bahadur Singh recounted that the judge went straight to A/11 Lenin Nagar, near Matiyani crossing. Bisnath was out with Vijay Tiwari doing some favour for a politician. The only one at home was Kasturi, aka Reunkadevi, whose rackets were the chit fund, social services, kitty parties, and money games. The judge asked her right off the bat her father's and mother's names; Kasturi madam, aka Renukadevi, having seen the siren mounted atop the government car, got nervous.

The judge's vehicle then left Lenin Nagar and began heading back along the Mirzapur-Banaras road. Exactly thirty-five kilometres later the car turned onto the dirt road that went toward the village of Awazapur. Half an hour later, the car pulled up in front of quite a grand house in Lankapur village. The judge only had two questions for Lalu Prasad Pandey and his wife, Jai Lalita. Number one, their own names and the names of their children.
And the second, the names and addresses of their sons-in-law. Then he instructed public prosecutor H.S. Parsai to get the notarised paper from Harshvarddhan Soni and take their sworn statements.

The judge's car then arrived at the home of the head of the village panchayat, where he took his and other witnesses' testimony.

The SSP had a huge smile on his face. ‘Fraudsters just can't think more than two steps ahead, and in the end, every last one of them gets caught. I called the SHO of Anuppur police station from Lankapur and told him to go to Bichiya Tola and Lenin Nagar to arrest Nagendranath and Bisnath, otherwise they would have escaped and caused lots of problems!'

The rest of the story is quite concise.

Harshvarddhan Soni and Mohandas were ecstatic with their victory. Kasturi danced and pirouetted throughout Purbanra. Once again Putlibai rummaged around the back of the rice bin until she found the bag of bisunbhog rice she'd stashed in there. The smell of the kheer being made with goat's milk, khandsari and bisunbhog filled every corner of the house. The myna bird used her tiny beak to help crack open the eggs in her nest, and the little chicks emerged, filling the rooms with their innocent chirping like a new kind of music.

The pain from Putlibai's rheumatism abated, and, for the first time in a long time, she swept the courtyard on her own. She sang with audible delight, but mixed in with the joyous bird-like voice was a sad note, too:

Harshvarddhan Soni told Mohandas that the next case he'd bring would be to get him his rightful job at the Oriental Coal Mines.
The court has confiscated all of your certificates, transcripts, and recommendations from Bisnath's service book. They'll be returned to you.
Mohandas embraced Harshvarddhan; his ravaged body was shaking, and he was getting choked up; tears of gratitude and joy flowed in equal measure, like a rain shower in the month of Shravan.

Biran Baiga hosted another all-nighter of feast and song and wine. Sitiya cooked a juicy pork dish made with mustard seed oil, garlic and onions, and garam masala. Three jugs of mahua were produced. This time, in addition to the dholak and manjira, Ram Karan brought a harmonium. Gopaldas, Biran, Bihari, Parmodi, and Mohandas all drank. Sitiya, Ramole, Kasturi, and Savitri also all took part in the libations. They sang and danced. Mohandas couldn't figure out how he managed to remember each song, one after the next; time simply came to a standstill.

This time Kasturi was the one who drank a little too much. Every few minutes she'd pull Mohandas over into her arms. ‘Hu Hu Tu Tu! Wanna play kabbadi with me? Hu Hu Tu Tu!' she said each time, tickling Mohandas.

‘Eh, scram, go back to Inspector Tiwari's cowshed!' Mohandas said, teasing her, and everybody thought this was the funniest thing.

Savitri chimed in. ‘Hey, check out Tiwari! The police inspector's shit his underwear!' This set off a bomb of hysteria that echoed around Purbanra the rest of the night.

Mohandas and Biran Baiga stood up together in the middle of the courtyard as if they were in a courtroom. The questioning commenced.

Mohandas: ‘You! What's your name? WHAT IS YOUR NAME? C'mon, tell the court, we don't have all day!'

Biran Baiga: ‘My name is Biran Baiga. And my father's name is Dindua Baiga! Dindua Baiga!'

Mohandas: ‘You! And What Is My Name? MY name? What IS it?'

Biran Baiga (driving his finger into his chest) ‘You sonofa-bitch bum! Your name is Mohandas! MOHANDAS! Mohandas Kabirpanthi Bansor!'

Mohandas: ‘And my father's name?'

Biran Baiga: ‘You father's dead! His name was Kabadas.'

Mohandas: ‘You! So if Mohandas is here, and my father Kabadas is up there, in heaven, then, Mr. Smartypants, who's the cuntworm sitting over there in jail in Anuppur?'

Birandas: (jumping up and down and clapping his hands) ‘That's fryface depot supervisor Bisnath! Fraudster! And his father's a two-time fraudster. His wife? Fraudster! And the bigwigs in Lenin Nagar who run the coal mine? All fraudsters!'

Parmodi, Sitiya, Bihari, Ramkaran, Ramoli, Savitri, and Gopaldas's laughter rang anew as they picked up the tempo on the dholak, manjira, and harmonium.

(Don't you think that amid all the pain and sorrow and bleak colours of this story little drops of joy have been interspersed? Don't you think so? Well, you're right. In the rough reality of the lives of the poor and victims of injustice, sometimes little bright colours flash. Like when combined forces of power and capital suddenly swoop down in a surprise attach on the myna
bird, utterly destroying her nest, and then all you can see are the feathers and drops of blood of the little chicks. These drops are never visible in the history book that's been written by the lackeys of a human resource minister of some political party. This is the job of a historian: to cover up the stains and spots at the edges of the clothing of his own time.)

The month was full of the unexpected. You won't find an account or news about what was happening 1050 kilometres from Delhi anywhere else outside this story. Here's a short summary of the circumstances that Mohandas's life passed through:

Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh, judge, first class, was all of a sudden transferred to Rajnandgaon, and he left Anuppur.

Ras Bihari Rai, Bisnath's lawyer, who was a well-known leader of the party in power and whose wife was a member of the city council, got both Bisnath and his father Nagendranath bailed out of prison with a single court hearing. Ras Bihari Rai was a skilled player of the politics of the day. As they were releasing Vishwanath aka Mohandas from prison after making bail, they cleverly wrote ‘Mohandas' and nothing else into the Police Record. Because the final sentence had yet to be delivered, Mohandas aka Vishwanath was not a convinced criminal in the eyes of a law, but just a suspect. In other words, in the official police documents, the two men who were released on bail from the prison at Anuppur were let out under the names Mohandas (aka Vishwanath) and Kabadas (aka Nagendranath). The names that were written after this on the release orders were scribbled so they weren't legible.

And then all of a sudden one day the news came from Rajnandgaon that judge G.M. Muktibodh had had a brain haemorrhage and was taken in a coma to the Apollo Hospital in
Bilaspur. At the hospital, Congress party stalwart Srikant Verma, and his dear old friend, Nemichand Jain, were there with him. But after seventy-two hours of a tough fight between life and death, Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh, judge, first class, breathed his last breath. And with it he said, ‘Hé Ram!'

With Harshvarddhan Soni, when he got the news of his death, was the inconsolable Mohandas Kabirpanthi Bansor of Purbanra village. With the judge's life had gone out his lone hope.

The most recent news is that Bisnath and his wife Renuka have been making a lot of money from their side businesses related to the coal mine. Bisnath and Vijay Tiwari are still in cahoots. These days he's openly come into politics and is running for a seat on the district council. And his caste brothers are also in positions of high power. They help him out in every way possible. He'll say, ‘Who is the real Mohandas? Who is the fraud? That's something that I and I alone will decide! That two-bit piggy shithead cast aspersions on my honour, and took the job I had fair and square. So now I'll show him what true force is!'

When I went back to my village last week I saw that the look on Harshvarddhan's face was of numbness. His eyes were red. He said, ‘I haven't slept the last three nights. I have no idea what I'm going to do. The people in Purbanra are telling the truth about Bisnath. The worst poisonous snake. A viper's viper.'

He let out a deep sigh. ‘Every couple of days Bisnath creates some kind of catastrophic criminal act in Lenin Nagar. Sometimes he'll grab a gold chain off someone, or else he'll beat someone senseless. And when someone owes money to the chitfund his wife runs, she'll have them beat up, walk right into
their house, and take whatever stuff she pleases. And then when a criminal complaint is lodged at the police station, it's done so in the name of Mohandas, since most of the people still know Bisnath as Mohandas. Then it's poor Mohandas, the real one, who gets arrested and dragged off by the Purbanra police.'

Harshvarddhan's eyes filled with tears of helplessness. ‘Bisnath colluded with police inspector Vijary Tiwari and bought off the guards at the station with food and wine, and now they've beaten Mohandas within an inch of his life. They broke his hands and feet and he can't walk. And four days ago his mother Putlibai fell into a well and died. Kasturi is cobbling together whatever she can to put bread on the table.'

I looked up; Mohandas was approaching, limping heavily. He was not wearing the washed-out, patched up pants and torn checked shirt, but only a loin-cloth. His hair had fallen out, and he wore cheap round eyeglasses. He walked slowly, using a walking stick, shuffling along like an old man.

‘Ram Ram, uncle!' he said upon seeing me, joining his palms together in greeting. The deep wrinkles on his face were a monument to his suffering and defeats. He looked like a very old man, maybe eighty or ninety. He sat down on the ground, using his walking stick as a support. But the gruff voice that came out of his mouth with a groan wasn't our local tongue, but Hindi, the ‘national language.' He said:

‘I take your hands and beg: please find a way to get me out of this. I am ready to go to any court and swear that I am not Mohandas. My father's name is not Kabadas, and he is not dead, he is alive. They really beat the hell out of me, the police did, on Bisnath's order. They broke my bones. It hurts to breathe it's so bad.'

I noticed his lips were cut badly and he was missing some teeth; they must have smashed them out in the police station. He could barely put two words together.

‘Whoever wants to be Mohandas, let him be Mohandas. I am not Mohandas. I never did a BA. Didn't come out on top of my class. Never was fit for work. Just want to live in peace. Leave me be, no more beatings. If you want something, take it. Take what you need and fill up your homes. But leave me to my life and toil. Uncle, please stand by my side.'

It came out that Mohandas's eleven-year-old son Devdas hadn't been home in ten days. Some said that Bisnath had him disappeared, others said he'd fled to Mumbai in fright.

Still others claim to have seen him in the jungles of Bastar.

(It was the time when at the top of a hillside near Bharuch stood a thirty-year-old Dhanuhar archer named Raghav. Night after night he'd stay up late whittling down shaft after shaft of bamboo into arrows. He drew the bowstring taut and shot arrows at the sky, then ran down the hill to retrieve the arrows that'd come back down.

Again and again and again – countless times he fired arrows at the sky and retrieved them from the dirt.

But then the arrows began to be submerged under water, and it became difficult to find them and pull them out. The fields of the valleys that lay between the mountains were filling up with water: inundated, a massive flood. Village after village began to go under, and trees, too. North and south and east and west were going under; all memories were going under.

Yet thirty-year-old Raghav kept shooting arrows into the sky and running down to retrieve them as long as he himself wasn't swept under.

Where is Raghav now? Just where he was, where there's now nothing but water. A vast, bottomless sea where electricity is created. There once was a hilsa fish in Bharuch. The greatest fish in the rivers of India, the most magnificent in the world. The hilsa is only able to survive in the fast moving current of a river.