The Walls of Delhi (17 page)

The tape deck was still blaring music; twenty-year-old
Shobha hiccupped between her little sobs. ‘You can do to me what the inspector and builder do to me and I won't say a word. If it hurts, I won't cry, I won't scream. I'll stop the blood, I won't allow myself to bleed. I'll clean everything up without a fuss, no one will know. I'll just keep smiling. You can tear me to bits and I'll keep smiling. I'll stay by your side and serve your every need. I'll nurse you when you get sick, soothe your body with massage. Do with me whatever you want, your heart's desire – I won't stop you. If you bring someone else I'll serve her too. Just get me out of this trap.' Shobha had gripped Chandrakant's shirtsleeve as if she would never let go, as if it were a root on a riverbank she suddenly found, and clung to, like life itself, in spite of being swept under by the current.

Listening to twenty-year-old Shobha, nineteen-year-old Chandrakant felt for the first time he wasn't just a servant in the contractor's employ. He could be more, and this thought gave rise to a kind of self-confidence he'd never had. Just then, Ramakant appeared. He saw Shobha attached to Chandrakant's sleeve, sitting close in the back seat of the car, telling him things, crying. In one fell swoop he opened the door, seized Shobha, and dragged her out. ‘Did you come out here to feed him or fuck him, you whore. Haven't had enough yet?'

This was that same violent night when the contractor shredded Shobha's rectum with a beer bottle and she passed out from the bleeding. That night was also the first time Chandrakant heard her scream. A scream that carried so much pain it pierced the closed car window and even Chandrakant's eardrum. He panicked, sat up, and switched off the music. And for the first time he rolled down the window and stuck his head outside.

Inside, they had switched off the light; all there was to see was shifting shadows in the dark. He listened, but the only thing he could make out was the fearsome growling of wild animals issuing from inside the house, and it sounded as if they had found their prey and were tearing it to bits in a frenzy. For the first time, he despaired of Shobha's fate, she who had just a few minutes ago clung to his shirtsleeve, whose tears still moistened the same sleeve, whose curry and roti he had just finished eating. The image of her tearful face flashed before his eyes, and he felt as if she were still there with him. Chandrakant thought, I will absolutely help her out of that trap and lift her out of the pit.

Fear, however, reared its head inside of nineteen-year-old Chandrakant. The inspector and contractor were very powerful. He had seen their acts of barbarity with his own eyes. He knew from conversations with them and by the way they talked about places like Lucknow, Bhopal, Bombay, Delhi, and Calcutta that their influence stretched far and wide. They could get to wherever they wanted to go. And they would get to wherever he took this girl: the inspector, the contractor, their flunkeys – they would find them, there was nowhere to hide.

Chandrakant was in a tangle of fear and nerves and worry. That's why when he fled the house in Jalgaon with Shobha, he had wrapped a towel around his face and covered his body with a sheet. Shobha, however, beamed non-stop with a joy that bordered on rapture. As the train left Sarani station with the two safely inside their compartment, Shobha stowed her trunk and bundle and Chandrakant's bag underneath the berth with such delicacy and care it was as if she would make her new home right there on the train with Chandrakant – as if she was going to light a little cooking stove on the floor of the train and start
a household. The carriage in which the two passengers rode rumbling along the iron rails wasn't made of wood, glass, and steel, but was transformed into a simple courtyard of fragrant adobe, where sweet spicy smells mixed with the rising smoke of the cooking stove, where a twenty-year-old girl, leisurely humming a song, rolled out the roti, fully absorbed in her work.

Something in this was quite pleasing to Chandrakant; time and again he wanted to break into song. What that pleasing something was, however, he wasn't able to fully comprehend.

Ah ha! So this is what had been so pleasing to Chandrakant that day on the moving train, the thing he wasn't able to fully understand.

It was some ten days after they found the half flat in the Jahangirpuri neighbourhood of Delhi at E-3/1, lane seven. The two of them had spent the first few days purchasing household goods for their mini-place, cleaning and setting up house. Chandrakant had found work as a shop assistant in a department store in Vijaynagar, which is also known as Kingsway Camp. Vijaynagar was no more than six kilometres from Jahangirpuri, with plenty of buses at the Aazadpur bus stand headed that way. He set off for work at six in the morning, came back at two in the afternoon for lunch, and returned to work at three thirty. It was nearly nine at night by the time he came back for good. Shobha had no idea how much money she had run off with from Sarani – it had easily covered the stove, fan, curtains, tarp, tin trunk, sheets and blankets, cup and saucer sets, pressure
cooker, thali dishes, glasses, food staples, tea and sugar, and all other household necessities. Smiling, she plunged her hand into her rainbow flower vinyl purse (a treasure-chest as bountiful as Tutankhamen's), and withdrew as much money as she pleased.

Day three after their arrival in Delhi Shobha began calling Chandakant ‘Chandu' while he continued calling Shobha Shobha. Chandrakant began to get a little worried watching Shobha buy so much stuff, but she just scooped her hand into the flowered purse and said, ‘Don't worry, Chandu! No worries at all! I hit the big one with Ramakant and inspector and contractor's cash.'

It was a Monday, when the bazaar at Vijaynagar was closed and Chandrakant had the day off.

He stretched out on the ground in the little room and began listening to the radio.
Oh don't shake down the apples from my tree! A little thorn will break the skin in a flash!
Every once in awhile he joined in. As he sang along, Shobha's voice rang in from outside, ‘Nice voice, Chandu, it's like you're Kishore Kumar singing along with Lata Mangeshkar! Today's a singing kind of day!'

Chandrakant gazed outside, transfixed. Shobha was sitting next to the tap on the ‘balcony' bathing, rubbing the soles of her feet with a little pumice stone, her sari bunched up to her thighs. As she poured water over her head with the red plastic mug, it was as if her sari was dissolving in the water, the sari turning to liquid and washing over her skin in glistening colours, clinging tightly to her body, revealing more and more of her wet form.

Chandrakant felt a lump in his throat, his voice began to crack, and so he stopped singing along with the radio and started
staring at Shobha. His gaze must have burned into her backside; she turned around suddenly. ‘What happened, Mr. Mohammed Rafi crooner man?' she teased. ‘Lose your voice? Cat got your tongue, Chandu? Feeling shy?'

He didn't say a word, but just kept staring. Lather ran down her face, little white soap bubbles popped on her closed eyelids, she couldn't see a thing. This was the first time Chandrakant could observe her the way he wanted for as long as he wanted to. Beneath the folds of her sari, she lathered her chest, bar of soap in hand.

Chandrakant realised for the first time how huge her eyes were, just like the actress Hema Malini's, but bigger, even bigger.

They had been living together in the half flat for ten days, and he had known her even longer, from before, in Sarani, but he had never really looked at her body and her eyes as he did now. Chandrakant felt embarrassed for having spent so much time with Shobha – for having lived so long – without ever having been as close as he was now to the kind of body and shape of eyes that this girl had.

And how this girl looked though the soap lather that glittered like dewdrops, how it took his breath away, this was a new sensation.

Shobha stood up in her dripping wet sari and began drying her hair with a towel.

The magnetic field that originated from the water tap and enveloped him was also something new. It was like a zap from inside inducing him toward her with full force. His mind was in a bad way. He could see only colours swimming in front of his eyes, like the soap bubbles that floated in the air.

He walked up behind Shobha and clasped her around the
waist, then lifted her back into the half flat, the ten-by-seven ‘room' that, for the moment, was the Delhi home of these two winged creatures.

Shobha said nothing. She was still wet; her hair too, eyes closed, face flushed with a flame that slowly let its heat seep over her body, and into her blood, until heat rose from her skin and met Chandrakant's lips. Not a drop of dew escaped his waiting mouth while hands explored every place on Shobha's body, tracing her wet skin.

The little mat on the floor beside the trunk, in the cramped half flat, was wringing wet. And atop that wet rug Chandu and Shobha seized one another as if at the epicentre of a consuming blaze. Soap bubbles of all hues seeped through the room, while outside on the balcony it wasn't water that gushed from the tap and noisily filled the bucket, but a rainbow of colour.

Shobha felt as if she was sinking into a deep dream on a magic carpet, not just lying on a rug. Her wet sari lay to the side, while atop her body was a blushing nineteen-year-old boy, smiling nervously, rather than the old, savage inspector, or contractor, or the husband she had been made to marry. That night in Sarani, she had grabbed hold of the edge of the rope that sprang from the smile of the boy born while eating her homemade curry and roti. And now it looked as if she might make it out alive.

It was as if the mouth of nineteen-year-old Chandrakant, whom she had begun to call Chandu, was still stuffed with the bits of her food, hungry and blushing as he smiled. Overcome with love for Shobha, he gathered her tangled hair in his hands and kissed her feverishly.

After that Monday, some thirty years ago, and a mere ten
days after the two of them had moved to their half flat at E-3/1, bylane number seven, Jahangirpuri, Shobha had begun referring to the covering on the floor as the carpet rather than a rug. She hummed while she worked, and after Chandrakant left for work in Vijaynagar, she sang duets with Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle on the radio.

Shobha prepared food for the two of them, peeled and chopped and sliced the vegetables, did their laundry, took naps, while Chandrakant swept her up and onto the magic carpet where the two of them would make love in a blaze of heat. Like this, years passed, Shobha grew plump, Chandrakant's hair thinned and turned grey, both of them sometimes fell ill, then got better, all the while and for thirty years playing the nonstop game of fanning the flames atop their magic carpet.

Shobha got pregnant seven times. She registered with the government hospital in Aadarsh Nagar, stitched and sewed clothes and booties and a bed for the baby, and ate and drank with great precaution. But either she miscarried, or the baby succumbed to an illness a few months after birth – each and every time. Chandrakant and Shobha were devastated. They decided that the mosquitoes and bacteria from the sewage gutter in front of their house had infected the babies with some illness; a thick, damp, and often strong stench came through their windows from the gutter. During the monsoon season, earthworms, centipedes, millipedes, snails, and frogs would crawl or hop from the gutter into their flat. One time when Shobha and Chandrakant were deep in the middle of playing their favourite game on the magic carpet, Shobha screamed when she saw a baby snake slithering on the ground off to her left. Another
time it was a boa constrictor that sprang out from behind a box. Things got even worst during the rainy season – spiders were everywhere.

Both of them wished to move somewhere else, somewhere clean and tidy. But as time went on, rents began to soar. Chandrakant had always been on the lookout for another job or additional income, but nothing ever materialised. His boss at the shop, Gulshan Arora, was a good man, and no other shopkeeper would have paid a better salary. Over the thirty years, Arora had become an elderly seventy-year-old. Both his daughters had been married off, and he had one son who ran a small travel agency in Paharganj. Father and son didn't get along, and the son didn't care about the father's shop. The son, too, was already married, and had for the past several years waited for his father to die so he could sell the Kwality Departmental Stores. Gulshan Arora seemed to have an inkling of his son's wishes: time and again after a serious illness he returned from the brink of death, as if to dash his son's hopes. Gulshan Arora placed great faith in Chandrakant, since he didn't have any other option. The store limped along, but Arora still had to pay expenses.

Gulshan Arora was by then totally alone; his wife had died a dozen or so years ago. He had detained Chandrakant at his house on several occasions for late-night rum-drinking and chicken-eating sessions. He told Chandrakant not to worry about his inevitable death: he had left the store to his younger daughter, and had made a provision in his will for Chandrakant to the amount of 200,000 rupees. After the third or fourth drink, Gulshan Arora got animated and waxed philosophical. Chandrakant was aware that his boss, in spite of his age, brought home call girls, and was continuously taking herbal supplements
and vitamin boosters called ‘Lion Life,' ‘Shot Gun,' and ‘Hard Rock Candy Man' – these were the days before anyone had heard of Viagra or 40-60 Plus.

Chandrakant, while listening to his seventy-year-old boss's elaborate stories, would often begin to long for the man's death – and just then, Gulshan Arora by some means sensed his thoughts, smiled from ear to ear, and said, ‘Chandu! Enough with your dreaming of my death. My father was eighty-two when he came here from Lahore in '47, and when he died in '74, he was over a hundred and ten. The neighbourhood had a huge celebration for his funeral procession, and we even hired the Daulatram Band and gave away endless sweets.'