The Walls of Delhi (8 page)

Kasturi was delighted to see Gopaldas. It had been a long time since a visitor had come from a village near her home. After offering him something to drink and sharing a smoke, Gopal told Mohandas that he'd been at the Oriental Coal Mines three days ago on business. While there, he found out that Bisnath
from Bichiya Tola had been working there under the name of Mohandas for the past five years as deputy depot supervisor, earning more than ten thousand a month. Gopaldas also found out that Bisnath's father Nagendranath had gone to the clerk in the recruitment office and wrangled Mohandas's employment letter out of him, then given it to his wayward son. Bisnath took advantage of the fact that the transcripts and diploma Mohandas had brought at the time of his interview didn't have his photos on them, so he presented himself as Mohandas, and put his own photos where Mohandas's photos would have been, then went to court and had all the documents notarised by the gazetted officer. Bisnath had transformed himself into Mohandas, son of Kabadas, caste Kabirpanthi Vishwakarma, and was taking home ten thousand a month as deputy depot supervisor, a position he filled with great confidence.

Gopaldas had seen Bisnath near the mine at a food stall drinking chai. He saw the plastic ID card hanging around his neck: it was Mohandas's name, but Bisnath's photo. And on top of that, everyone drinking chai with him was calling him ‘Mohandas.'

What's more, Bisnath had left his home in Bichiya Tola village four years ago and had moved with his entire family to the workers quarters, called Lenin Nagar, where his wife made more than a few rupees with her own small time loan sharking; she also ran a shady chit fund. It was bizarre how all Bisnath's fellow workers called him ‘Mohandas' and his wife Amita ‘Kasturi Madam.' Bisnath had not, like Mohandas, earned a BA, but rather was a tenth-grade drop-out; so rather than doing any work in the mine, he spent his time arse-kissing managers, skimming whatever coal he could, and busying himself with union politics.

Mohandas's mind was spinning as he heard what his brother-in-law was telling him. How could this happen? Even if the world's turned upside-down, how can one man become another? And like this, out in the open, in broad daylight? And not just for the afternoon, temporarily, but for four whole years? And yet, in his poverty and powerlessness, Mohandas – given the days that he'd seen and the old stories he'd heard from Kaba about his own life – began to feel as if the officers and the hakims and the wealthy and the party members were so powerful, they could turn anything into anything: a dog into an ox, a pig into a lion, a ditch into a mountain, a thief into a gentleman. Mohandas could hardly catch his breath. O guru, what kind of time are we living in when not one person in four long years has been able to step forward and say that the man working at the Oriental Coal Mines who calls himself Mohandas and earns ten thousand a month isn't Mohandas, but Bisnath; that his father isn't Kaba, he's Nagendranath, his wife isn't Kasturi, it's Amita Bhardwaj, his mother isn't Putlibai, but Renukadevi, who isn't from Purbanra village, but lives in Bichiya Tola? Who doesn't have a BA, but who dropped out of tenth grade?

Mohandas lost focus that day and kept stopping weaving the mats. His gaze wandered off and he became lost in thought. His hands slipped as he wove the bamboo, and he nearly cut his thumb with the sickle. Katuri kept an eye on him the whole time, knowing exactly the kind of roiling was going on inside. She took the knife from his hand and said, ‘The sun's a bit much today, why don't you wash up and have a rest?'

The next morning Mohandas caught the seven o'clock bus and set off for the Oriental Coal Mines. The night before he couldn't sleep. The bus arrived at the mine at half past ten.

Who could he go talk to? That was the first problem. He didn't know anyone. On top of that, the way he looked would make it hard for people to believe that he was the real Mohandas who'd graduated with a BA at the top of his class at M.G. College, and whose photo just a few years ago was in the newspaper. Another problem was that he didn't have any copies of the newspaper, and therefore wouldn't be able to point to the photo and say, ‘Look, that's me, Mohandas, son of Kabadas, resident of Purbanra, district Annuppur, Madhya Pradesh, the one who a few years ago got his BA at M.G. Degree College, the one who graduated at the top of his class and was number two in merit. See the resemblance? It's me, Mohandas!'

It wasn't easy, but Mohandas managed to sneak in through the gate and into the company compound. His jeans were torn at the knee, and were beginning to rip at the back, too, but Kasturi had patched those bits up with matching colours she'd used from scraps of fabric from a sari top or bedcover. Exposure to the elements and heat and cold and hunger and hard work had turned his skin a dark copper. Sorrow and calamity had scored his face with so many wrinkles that no one would ever believe he was younger than forty. Enduring want and quietly eating insult and injury had made the hair on his head and all over his body a little greyer. Mohandas was in his early thirties but looked as if he was in his fifties.

Mohandas stood in front of the same office where, four years ago, he'd brought his diploma and certificates, and where the employment clerk assured him that his name could never be crossed off the list since he'd had the highest marks for both the written and physical exams.

And sitting in the very same office was the very same clerk. He had a bigger chair now and a bigger desk in front of him to match; the air conditioner behind his desk provided him with a constant cool breeze. Mohandas stood in the doorway watching him busily eating tea biscuits and drinking chai, while two people sat in front of his desk chatting with him, as if they had all the time in the world.

At once the clerk noticed Mohandas, who quickly pressed his hands into a
namaskar,
and smiled a big smile with the hope that it'd jog the clerk's memory. But the clerk looked put out – maybe he didn't recognise Mohandas? He tried again, joined his hands again into a
namaste
and said brightly, ‘Sir, it's Mohandas...!' But by then the clerk had pressed the button beneath his desk that rang the bell. It had a hard clanging ring, and the underling appeared immediately. Mohandas couldn't make out exactly what the clerk said to him, but they were clearly words of scolding. He emerged from the room, drew the curtain, and looked Mohandas over from head to toe with a scowl. ‘What business do you have here? Go sit on the bench outside. How the devil did you get in here?' Mohandas wanted to tell the clerk that his name was Mohandas, and that four years ago he'd been offered a job here at the coal mine, and that all of his papers were sitting in that office, but then what happened was that some other man stole his name and stole the job ... But Mohandas's voice was too feeble, and the underling manhandled him over to the bench, and his utterances made no sense. There was a lump in his throat and he was stammering. Breaking free with one of his arms from the underling's grip he managed to spit out, ‘
Dada,
I need to see that clerk, just for a minute to pick up my papers and transcript.'

The underling more or less pushed him over onto the wooden bench that sat against the wall, turned around, and went back. Mohandas knew that he'd never be allowed back in; this was his last chance. He called after the man, who was just about to disappear inside the employment office.

‘Hey! HEY! Go tell that clerk that Mohandas, BA, is here, and he wants all the papers and certificates back he deposited here on 18 August 1997. What a bungle! Give you a nice room and big chair and then it's nothing but anarchy? Grab a piece of paper, take down my name. Then go show it to your boss!'

The underling's jaw dropped. Here was a guy dressed in rags who looked like a hobo, yet the language that came out of his mouth was quite lucid, even eloquent, and his manner equal to a educated manager, or clerk's.

The man remained planted in the doorway and just stared at Mohandas: his washed-out, patched-up jeans; his mended, dirty checked shirt; his balding head, hair that'd turned half-grey; his lustreless, burnt-copper face, criss-crossed with crooked wrinkles; deep-set eyes, gloomy and weak, as if they were seeing a reflection of themselves; his cheap sandals stuck to his feet, their ancient rubber molested by penury and despair, now turned into dirt and wood and paper.

‘You son-of-a-bitch!' the angry underling muttered under his breath. ‘You crazy bastard! Hey motherfucker, you think the big man will help your beggar butt?'

Mohandas surmised that the underling didn't really believe what he was saying, even though god himself knew it was all true, so he stood up from the bench and walked toward the man with sure steps, maybe even with a little swagger. He had in mind that he would go in and try to explain that it wasn't just
that Bisnath had taken him for a ride, but had played the entire Oriental Coal Mines for a fool.

The way Mohandas was striding toward him, the impatience and swiftness, the taut wrinkles on his face that mirrored the distress in his mind, his deep-set eyes radiating an agitation, his dry, crusted, quivering lips, and the extreme upset in his words: the underling was scared out of his wits.

‘Whoa! Whoa! OK! One more step and you're out the door! Stop right there, old man, stop, STOP!'

‘B-B-Buddy! Brother! Just hear me out...' Mohandas said, a little on the loud side, trying to calm things down a little. But there was too much desperation and not enough supplication in his voice, and things got worse. The man straightened his back and screamed, ‘Get out! Stop right where you are or I'll rip you a new hole, old man! One more step and out on your arse!'

Hearing the shouting and screaming, four or five guys emerged from the office. They were dressed like higher-ups, and gave Mohandas the hard once-over.

‘Who is this? How'd he get in here?'

‘Where's security officer Pandey? He chews tobacco and sleeps on the job!'

‘Who's on guard today at the main gate? Show me the log!'

‘Get him out of here!'

‘Isn't this peachy? Any old fart could sneak in, take out a gun and start shooting –
bang! bang!
– and then what? Set off a bomb maybe!'

‘Hand ‘em over to the police! Sharmaji, call the police, dial 1-0-0 on your mobile!'

Nobody was listening to Mohandas; he was just being pushed around in a shower of slaps, fists, and elbows raining on
his head, back, shoulders, and face. Mohandas covered his head with his hands to protect his eyes, ‘Please! Just hear me out, hey, stop hitting me, hey!'

Meanwhile, a small group of guards had come running. One was carrying a twelve gauge double-barrelled shotgun, the kind bank guards carry. The rest had batons. Shivers went up Mohandas's spine; stars from the new moon night on the banks of the Kathina flashed before his eyes, the celestial bodies screaming and groaning, then falling like shooting stars, breaking into pieces. A hard blow struck him unannounced and he let out a scream that sounded like a bound pig getting its throat slit. The sound reached the coal miners, who came out and gathered to watch the show.

(Pay attention, this story takes place at the same time as when that all-seeing Hindi guru was doing you-know-what to a woman in his ascetic quarters, and, thousands of miles and a few oceans away, the US president was sitting in a chair in the White House doing the same thing. When latter-day sea pirates dragged a descendant of Gilgamesh out from a hole near the Tigris and Euphrates where he'd hidden for his life, shining a flashlight in his mouth, counting his teeth, looking for a cyanide pill.

It was the time when the amount of power someone had was, by the law of a kind of backward ratio, equalled by the same degree to which that person had become out of control, violent, barbarous, hellishly immoral. And the same force applied to states, political organisations, castes, religious organisations, and individuals.)

Mohandas stood outside the main gate of the Oriental Coal Mines in the middle of the road. He'd simply stopped thinking. A frightful near-silence buzzed all around. He didn't realise he
was standing in the middle of the street with trucks, Tempos, and cars honking their horns and whizzing by. He still had that thirty-rupee wallet in his pocket that he'd bought when he thought the job was his. In it was one hundred and seventy rupees, all from his labour and toil – this is what he had left, minus the sixty-five for his bus fare. Finding his wallet still there when he reached into his pocket, his mind eased a bit. He suddenly felt the sun's heat and moved quickly to the side of the road. He was hungry.

While eating at the Fatso's Vaishnava Pure Vegetarian Food Stall he found out that although there were two state transport buses only one private line had an evening service to the area near his village, Purbanra. He decided to take a look around Lenin Nagar, the coal miners' colony. He might see someone he knew, maybe someone he studied with at college, maybe someone else.

He lost his way in Lenin Nagar. It was afternoon, all of the apartment buildings looked alike, and everyone was at work in the mines. Only women and children were at home. A school bus was making stops and unloading schoolchildren who were walking on ahead. Lenin Nagar was an enormous residential colony. If I hadn't had the wool pulled over my eyes and been played for a fool, Mohandas thought, I would have been living in one of these flats with my family, bringing home a pay cheque; Devdas and Sharda would have been going to school wearing little uniforms and shoes and socks and getting off the school bus. We'd have a fan or cooler to help us sleep at night. But how totally ludicrous that in order to find out where Bisnath's flat was, he'd have to ask for his own name.

‘Hi there friend, can you tell me where Mohandas lives?'

‘Who? You mean supervisor sahib?'

‘That's the one!'

‘Go straight ahead, make a left at the fourth bylane, it's the third house, A/11, next to Dr Janardan Singh's flat.