In the City a Mirror Wandering

by Upendranath Ashk

  1 A narrow, dead-end lane.

  3

  ‘Oh, hello there, Chetan bhai, how are you?’

  Chetan turned and saw that it was Badda.

  He and Anant had come out from Khoslon ki Gali and were walking towards the bazaar when Badda leapt forward, slapped Chetan on the shoulder with his wide hand and asked how he was doing. Chetan was not in the mood to run into Badda. He felt quite distracted. Anant had to go to Chowk Sudan and Chetan had thought he would go meet up with old friends and, if possible, take a turn through Puriyan Mohalla and Kot Kishanchand as well.

  ‘When did you get back from Shimla?’ asked Badda.

  Chetan stopped. ‘So, Badda, how are you?’ he asked.

  Badda’s real name was Nihalchand. He was around the same height as Chetan, but with a slightly broader build, a wide forehead and salt-and-pepper hair, despite his youth. He wore a dirty kameez and patched tahmad.

  ‘Great, thanks,’ he said, smiling slightly.

  ‘So, did you take the Matric again this year?’ asked Chetan.

  ‘Did he take it!’ retorted Anant, with a mischievous laugh. ‘This fool actually did something amazing. He passed in the second division.’ And he gave Badda an appreciative slap on the back.

  Badda grinned widely. Chetan was just about to congratulate him when someone called out from behind: ‘Ask him his roll number.’

  The three of them turned around and saw Hansa of the Jhamans, who lived in the same gali as Badda.

  ‘Why, it’s 4229!’ blurted Badda.

  ‘And Debu Kana says you said it was 4226 at first. When he asked around and found out that was someone else’s number, you told him it was 4229.’

  Suddenly Badda stopped. He grimaced, his nostrils flared, his lips began to tremble and, cursing Debu Kana fulsomely, he cried out, ‘That mother— is lying!’

  They had turned from the gali towards the bazaar, where Ramditta the sweet-seller’s shop sat right across from Harlal Pansari’s grocery. Actually, in Kallowani Mohalla, there were three galis, two chowks, and one long, wide gali, through the middle of which flowed a narrow drain. This gali turned to the left at the end of Bajiyanwala Bazaar. Ramditta’s sweet shop was right at the beginning of the gali, to one side, and Harlal Pansari’s shop was on the other side. There were two more shops after those two, in which only Harlal Pansari’s goods—sacks of grain, canisters of ghee and oil, etc.—were stored. The first chowk was called Andon (short for Anandon). This was where Chetan’s home was. From there, the gali grew rather narrow and curved to the right. At the beginning there was a kiln, where Jwali Mehri roasted chickpeas and corn kernels. A little beyond this, to the left, was a long closed gali, Khoslon ki Gali, where Badda lived, and beyond that, along the right side for quite some distance, all the way to Barne Pir, were a series of walls, the backs of Muslim homes, none of which had doors that opened on to that side of the gali. After Khoslon ki Gali, to the left, there was a house where two families lived. In one section lived a widow who had five sons. Since the widow was very quarrelsome, the people in the neighbourhood called her Gidhari, or ‘the Vulture’, and they called her children, ‘the Vulture’s Children’. In the other house was another widow, but she was remarried. Her husband was an ordinary superintendent, but she had been a child widow, from an important family. She’d moved to the mohalla after her remarriage. She was educated, dark-skinned and had a beautiful singing voice, so people called her Koyal, or ‘the Cuckoo’. She had three daughters and two sons, all of whom were called ‘the Cuckoo’s Children’. Next to this house was Barhaiyon ki Gali, at the start of which was Anant’s home. A bit farther ahead, to the right, beneath a large neem tree, was the tomb of Barne Pir, the arch of which was built into the wall. There were sconces here for small clay lamps, and at night devotees would light many lamps at once. Chowk Chaddhiyan was to the left. The gali on the other side passed by the houses of this chowk and met up with the bazaar. From Barne Pir, a road went straight through the Muslim mohalla and came out into Chowk Qadeshah. Right here in Chowk Chaddhiyan, directly across from Barne Pir, was the home of the astrologer Daulat Ram, whose son Debu was the neighbourhood’s most famous goonda. He was a bit squinty-eyed so he was also called Debu Kana, or ‘Squint-Eye Debu’. Beyond Barne Pir, where the street curved above the chowk, was the gali where an old classmate of Chetan’s, Laloo Baniya, lived; this had come to be called ‘Baniyon ki Gali’.

  Arriving at Ramditta’s shop, Chetan ordered half a paav of barfi and asked the sweet seller to make him two large glasses of lassi, requesting that he beat the cream well, then add the ice and water.

  Chetan placed the dish of barfi in front of Anant, then popped a piece into his own mouth and looked Badda over from head to toe. He wanted to ask Hansa and Anant why they were bugging this poor guy, but couldn’t say anything in front of Badda.

  ‘Yesterday Laloo Baniya was saying that the number 4229 didn’t even appear in the paper,’ observed Anant, as he popped the bits of barfi into his mouth. He glanced at Chetan and added, ‘You work for a newspaper, yaar, did you see roll number 4229 in the Matric results?’

  ‘What are you talking about!’ Chetan nearly retorted. ‘Does a newspaper editor remember all the roll numbers?’ But he saw a glint of mischief in Anant’s eyes; Anant looked over at Chetan and winked subtly.

  ‘It was! How could it not be?’ cried Badda. ‘I’ll go get it and show you.’ And he ran off toward his gali.

  Chetan watched him running off, then laughed slightly and said, ‘Badda is exactly the same; he hasn’t changed a bit, except in terms of passing.’

  ‘Who says the bastard passed?’ asked Hansa of the Jhamans, chuckling loudly. ‘When Badda took the exam this time, he didn’t even tell his mother his roll number. When the Matric results came out he went to his mother and told her the good news—that he’d passed in the second division. His mother can’t tell the difference between A and B. Her eyes danced with joy. “Your name is in the paper?” she asked. “Not my name, my roll number is printed right here,” Badda told her. “Look at this, it’s my roll number!” And the fool put his finger somewhere on the list. His mother borrowed a rupee from the Khoslas and distributed sweets to the whole neighbourhood.’

  ‘The son of the whore and the smuggler’s horse, both overeat and are lazy of course!’ interjected Ramditta, thereby enriching their knowledge with a fresh saying as he churned the lassi, a look of boredom permanently affixed to his face. Though he laughed as he spoke, the boredom continued to cling to his person.

  No one paid him any mind. ‘You know Debu Kana, that son of a bitch,’ said Anant. ‘Somehow he found out that the roll number Badda said was his actually belonged to someone else. Who knows if he actually found it out or was just bluffing, but Badda immediately changed his story and said he hadn’t said that number at all.’

  Hansa of the Jhamans guffawed at this and clapped his hands together.

  *

  Badda was two years older than Chetan and had studied two grades ahead of him in the same school. His mother, Prasanni (Prasann Kumari), had become a widow when she was young and, like the other widows, she had great faith in holy men. She had numerous brothers-in-faith. Partly with their help, and partly by her earnings spinning and skeining cotton, she managed to educate her son, and she dreamt of making him an important officer one day. In her view, this boy of hers was brighter and wiser than all the other boys in the mohalla. As she sat in the gali and spun or skeined cotton with her neighbours, Badda would sit in his own doorway or a neighbour’s, and amaze her and the other ladies with his dazzling intelligence. He remembered everything: who was born when in the mohalla; who married when; who died when—all the days, dates and times of all incidents and accidents. He knew the train schedules, the dates of holidays, the comings and goings of the mohalla, everything about everything. Often, when the date of some holiday or some incident or accident in the mohalla would be in doubt or a topic of debate, Badda would demonstrate his point with proof, and his m
other and neighbours would be astonished at the brilliance of his intellect and memory. He had no shortcomings whatsoever and his mother liked to say that Nihalchand was a boy who was like the girls. There was no doubt about this. All day long he sat with his mother and her friends, and his mother would periodically praise this or that fine quality of his. So when he failed the Matric the first time and told his mother that his paper had been very good, but that he’d had a fight with the invigilator who either hadn’t sent his paper forward or put a blank notebook in its place, his mother immediately believed him and announced to all the neighbourhood that her boy would have passed with very good scores but that the ‘ingilator’ (Badda’s mother was very fond of using English words she’d heard from her son in conversation) had made enemies with him and switched his notebook.

  But Badda stayed back the second year as well. That time he’d saddled his school teachers with all the blame, saying they were against him and didn’t instruct him properly. He told his mother he wouldn’t pay fees to the school any more, and instead take the exam privately; he’d pass in the first division and show everyone. And from then on, he’d either studied at home or sat among the gali women. From then on his nickname became Badda.

  He took his first private exam the same year that Chetan took the Matric. In the English paper, there was a story filled with blank spaces, and one was to fill them in to complete the story. The gist of the story was ‘Ram rakkhe use kaun chakkhe’—or, no harm shall come to him whom God protects—and it went something like this:

  Prince Hira Singh was defeated by his enemies in a fierce battle and fled. On his way home, his horse died. Night had fallen, so he hid in a mountain cave. His enemies came and searched for him, but, thanks be to God, in the midst of this, a spider had woven a web over the mouth of the cave. Two enemy soldiers came to the cave as well. One proposed searching for the prince inside the cave, but the other, on seeing the web by the light of his torch, rejected the proposal, saying that if the prince had gone in, the web would have been broken. They went off to look for him elsewhere instead and the prince’s life was saved.

  In the textbook from which this story had been taken, there had also been printed a dialogue between a spider and a fly. The spider spins a beautiful web and calls out to the fly, praising its beautiful wings and enchanting voice, but the fly does not get caught in the web.

  In the evening, when Chetan had seen Badda at Ramditta’s shop, he’d asked him, ‘How did your paper go?’

  Badda grinned widely and slapped his hand on Chetan’s, saying, ‘It was so easy. There was that conversation between the spider and the fly. I answered that question first. I bet I got at least nine points out of ten on that one.’ (Badda had read the word ‘spider’ and written his answer based on that. How he’d answered the rest of the questions, one can only imagine.)

  Chetan smiled to himself at this, but he shook Badda’s hand warmly nevertheless and only replied, ‘You killed it, yaar, I just wrote out the story of Prince Hira Singh.’

  Chetan told Anant and his other classmates what Badda had done. They had taken the Matric exam at the same time. All of them slapped Badda on the back and assured him that his paper would be the very best of all, and all of them had just given the wrong answers, and Badda told his mother the news and Badda’s mother joyfully told the women of Khoslon ki Gali the news, and from that day on, she began to light lamps at Barne Pir.

  But Badda failed that year as well.

  After that, he entered all the schools in Jalandhar and tried to do the Matric, but the year Chetan did his BA, he failed yet again. This was the eighth year he had taken the exam. He had no job and his primary occupation was sitting among his mother’s friends expressing his priceless views on mohalla politics and enhancing the knowledge of the gali women on numerous topics as well as performing small chores for them. In the gali, he was famous for being a ‘son-like-a-daughter’, and in Andon Chowk, for being ‘more womanly than the women’, but he was perfectly happy and didn’t care about either of these epithets. In the meantime, he’d acquired skill in cards and chaupar and usually he joined up with card and chaupar games at Laloo Baniya’s house, at Pandit Banarsidas’s shop, in the chowk at Papadiyan Bazaar, or on the open cement platform in front of the Shiva temple at the Dharamshala. No hero’s eyes could have shown greater concentration than Badda’s as he dodged the blows of his enemies while playing cards and chaupar.

  *

  Ramditta had finished making the lassi and given a glass each to Chetan and Anant, then began to scrape the pot with a spatula.

  Hansa of the Jhamans was saying, ‘The funny thing is that the results came so many months ago, but the fool never even shows anyone his certificate. Uncle Telu Ram talked to Lala Jalandhari Mull Yogi ji and arranged a job for him, he praised Badda and also said he’d passed the Matric in the second division, but when Lala Jalandhari Mull asked for the certificate, Badda never showed his face there again.’

  ‘Look! Did my roll number get printed in the newspaper or not?’ Badda called out from the bend in the gali.

  Chetan drank down his lassi and placed the glass to one side, then picked up the newspaper to take a look. It was an old copy of the Tribune, very carefully folded. One spot on the list of private roll numbers for the Matric had been marked in red pencil. Chetan read it: it was number 4229.

  ‘Look, does it say 4229 or not?’ asked Badda, pointing at the number again and again.

  Although just a few minutes before, he himself had wanted to tell Anant to stop teasing the poor guy, Chetan put out his hand. ‘Congratulations,’ he said.

  Badda grinned widely as he grasped Chetan’s hand in both of his. His nostrils flared and his eyes shone; he glanced very proudly at Hansa.

  ‘Take this newspaper and show it to Amichand; if he becomes a magistrate, he’ll make you his record keeper,’ suggested Hansa sarcastically.

  ‘And you won’t even need a certificate,’ added Anant.

  ‘I’ll show him, I’ll show him, why not?’ responded Badda, sticking out his neck defiantly.

  ‘Oh, even if he made you a chaprasi, that would really be something.’

  And everyone guffawed.

  Just then, Ramditta jumped down from his shop, cursing, and ran after someone in the direction of Chowk Kharadiyan, still holding his metal spatula dripping with milk.

  ‘What happened?’ Chetan asked Anant.

  But Anant didn’t know himself.

  Everyone dashed off in that direction.

  4

  Chetan had seen Ramditta sitting at this same shop ever since he could remember. In the past few years, the hair at his temples had grown white, the boredom on his face had increased, and one of his front teeth had weakened and broken, but otherwise the rest was all the same—his round cap jammed down on his head, his coarse, filthy, too-short pyjamas stitched from the same fabric, his legs that turned out slightly like the points of a compass from sitting all day, his strangely stiff back and his awkward gait . . . his entire person bore a striking resemblance to his clothing. Chetan couldn’t imagine Chacha Ramditta wearing anything else.

  Chetan had called Ramditta ‘Chacha’, or ‘Uncle’, since his childhood. This was partly because he too was a Brahmin and partly because his mother had taught him and his brothers that whoever was the same age as their father or two or three years younger than him in their mohalla should be called ‘Chacha’. Since he called him Chacha, he also felt a sense of kinship with him, and when people teased Ramditta, he didn’t like it.

  But just as he had ribbed Badda without even really wanting to, in the same way, despite calling Ramditta ‘Chacha’, and feeling sympathy for him, Chetan sometimes joined in on the jokes being played on him.

  Since his childhood, he had heard many things about Ramditta’s past that were etched in his mind. The first was that Ramditta’s wife had been very beautiful and innocent. Ramditta had beaten her a great deal, but when their first child was born (the baby was stillborn) and s
he fell ill from post-partum fever and died, he had pounded his head against the walls and cried like a baby. The other was that when he began to try to get remarried, Pandit Gurdas Ram had interfered. What happened was that Ramditta had hoped to remarry sooner, but since there weren’t any elders in his home, no one insisted, and then, when people did come to see him a couple of times thanks to Harlal’s efforts, Pandit Gurdas Ram had said things that not only stopped that particular marriage but future ones as well. The door to marriage was shut forever for the poor man.

  Chetan was very young when he heard this story about Ramditta from his mother, and ever since then he’d felt a strange loathing towards Pandit Gurdas Ram.

  *

  Pandit Gurdas Ram had four sons. The eldest, who had died recently, had lived in Bilga (from whence his paternal grandfather had come to Jalandhar). The second was an astrologer; the third had passed the Matric and become an employee at the audit office in Delhi; and the fourth was a goonda famous not just in the mohalla but throughout the entire city.

  Pandit Gurdas Ram was of medium height and extremely muscular. He was fair, with large round eyes. He always held a stout lathi, a wooden staff, in his hands. Chetan had heard from his mother that he was quite adept with a lathi. He was rather old by then, and Chetan had never seen his lathi feats, but he’d heard from his mother that he had once walked in a groom’s procession with his patrons, when thieves had surrounded them. Pandit Gurdas Ram had single-handedly confronted them with his lathi and not only saved the groom’s party from getting robbed, but also wounded several of the attackers. Pandit Gurdas Ram would sometimes come and sit at Harlal Pansari’s shop with his lathi in the evenings and Chetan would glance at him and imagine those days when he wielded the lathi with such force.