The Scent of God

by Saikat Majumdar

  There were rules. He could never get Kajol to break a rule. Sometimes, Anirvan cut the games hours in the afternoons and wandered around the ashram, often hiding in the huge library. They were supposed to be on the playground. It could be nasty if someone caught them.

  They spoke a lot. Kajol’s words had the spiky weight of a teenager whose voice had started to crack. It was clumsy, their conversation, but they wanted to talk to each other forever so it didn’t matter. Kajol wanted to savour Anirvan’s words and Anirvan wanted to draw out Kajol’s heavy, faltering voice as if he was dragging a cart on a bed of stones. They sat and said meaningless things to each other. They got in each other’s way much more than Anirvan had realized before—in school, the dining hall, the bathroom, on the walk to school, in the assembly line; numbed out of their minds on the way to the prayer that started school—the prayer that pleaded for them to be taken from darkness to light. There was always a sunburst of happiness whenever he saw Kajol. Kajol always smiled but he did not speak much when other boys were around. There were signs. They had a system of sign and whisper.

  He wanted Kajol to cut games too. Four to six—they could wander around for two hours, play ping pong in the common room, Kajol could even help him with algebra. They could talk.

  ‘Game time?’ Kajol said in shock. ‘We cannot miss games.’

  ‘Why?’ Anirvan asked. ‘We can walk around the orchard behind the football ground. No one ever goes there.’

  ‘It’s against the rules,’ was all Kajol would say. ‘Bad idea.’

  He would never do it.

  Quietly, he looked away, making sure their eyes did not meet.

  So Anirvan wandered around alone, sometimes staying back in his room with scattered schoolwork all around so if a monk or a teacher caught him he could say he was studying. A few days later, while he was rearranging things in his desk, Kajol walked into his room.

  It was 5.30 and the boys usually came back to the hostel a few minutes before 6 and then the shower room became a muddy screaming match. But at 5.30, the hostel was quiet and empty. The teachers usually went out at this time and the monks…no one knew where the monks went.

  It was football season and Kajol wore an Argentinian jersey that was plastered to his body. He was sweaty but very little dirt had touched him. He played just enough but never so wildly as to get really dirty.

  ‘You’re back already?’ Anirvan asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Kajol said. ‘Thought I’d see what you were up to.’

  Happiness was a warm flood in Anirvan’s chest.

  They were not sure what to talk about.

  ‘I’ll go and shower,’ Kajol said.

  ‘I’ll come too,’ Anirvan said.

  Each hostel block had a large bathroom with a row of toilet stalls and a large shower area with five showers. Shower times, morning and evening, were a mayhem of shrieks and screams and water games and spray violence with sixteen boys from four rooms jostling for the five showers, taking turns and sometimes wrestling under the rain.

  It felt huge with just the two of them in there. Football season was monsoon season, and the days were long and shiny.

  They were both in their shorts. Anirvan loved looking at Kajol’s body. It was small and dark and slim, but nicely shaped with small, billowing muscles as he never missed a PT or games session and always threw himself wholeheartedly into the madness of rules. His collarbones were shiny and afloat.

  Anirvan felt a slight shame standing in front of him without his shirt. He was also thin but his body was uneven, lacking the sportsman’s billowy shape. He was bigger than Kajol and felt clumsy.

  Quickly, he ran the shower and closed his eyes. Water, warm from the sunbaked water tanks on the terrace, washed over his body.

  He didn’t know how long he had kept his eyes closed. Perhaps ten seconds, perhaps fifteen. He heard Kajol’s voice through the spray of water.

  ‘How do you meditate?’ He asked. ‘How do you empty your mind?’

  Anirvan was quiet. He wanted to say something but he couldn’t speak.

  ‘I just can’t do it,’ Kajol said. ‘Whenever I try to do it, thoughts crowd my head.’

  Anirvan wanted to open his eyes. But the spray of water made it impossible.

  He tilted his head, popping out of the halo of water.

  ‘I didn’t know you wanted to meditate.’ He said.

  ‘It cleans your mind,’ Kajol said. ‘Helps with math.’

  Anirvan closed his eyes again.

  ‘They say if you stare at something real hard,’ Kajol said, ‘everything around it vanishes.’

  Anirvan stared at the knob that turned the shower. He stared hard, not talking, and after a while Anirvan started feeling a bit sleepy but everything was still there. The rain. The liver-coloured wall of the bathroom. Kajol’s red towel hung over it. Kajol was there too; Anirvan stole a glance at him, the bony ribcage rising and falling with his breath. Water ran over his soft brown skin; it was as if he was swimming underwater.

  He opened his eyes. Kajol was staring at him. He was Kajol’s thing.

  ‘You breathe long and hard.’ Kajol said. ‘Your ribs stick out sharp.’

  ‘One, two, three, four,’ he touched and counted them. Suddenly, Anirvan started breathing faster. He wished he could breathe as if meditating because that drew out his ribs sharp and clear.

  Kajol traced his ribs like a child who had just learned counting. His fingers lingered on Anirvan’s belly-button; slowly, his index finger dug inside.

  All the life left in Anirvan was in his belly-button—the centre of his body, where the serpent lay in sleep. Would the serpent wake up?

  Anirvan could not stare things away. But he could step back and watch his body breathe. Slowly, he could disown his body. There it was, breathing away. There was nothing else.

  He could never be like Kamal Swami.

  But slowly, Anirvan could float out of his body. Soon, he just watched it breathe and get wet under the shower. It wasn’t his body any longer. It pumped itself like a brute animal. Anirvan swam away from it, like a wisp of incense smoke in the prayer hall.

  Slowly, he opened his eyes. Before him was Kajol’s right collarbone. Under the water, it shone like a knife.

  ‘Yogi!’

  Kajol laughed his little-boy laughter.

  ‘You’re just gone!’ He said. ‘You can really tune out. Like a real Yogi!’

  Kajol’s voice shivered.

  A Yogi. One who could cane and whip his mind into a sharp and shiny machine.

  Don’t fight it. The Lotus said.

  Slip out of it like you slip out of your shirt. Watch it play, a cheap toy. Slowly, the mind will become your slave.

  The Lotus, he knew, could do anything. He could be like Arjun. Arjun shut out the rest of the world, fixed his gaze on the wooden bird on the tree, and shot its head off with his arrow. The carrom striker became an arrow in Kamal Swami’s fingers. The red monster shot at the circle of coins at the heart of the board and ripped it open, sending a cluster of the right coins to the pocket. It was like a blast of dynamite.

  Anirvan felt terrified to see the explosive force stored in the smooth, saffron-robed monk. But if you controlled your mind you controlled the striker. Kamal Swami, he knew, could stare hard at a coin so as to make everything else vanish from his vision. And then destroy it. Kamal Swami. The Lord Lotus.

  Meditation was a skill crucial to life in the ashram. It sharpened your mind, helped you master algebra, geometry and physics. Everything one needed to crack the engineering entrance tests. The boys stared at the tests, five years down the line, and tried to make the rest of the world vanish. How do you think the ancient Indians invented the zero and other foundations of mathematics? Kajol always said. And he cracked the puzzles of geometry so smoothly that it seemed that he felt the problems and the answers like tremors in his own body. His lovely bony body.

  How do you think? Because yoga is the foundation of mathematics.

  Yogi. K
ajol fell in a kind of a spell whenever Anirvan meditated under the shower. Sometimes when Anirvan’s mind wavered, he could feel Kajol’s liquid stare on his skin. Sometimes Kajol would touch him lightly and Anirvan’s focus would shatter. Yogi. Kajol called him Yogi. The one who has mastered Yoga. One who controls his mind like a steel toy. It became his name. No one remembered Anirvan.

  But Yogi would never be like the Lotus. Could he?

  Suddenly, without warning, the Swami could become softer, gentler. That’s what happened during the Diwali mini-vacation that year.

  They had only four days off around Diwali so a few students stayed back at the hostel. Mostly the boys who lived far away, and the poor village and tribal boys who didn’t always want to go home as life was much better in the ashram. Anirvan stayed back too. It was never difficult to convince his parents why he should spend more and more time away from home. Anirvan told Kajol that morning that he was not going home and Kajol had said nothing.

  ‘I’m staying back too,’ he told Anirvan in the dining hall that evening. Anirvan felt struck with a lightning of delight. Yes!

  There were no rules during these few days. Only three other boys had stayed back in Bliss Hall, sporty tribal boys who played football all day. There was no morning bell, no PT, no prayer, no study hall, and no school. The whole day was theirs. They could do whatever they wanted.

  They spent the entire morning playing carrom with Kamal Swami. The Lotus was softer, intimate; his voice sounded different. He cracked jokes while striking the carrom disks on the board. What a player! When he aimed the striker, his soul was focused on the board. Like there was nothing else in the world. He never lost a match.

  When they went to take a shower, Anirvan and Kajol were the only ones in the hostel. The bathroom felt big and hollow. It echoed every word they uttered. So they showered in silence, next to each other, playing games, laughing quietly. Kajol clamped the mouth of the faucet and shot a blinding water jet at Anirvan. He drowned Anirvan in water and laughter. There was nothing else in the world. The bathroom door was open and yet no one would ever come; they could take as long as they wanted.

  Kajol was another boy. Free, wild, noisy. His still eyes sparkled. He wouldn’t take his eyes off Anirvan. The campus was empty and the place didn’t feel like a school anymore. It was a sandy saffron place of happiness.

  After lunch, they wandered around the ashram. They walked all over the endless campus, spread over eighty villages from the past. No one stopped them anywhere. When school was on, they were not allowed to leave the limits of the junior school. But today they walked from the junior school through the winding lanes crowded by mango trees to the senior school. They wandered past the stadium into the senior school, where the hostels and the buildings seemed larger, shinier. Everything was empty. Everybody had vanished and there was no outside world and no time ticking along. But Kajol seemed to belong to the ashram, a plant nourished by its sun and soil.

  The campus was a place of play. They lost their way and walked into the school for the disabled boys but nobody shouted at them. The people smiled and led them back to the route to the junior school. On the way back, they flung stones at the mango trees to bring down mangoes but nothing happened; mango season was long over. Their palms twirled against one another and stayed there as they walked. They laughed and joked and tried not to notice it. They drifted apart as they stepped back into the junior school campus.

  In the evening they went back to Kamal Swami’s room. The room looked dark but as they peeped through the door, they saw a blue light.

  A night lamp was on and the Swami was seated on the floor in the lotus position. He opened his eyes as he heard them at the door. He gestured, calling them inside.

  The Swami sat in a narrow space between his bed and the wall. Kajol went and sat behind him on the floor. Anirvan sat at the end, behind Kajol.

  The Swami closed his eyes and went back into meditation.

  The small room looked ghostly in that blue light. Grey cotton things hung from the bedstead and the furniture cast long shadows. The windows were shut. The smell of incense danced like a raincloud and the air felt cool. Anirvan reached out and encircled Kajol’s waist with his arms.

  They straightened their spines and sat in the padmasana—the Lotus seat. They closed their eyes. In a daze, Anirvan slid his fingers down and felt the heat of Kajol’s hardened penis. He felt safe, and at peace.

  They heard the sound of the wall clock. Tick, tock. Tick, tock.

  And then the sound melted away.

  Dinner was like a picnic. The three football players were back. The exhausting daylong game had made them more talkative and they cracked jokes that were lost to those who had stayed away from the field. But nobody felt left out and it was like a little festival in the dining hall, which only had seven people in it—the five boys, Kamal Swami and the caretaker Nitai who was a villager from the deep interior of rural Bengal.

  ‘Luben kicks like a demon on the field,’ Nitai said.

  Luben Kisku ate silently but a smile had crept into his face. He was one of the tribal boys who rarely spoke. But he was the magical athlete whom everybody loved.

  ‘Was shooting the ball like a bullet and all I could do was to duck at the goal.’ Nitai laughed.

  ‘The lungiwallah from Mosulgaon was playing the goalie behind the goalpost,’ Naren Das said. ‘He caught the ball every time and kicked it back to us.’

  Naren Das was a poor village boy who was a math geek and a deadly football stopper. He had a tiny face but spoke like a sage.

  ‘The men from Mosulgaon were there?’ Kamal Swami asked calmly.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Nitai said. And then suddenly his voice fell to a whisper. ‘They always slip into the stadium when the boys play.’

  Anirvan and Kajol listened to them but said nothing. Kajol was a good football player but today he hadn’t gone to the fields at all. There were no rules today.

  Their voices rose to a crescendo. The Lotus smiled and cracked jokes. The boys looked up in wonder.

  ‘Luben smiles like a sweet little girl,’ the Swami said. ‘And on the field he shoots the ball like lightning to split your guts open.’

  Everybody laughed. Luben kept smiling but said nothing.

  ‘But he doesn’t pass the ball,’ Sanket Tudu, another tribal boy, said gloomily. ‘He wants to play alone.’

  ‘Arre who cares!’ Nitai said. ‘He shoots so well, he can tear apart any net. Today I thought he would kill the Mosulgaon bastards behind the goalpost.’

  ‘My blood had started to boil,’ he went on. ‘Took me back to those days when there was nothing but forests here—forests and savage villages where these people wandered around.’

  Nitai went on. Suddenly the old man had slipped back forty years in the past.

  ‘We came in with sticks and spears and chased the split-dicks out of their homes.’ He looked dreamy. ‘And only then they could put up the walls of the ashram.’

  ‘Nitai,’ Kamal Swami said sharply.

  Nitai froze.

  Yogi looked at Kamal Swami’s face and his heart stopped. The Swami’s face had darkened.

  Silence sat there for several long seconds.

  ‘Hey,’ the Lotus smiled. ‘Get a couple of more eggs for Luben. I bet he can eat a village today.’

  Everybody laughed.

  They walked down the long corridor that joined the dining hall to the blocks that housed their rooms. The football players had wandered off again, and Nitai was nowhere to be seen. Kamal Swami walked with Anirvan and Kajol.

  Jackals howled in the distance. They sounded faraway but they were closer. The boys had heard the stories. How they used to slither across the campus just ten years ago. The ashram had been built on wild, savage villages. The past was fearful.

  The Lotus walked slowly. His feet, covered with thick socks, made no noise. He walked up the stairs. Anirvan and Kajol followed him. His saffron robe looked darker in the night, almost mournful.

  T
hey paused before Kajol’s room.

  ‘Why don’t you stay here tonight?’ The Lotus looked at Anirvan. ‘You’ll be scared to sleep alone, won’t you?’

  Anirvan’s heart jumped with joy. Quickly, he looked at Kajol. Kajol’s face was flooded with the slippery light of happiness.

  ‘I’ll get my things,’ Anirvan said quickly, as if he was afraid the Swami would change his mind.

  ‘Before you go to sleep,’ Kamal Swami said, ‘close your eyes and cleanse your mind.’

  ‘Yoga works best when you do it with a partner,’ he said. ‘But you must learn to hold your essence. Breathe deep and cultivate self-control.’

  He vanished across the corridor.

  The Lord of Love

  There were things in Anirvan’s life that had to be hidden from Sushant Kane. That made him feel shameful and a little criminal. SrK meant something real. He gave colour to the world.

  He had never seen SrK and Kamal Swami speak to each other. SrK would never know that the Swami gave Anirvan special duties. Never. But Anirvan had to talk to SrK.

  ‘It’s strange,’ Anirvan said. ‘My mind feels lost when they turn the lights off after prayer.’

  SrK nodded. The two of them walked towards Conscience Hall.

  ‘It’s like I’ve lost the power to think,’ Anirvan said.

  ‘Happens,’ SrK said. ‘The slow music. The smell of incense. The flowers.’

  ‘It’s so beautiful,’ Anirvan whispered.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ SrK said. ‘It’s not life.’

  Anirvan was quiet.

  ‘The monks say the world is Maya.’ SrK said softly. ‘It’s not the world; they have Maya here. The incense and the flowers and the music.’

  ‘The three of us came here as orphans,’ he said. ‘Almost as orphans…well, never mind that.

  ‘Prashant and Ashant lived their lives in the football field. Ever since they were little boys. The monks loved that. They like to say you can get closer to god by playing football than by reading the Gita. They came back from the football field, showered, and fell into the prayer hall. The music, the incense, and the flowers.’