The King Who Owned Nothing
Anirvan’s father helped his grandmother to her death. Happily. He was that kind of a man.
The doctor looked grim the day they took her away to the hospital. But Anirvan’s father looked joyful, wearing his bloated white pajamas as if he had forgotten that he would have to change and step out of home, go with his mother to the hospital in a condition the doctor said only 1 per cent of people survived.
Anirvan’s grandmother was in a joking mood. The whole time. Her body had melted into the coarse cotton of the hospital bed. Something about her was like a little girl, ribs poking and all. She would quickly become popular in the ward of the hospital where she lay, laughing and singing songs. Anirvan saw her laughing whenever he went for a visit. Her body was shrunken, little-girlish. He never fully understood what was wrong with her, just that something was sick with her inner organs. She had lost most of her weight and her white cotton sari flapped on the bed.
There was a young woman on a bed next to her, almost a girl. She was probably eighteen or nineteen, dark, thin, and pretty. Anirvan had started to like her. She was one of those people who are so good-natured to be always happy, but in a shy way. She had become good friends with his grandmother, which was why he liked her so much.
‘Mashima sings songs for me.’ The girl told him. He never asked her name. She called his grandmother mashima—auntie—which sounded strange as his grandmother was too old to be her aunt. But she said it naturally, and spoke as if his grandmother was her friend. She spoke softly, and talked about his grandmother’s singing as if it were a gift given to her.
Anirvan realized that his grandmother would never come back home. The ward was not of this world. The girl was going to die too. She was so young, and so happy there, such good friends with his grandmother, who seemed to notice nothing, just laugh and sing and make her neighbours happy. It was all beautiful and magical and absurd and his heart weighed like a stone every time he walked out of the ward at the end of the visiting hour.
His father didn’t care about his grandmother. Things would be simpler if she died. Anirvan’s aunts, doting daughters of his grandmother softly complained that he did not look after their mother. He spent most of his time with Ivy Kar, the dark and ugly typist from his office. She had cast a spell on him. He was gravitating towards the dirty world of rustic refugees. Why did he want to marry her?
To become man and wife was to start a lifelong fight. Marriage was a violent thing.
People cried about his father and said many things.
‘Which member of our family has ever stayed in a government hospital?’ They cried. ‘And that too in a ward
with so many people?’
‘Couldn’t Tushar pay for a private cabin?’
Everybody knew he was drawing money from the old woman’s account, the little money left over from the dissolution of her husband’s estate.
But Anirvan already knew his father did not care if his mother was alive or dead. With a slight preference towards the dead.
He knew it that night when she bled in the dark.
She had stepped out to go to the bathroom in the little balcony outside her room. Anirvan’s father refused to keep a night nurse. They were expensive. So she had to get up on her own even though it took her a long time to walk just a few feet. Anirvan slept in her room, on the empty bed of his grandfather. He woke up when he heard the metallic clang of the tin mug on the balcony like a piercing cry. He rushed out onto the balcony to see his grandmother sprawled on the floor. Blood gushed from her head, a black stream in the moonlight. She was quiet. When she saw him, she asked him to help her in her usual soft voice.
It meant nothing to his father and things went on as before. But the blackness of the blood gleamed before his eyes and he knew his father didn’t care if she was dead.
Home was a different place when his grandmother was there. It was another house. Anirvan had a special job. He had to put his grandmother’s little god, Gopal, to sleep every night, lay him down on his tiny brass bed in the shrine and draw the embroidered blanket over him; wake him up in the morning, sit him up on his tiny golden throne and place the sweets before him so that he could bless them and turn them into prasad.
The old woman gave out sunlight, where Anirvan was safe from the darkness of his father. A pale, soft and buttery man who wore flapping pajamas and chain-smoked filter-less Charminar cigarettes, a man who had made them all unhappy with his love for Ivy Kar, the young secretary in his office. Anirvan’s mother refused to talk to him anymore, the proud woman who now spent most of her time in the college where she taught English. Anirvan’s grandmother fought a strange kind of pride, that of high-born women when their men had women outside home; it let her face the fear of a family breaking apart.
She lived as though nothing had happened, never said a word about any of the family fights and sorrows, just drew Anirvan into the sunlight of her stories and the lust for nirvana, freedom from the cycle of birth and death and the sweat and pain of life.
For Anirvan was terrified of smells that came from his father’s room, the coarse air of cigarettes and unwashed clothes, the loose pajamas that covered his soft, buttery legs. He heard people say that his father was going to leave his mother and marry Ivy Kar, the secretary who was dark and ugly and spoke in the savage East Bengal dialect.
Anirvan rarely saw his mother these days. She was a clever woman who came from a family of brilliant people and she was sick of Anirvan’s father and his woman and the sins of rich old families who had riches no more, nothing at all but their laziness and their love for sin.
‘I fell for your father’s honeyed words,’ she would say in tearful rage. ‘But the men in this family are shiny pink fruits that are rotten inside.’
‘What?’ His father would laugh dreamily. Ever since Anirvan could remember, he barely noticed his mother.
‘You’re sick,’ she would say. ‘And so is your blood.’
Naturally, she hated Anirvan too for being a son of that family, a boy who carried the seeds of sin and would sprout them in time.
Sushant Kane smoked the same kind of cigarettes. In the cool dark of his room, Anirvan knew, he wore the same kind of pajamas. Anirvan stood outside his room for so long, every day, sensing the rare whir of the electric fan inside, catching the glimpse of pajamas that were not allowed in the ashram.
SrK made him feel special. But he didn’t make him feel safe.
Anirvan had no idea how he got back to the Mission. Somebody must have brought him back, perhaps his mother as he had been loaned out just to see his sick grandmother. And then suddenly he was back in his room, number 22, Block V and it was a Wednesday evening and there was a monthly exam next week.
It was past twilight and the darkness had started to clamp around the balcony of Bliss Hall. He had never realized the foreign nature of this hour. Play time was over and everybody was back in the hostel and gathered in the dining hall where the evening tiffin was being served. They rarely came back to their rooms at this time, preferring to knot in the common room and the lawn downstairs till it was time for prayer.
He was not hungry and so he didn’t go down to the dining hall. He felt numb. There was a coating of something around him, and the happy face of the girl in the hospital floated before him. She smiled in a weak, ghastly light and said, ‘She sings for me.’ Her face was yellow and kept withering away and the voice echoed. ‘She sings for me.’ And then his grandmother’s laughter crackled in the background and it was a little-girl laughter and he knew she was going to die, and the girl would die also. They would all die, that entire ward where everybody was happy and friends with each other and sang songs and giggled like children. They were happy in such a place of illness because they were already dead, dead and gone and were really just a memory.
His grandmother had left him. He missed the soft white cotton of her sari and the bunch of rusted keys she kept tied to her anchal, keys which opened nothing, her softly m
oving, paan-chewing jaws. All would become nothing. Her stories were the air that he breathed. She was his place in the world. He was falling. There was no one to hold him.
The sobbing came as a relief. It broke through the strange coating around him and started breathing in the evening air. He cried like a wounded animal.
He stood next to Anirvan, the quiet shadow of a tree. Anirvan hadn’t noticed when he had walked in. He stood at the door of their room. The monks never entered their rooms. They were too dirty for them to enter, even when they were clean, because young boys could never be clean. They stood, saffron shadows at the door, and glanced from one end to another, preying on unwashed socks rolled into balls and thrust under the beds and muddied school shoes. They never stepped in but cleaned everything with their glance.
‘Grandmother make you sad?’ Kamal Swami’s voice was so gentle.
The sobs quaked through him.
He knew about his grandmother. He had given permission for Anirvan to go home in the middle of the week. The boy will never see her again. They had said. He had let him go.
The words flooded through him. ‘She’s going to go.’ He said. ‘Soon. She sings and laughs in the hospital. My father wants her dead. She fell down and hit her head on the railings and the balcony was full of blood and he never came out to see her. There was so much blood.’
He could not stop. He went back to the past, dug at it, slithered inside like a burrowed animal, flung back clumps and clumps of earthen past at the kind, soft-voiced man in saffron who was his only shelter. The early evening light shone on his green, shaven cheeks and the purity and the beauty of his body gave him gooseflesh. He wanted this form. He wanted this form to be his. He would tell him everything. That his mother did not speak to his father any more. Even she was appalled by the way he treated Anirvan’s grandmother. But now she was going to die and there would be no one left for him.
Saffron was the colour of magic. A magic that deepened with the evening. He stood there, and his fevered chatter slithered into him like homing birds returning to their nest. They were no more. The evening was quiet as if there had been no words.
‘Cry well.’ He said. ‘Cry. Fill your heart with tears and blow it all out.’
And he cried. He cried to him. He spoke to him through the tears and he spoke better than when he had used words.
Anirvan floated again. He was lighter, much lighter. The Swami’s saffron robes smelled clean and fresh, the clean fragrance of cotton. He stood away from Anirvan and yet the peace of that cleanliness engulfed him.
Anirvan’s inside was empty of tears. He had no more sadness left. Now he was poor.
‘You little idiot,’ the Lotus said. It was the sweetest voice in the world. ‘Why are you crying?’
It was a voice that said that he loved Anirvan more for his tears. For his stupidity. He came close. He hugged Anirvan with his strong, fragrant arms; they snaked around the back of his neck and slid down to his back and drew him close. They slipped under his shirt and gently caressed him, rubbing his skin like they knew his flesh forever.
Miraculously, he strummed the sorrow out of his body.
‘Your grandmother is an extraordinary woman.’ His voice deepened, its softness gone. ‘She has gathered rare karma.’
‘Really?’ Anirvan’s voice shivered.
‘If you have trouble believing, just go and stand before the mirror.’ There was ferocity in his voice, a sudden flash. ‘Look at yourself. Who has made you? This beautiful boy?’
Anirvan closed his eyes. The Lotus sat him on his lap, slowly caressed his neck and shoulders. Roughly, he ran his fingers through his hair, squeezed clumps of it in his palm.
Anirvan felt his muscles through the thin saffron fabric; soft and strong muscles that were real, so real.
You have trained your grandson beautifully. His grandmother glowed like the sun every time she repeated what the Maharaj had told her, the very first time she came to the ashram. ‘He saw it, right away. After all he is the Maharaj.’ The saffron king who owned nothing.
‘The day she leaves the earth, she will leave the cycle of karma altogether.’ He looked away, past the balcony, to the silence left by the homing birds. ‘Her soul will be free.’
She laughed and sang in the crowded hospital ward where everybody was going to die. It wasn’t death. It was freedom.
‘Come.’ Kamal Swami gestured dismissively. ‘Let’s go.’
Anirvan walked next to him.
The Lotus led him into the prayer hall. He parted the thick curtain and stepped inside. The empty hall felt like a palace as Anirvan entered behind him. The air was dead and still inside, unlike how it usually was, full of music and incense and restless boys. The Swami went to the end of the hall, opened the wooden cupboard, and took out two prayer mats. He spread them out at the usual place, at the back of the hall near the wall.
‘Sit.’ He gestured towards the second mat. His voice was soft again, a voice that belonged to the prayer hall.
Anirvan sat down, folded his legs. He sat in the posture of lotus yoga. His spine was straight and limbs taut. He had returned to a natural state, and he looked not seated but afloat, on cool water.
‘Think of your grandmother.’ The Swami whispered. ‘And let your mind cry.’ His voice trailed off. He was leaving Anirvan.
‘But only your mind.’ He whispered again, almost inaudibly. ‘Only inside. Only the tears of the mind.’
His chest rose and fell as he took deep breaths. ‘Let your mind out. Let it get drunk with sorrow. Let it bathe in the mud of pain.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Step back. Watch the mind. The little toy.’
Anirvan lost his mind. The mind of the Yogi. It swam away from him. It became a liquid thing, a pool, and then a sea. A glowing blue sea.
When he opened his eyes, the prayer hall was full of boys. Restless, white cotton-draped boys who peeked back and stared at him. They started to whisper but stopped suddenly. The Lotus was still seated next to Yogi; a slow-breathing, blind statue.
Yogi’s mind was back, fresh and clean and alive. He was calm and afloat.
There was beauty and power in saffron that no colour in this world could match.
Flesh
Bliss Hall was hit by a famine just as they entered Class 8. The immediate trigger was Tavi’s lust for food. But actually it was a long time coming.
Hunger was a pain. Everybody was always on the prowl for meat. There was very little real food to go around, round the clock.
Who could live forever with chunks of bread as thick as brickbats with a brushing of butter on it? The dining hall was a war zone and strange things happened at dinner when after all the garbage of daal and vegetables, they served a single egg. It was a beautiful, golden egg, boiled to perfection and then fried in oil. Some people ate their whole dinners just by staring at the egg which they placed at a key corner of their plate, to be relished at the end, a tiny bite at a time.
That night Tavi went overboard with the spitting and claimed eggs that were not his own. Eggs were sensitive things on the plate once they were served and suddenly a boy’s neighbour might just gasp at something terrible outside the window. If the boy fell for it and looked away from his plate there was no egg there anymore as his laughing neighbour had already stuffed his mouth with the golden egg. People did everything to save their eggs, hide it under the mounds of rice, sit with it in their left hand, even eat it the moment it touched the plate, which was hard as the rest of dinner was a long dry spell of pain after that. Tavi’s style was brilliant. He spat all over his plate and drowned the egg in a fresh puddle of spit the moment it arrived on his plate and so it was safe from all invaders. Who wanted an egg coated with someone else’s spit? The strategy worked too well and he got greedy. That night after spitting on his own egg he rolled up a mouthful of spittle and shot at the egg that had just landed on Lothar’s plate right next to him, hoping to claim that one as well as nobody could possibly want to eat something wet with his spit.
Lothar was a sleeping volcano. Full of jingles and puns and a mudslinging pig on the football field. Who could tell there was such brutal anger inside? He took the egg and flung it at Tavi’s face, and then he took the curried pumpkin and flung it at his face too, which was unkind as Tavi hated pumpkin.
Sushant Kane exploded and threw them both out of the dining room. It was confusing as he normally noticed nothing, chewed his food absently and left the dining hall without talking to anybody. He came early and left early; always before Kamal Swami entered. Sushant Kane looked strange these days, especially since Bora’s beating, as if a red hot tip of rage was burning inside him.
‘Out!’ He stood before the table, a lanky messenger of death. ‘Both of you.’
Tavi and Lothar stepped out, both smeared in curried pumpkin, for Tavi had returned the love. The saddest thing was that two golden eggs lay on their plates, both drowned in Tavi’s spit. Never to be eaten.
Even Pir was terrified when he saw them. Pir, the small boy from Mosulgaon who came in to help clean the kitchen and the dining hall for a meal. He was barely 8 or 9, but seemed to laugh at everything, steadfast in his claim that he could read palms to tell the future. The boys mocked him but still crowded to show him their palms. Everybody called him Pir. No one remembered his real name.
Even Pir was terrified.
Tavi and Lothar looked like orange demons at the door.
Sushant Kane left them standing outside the dining hall, their faces a gooey mess. And then he left. Kamal Swami would come soon. He would ask what the matter was. And then they would have to tell him.
Nobody knew what the Lotus did to them, but they returned to their rooms hungry. It was dangerous to have Tavi around in a state of hunger. Especially after lights-off when the teachers had locked themselves inside their rooms.
Along the terrace overlooking the block, pigeons had made wild nests. They slept inside the ventilators and soiled the ledge of the terrace with poop. One pigeon had dozed off in a low crevice on the wall of the block.
The Scent of God Page 6