‘You won’t understand the place,’ Yogi looked into the man’s eyes and paused, and spoke softly. ‘There are the eyes of the bird who sits on her eggs to warm them. Her eyes look blank, says the prophet. She cares nothing for the world; all of her is in her eggs, to warm her babies to life. Such are the eyes of the Yogi. Dead and blank. All for god and none for the world. Hundreds of pairs of such eyes you see in our ashram. Going about, living the everyday and finishing homework and cracking puzzles in math and physics. Eyes dead and gone.’
Coarse and dirty smoke from Sushant Kane’s bidi flooded Yogi’s nostrils and he wanted to vomit. SrK was listening to everything, hanging on to every word. He was, wasn’t he? He really was.
There was a shine in the man’s eyes like the tip of a dog’s nose when he licks it.
‘They’re smoking something bad at the ashram, real bad,’ the man looked at Anirvan, unblinking. ‘Or is he some kind of freak?’
‘He’s a great kid. A super kid we need to pull out of the toxic fumes of their incense sticks before they get to him. The drugged brotherhood.’ Sushant Kane stubbed out his bidi on his yellow-stained plate and looked at Yogi. ‘Finish your meat and then we’ve got to head back. Evening prayer starts in twenty minutes.’
‘I don’t want to eat any more.’ Yogi stared at the chunks of meat in the dull steel bowl. The gravy had thickened to a flesh of its own.
He was seized by a quiet fury. He wanted to drill holes in this man. Who was he? He was an adversary. He would strangle Anirvan with a cloud of words. But Yogi would strangle him back.
As they walked toward the auto-rickshaw, Sushant Kane blew more sickening smoke in his face.
‘You were in the mood for an adda!’ He said. ‘Not a speech, just a chatty chat.’
Anirvan’s head reeled in the smoke and words refused to come. Dreamily, he wanted to reach out to that man, weave a web of words that would throttle him to a blue death. He wanted to talk to him again.
The Fragrance of Paan
The little book of Gita rose and fell on his grandmother’s chest. It was no longer a human body. It made an animal noise.
She was no more in the world. There was a bit of breath trapped in her that made her room an echo chamber of howls. But she was already past pain. She wasn’t anybody he knew.
It was late afternoon and nobody was home. His grandmother’s last nurse was a Vaishnavi woman who smeared her nose and forehead with sandalwood paste and ash and other ghostly things. She never spoke much to others but always hummed and sang to herself.
She had placed a dusty booklet of the Gita on his grandmother’s chest. They did such things. Throw flowers and incense sticks on corpses, dress them up with garlands. Place cheap copies of the Gita. Was this a corpse? A corpse that still breathed?
The mad Vaishnavi nurse had done what needed to be done. There was nobody else.
He stood next to the gasping corpse. Looked at her for a long time. He could not look away from the Gita dancing on her chest.
Then he left.
He was home for the Saraswati Puja weekend. The festival of Saraswati, the goddess of learning. The narrow lanes were fragrant and musical. Girls roamed in red-bordered saris and there were heaps of flowers outside the pandals. Whatever remained from the morning prayers.
As he roamed, he heard the shivering voice of his grandmother singing the hymn for goddess Saraswati. Her breasts adorned with pearls. The veena in one hand, a book in the other. Pearls adorning her breasts.
He roamed and roamed. Following the wilderness of scented flowers in the neighbourhood streets, walking along the slivers of music trailing off the loudspeakers. He waited.
People were back in the house when he returned. She had died.
The corpse was still.
They were busy. She had to be burned quickly.
Anirvan didn’t have to go through any of the smelly mess they did to the body after it died. Or he didn’t remember it if he did. He was returned to the ashram. It didn’t seem to make much sense for him to prolong his stay in that house now that she was dead.
He was in the prayer hall, alone. He didn’t know what he was doing there. He felt the empty hall touch and soothe him. There were all these portraits on the wall, all around the hall. Strange men with dazed looks and chadors around their chests. They were disciples of the Happy Bearded One. Some of them looked bewildered; a few looked grim; others looked at peace. Garlands hugged these photos but they looked dried and yellowed. They were changed far less often than those at the main shrine in front where the trinity sat: the Happy Bearded One at the centre, the Great Saffron One to his right and the Melting Mother to his left.
The floor of the prayer hall was a huge white bed. Thick, ribbed carpets covered in thick white chador, the same kind that covered the boys’ bodies. The shrine was white too. White chador, white flowers, the white of the Melting Mother’s sari and the thin red border. The creased robe of the Great Saffron One was a dull flame.
The windows of the prayer hall were small; most of them covered with thin curtains that flapped in the wind. The outside was not allowed in. The prayer hall was its own sky. The weight of his body vanished. He was afloat in air even though the fans were turned off; they swayed softly in the air streaming through the windows. It was the kind of wide and sunny room that made one breathless.
Tears rolled down his cheeks. He was alone and he could tell the prayer hall anything. These walls held the scent of god.
He went to the back, opened the cupboard and took out the prayer mat that looked like a tiger skin. He spread it out next to the wall and sat down on it, right next to the Lotus, who sat there, his spine stretched, arms stretched over his knees, eyes closed. He didn’t see Anirvan.
Anirvan closed his eyes and breathed deeply. In. Out. In. Out. In. Out. They rose and fell like seawaves. His body was no longer human.
But something held him back. The flapping, butterfly-yellow of the curtains at the small windows. The whiteness of the chadors fragrant with incense. Something in him didn’t want to leave this room.
But he was alone. He had to rise above the earth.
‘When an ant dies,’ Kamal Swami spoke, his eyes still closed. ‘It returns to the earth as a fly in its next birth.’
‘When the fly dies, it is reborn as a grasshopper.’
‘It may become a human being after a hundred births.’
‘Humans are mired beings. They float from one life to another. They cannot give up the pleasures of the body. Great Brahmins who have spent their lives in prayer come back to earth for the taste of sweet yogurt. You know the babies who have a sweet tooth from their birth, don’t you?’
He didn’t wait for Anirvan to speak. He went on.
‘Gold threads on red saris. The feel of blankets made of goose feathers. The memory of bright chandeliers. Everything brings the spirit back. To be reborn.’
His eyes were still closed. Trancelike, he spoke.
‘The day your grandmother walked into my room, I knew there was nothing that could hold her spirit to earth.’
But Yogi thought of paan. Fragrant green leaves stuffed with mildly intoxicating spices that reddened the shriveled lips of the old woman, jaws that moved constantly. And sweets—she could not go to bed without a piece of cream-carved love from one of the neighbourhood shops. Would she come back for them?
Be a little kindhearted newborn with paan-stained teeth and a craving for fried sweets?
‘She’s not to come back,’ Kamal Swami’s slow, whispering words made his heart jump. ‘She’s not to come back.’
‘She was not of this world. She belonged to the Godhead.’
‘She loved you,’ the monk turned and touched his shoulder. ‘You were made by her love. But she was made of something…something that is not forged in this world. She lived outside the cycle of karma. Even while she lived here.’
Warmth flooded the innards of his body. She was his grandmother. He was made by her love.
She was ethereal. Far beyond the grimy garland of karma.
‘Seven generations before him,’ a smiling old woman voice flooded his head. ‘And seven generations after attaining nirvana. Fourteen generations in all, freed from the cycle of death and rebirth.’
‘If a boy puts on the robes of a monk.’
Who said that? He opened his eyes, looked at the Lotus. He couldn’t be sure. Was it the voice in his head? Was it the Lotus? The soft cotton fabric was his skin. Happy. Kind. Calm.
‘The brotherhood of love.’ The Swami said softly. ‘Kajol knows that. Doesn’t he?’
Yes, he did. Yes, they did.
He wanted to lie down on the bed of saffron.
Widowhood
Kajol’s hug was home. He hugged Yogi hard. It grew harder, as if Kajol was trying to flush out the pain in his chest. He dreaded looking at Yogi’s face, at the cheeks on which tears had dried. He would lick his cheeks wet again, wet with the shine of pain. He would make Yogi his own.
Kajol was real. He would always be real. He would be there, like a quiet whisper in Yogi’s ears. Always. Yogi closed his eyes and nuzzled the side of Kajol’s bony neck. Soap and clean cotton and the heartwarming Kajol smell.
‘I don’t want to go play today,’ Kajol said. His eyes grew wet.
‘Really, don’t worry,’ Yogi said. ‘Go. I’ll be fine.’
‘No,’ Kajol said. ‘No way.’
‘Why ask for trouble? They’re going to notice you’re not on the field and then Mihir Dam will mark you absent and you’ll be in a spot.’
Yogi fought for words. It was so hard to fight Kajol. This Kajol who suddenly looked mired in tears and a red film of anger. Anger at not being able to claw his way out of it. Yogi had never heard him speak of school rules as if he cared so little about them. But it was impossible to see Kajol break rules and suffer from the wreck.
‘Kajol,’ he begged. ‘I’ll be fine, just go play.’
He didn’t want Kajol around. He felt naked in his pain, a spiky mess. He wanted to curl up and die.
But he had no idea Kajol could do such things. Did he not care about school rules after all? What was he willing to throw away? This was not a boy Yogi knew.
‘You can’t make me go.’ Kajol stared at him.
He had moved closer to Yogi. Closer still. On him was the musky sweat of the afternoon, end-of-the-school-day sweat. Longing for the violent sweat of the playground.
Kajol wanted to melt into Yogi. But Yogi wanted distance today. Distance from touching, from breath and sweat.
Yogi clasped his wrist. The thin breakable bone.
‘Really, Kajol,’ he looked straight into his eyes. ‘Let me be. I have to clear my head. I just need to wander and think of her for a while.’
Kajol looked at him unhappily. His eyes softened.
He left. He didn’t look back.
Yogi took a long time to tie the laces of his running shoes. It was hard to be at it for so long. He had to tie it up all wrong, get it knotted up, and then undo the tangle. While doing the left shoe he forgot and tied the laces up properly. Quickly, he looked up to see if anyone was around. And then he untied it and knotted it all in a tangle. And so it took a long time.
When he was done, everybody was gone. Their block was empty. As he walked down the stairs, as slowly as he could, he realized, there were no boys left in Bliss Hall; everybody had reached the football fields by now. He would have been there too, only if he hadn’t made such a mess with his shoelaces.
Between four and six every day, the boys from all classes had to gather in the sports fields. If any boy was found anywhere in the hostel, he would be punished. It was a rule everybody had forgotten was a rule. They couldn’t wait to be at the football fields and bash around the mud with the ball.
He had lost the will and the muscle to keep up the game. Nothing mattered after death.
They were in such a hurry that they never noticed he was taking forever to tie his laces. When on the sports field, the boys noticed nothing.
Nobody knew a boy could try to flee football. Nitai the caretaker saw him straggling along the stairs of the empty hostel, and said, ‘Poor thing, still here? Just dash to the field! They’ve barely just started.’
He had to be careful on the road. It wound past the other hostels and then turned right toward the school. You had to keep to that road and the playgrounds would come up right opposite the school. But instead of turning right, he turned left. He went over the little bridge that ran over the half-dried canal below. Then he entered the large building to the left.
It was the Central Library. The main library of the ashram. It was a huge house. He always slipped in there like an elf. People came there from the college and from outside the ashram and in a way it felt like a part of the big real world outside its walls and nobody bothered to check who you were and where you were from. Sometimes he worried that people would stare at him not just because he looked too small but he was there in his sports outfit and white running shoes but no one cared. They just checked your bags thoroughly before you left so there was no chance of stealing a book. He was in love with those little, clothbound, gold-embossed editions of old English novels they had and used to look longingly at the windows inside and dream. If only the slats were wide enough, he would toss one out in order to pick it up later when he was outside. The Mayor of Casterbridge. Little, smooth and blue, with gold lettering and a gold thread as a bookmark. There was much in the Central Library to steal and some people stole them. That was the only place in the ashram you could read the adult novels published in the special festival issues of magazines; but sometimes just as you came to the naughty parts you found the pages torn. It was a large library and the reading rooms were often nearly empty and it was not hard to tear pages out and stuff them in your pockets because they would never catch them while checking your bags. When he came to those torn pages, he wanted to chop their hands off.
As he walked into the library he knew where to go. Rows of ochre-coloured volumes sat on the shelves next to the windows. Large volumes with white flowers painted on the top. He knew them from home. They lay scattered in his grandmother’s room. His widowed aunt who lived in Asansol had the entire series. She brought a volume whenever she visited and took back the one his grandmother had finished reading.
They were the stories of the old Bengali writer Saratchandra, mostly about pain and suffering and sorrow, especially of women in villages with wicked landlords and cruel Brahmins, full of good people who suffered. The suffering was magnetic and engrossing.
They drew him in. Saratchandra’s language was old-fashioned but easy and felt wet and shiny with tears and he slipped deep inside his stories; the slow, saintly verbs became his own. He couldn’t actually speak in that language as it would be too strange to break out in a language found in books possibly written a hundred years ago but he could, he easily could if he wanted. Even Kamal Swami would be confused if he spoke in that language but he would love Yogi more if he found out that Yogi could speak in a tongue a little closer to Sanskrit.
Today he could only reach out to these stories. He wanted to be with the kind, white-clad widows, even the wicked ones that chewed paan and laughed with blackened teeth. They surely craved for cream-carved sweets even though back in those days widows were not allowed to crave anything.
He pulled out a book and sat down. He opened to a story called ‘The Brahmin’s Daughter’. It was a story of such dark and sad pain that it cinched him like a drug. It was about how a rich old Brahmin man tortured a young female relative of his, a helpless widow. Nobody could change anything and in the end she suffered a terrible tragedy. It was dark because Yogi didn’t quite understand what he did to her, something which made her want to kill herself. The most evil figure in the story was that of a woman, an old widow in white who knew a rich Brahmin could do no wrong no matter what he did. She coaxed and cajoled the young widow to let the rich Brahmin do what he wanted with her. While reading, he always imagine
d the old widow with a big round head, closely shaven, covered with the coarse white cotton of the widow’s sari. She was nothing like his grandmother. His grandmother wore white saris of fine quality that had a thin coloured border around them. But still it was the widow that drew him to that story today. The pain she caused to the young woman, a pain that was hard to understand and impossible to bear.
Saratchandra’s stories were like wet moss. There were village ponds and muddy rivers and thatched huts and the dark empty rooms in the houses of rich landlords. Fruits ripened and spread their drowsy smell, women gossiped by the pond and untouchables swept their own footsteps away so that Brahmins didn’t have to step on them. It was a sad world now dead and gone.
There was one of these books lying on the desk in his grandmother’s room that no one had dusted for years. Dust was a thick layer on the plastic table cloth that no one had changed forever. She had not read the book for several weeks now. She had been too sick.
The widows in the stories were like ghosts. They were silent women with shaved heads; garrulous and crooked; fat and old; young and beautiful—their beauty impossible and sinister because they were widows.
He was haunted by the teenage widow who felt her lips burn when they were kissed by a man, because she had fallen in love with him. Her name was Lolita, wasn’t it? What was the name of that story? His heart jumped when her lips burned, and now all widows had a touch of Lolita in them, lurking behind like a half-eaten beam of moonlight.
The Scent of God Page 8