Whose fault was it? Tavi’s, for flinging Lothar’s knapsack away or Lothar’s, for refusing to move from Rajeev’s side? It was a done thing that Tavi would sit next to Rajeev in class and the prayer hall and the study hall and so it was natural that he would sleep next to him. Lothar had broken that pact and suddenly Tavi’s anger looked like a naked animal that panted and gasped with a sweaty upper lip. He had to sleep next to Rajeev. He would kill if he couldn’t.
Yogi looked at Kajol, halfway across the room from him but along the same wall. He wanted to sleep next to Kajol. He wished Kamal Swami had told them how to sleep. He would let Yogi and Kajol sleep together. Would he have? Yogi wondered why he thought that. Yes he would. Kamal Swami understood everything. If only he could sleep next to Kajol. If the day had gone well, they could have planned it. It would be the most natural thing to do, to walk towards their corner of the bed. They had sat together in the bus. If only they hadn’t had that fight. They had gone in different directions and had not looked at each other throughout the day. Till now he had not realized how much he wanted to sleep next to Kajol. He wanted it so much that he felt like crying. Kajol now acted as if he didn’t care who was next to him. His bit of the bed was clean and the sheet taut, his small knapsack folded neatly across so as to become the sweetest pillow ever. His left arm a shade over his eyes, the smooth skin of his upper arm naked below the tiny sleeve of his t-shirt. But he didn’t look at anybody. They would turn the lights off and it wouldn’t matter which way he looked or if he looked anywhere at all.
Yogi wanted to sleep with his face nuzzled into the back of Kajol’s neck. He knew what he wanted. He would lick Kajol’s skin softly but he would wait till they put out the lights. He knew Kajol would lie quietly today, say nothing, not even turn to him. When it was dark, Yogi would sneak his hand inside his pants, caress his smooth bottom, nuzzle his penis against the soft, naked flesh. Kajol would say nothing but perhaps his body would breathe again.
Yogi looked at Kajol. Suddenly Kajol glanced in Yogi’s direction but turned his eyes away as soon as their eyes met.
He folded and re-folded his knapsack. He pretended not to notice the fear that hung in the air, the fear of wanting something too much.
Supermen
It was exciting to walk out of the ashram gate. The guards did not try to stop them. They saluted sharply. Yogi knew that they really saluted Sushant Kane but he and Rajeev were also there with him, so they also kind of saluted them, right?
To be able to walk out of the main gate on a school day felt like magic. The only time they walked through this gate was when they left for home during vacations, when the campus was a carnival with parents and luggage and cars and pretty mothers and sisters and the shouts and the chatter and the empty hostels laughing silently behind them. Everything was lovely and lit up. But these days the older boys sneaked out through the narrow alley-strip that ran past the stadium and led to the main road from where they could hail auto-rickshaws to Tejpur where they could buy paratha and beef curry for less than a hundred rupees. Chicken was expensive and most people here from Mosulgaon and the other villages ate beef which felt kind of dusty and leathery but was okay since they were so hungry all the time. But this was past the real huge front gate of the ashram, past the hawkers’ stalls and the auto-rickshaw stand and the bus stop, under the colossal bronze swan on the arch of the gate.
Sushant Kane called a taxi and slipped in next to the driver. Yogi and Rajeev sat in the back which was nice as both of them got window seats. The taxi rolled along. It was a strange feeling. They had walked out of the high walls of the ashram in their school uniform and now they were on their way to Calcutta. To a debate competition at a very important place, the Library and Cultural Centre run by the Mission. They were special and so the ashram had blessed them and let them out in the world where they would represent their school to fight for the trophy named after the Great Saffron One who held great crowds in a spell with his words.
The taxi glided along the street past markets, construction sites and makeshift stalls and got on the bridge that linked it to the city. It was a small bridge but it took a long, long time to cross it as it was always choked with traffic. This was the only way to enter the city from the southern districts and all traffic had to pass through it and got tied up in a knot. Beyond it was the city of Calcutta. Hungrily, they looked out of the windows and stared at the milling crowd of vendors, porters and beggars and hangers-on. They had pulled down the windows so that air thick with burnt petrol wafted inside and they breathed in it deeply. The city was here.
In the city, the taxi slowed down. It was a slow fight through the road swarming with buses and rickshaws and wheeled carts piled high with wares from the markets that clogged the road. So many people.
The taxi had stopped. The driver muttered something and took out a bidi and a packet of matches.
Suddenly, Sushant Kane spoke hoarsely. ‘Is there a lack of smoke anywhere in the world? Do you have to dirty the car as well?’
‘What?’ The driver asked, bewildered.
‘There are two kids at the back. Spare them the smoke.’
That felt strange. Sushant Kane smoked before Yogi. It was odd to hear him protest against dirty air. SrK was so restless these days, nervous and angry at the same time.
The car slid a bit more smoothly after it left market-infested Garia. It moved through Baghajatin where the houses looked cheap and dusty, even though they were newly made and there were scaffoldings and unfinished paint-jobs. The city was expanding to these parts and this was a housing colony where families of East Bengal immigrants lived. Even after all these decades after partition they liked to cluster together in these new colonies and shout and scream in their savage language. Ivy Kar lived here with her family. Yogi had gone in there once with his father. There were trees and ponds and nobody could understand a word of what they said. Why were these colonies part of the city? They were disgusting.
But after that came nice and clean Jodhpur Park and everything felt okay, and then the streets widened again and it was beautiful to stare at the bridges and the huge billboards and the rows of electronics and clothing shops. Suddenly, the people looked small and scattered and ridiculous. Everything was bigger than them.
The taxi stopped when the palace came into sight. It was a palace. A huge house shaped like a palace and crenellated like a temple with the insignia of the Mission on the top—the lotus in full bloom. This was the Mission’s famous cultural centre. The door was huge, like a fortress, with shiny silver knobs on them. There was something royal about the place, and something scary. It was ready to war with the streets outside. Something shot through Yogi. One could change the world here.
The driver buzzed away after Sushant Kane paid him. They walked towards the golden fortress.
There was a small group around a chaat stall on the pavement, restless like a cloud of flies. Three or four of them. They stared at the boys in wonder.
‘Yes, look carefully,’ a young man pointed at Yogi and Rajeev, his face dark with gloom. ‘Those two boys.’
‘The season’s cut of clothes.’ The young man said with a flourish. ‘Diaper-pants for hairy boys.’
Yogi’s ears turned so red that he felt they would burst. They made a picture—ashen half-pants made of coarse cotton, flapping like cheap flags around legs that looked grown up and naked. Big Class 9 legs. The ashram wanted simple, coarse clothes and they didn’t care how the boys looked in them as long as they all looked the same. But now they were out in the city and there were giant billboards around them and young men stared at them with a spark in their eyes.
Suddenly, a wet lizard slithered under Yogi’s shirt. There was a girl in the group. She was laughing so hard that she was gasping for breath. ‘The juveniles of Alipore jail,’ Yogi heard one guy say.
‘Seriously, guys,’ the first young man continued in his gloomy voice. ‘Autumn fashion is here. Take note!’
Sushant Kane softly placed a hand
on Yogi’s back, but there was a smile under his sharp beard. He could be cruel sometimes.
Yogi ran towards the metalled door of the fortress. Rajeev slithered along like a shamed mouse.
Yogi’s breathing calmed as he stepped indoors. It was the ashram, the long hallways with marble floors and dark wood banisters and bookshelves with rows and rows of dark brown volumes but everything was well-lit with the late afternoon sunlight streaming in through glass windows everywhere. People walked silently, barefoot after leaving their shoes in the hallways and sprinkling their hands with Ganga water. But it was also a place in the real world and there were men and women in ties and saris checking books out of the library and talking with the monks who were robed in saffron as usual but seemed at ease with this world, joking with it. There were several white foreigners too and the monks spoke to them as if they had not come from faraway but had just sprouted on the sidewalks of south Calcutta like everybody else there.
Sushant Kane breezed through the corridors and the hallways like he was home and it suddenly struck Yogi how well he belonged here. This was the city and the world and foreign visitors and important people came here all the time and right outside was one of the main crossings of south Calcutta full of cars and billboards. And yet it was also the quiet world of the ashram where people walked without shoes and sprinkled Ganga water on their hands, and where Sushant Kane belonged in the end with his brothers. Somehow they met here.
Sushant Kane took them to the heart of the shrine. The secretary-monk of the Centre sat there with two tall white women. The room was lined with bookshelves along the wall and smelled of fresh incense. The secretary-monk raised a blessing palm and smiled but went on dictating something which one of the women noted down. Yogi had never seen someone like him, not even at the ashram.
His saffron robe shimmered around him and on the writing desk. It was silk. He wore 10 rings, one for each finger. They had different kinds of stones on them, big and small and of different colours. He also wore a cap like Nehru, but it was saffron.
Kamal Swami was just a boy from the neighbourhood streets. This monk was the ashram.
Yogi already knew his face even though he had never seen him before. He knew the face from newspapers and TV and countless brochures and leaflets and posters. State leaders came to see him and on special days like the birthday of the Great Saffron One he spoke from every television everywhere.
He finished dictating and turned to them. He spoke to them in a tone Yogi had never heard in the ashram, like they were foreign dignitaries themselves, little foreign dignitaries who had come to visit the centre. He was waiting to hear them debate and he was excited as they were the best of their school.
The moment had come. Yogi would break into the world. Whatever it took.
Sometimes Yogi had the fear that the boys from the Calcutta schools were getting to see things they didn’t. They were afloat on birdsong and greenery while the city students were watching news shows on TV and watching adults fight. It worried him during debate and quiz competitions as knowledge of the world spiked the winning edge at these times.
Especially with a subject like ‘Winning back the nation’. Most of the debaters spoke a lot about freedom fighters and blood spilled on the streets and the slaughter of the Partition but most of all they spoke about the Great Saffron one who said that the nation would be nothing without its women and how playing football was essential to the nation’s health. Everybody knew that speaking about the Great Saffron One would get them more points with the judges here.
Some of them were very smart or had smart fathers and teachers so Yogi heard things like the budget and five-year plans also but he realized that all of them were speaking in different varieties of the military style. That was Sushant Kane’s term—the military style, or sometimes the ocean-desert-mountain style where you debated like you were fighting the elements.
Rajeev went up. He spoke like he sang. His thing was all about love and it was heartfelt. That’s who he was. He couldn’t go long without breaking into song, and whenever he sang he touched whoever was around. Grab their hand, play with their fingers, throw an arm around their shoulder. He would win the nation back with love.
The guy who went up after Rajeev was from one of the new schools in the outskirts. New-money Schools, Sushant Kane liked to say. He spoke in Bangla but he was clearly Hindi-speaking. Yogi wondered why he didn’t speak in English. His speech sounded comical, as he was trying to say things about which he understood nothing. But his voice grew like sunrise. He cared about what he was saying. Whether or not they understood him did not seem to matter so much. Yogi forgot that he was speaking in Bangla. It was like he was speaking in Hindi and he staked his life on it, even though he went on speaking in his kind of Bangla. The hall was in a spell.
It was Yogi’s turn. He didn’t know what to say. Everything he had prepared withered away like torn clothes.
The story that needed to be said knew everything. The story knew everything.
‘We were angry,’ he told them.
‘We wanted to break things, smash everything the people had. The people who had made us angry.’
The secretary-monk was seated in the front. Along with the judges. He was not a judge. The judges had his blessing.
‘We were angry because they didn’t let us watch TV. We did push-ups through the evening, and now we could eat the world. We wanted to win India back from the killing fields of Pakistan but they wouldn’t let us. We were powerless. We woke up in the morning to run circles around the field, but we ran in circles all day, eat and pray in the prison, study in a blindfold. Then they pulled us away from the cricketing fields of Pakistan while the village outside our walls burst a string of crackers every time India lost a wicket. How could they do that?’
The judges fidgeted. One of them looked like he would like to leave, go to the bathroom. The secretary-monk had his eyes fixed on Yogi. There was a smiling light in his eyes, as if everything depended on him.
‘We finished mounds and mounds of rice,’ he said. ‘We wanted them to feel poor and powerless. To become us. To make them understand that they couldn’t feed the boys they wanted to teach the lessons of life. And that would happen through the strength in our bowels. When we couldn’t eat any more, we just threw the rice away. We piled our plates high with rice, walked out of the dining hall, and threw the rice down the drain like it had been served to us by untouchables. When all their food was destroyed, their walls would come down and the shiny bald heads of the monks would drip with the sweat of fear.’
Sharply, Yogi glanced at the saffron Nehru cap on the secretary-monk’s head.
‘It was simple,’ he said. ‘Just ask the dining hall boys to pile our plates high with rice and then walk out of the hall, to the long washbasin, dump the rice into the gutter behind it. The rice looked like a cloud of white flowers in the drain that was torn and scattered by the stream. Some of us sneaked back with empty plates and sat at the tables again and asked for more rice. They were cruel to us. It was a nerve-destroying match on TV and the Pakistani bowlers were out for blood. And the brutes in the village outside shrieked every time the bowlers drew blood. So we had shrieked back at the Pakistani bowlers and called them by their true names and the bald tyrant of the house had just turned the TV off, thrown us out of the room. It was their great pleasure to take away our only pleasure. They didn’t care about the nation and they didn’t care that the brutes from the village wanted to see it go up in flames.’
One of the judges got up and edged his way out of his row. The secretary-monk smiled into Yogi’s eyes. He had leaned forward. Saffron shimmered around him like a king’s robe. Everything else looked colourless.
Yogi did not want to look at Sushant Kane but caught him through the corner of his eye. He looked at Yogi, his face unreadable.
‘I went out three times, dumped three plates of rice down the drain,’ he said. ‘Who wanted their food, these saffron anti-nationals?’
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��In the chaos of the dining room,’ he went on, ‘nobody noticed the boys. Nobody who would stop us. We were all in it and wove a web through the hall. Our friends served us daal and vegetables too. We threw everything down the drain. More and more and more. We had to destroy all the rice in the kitchen before the bald devil came in. Down-the-drain. Down-with-Pakistan. And then,’ Yogi’s voice crumpled, ‘I went out with my friend with a plate sky-high with fresh-cooked rice and the little boy from the next village walked in to wash our dirty dishes and while we flung the rice down the drain and he stood frozen. “So much rice!” the little boy gasped. “You throw away?”
‘It was as if the little boy had slapped me,’ Yogi said. ‘The little boy wore torn khaki pants—ones we had thrown away. He was probably eight years old. He came past the wall to work in the ashram for which he got two meals a day. Otherwise he would eat once in two days. The little boy looked at us in awe. Like we were supermen. We went back to our rooms. Our heads felt heavy. Everybody came and saw the boy frozen near the drain, looking at the rice as if he couldn’t believe it. Someone tried to make a joke. Something about the rice being good for the plants. But no one laughed. The rice we had thrown away could keep the village well-fed for a couple of days. The village that burst crackers whenever India lost.’
Yogi looked up. Many people had left for the bathroom. His voice softened.
‘That’s how we won our nation back—from ourselves. We were awkward, from that day on—before Pir. The boy who had stared at the rice. Pir, yes. That was the little boy’s name.’
The Scent of God Page 11