The boy from new-money school won the first prize. How could he not? No one had left to take a leak during his speech.
Rajeev won the second prize. Love was magical. They didn’t have to return empty handed.
The third prize went to one of those boys who tried so hard to sound like a news-show host. Budget and parliament, all such things he spoke about. Nobody understood anything he said, so he had to be given a prize.
The secretary-monk came and clasped Yogi’s hands. He had not taken his eyes off him. Ever since Yogi had started speaking. Surely that was not possible. But it felt that way. His clasp felt like a hug, something which swallowed Yogi’s whole body and pressed him against the saffron silk.
‘My son,’ he said in a musical voice, ‘you’ve won your nation back.’
Sushant Kane waited till the great monk had vanished with his train of little monks and polite white devotees.
‘Well!’ Was all he said.
Delight coursed through Yogi. SrK’s face was all lit up. Suddenly he realized that praise from this man meant more to him than all other praise in the world put together.
Next to him was the same man. From the dark restaurant in Tejpur where they ate beef and paratha. The large man who had mocked Yogi.
His eyes glowed.
‘Let’s go,’ he said.
There was a light in SrK’s eyes.
Acharya
His name was Raghav Acharya. He was a friend of Sushant Kane.
He looked like he had been a sportsman in the past, maybe a football player. Now flab had grown around his body, and yet he had a touch of the wild.
Quickly, he guided them out of the palace, into the city air. The shiny metaled door closed behind them.
Rajeev had left with his mother. She had come to listen to him debate. She was joyful about his prize, grateful to his teacher who had trained her son so beautifully. His speech on love had melted the audience. She had taken him home where he would spend the weekend and come back to the ashram on Sunday evening.
They walked, the three of them. Raghav walked on Yogi’s right, and Sushant Kane walked next to Raghav. As if he wanted to keep a little distance. But he walked with Yogi.
‘You were fucking with me that day?’ Raghav asked, his eyes on the road. ‘In Tejpur?’
Yogi did not say anything.
‘You knew what you guys really did that night.’ He said. ‘You knew what all that wasted rice had done to Pir.’
‘And still you were fucking with me.’ He paused before the sea of traffic.
They had walked to the main crossing at Ballygunj. Roads forked out in several directions here and the traffic was a shrieking mess. It took 15 minutes to cross this place.
Where were they going? Yogi had no idea. Sushant Kane wouldn’t say anything. But they had a plan, he knew that.
‘Today, you sounded like you knew what it’s like to starve,’ suddenly Raghav looked at Yogi.
Raghav held his hand and shot through rows of moving cars like a cat and suddenly they were on the island in the middle. For a second Yogi sensed what he might have been like on the football field.
‘I know you don’t. But you can sound like you do.’
And then the same thing again. Like an invisible arrow, Sushant Kane had also reached the other side. Next to them was the big Kwality restaurant with its dark glass door before its air-conditioned interior.
‘That’s kind of incredible.’ Raghav stood on the pavement. ‘A fucking dangerous kind of incredible.’
‘Now you need to see,’ Raghav said. They walked into the noisy side street.
‘We don’t have much time,’ Sushant Kane said. ‘I have to take the boy back to the ashram.’
Raghav raised an arm. Wait. Like a traffic cop stalling a car.
Sushant Kane walked steadily on the far right, smoking a cigarette.
‘You need to see,’ said Raghav, walking along.
‘Yes,’ Sushant Kane spoke in a muffled voice. ‘Yes, Raghav, yes!’
Raghav said nothing but kept walking.
They arrived at the train tracks. The street seemed to end there. People clotted around the place; they had tried to build homes there. Muddles of clothes were hung over wicker fences and green froth oozed through cooking pots on small fires. The people looked exhausted; the women leaned against one another and chatted, poking the green froth from time to time and the scattered children squealed like birds and animals.
‘Sit down,’ Raghav said and sat down himself right on the tracks. These were rusted tracks where no train had run for ages.
Yogi looked at Sushant Kane. SrK held out his handkerchief. A clean white handkerchief. ‘Spread it out and sit on it.’ He said softly.
‘This is a lot like Pir’s village,’ Raghav said. ‘But much worse. No rich ashram next door that they can climb through the walls for odd jobs. And the city’s a killer.’
‘The rice you guys threw away that night would have started a riot here.’
Yogi kept quiet.
‘See what they are cooking?’ He pointed to a frothy pot. ‘The children fight with the cats and the dogs all day at the local market to scavenge throwaway bits. Vegetable skin, fish gills, stems and roots and bones. The kids are like dogs.’
A shiver ran through Yogi. He heard the kids squeal and grunt but not say a word. Animals.
‘But not getting food is not their biggest problem. They grow fine on gills and tails and throwaway skin.’
‘Look at that shop,’ he pointed to a shack on the other side with a small clot of people around it.
‘That’s a country-liquor shop. That’s where the men spend most of their time.’
‘They find the money to booze even when they are starving. It’s killer stuff. Whitens the floor if you spill it.’
He turned to Yogi. A part of Yogi wanted to slink away. He was a big man, with something of the athlete’s pure power.
‘If you want to talk about poverty, that’s the real problem you have to talk about.’ He pointed his finger to the shack, his eyes fixed on Yogi. ‘That.’
A hand touched Yogi’s shoulder. Sushant Kane had come and stood next to him.
‘We need to go back to the ashram today.’ He said slowly.
‘The streets,’ Raghav whispered. ‘The real place to tell stories. Not air-conditioned halls of posh schools.’
Gently, SrK pulled at Yogi’s hand. Yogi followed him.
But Raghav, Yogi realized, would not let him go.
The Lotus Skin
The question buzzed inside Yogi’s head like a fly. Why was Sushant Kane so quiet that Friday afternoon? Even on the way back to the hostel. There were just the two of them in the taxi, but he had barely said anything. He had just muttered something about the traffic bottleneck on the bridge at Garia. Yogi did not know what to say.
Chat. Have a conversation. SrK liked to say. A speech is a conversation with many people at the same time. A conversation where everyone feels you are speaking to them alone.
Yogi wanted to talk to the Lotus. He felt like a fool. The Swami knew Yogi in ways that didn’t make sense to Yogi. Under his saffron robe, he was a forest of wild green shoots, full of wild, wet energy. He knew Yogi could recite well. He gave him difficult passages to read aloud in the prayer hall and during the school assembly, passages that gave him gooseflesh. But he never said anything about his debating. Neither had Yogi ever seen him speak to Sushant Kane.
There was the Swami and there was Raghav. It did not make any sense. The Swami was here, but just out there was a dark, dusty roadside eatery. The Lotus lived close to leathery meat that was neither chicken nor goat. It was madness.
Yogi walked to his room. The warden’s room was the first one in the ground floor of the hostel. The curtains were drawn. Heavy saffron curtains that sat still.
He drifted into a familiar fragrance: sandalwood and flower and incense and a soft yellow orange sheen all over the room. But there was someone else in the room. She sat on t
he chair across Kamal Swami’s study table. The Swami sat at his usual place.
She looked at Yogi sharply as he entered and he knew he hadn’t seen anyone quite like her here at the ashram. She was probably his mother’s age but had the eyes of a young college student, eyes which searched the room keenly. She wore a cream silk sari that looked expensive but one which was borderless like that of a widow. Yogi smelled camphor and something else, something beautiful and pointed, like clove. He stood still at the door.
‘Kire, what is it?’ Kamal Swami smiled at Yogi. His cheek creased with the familiar smile and a deep happiness drifted back to Yogi.
‘I…I,’ Yogi tried to say something but the smiling eyes of the woman made him freeze.
‘Just wait outside,’ the Lotus smiled again. ‘I’ll call you.’
Yogi stepped out and stood behind the curtain.
‘There was something in that voice,’ the woman’s voice floated through the curtain. ‘She always said, that made her want to give up everything in the world.’
‘He was a lion of a man,’ the Swami said in a smiling voice. ‘But she too was special, to be able to hear his call.’
‘And follow him till the end of the universe.’ She responded.
‘Helena was a very special woman.’ He said. ‘How many people of her birth and wealth feel that their calling is with the world’s poor?’
‘But how could she say no to that voice? Did she have a choice? That bronze skin and those deep eyes? Just look.’
Her eyes, Yogi knew, had stopped at the giant portrait of the Great Saffron One on the wall of Kamal Swami’s room.
The Lotus didn’t say anything. Was he smiling?
‘Tell me Swami,’ her voice softened. ‘Was that all for her?’
‘Men like him come to the earth for just one reason,’ the Lotus also spoke in a softer voice.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘She was a miracle woman. A goddess hailing from Parisian high society and making India’s poverty her own. But would she have come here if she didn’t love him?’
‘She loved. There was so much love in her heart.’
The curtains brushed Yogi’s cheeks. There was another kind of music in there. Kamal Swami’s voice was like a conductor’s hand; the beautiful woman’s voice rose and fell as the Swami’s voice asked, as if the Swami was telling her how to talk, and how to feel.
But her words fought him off.
‘But when a woman hears your voice and looks into your eyes and decides to turn her life upside down, a man must know something, doesn’t he? You know, don’t you?’
Her voice shivered.
‘If I touch you,’ her voice softened. ‘Like this. And this and this, tell me,’ she asked. ‘Don’t you know?’
‘I know all there is to know,’ Kamal Swami’s beautiful voice boomed and Yogi longed to see his smile. ‘He was a man but in form. He was but the Great Spirit.’
‘The form too, feels, does it not? Tell me it does.’ The woman paused, as if taking a deep breath. ‘Is it true? Is it true that once while they were traveling together, just the two of them, she had…’
‘No, Helena!’ Suddenly Kamal Swami’s voice became warm. ‘He had said, reminding her of her great calling on earth right then. Never forget why you’ve arrived in this world. Never!’
‘No?’ She sounded almost hurt. But strangely, Yogi felt if he could see her face he would see her smile.
‘No,’ he said. Yogi couldn’t help but part the curtain, look inside. The woman’s hand lay on Kamal Swami’s palm like a dead branch. ‘Gold and women. Women and gold. They cannot touch the brotherhood.’
He had never seen Kamal Swami smile like that. Never like that. He felt a sharp ache, as if the bones inside his chest had shifted suddenly. He knew nothing about the Lotus.
He turned and walked back to his room.
The Poison Bowl
‘These people belong to us,’ Raghav said as the auto-rickshaw started to crawl through the housing colony.
This place always left Yogi desolate, with the mourning sound of wind over empty land. It didn’t seem fit for human life. The houses were half-born, with bits of wicker poking out and plaster unfinished on facades, and there were ponds half-covered with swathes of water-hyacinths.
‘That’s a strange thing to say,’ Sushant Kane said.
‘Where would they go?’ Raghav asked. ‘They are not the rich of Calcutta who vote for the Congress. They’ve been with us ever since we gave them the land on which they were squatting after they came to India. What did the Congress do except throw them out of their homes?’
‘Really, Raghav?’ Sushant Kane frowned. ‘Is that what your Party says? Seems a bit extreme to blame the Congress for the Partition of India, no?’
There was loving laughter in his voice. The two men shared something that Yogi couldn’t quite figure out. Something they didn’t talk about but which still glued them to each other. What was it? Yogi tried to touch it every time he saw the two of them together. He couldn’t make sense of the language. But he had realized that it was about believing in the same things.
They lived different lives. But Raghav seemed closer to Sushant Kane than his own brothers. Looking at them together, Yogi knew why Sushant Kane never seemed happy in the ashram where his brothers belonged. And yet he had to live there. That was his real family. But he didn’t believe them.
Was that why he always brought Yogi here? But he was always making fun of Raghav, poking holes at everything Raghav said. And yet, when Raghav reached out for Yogi, SrK’s eyes sparkled. As if he knew something he wouldn’t talk about. What did he want Yogi to do? Yogi ached to know.
‘They still live like refugees,’ Raghav said. ‘People in Calcutta make fun of their language. They belong to the poor people’s party. They always have.’
‘Brothers and sisters,’ the thin boyish man seated next to the driver spoke into the hand-held loudspeaker. ‘Go around your house carefully. Look everywhere. In the bathroom, the kitchen, outside under the shed. The bowl of poison is closer than you think.’
‘What is he talking about?’ Yogi asked, startled.
‘Love!’ Raghav said mysteriously. ‘Pure love.’
‘Pure poison.’ Sushant Kane snorted.
‘The bowl of poison,’ the man removed the funnel-like loudspeaker from his mouth and paused for a second, returning quickly. ‘The nursery of killers. Go around and look for them. Please, please do. Brothers and sisters, for my sake.’
‘Doesn’t work as well as it used to,’ Raghav looked past Yogi, at Sushant Kane.
‘You guys are just mad,’ Sushant Kane took a drag at his bidi and laughed. ‘No wonder they call it blasting a canon to kill a mosquito.’
‘Bowls of accumulated water,’ the man turned and winked at Sushant Kane. ‘Sitting still. Breeding ground for the killer babies.’ He spoke with a flourish, almost breaking into song. ‘Malarial mosquitoes.’
The singing auto-rickshaw hobbled over unformed roads past homes that looked like half-cooked tea-stalls, giant bamboo scaffoldings for construction that looked abandoned, houses with their jagged brick facades covered with clothing spread out to dry—men’s cotton underpants flapping over windows and rust-coloured saris winding around the houses like unfolding stories.
The man recited a string of details like a long poem he had memorized. Blood tests, a charitable dispensary, the state health department, fever and symptoms of malaria. He was so thin. Yogi marveled at the burst of energy that carried his words through the air and worried that the man might collapse from the force of his own words.
‘Flush the still-water out of your lives and let it flow,’ the man sang. ‘God forbid the poison enters your lives and you meet malaria in person. But if you do, you know what to do and where to go.’
Sushant Kane flicked his cigarette-butt away. ‘Here comes the best part,’ he said.
‘The charitable dispensary sponsored by your well-wisher and councilor, Raghav Acharya, is forever op
en for you.’ The man screamed. ‘At all hours of the day and night. You are welcome, forever welcome!’
The auto-rickshaw took a turn and hobbled past a pond. At the end of the pond was a field with tall wild grass and a single goal post.
‘Brothers and sisters,’ the man took a deep breath and screamed. ‘Go around your house carefully.’
Suddenly Yogi wanted to laugh. But he couldn’t. Something about this made him ache inside.
‘The market makes slaves of everybody,’ Raghav said. ‘Why go for something free when you can pay for it?’
‘Is that so?’ Sushant Kane said. ‘Don’t people queue up for freebies?’
‘Not true. The crowd’s thinning out these days at the dispensary. There’s a new clinic near the market where they have a female receptionist—not a compounder but a receptionist. And they charge a fee. And they are all going there to find out if they have malaria in their blood.’
‘They actually want to pay?’ Sushant Kane asked in a slow voice.
‘It’s not a lot of money,’ Raghav stared absently at a cycle-rickshaw far ahead of them. ‘Twenty rupees. But if there is a fee, it must be good!’ He said mockingly.
‘Not that he needs the money,’ he spat. ‘The booze keeps him well-oiled.’
‘Ratul Munshi?’ Sushant Kane asked. ‘Ethyl Alcohol? He owns the clinic?’
‘Who else?’ Raghav gestured to the rickshaw, now right before them.
A shiny cloth poster flapped on the back of the rickshaw now right next to them like a gown trailing behind the vehicle. On it, a plump tri-colour palm blessed all and the smiling face of a balding man with a neat wisp of a moustache stared at them, wavering in the breeze. Vote for Ratul Munshi. The words rippled like an oceanic wave as the poster flapped in the wind.
‘He helps them with the loans they owe the banks for their rickshaws,’ Raghav said. ‘And with parts, maintenance, help for the families. In return they have to flap his face on their ass.’
‘The rickshaws with the white chadors have taken over these parts.’ He said as they passed the rickshaw. ‘Ratul smiles at us everywhere.’
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