It was a co-op where men walked in to buy women. Sometimes small girls. By the hour, for the night. It was a co-op that needed to run smooth, which sent its key players out in the world to get business sorted with the leaders of the people. Renu grew deeper in years as she laid out the madness of it all. Making his way through the coded language, Yogi saw a mind to which one could not say no.
The wives of their key clients were pulling a cheap trick this time to get their men off the women who took care of them in the evenings.
Bitches. They had rallied themselves into a cranky ring cast around the right party. The party that hated meat. The meat of women that men liked to eat in illegal massage parlors and hotel rooms. Meat set their blood boiling. They rammed down doors with sharp tridents to wrench out the flesh of people who liked to eat.
They had egged those butchers to break up the good work of perky women who picked up hardworking men at the end of a tiring day to give them the free run of a woman’s body. Mountains-deserts-oceans. Climb-hikeswim. What would those bitches offer in homes littered with kids? Hardly a tender word, and you could forget about a hike or a swim.
But why would the bitches bear the pain of their men’s pleasure? Rough with anger, Renu’s face revealed a cruel woman of the world. Gooseflesh stood throbbing on Yogi’s skin at the smell of her body—a live whore sitting and talking in the very same room, wicked brilliance reddening the tips of his ears. Hidden under a silken sari, her body swelled with stories to tell and Yogi’s heart jumped to his mouth in terror as he glimpsed the smooth, light brown skin of a flat midriff between her blouse and sari.
The rival party had jumped at the chance. Angry women of soot-stained homes made up a bank of votes that rarely reached the polling booths. Here was their chance to win over the women who wanted their men to come home with the money made in the day and not blow it in the bed of some woman who could curl her body like a snake. So why not beat up a few whores? Catch the men with their pants around their ankles, penises drooping faster than they could rise. Make it the house of shriek and shame it was meant to be.
A fly on the wall of that adda, Yogi saw the birth of a glowing thing that evening. A future. Between the two of them, Raghav and Renu opened up a way of thinking that Yogi didn’t know existed. The big-boned councilor and the small, doll-like prostitute pushed the limits of what one thought was possible, beyond the mere fighting of goons by goons, muscle with muscle. Pretending to dust furniture and photo frames, Yogi realized the crying need that had hidden itself so well in the air blessed by stale cigarette smoke and Renu’s maddening fragrance. The need of a strong collective will of hookers. Not a shriek but a steely voice of demand. A union of their own.
‘And why not?’ Renu creased her brows. ‘We run a good house. We give what we promise. We raise our children with care, better than some of those bitches wed-locked by their husbands…’
‘But of course.’ Raghav hummed. ‘Children…’ His voice trailed away in the dusty air of the room.
‘Yogi,’ He had smiled. ‘Why don’t you come and sit here?’ He flouted his own rule with such indifference that Yogi’s flesh grew red and warm and he thirsted for a place to hide. They were to pretend he didn’t exist.
Renu looked up, gave Yogi a smile of such molten warmth that the world turned, in a flash, to a sunnier place. ‘Come and sit, little man,’ she said, the dark blue anger from a moment ago gone like a nightmare that had never been.
‘Some of you have children his age, right?’ Raghav asked.
‘My daughter would be a couple of years older than him,’ one of the tall women said. ‘She goes to school too.’
‘Yes, many of us do,’ Renu said softly. ‘I have a son a few years younger than him. He lives with me, watches me work.’ Her face darkened. ‘Life! What are you going to do?’
‘Here’s what you are going to do.’ Raghav leaned ahead, the old glint of revenge peeping through his tiny, slit-like eyes. ‘Talk to the world. Tell them your stories. Claim your rights.’ He grabbed Yogi’s hand. ‘Have him around. He is a boy with a special gift.’
He looked at Yogi with a helpless smile. A smile that was shielded from the three women, not in body, but in soul.
He dared Yogi to do it.
A few weeks later, the beast was born.
‘Justice for sex workers,’ said one orange banner, the colour same as that announcing local volleyball tournaments. ‘The National Sex Workers’ Union.’ Said the cool white banner pinned across the wall behind the raised platform. That made no sense, Yogi told himself. What was national, the union or the sex workers? And what was national about prostitutes and pimps from the sleepy houses across the railway station getting their anger knotted together? People! Sometimes, he really didn’t understand them!
There was music, and songs, and poems. Paul Robeson and all that. The gambit was opened by a fattish, weird-haired woman in jeans and khadi kurta. She was studying for a doctorate in London and was a professional hell-raiser for the cause of prostitutes. It was a cause—she told the crowd—that had a life of its own, in many corners of the world, where hookers worked with licenses just like doctors and chartered accountants. She spoke in a singsong and from time to time looked like she needed a chalk and a blackboard. But the pale banner of the National Sex Workers’ Union was all she had behind her. They were not just some pillow, she said, men clamped their legs around to masturbate and could throw away when soiled. Her nice analysis of masturbation—repeated a few times—thickened the knot of people before the stage and sent strong murmurs through them. These were, she sang, human beings, women just like those who helped them at banks and stores, who cooked their meals and washed their dishes. Agile women who cleaned their pipes to flush out needs that might have turned them into rapists and murderers. By drawing out the violence, taking it on themselves, these women were like sharp, skilled snake-charmers. Help them stand up for their rights. She flung a khadi-wrapped arm in the air, and a fist rolled into a ball.
Oh, and pillows did not spread diseases. Human beings did. Without a sane system and a sprinkling of peace, they would all be wiped off by AIDS.
Shooting little arrows of terror into every man’s loins, she stepped down.
Next was the hookers’ chorus, a song by a famous dead poet about mountain-climbing. Hiking across endless deserts and swimming through bottomless oceans. All to be done in the dead beat of night.
Then Renu walked up to the stage. She spoke the same way she had spoken in Raghav’s adda. The same clear, simple, cutting spray of words, the straight attack at the jugular, the same intimate manner, biting, caressing. To what a crowd! College boys tickled by the colour of the gathering, housewives back from grocery shopping shocked and frozen on the spot, railway coolies unable to tear their eyes away from the protestors. Not that Renu cared. She had a story to tell. A story of horrors. Madamji was right, she said. Could you get away by bashing up the shop-girl who showed you clothes? Would you have the balls to stub out your cigarettes on your housemaid’s cheeks? On her bare breasts? Would you? She paused, looking urgent and composed at the same time. Would you? Then tell me, why would you do it to the girl who was just there to do business with your body?
Yogi walked up to the stage. He did not believe a word of what Renu said. He didn’t have a thing to do with them, with their sad lives on which goons stubbed out cheap cigarettes.
He passed her. Her mouth melted into the smile that gave him deep comfort. ‘My little man.’ Lightly, she pulled his cheeks as she passed. ‘Go tell them.’
Lovingly, he touched the microphone, moistened it with his slow breath.
‘I’m a student,’ he began, ‘at the school out there.’ His finger pointed to the horizon behind the crowd.
No one turned back. No one cared about his school. They were thirsty for him.
‘Most boys in my class bring nice lunches from home. Sabji and paratha, bread and omelettes, rice and egg curry, noodles. Their tiffin-boxes shine like mirrors. T
hey have superman stickers across their tops. Lunch hour brings shocks and surprises, every day.’
There were blank-eyed, drooling idiots who had to be respected because of the shininess of their tiffin boxes, the deep-fried fragrance of their food.
The shine on the boxes and the fragrance of the food, they knew, in the shadows of their hearts, were shaped by the ladles and scrubs of their mothers at home.
‘There are a few ragged kids who never brought shiny tiffin boxes or fragrant food. On a good day, they got street food wrapped in greasy paper, the covers of their notebooks dark with grease. Savoury stuff sharpened by street salt. On worse days, a few rupee notes to thrust at the street vendors outside the school for some spiced junk in a knitted bowl of dried leaves. Good money, some of them bring, good enough to buy pista ice-cream for a whole row of boys. But never ever did you see them with a tiffin box or a home-boiled egg.’
Yogi lowered his eyes, looking at the crowd in front, and not quite.
‘It felt very strange when our teacher, a smart woman who loved us all, told us that the mothers who never packed tiffin didn’t hate their boys. What? Were we idiots? Was that what we thought? She didn’t. These boys with street food wrapped in grease-stained paper just had mothers who had jobs outside home. Just like fathers. In offices, typing letters. In shops, crunching numbers. Sometimes, in other people’s homes, watching over growing kids. Bringing money home for food and rent.’
‘Just have a chat,’ Sushant Kane always said. ‘Even if it’s five hundred people.’ Yogi’s eyes became moist for a second but quickly they were dry.
‘The thought of moms who didn’t have time to think about lunches for their sons,’ he told them, ‘was fog that messed with our heads. So we cracked a nasty joke across the back of another boy, an idiot from another class whom we saw lunching on sliced bread bought at the store next to the school. Something about bread from that shop being laced with rat poison. We cracked up in laughter. Our teacher came and smiled. She found the joke funny too.
‘She smiled and told us that the idiot boy’s mother did not love him less. Just that she couldn’t stay at home making lunch for her son as she was here teaching us all. We wanted to melt into the darkest cracks on earth. The boy they had whipped with mean laughter was our teacher’s son. The smart young woman who loved us all and had taught our fingers and eyes and minds a thousand things to do. Once and for all, a roomful of boys understood the meaning of a woman who worked outside of home. Who couldn’t send her son to school with a well-scrubbed tiffin box and well-fried pooris.
‘And then we got the blow of our life. A boy in our class came back to school after missing classes for more than a month. A happy boy everybody loved, most of all, our teacher, because he was clever with his fingers and eyes and mind, picking up with thoughtless ease all she had to teach us. He came back to school a broken boy with the news that his mother had been beaten so much at work that he had to stay back home to take care of her.
‘A cup of boiling-hot tea had been thrown at her face, leaving her skin scarred for life. Her head had been smashed so hard against the wall that her hair had become sticky with blood. And,” Yogi told the crowd, his fingers loosening around the mike, “We didn’t even know the boy’s mother worked to make a living. As she lay fainted, they had poked glowing cigarettes at her, burning holes through her skin.
‘How would we know?’ Yogi asked a college boy who had stopped at the rally for fun. ‘We fought with each other to trade food with him at lunch hour. It was hard to believe that home-fried eggplants could taste that good. Or that one could make parathas so magical that they tasted fresh-cooked after three hours inside a tiffin box. What a beautiful tiffin box it was. Old, but old like a house in which families had lived for many, many years. How did a mother like that find time to work at a job and pay for her son’s books and school-fees?
‘Who would want to kill her? Who would?’ Slowly, Yogi moved a little away from the mike. ‘You can ask her,’ he said softly. Silence had thickened in a dark clump around the rally, faintly bitten off by the whistle of trains taking off from the railway station nearby. ‘She is sitting right there.’ He turned at an angle from his silent brood of listeners, pointing to the dark tribe of hookers seated to the left of the stage. The beaten up whore was there too, dressed in the finery of bandages and a plaster-coated arm.
She had no children. Sweetly barren, the best kind in her line of work.
Yogi’s body had woven a spell out of which it could not claw its way out.
The hookers’ choir had been spared the effort of the last protest song. God was generous with small mercies.
That evening saw the birth of a new labour union. The first of its kind in the area. A newborn, solid block of votes for The Party.
The birth-pangs were loud, lovely and cruel. The flurry of songs and sweets and laughter marked a drunken trail all the way back to the burrowed houses across the railways station, where Bollywood songs were already ricocheting off the walls. Mountains, deserts, and oceans had been climbed, hiked and swum across. Finally.
Renu picked Yogi up at one end of the narrow corridor ripped apart by the blaring music. Her strength surprised him, and the muscles on her arms like wiry snakes. ‘My little man.’ Breathlessly, she stuffed a furry sweet into his mouth. ‘You are blessed, my sweet, sweet boy.’ Her voice was hoarse, as if from a cold, and it took him a few seconds to realize that she’d been crying. ‘Today, I feed you to fullness.’ Pushing open the door to her room, she had drowned him in a sea of goodies made by the ladies of the house. Laddoos, gulab jamuns, a platter of sweets made with cashews and pistachios, the warm breath of her moist lips.
Up close, her features were sharp and delicate.
He felt her heartbeat of happiness as she crushed him to her chest. Choking on cream-soaked cashews, Yogi’s lips mashed themselves against her sharp collarbone. They were real; they reeked of adulthood. Kajol’s bony body passed through his senses. It felt half-formed. Tears welled up in his eyes as he licked the hollow of her neck, sucked its way down to the soft crevice on her chest. ‘My little man.’ She laughed, pulling herself back to unbutton her blouse, revealing pale shoulders and upper arms, smoother than he had imagined human skin could be. Bracing himself, he scooped her firm and fragrant left breast into his palms, licked and bit its puckered areola. Suddenly, he felt he couldn’t breathe.
Painfully, he tore himself from her body to stare at it, the large, proud breasts over the arched stomach, the deep belly-button, the sari worn low on the waist. She shone with deep laughter and her brown nipples glistened with his spit.
Gold and women. Women and gold. The Great Saffron One always said. Kamal Swami had never given in to womengold. His raging muscles and sparkling eyes lived on their own.
He felt sick and the world started to turn. His lips and tongue were caught in a storm that scratched and bruised and chewed her skin. The hollow of her shoulder, the underside of her breasts, smoothly rough. Her toy-like ribcage and the cave of her stomach. He ate her like a beast and choked from her fragrance.
Pushed against the wall, her body shook with laughter, an undulating river. She squeezed his exploding penis in her palm, wrenching the tip between her thumb and forefinger. ‘My big little man.’ She had whispered. Fingers laced with killer strength.
Helplessly, he had bucked and come in a hot spurt against the taut flesh of her inner thigh. Spent all of a sudden, he’d marveled at his hatred for her, a hatred more like awe.
Like Kajol’s body, its memory was half-formed. It tugged at his heart and made it wet.
A Deserted Temple
When did he get comfortable talking to more and more people? Gatherings a bit bigger, and then a bit more? His audience swelled as he moved into Class 10, fracturing his vacations between his parent’s home and Sushant Kane’s. He would move into SrK’s quarter right as vacations began and the boys left the hostel for home; his mother would pick him up sometime and bring him back home, b
ut sometime mother and son would tell each other that the teacher’s place was better for his studies and quickly avert their glances so that the conversation was closed. He knew his mother missed him and yet she did not like to see him in the darkening chaos at home.
Here things moved fast. The promise of a mere ten or fifteen people was shattered soon, into a ragged crowd of fifty. Raghav and his boys pushed him towards larger gatherings and Yogi learned to pretend. At seventy or eighty, he could imagine it was a debate auditorium where parents of every student had shown up. The people looked a bit scruffy. But more intense. And then suddenly he was talking to the whole neighbourhood. It was easy enough to be sucked into arguments at street-side tea-stalls. The inner hollows of government schools gave him a fake comfort, except it was full of adults who would be back here on time to cast their vote behind cheap, flapping curtains.
The stretch between Bandelport Station and the refugee colony became his neighbourhood. It was the most crucial chunk of Raghav’s constituency.
Sushant Kane watched him. He looked happy, and there was something childlike about his happiness.
The candied knife. Look like the smiling Buddha while twisting their arteries. Smile and stab and smile.
There were those who hated him. Drill sergeant Prashant Kane was shocked at his toxic brother. His was a sports camp for the poor boys. To push them past the sloped gate of the board exam. It was his own cult, the running, sweating cult who swore by the Mission. Ashant never brought a boy home but he cheered the same boys. He was also a devil on the field but his devotion to the celibate order was splintered by pangs of desire for sunglasses and motorbikes. But Sushant was a heretic. He wore pajamas and smoked cigarettes right in his hostel room. He would have been a spiky student leader if he could. If only the ashram hadn’t breaded, buttered and sheltered him way back when he had nobody. He would spit on the shrines.
The Scent of God Page 14