But to bring a boy like this home? A snake? He crashed here every school vacation. Didn’t he have a home?
Prashant refused even to look at Yogi while he lived in their house. To Yogi’s great relief.
Once there was a world of competitions and prizes and certificates. And teachers patting your head and saying nice things. There truly was such a world. It was now a dream.
There were people who were mad enough to think that they had a shot at toppling The Party from the Municipal seats through which they had grown a wild web of roots. That they could get the rustic refugees in the colonies and the dwellers of the slums along the railway tracks to vote outside the colours of The Party. The scattered night-dwellers who slept on rusted tracks, snatching a living when they could by carrying cargo at the giant crater of the railway-station sprawling across the suburb. To change the minds of the trash heap of humanity scattered here.
The prophet to steer them out of the colours of The Party was Ratul Munshi, a man who had made a fortune through a chain of liquor shops scattered throughout the city and some of the satellite towns around it. Those little nooks where men behind bars handed customers newspaper-wrapped bottles of IMFL—Indian Made Foreign Liquor. Director’s Special whisky. Old Monk rum. Vodka marked with a range of Russian vices, shipped all the way from factories in Andhra Pradesh. Running the vibrant empire, Ratul was a man who poured money churned off alcohol into the gaping wounds of society. Building schools and hospitals, a temple or two. A formidable man who had been named Ethyl Alcohol by a brain in ferment. Dangerous and flammable, pleasantly narcotic, devotedly applied to healing the cuts and bruises of society. Ill-health, illiteracy, the works. Cuts that could turn gangrenous without the dab of cotton wool soaked in ethanol.
The Party of the Palm, a bunch of limping, beaten strays gathered up for one last growl, couldn’t have chosen better. Ethyl Alcohol was a legend in these lanes, only half-visible as a real human being. A man of mythical wealth in a habit of hushing his source for it, the booze stores garlanding the city like tiny islands of pleasure, he was already a law-giver who jostled with The Will of The Party many times. The Party couldn’t wedge a foot into his hospitals, not in their advisory boards, and not in their sweepers’ unions. To return the favor, The Party had its very own band of middle-aged women with shrill voices and giant bottoms who blamed every disaster, human and natural, on Ratul’s liquor stores, lying down en masse in front of as many stores as they could cover, pledging to live on nothing but the slow-burning lard around their waists for days on end. It was one of the most moving sights in the world, enormous women wrapped in coarse cotton saris rolling across the pavements in front of the liquor shops, picketing the shops to protest everything from hit-and-run accidents to high prices to tornadoes. Sometimes they’d refuse even a drop of water.
How can Yogi ever measure his debt to them? The mean mashis who had, over the years, paved smooth roads into people’s minds for him to slip inside?
It arrived as a natural disaster that came at the end of a long prayer. Just as Raghav had promised. Even before the night was out, corpses dropped on the streets like felled trees. Big men who could run across the railway platforms with fifty kilos on their back. Small men with bones dried up from years of card and dice games. It had been a regular workday that had ended with the purchase of a glass or a liter pouch of liquor along with green chilies and mustard oil for homes across the shanties. They came knocking at their wicker door, the hooch-vendors on bicycles. Around midnight, the storm started raging through the hutments, the tornado of screams, of seawaves of pain in the throat and chest, the misted eyes. Hardly any women, none of the wives who paid for most of the booze they never drank.
What happened? Who cared? Some mix up with methyl alcohol and pesticide, they heard. Moonshine laced with fire. A raging wildfire. But who cared? Here it was, their chance of a lifetime.
It was not the kind of chance that The Party could throw at the mean mashis rolling in the dust. Yogi spent a couple of hours locked up in Raghav Acharya’s living room with a fog of cigarette smoke burning his eyes, six men whispering to him, a brutal gang that made up the big man’s brains and brawns. Sushant Kane had gone back home. There was a smell that defined these gatherings, the sweet and pungent stench of whiskey bought incognito at Ethyl Alcohol’s megastore by the railway station. Bought and wrapped incognito in old newspapers, delivered to the Party offices faster than the fat mean mashis could turn their bottoms around on the protest grounds in front of the store.
Soft as silk, they said, as gentle as pineapple juice. Not the liquor for the people. Only for the people for whom they vote.
It was the kind of living room that opened straight into the streets. Like the private clinics of some doctors who are too chatty, too kindly to take their jobs seriously, the kind who open up their doors to all in the neighbourhood who want to drop in for a chai and a chat. Stepping out on the steps, Yogi remembered asking:
Have they removed all the bodies?
‘Doubt it.’ One of the quiet, sulking types had spoken. ‘It’s chaos out there. Fresh corpses sprouting every few minutes.’
The magic had begun. None of the writhing men were taken to any of Ethyl Alcohol’s free clinics, even though the doctors sat there staring at the doors. The Party boys had done the rounds spreading the shocking news that the IVs there were laced with killer alcohol. That they were good places to go if you couldn’t bear the pain any longer and wanted to step out of the world right away. Magically, too, none from the stricken families prayed at the roadside shrines and tiny marble temples carved with the generous booze money. The Party boys, though, had nothing to do with that. On the subject of gods, The Party was silent.
Yogi walked into bustee number eight, a child returning to a family scalded by acid. A forest with felled, burnt trees, creepers wound around the burnt stubs, wailing. Women flailing their arms shrieking in pain, grown up women crying like babies, aching their way through birth canals. Frozen in fear, the babies of the slum had stopped crying. Open-mouthed, they stared at their mothers, unsure as to how they might cradle them in their short, stubby arms to comfort them. The Party boys were dancing around, bloated flies over a sea of muck, pulling out bellyaching men by their shoulder-joints, piling them up in their own rickshaws and auto-rickshaws, into long thela-carts, to take away from the nightmare world of Ethyl Alcohol’s clinics and their string of Poison IVs.
In that gutter Yogi was a wedge of the moon, shiny and touchable, that touched you in turn with soft fingers and clean nails. He touched an old woman at her wizened elbow, asked her:
Did you drink the moonshine?
Stunned, she paused mid-wail, a massive, sick fish hooked by the angler.
Did you? Yogi asked again. Her head wobbled, left to right and back again.
She had not. The silly old cow.
Disposing of her, he walked ahead, gently picked a silent six-month old off the arms of a wailing mother. Unstirring, the mother wailed along, an even wail that cared little about the loss of her baby. Yogi moved in and out of their lives like a limb of their own, a pale, unblemished limb that they never owned, just about eating their food (but never quite), playing with their kids (touching them as lightly as possible), offering them a gift hamper of words they felt could be theirs, if only for a moment. Did he booze? Holding up the baby, he asked the mother, the skinned animal shrieking in pain under the butcher’s knife. ‘No. No. No.’ Finally there was a touch of novelty in the mum’s wails, a shocked rocking to and fro like a scarecrow caught in the wind. Lovingly, Yogi looked at the tiny thing, a large-ish dark brown lizard covered in snot that drew a wave of nausea out of his bowels.
‘So he isn’t going to die like his father,’ Yogi told the crowd. ‘Lovely!’
He held him up, the snotgreen, muckbrown piece of flesh like a chicken roasted and skinned. The maelstrom of wails thinned a little, how could they not? Yogi’s voice offered them something in the midst of spiked suffering.
‘I hope you have shiny plans for him,’ he raised his voice. ‘To send him to Ratul Munshi’s fine school where he could pick up the art and science of boozing.’
There were posh alcohol companies, he told them, which gave its employees booze bonuses, a wad of money with the salary to spend on liquor, a fine shot to sales. And they did, month after month, year after year, till they were biting away larger and larger chunks of their salaries to buy booze, fattening the companies and shriveling their livers at the same time.
‘Christian monks and nuns round up your kids for their school in order to swell their own flock of believers and whiskey companies give you money to buy booze from their own shops. What do you get when you sent your kids to a school run by a booze mogul?’
But even if you’re god’s own gift to the smelly and the downtrodden, a milk-pure child in a gutter of slime, once in a while you stared at the face of an unbeliever. An unbeliever who was a suspicious creature, a young labourer who did not drink, was alive and healthy, a forehead creased and eyes wrinkled under the blazing sun.
‘Ratul Munshi’s shops sell foreign alcohol.’ He looked at Yogi, a kindly older brother whose question was wrapped in helpless affection. ‘Cheap hooch is all that people here can afford.’
Indian made foreign liquor. Yogi was tempted to correct him. Scotch distilled on the highlands of Karnataka. But this was no time to play. Yogi shot him a pair of hurt eyes. Deep in his mind, ripostes jostled with each other in a race to pop out first. Truth: But for the jacked up prices of IMFL, would the craze for Bangla hooch be so careless? Truth: Convoluted reason didn’t belong to a shaken boy who was getting ready for the uphill battle against pimples.
‘Dada,’ Yogi pleaded with him. ‘You live by the rickshaw, don’t you? When you come home late at night, you take out the rupee notes from the pleat in your loincloth, don’t you? Notes darkened with the sweat of the day?’ In his words, Yogi is his wronged younger brother, a boy hesitant to make eye contact with his elders while he speaks. ‘If they are whole, tell me, do the soiled notes tucked in a rickshaw-puller’s waist fare any less than the crisp bills in the pockets of pressed trousers?’
The kind of logical muddle, Yogi realized, worked well for the muddy tribes. People who make do with grunts will be dazzled easy with a healthy sentence strung together. A healthy sentence rotten inside.
Two of their boys carried a tall old man with bony ribs out from behind a wicker fence. The man who could have made it to a slightly fancier death toppled over the gutter halfway through his morning shit. Doomed to die now, fly-swathed on the coir-bed of a free clinic, jaws frozen in the grimace of pain from hooch laced with insecticide.
Yogi looked around the sea of dazed women (and a couple of creepy men who didn’t drink), taking a deep breath. ‘Why do you run to the city to wipe the bottoms of others’ kids when the shit dries on the bums of your own children?’
Why, he asked them, do you scrub your breath away at other people’s lives and coffee tables when the muck piles up table-high on your own floor? Hang like bats from crowded trains and get groped by perverts to get to fancy houses to live in dark, damp burrows under them? To suck in their crap like human vacuum cleaners and get your guts and lungs tinted with dust and bleach and cusswords that would piss off stray dogs?
For this?
So that you can send money home? So that your men can go hunting for hooch in crinkly plastic packets that once held Mother Dairy Full Fat Milk? Bangla moonshine in bhads of burnt clay? Husbands, brothers, shaking, spittle-mouth fathers who smell of alcohol instead of the life-saving drops they were supposed to swallow? Spindly, gawking boys who steal from their fathers, their Mother Dairy pouches of hooch?
‘All the time,’ he told them, ‘you thought you were commuting to clean the poop off baby bums and toilet bowls was time spent working for one man only: Ratul Munshi. To him, you didn’t miss a payment. Payment for scorching with pesticide the pest-ridden bodies of your husbands and sons. Lice in their heads and tapeworms in their guts. Pesticide laced with moonshine.’
The mothers had stopped wailing, all of them. Frightened by the peace, a few babies shrieked.
Later that afternoon, the hunger-striking mashis looked on sadly as a jagged mob ripped apart Ratul Munshi’s megastore by the railway station, not touching a drop of Andhra Scotch that flooded the sunbaked picketing grounds from the crates and crates of bottles smashed across it. Starving before the store for ages, they had sprouted for it a mild affection, a hurt love as that the devout widow comes to nurse for the flute-sporting god who demands from her endless days of fasting. And paper, endless reams of old newsprint, torn, crumpled, balled legions of paper. In Calcutta, when you destroy a liquor shop, you damage more paper than glass. More paper than what you can murder if you vandalize a newsstand. Newspapers aged from a week to a few years, rolled up in a colossal forest to shade the bottle of shame with which you slink away from its steps.
Paper and glass and Karnataka Scotch, murdered en masse by the masses, thankfully, soon after several crates of the best IMFL had been removed to Raghav Acharya’s office.
The temple at the end of that alley gave Yogi pause. He had never seen an abandoned temple before. Not the way he saw Ethyl Alcohol’s marbled gift to the neighbourhood that afternoon; bare, naked and empty, but for a dry marigold garland wound around the shrine and a skinny dog asleep across it. A temple vandalized by desertion.
The mood in Raghav’s office that evening was like that of Durga Puja. A Big Brother from the city’s headquarters dropped by and he pulled Yogi to his chest in an embrace that sucked all air from his lungs. He smelled of cinnamon and menthol cigarettes, and he had tears in his eyes, a heart that bled for the nation. He lifted Yogi’s chin up, looked deep into his eyes and showered him with abuse of every kind. That he was a crazy wildhorse, a tropical storm, a Satanic mill that gorged on human flesh. He strangled Yogi with a garland of bloated, cancerous marigolds and then someone hoisted him up on a jagged bed of human arms and balled fists flung in the air. Later they laid out a spread kids dream about: pizza, three kinds of ice-cream, the fanciest kind of chocolate. Chocolates he loved. All the elders of The Party blessed him, marveled at the power of his innocent feminine voice that had castrated the liquornawab and had steamrolled his political dreams, forever and ever, brought to shattered shards and tattered sheets his IMFL megastore.
The girl who gave him the chocolates was tall and smooth, with a face to launch a hundred moisturizing lotions. A supple twenty-year-old goddess, one of the ambitious student leaders in the college where the reigning union belonged to The Party. Later in the evening as the festivities got more and more drunken, she whispered, ‘Time to get out of here.’ Entranced, he followed her to a room upstairs where she flung him onto an aged sofa, and without bothering to close the door behind her, sucked his young neck in the darkness of the room, her saliva warm and slow-moving on his skin. Intense pain fought the sudden need to wet his pants, and his heart beat so fast that he sensed his death was near. Her right hand crept between his legs and the softest palm closed over his penis, harder now than when he had the fullest bladder. Her fingers played him like a musical instrument while he gasped and fought the fear that she would discover the wispy hairs that had sprouted along his groins, his source of shame. ‘The magic voice,’ she locked eyes with him. ‘There’s magic yet in heaven and earth not dreamt in your philosophy.’ She had honors in English, and quoted dirty lines from Jacobean poetry till she took his penis in her mouth and he had to throw his weight against the wall to keep straight, the inside of her mouth was so warm and moist. When she pulled her kameez over her head, he asked in a shivering whisper if they could turn on the lights and she snorted with laughter and fumbled with the switches to bring the room, stacked with paper and posters and billboards, to a pale yellow light in which the dark stare of her nipples brought tears to his eyes. Her hairless body was that of a crafty snake. Stay away from the seductive gold of women. The H
appy Bearded One used to say in his childish lisp. The womengold.
He remembered the fine hair sprouted around Kajol’s nipples and his head felt ripped apart by lightning. As she threw her weight on him and his bony spine, bereft of his white kurta, hit the couch, they rolled up in a ball and over her shiny shoulders he saw the door close slowly on them.
It was in a slip of a conversation a week or so later that he learned that the girl had gained The Party’s ticket to run for general secretary of the student union in the next elections.
Malini. There was a lot Malini would teach him later. But that evening, she broke him into pieces.
Pir and Sana wait for him. The Party waits for them to reach voting age. For the neighbourhood to reach full bloom. They keep him real.
They are weed from Mosulgaon, the half-formed settlement for half-humans outside the spotless walls of the ashram. Spotless but for the dirty graffiti carved there by the dusty creatures of the settlement. Where muddy looking women bathed in dirty pools easily seen from the windows of the hostel rooms. The village of angry, savage people who moaned in prayer several times a day.
Pir appeared whenever Raghav was around. Yogi now knew why. Pir was one of the Party boys. He served people tea and brought the paint and glue with which the cadres put the posters together. He too, would grow up, reach voting age one day.
Yogi was shocked when he saw Sana with him. It had been such a long time since he had seen her, nearly two years. They were in Class 8 when she’d been trapped under a tree in heavy rain, her kameez stuck to her like dripping skin. The Lotus had caught a crowd pasted on the balcony staring at her. Sana was from Mosulgaon and wandered into the ashram often. It seemed that she made a living picking scrap and refuse on the campus.
Pir and Sana were ghosts around the Party. The Party welcomed children like them—from the railroad slums and the refugee colonies and Mosulgaon. Everybody at the ashram thought the people in Mosulgaon were dirty and dangerous. The siren-song of their namaaz floated into the ashram several times during the day and it felt like a nuisance. Now Yogi knew that people in Mosulgaon hated the ashram. The realization clawed across his skin and drew a trace of blood.
The Scent of God Page 15