Antiman

by Rajiv Mohabir

  “This first one is a thumri,” he said and began to sing.

  His voice was fluid. Clear. Strong like bricks that make a dam. I didn’t write down the words, but I recorded his voice on my tape recorder. He sang about the monsoons and about how King Dasharath was injured on a hunting trip. The king killed a deer that was really a boy and was then cursed by his parents. But stumbling through the forest the king pricked his finger. The splinter made him deathly ill, so he called for his beloved queen Kaikeyi. She came and removed the splinter and restored the king’s health. He gave her two promises to be fulfilled later.

  I was astonished. I shifted in my seat and thought about Aji and the way her own version of the Ramayana echoed this baba’s.

  “But that’s not how Kaikeyi received her two boons,” Kumar interjected. “She drove the king’s chariot into battle and saved his life on the battlefield.”

  The baba looked at him for a while and then at me.

  “This is an old version that we tell in Ghazipur.” Ghazipur was the district in Bihar where the baba was born. He had admitted some truth about his former self—this self that belonged to the world of living and dying, samsara.

  “I know this version,” I chimed in. “My Aji sings a song about this, how Kaikeyi actually saved Dasharath by pulling out a splinter from his finger.” This was a broken part of our diasporic identity, an alternative version that Valmiki’s Ramayana, the Goswami Tulsidas Sri Ramacharitamanasa, and the television serial Ramayan all worked to erase. Maybe all stories became fixed when we tried to stretch them to fit everyone and everything. Maybe there was no one singular Ramayana, no one way to tell the story. If Kumar didn’t recognize it as the Ramayana, maybe my Indianness was fluid, too.

  “You know, there are so many differences in the way that people tell the Ramayan story here from how they do in Ghazipur. The real Ramayan is in the heart,” the baba said. A flock of doves had been released in my stomach and I sprouted wings: I could feel the sensation of flying—perfect weightlessness. But there were still several major problems: The Ramayana’s Ram upholds caste, the name of truth betrays his wife.

  “But baba, how do you justify the cruelty of Ram? If he really were Vishnu incarnated into the world, why would he have tortured his wife by leaving her in the forest to die and constantly questioning her fidelity?”

  “We cannot understand the entirety of the lila, the play of the gods,” the baba said.

  I stood up. The blood flowed hot into my thighs and legs. My feet could feel their thirst. I wanted to believe but could see only metaphor. I sat back down. Though my learning here was deeply spiritual, it was not for my own religious edification. I was trying to understand my Aji’s music and the ballads I came from. My father’s ancestors were mostly unlettered; our stories were invaluable—our literature bloomed as lotuses from our throats.

  “Aur gaaiye ji, please sing some more,” I asked. With a clap on my back the baba smiled and laughed. The sudden slap knocked the frustration out of me.

  “One day your questions will change, beta.”

  The baba closed his eyes and out of his mouth streamed Bihari rice fields, mustard flowers, ancient kings, the gods, the monsoon clouds gathered in the courtyard above us and there was darkness. The baba lit a flame with his words and the sun shone through the rain and there was the earth under our feet.

  We sat with the baba. The sun shone its brightest gold. Kumar looked at his watch and made a motion to leave. But I wasn’t done. I touched the baba’s foot and then my head. He blessed me in music.

  “It looks like we have to go soon, but baba-ji, before we go, can you sing the oldest song you can remember? Like one of the songs that your mother or grandmother used to sing before you took brahmacharya and became a sannyasi.” Only after I uttered these words did I realize what I had done. My heart pounded. My ears grew warm. I couldn’t believe what I had just asked the baba. Was that thunder in the background or the sound of my pulse?

  Becoming a mendicant meant that the baba would never marry—these ancestral songs that passed from grandparent to grandchild would meet a dead end. At least in linear Western thinking. For him, I suppose there was no difference between blood relations and strangers. As a sannyasi, he renounced his worldly attachments and familial bonds, staging a pretend cremation to sever all ties with where he came from before making the decision to live in an ashram as a mendicant, worshiping the Divine day and night. My mind was a small one, incapable of thinking beyond descent, trapped in the world of samsara. I was asking a holy person to reach back into their life of birth and death and to bring it forth. That past was dead to the sannyasi. What would he care about a stupid song sung by mortals?

  The baba looked at me with stormy eyes. I was a koyal bird perched on a branch before the July deluge. I knew that I had crossed a line. I shifted my weight from one leg to the other as I sat. The breeze started to blow and dry the sweat creeping down my back. It was as if cold fingers traced my spine. A small sparrow eating rice flew away.

  I smiled like an idiot at the baba and said in my Aji’s Bhojpuri, “Bahut dur batiya hai, na baba? Such a distant thing, no baba? It’s no matter.”

  He shook his head and said, “Of course I will sing. I was remembering back to the village where my mother gave birth.”

  Kumar and I exchanged glances. I exhaled a cloud and my shoulders fell.

  “Ramayan ke upar this song is a purbik, an Eastern song. It’s so old and I don’t know exactly where it came from but it was sung in my village,” the baba told us.

  The afternoon sun began its burn, but we were shaded in the middle of the courtyard. The baba sang.

  avadh nagariya se nikale do kumar

  dhanus leke chale gailan

  kekahi mange bheje khatir

  raja ke jaan bachaiyal manchwa par

  ajodhya tohar hoijai

  je mango to mango rani

  ham mange, raja, tohar batiya

  ham mange ram banbas jaye

  aur bharat raja chalaye ho

  je mango to mango rani

  I was a frozen stone. I couldn’t believe that this baba at Ram Mandir ashram was singing my Aji’s song almost word for word. Aji had been separated from India for over a century, but this song that I was hearing now was intact.

  Two princes leave the town

  carrying bows

  Kaikeyi wished to exile them

  having saved the king’s life once.

  Ayodhya is yours,

  Whatever you wish for, ask.

  I wish, King, for your boons.

  I wish Ram exiled

  and Bharat to rule the throne.

  Whatever I wish for I ask.

  I gulped. I looked around. The birds in the courtyard were listening, too. I was pecking at the grains of my connection to this place. The grass in the direct light began its daily wilt. I glanced at Kumar. He checked his watch again. My time with this baba was coming to an end.

  “What else can you tell me about this song?” My mouth was dry. I surprised myself with the desperation in my voice.

  “It’s old is all I know. I know that women used to sing this kind of song about the Ramayan. I call it a purbik because it comes from east of here.” The sun started to paint shadows of canyons on the baba’s face. His skin sagged and folded too heavily for the muscle that once held it in place. I remembered Aji’s own frame when she first sang her version of this song to me. The song itself showed that even queens are servants in their own homes; the feminist critique of this song would show the scars of patriarchy marring all the members of my family. My Nani, Aji, my mother, my sister, my queer kin, and my own body had been indelibly carved and scarred by this story. Sita was eventually swallowed by the earth as final proof that she was chaste, devoted to her husband when Ravan kidnapped her.

  As an undergraduate I read about the Ramlila of Southall, that once in England in the 1970s, Caribbean women and Indian women came together to protest Enoch Powell’s National Front. They tol
d the story of empire and how it kidnapped others. My sister used to say the rhyme, “Ram and Sita been a ban / Ram fall down and bruk he han’ / Sita cry Maiya!”

  I thought of Aji and how I imagined her memory, her language, her Hindi as broken, and now sitting here in front of a man her age in Varanasi, I realized that Aji was whole. That I was whole.

  “Baba-ji, I know this song. My Aji used to sing it to me and taught me the stories that you are telling me,” I said with wide eyes.

  “Sing for me the version you know,” he smiled and looked at Kumar.

  I began.

  ham mange, raja, tohar batiya

  ham mange ram banbas jaye

  aur bharat raja chalaye ho

  je mango to mango rani

  Everything around me stopped. The sparrows froze. The grass stopped wilting. The wind calmed. The clouds stood still. Even Kumar’s watch stopped. For a moment I felt that I had made a real connection with this baba—that, singing his song back to him with a Guyanese accent, I had come from a tradition that had survived and changed in constant motion. I sang through my tears. A river raged behind my eyes. My lips quivered.

  “Tohar Bhojpuri bahut sahi ba babua. Your Bhojpuri is very good,” the baba exclaimed, nodding at Kumar who raised his eyebrows and nodded in agreement. “You keep saying the word Aji. Most people use the word Dadi instead. How come you know that word, too?”

  “Aji is what I call her because that’s what she said I should call her. Sometimes I call her Ajiya, or when I tease her, I call her Gangadai.” The truth was that Aji felt like Aji not Dadi. Aji was Bhojpuri. Aji was Guyanese.

  He laughed. “Ajiya—how sweet. And Gangadai? That name is very powerful, it means that you are definitely from this place and that her songs are gifts from the river, too.”

  I held my head high. Aji and the baba’s family had come from the same song lineage. I was discovering the truths about my history—that being Guyanese did not mean that I was less Indian, it meant that I was a descendant of survivors. It meant I was strong.

  “Achcha baba-ji,” Kumar got up and folded his hands in namaste. It was time to go. Kumar had to get back to his other work and the ride home would be long.

  I touched the baba’s feet. “Thank you for the blessing of your music. It means so much to me that I heard you sing my Aji’s song,” I said.

  “Jug jug jiye, beta. May you live long,” he said with a smile.

  As Kumar and I sped down the narrow gullies cluttered with women wrapped in saris, men with hennaed beards, children chasing puppies, there was only music. Music in the streets. Music in the cows. Music in the pigs. Music in the shop fronts. Music filling my ears. Music flooding my heart. The baba’s words mixed with Aji’s. May you live long. May you live long. Jug jug jiye, beta.

  Bhabhua Village

  GOLLU, MY HINDI teacher’s son, took me to Bhabhua Village, just outside of Varanasi, to the home of his friends—twins named Adish and Vagish. He sat me at the back of his motorcycle and we sped past the city and into the paddy fields that fringe the City of Light. The lane was lined in tall trees that offered shade and cooled the air. The balm of the paddy fields was a relief after the dust and dry heat of the city. Women wore saris and covered their heads and faces as they walked down the lane, water jugs atop their heads, paan in their mouths. Schoolgirls looked at us and giggled behind their fingers. A line of black buffaloes lumbered. In the gutter a pig muddied itself.

  We reached the village house, which was more like a mansion made of fine brick and mortar. Adish and Vagish’s family made a feast—cooking lamb especially for me, even though they didn’t eat it themselves.

  “Come, Rajiv, the food is ready. We have made lamb for Gollu and Adish, you should have some, too, if you want,” said Auntie, Adish and Vagish’s mother.

  “Thank you, Auntie, but I can’t eat any meat today.”

  “Why not?” she narrowed her eyes.

  “This month is Maha Shivratri. …” I said. It was a time sacred to Lord Shiva, the god of Varanasi. My Aja’s name was Sewdass—or Servant of Lord Shiva. To be in Benares and eat meat for me, as an outsider, would have been an insult even though I grew up eating everything. I could hear my Aji complain to me.

  Auntie let out a laugh that shook the room. “Ai, hai, Rajiv has made you all into chutiyas, into assholes! He is not from here, but he observes his fast better than any of you do!” It was novel to hear a woman curse so loudly. Bhabhua Village was a fertile place.

  After eating we climbed to the roof to watch the stars. Adish and Vagish’s Aja was lying there on a cot and welcomed us. It was time to be formal. I’d heard that he was a severe old man.

  “Come. Come. Sit next to me. You have come from far away, beta.”

  “Oh, yes, Aja, Benares to Bhabhua takes a while.”

  “No, you bahin-chod, I am talking about Amrika.”

  Everyone burst into laughter. He just called me a “sister-fucker.” I’d never felt more lovingly insulted.

  “I hear from Gollu that you like Bhojpuri music. Do you know any songs?”

  “I know a couple that my Aji taught me—you know we’ve lived outside of India for over a century.”

  “So sing one in Bhojpuri, majaa jarur aiba, it will make all of us happy.”

  I loved Bhojpuri. It was musical when spoken and had always been like a puzzle for me, a knotted skein of wool to untangle in my mouth. The language Guyanese Bhojpuri developed from an amalgamation of several North Indian languages such as Awadhi, Maithili, Oriya, Bengali, and Bhojpuri grammar (with loan words from Dutch, English, Creole, and Portuguese as well) into plantation-specific versions that émigrés could use to communicate with one another. Most people called this language Hindustani, as that’s what the British planters and colonists called it. After one generation, the language regularized and developed a unique system of grammar and meaning: a Guyanese Indian language of its own, filled with history and power.

  It was a language that upset the colonial hegemony of English domination, and as a matter of language evolution, it bore testament to the survival of the laborers, who despite being labeled as Coolie in all the colonial ledgers maintained a sense of their humanity. My Aja and Aji, second- and third-generation speakers for whom Guyanese Bhojpuri was a first language, did not pass their unique tongue to their children. In Guyana in the Westernizing decade of the 1950s, my Aja insisted that his children speak English and go to the Christian school. My Aja believed that reading was the key to his children’s success: his sons and his daughters must learn, which ultimately meant that they must forget.

  My Aji used to play these games where she would singsong phrases and ask me if I could understand. Once in Toronto I looked at her and asked her why she no longer made phulauri and she laughed and said, “Hai beta, jawani ke rail chala gail. You h’undahstan wha’ me talk?”

  Jawani ke rail chala gail. Youth’s train has departed. Aji was so clever. She spoke in Bhojpuri metaphors. Mostly she talked about not being understood by her children’s generation, who had all converted to Lutheranism—first for the opportunity to be educated and then to assimilate into white North American neighborhoods. I did not fault anyone for their acts of survival—what they must betray to continue.

  One of her favorite songs was “Raat ke Sapna,” originally recorded by Ramdew Chaitoe, then by Sundar Popo, and most famously by Babla & Kanchan. My cousin Jake referred to it as a chune, or a tune that needed to be played loudly. He sent me a remix that he recorded in his parents’ basement and that now, in an Indian village, would come in handy. I couldn’t wait to write to him and tell him about this.

  I looked at my palm. I imagined each line was a road that led me here. I was from this place, but from nowhere. I took a breath and thought of what village I must have come from. I began.

  Na more angane mein nimiya ke perwa

  kekar chaaiya bithaiya hamko

  In my courtyard, not a single neem tree—

  In what shadow will he sit me?


  What courtyard did I belong to? Aja insisted that this was my new home. The stars shone down as Aja lay on his back and looked up. Adish admitted later that drops like pearls fell from his eyes.

  Neech

  IN THE SPRING semester, I decided to take a trip by myself: half a test of my Hindi skills and half a test of my blood. I slid open the doors between railcars and lit a Capstan cigarette. The police usually pretended not to notice me if I offered them one. Fields and fields of mustard in bloom raced by me, a whir of green and yellow flowers. I wondered what it would be like if Bollywood film stars actually danced in these desi fields of mustard instead of in the flowered fields of Switzerland.

  I went back to sit on my berth. An old man, likely in his late-sixties, looked at me curiously and asked how far I was going.

  “Rudauli. You?” I replied.

  “You’re not from here, are you? You must be from Delhi? Mumbai?” The train bounced on its tracks.

  I had been advised by my Hindi teachers to tell people that I was from the city as a way to excuse my lack of Bhojpuri and have my difference recognized. The hope was that I would get the same treatment as an Indian in university.

  “Well, uncle, my family hasn’t been here for a very long time. It’s been over a century.”

  “Oh, you mean NRI.”

  Non-Resident Indian. I balked at the label. What did this even mean in my case? The India that I am from is not the India with the monstrous political borders that shut people out, but rather a different, older demon, that of colonial India—a British invention. In the Caribbean, Indian actually just meant people from East India. We didn’t need to specify where exactly our families were from, although I did make the distinction that my mother’s mother’s family was from Madras—now Chennai. We were exploited for our labor, and India was erased from under our feet. Bhojpuri and Tamil were the rural languages of backdam, of road-end, of the Hindu, Muslim, and Christian diasporas from India.