by Vikas Khanna
She sipped at the cup of water one of the widows had handed her and sighed deeply. All she could do was look at Alka’s concerned face, then trace her stare as it became lost in the ashram’s faded white balcony above, which now seemed to rise as high as heaven itself…
Tamasha
Varanasi, 1992
A fine balance between stage and life: both replicating each other
“Aawa-aawa paisa kamawa
Ek lagawa du kamawa
Du lagawa char kamawa
Kuch na lagawa
Ghantta hilawa
Aawa-aawa bhaiya aawa
Bhauji ke bhi saath le aawa”
“Come, come; earn a sum,
Make two on bidding one,
Make four on bidding two,
Stay a zero by bidding none
Come come, brother come,
Bring your wife too; earn a sum!”
Chintu’s raucous singing had gathered a ragtag crowd that had assembled to watch the miracle of Choti walking above them on her tight-rope. She was dressed in her favorite yellow frock with the black polka dots and carrying the balancing pole that her friend and partner Chintu had made for her. She had found the dress at Manikarnika Ghat, the steps where people cremated their loved ones, and often discarded their deceased’s favorite possessions. Manikarnika was where she found most of her treasures. Chintu, had set up the bamboo tripod from which the rope was strung and was now trying to get the people to pay to watch the performance.
Choti had known Chintu all her life, or at least as far back as she could remember. They had both been “raised” in the Nameless House with Pink Walls and now, at the age of about eleven, they both worked with each other, annoyed each other, played with each other, fought with each other—but always had each other’s backs if a third person tried to mess with them. Some of the other children used to say that their names should be “Shiv” and “Parvati.” That kind of made sense, for those were the gods they always dressed as, every year on Shivrathri, the festival of Lord Shiv. They made a lot of money on this day. Choti was happy enough being Parvati to Chintu’s Shiv, but got really mad when he did not share the money they made together, fair and square. Then they had the most awful fights!
What Chintu and she had was a love-hate, lost-found, earned-stolen, sweet-salty relationship.
They usually set up their small act near the Tulsi Ghat, the great amphitheater-like steps that led down to River Ganga. It was the safest place for Chintu and Choti to set up their tamasha, their performance, because it was easy to escape from here when the police inevitably arrived to break up their ring of admirers, some of whom would give them a few rupees in exchange for their efforts.
The narrow streets behind Tulsi Ghat were like a huge maze so it was easy to disappear into them to avoid being caught in the ensuing chase. Chintu always joked that it wasn’t so much the maze they fled into that made it hard for the cops to catch them, but the cops’ potbellies and weak lungs, that had them huffing and puffing in no time.
That day, three people had bet against Choti, putting their money in Chintu’s battered cap—the one with a check-mark on it that he’d been given by a tourist—hoping to double their money if she fell off the tight-rope before Round three.
Choti had completed the first round, walking carefully back and forth along the rope with the balancing stick and afterwards everyone had applauded. As she readied for Round two, the first money-collecting round, Chintu raised his voice above the crowd’s din and announced: “One rupee, two rupees, three rupees. The tamasha is on! All you have to do is pay and you can see more.”
One of the men shouted: “We’re fed up with the old tricks, show us something new...”
“Okay, place a bet and earn three times what you put in,” Chintu offered.
“No, tell the girl to walk without her balancing stick,” the man said, upping the challenge.
Chintu hesitated, then turned to Choti with false bravado in his voice: “Aiy, Choti, toss that pole away…”
Choti was indignant, stuck one arm on her waist and gesticulated at him with the other: “Oh, really? And what if I fall? I’ll be the one to break my limbs; what do you stand to lose?”
Chintu looked at her square in the eyes. Then he made the V-sign with two fingers pointing first at his own eyes, then towards Choti’s as if to say, “I’m watching you.” It was the sign he always made to give her confidence. But under his breath he muttered, “If you fall, I’ll lose my life…”
Choti rolled her eyes in exasperation. She loved performing this act. It made her feel that people were paying to see a bird fly, defying gravity. But the gambling was another matter. It gave her a strange feeling. She felt sympathy for the people who lost their money but she felt worse for those who won, because they didn’t have to earn or work hard for the cash the way she did.
She put a foot forward, tottered, and immediately stepped back on the platform.
“Bakwas act, total rubbish, she will surely fall before taking two steps!” the man who had placed a bet said dismissively, looking all around for support.
“She will fall before she walks even half the rope,” another guy said, laughing like a lunatic.
Choti looked down at the top of their heads from the platform’s edge. It was like looking down on a dark, swaying forest from above. “I’ll show you, I’ll walk the full rope, and with no balancing stick. How many steps can you walk up here, you fat man?” she screamed back.
Chintu, keeping one eye on the growing pile of rupees in his cap, yelled over the crowd, “Choti, just focus.” Choti craved Chintu’s confidence even though at other times she almost believed she could walk on the clouds if she set her mind to it.
Standing on the platform, she wound her long unruly hair into a knot and set her first step on the rope, balancing her body by counterbalancing her arms. As Choti took her first step, Chintu’s lower lip began to wobble uncontrollably. This always happened to him when he was nervous and it almost always caused Choti’s lip to tremble too. Chintu was such an idiot, she thought. She was already a nervous wreck after no one had bet that she would complete her walk without the balancing stick. How could she concentrate if he was worried too?
As she tried to calm her lip with her tongue, she wondered why most people would rather hope for others to fail than hope for them to succeed. So few are eager to imagine that the other might fly, or in her case, walk without her stick. She looked straight ahead and imagined herself suddenly taking off like a baby bird learning to fly.
Then came what was always her favorite moment: when she felt like she had actual wings and had broken the bond of gravity. Defying the dark pull of gravity, she came into perfect balance after taking three assertive steps, and then like a dancer slowly crossed the half-rope mark. Satisfied, she looked down briefly to absorb the aura of the Ganga washing over her, while beaming her triumph at all those who had bet she would fall, especially that screaming lunatic.
The money was secondary to the high rope-walking gave her, but still she kept one eye (and sometimes her third-eye) on Chintu, as he gathered their pile of winnings, into his battered cap.
The excitement had built and come to a peak, and she lived for being the center of its attention. Choti felt she could do anything up in the air. Being at that height made her feel superior to everyone else on earth, while not much else did, and that alone made her feel free.
Because she was the one highest up, she also had to serve as the lookout for the cops. Sure enough, there they came, charging and bumbling, potbellies and all, down Tulsi Ghat’s steps to break up their tamasha. She had almost arrived at the far platform when she first saw them, and seeing them, almost burst her lungs as she stumbled, shouting, “Run! Police!”
The crowd dispersed, and she jumped off the rope and began to run too, but she wasn’t running from the cops— she was running to catch Chintu! Every time after the cops came to break up their tamasha, he tucked “their” rupees atop his head under
his cap, and tried to cheat Choti by racing away with all the money before she could even reach the ground. That day, she was determined to catch her thief of a partner.
She raced up the steps and caught a fleeting glimpse of him as he disappeared into the maze of streets. “Chintu, you thug! When I catch you, I will kill you. Last year you lost all our savings in gambling and I couldn’t go to school! I won’t let you do it this time,” she shrieked as she quickened her pace after him. “And if you steal or spend the money I earned for us and risked my life for, I will cremate you alive at Manikarnika Ghat, I swear!”
Choti was fast, but Chintu could run much faster than her—since they had started their tamasha racket, he had to learn to run fast just so she wouldn’t try to kill him every time for stealing her money. Choti passed a tour guide as she ran and overheard him telling a pilgrim about Varanasi, “This is the oldest living city of the dead. Nothing can hide in this city, not life, not death, nothing, it’s all out in the open for you to see.”
What the guide said was true. In Varanasi, amid its colors, chaos, and semi-organized rabble, life and death coexisted, and it was all naked to the eye. Truth and inevitability were neither hidden nor distant. Both existed between the smoke and the bells, between the shades of flame and ash, between the funeral pyres and the healing, blessed, holy river. There was nothing to chase in Varanasi. It was its own chase and its own final place of rest, where all egos, possessions, disputes, secrets, time, space, light, dark, spirits, and materials could be peacefully and uncontroversially placed on a pyre to meet a Ganga-borne end.
In this oldest surviving city of the dead, the chaser was bound to be chased; the buyer bound to be sold; a river bound to quench its thirst; and she was bound to chase Chintu for the meager rupees she had earned, unaffected by the constant parade of burning bodies or mokshaseeking pilgrims.
Choti had always hated Manikarnika and its screaming tea-stall hawkers, misers who saved every penny, the confection-making halwais with their protruding stomachs, the wealthy women with their golden bangles, the self-entitled men with their fancy cars, and their broods of self-entitled children—no one from any caste could escape this ghat. What differentiated Varanasi from any other place in the world was that on one side of the banks people prayed for immortality and wealth, while on the other, their loved ones were slowly fed to the fire, leaving all their wealth behind.
Choti braced herself and then continued her chase past the many tea-stalls and breakfast-kiosks situated precariously on the uneven steps leading down to the water, cutting through the ebb and flow of disoriented tourists, pilgrims, and bewildered schoolkids. She was so determined to catch Chintu, she even passed under the many biers, the movable stretchers designed to carry the deceased to their funerals via coffin or cremation. Carrying the deceased bodies of loved or not-so-loved ones to the Ganga on these biers is an ancient tradition. The biers are adorned with colorful pennants and shining paper buntings when one has lived a complete life, and dressed in old whites or faded rags when someone has lived an accursed one.
Suddenly an old man, an old Manikarnika guard, grabbed her arm right outside the last gate through which she saw Chintu running away with her money. The guard’s eyes were yellow and oozing, and he tried to shoo her off, back in the direction she had come, with wild motions of his dirty hands. “You! You get out, you get out of here! Girls can’t be here.”
Chintu had hoodwinked her again! She kept thinking about the conversation they had had two nights ago, lying in the dry leaves beneath the old banyan tree:
“Chintu, yaar, I don’t want us to be scavengers like the other streetkids. I want us want to live in real homes and go to school. Remember, how we both stood outside the school wall to learn the National Anthem that day?”
“I’ll put you in school someday, Choti don’t worry. Mein hoon na? I’m there for you, aren’t I?” Chintu had replied. “Besides, I’m going to grow up and be a cop and beat those potbellies black and blue…”
“I’ll be the chief of the cops and beat you for stealing all my money,” Choti had said dismissing her partner with a toss of her head.
If Chintu didn’t believe in change, then neither would I, she had thought then. But the truth was that she just loved the uniforms the kids wore at that school, the bags and tiffins they came with. Most of all she like watching their parents, when they came to fetch them at the school gates. How tightly the kids held their parents’ hands. How sweetly the mummys smiled.
Chintu was less enamored. He claimed that to him a uniform was silly; it was like being put into a cloning machine.
It was humiliating to be kept out of the Manikarnika Ghats, but every time she laid eyes or set foot there her spirit became paralyzed anyway, so what did it matter? She had not yet lost anyone. But then she never had anyone to lose, and so had never understood the pain. She only snuck into Manikarnika Ghat to pilfer the belongings left by the deceased or to help her orphaned housemates sieve the ashes of the deceased’s cremated skulls for their gold fillings.
Most people in Varanasi referred to the scavenging kids as “rodents” or “sewage dwellers,” but all the orphans considered themselves the reincarnations of gods and goddesses. All of them had one thing in common: every day, they woke up expecting some sort of magic to happen, like the overnight metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly. But in the world outside, the reality of things was very different. No one trusted them because they had neither a name nor a home. There were no Cinderella stories they could hope for, because no palaces were open to them.
Some kids from the Nameless House with Pink Walls became beggars, some worked as daily laborers, some dressed up as gods and goddesses, and some scavenged and sold the ornaments left by the deceased. She was the only tight-rope-walker among the bunch, and, up until then, Chintu had helped her with her act.
Choti finally managed to evade the guard and enter the ghat. After she had tiptoed past the burning bodies and piles of smoldering ash and made it to the shore, she was so out of breath and thirsty that she sucked water from the first leaking tap she found.
As she stepped back, she suffered the bad fortune of stepping into a steaming fresh pile of pungent cowdung. “Oh Teri!” she squealed.
Cows may have been sacred, but at that moment, she had other beliefs about their dung! Chintu, gripping his cap tight to his head so as not to lose the rupees he had won, heard her loud swear and turned around to see the mess she had stepped into.
“Ha ha ha! Happy Baarrrday, Choti!” she looked at the holy Ganga and whom did she see but Chintu drifting away in a boat! He even had the gall to lift his stupid check-mark cap, grin, and wave the small wad of notes he had stolen from her.
“Chintu! You bloody loser!” she shrieked. “Next it will be your turn! I’ll collect the money and fly away. Or get another assistant! I don’t need you! I’m the one they come to see.” Choti tore at her clothes in frustration and wheeled around through the smoke and pyres to the staircase to inspect her dung-smeared feet.
“Stupid dog, bloody Chintu. Took all my rupees. I’m the one who walks the tight-rope, I’m the one who knows how to fly!” she grumbled aloud to no one, as she sat down on the steps leading down to the river and began stamping and scraping her feet.
A splash of cowdung shaken off her foot went flying into the air!
“Hey, watch it, child,” she heard a woman’s voice say. “You have no regard for anyone, wretched girl… and such abusive language. You street kids are the worst.”
Choti looked up from her smelly feet to see seated beside her an elderly woman draped in a saree as white as the first white blossoms of jasmine. Her saree had flecks of cowdung on it, which she was trying to shake off without actually touching it as she had just come back from a purifying dip at Ma Ganga.
A chai-wallah nearby scowled at Choti too: “I tell you, they’re not street kids they’re street scum. Scavengers. Sewage rats. The lowest of the low. Besides, they’re all thieves too… alway
s looking to make off with your stuff...”
Choti scowled at the emaciated old woman. She had a shorn head and, Choti immediately noticed, was reading an ancient-looking book with a pink cover, apparently as old as her, concealed inside a large, hardbound copy of the Bhagwad Gita. “Who are you, some kind of schoolteacher Madamji?” she said rudely. And Madamji, what is this inside your holy book? Is it some filmi love story?”
At once the woman looked so scared that Choti felt bad for her. I mean, after all Choti had dirtied her saree, but the woman hadn’t hit her or anything. She should have been more respectful to this elder—especially one clever enough to hide one book, whatever it was, inside another so she could read it in peace—but that damn Chintu had got her in a foul mood.
The old lady hid her double book under her saree as Choti ranted on, venting her frustration with Chintu: “Chor! Dog! Son of a pig! He stole all of the money I risk my life for every day! I swear, I will burn him alive—just like they do with all these dead people.”
“Then, child, you will go to prison,” the old lady announced.
Choti looked up to scowl at the woman again; this time she was smiling, amused perhaps at Choti’s immense anger. Now that she had set aside her book she was looking at her. It was a gaze of deep, serene understanding; the kind of understanding that can only come from the pain of great sacrifice and loss. Instead of chiding her or telling her she wasn’t supposed to be at Manikarnika in the first place because she was a girl, the old woman was teasing her.
Choti stared at her a moment, wanting to say something tough to scare her off, so she said: “Okay then, I won’t burn Chintu, I will drown him.”
The woman smiled again and moved her gaze towards the Ganga. “Angry girl, how do you fight for your food all day long? And who is this Chintu?”
For some reason, Choti found herself opening out to the old woman: “I’m a tight-rope walker. Chintu is my partner, sometimes a cheating dishonest one. We have an all-day tamasha together. We go all day long without a break. If we took a break, we wouldn’t survive. I fly and float up in the air, balancing on a rope, and he gathers the crowd, takes their bets, and collects the money we win, after I walk my tight-rope without falling off. Anyway, why do you ask? Are you a teacher who wants to put me in school? I noticed you are not reading your ‘holy book’ anymore,” Choti finished with pointed sarcasm.