by Vikas Khanna
Raja waited for Rekha to leave and then instructed his men, “Take the little guttersnipe to the men’s jail near the police gym; that reporter bitch should not know where she is.”
Chintu, who had been listening all along, cowering in a corner, knew what the first thing was he had to do when he was released.
Raja strode into the police chambers near the akhara, the wrestlers’ pit, and looked into one cell in particular. Seated among a few drugged-out men, was a wan and shivering, broken-bodied young girl in a torn and dirty flowered dress, who lay crumpled in the corner like an old rag. The bright petals that had once adorned the dress had long since wilted.
Raja banged his stick on the cell’s encrusted bars. “Eh you! Street-rat, widow-thief, so who was it who killed Anarkali again?”
Choti was too weak to answer.
Raja took out his keys and opened the overcrowded cell. He kicked and waved his stick through the other prisoners towards Choti. All of them moved to the corners of the cell.
Choti, experiencing for the first time the real terror of a child, was energized by pure fear to jump up and then cower against the cell’s furthest wall, like a chicken, ready to be slaughtered.
“I don’t know anything, Babuji,” she whispered. “I’m sorry, I won’t say anything. I promise. Anarkali? Who is this Anarkali you keep talking about? Please, Babuji let me go to my old mother, Noor. Please have mercy. Please just take me to Noor.”
Raja shoved his stick into Choti’s ribs, and she screamed and fluttered her arms in panic. “If you don’t know anything, then why are you so scared?” Raja said.
The other prisoners stirred in their dark corners, and Raja threw all of them a threatening look. “Shut up! Or you’re all next!” Raja said, and they immediately grew still again.
Raja called out to Veer. “You, keep an eye on this gutter rat!” Raja said.
Choti’s eyes glazed over, as if they no longer connected the outside world to her inner person; as if she had already left her corporeal self. Raja flicked Choti’s damp, blood-crusted head. “But first shave off her hair,” the king of Varanasi said, and grinned.
In the evening, Rekha sat on the same bench near Tulsi Ghat where she had first found Choti, frantically scrawling in her notebook, and, as much as her concern would allow her to, occasionally looking up to observe what seemed like all of Varanasi’s population lighting and holding aloft their trays of golden lit candles, and heading for Ganga’s shore in celebration of aarti in all its flickering, flaming, reverent and quiet glory.
Rekha knew Choti was being detained in Raja’s police custody without legitimacy or documentation, but after Raja threw her into the street, and she tried to return (she couldn’t help herself) to Nagar Nigam to get more information about Choti’s whereabouts, she was repeatedly scuttled away under threat of her life.
Now she was making calls to everyone she knew; she had got one of the reporters in her office to talk to a local woman’s organization, she had phoned the MLA of Varanasi district and threatened to put the story in the papers. She was doing everything she could but she could do nothing if they hurt Choti.
If Choti was dead, what would she do?
Suddenly a small boy wearing a cap with a check-mark on it walked over and disturbed Rekha’s frantic note-taking. “Are you from Delhi for Anarkali’s case?” the boy said.
“Yes, I am, but who wants to know?” Rekha said, a little on edge.
“I know where they have taken her, and we need to help her. Please come with me, we have to go there now, it’s urgent…”
Rekha looked at the boy. “Who are you?” she said.
The boy’s eyes moistened, though his upturned chin still indicated his street-hardened pride. “My name is Chintu. I am Choti’s friend and partner.”
Choti woke up in a strange cell, barely conscious and still bleeding, with water dripping down her face. Her memory of things was fuzzy. Blood had dried across the smeared petals of her frock, tears she didn’t remember crying had crusted around her eyes, bruises and welts stiffened her limbs, she was damp and her hair was gone, cut short as a boy’s, like bloody Chintu’s, just another sign of the spirit they had dragged out of her.
She stared at the leaking ceiling, inhaled the foul odor, and heard the voices of talking women. Was she still at the ashram? Noor? Ma, are you still here? she thought, and nearly asked aloud.
Then she remembered a man beating the soles of her ankles with his stick, as he yelled, “You used to walk a tight-rope, now you won’t even be able to walk on the ground. And by the way that sinful old woman Noor is dead, I thought I should let you know…”
Choti recalled what the man had told her and broke down. It was the news of Noor’s death that had made her lose consciousness, not the beatings. Her heart cried out for Noor, for Anarkali, for Chintu… where are all my friends, somebody help me, please, I’m so tired, I miss you, I need you, please Ganga Ma I don’t want to die…
Choti was overcome by all the memories and collapsed in a huddle on the floor.
The day of Holi arrived. Mists of pigment flung into the air by boisterous Holi players blocked out even the acrid smoke of Manikarnika. Cremations in Varanasi would be a different kind of cremation that day, not just of bodies into ash or bodies into water, but of burning emotion and playful forgiveness exploding into a full spectrum of a joyous frenzy of color. Holi Hai! Holi Hai! many in Varanasi wanted to say, and most of them would, as they attacked one another with pigments and gulal of every color and hue, leaving behind trails of laughter and happiness.
All would be forgiven, except the few, the wretched and the damned of Varanasi.
That Holi morning, the Varanasi sun remained stubbornly at Ganga’s horizon, which appeared gray and somehow drained of its fire, before finally making its proud, bright ascent, and everyone became festive again. Holi had arrived.
At the ashram, the widows prepared for Noor’s funeral. They had already dressed her in a saree of pure white, covered her face and head with it, and were now placing her body on a funeral bier. Usually when one widow died, the other widows would chant praises for the Lord’s protection and passage, but for Noor there was only silence.
Asha found the need to run from widow to widow proclaiming: “I’m glad Noor died alone. It was for the best. Imagine if we had allowed her to keep this ‘daughter’ or her shameful pink toes, how many sins she would have stained our holy tradition and community with.”
Having caused the accident that led to her death she now wanted everyone to believe that Noor was truly, absolutely evil and deserved to die.
“Asha’s right. Shame, shame!” the widows chanted, until one of them raised her arms, closed her eyes, and looked at the lightening sky to scream out, “Devi Ma, forgive her, she faced her life on this earth with great penance and fortitude. Ma Ganga, grant her Moksha.”
“She won’t be. That I know. Shame, shame!” Asha retorted.
“Shame, Shame!” the other widows chanted as they went back to preparing Noor for her final journey.
The Bird Flies
Broken wings, buried seeds, eclipsed sun
When Choti fainted in Raja’s jail cell, the men there started shrieking because they thought she was dead. Upon hearing the shrieks, Veer entered the cell and saw Choti lying on the floor, barely conscious. Not knowing what else to do he picked her up off the ground, and sprinkled some water on her face.
She looked up at him weakly.
“Can you stand?” Veer asked in a kind voice.
With great difficulty, the broken-bodied Choti stood up.
Veer steadied her by gripping her elbow. “You need to go to the bathroom and wash up; you’ll feel better that way.”
Choti became slowly aware of a hazy distant hum of voices—people wishing one other Holi.
As they walked down the long corridor Veer told Choti in a hushed whisper, “Look, I’m sorry about how you’ve been treated. Your friend Chintu got in touch with me and told me to giv
e you this.” He handed her a thin length of rope, as fragile as a washing line, but it was her only hope. “Chintu and that journalist lady are waiting for you. The bathroom has a skylight. Best of luck and now go…this is your only chance…I can’t help you again…”
“Chintu?” Choti barely understood what was happening, but she went into the bathroom and locked the door from inside. She looked at herself in the stained mirror. Her reflection told her what she already knew, that she was in bad shape but at least she was still alive. That fact alone gave her renewed energy; as did the words that Noor had always said to her; that one day she would “fly.”
Choti looked up and saw a small high—cracked-open— window up near the bathroom’s ceiling.
Choti considered the floor, the ceiling, and the open window, and had no option but to make a silent prayer and start her climb, a climb she hoped would lead her first to Noor and then to freedom. A new determination burned through her. She held the rope Chintu had sent for her and shimmied up an iron sewage pipe (it reminded her of her tight-rope stick) jutting through the bathroom floor and reaching up to and out of the window.
Choti gripped the pipe with her hands and feet and began to climb, slowly but steadily until her face glowed with a small square of the afternoon sun’s warming light. And before she had the chance to feel any pain from her injured feet or Ganga-tortured body, she gingerly appeared, light as a bird flying from its cage, on the terrace above the station overlooking the wrestling pit where she had first seen Anarkali being murdered.
She looked across her black and white city of death, suddenly reincarnating in full color, with all of Varanasi now being painted in the many colors of Holi. Choti took a deep breath, almost trying to breathe-in and fill herself with the glorious hues of every color she saw, then began to climb from terrace to terrace, until she felt far enough away from Nagar Nigam and Raja and his potbellied chamchas, to feel, at least momentarily, “safe,” if safety was even possible in Varanasi. Then she tied the rope to the side of a pipe and gently let herself down.
When Raja’s on-duty police discovered that Choti had escaped, they fanned out on foot and motorcycle in all different directions looking for her. Word of Choti’s fortunate escape soon spread to Rekha and Chintu’s ears— the two had been keeping up a dedicated vigil near the police station as they considered what to do next. They too fanned out to cover the area, looking for Choti.
Two of Raja’s goons ran to Raja’s home to inform him about Choti’s escape. They arrive in the midst of Raja’s family performing a Holi puja. Upon the interruption, Raja lost his temper and began yelling at the top of his voice, “You good for nothing people! You lazy bastards! You call yourself police? You can’t even control a little girl. How could she escape? Were you sleeping with your faces in the dregs of your tea? I am going to fire the whole department.”
“A little girl? Why is the entire police force trying to capture and kill a little girl?” Rani asked.
“Shut up and mind your own business, or your little girls will suffer the same fate!”
Raja’s bulging eyes and livid screaming sent his daughters back into their room, and their father continued to yell as he left the puja, and ran to his room to change into his uniform. His wife Rani followed her furious husband into their bedroom to help him dress.
As Raja fought with the buttons on his shirt, Rani, having spied Raja’s gun holster on the bed, silently reached over to remove Raja’s gun and empty the bullets, before putting it back.
When Raja’s men came to pick him up, Rani spoke out for the first time, knowing that they too would hear what she had to say: “Say, Raja, do you know why I never touched the waters at Lolark Kund? Do you know why I never prayed for a son?”
Raja tried to ease the situation by sheepishly glancing around at his boys, then fell into a shocked, staring silence, his eyes becoming like black darts into his wife’s soul, as she shrieked, “I never wanted to give birth to a Ravana like your mother did!”
Raja seized his wife’s flailing arms, but she continued: “Raja, one day a daughter will rise to crush you and everything you stand for. Before then, I curse you. I curse you.”
Held aloft by the hands of the other widows, Noor’s body departed through the ashram’s gate on a funeral bier and was carried through the narrow streets toward Manikarnika Ghat. Raja’s police, expecting Choti would appear, had filled in any gaps between the widow’s death parade and the intricate networks of streets on either side, front and behind. If she appeared, she would be theirs.
Choti zigzagged the streets as she sought to evade capture, catching glimpses from around corners and rooftops and stairways of her and Noor’s favorite spots, especially their bench on the hidden terrace. As she snuck from place to place, still not quite sure where she was going, she saw the children from the Nameless House with Pink Walls, who had again dressed up as the Hindu pantheon of gods and goddesses for Holi, being interrogated by a handful of Raja’s potbellies, under threat of having their masks ripped from their faces.
Then Choti saw a procession. Noor’s body, wrapped in a white saree, floated and teetered and moved atop a flow of hands toward Manikarnika. Around the procession, walked or stood groups of police. Obviously, they were not interested in an old dead widow.
Choti had come around the sharp corner of an alley when she saw an irresistible eyeful, a huge pile of pink gulal pigment. She feigned to speed past the Holi stand, but as she did, and before anyone noticed, she swooped her hand in to swipe a large handful of the glowing pigment into the pocket of her frock.
Right near the last turn before Manikarnika, Choti stopped to drink water from a sprung pipe. When she cupped her hands, the pooled water reflected back a disc that looked like the moon. Perhaps the moon had been hiding in her hands the whole time, ready to eclipse that which sought to burn her. Over the small reflected moon, Choti closed her eyes and made a small, vague prayer for Noor, asking that she would not suffer and would have safe passage to somewhere, a somewhere that would last forever.
Choti threw the moon from her hands, and ran up the rickety exposed staircase of an abandoned house into a door. She locked the door behind her, and ran up another set of stairs to the building’s collapsing terrace—and who did she see appear out of nowhere in the dimness across the way on the opposite terrace but a miracle of the gods themselves, her glorious bloody thief of a partner, Chintu and the journalist auntie!
Choti had no time to consider whether it was really Chintu or just some hopeful phantasm desperately risen from her desperate imagination, but then Chintu was throwing a tight-rope across the sky for her to catch. The journalist auntie was praying hard, her hands folded, her eyes shut, so worried that Choti might hurt herself.
On the second try, Choti caught the rope and then Chintu pointed his fingers in his usual V-shape, first at his eyes, then at Choti’s, then back to his again, and they both smiled.
This was no time for Choti to grudge Chintu a couple of stolen bucks.
Choti tied her end of the rope firmly to a pole, then tested its tautness with her feet to ensure it could hold her weight. On the opposite terrace, Chintu was having no such luck. He could find no pole to tie his end of the rope to. He flashed his V-sign again at Choti, who flashed her own V-sign back, as Chintu sat firmly on the ground after wrapping the rope around his body and arms like a giant constricting snake, and dropping all his weight to earth, braced his feet on the roughened edge of the terrace, then reared as mightily as a boy his size could. The rope seemed to hold fast, bouncing up with surprising tautness, but it was surely a blessing and a good thing Choti was so feather-light and small, with hollow bones like a bird.
Noor’s procession rounded the corner of Chintu and Choti’s newly rope-spanned alley, as Choti began her slow walk, gaining her old balance and momentum as she always did, ignoring the blood oozing from her injured feet.
Then she felt it. She was the moon, the small thing, eclipsing the spring sun. Choti’s shadow
cast across the procession of widows below and everyone looked up in stunned astonishment, just like Noor had said they would one day. Then she saw Noor directly below, peacefully arranged on her funeral bier, ready to be fed to the flames of Manikarnika Ghat. Perhaps it was Choti’s wishful imagination but she swore she could see her old widow friend Noor smile.
Balancing above all the heads, not caring if she lived or died, she reached into her frock’s pocket, grabbed a fistful of pink and threw it straight onto Noor! The magical forgiving powder saturated Noor with her favorite color, a color the widow, for almost her entire life could never admit, and the same color Choti imagined Rajasthani queens danced and twirled in.
Some who witnessed all the color suddenly splashed onto Noor’s saree, which also drew attention to Noor’s still pink-painted toes, might have seen the spectacle as an example of the lowest, vilest sin (would they have preferred blood or the dirty ashes of burned bones?) but to Choti it was the purest heaven on earth, a heaven as splendid as the sun rising over the Ganga.
It was the seeking of that lasting and heavenly image that drove Choti’s legs, injured and tired as they were, deftly across the edge of the rope.
The burst of sudden pink, which had arrived like a bomb of color dropped from above, caught the attention of Raja, who had just made his way through the throng of chamchas and widows, already gripping his holster at the scene. When Raja reached for his gun and aimed it at the little child the whole crowd saw him in his true colors. Surely her sin was not that big, they thought.
He pulled the trigger of the unloaded gun again and again, screaming in frustration as the little urchin evaded him, cheating death once more, because with her was the protection of Ganga Ma and the guiding spirits of Noor and Anarkali.
As she finished her tight-rope act in a blaze of color, Chintu and Rekha pulled her to safety. Rekha gathered her in her arms and hugged her tight and said, “Hurry child, I have a car waiting. My colleagues are waiting in a back alley. Chintu knows the way.”