A Delhi Obsession

by M G Vassanji

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  When the ambulance brought Bau-ji home the morning after he died, as the stretcher was rolled out of the back of the van, it was met by loud wailing from the women inside. As the stretcher approached the threshold, Ma had stood up, both arms stretched out to receive him, as Mohini and Aarti stood behind, prepared to steady her. She and a few others had stayed up the night, waiting, while bhajans and verses from the scriptures were recited by individuals or played on tape.

  The body was taken straight to the main bedroom, which had been cleared, and placed on a mat on the floor. A new set of kurta-pyjamas had been set aside, with a jug of water and a bowl of dahi. Aarti closed the door to mild protestations from the relations, telling them firmly, “Later.” Mohini and Aarti told Ma to hush and be brave, for the sake of his soul, as though they knew anything about it, and she pulled herself together. They removed the sheet that covered him, and his hospital gown. And then, kneeling down, the three of them began to anoint and wash him as ritual required.

  They rubbed him lightly with the dahi and sponged him with the water, talking to him and to each other, pretending this was all in a good day’s work, ordinary and routine, and he was their baby. How thin he had become. All because he wouldn’t eat well recently, would you, Bau-ji? What’s that in his hair, let me remove it. I’ve combed it, there, don’t you look smart! Else, how do you cope with touching your father naked? Lying lifeless before you? All those thoughts ready to rush at you through the slightest crack in your wall of composure? His eyes were closed. As if by magic, his body was hardening in their hands in a matter of seconds, so that suddenly he looked stern, as though to reprimand them, This is not funny! You are touching my privates! They wiped him with a small towel and put his pyjamas on him, Aarti and she lifting his legs one by one and Ma pulling up the pant. And then the kurta. Finally he was ready. Looking smart and handsome.

  Ma, who had contained herself all this while, even allowing herself an occasional smile, now gave a loud sob. They called in Kishore and Ravi to lift and place the body onto the wood frame, which had been set aside to carry Bau-ji out. They covered him with a clean white sheet and tied his body with twine in three places so it wouldn’t roll. Finally they paid heed to the clamour outside and family and friends were allowed in to pay their respects. They walked by, their hands joined, they sat down, some placed offerings of plain shawls—those would end up with the priests—on the body. Marigold garlands and rose petals were strewn across his body. His two sisters, Madhu and Suman, whom he had brought here from Sargodha in now-Pakistan and gotten married, cried uncontrollably.

  Mohini and Aarti went with the body in the hearse to the cremation ground. Ravi and Kishore had already gone ahead with two cousins to finalize arrangements. Ma stayed home as was customary, in the comforting care of other women. The road was bumpy and Mohini and Aarti again bantered one-sidedly with Bau-ji all the way. Sorry, Bau-ji, it’s a rough road, take care now. Couldn’t you have waited a little longer? When Aarti uttered this, they both broke into fits of sobbing, and then suddenly stiffened and recomposed themselves.

  Bau-ji had no sons, he was the last of his line. At his cremation, his two daughters Mohini and Aarti had undertaken to light the fire that would consume his remains. They stood before the body, their husbands a couple of paces behind them and well-wishers further back, and they acted as instructed by the priest, who was chanting mantras when not speaking to them or attending to the raised pyre. He took away the shawls and the flowers. The twine tying down the body was cut. Then Mohini went around it with a jar of water, sprinkling it on the ground before stopping at their father’s head and throwing the jar down with a crash. That symbolized the soul’s release. The men helped to lift the bier to the pyre and stepped back, as Mohini and Aarti placed the pieces of firewood atop the body as instructed, leaving a little space below the face.

  Finally, Mohini took the flaming torch from the priest, and the two sisters went around the pyre and took turns to light the ghee that had been placed at various spots on the body and, after some moments which seemed to take forever, the heap went up in flames and they watched, and couldn’t watch, and the smoke and fire blinded them, thankfully. But this was not over yet. The priest gave her a slight nod. The head. Aarti and Mohini looked at each other. They knew what was required, they had heard of it, seen it from afar, dreaded it. The head had to be struck. After a moment’s falter, Mohini took the long bamboo stick from the priest and with a flinch smacked the head and thought she heard it explode. She began to cry, loudly this time.

  If anything told you of the ultimate worthlessness of life, this was it.

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  Then, on the third day at dawn, picking flowers, as they call it, picking up the brittle bones from the ashes at the cremation site, telling the bones from the cinder. A glowing heat welcomed them as they arrived, and the priest poured a cooling mixture of milk and water over it before they began. It still glowed in spots and their fingers burned as they picked. Ashes into a sack, bones into an urn. And then, Mohini clutching the urn, the sack of ashes in the car trunk, they drove with their husbands to Haridwar. When they stopped for a meal on the way, she took Bau-ji with her, hugging him to her chest.

  At the riverbank at the Ganga, Ravi and Aarti took care of the arrangements, finding the right ghat, doing the rituals and paying for them, finding the family priest and giving him recent family history, telling him this was the last of the line of the Khannas of Sargodha in now-Pakistan.

  Munir

  HE WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD and it was the glorious day of Eid. He wore an off-white sherwani and matching pyjamas specially made for him by the family tailor, Parmar. On his head was a white cotton skullcap embroidered in blue and red, an affectation imposed upon him by the adults as he left home with Dada. He looked cute, they would say, and he squirmed. It was Eid, he never remembered which of the two, and he had gone with his grandfather to the downtown mosque for the Eid namaz. Dada wore a lovely brown sherwani embroidered in yellow and blue, and a grey Afghan topee. Inside the mosque, they found themselves in the middle of a row, the hall quickly filling up behind them. He saw his grandfather nod brief greetings at the men to their right and left. All was silence but for the rustle of perfumed new clothes and the occasional murmur. Suddenly the loudspeakers gave a brief piercing squeal and the Arabic prayer started; Dada put a gentle hand on Munir’s back and nodded at him. As the rich, throaty recital wound on, Munir followed the ritual actions of those around him. The bending, the turning, the bowing. His knees hurt when he went down on them—why this intense memory of burning knees? He bowed with the others to the One True God and when his forehead didn’t quite touch the mat the first time, Dada pushed his head down, and Munir almost toppled forward. The prayer ended with the collective gesture of the men putting their open palms to their faces and murmuring, al-hamdu lillahi, praise be to Allah. Then, as one, they got up on their feet, and as though a volume control had turned, the hall became noisy with Urdu and Punjabi and other languages, and all the men and boys exchanged warm greetings with whomever they could. Then they attached themselves to a snaking queue to file past the elders, who stood in a row in the front to greet you, taking your hands into theirs, Eid Mubarak! Eid Mubarak! When they reached the end of the row they stopped and joined it, and it got longer and longer as more well-wishers arrived, until everyone had greeted everyone else. And then the row broke into pieces and dispersed.

  It was a solemn yet joyful occasion. Among the elders had stood the governor of the colony, Sir Evelyn Baring, and the mayor of Nairobi.

  Munir’s father Jehangir had been present, though he sat separately near the back; after the namaz he came up and gave Munir an affectionate caress on the cheek and twenty shillings, and his own father a tight embrace. Back home, hugs and kisses from Mum and Dadi and his sisters, and shortly afterwards the aunts and uncles arrived, the aunts adding a pi
nch on the cheek to their gifts of money, which Mum put away for safekeeping. One day he would use these savings to buy a cricket bat with the signature of Don Bradman on it. The laughter and the joy, the feasting. Biryani, sweet seviya, samosas, kachumbar. Games with his cousins.

  Eid Mubarak! Why this memory now, arriving after all these years, why Eid and the namaz prayer, when he had put it all behind him, to start his life anew? What’s she doing to me, this woman I impossibly love, prompting scenes from my childhood, imposing an identity on me? This is what India does to you.

  Munir’s father was the younger of two sons, the spoilt one; the older one was upcountry in Eldoret. There were three daughters, Munir’s aunts, married with children. For many years Dad and Dada ran the fashionable Kohinoor Jewellers on Government Road. Following the great Asian exodus of 1968, when so many left for England, business waned, and Kohinoor closed. By this time Dada was disabled with Parkinson’s. Dada prayed every day, twice, which was enough for progressive, westernized Nairobi. Every evening and morning he had to be helped to go down on his knees, by his favourite servant or by Munir if he was around. At one time Munir could recall in their proper order all the arduous motions of this prayer that so sorely tried his grandfather’s joints.

  He’d pushed them away, yet over the years these memories would arrive in teasing fragments. Dada’s face contorted with pain and his knees cracking as he was helped up from his prayer mat; his crackling voice towards the end. The old man holding him on a knee to tell him stories, about the goodness of that best of men and friend of God, Nabi Muhammad, and about funny, clever men who outwitted sultans and wily animals who outwitted each other. They became distant when Dada was ailing and Munir a bragging teenager—cricket-playing, blazer-wearing, comb-in-back-pocket, hanging out at the new cafés, going to parties and concerts. Discreetly drinking alcohol. The world was racing ahead, with the moon shot and the Beatles, the long hair and the bell-bottoms; his world, and Dada too much of a bygone era and foreign place in which a terrorist or freedom fighter once hid behind the skirt of a woman frying pakodas.

  And Dadi? Diminutive Dadi, whom he remembered always cooking or tinkering in the kitchen, at the end had shrunk into herself and her Quran.

  There was a photo of Munir in his sherwani taken that day of Eid. Standing by himself, taken at the studio of A.C. Gomes. The hair slicked and parted, with a small puff in front. It had been placed in the family album. He wondered where that album had gone.

  In Nairobi he was an Asian; and among the Asians a Punjabi and a Muslim. But at home his mother was an alien, a Gujarati whose Urdu was halting, and a heretical Shia from Tanganyika who had visited Kohinoor Jewellers while on a holiday in Nairobi and ended up, against opposition from both sides, marrying a rambunctious Sunni Punjabi who spent his weekends playing bridge or snooker and drinking whiskey at his club.

  Munir would recall her as quiet but determined and always ready with a smile for him. She baked cakes for him, and brought games and books from Woolworths, and was his first stop when he needed something not quite essential. Like her female in-laws and neighbours, she wore salwar-kameez and dupatta and kept a long braid. But on some rare occasions, Zainab Khan came out lithe and beautiful in a sari, and Jehangir her husband would walk out proudly with her to the car. Mummy, wah! You look lovely! Why don’t you dress like that always?

  There was a period every year when she insisted on going to her Shia mosque daily, and there would be shouting and screaming in the house. Dad would not give her the car keys, but somehow she would have arranged a ride. When she returned from those sessions the makeup would have run down her face as though she had cried, and if Dad was sober enough there would follow another shouting match.

  Was there violence? He would not like to think about it. Once she ran out from their room, finger marks on her puffed cheek, tears running down and wailing, straight into Dadi’s arms; and Dadi had gone and cussed out her son, telling him, “Find someone your own size!”

  One day in exasperation, following an argument about this Shia and Sunni business, Munir had shouted to both of them, “If this is what you call religion, I want nothing of it. I am an atheist. You two have convinced me.” He was in high school.

  Soon afterwards, the Asian exodus having happened, he was sent to London to complete his high school certificate. He went on to the University of Bath. It was then that Mum died, of cancer, and he went home for the funeral. Soon after he applied to business school in Toronto.

  By this time first Dadi, then Dada had died. Dad married a Somali woman he had known for some time, and he lived with her in Eastleigh, not far from their former home. Munir sent him money occasionally.

  Munir Khan, Mohini Singh

  THIS TIME THEY MET at Khan Market. They did a casual round of the shops first. He bought a notebook, for which she paid, and he picked up the reading glasses he had ordered. Alphonso mangoes were just in season, displayed in fragrant heaps, and she bought a couple for him to eat that evening. He bought gifts for Razia and her family. She bought for Razia and Joshua, and he got a necklace for Asha. Finally, from a jeweller he bought a small pair of earrings for her. “Surely I can do that?” “Yes, you can.” “I’ll have your ear then.” “But not too conspicuous,” she said.

  They went for a late lunch at a modish restaurant on the market’s second floor, where the servers greeted them in English—and looked like teenagers, he observed to her. This was goodbye; he was to leave the next evening. Across their table, he reached out for her hand. The long, slim fingers.

  “You know…”

  She nodded, wiped off a tear and smiled.

  “It will be some time before…”

  “Hm.”

  “You’ll have time to forget.”

  “Yes.”

  “You could come tomorrow morning.” His flight left late evening.

  “I can’t.”

  He told her about his visit to the school in the old city the other day, and she said it was good of him to go there. She would have loved to meet the girls, especially the one who had proposed to him. She took down the name of the school and Altaf’s phone number.

  “I had a lamb biryani there. It was delicious. They gave me a plate to take with me.”

  “Now I’m jealous. Do they have biryani on the menu here?” She pored over entrees. “Yes! Let’s order it. Lamb. You don’t mind? It won’t be as good, I bet, as the one you had.”

  “But you had gone vegetarian, you said.”

  “That was temporary. Don’t judge me.”

  “How could I?”

  Later, over their coffees, she looked at her watch, and he at his. Desperately.

  “In six months?” he asked. “A year? We could meet somewhere else.”

  “Delhi,” she said. “Delhi is not far yet,” she murmured, misquoting Sheikh Nizamuddin. “But write. Stay in touch. I mean it.”

  Coming down the stairs in silence, they paused at a landing halfway. There was no one in sight. They fell on each other and embraced tightly.

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  The Express Times reported two days later that a man had been murdered in a quiet spot on the track of the Sikandar Gardens. The body had been discovered by joggers in a patch of shade. He had been stabbed multiple times and the corpse had been defiled. The victim was identified as Munir Khan, a Canadian, staying at the Delhi Recreational Club nearby. The murder was attributed to cow vigilantes. A plate of biryani had been found in the refrigerator of the man’s room and was undergoing analysis by the authorities for beef content.

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  Two weeks later the paper reported that its columnist Mohini Singh had met with a tragic accident on the Outer Ring Road near Hauz Khas. The car had caught fire.

  A reporter from the paper had spoken to those who knew her at the Delhi Recreational Club.

  “She was a f
ine woman,” Pandit Jetha Lal, a friend of the Singh family, said. “She was a beautiful and talented woman. Unfortunately she was pursued by a Muslim man. A terrorist, part of the love jihad against our women. In olden times, our ladies, when their kingdoms were attacked by Mohammedans like Alauddin Khilji, chose to take their own lives, not to fall into the hands of these lechers. The ceremony was called johar. Mohini Devi was purified by the fire.”

  “Do you, sir, believe Mohini Singh committed johar?”

  “I did not say that. She died in an accident.”

  “Who was this Muslim man?”

  “He’s gone. But the lady did not die, she will return. She’s a suttee. As you know, we believe in reincarnation. The body dies but the person returns.”

  “And the husband of this lady?”

  “He has entered an ashram and taken a vow of silence for sixty-one days.”

  Author’s Note

  IT’S A PLEASURE TO THANK THE MANY PEOPLE IN DELHI WHO have welcomed me and become friends over the years: Chandra Mohan, whose smiling face was the first one I saw as I came out of the old airport on my first visit so many years ago; Harish Narang, my companion and enthusiastic guide over the years in Old Delhi and many other places, always with many fascinating stories, commentaries, and readings, who also always stood with me outside a certain establishment, waiting for the doors to open; Alka Kumar for generosity beyond the call of friendship in responding to my pestering queries; Neerja Chand for her friendship. And lately, Bharati Bhargava, Jawid Laiq, Lata Krishnamurty, and Ram Jethmalani for their hospitality, and Razi Aquil for his insights. Khushwant Singh was helpful, and understood me, but is no more.