No God in Sight

by Altaf Tyrewala

  I follow Lajwanti into the cornfields. She stretches out in a clearing. I remove pertinent items of my clothing. Lajwanti parts pertinent segments of her anatomy. Then she waits and waits. ‘What’s wrong?’ she says.

  I don’t know! I am trying my best!

  ‘Thoo-thoo!’ Lajwanti says. She stands up, dusts her clothes and skips off, giggling cruelly.

  I lie there in a corny, horny daze.

  That’s right: my very first chance to khutt-khutt and my tools have failed me. I can’t believe it!

  After the Lajwanti disaster I think about running away to escape the dishonor. Thankfully, she runs away first—to become an actress.

  Lajwanti’s departure means my secret is safe. But my problem persists. I start peeping into my dhoti several times a day, praying, hoping and begging for something to happen.

  After that day in the fields I read no books, watch no serials, and hear no music. My days begin and end obsessing over the morgue in my dhoti.

  A year later, I turn seventeen.

  ‘You are a man now, Babua!’ father announces.

  ‘You are old enough to shoulder my corpse!’ grandfather says with his characteristic morbidity.

  I am hoping my sires’ baritones will impress my necropolis. Alas, my tools are deader and deafer than I thought. Nothing stirs.

  Then, one afternoon, after gazing at my jewels for many, many hours, the error of my ways smacks me on the head. I fasten my dhoti. What eggs hatch when watched, haanh? I realize I have to find something else to do. I have to think of anything other than…

  So I go looking for father and find him hunched over a sapling in our orchard. ‘Give me something to do,’ I say.

  ‘There is nothing to do,’ father looks up and replies. He sweeps his hand over our huge orchard crammed with workers and trees, ‘I have worked hard, so your sons and your sons’ sons don’t have to lift a finger. Just relax, Babua.’

  I squat beside father. ‘You don’t understand. I can’t have sons if I don’t do anything.’

  He is aghast. ‘What do you mean? You will marry a woman, then you will have children…’

  I make a face. ‘It’s not that simple, okay!’

  Father cries, ‘It is! You are a man just like me and your grandfather!’

  I ask, ‘Why?’

  Father replies, ‘Why? What why? Be gone, Babua, your questions aggravate me.’

  I stand up. ‘A nice way to dismiss a man, haanh, Baba?’ I deliver my parting shot and return to the spot behind the well to look inside my dhoti.

  What should I do? Oho-rey, I cry to myself, what should I do? I want to be a man like my grandfather; a man like my father, whose rare words and ample riches make people tremble. I want to be like the barber, doctor, bus driver, and even our orchard workers—they are all men, siring sons like rabbits, unmindful of their bodies.

  Mahant Suyansh would say, Men must fulfill their dharma.

  I don’t have any dharma. Mahant Suyansh, on the other hand, has loads of it. He is our local sage and seer. On his monthly visits to Barauli, he mounts a chair on our porch, furls in his saffron robes and addresses the villagers. The Mahant’s discourses are unintelligible. But we are all mesmerized by his immersion. Once, to demonstrate the mythical marriage of some god with some goddess, the Mahant had stabbed his thumb and smeared blood on his widow’s peak; the details I never did catch, but I will never forget the blood trickling down his forehead.

  The Mahant certainly doesn’t waste a moment pondering over his lungi, leave alone what is inside it. Like my ascendants he, too, is a man. Religion and mythos are his wards and he injures himself in their upkeep.

  So, am I to remain half a man till I have inherited the orchard? Till I have remained engrossed for hours like father in the selection of manure, am I to think of nothing but my giraffe that won’t lift its neck? Inside my wide chest is an ant’s heart, and in this heart is immense regret for having a lineage that, by giving me everything, has left me with nothing better to do than contemplate the catastrophe in my dhoti.

  *

  Then, one afternoon (funny how all the important stuff happens in the afternoon), as I am napping in my room, I hear my mother scream, ‘Babua!’

  I hear a commotion outside. I panic. ‘What-what?’ I fasten my dhoti and run out of my room. ‘What happened?’ There are several villagers in the veranda. More are gathering by the second.

  ‘The Mahant!’ mother screams. ‘The Mahant is coming!’

  Again? A second visit to Barauli in the same month? This is extraordinary!

  ‘Start preparing!’ I shout.

  Minutes later, the Mahant hurries in through our gate. Work in the village stops with unprecedented swiftness: the bus driver abandons his vehicle mid-road, women kill the flames under half-boiled pots of rice, and everyone rushes to our courtyard within minutes of the Mahant’s arrival.

  The Mahant refuses lunch and damn near hurts himself in his scramble to mount his seat.

  I sit next to father at the foot of the Mahant’s chair—my new position since turning seventeen—and look down at my dhoti, as usual.

  The Mahant raises his hands. The crowd becomes quiet.

  ‘Eunuchs!’ the Mahant screeches, half-leaping off his chair, sending his saffron robes pell-mell. His angry finger sweeps over the hushed crowd. ‘Moustaches and dhotis. If you have wives also, so what? Eunuchs! All! Eunuchs! You are all eunuchs!’

  The Mahant claps his hands. His spittle descends on father and me like a foul mist. I am astonished by the god-man’s vulgar clarity. Gone are the tales of scorpion gods and nebulous universes. For the first time there is no mistaking the Mahant’s discourse.

  He is talking to me!

  ‘Your safes. Keep them open. Your women’s legs. Keep them parted. Right now, lambs and goats. The outsiders are sharpening knives on animals. One day, it will be your necks. Your women. Your money. Hai-hai, sixers! Who is not eunuch here? By their beards, grab the outsiders. Out. Throw them out. Which man will do it? Throw out the outsiders from your house, your village, your country. Hindustan for Hindus! Hindustan for Hindus! Understand, donkey eunuchs? Not for outsiders, our Hindustan! Who? Who will correct history, who will avenge the past and drive the outsiders out…?’

  Zail Singh, the Scapegoat

  I am standing at the back of the crowd, enjoying the drama. All of a sudden Babua, who is sitting beside his father at the foot of the Mahant’s chair, jumps up and says, ‘I will do it, Mahant. I am not a eunuch! I will drive out the outsiders!’

  The Mahant thumps Babua on the shoulder. ‘Here is a man! Go! Throw them out!’

  Babua tightens his dhoti. Then he touches the Mahant’s feet, bows to his father, and descends the steps of their porch. He stands before the crowd and looks us over like a policeman trying to decide who is guilty.

  I disguise my laugh with a cough. Such fun! Just like cinema!

  Babua approaches the squatting villagers. They move their legs and lean to the right and left to let the youth through.

  The Mahant raises his hands and shouts at the sky. ‘Go forth, oh son of Hindustan for Hindus! By their beards, grab them. Yours it is—Hindustan. From the outsiders reclaim it!’

  Babua doesn’t walk; he prowls. With every step, his back straightens and his chest inflates like a dolly being pumped through its nozzle.

  Oye. Too funny. ‘Uhhoo, uhhoo!’ I cover my mouth and cough with uncontrollable mirth.

  The people standing around look at me distractedly. Babua notices the faces turning in my direction. The seated villagers, noting Babua’s frozen stare, swivel their heads. I look around.

  Babua, and everyone else, is looking at me.

  What the fuck!

  Babua comes and stands before me. ‘Hello, Babua,’ I say, nodding respectfully, biting my tongue to stop the laughter. He is a whole head shorter.

  ‘Hindustan for Hindus!’ Babua shrieks into my face. He grabs my beard. It feels like needles poking out from inside my jaw. />
  ‘Abbey! Let go!’ I shout, and catch Babua’s hand.

  ‘Hindustan for Hindus!’ he shrieks again.

  The pain blackens my sight. I flail weakly in Babua’s grip as he drags me by my beard to the Mahant.

  An Omniscient Villager

  Yaar. The Sikh got screwed.

  When Babua dragged Zail Singh to the front, the Mahant took one look and hopped upon his chair. ‘You eunuch! Donkey! Leave it! Leave his beard!’

  Babua hung on in puzzlement. Zail Singh lifted his hand with considerable effort and boxed Babua’s ear. Babua fell to the right; Zail Singh collapsed to the left, massaging his jaw and moaning in pain, ‘Maadar da phaataa, saala, todi ma di aankh!’

  Perched on the chair, the Mahant began clapping like mad. ‘You eunuch! Sixer! Go attack real outsiders!’

  Babua stood up rubbing his head. He argued petulantly, ‘This Zail Singh is not from our village. He has beard. He is outsider. He is!’

  The Mahant hollered, ‘Sixer! He is Sikh. Not outsider! Sikh is Hindu!’

  Zail Singh heaved and got to his feet. ‘Oye, I’m not Hindu, I’m Sikh, not Hindu, and I’m going back to Karnala right now.’ He walked away, muttering, muttering.

  Babua scanned the crowd with growing shame. He turned to the Mahant. ‘Tell me, Mahant, who you want me to throw out? Who is the outsider? You tell me, I will throw him out right now in front of you. I am not eunuch!’ Then he screamed desperately, ‘Hindustan for Hindus!’

  The Mahant didn’t answer; he placed his hands on his head and looked down in resignation. Someone at the back started giggling. The laughter spread like plague. Villagers were falling over each other for support. Babua ran into his house, inflamed with hate for an outsider he didn’t even know.

  Over subsequent days, the people of Barauli reenacted the fiasco repeatedly. Someone would impersonate the Mahant, another would ask to play Babua, and several would vie for Zail Singh’s role. Over several replays, hyperbole morphed the original event into something else entirely: after a lewd dispute over pubic hair, an incensed Zail Singh would thrash a stone-blind Babua and chase away a high-strung Mahant.

  Not all the villagers ran to watch and cheer these performances.

  There were a few who merely chuckled with indulgence at these impromptu skits and continued with their tasks. The sudden reticence of these few went unobserved. No one noticed that their businesses were opening late and closing early. That the stocks in their shops and workshops weren’t being replenished. That the men amongst these few went on mysterious trips with their wives and children, carrying trunks and cartons, and that these men returned next day empty-handed and alone. The withdrawal of these few was like the invisible dwindling of an invalid. When they were all finally gone, no one in the village even noticed.

  And then it was too late. A month later, the Mahant reappeared with eighty men. They poked the air above their heads with tridents. The motley crew kicked up dust and startled birds with roars of ‘Hindustan for Hindus! Out with outsiders!’

  Seeing that the Mahant was responsible for this early-morning ruckus, the villagers calmed down and squatted outside their homes. They looked forward to another juicy farce and one more vain witchhunt for an outsider who just didn’t exist here, in this village, where everyone knew everyone.

  The Mahant and his men broke into seven cottages. They forced up the shutters to five workshops and two shops. Bare walls and cupboards were all they found.

  The mob rushed to the west of the village. Without removing their shoes, they barged into a structure where people once prayed.

  ‘Empty. All of it. Fled. All of them,’ the Mahant spat at his disappointed eighty.

  Babua had come rushing, enthused with anger toward an outsider he would finally discover.

  Hanging around the edge of the Mahant’s herd, Babua was now doubly unsure why the outsiders were who they were.

  Suleiman, the Outsider

  I get off the train at Namnagar and trudge to my great-grandfather’s house two streets from the station. Who am I? Where have I come from? Why am I in Namnagar, carting my life’s possessions like a refugee?

  I don’t have time to explain.

  I knock on the light blue, flaking door. Shazia-dadi, my septuagenarian spinster grand-aunt, opens the door and encircles me in arms gnarled like branches. ‘Suleiman, I haven’t seen you in two years. How you’ve grown!’ she cackles.

  ‘No one grows at twenty-seven,’ I say.

  I drop my four bags and dart around the house looking for him. ‘Where is he?’ (I have no name for great-grandpa.)

  ‘Abbu’s sleeping,’ Shazia-dadi says.

  ‘At one in the afternoon?’

  ‘Abbu’s ninety-six. He can sleep forever,’ Shazia-dadi remarks with awe.

  ‘Wake him,’ I say, and begin walking in and out of rooms to find him. Shazia-dadi follows me around like a chick, cheeping her protestations. I raise my voice: ‘Tell me! Where is he?’

  Flaunting a wet, gummy smile, she points to a room I had just inspected. ‘Heeheehee. You missed Abbu. He’s in there.’

  I rush back in. Great-grandpa has shrunk. Not only in length and breadth; his width is under attack. He is lying on his back, flat as the mattress. I go up to his bed below a curtained window and shake his bony arm. Dadi pats her cheek to warn me of the slap I will receive for this insolence. Is she still afraid of her father? This withering husk of a thing?

  I stoop to his ear and whisper in a voice made hoarse by thirst and dust, ‘Come on, wake up. I have to ask you something.’ It is vile to do this to a man this ancient, but had my father, a carpenter, been alive, he would have been rougher.

  Great-grandpa flutters his eyelids. I prop him up on a pillow and give him water.

  ‘Remember your son Allaudin?’ I ask.

  Great-grandpa stops sipping and raises his head in distress. ‘Allaudin, my peace of heart! Why Allah didn’t take me instead!’

  ‘Okay, okay. You remember Allaudin’s son, Nizar?’ I ask.

  He stops sipping again. ‘Nizar, my grandson, how I miss him! Why Allah didn’t take me instead!’

  I snatch the glass from his hands. ‘I am Nizar’s son. My name is Suleiman. Do you remember?’

  Facts tear through great-grandpa’s senility. His eyes dilate with recognition. ‘Suleiman, poor orphan, both parents dead. But don’t worry, I am still here, your great-grandfather.’ He strains forward and taps my hand. Shazia-dadi pats my shoulder. The ambitious kindness of feeble kin. I am nearly tempted to skip what I have come for. But it has to be done.

  Softening my tone, I proceed carefully. ‘Do you know what has happened?’ I lean closer to great-grandpa. ‘They drove out all Muslims from Barauli, my village. The Mahant said we are outsiders. We have abandoned our houses and shops and some have fled to Mumbai, some to Hyderabad.’

  Great-grandpa says in his scratchy voice, ‘Suleiman, you live here with us. You are a carpenter, no? You can begin afresh in Namnagar.’

  ‘No,’ I hiss like a boa, ‘I am not a carpenter. My father was a carpenter. I am a tailor, and I too am going to Mumbai to live like other refugees…’

  Great-grandpa’s jaw drops with exhaustion.

  I continue with a colossal pretence of calm, ‘But before I go, I must understand. I must know so I can endure. Only you can tell me because you, you severed us from who we were, you turned us into outsiders to be driven out of villages…’

  (Shazia-dadi pokes my shoulder. But today nothing is going to stop me.)

  ‘So, now tell me,’ I say. ‘Why? Why did you convert?’

  (Shazia-dadi yelps.)

  ‘Haanh? What came over you? What mischief made you become a bloody Muslim?’

  The Convert

  Suleiman’s question knocks the wind out of me.

  When I reopen my eyes hours later, it is night. The bulb in my room burns weaker than ever. In an irrelevant hamlet like Namnagar, even our electricity seems to lack confidence. Except for a circle of
light to the left of my bed, the room is dark. Suleiman and my daughter Shazia are talking in the adjoining room. I am gladdened to hear the accompanying clatter of silverware. That even today, at my age, my children eat what I provide is an excellent compliment.

  Be it taxes, obligations, or misery, I have never evaded anything. When I passed out on hearing Suleiman’s question, I wasn’t taking refuge in sleep. I was revisiting the past. I have picked out the necessary facts and reasons from its huge storeroom and am ready to answer my great-grandson’s question: Why did I become a Muslim? But, before I answer, I too have a question to ask Suleiman: How does it matter?

  If he isn’t silenced by my counter-query, I will doze off again. I will sleep till my great-grandson tires of waiting and goes away. Regardless of my reply, Suleiman will remain a Muslim and must survive the trials of these times. Asking a ninety-six-year-old man why he did what he did seventy years ago isn’t a solution to anything. What will Suleiman do with my answer? Sing it in trains? And what if even that doesn’t work? Will he then change his name to Suresh, shave his beard, and stop going to the mosque? It is futile. And so I will sleep.

  I used to think old people sleep to rest. It was so till about six years ago. Sometime during my ninetieth year, my sores and fevers ceased to torment me. They are still there, I’m sure; the doctor visits every week to fuss over them. But now, when I moan during the medico’s poking and prodding or when I grunt as Shazia attempts to feed and clean me, it isn’t pain I am bewailing. All I want to do is sleep. If you can call it that. Unlike the coma of youth, when yesterday, today and tomorrow cross-bred to spin visions of infinite hues and moods, my sleep is dreamless. I used to think old people relive memories in tedious detail. That may be true of the moment of death. I, for one, can conjure and dismiss my yesterdays like so many measly genies. In my sleep I go nowhere, regret nothing, and miss no one, like sitting in an empty darkened theater staring at a blank screen.