The next day, I asked Menon to fix a call bell on the gate. He refused, saying that children would give him hell by pressing it all day. I thought of looking out for another place but I knew that things wouldn’t be any different if I moved out. Here, at least, I had a room to myself. In some places, you had to share one sleeping area and one toilet with eleven other people.
Before I moved into Menon’s house, I’d been staying in a nice, convenient place where I was happy. One day, when I was listening to qirat on Radio Kuwait, the house owner dropped in to ask whether I was a Muslim. When I told him I wasn’t, he wished to know why I was listening to “all that Mussulman stuff.” I explained to him that I came from a town that was sacred to Muslims, like Ajmer. At the end of the month, when I went to him with the rent, he told me that a relative’s son was coming to Delhi for college and he asked me to vacate my room and added that I shouldn’t misunderstand him.
I moved into another room where a good bit of my money did the vanishing act.
Accommodation proved to be my biggest problem in Delhi. I wasn’t able to stay in one place for more than a year, so I was in a quandary, wondering whether or not it would be wise to move from Menon’s house. My problem was solved when Gupta got a transfer, but I still had to skip dinner most nights.
It was during that summer that I’d begun running in the morning after Bhilai had trounced me in the arm-wrestling match. The cultural programs were few and far between in the summer so I was able to have a proper dinner and get home on time. Mornings and evenings, I skipped rope. The only downside to my regimen was that it drained me too much to even think of staying up late and reading.
When I felt I was ready, I approached Bhilai and challenged him. The arm-wrestling match took place in Chandan Singh’s tea stall near Indra Prastha College. Chandan Singh and his tea stall had become a part of me in my Delhi life. All those twelve years I worked in Civil Supplies, Chandan’s tea shop was where I had my breakfast –toasted bread and channa. Still that taste lingers in my tongue. Unlike many moustache-less North Indians, Chandan sported a big Nietzsche moustache. When I went to Delhi few years back, I visited Chandan Singh’s stall one evening and drank just tea as he made channa only for breakfast. I observed that age had made Chandan languid and the tea he gave me was too sweet. I thought I should have told him ‘Cheeni Kum’ when ordering, but while I contemplated about this I also thought that the amount of sugar in the tea was perfect in the eighties.
All the girls who were standing nearby began to take notice. For a whole thirty seconds, our arms remained gridlocked. Summoning all my strength, I pushed hard and I won.
“You looked like a ghost getting anal raped,” Bhilai commented after his defeat.
When I was staying in Menon’s house, I always used to have my dinner at Chawla’s. It was there that I met Misra. I’d been searching for Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason in several libraries but never found it until Misra walked into Chawla’s with it. My friendship with Misra began over a conversation about that book.
“Don’t waste your time reading it,” he told me. “It’s lousy as fuck.”
I started appraising Being and Nothingness only to discover he hated that as well.
“I will accept no one but Heidegger as a philosopher,” he said. “That cockeyed Sartre said he’d prefer a third-rate crime novel to Wittgensten’s works and people call him a philosopher?”
The next time I ran into Misra, he was sporting a two-week-old beard that made him look like a completely different man.
“Now this is a mug I haven’t seen in a long time. What happened?” I asked.
He told me he’d been having problems with his father and had subsequently cut off all ties with his family.
“You still have another year of college to go,” I said. “What will you do?”
Misra was in the first year of his postgraduate philosophy course.
“Mridula will help me,” he said.
He’d mentioned his girlfriend a few times and I was curious to know more.
After that encounter, we ran into each other again after five months in the university stadium.
“How many laps do you run?” he asked me.
“Eight,” I answered.
He said he ran ten. I was astonished as the circumference of the stadium was one whole kilometer.
Though he was living of Mridula, he didn’t seem to be cutting back on his expenses. He was still staying in Madhuvan, paying three hundred rupees by way of rent for a room. He was wearing a new pair of Avis corduroys and I asked him where he bought them from.
“Oh, Mridula bought them for me,” he said. “They’re very durable. I haven’t introduced you to her yet, have I? Come with me.”
He took me to the bus stop on Mall Road. She’d agreed to meet us there. Seeing the four heavy books he was carrying, I asked him, “Doesn’t it bother you to carry your books like this? Why don’t you get a bag?”
“I don’t carry my books. Mridula does.”
“I see.”
Misra laughed. “Now don’t go on a rant about female slavery and male chauvinism and all that bullcrap. I don’t like her doing it either, but since she’s happy to do it for me, why should I spoil her happiness?”
When I heard this, I became even more curious to see Mridula, but when I finally saw her, I was disappointed. She hardly wore any clothes. After the introductions were made, she offered me a cigarette.
“Don’t spoil him,” Misra said. “He’s a runner too. Needs a healthy body and a healthy mind and whatnot.”
Misra always traveled by bus. He never bought a bus ticket and had no student’s pass either. When I asked him about getting caught, he said nonchalantly, “In the event of getting caught, I can always come up with some excuse or the other, but I’ve never been caught, not even once.”
Misra liked to tease me by comparing me to film actors. Once, when I fought with the owner of the Chawla Restaurant on behalf of a young waiter, he compared me to M. G. R. and taunted me. Another time, when a mutual friend wished to meet me urgently and asked him my whereabouts, he replied, “It’s easy to find Udhaya – he will be wandering on Mall Road in a Bruce Lee t-shirt.” He meant to say that, unlike a bearded kurta-donning intellectual, I was an average Joe in a Bruce Lee t-shirt.
One day, Misra came to my office looking for me. I usually never liked meeting people at my workplace, so I took him to the canteen. I was anticipating a critical comment about my office environment but he didn’t say a thing.
At the canteen, we ordered an omelet and sat down to talk. The man seated across from us looked like Van Gogh. When he looked at us and smiled, I smiled back. He wasn’t a familiar face.
After some time, he said, “I’m hungry but I have no money. Can you buy me a cup of tea?”
Just the day before, a peon who worked in the department came up to me and stooped low, revealing a crooked set of butter-colored teeth. He asked me to give him two rupees. He showed me the three rupees in his hand and said, “Dada, I need to give five rupees to a poor old man.”
Later, when I’d gone to get myself a cup of tea, I heard the canteen proprietor tell the peon, “Chalk it up to Dada’s account.” The peon looked at me with his repulsive toothy smile. I said nothing to him then, but the next time he demanded money for the old man, I refused.
Misra seemed to have taken a fancy to Van Gogh and began talking to him. The man told him that he’d been a peon in the office and had gone to prison for illicit cement procurement.
Misra, who’d been listening to him calmly, suddenly started yelling.
“Steal, don’t beg! What you want now is a cup of tea. Why are you begging for it? Order a cup! It will come. Drink the tea and walk off. Do you think people will care to come after you for three rupees in this crowd? Even if they do, so what? Tell them you have no money. If you get hit, hit back and hi
t harder than you got hit. If four people gang up against you, take a stone and knock them all out. They might hand you over to the cops. Let them. Go to prison again and once you’re out, don’t go and steal a cup of tea again. Steal something more valuable! Pick pockets, snatch women’s gold chains, and if you get caught, don’t be afraid to try again!”
After this insane incident, I didn’t see Misra for a long time. When I went to Madhuvan and asked around, I was told he vacated his room. One day, as if by chance, I met Mridula at the university library and she said she wanted to speak to me. We found a shady nook under a tree and she told me everything about her relationship with Misra, starting from the time she got married to him. I was shocked to hear that Misra had tried to strangle her when she talked to him about having a baby. Luckily, her brother came to her rescue.
“Where is Misra now?”
“Prison,” she informed me.
“Prison?”
“Yes, for something I feel ashamed to speak about. On G. B. Road, he and his friend got into an argument with a prostitute over money. The woman beat the friend and Misra attacked her. She died from the blunt force trauma of the blow.”
I went to see Misra in prison. There was something in his eyes – regret, maybe.
After a long silence, I said, “I went to Madhuvan several times in search of you.”
He mumbled something and fell silent again.
“Do you want me to get you anything from outside?”
“No.”
The rest of the visitors’ hour passed in silence.
“Is there something you’re angry with me about?”
“Stop asking absurd questions, will you?”
Mridula had asked me to meet her after meeting Misra in prison. When I went to her house, I was amazed to learn that she was from a very wealthy family.
On hearing that he’d refused to speak to me, she said, “At least he agreed to meet you. He didn’t wish to meet me at all.”
A few days later, I heard from Mridula that Misra had committed suicide in prison.
Kiran was driving the car at 120 kmph. With Outer Ring Road void of traffic and mortal bodies, it felt like we were whizzing across strange universes. The unreality of the situation made me feel like a consciousness floating in space outside the snakeskin of my corporealness. I don’t know how long the maniacal drive lasted. When Kiran shook me awake, I realized we’d reached Vasant Vihar. As usual, Malhotra, Kiran’s father, was not home – he was either in office or out of town on office work. His wife was a Tamil. He’d gone against his family’s wishes when he married her. After fifteen years, she left him for another man and returned to Chennai, leaving him alone. Kiran was not fond of Chennai, so she’d chosen to remain in Delhi with her father. There were also several other things that were not to her liking. In fact, I’d call it deep hatred as it was many shades darker and angrier than mere dislike. Reckless driving seems to be the only thing in the world she doesn’t hate.
I first met her when I’d gone for a run in the university stadium. It was very early in the morning and still very dark.There were only two other people in the stadium performing yoga. I saw Kiran seated on the stairs in a corner. She had a schoolgirl’s face. Every time I ran past her, she smiled at me. Drawn by her beauty, I finished my run and walked over. “Aren’t you planning to go for a run?” I asked her.
“No, fancy a walk?” She told me I resembled a Tamil actor whose name she’d forgotten.
“Kamal Haasan?”
“Yes! Kamal Hassan.”
“It’s Haa-san,” I said, “not Hassan. Oh nevermind! You don’t know Tamil. But still, you look like a Tamil girl.”
“My mother’s a Tamil.”
We walked in silence for a while. People had started trickling into the stadium for their daily run. She suggested we go out and we began walking on the University road that was deserted at that time. At the entrance of the University, we saw several monkeys creating a commotion. On seeing them, she got scared and clutched my arm.
“Shall we go back?” she asked me nervously.
“They won’t harm us,” I assured her. “Come on, let’s keep walking.”
She was clutching my shoulder now. We took a left and entered the Khyber Pass.
“So, it’s monkeys you’re afraid of, not human beings?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Well, because here you are walking in a lonesome forest with a complete stranger.”
“Nah, I’m not scared. What’s the worst thing you can do to me? Rape me? I won’t fight you; I’ll enjoy it. You don’t seem like a lowlife rapist anyway.”
I was flabbergasted.
And just when I thought she couldn’t shock me more, she pulled out a handgun from her pocket. I’d never seen a handgun in real life before. We talked for a long time in the woods and then returned to the tea stall at the entrance of the university.
Before she left, she told me she loved going for long early-morning drives which was why she’d come here all the way from Vasant Vihar. I passed the rest of the day in a dreamlike state. I couldn’t wait to see her the next morning.
I went to the stadium earlier than usual, but my heart sank when I saw the empty stairs. I ran several laps, hoping all the while that I’d find Kiran around by sheer chance. When I’d tired myself out on every level, I slumped down on the steps, panting like a dog, feeling a dull melancholic ache. When I looked up, I saw a beautiful vision approaching me – Kiran. My heart jumped with joy.
She sat down beside me.
“I thought I gave you such a case of the creeps to make you never want to come here again,” I told her, giving her a friendly pat on the shoulder.
“Nah, I just slept in. So I came here late. I was on the other side of the stadium and I saw you looking for me.”
She invited me home and I happily accepted. We would go on to become close friends.
I introduced Kiran to Misra but they didn’t take to each other. Misra, to her, was a male chauvinist pig.
“He’s a madman,” she confided to me. “Reminds me of a hungry Doberman.”
As for Misra, he summed her up as a typical personality-lacking bourgeois who was also deficient of individuality and empathy; a weak and foolish girl with arrogance that comes from being rich. After a couple of encounters, they never met each other again.
Kiran was home alone most of the time. Her father irked me. Though he knew that Kiran’s mother was carrying on with someone else, he still referred to her as his wife and made frequent trips to Chennai to visit her. When I asked Kiran why he was yet to divorce her, she laughed and said that he had a reputation to maintain. If he divorced her, then the whole town would come to know of how his wife trashed him for someone else, and he would lose face. I realized that she had been deprived of love and friendship right from her childhood. I began to love her like a daughter and she often called me “dad.” But I will admit that I felt a little uneasy when she did because my feelings towards her were beginning to get dirty. Her beauty was making me lose my senses and every time I jerked off to the thought of her, I was guilt-ridden, but I rationalized my sexual feelings in a few days.
One day, I was sitting in her room and doling out some fatherly advice. She was suddenly possessed with an urge that made her thrust herself at me and start kissing me.
“Fuck me, Dad!” she said, squeezing me tight.
I began to stay over at her house and indulge her sexual fantasies.
There was no one in the house apart from Malhotra and a maid and since neither of them ever came near Kiran’s room, we didn’t have to fear getting caught in the act. In her room, we were mostly naked and when we felt an urge, we fucked each other like animals. Being naked felt so natural to me, but in my clothes, I felt like I was playing a role, a very hypocritical one.
One day, after a few glasses too many of wi
ne, I started kissing her posterior.
“Woman, you’ve made me understand the greatest truths of life!” I declared ecstatically. “My salutations to you.”
“I doubt you understand the greatest truths of life, Udhaya,” she dully replied.
“Mind explaining that?”
“Sometimes you look only at the surface of things and other times you see what lies beneath but you pretend you see nothing. If the first half of my statement is true, you are shallow; if the second half is true, you are a hypocrite.”
I was offended that she had such a low opinion of me despite having known me intimately. I got dressed and left the room in a huff. I didn’t bother to meet her for ten days after that. However, once my temper had dropped a few degrees, I went to her house and knocked on the door.
“Who is it?” Kiran asked from inside.
At the sound of her voice, my heart began to beat faster. How I missed her during those ten days! I just wanted to wrap her up in a tight embrace.
When she opened the door, before I noticed her, I noticed a nude man sitting in the sofa. A real slap in the face.
“Hi Dad, how are you?” Kiran asked with an uppity air.
She took my hand in hers, but I didn’t know how to react. Like an idiot, I muttered that I’d come later.
“Why later? Why don’t you join us now?”
“No, I can’t. I’m sorry.”
“Do you understand now why I said that you don’t understand anything? You will never understand the greatest truths of life, Dad. Go find yourself a nice, virtuous, educated beautiful woman who knows how to cook and marry her. Write essays on Germaine Greer’s Madwoman’s Underclothes for magazines.”
My face flushed with humiliation, I left.
On the way home, I spotted a hornbill perched on a golden shower in Majnu-ka-Tilla. It brought back vivid memories of a conversation we once had about the bird’s breeding habits.
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