Marginal Man

by Charu Nivedita

  When the violence had begun, all the Sikhs fled to the houses of the Hindus on Block 28. The goons also went to Block 28 where they’d begun to search for them. Initially, mother and son had concealed themselves in a quilt box, but they fled the house when they realized there was a high chance of being discovered.

  I immediately took a pair of scissors and cut Rekhi’s hair short. His mother didn’t protest. I told her that they should call themselves Bindiya and Rakesh for a while and that Rekhi’s mother should give up her salwars and wear sarees. Nalini gave her one.

  The army and the police showed up the next morning but they were no match for the rampaging mobs that kept arriving in jeeps. This time, the mobs didn’t go banging on people’s doors. They went to the ration shop and summoned the owner. They got him to open the shop and take out the register which contained the names of the ration-card holders. They identified all the Sikhs from the register and took down their details. I was standing in the crowd and watching this unfold. Then I realized with a shock what they were planning to do and what was going to happen. The mob then made its way to another shop that sold kerosene. They loaded drums and tins onto the jeeps.

  I rushed to the gurudwara where the army had pitched its camp and told the soldiers what was happening. They gave me a deaf ear.

  “There is nothing we can do,” they said.

  “But I heard it in the news that people indulging in violence would be shot at sight!” I protested.

  “Why don’t you ask whoever said that on TV to actually come and carry it out?” a soldier rebuffed.

  An older policeman who had witnessed what had passed between me and the soldiers said, “Brother, as the two people who shot the prime minister were policemen, the entire police force is running scared. Our senior officers are frightened as they don’t know whose heads are going to roll once the last rites are over. In this situation, what can we do? If we spray bullets at this mob, what will happen to us? Who do you think the mobsters are? They are the same people who give orders to our superiors. Just keep your TV on and remain in your house.”

  Instead of going home, I went to the gurudwara. As the Sikhs from Kalyanpuri had kirpans and sticks, I thought of informing them about the mob so that they could mobilize. But there was no one there. Had they all been killed? If they had escaped by some stroke of luck, where had they gone? While I was wondering what to do, I saw the jeeps. On it were several Sikh men. There were a few youths and even children who couldn’t have been any more than five years old. The mobsters upended tins of petrol and kerosene on their heads and set them on fire. Those who attempted to flee were cut down with swords.

  Trilokpuri will not have even a single male Sikh left, I thought despairingly as the jeeps sped to Kalyanpuri.

  In the afternoon, the army conducted a march past. Thirty minutes after it was over, the jeep-mob returned to Mayur Vihar. Addresses in hand, they went from house to house, dragging more Sikhs out and setting them ablaze. When the people who lived next door to us declared they were Punjabi Hindus, the mobsters refused to believe them. The madmen were still not convinced of their religion even after they were shown the puja room.

  The man with the addresses asked haughtily, “Who is Darbara Singh?”

  Immediately, the husband said, “He is the owner of this house and lives in Tilakpuri.”

  “You should have mentioned that first, my friend,” he said.

  They came to our house next.

  Before they had the chance to say anything, I summoned Rekhi and Harpreet and said, “This is my bhabhi. Her name is Bindiya. My brother is in the army; he had a love-marriage. This is their son Rakesh. As my brother is in Agra on special duty, they are staying with me and my wife, Nalini and our daughter.”

  The leader of the mob turned to Kalpana.

  “What’s your name, girl?” he asked.

  Kalpana looked at me with terror in her eyes.

  “Kalpana,” I answered for her.

  The leader stroked her head.

  “Why are you afraid, beti? You’re not a Sikh. We won’t harm you.”

  Then he turned to me and said, “Madrasi babu, a girl from our village has come to your house. I hope you haven’t lied to me. If I find out you have, you won’t be spared.”

  With this warning, they left.

  That night on TV, the commissioner of police announced, “Today, around fifteen people have lost their lives, but the situation is under control.”

  The next day, the governor told the same sick lie, “The situation is under control. We have received news that nothing untoward has happened today.”

  The BBC reporters told on that very day, the worst of the killings had happened. 200 bodies were lying in the Tees Hazari police morgue; a thousand Sikhs had been killed in Shakkarpur, Kalyanpuri, Shahdara, Krishna Nagar, Parpar Ganj, Shivpuri, Chandar Nagar, Gandhi Nagar, Geetha Colony, Durgapur, Bhajanpura and Seemapuri, all in East Delhi; another thousand had been massacred in Nathu Colony and Trilokpuri alone; in Mongolpuri, Sultanpuri and Budh Vihar in West Delhi and in many colonies in Narela and Jehangirpuri, almost the entire male Sikh population had been wiped out. Even the trains were full of corpses. Except for New Delhi, there seemed to be no police or army presence anywhere.

  In the morning, I went to Trilokpuri. The roads were littered with bodies of Sikhs who had been burnt or beaten to death. The remains told me that there were also those who had been hacked to pieces. The houses in Block 27 – Rekhi’s included – had all been burnt black.

  When I reached Block 28, I saw army trucks driving away with more bodies. It was then that I saw a curious structure that resembled a shed – or did it resemble a tent? I really didn’t know how to describe it to myself or to anyone. It had obviously been constructed with scant resources – wooden boards covered with tarpaulin. Where there were no wooden boards, there were sheets of tin. There was also a barbed wire fence. The thing must have been torched the previous day. The army personnel, who I’d assumed were accustomed to pathetic sights, were themselves staring in shock and disbelief at the fully gutted tent. I walked towards it as I needed a closer look. The tarpaulin had been burnt and the roof was open.

  Two small children were sitting on a set of planks that was precariously held up by sticks. Their heads were on their knees and they were hugging their legs to their chests. One of the children was around four and the other was probably a little older, six or seven maybe. They were dead, burnt. I was looking at their charred bodies; I was looking at how they died. A young solider covered his face and began to weep while another soldier kicked open the burnt door. Inside stood the charred corpse of a sixty-year-old man looking up at the children with one arm raised.

  Everyone from Block 28 was there to take in the grisly sight. We were told that the previous evening, an elderly Sikh and his two grandchildren who were being sheltered in a Hindu house got discovered by the mob. They managed to escape and hid themselves in the ramshackle structure, whatever it used to be, but the mob hunted them down and set fire to the shack saying, “Achcha hua! Let’s burn them and celebrate Lohri here itself!”

  The Sikh women and children who had been hiding began to come out when they spied the army trucks. Their women were now widows, their girls were now fatherless. Keening and wailing, they were also taken away by the soldiers.

  I returned home, numbed by all that I’d seen. I didn’t tell Rekhi or his mother that there was nothing left of Block 27.

  “The leaders in Teen Murti Bhavan must have dispersed. I think things will be better tomorrow,” I was telling Nalini when we heard a light knock on the door.

  Wondering who could be knocking so gently, I went to the door and opened it to find the mobsters standing there, the same beasts who were responsible for the carnage the day before yesterday.

  “So, Madrasi, you thought you’d take us for a ride, huh?” one of them barked, slapping me h
ard across the face.

  “Arrey bhaiya, Madrasi ko chod do,” said another one. “Sardar kidhar hai?”

  On hearing this commotion, Rekhi and his mother came out of the room. A mobster caught Rekhi by the neck and threw him with such force that he landed against the wall and broke his nose.

  “Idhar hi Lohri banayenge!” said one fellow with a tin in his hand.

  “Bhaiya, nahi, we don’t have enough petrol. There are four other people in the street. We don’t want to burn them off one by one and waste the petrol, do we?”

  Saying this, he picked up Rekhi, who was stuporous, and threw him into the jeep. The rest of the mob hopped onto it.

  Rekhi’s mother and Nalini tried chasing the jeep. I ran after Kalpana who had run out to follow them. I picked her up and we stood there, frozen.

  Shortly after this painful incident, Nalini wanted to move to Chennai and I got transferred there. A couple of years later, she divorced me. For four or five years after the divorce, I kept my distance with women. I had nothing whatsoever to do with their kind. Being a man, I needed sex, but I was not willing to put my hand into a pit of snakes for it. Then, I met Peundevi and married her.

  Note: The following stories were told to me by Perundevi. I had written them out as she’d told them to me and I titled the collection Perundevi’s Snake Stories.

  “Those who have committed at least one murder in their lives,

  Those who have raped at least one woman,

  Those who feed drugged biscuits to passengers on trains and loot them,

  Those who hire hitmen to kill their husbands for the sake of their lovers,

  Actors, army brats and activists,

  Drivers, drug-addicts and drunks,

  Eunuchs, eccentrics and eggheads,

  Journalists, junkies and jacks of all trades,

  Ministers, mistresses and mistresses of ministers,

  Pickpockets, psychos, pimps and policemen

  Prostitutes, priests, petty politicians and presidents,

  Street-singers, strippers and sex-offenders,

  Teachers, tramps and terrorists,

  Widows, witches and wenches…

  If all these people can write ‘literature,’ why the fuck can’t commercial writers*?” I asked Cockaphonix.

  He told me that it was beyond me.

  I rose to the challenge and insisted I’d produce class literature and moreover, he would be my stenographer.

  When Cock readily agreed to be my stenographer, I knew that he was all out to humiliate me. He said that if someone like me could write literature, then he had no problem being the scribe. Every word of his was dripping with scorn.

  (*After resigning from the postal service, I began to write gossips on actors and actresses for a livelihood. I did this for three years and my fellow litterateurs began to club me with writers of pulp fiction. So, a few years later, I gave up the gossip articles and became a pickpocket. This helped me recover my literary status. I am deeply indebted to Monsieur Jean Genet for this.)

  Cock has his own understanding of what literature is. When language is twisted, wrung and strangled until its eyes bulge out, it becomes literature. Otherwise, it is mere newspaper reportage.

  I feel that reportage can also qualify as literature sometimes. Don’t you think so too? Only this morning, a newspaper article I read wrung my heart because it was, in its own way, a tragic poem.

  A lorry coming from Pallavaram crashed into the E. S. I. compound in K. K. Nagar and ran over some people who were sleeping on the pavement. The newspaper carried the names and ages of those who were crushed to death, those who survived with grave injuries, those who died on their way to the hospital.

  In the Ramayana, Dasharatha, Rama’s father, promised Kaikeyi, his second wife, that he would grant one request of hers. She asks him to exile Rama for fourteen years. Rama goes into exile, telling his father that he should not go back on his word, and the people of Ayodhya follow him. When they come to a river, Rama looks back and says, “If you accompany me, my exile will be fruitless, for the wilderness will not be the wilderness but Ayodhya if you come along. So, children, women, men, please return to your homes.”

  After completing his fourteen years of exile, when he returns to the river, he sees a small band of skeletal figures.

  “Who are you?” he asked them, a sense of unease settling over him.

  “We are eunuchs, Rama,” they said. “You forgot to mention us when you asked the people of Ayodhya to return home. So we stayed here.”

  How many kinds of human beings have we tried to write out of history? We have banished so many people from society just because they’re slightly different from the rest of us and we relegate them to the margins. This is not something new. It’s been in practice for eons. When I think of the plight of the outcasts, I feel that the chance to create literature is a discriminatory privilege that is unreserved for the castaway. It is only available to promiscuous women and royal men who fuck around in harems as all these people have much to say – things that polite society is interested in.

  I don’t know how kings in days of yore had the stamina and the virility to fuck women from sun-up to sundown. For the common man today, the mere thought of fucking one woman is frightful.

  There have been several nights when I sat trembling because my dick refused to behave the way a dick should. When Nalini approached me, it would curl up like a centipede that had been kicked and disappear. How the fuck could you expect me to fuck with a trembling dick the size of an areca nut?

  YOU ARE A BLOODY EUNUCH, MAN

  This was why she divorced me, but she chose the sophisticated euphemism of “irreconcilable differences” for the court papers. She was kind to not bring up my unmanliness and my many perversions. She concealed her reasons for divorcing me between lines, underneath words and between spaces. (Oh looky here, Cock! Who said I can’t write “literature”? Let me give myself a pat on the back.)

  After I married Perundevi, a friend called Vasanthan asked me, “How’s life? What are you doing now?”

  “Fucking, fucking, fucking and fucking a little more.”

  “Really?”

  “Why do you doubt?”

  “Well… People are saying you’re a eunuch.”

  “For some time, I thought I was a eunuch too. Maybe I was. But not any longer. Hear this: my areca nut grew to the size of a giant fucking king cobra, man. Sex is in the brain, my friend. Sex is in the brain.”

  Nalini used to often tell me that my mouth smelled like a sewer. It baffled me as to how she knew what my mouth smelled like as we’d never kissed in spite of being married for ten years. Whenever I’d try to kiss her, she’d move away, saying that she didn’t like kissing. Instead of admitting that she was an arrogant bitch with a stick up her ass with a limp and lifeless tongue, she started complaining that my mouth smelled.

  After kissing Perundevi for the first time, I asked her, “Does my mouth smell?”

  “No, sweetheart, but if you suffer from halitosis, we can go see a doctor. Don’t worry. Even I’m conscious of the way my breath smells sometimes. It might have something to do with the stomach.”

  She took me to the doctor like a mother would a nursery-schooler. After my visit to the doctor, all my fears of odor were dismissed.

  Your breath stinks.

  Your sweat stinks.

  Your shit stinks.

  Your piss stinks.

  Your flatulence stinks.

  Your armpit stinks.

  Your groin stinks.

  Your clothes stink.

  Your side of the bed stinks.

  After Perundevi entered my life, Nalini’s opinions of me ceased to ring as loudly as they used to.

  You are a filthy gutter rat.

  You are an obscene reptile.

  You are a deviant.

  You ar
e a pervert.

  And all her bitter anathemas lost their sting.

  You should die the death of a street dog.

  You should rot like a worm.

  You should be gutted.

  You should have your eyes gouged out.

  You should have an electric cable shoved up your anus.

  I HATE YOU, EMASCULATED BASTARD!

  I first met Nalini when I went to watch a play at Shri Ram Center in Mandi House. She was the roommate of my friend’s lover. They stayed in a hostel on Bhagwan Dass Road which intersects Mandi House. I was so badly starved of sex then that you could say I was going through a sexual drought. Even masturbation had become unamusing. When I saw Nalini, it was lust at first sight, not love. Within a week of knowing each other, we began a live-in relationship. During our relationship, we lived in a number of places – Kalyanvas, Kalyanpuri, Mayur Vihar and Possangipur. Possangipur was a tiny village in Janakpuri. The villages and forests that thrive alongside the urban centers are Delhi’s real wonders. There were many buffaloes in Possangipur, so the air smelled of dung at all times.

  Of all the houses I’d rented in Delhi, the house in Possangipur was the worst by far. The owner, a seventy-year-old man called Choudhary, carried himself with the air of a dictator. There were ten families staying in the houses he’d let, spread over three floors, all Tamils. Wait, did I just say Tamils? Correction – all Tamil Brahmins, except us. Wait, did I just say “us”? Correction again – Nalini was a Brahmin. All these Brahmin families had moved from Chennai after the advent of Periyar and their speech was a curious mix of Tamil and Hindi. Nalini and I lived on the second floor in a ten by eight rat-hole of a room where there was just enough space to accommodate a bed. As for our clothes, we had to keep them in a trunk under the bed. The kitchen had standing space for one person only. There were two other rooms adjacent to ours in which a family of four – a husband, his wife, and two teenagers – lived. When they talked, you’d hear a peculiar mix of Palakkad Tamil mixed with Hindi, and their speech was so loud that the whole of Possangipur would hear them. I never once saw the woman of the house walk; she moved slowly and I’d assumed this was because she’d had a hysterectomy (as she was always grumbling about some surgery that had reduced her to a corpse). Our families shared a toilet and a bathroom.