by Arnab Ray
‘Those were not my friends.’
‘I know that. But still, would you kill me? Ever?’ Bangali asked, almost sadly.
Arjun looked at his cigarette intently. ‘If you are my best friend, you should know me better than anyone else in the world. Right?’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, if you do, then you would know that I would know before you betray me that you are going to. I always move a few steps ahead of the world. It’s how I stay alive. So if you decide to sell me out, you must have thought, “I am one up on Arjun”. The moment that thought crosses your head, my friend, you would have done something very, very foolish.’ Arjun took a long puff, the end glowed red. ‘And you also know that I cannot tolerate fools. Traitors, yes. Bastards, yes. But not fools. For fools get people killed without even wanting to.’
‘Maybe a fool then, but I would still be your friend. Your best friend.’
‘No. You would no longer be a friend. I mean, if you don’t know the first thing about me, that I cannot be fooled, then how can you be my friend?’
‘You are an arrogant madarchod, aren’t you?’ Bangali said, and there was spite in his voice. ‘You think you are so smart, and I am so stupid.’
‘No. I don’t think you are stupid. Not at all. If I did, we would not be in business together. But tell me, why this sudden strange talk of betraying me?’
‘Well, figure it out, you chutiya, you know everything. Read my mind.’
Bangali dropped his half-finished cigarette on the road and stepped on it with his shoe.
‘Ma chudaaye yeh sab. I am going to have my family. My own family. So I don’t have to come to beg you to be my friend.’
‘I thought you wanted me to shoot you in the head if you ever got married,’ Arjun said, trying to lighten things up. ‘Though that’s a great idea. You are never really a man till you have a family.’
‘I will. I will have children. And I will have a beautiful wife and I won’t marry a truck to get a garage. But of course I am foolish and you are the smart one.’
‘Aww, come on.’ Arjun tapped Bangali on the shoulder. ‘You miss the point. I never said you are stupid. I never think that. You are the guy who reads all those big books, knows English so well, watches Italian movies at film clubs and buys Cuban cigars. All I said was if and only if you thought you could get away with putting a knife in my back, then that would mean you didn’t know the first thing about me. Simple.’
Bangali still sulked. ‘Well, I have not told you this. But I am in love.’
‘And how many times have you fallen in love this year already?’
‘This is different. It’s serious. Someone I think I want to settle down with. You didn’t know that, did you, all-knowing genius?’
‘Settling down? Do you even know what that means?’
‘Better than you ever will, madarchod.’
‘What’s the lucky girl’s name?’
‘None of your business.’ He pushed Arjun lightly by the shoulder. ‘You stay in your little cave with your lioness and your cubs and pee all around and roar “Don’t get near my family.”’
‘What’s her name? At least that you can tell me.’
‘No, I am not going to.’
‘I know you want to. Otherwise you would not have brought it up.’ Arjun pointed towards a dhaba. ‘Dinner? I am buying. Come on.’ Arjun fished out a few crumpled notes from his pocket and rustled them in his fingers. ‘See, there is always some for friends.’
Bangali said, ‘Chicken jahangari. Two plates for me. And a full tandoori chicken. I am not sharing. But really, where is this smug superiority of yours coming from?’
‘Smug superiority? Me? Aren’t you the one who calls me a low-culture Hindustani with no understanding of good things?’
‘But you fell asleep during Apur Sansar and you think Kishore Kumar has a better voice than Mohammed Rafi. What else can I say?’
The sun had by now dipped behind the massive dome of Jama Masjid. Matia Mahal was an ocean of humanity, rickshaws and handcarts fighting for space. The evening air hung heavy with a haze of kabab smoke. Women bargained. Bearded shopkeepers held their own. There was sweating and swearing and raised tempers all around and yet a quiet sense of contentment held dominion, a sensation not dissimilar to the comforting satisfaction of a good meal sinking down into the base of the stomach.
The two friends walked on, still arguing animatedly, into Gali Kababian, their voices blending steadily into the symphony of Delhi.
Part Two
6
1975
‘Requesting all first-class passengers to board Indian Airlines flight IA 360 with service to Calcutta.’
Arjun Bhatia was happy. The purchase order from the ministry of defence had been executed. A consortium of Israeli arms manufacturers, through front companies in Russia, had won a huge order for military equipment. He had brokered the partnership, got the tender rewritten for his clients, taken it through the ministries, and wiped his tracks. He was going to be rich, not that he was not already, but a payday of ten crore was not something that happened every Tuesday. Put this with the petrochemical approval and he was looking at more money this year than he could have imagined.
And it was not even July.
He adjusted his Aviator glasses slightly as he passed the air hostess, and gave her a smile of acknowledgement.
‘Please proceed, Mr Bhatia.’ She handed him back his ticket and the gentle whiff of perfume that wafted through the air as she did so reminded him of Nayantara. He would be with her in a few hours, and the expectation of her gentle ministrations already made him hard.
‘Would you like a newspaper?’ the air hostess asked, pointing to the rack of dailies kept to the left. Arjun shook his head but glanced at the headlines as she passed by, and they were all reporting things he had known a week ago.
Delhi had fallen easily, easier than he could have dreamt it would. Within just a few years of leaving gun smuggling, he had a network in Delhi, he understood the people, and he knew all their secrets.
‘What kind of secrets?’ Nayantara had asked him the last time he had been in Calcutta, during a lull in their lovemaking session.
‘The ones they keep in the bird’s belly,’ he had said, his hands running over her impossibly flat stomach, before curling around the bottom of one of her heavy breasts and lifting it up for his descending mouth, ‘as they say in the fairy tales, the life of the demon.’
‘Well, tell me a few. The juicy ones.’
He had. Stories of blackmail, double-dealing and strategically applied muscle. She had listened wide-eyed and when he had finished, he was ready again.
Arjun sank back contentedly into his seat in the aircraft, and stretched his legs forward, mightily pleased with the legroom, himself and the world.
Then a voice inside his head whispered, ‘Remember what mummy used to say. Pride comes before a fall.’ Which is when he tried to sober down, to reflect on his failures.
Namely his marriage. He would leave for work early morning before Preeti had woken up. Since they had an army of servants and guards and gardeners and ayahs for their bungalow in Defence Colony, there was little for her to do at home. So she read the film glossies, or left for the parlour or shopping or went to kitty parties or hosted them herself. It was not that Arjun and she did not talk, they did from time to time, but it was the same kind of conversation he had with that old man he would run into during his morning walk – desultory, polite and without passion – one in which his feet started moving before the words were finished. He could never talk about his business, nor about sex nor about politics and what she said he simply nodded to – religious vrats, neighbourhood gossip and the latest developments in the lives of Rajesh Khanna and Raj Kapoor.
The only real topic of conversation they had together was about their children. And it was precisely there that their placid life of comforting acceptance had started fraying at the seams.
Sudheer, the eldest, was e
leven and Arjun was worried for him. His report card was more red than blue and only the fact that Arjun was the school’s biggest donor had kept the boy from being held back a year. Whenever the topic of Sudheer’s academic progress or the lack of it came up, Preeti’s response would be simple and consistent.
‘Why does he need to study? That’s for middle-class people.’
‘He needs discipline,’ Arjun would protest.
‘Discipline? Why? Don’t you love your son?’
He had hired a private tutor. Then he got an Anglo-Indian governess to teach him English and play the piano, just like he used to have in Lahore. But there was little they could do because Sudheer would just run away. Preeti indulged his anarchy every step of the way, loading him with the best toys, the best clothes and a whole lot of chocolates and laddoos and ice cream.
It had already left a mark. Sudheer was obese, extrusions of lard squelching out from neck and stomach, making him look years older.
‘I am worried about Sudheer’s health. He is too fat for his age.’
‘He likes to eat. Why do you have a problem with that? It’s not that you cannot afford it.’
‘That’s not the point,’ he had said, clenching his fists in frustration. ‘Have you looked at him? He wheezes after walking up one flight of stairs. He can’t run from here to the gate without gasping for air and holding his sides. You don’t see the problem?’
‘Why does he have to run? He has made the ayah’s son his permanent runner, he even runs his runs for him in cricket.’ Arjun had said it slowly, ‘And you still don’t see the problem?’ ‘Don’t you love your son?’
The final straw had been the cat. The ayah’s son who did the running for him had gotten Sudheer run out in a match. Sudheer had slapped him hard, sending the poor kid flying into the dirt. The boy had called him a fat pig and then run away, and Sudheer was smart enough not to give chase. A day later, that boy’s cat was found dead in the shrubbery. Someone had broken its legs, all four of them, and then smashed the head in with a blunt object. The ayah had gone to Preeti first to complain and then to Arjun.
Arjun had summoned Sudheer and he had confessed to having done it.
That evening was the first time that Preeti had raised her voice in all their years of marriage.
‘The ayah has to go. She just has to.’
‘But Sudheer killed her son’s cat.’
‘So what? It’s a cat. They work for us. For that ayah’s boy’s cat, you even slapped our son.’
‘Your son killed a cat. He is lucky he got only a slap.’
‘Don’t you love your son?’
Arjun had given the ayah five hundred rupees and asked her to leave, not because he believed that was the right thing to do but because that would give him peace at home and time to think. He made a decision. Sudheer had to go to boarding school. And since he was sending him, he might as well have Mohan go there too.
Mohan was not like Sudheer. One would not even know if he was in the house. Reed-thin, with sharp, somewhat feminine features that reminded Arjun of his own mother, he had mastered the art of staying invisible, usually up in his room, solving jigsaw puzzles and reading books. Again, unlike his brother, his teachers at school liked him, because he did what he was told and did not make a peep.
Arjun was worried about Mohan too. In a way, he understood Sudheer. Mohan was a riddle. When the boys were together with their cousins, all from Preeti’s side of the family, Sudheer would be the leader of the group – bullying, shouting, fighting and laughing. Mohan would slip away quietly either to his jigsaw puzzles or make one up himself by tearing leaves or flowers, and then trying to reassemble them by matching edges.
He had asked Mohan one day why he never seemed to want to make friends.
‘Papa, they all talk too much.’
‘Why don’t you play cricket or football or badminton with the rest of the boys?’
‘I play cricket. Sometimes.’
‘Sudheer says you are very good at batting and fielding. But you don’t like cricket much, do you?’
‘No, I don’t. It’s okay I guess.’
‘Well, what do you like then? Besides jigsaw puzzles and books?’
‘When I figure it out, papa, I will tell you.’
They had to be sent somewhere else, both of them – one so that he could keep himself in and the other so that he could let himself go.
When he had told Preeti his decision, she had not taken it well. She had wept and then called her mother whom Arjun positively detested and not just because of the old-person smell she gave off. She had come immediately and both of them had tried to wear Arjun down, each in their own way. Arjun had tried to explain, as best he could, that this was the best course of action for the boys. The school he would be sending them to in Dehra Dun was the very best, and there they would have round-the-clock care.
‘I know why you are sending them away,’ Preeti had said, through intense sniffles.
‘Please tell me why.’
‘Because all important people send their sons there. So now you can get to know their fathers. This is all your way of getting influence. Now you have started using your own sons for business.’ Preeti shook her bangles dramatically, and her mother had looked on in that stern disapproving way of hers.
‘I am doing this for you,’ Arjun had said equally dramatically. ‘We are not middle class. Isn’t that what you like to say? Well, here you are. This is where rich kids go.’
‘But…’ Preeti had faltered and Arjun had congratulated himself for turning her own words against her.
He pressed home his advantage. ‘The sons of today’s kings will be the kings of tomorrow. That’s how Delhi works. Our sons will be there, growing up with other princes. Isn’t that better than keeping them here, where they grow up playing with the gardener and the ayah’s son?’
His mother-in-law had said, with her dragon breath of paan and zarda, ‘But beta, if you send those two away, how can Preeti live?’
Arjun had half a mind to say, ‘Well, I am sure between the kitty parties and Mrs Khanna’s charity balls and special issues of Filmfare, your daughter will live.’ But he hadn’t survived this long without knowing when to hold fire. So he let it pass.
‘Riti will be here,’ he had said, as a means of reminding Preeti that they had a daughter also.
Riti was his youngest, all of five. Curly hair, a brilliant smile and the ability to fill a room with her presence, she was the bright sunshine in Arjun’s life. The only time he really enjoyed being at home was with Riti on his lap, flipping through a picturebook, with her looking at his face and then back to the page and then once again at his face. They had their little games, and their own little language of nods and whistles, and they would spend hours drawing pictures together, and prancing about on the lawn behind, early in the morning, before the others had woken up. There was no way he was going to send her away, though in a little corner of his mind he felt he should, maybe in a few years.
‘Don’t you dare even think of sending her away. Ever,’ Preeti had said with emotion. ‘She will be here till she goes away to her in-laws.’
Her mother had interrupted, ‘Why would Arjun send her away? He should know that a girl’s place is in the house. First at her parents’. Then at her husband’s. And then with her son.’
Arjun was going to say, ‘Then what is your mother doing here?’ but once again prudence won. He shook his head and walked away, as Preeti came remonstrating to her mother, ‘Just because of a cat. Just because of one little cat.’
And that was that. The boys would go to boarding school. Sudheer had cried for days and Preeti had not helped matters any by saying, ‘Don’t look at me. It is your papa’s decision.’
Mohan had said nothing but one evening he had come up to Arjun’s office, in his long shorts and suspenders.
‘Why are we going to boarding school?’
Arjun went through the whole little speech – of making them men, of the opportuni
ties that the school would provide, of the importance of a British education and of being with people like themselves. Mohan had listened patiently, even though they had been through it all once before.
‘I don’t want to go.’
‘Why? I thought you said people here talk too much.’
He had looked at his feet and fidgeted with the suspenders.
‘They might talk even more there.’ Then he had turned around, his head still bent forward, and shuffled sadly away. Arjun had called out to him but Mohan had kept going, down the stairs, pretending not to hear, his steps becoming increasingly quick. Arjun had thought of going down to search for him but then thought better of it.
Now, as the plane was about to take off, he wondered if he had taken the correct decision. Had Preeti been right? Was he indeed using his sons as pawns in the big game? Had his real interest been in meeting the ministers and the IAS and IPS guys who sent their sons there too? Not that he would not use the opportunity if it presented itself, for it would be foolish not to, but no, that was not the reason he had decided to take this step. Sudheer and Mohan had to grow up to be ‘someone’ and that school in Dehra Dun would give them the substance and training they required, but more importantly, it would give them pedigree.
Pedigree. The only currency they accepted in Delhi. Not talent, not intelligence. Just who you knew and what they could do for you.
Arjun glanced impatiently at his Rolex. Just a few more hours. Just a few more hours before Calcutta.
And Nayantara.
7
Arijit was in his own universe. Sitting on the ground cross-legged, in a pair of khaki shorts two sizes too big, he was assembling a transistor radio, his hands a blur of movement, while humming a song which Arjun had guessed must be Rabindrasangeet for he was, after all, Bangali’s son. He could hardly believe this was possible, a disassembly and a faster assembly, and yet there Arijit was, tightening the cover with a screwdriver. He turned the knob and the transistor radio crackled to life, followed by the familiar voice of the All India Radio announcer.