Mohitram moved to the right to give way. But the van held on. It stuck to his tail, the beeping maniacal in his ears. Mohitram slowed and peered into the mirror. There were cops standing on the footboard; they were beckoning to him furiously, and one of them waved a pistol.
“Some mistake, looks like,” Mohitram murmured, and glanced at his passenger. There was no curiosity or surprise on his face. Just caged fury—like that of a trapped animal. He clutched his bag, the white on his knuckles resembling the pallor on his face. With a sigh, Mohitram began pulling over. The cop van followed like a dark, obstinate hound.
When the cops came rushing forth, pointing a gun through every window of the taxi, Mohitram said nothing. He maintained a look of studied helplessness, of solemn disapproval. What could he say? They grabbed at his passenger, manhandled him in that nice suit of his, slapped him, dragged him, cuffed and kicked him, all at the same time. There, in the open, along the side of the highway, they had him kneeling, a gun at his head, his mouth foaming with blood. He tried to say something about his rights, but they slapped him, challenging him to repeat that.
Later, at the police station, Mohitram caught a glimpse of him. Gone was the suit and tie; gone was the cool demeanor. His shirt was torn; his lips were swollen; his face—one side of it—was a nasty shade of blue. He looked sullen and defeated, yet he smiled at Mohitram and said weakly, “Sorry, friend. No return journey.”
The cops heard this and misunderstood. They suspected Mohitram to be in league with the foreigner. His taxi might be a courier for the drugs. Three kilos of cocaine were found in the bag, beneath a cleverly concealed false bottom. At three thousand rupees a gram this was a sizeable haul. The cops couldn’t let anything that hinted of a network or smelt like a clue pass. There’d be questions from the top. The press would get wind of it. The anti-narcotics department would move in and try to get mileage. Times like this, the cops weren’t ready to listen about visiting sisters, kid sisters arriving in the city, full of hope. Before ruling you out, they wanted to know everything about you: about your life, your friends, your income, and your habits. Again and again they’d drill you, until they were convinced you were above-board, until everything was down in black-and-white, and they had your thumb impression as proof.
It was 11:00 P.M. by the time Mohitram was allowed to leave the police station. He left without his taxi, which would be stripped down to the chassis to complete the search. A panic tore at his heart. He fretted about Meena. She would have arrived three hours ago.
He took the nearest cab he could find. Along the way, he shouted at the driver, “Bloody bastard! I, too, drive a taxi. You are trying to waste time, huh, so you make more on the meter.”
“No, son, I haven’t done that in fifty years. Why would I do it now?” replied the driver.
Mohitram saw he was a frail man of seventy. His jaws were toothless hollows, his hands were thin and bony, like bird claws, and he wore thick foggy glasses, the kind that shield a patient after cataract surgery. Mohitram glared at him. What bad luck to be stuck with this old tortoise!
The taxi rolled into the Victoria Terminus. Without waiting to check the fare, Mohitram thrust a bunch of notes at the driver and rushed out. He tore through the hordes of passengers crowding the entrance: families shuffling with their luggage, kids in tow; coolies with muscular stacks on their heads, buckling at the knees. Skillfully he navigated his way past the upcountry travelers sleeping all over the foyer, their heads resting on pieces of luggage, while stray dogs came sniffing at their food baskets.
God, platform four—where was it? Mohitram thought. And where was the train? All he could see was tracks of cold steel with moonlight bouncing off them, tracks leading outward, into oblivion.
He grabbed a ticket collector, a thin, forlorn man in a black coat, and asked, “Ek sau chaar Mumbai Express. Was it on time?”
The collector looked at him indifferently and said that the train had arrived three hours before. Then slyly he added, “You will find it in the yard, if you are greatly interested.”
“One girl: seen her?” Mohitram asked. There was a cold panic rising in his stomach, a sick feeling in his throat and chest. He could picture Meena arriving, all eager and excited, craning from her window to catch a glimpse of him. (She hadn’t seen him since what, three years now!) He could see her getting off, nervous and mystified. What would she do? Where would she look? Whom would she turn to for help? And who would respond? Yes, who?
He had heard about unescorted girls finding men eager to help. He had heard about their reception on the first night itself. No—that couldn’t happen to her. He must control himself. He must be patient. He would find her. Come what may, he would.
He clutched the ticket collector by his coat. “Speak up! Tell me!” he said in a choking voice. “Have you seen her, a young girl, afraid, and ever so pretty?”
The ticket collector looked at him as though he were mad. Through his eight hours of duty, he would have seen many girls, a hundred at least, maybe more. How to know who this madman was talking about? How to know who he thought was pretty? Best to humor him, get him off his back. “Ask the railway police,” the ticket collector said, pointing to a room at the side. Outside the room stood a railway cop in uniform. He wore a navy blue cap pulled unevenly over his head, and he carried a lathi under his sweat-stained armpit. Mohitram saw he was grinding tobacco in his palm, back and forth, back and forth, increasing the pressure each time.
Mohitram ran up to the railway cop and started spilling his story. He described Meena, described her like the child she was, sweet flower of youth. He described her newness to the city, her tenderness of age, her excitement, her sprightliness, and her helplessness when she wouldn’t find him there. Meanwhile the cop placed the tobacco strategically in his mouth, on the right side, pulling his cheek aside and squeezing it alongside the gums. Mohitram got a full view of his teeth, charred and chewed away by the habit.
With hands folded, tears streaming down his face, Mohitram blabbered on: “Please, sahib, please do something. Find her anyhow. She is only seventeen, a child, you see . . . my only sister. Please find her. I will be your slave for life.”
A train hooted its departure. The announcer’s voice broke overhead. It came rough and raspy over a cracking PA system. The cop signaled to Mohitram to be patient. The announcer went on about how some trains would be delayed. They would leave toward morning. A bridge had collapsed somewhere. Nothing serious, nothing lost, except the taxpayers’ money.
Mohitram waited. He wore a pathetic expression. His heart threatened to leave his body; a frightful monster tore at his gut. If they couldn’t care for a river, he thought, a sparkling, flowing river, what hope for a girl indeed, a lone trusting girl like Meena? The cop continued to fix himself a second dose of tobacco. He began playing with the powder, lifting it, crushing it, letting it fall, a sprinkling almost in his palm. Mohitram watched with a growing feeling that he was part of the fix.
The announcer went over the announcements slowly. All the trains delayed that night had to be rescheduled; the new timings were announced. The cop struck at the tobacco in his palm. To Mohitram’s mind, it was like a gong going through his head.
A chaiwalla came by with his cart, making a rolling, clattering sound. The noise of the cart drowned the announcer’s voice. Seeing them, the chaiwalla slowed, but the cop shooed him on.
Cupping his palm, the cop squeezed the second pinch of tobacco into his mouth. His face contorted as he shuffled to find the tobacco its rightful place, the perfect chewing position.
The announcements stopped. Mohitram began speaking again. This time he used a more subservient tone. “Oh, sahib, where do you think she is? Please help me look. What will I tell my parents? How will I face them? Oh, help me please, sir. I will be your debtor for life.”
The cop wasn’t listening. His attention was elsewhere—on a beggar girl who had walked past, a huge sack thrown over her shoulder, its bottom scraping the ground.
>
The girl couldn’t have been more than eighteen. Her hair was long, brown, and caked with dirt. Her blouse was loose; it hung low at the back. Her shoulders were lean, dark, and smooth. Good bones, basically.
Mohitram looked, too. As if aware of them, the beggar girl turned. Her face was shapely, her eyes sharp with survival. She was searching for articles with resale value, anything she could find to sell: old chappals, old bottles, old magazines.
The cop fixed his eyes on her, staring suspiciously at first, then insolently. He chewed away, making smacking sounds with his mouth. The girl looked at him, as if reading his thoughts, and a strange vocabulary rose between them, a language of tacit understanding.
But for Mohitram there was no such understanding. “Sahib,” he whispered to the cop, who now wore a peculiar expression. Not that of a captor but of a captive. Not that of a law keeper but that of one about to contemplate mischief himself.
The girl walked on, a faint smile on her lips. The sack trailed behind, making a dull scraping sound, leaving a track in the dust of the platform. The cop turned and followed her. He had pulled himself up smartly; the lathi swung in his hand.
“Sahib, please,” Mohitram pleaded, knowing full well that he was losing ground.
The cop turned and stared at Mohitram. He stared at him with flat, glassy eyes and said in a tone that Mohitram knew only too well, “Duty khatam, samjah? My duty is over. You understand?”
LOVE IN THE TIME OF AIDS
♦ ♦ ♦
I GOT UPTIGHT WHEN DR. DOONGAJI officially passed judgment on the scarecrow-thin woman who had minutes earlier sat outside his office shivering, her sari wrapped tightly around her shoulders. Bluntly his voice boomed over the swiveling half doors, “I have told you before, you have AIDS. There’s nothing I can do about it.”
In the waiting area, heads turned. Expressions of cold shock gave way to expressions of uneasiness. Feverish whispers were exchanged. An energetic young man in his twenties popped his head over the half doors. Standing on his toes, he stretched, peeped inside, saw the patient, sat down, and nodded gravely to the others. A fifties-something Parsi lady, with a flabby white face, short brown hair, plump arms, and a florid dress that showed her thick calves, shot instructions at her husband, who was old and hard of hearing. Without waiting for his reply, she pulled at their grandson, a frisky eel of six, and dragged him out of the dispensary. Her husband followed, blinking in confusion. A middle-aged lady in a sari, her hair done up in a bun, looked around for a camaraderie of outrage. Finding none, she took to looking down, severely, at the floor. A male patient got to his feet and asked the compounder whether it was his turn next. The compounder, a bespectacled man with frail shoulders and a listless expression, looked up from among the shelves of colored medicine bottles and said, “After him,” pointing to where I sat, feverish and miserable, head, nose, and chest blocked with phlegm.
This was the summer of 1986, when AIDS was the new disaster on the horizon, the latest threat to mankind, and there were all sorts of theories being tossed around:God, displeased with man, sending down an epidemic to punish man for his wanton decadence; man being asked to find his own limits of permissible sexuality; man extinguishing himself, playing out his fantasies of being God by making way for a new generation of power clones, a few years away but expected nonetheless—none of which were true anyway, none of which we believed, yet felt excited about, in the way one feels about a new era of progress, a new threat, like an imminent world war or a terrorist strike somewhere.
I had been going to Dr. Doongaji longer than most of his patients, ever since I outgrew the pediatrician. As a doctor for minor illnesses there was no one better. Some might argue that he was old-fashioned, that he was not a medicine man of today, but I had faith in him. Besides, it was amusing to come to his dawakhana and find that nothing had changed. Nothing for twenty years! Still the entrance with long white folding doors. Still a railing at the entrance, polished brass, for the old and the handicapped to hoist themselves up. Still large dusty sofas that squeaked when you sat, their springs broken, their leather upholstery creased and crushed. Still armchairs of solid teak with sagging straw work. Still the oversized fan, which quivered and threw out air at astonishing speed. Still the walls with the paint peeling, the cement showing, and a placard that said: “Laughter is the best medicine.”
Again the good doctor boomed, this time with the resonance of a man who wished to impact his environment. “This AIDS is a serious bimaari,” he said. “Its treatment needs a lot of money. More than you can imagine. To afford it you will need to go to a government hospital.”
We waited to hear her reply. If she said something, it was inaudible. A taut silence fell over the waiting room. The blades of the overhead fan made a slicing sound, which grew in our minds. We chose to look away, look down, anywhere but at one another. We had to grapple with the gravity of the statement we’d just overheard, a death sentence passed phlegmatically in our midst. An onlooker to the gathering would have thought we were at a funeral, mourning the loss of someone very young, who had been snatched away without warning.
Again, the firm voice of Dr. Doongaji: “Why don’t you understand? I can’t help you. I can’t do anything. You please go to a government hospital, huh.”
Silence again. Not a question or a doubt expressed. She was whispering, pleading, I thought. Maybe she needed a clue, some direction. Maybe she needed information, some time to think. Maybe she was stunned with shock and embarrassment. Maybe . . . she was just plain broken.
I knew Dr. Doongaji well enough to do what I did next: I charged into his office. The woman turned to the squeak of the doors swinging open. I saw her. No flesh—all eyes, bones, and teeth.
The woman stared at me with the face of a vulture. It was a face masked with confusion, ignorance, and terror, absent from the sequence of events it was being asked to understand. I trembled, as much with compassion as with fever.
Dr. Doongaji looked up. His glasses had slipped down his nose, which was large, oily, and smudgy. His face was rough and unshaven, peppered with white bristles. His eyes were dim with age. Shrubs of white hair sprouted from his ears. He looked more like a scientist than a doctor, a dissolute dinosaur forced into a world he did not care for.
“Ah, Pesi, what is the matter with you?” he said. “Are you dying or what, like this lady here? Look, her husband has died, leaving her a present. And she won’t listen. Thinks I can save her.”
“Sorry to barge in, Doc,” I said, sniffing. “But maybe I can help. I know of an NGO, a non-profit organization that works with HIV patients. It helps them get treated in government hospitals. It offers counseling, support, and helps with their adjustment. Let me speak to them.” I pulled out my wallet and began going through my phone list.
“Nothing can help these people, Pesi. Problem is, they don’t listen. They only want to fuck away. Fuck here, fuck there. Insert, insert everywhere. See where it gets them finally?”
The woman’s eyes widened. Our language was alien to her. It was the language of the educated, the rich, and the powerful, whom she knew nothing about. The look she gave us said: berate me, but don’t send me away, please.
“But Doc, it was her husband’s fault. You said he infected her. So how can we blame her?”
“Blame her? Of course I blame her. The problem with these idiots is they don’t listen. She came to me a year ago with her husband. He had tested positive, and I told her to take care, to make him always wear a condom before sex. No condom, no sex! I remember saying this ten times, and them nodding like goats. Now, he has kicked the bucket and left her with this bimaari. What can I do? I am not God. I don’t have special powers. When they wanted to fuck, did they think of me? Did they even think of my words, my advice? And now she wants me to save her. What I can do, huh?”
Just then the woman whispered in a thin cracking voice, “Bhook nahin hain, dawa do.”
“Look at the stupid woman,” Dr. Doongaji said. “She wants
me to revive her appetite. She wants medicine so she can feel hungry. Have you ever heard anything so absurd? Tell me, what do you do with such people? They don’t understand. They just don’t listen. Do you think this would have ever happened if the British were here?”
“Eh . . . what?” I asked, taken aback.
“I said, do you think this would have happened if the British were here, if they were still in power, ruling us?” His eyes narrowed, looking at me expectantly. For a change they weren’t flickering.
“What have the Brits got to do with this, Doc?” I said, trying to grapple with the incongruity of the question. I wondered if the good doctor had taken leave of his senses, whether the years of practice and the company of illnesses had finally taken their toll.
“They wouldn’t have tolerated it! They would have passed laws. They would have enforced discipline. They would have made condoms compulsory. They would have punished sexual offenders and made an example of them. That’s what they would have done. You didn’t know the British, son. They had a way of getting things under control.” His eyes shone. His fists were clenched. The glasses were back in place. I saw there was a bubble of saliva at the edge of his mouth. Some bile had seeped through and lingered.
“But how would the British have managed to keep people from screwing around? How would they have controlled individual wills?” I said, feeling sore at this illogic.
“The problem with you, Pesi, is that you were born in the wrong age. You don’t know what it was like under the British. We had discipline, cleanliness, prosperity . . . and no corruption, boy. There was no pollution, no disease. AIDS? Whoever heard of it? They would have made sure it never entered. They would have got it under control, like that uprising of 1857.”
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