Half of What I Say

by Anil Menon

  In any case, as mentioned earlier, grain merchants in the NCR had learned to deal with the chyuntis’ weekly depredations of their hoards with a resigned pride. Yes, it was a loss, a curse, a pain as predictable and inevitable as a woman’s monthly bleeding. But then again, aren’t the petty pin-pricks of ants the reason noble elephants pause to laugh?

  All this has little to do with why young Rafiq Aslam had to die. One theory went that he’d worked hard to load the lorry and worked through the night, a fact the driver and leader of the operation Shefiq Ahmad was not inclined to observe. Young Rafiq Aslam had hooked the last jute bag into the lorry, hopped on to the back panel, curled his left arm through one of the securing cords, and waited for the gate to be opened by the guard, one Rahul Bhatt. Bhatt took it into his head however, to open an old quarrel with Shefiq Ahmad. Bhatt wanted his bribe to be increased; it was distressing to his sense of self, said Bhatt, that his rates were a mere one hundred rupees per chyunti. Shefiq Ahmad had no intention of waking up his boss Wasim-bhai for a consultation, and as the two men argued, Rafiq Aslam fell asleep. Eventually, things got sorted out, but the fracas hadn’t gone unnoticed. As Aijaz Ata’ullah’s security goons came running out—there was a bounty on each chyunti—Shefiq Ahmad panicked. He revved the engine and accelerated, smashing through the gate, and ejecting the loosely attached Rafiq Aslam in the process.

  What happened next is conjecture, probably even apocryphal. Dawn found Rafiq Aslam hanging from a tree. Someone had taken the trouble of dipping him in engine oil and dusting him with discarded bajra, wheat, and sawdust.

  One reason for doubting the story is that there are no trees to be found in the vicinity of Aijaz Ata’ullah’s godown, or for that matter, in most of Delhi. The second reason is that the sawdust element is part of another urban myth, namely, the one which has evil grain merchants mixing finely ground sawdust into processed grain. Aijaz Ata’ullah’s godown had no need for sawdust, unless he were a wholesaler for processed grain, which he swore, in a notarized affidavit, he wasn’t. By afternoon, Rafiq Aslam had been cut down and laid out for display.

  At this point the narrative acquires more parents. One account claims that Rafiq Aslam’s parents arrived to pick up the body, weeping and wailing, and declaring their son to have been as good a Muslim as Shah Qasim himself. They were promptly arrested and loaded into the police vans. This infuriated someone in the crowd, a stone was thrown, the cops plied their lathis left and right, the crowd went insane, and the riot was born. Colonel Kal Kishore ‘Kalki’ Shastri, who had put down the riot with his customary efficiency, testified that the whole thing had been a tragic mistake. By which he presumably meant the boy had been playing hide-n-seek, had hidden himself in a grain chest, another box had been placed on top of it, and Rafi Aslam had suffocated to death. This also explained the large amount of bran in his lungs.

  Another thread claims that the riot was triggered when Aijaz Ata’ullah was caught trying to remove hundreds of bags of hoarded grain before the police arrived. The crowd stopped Aijaz Ata’ullah, or rather, his driver, stormed the gates and burnt down the godown. The other grain merchants in Najafgarh reject this version entirely, pointing to the inconvenient fact that there was no hoarded grain to be found anywhere in Najafgarh. They welcomed news reporters to visit their godowns and search for said hoarded grains. Reporters who took up the challenge were served Limcas, Fantas, medium-sized plates of bhel and educated in the many perils of doing business in this land of many quarrels. Nobody found any hoarded grain.

  A third story claims Wasim-bhai had engineered the whole riot to teach the grain merchants a lesson. There was no way he could let the killing of one of his foot soldiers go unpunished.

  Perhaps there was no child, no thieving lorries, no sudden acceleration, no tarred and suspended child. Perhaps the real reason is much simpler. As mentioned, the godown was located in Najafgarh. Najafgarh is named after the last of the great Mughal generals, Mirza Najaf Khan, a Safavi prince in the service of Shah Alam II, the last of the Mughals. Once Najafgarh had been a chhota-mota town, mota in the context of the twenty or so villages that surrounded it and chhota in the context of the Gorilla that sat a mere glare away, namely, Delhi. Then the Delhi Agricultural Produce Marketing (Regulation) Act was passed in 1976, the Delhi Agricultural Marketing Board (DAMB) acquired some teeth and promptly looked around for problems too large to chew. It soon noticed that Delhites insisted on being fed and clothed, and the feeding and clothing was the responsibility of a handful of wholesale markets, namely, Saharanpur, Panipat, Hissar, Sonepat, Rohtak, Faridabad, Alwar, Meerut, Hapur, Rewari, Khairtal, and Khurja. DAMB crapped ninety crores and the next three five-year plans for developing markets at Loni Road, Najafgarh, Narela, Gazipur, Mehrauli, Wazirabad, Nawada, C.B.D Shahdara and other centres.

  Najafgarh stopped being chhota-mota. By the time the Rafiq Aslam—assuming there ever was such a victim—was allegedly hanging from the alleged tree, Najafgarh had become a major urban-industrial centre with some two million people. Some forty-six per cent of those people were women. A further eighty per cent of this forty-six percent was married, and seventy-three per cent had children aged five years or more. A quick calculation thus reveals that of two million people squashed together in Najafgarh, about half-a-million were mothers. Mothers who waited in ration lines together, mothers who helped each other push their reluctant offspring into school buses, mothers who saw themselves in the tired eyes of the other lady, shopping, working, hustling, cringing, walking.

  Tanaz Cyrusi, a survey agent at Social Weather, had written in a never-released classified report on the area’s demographic: ‘This is a tightly knit community of literate lower middle-class women, with definite lack of enthu for politics.’

  Her supervisor, Supriya Bansal, had made two annotations. The first was an unimportant grammatical correction and a request to stop using colloquialisms like ‘enthu’. The second was a prescient question: ‘Literate includes computer literacy?’ In other words: can these women use Facebook to be a political nuisance?

  There’s yet another theory which traces the cause of the riots at Najafgarh to the death of Rafiq Aslam, but makes him a girl, Rafeeqa Aslam, and fixes his age at twenty, and not thirteen, and makes her a student of Delhi University and the daughter of one Sultana Aslam.

  Rafeeqa Aslam, a pretty journalism major at Delhi University— isn’t the rest of the theory wearingly familiar?—had been pursuing a ‘human interest’ story on Social Weather agents, those ladies (mostly) who had increasingly become the nation’s means for keeping tabs on the nation’s many meanings. It so happened that DU’s new administration had made drastic changes, and the new syllabus laid emphasis on ‘practical knowledge’. Where once Rafeeqa Aslam would have comfortably googled and emailed her way to a nice grade, she now had to generate a report and prove she’d spent a few hours in the field. Rafeeqa had chosen to accompany a Social Weather agent on her Najafgarh beat, and when the day’s work was done, she’d called for her boyfriend to pick her up from Aijaz Ata’ullah’s godown. The theory claims that she’d been arrested by a police patrol, supposedly led by a Lokveer officer, which had come to investigate the many complaints against the chyuntis. Sheer fantasy! Nothing in the police records—no incident reports, no radio chatter, the sworn depositions by the officers concerned—indicates any such arrest. A lone woman in a somewhat male-intensive part of the city. It could happen to anyone.

  As the saying goes, never torment an animal if you don’t know where its mother is. Rafeeqa Aslam’s death, claims this theory with metaphoric vindictiveness, was the tinder to the riot’s match. Approximately seven hundred social-media savvy mothers converged on the godowns at Najafgarh. Perhaps there were more than a few fathers too since this is an age when men have discovered their hearts. Things got ugly and the riot was born.

  For the want of a nail, a kingdom was lost; the nail alone couldn’t have done it, but it was a necessary piece of the horse that toppled the king that f
ailed a battle that lost a kingdom. A kingdom is lost; ask for reasons and risk disappearing into a story.

  Of course, all this is just sentimental hogwash. Behind every thrown stone is always some chap who has read too many books. Why should Rafeeqa Aslam’s death matter in the least? It mattered because Durga Dhasal made it matter. He had seen, with characteristic lack of scruple, that the supposed death of a young college girl at the Lokshakti’s hands was the emotional hinge on which to turn the public opinion against the anti-corruption enforcement unit.

  The students of Delhi University didn’t believe in the time-honoured Indian tradition of muddling through. They called themselves the Bhavi Itihaas. They were organized. They squatted. They hollered. They cordoned off areas. Led by the student leader Sawai Gawai, and supported in stealth by the CPI(N) party, the Bhavi Itihaas made a thorough nuisance of themselves. Especially the effigies.

  The Bhavi Itihaas built and burned effigies of Director-General Dorabjee, the chief minister, and members of the Governing Committee. Something had to be done. It is true that like all bastards the riot had many fathers and many mothers, and like all bastards, it thus had no parents at all. The authorities took comfort in this fact. It was decided to clear the public square.

  Lieutenant Bilkis folded her cell, got back into the Vajra, cursing the day she’d joined the army.

  ‘Do we go in with the CRPF?’ asked Patil.

  ‘No. We’ll wait for the CRPF to clear the square. The 105th is backup. Our job is to arrest the ring-leaders.’

  ‘What are they accused of ?’

  ‘Not bathing,’ said Bilkis, briskly.

  Patil nodded, as if that was all that he’d been waiting for. The Lokveer was full of such donkeys. The whole country was going to the dogs. Why weren’t the scoundrel students in their homes studying? Leave the political stuff to politicians, bhai. What were the parents doing! Their kids were looting, rioting.

  She watched the CRPF go into action. They were good at their jobs. The CRPF strategy was a very quick brutal thrust with the light-weight shield, and then back it up with an equally brutal blow to the ribs or knees. They’d had much practice. What did it say for a nation if its riot police had plenty of experience? She watched the encirclement of activists around Sawai Gawai swing open under the batons and steel boots. Many were being clubbed and stomped for a second time as they tried to crawl away. Stupid, stupid, stupid kids.

  ‘Chalo,’ she told Patil, starting the vehicle. ‘You pick up Gawai, I’ll take care of the bachchas next to him.’

  11

  IF THEY ARE TRYING TO DRIVE ME CRAZY, THOUGHT KANNAGI, THEY are totally succeeding.

  Sampoorna kranti ab naraa hai, bhavi itihaas hamaara hai!

  The students had laid claim to Jayaprakash Narayan’s slogan, originally used to topple the 1975 Emergency’s Iron Maiden. The Lokshakti seemed determined to reclaim the words. The cell block’s audio system kept playing the slogan over and over again, speeding it up, slowing it down, sometimes shouting the slogan, other times whispering it, and once repeating it non-stop for hundreds of times. There’d be eerie intervals of silence and then the chanting would start up again, this time punctuated with manic laughter.

  The shivering came and went in malarial waves. Fine one minute, and then suddenly, a shiver that set her teeth chattering. Her stomach clenched at every slamming door. It was exhausting.

  The sweltering heat inside the prison cell was unbearable. Her skin was damp, not just in the folds of her skin, but an overall clammy film that no amount of wiping could clear. She blew on her moist forearms and watched a bead of sweat run along an arc on her arm.

  She wiggled her fingers and toes, did an inventory of her body. Her neck hurt, so did her right ankle but otherwise she was fine. She listed every seventh number backwards from hundred as a warm-up exercise. Then she listed four-letter words that could have been perfectly feasible English words, but inexplicably weren’t: loof, trin, blag, mank, nooz, guld, hork. Totl wast, blod helt.

  The slogan was now being repeated polyphonically, several voices weaving in and out, the syllables mixing chaotically. The whole thing was underpinned with a complex rhythm which made it impossible to classify the sound as noise.

  Kannagi lowered her head and began to moan. The moans were totally drowned out by the pounding chant, but she was choosing to make the animal sounds; it was her voice. Fork youk, motr fckr.

  She could handle the noise. What sucked was waiting without knowing what she was waiting for. She’d tried to visualize this situation, known it could happen one day, tried to be ready for it when it happened, but reality was always so much more 3D than any expectation.

  The shivering was from the fear. They would probably rape her. Never mind, don’t think about it, she would survive. It would be painful, degrading, but they wouldn’t have all of her.

  To be a woman is to live with the ever-present possibility of violence, Durga had once said. Or some such thing. At the time, she’d thought he was over-compensating for being a man. But perhaps he had been trying to warn her.

  She really wanted to pee, but not enough to approach the grotty faeces-encrusted desi toilet. So far, life in prison had turned out to be very like the movies, and that didn’t bode well. Movies were very good at imagining the worst.

  Just hold on, Anand or Akka would come through. They’d get her out. It might take a day or two—Jesus, two more days!—but they’d figure something had happened. Akka usually called twice a day. She would call and by the third unanswered call, she’d start to freak out. That meant Anand would have to get involved. And when the great Anand Dixit got involved, things happened. He’d get her out. It was hard to say how many hours had already passed. She remembered being violently shoved to the ground, a couple of stunning slaps, a bag had been pulled over her head, a bumpy ride with other protestors, then here, wherever ‘here’ was. Where was Sawai? She thought she remembered he’d been taken down by a ferocious female with wolf eyes. He could be close by, perhaps even in one of the adjacent cells.

  ‘Sawai?’ she shouted. ‘Sawai?’

  The day had begun well. As Sawai’s main squeeze and one of the few profs to support the protest, she had a front-row seat at the revolution. The morcha had started at the Bhagat Singh Statue in Shaheed Park. She’d stood at the front of the crowd, cheering and hollering, as Sawai delivered his fiery Vande Mataram speech. She’d walked at the head of the morcha down Bahadur Shah Zafar road, a left onto Indraprastha Marg, up Mahatma Gandhi Road, then waited with Sawai and the thousands of other students in the great open space at Rajghat. That hadn’t seemed like a good idea. She’d reasoned that by gathering in the open square, by defining the boundaries of the protest, they were playing into the hands of the Lokshakti.

  But she had failed to convince Sawai. The square offered many conveniences for the would-be protester. For one thing, there were no vans and jeeps zipping by, hurling lewd abuses at the women. There were working toilets. One felt part of a long tradition of similar protests. Rajghat was where Indians came to protest national issues. If a protest on the road was hard for the authorities to control, it was equally hard for the protest’s organizers.

  The students were having too much fun to care. The protest had mutated far beyond the issue of the death of Rafeeqa Aslam at the hands of a few Lokshakti thugs. The focus had turned to reforming the entire anti-corruption institution. The gathering at Rajghat had become a mela with chai stalls, art installations, political jam poetry sessions and street theatre performances. Sawai Gawai’s theory that politics had to become a branch of entertainment was proving to be correct. He had organized the DU students to join the morcha, which was a given, but contingents from JNU, Jamia Millia Islamia, Indraprastha University and a whole slew of polytechnics and private colleges had turned up as well. There was even representation from AIIMS and IIT-Delhi; normally those mugpots were impossible to motivate beyond an exam’s requirements.

  ‘They look like they’re having
fun,’ said Kannagi.

  ‘Fun or not, look is the operative word. We can’t be seen as angry right now.’ Sawai wolfed down his egg fried rice in large spoonfuls. ‘Idealism is okay but not ideology. Today we need to show we’re everybody’s children.’ He turned to the student party secretary, Jayshree. ‘Move more girls to the barricades. Tell them to be jolly. I want the cameras to pick up their jolly faces. Kanno, where are you going?’

  ‘I’m a girl, aren’t I?’

  ‘Wrong answer. You’ve already spoken to the press, your work here is done. Go home. Ashraf will give you a ride to the metro. Wait for me.’

  ‘And do what? Make a nice hot dinner for my master?’

  ‘Bhenchod Kanno, just do as I say.’

  ‘Dream on.’

  He cursed. ‘At least stay close.’

  ‘Ma’am, I can get you a chair?’ said Jayshree.

  ‘Call me Kannagi,’ she said automatically, even though she knew it was futile. The kids had grown up calling their teachers ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am’ and would go to their retirement homes doing so.

  ‘Yes, ma’am. Do you want the chair?’

  ‘Jayshree?’ said Sawai.

  ‘Going, I’m going.’ Jayshree moved away.

  The decision to move more females to the front was an intelligent one. What the cameras noticed, people noticed. Women gave legitimacy to a political movement. The situation must be serious, otherwise why were the women marching? The women were all decked out in white saris with red borders. Kali couture.

  ‘The colour scheme has solid spiritual funda,’ Sawai had explained. ‘The white sari with a red border reminds the public about Durga puja. These girls are no longer college girls, drinking, smoking, loose-type; they’re young women in saris, good women, future daughterin-laws. They’re bhadramahilas. They’re also angry Indian women and what an angry Indian woman fights is the demon Mahishasur. They’re fighting the Lokshakti, so the Lokshakti becomes Mahishasur in the public’s mind. Once the public sees the Lokshakti for what it is, it’s the beginning of the end.’