by Anil Menon
She simply wanted to express her gratitude. Vyas, just wanted to say, thanks so much for this assignment. Very interesting day-to-day challenges. Frankly, now I feel like a soldier, not like before, wanted to let you know. This actress, she’s a piece of work, isn’t she? You met her; what did you think of her?
‘Is Saya giving you a difficult time?’
Difficult? Please. How difficult could it be to babysit a spoiled, filthy rich actress whose biggest worry was an upskirt photo? Ha ha. Just joking, I watch over her, don’t worry mian. Seriously, these arty people are so strange. I have to be very careful what I touch of hers. You should see how she treats her help. Like slaves. It’s not too bad for me, because it seems the woman had a friend in her madrasa called Bilkis. She’s therefore quite affectionate, et cetera.
‘You’re sure you’re not her?’ I was surprised the actress had held on to her fantasy.
A small pause, and then Bilkis continued her remorseless snivelling. Did I think Saya had mental problems? No, just saying. Sometimes Saya didn’t seem able to tell the difference between reality and movies.
‘I told her my friend’s name was Jahanara,’ explained Bilkis, ‘and now Saya claims to be her. If this continues, I shall forget my memory. I am somewhat upset. Arre Vyas, it is not enough Her Highness has everything; now she wants my stories also? She’s not a bad person but why this strange game?’
Good, good. Saya’s mental problems would help Bilkis strengthen her own grip on reality. I told Bilkis to do her duty and take a break at the first opportunity. She had lots of vacation pending. Why didn’t she spend a day at a hill resort dancing around trees in a yellow sari, preferably in the rain? And by the by, when was she planning to give me a godson?
Her laugh resonated in my ear. Oye Vyas, outsourcing your input-output or what? What are you two waiting for? Vyas, you just say the word and no man, woman, djinn or work schedule will be able to stop me from uniting you with your Tanaz.
It was as if her question had removed the handcuffs on a bound body of desire. Then I thought: is it desire or is it self-loathing? If I can’t approach myself, how can I approach her? So and so forth. It was a relief to leave for the meeting at the Oberoi.
I liked the media; they feared me. The tragedy of our republic is that it should have been the other way around.
It was late by the time I got back to the office. I found an intelligence report waiting for me. It was about Shabari Khargane.
Shabari Khargane hadn’t been using the telephone at all. But Shabari, or some other person in her apartment, had been receiving Skype calls from Dodda Gowda during the weekends, usually Friday nights. The calls came well after eleven but the location data was too scattered to pin down the caller’s whereabouts. Dodda called most often from a club, the Dream Factory. I had never heard of it.
Shabari had terminated the first call from Gowda rather abruptly. Just five seconds. I could imagine her indignation. But Dodda the cockroach had tried again. And again, again and again. On the fifth attempt, a flicker of interest from Shabari; the call lasted ten minutes. Three more calls, all roughly of the same duration. The last call was thirty minutes long. Then the calls abruptly returned to their five-second durations and Shabari had started going out at night. I lacked the resources to have her followed but it could be inferred she was going to meet Dodda Gowda. The five stages of her relationships: indignation, temptation, seduction, perversion, regret. I had to catch her before she got to regret.
Why hadn’t Shabari called me? I only wanted Gowda. She had decided to side with a venal film producer who wished to mount her solely as a substitute for his true desire: Saya. I could understand his animal necessities. What was her excuse? Why were people so stupid? Now what was I to do?
I felt a familiar headache developing. There was Sudhir to consider; without his mother, the diabetic wouldn’t have a chance. I’d have to find a way to get Gowda without dragging Shabari into the net.
My cell pinged. It was the most welcome call of the day, any day. Of the three women who had this particular number, Bilkis had already called, Shabari had chosen not to call and the third, the one on the line, was Tanaz. I was no longer restless, only weary. How I ached to lay my head in chakli’s lap, play with her toes, sleep. I composed myself and took my beloved’s call.
16
THE SUN IN HALI. UNRELENTING, ANCIENT. THE PANDAL’S COTTON cover granted little relief from the sun’s feverish light, even though the Lokshakti’s PR Unit had constructed the pandal in front of a decrepit Pipal tree. Its leaves cast fluttering shadows on creased white kurtas, on the white tablecloth, and on the bleached expanse of Anand Dixit’s mind.
He felt despondent. He discounted the feeling. It was a familiar phase in any project worth doing. But discounted or not, the feeling refused to go away.
The despondency arose from a multitude of causes, mainly outside his control. He didn’t understand Super-WiFi technology, didn’t want it, didn’t trust it. He didn’t like dealing with Pillai’s engineers. He didn’t want to be in the infrastructure business. He didn’t want to talk to the media. He didn’t approve of the project’s rapid progress. He didn’t trust Pillai. He didn’t like having to play the stern responsible spouse in this doomed corporate marriage. He didn’t want to deal with the Lokshakti; unfortunately, Pillai was too unstable to be trusted with the task.
The problem wasn’t the Lokshakti per se. He had dealt with the Lokshakti before. Then the relationship had been that of a whore and a client; the Lokshakti had wanted money and he’d wanted relief from bureaucratic stress. But this transactional situation was different. The whore now wanted a relationship. She was looking forward to the streak of vermilion, children, domesticity.
What was the best way to ask Eshwar about a cure for lesbianism? The I-have-a-friend strategy wouldn’t work. His friend was too sharp. It had to be done smoothly or Eshwar would guess the question was about Padma. If Eshwar helped him, he would be in his friend’s debt, but if Eshwar helped him knowing Padma was the person, then he, Anand, would be indebted forever.
Debts were strange things. It didn’t help that Dorabjee owed him a mortal debt. Dorabjee knew, as he knew, that such debts couldn’t be settled through financial transactions. Anand neither expected nor wanted to use the debt to shave off a few percentage points on some financial transaction. The debt Dorabjee owed him was too valuable to be wasted on mere business.
Never mind, none of this could be helped. Cost of doing business in Bharat. At least the Lokshakti had consolidated corruption under one umbrella. He remembered what the Chief Operating Officer of LTI Shoes had told him over lunch at the Meridien: ‘Anand, this is another sign of India’s progress. Corruption has been streamlined. Instead of bribing a hundred people with one lakh each, it’s enough to send over a single suitcase with one crore. The savings in suitcases alone makes it a good thing for us.’
Anand scratched his nose irritably. What else was there to do but proceed as unplanned?
Eshwar Pillai leaned his head forward. ‘This sucks toads.’
That meant the situation wasn’t as bad as it could have been. In Pillai’s cosmology, ball-sucking was way worse than toad-sucking. The worst case scenario was having to suck the balls of a toad.
Anand was ready to swap jobs with the toad-sucker if he would be willing to take his place and sit between by Pillai and Saya’s double. The fraud’s presence, instead of the original, was one of the after-effects of the assassination attempt. Initially, Dorabjee had been scheduled to attend this waste of time—the real test-bed launch was in Hapur, not Hali—but he had cancelled at the last minute.
‘Work, old chap, what to do,’ Dorabjee had explained over the phone. ‘Besides, I prefer doing victory laps to inaugurals. We’ll save the real fireworks for when the project succeeds. For now, I’m sending expendables.’
So Shyam Chokshi, formerly a mid-level politico, now Head of the Cultural Affairs’ newly minted PR Unit, had replaced Dorabjee at the ina
uguration ceremony. Similarly, Dorabjee’s mistress had been replaced with some perspiring starlet.
The starlet didn’t resemble Saya so much as suggest her. Somebody in Lokshakti Bhavan had decided that coyness and vapidity wrapped in a chubby package was a good enough facsimile of the voluptuous original. Unfortunately the starlet evoked not only the actress but also represented her unavailability, and so the knock-off failed for the usual reason: it was just a knock-off. He had met the real article once, just once, at the Miss India ceremony, the same ceremony where he’d met Padma, another event which had upset the carefully balanced forces in his life. He had sat next to Saya on a glittering podium, trying to focus on the parade of beautiful women before him but unable to prevent himself from stealing glances at the voluptuous perfection sitting by his side. For the first time in the weeks that had led to the event, he hadn’t regretted the decision to be a judge, even though Saya’s perfume had provoked a headache and her diva-giri had been off-putting. Saya’s presence had made everyone at the Miss India event aware they were really selecting the second-most beautiful woman in India.
There were rumours Saya was a hermaphrodite. Or maybe the rumour was that she was a lesbian? Perhaps lesbianism was the in thing now. What a comedy of mirrors. He had met Saya at a function where he’d also met his future missus. He had caught his missus playing tongue-hockey with her maid, who happened to resemble the actress. Never mind, the past was past. Eshwar was sure to know about a cure. But how to ask?
Anand thirsted for some water but the bottles of Aquafina on the white tablecloth weren’t an option. A part of his mind fumed at the lack of Bisleri as yet another example of Pillai’s carelessness. Anand had made it clear that ‘indigenous’ didn’t mean ‘made by a US company in India’. Indigenous meant swadeshi. What was the point of shoving digital access down Indian throats if it didn’t lead to greater self-reliance for Indians on all fronts? Now this bloody Pepsi brand would get media exposure at his expense.
‘I don’t get your anti-Americanism at all,’ Pillai had said, baffled. ‘You studied at Brigands, for god’s sake. Is this swadeshi business an allergic reaction or what? We really need to hash it out someday.’
Shyam Chokshi had finally decided to yield the floor. He cracked an inappropriate joke about ladies being the original Jadoo device and requested the starlet to present the first dozen Jadoos to representatives of the future of India. The starlet got up with a smile, her large sunglasses displacing attention from the rest of her features. The journalists angled their lenses and took a series of page three shots.
The crowd cheered. A platoon of cheap plastic chairs. The Lokshakti had done a good job of rounding up bodies. There had to be at least a thousand people. They were decked out in their festive best, seemingly immune to the sun, their mouths revealing glints of silver as they quietly chowed down the free puris and ladoos. Villagers were good at being crowds, he reflected. They seemed to have an uncanny gift for blending shoulders, arms, knees and expectations. They had become a granular flow, their eyes like herrings flocking from one point in liquid space to another.
A pretty girl in one of the middle rows was staring at him. She immediately looked away, then with endearing coquetry, glanced back. He studied her. Pigtails. Oiled hair. Clean but faded salwar kameez, its style dating back to the nineties. She shifted uneasily on the plastic chair, as if missing the ability to adjust her space in an intimate circle of friends. Look at her. Such a world of difference between this girl and Kannagi. But he thought he could recognize the same thirst for life. It was a thirst that wouldn’t be appeased with platitudes, puris and ladoos.
Once again she caught his eye, and this time he smiled and winked. Dixit, you goat, you! At once she dropped her glance, then leaning forward, whispered something to her friend. Giggles. A whole torch of bright glances. Well, it was good to have some effect on women. Even if it was only on innocent village girls.
We are going to do this, thought Anand, his spirit soaring. We are going to build this digital bridge. The content had almost been decided upon, assembled. The master list of all the items that would go on the tablet—software, media, files, all of it—the so-called Vayuputra distribution, it would all be ready in a few weeks. He liked the name. Vayuputra. Perhaps they should have called the tablets Vayuputra. Never mind, it wasn’t important.
After this, what? Pillai was threatening to fix the weather. What the country needed was a large-scale weather control project that would neuter the sun’s death-grip on the subcontinent. Something really ambitious. That is, something that was financially suicidal. But why not? Pillai talked about acre-sized sun sails, artificial clouds, vast bionanotech-based greening projects, anything to clip a few rays off the sun.
Really, why not? With his business sense and Pillai’s technical genius, the idea of radically altering India’s weather lay in the realm of possibility. The country needed Brunels and Carnegies. Anand stared out at the desolate landscape. Trees, green fields, cool shade, waterways. Now, that would be a serious legacy. Anand Dixit: the man who’d tamed Indian weather. All madness, of course. Eshwar’s madness was infectious. Father would definitely approve.
The ‘representative of the future’—youngsters in their best outfits—had lined up on the stage. The starlet seemed keen to give them a memorable moment. Judging from their faces, she was succeeding.
Pillai wanted to say something and Anand reluctantly leaned in. More grief from the griefmeister.
‘I really don’t have time for this dog-and-pony show,’ hissed Pillai, twisting and grimacing in his seat. ‘And I know you don’t either. So what the fuck is this? I thought Dorabjee was going to make a show. And Saya. And what is the point? The tablets have nothing loaded on them so why are we even distributing anything? The Vayuputra distribution is still being assembled and we’re already celebrating? And why are we having the inaugural here, wherever the hell this place is?’
‘I told you the event was in Hali. You seemed fine with it.’
‘Hali, Hapur. It just didn’t register until a few hours ago. Else I would’ve given you hell. What are we doing in Hali?’
‘Cultural Affairs wanted it in Hali. It’s purely show—’
‘C’mon Anand! C’mon, man. I thought you said you could keep the Lokshakti off our backs.’
‘That’s what I’m doing. The CM needed an India Shining moment for his elections and Dorabjee wanted to oblige him. So we fell in line. Also, this is Hali, yes, but it is also wherever the Lokshakti’s PR unit wants it to be. This place is generic, something like a blue screen. Add palm trees and it is Goa. Add a haveli and a bullock cart and it is Rajasthan. Get it? Nobody is taking any of these tablets home. This event is purely for propaganda purposes. The PR unit wanted backup footage in case the big show at Hapur ran into problems. Internally, there will be hell to pay if there’s a screw-up. But externally, nobody will know a thing. That is why we are here.’
‘Fuck me.’ Pillai looked stunned. ‘I thought all this bullshit was for real.’
‘It is. Depends what your reality is. You just focus on a smooth run at Hapur. No technical glitches. No power failures, no satellite hang-ups, no hourglasses that refuse to stop turning. Can you guarantee that? Me, I need to bring in a lot more stakeholders onto the platform. Banks, FMCGs, NGOs, the various mafias. Okay?’
Eshwar Pillai finger-combed his hair. ‘I don’t like it.’
Anand had a sudden flash of genius. ‘See Eshwar, the way I think about the Lokshakti is this. Would you refuse to date a girl just because she’s a lesbian?’
Pillai laughed. ‘It would be a consideration though. But I don’t follow. What’s the connection? I mean, I’ve been out with a few lesbos. I don’t worry about terminology. But these clowns are more like an STD.’
‘I’ve no idea what I’m talking about,’ he confessed, hardly able to get the words out because his throat was so dry. ‘I think I was saying the Lokshakti can be reformed, just like lesbians. Lesbians can be cured
, right?’
Pillai gave him a strange look. ‘Anand my man, you don’t look too hot. You feeling okay?’ Then Pillai’s attention was diverted by Chokshi. He was led away to pose for a group photo with the youngsters plus tablets. Anand cursed, sat back. It would now be harder to re-raise the topic.
What did Eshwar mean by: I don’t worry about terminology. Did he mean there wasn’t any such thing as lesbianism? Or did Eshwar mean he didn’t care what he humped? The second option, no doubt.
But he had also said: a few lesbos. Plural, more than one. Meaning he hadn’t stopped with one lesbian. He wouldn’t have said: I’ve been out with a few gays. One gay would have been more than enough for him to realize things were incompatible. Whereas, here, the sexual experience had been indistinguishable enough for him, as well as for the woman, no doubt, to continue with Lesbian #2, 3, 4 all the way up to a few. Meaning the situations were not symmetrical. Lesbianism was more of a lifestyle choice, really.
People could be encouraged into all sorts of perversions. As a pornographer, he’d learned that fact first-hand. Quite literally, he, Annie Dixit, had drawn his classmates into all kinds of vices. He hadn’t meant to, but nevertheless. Perhaps Padma had been similarly corrupted. Perhaps by that woman Shabari. It was no use putting a cockroach on velvet; it remained a cockroach. You couldn’t improve these people. Then he recalled the abject expression on Shabari’s face and felt ashamed. He had seen the same expression on his own face in the mirrors at Brigands a hundred times. It wasn’t her fault.
His assistant had procured a Bisleri from somewhere.
‘Ratnakar, that Savitri woman. The one who used to work for Madam.’
‘Do you mean Shabari, sir?’
‘Maybe I do. Shabari. What’s the status?’
Ratnakar got busy with his tablet. Anand strolled over to Eshwar Pillai.
‘I’m returning to Delhi. What are your plans for the night, Eshwar?’