Vertigo

by Ashok Banker

  The same effect of super-realism, trivial detail piled upon detail, a feeling of something about to happen, of violence about to erupt, of history about to turn a page, of something that will change your life, one of those moments when you feel anything is possible.

  The time is five minutes past 5 p.m. The day is Friday. The date is the 31st. The month is October. The year is 1984. 31 October 1984.

  The President of the world's largest democracy is announcing to 750

  million Indians that their prime minister is dead. He appeals to all citizens to remain calm and show their respect for the expired Mrs Gandhi by maintaining the peace. He adds that Shri Rajiv Gandhi will be the interim prime minister.

  The buzz of a thousand voices speaking at once, in the restaurant, on the street outside, across the street; growing, swelling into a murmur that echoes, hums across the length and breadth of the city; ten thousand... one hundred thousand... a million... ten million voices clamouring together, abusing, cursing, weeping, moaning, but most of all questioning, questioning why.Why? WHY?

  Jay slips into the crowd, swims through the sluggish thick mass, his own panic blocking his nostrils, making it difficult for air to pass up his sinus into his lungs, into his blood vessels; he pushes through, is out in the open for a few merciful seconds, miraculously sees an empty autorickshaw, the passenger paying the driver, asks him desperately

  ‘Lokhandwala.' ‘Lokhandwala? Huh?’ gets a sharp appraisal and a brief nod, slides in, looks right and left and right again at the people milling about aimlessly, starting to disperse, confused, doped, shaken, the florid face of the Irani restauranteur over the black sea of heads, lifting the blackboard, taking it into the restaurant; shutters of shops rolling down with a gnashing and clashing of metal and stone; the auto rolling down the road (when did he start it? has he started the engine already?) towards D.N. Nagar, the road filled with people, people, people in the middle of the street, unmindful of the persistent horn of the auto; Jay wants to tell the driver not to blow the horn so persistently, not to annoy anyone, to simply drive as he can, but finds his hand stuck to his knee, his tongue to the roof of his mouth, his heart to his ribs. Why is there no traffic on the road? We'll never make it through that crowd. Look at that crowd. A Sikh couple trying to flag down the auto, the woman carrying a little girl. The auto ignores them, swerves to go around them, but Jay speaks suddenly, startling himself: ‘ Ek minute, roko.’ The auto driver's head jerks back but he doesn't stop or look back; instead he picks up speed, goes around the Sikh family. ‘ Roko, bhai,’Jay repeats, ‘ Roko.’But the driver says nothing, does nothing, except drive on. The Sikhs are left standing in the middle of the street, surrounded by Muslims, Hindus, Maharastrians, Gujaratis, Indians.Why does it make a difference?

  Why is that so frightening? They are all Indians, aren't they? Even you, you're Indian too, aren't you?

  The shutters are downed at D.N. Nagar. The streets are emptying.

  Jay sees a little urchin squatting on the traffic island, shitting. She grins at Jay as he whizzes by. Turning off on to the road that leads to Lokhandwala Complex, an eerie silence settles across the streets.

  Where is everybody? What happened to all those office-goers swarming out of the station? A single-decker bus roars by, appearing out of nowhere, virtually empty except for a few passengers sitting tautly with the windows shut. The auto driver picks up speed, revving his engine as fast as it will go, taking the bumps and jars without slowing down. Jay bumps his head on the rod directly overhead and crouches down after that to avoid being struck. A stone comes out of thin air and strikes the side of the auto. Jay swivels in his seat to look through the little plastic window at the back of the auto but sees nobody. The windows of flats in Teachers’ Colony are all shut, but perhaps that's because all the flats aren't occupied yet. Then again, perhaps not. The auto bumps and farts down the last stretch of dusty dirt road to Lokhandwala and Jay is dead certain that they will be stopped, forced out and beaten or killed a few feet from his flat. But nobody stops them. Lokhandwala Complex is comparatively deserted, but there are a few people around. They glance up anxiously at the approaching auto. A Fiat starts up and roars away; there must be eight or ten people squashed inside. The shops are all closed. A group of young men with brutally short haircuts are stalking the street with bricks in hand, calling out to the few shops still open to shut down. As Jay's auto whizzes past, one short Shiv Sainik (who else could they possibly be?) hurls the brick at a stack of plastic buckets. It makes an explosive sound as it crashes into and topples the brightly coloured buckets. ‘Right, right, bhai,' Jay says as he realizes the driver is going to drive past the turning to his lane. The man screeches to a halt and tells him to get off here if he wants—he's heading home as fast as he can. So he stays at Lokhandwala. No wonder he agreed to come here.

  Jay pays him with a ten-rupee note and the driver zooms away without returning his change. Jay sprints into his lane as the Shiv Sainiks come around the corner, dodges into the little gate which is a side-entrance to his colony, smiles grimly as he runs into the lobby of his building, No. 22. He runs up the stairs. As he reaches the first floor, he hears screaming from the road he has just left; terrible heart-rending screaming. He stops, his hand on the cold wooden banister. His legs tremble. He fumbles in his pocket and pulls out his house keys.

  Somewhere in the building a door slams shut—too hard, opens again, is shut again. The screaming from the street stops abruptly. Jay remembers seeing a video library still open. It occurs to him that this would have been the perfect day to hire a video and TV. Nobody would be able to enforce the twelve-hour time limit and, and … he falls into the flat and shuts the door behind him, grinning with mad relief.

  Shutting the open balcony door—anybody can climb up to the first floor—he hears screaming again, much fainter than before.

  Then he realizes it's only the squeaking of the balcony door, audible in the stony silence. A car with a faulty silencer blazes past, screeching as its owner applies the brakes, then goes on, screeching again as it turns the corner, and fades away into the thick liquid silence. Jay can't bring himself to change his clothes; he feels he must be ready to leave at any moment. He remembers descriptions of Partition in Khushwant Singh's Last Rain to Pakistan. He can't find his house keys and searches all over for them. Finally, he comes to the conclusion that he must have left them in the door latch. The thought of opening the door again terrifies him. He listens carefully with his ear to the door, but hears nothing except the humming of the water pump somewhere above the building. Opening the door, he tries to pull the key out too quickly and the pressure makes it bend and stick in the lock. Footsteps and voices approach the building and through the cement grille on the stairway he can see figures of several people entering the lobby below. He struggles desperately with the key. Breathing deeply, he forces himself to look at the latch, bends the key back into its proper shape and pulls it out easily. He shuts the door just as the first person comes up the stairwell. He locks the door softly and listens as the footfalls pass his door and continue up the stairs. They all seem to be men. He strains to hear what language they speak and is relieved to recognize the ululating accents of a south Indian tongue. The footfalls go on for at least two floors, then stop. He hears a doorbell ring. A door opens. The men enter the flat, the door shuts, and then all is quiet once again. On the street outside, a dog barks.

  He goes to the sofa and sits down on it, forcing his pulse to slow down, his breathing to relax. After a few minutes, he picks up his Modern Library copy of War and Peace and tries to read.

  Falling deep into the well of the novel, he looks up again an hour later and is suddenly struck by the thought that Indira Gandhi is dead.

  He pictures her face; hard-lined, determined. Her hair, puffed back with its elegant streak of grey. Her saree, billowing in the wind behind her as she makes a speech on a winds wept dais to a huge silent crowd of squatting people. He forgets the speech and the occasion, bu
t recalls the reverberating clunk of her spectacles tapping the mike accidently, the desolate moan of the wind, the flapping of an Indian flag somewhere above and behind her, and her erect stiff posture with only her chin jutting out straight, face raised, hands poised on the lectern, and the words Chicago Radio in an upward semicircle on the microphone.

  He sees her face melting like one of the Nazis at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark,blurring into an ice-cream hot-wax molten nightmare, and she collapses into a puddle of flesh and slag.

  He tries to compose a poem on the flyleaf of thebook. It doesn't turn out very well but he is struck by a bold idea: he copies it out neatly, puts it into an envelope, addresses it to Rajiv Gandhi, 1

  SafdarjungAvenue, New Delhi, and seals the envelope with glue. He wants to go down right now and put it in the mailbox; he laughs at the idea. The laughter turns into grief, but grief about what? He thinks of his mother, of her sitting alone in the Bandra flat, surrounded by this same silence, this same terrifying sense of disaster, this crushing weight of waiting ... for what? He worries that she might not have liquor to drink, that she might not know about the assassination, that she might try to go out and might get hurt. He worries that thugs might break into her flat and kill her. He worries about Tuli, but not as much because he knows that Breach Candy is full of politicians and rich powerful people and there will be no rioting there because special squads of police will be patrolling every square inch of the area. He worries about the poor homeless people whose only refuge is a rubbish bin or a cloth tied across two lamp posts. He wonders how people survive, how they always survive, why the dark prophecies of end-of-the-world messiahs never come true, why civilization goes on, how Hiroshima was rebuilt after the H-bomb. He remembers a line from Stephen King: ‘Once in every generation, a plague will fall among them.’ He wonders if the rest of the country is as silent as this.

  He gets down on his feet and puts his ear to the cold tiled floor, listening. The water pump has stopped. He hears a muffled growling.

  It might be the voices of his neighbours. He hears the muffled echoes of footsteps somewhere in the building. He hears a humming silence that is everywhere and nowhere. He listens hard and detects a faint pulsing rhythm, a non-sound that exists between the other human sounds he can recognize. This is the heartbeat of India, he thinks.

  chapter forty-four

  If the assassination of Indira Gandhi marks a turning point in the history of India, it also marks a pivotal period in the biography of Jayesh Mehta. In the months following the brutal killing of Mrs G, Jay's fortunes rise as swiftly and unexpectedly as the political star of Rajiv Gandhi, ex-pilot-turned prime minister.

  Firstly, the launch of Pinch is not cancelled outright. After much heated debate in the corridors and conference rooms of Synergetics, long complicated overseas calls between the company and its American parents, several lightning trips from Bombay to Seattle and vice versa, the group finally receives word that the launch is temporarily suspended, but that work is to continue without any diminishment of effort. Conrad has his usual rejoinders to that, mutters in a low voice to the executives around the table as Dave reads the memo aloud.

  Sunil is the one most affected. He is facing a marital crisis. His wife refused to accompany him to Bombay when he transferred here; he hasn't seen her for over six months. He was counting on being able to make a trip to Delhi to try and end their unplanned separation—but that would only be possible after Chamatkar is launched and on its way, which is now up in the air. Never one to take an overt interest in the affairs of others, Jay is only vaguely aware of Sunil's problems.

  But after the suspension of the launch, Sunil goes into a blue funk which is obvious to all. In the men's toilet one day, Jay overhears Dave talking to the MD about something to do with Chamatkar. He catches Dave's last words before they see him and stop talking; something to do with ‘Sunil's becoming a real problem, better to—' and deduces that poor Sunil is in trouble. Sunil seems to lose all interest in work and this becomes so obvious to the group that nobody shows any surprise when they notice his absence for several days and are told by Yogesh (privately, out of Dave's hearing) that he has gone to Delhi without prior permission from Dave. Oh well, Jay thinks, nothing's really happening anyway, at least he might be able to save his marriage. But everybody is shocked when a memo comes around announcing that Sunil Khosla has been dismissed for gross insubordination'. He is debarred from entering the premises and nobody is to have any kind of interaction with him, even on a non-official level, in the interests of company security. The group knows that this refers directly to Chamatkar, but all the executives are shaken by this summary dismissal.

  Milind mentions a court martial, and they all laugh nervously over this: Sunil went AWOL and was court-martialled, just like in the army. But after they go their separate ways, Jay finds himself feeling outraged at the cruelty of this decision. He never sees Sunil again, but the matter worries him, until one afternoon he finds Dave alone and tries to bring the subject. After exp ertly brushing aside his hesitant attempts Dave finally looks at him sharply and says, ‘Jay, why do you think people work for a living?’

  Jay isn't sure.

  Dave stares at him for a moment. ‘Because they realize that on their own they are nothing, but together they can achieve miracles.

  Do you understand Jay? Perhaps when you're older and wiser you'll appreciate the value of a structure. A system which employs your individual talents to their fullest potential and coordinates them in a planned pattern with the talents ofyour co-workers to achieve the best results possible.’

  Then he says again, marking each word with a small chopping gesture: ‘Alone we are savages, together we are civilization.’

  Jay looks at him and wants to say a hundred things. Instead he nods and leaves the room.

  The other executives soon forget about Sunil and even Milind, Sunil's best friend while he was here, shrugs off Jay's queries about Sunil's present whereabouts and condition. ‘Forget it, yaar,' he says,

  ‘Jiyo aur jeene do. ’

  But Jay doesn't forget. Sometimes, lying on his new sofa at home late at night after a twelve-hour workday, he thinks of Sunil and his wife. He wonders what would happen if he, Jay, were in Sunil's place, and if the woman in question were Tuli; would he grow as impatient as Sunil had? Probably.Would he have grown disgusted with Dave's repeated refusal of his requests for leave, even during a period when there was almost no work to do, and play truant? Probably. And would Dave fire him as brutally? Probably. Now that he has money, the idea Of being fired doesn't scare Jay as much as it used to. In fact, there are days when he resents the power Dave and Synergetics has over him; the power to control his most private affairs through an intricate pattern of discipline and competitiveness. Bullshit,’ he says to the empty room.

  The Chamatkar launch does take place. And not only does it go off smoothly, it is a bigger success than Jay expected. Being the first time he's gone through the tedious process of preparing a product, branding it, propositioning it, targeting it, advertising it, distributing it, and finally offering it across the shelf to the consumer, he has lost sight of the fact that ultimately he is perforrning that most ancient and simple of tasks: Selling. Perhaps it is all those thousands of man-hours invested, the awareness of an immense body of personnel, technology and expertise spread worldwide, or the carefully couched speeches of professional indoctrinators like Dave and Balram that creates this illusion of a major historical breakthrough.When you're in the thick of it, a major product launch is comparable to the thrill of being part of the front row of an Alexandrian or Napoleonic army in a world-encompassing battle campaign. Even the word ‘campaign’ is common to both; not without reason. Still, Jay had temporarily lost sight of the big picture. So when the sales figures start to pour in, when they continue to pour in, when initial trial sales far exceed the original stock sent out, when the ad agency and market research agency and distributors and retailers all raise their voices in
hosanna to ‘the greatest marketing success of the eighties’, when Dave and the MD

  and every product manager, supervisor, executive, typist, receptionist, telephone operator, accountant and peon in Synergetics talks about nothing but Chamatkar Chamatkar Chamatkar, even Jay is filled with a pride at his own part in this magnificent event.

  He goes with the group for another beer-and-dinner session, but this time Dave does them the honour of accompanying them and they go, not to Alps, but to CCI Club, where Dave is a member. They sit on cane chairs on the grass in Brabourne Stadium and drink beer and talk about everything under the sun. Dave smiles a lot and talks more than Jay has ever heard him talk in a single evening—about topics other than work, that is—and he begins to realise that there really is a flesh-and-blood organism under that immaculately tailored clothing, and that the organism has interests other than marketing.

  For a while, the Sunil incident goes away and hides in some dusty shelf at the back of his head—an overstuffed shelf. It is shoved up there by another momentous event in the life of Jayesh Mehta.

  He goes into Dave's cabin one morning about two months after the Chamatkar launch and success.

  Dave is sitting on his swivel chair, staring out of the window. The huge crane in the dockyard is visible, sliding slowly across its track, bearing some enormous load from a container ship to the dock. Dave turns and greets Jay with a smile that is as unexpected as unhabitual.