‘So what happened?’ interrupted Sravan.
‘God bless the name of Vadilal. I sent for ice cream and relied on it to make everything cool and smooth again. I only wish that could be possible with grown-ups. Banwari Lalji and his wife are very touchy about the caste issue after their daughter-in-law abandoned their son.’
Sravan was in no mood for neighbourhood politics. But he knew from long experience that there was no silencing Pragya when she’d come to his study with a scoop.
‘Actually that was a smart girl, Suchitra. Remember how they carried on about their son having disgraced the family by marrying a Brahmin girl? The old folks wouldn’t touch food or water touched by her. After the wedding, when Satish brought her home to meet his parents, they refused to let her touch their feet! This bit of vanity I’ve never understood. What great deprivation do you inflict upon another by not letting him or her touch your ugly feet? The girl came to live with them and they outdid themselves in general nastiness. Funny, isn’t it? This reverse snobbery. Not only has the practise of demanding huge dowries been acquired by people on that side of the great Indian divide, but they’re coming to mimic the obnoxious things common to the caste folks.’
‘Look, why don’t you write an article or something?’
She didn’t catch the snipe. Instead she took him perfectly seriously. ‘D’you think I should? I’ll think about it. But, yes, Suchitra’s gone and outsmarted everyone, her own furious family and her in-laws. See what happened? She appeared in the civilservice exams. Got selected for a reserved vacancy—which she’d never have done had she remained technically a Brahmin. Now, very coolly, she’s filed a divorce suit against Satish. Point is, does that cancel out her selection? No, say the rules. It’s our very own indigenous version of the green-card-marriage syndrome. As for Satish, I’m sorry for him but he did precious little to protect her from his parents when she was staying here. I guess it is a bit unfortunate that neighbours keep stopping Mrs Banwari Lal and congratulating her on her ex-daughter-in-law’s selection. One of them even wanted to know if a man marrying an SC girl qualified for a reserved vacancy and if a girl married to an SC man could be given that facility, why not vice versa? Then these brats had to go and call out rude things … And look at Ashu’s cheek! He waited for Haider to leave and picked up a fight with me. Said: “Why did you say our Nandi bull and Kali-Ma and Shivji are toys?” I said they stand for powers but in themselves they’re there to add to the décor of my room and not for puja. I said these powers aren’t only Hindu powers but belong to everyone else and have other names. He said, “No, why did you call them toys? Because they AREN’T TOYS!” I said don’t bother your head over all this nonsense. He said, “It’s not nonsense. They AREN’T TOYS.” Did you know, Sravan, that you have a fundamentalist eleven-year-old son and there’s nothing you or I can do? I said Look, it’s time for your papa’s tea and I’m off. And here I am, seeking shelter from the little fanatic.’
She sighed, sipped her tea, looked meaningfully across at him. ‘And there’s this other thing bothering me. It’s about Malini.’
He mastered his face. ‘She came?’
‘No, she telephoned,’ said Pragya. ‘Told me something very upsetting and I want to discuss it with you.’
Above all, he had to unhitch her eyes from his face.
‘I asked her what she wanted me to do about it. I mean, how did she expect me to react? And how should I pay her back?’
Slow, this masterful knife-twisting. He had to shake her eyes off his face before they drained him of all his poise. All he could utter was a guarded ‘Uh-huh?’
‘I gave her the choice. Since the amount concerned was only three thousand, I could repay her in cash or in clothes. She chose clothes. Three outfits out of my summer collection. A lovely pale-lemon Dhaka cotton …’ She was still studying him too closely, thought Sravan. He busied himself with the last dregs of tea in his cup. ‘The point is, Sravan, that bank account is depleted again. You’ll have to put something in soon.’
A sick feeling gaped in his stomach. His voice was curt. ‘When did she visit him?’
‘Last Friday. You were out.’
‘She didn’t tell me.’ Oh hell, an involuntary slip.
‘No? Did you run into her somewhere?’ Again that large-eyed innocence, that trusting voice.
‘She phoned.’ He went on, frowning to give his unsure face a focus. ‘Pragya, you’ve got to speak to him again. Tell Babuji enough is enough. He can’t go on embarrassing us this way. Taking loans from our friends and repaying them in cheques that bounce! What sort of senile mischief is this?’
‘And I’m worried about these kids of ours. Take Rina.’ Child psychology now, groaned Sravan. ‘Only nine, and broken-hearted that she can’t grow up to be a model! Depressed. Why’m I so ugly, Ma? If you please! I tell her Rubbish, you’re not ugly, you’re a very cute little girl, but she won’t be consoled. I can’t get this nonsense, out of her head. And it’s funny—it’s what I used to ask as a child. I used to think of myself as the most hideous creature around. The most unpresentable and absolutely unlovable.’ Her narrative slowed down.
She added in a wistful voice, ‘There are times when the feeling comes back. That I’m growing old, the best is over and didn’t amount to much, that the years and hopes were wasted, that I’m finished, with nothing left in me.’ She waited, gazing silently at Sravan. Hoping for reassurance, refutation. But Sravan refused to be stirred by this appeal to his gallantry. He kept a non-committal silence.
‘One can’t share these moods with anyone. I have just you and Malini—the only two people I’m close to. She told me it was the midlife blues coming on.’
Sravan became uncomfortably aware that she was watching his reflexes with peculiar alertness. He felt the scrape of her searching gaze upon his raw skin and he tightened his will in resolve. He wouldn’t flinch. Wouldn’t be outmanoeuvred. He looked away and yawned.
‘Pragya,’ he said in a deadpan voice, ‘there’s something I’ve been trying to write all morning. If you don’t mind …’
‘Oh, sure.’ She jumped to her feet, crestfallen. ‘Why didn’t you say so? Okay, I’ll be off—sorry for wasting your time.’
With Pragya gone, the density of stress fell, the oppression instantly lifted. Sravan turned to Devyani like a lover long denied and found, to his dismay, that now he couldn’t fix her in his mind. She kept disintegrating in flakes of clichés. Devyani had escaped through the slats of his description, and the closer he knit his sentences the more insubstantial she grew. Then, just as he was managing to retrieve some of her with a few magnetic syllables, an irate voice in the next room shattered the spell entirely.
‘This country! They should have the flag hoisted by a beauty queen or a cricket player and train the bureaucrats to give a PT display! Independence Day parade, ho! Saala dogs!’
His father’s strong, subjugating, supremo voice. A voice that dehydrated the words it uttered.
Years back Sravan had begun avoiding looking his father in the face, but he had memorized each line of it. The loose mouth— who could tell that the slack muscles of that lubberly snout could squeeze out such an uproar? For years Sravan had carried the blurred blueprint of that laxated mouth movement. The soft, nude slope of the upper lip, the elastic flex of the corners, the pliant sphincter of lip tightening round its roaring gush. So many shades of deprecation in its repertoire. One side curled down in grimace, the other twitched up in withering scorn. Or both sides plastered flat in a long-suffering, malevolent stretch. Now, in old age, that mouth lay lapsed in a crumpled sponge of flab, but it needed only the whim of a moment or a stray irritant to make the man unzip his lips and piss poison over them all.
‘Uf! You say such crazy things, Babuji,’ came Buddhoo’s laughing voice. But the old man cut back.
‘That big freedom-at-midnight binge in ’47? I’ll tell you what happened to me. I went with my wife on a tonga to the chowk bazaar, where a massive celebration was on.
An August night, so I carried my new umbrella. The first thing that happened to me after midnight struck and we made our tryst with destiny was that my umbrella got stolen! Don’t laugh—I see nothing to laugh at. Now let me tell you about my friend Kishori Lal Haldar’s ancestry. He’s the one who owns a couple of prime guava groves on the Manauri road. That and the massive haveli in Begum Bazaar. His grandfather didn’t build it, as he claims—what did you think? Ji nahin, ask me who did. Well, that property belonged to the Kunwar Sahib of Kanauj. In 1857, when a lot of Kunwar Sahib’s kindred were hung from the roadside pipals, a handful of British soldiers stormed into Kishori Lal’s grandfather’s outhouse. He was the Kunwar Sahib’s munshi. They hauled him up, quivering like jelly. They produced a scrap of paper with a garbled Persian message scrawled across it, and thundered at our friend to translate it. He said he couldn’t, and they’d have strung him up as prompt as you please but he begged for mercy, pleading that his wife lay ill in the inner room, with the pox, the horrific maata. That hit them in the arse. Off came their caps—they’d developed a healthy horror of the maata, the bastards, and all its native offspring—malaria and cholera and dysentery. They spared him out of sheer dread. The pox proved his fairy godmother. The message he decoded for them turned out to be half correct, and taking him for a faithful collaborator, they granted him the Kunwar Sahib’s property. On the condition that he permit them to go on hanging rebels from the big pipals in the grounds, which demand he readily granted! They granted him a title as well—Haldar, for Havaldar of the Company’s Forces—which turned him from a Gupta into a Haldar, ha ha!’
A blast of laughter. Like a handful of sand smarting in the eye.
‘Freedom! And now allow me to tell you about how my friend, Kishori Lal Haldar, turned summarily into a freedom fighter in ’42. Today he enjoys all the freedom-fighter perks. Wears only khadi. Has jaggery in his tea, no mill-refined sugar—he’s for the cottage industries, the humbug! Cuts ribbons and lassoes garlands around Gandhi’s portrait on Gandhi’s birthday. Remembers those glorious days with tears in his eyes. Travels AC. Freedom fighter— hish! I’ll tell you how he became one. Boarded the Upper India Express one day. He never bought a ticket—always travelled without one. Was nabbed at the next station and arrested. Consider the rascal’s presence of mind: He started shouting Jai Hind and Bande Mataram! I refuse to buy any saala railway ticket from any saala British sarkar! Jai Hind! Flung his tweed coat on the ground, struck a match with a flourish and tossed it on the coat! Turned into a freedom fighter overnight!’
This time a low, vicious snigger. His father’s brand of humour—mustard oil and gastric juice. A special hyperacidity. Bilious memories soaked in gall. The crumpled old Jeremiah sat with blight on his tongue, scourging past and present.
‘Shocking,’ exclaimed Buddhoo.
‘They sent round an ad just after your precious Independence. Asked, How many times has the candidate been to jail? For how long? How many times beaten? How many lashes? Fellows made ten into twenty and twenty into hundred. Me? I refused, Sahib, I refused with good reason. I wasn’t going to trade the batons on my stinging rear for the pleasure and the privilege of sharing an AC compartment with haramzada scum like Kishori Lal Haldar–sometime–Gupta! I spit on the lot! Saala swine-born curs!’
Sravan wondered how this squared with the Ha Ha Hi era, when his father was avidly serving the British Empire. But he allowed him a bit of fictional licence.
Buddhoo had a technical objection. ‘Swine-born cur? That’d be a creature that our best zoologists …’
‘Be quiet,’ crackled the old man.
Buddhoo would not be suppressed. ‘As for haramzada dogs, Babuji, bastardy’s the pucca convention in beast circles.’
‘What more?’ continued the old man’s gravelly voice. ‘I’d composed a very pleasing melody for the national anthem and sent it up to Delhi for consideration. Later a perfectly ghastly tune was selected for the Jana Gana Mana. Yes, it’s totally appalling and I wrote to the editors of hazaar newspapers complaining, but did the ulloo ka patthas ever dare to publish my letters? Nah! I’ll go on calling it execrable! When the tricolour soars across the movie screens at the end of a film …’
‘It doesn’t anymore,’ put in Buddhoo.
‘It did twenty years back. I never stood up, as others did, when the national anthem played. My democratic protest. What have I to fear? I’m going to die soon.’
‘Nonsense. You’re getting better and better,’ came Buddhoo’s soothing voice.
Sravan could hear the sparks snap in the old man’s voice. ‘Don’t lie to me. I can’t stand liars!’
There was an uncomfortable pause, and then the old man husked on: ‘I don’t mind dying one bit. I welcome it.’ His waspish voice turned pontifical. ‘There’re only two things one must hope for. A life of honour and a death with dignity. I’m ready now.’ A resounding line like that needed a significant pause to round it off. The old man observed a two-minute silence in honour of his utterance. Then he picked up the thread again. ‘You can celebrate fifty years of independence in this benighted country, but I’m the only one in this house who’s going to enjoy real independence. None of you. All I’ve got to do is wait for my personal independence day to approach. Then I’ll be rid of this world and the world shall be rid of me. Good!’
Forgodssake! fretted Sravan. Why did everything have to find a dramatic connection with his father’s own death? For years the old man had dangled his death over their heads like a baleful threat. There he sat, coddled and pampered, recovering from his stroke, with nothing worse to impede his normality than a fall in the bathroom and a fracture of the hip. Even the bedsores had healed now, and Buddhoo gave his back a diligent powder-and-spirit massage every day. His speech was unaffected, the physiotherapist came daily, a walker was used to coax him out of bed, but the old man had set his teeth against all chances of recovery. He’d always been proud and possessive of his illnesses, peevish at his recoveries. A man who in former times had lived to eat, who’d fly into a passion over a piece of fish or one chapatti less than what he was used to.
‘I’m not afraid of death,’ he repeated in his most pompous tones. ‘So many sister-fucker fools have managed it—why can’t I? If Badrinath Gupta could manage it, why not me? I always did everything he tried to do much better. And Mahendra Singh Chauhan, who always surrendered to me in argument. And Raghupati, Vishveshwar, Jagdish Prasad … If they coped with death, I’m sure I’ll cope ten times better.’
‘Funny thought,’ mused Buddhoo. ‘I wonder if God awards trophies for excellent death performances. You seem to have quite a social circle among the deceased, Babuji. It sounds like a law-abiding, tax-paying, urban middle-class colony.’
Another serrated laugh from the old man. ‘That’s right, Prabuddha beta. I know more people there than here. My only regret …’ He lowered his voice. ‘My only regret is that I’ll die in this swine-ridden hell-hole city—I’ll never get to see my Etawah again. In the last week, there hasn’t been a single night when I haven’t dreamt of Etawah. Wandering down the old bazaar …’ The vinegar in his voice blackened with longing. ‘Through those old winding lanes and plunging roads, those sudden staircases. Going down deep troughs, up the steep climbs past the ruins of Jaichand’s fort, towards the big temple on the hill. Tixie Temple, it was called. Like a massive fortress, flags flying, ravines stretching away as far as Gwalior. The two highest points in the city were the railway station and the Tixie Temple. The city nestled in a hollow between them … and beyond … the ravines of the Chambal valley. If you dropped a coin into the Chambal, you could see it gleaming on the riverbed—that clear the water was.’
Buddhoo ventured, ‘I’m from those parts myself, Babuji. I know the city. Went to Government College there …’
A sudden squelch of emotion in the voice: ‘Ah, did you, then? How did it look in your days?’
‘Muddy yellow walls. Vast dusty grounds. British Normal School architecture.’
‘Doesn’t change, that sort of structure. Until it caves in and sinks like a toothless mouth.’
‘Or is pulled down to make way for a glass and concrete box.’
‘And d’you remember my college? Islamia College? With the carved, mosaic-crusted arch and minaret?’
‘Part of it was damaged. Maybe by an earthquake? I’m not sure what made the dome crack through. Looks like an overturned china bowl.’
‘Sometimes I find myself in one of those twisted lanes behind the main bazaar and there’s a low muezzin’s call in my head, shivering all the way down my spine …’ The old man had a sudden fit of coughing. He coughed as though the words annoyed his throat, hooked themselves to his larynx and he had to cough to clear them away, wheeze to spit them out. A sound like Haaaakkkhhh! Sravan knew it well. Haaaakkkhhh was catarrhal and cathartic both. It deep-dredged stubborn phlegm and buried pain in one spirited interjection.
Virtual Realities Page 9