Exile

by Akhilesh

  I would like to pose a question. Nature has blessed man with such a wide variety of grains, vegetables, fruit, etc., all of which are filled with the most wonderful flavour so that when he is hungry, he can enjoy them. This implies that hunger is nature’s boon. It is not a problem, but a joy. I am an atheist, but you can also term it God’s blessing. Therefore, a person who makes fun of a hungry man, or mocks it, commits the crime of acting against nature or God’s will.

  Pay attention: there are other sorts too in this world; forget their granaries, their safes and bank balances and lockers are also overflowing. Their earnings, their movable and immovable properties, gained from black markets, profiteering and corrupt practices, surpass those of kings and emperors from the feudal ages. However, they are bereft of hunger of the belly. Is there a writer or a novelist who has the courage to make fun of these people’s weak digestion, their acidity or present such things in a comical manner? There is none, and nobody dares take up cudgels! Who has the guts to ridicule the rich? But as the adage goes, ‘a poor man’s wife, everyone’s delight’. Whoever wishes can tease her.

  Once, I too was mistaken. I thought Baba was sick and took him to the hospital in Sultanpur for treatment. There’s no need to lie – nobody in my family is a frugal eater, but Baba was matchless. So, I thought that we would take some of the medicine that was prescribed for Baba. My father accompanied Baba.

  When we reached the hospital, we broke into a sweat. There was such a huge rush and such a humongous crowd! People filled the verandas in front of the rooms of the doctors. Each person sicker than the next. Most of them were either from the lower classes or the lower-middle classes. Indignant, sad, dead, withered folk. I felt that my Baba was really lucky that he was so old but that he suffered from no disease other than eating and farting … although going hungry is a real struggle, a plight more social than personal. Breaking wind is not such a major illness! Had it been a major illness, my Baba would not have survived these one hundred years despite his terrorizing farts. It might have been caused by hunger – by not having enough food. While we were in the hospital, I thought that I should return, but then I was afraid Baba might take umbrage at my dragging him here pointlessly. So, finally I went in to the doctor’s room with him.

  The doctor went into hysterics when he heard the case. He asked amid chuckles, ‘How old is he?’

  ‘Around ninety,’ Baba said.

  The doctor guffawed. I began suspecting the doctor suffered from some kind of laughing disease. He controlled himself somehow and asked, ‘Why didn’t you take him to a doctor earlier?’

  My father replied, ‘Sahib, it was tolerable until then, but now it has become really troublesome.’

  The doctor inquired, ‘What kind of trouble?’ He was enjoying himself.

  Just then, Baba farted a roof-renting fart and the doctor’s laughing disease re-emerged. Finally, he called in the next patient and advised Baba, ‘Have a party, Baba. Eat a lot, fart a lot. There’s nothing to worry about!’

  You must be wondering about the statement my father made to the doctor, ‘Now it has become really troublesome’. What was the trouble actually? Before I scotch your curiosity, I would like to narrate my meeting with another doctor. We were returning from the hospital without buying any medicine since the doctor had confirmed that Baba was not suffering from any disease. We decided we should do some shopping in the bazaar before returning to the village. The nameplate of the doctor drew our eyes. What a strange name – Devdutt Tendulkar! I thought that since the allopathic doctor had said that Baba had no disease and that there was nothing to worry about, an Ayurvedic one might have a solution. Moreover, the fees of an Ayurvedic doctor are trivial. Really, his fees were a measly twenty rupees. The superior attraction was that his signboard had the tagline: ‘Guaranteed cure for chronic and incurable diseases’.

  Devdutt Tendulkar informed us, ‘It is called the Bhasmak disease. I guarantee I’ll cure him, but it will take some time.’ He gave us an assortment of pills, grains and a powder to be licked with honey and instructed, ‘Avoid milk, butter, ghee, sweets and spices.’ And the three of us from different generations wondered if we could ever afford these things! But our laughter vanished when we realized the cost of the medicines – two hundred and forty rupees! And this was the dose for merely fifteen days, and the treatment was to be drawn out. We also thought that we could afford to provide Baba enough food for less than that. It was a simple calculation – we had money enough only for the medicines or for food – not both.

  As I have told you, everyone in our house suffered intensely from hunger. Although nobody else had Baba’s appetite, our intake was extraordinary. I remember my childhood: all of us children would start hovering around the oven as soon as it was lit. Our eyes shone and a craving welled up in our stomachs when the dough was kneaded in a large platter. We would sit down on the earthen floor of the kitchen with our plates. But our hunger was never satiated. If you discount the feasts on auspicious and inauspicious occasions, we children seldom had our stomachs full. Sometimes, we grabbed our mother’s roti too and still remained hungry.

  However, things changed when we grew up. It was the best time for our family, because there were several earning members. I was a good student and my brothers were doing well so they sent me, their younger brother, Comrade Girija Shankar, to study in Sultanpur.

  The shop where I used to drink tea belonged to Comrade Komal. He drafted me as a member of the Students Federation of India. I would shout slogans, study and smoke bidis. I used to smoke four bundles of bidis a day. Perhaps it was because of my addiction to bidis that I quit studies and started working in the settlement of the bidi workers to incite them to participate in the revolution against capitalists. Later, I started a fruit juice shop near the Sultanpur Hospital with the help of my brothers. There was not much – a kiosk, a small juicer machine, a few glasses, chairs, a jar of salt, a jar of pepper and a variety of fruits. I too became an earning son. But the thought always haunted me – I was earning like everyone else, but what was I doing for the revolution? Finally, I convinced myself that the strength people got from the juice at my shop would ultimately be used in the fight against capitalism. And so, I ran my business and was engaged in the battle against capitalism as well.

  Whatever, those were fine days. There was plenty of grain in our house. The canister in which we stored the grains for grinding was never empty. We also enjoyed mutton every week and pooris were fried at least once or twice a month. Those were the days when Baba visited Sultanpur for some court case with the eldest or the middle brother. He was treated sumptuously there. I never offered him juice, but I would make the rickshaw stop at the banana vendor. He would comfortably gobble up twenty to twenty-five bananas in one go. We brothers too had at least a dozen each.

  Once I told him, ‘Baba, have some boiled eggs.’ Baba ate twenty eggs at one go. On the other hand, it took both us brothers to match his twenty. It really was our golden period! Try to understand the situation this way: a household has plenty of food and vegetables, ghee, pickles and jaggery, a buffalo at the door to provide milk and curds, and there are three earning young men with their three beautiful wives! To tell you the truth, our house was like paradise then. I used to tell my brothers, Baba and father, ‘Every household will enjoy this happiness once we have socialism.’

  Remember what I just mentioned – three comely wives? On the washing line in the courtyard, multi-coloured saris and blouses were spread out. The three women had on their wrists colourful glass bangles which tinkled cheerfully when they ground spices or kneaded dough. The chime of six anklets, the bindis on three foreheads – it seemed our house was hosting a beautiful fun fair.

  But this happiness was short-lived. Gradually, the full moon started waning. We three brothers began having children. Every year a child was born, sometimes two. And in this way our family started slipping from a full moon night to a moonless one. The clothesline in the courtyard remained chock-full of filthy
, turd-and urine-filled diapers. There was a din all the time – beating, thrashing and banging. My children too followed in the footsteps of my elder brother’s – all prodigal eaters.

  In a few years, conditions deteriorated to such an extent that there were only three earning members, but eighteen stomachs to fill and the intake of one person was equivalent to that of four normal men. It meant there were only three wage earners to fill seventy-two stomachs. 44=11 (i.e., one child with the appetite of four) ravenous children had been born on the earth with the sole purpose of eating. The children were so rapacious that each one of them alone could drink the entire milk produced by the cow. Not only milk, our children were so gluttonous that many of them were capable of finishing off all the bananas from the plantain tree. If a contest for eating fried grams at the gram fry shop were to be held, our nippers surely would have excelled.

  The gentleman who penned this novel may make fun of the rising population of our family. I know he will, as soon as he has the chance. He will try and prove that the cause of our poverty, troubles and discord is our ever-increasing number of children. Producing more children has forced us to remain illiterate and uncultured. But I would like to tell him – no, comrade, the real cause is the unequal distribution of natural resources. Let’s take the case of my village. The produce from the fields of my village is enough to cover the needs of three villages. The real cause of our misery is disproportionate allocation.

  I would like to take up the issue with Mr Author – it is fine that the cause of the problem is unregulated reproduction which leads to our remaining illiterate and uncultured. So, comrade, is that our fault or the fault of the social system that we are illiterate and uncultured? The fault should not lie with us, but with the capitalist and feudalist powers of the country. If hunger is a malady, why don’t they have a cure? If there is a man hungry, illiterate, sick or indigent, it is the powers that be who are to blame. Eventually, Mr Author, I would like to implore you that whenever you compose a narrative in the future and you find a poor, unfortunate and pitiable character like my Baba, Jagdamba in it, please don’t mock or deride him!

  18

  HATHA YOGA

  ‘Hey, off with all of you! This is no tamasha!’ the pradhan said as he drove off the people sitting and standing in various postures. In any case, the crowd had already started thinning after Jagdamba’s departure.

  ‘Please, sirs, come into my humble home,’ the pradhan said, escorting Chacha and Suryakant into his sitting room, which also doubled as his office. It had the air of an office, and a number of rubber stamps lay on a wooden bed. The pradhan knew how to sign his name, and so he would whack the stamp on papers and sign his name adroitly. His special skill was that he used the stamps and signatures of others too with the same adroitness. With this special skill, he had executed jobs that had earned him infamy as the leading scammer in the entire block. The universal opinion about him was that no sooner did he see something or someone than his brain started whirring to work out how he could exploit the thing or person to his advantage. Luck favoured him so prodigiously that everything and everyone eventually proved useful to him. He had thought Chacha and Suryakant were investigating officers, and had climbed up the tree. When he was certain that they weren’t, he wondered as he clambered down the ways he could use them. At first, he drew a blank, but fate cast a kind eye on him and he received a call from one of his contacts in Sultanpur – Awadh Narayan. The pradhan had come across Awadh Narayan during his pursuit of irrigation projects, and he had pleased him by addressing him as ‘Chacha’ all the time. As a result, he had accomplished many errands simply by making phone calls. He had remained in touch with him even after Awadh Narayan’s retirement.

  Awadh Narayan inquired of the pradhan, ‘My son has gone to Gosainganj with my younger brother – have they reached?’

  The pradhan stuck the mobile phone to his ear and walked away to the shade of a tree, ‘Yes, Chacha.’

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘With me. They are in my own house.’

  ‘Help them.’

  ‘But they are not saying why they are here. All they keep repeating is merely that someone from a Pandey family had gone abroad.’

  ‘A wealthy man from America has assigned a task to my son – to find his ancestors. His grandfather left Gosainganj and went abroad more than a hundred years ago,’ Awadh Narayan said with some pride.

  ‘How is that possible? How could an Englishman or an American hail from a Pandey family of Gosainganj?’

  ‘He is not an Englishman, but a Pandey! His grandfather was from Gosainganj. He went to a foreign country as a girmitiya mazdoor.’

  Pradhan’s brain whirred like a top. He extended an option without losing time, ‘Tell your son to advise the Amrikan to adopt this village and make it Paris, Hong Kong, Singapore!’

  After finishing the conversation with Awadh Narayan, he rang up his adviser, Mahesh Narayan Srivastava, ‘Man, rush!’ His brain raced. He was toying with an idea – through Suryakant he would entice the American tycoon to his village. He would emphasize the need for an intermediate college for girls and a hospital. He would also claim that a sewing training centre should be started for girls – with a minimum of forty sewing machines and a building. Surely, all this would be done through the Gosainganj pradhan.

  The advisor, Mahesh Narayan Srivastava, smiled faintly after the pradhan acquainted him with his ideas, then he broke into a laugh, ‘Pradhanji, you are a real idiot, a frog in the well.’ He pursed his lips.

  ‘Lala, don’t talk in riddles – out with it!’

  ‘It is idiocy to ask for such trifles of the Amrikan industrialist. Tell him you want all the young boys of the block to learn to use a computer. A big training centre must be started for this purpose and every young person should be given a laptop free – no fewer than twenty thousand laptops. Pradhan, if you get even ten per cent commission of two thousand laptops, you are made!’

  The pradhan’s face glowed with delight. He asked, shivering with pleasure, ‘Any other ideas?’

  ‘These foreigners are always willing to spend for the cause of the crippled so, Pradhan, you should propose a livelihood programme and unearth an endemic in Gosainganj.’

  ‘Illness? Is there any lack of those here?’

  ‘It’s not that! You need to find an exclusive problem. For example, two thousand persons in Biraipaar block suffer from goitre. For example, six hundred people in Sonpur are blind …’

  ‘What can we claim for Gosainganj?’ the pradhan wondered aloud. ‘If we don’t discover anything, we can always say that the folk age too quickly. They start losing their teeth once they are over forty-five and their skin hangs in folds. And the most prominent symptom is that hundreds use sticks while walking. This is the epidemic of geriatrics. A blight.’

  ‘That is a brilliant idea, Pradhan! Well done, Pradhan, well done! If Pandey comes from Amrika to this village, we shall buy four hundred sticks and distribute them to four hundred men and women to prove how badly they hobble,’ Srivastava tittered.

  The pradhan shrieked louder, ‘But you must buy old sticks, not new ones, so that he won’t get suspicious.’

  Mahesh Narayan laughed still more shrilly. ‘That’s why people in the village say that the pradhan must have been born as the aggregate of a hundred scoundrels.’

  The pradhan replied, ‘The villagers also declare that Mahesh Narayan Srivastava must have been born as the aggregate of a hundred scoundrels, just like the pradhan.’

  When the pradhan walked out with the mobile phone stuck to his ear, Chacha swept aside the rubber stamps scattered on the wooden bed in the sitting room and advised Suryakant, ‘Let’s take a nap.’

  Suryakant realized that the pradhan had left the door open and the hot loo was blowing in. He shut the door and moved Chacha a little and stretched out on the bare wooden bed.

  But soon, someone knocked courteously on the door. Suryakant wondered who it was because the pradhan was not so w
ell-mannered. But it was the pradhan, who bowed with a slavish grin and said, ‘We are laying out the meal in your honour.’

  ‘No, we’re not hungry yet,’ Chacha replied.

  ‘That’s fine, but I won’t let you go without your staying at least one night in my house,’ the Pradhan said, stating his sudden affection for them.

  Suryakant smiled, ‘Thanks! We may have to hang about three or four nights.’

  ‘This is our good fortune.’

  ‘No, please make arrangements for us somewhere else – we’ll pay for our stay.’

  ‘I won’t let you forsake my abode, sir. It’s an affront to my hospitality.’

  ‘We are beholden to you.’

  ‘Okay, I will serve non-vegetarian food at night.’

  ‘We are vegetarians.’

  ‘Which vegetables do you have an inclination for?’ The pradhan bent double with politeness. His sudden transformation surprised Chacha and Suryakant, made them a bit suspicious. Suryakant told the pradhan, ‘Please don’t take any trouble. We have no particular preference.’

  ‘Any other instructions for me, sir?’

  ‘When will the electricity be back?’

  The pradhan gazed at the stationary ceiling fan above and shoving his face outside the door, hollered, ‘Bastard, switch on the generator!’

  A clattering sound sounded outside and the tube light was switched on, while the fan began spinning.

  ‘Thank you, Pradhanji. Get some rest yourself.’

  Suryakant bolted the door from inside when the pradhan left and told Chacha, ‘Did you notice Jagdamba’s great-grandson?’