Bombay Swastika

by Braham Singh

Ernst wondered how many lifetimes would it take and how many good deeds over each of those lives, to be granted by Lord Vishnu, by Krishna, by Maheshvara, the strength to say, ‘No, in that case I won’t accept the money.’ Just like how Arjun had shook his head and said “No!” to Chhote Bhai.

  And died for it, he reminded himself.

  ‘Thought so,’ the great man said. ‘No worries, old chap. Punjabi tells me the money’s in your account.’

  Instead of relief, Ernst felt the cork tighten up his arse. Sassoon shifted his on the rattan sofa and nodded towards the Hansons, seated on an identical sofa with red cushions. In all fairness, it wasn’t just darkies and Salim Ali; the great man didn’t care for Americans and Hanson either. The rest of the Golf Club followed suit and kept away, leaving the Texan with more or less his wife for company. For some strange reason he appeared content with that, and it baffled the Anglos.

  ‘Always wondered if she carries them too.’

  ‘Carries what?’

  ‘Those damn biscuits.’

  Hanson looked subdued. Holding his wife’s hand, he stared out, seeking the same solace Sassoon sought within all that grass. A bearer lowered his tray to serve them. Over at the next table, Willie Lansdowne downed his fifth gin tonic. The empty glasses around Daisy Lansdowne suggested she must have long, lost count. Encouraged, Ernst ordered another Bloody Mary to celebrate all the zeroes and walked over to the Hansons. To go say hello. Shake hands, meet the missus, shoot the breeze. Find out what Hanson was doing towering over everyone in that photograph on Tufan’s altar at his AEET workshop. The one with Nehru, Bhabha and that other American.

  ‘You mean, Nichols,’ Hanson said, after his wife strolled off towards Daisy Lansdowne, assessed the damage, and did a quick right turn towards the greens.

  ‘Kenneth Nichols. We met the prime minsiter and Bhabha together. Nichols was once with Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project.’

  He was also with Oppenheimer in the other picture with Bhabha. Bhabha looking at Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer looking at Bhabha. Nichols looking sanguine.

  ‘You know,’ Hanson said, ‘they asked Nichols to vouch for Oppenheimer after he resigned from the nuclear project. Was he a communist, they wanted to know. Why else would he resign? They asked him whether Oppenheimer be allowed to retain his security clearance. Nichols went threw him under the bus instead. It became claim to fame. Said Oppenheimer was a communist in every way, except that he didn’t carry a party card.’

  So what was this Nichols doing in that picture with Prime Minister Nehru and Bhabha?

  ‘Selling them a nuclear power plant. He had retired from the army and was working at Westinghouse by then.’

  What was Hanson doing in there?

  ‘Chemerica was the sub-contractor,’ Hanson said.

  ‘You guys are everywhere.’

  ‘I like that. We should use it in our brochures. Chemerica is everywhere!’

  Then he went got pensive again. ‘You know, we were there to sell them a nuclear power plant for the fucking electricity they need, and all Nehru would talk about was the bomb. He asked Bhabha in front of us how long would it take to build one. A year, Bhabha said. Just one year to build the bomb. You should’ve been there. It was as if they had found the answer to famine, starvation, power blackouts, Pakistan and China in one go. ’

  Nearby, Willie was getting louder by the minute and Daisy ready to pass out. Ernst tried taking past him but then Willie was up and gesticulating towards the entrance and there was no point.

  ~

  When Brigadier Bankim Kumar Chatterjee, Club Secretary, walked down the carpet pretty much master of his domain, a buzzed Willie eyed him with more ferocity than he otherwise reserved for wogs. It was a lovely evening and standing there on the verandah, Brigadier Chatterjee struck a pose—legs apart, an imaginary swagger tucked under an arm, and a satisfied demeanour.

  ‘Bloody good, what?’

  ‘Tell us, Chatterjee,’ Willie asked, dispensing with unnecessary titles. ‘Do we still have a dress code in this club?’

  Now, the Brigadier wasn’t particularly in awe of the white man. Stationed in Singapore, he had witnessed Brits and Australians panic, leaving Indian sepoys to deal with the Japanese pouring in from Malaya on bicycles. Willie, however, was a paying member and civility was in order. Besides, Brigadier Chatterjee wasn’t the kind to hold a grudge against all Englishmen just because most were arseholes.

  ‘Independent India, old chap. As long as you’re in a pair of pants and shoes, it’s fine by us, what!’

  ‘Over there. Do those look like bloody pants and shoes to you?’

  Willie’s rudeness was beginning to rankle, and it showed on the Brigadier’s face. Nevertheless, the reigning secretary followed the ex-secretary’s sausage of a finger—pointing at Seth Jamunadas Kejriwal.

  ‘Don’t even go there,’ the Brigadier advised.

  ‘Is that man complying with the club’s dress code or not? A simple yes or no should suffice.’

  Both men studied the bania foot innocently swing back and forth, while hangers-on and bearers fawned. Sticking out through his dhoti, the leg stopped each time someone bent low to whisper something. Then start on its own volition, waiting for the next minion to step up.

  ‘What would you like us do?’

  ‘Go talk to him,’ Willie said .

  Ernst didn’t want to know where this was going, and waved down a bearer for another hit. His third Bloody Mary for the evening. One above his limit, but at this point, what would that do? Kill him? He watched Willie cross The Great Divide, with the Brigadier dragging from behind. Resplendent in his dhoti and waistcoat, the Seth brightened on seeing them.

  ‘Brigadier Bahadur! Come, please! Sit! Now! Here!’ and he patted the cushion by his side.

  Lowering the treble a bit, his voice took on an inclusive tone to co-opt the two and Ernst could no longer hear what was being said, until Willie spoke up. ‘Chatterjee, explain to the man. This is not a bloody, Indian hangout. There’s a dress code.’

  Instead, the Brigadier stood aside to allow the Irresistible Force direct access to the Immovable Object. No matter. The Seth had sized up Willie. In such situations, a bania from the trader caste will freeze momentarily. He will withdraw to mentally regroup. His outer personality becomes even more pliant, if that’s at all possible. He becomes his accommodating best, bending backwards while a hard knot forms inside. He explains in broken English how being a simple man, this is how he dresses. Surprisingly, no one had raised this matter before. He’ll then go on to say, not to worry about anything. He’ll take care of everything. No rules should ever be broken, he agrees. After all, where would that leave us? All will be resolved, he assures them, and looks at Willie with a big smile. What? Never again enter the club in a dhoti? Really? Okay. If you say so.

  Then after he has Willie withdraw in the face of his performance, and after done with all the acting for the white man, the bania turns and stares at his minions. The eyes have gone cold and the demeanour more in line with the hard knot in his stomach. He snaps his fingers to send people scurrying and Ernst, who has seen this go down before, knows Willie is fucked. If not today, then tomorrow. But he is fucked.

  ~

  The evening ripened with an overpowering smell of jasmine—incomplete without her sweat. With a fourth Bloody Mary in hand, he wondered what Sassoon had to say about Goddess Bhairavi’s body odour. Did he wrinkle his nose, or breathe it in? A wail went up in the air. A cuckoo, this late? Could mean just one thing: the monsoons were here. Peering up to see if he could spot the harbinger, Ernst stepped out on the lawns. Trying not to dwell on Willie’s upcoming travails, he swayed toward the club fence. Everything seemed amplified. He could handle his alcohol, so this heightening had to be Andhi Ma ratcheting up the remaining three minutes of his life. He didn’t feel ill at all, as if he had outrun his cancer. There was a hole in the fence beckoning him and he floated over. He placed an eye to it and backed away.

  There wa
s someone peeking back from the other side. When he peeked again, the huge Indian eye was still there and the waft of sweaty jasmine was unmistakable. It sent him lurching for the rusted side gate—the one used by caddies to go in and out. He opened it and saw a woman walking away with that familiar shimmy. A blast of neon from Jhama Sweetmeats caught her neck, painting it white.

  34

  The Haunted Whorehouse

  In abandonment of the scriptures, is the birth of love.

  —Tantric Sahajiya belief

  From where he stood in the jhopadpatti, Sindhi Refugee Camp appeared an advanced civilisation.

  Warrens of jute bags came alive around him, breathing in their sleep. Crazy shanties made from flattened Castrol tin cans and cardboard, jute string and stolen plastic sheets crept up like his cancer. And everywhere, above, below, sideways: the heat, humidity and most of all, the hunger.

  The place was asleep, and maybe that helped somewhat. Even so, the jhopadpatti made it clear: it was hungry. Not starving like the villages on the other side of the Ghats, but hungry nevertheless across its length and breadth. And it was endless, this jhopadpatti, spreading like a virus in the whole open area behind Sindhi Camp; extending, and extending, and growing, looping where necessary to squirm past housing societies and factories and roads and anything blocking its progress, until it reluctantly stopped from where the marshland mangroves walked out into the sea. These jhopadpatti would swallow a person whole unless one stuck out like a white thumb. It pressed Ernst from both sides, allowing him three feet of mud and faecal matter to walk on. There was no electricity. No public taps. No running water. No drainage like the Sindhi Camp’s sophisticated, open sewage where one could squat and shit. Ernst remembered the E.M. Forster Brahmin with a lota of water in hand, sneaking into Sindhi Camp under the cover of darkness to crap in style.

  Distracted, he almost stepped on a little boy asleep on the three-feet of a footpath, curled snug against a tin shack. The kid could be Salim Ali before his Great Escape. The tiny lady sleeping inside that shack with her tired, cracked feet sticking out could be his blind mother. The man lying drunk further up, a wayward father. No Sindhi would be seen dead around here but there she was, Sindhi Camp Bhairavi, afloat over the mud and heading deeper into the slum as if she knew where to go and blind to her surroundings. He wondered if it was a case of the blind leading the drunk. The back of her neck wasn’t dark brown anymore and instead, looked a pale white under the moon. Like the flutter of her sari, it guided him forward. He shouldn’t even be in Sindhi Camp at night, and look where he was.

  The moon disappeared but her neck remained white. He saw her float past a stall. The stall-owner was packing away his bhelpuri ingredients: peanuts, puffed rice, tamarind chutney. He placed them underneath the display area in a box with a disproportionate, Nav-Tal lock. The stall was in front of what looked like a school. It was a school. Chhote Bhai stood on display above the entrance in black and white—the school’s patron—framed and garlanded with his aura intact. Nothing like how he looked the other day after Salim Ali was done with him.

  Behind the school, there was a wide-open, empty space—two acres of it in a demarcated rectangle. It was staggering that the jhopadpatti wouldn’t think it appropriate to encroach. Equally improbable, an expensive length of canvas pegged smack in the middle of the playground. It was sixty feet by ten feet—cover for a regulation-size grass cricket pitch to protect it from moisture. Keep it dry for a cricket match with people betting money. Going by the loving care on display, lots of money. A heavy, manual roller rested at the far end of the playground, used to even the pitch and compact the expensive clay bulli that Chhote Bhai must have paid for. Ernst could see Chhote Bhai bouncing his hockey ball on the ground to inspect the grass pitch—more the bounce, faster the pitch. At other times, he used it to smash in people’s heads.

  The playground filled up with ghosts in white after Chhote Bhai was done bouncing his hockey ball. Ernst stopped to watch Salim Ali deliver his spin—the ball taking an innocent trajectory away from the wicket before heading back to demolish some batsman. Arjun was behind the wicket; Chhote Bhai busy taking bets from the sidelines. Ernst saw the girl Bhairavi looking on from the edge of the playground, with her teeth sticking out and eyes on fire.

  Whereas, she had actually gone on ahead, so Ernst followed. It wasn’t for him to unravel the threads within this group of childhood friends—their love, and hate, and all their history clouding his judgement. More so now, with one of them dead, another the accused, Salim Ali the accuser, and the girl up ahead crossing a rope bridge swaying over a stretch of darkness. He approached after a mental coin-toss, and looked down into fetid waters you could probably walk on without sinking. The jhopadpatti had taken root on both sides of the ooze with a section down there to shit, and a little further up, to wash clothes.

  The other side of the bridge was an incline with clustered huts clinging on for dear life. Tin and thatch playhouses strung next to each other, and there was that smoky air from burning cow dung that hangs over a jhopadpatti. A large, pukka structure stuck out from top of the incline, lit up like someone’s mother-in-law had died.

  The first sign of electricity. If not blazing so recklessly, it could be a textbook haunted house: a bhoot bangla. He remembered the suburban myth about a churail blowing evening gusts towards Sindhi Camp from just such a place. The girl walked up its porch and into the incandescence like an angel without wings, opening the front door as if she owned the place. A voice sprang from the door and Ernst groaned. It was the fucking churail, and only his hard-on kept him from making a getaway.

  Stepping on to the wooden porch, he was careful to walk around the powder mandala design radiating from dead centre, the triangle’s apex pointing where the sun would rise a few hours from now. She had left the door ajar, and he walked into a Tantric, Bhairavi Chakra ceremony just about to begin. Seated inside, feasting on him with sightless eyes, Andhi Ma cleared her throat, imitating the practice that singers of her calibre do with the scales, before tearing you apart with their voice.

  ~

  Here’s how a Sahajiya fairy tale goes. There were two young people, very much in love, who each day laid together in the flower grove behind the palace. The girl’s father was the king, and one day he discovered their tryst, and forced them to get married. Their bed of flowers turned to thorns and their love, to ashes.

  Taking the fairy tale to heart, the Tantric Sahajiya decided early on that love within marriage was profane. Love had to be with the unattainable for it to be sublime. Just like Lord Krishna’s dalliance with his consort Radha—the Perfect Woman, because she was married to another.

  ~

  The evening’s Tantric ritual celebrating the Perfect Woman would have started the night before. The decision on time and day would be arrived at through astronomical calculations—as complicated and scientific as her father’s desperate Matka math to play the numbers. And just about as accurate. No matter, as with Matka gambling, it’s faith that counts.

  Ernst could see he was in a mujra-style dance hall inside the haunted house. There was another Tantric powder mandala on the floor of the dance hall. This one was king-size and made of sand, built with great care by the Tantaji—the ceremony’s Tantric guide. Really big—over ten feet in diameter—the powder mandala allowed the Tantaji to enter through its doors and move around the streets. Men and women sat around it in a circle and no one could enter the powder mandala except the guide. Ernst knew the Tantaji would destroy this king-size work of art after the ceremony. Erase it to demonstrate maya and the nebulous nature of all material things. The Romans had slaves whisper, ‘Memento Mori!’ in the victor’s ear. ‘Remember! You too will die.’ The much more sophisticated Indians have maya to tell them something similar, or the exact opposite; depending on what one wants to hear.

  ~

  A Tantric guide would be typically female, like the gardener’s wife at Purandhar Fort. Or Arjun’s feminine half—the one Bhairavi cla
imed had a full fifty per cent of Arjun in its thrall. The bhoot bangla’s Tantaji was all male, but working under Andhi Ma’s instruction. He looked to the blind woman for permission every now and then, as if she could see. Andhi Ma sat cross-legged in one corner with her musical instruments, and nodded back as if she could.

  ‘The way of truth is different from the way of society,’ the Tantaji said in a standard Tantric preamble, and a caution of sorts. ‘The two may overlap, or they may not.’

  Quoting Chaitanya, the patron saint of the Sahajiyas and Lord Krishna’s last reincarnation, he then intoned, ‘At one time my mind was calm, but in the name of Radha-Krishna, my rationality disappeared.’

  First caution, now licence.

  An equal number of Krishnas and Radhas sat in the circle, man, woman, man, woman. As Ernst watched, they were asked to hold hands, which they did. In thirty years, he hadn’t seen an Indian couple hold hands in public; now this. The participants were instructed to consider each man in the circle an embodiment of the divine consciousness, each woman as the embodiment of divine energy. Typically, as he knew from the Tantric texts, husband and wife would not be next to each other. In this way, adepts and acolytes together build an approximation of the Place of the Hidden Moon—one can never get there but there was no harm in trying.

  As the ceremony heated up one had to ask, who led him here? Sindhi Camp Bhairavi, or was it the blind Andhi Ma—trying to liven up what was left of his life? This did beat having to die from whatever it was Waller had pointed out in the X-ray. No matter. Seeing the living, breathing chakra move in front of him, his illness wasn’t important, nor was this orgy. He just wanted to locate the girl because his heart was in a free fall. The women in the room, though, all looked married—a line of red sindoor parting their hair, or a mangalsutra around the neck, or both. Sindhi Camp Bhairavi wasn’t in the room and he buckled in relief.

  The Tantaji then said, existing interpersonal relationships stood dissolved for as long as the powder mandala remained on the floor. He sat at the centre of the circle and asked the congregation to do their asanas, just as he had taught them. When they began, it was almost like a dance; the Tantaji reciting his mantras while the participants concentrated on their respective chakras, and on each other’s wives. By the time Ernst ventured further into the room, the group was entangled and intertwined into a single, labouring organism.