Bombay Swastika

by Braham Singh

  The rat hole of a Krishna Temple came on their left, looking like never before and not just because a party was underway. A white sheet was laid across the porch for what, unbelievably, could only be a band of Muslim qawwali singers. The qawwali wafted into his ears.

  Muslim mians singing at a Hindu temple? A manicured beard in white sherwani sat behind the tabla on the patio. A clone sat behind a peti—the venerable Indian harmonium. An older, untended greybeard in crumpled white kurta was belting it out, while Andhi Ma swayed. Making it that much more surreal, the local mosque’s mullah sat in front and centre on the temple patio, looking sharp and impeccable. Behind him, the Mian Building’s Muslim population congregated alongside Lord Krishna for the evening.

  It would seem this time, the blind, Hindu nut-job of an Andhi Ma wasn’t just fucking with Salim Ali’s blind, Muslim mother, or with Sindhi Camp for that matter, but the world as we know it. This is how you kindle a riot. By trying to bring people together. Andhi Ma was a nuanced bitch though, and astute. The greybeard was singing paeans to Jhulelal, that neutral Sufi residing on a fish in the River Indus and revered by Hindu Sindhis, as much as by their mortal Muslim enemies. For now, therefore, no one took issue with Muslims singing at a Krishna Temple. The Hindu majority watched, swayed, even joined in singing praises to Jhulelal.

  ‘Stop here a minute,’ Ernst instructed, trying to stay Krishna the charioteer, all ready to charge down an empty Vashigaon Road.

  ‘Why for?’ Mohan Driver’s calculations were implacable. ‘Less than an hour for you to get to Colaba, and leave again for Santa Cruz Airport. Otherwise, don’t even bother.’

  ~

  Done with Jhulelal, the qawwali singer now went, ‘Dhin, tanana, dhin, dhin, tananana…’ in a classic dhrupad string, weaving Vedic chant with Persian melody. ‘Dhin, tanana, dhin, dhin, tananana…’ the greybeard sang. He took off, soared, and didn’t let up. Ernst stepped out of the one-eyed Fiat to allow Mohan Driver tear at his hair in the privacy of the car. He found he couldn’t walk, so Mohan Driver got out too, took his arm, and they stumbled forward together.

  ‘Dhin, tanana, dhin, dhin, tananana…’ It was relentless, the music. Descending from his high, the greybeard switched over to rustic Punjabi to better make his case to a lover, or maybe Allah. Just as with Tantric Sahajiyas, one could never tell with these Sufi types. Two Mian Building mians heaved Ernst to the concrete patio as if he weighed nothing. They were laying him down now and Andhi Ma slid on her arse to make space by her feet, mud-caked toes wriggling inches away from his face. From behind a prison-type window, the part-time, Brahmin priest watched Muslims defile his temple; allowed by the blind bitch. His hopes lay in their namaaz prayer time to approach. It would force the hordes to dissipate and the mullah go do his job at the mosque, allowing the priest to do his.

  The qawwali simmered down, the mullah swaying to the dying strains of the greybeard’s Punjabi lyrics, and in no hurry to leave. Andhi Ma cleared her throat. Apparently, her turn. Some more throat noises, and she erupted in a song to Krishna using words no Indian woman would dare whisper to a lover, let alone her husband. Some of the younger Muslims got up to leave, than participate in this sort of licentious idolatry. They were circumcised for a second time with a single look from the mullah and one-by-one sank back on their haunches.

  Ernst inched forward to touch Andhi Ma’s feet with his head. He clutched them and wouldn’t let go.

  ‘Maaji,’ he said, ‘I’ve seen the light.’ Andhi Ma looked down at him and winked one blind eye without missing a beat.

  It had to be close to namaaz time, but the Muslims weren’t packing up. This was sacrilege on a grand scale. Ernst began to suffocate as if someone had cornered the oxygen again, and things got hazy. Andhi Ma took a deep puff from a chillum and offered it to him with another wink. He pulled at the ganja, coughed, and found he could breathe once more.

  ~

  The crowd got bigger with every pull. The pain now throbbed from somewhere outside his body. They were all here, around him. Schwester Ingrid too, of course. He tried calling out to her—say, he is sorry. Will she forgive him? The way she looked, who could tell? And there was his father, hovering behind her. The huge fat, Göring of a Jew tapped at his slashed left wrist. It was time. Ernst forced himself to focus as Mohan Driver tried to say something. Probably, the same message his father was trying to convey: time to go.

  ‘Here is good,’ Mohan Driver said, instead. If only he would stop crying. He pressed Ernst back down to prevent him getting up. ‘Don’t go, Sa’ab. Here is good.’

  Goddess Bhairavi had arrived too. When did she find time to change into a red sari after gutting the Seth and his police dog? He wasn’t worried about her safety. The police couldn’t stop a lone Englishman from storming their chowki, and they’d go fuck with a Goddess?

  Her lips were swollen, the way newly-married women get, and she had red sindoor powder where the hair parts, like a Perfect Woman—married to another. He had never, ever, seen anything so beautiful in his life and knew his three minutes were up. He was also hard as a rock, and felt that’s only fair.

  She turned away to throw up. Something did happen that night, after all. The faceless little girl hiding in the folds of her sari had her jet-black hair, his skin. Not altogether a bad thing for a girl to be European-white in India. He tried to get Mohan Driver’s attention. The Golf Club debentures were in his bedroom credenza. Could be worth something, some day. Split the proceeds with Parvatibai and the girl.

  Namaaz time came and went. Greybeard started to sing to lyrics from the fifteenth-century mystic, Bulleh Shah. The mullah swayed alongside, eyes closed. Fucker was going to lose his tenure over at the mosque.

  ‘Bulleh ki jana mai kaun’

  Bulleh, I know not who I am,

  I just know, what I’m not.

  I’m not Hindu, or Christian,

  Not Muslim, or Jew,

  Not a liar, not a cheater,

  Not a killer, nor a wife beater,

  ‘Bulleh ki jana mai kaun’

  Bulleh, I know not who I am.

  He took another puff from Andhi Ma’s chillum and began to cough. Goddess Bhairavi took on that disapproving look women reserve for their men.

  ‘Ernest!’ she berated, and lifted his head from the hard cement to her lap. People were somewhat startled, it being unimaginable for an Indian woman to take her man’s name. Not even goddesses do that. The Tantric Sahajiya insisted however, the Perfect Woman can.

  The Historical Context

  Before the beginning and after the end.

  ERNST STIEGER

  Ernst Steiger is an amalgamation of German Jews who found themselves in British India when World War II broke out. They were interned in places like Purandhar Fort across the Subcontinent, for being Germans. Their families and relatives were interned in concentration camps across Germany and Eastern Europe, for being Jews. Jewish humour draws on stuff like this.

  THE JÜDISCHE KRANKENHAUS

  While the Nazis were plucking Jews out of Occupied Europe, ’tis strange but true they didn’t touch the patients, doctors and nurses in Berlin’s Jüdische Krankenhaus. Why such un-Aryan behaviour? For one thing, the SS had cordoned off an area within the Jewish Hospital as staging post for those shipped to concentration camps. Seeing fellow Jews walking about freely the other side of the barbed wire, helped internees remain sedate and believe they were simply being shipped to similar locations in the East. For example, like the one in Auschwitz. Incidentally, the Jüdische Krankenhaus is still around after surviving the Nazis. So are the Jews.

  THE SASSOONS

  By the time India became independent, the Jewish family that single-handedly built Bombay was no longer around, with Sir Victor Sassoon moving on to go build Shanghai. Left behind, were minor relatives and pretenders like the fictitious Adam Sassoon from our story. Barely a decade later if asked about the Sassoons, Bombaywallahs would go, ‘Who?’

  PUBLIC LAW 480

  PL 480 ma
de for big headlines in the Sixties, with America paid in rupees for ‘food aid’ shipped under this American law. While the money couldn’t be repatriated, the Americans could use it for approved expenses or certain types of purchases—like textbooks printed in India. Consequently, America bought millions of dollars worth of Indian textbooks it didn’t need. There’s a theory this was essentially to launder money back to the CIA’s Indian operatives. When the author brought this up with people at Langley, he was told we Indians suffer from feverish imaginations. Moreover, they took pains to inform him the CIA has an impeccable track record overseas.

  DR. HOMI J. BHABHA

  The father of India’s Atomic Program was killed on 24th January 1966, when an Air India Boeing 707 carrying him ploughed into Mont Blanc. His body was never found. The crash was attributed to pilot error, or the CIA, depending on the point of view.

  While his violin concert at the Bombay Presidency Golf Club never happened, he was a classical violinist, besides being a gifted painter along with the rest of everything else that makes him stuff of legend.

  THE PHOENIX NUCLEAR REPROCESSING PLANT AT TROMBAY

  After the Chinese nuclear explosion of November 1964, John Foster Dulles decided India shouldn’t be allowed one. Krypton gas detectors were installed at the American Consulate at Bombay, to sniff the air for levels of Krypton gas that would suggest weapon-grade plutonium being manufactured at India’s Atomic Energy Establishment in the Trombay suburbs. For our fiction, we smuggle an American Krypton gas detector closer to the Phoenix Plutonium Reprocessing Plant at Trombay.

  For all of Bhabha’s genius, the Phoenix Plutonium Reprocessing Plant never took off, producing mediocre quantities of weapon-grade plutonium. It remained shut for more than a decade. ‘Poor choice of materials in early stage,’ was the official reason, giving us an excuse to build our story around defective stainless steel pipes supplied by the CIA. Ironically, while America obsessed over Phoenix, it was the Canadian-aided CIRUS reactor with American heavy water, that provided India weapon-grade plutonium for its 1974 nuclear explosion, code named: Smiling Buddha.

  In this novel, that’s the nickname Dr. Homi J. Bhabha gives his serene Head Machinist Tsering Tufan, who is dying from radiation exposure.

  India entered the 21st century still struggling to bring Bhabha’s three-stage, nuclear-power based, electricity solution to term. As of 2010, nuclear energy provided less than three per cent of the total electricity produced. On the bright side, an inability to scale may have spared the country a Chernobyl, or Fukushima.

  Given a nuclear program that continues to go nowhere, one may argue in favour of India applying that money to education instead. Then there’s always health care, clean water and basic infrastructure like roads and commercial thermal, hydro and solar power plants. India’s priorities remain different however, because of heroes like Dr. Bhabha and Pandit Nehru in the past and those that followed. An IAS officer once said to the author that maybe India doesn’t need any more heroes, just fewer assholes.

  THE SAHAJIYAS

  Proponents of Tantra or the left-hand path in Hinduism, the Sahajiya have been targets of virulent attacks by the orthodox since their inception. Harassment prompted them to develop their own shadow language, resulting in further misunderstandings. Increasingly, they continue being exploited for purulent purposes, or by the sanctimonious making a moral point.

  A prime reason for being misunderstood thus is their study around Lord Krishna’s behaviour. The Tantric Sahajiyas have their own take on the Lord’s dalliances with married women. Even his consort, Radha-devi, fundamental to the gigantic religious edifice built around the Radha-Krishna mythology, was married to another man.

  This gave the Sahajiya pause, rather than to sensibly follow orthodox advice and, do as Krishna says, not as Krishna does. Instead, they decided early on, to take Lord Krishna literally and decreed that love within marriage was profane. Love had to be with the unattainable for it to be sublime. Just like Krishna’s love for Radha—the Perfect Woman, because she was married to another.

  This concept of reaching out for the unattainable is further perfected in their metaphors around the Place of the Hidden Moon. Edward Dimock, Jr. explains this best in his eponymous book. Citing examples, Dimock also shows that this concept of love outside marriage in not exclusively Tantric. Medieval Europe had its own Courts of Love where such matters were hashed out. Dimock tell us, ‘One of the most famous of all (such) decisions is said to have been taken by the court of the Countess of Champagne in 1174 and is as follows:

  ‘We declare and affirm, agreeably to the general opinion of those present, that love cannot exercise its powers on married people. The following reason is proof of the fact: lovers grant everything, mutually and gratuitously, without being constrained by any motive of necessity. Married people, on the contrary, are compelled as a duty to submit to another’s wishes, and not to refuse anything to one another. For this reason, it is evident that love cannot exercise its powers on married people.’

  The Tantric Sahajiya couldn’t have said it better.

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