by Chatura Rao
‘As the bus roared along the narrow tree-lined road, Papa turned in his seat to look at the people sitting behind and to our side. Satisfied that they were law abiding, he leaned his head against the seat and closed his eyes. His large hands relaxed on his knees. I felt the stiffness in my shoulders and my misery relent to the excitement of journeying to a new place.
‘We got off the bus on the Almora road close to Gangarkote. An elderly man was waiting for us, standing at the bus terminus tea shop folding an old newspaper into different shapes.
‘Papa tapped him on his shoulder and the man turned.
“‘Hah yes, it’s you!’’ he noted. Putting the paper aside on the counter, he smiled and said, khush raho. Be happy.
‘He observed that I had my mother Uma’s eyes and my policeman Papa’s height. He peered at me through his thick spectacles. He was portly and possibly bald under the topi. He wore a faded kurta-pyjama and a checked vest.
“‘Benilal Maama?’’ I asked, somehow guessing this was my mother’s shopkeeper uncle.
“‘Correct,’’ the old man said, patting my shoulder. “Are you hungry? Will you have a boiled egg? You get good boiled eggs at this bus stand.’’ He pointed at a hen walking about in the mud. “Fresh.’’
‘I smiled at that. Ben Maama laughed and then I laughed too. For no reason, but just because the daylight was luminous here in the hills and I was away from the recent sorrow of home. Ben Maama and Papa walked ahead with the bags, talking quietly, and I followed them to the boiled egg seller outside the bus terminus, and later into a tempo.
‘This tempo took us to a lodge in Gangarkote where we stayed the night. Waking up the next morning, I found my father smoking a cigarette at the one window our room had, that looked out onto the main street of Gangarkote.
“‘Your mother doesn’t snore, and smells better than her brother here,’’ he grumbled.
“Have you spoken with Ma?’’ I’d wanted to ask him the question since last evening.
“‘Mm, to your Pratik Maama. He says it went okay.’’
‘I wanted to know if the baby had been a boy or a girl but could not bring myself to ask. It had been years since we’d exchanged more than what was strictly necessary.
“‘That’s good, good,’’ Ben Maama awoke and sat up with a fart. After an hour of bathing and brushing, tea and bananas for breakfast, we set off for school.
‘The school consisted of several long single-storey brown buildings with sloping roofs, built along the steps of a terraced hill. I was really excited about the football grounds and hoped I’d make the grade. About sixty children had come from various villages and towns of Uttarakhand to write the 7th standard scholarship entrance exams. This was a reputed branch of JNV that offered a good balance of sports and studies. It was an education my parents would not have been able to afford to pay for.
‘After the tests, Ben Maama, Papa and I took a bus to Raikholi village where Ben Maama lived. We would stay there three days till the exam results were announced. The village had a view of the river on one side and of snow-capped mountains on the other. I had heard about Raikholi from my mother. She’d lived here with Ben Maama and his wife, Rani Maami, for a few months when she was a girl my age.
‘Ben Maama took us to a lodge on a hill that overlooked the stunning blue river. He did not offer to take us to his home which was in the village. Rani Maami had died three years ago; perhaps the house was too dusty or in disrepair.
‘Ma had told me about that house. I wished I could go see the walls of shapes and shadows that she had described. I wondered if the trees my mother remembered still stood around the cottage, whether birds nested in them, and if the reclining chair was still put out in the garden sometimes. And whether her friend the “cloud-king’’ Doctor Rawat still lived in a house on a purple hill.
‘I was afraid my father would be angry at my asking a trivial sort of question. “Ben Maama, there was a doctor, a doctor of dogs and birds who my mother met when …’’
“Meghraj Rawat,’’ Ben Maama said loudly. “Who didn’t know him!’’
“Where is he?’’ I tried to hide my excitement.
“He’s dead. He died years ago,’’ Ben Maama said. “You see,’’ he turned to papa, “for many years people thought he was a healer, a kind of magician or saint. Not me though. I’m a businessman and cannot be fooled so easily by shape-shifters. I like solid men! But the uneducated villagers began to ask Rawat to cure them of diseases. The Primary Health Centre was far away in Nainital in those days, so it was more convenient for these people to believe their village vet was so gifted that he could cure even two-legged creatures!’’
“‘So our local fraud, Doctor Rawat,’’ Ben Maama continued gregariously, “diagnosed Keerat Kala’s 8-year-old son with Flu, when it was a case of Malaria. The child died. Kala and I and a few others sent the body for postmortem to Nainital and when we found out that the child was given ineffectual medicine, we filed a police complaint. Rawat was spared because Keerat Kala had asked him to treat his son, knowing quite well he was a vet … But after that his followers lost faith in him. People used to think he was a sort of Buddha. They would leave him gifts of food and things. Many used to come to him for advice on their personal problems. Tsk! People will believe in anything!’’
‘The clouds had come in over the hill where we sat and I remember shivering,’ Suveer told Reva now, ‘though not just from the cold. Ben Maama’s narration was radically different from my mother’s memories of the doctor.’
Reva handed him a fallen shami flower that she’d been holding and he caught it lightly to his chest.
“‘Didn’t Doctor Rawat make my mother better when she fell ill?’’ I asked Ben Maama finally,’ Suveer said. ‘He said that Ma had been lucky to survive the doctor’s ministrations. The injustice of his words cut me to the quick. My mother had told me how lonely she had been in Ben Maama’s house, which was possibly what had made her ill. Doctor Rawat had cured her. He’d extended a hand of friendship and shared his stories. He’d made her whole again. But I was a boy and I couldn’t say anything.’
‘So what had happened to the doctor?’ Reva wanted to know.
‘He died alone in his house,’ Suveer’s voice dropped so she had to strain to hear. ‘The villagers could hear him coughing; they didn’t notice when he stopped. The body wasn’t discovered until a week later.’
‘I walked to the edge of the hill in Raikholi from where I could turn my back on the adults. I tried to imagine Doctor Rawat’s house like my mother had described it: the cottage, purple hills and white stupa in the distance. The clouds that came to gather around the house of the doctor when he lay dying. Of hunger perhaps, or disease, or shame.
‘I retched and bent down, trying to hide my face, trying to control my tears. The old man who had befriended and healed my mother was no more. And she had lost the tiny, moving thing below her skin who we had built so many dreams around. She’d had to go through it alone.
‘When I finally composed myself and turned around, I found papa standing a couple of feet behind me. He held out a bottle of water.
‘“The world does not always understand good intentions, nor a person’s honour. In time you will stop crying about these things. You will do what you know to be right.’’
‘He watched me drink. “JNV is a good school. It will make a man out of you. If you pass the tests and have to stay on, you may write a letter to your mother,’’ he added gruffly. “I’ll give it to her.’’
‘His steady gaze engaged mine, lifted me to my feet.
‘What it meant to be free,’ Suveer said to Reva as they gathered up their belongings to head back to Nashik city, ‘I learnt from my father who I’d felt all along to be a kind of enemy. In his time he had done what he believed to be right, regardless of the consequences. He pointed me along the same way.’
‘The hard road,’ she said.
As they trudged away from Gangapur Dam, he slung an arm around her
shoulder. He recalled how, on Aboli’s request, he would sometimes drop Reva to her tuition class on his friend’s scooter. Sitting doubtfully behind him Reva would lean as away from him as she could, one elbow jutting out as she gripped the back handle of the scooter. To rest a hand on his shoulder would have been unthinkable! Now she leaned companionably into his arm, not minding his closeness at all.
6
T
wo weeks after he’d met Reva at Nashik, Suveer arrived at Ahmedabad airport on a calm morning. He had spoken to his mother the evening before, told her about his assignment. His father had called him a little later, said gruffly–be careful, be inconspicuous, your only safeguard against trouble is alertness and your Press Card.
The driver of the rickshaw he hired was Prakash, a man in his early twenties. He told Suveer, while driving him to Gandhinagar, twin city to Ahmedabad, about the unexpected turn his life had taken. His older brother, who had been a responsible member of the family, had turned paranoid and accusatory one day. At that time no one understood that he was losing his mind. He left home with nothing but the clothes on his back. It had put the responsibility of his wife, young children and aging parents, on Prakash. So here he was, the happy-go-lucky youngest, working 18 hours a day to feed and clothe three children, a woman and two old people, and to comfort them when they worried about his brother.
He’d reported his brother as missing, so he went to the police station every couple of days to ask if they had any news of him. All this in the course of the last month. He told Suveer his story with a smile, eyes puffy and red from a night on the streets in the open three-wheeler. They exchanged phone numbers, Suveer promising to call him if he needed to be transported anywhere in the city. He made a mental note to call and check on him anyway.
They arrived at Suveer’s destination–a quiet street in Puneet Nagar, an upmarket business-class colony in Gandhinagar city. Here, a Muslim non-resident Indian had recently bought a home. For the last couple of days the Hindu right-wing Prahaar Political Party of India, also known as PPP India, was actively protesting the purchase, demanding that he sell Bungalow No. 37 and leave. They had declared they would not allow Muslims to live in this area. Gandhinagar had increasingly begun to implement the Disturbed Areas Act, an Act that debars people from a community selling property to people of another community. Ostensibly, to keep law and order. What it was really doing was segregating residential areas into Hindu or Muslim-dominated.
‘Tripuri was what this area was once called,’ Suveer’s producer, Ranjan Dayal had explained back in Delhi. He was fifty-one years old, volatile and well-informed, with twenty eight years of journalism behind him, twenty in print alone. ‘Tripuri’s main street tarred and plots sold to newly-moneyed trading families, is now Puneet Nagar.’
He forwarded Suveer the research that one of the interns had put together as a backgrounder for the story: Tripuri had once been an uncertain idea of an amorphous shape when it assembled as a slum colony fifty three years before. Here migrants from villages that had stood on the banks of the Narmada arrived when the Sardar Sarovar Dam project flooded their dwelling places and left them homeless.
They had been stone-cutters from the hills, farmers and fisher people, and lower caste Hindus who worked as migrant labour when they first arrived. In the shanties that were Tripuri, their children grew up with no education. They played on hillocks of cement and sand on construction sites in the city of Gandhinagar through the blistering summers and misty winters, while their parents worked as daily wage labour.
The shanty became a town and some amenities came. Electricity, water supply, and by and by, the government school. Textile factories were set up by a couple of businessmen. Their extended families set up jewellery manufacturing units.
When Muslims from Surat arrived to work as diamond cutters, the population became even more diverse. Among them three political parties thrived—one Hindu, one secular and a third that was Dalit, representing the lowest caste of all.
‘The Prahaar Political Party, known as PPP, has been best organised in community uplift work. Over time it’s rallied the support of most Hindus in the area, and even some Dalits. Perhaps,’ Ranjan conjectured, ‘that’s why no one’s protesting their party workers’ behaviour outside the gates of No. 37 the past two days.’
‘Charges could be pressed,’ Suveer ventured. ‘Section 441 of the IPC, I think.’
‘But who has the balls to press charges against the PPP? It’s a bloody shame!’ Ranjan had rued. Suveer for his part was indifferent. It took more to get him to attach adjectives to what was, for him, a story like any other.
For the past two days, the road outside 37 had been a battleground where right-wing activists and supporters gathered to protest against the new Muslim owner. The news channels had briefly carried images of saffron-clad people putting up banners and shouting slogans of ‘Jai Shri Ram’, and even threatening reprisals. Some journalists asked why the Disturbed Areas Act could not be put in place all over cities as sensitive to communal disharmony as this one.
Suveer deliberately held no opinion on the matter. He would observe and understand before beginning to record real location incidents and interviews for his news feature. National elections were ten days away, and his was one of what the news channels called build-up stories.
It was still early and hence, quiet on the street. The two-storey beige and white bungalow’s design dated back to the 1980s, a time when Suveer was growing up in the hills. Its gate was padlocked. Someone had splattered saffron paint on the lock and on part of the gate. Red paint vandalised the walls. Only the branches of the trees within its walls seemed serene, the topmost leaves shining in the early light. Suveer directed Prakash to a shack selling tea. He paid him more than the fare and touched his shoulder in goodbye.
Over a steaming glass of chai, Suveer asked the middle-aged man who was boiling the draught what he thought of the controversial bungalow. The crowd that gathered there was good for business, the man shrugged, so he had no complaints.
Suveer thought of the peripheral witnesses of each story he did . . . the cobblers, the paan and cigarette, tea shop and small restaurant owners in the vicinity. They usually knew every detail of the goings-on, every secret, but reserved these for perhaps their wives at home by way of bed talk, or for the police, under questioning or if they were paid for information. Else they kept things, especially opinions, to themselves. The faces stayed expressionless, intent on the job, the glance darting brief and sharp on the goings-on, then sliding back to the work their hands were at.
‘Reporter?’ the tea seller asked, as Suveer finished his second cigarette and squatted to take his camera out of his bag.
Suveer nodded. He didn’t need to explain about being a maker of sound documentaries. The Canon 5D was to take stills and videos to refer to later. Visual details jogged his memory and helped him edit the story more sharply.
‘Need a hotel room?’ the tea seller guessed.
Suveer shrugged. ‘I prefer to stay close by. Will any of the homes in the neighbourhood keep me as a paying guest?’
‘If you’re a Hindu,’ he replied with a wry smile.
‘Which door do you suggest I knock on?’ Suveer asked, handing him Rs 20, more than the cost of a glass of tea. The old man calmly piled up his dirty utensils, adjusted his shirt over his protruding belly and stepped out from behind the counter.
‘Press people are staying at Mani Palace hotel in the market a kilometre away. But a guest accommodation I know of in the lane behind Number 37 is much closer.’
Suveer nodded. ‘I’ll take some pictures before we go.’
He walked down the street, capturing details of the house, its padlock and walls with their splashes of paint, neighbouring homes and gardens, making a mental note to get interviews of neighbours who had witnessed the goings on. House No. 28 had its windows placed so its residents got a clear view of No. 37’s gate. He looked at his watch. It was 8:30 am. He had an hour to park his l
uggage, freshen up and return.
‘My name is Suveer Bisht,’ he told the teaseller as they walked away together.
‘Chimmanbhai Patel,’ the man said, introducing himself with a limp handshake.
‘Is it safe to leave your stall unattended?’
‘Sure. I’ve run it for seven years at the same spot. Anyway, my son will arrive anytime now to attend to customers. I’m putting you up in my own house, if you don’t mind. It’s a small room but quite comfortable and my wife’s cooking is great!’
‘Shows on you,’ Suveer said with a grin at Chimmanbhai’s girth.
‘I didn’t think she was special the first time I set eyes on her, but the first meal she cooked transported me to heaven, and I knew then that she was the wife for me!’
As they turned the corner to an unpaved offshoot of the main street, Suveer’s phone rang. Reva’s voice made him suddenly aware of the smell of the leaves on the trees he was walking under. Water lapping against the shore of the lake they had sat by, and morning light on the ends of her long curly hair, came to him unbidden. He was surprised, an instant later, that Aboli wasn’t part of this reminiscence. Just Reva. She’d reminded him of herself alone.
‘When did you get there?’ she asked. ‘Is everything ok? Please message me tonight, so I know you’re well.’ He answered with an abrupt, ‘I’ll see.’ He wasn’t used to reporting to anyone but his Producers at PBS, and the thought of her waiting for his message bothered him.
‘I’m going into a meeting now,’ she said, not reacting to his terse tone. ‘Message me. Don’t forget.’
Chimmanbhai’s wife, Sarojben greeted them at her small blue wooden door. She was as well-nourished as Chimmanbhai, her eyes almost disappearing into the folds of her cheeks when she grinned. This happened whenever her husband complimented her cooking, which was about half a dozen times in the ten minutes it took for Suveer to settle his things into the tiny bedroom that Sarojben had got her son to vacate for the paying guest. Both husband and wife crowded into the room with him, chatting in a mix of Hindi and Gujarati. Sarojben offered him breakfast which he accepted gratefully. The bathroom was common–small but neatly tiled. Everything was spotlessly clean and Suveer felt lucky to have chanced upon this place.