Blueprint for Love

by Chatura Rao

  ‘Dinner?’ she asked, anxiously, when she saw him slip his feet into his shoes at the door.

  ‘I’m not eating at home.’

  That night he stepped out to eat at the stalls that sold bread and meat in the market. His phone rang. It was Wajidbhai’s brother-in-law, Usman Qureshi. After greeting him, Usmanbhai asked Zahyan to meet him the next day at his party office. Zahyan was not keen to go, but agreed. He felt that he owed Wajidbhai.

  Mahnoor got little sleep that night, lying alone in Mariya’s bed, Zahyan rooming outside with his father and uncle. She hated the dank house which was filled with broken furniture, old clothes and expired cosmetics. Mariya’s untidy flamboyance that she’d ignored, telling herself that this was someone else’s home and they had a right to keep it as they wished, filled Mahnoor with distress. She felt that the place with its wasteful sour-smelling odds and ends was closing in on her. She’d never felt so exiled from her own dream of a home. She missed the tiny, neatly kept house in Puneet Nagar that they’d left forever, and cried herself to sleep.

  ‘When can I go stay with my mother?’ she asked Zahyan timidly in the morning.

  ‘I’ll ask Abbu,’ he said uncomfortably. ‘Cover your head around the house. If you have to go out, call me, I’ll take you. You will wear a veil.’

  Mahnoor stiffened at the orders. She searched his eyes, looking for a trace of humour or kindness, a way back to her Zahyan whose heart she knew beat for her, but they were shuttered.

  Zahyan watched the light die in her. He felt numb from all that had happened and did not know how to escape his father’s strictures. Rubbing at his own eyes, prickly from lack of sleep, he left for his meeting with Usmanbhai.

  Usmanbhai’s party office was about two and a half kilometres away via High Tension road. Green and silver flags announced its presence at the head of the lane. Zahyan passed a hoarding and several posters which had Usman Qureshi’s unsmiling visage with neatly cut hair topped by an embroidered green topi and a perfectly manicured, hennaed beard. The high-collared sherwani made him appear formal and forbidding.

  Zahyan almost did not recognise Usman Qureshi when he saw him. The man was in a crumpled kurta-pyjama. The cleverly-shaped beard was gone, replaced by a few days’ worth of stubble. He was, however, seated plum in the centre of a sofa in the office lobby with about a dozen Party workers about him, all of them intently watching TV.

  They looked at Zahyan with a mix of curiosity and disbelief when he entered. Which is when Zahyan recognised the tone and narration emanating from the TV. He stepped forward, ignoring them all even as, on Usmanbhai’s muttered order, they hastily made way for him to sit next to their leader. Zahyan continued to stand at the door and stare mesmerised at the TV screen.

  Suveer’s voice was pitched low over pictures of Zahyan’s old home in the lane off Puneet Nagar and visuals of Ishq bungalow’s walls and gate with their swastiks, orange and red paint. The sound of devotional Bhajans being sung underlay his narration.

  ‘On November 18th, 2015, the state police stood and watched while a young woman was assaulted by a mob in Puneet Nagar, Gandhinagar. She was returning home from the nursery school she works at to pick up some folders she had forgotten. Members of the minority community she belongs to are clearly unwelcome here.’

  There were pictures of the group outside the bungalow, including the leaders and the policemen. And then terrifyingly violent pictures of saffron bandanna, trident-wielding people attacking. On the soundtrack ‘Jai Shri Ram!’ played as a battle cry.

  Zahyan recalled that the Bhajan singers had not been carrying anything but musical instruments. Neither the last pictures, nor the cries of ‘Jai Shri Ram!’ belonged to the actual incident. These had simply been lifted from the documentation of some other incident and placed here.

  Over visuals of a violent mob was Mahnoor’s soft sobbing voice, saying, ‘The women hammered me with their fists and they kicked me down to the ground. I felt. . . as if I was not human anymore. Just some dirt or a thing to break.’

  ‘Article 19 of the Indian Constitution assures the fundamental right of every citizen to reside and settle in any part of India,’ Suveer was saying. ‘But the reality is very different. Some among us are forced to ask the question, “where is home”.’

  A silhouette of Mahnoor with her head in her hands at the square table at her house in Puneet Nagar appeared. Zahyan saw himself in the background, his stance watchful and concerned. This must have been a photograph that Suveer had taken between recording interviews; he’d been taking photos and videos of their place.

  Surely the feature would not reveal Mahnoor’s face! Suveer would never do that. He had promised her. But even as Zahyan watched, fear creating a pit in his stomach, a close-up of her profile appeared, eyes lowered, the sadness evident. It was a heavily pixellated picture, a zoom into the previous artistic silhouette. But he noticed the group watching TV strain to identify her features. Many glanced back at him, embarrassed at his plight. This broadcast, Zahyan realised with dawning dismay, was being aired on cable TV all over Baroda and possibly in Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar too.

  ‘The men,’ her voice was stretched to breaking, ‘were reaching out to touch me in bad ways. Suveer Bhaijaan tried to save me, but there were too many of them . . . ‘

  Zahyan went cold. When Mahnoor had spoken about the men trying to molest her, although Suveer’s recorder had been on they had agreed not to include these lines in her statement. Zahyan had clarified that he wanted redressal for her, not social embarrassment or humiliation. Suveer could not possibly have made this feature, could he? Something was wrong. Zahyan heard the others’ voices heighten around him. They cursed the vileness of the infidel men who had dared to touch a woman of the qaum, the community.

  As Zahyan rushed out he heard Usman Qureshi call his name. He ignored him and continued striding blindly through the lane leading away. His father and uncle’s faces appeared before him, accusation writ large when they realised that the whole world now knew about the assault.

  On Usmanbhai’s command his men followed Zahyan out. He was barely aware of them even as they swarmed around him.

  ‘We’ll seek them out on the streets of Gandhinagar. There’s a party office in Thaltej. Just one call . . .’

  ‘Bhai, we’ll kill those people!’

  Pushing them aside, Zahyan walked. He did not know where to go. He could not go home. Shouldering responsibility even as a boy had ensured a certain standing for him within the family. He now felt more a failure than he ever had. What about poor Mahnoor? He would take Mahnoor away, far away to where his father’s rules and the shame that had been heaped upon her would not reach her at all. But even as he swore this, he was not sure how far they could run. The video in circulation might be an enemy beyond his control. He feared it.

  He was aware suddenly of shouting. He’d circled back to the lanes of a market area adjoining the Party office, an area mostly Muslim in demographic. Usmanbhai’s men, now numbering about two dozen, were demanding retribution for Mahnoor’s honour. Some picked up stones and sticks. Ignoring the dealer’s protests some grabbed iron rods, metal objects and glass bottles from a scrap shop.

  In threes and fours they barged into the small, Hindu-owned shops by the side of the road–an eatery, a clothes shop, a jewellery store. The jeweller, a fat, middle-aged man dressed in a China silk kurta-pyjama was dragged out of his shop.

  Zahyan watched them tear at his clothes, beat and kick him. He heard the thump of fists on flesh and the man’s howls of pain. More people joined in. Hardly aware of what he was at, Zahyan pushed his way into the centre of the group. The faces seemed barely human, their teeth bared, snarling, showering abuse and spit. Heavy arms reached for the man they were determined to extract justice from.

  Thrust and jostled almost off his feet Zahyan looked from one face to the next. His head grew hot with rage. This is how his gentle wife had been mauled and torn at. His gaze fell on the jeweller, his clothes tattered, ear
and nose bleeding, almost beaten to the ground. He was crying, pleading to be spared.

  His eyes transfixed on the crouching figure, Zahyan’s emotions drained away. This Hindu was as blameless as Mahnoor had been. The moment hinged on his decision just as it had hinged on Suveer’s in Gandhinagar. Suveer had chosen to defend Mahnoor. Zahyan could call an end to the beating. Now. But who then would pay for all that his wife had suffered?

  He pushed his way out of the crowd and walked quickly off in the direction of his father’s house, turning a deaf ear to Usmanbhai’s men calling after him.

  28

  M

  ahnoor was startled when Zahyan entered her mother-in-law’s kitchen where she was peeling and chopping vegetables to cook for lunch. She kept aside what she was doing and stood up worriedly. Zahyan was breathing hard. His hair and clothes were drenched with sweat.

  ‘There’s been a riot,’ he told her. ‘We have to go away from here.’

  ‘Will we be attacked?’ Mahnoor asked fearfully. She glanced at the lit stove in the dark kitchen, on which a pressure cooker with daal and rice was hissing, wondering what to do about half-cooked food if they had to leave in a hurry.

  He swallowed some mouthfuls of water from a tumbler she filled and handed to him. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘But Suveer’s news feature is being shown on cable TV. Your face is visible.’ He did not tell her that her description of being molested was also on air. He was deeply sorry for bringing this upon her: he blamed himself for allowing Suveer to record her narration.

  ‘Will Abbu and Chachajaan be angry?’ she asked anxiously.

  ‘They are worried for your honour; for the family’s honour.’

  ‘But I was honoured . . .’ she said after a pause, ‘by my husband and Suveer Bhaijaan and Reva Bhabhi.’

  He realised that she’d been holding the memory of their time together, guarding it like a small flame from the gusts of fear and sadness that threatened to overcome her within these walls. In the dim, shrunken space he’d brought her to, with her dupatta pulled tightly over her forehead and tucked carefully behind her ears, fingers sticky and eyes watering from the onions she’d been peeling, her beauty and honour were as peerless as the moonlight for which she had been named. They struck him as things intrinsic to her nature. Who could possibly strip them away?

  He gathered her close.

  ‘I wish you could be happy again,’ she said, her cheek against his shoulder. ‘I only wanted justice for you,’ he was saying, his lips to her forehead. ‘I want us to live like we did,’ she said, their words like wavelets overlapping.

  The sight of the man grunting with pain, blood streaming from his nose filled his vision. How were they to know ordinary joy, having seen what they had? Zahyan tried to inhale so the stone in his chest might somehow shift and let him breathe. He felt he could never go back. There was no way home.

  ‘You carry on cooking,’ he said. He pressed his lips to her forehead to still her anxiety. ‘I’ll make us some tea. Like we used to in our Puneet Nagar house, we’ll just . . . sit together.’

  When he went to the stove, she mopped the sweat off her neck with the end of her dupatta and continued with her work. Her lips moved silently. She prayed that they might be safe and no trouble should come looking for them.

  ***

  Suveer resigned from his job at PBS the day after his news feature appeared on cable networks, causing skirmishes across the state of Gujarat. Immediately after he’d sent the email, Ranjan called him into his office. Shwetalena had also been summoned. With her characteristic raised eyebrow, lips twisted in the semblance of a smile, she quipped that she would miss him.

  ‘It’s really the wrong time to quit on us, you know. We need you to report on the waves your film’s created!’

  Suveer didn’t find it funny. ‘Not my film,’ he said shortly.

  Ranjan could not meet his eyes. He was deeply embarrassed by how his daughter had reworked Suveer’s footage. She’d run photos of the victim from the data card in the Canon 5D camera that Suveer had, as was protocol, handed back to the office. She’d added potentially incendiary quotes which Suveer had witheld, and then distributed the feature without running it by him first.

  ‘I accept your resignation. I’ll write you a formal reply,’ he said to Suveer. ‘Sorry, man,’ he added without looking at his daughter. ‘We didn’t do right by you.’

  Shwetalena, miffed at her father’s apology for her actions, couldn’t refrain from rendering Suveer a bit of professional advice out of her father’s hearing.

  ‘Your squeamishness on so-called ethics could cost you more jobs like this one. It’s not my place to tell you, but I will: get smart.’

  As he turned his back on his workplace, Suveer knew he’d made a regrettable mistake giving Shwetalena access to his raw sound footage and photographs. He’d wished so desperately for his feature to be circulated that he hadn’t thought the decision over. It had seemed necessary to have it out before the elections. Had he, somewhere deep down, wanted simply to make an impact so his work would be noticed? Had his journalistic ambitions made him blind to the cost?

  He hoped against hope that his friends wouldn’t have to pay for his mistake. Mahnoor’s face might become the recognisable face of a suffering minority in the media. It would raise passions and stand for a cause, but she might never be able to move on from here. Her own mirror would remind her everyday of what had happened; over time become part of an identity forced on her.

  29

  T

  wo months from the day they arrived in Baroda, Zahyan got a job as an assistant professor of Science at the Naveen University on Vasna Road. Mahnoor and he found a small flat to rent close to the college and moved in with their few possessions.

  Mahnoor rejoiced in each thing she got that would make their little flat a home, be it a tea strainer or a pair of cushion covers. She taped a poster of plump, smiling babies on the bedroom wall. She prayed that she would conceive; a child would make Zahyan forget the past and be happy again. She did not know that the members of an underground cell of Usmanbhai’s party had come calling, and that Zahyan had agreed to a meeting.

  The meeting was convened in the classroom of a school attached to a private masjid, after school hours.

  ‘Our brother, Zahyan Sheikh, is a senior-level teacher, a very clever and erudite man,’ Usmanbhai introduced. ‘He is a dear friend of the political leader Wajidbhai Ansari, who, as some of you may know, is my sister’s husband.’

  When prompted, Zahyan narrated the Gandhinagar incident. Many among the fifteen men gathered had seen the news feature on cable TV but they listened with rapt attention. They did not look away with shame or in sympathy. Instead their faces darkened with anger at what Mahnoor had suffered.

  When he’d finished, they looked to their leader Nawazuddin to speak.

  ‘We must make sure her honour is compensated and restored,’ Nawazuddin said gravely. ‘The voice of Truth will be heard, not silenced.’

  ‘Inshallah,’ they affirmed.

  ‘An exalted Heaven awaits those that execute God’s will which is to restore the balance between weak and strong,’ he went on. ‘Justice will be delivered.’

  To Zahyan, Nawazuddin appeared an unlikely leader, a lean man only about five feet two inches tall with watery eyes that he frequently dabbed with a handkerchief. He’d looked comical greeting the rest with a ear-to-ear grin before the meeting, not someone you’d take seriously. Yet he seemed to have everyone’s respect. Zahyan found himself curious: possibly Nawazuddin had a thorough knowledge of the holy text or maybe the secret lay in the humility of his demeanor.

  Nawazuddin went on to describe a rewarding afterlife in sombre tones: ‘Allah guarantees that He will admit the mujahid in His cause into paradise if he is killed, otherwise He will return him to his home safely with rewards and war booty.’

  Zahyan was grateful for being given an audience here, but wasn’t interested in learning about the benefits of Ji
hadi death. He’d been up against cruelty and indifference and was ready to lob live grenades at Solanki and his party workers, if that was what it would take to bring them to their knees. He thought he might work his way to asking if these men would help him.

  Nawazuddin noticed Zahyan’s subtle disdain for his description of heaven but smiled when their gazes met.

  ‘Do you wish for justice, brother?’

  ‘I do,’ Zahyan replied bluntly.

  ‘We will surely help you,’ Nawaz touched his shoulder and looked to the others, giving them permission to speak their minds.

  ‘It is regrettable and condemnable what was wrought upon our sister,’ one said.

  ‘Shame!’ a couple of them spat.

  ‘Yet you must keep in mind that the mothers and sisters of our community have been brutalised in riots since Partition and Indian Independence.’

  ‘Even now, in Kashmir . . .’

  ‘To think of avenging only your own tragedy is not moral, brother.’

  ‘Read these,’ one of them said, removing booklets from his knapsack. Zahyan was immediately on his guard. He didn’t plan to get brainwashed like the poor fools he read about every day in the newspaper. His own purpose would get diluted. Saying that he could not read Urdu too well, he held the booklets loosely in his hands to return later.

  The rest discussed and advised: Contemplate beyond your own pain and work to redress the suffering of our community. Be prepared for the next time that the infidels try to satisfy their thirst for blood. The next time we will be ready to defend our women and children. We will avenge every attack . . . shed blood for blood.

  Zahyan did not know that men like Hareshbhai Solanki spoke much the same way at their meetings, except that their tone held the arrogance of the majority community and these speeches, the anger of the minority. Pronouncements were phrased in a language Zahyan had consciously skirted all these years by keeping away from the huddles of men who’d made them even at brightly-lit nikah and Eid parties.