The king lifted wine-darkened eyes. “Begone, wraith!”
Sometimes he stops at the India Gate lawns in the heart of modern Delhi and buys ice-cream from a vendor and eats it sitting by one of the fountains that Lutyens built. Watching the play of light on the shimmering water, he thinks about the British invaders, who brought one of the richest and oldest civilizations on earth to abject poverty in only two hundred years. They built these great edifices, gracious buildings, and fountains, but even they had to leave it all behind. Kings came and went, the goras came and went, but the city lives on. Sometimes he sees apparitions of the goras, the palefaces, walking by him or riding on horses. Each time he yells out to them: “Your people are doomed. You will leave here. Your Empire will crumble.” Once in a while they glance at him, startled, before they fade away.
In his more fanciful moments, he wonders if he hasn’t, in some way, caused history to happen the way it does. Planted a seed of doubt in a British officer’s mind about the permanency of the Empire. Despite his best intentions, convinced Mohammad Shah that the impending invasion is not a real danger but a ploy wrought against him by evil spirits. But he knows that apart from the Emperor, nobody he has communicated with is of any real importance in the course of history, and that he is simply deluding himself about his own significance.
Still, he makes compulsive notes of his more interesting encounters. He carries with him at all times a thick, somewhat shabby notebook, one-half of which is devoted to recording these temporal adventures. But because the apparitions he sees are so clear, he is sometimes not certain whether the face he glimpses in the crowd, or the man wrapped in shawls passing him by on a cold night, belong to this time or some other. Only some incongruity – spatial or temporal – distinguishes the apparitions from the rest.
Sometimes he sees landscapes too, but rarely – a skyline dotted with palaces and temple spires, a forest in the middle of a busy thoroughfare – and, strangest of all, once an array of tall, jewelled towers reaching into the clouds. Each such vision seems to be charged with a peculiar energy, like a scene lit up by lightning. And although the apparitions are apparently random and not often repeated, there are certain places where he sees (he thinks) the same people again and again. For instance, while travelling on the Metro, he almost always sees people in the subway tunnels, floating through the train and the passengers on the platforms, dressed in tatters, their faces pale and unhealthy as though they have never beheld the sun. The first time he saw them, he shuddered. “The Metro is quite new,” he thought to himself, “and the first underground train system in Delhi. So what I saw must be in the future . . .”
One day, he tells himself, he will write a history of the future.
The street is Nai Sarak, a name he has always thought absurd. New Road, it means, but this road has not been new in a very long time. He could cross the street in two jumps if it wasn’t so crowded with people, shoulder to shoulder. The houses are like that too, hunched together with windows like dull eyes, and narrow, dusty stairways and even narrower alleys in between. The ground floors are taken up by tiny, musty shops containing piles of books that smell fresh and pungent, a wake-up smell like coffee. It is a hot day, and there is no shade. The girl he is following is just another Delhi University student looking for a bargain, trying not to get jostled or groped in the crowd, much less have her purse stolen. There are small, barefoot boys running around with wire-carriers of lemon-water in chipped glasses, and fat old men in their undershirts behind the counters, bargaining fiercely with pale, defenseless college students over the hum of electric fans, rubbing clammy hands across their hairy bellies while they slurp their ice drinks, signaling to some waif when the transaction is complete, so that the desired volume can be deposited into the feverish hands of the student. Some of the shopkeepers like to add a little lecture along the lines of, “Now, my son, study hard, make your parents proud. . . .” Aseem hasn’t been here in a long time (since his own college days, in fact); he is not prepared for any of this: the brightness of the day, the white dome of the mosque rising up behind him, the old stone walls of the city engirdling him, enclosing him in people and sweat and dust. He’s dazzled by the white kurtas of the men, the neat beards and the prayer caps; this is, of course, the Muslim part of the city, Old Delhi, but not as romantic as his grandmother used to make it sound. He has a rare flash of memory into a past where he was a small boy listening to the old woman’s tales. His grandmother was one of the Hindus who never went back to old Delhi, not after the madness of Partition in 1947, the Hindu-Muslim riots that killed thousands, but he still remembers how she spoke of the places of her girlhood: parathe-walon-ki-gali, the lane of the paratha-makers, where all the shops sell freshly cooked flatbreads of every possible kind, stuffed with spiced potatoes or minced lamb, or fenugreek leaves, or crushed cauliflower and fiery red chillies; and Dariba Kalan, where after hundreds of years they still sell the best and purest silver in the world, delicate chains and anklets and bracelets. Among the crowds that throng these places he has seen the apparitions of courtesans and young men, and the blood and thunder of invasions, and the bodies of princes hanged by British soldiers. To him the old city, surrounded by high, crumbling stone walls, is like the heart of a crone who dreams perpetually of her youth.
The girl who’s caught his attention walks on. Aseem hasn’t been able to get a proper look at her – all he’s noticed are the dark eyes, and the death in them. After all these years in the city he’s learned to recognize a certain preoccupation in the eyes of some of his fellow citizens: the desire for the final anonymity that death brings. Sometimes, as in this case, he knows it before they do.
The girl goes into a shop. The proprietor, a young man built like a wrestler, is dressed only in cotton shorts. The massage-man is working his back, kneading and sculpting the slick, gold muscles. The young man says: “Advanced Biochemistry? Watkins? One copy, only one copy left.” He shouts into the dark, cavernous interior, and the requisite small boy comes up, bearing the volume as though it were a rare book. The girl’s face shows too much relief; she’s doomed even before the bargaining begins. She parts with her money with a resigned air, steps out into the noisy brightness, and is caught up with the crowd in the street like a piece of wood tossed in a river. She pushes and elbows her way through it, fending off anonymous hands that reach toward her breasts or back. He loses sight of her for a moment, but there she is, walking past the mosque to the bus stop on the main road. At the bus stop she catches Aseem’s glance and gives him the pre-emptive cold look. Now there’s a bus coming, filled with people, young men hanging out of the doorways as though on the prow of a sailboat. He sees her struggling through the crowd toward the bus, and at the last minute she’s right in its path. The bus is not stopping but (in the tantalizing manner of Delhi buses) barely slowing, as though to play catch with the crowd. It is an immense green and yellow metal monstrosity bearing down on her as she stands rooted, clutching her bag of books. This is Aseem’s moment. He lunges at the girl, pushing her out of the way, grabbing her before she can fall to the ground. There is a roaring in his ears, the shriek of brakes, and the conductor yelling. Her books are scattered on the ground. He helps pick them up. She’s trembling with shock. In her eyes he sees himself for a moment: a drifter, his face unshaven, his hair unkempt. He tells her: don’t do it, don’t ever do it. Life is never so bereft of hope. You have a purpose you must fulfill. He repeats it like a mantra, and she looks bewildered, as though she doesn’t understand that she was trying to kill herself. He can see that he puzzles her: his grammatical Hindi and his fair English labels him middle class and educated, like herself, but his appearance says otherwise. Although he knows she’s not the woman he is seeking, he pulls out the computer printout just to be sure. No, she’s not the one. Cheeks too thin, chin not sharp enough. He pushes one of the business cards into her hand and walks away. From a distance, he sees that she’s looking at the card in her hand and frowning. Will she throw it away?
At the last minute, she shoves it into her bag with the books. He remembers all too clearly the first time someone gave him one of the cards. “Worried About Your Future? Consult Pandit Vidyanath. Computerized and Air-Conditioned Office. Discover Your True Purpose in Life.” There is a logo of a beehive and an address in South Delhi.
Later he will write up this encounter in the second half of his notebook. In three years, he has filled this part almost to capacity. He’s stopped young men from flinging themselves off the bridges that span the Yamuna. He’s prevented women from jumping off tall buildings, from dousing themselves with kerosene, from murderous encounters with city traffic. All this by way of seeking her, whose story will be the last in his book.
But the very first story in this part of his notebook is his own . . .
Three years ago. He is standing on a bridge over the Yamuna. There is a heavy, odorous fog in the air, the kind that mars winter mornings in Delhi. He is shivering because of the chill, and because he is tired, tired of the apparitions that have always plagued him, tired of the endless rounds of medications and appointments with doctors and psychologists. He has just written a letter to his fiancée, severing their already fragile relationship. Two months ago, he stopped attending his college classes. His mother and father have been dead a year and two years respectively, and there will be no one to mourn him, except for relatives in other towns who know him only by reputation as a person with problems. Last night he tried, as a last resort, to leave Delhi, hoping that perhaps the visions would stop. He got as far as the railway station. He stood in the line before the ticket counter, jostled by young men carrying hold-alls and aggressive matrons in bright saris. “Name?” said the man behind the window, but Aseem couldn’t remember it. Around him, in the cavernous interior of the station, shouting, red-clad porters rushed past, balancing tiers of suitcases on their turbaned heads, and vast waves of passengers swarmed the stairs that led up across the platforms. People were nudging him, telling him to hurry up, but all he could think of were the still trains between the platforms, steaming in the cold air, hissing softly like warm snakes, waiting to take him away. The thought of leaving filled him with a sudden terror. He turned and walked out of the station. Outside, in the cold, glittering night, he breathed deep, fierce breaths of relief, as though he had walked away from his own death.
So here he is, the morning after his attempted escape, standing on the bridge, shivering in the fog. He notices a crack in the concrete railing, which he traces with his finger to the seedling of a pipal tree, growing on the outside of the rail. He remembers his mother pulling pipal seedlings out of walls and the paved courtyard of their house, over his protests. He remembers how difficult it was for him to see, in each fragile sapling, the giant full-grown tree. Leaning over the bridge, he finds himself wondering which will fall first – the pipal tree or the bridge. Just then he hears a bicycle on the road behind him, one that needs oiling, evidently, and before he knows it some rude fellow with a straggly beard has come out of the fog, pulled him off the railing and on to the road. “Don’t be a fool, don’t do it,” says the stranger, breathing hard. His bicycle is lying on the roadside, one wheel still spinning. “Here, take this,” the man says, pushing a small card into Aseem’s unresisting hand. “Go see them. If they can’t give you a reason to live, your own mother wouldn’t be able to.”
The address on the card proves to be in a small marketplace near Sarojini Nagar. Around a dusty square of withered grass where ubiquitous pariah dogs sleep fitfully in the pale sun, there is a row of shops. The place he seeks is a corner shop next to a vast jamun tree. Under the tree, three humped white cows are chewing cud, watching him with bovine indifference. Aseem makes his way through a jangle of bicycles, motor-rickshaws, and people, and finds himself before a closed door with a small sign saying only, “Pandit Vidyanath, Consultations.” He goes in.
The Pandit is not in, but his assistant, a thin, earnest-faced young man, waves Aseem to a chair. The assistant is sitting behind a desk with a PC, a printer, and a plaque bearing his name: Om Prakash, BSc Physics (Failed), Delhi University. There is a window with the promised air-conditioner (apparently defunct) occupying its lower half. On the other side of the window is a beehive in the process of completion. Aseem feels he has come to the wrong place, and regrets already the whim that brought him here, but the beehive fascinates him, how it is still and in motion all at once, and the way the bees seem to be in concert with one another, as though performing a complicated dance. Two of the bees are crawling on the computer and there is one on the assistant’s arm. Om Prakash seems completely unperturbed; he assures Aseem that the bees are harmless, and tries to interest him in an array of bottles of honey on the shelf behind him. Apparently the bees belong to Pandit Vidyanath, a man of many facets, who keeps very busy because he also works for the city. (Aseem has a suspicion that perhaps the great man is no more than a petty clerk in a municipal office.) Honey is ten rupees a bottle. Aseem shakes his head, and Om Prakash gets down to business with a noisy clearing of his throat, asking questions and entering the answers into the computer. By now Aseem feels like a fool.
“How does your computer know the future?” Aseem asks.
Om Prakash has a lanky, giraffe-like grace, although he is not tall. He makes a deprecating gesture with his long, thin hands that travels all the way up to his mobile shoulders.
“A computer is like a beehive. Many bits and parts, none is by itself intelligent. Combine together, and you have something that can think. This computer is not an ordinary one. Built by Pandit Vidyanath himself.”
Om Prakash grins as the printer begins to whir.
“All persons who come here seek meaning. Each person has their own dharma, their own unique purpose. We don’t tell future, because future is beyond us, Sahib. We tell them why they need to live.”
He hands a printout to Aseem. When he first sees it, the page makes no sense. It consists of xs arranged in an apparently random pattern over the page. He holds it at a distance and sees – indistinctly – the face of a woman.
“Who is she?”
“It is for you to interpret what this picture means,” says Om Prakash. “You must live because you need to meet this woman, perhaps to save her or be saved. It may mean that you could be at the right place and time to save her from some terrible fate. She could be your sister or daughter, a wife or stranger.”
There are dark smudges for eyes, the hint of a high cheekbone, and swirl of hair across the cheek, half-obscuring the mouth. The face is broad and heart-shaped, narrowing to a small chin.
“But this is not very clear . . . It could be almost anyone. How will I know. . . .”
“You will know when you meet her,” Om Prakash says with finality. “There is no charge. Thank you, sir, and here are cards for you to give other unfortunate souls.”
Aseem takes the pack of business cards and leaves. He distrusts the entire business, especially the bit about no charge. No charge? In a city like Delhi?
But despite his doubts he finds himself intrigued. He had expected the usual platitudes about life and death, the fatalistic pronouncements peculiar to charlatan fortune tellers, but this fellow Vidyanath obviously is an original. That Aseem must live simply so he might be there for someone at the right moment: what an amusing, humbling idea! As the days pass it grows on him, and he comes to believe it, if for nothing else than to have something in which to believe. He scans the faces of the people in the crowds, on the dusty sidewalks, the overladen buses, the Metro, and he looks for her. He lives so that he will cross her path some day. For three years, he has convinced himself that she is real, that she waits for him. He’s made something of a life for himself, working at a photocopy shop in Lajpat Nagar, where he can sleep on winter nights, or making deliveries for shopkeepers in Defence Colony, who pay enough to keep him in food and clothing. For three years, he has handed out hundreds of the little business cards, and visited the address in South Delhi dozens of times. He’s become u
sed to the bees, the defunct air-conditioner, and even to Om Prakash. Although there is too much distance between them to allow friendship (a distance of temperament, really), Aseem has told Om Prakash about the apparitions he sees. Om Prakash receives these confidences with his rather foolish grin and much waggling of the head in wonder, and says he will tell Pandit Vidyanath. Only, each time Aseem visits there is no sign of Pandit Vidyanath, so now Aseem suspects that there is no such person, that Om Prakash himself is the unlikely mind behind the whole business.
But sometimes he is scared of finding the woman. He imagines himself saving her from death or a fate worse than death, realizing at last his purpose. But after that, what awaits him? The oily embrace of the Yamuna?
Or will she save him in turn?
One of the things he likes about the city is how it breaks all rules. Delhi is a place of contradictions – it transcends thesis and antithesis. Here he has seen both the hovels of the poor and the opulent monstrosities of the rich. At major intersections, where the rich wait impatiently in their air-conditioned cars for the light to change, he’s seen bone-thin waifs running from car to car, peddling glossy magazines like Vogue and Cosmopolitan. Amid the glitzy new high-rises are troupes of wandering cows and pariah dogs; rhesus monkeys mate with abandon in the trees around Parliament House.
He hasn’t slept well – last night the police raided the Aurobindo Marg sidewalk where he was sleeping. Some foreign vip was expected in the morning so the riffraff on the roadsides were driven off by stick-wielding policemen. This has happened many times before, but today Aseem is smarting with rage and humiliation: he has a bruise on his back where a policeman’s stick hit him, and it burns in the relentless heat. Death lurks behind the walled eyes of the populace – but for once he is sick of his proximity to death. So he goes to the only place where he can leave behind the city without actually leaving its borders – another anomaly in a city of surprises. Amid the endless sprawl of brick houses and crowded roads, within Delhi’s borders, there lies an entire forest: the Delhi Ridge, a green lung. The coolness of the forest beckons to him.
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