Diwali in Muzaffarnagar

by Tanuj Solanki

  Soon came 14 February, Valentine’s Day. In Holy Angels’, it had been a special day since Class VII. The girls would bring chocolates to school, and the boys would sneak in flowers. The flowers could be any type – roses were preferred, but difficult to procure, and I remember even marigold being used. I myself never participated in the flowers-and-chocolate business in Holy Angels’. I had seen how the number of flowers brought to school that day was always larger than the number of flowers given to girls. Most guys could just not pick up the courage to hand the flower, and I suspected I would be one of those if I tried.

  Daanish, I remember from the V-Days in ninth and tenth, would get multiple roses to the school and would manage to give all of them away. His advances were never taken seriously, for any girl receiving a rose from Daanish knew that there were four others like her. There was much frolic about this – the girls would tease Dadonis about his multiple crushes, something he would laugh about.

  For this V-Day, Daanish’s plan was to take girls out to Harmony – have the bigger burgers at McDonald’s, play some video games at Zone 7, watch a movie or something, maybe even try some kissing in the basement. He had included Usman, Ankush and me in his plan. But Usman backed out immediately, saying Daanish was out of his mind. When the time came to decide whom we wanted to go out with, Daanish announced he was going to ask Gunjan. Hearing this, Ankush backed out of the trip as well. Ankush and Gunjan were neighbours, and there was something wrong between them. They had not been on speaking terms for several years now.

  I decided I wanted to go out with Anjana. She and I had shared a bench at school till Class VI, after which strict Sister Venetia, who taught history well but completely confused us in civics, made boys and girls sit in different rows. Anjana and I had often joked about being boyfriend–girlfriend when we grew up, and I hoped that she too remembered the days when it was easier for us to say silly things like that – days when childhood was present at either end of our present.

  In a meeting at Meenakshi Chowk a couple of days before the big day, Daanish told me that Gunjan had said yes to going out with him. He asked me about Anjana, and I told him that she had refused to go to Harmony. ‘I don’t blame her,’ I added.

  ‘You don’t blame her?’ Daanish said. ‘What does that mean? You blame Ricky Ponting, then?’

  ‘It’s a sensible decision,’ I said. ‘It is risky to take the girls so far out.’

  ‘What risk? It would have been fun,’ Daanish replied. ‘And you don’t get anything in life without risk.’ The irritation was clear on his face. Gunjan would also say no to the plan now that it was just the two of them.

  Then my patience ran out, and a giggle burst through from me.

  ‘What?’ Daanish asked. ‘What, you bastard? She said yes?’

  ‘She did say no to Harmony, but she said we could meet somewhere inside the town.’ I think I was grinning with jubilation, not least because I had been able to make Daanish depend on me for something.

  It took a moment for him to reconcile with the change in plans. But after that he asked excitedly, ‘So, any ideas?’

  We decided to go to Nandi in the Nai Mandi area. It was not that there were many options. Luckily for us, 14 February fell on a day when Holy Angels’ was open, so Gunjan and Anjana didn’t have to make any excuses to get out of their homes. We would not have had them bunk school, for that would have meant having to spend a lot of time together, which could have been very problematic, even boring.

  So we met the girls after school, outside the large gate of Holy Angels’. Anjana quietly sat behind me on my Activa. I assumed Anjana was shy. I was too excited to worry about it. While on the scooter, I stole glimpses to my right, where the scooter’s shadow and our shadows bobbed over the road and the cars and two wheelers and other roadside things; I saw the sunlight between her silhouette and mine, and also how her back was painfully erect, with her arms going behind it to hold the metal frame behind the seat. Her hair was freer, and it somehow delighted me to look at its freedom in the shadow.

  Daanish had Gunjan behind him on his bullet, with her hands on his shoulders. When I looked at them, it was with envy – they were the two most beautiful people in Muzaffarnagar.

  It took barely five to six minutes to reach Nandi. We parked our vehicles by the road and went inside. Nandi had made a small, restaurant-like area next to the tall displays of food items. We were all excited; nervous laughter emitted from all of us as we sat down after placing our orders at the counter. There was a thrill in doing what we were doing, yes. It felt like breaking some rule, but I wasn’t sure which one. Soon, as we bantered, as the roses (sourced by Daanish) and chocolates were given, as sideways hugs were shared with the girls, the other customers at Nandi looked at us as if they had a better idea, as if they understood exactly what we were doing, what rules we were breaking. Their gazes didn’t approve of this – of young boys and girls loafing at Nandi and celebrating a day that generally had no business being celebrated in Muzaffarnagar. I looked at Daanish with concern, which he didn’t register. He just winked at me and moved his hand behind Gunjan’s chair (she was sitting next to him, obviously). I smiled back but, aware now of the gaze of others, I was sweating.

  In the next minute, Anjana touched my hand with her fingers. My hand was below the table, on my thigh. She picked my hand and placed it on her thigh. The sweat on my forehead cooled. I got an immediate and nervous erection. In my mind, the entire clientele at Nandi was looking at that hand of mine, something that was impossible since both Anjana and I were concealed well, sitting behind a table, with our backs to the wall.

  Nevertheless, I pulled my hand back. Anjana shifted on her chair. I shifted on mine. I stuffed my mouth with the kachori on the table. She pinched a petal of the rose I had given to her. When I finally looked at her after a minute, she smiled in a forgiving way. That gave me some relief.

  After two rounds of snacking, we left Nandi to chit-chat right outside the restaurant, where our vehicles were parked. Gunjan leaned on Daanish’s bullet, seeing which Anjana also sat on my Activa. Daanish moved his fingers through his hair. He and Gunjan laughed at something. Anjana slapped me on my shoulder, making a complaint I didn’t really register. Will I get married to her, I was thinking. We were perhaps not having fun but only simulating fun. But there was no other way; the excitement was too high. And that’s probably why we didn’t notice the two men who came up next to our vehicles till they started talking to us.

  ‘What are you doing here, hein?’ the larger one among them asked, his hands behind his back.

  ‘What’s your problem?’ Danish said. He shouldn’t have said that, I thought. He was acting tough, showing off.

  ‘Tell us your names. What are your names?’ the other one said. He was smoking a cigarette.

  ‘Why?’ Daanish replied, standing up and moving towards the two. ‘You own this place or what?’

  The men moved their gaze towards the girls. ‘What are your names?’

  The girls told them their names. They weren’t sitting on the bikes anymore. I had the weird feeling of being caught in something terrible. Almost in reflex, I moved my keys into the Activa keyhole and unlocked it. The smoking man noticed this.

  ‘So what’s your problem, eh?’ Daanish said, walking up to the man who had his hands behind his back. They were both the same height, about six feet, the tallest among all present there.

  ‘Tell us your names,’ the other man repeated.

  ‘It is Daanish Alam. Now tell me what you intend to do with it.’

  ‘And what’s yours?’ the men asked me.

  ‘Ankush,’ I said. I don’t know why I lied.

  The man who was smoking stopped a rickshaw that was passing by. ‘Girls, you get into this rickshaw and go home.’

  ‘What do you want? Why should they leave?’ Daanish tried to intervene.

  The girls, terrified, followed the order. Daanish looked at me. He was trying to convey a signal which I couldn’t decipher.
I was worried because he had talked back to the men and now something bad could happen. The girls glanced back at us from the rickshaw.

  ‘You’ll do musalmani here, eh?’ the man with the arms behind his back barked, addressing Daanish. I now saw that he was concealing an iron rod behind his back.

  ‘What is that?’ I asked the man.

  The other man grabbed my throat and said, ‘You sure about your name?’

  I was stunned – not telling my real name was going to get me beaten. I started mumbling my sorrys.

  ‘That’s his name,’ Daanish said, and in the next instant, punched the man who held the iron rod.

  The man staggered, but did not lose his footing. The other man slapped me, and then pushed me on the Activa. ‘Go, or you will also get pulped,’ he said. He then punched Daanish on his chest. By now the first man had recovered, and he hit Daanish’s shoulder with the rod. Daanish yelped. I started my Activa. The rod had made a swoosh in cleaving the air. And then I heard the swoosh again. This time the rod hit Daanish on the left thigh. I looked at him. He had rage in his eyes, and I knew that he had not registered the pain of the second hit. I saw him lunge at the assaulter and take him to ground. The man poked the rod hard into Daanish’s ribs. The other man kicked him in the head. I saw a little burst of blood on the road. My friend was bleeding. There were three more men at the scene now; they had emerged from a neighbouring shop and looked hostile to Daanish.

  Daanish was raining punches on the man who had held the rod earlier, but punches and kicks were being delivered to him as well. I manoeuvred the scooter, almost circling the area where the fight was taking place. All I was thinking of was getting out of there. I rolled the accelerator. I did not look back at anything. Looking back did not even occur to me. But after there was a good distance between me and the scene, once I was safe, my vision constricted and my hands started shaking. I had to stop the scooter. I didn’t have any coherent thought for the next couple of minutes. In my mind, it was as if a pencil was making too many random criss-crosses, making everything unintelligible.

  Then I realized that those goons had assumed that I was Muslim – that’s what they meant about me being unsure of my name. Had Daanish saved me then? I heard the sound of an Enfield Bullet, but it was only in my head. My friend Daanish, I thought. ‘My friend Daanish,’ I mumbled. Daanish was probably still there, fighting. Or having fought. I had a vision of him getting pulped, and it sent a cold shudder down my spine. My teeth started chattering. I sat down on the edge of the road. There were people on that road, but none seemed to notice me. Or maybe not much that was wrong with me was visible. I tried to speak out my friend’s name, as if uttering his name would change things. But the ‘Daanish … Daanish …’ that came out of my mouth was worse than a whimper. Save him, a voice inside me said. I shook my head. I realized I was choking, and forced myself to take deep breaths. Nothing bad is going to happen, I told myself. Nothing too bad is going to happen.

  I spent five minutes like this, maybe ten, till a man wearing a chequered shirt over loose trousers, around my father’s age, came up to me. ‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘Nothing,’ I replied, rising to my feet and slapping the dust off my jeans. ‘Is this your scooter?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Why are you sitting here like this?’ When I couldn’t answer, he said, ‘Go home, beta. This is your age to study, not to sit on the road.’ My age to study, not sit on the road – that was right. I mounted my scooter and started it. I thought of going back to Nandi and checking what had happened to Daanish, but didn’t have the courage to do that. The scooter began homewards, running on a decree of its own, but as it did that, I allowed myself to think that Daanish had probably escaped without being too hurt. I cultivated this idea for the immediate comfort that it allowed me. But this lightness was a mistake, something that I would pay for later with a damning weight on my chest.

  At that time, however, I had made reaching home my only objective. When the scooter was at Meenakshi Chowk, I tried hard not to look at the point where Daanish and I would usually stand to make or break our numerous plans. There was that Khalapaar road to my right – the road beyond which Daanish’s safety lay today. Why did he have to pick a fight, I thought. But would it have mattered? Daanish was like this: bold, brash, and a show-off. Perhaps to distract myself, my mind recalled an incident with the S.D. physics teacher, who was used to beating up the boys on a whim. Once he had punched Daanish on his chest for not bringing the physics textbook to class. The punch had taken the wind out of Daanish’s lungs, and for a second he had collapsed on the bench. But then he had risen and looked into his abuser’s eyes with such rage that he had had to back off. It was the same fiery look that Daanish had given today to the man with the rod.

  After a while, the Company Gardens appeared to my left and the breeze turned nippier. I had to take the first left turn after the garden ended. As I neared home and the distance between the incident and me increased, my ability to lull myself into thinking that nothing too bad would happen also increased. But it was mostly because I was distracting myself, not letting myself think too much about the incident.

  The huge Numaish Camp ground, where I had played a lot of cricket before tenth standard, appeared to my right. Muslim kids from Khalapaar used to come to the ground too, but the kids from Jat Colony never played with them. The Muslim kids bowled faster, and we often compared them to the tearaway Pakistani bowlers of the nineties. The dilapidated walls of the Metro Motel passed me by to my left. It was a government-made motel that had been closed for years. But then whose undergarments were drying on the first floor? ‘It was never supposed to work,’ Papa had said of it, hinting at a government gaffe I had no care for. My friend Daanish, I thought. Then I crossed an empty ground to my left, whose only purpose was to house the circus during the annual numaish. I had never been to the circus. My friend Daanish. The air above the road I was on would remain misty right till the end of February. At the road’s end, I would take a left turn. The third house to the right would be mine.

  My friend Daanish.

  I opened the gate and parked the scooter in the front yard. Then I went inside the living room, where Mummy was turning the pages of the knitting issue of a Hindi magazine. ‘How was the test?’ she asked me.

  I didn’t answer. Then she said, ‘Oh but it was an extra class, right? Not a test.’

  I walked into my room to change. Then I lay down on my bed and closed my eyes. The events outside Nandi played in my mind vaguely, with some of the actions blurring out. The worry, and the effort I had put in to distract myself, quickly exhausted me. I fell asleep, and was woken up by Mummy after a few hours.

  During dinner, Papa asked me a lot of questions about my studies. He wanted to know what I thought the outcome would be, now that the board exams and the competitive exams were close. I guess I looked sick then, for he advised Mummy to take special care of me. He joked about me being a cricket player getting ready for a big test series.

  At one point, he spoke about some tension in the city after a violent incident in the Nai Mandi area. ‘Some Muslim kids were creating a ruckus and got a couple of slaps,’ he said, ‘and the whole of Khalapaar was shouting slogans at Meenakshi Chowk.’ I buried my face in my plate, knowing that it would be impossible to protest against his version of the events without revealing that I was present there.

  That night, I sat down to practise some maths problems from the chapter on probability. Probability was my weakest area, and it didn’t help that I could not really concentrate, for every other problem reminded me of the events of the day.

  The probability of a man hitting a target is ¼. He tries 5 times. The probability that the target will be hit at least 3 times is _______.

  Four boys and four girls sit in a row at random. The probability that boys and girls sit alternately is ________.

  And so on.

  Next day, the local Hindi bulletin ran a story on Daanish’s beating. The first thing I noticed in the story was Daanish’s reported a
ge – eighteen years. I was due to turn seventeen in a month’s time. It surprised me that in our conversations we had never discovered that he was elder to me. I established a silly connection between Daanish’s dexterity and his age, as if all my clumsiness could be explained away by the fact of me being a year younger. Could my cowardice be explained by that, too?

  The news story reported that Daanish and his friends were celebrating Valentine’s Day with Hindu girls. I was the only friend there, but the paper seemed to be suggesting that there were more than one. I was relieved by this absence of specifics about anyone other than Daanish. I didn’t want to be discovered.

  The hospital where Daanish was receiving care, Nisar Hospital, was in Khalapaar. His condition was reported as stable but not out of harm. It puzzled me to read that – what was the possible harm? Could he die?

  The story also covered the protest by Muslim leaders at Meenakshi Chowk. It then gave space to a statement – which mentioned a ‘Salman Khan–Shahrukh Khan culture’, something that young boys from Khalapaar wanted to bring to Muzaffarnagar – it was by the spokesperson of a Hindu organization.

  The report ended with the city DSP vowing to bring the perpetrators to justice.

  It was not I who had discovered the news in the paper. It was Papa, who showed it to me when I was brushing my teeth that morning, the index finger of his right hand pointing at the news. He asked me if the Daanish of the news story was my friend Daanish. I rinsed my mouth and read the news item. I could not feign indifference, but I had no response to his question, so I moved into my room with the newspaper still in my hands. I, in fact, wanted this question, this news, this entire situation to dissolve, to somehow not exist. Papa followed me into the room. He waited for me to read the news, then took the newspaper from me and walked away – all of it without uttering a word. I knew then that there were seeds of some sort of suspicion in him.