‘Aandhi,’ smiled the construction magnate. ‘Now it’ll get cool in the evening.’
As the tall dust-walkers strode past, she was dazzled at how rich with elements the city had become in the midst of the summer stupor; a vibrant poem from the earth after a dull drone of heat.
She set off in pursuit of those tall stilt-walkers of dust. Shaking off the smells of Duty Free, she rediscovered her father’s city. Flaming yellow amaltas and burnt orange gulmohar trees marked her way as she drove and pelted along in scooties. She saw grand farmhouses with spiky metal gates to keep out the poor and the potentially villainous. She visited the villages surrounding Delhi, Tata Safaris nuzzling bullock-carts. She met Munshi Gopalchand who had retired from bailiff service to a big Haryana landlord, come back to a double-storeyed house in Khirkee village and bought his son a cyber café. She saw call centres with their windows blackened, export houses sending fabric to California and Brussels. She juggled contradictory images of brutality and normalcy. There was an older rational life, a long continuum of human existence under the daily clamour.
In every touch and gesture and shout she fancied she saw empires and royal courts and kite-flying rooftops. She tried to trace the gestures back to where they must have come from but she was soon lost.
Summer flared into the monsoon. Sheets of hot rain came spraying into the Victoria Villa veranda. The jamun was covered in fruit and Vik called in the children from the surrounding shanties to shake the tree free of its riches and fill up their tins. Mia’s first taste of jamun was so tangy and satisfying that she couldn’t get enough of its purple pleasures and looked with camraderie at the friendly tree.
Vik kept up with his travels, Kerala, Kolkata, Berlin and Paris – promising every day that Goa awaited at the end of the year, his mother waited, a long break waited. She visited her grandmother’s home, St Stephen’s College where Anand had been a student and rebel, met his old friends who lamented his death, and because they were all important government personages now, laughed away their forgotten revolution. She spent some afternoons at Moksha Herbals gazing at the fresh stock arriving nearly every day. The make-up studio was specially impressive. One afternoon, she volunteered to have herself transformed into Naomi Campbell and was stunned at the near-perfect likeness.
The monsoon made the air as thick as a hot wet towel and the power cuts in Victoria Villa made for some desperate conversations with Mithu. Wait for October and November, Vik told her. Wait for Delhi’s prettiest months.
Sure enough, October then November, came with their air rich with festival. Chrysanthemums smiled to life. The city became crowded with religious renewal and consumer excitement. Deities pranced through marketplaces: Durga, Ganesh, effigies of Ravana. Mothers trailed through traffic dragging weepily reluctant Rams and Sitas to school Ram Lilas. Mia went to card parties at the runner-up’s plant-strewn flat, another card party at the home of the newspaper baron and another Diwali party where a fireworks display sent flashes of fire shaving closely past her ears. The smell of candles, dry fruit and silk reminded her so strongly of Karna that she realized she hadn’t stopped thinking of him in the past six months. Where was he?
She pulled out Sanatkumara’s card from the bottom of her suitcase and stared at the address. Pavitra Ashram, Bijwasan, Delhi.
The wait for Karna and the Kumbh Mela was a long one, but she wouldn’t have to wait much longer.
It was her duty to visit the Kumbh.
I must hollow out a crater and fill it with my revelations, cover it with sand and leave it for others to discover after I’m gone.
Sitting at the computer in the semi-circular study, she had already accumulated print-outs from the Net on the Mahakumbh Mela. The Grand Pitcher Festival, the first Mahakumbh of the new millennium was to start on January 9. Less than two months away. But where was her guide?
ALQUERIA, GOA
Francis Xavier had lots of stories about Goa. He would sit on the beach and tell long histories of his homeland to anyone who cared to listen: Goa was Portugal’s golden land, informed Francis Xavier. Up the Mandovi river, which wound its way through mangroves and coconut forests, Velha Goa became the Rome of the East. Golden Goa. Arabs, Jews and Persians came to the cobblestone marketplaces outside the huge cathedrals to sell horses, carpets, diamonds and rose water. A Portuguese carpenter from Lisbon would come to Goa and get so rich that he could become a fidalgo overnight and add Dom to his name.
For a while, the Portuguese had a grand time. They raced about on horseback or jolted about in palanquins in their own little strip of the Orient, building churches, marrying local beauties and converting whomever they could to Catholicism. But they spared little thought for mundane things like sanitation and after the torrential Goan monsoon, when the rain came thundering out of the sea flattening the palms and shacks, the gutters outside the villas and churches began to run with filthy water and dead leaves. Malaria and plague began. The Inquisition arrived and drove away the fun loving traders. Golden Goa began to fade.
Yet, buried deep behind the palms, in the Catholic villas and the Hindu mansions, a new civility was born. Hindus and Christians lived separate lives yet they learnt to coexist in this new civility. Paddy, coconuts and oil were offered to Jesus, richly gilded churches sat along Shiva temples. Feast days were like festival days. Garlands and diyas decorated roadside crucifixes. In Alqueria, civilizations had learnt to live together in peace. In Alqueria, Father Rudy made plans to visit the Kumbh Mela.
‘Right, let’s go through this again,’ Justin said to Indi for the hundredth time, as he had over the past months. ‘The guy whispered something? He said something?’
It was late. Outside, Francis Xavier snored against the wall of Indi’s house. The intruder hadn’t come for several weeks and probably never would return, although for Indi his presence was intangibly constant.
‘I’ve told you a thousand times, Justin,’ Indi threw up her hands. ‘He said there’s no one here. But he whispered it. I told you, I couldn’t make out his voice. He smelt of something. Nail-polish remover. Something like that.’
‘All I saw,’ Justin said, ‘was this tall guy rushing off down the road, running up the hill wearing some sort of costume, something, a bow, can’t be sure…and then suddenly…nothing.’ He sighed, ‘This world is full of scary creatures. Young, scary creatures. Much younger than me, to be able to run so fast.’
‘Well, at least Francis Xavier is here.’
‘What the hell did the creep want?’ exclaimed Justin. ‘Why was he so bothered by little Sharkey’s Hotel? We’ve just got to get through to him somehow, if he comes back. There has to be a reason why he’s doing this. There has to be.’
‘There doesn’t,’ Indi’s brows were arched. ‘Nothing needs a reason. Disasters are as much part of our lives as the sun and moon.’
‘Some sort of very angry crank,’ he said. ‘A costumed clown. Listen, do you want me to come and live with you here? I’ve been wanting to do so for months!’
‘Oh rubbish! Of course not. How many times do we need to discuss this. Nothing’ – she waved her cane – ‘nothing will happen to me here. You’re needed at the hospital. I don’t think it’s me he’s after, anyway. It’s the hotel. Besides,’ she smiled, ‘there’s Francis Xavier.’
‘That guy was terrifying,’ Justin said. ‘Could be an extremist. An extremist, you understand? Don’t you read the newspapers? Are you,’ Justin shouted, ‘by any chance, blind?’
‘No, I am not blind,’ Indi said calmly. ‘You’re talking to a former Additional Secretary. I know a troublemaker when I smell one. They say it’s unemployment, but I think it’s a crazed sense of…something else. The LTTE picks them even before they’re ten. The Khalistan movement was all mostly young. How old was Bhindranwale? Late thirties, if I remember right. No matter if their cause is just or unjust, they somehow feel they’re constantly up against an enemy; that they need to destroy the enemy before the enemy gets them. The energy of a hormonally cha
rged young male is a great asset or a lethal weapon. If harnessed to the good it leads on to great things. If not,’ she ran a hand across her unseeing eyes, ‘nothing is more destructive.’
There was a pause before Justin spoke. A pause in which faint choir music from Santa Ana could be heard. ‘I don’t think this guy’s anything like that, for heaven’s sake. Probably just a small time criminal. But I’m confused,’ Justin said quietly. ‘What’s he got against us?’ He got to his feet, his eyes on her face, ‘I think I’ll go to the station again. I’ll tell them about the other incidents. They need to send out an alert. We’ll put it in the newspapers. Just to be on the safe side.’
‘We need to talk to him,’ she said briskly. ‘We need to negotiate, find out what he wants and what we can offer. There has to be some meeting ground, some reasonable compromise solution without loss of life and limb. Perhaps I should ask him to bathe the next time I smell him. A good bath always helps clear the mind and might ease his delusions. Lux and Dettol will provide him with some values, or perhaps a sense of belonging.’
Justin laughed. ‘Madam, you are one in a million.’
‘I hope so!’
Indi cared about nothing but Justin’s continued obsession with her. She, hated by the world and loved only by Justin, fed his obsession with her as a zookeeper feeds a hungry tiger. Her own mind raced off in many different directions, back into the past or forward into the future. But her worst fear of all was the loss of Justin’s attention. She was grateful for her blindness at such times because even if he ever forgot her in his preoccupation with his duty towards his patients, he would never be free of the suzerainty of her blind eyes.
Indi’s vision, now completely obliterated, had narrowed into a long tube and stabilized as such in the early years of her career as an IAS officer.
She was easily incensed, unable to sit still, impatient with everyone and everything except her private abyss. I’m going blind, she thought. The brown paper, the neon light, the semal tree, they will all exist but I will not know it. I’ll have to smell my way around like a cur, feel my way around like a leper. The ticking clock rings out my death every second of the day but no one can hear it except me. The darkness will be impenetrable. I’ll die airless at the bottom of a black ocean. What means will I have to live? Nothing, but my probing hands and feet, my ears straining to catch the faintest of sounds to stay ahead of my sighted adversaries, my nose twitching for the smells of people, cataloguing them by the smell of their burps and farts, no maroon or azure except in memory.
She felt trapped in an airless vault, gasping for oxygen, then felt relieved that her lungs at least were letting in air even if her eyes were shutting out light.
She developed a rigid formula about dress, yelling out warnings to her maid that there must never be any deviation from the dress code. She scraped her hair back into the tightest possible plait which hung down to her hips like a thick length of blue-black yarn. She scrubbed her face mercilessly with soap and covered herself from head to toe in white, nun-like saris with high-necked blouses. Yet her physical perfection, the audacious sensuality of her face, made Indi’s presence unbearable to almost everyone who saw her.
Her furious energy manifested in long hours of work. And in a secret life which was self-destroyingly perverse.
One night the floor gleamed with a lunar pallor.
Vikram, an old admirer, had pushed her breathlessly into bed. She had surrendered wickedly, knowing that Justin was about to arrive. When Justin walked into her Victoria Villa bedroom she had laughed.
Vikram jumped to his feet, hurriedly pulled on his pants, and left as soon as Justin entered. Indi remained on the bed with her nightdress hitched up above her knees and calmly told Justin that he couldn’t ask for explanations because she didn’t belong to him. He couldn’t expect anything from her, least of all fidelity. She was incapable of natural goodness, gratitude and other virtues
‘This is how it is, Justin,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘This is just how it is. You can get out if you want.’
‘You needlessly cheapen yourself,’ was the only thing he said before catching a plane back to America.
Her need was to convince herself that she was invincible. She had to prove that she would never be destroyed, however hard people tried. But her invincibility depended on Justin’s love and his care – however bored she may have occasionally become of his devotion and however wearisome the burden of being his chosen instrument in righting the world’s wrongs.
She knew that she was his ‘cause’, his crusade, his expiation of guilt. His selfish way of compensating for his country’s mistakes, his atonement for the sins against the Third World. She knew he would never be free of her, not just because of herself, but because she was his bludgeon against his own world.
As he turned on his heels and left her bedroom, she knew that she had won again. That her rejection had only made his love stronger. He went back to New York, telling herself that he would never ever see her again, but felt trapped and could no longer concentrate. He fled to Viet Nam as an army doctor where memories of her dominated every minute of his days.
A few lines of latitude down from Viet Nam, Indi plunged into care of her country. After a few months in Delhi, she was posted to a small town in North Bengal, where whispering rivers ran through pine forests. She was Madam District Collector, with her own office, staff and bungalow. Her monsoon eyes gave her a semi-divine quality among the locals. When Madam District Collector swept into courtrooms and sorted out disputes, or strode fearlessly out towards a riotous mob, or quelled a belligerent protestor with an unseeing stare, her booming voice and flashing eyes became an incarnation of goddess Durga. Like the blind saints of the past, Indi passed into the local pantheon as an avatar of Shakti.
She devised secret ways to master her surroundings. Exactly counting the number of steps from her desk to the door. Never being afraid to stop in her tracks if the light in her eyes suddenly went out. Laughing when someone said, ‘look out’. For the government, her – at this stage – partial blindness made her doubly formidable. She seemed so outwardly good humored about her failing eyesight, so tall, capable and clever despite it. She started schools, laid new water pipes, sanctioned roads and bridge building projects. She was the showpiece of the service. Her name was recommended for the Ramon Magsaysay Award. Even the prime minister wrote to her saying how proud the country was of so courageous a public servant, who struggled daily against such a terrifying disease. On occasion, her eyes seemed to suddenly improve. The two prison bars became fuzzy at the edges and she woke up some mornings convinced that the doctors had been wrong. But by afternoon, there they were again, black welts against two sides of daylight, forcing her to peer into a railway tunnel ahead.
She dictated a letter to Justin, in the manner that civil servants dictate notes to their secretaries. She didn’t apologize for what she had done. She didn’t mention her vow of promiscuity. Instead, she wrote that she was getting married. And Justin forgave her as soon as her letter arrived. His heart, full of resolutions for a future without her, returned to her again.
She married Vikram, now a major in the army. He wore a turban for the wedding and his body was flat and bronzed. She sent Justin a hilarious account of the wedding – how the priest kept sniffing at the wafts of brandy in her breath, how she was barely able to see Vikram. Their lovemaking, she wrote, was progressing superbly. But then they went to Haridwar for their honeymoon. In the bus down from Dehra Dun, Vikram complained of pain in the chest and threw up a few times. He arched, stretched and pushed his legs through the window of the moving bus. By the time she got him to a hospital, Indi’s soldier husband, her spouse for a week, was dead.
Shiela Devi and Ashish Kumar rushed to the Dehra Dun hospital.
‘Do you have any idea what you are doing to your parents?’ Ashish Kumar’s voice cracked. ‘Don’t you care? God curse the day you were born!’
‘But this is not my fault!’ Indi yelled bac
k. ‘Is it my fault that he died? Is it my fault that I’m blind? Am I also the God of Death on top of everything else?’
‘It is your fault,’ wailed Shiela Devi. ‘Who will marry poor Pom when they know she has an older sister like you who is blind and a widow after only one week of marriage? Ill-fated girl! Source of my unhappiness!’
‘Demoness!’ shouted Ashish Kumar. ‘You’ve eaten up your husband and your mouth is running with his blood. You never looked after him. You killed him! You’re the worst person I’ve ever set eyes on! The worst. A bad character. The way you carry on! Everyone knows what you are.’
‘Oh, stop talking like idiots,’ shouted Indi. ‘He had a heart attack, that’s all. Now get lost and let me make the funeral arrangements in peace. Carrying on like a pair of uneducated rustics! Mouth running with blood, if you please. Demoness. Such words! Very picturesque…but is this the language of educated people? Aren’t you ashamed of the way you talk? What is this, some sort of gothic drama, folk theatre? No thought for me as usual. Concerned only with yourselves. I’ll eat you up next if you’re not careful.’
‘Oh, god,’ wept Shiela Devi. ‘Now she’s even talking like the Four-Armed-One. The way she ate up a decent man for no reason at all.’
As punishment, when Pom’s marriage was arranged, Ashish Kumar and Shiela Devi didn’t invite their older daughter to their younger daughter’s wedding.
‘Why?’ Indi demanded on the telephone. ‘Why don’t you want me to come for my younger sister’s marriage? Because my husband happened to die? Because I’m a widow? Because I’m polluted? Come off it, you can’t be serious.’
‘Your mother does not want you to come,’ Ashish Kumar’s voice was triumphant. ‘She feels you might cast the evil eye. Or whatever eye you have.’
She swallowed hard and shouted to camouflage the tremor in her throat: ‘I can’t believe you. The double standards. The public posture of sanity and your private sickness. The way you go on about being a progressive. I believe in the Constitution, I believe in the Constitution. Yet you’re nothing but a village bumpkin. You exemplify the gap between public stance and personal belief. You talk of progress but you’re in the Stone Age.’
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