An Obedient Father

by Akhil Sharma

  I felt no kinship with Krishna. Yet he had my mother’s perfectly round nostrils and my father’s small mottled teeth. The whole useless, shapeless day was present in my head, and my heart started to break. “You can never stop being brothers. Raju told me.” For a moment I wondered what he was talking about. Then I realized that Raju must have told him I had come to ask him to tomorrow’s ceremony and therefore make amends. “Both Vinod and I talk about you often. We are still your brothers.”

  After a moment I asked, “Will you come?”

  “I will. Vinod is away on a pilgrimage. Last year he had a brain thing and he promised God if he got well he would pray twice every day and go to Vaishnodevi. He’s become so religious now anyone can sell him a statue if they claim the river threw it up.”

  A short plump woman entered the room with two plates of rotis and subji. I sat up. She put the plates on a stool and placed this next to the bed. “Did anyone tell you to bring food?” Krishna said calmly. The woman became perfectly still. “Does my brother look like he can eat?” Krishna’s voice was louder now. She took a step back. “Your parents didn’t warn me you were retarded.” She picked up one plate. “I’m going to eat while my brother can’t?” Krishna stared at her as she took his plate and hurried out. Then he turned to me and smiled. “That’s Raju’s wife. When she came here, she was so proud of being high school—pass, she would read the newspaper in front of me. Now she barely talks.”

  At least I am better than Krishna, I thought. I pushed myself up and sat leaning against the wall. Raju appeared in the doorway, drinking a cup of tea. He asked how I was and left. Krishna began telling me what had happened over the last five years, some of which I already knew from mutual acquaintances. Vinod’s son Sanjay and Krishna’s son Pankaj had smuggled in seventeen thousand dollars from working in the United Arab Emirates. With this capital Vinod and Krishna had seized control of the most profitable businesses in Beri. Their latest acquisitions were the ice-cream factory and a license to sell liquor. Pankaj had recently written to Kusum telling her they were planning to sneak into America and could she help them. She had promptly written back saying her husband wouldn’t let her.

  I had a hard time concentrating. The odd shape of the day was making me want to cry in frustration. What could I do if things happened unpredictably and I was too weak-willed or stupid to handle anything but the simplest situations? I managed to ask if the pundit was still in Beri, but he had returned to Delhi. Krishna spoke so long and had such a good time talking that when he asked if I was going to spend the night, I felt he would genuinely have liked me to remain.

  Raju drove me to the bus stop on a motorcycle. I was so weak that I kept sliding about and throwing him off balance. He got me a seat on the bus, and once I was in it, he bought me oranges for the trip back. He stood in the aisle beside me waiting for the bus to start. I asked what had happened to Munna’s wife.

  There was such a long pause after my question that I thought Raju meant to ignore me. “She hanged herself,” he said finally. It was too dark to see his face. “It isn’t Munna’s fault. Everybody thinks it is. She used to cry a lot. She couldn’t adjust to Pitaji. My wife, she’s fine.” He touched my shoulder.

  “This was Munna’s second.”

  “Yes, that’s why it appears so bad. People now say the first one threw herself before the bus.” He looked away and sighed. “It’s because of her death that Munna’s angry all the time.” After a moment he shrugged and said, “She was crazy. The fact that she killed herself is proof.”

  Once the bus left Beri, I leaned my head against the window and fell into a stupor. I dreamed of the bear dancing and the squirrel boy and the cold vomit. The bus moved shaking and rattling down the highway. There was a full moon, but the fields along the side of the road looked as dark as the sea at night. I kept slipping into sleep and being jolted out of it.

  I woke from one such sleep when the bus stopped in the middle of the highway. There was a hill on one side and fields on the other. The bus had stopped because a road was being cut up the hill and the engineers had placed their equipment in two tents in the center of the highway. There was a traffic jam as trucks and buses edged off the highway and tried to go around the encampment. I was so dazed that I stared at the hill for a while without fully realizing what was being built.

  There were a hundred or so men digging the road, and the only light they had was the moon. They were working in teams, on separate patches ten or fifteen meters long. As they dug, women came behind them, scattering gravel in the spaces which had just been emptied. Some of the men and women looked like shadows, and others I could locate only by the sound of their voices or their shovels hitting dirt. I could not tell how far up the hill the teams were working, whether there was one at the very top.

  Perhaps my unhappiness began to ease, because I started to appreciate how lucky I was to have reconciled with my brothers so easily. Or perhaps my mood changed simply because of the strange beauty of what I was seeing. But it took nearly an hour to pass the construction site, and during that hour, as I waited and watched the road being dragged up the hill, I began to believe that my life could be changed in inches, even by accident, the way my brother and I had been reconciled.

  The bus shuddered as it went off the highway and onto the slope edging it. When it tried clambering back onto the road, the wheels kept sliding and suitcases and boxes raced down the aisles. I covered my ears against the engine’s noise. With a lurch, the bus pushed itself back on the highway. It stood shivering for a moment with the incomplete road on one side and the dark fields on the other. And then again the engine’s roar pushed the silence of the night ahead of us.

  FOUR

  I woke to a knock at my door. The room was dark, the air warm and overused. As I rose, I was afraid. Yet I now believed that Anita suspected nothing. This certainty had arrived in the middle of the night. Perhaps it came simply from the fact that thirty-some hours had passed since Mr. Gupta’s party. Also, when I returned home, the door of the flat was unchained, as I had left it, and Anita was lying beside Asha. My feeling that time had not passed also made my reason for fleeing Delhi dreamlike. Nonetheless, I was afraid. There was another volley of raps, then Anita asked, “What about the pundit?”

  To have her speak of something other than Asha was comforting. The squatter colony was silent, so I wondered what time it was. “I’ll go find him,” I said. Anita did not respond. I sat at the edge of my cot. Only a little light was slipping beneath the door, which meant the sun had not yet risen. I thought of the road being dragged up the hill. It made me feel determined.

  “Rajiv Gandhi was murdered,” Anita said. At first I thought she was speaking metaphorically, that there had been some scandal which had destroyed his chances for reelection. “The city is closed. The radio says there might be riots.” The news must not have spread by the time I reached home, otherwise getting to Delhi would have been more difficult.

  I got up and opened the door. Anita held out a folded newspaper to me. Her lips drooped in a child’s caricature of sadness, but her eyes were expressionless. The white sari and lugubrious face made her look like a symbol of woe. The common room was dark. The door to the balcony and the kitchen windows were shut and bolted in preparation for riots. The light pressing through them revealed that it was early morning.

  “Show me.” I still could not believe her words. Unlike the time before his mother’s death, when the military invaded the Sikhs’ Golden Temple and every week terrorists were pulling buses off the road and shooting the passengers, or bombs were going off almost once a day, there had been no violence lately. I took the paper from her. I saw the headline RAJIV GANDHI KILLED and still thought it was a mistake.

  Beneath the headline were two large photographs. One was a videotape image of a woman surrounded by a crowd and taken from some distance. The image had been blown up so many times that it would have been difficult to guess the woman’s gender without the caption. The other photo was a
publicity picture of Rajiv Gandhi facing slightly away from the camera and looking up. The front page was devoted to the assassination. Gandhi’s speech in Tamil Nadu was the same as any of the dozens of speeches he had given in preparation for the election. The only difference was that a woman just five feet tall and strapped with dynamite had come up to him as he walked toward the stage. She put a garland around his neck and detonated herself. No group had taken credit yet, and everyone—the Sikhs, the Pakistanis, the CIA, the Tamil Tigers—was under suspicion.

  During the minutes it took me to glance through the articles, Anita stared at me from a meter away. I wondered if she needed to be comforted. Her lips continued to sag. “The world is not what it was yesterday,” I said, wanting to let her know her experience was shared. For the first time in nearly a hundred years, a Nehru was not at the center of power. Rajiv Gandhi’s wife was Italian and his children were too young to assume control. The sense of strangeness at no longer having a Nehru ready to rule was the same as approaching a familiar place through an alley I had never used before. Was this also the world? “Don’t worry. There won’t be riots. People didn’t like Rajiv Gandhi the way they did his mother.” Then I noticed I was holding a newspaper which should not have been delivered on such a day and asked, “Did you go out?”

  “To get milk.” Before I could respond to the oddity of this, Anita said, “Mr. Gupta’s party,” and paused. Mr. Gupta belonged to the Congress Party, I thought. The moment between the surge of fear and my heartbeat leaping was like car gears grinding when the speeds are switched too quickly. The fear made everything on either side of me vanish. All I could see was Anita. “You were drunk,” she said, and halted again. Her lips stayed curved down. “I don’t want …” she said.

  When she stopped this time, my fear set me babbling. “I was drunk. Everybody at the party was drunk. I was so drunk I was stepping on my own feet. You get old and a little bit of liquor makes you crazy.” I kept talking so that Anita would not have time to say something which could not be taken back. “I won’t drink again. It was the first time I’d drunk in a year and a half.” As I spoke, I willed Anita to think, If I say any more, where will I sleep, who will feed me?

  “I would kill Asha …” she said, interrupting me. Her voice was thin and shaking.

  “Even as a joke …” I said.

  “I’m not joking,” Anita answered. She raised her hand and pointed a finger at me. She shook it. “I would kill you.”

  “Don’t worry. Don’t worry. Don’t worry.” My voice stayed low and calm as I repeated this.

  “I can’t go anywhere. I have no other home.”

  “Don’t worry.” Anita tried saying more, but I kept interrupting. “I’ll take care of you. You’re my daughter.”

  Asha stepped out of the bathroom. She noticed the way Anita and I were looking at each other and halted just before the bathroom door. Draped over an arm was a freshly washed shirt and underpants. Anita watched Asha and me for a moment. Then she took the laundry from Asha and hung it over a clothesline she had strung along one side of the common room. Anita returned to the kitchen.

  Asha tried catching my eye, and the possibility of Anita seeing this scared me. “I’ll go to the temple,” I said. I thought, I can take all my money and all the money I’ve collected for Congress and vanish.

  The sky was bright and cool. For May the weather was mild.

  The entrance to the squatter colony was blocked by a pile of sandbags. The doors were guarded by a neighbor, a young man with an enormous and ancient gun. “My grandfather killed a lion with this,” he said. He shut the doors behind me as soon as I stepped into the alley. The piece of road I could see from the alleyway was empty of traffic. Shops had their grilles pulled down over their fronts. Rajiv Gandhi’s death would have closed the banks, too, I realized. The ordinariness of this detail reminded me of my nature. I did not have the stamina to disappear.

  A rickshaw driver sat in his vehicle at the mouth of the alley, smoking a bidi and regarding the thoroughfare. I came up to him and stopped. The roofs on both sides of the street were completely lined with men, women, and children waiting to see what would happen. I thought of floods I have seen during which everyone in a town is forced to live on a roof But the road was empty. I did not know whether a curfew had been declared, but even without one, few people would take the risk of going out. I wondered at Anita’s having left the flat.

  Seven or eight men in their twenties stood bunched together several meters to the right of me on the sidewalk. The top buttons of their shirts were open, and as if this were how they recognized each other, most wore canvas shoes with clumsily copied foreign emblems sewn on. The hoodlums were staring at a Bata shoe shop directly opposite the alleyway. Behind an iron grille fixed to the ground by heavy locks was a large window displaying Bata shoes. The shop was owned by a Sikh, and I knew it was symbolically important that the first shop looted belong to a Sikh or a Muslim. If I died in a riot, it occurred to me, I would never have to speak with Anita again.

  The hoodlums talked and joked among themselves, but kept looking at the shoe shop. Their bodies were tensed and, when not moving, tilted automatically toward the shop. I wondered if what had happened after Indira Gandhi’s assassination would be repeated. For several days after her murder, the roofs of most of the houses in the Old Vegetable Market remained crowded and bunches of looting men roamed the streets. Periodically people spilled from their homes and a riot started. Then, after a while, a tank or some military jeeps appeared and the roads were abandoned once more. The butchering of Sikhs and Muslims—shooting them, knifing them, hanging them, setting them on fire—continued for weeks after they had been chased out of mixed neighborhoods. I stared at the shop, the hoodlums, the people on the roof I felt as if the blue sky had become solid and the whole country was now under a lid. Not wanting to return home, I stayed where I was.

  A half hour passed. I watched the blue sky and the silent, full roofs. The world felt impossible, like a door larger than the building it belonged to. But this impossibility was strangely comforting. The world had changed, and I must have been changed with it.

  The Sikh’s wife stepped out of a narrow, dark staircase next to the shop. She was fat and wore a green salwar kameez. I had never spoken with her but had seen her working in the shop and buying milk from the same milkman I used. She stood in front of the steps for a moment and looked up and down the road. She avoided meeting any of the eyes that were focused on her. When she stepped aside, two young boys, about six and ten, came out from the staircase. They were dressed in blue-and-maroon school uniforms and their hair was neatly bunned in small white handkerchiefs. They looked as if they had just bathed. The boys’ wet cleanness made me think of newborn rabbits. Making them look young was smart, but I doubted it would help. A moment after the boys, a fat white-haired woman dressed in a widow-white salwar kameez emerged. This was the Sikh’s mother. I began to feel sad.

  The Sikh’s wife stepped to the edge of the sidewalk and waved to the rickshaw driver. He looked at her coolly and continued to smoke. He was eighteen or nineteen and had short bristly hair. To be out on such a day signified the rickshaw driver’s predatoriness. One of the hoodlums said, “Bitch.” Everyone else remained silent and the word expanded in the air. I sensed the attention of people on the roof. The older boy took the younger one’s hand. The woman kept motioning for the rickshaw driver long after it was obvious that he was not going to move. Perhaps she thought that if she stopped motioning, the next part of something preordained would happen.

  I wondered how much time it would take to murder the Sikhs. The men would probably make a game of getting them away from the stairs. They might be threatened till the women and children started crying and pleading to be allowed to leave. After the hoodlums had let themselves be bribed, the rickshaw would be ordered forward. The Sikhs would get in. The rickshaw driver would pedal in the exact center of the road and be leaning as far away from his passengers as possible. Then
the hoodlums might start running alongside the rickshaw, laughing and talking among themselves, or completely silently. They would begin punching and tugging the women and children. After a block or two, they might grab one of the boys and drag him into the street. Then the rickshaw driver would jump off and run away. I remembered the dead naked Muslim boy of forty years ago, whose shoulder had been opened so that white bone showed.

  “Go, friend,” I said to the rickshaw driver. I was surprised at having spoken. Once the words were uttered, I felt complete confidence. The rickshaw driver looked at me. He was small, with thin arms. I smiled and cocked my head in the Sikhs’ direction. “They are women and children,” I said in a loud, casual voice. “The Sikh, he’s still up there.” The hoodlums must have been surprised as well, for when the rickshaw driver glanced toward them, no one made a gesture. I felt the authority of being incongruous, an old very fat man, dressed in the white shirt and dark pants of a bureaucrat, standing in the open when a riot might start. I was glad that Delhi did not have the fanatics of Bombay, that confusion alone might stop people.

  The rickshaw driver pedaled across the street. When he got to the Sikhs, he pulled the rickshaw parallel to the sidewalk and asked, “Where to?” as if they were any other passengers.

  “Morris Nagar,” the Sikh’s wife said.

  “Fifty rupees,” he responded loudly. The hoodlums rustled at the outrageous sum.

  The family got on. The women sat on the sides and the children in between. The hoodlums looked at each other in confusion.