by Akhil Sharma
In the middle of the night, once Anita and Asha were asleep, I left my room and went onto the balcony. Dust was a lid for the city’s lights and made the sky’s gradual curve clear. I stood there for nearly an hour. The squatter colony was silent, except when someone got up and creaked the hand pump for a drink of water.
I thought of admitting everything to Anita and begging forgiveness. But I felt no more capable of honesty now than when I had shut the windows to keep the neighbors from hearing her screams. I also believed that Anita was no longer willing to exchange confession for pardon. I thought this because Anita had begun telling Asha numerous lies which appeared unnecessarily extreme, and this implied indifference to the future. Anita had told Asha I was sick and that the sickness had come about because of sinful things I had done. Anita claimed her squeak was caused by my disease and that she did not know if she would ever improve. She also informed the child that I was disgusted with Asha because she was a burden on me. I had heard all these things over the last few days because Anita said them in the common room, intending, I understood, for me to hear.
I stayed on the balcony for hours. At maybe two or three in the morning, far away in the dark, a box kite with a burning candle inside rose and hovered. It was pulled down near dawn, and then I went back to my room.
In the morning I listened to Rajiv Gandhi’s funeral on my radio. There was a biography of the Nehru family and then one of Rajiv Gandhi. Friends of Rajiv Gandhi and important politicians like Nelson Mandela were interviewed. There was a long period when the commentator merely described who was passing through Rajiv Gandhi’s residence on Janpath and stopping and praying before the mound of flowers that buried his casket. Anita and Asha listened to something similar on the television. They periodically left the living room, but the television stayed on, as if it were a prayer lamp which, even after the prayer is over, must be allowed to burn itself out.
Rajiv Gandhi had always struck me as sly and somewhat stupid. He had dignity only in relation to his opponents, because they were completely shameless. Yet by eleven, when the body was placed on the back of the army truck and carried to the crematorium at five kilometers an hour, bereavement had overcome me.
When the funeral pyre was lit, I felt such a sense of ending that I opened my door and walked into the living room, where Anita and Asha sat silently together on the two love seats watching television. It was about three-thirty.
“Are you better?” Asha asked.
“I’m still sick,” I said immediately and without thinking. I sat down on the bed. When I did not say anything else, Asha concentrated again on the screen. Anita’s eyes never left the television.
The pyre shook smoke into the sky. I covered my face with my hands.
“Nanaji,” Asha said to me.
She must have touched her mother, for Anita screamed, “Let go.”
I removed my hands and saw Anita glaring at me. Asha now faced the television. “When Rajiv Gandhi was collecting his mother’s ashes from the pyre, he kept finding bullets,” I said, wanting to hide the fact that we were causing each other’s misery. “She’d been shot so many times the doctors couldn’t remove all the bullets.” Asha sobbed. Anita pinched the back of Asha’s neck and Asha began crying with her shoulders pulled up.
“What are you crying for? Who is Rajiv Gandhi to you? Would you cry for me if I died?” Asha looked up at her mother. “Lower your shoulders.” Anita twisted the skin she gripped. When Asha dropped them, Anita let go. Her actions were so extreme, I wondered if Anita was merely out of control or whether she wanted Asha to be afraid of her so that Asha would obey her and not come near me and my contagion.
I continued to watch television. Asha had to keep wiping her eyes. “Wash your face,” Anita said to her, and the child ran from the room. She did not return.
After a while I said to Anita’s back, “Forgive me for what I did.” My heart was beating so fast I wanted to stand.
Anita turned and looked at me. “What did you do?” she asked slowly, but in a voice so high it sounded like the end of a long, screaming fight.
The words wouldn’t come. “I touched you.”
“Touched?”
“Raped you.”
Anita stared at me expressionlessly. “Is that all you did?”
I did not know what she wanted me to confess, so after a moment I said, “I did everything.”
“Yes. Say more.”
“I’m a rabid dog that should be beaten with bricks.” Anita watched me. “Forgive me.”
“How do I do that?” When I gave no answer, she asked, “Do I forget?” She kept looking at me. “Do I think it was just a mistake you made? Or am I a saint and I forgive, knowing you are a devil?”
“I did everything bad that is possible.”
“Yes.” She again waited for me to speak.
“I will go to hell.”
“I forgive you.” Anita held up her hand as if endowing a blessing. I knew she was being sarcastic, but her voice was so high it lacked all inflection.
“What I did …”
“I forgive you.” Perhaps she noticed that she might not be sounding ironic, for she added, “Snake.”
The word sounded so awkward in her mouth I wondered if she had experienced a thrill at breaking the taboo of cursing a parent. “I am a snake.”
“What kind of a snake? A cobra?”
Anita watched me for a few minutes and then stood and left.
The phone rang at a little after one in the morning. I heard it immediately because I was awake. The low buzzing rrrs must have repeated ten times before Anita picked up. A moment later she knocked on my door.
Mr. Gupta spoke as soon as I said hello. “Mr. Karan, Sonia Gandhi will say no to Congress. Congress has to win the elections by itself now.”
I was relieved at being able to talk with someone. “How do you know?” I asked, not believing him. To reject such easy power appeared to go against biological laws. Also, after learning about his family, I could not treat Mr. Gupta as seriously as I had before.
“From someone in Congress,” he said.
“A reliable person?”
“Like the sun.” I did not say anything. “Come to my home in the morning, by ten. The BJP is having a prayer for me. Bring all the bankbooks.”
After he hung up, I sat on the sofa in the dark living room for several minutes. Admitting my sins had brought no relief Now having to cope with Mr. Gupta began to fill me with self-pity. I had not done anything to Asha, and Anita was twenty years ago. In twenty years a destroyed city can be repaired or buried.
Dressed in a coat and tie, I left half an hour after Asha went to school. The twenty-three bankbooks and Father Joseph’s cash were in a cloth bag. I had my wrist through its strap and held the bottom with the other hand.
The Sikh whose family had nearly been killed was washing his sidewalk with a bucket and a broom. He wore shorts and rubber slippers. I wondered what he felt at having things return to normal. I could not imagine him feeling forgiveness for the men who had threatened his children. Seeing him reminded me that criminals who confess are still jailed.
He waved to me and I crossed the road.
“How are you?” I asked. The grille of his shop was down, despite the road having nearly returned to its old busyness.
“Without you my world would have ended,” he said. His stomach stuck his red shirt straight out.
“It was nothing.”
His voice shook. “More than nothing. My wife, my babies, my mother.”
I wished I could have used the credit from here to diminish the damages from other parts of my life. “How is your family?”
An old woman shouted, “Move,” at us, and then hurried past.
“My sons don’t want to come back. They’re in Morris Nagar.”
“They’ll forget.”
“They shouldn’t forget.”
“Thank God the killers were Tamils.”
He looked around and angrily said, “I d
on’t even want to sell them shoes. Watching from the roof. Like a circus.”
My guilt made me possessive of this one good deed. I squeezed his shoulder.
“Tea?” he asked.
“Not today.”
“You’re a hero.”
“Hero zero,” I said, because I wanted him to protest.
“One hundred percent hero. Gold hero.”
As I left, I thought, I’ve saved lives.
Before going to Model Town, I stopped to eat at a dhaba near the Old Clock Tower. After a few bites it was as if my mouth got bored with chewing.
The radio was playing. Sonia Gandhi had announced that she would in no case accept the Congress Party’s presidency. Congress was now discussing who else might be selected. Sonia Gandhi’s action appeared inhuman. In the autorickshaw, my thoughts kept turning to her. She was so different from me that I could not enter her thoughts but could only imagine her physically: the long dark hair, the straight-featured face that had lost its beauty over the years and become merely a face.
Mr. Mishra was in front of Mr. Gupta’s house, supervising men who were unloading chairs from a truck. He was also wearing a coat and tie. His presence made me feel that the secret of Mr. Gupta’s ambition was out and some irrevocable step had been taken.
“When did Guptaji call you?” I asked.
“His son did. This morning.”
The fact that Ajay, who had been drunk at his own wedding reception, was involved made me nervous. There were sixty or seventy chairs on the truck, and once these were carried into the house, the men began passing down fans which were bolted onto two-meter-high steel poles. They were working without talking, which made me wonder how much quality labor such as that cost.
“To know a Member of Parliament would be strange, huh?” Mr. Mishra said. A ten- or twelve-year-old boy in blue shorts and a white shirt came and inquired if I wanted tea. “You don’t even have to ask for anything,” Mr. Mishra said. “Money is being spent.”
We began talking about Sonia Gandhi. Mr. Mishra was also amazed, but he thought the explanation was that Sonia Gandhi feared further assassinations in her family. As we spoke, two elephants rounded the corner of the road. They were enormous gray beasts with shaved tusks. Each had a teenage boy sitting on its neck holding a short spear that had a hook just below where the blade began. The boys stopped the elephants across the road from us, next to the iron bars of the park fence, by catching folds along the neck skin with the hooks. The elephants knelt and the boys got off. Mr. Mishra began laughing as soon as he realized they would be part of the ceremony. “Will you give us a ride around the block?” Mr. Mishra called to one of the boys.
The boy looked at us seriously and said, “No.” The other one scurried up the fence and hopped onto a eucalyptus tree in the park. He stood on one branch and, grabbing the branch above him, began jumping to break the branch beneath him. The whole tree nodded.
Mr. Mishra hesitantly asked me, “Is it true that Mr. Gupta had to give the BJP twelve lakhs for their support?”
The amount was frightening, because if things changed there wouldn’t be anything to use in negotiating with Congress. “I know less than you do,” I said. The branch being jumped on broke and fell beside the elephants. They began eating its leaves.
I went into the house to let Mr. Gupta know I had arrived. Servants in blue uniforms were moving about the veranda. A red-and-blue dhurrie, like the ones used at weddings, had been spread across the floor. Thick cables ran beneath the rug and several servants were busy attaching them to fans lined up along the veranda walls. From somewhere inside the house I heard a generator’s heavy hum.
Mr. Gupta’s son, Ajay, was standing against a wall arguing with a balding man in his forties who wore the white kurta pajama that is the BJP’s uniform. Ajay had a thyroid problem that made him alternately fat or very thin. Just then he was fat. Ajay also had on the BJP costume. I was about to pass them when Ajay shouted, “Uncleji,” at me. This was surprising, because he usually called me Mr. Karan. I wondered whether it was marriage or his father entering politics that had caused the shift to respectful familiarity. “Daddy is going to sit on the ground for the puja, so I think we shouldn’t use chairs,” Ajay said, “but he says we have to.”
“I don’t care whether you have chairs or not,” the BJP man replied, only glancing at me. I wondered if he knew we were switching parties. “I was told there had to be chairs.” Something about Ajay made people impatient. After a few minutes with him, you sensed something both manipulative and stupid. Ajay changed rings and diets to match his astrological sign. He spoke domineeringly about unimportant things. Up to then, I had thought of Ajay as a shocking disappointment compared to his father. But now that I knew how successful the rest of Mr. Gupta’s family was, it seemed reasonable that Mr. Gupta’s family was slowly reverting to the average.
“Put the chairs inside,” I said to the man. “If we need them, I’ll have them brought out.”
“Who are you?”
“My name is Ram Karan. I’m Guptaji’s man.” Maybe the BJP man had heard of me, because he immediately became silent. I felt a rush of pride at this. “Ask me if there are any more questions,” I said.
As the BJP man left, Ajay said loudly, “He doesn’t listen.”
I clapped him on the back and asked how his marriage was. I started thinking that Mr. Gupta would certainly not trust Ajay with much responsibility if he became an M.P., and that power would drift toward me. I imagined arranging water and electricity for whole neighborhoods, exchanging ration cards for votes.
“What’s in the bag?”
“Something of your father’s.” Ajay did not ask what it was, discretion that surprised me.
He took me into the kitchen, where his wife, Pavan, was making sure that the six or seven people cooking did no harm to the room. The kitchen was as large as my living room, and along one wall was a row of brick-colored gas tanks.
“Namaste,” Pavan said. She was beautiful. She had wavy hair which reached her waist, a wonderful oval face and rounded, even teeth, and she wore a sleeveless blouse, which meant that she must be daring enough to shave her underarms. Pavan was a Sikh. Seeing her beauty, I was baffled that she had been willing to leave her religion and risk losing her family for Ajay.
“You are doing a lot of work,” I said.
“Not so much,” Ajay answered for her, and took me farther into the house and up a staircase to meet Mr. Gupta.
Mr. Gupta was sitting on the floor at the center of a wide and brightly lit room. All the furniture had been pushed against its pale green walls. He was wearing only pajamas. He had wide shoulders and distinct muscles on his arms. Around him were five men near my age in white kurta pajamas. One of these was scrubbing Mr. Gupta’s face with a mixture of flour, sandalwood paste, and grass while the rest watched. Mr. Gupta’s face and chest were streaked with yellow. He was smiling broadly. “I’m marrying again,” he said to me when I came in. Then I realized that he was being prepared in the same way a groom is by his sisters before the wedding.
One of the men watching shook my hand and said, “Thank you for coming, Mr. Karan. I am Pankaj Tuli.” He was tall and slender, with completely white hair and a young face. I was surprised to be treated with such respect. I wondered whether Mr. Gupta needed to present himself as a leader and so Mr. Mishra and I were to play the role of followers.
A very short man with a slightly hunched back went to a diningroom table that was pressed against one wall and brought back a white plastic bag. From the size of the bag and because of how it felt, I could tell it held cloth. “Naveen Kumar,” he said, introducing himself, and, shaking my hand, gave me the bag.
“For you,” Mr. Gupta said, as his head bobbed back and forth from the rubbing. I slid the cloth out. It was a shawl made from a reddish brown wool. It was so soft and smooth it felt slippery.
“Pashmina,” said Mr. Tuli.
I had never touched pashmina before. To me pashmina shawls had
always been something in stories: what the Birlas gave Mahatma Gandhi; what would make you sweat in winter if you wrapped yourself tightly in it. I felt a wonderful wrench of dislocation, of being in my own world and also belonging to a world where gifts of pashmina shawls were given.
Ajay rubbed the cloth between his fingers. “I got a watch and cloth for a suit,” he said. I thanked Mr. Tuli and carefully slid the shawl back in the bag.
“Do you have my dowry, Mr. Karan?” Mr. Gupta asked.
I said yes, and he tapped the floor beside him. I put the bankbooks there and went around the room introducing myself to each of the BJP men. I had heard of one of them before, a bald man whose kurta collar bore delicate white embroidery. The others I did not know. I wondered how loyal they would be to Mr. Gupta, knowing he had already betrayed one set of political allegiances.
“Come downstairs,” Ajay said, taking my elbow, “and tell me if you think everything is right.” I smiled wryly at the BJP men, as if this humoring of a child must be something they were also familiar with.
As soon as we were on the stairs, Ajay said, “They’re friendly now, but tomorrow they might not know his name.” I sensed that Ajay wanted me to reveal myself, but I merely nodded and let him try to press me. I kept the shawl in one hand. Holding it made me happy. “My father can’t show that he knows this, but he does.”
“Politics,” I said. I felt capable of serving Mr. Gupta.
“You have to be polite.” We reached the bottom of the stairs, and Ajay, looking me in the eye, said, “If he wins, we’ll have to do the hard things for him, the bad things.” I shrugged my shoulders, as if I were a man and knew what men had to do. The more Ajay spoke, the more confident I became that if Mr. Gupta rose in the world, so would I.