by Akhil Sharma
On the veranda the servants were stringing garlands of geraniums along the walls in cursive u’s. There was no work for us, so we stood in a corner. Ajay nattered on about the BJP. At some point he checked himself, grinned, and asked, “Shall we have a peg?” I had not thought about alcohol for days, but as soon as he said it, I felt desire overcome me. It was as if I had passed a room with the door slightly open and glimpsed a woman lying naked on a bed. “Thinking of these people gets me angry,” Ajay said. “A peg of whiskey.” There was something so obviously false about him that I knew he had a plan.
We went to a long, rectangular room in the back of the house. It was dark because of the drawn curtains. Excess furniture from all over the house had been placed there. In a corner were chairs arranged in layers of semicircles. Along a wall were two sofas with two more stacked on top, and beside these were several armoires. My stomach had tightened from wondering what Ajay intended. Ajay took out a bottle of whiskey and two glasses from a cupboard. We said cheers and downed the liquor. To get Ajay to give me more, I said, “Delicious.” He smiled and poured. Ajay’s solicitousness reminded me of businessmen I had dealt with who had tried to get me drunk.
“Show me the shawl.”
I wanted to make him struggle for everything and pretended not to have heard him. I sat down with the shawl in its bag draped over one thigh. “Have some whiskey.” I suggested this because I thought he wanted the advantage of being sober in whatever maneuver he was about to try. “Don’t give me whiskey if you’re not going to drink.” Ajay drank a second peg. I extended my glass, and Ajay poured it more than half full. “Delicious.” I swallowed the drink quickly, nervous and eager to do this before my good sense intervened. I began feeling drunk and relieved. The muscles along the back of my legs relaxed, and I stretched them.
He sighed with pleasure as I finished the drink. “How much do you think the shawl cost?”
“A lot,” I said. I smiled and waited for him to reveal himself.
Ajay smiled back. He was quiet for a little while. “Want more?” he asked finally. I shook my head from side to side and smiled.
“You have some. I’ve had three,” I replied, and stared at him till he drank.
“Pavan would like a shawl like that. How much do you think it was?”
Now I understood that he wanted to buy the shawl at a cheap price from me. “Maybe fifteen thousand.”
Ajay’s face became serious at hearing the large amount. “Do you want to sell it? Not for fifteen thousand. Three thousand I have right now. I could pay that in five minutes.”
“I’m going to give it to my daughter,” I answered.
Ajay looked angry.
The bright light of the veranda staggered me. The noise of the servants and the arriving guests was a roar. I had been so unhappy that the relief from the alcohol delighted me. The BJP was not perfect, but I would be so good that over the years my sins would be chipped away.
A fire was lit in the center of the veranda. Mr. Gupta stepped out dressed in a new silk kurta pajama, looked around, shook hands with everyone in reach, and went back into the house. Ajay said we should go to the gateway and greet the guests. Mr. Tuli joined us and we walked out together.
The two elephants were standing on either side of the gate. They were almost completely covered with multicolored chalk drawings of religious and historical events and figures. One entire side of an elephant was taken up by Krishna preaching the Gita to Arjun the morning before battle. Another side had a map of India. Along some of the legs were individual figures. Subhas Chandra Bose, who had been forced out of the Congress presidency by Mahatma Gandhi because he was willing to use violence, wore a yellow turban. Bhagat Singh was slightly blue, and the stick of dynamite he held was very red. Shivaji, who looked very much like the TV actor who portrayed him in the serial, took up another leg. Rana Pratap, atop the leaping Chetak, appeared to be climbing the elephant. Next to and between the elephants stood the boys who had brought them. They now wore shiny gold kurta pajamas and turbans, but still carried their spears. Periodically the elephants would shift and the boys would jab them back into position.
There were already a dozen cars, mostly white Ambassador sedans, pulled up along the park fence, but more kept coming. Ajay was the first person to greet people. He had his hands pressed in a namaste. Then I said namaste and then Mr. Tuli. Ajay’s voice was slurred. Afraid that mine might be also, I didn’t start conversations.
While we stood in line, Mr. Tuli asked, “You live in the Old Vegetable Market?”
“Yes.”
“You should thank me, then.”
“Thank you,” I said.
Mr. Tuli laughed. Making him laugh, maintaining my deception, imagining being rich and good, all made me feel potent.
“The Old Vegetable Market used to be all Muslim,” Mr. Tuli said. “After the partition, I was one of the people sent to punish the Muslims. Pakistan had just sent a train full of Hindu bodies from Islamabad. All along the outside of the compartments they had written Go to India, Hindu. We were told to send them a train. We put two thousand bodies in one train. I had to go back to the office to get more bullets. Nehruji knew what we were doing. We would have cleared Chandni Chowk, too, but Nehruji got frightened and said, ‘Enough.’ After that there were no more trains.” I had heard many people make claims like these, and most I had not believed, thinking they were just attempts to impress. Mr. Tuli, perhaps because of the unusualness of his white hair combined with his youthfulness, appeared to be the type of man who might actually have done what he claimed. “We had a parade of naked Muslim girls from the Old Clock Tower to the train station. There was a band.” All these stories were familiar. Mr. Tuli read dismay on my face, for he said, “The BJP is about politics and Parliament seats.” One of the elephants lurched forward and was prodded back. “You don’t believe me.”
“I believe you.”
Mr. Tuli took out his wallet and showed me what looked like a business card. It was an unevenly scissored rectangle of cardboard. He placed it in my hand. Printed on it in blue ink was a partial list of prices for copper wires. Mr. Tuli turned the card in my hand. The other side had a name and address rubber-stamped on it and a handwritten date: Gopal Godse. Savarkar Bhavan. 500/2-A, Shaniwar Peth. My fingers twitched. “I’ve stayed at his flat in Pune.” Gopal Godse had served eighteen years in jail for conspiring to assassinate Mahatma Gandhi. “When I left Pune, he and his wife came to the train station with a bag of guavas. His wife started an engineering company while he was in jail.” He put the card in his wallet.
The prayer started, and we went back onto the veranda. The presence of history had given me a sense of scale, and I felt myself shrinking. The ceremony went on for an hour and a half. Sitting behind Mr. Gupta with my drunkenness evaporating, I became colder, and self-disgust began to bead inside me. To have imagined I could use the BJP to make up for my other wrongs was the same as believing that if I did not admit my evils, they would not exist.
The prayers were the same as most others, coins and rice were thrown into the fire, water from the Ganges was carefully spooned out, saffron threads were tied around wrists. At the end came the only unusual thing. The pundit presented Mr. Gupta with a bow and arrow. He then gave me one. I imagined the bows were to identify us with Advani, who was making appearances with bow and arrow in hand because of the BJP’s support of tearing down Babri mosque, the supposed birthplace of God Ram. The bows were supple polished wood and their strings were saffron. Later, after the photographs had been taken, when I pulled back my bowstring, I found a black dash in the string, a slight split, which, when stretched, formed an O and rose naturally to my eye. Mr. Tuli told me this was called a peep sight.
During the reception after the prayers, Mr. Gupta wandered about with his bow, having his photo taken with whoever wanted it. Mr. Maurya came for the reception on crutches and I saw him enter the house with several BJP men. Mr. Bajwa also came, but only Ajay greeted him. To have my hands
free for eating, I put my bow in a side room, under some sheets that were beneath a table. I ate without hunger. When I was ready to leave, I could not find my bow. I knew immediately that Ajay had stolen it. The foolishness of this made me sad. I was relieved I had never let the shawl out of my reach.
Outside, across the street, the boys were washing down the elephants with brushes and buckets of water. One boy was on top of an elephant and the other was scrubbing India off its side. The other elephant had already been washed and was eating leaves from a pile of branches before him. Chalk had settled into wrinkles. I looked at the elephant’s face. A fly sat near one wizened eye. I shivered.
Anita sat on her bedroom floor near the gallery sifting a copper tray of black lentils for pebbles and grit. She did not glance up from her work as I entered the flat.
I had planned to go to my room and take off my shoes, then build up my courage to talk again with Anita. I walked two steps past her and then sat down on her bed. Delay would only make things harder. I stared at Anita’s back. She did not turn around, but her back straightened and her fingers flew faster.
I opened my mouth and forced words out. “I promise …” Anita’s head turned slightly. “I won’t hurt you.” I thought this was a foolish thing to say, but I could not stop my stupidity. “I won’t live long.” Anita finally turned around. “I should be dead in a few years. Why hate me when I will be gone soon?” She stared at me. “I can change,” I said.
Anita slammed the tray to the floor. The clang was enormous. The lentils rustled across the floor. Anita kept hold of the tray for a moment. Then she set it quietly on the floor and stood. She walked through the bedroom, into the common room.
My mouth tasted of iron. Maybe five minutes later, maybe twenty, I followed her.
Asha was asleep on the sofa, sweating in the sun coming through the window.
Anita sat crouched under the kitchen’s stone counter. She had her back to the wall and her knees pulled to her chest. Standing just outside the kitchen, I cringed at this wretchedness.
I squatted in the kitchen doorway. Neither of us spoke for a while. The refrigerator hummed. I thought, Maybe she’s desperate to end this, too. “What should we do?” I asked. Anita moaned. “I’ll do anything.” After a moment or two, I repeated, “What can I do?”
“Die. That’s what I want,” Anita squeaked. She pointed at her jaw. “Look what you’ve done to me.”
I wanted her to say more, say everything so that some of her anger might be drained. “We have to live together,” I said. “I don’t want to die this way.”
After several minutes Anita said, “I want you to give me money.”
This surprised me, but no more than if she had demanded I live in the room on the roof, a possibility I had considered.
“How much money?”
“Two thousand rupees a month.”
“All right.”
“And I want the flat when you die.”
I thought of Rajesh’s anger when he heard this but said, “Yes.”
“I don’t want to pay for any of Asha’s schooling, and I want five hundred rupees a month for that.”
“Yes.”
Anita began crying then, quietly. I waited with her till she said, “Go away.”
I returned to her bedroom, where I had left the shawl. I brought it back and, squatting in the kitchen doorway, pulled it slightly out of the bag. I placed it on the floor between us. “It’s a pashmina shawl. For you.”
She looked at it. “I want cash.”
“I’ll give you cash also.” I then went into my room and took two thousand rupees from what I had collected for Mr. Gupta. Anita had the shawl in her lap. I placed the bundles on top of the shawl.
SIX
When Anita started cooking dinner that evening, I came out of my room. She looked up from the pot of subji she was stirring, and I stopped. I had spent the afternoon on my cot listening to the radio. I left my room because I wanted to act on our agreement right away so there would be no doubt we had struck a bargain. I moved to the center of the common room and sat down on the floor.
I brought with me my transistor radio and a Gita. I did not remember the last time I had opened the Gita. A holy book, I thought, would suggest the solemnity of my commitment to the bargain. Before last week I would have worn just my underpants and undershirt. But I did not want to call attention to my crotch and therefore wore pajamas. The radio played. I sat up straight and tried appearing proper, even though usually if I spent much time on the floor, because of its hardness, I reclined on my side. A distant but distinct satisfaction came through the anxiety of being in open sight, as if I were managing to move through a difficult and dangerous labor. I reread several times Krishna’s argument to Arjun that it was acceptable for him to fight his cousins, because he was responsible only for actions, whereas God controlled consequences.
Asha woke from her long nap, and after going to the roof to see whether a kite might have caught on the TV antenna, she sat beside me in silence, switching from station to station on the radio. She kept closing her eyes as though she was ready to slip back into sleep.
“Take a bath,” I said. This was the first time I had spoken normally to her in several days, and it felt strange. “You’ll be less sleepy.” Forming and speaking a sentence was like making something. Anita glanced at me. I continued talking, feeling willful, as if the more words I said, the stronger my hold on the world of the common room would become. “How is school? Do the children talk about Rajiv Gandhi?” I noticed that I sounded as if I had been away.
“No,” Asha answered, yawning.
“Strange how somebody so important can just vanish and it makes no difference.”
“His family must be unhappy,” Asha said, spinning the station dial. Till then I had only thought of Rajiv Gandhi’s death as the end of a dynasty. I remembered the swiftness with which Rajinder had died. One side of Asha’s hair was matted down and there were hatchmarks on her cheek from the sofa’s weave. Her thinness and disheveledness made her look poor.
“Take a bath,” Anita said, sounding as if she had already repeated this several times. She poured a glass of water into the subji. We stared at each other. This meeting of gazes felt like something new, one of the benefits of our compact.
“Yes,” Asha said, but made no move to stand.
“Has your mother been giving you yogurt for breakfast?”
“No.”
“What are you doing?”
“I only asked if she had been eating yogurt.” I understood that Anita was drawing the limits of what I had bought.
“Go bathe,” Anita said.
“In five minutes,” Asha replied.
“This is not a shop that you can bargain with me.”
Asha went and got her towel, which was draped over the balcony ledge. I started at the Gita again.
During dinner only Asha and I talked. Asha asked me if I was better, and I found myself replying, “Better than before,” even though I had not meant to qualify my answer. When I questioned her, How is school? Why did you sleep so much this afternoon? Did Mr. Gupta’s phone wake you last night? she answered in short phrases. Anita was examining us and I think this quieted Asha. Having a home again made me want to talk and talk. In my loneliness, any detail, whether Asha had turned left or right at a street corner, would have been comforting. Even with her short answers, I might have developed a conversation, but I thought that to do so in front of Anita could appear threatening.
Near the end of the meal Asha asked Anita, “Will you play badminton with me?”
“Not.”
“Why?” Asha said, sounding startled. “You said you would.”
“When I tell you to take a bath I want you to do it right then.”
I couldn’t watch the punishment and looked at the floor. I believed Anita was training Asha to obey her immediately as a way of guarding against me.
“I took a bath.”
“I’m not playing with you. You c
an play with someone else. I don’t want to play with you.”
“Who?”
“Find someone.”
“Will you play with me?” Asha asked me.
“No,” I whispered.
Anita stood and went to wash the dishes. A little later Asha climbed the ladder to the roof.
I continued with the Gita on the living-room sofa, unwilling to give up my freedom to be anywhere in the flat.
Nevertheless, when I lay down that night I was happy. Before I fell asleep, I tried to think of innocuous questions I could ask Anita or facts I could chatter about like a beacon pulsing to mark its presence. I had not yet told Anita about Mr. Gupta running for Parliament. That information, if handled well, might last several meals.
I was to meet Mr. Gupta at Safdarjung Hospital. He had gone there to talk with doctors who were striking. After meeting with them, Mr. Gupta decided to donate blood. A doctor who met me outside the hospital told me the sight of his own blood had caused Mr. Gupta to faint.
The hallways were empty, and only the patients who could not be moved were in the hospital. Mr. Gupta was lying on a bed with a wet cloth on his forehead when I arrived. There were two beds in the room. The other one held an unshaven man with a three- or four-year-old boy curled against him. A woman in a frayed cotton sari was leaning against a window and looking at the room. Two young doctors in white coats and a reporter with a camera around his neck stood between the beds.
“We feel bad to be on strike,” one doctor was telling Mr. Gupta. “That’s why we are all giving blood. But look at this room.” The floor had dark mop marks where someone had pretended to clean. “We have machines costing ten lakhs in the hallway because nobody will buy one part that’s broken.”
“This is because of corruption,” Mr. Gupta said. I went and stood near his head, with the bed between me and the doctors. “They are getting my blood,” he told me, and tilted his head toward the half of the room with the man and the child. I wondered whether both the father and the child were sick. “My relatives now.” The unshaven man smiled.