by Akhil Sharma
“Everything gets eaten,” said the other doctor, tall and thin, with hair that reached past his collar.
“The machine you were talking about, what do you need for it?”
“It’s for imaging, and the part that actually sees is broken. The part costs seventy thousand.”
“Give Mr. Karan here your phone number and he’ll get it for you,” Mr. Gupta said, lifting his eyes to me. The doctor wrote down his number. Mr. Gupta then said, “Photos done?” to the reporter.
“One with the machine, maybe.”
Mr. Gupta and the others went to find the machine.
“What are you sick with?” I asked the unshaven man.
“She’s sick,” he said, and pointed to the woman. “My wife.”
“Did you get the blood as well as the bed?” I asked him, and he started laughing. After a moment the woman did as well. “Who will you give the vote to?” I asked him.
“Him.”
“You?” I said to the woman. She smiled and did not answer.
“Her also,” the husband said. I did not believe him. “I need a job, sahib. I’m fifth-standard pass and can read and write. I used to drive an autorickshaw, but because of diesel prices had to stop.”
I promised to help and gave the man my office phone number instead of the address, hoping he would not want to risk wasting a rupee on the phone call.
Mr. Gupta returned and motioned me to join him in the hallway. “This is Anand,” he said, introducing the reporter.
Anand nodded as if agreeing that the correct name had been given. “I can put the blood-donating story in one paper and the machine story in another.” We spoke in English in case the people in the room could overhear us.
“I’m paying only if they mention the story on TV,” Mr. Gupta warned.
“I can’t do TV I told you that before.” The reporter looked angry.
“Fine.”
“I’ll write that the part will come in several months, so nobody checks.”
“Good.”
They were silent for a minute. I had not been sure whether the gift would actually be made.
Anand said, “I forgot my wallet and need to buy lunch.”
Mr. Gupta gave him a fifty-rupee note and he left. “The BJP sent him,” Mr. Gupta explained after Anand had turned a corner of the hallway. “He writes for four or five newspapers.”
He was about to say something else when I spoke. Even though it was too late, I still wanted to discourage him. “The woman who’s getting your blood won’t vote for you.”
Mr. Gupta looked startled and then laughed. “A voting booth curtain is a license to steal. I give them my blood. My blood! They say they’ll vote for me, but then the curtain is drawn and they can do anything.” When I did not join in the laughter, he said, “The BJP’s votes come from people a little more educated than those two.” I still did not smile. “We have money, Mr. Karan. And we have no history, so we can promise anything without them being certain we’re lying.”
“Where will the money come from?”
He did not answer. The woman in the hospital room said something and a boy’s voice answered. Mr. Gupta leaned forward and then tilted back. “Whatever happens to me will happen to you.” I nodded. “I am being frank.”
“I understand.”
“How much is the school system worth? If you sold all the land and money we can grant. If you sold everything. The maps on the classroom walls.”
“We can’t sell everything. We’d get caught.” I knew, of course, what Mr. Gupta wanted, but was trying to resist him.
“Not every school. Not everything literally. The schools that have a hundred students.” He was now watching me intently. I wondered what Mr. Bajwa would do in my place. “Some of the small schools sit on good land.” Mr. Gupta waited, as if for me to catch up. “How much would people pay? What amount?”
“How many people have connections enough that they can risk buying schools?”
“You tell me.” I didn’t answer. “If I win, we can put the paperwork in later, saying the property was not useful as a school,” he said. “If I don’t win, the buyer either loses what he has paid or pays other people.”
I did not want to offend him any further, so I said, “I understand.”
“How much would we get if we sold the school on the Hill?”
The few property developers I knew I did not know well. “I’ll find out who has the most contacts.”
Seeing I had nothing more to add, Mr. Gupta said, “We have the BJP’s support if we don’t embarrass them. People think Rajesh Khanna still looks like he did in the movies.” Mr. Gupta stopped and appeared to check my response. I shook my head no. “They see him fat and bald now, they’ll feel cheated and vote for someone else.”
Six or seven schools and stretches of property were out of the way enough that they could be sold without the newspapers discovering what had happened.
Mr. Gaur ran a small school at the base of the Hill. The school was two long yellow rooms in a dirt compound. He and his wife were the only teachers there. It had started out as an experimental year-round school to teach street children basic skills. Instead of regular classes there were supposed to be short repeating units of math, literacy, and government that children could drop in and out of. When Mr. Gaur took over the school, he converted the rooms into a home for his family. Classes were held outside. In the winter, students were discouraged from coming; those who did were accommodated in one of the rooms. The wall behind the school had separated the compound from the brambles and dirt paths of the Hill until four or five years ago, when it collapsed. Bushes now came within a few feet of the school windows.
The Hill, the largest park in Old Delhi, abuts several rich neighborhoods, and I had no doubt the school would sell. I thought Mr. Gaur would agree to the sale because he and his wife were near retirement, his daughters had married, and his son worked outside Delhi. The difficulty was to get Mr. and Mrs. Gaur out without panicking them that the Congress Party would punish them for taking part in the funding of the BJP.
Thirty or so students, from about eight to fourteen or fifteen, were sitting in two clumps under a mango tree in the center of the courtyard. One clump was chanting the alphabet, which was written on a blackboard, and the other was having subtraction explained by Mrs. Gaur. They appeared to be trying to shout each other down. Mrs. Gaur was a tiny woman with a flat face that appeared pressed in. She had a blackboard behind her and was showing how numbers are carried over. The sums were faded, and instead of marking them with chalk as she explained, she only pointed at the figures. I realized she did not write new problems every day.
Mr. Gaur was sitting in a chair on the veranda that ran along the yellow rooms. He was eating rice and lentils with his bare hands. As he saw me, he took a glass of water from beside his foot and, leaning beyond the veranda, rinsed his hands. “How are you?” I asked. Mr. Gaur was under five feet tall and had a face so round you could set instruments by it.
“Your blessings,” he answered, smiling and bobbing his head.
He stood and I followed him inside. The stink of shit and heat was so strong I backed out as soon as I stepped through the door. The room was dark. The only windows were high up and narrow. There was a cot against a wall, several cots standing on end, and a table with an enormous radio.
“Oh ho,” Mr. Gaur chuckled, and called, “Baby. Baby.” He moved into the room and leaned down and scanned the floor. He spotted something beneath the cot and, kneeling, pulled it out. The child was perhaps a year old and wore only a cloth diaper. “My granddaughter,” Mr. Gaur said, and carried the child, held beneath its arms and kept as far away from himself as possible, past me. From the veranda he shouted, “Mrs. Gaur! Come take care of this bad girl.”
Mrs. Gaur left her class and, after saying namaste to me, took the baby behind the school.
Mr. Gaur and I sat on the veranda.
At first we talked about his children. His oldest daughter had cerv
ical cancer. His son, who worked at a cigarette factory, had been promoted. Mrs. Gaur returned to her classes. After a while the discussion came to the elections. At some point I let a meaningful pause develop to indicate that the serious part of the conversation was about to start.
“Big things are happening,” I said.
“What?” he asked, leaning over. There was fear in his voice.
“The government wants to shut down your school.”
Mr. Gaur straightened in his chair. He was quiet for a moment. “Can’t you save us?” Mr. Gaur asked. “We have rights after living here so long.” He said the two things in the same quiet, frightened voice.
Looking at the students, I said, “You have forty students.” Most of them were thin and all were barefoot. Mrs. Gaur made them leave their slippers in a pile on the side of the compound entrance because she did not want them bringing their germs into her dirt yard. This detail had, in the past, made me wonder whether she was crazy.
“I can get more, as many as you need.”
I did not answer for a while. “That’s not what it is. Congress wants to sell your school to raise money for the election.” About fifteen years ago a bank robber had phoned the Central Bank and pretended to be speaking on Indira Gandhi’s behalf. He had said the Prime Minister needed money and would like it to be ready in a briefcase in two hours. The robber appeared at the bank at the appointed time, showed some identification he had made up, received the money in a bag, and vanished, never to be seen again. When I first heard that, I immediately thought of doing it myself.
“What are we to do? We have to live somewhere.”
“Take a flat like everybody else. The government never meant you to live here.” I dripped a little anger into my voice so that he would know he was unimportant.
“Don’t be angry with me. I am a poor man.”
“This is a nation of poor people.”
“But what am I to do with my family?”
“Your children are gone.” As I was saying this, Mrs. Gaur dismissed one batch of her students and came to the veranda.
Mr. Gaur explained Congress’s plans to her.
The thoughtful stare she gave me made me uneasy and I said, “Changes are happening. Changes which if you knew would drive you mad.”
“Will we get other jobs?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Will we work in the same school?”
“I give you my finger, you grab my wrist.”
“No. No,” Mr. Gaur protested.
“What if the BJP wins?” Mrs. Gaur asked.
“That is the good thing about the sale. The BJP and Congress will both share whatever money is made.”
“Strange,” she said. Women, I think, do not speak as fast as men and this lets them be more reflective.
Mr. Gaur also appeared doubtful.
I said, “Does a lion care what another lion eats as long as its stomach is full?”
Mr. and Mrs. Gaur were quiet. Many of the children that had been reciting the alphabet had stopped and were talking among themselves.
“Can we get government quarters?” Mrs. Gaur asked.
I sighed. No one spoke for a while. “One piece of good news I have. I can offer you one lakh.” Mr. Gaur looked at his wife. I had picked this figure by calculating reasonable rent for two years and then doubling it. I was afraid of how long negotiations could take if Mr. Gaur resisted. “But you can’t tell anyone what’s being done. If anyone asks, and why should they, you say this school is being closed and you are being moved.”
“Will you find out about government quarters?” Mrs. Gaur asked.
“One lakh is what you get. You’ve lived for free all these years.”
Again we were quiet. “I can buy stocks,” Mr. Gaur said.
“You won’t gamble with our money,” Mrs. Gaur immediately replied.
“Stocks are not gambling.”
“And every type of alcohol is not bad.”
I had to begin investigating the property dealers capable of buying the land. The school was about two kilometers from home, and I decided to walk to the flat and make my phone calls from there. The confidence that comes with success made me think I had been superstitious to believe I could not be bad in one part of my life without suffering elsewhere.
Asha opened the door and said, “Every twenty minutes you’ve had phone calls.” She was smiling and excited. I thought the phone calls had to do with Mr. Gupta. I felt a gust of self-importance.
“The same man always,” Anita added. She was in the doorway between her bedroom and the living room. “I told him you were at work, and you would be back by three. But he keeps calling.” Her squeaky voice made her sound as if she was about to cry.
The phone rang. We became still at the sound. “I’ll answer,” I said.
“Hello,” I murmured. I sat on the edge of the bed and leaned down into the phone, which I held in my lap.
“Ram Karan?” The man had a Haryanvi accent. I didn’t answer. “Ram Karan?”
“What’s your name?”
“Sisterfucker, you think you’re in a toy store. Asking me questions.” It was Congress, of course. Immediately I wanted to apologize and claim there had been a mistake, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. “We’ll kill you. You return the money or they won’t find your corpse.”
I cut the line and immediately dialed Mr. Gupta at the office. I was so panicked, I started dialing my own number. Anita came and sat on one of the love seats and watched me. She kept her hands on her knees. Once the other end was ringing, I heard a click and the phone became airy. “Who are you calling?” asked the man with the Hariyanvi accent. I didn’t answer and the phone stopped ringing. “Who are you calling? Roshan Gupta?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. You can dial him now.”
I dialed again. The other end rang for a while and then I hung up. I tried Mr. Gupta at home. “Who are you calling now?”
I thought about whether to answer. “I’m phoning his house.”
“I have to write down everyone you call. That’s why I ask.” Now none of the menace that had been in his voice a moment ago was present.
A servant at Mr. Gupta’s picked up. Mr. Gupta was out and Ajay was put on.
“Somebody is listening to this,” I told him as soon as he spoke.
“Who are you?” Ajay demanded.
“A killer from Bihar,” the man answered. “You think you can steal from us?”
“Steal what? From where?” Ajay said.
“Sisterfucker.”
“You think this will scare us. Slap you twice and you’ll start crying.”
“Cut your throat twice. Make your whole family cry.”
“I am home,” I said softly, fear crushing my voice.
“Don’t worry,” Ajay said in English, as if his speaking a foreign language would make me more confident.
“Don’t worry,” the Haryanvi-accented man repeated in English, and laughed.
“This is illegal,” Ajay said.
“I am the police.”
“You’re not the police. The BJP has the police.”
When I hung up, Ajay and the man were still arguing.
Now that Congress had confronted me, I knew that Mr. Gupta had to win or Congress would, if I was lucky, put me in jail for corruption. I couldn’t imagine the man being Central Bureau of Investigation, because he would not have revealed himself. I moved the phone from my lap to the stool beside the bed, where it usually sat.
I didn’t want to look at Anita, but when I did, she was staring at me. “Mr. Gupta is running for Parliament,” I said. My voice quavered. “He’s taken the money we’d raised for Congress and is using that.”
“Now this,” Anita said. She sounded tired, and the fact that her cartoon voice could hold fatigue was surprising.
“I had no say in this.”
“Of course you did. You could have said no. You could have said I am not doing any of this.”
�
��It’s not like that. I’m Mr. Gupta’s man. Everything that happens to him happens to me also. If Mr. Gupta agreed to do this and I went to Congress to warn them, the BJP would come after me. Or he would.”
“What’s happening?” Asha asked from her bedroom. “Can I come in?” She moved into the doorway. Since neither of us said no, she entered the living room and sat on the love seat beside her mother.
“Mr. Gupta was going to do what he wanted,” I said quietly.
“It’s never your fault. You can never do anything. Your idiocy will never end.” Because of the pride I had been taking in being Mr. Gupta’s man her accusations felt deserved. Of course, God was punishing me. The wrinkles on Anita’s forehead were ruler-straight. “I’m handcuffed to a crazy man.”
“It was wrong,” I said. “You were twelve,” I started saying. Listening to myself, I wondered why the only response I had to Anita was admitting my crime. “I remember the newspapers under you so that if you bled …”
“Go,” Anita screamed at Asha, and shoved her off the love seat. Asha fell onto the floor. “This is not for you.”
Asha sped from the room.
The shout had shocked me and I didn’t know whether to continue. “Anything I could say wouldn’t be enough,” I said, trying to suggest I could add more if wanted. But I had already said all that needed to be confessed and there was no value in repeating it.
“Stop,” she said, and stood and put her hand over her mouth. The space between sofa and love seat was so narrow she was standing over me.
I stopped.
“Don’t talk about that with Asha here. What would I do if she knew?” I didn’t understand her, and Anita must have seen this, for she said, “She’d be frightened all the time if she knew.”
“I don’t want to hurt Asha.”
“I’m not angry about back then,” Anita said. “This is about today.” I did not know how to respond. “You think I can’t tell the difference between the past and the present? I’m not crazy. You are bringing danger now.”
Because I had no answer to this, my jumbled thoughts made me say, “You don’t have to be unkind to Asha. I won’t ever go near her.”