An Obedient Father

by Akhil Sharma

“‘You ordered wine?’ the assistant manager asked, though, of course, he knew we had”.

  “Mr. Bajwa opened the list of wines. The list was on a desk. He pointed at some and said, ‘These three.’ Hotels are always willing to let you have empty rooms and order some food and alcohol because it costs them little and later you owe them a favor. But to order expensive things is to make the hotel manager calculate whether you are worth the free things you are getting. The assistant manager asked if Mr. Bajwa would rather not continue with whiskey. Mr. Bajwa looked at him, then slapped him twice, once on each cheek, so loudly it was like a paper bag bursting. The young man stepped back. His eyes began tearing. I realized that the manager had not come himself because he had guessed there might be blows. ‘Listen to what I say, son,’ Mr. Bajwa said. The assistant manager nodded and left. ‘The assistant manager in charge of being hit,’ someone said. The wines came. Everybody tasted some. Including me.”

  “You said you didn’t finish one drink.”

  “It was just a taste.”

  There was silence, and that’s how this confession ended.

  I would become nervous as soon as they ended and so I sometimes babbled apologies. “I am ashamed of what we did.”

  Anita rarely got angry instantly at what I revealed. “I wish I knew more ways to hate you,” she might say. Asha would nod, as she often did at enigmatic statements. Then Anita tried working herself from abstraction into specific anger. “The bad schools Asha goes to. The children in her classes who cannot buy schoolbooks and so share with her. We get water five hours a day, and that in drops, and the Oberoi has a pool as large as our compound.”

  Once the anger was released, it might lunge about for an hour and a half or two, and might include in its ambit everything in the newspaper, from cow-feed prices, which the Iraq war had pushed up, to Nehru’s socialism, which had bound us to Russian aid. I never pointed out to her that Rajinder had been corrupt, and that when she was married Anita had been able to live quite easily with the watches and the saris that bribery brought her gift-wrapped every New Year.

  Sometimes her anger did not stop, and she and I would be awake until one or two because I did not want to leave her whirling mind alone in such a state. Asha would go to the roof to sleep. Once, during such a rage, after Asha had gone upstairs, I went to the latrine. Almost immediately Anita knocked on the door, and when I asked what she wanted, she said, “Nothing,” but I knew she had panicked at the possibility of my following Asha.

  Occasionally the open rage lasted into the next day, and if it did, I gave Anita money. I might take a hundred or two hundred rupees, fold them, and put them beside her, and soon her anger would be replaced by exhaustion.

  Money always worked. By the end of June I knew Anita was stealing from me. She had stopped giving me accounts for the household expenses. If I left my wallet anywhere other than locked in my closet, I discovered that some of the money was gone. I found these thefts comforting, because they diminished Anita’s moral weight.

  Perhaps because Anita felt more confident financially or perhaps because she was allowed to confront me, she began challenging other people as well. An electricity repairman came to the flat and before doing any repairs demanded a bribe. Anita refused, and when he persisted, saying, “A little tea money,” Anita went out onto the gallery and began shouting “Thief.” A crowd gathered in the flat and in front of it; Anita harangued the repairman until he did his job.

  There was often an odd jocularity to her hatred. Anita had started calling me a snake, and sometimes she would hiss at me, holding up a hand bent into the shape of a hooded cobra.

  It was obvious from Anita’s sometimes being too angry to sleep that she could not control her feelings and that, like lightning in the air, her anger required only something standing upright to strike. I realized that if my plan to use up her anger was to work, I must persist. Anita’s voice remained a screech, brakes scraping metal.

  I never lost faith in the power of confession. Probably this was because I needed to confess.

  Also, Anita occasionally gave good advice. Although she hated me, she was the one person in the world whose interests were most parallel to mine. If I went to jail, the government would probably also seize the flat and all my money. Anita, therefore, thought a great deal about what I should do to protect myself

  One night, because I was afraid of becoming unimportant to Mr. Gupta, I mentioned the possibility of telling newspaper reporters about the corruption charges against Mr. Bajwa.

  Anita responded that it wouldn’t help. “You think they don’t know already? Your problem is you are such a bad moneyman, like when you arranged the tax benefit and miscalculated the value of what you’d given. What a failure you are to spend a whole life being corrupt and still be incompetent at it.”

  If I wanted advice from Anita I almost had to seek insult. “I know my problem is I’m no good.”

  “Don’t give all the money you collect immediately to Mr. Gupta. Give him a lakh or two at a time. He can’t keep the money, or the bankbooks, because of the possibility of a tax raid. Tell him you’ll give him the money when he needs it. He won’t fight this, because he’ll be afraid of angering you. Stupid people are unpredictable and you are stupid. This way, you get some power of your own instead of just being the one everyone can identify to the CBI as the bribe collector.”

  The boldness of simply not turning over the money was breathtaking, and when I attempted this, it worked so well that it felt as if Mr. Gupta and Mr. Bajwa had been expecting it. Mr. Bajwa only said, “Don’t think we don’t know every paisa you are getting.”

  After the confessions started and Anita could be angry with me, the idea of suggesting that we all go to Kamla Nagar and buy Asha her school uniforms did not feel as ridiculous as it would have earlier. Sometimes we went to dinner or a movie, and because I was the one who always proposed these things, Asha would occasionally ask me to recommend such a plan to Anita. I tried not to be alone with Asha in the flat, and the implied confidentiality of Asha requesting something from me made me nervous. The first time she came to me, I told Anita, and she became angry at Asha, accusing her of ingratitude. After this, I always acted as if the suggested venture was solely my idea.

  I confessed everything except that I was visiting Asha in her school. When Asha told stories of her schoolday, I would act surprised.

  Confessing became as important as sleep for me. If I did not confess for several nights, I grew confused and walked around looking at the ground.

  The talking I was doing during Asha’s lunch hour and at night became as important as sleep to me. If I did not have an extended conversation with Anita or Asha for several days I began to feel dazed. My talking and explaining gave my world order.

  EIGHT

  One evening, Anita, Asha, and I went to see Rajesh Khanna speak at the Ram Lila Ground at Red Fort. Seventy or eighty thousand people stretched around the stage and up to the enormous crenellated walls of the fort. The stage was about fifteen meters long and had cords of geraniums dangling from its front. It took almost an hour for us, with Anita and me holding Asha’s hands, to push our way near the VIP section so that from where we stood we could actually see the speakers. The section was distinguished by a dhurrie on the ground, plastic folding chairs, and waiters that kept bringing glasses of water. The crowd grew till it appeared unbelievable that this dark mass with its roar and smell was gathering under the thin blue sky only to listen.

  I attended from curiosity about Mr. Gupta’s competition. The size of the crowd didn’t worry me, because over the last month I had given up trying to predict whether Mr. Gupta would win or lose, since all this did was rush me from one emotion to another.

  Anita came because Asha had never seen a celebrity and demanded that she must. Anita was trying to compensate for the rage that could still cause her to wake Asha from the middle of a sleep and demand that Asha reveal what she had been dreaming.

  There were about twenty people ons
tage. Some were candidates; each was invited to speak. Their words—“This nation is ours and will remain ours”—spoken about foreign lenders, were similar enough to the BJP speeches I had heard that I could assume the crowd was there for Rajesh Khanna, not to support Congress. Many people appeared so indifferent to the candidates that instead of looking toward the stage, they watched the bell-shaped speakers, tied to bamboo poles along the field, from which the candidates’ words echoed out.

  Rajesh Khanna’s turn to speak came. I lifted Asha onto my shoulders. Even from one hundred meters away he looked heavy and his hair appeared unnaturally dark. This man, at the height of his fame, had married Dimple Kapadia, twenty years younger than he and considered, after she appeared in Bobby, the most beautiful woman in India. With his new wife, he retired from movies. After fifteen years of marriage and two children his wife cheated on him, and he had reentered movies only to discover that his films were no longer hits. Now he was running for Parliament.

  As Rajesh Khanna moved toward the microphone, dialogue from his movie Anand boomed from the loudspeakers. The crowd became so loud in response that my heart raced automatically. Rajesh Khanna stood silently before the microphone a minute as the dialogue concluded. “Namaste,” he said then. In the last month and a half I had shaken hands with Advani twice, but there is something thrilling about the familiarity of a movie celebrity’s voice which no other type of fame can generate. Rajesh Khanna’s voice was immediately drowned by the crowd’s roar. “Namaste,” he said again, and the crowd’s roar absorbed this, too. When he realized the crowd was not about to stop, Rajesh Khanna began a short speech, portions of which he had to keep repeating because of the noise.

  Once he was done, the crowd leaked away. I kept Asha on my shoulders and carried her out. Mr. Gupta had never received a response like this, even when he spoke directly after being praised by Advani. But in India even a lip-synching contest in memory of a dead singer can draw thousands.

  When things turned bad for Mr. Gupta, I responded with such speed that I must have been expecting disaster. Many other people also acted rapidly, and in the same way, so perhaps our alacrity only revealed a general readiness for betrayal.

  One afternoon I came home exhausted and nauseated from a headache. The heat had given me a nosebleed earlier that day, and just before I arrived, the trickle restarted. I lay down on the living-room bed, because when I tried sleeping in the smallness of my room, the ceiling swayed. Anita made me salty lemonade before I fell asleep. I woke an hour later, at about five, with the phone buzzing beside my head. It was late enough in the day that I winced at the idea of a fresh task.

  One of Mr. Gupta’s servants spoke and in a quick voice requested I come to Model Town.

  “Something important?” I asked. From where I lay, I could see a sky so bright that it felt as if day would never end. Beneath it, the roofs, stepped terraces, were abandoned.

  “Please come, sir.”

  “Answer him,” said the man who listened to our phone. He liked to enter conversations suddenly and frighten the unsuspecting party.

  “Who?” said the servant.

  “Your father, baby.”

  “There was an income tax raid and they found money.”

  “How much?” asked the phone tapper.

  “I don’t know. Enough.”

  I assumed Congress already knew all this information, but I interrupted and said, “I’m coming.” The servant hung up.

  “I wasn’t told about this. That’s how I am treated,” the man said.

  “We are nobodies.” I always tried appearing pitiful before him in hope that this might keep him from harming me.

  “You are right, Mr. Karan.”

  When I went to tell Anita about the income tax raid, she was sitting on the common-room floor, wearing glasses and reading the newspaper.

  “Of course they had some money hidden away. They couldn’t trust you. Also, in case they lose the election, they want to have made something from all this. But to keep undeclared money at home? It’s terrible to be both corrupt and stupid.”

  “This makes me more important,” I said, acting stupid. “They can say whatever money found was from family property they recently sold. But that excuse will only work once, so all the money now will have to go through me.”

  “Life is more complicated than your fantasies,” Anita said.

  I left for Model Town.

  Only two cars were parked in the shade across the road from Mr. Gupta’s house. I visited his house several times a week and there were usually ten or more cars and jeeps lined up nearby. My worries about the campaign had been kept in check partially because so many other people were taking part in Mr. Gupta’s venture. I had expected even more activity than usual because of the scandal. The silence worried me.

  It was now nearly seven, but the sky was unflaggingly blue. As I got out of my autorickshaw, a fat man was climbing into a white Maruti van in front of Mr. Gupta’s gate. The fourteen-year-old boy who had brought it for him took his five-rupee tip, and in extravagant obsequiousness backed away, salaaming the man and also stepping on his own feet with little exclamations of pain. The boy, his face terribly streaked by chickenpox, like raindrop marks on a dusty window, had appeared out of nowhere soon after it became obvious that each day there would be a tangle of automobiles outside Mr. Gupta’s house. He took charge, parking cars near and far, telling you when he returned the keys that he had had to hunt hard to find shade for your vehicle. In hopes of increasing his tips he had begun behaving clownishly, wearing too-large black shoes and a trained monkey’s Muslim outfit of a fez and a vest, and tripping over himself, doing pratfalls and tumbles, when he accepted his reward.

  Congress had turned off the electricity on Mr. Gupta’s block, and inside the house there was the heavy vibration of a generator but not the overlay of voices to which I had become accustomed during my visits.

  Inside, in one of the several living rooms, Mr. Gupta sat on a sofa. Across from him, on another sofa, was Mr. Tuli, the man who had shown me Gopal Godse’s business card. The room was very large, and there was a smaller room separated from it by a ceilinghigh closet. When I came around the closet into the room, Mr. Tuli was saying, “The police will look. Our people will look.” I did not see Mr. Bajwa, although he rarely left a rival adviser alone with Mr. Gupta.

  Mr. Gupta patted the space next to him. Since I had begun doling out the money, Mr. Gupta had been showing me more respect. I sat down and tiredness made me sigh. The ceiling fan was turning slowly because only one generator powered the whole house. Both Mr. Gupta and Mr. Tuli were shiny from perspiration.

  “It was Ajay’s money they found,” Mr. Tuli told me. “He’d been collecting money by telling people it was for Mr. Gupta’s campaign. Of course, he had never turned over any of the money to us.”

  “I hope he’s dead,” Mr. Gupta said, and gave me a half-smile, as if to tell me not to believe him. “He’s run away. He might have more money.”

  “When was the raid?” There were no overturned and slit sofa cushions. The kitchen, which I had passed on my way to the living room, had all its plates and pots on the shelves. One of the latches to a closet had been pried off. Where the latch used to be was a gash that revealed the yellow wood beneath the red varnish.

  “Two, three hours ago,” Mr. Tuli answered.

  “Ajay said Mr. Bajwa had helped him get the money.”

  This made sense, because Ajay could not know who needed what favors. “From whom?” I asked. I marveled at Mr. Bajwa’s talents, that he had been able to raise money without my ever hearing of his efforts.

  “I hit him with my shoes. I nearly knocked off an ear. He cried like a woman.” I could not understand Mr. Gupta’s voice. It was tight with anger, but slow and almost dreamy.

  “Ajay probably sold the same thing to two people and one phoned income tax,” Mr. Tuli said. “In an election this close, income tax wouldn’t raid a candidate unless they expected to find something in parti
cular.”

  “I hit him in front of his wife. That was stupid.”

  “What are you going to say about the money?”

  “That it was money from land Mr. Gupta sold, and because nobody will believe it, we’ll suggest that the money was Ajay’s dowry. Nobody cares about not paying taxes, and people understand dowry, especially for an MP candidate’s son.”

  “Mr. Karan, I am relying on you now,” Mr. Gupta declared. “You will have to help me.” He looked in my eyes when he said this. I think Mr. Gupta hoped to have some jocularity in his voice, but the statement sounded serious and made him appear desperate.

  “How much money did they find?”

  Mr. Tuli answered, “Eight lakhs. Five in cash. Three in bankbooks.” Mr. Gupta grimaced at the lost sum. This was vastly more than I had expected. It was equivalent to selling a school. Mr. Gupta’s campaign must be so confused that at night people couldn’t tell what had happened during the day. I wondered whether the BJP might abandon the campaign. An ordinary candidate, even one who lost, was better than no candidate, but a bad candidate, one that harmed the BJP’s reputation, was worse than no candidate.

  “How much do you think you can raise?” Mr. Tuli asked. I understood the answer would affect how much effort the BJP was willing to put into the campaign.

  “I have enough money already to win this campaign,” I said, and thought that if Mr. Gupta was relying on me to save him, it was time to leave Mr. Gupta.

  “Bring the money,” Mr. Gupta said.

  Late morning the next day, I went to the many banks in which I had stored the bribes and withdrew twelve lakhs, about half the money I had accumulated. Anita had confirmed my belief that I should turn over only part of what I had raised. As I carried the bundles of rupees in the rubber briefcase Mr. Mittal had given me, I realized that since last night I had begun thinking of the money as more mine than Mr. Gupta’s.

  The boy who parked cars jumped up and saluted me from where he was sitting in the dirt eating roti and subji off a leaf plate. Again Mr. Gupta’s tall yellow house was silent. The silence made the building appear to be waiting.