Vanity Bagh

by Anees Salim

  ‘Who do you think will win today?’ he asked. I was not sure whether he meant which team or which sofa in the room. Zia blushed.

  ‘England,’ I said.

  ‘The match is between Manchester United and Manchester City.’

  I blushed.

  Behind a curtain, Rukhia Jamal cleared her throat and, taking the cue, her husband got abruptly down to business. ‘So you are the one who wants to marry my daughter?’

  Zia said neither yes nor no; he looked briefly at the screen where the referee blew a muted whistle and sliced the air with a stiff hand. Rooney was lying still on the ground as if he were hit by a missile, then he clutched a shin and started rolling from side to side in immense fake pain.

  ‘I have no problem with that,’ Jamal sahib said. But he said it in a tone which suggested he was the only one who had no problem with Zia marrying his daughter. As if in confirmation, the mother of the girl coughed behind the curtain, coughs as unreal as Rooney’s agony, who was now limping past the referee, then sprinting like he was late for office.

  ‘You talk to my elder brother who has the final say in all our family matters.’

  We never knew Jamal sahib had an elder brother; we never imagined he could have any relation other than his wife, daughter and son Iskander who had died long ago from consuming too much fake cocaine. For a moment I wondered if he was referring to the beggar under Franklin as his elder brother – it could be a joke, it could be the harsh reality.

  ‘I can’t talk to my brother because we are not on speaking terms anymore,’ he went on, looking absently at the television. ‘He thinks I am good for nothing. He thinks I let my son run wild which finally killed him. And he says he will take all important decisions for my family and I just have to obey. My wife reports to his wife every week.’

  ‘No problem,’ Zia said enthusiastically. ‘I will talk to him in the morning.’

  ‘You can tell him you and I already had a chat about this.’

  ‘Yes, I will do that,’ Zia said, consulting his watch to hide his joy and relief. ‘Can I take my Ammi with me?’

  ‘That is up to you,’ Jamal sahib waved a hand in the air. ‘He lives in the alley behind the Irani Café. Fifth house on the left.’

  A cold shiver ran up my spine while Zia continued to simper gratefully at the potbellied Rooney. My mental GPS worked better than his. I stared at Yahya, who smiled and shook his head happily, ready to shake Jamal sahib’s hand and then press the shaken hand to his heart.

  You might know my brother.

  His name is Abu Hathim.

  – Jamal Hathim (1962- )

  The three of us sprang to our feet together as if we had become conjoined since we had been ushered into the house.

  Jamal sahib picked up the remote and restored the hoots, horns and carol-like singing in the stadium to the room as we marched towards the door. Then he changed the channel.

  Kalawati’s husband committed suicide …

  – Rahul Gandhi (1970- )

  ‘So?’ Jamal sahib asked the TV irately as we filed out of the house.

  Three months later, a thirty-one-year-old dry fruit dealer married the sixteen-year-old Aasia Jamal. He was not a wholesaler, though. That was some consolation for Zia and my Ammi.

  XII

  By the time we reached his home,

  Accused No. 4 was already dead.

  ~ Inspector Machangada ( – )

  I touched Will Smith yesterday. That is to say, I touched something that had been touched by him a few years ago. That is to say, I shook hands with someone who had shaken hands with him in 2009. When you have physical contact with famous people, their fingerprints don’t wear off you, they get passed on like viral fever.

  Welcome the king of sound engineering

  who won the Oscar for the best sound.

  – Dy Superintendent ( - )

  The king of sound engineering raised a hand and waved at us the way politicians do; for the last twenty minutes or so he had been smiling the smile of a spiritual leader: the fake, nonstop smile. On the table before him was what Will Smith had handed him with a handshake, a smile and half a hug: the golden figurine that looked like a Phantom statuette with the wrong choice of colour. Could this be the real one? Or was this just a replica? If they part with it every year, it could be gold-plated. If they don’t, it is definitely twenty-fourcarat. The Muneer Shah Memorial Trophy, which is real gold plus six real diamonds, belongs to the winning team only as long as the photo sessions last. After the press drives away, the victorious club goes home with a replica that is golden only in colour and the six equidistant objects around the base of the trophy are glass pieces pretending to be diamonds. But the Oscar is not the Muneer Shah Memorial Trophy. The first never leaves your mind, the latter never leaves Muneer Shah Trust.

  When his turn came to address the inmates, the king of sound engineering made a mess of his speech. He started by saying he was happy to see us all. But then he changed his stance and said he was saddened to see precious human life wasted in captivity. That he would be happy when we roamed the world as freely as the rest of humanity did. Then again, probably fearing he was instigating mass jailbreak, he said we should make the best use of prison life to cleanse our conscience and make ourselves better human beings. Then he contradicted himself by saying that every human being in the world was good and golden at heart. I think this was his real extempore speech and not the one, as he claimed, he had delivered at the Kodak Theatre with Will Smith smiling sympathetically by his side. We all applauded him nevertheless.

  You know the difference between you and me?

  I make this look good.

  – Will Smith (1968- )

  Misinterpreting our frenzied clapping for an act of sarcasm and pretending that he was not ruffled by it, the king of sound engineering waved at us and sat down, but the superintendent leaned sideways to whisper something in his ear which made him stand up again. With an apologetic smile he declared the Independence Day celebrations open. We applauded him again.

  Autograph hunters,

  line up on the left side of the stage.

  – Dy Superintendent ( - )

  The whole prison lined up and a warden distributed scraps of paper – I recognized these scraps: they came from the piles of waste from the Book Room – as the queue crawled up a temporary flight of stairs leaned against the side of the stage. The August sun beat down on us, and enthusiastic autograph hunters started to bicker. Some swore at the superintendent’s mother, some at the chief guest’s father. The king’s smile was still untired when the turn for the man in front of me came, his signature still as lengthy as his name in spite of having been repeated more than a hundred times already. This man probably knew glory came stamped with a date of expiry, he probably doubted if it would ever come his way again.

  Now we were face to face, I on the sunny side of the stage and he, the man who was half-hugged by Will Smith, on the shady half of it. He waited patiently with the superintendent’s pen while I, to everybody’s surprise, ran a hand over the statuette on the table. The king’s smile brightened by many degrees, the superintendent’s smile dimmed by many more.

  ‘Is this the real one or the replica?’ I found myself asking.

  The king still smiled, not very pleasantly though. The superintendent looked as if his stomach was suddenly upset; he turned his head sharply to look agitatedly at his deputy, who turned his to look agitatedly at me. The king quickly doodled on the scrap of paper I held out, he hurriedly shook the hand I thrust at him. ‘I love Will Smith,’ I told the king as the deputy superintendent signalled me to move on with the scrap of paper scrawled with a signature sound engineering had made worth standing in a long queue for.

  Across seven seas from the Kodak Theatre, the Oscars of 2009 made Vanity Bagh cross swords with Mehendi. It all started with a poster pasted on the back of a bus, but it didn’t stop when the bus was mobbed near the Air India building and set on fire. The poster was in green felt pen,
signed with the impression of a hand dripping red emulsion. It stated nothing but the obvious: OSCAR SCORE. MUSLIMS: 3. HINDUS: 0.

  We knew the bus was doomed the moment it left the depot happily tootling. What surprised us was the amount of time it took for the poster to be read and reacted upon. The bus had plied through the heart of Mehendi twice in broad daylight without anybody caring to read the Oscar special communiqué. It would have made the third round too had it not been for a teenager who happened to be trailing the bus on his bike. He called his uncle who was the treasurer of Mehendi Hind Sangh; the treasurer called the secretary, the secretary called the president, who called everyone and they set the bus on fire.

  We would have been heartbroken if the bus had ended the day’s trip with the poster still intact on its arse.

  No pain is bigger than the pain you feel

  when your words come back unread.

  – Shair Shoukath (1928-2010)

  You finally admit you are

  an unpublished poet? Good.

  – Professor Suleiman Ilahi (1949- )

  Shoukath miyan, put the flower vase down.

  Poetry Club was not formed to promote martial arts.

  – Rustom sahib (1951- )

  The commissioner of police termed the act of torching the bus as an act of overreacting to a rumour. ‘Rumour?’

  the press asked him. ‘There was a poster, no?’

  The commissioner was known for his short temper,

  especially when he sat in a pool of white light and confronted more mikes than he could count. ‘Then where the hell is that damn poster?’ he asked the press back. ‘You haven’t seen it. I haven’t seen it. 99.9 per cent of Mangobagh hasn’t seen it.’

  Only a crowd of less than fifty people claimed to have read it, and they were the same people who had made the bus look like it had been driving through hellfire.

  ‘Then what caused the arson?’

  ‘Probe is on. We are actually interrogating the transport company officials. We don’t know if the bus was torched by the owners to claim the insurance money. The matter is put to rest till we have the forensic report.’

  Only if it was. Even before the Oscars physically reached India and were taken on a victory lap around the country, there appeared another scorecard which was stuck on the windshield of Abu Hathim sahib’s youngest son’s car.

  The Post-it note read: Muslims: 1. Hindus: 0.

  The car was parked near a gambler’s den on Broadway Street, and Rasool Hathim sat behind the wheel, clutching the gear shaft, strangled with a deep orange – almost saffron – ribbon. ‘Is this a sequel to the bus burning episode?’ the press asked. ‘The Post-it note too had a score, no? Just like the poster.’ ‘There was no poster, to begin with,’ the commissioner

  said. ‘And this is a sequel to nothing.’

  ‘What is the motive then?’

  ‘It either has something to do with the hawala racket or a love triangle. We have separate teams investigating into both possibilities.’

  Abu Hathim sahib seemed to be sharing the fate of the man who goes for a jungle combat with a bunch of gun-wielding, bandana-wearing men. No one, except our man, survives the jungle. He survives to bury the dead, settle the scores and then passionately kiss a hay-complexioned lady in a floral frock with his warpaint still on. I don’t remember the name of the movie. I never had a head for complicated movie names.

  Rasool will be avenged.

  – Abu Hathim sahib (1931- )

  Inconsolable Ammi was. She recounted how Rasool once came to her aid when things were coming to a head at Dey’s. She had had a fight with the security guard for emptying a mouthful of betel juice into a flowerpot put up for sale. Rasool strolled down an aisle and stood watching the argument for a while. Then he stepped in. When he intervened, there would be no more argument, only the final verdict. He wagged two butter-coloured fingers in front of the bewildered eyes of the liveried man, saying he should never forget to behave in the mohalla, especially with this lady, whom he considered as his elder sister. Ammi was flattered. And the guard, with two sausage-thick fingers placed perilously close to his eyes, promised to behave himself for the rest of his life, though Securitas withdrew its service from Dey’s the very next day. This happened a few weeks before Rasool stood in the elections to serve Vanity Bagh in a corporator’s capacity. He lost miserably, though, by a margin bigger than the number of frauds in the area.

  Overwhelmed by the memories of this brief encounter, Ammi skipped breakfast and lunch. By suppertime the good old memories appeared to have ebbed away, for her appetite had returned, although she was still making faces in the general direction of Mehendi.

  ‘Just wait,’ she muttered, shaking a finger at her own shadow. ‘Just wait till Abu Hathim sahib is ready for you.’

  ‘I don’t know who you have asked to wait,’ the imam said. ‘But whoever they are, they will die waiting for Abu Hathim to be ready.’

  Wasim started chuckling. For some reason, the mohalla was less touched and far less angered by Rasool’s death than by other tragedies, many of which much smaller in comparison, that struck Abu Hathim sahib’s family as regularly as Salman Khan changed his girlfriend.

  ‘Every member of your masjid committee will die waiting for Abu Hathim sahib to die,’ she whined. ‘Every single member, I mean.’

  ‘Children born to fighting parents usually turn out to be criminals or cracks,’Wasim warned.

  ‘Your words of wisdom have come a little too late, Wasim miyan,’ the imam heaved a dramatic sigh, casting a quick glance at me. ‘That has already happened in this house.’

  In time everyone forgot about Rasool’s murder – the press, the commissioner, his A team investigating the possible involvement of a hawala racket and his B team of Rasool’s mistress and her paramour, more or less everyone. I don’t know if Abu Hathim sahib still lamented over his son – there was nothing to suggest that he renewed his pledge to wipe out Rasool’s killers; when he had first uttered it over his son’s body, the fortitude in his voice had made Mehendi’s stomach churn and its hair stand on end.

  Three months after Rasool’s death, the recognition that every single soul in filmdom dreams of winning and thereby qualifying themselves to deliver an extempore speech of gratitude arrived in Mangobagh. Out of the three winners, two had declined the invitation from Mangobagh Movie Masters, better known as 3M, suspecting it to be nothing more than a third-rate club run by crooks, which it actually was. The third one, the king of sound engineering, jumped at the invitation and landed in Mangobagh with the golden statuette, using it to punch the air at the arrival terminal as if he had just won it, not three months ago.

  3M had built a stage in a corner of the parade ground: they put the main sponsor’s logo on the backdrop and the co-sponsor’s logo forestage; they let retailers tie their banners between lampposts, charging them according to the size of their advertisements and the visibility they enjoyed. They even did speech rehearsals for the next evening, using a smiling, bearded man as the dummy of the chief guest. Only then did they go home to catch some sleep. A few hours before a shimmering sun rose above Mangobagh’s foggy horizon, the stage went up in flames.

  Wrapped around a tree trunk was a poster, a new scorecard.

  Hindus: One Muslims: Zero.

  ‘We have all seen that poster,’ said the press. ‘So you can’t deny it this time.’

  ‘Why should I say there was no poster?’ asked the commissioner. ‘Have I ever done that?’

  ‘So do you think this has anything to do with torching the bus? The bus had a poster crediting one religion with India’s performance at the Oscars, no?’

  ‘No, no, no,’ the commissioner blurted out. ‘There was no poster on the bus. It had nothing to do with any religion or any Oscar.’

  Before he caught the evening flight out of Mangobagh, the king of sound engineering paused at the departure terminal to show a thumbs-up sign to the press, as if he had bagged another Oscar overnight.
He said he loved the city, that he sincerely regretted the stage had had a short-circuit issue and the organizers did not have the courtesy to apologize to him before they went into hiding. But this city was fabulous, full of interesting sounds. If he was invited again, he would definitely revisit the city.

  Was that why he came back to declare the Independence Day celebrations open? Had the superintendent invited him?

  XIII

  This boy Imran visited orphanages every week.

  With sweets and a sweet smile.

  ~ Haji Akram Shirazudin (1945- )

  Zia escaped on the afternoon of Independence Day.

  Late in the evening there was a long blare of the prison siren to herald his freedom. I heard boots trampling down the corridor, jeeps leaving the prison wailing and coming back quietly and thunder rolling in the distance over the city. But only this morning did I realize that it was Zia who had caused the last night’s commotion, except the thunder.

  It did not surprise me that no one cared to interrogate me; what left me flabbergasted was how Zia copied the idea in my head without my knowledge and implemented it without a flaw. As most of the prison sat on its haunches to watch the king of sound engineering talk and then lined up for his autograph, Zia was clawing his slow way up the banyan tree. While laying claim on the ownership of the plot I have to admit that Zia added his own subplots to make my script watertight. He even chose the right costume and picked the perfect accessories, which made his escape the talk of the town here in the prison and out there in the city.

  Zia chose his ensemble backstage, from the rucksack of the carpentry instructor who was in the green room, his pancaked face being fixed with an enormous moustache which transformed him into a diabolic king destined to abduct an inmate cross-dressed as a woman of high morals. Zia disconnected a mobile phone which was hooked into a temporary plug point; this belonged to the make-up man hired to turn skits and tableaux stage-worthy, and was later recovered from a waste bin a few miles from the prison. Then Zia could have chosen from a fairly big collection of wigs, fake moustaches, false whiskers and close-to-real facial hair. But he, rightly, did not; any of those could have made him conspicuous, an easy suspect. The last item he pinched before slipping away from the back of the stage in civilian clothes was a nice pair of sunglasses; nobody knew whom these belonged to. Some swore they belonged to the deputy superintendent, some others claimed they saw them dangling from the V-neck of the burgundy tee the king of sound engineering wore as he was taken on a tour of the jail premises.