‘Who lives in 48?’ I asked him. ‘No 48,’ he said. ‘What do you mean, there’s no 48?’ ‘Madam, no house is 48 number.’ He laughed, as if he were reiterating some obvious feature of our locality to a witless newbie. Later, the manager also confirmed that 48 had always been ‘missing’ from the layout. Fantasia was built with 79 homes. Apparently the staff had always known this, and dismissed it as a mistake. Or as one of Kusro’s quirks.
I wouldn’t have dwelt on this for much longer, if Shyam Mehta hadn’t been so shaken by that void, by that deliberate gap in our numbering scheme. He said 4 and 8 were his unlucky numbers. So what? Surely, it was conceivable that those numbers were also Kusro’s ‘bad luck’ numbers? But Mehta’s fear had been so visceral, it must have emerged from his knowledge of something else. Was the missing villa some kind of a coded message? Did the answer to that question, like the mystery behind that child’s picture, lie in Dhoolvansh?
THIRTY-THREE
I HAD BEEN GEARING up for Manas’ objections to my Patna trip. After all, Patna was the capital of Bihar, a state that was reputed for high crime rates and appalling poverty levels. For guns and slum-dwelling IIT aspirants. But that article fragment in Mehta’s house had convinced me that I needed to head there and then to Dhoolvansh.
I was afraid of leaving Rhea at Fantasia again, but I was more afraid of taking her with me. Besides, Mariamma, with her feisty grin, assured me that she would keep a very close watch over my child. Of late, I had started trusting Mariamma with Rhea’s care more than I trusted myself. Before Manas returned from his office, I already had my excuse planned. A high school reunion seemed like a plausible reason. After all, many friends on my high school whatsapp group had been proposing one for a while. Of course, Patna felt like an odd destination for a Kolkata school meetup. But Manas seemed so frazzled by some development at work, he hardly heeded my lies. He only said, ‘Sure, whatever. But I can’t pitch in at home. Things are crazy busy at office.’ I had a sense that Manas was desperately seeking funds to prop up his operations but I didn’t want to hear the details. There were only so many things I could worry about at once.
A frantic phone call to the India Times Patna office from Nitish Patel’s ‘ailing relative’ had elicited his contacts. The reporter himself seemed rather skeptical on the phone, when I requested a personal interview. ‘You’re coming from Bangalore? To talk to me? Why?’
Seated across from me in his cluttered two bedroom flat, piled from floor to ceiling with books, Nitish viewed me with the same derision that had infected his voice when we had spoken a few days earlier. He was much older than I expected, perhaps in his late seventies or early eighties. But sprightly, despite his age.
My eyes quickly roved over the books’ spines. All beefy books with somber titles, whose scholarly authors would be horrified by the inventive forms I could spawn with their pages. Nitish’s eyes glinted as he studied me, perhaps seeing through my carefully donned khadi salwar kurta for what it was: a costume, of sorts. He was a gangly man, long arms and legs, with a scraggy, white beard and smallpox scars that cratered his face. Every two minutes, his furrowed hands, specked with brown spots, ran over his beard, as if consciously assuming the pose of a thinker. Marlboro packets were strewn across the floor, among cups and saucers rimmed with ashes. The room, overlooking the browned waters of the Ganga, held the muggy smell of stale cigarette smoke. As we spoke, his fingers dipped into a steel box, with an elaborate array of betel leaves, chunam and variously coloured filaments and powders.
‘Madum,’ he said, the word booming out like a drum beat, ‘have you ever eaten a rat?’ He looked at me intensely and stuffed a paan into his stained mouth. I shook my head. He must have figured I was raised a fish-eating vegetarian, because he had already culled key features of my life with a few prying questions.
‘I grew up eating rats,’ he said, chewing the paan as if he were biting into a rat’s entrails. ‘You see, we are Musahars, the most derided caste in our state. Rat meat is delicious. Would you like to try some?’
I shook my head again, with a brave smile. Nitish was trying to provoke me, to drive me away. I wasn’t willing to budge from my position on his floor mattress, while he rested on the hard ground, against a bolster on the wall. I had already braved the city’s grim sights, its Dickensian alleys, its beggar swarms, its squatter tenements jostling with the signs of unconcerned modernity—Coke hoardings, Pizza Hut outlets, swank cafes, roaring SUVs. On the taxi ride to Nitish’s flat, situated on the teeming Boring Canal Road, I had averted my gaze from bare-bottomed men, plastic bottles in hand, defecating into the holy river.
‘I’m really interested in Dhoolvansh. I want to write about the place my parents used to live in.’
‘This is worse than I thought, at least Patna has a growth story. It’s now an important business hub. But you people, you always want to focus on the worst. Perhaps, this is to make yourselves feel better about your own lives. Why don’t you write about the dark grit beneath your Silicon Valley glitz?’
‘My parents lived here. I have a personal interest in this.’ Inside the kitchen, out of sight from the makeshift living room, I heard a clatter of pots. Was it his wife? Or a maid? A few minutes later, as if in response to my unasked question, a woman with dark kohl-lined eyes appeared bearing a steel plate with two steel tumblers. Her cotton sari, hitched high, revealed silver anklets.
‘How did they land up in Dhoolvansh? Was your father working for a mining company? Did he plunder those fucking lands?’ Nitish picked up a steel tumbler of milky tea and impatiently gestured at me, urging me to do the same.
‘Thank you,’ I said, smiling at the lady, but still unsure of her relationship to him. Wife? Partner? I was grateful for her intrusion into the room. Perhaps Nitish would miss the heightened colour on my cheeks as he scoffed at my parents’ past. ‘My father worked for the Pollution Control Board.’
‘Those buggers did fucking nothing! Made the place worse. Why would they care about trashy places like these?’
‘Manohar called, he wants the payment settled by tomorrow.’ The woman spoke in Hindi, looking directly at Nitish.
‘Tell the rat to drown himself,’ he said. The woman shrugged and left the room.
‘Was there an incident involving a child? A little girl?’ The tea was too milky for me, but nonetheless, I gulped it down.
‘Many bloody incidents. Explosions inside the mines. Workers died, children died.’
‘I’m talking about a specific incident. In 1979. My mother showed me a picture, the child was holding a clown doll?’
‘Have you seen the working conditions of miners, anywhere?’
‘What happened to that child? Do you remember that case?’
‘I can’t remember all the stories. Those are the milder stories. I’ve covered everything in this state, rapes, murders, genocides. Twice, I’ve been shot. Once had a bullet lodged inside my leg.’
‘Do you know anything about a clown doll?’
Nitish paused, and lit a cigarette. ‘No,’ he said, inhaling slowly. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘There was a picture accompanying the article you wrote.’
I retrieved the article from the zippered pouch inside my handbag. The child in the picture stared at me with doleful eyes, as if she were entreating me in some way.
‘This is a snippet from the article, do you remember this story?’ A small flicker of something passed through his eyes. Then it vanished. Inhaling deeply on his cigarette, he responded with the smoke curling out of his nostrils. ‘I’ve done so many stories, how can I remember?’
‘I’d like to go to Dhoolvansh to investigate this. Would you have any travel tips?’
‘There’s a train, the Black Diamond Express, goes there once a week. You can ride on hot coals.’ His eyes glinted with mischief. ‘If you go, you must be willing to be shot or knifed.’
‘Would you have any of those articles that you’ve written about Dhoolvansh? I’d like to read them.’
‘It’s too late, I’ve destroyed my files. For years and years, I have been writing about this region, and no one has cared. This is not the part of the country that people read about. Unless it’s election time.’ For the first time, that afternoon, I felt Nitish wasn’t mocking me. He seemed genuinely despondent about the indifference of readers in other parts of the country.
‘If you stay here long enough, you will experience human emotions unlike any other. Have you ever known what hunger feels like? Real hunger, not the self-imposed, I’m-on-a-diet kind? Even worse, have you known what it’s like for your kid to say he’s hungry, and to shut him up, because you have nothing to feed him?’
Something exploded inside me. My voice steamed out, like vapour from a whistling cooker. ‘Have you known what it’s like to have your kid die inside a godforsaken generator, in a place that you imagined was safe? To imagine your kid’s last cries for help, and your distance from him when he needed you most? Just because I’m rich, Nitish, please don’t imagine I haven’t suffered. Perhaps as much as the hungry boy’s mother, or more.’
Nitish’s white eyebrows lifted. Laying his cigarette aside, he wiped his face with his kurta’s sleeve, as if I had just spattered him with something. ‘Is that why you’re here? Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?’ His face wasn’t lit up with compassion but at least the scorn in his eyes had momentarily vanished. ‘But I have another meeting now. I will search through my files and call you if I find anything. On Mira.’
Mira? I hadn’t mentioned the child’s name. The skin over my face seemed to be tightening. Nitish had unwittingly confirmed that the child in the newspaper was the child in my dreams. Nitish knew. So it wasn’t a minor story. It was a story that Nitish remembered. Rather vividly, contrary to his claims. ‘You remember the story, don’t you? The child who died was called Mira. Why can’t you tell me what you know?’
‘I don’t remember everything, and I have to rush to my meeting. If you don’t mind, I need to step out now.’
I had booked myself into a rather seedy hotel in Patna. Not too far from Nitish Patel’s flat, and overlooking muddy river waters. But the stench that wafted into my room from the street below compelled me to keep the window shut. On the ceiling, where peeling green paint revealed white patches, a grey fan stirred the air in the room with annoying clicks. I was lying on my dupatta, spread inadequately across an unclean sheet, listening to the cacophony of sounds from the street, almost dozing off when I heard the mobile ring. Nitish Patel? Despite what he said, I hadn’t expected to hear from him again. And definitely not so soon. ‘Madum,’ he said, his speech slurred, but still edged with his trademark derision. Was he drunk? There was, after all a smudge of bar noises—voices, raucous laughter, music - behind him. ‘Mira is dead, stop chasing her ghost.’ His voice sounded thick. ‘Return to your cocoon in Bangalore.’
‘Did you find anything on her?’ I tried to mask the fury bubbling into my voice. Nitish Patel hadn’t been moved by my story. Why then, had I revealed so much? And bared the most vulnerable part of myself to a man I hardly knew?
‘If you go to Dhoolvansh, you may not come back.’
Was he threatening me? I wondered suddenly about Manas’ warning. Perhaps he had been right, perhaps I was flirting with more danger than I was equipped to handle. But I couldn’t turn back now. Every encounter seemed to be drawing me closer. How would I protect Rhea if I didn’t know what the danger was? I had been calling her every now and then, and she always responded with a chirpy: ‘I’m fine Ma, Mariamma’s with me. She’s plaiting my hair.’ Or ‘She’s cooking my favourite brinjal curry.’ My maid too had reassured me, in her crackling voice: ‘Madam, I am looking after like my child only.’ When I called Manas, he was always at the office and fortunately didn’t notice the absence of any backdrop chatter that marked most reunions.
Meanwhile, I had to press on.
THIRT-FOUR
If Patna felt hot and humid, the feeling was ratcheted up by several degrees at the Dhoolvansh train station. It was unnerving to note that I was one of only three persons to alight at the stop. Soon after I had scrambled for my luggage, and hoisted myself from the coach, the train had started grinding its wheels and gathering speed. In the meanwhile, as I fished around my handbag for my dark glasses to diffuse the sun’s glaring heat, the two other passengers had dissipated into the white light that blazed everywhere. Donning my glasses, I hoisted my suitcase and exited the station towards the surprising emptiness outside. Where were the waiting autos and taxis that preyed on passengers in the larger cities? Why this jarring emptiness in a country so densely populated? I could already hear Manas chiding me: Because, you foolish woman, no one gets off here and there must be a reason for that.
As I hoisted my suitcase with my right hand, my hand bag slung on my left, I walked along a desolate road that led to god-knows-where. There wasn’t any mobile coverage by the station, no GPS, no google maps. I had only walked for a few yards, but the suitcase was already tugging at my arm. Why had I packed in so many extra things, the steel torch, the spare mobile phone, the hardbound notebook, two extra sets of clothes, the camera, batteries, biscuits?
I plodded ahead on the blistering asphalt, screening my face from the white blaze with my palms in a visor-like salute. Nothing seemed visible in the distance, till at last, after what seemed like an eternity, I spotted a shimmering wheel. A cycle rickshaw, an empty one. Giddy with relief when the driver hoisted my suitcase onto the seat and ushered me into the gaudily patterned, cushioned space, ‘hotel,’ I said, panting. ‘Best hotel here.’
‘Do you know the name?’ he asked, chewing a beedi between his teeth, his eyes panning my arms and face. Was this a test to ascertain how much knowledge I possessed of the place? To gauge the extent to which he could hoodwink me? I was too fatigued to care.
‘I knew the name but forgot.’ He turned to look at me again, the beedi still stuck in his mouth.
‘From where you came?’
‘Patna,’ I said, keeping my response curt, trying to mask the Bengali accent that infected my Hindi.
As he steadily pedaled on, I sensed he was watching me through the decorated rear view mirror. The street was narrow and cobbled with granite stones. Had it been built during British times? Flanking the street on both sides, the buildings wore a decrepit appearance. Above us, segmenting the porcelain sky into a mosaic of squares and triangles, dangled a maze of telephone wires and TV cables. From crumbling balconies, between strings of wilted washing, pallid faces stared out. On both sides, an assortment of vendors squatted over their wares, over mounds of turmeric and ginger, beans and gourds, rubber flip-flops and patterned underwear, all heaped alongside in peaceable disharmony.
As the rickshaw trundled into other streets and alleyways, all lined with squatting vendors and grim buildings, I felt like I hadn’t just entered another place, but stepped back in time. Perhaps, pre-motoric Bangalore might have been like this once: filled with the chimes of rickshaw bells broken occasionally by a rare car horn. The only ubiquitous sign of modernity was the mobile, that drivers and vendors seemed to be chattering into. As I watched the man pedaling forcefully up a steep climb, as I watched his spine protrude from his thin polyester shirt, I felt like I was moving closer to that Evil. What was it about this place?
The man finally braked at a squalid two-storey building that had a neon ‘Lodging’ sign flashing on its roof. I sighed. Was this the town’s best hotel? What else could I have expected in a place that seemed suspended in the sixteenth century?
The next morning, I woke up to the whiplash of sudden rain. After a surprisingly bracing night in the rickshaw man’s recommended lodging, despite the company of two creatures—a flying cockroach perched on the steel toilet rim, a rat scurrying under the spring cot—I was eager to head into the town. The previous evening, the receptionist-cum-cashier (there wasn’t any other staff in sight) had expected to be hysterically summoned, to rid my room of those arresting critters. Lit
tle did he realise that they were a necessary diversion from my muddled thoughts.
When I didn’t turn up at the reception for a few hours, he knocked on my door, with the ‘POISON’ spray in his hand. He was willing he said, with a wry laugh, to kill them for a substantial fee. I had, however, run out of supplies, so I asked him for the day’s newspaper. And used the colorful classified ads to fold into the contours of the rat, mastering its rounded ears.
This is what my children had done to me. Sajan, by dying, had banished my fear of other dangers. Rhea, by living, had changed the way I saw these creatures. She had forced me to look beyond my terrors into the pressing urgency of life throbbing in them. I no longer folded forms based on two-dimensional facsimiles of the animal and insect world. I could, like other artists before me, draw from the world itself.
I had already arranged for the same rickshaw man to meet me at my lodging. But when I drew the stained curtains apart and stuck my head out of the grimy window, roaring waters and lightning-streaked skies scorned my plans. The whole day, I paced the room while the street outside liquefied into swiftly moving eddies of last night’s wares: flowers, chicken carcasses, plastic combs.
It was evening before the rains let up. The skies were still clouded over and the light was murky, but at least my carriage turned up eventually. I asked him to head out to the Kushi Company Employee Colony.
‘Not there, Madam. That not good place. Full ghosts.’
‘I still want to go there.’
‘Madam, I not come, I leave you outside.’
‘You can come back after two hours,’ I said, when he dropped me off at a red, wrought-iron gate and sped away soon after I disembarked. Was he really that scared?
I wondered if the colony was guarded by a watchman of sorts. I banged my fists on a rusted gate, tinting my hands with a coppery sheen.
‘Koi hai?’ I asked, but I seemed to be talking to myself because I was greeted by a loud silence. Besides the gate wasn’t locked, merely latched by a large bolt.
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