We that are young

by Preti Taneja

  She wakes, she sleeps. She wakes. The clouds roll towards her in shadows of grey, pale silver, deep blue. Fissures of light slice through the blinds, glittering gold like that day in Goa. There are waves of dark purple, then flicks of yellow again. A sky so bruised, it covers the city, swallowing the earth.

  Gargi texts her, Don’t worry. She hates Gargi for making her hurt Ranjit Uncle, and for having Surendra. For being older, for taking Jivan back to Delhi with her. She hates Jivan for going. She hates Bubu, for dying, and most of all she hates Ranjit Uncle. And she cannot explain this to anyone, because the only man who might understand, Radha thinks, and here, she stops: Bapuji. He is not speaking to her either: she hates him most of all. Too busy getting the whole nation against her. She is alone. She has always been so, since she was young.

  The soft, silent cushions of the suite watch her and whisper, so do the carpets and sofa and antimacassars. Pieces of her own skin, stripped from her. The carpet smothers her steps. She does not remember what she should say or care about. From the bar she takes the bottle of scotch, the vermouth, the cognac, the vodka, good bottles all, she lines them all up and begins. A toast to Bubu! Shot. A toast to Jivan, now rich as a king! Shot. A toast to Sita, wherever she is! Double shot. To Gargi! Shot. To Nanu! Shot. And, to her mother, long burned and scattered. Shot.

  Where is Nanu? In the room, here surely, her mutterings jangle with the shadows, a skeleton of words. All this shall pass, as it has passed, as it is passing, and come again. And every wife whose husband is a bear shall bear no children, but the children of owls. Twit TWOO! The glasses make so much sense. The glasses on the bar take up her refrain, as clear as if she were in the room. Radha chants the words herself and toasts to the windows, to her own translucent self. To Radha! – Shot.

  Radha writes her own eulogy on Company paper, she will send it to Barun J. Bharat, recently promoted Senior Happenings Editor at the Times of India. Here lies Mrs R. Devraj Balraj: a widow aged twenty-eight, a living death for a motherless girl. Mrs R. Devraj Balraj, abandoned by her father, a blinder of men, murderer of a servant in the name of honour. Who cannot do a wife’s basic duty and keep her husband alive.

  Rampaging, marauding she drinks the gold liquid and the clear, the white wine, the red cherry liquor, the disgusting sweet kahlua lurid blue in the glass, on her lips, Shiv’s poison she cannot hold in her throat see, see? All downed, all drowned. She paces as she drinks and chants like a Yogi, a Sanyassi, invoking the Book According to Nanu, to shut out the sound of men dying. Then she opens Bubu’s Kashmiri box. There is no Queen of Diamonds to cut the lines. She dips her finger and licks and licks; a meal made of pure white snow.

  Shh, say the sofa cushions, hush says the bed. Calm, say the curtains, you must try to be calm. She cannot listen to them; eyes blazing and blood red from tears, she forgets she is human, turns jackal. Naked, breasts swinging, hair wild, she finds a pair of scissors and goes to hunt, slashing at every soft thing in the room. Catch the chiru! The blades shred the sofas, the chaise lounge, the cushions, the curtains, the bedclothes. Ayee, ayee, she thrusts, she rips; nothing has the same give, nothing makes the same soft slurp of eyes giving way to the splintered end of a bone topped cane – only the thrill as the blades plunge in: then the floating softness of feather and down.

  When she is spent, she sits on the floor in the fluttering ruins. Sweating and bleeding from tiny gashes where the scissors have caught her, she crawls into the gutted remains of the bed and picks up the phone. To whoever answers in the kitchen she croaks,

  —Bring me a pot of first-flush tea. And a plate of rose macarons.

  The next morning, the papers report the great rally at Chandigarh Bapuji held, where he announced a vow of silence. In the far western state of Odisha they give thanks, rain has come; that there is relief for the farmers thirsting, although there is a risk of some dams breaking (Company concrete – again). They say that Shilpa Shetty, the sylphlike Bollywood star, the heartbeat of millions, is offering Vastu checked apartments offplan in Gurgaon. The following day, Bapuji is planning to show himself fasting at Ramlila Maidan in Delhi, preparations are being made there for a vast crowd, parents are outsourcing homework and science projects to IIT grads so their children can get ahead, and this is a well known, multi-lakh scam, while on page three Radha’s friends are partying in Mumbai and Delhi without her. There is nothing about Bubu, or about the man Radha killed. Days pass, by Sunday, there is still nothing at all. Monday’s news has something though: Bubu is dead.

  An urn was delivered to Radha twenty-four hours later. Radha stayed locked in her room. Its mother and father, its sister, arrived in Amritsar – Radha said she could not not see them, she was just too devastated. She sent the urn down to in the lift to its mother.

  Every day Radha expects a knock on her door. Why is the hotel still running? How come the servants aren’t talking? Why hasn’t anyone come to question her about Ranjit Uncle, or Bubu – or even come sit with her, to ask her how she is? Where is Gargi? The walls do not answer. Jivan she thinks. Maybe he too, is dead.

  A week, or three days – no, a week later, as Bapuji’s silence resonates across the nation – the paper reports that a man has been caught and charged for the murder of Devraj Bapuji’s second son-in-law Bubu, son of Manpreet and Nalini, the town planners and mall investors, brother and sister-in-law to the MP for Commerce and Industry. Who are suffering so much at the loss of their only son. Radha watches on TV as the case grips the country: a servant who thought he could tell his boss where he was going wrong, a man of the people, from a rough area, left behind from prosperity, seemingly loyal, but who had a history of violence of course, a poor family. The accused was also fingered as one who was in the Company under Gargi Devi’s special quotas for Muslims to find jobs. Those in the know say the culprit will rot in jail for the rest of his life, and that life will be short, if God (or the police, where Bubuji had great friends) have anything to do with it.

  Yes! The lowborn man who killed Our Beloved Bubuji will go swiftly to justice – for that is the penalty for murder. A good man has fallen, a man who was building a future for the country beyond anything his grandfathers could have dreamed. And his wife! Radha Devraj Balraj, such an icon of loveliness. Yes. A beautiful girl has been left bereaved. Too young, too young, the media agree. But she is still young, and an heiress to an empire’s fortune. Aré, who knows, in time, what will happen? Widow remarriage is not so unheard of these days, and she too is so wealthy. It was not a divorce. And she is still so pretty. Yes, thank God, they all agree: at least she is still quite young.

  §

  WHEN GIRLS ARE YOUNG, they should all be like Sita. Brave and studious and kind. Out of the five of them, my three girls and Ranjit’s two boys, it was Jeet and Sita I thought would make a good match. Everything about him is exactly as a man should be. Just one flaw, he has. I won’t say what it was, because in the polite society of fallen manservants, dogs and birds, angels and dust that I find myself in, such things should not be mentioned. But let it be placed on record that I valued him despite that. And how he believed in the Company dreams! I built the hotels, and Jeet made them beautiful. Such taste, he had. I wonder where he is now, why he does not come. He loved me. He will come again, I am sure of it.

  I once asked Sita to prove her love for me. But now I realise that even if she had spoken, I would not have been told the truth. Because Sita’s love was not really for me, it was for nothing human.

  —What is the most important thing in the world to you? I asked her.

  —Photosynthesis, she said, the coming into being of breathable air.

  So much she feels, for my life’s work.

  There was a night when Sita was still missing, and I stood on the eighth floor terrace at the Company Amritsar. When you are on that plateau, you can see the city stretching out beneath, as if on fire. You can imagine all the men roaming around, there are hardly any women at that time of night. In any case, women are fewer there. And all of th
em seemed to be gathered on the terrace to speak, speak, speak, speak, speak at me. Only the sky was dumb.

  It seems a small step between Amritsar and Srinagar, but much happened in between. That night I decided I would ignite the country for my cause. I knew I could do this, for people love me blindly, all my life. It might be because of the things I have experienced, it might be because I am so generous with my resources and forward thinking with ideas. I invoke India, I call for a new order. The country should be wiped clean and we can start again without that Muslim-loving Gargi or that bad apple Radha to stop us.

  Sita used to say that if she could start a movement she would feed and educate every girl child and grow crops without chemical intervention. Hers was an economics of love. Nevertheless, I used this ambition of hers to invite her home. We promised her:

  (1) Her own apartment in the city of her choice. She wanted Mumbai. She told me it would have a sea view, and room for me. She wants to live there because she loves the water. We will do this, but maybe on the Farm we could build it. Brick against brick. Story against story. Will it have a glass house? She wants to write and research and publish her findings. On plants of all kinds; indigenous, strange and native kinds. The ones that flower between the cracks of brick buildings and in the cisterns of the Mughal gardens. To show the world that beneath the surface, all creatures are of the same matter. I said, of course, just come home, Sita and all this will I give you.

  (2) A campaign of her designing. This on the condition she would come home, and release her shares back to me. She could have her nothing and get everything she wanted in one go.

  She came home.

  How simple are her desires!

  When she raised the issue of the Kashmir hotel, I took a fasting vow of silence, until she promised she would protest no more. When I began to speak again, I told her this story, to make her understand why we had to come back to Srinagar and build.

  —Once upon a time, there was a king with many lands. Who answered to no one lower than him, but only to one very demanding God called Kalki. Kalki was embodied as a warrior on a flying white horse, whose wings needed storm winds to move them. Kalki waited always for the King to make war, which would be a mistake so bad it would ignite a storm for Kalki’s flaming sword. But the King was clever. Instead of waging war, he found a plot of landlocked land and built on it.

  The problem was, the people on this landlocked land had suffered for many years under the King’s family’s rule. Still the King would not stop. He had to build on that land. From there, he would win the hearts of the whole kingdom. And open that place to the world, through a tunnel, cut through rock. The more that people came in the name of beauty, the more the whole world applauded; for they were only there to be entertained, to spend their money, to create a service economy and build a newfound prosperity; of course there would be approval and gratitude from all. And the people of that place were glad. All of this was done over decades. Kalki, waiting, got bored and was asleep.

  And so did Sita, her head in my lap. Darkness and chill all around us. The manservant was back in his place at the door. He watched as I tried to move without waking her, his eyes shining, his ears two jug handles, like that chap from Slumdog Millionaire. Was that Radha’s favourite or Gargi’s?

  —Then what happened? he asked me. His face was eager, like a boy’s with a gun.

  —I forget how, I said. It ends.

  IV

  Jeet

  i

  —Rudra bhai, can you swim and can you fly?

  This from Felix, a basti boy, seven-years-old, in a faded Coke is*it T-shirt and cut off pants.

  —Rudra bhai, do you remember everything about your past life?

  This from another boy: Akul, about thirteen, but short, with no Pa, always begging for stories of drinking, ganja, and the ability to blow rings from a pipe (as unimaginable girls, fishing, fishy, tried to hook Jeet with their made up smiles and their sighs).

  —Rudra bhai, what is the worst thing you have ever done?

  This from Nakul, his identical twin, who came out second (he tells them each time), as if this makes him more willing to believe that Rudra the Sage was once a Babu named Jeet Singh.

  —Rudra bhai, what does it take to kill a man?

  Silence. The boys look up at Samir, their fourteen-year-old leader, who always seems to find the treasure in the rubbish pile; a gold pendant, a half bottle of hot pink nail polish, a silk Heritage label tie around his dear head. Samir, whose father wears a Company uniform to guard the back gate of the Amritsar hotel, and who has a pair of proper shoes; flat leather lace-ups with scratched red soles, too big, a found pair, but his own.

  *

  The day before the storm breaks over Dhimbala, Jeet will sit under his tree, watching the boys through half-closed eyes. He wonders what Samir had to do to get those shoes. Is he a con-artist? A spy? No. Jeet must not suspect Samir’s sweet smile. This is the path he has chosen: to try to be clean, to be good and – to think only pure thoughts, and set himself towards salvation. To remember that he is: Rudra, Rudra, Rudra.

  Each day, the hour comes when the basti-boys will climb off the dump. They will gather around Jeet at the foot of the tree. Dark skins covered in scraps of fluttering white plastic, as if they are mosaics of themselves. They will pick and pull the scraps off each other. Pester him with questions such as What does it take? Ask for stories before they go home to their shacks. They demand these stories straight: beginning–middle–end. But he is Jeet Singh: his mouth is dry. He is striving as hard as he can to be Rudra, a Naph sage. His calling is not to simplify these boys’ lives. He tells his stories in vernacular circles, backwards and around: for his own sanity, to stay here, he must teach the boys that life is not lived in linear fashion. They must learn what it means to be the future of those ancient tongues that count no time but today.

  They gather for stories, watched over by the back of the Amritsar Company hotel, its white façade pocked with air conditioning units, the walls stained with black streaks as if the windows are weeping mascara tears. Dhimbala spreads across a scoop of land formed by an ancient lake bed, long dry. It is at least two kilometres wide, maybe three. But how would Jeet know this or count? All he knows is that the shacks of this place have spread like fungus in a bowl, taking no heed of the state border – spreading, spreading – until they stop at the high, stone-walls of the old Napurthala Palace, where Bapuji was once a boy.

  *

  Half the rim of the basti is edged by a cracked plain, where stilted, rusted advertising hoardings show washing machines, dishwashers, pictures of the beach, peeling in strips to reveal Bapuji’s face – and Nanu’s – their hands in namastes battered from years of monsoons and harsh, dry heat. The slogan in patches across each board reads: Company City – coming soon!

  Soon, Jeet thinks, sitting under his tree: I will go on. I will join the pilgrim’s route to Amarnath. I will get the blessing of Lord Shiv and see for myself the lingham formed of ice. That waxes and wanes. Among so many pilgrims of all purses, I will walk; all of my sins will be cleared. Yet, even the day before the storm, when his mind will reach this freewheeling point, when the tiny scars all over his arms have faded to thin white lines and he tries to count the weeks he has been here, is it four? Five? Six? He will not leave. Instead he tries to think about what he has been asked, and how he has come to this.

  What does it take to kill a man? That Tuesday when Jivan came home. That night. Jeet spoke to Jivan; then walked away from all he knew. He reached this square in Dhimbala in an open-backed lorry – driven, it seemed, from the core of the earth by a white-haired, white robed Sardarj whose patta snapped through the carriage window, clapping against the sky, an Asura being chased by God. The truck had no number plate, no markings on its side.

  Jeet had clung on, bleeding from so many small cuts, shivering between the jute sacks stuffed with maize, chanting his new name: Rudra, Rudra, Rudra. As dawn broke he was dropped, starving and dehydrated on th
e highway somewhere outside Amritsar. He walked from there, parched, freezing, early cars rushing past him, until he reached his father’s hotel.

  This was the first test. Rudra, he told himself that morning – Rudra is a Naph; he must fight against desire, of the body and mind. Still, it was difficult not to run into the hotel to greet faces who knew and loved Jeet Singh, to bathe, and eat, and change his clothes, and sleep, and eat, and bathe and order. Instead – reciting under his breath, strengthen the self by means of the self – he limped off the highway, following the hotel’s yellow brick wall, until he came to a space big enough for a family of elephants to turn full circle in.

  There was a beast called Haathi, who used to live here. She was used for the hotel weddings and tourist rides; she was hired out to grooms in downtown Amritsar. She was fed leftovers from the Company kitchens and her dung provided her keeper’s sons with a side business in fertiliser for the local farms; it was made into paper by the keeper’s daughters to sell in the Company hotel shop; it provided mosquito repellent when rubbed on children’s skin. They even squeezed that shit for water in times of drought, which came, increasingly regularly, as the beast grew old. After Haathi died, the Amritsar side of the basti had to diversify to replace her. According to Samir, the competition for slices of the dump became fierce.

  It has been four or five weeks since that first morning, when Jeet had walked down the kachcha path, a desire line wide enough for a car, but made by many, many feet over years. He was pulled by the sound of men singing. He reached a block of unpainted concrete stores. First, he came to JAB WE MET PAN, a mobile top-up shack, closed because it was so early. The place has a fridge selling chuski and drinks; local newspapers, cheap magazines for lifestyle, homes and soft focus girl porn. Plastic jars of candy line the shelves; silver-wrapped packets of paan dangle in streams at the entrance, these have always looked to Jeet as if strings of individually wrapped condoms are hanging. He has since found out that Kal and Dodal, the two muscled brothers with matching designer stubble who work in the shop, do not live in the basti; they live downtown, they ride pillion on their motorbike to and from the store. They never give anything free, not even one sucking sweet, even to Rudra, the Naph.