We that are young

by Preti Taneja

  Second, there was the swap shop money-lender run by Mr Kataria Senior, a man with five sons the basti women call 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 since they all dress the same, are the same height and build – except number 4, who has the longest nails Jeet has ever seen on a man, and 5, who is missing a finger. He has been told that these five slice up the basti between them, collecting rent once a month, monitoring the distribution of tokens to use the first circle toilets, keeping an eye on what the boys find on the rubbish pile, which might be more valuable than they could know.

  Third was the dhaba, run by a short, taciturn man with a clipped moustache and clean shaven cheeks who Jeet now knows as Feroze Shah, son of Charan Shah, who makes the kind of dark burned aloo paranthe tourists dream of tasting but would order only if a guide book recommended them to do so. Tastes of charred atta and green chilli – so hot – eyes water if you eat them without curd. Shah was there, that morning Jeet arrived; he was just setting up outside for the morning clientele. His small TV, rigged up over his counter, was already streaming live from the Golden Temple, the rhythmic tabla overlaid with men singing Shabad from the Guru Granth Sahib. It washed over Jeet – as if this small place, with its long wooden tables and benches, the plastic ketchup and chilli sauce squeezers, the posters on the walls of faded Bollywood starlets from the 1980s were the inner rooms of the Gurdwara itself.

  Shabad – for Ranjit’s faith buried in Jeet through years of Catholic school with prayers to Jesus (who died bleeding on the cross, and was reborn each Sunday). Shabad – for Jeet’s precious Sanskrit–English dictionary, its delicate pages, listing an almost infinite variety meanings; words beget words as leaves from a branch. Shabad – for speech-sounds – to perform speech. School was spent singing of the omniscience and omnipotence and omnipresence and the dilemma therein of the omni-beneficence of God.

  The Christian brothers were not kind. They brooked no deviance, not an inch. They taught Jeet denial. For Lent each year he fasted, he prayed. Later, these rituals made him want to compete with Vik at Eid, but Vik did not keep the fast. He was Kashmiri, he said he knew already what it was to starve.

  Until you might eat rats? Jeet asked him once.

  Shabad.

  When he heard the Temple chanting from the dhaba TV, the morning he arrived in Dhimbala basti, Jeet faltered.

  Jeet wants to go back. To that morning with the voices from the kirtan pulling him in. He had approached Feroze Shah, who was lighting the dhaba burners. And told him what his name was: Rudra, the Naph, on his way to Kashmir, to join the pilgrimage of thousands to the Amarnath shrine. For this, he got to wash his face with carbolic soap at the dhaba sink, he was served hot water in a tin cup; he tried to sip it, but it was gone in one gulp. He got an aloo parantha too, pat with butter; he paused when Feroze passed it to him, dammit, for a moment in the dawn – Jeet – dhaba food – never, never, eat it – then he rolled it up and swallowed it in three bites.

  It was only when the light sprang into full sun that Feroze Shah took back the plate and cup, and folded his hands together to wish Rudra on his way. Where should Jeet go? He stumbled across the square, avoiding the hotel back gate. The guard box, the CCTV camera attached to it seemed to follow him blindly; its wires had been cut and were dangling. Jeet saw the neem tree (where he now sits); a good tree, offering some meagre shade. He saw seven water pumps; he went to one; he was so thirsty – he tried it, but it did not work. Now he knows that the pumps give liquid between the hours of dawn and 8am, the people of the basti pay Kataria 1 for individual, couple or family tokens that can only be bought a month in advance. Then he thought his eyes were failing: in the lightening sky, a mountain range appeared, covered in snow.

  Jeet blinked. A slapping noise made him turn. Behind him, black slumwomen in chappals were coming out of a stone archway called (he has since learned) the Amritsar Gate; some were carrying cheerful plastic buckets to the water pumps. He tried to hide by squatting under the tree; looking up, up, and realising that opposite the dhaba is not a snow capped mountain but a slope of rubbish, a towering mound of it, at least five metres high (but again how would Jeet know?) stretching around the curve as far as he could see. It begins at the skips outside the Amritsar hotel, it rises up and around in a stinking half circle until it tapers off at Napurthala. Dhimbala is embraced by the city’s dump. The wild dogs and rats and the people of the basti live on all it provides: everything they have to feed on, to shelter them from precious plastic bags and wrapping for their houses, to the freshest excrement that humans eating food waste can produce. Jeet has walked on it himself; there is a softness to some parts of it – gelatinous black liquid sometimes bubbles up, gasping for air or desperate to suck him down. A monster of the deep waits for those who work and play on the rubbish; they all know she is there, they can smell her breath.

  That first morning in Dhimbala terrified Jeet. He had sat on the earth under the neem tree, head pounding, mouth dry. Eyes as heavy as the weight of hot sun on his shoulders. His arms wrapped around his knees, he watched the basti begin the day. The boys gathering, preparing to climb the pile.

  Jeet wept. For them (but more for himself), sweat trickling salt into his mouth as the sun reached midday and the shadow of the tree carried on its rotation across the ground. After they had used the pumps, the women departed. He took off his singlet and soaked it on the ground, then put it back on. Telling himself he is Rudra not Jeet, that Jeet would never do this; Jeet loved beauty, he was raised by a man with a bone-topped cane, who always matched his ties with his socks and pocket handkerchiefs.

  Singlet wet, cooling a little, he had watched the boys, their mahogany hides, their hair matted, faces dusty, as they climbed, and picked, and found. By the end of that morning, he had identified the leader, who he now knows as Samir – watched him show his finds to the Company guard in the guard box, then spit at the gates of the Amritsar hotel. Jeet sat under the neem tree, eyes closing, spirits sinking. Waiting for what? He did not know.

  The day before the storm is a Friday. Some of the boys should be washing for afternoon prayers. Others should be working in the rubbish. Yet they crowd to Rudra under his tree; they are almost close enough to touch. The whites of their eyes are the only clean things about them. There is no breeze. The weeks of heat now seem ineffable but the boys never seem bothered by the sun. They want to know stories of Jeet’s old world, where there are squares and gardens just for walking in; where the houses are made of concrete or brick, bank vaults for human lives. Where the terraces have plants growing in pots just to look at, and birds are fed from wire bags full of nuts and seeds that cost no more than 50 anna – a whole meal for a family of five in the basti or some similar conversion. Jeet has never bought bird food, so this number is a guess.

  Though Jeet has not traversed the whole of Dhimbala he knows it has nine circles. As all men coming to new lands, he has mapped and marked his favourite routes.

  He has decided that the first circle smells most of rotting food. This is because it is reserved for those lucky enough to work in the Amritsar hotel kitchens (though none of them higher than pot-washing level). The first circle also has a block of its own squat toilets – token operated, again; some families even have electricity, sluiced from the Company wires to the dhaba, then out to their shacks.

  In the second circle, Jeet counts five generations of men who carve soapstone temples to sell in the old city; the shavings from their work collect in the drains, turning the black sludge grey. He counts ropemakers: boys hoarding plastic bags and bottles, cutting them with rusty scissors and blades, sitting, plaiting for hours each day. Their huts are brick and tin; they too share some electric light.

  After that the structures change, to three, two and one storeys built of found-brick in the third and fourth, where, on the first day, Jeet sees a real prostitute for the first time in his life – he has only read about such women in the stories of Saadat Hasan Manto. She is a Madam called Madam; her building is a faltering three-storey brick house, l
eaning onto the one next door. He expects her to be sassy and savvy. To greet Rudra, a Naph, with sly respect, which he would of course ignore. But she doesn’t look up when he passes. She sits in her courtyard each morning, her pale blue pallu over her head, reading some local newspaper, not even chewing pan or smoking a bidi. Next to her is a huge brass bell suspended over an old bore hole, and in the opposite corner, a deep, rusted brazier.

  Jeet walks by that place almost every day. The courtyard is usually empty, except for his own sense of yearning, only to connect, for a second, not with Madam or her girls, but with the small group of hijras who come and go quietly through the lanes; they sit on a mat in the whores’ courtyard sometimes, in the evenings they oil each other’s hair. Their hands are big and capable. Jeet wants to see more. Rudra goes near but never gets close; he is sick, jealous of the bandwale who live in this circle and will perform for grooms’ processions when October comes. He hears them practising some nights. He imagines their crimson jackets and gold epaulets; they live alongside the brothel, they are welcome in the courtyard, they store their instruments in the basement, where it is warm and dry – and Jeet wishes he could play an instrument; the drum or the trumpet or even the pipe; then he would have been able to go inside. To prove he isn’t afraid of the way women touch, and what they touch or how.

  He has come to know the fourth circle by its painted shutters. Here Samir says, once lived a white woman, Anya. She came for months, before Samir was born; she had a stills camera with Kodak film and one with pictures that developed when you shook them. She took snaps of all the young basti girls, their jewellery and clothes. When Samir’s mother was a sixteen-year-old bride she helped Anya to live. Here, in a small brick room. The tin shutters are now pulled down and locked, painted with a woman; her face brown-pink, her dark hair flowing, held back from her face with a chequered scarf; some scratched Hindi lettering on her curled bicep spells Dhimbala Women’s press: an independent project of the All India Women’s Commission on Women’s Rights.

  In the fifth circle, the Muslim lanes are scrubbed clean. The shacks are small, set out in a chain with connecting doors between families. Rudra resents this order and cleanliness; he spits whenever he passes through the fifth. The Muslims also, Jeet has noticed, have a Hindi-medium school; the murals are of happy children sitting under a painted tree, listening to Krishna as a teacher. A speech bubble over his head says that their hearts, minds and mouths are as offerings to the Ministry of Human Resource Development. According to Samir – who shrugs as he says it – no one goes to school there; the building was put up by Kataria senior; it only opens for a month or two, around election time. There is money hiding in the fifth, Jeet can smell it.

  In the sixth and seventh circles, the structures are made of jute sacks, soaked with urine to stiffen them, then packed and bound with plastic rope against bamboo. They are sturdy, though they crawl with lice and stink in the heat, on days when rain is a memory from years ago. Here live the Christians making moonshine. In the eighth the structures are made of cardboard, plastic sheeting and found things, old suitcases and clothes; this is the circle of the workers at the burial sites and cremation grounds, the men and women and children who clean the open toilets on the farms across the state, whose life’s work is to handle every dead thing in the basti and the town drains, from rabid dogs biting each other to death, to the ragdolly foetuses spat from waste pipes in the back lanes of the city, which wash up in the Dhimbala scrap.

  The lanes between the circles are no more than two metres wide. From the first to the fifth they are rough mud. From the sixth onwards, rough wooden planks are balanced over stinking black water, the stench is rotting food, sweet incense – there are drains on each side; the blood of the rubbish beast, so the basti boys call it – even as they defecate in the mornings, straight into it – even as they scare each other with the threat of a push off the boards. A foot goes in, a shoe is sucked off; it will sink or get stuck in the drain that leads to the next half circle. If it is a small shoe, it will travel through the gap to the ninth circle of Dhimbala, where those who have nothing do something like living – and from there to the pit, ten men deep and twenty wide, so the basti-dwellers say, filling slowly with rubbish to be burned; a pupil in denial at the centre of the eye.

  Since Jeet arrived in Dhimbala, the hair on his face has grown. He claws at it in his sleep. For the first week he could not wash it, it got in his mouth and nose as if a heavy-bodied girl was sitting on his face. He knows he must look wild – not the picture of himself he had seen that night of the party, when he left Jivan at the bar and went to Ranjit’s bungalow. He stood in his father’s room and looked in the cupboard mirror – his own long hair, unbound, over his artful stubble. The layers of skin and fat that marked him out as a stranger here have grown taut over his hips. That night of the Tuesday Party, Jeet had taken off his silver kurta, and squatted. His balls ached slightly with the movement, he banged a knee on the bathroom cabinet when he opened it to rummage among old medicines and cotton balls. Hidden at the back was a small baggy which contained three pills engraved with some primitive beast, maybe a cow or a yak. He took one with a tall glass of Company sparkling water from the small fridge beside the bath. Naked, he went back to his father’s room. Shivering in the air conditioning, not caring about being watched, Jeet opened the wardrobe: Ranjit still slept in white cotton kurta-pyjama with a singlet underneath, bought from the same tailor for years. He would not miss one from the many; he does not count them. So Jeet took a singlet. It was too big but he put it on. He drew the string of the pyjama tight: it bunched around his waist.

  After this, Jeet folded his clothes. He left them on top of his shoes. He took out his piercings: one ear, both nipples. There was blood; he washed it. Then he paused. Placed his kara, then his mobile phone, then his wallet on top of the pile. He took one more round of the bungalow. He took a pair of old chappals, then decided against it.

  Pilgrimages must be taken barefoot.

  After ten minutes walking across the Farm grass he had to stop, sit on the ground. He held his feet as if they were babies, surprised by the pain. Then hobbled back to the bungalow, to get the chappals and put them on. He tried not to hate this false start.

  The smell of rain was on the wind, teasing the dry ground. The monsoon was late then (it still has not come). The outer reaches of the Farm land were parched and burnt. The night embraced him, and as he felt the buzz of drugs through his blood, in his cheeks, behind his eyes, he began to run.

  At the perimeter fence, his journey proper began. He climbed through the barbed wire. It tore; he bled from tens of tiny cuts and scratches. Stuck halfway, he had a chance to go back again, but he was afraid it would only hurt more. So he pushed on, feeling the scrapes begin to swell, knowing he might get tetanus, or an infection – and thinking, so what? The pain felt sweet, it had certainty. But Christ, it hurt. Worse than the burns he used to make with cigarettes on the parts of his skin that no one could see. Could anything hurt more? The Brothers’ stories were of monks who would mortify themselves with nails, with pins, with wooden pricks.

  Jeet howled. When he scraped through the wire to the other side, he had to roll in the dirt until his hair was matted, the white pyjama stained with mud. He lay flat on the ground, staring up into the sky. There were so many stars – it was summer – tears ran down the sides of his face; he didn’t wipe them – he set his teeth on the pain. He wanted to prove he could pass, and live among the hundreds, thousands, millions of nobodies that shadow the land. Where no one would stop him – or believe, even if he told them – that once he had been Jeet Singh, son of Ranjit, Godson of Devraj Bapuji, one of the richest men in India. He thought of the men he had left at the party. What would they say if they saw him now?

  They might kick him, ask:

  —What is your name?

  To which he would answer:

  —Rudra the Naph, keeper of the sacred rites.

  They might wonder: Why?

/>   He would tell them, in a voice more bleating, more guttural than Jeet’s, that it was his dharma to take on a disguise; it was the purpose of his birth.

  —Where will you go, you ugly Pagal? Rudra, scum–pilgrim–saint? Where will you go? They might ask.

  —I will turn my face to the longed for rains of the north, to the winds. I will make my way to Amritsar and from there to Amarnath.

  —What tongue will you take?

  To which he would say:

  —That of the ancient sages and BlackBerry texters: All those who hear it will call me mad. My name is Rudra, I will beg for food and rely on the earth to provide. My mind will be free of Jeet.

  Then the drugs gripped him, the words found his mouth, and he began to chant, lying there on the ground, on the other side of the Farm, to the night—

  —Long Hair holds fire, holds the drug, holds sky and earth… These ascetics swathed in wind put dirty saffron rags on. Our bodies are all that mere mortals can see. Long hair drinks from the cup, sharing the drug with Rudra.

  Ignoring the pain in his feet and all over his body as much as he could, Jeet swallowed his dry fears. He mouthed a goodbye to his father, the tap-tap-point of the bone-topped cane. Clean and unclean, Jeet set his face towards the road.