We that are young

by Preti Taneja

  Ha, remember when Gargi first got her period? She didn’t leave her room for a week. Jeet had roamed the Farm without her. Sat under the willow and smoked cigarettes, stubbing them out on the bench and flicking the butts into the duck pond. He was glad she was not there.

  On the Napurthali side, men sit through the days. Devraj Bapuji is a constant subject. What they would ask him if they had the chance. The Dadajis, the Taojis and Chachajis and the boys who worked for the Napurthala Royal family are all tattooed on their upper left biceps. When Bapuji was a boy, they were the masters of the basti: raiding the invisible lines into Amritsar land. There are hundreds of children in the slum named Dev, or Devi, or Raj. Then Bapuji relocated to Delhi, and the Palace became a hotel.

  There was hope for new jobs for some of the Napurthali boys, the ones in the first three circles. But not all of then can be gardeners and bearers. Not all can work as kitchen boys or earn paltry tips from crude puppet shows. It became clear that Gargi Madam’s policy was to bring in staff from outside (she hates her own and does not hire locals; has become famous for this thing). Then the hotel closed; no one knew why – though they said it was for renovation. There has been no hope of work for more than five years. And this year, again, there will be no work leading up to Diwali for the men who can cook, the boys who pot wash and sweep. When the rats go hungry, so do the babies. No one can pay for the girls. The boys must learn a new trade.

  Some of the men travel out to find labour on the farms. Jeet knows what they will have found: for twenty years the Company seeds have not grown. All that the land yields is widows and daughters whose fathers and brothers have taken their own lives. That crop of women is rising, rising, bringing more females to the basti on both sides – Amritsar and Napurthali – and what are they now to do?

  Drought began last year; it stretched, yawning across the state, it settled in the cracks of the earth and lay still. Loans against seeds must be paid with interest even if nothing will thrive. In the Napurthali circles of Dhimbala, the people hate Gargi, and blame her even for this. They say she is starving them out because Devraj Bapuji and Ranjit Sahib will not allow her to move them from the dry earth bed of their sacred, ancestral lake by force. Some say if she moves them, she will expand the hotel. There, she will build a cold, cold room where dikhata will fall, white as it does in the mountains. Others say a vast expanse of swakachcha will be imported from Goa and arranged around a man-made pool, where girls will go naked at all hours for anyone to see.

  If Gargi Madam thinks she can bend nature to her will, the men of Dhimbala believe she can. They blame her for the drought that began last April, which followed a storm of ice chips falling from the sky. This had never happened before in their state. After that, more basti-girls than usual were born deformed; they had to be put down.

  More rumours have it that Gargi Madam is turning the Palace into her private residence. That there will be no more work at all, because she surrounds herself with Muslims from her mother-state of Jammu and Kashmir; or with educated girls from Brahmin families only. That no, actually she is selling the Palace to a short man from far away, who will turn it into a factory staffed only by Chini-workers. All will be given houses: the slum will be cleared for this purpose. They say that Devraj Bapuji is no longer in charge, and when he is gone the people will loose their place for good. Only Bapuji can help them. If only he would come, he would see for himself. He will come – they are sure of it.

  The day before the storm is the same as each day before it. Dawn springs the basti awake. The sharp smell of open drains is refreshed by the sun’s hopeful efforts. Jeet curls from his sleep; crouches in the field with his hand over his mouth and nose, looking at the others, yearning for a phone. He has learned how to shit without soiling his pyjama, his chappaled feet. After this he makes his way around the pit, through the lanes of the basti towards the square. He sits beneath his tree, to watch the morning routine. First, the matriarchs come with their buckets to fetch water from the pumps. Some of them make plastic rope. One runs a cutting salon in the first circle for girls coming of age. Her sister is the basti matchmaker – she chaperones the new brides, jasmine wilting in their hair. Then there are Madam’s girls, putting on their free show just by walking. Jeet watches the boys at the dhaba watch them. Then come the acid-attacked runaways; they form a curtain of saris around the pumps, so eyes can only see feet, and heads and shoulders and hands. They do not wash here. They carry their water in buckets to their shacks to wash themselves and their daughters, to make fresh chai. They help each other and watch each other. They are careful with each drop.

  The boys come, minutes later, the older ones pushing the young. They scatter through the gate, cluster at the pumps; splashing and soaping themselves white, down and up; then they stand, as close as they can to each other to rinse it all off. Watching this, weeks ago, Jeet had an idea, such a simple idea, an idea to be proud of. He began to collect the plastic bags that blew from the dump into the lanes; he chose three boys who wash with tokens – Little Amar, Akul and Nakul – and told them to collect a bag of water each to trade for a story.

  How they love the story hour. Enough to risk Kataria’s rage and collect water in bags, in plastic bottles, to form a chain through the circles, which Rudra oversees. All the way to the Napurthala side of the basti. He takes coins from those who can pay, and collects more bags on his way back through the lanes, to the tree to watch the boys in their chappals or feet as they begin to climb the rubbish pile, shouting to each other at each find.

  The rest of Jeet’s morning is spent under the tree. The men slink out to find work; others sit under corrugated awnings to begin the day’s philosophising. Then comes the hour for swachh basti, when the women fold the night into piles of cloth and store them under cases, when the square inches of floor space are sprinkled and swept, when every female tidies her family’s corner, empties her toilet into the lanes and begins her next task – to sort plastic, to weave blankets, to cut rubber nuggets, or turf, to wash kapde, to service the men. Observing each woman as he takes his morning circular, Rudra learns the art of work. The dogs, even the mangy dogs, even the flies on the dogs have place and purpose here.

  Once a week, there are buses that take the basti-dwellers to langar at the Temple. For four weeks (or is it five?) this Temple bus, this langar meal, marks time passing. There have been four trips since Jeet arrived at Dhimbala, if he counts the first day it would be five. Since then he has learned to climb the rubbish heap, trying to avoid the soft sinking parts, the places where fires spontaneously begin and go out as if to reheat the waste from the Company kitchens. He has learned this is a short cut to the square, quicker than going around the pit and taking the lanes to the Amitsar gate, where people always push and shove to pass each other. Four meals, four blessings in the cool white spaces. The chance to see water for its own sake.

  *

  August passes in heat. Rudra possesses Jeet; he purges his body. Jeet rises in him; he craves the sensation of water on his skin; food, a phone; the play of credit cards stacked in a wallet, the smell of new shoes. His hands never feel clean.

  On the second week he takes the bus. He eats in the clanging hall, sitting on the floor alongside hundreds of others. He watches the door for dignitaries and tourists and white boys careless with their mobile phones. To steal? From here?

  He cannot – then he does – it’s only a cheap old handset stuffed with spam messages and three saved contacts:

  Aunt June

  Driver Narain

  Jaipur Hilton.

  Before taking the bus back to Dhimbala, Jeet allows himself one short forage in the back alleys of Amritsar. Why is he walking the back lanes? Rudra would not do this – would not take a small baggy with one last pill engraved with a cow and go hunting for a couple of middle class chumchas with poetic sunglasses and tight ripped jeans – Delhi-ites, he thinks – but who cares? He sells them the pill for 300 rupees when it should have cost 1500 but they laugh in his f
ace, they won’t pay it – 1000 he says, 500. They walk away – 300 is an amount for kings in the basti – so he submits, thinking Yes! Yes! because only first circlers have this kind of cash.

  In the basti that evening Jeet waits until after the story hour. Then he climbs with Samir around the dump, to a hollow place, walled in, which they use as a kind of store. He gives one note to the boy and tells him to take it and change it with Kataria 1; they get 75 rupees back. They split this in half and half again. They call it the aloo parantha ration. Samir buys ten paranthe, for him and for Rudra; they climb to the top of the rubbish heap between prayers and sleep and eat half and discuss how best to save half for the next day. With the second bill he pays Samir to buy extra water-pump tokens, watches him go, wonders why he is so dark skinned, why he wants to learn Yoga.

  Now, Rudra can buy water. The pump works for him. He can pay to charge his new phone in the mobile top-up shack, run by the brothers who never give anything for free – not even to Rudra the Naph, who blesses them, despite this.

  —Rudra bhai, have you been inside the Company Napurthala? Samir asks one evening, after they have eaten, settling his jeans on his nagin hips.

  Aré, basti hipster, knowing what style is! What line shall Jeet spin for this boy who performs, as part of his many tasks, what it is to be a man? He licks his lips.

  —Mujhe ek glass pani milega? Phir main tumhe ek kahani sunaonga. He waits until Samir brings the water in a tin cup, warm and bitter, making a man sick when it should keep him well.

  —Samir, Jeet says. The Napurthala Palace is the first, the eldest, the most exclusive of all Company Hotels. It was the childhood home of Devraj Bapuji, and belonged to his father before him. How can I explain to you the priceless art, the silver artefacts, the four room suites, each with their own butler? What an honour! The memory of that place is a dream of silence and meditation, a life lived in the softest of clouds. As far away from here as London, or the moon.

  —No it’s not, says Samir. The Company Napurthala is on the other side of the basti. You know that, Rudra bhai.

  —OK, it’s the speech police! You are right. Now what else do you want to know?

  —Can you make me the Napurthala tattoo? Samir sticks out his arm and the ball of his shoulder rotates all the way around. The boy is a natural Yogi. He shakes his hand, a dog wagging a wet paw: the day is too hot for sweat to dry.

  —No, Samir, I will not give you the tattoo. You should be grateful – you live in the first circle, you are on the winning side, where business is good.

  —Please, Samir says.

  —Don’t you understand there is nothing for you in this? You will belong to a dying brand. Chal. Go do your work and bring me what you find. The poor man who lives on rich people’s garbage also lives on their pleasure! Next life toh achi banegi teri.

  In the afternoon, Jeet sits under his tree. He does not know that tomorrow, the sand will reach him, and so will the rain. Today is still for the fight against desire, to love his poor neighbours, to accept he is one of them, to accede, to try not to dream of meat in this place where most people eat no more than rice mashed with whey – and whatever leavings the Company kitchens discard. To count the sightless windows of the Amritsar hotel, concentrating on the daily rhythm of the basti, trying not to think of the life inside that clean, soft place.

  He ponders the questions the basti-boys have asked him.

  He teaches the boys Suryanamaskars, down facing dog.

  He can’t think too much of what he has done.

  Does not want to think of Vik.

  Vik came from a village outside Anantnag. His family were apple farmers, with a small orchard always under siege from one blight or another. Vik had been in Delhi for two years when the spring turned to blood in the Kashmir Valley. Riots and protests, stone pelters against the Indian Army, bandhs, crackdowns. All Jeet could think of were the treasures he had left, how he had wanted to get them out that summer, but now could not.

  He met Vik at a poetry launch in a tiny bookstore in Haus Khas Village. The poetry was in translation – good enough, Jeet thought, still a mockery of the original. Jeet looked around for someone’s eyes to meet, so he could ask, silently – do you agree? That the Urdu version was so much better? No one responded, then Vik put an elbow in his side.

  Jeet remembers smiling. He remembers Vik’s eyes, his answering smile. He felt his blood slow. He looked around at the faces in the bookstore; alight, alive with listening to voices reciting. He’d thought of school, where the Christian brothers were definite about the destructive impulses of self-love and male sex (slippery, remembered, hard, luscious and biting). The brothers lectured on the sanctity of the family, the value of marriage. Jeet knew his own religion would agree; he knew Nanu would agree, despite the fact that once upon a time the Naphs treasured same sex love between men as golden. So Jeet, as a young schoolboy – before he had ever tasted a tongue (male or female) – knew that when the brothers said these things they were speaking directly to him, about him. The scion of Ranjit Singh, unnatural in his desires.

  He knew – because the Company owned the land underneath it – that bookstores such as this one, built on translation, would not survive in bricks and mortar, the cost of rent was rising, would become too high. Instead, these old and young men, aged, Jeet thought, between twenty-one and fifty (some of whom he recognised from that night in the Union Café, in 2009, when they had celebrated the legalisation of love fiercely – as if such bonds were gold (forgetting that gold can be melted), with coffee and shots and the words of Lalla – Lal Ded, the wandering Kashmiri, the wild goose of writing, who Vik loved, singing, surrender to the soul’s light, you too shall be free), would be forced underground again, when the store closed. Men, and store, would only be able to trade in another, virtual world, a world of sin or hate or pleasure – it would be hard to tell which through the screens of devices.

  Vik had driven Jeet’s car through the city, around and around the ring road. The night pulled through it: a light, warm shawl. Jeet talked, he could not stop – but Vik had only listened as he drove. War stops men’s tongues, he said, eventually. It had taken his friends and brothers to silence. Vik said he was a coward: he never wanted to throw stones, or join the armed resistance against India. But Jeet knew differently. It must take courage to resist the pull of war. Months passed before Vik would speak of that time; saying that, as a child, he had taken messages between Anantnag to Srinagar, between this azadi and that. So, Vik was brave – but perhaps unaware of it. Silent dreamers, Jeet had thought, never know their own strength.

  Vik had told Jeet he wanted a different kind of azadi. To drink fresh milk every morning, to eat dark chocolate every afternoon and night. To sit and argue in cafés on the comparative literary merits of Manto against those of Manu Joseph, a writer who Vik had discovered only after he moved to Delhi. You have your Laws of Manu, so do I, he said. Vik’s mother had sent him to Delhi to study, then to find work – he said he wanted to write.

  Vik, whose real name was Nadir. Jeet changed it, sitting in the car that very first night, outside the gallery in Nizamuddin. Before they even kissed.

  —Rudra bhai, says Samir. You have to tell us now. What was the sin that cast Jeet Singh from that highlife to this?

  The sin was not hate, but love, for a boy called Vik.

  Their year together was marked by the butcher’s cleaver: chop skin, chop flesh, chop gristle, chop bone, coming from the stall underneath Vik’s rooms. It was a strange thing to be lulled by. The memory of that sound and the feeling of Vik’s fine planed body against his remains imprinted upon Jeet, inside and out, the skin, the muscle of him meeting his, cheek to heartbeat to hip and hip bone, ribcages cleaving to each other: a pair of eyes looking into its mirror while a voice smoked smooth as a high after drinks sings in Kashmiri at night.

  Vik’s laugh, when he said: Society is sleepwalking through despair, this world is a pill, swallowed to dream.

  Love. Teeth on lips,
biting just enough.

  In the burning sun of Dhimbala, Jeet remembers the texture of that night as Vik drove around Delhi. Trying to persuade him to come back to Nizamuddin, Jeet had said, This is a war. Vik had looked at him briefly. Then back at the road.

  Vik had said it back to him, that last day: This is a war. They had fought; words thrown between them to the rhythm of the butcher’s cleaver, chop, your faith, chop, your silence, chop, your brother, to the bone, your father. They fought with all the words they could think of – shame, prayer, kneel, sin, bite.

  After months together in the city, Jeet had wanted Vik to come back with him to Kashmir; he wanted them to go together, first to Anantnag – where he would collect the treasures he had left, he wanted to get them out in the summer of unrest – and then on the pilgrimage to Amarnath. He thought they both should let go of their old lives, that this would bring them full circle. Something about them would feel different and then Jeet might be ready to bring Vik to Gargi, to meet Radha and all his friends and come out. Finally, after all the nights he has spent, auditioning those Delhi, Mumbai, Goa females for the part of future wife.

  Most in their circle knew Jeet preferred chocolate to khir – and he knew a dozen men the same. They met at parties and in each other’s houses, able to live as long as they married. Yet, most of these men were not for him. They were all variations of Radha’s Bubu. Uncouth. Unclean, Vik called them. And meanwhile all of their closest friends would smile and exclaim, trying to be modern about the ancient forms that love could take.

  Vik laughed at Jeet that night. Actually laughed at him – a Hindu yatra in a German 4×4 over stolen land won’t make it better, you idiot. Can’t you understand we don’t need that shit? We are the new world – just say it and be it that’s all you have to do.