We that are young

by Preti Taneja

  She looks around at them; her lamp casts her face half light, half dark. She waits.

  —Good, she says. Now you. Rudra the Naph. She pulls a small draw-string purse out of her sari blouse. From inside, she picks two notes; she looks around the men, all of them Amritsaris, she elbows them out of the way, she shows the notes to Rudra – a ten and a five.

  —Go to Mumtaz, she says. Tell her to come back if she wants this; bring her if you want a share too. The rest of you, back to your beds. Not a word about this to the Katarias, or anyone outside, until we get Ranjitji out of Dhimbala to Bapuji.

  The men in the courtyard watch while Madam and her girls help Ranjit inside. Then, arms around the guard, they lead him towards the ninth circle, to tell them more, to drink.

  The dung-smoke fucks the smog and births a sickening pall, picked up by the wind and carried over the basti that night. The rats begin to squeal as Rudra makes his way through the lanes, around the pit where Samir’s mother’s body still waits to be recovered; the municipal authorities will not allow the Jhimbas time off for this task for ten more days. The woman is already dead. What does it matter, thinks Jeet. When Ranjit has been blinded by Radha, the silly girl whose clothes he thought were always so try-hard; who he, Jeet, used to tease to tears for her matching purses and earrings. He stops to be sick, now, not from fever returning, but the sight of his father’s face, his body. Radha did this, with a stick in her hand. What was she wearing? Her signet ring. Perhaps Bubu joined in. Bubu, who is dead. Where is Gargi? Jeet thinks, as he slips through the lanes, past sleeping women huddled over their children. A few dogs run beside him before turning off to follow some other scent. He passes his own hovel, then the Naph shrine. Feeling his way, trying not to be sick again, he reaches Mumtaz.

  He knocks gently on her shutter. He waits. It opens a crack. He gives her Madam’s message. The shutter closes again. He waits. A minute in the dark. Mumtaz comes out of her hut with her bundle, she gestures to him to follow her. Gaps seem to open up where there were none before; she turns between the circles, winding the lanes around her feet instead of obeying their logic. They reach the fourth when Jeet thinks they should only be in the seventh. They come out flush to the brothel.

  Madam is waiting, smoking her bidi in the courtyard. She gives Rudra the five rupees and the end of her smoke. She takes Mumtaz inside.

  Smoke the bidi, Rudra, stay by the smouldering brazier. Just as fire is obscured by smoke – he can see no stars. The rats scuttle, their claws on the tin roofs scratching his nerves. He waits, shivering in the doorway almost until dawn. He is dry, he has lost the need for water or for food. He sleeps until the door opens. Mumtaz steps over him, looks down at him, and pushes him gently with her foot. Go inside.

  Rudra expects the inside to be pink with drapes, incense and candles, to smell of disinfectant and fish. The next scenes should be hallucinatory – women and singing, curved flesh, long hair, whispering. The bell has not rung for customers tonight – yet he expects to see men, watching, touching. But inside he passes small cells, each doorway covered with a think crewl-work curtain (birds in branches, singing). Each cell is small, he thinks, there would only be space for a single bed and perhaps a cupboard, a mirror, in there.

  Madam unlocks her room – a corner space, laid with a carpet – Jeet cannot remember the last time he walked on such a thing. In a corner is a cracked sink. A bucket of water lies next to it, a tin bowl floating on top. Madam gestures to Rudra to wash his hands. Then she unlocks an inner door and takes him to Ranjit.

  Mumtaz has cleaned his eyes and applied herbs and fresh bandages. She has left pain balm, the sharp colour and scent of lemons. A sleeping drought, made of who knows what. Now Ranjit seems to be dreaming, muttering in his sleep. Jeet leans over him, without touching him.

  —What’s he saying? Abbaji, what are you dreaming? he says.

  —Jammu and Kashmir, Madam says. Amarnath.

  Ranjit hears her; he seems to wake. He raises a hand a little. Jeet bends low, ears to lips.

  —Let me go there again, and climb the mountain, Ranjit whispers. I need to feel God’s healing breath in the land of the lotus root. Let me be led to Amarnath by one who has no fear of death. What does anyone care when we die? He falls silent.

  —All night he has been raving, says Madam. A Sikh prince begging for Hindu blessings moonlighting in a whore’s bed. Weren’t you heading to Amarnath, Rudra, Naph sage, traveller, when the charms of our basti stopped you in your tracks?

  She grins at him.

  —Poor Rudra, poor Samir, she says.

  He ignores this. He looks down at his father.

  —What should I do?

  —I always thought you had such smooth skin Rudra, for a traveller. Such clean hands, Madam says. Someone has to take him from here. Someone who can pass easily outside with him and get him to Bapuji. I’ve heard the stories you tell the boys. Only you remember the way through the city. And were you not blessed to be Bapuji’s pet only a week ago?

  Jeet wants to stop her voice. This room is so sterile; there is nothing soft about its brick walls, its concrete floor. The carpet is outside, waiting for him. He remembers seeing Ranjit’s arm around Jivan in Delhi, on the night of the last Tuesday Party. His father is now shivering, silent. His eyes are bandaged. Jeet knows that Madam is right; it is time to repent for his own sins – love, gullibility, rage.

  *

  A day later, the Company man comes back to the brothel. He waits in the courtyard. When Rudra comes out, he gives him 2000 rupees in two slim bricks of 100s. He says in a week, when Ranjit has recovered enough to be moved, he should bring him to the Napurthala Gate, where Amrit, his second wife’s nephew, will meet them with a car. He gives Jeet a cloth bag; inside is a kurta pyjama for Ranjit. A Company uniform: shirt, pant, cap, which is meant for Rudra.

  —There, he says. Naph or no, the nights are cold. Keep warm in the cloth of the Company, even as you follow its hero to God.

  Jeet holds the money. How fresh it smells. How solid it seems.

  —Thank you, he says. The English words come with difficulty, almost through tears.

  A day and a night passes; days and three more nights. Mumtaz comes and goes. Jeet sits with his father after he has finished his rounds in the basti. His boys circle the lanes, ensuring that everyone is inside before dusk, that nobody is gossiping about Ranjit, or what anyone saw. Their recitations continue; their bodies are getting strong with daily yoga. The dhaba TV churns out news of the Campaign: in Delhi, Bapuji has set up at Ramlila Maidan. He is still fasting. No drop has passed his lips. On the fifth day they hear he has been arrested, put into Tihar jail. A crowd has gathered outside, demanding the government release him. In Kashmir the Company hotel is almost finished. And Gargi and Radha? No comment.

  Madam hardly speaks to Jeet as she brings food and water to Ranjit’s rooms. He absents himself while she feeds Ranjit and cleans him. She has told her girls to keep as quiet as possible, even as they go about their business. Jeet can still hear the men, coming for them.

  So can Ranjit.

  Sometimes, he moans Radha’s name.

  *

  In the dawn of the seventh day, Rudra washes in the square. He wraps his Shahtoosh, and then his bright cloth around his legs and ties it. On top, the Company jacket and cap. He does not even think any more about mirrors. Or wish for them, at all. He combs his beard with his fingers, he stands under the neem tree, his hand pressed against the bark.

  The guard box is empty. The dhaba shutters are closed. For the last time, he goes through the Amritsar gate and walks the circles of Dhimbala until he gets to the fourth.

  He goes into the brothel to collect Ranjit. Madam is waiting with him at the door; she has dressed him in white and wrapped him in a dun coloured quilt. Jeet thinks his father looks like a chaukidar. So, they go through the deeper lanes, the image of a gatekeeper and a Saint.

  It is cold before sunrise. He thinks they are not followed, though enough people see th
em go. Except for the dawn patrol of Little Amar, Motu and a few of their friends, the basti-boys are all sleeping. At the Napurthala Gate, an old, white Ambassador car is waiting, a young man leaning against the bonnet. Jeet does not know this person, but the car is familiar – it is from the Company Amritsar tourist fleet; they hire it out for wedding nostalgia. How shocking to see it here – but why? After all he has seen, why does this old relic seem strange?

  The driver, Amrit, is short. He wears his bomber jacket and jeans, his white T-shirt, as if revealing new buys from the mall; he has a way of flicking his wrist out that shows off his watch – a Timex with a thick silver bracelet. He has a bowl cut over a moon face and a gap-toothed smile; cute, Jeet thinks, then realises the boy has a habbit of chewing chicklets as he talks. Disgusting.

  Amrit has brought five one-litre bottles of water and thirty homemade mooli paranthe in a round, steel tin.

  —Just as a snack, he says. He chews his gum and starts the car. He tells them the journey should take seven hours, according to MapmyIndia. He has never used the app before – he has downloaded it just for today.

  *

  The basti recedes. Jeet holds his father’s head cradled in his lap, he is dabbing at the tears that trickle every now and then from under the bandages Mumtaz applied. Jeet is wearing a borrowed, too big Company uniform; it keeps him warm – he feels warm for the first time in weeks. He opens a bottle of water. He drinks slowly, carefully. He is aware of the money in his pocket.

  —Amrit, take the back routes, he says. Find us some village for our first meal of the morning.

  They cut off the highway.

  Jeet has his Prem BlackBerry; Amrit has his Samsung Galaxy – from these, they learn that in Delhi, Bapuji has been released from Tihar jail. A crowd has gathered on the streets outside, lining the route to Ramlila Maidan where a vast tent is waiting to receive him, where thousands have gathered to see him. He will appear, it is promised, still keeping his fast and his tongue.

  Ranjit drifts in and out of sleep. For an hour that morning Jeet, too, closes his eyes to the sound of chewing gum and the road. Then Ranjit screams. His arms come up, trying to claw at Jeet’s face; Amrit swerves, just missing a boy who is driving an old woman sitting sideways on a motorbike. Her sari catches in the wind, sending ripples across her body. Amrit honks his horn. He rights the wheel.

  —All good in the back? he says.

  —All good, says Jeet. Next village, we stop.

  Ranjit seems calm again. In his white kurta, his bandaged face, it is hard for Jeet to remember that so many women have sat on his lap. So many have stroked his beard.

  —What is your name? Ranjit whispers to Jeet. I will call you Yogi, for I know you are my guide.

  Ranjit seems to think that they’re driving north. He talks about the days he spent taking tea before going hunting through palace gardens. Sometimes he seems more awake, giving Jeet and Amrit a masterclass in the true history of the Company and its spoils. So they learn that the child-size, custom-made, automated, open-top, four-seater Mercedes Jeet was gifted for his sixth birthday (complete with Company walnut interiors, the Company shield replacing the Mercedes badge in the centre of the wheel) was bought with the profit from high-interest loans, granted for the cultivating of land for cash crops in Punjab. Jeet and Gargi played Mummy–Daddy in the front of that toy, driving Jivan and Radha around in the back, making them stop for pee-pee or picnics on the Farm grounds: lamb patties and Company-Cola. Aged eighteen, Jeet’s birthday gift was the life-sized version: a white soft-top and matching 4×4 with customised interiors and the number plate j1t. Bought, Ranjit laughs, his head lolling on Jeet’s thigh, with interest paid by farmers through Company part-owned banks across the backward states. How lucid Ranjit seems in these memories. Each one more familiar than his own son’s hands on his face. Jeet holds his palms above his father, batting the one, insistent car fly away.

  As Amrit takes the back roads, with flat fields and dirt tracks running alongside, Ranjit begins to hum old freedom songs. Jeet claps his hands over his mouth, feeling his beard prick him. He tries not to tell his father to stop. Instead he asks for the radio – and gets Punjabi love songs, songs from Bollywood hits and weepies. Sometimes, even Madonna.

  They drive for an hour or more. Then stop for breakfast at a small dhaba on a backroad next to a tyre garage. Posters of Bapuji’s face, caught mid-speech, mouth open, eyes squinting, his finger pointing upwards, are plastered across a square of wall. Twenty or thirty Bapujis, each laid over the other, so Jeet has to piece together the saying:

  Don but such apparel as will cause the cold to flee.

  Eat but so much food as will cause hunger to cease.

  O Mind! Devote thyself to discernment of the Self and of the Supreme,

  And recognise thy body as but food for forest crows.

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  Jeet looks at his own strange attire. At his father, all in dirty white. He thinks about where they are going. Can he arrive in Delhi, like this? Hours have passed; already the basti seems so far from here, childhood seems nearer. Amrit buys them hot tea, he places the cups on the ground so he can help Jeet pull Ranjit upright; then drags a red plastic chair to the car so Rudra can sit by the open door, and feed small bites of cold parantha, watching his blind father lick his lips, and sigh.

  —Here is Ranjit Singh, the living evidence that God is great. You will not age if you keep your wits in service to your country. Are there any gulab jamun here?

  Amrit and Jeet look at each other, then Amrit shakes his head and raises his eyebrows. He goes for a smoke with his phone, standing under the posters of Bapuji, finger pointing the sky.

  On the road again, Ranjit strokes Jeet’s arm. His voice turns melancholy as he tells stories Jeet has heard four hundred times before.

  —But listen, says Ranjit. We are travelling – stories are for retelling—

  Jeet keeps quiet. He thinks that it might help Ranjit to stay alert, alive even, if he recalls meeting ambassadors and other dignitaries: Bush, Blair, Idi Amin (who Amrit has never heard of). Mrs Gandhi nos. 1 and 2, shaking them all by the hand while giving and receiving gifts passed down to one of the divisions or another. None of which were ever accounted for; some were re-gifted to certain friends, a member of the Hundred perhaps, who was destined to shortly join the Company anyway. No tax levied for them.

  —This is not corruption, Amrit says, raising his hands from the steering wheel. Rudra bhai, this is the way of the world. A great business was built.

  —But we must move on, says Jeet. The way Gargi and Radha are conducting now – you must understand that it cannot continue – that is what Bapuji’s campaign is about. This is not the India I imagine. Did you know that Christians believe by repenting, a man can be reborn in this life?

  Amrit did not know this. All he knows about that faith is that when they gather in their churches everybody sings, not only those trained to recite their holy book.

  —And is it true, Rudra bhai, that they also eat God’s body and drink his blood? And actually marry their girls to God before they even become women?

  Jeet does not answer; he is listening to Ranjit’s breathing. Outside, somewhere, the fields are burning. It is the end of the harvest. Black smoke rises in plumes – five, six, seven of them, against the white sky. A dry, choking taste of roasting wheat penetrates the car, making Jeet’s eyes water, making Amrit cough.

  Shame stacks up – cards in a poker hand as Ranjit keeps on talking. Revealing the how, the when, the where, the jack, the ace, the king.

  Jeet could tell his father who he is. He could shout at him —Why don’t you know? Are you fucking with me Dad? Are you? Are you? Silence has become a habit too precious to remove.

  Ranjit’s face feels burning hot. He tries to turn on one side then another, but the back of the car is no place for this. He sighs: Sita.

  Jeet leans over him.

  —Shh.

  Lying on
his back with his knees bent, feet pressed against the door, Ranjit sleeps.

  They stop in a small market, three or four stalls arranged around a roundabout, for a lunch of chana bhature and gulab jamun mashed into its own juice. They share a long table where men look at them – a Sanyassi dressed as a Company guard, a stocky driver with his thick Timex, ek andha who should be resting in a bed. Jeet tells them he is taking Ranjit to Delhi and to Bapuji. Ranjit hears him: he bangs his spoon on the wooden table.

  —You are no one, you do not know our way. We will go to Chennai, we will take the Company tunnel, though it is not yet built – we will go to Srinagar and from there to Amarnath, where I will make the ultimate sacrifice, he says. His voice breaks.

  Amarnath – everyone at the table knows it is too late in the year for this. No one protests.

  —Rudra, Ranjit says, will you accompany me to the Rishi Bhumi? To the holy shrine? From there, you will see the sacrifice I will make. I will go from that place, to make amends for this cockroach life I have lived.

  —I will come, Rudra says.

  He watches the faces around the long tables – their smiles as he comforts Ranjit – as his father grips his fingers so tightly, he almost loses feeling.

  Jeet raises their joined hands above the steaming bowl of channa. The warmth of the dhaba washes over him.

  But Ranjit is not used to the food from the street. As the day falls into afternoon, they have to pull in at least two times an hour. Jeet has to help Ranjit to the roadside toilets, where even the sweepers waiting outside say chi chi under their breaths at the mess he makes. Once or twice Jeet feels wistful for the open basti field, the sky. In the car again, he soothes Ranjit, chanting the Gyatri Mantra, then singing the chorus to Dum Maro Dum in Rudra’s high voice: Hari Krishna Hari Ram, Hari Krishna Hari Ram, Hari Krishna Hari Ram. He amuses himself by doing both: the ask and the response. When evening begins to fall he switches to Aaj ki Raat; he knows this film song will keep Ranjit’s blood up. Aana hai kya? Hona hai kya? What will be, will be. Ranjit has a sudden desire to sit up. Face outwards. Though he cannot see anything, he claps time.