by Ings, Simon
Squirming as best they can out of the way of the weaving barrel, Rishi and Vinod try to steady Yash down and get him into the roadhouse. Yash insists on tucking the gun into the waistband of his trousers. He’s CBI now: a plain-clothes constable with the Central Bureau of Investigation. He wants to celebrate.
‘We can’t go in there with that thing.’
Yash is adamant. He has passed a firearms course.
Rishi and Vinod help him round the back of the building, where string mattresses slung around short wooden posts make hammocks for drivers plying the Sher Shah Suri Marg. At least, they try to.
‘A moment.’ He stumbles off towards his car.
Vinod sucks his teeth. ‘Can you believe they’ve given that oaf a gun?’
Yash has a personal supply in the car. He returns with the bottle. He’s already opened it, releasing into the air a pungent chemical smell with an undertone of burnt sugar. Yash takes a swig and hands it round. The stuff is as strong as it is rotten. Rishi tries to read the label in the weak exterior light.
Yes: Rishi can read. Not that you need much skill to interpret the three big Xs printed, blood-red on black, beneath the brand name. Under them comes an admission, CONTAINS FLAVOURS, and in smaller letters, along the bottom, FOR SALE IN JAMMU AND KASHMIR ONLY. This rotgut is a long way from home. A gift from one of Yash’s army friends, perhaps: souvenir of one of those drear winter camps that fill whole valleys of shitbrown Ladakh. Holding the Himalayan line. Keeping the Moslem hordes at bay. Rishi takes another slug and fights a gagging reflex. No wonder the they don’t drink if this is all they have to hand.
Yash is in a mood to celebrate. He wants to show off, and he has plenty to show off about: ‘I recently completed the Advance Commando Combat System of Professor Doctor Rao,’ he announces, climbing on to the webbing of his crude string bed. He keenly communicates the professor’s insights concerning Vital Organ Striking and Subclavian Artery Termination, ‘One Enemy, One Chance, One Strike, One Kill!’ The bed frame creaks as Yash bounces back and forth, cantilevered hips in constant hula motion, arms sweeping and chopping the air.
Rishi and Vinod gaze at him, captivated, waiting for him to fall through the netting or for the gun to go off in his pants.
Rishi and Vinod stretch out side by side on string mattresses, slugging cold beer in the dark, while Yash, a wakeful drunk, lectures them on the nature of the insurgent Mohammedan machine. Its networks, its hawala economy, its sleeper cells.
Three young men, bullshitting the dark.
Yash tells them: ‘You can beat a man bloody, but a night in a refrigerated truck is cleaner and faster.’
Morning brings them back to the matter in hand. Over chilli-egg sandwiches, between bare walls, hunkered over a melamine table, Vinod explains the circumstances of his father’s death. ‘Those cunting retards fucked Dad’s car. They as good as killed him.’
‘Not in law,’ says Yash.
‘Their carelessness –’
‘The lack of evidence –’
‘Fuck’s sake –’
‘ Not in law, I said.’
A pause.
‘There are things the law cannot do.’ Yash’s statement hangs over them a second: a general sentiment regarding the human condition. ‘Off the books, we still have one option.’
‘What?’
‘We can ruin them. We can take their garage off them and kick them into the street.’
‘How?’
‘There are papers Mohinder Gidh can draw up.’ He turns to Rishi. ‘But he will need your help.’
‘My help?’
‘Mohinder can show you the documents he needs. He can show you what to make.’
‘Make?’
‘Come on, Rishi,’ Yash sighs. ‘Vinod’s told me what’s in that tin of yours.’
Each week Rishi visits Devnagar and collects glass blanks for his mother to cut against her wheel. The journey from Chhaphandi to Devnagar and back is too much to do in a day, so Rishi spends the night with a cousin of his mother’s. After they have eaten, his auntie goes to bed – she’s forever dropping with tiredness – leaving Rishi free to pursue his hobby. On the roof, basking in the city’s churn (spinning wheels and screaming babies, insults hurled from house to house, squeal of pulleys, snap of clothes pegs, slam of ten thousand doors), he pulls his biscuit tin out from under the plastic water tank and sorts through the dollars there.
The trouble with the dollar-stamping machine – a constant of his life, and still sporting its Clint Eastwood paint job – is that while he can compose pretty much whatever message he wants around the edge of the coin – ‘Board of Intermediate Education’, ‘Bihar School Examination Board’ – the centre of the coin must feature a novelty motif.
So Rishi embosses his legal-looking documents very lightly, rubbing the paper over the circumference of his chosen dollar with steady strokes of a soft eraser. The impression this leaves is weak-wristed, but the stamp is fraudulent anyway so this isn’t a huge problem. Growing adept, Rishi has even begun cutting his printing blocks by hand, using the chewed up jewellers’ tools that litter the city’s bric-a-brac stalls. And with this reconditioned kit he counterfeits what so few round here can afford: a paper life.
‘You don’t have to make masterpieces,’ Yash assures him. ‘Just make documents good enough that if someone asks, Mohinder can hold them up and say he was honestly duped.‘
Rishi thinks about it. An idea comes to him. Really, a very good idea. ‘Write off the dowry.’
Rishi’s demand surprises them both. Yash laughs.
‘Years I’ve been driving your family’s fucking earthmover around and what have I ever had to show for it? What wages have I ever seen? I’ve paid you Safia’s dowry many times over and you know it.’
Confused, Vinod glances at Yash.
‘After all,’ Yash says to his cousin, ‘you’re getting a going concern out of the deal. You’re getting an entire auto business. You can afford to be generous.’
Vinod takes a swallow of Pepsi and swills it around his mouth, scowling, judging the vintage. After a minute or two of this charade, he holds out his hand: ‘So we’re done,’ he says, and Rishi shakes his hand.
Once Rishi has some money in his pocket, he goes in search of a companion. He finds a girl from Agra. Educated. A catch. A prize. Pali Ghoshdashtidar. They marry. In Firozabad he gets a foreman’s job in one of the city’s glass factories and his mother comes to live with them in Devnagar.
They don’t rub along too badly. Once Rishi’s off to work in Firozabad, away go the pots, the pans, the cushions, the few domestic knick-knacks that make their home. Out come the gas bottles, the lathes, the burners, spools of solder.
Men tend the kilns in the centre of town and it is their grievances and disputes which make the headlines, but in reality the city’s industry is driven by the women and girls in places like Devnagar, squatting in poorly lit rooms like this one. Pali is a businesswoman and expects to be taken seriously. Rishi’s mother hides her fear of her daughter-in-law behind a tremulous smile.
By the time Rishi gets home, Pali has packed away the children and his mother has prepared their dahl. They move around their room in silence, rearranging their few possessions. They eat, and for a while the smell of food erases the day’s busy milling of glass blanks: hot electric leavings in the air.
Rishi’s mother piles their dishes into a bowl of grey water and washes them herself: servile work performed without complaint. We spend all day with children, Pali and I, ordering them about, keeping them in check, seeing to their cuts and scrapes, what do we want with a housegirl cluttering up the room of an evening? (In truth, she is glad of a way to demonstrate her humility to her scary daughter-in-law.)
At night a curtain, drawn from wall to wall, divides the room, offering the couple a little privacy. Rishi’s mother sleeps among the piled-up lathes and wheels, boxes of irons and solder spools.
It’s a bad time for the brickmaking business. Word’s gone round
the camps that indentured labour is done for. This, anyway, is the pronouncement from Delhi. Politicians are on the TV saying that there’s no longer any place in modern India for employment practices that border on slavery.
Which is all very fine, but urban sentiments fall on stony ground in Chhaphandi. Freeing the serfs into what, exactly? In roadhouses up and down the Sher Shah Suri Marg, Vinod explains the matter: ‘The only other work these people get is shovelling shit. Literally, shovelling shit. Maybe one or two get to change the dressings in charity hospitals. What kind of life is that?’
Next, the Communist Party roll into town, stirring up trouble, inflaming the workers at the Yadav Brickworks. A couple of days later, a mother of two, Samjhoria Nankar, declares herself free, downs tools, and walks out of the Chhaphandi brickworks to attend a rally. She comes back, of course, to eat Vinod’s food and burn his fuel, but she doesn’t go back to work, oh no, she just sits there (‘the fat pig’), all the while demanding her ‘rights’. That’s why Vinod has been taking a lathi to Samjhoria Nankar’s back.
There have been fights at the brickworks before, of course. It is a place of hard knocks. Whenever upstart bhangis win at cricket, the rich boys of the village ride up on their Enfields and beat them down to size with bike chains. It is in the nature of things. In this region the wealthy make their own justice. Terror is a tool of control, cheaper and more effective than the law. Horror inspires fear, and fear inspires respect.
Vinod’s escalating harassments of the Nankar family have been anything but calculated. More like the tantrums of an overgrown child. Rishi comes home one evening from his shift at the glass factory and finds Pali’s milling operation still in full swing. ‘Late delivery?’
Pali elbows past him with a tray of bangles. By the door sit beaded bags, loaded with samples wrapped in brightly coloured tissue. Pali is due aboard the Kalindi service tonight. She’s going to New Delhi to play the aspiring businesswoman, displaying rural handicrafts to a discerning urban market. If she secures good orders, as she expects, almost everyone in the street will be able to afford a brand-new plastic water tank this year.
‘I’ve been busy entertaining your friend,’ Pali grumbles. ‘Yash Yadav is on the roof with your mother.’ She turns off the gas taps, one by one. The Bunsen burners gutter out even as the girls are working.
‘What the hell is my mother doing on the roof?’
‘Flirting.’
Rishi takes the dregs of liquor from behind the portable television and climbs the ladder.
Yash, the region’s counter-terror tsar, is a man people turn to for advice regarding agitation, insurrection and incitement. He’s the one who says to backbenchers, newscasters, clueless relatives and dotty old women where the national rot is to be found. The toothless old men of Devnagar adore him. He is their shining boy. He is, to hear them speak of him, the youthful embodiment of every ancient courtesy. He wears pressed shirts. He wears a watch. He shakes their hands in the morning. He buys them tea. He loses to them at backgammon and chess.
Yash can bowl over toothless old women too: Rishi’s mum has given him the embroidered cushion to sit on and has even brought Pali’s best china up on to the roof. The plates are piled with kids’ food: halva, kulfi, sugared almonds. At Rishi’s arrival she stands, yabbering like a schoolgirl. ‘Rishi! Inspector Yadav and I have had such a fascinating afternoon! He has been telling me everything – so shocking! What would we do without him?’
Yash says: ‘Let’s talk in the car.’
Rishi rides to Chhaphandi in Yash’s brand-new, saffron-yellow Maruti Zen. The front passenger seat is set so low he can barely see over the dashboard. The car’s wallowing suspension makes him feel seasick – not that he’s ever seen the sea.
While they drive, Yash tells Rishi the news. Vinod has come to blows again with Manjit Nankar. He claims that he caught Manjit interfering with the Lohardaga girls. The pair of them must have been drunk, for neither one managed to land a decisive punch. Bleeding and panting, they plunged into the shadows behind the Nankars’ hovel. ‘Someone left a hod-carrier lying around.’ Yash draws his sigh from a deep well of weariness, as though human incompetence generally is his personal burden. ‘This Manjit person tripped over it.’
The blade buried itself in his skull, killing him instantly. The news, the horror of it, has an almost physical mass: it sinks in. ‘Who knows about this?’
‘You. Me. I phoned Mohinder. Safia and the kids know by now. A bunch of bhangis, you know, kiln-workers. I have that in hand.’
It takes Rishi some while to map the enormity of Yash’s plan. ‘You can’t expect me to do this!’
Yash won’t even give him the satisfaction of a reply. Rishi has bought his way out of his dowry obligation by becoming Yash’s little helper, and little helpers do what they are told.
Defining the southern edge of the kiln-workers’ compound, broken pallets lean in teetering piles against the walls of a forty-foot-long shipping container. The container fell off the Sher Shah Suri Marg years before, rolling down the embankment, grey and relentless, like one of those elongated dice from the cricket game Aadi and Ram played with Rishi sometimes. Howzat! The Yadavs use it now to store tools and equipment. They keep the kerosene in there.
About fifty workers live beside the kilns. Most are teenage girls, itinerants from Lohardaga. Their huts are thrown up as and when they are needed. Each girl gets one room, which doubles for cooking and sleeping. The rooms aren’t big and the older girls are taller than their rooms are long. This doesn’t matter so much, and the girls can still stretch out at night as the rooms don’t have any doors. Some of the girls have made doors of sticks and straw to keep the dogs out, and the more enterprising ones have made roofs of straw to protect them from the sun.
Vinod and Yash are waiting by the container. As Rishi shambles up, Vinod unfastens the padlock securing the container door and tugs the locking bar. The hinges squeal. The keys to the Komatsu are hung from a string just inside the door. Vinod throws them to Rishi and Rishi climbs into the Komatsu.
The Lohardaga girls, woken by the engine’s growl, poke their heads out to see what’s going on. The sardar dropped them off only a couple of months ago and they’ve yet to acquire much discretion. (Vinod’s memorable assessment: ‘In the fields they piss themselves where they stand and they don’t even think to cover themselves.’) That said, they can smell trouble brewing under their noses. They flee their hovels and scamper through the cornfields with their few possessions balanced on their heads. One takes her door with her, a square of battered corrugated iron.
Rishi, more nervous than anything, laughs.
Vinod and Yash pour kerosene into the house that, only hours before, served as the Nankars’ home while, high up in his cab, Rishi listens to the clank of buckets, the splash of kerosene, a baby’s cries stifled by a mother’s hand. A dog’s barking, a cockerel’s crow.
Vinod Yadav lights a rag and throws it into the empty hut. The whoomp of ignition is felt more than heard. The oily, brazen flames of the fuel die back quickly and leave the hut smouldering steadily. There is little inside to catch light other than the fabric of the hut itself. The straw roof blackens and caves in quickly; corrugated-iron sheets tumble into the ruin. Streamers of white smoke spring from the mud walls as though the hut were a cracked kiln. In the cab, his view framed by the tubes of the safety cage, Rishi feels weightless, as though he were on board a fairground ride.
At Yash’s signal he puts the Komatsu into gear and rumbles forward. He takes the front wall of the hut clean off, jamming to a halt in a cloud of dust and ash. He yanks the Komatsu into reverse and wobbles out of the wreckage pile. He stops, applies the handbrake, and lowers the front scoop. Vinod and Yash disappear into the container. They come out again lugging something in a sheet. Rishi watches, pressing his hands into his groin. Vinod and Yash manhandle the bundle into the scoop. The vehicle tips forward slightly on its suspension, then rights itself. Rishi pulls a lever, raising the scoop�
�s hydraulic arms. Yash waves at him: Rishi stops the scoop. Yash and Vinod disappear into the container a second time. Rishi waits. They reappear, lugging a second roll.
‘What?’
Neither Yash nor Vinod will look at him as they heave it into the scoop. The Komatsu rocks and creaks.
‘For the love of God, what have you done? Yash?’
They turn their backs on him, surveying the burning house, then Yash wanders over to the shipping container a third time and comes out with a coal bucket. Rishi watches as Yash carries it back and sets it down beside Vinod. It is full of potatoes.
Vinod looks at the bucket. He picks up a potato. He weighs it in his hand. He chucks the potato into the wreckage of the Nankars’ hovel. He picks up another. Yash joins in. Potatoes. Why are they throwing potatoes into the wreckage?
The Nankar woman demanded better wages for the family. She said they were starving. She even lodged a police complaint about it. So this is the idea: let the busybodies come. Let them have their enquiry. When they do, they’ll find food here, right inside the remains of the Nankars’ home.
Potatoes.
Rishi wrestles the Komatsu into reverse gear. He turns the vehicle roughly round, sending bars of lemon light through the safety cage and on to his lap. Heavy tyres churn the dry earth as he drives out of the compound. The sun is shining through the branches of the trees as he draws clear of the kilns.
There are a couple of hard nuts among the workforce, so the Yadavs can expect some do-gooders to come snooping around in the next few weeks. Some handwringing scribbler from the Janwadi Lekhak Sangh. Still, it will be hard for the workers here to drum up a public protest if there are no corpses to protest around.
The fire pit is not new. Rishi used to burn waste from the brickmaking operation here. Old rags, articles abandoned by absconding workers, broken pallets. He drops the bodies into the pit and uses the Komatsu to cover them with old tyres. Once the tyres are alight, their thick, liquid smoke fills the complex: a choking stink. The burning tyres will break the bodies down.