by Uday Prakash
It wasn’t easy, but Mohandas managed to sneak in through the gate and into the company compound. His jeans were torn at the knee, and were beginning to rip at the back, too, but Kasturi had patched those bits up with matching colours she’d used from scraps of fabric from a sari top or bedcover. Exposure to the elements and heat and cold and hunger and hard work had turned his skin a dark copper. Sorrow and calamity had scored his face with so many wrinkles that no one would ever believe he was younger than forty. Enduring want and quietly eating insult and injury had made the hair on his head and all over his body a little greyer. Mohandas was in his early thirties but looked as if he was in his fifties.
Mohandas stood in front of the same office where, four years ago, he’d brought his diploma and certificates, and where the employment clerk assured him that his name could never be crossed off the list since he’d had the highest marks for both the written and physical exams.
And sitting in the very same office was the very same clerk. He had a bigger chair now and a bigger desk in front of him to match; the air conditioner behind his desk provided him with a constant cool breeze. Mohandas stood in the doorway watching him busily eating tea biscuits and drinking chai, while two people sat in front of his desk chatting with him, as if they had all the time in the world.
At once the clerk noticed Mohandas, who quickly pressed his hands into a namaskar, and smiled a big smile with the hope that it’d jog the clerk’s memory. But the clerk looked put out – maybe he didn’t recognise Mohandas? He tried again, joined his hands again into a namaste and said brightly, ‘Sir, it’s Mohandas...!’ But by then the clerk had pressed the button beneath his desk that rang the bell. It had a hard clanging ring, and the underling appeared immediately. Mohandas couldn’t make out exactly what the clerk said to him, but they were clearly words of scolding. He emerged from the room, drew the curtain, and looked Mohandas over from head to toe with a scowl. ‘What business do you have here? Go sit on the bench outside. How the devil did you get in here?’ Mohandas wanted to tell the clerk that his name was Mohandas, and that four years ago he’d been offered a job here at the coal mine, and that all of his papers were sitting in that office, but then what happened was that some other man stole his name and stole the job ... But Mohandas’s voice was too feeble, and the underling manhandled him over to the bench, and his utterances made no sense. There was a lump in his throat and he was stammering. Breaking free with one of his arms from the underling’s grip he managed to spit out, ‘ Dada, I need to see that clerk, just for a minute to pick up my papers and transcript.’
The underling more or less pushed him over onto the wooden bench that sat against the wall, turned around, and went back. Mohandas knew that he’d never be allowed back in; this was his last chance. He called after the man, who was just about to disappear inside the employment office.
‘Hey! HEY! Go tell that clerk that Mohandas, BA, is here, and he wants all the papers and certificates back he deposited here on 18 August 1997. What a bungle! Give you a nice room and big chair and then it’s nothing but anarchy? Grab a piece of paper, take down my name. Then go show it to your boss!’
The underling’s jaw dropped. Here was a guy dressed in rags who looked like a hobo, yet the language that came out of his mouth was quite lucid, even eloquent, and his manner equal to a educated manager, or clerk’s.
The man remained planted in the doorway and just stared at Mohandas: his washed-out, patched-up jeans; his mended, dirty checked shirt; his balding head, hair that’d turned half-grey; his lustreless, burnt-copper face, criss-crossed with crooked wrinkles; deep-set eyes, gloomy and weak, as if they were seeing a reflection of themselves; his cheap sandals stuck to his feet, their ancient rubber molested by penury and despair, now turned into dirt and wood and paper.
‘You son-of-a-bitch!’ the angry underling muttered under his breath. ‘You crazy bastard! Hey motherfucker, you think the big man will help your beggar butt?’
Mohandas surmised that the underling didn’t really believe what he was saying, even though god himself knew it was all true, so he stood up from the bench and walked toward the man with sure steps, maybe even with a little swagger. He had in mind that he would go in and try to explain that it wasn’t just that Bisnath had taken him for a ride, but had played the entire Oriental Coal Mines for a fool.
The way Mohandas was striding toward him, the impatience and swiftness, the taut wrinkles on his face that mirrored the distress in his mind, his deep-set eyes radiating an agitation, his dry, crusted, quivering lips, and the extreme upset in his words: the underling was scared out of his wits.
‘Whoa! Whoa! OK! One more step and you’re out the door! Stop right there, old man, stop, STOP!’
‘B-B-Buddy! Brother! Just hear me out...’ Mohandas said, a little on the loud side, trying to calm things down a little. But there was too much desperation and not enough supplication in his voice, and things got worse. The man straightened his back and screamed, ‘Get out! Stop right where you are or I’ll rip you a new hole, old man! One more step and out on your arse!’
Hearing the shouting and screaming, four or five guys emerged from the office. They were dressed like higher-ups, and gave Mohandas the hard once-over.
‘Who is this? How’d he get in here?’
‘Where’s security officer Pandey? He chews tobacco and sleeps on the job!’
‘Who’s on guard today at the main gate? Show me the log!’
‘Get him out of here!’
‘Isn’t this peachy? Any old fart could sneak in, take out a gun and start shooting – bang! bang! – and then what? Set off a bomb maybe!’
‘Hand ‘em over to the police! Sharmaji, call the police, dial 1-0-0 on your mobile!’
Nobody was listening to Mohandas; he was just being pushed around in a shower of slaps, fists, and elbows raining on his head, back, shoulders, and face. Mohandas covered his head with his hands to protect his eyes, ‘Please! Just hear me out, hey, stop hitting me, hey!’
Meanwhile, a small group of guards had come running. One was carrying a twelve gauge double-barrelled shotgun, the kind bank guards carry. The rest had batons. Shivers went up Mohandas’s spine; stars from the new moon night on the banks of the Kathina flashed before his eyes, the celestial bodies screaming and groaning, then falling like shooting stars, breaking into pieces. A hard blow struck him unannounced and he let out a scream that sounded like a bound pig getting its throat slit. The sound reached the coal miners, who came out and gathered to watch the show.
(Pay attention, this story takes place at the same time as when that all-seeing Hindi guru was doing you-know-what to a woman in his ascetic quarters, and, thousands of miles and a few oceans away, the US president was sitting in a chair in the White House doing the same thing. When latter-day sea pirates dragged a descendant of Gilgamesh out from a hole near the Tigris and Euphrates where he’d hidden for his life, shining a flashlight in his mouth, counting his teeth, looking for a cyanide pill.
It was the time when the amount of power someone had was, by the law of a kind of backward ratio, equalled by the same degree to which that person had become out of control, violent, barbarous, hellishly immoral. And the same force applied to states, political organisations, castes, religious organisations, and individuals.)
Mohandas stood outside the main gate of the Oriental Coal Mines in the middle of the road. He’d simply stopped thinking. A frightful near-silence buzzed all around. He didn’t realise he was standing in the middle of the street with trucks, Tempos, and cars honking their horns and whizzing by. He still had that thirty-rupee wallet in his pocket that he’d bought when he thought the job was his. In it was one hundred and seventy rupees, all from his labour and toil – this is what he had left, minus the sixty-five for his bus fare. Finding his wallet still there when he reached into his pocket, his mind eased a bit. He suddenly felt the sun’s heat and moved quickly to the side of the road. He was hungry.
While eating at the Fatso’s Va
ishnava Pure Vegetarian Food Stall he found out that although there were two state transport buses only one private line had an evening service to the area near his village, Purbanra. He decided to take a look around Lenin Nagar, the coal miners’ colony. He might see someone he knew, maybe someone he studied with at college, maybe someone else.
He lost his way in Lenin Nagar. It was afternoon, all of the apartment buildings looked alike, and everyone was at work in the mines. Only women and children were at home. A school bus was making stops and unloading schoolchildren who were walking on ahead. Lenin Nagar was an enormous residential colony. If I hadn’t had the wool pulled over my eyes and been played for a fool, Mohandas thought, I would have been living in one of these flats with my family, bringing home a pay cheque; Devdas and Sharda would have been going to school wearing little uniforms and shoes and socks and getting off the school bus. We’d have a fan or cooler to help us sleep at night. But how totally ludicrous that in order to find out where Bisnath’s flat was, he’d have to ask for his own name.
‘Hi there friend, can you tell me where Mohandas lives?’
‘Who? You mean supervisor sahib?’
‘That’s the one!’
‘Go straight ahead, make a left at the fourth bylane, it’s the third house, A/11, next to Dr Janardan Singh’s flat.
The door to the apartment was closed. The brass plate affixed to the wall outside read, ‘Mohandas Viswakarma, Deputy Depot Supervisor, Oriental Coal Mines.’
He stood reading that for a little while before ringing the doorbell below the brass plate. The sound gave him a start since the hard ring was identical to the clerk’s desk buzzer, the one that caused calamity.
A fourteen-or fifteen-year-old boy answered the door.
‘Sahib’s not at home, he just left for the market to go drink a lassi,’ the boy said in one breath.
‘Could I have a glass of water?’
Mohandas was very thirsty, the hot sun had been beating down on him, and the wind blew like a furnace. He was wilting. He’d been nicked and bruised on his face, arm, and back during his beating and subsequent ejection from the office compound, and the dried sweat was coagulating the blood in the cuts.
The boy looked him over head to toe.
‘Wait here, I’ll be right back.’ He went inside.
Mohandas gulped down three glasses; the boy’d brought a cold bottle of water from the fridge. The water rejuvenated his body, brought the light back to his eyes, and calmed him. He noticed the boy’s sympathetic look as he took the glass back.
‘Who else is at home?’ Mohandas asked.
‘Nobody. Just Kasturi madamji. But she’s sleeping. Come back after five.’ When the boy started back in with the empty bottle, Mohandas said, ‘When sahib comes back tell him that Mohandas from Purbanra village stopped by. I’ll come back this evening.’
The boy stopped. He looked quizzically at Mohandas. ‘Who? Who should I say stopped by?’
‘Mohandas!’ Mohandas said a little louder, before slowly returning to the May inferno and the nearly melting pavement.
There wasn’t much to Lenin Nagar market, though it ached for a modern makeover. There were a handful of dry-goods stores, a few convenience shops with some groceries. A Kaveri Fast Food that served dosas-idlis-vadas. Two food shacks with the usual tandoori, dhal makhini, kadhai paneer, butter chicken, aloo paratha. A liquor shop with whisky and local toddy with a sign outside that read, ‘Cold Beer Available.’ Two cigarette and paan stalls, and two stores with proper glass window displays that carried all sorts of plastic stuff, small electric appliances and electronics. Then another cavernous apparel store with a show window featuring crude foam mannequins modeling lacy bras and underwear that showed off everything.
Mohandas saw a police Tata Sumo parked in front of Lakshmi Vaishnav Restaurant, and among the handful of police inside drinking lassis was Vijay Tiwari from Mohandas’s village, son of Pandit Chatradhari Tiwari, who’d been fixed up with a police inspector position by his in-laws.
Bisnath, too, was there.
Bisnath was having a good laugh at something as he finished his lassi; walking back toward the Sumo, Mohandas caught his eye. Bisnath did a double take, and for a moment the colour drained from his face. The laugh evaporated. Vijay Tiwari saw the panic on Bisnath’s face and turned around to look; he was sitting in the driver’s seat in full uniform.
Mohandas stood about fifteen yards away, beneath the lamppost, dressed in rags, scorched by the scalding wind.
A tense silence settled over the hot, sunny afternoon.
Bisnath climbed into the SUV. Vijay Tiwari started the engine and floored it, right at a terrified Mohandas, who stumbled to take cover behind a lamppost. Vijay Tiwari hit the brakes hard and the car ground to a halt right beside Mohandas; if it hadn’t, the car would have smashed into Mohandas and the lamppost. He was in a daze.
‘Get over here!’ Vijay Tiwari called him over.
Not even eight years had passed since the very same Vijay Tiwari had studied with Mohandas at the M.G. Degree College. They had a class together and saw each other there every day. He’d been a bit slow in his studies. His father Pandit Chatradhari had held out Mohandas as a role model, since every year he was at the top of the class. Now the same Vijay Tiwari wore a police uniform, rode in a Tata Sumo fitted with cop sirens and a bullhorn, and put on a show: more than simply pretending he didn’t know Mohandas, he put on a show of hostility and scorn. And why? Just because Mohandas was poor, low-caste? Or because he didn’t have a job and was labouring quietly to support his family? Or maybe because these people had swindled him, walked all over what was rightfully his. But now, his presence threw a wrench into their freedom and carousing.
‘You’re lucky that lamppost was there otherwise you would’ve been dead meat!’ Vijay Tiwari spat out.
‘Eh, leave him be,’ Bisnath said. ‘It’s not worth the mess just to swat a fly. And you, arsehole, had better not show your face around here again.’
Mohandas hadn’t budged an inch from his spot.
Vijay Tiwari leant on the horn few times, and then flipped a switch to the bullhorn mounted on the roof of the SUV.
‘Hey Bisnath!’ the sound screamed from the loudspeaker. ‘Have you lost your mind, Bisnath? Oh, Bisnath, what’s the matter? Cat got your tongue? Gone deaf? BISNATH! Hey, Bisnath!’
They exploded into laughter inside the car.
‘You didn’t bring your wife with you, Bisnath? You came to die alone? Tsk, tsk.’
Bisnath climbed out of the car and went right up to Mohandas. He reached inside his pocket, took out a five hundred, and stuffed it into Mohandas’s.
‘From now on forget about your old name, and from now on don’t even take a step toward Lenin Nagar. Today you got lucky. We were just drinking lassis. The lamppost saved your butt, otherwise you would’ve been a grease spot. If we ever see you around here again, it’s into the coal furnace, and out as ash!’ Then he turned towards Fatso’s Vegetarian Restaurant and shouted, ‘Nand Kishore! Hey! Can you bring a lassi to Bisnath over here? And make it cold, put some ice in it! It’s Bisnath, from the next village over!’ More laughter from inside the SUV.
Bisnath joined in, and while getting back into the car, whispered to Vijay Tiwari, ‘Nand Kishore? Just a dhimar from Bhakhar who turned himself into a Brahmin after he came here and now runs a Vashniva vegetarian restaurant. Even married a brahmin girl from Sajanpur, the little weasel. Call him ‘panditji’ and he loves it, gets all swelled up with pride.’
‘That’s good! And so the brotherhood enlarges.’ Vijay Tiwari chuckled at himself and turned to the food joint. ‘Keep an eye on Bisnath, Panditji, and thanks for giving him a lassi to drink, and put it on my tab, and, oh, he’s just a little off his rocker.’
‘Don’t worry yourself about it! Not one bit! All in a day’s work! I’ll put him back on his rocker!’
The Tata Sumo sped off, leaving Mohandas covered in a cloud of dust and exhaust.
He
stood perfectly still, grabbing hold of the lamppost. Was this some movie where a scene had just wrapped up, and he was a character trapped inside? Or was it some twisted nightmare?
Fatty’s Vaishnav Vegetarian Foodstop’s light-skinned, beady eyed, middle-aged fat sweetmeat proprietor, Nand Kishore, held out a glass of lassi.
‘Bisnath, oh Bisnath! Come and drink your lassi!’
Mohandas was leaving Lenin Nagar market and walking to the bus stand when he noticed a disturbed-looking man coming toward him. A little bag was slung over his shoulder, his pants were washed out, and coming apart at the seams. He came up to Mohandas and stopped.
‘Do you know where Suryakant’s flat is in Lenin Nagar, brother?’
Mohandas remembered seeing that name on a nameplate when he’d been looking for Bisnath’s house. He tried to remember.
‘Keep going straight ahead and you’ll see Matiyani Chowk at the big intersection, and ask someone, it’s not far from there.
The man started to leave and Mohandas asked him softly, ‘Whose apartment are you looking for?’
‘Suryakant’s! From a village near Unnao.’
‘What’s the name of his village?’
‘Gadhakola!’
‘And what’s your name’
The man hesitated. His lips trembled, his deep-set eyes began to well up, and in a thin, gravelly tone, a rough sound emerged.
‘Suryakant! I’m Suryakant from Gakhakola!’