by Uday Prakash
He looked high and low throughout the house for the old postcards sent to him from the government job office. He yelled and screamed at Kasturi when he couldn’t find them. He did end up coming across a few postcards from a few years back with his name and his address. In town, people saw him and either didn’t say anything, or told him he should approach some politician or high-ranking civil service officer about his case. But in his current state Mohandas was unable to do so. Even Pandit Chatradhari, head of Purbanra’s village panchayat, had issued a written certificate declaring that Bisnath from Purbanra was Mohandas; his son, Vijay Tiwari, was in cahoots with Bisnath. He was always stealing glances at Kasturi and, like a hunter, he lay in wait for the day when a broken Mohandas would come fall at his feet and beg for the job at his buffalo dairy.
Mohandas kept noticing that whenever a public water pump was approved by the local panchayat it’d be installed right outside the home of one of the more important people in the village. When teachers were hired, or slots opened up for female teachers or rural health workers, or grants became available for building houses under the Indira Awas program, or funds were released by the Grameen Development Department for digging wells or tilling land, when the Nehru Employment Program had openings in its program for the educated unemployed, those same people would be the ones to divvy up the spoils. Sharda and Devdas reported that the same kind of discrimination happened during lunchtime at school when they ladled out the gruel.
That night for the first time in years Mohandas went over to his childhood mate Biran Baiga’s house; they got some stiff mahua brew and made a pork curry. Gopaldas also came. The group of four or five began drinking at seven. They’d also got hold of a dholak and a pair of manjira. That day Mohandas had got paid by the Seth from Vindhyachal Handicrafts for the bamboo ware he’d made: twelve hundred rupees. Gopaldas also had a bulging wallet. Biran Baiga was hosting, but the money for the liquor and meat had come from Mohandas. The stuff that Biran’s wife and sister brewed was so strong, it’d burst into flames if you rubbed it against the wall.
In the soulful music, Mohandas and his friends forgot about their sorrows for a little while. Bihari played the dholak, Parmode the manjira. Mohandas, buzzed and feeling good, sang:
Hello mister train man where are you driving your train?
Tell me where you drive your train
And I’ll tell you where you can find me and mine
Tell me your name, your village, where I can find you
Love pushes love along the tracks
Only news about love reaches us way out here
Love makes us dance, our bodies spin, whirl
in this town that’s as conjured up as love, the mirage
Here’s my address, what’s yours?
How can I reach you, mister train driver?
It was two in the morning by the time the women served dinner. Everyone was ravenous. Biran’s sister had used mustard oil to prepare the pork with spices, garlic, onions; the smell filled the entire courtyard. Everyone helped themselves to a roti and dug in. There was also a big pot of rice. Mohandas, however, was silent. It was as if the singing had stuck a little needle in him; he felt a stitch in his chest that he tried to suppress and forget about by drinking more than the rest.
With a handful of food he was about to scoop into his mouth, Mohandas stopped, looked over everyone, and then looked at them once more; a sob then emerged, followed by uncontrollable weeping. Gopaldas, Biran, Bihari and Paramodi were so hungry and it’d been so long since they’d had such a good meal that they were a little bit offended at Mohandas’s outburst. Taking bite after bite of food, they asked while chewing, What’s the matter? Why don’t you eat first?
Mohandas wiped away his tears and asked Biran Baiga, ‘Who are you? What’s your name?’
‘Biran. Biran Baiga,’ Biran said with a laugh.
‘And your father? What’s his name?’ Mohandas continued.
‘My father’s name is Dind-wa Baiga,’ he responded, still laughing. ‘And you’re drunk on the ma-hoo-wa.’
Everyone thought that was funny. Mohandas’s eyes were bloodshot. He plonked his fingerful of food down on the tin thali and raised his voice:
‘Biran, Parmodi – tell me if you can, who am I? And don’t just feed me lines or treat me like an idiot. I want all of you to swear on Malihamai!’
‘You are Mohandas, your father is Kaba, and your mother is Putli,’ Biran said firmly, poking Mohandas in the chest with the finger he’d been eating with. The group began laughing. Mohandas didn’t respond but regarded Biran for a moment before staring down the rest of the group. He wanted to put a stop to his fears about whether these people were who they said they were, or some other people. Then the feeling crept in that they were to a man quite real people who’d been, like him, cheated out of something and, they too, had had the rug pulled out from under them. The only difference was that he’d found out the secret, whereas the rest of them were still in the dark.
Mohandas wanted to instruct his childhood friends to go to government offices, go to skyscrapers and mansions and coal mines and factories in the cities, and to Lenin Nagar, Gandhi Nagar, Ambedkar Nagar, Shastri Nagar, and other residential colonies like them and ask around to see if some imposter has deprived them of their rights and is living there saying that they are them, their father is his father, and they’re from where he is from. But even though he was buzzed he felt that if he told them this they’d just say he was drunk.
His four friends were busy eating. Biran’s wife Sitiya and his sister Ramoli joined them. The two had also been drinking the mahua, and it was all frolic and fun with them, laughing and joking and eating. Mohandas, however, had by then separated from the group, and sat in the corner alone where he’d taken the bottle with him, letting out little sobs between singing verses of Kabir and taking swigs from the bottle.
It was four in the morning when his mates slung Mohandas over their shoulders and took him home. It was the first time Kasturi had seen her husband in this kind of shape. She began castigating Gopaldas and Biran until Gopaldas handed her a thousand rupees and said sorrowfully, ‘I kept saying you’ve had enough, you’ve had enough, but he wouldn’t listen. Take this, it’s the money that fell out of his pocket.’ That quieted her.
It was seven in the morning when Kabadas started with a fierce coughing fit, as if a tornado were stuck in his throat. It showed no sign of abating. Blind Putlibai ran around crazed, like a cow broken loose from its tether. Her cries echoed through the neighbourhood; Kasturi awoke, and tried to shake Mohandas awake. But he was still drunk with mahua and showed no signs of consciousness. She poured a bucket of water over him, causing him to open his eyes. They were as red as if soaked in blood. He was still intoxicated. She screamed, ‘Get up! Go run get a doctor! His cough is deathly!’
Men, women, and children from the village began coming over. Devdas and Sharda stood panicked beside their grandfather’s bed. It was as if his insides had exploded; each cough came with spit full of blood and flesh. Lines of ants began forming on the ground; horseflies began swarming.
Everyone tried to shake the drunken sleep out of Mohandas. It was no easy task, but he finally began steadying himself with his hands and lifting himself up; everything looked terrifying through those bloodshot eyes. He didn’t recognise a soul, and he couldn’t focus. Then suddenly a big grin came over his face. He struggled with all his might to look directly at the man he recognised, Ramai Kaku. Mohandas’s voice came out like gravel: ‘Kaku, who am I, what’s my name, Kaku, tell me, tell me!’ Mohandas then collapsed on the spot into a lifeless heap.
The wails and cries of the village women rose, and Putlibai’s were the loudest. Soon it was a kind of harmony of women’s lament.
Kabadas died. The flies covered the bamboo and cutter under his cot. He’d been up half the night shucking bamboo and it was only yesterday they’d received an order from Vindhyachal Handicrafts to make thirty baskets and fifty winnows.
&n
bsp; That morning around seven thirty the cat had pounced on and gobbled up the pair of myna birds out in the open of Kasturi’s room. Mama myna was carrying two eggs in her belly; crushed feathers and drops of blood still littered the earthen floor of the room; the day before Kasturi had covered it with cow dung.
Mohandas, who had been left passed out in the courtyard, wasn’t conscious enough to be aware of how his father’s funeral rites were conducted; he wasn’t there to witness how village and caste elders took Kaba’s body to the cremation ground, how Mohandas’s mother Putlibai kept rapping her forehead on his cot and how she cried while she cleaned his blood and spit from the mattress, basket, and water jug; how little Devdas took the place of his father and lit his grandfather’s cremation pyre, and how his childhood friend Biran Baiga performed the kapal-kriya, the ceremonial breaking of the skull. Mohandas knew nothing of this. The low-caste gosain priest shook Kasturi down for five hundred rupees, and the forest guard took another five hundred for himself; the wood he used from Patera for Kaba’s pyre wasn’t even dry. All the money Gopaldas had given Kasturi was gone.
Mohandas snored with vigour. He opened his eyes a couple of times, looked around as if he had been brought someplace he didn’t recognise, then went back to sleep. Maybe it was the deep sleep, or maybe the mahua had been adulterated with lentina or besharm leaves, or maybe it was the pork curry that’d been bad. But if any of these had been the case, Biran, Parmodi, Bihari, Kitiya, and Ramoli would’ve have come down with something. But they’d all been fine, and what was more, as soon as Kaba died, they all busied themselves arranging for wood, going to Khanda village to tell the gosain what had happened, and making sure all the funerary arrangements were made properly. Mohandas’s drunkedness wasn’t an ordinary one.
‘The mahua’s flooded his brain. Mix jeera and ajwain with yogurt and spoon it in his mouth!’ Biran Baiga advised.
Kasturi mixed the jeera and ajwain in a little cup and brought it over to Mohandas; Gopaldas took Mohandas’s head in his lap. Mohandas’s eyes and mouth opened, and he regarded the two as if he had no idea who they were. In a weak and barely audible voice he asked Kasturi, ‘Who are you, sister? And who am I, tell me!’ He then smiled at Kasturi and began humming:
Hey Bilaspur lovely
I’m a Raigarh lad
Don’t you think we’re made for each other?
This was too much for Kasturi, and she began to break down. Sharda also began to cry at her father’s condition. Gopaldas patted Kasturi on the shoulder, took the little cup from her hand and told Mohandas, ‘Here, take your medicine.’
Mohandas looked at him sheepishly, as if he himself were a little child, drew the cup to his mouth, and drank it in one gulp. Maybe somewhere in his mind stirred the wish to get better. Kasturi and Gopaldas were relieved; maybe it would make a difference – otherwise, they’d have to call the doctor.
Mohandas fell back asleep.
Mohandas slept in the same spot in the same corner of his house for five days and four nights nonstop. The word had spread in the village that he’d completely lost his mind and he didn’t recognise a soul anymore, not even his wife and kids. Some had it that the mahua he’d drunk had been diluted with urea, while others insisted that his summer-heat-induced faint at the Oriental Coal Mines that day had erased his memory. Vijay Tiwari spread a rumour that his spotted dog had bitten Mohandas by accident, and now you’ll see, as sure as the sun will shine, Mohandas will start barking like a doggie. Everyone had his own rumour. It was tough for Devdas and Sharda; they went to school and were asked by the teacher and kids, Is your papa a loony toon? Does he even know who you are anymore? Is it true he only sleeps and sleeps – and if so, how does he bathe and pee and poo?
A rumour even spread that one night Mohandas got up in the middle of the night, grabbed his father’s machete, and ran around trying to slash and kill everyone in the house. Kasturi tackled him and blind old Putlibai tied him up with a rope, otherwise god knows what might have happened!
(All of this was happening at exactly the same time as when the ‘India Shines’ campaign was in full force, and the finance minister and World Bank promised that as long as the five point eight per cent rate of economic growth that started in 1990 continued for the same number of years, India would become the United States, given the fact that the US became the US in fifty years with half that rate of growth.
...it was the time when I was diagnosed with bone tuberculosis, two of my lumbar discs in a state of advanced degeneration. I was confined to bed for nine months and the smiling heads of the Buddhas carved from the Bamiyan mountains in Kandahar were being destroyed by rocket fired missiles...
...it was the time when four years’ worth of the sweat of destitute workers, nineteen thousand tons of steel, and four hundred and fifty seven thousand cubic metres of earth were moved during the construction of Asia’s biggest, and the world’s most expensive and modern, metro rail system ... At the time when the houses and homes and fields and yards of more than fifty million adivasis and dalits and aboriginals were submerged under water for the construction of thirty five hundred dams ... At the time when twenty million people living in India didn’t have drinking water ... and seven hundred million didn’t have a place to wash, bathe, piss, or shit.
...it was the time when the parties in the Left coalition raised hell in the streets of Delhi to protest against a rise in gas prices, when some ninety percent – nine hundred and twenty million Indians – never bought a drop of gas in their lives...
...it was the time when the police fired on and killed a dozen starving farmers in Ganganagar and Tonk in Rajasthan because they’d thrown rocks demanding water to irrigate their withering crops...
...it was the time when Abdul Karim Telgi ran a counterfeit postage stamp operation worth billions of rupees, with several high-ranking politicians and officials working in cahoots. It was the time when an elderly critic of Hindi letters proclaimed that a bureaucrat-turned-writer was the new Muktibodh, and a second old corrupt critic insisted that some paper pusher was Premchand and Phanishvarnath Renu reincarnate and rolled into one. It was the time when the atom bomb blew up at Pokhran and the Goodwill Bus was running between India and Pakistan after the Kargil war.
And it was the time when the waters of the Kathina river were exacting revenge in Purbanra for the paper mill and the rotting wood at the dam by inundating the land where Mohandas had planted his cucumbers and watermelon and honeydew...
The land where Mohandas, crying ‘hu tu tu!’ had played with Kasturi in the strong current of the Kathina, the memory of their hot passion under the glow of the starry night was the birth, nine months later, of Sharda...)
The truth was that Mohandas wasn’t crazy, and nothing was wrong with his memory. The blow to his psyche had silently festered during the week of unbroken sleep, stupor, and drunkenness. When he awoke, he was again the same Mohandas: a person who knew full well that he and only he was the real Mohandas, son of Kaba, resident of Purbanra, district Anuppur, Madhya Pradesh, who had, some ten years ago, earned a BA from M.G. Degree College, and was second in his class. He was the Mohandas who’d been denied a job because he had no connections, no pull, and no money to use for bribes. He wasn’t a member of any gang or group or mafia because he didn’t belong to a caste that had any power. He knew full well that he and countless others like him had been cheated and lied to and tricked for many, many years, but he had no means to do anything about it.
And one other thing that he knew full well was that Bisnath from Bichiya Tola, son of Nagendranath, who’d assumed the guise of Mohandas Vishwakarma, son of Kabadas, and who was pulling in ten thousand a month as a depot supervisor at the Oriental Coal Mines, was in no way, shape, or form Mohandas. No, he was a soulless bastard, a dyed-in-the-wool caste fascist, and a fraud who wielded so much power that Mohandas, compared to him, was nothing more than a sick, whimpering little mouse.
Mohandas knew that his father – the real Kabadas – had died of TB, af
ter coughing up bloody phlegm while making bamboo baskets, mats, and winnows; but he didn’t have the capability to prove this, since Bisnath’s father Nagendranath was still living as Kabadas in Lenin Nagar and Bichiya Tola – and he was the one who had the papers to prove it.
Mohandas’s silence grew every day. The dam on the Kathina had taken away one of his livelihoods, so he began working at Imran’s Star Computer Centre as a typist, and making printouts and copies. His son Devdas began working at the roadside Durga Auto Repairing Works, helping repair flat tires and fix whatever car problems he could with a screwdriver and wrench. He made one or two hundred rupees a month, enough to cover his school costs. It’d been two years since Sharda had quit working as a nanny for Bisnath’s kids and doing their household chores; Renukadevi had gone to Lenin Nagar to live with her husband. A year ago, Sharda got work in town at the Aishwarya Beauty Parlor. Shikha Madam was crazy about Sharda and helped her out with school. She said, ‘Sharda, one day you’ll become a model and then Miss World and you’ll be on TV!’ Sharda, who was eight, dreamed every night that this would come true.
Kasturi kept an eye on people’s crops in addition to working in the fields of neighbours and villagers. Putlibai’s knees had turned to stone after Kabadas’s death, and she could no longer walk. In order to relieve herself, she had to crawl on all fours out back, and then come back to her corner where she sat on her burlap-like mat. Her blindness had grown even more severe.