The Walls of Delhi

by Uday Prakash

  When I went back to my village last week I saw that the look on Harshvarddhan’s face was of numbness. His eyes were red. He said, ‘I haven’t slept the last three nights. I have no idea what I’m going to do. The people in Purbanra are telling the truth about Bisnath. The worst poisonous snake. A viper’s viper.’

  He let out a deep sigh. ‘Every couple of days Bisnath creates some kind of catastrophic criminal act in Lenin Nagar. Sometimes he’ll grab a gold chain off someone, or else he’ll beat someone senseless. And when someone owes money to the chitfund his wife runs, she’ll have them beat up, walk right into their house, and take whatever stuff she pleases. And then when a criminal complaint is lodged at the police station, it’s done so in the name of Mohandas, since most of the people still know Bisnath as Mohandas. Then it’s poor Mohandas, the real one, who gets arrested and dragged off by the Purbanra police.’

  Harshvarddhan’s eyes filled with tears of helplessness. ‘Bisnath colluded with police inspector Vijary Tiwari and bought off the guards at the station with food and wine, and now they’ve beaten Mohandas within an inch of his life. They broke his hands and feet and he can’t walk. And four days ago his mother Putlibai fell into a well and died. Kasturi is cobbling together whatever she can to put bread on the table.’

  I looked up; Mohandas was approaching, limping heavily. He was not wearing the washed-out, patched up pants and torn checked shirt, but only a loin-cloth. His hair had fallen out, and he wore cheap round eyeglasses. He walked slowly, using a walking stick, shuffling along like an old man.

  ‘Ram Ram, uncle!’ he said upon seeing me, joining his palms together in greeting. The deep wrinkles on his face were a monument to his suffering and defeats. He looked like a very old man, maybe eighty or ninety. He sat down on the ground, using his walking stick as a support. But the gruff voice that came out of his mouth with a groan wasn’t our local tongue, but Hindi, the ‘national language.’ He said:

  ‘I take your hands and beg: please find a way to get me out of this. I am ready to go to any court and swear that I am not Mohandas. My father’s name is not Kabadas, and he is not dead, he is alive. They really beat the hell out of me, the police did, on Bisnath’s order. They broke my bones. It hurts to breathe it’s so bad.’

  I noticed his lips were cut badly and he was missing some teeth; they must have smashed them out in the police station. He could barely put two words together.

  ‘Whoever wants to be Mohandas, let him be Mohandas. I am not Mohandas. I never did a BA. Didn’t come out on top of my class. Never was fit for work. Just want to live in peace. Leave me be, no more beatings. If you want something, take it. Take what you need and fill up your homes. But leave me to my life and toil. Uncle, please stand by my side.’

  It came out that Mohandas’s eleven-year-old son Devdas hadn’t been home in ten days. Some said that Bisnath had him disappeared, others said he’d fled to Mumbai in fright.

  Still others claim to have seen him in the jungles of Bastar.

  (It was the time when at the top of a hillside near Bharuch stood a thirty-year-old Dhanuhar archer named Raghav. Night after night he’d stay up late whittling down shaft after shaft of bamboo into arrows. He drew the bowstring taut and shot arrows at the sky, then ran down the hill to retrieve the arrows that’d come back down.

  Again and again and again – countless times he fired arrows at the sky and retrieved them from the dirt.

  But then the arrows began to be submerged under water, and it became difficult to find them and pull them out. The fields of the valleys that lay between the mountains were filling up with water: inundated, a massive flood. Village after village began to go under, and trees, too. North and south and east and west were going under; all memories were going under.

  Yet thirty-year-old Raghav kept shooting arrows into the sky and running down to retrieve them as long as he himself wasn’t swept under.

  Where is Raghav now? Just where he was, where there’s now nothing but water. A vast, bottomless sea where electricity is created. There once was a hilsa fish in Bharuch. The greatest fish in the rivers of India, the most magnificent in the world. The hilsa is only able to survive in the fast moving current of a river.

  The hilsa at the dam is sick from the polluted water, and has probably died.

  It happened at the same time as when I was writing this story in a language that imprisoned me inside just like Iraqis were imprisoned in Abu Ghraib. Or like Jews in 1943 were imprisoned inside a German gas chamber. Or like a drowned hilsa fish in dirty, stagnant, polluted waters. Or right now like Raghav Dhanuhar, still fighting.

  This was the time of Mohandas, of you, of me, of Bisnath, of what we see this very day when we look outside our windows.

  And the time everybody knows as the first decade of the twenty-first century, when all of us were celebrating the one hundred and twenty fifth anniversary of the birth of Premchand, the King of Hindi Fiction.

  But really, tell the truth: Doesn’t the name of Mohandas’s village, Purbanra, remind you even a tiny bit of the Mahatma’s Porbandar?

  MANGOSIL

  —This story is dedicated to Laghve,

  Paul and Shailendra—

  A PREFACE TO THE END OF TIME

  (Reading this preface is mandatory)

  This is the story of Chandrakant Thorat. It’s also my story.

  And it’s a story that takes place in the present day, in our own time, a tale with the sights and sounds of this day and age. A few of the characters have been cast out of their own space and time, and now stand in wait for the destruction at the end. I am one of them, living outside of my proper space and time, in a filthy quarter far from the finery and culture of the city. The efforts of human beings to lead lives in the shanty towns that circle the city on grabbed land eventually take shape, one unfortunate day, on the maps of a town planner, or property dealer, or urban coloniser. Then, the engineers of the empire of money send out the bulldozers – they fan out, non-stop – until even a dirty sprawl of shacks is transformed into a Metro Rail, a flyover, a shopping mall, a dam, a quarry, a factory, or a five-star-plus hotel. And when it happens, lives like Chandrakant Thorat’s are gone for good.

  ***

  Chandrakant Thorat is a friend of mine, and he’s one of the characters of this story. My life is bound to his as if by decree or fate. Even if I didn’t want it to be so, it would be.

  You ought to know the truth: there are only two reasons lives like ours are stamped out. One: our lives are left over as proof of past and present sins and crimes against castes, races, cultures; they always want to keep this as hidden as they can. Two: our lives get in the way of the enterprising city, or act as a road bump in the master plan of a country that thinks of itself as a big player on the world stage. Our very humanity threatens to reveal the wicked culture of money and means as something suspect and unlovely. That’s why whenever civilizations once developing, now on the brink of prosperity, decide to embark on a program of ‘beautification’, they try to root out such lives, the same way the mess on the floor is swept outside.

  Suppose we fled these megalopolises to an exurb, or to the mountains, or into the forest, or to a small town? There, too, lives like ours would one day be inundated and swept away, just as the Harappan or Babylonian civilizations you must have read about in archeology books were also wiped out.

  The memory of the destruction at the end of time lies in the psyche of every community of every people, including ours.

  There is something else you should know. Whenever our lives are steamrolled in the name of cultural progress and cultural beauty to profit the rich city or state; or when lives drown for power and energy: it’s not just us. The deer, butterflies, birds, elephants, pipal and teak trees, the flora (divine beings all) are also washed away from this earth. Beings that descended from heaven, thousands of years ago, in the ancient treta or dwapar epochs; beings that settled into rocks and books so that our suffering might be eased. To allow us to endure our pain an
d desolation. To light our way like a candle or firefly or light bulb in the darkness. When violence permeates everything, and reality has become a nightmare, these creatures carry us into a dream.

  You know the truth: none of it is meant for us. Not the medicine of rich, developed nations that give relief from suffering, or the energy that creates the illusion of light and wind and words and dazzle – none is meant for us. Top-tier hospitals, banks, institutions, parliaments, courts, airports, and wide boulevards aren’t for us. We’re chased away from these places, or crushed underfoot.

  Only they may inhabit the buildings and institutions built by civilizations of wealth. Their constitutions only serve to protect their interests. Their language of poetry and legend is covered with our blood, sweat, sorrow, and tears.

  Their poems and epics aren’t ours. They want to keep us out of everything: poetry, prose, music, cities, work, industry, the marketplace. We’re the drudging, untouchable, poor, unemployed, dissatisfied, anxious, and hungry people who, to them, are utterly unknown. They despise us each and every moment; each and every moment, they wish to do away with us.

  ***

  What do you think? In 2003, could what’s happened in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, or what happened in the middle of the twentieth century in Hiroshima-Nagasaki, Korea-Vietnam, or what happened two-and a half thousand years before Christ in Mohanjodaro, Harappa or Mesopotamia, or what’s happening right now, as I’m writing these lines, in Karbala, Baghdad, Fallujah, Najaf, Nasiriyah or in the Gaza strip – is it so different from what’s happening in Delhi’s Gurgaon, Noida, Silampur, Bhilasava, Rohini, Jiyasaray, Mahrauli? Or different from what’s happening on the banks and shores of the rivers Narmada, Son, Betava, Krishna-Cauveri, Dajla, Yangtzee, Amazon, Volga, Mississisppi, Jambeji, Thames, Nil, Sindhu, Ganga, Tungbhadra, and Kosi?

  Read this preface to the end of time very carefully! Pore over each and every word and sentence, sift through the blank spaces and the silences in between. Close your eyes, focus all your concentration on our time, our age, and take a deep breath, a very deep breath. Breathe in the sun, the radiant, fiery ball that’s fixed in the sky. Take it all into your lungs: after all, the sun’s the only thing that connects us into harmony with time and space. Lie down on your back and relax. Forget the here and now and ponder the immortal Lord of Time, Shiva. The present moment is ephemeral, a mirage. Now place your right thumb between your two eyebrows and place your index finger on your forehead. Yes, good! Very good! Remain still, very still. And as soon as you do this – pop! – a little burst rushes forth, and the mystery of all life and creation and the universe will appear in front of you in the dim light of your own consciousness.

  And after being liberated by your deep encounter with time, you too, like Chankrakant Thorat and me, will begin to wait for the great flood, the inescapable and omnivorous fire.

  To anticipate the apocalypse.

  To await Armageddon.

  To hold on for a great new revolution, the likes of which has never been seen before.

  The massive destruction that’s essential for anything new to rise up.

  The mad volley of an age, of which a new epoch is born. A new civilization comes into existence. After the present fades into oblivion, everything can begin anew. A revolutionary moment marking the end of now and the beginning of to be.

  Ah! And on that day, on a tiny, green leaf of a pipal or banyan or wishing tree, swims a little baby, screaming and swimming on top of the gigantic waves in a vast, fearsome ocean that’s swallowing all the earth and all creation into its belly. The sound of the baby’s weeping and wailing echoes throughout the whole universe.

  Waaaah! Waaaah!

  On a primitive wooden boat, without rudder or paddle ... atop the churning tide, silently floating ... flickering in the distance.

  Ah! That wooden boat is very old ... slowly floating off into the distance...

  Oh, yes, I forgot to tell you something about Chandrakant and me ... it’s that our head – yes, the round head that every living man has on his shoulders – it’s become big, and is continuously getting bigger. Doctors say it’s an incurable disease...

  And the disease is called – ‘Mangosil.’

  And it’s a disease for which medical scientists know no cure. Neither allopathic doctors, homoeopathic doctors, nor ayurvedic doctors. And nothing in Baba Ramdev’s Yoga and Pranayama Breathing Exercises to Tackle All Diseases. It’s true, an old fakir (you can find him at the shrine of Amir Khusrau, ‘the other master’) once said that there is a book in which its cure does indeed exist. But with a heavy sigh, he added that the problem was that this book is yet to be written.

  For the past several years, both Chandrakant Thorat and I have carried the burden of our big heads on our shoulders, ever in search of that book. The fakir, whose eyes were red like the eyes of fire ants, creatures the creator did not give the capacity for sleep, animals that do not slumber once in their entire lives, insects that continuously carry thirty times their own body weight, or more; this fakir said, ‘A curse of rain and ruin on those who pen books of wickedness by their own hand and claim it the writ of Allah. And on those who claim that these books will bring an end to the sorrows and trials of man. Ruin will come to those who write these books, and ruin will befall those who profit from them.’

  The fakir added, as he was leaving, ‘Look at your own life, and at the lives all around you. One day, on your own, you will stumble upon that book. But remember this: in it, you will find fire and water. And you will find a leaf or a boat above the tip of a flame, or the top of a wave, somehow swimming, somehow surviving. And you will hear a voice – a voice that will give birth to all other voices in the world that comes after.’

  Chandrakant and I, carrying the burden of our heavy heads of bottomless sorrow on our shoulders, have been in constant search for that book.

  You can see for yourselves: our eyes are red like the eyes of fire ants. We aren’t blessed with the capacity to sleep, and, in our life, we’re carrying thirty times our own weight. Are you watching? Can you see the blood that pours forth beyond the bounds of our speech? The same words that bring nothing but punishment without pause! Time and again, we’re forced to leave town. Place after place, they’re kicking us out.

  Words that, one day, will give rise to all the world’s languages. Because the old fakir with eyes as red as a fire ant, sitting that day in front of the minor court of Hazarat Nizzumaddin – the shrine of Amir Khusrau, the first poet of the language we now call Hindi, said so.

  JAHANGIRPURI BYLANE NUMBER SEVEN

  Buttressed by what is said to be the largest fruit and vegetable market in Asia lies a neighbourhood in Northwest Delhi – Jahangirpuri. If you’re travelling between India and Pakistan on the Goodwill Bus, you’ll see what looks like a residential area right before the bypass road on the left hand side – rising up from the mud and the muck, that’s Jahangirpuri. But from a distance the land between the highway and the settlement doesn’t seem to be made of simple blackened ooze, dirt and water, but instead from a chemical mix consisting of a molten solution of motor oil, grease, gasoline, and plastic. Might as well throw in the rotting organic matter from the fruit and vegetables as well.

  Jagangirpuri was most assuredly settled without a planning map. Over many years, people showed up, built a house wherever they found some space, and settled down. In the surrounding area you’ll find what looks like ancient ruins, giving the impression that this area has been gradually inhabited over a period of centuries. If you’re flying overhead and glance down, you’ll see a mishmash of half-built houses. It’s as if someone took the waste material from wealthy Delhi’s architectural finest, and swept it clean out here into a pile: a trash heap of higgeldy-piggeldy brick houses tossed in the middle of a black chemical slime bog that exudes the stench of rotting fruit and vegetables. There are exceptions – a few multi-storied, modern houses. But this is like what Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Bombay look like from way up in the sky compar
ed to the rest of India: incongruous tokens of priceless, shining marble stuck in the mire and mud of the subcontinent’s swamp of chilling poverty.

  Narrow alleys or bylanes, no more than ten to twelve feet wide, wind through the rows of houses that are built right on top of one another in Jahangirpuri. In some places, they are as narrow as eight to ten feet from one side to the other. You can traverse these bylanes, without fear of collision, only on foot or by cycle. During the hot season, people bring their cots outside and sleep; settlements like these are the hardest hit by the capital city’s frequent power and water cuts. Gossip, STDs, dengue fever, black magic, criminality, and disease spread most vigorously in places like Jahangirpuri. This summer, the channels built for water drainage were all running open, and every morning, the young and the old and infirm squatted above them and did their business. The smell rising from the ditches after the water is turned off gives the neighbourhood its unmistakable stamp.

  It’s half past ten at night right now in bylane number seven, where a fat, dark-complexioned man of forty-five or fifty tiptoes down the alley loosely clasping a bag in his right hand. It’s dark; all five lampposts in the streets are without bulbs. The bright light shining in the eyes of the people sleeping outside bothered them, so they unscrewed the bulbs. At the end of the bylane was (until just a few months ago) a working light, but Gurpreet and Somu from bylane three broke it because they were running around with Deepti and Shalini from E-7/2 of bylane seven, and liked it dark when they brought the girls back late at night on the back of their Hero Honda motorbikes. Deepti and Shalini were C-list models; aside from appearing in cheap ads for underwear and hair removal products, they were also available at nights in five-star hotels, or for private parties. An older lady of the night lived in house E-6/3. Her husband had been run over by a bus in front of the Liberty Cinema three years before. Since then, she has been supporting her three kids and elderly mother-in-law with the help of the kind-hearted men who visit her after hours. She has full sympathy from the residents of bylane seven, and even if the bulb at the far end hadn’t been removed, no one would have batted an eye.