by Uday Prakash
Suri also lumbered over to the edge, with his heavy, misshapen head.
Pickle-pee! Pickle-pee! Pickle-pee! The street hawker played his little plastic flute below. A lengthy bamboo stick was tied vertically to the handlebars of his bike; fastened to the stick was a cardboard sheet at least four-feet- by-four-feet. All sorts of fabulous items hung from it: balloons, toys, assorted colours of plastic combs, lighters, scissors, berets, drawstrings for skirts, ribbons of rainbow colours, hair bands, hair brushes, little mirrors, bangles, and all sorts of other merchandise.
But at the very top of the board sat a row of Chinese cap guns. You could get them in any bazaar those days for fifteen rupees, and they were unbelievably popular with the kids of Delhi. Chinese goods were threatening to flood the marketplace – wondrous electronics at startlingly low prices. The Chinese cap gun shot little plastic coloured bullets, and as soon as you pulled the trigger, rat-a-tat, ping! ping! Utterly realistic. And if you aimed right, the plastic bullet would hit the target spot on.
‘I want a Chinese cap gun so I can kill the bad guy!’ Amar pleaded.
Shobha had earlier said no. But, number one, just yesterday, she received 2,200 rupees from the Kalpana Boutique Garments Centre, part in advance, the rest on receipt. And, number two, Bimla Sahu and her yelling and screaming had put her and the kids in a really foul mood, and she thought the kids might feel better if they got to play around. Therefore, she decided to purchase a cap gun. She went up to the railing, leaned over, and shouted to the hawker. ‘Hey mister! Don’t move, I’m coming right down.’
Shobha was just about to go down the stairs when she heard Suri’s cold, hard, machine-like voice.
‘Mummy, I want a cap gun, too. My own.’
Shobha turned around to find Suri pressed against the railing, standing and looking at her with the big head held up by his shoulders.
‘Are you just a little kid who likes to play guns?’ she said with a sweet smile.
She reached their flat (C-7/3) on the third floor, unlocked it, went in, took money from the pouch inside the cabinet drawer, and took the stairs down to the ground floor.
When she got there, she bought the Chinese pistol from the hawker for fifteen rupees. She tried and tried to bargain, but he wouldn’t even drop the price one rupee. Shobha thought, they’re not going to drop the price of these things that are selling like hotcakes. She took the gun, went up the stairs, and, when she got to their flat, found Amar who had come down from the roof. You could see on his face how happy and excited he was. He grabbed the cap gun at once and rushed back upstairs. Shobha shouted after him.
‘Be sure to let your brother play with it, too! Don’t play on your own.’
‘It’s mine, mine!’ Amar shot back while running.
Shobha went into the kitchen. The pressure cooker with the channa dhal sat atop the gas burner. They purchased a gas burner after moving to Ambedkar Nagar from Jahangirpuri, retiring the old coal stove, though there were still plenty of families in the Janta Flats who still cooked with coal or kerosene.
Today for lunch she was planning to serve the channa dhal and ghiya dish that she, Suri, Amar, and Chandu all really liked. She learned the recipe in Jahangirpuri from Natho Chaudhuri, who had left her alcoholic husband in Bijnor and run away with her lover to Delhi. She called the dish ‘luckdala.’ Maybe she got ‘luck’ from the vegetable ‘loki’ and ‘dala’ from ‘dhal,’ and combined the two to come up with this cute name. She thought she would wait until the pressure cooker had let off all its steam so she could go back to her sewing on the roof without worrying. There were still ten or so minutes before noon. She turned the gas up on the burner.
One minute later the cooker gave off its first steam whistle – a long, throaty blast. There was probably still plenty of steam bottled up inside. The strong burst of vapor carried spicy, delicious smells throughout the kitchen, smells that made Shobha’s mouth water. But still five more whistles to go.
Just as the second whistle was about to blow, she heard a loud commotion outside. Women and children, screaming and shrieking, the sounds of people running downstairs.
Shobha froze. Something terrible had happened. She first thought of Amar and was seized by fear.
She turned off the burner and started fast for the roof. She thought about what Suri said just after she called after the hawker, Mummy, I want a cap gun, too. My own, in that cold, hard, machine-like voice, eyes red, head trembling, that look of wildness on his face, just like when he took Amar’s tiffin box to eat in the park, and got in a fight with Amar, and if she hadn’t broken it up Suri would have strangled his little brother.
And now if Suri had pushed Amar off the roof?
‘Amar! Amar!’ she shouted, arriving on the roof in bad shape.
Amar clung to the railing as if he were made of stone, sobbing quietly, holding the Chinese cap gun in one hand.
The women still on the roof leaned over the railing and stared down.
Shobha looked. There was a crowd of people gathered around the spot where just moments earlier the hawker had stood with his bike. More people came running from adjacent apartment buildings.
Bimla Sahu, the one who everyone called ‘toughie’ or ‘the wrestler’ since she was big and strong and always picking fights came up behind Shobha, put her hand on her shoulder, and she was in tears.
‘He went up to the railing himself and just jumped. It happened so quickly.’
Her face was covered in tears and she was choking on her sobs. ‘Your eldest committed suicide! You and I said one little thing, and look how he took it to heart.’
***
The women said Amar came back to the roof with his cap gun, and as soon as he fired the first shot, Suri began to have trouble breathing. He grabbed his head with his hands, and tottered over to the edge.
And from there he jumped quietly.
***
On Nigambodh ghat, Chandrakant set fire to his son Suri’s body. After the flames rose and began engulfing the body, I turned away.
An old fakir was sitting a little distance behind us, wrapped up tight under a dirty, old, torn, bed sheet. It had been a cold December, and all of North India was under a cold snap that had already killed a handful of poor people. The old fakir was shivering.
It was the same old fakir Chandrakant and I had met years earlier in the Hazarat Nizammuddin dargah near the shrine to the first Hindi poet, Amir Khusrau, a fakir whose eyes were red like an ant’s, whom the almighty did not bless with the ability to sleep, who carried thirty times its own weight its whole life.
He noticed me staring at him and got up to leave. I saw that his head was proportionally much larger than his body – something he was always trying to hide with that torn old bedsheet.
FINALLY AN ASSESSMENT BY THE WHO; A PAGE FROM SURYAKANT’S DIARY; THE PENTAGON
Suri – Suryakant – was born sometime in September, 1995, and died on 25 December, 2004, at 12:04. He was born in a private hospital called Kalpana Health Centre between Model Town and Adarsh Nagar, but determining the exact date is no easy task, because a restaurant, day spa, and massage parlour now stand where the hospital used to be. Nobody has any idea what happened to Kalpana Health Centre. People had of course heard of the big scandal and police raid a couple years ago that had made the TV news after the kidney of an indigent man had been removed and sold.
I couldn’t be sure whether nine months before his birth in that hospital when Suryakant came into his mother’s womb was the time of the magic carpet, the one Chandrakant and Shobha had brought with them to the half flat of house number E-3/1, bylane number seven, Jahangirpuri, Delhi, after fleeing Sarini, and had put on the floor, and played the game they played for years to put out the fire; or whether it was true that one night he crawled like a turtle out of the dirty drainage sewer and silently entered his mother’s womb that way. And the disease that made his head grow and grow, day by day, the disease the doctors said would give him a life span of two years max, the dise
ase that had no trace in any of the medical literature, the disease Chandrakant and Shobha called ‘Mangosil’ but it was really only Suri who knew about the virus that caused it – it wasn’t the disease that caused his death.
He himself chose when to end his life.
***
Suri’s notebook lies open in front me at page fifty-six. He had copied down some lines of a poem in his beautiful handwriting:
You are still alive, you are not alone yet –
She is still beside you, with her empty hands,
And joy reaches you both across immense places,
Through mists and hunger and flying snow,
Miserable is the man who runs from a dog in his darkness...
And pitiful is the one who holds out his rag of life
To beg mercy of the darkness.
I did the translation in a rush because in front of me are this year’s findings from a World Health Organization report. It contains alarming statistics about millions of children in the developing countries who will fall victim to deadly diseases because of malnutrition, poverty, and squalor.
The report also included startling information about children who have been falling victim to an illness for the past several years that causes the head to grow significantly faster than the rest of the body, causing unnatural behavior. According to doctors, the virus or causes of the disease have yet to be identified, but children who suffer from this disease usually only live to two. According to the WHO, this disease, like AIDS, is spreading rapidly.
But the strangest part of the report came from the Pentagon. A total of sixty seven countries including Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Bangladesh, Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Palestine, Kosovo, Sri Lanka, Namibia, Nicaragua, and Brazil were home to children who had been born with heads that so quickly got bigger.
And they were even being born in wealthy, developed countries like the US, France, and the UK.
The brains of these children knew everything. They weren’t innocent and wide-eyed like most kids.
The brains of these children were several times bigger than normal for their biological age. And several centuries of living memories were present inside these brains – you could call it a mini flash drive with all history up to the present day. Their DNA was eerily alike.
The Pentagon urged all governments of all countries to keep a close eye on these big-headed kids.
This is how they can be identified:
‘They are in squalor to poor families. Their eyes are red like the eyes of ants. They more or less never sleep. And it is possible they know everything.’
TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD
Life was getting better for Uday Prakash when I first met him face-to-face in August, 2005. His ‘Mohandas’ had just been published by the leading Hindi literary magazine Hans, and it was clear that the novella, to steal a phrase from Bollywood, was a superhit. The mobile numbers and postal addresses of Hindi writers are a standard part of back-flap bios in India, just in case readers would like to call and compliment the author on a job well done. And so in the car on the way back from New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport to his home in nearby Ghaziabad, Prakash received call after call and SMS after SMS from happy fans who wanted to tell him how much they’d enjoyed reading the story. He continually pulled the car over to receive felicitations from a local colleague, or a stranger from elsewhere. Things were changing quickly in India, as Prakash often points out in his stories – and one advantage of mass mobile-phone ownership, if nothing else, has been that lonely poets and writers are able to receive at least a little boost now and again from their readers.
When he and I had first emailed a couple of years earlier about my translating his novel The Girl with the Golden Parasol (Penguin India, 2008), I had little idea about the ‘dark days,’ as Prakash puts it, he was passing through – a period in his life he alludes to at least once in all three stories of this volume. Prakash has always been a popular writer with a huge base of readers: before mobiles, and even in 2005, he received stacks of one-rupee postcards every day from admirers spread across the most forgotten corners of India. (After the publication of ‘Mohandas,’ many postcards simply read, ‘I am Mohandas.’)
Despite his huge, grass-roots fan base, Prakash has always had an uneasy relationship with the Hindi establishment, or any other (in a phrase he likes to use) ‘power centre.’ For most of his professional life, he has worked as a freelance writer, journalist, poet, critic, film maker and producer: anything to provide for his family, at the mercy of the kindness of assignments, rarely able to enjoy the stability that an academic job or government post would have provided. Accused of stirring up caste unrest, called a ‘rabid dog,’ Prakash sustained many attacks from both left and right after the publication of The Girl with the Golden Parasol in 2001 (the novel tells the story of a non-Brahmin boy who falls in love with a Brahmin girl). The plug was pulled overnight on nearly all his freelance jobs. The dark days had begun – and only began to lift years later after the publication of ‘Mohandas’ and the winning of a PEN American Center Translation Fund Award for The Girl with the Golden Parasol in translation.
Uday Prakash was born on New Year’s Day, 1951, in Sitapur, a village on the Son river in the state of Madhya Pradesh. Hindi is his second language: he grew up speaking Chhattisgarhi, a regional language of north India now with its own state, Chhattisgarh. His family were thakurs, or landlords of the village, in a system that was, and is, quite feudal. I have seen Prakash regale a wide-eyed five-year-old in San Francisco with the true tale of the pet elephant he called his companion as a child – and how the elephant used to assist in bathing the young writer with its trunk. Prakash’s own childhood is filled with astonishingly detailed memories of close friends from the village, and the surrounding forest he used to explore – much of which has been decimated after years of deforestation, development, and the forcing off the land of indigenous inhabitants.
Prakash’s mother, Ganga Devi, had come from a Bhojpuri-speaking area near Mirzapur, and had brought with her not only many Bhojpuri songs she often sang at home, but also a facility and abiding love for traditional drawings and illustrations from her region. She painted on the walls and sketched in a notebook she’d kept since she was a teenager. She was skillful, and her art made a deep impression on Prakash, the youngest of her four children, to whom she was very close. After suffering from tracheal cancer, she died two days before Prakash’s thirteenth birthday.
Prakash’s father was an avid reader, had a good education for the time, subscribed to many Hindi magazines, and wrote poetry – all of which spurred Prakash’s own reading and writing habits. After the death of Prakash’s mother, his father began drinking heavily, and it soon became difficult for Prakash to stay at home. Prakash was taken in by a teacher at a nearby town, Shahdol, sixty kilometres away: a tiny hamlet by Indian standards, but as big and strange as a foreign country to Prakash. In an age with bad roads and few bridges, it was quite far from home. He considers the teacher who looked after him a second father, and credits him for helping to guide his studies.
Prakash’s father later developed carcinomas on his cheek and mouth, and Prakash travelled and stayed with him in the city of Indore as he underwent treatment. Before slipping into a coma, his father wrote a letter to a relative, kept by Prakash’s youngest sister, about his fears of what would happen to Prakash. His father was worried that his son lacked sensibility in the ways of the world, and would face terrible problems in the future.
When Prakash’s father died in September 1969, he left to study at the university in Sagar, Madhya Pradesh, and later, in 1975, just after the Emergency period began, moved to New Delhi where he soon began teaching comparative literature and Hindi at Jawaharlal Nehru University. For the next thirty years, he rarely travelled back home. Only recently has Prakash begun returning to Sitapur for longer periods in order spend time with his relatives and childhood friends.
‘The Walls of Delhi’ and ‘Mangosil’
– the two ‘city stories’ in this collection – are clearly the work of a writer who has trod extensively through the bylanes of India’s sprawling capital. Still, Prakash shines greatly in his village stories. His poem Tibet, which earned him a prestigious poetry prize at a young age, was inspired by the chanting of Tibetan monks resettled near his village after fleeing the Chinese invasion. ‘Heeralal’s Ghost,’ expertly translated by Robert Hueckstedt, is a fable of a low-caste servant of the village landowner who dies from overwork, then returns as a ghost to terrorise his former employer’s family in episodes both hysterical and tragic. And here, in ‘Mohandas,’ Prakash provides a harrowing portrayal of the caste dynamics and corruption that are still a powerful force in India.
After Prakash picked me up from the airport on that sticky monsoon night in 2005, we spent a week in New Delhi discussing the translation of The Girl with the Golden Parasol. We also spent half a day with his longtime Hindi publisher drinking some twenty cups of tea while in tense negotiations over a decade’s worth of unpaid book royalties. Prakash and I then packed up the car for the three-day trip to Sitapur. From there, we had been invited to the inauguration of a museum in the capital of Chhattisgarh, Rajnandgaon, to be dedicated in part to one of the most important twentieth-century Hindi poets, Muktibodh – a favourite of Prakash’s, and a fellow struggler. At first, Prakash was reluctant to accept the invitation, since the museum and ceremony and publicity all fell under the auspices of the right-wing BJP state government of Chhattisgarh; the Chief Minister of the state – by coincidence, a distant relation of Prakash’s – would be cutting the ribbon. In the end, Prakash decided that it was more important to support recognition of Muktibodh, a man marginalised in his own time, than to keep away from politics he disagreed with.