The Girl with the Golden Parasol (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Prakash, Uday

  Rahul was taking a walk when a cold, pointy thing jabbed him in the neck. He turned around. Anjali was standing there, laughing, holding the closed parasol, the tip pointed at him—en garde!—trying to frighten him.

  Back in the library, looking at books in the narrow space between the shelves, someone’s shoulder gave him a little shove. It was Anjali’s.

  Rahul was on his way to the canteen with Shailendra George and Shaligaram. Anjali was coming the other way with Chandra, Shuba Mishra, and Sharmishtha. The infamous gang of no-good locals stood just a few feet away, on the side of the road. With them was Lakkhu, the one who’d thrown a rock that day first at Rahul and then at Abha. “Your mother!” Rahul was afraid one of them might start something again. “O hero! If we get ahold of you, we’ll turn you from Rahul Rai into Anupam Kher, not a blade of hair left on your head!” Anjali had peeled off from her group and was coming in toward Rahul, eyes on him. The same smiling eyes transformed into two tiny shining fish, at once swimming in his bloodstream.

  As the two groups crossed paths, Anjali suddenly tripped and stumbled to the side. It seemed the heel of her sandal had caught a rock and she’d slipped, but her stumble was quite fake and deliberate; in the middle of it she managed a quick pinch of Rahul’s back, holding it for a moment. An “ouch!” came from Rahul’s mouth. In his ear he heard the word “bee.”

  A clever bird had played her own little trick before the cunning eyes of a gang of hunting hawks. She returned to her own group, now laughing at something else.

  Oh! You are so brilliant. This is why I love you. I’m just a dumb donkey, but you, madam, one day you can hop on my back and I’ll carry you to the moon. I promise! Have you ever heard a donkey sing?

  My heart cries out

  From choppy seas

  Hear me, love!

  Hear me, please!

  If Hemant Barua, Kartikeya, or O.P. had been there, they would’ve guessed immediately that “something” had happened. But Rahul was with his two first-year Hindi MA friends. Shaligaram said, “Rahul-ji, you’ve really got a lovely voice, and you sing so well.”

  “Oh! Please, it was nothing, it just came out,” Rahul said, blushing.

  Anjali was on the lookout these days for any excuse to touch Rahul. And Rahul was taking part in the same plot.

  Anjali was coming out of class to go to lunch with the other girls. Rahul stealthily managed to squeeze her pinkie. The first time in the library he gave her ponytail a little tug, the second time he pinched her ear, the third time he lightly placed his hand on her waist, and the fourth time, for a few seconds, her took her hand in his.

  This was a new language, which Rahul and Anjali were being exposed to for the first time. Sentences in this language were different, its syntax unique. Each day they slowly learned something new about its particular grammar. The lessons were full of such wonder, eagerness, joy, and an impatience that took their breath away, that each one left them speechless, drained, numb. The experience cloaked their sense of self with a kind of sorcery that made them feel as if in all of creation, they two were alone.

  There were words in this language that weren’t articulated with sound. They had no need for an alphabet, or even letters to write. This was the kind of language that functioned by electricity and magnetic waves. Electromagnetic current. It was possible to express anything in this language merely by touching one another. And when they did their bodies became paralyzed, caught in a whirlwind, a whitewater of enchanted energy, like blades of grass blown in the wind, helpless.

  That day in the library, for example, in the tiny, narrow space between the bookshelves, surrounded by dank and dusty smells, Rahul took Anjali’s hand in his, which sparked a turbulent electromagnetic storm inside his body and radiated such an eruption of feeling, that, without a word being spoken, Rahul could see how it heated Anjali’s fair-colored face to a hot dirty copper. Her eyes seemed filled with submissiveness, and it seemed she might faint onto the floor. He himself felt that the blood in his veins had abandoned its molten form and changed to vapor or raw energy, and Anjali’s hand in an instant drank him up. His knees were shaking. He’d become void of power, quivering like a weak plant in a violent storm.

  Could there really be something to “Reiki,” which Rahul had never believed in? The Japanese therapy of touch, which is said to have to have been brought to Japan from India centuries ago by Buddhist monks. He who loves becomes a Buddhist monk. And whoever he touches is cured of all that ails. Someday I’ll heal you and someday you too can heal me—if you please! Because you too are a Buddhist she-monk. Right?

  How strange was that moment, when in less than thirty seconds a butterfly, through a singular act of magic, assumed the form of a parasol, and now the butterfly, casting a spell over the whole world, had brought Rahul’s sense of his own existence under its wing.

  And during that time, the greedy, potbellied, gluttonous, rich, lustful, corrupt, depraved, fat man was present still, armed with his marketplace and his power. And even those awful “critters” had smeared blood on every tract of reality with their violence, plunder, immorality, and transgression.

  The worrying thing was that a frighteningly large number of “critters” were also present within another language, the language that Rahul, after dropping anthropology, had hitched his star to, and, what’s more, a language they’ve seized control of. Namely, Hindi.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The night of September the twelfth. Ten thirteen and twenty-three seconds.

  Kartikeya Kajle’s voice echoed over the speakers in the rooms in the four boys’ hostels where the core committee members of the SMTF lived. “Hello! Hello! Get ready. Quick. The jeep’s in the gate of C. V. Raman Hostel. Get hold of everything you have! Okay—wait for the next call. Okay. Over and out.”

  As fast as they could, Niketan, Praveen, Masood, Madhusudan, Kannan, O.P., Ravi, Dinesh, Imroz, Parvez, Hemant Barua, Dinamani, Ramesh Ataluri, Gulab Kesavani, and the rest of the twenty-five boys from the four hostels armed themselves with hockey sticks, iron rods, knives, dandas, Rampuri knives, switchblades, chains, and homemade pistols. Other students ran back and forth as fast as they could from one end of the hostel to the other to spread the information to the other students. Some scaled to the roof of C. V. Raman Hostel carrying Molotov cocktails, bricks, stones, and hand grenades. The goondas’ jeep was idling below.

  D. Gopal Rajulu: Room 112. Naukant Jha: Room 148. These two students, from Andhra Pradesh and Bihar, living in C. V. Raman Hostel, were on the top of the hit list. Rajulu had received a money order for 20,000 rupees and Naukant Jha one for 8,500.

  The bald, shrewd, decrepit postman, growing old, had spied again, greedy for commission. But the difference this time was the students had intercepted his information and were ready before the criminals could make their move.

  Twenty minutes later, the SMTF swung into action.

  Bang, bang, bang!

  The door of Room 112 was kicked in and a group of boys barged into Rajulu’s room like a whirlwind. At that very instant, the main circuit breaker was thrown and all four hostels were plunged into darkness.

  Biff! Bam! Whiz!

  In the dark, billy clubs, rods, and hockey sticks went into motion. A sudden crashing sound from somewhere. Someone fired a pistol. Glass was breaking.

  Lacchu Guru, the notorious town goonda with a police record a mile long, lay writhing on the ground of Room 112 with his four underlings, covered in blood. He had been relieved of his pistol. He’d sustained fifty blows in under a minute.

  The five goondas were in a state of shock. They were being dragged into the hallway.

  “Be careful. We don’t want them to die. Take them downstairs . . .” Rahul was issuing instructions. His beefed-up arms were pulsating. The six-foot-three skinny skeleton O.P., center forward on the field, was using his hockey stick to score a few more goals on Lacchu Guru’s skull. Pratap and Kartikeya looked dead serious.

  Eighteen-year-old first-year Niketan, who
hardly had a trace of facial hair, had transformed into Bruce Lee and was in the middle of the goondas lashing them with his belt like a whip.

  The main circuit breaker was switched back on. A simultaneous chorus ushered from all four hostels. “Ho! Ho! Hurray! The electricity’s back!”

  It had been a first-rate success. In their eagerness, some of the students wanted to torch the goondas’ jeep, and had even poured gasoline on it. It came so close they were ready to toss a Molotov cocktail down from the roof, or light a match. But Pratap and Masood talked them out of it. Nevertheless, this didn’t mean that the goondas would be able to make a getaway in their jeep; to make sure they didn’t, the air had been let out of all four tires.

  The goondas were marched down the steps down to the field in front of Raman Hostel. More than three hundred students had materialized in a flash. Their faces beamed with the pride of the victorious and delight in their success.

  “Hip, hip, hooray!”

  Hip hip hip hip.

  “Down with goondas!”

  “No more goondas!”

  Ajay Devgan took a giant leap from somewhere in the crowd and landed both his boots on the goondas’ backs, just like Bruce Lee, shouting “ho, shu, shu,” showing off his karate-judo moves, whipping his belt around in the air. He removed his shirt with the bloodthirsty look of Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator and, grabbing the bewildered goondas by the scruff of their necks, hoisted them in the air, just as a massive monkey arrived on the scene and used his bare fist to rain blow after blow on the goondas’ ugly mugs. The chant of victory echoed from the crowd—“Victory to Hanuman!”

  Rahul, as Pierce Brosnan of James Bond fame, pretended to help Lacchu Ustad to his feet while simultaneously kicking his legs out from under him, then laughed deeply.

  And in the middle of the chaos emerged Johnny Lever and Jim Carrey from Mask, as the two clowning jokers flashed their teeth and began leaping around in song—

  Shall I kill you, or let you go—speak . . .

  and

  I am the Don, I am the Don . . .

  The six-foot-three ostrich became the superstar Amitabh Bachan, dancing away, kicking his sticklike legs into the air.

  “Ab tera kya hoga re, Kaliyaa? Looks like the end of the line!” Gabbar Singh and Sambha said to the cowering, blood-soaked goondas.

  Someone placed his hand on Rahul’s shoulder. It was Dinamani. He’d come from Manipur to do a postgraduate degree in geology. “He’s the one! Now I can make it out. He’s the one who beat Sapam. I recognize him. It’s 100 percent confirmed, I tell you!”

  O.P. and Kartikeya had to restrain Rahul. He resisted like a wounded leopard, trying to break free. “I’ll kill him!”

  “Control! Control yourself, Rahul! Rahul!” Kartikeya screamed.

  The goondas were loaded into the back of the jeep. Students took up every inch of remaining space, from the hood in front to the spare tire in the back. The jeep, with no air in its tires, set off very slowly toward the residence of Vice-Chancellor Ashok Kumar Agnihotri, trailed by the throng of students.

  Rahul noticed that amid the crowd of hooting and hollering students following the jeep were Sapam and his brother, walking silently. Rahul’s eyes met Sapam’s for an instant, and he saw Sapam’s brother. Blood still flowed from his temple. It was the spot on his head where the police, thinking him a terrorist, had shot him dead while he was on his way to school to teach.

  “Every civilization absolutely needs to have a big collective dream, a utopian ideal, one without self-interest. History has shown us that there hasn’t been any civilization without some sort of craze or madness,” Kinnu Da had once said.

  “Have you read Michel Foucault? The fear and avarice in the West toward lepers and nonwhite indigenous peoples in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was nothing more than a craze, a frenzy, a collective neurotic disorder. The notion that ideas, religions, philosophies, and political theories are great ones, or worthless ones, depends on the kind of utopia or frenzy or dream they manage to create in the minds of the individuals of that civilization, and to what extent they contain a minimal degree of violence, hatred, fear, and destruction. Buddha and Gandhi were so remarkable because there was no place in their dreams for violence or hatred. Meanwhile, most of the ‘constructs’ that have issued forth from the West have not been fully devoid of violence or hatred.”

  Kinnu Da’s voice echoed in Rahul’s ears. “Rahul, the West has beaten Gandhi for good. My fear is that soon we’ll have a bloodbath and everything will be broken up into tiny pieces.”

  Rahul looked at Sapam and his brother. Then he saw the great master, Chaitanya, mortally wounded, standing beneath the neem tree along with his broken drum and cymbals. Then he saw that a map of the country he loved with all his heart was breaking into tiny pieces, scattering, and disappearing into a black hole.

  “I’m not opposed to the market. But the market is no ‘collective dream,’ no utopia. No dream can be seen in the marketplace. There is nothing in it that is great, moral, or lofty. All its ingredients—gains, losses, profit, cash—are tiny and base. The market is operated by the science of exploitation, greed, gambling, thuggery, and self-interest.” Kinnu Da’s voice was grave and sad. “Can’t you see with your own eyes that wherever a market comes to a country, the place is torn to bits and handed over to violence and bloodshed.”

  The great countries and united republics—those that had been eaten away by market forces—flashed before Rahul’s eyes: Kosovo, Serbia, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union.

  America and some rich European countries had become countries of commerce, and then transformed third world societies into their wholesale markets, turning them on their heads, bringing destruction and violence, flooding them with their brokers. The limbs were dismembered and organs ripped from one society after another, from one once-sovereign country to another, and then brought into conflict. Scattered, wasted, spoiled.

  It’s interesting that television and newspapers only report the daily ups and downs of the stock market index, but not the nonstop destruction, disintegration, violence, and conflict happening everywhere, from all sides, twenty-four hours a day.

  Now is it our turn? Who is the agent representing this market? Who is the real enemy of the country? Is it the offspring of the demon Ravana, cast across the ocean by Pulastya? Have they returned, the English having, in fact, handed over power to them?

  Rahul, O.P., Kartikeya, Parvez, Imroz, and Hemant were standing together on the back of the jeep. Their hands were clasped together and they sang:

  Let the time come, O heavens, and we’ll tell

  But for now in our hearts—what can we say?

  Sacrifice, sacrifice—the longing for sacrifice

  Vice-Chancellor Ashok Kumar Agnihotri, after a long period of slogan chanting by the students, finally emerged from his residence. He’d called the police. Soon they arrived and took away Lacchu Guru and his four wounded associates.

  He promised that the university would beef up security in the student hostels. The students shouldn’t take the law into their own hands. He had information that weapons had been stockpiled in some students’ rooms. This was illegal. He’d used his influence to dissuade the superintendent of police, who otherwise would have already raided and searched several rooms in the hostel.

  The VC added he’d also received information about the indecent conduct of a few students. Students should focus their entire concentration on building their futures. If you asked him, he was against the type of higher education that was unrelated to the question of job salary or earning potential. We are living through such wonderful times, with endless career opportunities. Short-term courses were now offered. Why waste your time with dead-end pursuits? Take a diploma and fly to America, the vice-chancellor advised with a laugh.

  “Sir, the criminals that were just now apprehended were exactly those ones who beat Sapam Tomba within an inch of his life . . .”

  “They tried to sodomize him . .
. and they made him urinate on the heater and it was the shock from that which . . .”

  Rahul and Dinamani tried to interrupt the VC. “Sir, the Sapam Tomba who committed suicide!”

  “Oh!” Ashok Agnihotri exclaimed, his tone turning serious. “I will look into it. What a tragedy. I have a lot of sympathy for his father. Poor chap . . . I called the governor and chief secretary of Manipur. They had his father informed. You know, that’s why the fashion show and cultural program of September 10 was postponed. Because of it, the university took an 800,000-rupee loss. We’ve talked with the sponsors. It would have been an excellent source of revenue. I had made such grand plans. I realized we need to generate extra funds on our own. What does the UGC give us? Everything goes to staff salaries. I want to develop a park here. I want to computerize the entire administration. I want to provide twenty-four-hour net-surfing access in all student hostels, for a nominal and reasonable fee.”

  “Your security officers are mixed up with the local goondas and criminals, sir!”

  “And the postman tells all of them which students are getting how much money sent . . .”

  “The hostel warden is bungling the job terribly, sir!”

  “There’s rampant cheating in the admission process, sir!”

  “The dining hall food’s not even fit for a dog, sir!”

  “There’s no doctor and no medicine in the dispensary . . .”

  “The Hindi department’s a den of Brahmanists, sir.”

  “Teachers don’t teach classes and are always on strike. It’s a big loss for students, sir!”

  Everyone watched as the smile from Agnihotri’s face suddenly disappeared, replaced by anger and annoyance. He marched back inside his bungalow with his four security guards.

  Back in the Max Cyber Cafe, information about Vice-Chancellor Ashok Agnihotri was fed into the de facto file and came out like this: