The Temple-goers

by Aatish Taseer

When I next opened my eyes, two flight attendants were walking past. They spoke in the dawn whispers that precede waking up the cabin for landing. Through a half-oval window, past dark sleeping figures, a thin fire burned precisely along the edge of a colourless sky. One of the attendants was a young woman with brown lipstick and hair held firmly in place by a wide clip. Her colleague was a tall man with darkening circles round his soft, attentive eyes. They were courteous, ambitious and bilingual. How different they were from the Indian Airlines ogres of my childhood. Those women with their boiled sweets and matronly tread, the stench of stove and state woven into their clothes, weary at serving men other than their husbands… were they the mothers of these bright, beautiful children?

  Peering out of the white light at the two attendants, I attracted their attention.

  ‘Sir, may I serve you with anything?’ the man with dark, soft eyes asked.

  The woman attendant smiled benignly, like a politician’s wife.

  The cabin lights came on.

  ‘Lime water, please.’

  ‘Sir, right away.’

  The attendants went off.

  I was flicking through the last of the channels when, a few seats down from me, I noticed a large woman with black, dimpled arms transfixed by what she saw on her screen. Thin clouds raced across the video display, then a patchwork of fields in changing shades of green appeared, dotted with cement roofs, swimming pools and corrugated-iron sheds. Pale quarries with green water and coppery edges came into view. The wandering eye of the camera caught slum roofs, a blue and pink polythene waste dump and brownish, algal rivers choked with hyacinth. A red earth road ran like a vein through the land. The widening bulge of train tracks, the yellow and black of taxis and, at last, the striped walls of Delhi airport.

  The camera pulled the land closer and I saw what I loved most about Delhi: its trees. They managed a surprising unity, declaring themselves the first line to touch the city’s white sky. Not so white today. As the land came close, I could see a dust storm rage, blurring the camera’s vision. It stole through the trees like a spirit, ready to pounce on the city below.

  Delhi vanished, the camera swung down and the runway’s bumpy, oil-stained surface came into view. The large dark woman, watching peacefully until now, let out a cry.

  At home, in my mother’s study, Chamunda sat behind a silver tea set in a green chiffon sari. When she saw me, she extended a sharp, jewelled hand and clutched me to her breast; I tried to reach to touch her feet. ‘Welcome home, baba, welcome home,’ she said to the tune of may-you-have-a-long-life.

  Then pulling away as if overcome with emotion, she poured me a piped column of tea. In her other hand she held the silver strainer’s handle. One wrist had green bangles on it, the other a Cartier watch and two inches of red religious threads, tight and damp from a shower.

  ‘You’re wearing so many,’ I said, amazed at the thickness of the red threads.

  She glanced at them as she finished pouring the tea. ‘Politics, baba, all from politics.’

  ‘Oh, of course. Congratulations. How long has it been now?’

  ‘Nearly four years. Elections next year, baba. I want you to come and help me. Your mother will come too. It’ll be hectic, but we’ll have some fun. They’re early in the year, so the weather will be lovely.’

  Chamunda was my mother’s best friend, and my girlfriend Sanyogita’s aunt. She had been married into a small princely state, but her husband had deserted her just months after their marriage. She had joined politics as a young bride, defeated her husband in his own constituency and risen steadily. She was a member of the legislative assembly in the 1980s, an MP in the 1990s, a junior minister in 2000. Then four years ago, she had gone back to the state as its chief ministerial candidate and won. It had made her the Chief Minister of Jhaatkebaal, a small breakaway state on the border of Delhi, important for its twin satellite cities, Sectorpur and Phasenagar. I had no idea what she was doing in my mother’s flat.

  ‘Chamunda massi, Ma is in Bombay, right?’

  ‘Yes, in Bombay. She asked me to be here to welcome you home.’

  This was doubtful. Chamunda was busy and selfish; I couldn’t imagine her welcoming Sanyogita home, let alone me. And besides, I’d spoken to my mother on the way into town and she’d said nothing about Chamunda. I noticed that the edges of her hair were wet.

  ‘Can you imagine,’ she said, handing me a cup of tea, ‘me in politics? Who would’ve thought it?’

  ‘Is it difficult, being a woman and everything?’

  ‘Yes, very,’ she replied, pleased to be asked. ‘But there are advantages.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘I like to take advantage of, exploit one might even say’ – she smiled, showing little teeth and mischief – ‘the very things that make it difficult to be a woman in politics. So for instance, I always dress the part. I always wear beautiful saris, never any ethnic crap. I always wear make-up and jewellery. I make a point to look like the Maharani of Ayatlochanapur. And if I’m talking to some bureaucrats or opposition leaders, or even treacherous elements in my own party, and my pallu accidentally falls…’ She pushed the green chiffon end of her sari off her shoulder to demonstrate what she meant. Her cleavage showed soft and brown, dimpled in places. ‘Then I may let it stay fallen for a few moments till I’ve finished my point and sweep it up when I’m done.’ In one motion, she swung it back over her shoulder and the breasts were once again half-concealed behind a papery chiffon screen. ‘And inevitably the response in these cases to what I’ve been saying is…’ She paused, altering her accent to a strong Indian one and moving her head from side to side. ‘ “Yes, yes, madam,” or an emphatic “No, no, madam, of course not.” ’ Chamunda chuckled wickedly, her pert comic-book lips arched. ‘Or, I’ll lean forward and let the pallu drop, very slightly.’ She did; her breasts collected warmly, and though they remained hidden, the cleavage became long and dark. A gold chain with a Kali pendant dangled hypnotically in front of the tunnel.

  Then suddenly, she was in a rush.

  ‘Baba, I can’t stay long. You might have heard, I’m having a small rebellion in my state. Bloody Jats. I have to go back and deal with it.’

  ‘Jats?’

  ‘It’s a sub-caste. They want reservations in government jobs and schools. I tell you, the Congress Party has let a monster out of the bag with this reservations business. Women, dalits, scheduled castes, Muslims, now Jats… Soon the Brahmins and Kshattriyas will be saying, what about us? Then we can go ahead and carve up the country and no one will have to do a day’s work again.

  ‘I can’t lose the election even before you and Sanyogita have come to stay with me. But enough about politics, tell me about your book.’

  ‘No, nothing, massi. There’s just interest in a revised version. Now I have to actually fix it.’

  She smiled placidly.

  ‘And your relationship with Sanyogita, all good there?’

  ‘Yes, very good.’

  ‘She’s moved back too, you know.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Does she know what she wants to do?’

  ‘She wants to write too.’

  Chamunda looked serious. ‘It’s a racket, this writing business. You’re writing a book, my friend Jamuni is writing a book, now Sanyogita wants to write a book…’

  ‘What’s Jamuni writing about? She hasn’t written anything in years.’

  ‘I don’t really know. She wants to do a funny book, a rehash of her earlier book, but about Indian ostentation.’

  ‘And Sanyogita?’

  ‘She doesn’t know yet.’

  Chamunda bit at a cuticle.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘No, nothing. Nothing.’

  ‘Come on, Chamunda, tell me.’

  ‘It’s just that these girls, you know, these privileged girls, like I once was, I suppose, and like Sanyogita is – they feel that because these are modern times, the world owes them a job, a career. Your mother and I
, we never thought this way. If our husbands hadn’t both been such rotters, we would have been quite happy to settle down and produce a brood of children. We worked because we had to work. You want to learn something about women in India? Learn this: India is a country where women work right from the top to the bottom, but they work because they have to work. And it’s the best kind of work. Always be suspicious of these rich and middle-class girls who go off to college in the West and come back feeling that the world owes them a living just because they’re modern women. I say this about my niece too and I’m saying it because you’re a smart boy, you understand these things; I want you one day to marry her, but don’t put up with too much of this silliness.’

  ‘Come on, massi, she can’t stay home and make me lunch and dinner.’

  ‘Tch,’ she spat with irritation. ‘Is that what I’m saying? Do I look like a woman who would say something so stupid? No. All I’m saying is that you’re setting out to be a writer, you’ve worked hard at being a journalist, you’ve secured a book deal –’

  ‘An agent.’

  ‘Whatever. All I’m saying is I don’t like the sound of my darling niece Sanyogita, who is basically just following you back, also wanting to write.’

  There was a knock on the door. Shakti, my mother’s servant, came in with a cordless phone. She took it from him. ‘Yes, yes, Raunak Singh. Yes. Tell them I’ll be there very soon.’ She punched the lime-green button and looked absently at me, as if for a moment forgetting where she was.

  ‘Right, baba. I’m off. Come and see me soon with your mother, or with Sanyogita. Welcome back.’ With this she was gone, leaving a trail of tuberose perfume behind her.

  I wandered about my mother’s flat for under an hour. Its familiarity, its inevitability, far from comforting me, oppressed me, seeming to force our old association. It made my few foreign possessions – a red Old Spice deodorant stick, an electric toothbrush, a Lush soap – appear out of place, as though I’d brought unwelcome friends to dinner. ‘It is my mother. This flat is my mother,’ I said, almost aloud. ‘I’ll have to scrape her off the walls if I’m to live here.’ And so, just hours after I arrived, I escaped the flat for Sanyogita’s.

  2

  The hot months before summer were months of flowering trees in Delhi. The silk cotton, a stony, shadeless tree, was among the first to bloom. I passed one on the way to Sanyogita’s flat. Its fleshy coral flowers had appeared like women’s brooches on its thorn-covered branches. Though I could have gone through Lodhi Gardens, I chose instead to take Amrita Shergill Marg, a laburnum-lined crescent that ran along one boundary of the park, connecting my flat with Sanyogita’s.

  The storm I thought I had seen from the plane turned out to be only a wind. It tore through the city that morning. Many of the trees were losing their leaves even as new ones grew. The wind swept away their old leaves, littering the streets with an autumnal scene. Bees and ladybirds crawled through the debris. The leaves that remained, though new, were in some trees brown before they were green. So it seemed like spring and autumn had come together in one afternoon.

  The quiet on Amrita Shergill Marg was broken at even intervals by the tinkle of a cycle bell and the wail of a man in a lilac shirt collecting junk from house to house. At the end of Amrita Shergill Marg was a busy main road. Black and yellow taxis, now with green stripes across their flank that read CNG, rumbled past, their colours clashing with the black and yellow of the lane divider. Everything beyond was the post-independence Delhi of colonies; Jorbagh was among the first of these.

  I entered through a tall iron gate and walked past low white houses with clean simple lines and small lawns. On my right, there was a narrow lane under a dense arbour. The cool and shadows of that lane had transfixed me as a child. I used to come here with my mother in our green Suzuki. Halfway down it was Chocolate Wheel, where a jovial woman sold bread and fudge brownies. Ahead was the Jorbagh florist, still selling yellow gladioli. The pan shop. The Jorbagh colony market.

  Sanyogita’s flat was on one corner of a U-shaped garden with houses on three sides. Her building was white with a narrow plaster screen built into its façade. It ran down the building’s entire length and a pink bougainvillea hung like a hive from its floral hollows. Outside there was a single dark mango tree with long twisting leaves and greenish-yellow flowers. I saw Sanyogita on her balcony watering plants. She hadn’t grown up in Delhi; she was from Bombay. And to see her in so distinct a Delhi scene, I felt the special joy people feel for the migrant who masters their ways. Sanyogita, as if aware of her triumph, blushed when she realized that I was standing below.

  The white marble stairs were dim and dirty. A green stone skirting followed them up to Sanyogita’s flat; blue and red wires swelled out of an electricity box; the banister shuddered.

  Sanyogita had planned a surprise. I saw her, with her back against the door, as soon as I reached the top of the stairs. She wore tattered tracksuit bottoms and a faded T-shirt. Her wavy black hair was twined into a rope and pulled forward.

  ‘Baby,’ she breathed.

  She was large and shy and beautiful. That’s not to say she was fat, she wasn’t; but there was a prominence about her bones and joints, and a softness in her limbs and breasts. When she hugged you, you could feel her architecture. She had broken her thigh bone as a child, skiing in Kashmir. A man had crashed into her, leaving her crumpled in the snow. She had a scar from where they put pins into her leg. It was a great smooth-backed caterpillar crawling over her pelvic bone. Which itself was so prominent, and strong, that whenever I saw the scar I felt the force of the collision.

  The flat inside, almost as if the squalor of the staircase were a deliberate part of the aesthetic, was a sanctuary. Its high ceilings, its rooms overlooking a secluded balcony, its shade and screens of twisted matting hanging like wet tobacco in front of the windows, faintly scented and cool, were like a preparation for summer. Though much of the flat was still empty, an entire wall of white shelves had been filled with colourful paperbacks. Seagrass carpets and runners with dark blue borders had taken their places in the bare rooms and corridors. So even empty, the flat seemed ready to be lived in.

  Sanyogita led me by the hand down one of these shaded corridors. Past black metal grilles, I could see a small terrace with vine roses, potted frangipani and giant yellow and maroon dahlias. We came to a brightly polished double door with an old-fashioned bolt and a brass Godrej lock. Sanyogita took out a key she had kept pressed in her hand. It went loosely in and the lock fell open. We entered a long narrow room, the most furnished I had seen so far. It had a thin red rug, a black wood and cane chair and a maroon leather-topped desk with a green banker’s lamp on the far end. A window on one side overlooked the garden terrace. Sanyogita, standing on the balls of her feet, watched me take in the room.

  On a wall covered with bare white shelves, one shelf contained new books. There was a dictionary of Islam, something called Infidels by a Cambridge professor and bathroom books: Oscar Wilde’s epigrams, a Second World War American soldier’s pocket guide to France, Elements of Style. On the desk’s maroon surface, marching along its gold border, was a family of blue and white porcelain elephants. I picked one up.

  ‘Be careful, baby,’ Sanyogita squealed on his behalf. ‘He’s the smallest!’

  I sat down at the desk, slowly comprehending the surprise. Sanyogita watched with tense delight. At length I opened one of the desk’s drawers. The lamplight obliquely struck a neat pile of letterheads and envelopes. They were held in place by a paper band that read: ‘Alastair Lockhart. Fine writing papers, etc., Walton Street, London SW3’. And on the thick cream-coloured paper, under a faintly raised margin, it said Aatish Taseer in burnt red letters.

  ‘Baby, a present for your book,’ Sanyogita said, slipping her hand over my collarbone.

  The room was the surprise.

  She didn’t have one to spare; she had writing ambitions of her own; and though her flat was barely ready, she had made me a present of
a study. I was speechless; it was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me.

  Sanyogita’s face shone with my delight. She became organizational: ‘Vatsala could make you coffee. I’ve just bought her one of those Italian things.’

  ‘Who’s Vatsala?’ I asked, trying to recover myself.

  Sanyogita’s eyes brightened. ‘Vatsala, baby, the little goblin who brought me up?’ She stuck out her teeth and flared her eyes.

  Vatsala Bai! I did remember her: she was a devious little widow in white who had moved with Sanyogita to Delhi. Her family had been with Sanyogita’s for centuries. She was devoted to her and suspicious of me, always taking every opportunity to remind me of how old and grand Sanyogita’s family was. We stayed in the room a few minutes more, then Sanyogita locked it and pressed the brass key into my hand with a kiss.

  The flat, but for one small terrace and drawing room, had its back to the park. The bedroom was still bare, but for a low bed. Cane blinds shut the room off from the terrace and a modern steel light, with a salon drier head, drooped over the bed like a flower.

  Sanyogita sat on the white lace bedcover, her toes hanging off the edge. She was full of Delhi news. She told me of my old friends, her new friends, gay men she’d had lunch with, fashion parties and the agitation in Chamunda’s state. It was Holi in a few days; she broke the sad news to me that my mother’s sister was not having her party this year, as the metro had claimed her house. She’d organized instead for us to go to the Times of India party with Ra.

  ‘Ra?’

  ‘Ra. Rakesh. My friend the jewellery designer.’

  She wiggled her head. Two earrings dangled happily. They were long, with a line of glassy, rectangular diamonds set around a many-faced greyish stone in a paisley shape. There was a single, prominent ruby at the ear. The effect of that colour, like a sudden red light on a misty day, was startling.

  ‘He gave them to me as a present,’ she said. ‘You know, that way people see them around as well. He’s just getting started, but he’s good, I think.’