The Temple-goers

by Aatish Taseer

  ‘Yes, man.’

  ‘Are you still coming?’

  ‘Of course, man. Keep the beer ready. Who can tell how many life has to spare?’

  It was nearly dark now. I could hear a siren wail in the distance. The bell rang. I opened the door to see Aakash in a red turban. He wandered in past me with no explanation for the turban or beev’s absence. I followed him into the flat, where he flicked through the mail, picked a samosa off the tray Shakti brought in and drank half a glass of Cobra beer in one sip. Shakti looked adoringly at him, then shut the front door.

  ‘Where’s beev?’

  The bell rang. Aakash bowed deeply and extended a hand. ‘The beev at your service.’

  I opened the door; then I almost couldn’t look. In the light that fell from a single bulb, there stood a girl no taller than five feet in a red turban. She had one plump arm propped against the doorframe and was panting heavily. Beads of sweat glistened on her wet lips and pale face. She wore a baggy purple T-shirt which did nothing to conceal her vast breasts and stomach. The light, catching the grease on her face, shone dully on to the dark flesh that ringed her neck. Two diamond solitaires the size of boiled sweets gleamed in her ears. For some seconds, she didn’t look up, making a show of her breathlessness. I felt Aakash’s chin rest on my shoulder. ‘Your new bhabi,’ he whispered proudly, as if giving me the keys to a sports car.

  She was quiet at first, smiling and watchful. She entered the flat timidly, brushing against the doorway and then the dining-room chairs. We walked in behind her, Aakash grinning and gaping at me, watching my every gesture for a reaction. When I showed none, he said, ‘Beev’s healthy, no?’ She heard, and slowly turning around, gave him a cautioning look. He bit his tongue, but was encouraged by the reaction. ‘And the funny thing is I’m her trainer. Beev, what an ad you are for me!’ At this provocation, she swung around and made a short charge, yelling, ‘Always making fun, twenty-four seven, seven eleven, making fun.’ Aakash took her in his arms and kissed her tenderly on the head. The kitchen door swung open and Shakti emerged with more samosas and beer. His expression changed from morose to ribald delight at the sight of them, both in their red turbans. Aakash and Megha joined Shakti in his brazen laughter and I was left feeling somehow that the joke was on me.

  When we came into the drawing room, Aakash dropped himself on the sofa, his arms sprawling behind him. Megha sat on the edge of a chair, looking only at him. He closed his eyes and said, ‘Now, you guys talk. I’m going to sleep.’ But when I asked how near they had been to the blasts, he sprang up. ‘Man, you won’t believe it. The silence. Can you imagine an area as big as Connaught Place silent? It was amazing. For two seconds, you could hear the wind, you could hear a brown-paper bag scraping along the road. You know how in the movies when they have mute slow-motion scenes, exactly like that. But I tell you, it’s gone too far. Now something or the other has to be done. Bring back terrorist laws, have quick arrests, quick trials. I’m saying anyone there’s a doubt about, that’s it, straight in jail. It’s gone too far.’

  Megha listened carefully.

  I wasn’t in the mood for a political conversation. I said, ‘Maybe. But until now there have never been any real arrests, no real evidence. Without that, terrorist laws just become a way to keep the wrong people in jail.’

  Aakash’s eyes hardened. ‘Then each one of them will have to go.’ He sighed. ‘The lot of them.’

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘I don’t know. Pakistan? Round them up in the Red Fort and blow them away? I don’t care, but this can’t go on.’

  ‘Come on, Ash-man. You don’t mean that. What about Zafar? Will he have to go?’

  Aakash had met him once or twice and was fond of him. His face softened. ‘In so large an operation, a few good people end up sacrificed too. And by the way, I’m not saying just Muhammadans, the bad Hindus should go too.’

  For that one moment, Aakash seemed to lose his particularity. I saw in his anger and his hunger a greater Indian rage and appetite; and in his face, the face of a mob.

  Megha spoke to me only in English, and to Aakash only in Hindi, no matter how much either of us tried switching to the other. It positioned her at the centre of conversation and brought up a wall between Aakash and me that had never existed before. As she became comfortable, she began poking fun at my Hindi, embarrassing me for speaking well rather than for speaking badly. ‘Oh,’ she teased, when I used the Hindi word for election, ‘using such big words and all. Even I don’t know words like that.’

  I became curious about when they’d met. Megha beamed, and resting a small, fleshy hand cluttered with diamonds on Aakash’s lime-green T-shirt, said, ‘What now, it must be six, running seven months?’

  ‘Seven months?’ I gasped.

  It was nearly exactly as long as I had known Aakash. I suddenly remembered, and now understood, what the Begum of Sectorpur had been referring to all those months before.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I said.

  Aakash, seeming to enjoy the deception, said, ‘I couldn’t have, man. It’s all been very secret. She came as a client. I was meant to make her lose weight so that her parents could find her a match, according to her caste, which, by the way, is much lower than mine.’

  Megha nodded, apologetically adding, ‘We’re Aggarwals, the business caste.’

  ‘And,’ Aakash continued, ‘according to her financial status, which is much higher than mine. Her father’s not a lakhpati or crorepati, but an arabpati. He has three factories in Sectorpur, desi ghee, plastics, autoparts. Her brother went abroad for university; not that it did him any good.’

  At this, the two of them eyed each other and laughed.

  When their laughter died down, Megha explained, ‘He’s a homo.’

  ‘A homo?’

  ‘You know, homo?’ she said, then rattled off, ‘Homo, a gay, fajjot.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Aakash continued, ‘her financial status is very differ from mine. No one in her family knows anything about us. In fact, I think I can honestly say that if they found out, they would probably try and kill me.’

  ‘My brother suspects,’ Megha inserted, ‘maybe.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘The homo saw us leaving Junglee together,’ Aakash added quickly. ‘But what can he do? Zero.’ Aakash stressed this by making the numeral with his finger and thumb.

  Megha felt some explanation was needed. ‘You know, money is status. That’s a fact of life, but me, I don’t believe in all of this. I can only marry a man whom I respect. Money comes and goes, but respect lasts. All the guys I meet in Delhi, they just want to work for their fathers and live off the family business. Only Aakash is someone I see who wants to make something of his own.’

  Megha, as she became more energetic, had taken off her red turban and crumpled it in her lap. Her limp medium-length hair was streaked blonde in places; she had a nose ring. Without the turban, her features were thicker still, her head heavy and round.

  The mention of marriage alarmed me; I felt a joke had been taken too far. At the same time I could see how a girl like this, rich, strong-willed and clearly in love with him, could be a great asset to Aakash. Though he enjoyed stressing her ‘healthiness’, deriving from it a kind of boisterous fun that Shakti also shared in, Aakash seemed to see a kind of virtue in her form. It was as if some notion of strong traditional values – of a woman who supports her man, and there were songs about this kind of thing in India – had become tied up with her substantial size. By choosing her, he expressed his contempt for the lithe modern girls he trained at Junglee. And I was not at all certain whether her weight was really so off-putting to him. His mother was fat; the begum had been fat. Certainly behind Shakti’s laughter there had been a note of understanding, as if Shakti was congratulating him on making so robust a choice. In fact, the only person who was deeply uneasy was me. And Aakash, for whatever reason, whether pre-empting me or aware of my discomfort and hurt by it, or simply taking a ki
nd of pleasure in offending my soft tastes, did all he could, after months of secrecy, to include me in his relationship with Megha.

  Now smoking at will, sipping his beer, his turban still on, he read into my silence. As was so often the case with him, he had not introduced me to Megha without a purpose. He said, ‘Our love match is not going to be easily accepted by this world. I’ll need my friends. If things become difficult, you’ll help me, no?’

  ‘Me? How can I help you?’

  ‘You can. You know people. Your mother’s a journalist. The owner of TVDelhi just hangs out in your girlfriend’s house.’

  ‘The owner of TVDelhi, who do you mean?’

  ‘You know that woman who was there that day at Sanyogita’s when Lul was reading his homo story.’ At this Megha’s wet lips opened and her laughter rang out. I looked at Aakash in puzzlement. A private moment passed between them. Her eyes were full of some unexplained significance, which Aakash dismissed with a firm look. ‘The woman,’ he continued, ‘with the red bindi and the grey hair, and those huge silver bangles, owns TVDelhi.’

  ‘I had no idea,’ I said, genuinely surprised.

  ‘Please, man. You have to do this for me. In this country, we can’t trust the police, we can’t trust NGO workers, we can’t trust government people, but we can trust the press. You have to speak to this woman about our situation. Just so we have help, if we need it.’

  I couldn’t understand his urgency. ‘For what?’

  ‘For nothing yet,’ he said, draining his glass and sitting forward. ‘But maybe later.’ Removing his turban, his messy look pasted to his head, he added, ‘Should things get ugly.’

  14

  The first pale sky of the winter was reflected in the tanks of dark water outside the National Museum. Pedal boats glided over its glassy surface, dark small-leaved jamun trees dotted the esplanade and bright ice-cream trucks crowded the edge of the grass. In the distance, a runway-sized road led up to the President’s Palace, and Parliament, a low, punctured cylinder, brooded on the side. Nearer to the domed, sandstone museum, a black rubber hosepipe lay in the grass, choking out a wide puddle of smelly water.

  A writer had come to town. My mother was a friend of his wife and was hosting a dinner in their honour. He was a writer I had come to admire. I had first met him in London when I was eighteen and on my way to college in America. He had advised me not to go: ‘Indians go to these places and all they ever learn is the babble.’ At the time the remark offended me, not because of what was said but because of his tone: cold, dismissive, uncaring that he had upset my plans. I went anyway.

  The next time we met was in Delhi and I was in my last year of college. I was writing a thesis at the time on how the Mahatma, through a programme of celibacy and dietetics, had sought to overcome the body. In doing so, he negated the source of interests in Western society, interests such as property and self-preservation, making it possible for him to fight the British with a coin different from theirs. For all their threats to his body, they would never have any purchase over his soul. The writer listened for a while, sipping a martini he had been complaining about earlier, then said, ‘But there’s a great flaw in your theory. Because the British could have killed him; they could have destroyed his body. Then there would have been nothing to house his soul. What kind of victory is that?’ The adviser in college who had fed me the idea for the thesis hadn’t thought of that. When I went back to him with it, he confessed that the true rewards of the Mahatma’s programme were not temporal but metaphysical. I did the thesis, but lost interest. I read the writer’s books instead, all of them, carefully. He was the first writer I had read in this way. I felt a great feeling of release reading the books. He could take big ideas such as colonialism, defeat, occupation and show their effects in small human ways like lying and boasting, in hidden anger and resentments. I felt the writer release me from a sense of entitlement that I had about the West, a feeling that since they colonized us they owed us education, technology, duty-free goods. He released me by exposing the attitude as not post-colonial in any real way, but still very colonial; one that some in the West might happily endorse. It was an attitude that would forever leave us robbed of responsibility and the privilege of blaming oneself for one’s failures.

  My mother was hosting a dinner for the writer, but first he wanted to go to the National Museum to see the bronzes; he asked that I come along. I’d never been to the National Museum, though I’d been to many museums in many countries; I had never seen any bronzes. I was waiting in the porch of the museum when the writer’s Ambassador drove in. His wife was with him, a handsome Punjabi woman with green eyes.

  ‘Leave it, leave it in the car,’ she said of the writer’s green felt hat. She thought it would make him look English. It would mean us all paying the foreigners’ entry fee, which was thirty times as much as the regular fee. I had already anticipated this and had sent Uttam in to buy three tickets in advance. The security was tight, both because of the blasts and because there was an exhibition in the museum of the Nizam of Hyderabad’s jewels. Mobile phones had to be left outside, handbags were searched, a fuss was made over the writer’s brown leather shooting stick. Then the security guard in his olive-green uniform wanted to know why we had bought the Indian ticket.

  ‘Because we’re Indians,’ I answered in Hindi.

  ‘Show me your passport or ration card,’ he said.

  We weren’t carrying any identification, but neither were a group of young men in polyester shirts and baggy trousers.

  ‘Why aren’t you asking them for identification?’ I said.

  ‘Because they look like Indians,’ the security guard replied.

  ‘And why don’t we look like Indians?’ the writer’s wife intervened.

  The man was stumped; it was just a feeling, a class feeling.

  ‘We’re speaking Hindi, aren’t we?’ the writer’s wife pressed him. ‘Would we be speaking Hindi if we weren’t Indians?’

  The man smiled. ‘Some foreigners have learned as well,’ he said, shaking his head from side to side. ‘But never mind, carry on.’

  The writer had watched the whole scene. His eyes were dim and old, but intent somehow. They were set in a faintly Asian cast. They could make events occurring right in front of them seem far away. The writer had recently had back trouble and needed help up the stairs. He took my hand in his small, firm hand, and once he’d got going, he moved fast. When we went in, inhaling the musty smells that surround any organization linked to the government of India, he wanted to rest for a few minutes. We sat down in the lobby in front of an eleventh-century stone statue of a man and a woman; the woman was leaning into the man and gentle rolls of fat were visible on the sides of her waist. The writer caught his breath, then looked up and said, ‘Why don’t you sit down? You’ll be able to consider it better that way.’

  His wife, who was dressed in a green, black and yellow salwar kameez, continued to stand. I sat down; a few awkward moments of silence passed between us as I tried entering the world of the statue.

  The writer started us off. He said that the statue was from Khajuraho and that he had a special feeling for the Chandela dynasty as he was named after one of its kings. ‘The son in fact,’ the writer said, ‘of the man who was king when the invaders came. He had to move away. And that saved the Khajuraho temples. The bush grew over them. I fear that now they’re admired for their erotic content, which is foolish.’

  I looked harder at them, but I noticed only outside things: the spotlight and its loose wires; the roughly made pedestal on which they stood. They seemed closed to me; I still had nothing to say. I felt as I had with Aakash in the temple.

  ‘What is nice,’ the writer said, ‘is the absolute confidence in the faces. These people are…’

  ‘Complete,’ his wife finished for him.

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Then rising, he said, ‘We won’t look at everything or we’ll get tired; only at the fine things.’

  We walked into the museum�
�s main rooms past long pieces of carved stone.

  ‘Lintels,’ the writer said, pointing with his shooting stick. ‘We didn’t have the arch; we had lintels.’

  We entered a circular passage with a grubby marble floor. On one side, past glass walls, was an open courtyard with a stone chariot in the middle. On our right was a red-painted sign for the bronzes. I was wondering when the building that housed the collection had been built and asked the writer about it.

  He misunderstood my question or chose to answer it differently. ‘I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you,’ he said, as we entered a room with chalky-green walls. ‘These bronzes used to be in the viceroy’s house. They were collected by the Archaeological Survey of India. A British institution. It is safe to say that not a single Indian prince made a collection like the one we see displayed here, though he easily could have. The Maharaja of Patiala went to England, where he had his portrait painted, that was the thing to do, and he picked up a few nudes and brought them back. They gloried in their ignorance,’ the writer said, ‘gloried in their ignorance.’

  The room we entered was in spotlight and shadow. And though in places a crucial light was fused, a pink bucket left in a corner, the glasses of the display cases fingerprinted and dusty, there was something entrancing about the green, dimly lit room with the bronzes and the shadows they cast.

  The writer, as if wishing to give me the best of his energies, wanted to see the Natraj first. On our way to it, he stopped in front of an unfinished Chola Natraj. He looked for Shiva’s drum, but it wasn’t there. Next to the bronze was a black and white picture of an artisan working on the floor, illustrating how the object was made. The writer, as if anticipating a buried judgement in me, said, ‘That man seeming to hammer out the image would have had all kinds of fine ideas going through his smooth head.’

  Then following my eyes drift to the Natraj, he considered Shiva’s dance of creation and destruction. He said it was very close to him; he described it as having entered his soul, this idea of the nearness of creation and decay. ‘How did that idea, the twin forces of creation and decay,’ he asked, as we approached the bronze Natraj, with its floating hair, and one leg filled with the tension of both rising and swinging, ‘become enshrined in human form?’