The Temple-goers

by Aatish Taseer

  ‘He said all this?’

  ‘Yes, man! I think they’re going to disappear her if we don’t do something.’

  ‘Maybe you should back off?’

  ‘Whaddyou saying, man? We have once to live, once to die. We’ll love once too.’

  ‘Aakash, stop giving me these bullshit filmy lines.’

  ‘They’re not filmy. There’s another reason; I’ll explain later. What should I do, man? If her brother tells Junglee, I’m gone. Taking too much tension.’

  ‘What kind of man is her brother? Big, small? Could he have you killed, your legs broken?’

  ‘That homo, no chance! Aatish, man, he’s a gay. And I have my people too, in Sectorpur. You’ve seen the guy. What can he do to me?’

  ‘I’ve seen the guy? Where?’

  ‘In Junglee only. A friend of Sparky Punj’s? He even came that time to Sanyogita’s house. Remember, when –’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Lul! The guy we call Lul. Kris, Krishna. He is Megha’s brother.’

  ‘What? Lul is Megha’s brother? Aakash, how could you not have told me?’

  ‘I didn’t tell you? I must have!’

  It was a suppression of truth greater than a lie. It didn’t just alter one reality but several that had come before. And it was the multiple deceptions contained in this one deception that gave it its particular sting, the sting of making me feel like a fool. It was also the reason it had been kept from me. It made Aakash seem like a man with secrets, a man playing for higher stakes, someone who didn’t need to make confidences to friends. I wanted very much in that instant to turn away from him for good. How easy it would have been in this slippery-floored lobby, into which he’d never come, with my mother and girlfriend in the other room, to get a new trainer and never think again of Aakash. I could turn away and he would vanish.

  There was also, beyond questions of truth and lies, my genuine amazement that Megha and the creative writer could be brother and sister. Not only were they nothing like each other physically, but they were so different in their concerns and values, with almost nothing, save their taste for the rough side of Sectorpur, in common.

  ‘Ash-man.’

  ‘Yes, man.’

  ‘Let’s meet tomorrow and discuss this thing properly,’ I said, putting away the question of his deception.

  ‘OK, man,’ he said with disappointment. The time to tell me about Megha’s brother had no doubt been carefully chosen; I thought he would have liked to have better relished the surprise it produced in me. ‘I’ll tell you,’ he said, suddenly excited, ‘tomorrow’s Saturday, no?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why don’t you come with me to the Shani temple? Megha and I go every Saturday; after that, we’ll talk as well.’

  ‘Done.’

  ‘Done-a-done done. Oh, and sir, one more thing, bring a briefcase of money.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m going to take you shopping after the temple, and when I shop I like to…’ He made a sucking noise to indicate, I thought, a credit card swiping.

  I stood for a moment by the glass panels in the lobby, looking down at the pool, still bright blue in the darkness, then went back into the restaurant.

  My mother and Sanyogita were talking like women do after a man has behaved badly, conciliatory, making a show of having a good time, but wounded somehow. I told them what had happened with Megha and her brother, but didn’t mention who he was.

  ‘Well, that’s no big deal,’ my mother said. ‘Even politicians can’t disappear a girl these days. Not with television the way it is. One word to Shabby aunty and we’ll have TVDelhi’s cameras surround Sectorpur.’

  ‘Shabby aunty?’ I asked, uncertain where I had heard the name before.

  ‘Don’t you remember,’ Sanyogita said, ‘she’s part of Emigrés at Home. She was there that night when…’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ I didn’t want to be reminded of that night again. The scars, smooth and pink from her grazes, still remained on Sanyogita’s elbows and knees, and if anything, the entire episode was more painful with time.

  ‘She’ll be there tomorrow night,’ my mother said, ‘Shabby. And Chamunda. You two have to sit between them. They can’t stand each other.’

  ‘Why?’ Sanyogita asked.

  ‘Your aunt thinks Shabby’s channel is prejudiced against her because she’s BJP. It’s all that Hindu nationalist/liberal secular nonsense. Just don’t let Chamunda get carried away.’

  As we waited for our bill, the man in white returned with a silver brush and pan, sweeping away the crumbs from the table.

  My mother looked irritated. ‘You don’t have to…’ she began.

  ‘Yes, I know, ma’am. I tell him, the manager, that in Europe people put their bread on the tablecloth, but he doesn’t listen. He says, “Here is here.” ’ Sweeping away the last of the crumbs, and leaving my mother struck dumb for once, the man said, ‘Sorry if it was any inconvenience.’

  16

  When Aakash was ‘taking tension’, he liked either to go to the temple or to shop. As the day before he had taken tension in unusually high quantities, he wanted the next day to do both. He was astrologically under the influence of Shani or Saturn. Shani, lame and malevolent, could, once installed in your planetary house, move slowly through it for seven years, bringing luck that was not so much bad or good as it was patchy. And it was to lessen the effect of this roller coaster that Aakash, on Saturdays, went to Shani’s temple on a main road in Sectorpur and stayed away from alcohol and ‘non-veg’. He asked that we meet after the flyover. He had spoken separately to Uttam the night before, explaining where it was.

  We set out the next morning at six fifteen. A cold, persistent drizzle, coming on the back of three days of rain, followed us the entire way. The traffic was terrible even at that hour and Uttam suggested we take ‘the jungle route’. He swung off the main thoroughfare on to a thinly surfaced road overgrown with keekar. Their long, spiny branches reaching out to the car, like many frail arms, made a sound of nails on glass. On our left was a wide canal choked with hyacinth. And on our right, seeming almost desolate save for the bush that encroached on it, was a power station. Its iron men rose high above the foliage, their power lines slung wide between them, like a tug-of-war team. The foliage had grown so thick after the monsoon that it took me some minutes to realize that I had seen this canal once before. It was with Aakash, on the way to the Begum of Sectorpur, when I had glimpsed the power station’s red lights reflected in the canal. Its dark water had seemed foreboding then; and now, too, for other reasons, there was a strange menace about it. It came in part from the thick clumps of hyacinth that grew on its edges and appeared like islands in its centre, so that they seemed not so much to be separate clumps as a single net of hyacinth strangling the canal. It came also from the factory drains, forming great mountains of white chemical foam where they deposited their refuse. And it was the plant life that grew so furiously from this poisoned river that unnerved me.

  There had been a police encounter the day before in the old city in which one policeman and two alleged terrorists had been killed. The images that had flashed on everyone’s screens for the past twenty-four hours had shown the dead policeman being carried away, but they had also shown a Muslim crowd enraged for being the target of the police encounter. There was talk of it having been staged. ‘Just answer me one simple question, Aatish saab,’ Uttam asked, full of political feeling that morning, ‘if the encounter was fake, then how come one policeman is dead and another injured? Now, obviously they didn’t shoot themselves, which must mean that the people they were having the encounter with had weapons too, no?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So fine, even if they weren’t the bombers, they would have been some kind of criminal. I tell you, saab, we suffer from the worst traitors in this country. And I don’t mean Muslims; I mean Hindus. You put two Muslims next to ten Hindus and they will somehow subdue them. I hear it’s written in their religion that if a man ra
pes my wife, she has to live with him and can only come back to me after she has divorced him.’

  ‘I’m really not sure about that, Uttam.’

  ‘And how is it that the Muslim guard in our building will say, “Namaste,” but he’ll never say, “Ram, ram”? I don’t mind saying, “Allah.” Sometimes I say, “Salaam alaikum,” to him, then he’s happy.’ Uttam choked with wet, throaty laughter. ‘And what about that driver that came around the other day? We gave him dinner, but he wouldn’t touch the meat. I asked him what the matter was, and you know what he told me?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He said he was vegetarian. A Muslim who doesn’t eat meat? I said to myself, Can’t be! That’s one thing that couldn’t have been written in their Book, because we know there were no vegetables in the desert. I thought, he’s definitely hiding something. So I take the cook aside and ask him if he still has the receipt from the butcher. He did. I show it to the man; he sees that the butcher’s a Muslim butcher and the bastard’s face lights up. And he eats the meat! Now, why couldn’t he have just said, “I don’t eat meat that’s not halal.”?’

  ‘Maybe he was being accommodating.’

  ‘Yes, but why lie about being vegetarian? There’s the slyness.’

  Uttam’s talk was making me think about Zafar, and perhaps misinterpreting my silence, he said, ‘But I will say this, my father saved one once.’

  ‘Saved what?’

  ‘A Muslim. It was 1947 and the riots were going on. They were killing Muslims everywhere. My father hid one inside a barrel with holes in it and saved his life.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘But,’ Uttam said, already roaring with laughter at his own joke, ‘we kept the barrel outside the house.’

  The road widened and open fields came into view. They were dotted with dozens of tall apartment blocks. The land had barely been cleared. There were nothing but long, cracked streets lined with Alstonia scholaris and apartment building after apartment building decorated with geometric designs in dull colours. The foliage on the sides of the road was dense, and along with the fields, seemed to mock the new city that had sprung up. Long, grid-like streets with giant stooping street lights finished in fields. On some stretches of undeveloped road, headless lamp standards had rusted before ever being installed. I couldn’t tell which building would have been the begum’s.

  The flyover that had brought life to Sectorpur had also swept away its older sections. A low city of half-painted buildings, black water tanks, orange and white mobile phone towers and the occasional gurdwara dome or temple steeple lay huddled under the flyover. Dotting the mismatched landscape were signs for medical centres, computer courses, cricket academies and foreign travel. And at the foot of the flyover was Aakash on his bike, indicator lights flashing, Megha riding pillion. Aakash wore a black faux-leather jacket; Megha, a now drenched purple T-shirt and a shawl. Uttam blew his horn. Aakash raised his arm without looking back and drove on.

  We followed him for many minutes until we came on to a roaring street. I knew it well; not only was it the road to the airport, but a friend of mine lived not more than a hundred metres away. So when Aakash pulled over to the side of the road, I couldn’t understand why he had stopped. Then stepping out on to the pavement in the rain, I saw, and for some moments stood wondering at how I had failed to see before, a large temple in pink stone with a tall steeple and a crowd at the entrance. Only a damaged eye could have missed it.

  There were green and blue tarpaulins outside the temple, under which a man distributed steel platters containing a garland of marigolds, a clay lamp, a black cloth, a litre bottle of sunflower oil and a newspaper sachet of black lentils and asafoetida. Aakash bought one platter for himself and Megha and one for me. We lined up behind a frail old woman in a black and red sari. She was trying to garland the god’s brass figure. Moustached and fierce in aspect, he was deep within a dark stone recess, covered in marigolds and black seeds. A steady stream of oil dripped from his foot. Around the feet of his brass elephant, several oil lamps cast their smoky light into the corners of the recess and over the god’s dull metallic body. The combination of black offerings, the dim light from the lamps and the orange of the marigolds suggested a carefully worked-out harmony, playing on the idea of Shani as a dark god, a cousin of Yama, god of death.

  The tiny old woman ahead of us missed the god with her garlands the first few times, then threw a garland clean over his head and was forced to retrieve it from between the elephant’s legs. When at last she hit her mark, she brought down a small avalanche of marigolds on to the lamps below. As we waited, I asked Megha if only people suffering from the maleficence of Saturn needed to appease the god.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘He’s good to me. I’m saying, “Good, you’re good to me; now be very good to me.” ’

  With this, she leaned forward, showing a long, pink band of Jockey underwear, and after dressing the deity in marigolds and black starched cotton she drenched him in half a litre of oil. Aakash, unshaven, his face intent, guided her hand in offering the lamp, then slipped an iron nail into the wire coiled around the god’s ankle; iron was Shani’s metal. With the enactment of each rite, which took us from Shani’s brass form to offering clay lamps at the base of a peepal tree, to entering the main sanctum with its Shiva linga beneath a silver serpent, Aakash’s mood softened. The sensual power of the rites, the feeling of oil, metal and pulses early in the morning, and their supposed relevance to the turmoil in his life, seemed to provide a reminder of enduring materials that would help him face the world beyond, all the more illusory that morning thanks to Shani’s antics. And when at last we stood in the main sanctum, the linga in a bed of papaya leaves, surrounded by many little lingas in a white marble tank in the floor, and Aakash smashed the temple bell three times, I felt all the force of his restoration.

  And then we shopped.

  Aakash parked his bike outside the temple and he and Megha came in the car with me to Connaught Place. Uttam watched Megha intently as she got in. It was a high van, and when she put one foot on the step, her short, splayed fingers reaching into its cavernous interior for a grab handle, Uttam wheezed with laughter. Aakash saw, and as he had with Shakti, encouraged him by shooting up his eyebrows in quick succession. There was in this joking, this light humiliation of the woman in public, an element of Indian male pride and control. And Megha, as if it were a testament to their love for each other, increasing both their statures, only pretended to mind. She glowered at us all, then seated comfortably, smiled.

  On the way, Aakash wanted to stop at Junglee. His mood had lightened. He hummed the tune of an advertisement jingle, adding a modified Hindi movie line to the ending. Where the hero says, ‘Which sod drinks to stay in control? I drink to lose control,’ he said, ‘I drink because the cheetah drinks.’ ‘Do the dew, mountain dew!’ he said vacantly to himself, as we drove into the grimy alley which housed Junglee.

  He wanted me to come upstairs.

  ‘Are you sure? Why?’

  ‘Just trust me.’

  The Nepali doorman pushed open the brushed-steel door and Junglee’s incense-filled air tumbled out. Upstairs, the other trainers eyed Aakash come in, both in civilian clothes and with a member. Aakash ignored them, taking me straight to the locker room and the men’s ‘wet area’. He opened his dark green locker with a pair of tiny brass keys. Then, rummaging about among exercise clothes and a tiffin in blue polythene, he took out something thin and rectangular, wrapped in the Delhi Times’s social pages. I opened it and saw that it was a laminated certificate of sorts. My impressions of it were haphazard: I saw red and blue colours on the white board; the words ‘Arya Samaj’, Hanuman mandir; a picture of Aakash in a blazer and tie, looking like a schoolboy, against a sky-blue background; a picture of Megha, with a fat inky stamp over her face; their addresses, both Sectorpur addresses; and the word ‘solemnized’.

  How these scattered impressions came together to form a single, horrible realization of what had occ
urred, I can’t say. Perhaps it was the pictures Aakash handed me of him and Megha, garlanded and in bright sunlight, that helped focus my swimming mind. Or it was his words, ‘You see now why I can’t back off?’ reaching me from some distant place. But none of the finality of the deed lessened the dread it awoke in me. ‘Ash-man, what have you done?’ I wanted to say. ‘What have you done?’

  Scanning the certificate’s smooth, laminated surface, my eye fell on the date.

  ‘The 25th of July?’ I gasped.

  ‘Yes, man. You don’t know what it was like. They were sending her to Bombay to meet a suitor. I was here on my own; you weren’t here. I felt I had no one. I felt this was the only thing that would give me some protection. After that, they could do whatever they wanted to do, but at least we could say, “Look, here, we’re married. Now do what you want to do.” ’

  ‘Whose idea was it?’

  ‘Hers. She came to me just before she was being sent to Bombay and said, “We have to do it now.” She went straight to the airport from the temple. We even had to make the priest hurry up because otherwise she would have missed her flight.’ He laughed. ‘Can you imagine, some people go on honeymoon after their wedding, she went to meet a suitor!’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘It didn’t work. The guy thought she was too healthy. Can you imagine?’ He smiled sadly. ‘All these guys rejecting her because she’s too healthy, then there’s me who wants to marry her the way she is and they won’t let me. You know, they’re even considering sending her for lipo.’

  ‘Lipo?’

  ‘They suck out the fat…’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know,’ I said, looking up, then the thought of his marriage returned. ‘Who else knows about this?’

  ‘Nobody, man. Just you. You know, I don’t have much of a friend circle. And I haven’t told anyone in my family.’