The Temple-goers

by Aatish Taseer

  He was annoyed even before we sat down. My mother had asked him for eight; he had arrived with his wife and shooting stick some ten or fifteen minutes past eight. Shabby Singh, in a black and red cotton sari, her large red bindi fiery that night, her politically grey hair in a tight bun, had come by eight thirty. She brought her husband, a small Sikh gentleman in a yellow kurta. Sanyogita and I were on time as well. But Chamunda was late, very late.

  At nine, the writer, unaware that Chamunda was coming, but seeming to anticipate a general tendency on the subcontinent for late, drunken dinners, said, ‘Udaya, we’ll eat soon, won’t we? We’ll eat soon.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ my mother said, covering his small, firm hand with her jewelled one.

  ‘Good, good,’ he said.

  My mother, intercepting me on the way to the bar, sent me to take her place and dashed off into another room to call Chamunda. An urgent exchange was faintly overheard. She emerged a few minutes later, with a strange, nervous smile playing on her lips. She took the writer’s wife aside, and, in Punjabi, rapidly recounted the outcome of her conversation. The writer, who had been talking to me a moment ago about the bronzes, now let the conversation between us die and turned his attention gravely to the women talking. His eyes seemed shut, and though he hardly understood the language they spoke, he drank in every word. His lower lip quivered and his expression became so dark that his wife could not continue listening to my mother. She turned to her husband with a large, prepared smile and said, ‘Darling, Udaya is just telling me that Chamunda, her school friend whom you like so much, the Chief Minister of… Where is it?’

  ‘Jhaatkebaal,’ my mother offered.

  ‘Jhaatkebaal! Is coming to dinner tonight.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ the writer said coldly. ‘When?’

  ‘Darling,’ the writer’s wife said, agitation thick in her voice, ‘she’s had some problem in her state, the discussion in the Assembly has gone on longer than she expected. Bas, she’ll be here any minute.’

  ‘Amrita, I’m not a child. If I get home past a certain point, if I am forced to drink too much, the following day is ruined. Ruined.’ Then turning to me, he said, so everyone could hear, ‘Amrita speaks to me as though I’m a child, as though I could be fooled into believing I haven’t been waiting one hour.’

  The room fell silent. The writer’s wife was close to tears. She reached for some nuts. The writer saw this and smiled. ‘Amrita eats nuts,’ he said to me, but again for all to hear, nodding his head slightly. ‘She eats nuts; she likes to eat nuts.’ The Sikh gentleman in the yellow kurta, perhaps vicariously enjoying this bit of conjugal derision, of which he himself seemed incapable, laughed uproariously.

  ‘Shut up, Tunnu,’ his wife barked, fixing him with a stern look.

  It was nearly nine thirty when the front door swung open and a mobile phone conversation, complete with bouts of wicked laughter, was brought leisurely to an end behind the stained-glass doors that separated our tiny hall from the drawing room. For a few seconds, everyone’s eyes watched the double doors, the wicks of candles burning through their coloured panes. Then they flew open, coughing out Raunak Singh with his great moustaches, kohled eyes and gold earrings, and his boss, still, at this time of year, in chiffon. And what chiffon! The colour she wore was hardly different from her own, a chocolate brown, with tie-dyed diamonds of reddish-orange. She wore little bits of gold in and on her ears, nose and fingers, her straight black butt-length hair was open, her giant eyes wide over her face.

  Chamunda, who moments ago had been late and rude, was now like a girl of sixteen, biting her lip from shyness at facing a room full of people. The writer had watched Chamunda’s entrance carefully, seeming to record every detail, and now, as she went over to shake his hand and apologize for being late, deciding in the last instant to give him a brief hug, an amazing change came over him. The old writer began to laugh. A deep, asthmatic, rolling laugh rose from his depths, and like those whistles that only dogs can hear, diffused the tension in the room. ‘Beautiful, beautiful, all beautiful,’ he muttered to himself as Chamunda, after Sanyogita and I had risen to touch her feet, took my place next to him.

  Dinner – shami kebabs, baby aubergine, cumin potatoes, lentils, raita, okra and chicken curry – was served very soon after. On the way to the table, Shabby pushed her way up to Chamunda. ‘Where… where were you?’ she said, prodding her. ‘Not at a prayer service for yourself, I hope.’ At this, her whole body shook with laughter. ‘The divine Chamunda,’ she sniggered, as though wishing for the writer, still finding his place on the table, to hear.

  ‘Shabby, I don’t know if TVDelhi considers this news, but there have been bombs in my state –’

  ‘One bomb!’ Shabby interjected. ‘And that also a very small one.’

  ‘There has been an encounter, a man from Sectorpur was killed, there are rumours of a backlash.’

  ‘What about the two young boys who were killed?’ Shabby demanded. ‘What about that backlash?’

  ‘They were terrorists, Shabby.’

  ‘Terrorists, my foot. Show me the evidence. Where’s the evidence? Just two poor Muslim boys framed by your police because they’re too incompetent to catch the real guys.’

  Chamunda gave my mother a look as if to say, ‘Put this woman far away from me or I can’t be held responsible for the consequences.’ And, as my mother was in the process of seating everyone, it was easy to separate them. The writer went between my mother and Chamunda; the Sikh gentleman in the yellow kurta between the writer’s wife and Sanyogita. With three men and four women, it was a difficult placement, and though Chamunda and Shabby could have been put further apart, any further and they would have been face to face. And so my mother, counting on me and the curvature of the dining table to ease the tension, put them on either side of me.

  Shabby, perhaps sensing why the placement had been made the way it had, let drop her conversation with Chamunda and picked it up in a different tone with the writer.

  ‘What do you think, Mr Vijaipal, of this dastardly situation we’re in, here, in India?’

  The writer, putting away small quantities of yellow dal with a teaspoon, wiped his lips. For a few moments, his mouth seemed softly to run over the words he was about to give Shabby. Then as if finding them too complicated, he began more simply. ‘I think it’s a difficult situation, a unique situation in fact. Unique, yes, unique. I’ll tell you why. You don’t have a Muslim-majority population, like Pakistan and the Arab countries, but neither is your Muslim minority an immigrant population, like with the European countries and North America. This makes for a special tension…’ He broke off, and as if articulating this tension directly was proving too hard, came at it from another angle. ‘I was in England when they had their bombings. I felt then that the great shock was not the bombings themselves, but the headlines the following day.’ Making the shape of a lengthening rectangle with his hands to indicate a headline, he said, ‘They were all British!’ The description had its impact and the table was silent. The writer, now only warming up, said, ‘The shock of being attacked by one’s own people, you know, the shock of being attacked by one’s own. Very hard, you know, very hard.

  ‘The English to some extent could distance themselves, knowing that the people who attacked them, though legally British citizens, were immigrants. That made it easier to bear. They had come to Britain no more than fifty years before. To undo that history would be no great thing. But in India we’re talking about that same feeling, the feeling of being attacked by one’s own, and the tension that arises from that, except in India we’re talking about a non-immigrant population that constitutes nearly 15 per cent of the whole population. And of course a thousand years of history, bad history, most of it obscured or not dealt with. That cannot be so easily undone. Any serious eruption along those lines would tear the country apart.’

  This last remark concerning the tearing apart of the country was understood on the table in very different ways. Somewhat e
lated, Shabby said, ‘I know, I know. I keep telling these saffron-types that this was never a country; the British made it a country. It can never be ruled as one country. It must be ruled in small, manageable portions.’

  ‘You want it to be partitioned again,’ Chamunda flared, ‘why don’t you come out and say it? Do you see, Mr Vijaipal, what our so-called “intellectuals” want?’

  The writer, seeming to filter many ideas at once, muttered, ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘Yes, yes, what?’ Shabby badgered him.

  The writer answered her by ignoring her. Raising his old lion’s face up to Chamunda’s, a comic gleam entering his eyes, he said, ‘I think they would like to make India destroyable. Isn’t that right, Chamunda? That’s what they’re trying to do, yes?’

  Chamunda clapped her hands like a little girl. She took the writer’s huge face in her soft brown hands, with their reddish-orange nail polish matching, I could see now, the diamonds on her sari, and kissed it. ‘Now this is a writer!’ she exclaimed. ‘Not a bit like our treacherous lot who feel that to be an intellectual means betraying your country.’

  The writer purred contentedly. My mother laughed out loud, expressing the special delight one feels at characteristic behaviour from an old friend. I caught Sanyogita’s eye and saw that she was embarrassed. In that instant, I wished for her not to be embarrassed and for her to be a little bit more like her aunt, not always so correct.

  At the table, Shabby was far from defeated. ‘What country, what country?’ she was saying, now readily taking up Chamunda’s challenge. ‘That’s what I’m asking. You tell us, Mr Vijaipal, what country? Was India ever a country until the British came along?’

  The writer, who after his mischief-making had retired to the affections of Chamunda, now became interested in what Shabby was saying. ‘I’ve always been intrigued,’ he said, ‘by how this bit of babble left behind by the British, and taken up by the Leftist historians, has survived in India till today. When people say India was not a country until the British arrived, what exactly do they mean? They could not really be saying that India wasn’t a nation-state. That would be absurd. The idea of the nation-state, even in Europe, is a relatively recent idea, a nineteenth-century idea. So what they must mean, then, is that there was not even an idea of India, the way there was of Europe, or of ancient Greece; that there was never in the minds of its people the notion of belonging to a land called India.’

  ‘There wasn’t!’ Shabby asserted. ‘You ask the average Indian, not a princess or a goddess like Chamunda Devi here, but the common man, and he would not think of himself as an Indian. He would think of himself as a Gujarati, a Punjabi, a Tamilian, an Assamese. He wouldn’t have the faintest idea of India, “the land”.’

  The writer seemed caught between the interruption and Shabby’s raised voice, both of which he was unused to, and what he was going to say next. He lowered his head and muttered, ‘Not the temple-going Indian, not the temple-going Indian.’ Then raising his head and voice at once, he silenced Shabby. ‘Not the temple-going Indian,’ he said for the third time. ‘People like you perhaps, but not him. He knows this country backwards. He forever carries an idea of it in his head. For him, it possesses a sacred topography. He knows it through its holy places. He knows it from the mountains in the north where the rivers begin, and from where the rudraksh he wears around his neck come, to the special place from where the right stones for the lingas come. He knows the rivers when they widen and the great temples and temple cities, with their stone steps, that have been set along their banks. He knows the points where those rivers meet other rivers, and their confluence becomes part of the long nationwide pilgrimages he will make several times in his lifetime. In fact, it could be said that there is almost no other country, certainly not one so vast, where the countrymen are as acquainted with the distant reaches of the land through their pilgrimages as they are in India; perhaps no country where poor people travel more. They think nothing of jumping on a bus or train, for two or three days, to journey to Tirupathi in the south or Jagannath in the east. And in this way, the religion itself is like a form of patriotism.’

  Shabby was nodding her head vigorously even before he had finished. She took a chopstick out from her grey bun and began playing with it in her fingers. An arch smile rose to her lips.

  ‘Ah!’ she said. ‘So you have a communal agenda. I get it now.’

  ‘Communal?’ the writer said, with genuine confusion in his eyes.

  ‘ “Communal” in India,’ my mother explained, ‘means advancing the interests of a particular community or religious group; to be divisive.’

  The writer chuckled happily.

  But then, as if thinking still of what he had said, his thoughts turned inward. I had the feeling he was not quite finished. It had been very affecting to hear him speak, very affecting to watch his distant observations coincide with smaller, more particular observations of my own. I had thought only of Aakash as he spoke and was feeling some relief that the appeal he held for me was not mere obsession, that there was something more abstract, more general, behind it. But it was an unstable feeling, edging on euphoria and hysteria, and what the writer said next broke my composure.

  ‘You know,’ he began, looking deeply into the room, where illuminated foliage could be seen beyond darkened windows and the orange coils of an electric heater burned steadily, ‘they say that Benares is a microcosm of India. Today, most people take that to mean that it contains all the horror and filth of India, and also, loath as I am to use these words, the charm, the beauty, the magic, whatever you want to call it. But Benares was once a very different kind of microcosm; it was a very self-conscious microcosm. The streams that watered the groves in its Forest of Bliss were named after all the rivers of India, not unlike the avenues in Washington, DC, being named after the American states. All the princes from around the country had their palaces along the river. And they would come and retire there after they had forsaken the cares of the world. The Indian holy points, the places of the larger pilgrimage, were all represented symbolically in Benares. It was said you could do the whole pilgrimage in miniature in Kashi. And Kashi, too, was recreated symbolically across the country. It wasn’t a microcosm; it was a kind of cosmic capital.

  ‘And on certain days the moon would appear in the afternoon and the water from those symbolic Indian rivers would run through the groves and flood the Ganga, which, at one point, curls around the city. The ancient Hindus, with their special feeling for these cosmic changes, would gather at high points in the city to watch, like people seeing a fireworks display. Now consider this: it is mid-afternoon, the sun is out, but probably obscured by clouds, appearing now and then like a silver disc, the moon is low over the river and there is a kind of daytime darkness. The sound of water can be heard in the silence. It is the sound of streams gushing through the Forest of Bliss and emptying into the Ganga. And then suddenly, at the exact point where the river bends, the Ganga, flowing smoothly in one direction, stops and begins, as if part of the magic of that darkened afternoon, to flow in the opposite direction. That was how people, common people,’ he added pointedly, ‘were brought in touch with the wholeness of the place, in just the same way as someone crossing a street in Manhattan might feel when, looking to one side and seeing the sweep of the avenue, he says, “I’m in New York!” It’s my dream to see that wholeness restored in India.’

  There was an interruption from an unexpected quarter. ‘This thing you describe,’ Shabby’s husband asked urgently, receiving a dirty look from his wife, ‘can one still see it in Benares?’

  ‘No. What is there to see now?’ the writer replied sadly. ‘No one has seen it since the thirteenth century, since… They destroyed it six times, you know, the invaders. Six times, over hundreds of years, they smashed its temples and carried away its stones until they had broken its orientation. The river no longer performed its tricks, the Forest of Bliss was bricked over, its pools and ponds drained, and the lingas, once placed ingenio
usly across the island city, uprooted. I think they even tried to call it Muhammadabad.’

  The writer’s descriptions had perturbed everyone at the table; Chamunda had tears in her eyes. ‘No one knows any of this. No, Udaya?’ She reached past the writer and held my mother’s hand. ‘That’s our problem in India, no one knows any of these things.’

  Shabby had also fallen silent and played thoughtfully with a large silver ring on her finger.

  ‘Chalo,’ my mother said suddenly, alarmed perhaps at the mood that had descended over her dinner party, ‘let’s sit soft.’

  I had meant to keep many things to myself, but the vision of completeness that the writer’s descriptions had inspired, as well as a thought about the city beyond, smouldering from some of the tensions that had arisen that evening, forced me to ask, ‘How do Indians who aren’t “temple-going” participate in this Indian idea?’ I was thinking in part of myself, but also of non-Hindus, men like Zafar, whom I had arranged to see in the old city some time over the next few days. He had had his operation while I was away and was still convalescing.

  The writer, perhaps thinking I was being political, coldly dismissed me. ‘It’s more difficult for them,’ he said. ‘If you mean Muslims, perhaps they should begin by thinking of themselves as converts to Islam and not invest themselves so emotionally with the invader. If you mean the green-card folk…’

  It was too much for me. I burst out with the story of Aakash. I spoke in disjointed sentences of this Brahmin trainer I had become friends with, and how he was many men to many people, now a trainer, excited about brands and malls, now a Brahmin, performing the ancient rites of his caste. I spoke of his hunger, his ambition, of the disappearance of his ancestor down a river and how he had taken me to see the place where he had lived. I told them of my discovery in the National Museum, and how I had seen first hand, but cast in a magical way, the history of the nineteenth-century anti-Brahmin movement that the writer had spoken of. And in my excitement, I also let slip the story of Aakash’s affair with an industrialist’s ‘healthy’ daughter who that very afternoon had been whisked away so that she might make a better match. And of Kris, her creative-writer brother, who was determined to break her love for Aakash. I said that I understood her love for him very well, understood how she might want to take a chance on him, how she might have come to believe in his star. I said all this, without thinking of the consequences, without thinking of who might be listening, and there was some agitation in my voice. The writer listened enthralled; he seemed to see that I was trying to get something off my chest. And when I had finished, when I had told him how Delhi for Aakash was a city with temples to Saturn, how the weeks now for him were jam-packed with religious observances, fasts, shopping for new kitchen vessels, a great jagran that he and his friends had put together in their colony…