The Temple-goers

by Aatish Taseer

  ‘He’s had an operation!’ I screamed.

  Zafar winced, then smiled.

  The policeman now turned to me and said courteously, ‘I’m sorry, sir, but you can come and pick him up in a few hours at the station.’

  ‘But why are you arresting him?’

  ‘He’s crossed the police line, sir. It’s a routine arrest.’

  ‘But why…’

  The policeman anticipated my question. ‘Sir, I’m very busy. Here is my card.’ He produced a visiting card with a gold police emblem on it. ‘T. N. Vohra. It has mobile too. Now, please go home. It’s not safe at this time.’

  With this, he pushed his hand into Zafar’s, locking fingers with him, and led him into the blue van with its caged windows. Zafar stepped elegantly on to the footboard and sat down on a bench next to a young demonstrator with a sweaty, bloodied face. Just before the door closed, he said apologetically, ‘I shouldn’t have worn this.’ He ran his hand down the length of his black coat again. ‘It made me a target. This mistake won’t happen again. Please excuse the trouble I’ve caused.’

  The van sped away, leaving me to walk back to the barricade. When I approached, the young policeman had reappeared to let me through.

  Zafar was released at seven that evening. The fat policeman was right: it had been a routine arrest. The place to which they had taken him was a squat building with screened balconies, each level painted in two shades of orange. There were neem and peepal trees outside, motorbikes parked in the shade and a roaring street beyond. From a makeshift porch of white metal and green fibreglass, there hung a large blue and red sign which read: ‘Police Station, Lahori Gate’.

  I’d never been in a police station before. I was surprised by the congenial, government office atmosphere, the fluorescent lighting, the potted plants, the simple sign that read: ‘Lock-up’. Releasing Zafar was no great task either. After my initial panic, and yes, a few wiped-away tears, Uttam came to pick me up. We drove to the station, and on the way I called my mother and Sanyogita, who both called Chamunda. At some point around mid-morning, after tea and breakfast in the car, a fixer of sorts showed up. He was not from Chamunda’s office – she couldn’t interfere with these things – but worked for a businessman. He was a man who ‘knew how to talk to the police’. He carried three mobile phones, had a Bluetooth piece in his ear and a weak handshake. Within minutes, he was joking with T. N. Vohra, and setting in motion the process by which Zafar would be released.

  The day went by languidly and was spent mostly in the car, with occasional forays into the station. A mild winter sun burned away the rain. There was a fresh warm afternoon, then a fat orange sunset, and later the street hung in wisps of fog and bright kerosene lamps. In fact, Zafar’s arrest might have had something of the mood of a picnic or a long drive had it not been for one thing: Zafar, in the lock-up with some twenty other men, refused to sit down.

  At first this gentle protest went unnoticed. Vohra’s sub-inspector tore around the room, prodding men with his stick, roughing up the ones he thought more guilty, but he didn’t touch Zafar. It was only after his second incursion into the room, some time around noon, when our arrivals at Vohra’s desk coincided, that the sub-inspector remarked that the old poet fellow had been standing in the same spot for nearly five hours. Vohra laughed at the genteel manners of people like this. I was concerned because of Zafar’s operation. Vohra nodded, promising to send in a chair for him. But at two p.m., Zafar had still refused to sit down. I was sent in to talk to him. I saw him leaning lightly against the wall, an empty chair next to him and dozens on the floor around, like nursery school children. He glided up to the lock-up’s bars when he saw me, reassuring me that he was fine. When I implored him to sit down, told him it would be a long wait, he smiled mysteriously and said he was fine standing.

  By mid-afternoon, Zafar’s protest had become something of a religious event in the station, and everyone was perturbed. Vohra said he could not release him until the demonstration in the old city was over, but begged me, seeing now that I was someone of clout, to make my old teacher see reason. I, more than anyone, wanted Zafar to sit down. The whole episode would be no more than a harmless brush with Indian officialdom, if only Zafar would sit down. But when, at five p.m., the sub-inspector tried to push him down by the shoulders, Zafar pressed his back against the wall and locked his knees.

  It was the sub-inspector who told me this as I waited outside for the last of the paperwork to be finished, and for smudged purple stamps and little signatures to complete the formalities. ‘Bloody Gandhian,’ he said, visibly upset. He had chosen his words well, because in this country, with its special feeling for victories of the mind over the body, Zafar’s protest, the refusal of an old frail man, wrongly arrested, to sit with the others on the prison floor, or even on a chair, acquired all the force of a spoken curse.

  And when at last Zafar walked out, moving his legs with difficulty after standing for nearly twelve hours, the applause he was met with in the station sounded like a plea for forgiveness, like young, superstitious men with families asking to be spared the anger of a miracle man.

  Zafar’s protest had not spared me either. Of course India worked on influence, everyone knew that. But I had used that influence – which to some extent was so innate that it had prevented me from being arrested – for a good cause. It could have allowed me to go home with an easy conscience that evening. But because Zafar’s protest was to some extent aimed against the casual violence of the system that sought to diminish him, I, acting even more casually than the police officers, felt the more implicated. In the end, its sting had nothing to do with ‘communal’ issues or even class ones; it was just a poet speaking to an aspirant, asking him to think hard, to really consider, as someone concerned with beauty and not with politics, whether what was at stake was worth defending or not.

  He was a stubborn man, of this there is no doubt. But there was nothing he had been more stubborn about than his determination to be a poet against terrible odds. In the car home, as if remembering who he was, he told me the story of how he got his pen name. ‘I was called Muhammad Shafiq,’ he said, ‘but when I was about seven or eight, I became enchanted with the word aashiyan; I didn’t know what it meant, but I liked the ring of it. So I kept it as my pen name, Muhammad Shafiq Aashiyan. And I began to use it in my schoolwork. A few weeks later, the teacher was calling out our names and she said, “Come here, Muhammad Shafiq Nest.” My face became red with shame. Aashiyan means “nest”, like bird’s nest!’ Zafar’s rasping laugh broke from his blackened lips. ‘It was then that she said to me, “If you want to be a poet call yourself Jigar or Kamar or Zafar.” And since there was already a Jigar and Kamar Moradabadi, I called myself Zafar.’

  Uttam stopped the car in front of the art-deco cinema. The area had now returned to life and was teeming with rickshaws, pedestrians and naked bulbs in shop windows. There was nothing to suggest the morning’s disturbance except a column of yellow metal barricades, gathered neatly at the side of the road.

  Zafar stepped out of the car, with some relief I thought, perhaps at being his own man for the first time all day. After a hurried goodbye, he vanished around a gloomy corner, illuminated by a single street light, heading home to the house and family which had once again eluded me.

  19

  Sanyogita had begun to see a therapist. She said that there were many things she needed to sort through, related to her mother and aunt. Things that might explain her inactivity in adult life. They were both, in different ways, strong women; she felt they might have stifled her. The therapist was fast to confirm these doubts. He had Sanyogita write a letter to both women, a letter Chamunda later described to me as ‘four pages of pure vitriol’, with accusations that she abused her. ‘She accuses me of calling her a “stupid child” when she was little,’ Chamunda ranted down the phone. ‘One says that! It’s like saying, “Stupid boy”. It doesn’t mean “you are a stupid boy”.’ I could imagine her wagging a jewelle
d finger as she spoke. ‘Aatish, please speak to her. She’s left a lot of hurt in this house. I’m told by a friend who’s had years in psychoanalysis that they blame the family as the source of all troubles. But, Aatish, I know if she would only get married and pop out a child or two, all of this would go away. And guess who introduced her to this psychoanalyst?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That fat cow Shabby.’

  Chamunda, as Sanyogita’s guardian in Delhi, was forever asking me to make her understand some particular point of view or to get her to agree to come to some event she was hosting. Most of the time I was happy to make her case, but lately my own position with Sanyogita was not what it had once been. While I had been distracted with Aakash and then Zafar, I had moved slowly from being one of the people Sanyogita considered on her side, to one of the people she viewed with suspicion.

  It had begun the night Aakash pushed her over; the summer of boredom and flight had not helped; the two dinners, at the Oberoi and at my mother’s, had made things still worse; and my general state of preoccupation prevented me from seeing many opportunities for repair. She was someone in whom these emotions percolated slowly, but once a definite shift had occurred, a reversal would have required the full use of my emotional energies.

  And these were divided. In the period when Megha had been abducted to the lipo clinic, and Aakash was organizing the jagran in his colony, he made great emotional demands on me. I saw him nearly every day, Junglee aside, spoke to him two or three times and received countless text messages. He had become a master of the text message. In his bad, broken English, he always succeeded in expressing some forceful emotion or plan that would change the course of my day. There was also a powerful sexual tone to these messages. I might be sitting with Sanyogita, the heater yawning in front of us, and my phone would beep. Sanyogita, now wise to the fact that 90 per cent of these messages were from Aakash, would get up or look away. The moment would be spoiled for her. Still worse was the suppressed expression of amusement on my face.

  Going against all her high notions of privacy, she would ask, though feigning boredom, ‘What does he say now?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing,’ I would reply, still smiling.

  She would press me; I would try and laugh it off; she would become agitated and we would have a fight. ‘If it’s nothing, why can’t you tell me what it is?’ she’d ask.

  ‘Because it’s just the principle of it,’ I would reply half-heartedly. ‘I don’t ask you what Ra says in his text messages.’

  ‘Yes, but the point is that we don’t have these fights about Ra, do we?’

  ‘We might if I was to start hounding you in this way.’

  An acid silence would fall over the room. I would think back to the message, seeking solace in the playful mood in which it was sent. The message might say: ‘Arse bandit.’ How Aakash had learned that expression, or come to find it amusing enough to put it in a message, without any provocation, and send it to me, I don’t know. But it was part of a string of messages of this kind. The first, literally the first, after I told him I had a new Nokia, was, ‘It’s lost its virginity to me, that phone will never be the same.’ A few days later he wanted me to have lunch with him. When I said that I would have loved to but couldn’t, as I was meant to be having lunch with Sanyogita, he wrote at 21.39: ‘That is going to be your problem, for you have to be with Sanyogita. All I can suggest is that we make a concoction like you wouldn’t believe for her which knocks her out for a couple of days.’ The next day he told me he’d spoken to Megha and that, though they could only speak for a few minutes, she was fine and would be back soon; the lipo had made a great difference. He also said that when she was back, he was going to make her have lunch with Sanyogita on the days when he wanted to have lunch or a drink with me alone. I replied, referring to Megha’s condition, ‘Good to hear it,’ to which he, at 14.49, while I was still at lunch with Sanyogita, replied, ‘I thought you might like that. I told her that she’d better start making friends with Sanyogita if she wanted our relationship to progress.’ Then at 14.53, four minutes later, ‘What if they end up fucking each other?’

  And it was in this way that Aakash began to excite a fresh tension in our friendship. I knew from the start that it was only his vanity declaring itself in new and corrosive ways. He liked now to speak of bisexuals and metrosexuals, sometimes confusing the two, but like his ‘messy look’, it was really just a part he was trying out. It gave him an illusion of privilege and indulgence. And he always needed his audience. We would come back after an afternoon of drinking – we drank a lot in those days – and he would stand behind me, as Sanyogita lay on a sofa reading, and begin massaging my shoulders. In the mirror in front of me, I could see a large potted fern, the white sofa on which Sanyogita lay and Aakash in a small, tight T-shirt, the afternoon light striking the vein-like muscles in his arms, making golden their pale inner portion. If Sanyogita ignored the tension of the three-way scene, he would say, ‘Bhabi, do you massage him? Do you treat him well? You know, he needs it.’ Sanyogita then either played along or laughed it off, but I could see that her eyes shone painfully. I would shrug off Aakash’s attentions, and he would drift around the room, lightly fingering the bookshelves or picking up and closely inspecting an objet. Till just the other day, any mention of homosexuality had appalled him. He had once said to me, like with the Muslims, that they must be killed off. But now again, like a preparation for a future life, he tried out a new self.

  It was in this period, walking one day in Lodhi Gardens, that I ran into Megha’s brother, Kris, the creative writer. The park was full of early-evening mists and bougainvillea. The number of walkers had multiplied with the cool weather, and the hurried fall of evening seemed to correspond with their eagerness to go home and dress for the endless engagements, weddings and card parties whose fairy lights filled the trees.

  I had come around a shaded corner of the park when I saw him, pulled along by a basset sniffing the cold, moist earth. His thin figure, and the round hardness of his collarbones and wrists, were visible through the T-shirt and light, V-neck sweater he wore. Because I knew him through his short story, and saw him now almost magically in the story’s setting, I had no trouble recognizing him. It was as if he had always been there. But then what I knew of him beyond the fiction, here from Megha and Aakash, there from Ra, returned to me. I remembered that he was Megha’s brother, that he didn’t live in this part of town, and thought it strange that he would have brought his basset from Sectorpur, nearly an hour away, to walk him here.

  These thoughts rose so fast in my mind that their very momentum made me blurt out his name as he passed. He looked up; his eyes, set deep in their dark sockets, were wide and expressionless. A faint smile rose to his lips.

  ‘Aatish?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He held out a large dark hand.

  ‘How are you?’ I said, taking it in mine; it was slightly damp. ‘I haven’t seen you around for a while. Do you still go to Junglee?’

  He replied, ‘Me? Yes, I’m fine. Junglee, you said?’ Then laughing awkwardly, he added, ‘Yeah, I still go to Junglee, but at a different time, and so that’s why you haven’t probably seen me around. And you? All well there?’

  His speech, though still American, had more Indian rhythms than I remembered.

  ‘Yes. Fine, fine.’

  ‘Good, good.’ He smiled.

  An uncomfortable silence settled round us.

  ‘Well then, chalo, I’ll see you around.’

  ‘Yes, Kris, definitely.’

  We were about to part. His basset, after panting patiently at our feet, had stood back up on his heavy paws when I said, ‘Kris, actually, do you have a moment?’

  ‘Yes, yes, why not?’ he said, with some satisfaction. ‘Why don’t you walk with me? Beyoncé here won’t let us stand in one place and talk.’

  ‘Beyoncé?’

  He laughed. ‘My sister named her.’

  Beyoncé had now picked up a sce
nt, and nose down, waddled forward, her ears dancing about her.

  ‘Kris, actually… it’s your sister,’ I began, ‘that I’d like to talk to you about. You know I’m a friend of Aakash’s.’

  ‘I know,’ he replied.

  Then I wasn’t sure what to say.

  ‘I hear your family’s very upset about their relationship.’

  ‘Well, thank God my parents don’t know anything about it. But yes, us brothers and sisters are naturally very upset. She’s compromising all our futures over this low-grade person who’s only after our money.’

  I began to see now for the first time how Megha and Kris were brother and sister. His entire language, even his facial expressions, changed as he spoke about Aakash. The creative-writing language of the short story fell away. He made grammatical errors in his speech, almost as if a different language was needed for the different values expressed.