The Temple-goers

by Aatish Taseer

  With this, we sank again into a solemn silence, like two children newly aware of the hard realities of adult life. But neither the silence nor this mood lasted long, as a few minutes later Megha’s grey Hyundai pulled up in front of Sher-e-Punjab.

  ‘Oh my God-d,’ Aakash said, and chuckled with delight at seeing Megha step out of the little car in a pink silken kurta and beige capris. ‘Loddof difference.’

  Megha stood timidly in one spot, smiling up at us, her nose ring catching the light from the restaurant. Aakash trotted down the two steps that stood between them and took her in his arms.

  ‘Come here, and look at my brand-new wife, thin and all,’ Aakash yelled back to me. As I made my way down to them, Aakash was saying, ‘Appu, these lipo people are for real! They’ve pulled off a miracle, no? Sir, whaddyou say?’

  I was dumbstruck.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ I managed. But it was a transparent lie. And Aakash and Megha must have seen it was, because she said angrily, ‘Five litres, they took out, you know!’

  Looking at her, you wouldn’t have known it. There wasn’t an ounce of visible difference. The greasy rolls below her neck were intact; her breasts were still vast; and above the hem of her pink kurta, her stomach still sprawled. I was also puzzled by how, if she had run away from home, she was able to pick up her car. These questions, swarming in my mind, were put temporarily to rest by the appearance of the fat man Aakash had given a ride to. He wanted a ride back. Aakash handed him the bike keys and told him to drive it back to the colony. We would go with Megha.

  In the little Hyundai, with plastic still covering the seats, Megha, perhaps thinking of the experience of the past few days, looked back at me and sighed. ‘Look what trouble your friend causes me. I think he’s going to cause me a lifetime of troubles only.’

  ‘This is just the beginning, my darling,’ Aakash replied stylishly, and leaned in to kiss her.

  In the car, it emerged that although Megha had run away from the lipo clinic, she had not actually run away from home. She had taken advantage of a journey from the lipo clinic to the house of a suitor to give her uncle in Bombay the slip and escape to Delhi.

  ‘I went straight to the airport,’ she said. ‘Thanks God, my father hadn’t cancelled my credit card. So I bought a ticket and came back.’

  She had even gone home, met her family and picked up her car. Her father was angry at first, but then pleased to see his little girl. He had said to her, ‘The problem is you’re too healthy. We’ve tried our best, but I suggest now that even when you go to the market, you try and look nice. You never know where an offer might come from.’ She also added that among the Aggarwals, there had recently been five or six love marriages. ‘Then there is the age factor and that I have had lipo. The doctor told my parents that I should wait six months before getting married. I’m twenty-six, running twenty-seven. So if I wait three months, twenty-seven will be complete. All this makes me feel that my parents will now be willing to hear my choice.’

  Hearing this, Aakash leaned over and kissed her, softly whispering, ‘Appu.’ Then abruptly: ‘What did you tell them before coming here?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Megha replied jauntily. ‘Just that I was sleeping the night at my friend’s house.’

  As we drove into the colony, past the community centre, Megha asked me how the food had been.

  ‘Very good,’ I replied.

  ‘You would say that. But it must not have been “very good” because not many are eating.’

  ‘What are you talking,’ Aakash exploded, ‘we’ve fed some six hundred.’

  ‘Oh, so you’re counting,’ Megha said, and laughed.

  We returned to find that the power was back and the jagran was beginning. Bejewelled women, clutching their saris, rushed towards the tent. Aakash ran upstairs to try on the kurta Megha had designed and stitched for him in the lipo clinic. As the two of us waited downstairs, Megha explained her family’s position. ‘Now, if my father is going to spend two crore on the wedding, then at least the husband should be making fifty lakhs monthly. No?’ Aakash, I knew – though still a huge amount for a trainer – made only sixty thousand a month: a tenth of that amount.

  ‘I know!’ Megha cried. ‘Now what to do? Every day my mother comes to me and says, “Such and such person has had a son. And her husband went out and came back with a tempo full of stuffs. Refrigerator, microwave, laptop, jewellery, saris – you name it, he bought it.” Imagine how I feel, thinking when I have a son, who will go out and buy a tempo full of stuffs?’ She spoke with such feeling, her eyes beginning to glisten, that it was hard to believe she was talking about electronics and home appliances.

  During this sharing of intimacies, I came out with something that had first occurred to me in the car. I had wanted to tell Megha and Aakash then, but had been prevented by some inexplicable feeling of loyalty. But now, fully won over by the cause of their marriage, I told Megha about my accidental meeting with her brother in Lodhi Gardens.

  ‘That bloody homo,’ she whispered viciously, ‘let him try. Kill me? I’ll make keema out of him and each of his little yellow-fingered friends.’

  And though it had seemed a real threat at the time, returning now as an echo from Megha’s lips, it seemed absurd. Of the two, she was without a doubt the more unsinkable. She muttered angrily to herself for a few moments, and then, as if it were too much for her to contain, started yelling, ‘Aakash! Aakash! Listen to what Aatish is telling me my fajjot brother has been saying.’

  ‘Megha, no, listen,’ I said quickly, ‘don’t tell Aakash.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He’ll just get worked up over it. And there’s no knowing what he might do.’

  I wasn’t sure myself why I didn’t want him to know. I think, bizarre as it might sound, that I had a superstitious fear of his dormant Brahmin’s powers.

  And perhaps some of my nervousness was felt by Megha too, because when Aakash appeared, bare-chested on his balcony, having heard her voice but not what was actually said, she didn’t repeat herself.

  ‘Bas, nothing,’ she said, ‘we’re coming up.’ She gestured to me to follow her and marched up the stairs. At the first landing, in part perhaps from fatigue, she swung around and said, ‘And by the way, one other thing. My father, he doesn’t know that that brother of mine is a chakka.’ She used the Hindi word for hitting a six in cricket, which also meant eunuch, and flicked her wrist effeminately. ‘But he’s got a pretty good idea. If he finds out, he’ll not just cut him out of the will, he will also kill that half-starved gandu.’ With this, she swung back around and climbed the remaining steps.

  In the now empty flat, Aakash walked around in his towel, his hair wet and messy. His nipples were small and high, and his body, expansive and well made. We followed him to the end of the flat, past cluttered sideboards where a telephone table, tooth mug and bedclothes were stacked close together. The kurta, a VIP kurta with a gold and white collar, lay on his bed. Aakash vanished, only to reappear a moment later in just a pajama, the drawstring hanging out.

  ‘Tie it, no?’ he said to Megha, seeming to enjoy the execution of this intimate gesture in my presence. Then he put on the kurta over the grey vest he always wore and experimented with hairstyles, messy, the eighties, which Megha vetoed instantly, settling in the end for something in between.

  Megha looked adoringly at him and said, ‘Aakash, you’re looking very black today.’

  Aakash looked hard at himself and replied, ‘Appu! Why do you say such things! It’s because I haven’t slept. You know, whenever my sleep is incomplete, I look blacker.’ Then scrutinizing his reflection, he added, ‘Actually, I’m not looking black. It’s your imagination. Sir, am I looking black?’

  ‘No,’ I replied.

  Megha glowered at me, then smiled and produced some of the other things she had made for him from the green metal cupboard.

  ‘Pure linen,’ she said, showing me a short-sleeved shirt with many little pockets and straps, ‘and all for rupees fi
ve hundred. If you went to Giovanni, the same thing would be two thousand. No point spending too much on a kurta because he never wears it.’

  ‘I never wear it,’ Aakash confirmed, still fixing his hair and applying deodorant.

  ‘Then why to waste money?’ Megha said. ‘This way even if he wears it five times, it’s only rupees hundred each time.’

  Downstairs, the tent was almost full. We made our way towards the stage, passing armies of children sitting cross-legged on the floor beside women in bright, hot synthetics. There was a smell of warmth in the tent, but it was not unpleasant. Aakash went to the front of the crowd and began ushering people backwards to make room. He was like a hero among the children, whom he would pick up and swing back, or run at, stamping his feet, causing them to shriek, laugh and retreat. The rest of his family sat solemnly on a white podium – Amit’s wife, the ‘sharp one’, had a pink mobile phone tucked between her legs – where a young boy had begun chanting in Sanskrit into a mike. He was identifying where the ceremony was being performed, beginning with Jambudvip, India, Isle of the Jambul tree, and zooming in on Bharatvarsh, Delhi, and finally, the little colony where we were.

  ‘What’s the name of this place?’ he asked, hardly taking a breath.

  ‘Chitrakut,’ the others answered in one voice.

  ‘Chitrakut,’ he repeated, working it into his incantations.

  He was dark-skinned, with a pubescent moustache and pinkish lips. There was a confidence, bordering on a glint in the eye, about him. I thought it came from an awareness of his own fluency, the knowledge that, despite his youth, he uttered powerful things effortlessly, filling the people around him with admiration. As the prayers continued, the senior priest took over and his apprentice began going through the crowd, tying orange threads to our wrists.

  At that moment, the master of ceremonies for the evening appeared. He was a great fat man in an off-white shirt with gold rings on his fingers and a gold medallion of Kali around his neck. His teeth were bright orange from eating pan, and like a cross between an Elvis impersonator and an evangelist, he reminded me of medieval friars in Europe, rotund and jovial, with a hint of corruption about him. As people stood close to the durbar, all holding their hands over the pyramid of lamps, a knotted red thread covered in butter and oil was set aflame. Ghee and fire dripped from it. And it was with this oily fire-dropping thread that the MC lit the central lamp. From its flame, men who had been crouched round the podium began lighting the other 107 lamps. Soon they were all flickering contentedly in the light breeze that came through the tent. The MC, who hadn’t said a word so far, now yelled into the mike, ‘Victory to the true durbar!’

  ‘Victory to the true durbar!’ the congregation yelled back.

  The MC’s orange teeth gleamed and he began taking donations, speaking the donor’s name into the mike and blessing him in public.

  Aakash and Megha were in line to receive the blessing. Directly behind them stood Amit and his ‘sharp’ wife. Everything was going smoothly until the MC leaned forward and seemed to ask Megha something. Megha took a moment to answer, but when she did, Amit’s wife, now sharper than ever, gasped aloud, ‘How can one lie in the presence of the goddess?’ Aakash’s face went pale even as Megha’s burned with anger. She swung around and there was a loud exchange between the two women, which spilled over into a fight between Aakash and Megha. Aakash seemed to be trying to cool the situation, but soon there was an opening in the crowd and Megha charged out, tears of rage streaming down her face. Aakash dived out behind her and the crowd closed again.

  In the meantime, the MC, who had a powerful singing voice, launched into a devotional song, raising his hands over his head and clapping. The pyramid of lamps burned brightly behind him, the colourful mountains shone in the halogen light, and soon the tent-full of people were clapping along and joining him in the song, stopping only to say, ‘Victory to the true durbar.’ It was eleven thirty.

  I always knew that I wouldn’t have lasted the night. Within an hour of the singing beginning, my bottom began to hurt and my feet fell asleep. I tried wiggling my toes, but it made no difference. The feeling would subside, only to return with greater force. My restlessness was heightened by Aakash, now with a red and gold Om scarf around his neck, coming in and out of the tent with an expression of deep worry darkening his face. So after another ten minutes of song and hand-raising, I slipped out into the cool night with its spokes of yellow street light. Uttam sat on a chair with his shirt open in the dark. I went up to him and said that we should leave. Aakash was standing near the tent. When I told him I was taking a break but would come back, he said, ‘You’re going now? Fine, go. Looks like everyone is letting me down tonight.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘What’s the point of telling you? You’re leaving, what help can you be to me?’

  ‘Where’s Megha?’

  ‘Does it look as though I know?’

  He was like a man who had been struck at by his superior and was now striking down at the man below him. But I had been too low on this food chain for too long and I was beginning to tire of it. I had only myself to blame; I had allowed, I had welcomed my own diminishing. My belief that Aakash could rescue me from being an outsider in India had led me into a kind of self-effacement. The place had been so strong and yet out of reach that now that it felt nearer I wished it to wash over me, even as Aakash wished to define himself against it. But that night I felt my own particularity acutely, and tired of the crowds, and of Aakash’s antics, I questioned him no further. I promised to return, but he didn’t seem interested. It was from his father that I learned that I should return at three thirty a.m., when the story would begin. With this, I left.

  21

  When I returned at four a.m., Megha had returned too and the night was entering its second phase. Aakash still stood at the wings where part of the tent flapped open. The anger he had shown me earlier had gone and tiredness like that of a child, joined with some feeling of satisfaction, had taken its place. The red in his eyes brought out their mud colour. Seeing me walk up, his father, standing near Aakash, said, ‘He’s come at just the right moment.’ Aakash seemed pleased to see me and rested his elbow on my shoulder. Megha sat at the other end of the tent with the women of Aakash’s family. Their fight, Aakash explained, had been caused by the MC asking Megha and Aakash whether they had come as a married couple. Megha, feeling she could not lie in the presence of the goddess, had replied, ‘Yes,’ and Aakash’s sister-in-law had overheard. Aakash said that he had tried to cool the situation, but Megha felt he was letting her down. She had apparently got back into her car and driven home. Aakash had had to bring her back in person; and he was now worried that members of her family had discovered where she was. ‘Tonight’s final,’ he kept saying in English. An uneasy peace prevailed between Aakash and Megha, and its mood was mirrored on stage by two children, in liver-coloured satin, playing Krishna and Radha in a pageant of sorts.

  The boy wore a black matted wig with painted sideburns and heavy make-up. There was something dark and tantalizing about his exposed armpit hair, seeming to emphasize his adolescence. The girl was plump and well formed, with a reddish-brown dupatta falling from a bun at the top of her head. They had a confrontational relationship, now dancing, now sulking, sometimes they were making up, sometimes she was attacking him with a rolling pin. His favourite expression was an appeal to the crowd, a stunned wide-eyed expression seeming to say, ‘Isn’t she mad?’ before retaliating himself. She never looked at the crowd, more like a soap opera wife than Krishna’s consort. There was a lot of Bollywood-style dancing, which ended with a freeze in godly postures. It was at this point that Sudama appeared.

  A group of colony boys had collected at one side of the stage, slouched on chairs, laughing and hanging on to one another. One of them said, as though he’d seen it many times before, ‘This is really something to watch.’ Aakash suddenly became protective of me, and taking me by the hand, led me to one sid
e of the tent, away from the blaring speaker. He gestured to me to sit down, then sat next to me. I felt, as I had many times with him, that in his moments of self-doubt and trouble, he rehabilitated himself through his friendship with me. In these moments he was tender, giving, eager to please, as if my approval could restore him to his normal levels of self-confidence.

  A boy with a broken tooth and a thin, expressive face appeared on stage. He wore simple white clothes and his hair was tied with red rubber bands in a long cone. He was Sudama, Krishna’s childhood friend who falls into poverty. Barely able to feed his family, he goes looking for Krishna, who has by then become the King of Dwarka. But when he arrives at his doorstep, the guards prevent this near beggar from going in.

  Standing outside a make-believe door, the teenage Sudama began singing a moving song, which at times had the audience in tears. Calling Krishna by all his different names, he sang, ‘Murli vala, your memory would trouble me, my faith in you must not break.’ In the end, he seemed to have succeeded in informing Krishna that he was standing outside his door, because Krishna, having dropped his godly freeze, now rushed out, and taking the broken Sudama in his arms, fell to the ground and began washing his feet. At this moment, Aakash, with tears in his eyes, put his hand behind my neck, massaging it as he once had at the Begum of Sectorpur’s. Forever able to see himself in exalted scenarios, whether it be Bollywood or Dwarka, he said, ‘Remember?’

  ‘Remember what?’ I said, not wishing to let him down.

  ‘Remember the time when I washed your feet?’

  On stage, Krishna had brought Sudama into his palace and had seated him on his wooden throne with its red felt fabric. Radha had seen this and was enraged. But Krishna by this point had had enough of her and pushed her aside. Some great tension was expressed here, but it wasn’t clear what. The colony boys were both riveted, and judging by their scornful howling, repelled by Sudama’s story. It was easy to imagine how these Indian stories glorifying poverty were not always pleasing to them, easy to see how they were at once familiar and something young people, especially, were a little tired of.