Screeching and pushing, the people who had surrounded them were now replaced by a new bunch of people, with new noses, new brows and new eyes.
Approaching the hospital on foot, Madhubani broke into a run saying, ‘We’re getting late!’
Clutching their blue suitcase, Sohanlal shouted to her to go slow, and fell back as she ran ahead, moving as if in slow motion. Keeping his eyes on his daughter, he said, ‘Go get your name registered!’
Having given her name, Madhubani came out again, and seeing her father sitting on top of the suitcase on the footpath mopping his neck with a kerchief, she signalled to him that there was time, and he shouldn’t worry.
‘If we have time, you should get something to eat. You haven’t had anything this morning, Madhu,’ said Sohanlal. Both of them walked slowly towards the hospital canteen.
Hospital canteens have a uniquely mellow atmosphere. The kind of greedy anticipation found in regular restaurants and canteens, the subconscious smile with which an expectant customer greets the waiter bearing a tray on which rests a dosa or a large puri – you didn’t see that here. What you saw were people filling thermoses for the patients under their care, grabbing a quick bite while wondering anxiously whether the duty doctor might come around when they were away in the canteen.
Madhubani ordered a dosa. At the table across from her was a good-looking young man who seemed to have been sitting there for some time.
‘Is it good?’ he asked her.
For a while she could not figure out what he was referring to. Then she understood and said, ‘Yes, it’s good.’
‘Then I’ll have one too,’ he said, calling the waiter.
The young man turned to them and asked: ‘Quiz?’ His shining eyes seemed to dull a little when they stretched while asking a question. His easy posture suggested that he had been in the hospital environment for a long time. ‘Who’s your guest on the quiz today? I heard that yesterday Shah Rukh Khan had come. The kids in our ward were talking about him. There was a rumour that he’d come into the children’s wards, but the poor things waited in vain all day.’ Then as if wondering whether his listeners were getting tired of his quick speech, the man changed his tone a little: ‘What’s the prize? A trip to the Taj Mahal or kilos of chocolate?’
Sohanlal suddenly said: ‘Will they give us cash instead of the prize if we ask them?’
The young man pointed to the board behind the canteen payment counter which read in English ‘No Credit, Only Cash’ and said, ‘Oh, you’re taking that board very seriously!’ He started laughing. Madhubani knew that her father would not like this. Perhaps at another time and in another place she too would have been irritated. But because of his hospital gown, the young man’s behaviour appeared both simple and tolerable.
‘Now you have to answer my quiz. You’ll have four options. Don’t be afraid. The first question: What is my name? Answers to choose from: A. Santanam, B. Joy, C. Buddhooram, D. Makarand. Come on! Your time starts now. Don’t think too much about it. Just tell me the answer…’ He started making the tick-tick-tick sound of a clock.
Madhubani began to think in earnest. She began to compare the names with what she perceived as the man’s nature. She was in the tenth standard. The man was probably about ten years older than her. This sharp-looking man could not possibly be called Buddhooram! With his sparkling eyes and long fingers, the name Santanam didn’t suit. (Hurry up – your time is nearly up!) Joy somehow sounded either like the name of an ice cream or a tailor shop. This person, eating his dosa rather delicately in his blue uniform, had to be called Makarand. So she said, ‘Option D. Makarand.’
‘Oh no! Sorry, my name is Buddhooram. Truly,’ said the young man.
Sohanlal got up hurriedly. Madhubani said with some disappointment, ‘Your name can’t be Buddhooram.’
‘Why not? People call me Buddhoo affectionately. Don’t you like it?’
The man reached out to pick up a white paper napkin from the table, made a tiny boat out of it, and handed it to Madhubani. ‘Enjoy your quiz. Quiz questions are to be enjoyed. You see that hospital board there, saying “Enquiry”? No one can enjoy any question that’s asked there. But a quiz is different. It’s like asking in this canteen, “What’s there to eat?” You don’t have to know the answer to enjoy the question. Who knows? By the time you arrive at the answer, the fun would have gone out of it.
‘Okay, I have a request: if Kareena Kapoor comes to your quiz as a guest, please take her autograph for me on this paper boat. I’m crazy about her. She hides the entire universe’s moonlight inside her. That’s why there’s so much darkness around us. But if she smiles … wah! Please dear, get her autograph for me…’
The young man took the bill out of Sohanlal’s hand and said, ‘Please don’t say no. This is on me, with my best wishes.’
As though accepting the hospitality unwillingly, Sohanlal said, ‘Thanks. I hope you get well soon.’
The man shook his hand. Then he stroked Madhubani’s head along the parting and said, ‘If they ask you what disease wipes away one’s memories, the answer is Alzheimer’s.’
By the time she reached the studio with her father, Madhubani’s mind felt cleansed. Who was this Buddhooram? She felt she had just been born, sitting in front of that man, eating her dosa at the canteen table. How immersed he was in what he said!
Sohanlal said, ‘Poor man … he must be very intelligent … see how he’s been struck by disease at such a young age. What did he say it was called? Do you remember? Perhaps you’ll get a question on it.’
Madhubani felt bad that they had both assumed the young man had this disease when all he had been doing was perhaps giving them information about it. Buddhooram’s hair was very short. Was that because of the style he had adopted, or because of the medicines he was taking? His face seemed brighter because of the short hair.
The studio was boiling over. The parents in the audience were being ordered about, and arranged according to their height and colour of clothing. ‘You in the blue shirt, go and sit over there. You, yellow dupatta, come this side.’
Each parent was focusing on the child they had escorted. Madhubani felt her wits desert her under the scorching lights. Buddhooram was right. The entire world was in darkness. All that she had mugged up in the last five months for the quiz – the height of the pyramids, the seals of Mohenjodaro, the weight of the atom bomb that had fallen on Nagasaki – all these were in darkness. The golden girl Kareena Kapoor needed to come there and smile, to scatter her moonlight and save everyone from darkness. Buddhooram hadn’t even asked their names, mused Madhubani. A woman in tight jeans came to the stage and started reading out the regulations. Parents started twitching in their seats, giving a thumbs up sign, or raising a fist, or using other awkward signs to encourage their ward. Since there was a bright light next to Sohanlal, Madhubani couldn’t see his face clearly. There were a couple of giant screens in the room, on which everyone’s face could be seen now and then. Madhubani had chosen her best clothes, starched and ironed them, and put them on in the dirty waiting room at Dadar station. But the journey in the local train had seriously creased her dress, and she felt that everyone else was sparkling in unwrinkled clothes in contrast. But everyone’s face had a sort of fearful, non-human smile, as though to say ‘thus far and no further’.
Madhubani felt like going back to the canteen. In the midst of such pain and suffering and terror, the hospital canteen had seemed such a comforting place. Even the waiters there seemed to have the qualities of a nurse. The sweets in the glass cupboard at the counter didn’t seem incongruous at all. With the awareness of widespread suffering, private hunger and thirst was dealt with in a subdued way in that place. Shouldn’t the world be like that too?
All the lights were now on. In contrast, the areas that were unlit looked even darker. From the dark sea in front came the sound of clapping, wave after wave. The quizmaster, clad in a colourful coat, spoke in spurts with feigned enthusiasm. When he heard Madhubani’
s name, he said, ‘What a beautiful name! Can you tell me what this name is famous for?’
She felt embarrassed to speak about her own name, and debated whether to say anything or not. The candidates on either side of her raised their hands.
‘It’s a form of folk art!’
‘Tribal art,’ they said, to thunderous clapping from the audience.
Madhubani felt like laughing.
Sohanlal was upset that his foolish daughter had not spoken up, even though she knew the answer. It was useless to have bought her a second-hand bicycle when she had entered the tenth standard, he thought.
As Madhubani began to wonder what the quizmaster would have done with Buddhooram’s name if he had been a candidate, the questions started. The sound of the buzzer, the marks going up, the right answer, the wrong answer. Is that a guess? Is it right? Your time begins now … tick … tick … tick…
The quizmaster spoke English in such a convoluted way that Madhubani’s ears buzzed. But she was doing well. Then the quizmaster asked: ‘Madhubani, a special question for you. The Bhopal gas tragedy – in which four thousand people perished – on which date did it happen? It took place after midnight. You don’t have to tell me the time, just the date.
‘Your time begins now. A. September 16, B. August, C…’
Madhubani felt dizzy. She remembered the tragedy – that poison-filled night, the deep silence. Their neighbour Jyotsna Bhabhi and her daughter Sejal were to arrive in Bhopal that night. But the train had passed through the fog of poison, and stood at the station filled with corpses. Those who were running collapsed even as they ran. Those who were alighting from the train fell as they got down. The entire world had fallen silent when the bodies of Jyotsna Bhabhi and the eight-year-old Sejal, wrapped in white cloth, were lifted out of the green tempo. Within seconds the silence was riven by Bhavesh Bhai’s scream as he stroked his wife’s forehead, nose, and face through the white sheet with trembling fingers. And then they had to tear Sejal’s body away from his lap. Bhavesh Bhai had lifted both his hands to the skies and howled…
‘Lights off !’
‘Bring some water here…’
‘Let in some air…’
Madhubani opened her eyes to find herself lying on the sofa in the make-up room. Sohanlal asked her if she wanted some coffee.
‘Cheh, if you had answered this one question you would have won. How many times have I told you to eat properly? How could you forget the day that Jyotsna Bhabhi died?’ he said helplessly.
‘Jyotsna Bhabhi … Sejal—’ said Madhubani through lips that had gone white, as she began to sob.
‘Six years since they left us,’ said Sohanlal. ‘I was the one who took Bhavesh Bhai by the hand and wandered in the hot sun through Gwalior, Jabalpur and Jhansi seeking compensation. I spent my own money doing this … People said I was trying to hoodwink Bhavesh Bhai and grab half the money. He too began to believe it. Then he went off on his own, and after six years he’s still trying to get his relief. I’m the one who should cry, not you. You don’t know what humiliation is. You’d come to the final point. You’d have won this contest…’ There was no gap between his sorrow and his rage.
The quizmaster had come in to change his coat, and Sohanlal said to him, ‘Please give her another chance. We didn’t sleep much on the train coming here. And she didn’t eat properly this morning. That’s why she felt weak. Please, sir. We’ve come with a lot of hope. If she wins this prize, her future education will be taken care of. I want her to do well in life. She’s a very clever girl … but…’
Madhubani squirmed to see her father grovel. He went on: ‘People very close to us died in the Bhopal gas tragedy. Our neighbours. Their dead bodies were brought into our own yard. She’s very sensitive. The moment you said “gas tragedy”, she remembered all that and went blank. She knows that date very well.’
Madhubani covered her face with her hands.
‘Okay, let’s see,’ said the quizmaster. ‘If a candidate fails to show up for the afternoon episode, we can take her. Your daughter’s a smart girl. But if she had given this answer and then fainted, she would have been seen as a brave heroine.’ Laughing a strange laugh meant to win everyone over, the man walked out of the room.
Looking back at his daughter, Sohanlal ran after him.
A strong spotlight from the set was reflected in the mirrors of the make-up room. Along with two of the contestants, their mothers too were changing their clothes. The bulbs in the bracket above shone brightly on the wall of mirrors.
After Jyotsna Bhabhi and Sejal had died, Bhavesh Bhai used to eat his meals in their house. One day during the meal, Sohanlal had said, ‘Either you should believe in me completely, or not at all. There’s no such thing as half-half in trust. Or in honesty. Trust me, or don’t trust me – that’s all.’
After this, Bhavesh Bhai had slowly stopped coming to eat with them. Someone told them that he was now sleeping on the verandah of a city lawyer’s house to make it easier to go to court regularly. From time to time, Madhubani used to be consumed by that silence that couldn’t be shattered, the silence in which the two white-sheeted bodies, one big and one small, were brought down from the green tempo. She could will herself to go into that silence at any time. Once she had gone looking for a lost ball in the deserted field behind her school, and there in the unfamiliar green bushes she had suddenly seen a hundred strange yellow flowers. On that occasion too the deep silence had overcome her – the silence that seemed to underlay all the daily bustle afforded a peculiar kind of comfort. She never felt the urge to come out of it. But on the quiz contest set, someone had shrieked, ‘Silence!’ and the entire set had fallen quiet at once. It wasn’t that kind of silence that Madhubani was accustomed to. The quiz contest silence was not exactly a quiet one. Underneath were all kind of sounds that stuck to the mind like honey bees. The tick-tick sound was one that took your breath away.
Now there were new contestants on the show. A man dressed in a sanyasi’s saffron robes was there to give the prizes away. He was speaking the kind of English one heard in English movies. It was clear that his moustache was dyed. Her father was standing next to a man, his arms folded in a pleading posture. Signalling to him that she would be back in a minute, Madhubani climbed the steps that took her out of the basement.
Outside, there were other sounds. In the narrow lawn in front of the hospital, the relatives of patients were sprawled, one hand under the head, the other holding a newspaper. An assistant director from the TV channel, who had been prowling on the sets with a cap crookedly balanced on her head and scrawling something on a pad, had taken a cigarette break and was puffing away with great concentration as though she was performing pranayama. Except for the Rajasthani women who worked as construction labourers in her hometown, Madhubani had never seen a woman smoke before. Remembering Mona Darling in Hindi movies standing next to the villain with a cigarette in her hand, she saw features of the vamp in the directorial assistant. The cigarette didn’t go with the big bindi on the girl’s forehead, but it did go with her jeans. It didn’t suit her bangles and anklets, but did suit her decisive posture. She was blowing the smoke straight to heaven through the curls on her forehead.
Observing Madhubani staring at her, the girl jumped up and asked: ‘How are you feeling now? Better?’ Then she said: ‘Oh, I shouldn’t smoke here. It’s a hospital, isn’t it?’ She threw away the cigarette, and gave Madhubani a peppermint even as she popped one into her own mouth as she ran inside. Madhubani was pleased at how quickly the vamp had morphed into a heroine. She even liked the faint whiff of smoke clinging to the girl.
As Madhubani moved towards the hospital canteen, people stopped her to ask: ‘Which way is the drugstore?’ ‘Which way is the Emergency Ward?’ ‘Where does one register?’ ‘Will the blood bank be open now?’
There was an information booth nearby, staffed by a woman wearing pink lipstick giving directions in a raised voice. Depending on the clothes of those who approached her, th
e woman’s voice rose and fell accordingly. In the drugstore, people with quavering voices asked questions like ‘Don’t you have a less expensive drug? Wouldn’t it do to take just one injection?’
Those who waited on the bench asked: ‘Was that your daughter who stayed here last night?’
‘Will your patient be discharged tomorrow?’
‘Has your son taken leave from office?’
There was a strange way in which to answer these questions – to unburden oneself. But inside, under the spotlights, the questions were:
‘What is this strain of penicillin called?’
‘Is euthanasia legal in India?’
‘Which Indian Olympic medallist is today living in a Kolkata slum?’
Even when Madhubani knew the answers, these questions were terrifying. Here, even if there were no answers, there was no fear. No, she couldn’t go back to the quiz.
As though entering a familiar place, Madhubani went into the canteen. The seat where Buddhooram had been was empty. It was as though he had just gone out and would be back again soon. Although Madhubani wanted to sit at the same table as before, there was already a middle-aged woman there. She seemed like she was quietly drinking a cup of tea, but she was actually sobbing to herself. She kept wiping her cheeks with the tissues on the table, sucking the tea in as though she was breathing intermittently with every sip which fuelled her private journey – like the assistant director who drew in the smoke of her cigarette so intensely. The woman was wetting the tissues with her tears, while Buddhooram had made a boat of the same tissue for Kareena Kapoor’s river of moonlight. Madhubani felt like going up to the woman and sitting close to her, touching her – in Buddhooram’s place.
Sohanlal came looking for his daughter. Shaking her a little, he said, ‘Come on, come on. Eat something. They will call you in for the 4 p.m. session. It was quite a job to persuade that production chap.’
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