Once Upon a Curfew

by Srishti Chaudhary

  ‘Say something to you?’ Rajat asked incredulously. ‘Saying something would be a bit of an understatement, don’t you think?’

  Indu had to agree with that one. ‘Look, I know I’ve gotten you in a bit of an adventure, I’m sorry, but I think things will work out.’

  He shook his head at her, astonishment on his face. ‘Things will work out?! I came here to marry you, and you’re basically taking me on a chor-police chase, with criminals! I don’t even get what’s going on!’

  ‘They are not as criminal as you are making them sound; this is the Emergency, and they have been wrongfully arrested—’

  ‘I don’t know if they have been wrongfully arrested, and I don’t care! There is a man in jail, he must have done something!’

  ‘Can you relax? It’s not like that. Rana is willing to give up the photographs, and then you can see for yourself in these photographs what has been happening all around us in this country! Tell me if clicking that makes them criminals.’

  She stopped talking as they stopped on the side of a road and he put his head in his hands, finally speaking after a couple of minutes of silence. ‘Listen Indu,’ Rajat began again, ‘if you want me to help you, you have to promise me: as soon as this is over, you will end all this madness and focus on the wedding. Can you give me your word?’

  She imagined how Rajat must be feeling. To return after two years, looking forward to meeting the woman whom he was going to marry, and instead, getting dragged into having a fugitive released. In the face of all that, his demand did not seem very unreasonable.

  She nodded.

  In the middle of all this, it seemed like the stupidest question in the world when Indu’s mother asked her when she planned to have the final fitting for her wedding sari. Indu had completely forgotten about it, but said they could do it after the weekend. Her mother was already suspicious, as it was not like Indu to take her clothes lightly. What made her even more curious was when she and Amita spent hours whispering together, discussing the plan.

  Meanwhile, Rana was trying his best to lay his hands on those photographs. He got in touch with everyone they were associated with, which was a task on its own as the people in the movement were, obviously, hard to trace. He disappeared for days at a time, and Indu would then curse herself again for getting into this mess with him. It was a couple of weeks later when Indu met him at Indian Coffee House, where he arrived panting with the promise of some news.

  ‘What?’ she asked, getting up from her chair, ‘Did you get them? The pictures?’

  ‘No,’ he said, still out of breath, ‘but I might just know where he hid them. I got to know that Fawad had visited the safehouse when he reached Delhi—before I arrived!’

  Indu looked at him, confused. ‘The safehouse?’

  ‘The place where I am staying!’ he whispered impatiently. ‘I told you, where people can stay if they wish to remain in the city . . .’

  ‘Oh! Yes. So? What if he went there?’

  ‘I have a hunch he hid the photographs there, right inside the house! I can’t believe I’ve been there all these days and never thought about this!’

  ‘Is it a strong hunch?’ she asked him. Rana nodded.

  ‘Let’s go then,’ she said, getting up immediately.

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘To the safehouse, where else?’

  ‘But . . . Indu, you can’t go there.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s a protected house, nobody apart from the people in the resistance can know about it . . .’

  ‘Listen, mister, haven’t I proven myself loyal enough to know your secrets? You came to me after a year asking for help and I put everything I have in jeopardy to do that. Now you better not tell me where I am and am not allowed.’

  When Rana didn’t reply, Indu got up and told him she would look for Natty.

  ‘No!’ he exclaimed. ‘We definitely can’t take Natty. We can’t have anyone else knowing the location. No, if we have to go, we must do it ourselves . . .’

  * * *

  It was a single-storeyed, yellowing building a little way from a parched, fraying park somewhere in Mehrauli. A board outside it read ‘Shreemati Kamala Devi Organization for Women’.

  ‘That’s it?’ she asked him.

  He nodded.

  She thought she might be missing something. ‘You’re blocking my view with your big head,’ Indu said to Rana as she looked towards the building.

  ‘Well, it’s time your head got used to seeing something other than its own reflection.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I mean, your head should get used to seeing my head, as it’s going to be a-round. Do you get it, ha ha ha?’

  ‘What now?’ she asked him, ignoring his frivolousness.

  Rana suddenly looked very nervous and Indu patted him on the back as he gulped, and finally nodded.

  As they walked towards the building, Rana’s pace quickened, became more purposeful. He held Indu’s hand tightly and glanced around furtively, but the thought of Fawad must have prevailed, for he kept going.

  ‘How many people live inside this safehouse?’ Indu muttered to him.

  ‘Maybe three or four, nobody really knows,’ he said. ‘The thing is, people come and go, and nobody talks to each other. Most of the times I’ve come back, there’s hardly anyone, save for footsteps I hear on the staircase. You aren’t introduced to anyone unnecessarily for the sake of your own safety. You are allowed to stay here only if someone on the inside vouches for you.’

  The sky was a light blue, and the sun shone steadily on the park in front of the building. When they were close to the building’s gate, Rana suddenly stopped and looked at Indu, unsure. ‘Maybe you should stay outside,’ he muttered to her. ‘I’ll try to figure out where Fawad could have hidden the pictures.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Indu hissed. ‘Why do you think I have come all this way? Two eyes are better than one.’

  ‘I have two eyes.’

  ‘I mean two pairs of eyes are better, Rana, don’t—’

  They heard the gate creak as it swung lightly in the wind.

  The iron gate was unlatched and Rana walked in, Indu trailing him. A dusty corridor led them to what seemed like a government office. He pushed open a rickety wooden door to reveal a sad, old room that looked like it hadn’t been inhabited for ages. Cobwebs covered the grimy walls, while old, bent steel almirahs stood against the walls. Files upon files lay on shelves across the walls, gathering dust. Some rocky wooden tables took centre stage, looking surprisingly clean.

  Before Indu could ask anything, Rana was rummaging through his pockets, taking out a set of keys. ‘Come,’ he said to Indu, moving farther into the office, heading towards one of the bookshelves. She followed him, lifting her dupatta so it wouldn’t do the much-needed sweeping that the place required.

  ‘Uh, what are you doing?’ she asked him as he began removing the books from the shelf one by one, and putting them on the table. He didn’t reply and continued removing books, maintaining the order, and finally Indu saw why: behind the books was another door. Rana inserted the key into it, rotating it with a click.

  ‘That’s the safe—’ Indu began, but Rana shushed her. He began putting the books back in the same order, and Indu helped him. He then stepped back and gave the bookshelf a little nudge, unveiling a dingy staircase that Rana immediately moved towards; when Indu didn’t follow him, he looked back at her.

  ‘What?’ he asked her.

  Indu didn’t reply and simply gave him a dubious look.

  ‘Now you take a moment to doubt my intentions?’ he asked incredulously. ‘Come on!’

  The stairs were dark and unlit, leading down to some kind of basement, and Indu felt the wall beside her so as not to trip. When the stairs ended after turning a corner, Indu’s mouth fell open.

  The dust and dinginess of upstairs was suddenly gone. Although the area was dimly lit with lamps only in the corners, Indu saw that righ
t in front of her hung a huge noticeboard. It had many scraps of paper, with messages to one side, and the centre had a layout of the Parliament. The entire surface of the noticeboard was covered with paper, some with slogans written in bold letters, some which seemed to be code words.

  Indu tore her eyes away from the board to see lockers stashed untidily in a corner, stacks of newspapers, a desk on which lay multiple open files, some of which were full of charts and figures. A room from there led into what seemed to be the kitchen. The whole area seemed to be a bit haphazard. On the other side lay a couple of telephones on a desk, along with a typewriter, behind which, on a slab of a wall, lay a transistor. Indu wondered how they kept all this functioning, when Rana interrupted her train of thought.

  ‘Okay, doesn’t look like anyone’s here,’ Rana said in a low voice. ‘All the better for us.’

  ‘What about your Leader—’

  ‘Shh,’ he said, alarmed and looking around. ‘Let’s go to my room, come.’ He grabbed Indu’s hand and pulled her through a labyrinth of shabbily built rooms to step inside a tiny area, no bigger than a storage place or a prayer room, where his bag lay neatly in a corner, next to the mattress where he presumably slept.

  ‘Let’s just try and look for the photographs quickly, okay, without drawing too much attention to ourselves.’

  ‘What about the lockers?’ she asked him.

  Rana shook his head. ‘Somehow, I can’t imagine him giving up these photographs— other people would have access to these lockers. It was our work, you see? No, if they are here, he would have hidden them somewhere hard to find . . .’

  Indu was at a loss. How could they find the photographs in this clutter of a house? She felt a stab of annoyance at Rana. Why did he mention the photographs to Dhar uncle when he didn’t know where they were?’

  It’s my last hand, she remembered him saying.

  They came out of his room and walked further into the corridor, which was lined with paintings, and she wondered how someone had found the time to decorate this place.

  Now that they were here, it seemed ridiculous to Indu that they had gotten themselves in this mess. She had forgotten how it was before Rana had come into her life, and she had thought about him every single day. It wasn’t her fault, she decided. He was the one who had waltzed in uninvited with his poems and paintings, flowers and fancies . . .

  ‘Let’s just start looking around’ he said, ‘and I know we’ll get it.’

  She opened a couple of drawers, going through the sheaves of paper, frequently distracted by the writing on them. Rana too listlessly went through some stuff as the futility of the exercise hit him, and they caught each other’s eye. Indu didn’t want to give up so easily, so she tried hard to think where it was in this place that Fawad could have left the photographs.

  ‘Fawad arrived here from Gujarat,’ Rana was saying to himself, ‘stayed here a couple of days, went outside and then got caught.’

  Her gaze again fell on the paintings on the wall. Indu asked Rana who brought in the paintings and he shrugged, saying they must be possessions of the residents who had been driven away at some point. She stared at the one with the blue lake and white lilies and houseboats. It was beautiful, like the hands had magic: the artist’s hands had magic. She heard a noise and looked immediately at Rana.

  ‘Someone must be coming,’ he said. ‘Don’t act alarmed. Just stay calm, and act like you belong. People come and go frequently.’

  Sure enough, in a couple of minutes, a man dressed shabbily emerged from the corridor and looked at them curiously for a few seconds, then nodded, ducking inside a room and shutting the door behind him. A couple of minutes later, the same man came out again and went back, exiting by the stairs. Rana sighed.

  ‘Look, maybe we should just . . . lie to Dhar uncle, meet Fawad and ask him where . . . I don’t know . . .’ he murmured, but Indu was again staring at the painting with the lake and the lilies, and turned to look at him. He stared quizzically at her for a second, and then lunged for it. She told him to be quieter as he removed it from the wall and turned it around.

  There was nothing on the back of the painting. Indu whispered, ‘How did you not recognize earlier that it was Fawad’s?’

  He shook his head, stunned, and suddenly felt at the back of the painting. He unhinged it, and out fell a package. Rana opened it with quivering hands, and took out a bunch of photographs.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Indu extended her hands towards them, and they quickly saw a couple of pictures. Rana held her by the shoulders.

  ‘Let’s go now, Indu,’ he said, ‘come.’ He led her to his room and picked up his bag, stuffing the photographs inside.

  He grabbed her hand, and they left the room to find another man examining the painting they had just ripped open.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, revealing a set of bad teeth.

  19

  The man had a thin stubble on his head and his face, and a dark complexion. He wore a shirt and a pair of trousers. He smiled at them graciously, leaning against the wall where the painting had hung. Indu thought he seemed like someone who meant business. He examined the dismantled painting and looked up at Rana for an explanation.

  Rana had become very still and refused to look at Indu. ‘Namaste, VP ji,’ he said.

  Indu wondered whether this was the leader; he certainly looked it, with the dark shadow over his face, but he seemed too ordinary, and had an open, welcoming smile.

  ‘Why would you tear this up?’ he asked Rana, glancing occasionally at Indu. ‘And who is our lovely companion?’

  Rana grinned broadly. ‘VP ji, meet Indu . . . uh, my girlfriend.’

  Indu gave Rana a sharp glance; had he forgotten the terms of their deal? VP ji looked pleased, however, and stepped forward to shake her hand.

  ‘But that’s wonderful,’ he said. ‘I’d love to get to know you. We must sit down for a chai!’

  Indu smiled uncertainly and looked at Rana, who nodded and immediately put his bag down. As he put some water to boil on the stove, VP ji sat down opposite Indu on a chair, staring at her with interest.

  ‘Indu,’ VP ji said, his fingers drumming the table, ‘short for . . . Indira?’

  Indu said yes with a weak laugh, and VP ji seemed absolutely delighted, unable to stop smiling in amusement.

  ‘The woman of the moment!’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s perfect that we have you here. You know how much Indiraji would love this place, don’t you?’

  Indu simply laughed, not answering.

  ‘So Rana is your boyfriend?’ he asked her, and Indu looked up at ‘her boyfriend’. He deliberately had his back to her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, fiddling with her dupatta, and then added with an eyeroll, ‘unfortunately.’

  VP ji chuckled and looked fondly at Rana. ‘And you will get married?’

  ‘Of course,’ Rana replied from over the brewing chai. ‘Otherwise what kind of man would I be?’

  VP ji twiddled his fingers and looked at Indu with twinkling eyes. ‘So! Tell me about yourself! What do you do, how did you meet?’

  Indu again looked at Rana with trepidation; she wasn’t sure how much to tell VP ji, again wondering why he had said she was his girlfriend. Probably because they weren’t allowed to bring anyone here unless they trusted them implicitly.

  ‘Well, I met him through a teacher, he helped me set up a library of sorts, and then we got to know each other.’

  ‘Amazing,’ he said, clapping his hands together. ‘He’s very charming, isn’t he?’

  ‘Deceptively so,’ she said.

  Rana grinned from the kitchen, pouring the chai into cups and bringing one each for the three of them.

  ‘So how did you get involved in the resistance?’ VP ji asked, still smiling.

  Indu took an extra large sip of her tea and burnt her tongue as she thought about what to say, and then cleared her throat.

  ‘Well, I heard about Fawad, and have also been hearing about the government’s . . . injustic
es. I am sympathetic to the cause, and eager to learn more about it.’

  VP ji nodded, waiting for her to say more, and when she didn’t, he looked at Rana.

  ‘VP ji,’ he said, leaning towards him over the table, and staring at him with intensity. ‘We are going to get Fawad out.’

  His mouth fell open and he held Rana by the shoulder. ‘Make him escape? From prison?’

  ‘No,’ Rana said in a tone that Indu thought was almost rueful, ‘no, we have something else in mind. We are getting him in a barter.’

  ‘Barter for what?’

  Rana glanced at Indu, and when she didn’t react, went to his bag and retrieved the pictures.

  ‘Here,’ he said, laying the pictures on the table, one next to the other. There were several pictures of the streets: policemen holding up lathis, armed men in cars, a policeman with his gun up in the air, an advertisement that said, ‘Sterilization is the best method of family planning. Incentives: Male—Rs 40, Female—Rs 20’, a man bent over on the ground, people lining up outside a makeshift doctor’s clinic with similar papers in their hands . . .

  ‘Incredible,’ VP ji said, going over them, passing a few to the other man. ‘Yes, I remember Fawad mentioning these. A few other boys also took similar pictures; they are still in Ahmedabad, though. Yours are definitely incredible.’ He turned to Indu and said, ‘This is the kind of work that will bring down the government, Indu. This is what a few of us must do, to undo this tyranny.’

  Rana nodded, holding a picture. ‘We need to let go of these, though, for Fawad.’

  ‘And who is the source? Of the barter? Who is getting him out?’

  Rana looked at Indu, and VP ji nodded. ‘Her father has some connections,’ he said. Indu nodded, knowing that he couldn’t very well say ‘her fiancé’.

  ‘And who is your father?’ VP ji asked mildly.

  Neither Indu nor Rana answered for a few seconds. ‘Ajit Narayan,’ he finally said hesitantly, ‘chief advocate.’