Q & A

by Vikas Swarup

  We are still in the commercial break.

  Prem Kumar leans forward and whispers to me, ‘Let me tell you what the next question is going to be. I will ask you what FBI stands for. You have heard of this organization, haven’t you?’

  ‘No.’ I shake my head.

  He grimaces. ‘I knew it. Look, we would like you to win at least a little more money. I can change the question for something else. Tell me quickly, are there any abbreviations you are familiar with?’

  I think for a while before replying. ‘I don’t know about FBI, but I know INRI.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s what’s written on top of a cross.’

  ‘Oh! OK, let me check my data bank.’

  The commercial break ends. The signature tune comes on.

  Prem Kumar turns to me. ‘I am curious, Mr Ram Mohammad Thomas, as to your religion. You seem to have all the religions in your name. Tell me, where do you go to pray?’

  ‘Does one have to go to a temple or a church or a mosque to pray? I believe in what Kabir says. Hari is in the East, Allah is in the West. Look within your heart, and there you will find both Ram and Karim.’

  ‘Very well said, Mr Thomas. It looks like you are an expert on all religions. And if that is the case, the next question should be fairly easy for you. OK, here it comes, question number two for two thousand rupees. What is the sequence of letters normally inscribed on a cross? Is it a) IRNI, b) INRI, c) RINI or d) NIRI? Is the question clear, Mr Thomas?’

  ‘Yes,’ I reply.

  ‘OK. Then let’s hear your reply.’

  ‘The answer is B. INRI.’

  ‘Are you absolutely, one hundred per cent sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  There is a crescendo of drums. The correct answer flashes.

  ‘Absolutely, one hundred per cent correct! You have just won two thousand rupees.’

  ‘Amen,’ I say.

  A BROTHER’S PROMISE

  You should take a good look at all sides of an issue before making a decision. Put something away in case of an emergency. New neighbours will bring good cheer. A small problem may occur at home base, but you will solve it quickly and correctly. Don’t offer smart advice unless you are really asked to comment.

  This is what the daily horoscope in the Maharashtra Times has predicted today for those who are Capricorns like me, born in the last week of December.

  I don’t read the Maharashtra Times. In fact, I don’t read any newspaper. But I occasionally pilfer a copy from Mr Barve’s rubbish bin. It is useful for stoking the fire in the kitchen, and sometimes, when I have nothing else to do, I flip through its pages as a time pass before they are reduced to ash.

  I also don’t believe in horoscopes. If I did, I should be dead by now, as per the prediction made by Pandit Ramashankar Shastri. But today’s daily horoscope does appear to contain a kernel of truth. New neighbours are moving into the room next door and there is indeed a small problem at home base.

  We have just returned from the matinée at Regal Talkies and Salim is in a blind rage. He is tearing down all the posters of Armaan Ali which have adorned the walls of our small room for nearly three years. The poster of Armaan in a leather jacket has been torn to shreds. Armaan on a motorbike has been dismembered with a knife. Armaan with his shirt off, baring his hairy chest, is now in the bin. Armaan with a gun has been diced into tiny pieces and Armaan and his horse have both been roasted over the fire. With all the posters gone, our room, with just two beds, is suddenly looking even more bare than before, and the mildew patches on the whitewashed walls are no longer hidden.

  Despite the warning in the daily horoscope, I cannot resist offering some smart advice to Salim. ‘Do you now realize the truth of what I told you ten months ago, when you were busy trying to fix Armaan’s relationship with Urvashi? I told you not to poke your nose into other people’s affairs, or make other people’s troubles your own. Remember this as a lesson for the future.’

  Salim hears me sullenly as he stomps on the poster of Armaan in a pool surrounded by a bevy of beauties.

  I hear footsteps and voices outside the room. It looks as if the new tenants are finally moving into the room next to ours. I am excited. It is always good to meet new people. I hope the new tenants have boys of my age. Putul and Dhyanesh are good company, but they rarely get permission from their parents to come and play with me on Sundays, which is the only day I don’t have to go to work. Ajay, the show-off, is also getting on my nerves. He made fun of me in front of the whole chawl when I told him I had joined a foundry. I know working in a foundry is not half as exciting as working for a film star, but at least it is better than sitting in the street.

  After the time I spent with the actress Neelima Kumari, living in her flat, I had almost forgotten life in a chawl. A bundle of one-room tenements occupied by the lower-middle classes, chawls are the smelly armpit of Mumbai. Those who live here are only marginally better off than those who live in slums like Dharavi. As Mr Barve told me once, the rich people, those who live in their marble and granite four-bedroom flats, they enjoy. The slum people, who live in squalid, tattered huts, they suffer. And we, who reside in the overcrowded chawls, we simply live.

  Living in a chawl does have certain advantages. What happened to Neelima Kumari would never happen here, because in a chawl everyone knows everything that is going on. All the residents have a common roof over their heads and a common place where they shit and bathe. The residents of the chawl may not meet each other for social occasions, but they have to meet while standing in a queue outside the common lavatories. In fact, it is rumoured that Mr Gokhale met Mrs Gokhale while waiting outside the latrine and fell in love. They got married within a month.

  There is no chance of my falling in love with any girl in the chawl. They are all fat and ugly, not even remotely like my favourite actress, Priya Kapoor. Besides, they all like stupid things like dolls and cannot play any decent games like boxing and kabaddi. Not that I get much time to play these games. The whole day I work at the foundry, returning only at six in the evening. And smelting metal is a tough job. The molten iron smothers you with its heat and your eyes are often blinded by the bright-orange flames.

  ‘Thomas!’ I hear a voice. It is Mr Ramakrishna, the administrator of the chawl, calling me. He is a very important man. We go to Mr Ramakrishna whenever the bulb goes out or the water pressure becomes low. We beg Mr Ramakrishna when we don’t have enough money to pay the monthly rent. We have been after Mr Ramakrishna to repair a section of the first-floor wooden railing which has become weak and wobbly and poses a safety hazard.

  I come out of the room and see Mr Ramakrishna standing with a short, middle-aged man who frowns and looks as though he has not gone to the toilet for a long time. ‘Thomas, meet Mr Shantaram. He is our new tenant, who will be staying in the flat next to yours. I have told Mr Shantaram that you are a very responsible boy, so please help him and his wife and daughter settle down. OK, Mr Shantaram, I will now take my leave.’

  ‘Oh no,’ I think to myself. ‘No boys.’ I try to see his wife and daughter, but only catch a fleeting glimpse of a woman with grey hair, and a girl, older than me, with long black hair tied back, sitting on the bed. Shantaram sees me peering into his flat and hastily closes the front door.

  ‘What do you do?’ I ask Shantaram.

  ‘I am a scientist, an astronomer. You won’t understand. But these days I am taking a break. I am working as the sales manager in the Vimal showroom. This room here is a very temporary arrangement. We will be shifting to a de luxe apartment in Nariman Point very soon.’

  I know Mr Shantaram is lying. Those who can afford to live in Nariman Point never stay in chawls, not even temporarily.

  The walls of the rooms inside the chawl are very thin. If you put your ear against the common wall and concentrate hard or, even better, if you put an inverted glass against the wall and put your ear against it, you can listen to almost everything going on in the next room. Salim and
I do this often with our neighbours on the left, whose room adjoins our kitchen wall. Mr and Mrs Bapat are not a young couple any more. It is rumoured that Mr Bapat even beats Mrs Bapat, but they obviously make up at night because Salim and I often hear their heavy breathing and panting, their ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’, and we snicker.

  I adjust a stainless-steel cup against the wall adjoining Mr Shantaram’s room and bury my ear in it. I can hear Shantaram speaking.

  ‘This place is nothing less than a black hole. It is totally beneath my dignity to be staying here, but just for the sake of you two, I will endure this humiliation till I get a proper job. Listen, I don’t want any of the street boys to enter the house. God knows what hell holes they have come from. There are two right next to us. Rascals of the highest order, I think. And Gudiya, if I catch you talking to any boy in the chawl, you will receive a hiding with my leather belt, understood?’ he thunders. I drop the cup in panic.

  Over the next couple of weeks, I hardly see Shantaram and I never see his wife or daughter. She probably goes to college every day, but by the time I return home from the foundry, she is inside her house and the door is always firmly shut.

  Salim doesn’t even notice that we have new neighbours. He hardly gets any spare time from his work as a tiffin delivery boy. He wakes up at seven in the morning and gets dressed. He wears a loose white shirt, cotton pyjamas and puts a white Nehru cap on his head. The cap is the badge of identification of all dabbawallahs in Mumbai, and there are nearly five thousand of them. Over the next two hours he collects home-cooked meals in lunch boxes from approximately twenty-five flats. Then he takes them to the Ghatkopar local train station. Here the tiffins are sorted according to their destination, each with colour-coded dots, dashes and crosses on the lids, and then loaded on to special trains to be delivered promptly at lunch time to middle-class executives and blue-collar workers all over Mumbai. Salim himself receives tiffins by another train, which he delivers in the Ghatkopar area after deciphering the dots and dashes which constitute the address. He has to be very careful, because one mistake could cost him his job. He dare not hand over a container with beef to a Hindu, or one with pork to a Muslim or one with garlic and onions to a Jain vegetarian.

  It is nine at night. Salim is flipping through the pages of a film magazine. I am kneeling on my bed with my left ear inside a stainless-steel cup held to the wall. I hear Shantaram speaking to his daughter. ‘Here, Gudiya, see through the eyepiece. I have adjusted the telescope now. Can you see the bright-red object in the middle? That is Mars.’

  I whisper to Salim, ‘Quick, get a cup. You must hear this.’

  Salim also glues his ear to the wall. Over the next thirty minutes, we listen to a running commentary on the state of the sky. We hear about stellar constellations and galaxies and comets. We hear about the Great Bear and the Little Bear. We hear of something called the Milky Way and the Pole Star. We learn about the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter.

  Listening to Shantaram, I am filled with a strange longing. I wish I too had a father who would teach me about stars and planets. The night sky, which till now was just a big black mass to me, suddenly becomes a place of meaning and wonder. As soon as Shantaram’s tutorial ends, Salim and I crane our necks out of our first-floor window and try to find the celestial landmarks pointed out by him. Without the aid of a telescope we see only little white dots in the dark sky, but we squeal with delight when we recognize the seven stars of the Great Bear, and even the knowledge that the dark patches on the moon are not blemishes but craters and seas fills us with a sense of satisfaction, as though we have unlocked the mysteries of the universe.

  That night I don’t dream about a woman in a fluttering white sari. I dream about rings around Saturn and moons around Jupiter.

  A week later, I am alerted by a totally new sound coming from Shantaram’s room. ‘Meow!’ I scramble to the wall with my stainless-steel listening device in hand.

  I hear Gudiya speaking. ‘Papa, look, I’ve got a cat. Isn’t he lovely? My friend Rohini gave him to me from her cat’s new litter. Can I keep him?’

  ‘I am not in favour of any pets,’ Mrs Shantaram grumbles. ‘There’s hardly space in this room for humans – where will we keep an animal?’

  ‘Please, Mummy, he is such a tiny thing. Papa, please agree,’ she pleads.

  ‘OK, Gudiya,’ says Shantaram. ‘You can keep him. But what will you call him?’

  ‘Oh, thank you, Papa. I was thinking of calling him Tommy.’

  ‘No, that is such a commonplace name. This cat is going to live in an astronomer’s family, so it should be named after one of the planets.’

  ‘Which one? Should we call him Jupiter?’

  ‘No. He is the smallest in the family, so he can only be called Pluto.’

  ‘Great, I love the name, Papa. Here, Pluto! Pluto, come and have some milk.’

  ‘Meow!’ says Pluto.

  These little snippets force me to reconsider my opinion of Shantaram. Perhaps he is not so bad after all. But, once again, I learn that appearances can be deceptive and the dividing line between good and bad is very thin indeed.

  I see Shantaram come home one evening, completely drunk. His breath stinks of whisky. He walks with unsteady steps and needs help to climb up the flight of stairs. This happens the next day, and the day after that. Pretty soon it is common knowledge in the chawl that Mr Shantaram is a drunkard.

  Drunkards in Hindi films are invariably funny characters. Think of Keshto Mukherjee with a bottle and you cannot help bursting out laughing. But drunkards in real life are not funny, they are frightening. Whenever Shantaram comes home in a stupor, we don’t need listening devices. He hurls abuses at the top of his voice and Salim and I quiver with fear in our room as if we are the ones being shouted at. His swearing becomes such a ritual that we actually wait for the sound of his snoring before falling asleep ourselves. We come to dread the interval between Shantaram’s return from work and his crashing out in bed. This interval is, for us, the zone of fear.

  We think this is a passing phase and that Shantaram will eventually recover. But it actually gets worse. Shantaram begins drinking even more and then he starts throwing things. He begins with plastic cups and books, which he throws at the wall in disgust. Then he starts breaking pots and pans. The ruckus he creates makes living next door very difficult. But we know complaining to Mr Ramakrishna is out of the question. The voices of a thirteen-year-old and an eleven-year-old habitual rent offender do not carry much weight. So we simply duck in bed whenever an object thuds on to our common wall and cringe in fear whenever we hear the sound of a plate crashing or china breaking.

  Even this phase does not last long. Pretty soon, Shantaram starts throwing objects at people. Mainly his family members. He reserves maximum ire for his wife. ‘You bloody bitch! You are the one who has brought me down in life. I could be writing research papers on black holes, and instead I am showing blouse pieces and saris to wretched housewives. I hate you! Why don’t you die?’ he would holler, and throw a peppershaker, a glass, a plate. At his wife, his daughter, her cat.

  One night he exceeds all limits and throws a piping-hot cup of tea at his wife. Gudiya tries to shield her mother and the burning liquid falls on her instead, scalding her face. She shrieks in agony. Shantaram is so drunk he doesn’t even realize what he has done. I rush out to get a taxi for Mrs Shantaram to take her daughter to hospital. Two days later, she comes to me and asks whether I will go with her to visit Gudiya. ‘She gets very lonely. Perhaps you can talk to her.’

  So I accompany Mrs Shantaram on my first-ever visit to a hospital.

  The first thing that assails your senses when you enter a hospital is the smell. I feel nauseated by the cloying, antiseptic smell of disinfectant, which permeates every corner of the dirty wards. The second thing that strikes you is that you don’t see any happy people. The patients lying on their green beds are moaning and groaning and even the nurses and doctors seem grim. But the worst thing
is the indifference. No one is really bothered about you. I had imagined there would be doctors and nurses swarming all over Gudiya, but I find her lying all alone on a bed inside the Burns Unit with not a single nurse on duty. Her face is completely bandaged; only her black eyes can be seen.

  ‘Gudiya, look who has come to see you,’ Mrs Shantaram says, beaming at me.

  I feel diffident approaching the girl. She is obviously much older than me. I am just a voyeur who has heard some snippets from her life; I hardly know her. I don’t see her lips, but I can see from her eyes that she is smiling at me and that breaks the ice between us.

  I sit with her for three hours, talking about this and that. Gudiya asks me, ‘How did you get such an unusual name – Ram Mohammad Thomas?’

  ‘It is a very long story. I will tell you when you are well.’

  She tells me about herself. I learn that she is about to finish her Intermediate and start University. Her ambition is to become a doctor. She asks me about myself. I don’t tell her anything about Father Timothy or what happened to me later, but I recount my experiences in the chawl. I tell her about life as a foundry worker. She listens to me with rapt attention and makes me feel very important and wanted.

  A doctor comes and tells Mrs Shantaram that her daughter is lucky. She has received only first-degree burns and will not have any permanent scars. She will be discharged within a week.

  The three hours that I spend with Gudiya enable me to learn a lot about her father. Mrs Shantaram tells me, ‘My husband is a famous space scientist. Rather, he was a scientist. He used to work in the Aryabhatta Space Research Institute, where he investigated stars with the help of huge telescopes. We used to live in a big bungalow on the Institute’s campus. Three years ago he discovered a new star. It was a very important scientific discovery but one of his fellow astronomers took credit for it. This shattered my husband completely. He started drinking. He started having fights with his colleagues and one day he got so angry with the director of the Institute he almost beat him to death. He was thrown out of the Institute immediately and I had to beg the director not to have him arrested by the police. After leaving the Institute, my husband got a job as a physics teacher in a good school, but he could not keep his drinking and his violent temper in check. He would thrash boys for minor lapses and was kicked out in just six months. Since then he has been doing odd jobs, working as a canteen manager in an office, as an accountant in a factory, and now as a sales assistant in a clothes showroom. And because we have exhausted all our savings, we are forced to live in a chawl.’