The Rat Eater

by Anand Ranganathan

‘Yes.’

  ‘Then do something…say something!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Say pushh!’

  ‘Push.’

  ‘Say push-sh-shh…ae-maaa!’

  ‘Pushh! Push…Pushh.’

  ‘Diee…just let me diee.’

  ‘It’s coming. I can see the head—it’s very black, the head.’

  ‘Say pushh.’

  ‘It’s coming…pushhhh…push!’

  ‘S-Sarla, hold the head…beti, hold the head…and pull…diee, let me die…’

  ‘Push, Mai, push! Push, Mai…with all your strength.’

  ‘Haiiiiiii! Raaaaaammmmmmm!’

  ‘Yes, that’s good. More, more.’

  ‘Raaaaaammmmmmmmmmm!’

  ‘It’s coming. Just a few more, Mai…’

  ‘Raaaaaaaammmmmm!’

  ‘Push, Mai, push. Nearly there. Sarla. Bela. Empty your mouthfuls here. Quick.’

  ‘Aaaathhhoooooo!’

  ‘Bimla. Go get some more mouthfuls! It’s nearly there, Mai. It’s sliding, it’s sliding out,’ said Sarla.

  Baba offered to help. ‘Keep calm, Mala-ki-Amma, keep calm.’

  ‘Shut up! You try it...next time you try it. There’ll be no next time-mm…I promise.’

  ‘Don’t say that, Mala-ki-Amma. What if it’s a girl?’

  ‘Never in a thousand y-years.’

  Baba insisted. ‘But what if it comes out a girl?’

  ‘Never again-n.’

  ‘But...’

  Mala had heard just about enough of this. ‘Baba, shut up! Can’t you see mai is in so much pain?’

  ‘Kill me. Enough. Enough! Hain-Hain-uunnhhh, Haan-uunhh. Maa! Ay-eema.’

  Mala was in command. ‘Bimla. Spit out. Now.’

  ‘Aaathhooooo!’

  ‘There…Mai! It’s come out...it’s a boy. A boy. A brother! Did you see? A brother.’

  ‘Hain-Hain-uunnhhh, Haan-uunhh! Hain-Hain-uunnhhh.’

  ‘Mai! A baby boy.’

  ‘Hain-Hain-uunnhhh, Haan-uunhh.’

  ‘Baba! Can you see? A brother...for us!’

  ‘Yes. Yes. A boy! A boy. A son.’

  ‘Hain-Hain-uunnhhh, Haan-uunhh.’

  ‘Arey, Mala-ki-Amma, can you hear it? Can you not hear his beautiful, sweet cries; can you not see it?’

  ‘Hain-Hain-uunnhhh, Haan-uunhh.’

  ‘It’s a boy. My son.’

  ‘Hain-Hain-uunnhhh, Haan-uunhh.’

  ‘Tenth time lucky. Tenth time lucky. Thank you, God. Thank you.’

  ‘Hain-uunnhhh.’

  ‘He is my son.’

  ‘Hain-Hain-uunnhhh, Haan-uunhh.’

  ‘My only son.’

  ‘Hain-Hain-uunnhhh, Haan-uunhh.’

  ‘He will be strong.’

  ‘Hain-Hain-uunnhhh.’

  ‘He will rise.’

  ‘Hain-Hain-uunnhhh, Haan-uunhh.’

  ‘He will lead us.’

  ‘Hain-Hain-uunnhhh, Haan-uunhh.’

  ‘He will feed us.’

  ‘Hain-Hain-uunnhhh, Haan-uunhh.’

  ‘Protect us.’

  ‘Hain-Hain-uunnhhh.’

  ‘He is our saviour.’

  ‘Hain-Hain-uunnhhh, Haan-uunhh.’

  ‘Our avatar.’

  ‘Hain-Hain-uunnhhh, Haan-uunhh.’

  ‘Dashavatar.’

  ‘Hain-Hain-uunnhhh.’

  ‘Did you hear, Mala-ki-Amma?’

  ‘Hain-Hain-uunnhhh, Haan-uunhh.’

  ‘Dashavatar.’

  ‘Hain-Hain-uunnhhh, Haan-uunhh.’

  ‘The tenth reincarnation.’

  ‘Hain-Hain-uunnhhh.’

  ‘I will—we will—call him Kalki.’

  ‘Hain-Hain-uunnhhh, Haan-uunhh.’

  ‘Kalki!’

  ‘Hain-Hain-uunnhhh.’

  ‘Kalki has come. Kalki has come. Kalki has entered this rotten godforsaken world. But he has come. Yes, my son has come now.’

  ‘Hain-Hain-uunnhhh, Haan-uunhh!’

  ‘Did you hear?’

  ‘Hain-Hain-uunnhhh.’

  ‘Are you listening, Kalki-ki-Amma?’

  Can you smell the shit? You are standing on it. After she ensured your safe passage. Aisle, corridor, sky, veins, arteries, windows, mainframe, firewall. Fire. Agni. It is all around you, it is you—from head to toe—and all you can see is a son. Son. Fils. Son. Figlio. Yes, yes. Finally, a son, the heir, the inheritor, the independent procreator, the powerful, the pitiful, the pitiless, the conqueror, has come knocking on your door. Lottery.

  The womb, the garbh, is but a taxi. Uber alles.

  Can you smell the hurt? It is odourless. It is colourless. As colourless as that foetus found in a fridge. Headline, breaking news, star-studded panels, outrage that would make the sound barrier shy. Lament. Lament between G&T and single malt and, unknown to you, cheap wine. Perfect for the display of handloom saris at the next innovation summit. Even better with a prêt-à-porter and chipped shoes and craggy elbows at a women’s conference—where else, where else can the foetus go? Think up some possibilities for the Travelling Foetus. Over men and horses, hoops and garters; lastly through a hogshead of real fire. In this way the travelling foetus will challenge the world.

  Can you smell the thought? It comes sealed in a tank. Think tank. Can’t speak about misery in miserable conditions. Chi. Thoo. Who will go to Patherdih. Can’t think when hungry and far away. Research and more research must be done about women in India. It’s a generational ATM—perpetual seminarists.

  Indian women are struggling.

  That canapé is tasty.

  Indian women are trapped.

  I have a new iPhone.

  Millions for researching the obvious. Lawyers, journalists, experts, interns—everyone but those who die a little every day. Of course. Can’t trust poor people with money. They will buy sunglasses and chips when what they really need are micronutrients. Grunts, grants, grunts, grants and frequent flyer miles. Even the World Bank has said poverty is feminine. And virginity? Is it also feminine? Now that’s a good headline for a speech. But we have to be careful, you see. Actually a multicoloured PowerPoint presentation might fit the bill better. What is the colour of the hurt that is running in the gut? Next slide, please.

  Why on earth would anyone stuff a foetus into a fridge? New desperation, new deprivation, new place but same shit. Normally we bury them in sand—girl foetuses and newborn babies—just deep enough for vultures and other birds of prey to take them away, upwards and ever more, higher and higher, to an abode called heaven. On earth, in India, it is called a girl child, a dead child, a curse, a cost, a shame, a burden, a disease, a disaster, a prostitute. The lettered call her a responsibility to be passed from hand to hand.

  Passing the parcel.

  In books, in cultural tradition, in scholarship, she is Goddess—forgiving: she is Ma Kali; she is Mary; she is Durga; she is Mahishasuramardhini. But when Mahishasuramardhini wears trousers and drives a Vespa instead of coming astride a buffalo, she is leered at, spat on. In Bollywood, for decades she used to be a swing. Nari jeevan jhoole ki tarah, iss paar kabhi, uss paar kabhi; hothon pe madhur muskan kabhi, aankhon mein asuwan dhar kabhi. That has changed. She now advertises for razors for men and performs acrobatics to make tea. She has been liberated, by men. Liberian Girl. You came and you changed my world. In this plastic return to modernity, she is neither jeev nor jantu, neither dark nor fair, neither inside the house nor outside it. Evolving, revolving—that is what is expected of her. Smiling, serving, servant. Smiling, servile, survive. Oh, alliterations after alliterations.

  Spot the foetus, start saving. Shame if you can’t see the shame.

  What exactly is shame? Who defines it? Is there an upper limit? More girls, babies and otherwise, disappear in India than anywhere else in the world. Those who start saving for the curse are also women. Those who pour kerosene over brides are also women. Those who cover up household rapes are also women. Those who ignore their victimised col
league’s cry for help at a workplace are also women.

  It is not enough to look like a woman to be a woman. It is important to be one in all the manifestations that are known and continue to be. Tell the stories first, then whisper whatever little remains of the day.

  Stories, what stories? Of plastic bottles inserted into the vaginas of toddlers? Of women being burnt alive because they dared to step out of their homes without a male escort? Of khap panchayats ordering the lynching of a girl who married in the same gotra? Sagotri is okay if you have an obliging priest. You can do a gotra-swap for a bit. God is kind, very understanding, and above all, very accommodating if you have money. Accounts in heavens are of a different nature.

  And what if God was one of us? A woman and black and not amused at all?

  Stereotype, separate; stereotype, segregate. A girl who wears a skirt is fast. A girl who wears a sari—is she slow? What does God wear if she wants to go jogging? Pinga—got you! The pant and the Pinga have to go out and earn a living; in some cases, they are the sole breadwinners. She drinks, she must have no morals; she doesn’t drink, so she has several. She can take care of herself in a city. But wait, she’s not a foetus anymore. What happened? Money came calling and so Lakshmi came blessing.

  How do they manage to get into buses that never stop, trains that spit them out, crowds that grope them, husbands who harass them? We are civilised. We use words like naukrani and bartanwali and jhadoowali. Celebrate—their principal tool is now an election symbol.

  The inconsistencies are jarring. Naming is shaming, naming is respecting. Widows of Mathura—we make films about them as if they are animals in a zoo to be photographed and pitied. We celebrate festivals that pointedly exclude widows. Sumangali prarthinai excludes young widows of tragedy from family prayers. What kind of an animal does this? Such atrocities in the name of gods and goddesses no one has seen. If god is Brahmandam, where then, is the exclusion? It is in the dirt of the uninformed, the vacuous and the vile mind that segregates to survive.

  There is no point in getting angry, for this type of anger, the helpless one, is the anger of a loser. It is the first step to cynicism, to betrayal, to complicity. There is no point in citing the wisdom of texts and knowledge in the whispers of cultural practices and traditions. Try this. Tell people the Bhagavad Gita can also be seen as a violent text and see them bristle. Tell them that it throws you over the cliff without nets—that dharmakshetre, kurukshetre is not obvious.

  The Gita is alive. It is scary. It seeks you as you seek it, and if you have the courage, it throws you right back on the roller coaster. What has the Gita got to do with women? Nice try.

  To the self-styled oracles, the middlemen speaking for gods, any gods, everything is in the religious texts when it suits them. Everything from going to Mars to blasting the atom to developing a stem cell to driving a Ferrari to overtaking a Tesla—we know it all. Overlook parts that teach us to live like human beings. Compassion, empathy—atmavat eva paraan api pashyata. Okay. Sure, with some ice please.

  Privately, we cheat. Publicly, we chat. Privately, we want a Madonna. Publicly, a Virgin Mary. So many women in India get acquainted with their feminine or masculine—yes, you read that right—aspects the first time they are assaulted. If reading this is difficult, think about the living dead.

  She is all around you. Fear what we are doing to her. Fear yourself.

  Fear the Brave New World.

  3

  2004—A Guest of Honour

  Out of nowhere, the north-bound Swami Gangeshwar Janta Mail approached platform two of Mumbai Central like an angry bolt of lightning, leaving the waiting mass of humanity scampering for cover. The speed was as unrelenting as the sound was thunderous, and the coaches continued to boom and go, boom and go, allowing the crowd only hazy glimpses of platform three and the trains waiting on the adjacent tracks through the gaps in-between or when the opposite doors of a coach were both left open.

  Dust from the tracks invaded the platform in no time and the wind gave birth to a tornado of plastic bottles, paper cups, biscuit wrappers, crumpled newspapers, pattals, bidi ends, zarda sachets and cigarette butts. Only the driver of the train and its passengers saw the joke. They looked at the fog of screaming and cursing people and laughed their hearts out. An uneasy hush descended as the last coach sped by—as though the train had sucked the soul and the sounds of the platform and dragged them in its wake.

  Slowly, people began to recover their postures. The coolies were the worst-hit as they had formed an Indian file close to the platform edge, expecting to hop on to the normally slow-moving train in order to save time. They waved their fists and swirled their turbans like lassoes at the now-vanished train, heaping curses on the obviously punch-drunk driver and his immediate family.

  As the dust settled, the thriving ecosystem of the tracks became visible. Gigantic rats emerged from their holes by the sniffing the upturned filth with their twitching noses. Pigeons fluttered in and, once they had perched on the iron girders that supported the corrugated cement roof of the platform, they trotted, but guardedly. A pack of stray dogs arrived from across the tracks—shrivelled udders long dead, wounded tails incapable of wagging, mottled looks driven by fear; they hopped on to the platform ledge and vanished amid the human sea.

  Bisleris lay strewn like dead soldiers in a battlefield. Urchin managers scrambled all around the confused crowd to collect as many as they could, punching and shoving their fellow gatherers, arguing heatedly over territories. Meanwhile, the announcer resumed her disjointed babble, the coolies revamped their Indian file and finally, when the mothers risked their toddlers to the platform edge for soo-soo, normalcy was restored.

  Having missed all the fun, SP Kharbanda emerged from the Left Luggage Room exercising his knee joints and zipping up his trousers. Well aware that Men must be avoided at all costs, he had slipped past the Left Luggage Room attendant unnoticed and selected a corner.

  ‘Arey bhai, where’s my tea?’ he said, having spotted DSP Sharma. ‘This ban-cho Agast Kranti is always late. Platform number two, na.’

  ‘Yes, sir, two,’ replied DSP Sharma, discarding his chana cone in a flash. ‘Not to worry, it should be arriving any moment. Arey Jatinder, get a steaming cup for sir.’

  ‘Haven’t slept a wink. I say too much pressure in the force these days, no Sharma?’

  ‘Indeed, sir. And then they want quick results.’

  SP Kharbanda dropped his shoulders and massaged his potbelly. ‘What to do, Sharma saab, what to do.’

  ‘True, sir. There are days when I don’t get to see my Tanisha and Shiv at all. Sometimes I even forget whether Tanisha is in class nine or ten. And the wife is always nagging: Why are you late again, kids are growing up so fast, why aren’t you investing in mutual funds,where’s that Honda City you promised…’

  ‘Bas bas, same at my end, Sharma, just the same. Arey what happened to my tea?’

  DSP Sharma craned his neck and tried to locate the sub-inspector. ‘Arey Jatinder? Oh, he’s getting it, sir.’

  Sub-Inspector Jatinder hurried his steps and hunched forward in respect as the kullarh switched hands. ‘Here, sir. Garma-garam.’

  SP Kharbanda would have acknowledged the effort with a thank you, but that would have meant breaking the habit of a lifetime. He nodded dismissively and blew hard into the chai.

  ‘Hmm…aahh. Good tea. Come, Sharma, let’s stand under a TV. You select.’

  ‘Sure, sir. Arey, Jatinder, just get the mooda near that TV.’

  ‘No need, Sharma.’

  ‘No problem, sir…come, please sit.’

  ‘Sharma, any biscuit?’

  ‘In a minute, sir. Arey, Jatinder?’

  Even as the sub-inspector scurried round the platform searching for Hide & Seek—SP saab’s favourite—the object of his affection had collapsed on the wobbly mooda and was complaining to a passer-by about the TV not being loud enough. It was left to DSP Sharma to hunt down the stationmaster and get the remote. Both th
e DSP and the sub-inspector hurried back with their respective pickings and took their positions on either side of the mooda. SP Kharbanda winked—he was happy. He dunked his first of many Hide & Seeks into the kullarh and spat out something, not entirely sure what.

  ‘Now, what is this Star News harami saying? Sharma? Volume…’

  DSP Sharma dutifully commenced fiddling with the Sellotaped remote, muttering ‘volume…volume…volume’ under his breath, trying to decipher which of the rubbed-out buttons signified volume control. The channels changed, so did the colour; next was contrast, after which came the aspect ratio. The TV switched to AV until, finally, he managed to make the volume bars run helter-skelter on the screen. He cursed the stationmaster once more and restored the screen to the news channel SP saab was interested in.

  The reporter sounded confused, much to SP Kharbanda’s irritation. ‘Rohit, can you hear me?...Rohit?...Please inform us of the latest update on the Saane murder.’ ‘Ji, yes, Pritam, as I was saying before the break, this case has shaken Mumbai to her core. People on the streets seem to be saying: if this can happen to a minister…er, we have with us Inspector Gokhale, in-charge of the investigation. Inspector Gokhale, please, this way…’

  SP Kharbanda was flabbergasted. ‘Oye, saala. Arey Sharma, where did this Gokhale come from?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. I strictly told him...’

  ‘Did you explain to him the underworld connection to this case? Please tell me that you did.’

  ‘Of course. But I also told him to redirect all media queries to us, just us. Let me go back, sir, I’ll...’

  SP Kharbanda breathed a sigh of relief, followed by one of goodwill. ‘Arey leave it, Sharma. Let him get some sunlight, bhai.’

  Inspector Gokhale, meanwhile, was trying to convince the reporter, and through him the general public, of his extraordinary efforts at fighting crime: ‘So, I have been on top of this case since yesterday, with the honoured support of my seniors, DSP Sharma and SP Kharbanda saab.’

  ‘Saala. Did you hear that, sir? Bastard’s saving his ass. I’ll slice him in two, just you wait and see.’

  ‘Leave it na, Sharma. Listen…’

  ‘So Gokhale saab, what you are saying is that the body was found behind a bench and in a plast...’ ‘Look, all I am saying is that we apprehended a Mitoo gang sleeper, who we believe was trying to help the real murderer, none other than a Mitoo gang member called Kitla, who we know was killed in a police encounter day before yesterday, which was the very day he murdered Mr Saane. You see, it...’