The Rat Eater

by Anand Ranganathan

  Where is this going, thought Akhil.

  ‘…so then, there was this Bengali friend of mine—great fellow, and an IAS of course. He took us to this village near Darjeeling—his guru’s ashram. We walked barefoot all the way from Calcutta, your auntie and I. The guruji had one look at both of us and told us there and then what our problem was. It was incredible—his aura, his presence. He told us to stay in his ashram for a fortnight and arrange for a few havans, carry out pujas. I remember he would ask just Rukmini to accompany him for long walks in the forests, to tell her, I suppose, not to lose any hope, that the Supreme Being was always there to hear and act. And sure enough, nine months later, we were blessed with our Appu. We decided to pay our respects to the Bengali guruji and gave Appu a Bengali name.’

  Akhil didn’t know what to make of the story. He remained silent.

  ‘Aiyo, Sukumaran, I am the one here talking on and on; you say something, bhai. And let me just add that we would prefer to have the ceremony in Kerala style. You can take a brahmin out of Pallakad but you can’t take Pallakad out of the brahmin. Haha.’

  Akhil cleared his throat. ‘Sir, I think there’s been a terrible misunderstanding. I mean…Aparajita? Would you like to clarify the…’

  ‘I am sorry, Sukumaran, but I didn’t get that. What misunderstanding?’

  ‘Aparajita…?’

  ‘Leave Aparajita—you tell me.’

  ‘Sir, I am Sukumar, not Sukumaran.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I am not an Iyengar, or even a brahmin. I don’t know what and why Aparajita told you…’

  ‘What do you mean you are not an Iyengar. What are you then…Appu? What’s going on?’

  Akhil cleared his throat. ‘I am a Chamaar.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A Chamaar.’

  ‘What Chamaar?’

  ‘In your scheme of things, the lowest of the low. Or as you might think, someone masquerading as a human.’

  ‘What exactly do you mean? You better tell me clearly, boy.’

  ‘I am a shudra, and within shudras, I am a Chamaar. A Chamaar!’

  The exclamatory end to the last word whisked away all sound from the room. There was deathly silence. Appa opened his mouth many times—slivers of spit stretched and contracted between his quivering lips—but he couldn’t say a word. Then, as though hit by a tidal wave, he sprang up and started beating his skull with both hands. ‘Oh my God! Aiyyo Ayappa! Lord Ayappa! Rukmini? Did you hear that! How dare you deceive us, boy. How dare you deceive my daughter!’

  Akhil was taken aback. ‘Your daughter? She knows…’

  ‘No. No, Appu, no! Tell me this isn’t true. Tell your Appa this is a lie. You bastard monkey. I’ll kill you with my bare hands. Get up. Get up! ’

  Akhil tried to calm things down. ‘Sir, I know you are agitated, and this has come as a shock to you, but I was under the impression that you were aware of…’

  Appa was yelling uncontrollably. ‘Aware? I was aware, you said? How dare you even think that I can call you to my house and discuss marrying my only daughter knowing fully well that you are a, a– oh, Ayappa! What have we done! Why are you punishing us like this?’

  Akhil retreated to the sofa but did not sit down.

  ‘Don’t keep standing there you thief, rascal, you monkey. Get out!’

  ‘Sir…’

  ‘Rukmini? Call the police.’

  ‘Sir, please, at least listen to me. My caste is something I have no control over. Who decides all this? You could have been a shudra.’

  ‘Why, you filthy bastard, how dare you even say such a thing!’

  Akhil pleaded with his hands. ‘I love your daughter. I’ll give her all the happiness in this world—and she knows it. Ask her, sir. She loves me more than I love her, just ask…’

  ‘You leave her out of this, you stinking…Appu! Go upstairs. Now!’

  Aparajita, too terrorstruck to be coherent, simply mumbled. ‘Appa, please try and understand…’

  ‘No no no no, no! Go upstairs—now. If you want to see your parents alive then do as I say…’

  Akhil clenched his fists behind his back. ‘Sir, please. I am prepared to do anything you ask of me—anything. I am prepared to convert. Yes, I’ll become a Muslim if you say so.’

  ‘How dare you! That’s only slightly less worse, you dirty little…’

  ‘You want me to undergo a blood transfusion? To drain off my “cursed” blood? I’ll do it.’

  ‘And you think I am a buffoon? I know my biology. You may come out of the clinic with good blood but after a few months your bone marrow will resume supplying you your own Chamaar blood. You don’t fool me, boy. There’s no such thing as a two-month brahmin. Now get out. And just you dare see my precious Appu again. I will gouge your eyes out and feed them to…’

  ‘Alright sir, I’ll go. I would, however, like to hear what Aparajita thinks of all this.’

  Appa bared his teeth. ‘You wish. Get out. Out of my sight, out of my house, out of my mind, out of my daughter’s mind—Out!’

  Akhil tried one last time. ‘I have no interest in prolonging your misery, but as I said, if I can hear from Aparajita…’

  ‘You don’t believe me, do you? You want her to suffer, is that it? Alright then, you’ll see her suffer. You’ll see her watch both her parents die right here in front of her. You’d like that, wouldn’t you…Rukmini! Get that bottle of calmpose from the medicine cabinet.’

  ‘No, sir, please…’

  Appa wagged a finger ferociously. ‘I’ll show you what true sacrifice is.’

  ‘Please…’

  ‘No. Now you wait.’

  ‘There’s nothing left to wait...’

  Akhil started walking towards the main door.

  ‘No, don’t go. See this—you must see this.’

  Appa heard the door click shut. He turned around and shouted on the top of his voice. ‘Rukmini! That Chamaar may have gone but you bring Appu down here, right now. And for the last time, where is my bottle of calmpose?’

  Akhil stood on the steps of the main entrance. Try as he might, he could not take a step; his legs were rooted, frozen. He could hear Appa’s shouts and screams but could not understand them as they were now entirely in Tamil. He thought at that instant of Aparajita, but to his horror, he found he could not put her picture to it. He kept repeating her name, in the hope that, sooner or later, the name would recall the face. But no. There was no face—only the letters of her name formed and zoomed in and out. The shock had kept back the face, the tears, everything. The shock had taken complete control of the body and the mind.

  Slowly, Akhil detached his left foot from the step, then the right. Strength returned as blood rushed through his limbs.

  It had gone dark and the street lamps were flickering to life. He came out on to the road and kept on walking.

  Many years later, he would recall that he had walked all the way back to college, tracing the exact route he had taken earlier that day.

  Chamaar.

  The shoe fits but the soul doesn’t.

  Jhini jhini bini chadariya;

  Kahe ke tana, kahe ke bharni

  Kaun tar se bini chadariya.

  Kabir. What strings are your body, mind and soul made of?

  My soul, your soul, our soul.

  Dhikku ver-illai Deanna sharannai, sang Papanasam Sivan in front of the Kapalishwarar kovil. Nowhere to go. Pap is which language and what direction? The Chamaar who escaped the pap smear is rickety and diseased, cancerous and oozing with pus, but human and nowhere to go.

  Chamaar. Gucci.

  We are weaves of the same cloth, hues of the same dissonance, notes of the same song. We are the same chadariya. Are we not?

  Chamaar. Gucci. Chamaar. Ferragamo. Chamaar. Clarks. Toucher and tanner of leather, maker and wearer of belts. So at what point does sin enter into it? During marriage negotiations, or when the kaapi tumbler has a false bottom? Tearing, tanning or torn between ordinarines
s and the song of the creators? Did someone get shortchanged because some God decided a few of us could?

  It could have been worse. Karim Abdul Jabbar. Muslim Bhangi. Jamadar. She could have brought in a rat with rabies.

  Chamaar. Shoemaker, tanner, Gucci, catwalk, Milan. No Milan here. Just mayhem because our sheets and weaves are only as long as our bodies, our human bodies. Akhil thought he was human till he wasn’t. Two-penny opera—loose change. Jugaad.

  How on earth could a Tamil brahmin girl, a pure and creamy thair sadam with a strong lineage of saints and sages and intellectuals roaming around the world and in jungles of concrete and trees, not be called Urvashi, Rambha, Menaka or Tilottoma? Menakai, Rambhai, Tillotamai, you stupid Punjabi.

  In this land of so much sun, so much sin. So much sun that disinfects only the shit mounds on the roadsides and the railway tracks but does nothing to the sin. Sin. What is sin? Where is sin? You will never know how strong you are till you are broken. Breaking is not a sin. Not learning from it could be. How many people think when things go topsy-turvy, there may be a bigger reason, a grander learning around the corner? Where did Api fit into all this? She harmed herself. No, she harmed three souls. Is the intellect ahead of the body or missing a few births here and there? How can an intellectual giant be an emotional pygmy?

  So much sin is attached to everything—this when our gods tell us there are no permanent sinners. All because of television, the internet and foreigners from Nigeria. Polluting India. Ram Teri Ganga Maili. What? Are you mad? Ganga Tera Pani Amrit. Rishi moolam, nadi moolam. And quiet flows the don. Not the river. Like Aparajita, which means the one who cannot be conquered. What is sin? Who are the sinners? Api doesn’t know.

  Chamaar—licker of thread and feet, maker of chappals and sometimes shoes and daring to dream. That is the worst part. Daring to dream. Daring to dream of a good education, of being an integral part of society, of marrying a brahmin. No blood transfusion can correct that karmic message. None.

  Foreign Chamaars are okay, Tod, foreign Chamaars are fine. Try and understand, Salvatore, their hide is white.

  Anno Domino, BC, DVC, OBC, AC/DC, Pink Floyd. Rascal. Changed his name to fool an innocent Indian girl. To touch a girl in this land of seven rivers, mountains and notes is to insult her mother, her mother’s mother and all mothers’ mothers. He came home and cast a shadow of filth.

  Love marriage in the land of swayamwar. Love marriage. What has love got to do with marriage? Heart? There are so many cardiac surgeons amongst us. Why go there with them? And even the heart has upper chambers and lower chambers and the two can never meet. In fact, the heart is divided into four parts, just like the caste system. Nothing can bypass anything. That is the rule, the law. And this is the problem with quotas. The polluted blood can access the upper chambers of India when in reality, without quota, they would be ciphers. Vermin. Contained and destined to keep to the lower chambers. And once they cross the road and come to our side, they entice our daughters in bars, restaurants and lungis.

  Love. How dare anyone talk of love before marriage. Love should be banned. Banned. You go to college to study. You go to college to study physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, history, English—our subjects. But then these lower-caste people, and that community people, they come along and also end up studying physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, history, English—our subjects. Our subjects end up studying our subjects. You know why? Because they can then lecture us on history. Our history, as if they belong with us. They study English to correct our English but it takes a brahmin to tell them why the great George Bernard Shaw questioned the rain in Spain. Whatever you say, their accents, punctuation, grammar will give them away even if they are fair-skinned shudras and bhangis. Style don’t come easy, boy! Boy! Nigger! Wog! Chamaar!

  Look at India’s telephone directories under the alphabet C. Chakravarti, Charukesi, Chattopadhyay, Chidanand, Chaitanya is what you will find. If they are so intelligent, why don’t we find Chamaar in the telephone directory? Basics.

  But what does a shudra know about all these important matters? It’s not us who keep them down and trodden; it is them, for howsoever much you try and help them, they will go back to their roots. Intellectuals like us need roots because they set us free. These lower-caste people need roots for routes—into our homes, into the hearts of our innocent womenfolk, into our libraries. Them. Them! Chamaar DNA. Chamaar bone marrow. Chamaar love. Do you now understand? Do you?

  Yes, it’s best they marry a foreigner from Scandinavia. Ingmar Chamaar, Nils Bhangi, Olof Jamadar Henriksson. It even sounds better in foreign. And maybe in seven generations when bloods have mixed and re-mixed, they will produce pink babies with black hair. Then they can apply to the elite Indian universities. For now, it is better to apply to white countries for funds. These foreigners, they cannot tell the difference between sex and love. The only difference between Denmark and the bhangi colonies in India is space. More space, more litter.

  All in the upbringing, all upbringing. In their homes they have mosquitoes, nothing to eat and sewage water to bathe in. That’s what they deserve for having dared to dream. In our homes, we have books. We don’t need to eat, sleep or bathe, for a true seeker of knowledge is not bound by desires and trousers. For us, all else is detail. All else is detail. Our floors are clean as our minds, our windows are open as our hearts, our speech is flawless as our music and the only smell in the house is that of knowledge mingled with sugar, coconut and ghee.

  We in India are not like foreign parents who don’t know what their children are doing. Father going with someone, mother going with the gardener, postman and personal trainer. How can you blame the children? Rubbish in, rubbish out. Sex all the time. Even in the kitchen. That’s why they don’t know how to cook. Why does anyone with a brain need a table in the kitchen? Kitchen is for cooking only, where women cook and men eat and after all the men have eaten, women eat what is left.

  Dirty brain. The watchful eye of Indian parents has ensured that nothing dirty like ‘that’ is ever done before marriage. We will go on the internet hunting among complete strangers to marry off our daughters, but heaven help the child if she falls in love with a stranger who has no gotra or rashi. If a girl goes ‘astray’ and wants to marry out of caste, it is the solemn duty and responsibility of parents, friends and family to bring the cows home to graze. The grass is always greener this side, and our beasts are better.

  This is the land where women are worshipped and this is the land where all the lands come to seek salvation. If that doesn’t work, there’s always Tik-20 or kerosene. Nothing like a good oil bath in kerosene. First soak the hair; you don’t have to go all the way—just a little distance to be maintained from the object of fire. Light the match and hold it for show. You will see everybody and everything will fall in line. Ignite, good night.

  We need to ensure that the heart does not beat everywhere and anywhere and especially not in front of the public. Extend your loving arm and wrench it out from between your child’s broken ribs, stomp on the throbbing lump, pummel it, squeeze it in your bloodied fist so tight it begins to ooze out through your fingers like curd rice during lunch. Suck, yes, suck, suck all love from it and then toss it away to die by the roadside bin.

  It’s just a body part, silly. Appendix.

  16

  2004—Under the Net

  OUT OF ORDER. INCONVENANCE REGRATED—BY ORDER, MUMBAI POLICE’ said the child-like scrawl on a torn fragment of a whiskey carton left dangling on the grille of the antiquated lift.

  ‘Bloody bastards, shit,’ scowled DIG Ajay Biswas as he stood opposite, pondering his options. He turned his attention to the dusty, perforated plastic board by the lift and let his gaze wander from top to bottom, trying to decipher the names and words that were made up of white plastic letters, some missing, most limp. In due course, his eyes spotted ‘MHINDR PATAP KHABAND’ with its designation ‘SUPRITENDENT OF LICE’ linked with ten white plastic dots. The designation was furth
er led on by such dots to ‘SEVENTH FLOUR, ROOM NO. 714.’

  Ajay grunted. ‘Bastard Kharbanda,’ he said out loud and took to the stairway, avoiding pulling himself by the railing of the wrought iron and Burma teak balustrade, having seen the grime and the paan-juice deposits it was layered with. The seven floors became the seven peaks of a mountain range. After he had conquered the second, Ajay wished he was carrying an oxygen cylinder. His pace slowed. Older policemen with unreal pot bellies went past him lithely, some taking two steps at a time. After the third peak, Ajay began to gasp for breath. He did not think twice now about latching his palm onto the handrail to gain that slight advantage while hauling his body up. He turned midway to the fifth floor and paused, looking at the fifteen or so steps that would take him to the fifth peak. His thoughts were jamming up, his feet unsteady. It looked impossible.

  Ajay wiped his forehead and the back of his neck with his handkerchief and put his foot on the next step. He had forgotten why he was climbing the stairs. The expedition had taken over his senses completely. Survival, to garner that extra bit of strength, was what was on his mind now. What for? What for did I come here to the HQ? he repeated the question with every new step. Eventually, he stood on the fifth plateau, facing the steps for the sixth and beyond, knees moving involuntarily from side to side, but not quite touching each other, like cymbals.

  Water! He looked around, and even with his doped senses he could make out that this was the floor where they hoarded broken furniture. Sofas shrouded in old cobwebs spilled out rusted springs and nibbled foam. Green Rexine-sheathed tables with three legs stood in mourning alongside crippled woven cane chairs. Eastman portraits of great leaders and slain prime ministers lay strewn, coffinned in mock wooden frames and shards of glass.

  Hopeless, beaten, defeated, Ajay pulled at the banister with trembling hands and began his ascent. He recalled the famous last scene of a Ray movie—Seemabaddha—where the manager Shyamal returns home from work, all energised and cheerful, anticipating a good evening in, and then comes home to a dead lift; and how the camera follows the man throughout his painful climb up the stairs, right up until his sweat-dripping nose touches the door of his apartment.