The Heat and Dust Project

by Saurav Jha

  ‘We are yet to see what the entire point of the journey is,’ I counter, ‘but surely it is about getting a true feel of the place. How do you propose to do that in a few hours?’

  ‘Oh, but you can easily do it in a few days. Hahaha.’

  ‘Definitely. You can most definitely get a better flavour of a place in a few days as compared to a few hours.’

  ‘Accept it,’ S says smugly, ‘you’re sprouting roots. Even Veer Rajput Palace seems a passable proposition to you, compared to the uncertainty of another new place tonight.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I say, annoyed. How can he even suggest that I am less enthusiastic about uncertainty? I’d married him.

  ‘This is exactly why Buddhist monks were cautioned against sleeping under the same tree for more than three nights in a row. Because people sprout roots. And you are sprouting roots in one night.’

  I scowl and step back and contemplate a fitting reply.

  It is around eight-fifteen now. We have been walking around the lanes and by-lanes near our hotel, and now emerge from one of them onto MI Road. We are to have some breakfast, acquire an umbrella, understand Jaipur. And then, apparently, by four in the afternoon or so, we ought to be off.

  MI Road is one of the central arteries of Jaipur – broad and well laid out. Well maintained too, after a fashion. Traffic has begun to thicken as office-goers rush to work, the sudden shower notwithstanding. We stop for a while and watch them through the bluish haze that moisture in the air creates in dusty places, the road shining, the sky dipping low, grey and overcast. The signal changes. All traffic comes to a halt on the other side of the road – the motorbikes, the SUVs, the buses, the bicycles. And suddenly, a camel lurches forward, dragging behind her a cart. Her ride tries to stop her, and then, after a half-hearted flailing of arms, the man gives up and begins to laugh. Her head held high, she moves forward – to mix metaphors horribly – a ship with its mast tall and banners flying, sailing in style.

  That surreal moment, suggesting perhaps the main point of the journey, marks our truce for now.

  6

  There are large batches of samosas being fried. The owner of the small eatery, dexterously lifting all fifteen or twenty at a time with his giant metal karchhi, waves us inside. It is a small room with a low ceiling and sooty walls. The effect is cosy. It begins to drizzle afresh. There are four mismatched tables, with a mix of chairs and benches surrounding them; all of these are occupied. We ask the lone member of the nearest table if we can join him. He is finishing a bowl of dal-bati-choorma; he smiles and wordlessly invites us to join him. For a while we sit quietly, all of us. S orders samosas. The man orders tea. The ice is broken.

  ‘Are you from hereabouts?’ I ask him, somewhat shyly and rather unoriginally. But it is, of course, the safest opener. Most people in India are not exactly from where you meet them; and even if they are, most Indians have a hometown beyond their hometown, a story of travel somewhere in the past which they are happy to narrate. (For instance, though I am from Calcutta and my dad is from Ranchi, my grandfather’s family was originally from Deoghar, a pilgrim town in Jharkhand which I have never visited. Several generations ago, though, they were in Pabna, which is now in Bangladesh.)

  ‘From near Ajmer,’ the man replies. ‘Though my mother was from the far west, from near the Pakistan border. But now I have been in Jaipur for sixteen years. I’ve got used to this place,’ he half-complains. ‘Can’t seem to think of returning. What about you? Where are you coming from?’

  ‘We are from Calcutta,’ S answers, ‘though now we’ve come from Delhi. We are rather fond of Jaipur – we’ve been here once in the past.’

  The tea and samosas arrive at the same time. We dig in ravenously, dipping our samosas in the wildly hot chutney on the side. The man drapes his glass with the end of his shawl, and sips from it.

  ‘I am a rickshaw driver,’ he informs us, pointing to a smart rickshaw upholstered in electric blue, parked outside. It isn’t his though; it’s on rent. His own rickshaw was stolen a few months ago. As we rearrange our features into an appropriate expression, he shrugs, resigned. Early last winter he was at an eatery having lunch when it was stolen. It’s apparently a big racket in Jaipur. He tells us that rickshaws are routinely picked up in Jaipur; in a matter of hours the colour schemes of the seats are changed, the wheels are replaced, and bam – nobody can prove anything! He’s had enough of this. Now he rents a rickshaw for twenty-five rupees a day from a man who has 5,000 rickshaws. It’s alright, he assures us. On a good day in the season he can make about 500 rupees. The twenty-five doesn’t hurt so much then. There are even some benefits in this arrangement. The man with 5,000 rickshaws has mechanics who work directly for him, so repairs and things are all taken care of.

  ‘Maybe the guy with the 5,000 rickshaws is the one who runs the racket, stealing rickshaws on the side. His army of mechanics can change their look in a jiffy,’ S mutters at me darkly, while our friend looks philosophical.

  I am curious if he would like to buy another rickshaw.

  ‘I am tired of this trade now,’ he replies. ‘I would like to start a business of my own. You see, I had been apprenticed in the bakery business. We had a shop. We used to make breads and cakes and sell them. My father had a cycle rickshaw with a box for the baked goods.’

  At the mention of the bread box on the bicycle we all feel a fleeting touch of wistfulness; it belongs to a time past, along with Chitrahar and the ‘Sunday-ho-ya-Monday-roz-khao-andey’ ad on Doordarshan. (This ad of course belongs in the innocent days before cholesterol was discovered.)

  He continues, ‘The shop was doing quite well. But it all came unstuck when my elder brother got married and became a complete joru ka ghulam. He cut us out of the business. By then my father was dead – there was no one to intercede on our behalf, me and my other brother. I want to get back into the bakery business. But my children are still young, so sometimes I think I should not take a risk and start something new. I know the rickshaw trade well; it’s safe.’

  We understand, we murmur. We’ve also changed trades recently, S tells him. It can’t be easy if one has children.

  His sisters, though, he is happy to report, have married better. One is in Gandhidham in Gujarat; one in Delhi. The Delhi sister’s son is in Hong Kong, a house owner; the Gandhidham sister’s son-in-law is in Dubai (also a house owner).

  He motions for another chai while S calls out for another samosa.

  ‘You must have been around these parts on work?’ S asks, changing the subject. ‘Rajasthan, Gujarat…’

  ‘I have, actually,’ he tells us. ‘Before joining the rickshaw business, I travelled quite a bit. To Mundhra, Gandhidham, Surat – many other places, looking for work. Not been to Bombay though. Not that adventurous. I’ve been to Delhi several times; but nowadays I don’t like going to my sister’s place. They have become too posh for me.’

  He has four children. The younger three clamour to be taken to Delhi to their aunt’s house but he studiously avoids that set.

  ‘Do many people from Rajasthan go to Gujarat for work?’

  ‘Oh yes. Plenty! There are dalals who round up people and get them jobs in Gujarat every season. Mostly on contract though. All these jobseekers then travel together. Some become lifelong friends. But I’m too old for all that now. My eldest boy is in Gandhidham. He is sixteen. After he dropped out of school, we sent him off – some other boys from our neighbourhood were going to Gujarat to look for work. He stays with my second sister. Our Dubai relative has promised to take him to Dubai after he turns eighteen. Let’s see if he keeps his word. I did much for them once upon a time.’

  The tables around us empty and then fill up again; we chat, the rain tapers off, there are regular splashes as buses trundle by.

  The owner looks at us curiously. Perhaps if it weren’t rush hour he’d have joined us at our table.

&nbs
p; Later that morning we find ourselves wandering around old Jaipur, the pink city as it is called. An umbrella is acquired from Tripolia Bazaar.

  But my memories of this jaunt and those on previous occasions, all the walks around the bazaars of the old city, coalesce. It should have been more hope than anxiety really that first time but for our predilection towards neuroses. I had wondered then why it was called pink city. When, in fact, the buildings are all the hue of sandstone. A reddish-saffron shade. The city had been bestowed this uniform look by Maharaja Ram Singh, in 1876, to welcome the Prince of Wales – and ever since, the residents are bound by law to follow the colour scheme. But then I’d seen the sunset: the extravagant gild the departing sun lends to the old city at cow-dust hour, a magic glow that turns the buildings into what is not quite golden pink but can only be called so.

  The gloom of the present weather amplifies the romance of old Jaipur. But as usual, every medieval Indian moment gets interrupted by the aggressive signposting of MNCs – Coke and Lux – a study in postmodernity. Through the scattered raindrops, the bustle and the bargaining are a little muffled. But the rows of shops in long straight lines are doing brisk business. The bazaars with their silversmiths and gold johris, meenakars and cotton traders are full of tourists – local as well as foreign. From the Siredeori Bazaar I look up at the Hawa Mahal, Palace of Winds, the exquisite five-storey honeycombed structure built by Maharaja Pratap Singh in 1799 so that the women could witness the life of the city from its unique windows without anybody spotting them from outside. Once again, my memories meld, and I rapidly recede into my early twenties; S and I are standing at the edge of the bazaar, our skins raw, bumping into each other in the crowd like new lovers, enveloped by worlds of noise.

  But that is late summer. The light is something else.

  Two:

  How (Not) to Get Mixed Up in Other People’s Pilgrimages

  Tirtha belongs to a whole family of Indo-European cognates that are the great words of passage and pilgrimage in the West as well… ‘thoroughfare’, ‘transition’, ‘transformation’, ‘transport’, and ‘transcend’.

  — Diana L. Eck, India: A Sacred Geography

  7

  A year or so before the rainy day in Jaipur. We were still reasonably respectable yuppies living in Delhi. We had our jobs; I even had a tenuous link to the university, a higher degree that I was supposedly working on. S was away for a few days from office and while I stayed with friends in Chittaranjan Park, instead of my regular route to Vasant Vihar, cutting through Chanakyapuri, I took to returning home via Nizamuddin. Every evening I’d see a long line of buses parked there. Not the usual Delhi state transport buses or even the long-distance buses that plied from Delhi to neighbouring states. These were ancient weather-beaten vehicles with gaping windows and battered bodies, much the worse for wear.

  Every evening, I’d observe the pavements as the signal changed and traffic around me stalled and heaved. Dusk would deepen; the remaining daylight would be sucked out from the sky, quart by quart as it were. The pavements would be filled with men cheerfully going about their business of life right there, cooking on portable stoves and washing vegetables and sitting in circles, talking, never mind the passers-by walking through their ranks swiftly, sometimes raising clouds of dust in their faces. But they did not look like squatters; they had instead the look and bearing of travellers, people passing through – and not merely passing through. The patience in their eyes indicated a confidence in what was awaited. One or two young men would sit away from the group at the edge of the footpath, their feet casually stretched on the road, fiddling with their mobile phones. Who were these people? I wondered. Why were they here?

  On the fifth or sixth evening, I asked the autowallah what was going on. He was a man in his fifties. It seemed he knew what was what. He had also indicated a tendency to chat.

  ‘Who are these people, bhaisahab?’

  He took a quick look outside. ‘Oh, them? They are going for Hajj, madam,’ he replied. ‘They’re on their way to Mecca. You see these buses? That’s what they’ve come by – and will take onward.’

  I didn’t quite understand. My geography was a bit dodgy but I was certain that Mecca was not just a bus-ride away.

  The autowallah went on, ‘These people have come from different parts of India. Each bus brings one party. It sometimes takes weeks for them to reach Delhi. Nizamuddin is the meeting ground. These people will only go on Hajj after paying their respects at the dargah. Only after all the buses reach and everybody has sought the blessings of the pir will the buses start.’

  Enchanted as I was by this compelling account, I was still iffy about the route.

  ‘But how will they go? Through Pakistan?’

  ‘No, no, madam-ji,’ he said, laughing, ‘they’ll go by jahaaz. From Bombay I think. Or maybe Gujarat, not sure. The buses will wait for them there and when they return, each party will be taken to their villages in the same bus that had brought them.’

  I was seized with the sudden swirl of images this presented: the sea and piety, hope and grime, and long long days in buses through changing landscapes. The thin brown pilgrims, now baking rotis on a pavement as night beckoned.

  The autowallah continued, ‘Very difficult journey on the bus, madam. Long journey in ship. One person from my basti had gone a few years ago. A tailor. After he returned, he changed the name of his shop to Hajji Tailors from Pinky Tailors. It is doing much better these days. But then that is the thing about teerath: the more hardship you bear on the journey, the sweeter the results. But haan, it is not so easy to go on a teerath, after all. You can only go when Bhagwanji wills. In their case, they can only go after Allah permits, after all their duties are done. You know what happened to me one time? Many years ago, my wife had made a mannat when my youngest son developed meningitis and was critical, that if by God’s grace he was cured, we would go to Haridwar and offer puja there. Feed at least a hundred people. He did become alright and every year, around his birth anniversary, my wife would start badgering me about this. But something or the other would intervene. Sister’s wedding, children’s education – never did I have enough money to take everybody to Haridwar. Seven years went by. One evening in August – I remember it was August because my youngest son was born in the rains and every time during monsoon my wife used to start the Haridwar gaana – I returned home and found a friend waiting. He told me that the next morning he was setting out for Haridwar to run some errands for his employer. He worked for a Delhi business family that hailed from Haridwar. He was driving an old Tata Sumo there and would come back after four or five days, along with a few boxes from the employer’s ancestral house. Would we come? He would be glad of the company.’

  The wind streamed in from both sides as the auto sped along. I was straining my ears, trying to collect his words in the right order as they ricocheted around my seat.

  Luckily, we soon came to a signal.

  ‘What can I say, madam?’ The man now took his eyes off the road and turned to look at me. He had a square face with a high nose on which were perched gold-coloured spectacles. ‘The offer was very kind. If we went in his jeep both ways, I wouldn’t be spending anything at all. The employer was paying for petrol. The children would love a road trip. My mother would be thrilled. But what can I say? It was the end of the month. My hands were empty. I had just had my engine changed to CNG. That had been expensive. On top of that, the auto had been out of commission for a few days. Hardly any money for groceries – how would we go on a teerath? Feed a hundred people? My wife and I sat dispiritedly all evening. Where would I get eight to ten thousand rupees at such short notice?’

  The signal changed and we began to move again. Darkness had fallen and the lights of the city glimmered around us.

  Eyes on the road, the man continued.

  ‘But, madam, you know the strange thing that happened that night? You won’t believe me if I
tell you. At nine-thirty my brother-in-law came. My brother-in-law, my sister’s husband. He works as a house painter and is often called away on projects here and there. He was in a rush, going to Karnal that night. He gave me a bundle and said, “Bhai-ji, there’s ten thousand rupees here. All my savings from this quarter. I am going to Karnal on a two-month project. Please keep it safe.” After he left, I rushed to my friend’s house and my wife started packing. The kids were jumping around. Two months later, when my brother-in-law returned, I gave him his money and told him the whole story. I told him he was a shareholder of the punya, since it was his money that had enabled the daan. Five hundred people, we’d fed.’

  We were outside the second market at C.R. Park. The air reeked of fish. I scrabbled in my bag for money. ‘Teerath is like that, madam-ji,’ he said, returning the change. ‘When you are supposed to go, you will.’

  I thanked him for the stories and began walking towards the house. Like every evening, moths fluttered around the lamp posts. Large cars were parked in double lines.

  I remember that evening clearly. It was a listless night. Little chips of grey stone crunched as I walked, leaving the smug bright lights of the shops and the thrum of traffic behind, down a street dimly lit by yellow pools of fluorescence. I have since convinced myself that it was this evening when I found myself willing to admit, for the first time, how unhappy we were.

  It was not enough: the busy hours over unimportant tasks, the shopping, the eating out, the investments we were learning to make. Not enough to plug the hole through which everything black and scary seemed to flood in diurnally.

  Just why the fact of our unhappiness came to me thus, unbidden and mixed up with other people’s pilgrimages, I cannot say, but that was how it was; I can see the lacklustre buses and the sprightly pilgrims and the moths around the lamp posts and the double lines of large cars. I can recognize the fish smell in the air.