The Heat and Dust Project

by Saurav Jha

  In the mornings, I run upstairs to the terrace. And invariably hop from one foot to the other, shivering in my pyjamas, wistful for a cup of tea. The season has injected an icy sheen into the full-bodied Pushkar sky, which is a vivid but cold blue and one can almost feel the ceramic touch. And so cloudless and optimistic that I begin to fear for my inner neurotic self. It could be the 1950s here and one wouldn’t know.

  There is a network of terraces surrounding ours. But at different levels. It breaks the sky into a playful unevenness. A young bride dries her long hair in the terrace to the right, chatting softly with an older woman. On the terrace behind, a thin elderly man sits hunched over an almond-brown desk in a precise square of sunlight. He is reading what appears to be a holy book. The Ramcharitmanas perhaps? The old man rocks gently, backwards and forwards, and is probably singing. Though I strain my ears I can only make out the empty shapes of musical words in the air. I have no idea what they are about. But in front of the house, past the street where a motorcycle is parked, past other flat-roofed houses with their whitewashed fronts and unpainted brown sides, and then past yellow, brown and olive-green fields, there lie the snaking low hills that Emperor Jahangir had loved.

  We walk a lot. On our comings and goings, we run into the Parashars and stop to chat. We trudge past the poorer parts of Pushkar to the hill where Gayatri’s temple is.

  The sky is cut into shape-shifting oblongs by kites flown from the roofs of shabby houses. The boys who fly them – and one or two girls – have clear loud voices that send out ungrammatical, unapologetic English at us. Much waving occurs. There is a rocky lip and then, standing rugged, rich-brown, is the hill, in a landscape that after all the prettifications of Pushkar is unmistakeably desert-like. Loose stones fall as we climb past huge cacti. The direct sun dazzles the eye.

  Other days, we ramble in town, along the ghats. The Queen Mary Zenana Ghat, with its white arch and portmanteau summation of Indian history, is my favourite, and I like to sit by it in silence and watch devotees, both very rich and very poor, being led by priests into what is left of the lake. Men and wives stand in little pools of water, sometimes accompanied by children, and faithfully carry out the rituals. Then we walk through the bazaars – with their rows of carved wooden boxes, mounds of colour, racks of sparkly bangles, bright hippie-chic clothes undulating in the breeze, incense shops and, finally, the intoxicating gali of halwais – to the Brahma Mandir. The donations of devotees to the temple are recorded in cold marble tablets on the walls and the floor. Several of these are in Arabic.

  On the way back I buy picture postcards.

  Apparently, it upsets the budget completely.

  ‘Sixty-seven rupees for lunch!’ I have just mopped up the last of the chana masala with my thick roti.

  ‘And sixty-seven rupees for dinner if you decide to eat here and not in one of the firang places. We can try one of the subzis instead.’

  ‘But that means, for the first time, we have money to spare!’ I say.

  ‘Not spare exactly. Remember we exceeded the budget by fifty bucks in Jaipur.’

  I pretend not to hear this. ‘We can visit New Chandra Bakery too.’

  ‘Not so fast,’ he continues, now rapidly devouring the pickle that had come free with a bit of roti. ‘You have to send your fancy postcards. God knows how much that’ll come to.’

  ‘Oof!’ I reply. ‘The Indian postal system is very reasonable. It will barely cost us anything.’

  ‘Please don’t make sending postcards your new fetish,’ he says meanly, counting with his left hand the postcards of Pushkar that I have written out painstakingly: one to my grandmother; one for my nephew (who can’t yet read); one for a young cousin, J, who never quite forgave me for getting married and sort of becoming a grown-up. He grumbles like an old husband, ‘Anyway. Send only four postcards to each. One from each corner of India.’

  That night we dine in the hole-in-the-wall but rather famous Honeydew Cafe. Chocolate pancake for me; (vegetarian) French toast for S. Pushkar, like several other temple towns, is vegetarian only. The brothers Saleem and Nizam, relatives of Neki Mohammad, wood merchant by day, tantrik by night, have invented a fine recipe for vegetarian French toast. We have a guessing game running about the key ingredient which is used to replace the eggs. It is a tiny restaurant and the brothers are chatty. On the third day, Saleem finally tells us what his substitute is. Bananas. Oh. So bananas induce such clever sweetness into the savoury? We recount our journey. I look through the notebook.

  ‘We need to move on,’ S says, finally.

  ‘Fine,’ I can almost hear myself glowering. ‘Fine. Yes. We must, I suppose.’

  ‘Go to Jodhpur,’ Saleem tells us, joining the conversation from his corner, behind a curtain.

  ‘Should we go back to Ajmer and take a bus from there?’ S asks.

  ‘Naah,’ says Saleem, ‘don’t bother. Take a bus from Pushkar to Merta City. And from Merta, you can take another bus to Jodhpur.’ He blushes boyishly and says, ‘My missus is from Merta. We take a bus from here only.’

  ‘Aahaa,’ I say, ‘so Merta is your sasural!’

  And as we are about to leave, Saleem says, ‘Oh, and you do know that Merta is where Mira Bai came from? Her father was the ruler of Merta.’

  Merta: city of Mira.

  We had not known that.

  Just before noon the next day we leave Mayur Guest House with our red and black rucksacks. The bhabhis come to see us off. ‘Next time, in saawan, come with one like this.’ Renuka Sahane nudges me, pointing to the baby in her lap. I laugh and say, ‘If you put conditions like that, I don’t know, Bhabhi.’

  ‘Oho.’ She cuts me short with a laugh. ‘Saawan will be green and lovely. We’ll look after it, okay?’

  Then it all gets hopelessly mixed up.

  Renuka Sahane stands waving at the threshold of the whitewashed house with the arched doorway. The sunlit courtyard is visible. The sky is beginning to whiten at the edges as the sun gets hotter. A little ahead there is the dull gold of sandy earth. We get into the bus for Merta.

  One of the central themes in Mirabai’s songs is saawan. The rains come with her dark lover; the rains come and her fickle lover, the dark one, does not; the dark clouds gather from all sides, shivers of lightning cut open their bellies, and tiny cool drops stream across her face. It is time again for him to come.

  I was always gripped by her poetry: by the imagery of longing. And yet, until I travelled to Rajasthan, I never quite understood the exact contours of a cry for the monsoon that might emanate from a dry, dry land; I am from Bengal. Green and moist and full of ponds. So fertile that people say it’s made us lazy.

  Mira occupies the messy grey zone that appeals to me so greatly. Feminist. Author of such perfectly female, perfectly natural sentences that Virginia Woolf would have held them up as examples. So centred in her own space. So cleanly refusing to be torn by husbands or rules or children or empires. And simultaneously, so anti-feminist. So full of waiting. So much crying for a fickle lover. On one hand, she is utterly feminine. The eros of her poetry inscribes her body as the chief site of play. Of meaning. On the other hand, so anti-feminine. The ungendered yogi who circles the town with other bhaktas, in a nakedness of clear enlightenment that she herself fashions as asexual. When she roams naked with the other saints, she does not want to be seen as a woman at all.

  The bus moves. I sit by the window and look outside. I do not process a single thing I see.

  Since the previous night, ever since Saleem mentioned Merta, I’ve been in an odd sort of agony. I am trying to remember one of Mira’s songs from a selection I once read for a term paper. And all the time, since last evening, I’d been getting distracted. The packing and the paying off, this and that. Now, finally, I sit down, my bag squashed on my lap, my hands bunched together, and I close my eyes as the bus begins to move. I focus on the lines that begin to appea
r in little flickers. I have to work to remember each line. So I hear nothing of the discussions that keeps S rapt in the bus; there are heated arguments between Kangressis and Bhaajpaayees, apparently. Much discussion about an honest collector, Shri Sumit Sharma. The notes in S’s scrawl indicate that there was an idealistic young man called Ram Dayal Jat in the bus that day, a small neat chap with his hair parted in an exact straight line on the left, who was a fan of said district collector and on his way to take a mid-level government exam. I heard none of this. There was only the invitation of monsoon mid-winter. A word, a phrase at a time.

  Baadal dekh dari main, Shyam! Main baadal dekh dari.

  Kalipeeli ghata umdi, barsyo ek ghadi

  Jit jaun tit paani paani, hui sab bhoom hari

  Jaakaa piya pardes basat hai, bhinju baahaar khadi.

  Mira-ke prabhu Hari abinasi, kijo preeta khari.

  (I saw dark clouds and was filled with fear, Shyam!

  Dark clouds saw I and paled.

  Black-and-yellow, the skies broke open,

  For hours after, it rained.

  Water, water, wherever I go,

  All the earth has turned green.1

  Drenched to the bone, standing in the street

  The forlorn girl is seen.

  My lover is away in far-off lands.

  Mira’s lord is Hari-Indestructible.

  Pristine is her love for him.)

  The bus pulls into a stand. Merta City is the prototype for hundreds of places we shall stop at the hinterlands in future to change buses or drink tea or look for filthy toilets. A cluttered littered dustbowl with unpainted concrete buildings and thriving businesses and piles of trees and dull-green bricks. Men in mighty orange pagris or white skullcaps go about their business or loll in the shade. Women favour magenta, sunflower yellow, pink and red when it comes to dupattas and bangles. Or they wear black burqas.

  14

  I have spoken to Mr Joshi of Cosy Guest House about a room. According to the Lonely Planet guide, Cosy is a ‘five-hundred-year-old blue house with several levels of higgledy-piggledy rooftops’. The eccentricity of the description appealed to me instantly. I called Mr Joshi, told him about the book we had in mind – emphasizing the budget bit – and he agreed to give us a discount. ‘Three hundred rupees. Okay?’ He spoke through the crackling on the line before the phone got disconnected altogether.

  Hopefully the room will be ready for us when we reach Jodhpur.

  The land turns burnished copper while we are still in the bus, about 20 kilometres from the city. When we near the urban sprawl, with large stores advertising furniture and gemstones, the sun has set and the birds are going mad. The solid bodies of old T-55 tanks lined outside the military base and billboards announcing Java/Oracle/C++ classes still retain a brief phosphorescent orange glow, steady beacons in the twilight. By the time we reach the bus depot in Jodhpur and dust our bags and stretch our legs, a curious dusky film tints everything we see. When we walk out of the bus station, we are assailed by a snarl of rush-hour traffic; honks, beeps, squacks, screeches and long low purrs that surround the crossing like a magnetic orb, absorbing into the din every other sound – our conversation, for instance. We engage an autorickshaw, shouting, and throw in our bags. We haven’t eaten all day. I am now craving sugar; S is impatient and snappy. He begins to recite facts. Something he always does when he is exhausted. ‘Jodhpur is the second city of Rajasthan.’ ‘A great node for trade.’ ‘It almost became the capital of the state.’

  The auto enters the old city through the arch of Jalori Gate. We go past the congested bazaars and S clutches on to my bag. Apparently, I am giving off my dotty am-about-to-float-out air. But then, it’s true. There are those who like the seas and those who love mountains, but give me a busy Indian bazaar and I am giddy with delight. I shall remain transfixed all day.

  The autowallah manoeuvres through the chaos of narrow tube-lit lanes. There are tiny stairways by the streets which lead to boxy blue flat-roofed houses. S shines his phone on the maps, looking to make sense of the turns that come upon us every minute. I gaze outside, my nose sticking out from the auto, and old Jodhpur, obliging and quirky, tumbles into my startled lap. It is so charming that my heart begins to ache with strange longings. I am already reminding myself to hold on to the details; already half-hysterical, since I know I will have to leave soon, long before the place settles into me and brands my bones. I tell myself edgily that I will come back again, and the next time, I will remember everything. S grumbles and blames himself for not taking directions. The auto zooms around in the blue web, lost in that maze.

  Eventually we get to Navchokhiya Road.

  It is deep within the intestines of clustered blue-laned Brahmpur. A quiet lane climbing up between two buildings bears the sign of Cosy. Our autowallah ejects us there with the baggage. He collects an extra twenty for the twists and turns he had not accounted for and vanishes. We wear the bags, count the mufflers and caps, and start walking. Ahead, there is another board.

  We follow the signs through frightfully steep up-and-down galis. Cows, however, seem undeterred by the climb. They ramble along in their fashion, and in the darkness, we have to stop and flatten our bodies against walls to let them pass.

  Finally, we stand before Mr Joshi’s blue haveli.

  Strains of guitar. Snatches of conversations in strange languages. We take a narrow flight of stairs to a grungy foyer/family room/reception where a man with dreadlocks is playing the guitar. Behind him are built-in shelves full of books. Mr Joshi is out for a walk and his brother, a youth with a squarish face, who is filling out a passport application form, is iffy about the three hundred. But eventually, after speaking to Mr Joshi on his mobile, the brother signs us in, collects the money for one night. This is standard procedure. Backpackers are not considered particularly reliable. He asks us to follow him up the narrow blue stairs.

  One level up, there are rooms. Two levels up, there are more rooms, and a rooftop cafe filled with travellers. Almost all are foreigners, chiefly goras. They are eating, drinking, chattering and smoking ganja aloft large cushions. A couple sit on a swing, studying the menu. It is all very relaxed and neo-hippy. The final flight brings us to our attic.

  It is tiny. But the room is clean and friendly. There is a narrow wedge by the door with a table and one chair squeezed in. Three steps to the rest of the room, with barely enough space for a bed. The bed is fat and comfy (I sit on it and bounce once or twice). It is pushed against the sky-blue wall upon which an amorous couple have been painted. The bathroom is tinier still but it has a proper geyser. Hot water. I immediately feel the need for hot water. The bus from Merta to Jodhpur was jam-packed with people.

  ‘Come and see this,’ S calls from the doorway. ‘Come now. What are you doing?’ Rubbing my forehead, I go and join him, thinking disconnectedly that I could do with some coffee. Below us, on the terrace, the revellers are busy.

  But I follow his arm and raise my eyes. Only then do I see. Straight in front, across the hotchpotch rooftops, the skyscape is dominated by a shadow. The fort. Mehrangarh. It’s strange that neither of us noticed it while we were climbing up. Lights glimmer along its ramparts. Even in the darkness, when we can only see a rough shape rising from the dim cobalt in the distance and can only guess its scale, it is spectacular.

  My phone begins to ring. I turn around and scrabble in my bag. S ventures down to investigate the affordability of sandwiches. It is my mother.

  15

  Phone conversations with my mother, even at the best of times, is an intriguing affair. For an eminently practical person, my mother introduces dancing eccentricity into our telephone relations. ‘Hello,’ I might squeak, just waking up to her long-risen-and-been-shining-for-hours voice. ‘Remember the paper I was co-writing? On the application of principal component–minimum variance technique in gene prediction?’ (Oh, and by the way, my mother is
currently doing a PhD. Only for the love of the subject, mind you, not for any career reason or anything. She is due to retire in a few years.) I have no recollection nor had knowledge of said paper. ‘They asked for an online submission. The website wanted me to upload it page by page, which I have done. But the final submit button is not working. What does it mean?’ ‘Umm-hmm,’ I might say, now swimming rapidly towards wakefulness. ‘Maybe it’s your connection?’ But by then she is saying briskly, ‘I have to go now. The police are here. Two of my lecturers have filed complaints against each other. See you Sunday.’ ‘Bye,’ I say weakly after the line has already gone dead. Did I just agree to see her on Sunday?

  When the going is good, this can be fun. When the going is what it is, it can be, truth be told, taxing.

  This criticism is, of course, a bit rich coming from the likes of me. Not that I have ever been a model daughter myself, telephonically speaking. Or otherwise. Not by a long shot. It has always been high drama or surly moodiness, slamming doors, recriminations and/or presenting of fait accompli, only sometimes softened by tears.

  At any given time my mother – justifiably some might say – can be any of the following on the phone: busy and bossy; just busy; just bossy; loving and money-plying; happy and travel-enthused; worried and antsy. Ever since the grand experiment has begun, the unemployment, the plans of travel, the whole opting out, she has mostly been flourishing her final ‘Do-What-You-Like-But-Let-Me-Tell-You-Your-Father-Is-Extremely-Worried’ card.

  Now, instead of beating about the bush regarding her call that evening in Jodhpur, let me just come out and say it straight. Has anyone heard of a more pompous phrase than opting out?

  Opt: it’s such a casual verb.

  It sounds about right in a muted restaurant with starched waiters and sparkling tableware. I’ll opt for the fish. Or, in similar environs, I can as easily imagine some of my super-sophisticated friends adopting the same tone about theory. I’ll opt for the Menshevik dissensions over the Bolshevik mainstream for my paper, thank you very much. But ever since articles have flooded the glossier sections of Indian newspapers, about forty-year-old corporate honchos and advertising stars who have quit their well-paying but soulless jobs to live in villas in Goa and pursue writing or cooking or inner selves, and smile smugly at the camera, wearing a hessian skirt they hand-made themselves along with blind schoolchildren, this phrase has firmly entered urban middle-class vocabulary. Along with assisted reproduction, time-sharing at resorts and SIPs.