by Saurav Jha
By the time Zvika and I come down the hill, after several interruptions for photos, the other two are far ahead. We can see them in the distance, Motty’s dark brown t-shirt, Saurav’s beige jacket, in the haze of twilight. We follow in that direction. Zvika is telling me about their family. In addition to their parents, they have two elder sisters. Both married. The eldest sister has three kids. One boy. Then twin-boys. Twins run in the clan. Their second sister, a graphics designer, has one little girl. Letta. ‘Her husband has travelled to India eleven times, you know?’ Zvika tells me. ‘He is a biker. You know the Shiva Riders?’
‘No,’ I say.
‘They are a group of bikers. They go everywhere on motorcycles. From the Himalayas to the seas. Hundreds and thousands of kilometres on the road. He has biked with them.’
‘Wow!’ I sigh jealously.
You know what happens if you are an only child growing up in the city? You never even learn to ride a cycle, let alone a motorbike.
‘Our sisters also travelled through India after they finished their army service. It’s like a tradition in Israel. Like a growing-up thing. After you finish army and before you go to college, you visit India. When we were planning our trip here, everyone told us, “Oh, many countries have great views and great places, blah blah blah. But India has some magic. Something extra.”’ He grins at me.
We near one end of the low walls that ring the larger fort area; we had crossed the wall elsewhere. A strip of grey road is on the other side; a thin trickle of traffic on the road. Saurav and Motty are waiting for us there, talking intently about army training. I interrupt the discussion on the IDF, which I gather is the Israeli Defence Force, and wonder about the plan of action.
The boys have planned to leave for Jaisalmer tonight. They arrived this morning and spent all day inside the fort. They have to collect their bags from their hotel somewhere near the Clock Tower. ‘Let’s go to our hotel,’ S suggests. ‘There’s a nice rooftop cafe. We can eat something.’
‘I need some coffee,’ Motty agrees.
Zvika, however, hems and haws a bit. He fishes out a card from his pocket. ‘But before that, can we find a telephone booth? Let us call the manager of our hotel once,’ he says, ‘and tell him we will be a leetle late. We have already paid and everything. But they said they might want to give the room to someone else. What happens to our stuff then?’ S produces his mobile, squints at the card and dials the number. Zvika remains next to him, instructing him in what needs to be said to the manager. I turn and find the fort looming in the dark, propped up on the ridge, through the silhouette of huge cacti that dot the land. The sky behind is purple but for a red band at the bottom which meets the earth somewhere behind the ramparts.
In a perfect inversion of the walk so far, it is Motty and I who jump the wall first and head towards Cosy. Then, because he asks, I complete the arc and tell him about our families.
Caffeine makes us boisterous. We laugh loudly and chatter, sometimes speaking diagonally across the table to one twin. The boys sit opposite us. We share a pizza. S is buying. A contingent India–Israel friendship fund has been instituted. Zvika becomes Zohan of You Don’t Mess With the Zohan and I am happy to note that the smug goras from yesterday evening, the ones who were drinking life to the lees and not sparing us a glance, are now looking over at us and envying all the mirth. They don’t have a Zohan. Zvika has us in splits with all his mimicry.
Afterwards, Motty tells us how the brothers had actually begun travelling separately, with their own friends from the army. Motty came via Nepal, while Zvika had plans to get to Delhi straightaway. Motty and his two friends had a bit of a shock in Nepal. One of the friends suddenly complained of a terrible pain in the stomach. They were in Pokhra. The hotel guy got them to a private nursing home though they said a hundred times they wanted to go to a government hospital. Not only was it rather shady, there was no power when they got there. The doctors (who seemed polite but inscrutable to Motty) brought the friend to the OT to examine him (the OT, unlike the OPD, had power backup) but the friend freaked out massively. He thought it was an organ-harvesting racket that they’d been dragged into. He jumped off the stretcher and streaked out of the OT, screaming.
The two friends were in shock after this. Fortunately, the stomach pains disappeared. Motty did his best to convince them that it was probably not what they thought anyway. In the light of day, the place didn’t even seem that shady but was full of genuine-seeming patients and nurses. The other boys, however, would have nothing more to do with the holiday. They didn’t even go to Bangkok. They simply went home. Zvika, meanwhile, had already spent a few weeks in India, and was more than happy to lose the group he had attached himself to. After Motty arrived, the boys began travelling together. ‘You know,’ Zvika says, ‘you guys will understand this. Being twins is a little like being a couple. You fight a lot but you also stick by each other. And it is easy and comfortable. You don’t have to try and seem smart and funny all the time. Unlike a group of tourists. That is a lot like a summer camp. You have to make an effort to stand out. It can be tiring.’
The rest of the evening, we walk around the chaotic lanes of old Jodhpur, first looking for the Clock Tower, and then for Motty and Zvika’s hotel. They’d left it in the morning and in the sunlight everything had looked different.
Not that the rambling is a problem. The bazaars are noisy and dirty. Full of life and people and cows and bicycles and autos and motorbikes and charm. Great dollops of charm. The narrow lanes are lined with houses, the filigree around the scalloped balconies making one pause and point. There are temples where women crowd in bright saris and then, further ahead, a mosque with imposing minarets. The shops are full of customers. Tailors who make jodhpuris; little jewel-box rooms with scarves and stoles and handmade paper notebooks where foreigners attempt to strike bargains; more mundane stores stocking utensils, grocery items and sports equipment; pharmacies. Motty and I eat jalebis and talk about college. The boys will go home and start preparing for college entrances while working part-time. There are specialized institutes across Israel that train people for these exams. Motty wants to do ‘something with my hands. Mechanical or electrical stuff. Maybe.’ S and Zvika are walking just in front of us, devouring kachoris and talking about tantra. It all began with Zvika’s description of some strange rites witnessed in Rishikesh. ‘There was a baba sitting by a fire all alone at night, drinking something strange, with a dog sitting calmly beside him. He was talking to the dog.’
‘Perhaps he was an aghori,’ I say, from behind.
‘Do you know what an aghori is?’ S asks.
‘Like a bad baba?’ Pat comes Zvika’s reply.
‘There is no good or bad baba, only fraud baba and capable baba…’ S begins to offer a detailed philosophical exposition on tantra.
Motty and I hang back in the vegetable market to ask the rate of potatoes and onions that day.
According to my notes, potatoes were twelve rupees a kilo and onions, twenty rupees a kilo.
After a couple of hours, Motty and Zvika Hillel finally recognize their hotel. It is a decent-sized house built in the traditional way. When we follow the boys up to their room, we are flabbergasted. For three hundred rupees – which is what they paid – they have a large airy room with tasteful furniture and ethnic orange draping. Gorgeous lampshades. There are windows on all sides and a TV. ‘Super bargain, boys,’ I tell them, my eyes widening. Motty smiles and says, ‘We haggled.’ Zvika says, ‘We told them, “Hey, see, we’re poor Israelis. Not Europeans. We have less money. One shekel only eleven rupees. Not like dollar or euro or pound.”’
They strap up their bags and check the drawers. We troop downstairs again. Very conveniently we find an auto outside the guest house. And as lightly as it had begun, the evening is over, and we are back to our original couplings. S and I stand aside. The twins push their bags into the back of the auto.
The street is dark. ‘Maybe we’ll meet again!’ I say brightly, trying not to behave like a sentimental fool. ‘We might as well go to Jaisalmer next. Right?’ I look at S. ‘Yes,’ he nods in assent. ‘Sure. We’ll mail you guys.’ Zvika makes us pose for a photograph. The rest of us complain but secretly we are happy. There is going to be some trace of this evening somewhere.
‘If there is karma,’ one of them says, ‘we meet again.’
The boys are off.
We begin to walk back to Cosy. It’s a long, long way. My feet are aching and I feel exhausted. The markets are winding down and the place seems strange and forbidding, the Clock Tower slightly eerie, and I want an auto. I need an auto. But apparently we have spent a lot of money already and cannot afford one.
‘Look, if you hadn’t had coffee after coffee, you could have taken your rick,’ S grumbles, walking as fast as his long legs can carry him.
‘The boys got such a fabulous room for three hundred rupees,’ I grumble in turn, sprinting to keep up. ‘That’s the market rate. We should have bargained more. It’s your fault. You never haggle. Always playing posh.’
‘No, no,’ S says, looking at me. ‘Think of our view. That’s why our room is for three hundred. It’s right next to the fort.’
‘Anyway,’ I say, ‘let’s just hurry up and go to the room now. I’ll take a nice hot shower and read my book. I am tired of talking. For the rest of my stay in Jodhpur, I’ll simply keep my mouth shut and soak in the blue. Okay? Okay.’
Half an hour later, the old man stops us.
The old man is sitting in his shop. He is large with white hair, in a cream sweater-vest and white pyjamas. The shop is a bright little room, carved into his house in such a way that one couldn’t walk into it from the level of the road. It is like a stage, a plinth lit up by a fluorescent tube light of generous wattage. The shop stands out in the dark lane, its counter lined with jars full of toffees and mini-tubs of Vaseline. By this time, the lanes of Brahmpur are quiet. ‘Namashkar,’ calls out the man, his voice ringing in the night, his white hair gleaming like a halo, when we walk past his shop at the mouth of Navchokiya Road.
‘You must be from Bengal,’ he says. ‘I heard you speak in Bengali when you were going to the fort this afternoon.’ We stop and smile and begin to explain the backstory of our Bengal roots. But the notion of Bihar/Jharkhand underpinning our Bengaliness delights the man immensely. (Other than S’s dad, the three other parents grew up in Jharkhand when it was still Bihar. They all considered themselves Bihari.) His family, though originally from Jodhpur, had migrated to Madhubani in Bihar a couple of generations ago. It was only in his late twenties that he moved back to Brahmpur, to Rajasthan, but it is Mithila that he longs for. The fertile soil, the lush green, the hush of rain, the musical language. ‘You see,’ he tells us, ‘I lived with a large number of Jhas. And since I have a bit of an interest in genealogies, I used to track families as they spread out across India. Do you know where your mool is? Have you been to Mithila?’
‘Tarauni,’ S replies, though he confesses to not knowing more about the place. Perhaps, in the course of the journey, we’ll go to Mithila, we tell him. And then, naturally, we have to tell him about the journey.
There is another man in the shop. A fair bald man in a smart cardigan and trousers, glasses perched on his nose. He is reading the newspaper. A neighbour. He emerges from the slight crackle of the creased day-old paper, to be introduced to us. Also a resident of Brahmpur, we are told he belongs to a unique community of Brahmin goldsmiths. ‘Mahech is his name,’ the shopkeeper tells us. Mr Mahech is in the gemstones business, and after we have chatted for an hour or so, offers to look at our palms. He examines S’s closely and finally remarks, ‘But you have no attraction to money. Money will come and go and come and go and come and go.’ Then he looks at mine. ‘It is perhaps just as well that Madam seems to have a good Jupiter. Money will come.’
‘Speaking of money coming and going,’ the shopkeeper says, ‘do you know this conspiracy theory? Indira Gandhi’s people did a great deal of digging in these parts and truckloads of gold coins were carried away from Marwar. The national highway was closed to the public for three whole days! I am talking about the seventies, of course.’
We laugh.
The shopkeeper then looks at Mr Mahech and rubs his palms together. ‘Instead of discussing it obsessively, just the two of us every night, why don’t we ask these travellers?’ He looks first at S, and then at me. ‘We hear India is going to be a superpower. Is that right?’
S opens and shuts his mouth. I roll my eyes. They might as well have handed him a mic and a podium. He begins to speak.
It is one o’clock in the morning when he stops. The cold has crystallized into lozenge-like slabs that drape the houses and coat the streets, making them glint soberly in the clear night. Mr Mahech’s son has joined us in the shop. ‘Water?’ he asks, without any trace of irony, though it makes us burst into peals of laughter. S accepts the bottle from him. Mr Mahech promptly organizes bowls of kheeran – a rich creamy dessert of boiled rice and milk with saffron and raisins – to be delivered to us on the street, in steaming hot bowls. It is a tradition after all. You never give just water to a traveller. You ought to offer something sweet.
1‘Hari’ is both ‘green’ and the lord’s name. The duality gets lost in translation.
Four:
How to Write in Indian
The trouble is our lives are polyglot,
to write them down we have to
cheat a lot.
— ‘Tonguing Mother’, Editorial, Civil Lines 4
18
We were global and opinionated. We were conscious of what we had earned.
A few of us could pull off the sharpest of short skirts. Others might invent the most stinging of put-downs. Several loathed their bosses, a small number ran popular blogs on company time, all took particular preferences seriously: pepperoni with no mushrooms meant no mushrooms, okay? A few clung on to the 1970s’ ideas of love and marriage. But the rest of us pitied them deeply. We were that generation.
Our successes too were built on the foundations of a few words losing their meaning altogether; bleeding out to become cold curiosities like five-paise coins and pagers. Consider lakhpati. When we were children, lakhpati was such a sparkly word, glamorous and debilitating all at once; it was powerful in our mouths, expanding between tongue and palate to mean cars and factories and garish drawing rooms filled with large marble vases. Lakhpati was Juhi Chawla’s father in Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak.
By the time we entered our twenties, those of us who went to top B-schools became lakhpatis in the first month of our jobs. Those of us who studied the arts and social sciences, and remained at university to pile on degrees, obtained an arch tone about this lot. Some of us who studied medicine and spent our twenties in protracted agony punctuated by raucous boozy pharma parties and impossible examinations merely glowered. But we would have our day in the sun. If we became surgeons and joined those private hospitals which looked like malls, we’d get a lakh per operation. We could do about six operations a day by the time we were in our mid-forties though our spouses might complain about the frequency of sex.
The culture guys call us the children of globalization. But really, we were lip service givers to global warming. Globalization meant global warming, but we could not do without our globalization. We paid more for our bras and floaters than our parents had earned in their very first jobs. We whittled our profound anxieties down to perfect apps that kept our fingers twitching all day, and to blue anterooms of the mind by night, where nightmares battled with furniture wish-lists. Sometimes we would wake up in panic at 3 a.m. But on the whole, we were reasonably sure we would survive. The house with the three bedrooms and the heated swimming pool downstairs at the clubhouse would be ours; on the honeymoon in Mauritius, champagne would gleam in cold flutes by the window.
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br /> We would spend our lives pursuing happiness since the American Constitution had asked us to.
And then there were the younger or more fortunate among us, whose parents too had ridden the liberalization boom.
Sometimes we let them take us to fancy restaurants. When the cheque arrived, we saw how the ageing skin beneath their eyes registered the mildest of flickers. Though naturally they had come prepared. They knew what fine-dining meant. They were learning the ropes. Their fingers would rub sharply at the friction generated by the crisp thousand-rupee notes. It was still so new to them, this Indian plenty. We observed, and in all our love and protectiveness, were a little pitying in our hearts. We spent thousands far more casually. In any case, what is a thousand? Film and popcorn over the weekend.
Foreign travel – whether on company money or on academic grants (for many of us still believed in the West) – made us smooth. We learnt to distinguish between types of beer and complain about airlines. We saw white people begging and felt vaguely embarrassed.
The real innovators among us, though, the ones who truly pushed us into a new age, were those who brought to cleverness that sense of democracy. The cleverness of old boys’ clubs – beginning in posh boarding schools, honed at old-money universities in England, and then served up with bitters in clubs – was old hat. It didn’t matter where we came from any more; or if we were women. We would read the Guardian, follow Manhattan’s hippest blogs. We would learn the language. It only mattered how quickly we caught on. But then again, balance was important and we negotiated tightropes. Too much cleverness, and you became a cynic; too little, and no one would retweet you ever.
We were so glorious and so connected, it never really felt that in a nation of a billion, we were so very few. And so we forgot that if practised in appropriate amounts for too long, cleverness could take the place of life.