The Heat and Dust Project

by Saurav Jha

  S tells the conductor that he understands the feelings of the other passengers. But the fact is that jackfruits do travel from villages where they are grown to cities where they are sold. People must have transported them, no? The conductor nods matter-of-factly though a few passengers in front still grumble. They are not against the girl, the conductor translates in Hindi, not at all, but they are against the jackfruit. But it is her property, S reasons patiently, while I bristle in my seat. Finally, he says to the conductor, now sitting down, there are so many of us. Right? Even if there is any trouble, it will get equally divided into so many parts, that what befalls us individually is sure to be minimal. ‘That is right,’ says the conductor, now shaking his head in assent, ‘that is how these things are,’ and after he confers with the driver, the bus begins to move.

  The man who had kicked the jackfruit is travelling with his mother. That odious woman – who had done nothing to stop her headstrong son – now begins a long, slow fight with the girl in the pink dupatta across the aisle. Both give as good as they get. I cannot follow most of it. At one point, I hear the old woman tell the girl, ‘Tu toh raand hai.’ That word I understand and it makes me start. Whore. I hear the girl give a low voluptuous cry at this allegation and screech something stinging in reply, but I do not understand what it is.

  S rests his head on the iron railing again. I shed some hot, meaningless tears on the box of cakes sitting prettily on my lap.

  20

  The girl in the pink dupatta and the man (policeman?) who attempts to strike her. The man’s mother, shrill voice supporting her ugly-Indian son, and girl in pink dupatta’s little sister, kajal crusting her eyes and bright necklace of plastic beads. I see them frozen in the bus. I see myself, in my blue stripy sweater, sitting with a box of cakes on my lap, shedding tears copiously over what has just happened, the fog in my brain still and tremulous. Pasted on the window, there is a frame of a dirty, busy bus station that could be anywhere in the country. I close my eyes. I can see my friends in the city, in a tasteful drawing room in south Delhi – though the drawing room, like the bus station, could also be in any Indian city. Instead of a box of cakes, though, my friends have other things on their laps: a pile of pink papers, a fat manuscript, an i-phone, a copy of The History of English Literature, Vol II, by David Daiches. I can see their faces, smooth, the distinct shades of brown flattening into an even skin tone, as though they are sisters: the investment banker, the editor, the mommy blogger, the lecturer – I can see them and they are shedding my tears. They are angry, exasperated, darkly ironic, depending on their style. We talk and talk and talk; coffee cools in our cups and the two who are mothers call and tell their nannies they will be late. The state of women in real India, our cross. (There is always this mild sting of guilt that banking, blogging, publishing and lecturing are not real India, not really.)

  To them, I can open up and say the stuff that I only suggest above, circuitously, for fear that in the mouths of others, people who do not read Indian, they will get twisted to mean something else. I can tell my friends that the stocky man must be from a Thakur-type caste. That it is totally a caste and gender and class thing, his assumptions that he could kick around her stuff and hit her in rage. What would have happened if we, the Delhi couple or whatever, with our rucksacks and running shoes, had been carrying a jackfruit? Would he have said anything to us? The girl is probably part-tribal; certainly, working class. My lecturer friend now begins to rant. Against a system that allows such things to happen, to continue. No country for women, the banker, youngest VP in her bank, shakes her head and says. The very worst. The editor immediately fishes out her tablet and shows us this powerful article she’d bookmarked in The New York Times about women and real India and shame and stuff. And something about this annoys me – just as much as the passengers in the bus obsessing about that sack of jackfruit had – and I begin to argue loudly, against myself, because in these cosy sessions the five of us, for a while, become one central self with the impressions of character lightly layered on, like a smudged oil painting. It’s not that those Americans treat women – or other races – very well. Who has given them this arrogance of high moral ground?

  ‘How is that even relevant?’ one of them asks.

  ‘Because,’ I glower.

  The more I sulk and behave rudely, the quicker I separate from that central self, and the more my friends ply me with food and indulgences. I am the youngest after all, and with the most uncertain means. Privately, they often wonder exactly how we make ends meet. If only I could write in Indian, I mumble.

  ‘What do you mean?’ they ask, kindly.

  I tell them, looking specifically at the editor, ‘Remember how we got to Pushkar? Where we got off from the bus and stepped into mud? While writing that bit, I had erred on the side of cow dung. “We disembark at the wrong stop near Pushkar, and in our hurry step right into cow dung,” I wrote initially. “Was it cow dung?” S asked, revising that part later, his brows beetled together. And then, I re-imagined the scene in my head, jogged my memory, recreated the exact squelch, remembered the smell as best as I could, and finally I thought it must have been mud. We’ve had too much of this shit clogging our writing anyway.’

  The lecturer is unsure where I’m going with this. The mommy blogger is quiet; the banker has excused herself and is speaking to a client in hushed tones in the corner. My editor, with her slim fingers woven together, is always very patient.

  ‘What I mean,’ I continue, ‘is that I doubt if any Bengali writer ever – whether humourist or serious novelist – has had to break her head over a splatter of cow dung on the road. Gobor, they would say, matter-of-factly. Photik slipped on it and broke his crown. Full stop. And when they say it, the Bengali writer or the Malayali writer or the Marathi writer, cow dung is simply cow dung. But in English, it can quickly become something else. If it’s wielded by the foreign correspondent, it is definitely something else. In this age of connectedness, these articles enter our inboxes and timelines in India so airily, far more democratically than, say, Katherine Mayo’s Mother India could ever have done. And like eavesdroppers who never hear any good about themselves, we hear what they have to say, and squirm or chime in agreement. If I could write in Indian, the jackfruit incident would be the jackfruit incident and cow dung would simply be cow dung. And I tell you, come Mathura, it’s going to be one big cow-dung conundrum.’

  S taps my hand and asks me if I know where the Photon is. The scene unfreezes. He takes one look at my face, the odd mix of tears and sleep, the strange smell of mixed-up timescapes, and tells me, ‘This isn’t over yet. They’re all getting off at Pokhran and I bet the woman will have the rest of her family waiting there.’ He speaks with relish. ‘The guy is sure to get beaten up.’ He takes out the laptop and balances it on the bag. Our bus has just hit the highway and is beginning to pick up speed. Simultaneously, several women vomit. In that interval, the girl and the mother decide to stop fighting. People protest about the smell. The bus stops. The local solution is to bury the vomit in sand and mud, scoops of which are sourced from nearby fields. The conductor oversees operations. The bus moves again.

  I cannot sleep any more. Outside, the grey road is sunlit and one can go miles without seeing a soul. At intervals, attempts have been made to green the land. Apparently an Israeli variety of grass had been introduced some years ago and it adapted very well to the climate here. There are mustard fields and trees full of rust-orange flowers. But ultimately, these are just interludes. There are long sandy stretches dotted with black thorny bushes. I try to memorize that desert smell; it is a dry, aloof brown. I stick my nose out of the window and the tears dry up quickly. Later on, when I get off the bus, fine grains of sand will rain around me. And when I try to recall the journey to Jaisalmer, it is only that peculiar hurtling sensation – the rushing towards the edges of the land we know as our own – that remains.

  At Pokhran, about half the traveller
s line up to disembark. The odious man lurks at the back but his mother comes in front and stands near the conductor. The women are sharing the weight of their sacks, the little girls trying to help. The girl in the pink dupatta and the ugly-Indian mother are talking again. The girl is grim. The old woman tries to make nice. I finally hear her say, before they all troop down, ‘Arre, tu toh hamri beti hai.’ The whore becomes the daughter in the space of a couple of hours? It’s probably the fear of numbers at work here, at a strange stop where the woman may have a whole group of her men waiting, and the mother-and-son, removed from their big contacts, are just one pitiful cowardly unit. ‘There has to be something there – about agency that these women too possess? No?’ I tell S. ‘The guy should be beaten up,’ he replies.

  I spot deer, peacocks and peahens, blackbucks and goats. At six o’clock, the sun goes down. And later, when the sky looms pink and mauve, S looks up from the laptop, ‘I finally have a signal. The twins have sent an e-mail.’

  Saurav

  If you are a true Bengali, there is one thing on your bucket list, between No.5. Seeing Sunset from Tiger Hill and No.7. Wearing monkey cap on trek from Kedarnath to Badrinath. That one thing, the number 6, secretly more special than either Tiger Hill or Kedar–Badri, is to get a glimpse of the golden fort when Jaisalmer’s dramatic sunset is enacted in the deep bowl of that endless desert sky. A concave sunset.

  Ever since Satyajit Ray made Sonar Kella in 1974, a cult film featuring Ray’s Calcutta-based private investigator Feluda, generations of Bengalis have made a beeline to Jaisalmer. While in Jaisalmer, they have woken up at dawn to see the ninety-nine bastions of the fort gilded in mannerly splendour. While walking past mighty havelis inside, through the warren of narrow cobbled lanes, they have imagined past lives when instead of being pen-pushers or code coolies or researchers in cold American labs, they were warriors or merchants. All the Bong women with their spectacles and large bags remembered princess-hood, the hundred retainers who polished their skin with milk and honey and smoked their hair dry. ‘But isn’t it tough being a Rajput princess?’ I ask D conversationally, as we get off the bus and she reports an immediate déjà vu (it seems she instantly recognizes the scent of evening here). ‘One has to always be prepared for violent wars and self-immolation. Take the case of Jaisalmer. The city was sacked two-and-a-half times; thousands of women jumped into the fire.’

  ‘Well, that might be,’ she replies archly, turning her nose up, ‘but if that’s what the code was, so it was. The past was a bloody violent place anyway. It would have given an edge to life.’

  The bus station is noisy and the smell of roasting peanuts fills the air.

  ‘But what makes you a pacifist in this life then?’ I ask her as our eyes scan the crowds.

  ‘The proof of the pudding is in the regretting,’ she says, her eyes twinkling. ‘Naturally that might be the response of someone who’s seen the pointlessness of violence.’

  Her black eyes look brown in the half-light.

  At that point, Steve, the Australian who is waiting to collect his jacket, emerges from the crowds, reeking of alcohol, and we hand him his stuff. He is a handsome man – and goes on and on about how his friends call him Stavros because he is part-Greek. D is charmed and chats pleasantly and I feel stabs of jealousy. For an instant, I want to punch his Grecian nose. We find an auto. We head to the hotel.

  I note that she neglects to ask me how a city could have been sacked two-and-a-half times.

  Jaisalmer was founded in ad 1156 by Jaisal, a prince with a dubious track record. He swore allegiance to Muhammad Ghori who had, by then, overrun Multan and Sind, and acquired a force to attack Lodhruva, the capital of the Bhattis, which was now ruled by his nephew Bhojdeo. After Bhojdeo was slain in battle, two days were given to the subjects of Lodhruva to escape with whatever goods they could manage to carry off. On the third day, the city was sacked and many valuables were carted off by the forces of Muhammad Ghori.

  Afterwards, Jaisal decided that the location of Lodhruva made it vulnerable to attacks, and determined to move his capital elsewhere. About five kos away, there was a rocky ridge that he found suitable. In a lonely spot by the fountain of Brahmsar, Jaisal found an ascetic sitting in deep meditation. Jaisal approached him in all humility and asked him if the spot was indeed an auspicious one for his new capital. The hermit, it seems, was almost expecting him. He pointed to the three-peaked hill or Trikuta Parvat and said that in the Treta Yug, this had been home to a celebrated rishi called Kak – or Kaga – who had sanctified the place. To attend a sacrifice here, the Pandava, Arjun, and the Yadu king, Krishna, had come to Trikuta Parvat. According to the hermit, Krishna himself had prophesied that a descendant of his would come here one day and establish a castle. Arjun pointed out that the water, as far as he could see, was brackish. Most unsuitable for a new site of settlement. Apparently, Krishna had cast his discus at the rocks and through the cracks that emerged, sweet water had bubbled forth.

  The hermit foretold that the new capital would be sacked two-and-a-half times and rivers of blood would flow. For a while, all would be lost to his descendants. And yet, Jaisalmer would survive.

  In ad 1156, on Ravivar (a favoured day for the commencement of auspicious projects), the twelfth of Shravan, shuklapaksha, the foundation of Jaisalmer was laid. Soon, the inhabitants of Lodhruva began to abandon the old capital and migrate to the new one.

  Exactly 853-and-a-half years later, D and I have reached Jaisalmer. According to the Saka calendar, it is Shanivar, the nineteenth of Pausa.

  We stow the luggage in our room – the hotel has been recommended by Mahender Joshi – and decide to set out and find the twins. Their final email had read as follows:

  motty_hillel_87@walla.com1/9/10

  To me

  Heyyyyyy how are you ?

  Nice to hear from you

  We staying in Temple View guest house.

  We all ready booked a camel safari trip for tomorrow morning, for 2 nights and 3 days, starting tomorrow morning 7 am 10.1.10.

  So we will probably meat you in 12.1.10 evening time.

  If u are here, this 9.1.10 evening, you welcome to join us

  I’ll check your comment in about 1 hour

  Well Come to Jaisalmer

  Cheers,

  Motty $ Zvika

  21

  The night is cold and we are exhausted. Just as we are about to step out of the hotel, the manager calls out to us and hops over, interrupting his conversation with a group of three beautiful Mediterranean women. He is a clever-looking tall chap with light eyes, a pronounced air of when-I-drink-I-chase-girls-in-my-open-jeep, a handlebar moustache and a turban perched cockily on his head for effect. He gives us some directions to Temple View. It is inside the fort. Among tourists, he hates, no, absolutely loathes, Koreans and Bengalis. And then, before returning to the beautiful women, he warns us. We ought to turn left outside the hotel. A cow has died on the street to the right and nothing can be done about the corpse tonight. A dead cow is a huge thing; special arrangements will have to be made to remove it.

  We step out of the hotel; we turn left. We have, however, already caught a glimpse of the animal, pale and gigantic in death. Other cows are clustered by the corpse and flies hover above. We walk in silence. No detail of the roads or the skies or the cold seems to register. So it is only after we have entered the fort area, oblivious of the sandstone gates sporting the colour of wild honey in the fuzzy yellow fluorescence cast by electric lights, that we see. Only after we are already embedded in the network of little lanes.

  The lighting is inconsistent. There are lanes of shimmery darkness through which shapes of balconies with lace-like jharokha loom. The dark patches are interrupted by bright shops full of clothes with mirror-work and other touristy stuff. It is then that we literally take a step back and realize we are in a magical land. Its charm is of the extravagant sort that m
akes one say extreme things like, ‘If you have not seen Jaisalmer, what have you seen?’

  We have stopped and turned, so now we are facing each other. We look around, our heads swivelling, slightly hysterical. I hear S draw his breath in sharply. ‘Wow,’ he mutters under his breath, for you do not talk loudly in front of such beauty. ‘Wow,’ I whisper back, the soft ‘o’ ballooning between us and then drifting over his shoulder to wander into the louder bargaining of tourists and shopkeepers close by. Here, on my right, there is a little bookstore built into a haveli that is several hundred years old. There, behind S, I can read the hectic signposting – hotels, restaurants, desert safaris – advertisements on a grainy golden sandstone wall that is resonant of genealogies and histories, going back centuries. In the street corner is an old Jain temple. We begin to walk again. It’s like striding through a museum. But a lived-in museum: piled clothes, masses of papers, the colliding smells of lust and dinners cooking. It is a peculiar kind of awesomeness, possible, perhaps, only in India. Anxiety flares in me instantly: how on earth will we ever do justice to this place?

  Anxiety is a strange but not uncommon response to beauty. It is mostly exhibited by people with a talent for stress. My head begins to throb. My eyes feel tired suddenly, and I take my glasses off and rub my eyes. S, meanwhile, has popped in and out of the bookstore, and got directions to Temple View Guesthouse.

  We walk along a street of shifting shadows and street lights on golden walls, S very garrulous. ‘Can you believe this place?’ he says, again and again. We arrive at a busy chowk where someone points out Temple View, but before we cross the lane and get there, we hear voices with familiar inflections. ‘Dippy! SJ! Hi.’