The Heat and Dust Project

by Saurav Jha

  Years later, in Barmer, atop those dunes, I am reasonably sure that Ramaram Mali’s invitation is perfectly in order, exactly like Anil Mehra’s was. S, on the contrary, is not quite convinced. But the orange waves have now started to advance from the west. Under that flaming sky, the sand begins to glow. It is, in any case, long past the moment when one could have said no.

  28

  It is dark when we set out for Ramaram’s house. The streets are mostly unlit, and traffic continues to be heavy and haphazard. S suggests we stop at a local chowk that is dazzling with shop lights. From a payphone, we call the parents. (In every new place, we make it a point to tell my father-in-law the name of the hotel we are in and a phone number. Just in case.) I buy chocolates for Ramaram’s children. There is a huge off-licence next to the kirana shop with the payphone, and it is almost mobbed. There are many people in trademark orange drilling suits, including two girls with severely straightened hair, the fluorescent strips of their jackets glittering in the strobe light.

  We have now reached the edges of town. It is quieter.

  ‘I will take you first to the house I have put on rent,’ Ramaram says.

  He parks the auto in a dark street. Sounds of prime-time television are drifting in faintly from neighbouring houses, and we follow him into a two-storey house that is so freshly painted, there are dried blotches on the floor and the hallway smells dizzyingly of paint. We take the stairs and Ramaram offers continuous commentary on every aspect of the architecture – the house has been designed almost entirely by him.

  Upstairs, the main door is ajar and Ramaram walks in smartly. We hesitate by the doorway, since voices and laughter from inside indicate the residents are at home. Ramaram, however, does not think it is necessary to knock before barging in. He is the owner of the house – and apparently, he can bring people to show off anytime he likes. ‘Come, sir, please come in,’ he urges us. A man now comes out from a room on the right. He is a large balding man, with a massive beer belly. He is in a vest and shorts, a towel thrown over his shoulders, presumably the L&T Bengali. It is rather awkward. He is a little embarrassed – he’s not dressed to receive visitors – and after Ramaram introduces us, he has no choice but to invite us in.

  I try to hang back while S apologizes to the man in Bengali, but Ramaram will have none of this hesitation. He must show me the finer features of the house he has designed and I follow him inside. There is a fridge and a plastic table in this room; it’s been imagined as a drawing/dining space, I guess. The Bengali takes S into the room on the right, and introduces him to the others. I can hear their voices. They are all middle-class men who have left their families behind to live like college students in Barmer. ‘This place is not suitable for families,’ I can hear one of them say. ‘If there were townships, there could still have been a possibility. But good schools are very important – and one can’t be sure about the schooling scene here.’

  Meanwhile, Ramaram Mali busily switches on more lights. ‘Madam, please observe the tiles,’ he says. I look down. ‘I chose them myself.’ The tiles are rather pretty. White, with little pink flowers and elaborate vine trellises. I smile and praise his sense of aesthetics. He opens a door and takes me left, into the terrace. I catch my breath. The breeze is bracing, the dark not uncomfortable. Ramaram tries the lights here too and then clicks his tongue. Apparently, the bulb is fused. He quickly switches on the torch in his mobile and holds it close to the ground. ‘Madam, I have tiled the terrace also. Later on, this can be another room. Demand for rooms is growing so fast in Barmer. I will put ACs in all these rooms before this summer.’ In the narrow beam of the torch I see another set of pretty tiles – smooth ivory squares like slabs of white chocolate, dotted with ochre flowers. I admire them eloquently.

  From the hall where I wait for S to join me, I can see the room the L&T men occupy, in the mirror that is stuck on the wall. It is a large characterless space. There are two steel almirahs in one corner, two single mattresses with grey pillows, and plastic chairs. Several bottles of liquor are neatly lined by size at one end. The tall vodka bottles, the squat whiskies, the small pints of rum. S takes leave of the three men, shakes their hands. We follow Ramaram downstairs – where we learn there are two rooms, each occupied by single men who work for one of the big companies – and then outside. All sounds seem to have dried up on that street now, though a couple of plastic bags are dragged along in the wind, and they leave a soft crackly imprint on the evening.

  Ramaram’s home is on this same five-hundred-rupee plot, but sort of back-to-back with this house. So we walk down the street, turn left, a few steps ahead, and then we enter a courtyard through a small gate at one end of the compound. It’s like the second half of a revolving stage – if one part is Dushyanta’s palace, the other is the forest with Kanva’s hermitage. Two different worlds. It’s almost as though the house for rent, with the tiles and the AC vents, is the new urban model, while the obverse is literally the village in miniature. It’s an exact metaphor for the life that hundreds of thousands of Indians live.

  The courtyard leads to a kitchen with a traditional chulha that is now being lit. Ramaram introduces us to his wife. She looks up from the chulha, where she has been poking the embers, a very calm-looking woman in a cotton lehenga and short kurta, both made of the same fabric, a cheery yellow sprinkled with little orange and white flowers. Her hair is covered with a matching orange dupatta. A few bangles, a simple mangalsutra, and there’s a dot of red vermilion on her forehead. She is busy cooking, and asks us to sit in the other room. She promises to get dinner ready quickly though we assure her there’s no hurry. Her calmness, her sense of self-containment make her an interesting foil to the hyperactive Ramaram. It seems to me that she likes humouring him, his stabs at urbanity, his obsession with the lives of his tenants. She does not mind cooking for his sudden flocks of guests. She loves him in a quiet self-contained way that fills this kitchen, the courtyard outside, with a sure stamp of happy domesticity. At this point, the children arrive – Ramaram’s three, and a little boy from the neighbour’s who has also trailed in to meet us. We gift them the goodies we have brought; fortunately, I have an extra bar of chocolate.

  Ramaram’s daughter is about ten years old. Bobbed hair and embroidered jeans. She holds my hand and takes us from the kitchen to another room. There are two boxy rooms on the other side of the courtyard, though only one is open. In the traditional rural style, the rooms too open onto the common courtyard, a style of architecture that has now gone out of fashion in cities where nobody would want to waste a single square foot on something as useless as a courtyard. Unlike the obverse house which has been lavished with attention and modern details, Ramaram’s family home gives the sense of being slightly provisional. The roofing has not been completed yet – there are sheets of asbestos covering the rooms, weighed down by a large number of rocks; the walls are not plastered; the floors are not polished, let alone tiled. In one corner, where the wall has been painted yellow, there is an earthen surahi. It reminds me of my childhood holidays in Jharkhand, where we would interrupt our afternoon’s play in the hot sun to drink glasses of cool water from a surahi. But other than that yellow portion, all the other walls are an indeterminate shade of grey. Ramaram seems to have left this zone alone (perhaps to approximate the dwelling they must have left behind in the village?) and concentrated his experimentations on the cash cow, the house they’ve put on rent, with its fancy tiles, its geyser, its concrete extravaganza. But this – this is home.

  Outside, darkness has settled into a quiet night, broken by the song of crickets and the occasional strains of television wafting in. The room where we sit is dominated by a double bed with an elaborately designed headboard dotted with gilt. There is a calendar, a picture of a goddess, a wall clock and a chart illustrating yoga postures on the wall. Above these, just below the ceiling, there are two shelves that run along the room, across three walls. Many steel utensils are placed dec
oratively on the top shelf, at regular intervals, including the body of a mixer-grinder. Ramaram points and tells us that these had come as his dowry.

  Tea comes with snacks: fried brinjals and til laddus. We invite the children to eat with us, but it seems they have already had dinner, and they prefer to watch us eat. Discreetly, Ramaram asks S if he would like some videshi. S smiles and says, ‘Not today. Next time, perhaps?’ Ramaram does not press. ‘Sure, sure,’ he says. ‘Many times my friends come and we drink videshi here in this room. But we have to be careful. This neighbourhood is full of Bishnois and if they find out one is drinking or serving drinks, they will cause a massive halla. My father liked to drink. Once, these Bishnois came and smashed up all his bottles.’

  Ramaram puts on a video. The small television set is in one corner of the room, next to a sewing machine, now covered carefully with a bed sheet. The children join us on the bed, and we hunker down to watch. It is an elaborately shot wedding video of Ramaram’s cousin in Jaipur, the most impressive scion of the most urbane branch of their family. He works in a government bank and his salary is Rs 24,000 plus benefits. The groom sits on a white horse with a little boy in front, a ceremonial sword in hand. His face is covered with thin strings of flowers. A large party of women dance in front to Bollywood numbers, though their foreheads are dutifully covered with sheer chiffons, dupattas or ends of saris. Jewellery flashes.

  We eat dinner in the kitchen. Once again, in Rajasthani style, we are served on the same plate. I remember reading that in Burmese custom, if a man and a woman eat from the same plate, they are considered to be married! S loves the bajra rotis, hot off the chulha. But there are regular rotis too, and Ramaram keeps repeating that they have become modern these days, and eat normal atta rotis like people in other parts of the country.

  ‘Isn’t bajra more nutritious?’ S asks.

  ‘That it is,’ he says. ‘It takes much less water to grow also. But bajra is old-fashioned.’

  We talk about travel. Ramaram tells us how in these parts, travel for families is necessarily pilgrimage, and that, too, pilgrimage with a specific end in sight. But not for him, of course. At one time he used to drive a car, and he’d taken a couple across several tourist destinations. The details are very vague. One never finds out who this Sir and Madam were, or where they lived. But an album is procured, and we are shown the pictures. It’s a modern couple, by all accounts, the woman in a tight red salwar set, the man in sunglasses. Ramaram has several pictures, striking poses in front of monuments. Once again, I see how loving his wife is – she shows me the pictures with a gentle pride, and I wonder if she had wanted to accompany him at all. ‘Actually, I had thought of buying a car. But then, so much money went into building the house that I decided to buy an auto. It’s the perfect size for my family. We can all go somewhere together. Quite easily. Doctor. Temple. Joyride. Whatever. And otherwise, I take it to town every morning after breakfast, and earn some extra cash. But basically I bought the auto to ferry my family around. Motorbike is not suitable for us.’

  The subji is delicious, and we compliment her cooking. The vegetables have all been grown on their farm – and to us, city dwellers all our lives, there is great heartiness in that, an extra dash of flavour to the taste. Finally, Ramaram says that he is going to present the great delicacy of the evening. He squats next to us. He crushes a bajra roti with his hands, crumbles gur on it and then soaks it in ghee. This traditional concoction is to be shaped into little balls and eaten as afters. Politely, I try it, not expecting to like it – but it is delicious. At that moment, as the fugue of sweet and savoury flavours mix in my mouth, with the perfect oiliness of the ghee, the lights go off. Ramaram steps out of the kitchen where the glowing embers of the chulha cast strange shadows on the walls, and returns with a lantern. ‘It is raining,’ he reports. And sure enough, we can hear the light patter of rain in the courtyard and the roof above. The children are huddled between us, and Ramaram sits by the doorway. ‘In these parts, they say, if meh and mehmaan come together – clouds and guests – it is going to bring good luck.’

  Later, after the rain has stopped and we are on our way back to the hotel, in Ramaram’s auto, the roads of Barmer will give off the scent of moist earth – that most stirring of Indian scents. In the hazy misted view, Barmer will grow into a dim familiarity: not the touristy high of Pushkar but the gritty tumble of the new that underpins the Indian story of the moment, and below that, like sand in shallows, a river of old certainties. It is ugly. It is beautiful. It is so far away. It is home. The night in the government room is cool and wet, and sleep comes with the soft clean weight of a clay wrap on the body, leaving us refreshed and new in the morning, smelling of leaves and twigs.

  Saurav

  ‘No, no, no, don’t drop the gold. Hold on to it. Yes, I am sure. Haan bhai haan.’

  Yet another bus; yet another bus depot full of jostling crowds and wandering buffaloes and dirty toilets and the sputter of oil into which samosas are being dropped two by two.

  ‘If I’m telling you to hang on to the shares, you hang on to the shares. Who’s the understudy, you or me?’

  Once again, because we have come early, we get seats in the first row. This is a Gujarat State Transport bus, three seats on either side of the aisle, tickets to be purchased on board. D is by the window on the left. I am in the middle. The seat next to me is still empty.

  ‘I am telling you, gold prices will continue to shoot up. Dump them a week later and see the munaafaa. Okay. Hmm. Hmm. Theek hai. Keep me informed. I am in a bus now. On the way to Sanchore. I’ll see you day after.’

  The man hangs up his phone and slips it into his pocket. A thin short guy with a sharp fox-like face, he is sitting in the first row, just across the aisle from me. He nods at me. His manner is friendly, curious. ‘Sanchore?’ he asks. ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘though we are actually going to Palanpur in Gujarat.’

  ‘Achchha, then you have to take a bus from Sanchore to Deesa, another from Deesa to Palanpur.’ I nod. That is precisely the route I had worked out just a few minutes earlier in the bus stand. ‘Why are you going to Palanpur anyway?’ he asks. D had asked me this in the morning, though the rain in the night had softened her. She was not averse to staying on in Barmer either, but it was awful for the budget. We couldn’t exactly filch dinners off people every night, I’d said. Was so not filching, she said, as she dried her hair with a towel after her bath.

  The man and I are speaking in Hindi, though his is not the hard Hindi of Rajasthan but a rounder, softer version, with a Gujarati register. Before I begin to answer, his phone rings again.

  ‘Bolo,’ he says. ‘Uhm hmm. Two khokhas? Oh-kay.’

  The sun is shining brightly today. D shields her face with her palm. ‘There’s your enterprising Gujju taking over the world.’ She nudges me softly, her eyes sparkling with mirth.

  The young man is enterprising alright. His wiry frame vibrates with energy as he does some quick calculations in his head. He shuts his eyes for a second.

  ‘Forget the gold for now and look at the silver and the chana. Arrey, baba, the chana, the soya beans.

  ‘Sorry,’ the man says, ‘too many phone calls.’ He slips the phone into his pocket, palpably self-conscious, and grins at me. It’s a broad interested smile that extends to his eyes and makes his forehead taut. ‘Myself Jignes Goradia.’ He extends his hand across the aisle.

  Jignes Goradia is a share broker, though neither senior enough, nor, in his own words, experienced enough to set out on his own. At least not yet. He works for a company that pays him eighteen thousand rupees a month as salary. Plus coverage for travel. Do we get paid salary while writing books? He asks this moot question, brows furrowed in genuine concern for our sanity.

  Not a salary, no, D says, with that flicker of annoyance she reserves for people who ask us this question. But yes, the publishers do pay a small advance, she admits. But then, we are doing thi
s to also see the country. ‘Ah, okay.’ His face is reflective for an instant. ‘What is your caste?’ he asks us then, as though the answer to this will help clear matters up. Apparently, it is okay for Brahmins to up and become writers, incurring such a fiscal loss.

  The conductor appears and tickets are for a hundred and forty rupees each. He has a ticketing machine and smartly prints out stubs. A few more passengers get into the bus before the door is shut and a balding old man, wiping his face on a large checked handkerchief, comes and sits next to me.

  ‘I have to travel very much for this job,’ Jignes tells us, the words carrying over the new guy’s head. ‘Twenty or twenty-one days out of thirty, I am out on tour. I cover many parts of Rajasthan and Gujarat. Demanding job. But I enjoy it.’

  ‘That’s a lot of touring,’ D says. ‘Your wife does not mind?’

  At the mention of wife, Jignes Goradia flushes slightly. ‘She is herself busy,’ he says finally. ‘You see, I have twins.’ At that his face becomes cocky again. Twins! Two for the price of one – that’s got to be something. Love’s dividend doubled. ‘They keep her on her toes. It’s a joint family also. Company is there. Help is there. After all, madam, travelling is the key in my job. The relation is what the customers remember finally. Profit or loss is one thing. Natural in business. But it’s the relationship that counts.’