The Heat and Dust Project

by Saurav Jha

I remember that I bought a little donga made of saal leaves and filled with offerings for ten or fifteen rupees, a little red veil, a few items of puja. And I remember, even though the solemnity of the atmosphere was a bit marred by popular Bollywood tunes set to dharmic lyrics, I shed a few tears under a tree.

  I remember walking. Uphill, around a grand old palace, surrounded by trees. There were posh cars that came via an alternative route and deposited some slick Radhaswamy sect members, who adjusted their saris and brushed their starched kurtas and then went off somewhere. There were views of the little cluttered town from upstairs – and the houses, between giant cell phone towers, appeared blue and happy. There were lush green fields on the other side. I remember walking through a grove with brown leaves and green grassy beds and haunting vistas of the old fort. We came upon monkeys. Hundreds of monkeys, suddenly, spread out over the forest – on trees, chattering, looking after babies; on the ground, under the tall trees, fucking, delousing, eating – sometimes all three simultaneously.

  We sit on the cool steps of a temple.

  ‘It is said that here Radha was once entertained by a huge flock of dancing peacocks. Seeing her rapt in that performance, Krishna too danced as a peacock. That is why he wears a peacock feather in his crown. It was gifted to him by the peacock who was the chief of that flock.’

  S laughs. The light has started to weaken. The warm orange of the afternoon is now a paler shade; it is the hour when Radha would have begun to prepare for her nightly rendezvous. Abhisaar. Paint her feet. Anoint herself with sandalwood paste.

  S asks me, ‘What was that story you were telling me about the gopis begging Krishna to return?’

  I tell him what I’ve read. ‘According to an account in the Bhagavata Puraṇa, Krishna, it is said, on a certain moonlit night, conceives of a desire to dance. As he begins to play his flute in the groves of Braj, all the gopis forget their work at home, and rush towards him in frenzy. One rushes with her hair only half-braided. One rushes leaving a child half-fed. They gather and dance beneath the moon. It is always spring in these stories. In order that every gopi has him to herself alone, holding his undivided attention, he divides himself into a hundred Krishnas, and they sport by the river. Then, suddenly, without a word or a hint, he disappears, having danced with the gopis for several hours at a stretch even as the moon shines wanly. Some versions add that he disappears to break their pride because they’d begun to take him for granted. Other versions go deeper into philosophy. They say this is part of his lila. Whether he comes – in this song or any other – or not, is entirely beside the point. Lila is the irrational, illogical exuberance of a young child’s play.

  ‘Disconsolately, the girls look for him everywhere – amid the trees enveloped in the silvery darkness and on the banks of the Yamuna – but he remains elusive. Now he was there, now he is gone. “I say to him, come, come, come, come, come,” the gopi sings in Foster’s account in A Passage to India. But “he neglects to come”. That is where Godbole’s song ends. So Mrs Moore responds to its tragic overtone – “But he comes in some other song I hope?”

  ‘This episode is a favourite act with raas lila performers. But they usually take the story one step further. Having looked for him everywhere, the gopis are first deeply distraught. Then, in consolation, they trade remembrances with each other, acting out the things Krishna did when he was among them – they mimic his walk, how he played his flute, what mischief he was up to all the time, and the manner in which he worked his miracles. And seeing the intensity of their devotion expressed in their remarkable pageantry and playacting, he returns.’

  Saurav

  It is night and we are by the black river on Bengali Ghat. We had supper in Govardhan – double-fried paneer parathas – and now we sit on the bench. Tomorrow, we are returning to Delhi. For one, I have to meet the power magazine people, though I am still not sure if it’s a good idea to work with them. For another, I’ve realized that before we do our continuous yatra, I must wait for the money from my big article to come in. Oh, I haven’t told you about the night of the big article, have I?

  When one is terribly broke, one often wakes up in a sweat in the middle of the night. If perchance one’s prospects depend on uncertainties like books and ideas, one can add a fair amount of panic to the mix – a constriction in the throat, a sound of the roaring sea from one’s gullet, a general numbness. Add to this the presence of extended family, and it is inevitable that a blame game between spouses will ensue at midnight. In fact, it is mandatory.

  In the course of our life as born-again free spirits, many, many such fights have ensued. The night of the big article is not, however, one of them.

  We have moved to Calcutta. Several months have elapsed. The books are not out. A few of my articles have been published in World Politics Review, but nobody in the family reads WPR anyway. One evening, there is some conversation, about fruit juice or something equally ridiculous, wherein D perceives a slight that, in her defensive crouch, hearkens to our financial situation. I still cannot decide whether a slight was intended, but it rattles her. Back home, she and I inhabit a gloomy subdued mould. I sit to work. She doesn’t even read, just lies face down on a pillow, muffling tears, and eventually goes off to sleep.

  It’s two in the morning when she wakes up with a crick in her neck. She gets up, finds a Tiger balm, and then goes to the bathroom. She comes out, gets a bottle of water from the fridge. She looks awful.

  ‘There’s some news,’ I say.

  ‘It better be good.’

  ‘I’d asked J (the editor of WPR) if he wanted a larger piece on India’s strategic posture for the upcoming year. He’s agreed. They have a special edition planned for February.’

  ‘Okay,’ she says, coming to look over my shoulder at the computer screen.

  ‘It’s not a regular piece,’ I tell her. ‘It’ll be a 5,000-word thing, and he’ll pay 800 dollars.’

  ‘Eight hundred dollars? Is that like 35,000 rupees?’

  Outside, our neighbourhood is asleep, though sometimes dogs growl and very occasionally cars speed past. In the pause between her question and my slight nod, there is suspended the possibility of exhaling, of the sweet flood of relief, perhaps even more than relief, of vindication.

  I nod, a broad smile on my face, though the money is pitiful in comparison to what we used to earn together. In the superb silence of the night, she raises her hands and begins to dance around the room, adroitly stepping past furniture, even though the promise of one article is but slender.

  Now it is end-January and my editor has written to me with a deadline. I need to find a quiet place where the Internet works properly – and finish the piece. That place can only be Paharganj, though we’ve agreed that this time, we have to find a better room. And since we leave for Delhi tomorrow, we are waiting for the boatman to return and see if he’s willing to take us for a spin. The idea seems to have pleased D inordinately. The lacrimal excess that Barsana induced in her has worn off.

  43

  Gingerly, I follow S into the boat. It rocks under our cumulative weight, but once we sit down and the boat begins to cleave into the tide, and the moist breeze cools my cheeks, I am not afraid any more. Our boatman is Gopal Nishadh and, in the manner of archetypal boatmen, he has a lovely turn of phrase.

  His Bengal connection is strong, he opens. Not only does he work here at the Bengali Ghat but – his voice dips pleasantly – his wife is from Bengal. Twenty years ago, she had come to Mathura with her family, on a pilgrimage. One of her brothers lived in Mathura with his wife. They were staying at his place. Gopal had taken the family on a boat ride. It was love at first sight. She had long hair and was only seventeen or eighteen years old. Early next morning, she came to these ghats. When he came to get his boat, half an hour after sunrise, he found her waiting, a ten-rupee note clutched in her palm. She said she wanted to see the river at dawn – would he take her?
/>   Bas, he said.

  One after another the ghats glide before our eyes, a moving scene. It is like witnessing, for a few minutes each, different rooms in a long house from a slow-moving night train. A few of the rooms are lit up and filled with laughing children; a few are dark caves with mosquito nets and mashed food where the old are waiting to die.

  For Gopal Nishadh and his missus, love was not enough. Her family was far more prosperous that his; they owned land in Bengal. She knew her father would not agree. When the family went away, she stayed back with her brother and sister-in-law, in whom she confided. One month later, after Gopal’s mother agreed to the match, they ran away and got married. Her father was furious and threatened to come to Mathura and do something drastic. But it was harvest time. No farmer in his right mind would leave his fields. After their first child was born, the two of them travelled to Bengal, and all was well. Now, of course, four children later, neither of them is as youthful – like the two of us, he says – as they used to be, and his wife has no time for boat rides. But one thing Gopal Nishadh considers his duty: the facilitation of romance. Often, there are young couples, including married ones, who have no privacy at home, no place where they can just sit and nibble chips and share an ice-cream cone on summer evenings and chat about nothing. He provides them this open-air room.

  We are now passing Swami Ghat, where devotees are milling about and several boats are moored at a makeshift quay. There is a temple lit by an overhead halogen lamp, and the resultant glow is a bright reddish-gold globe that is mashed up in the water. There is a Bhagavad Katha happening this evening, and the narration, interspersed with music, comes to us scrambled in the wind. We pause and observe the busy shapes through the mist. To the left of the temple is another fine building, old, and lit up by a tube light. Its flat white is somehow flatter in the river, more wavy, and it bounces off the opposite wall. Near the Sati Burj (a four-storey tower built in 1570 by the son of Behari Mal of Jaipur to commemorate his mother’s sati), girls are floating diyas in the water – little bursts of flame prick the surface of the dark river, but they don’t float towards us. Instead, marigolds and crushed petals of other flowers surround our boat, and when I reach for a beautiful pink petal shaped like a shell, my fingers tingle in the water.

  Gopal Nishadh belongs to the kevat caste. His six brothers are also boatmen, though with the next generation, things are likely to change. The family occupations of many people in Gopal’s generation will not necessarily be passed on. And yet, this passing is lamented by Gopal himself. For one, the community of Nishadhs had been blessed by Shri Rama himself, when a Nishadh ferried him across the Mandakini. When Rama had asked the good boatman what he would like in return, the man had not been tempted by wealth or afterlife. He had simply said that his descendants should always be able to do their work safely, and make their living from the river. So, one of the offshoots of this is that if a Nishadh ever sits down to fish, he will always find something at the end of his line. (This story was later independently related to us by our friend Prem Paramlal, a carpenter employed at JNU, who was also from the Nishadh community. His father came from Bundelkand but Prem grew up in Delhi. At one point, he had a gig by the Yamuna and his friends would insist that he sit down to fish, since he would invariably manage to catch stuff. His friends might sit perfectly still and dangle the juiciest bits for hours without any luck – but Prem would never return empty-handed.)

  We are now deep into the river, and the bright, colourful ghats have given way to a dark neighbourhood, which is designed like a ghat, but the houses beyond are bare and unlit. From the boat, mid-river, the perspective changes. The ghats, so solid when one stands there looking at the waves or flickering lamps or floating flowers – its steps so white, its benches so orderly – seem insubstantial from the water. Unreal. As though the darkness around us, the sky, the river, these are the only real things. All other construction is mere child’s play, to fill up time in a world where simple things have got complicated. These buildings here, ghostly under a single strobe light, seem to be deserted. Or worse, forgotten.

  ‘What is that hum?’ S asks Gopal.

  He strains his ears and replies, ‘Oh, that is from the shallows. You see, through winter, some particularly faithful pilgrims erect tents on a shallow flat some distance away, in the middle of the river. All through the night, they stay awake and sing and talk. Some sadhus are there. They tell stories. It is called kalpabas.’

  ‘In the middle of the river? That could be scary,’ I say, looking at the vast blackness in front of me and trying to imagine pilgrims and their tents.

  ‘True,’ Gopal says reflectively. ‘Fear lurks about the waters. Let me tell you, boatmen witness some really spooky stuff. I don’t want to boast, but I have saved a hundred people from drowning. One hundred. You can write that down – no problem, everyone knows. So I am always alert. Whenever I see someone flailing about, I immediately jump into the river, though with one hand I keep my boat chain in my grip, and I try to drag the person into my boat. Then I row them ashore. But sometimes, you see someone struggling and you rush the boat there. You jump into the water, you are trying your best to save them, but somehow, you can’t seem to get them to safety. They slip through your grasp. You go close to them and they elude you. It seems they want to be saved but yet they want to drown. At that time, you must immediately get back into your boat and row away, chanting the name of God. It is someone who has already passed on, but his unhappy soul keeps enacting the drama until it is able to move on. But one thing is there: once I am in my boat, nothing can touch me.’

  Eleven:

  How to Perfect the Paharganj Posture

  Not only is it a rich and ancient civilization but you wouldn’t BELIEVE what you can get in the chemists without a prescription.

  — Dexter Mayhew in a letter to Emma Morley, while on his gap year in India, David Nicholls, One Day

  44

  A small restaurant in Paharganj. Two Chinese girls and two young Indian thugs with friendly faces sit at a small table in the corner. Eventually, it emerges, one guy is a tourist guide and the other is his friend. All four are first-generation English speakers and are in search of what good time is to be had.

  Thug 1: I am off to China next week to develop a resort. This is the latest thing. Big American company sells shares of resorts. My good friend from America and I will work this deal. I don’t like this travelling by bus that we had to do. You girls suffered. Next time, I will personally get tickets for plane. We will fly to Jaipur.

  Girl 1: But why are you going to China? Stay, no. We are having fun.

  Thug 2: No, no, don’t worry, he will be back by the time we go to the Yoga Festival in Rishikesh in March. In your company he is finally forgetting his old girlfriend with whom he broke up five years ago!

  Girl 1: What happened?

  Thug 1: Did not work out.

  Girl 2: Bursts into peals of laughter.

  Thug 1: What?

  Girl 2: You’ve been single for five years, hee.

  Thug 1 (self-consciously): No. Only one year. Other girls came into my life. But nothing serious.

  Girl 1: But I want to go to the sex temples!

  Thug 1 looks to Thug 2: Kahaan hai?

  Thug 2: There are two options for sex temples. Khajuraho and Hampi. No, wait, one more. Konark also.

  45

  ‘Will you please hurry up?’ I say, talking through blue walls to S in the bathroom.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ comes his muffled reply. ‘I’ll be out in a minute.’

  My stomach clamps open and shut in response. He takes such a long time in the bathroom. Even after years and years, some things remain prickly territory. I exhale loudly. ‘It’s nearly half past twelve.’ I raise my voice again. ‘The boys will be waiting. We were supposed to meet for brunch, not lunch.’

  He doesn’t reply. Or, at least, I don’t hear what he says. T
he water hits the bucket in a steady stream, and he begins to hum cheerfully above the din.

  Already dressed up for the day, I flop back on the bed, exhausted from fanning my flame of annoyance. I decide to let go. If we’re late, we’re late. I let the small of my back dig into the mattress and my feet, sticking out over the edges, are motionless. I stare at the blue walls of the square room, and allow the thoughts, vague and illogical, to flow right through me, mounting no resistance to their content.

  It is the Paharganj posture. I think I have mastered it.

  A functional room with utilitarian furniture. A bed with side tables on either side; a writing table with stains etched into the surface from teacups left for too long; a couple of chairs. On the left wall, a laughing Ganesha has been painted by a tourist who lived here for many months, about eight or ten years ago. It’s a lucky Ganesha, the manager told us, and even when the rooms were being renovated, they always painted around it to keep the picture intact. If one stares at the wall long enough or hard enough, one can notice minor differences in the many variants of blues that have, at different times, been used around it: a soft sky colour, a watered-down cobalt, and beneath these, the bottom layer, a shade that ink bottles from my childhood called ‘Sulekha Turquoise’.

  Should I text the boys?

  I only have to stretch my hand and there, on the night table, is the phone – perhaps I shall text them we’ll be late if S does not get out of the wretched loo in another five minutes. If I scrabble around a bit more, there is the book, which I do not want now, and then, a tiny jar of Vaseline, which I realize I do want. I apply a tiny pearly smear on my lips and rub it in. Delhi: a city where you have to use lip balm round the year. That had been my view in the beginning. In moist Calcutta, lip balms were more cosmetic than essential; in the dry Delhi air, one has to use them all the time.