In comparison my room had the personality of a McDonald’s burger. If I walked down the stairs and never came back, anyone could get in and settle in my place, without a thought, five minutes after I had left. Sometimes I felt like that in my house too. I could walk out the door, past cavorting Jeevan, past pawing Mr Sharma, past the big peepul, and keep going, turning corner after corner, till there was no finding my way back. Anyone could, five minutes later, walk in without anxiety, settle into my bed and curve into the sleeping s of Dolly/folly. Later, dark-dank Felicia would fetch him tea on a plastic tray and he would use my toothbrush to shine his teeth.
I decided to tell Jai what Guruji had said. For once he didn’t sneer or launch into a teasing harangue. The precipice can provoke unexpected faith. He got up from his chair and went and stood against the big window and put his palms against the plate glass. ‘Actually, why not, there is nothing else to do. Let me for a moment remove this glass between god and me and see if it changes anything. And if it doesn’t, we’ll just put the glass right back!’
In the next week, in pursuit of an idea, Jai became a secular
devotee. His zeal was to be marvelled at: it had the same intensity of his orations. With a schedule in hand, he visited as many major temples, gurudwaras, mosques and churches as he could manage. He meticulously followed the protocols of each, buying boondi and marigold garlands, cracking coconuts and drinking sweetened water, wearing white skullcaps and handkerchiefs tucked behind his ears, bending at the knee and bowing at the waist, lighting candles and parroting hymns, feeding urchins and amputated beggars, getting vermilion smeared on his forehead and sacred thread wound on his wrist, walking barefoot in the dirt and getting jostled by the believers. If there was a quota for spiritual genuflection, he had made up all the lost ground.
When I told Guruji, he said, through his happy laugh, ‘You don’t become a mahatma because you wear a loincloth. Else, every man in his bathroom would be one.’
And yet, despite Guruji’s cheerful cynicism, something happened while Jai was still visiting god’s showrooms—something totally removed from us—that altered our derailed fortunes. A few days after Jai began his quest, a couple of days after Holi, the hard colours still lingering on skins everywhere, irritating me because I hated that adolescent bullshit, on a lazy afternoon as I was slumped in my chair watching India struggling under the heel of the Australian cricket machine in Eden Gardens, Calcutta, my mobile buzzed frantically. I didn’t recognize the number and I didn’t recall the last time someone unknown had called me. It was several months since the hoopla of our exposé and the murder attempt had died down.
The voice belonged to a breathless television reporter. He wanted my reactions to a story. When I said I didn’t know what he was talking about, he said, well, I ought to hotfoot it to my television set: if what we had done was the mother of all stories, this one was the motherfucking great-grandmom of them all. All hell was breaking loose; the government was about to fall; the skies were about to open; the Himalayas were about to crumble; the country was about
to change. I clicked away from the Indian batsmen—abjectly on a follow-on, chasing a mountainous score—and found an exploding nuclear bomb of a story on the news channels.
A bunch of guys running a website had cracked wide open the rules of the journalistic game. Using spy cameras, they had hauled in footage of the rich, the powerful, and the animals who work the in-between, grabbing crisp rupee notes from reporters posing as arms dealers. The journos had sold the corrupt jokers a turkey as big as an elephant and, blinded by an endless influx of easy money, the jokers hadn’t seen it. Now here they were—politicians, generals, businessmen, government officers, presidents of major political parties—all in Technicolor, emblazoned across tens of millions of television sets across the country with their pants down and scabs showing.
No one the fuck knew what to do. There were swarms of newsmen buzzing around like hornets, hitting on whoever they could find. There were politicians running around like headless chickens, raving and ranting every which way. Parliament had been stalled by screeching members filling the well and bouncing up and down as if they had roaches in their undies. Everyone was looking for a television screen. Everyone was looking for an explanation. Who was behind it? What was the motive? Was the government going to resign? Nothing like this had been seen before.
Jai barged into my room, his neck a swathe of Holi purple, his forehead freshly slashed with vermilion. Throwing himself on the single sofa in front of the television, he flung his legs over its arms, and said, ‘They are fucked.’ We both looked at each other, and knew what he meant. We’d been fucked for something that in comparison was the pop of a balloon.
At the moment they were on television, and they were talking big. Facing down phalanxes of cameras and thronging reporters, and
talking real big. One of them in particular was grand—grand in the manner of Mr Lincoln. In fact, he was surreally reminiscent of Jai. He had a beard with a little more salt in it than Jai’s, and the lofty cadences of Mr Lincoln. He was giving state-of-the-nation orations on corruption, morality, politics and the Idea of India. He was talking about illicit electoral funding and national security and the subversion of a democratic dream.
I looked at Jai, and asked, ‘Separated at birth?’
Jai said, ‘Boss, I am not in this guy’s league.’
The bugger was dripping virtue like Christ on the crucifix. And he was smart enough to be loftily humble. No personal preening, no naming names. Just principles and values and morals and a whole lot of fucking hot air! Stuff that fills up balloons the size of buildings, but if you want to hold it in your hands you get nothing but your own damn palms rubbing against each other. Of course they would fuck him eventually, but it seemed it would take some doing.
The other guy with him appeared more all there, more my kind. Sort of a big, thickset, straight-seeming fellow with nothing overtly creepy about him. No grand design, no save-the-nation crap. There was shit out there in the world and he had gone and hit it with a solid club, a big bertha. And if it was now flying around splattering everyone, it was not his fault. It was not his shit. He was just the clubman.
Apart from hotair and clubman, there was a third specimen lurking in the corner. This one was like the bumbling hitman of a noir film, or the comic moment in a Hindi movie. He didn’t seem like any investigative reporter one could have imagined. In comparison, Woodward and Bernstein were Citibank managers. This guy was rotund, clad in a loose bush shirt, with a shambling manner, and nothing he said made any sense. It was easy to see how devastatingly deceptive he could be. Men would think nothing of handing him their cheque books, and wives, for safekeeping.
I guessed he was the pitchman who’d sold the sod politicians
the turkey bigger than an elephant. So all-pervasive was the hoopla around these guys that I, like many others, did not realize till a whole day later that India had turned around the Test match against Australia and were on the verge of their greatest-ever victory.
Though, like us, it teetered on the precipice for the next ten days, the government did not fall. The shit continued to fly—there were resignations, sackings, suspensions, inquiry committees. The cacophony grew by the moment but the citadel held. Within forty-eight hours the counter-attack began, and a hundred versions of everything rent the air. Soon no one knew the truth of anything. We had an eerie sense of déjà vu as wild theories of the underworld, business rivalries, stock market manipulations, Pakistani subversion, political skulduggery and Swiss bank pay-offs began to scorch the social waves. The only real difference was scale. If we had been mucking around in a puddle, these crazies had gone and fucked up the whole ocean.
For us the chaos created a sweet moment of reprieve. If it was owed to Jai’s rush of eclectic religiosity, I was happy to credit him. And if it was the inadvertent doing of hotair, clubman and hitman, then they had my gratitude.
A few days later we were sitting in Jai’s room watching the shit fly on television when his phone rang. I paid no attention, but when he got off the line he said, ‘Do you remember that Kapoor?’
I did.
He had visited our office in a red Pajero, bathed in cologne, wearing a wide-brimmed hat. Delhi was full of weirdos struggling to manage their machismo. Chutiya-Nandan-Pandey had once talked about a friend who kept a ghariyal—illegally, of course—on his farmhouse, and often during parties, muzzled the antediluvian beast and lowered him into the pool as guests screeched in frightdelight. Kapoor had talked of holidaying in the south of France: ‘Lousy beaches, skinny women, lovely blue waters; take your own women, ignore the beaches, sail the waters. Food and wine, just fine.’
Jai said, ‘He wants to come and see us. Wants to carry on the investment discussion.’
We looked at each other, serious and expressionless.
I said, ‘But do we want to?’
He said, ‘No. Absolutely not. Not our type.’
By now both of us were standing, beginning to pace.
I said, ‘Tell him we’ll consider it only if he changes the colour of his Pajero and stops wearing that hat.’
Raising his right arm and his eyebrows, Jai said, ‘Dhan dhana dhan dhan …’
Raising my right arm, I said, ‘Mahmud di maa di lund!’
And then breaking into a slow dance—one arm raised—both of us said in unison, loud and ringing, ‘Dhan dhana dhan dhan, Mahmud di maa di lund! Dhan dhana dhan dhan, Mahmud di maa di lund! Dhan dhana dhan dhan, Mahmud di maa di lund!’
We were still chanting and dancing, criss-crossing each other in front of the hyperventilating TV, when Sippy walked in, tea on tray, eyeballs swimming, and said softly, ‘Sirji, you are right, Mahmud di maa di lund.’
When I called up Sara to inform her of the new glimmer of hope—there was no one else to tell: father, mother, Dolly/folly were imbeciles; Guruji I could dial only after eight in the evening—when I called Sara up, she was in the waiting room of Tihar jail. Before I could say anything, she said, ‘You have no idea of the stories of these guys. Just no damn bloody idea. The bastards who run this fucking country owe an explanation to at least 800 million fucking people! A personal explanation and a personal apology to each one of the 800 million!’
I said, softly and slowly, ‘Dhan dhana dhan dhan, Mahmud di maa di lund.’
H
is father named him Kabir to confuse all killers, amputators and arsonists of the ominous future. There was another perilous giveaway Ghulam Masood needed to account for, and for that he procured a medical certificate when his son was twelve years old. The certifying piece of paper was a letterhead that declared in bold black print: Dr Babban Khan, MBBS, Specialist in Diarrhoea, Fever, Boils and Ladies Problems. It stated in a typewriter’s clear script, not a medic’s illegible scrawl, that acute phimosis had necessitated the surgical removal of young Kabir’s little skin of pleasure and pain. In effect, he was circumcised for medical reasons, not …
Carefully folding over the thick paper and encasing it in a robust green plastic pouch—fashioned from a smart shopping bag from the local saree emporium by firmly firing its new seams together—his father protected the document so that even the most torrential downpour could not breach its skin. Before he was thirteen, Kabir knew that he had to carry the pouch on his person whenever he left the house, and if the occasion ever arose, swiftly present it as his credentials.
Ghulam Masood did not stop at this alone. A hard-thinking, far-sighted man, quite unlike those of his tribe, he studied the past and cast the future and built in further safeguards for his boy in this forever unstable world.
When the padre at the local missionary school insisted he give his son’s surname, Ghulam said, with his palms joined and his head bowed, that his son would carry his blood and his spirit but not his name. He had called his son Kabir to put him beyond the lines of community and religious lacerations that shredded the land. It had been the most thought-out act of his life.
Though this was most unusual, Fr Conrad was not thrown by it. The big burly priest from Kerala, dark as bitter chocolate and bald as an egg, had trained all his life for misery and the deformities it creates. The first case he had handled in his diocese as a young friar was of a middle-aged transport department clerk who got drunk and thrashed his parents every weekend while being a model son, caring and solicitous, all week. The old parents loved him and feared him; he adored them and hated them. He beat them with a seasoned bamboo cane either on Saturday night or on Sunday, sometimes on both days. Then on Monday morning he took them to the mission dispensary or to the government clinic and applied the poultices and mercurochrome on their wounds himself. Through the week, several times a day, he prayed at the altar of the crucified one, begging forgiveness for the beast that raged within him. And each night he heated a brick, wrapped it in an old towel, and pressed it for hours to his parents’ aching bones. Then Saturday arrived, and the bottle was unscrewed. The brick was put away deep under the bed, and the cane was pulled out.
The young Conrad, attempting gravitas with a goatie—later he would sport a full flowing beard—had tried to talk to the entire family, in turn. The clerk’s wife Maria had said, ‘Better them than me! All men are animals, there’s nothing to be done.’ The old parents had said, ‘He is a very good son. We forgive him his trespasses. The devil has ways of waylaying men that we can never know.’ The clerk had said, ‘I am a sinner. I deserve no mercy. There is no hope for me. Curse me, Father, curse me!’
The young friar had spent hours, week after week, talking to
them all, fondly and threateningly, invoking man’s law and god’s law, till he finally understood the great truth of his calling. His task was not to talk but to listen. His job was to offer men the solace of god’s ear. Men were what they were; very little could alter the darkness within them. Each man walked his darkness on his own, in his own way, feeling his way through. No lofty sermons, no stinging admonitions, no preceptor or padre, no policeman or pandit could help light the way. All that each stumbling soul wished to know was that there was someone out there who would hear him, hear the story of his darkness, and punish or absolve him.