I noticed her earrings. They were tiny silver tennis racquets! We were really a country without hope. I closed my eyes tight and tried to conjure up a red wrap with yellow flowers. Without warning the woman below me gave a loud grunt. It was an animal sound. In disgust I bit hard into her shoulder. She read it wrong and began to buck even more, her heel banging me rhythmically. I tried to think of things that would help me finish this. I could dredge up nothing.
For some reason, the grinning squirrel kept grabbing all the space: the bushy moustache; the no-suicide window; great minds working in silence.
Three muffled beeps sounded. I stretched my hand down to the floor and felt around in my peeled-off trousers for my mobile. I held it away from her head and opened the message and instantly felt a charge. It was nothing short of a book. Much too long to read and fuck at the same time. So I rolled off her and sat up against the backrest. She looked at me with an abject mix of self-pity and rebuke, as if I’d stripped her naked in the middle of the road. The flying cherubs bunched around her waist looked pretty forlorn too. Grimly, without looking her in the face, I said, ‘Police’, and began to scroll. Dolly/folly! She was foolish enough to believe the police was writing me novellas on sms in the middle of the night. The best thing I’d ever done in my life was to have never given her the right to ask questions. Two scrolls of the screen and I’d forgotten there was a half-naked woman with a mug of warm water inside her lying by my side.
Sara was distressed because the sparrow had finally flown from her side. For the last two months I knew Bhandariji, the tiny melodramatic lawyer of Patiala House, had been giving signs of waning interest in Sara’s case, or rather in Sara. I had not been told this, but had gathered it from the drift of her conversation. Today it seemed he had not taken her calls, and when she’d shown up at his office—in his residence—he had refused to meet her. Of course you did not stop Sara so easily. She had hollered so loud and long that all the doors had to be flung open. In the presence of his juniors, and with his sour, prematurely ageing wife hovering in the backdrop, Bhandariji had declared that there was no case. The five men were doomed. He had done his best. He could not give it any more time.
When Sara attacked him for being money-fixated, he said—and I could just see him, with a cinematic cock of his head, his fingertips priming his collar—‘Madam, who doesn’t like money? But
here there is no case and there is no money! I have studied it and I know. We are both wasting our time. These men are like random stalks of sugarcane. Powerful men cut them, chew them, and spit them out. No one pays to kill them; no one pays to save them. You must spend your time on better things. Bride burning, child labour, witch-hunting, sati, dowry deaths, female foeticide, cholera, tuberculosis, polio, tree-felling, pollution …’
Yes, the whole fucking world waiting to be saved. From itself.
Sara was not one to take anything at face value. She was too full of grand education for that. The American university had taught her things like deconstruction and subtext. Instead of the cunning of the sub-literate she had the suspicion of the overeducated. And like most Indians, with two hundred years of colonial genuflections running in their veins, she was born bawling conspiracy theories. She said: clearly, the sparrow was either being leaned upon or had taken money from someone. She was going to find out and she was going to fix him. The sparrow’s strange about-face made her even more certain that the assassins were innocent.
I became aware of naked legs lying next to me, the cherubs congregating at the waist. How well she’d trimmed herself, as if she were about to star in a centrefold. She was doing what I had been ordered to do—stare up at the ceiling and think about oneself. Sensing my gaze, she turned to look at me. Her pleading cow eyes filled me with revulsion and I leapt off the bed, picked up my trousers, and went into the bathroom.
I pulled the car out of the lane, took two turns and parked under the old semul tree by the park.
The shadow had been sleeping on his fold-out bed inside the veranda’s overhang when I emerged from the house, and had poked his head out of the blanket. This was a new one, a young boy called
Munna, only six months in the business. He was not made to be a cop. He had done a BSc and an MSc in physics from Rohtak (one degree more than me) and had a soft face that belonged to a bank clerk or a chemist. Someone—some frantic family member: in Indian families breeding insecurity is a favourite pastime—someone had pushed him into enlisting. His ambitions lay elsewhere. Often he could be seen reading thick blue-coloured tomes, preparing for the civil service exam that he hoped would give him a desk job and other cops to order around. The fool held his 9mm as if it would explode in his hands. I knew he never kept it loaded—the magazine was always in his right pocket. If I was ever attacked I would be killed, cremated and drifted down the Ganga before he got his pistol and ammunition aligned. I answered the question in his eyes by saying I was just going down the road for a paan and he could keep sleeping. He had slumped back gratefully.
Under the semul tree, I turned off the car lights, locked the doors and dialled Guruji’s number. It was not yet ten, but the colony lanes were empty, with not a single after-dinner stroller visible. Only one-eyed Jeevan was moving around, and had jumped out of his nest amid the dried leaves in the gutter and headed towards me and the car. He was a determined bastard, with a saint’s faith in humanity. For some reason I didn’t kick him away as I tended to, and he stood next to me, wagging his weak tail, as I opened the door and fired the engine.
Guruji was relaxed as ever when he came on the line. ‘What trouble have you got into now?’ he said, with the hint of laughter in his voice.
I told him the story of Kafka’s castle.
He said, ‘Just as the temple stands between man and god, in India the government stands between man and justice. Don’t let it worry you.’
I said, ‘But how does one get to know what the truth is?’
He said, and I could see him sitting on his charpoy under a
billion stars, bare of torso and smiling, ‘The truth is what it is. It doesn’t change whether you know it or not. So why let it worry you? Men chase the truth as if it’s Aladdin’s djinn, and will solve all their problems—instead of doing the right thing, secure in the knowledge that the truth is unalterable and will remain what it is whether we know it or not. What is it about all this that is worrying you now?’
So like Guruji. The large wisdom, and in the same breath, the small tactic.
I said, ‘All I want to know is whether I should worry at all. While they are saying these are killers contracted by Pakistan, she says she’s been checking and they are fully innocent, and have been trapped in all this.’
Of all the people in the world, Sippy staggered by. His sparse hair was standing on end, and his pants were dangerously low, getting in the way of his stagger. I could almost smell the stench of booze through the closed windows. He went past without noticing me. How could he possibly push up the shutter in this state? One of these days he was just going to die on the veranda and we’d be dealing with another hundred conspiracy theories.
Guruji said—I could almost see him beaming—‘If she means innocent because they are the victims of their circumstances, then of course they are innocent. Just as the police are, and she is, and you are, and I am!’ He laughed, and added, ‘And Ravana was, and Duryodhana was, and Pakistan is!’
I said, ‘This leaves me no wiser.’
He said, ‘Of course it won’t. And in any case this is not what she means. This is not the way to look at the world. Only holy men and fools are supposed to find everyone blameless. And you all are neither. Trust is not like love. It is good to give love freely to everybody, but trust is like good karma—it must always be earned. Men must remember that they live among men. There is no wisdom in forgetting that. For men, we know, are the least reliable of all animals.
For money and power they can forsake the womb that birthed them, slice the loins that spawned them, murder the friend that sheltered them. Remember, Gandhi was killed by a Hindu, and Issa betrayed by his followers and nailed to a cross. The universe manufactures more bad than good men so that the good may be continually tested. Because it is not enough to be good once or twice; it’s not enough to get the better of one bad man—the warriors of god need to best battalions of the bad in the course of their lives.’
Fuck. I was regretting I had called. This was not the sermon for a man transporting his tumescence across town. By the time I got to her she’d probably have reverted from Durga to Mahakali. Somewhere behind me I could hear the jangle of steel. Sippy was wrestling with the shutter as if with an oiled snake.
I said, ‘I understand, Guruji.’
The laughing voice said, ‘You are wondering why Guruji is dribbling big words like spittle at this time of night. But you know, gurujis too have to fulfil their karma. Just remember, if you are not a holy man and not a fool, and your destiny is neither to forgive nor to laugh, then the men are not innocent. All of them have crossed the lines men draw among themselves, and one of them was cracking open heads like eggshells at an age when you were still cycling to school in your half-pants.’
H
is mother insisted he was benign of heart. It was just his head that was hot. His father, spitting a scattershot, a frayed datun poking out of his mouth, said that his head was not merely hot, it was in flames, and that one day the flames would char his heart, and perhaps everything else around him. His siblings said they loved him but needed protection from him. His friends at school said they loved him but needed protection from him. His teachers said they doubted they could teach him anything, especially the fundamentals of non-violence.
The shastri—the astrologer-cum-pandit from the neighbouring village—who had made his birth-chart, peeled open the roll of yellow parchment and scratched his head. Going up and down the garish blue-and-red hexagons, pentagons and triangles with the blunt end of his pencil, he said slowly, ‘The boy’s chart is full of good signs. He is born under the sign of the ruler. He will have strength, and he will have power. Men will fear him, and men will follow him. He will never lack for food or for money. It will come to him whenever he wants it, and like a king he will give of it freely to others.’ He then stopped, and from over his thick black glasses, looked around the yard.
These were people fallen on bad days. The dung-washed yard was clean but spare. At the far right end were tethered one milch buffalo and her thin-legged calf, and a little removed from them, two dirty-white oxen with starvation bones jutting out. A single
rectangular mud trough, its edges crumbling, served them all. At the moment it was flecked with snatches of dry hay. On the left side of the yard was a clunky handpump with an unusual square mouth, and just behind it a small, screening mud wall, behind which the women of the house bathed. Draped over the wall he could see women’s clothes drying.
The shastri, who lived two villages away, had been visiting this family for a lifetime. He bore witness to its gathering distress—the land disputes, the brutal face-offs, the police interventions, the resort to the courts, the ensuing impasse, and the shrinking fortunes.
The house comprised one large room, made with rejected bricks—their nakedness displaying their defects. The solitary door was always open, letting in a shaft of sunlight during the day, and in the night, a shimmer of moon. The two windows, at opposite ends, were always closed, their sills loaded with chattel, the frames hung over with dusty old clothes. The floor was polished dung. Chinks of light burst into the room from the imperfect wall, the loose frames of the window, and the clumsy roof, which was always alive with the traffic of rodents.
Two big iron trunks sat next to each other against the far wall, piled high with bedding—mattresses, pillows, quilts—all the same faded dirty brown. Both the trunks sported big locks. Inside them were secured everything of value the family possessed, most importantly wedding jewellery passed down the generations. Often years rolled by without either of the trunks ever being opened. Standing on their side, stacked into each other, were five rope charpoys with crudely carved legs. In the summer they were dragged out at night as the family slept under the stars, and in the winters laid out inside cheek-by-jowl till the room was a sheet of charpoys and everyone had to climb over each other to find their appointed place. In one corner stood two long spears, their bamboo torsos stout and strong, their iron heads blunt and rusted. A naked sword, its metal black with neglect, hung from a nail next to them. Heaped in the far
corner were big brass utensils, some of them large enough to stir up meals for a hundred people.
Gyanendra Tyagi had a handlebar moustache and big shoulders but only one good leg. His left knee had been shattered by an iron-tipped lathi six years ago during the last land-grab. Gyanendra had only fifty bighas of land left. One hundred bighas were in dispute, and hundred and twenty more had been wrested—over many invasions—by his older cousin Jogendar and his five strapping sons.
For six years now, the shastri was aware, Gyanendra had held the peace, simmering in rage but scared to provoke another physical skirmish. The boy whose horoscope he had come to read was named Vikram and he was already two years old. Gyanendra had spawned him after a succession of girls. All hopes of levelling with his cousin rested on him.
Weighing his words carefully, chewing on the pencil, the shastri said, ‘For his father he will be like a tangerine—sweet and sour at the same time. For his mother he will be like a guava—always tasty even when it has too many seeds. And for the world he will be like a pineapple—very thorny outside but full of juice inside.’
To Gyanendra Tyagi, sitting cross-legged on the charpoy opposite the shastri, it all sounded good. His wife, squatting on the yard floor, veil pulled over her forehead asked, ‘Will his coming help end this endless land row? Will we have peace finally? And will there be enough once again?’