Outside, he was unknown. But as the Sena had grown, he had risen in the Sena. All the time he had left over from work he gave to the Sena. He thought that in those days, between the Corporation and the Sena, he was working for 20 hours a day. He found himself running 22 Sena areas in central Bombay; he became close to the top leaders; he was put in charge of the Sena’s election organization. He began to be known; his name began to get into the papers.
Yet, when he resigned in 1972 from the Corporation, all they had was his wife’s telephone-operator salary. Then he appeared to have some luck. Just two days after he left the Corporation, he found a job as a shop supervisor in the tube-well section of one of the most highly regarded engineering firms in India. His salary was to be 750 rupees a month, nearly three times what he had been getting in the Corporation. This was a great piece of good fortune, but it hardly lasted. His Sena reputation undid him.
The Maharashtrian workers began to treat him as a Sena organizer rather than a shop supervisor. They wanted him to start a union. This kind of excitement couldn’t be kept secret from the management. The works manager called him in one day – the works manager was an old army officer: the kind of man Mr Raote had longed to be – and began to question him. Had he come to work, or had he come as an activist?
Mr Raote couldn’t endure the questioning. ‘I am a hot-tempered man. I resigned that very day. I had been with the firm for one month and 22 days.’
Mr Raote paused here. He was coming now to the part of his story he especially wanted to tell; this was the period of his life he had wanted me to know about almost as soon as he had decided to talk seriously to me, in his office in the Corporation.
So, sitting at home now, after his morning puja, with the open photograph album and the sacred Marathi books laid out on the sofa, he paused. Then he said, ‘That was when my starving started. That was my most difficult time.’
Though it was the time of his glory in the Sena.
‘I began to work the whole day for the Sena. My wife used to feed my family with what she got from her job. And now – since it was a love-match – there began to be trouble in our family. My mother and my wife couldn’t get on.’
Whether arising out of a love marriage or an arranged marriage, it was the eternal conflict of Hindu family life, a ritualized aspect of the fate of women, like marriage itself or childbirth or widowhood. To be tormented by a mother-in-law was part of a young woman’s testing, part, almost, of growing up. Somehow the young woman survived; and then one day she became a mother-in-law herself, and had her own daughter-in-law to torment, to round off a life, to balance pain and joy.
‘I decided at last to leave my place.’ To leave, at last, the one room at the end of the upper verandah. ‘I left with my wife and children. We went to stay at my mother-in-law’s place.’
That wasn’t far away. Like the tenement he had left, the building he moved to could be seen from the flat where we were. He would show both places to me later from the roof terrace: the drama of small spaces and short distances, the settings themselves always accessible afterwards, never really out of sight, and perhaps for this reason cleansed (like stage sets) of the emotions they had once held.
‘If my mother-in-law gave me food, I had food. If they didn’t give me food there, I would starve for the day. In those days I didn’t have a penny in my pocket, not even for a cigarette. But, being a proud person, I have never gone down in front of anybody for anything. I prefer starving. And those were my starving days. Since that time, you know, I have only one meal a day. That meal is at night. I never eat in the mornings. I have only coffee.
‘One of my maternal uncles used to visit me at that time. Twice or thrice a week. He was absolutely poor, but he used to take me to a hotel.’ The word ‘hotel’, as used by Mr Raote, and pronounced ho-tal, was more of a Marathi or Hindi word than an English word, and meant a restaurant, usually of a simple sort. ‘He would give me a meal. Poor food. And a cup of tea, and a cigarette.
‘One day my father-in-law didn’t come home. He didn’t come home the next day either. We began a long search for him. After four days he came back on his own. We found him in the road. He had had a road accident, and he had been discharged from the hospital. After this he became “psychiatric”. He used to harass everybody. So I had to stay away from my mother-in-law’s place during the day. I was quite homeless. I used only to sleep at my mother-in-law’s place.
‘Then one of my father-in-law’s friends offered me a place in East Dadar. We went there, and it was there that my second son was born. During all this tormented time my wife was pregnant. In East Dadar I got settled nicely. I had a peaceful life. I used to get there at 11 in the evening, after my work for the Sena. This was in 1973–1974.
‘This period of my life lasted four years. I used to walk kilometres to take the Sena meetings. I never grumbled then. When, later, I was elected to the Corporation, and began to talk there, all that I poured into the speeches came from these years I’ve been telling you about.’
What had supported him? Had he felt ‘guided’?
He had felt guided. He had a guru. In what I had thought of as the holy corner of the sitting room there was – not far from the small shelf of devotional cassettes – a large, perhaps more than life-size picture of a handsome, bearded man, just the face. I had seen the picture as I had come in; but with the feeling I had had that the corner was holy, and private, I hadn’t looked at the picture more closely. That man – with features of almost unnatural regularity and beauty, in the picture – had been Mr Raote’s guru.
It was of religion that now, near the end of the morning, Mr Raote wished to talk. He took me to his puja room. It was next to the sitting room. The shrine was a deep, chest-high recess in a wall. The images were freshly garlanded; there was a husked coconut with a tuft of fibre or coir at the top. Right at the back of the recess, and fitting the back, was another picture of the guru, perhaps trimmed to fit the space, but similar to the picture in the sitting room: the devotee, and the shrine, would be held in the gaze of the guru. Fresh flowers were placed on the shrine every day; the coconut was changed every month. Mr Raote spent an hour and a half every morning on his puja. He sat on a deer skin. The skin was then rolled up and placed on a high shelf.
Some days later, when I went to see Mr Raote again in his flat, I got the rest of his story.
At the end of that four-year period of starvation, good fortune came to him quite suddenly. In the garage of a friend, right here in Dadar, he began to make furniture. It was a new turn for him; but he wasn’t absolutely a novice. At school he had done woodwork and furniture-making as a special technical subject. Now, in the friend’s garage, he began to make sofas, tables and chairs; and he sold the pieces he made. He discovered he had talent.
He had made much of the furniture in his flat. Against one wall was a special table he had designed. It was like a Pembroke table, with two fold-down flaps on either side of a central plank. But in this design the central plank was very narrow, about eight inches, making it ideal for the small, multi-purpose spaces of Bombay dwellings. The design found favour; it was adopted by all the leading furniture-manufacturers of Bombay. Mr Raote also specialized in study units that doubled as room-dividers. The pieces he made were all his own designs: the ideas just came to him. The moment I started working in the furniture business I thought of these things.’ He also made doors. He had made all the doors in his flat, and designed and made all the decorated teak architraves. The flat was a special kind of triumph for him, a proof of his success and a demonstration of his talent. There was much in it I had taken for granted and only now, with his help, began to see.
His success grew. He began to do woodwork for big buildings on subcontract; and then he thought he would go into the building business itself. Two years after he had started making furniture, he put up his first big building in partnership. Though his journey had seemed long to him, he was at that time only thirty-three. Since then he had done 15 or 1
6 big projects.
‘But in all my business I have tried, as a member of the Shiv Sena, to accommodate the middle-class Maharashtrian. So, instead of becoming a multi-millionaire as a builder, I prefer to follow the path of the leader, to follow the principles he has laid down.’
This devotion to the Shiv Sena and its leader was like an aspect of Mr Raote’s religion. He had always had courage, and confidence, the gift of religion, the atma-vishwas of which Mr Patil of Thane had spoken.
‘In my rise, my falls, whatever the problems, I faced them boldly, whether as a businesman or social worker or head of a family. Up to the time of my college days I had my father pushing me on. Then in 1964 I came across the great saint who had set up his ashram at Alibagh.’
This was the guru whose picture was in the corner of the sitting room and at the back of the shrine in the puja room. Mr Raote, from what he said now, had come in contact with him in the year he had had the great disappointment of not being able to go to the engineering college at Sholapur.
‘I used to go to see him for his blessing. I never asked anything of him. I went to him only for his blessing, to serve him because he was a saint, and I feel he changed my entire life. He died in 1968. But I feel he is still blessing me whenever I need his blessing. Though he is not here physically, in the actual body, he always gives me and my family his presence. Look,’ Mr Raote said, taking me to the teak front door of his flat. ‘My door has no latch. It is always open.’
I had caught Mr Raote just in time to get the end of his story. Though, when we were making our arrangements, he had told me nothing about it, it turned out now that I had caught him, that second morning, on the very day he was going off to his ashram for nine days. He was going alone, without his wife.
‘I go every year, without fail. These nine days of my year I cannot give to anybody else.’
He had done other pilgrimages. He and his wife had been six times to the cave of Amarnath in Kashmir, 13,000 feet up in the Himalayas, where – an ancient miracle of India – every year in the summer an ice phallus formed, symbol of Shiva, waxing and waning with the moon.
He said, ‘I love that Himalayan place.’
The worldly man who wanted to be an officer and an engineer, the Sena worker, the devout Hindu: there were three layers to him, making for a chain of belief and action.
Papu, the young Jain stoockbroker, speaking of the Shiv Sena, one of the many components of the threat around him, said, ‘All our problems are economic. We wouldn’t have a problem if we didn’t have an economic problem.’
He was taking me that afternoon – after trading on the stock exchange had ceased – to see where he lived, and especially to see the slum by which he was surrounded. Dharavi, as its name was, was a famous slum. There were people in Bombay who claimed, with a certain amount of pride, that it was the largest slum in Asia.
We were in a yellow-and-black taxi, and moving slowly: sunlight and crowd and hooter-din, the hot exhausts of buses billowing black, grit resting on the skin. And then, in the middle of this, a glimpse of purity: a group of thin young boys in white loincloths, walking fast on the other side of the road.
The boys were Jains, Papu said, munis, aspirants to the religious life, and they would have been the disciples of a guru. Munis didn’t have a fixed abode; they were required to move about from place to place and to live off charity. There were places attached to temples where they might spend a night; they asked at Jain houses for their food.
How would they know that a house was a Jain house?
‘Normally there is a board at the entrance, or an emblem of some sort, or some kind of tile. Nowadays you can even get stickers. But usually there is an attendant with the young munis. He takes them round and shows them the houses. It is said that the purpose of this discipline is to control the ego. In Jainism knowledge is very important. A brahmin is supposed to be the most intellectual person; he is the person to whom everyone listens. It is to become someone like that that the munis go around asking for their food. To gain knowledge, they have first to keep the ego under control.’
But the rituals and traditions came from a more pastoral time. Did they serve their purpose when they were acted out now in the streets of Bombay?
Papu’s attitude was that rituals had to be constantly adapted. Jains, for instance, were supposed to bathe every morning and walk barefooted in an unstitched garment to the temple. In Bombay many Jains could still do that; Papu’s mother did it in the suburb where she and Papu lived. But Papu himself couldn’t do it. He might walk to the temple after his bath, but he couldn’t walk barefooted and he couldn’t go in an unstitched cloth, because nowadays he went to the temple on his way to work.
I told him about my visit to the Muslim area and my talk with Anwar.
He said, ‘The aggression can be made creative. We used to play basketball with a Muslim team from that area. The aggression of the young Muslim boys made them good basketball players. It gave them the killer instinct.’ The killer instinct which Papu saw in the Indian industrialist, but which traders like himself didn’t yet have. ‘If I hit them, they hit back. And they play to win. Whereas I come back home satisfied with a good game. If they hit me, I wouldn’t hit back. I suppose I might complain, that’s all.’
He talked again about his wish to retire at forty to do social work. I knew, from what he had said before, that he had doubts about the idea, doubts especially about the possible waste of his God-given talent, which, if properly used, might produce more funds for his welfare work. Now – sitting in the taxi, in the dust and afternoon glare, at the end of his working day – doubts seemed to have taken him over and enervated him. He wasn’t even sure about the social work he was doing on Sundays among people of the slum in his area.
‘Every Sunday a group of us, mainly Jains, feed the slum people. We feed perhaps 500 of them. We start at about 10.30 in the morning. For many of the people we are feeding it may be the only big meal in the week. It may keep them going. I am doing it to help them – there can be no doubt about that. But there is also in me a feeling of relief from the guilt which I always have. Whatever I do for them, I know there are limitations. Perhaps I should try to help them to help themselves. My father’s idea about this was: “I would like to teach them fishing, and not give them fish.” If I’m giving them a square meal, it ends there. What I think I would like – even if it means helping only five kids rather than 500 – is that the five I help should be able to make a living.’
He was obsessed by the idea of charity, of what he, with his blessings, might do for others. Charity was like an an expression of the religious life, the prudent life, the pure life.
We came at last to Sion. This was the name of the suburb where he lived. He asked the driver to drive round the area of ‘quarters’. His spirits, low during the drive out, went lower. He spoke of prostitution and despair in the back streets; but he didn’t look at what we were driving through. The ‘quarters’, though, were only government quarters, apartment blocks for government employees. As a piece of urban development, it was depressing – Indian architecture at its most ignorant and inhumane, concrete block after concrete block set down in scarred, bare land looking in places like a rubbish dump – but it wasn’t the slum I had been preparing myself for.
That slum, the famous one, was, in fact, on the other side of Sion. Papu had, however, stopped talking about it. And I began to feel that, though the idea of showing me the slum had been Papu’s, his mood had changed during the drive out, and he couldn’t face it now.
We went to the street where he lived. It was in the middle-class area of Sion, some way from the quarters, and on the other side of a thoroughfare. It looked a well-to-do and established street; there were big trees; and well dressed men and women, office workers, were waiting for buses. The flat Papu had bought on that street had cost the equivalent of £100,000 – and we were an hour away from central Bombay, and close to a very big slum. That gave an idea of what had happened to property p
rices here. It explained why the big problem for most people in Bombay was the problem of finding room, a place to stay, a place to sleep; and why the huts and shanties and rag-structures filled so many of the city’s nooks and crannies.
The sandy yard of Papu’s block was swept and clean and bare. In another city it might have seemed a drab yard. But here it was noticeably clean, noticeably bare; and it was as though the emptiness of the yard was an aspect of its cleanliness.
Papu said, This is a co-operative block. That means that the people here are vegetarians. The people in the other building’ – the neighbouring block, architecturally similar – ‘are mixed vegetarian and non-vegetarian. Property values are higher here because this building is vegetarian. If you cook fish, there is a smell that it generates. If there is a non-vegetarian in a building, you may sometimes see a goat tied up in the yard for a couple of days, and then one day you won’t see the goat, and you’ll know it’s been killed and eaten. But it’s changing for young people in our community. When they go out they feel that the rest of the world eats meat, and they can get the feeling that they might be feeble, without manhood. Everybody tries to change things to suit himself.’ That was also what Papu thought about rituals: they were being adapted all the time.
We took the old-fashioned lift to his flat. He showed the distinguishing Jain sticker above his front door, and the Hindu marks on the front doors of other flats. His sitting room, looking out on to the street and the school across the street, was big and uncluttered. It was of a piece with the yard: the emptiness of the space was like luxury. The walls were clean, the terrazzo floor gleamed.
I asked about my shoes. He said it wasn’t necessary to take them off. But later he said something which made me feel I should have taken them off without asking. We were talking about ritual acts; and he said that a Punjabi friend had said that the floor of the sitting room where we were was truly a floor one could walk barefoot on. What the friend meant was that normally the ritual of taking off shoes – before entering a temple, for instance – meant walking on filth, getting your clean feet dirty in the name of a ritual cleanliness.