Another flyover.
This time the goose-chase party went under it. It was packed tight with sleeping people. A bare-bodied bald man with a purple crust of congealed talcum powder on his head and a long, gray, bushy beard beat out a rhythm on an imaginary drum, flinging his head around like Ustad Zakir Hussain.
“Dha Dha Dhim Ti-ra-ki-ta Dhim!” Ishrat called out to him as they went past. He smiled and rewarded her with a complicated flourish of percussion.
A shuttered market, a midnight egg-paratha stall. A Sikh Gurdwara. Another market. A row of car-repair shops. The men and dogs asleep outside were covered in car grease.
The rickshaw turned into a residential colony. And then leftrightleftrightleft. A lane. Construction material stacked along it. The houses were all three and four storeys high.
The rickshaw stopped outside a barred iron gate painted a dull shade of lavender. Payal stopped in the shadows, many gates away. A snuffling specter. A pale mare-ghost. The gold thread on her saddle glinting in the night.
A woman got out, paid and went into the house. After the rickshaw left, Saddam Hussain and Ishrat-the-Beautiful approached the lavender gate. Two black bulls with wobbling humps lolled outside.
A light came on in the second-floor window.
Ishrat said, “Write down the house number.” Saddam said he didn’t need to because he never forgot places he’d been to. He’d be able to find it in his sleep.
She wriggled against him. “Wah! What a man!”
He squished her breast. She slapped his hand away. “Don’t. They cost a lot. I’m still paying my installments.”
The woman silhouetted against the rectangle of light on the second floor looked down and saw two people on a white horse. They looked up and saw her.
As though to acknowledge the glance that passed between them, the woman (who was beautiful, who was not, who was tall, who was short) inclined her head and kissed the stolen goods she held in her arms. She waved to them and they waved back. Of course she recognized them as the team from the scrum at Jantar Mantar. Saddam dismounted and held up a small white rectangle—his visiting card with the address of Jannat Guest House and Funeral Services. He dropped it into the tin letter box that said S. Tilottama. Second Floor.
The baby had fretted most of the way, but had finally fallen asleep. Tiny heartbeats and a black velvet cheek against a bony shoulder. The woman rocked her as she watched the horse and its riders exit the lane.
She could not remember when last she had been this happy. Not because the baby was hers, but because it wasn’t.
6
SOME QUESTIONS FOR LATER
When the Baby Seal grew older, when she was (say) crowded around an ice-cream cart on a burning afternoon, one among a press of schoolgirls clamoring for an orange bar, might she get a sudden whiff of the heady scent of ripe Mahua that had infused the forest the day she was born? Would her body remember the feel of dry leaves on the forest floor, or the hot-metal touch of the barrel of her mother’s gun that had been held to her forehead with the safety catch off?
Or had her past been erased forever?
Death flies in, thin bureaucrat, from the plains—
—AGHA SHAHID ALI
7
THE LANDLORD
It’s cold. One of those dim, dirty winter days. The city is still stunned by the simultaneous explosions that tore through a bus stop, a café and the basement parking lot of a small shopping plaza two days ago, leaving five dead and very many more severely injured. It will take our television news anchors a little longer than ordinary folks to recover from the shock. As for myself, blasts evoke a range of emotions in me, but sadly, shock is no longer one of them.
I’m upstairs in this barsati, this small, second-floor apartment-on-the-roof. The Neem trees have shed their leaves; the rose-ringed parakeets seem to have moved to a warmer (safer?) place. The fog is hunched up against the windowpanes. A clot of blue rock pigeons huddles on the shit-crusted chhajja. Though it’s the middle of the day, nearly lunchtime, I’ve had to switch the lights on. I notice that my experiment with the red cement floor has failed. I wanted a floor with a deep, soft shine, like those graceful old houses down South. But here, over the years, the summer heat has leached the color from the cement and the winter cold has caused the surface to contract and shatter into a pattern of hairline cracks. The apartment is dusty and run-down. Something about the stillness of this hastily abandoned space makes it look like a frozen frame in a moving picture. It seems to contain the geometry of motion, the shape of all that has happened and everything that is still to come. The absence of the person who lived here is so real, so palpable, that it’s almost a presence.
The noise from the street is muted. The blades of the still ceiling fans are edged with grime, a paean to Delhi’s famously filthy air. Fortunately for my lungs, I’m only visiting. Or at least that’s what I hope. I have been sent home on leave. Though I don’t feel unwell, when I look at myself in the mirror I can see that my skin is dull and my hair has thinned noticeably. My scalp shines through it (yes, shines). Almost nothing remains of my eyebrows. I’m told this is a sign of anxiety. The drinking, I admit, is worrying. I have tested the patience of both my wife and my boss in unacceptable ways and am determined to redeem myself. I am booked into a rehabilitation center where I will be for six weeks with no phone, no internet and no contact whatsoever with the world. I was supposed to check in today, but I’ll do it on Monday.
I long to return to Kabul, the city where I will probably die, in some hackneyed, unheroic manner, perhaps while handing my Ambassador a file. BOOM. No more me. Twice they nearly got us; both times luck was on our side. After the second attack we received an anonymous letter in Pashtu (which I read as well as speak): Nun zamong bad qismati wa. Kho yaad lara che mong sirf yaw waar pa qismat gatta kawo. Ta ba da hamesha dapara khush qismata ve. That translates (more or less) as: Today we were unlucky. But remember we only have to be lucky once. You will need good luck all the time.
Something about those words rang a bell. I googled them. (That’s a verb now, isn’t it?) It was a close-to-verbatim translation of what the IRA said after Margaret Thatcher escaped their bomb attack on the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984. It’s another kind of globalization, I suppose, this universal terrorspeak.
Every day in Kabul is a battle of wits and I’m addicted.
—
While I waited to be certified fit for service, I decided to visit my tenants and see how the house—I bought it fifteen years ago and more or less rebuilt it—was bearing up. At least that’s what I told myself. When I got here I found myself avoiding the main entrance and going all the way to the end of the road and around to the back, to take the gate that opens on to the service lane that runs behind the row of townhouses.
It was a quiet, pretty lane once. Now it’s like a construction site. Building material—steel reinforcement rods, slabs of stone and heaps of sand—occupies what little space parked cars do not. Two open manholes give off a stench that doesn’t quite complement the soaring price of property here. Most of the older houses have been torn down and plush new developers’ flats are coming up in their place. Some are on stilts, the ground floors given over to parking. It’s a good idea in this car-maddened city, but somehow it saddens me. I’m not sure why. Nostalgia for an older, quieter time perhaps.
A posse of dusty children, some carrying infants on their hips, amuse themselves by ringing doorbells and skittering away hiccuping with delight. Their emaciated parents, hauling cement and bricks around in the deep pits dug for new basements, would not look out of place on a construction site in ancient Egypt, heaving stones for a pharaoh’s pyramid. A small donkey with kind eyes walks past me carrying bricks in its saddlebags. The post-blast announcements being made in English and Hindi on the loudspeaker in the police booth in the market are fainter here: “Please report any unidentified baggage or suspicious-looking person to the nearest police post…”
Even in the few months si
nce I was last here, the number of cars parked in the back lane has grown—and most are bigger, swisher. My neighbor Mrs. Mehra’s new driver, his whole head wrapped in a brown muffler with a slit for his eyes, is hosing down a new cream Toyota Corolla as though it’s a buffalo. It has a small saffron OM painted on its bonnet. Only a year ago Mrs. Mehra was flinging her garbage straight from her first-floor balcony on to the street. I wonder whether owning a Toyota has improved her sense of community hygiene.
I can see that most of the apartments on the second and third floors have been smartened up, glassed in.
The black bulls that lived around the concrete lamp post opposite my back gate for many years, fed and spoiled by Mrs. Mehra and her cow-worshipping cohorts, aren’t around. Maybe they’ve gone for a jog.
Two young women in smart winter coats and clicking high heels walk past, both smoking cigarettes. They look like Russian or Ukrainian whores, the kind you can dial up for farmhouse parties. There were a few at my old friend Bobby Singh’s stag party in Mehrauli last week. One of them, who walked around with a plate of tacos, was actually a Dip—she was topless, more or less—with hummus all over her chest. I thought it was a bit much, but the other guests seemed to enjoy it. The girl gave that impression too—although that may have been part of the job description. Hard to say.
Servants wearing their employers’ expensive cast-offs are being walked by even better-dressed dogs—Labradors, German shepherds, Dobermans, beagles, dachshunds, cocker spaniels—with wool coats that say things like Superman and Woof! Even some of the street mongrels have coats and show traces of pedigreed lineage. Trickledown. Ha! Ha!
Two men—one white, one Indian—go past, holding hands. Their plump black Labrador is dressed in a red-and-blue jersey that says No. 7 Manchester United. Like a genial holy man distributing his blessings, he bestows a little squirt of piss on to the tires of the cars he waddles past.
The sheet-metal gate of the Municipal Primary School that abuts the deer park is new. It’s painted over with a dreadful rendition of a happy baby in its happy mother’s arms being given a polio vaccination by a happy nurse in a white dress and white stockings. The syringe is roughly the size of a cricket bat. I can hear children’s voices in their classrooms, shouting Baa baa black sheep, rising to a shriek on Wool! and Full!
Compared to Kabul, or anywhere else in Afghanistan or Pakistan, or for that matter any other country in our neighborhood (Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Burma, Iran, Iraq, Syria—Good God!) this foggy little back lane, with its everyday humdrumness, its vulgarity, its unfortunate but tolerable inequities, its donkeys and its minor cruelties, is like a small corner of Paradise. The shops in the market sell food and flowers and clothes and mobile phones, not grenades and machine guns. Children play at ringing doorbells, not at being suicide bombers. We have our troubles, our terrible moments, yes, but these are only aberrations.
I feel a rush of anger at those grumbling intellectuals and professional dissenters who constantly carp about this great country. Frankly, they can only do it because they are allowed to. And they are allowed to because, for all our imperfections, we are a genuine democracy. I would not be crass enough to say this too often in public, but the truth is that it gives me great pride to be a servant of the Government of India.
The back gate was open, as I expected it to be. (The ground-floor tenants have painted it lavender.) I went straight up the stairs to the second floor. The door was locked. The extent of my disappointment unsettled me. The landing looked deserted. There was mail and old newspapers piled up against the door. I noticed a dog’s paw-prints in the dust.
On my way down, the plump, pretty wife of my ground-floor tenant, who runs some sort of video production company, came out of her kitchen and accosted me on the stairs. She invited me in for a cup of tea (to what used to be my home when my wife and I were both posted in Delhi).
“I’m Ankita,” she said over her shoulder as she led me in. Her long, chemically straightened hair streaked with blonde highlights was damp and I could smell her tangy shampoo. She wore solitaires in her ears and a fuzzy white wool sweater. The back pockets of her tight blue jeans—“jeggings,” my daughters say they’re called—stretched over her generous behind were embroidered with colorful forked-tongued Chinese dragons. My mother would have approved, if not of the clothes, then certainly of the plumpness. Dekhte besh Rolypoly, she’d have said. My poor mother, who spent all of her married life in Delhi, dreaming of her childhood in Calcutta.
The word set up an annoying buzz in my head. Rolypolyrolypolyrolypoly.
Three of the four walls in the room were painted watermelon pink. All the furniture including the dining table was a sort of flecked—distressed, I believe is the right word—rind green. The door and window frames were black (the seeds, I suppose). I began to regret having given them a free hand with the interior. Ankita and I sat facing each other, separated by the length of the sofa (my old sofa, re-upholstered now). At one point we had to clasp our knees and lift our feet off the floor while her maid passed below us, shuffling on her haunches like a small duck, swabbing the floor with something that smelled sharp, like citronella. Would it have been so difficult for Rolypoly to have had that section of her floor swabbed a little later? When will our people learn some basic etiquette?
The maid was obviously a Gond or a Santhal from Jharkhand or Chhattisgarh, or perhaps one of the aboriginal tribes in Orissa. She looked like a child of maybe fourteen or fifteen. From where I sat I could see down her kurta to where a tiny silver crucifix nestled between her tiny breasts. My father, who had a reflexive hostility towards Christian missionaries and their flock, would have called her Hallelujah. For all his sophistication he possessed more than just a streak of impropriety.
Enthroned in her giant watermelon, looking radiantly out at me from under her halo of tinted hair, Rolypoly gave me a whispered, incoherent account of what had happened upstairs. “I think so she is not a normal person,” she said, more than once. To be fair, perhaps she was coherent and I was hostile to the idea of hearing her out. She said something about a baby and the police (“I was dump-struck when police knocked on the door”) and bringing disrepute to the house and the entire neighborhood. It all sounded a bit vicious and far-fetched. I thanked her and left with the gift she pressed into my hands—a DVD of her husband’s latest documentary on the Dal Lake in Kashmir made for the Department of Tourism.
An hour or two later, here I am. I’ve had to bring in a locksmith from the market to fashion a key for me. In other words, I’ve had to break in. My second-floor tenant seems to have left. “Left,” if Rolypoly is to be believed, may be something of a euphemism. But then “tenant” is a euphemism too. No, we were not lovers. At no point did she ever offer me a hint that she might be open to a relationship of that sort. Had she, I don’t know myself well enough to say how things might have turned out. Because all my life, ever since I first met her all those years ago when we were still in college, I have constructed myself around her. Not around her perhaps, but around the memory of my love for her. She doesn’t know that. Nobody does, except perhaps Naga, Musa and me, the men who loved her.
I use the word love loosely, and only because my vocabulary is unequal to the task of describing the precise nature of that maze, that forest of feelings that connected the three of us to her and eventually to each other.
The first time I saw her was almost exactly thirty years ago, in 1984 (who in Delhi can forget 1984?), at the rehearsals of a college play in which I was acting, called Norman, Is That You? Sadly, after rehearsing it for two months we never performed it. A week before it was meant to open, Mrs. G—Indira Gandhi—was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards.
For a few days after the assassination, mobs led by her supporters and acolytes killed thousands of Sikhs in Delhi. Homes, shops, taxi stands with Sikh drivers, whole localities where Sikhs lived were burned to the ground. Plumes of black smoke climbed into the sky from the fires all over the city. From my window seat in a
bus on a bright, beautiful day, I saw a mob lynch an old Sikh gentleman. They pulled off his turban, tore out his beard and necklaced him South Africa–style with a burning tire while people stood around baying their encouragement. I hurried home and waited for the shock of what I had witnessed to hit me. Oddly, it never did. The only shock I felt was shock at my own equanimity. I was disgusted by the stupidity, the futility of it all, but somehow, I was not shocked. It could be that my familiarity with the gory history of the city I had grown up in had something to do with it. It was as though the Apparition whose presence we in India are all constantly and acutely aware of had suddenly surfaced, snarling, from the deep, and had behaved exactly as we expected it to. Once its appetite was sated it sank back into its subterranean lair and normality closed over it. Maddened killers retracted their fangs and returned to their daily chores—as clerks, tailors, plumbers, carpenters, shopkeepers—life went on as before. Normality in our part of the world is a bit like a boiled egg: its humdrum surface conceals at its heart a yolk of egregious violence. It is our constant anxiety about that violence, our memory of its past labors and our dread of its future manifestations, that lays down the rules for how a people as complex and as diverse as we are continue to coexist—continue to live together, tolerate each other and, from time to time, murder one another. As long as the center holds, as long as the yolk doesn’t run, we’ll be fine. In moments of crisis it helps to take the long view.