In the City a Mirror Wandering

by Upendranath Ashk

  ‘Jija ji, if you don’t eat pork, then just get a plate of roghan josh,’ suggested Ranvir. ‘If not that, then get keema or kofta!’

  ‘No, I don’t feel like it,’ said Chetan distractedly.

  *

  Chetan had only started eating meat in college, and that too, on Anant’s insistence. He had been raised as a vegetarian, although his father ate meat and drank heavily as well. His mother had instilled an unspoken revulsion against meat in his heart. An incident from his childhood and a conversation with Ma about it had been etched forever in his mind . . .

  He must have been about seven or eight years old. He’d gone to his father’s station in Mukerian. Karim Khan, the switch operator, raised chickens there. One of his hens had given birth to chicks. Chetan just adored those tiny fuzzy chicks. After dinner, he’d take half a chapati and go outside, calling ‘Here, here!’ as he tossed pieces of it in their direction. The chicks would come running and cheeping as they leapt upon the bits of chapati. They’d pull them from one another’s beaks and carry them off. At first, Chetan would have to toss the bits of chapati to call to them, but after a few days, on just hearing his voice, and later, on seeing him, they’d come hopping up. Chetan wanted them to nibble the chapati from his hand the way they did with Karim Khan’s wife, Daani. Sometimes he’d toss them the bits of chapati, or he’d hold them up at a slight distance. Two chicks (which were perhaps male and therefore bolder) would jump up and nibble at the bits of chapati. Slowly, they began taking the pieces from his hand. But then one day, when he was late in tearing up the chapati, one came hopping on to his knee. Chetan’s happiness knew no bounds. It began to nibble at a piece he held in his hand. As he watched, another also came and sat on his knee and the two began to compete. Chetan was elated. What he wanted was for the other three chicks to come too, but they didn’t have the courage. Chetan would call those two chicks every day and feed them in his lap. The hen—she was fluffy and round, and completely white, with a long neck and a spotless, fluffy chest—would stand at a slight distance, head up, excited, and the other three chicks would wander about near her feet. Chetan would sometimes throw her a piece as well. Then she would pick it up and the other three chicks would rush over. The hen would put the piece back on the ground. If it was large, she’d wave it in her beak and break it, and then the chicks would take it away. Chetan enjoyed all this immensely. He had come to love them so much that he decided to tell Ma to buy the chicks and the hen from Daani. When he told this to Ma, she scolded him, ‘How can Brahmins raise chicks? This is the work of Shudras!’

  Chetan couldn’t understand this. When he insisted, Ma said, ‘All right, I’ll tell Karim Khan that the chicks will be ours. They’ll stay with them, but they’ll be ours. You can go over there and play with them as much as you want, but you can’t bring them inside the house.’

  But the next day, when Chetan brought his chapati out, he saw there was one chick less. When he went and asked Daani about it, he learned that she cooked one chick a day to make a stew for his father. Ma didn’t allow meat to be cooked in the house. Pandit ji either went to the Kalals in the city or held a party in the evening in the switch operator’s quarters. Daani was very beautiful. She served him liquor. She was the one who prepared the meat for him. What made Chetan extremely sad was realizing that Daani herself slaughtered the chicks she fed with her own hand . . . He ran weeping to his mother. ‘Son,’ Ma explained to him, ‘all these people who kill living things, they are sinners. In this life, they eat the animals; in the next life, the animals will eat them.’

  ‘But Ma, does that mean father’s a sinner too?’ Chetan asked suddenly.

  Ma turned the response around, ‘Son, he is your father. It’s a sin to even think anything bad about him. His dharma is for him, ours is for us. Swear today that you won’t kill living things and that you will never eat meat.’

  And Chetan swore to it enthusiastically. But secretly, he decided his father must be a great sinner because of his cruelty.

  *

  But when Chetan was still a schoolboy, Anant had explained to him that if chicken eggs were not eaten and if chicks hatched from only half of the eggs a hen laid, there wouldn’t be enough grain to feed them all. Anant had been eating eggs since childhood. By the time he reached the Matric, Chetan had tasted egg, but he still didn’t touch meat until he was in college. In college, he did eat meat in Anant’s company, but he couldn’t enjoy it when he thought of that incident from his childhood and the oath he’d taken before Ma, and her sermons. Chetan had never enjoyed eating meat the way Ranvir and Nishtar did: their eyes lit up at the mere mention of pork, and when the dhaba proprietor lifted the brass lid from the pot to serve the meat on to their plates, Ranvir’s mouth began to water. Whenever Chetan tasted meat, he felt as though he were committing a sin.

  *

  The plates had been set before them. Suddenly, Ranvir said, ‘Jija ji, please, just take a little piece, why don’t you?’

  ‘No, no,’ said Chetan, ‘I don’t like pork.’

  ‘Have you ever tasted it?’

  ‘No, just hearing the word makes me think of that filthy animal,’ he said with irritation (he wouldn’t tell those fools where his mind went at the mere thought of pork). ‘It snuffles its snout around in filth. It rolls about in the drains. How can you people eat it?’

  Nishtar laughed. ‘Sometimes you say really stupid things, yaar. There’s manure lying in the fields and wheat gets planted in that. But do we quit eating wheat because it makes us think of manure?’

  And he picked up a piece of meat from his plate and placed it on Chetan’s.

  ‘There aren’t any bones in this?’

  ‘Why don’t you taste it and see!’

  The piece of pork reminded Chetan of a small slice of watermelon. There was a thick rind along the flesh, which looked like watermelon pulp. ‘Just taste it and see,’ he thought. He even picked it up. Just then he wondered—would he also just taste a piece of beef like this? Hamid had tried to get him to so many times. He put the piece back on his plate.

  The thing was, though that argument had prepared him to eat meat, his upbringing was so strongly rooted in his subconscious that even when eating other kinds of meat, he thought about the problems with eating cow and pig meat, and although that argument gave the lie to his beliefs, he ended up losing the thread. He wouldn’t eat meat at all, he’d decide. But then, people thought so many things were fine: lying, counting earnings from bribery as part of one’s income, beating children mercilessly, earning money through questionable means by sucking the blood of the poor, killing women bit by bit, destroying generations with diseases such as syphilis—yet if someone were to find out that a certain person had tasted beef, he might be forced out of the neighbourhood, and thus Chetan would be compelled to think through several questions logically.

  Maybe chickens were not that important, but thousands of poor people who couldn’t raise cows or buffaloes raised goats; they only drank goat milk; for them, the goat is the mother and daughter, the way a cow is for Hindus. On the other hand, ever since he’d heard that Mahatma Gandhi only drank goat milk and when he’d gone to England to participate in the Round Table Conference, he’d taken a goat with him, he kept thinking about the difference between goats and cows. If it was a major sin to slaughter a cow or a calf, why wasn’t it a sin to slaughter a goat, he wondered. He’d once asked his Sanskrit teacher this very question. His teacher had told him that we consider the cow to be like a mother because she gives us milk and ghee; her calves become bullocks, and not only do they carry loads but they also pull ploughs, and in an agricultural country like India, those beasts that pull a plough for us and plant seeds and prepare the crops for us are like our sons. And then, the cow is the sort of animal whose dung comes in handy not only for manure but also for dung cakes, and moreover it’s pure, and Hindus smear the kitchen with it, and according to Ayurveda, cow urine is beneficial as a cure to scores of afflictions.

  But when
he got to college, several questions on this topic began to trouble Chetan. He’d often had no response in debates with Hamid and he could think of no answers himself.

  First of all, cows give us milk, but then water buffaloes also give us milk, which is more nourishing than cow milk. If cow milk has some additional merits, then buffalo milk has other additional merits. Bullocks carry loads and pull ploughs, but so do buffaloes. So then, why are buffaloes not worshipped the way cows and bullocks are?

  Then, as far as agriculture goes, when, thanks to scientific progress, tractors had begun to plough fields and trucks to carry loads, would there still be a special need for bullocks, and wouldn’t the increased population of bullocks become a burden on the country? As for cow dung and urine being useful for medicines, well, science had made unimaginable progress, thus greatly diminishing the importance of the cow . . . And wasn’t it better to send healthy livestock to dairies, have the animals properly tended, and get better quality milk and ghee made there, than keep sick and feeble cows, and bullocks caged up and . . . Was that true cow worship or was it what was happening nowadays, with cows growing old or hungry in cages, or wandering about freely in bazaars, carrying off the merchants’ wares and getting hit with sticks in retaliation, and often walking about with terrible wounds . . . while day by day pure ghee was disappearing from the bazaar . . .

  Chetan had read somewhere that in ancient India there used to be cow sacrifices—at the court of King Janaka of Videha, so much beef was cooked in the kitchen for the Brahmin guests that the drains ran with rivers of grease. Much later, during the time of Alexander’s attack, the defeated kings had gifted him finely bred, fattened bullocks. Who knows when cow slaughter was decreed forbidden. There must have been some horrible famine. Thousands of beasts must have been offered up to the famine. At that time, buffaloes must not have been reared as domestic animals. Then, because of the necessity of the bullocks for agriculture, it was decreed that it was forbidden to slaughter them. This must have been publicized by the priests and become a part of religion . . . and over time, like scores of other social and religious customs, this had become one as well.

  ‘Even if man is extremely vegetarian,’ Chetan would think, ‘why would he imprison a goat or a cow or a pig?’ If no meat is harmful, then he couldn’t understand why it was only to be given up because it was forbidden centuries ago under who knows what circumstances or for which reasons. Both the Muslim and Hindu approaches seemed wrong, but as the sattvic principles instilled in him by his mother in opposition to his father’s tamasic tendencies since infancy were strong, whenever he began to think about this problem, he’d stop eating meat.

  *

  The piece of pork was still lying on his plate, and he was eating the dal and paneer with roti, lost in thought, when suddenly he started on hearing the people around him chuckling and laughing. Across the intersection, Debu had smacked a youth wearing a hat from behind; he’d knocked off his hat, and the youth had grabbed his collar and was about to haul off and punch him.

  ‘That ass was bragging,’ said Billa, pausing his laughter for a moment to explain to Jagna. ‘There’s no way he can pull this off. Just you watch; there’s going to be a fight. He can’t get out of it without a fight.’

  And truly, as everyone watched, the youth slugged Debu in the temple with his drawn fist. Debu grabbed the other guy by the waist and tripped him. Just then, by ill fate, a tonga coming from the direction of the Mayo Hospital drove right over the youth’s hat as it swerved to avoid them. The youth fell over, then got up, but instead of picking up his hat, he got tangled up with Debu and the two of them started wrestling in the middle of the street.

  Jagna and Billa ran over. Quite a crowd had gathered. Somehow they sorted the matter out. Debu’s kameez was torn. They managed to calm him down with great difficulty and brought him back.

  What had happened was that the fight over the charpoys in front of the hotel a little while earlier had been gnawing at Debu. If it had been a regular fight, Debu would have sent that youth on his way, and everyone would have ended up with a busted head, but since Debu had grabbed the guy’s legs and knocked him over, and Billa had stopped others from coming to his aid, the fight had turned into a wrestling match, and perhaps the other guy knew wrestling moves better than Debu. Debu had felt jealous of the authoritative tone in which Billa had told the dhaba proprietor to take special care of Chetan and his friends after driving the youth away. If he had been the one to chase off the youth, he could have used that tone. He’d have been the one to direct the dhaba proprietor to serve his friends good food. And this was what had been eating at him. When he came back under the tree after dusting off his clothes and washing his hands, he told Jagna, to ease his shame, that he was going to knock the turban off someone walking by, and when he got caught, he’d apologize innocently; all this was second nature to him, he said. Perhaps Jagna hadn’t been in the mood at that moment, or his attention was wrapped up in his court case, or his empty pockets were making him absent-minded—for whatever reason, he hadn’t paid attention to what Debu had been saying. Just then a young man wearing a hat had walked by. And Debu, in order to mitigate his previous embarrassment and re-establish his superiority, had boasted that he himself would knock off the man’s hat.

  ‘You’re going to get beaten, sala,’ Billa had said.

  ‘I can do it!’

  ‘Or you’ll beat him.’

  ‘Not true!’ Debu had said. ‘I’ll knock off his hat and he won’t say a peep. If Jagna can do it, why can’t I?’

  Who knows what was going through Billa’s head! Maybe he was in the mood to watch a spectacle. ‘You can’t pull it off, you ass,’ he said. ‘Only Jagna can do that kind of thing.’

  And this had been the result of that taunt, which was what Billa had hoped for. ‘What can’t I do?’ Debu had said, throwing back his head. ‘There’s nothing to it—knock off a hat, if he says something, apologize.’

  ‘Then go and knock off his hat and show us.’

  The youth was continuing on his way. Debu leapt after him.

  ‘The sala’s going to get beaten. Not everyone can do everything,’ said Billa.

  But Debu didn’t hear him. He’d rushed off and, just as Jagna always did, landed a blow on the youth’s hat from the rear.

  *

  When the three of them came back, they learned that when the youth’s hat had gone flying off, he’d grabbed Debu by the collar, and Debu had apologized for his mistake—he’d thought it was his friend Hari! But at this, the youth had hauled off and socked Debu, and then Debu had got riled himself.

  ‘Beta, that’s why I said,’ said Billa, smacking him on the neck, ‘that you weren’t up to the task. Jagna is the one who can do it better.’ Then he turned and said to Jagna, ‘Right, beta? Why don’t you show us your stuff?’

  In the meantime, Hunar Sahib and the others had finished eating. Hunar Sahib was under the impression that perhaps Debu and his friends were going to pay. When Billa had told the proprietor that they were their guests, what need was there to pay? And so they got up to go and watch Jagna’s trick without having paid for anything. But Chetan took them aside and told them that these folks were all completely broke. They never have any money, and even if the dhaba people refuse, you should still pay. These guys can accomplish any number of other tasks, but not this one.

  Hunar Sahib had thought perhaps the hotel owners would refuse to take money and say something like, ‘No, no, how can this be, this bill is for them,’ and then he’d keep his hands on that five-rupee note. But no such thing occurred. He asked for the bill. The proprietor told him the amount. He held out the note, and the man took it, then counted out the change and placed it in his hand.

  At this point, Chetan thought he’d part ways with Hunar Sahib, when at that very moment, Jagna suddenly interjected, ‘Okay, look at him, that gentleman walking by. I’m going to knock off his hat. You all won’t laugh at all. Walk behind me, but keep your distance. If there’
s a dispute, he’ll just yell at me.’

  He was now totally in the mood, either because of Debu’s lack of success or Billa’s praise. He may only have been middle-school-pass, but he was wearing a really nice boski kameez and cotton trousers. He flew off with feet of wings.

  They all followed him at a bit of a distance, and even Chetan, abandoning the idea of going home, went along with them.

  19

  Jagna continued to put his skills on display all the way to Company Bagh Gate, and his companions (Hunar Sahib’s party had joined them) continued to follow along at a slight distance, chuckling so much it made their stomachs ache. Chetan considered it goonda-ism through and through, but Jagna pulled it off so cleverly that he was enjoying it despite himself. He kept bursting out laughing, at times completely forgetting his own sorrows. His sad thoughts had burrowed deep down somewhere, and the exuberance of the moment had taken their place. He too, with his comrades, had begun to enjoy the whole thing, and when Jagna, despite his best efforts, had ended up in a dispute with a round, bald gentleman near Company Bagh, he too descended to their level—unconsciously, unwillingly, even knowing Jagna’s excesses all too well—and intervened on their behalf.

  *

  Although the youth Jagna had gone after from the Khalsa Hotel had walked quite a distance ahead, Jagna had caught up with him quickly, nearly flying along, and called out, ‘Hey, Sohne, you bastard! I kept calling after you, are you sleepwalking?’ And smacked him from behind.

  The youth’s sola topi flew off, and he turned to glare at Jagna, enraged. Jagna had evinced surprise mingled with regret. ‘Oh, I am sorry!’ he had said in English. ‘I thought you were Sohan Lal. You look exactly alike from the back!’ . . . And without giving him the chance to say anything, he leapt forward and picked up his hat. He removed a silk handkerchief from his pocket, dusted off the hat, then placed it back on his head with both hands. Patting him lightly on the back, he said, ‘Please forgive me, please don’t be offended,’ and held out his hand.