The Last Color

by Vikas Khanna

  Her hope was realized because when she arrived, Anarkali was working the street—dressed in her red Banarsi saree with its bodacious giant gold paisleys—and with more vitriol than ever, pounding on, screaming at, flirting with, blessing, or cursing the occupants of every vehicle that approached from either direction—like Shiva come to earth.

  I am so happy that Anarkali is getting into arguments with everyone because I am also getting sick and tired of the system, Choti thought, skipping even faster until she reached her friend, who immediately turned to her. “Hey, Choti!” Anarkali said, fixing one eye on her and the other on all the traffic. “I noticed that Ram Halwai Sweets closed down.”

  “Yes, Ram Halwai died and his sons had a big fight over his shop,” Choti said, feeling important with the news. “I saw it with my own eyes. The son, who looks just like his father, fell on the ground crying like a big baby.”

  “Do you think he took his red money-box with him?” Anarkali said. “Or his tap?”

  Anarkali and Choti both laughed hysterically at this joke, grabbing their aching, unfed bellies.

  The sun was reaching its peak, so Choti moved out of the traffic and sat in the shade on the sidewalk to cool off, pushing the toes of her slippers together as if her toes wanted to grapple with one another.

  “Anarkali. I just met my widow friend Noor, and she says that I should be educated, because she believes that if I was, then someday I would really be able to fly,” Choti said. “Do you agree?”

  Anarkali stopped screaming at everyone and everything to cast her eyes up and down Choti. “What I agree with, Choti, is that you should stay away from that old widow,” she said.

  “Why? She’s very kind to me and we’re becoming friends.”

  Anarkali huffed as she approached a car window yelling, gesturing, begging, and flirting.

  “I invited her to play Holi with me!” Choti said.

  At this Anarkali gasped and stopped her aggressive solicitations to turn her scornful glare at Choti. “Invited a widow to play Holi with you? Is your head okay?” Anarkali said.

  Several cars drove past. A rickshaw nearly collided with her as Choti confidently nodded.

  “Have you gone mad? You know you can’t play Holi with a widow,” Anarkali said, before turning back to her business, adopting her exaggerated pose and banging on a car window.

  “Don’t be jealous!” Choti retaliated.

  Anarkali turned around slowly, placed one bony hand on her bony hips and pointed a bony finger in Choti’s direction. “I’m not jealous,” she said.

  Choti retreated to relax in the shade at the side of the Chowk, intertwining her fingers behind her head and propping it up. “Okay, okay. Look, Anarkali, that old widow has had a hard life. She also keeps this secret little pink book filled with Tagore quotes her grandfather had written in it and she has memorized. Should I recite some of them to you? Maybe hearing some of them will get you in a better mood, so you don’t end up killing one of your customers,” Choti said, grinning impishly.

  “I doubt it!” Anarkali said, thrusting herself back into the traffic to scream and coerce passersby. “At least you finally recognize that Tagore is not that ‘1000-year-old’ widow’s grandfather. I told you they weren’t related!”

  Choti frowned and closed her eyes, hoping her smile would return if she could manage to recall the free, soaring feeling she used to feel when she walked on her rope.

  “And by the way, do you think I have time for poems?” Anarkali yelled at Choti over the traffic’s rumbling din. “I’m fighting monsters from every side, if you haven’t noticed.”

  Choti clenched her jaw. Of course, she had noticed, more than Anarkali knew.

  Now her friend swung her head toward the Chowk’s signal lights to tease a young man behind the wheel of a car stuck in traffic. “Oye hoye! Salman Bhai!”—“Bhai” was the way she greeted any man she encountered—“Hai, why don’t you look over here sometimes?”

  Anarkali’s outrageously flirtatious exchanges with her potential customers always made Choti’s mouth and eyes pop open, and she exploded with laughter. She didn’t really need to imagine rope-walking to bring a smile to her face, or to make her giggle until her stomach hurt—she had Anarkali. “Yaar, Anarkali. I missed everything about you. Holi is coming soon. Between that and having you back it’s going to make this my best day ever,” Choti said.

  A familiar dreaded figure on a motorcycle zigzagged through traffic, and headed straight for Anarkali. Choti backed away to watch Inspector Raja, his teeth gritted, his eyes red and glaring, one of his hands already holding his stick in a tight fist above his head. The sight of the enraged chief threatening to accost her best friend erased any trace of Choti’s happiness and sent a tremor through her body.

  “Where did you disappear to?” Raja said, blocking Anarkali’s movement with his bike. “How many days can you hope to avoid me and save yourself?” Raja shouted angrily.

  Anarkali froze in the middle of the intersection and remained that way even as the signal turned green and unleashed another wave of potential customers, whose potential rupees Raja’s appearance had caused her to lose.

  Raja belly-laughed, cocked his head, and smiled. “Now what will you do, hijra? Your river of rupees just flowed away downstream—if you don’t come to see me tonight, that will be the end of you, clear?”

  Anarkali had no words. Raja gripped his stick with both hands and hit Anarkali’s healthy arm with it. Anarkali winced and grabbed her elbow as Raja accelerated away, vanishing amidst the thickening traffic of early afternoon.

  As soon as Raja was out of view, Choti raced to Anarkali’s side and hugged her tight. “I hate that man, and I am very scared of him,” Choti said.

  Anarkali rubbed her arm. “He’s trying to destroy me, bit by bit, limb by limb, but don’t be afraid, little sister. It’s me he’s after.”

  “I’ll do whatever I can to protect you,” said Choti.

  “I believe you, but promise me you won’t be naïve. Remember, you need to fly someday,” Anarkali said, and reaching into her saree blouse, pulled out the day’s take of rupees. “Take these, you’ll need them to buy powder to celebrate Holi.”

  Choti looked up into Anarkali’s eyes, puzzled. “But, you might need the money,” she said.

  “Maybe not,” Anarkali said.

  Since she had returned, Anarkali’s eyes had gone vacant, as cold and dead as winter, like they had never witnessed the bloom of spring. Never before had Choti seen Anarkali’s lively and mischievously angry eyes look so listless and dull, even scared. Something in them signaled a change for the worse.

  Anarkali gently removed Choti’s arms from around her waist. “I better go,” she said. Anarkali headed back into the traffic and weaved blindly through it, without any heed for the accelerating traffic. It was a miracle that no car or rickshaw cut her down.

  Choti watched her friend limp through traffic like a wounded animal to the far side of the intersection, and disappear beyond the traffic into a tangle of narrow, intersecting streets. A queasy feeling tugged at Choti’s throat and gut, the nausea of thinking she might never see her friend again, though admittedly, Anarkali always seemed to surprise her.

  The Faces in the Shadows

  Vanished identities clinging to faith

  A narkali took a deliberately round-about route as she hurried through the sun-and-smoke-filled Varanasi air and descended the rickety ladder to her secret underground Temple of Fireflies. She had returned home in an attempt to escape. But she knew the respite would be short-lived. Anarkali knew Raja would punish her severely that night. She winced as she imagined the blows of his stick. That was nothing new. But somehow Anarkali knew it would be a worse beating than ever before, perhaps the worst ever. In a strange, relative way, a way only someone caught in the dance between those in authority and those who have nothing could understand, she fully deserved it. Or did she?

  Now entombed in her Temple of Fireflies, Anarkali lay in the da
rk, flat on her back on her bed of wooden planks, feeling the warming breeze from the sewer stream flowing beneath her bed as it wafted across her weary, half-broken body. The stream’s temperature was rising, as it always did when Ganga’s spring swell began. Somewhere in the distant mountains, in the far-off land of Ganga’s source, the snows were thawing, the ice was cracking, but Anarkali felt anything but warmth. Her heart had turned into a cold stone, incapable of feeling any trace of love or pain.

  She shouldn’t have blackmailed Raja by threatening to expose him to his wife. But that was not the only reason Anarkali’s heart had gone cold.

  Anarkali had once stationed herself by the steps leading down to Lolark Kund, raucously blessing every woman who passed by to give birth to a Ram-like son: virtuous, brave, honorable, and obedient—when she saw Raja’s wife, Rani, making her descent.

  It was on the auspicious day of Lolark Shasthi that everyone in Raja’s family, even his own daughters, were excited about Rani’s visit to Lolark Kund for a holy dip at the bottom so she might one day, finally, birth a son. Like the other son-eager women, Rani was all decked out in a gold-edged saree with lots of jewelry, wearing colorful glass bangles and flowers in her hair. So decked out was she that Rani positively clinked as she moved, up to the point of becoming lost in the vast cascade of women descending the steps for the same pressured reasons.

  Rani neither dipped so much as a toe in the waters, nor left behind any of the ornaments she wore, in Lolark Kund. Well—why would she? Just to satisfy everyone at home? The ornaments might better be used for her daughters’ education. Would she toss her newest saree into the well? No. She would leave an old one somewhere on the majestic steps above.

  In her heart, Rani knew that Raja, the son of his harsh father, would never be, and never could be, faithful to his professional duties, or to her. Every corrupt rupee that entered their house only added to what was already a national bank of curses; curses marked with the fingerprints of the weak, of the poor and fallen, or those innocent souls who still believed that justice would somehow prevail, even in their silence. In this way, Rani would always be cursed, but she hoped her daughters wouldn’t be. Having a son whom she was certain would be just like his father would only curse everyone more.

  Would Anarkali bless such a woman to have a son? Absolutely not. Anarkali only glared and said nothing. Rani too noticed how the usually effusive, fortune-telling hijra had suddenly gone mute when she passed by.

  It was Rani’s sudden frown and down-turned eyes that proved she understood the hijra’s reason for withholding her blessing. They both knew that Raja’s son would be the devil incarnate. Rani would never bear Raja a son. All this, Anarkali could surmise.

  This episode, coupled with the darker ones shared between Anarkali and Inspector Raja, were what made everything so different today. Things had gotten deeply, troublingly personal between them.

  As for Raja and Rani, the every-day, every-night tangles and grinding gears of actions and inactions, violence and shame and chivalry, husband and wife found themselves in, would transform into the endless night of nightmare visions that now shook Anarkali to her skinny bones.

  The strange triangle they made was all so sordid.

  In her snakehole beneath Varanasi, Anarkali’s stomach churned with fear and she shivered as though a fever were coming on. It took all her strength to try to detach, stay warm, and keep her eyes open.

  When, finally, Anarkali’s eyelids did close (seeking death, perhaps?) a small miracle occurred. An internal, deeply sonorous voice told her to open her eyes. She did as the voice commanded, and upon doing so, Anarkali woke not into her rough and sullied life, but into a dream, a dream composed of hundreds of swarming fireflies of every imaginable hue flying—no, dancing!—around in fantastic, ever-shifting shapes and patterns all around her room, like Holi exploding early, and just for her. The swirling, shifting dots and fantastic streaking colors delivered back Anarkali’s hope.

  Perhaps I will survive to witness Spring, Anarkali thought, as she got up and climbed her rickety bamboo ladder to face her demon.

  It was a special day because it was the day Choti, rich with the money Anarkali had given her, had promised to take Noor for samosas at her favorite samosa place in Sangam Chowk. For this special occasion, Choti had stuck a delicate paper flower of faded orange in her hair. Even if Noor would never reveal it, Choti’s hope was that the flower would bring the color of joy into Noor’s eyes.

  The two met at their usual bench, just off the terrace, and walked arm-in-arm to the samosa shop in the Chowk. This samosa shop was the hot-spot that every Gangabound pilgrim stopped at for a last quick bite and hot chai before seeking the purifying waters.

  Halwai’s wasn’t really a “shop,” it was more an open-air arrangement: a crooked counter around which were strewn a motley collection of weather- and ghat-beaten chairs and tables on the verge of collapse. Nonetheless, in Choti’s opinion, the spicy potato samosas served here were Varanasi’s best.

  Choti led Noor by the hand and saw the proprietor, in his white banian vest that was stained and soaked with sweat. Beside him was the kadhai, the large wok filled with bubbling hot oil in which the samosas were being deep-fried. The skinny fifty-year-old waiter who worked for him not only suffered the owner’s watchful, beady eyes as he prepared and packed orders behind the counter, but also suffered them as he took orders and otherwise attended to the twenty or so seated guests the place could hold.

  What was apparent from the skinny waiter’s knife-like glances was that the favorite part of his job was taking out his frustrations and anger on his customers. He passed on his boss’s treatment of him directly onto his customers. This maltreating service was the waiter’s victory, his revenge, his power, his entitlement, his reward for suffering under his superior. In a way, this made the samosa shop experience all the more exclusive and “full-service.” For such consistently distasteful service to result in such consistently delicious samosas was nothing short of another Varanasi miracle, one worth every contemptuous look from the proprietor and his waiter.

  The proprietor’s peripheral vision tracked Choti and Noor as they walked behind the waiter and ignored his frantic shooing-away movements, to a table, if it could be called that, at the farthest corner from him. Their gumption challenged the skinny waiter’s authority—as thin and meager as it really was—so much so that rather than greeting them the first thing the skinny waiter did was drop everything he was doing and turn off the fan, a clear signal that he wouldn’t be offering service to patrons of such low stature as a street waif and a widow.

  The waiter’s rude action did nothing to deter Choti. “Ey! ey! Waiter! Two samosas and two kadak, stiff, chais,” she demanded, raising her hand like all the other adult pilgrims around. Noor sat with her head lowered, blushing with shame. She was completely overwhelmed, and sank lower in her chair, with no pride whatsoever, visibly guilty for having the gall to enter the shop in the first place, and especially guilty for being led in by a child.

  Choti reached across the table to clutch Noor’s hand, but Noor pulled it away.

  “Noor,” Choti said. “So sorry to put you through this, but these samosas are the best. If you feel uncomfortable, you can just stare at the flower in my hair.” Choti tilted her head so Noor’s eyes would have no chance of missing its orange petals.

  Instead of serving her and Noor, the waiter went over and stood near the counter to whisper his complaints into the proprietor’s hair-sprouting, flappy ears. The proprietor nodded, deepened his frown, furrowed his brow and glared back at Choti and Noor.

  And, so the waiting began. Choti glanced at the waiter and his overlord behind their crooked counter. For twenty minutes now, the halwai had sat idle, staring unblinkingly at Noor and Choti, refusing them service, denying their appetite—and for his own samosas—and causing their stomachs to whine and groan. The fan had yet to be turned back on. To Choti, twenty minutes of hunger was twenty minutes too long. She looked at N
oor, who had started to sweat.

  “Choti,” Noor said finally, “I really appreciate what you were trying to do for me but no one’s going to serve the likes of us. We better leave.”

  As they made their way out of the shop, bellies empty, three other guests—Privileged Ones, in Choti’s estimation—entered and found a table in the center, an action which sent the waiter tripping over himself, seemingly reincarnated from the grave, to welcome them with a beaming smile. He even turned on the fan and directed its spinning blades at his new guests so they could cool off as he enthusiastically took their order, while also finding the time to inquire if they had come to Varanasi so they could witness the evening aarti soon to transpire nearby.

  Choti turned and stuck her tongue out at the waiter: “I even had the money to pay today, and still you denied me; I’ll just steal them the next time, you wait and see.”

  Choti and Noor walked back to the broken sidewalks strewn about the ghats. Their bellies ached with hunger pangs and, for a while, as they walked together, they didn’t speak. The more they walked, the more Choti fumed, until she suddenly stamped her foot on the ground.

  “I’m so angry at that bloody skeleton of a waiter. All I wanted was to share my favorite samosas with you, and that bloody bastard had to keep me from doing it,” Choti said, digging all over herself for something.

  “It’s fine, child. That’s life,” Noor said, cracking a forgiving smile.

  “That doesn’t have to be ‘life,’ Noor,” Choti said. “I wasn’t even asking for free samosas! I was happy to pay!”

  “Like I always say, that’s life,” Noor shrugged philosophically.

  “Well, if that’s life, life’s not fair. I’ve seen so many people sitting and eating samosas here,” Choti continued. “They line up to eat them. Once I begged there and someone gave me a piece of samosa, and it was the best thing I ever ate in my life. All I wanted to do today was share that delicious taste with you. Maybe I’m too small and lowly for anyone to take seriously,” Choti stamped her foot again. “Ugh!”