by Vikas Khanna
Choti set her bowl of rice aside and hugged Noor back and said, “Can I call you Ma then?”
Noor’s roommate Asha had been watching both of them the whole time. She had watched their arrival at the gate, she had watched the stranger conferring with them and then leaving abruptly, she had watched Choti run off to “play” with the children, she had watched Noor wave her directions from the balcony.
And what did Asha do after so much watching but immediately call the police to make a report, as she had overheard on the streets that they were searching for Choti over the murder of Anarkali.
In no time at all Choti and Noor heard the clamor of footsteps and resonating voices rushing up the ashram stairs.
“Choti, listen to me, crawl in as deep under Asha’s bed as you can and make yourself as quiet and small as possible. Hurry!” Noor rushed around the room, trying to hide the Holi powder and any other trace of Choti’s presence.
But it was too late. The door whipped open and there stood, fuming in a collective glare, Asha surrounded by Raja’s chamchas. Asha barged into the room, not even bothering to take her shoes off as she trod all over Noor’s sleeping mat, and pierced every corner of the room with her eyes, which had become sharp as razors.
“Noor, how many times have I warned you to stay out of trouble? And now you have brought all this trouble back to the ashram,” Asha intoned.
“Asha, I thought you were my friend. Has the world changed, or have we changed?” Noor said. “How could you do this to me?”
“Noor, you’ve becoming a sinner,” Asha said, showing no mercy. “That’s how I could.”
Noor stood frozen in place, saying nothing, like a sad, humiliated child, accepting her punishment, with no defense but a puzzled frown. It was a wonder all the blood from her heart didn’t burst out and spill onto the white surface of her saree.
“You are a sinner,” Asha said. “You are against the Gods, you are against religion, you are against society. You are against everything!”
The police goons trickled in on either side of Asha, rubbing their knuckles, adjusting their belts, smoothing their mustaches, readying for violence.
Noor took a breath and found the strength to speak. “Saving a life is not against any form of religion I know of.”
One of Choti’s feet poked out from under Asha’s bed, and the bulging eye of the ugliest, dourest-faced chamcha saw it. Chaos ensued as the chamcha reached down and caught Choti’s foot like it was the tail of a Ganga fish being pulled from a net. “I knew it,” Asha said, smirking. “You’ve stained the ashram with another sinner, and under my own bed, Noor! The gods will never forgive you.”
The chamcha showed no mercy in pulling Choti first by the legs and then more violently by grabbing her by her hair. Choti kicked and threw her fists, even spat in the chamcha’s face. “You smelly little fish!” said the chamcha.
“Leave me alone. I didn’t see anything. Noor, help me, Noor!” begged Choti.
Noor deployed every limb of her withered body against the goons. Hitting them with her weak fists and finally throwing herself at their feet. “She’s just a child, leave her alone! She’s not a danger to anybody! Don’t fear her, fear the Gods!” Noor shouted until she was hoarse.
All the ashram’s widows collected in the courtyard, gathering like a white fog, sweeping closer to the veranda to witness the tamasha and hearken to Noor’s screams— “Leave her alone! Let her go! She is sick and in danger, the girl will die if I don’t take care of her!”
The chamchas beat Noor back and pushed her back into her room, where another oily haired, paan chewing chamcha lingered. He stepped onto the veranda, next to where Asha had rushed to position herself. “The girl is finished,” the chamcha said, drawing his finger across his throat and whistling. “She shouldn’t have raised her voice against the Lead Inspector. She did, and now the girl is as good as dead.”
As soon as the police had left with their child captive, Asha leaned over the veranda to spread word of Noor’s sins.
“I’ve personally witnessed this widow’s excesses with my own eyes. She has no shame! I’ve seen her drinking sugared chai,” Asha said.
The other women in the ashram began taunting Noor:
“If you are so keen to have a daughter, then get married and produce one of your own…”
“We renounced all our earthly ties and came here to spend our time in prayer and worship, and this loose woman is having a roaring time…”
“The slut! She’s at death’s door but still wants a good time…”
Asha reached over and yanked up Noor’s saree to expose her foot. “And look at this! She dares even to put nail polish on her toes to seduce the new husband obsessing her mind! She’s destroyed the sanctity of this ashram for widows by treating it like an ashram for married couples.”
“It’s a sin, it’s a sin,” the widows began to whisper in chorus, reacting to each other’s growing shock.
“And this young new ‘bride’ even plans to play Holi with that young girl she regards as her own flesh and blood daughter,” Asha continued, displaying the pouch of bright pink pigment she had found under her bed. All the widows present shut their eyes to avoid their own sin of looking at color.
Noor made a grab for the pouch—the proof of her sinful desire, and also her love for Choti, the closest thing to a daughter she’d ever had.
All the women gathered in the veranda closed in further and began to harangue Noor. Noor was cornered, pushed to the end of the terrace: “Shame, shame, shame,” they repeated until Noor was forced to cover her ears. She looked through the widows’ crowding presence and saw Choti being dragged out of the ashram’s front entrance.
Noor screamed, “Choti, my darling child, fight them, try to run and never look back, you are big, one day you will fly above them all!”
At this point Asha lunged at Noor to intimidate her, and Noor took a couple of hasty steps back. She missed her footing and fell off the ledge of the first-floor veranda, hitting her head hard on the courtyard tiles.
It took that kind of violent action to convince the widows, including Asha, to finally cease their aggression.
Blood flowed from her head like a vermilion river, but Noor never got to see its brilliant hue. Would the other widows dare ever recall its color after it flowed past the tulsi plant Noor had nurtured every day with Ganga water?
Noor died while still clutching a pouch of sinful, vivid pink, a pouch of color she never had the chance to open.
Why do I threaten you?
You have a million weapons, I only have truth
Why are you cremating me?
You have the entire Sun, I only have the light of hope
Why are you burying me?
You have the entire Earth, I only have a puff of dust
Why are you drowning me?
You have an entire River, I barely exist in a drop of water
The beasts in police garb dragged Choti by her hair out of the ashram to Ganga herself. Then they blindfolded her and dumped her in a police patrol motorboat. She heard the engine start, and go faster and faster, racing along the ghats, steering away towards sinister darker waters. She felt a warm breeze on her face. But she wasn’t on her tightrope. Where was the safe and clear height of her air? And where was Noor?
Choti had never learned how to swim. Why? Because she had always been an aerial creature, walking the tightrope high in the sky, or in a tree concealed in her sky-nest.
She wanted to fly, but she had to drown to meet Anarkali again.
Choti heard one of the officer’s say, “Drown her in the river, this stupid girl is creating too much trouble. It will be a clean end of the Anarkali case if we just push her in.”
Her hands were bound with rope and then suddenly one of the men grabbed her with his rough dirty hands and cast her over the side of the speeding boat into Ganga’s fast waters.
But did they release her? No, they did not. They held onto her by her hair. She sank into the
filthy water and splashed her arms around trying to stay above the surface to catch her breath, but all she felt was more pressure on her hair. It hurt so much, she wished her scalp would just tear off and they would just let her drown. To sink to the bottom of the river with the big fish and dead bodies that choked it.
Choti stopped fighting and closed her eyes, and then her frail limp child’s body began to float, lapped by the dark of Ganga’s waters.
The boat stopped and abruptly Choti was pulled back in. Raja’s henchmen carried her wrapped in a thin blanket back into Nagar Nigam Station, where her whole ordeal had first begun.
Was Choti dead?
No, the wretched child clung as stubbornly to life as she had as a newborn. Ten years ago, abandoned in a garbage tip, with no air in her lungs, the infant Choti had been rescued by the Woman in a Yellow Saree, and survived. This time too, though her lungs were full of water, Choti spluttered, and her frail body shook and shivered and slowly wakened to life.
“Don’t put her back in,” one of the men implored. “We’ve been dunking the kid in water for half an hour. Obviously, Ganga Ma doesn’t want her dead and if we mess with this child, the Goddess will take us to task…”
The police station was unusually busy, full of petty criminals, aggrieved people trying to lodge their complaints, and cops going about their business. Chintu sat in a far corner with handcuffs on his hands. The already skinny child had lost more weight. The smile had gone from his face. His eyes were dull and glazed. He had just spent almost a year in jail for some petty crime and was being released that day. He had been sentenced without trial. A young child thrown into the dungeons with hardened criminals just because he had shouted at one of the men he was gambling with, and had lost his money to, turned out to be a friend of Raja’s.
Suddenly there was a commotion in the hall as a couple of policemen burst in carrying a small girl wrapped in a blanket.
Filthy water dripped all over the desk and floor of the holding room.
Chintu stared in shock as he caught a glimpse of the girl’s face!
Just then Raja rushed in, beaming with excitement. “Excellent. I see you’ve given this little guttersnipe a fine lesson in police procedure and how to become a more responsible citizen of Varanasi,” he said. “Take her downstairs immediately and finish the job. That’s an order!”
Then the officer who had stopped her drowning before, one of Raja’s subordinates called Veer, who was fresh, younger, brighter-eyed than the rest, dared approach to offer his opinion.
“Please sir, you can’t torture this child anymore, she’s had enough! We did everything we could to finish her off; we keel-hauled her in the Ganga, I was there and it was terrible. The men did their best, but she survived.”
Raja’s eyes appeared to sear the fresh-faced officer alive but he insisted on finishing what he had to say:
“Sir, I promise you, I saw it with my own eyes, I saw Ganga Ma give the girl her breath back. It was a miracle,” the young officer insisted. “She’s Ganga’s own daughter. The right thing to do is release her, otherwise it will prove certain bad luck for all of us.”
“Shut up! This is my station and what I say, goes, understood?” Raja said imperiously. “Ganga’s own daughter, eh?” he stroked his chin. He was worried that Choti and the reporter woman could get him into serious trouble and wanted them out of the scene permanently. “We’ll see about that.”
Veer tried to reason with his superior once more: “Sir, please sir, she’s just a child.”
Raja grabbed him by the collar and shoved him hard against the wall. “I suggest you worry about your own children! If you don’t follow my orders you might be the one who ends up at the bottom of the Ganga.”
Chintu watched in horror as Choti was taken downstairs.
The Flower of Faded Orange
A heritage of a book and a paper flower
Rekha had been haunting the colorful streets of Varanasi, drinking chai, pacing, brooding, biding her time. Finally, nerve-racking anxiety had driven her back to the ashram to do a little spying. Immediately she knew something was amiss. She saw that a small group of local women of all ages, old and wrinkled, young and still smooth-faced, decked-out in rich Varanasi textiles with their heads covered, had gathered at the gate, their attention riveted across it.
Though she badly wanted to, Rekha could not barge into the courtyard like the intrepid journalist she was, because only widowed women were allowed to enter—and she wasn’t even married yet. The local women kept up a constant murmur of whispered curiosity as they stared across the gate at the ashram. She moved closer to them to hear what they were saying.
“Can you believe it, now these widows are adopting children?” one of the women said.
“Shame! Soon these inauspicious crones, whose dark shadow caused the death of their husbands, will invade our whole society,” said another.
“Thank God the police took action and arrested that little thief of a street girl,” a third woman said.
Rekha’s face turned pale with horror. “Did you see what happened?” she asked them.
The women all nodded. “Everyone saw it. Such audacity! Shame on them, shame.”
“What did everyone see?” Rekha persisted.
“They dragged that dirty little thief girl out of the ashram by her hair!”
Rekha’s heart sank. The worst that she had feared had happened. She placed her hand on her chest to calm her loudly beating heart. “And? What else did you see?”
“Then an old widow fell off the veranda, hit her head, and died on the spot. She must have been the guilty one who let the streetchild in.”
All the life seemed to be knocked out of Rekha’s body. She clutched weakly at the wall behind her as a wave of nausea convulsed her body.
“The worst part of it all…”
“Yes, yes, what was it?” another woman in the crowd asked eagerly, taking great pleasure in the tragedy that had just occurred.
“…was that the old widow clutched a packet of pink gulal in her hands.”
The crowd gasped in collective disapproval of such blatantly blasphemous behavior.
Rekha raced back to Nagar Nigam, arriving at the police station’s front desk, in a completely hysterical state. Seeing her, the cops hanging about swiftly retreated behind their desks. One of them stood smoking and staring—here was the reporter lady from Delhi again, come to stir up more trouble, he was thinking, no doubt.
“Where’s the inspector on duty?” Rekha demanded to know. “I want to speak to him immediately!”
The inspector on duty stepped to the desk, but Rekha didn’t recognize him, and he just ignored her and pretended to study some case files on the desk, while keeping his eyes on a phone he pretended to expect to ring any second with some urgent call that would surely demand his serious attention.
“Inspector! Listen to me. Did your officers bring a young girl in today?” Rekha said. “I’ve been looking for her. If she’s here you could be in serious trouble.”
The inspector didn’t even look up from his files.
Rekha raised her voice loud enough so that even the cops in the back offices and cells must have heard it. “Answer me! Did anyone bring Choti in? I demand to know. Let me tell you all, there will be serious ramifications, if even an inch on her body is hurt.”
At the far end of the desk, Rekha spied a scrap of faded orange, now with flecks of deep red criss-crossing it, and it seemed like it had become damp and had then been dried out. It was the flower from Choti’s hair. Her eyes widened and she threw up her arms, as she raced to the end of the desk in a rage, and snatched up the flower. Brandishing it at all of them she said, “I know she’s here. I’m not going away until I get justice. I’m going to call the Delhi Police Department and the Security Ministry and report to all the ministers that the UP police have abducted a juvenile witness to a cover up a murder committed by its very own officers.”
The inspector at the desk laughed in her face.
“So, now a journalist thinks she can determine the fate of a police officer,” he said, his gaze resting lecherously on her chest. “Madamji, I’m sure you realize that hundreds of people are openly cremated here on the ghat, every single day. Get your nose out of official police business and buy a bus ticket back to Delhi before you become an earthenware pot yourself.”
The other cops laughed with him in open mockery.
Rekha banged the desk again. “Sir, I’ve made it my duty to bring the world’s attention to the crimes your corrupt force has committed. And there are many. Where is Inspector Raja?”
Raja suddenly strode through the entrance and stood behind Rekha, exhaling his foul breath. “I’m right here,” he said, targeting his harsh whisper into Rekha’s ear.
Rekha turned to face him.
“Journalist lady from Delhi, I could kill you and bury you in the station’s backyard and no one would even know about it. Do yourself a favor, either forget about this and go enjoy Holi like everyone else, or go back to Delhi and save your life. The pyres of Manikarnika burn all evidence of life away. Even your ashes mingle with those of a thousand others. No one will ever be able to trace what happened to you.”
“But you murdered Anarkali in cold blood! How can you stand there like nothing happened?” Rekha said.
“Keep your voice low,” Raja rasped.
“I will do quite the opposite, I know people in the ministry and the media. They all know where I am, and what I’m investigating. Don’t you dare threaten me! Now that I know you’ve abducted Choti as well.”
Raja dropped his lids across his cold, dead eyes. Rekha stared the inspector down.
“I promise you, the world will hear of this, Raja,” said Rekha.
Raja grabbed hold of Rekha’s wrist like he was cuffing it. “You have no proof of any of this. I own these streets of Varanasi,” he said. Raja yanked Rekha to the door and shoved her out. “Stop sticking your nose in official police business and allow us to continue doing our best work for the people of Varanasi,” Raja said, continuing to bully Rekha down the street, as tears of rage streamed down her cheeks at the sheer malice in his voice.
