Travails with Chachi

by Louise Fernandes Khurshid

  I regretted it immediately. The little lady was on the roll. And I was the prime target. ‘Why are you men harassing this police lady? You men try to pull down every woman worth her salt. It’s your insecurity complex. You try to keep us behind the purdah − Hindu and Muslim women alike − because you are worried we will outshine you.’

  I thought of protesting but the humour of the situation got the better of me. Did we men really stand a chance against her clan? All these goras protesting about how we eastern men suppress our women. What were they talking about? I remember this newspaper photo Bablu showed me about leaders of something called ‘SAARC’ countries. We men, here in India, were well and truly surrounded − Bangladesh on one side; Pakistan on another; Sri Lanka on the third with our own iron lady, Indira Gandhi here in India. Who had the better of whom?

  ‘Freud would have said these chaps have an Oedipus complex,’ said my smarty-pants, DPS-educated son when I voiced these thoughts aloud. Bablu ki Ma stopped open-mouthed. I, too, was thrown off stride. What was this Oedipus complex business? As a taxi driver I was supposed to know the direction to all complexes in the city. I have heard of the Ansals and Rahejas and DLF complexes in the city. But this Freud character. Was he one of those firangi multinationals who Advaniji keeps warning us against? I would have liked to ask, but my experience is that every time I ask for clarifications Bablu looks down his nose at me and declares I am ‘ignorant’. Before I could say anything my friend Akbar Pasha smirked and said: ‘That’s Congress culture for you. Ever since Mrs. Gandhi died those chaps have been running around like plucked chickens.’

  Now I have no real brief for the Congress but even this was too much. But I was saved the interruption. Bablu ki Ma, belan in hand, rounded on him and sneered back, ‘You SP men have no business to talk. You made crude remarks about her behind her back but you tremble at the sight of Madam Mayawati. She holds the key to your survival and both she and you know that.’ Just then Gurcharan entered the room. He held the morning papers in his hand. The mention of the name ‘Mayawati’ got him all steamed up.

  ‘Discrimination!’ he muttered. ‘Discrimination. What business do you UP wallahs have to be talking about discrimination? Look at the discrimination we Punjabis face. Phoolan Devi can shoot 14 men in cold blood. You give her a public pardon, make a movie about her and offer her a ticket to the Lok Sabha poll. Mayawati can abuse the Father of the Nation and no one has the guts to speak up. But Kabir Bedi’s wife, Nikki, allows someone to say something unpleasant on her show and you fellows throw Parliament out of gear. Why are you so surprised about action against Kiranji? We are not.’

  Bablu ki Ma picked up the rolling pin again. ‘You fellows refuse to take the subject seriously. Kiran Bedi is not really the issue here. It is very clever of you to show us pictures of those famous mahilas (Khalida Zia, Chandrika Kumaratunga, Benazir Bhutto, Indira Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi). But the five famous ladies making it to the top does not change the fact that, till today, you will save and scrape to send Bablu to college but your brother’s daughters’ marriages have already been fixed − and they are still only 14 and 15 years old! The fact remains that I may have freedom in this city but my sister still remains in purdah in Etawah. I may have been given the choice of having only one child but your own sister, Pushpa, never seems to stop eating achar. And can you honestly say you would have called a halt if our first child had not been a boy?’

  That had me stumped. The little lady speaks up very rarely. But when she does we all have to sit up and take notice. She certainly had a point. What really was Kiran Bedi’s fault that she should be pushed around so much? At the time of this controversy the IB officer who lives in the DDA flat right opposite our taxi stand told me her ‘bureaucratic behaviour was not correct’. But the foreign service fellow who lives next door, who had overhead this remark, had responded, ‘Arre bhai, this is not the time for us to be nit picking! We praise Atal Behari Vajpayeeji and Salman Khurshidji for defending our human rights record in Geneva. For that they get to be on the cover of India Today. Kiran Bedi gets the Magsaysay Award for her performance as superintendent of Tihar Jail but when she asks permission to accept an invitation to have breakfast with President Clinton her behaviour is declared to be “bureaucratically incorrect”? Does that make any sense?’

  Does it to you? It certainly didn’t make any sense to me.

  25

  PETROL MEIN KUCH MILAWAT HAIN!

  IT WAS NOT A GOOD WEEK. IT WAS MAY 1995. THERE WERE strong rumours in the air that our biradari brother, ‘Softy’ Singh (as Bablu calls him) was in trouble. Something about his junior partners in government, the BSP, doing a deal with the ‘enemy’ − BJP.

  ‘How is that possible, Papa?’ Bablu asked as he helped me pack. ‘I thought you said the Dalit fight song was “Tilak, tarazu aur talwar, Sub ko maro joota char.” How then can these BSP fellows be doing a deal with the BJP who, everyone knows, attracts exactly those three upper communities? I think Dadu’s just looking for an excuse to get you to visit.’ I didn’t say anything. I knew differently. Even here in the capital city, Trivedji, my UP politician friend, had been dropping liberal hints about a change of status for my biradari brother. He should know. He was an essential member of the ‘dealing’ committee. And some of those crucial talks took place in my own Chachi’s lap.

  ‘Petrol mein kuch milawat hain,’ Gurcharan Singh had said, in language both Chachi and I understood, when I kept getting called out on secret night duty. ‘Daal mein kuch kala hai,’ said his wife. The clan was to meet in the late afternoon the day after the phone call − day two of the bad week. This was to give me and the other members of the clan time to travel the long journey from distant parts of the country. Even Krishna Yadav, general secretary of the Yadav Mahasabha from Hyderabad, wired that he would be there.

  I arrived just in time to hear Tau Nakli Singh Yadav fiercely exhorting the clan to ‘take revenge’.

  ‘These BSP fellows have been ungrateful wretches.’ He was on his pet theme. ‘Not only do they continue to harass our brother, now they are threatening to replace him with a woman. A woman! Imagine that! Pardoning Phoolan Devi was bad enough. But this is too much!’ I volunteered to suggest that perhaps we were better off. How long would our leader continue to swallow insults just to stay in power?

  ‘This is not the time for post mortems and accusations. This is the time for action and suggestions. What shall we advise our leader to do?’ We must save his CM-ship by all means. Without him in power we Yadavs sub sadak par ayenge.’ We will be on the road. That was Chacha Krishna Yadav, for whom Tau had campaigned vigorously in the last election, immediately raised his hand. He had the ideal solution. He swore it had worked in his own state when some heavyweights in the late Rajivji’s inner circle had temporarily tried to turn the spotlight off the late actor-turned-politician, N. T. Rama Rao. What was he talking about? It didn’t quite make sense. Manglu Singh Yadav, my distant cousin from Begusarai in Bihar, immediately rushed in. He was obviously familiar with the tactic. It apparently involved escorting key MLAs to a secret safehouse and keeping them under unofficial house arrest till the crucial time passed. The ‘crucial time’ being till the governor physically did a head count. ‘This is what we should suggest to “Softy” Singh,’ Manglu Singh said. This should be Plan A.

  ‘But that’s illegal and improper,’ Dadu protested. ‘Surely people shouldn’t be coerced into expressing their choice?’ Tau Nakli Singh laughed loud and clear. What an innocent Dadu was, even after so many years of seeing elections being fought around him in the badlands of Etawah, Mainpuri, Etah and Farrukhabad. Caste, criminals and cash. That was the unfailing formula. If it worked during polls to elect those MLAs why would it not work now to ensure the ‘loyalty’ of those very same men?

  Dadu was not amused. Such cynicism. That was horse-trading we were suggesting. It was not correct. Other political parties would never accept this and our man would be discredited. Better he bowed out of power with dignit
y. That’s what we should suggest, Dadu insisted. That should be Plan B. At which Tau sniggered even louder. ‘Bhai saheb,’ he said, ‘you are far too innocent. Everyone plays the same game. Ministerships and money, petrol pumps and gas agencies. It’s only called “horse trading” when you are unsuccessful. When you succeed it’s called “political persuasiveness”. All’s fair in power and politics.’

  What about Plan C − that there be President’s Rule? That was my suggestion, but it was immediately shot down. Everyone there insisted that our leader would not benefit from such a plan. Firstly he would not get a chance to expose the matlabi character of the BSP. (Bablu, the smart aleck, calls this ‘political opportunism’.) Secondly, the real beneficiaries of President’s Rule would invariably be the party at the Centre (the Congress). And everyone knew just how much down the ladder the Congress was in UP. Why give them power on a platter? To tell you the truth, I suspect that the real reason was our biradari brother simply didn’t have the guts to go into an election without his own chosen officers in place at the ground level. But this was not the time, or place, to air my views.

  By the third day everything was in the open. Just as we feared, those BSP wallahs pulled the plug on our leader. As was rumoured, they made a bid for power with the total backing of those saffron wallahs. Tau immediately shot off a telegram to Lucknow advising our biradari brother to use Plan A. Dadu sent another one begging him to use Plan B. Trivediji urged me to drive to Lucknow to suggest Plan C. This made me extremely suspicious because, as you know, the man was in the Congress − the very party that had dethroned my biradari brother. A little pressure and his plan unfolded. Advantage A: Use the Dalits to destabilize the Backwards by playing one against the other. Advantage B: Further destabilize that breakaway faction of the party led by that pahadi Brahmin and that Thakur from Madhya Bharat. Only some friendly persuasion would be necessary: Lend support to the Dalits and the Muslims (whose nationwide support my jath wallah publicly claimed) would be angry. Do the same for the Backwards and the Dalits (whose nationwide support was necessary for him to make a nation-wide impact) would be angry. Advantage C: A boost for the BSP will cut at the support base of the BJP. The logic: The Dalit fight song of ‘Tilak, tarazu aur talwar. Sabko maro joota char’, would cut at the base of the traditional, largely upper caste, BJP vote bank. The fellow was depending on enough bad blood flowing along the bylanes of Lucknow for there to be an intolerable law and order situation. Then, he hoped, his own party would step in with the logical (and conveniently beneficial to them) solution: President’s Rule. From then on it would be sheer bliss. With the competition slyly sidelined, my friend, and other netas like him, could get down to the real business of running UP − the business of postings and transfers. (And we all know what that means. I myself passed Rs. 10,000 from an old friend in Etawah to my own politician friend for the posting of an SHO when last such a situation prevailed in UP).

  All this came back to me in a flash because, just as I slid into the darkened confines of the Ruby Restaurant in the University town of Aligarh, I spied Trivedji sitting in solitary silence in one corner. ‘Kya hua?’ I asked. ‘You should have been celebrating. You’ve successfully dislodged my biradari wallah.’ My friend looked startled. For once I was not able to hide my political preference. Having always seen me as a mindless, characterless, sounding board he looked at me with new respect. That encouraged me. ‘What went wrong?’ I asked. ‘Isn’t this how you wanted it?’

  ‘It wasn’t supposed to end like this,’ he said. ‘We only meant to tempt the Dalits with power. We didn’t really expect them to pull it off. We thought we could sow the seeds of dissension and then watch them grow into a chaotic bed of wild weeds, pushing in different directions. Then, when the situation got out of hand, we were going to use our contacts in the media to editorialize about the necessity of President’s Rule.’

  ‘It’s all turned horribly sour,’ he said. While he spoke I noticed that he punched nervously on the keyboard of his laptop computer and shook his head from side to side. And, as he fumbled and mumbled, I couldn’t help glancing at the computer screen. What I could see went something like this: Brahmins − 80% gone to the BJP along with the temple plan, 20% gone with ‘Panditji’ (whoever that was). Thakurs − 70% gone away from us with Privy purses, 30% gone with ‘Thakur Saheb’ (whoever that was). Backwards − 100% Yadavs gone with ‘Softy’ Singh. Lodha Rajputs − 100% gone with Kalyan Singh. Dalits − 100% gone with the BSP.

  I couldn’t read anymore. This was embarrassing. And yet, my friend didn’t look terribly worried. That really intrigued me. ‘Kyon bhai?’ I asked. ‘If I were a Congress politician, especially from UP, I would be sweating the red stuff. You seem totally unperturbed. What’s your secret?’

  He smiled enigmatically. ‘Simple,’ he said. ‘Do your homework. Do your chamchagiri. Become an “Elder” and enter the Rajya Sabha. All the top politicians − at least in the Congress party, are doing it these days. Those are the guys who have all the clout anyway. It’s the only way to survive today ….’

  26

  YE HAATH MUJHE DE DE, THAKUR!

  TRIVEDIJI’S CALCULATIONS KEPT GOING THROUGH MY MIND. Now, I’m normally quite clued up to all the political characters he refers to – especially the Hindi heartland wallahs – but I hadn’t been able to place the ‘Panditji’ and the ‘Thakur Saheb’ he had mentioned yesterday. Surely I would have heard of them before if they were any kind of political force to be reckoned with?

  Pandit, Thakur, Pandit, Thakur – the words kept echoing in my mind. Should I ask Thakur Lambemoochwale, I wondered? Should I check with Pandit Bimari? They are usually quite up-to-date on the hierarchy in their respective biradaris.

  I must have dozed off at some point. Till a sudden commotion rudely jerked me back to consciousness. ‘Ye haath mujhe de de, Thakur!’ Was I dreaming? ‘Ye haath mujhe de de, Thakur!’ No, no, the voice sounded most familiar. And the words, too, I had heard before.

  ‘Ye haath mujhe de de, Thakur!’ The words were familiar. It was that Bablu in action again − rewinding for the tenth time that battered print of Sholay? I was furious. If his mother had let him have the cassette it was against my advice. All this guns and violence was getting too much even for me.

  But even while my temperature rose, I could not help remembering the day I first saw the film. The rubber on Chachi’s tyres had still been raw and the upholstery still covered in hard plastic. Chachi purred like a dream and blew elegant smoke rings at anyone who came too close. Bablu wasn’t even a twinkle in my eye. And the little lady still blushed coyly each time I groped for her hand in the dark.

  Those were the days when our elders whispered in soft murmurs about the daring escapades of the Chabhiram geng and Daku Man Singh. I remember the day so clearly because when we returned from the movie theatre this registered letter came in from Dadu. Some new chori called Phoolan Devi had gunned down 14 young Thakurs in cold blood − something about a ‘revenge killing’. ‘Don’t come home for these holidays,’ Dadu wrote. ‘The zila is tense.’

  But he had added in a postscript: ‘Maan gaya is chori ko. She fixed those Thakurs like I never could.’ That was quite an admission from my gentle, peace-loving Dadu. But I understood the provocation. The local Thakur youth had been harassing our biradari girls something awful. There was even some talk of a few of the girls disappearing into the night and never being seen again…

  We’ve come a long way since that time. Well, literally. Sanjeev Kumar and Amjad (Gabbar Singh) Khan are no longer with us; Dharmendra has children from two wives; and Amitabh Bachchan has graduated from movie mogul to business tycoon. Why, even Phoolan Devi − who surrendered and went to jail for her crimes − has since been pardoned, turned Buddhist, turned to Hinduism again and won a parliamentary election!

  Back at home, Bablu is now a strapping loud-mouthed teenager, the leader of a local arm twister’s gang and, for the last year, has been the director of the local street theatre group.

>   And it was the initial rehearsal of the group’s maiden production that I stumbled upon that day − not a re-run of Sholay!

  As I asked: ‘What’s the play about?’ I remember thinking: What’s wrong with good old-fashioned plays like Ramayana? Why do these public school educated kids have to confuse us with some ‘meaningful’ and ‘socially relevant’ theatre? Judging from what they were trying to produce this time they could take their ‘relevant’ and ‘meaningful’ tamasha and put it in the dustbin.

  From what I was to see about the initial rehearsals, the characters looked very familiar. In fact they looked very much like that bunch of netas I had driven up and down the firing range near Surajkund the previous year. But surely Bablu would not have known about them? He was the least politically conscious boy. And he had developed a great contempt for netas.

  The theme was rather complicated, made even more complicated by the fact that all the characters − main and minor − were determined to write their own lines and none was willing to accept the other as director. Somewhere in the confusion, at least at rehearsal No. 9, the story line seemed to go like this: The stars were these two characters born in the same Mafia-type ‘family’. They had very little in common − except a common desire to be the ‘Godfather’. Though both publicly paid court to past ‘Godfathers’, each privately nursed a grievance that made him swear revenge. The first was a baby-faced, red-cheeked roly-poly fellow whose hands were always folded (in pray or chamchagiri, I don’t know). He kept flipping through a black book that contained countless ladies’ addresses. The second was a square-bodied, square-jawed dour-faced individual who kept trying to twirl his minimal moustaches. The roly-poly fellow laughed a lot but he had been nursing a hurt that went way back. Though he was conferred with all sorts of high-sounding titles, in essence he felt he was just a domestic servant, a court jester. The dour-faced one had the air of an injured warrior (and that’s what he apparently was, a Thakur). His revered father had died in jail, imprisoned on charges of corruption by the Boss’s very father. He continued to serve under the Boss but his warrior blood said this humiliation would one day be avenged.