Exile

by Akhilesh

  He resolved that Keith would be his heir. All his companies, his businesses would expand under Keith. When he finally made up his mind, he was all the more strongly drawn towards Keith. Gradually, he started imaging his own child in Keith, the child he never had. He longed to talk to him, to invite him to dinner at a grand restaurant and share a rare bottle of wine with him. But because of the position that Pandey held, it was not possible for him to entertain a young man in his firm like this. Finally, Pandey dispatched him to France on a business trip and booked himself on the flight. He discovered during the journey that not only did he think of Keith as his child, but Keith too looked up to him as a father figure. Pandey was his guide, father and philosopher.

  ‘But you have not met me often … perhaps twice or thrice … why then …?’

  ‘Sir, is it possible to meet the messiah frequently?’ As Keith said this, his usual smile waltzed on his lips and the same sense of wonder was ablaze in his eyes.

  Pandey took a year to take the final step. He assessed Keith minutely during this period, and decided finally that he would appoint him CMD in his seafood company on his birthday. Thus, he would start grooming him as his heir.

  Pandey did not say anything to Keith. He wanted to astound the lad. Perhaps he also believed that the premature disclosure would degrade the act and perhaps it was his nature be dramatic. Perhaps all three assumptions were true to some extent. So, Pandey secretly arranged a magnificent banquet to celebrate Keith’s birthday and his special instructions were that no seafood was to be served. It was Pandey’s idiosyncrasy that there never was any seafood at his private parties. He would laugh it off, exclaiming that if they ate seafood themselves, what would they sell?

  On the morning of his birthday, Keith woke to the sounds of the telephone. His friends were greeting him on his birthday. He left his bed, brewed tea and went through the messages on his mobile. The birthday greetings had been pouring in since midnight. He read them slowly – he savoured such things.

  He made another cup of tea and checked his mail as he lay in bed. As soon as his inbox opened, he got so excited that he leaped out of bed yelling. Another seafood company had offered him the post of country head in Mexico. ‘This is a real gift!’ he screamed and jumped back on the bed, ruffling his hair in exhilaration. It was at this moment that fate decided that he would not be the master of Pandey’s financial empire, and that Pandey was doomed to remain childless. Keith typed out his resignation to Pandey’s firm and wrote to Pandey’s personal email address, ‘With extreme regret, sir, I am unable to make it to the party tonight.’ And then, he hit the send button.

  Pandey checked his mail at breakfast. He did not even sigh. As he ate, he directed his secretary to circulate two directives: one, an emergency meeting of the board was to be summoned, and two, seafood would be on the menu at tonight’s party.

  At the meeting Pandey announced that he was feeling old now. He regularly got exhausted and was uncomfortable with the workload: he wanted to take a break, reduce his equity in the company, pass his time peacefully and depart this life with a tranquil mind. The board was shocked – why did a veteran like Pandey want to offload his shares at a time when his companies were minting money? Later, it was considered Pandey’s astuteness, ruthlessness and insight into the future that had told him about the imminent economic slump. When Pandey sold his shares, the rates were the highest in the history of the company but soon afterwards, they tumbled rapidly to the lowest.

  Now Pandey did not have much to do, although he was in excellent shape. He had started drinking more to pass time. In fact, he had been hurt badly by Keith’s duplicity and preferred to remain alone. Most of the time, he sat idle, gazing at an object in the room. Gazing at it did not mean he was really looking at it. His eyes, his physical form would be present in the room, but his soul would glide back to his teenage years in Surinam. And he finally grasped the intensity of Baba’s emotional agony, melancholy and sorrow.

  Pandey was overwhelmed by the memory of Baba. He discovered he was damned and cheerless like Baba and thought, I’m old enough to be at death’s threshold. The question is what would happen to me after I breathe my last?’ He cursed himself and thought, I will be responsible for annulling the name of my dynasty.

  In his despair, he destroyed the photographs of his two wives, deleted everything even remotely connected with them from his computer and left on a long vacation to Surinam. There, he led his life like Baba. He spent hours in the small temple in the house. On several occasions, he sat rooted at the feet of the idols with his head bowed, and often fell asleep on its bare floor. He touched his forehead not only to the idols but also before his Baba’s portrait. ‘Your Ramajor failed to reunite you with your family,’ he would say.

  One night, something strange happened. He shut himself in the room, put on Baba’s clothes – his shirt, his trousers, his coat. Even the chappals on his feet belonged to Baba. He held Baba’s photograph in his hand, and he glanced at himself in the mirror and then at Baba’s photograph every now and then, trying to match his face with Baba’s. But he was disappointed to see that he did not look like Baba despite wearing his clothes. The only similarity was in their eyebrows – both their eyebrows met in the middle. He muttered, ‘Baba, I’m not like you but I’m yours.’ He walked to the bar in Baba’s clothes and uncorked Baba’s favourite wine. He decided that he would force himself to think about Baba as long as he was awake.

  It is not clear whether he slept that night, but in the morning, he started preparations for his India trip. Before he arrived in India, he collected all kinds of information about India on the internet, but unfortunately there was no concrete information about his village Gosainganj. There were two Gosainganjs apparently. One was a settlement around twenty-five kilometres from Lucknow, with the pin code 227125, and was a town municipality. The other was the oldest market in the former capital of Awadh, Faizabad. Pandey had hoped he would discover his destination in either of the Gosainganjs and embrace the members of his clan.

  But the information he got when he came to India befuddled him. The country had not merely two but numerous Gosainganjs in several districts of several states. Pandey found it hard to decide which one to explore and which one to ignore. Exhausted, he postponed sorting out the issue until his next trip to India and toured the length and breadth of the country instead.

  There appeared two contradictions in his lifestyle and conduct during this India trip. He used to stay in the top-end hotels in each city and took pleasure in an expensive wardrobe. However, he would always go to some shoddy dhaba to eat in spite of travelling in his shiny, plush car. Once, he even stopped his car at a local water dispenser and attempted to drink water from his cupped palms at a pyau. The entire length of his sleeve was drenched and more than half of the water splashed down. He tried to hearten Baba’s spirit through such endeavours.

  Countless times he tried to imagine the era his Baba lived in India. He was not a historian to be familiar with the manners and things of that time. Neither had Baba ever described his life. He supported his imagination through guesswork and common sense. And thus, he visualized Baba taking a dip in the Sangam in Allahabad, and the man sweeping the roads in Delhi early one morning appeared to him like Baba. When he glimpsed a man eating bhoonja in Vaishali, he felt that Baba was partaking of the bhoonja. He did not even realize when he started smoking bidis. If he realized something, it was that it was not him but Baba smoking. In the course of living the past, he stepped into a native hooch shop, a hauli, and felt that it was not he but his Baba sitting on the old, filthy bench to guzzle a pint of Lal Pari. He beheld a boy in absolutely dirty underwear selling fried gram from a platter on the counter. He bought a dona of fried gram, ghughuri, and munched it with the hooch like all others. It was such a rare, precious experience that he decided on the spur of the moment that the next time he visited India, he would enjoy the hauli hooch and gram ghughuri without fail.

  ‘I have to sip hooch in the ha
uli and munch ghughuri from a dona,’ Pandey said again.

  ‘The local hooch and the ghughuri is on me,’ Bahugunas said, trying to fend off the impending nuisance. ‘Pandeyji, we already had a great deal of fun, let’s get back to business.’

  ‘How does that concern me? He is the man to do it,’ Pandeyji said, pointing at Suryakant.

  Suryakant fell silent, brooding. How should he begin? Although he was tipsy, his brain was working properly. He decided to begin in a formal manner. He said ‘Pandeyji, I’m delighted to see your deep desire to know your ancestors. Today, when most forget their forebears, you have travelled such a long distance to this country in search of your Baba’s native village – this is commendable. I feel grateful that you want me to help you in this objective. I assure you I’ll succeed in locating your village.’

  Bahuguna was wary and shocked when he heard Suryakant speak. The rascal! God knows whether he has taken liquor or not, but he sounds so lucid, he thought

  Suryakant continued, ‘First of all, I request you to tell me about some unique traits of your Baba, which both you and your father also have.’

  He’s trying to prove that he is the prodigal spy Karamchand, thought Bahuguna, feeling elated.

  ‘How does that concern Gosainganj?’ Pandey asked Suryakant.

  ‘It does,’ Suryakant replied like a true detective. ‘Your house in Gosainganj will be identified through your present blood relatives. It is quite possible that the unique traits in Baba’s personality and his habits, like in your father and you, are identifiable in the Gosainganj family too.’

  Pandey looked preoccupied; it was difficult to say whether it was due to his drunkenness or being lost in his memories. However, he drifted back into reality and replied, ‘Baba never wore glasses. He could see quite clearly in his old age too. Father left this world much too soon, but I … I still don’t need glasses. If I make the effort, I can read the smallest print. I’m sure that if my father had lived longer, his eyes could still have made out the lines on his palms without glasses.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘And yes … you see these eyebrows of mine? They are joined together. Baba and father too had similar facial features.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Anything else?’ he laughed, ‘And that like Baba and my father, I too have two arms, two legs, two ears and two eyes.’ He guffawed and said, ‘Since we are three different people, naturally there won’t be many similarities between us.’

  Suryakant took off the veneer of the spy and turned into a homeopathic doctor, ‘Any food that all three of you love?’

  ‘Sweets.’

  ‘A disease that all you three have?’

  ‘Both were victims of depression, and I am too.’

  ‘You, depression?’ Bahuguna chimed in after a long pause.

  ‘Cause of depression?’ Suryakant was a psychiatrist now.

  ‘Let’s get on with it,’ Pandey averted the topic with a smile.

  ‘Fine. Do you have any items that would help in tracking Gosainganj and your family?’

  A regard for Suryakant surfaced in Pandey’s eyes and his voice grew a tad sentimental and he said, ‘My child, I fervently hope you succeed.’ He walked to the cupboard and returned with a leather bag. He pulled out a laptop from the bag. ‘Here it is, the second innings of Baba’s life.’

  There were heaps of Baba’s pictures on the laptop. In one of them, Pandey, when he was a child, was swinging from Baba’s neck. Some of the photographs also featured his father, mother and grandmother. One of them showed Baba, the teenager Ramajor and his father. The joined eyebrows of each of the men lent a unique quality to it. A photo had Baba standing on a terrace filled with greenery, and in some he was in a reclining chair. A couple displayed him drinking at the home bar. He was photographed in various postures – awake, sleeping, gloomy, working, relaxing. The pictures were from the latter part of Baba’s life, when his son had grown rich. Therefore, except one, he was either aged, almost elderly, in most of the pictures. The picture from his youth, from his initial life in Surinam, had him standing with many others. It was a large group photograph of several men and women.

  ‘It was taken when Baba came to Surinam. The others are his co-passengers from the ship.’

  Pandey put his finger on one figure, ‘This is Baba.’ There appeared nothing unique in Baba. He looked exactly like the other men in the photograph. He was wearing a kurta and dhoti. There was no glow on his face but a fatigue, most likely caused by the long sea journey.

  Bahuguna was leaning over Suryakant’s shoulder and inspecting the photograph. Suryakant pushed him away. Suryakant began to speculate: what sort of clues would he get from the photographs? Possibly, the descendants looked like the forefathers. He glanced at Pandey – the fellow had grown old, but his face did not match his Baba’s in his old age. Neither did the young Pandey look like his father. But he shared a few similarities with his mother. He asked Pandey, ‘Is there anything else?’

  ‘Yes, I have one.’ Pandey opened another file on the laptop; it was a painting. ‘I found this painting in Baba’s suitcase after his death,’ Pandey said.

  Suryakant stared at it – it was a village. As in every village, there were mud houses, thatched grass huts, some trees and cattle, a pond, fields full of crops, barnyard, etc. The fields had luxuriant crops, the trees were overflowing with fruit, the cattle were hale and hearty and the men looked happy. There was a woman drawing water from a well. The unique thing about the painting was all of this was happening in a downpour. Rain fell from greyish clouds.

  ‘Was it painted by your Baba?’

  ‘No, he did not know how to paint. He must have had it done by someone else.’

  Suryakant looked at the painting again – it did not look like Baba’s village, which had been destroyed by drought and famine but his dream village. It is quite possible that he had described his dream village to the painter and asked him to paint it. But the problem was that it provided no clue to discovering Baba’s family in Gosainganj. Had Baba drawn even a childish map of his house or his village, it would have proved more helpful.

  ‘Please email this to me,’ Suryakant said and handed his visiting card.

  ‘Pandeyji! Let’s finalize our chat,’ Bahuguna intervened. Sounding shrewd, he said, ‘I mean Suryakant’s fee.’

  ‘Don’t you worry about that. I have loads of money and nobody to spend it on.’ Pandey’s voice was rather sad.

  ‘I know, but I mention it because Suryakant has almost lost his job,’ Bahuguna clarified.

  Pandey asked before sipping his drink, ‘At Suryakant’s age … what do you call it … what post does an IAS officer hold?’

  ‘Chief secretary,’ Bahuguna enlightened him.

  ‘I shall pay you the equivalent of a chief secretary’s wages for a year for this work. Whether you finish it in a month or in more than a year is up to you.’

  ‘Yes, sir, he is like your child. Like your son.’ Bahuguna was delighted that he had said all he wanted to.

  Suryakant felt uneasy. For a moment, he was disillusioned with Bahuguna as well as Pandey. What a nonsensical conversation this was! It would be better if Pandey rejected the proposal and left. But he reflected on his present position, future problems and settled for a compromise. Still, there was something that was annoying him, something that would not allow him to let this unwonted moment pass by serenely. A powerful desire rose to utter something so vicious that it would miff Pandey, and then this father-son talk of Bahuguna’s would go awry. But at that very moment, an arrow-like sentence flashed in his mind like God’s blessings and he placed it on the bowstring of his tongue, ‘Pandeyji, why do you want to discover only your Baba’s roots? Your Dadi also went to Surinam as a girmitiya labourer. Why do you have no interest in her life? Because she was a woman?’

  Pandey was not ruffled. ‘I never think like that. It’s probably because I didn’t spend much time with Dadi. I didn’t know her as intimately as I did Baba
, with all his misery, restlessness and wretchedness.’ He swallowed his wine and said, ‘We have done a lot of business tonight. Now take me to a hauli. I must drink hauli hooch and eat some ghughuri.’

  7

  I AM FIRE; LOVE, YOU WILL BURN

  Being alone in the house was not unusual for Gauri. When Gaurav left for school and Suryakant for his office, she would be alone. When Gaurav had not yet been born, she was on her own whenever Suryakant went out. However, in reality, she was never alone. A carnival materialized in the solitude of the house after they left. Innumerable colourful sights, sounds and gossips congregated around her. One Suryakant moved off only to leave behind several Suryakants. When Gaurav went to school, he also left behind quite a few Gauravs. It was as if some imposter-Suryakant and imposter-Gaurav had walked out of the house, and she retained the real ones. She was never liberated from their custody, plummeting in the middle of their joys, pastimes, reluctance, annoyance, etc. She climbed out of the chasm only when they returned home.

  This day, however, the difference was in the way she was feeling. She pondered over how turbulent and dramatic recent times had been. Suryakant’s exaggerated illness followed by the discovery that he was in perfect physical shape, though anxious from developments in his office. This was followed by a long leave from his job, the self-assuredness of bagging a new job without any trouble, and then the disillusionment, the struggle to find a job, the failures, Suryakant’s depression and worry, and then his rendezvous with Pandey.