by Akhilesh
Amma’s story is drawing to a finish, but I must go on with my life. So, I request you – you came this once, please make it a habit. Don’t think that since Ramajor Pandey’s work is over and done with (or not), you need not appear again. The days I spent with you have brought me back to normalcy after quite a long time. You are already familiar with the kind of turmoil I harbour inside me!
I also wish to say something in this context: I hope you will take it seriously. You came to look for Ramajor Pandey’s origins. It was something you were supposed to do and which Ramajor Pandey had instructed you to do. You undertook it because you were paid. However, the issue is whether Pandey wanted to find Gosainganj and his grandfather’s descendants because he was deeply attached to his grandfather. Was the restlessness of his Baba when he remembered his Indian family, and his grief, beyond Pandey’s endurance that eventually he resolved to visit Gosainganj and embrace his family? Just think: if it was only Baba behind Pandey’s love for India, he could have done this when Baba was alive. After all, he made his fortune a long time ago.
But no, he got the idea when Baba had already left this world and when he himself has grown elderly. Do you know why? Because he is alone in the world and sees death. One longs for one’s kin only when there is nobody close to him. I would like to tell you point blank that the task Pandey has assigned to you is not so much for the sake of his Baba as it is for his own. He will achieve his objective. He will stage a Bharat Milaap with Jagdamba or some Pandey and everything will be hunky-dory.
The real difficulty exists for people like you and me. You tell me – what should I do even though I am not dislocated like Pandey or Pandey’s Baba? I am still in Sultanpur, the very dust and dirt of which I have been consuming since childhood. However, I am still going through similar pangs of separation. An entire period has been lost for me. All my close ones, all my friends have slipped far away or else, I have been removed from them and have been enslaved in the netherworld. There is an eventual return in every displacement, or there is a possibility or a dream of return. But the sort of displacement I am suffering from, it has no scope for homecoming at all. On the contrary, the distance keeps growing. I had realized that I was unable to cope with it and so I did what was within my powers: I created an imagined age out of the time I had lost forever and settled down in it.
The risk was that when I emerged out of my fake era into the real one, my confidence might give way. Hence, I dissociated myself with the reality and started living in my self-made exile. My lifestyle was interrupted when you came here. But now you are leaving, and Amma too is leaving this world. We have to wait and watch whether Amma lives or dies. Although the result is predictable, we have to wait. If Amma survives till morning, I shall meet you at the station tomorrow and will hand over this letter to you. If I don’t meet you, it hardly matters because it is not as important to give you this letter as to write it. Having written it, I am expressing myself after a long time – the things I feel or think, I can express them. How terrifying it is, time whizzes by and you are unable to lighten your heart to anyone! You have afforded me this opportunity, and I thank you!
Yours,
Chacha
P.S. This is not a letter. You can presume it is my autobiography, nonsense, gibberish, ranting, monologue, the cry of a soul, my whims or my grief or my twaddle – but not a letter. Therefore, you need not reply.
Chachaji,
You have asked me not to reply. So this is not a reply. However, you have not written me a letter but an autobiography, nonsense, grief, testimony or gibberish. I want to do the same and you cannot deny me my right. Do not consider this a letter because it may not reach you at all. In fact, I am sitting by the window in the Varuna Express and have the laptop with me. Your letter has made me extremely sad and hollow. It will take some time to reach Lucknow, and I was bored watching the countryside rushing by, and I switched on my laptop and have started typing. I will go on jotting whatever comes to my mind. Perhaps it is not for you but for my own perusal. Had you known how to use a computer and had an email ID, I might have sent to you an email. If we meet again and if you wish to, I’d definitely prefer you to read it.
I am returning from Sultanpur, but I am not the same person I was before coming here. Chacha, you feel your own time, the time that moulded you and which existed before you, has vanished, but I am afraid I have parted from myself. I was full of expectations when I left Lucknow. You quit your job and sat idle at home. What a unique coincidence that your nephew too was sick of his job at the tourism directorate! He also missed office.
Naturally, when I received the Gosainganj offer, I was beside myself with joy. There was a ray of hope that it would fetch some kind of fortune, but the greater delight I experienced was that I would not only reunite Pandey and his grandfather’s family, but I would also return to the place from where I had been banished. So, from this perspective, you will realize, Chacha, that this nephew of yours who lives in the capital of his own state – merely one hundred and thirty-eight kilometres from his native town – he too is a deportee. The night you provided us shelter, I was uprooted. The moment Babuji drove us out of the house and slammed the door shut, I became homeless. Everything since then has merely been an extension of my exile. But as long as you have pleasant memories of your separated kin and town, no displacement is complete. It is the first time that I am migrating without roots. When you are displaced, the roots remain within you, but everything has been devastated within me now. The experiences I had from Gosainganj to Sultanpur, from the pradhan to Babuji, from home to outside, have destroyed much. Chacha, it is the sort of destruction after which my foundations will not support any edifice again. My inner world will remain in ruins forever.
You have found your path in your own way. You imagined an age and existed in it. In your own way, you have constructed a world belonging to the latter half of the twentieth century in the twenty-first century and live in it. I will not comment on its relevance, but I will confess I am at my wit’s end – I am a person who finds both the old and the new unbearable. When both the past and the present hound you, gnaw at you like cancer, what can a man do? You may come up with a cranky reply that the fellow should discard both the present and the past and travel to the future. Alas, if there were such a time machine! Even if we slip into the future in our imagination, how long can it last? Like a dream or a nap. For a second or two. No one can remain in the future any longer than this.
I am putting an end to this reflection on time at this point because …
Just then he was interrupted as his mobile screen blinked and the SMS tone buzzed. He picked it up, it was Shibbu. ‘Dadi is no more.’
One after another – Tendulkar, Nupoor, Kamana – everyone sent the same message. Dadi’s life was over. When he had arrived in Sultanpur, he had intuited that death had already pitched its tent in her. He had seen many people die, and he had felt that death puts up its dwelling inside the person who is going to die and then peeps through their eyes. It had also peeped from Dadi’s eyes.
24
SATYUG DREAM
During this visit, Ramajor did not stay at Hotel Taj. He was staying at perhaps someone’s house or a guest house. Anyway, what did it matter to Suryakant? He already had an appointment with Pandey, and he reached the destination half an hour before the rendezvous only to be bewildered by a very grand structure.
A splendid house towered before Suryakant. There were high posts inside on which security guards stood alert with machine guns. There was a huge entrance which was closed and there were armed guards atop the posts, both left and right. Suryakant was frightened. He had always been terrified of armed people. He trembled whenever he saw a sword or gun – who knew when the sword would slash or when the gun would fire, and whose head would then be rolling on the ground.
He was also astonished that such a building had been constructed in Lucknow, but he never got a whiff of it. When he had passed the same neighbourhood six months ago, there
had been no structure, but it was a gleaming presence now. Such things were routine nowadays: splendid buildings rose without warning, forcing passers-by to crane their heads. But if you examined it closely, there was another kind of alteration as well: what had existed at the spot yesterday existed no more. The scariest development was that people paid no attention to what had gone missing. A topography is often obliterated, but nobody even mentions its absence.
Questions blossomed in his mind: who owns this grand edifice? Which tycoon is Pandey’s host? How does he know Pandey? The newly constructed house made a lot of people curious and they had similar questions – who had constructed it, who owned it? But no definite information had emerged, only gossip, opinions and differences of opinions. Someone claimed it belonged to a reputed builder and according to another, the owner was a Haryana industrialist, a prominent name in the steel industry. There were also talks that the most corrupt IAS officer in the state was the owner.
A corollary to the story was that when the chief minister had inquired about its value at the house warming ceremony, lauding its architecture, the IAS officer replied it had cost only a crore of rupees instead of the real two billion. The chief minister had handed him a cheque for a 1.25 crores and acquired the property outright. There is a canard that the cheque bounced while a different one claims the officer did not even deposit the cheque in his account. The third angle was that it was constructed not by the most corrupt official, but by the chief minister’s brother. A couple of nosy investigators revealed that it was a gift from the most notorious gangster in the ransom industry to his pet film actress, who was fond of Lucknow kebabs. There were several such reports, each one ascribed a different claimant to the citadel.
Suryakant called Bahguguna and said, ‘I have reached and I’m waiting for you.’
‘I’ll take some time – hold the fort till then.’
‘I am rather apprehensive of going in alone.’
‘Why are you afraid? You are going after all, to your “papa”.’
‘This is morbid humour. I am afraid of Pandey’s current residence – it is built like a fort, complete with an army! Who owns it?’
‘Doesn’t matter. If you like it, you can ask Pandeyji to gift it to you. A son can claim this much from his father.’
‘I’ll tell him to hand the property over to you.’
‘Thanks, thanks a lot, my friend. I’ll rush to accept this unique present!’
Suryakant wandered around to kill time, and finally approached the entrance from the top of which, security guards stared at him indifferently, or maybe they did not, but someone saw him on the screen standing outside the gate from the invisible camera fitted there. Suryakant heard someone ask, ‘Who do you want to see?’
‘I am here to see Ramajor Pandeyji.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Suryakant,’ he said. ‘I’ve an appointment with Pandeyji.’
The large gate opened slowly. A man in uniform across the threshold bowed reverentially and said, ‘Please come, sir.’
The man in uniform leading him stopped, ‘Sir, a small formality.’ The formality meant that he had to pass through a security check.
There lay a long carpet beyond the security checkpoint, and there were rows of trees on both sides. Through the bushes, one could catch a glimpse of large lawns, lush with beautiful grass, vivid flowers and plants. He followed the uniformed man and they entered one of the rooms of the majestic building. The uniformed man pushed the door open gently and respectfully gestured him to enter.
It was a large waiting lounge from the high roof of which a chandelier hung. There were several large sofas. Right in the middle of the room was placed a granite statue of the Yakshini. There was jewellery on its neck, arms, wrists and waist. The man in uniform said, ‘Sir, please come inside.’
Suryakant got up. Advancing into the lounge, he cursed Bahuguna for his non-appearance. He also struggled to animate the warehouse of his mind that contained the images of Gosainganj, Jagdamba Prajapati, the Pandey dynasty, the pradhan, etc. In fact, as soon as the appointment was fixed, he had endeavoured to play out all the probable scenes and conversations with Pandey. Obviously, this entire script was bleeding and haemorrhaging from being ploughed into over and over again into Pandey’s descendants, his present family, his village and Jagdamba Prajapati. Jagdamba was a player without which the story of the hunt for the Indian family of Pandey’s father was not complete, and he was also the person because of whom the story could never be completed.
Suryakant was shocked when he entered the inner sanctum: he encountered not Ramajor Pandey, but Sampoornanand Brihaspati. He was repulsed as soon as he saw the man, as if a loathsome lump of flesh lay there. However, it was a fleeting sensation. His anger abated and then he was filled with a strange indifference towards the man. He was neither resentful nor cordial. He wanted neither to reprimand nor absolve him.
‘Come,’ Sampoornanand Brihaspati said warmly. ‘Sit down.’
He followed his instructions and asked tonelessly, ‘Sir, you, here?’
‘Aren’t you happy that I am here?’
‘No, sir, it’s not that. I did not expect you.’ It was a long sentence although he wanted to speak little.
‘I am also here to see Pandeyji. He had to leave all of a sudden for an urgent errand. He asked me to request you to wait.’
‘I’m waiting, sir.’
‘Fine,’ Brihaspatiji said. ‘He is fond of you.’ Brihaspatiji’s eyes remained on his face. ‘I too am fond of you – you’re just like my child.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Will you share some paan masala?’
‘No, sir, I’m not in the habit.’
‘I called your wife, Mrs Gauri.’
‘She told me.’
‘Then she must have told you what I had said.’
‘Yes, sir, I am thankful to you.’
‘Think of me as your friend, not an enemy.’ Sampoornanand Brihaspati added, ‘I ask only this of you: in the future, the reconstruction of high-quality civilization and culture will start, and you should prove to be one of its foundation stones. That’s why I put pressure on you, but you did not join us. However, don’t think I’m cross with you. Not at all! I just want to explain that man may consider himself the mightiest and greatest, but he cannot halt the march of time. At the most, he can presuppose or imagine that he is improving the times, but in fact he exploits time and history to improve his own conditions.’
Suryakant raised his head and looked into his eyes. ‘I had no interest in that project, so I didn’t support it.’
‘You are saying this because you have excellent sanskaras and humility, or else I very well know you were against it. Your opposition is not a crime, but your right. In the same manner, I have the right to protect my dreams, thoughts and beliefs and implement them.’
Suryakant listened silently.
‘Would you have a cup of tea?’
‘I don’t feel like it.’
‘Come with me then, I’ll show you something.’
Sampoornanand tore open another pouch of paan masala, put it in his mouth and escorted Suryakant out. Within a couple of minutes, they were in a large air-conditioned hall, which was about fifty-square-feet-by-ninety-square-feet, and was lit dimly. There was a single lamp burning on a table and a man in a chair was visible in the circle of the light. The man, when he saw Sampoornanand Brihaspati and Suryakant, got up swiftly and started flipping switches, and the hall was flooded with light. Suryakant’s eyes were dazzled: the entire hall was full of the exhibits of the new projects of the tourism department. There were scale models of palaces, gurukuls, armouries, bedrooms, spots for yajnas, etc. It appeared as if one was viewing the ground from a great height – its buildings, cattle, roads, cemeteries, huts, human beings – each a tiny replica.
‘This is the future dream of Satyug,’ Sampoornanand Brihaspati said. ‘This vision will become reality soon.’
He continued spe
aking, but Suryakant had stopped listening. He ruminated in disbelief: it had hardly been ten days since the discussion regarding the proposal of this project at the tourism directorate was held. How was its planned exhibit prepared on such a large scale in this short period? The grandeur, finesse and technical details that had gone into the models must have been accounted for by the intelligence and labour of several architects, artists, engineers, historians and anthropologists. Time was required to create the models and he could not understand how it was done so promptly.
He was dazed: had it all been constructed before now and its supposition, the proposal in the tourism directorate, the presentation in the meeting and everything else took place later? Were all these activities, happenings simply a front? It was a future discourse, the implementation of which had already begun. He shivered as if dust had fallen into his eyes – he felt dust was pouring in the entire hall. He was filled with unimaginable exhaustion. His palate was dry. He managed to squeak, ‘I’m suddenly not feeling well.’
‘Come and rest in the room,’ Sampoornanand said.
And then, he heard his footsteps echoing his own. He imagined that the employee in the hall was putting off all the lights quickly, and soon nothing remained but darkness. The feeling was momentary, and he felt fine again. The two entered the room, Pandey and Bahuguna were already there, sipping tea. Pandey got up and hugged Suryakant warmly.
Pandey and Bahuguna sat on one side, on the other side sat Suryakant and Sampoornanand Brihaspati.
‘Have some tea,’ Pandey said.
‘Thanks, but I don’t feel like it,’ Suryakant replied.
