Mrs Ali’s Road to Happiness

by Farahad Zama

  The villager sighed. “Yes, I suppose I deserved that question. You must understand, sir, that all the Naidus of our village are conscious of how badly we have acted by driving out a boy of our caste when his grandfather died. We fully deserve any opprobrium that you may cast on us – no one more so than myself. Vasu’s grandfather was my cousin and my greatest friend. We grew up together, living side by side all our lives, and when he finally died I refused to look after his grandson. That makes me a traitor and I know it. So I am really grateful that he has found a good home and I don’t want anything to jeopardise that. The boy has a good life, and I tell myself that my own karma is not as bad as it could have been, because of that fact.”

  “But he is with a Muslim family – ”

  “Hindu, Muslim – what’s the difference, sir? The boy is being well looked after and that’s the important thing. My cousin always wanted his grandson to have a good education, which he is getting. The boy even knows how to read and write English. He is happy. Everything else is a dream within a dewdrop, isn’t it?”

  Mr Narayana, who obviously didn’t agree with these views, had looked sharply back at the villager. Hinduism was born in India and India was born of Hinduism: the two were inseparable. Both words were derived from the same root – the river Sindhu. Islam was an interloper, the religion of invaders and conquerors. Sixty years ago, Muslims had split the motherland in two with their demand for a separate nation of Pakistan – literally, the land of the pure, as if Hindus were somehow unclean. Well, if that’s how they felt, they should all have left India. But even though he felt that the old man was wrong, Mr Narayana was still proud that even an illiterate Indian had a grasp of philosophy and could argue about such metaphysical matters.

  “Why did you and the other Naidus send the boy away? He could have helped any of you in your homes and fields.”

  “I wanted to keep him with us, very much. But my wife and my sons were against me. They did not want me to take him in.” Mr Naidu closed his eyes for a moment and then opened them. “Who am I trying to fool? This is a temple and here at least men should not lie. It’s true that my wife and sons told me not to take in my cousin’s grandson but, really, I was scared too.”

  “Gita told me that the boy was unlucky. But surely that’s an exaggeration. You should have asked the priest in your village to say some prayers and break the gandam – the obstacle – and then taken him in.”

  Mr Naidu laughed shortly. “Of course I thought of that. I asked the Brahmin who came to officiate at the funeral rites of my cousin, but…” Mr Naidu shrugged. “He said that some misfortunes are external – brought on by doing something; a woman of childbearing age cutting down a green tree and becoming barren, for example, or a young man disturbing a snake on a holy day and failing to find a job. Such matters can be resolved by prayers and offerings to the gods.”

  Mr Narayana nodded.

  Mr Naidu went on, “The Brahmin said that Vasu’s misfortune was intrinsic to him. Only such a powerful characteristic could kill not one, not two, but three of his guardians before the boy had even turned nine years old. That’s why I was very happy when Rehman took the boy away.”

  “Maybe the ill luck has waned. The Muslim woman who looks after him seems all right.”

  “I initially thought that maybe Muslims were immune to the boy’s ill luck. After all, they don’t believe in our gods, so why should they be affected? But that was just a faint hope and now I am sure that all people, regardless of religion, are the same. You see, Vasu’s adopted mother is a widow. Do you think she could have paid the price even before she became his guardian?”

  “No, no. That’s silly,” said the priest.

  Mr Naidu leaned forward. “Then what do you think of this? I heard that a few months ago they had almost settled her marriage. It was all decided and they were just about to fix the wedding date. Her would-be husband came to our village with Rehman and I met him. I couldn’t help wondering why a rich, handsome man like him would marry a widow rather than a virgin, but Muslims are funny that way. I’m told that their Prophet married only widows so some of them consider it a duty to do the same. Anyway, soon after the man left the village, his father died suddenly and the marriage was called off.”

  Mr Narayana was startled. “Is that true?”

  “Oh yes, sir. So do you still think the boy’s bad luck has broken? Trust me, sir. You have disturbed something very powerful by taking the boy under your care. I would be careful if I were you.”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Mr Narayana, but there was a tremor in his voice. People came to him to cast horoscopes and determine auspicious times, for he was the most knowledgeable local authority on the ancient Sanskrit shastras. In all his experience, he had never encountered such malevolence as this boy seemed to represent. His voice grew stronger as he said, “Anyway, the boy is not under my care. He is under the care of the temple.”

  Gita’s voice broke in on his reverie. “As I said, sir, I swore an oath in the temple to keep Vasu here and I can’t break that.”

  The priest smiled. “You are a good woman,” he said. “Let it not be said that a good Hindu woman’s word spoken in the hearing of the gods was worthless. I just want to see the boy who’s caused us so much trouble. I am not going to take him away.”

  Srinu and Gita exchanged glances and Srinu nodded. Gita went to fetch Vasu. A brief exchange of words was heard, in which the boy seemed to questioning why he had to leave in the middle of the cartoon.

  Vasu was soon at the door and Gita pushed him further into the living room. Mr Narayana was surprised to see an ordinary-looking boy. After all the talk about the ill fortune that he brought, he had been expecting to see some sort of raakshas, or demon. The boy was dark and scrawny, more like a servant despite his good clothes. Actually, he resembled the son of peasants, which, of course, he was.

  “Can I go now?” Vasu said to Gita, twisting back to look at her.

  She nodded and he rushed back to the TV.

  After a quick tea and snacks, the men took their leave, Mr Narayana wondering how to turn Vasu into a good-luck charm for the candidates that he supported in the forthcoming election – candidates who had proven by their word and deed that they would not be pressurised into appeasing minority communities for short-term electoral gains. He had first taken up Vasu’s case because his blood had boiled with indignation on hearing about the demand from the mosque for Vasu’s conversion, but now Mr Narayana’s busy mind was focused on how to gain all the advantage he could from the situation.

  Fifteen

  The Tirupati temple, on the seventh peak of the Tirumala mountains, is the most popular and richly endowed Hindu temple in India. When Lord Vishnu decided to descend to earth in the avatar of the boar, his mount, the celestial eagle Garuda, brought down the heavenly mountain, Vaikuntha, for His residence. On that mountain, the idol of Venkateshwara (another name for Lord Vishnu) spontaneously manifested itself and, over the centuries, a magnificent temple complex has been built around it. The temple day there starts at three in the morning when the priests begin chanting the Venkateshwara Suprabhatam to wake up the Lord from His yogic sleep, as they have done every single day since it was composed seven hundred years ago by Sri Prativadi Bhayankaram Annan Swami.

  Five hundred miles to the north of the temple, in the town of Vizag, which lay at sea-level, the day started a couple of hours later. At five in the morning, an electronic switch tripped and M.S. Subbalakshmi’s definitive rendition of the same Suprabhatam filled the room, escaping through the open windows. Mr Narayana opened his eyes and lay for a moment, listening to the clearly enunciated words.

  Kausalyasuprajarama! O Rama! Kausalya’s auspicious son!

  Purva sandhya pravartate, Twilight is approaching in the east,

  Uttistha! narasardula! O best of men! Wake up!

  Kartavyam dalvam ahnlkam The divine rituals have to be performed

  He got out of bed and started getting ready for the day while the
devotional song continued to play in the background. He drank two glasses of warm water mixed with a teaspoon of honey and a squeeze of lemon, as prescribed by Ayurveda, the ancient Indian science of life, for good bowel movement and a healthy body. While he brushed his teeth with a bitter neem-infused toothpaste, he thought about what he had to do. Today was Monday, which meant that the municipal and state elections were now less than a month away. After the HUT morning training, he had a meeting with the candidates he was supporting.

  When he turned, his wife, a thin, shrinking woman who looked perpetually ill at ease, was hovering at the door of the bathroom. “Somebody’s come for you,” she said.

  “Why didn’t you tell me straight away, instead of just standing there like a congealed lump of dhal?” He brusquely snatched the towel she offered, wiped his face with it and dropped it on the floor at her feet.

  Outside the house stood the two men who had accompanied him to Srinu and Gita’s house the previous evening. He flung open the doors and said, “Come in! Don’t stand out there like strangers.” Not for the first time, he cursed the bad karma he must have accumulated in a previous life to be lumbered with such a nincompoop of a wife in this one. “Weren’t we going to meet at the training ground? Why are you here so early?”

  “Sir, look.” One of the men held out the Telugu newspaper in his hand.

  CIA WARNS OF PAK PLOT TO DISRUPT ELECTIONS, declared the headline in big letters. A terrorist group based in Pakistan was believed to have smuggled some operatives into India that were thought to be either in Mumbai or Bangalore. There was much speculation in the article, but not many hard facts.

  “What’s new about this? I suppose it can come in useful during campaigning, but I doubt it. People in smaller towns and villages are just not excited about terrorism. They see it as something remote that happens in faraway places like Mumbai or Delhi.”

  “No, sir. Not that article; look down here.”

  The man pointed to the bottom of the page. The priest saw an advertisement for underwear by a company called Zapata, with a picture of the torso of a male model wearing briefs. “Wear Zapata or wear nothing,” said the slogan. The priest frowned. Surely, pictures and slogans like that were inappropriate on the front page of a family newspaper. At least, he thought, the ad was for underwear for men and not for women.

  “What – ” he began.

  The man’s finger moved. “This news, sir.”

  “Municipal corporation announces road-widening project.”

  Mr Narayana’s eyes widened as he read. The main road going past the temple to the highway would be widened from eighty feet to one hundred and twenty feet, all the way from the highway to the culvert by the Muslim graveyard that spanned the storm drain. The corporation was even talking about laying a footpath on either side for pedestrians – which would be a first.

  “More appeasement of minorities,” he said. “Why stop there? Why not take some of the graveyard land too and widen it past the culvert? Otherwise it will just become an even worse choke point for traffic than it is today.”

  “Sir, don’t you see? The temple will lose half its courtyard. The Hanuman idol will have to be moved back. People won’t fit in the yard during auspicious days. It’s a disaster for the temple.”

  “True.” The priest’s mind felt sluggish without his early-morning tea. And his stomach felt heavy – he needed to go to the toilet after drinking that water with the honey and lemon.

  “It’s the boy, sir. Yesterday, we made the temple his guardian and this morning the news comes out. The boy’s uncle and all those people were right, sir. He is a walking bad-luck magnet.”

  The priest’s stomach churned as he stared at his men, and a chill spread down his spine.

  ♦

  When Mr Narayana reached the temple, Gita and Mr Naidu were waiting for him. He unlocked his office and beckoned them in, as he did so looking around the yard with pride. He had resisted the temptation, common in India, to use up every single square inch of land for the building itself.

  A bevy of young girls came into the yard – college students in bright salwar kameez, their gauzy dupattas trailing over their shoulders, fluttering in the breeze like banners. They continued chattering as they took off their footwear and walked into the temple. The yard had been swept clean and decorated with patterned muggu. One corner, in the shade of a mango tree in bloom, held the idol of Hanuman in a small alcove. The fragrance of jasmine and frangipani mingled with perfume from incense sticks. Mr Narayana mentally tried to calculate how much of the land would disappear and what the temple would look like once it had been so diminished. It had taken years of planning and hard graft to bring the temple up to this standard and it was a shock to even imagine that it could just disappear overnight.

  His office would be the best place to put the Hanuman idol, he thought. The office was just a tiny shack with four cement walls and a multi-coloured, corrugated-fibreglass roof. It got too hot in the summer, but he could meet people there away from his house and he liked it. It would be a wrench to lose it.

  “Have you heard the news, sir?” asked Gita.

  “Yes,” said Mr Narayana.

  “I told you the boy was born under a malevolent star. Sani, the ill-luck planet Saturn, must have been ascending strongly at his birth. Actually, when I think about it, there was a lunar eclipse about eight months before he was born – he was premature, you know. So maybe he was conceived during the eclipse.”

  “Such boys should not be allowed to go around causing mayhem,” said Mr Narayana angrily.

  “I don’t want to keep him under my roof any longer, sir,” said Gita. “I am scared. If even the temple can’t protect itself, what hope is there for us mere mortals?”

  Mr Naidu said, “Sir, our village Brahmin told me that if certain purification ceremonies had been carried out as soon as the boy was born, these troubles could have been avoided. But his parents were educated people living in the town and they didn’t even consider getting a horoscope made for him at that time, so the gandam – the ill luck – remained hidden and now it is too late.”

  Mr Narayana nodded. In his mind, he could envision the exact prayers in his mind. It would involve a lot of expense and the feeding of many Brahmins, but Mr Naidu was right: the prayers should have been carried out a long time ago.

  Mr Naidu leaned forward. “Sir, leave Vasu with the Muslim family. If there are any difficulties, let them face them. Why do you want to bring calamity on a Hindu family?”

  “But the election – ”

  “Election?” Mr Naidu and Gita echoed each other, sounding puzzled.

  Mr Narayana shook his head. What was wrong with him? He was behaving like a village idiot – the boy was fogging even his own, always-clear mind. He considered what Mr Naidu had said. It made sense. He would have to come up with some other issue to help his candidates in the election. This boy was a 440-volt electricity wire that looked innocent as it lay on the ground, but killed anybody who touched it.

  He thought for a moment and stroked his beard. “I thought the boy was an orphan. I didn’t know that he had family members like you who had willingly given him up for adoption. In those circumstances, what can I, as an outsider, say? Let the boy go back to that woman.”

  Gita and Mr Naidu looked at each other.

  Mr Narayana continued, “But I want the boy to visit the temple regularly and learn about our religion. And he can never forsake Hinduism and convert to another religion.”

  Gita nodded. “I will talk to Pari about it, sir, and convince her. That should not be a problem.”

  “See that you do. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to organise a rally.”

  ♦

  Less than ten minutes later, Gita and Mr Naidu arrived at Pari’s flat with Vasu.

  “Do I have to go away again?” asked Vasu.

  Pari hugged him. “No,” she said. “From now on, we’ll be together whatever happens.”

  “Good!” said Vasu, smili
ng widely.

  “And that means from tomorrow, you are back in school.”

  “I want to go to school. I am missing lessons and my friends.”

  Gita cracked her knuckles on her temples to draw bad luck away from Vasu and said, “It’s good to see a boy who wants to go to school.”

  “Of course,” said Vasu. “If it wasn’t for school, how would I get holidays?” He skipped off to his room. “My toys…”

  Pari leaned towards Gita and Mr Naidu and whispered, “How did it go at the temple?”

  “Exactly as planned,” said Gita. “I thought I was laying it on rather thick, but he fell for it hook, line and sinker. In the end, he couldn’t wait to get rid of Vasu.”

  “Thank you, thank you,” said Pari. “I know you went against your beliefs by lying in a temple, but I’ll pray that the good karma you have collected by uniting a mother with her son outweighs it and leaves you both in credit.”

  Gita shrugged and smiled. “Anything for friends…”

  Mr Naidu remained unsmiling. “I followed Rehman’s advice,” he said. “I didn’t tell any lies.”

  ♦

  Monday was Aruna’s day off, but on Tuesday she came in to work before nine. Mrs Ali answered the door with a drawn face. Aruna said, “I saw the news about the road, madam. I’m really sorry.”

  Mrs Ali took a deep breath and looked ready to cry. “Life is not a smooth path. These things are sent to try us. What can we do?”

  Mrs Ali went back inside and Aruna switched on the computer. Mr Ali came out soon after. “I heard, sir…”

  “There is no point talking about what cannot be changed. Let’s carry on with our work as normal.”

  But Aruna couldn’t stop thinking about the impending demolition. From what she’d read in the paper, about twenty-five or thirty feet of the Alis’ land would be lost. She tried to estimate what that would mean to the house. The yard with the guava tree and curry-leaf plants – how wide was that? Fifteen feet? Probably. She had no clue, really. The well would definitely be gone. She remembered a well closure that she had witnessed as a small girl. Special prayers and offerings had been made to propitiate the goddess of the well and to ask her forgiveness for entombing her. Would Muslims like the Alis do that? A well is not just a hole in the ground – it supplies life-giving water and was surely holy, regardless of the owner’s religion.