Storywallah

by Neelesh Misra

  The girl looked like she wore a river, her hair was like thick, dark monsoon clouds. Her eyes were like a deep lake, her eyelashes like a gossamer curtain, her kajal like a swaying snake. Seeing her standing so close, and so clearly, Priyamvad suddenly couldn’t breathe.

  She blocked the doorway with both hands and gestured for him to go back inside. Some spell caused him to follow her back inside and sit down where he had been sitting.

  That was that evening three days ago. Three days that seemed like three lifetimes. He didn’t want to work. He didn’t have the courage to go back there. Society’s shackles blocked his way. He had been told about girls like these, and how they were not worthy of love.

  Priyamvad sat at the tea stall every day, waiting for Guddu. That day she had asked Priyamvad why he was leaving, and his reply had made her garish red lips widen into a smile.

  The tabla player was sprinkling powder on his tabla, the harmonium player indicated a new song. That girl’s ‘Mausi’ had come and sat down beside him. He knew about these Mausis, the owners of these premises and businesses.

  With a thoroughly professional smile, Mausi had said, ‘Son, there are no appreciators of real music and dance any more. These days everyone wants film songs. Who wants to listen to a traditional courtesan’s mujra any more? The people here seek something else, with their lustful needs and eyes.’

  Priyamvad appreciated the truth in Mausi’s words, there was no artifice. These people had killed art. It was just a business. Whatever the market demanded, the artist provided.

  So, that day, that girl, who had introduced herself as Kajal, then Juhi and then Karishma, had sung a kajri for Priyamvad. And when she had sung a Begum Akhtar piece, the pain and honesty in her voice had cleaved through Priyamvad’s heart.

  Ever since he had left Priyamvad had prayed that he would see her again. Her put-on face had so much honesty, there was such simplicity and beauty behind that garish, cheap make-up.

  A sound jerked him out of his reverie. Guddu stood in front of him.

  ‘Guddu! Where had you disappeared?’ Priyamvad asked excitedly.

  Guddu said nothing but led him purposefully to a dark spot away from the stall. He was limping heavily. ‘I had terrible pain in my feet these last two days,’ he said. He held his hand and led him to a dark shadow.

  ‘You!’ Priyamvad was shocked. ‘What should I call you? Juhi, Karishma or Kajal?’

  ‘No, sir, those are all my assumed names. I have come to thank you for that day.’

  ‘Thank me?’ Priyamvad was surprised.

  ‘You recognized our art. Only art. You are the first person ever to do that. Anyway, Mausi was remembering you. Do come again.’ That girl with many names tried to use Urdu to regain her courtesan’s image.

  It was business time so she was in a hurry. She said namaste and left. She had barely taken a few steps when she turned around and said, ‘And yes, my real name is Gudiya. Gudiya.’

  Priyamvad watched her go. He met her many times after that. And watched her from up close: light brown liquid eyes, quivering lips. Every time Priyamvad looked at her, Gudiya would blush with a sweet shyness. When their eyes met, hers would drop of their own volition.

  They were not meeting alone, Guddu was with them. As he sat always with her in his arms Priyamvad wished time would stop, the moon would stay where it was, the breeze would be just as it was then. He gently pushed back a strand of hair from her face.

  That day she wore no make-up, no powder, no kajal, no lipstick. She was just herself. But this bliss wasn’t to last long. Guddu called loudly, ‘Kajal, Mausi is calling you. We have an order to dance at a wedding.’

  Gudiya had given her cell phone to Guddu and Mausi had just called. After talking to her Guddu came up to Priyamvad. ‘Sir, if you don’t mind, I’d like to say something. It’s not good to fall in love with a courtesan. I took you to watch a dance, but you’re now falling in love. Mausi is getting angry.’

  And then he left.

  Gudiya had said bye and left, promising to come back soon. Priyamvad had asked, ‘Do you have to go? Why don’t you leave this work?’

  Gudiya was in a quandary, she didn’t know whether she should say anything or not. She would tell him, but not now. It wasn’t good for a relationship to hide the truth, and this was a relationship of the heart.

  After all, what was she? A dancing girl from an infamous area. No one considered her profession art; in fact, it was called all kinds of dirty words. Every evening she had to dance in front of an audience; it didn’t matter who it was made up of: rich, poor, educated, uneducated, young, old, dirty, clean, handsome, as long they had money in their pockets.

  No one knew her name, and no one had looked beyond her false names to see a child, a girl, a woman who could be a daughter, a sister, a mother or a wife.

  She knew Priyamvad loved her. She trusted his love. But a man like Priyamvad could never be her future. Nor was she his. He would be able to fight through life without her, but he wouldn’t be able to fight with the world and society for her.

  Priyamvad was unlike any man she had met.

  She had always lived by one principle: dance fully and sing deeply. Ever since she had fallen in love with Priyamvad, after work, she would often sit for hours singing songs of Begum Akhtar in her heart-rending voice.

  These Begum Akhtar ghazals would deepen the sadness of her nights. And it got worse the day Guddu lurched around the courtyard singing, ‘Bhurey Bhai is coming! Bhurey Bhai is coming!’

  Mausi had passed on the information about Gudiya and Priyamvad’s love affair to Bhurey Bhai, who was in fact no one’s brother. He had taken so many sisters to so many brothels and so denied them all relationships. This was the same Bhurey Bhai, the uncrowned king of the business. It was his law that any girl, under no circumstances, was permitted to fall in love.

  And if, heaven forbid, someone was to fall in love, they must never try to run away. They could succumb to their grief and bang their heads against the walls, but they were never to try to break their shackles.

  There were shackles on both sides. Priyamvad was shackled. Gudiya was shackled. When Bhurey Bhai arrived he wasted no time in putting a loaded pistol to her head. The feeling of the cold metal sent shivers up her spine.

  In his steely voice he had said, ‘Look, I’m not your enemy. You go, go and tell that engineer that if he is willing to keep you, then I have no problem. But don’t think I am a great friend of yours either, and that I will just let you go to him. I know he is a decent man, he will never be able to convince his family, let alone the society he lives in. Now go!’

  Everyone had a good laugh at his words. Mausi laughed too. Clenching her teeth in anger Gudiya went to look for Priyamvad.

  Priyamvad had been shocked when Gudiya had walked into his office openly. She had cursed Guddu the whole way there about having told Bhurey Bhai about her love. Guddu swore over and over that it hadn’t been him.

  Actually it had been Mausi’s work. If Gudiya had left what would happen to her business? In his hard hut outside the container that served as his office, Priyamvad was flustered, ‘What happened? You, here?’

  Gudiya was in a rage. ‘Why? Are you feeling bad that a dancing girl has come to your high-class office? Today is the day your love is tested, sir! Let’s see what the truth is!’

  Guddu had a better understanding of the world. He felt that she should not have come here like that. People like Priyamvad have a standing in society. Priyamvad sat them down and ordered tea. Slowly he understood what had happened. He was up against a challenge, Bhurey Bhai’s challenge, Mausi’s challenge, the challenge of a whole business, and at stake was Love.

  What should he do? Call his mother? Who had already sent him dozens of photographs of educated girls, potential wives whose fathers were engineers, judges, bank managers, all very established. He knew that most of them were buyers in the business, like people buy bulls, gauging the height at the shoulder, touching the horns, checking the shine
in the eyes.

  ‘Are you with her?’ Priyamvad asked Guddu.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Guddu replied.

  ‘Then come to the station at the time of the six o’clock train,’ Priyamvad said and called his mother. Guddu and Gudiya could hear the screams from the other side of the phone.

  Guddu stood up, said ‘okay’ decisively and they left.

  ‘Do you think it is a good idea to go to the station?’ he asked finally.

  ‘We’ll reach at exactly quarter to six. You’ll stay with me?’ she asked.

  ‘What do you think? He’ll come?’

  ‘This is the test, Guddu, for me as well. Let’s see what the truth is.’

  The afternoon turned into evening without anyone noticing. But after a quarter to six time began to drag. Every second seemed to ask, will he come?

  It was a quarter past six now.

  Guddu glanced at Gudiya, ‘He won’t come now, let’s go back.’ Gudiya understood. No one came after making promises like that. She was an astute player of the market, how had she fallen for this? Bhurey Bhai had been right.

  She still had a half-hearted hope. ‘Let’s have a cup of tea before we go.’

  They had been sitting at the tea shop for an hour and a half and had drunk five glasses of tea. Guddu had given up. Gudiya too had stood up to leave. She turned around to search the darkness one last time, with one last hope in her tear-filled eyes. Priyamvad was running towards them. ‘What can I say? I ran to the market straight from office. I got late looking for a ring, I just couldn’t find a proper one.’

  And then, still panting, at the tea shop, in front of everyone, Priyamvad went down on his knee and said, ‘The truth is that I am in love with you. Will you marry me?’

  OUR PEOPLE

  Kanchan Pant

  The sky had cleared after the rain. The night seemed dark and frightening. The neighbourhood slept uneasily under an oppressive silence. The area was littered with smouldering wood and shattered glass and stones, as if left in the wake of a storm. Aarfa had been hiding behind a wall for a while. When she was sure that no one except Gabbar who lay in front of the Community Centre could see her, she left her hiding place. Gabbar came up to her, whining and wagging his tail, expecting a roti from her today too. But she walked away without looking at him, to the last house at the end of a narrow lane. Her eyes had an indescribable emptiness as they looked out from behind the dupatta that veiled her face. A naked bulb shone sadly from a rough wooden pole. In that dim light, Aarfa found her way to the yellow house that until a week ago had been her home. There was a large wooden gate at the front, a twisted iron rod where a lock should have been.

  For a moment Aarfa stood confused; she remembered not stopping to lock the gate when she had run out of the house with Ammi and Bhabhi and Sahir. What was the iron rod doing there? She was sure her house had been occupied too. Where did things remain the same after riots? She took a deep breath and, hitching her long kurta up, jumped over the gate. Her heart trembled at the thought of having to sneak into her own house like a thief. What would happen if someone saw her? Shaziya bhabhi had been right—she should not have come. But now she was here. How could she go back without going inside? Her seven-month-old nephew’s face flashed across her mind; just a few minutes to retrieve his medicines and then she would sever herself from this house, this neighbourhood, even this city.

  She cleared the courtyard in one leap, and then drew up in front of the door. The jasmine tree near it cast a large shadow. For a moment it seemed as if that dark crowd was still gathered there. Fear flooded her veins. She was so scared these days. What a terrible punishment it was to have to be fearful in one’s own home. She wished she could say that to the crowd. She calmed herself and pushed the door. It didn’t open. Sometimes during the rains, when the wood swelled, it would get stuck. She pulled the left panel towards herself and pushed the right one with her shoulder, and like always it opened. The first voice she always heard when she opened that door was Ammi’s.

  ‘How many times have I told you not to push the door like that? Do you people have any sensitivity? And who has come in wearing outdoor slippers?’

  And if anyone made the mistake of answering, they had a whole month’s worth of complaints to answer for.

  ‘I had asked for that jar from Garima chachi . . . did you get it?’

  ‘And Rafiq, you better stop all this cricket-shicket; I’ve been asking you for a week now to get that tap fixed. You have time for everything except my work.’

  Aarfa and her older brother Rafiq had got used to listening to Ammi and then letting her words loose upon the breeze. And then three years ago Shaziya bhabhi had joined their gang. She was married to Rafiq bhai but she was more like Aarfa’s friend and Ammi’s daughter than his wife.

  ‘Don’t you worry about those two, Ammi, I’ll settle them both!’ Shaziya bhabhi would say lovingly, handing her a cup of tea, and the two of them would giggle. But today the house was silent. Those voices had been buried there forever.

  Aarfa still didn’t know how the fire started. Maybe a child’s cricket shot had landed in the small temple on the side of the ground. When and how that ball became a stone, and that stone left the temple and entered people’s homes, no one knew. That’s how riots always started: some people incited and others followed them into the fire. When she had heard about riots in other cities she was always reminded of those sheep in Turkey that followed one another off the cliff to their deaths.

  Something very strange had happened the day before. In the relief camp where she now stayed with her family, an NGO had come to distribute aid. Thousands of people stood in line for a few hundred relief packets. Aarfa had gone too, but she had stood on one side. Suddenly it seemed to her as if the people had turned into sheep—big, small, different colours, little lambs in the middle, their voices sounding like senseless bleating. She had held her head. She didn’t understand what she was feeling. If someone said she was sad, she felt sad; if someone said she was angry she did feel that she was angry. And if someone asked why she was scared she would think that maybe she wasn’t angry at all, just scared.

  Was she going mad? After coming to her house today she felt convinced that she was. She pulled herself together and felt her way around the house till she reached the living room. Just then she bumped into the sofa and drew back. That’s where Rafiq bhai’s body had lain. That day, when the crowd had entered their home, Rafiq bhai had hidden them behind the large chest and gone out saying, ‘Don’t worry, Ammi, Amit is with them, they won’t do anything.’ But that day Amit had refused to recognize his opening partner. That day she had learnt that a crowd is just a crowd, there are no people in it, no relationships, no faces, no hearts, no minds. That faceless, nameless crowd had killed her brother right there. Aarfa fell to the ground. How she wished the crowd had killed them all. She was going to cry when she heard a sound from the back door. Frightened, she hid behind the sofa. It was easy to think about dying, but who really wants to die? Those people who were now reduced to numbers in official files hadn’t wanted to die. Nor had Rafiq bhai. She bit her dupatta and crouched lower, because two feet were coming in her direction.

  Aarfa had been hiding behind the sofa for some ten minutes now. She could still only see the feet of the person who had entered the house. She tried to gauge what he was doing by the sounds he made. The broken glass window let a sliver of moonlight into the room. In its dim light, Aarfa looked around. When the riots had started they had all been sitting in this room, watching TV. Hum Aapke Hain Koun . . . ! was on; she and Rafiq bhai were fighting over the remote.

  ‘Just change the channel, Aaroo, you’ve seen this film a hundred times. Don’t be annoying,’ he had said.

  ‘Close your eyes na, if you don’t want to watch!’ Aarfa had retorted. Ammi had been sitting on the floor shelling peas and Shaziya bhabhi was drinking tea. Just then a stone had come crashing through the window and the glass had scattered around the room.

  Ammi had
been so angry. ‘I’m not going to let them go today. Why can’t these rascals go and play somewhere else? Such a big field they have out there.’ She went to the window to shout at the children she thought were out playing. But she froze at what she saw.

  The scraping of a chair broke Aarfa’s reverie. The room was exactly how they had left it. Dried peas were scattered everywhere, the cushion was on the floor and an unfinished cup of tea lay on the table. Ammi couldn’t bear a messy house. If she saw her house today she would have yelled at everyone. She realized how much she loved being yelled at by Ammi. She couldn’t see but it appeared as if the man was arranging things. She was straining to catch a glimpse when he suddenly bent down to pick up the peas and they found themselves face to face with each other.

  ‘Aaroo?’ he asked, shocked. The peas he had picked up fell to the floor again. Aarfa came out from behind the sofa. The person standing before her was Sharad, her neighbour, her childhood friend. Sometimes it seemed as if they were more than friends but the label still read friends. But what was Sharad doing here? At this time of night?

  When circumstances change, they sometimes change relationships as well. Until today, Sharad had been Aarfa’s friend, someone she took her problems to without thinking twice. But today, when she needed a friend more than ever, she couldn’t take a step towards him. He suddenly looked like Amit, and then like the crowd that had killed her brother. His name, Sharad Sharma, stood like a wall before her. Sharad came up to her and, clasping her cold hands, said, ‘Thank God you’re okay. How is Chachi? And Bhabhi and Sahir? We called your phuphi in Kanpur but she said you hadn’t gone there. We were so worried.’

  Aarfa should have cried when she heard those words. There were very few people left now to worry about her. But she didn’t cry. Her heart felt heavier. She slowly drew her hands out of Sharad’s and asked, ‘So now this house has become yours?’

  ‘When wasn’t it my house?’ he replied.