Diwali in Muzaffarnagar

by Tanuj Solanki

  Twenty minutes after he takes his seat, the bus is still waiting to fill up half a dozen or so seats. That is when he notices Katy stepping in and taking a seat three rows ahead of him. Of course, where else could she be heading to but Ahmedabad? He wonders if she has seen him too. If she did, would she acknowledge him? Say hi? Perhaps she is angry with him.

  The journey starts soon thereafter. He finds that his reclinable seat doesn’t really recline, which is terrible because the journey to Ahmedabad is long – twelve hours.

  It is possible that Katy did not recognize him because of his swollen eye, he reasons. In another two–three hours, the bus will stop for the driver to take a chai break. The passengers will step down to stretch their legs. He will walk up to her then. But what will he say to her? Will she think that he got himself punched in the town? He decides that he will tell her that Winston punched him because of her. That it’s all her fault. Perhaps she will sympathize with him; perhaps, at the end of this journey, in Ahmedabad, they will decide to travel together. He will take her eastwards, into the heart of the subcontinent, away from the ocean. That will be fantastic. There will be a whole country to traverse before they hit the sea again.

  The hours move ahead, and B’s head hurts more and more. The pain doesn’t let him sleep. He looks at Katy, who is listening to music with her eyes closed. Has she gone to sleep? There is a man, sitting a couple of rows ahead of her, who is staring at her just as B is. The man is staring not at her face, but slightly below it. Is she wearing a revealing top? Suddenly B realizes that he is the same man he had seen at Sunset Point the other day. His wife is sitting to his left, her head placed on his shoulder. B feels a spike of anger towards the man, of the kind he has never felt before. He wants to punch him. He wants this guy to get a swollen eye. On an impulse, he rises from his seat and moves forward in the aisle. Just when he is next to Katy, the bus takes a sharp turn to the left.

  Diwali in Muzaffarnagar

  It was the day of Diwali, around three in the afternoon. I was in the toilet, the common toilet between my parents’ bedroom – only in name, because they haven’t slept together for fifteen years – and the room that houses my ailing grandfather. I was masturbating thinking of Marie-Anne, and I was close. I was looking at her Facebook pics, the ones I had taken in a hotel room in Nusa Dua, Bali, when the call came. ‘Little Bro calling …’ it showed on the screen. I cut it and went back to my business. But then he called again and I had to swipe right.

  ‘Bhaiyya …’ my brother Kanu said. He was sobbing.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I had an accident. A little one.’

  On the day of Diwali, I thought. ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘No, but …’

  There was a pause in which I pulled up my pants and flushed. The sound of the water receded slowly. A different voice spoke on the phone then. ‘Bhaiyya, we hit a motorbike,’ it said. This was Kanu’s best friend, a thin, sickly boy named Arun.

  ‘How badly?’ I asked, washing my hands and looking into the mirror above the washbasin. I saw my upturned shoulder meet my tilted neck, the phone lodged in between. There was no alarm on my face.

  ‘He is asking for money,’ Arun said.

  ‘Okay. So …’ So pay it, was my immediate thought. ‘How much is he asking for?’

  ‘And he beat us, Bhaiyya,’ Arun said.

  ‘Hmm … I am coming,’ I said. Nothing came from the other end for a few seconds, so I cut the call.

  I got out of the toilet on my parents’ bedroom side. Then it hit me that I didn’t know where my brother and his friend were exactly. So I called back on Kanu’s number.

  ‘Where are you?’ I asked.

  ‘We are at the Circular Road chauraha. Near Soojdo Choongi.’ It was Kanu on the phone now. Sobbing lesser than before. But wasn’t he was supposed to get sweets and crackers from Shiv Chowk? Soojdo Choongi, where he was, was a Muslim village just outside town, in the direction opposite to Shiv Chowk.

  ‘Sorry, Bhaiyya,’ he said, anticipating my thoughts. ‘Don’t tell Mummy–Papa.’

  I cut the call. I passed through the verandah outside the bedroom and entered the living room on the right, where my parents were sipping tea and watching Baba Ramdev’s contortions on television. They never try any of that stuff themselves.

  ‘Kanu is in trouble,’ I announced straightaway.

  The idea of going to my brother’s rescue alone did cross my mind. But I was not going to be the one to fight on the road. And what if the motorbike guy turned out to be a Muslim? This was Muzaffarnagar. Riot-prone-piece-of-shit town.

  ‘What happened?’ Father asked.

  ‘I think he crashed with someone. Not a big deal. But the man is asking for money now.’

  ‘Hain?’ my mother exclaimed, rising from the plastic chair she was sitting on. The chair fell to the floor. ‘Is he all right? Where is he?’

  ‘He is okay,’ I said. ‘He is at the Circular Road chauraha. Near Soojdo Choongi.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ Father said immediately.

  We took the other scooter, me riding pillion, my hands holding on to the spare tyre behind my back. I can only drive scooters which don’t have gears, like the Honda Activa I gifted my brother last Diwali, the one that he crashed. It was a ten-minute ride from our house to the chauraha, during which my father and I didn’t exchange a single word. But this was normal. Papa doesn’t talk much. Except when he is drunk, which was happening on a daily basis that week. He would hide his liquor in the tiny storeroom beside the main bedroom, and after nine he would go there with a large glass. A couple of swigs, and he would emerge from the closet having shed the disappointment that his sober self felt with us. In his inebriation, he abused the Muslim qaum, recalling how during the recent riots he had had to stay awake with a loaded rifle in his hands. It was unnecessary, I could have told him; the rioting never really reached the town proper. But, well, panic and prejudice make one do things.

  At the scene of the accident, we saw Kanu and Arun standing timidly, their heads bowed. The scooter and the motorbike, perpendicular to each other, leaned on their stands. A woman dressed in an elaborately embroidered red sari stood next to the motorbike. She had her pallu over her head, and had tucked a small part of it into her mouth. No way was she the assaulter. But the pallu told me that they were Hindus, which was a good thing.

  We inspected the damage. Mudguard to mudguard, it seemed. A little dent and a little bend on either vehicle.

  ‘Where is he?’ Father asked the lady. She stayed silent. ‘Where is your husband?’ he asked again. Again no answer from the woman.

  I went close to my brother and saw fear in his eyes. I put a hand on his shoulder. He tried to shrug it off. Arun, meanwhile, smiled at me wistfully while pressing his head with his palm. I nodded to him.

  We waited at least five minutes for the assaulter to arrive. He had apparently gone to say hello to a friendly policeman somewhere nearby. There ensued a small conversation with him, in which he explained how the crash was the boys’ fault. Kanu and Arun didn’t seem keen to refute anything.

  The man asked for a thousand rupees to repair the damage to his motorbike. For a second I felt like reminding him about his mandatory two-wheeler insurance policy, which could easily cover such damages. But something told me it wouldn’t work here in Muzaffarnagar. It barely works in Mumbai, where I work.

  ‘But it doesn’t look like it will need a thousand rupees,’ Father argued.

  ‘Bhaisaab, it is Diwali time,’ the man said. ‘My festival has been ruined.’

  Father took out his wallet and checked – only a couple of hundred-rupee notes in there. He looked at me. I didn’t have enough to make it a thousand either. It was clear that someone would have to go to a nearby ATM, for which I, badly needing relief from the situation, volunteered. I took Kanu’s Activa, which gave no hint of having been involved in an accident.

  During my five-minute round-trip, my feeling was one of helplessness. But I had no
conception of how the situation could pan out differently. I was angry too – I didn’t know why – at Kanu and our father.

  When I returned, the man was not at the scene again. I tried giving the money to the woman but she refused to touch it. She was biting a different part of her pallu now. My father was looking away, a grimace on his face. We had to wait for a few more minutes.

  The man came back and took the money from me without any expression. Then he turned, kick-started his bike, waited for the seconds it took his wife to mount it, and sped off.

  All of a sudden, Father regained control of the situation. ‘You and Kanu go home. I will drop Arun to his house and come.’

  On our way back, I asked Kanu what he was doing with Arun on that side of town. He chose not to answer, and I chose to repeat the question in a harsher voice. I was still angry.

  ‘I would have bought the sweets and crackers later,’ Kanu said gruffly.

  ‘Yes, but what were you doing with him?’ I asked. I heard something in the scooter rattle unpleasantly. ‘Was he the one driving?’

  ‘Maybe yes. Maybe not. So?’ Kanu said.

  ‘So? You let others drive the scooter I bought for you? You want me to tell Mummy–Papa?’

  ‘You anyway tell them everything.’

  I thought about this. Not true, actually. After the break-up with Marie-Anne, I hadn’t told my parents that I still harboured hopes of returning to her, or her returning to me. They were content thinking that I had realised my mistake after four stupid years with the French girl, and would now settle for a traditional Indian girl. Presently, though, regarding my brother, I thought I would not divulge any further information to our parents. But I couldn’t resist prodding him about Arun.

  ‘So why did you let him tag along?’

  Kanu didn’t answer. We were not far from our house now. A slight breeze had picked up, and the wind in my hair made me forget the question. This was late October, and the afternoon air was cool and pleasant. Mumbai can never match Muzaffarnagar in this.

  ‘I like him,’ my brother said then. ‘He was with me because we like each other.’

  My mind circled for some time around the word ‘like’.

  In the house, we saw something we weren’t used to – grandfather was sitting in the living room, watching a news channel on television. The volume was close to maximum.

  Seeing us, mother started her monologue. ‘He has created such a mess. Passed urine on his bed. I gave him new pyjamas and helped him get here. I am not going to clean the bed. Let your father do it. It’s his father after all. For ten years now I have been taking care of this old man and none of your uncles has given us a penny. Your uncles have all made their mahals. And all your father has done is bound this old man to my neck.’

  There was no risk of grandfather hearing any of this. The man was ninety-four, and had been edging ever closer to deafness since grandmother died, which happened the same year I was born, almost twenty-eight years ago now. I was sure he was not getting much from the news show either. But he could talk, argue, manipulate. He was in that class of oldies who have screwed-up bodily functions but irritatingly high mental agility. We were all tired of him. Even my father, I suspected.

  ‘Congress is screwing this country,’ he said then, loudly, as only a deaf man can.

  It made Kanu laugh, which brought Mummy’s attention to him.

  ‘And what were you doing getting yourself into an accident?’

  He immediately looked down to the floor. Wrong move, I wanted to tell him. He should have answered back, been aggressive. Now there would be a barrage of questions.

  ‘Why do you ride so fast? You could have died, don’t you know? There are so many rash drivers on the roads. You need to take care not only of your mistakes but of others’ mistakes as well. Show me, are you hurt anywhere? Is the other man hurt? And how much did your father have to pay?’

  ‘I paid a thousand rupees,’ I said.

  ‘Thousand rupees!’ Mummy glared at Kanu, who shrugged ever so slightly. ‘When will you learn to respect money?’ she shouted.

  This was the worst thing one could say to my brother in those days. That summer, he had fared badly in the national-level competitions that determine entry to engineering schools, missing the cut-off for well-reputed – and subsidised – government-run institutions by some margin. This had led to him being enrolled in a private college not far from home, which cost my father a bomb, and also barred Kanu from the kind of freedom I had in my college time. He had to take a bus to college in the morning and had to return by another in the afternoon. I had a feeling that he attributed my parents’ vigilance – their not letting him stay in the college hostel, for instance – to my having had a firang girlfriend, whom I had met when I was in a hostel in Bangalore, where she was an exchange student. Kanu quietly envied me as the suave brother who had extricated himself from the shithole that is Muzaffarnagar. But it was something that Kanu could never say out loud, for when our father would retire from his miserable government job later that year, Kanu’s tuition fee could only be borne by me. Did I like this equation? No. Except perhaps for the fact that it allowed me an upper hand in domestic quarrels, which I had to face no more than twice a year, during the annual Holi and Diwali holidays when I returned to Muzaffarnagar.

  Kanu, as expected, did respond petulantly to my mother. He kicked the vacant plastic chair next to the one in which grandfather was sitting. ‘Money money money!’ he shouted. ‘Everyone in this house talks of money!’

  Grandfather saw what happened, and I can bet that I saw a smile on his face. Maybe he even heard something. It was loud enough.

  Mother hit her forehead with her palm.

  Kanu blustered out of the room. ‘You had no plans for me!’ he shouted from the verandah. ‘You didn’t even try to get me into a better college. You only had plans for him, and he did everything by himself. You don’t love me because you think I failed.’ He suddenly squatted down and started crying in despair, or maybe pretend despair, with his head in his hands and all. ‘I heard it the other day when Papa said that you two had me too late. You can’t deal with this, right? You can’t deal with my college and his retirement at the same time.’

  ‘Even your grandfather can hear everything,’ Mother said. ‘Don’t shout.’

  ‘I am not shouting!’ Kanu shouted.

  Mother went to the verandah to provide consolation, the way mothers have to. But such consolation requires hugging, which requires touching the other person’s shoulders. My brother shrugged her off the first few times.

  He did relent finally. Though the rage didn’t die down, and even as Mother had him in her arms, he kept howling.

  ‘And this old man doesn’t die. Hangs on and hangs on and hangs on. I want this man to die.’

  Grandfather showed no signs of having heard that. I agreed with Kanu. So much of our parents’ energy had been sapped by the old man, whose desire for even his kind of depleted life was immense. His ears hardly worked, he had trouble walking, and father definitely had to help him in the toilet. But he still retained his joie de vivre. Every Sunday, he would demand for food to be ordered from outside, and father would get him his favourite dishes. Neither I nor Kanu remembered ever being pampered this way by our father.

  I guess it was this identification with my brother’s feelings that made me go closer to them. I had to say something, but, unclear of my own feelings, I ended up talking of money. ‘You don’t have to worry about money, Kanu. That’s between me and Papa. You just have to study hard.’

  This was earnest advice. To study, to learn something about the world that could be used to earn some money – that was the only way to escape the pettiness of Muzaffarnagar. I got out by studying hard enough to get into an engineering school in Jaipur. Then I went further away by getting into a management school in Bangalore. Then I moved to Mumbai – for employment and to live with Marie-Anne in a city that was beyond my parents’ reach.

  But since his co
llege hadn’t given him the first exit from Muzaffarnagar, detailing how my own exit had been achieved could only alienate me further from my brother. It didn’t help that he was only seventeen, with hormones gushing through him like drugs, a body of rage and urges.

  ‘Griha yuddh,’ Grandfather shouted from the living room. The literal meaning in Hindi is ‘domestic war’, but the term is used to refer to civil wars. There was something about Iraq on the television.

  Mother and Kanu stood up. ‘I am so useless,’ Kanu said softly then. ‘I cause so much loss.’ Contrition following rage – this was a common thing with him.

  Mother answered predictably. ‘No. You’re not useless. You’re the star of my eye.’

  Except the cacophony from the television, things calmed down almost instantaneously. Kanu washed his face in the washbasin in the verandah. Mother and I moved to the main bedroom, where I flopped down on the bed. She sat with her back against the headboard. Kanu joined us a couple of minutes later and lay down next to me, such that our bodies were parallel, with both of us gazing at the still ceiling fan.

  I thought of the evenings with friends where Marie-Anne would accompany me, looking the best among the women. Our male friends would envy me. I would hold her by the waist and we would dance to slow tunes. I would smell Summer by Kenzo on her. The fragrance always made me delirious. Almost six months now, I counted.

  Mother interrupted my thoughts. ‘What is my life worth?’ she said. ‘What is my life worth if the two of you act like this? Talk like this? If you two are unhappy? I have done nothing else in my life except take care of you. Of all you men.’

  I didn’t turn to look in her direction. What she said was true, and a few years back it might even have pained me, but now I felt like asking her, ‘Why didn’t you do things differently, Mummy? You should have done something for yourself. Maybe we would have been better off.’

  Kanu, meanwhile, had moved closer to her. I kept staring at the ceiling fan, but from the corner of my eye I could see them hugging. Roles reversed!