Diwali in Muzaffarnagar

by Tanuj Solanki

  ‘Tarun,’ Mother told me, ‘you should be closer to your brother.’

  ‘Do we have crackers for the night?’ I asked Kanu.

  ‘No,’ Mummy answered for him. ‘Where has your father gone?’

  ‘He went to drop Arun home,’ Kanu answered.

  ‘I hope he goes to the market,’ I added.

  Just then, my cell phone started vibrating in my pocket. I took it out and checked the screen. ‘Love calling …’ it said. It was a call I had been desperate for, for months. But lying on the bed now, with my mother and my brother looking on curiously, I realised that it was a call I dreaded as well.

  I took the call without changing my position on the bed.

  Marie-Anne wished me and my family a happy Diwali. I realized that this could actually be the only reason for the call. Then she updated me about her life. She was somewhere in Switzerland, at a place called Interlaken. She asked me if I would visit her, and said she would love it if I did.

  ‘Yes. Maybe. I will let you know.’ I didn’t know what to say. The awareness of the geography of this phone call – from Interlaken to Muzaffarnagar – saddened me somehow.

  I think Mother sensed my feelings. When the call was cut, she said, ‘You wasted four years with her in Mumbai. You were miserable when she left. Why do you talk to her now?’

  ‘She called to wish Diwali, Mummy,’ I said. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘This is not a small matter. I can see this is not a small matter.’

  I rose up from the bed. ‘Believe what you want.’

  ‘She is white. European. Haven’t you thought of how many men she must have had in these months?’

  ‘Stop giving me this,’ I said in anger. It was tough enough to deal with this question privately. I went to the adjacent room to escape any further talk about Marie-Anne. This was my brother’s study room, and had been mine earlier. I busied myself with a carton full of books, one of the many I had hurriedly dispatched to Muzaffarnagar after Marie-Anne left Mumbai and I was forced to move to a smaller apartment. They were all in this room, the cartons, all stacked below a cot.

  A few minutes passed in peace. Then I heard Father enter through the gate that separated the verandah from the backyard.

  ‘Did you bring the pooja material and the crackers?’ Mother asked him.

  ‘I didn’t get the time,’ Father replied.

  ‘You didn’t get the time! What happened?’

  ‘Ask him,’ Father said loudly, pointing towards Kanu.

  I stepped out into the verandah.

  Father then told us how Arun had vomited as soon as they reached his house. His head had hit the asphalt in the accident. There was no external injury, but he had needed to be admitted to a hospital. Definite clot in the brain. Father said that Arun would be under observation for a few days.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ Kanu said softly.

  Mother asked Father if he wanted some tea and he grunted his assent. Then he went to the living room and reduced the volume on the television, which roused my grandfather from his nap.

  ‘I gave Arun’s family two thousand rupees,’ Father shouted from the living room. ‘The MRI will cost them five. I had to contribute.’

  ‘The CIA is behind the crash, Harbir,’ Grandfather spoke aloud. ‘They are behind all mischief.’

  ‘Let me and Kanu go and get the stuff,’ I offered.

  ‘Yes, go,’ Mother said. ‘And slow on the roads, please.’

  I started Kanu’s scooter. It rattled loudly, but still worked. As I rode with Kanu behind me, I wondered how long it would take Mother to reveal to Father that Grandfather had pissed on his bed. And that she hadn’t cleaned it.

  During our excursion to Shiv Chowk, Kanu and I spoke only when necessary. He did show a marginal interest in the quantity of crackers we bought. Otherwise, we were both too busy with our own thoughts.

  I was thinking of what it must be like to clean a urine stain on a mattress. Was it even possible? Papa couldn’t afford a nurse or a maid or whoever to take care of such things. I could, but that never crossed anyone’s mind. It seemed that only our parents were expected to provide for our grandfather’s welfare. Kanu and I were not expected to do a thing; not even serve him food. We were only expected to do our things well. To study well, to marry well, to make our lives outside Muzaffarnagar, and to ideally avoid any unpleasant incidents too, if we could help it.

  But would we be expected to do similar work when Mummy and Papa got really old? I tried to imagine cleaning my father’s faeces. Or my mother’s. It made me shudder.

  It was getting dark outside when we returned. The scooter’s front wheel was beginning to feel a little wobbly by now.

  Mother was the only one in the living room. She was watching a soap – one where a large family was celebrating Diwali, dancing to songs and bursting crackers. Even the vamps had let go of their meanness and were enjoying the festival of lights. Inside our house, there were lit diyas in every corner. I hoped that we would act like the family on television for the rest of the evening.

  Seeing us, Mother said, ‘We haven’t even done pooja and they are drinking. They try especially hard to displease the gods on festival days.’

  I reached Grandfather’s room, where he and Father each held a glass of whisky in their hand. Father asked me to sit on a chair. Then he poured me a drink.

  I took a sip. This felt like a set-up.

  Grandfather raised his hand and gestured to me to come closer, which I did.

  ‘What are your thoughts about marriage?’ he shouted into my left ear.

  ‘I have no thoughts about marriage,’ I shouted into his right ear.

  He closed his eyes and nodded; I knew this was in disapproval. Then he looked at my Father. ‘Harbir, I love Tarun the most among all my grandchildren.’ There were ten of us – the grandchildren. I had eight cousins from four uncles and an aunt. ‘And my last wish is to be alive for Tarun’s marriage.’

  Hearing this, I finished my drink in a gulp and asked to be poured another. It unsettled Father slightly, and I guess that is what I wanted.

  ‘It would be best, Tarun beta,’ Grandfather addressed me now, ‘if you were to marry within the caste. Marry a Jat girl.’

  This inflamed me. I wanted to say that I had fucked with a white woman more than a thousand times over the past four years, that caste didn’t mean shit to me, that their world didn’t make sense to me and it probably already didn’t make sense to Kanu. And I wanted to tell my grandfather that his last wish should be nothing else but to die in his sleep, without pain.

  But I stayed silent.

  ‘There is a proposal from a very good family,’ Father said.

  ‘What kind of family?’ I asked.

  ‘Her father and her brother are top bureaucrats. In the Central government. Delhi.’

  ‘You are not a top bureaucrat,’ I said, almost instinctively.

  ‘But you are a top MBA. They are very interested.’

  I sighed. What else? I also thought about Delhi – if I lived there, I would be within my parents’ grasp. Just three hours away.

  Then Mother entered the room, following the script almost perfectly. She stood behind Father’s chair, looking at me as if she were certain that I was on the cusp of a decision.

  ‘What do I have to do?’ I asked them.

  ‘You have to meet her,’ Mother said. ‘At a neutral place. It’s going to be easy. Just see if your thoughts match.’

  Kanu also came in. I don’t think he was part of the script. He probably just didn’t want to be alone in another room. Get out of this shithole, I wanted to tell him. ‘So when do we burst the crackers?’ I asked instead.

  ‘I don’t want to,’ Kanu said.

  ‘Why?’ Mother asked.

  Kanu remained silent.

  ‘Arun will be fine,’ Father said then. ‘He is under observation. Nothing will happen.’

  ‘But still,’ Kanu said.

  ‘Don’t you like girls?’ I found myse
lf saying. This shocked Kanu, and he stared back at me like he would kill me. The expressions on my parents’ faces changed too.

  ‘Let’s do the pooja,’ Mother said, trying to scuttle the suggestion I had planted. ‘And you brothers are going to burst the crackers. There is no need to say silly stuff.’

  ‘Pooja!’ Grandfather shouted. ‘Let’s have the pooja.’

  All of us then got out of the room and walked to the little temple that Mother had assembled just outside the kitchen. Father had to help Grandfather get there. Many twinkling diyas adorned the temple – all Mother’s labour. The idols sparkled in the diyas’ quivering light. Mother placed marigold petals and some rice in our hands. These pooja rituals were among my earliest memories of my family. But now the gods had little to give, and I wondered if any of us really believed that a prayer could answer anything. We anyway sang the hymns that every Hindu household knows how to. I glanced at Kanu and felt a pang of guilt for what I had done.

  Grandfather spoke aloud when the last hymn ended: ‘May such Diwali come every year.’ We threw the petals and the rice on the idols.

  Sensing the irony, Kanu gave out a little snort, and because I wanted to apologise, I looked at him and smiled. He just stared back.

  This was the point when I decided that I wouldn’t go to Interlaken, that Marie-Anne was a mirage that my world had to close its eyes to. I never spoke to her again.

  Two days after Diwali, I would travel to Delhi to take a flight back to Mumbai. In Delhi, I would meet the girl whose family had members in the bureaucracy. She wouldn’t impress me much, and I would tell my parents so. But even in this rejection, they would find a silver lining. I was on the right track, they would say. That I felt defeated, that I almost cried in front of that bemused girl – it wouldn’t matter even if I told them.

  Upon landing in Mumbai, I would receive another phone call from my father. He would tell me that Arun had died in the hospital. He would tell me that my brother was in a fit of rage and was throwing the Activa to the ground repeatedly.

  Father would not say it, but I would know that he wanted me to come home.

  Reasonable Limits

  I had that chronic neck pain that you get from working too much on the computer, but all else was fine, in the sense that I was doing okay financially and had a stable job and was fairly settled location-wise and all, yet all these things as a composite felt like a lumpy contradiction, feeding a kind of unwellness that felt close to boredom, while being clearly very different from boredom, so it wasn’t a great time for me and I felt life wasn’t really giving me what I wanted from it; so yes it was probably a bad time, yes, and I had some nomad-type friends who used to come to my house to spend a night or two, you know the smart You-Only-Live-Once kind of people who do not hold a job for too long and who do not worry about a house or an insurance and other such things, such friends; and these friends of mine would urge me, over drinks that were bought exclusively with my money, to do things like they did things, to let go and basically discover my physicality or whatever, be Rimbaud or whatever, to see the world as much as I could: but please don’t do it from the balconies of good hotels, okay? et cetera et cetera, and after hearing my friends I would feel compelled to outline the advantages of my position, the merits of obeying the order despite criticizing it; I would defend my place in the world, the unique coordinates of my independence, my committed cultivation of a life of the mind, and in my excitement I would sometimes posit that a life of the mind could only be cultivated around creature comforts, at which my friends would start their giggling; they would giggle because my AC would be running and my refrigerator would be humming and my mutual funds would be ticking, yet I would be the one with the dead eyes in those nights, I would be the soul in stasis, I would be the weakest bulb on the tree, so to say, the gist of the system, if you may, and so I guess it is not much to reveal that whatever I said to those fuckers only made me little in their eyes, and instead of giving me the solace of what was, only led me back to the bleakness of what really was, which is not to say that I saw the bleakness as bleakness, as cent per cent bleakness, for that couldn’t be possible, I mean I had a routine, I had work, I had to go to office five days in a week, I worked in a life insurance company, I wasn’t doing badly there either, and the company was doing well, in fact, so the bleakness was not really as absolute as I make it sound, but some things had led to dark sentiments, for example there was that gnawing story, always, that horrible story I had heard at work, the story of blood on paper, the story that I’d been told by the guy from Operations, about the frequent blood stains on the document scans received by Ops, the story that this guy had told me one day just in passing, which he started by informing me how any life insurance application needs to be appended with a slew of customer documents which are all collected and stapled together by the salesman, which are all excessively stapled in multiple places by the salesman because he doesn’t want anything to be lost in transit and then have to ask the customer for it again, which seems only logical, and so the documents come excessively stapled and then have to be digitized because it would just be unwieldy and unwise to rely on paper throughout the processing of any life insurance proposal, so the documents have to be sent to an outlet that can scan them all, a scanning vendor, an enterprise that hires people to de-staple the excessively stapled documents, an enterprise that gets paid depending on the number of sheets it scans per month, an enterprise that therefore incentivizes its own people on the number of sheets they can scan per hour, an enterprise whose employees soon figure out that using any tool other than their own fingers to de-staple a thick sheaf of documents is a loss of time and money, and therefore start using their own fingers for de-stapling as standard operating procedure, whose hurried fingers thus bleed as standard operating procedure, whose blood stains the sheets to be scanned as standard operating procedure, and so on it goes day after day after day after day after day after day after day and then again, and at this point of the story’s telling the Ops guy got a gleam in his eyes and a shine on his balding pate, he was happy that he had scandalised me, and that was not a mistake, for I was scandalised, I was in fact hurt and scandalised, and he surely saw something in my eyes for he then tried to calm me by reminding me of the good work that I was doing, reminding me that my project – of giving each salesperson a mobile application to capture customer documents as images – would mean that there would be no scanning required, that if my project succeeded, there would be no blood on paper because there would be no paper necessary, and I was surprised because I hadn’t thought that that was the real importance of my work, and for a few seconds I allowed myself to be happy, till I understood that with my success, not only would there be no paper, there would be no scanning vendors, which was the real logical reason why the company wanted me to succeed, to not have to pay those vendors, because stapling was anyway easy to avoid, the sales guys just had to be instructed to use easily removable clips for each file that they made, but when I succeeded there would be no scanning vendors and there would be no employees whose job it would be to de-staple paper, and all those people with their horrible fingers, who had done nothing in the big city but pushed their nails against sharp metal, would be out on the street with nothing to do, nothing to do other than showing their fingers to the sun and peeling the scab off them, and it was thinking of those people whose fingers knew only piercing and bleeding that I would be disturbed at my workplace, and this disturbance added to the bleakness that I’ve talked of, a bleakness that was also being contributed to, in part, by the fact that the story was after all a clichéd one – the well-worn, age-old story of how an advancement in technology must mean that some people fall into irrelevance – a story whose persistence was a bigger problem than the contents of any single version of it, and I did not feel guilty of my own participation in it as much as I felt frustrated in the face of the hard truth that even if I were to extricate myself from this particular narrative, the elsewhere I would go to wou
ld in turn bind me in a new way, impose on me another damning mode of participation, where essentially the same story would tap me on my shoulder and hand me my specific role in it; and on nights with YOLO friends it was this inextricability that I wished to impress upon everyone, my buttoned down inextricability and their happy-go-lucky inextricability, for there was never a doubt in me that they too were participating, their versions of youth also had a price, they too consumed and produced, they too had no escape from eating the things and wearing the things and drinking the things that someone somewhere was scraping their nails to get made, just as mine was making the things that would put that nail scraper out of his job, which meant that all in all there was no cosmically correct way to be on this earth, and all you could do was be aware of what you were really doing, acknowledge its painful by-products, and keep at it, and keeping at it was what I would be doing, for I wasn’t a revolutionary either, I knew that living in Yellow Pages was better than living in the crispy pages of history tomes, so I kept at it and looked at possible absolutions, I looked for inspiration online and started reading Wikipedia articles at work, only to realize that the denudation of my soul played its role here too, veering me away from what may be called general inspirational stuff and leading me to historical articles, articles detailing the cruelties of the past century, articles that described the magnitude of pain humanity had delivered and endured, and needless to say the Holocaust cast the biggest shadow among twentieth-century catastrophes, which is to say that I read a lot about it, pondering grand theories about State-sanctioned torture and death, and I thought about small silly things as well, such as whether Holocaust studies today could cover a peculiar twenty-first century phenomenon which may be titled ‘How extensive reading about the Holocaust impacts one’s evaluation of the Contemporary Arts’, which means that one can’t really watch a well-made movie about the complications of romantic love after reading this sentence: ‘The Nazis took in a batch of Jews, had them stripped, made them stand in adjacent rows, shot down the front ones from such proximity that a single machine gun bullet killed the entire row, then pushed the bodies in the ravine, covered them up with mud, stepped down to shoot at anyone still squirming, and then called the next batch in’; so it is not much to say that misery hounded me, to the extent that the faculties that help us differentiate between one thing and the other began to be filed away in my case, things began to lump into each other, such that the workers with the leprous fingers seemed to me no different from the murdered Jews, one suffering dissolved into another suffering, contemporary became historical and vice versa, and I starting having weird dreams, such as the one in which I found myself in a huge field of corn or wheat, in a desolate field of corn or wheat, where a silent UFO cleaved the sky, a restful UFO, and ki-ki-ki went my heart; I still kept my chin up, though; I drank with friends, found critical paths of critical projects at work, played my own powerlessness day in day out … and there remained pockets of my life that I liked, even enjoyed, but the heaviness would always return, I would think of those bleeding fingers, or would end up reading a sentence like: ‘The disposal of corpses was hard work and required managerial acumen’, and there were no lasting distractions for me even in any dull love that I tried fostering with a couple of ladies, and I followed the war in Syria, I paid attention to all reports of sexual crimes in India, I watched YouTube videos of American mass shootings, I read the bigotry of reader comments on op-ed pieces, I ate a lot of pizza, and I shrank and shrank on some incomprehensible dimension, realizing that the world was an inferno with only a few cool mirages, that there was only pure danger in ‘getting out there’, that my friends were wrong, that my friends’ favourite writer Kerouac was wrong too, that great Roman candles that burn magnificently actually just burn away, and we all need to find a bed, and for as much as possible we all need to follow the injunction of waking up tomorrow in our own bed, in our cocoons of peace and laziness; we can and should continue our hiding, if it is that.