Diwali in Muzaffarnagar

by Tanuj Solanki

  Gunjan had seen her father’s dead body in the toilet-cum-bathroom that had been modified for her grandfather’s use. Since then, she had taken to using the other toilet, the Indian-style one just outside her room. But, accustomed to the Western-style toilets that she used in Delhi, she had some trouble adjusting to the squatting routine for the first couple of days. It was a peculiar, private adjustment, for it was also true that for the first seventeen years of her life, when she was growing up with her parents, she had only ever used Indian-style toilets. In fact, this bungalow, with its two toilets, one of which had been modified to house a Western-style pot, had been allotted to her father only after his last promotion three years ago. Before this, their family had lived in three different apartments in the colony, progressing from two-room to three-room to four-room housing as her father got promoted every five to six years. None of those apartments had more than one Indian-style toilet. Gunjan had lived all her schoolgoing years in those three places, and her morning routine in the later years usually included attempts at being the first one to use the toilet; for somehow, either due to the commodes’ shape or due to the ineffectiveness of the exhaust fan, the shit smell lingered. However, she could not act on her preference much, for her father always woke up first; and so it happened rather often that Gunjan got to use the toilet after him. On such days, she would pinch her nose before entering the toilet and, creating a look of disgust on her face, say something like ‘such great digestion!’ or ‘smells like the end of the world’. These enactments, never serious, would be meant for her mother only, who always laughed loudly and tried to hush Gunjan at the same time. Her father would ignore this mother–daughter silliness.

  Over the first two or three days after her father’s death, Gunjan’s re-initiation to Indian-style toilets had brought to her mind a particular comparison. At Mahesh’s house, the two toilets needed the word exquisite to describe them. Even the flush made a pleasing, self-effacing sort of sound. There, you could be drunk, half-asleep or immersed in your phone: the downstairs business more or less took care of itself. Here, in Muzaffarnagar, the toilet was basic, even brutal. The up-close view of your excreta, the unavoidable smell, and the strenuous squatting posture – all ensured that you didn’t linger in the place. The flushing normally failed, such that an extra bucket of water often needed to be used.

  Slowly, though, as the days had passed, Gunjan had adapted. Going to the toilet wasn’t a bothersome idea anymore. She did not have to place her palm on the wall to find her balance as she squatted; her knees did not make an awful, clicking sound when she stood up after finishing her business; her feet did not go numb after the whole experience. Although she could not take her phone inside (for fear of dropping it), her mind had begun to use the private space to think of a thing or two.

  On the morning of 8 January, seven days after her father’s death, Gunjan found herself thinking of her lack of grief while squatting in the toilet. She had already shat; she was lingering. It was then that it hit her – the smell. The smell of her own shit.

  She filled water in the toilet mug to wash herself and saw it shake in her hands. After she was done, she got out of the toilet and, while in front of the washbasin in the verandah, absent-mindedly dabbed the liquid soap bottle much more than needed. The excessive lather drew her attention. She saw a flash of her father shaving right at the spot where she was standing. She looked up at the mirror above the washbasin, and for a minute tried to match her father’s facial features with her own. She then went to the bathroom and lifted a bucket of water, using it to flush the toilet. Again she smelled her shit. The man had died and she was alive and here it was, the connection. After only three days of eating food cooked by her mother. Her insides, her intestines, her body – all a testament. She collapsed on the floor just outside the toilet and let out a shriek, which brought her mother rushing to her. ‘What happened?’ Gunjan was asked.

  But she was choked with emotion and could not speak. Her mother tried to lift her but, as soon as she stood up, she crumbled again, as if paralyzed. ‘What is wrong, my child?’ her mother asked with a strain in her voice. Gunjan coughed, grunted, mumbled. Her face was smeared with tears. ‘You thinking of Papa?’ Gunjan raised her eyes to meet her mother’s. Then she cried again. A cascade. Her mother raised her face to her chest.

  They stayed in that position right outside the toilet for a few minutes. Then they moved to the bedroom, where Gunjan lay down on the bed. Her mother sat next to her.

  ‘Don’t cry like this, my child,’ Mummy said. ‘Your father, he’s up there somewhere. Imagine how sad it will make him to see you like this.’

  Gunjan noticed that her mother’s tone was different, as if she were talking to a child. ‘It’s because I’d not cried till now,’ she said, still hiccupping from the exertion. She wiped her face with her hands. ‘I’m going to get everything sorted, Mummy,’ she said then. ‘We will get the money, you’ll get the job, and you’ll get a good apartment to shift to.’

  They were silent after that. Fifteen minutes or so later, Mummy went to the kitchen to toast bread for breakfast. Gunjan had a twitchy nap on the bed, a nap that allowed for thoughts. Her father had died and there was bureaucracy and she was running through the motions. She had to stop going through the motions and beat the bureaucracy and ensure that her father’s death didn’t become the ruin of them.

  Mother and daughter had breakfast in the living room. After that, Gunjan put some papers in a polythene bag, knotted the bag around the cycle’s handle, and left the house.

  She went straight to the bank branch where the manager, wearing the same turtleneck sweater he had been wearing three days ago, greeted her into his cabin.

  ‘I met a man at the tehsil office,’ Gunjan said, coming straight to the point. ‘His name was Jairam. Do you know him?’

  ‘I don’t know any Jairam, Ma’am,’ the manager said, shifting a coaster on his side of the table between them. ‘Why?’ he asked.

  ‘I got to know that you have the power to release the money in my father’s account without insisting on a certificate,’ Gunjan said.

  ‘Who told you that?’ the manager said.

  ‘This Jairam did.’

  ‘Well, Ma’am, anyone on the street can tell you anything. What I told you last time was procedure. I can’t release the money without following procedure. No bank can. You can talk to other branch managers if you want.’

  ‘That’s strange,’ Gunjan said. ‘Because this Jairam offered to talk to you on my behalf and have the money released.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ the manager said.

  ‘He wanted a fee, of course,’ Gunjan said. ‘He said that he would talk to all the different banks for me.’

  ‘I don’t know any Jairam–Phairam,’ the manager said, his eyes searching outside the glass panel in his cabin, as if seeking help.

  ‘Look here, bhaisaab,’ Gunjan said, shocking the man into a wide-eyed stare. ‘You and your fellow branch managers are running a racket. It works fine as long as it’s some villager who leaves his sons clueless about the money in the farming account. You take a bribe from one of the sons and use your … your discretionary powers to transfer the money to him. Works just fine. The rest are so poor and clueless, they don’t know what hit them.’

  ‘How can you refer to me like that?’ the manager growled. He actually used the English word ‘refer’.

  ‘My only thing, bhaisaab,’ Gunjan went on, ‘don’t do it with me. You probably thought it’s just two women – mother and daughter – and they will not know what to do. No, I’m going to post this whole story on Facebook. And I’m going to call your bank’s head office in Mumbai and report this. And I’m going to go to the police. And report this to whatever news channel I can find. And, because it’s two helpless women against a corrupt banking system, fighting for a government employee’s hard-earned money, everyone will listen.’

  ‘You’re trying to scare me?’ the manager said, a mixture of anger and fear in
his voice. ‘I told you procedure and you’re trying to scare me?’

  ‘You don’t need to be scared,’ Gunjan replied. ‘You just need to do something that is within your powers. Can I, please, have the money transferred by tomorrow?’

  The manager moved a palm over his bald pate. ‘Your threats …’ he said, then used the pause to look sideways, ‘how can I be sure?’

  ‘Here’s the filled form,’ Gunjan said, pushing a paper towards him. ‘My mother’s account details are on it. I’ve also put my affidavit under it. This is all the paperwork you need. You don’t need that stupid heir certificate from the magistrate’s office.’

  ‘But how can I be sure, Ma’am,’ the manager took the documents and examined them, ‘that you won’t do those things you mentioned?’

  ‘Have the money transferred by tomorrow,’ Gunjan said. ‘Also, talk to the other branch managers and tell them to do the same. I’ll go to them right after this and give them the papers one by one.’

  ‘The other managers won’t listen to me,’ the manager said.

  ‘You’ve to convince them,’ Gunjan said with finality and rose from the seat. ‘Call them after I leave. They should know the situation before I meet them.’

  Gunjan didn’t need to intimidate the other branch managers. They all accepted her papers and grunted ‘yes’ when asked about managing the money transfers. In between, while she was cycling from bank to bank, Gunjan was scared of what these men could do in retaliation. At one point, she stopped her cycle and called Mahesh, telling him all about the conversation with the bald branch manager. It was an act of creating witness. Mahesh laughed. He also advised her to tell her mother, which Gunjan knew was a bad idea and thus rejected.

  The strategy with the bald branch manager had come to her in the morning, while she was slowing her cycle outside the tehsil office. She had realized that she didn’t want to deal with Jairam and, in the spirit of cutting the middleman, she assessed whether she already had enough information to enforce the outcome that she wanted.

  Her resolve outside the tehsil office and the toilet episode in the morning – they were somehow related. Something latent in her had been released this morning, due to the knowledge that her connection with her father was immitigable – that even if her mind let go of him, her body could never do so. An intensity had been added to the part of her character that was responding to the situations that had arisen after her father’s death. He himself had always been a gentle man, unable to intimidate anyone. Gunjan had, on the other hand, bared the ferocity that her own life had taught her.

  As she cycled homeward, she thought of how her going away from Muzaffarnagar to Delhi had primarily been a movement away from a small town to a bigger one, the kind of movement that everyone from her generation (and education) in Muzaffarnagar had to undertake. But over the years, her settling into a life in Delhi had taken her away from the otherwise important people in her life, the ones who had continued to live in Muzaffarnagar – her parents. She remembered how in the first couple of years she would visit them every weekend. That frequency had decreased gradually, and at the time of her grandfather’s and father’s death, she was in the habit of visiting home for no more than the annual holidays of Holi and Diwali. Her aspirations had been all about improving what she had come to see as her lifestyle. There was no element of giving anything back to her parents, for that would have meant a return to Muzaffarnagar – a mental return, if not a physical one. She would have had to think of her parents, and thinking of her parents would have meant thinking of the kind of life they had in Muzaffarnagar. And Muzaffarnagar was a town that she had conditioned herself to think of as an incidental occurrence, not a permanence of her life.

  But wasn’t Muzaffarnagar a permanent part of her life’s story? She thought of this question as she pedalled past the railway station on her left. The winter sun was strong and clear. When she took the less busy Circular Road, she saw how the slow movements of the town could be mistaken for beauty. Didn’t she already think of Delhi’s hustle-bustle as a sort of ugliness? Mahesh’s money had insulated her from that ugliness, but wasn’t that money the most impermanent part of her life?

  For her, her grandfather’s death had been a tiny vacation from work. Everyone in her family had expected it, and she had assumed that everyone was partly relieved. But her father was sad. He was the only son willing to take care of the old man, although it had never been clear if his dedication was a product of love. Could it be that love and filial duty were enmeshed for her father, that he didn’t know where one ended and the other began? And was the converse true for her – that because she had never felt, or been made to feel, the pull of duty, she had also forgotten about love?

  As she neared home, these questions receded to the background and the concerns of the here and now rose up again. She measured how much work she had completed. The insurance money could come any day now, and the bank money, she hoped, would get sorted soon. The provident fund money and the insurance money from the department her father worked for required no active intervention. The only thing left was filing the application for her mother’s job. She had already prepared the affidavits required for the same.

  As she was crossing the director’s bungalow, it occurred to her that it was lunch time and that her father’s erstwhile boss might be inside his house. She left her cycle by the curated bushes outside the bungalow and walked inside.

  The door was opened by the director’s wife. ‘Namaste, Aunty,’ Gunjan said, ‘is Uncle home?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ the woman said, ‘please come inside. Have you had lunch?’

  ‘Oh, yes, Aunty,’ Gunjan said. ‘I just wanted to talk to Uncle about my mother’s job.’

  There was a courtyard inside, girt by an L-shaped verandah on two sides. The director was having his lunch seated in the courtyard, taking in the sun. He smiled looking at Gunjan, pointed towards the couple of plastic chairs scattered around him. Gunjan pulled one of them and sat opposite him.

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you at lunch, Uncle,’ Gunjan said.

  ‘No worries, beta. Please have lunch with me.’

  ‘No, thanks, Uncle. I just came to ask a few questions.’

  ‘Yes, tell me.’

  ‘So … this is about my mother’s possible appointment … on compassionate grounds. My uncle had a chat with you about this earlier.’

  ‘Yes, he did. I’d explained the procedure to him.’

  ‘Yes,’ Gunjan said. ‘I just wanted to know … how will things pan out? When will she get the job? What will she get? What sort of housing?’

  The director nodded, then washed his fingers over his steel plate. It was a practice Gunjan detested. Looking at the yellow–red water collect itself in the utensils, she suddenly remembered how she had made her father give up this habit when she was in sixth or seventh grade. This speck of memory surprised her, pleasantly.

  ‘Right,’ the director said. ‘Your chacha told me that bhabhiji is a graduate. In Hindi.’

  ‘Yes, Uncle, that’s right.’

  ‘See, this practice,’ he took a moment to wipe his fingers on a hand towel kept on his plastic chair, ‘this practice of giving jobs on compassionate grounds is an old one, and isn’t appreciated much today.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘It upsets those who are already in the department. It’s natural for them to think that women who get such jobs don’t deserve them.’

  ‘So … but it’s a rule, right?’ Gunjan asked.

  ‘Not really,’ the director said. ‘It’s discretionary and dependent on availability, though I have seldom seen such requests denied by the headquarters. It takes about three months, which should work fine in your case. I’m letting bhabhiji keep the house at least till June.’

  ‘Oh, thank you, Uncle,’ Gunjan said, an immediate concern of hers erased.

  ‘But what we can offer,’ the director said, ‘considering that she’s a graduate from an unrelated subject, is a low-level clerical pos
ition. Support staff, basically.’

  ‘What would this mean?’ Gunjan asked.

  ‘Making photocopies, making sure the tea bills are signed and paid off, passing files,’ he said.

  Gunjan absorbed this, imagining her mother doing all this in her fifties. Her father’s peon, Sukhiram, did all this for him. He also ran errands for her father, even helping him sell his produce from the kitchen garden at times. ‘A peon?’ she asked, looking down to the floor.

  ‘She’s an ex-officer’s wife,’ the director said. ‘I’m sure her colleagues will keep that in mind. She won’t be overworked.’

  Gunjan nodded.

  ‘I know how this can feel awkward,’ the director said. ‘But there is going to be a pay commission revision. The salary will be attractive at this level too. And Ranbirji’s pension will also increase.’

  There was something else on Gunjan’s mind now. She knew that peons in the department usually got one-room housing. She couldn’t imagine her mother living there, as a neighbour to Sukhiram. Their relatives’ shame alone would make that option not viable. So her mother would need to take a place on rent in the town. But then she would have to commute in a rickshaw every day. It would be a hassle. ‘Isn’t there a way that the housing granted can be of a higher grade?’ Gunjan asked the director, already sensing how silly her query sounded.

  ‘No,’ the director said. ‘Even if I granted it, some or the other employee will complain.’

  ‘Okay,’ Gunjan said. She had to tell all this to her mother. She now worried that her mother would accept this life so that her daughter could remain free in Delhi. Thinking of this made her throat tighten. She stood up from the chair and mumbled a ‘thank you’ to the director.

  She had just turned towards the verandah when the director said, ‘Why don’t you take the job, Gunjan?’