by Akhil Sharma
Father Joseph went to his desk and took out two small newspaper-wrapped bundles. “Forty thousand,” he said, putting them at the edge of the desk. I had only expected him to pay twenty-five or thirty. Father Joseph, I thought, was one of those people for whom money is not real, and once he had surrendered in the bargaining, he gave up completely. I picked up the packages. I pretended to weigh the money. The heft of it and the feeling of victory removed the embarrassment I had been feeling. I asked for a plastic bag.
“Do I need to bring a gift to Mr. Gupta’s party?” Father Joseph asked and laughed as I left.
On our way back, I fell asleep. I dreamed of Radha and Anita, and when I woke I was grinding my teeth, though I could not remember the details of my dream. The back of my shirt was sticking to the seat and I had a slight headache from the sun. Mr. Mishra was looking out the window. He had finished the inspection report without my asking and it was on his lap. We were nearing my home. We had passed the Old Clock Tower and were beside the Old Vegetable Market’s layers of stalls. The jeep was moving in slow shudders. Pollution had created a blue haze on the road.
“You don’t notice it till you’re away, but Delhi is so polluted it’s like living inside an oil tanker,” Mr. Mishra said.
The dream and the money in my lap made me feel unworthy of his friendship. “Why do you think your son is so successful?” I asked him.
“I don’t know,” he said, continuing to look out the window. “Children are born with personalities. He was born determined to be successful. And he’s smart.”
“I have a daughter who is a scientist in America. I have a son who has a Ph.D. in history. The fact that Anita never studied wasn’t my fault.” Saying this made me feel as though I was pleading. “My daughter Kusum has met the American President.” Mentioning Kusum’s achievements made me feel that perhaps she had accomplished them because she had stayed mostly outside my influence.
Mr. Mishra turned toward me. “Of course not,” he said.
I think I was still dazed from my dream, for I kept going. “The things I do for Mr. Gupta … I do them only because I never had a wife who works, like yours.” Mr. Mishra didn’t respond. “Mr. Bajwa deserved to be caught. He had a wife who worked, but he was still Mr. Gupta’s moneyman. As the Gita tells, possessions possess you. To achieve peace, let go of desire and seek only to fulfill your duties.” When Mr. Mishra still did not say anything, I became angry at him. “You were lucky. Your first child was a boy and you could stop right there. I had two girls and only then a boy. How could I have supported five people on my salary?”
Mr. Mishra shrugged and kept quiet. We neared the temple where I was going to get the pundit for Radha’s prayers. I told Narayan to stop in front. As I climbed out of the jeep with my badminton rackets and shuttlecocks, the plastic bag full of money dangling from a wrist, Mr. Mishra said, “Once we get this old, Mr. Karan, there is no longer time to make up for our mistakes. We must try to forget them.”
There are four or five steps up to the temple gates. To one side of the doors is a little space where a fat unshaven Brahmin with a little ponytail sits most days selling prayer pamphlets, flowers, and coconuts. When I entered the temple, he was asleep on his back, with a brick wrapped in sackcloth under his head as a pillow.
The temple is set at the end of a long, narrow hallway: an open courtyard with a marble floor and walls painted saffron. There is a tulsi bush in the center. Alcoves with statues of God Ram, Hanuman, and Krishna line the wall. There was no one in the courtyard. I bowed before each of the idols and asked them to take care of Radha’s soul and guard Anita and Asha. I tried asking forgiveness from God Ram, but when I attempted to name specific sins, my mind would not form the words. I put a rupee in the collection box and the silliness of this offering made me feel a sudden keen grief for Radha.
After I finished praying, I knocked at a narrow blue door in a corner of the courtyard. After a moment or two, the pundit’s wife, a thin seventeen-year-old named Shilpa, unchained the door. Shilpa, like the pundit, was from my village, and I had known her all her life. “Namaste, Ram Karanji,” she said.
“Is Punditji in?”
“He’s gone to the village. He’ll be back tomorrow night, probably.”
“Wednesday is the first anniversary of Radha’s death and I would like Punditji to pray at my home in the morning,” I said. Shilpa didn’t answer, and I wondered whether she thought I was neglectful for coming this late to her husband and whether she would gossip about this. “Tomorrow night he’ll be back?” I asked. If the pundit turned out to be busy, I would have only Wednesday morning to find a priest.
Shilpa stared at me and then, half smiling, said, “An ice-cream factory is starting in Beri and he’s gone to pray for it.” As she spoke, her smile opened fully. It was as though she was bragging that the pundit had moved up from blessing new scooters and new rooms in houses to blessing whole factories.
“I’d like him to pray at my house Wednesday morning.”
“I’ll tell him.”
As I walked to our alley, I considered hiring some other pundit to pray for Radha, but Radha had believed that the prayers of a pundit who did not know the person on whose behalf he was appealing were ineffective. The idea of letting some stranger pray for her made me sad. Then I felt disgusted with my sentimentality. When she was alive, I visited prostitutes two or three times a month. It was only the trauma of the heart attack and Radha’s slow death from cancer that had sapped my desire for sex.
Going up our alley, I held the badminton rackets upright in one hand like a bouquet of flowers. I passed the flour mill with its roar and smell of grain burning. I passed the booth of the watch repairman, who was asleep on his stool, his head resting on the plank where he performs the repairs. Entering the dark archway that leads into our compound, I thought that all these details were part of Asha’s life as well as mine, and this gave everything a purpose.
Asha squinted when she opened the door. “I woke you?” I asked, stepping into Asha and Anita’s bedroom. The bedsheet was wrinkled on one side. She could have been home only an hour.
“What do you have?” Asha said, closing the door to keep out the heat. The only light now came through the living room.
“For you,” I said, giving Asha the rackets and shuttlecocks.
“Thank you. Thank you,” Asha said in Urdu as she took the gift. Asha’s choice of switching to a formal language surprised me. It suggested an inner life of which I knew nothing and made me aware that all day I had been imagining her only as a witness.
I sat down on their bed and took off my shoes. Asha stood before me and began swinging a racket.
“Maybe you can play with some of the compound children,” I said. Asha laughed and nodded. “Get me some water.”
Asha went to the common room carrying a racket in each hand. Anita came into the bedroom doorway. She was wearing her black rectangular eyeglasses, which meant that she had been unable to nap and had been reading the paper in the kitchen. “Couldn’t sleep?” I asked as I unbuttoned my shirt. When I reached the top two buttons, my hands trembled.
Anita shook her head no.
“I went to the temple.” I paused and tried thinking of a way to hide my mistake of going this late to the pundit. “Punditji’s gone to Beri.”
“What happens now?” she said with panic in her voice.
“He’ll be back tomorrow night.”
“He could stay in Beri. People might come and there’d be no pundit.” Anita’s body had become stiff and the lines on her forehead were sharp and deep. “Think of the shame.” Although Anita had most of the responsibility for the ceremony, the strength of her response made it appear affected.
“I can get someone else,” I said softly. “Don’t worry.” It took a moment for Anita’s body to loosen. When the lines on her forehead had eased, I said in a light joking voice, “You’re like me. Under pressure we stop thinking.” Anita didn’t reply.
Asha came back with the
glass of water. “How was school?” I asked.
“Good.”
She looked at me as I drank and I could tell that already our morning conversation and this gift had shifted our relationship. I put the glass on the ground and asked, “Your teachers don’t bother you, do they?”
“No. I have good teachers.”
“It’s bad to hit children.” I felt silly for saying something this obvious, so I tried hiding my inanity with more words. “When I was in higher secondary, the untouchables sat in the back of the class. The teachers couldn’t slap the untouchables because then they would be touching them. The untouchables knew this and would always be talking. Sometimes the teachers became very angry, and to shut up the untouchables they threw pieces of chalk at them. And the untouchables, because all the students sat on the floor, would race around on their hands and knees, dodging the chalk.”
When I churned my arms to show how swiftly the untouchables crawled, Asha laughed and said, “My teachers only hit with rulers.” She was quiet for a moment and then spoke eagerly: “I had something happen. There’s a girl in school who last week got one of those soft papers you blow your nose on. Those papers that rich people use instead of handkerchiefs in advertisements. She’s been using it all week. She doesn’t have a cold, but she keeps putting it in her nose. I told her today the paper was ugly. She said, ‘If I throw it away, you’ll take it.’ I said I wouldn’t, so she threw it onto the floor and waited. Two girls tried grabbing it. The one who got it blew her nose in it all day.”
I laughed at Asha’s attention to detail and tried tickling her stomach. Asha jumped away, smiling. “Do you want to come with me to a wedding reception tonight? Since I can’t eat much, I should bring someone who can.” I said the last sentence because I felt I had to wheedle Anita’s permission to do this. The possibility of taking Asha out of the sadness of her life and showing her all the people who knew me had come to me as I left Rosary School with the bag of money.
“This is Mr. Gupta’s?” Anita asked.
“I can show her off to everybody I know.”
“Will there be ice cream and Campa Cola?” Asha said.
“You can just eat ice cream if you want.”
Asha giggled at the idea.
“How is Mr. Gupta?” Anita inquired.
Mr. Gupta’s son had eloped with a Sikh and this wedding party was coming after many tears and curses. “He keeps wanting to know what he did wrong.” Anita sat down on a chair across from me. “I tell him it’s all written in the stars.”
“It’ll be late when you come home. Asha has school tomorrow.”
“We’ll take an autorickshaw.”
Anita looked at Asha beating the air with a badminton racket. Asha was moving from side to side and talking to herself as she played an imaginary opponent. “You can’t beat me.”
The sun had set forty minutes earlier, and the sidewalks and road were soaked in the same even gray light. I had been so afraid of having nothing to say to Asha that ever since we got in the autorickshaw I had been unable to stop talking. “Mr. Gupta’s son had gone with a friend to look at a used car and the man selling it had a daughter who gave them water. Ajay fell in love immediately,” I shouted over the beating of the engine. The boy driving the three-wheeler ground gears as he sought the narrow channels of movement which kept appearing and disappearing in the traffic. “I’ve never seen her, but Sikh women are either very beautiful or very ugly.” Asha was looking out of the autorickshaw and I wanted her to listen to me. “I actually predicted this. Long ago, when he was about to go off to college, I read his horoscope and predicted it. And then one day Mr. Gupta comes crying to me: ‘Oh, Mr. Karan! I have gone bankrupt.’” Asha held her folded hands between her legs and stared at the traffic. She appeared stunned to have left the flat and to be on the way to a party. Asha wore olive shorts and a white shirt. I saw again how small her kneecaps were. I wore a blue shirt that stretched so tight across my stomach that the spaces between the buttons were puckered open like small hungry mouths. I was using cologne and wondered if Asha had noticed. “I told him, ‘What use is it to cry. Pretend everything happened with your permission and that way your nose won’t be cut off before everyone. People always say bad things anyway.’” As I spoke, I actually began feeling as though I were Mr. Gupta’s friend. We passed through the Old Vegetable Market. The vendors were lighting the kerosene lamps, which look like ironstemmed tulips. “I am only a junior officer,” I said, “but Mr. Gupta always turns to me for advice. I spend as much time in his room as I do behind my own desk. If only Mrs. Chauduri would retire, I could be senior junior officer. She’s had cancer for six years. She’s worked hard. She deserves her rest. She doesn’t even come into the office much. Sometimes she sends her son to pick up her files.”
I tried thinking of something that might interest Asha. Making cheese had become illegal a few weeks ago when the heat started and cows began giving less milk. “There are going to be cheese dishes, I’m sure. Mr. Gupta has only one son and he’s a rich man. He’s not going to wait for the rains to come so he can have cheese at his son’s wedding reception. You want to bet how many cheese dishes there are going to be? Three? Five?”
After a pause, Asha unenthusiastically guessed, “Four.”
“I’ll bet five.” When the conversation didn’t move from there, I said, “There’s going to be so much ice cream. Did your father buy you ice cream often?”
Asha didn’t answer for a moment. Then she said, “No, but I like to think he did. I like to think he would come to me from his office during recess and take me with him to drink Campa Cola.”
This answer struck me not as just pitiful but as frightening. To slip into fantasy like this seemed the first step into madness. Looking at Asha at that moment I felt as if I had entered my bedroom late at night and found a strange man sitting quietly on my cot. “You’re imaginative,” I murmured. I was silent for several minutes. We had passed Kamla Nagar and were speeding down a straight road. Lights shone from the houses and shops on either side. “Thinking these things might hurt you in some way,” I told her and, putting one arm around her shoulders, pulled her to me.
Strings of red and green lightbulbs fell three stories from the roof and covered the front of Mr. Gupta’s house. There were cars parked on both sides of the street. There was a large fenced green across from his home. Because it is so dirty in the Old Vegetable Market that your spit always holds black grains, this park is what I always associated with Mr. Gupta’s wealth and power.
When Mr. Gupta joined the education department twelve years ago, each education subject had collected its own political donations. The physical education program had always had more influence than other departments because the physical education teachers, like the captains of Calcutta’s athletic clubs, have access to large pools of hooligans. Only when Rajiv Gandhi lost the prime ministership was Mr. Gupta able to consolidate fund-raising under himself in return for continued loyalty to the Congress Party.
Mr. Gupta was standing at his gate, receiving visitors. The veranda behind him was crowded with guests. Waiters in red turbans and white jackets and pants moved among them carrying trays. I took Asha’s hand in mine and walked up to Mr. Gupta. He was wearing a handsome blue suit and a tie flecked with yellow and blue. “This is my granddaughter, Asha,” I said after he had thanked me for coming.
He bowed and shook Asha’s hand. “You do my house honor,” he said. Asha was so surprised by his formality she moved behind me. Mr. Gupta is tall and muscular, with delicate features and hair that is just turning gray. “We have all this ice cream and cold drinks and so few children,” he said seriously. “Children are the only ones who can really appreciate ice cream. Don’t you think so, Mr. Karan?”
“I’ll eat a lot,” Asha promised.
“I know you will,” Mr. Gupta said, and prodded Asha’s stomach with a finger. “You’re so thin you look as though you could die right here.” He looked at me. “If you could, you’d b
ring your entire family to eat.” Mr. Gupta laughed.
Sisterfucker! I thought. He reached around me to shake someone’s hand. Without knowing it, I put my hand on Mr. Gupta’s shoulder and shouted, “Happy?” He appeared surprised. “Happy?” I bellowed again to fluster him. Mr. Gupta looked embarrassed and I felt powerful. “A gift,” I said, and from my pants pocket pulled out an envelope with a hundred and one rupees.
“Very kind.” He smiled and wrote my name on the envelope with a small pencil.
“Any booze tonight, Mr. Gupta? We should celebrate. Guess what Father Joseph gave. I will only drink foreign whiskey, though.” I let my voice ring with a village accent to remind him that we were both small corrupt bureaucrats.
Mr. Gupta looked confused but kept smiling. He tried leaning around me and shaking a hand. I moved into his way to tell him how much Father Joseph had given. But Mr. Gupta stopped smiling and snapped, “Just ask the waiters and they’ll get it from the back.”
I moved onto the veranda. I stopped a waiter and asked for a whiskey and a Pepsi Lahar for Asha. Asha peered around. Her hand was so small in mine that I felt enormous.
More men than usual were wearing traditional kurta pajamas instead of suits in anticipation of a BJP victory. There were perhaps a dozen Sikh men with their beards tied beneath their chin. All the Sikhs wore suits. After the thousands of Sikhs who had been set on fire and macheted to death in the riots following Indira Gandhi’s assassination, some of these men must carry a constant sense of physical danger with them. What did they feel, I wondered, at seeing all these Hindus so adaptable to the possibility of BJP power?
My whiskey came and I drank it in two gulps. The force of it made me shake. “Acid,” I said, grinning at Asha. She was sucking her Pepsi Lahar through a straw. After she finished, she asked if she could save the straw and take it home. I felt embarrassed for her. “I’ll buy you a box of straws tomorrow.” I ordered another whiskey and a cold drink. “A full glass of whiskey,” I said.
