by Akhil Sharma
“Not because I didn’t want to see you,” he said, looking into the eyes of the boy who had spoken, “but because God chose to keep me apart from my brother.” His voice was so soft it sounded as if he was holding back tears. “Have you seen the movie Time? It was like that.” Shakuntala made approving sighing clicks.
“You were separated by an earthquake?” Rajesh asked.
Krishna ignored him. “Yesterday, like a miracle, my brother appeared at my door and said, ‘Brother, let us stop this fighting. What else is there in the world other than family?’ And I told him, ‘You are right. I have always loved you.’” I began to be stared at. Could I have said these things? Krishna put a hand on my shoulder. After a moment he said, “Learn from us. Don’t make the mistakes we have made, losing the many years of brotherly love.”
He would have gone on, but the pundit came with his wife. The pundit was garbed in a saffron robe and had a saffron satchel slung over one shoulder. His wife wore an ordinary green sari. Seeing Krishna, she also wanted to hear the story of our reconciliation. I led the pundit to the common room, but everyone else remained in the living room to hear the story again.
From his satchel the pundit pulled out a thermos bottle with the figure of Superman on it. The thermos held Ganges water, and he poured a cupful onto the center of the common-room floor and scrubbed an area several feet wide with a saffron rag. I was not confident of his competence and wondered if the prayer he would perform would be from a Veda, or whether it was a recipe he had concocted on his own. I sat on the ground and watched him as he, on all fours, drew a two-foot-by-two-foot square with flour. Inside the square, along the edges, he drew small rectangles and filled them with oms, swastikas, flowers. He took a large tin box from his satchel and placed it in the center of the square. Then he began bringing out other things from the bag. A coconut, twigs, sugar twisted in a bit of newspaper, clarified butter in a bottle that used to hold hair oil, rose-colored threads, a bunch of bananas, a small paper bag of apples, a purse full of coins. There was no end to what the satchel contained. His efficiency promised the ability to do the impossible. Anita came into the room and I caught her eye by mistake. She looked calm, not crazy. She would not do something reckless that would destroy the world.
When the pundit was ready, Anita gathered everyone. People spread themselves around the room. The pundit lit a fire in the tin box.
The ceremony lasted about forty-five minutes. At first I was concerned only with throwing handfuls of rice into the fire at the proper time and following the pundit’s lead when he called out “God be praised” or “God is great.” The pundit sat on one side of the fire, and Rajesh and I sat opposite him. Anita was a few feet away, at my side. The sun coming through the balcony and the heat of the fire began to lull me. I knew enough Sanskrit to follow what the pundit was saying if I tried. After a while, the rhythm of the prayer snagged me. I could understand it without effort. “I am the fire and that which is consumed. I am the poison, the cure. The beginning without end and the end without beginning.”
I began to pray silently and with steady fervor. I kept asking God to free Radha from being reborn, and that if she was reborn, to let our souls not intersect so that we did not repeat our torments. I asked God to let Radha, Anita, Asha never meet me after this life.
Near the end of the prayer, Rajesh and I began to throw coins into the fire. I was pulling my hand away from the fire when I sensed Radha sitting beside me to my right. I did not turn my head, but I knew exactly how she was seated, with her legs crossed lotus fashion, and I could tell where the veins in her arms and feet stood out. I felt her watch me without emotion, as if she were writing down everything that she saw in my heart and head. I shivered. After two or three minutes, this sense of her abruptly vanished, and when it did, it was as if she had died again.
I wept slowly and quietly. I was not crying for Radha’s death but for the tragedy of her life. It took a few minutes for the others even to notice. When they did, there was an appreciative murmur. I tried to stop crying, but the tears kept coming. I pressed my fingertips to my eyes.
The prayer ended and people stood. I heard the pundit’s wife say, “I’m so hungry I could eat a dozen puris.”
The phone buzzed. Someone picked it up and yelled, “It’s Kusum.” Anita left the kitchen for the living room. I was unable to look up and saw only her bare feet. The common room emptied except for me.
“Hello,” Anita said, and a moment later: “There is no danger here. You are happy, healthy? Carolyn? Ben?”
There was silence for a little while, and then Bittu’s son, Rohit, called to me from the living-room doorway and led me through the crowd that surrounded the phone. Anita passed the phone to me. I could not meet her gaze.
The pundit said, “I should talk to her. It will help.” He was smiling ingratiatingly, wanting some of the glamour of an international phone call.
“Pitaji, what’s happening there?” Kusum asked.
Kusum lived with her grandmother till she went to college. I had last seen her two years ago, when she brought her husband, Ben, to meet us. She phoned a few times a year and sent postcards whenever she went on holiday. The fact that our lives had touched so little over so many years made me feel that my past was heavy and finished.
“It’s one year since your mother died.”
“I know,” she replied, as if I had accused her of indifference. “Are you crying?” she inquired warily.
“Hello, daughter,” the pundit called, leaning over my shoulder.
“Who’s that?”
“Punditji. He wants to talk on the phone.”
“Tell him a minute to America is forty rupees. Are you crying?”
“Yes.”
“Give the phone to Anita, then.”
I did, and went to my room. The crying had made me feel drunk. I closed the door and lay down.
When I woke in the middle of the afternoon, the flat was quiet. I stayed on my side and fingered my grief as though it were a bruise. I squeezed out a few fresh tears. I knew I must speak the truth or my life would spin out of control.
I got up and went to the latrine. I heard Anita’s footsteps as I squatted. She stopped in front of the door. “I’ll be in the living room,” she said.
“All right,” I murmured. A spider had spun a web right above the faucet. The green paint of the door was puffed with moisture and heat. I shat and shat until there was nothing coming out. I washed myself and stood, but my bowels clenched themselves so tightly that I immediately had to squat again. The world had changed, I told myself.
The common room was empty. There were whitish marks on the floor where the pundit had dragged his boxes. I went to the living room.
Anita was sitting on the sofa edge, leaning forward and cupping her knees. When I came in, she looked directly into my eyes, and after that, I could not look at anything but her face. “Asha’s away with Shakuntala,” she said. Her voice squeaked and she stopped. Anita tried saying something else, but her voice remained unnaturally high and she ceased mid-word. I sat down on the love seat across from her. “I always knew,” she began calmly. Her voice continued being high, thin, but she did not stop. “I never didn’t know you were cruel, you were merciless. Every time you touched me. Every time you made me touch you, I knew.”
I nodded. The sun coming through the living-room window covered her and the sofa with light.
“We have to live together. I can’t go anywhere else. I would if …” She stopped, and started making rapid gasping sounds, as if the possibility of a different life had overcome her. The gasps sounded like huh-huh.
For several minutes she did not say anything and just tried to control her breathing. I stared at her. Anita must have seen something defiant on my face. She shouted through her gasps, “I knew all the time!”
I nodded again.
“When you’d pretend to sleep and put my hand on your penis.” The shrill voice made her sound silly. Anita glared. I could tell that my
passivity annoyed her. “When you entered me, it hurt so much I thought I would die, that I had to die. How could I not die? And then I bled. After the first night, I was just waiting to die. Every night there was blood, and I kept thinking, I’m going to die. I won’t even have seen the Taj Mahal and I’m going to die. I won’t have put on perfume and I’m going to die.”
Instead of guilt, I felt anxiety for the lines I must speak. No matter how Anita shouted at me, the world would end only after I spoke.
“And you made it seem as if you would kill yourself if I tried to stop you. I used to think. Think seriously! What’s better, you die or me? I wanted you to die, but then I thought, What would happen to everyone else, and I was ashamed.”
I imagined how my body must have appeared to her when I was on top.
“I look at twelve-year-olds and think, I was like that. Who could do that to a twelve-year-old? You and Ma! Ma! What kind of a mother was she?” Anita stopped suddenly, as if she had just realized something. I had never known Anita was angry at Radha. “I’d kill myself if anything like that happened to Asha.”
Anita turned her palms up as if asking for a response. Was she seeking a promise that I would not go near Asha? I nodded. I waited for her to become less angry so I could make that vow out loud. Once she became quiet, I thought, I should say, What I did was astonishingly evil. But I said nothing.
“Remember when I had just got married and you were sick and went to the hospital? That’s when I realized how I hated you. I thought about killing you all the time then … Ma with her guru. You with your drunken crying … Say something.”
Only from her stare did I know I had to open my mouth. I couldn’t. “Say something,” she repeated. I wanted to turn my head, look toward anything but Anita. I kept gazing at her. “I knew it was your fault but once I started touching you, I was helping you be wrong. I thought I was the worst person in the world.”
No, I thought, I am the worst person. I remained silent.
“Say, ‘I’m a dog.’ Say, ‘Forgive me. I am an animal,’ and I will forgive you. Say, ‘I am a rabid dog that should be beaten to death with bricks.’ Admit it and we can go on. Admit it!” I started saying something, but only a hiss came out. “Say, ‘I am stinking shit.’” I had never heard Anita curse before and this made her anger mysterious. I kept silent. “Say, ‘I know what I did and I should die.’” Anita’s pupils were moving wildly. My mouth wouldn’t open. She continued speaking this way even after it was obvious I was not able to say anything. When she stopped, she began making the gasping sounds again.
I don’t know when Anita started screaming. It might have been two minutes after she stopped speaking or it might have been fifteen minutes. It started as a low note, a stretched sigh. Then it began sharpening, acquiring shape, as it gathered more and more pain to itself. I sat there and watched her sitting across from me. Her palms were facing up on her knees, and her mouth was half open. When the scream could rise no further, Anita began slapping her thighs with the backs of her hands. She slapped them quick and hard.
I thought I had to speak. Instead, I stood. Feeling ashamed, dreamy, caught in the inevitability of what felt like a fresh crime, I went and closed the doors to her bedroom and the common room. Then I came back and sat down. A moment later I rose again and shuttered the windows. Then I returned to the love seat. The light in the room was gray now.
“Ohh!” Anita continued. I still couldn’t speak.
FIVE
Several days after Rajiv Gandhi’s death, my office reopened. When I arrived, I found Mr. Bajwa, Mr.
Gupta’s former moneyman, sitting outside my door on the peon’s low stool. He was reading a religious novel about the martyrdom of one of the Sikh saints. I had not seen him for nearly a year and at first did not recognize him. He wore a white kurta pajama, a white turban, and, in a brocaded scabbard at his side, a dagger. His beard hung free. When we worked together, except for his turban, Mr. Bajwa had been one of the least reverent Sikhs I knew. Mr. Bajwa came again the next morning because Mr. Gupta had not been at the office during his first visit.
“Sonia Gandhi will have to become Prime Minister,” Mr. Bajwa said. He was sitting leaning forward, with his fingertips on my desk, trying to get me to meet his gaze. Mr. Mishra, with whom he was arguing, sat beside him in front of my desk. Mr. Bajwa was at the office because he wanted Mr. Gupta’s reassurance that Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination would not stop him from protecting Mr. Bajwa against the corruption charges he faced. I was Mr. Gupta’s man and so was receiving the attention he would rather have lavished on Mr. Gupta. I tried to avoid his eyes and kept glancing around the room. All four ceiling fans were spinning. “People, when they think of Congress, think Nehrus. There are only two Nehrus of the right age, Sanjay Gandhi’s wife and Rajiv Gandhi’s. They can’t bring in Maneka Gandhi because she’s Sikh, and she got pregnant before she married Sanjay Gandhi. Besides, Sanjay Gandhi was never Prime Minister. Sonia Gandhi is left.”
“Better Italian than Sikh?” Mr. Mishra asked.
“She held Indira Gandhi’s head in her lap as she died.” Mr. Bajwa’s voice rose at mentioning the assassination. For me it was hard to think of Indira Gandhi’s assassination as separate from government-supported massacres of Sikhs. Buses were stopped during bright day with the military a hundred meters away and Sikh passengers were dragged out and murdered.
The abjectness of Mr. Bajwa identifying so completely with those who had power over him stirred my anxieties. Even with the window behind me shut and the thick curtain drawn, the sun outside was a steady pressure on the back of my head. Ever since I had sensed Radha sitting beside me while I prayed for her, I had found myself automatically mouthing prayers, and now one began passing in fragments through my head.
“Congress might have just won if Rajiv Gandhi were alive, but with him dead, half the reason to vote Congress is gone,” Mr. Mishra said softly. “I think Sonia Gandhi is going to be Congress president. I am certain of this.” He smiled and nodded, as if sweetening unhappy news. “Congress has to pick a Nehru, and Sonia Gandhi could not say no to such an appeal. But there isn’t going to be any pity vote.”
Mr. Bajwa lifted himself slightly out of his chair in his eagerness to respond, but he continued looking primarily at me. “Congress is still strong in the villages. The villager knows the Nehrus have always been there. He knows the other parties are no better. The villager is most of India, no matter what city people think. I know … I know … that several village women have hanged themselves in unhappiness over the loss of Rajiv Gandhi.” After his claim about the suicides, Mr. Bajwa looked directly at both of us, as if challenging us to doubt him.
“Mr. Bajwa, how many Sikhs did Congress kill after Indira Gandhi’s assassination?” Mr. Mishra asked.
“Have I forgotten?” Mr. Bajwa answered, clutching his beard. To me it seemed rude to make the consequences of his position explicit.
Mr. Mishra didn’t respond. It appeared as if he finally felt shame at arguing with someone who was nearly crazy.
A peon entered the room with a folded paper in his hand and walked toward me. “Who sent it?” Mr. Bajwa asked.
“For Karanji,” the peon said, handing me the note. He was a new man, thin and young, with teeth stained rust from betel leaf.
The note said, “Come see me when he goes.” It was unsigned, but the writing was in Mr. Gupta’s elegant hand.
“From? From?” said Mr. Bajwa to the peon. The peon left without answering.
“Mr. Gupta?” asked Mr. Bajwa. I could not think of anyone else to name and so nodded yes. He looked above my head and cleared his throat. “What didn’t I do for him?”
All this sadness made me think it might be easy to go insane. I wondered if insanity was like being drunk.
“I need kindness,” Mr. Bajwa said.
A little later Mr. Mishra stood, announced, “I am going home to sleep,” and departed.
Mr. Bajwa’s gaze fell back on me. I was too ashamed to lo
ok away. After a moment he began singing a movie song: “Oaths, promises, love, loyalty. Words only. What can you do with words? Nobody is anybody’s.” He did not sing it well, somehow even getting the rhymes slightly off. A cheery laugh started in me. The laugh, along with a need to pray, had begun visiting me in my dark room. I imagined interrupting Mr. Bajwa to tell him that he was pitching his voice incorrectly, and then I would start to sing the song and make him try to copy me. “When everything has turned to dust …” Several times Mr. Bajwa forgot the words and just hummed the tune. As I laughed, I also started panicking. I became cold. The chill was a new symptom. I was beginning to find my symptoms comforting.
“Please, Mr. Bajwa,” I murmured. “You were not innocent.”
Mr. Bajwa, still singing, got up and walked to the window behind me. He pulled the curtain aside slightly and looked out. He finished the song and began it again. This time he remembered more of the lyrics. As he sang, he walked around the room, moving close to the wall. When he reached the door, he opened it and left.
Mr. Gupta’s office is at the end of a gallery that is open to the sun on one side. As I went to him, I wondered what would happen to me if the BJP won. There was probably a note in the BJP’s files on Mr. Gupta and the money I helped him arrange for Congress. They might try using him to raise money for them. Opposition parties are always hungry for bribes. But the BJP might decide they wanted someone without a complicated history. Any bookkeeper could look at our registers and see that our numbers were gibberish. No matter who won, it was unavoidable that over the next few months several people in our building would face investigations. The sheer activity of a campaign leads to paperwork that, once initiated, takes on its own existence.
Fear stirred in me and it felt like sadness. I stopped and looked out at the dirt courtyard. The wind was sliding sheets of dust back and forth across the yard. My emotions over the last few days had become undifferentiated. Horror could come as chuckling or as grief. Love might be like anger. Above all this was the certainty that I would be punished. A BJP victory could be a way for this to occur.
