An Obedient Father

by Akhil Sharma

  I knocked on Mr. Gupta’s door. He called out that it was unlocked. Mr. Gupta was wearing a deep blue T-shirt and a file was open before him on his desk. His room, more than that of any other officer of his grade, looked as if it belonged in a private house. The walls were lined with bookcases. A light blue carpet with geometric patterns covered the floor, and instead of an enormous air cooler stuck in the window exhaling mildew, he had a small air conditioner. His windows were washed each week, and the light they let in was fresh.

  I closed the door. I wondered whether he had summoned me because of how I had behaved at the wedding reception. The relative unimportance of this struck me as amusing. Nervousness made me repeat Ram Ram Ram in my head. Even God’s name was amusing.

  Mr. Gupta nodded to a chair and, once I sat down, said, “Tell me about the money.”

  “We have fourteen hundred and eighty-two thousand in twenty-three accounts. I am nearly done with my list of givers. There are one or two big ones left and some small ones.” As I spoke, a smile unfurled across Mr. Gupta’s face. The smile reached the sides of his cheeks and stiffened so that he appeared dazed. For him to take such personal pleasure was unusual, and I knew that some punishment, vicious and complete, was imminent. “Maybe we’ll have a little over twenty-two lakhs by the end.”

  For a moment after I stopped talking, Mr. Gupta kept smiling and staring at me. “Twenty-two lakhs.” I noticed his handsomeness, his exactly curved lips.

  “Are you political, Mr. Karan?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Who will win the election?” The question was presented in an abrupt interrogatory style. Mr. Gupta and I almost never talked politics, and I wondered what he was testing for.

  I thought about this for a minute and then said the obvious. “The BJP won’t win a majority. Their power is in the Hindu belt. Congress can’t win a majority either. They’ve lost too much ground the last few years. But if they want to rule, they can form a coalition.”

  “Can’t the BJP form a coalition?”

  “It’s difficult to compromise when you are so extreme.” The BJP’s leader, Advani, had recently begun seeking the destruction of the Babri mosque, claiming God Ram had been born there.

  “Will the BJP win the cities?”

  I wondered at the interrogation. “That’s where they are strongest.”

  “Why?” Mr. Gupta asked, and as I tried reasoning this through, he began laughing. Then he leaned across his desk, and for a moment I thought he was going to take my hands. “Some people from the BJP came to me a few days ago. They asked if I wanted to stand for Parliament from Delhi.” He laughed again.

  I couldn’t believe he would betray Congress, so I felt awe instead of fright. I had always known Mr. Gupta was much more widely and deeply connected than my work for him indicated. He had the type of personality that made people, older and more powerful people than he, ask his advice. But for a major party to ask Mr. Gupta to represent it was like one of my relatives who had bought a medical license discovering the cure for some baffling disease.

  “The news isn’t that good, though,” Mr. Gupta said, leaning back in his chair and putting his hands on his stomach. His smile became wry and self-mocking. “Advani was going to run for Parliament in two districts. One from Delhi. Insurance that if for some reason he lost in one district, he might still win in the other. Now Congress is standing Rajesh Khanna against him in Delhi, and even Advani doesn’t want to go against a movie star.” Mr. Gupta’s smile vanished. He removed his hands from his stomach. “Nobody wants to go against Rajesh Khanna. Also, the BJP wants someone who can bring his own money to the campaign. Anybody who has money already wants easier competition.”

  At first I didn’t understand what money he was talking about. “Your family’s money?” I asked, though I was not certain Mr. Gupta came from a rich family. “Congress’s money!” The fact that he appeared to be considering cheating Congress filled me with terror. There were men I had met who would come for us with guns if Mr. Gupta went on. A decade ago, a man in our office building who collected for Congress had embezzled some of what he had raised. His body was found in the water tank on the roof of the building he lived in. I knew Mr. Gupta thought he was invulnerable. “You can’t win against Rajesh Khanna.”

  Mr. Gupta raised his hands a few inches into the air, turned them palms up, and brought them down onto the arms of his chair. The injustice of this shrug converted my panic to anger.

  “You can’t win,” I said. I thought of turning him over to Congress, but then the BJP might take revenge.

  “If Sonia Gandhi runs, I can’t win.”

  “Think what it means when the president of the BJP doesn’t want to run against someone.”

  “Advani probably would have won. Rajesh Khanna hasn’t had a hit movie in ten years.”

  “Who knows your name? Most of the people in this building don’t know you.”

  “Rajesh Khanna is divorced and his wife sleeps with Sunny Deol. A man like that is not a man. No one will vote for someone like that.” Mr. Gupta spoke casually, offering me the details as if he were handing me photographs of places where he had traveled.

  “I thought you were smart.” I had never before spoken this insultingly to him.

  Mr. Gupta raised his hands off the arms of the chair and brought them down. “If the BJP is going to win the cities, even Rajesh Khanna can lose. Besides, I have money.” After a moment he said, “Go to Mr. Maurya. Tell him the BJP has asked me to run for Parliament. He must know what the parties are planning to spend.” I remembered taunting Mr. Maurya at Mr. Gupta’s party. When I did not stand, Mr. Gupta said, “Think about me being in Parliament and you being rich. That will make you feel better.”

  “It doesn’t.”

  The alley Mr. Maurya lives in is perhaps five feet wide, with a narrow half-meter-deep ditch running along one side. Chickens were wandering about and many of the doors to the houses were open for air. I passed one door, which led into a dark windowless room where an old woman sat on a cot stringing firecrackers. Several years ago Mr. Maurya moved out of Old Delhi to one of the posh colonies, but his wife had found it too lonesome there and forced him to return.

  Beside Mr. Maurya’s door was a metal plaque that had MAURYA ENTERPRISES etched on it in Hindi, Gujarati, and English. This was the only distinguishing mark on the gray concrete wall behind which he lived. I rang the doorbell. I wondered if Mr. Gupta would be angry at me for how I had acted at the party. A young girl let me in.

  The wall facing the alley goes up three stories and has windows with curtains that make it look like the face of an ordinary house. Then I stepped through the wall into a wide courtyard that was open to the sun. The house itself was two stories and painted a pale yellow. It had a broad veranda with large potted money plants. Five or six men were sitting on the veranda reading newspapers and drinking tea. The girl led me to them and I sat at their edge.

  Some of the men appeared to know one another and were talking. The others kept to themselves. Tea arrived for me. As I sipped it, I realized that even in the short time since I had left the office, the clear precise fear Mr. Gupta had created had become muddled with the confused unhappy terrors that had been with me for days. I was like a man in the Arctic who is dying of cold and feels any increase in wind only momentarily. I wanted the responsibility of feeling out Mr. Maurya removed from me. I thought of putting my tea on the ground, standing, casually taking off all my clothes, and then sitting down to finish the cup. I smiled at the idea that Mr. Gupta had trusted an almost insane person with an important mission to a gangster. I sang God Hanumanji’s song silently.

  Occasionally a man came out and one of the men sitting with me followed him into the house. I saw one of Mr. Maurya’s sons and waved to him, and he nodded back. Everyone appeared so serious that I wanted to shout, “This is nothing to laugh at.”

  About forty minutes after I arrived, the man came for me. The rooms close to the veranda were given over to busine
ss and everybody in them was typing or working through files. Mr. Maurya could not tolerate laziness. When I was last here, several years ago, it was the middle of a particularly slow afternoon. That time, as I talked to Mr. Maurya, we walked through his offices so he could oversee his employees scrubbing the house clean.

  I followed my guide up a white staircase onto the roof. I asked God that Mr. Maurya give me news with which to discourage Mr. Gupta. If Mr. Gupta ran, Congress would want revenge.

  The roof had an unpainted brick wall eight or ten feet high running along all sides except the one overlooking the courtyard. As soon as I stepped onto the roof, I began sweating heavily and had to squint.

  “Hello, Mr. Karan,” Mr. Maurya called out. “Still drunk?” He was sitting on a straw mat against the wall. Above him was an awning made of wire and covered with a printed bedsheet. Mr. Maurya wore only a white kurta and underwear, and his left leg was in a cast which went above his knee.

  “What happened, sir?” My guide left as I walked to Mr. Maurya.

  “The day Rajiv Gandhi died I rode all over Delhi on my motorcycle to see if everything was fine with my properties. In the evening, when I returned, there was some oil on the ground.” Mr. Maurya skimmed his hand through the air to show his motorcycle slipping. He smiled. I stood before him till he patted the mat. Then I sat down at the foot of his unbroken leg. The thinness of his legs surprised me, because he had a large stomach. “So I’m giving my bones sun. I was carrying a gun, and when I fell, the gun went sliding. Some boy, some ten-year-old, grabbed it and ran.” Mr. Maurya picked up a bottle of coconut oil that was sitting on top of an iron icebox beside him and passed it to me. “Oil my leg,” he said, glancing toward his good one. My chuckling began again at being ordered to do this embarrassing job.

  Mr. Maurya closed his eyes and tilted his head back. When I first met him, Mr. Maurya had laughed so easily and so hard his eyes would tear. Because my stomach was so large, I had to get on my knees to oil his legs. I said, “The BJP came to Mr. Gupta and asked him to run for Parliament.”

  Mr. Maurya did not respond for several minutes. My undershirt and shirt were sticking to me from sweat. In the middle of the silence, he tapped his left thigh and I stood, switched to that side, and began kneading and oiling it. His underwear was bunched, letting me see part of a testicle. I imagined grabbing his crotch. I wanted to hear him yelp.

  “Is this the Advani seat?” he asked.

  “Yes.” I was not surprised at his knowledge. Again Mr. Maurya was quiet. Then he opened the icebox, took out a Campa Cola, and, without offering me one, started sipping. This must also be part of my punishment, I thought.

  “Did you know Mr. Gupta’s father was in the Indian Administrative Service?”

  “No.” I was amazed. IAS officers were as rare as lottery winners.

  “He was almost a Secretary.”

  Mr. Gupta had achieved so much, grabbing control of all the education department’s money-raising, that I had never imagined he could be a failure relative to his own family. Mr. Gupta’s vast connections now made sense.

  “He died three, four years ago.” Mr. Maurya closed his eyes once more and spoke slowly, thoughtfully. “Mr. Gupta applied but did not get into the IAS. His older brother did but didn’t like it and is now the president of British Petroleum—Egypt.” Since there was no reason for Mr. Maurya to be giving out free information, I realized he must have some purpose for telling me this. My sense of Mr. Gupta began to shift. “Mr. Gupta is smart, but not too smart. He thinks that because his father and his brother have been part of the world of the great, the worst will not be done to him.” Mr. Maurya opened his eyes suddenly, as if to surprise me. I wondered if the people who worked for him were impressed by these mannerisms. “Maybe he’s right, but after Rajiv Gandhi nobody can feel confident.”

  Mr. Maurya adjusted his position and wiped his face with a towel.

  “Did the BJP offer him the spot definitely, or do they want to know how much money he can bring?”

  I then understood that Mr. Maurya had begun negotiating the price for helping Mr. Gupta. “It was a definite offer,” I said, though I did not know.

  “If Sonia Gandhi runs he has to spend two hundred, three hundred lakhs. Otherwise, maybe one hundred.” The amounts were so enormous I could not imagine them. I started smiling. “You don’t want him to run?” Mr. Maurya asked.

  “The BJP is very strong,” I said, trying to hide my feelings behind words.

  “Congress has to form a coalition and win. It has to. None of the possible Congress leaders are famous enough—even Sonia Gandhi—to lead an opposition. They all need to be at the center for a while so that people get used to seeing them as the source of power and gifts.”

  I was delighted. I swept my hands down Mr. Maurya’s leg to his foot and kneaded it. I negotiated automatically. “Congress isn’t strong in the cities. They have no advantage, as in the villages.”

  “Would you rather watch Mr. Gupta sing and dance or Rajesh Khanna?” Mr. Maurya paused and watched me. “The reason Mr. Gupta is going to run is that if he doesn’t and Congress loses seats, and the BJP takes over Delhi, which it will, he’ll have corruption charges against him. Only if he wins his election is he safe.”

  To be given evidence that Mr. Gupta would run jolted my fears.

  “It all depends on what Sonia Gandhi does.”

  I did not respond and kept massaging his legs.

  Mr. Maurya let me know I was to leave by handing me the empty cold-drink bottles and telling me to take them downstairs. I stood and said namaste. “Ask my cashier for fifty thousand rupees. Tell Mr. Gupta I am happy for him.”

  After all the confusing talk, the half lakh spun me around some more, because it suggested that Mr. Maurya thought Mr. Gupta was worth betting on.

  Mr. Gupta held the wads of rupees as he sat behind his desk and listened to me. Afterward he said, “Either Mr. Maurya thinks that I might win and that Congress isn’t strong enough to be too angry about his support or he thinks that he can buy off Congress’s anger by donating to Congress as well as to me.” I was pleased to hear Mr. Gupta’s caution. “You didn’t tell him I have Congress’s money?”

  “No.” I wondered how he could imagine Mr. Maurya would not know where the money was coming from.

  “He must guess. He wants the business I can send his way.”

  Rajiv Gandhi’s funeral was the next day, and the city would be closed, making it unlikely for me to find anyplace outside the flat where I could hide from Anita. Once I arrived at the flat I would probably stay in my room till the office opened again. Because of this, after leaving Mr. Gupta, I went to eat.

  I ate at a dosa place on a street corner in Kamla Nagar, not far from the Big Circle. It was missing the two walls which should have fronted the street. The restaurant was busy and I had to share a bench and table with two boys who sat with motorcycle helmets at their feet and ate plate after plate of ice cream.

  I ordered a masala dosa and, before starting to eat, clasped my hands and asked God to rescue me. I did not know what I meant by rescue. I was not requesting the strength to talk with Anita and cope with whatever came after. I only wished everything to be erased. Nothing else would be sufficient. Even though I was hungry, I found no relief in the greasy, spicy potatoes or the coconut chutney. Usually, as soon as food entered my mouth, something inside me loosened and swelled like a sail. I should have been especially hungry because, between Rajiv Gandhi’s death and the office opening, I had eaten little, only the small amounts of food left in the refrigerator overnight. Yesterday morning, as soon as I escaped the flat, I had gone to a dhaba and eaten the equivalent of a lunch and a half of parathas. But since then, even a few bites tamped my appetite. Once the fiercest part of my hunger dulled, I became too restless to continue chewing.

  I stopped halfway through the dosa. It was as if my saliva was bitter. I leaned back in the bench and tried to find the humor that had been helping me till now. No absurd images
floated up to my consciousness. I prayed again, but no matter how much I invoked God, I would have to go home, where Anita would look at me and not talk and Asha would stay away because she had been warned I was sick and contagious.

  From the doorway of the flat, I saw Anita sitting lotus-fashion on a love seat in the living room. She had on her rectangular eyeglasses and was reading a newspaper. When I entered the flat, she looked at me briefly and, turning to an Asha whom I could not see, squeaked “Stay” in the pinched voice which had been with her since she had confronted me.

  I crossed their bedroom and entered the living room. I was terror-stricken. I had not spoken a word to Anita since the afternoon of the anniversary of Radha’s death. I had tried to avoid even seeing them. The last two days I had bathed and shaved long before either woke, and had left for work quickly, with my head down. Now Asha was on the sofa reading a children’s magazine. She wore olive shorts and a white T-shirt. As I left the living room for my room, Asha waved at me as if I were going on a journey. I fluttered a hand. Anita neither glanced in my direction nor spoke, but she watched Asha intently.

  I went into my room. I noticed that under my cot was a small clay water pot and the glass I usually drank from. Anita must have put them there. I won’t even have to come out for water now, I thought. I closed the door, chained it, took off my clothes, and, wanting to express my anguish somehow, dropped them to the floor instead of hanging them up. I lay down. My fear settled and transformed into despair.

  I listened to music on a transistor radio. I slept. The line of sun beneath my door changed colors and receded. I read from old magazines I had collected for photos they contained of places I had been. The Taj Mahal under a full moon, standing out clear and bright as if it had been painted onto the night. It looked more a ghost than those the guards claim to see dancing in the gardens. I heard Asha and Anita eating dinner in the common room. To listen to the sounds of plates and bowls shifting, spoons rubbing against steel, Anita’s high-pitched voice meeting Asha’s and to lie on my cot in my dark room made me feel buried alive.