Even when he rose, twenty-five years later, to become the manager of the hall—with Ali Baba dead and Govind retired—he did not stop slinking into the hall every minute he could escape his duties of accounting and paperwork and telephone calls to distributors, and the management of VIPs and the canteen stall and the cycle stand contractor. Only when he was in there, with the long-necked fans whirring, the sawing hum of the projector, the mega-sized stars in splendid motion—declaiming, singing, dancing, loving, fighting—did he feel safe and happy.
Ghulam had left his house and the basti soon after he had begun to earn a salary. Too meek to argue, he’d quietly ducked the utensils his father flung at him, taken his mother into confidence, and rented a tiny room near Minerva. It was on the second floor of a small, hundred-square-metre house and had a nice hole-in-the-floor toilet, a brick enclosure across the terrace with a tin panel for a door and no roof. There was no kitchen—the cooking stove was on a table inside the small room—and for bathing you used the open terrace.
The house belonged to Bhatiaji, a refugee from Rawalpindi who was piecing back his life by selling bolts of cloth off his cycle. Firdaus had to put in a personal word and stand guarantee for young Ghulam.
The first day the Muslim boy moved in, Bhatiaji—stocky, with unshaven jowls, and a Hitler moustache—Bhatiaji called him into his front room and without inviting him to sit took a leathery scabbard off the wall, unsheathed a long, slightly rusty sword and held it up in his pudgy hand. ‘You put one step out of line, little boy, and I will chop into pieces all the bits of you that still remain uncut. Just remember this is not fucking Pakistan, this is Hindustan!’
All the blood drained out of Ghulam and he had to lean on the door jamb to keep from falling. For the rest of his stay on the second floor—four long years—he always climbed the stairs on animal feet. His endeavour was to never encounter his landlord. Coming back was fine—it was too late for anyone to be awake in the entire mohalla. But in the mornings he was very careful, glancing anxiously around for the refugee’s cycle, before he sprinted out.
In contrast, the thuggish landlord’s family was generally kind to him. On festive days they even left mithai and halwa outside his door. The young son, Pappu, no more than thirteen, occasionally made the trek up the narrow straight steps and chatted with him. Through him Ghulam acquired details of the family and understood their journey—the death of kinsmen, the rape of kinswomen, the hacking of limbs, the loss of everything, the neurosis of the rusted sword. The boy said, ‘My father hates you. He says, “I am waiting for that katua to do something stupid so I can cut him to pieces.” ’
Inevitably, Ghulam was out of bounds for the wife and two daughters, but they always smiled at him warmly and coyly if he encountered them in the lane or at the grocer’s. In turn, when a low-traffic film was running, Ghulam left complimentary tickets with the boy. Most times only Bhatiaji and Pappu came by—Bhatiaji’s glare making jelly of Ghulam’s limbs—but on a few occasions he was thrilled to see them accompanied by the wife and the two girls—filling out their kameezes, walking with tight thighs and darting eyes, the cowl of their dupattas creating a greater allure.
For some time he thought he was in love with Kamla, the older girl. She was fair with big liquid eyes and a strong nose. When he hummed the songs from Aan and Awara, Baazi and Aar Paar, he thought of Kamla looking at him. He paced the terrace practising passionate declamations gleaned from the movies on the inexorable nature of true love beyond the pale of border, caste, class and religion. He imagined the Hitler-moustached Bhatiaji breaking down in remorse and begging forgiveness. He saw the two of them embrace and the lovely woman in the middle—daughter of one, beloved of the other—shed tears that made her soft cheeks shine like morning dew. But he was also fearful that her father had sensed their romance and was whetting his sword. Ghulam took to firmly latching both the doors to his room—the one on the stairs and the other that opened on to the terrace.
The wordless romance ended when the girl was married off to a stout young man from Delhi who came on a seedy white mare with a frenzied band and troupes of wildly gyrating young men and patriarchs, wearing big pink turbans with cocky furls, who fired double-barrelled rifles into the air right outside the house, to lay claim to the bride. Ghulam was not even invited to the wedding and had to witness it peering over the parapet. Pappu brought up some food and goodies for the heartbroken lover on the terrace and reported what his father had said: ‘I hope one of these bullets catches that katua sitting on top of our head.’
Ghulam did not eat the wedding food Pappu had brought, and sat up all night on the terrace under the shifting stars, listening to the pandit’s rhythmic chanting of the wedding rites. When it grew cold, past midnight, he brought out his blanket and tied a gamchha around his head. Hundreds of tragic film scenes and sad songs played in his mind. He felt the sorrow of this night would weigh his life down forever.
When Kamla left in the wee hours of the morning, draped in jewellery and layers of red heavy with tinsel, amid the wails of her family, he craned his neck to see if she would glance up once, just once, to reaffirm the truth of their love. He knew this from the films: that even unsanctioned love, unarticulated love, was loaded with deep legitimacies.
In that hour before dawn the light was uneven and in the flurry of crying-hustling escorts it was not easy to see, but he would have had to be deluded beyond love to imagine that she even angled her neck in his direction.
The next day—and the next week—he wept in the privacy of the cinema hall through every show. The film playing was Mother India but his heart was full of scenes from Pyaasa. He saw himself as Guru Dutt, cheated of his love, in lyrical mourning, writing poetry, wandering the streets, rescuing abandoned prostitutes. The lump in his throat would become an unswallowable rock each time Nargis—her oxen dead, tears streaming down her beloved face—began to pull the plough herself, and all the images of her and Mala Sinha and Waheeda Rahman and Guru Dutt and the people from his basti and the lovely married-off Kamla became one tragic mush.
Some days later, Ghulam crossed Bhatiaji’s younger daughter in the lane. Parvati’s glossy black hair ran in a thick plait down her spine, like a splendid cobra. When she looked at him from the corner of her eyes Ghulam found it difficult to breathe. That was when he suddenly realized she was the one for him, the older sister had only been a decoy, a test of his true love. He knew this from the movies, of course, but now he had evidence of how incredibly devious the gods of love could be. To put forward Kamla when it had actually been Parvati all along!
After months of being in a daze of love, of exchanging burning glances and experiencing the whole hall light up like Diwali each time she visited it, one day Ghulam plucked up the courage to venture into Meena Bazaar and buy a dozen glass bangles—maroon and red with spangles of silver.
Two evenings later, he lured Pappu up to his eyrie for a conversation. When the boy asked him about the bangles spread out on his bed, Ghulam said his cousin who made them had sent across some and since he had no use of them why didn’t Pappu just take them for his sister.
That night Ghulam could not sleep and from early next morning he waited for a sign. All day at work the conviction grew in him that she would show up at the Talkies, daringly wearing the bangles and her feelings. Through every show he lingered in the foyer, afraid he would somehow, tragically, as in the movies, miss the moment when she arrived at his doorstep. When the evening show began and she still had not shown up, he sought Ali Baba’s permission and slowly walked home. Songs played in his head. He was Guru Dutt, lit masterfully in the shadows, questioning the universe.
He was sitting on his charpoy, eyes moist with heartache, when Bhatiaji kicked in the door, his Hitler moustache quivering and the rusted sword held aloft. Behind him were Hukumat Singh—the Sikh refugee from next door—and his two teenage sons in tight black patkas, twirling bamboo sticks. In Hitlerji’s left hand was the set of spangled bangles, clutched so tight that th
ey fanned out like the feathers of a peacock.
Ghulam’s bowels became water. The first image that came to his mind was of Imroze’s hacked limb bobbing up and down like a railway signal. He stood, transfixed by Hitlerji’s burning eyes, when Hukumat Singh stepped forward. The sardar’s slap exploded in his head like a comet, all coruscating light and noise. When the world cleared he was on the floor and Hitlerji was holding Hukumat back, as he slowly clenched and unclenched his ringing hand. When, out of politeness, Ghulam tried to struggle to his feet, Hitlerji kicked him in his stomach. The young man became a pretzel on the floor and began to spin. To complete the quorum the two sardar boys stepped forward and delivered a kick each. The pretzel spun faster, emitting a range of noises.
Hitlerji stopped the pretzel’s spin with the tip of his rusted sword. The only sound emerging from the tightly rolled circle of pain and fear was a low mewl like the whine of a run-over dog. Leaning on his sword the refugee landlord said, ‘Behanchod katuay, give me your hand!’
Through his tears Ghulam saw the railway signal arm Imroze had returned with: up, down, up, down. The older sardar boy kicked the pretzel where its buttocks were. Ghulam began to blubber incoherently for mercy.
The sardar—his beard corralled in a shining net—held Ghulam’s left arm at its frail wrist and prised open his twig fingers. Hitlerji placed the flaring peacock of coloured glass in his left hand on top of it and slipped all the twelve bangles down the Muslim boy’s forearm: ‘Behanchod katuay, from now on you will wear these every damn day of your life! If I see you without them even once I will cut your entire fucking arm off! Maaderchod wants to be a Romeo!’
When they were at the door, the landlord turned back and said, ‘And don’t think of running away—I will chase you till the end of the world, chop your balls off and shove them up your traitorous ass!’
The pretzel moved slowly and moaned in response.
Ghulam was too scared to tell anyone of the assault and too battered to go to the Talkies next day. Yet, through the pain of his bruised body, he imagined Parvati weeping silently in the house below, begging her father for the gift of her love. In the morning he tore his old gamchha into two and took one half with him when he went down the stairs to go to work. At the corner of the lane, using his teeth and his right hand, he tied it over the clutch of bright bangles on his arm. To the queries of Ali Baba and his colleagues he said it was a good-luck charm given him by the mendicant who tended the pir’s grave by the Nainital highway.
In the year that followed, Ghulam developed a permanent case of nerves—ready to whip off the cloth if he spotted the moustache anywhere. Each night as he entered his home lane he would untie the gamchha and let the bangles flash. When he walked up the steps he almost rattled them, hoping the landlord would see him holding fast to the covenant. Sometimes he did not have to because the refugee would be sitting in the tight porch by the gate whetting his sword bloodily on a brick, a steel glass of water next to him. He would look at the Muslim boy as if assessing how many pieces he could ideally chop him into. Always—always—Ghulam’s stomach became water, and he had to open his door and rush to the roofless latrine on the terrace.
Through the endless fear raining on him, in delusory moments before he fell asleep, he sometimes imagined the landlord’s heart melting at the unfair savagery he had meted out and the grace with which the young man had suffered it. In that moment of honour he saw the stocky marauder clasp him to his bosom, smash the humiliating bangles, beg for forgiveness, and put in his hand the hand of his daughter.
Yet, even in the confines of his room, in the cocoon of his bed, Ghulam did not dare remove the green and red bangles. Hitlerji was capable of suddenly breaking down the door in the middle of the night, or even glaring over the wall of the latrine. The fear ran so deep that he did not remove them even when he went to the basti. He told his family it was a putrid infection, being treated by the city doctor, too tender to be touched, too grotesque to see.
Through it all he retained faith in his love. How could it be otherwise given the smile in Parvati’s eyes each time she saw him? He knew she had been profoundly moved by the gift of the bangles and the penance he was doing for them. On the other hand, Pappu never crept up the stairs any more and his eyes hardened in an unpleasant way when he saw Ghulam. One day when he handed him two tickets for Naya Daur, the boy threw them back at him, saying, ‘We don’t accept gifts from traitors.’ Ghulam said, ‘I am your friend!’ The boy said, ‘My father says you all are friends by daylight and in the dark you will stick a knife into us.’
Ghulam wanted to drag the boy to Minerva to show him Dilip Kumar singing the anthem of a new noble India, ‘Saathi haath badhana, saathi re.…’ But Ghulam was too weak and the boy was too small, and his father was pouring poison into him at a speed that nothing could possibly extract.
One evening Pappu came to the Talkies with a summons from his father. Inevitably Ghulam’s bowels turned to water and he had to lean against the wall to steady himself. When he reached the house half an hour later, with night falling, he immediately noticed the bustle. Half a dozen men hung around the gate and in the thin veranda of the house several older people sat in what seemed like rented chairs. Everyone was eating and drinking—tea and samosas—and peals of laughter were doing the rounds. Curving his arms around his back—the right hand clasped tight over the jangle of glass on his left forearm—Ghulam stood by the gutter outside the house, self-conscious and afraid.
Long minutes passed and Ghulam had typically fallen inside the well of his own inner life and stopped seeing what was happening around when the landlord’s rough voice hit him. ‘Oye haramzade, come here! I’ve been waiting to show these fine people the specimen I have living up on the roof!’
The next ten minutes were raw wounds—never to heal. He could never bring himself to recall how he went into the room, how it arranged itself in a circle around him. All he remembered was his complete nakedness, the smallness of his incredible shame, as the refugee from Rawalpindi held up his left arm and shook it, jangling his adornments. ‘See! Out there they pulled out our intestines and wrapped them around our necks, but here they wear glass bangles!’
Amid a great outpouring of noise and goodwill the assemblage left late in the night. They came back in a month—white mare, drums, crackers, rifle shots—to take Parvati away. This time Ghulam latched his door and crouched behind the parapet for twenty-four hours, listening to his heart hammer.
At the end of that week, Ghulam went to the basti and put his head in his mother’s lap and cried like a baby. In disgust his father hawked and spat and walked off to the tamarind tree. ‘His job has made him a eunuch! Marry him off before he becomes a dancing girl himself!’
The girl chosen for him was from Moradabad, from a family of brass craftsmen. Fatima had frizzy hair and was as scrawny like him, all bones and edges: not at all like the fleshy Kamla or the juicy Parvati. Yet the first time he sank into her he fell deep in love. The poetry of the Talkies had so primed him to the idea of romance that if he had found a statue in his room he would have discovered an intense passion for it. Fatima had never been inside a school, and knew nothing except cooking and cleaning and sewing and darning. She would have had trouble naming the century she lived in, or the prime minister of the country.
For a time Fatima lived with her mother-in-law in the basti, and Ghulam visited her every weekend for some frantic fumbling. Whenever he could, he also took her to the Talkies where they became all hands and moans. But soon he began to crave the comfort and security of her bony body on a daily basis. One day he persuaded Ali Baba to speak to his landlord. He stood outside the living-room while Baba went in. Strangely, Bhatiaji did not jump on to his horse and unsheathe his rusty sword. Indifferently, vaguely, he said, ‘Yes, sure, let him. If he won’t get his own wife whose will he get—the neighbour’s?’ Then when Baba had reached the door, he called out, ‘But if he makes one more Musalman on my roof I’ll chop his cock off.’
When he stepped out the threshold of the house, the cautions became even more feverish. Ride carefully. Don’t talk to strangers. Steer clear of arguments. Never tell anyone where you live. You have no religion. You have no caste. You have no politics. You are just an Indian. Don’t mingle with the poor. Don’t mingle with the rich. Don’t mingle with older boys. Don’t mingle with younger boys. Never get into any tangles with girls. Actually, never talk to any girls. Be careful with the sardars, be careful with the vendors, be careful with the policemen, be careful with the padres. Don’t scowl at anyone. Don’t smile at anyone. Don’t anything with anyone.
Till Kabir reached class eight, all this made him a rabbit. A very timid and lonely rabbit. He even had the large ears and big scared eyes of one. But his body was like that of a cricket’s, thin and knobby, his legs and arms like burnt sticks—the legacy of his mother. He slid in and out of the missionary school quietly and sat in the front row of his class, eyes bulging, mostly in desperate incomprehension, his father’s anxieties madly multiplied by the pressures of school.
The Story of My Assassins Page 22
