by Manu Joseph
For all her charade, Miss Iyer is not a comedian. He can see that much. She is something else, something more political.
‘Sorry, I got a bit serious,’ she says, defending what she is in reality. Serious. Like comedians overplay their serious sides in their real lives, the serious often try to be amusing when they perform to an audience. That is why the world looks so awkward.
‘What I really want to say is my boyfriend left me last month,’ she says. Her audience lets out sounds of sophisticated empathy. ‘We had been together for two years. One Saturday evening last month, when we were watching a film about baboons on YouTube, he told me he was leaving me. There was no warning. “I love you too much,” he said. “And you’re always about to get into trouble. Never understood why you’re so reckless. I can’t sleep any more. I keep thinking something bad is going to happen to you. I can’t take it any more.” Which is all sweet, you know, but he also said, and that I think was the real issue, he wanted to “be free”. He found me suffocating, which I am.
‘But, my delicious yogi, you downward-facing dog, what did you expect? An easy love? This is how it works, sweetheart, to be in love is to agree to bondage.
‘Come back, my love. Let’s make up, twice, as usual, and faff for hours in the spoon position.
‘I suppose the point I’m trying to make here is that it looks like I am single again. And, you know what, strangely, the past few weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about Damodarbhai.’
On the dark background, which is probably a curtain, the image of ‘Damodarbhai’ appears. The son of the Sangh, the chosen one, the face that has been appointed by the patriarchs to be the mask. He is in a Nehru jacket, which needs to be renamed; his full white beard groomed and oiled, eyes shrewd, lips glistening, his grey hair more abundant than Vaid remembers. He is one of those men who suspect they are handsome. The past twelve years, since the slaughter of Muslims in Gujarat, he has been ascending across the nation. The liberals have been trying to send him to prison. They got the United States to ban his entry for crimes against humanity. But there is no evidence that indicts him, except one. Hindus adore him and they cannot explain why.
There is a grunt of a young man standing near the Patriarch. The unhappy patriot clenches his fists. ‘If she says anything about him, about our prince, if she says anything nasty about our future prime minister, I won’t spare her.’ The other patriots, too, look angry.
But Miss Iyer’s audience boos Damodarbhai. She asks people to calm down. When silence returns, she points to the image behind her and says, ‘Look at this man. There is a reason why some people call him India’s Putin. Look at this man-man. He is the exact opposite of my father. When my dad walks into a room, he knows nobody wants to sleep with him. Just look at him. How tragic for women that he has chosen to be celibate. He says he has always been celibate. How weird, between the Pope and Damodarbhai, two virgins rule half the world.
‘This is a man who knows he is extraordinary and life is merely a slow confirmation. If a smart soldier were to go up to him and whisper, “Chief, I am from the future. The machines have taken over the world and you are mankind’s last stand. You sent me back in time on a mission,” Damodarbhai would totally believe him.
‘And I don’t really think he is as evil as people make him out to be. I don’t believe he is India’s most dangerous man. He did not ask a mob of Hindus to slaughter Muslims. Damodarbhai did not send the thugs who massacred and hacked and raped, and burnt children alive. There is not a shred of evidence. Hundreds of millions of Hindus know that. That’s why they worship him. Because he is innocent.’
In sarcasm one says the exact opposite of what one means. It is the second-lowest form of humour, it is too easy. Through such low devices, though, she rebukes a nation that has fallen in love with Damodarbhai. Is she then one of them? Yet another young woman who, like the State, is the actuality of an ethical idea?
Her website says that she is a student of neurosurgery who has taken a one-year break before she heads to Johns Hopkins. Usually, science students do not become gadflies. Including women, despite their wounds, so many wounds. They have too much to study, and too much at stake in the present and in the future. And they are not trained in lament as students of liberal arts are. Science students are drawn to the strong. He himself was a student of physics when he joined the Sangh. Decades later, when he was chosen to lead the great organization, he was a nuclear scientist. That was a long time ago, when he was in his fifties, the infancy of old age. He has since relinquished all administrative powers. He is now just another old man in the Sangh.
‘The Sangh has returned. The Hindu Reich is coming,’ Miss Iyer says in theatrical glee. ‘Damodarbhai is here, bow to Lord Voldemort. Everyone has to choose a side.’
The Patriarch is grateful that the secular intellectual dig this time was derived from Harry Potter. Usually, it is Animal Farm.
Something about her reminds him of people who are not quite what they seem. He sits at his desk and explores her website. It turns out Miss Iyer has gained some notoriety as a performer. Sometimes, as she does in White Beard, she talks to small gatherings, which she claims is ‘Stand-up Anthropology’. How abused the idea of ‘anthropology’ is. People wish to be amusing, yet they want to be called anthropologists.
Her films are not all monologues. Most of her films, in fact, are pranks. That is where she gets confusing. She never pranks the patriots. Most of her victims are liberal eggheads.
‘Professor,’ a young patriot says. He is trying hard to be respectful but is unable to hide his excitement. ‘My friends called from Mumbai. An old building has collapsed.’
The boy now seethes.
‘This girl, she is there.’
3
Around 8:00 a.m.
THE CARS PARKED on the narrow lane have begun to nod in the surge of jostling men who have come to see the fallen building. Akhila is stranded in the mob, about fifty metres away from the site. There are only men all around her. She considers walking along the edge of the street so that she can climb a tree or a wall if trouble begins, but there is no guarantee the approach would be any safer. There are men on the walls, too, and they stand as though in queue. Behind the walls that flank the lane, in the tall residential buildings, whole families have gathered in their little balconies, looking in one direction, sipping hot drinks, combing hair, talking on their cell phones. The ones on the higher floors can probably see the rubble.
Every passing moment there are more men pouring into the lane. It is probably a very bad idea for her to be here. Some characters are taking a good look at her even as they are pressing ahead. She transfers her backpack, which contains emergency medicines, to her front, appointing the bag yet again the armour of her breasts.
She wishes J were with her. He would not have come on his own, she would have had to drag him along as she normally did to take him anywhere. He is still her background hum. Come back, honeybunch, come back to your woman and do your mussing and kissing, and be the witness, as you once were, to her days. How long before she solves this ache, which is chiefly in her temples and throat. Is that where love hurts for athletes with fabulous resting heart rates. And if the ache never leaves, would she become one of those girls who post on Facebook the sad obituary of their love, ‘Stranger, Friend, Lover, Friend, Stranger’. And would she, too, remain unhappy into her late twenties, wasting her best years in the memory of a mere adorable boy.
There is a commotion on the street, and the mob begins to flee. The men on the walls leap down and sprint. A dozen cops appear at the rear of the fleeing crowd, waving their sticks and slamming them on asses and lower limbs. It is astonishing how fast Indian men can run when they are inspired.
She stays. She stands pretending to talk on her cell phone, a careful denial of danger that usually disorientates aggressive stray dogs. The men run past her. The cops, too, ignore her. The lane is clear just like that.
She walks towards the knot of fire engines, ambulances
and television OB vans. She knows the street well but not the fallen building. The entrance to its compound is narrow, about as wide as a large car, where there are a dozen cops. It appears that entry is restricted. The building never had a gate, so the traffic police has erected a barricade. She can see the dwarf mountain of debris, about twenty feet high. There are swarms of firemen and civilians on the debris, shovelling. Near the barricade there is a tight group of reporters and photographers. There are probably not many of them about. It is unlikely the building collapse will even feature on any of the channels. All news is going to be about Damodarbhai. Also, the fallen building was a low-income kind of place.
She stands with the journalists in the hope that they might smuggle her in. The photographers have worn their beige sleeveless vests that make them look capable. Their poise and banter appear to have subdued the reporters who are with them. It is this way with calamities – the photographers have all the shine. Nobody is talking about Damodarbhai or the election results. At least not yet.
A large man who is carrying a tripod on his shoulder is in the middle of narrating a story, which is about a telephone call that a government clerk in Delhi made to his mother who was in the doomed building. She is probably still in there. The source of the information, according to the narrator, was the clerk himself. He had called his mother a minute before the building fell. The mother was telling him how expensive vegetables are these days. Then the conversation changed course.
‘I am feeling giddy, son.’
‘Maa, are you alright?’
‘I think something is happening, son.’
‘Maa?’
‘The plates in the kitchen are all falling down.’
‘Maa.’
‘The portrait of your grandfather has fallen…’
‘Maa.’
‘Your father has just fallen … He is rolling towards me.’
And the line went dead, according to the narrator.
Nobody laughs, so the narrator tapers off with, ‘One moment people are going about their lives. The next moment … boom. So sad.’
Akhila feels sorry for people whose anecdotes flop. So she lets out a faint chuckle. As it happens every time she does something inappropriate, she sees in her mind the grimace of conscientious citizens whom she always imagines to be indignant women with short legs.
THIRTEEN BODIES LIE on the corridor. Six men, four women and three children, all boys. Their eyes are open in a final dejection, some look surprised. They are covered in white dust but there is very little damage to their bodies. In fact, they are entirely unscathed, their faces especially. How must they have died? Do they have huge gashes on the backs of their skulls? They await transport to the morgue to join the other corpses who have already arrived. There are no mourners, no wails in the air. That is what is eerie. Are their families dead too, or buried inside the rubble? Or, maybe they have survived and are in good care in a hospital not far away. All Akhila can hear is the sound of drills and shovels, and of men yelling in a language that appears to have been invented this morning.
The AFD Chawl is an L-shaped three-storeyed tenement the colour of pus. It runs along two sides of an almost rectangular mud plot. The other two sides of the plot are circumscribed by the wall of an adjacent building and the rear of a high-rise. Between the wall and the high-rise is the narrow entrance to the compound from where she had infiltrated the police barricade by merging with a group of television journalists. One wing of the building has completely collapsed. The other wing is intact, its broad ground-floor corridor serving as a temporary shelter for the dead recovered from the debris. There is fear that this portion of the chawl, too, will sink in but the residents have demanded that firemen not leave the dead on the open plot in full view of hundreds of spectators who have assembled in the surrounding buildings.
There are about a hundred people inside the compound, most of them residents or relatives and friends of people who are still trapped in the debris. Some of the survivors have fresh bandages on their bodies. Many of them are lined along the wall and they look more damaged than the dead.
On the debris mound, as firemen and residents dig with machines and rods, fights break out between them.
Usually, quarrels employ efficient language and those involved appear fluent and proficient, even clever, because quarrels are repetitions of fights people have had in similar circumstances. They know what to expect, so what to say, and to say it better than they did the last time. But the fights here on the debris are hollow and incoherent because the men are in unprecedented circumstances, so their arguments too have no precedence. They have to invent new insults.
‘You are so fat, how can you call yourself a fireman,’ a resident says in Marathi. It is true. The fireman is a bit large. Most of the firemen on the debris have enormous paunches. That is how they have always been. Almost every day, on her way back from Worli Sea Face, as she passed by the Prabhadevi Fire Station, she has seen their daily drills. But they can do things men of their shape are not expected to – they can even climb poles, and only slightly slower than monkeys.
It is not surprising that the residents are overwhelmed by the novelty of the situation, but it is odd to see the firemen so dazed. They do not seem to have ever stood on the debris of a building. They look awkward. The residents complain that the firemen are too slow but nobody knows what exactly they must do. Where must they dig, and where must they dig fast?
Cops keep an eye on the compound wall because dozens of spectators have been trying to scale them. Huge crowds have gathered again on the narrow lane outside the society. Journalists who arrived late have begun to complain on Twitter that the cops are not letting them in.
Around the police barricades, there is a fresh altercation. Four men are arguing with the cops over something. They look tough, and all of them have a dash of red tilak on their foreheads. They look like patriots of some order and the cops are not too aggressive with them. Finally, they let the men enter. The four walk in and do not cast a glance at the debris. They appear to be looking for someone. When they see her, their eyes rest on her. She feels a stab of terror, she walks away towards a huddle of people.
Television journalists have begun their interviews. The people are easy to talk to. They talk about the mysterious rumble that lasted several seconds before the building fell and how they fled, and about the bodies scattered all over the debris. ‘You can hear them,’ one man says. ‘There are places where if you stand long enough you can hear them. Men, women and children buried inside begging to be saved. They go quiet for some time. Then, all of a sudden, they beg again as if they have risen from sleep.’
She has not set foot on the debris yet because she is unable to resolve an issue – if she were to stand on the rubble, would she be adding to the weight that is already bearing down on the buried? It is not a trivial question, she is sure of that.
There is some activity around a portion of the debris. Photographers and cameramen and onlookers rush to the spot and a crowd grows. Standing on the ruins, his legs on uneven stones, a powerful bare young man is pulling down a rope that has been fixed on a pulley. The pulley has been tied high on the beam of a freestanding shaft. It is as though the man is drawing a huge pail of water from deep earth, but what emerges from the debris is the body of a suspended woman in a purple sari, her long black hair blowing in the wind. Strung by her shoulders, she rises with every mighty heave of the young man, who now begins to cry. He stops to watch her as she twirls above the ruins.
THE SPECTATORS WANT to believe that the death toll is high. They reveal the wish through guesses made in sombre tones. They claim to hope that most of the residents of the doomed wing had managed to flee, but they point out why that is unlikely. There was not enough time, and it was early in the morning when most of the residents were probably asleep. According to Akhila’s estimates, not more than two hundred people lived in the collapsed wing, but some of the guesses of the death toll that people make are as high as five
hundred. She is repulsed, but only for a moment, because when she is repulsed she feels like Noam Chomsky. She has trained herself to make the unnatural assumption – what if the world is as humane and moral as you, what explains the action of a set of people? True though that if everyone is inclined to make such an assumption it would pretty much destroy Facebook. Maybe people do not wish anyone dead, but want the number of the dead in a calamity to be high. A remarkable number but a believable number that is not divisible by five or ten.
She hears a violent sound behind her but before she can turn she feels a sharp pain in her lower back and the air leave her lungs. The next moment she is on the ground. She is then lifted by her hair. She is facing the four men who had barged into the compound after arguing with the cops. ‘Can you tell us a joke,’ one of them says. They punch her, slap her. One man kicks as though that is his speciality. She catches a glimpse of one of them recording the assault on his phone. The crowd does not react. The firemen and cops don’t move. She begins to fight back, bites the ear of a thug, but they throw her away with ease.
4
A Patriarch’s Review
‘REAL COUPLES’ ARE a demographic that exists only in pornography. Their amateur home-sex videos remind the world that unattractive people too have sex. Ideally, the fact should not need reminding of. But in public imagination, including the imagination of Professor Vaid who is shaving at the moment, fornicating strangers are usually beautiful people. The source of the fallacy is part fantasy but he suspects it is chiefly professional pornography, which is a farce. What is real is the home-sex video. In such a film, unremarkable couples make love in banal ways and the woman never attains orgasm, which is a form of sound. But their sex, revealed to the world because of some treachery, is exciting – but not to Vaid any more. Their sex is exciting to most people because what they are watching is a fact.
