by Manu Joseph
Damodarbhai says things in public that most leaders only say in private. That is all he needs to do, it is that easy to be him. People have employed him to say some things aloud. If everybody who is given a mike, especially the righteous, if those intellectuals speak the simple truths of a nation, however unpleasant, Damodarbhai would have had to work harder to rise. He would have risen anyway, but not so easily. The way things are, he has to just speak the mind of his people. Some days, after he speaks the mind of a Hindu, the Hindu’s mind may not seem so impressive. But most of the time he reassures his people that they are not alone in their thoughts, that very powerful men who have got somewhere in life have similar views. That is what Damodarbhai is – he is not right, he is not wrong, he is a secret thought that people have already thought.
Mukundan would not deny that there are some similarities between him and Damodarbhai. He, too, is a soldier of the Sangh but he has not worn the uniform since adolescence. To climb up the ranks of the Sangh, as Damodarbhai has shown, you don’t have to always flaunt the stupid elephant shorts. You need to just remain a man. That, Mukundan plans to do. And like Damodarbhai, he is a poet. He has not shown anyone his poems but who can deny he is a poet. He is probably not very good, he admits. The major literary flaw in him is that he is incapable of whining, he finds that humiliating even in a poem no one else is going to see. All his poems are tributes to the strong, and to himself. Like Damodarbhai’s poems, which are usually about Damodarbhai as a tiger, Damodarbhai as a lion, Damodarbhai as a busy honeybee.
The filthy street teems with stunted young men in tight jeans, old men with orange beards, a few women here and there in hijab, little children in school uniforms walking carefully in the gaps between garbage piles and open puddles. Lots of little girls. Everywhere there are happy little girls in oversized uniforms. The image of girls going to school, or even if they are returning, has something triumphant about it. Whose triumph he does not know, but somebody’s triumph. Here they are a swarm, they are walking, on cycles, on the motorbikes of their fathers, in rickshaws, there are a dozen of them stuffed inside one stationary autorickshaw, some of them sitting on an iron-rod barrier, their bottoms jutting out, one such bottom being sniffed by a passing cow, who may be consumed soon, discreetly.
One reason why the Muslim population is growing faster than the Hindu, Damodarbhai would never say it aloud, is that Muslims don’t kill their girls in the womb. So many girls have been killed it is now evident in plain sight – not only as streets and villages and railways stations filled only with men, but as eerie stares.
A few months ago, when his niece was born, Mukundan began carrying the infant around the lanes of Parel. One morning, as he walked past a long queue of women who were standing outside a temple, he noticed some of them staring with a sad smile. They were staring at him and the girl in his arms who they probably imagined was his daughter. He was struck by the faces of the women who stared because they reminded him of accidental murderers in custody, and he wondered what crime the women may have committed and why they were looking at the child and him in that manner. Were they forced to kill their own girls, was that why they were gaping at a man walking so happily with a little girl in his arms? He has seen that dark gaze many times on the streets. That stare is in the heart of a poem that he has been struggling to write. It is a poem about him carrying an infant girl and walking across the great nation, across towns and villages, up the hills and on the banks of holy rivers, holding aloft the giggling girl and stirring the peace of fragrant guilty households. But he is not a good poet, the honest words just won’t come.
FINALLY, JAMAL APPEARS. He walks out of the building carrying a black travel bag.
Mukundan is always fascinated by this moment, the moment when an image becomes a person.
People look reasonable in photographs, but they are usually misshapen in the flesh. They don’t mean to disappoint, obviously, or to trick. It is just the way things are. In his photographs, Jamal looks fine as most people do. In person, he is not a man who is aligned well. His left shoulder is higher than his right, his neck is thick and short and he has the unquiet walk of a man who is lurking more than passing through. But he does look a lot like the man he wants the world to believe he is. A decent, educated Malayalee, an electrical subcontractor whose small firm lays cables in a dozen offices, a small businessman who dabbles in many things and feeds his happy family with his minor enterprises. This is not a front. He is all this, like millions of men. Most terrorists, like poets, have regular jobs, insipid jobs.
Jamal walks to a blue Indica that is among the many vehicles parked on the street. It is a second-hand car he had bought a few weeks ago with cash. That is the information with the Bureau. He flings the travel bag on the back seat. The way he does that, it is as though there are just clothes in it. Where is the bomb? It’s unlikely that he is strapped to it. Maybe it is in the boot of the car?
After Jamal gets into the driver’s seat he ducks to have a clear look at something through the passenger window. He is looking for something or someone in his building. It must be the balcony of his home – he wants to have a glimpse of home. A father of three little boys who thinks he is coming back.
The information with the Bureau is that Jamal will hit the National Highway and head towards Ahmedabad, five hundred kilometres down that road. All Mukundan has to do is tail him till the Vasad Tollbooth, about ninety kilometres short of Ahmedabad. Jamal will not be crossing the tollbooth a free man. He will not be arrested either. He will be abducted by the Intelligence Bureau and taken to a safe house. Every ounce of information will be squeezed from his body.
Mukundan will not be a part of the abduction. He is not so important. His assignment is, as always, to shadow until more important men take over.
His life has been filled with simple expectations from the world, and long waits. He is good at waiting.
In the act of waiting you watch events unfold. Events are usually the creation of people in haste. In waiting you watch them win, until an opportunity arises to intervene decisively. Then, surprise. He can wait for as long as he needs to. He hopes waiting is an art as some writers claim. That would make him an artiste. But he really does not believe that. He does not believe many beautiful things writers say.
He begins to drive. It is a slow congested road and there are half a dozen vehicles between Jamal and him.
Most days, Mukundan would say that people are not as unique as they imagine, that there are only a few types of people and the whole world is a repetition of the types. But he has never known a man like Jamal. That can mean the intel about him is not complete. But what is known about him casts him as an unusual suspect.
Jamal is not his name. Until eight years ago, he was Praveen Namboodiri. He was a Hindu, a high-caste from north Kerala, like Mukundan, who was raised by good, responsible parents. His father lives on a farm a thousand miles away. Jamal’s mother died two years ago of cancer. How does a high-caste Hindu become a Muslim? As things stand, Muslims are lower than the untouchables. It is harder for them to find jobs and homes unless they choose to stick with other Muslims. And they are always suspects even if people are not sure what the crime is. At least the untouchables are recognized as ‘the oppressed’, whatever that means. The Hindus were bad to them, everyone knows, everyone accepts, and society has been forced to make up to them. But there is no such concession for Muslims. So why would a Brahmin choose to become a Muslim in a country where the roll of the dice is everything?
The Brahmin had fallen in love with a Muslim girl. To win her hand he chose to convert. What an idiot. Still, the girl’s parents did not yield. But the girl accepted. A man loves a woman, he pursues her, he pursues her parents as he must, and he sacrifices his religion and his caste to win her. This Mukundan can accept because no matter what some scholars may say, there is such a thing as love. You can defame love by calling it madness, which only confirms its existence. But how can a man who converted to Islam out of love for a
woman become an Islamic terrorist? It does not make sense.
There is a lame Bureau theory that says Jamal was infuriated by the riot that almost everybody believes Damodarbhai had planned. But that does not explain the transformation of Jamal into a terrorist. Perhaps he is in it just for the money. Maybe he is not really going to blow up anything. He probably is not even carrying a bomb. Mukundan has tried to find the source of the intel on Jamal but nobody has been able to give a clear answer. And, what were the set of events that made the Bureau rush Mukundan to Mumbra to shadow this man? Nobody appears to know.
Maybe Jamal is only running supplies of a terror cell. Maybe he was lured into this by a good talker. But even this does not make complete sense. Why would a man risk everything he holds dear and go down this path? And Jamal has much to hold dear.
Jamal’s car is fifty metres ahead, and Mukundan can see the man’s contours. A young father, a young husband who pursued his childhood sweetheart. That is what he is, apart from other things.
Mukundan has never chased a woman. Even in that department he waits. He is not a romantic perhaps. That way he is not harmful to women. He wonders what it is to pursue love. Men who chase women, what is it that they whisper to their sweethearts? Do they ever speak the truth, which includes speaking all the truths? Do they say, ‘I will always be yours’? That makes him laugh, probably because he is alone in a car and people do things when they are alone in a car just because they can. ‘Sweetheart, I’ll always be yours because no one else might want me or I might be too frightened to stray, for that is what faithful men are, darling, unwanted or cowards.’ How can the Romeos be so sure that the women they seduce would not be happier with other men, better men? Jamal’s wife, for instance, would be destroyed in a few hours. Because of him. The romantics are probably men who have the gift of pomposity, selfish little men with an evolutionary advantage in a world where there is another kind of men, men who wait.
As Mukundan is available and the world of lovers and spouses such a miserable place, he hopes to become a beacon for at least women in doomed relationships, women who have seen through the farce of the men who pursued them. Once he discovers a way to let women find him, his life will be crowded with women, hopefully happy women – there have to be happy women – happy women who will regard him as an object of sex. But then that is not how women are made, no matter what the posh may say on television chat shows.
He is a fan of a woman who writes a weekly column in Malayala Manorama on the strange theme, ‘English books that will never translated into Malayalam’. Last week she reviewed a scholarly book, Why Women Have Sex, written by two serious professors. After a decade of research they believe that women mate for exactly 237 reasons. One of the reasons why women have sex, apparently, is that they want to. And love has nothing to do with it. The columnist mentions this with some sort of triumph. But there are 236 other reasons why women have sex. Treacherous reasons, terrifying reasons. Reasons that even women do not know are reasons.
He has to be vigilant. A life without meaning is fragile, it can collapse any moment into purpose.
Something is wrong. Jamal has skipped the turn. He is not headed towards the highway. He is going deeper into Mumbra. What’s going on? Has he got a whiff of the tailing?
The space between the blue Indica and Mukundan’s WagonR has accumulated four cars, a dozen motorbikes, a lost ass, and a water tanker chased by a gang of urchins who are trying to open the tap in the rear, ignoring the threats of the driver that he will kill them.
After about five minutes the Indica stops by the wayside, in front of a small bakery. Mukundan contemplates stopping. That would not be conspicuous in the chaos. If he continues, he would be ahead of Jamal in less than a minute. He decides to keep moving. It is never a bad idea to shadow a man by being ahead of him.
As he overtakes the parked Indica, he gets the clearest view yet of Jamal, who is calm but whose gaze is fixed on something ahead. Moments later, Mukundan sees what Jamal sees. A striking young woman in a light-brown salwar-kurta crosses the road. She is crying in a tense, angry sort of way. She is marching across the street with a small plastic bag that is stuffed with things. She does not have a handbag, which is odd. Almost every woman can afford a handbag these days. She is too preoccupied with her immediate trauma to look where she is going and she bangs into a cyclist. The cyclist, an old man, shouts at her but she keeps walking. After crossing the road she turns left, towards Mukundan’s car. She seems to know where she is going. She walks past his car, towards the Indica, which is about twenty metres behind him. In the rear-view he sees the front passenger door of the Indica open. The young woman gets in and shuts the door, but the Indica does not move. They are talking. It has to be about the reason why she is crying, what else can they be talking about? After about a minute, Mukundan is still not too far ahead of Jamal on the slow road. He is certain that the girl will leave the idling car soon. But then the Indica moves and merges with the traffic.
Mukundan does not have to try too hard to let Jamal overtake him. As the Indica passes him, he gets another glimpse of the young woman. She is not crying any more. She is a pretty girl with a very red nose. Would she like his poems?
She must get away from that car. She has to just open the door and walk away. That is all she needs to do. He hopes she has nothing to do with terror. He wonders why he hopes that.
About ten minutes later, the Indica enters a narrow lane and stops outside Patel School for Girls, which is a pink building of four floors that stands behind a high iron gate. The young woman gets out of the car without the bag, jogs to the gates and appears to argue with the security guard, who eventually lets her in. Mukundan hopes this is her escape, but Jamal does not leave. The Indica waits. She returns a few minutes later, looking a bit happier. She smiles as she runs towards the car.
In a few minutes, Jamal and the girl are on the highway, racing towards Ahmedabad, into a trap where some deadly cops wait for a blue Indica with the registration number MH02-DJ-687.
What must have lured her into the car? What hope, what lies?
He waits for an hour to see if the girl will get dropped off somewhere on the highway. That does not happen. He has no choice but to make the call.
‘Sir.’
‘Yes.’
‘Jamal is on the highway.’
‘Good.’
‘He is in the blue Indica.’
‘Good.’
‘Sir.’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Sir, there is a girl with him. There is a girl in the car.’
Boss is so taken aback he lets out a sound that is certainly not a word.
‘What do you mean there is a girl with him?’
‘He picked up a young woman, sir, and she is in the car with him. It appears that she is an acquaintance, very close maybe. She is family or lover or an employee or something like that.’
Boss is silent, which is not unusual. But the man is silent for too long. Then he begins to bark at someone. Boss’s reaction suggests that he has no clue about the girl, she was not on the radar.
She probably has no idea what she has got into. She is Jamal’s armour, that is what she is. Jamal imagines that the system would not take a man who is with a young woman in a little blue hatchback seriously.
What does he think, the State fights terror by standing on the roadside and looking for solitary men in SUVs?
‘Sir?’
‘I am here.’
‘Sir, what do we do about the girl?’
‘This is going to be messy.’
10
Laila
DEFINE ‘A TON of bricks’. All Aisha Raza has to do is swallow her pride, concede the point to the English textbook and write the only permissible answer on the answer sheet: ‘a great weight’. She does not deny that ‘a ton of bricks’ is ‘a great weight’, but a ton of bricks would weigh the same as a ton of peacock feathers. So ‘a ton of bricks’ cannot be about weight alone. But the world
is surely smarter than she is. A ‘ton’ probably has other meanings, meanings that she does not know yet. But still.
Aisha is a bit cranky this morning. It is not about the English test at all. It is not about what would follow either, even though that would be unpleasant. What is bothering her is the incident at home in the morning. Laila was going somewhere with Jamal and Mother went all Taliban. He seems to be a gentle person but it is also true that he has been to jail more than once for thrashing people. As much as Aisha is convinced that her mother is wrong about almost everything, she herself is tormented by the thoughts of Laila in the company of a grown-up man, let alone a man who has seen jail.
‘Time,’ the teacher shouts as though he is going to recite an angry poem about time. All the girls line up to hand in the answer sheets. Aisha prepares to survive the next few minutes.
Every day, towards the end of the English class, a student has to read out ‘an original essay in good English’ on the theme, ‘My Family’. It is her turn today. She can lie about her family but then everybody knows the facts. If everybody knows the facts, what is there to worry. Still, it is going to be humiliating when she herself spells out the details. She is overreacting perhaps. It is going to be bad only for the first few seconds.
No miracle occurs and Aisha finds herself standing in front of the overcrowded, sweating class of forty-two girls. ‘My family,’ she says. There are giggles already but that is just Mala, who is a cow. ‘My family consists of my mother and six sisters.’
The class erupts in giggles. It’s a lot of sisters, Aisha does not dispute that. Worse, she has made a tactical mistake. The pause is too long. ‘And one brother.’ There is disastrous laughter. Her essay sounds a bit funny even to her.
‘Anyone else? Anyone you forgot?’ the teacher asks. And there is more laughter than is necessary.
