by Manu Joseph
It may not be wise to mention that the Sangh, too, is a form of activism.
After the lecture, he will meet Damodarbhai, who does not pretend to touch the feet of elders any more. That is a relief. As a fat man his plumbing does not permit a full bend, so he bows, throws a hand in the direction of the elder’s crotch and touches his own chest.
AK will be present at the meeting. He has been calling with detailed information about the man in the debris. The event is minor by AK’s standards but the fact that intelligence should flow from a man trapped in the rubble of a fallen building in the heart of Mumbai would naturally fascinate him. AK is a scholar of anomalies. Miss Akhila Iyer will find him amusing if she ever gets to meet him.
What she would see at first glance is a plain little man in oversized shirt and trousers, with a flat forgettable face, narrow eyes behind thick spectacles and black hair parted sideways as though he is in a bad disguise. Not many ordinary citizens know of him, but Miss Iyer is an informed woman, she may have heard of him. If she has not, she will in the coming weeks, when Damodarbhai makes him National Security Advisor. Reporters will then tell, once again, his spectacular back story with no attributions at all because the source is AK himself.
The legends of men are the proof that they tend to overestimate the beauty of their own lies. What else can explain their lame fables when they could have spun almost anything about themselves? Young Fidel Castro was tried out for an American baseball team. Mullah Omar stitched his own eye after it was destroyed by shrapnel, and he sprang from the bed singing a Persian song. What’s wrong with these men? Is it so hard to tell a fascinating lie? The legend of Damodarbhai is duller. The best he could invent of his past was that in his youth he had gone off the grid and wandered for three years. That is almost a plagiarism of Jesus Christ.
The legend of AK, on the other hand, is extraordinary and it has endured for years as a settled truth. It does help the myth that he was an intelligence officer, and that about nine years ago he had retired as the most decorated director of the Intelligence Bureau, a position he held for just a year.
The story is that he spent seven years undercover in Pakistan, and in that period, in the summer of 1988, he slipped into India as a Pakistani spy and infiltrated a ring of Indian terrorists holed up in the Golden Temple. In this period he was also a negotiator when Indian planes were hijacked, often the lead negotiator. In fact, from 1971 to 1999, he was a negotiator during all the fifteen hijackings of Indian airliners.
There is probably a lot of truth in these stories. The Patriarch has worked with him closely. The man is not a sham. Three years ago, together they influenced a retired semi-literate army truck driver, who used to whip drunkards in his village, to go to Delhi, sit on a pavement and go on a fast-unto-death in protest against the corrupt government of the Gandhi dynasty. It was televised as a revolution, an Indian Spring. So the revolution followed. Thousands began to gather around the old man – first the poor, then the richer. Bankers carried their children on their shoulders and pointed to the old man far away. That is what good fathers do when they feel they are within a historic photograph – they carry their children, especially daughters, on their shoulders.
AK was then warming up for the elections. He was not the only patriot working to achieve the end but the only one whom all the squabbling patriots of Sangh adore. Some men are like that – even though they are alphas, everyone likes them. He even convinced the stingy old patriarchs to part with the money to build a right-wing think tank. Not all patriarchs knew what a think tank was, but his involvement assured them that it was something conspiratorial.
AK calls again.
‘Professor.’
‘Yes.’
‘Not a single Muslim lived in that building. That’s what the residents say.’
‘Then he is an outsider, a friend. A very, very unlucky visitor.’
‘Possible. Our Akhila Iyer wiped his face as much as possible to clear the blood and dust, and she took a clear picture but the residents are not able to identify him. But then his face is still covered with layers of things. I’ve got an image on my phone.’
‘Alright.’
‘Professor.’
‘I’m here.’
‘There is another matter.’
‘What is it?’
‘He is not circumcised.’
‘What did you say? Did you say circumcised?’
‘He is not circumcised.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Akhila Iyer. She goes into the tunnel, unzips the dying man and checks his penis.’
The men fall silent for a while, then they burst out laughing like adolescents.
‘If he is not a Muslim, who are we dealing with, AK?’
‘Some of my police friends who have seen naked Muslim men in custody tell me that now and then they do see a devout Muslim who is not circumcised. So our man could still be a Muslim.’
‘So late in my life I learn something new.’
‘This girl. She is something.’
‘You may have done a background check on her by now.’
‘Yes. I understand that you’re acquainted with her, Professor.’
‘Your sources are impressive, AK.’
‘Our patriots beat her up this morning.’
‘I know.’
‘But they didn’t hurt her much.’
‘I know.’
‘What do you think of her, Professor?’
‘I don’t know her. I’ve only seen her pranks.’
‘I feel you’re thinking what I am thinking.’
‘What am I thinking, AK?’
‘You’re wondering if the whole talking-man-in-the-debris thing is a prank.’
‘No, no, no. That’s what you think.’
‘These are the facts. There is certainly a man in the hole. Half a dozen soldiers have taken turns to go into the tunnel. So we know he exists. We have his images. And we know he is mumbling things. But only the girl can hear him because only she can get so close to him.’
‘You told me she has been asked to record the conversations.’
‘She is doing that. But what if she is fabricating the faint voice of a man. That’s not hard.’
‘She crawls into the tunnel and makes up a voice? Do you believe your own theory, AK?’
‘Not entirely. But why are you so sure it is not a prank.’
‘It’s not her style. She is not the kind to use a dying man for a prank. She is a modern young woman, AK. They are all ethical. And what’s the prank anyway?’
‘Making asses out of the entire intelligence and police network.’
‘But she has to record the facial expressions of the people who are being pranked. That is the whole point of her pranks.’
‘Maybe she is doing that.’
‘But the people who are being pranked, AK, is us and the police officers who are searching for Jamal. She can’t shoot those faces.’
‘Do you remember Aradhana Shanbaug?’
‘That name. It’s so familiar.’
‘The classy commie who went into the jungle to start a revolution.’
‘Yes, yes, yes. She died. Didn’t she die?’
‘Akhila Iyer is her daughter.’
‘I see, I see. Alright.’
‘This girl is not normal.’
‘She is not. Of course, she is not.’
‘What stops her from attempting a prank in any situation? Maybe she will follow it up for several days. She will get her facial expressions then. She has a lot to play with.’
‘This girl, AK, her pranks are not just fun. She has a motive.’
‘She, too? Don’t people do anything for love any more?’
Vaid laughs more than he thought he would.
‘What’s her motive, Professor?’
‘She wants to show a world where the heroes of the left are useless.’
‘She sounds like us.’
‘She does. AK, before you go, what else is our man
in the debris saying?’
‘He is saying that Jamal and the girl will soon go to a restaurant, but we don’t know anything about the restaurant.’
‘Nothing about where they are right now?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Jamal is meeting people in the restaurant, you think?’
‘Maybe. The curious thing about our man is that he has been talking only about the girl. He says almost nothing about Jamal.’
‘But he has not given her name yet?’
‘No. He takes Jamal’s name but not the girl’s.’
‘What’s he saying about the girl?’
‘“Ask her to run away from the restaurant.” The same thing over and over again. If she stays with Jamal, the cops are going to kill her. That’s what he says.’
‘Cops?’
‘Yes. According to him, the cops know where Jamal is going. They are waiting. The plan is to execute him.’
‘That sounds like cops.’
‘If the girl is with him, she goes too.’
17
Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous
IN HOW MANY ways can a girl be extracted from a car without changing the mission of the driver? What if Mukundan’s car bumps into the Indica in such a way that Laila is only mildly injured? In this country an accident is as natural as any act of god. But it is hard to choreograph a controlled accident. She might be seriously injured. Jamal, too. Actually, Mukundan, too. And this is not the type of plan Boss would clear. If Laila is injured in the accident, there is no guarantee that Jamal would put her in a hospital and continue on course. He may abort his mission. The same reason why Mukundan cannot risk mugging or assaulting her on the highway to inspire her to go home. If any of his actions make Jamal alter his plan, Mukundan will have botched up the whole operation. There are many things about the operation he does not know, including its real objective which might not be as simple as abducting a terror suspect.
An elegant way of extracting Laila, and he is an admirer of elegance, is to administer an injury to the girl’s parents in Mumbra or her siblings, if she has any. This can be carried out through a burglary or a street incident. Laila would then have a good reason to rush back home, leaving Jamal to complete his mission alone. But the Bureau would take time to collect information about her family. All they have is the description he has given them and the place where she was picked up by Jamal. The Bureau must have already started digging around but they have to be very careful. If they tap the wrong kinds of informers, the operation would collapse. The slightest slip would warn Jamal that the Bureau is on their tail. It is unlikely that her family can be used in the next few hours. Even if that plan can be executed, the Bureau would be counting on her family contacting her. At this moment it is not clear whether the girl is carrying a mobile phone. He has not seen her with the device. And the information is that Jamal’s phone is still dead as it has been since dawn.
There is a development. The blue hatchback finally slows down and drives into the parking lot of a highway restaurant.
18
Laila
THE CLASS IS drawing the ‘political map of India’; the geography teacher is sitting in a trance, her eyes baffled and frozen, a finger picking her nose as though someone has asked her to do it at gunpoint.
It occurs to Aisha that India looks like an ice-cream cone, including the thumb of an unseen child who is holding the ice-cream. The thumb is where Damodarbhai comes from. As she draws the bulge of Gujarat, she feels as though she is drawing the contours of a hostile foreign land, like Pakistan.
She marks major cities on the map. Malegaon is too small to qualify, but she marks it anyway – north-east of Mumbai, not very far from Gujarat. Aisha Raza hereby recognizes you, sweet Malegaon, with a red dot. She doodles a line between Mumbai and Malegaon, a windy line to make it look realistic. Laila is somewhere on that route. Unless she was lying. What if she is actually headed to Gujarat? Aisha feels a familiar gloom in her lungs. Malegaon is safe, it is in Maharashtra and it is filled with Muslims.
Aisha has been to Malegaon. Laila took her last month. They went as Naaz’s chastity guardians. Naaz is old, almost thirty, but she and Laila are good friends. It is not clear how, but even though Laila is only nineteen, she knows a lot of fully grown women and most of them have jobs that are very odd. When Aisha asked what her friend does, Laila said, ‘When the hero and heroine fall in love, Aisha, you know they start dreaming about being with dozens of extras in the background, who dance in formations? Naaz is one of those dancing girls in the background.’
One Sunday, Laila took Aisha to a film set in Goregaon, which is about an hour from home. The set was a giant shed. They were early and the dancers were just trickling in. They would arrive in salwar-kameez, go behind a narrow door and emerge in shiny golden miniskirts and sleeveless tops. Their bodies glistened. ‘It’s mustard oil,’ Laila said. ‘Inside that room, some spot-boys apply mustard oil on them.’
‘Why mustard oil?’
‘I don’t know why mustard oil. What I know is those spotboys must be running to the toilet often.’
‘Why?’
Laila laughed but did not explain.
Most of the dancers had big thighs and paunches, but Naaz was not so bad. She, too, arrived in salwar-kameez. The sisters were in a far corner, on a bench. Naaz made a gesture to suggest that she would talk to them later. She went into the mysterious room behind the narrow door and after ten minutes emerged with almost nothing on, but she was wearing short cycling shorts under the skirt. She, too, was glistening.
‘Does her family watch Hindi movies?’ Aisha asked.
‘Her family knows what she does. She feeds them, so they shut up. That’s all there is to this family-trauma business. You feed them and they shut up. By the way, this is not a Hindi film.’
‘No?’
‘It’s a Marathi film. Hindi films are now for rich people and brown folks who live in America and Britain. They don’t want girls like Naaz any more. She looks too poor. These days all the dancers in Hindi films are hip girls.’
‘If we were dancers, would the producers think we look cheap? But we’re fair.’
‘What’s the big deal about being hip? If you speak English and say “fuck” five times in every sentence, you become hip.’
‘You know that’s not it. It’s our faces. There is something about our faces that is not very English-English.’
‘Not you. You look expensive, Aisha.’
‘You too.’
‘We are trendy girls.’
‘Very trendy girls. Flashy, flashy.’
‘Do you see that some of the girls are not wearing cycling shorts?’
‘Yes.’
‘They get twice as much as the ones who are wearing cycling shorts.’
‘Because they are not so shy?’
‘It’s called “special rate”. There is a special rate for not wearing cycling shorts. And there is something called “V-cut special rate”. That’s for the swimming pool dance sequence. If you agree to wear a bikini, you get V-cut special rate.’
‘Why V?’
‘That’s the shape of the bikini bottom, you silly girl.’
The dancers stand in formation and when a man screams ‘one two three four’, they begin. In this sequence there are no leads, just an arrangement of extras dancing, kicking their legs in tandem, punching the air, flapping their knees, juggling their breasts. It looks like a very difficult way to make money.
After the shot, Naaz brings three cups of hot tea.
‘Save me, Laila. I am going out of business,’ she says.
‘You have Marathi films. Won’t you survive?’
‘Films nowadays are becoming realistic.’
‘What do you mean realistic?’
‘No song-and-dance. No dream sequence. Grim stuff.’
On the way back home, in the auto, Laila was quiet. She probably felt sorry for her friend. Aisha kept talking without a break but Laila’s mind was probably stil
l on the film set. When Aisha tired of talking, which is rare, they travelled in silence. There was something sad about the silence. Then Laila said, perhaps to herself, ‘Wherever we go we meet only losers, we only meet people who barely survive their miserable lives. That’s why I like Jamal.’
It was the first time she had mentioned Jamal without any prodding.
‘Why do you like him?’
‘He is not a loser. He does stuff. He makes money. He is the only person in the world who can help me. Everyone else I help. He gives me work.’
‘What work?’
‘This and that. I work as a receptionist for him some days, I do a bit of accounting, some sourcing.’
Laila may grumble about her loser friends but she is a good friend. A week after meeting Naaz on the sets, she fixed up something for her.
In Malegaon, a bunch of Muslim boys have started making spoofs of Bollywood and Hollywood classics. Some of those spoofs, which are played in small video halls in a dozen towns, run for weeks. Laila got to know that they were going to shoot Malegaon Ka James Bond, and through some friends she somehow managed to contact the director on the phone and convinced him to cast Naaz in the lead. She sent him her photographs. Laila can be very persuasive. She even got her a fee of ten thousand rupees for a two-day shoot. Naaz was ecstatic but she said she would go only if Laila accompanied her. That was how the three of them set out to Malegaon in an AC bus, the tickets paid for by the producer of Malegaon Ka James Bond.
Malegaon turned out to be a filthy, congested weavers’ town lined with dark tiny looms from where scrawny sullen men looked at young women on the street as though they were a funny joke they didn’t fully understand. All the young men had hairstyles with middle partitions. The town looked a lot like Mumbra. Black slush on the streets, green puddles, giant pigs, herds of goats going somewhere, the smell of decay in the air and several little mosques.
