~
Towards the end of the monsoon Deepak came to my room and discovered I had no plans for the evening. He suggested we go out. As he possessed neither the sophistication nor the connections that enabled my room-mate Rao to wander among the beds of the princesses of Cuffe Parade, Deepak made do with the whores of Shuklajee Street. When he discovered I was still a virgin, he swept my protestations aside and, after a few shots of Old Monk in his room, we found ourselves in a leaky taxi crawling through the flooded roads towards Shuklajee Street, where the madam of one of the brothels was expecting a consignment of fair-skinned, moon-faced, ‘almost virginal’ whores from Nepal.
The taxi dropped us off in one of the poorest areas of the city. Deepak, who could barely contain his excitement at the prospect of the women who awaited him, tipped the driver a hundred rupees and we floundered through dirty water to a building that seemed in imminent danger of collapse. The bouncer at the door looked astonished to see us, it had obviously been a day without customers, but his demeanour changed in an instant when he recognized Deepak. With a cry of ‘Palang-tod Master’ he hauled us in out of the rain and up a narrow staircase to a parlour where five girls lounged on two sofas. The attempts to make the place alluring were depressing. The sofas were covered in green Rexine, nylon saris had been strung up as curtains, garish posters of corpulent actresses torn from film magazines were stuck to the walls, and the glare from a cheap multicoloured chandelier from Chor Bazaar only served to accentuate the hopelessness of the place. But Deepak seemed to notice none of this, and the madam, a gargantuan woman casually draped in a sari, more than made up for the deficiencies of her brothel by enthusiastically crushing him to her shapeless bosom.
‘Ah, Palang-tod Master, not even the weather could keep you away, could it? Today you get two girls for the price of one.’
‘You said there would be new Nepali cheez,’ he said in his Tamil-accented Hindi.
‘The rains have stopped everything, alas, but there’s Shalini and you haven’t tried Neeta yet, have you? Her nipples are the size of rupee coins.’
Two of the girls got up obediently at a signal from the madam, and it was then that Deepak asked the mistress of the house to look after me.
‘He’ll be taken care of, Palang-tod Master, he’ll be taken care of,’ she bellowed jovially as he was led away by the two girls. I had been feeling more and more uncomfortable as Deepak and the brothel keeper bantered on, but now that he had vanished I wanted nothing more than to leave the place. To make matters worse, a blurry vision of Meher in the restaurant, the glow from her earring misting her face in blue, came to me, and it was all I could do to keep from bolting down the staircase and out into the rain. The madam must have sensed my discomfort because something approaching pity entered her voice.
‘You’re new to this, aren’t you? Think nothing of it; I have seen many young men like you. There will always be a first time, and it is my duty to make it memorable for you. Think of me as your own mother, I’ll make sure you’re cared for. Anita is very experienced, she’ll be gentle and loving, or, if you like, Bindu is a spitfire—after you have had her, you will never want to look at another woman again.’ I was so unsettled by now that I didn’t even react to the madam comparing herself to my mother; instead I was furious for landing myself in this situation, I was furious for not being firm with Deepak.
‘Take your time, beta, it’s a slow night, take all the time you want.’
And that’s when it struck me that I was the one in control here—the brothel keeper couldn’t do anything that I didn’t want her to do, and for 300 rupees she was mine to command. Decisiveness entered my voice, and I said clearly, ‘I don’t want Bindu or Anita, I want you.’
She couldn’t have been more than thirty-five, but her years of whoring had coarsened her. She was gross, with a triple chin, vast shapeless breasts, bad skin and a behind that had a life of its own, yet suddenly a huge desire grew in me to have my way with her.
Her self-confidence faltered when I made my demand but she recovered quickly enough. ‘Ah-ha, the young stallion wants to ride a mare with enough capacity to swallow a whole ship of lesser cocks. I like that spirit, beta, chalo.’
The whores on the sofa tittered as she led me away. But by the time she had drawn the curtain around the cubicle and motioned to me to sit beside her on the plank bed in that tiny space that reeked of semen, incense and stale food, my sense of power and the surge of desire I had felt had ebbed away. Her small shrewd eyes, bagged in layers of flesh and kohl, missed nothing.
‘You’re terrified aren’t you, beta? But there’s nothing to be scared about. I’m so pleased that you have chosen me. I feel like a young girl again, waiting for the first thrust of your manhood, I never thought I’d experience that sensation again. Come now, let me take off your clothes.’
If her words were practised, they didn’t seem like it. Her heavily be-ringed hands went to the top of my shirt but I pushed them away nervously.
‘Fine, let me take off my clothes, then maybe you’ll want to take off yours.’ She unwound her sari, slid the blouse from her shoulders, and her breasts swung into view. They were not a pretty sight, cumbrous and falling almost to her navel, but I had never seen a grown woman’s breasts before, so I gaped at them. ‘Do you want to touch them? If you’re really nice to me I’ll let you,’ she said in a high-pitched little girl’s voice, then guffawed, revealing her paan-stained teeth.
I was beginning to feel bilious—the Old Monk I had drunk earlier in the evening, the whore’s cheap perfume, the close fetid air of the cubicle and my own nervousness were beginning to come together in an unpleasant way and my stomach began to churn. The woman didn’t seem to notice my discomfort. She raised her hips and slid her petticoat off, then turned to me.
‘Do you like what you see, you little badmash?’ she asked coquettishly as she stood and shimmied her hips. She then did a slow pirouette, her belly following her hips just a fraction slower, swaying like a sack with the movement. The vast masses of flesh almost covered her incongruously neat pubic thatch, and as she revolved in front of me I caught sight of an angry red pimple high on her massive behind. I could take it no more. The bile that had been steadily rising in me ever since we had entered the cubicle now surged up and I began to retch.
The fabled humanity of whores is overrated. Abandoning any further attempts at seduction, the madam lifted me up and marched me across to a washbasin in the corner of the cubicle. ‘Don’t dirty my room, you useless bakra. That chutiya Deepak should know better than to bring me babies who haven’t outgrown their mother’s breasts.’ The warmth had gone from her eyes, they were hard little seeds of anger in her ravaged face. Quickly rinsing out my mouth I stumbled from the room.
After the fiasco at the brothel Deepak kept his distance from me, and my craving for company vanished for the moment. I was still at an age where I believed every setback should only be seen as a spur to advancement, so I attacked my work with a new ferocity. In time I might have tried to do something about my situation, but that was not to be. I and all the other inhabitants of the city were about to see our world rearranged in a way that would drive everything but fear from our minds.
4
City of Fear
In Mr Sorabjee’s cluttered and utilitarian office there was a single decorative object. The room faced east and on the wall opposite the window was an antique mercury wheel barometer. When the morning sun slanted in, it would kindle a deep caramel glow within the instrument’s satinwood finish. Catching me staring at it one day, Mr Sorabjee told me that he had bought it cheaply almost thirty years ago in Chor Bazaar. He had been advised to get it valued because it was a fine example of the work of Francis Pastorelli, a renowned maker of scientific instruments in the mid-nineteenth century, but as he had no intention of selling he had done nothing about it. When I remarked on the fact that the pointer seemed to indicate that it was stormy when it was in fact a fine day he said that a barometer told you what
the weather was going to be, not what it was like at the present moment; then he smiled and said the needle had been stuck in that position for as long as he could remember.
A week after we’d had our conversation I would have occasion to think ruefully that my employer’s barometer may not have been very good at predicting the weather but that it was prescient when it came to the political situation in the country. The Hindu right-wing organizations bidding for political power had embarked on the final phase of their campaign and the stage was set for what Mr Sorabjee’s editorial later described as the fourth greatest tragedy to befall independent India since the partition riots, the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi and the 1984 massacre of Sikhs in Delhi.
On 6 December 1992, as a supine government watched, hundreds of rioters demolished the mosque in Ayodhya that had been the object of their venom. Immediately, a long comet’s tail of violence swung across the country and tens of thousands of lives were affected.
In the past Bombay had always taken a sensible view of riots elsewhere in India. It believed that it was its own country, and if it was going to have riots and other disturbances it would manufacture them itself—it had its own crooked politicians and gangsters, it had no need to follow the lead of some politician from the Hindi heartland. Also, as the city’s riots were usually restricted to the poorer sections of town, nobody you knew, except perhaps the office peon or the dabbawallah who brought you lunch, was affected. Work went on as usual in the great steel and concrete canyons of Nariman Point and Dalal Street, the parties continued in Malabar Hill and Cuffe Parade, and the great ship of the city would rock briefly on the swells caused by the commotion and then continue to sail serenely on.
This time, the riots were different. Immediately after the mosque was demolished, there were reports of scattered cases of stabbing or assault by Muslims outraged by this insult to their faith. The reaction from Hindu mobs, egged on by fundamentalist political parties, was unimaginably savage. Muslims were sought out and killed wherever they could be found—in crowded tenement buildings, slums, mosques where they had sought shelter, trains and buses. They were burnt alive in their shops and places of work. If the victims were young and pretty and female they were raped before they were killed. Older women were merely beaten up before they were murdered. Milkmen and bakers, neighbours and people who had been part of the same local cricket team, no one was spared in an orgy of violence that was unlike anything the city had ever seen. To make matters worse, with some exceptions, the police either looked the other way or even encouraged the rioters. People had been killed in the past, often as a result of religious bigotry, but it was in December 1992 that Bombay lost its way.
~
I was working harder than ever because Mr Sorabjee had decided to put out a special issue of the magazine to decry the demolition and the sectarian violence it had unleashed everywhere in the country. On the third day after riots broke out in the city, I came home from work a little earlier than usual and noticed that the reception area and the courtyard in front of the hostel were unusually full of people. At any other time I might have stopped to see what was going on, but I was very tired so I continued on to my room. Just as I was walking up the stairs I heard a familiar voice call out my name. It was Rao, my elusive room-mate, who was at the centre of one of the groups animatedly discussing the riots. It rapidly became clear why there was such a crowd. In the evenings most of the residents of the hostel would go out as was to be expected of single men in a big city, but now no one was sure that it was safe to do so. The night belonged to the rioters, and although so far most of the victims had been Muslim, there was always the likelihood that the flames could reach out to others, especially those who belonged to other minority communities or were newcomers to the city. As a sizeable percentage of the residents of the hostel were non-Hindu or from outside Bombay, few of them wanted to find out if that was indeed going to happen.
Rao was part of a gang listening to Deepak, who was describing a killing he had witnessed from his office. A window in his firm’s building overlooked a Muslim slum and he was telling the group how it had been ransacked by a mob frustrated by its inability to find anyone to kill.
‘I could see them milling around, with lathis and choppers, trying to figure out what to do next. The streets were so deserted it was eerie. The last time I saw something like that was years ago when there was a total solar eclipse over the city and no one would venture out because it was considered inauspicious.’
‘What happened next? Come on, yaar, get on with it,’ Rao cut in.
Deepak looked irritated by the interruption but didn’t remonstrate. ‘The rioters set a couple of buildings on fire, but it was clear they didn’t have too much petrol or other weapons; they had just rushed out on to the street to kill as many Muslims as they could, and now they couldn’t find any. The leaders of the mob were arguing amongst themselves about what to do next when their prayers were answered. A taxi came pelting down the deserted road, obviously driven by a Muslim—the stupid fellow hadn’t bothered to take off his topi or shave his beard. I don’t know what the poor fucker was thinking. If I had been him, I would have put the car in reverse and made a run for it, but maybe he thought he could ram his way through the crowd. He didn’t stand a chance, a couple of stones were flung at the windscreen, and the car veered off the road. After that there wasn’t a whole lot left to see.’
‘Did you actually see the guy die?’ someone in the audience asked, sounding hopeful.
‘Of course I did,’ Deepak said, and then reluctantly corrected himself: ‘We couldn’t see very much; there were about a hundred men trying to get their hands on the taxi driver. I think they beat him to death, and then set him on fire. We called the cops, it took us a long time to get through, and when we finally managed to speak to them they promised to come but no one did.’ Deepak had little more to add, and his audience began to drift away, eager to soak up more information about the riots.
~
Back in my room, I let my satchel drop to the floor and lay down on my bed fully dressed, not even bothering to take off my shoes. I took in my surroundings—two iron cots with thin, skimpy mattresses, mine made up and Rao’s in a mess as usual, the large unwieldy chest of drawers, its wood scarred by former residents of the room, the oxidized mirror on the nail, the peeling paint, the clothes hanging on pegs driven into the wall—and a feeling of desolation swept over me. I thought about the taxi driver who had been murdered. Deepak hadn’t said whether he was young or old, but I imagined him to be as young as I was, and there was a good chance that he, like me, was a recent immigrant to the city, perhaps from Hyderabad, or some smaller place that did not have enough work or resources to hold on to its young. He would have come here hoping to make his fortune, and maybe in time he would have.
Why had he worn the badges of his faith to the very end, I wondered. Even when his life was at stake, why hadn’t he thought to take them off? Maybe they were so much a part of him, he hadn’t even seen them as symbols to be discarded. They would have helped him link himself to a community, of course, until he had saved enough to bring his family over from his home town because it was likely he had married young. Until this fateful day, his religion would have saved him from the loneliness of the room in the chawl or slum. He would go to the mosque, meet others as lonely as he was. They would do their namaz together, celebrate the great festivals of Id and Ramzan with feasts of biryani on Mohammed Ali Road. Yes, his religion had been good to him, until the day it had devoured him. Just like that. What did others like him feel, to be singled out for no reason other than having been born into a different faith? I wanted to find out just as I wished to understand how faith drove the agents of persecution.
In the course of the past few days, as our work at the magazine had grown feverishly busy, I had become aware of vague feelings of discontentment that had swiftly crystallized. I did not want to merely rehash the reports that had appeared in the dailies; I wanted to do more than
sub-edit eloquently worded editorials. I wanted to go out on to the front line where the battle was being fought and report on it. That was what I had imagined myself doing when I had first thought of becoming a journalist, and never before had it seemed more important. I thought of my father telling me about his dreams for me, for himself. I thought of his cousin, the distance runner who had lacked the requisite ‘kick’ when it mattered, and the feeling grew in me that the time had come to make my move. My job at the magazine did not involve reporting on events but surely, I argued to myself, Mr Sorabjee would not mind me writing a piece for ‘View from the Front Line’ about what was happening in the city.
Outside my room, the pigeons who made their home in the eaves settled in for the night. Footsteps approached the door. For someone so small, Rao walked with a heavy tread. ‘Hey, this is really a bummer, you know all this shit going on in the city—it’s putting a dent in my party scene…’
I wasn’t paying much attention, I was still thinking about how I might get to cover a riot, but Rao didn’t seem to need me to participate in the conversation.
‘Apparently the rioting is going to get worse, the Sena and others have just got started, they’ll be going house to house soon, the cops are with them, the ministers are with them, they are going to play Holi again this year, only with blood instead of colour.’
I could detect no sympathy for the victims in his voice, perhaps my room-mate thought riots were the same as his parties only a little more high concept. As I half listened, an idea began to form in my mind. Although I wanted to witness a riot, I wasn’t sure I had the nerve to go it alone, but if I could persuade Rao to accompany me it would be perfect.
The Solitude of Emperors Page 5
