The Girl with the Golden Parasol (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Prakash, Uday

  Chappa, chappa charkha chale, awni bawni bereyon tale . . .

  Raju picked up the tempo on the table. Then, in a soft, slow voice, Rana began singing again. Rahul joined in here and there.

  It turned out that Anjali was the daughter of Joshi, a cabinet minister at the state level. L. K. Joshi, minister of the Public Works Department. The family must have come from the hills once upon a time, but they’d been living in town for generations. Joshi had started as a forest contractor and then became a real-estate developer. He’d made millions. During this round of elections, his first time running for office, Joshi got on the ticket for the state legislature, won, and then finagled a state ministerial appointment. Behind him was the full weight of the businessmen, contractors, and real-estate dealers. He could also count on such criminal characters as Acchan, Bablu, and Lakhan Pandey.

  Joshi was considered one better than the Machiavellian political sage Chanakya, or so was common belief in the area. People said one day he’d go far in national politics. Astrologers clearly saw that it was in the stars.

  And Anjali? That girl munching merrily away on her corn on the cob?

  Anjali was the girlfriend of Seema Philip and Anima. The three of them had gone to the same inter-college for girls and had been inseparable. Anima said that Anjali was doing her MA in Hindi.

  An MA in Hindi?

  Rahul did a double take. An image of the Hindi department flashed before his eyes: the dull, gray, sick-looking walls, the red stains from paan juice spat out, garbage strewn in the corners, filth everywhere. It was as if the most isolated part of the university had been plunged into a blighted darkness. The mysterious building was serving a life sentence in solitary confinement.

  And the people who went in and out of the department! They didn’t look like they were living in today’s world. From the clothes they wore to the way they walked and talked, they were completely other. The males often traveled around campus together in a pack. Girls would see them and take fright. They spoke in high-pitched voices, screeching loudly, clapping their hands, having a coughing fit, all the while laughing at their own jokes in a sound like that of a mirthful primal man who’d jumped the fence into civilization. Ha-ha, hee-hee, hoo-hoo.

  They were at once ridiculous and frightful, inspiring both pity and fear. They spoke in a peculiar language among themselves, some spirit tongue of a dead culture.

  Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit: nobody really knew for sure why these three departments existed at all. What kind of future would their graduates have? No one had a clue. Those boys were ragged, misfits, backward, isolated from the real world, and their teachers made for the same caricature. One student would shamelessly scratch his crotch in public, while another shaved-head dhoti-clad type would ogle some girl like a chimpanzee.

  Students on campus jokingly referred to the department as “leftover land.” Any girl with brains and talent took admission in any of the other departments that were part of the university mainstream. Only the leftovers enrolled in the Hindi department. One look at them and you knew: dropouts.

  Could this Anjali Joshi really be part of that same Hindi department? What if next week she turns into a mother gorilla? She’ll look like some forest-dwelling rishi chick, speaking in middle Indo-Aryan or Pali, smeared with turmeric paste, drinking boiled cow or yak’s milk. Rahul heard from Anima that Anjali had been quite ill around the time of her graduation. She’d come down with jaundice, and was in a miserable state when she took her exams. Her grades, understandably, were simply awful, and she barely passed. So her father had a word with S. N. Mishra, the head of the Hindi department, who took care of matters, and so she was admitted.

  Kinnu Da once said, “Take any language. As long as there is some group of people, somewhere, using it to communicate, it won’t vanish. In spite of the massive spread of European languages, centuries of colonialism and imperialist subjugation, the itsy-bitsy indigenous languages of Africa and Asia still haven’t been eradicated. Living languages still exist today, like Ho, which is spoken by only a few adivasis.”

  So, they are the tribals! They are the adivasis of today.

  “No, those aren’t the adivasis,” Kartikeya countered. “They’re the Muslim mullahs and the Hindu purohits. Don’t forget, an adivasi is never retrogressive. He adapts to the times.”

  I’ll become a gorilla, too. A homo sapiens. A purohit. I’ll chew paan and gutkha, run around in a pack and laugh and laugh: Haha, hee-hee, hoo-hoo.

  Rahul watched from the corridor. In between Anima and Seema Philip was Anjali Joshi, walking away. In her right hand she held a parasol. A yellow parasol.

  He had no doubt it was the same back that deflected the sun’s rays from Room 252. “If I had a slingshot,” Rahul thought, “I’d pull the rubber band all the way back to my ear and let loose a shot.”

  A voice drenched in song, gratitude, and bittersweet pain would moan “Oooooooh,” and she would turn around with stunned, eager, inviting eyes.

  And she would freeze in that pose.

  That day was truly the first time in Rahul’s life that a real, living, breathing, flesh-and-blood girl had been captured in a freeze-frame, and her name was Anjali Joshi.

  SEVEN

  The emergency session took place at nine o’clock p.m., after dinner, on the field below Tagore Hostel. Nearly all of the boys from Maharshi Arvind, CV Raman, and Bhulabhai Desai hostels came out. There were also two other hostels: MLB (Maharani Laxmibai) and Sarojini Naidu Girls’ Hostel. Parvez and Kannan had sent the word over to them, and soon enough forty-five girls showed up.

  “Death to Vice-Chancellor Agnihotri!”

  “Shame on Chaturvedi!”

  “Warden Upadhyay: come out, come out, wherever you are!”

  “Comrades! Today we have come together as one to sort out some very serious business. If we don’t rise up today, we’re finished. This university’s become a haven for goondas and antisocial criminal elements. They do whatever they feel like and right out in the open. Your fellow students who stand among you now will tell you what the goondas did to them. I’ll start with the resident of Tagore Hostel, Room 212, Sapam Tomba, who came here to study from Manipur and is in his first-year MSc.”

  Sapam made his way to the dais and in broken Hindi and English began to tell the story of the calamity that befell him. In the middle, he choked up and began to weep right on stage. Maybe it was the sight of so many students, or his state of raw emotion, or his anxiety—but it was the first time he’d told the story to anyone. He’d even kept it hidden from the university administration.

  In the middle of his jerky sobs, as Sapam described the excesses he suffered at the hands of the goondas, he stopped for an instant, eyes seeming to stray off into space and fix on nothing in particular, and then, covering his eyes, he let it all out in one big breath. “Before forcing me to piss on the electric heater, they tried to sodomize me.” This was too much; he utterly fell apart. A new flood of tears breached his hands and drenched his face.

  It was as if a majestic bird, flapping its wounded wings, had fallen suddenly into the middle of the crowd. A frightful silence spread, and everyone stood still. The faces of the students gathered on the field below Tagore Hostel were covered with the grit of sorrow, disgust, defeat, and shame. An unbearable, soul-raking silence filled the ears of everyone present. And from the stage came Sapam Tomba’s sobbing voice.

  “I am not a gay,” he said in English. “Tell me, how can I go on? Why should I even try?” Sapam’s crying was now like a typhoon, once held back, now let loose. His delicate, lovely body trembled like a frail plant in a swiftly moving storm. Only a few days ago his brother, a primary school teacher, had been gunned down in Manipur, while here, Sapam had endured this.

  “Every day I think about suicide. And . . . I’ll definitely do it! Mark my words. If not today, then tomorrow. Why go on living? My brother sent me money so I could study. Now who will pay the bills? Tell me. Tell me!”

  Everyone’s eyes were mois
t with tears. You could hear the sound of girls’ sobbing.

  Rahul went up to Sapam and placed a hand on his shoulder. He himself was having a hard time holding it together. With great difficulty, he cleared his throat and said, “Come, come. Come down here, Sapam. It’s enough. You can hold it together.” Sapam’s red, swollen eyes glanced at Rahul, and, slowly balancing himself on him for support, Sapam began to descend the steps of the platform.

  The meeting lasted until midnight. It was concluded that either the security arrangements at the university were insufficient or, because of the presence of certain locals, no steps had been taken to fight the criminals. The administration acted this way maybe out of fear, or maybe an ulterior motive lurked behind. Who could say? Aside from Sapam, a few others came forward to speak—Madhusudan, Praveen, Niketan, and Masood—who’d also been beaten and had money and belongings stolen this term at the hands of the goondas. Pratap Parihar, whose uncle was a police officer, said these goondas had secured protection from police, university officials, and politicians. Last year, a senior named Jay Prakash Bhuiyan filed a complaint with the police against the goondas, naming them by name. A few months later, as he was waiting at the train station to go back home to his village, the goondas caught up with him on the platform and beat him up in front of the railway police, breaking both his hands. Afterward, he was forced to drop out of school.

  It was decided that all the students living in the hostels would unite to take on the goondas.

  “Don’t assume they’ve locked up support from all of the local students. We’ve talked with the ‘day scholars,’ and they’re with us. Sure, they come from the same place and know all the same people, so, okay, they might not support us openly. But they’ll find some other ways to help us.”

  “Believe me when I tell you that these goondas are few in number. Their strength and boldness have shot up only because of their weapons and political connections. If we let them know what we’re made of, loud and clear, they’ll think twice before breaking into our hostels again.”

  Pratap Parihar’s and Kartikeya’s speeches were powerful.

  It was also decided that the next time such an incident happened, the students would shut down the whole university.

  Strike! Strike! Long live student unity!

  The meeting was forceful and a complete success. Rahul felt as if the blood in his veins had suddenly picked up speed and was being licked by flames. He gazed at his biceps. The trips to the gym looked like they were paying off. I belong to a martial race. I will fight for a just cause till I breathe my last.

  He slowly began to hum. “I shall live and die for you, O Motherland . . . I gave you my heart and I shall give you my life, O Motherland . . .” He gently squeezed Sapam’s shoulder and gave him a smile.

  But Sapam didn’t return his smile. His eyes wandered off, lost in empty space. What was there? Was it his dead brother, who could only watch Sapam with his sad, helpless, lifeless eyes, and do nothing? He’d been shot. Blood still flowed from his temple. Sapam saw him right there, sitting quietly in the corner of the field below Tagore Hostel, looking at Sapam with his dead eyes.

  Every morning, he’d hoist his younger brother Sapam onto the bicycle, take the net, and go catch fish. At home ducks ran everywhere. Behind their house was dense forest, and mountains, whose color changed all day because of the sun’s and clouds’ continual play of light and shade. Mountains that appeared blue in morning would look gray or brown as afternoon crept along; then, a sudden shadow from a cloud falling on the mountain, and it transformed completely, green. It was a wonderful sight to watch the mountains disappear right before your very eyes, totally, without a trace. Only the fog of the clouds, suspended to the side of the mountain, was left to see. His brother used to tell him, “That’s how plane crashes happen, Sapam. The pilot thinks it’s just fog when really there’s a big mountain ahead.”

  In the summer heat, the thick, wet bamboo stands in the forest became dry, and when the evening wind blew swiftly through the stalks, they droned as if a thousand bansuris played. Father said that when Krishna fell in love with Rukmini, the sound from his flute floated through this same bamboo forest. Rukmini was from right here, the Northeast. These bamboo learned how to play the bansuri from Krishna. Even today, Rukmini comes to the jungle to meet Krishna, secretly disguised as the wind.

  Sapam’s father drummed on the dholak during the devotional kirtan songs. He played very well, and so totally submerged himself in the singing and drumming that people said the spirit of Chaitanya had entered into him. Chaitanya, the great master!

  Sapam had turned into a stone statue.

  It gave Rahul a shudder. Then he found his friend and roommate, O.P., six foot three, himself a bamboo stick, with a neck as long and delicate as a swan or heron’s, bobbing at every step, standing straight up in the middle of the crowd. His thin, oval face was burning with rage.

  Rahul came up quietly to O.P. and hugged him from behind. “Hey, Guinness book contender, why aren’t you looking around for your petite girl? There must be one here somewhere in this crowd. Forget about fighting the goondas. And if by chance your girl did show up, your great house of bones would break in ten places.”

  “Shut up! This is no time for jokes,” O.P. fumed. But as Rahul tightened his grip and twisted harder O.P. began to laugh amid his wincing. “Uncle! Uncle! Okay, you win!”

  EIGHT

  The SMTF—Special Militant Task Force—consisted of twenty-five young men. Pratap Parihar had not only procured iron rods, khurkhuri blades, Rampuri knives, hockey sticks, tiger’s claws, cycle chains, billy clubs, and lathi sticks, but also arranged for three makeshift pistols.

  Rahul and Madhusudan lifted the recipe for Molotov cocktails from Che Guevara’s Venceremos and filled ten soda bottles with gasoline, caustic soda, and miscellaneous shrapnel. Sapam and Kartikeya crafted homemade hand grenades from gunpowder, potash, lead shot, shards of glass, and nails that, when thrown, would burst open and cause all hell to break loose. These were the weapons for tossing into jeeps from the roof of the hostel, should the goondas happen to come at night.

  “Venceremos! Venceremos! We shall overcome—we shall overcome! Our hearts are filled with faith!”

  After that night, hostel warden Chandramani Upadhyay would seem like a scared, worried little mouse. Just over the last few days, he’d noticed a clear change in the boys’ behavior. The Namaste Index had fallen off sharply, went into a downward spiral, and nearly crashed. Even the rare “namaste” delivered like a blood-sucking protégé, reminiscent of the golden age and good old days, came from the lips of either a student from his department or a real ass kisser. Upadhyay had an eagle eye, infallible, for spotting boys of his own caste; so how was it he was now being fooled by not recognizing his own kind? Before, when he walked the halls, students made way and greeted him with a “namaste” or “adab” as he went by. Now they stood in groups, looked at him like he was some weird insect, and walked past talking among themselves, ignoring him. So now he stuck to the edge of the hallway. He was scared. Who knew if one of those bastards might take a cheap shot?

  It’s been said the age of information and technology had descended upon India, and on Delhi, and then somehow even got dragged all the way to this university. Students had in their possession reams of information about each and every person. Only a short distance from the hostel complex a “Max Cyber Cafe” opened where a few boys made what they called “de facto” files on professors and administrators. Hemant Barua, a student from Assam studying in the Department of Mathematics (and simultaneously working on an e-commerce degree from the private IT school NIIT), led the information-gathering effort. Hemant was a chess master and his number-crunching skills were dumbfounding. He was short and dark, his hair curly, his eyes tiny, smiling, and blinking. Every day Hemant and Rahul played chess for an hour or so. When Rahul confessed his crush on Anjali, Hemant said, “Hold on a little while. First I’ll put together a full profile on the girl.”r />
  Meanwhile, at the Max Cyber Cafe, the de facto file on hostel warden Dr. Chandramani Upadhyay looked something like this:

  Name: Dr. Chandramani Upadhyay.

  Age: Fifty-five years, seven months, four days.

  Marital Status: Married, but left the Mrs. Brahmin back in the village in Uttar Pradesh with six kids. Now lives with his mistress, who writes about women’s issues.

  Property: Bought two flats and three plots of land in town, but stays in the apartment reserved for the hostel warden. Besides his salary and retirement benefits, he holds several other private insurance policies. Has credit card. He gambles and plays the stock market.

  Comment: A classic schemer. A loyal lacquered lackey of Vice-Chancellor Mr. Ashok Agnihotri.

  Following this, some student added additional commentary.

  Special Edition: Upadhyay-ji pays for all his food with money taken from the hostel fund. He siphons off everything he needs from the bank account of the hostel, buying everything, from his fruits and vegetables to paper and pens to paying for his taxi fare. He’s gotten jobs at the university for a couple of nieces and nephews. Upadhyay made some dirt-poor untouchable Dalit student ghostwrite the thesis for his live-in lover, and with it got her conferred a PhD. He’s a regularly attending supplicant and darbari at the court held by L. K. Joshi, state minister of the Public Works Department. He claims he’s a Marxist but in actuality he’s a die-hard Brahminist.

  NINE

  It was a clear morning, not a cloud in the sky. The sun had finally emerged, radiant and clear. Orange rays of sunshine slanted through a corner of the windowpane of Room 252 and hopped around Rahul’s bed like sparrows. O.P. had gone to the bathroom for a shower, and Rahul was gazing out the window as he brushed his teeth next to Madhuri Dixit. Two glasses of chai sat brewing atop a heater in the corner. Chai was served only once a day at the dining hall, with breakfast. But since O.P. and Rahul were both accustomed to gulping down dozens of cups per day, they’d made their own arrangements.