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

by Prakash, Uday

  The hostel lay in the hills. The valley sloped down below and ended in a large, level field. On one side were the city hospital, bank, and post office. A residential development was also located in the same area. People played cricket and football on that field. If there had been a telescope in Room 252, you could have seen the whole game without even going there. It was like the university’s all-purpose sports field. The road surrounded the field like a semicircle.

  Just then, Rahul saw a spot of yellow far away by the residential area slowly making its way along the road. The yellow glowed beautifully in the morning light.

  There was something different about this particular yellow. This one entered through his eyes, dissolved in his blood, and went straight to his heart. Rahul felt a quick jump in his heart rate as the thump-thump throbbing reached all the way to his ears.

  An odd, intense longing took hold of Rahul, and his room suddenly struck him as tiny and cramped. Where could he get a better, clearer look at that slow-moving spot of yellow? In a few moments it would be hidden behind the photo of Madhuri Dixit’s slingshot-wounded backside taped on the window. And then he wouldn’t be able to see it. If only he had a pair of binoculars!

  There was no doubt: it was the yellow parasol, fluttering gently like the dainty wings of a butterfly, coming toward campus.

  It must be her underneath, the one I saw that day. But what if it is really her under that parasol? It was as if Rahul’s entire body had been seized by a sweet fever. His heart began to beat faster with a restlessness his body couldn’t contain. He held his breath. He eyes remained wide open. A few moments passed like this until, in a blink of an eye, Madhuri Dixit eclipsed the yellow parasol. Shit! Shit! It was unbearable. For the first time ever Rahul felt uncontrollable anger toward Madhuri Dixit and her pretty back. This isn’t some film, this is real life, madam. It’s not merely an image. This is reality. Understand?

  Rahul quickly threw on a pair of pants and a T-shirt. His mouth was still full of toothpaste as he bounded down the stairs, three steps at a time.

  He had to reach the bend in the road as quickly as possible, to the place where he could erase all doubt. O god! Let it be her who is carrying that parasol. Let it be her. But what if it’s someone else? O god! Whoever is underneath that parasol, just please make it be her! I will be grateful forever.

  The shortcut was strewn with rocks and littered with thorny shrubs. Rahul nearly slipped and fell in a few places on loose rocks; after that, he became stealthy like a leopard, without leaving any tracks, and finally arrived at the edge of the lookout point, from where he could hide behind the rocks and watch the road.

  Oh! It was her, Anjali Joshi, wearing a burgundy sleeveless handloom kurta with light red embroidery. A deep-eggplant-colored chunni was draped over her shoulders. And for sure it was natural vegetable dye, made from flowers and leaves. Wow, so you’re an environmentalist, and your taste is ethnic. Wonderful! Where did you buy it? Jaipur? You are simply, simply great. God has made you just so and sent you down here. But you won’t be permitted to live in peace in this world. Listen to me. Come with me—we’ll leave the world behind.

  Rahul kicked a rock by accident, which went tumbling down toward the road where Anjali Joshi was walking. It startled her. O god! Those wide, innocent eyes scanned everywhere around before she dared amble forth again. She glanced at the spot where Rahul was hidden, but she turned away, unconcerned. It was as if a startled doe stood watch for a few seconds, only to once again assume its carefree ways.

  Rahul’s mouth was still filled with toothpaste, which had begun to dissolve and give his breath a sweet minty fragrance. He continued to gaze at her back until after it turned the next bend, passed two neem trees and a wild ber bush, until it finally disappeared behind a big dumb rock. Shit!

  He returned to his room to find himself face-to-face with a livid O.P. The two cups of chai brewing on the heater had burned black, filling the room with smoke. “Sorry, yaar . . . very sorry . . . really, I’m sorry . . .”

  “Where were you? Look at the dirt and mud on your pants. And you forgot to rinse your mouth out after brushing your teeth?” O.P. glared.

  “That’s what I’m going to do now, yaar. There was something urgent I suddenly remembered,” Rahul said. Then he whispered, “Something to do with the color yellow.”

  But O.P. didn’t hear.

  TEN

  Rahul was sitting with Gopal Dwivedi in the living room of 18A in the professor’s quarters. This living room belonged to the head of the Hindi department, S. N. Mishra: Shri Shyam Narayan Mishra, MA, PhD., DLitt, Crowning Jewel of Literature, etc. Rahul had just come from the Max Cyber Cafe where he had read Mishra-ji’s de facto file: He has two living rooms. One for his sycophant students and unwanted visitors, and a second for his dignitaries and girls.

  So the old Vedic goat indulges in some of the finer things in life, eh?

  After a long wait, the curtains rustled, parted, and out came a roundish, potbellied man, the religious tilak mark on forehead, of either Nigerian or Dravidian origin, wearing a homespun lungi around his waist and white undershirt on top. Gopal Dwivedi, who was doing advanced studies in Hindi and, according to the de facto Mishra file, was Mishra’s number one student, suddenly lay face down on the carpet and stretched out prostrate, flat as a board. So, this was the chief disciple! Rahul began to panic. What should I do? Which posture should I take? Suddenly he remembered something from The Mahabharata or Om Namah Shiva or some other series on TV and was saved from some term of address like “good sir!” or “beloved child!” tumbling from his mouth.

  “Most Esteemed Honorable Acharya-ji!” is what actually came out.

  O.P., Kartikeya, and Pratap Parihar had briefed Gopal Dwivedi extensively and sent him to accompany Rahul. He took to his task with relish. “This is Rahul, sir. He is in the anthropology department in his first year. But he has a deep interest in literature and would like to transfer to the Hindi department.”

  “But it’s already so late. The first semester’s nearly finished,” Mishra-ji said, eyeing Rahul with total disinterest.

  “This student is extraordinarily courteous, disciplined, and obedient, sir. Before this he completed an MSc in organic chemistry,” Gopal Dwivedi said in a moment of humility.

  “Which division did you score?” Mishra asked, sizing up Rahul for the first time.

  “First, sir!” Rahul said. ““Same in graduation.”

  Rahul clearly saw the smile wiped clean from Mishra’s face, replaced by an expression signifying the arrival of indigestion. Gopal Dwivedi at once sensed the change and tried to rescue the moment. “I consider him my younger brother, sir, and as such he shall always require your good grace. He will give his last breath to carry out any command you may give. Take this as my oath—sir!”

  The squat frame of that blubbery, buffalo-like creature showed signs of delight for the first time. Under the flared nostrils of his pug nose, a sad excuse for a chuckle emerged from his fixed, fat lips, while his stomach, the size of a Laotian jar, rippled as if it’d been tickled.

  Gopal Dwivedi seized the moment and placed a largish clay pot sealed in a plastic bag on a table beside the acharya: “I went to town at daybreak, and by chance found Vajravasi’s shop open. Pandit Jagannath-ji himself called me inside, and absolutely insisted I take this,” Gopal Dwivedi said.

  “Shakun! Shakuntalaaaaaa! Have some chai sent for these boys!” Raga Jaijaivanti emerged from the acharya’s lungs, but with no attention to the melody. For the first time, Rahul felt like things might go his way. Gopal Dwivedi had informed him that if the acharya served them tea, they were as good as gold.

  “Our department is full of politics,” the acharya announced. “Tell him that his energies should be focused entirely on his research. If he encounters any difficulties, he should liaise straightaway with me or Gopal. No need to involve anyone else. And about tomorrow morning: he should bring his application forms here to me at ten o’clock sharp. By the way, w
hat kind of shape is your thesis in?”

  “Only a couple of chapters left, sir. I should have it done by the end of the month. If it weren’t for my sister’s wedding, I’d be done by now!”

  “Yes, of course, I understand. But you should speed things up. I’m feeling pressure to post the results. As long as I’m still around, things can still happen. After me, it’s Radha Raman’s turn. A real Kanyakubj Brahmin, that one. Pandit Suryakant Tripathi-ji says Raman bites the hand that feeds him. A total ingrate. Meanwhile, every day he’s plotting against me with the vice-chancellor. Even our dear Agnihotri-ji is encouraging these elements,” the acharyaji said maliciously.

  Then for the first time he softened toward Rahul. “You have an interest in literature. Outstanding. Tell me, what have you read so far? Poetry or prose?”

  “A little bit of both, sir-ji!” Who knows why Rahul had the burning desire to add the honorific “ji” after “sir.”

  “I see. And the names of some writers? Their works?”

  “Sir, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Resurrection and short stories. Old Man and the Sea and Tagore’s Gora, Gitanjali, The Home and the World, Garcia Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, Milan Kundera’s The Joke, Italo Calvino’s Adam and Eve, Arundhati Roy’s God of Small . . .”

  “So! Even supermodels are writing modern novels these days, eh? I haven’t read anything by her but I’ve seen that Arundhati on TV in her ad for Lux soap. No doubt. She was Miss World, no? And who wrote that Old Man? It rings a bell,” the acharya queried.

  “Hemingway did, sir! Ernest Hemingway. And sir . . .” Rahul wanted to go on but the acharya cut him short.

  “In addition to Western literature, have you read anything Indian?”

  “Yes, sir! I’ve read Premchand’s novels, Nirmal Verma’s The Last Wilderness, Alka Saraogi’s Kali-Katha: Via Bypass, and Vinod Kumar Shukla’s The Servant’s . . .”

  “What about early Hindi verse? Ghananand, Matiram, Bihari, Dev?” the acharya asked.

  “No, sir!”

  “No Alam, no Bodha?”

  “No, sir.”

  “ . . . and Vidyapati and Surdas and Tulsidas . . . ?”

  “I’ve heard of Tulsidas-ji, sir. I saw Ramanand’s Ramayana TV series, and where I’m from they put on a really great Ram Lila every year around Dusshera. And my mom knows the Sundarkand part by heart.”

  “Outstanding. Come tomorrow. But if you want to study Hindi deeply then go to the library today and begin reading Ramchandra Shukla’s A History of Hindi Literature.”

  “Which Shukla-ji, Sir?” Rahul blurted out nervously.

  “Ha! You . . . ha!” the acharya laughed. “Gopal will tell you everything you need to know. A very intelligent student, he is.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  After finishing their chai, Rahul and Gopal Dwivedi left and took the road back. Dusk had fallen. Shadows faded. Darkness slowly descended.

  “Thank you, Gopal-ji. Thank you so much,” Rahul said.

  Gopal teased him. “An empty ‘thank you’ isn’t going cut it, Rahul-ji. After you get admitted, you’ll have to buy a big box of sweets to celebrate.”

  “Certainly! Certainly! Have faith in me, Dwivedi-ji.” Rahul was very happy.

  But then Gopal added, “I’m only worried about one little thing. Do you think he—might there have been any confusion about you?”

  “What do you mean?” Rahul didn’t understand.

  “Nothing. I’ll take care of it. What I meant was confusion about caste,” Gopal said lightly.

  Rahul looked toward the sky. The clouds that gather in the evening pour out their rain late into the night. And it would rain tonight. The face of the acharya Shyam Narayan Mishra flashed around in Rahul’s head.

  Kinnu Da’s voice returned. “For thousands of years, countless castes, ethnicities, and cultures kept coming to this country and living in peace. The Scythians, the Huns, the Mongols, the Kushans. Would you be able to find and differentiate all those different groups today?” Kinnu Da asked.

  Then he said something Rahul would never forget. “Take any Indian middle-class family, this thing everyone’s talking about these days—one that lives in one of the identical Indian metropolises and lives very comfortably. Choose one that has four generations living under one roof, from grandparent to grandchild. Assemble them and take a Grand Family Photograph, just like they do right before ‘The End’ of a Bombay film. Then enlarge that photo and do a morphological analysis . . . Ha!” Kinnu Da burst out laughing.

  “Do you know what you’ll find? That one family photo opens up thousands of years of Indian history and places it right at your feet. ‘As is the individual, so is the universe’: yat pinde tat brahmande. It’s entirely probable that all of the descendants and offspring of all ethnicities and castes that once upon a time came to this great land will be represented by one single photograph of a middle-class family. But keep in mind there’s a part of our society afflicted with a superiority complex. The Great Indian Puritanical Sectarian Casteist Hedonist Homogeneous Middle Class. In that same family you’ll find a white, a black, a light brown, a dark brown, a flat nose, a big lips, a long and thin nose, a round eyes, a fine brow, a yellow face. Ha! Everything’s mixed in there. The Aryans, Dravidians, Africans, Mongols, Austric, everything.”

  Kinnu Da grew serious. “In the history of this country’s civilization, there was never any voodooland cut off from the rest of the world like in the Andaman Nicobar islands or in Africa or today in the Americas. Here, countless newcomers kept on coming, and once they came, they stayed. Something like 13 to 87 percent of genetic interaction occurred right here. Do you understand the meaning of ‘genetic interaction’? It’s a relic from an age when there was no AIDS and no condoms! Ha!”

  Rahul finally understood what he’d been talking about. So the head of the Hindi department, S. N. Mishra—that dwarfish, fat, pugnosed, fat-lipped tilak-wearing darky, was the fruit of the seed of a foreign mleccha or other non-Aryan sprayed into the womb of some foremother.

  The demon devil used the ancient text of Manusmriti, the basis of caste, as his ladder to ascend to the top of the sociocultural power structure in the country, and now that he’s there, he sits as the head of the caste system. Bastard son of Ravana. If I ever get a chance I’ll prepare his gene map and definitely put in his de facto file.

  Rahul regarded Gopal Dwivedi. He was rubbing tobacco and lime in his palm, readying it for a chew.

  “Gopal-ji, tell me, between Hema Malini from Tamil Nadu, or Dr. S. N. Mishra from Uttar Pradesh, which one do you think is the Aryan? Could you say?”

  Gopal rolled the plug tobacco around his tongue and said, “What kind of a question is that?”

  “You think it’s probably Mishra-ji, no?” Rahul said. He continued, “What about me? What am I: Dravidian or Aryan?”

  Gopal Dwivedi began to laugh. “Tsk, tsk, tsk. Forget about the anthropology, dear boy! And go read Ramchandra Shukla’s A History of Hindi Literature. Tsk, tsk, tsk.”

  “Hoo! Hoo! Oooga booga!” Rahul made gorilla sounds.

  This sound mixed with the rumbling of the clouds and echoed all the way to campus. There was something in it that made Gopal Dwivedi feel a bit uneasy for the first time.

  ELEVEN

  The next day Rahul spent the entire day in the Hindi department attending to admission formalities, running to and from all sorts of offices. During lunch he caught up with Anima, Bhagvat, Raju, Seema Philip, Rana, and Abha, who were all a bit down. They couldn’t understand the sudden whim of Rahul to study Hindi literature. Even O.P. put in his two cents. “I still can’t work out this stupidity of yours. What are you thinking? Best think twice, otherwise you’ll regret it later.”

  Rahul smiled and gave O.P. a little pinch. “Yaar, you remember that little bird? Well, she’s all grown up and has already ravaged my field. Isn’t it a little late for regret?”

  “You bastard. As soon as you get into the Hindi d
epartment you start pulling out Hindi proverbs. Why, I oughta . . .”

  Rahul took mental note that Anima didn’t laugh once. He couldn’t understand why this sad girl was so sad today.

  And Rahul didn’t even see Anjali Joshi once in the department. Maybe she hadn’t come to campus that day.

  After dinner, Rahul went out for a night stroll with O.P., Kartikeya, Pratap, and Praveen. They ran into Hemant Barua. It was the fifth of the month. Attacks from the local goondas usually took place between the eighth and fifteenth. It was decided that the SMTF meeting would be at Praveen’s the following night, and that next time they’d take the fight to the goondas themselves. The postman had been seen on campus two days ago. The middle-aged man was bald and decrepit, but shrewd and cunning. The son of a bitch gave the goondas a list of which students got how much in their money orders. No one knew whether he did it because he was afraid of the goondas, or whether he was greedy to get his commission. Rahul had once read a poem in Hindi and seen a Chinese film, both about postmen. But this local letter carrier had made a mockery of those noble characters. The era has descended on humankind where the sole purpose of everyone’s life has become money. The Angry Young Hero of prior decades’ film fame had transformed in the blink of an eye into the Middle-Aged Greedy Cunning Stock Market Player, and then was appointed game-show host of the superhit of the day, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

  Sapam Tomba’s name also came up. He no longer laughed or, for that matter, even spoke much anymore. He’d stopped coming to the badminton court. Considering what he had gone through, everyone could guess why.

  Kartikeya and Pratap prevailed upon Madhusudan not to return to Kerala. It was decided that a few students would write a letter to his father and explain that there was no need for him to return. His future wasn’t ruined. There was absolutely no need for alarm. Everyone was standing beside him.