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

by Prakash, Uday

  The weaver pleaded with his friends to tell him what kind of sweet dessert he should feed his new bride. His friends felt sorry for the weaver’s ignorance and gave him some advice: first take a toothbrush and toothpaste, clean and rinse out your bride’s other mouth, and then give us a call. We’ll come and bring her the snack ourselves. After all, what are friends for?

  The joke continues that meanwhile the weaver went to ask his new bride about her other mouth and other stomach. Even though the wife was simple and uneducated like the weaver, she put two and two together and, blushing, showed her second mouth to her new husband. He proceeded to use the toothbrush and toothpaste given by his friends to thoroughly clean his wife’s other mouth. Then he let them know he’d done as he was told.

  His friends came over and, one after another, they took turns serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner to the weaver’s new bride.

  The joke produced a great outburst of laughter among the first-year MA Hindi students in class. A fiery, seething, base, inhuman laugh that had prevailed for centuries.

  Rahul looked at Shailendra George and Shaligaram. Of the twelve students, the three of them sat off to one side, the other nine to the other. The laughing came from that side. Imagine a furnace in a steel plant in Bokaro or Bhilai, with temperatures of thousands of degrees, glowing bright red, liquid pig iron flowing so hot that it would vaporize a man into thin air—this laughter flashed even hotter than that. It wasn’t even the sound of laughter; it was the sound of a medieval fire disgorging caste abhorrence like lava from the Vedic furnace poured right into their ears.

  Rahul watched all their laughing faces. Vimal Shukla, Vinod Vajpayi, Balram Pandey, Vijay Pachauri, Kamal Tripathi, Ram Narayan Chaturvedi, Sudip Pant, Vibhuti Prasad Mishra. All of them were “critters,” like from the movie. Ball-like, rolling, frightening, omnivorous critters sent from another world or demon realm to this bit of earth. Or else they arrived in a mysterious pod dropped from the skies, which then exploded. The creatures emerged on their own and over time established their own system of rule. They were everywhere. In language, in politics, in temples, in Parliament, in civil service, in places of worship, in birth, at death; from food and water to clothing and medicine to all media of information—newspapers, books, universities, TV channels; from finance to poetry, from art to letters.

  These were the critters. When they came to this part of the world, the first thing they did was gobble up the sun in order to project a darkness into history, so dark that inside it no one could see the advance of their ever-hungry jaws and glimmering, razor-sharp teeth. They devoured the Buddha, the tales about his life, the sublime philosophies of the Upanishads, and all manner of folktales. They gnawed Jesus, Moses, Pirs, prophets, and Sufi saints down to the bones, crushed the bones into fertilizer, threw the fertilizer into a pit where a poisonous tree took root, and bore fruit—fruit that’s been hanging in the psyche of millions of innocent inhabitants of this part of the world for centuries.

  Insult and disgust stained Shaligaram’s face first the color of mud, then to black. Fear shone from the eyes of Shailendra George.

  “Shut up! Hold your filthy tongue! Bastards!” Rahul stood up. “Hindi literature and Hindu dharma have taught you this? Demon sons of Ravana! When will you stop eating? How much of this world will you destroy? You’re like weevils, leeches, gnats—parasites sucking on the broken body of this great country. Don’t forget that Ravana was one of you, living on the golden island of Lanka. It was still the treta-yug, when the dharma bull still had three legs, when you abducted the wife of the exiled Ram from their household, and then tore her up from the inside. It was a senseless life of never-ending wandering! And you bastards pretend to be devotees of Ram? Now in this kali-yug of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, when the dharma bull has but one leg, you are fashioning Ram into your very own barbaric, violent, murderous, fundamentalist, misanthropic, fascist image! Because you need the votes. Because you have to cling to power. Because now you need more to eat.

  “How many thousands of years do you need power? If you want to know the truth, you bastards, here it is. The Huns never really held power in this country. Neither did the Scythians, the Kushans, the Greeks, the Mughals, or the English. Each of these regimes was just a cover for your Raj. The machete blade that’s come down for centuries on the neck of every honest, meek man who stands for justice is really just a symbol of your political power. If you have been so ennobled, then tell me: why wasn’t god ever born a Brahmin?”

  Rahul was shaking with rage. But the dark stain had been wiped from Shaligaram’s face, and Shailendra George didn’t seem frightened anymore.

  Just then, Dr. Loknath Tripathi entered the room. “Is there some kind of meeting going on here? Oh, right, of course, you’re all getting ready for the Union Council elections. But which candidate was giving the speech?”

  The group of girls also returned. Now the medieval devotional literature lesson would begin, given by Dr. Loknath Tripathi, at whose house Balram Pandey worked as a cook, and who would one day become head of this Hindi department.

  The three o’clock class was over. Thick tension suddenly cast its shadow throughout the entire classroom. Rahul felt as if he was suffocating. He stepped outside into the corridor. From there he could see the library. Next to it were two leafy neem trees; the shade beneath them must be deliciously cool.

  As Rahul stood there, Kartikeya, O.P., Pratap, and a few others came running over.

  “Sapam committed suicide. He’s dead.” Kartikeya’s face trembled. Everyone was out of breath.

  “They found his body in the old well behind the hostel.”

  There was a deep silence, screaming and ringing even in the absence of sound. Like after a falling meteor breaks up, or after a big explosion, or after a horrific death.

  Rahul’s mind went still. No sound reached his ears. He fell in step behind his friends like a robot.

  In the cool shade of the neem tree near the library stood Chaitanya—Chaitanya, the great master. But there was no singing of kirtans; the man was silent. His body was covered with scratches. His brow was disfigured. A bullet may have pierced a hole right between his eyes, sending a steady stream of blood flowing over his eyes.

  A broken dholak lay on the ground, with a kartal and tiny set of cymbals next to the drum. And next to them, corpses. The police, Border Security Force, Central Reserve Police Force, a band of terrorists, a gang of Mafiosos, a fundamentalist, the Taliban or Hizbul or the Ranbir Sena, some Naxalites, Acchan Guru, Dawood, and the secret service detail of some government minister—all combined in a joint operation, and, after some wild firing, had shot them dead.

  Behind the neem tree stood Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse, smoke coming from his gun.

  Chaitanya’s mouth was still moving to sing the next line of the devotional kirtan song, but the only sound coming out was a near-silent bhaanya bhaanya bhaanya.

  Rahul realized that on the grass next to his feet and the broken dholak was Sapam’s body.

  “I’ll kill myself someday, I really will. Mark my words! How can I go on? Tell me? My brother sent me money for my studies. Now I’ll fight for my freedom. Do you know what they did to me . . . ?”

  White ducks ran everywhere; drops of blood stained their feathers. A wind blew through the dry bamboo grove playing thousands of bamboo trees like the bansuri. They’d learned how to play the flute from Krishna, whom Rukmini came there to meet.

  Sapam’s brother stared silently at him with his dead eyes. His father played the dholak and sang.

  Rahul burst into tears. O.P. and Kartikeya tried to calm him down. “Try to pull yourself together, Rahul!”

  Anjali Joshi stood silently in the corridor, watching.

  SIXTEEN

  It was nine thirty at night. Dinner hadn’t been served in the hostel. A unanimous decision was reached by all of the students of Tagore Hostel as part of the mourning for Sapam. Notices were tacked up in front of the dining hall that stud
ents wishing to eat could go to B. B. Desai Hostel.

  Later it turned out that aside from a few dining hall staff and a stray student, nobody had eaten dinner that night.

  It revealed a deep sense of sorrow born from Sapam’s suicide. The students spoke very little to one another, and even at that in feeble voices, as if their throats were constricted. Was it merely the sadness over Sapam’s sudden death that had weakened their voices so—or was there also a newfound fear inside each student that had disarmed their voices, rendering them weak and powerless? Even the most argumentative and boisterous among them, those who talked the loudest, today were silent. The sounds of motorcycles were menacing. Someone arriving to pick up a friend would sound the horn on his motorcycle instead of calling out for his friend on the top floor of the hostel. No one called out to anyone.

  The bulb in the corridor gave off a grimy, gloomy light. In the hazy darkness, the sound of the boys’ conversation, halting and subdued, was only occasional, like blurry silhouettes traversing a movie screen.

  Rahul, Kartikeya, Pratap, Masood, O.P., and Praveen were walking on the rocky pathway covered with shrubs and undergrowth that led from the area behind B. B. Hostel. The police had been at the scene all day long, and aside from a few university staff, no one had been allowed there. The crowd of students had been kept at a distance from where they couldn’t see the place Sapam had committed suicide. Some students wanted to try to climb a tree in order to see better, but there were only bushy acacia. There was a semal tree, but it was full of thorns.

  By seven in the evening, the police had completed their investigation of the site and withdrawn. Sapam’s body was transferred to the morgue at Gandhi Hospital. The postmortem was scheduled for the next day. His classmates tried everything they could to have a look at Sapam’s body, but they were refused. Vice-Chancellor Agnihotri had called to inform the chief secretary of Manipur, it was said. Sapam’s father could come from Imphal; otherwise, Sapam’s body would be sent there by train. There was no money to have his body flown home.

  Rahul wondered how Sapam’s father would take the news. It hadn’t been long since his oldest son, a primary school teacher in Singjamei, near Imphal, had been shot dead by the police, mistaken for a terrorist. And now all that remained of his youngest son Sapam was a corpse brought to the morgue a few hours ago. He, too, wouldn’t last long after this. Would he come here to perform Sapam’s last rites? Or he’ll get the news and have such a breakdown that he won’t be able to make the long three-day trip—from Imphal to Kohima to Guwahati to Delhi via Bongaigaon to Agra to Gwalior to Jhansi to here.

  The bitter truth is that Sapam, his father, and hundreds of millions of their unfortunate countrymen are not among those for whom technology has made the world a smaller place, or has eradicated distance. There are others who consider the U.S., France, and Germany just like their own backyards. Whenever the mood strikes, they mosey over to wash their faces and take a piss.

  Kartikeya held a flashlight in his hand. They pushed their way through the motley scrub of thick sirkin, lentina, chakvar, and besharam bushes, until finally they arrived at the well into which Sapam had jumped and taken his life.

  There was something about the place—as soon as they arrived, some thick thing covered their consciousness like a blanket. It was like a physical numbing, yet something that radiated a kind of shudder throughout all their bodily channels. They all felt as if suddenly Sapam would appear sitting on the broken rocks that formed a skirt around the edge of the well in the middle of all this undergrowth and declare, “Oh, I get it—you guys came here to get me to come to dinner! You go ahead, I’m on my way . . .”

  It was a very old well that hadn’t been in use for ten years. It must have been bored by hand. The soil here was rocky and craggy. It had to have been painstaking labor to dig this decent sized a well, inch by inch. The locals call it an indaara. Just think of all the iron that was ground down from the hoes, crowbars, and pickaxes used to dig seventy feet deep. It was constructed when there were no drill bores. It was said that this well used to supply the entire university. Now the main water station is located on another hillock.

  Kartikeya shined his flashlight into the well. Roots, shrubs, and dry clumps of grass grew from the inside of the well. This growth encircled a darkness extending to the bottom of the wall, where far beneath lay the water. Supposedly, it was a very deep well. The light from the flashlight just reached the water level in the depth of that darkness. They couldn’t make out anything clearly, just reddish-green hues twinkling in the beam of yellow light. “How did Sapam find this particular well?” Kartikeya asked in a quiet, uneven voice.

  “He said something about this once,” Praveen said. “I guess—I guess he’d been thinking about it for quite some time.”

  “What other choice did he have? The reality is that even before committing suicide he’d already been done in,” said Masood.

  “He should have become a terrorist. Then he could have taken revenge on everyone—the people who killed his brother, the people who stole his money and tried to sodomize him,” said Pratap Parihar.

  “That’s not the right way to think about this,” Kartikeya said, suddenly roused. His voice had become more serious and firm, cold and tough like metal. He switched off the flashlight and said in the darkness, “Even after this horror you still can’t grasp the truth of who’s the terrorist and who’s the criminal?”

  After this utterance of Kartikeya Kajle from Pune, the only sounds that could be heard were the night insects and the boys’ own breathing, such was the deep silence that spread through the darkness. The stillness, wordless and tense, combined with the tragedy of Sapam, awoke a surge of inner disquietude that made it hard to think straight at all. The calm was hardly peaceful, but rather anxious, disturbed, and suffocating.

  Seventy feet below, in the depths of darkness, where the faint yellow light from the flashlight caught the surface of the water in reddish-green sparkle, Rahul sensed something floating. He touched Kartikeya on the shoulder. “I think there’s something down there. A bit to the right. Now up a little more.”

  The dim light hardly reached the depths of the well, but there in its beam Rahul could make out one of Sapam’s sandals, floating on the surface. Two months ago, just after he and Rahul had become friends, Sapam had bought a pair of them in town at the Liberty shoe store.

  Rahul wished he could somehow climb down deep into the well to retrieve the sandal. What awful irony. This plastic, inanimate, 40-rupee sandal that had come into being in Sapam’s life a short two months ago still exists, floating on the surface, while a real life was no more. Vanished in the shimmering water.

  Not a word was spoken as they returned to the hostel. It seemed that Sapam himself had emerged from somewhere amid the bushes and shrubs, trailing behind them in the darkness. Head bowed, from the depth of his death. That must have been why Kartikeya shined the flashlight behind a few times. When he did, there was nothing. Only rocks, shrubs, and thorny, dried-out acacia.

  As they passed through the corridor of the hostel they saw Room 212, Sapam Tomba’s room. The police and university administration had sealed off the room. An unfamiliar heavy-duty lock had been fastened to the door. The lock was frightening to behold. Peering out from behind it was Sapam’s death.

  Rahul was wide awake late into the night. O.P. was just across the room in his bed against the far wall. He couldn’t fall asleep either, but neither spoke. It was a noiselessness neither had the strength to shatter. A few steps down the hall was Sapam’s room where he’d been living just four days ago.

  At that moment, Sapam’s bloated body lay in town at the mortuary of the Mahatma Gandhi Hospital. How must his sweet, round face look now? The mortuary wasn’t even air-conditioned; dead bodies were laid out on ice blocks. The word was that the hospital workers pocketed even the money set aside for the ice.

  SEVENTEEN

  The next day—the seventh of September—was declared a day off. This was
the routine and formality the university followed when mourning the death of a student, in this case one named Sapam Tomba, from Manipur, who was in the first year of his MSc.

  At ten o’clock, Rahul and Hemant Barua decided for no particular reason to leave the hostel and take a walk toward campus. It was dead quiet and the department buildings were closed. Dogs and crows hovered in front of the canteen. The entire area felt uninhabited.

  “Sapam used to say that the young generation of Manipuris were quickly dropping the Hindu last names once affixed to the end of their own,” Hemant said. “They want to get back to their tribal roots. We’re ashamed at the idiocy of our forefathers, who were made the fools for so long. The same winds of change are blowing in Assam, too. We have to ask ourselves, ‘Are we really Indian?”’

  “Who is really Indian then?” Rahul asked. “The professional politicians, con men, criminals, corrupt bureaucrats, middlemen, and businessmen who live in Delhi, U.P., and Bihar—are they the only Indians?” Rahul was getting wound up. “They’ve hijacked our independence. Since India’s not a proper nation-state, how can anyone say they’re Indian?”

  “But don’t forget, my dear, about Indian nationalism. Didn’t you see it happening just now during the Kargil War—what else do you think it was! Our boys coming from our very own Guwahati, Silchar, and Dibrugarh gave their lives up there, don’t you know.”

  Rahul began to laugh, and Hemant Barua followed suit.

  “Sponsored nationalism! Now explain this to me, Hemant, have you ever heard of a kind of nationalism that exists only in terms of another country?” Rahul asked.

  “What do you mean?” Hemant asked.

  “What I mean is, why is it that whenever the flag of nationalism is raised, it’s always in terms of Pakistan? Why don’t feelings of nationalism get stirred up when faced with a certain other very powerful country? One that made us slaves and sent fleets of ships full of arms in order to destroy our country—and those arms, once here, killed countless people. When it comes to them, we just wag our tails like a good little lapdog.” Rahul was now animated.