Rahul thought he heard the sound of a jeep pulling up outside, followed by the sound of footsteps.
Now comes the knock on the door. Lacchu Guru will be there with his pistol. Not a pistol, an AK-47. Even the six-foot-three-inch ostrich will be killed along with Rahul. His own corpse will lie where Sapam’s lies, and where Chaitanya’s broken dholak and little cymbals lie. Beside the bespectacled eyes of Gandhi-ji.
It was a dark, frightening tunnel with no sleep inside. It was airless, filled with only fear and danger. It was suffocating. Dear god! How I wish that yellow butterfly would come and keep me safe under its wing.
You are my power and strength, Anjali. I love you really. Save me, please. However you can.
Rahul couldn’t remember when sleep came to him that night, if at all. When his eyes opened, the golden rays of sunrise were falling on his burning forehead. The morning sunlight and Rahul’s head both burned inside with some kind of fire.
“I have no clue what you were muttering about last night,” O.P. said. “Why are your eyes red? You’re not getting a fever, are you? What’s happened to you?” O.P. placed his hand on Rahul’s forehead.
Rahul closed his eyes. There was Anjali. Her eyes looked worried. Distressed. Anxious. She covered Rahul with her yellow parasol.
“You’re such a good friend, O.P.!” Rahul said. A tear fell from the corner of his eye onto the pillow.
O.P. went to the dispensary to get some paracetamol—there had been a recent rash of viral and dengue fever.
TWENTY-FIVE
It was a five-day bone-shattering fever. Yet Rahul still stood in front of the window gazing toward the field below. The bobbing yellow spot, the little butterfly fluttering up from the valley toward the university—Rahul didn’t see either during those five days, not once.
“Dehydration’s the real danger. Drink lots of water. With sugar and salt,” said Govind Nema, who lived in C. V. Raman Hostel and was doing research in pharmacology.
Pratap, Ataluri, Niketan, Kartikeya, Madhusudan, Parvez, Praveen, Masood—everyone came regularly to visit Rahul in his room. They’d play cards. Sing a few songs. Smoke beedis and cigarettes. They even held a meeting of the SMTF.
Shaligaram and Shailendra George from the Hindi department both came. Rana, Manmohan, and Raju too. Rahul was feeling so distressed he asked everyone about Anjali. How was she doing? What was she doing? Has she said anything? Why hasn’t he been seeing her from his window?
On the third day, Hemant Barua arrived, smiling, and placed Rahul’s hand around a little slip of paper. “Message from your bird. She gave this to me on my way to the department.”
The little slip of paper was light green, and in a scrawling, childlike handwriting was written in blue, “Get Well Soon.” And below, in blue letters, was her signature, A-N-J-I, “Anji.”
Hemant had learned that for the past few days Anjali had been coming to campus by car, with a driver. She was a bit distraught. Then Hemant added, laughing, “But don’t lose your head, Rahul. I happen to know she really loves you. From now on, I’m putting the two of you in a joint de facto file, which will be updated daily.”
So much sweat was pouring out of Rahul’s body that he had to constantly wipe himself off with a towel.
“See! I told you the kind of paracetamol that would really cure this bastard,” O.P. said. “I ran over to the dispensary for no reason. Now that he’s got his love note, his fever will go away.”
“Oh, so it’s not dengue!” Hemant exclaimed. “It’s that Nana Patekar disease.”
“Not malaria, but ‘love-aria,”’ the six-foot ostrich wailed.
“Shut up,” Rahul said, and started to cough.
Yet this period of time wasn’t so bright and happy. It wasn’t simply that drops of dew were falling on its leaves; the leaves were also being ravaged by fire and ice.
Two of the three students Rahul had been tutoring stopped coming. He found out someone told one of his students, the sales tax officer Jaiswal’s daughter, that he was an indecent character. Someone had informed M. L. Gupta, of Gupta Transport and Travel, that Rahul had once been caught in the act of teaching the Kama Sutra to a girl and, after a good beating, was run out of town. He would have lost his third tutee had Pratap not rescued him by saying something to his uncle, a policeman.
It all added up to this: the critters were on the move. They were the proprietors of the biggest rumor and falsehood factory in the history of India. If they wished to eradicate any individual or group, first they’d unite and, once together, they’d erect a heap of rumor and lies. The apprenticeship, passed through the centuries from generation to generation, came in very handy. Brahminical texts and all of the puranas lent proof to the lies. Just a few years back the Babri Masjid incident in Ayodhya gave all Hindi newspapers occasion to support the lies. VC Agnihotri, the students learned, had indicated at a meeting of the university’s governing body that he’d recently come into possession of information that certain Communists and Naxalites living in the hostels were fanning flames among the other students. The names of Kartikeya Kajle and Madhusudan were mentioned, both of whom had spotless academic records, and it was suggested they had criminal records in Maharashtra and Kerala.
Dr. Dangwal and Dr. Loknath Tripathi took the girls to the side and warned them, “Keep your distance from Rahul. He’s an indecent character.”
Rahul’s head was spinning. Why was this happening to him? Because he was a hardworking student? Because he didn’t kiss up to any of the teachers? Because he and the other members of the SMTF got together and stopped the goondas from robbing, beating, and acting savagely toward students who’d come from different regions, different states? Was it because he had the kind of body and face that could not be made corrupt?
Or was it because he was of indeterminate lineage, but not a Brahmin, who, by accident, crawled into the medieval cave of Hindi literature while pursing a girl? Or was he some African slave who’d arrived in the middle of a Roman city? Or an outcaste with a gong tied around his neck so he can sound the alarm on his own, and give warning: “Please, kind Brahmin sir, keep your distance, as a vile untouchable is now passing! Kindly save yourself from contaminating your lordship’s self and have the good grace to avoid contact with the shadow of this base creature! Come, see how some Shabuk-like untouchable is again doing penance in your glorious Vedic language, and off with his head! At the hands of a Kshatriya. Then cut up the severed head with Parashuram’s blade. Throw his wife into the fire, kidnap her, and if that still hasn’t done the trick, call her a whore, a loose woman, and banish her from town.
“But keep in mind that this time, somewhere beyond the city limits of your capital, she’ll find refuge in a little hut inhabited by an outcaste. And this time too, that very outcaste, who you’ll call a bandit, will write another enduring epic poem.
“And now, dear bastards, once again I give you—the great poet Valmiki!”
Woo whee! Woo whee!
At eleven o’clock at night there was an uproar in the hostel. O.P. came rushing in with the news that Niketan and Masood had gone to see the film Satya at the Ganesh Talkies, where Lacchu Guru and his lackeys caught sight of them. They goondas surrounded the two boys and beat them senseless. They drew blood from Masood’s left eye and fractured a rib, his right wrist, and left thumb. Niketan had also been injured.
In next morning’s edition of Janvani on page three, which promised “All India” but gave only local news, ran the headline, “Lust-Crazed Hostel Student Beaten for Harassing Girl.” According to the story, a male member of a certain minority community was physically harassing a girl of a certain other community in front of the Ganesh Talkies when an agitated crowd formed and beat the living daylights out of him and his associate. Police officer in charge Vijay Narayan Sharma told Janvani that charges have been filed against the two students.
According to the de facto file at the Max Cyber Cafe, the publisher of Janvani was a regularly attending darbari at VC Agnihotri’s
court. Monthly installments were paid to conceal news about corruption and chicanery connected with the university. Puff pieces on VC Agnihotri were continually printed in the newspaper along with regular reports commending his activities. Most evenings the publisher could be seen with VC Agnihotri, drinking whiskey and burping loudly in curtained cabin no. 2 in the family section of the only bar in town, the Asiana. He was that breed of animal who in political terms is a “socialist” and in cultural terms a “fascist.” In other words, a true Brahminist.
Hemant Barua and Kartikeya were sharing a joke. Hemant said, “I’ve changed the spelling of ‘globalization’ by changing the ‘b’ to a ‘c.”’
“What do you mean?” asked O.P.
“Here we don’t have ‘globalization’ but rather ‘glocalization.’ In other words ‘g’ plus localization.” It wasn’t clear from Hemant’s tone of voice if he was angry or being sarcastic.
“Tell us, Hindi literature recruit, how do you translate that into Hindi?” Kartikeya Kajle asked Rahul. He was from Pune and his mother tongue was Marathi.
“Well, the ‘g’ gives us ‘grisly,’ and localization stays the same, so, ‘grisly localization,”’ Rahul said in a weary voice.
“That’s the true reality,” said Kartikeya.
The reality was also that the centuries-old factory of falsehood and rumors had begun clanging and banging away, ready to take on Rahul and the others, whose only crime was to be neither immoral nor corrupt. That and—in this age of profiteers, conmen, and vice—they were poor, their pockets were empty, and they were guided by conscience.
TWENTY-SIX
Shaligaram and Shailendra came with news that neither O.P. nor Rahul could believe. But once the six-foot-three skeleton accepted that the information was true, he did a dance worthy of Michael Jackson and ran off as fast as the queen of Indian track and field, P. T. Usha, to inform the others.
What happened was this: that day, each class from every department elected their counselors to the student union. Balram Pandey stood as a candidate for the first-year students of the Hindi department. Everyone knew he was the hopeful of Dr. Loknath Tripathi, since Balram even cooked for the professor at his home. Vijay Pachauri had nominated Balram, and Ram Narayan Chaturvedi had seconded the motion. It seemed as if he’d win, unopposed.
Shailendra George continued the story with a smile on his face. “So I just stood up and nominated Rahul for the fun of it. I thought even if he only gets two votes, Pandey shouldn’t be handed the election unopposed. Shaligaram was just about to stand up to second the nomination, when . . .”
“Anjali Joshi,” Shaligaram cut in excitedly, “stood up from the girls’ side and said, ‘I second Rahul’s name.”’
“We did a quick count and figured if all the girls voted for our side, that would still leave Rahul with only eight votes, compared to Balram Pandey’s nine Brahmin votes, which would cinch it for him,” Shailendra said.
“We readied ourselves for defeat. But when the counting was done, Rahul had gotten nine votes and Balram Pandey, eight. He lost by one vote,” Shaligaram said, clapping his hands. “Someone defected from their side.”
“And I know who it was!” Shailendra George declared as if he were a spy. “It was Sudip Pant. Sharmistha brought him over to our side. Those two have a thing going on.”
O.P. had returned with the others. He’d brought a pound of roasted peanuts. They extracted Balbir from the mess hall and ordered ten cups of pauper’s chai.
It was with roasted peanuts and chai that the unexpected election victory was celebrated.
Ten days had passed. During his fever, Rahul had sped through Hazariprasad Dwivedi’s novel Anamdas ka Potha, enjoying it tremendously. After the news from Shaligaram and Shailendra about his election as councillor, Rahul stayed awake long after O.P. had gone to sleep.
The novel tells the story of a celibate monk, dwelling in a hut in the forest, who sees a woman for the first time in his life and experiences a sweet shiver up his spine, impossible to articulate. That night, Rahul experienced the same sweet, unexplainable shiver time and again. All over his body, and all over his soul—everywhere Anjali had touched.
“Why did you second my name? Why, Anji?” he whispered that night, all alone, like a bird might. Crouching in a nest hanging from a branch, suddenly stung by a blast of wind at night, the bird might mutter to itself, to the wind, or to the branch.
That night, Rahul had forgotten how his life, and the lives of countless others like him, was like a boat with weak sails, trapped inside a typhoon, in a decisive battle for its very existence, struggling desperately against the deranged and omnivorous waves churned up by the violent and crazed ocean of today’s world. Each time, the imperative of the waves wagered with their lives, his and the others’. And each time their lives were spared, by chance, by some unexpected miracle.
That night Rahul felt he was sleeping safe and sound on deck of some ship, as if he’d just been saved by the skin of his teeth from a Titanic-like disaster, and was now on a carefree cruise in calm and peaceful waters, sailing on an imponderable, loving ocean. A full autumn moon was in the sky, really nothing more than Anjali’s presence. She was silently composing a new life story, written on his forehead with her moonbeams.
Just at the point of falling into a deep sleep, Rahul remembered part of a poem of his beloved poet Lorca:
On my forehead
The moon’s immortality
I want to sleep for a short time
An hour, a night, a week, a year
A century, perhaps
I am tired, endlessly tired
TWENTY-SEVEN
O.P. grabbed Rahul by the collar from behind. Rahul had seen the yellow butterfly through the window, fluttering up from the valley below, had thrown on his pants and a T-shirt in a hurry, and was dashing out the door. “Do you really believe I think you’re going ‘jogging’ so early in the morning? Am I that stupid?”
“So where am I going, then?” Rahul asked like a good boy.
O.P. landed his fist on Rahul’s back. “Go, go to your paracetamol. But just remember that one of these days, it’ll be me who saves your behind. Now get outta here!”
Rahul leapt down the stairs three at a time. The fever had sapped his energy—who knows where all this energy and enthusiasm had come from.
You are my power Anji, my shakti!
But as soon as he saw her, he knew something was wrong. She was looking all around and said, “Don’t come running like that, Rahul! Things have changed now. Let’s go over there, quick!”
They came to the area behind the storeroom, a safe little corner surrounded by two big rocks and lentinas. Anjali closed the parasol and hid it under a bush. She needed to get something off her chest in one big breath. Rahul saw the worry in her face. She took hold of Rahul’s arm as if she were holding onto a thing about to get away, as if she were a boatman making one last attempt to seize his oar being swept away by a strong current. Rahul trembled, she held his arm with such force!
Tears filled Anjali’s eyes. “Everything’s okay for now, but we have to stay alert,” she said.
“What happened? Tell me,” Rahul said, smoothing back the hair that had fallen in her face.
“Someone said something to my brother about us. And some crazy things were said about you, like you take drugs, like you’re a questionable character, like you’re a Naxalite.”
Rahul was shaking. “Who said all of this?”
“They also said that before coming here you were mixed up in some criminal case and expelled from another university . . .”
“Bastards!” Rahul’s blood was boiling. “Everything’s a lie.”
“You think I don’t know that, Rahul?” Anjali said, taking his hand in her lap. “Anyone who knows you believes you, Rahul,” she continued. “But how many people know you? And if they don’t know you, they’ll believe whatever they hear. Right? That’s why lies are always more potent.”
“Jesus!” Rah
ul was in agony. “Kartikeya’d said that they’d started operations at their factory.”
“Factory?” Anjali didn’t understand.
“Never mind,” Rahul said. “Tell me what you think about me.”
“What I think about you?” Anjali said as if he’d set off a storm. She looked at him with knowing eyes. By the time Rahul could move his face into position, she’d already pounced. “This is what I think! And this! And . . . and . . .”
In an abandoned place between two walls of rock, a synchronized ecstasy, a madness, welled up with equal force inside the two bodies, spilling over until they were crashing together, flying together.
Their faces were wet and sticky. Their clothing had gotten wrinkled, covered in little dried blades of grass and leaves.
“The girls have really supported me. Sharmishtha, Lata, Chandra. Anima, Abha, and Neera Didi, from your anthropology department, all of them came to visit me at home,” Anjali said, taking a deep breath. “While you were having a grand old time enjoying your fever.”
The Girl with the Golden Parasol (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) Page 13
