“I kept looking out the window for you. Why did you start coming to campus by car?”
“What could I have done? My brother got a driver so he could spy on me.” Then Anjali smiled. “But now everything’s okay. All we have to do is be a little careful.”
“But who’s behind all of this?” Rahul asked.
“All of them. All the Brahmins,” Anjali said. She thought silently, then added, as if scolding, “But don’t forget, Rahul, you won the election because of Brahmins, and they saved your skin this time, too.”
That startled Rahul. What confusion! He thought for a moment. Then he pulled her toward him.
So, her too! Dear god, what does all this mean?
Kinnu Da once said, “In the history of this country no caste has ever maintained a fixed position. In one area they’re high on the ladder. In another, lower. In some other field, they’re in the middle. These castes have fascinating mobility, downward and upward. The caste that has risen to the top of any field, in any place, is simply the one that’s seized power. These castes are capable of exceptional dynamism! That’s why they’re not so fanatical, or orthodox, since more dynamism and more variety equals greater liberality and greater openness.
“But there is one group that has carved out a static place for itself. Totally immovable. Right at the top. For thousands of years. This is the Brahmin caste. Free from physical labor. Illustrious representatives of a culture reaping pleasure from others’ work, struggle, and sacrifice. With its leave from labor, this caste created a kingdom of heaven it inhabited for centuries; during this time, it gave birth to another kingdom, one of illusion, and filled it with language, superstition, schemes, codes of law, false consciousness—all of which it used to control the lives and minds of those from other castes, and to rule all of society.
“Rahul, you must have read the Israeli poet Amichai, ‘A Very Active Head on a Very Pensive Trunk.’ A cunning, conspiracy-filled, racing head on top of a good-for-nothing, vagrant body. The kind of head you could drive the straightest of nails into, and it would come out a screw or spring.”
Kinnu Da turned serious and said, “They are the greatest and deadliest power manipulators for centuries! Nowhere in all of world history will you find a caste of clever magicians so bent on cinching power into the grip of their vise. A well-organized nexus of power manipulators. This group is capable of doing anything for power and money. And it’s the great misfortune of this country that they’ve always been successful. Even today!”
Oh, so that’s what it means! Chaos reigned in Rahul’s mind. That’s the reason the world of Hindi literature produced such lovely poetic odes for Queen Victoria. Songs were written to sing the glory of King George V upon his visit to India. Poems and articles were written during the Raj in praise of the British: you have saved us from untouchables, heretics, barbarians, and the butchers, also known as Muslims. During the Mughal Raj, they wrote couplets and quatrains and dactylic poems in Braj and Awadhi to flatter their rulers. Thank you, thank you a thousand times over for saving us from those insolent, wild, base, boorish villagers, and from the fallen castes.
Now at the turn of the twenty-first century, these everlasting upper casters of Hindi literature have started their sycophancy in flattery of corrupt bureaucrats and politicians. Rahul’s soul was crisscrossed with shame, disgust, and dejection.
Am I working toward an MA in Hindi literature or Brahmin literature? In order to get across his revolutionary message, Buddha had to abandon Sanskrit, seeking refuge in Pali. So now, must Hindi be dropped in favor of using some other language to formulate ideas to provoke change? This means that now neither Buddha nor Gandhi would be a possibility in Hindi. Only Acharya Tribhuvan Narayan Mishra and the Padmashree Tiwari will survive!
“Oh, shit, shit, shit!” came out of Rahul’s mouth.
Anjali was looking at him with bewilderment. “What happened? You seem a little frazzled.”
“I’m okay,” Rahul said, kissing her forehead. “I love you too much! I love you like I’m some kind of madman.” He stopped for a moment and gazed at her with a look of anguish, nearly imperceptible. Anjali recognized it, and knew herself what it was. Rahul’s face was now showing signs of swoon.
“Believe me, please! I really truly love you, Miss Joshi!” Rahul said in a weak voice.
“Tsk!” Anjali said, slapping Rahul’s cheek. But the slap she had lovingly placed on Rahul’s cheek at the “Miss Joshi” joke wasn’t a joking matter. It was a matter of deep suffering.
From all sides at once a windstorm suddenly sprang up, gusts crashing and cutting into one another. Anjali grabbed her parasol and clutched it tightly. Luckily it wasn’t open, otherwise it would have been carried away in the wind like all the dried leaves, grass, and plastic bags swirling in the air.
“We call this kind of storm a ‘dammon’ in my village—a ‘demon’ of wind. People say that if you chase down the first leaf blown in the storm and press it between your teeth, you’ll disappear, become completely invisible. Then no one will be able to see you,” Rahul said.
“I see!” Anjali said. “Should we try to find the first leaf?”
“We’ll never find that leaf with all that trash flying around, and even if we did, how can one leaf make two people disappear?” Rahul said, his mood lightening.
“Of course two people can disappear!” Anjali countered.
“From one leaf?” Rahul asked, uncertain.
“Sure!” Anjali was smiling.
“How?” It was perplexing to Rahul.
“No, really, they can disappear. I said they could, didn’t I? So what do you mean, ‘how’?” Anjali said, pushing her point.
“But . . .” Rahul still wasn’t getting the logistics. “How?”
“Like this!” Anjali said, and wrapped herself around Rahul with all her might. Rahul felt that the two of them really had disappeared. No one could see them now. But they could see everyone—the entire world, the whole town, from one end of the sky to the other.
At one end of the field, behind a makeshift storeroom, at the foot of the hill, in a secret, deserted place between two big gray walls of rock, Anjali and Rahul had become invisible. All that remained was Anjali’s yellow parasol. That too was shut closed, hidden under a lentina bush.
And what about the other parasol? That was a butterfly, which had one day transformed its very form, playing a trick on the whole world. In front of everyone’s eyes and in broad daylight.
TWENTY-EIGHT
“You’ve stopped going to the gym?” O.P. asked. “You’ve been looking really weak lately.”
Rahul thought for a moment and said, “I’m still kind of afraid of something, but I don’t know why. I don’t think I did the right thing when I transferred to the Hindi department, yaar.”
“I don’t get it,” Hemant Barua said with a laugh. “Nothing’s ruined yet. To hell with Hindi. Take a short-term course at NIIT or Zap and get out of that hellhole.”
“It’s the same situation in the Urdu department,” Parvez said. “If Hindi’s a hellhole, then Urdu’s the underworld. Shahid didn’t even finish his first year. In the end, he gave up and opened a repair shop for fridges and TVs. Now he’s saying he’ll go to Dubai.”
“I’m not going anywhere. I’ll stay right in the thick of it, I’ll fight right in the thick of it, and I’ll be killed right in the thick of it,” Rahul laughed. It wasn’t a lighthearted laugh.
“Right, you dumb bastard, why pull yourself out of that gutter? That’s where your paracetamol is, where your parasol is, where your butterfly is, where your bird is. Everything’s in Hindi,” the ostrich cried out, and started humming frighteningly out of tune, “My living is here, and dying is here, so where else can I go?”
“Cut it out!” Rahul screamed. Everyone laughed.
Rahul’s thirst for Anjali increased each time they met. He felt as if the sea inside him began anxiously churning whenever he came close to Anjali, ready to swallow up the entire world with its cities, mountain
s, and people.
Each time he got back after seeing Anjali he felt as if a towering, mad wave born from his sea inside had crashed against the rocky base of a mountain, rebuffed, and now returning. Despairing, and in shock.
What remains, then, is the sea, each time left alone with its murky melancholy.
Today Anjali wore jeans and a loose white T-shirt. This time she and Rahul were on the third floor of the library in the corner of the south wall. There was a filthy, dusty window that had been shut tight for years and hardly let any sunlight through. Then, nothing but stacks and stacks of books.
In a narrow space between two book stacks, Anjali and Rahul conspired to disappear. The smell of old books, the faint light barely coming in through the window, the moisture from the damp walls, the fine dust . . . Rahul and Anjali locked themselves in an embrace with such force, filled with such longing, it was as if they needed the entire expanse of the earth to make their wish come true. The space between stacks of books was too narrow.
Never before had Rahul lifted Anjali up and she wrapped her legs around his waist. Those seconds were like suddenly finding oneself in the middle of a misty twilight. Both could scarcely catch their breath. Rahul’s half-closed eyes opened from their trance and regarded Anjali’s face, which had changed completely. Now it was some flower being burned by fire, quivering, wilting into an enchanting potion.
In that hazy moment, Anjali’s eyes appeared to Rahul. What eyes they were, watching a dream unfold of another world. Her eyes were strictly focused, but what she was staring at was some scene far off in the distance, of another realm, another time. She looked as if she would swoon.
They were like two fish swimming in the strong current of a stream, having touched one another, yet their tiny bodies still full of such longing for one another that they continue to swim, and they still want to pierce one another through and through. Time and again their bodies make innocent, improbable gestures to extract themselves from each other’s insides.
Rahul’s hand moved toward the zipper of Anjali’s jeans.
“No, no, what are you doing?” Anjali’s words scattered into the darkness, a semiconscious objection.
“Please let me,” Rahul’s whisper trembled in the air.
“No, not here,” Anjali pulled him tightly toward her.
“Where, then?” Rahul asked, his question floating heaven-ward.
Then a muted thud, as if a book had fallen off the shelf. Anjali and Rahul froze like statues and held their breath.
Padmashree Tiwari and Balram Pandey were looking for something, a book, on the shelf next to the main door.
Rahul gently eased Anjali back down. The two of them crouched down and hid beneath the shelf, trying to control their nervous breathing.
Rahul finally took a deep breath only after Padmashree Tiwari and Balram Pandey had left. Rahul noticed a book peering at them from the shelf behind: Ján Otcenásek’s novel Romeo, Juliet, and Darkness.
Caught in the middle of Nazi soldiers’ boot steps and gunfire, two innocent, helpless teenagers, a boy and a girl, hide inside a room for one full year. The two children grow up between the fear that death might come at any moment, and with their love for one another. Rahul had read this novel just the month before, in Nirmal Verma’s beautiful Hindi translation that read like poetry.
In the corner, next to an ailing wall that could collapse at any moment on top of it, a very delicate plant grew slowly, but surely and lushly, like a riddle amid spreading violence and fear. Like a lifeline in the darkness of sin, in a daring attempt fraught by risk, this, the purest blossom and primary bloom waged struggle in a demonic time.
Rahul kissed Anjali’s hand. “So tell me: when?” he asked. His voice sprang from the solitude and longing of that sea.
“Thursday,” Anjali said as if she’d already had this day in mind from the beginning.
“Why does it have to be Thursday? That’s seven days away. Why not tomorrow?” Rahul was perplexed.
“Crazy boy. That’s the day there are only two classes,” Anjali said.
“Right, Dr. Loknath Tripathi’s Bhakti class and Rajendra Tiwari’s class on Vidyapati,” Rahul said. “You are brilliant.”
Anjali straightened her clothing, took a brush from her purse, and fixed her hair.
“Wait. But where?” Rahul got worried.
“I have no idea,” Anjali answered, and left.
Rahul stood for a long time in that narrow space between the bookshelves, absentmindedly taking books from the shelf and leafing through them.
Oddly enough Rahul didn’t notice the damp, musty smell of the old books, but rather took in the fresh, sensuous fragrance of Anjali’s body that still surrounded him.
Rahul remained for awhile, but just before leaving, he filled his lungs, inhaling the air slowly and deeply.
Lay me on the hills and mountains
of thirst
Burn me in the sun, and dance dance
in its flames
Dance as a fountain of water
Dissolve into ink and write me in the sky
O mirrors
There read of me, then grin at me
O mirrors
Before killing me
O mirrors
For I am your life
The meaning of these lines from Shamsher’s poem slowly opened up to Rahul. Reading poetry and uncovering its meaning: this is the true living of life.
TWENTY-NINE
Time was passing, days were turning. The days were filled with contrasts never before seen in all of history.
The internationally known geologist Dr. Watson had resigned from the university and left for Australia. The evening before the day he left, Dr. Watson went out to gaze at the mountains for the last time. Kartikeya was a student in his department. He said, “Dr. Watson was very sad. He stood for a long time in front of the well where Sapam committed suicide. He pried out a troublesome rock from the crumbling platform of the well. It was an odd rock, almost translucent.
“He spent a long time standing there staring at the rock. Then there was a flash of lightning in his eyes. It was as if he’d gathered all his fury and he suddenly threw that rock into the well. I peered into the well. It wasn’t that dark, and I could see Sapam’s Liberty flip-flop still floating down there.”
Dr. Watson had said, “That was a fossil. A fossil of a conch shell, thousands of years old. A conch from a time when this was a sea. You people use the same conch to perform your puja . . . a part of puja to Krishna.”
Kartikeya said they’d asked Dr. Watson why he decided to leave.
Dr. Watson had laughed and replied, “Because I don’t feel ‘safe’ here. Times have changed. Now I’m afraid.”
“Me too, Kartikeya!” Rahul said in a weak voice.
“Who’s not afraid? Is anyone safe here?” Kartikeya scolded. “All of the vile, dangerous, base, and hedonistic things we’ve imported from the West. Gambling, profiteering, weapons, fizzy, toxic drinks, alcohol, pornography, pizza, cars. People here have lost their minds pursuing this merchandise of thrill, titillation, frenzy, and violence. People here want the worst from the West, but want to kill and destroy the best it has to offer. These are its assassins. Enemies.”
Kartikeya’s eyes had become red with rage. “Buy a gun from America. Use it to shoot Jesus. Use the vilest thing invented by the West to commit the greatest murder in history. Buy a car from Japan. Use it to run over Buddha’s head. Find biochemical weapons from Iraq. Use them to kill the Prophet Mohammad. Get a missile launcher from Israel. Use it to blow Jehovah’s body to bits. Devil barbarians!” Kartikeya was out of breath.
“But really, what can we do?” Someone uttered this sentence, and it floated down, lodged itself inside everyone sitting in the room, and twitched like the wounded tail of a gecko.
Kartikeya’s words echoed in Rahul’s head. “They’ll take the fire from the Rig Veda and use it to burn all the Vedas. They’ll take the trishul trident from the Puranas and use it
to impale Shiva and Vishnu. They’ll get their hands on a Bramastra and launch it to annihilate all of creation.”
They will throw all enlightened souls in the history of mankind into conflict with one another, then crush them underfoot.
They are the Critters, sent here by Satan from some other world.
They are Ravana’s offspring, returned by the sea, who now hold everything in their hands: power, capital, language, words, newspapers, computers, television, satellites launched into outer space, atomic bombs, and quite a huge market.
“What kind of realization was this?” Rahul wondered.
He felt like sending an email to the president of the United States that would read, “If you truly consider yourself a follower of Jesus, then remove yourself from these all-powerful salesmen. They are the ones who murdered the compassion of Christ.”
THIRTY
Things were changing fast. A store selling seized customs goods opened next to Max Cyber Cafe. Pepsi, Coke, and Miranda stalls were springing up everywhere. So were fast-food joints, and in one of them the waiters even wore Nawab-style plumed turbans and creased uniforms. There, the same burger you could get in a regular dhaba or snack van for 5 rupees would cost you 20. The dosa that normally cost 12 would cost 22 rupees. What was surprising was that this kind of shop was most prevalent. Noodles, pizza, fried chicken, ice cream, burgers, Manchurian—a whole new menu of things to eat and drink had arrived. A big store selling greeting cards, cake, and gift items had opened next to the university’s supermarket. There were four shops on campus selling paan and cigarettes. One was right in front of the hostel, and under the guise of selling Ayurvedic medicine sold everything from “honey raisin” bhang balls to the same thing in a form you can inhale: ganja and hashish, brown sugar, and white powder. Condoms (both domestic and foreign brands) and oral contraception were now completely out in the open. Everywhere were AIDS posters and slogans, and advertisements for ultrasound and abortion.
At night, everything from the hard stuff (Boney Scott, Macdowell, Old Monk, Diplomat, Director’s Special) to the cheap stuff (bathtub mahua sold in plastic pouches) to the rough stuff (liquor made from a herb said to revive the dead) was sold at the fruit juice stand behind the post office. The police took their weekly cut, and that was that.
The Girl with the Golden Parasol (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) Page 14
