The Temple-goers

by Aatish Taseer

  ‘Have I ever met him?’

  ‘I think so. Short, squishy, like a pincushion? Adorable.’

  ‘Maybe. And Delhi? What’s been going on here? Any new things?’

  ‘Delhi? Everything’s new. New roads, new buses, new metro, new restaurants, new neighbourhoods, new money, everything except new people.’

  Then I saw that she felt bad. This was not the arrival she had planned. Our stilted conversation seemed to trouble her. She began flipping through the pages of the Times of India. Her hair fell around her. I thought of the study, and then I felt bad; I saw that she might have wanted to make love.

  I got up from where I lay at the head of the bed and crouched behind her. For a few minutes we sat like that, like two pods about to hatch; I read the paper over her shoulder. There was a picture of the new green buses. Their orange electronic displays transformed their destinations. Saket, Rajouri Gardens, Sectorpur and Phasenagar, running across a black screen in English letters, seeming suddenly like international places, places people ought to know of. The passengers, once just a crowd, became distinct in the bright modern buses, with their sunny yellow grab handles. In the background was a weary colossus from the old days containing distressed passengers. It was grey and yellow with deep scratches along its flank and an exhaust pumping out brown smoke.

  Some bureaucrats had decided that the new buses should have bus lanes. They imported whole a model from Bogotá. It advised that bus lanes be driven through the middle of crowded arteries. And so blue lanes, with little brushed-steel bus stops appearing at even intervals down their length, had been threaded through long stretches of roaring traffic. But what had worked in Bogotá was not working in Delhi. The crowds that mob the bus when it approaches in Delhi blocked traffic. The cars, already squeezed for space, were further deprived of a lane. They refused to adhere to the new rules. Young boys with orange vests and flashing batons were hired to enforce the new system. There were delays into the night. The picture showed a late-evening scene in which a car owner was abusing a policeman. The car’s headlights shone in his face. It was dark, haggard, on the verge of breakdown.

  I was still looking at this scene of frustration when Sanyogita ran her fingertips along the edge of my face. I felt her body easily through her faded clothes. It was broad and soft, slightly damp. Her fig perfume mixed with Delhi smells of food and grime. I kissed her shoulder and came near something stronger.

  ‘Baby’s hard,’ she said with laughter and surprise.

  I hated it when she laughed in these moments.

  ‘Why don’t we go to the big room?’ I said.

  ‘You want to!’

  ‘Yes.’

  We walked to it through the corridors, reaching for each other in the afternoon gloom.

  We made love simply and quickly in that outside room, overlooking the mango tree. She felt big and roomy. I longed to have her close around me, for there to be more friction on the edges. She was also dissatisfied. When I was finished, she climbed on top of my thigh. We did this often. I held her as she rocked up and down my thigh, moaning and muttering, ‘Baby, it’s so good,’ as though I was somehow responsible for what was little more than masturbation. Finished myself and oversensitive, they were minutes of disgust for me. When it was over again, we lay there with our legs spread out, the sun coming in. I felt fat. I squeezed my stomach into a mound with both hands.

  ‘I’m going to lose all this.’

  ‘Why, baby? You’re not fat.’

  ‘Perhaps, but now that I’m here, I’m going to join a gym and get a trainer.’

  ‘Really? What else are you going to do now that you’re here?’

  ‘Get an Urdu teacher and learn to read my grandfather’s poetry.’

  ‘Baby! I didn’t know your grandfather was a poet. The turbaned gentleman who was in the army?’

  ‘No, not him. My father’s father. He died when my father was six.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Sanyogita didn’t like hearing about my father. She felt that his absence from my life was an unspoken source of pain whose emotional consequences she had inherited. To speak of it casually was almost to belittle the wrong she felt he had done my mother and me. She could be unforgiving in these matters.

  I had thought I would return to my mother’s flat that evening, but Sanyogita dissuaded me.

  ‘Yes, stay here, baby,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what you’re doing staying in my aunt’s sex pad anyway.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘OK, this is totally confidential, and comes from my mother, who you know hates my aunt, but she told me that Chamunda uses your mother’s flat to meet lovers.’

  ‘What lovers?’

  ‘She has tons. There’s one in particular whom everyone calls the “French lieutenant”.’

  ‘Does my mother know about this?’

  ‘Of course, baby. Your mother’s the fixer.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  Sanyogita laughed out loud, then smiled thoughtfully as if she’d said something with more truth in it than she’d intended. ‘I think it’s great. If I was a high-profile politician, I’d like my close girlfriends to make sure I had some fun in later life, especially in this hypocritical society.’

  ‘Well, it’s settled, then.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m never going back.’

  ‘Don’t! I’ll tell Vatsala to send for your bags.’

  3

  ‘Junglee?’

  ‘Yes, yaar,’ the voice boomed down the telephone. ‘It’s a very sweet place. Not too expensive and the trainers are damn hot. I used to go myself in the promiscuous days.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Not so much now. Hubby doesn’t like it. What to do?’ She laughed uproariously. ‘I was a big slut, but just a one-man woman now. So sad! No?’

  Mandira was a Bombay friend of Sanyogita’s now married in Delhi. Her father had died when she was a teenager and she’d had a difficult transition into adult life, namely a string of bad relationships through which Sanyogita had been a constant support. She was one of the people whom Chamunda had in mind when she sometimes said of Sanyogita, ‘She likes birds with broken wings.’ And it was Mandira who recommended Junglee when I was looking for gyms in the area.

  In the days after I moved in with Sanyogita, I became anxious about routine. I had never worked as a writer before. I was back in the place where I grew up, supposedly writing about another place. I was worried that my ideas would slip away from me. I sometimes woke up with nightmares about having to call the agent in New York with the news that I had gone blank.

  My imagined routine consisted of waking up at seven; being at my desk by eight; working till one, then having lunch. After that, I would sleep for half an hour, read in English till three, then from three to five read my grandfather’s poetry in Urdu. (I still hadn’t found a teacher but had spoken to someone at the Ghalib Academy, a crumbling, art-deco building with pink walls and smelly carpets, who promised me a teacher would call in the next few days.) At six, I would either do yoga with Sanyogita in the flat or go for a walk in Lodhi Gardens. I wanted to be in bed by ten or eleven. I refused to go out at night until I had made a start with the revisions.

  But a few days into the routine, I realized there was a flaw. The exercise was too late and too little. By lunchtime I was longing for release. Sanyogita was doing errands and Vatsala buying vegetables when I stepped out from the study into the noon emptiness of the flat and decided to call Mandira about a gym.

  Junglee was in Sundar Nagar, and like Jorbagh, an early post-independence colony. I had known it as a child for its antique shops where I had also come with my mother. I called Uttam, my mother’s driver of many years, a gap-toothed Inspector Clouseau lookalike. He was downstairs a few minutes later.

  We took a busy road past one edge of Lodhi Gardens, then another along the edge of the Delhi Golf Club, also with tombs dotting its putting greens and bunkers. We passed the Oberoi Hotel, the Blind School and a purple
domed tomb marooned in traffic before Sundar Nagar appeared.

  Its two- and three-storey houses were ranged, like Jorbagh’s, round gardens with pale thin grass. A warm breeze made scraps of paper and heaps of dust race over the surface of the road. Uttam turned right and went down a grimy alley. Blackened cauldrons from a restaurant lay in the middle of the road along with groceries in white polythene bags. A man stacked cold Cobra beers into a fridge.

  Uttam was staring longingly at them when I indicated to him to stop.

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Yes. I shouldn’t be more than an hour. Have lunch and come back.’

  I got out in front of a brushed-steel door. Painted on it was a pair of angry red eyes, scowling at the chaos of the little alley. A Nepalese security man in a light and dark blue uniform stood outside, holding open the door. Cold, incense-filled air tumbled out.

  The light inside was dim but white. When my eyes adjusted, I saw dark plywood steps leading up. On the first landing a terracotta Ganesh basked in a fluorescent alcove. On my right, there were large framed pictures of shirtless movie stars.

  At the next landing, a priest in white and gold prepared offerings in a steel tray. He stood between a line of red bulbs in clear plastic orbs and a temple on the reception desk with an orange porcelain Ganesh. There were fresh flowers and burning sticks of incense.

  The priest rang a little bell and muttered prayers rapidly. He waved a brass lamp in a circular movement, its smoky yellow flame cowering in the blast from the air-conditioner, before the deity. Then he raced across the gym’s rubber floor and tied a charm of chillies and lemons to a cross-trainer. He had returned to his silver tray and begun another cycle of chanting and tying when, on the way to a treadmill, a trainer in black stopped him. He gave the trainer a cautioning look. Loud music played in the background; the trainer, bobbing lightly, irreverently mouthed the words of a Jay-Z song.

  My appearance at the top of the stairs gave the trainer his chance. He moved the priest aside and came up to greet me.

  ‘Hello, sir. Welcome to Junglee. How may I help you?’

  I assumed from his welcome that he spoke English. But when I asked him to show me the gym in English, his fluency vanished. A cold formality entered his manner. It was as if the English song and the greeting were part of a rehearsed role, creating the illusion of affability. In Hindi, he was intense and restless.

  His skin was dark, dark to his gums. His colour was what Manto describes as blackish wheat. It meant that a paler second skin ran under a dark patina. The fineness of his bones, his large, mud-coloured eyes and small, slightly hooked nose, along with the fullness of his dark, faintly pinkish lips, gave me an intuitive sense of high caste.

  He noticed me looking at him, but focusing at once on me, on the priest, on the other trainers, on a half-dozen people exercising in Junglee, he filed away the observation without a word.

  The priest in the meantime made his way back to the reception desk. The trainer watched him as though about to strike a fly. And just as he was skittering towards the preacher curls machine, armed with a charm, the trainer grabbed him. The priest made a show of his arrest, contorting and shaking his fine-fingered hand. He ignored the trainer, appealing instead to the deity, then to the gym’s ponytailed owner. The trainer draped his short, powerful arm over the priest’s frail shoulders with mock affection.

  ‘You see this?’ he said, lifting up the thick rope of red and black religious threads, entwined with silver chains, round his neck. ‘You see these?’ he said, flashing a pearl, a meanly cut ruby and a diamanté band on his wrist. ‘And you see this?’ He took out a single white thread from deep within his black T-shirt. The priest looked at all of these things like a child shown treasure. ‘So you understand then. I’m a Brahmin too. Now, go and do your dramas elsewhere and let those of us who are really working work.’ The ponytailed owner had disappeared, and the priest, perhaps taking this as a sign of disfavour, began putting his devotional equipment away into a black and neon green bag.

  The trainer gazed intently at a Hindi newspaper. A smile ran over his face. He seemed to arrange his thoughts. His dark, pinkish lips flowered with amusement.

  ‘Pandit ji, there’s a photo of one of my clients in today’s paper. Would you like to see?’

  The priest looked bitterly at him.

  The trainer held up the paper for everyone to see. Below its red masthead was a painting of Shiva. It was a popular rendering of the god astride a white bull with matted hair and a trident, a tiger skin covering his loins. But in place of his once soft, gently protruding stomach, there was a blue six-pack. His sprawling chest showed firm but discrete pecs. And a bulging vein, like the trainer’s, coiled down from his bicep over his forearm.

  ‘And all without supplements.’ The trainer laughed. ‘Protein yes, but no anabolics.’

  A few trainers guffawed, some clients laughed openly, the ponytailed owner reappeared on the stairs, smiling indulgently at the scene. The trainer, his joke successful, now warmed to the priest, putting his arm round him again. The priest smiled weakly. Junglee resounded with happy laughter.

  Shiva’s new body focused my attention more closely on the trainer’s. Its proportions, the small of the back pulled up as if by a hook, the narrowness of the waist next to the prominence of the chest and thighs, the large arms but fashionable slimness, a shaped body and yet so clearly not one of a bodybuilder, seemed somehow to imply a knowledge of the world: of the Internet and TV serials; of protein milkshakes and supplements; of Shakira and Beyoncé; of drinking perhaps and sex before marriage. It set him apart, in the values it contained, from millions of thin-waisted figures in baggy polyester trousers and smoothly worn chappals who roamed Delhi’s streets. It gave him a solidity and weight that could not easily be dismissed.

  Lost in these thoughts, I heard his voice through a fog of white fluorescent light tinged red.

  ‘Sir, sir,’ he said, as if I had been holding things up, ‘would you like to see the gym now?’

  I nodded absent-mindedly and we began making our way through weight machines with their pink, yellow and orange plates. On the back of the trainer’s T-shirt were Junglee’s red glowering eyes. His tracksuit bottoms were of a slippery, black material with silver piping running down the side. Before going upstairs, the trainer looked at himself in the mirror. He had looked every few seconds so far. It was more than a look of vanity. He looked with such depth that he seemed really to be facing his reflection. It was hard not to look for what he looked for.

  Junglee turned out to be a small gym with two floors, mirrored walls and dark plywood cornices, from which red light escaped. At this hour the main clientele were housewives and out-of-shape male models.

  We saw the ‘men’s wet area’: lockers, ‘loos’, a changing room and a small slimy steam room. We passed the women’s. The trainer said with a short laugh that he couldn’t show me that wet area.

  The second floor was fuller than the first. Young women on treadmills held mobile phones in their jewelled fingers.

  The trainer’s arrival spread tension through the floor. The women trainers, small, slim girls in tracksuits, scattered to their stations, whispering cautiously.

  ‘Cardio,’ the trainer said, with a wave of his hand.

  ‘What’s got into all of them?’ I asked.

  ‘They don’t like me,’ he replied in English, almost with pity in his voice.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, switching back to Hindi. ‘They’re always talking behind my back, carrying tales to the bosses. I’ve never said one word to them.’

  Our tour over, we walked past a group of men in T-shirts like the trainer’s, but grey to mark their being sous-trainers of some sort. They were small men, very dark, with bad teeth. To see them was to be made aware of what the trainer might have been without his good, clean teeth, his attentiveness to fashion, his rehabilitated body, and the confidence that came with these things. He spoke to them like an officer
inspecting a regiment. They beamed as he went past and for some the thrill of being spoken to left them dumbstruck. I had a feeling the trainer wanted me to see his popularity among them.

  Only Moses the Christian – Mojij, as I later discovered, to his friends – a tall, slim sub-trainer with longish hair, had the courage to make conversation. We were standing near the gym’s tinted windows. Below were the antique shops round the pale grass square. A myna sat fatly, unmoving, on the tin ledge. Moses smiled at us and without a word pointed at the bird. The trainer looked puzzled, then smiled back. With great difficulty, he managed to say in English, ‘She is pregnant.’ Moses choked with laughter. The trainer, again in English, said, ‘That is the labour room.’ Moses bent double. He lacked the trainer’s good looks but had a Christian’s comfort with English. ‘I’ll inform the father,’ he said. The trainer, now really feeling the pressure of so much English, said, ‘Who is name is Praful.’ The two exploded with laughter. They looked at a tall, reedy sub-trainer, who smiled frailly back as though used to being the butt of their jokes.

  Then the trainer suddenly became serious.

  ‘Sir, would you like to try out the gym before you make up your mind?’

  I decided I would and thanked him for the tour.

  ‘I’m downstairs if you need anything.’

  This line, delivered in English like the first, sounded rehearsed.

  I finished a short cardio warm-up and went down to the weights floor.

  I watched the trainer with one eye and felt myself similarly watched. His jokes continued as if one of the duties of charisma. Two or three young men had come into the gym. The trainer moved rapidly between all three of them, muttering numbers to himself. As the sets advanced, inspiration seized him. His eyes seemed to fix on some distant goal. Like a painter reaching for new colours, he ordered the men who worked below him to bring him plates. When the clients’ muscles failed under him, he threw off the coloured plates in levels, imploring them to continue, even if only with a bare iron bar. And with repetitions, he pushed them to the heights he had wished them to attain with weight. If left untended too long, the clients called to him, their voices filled with urgency. The trainer ran back with encouragement: ‘Come on, man. You’ll give me two more.’ Then suddenly, he withdrew support. The clients, now feeling narcotic levels of fatigue, asked for more. But the trainer, by then aware of satisfactions beyond theirs, said, ‘No. Done done-a-done done.’