The Temple-goers

by Aatish Taseer

  After the sets, he rested on the edge of a red exercise bench, dropping his arms forward. It made his shoulders seem long and expansive. His eyes rolled back and his eyelashes sank under their own weight. The gym had a large flat-screen television. It played a loop of half-a-minute-long programmes, horoscopes and fashion shows. At present, two animated girls called Kitty and Witty were on. The trainer watched with half-closed eyes. Witty, a blonde in pink, said to Kitty, the brunette, ‘What is the laziest mountain in the world?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Kitty replied.

  The trainer watched with one eye.

  ‘Mount Ever-rest!’

  He was mystified, then a moment later his laughter rang through the gym.

  I was doing some light weights on my own. I didn’t really know anything about them, but someone had once taught me to do sets of fifteen, twelve and ten repetitions. I felt the trainer watch me as I walked over to the bench press. It was not the brief, suspicious look from before, but a frank, open gaze. It reminded me of the way he looked at himself in the mirror. Then the music changed. A Hindi pop song came on with a single English line: ‘I will always love you, all my life.’ The trainer, still looking at me, sang with great feeling, forming every word carefully. He seemed to take pleasure in the illusion of fluency, in the long first line and the rapid ‘all my life’. He was totally absorbed in his role, but when the song ended, he was no longer a romantic hero; he was Shah Rukh Khan belting out the words of a super hit song. The trainer pressed his forearms between his legs, moved his upper body forward, bobbing on the balls of his feet. As the music quickened, he twisted his forearm in a downward movement, uncoiling a dark vein.

  When I reached twelve repetitions, my arms began to fail. I looked up in time to see the trainer swing one leg over the bench and yell, ‘Thirdeen, fordeen…’ He had been counting through the songs. ‘We’ll do it slowly,’ he ordered, adding with triumph, ‘Fifdeen.’

  I expressed my surprise that he had been counting my set.

  ‘Man, whaddyou saying? I’m a professional person,’ he said in English, and switching to Hindi, added, ‘And anyway, us Brahmins, we look out for everyone. You see that man there?’

  He pointed to a tall fair man, with a handlebar moustache and a white towel round his neck.

  ‘That’s Sparky Punj, one of the country’s top lawyers. All the biggest industrialists and politicians turn to him for advice. But who does he turn to?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Who do you think?’

  ‘You? Really? Why?’

  The trainer smiled sadly at me, then said, ‘Never mind. Come sit down.’

  We sat at the desk from where the trainer had seen off the priest over an hour ago. In that short time, I had decided to become a member of Junglee. I now watched the trainer fill in the form in careful, rounded handwriting. He did it like a schoolboy with a fountain pen, waiting for every word to dry. Seeing the English letters appear, his large, athletic form poring incongruously over the page, a tongue flickering out in concentration, I felt about the trainer as I had with the Jet Airways attendants: he struck me as someone who couldn’t have existed ten years ago. Not just that; his world, complete as it now seemed, could not have existed either.

  ‘Three months or six months?’ he asked, looking up.

  I couldn’t make up my mind; it was a question with deeper implications than he knew.

  ‘Take three. Why should we bind ourselves to these fuckers? Right?’

  I nodded unsurely. He gave me his small calloused hand, with its many religious rings, to shake.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Aatish, A-A.’

  He put down his pen and looked at me in amazement. ‘Sir! Whaddyou saying? Double A like me!’

  He slowly repeated, ‘My name is Aakash, A-A-K-A-S-H. Aakash Sharma.’

  4

  At Junglee, the Hinglish-speaking trainers began referring to me as ‘writer saab’. It was Aakash who coined the hybrid and it stuck. He quickly wanted to know what my likely advance would be. He put it to me as concern for my survival in the city. But really he wanted to know what to charge me for personal ‘trainings’.

  These trainings began without my knowledge. The day after becoming a member I arrived in the gym at noon. I was drifting about when he caught my eye and flashed ten short fingers at me. I went up to him in confusion. He was overseeing the recovery of an out-of-shape male model. ‘Cardio,’ he whispered, making the form of a running man, ‘ten minutes.’ I went upstairs and did as I was told. When I came down, he ignored me. He sat on the edge of his red bench, muttering numbers to himself like a Yemeni contractor. For some moments I stood over him, his face knitted up with concentration. Then theatrically, it cleared.

  For the next hour he was in a fever. His mud-coloured eyes narrowed; his darkish pink lips tightened; his small, powerful body hovered over mine, the rope of black religious strings hanging down like a noose. ‘No support, no support,’ he began. ‘Very good no support.’ Then, ‘Fix your balance, fix your balance, bring it all the way down. Don’t worry, I’m here.’ And at last, ‘Thirdeen, fordeen, we’ll do it slowly, fifdeen.’ He sprang back with the end of the set. His face remained closed, lips moving, calloused fingers calculating, the eyes with their heavy lashes sometimes shooting around the room for inspiration.

  And for that one hour of the day, Aakash’s world became mine. Far from feeling that he was employed to help me attain something, I felt I was an accessory to whatever hunger was driving him. He would run his axioms for success by me. The most basic were: ‘Whaddyou saying, man? I’m a professional’ and ‘I’m an ad-ucated person.’ Then in Hinglish, ‘Getting a person fit, what greater dharma could there be!’ Sometimes the hard materialistic world would prevail. Then he would say, ‘Man, I just need that one golden opportunity, then I’ll put this idea I have in me into effect.’

  ‘What idea?’

  ‘Ash’s! One place where a man can get his whole image set, his hair, his clothes, his body. Right now a person has to wander from place to place, getting this, getting that. He might trust one element, but how can he trust all? At Ash’s, he’ll get everything, a whole image.’

  ‘What will you need to set it up?’

  He looked at me as if we were about to do the set of a lifetime. ‘Sixty lakhs!’

  I nodded weakly, considering the enormity of the sum. The intensity of his gaze trailed away. Before I could say anything, he snapped, ‘Come on. There’ll be a gap. The whole workout will be ruined.’

  And almost as if they were necessary to offset the brightness of his star, there were detractors: people who wished to see him fail.

  He quickly drew me into the politics of Junglee. Everyone was his enemy. The ponytailed owners were drunks. They had made the gym with forty lakhs of their father’s money. The female trainers were screwing the owners and were against him. The male trainers wanted his job. Montu especially, he muttered, was a chooda, and damning him for the highest form of amorality, said, ‘Man, he is someone who will eat pork, beef, whatever you give him. That is the kind of chooda he is.’ He looked irritated at my indifference to his food neurosis. ‘Man,’ he pressed me, making an allowance for the possibility that one of the two might be permitted me, ‘would you eat both pork and beef?’ ‘No, never,’ I lied. He nodded gravely. But his main rival, the Iceman to his Maverick, was Pradeep, a fair, bulky, mild-mannered man and Junglee’s only other full trainer. ‘He looks like bouncer,’ Aakash would say with disgust. ‘He has bouncer’s body.’ Then switching to Hindi, he would add, ‘They’re all together against me.’

  Pradeep supplied Junglee with its protein shakes. This was a long-standing arrangement. Aakash advised I buy the protein powder and told me to ask Pradeep. But when Pradeep approached me on the treadmill, Aakash glowered at us. As soon as Pradeep was gone, he trotted up.

  ‘What was he saying?’

  ‘Nothing. Just telling me that I should take two scoops…’

  ‘One scoo
p.’

  ‘OK. He said two scoops twice a day.’

  ‘Once a day.’

  ‘I’m just telling you what he told me. And to mix a banana in.’

  ‘No banana.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘You know, just that he was married, used to live in Bombay, has two kids, that he liked Bombay.’

  ‘Fucker,’ Aakash spat, ‘trying to cut my clients.’

  I laughed. Aakash imitated my laugh, then laughed himself and walked away.

  Soon I was paying him four thousand rupees a month on the side. Junglee itself for three months was twelve thousand. He justified it to me as a personal training hour. I justified it to myself as still less than what I paid in London. Besides, I wouldn’t have gone without it. I felt that his passion for what he did strengthened mine. I had very few people like that in Delhi.

  A few days later than the Ghalib Academy had promised, Zafar Moradabadi called.

  Himself a poet, his name twice echoed the names of poets before him: Zafar, like the poet-king, Bahadur Shah Zafar; Moradabadi, like Jigar Moradabadi, the other, more famous product of the brass-manufacturing town of Moradabad.

  Zafar didn’t like coming to me through the academy. I felt he was embarrassed at having to teach. Even on the telephone, he seemed to want to establish a reason other than financial need for teaching me.

  ‘Aatish? Aatish Taseer?’ he asked in his papery voice. ‘But that’s a poet’s name.’

  ‘Yes, sir. My grandfather was a poet. I want to learn to read his poetry.’

  ‘Your grandfather was M. D. Taseer, the poet, and you don’t know Urdu?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then it appears I have something of a duty to teach you.’

  He came to see me a few days later in Jorbagh. He had a light, gliding step. He wore a safari suit, a white woollen cap and finely made spectacles. He was of medium height with a slight stoop. His eyes were yellow, his skin dark, he had a pencil-thin moustache and sores, black and bleeding, ate away at his scalp.

  I saw them when I asked if he would like to take his cap off.

  ‘I wear it because the wool from my head has come off,’ he said, and laughed throatily. Then he folded away his cap and revealed his bald head.

  ‘I can’t take the heat,’ he apologized when he saw me notice the sores. ‘And in the conveyance I’m forced to use, auto-rickshaws, it’s very bad.’

  He sat there with his hands discreetly by his side. He didn’t ask any prying Indian questions about how much money I earned and spent. He didn’t look around the flat. I asked him if he would like tea.

  ‘I don’t normally. My constitution is quite sensitive.’

  We started badly. I said I didn’t want to learn to write, only to read.

  ‘You can’t take a language, break it into pieces, keep what you like and leave the rest for the Pakistanis. What if you find you need to write?’

  ‘But I always write on my computer.’

  ‘Yes, but what if you’re in a poetry reading and you want to scribble down a couplet.’

  ‘I can write it in Devanagari.’

  His face filled with placid disgust.

  ‘Then perhaps you should learn Hindi.’

  ‘My grandfather’s poetry…’

  ‘I could have it transcribed for you in Devanagari. Problem solved.’

  ‘Listen, please, I want to read Faiz, Manto, Chughtai…’

  ‘All available in Devanagari.’

  ‘I’ll learn to write.’

  His face bloomed with affection and concern. ‘You know you have a responsibility. You’re a poet’s grandson; your great-uncle was Faiz; you have a tradition to uphold. I’m not saying that you should write poetry. I would never send you into poetry. It’s finished. Look at how I’ve suffered. I tell my children all the time that poetry is finished. But what’s been done is still there for you to read and know. You say you want just to read, but even that will only come easily when you can write.’

  I offered tea again. He said he didn’t normally, but he would.

  When Vatsala came in with the tea a few minutes later, Zafar was saying that life had forced him to become an intellectual mercenary. Our first thrill as teacher and student were those two words, neither of which I knew in Urdu. We stumbled about for a bit, coming up with ‘mental soldier’, then I was sure I had it. ‘Think tank!’ We backtracked and gave up. It was only when he explained further that I understood what he had meant.

  Referring obliquely to the dissertations he had written for money before he wrote his own, he said, ‘I gave birth to nine PhDs before I was born, and after my birth I have given birth to three more. It’s dishonest, I know. I take money to write people’s theses for them, undeserving people. It’s wrong, I know. But I only ever did it from need. I feel that makes it less wrong.’

  ‘How did you start doing it?’

  ‘I used to work as an accountant,’ he replied, ‘but that slipped away from me. The accounts were computerized. I needed money badly. I even had a breakdown, you know?’

  ‘What kind of breakdown?’

  ‘A nervous breakdown. I was lucky. A south Indian doctor helped me. Only he knew what it was. Without him, I wouldn’t be here today. There was a danger of brain haemorrhage.’

  ‘Can that happen from a nervous breakdown?’

  ‘Yes. My head used to become so hot my wife couldn’t touch it.’

  I began to think of his sores differently.

  ‘He used to tell me, “You have to stop thinking.” I said, “Doctor saab, it is my nature. Can you order a flower to stop giving off its scent? It is God-given.” ’

  He shook lightly with inaudible laughter, finishing in a wheeze.

  ‘At that point,’ he said, ‘a PhD candidate came to me. He had a famously strict adviser. A man who used to tear up theses if he didn’t like them. He asked me to help him. I said, “Listen, I can’t do this. I haven’t done your research. I don’t know what you wish to say.” But he went away and came back with all his books, begging me. I said, “Let’s just try it. If he likes it, then we’ll continue.” He agreed and I wrote the thesis.’

  ‘Did the professor like it?’

  ‘He said it was the best thing he’d read in twenty years of advising. After that,’ he added bitterly, ‘word spread. Would you like a cigarette?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, though I wasn’t really a smoker, ‘but outside.’

  We smoked a Win cigarette on Sanyogita’s front balcony. There, overlooking the single mango tree, he brought up money.

  ‘I can’t accept less than five thousand,’ he said, taking back the blue and white packet.

  ‘A month?’

  ‘Yes.’

  My face became hot with shame, but I said nothing. Neither his sores nor his haggard face could have expressed his poverty more extremely. He wanted five thousand rupees for two to three hours, five days a week. I didn’t know how to say I wanted to give him more. I didn’t want to upset his calculations.

  Then there was a soundless disturbance in the air and a splatter. I turned to Zafar and saw that a moist indigo wound had appeared on his safari suit. I followed its dripping to the floor. A red rubber hoop lay among the drops. Zafar’s face screwed up like a child’s about to cry.

  A white sedan with tinted windows drove by, leaving behind a trail of hiphop.

  ‘Holi,’ he spat, and dropped his cigarette into the colour. It fizzled and ran blue.

  ‘A water balloon. Oh, God, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Why are you sorry?’

  ‘I don’t know, for bringing you out here.’

  Just then the front door rattled and Sanyogita came in. She had been Holi shopping. The wooden ends of steel water guns stuck out from the bags she carried. I tried to signal to her to put them down. Zafar saw and looked irritated. I think he felt I was portraying him as a Holi curmudgeon.

  ‘By all means play,’ he said, ignoring me and addressing Sanyogita, �
��I’ve played too. But these balloons are not nice. Spoiling people’s work clothes when they’re not prepared. Zafar Moradabadi.’

  Sanyogita smiled, suppressing greater amusement. She held out her hand. He seemed unsure what to do with it. He dropped his head in greeting. Then he said he would call me after all the madness was over. It was Holi that weekend.

  ‘Baby’s found a creature!’ Sanyogita said after he had left. ‘He seems so sweet.’ She made her eyes big and sorrowful and scrunched up her mouth in imitation. ‘How old do you think he is?’

  ‘He said he was born in ’51.’

  ‘But he’s young, then!’

  ‘That’s what I said, that he was nearly a decade younger than our parents. But he said life had made him old.’

  ‘Oh, you must keep him. Where will we put him?’

  ‘Sanyogita, he has his own house. He’s only coming for a few hours in the afternoon.’

  ‘But it’ll be so nice to have him here, in the evenings, when all the other creepy-crawlies come out.’

  I suddenly felt very sad, thinking of him going home: the ‘conveyance’ he mentioned, an auto-rickshaw; through the smoke and roar of Connaught Place; past naked bulbs and into the evening congestion of the old city; his safari suit stained blue; his wife and her acknowledgement under dim fluctuating light that it couldn’t be saved.

  Sanyogita thought I’d taken her joke amiss. She pulled me towards her.

  ‘Come here, baby. I’m only joking. I think he’s the sweetest man I ever saw.’

  5

  Before the metro claimed her house, my aunt had a Holi party every year. The house was in the centre of Delhi with a large lawn and the party was famous. Hundreds of people came. And armies of children, of which I had been one, attacked them at the door, shooting jets of blue and pink paint on to their white clothes. They shrieked, shielding cold glasses of beer and Bloody Mary. Their starched muslin clothes caved in and clung to their bodies; paunches and lace bras appeared through the cloth. Then grown-ups who had already been coloured came with handfuls of green, yellow and pink powder. They smeared the faces of the newcomers, who put up token resistance but knew that there was no isolation greater than being left uncoloured. By noon the colours began to coalesce into a single rust red. As the sun climbed higher, the festival became more adult. Clay cups of bhang and small portions of food in leaf plates went through the crowd. Glasses of beer were traded in for full bottles. Musicians appeared with drums around their necks. By lunchtime, as the children wandered around vagrantly, the dance floor began to fill. The sun’s blaze fell on the yellow bungalow and its pale reflection appeared in steel tubs of red water. These late-afternoon hours, a painted crowd with gleaming eyes and teeth, dancing on the lawn, were difficult for me as a child. I think, though I didn’t know it then, that I felt their menace. My good memories of Holi were formed by those hours that came before.