The Temple-goers

by Aatish Taseer

  I lied to Sanyogita about needing books in my mother’s library, ate lunch on a trolley alone and sat down to wait for Aakash. At about three thirty, his name flashed on my phone. A few minutes later he was at my door.

  I had only ever seen him in uniforms. Now in his own clothes, his attention to style was apparent. He wore low, loose jeans and a striped grey and black T-shirt. Its long sleeves were pulled up to the elbow. A small black backpack hung from his shoulders and a hands-free wire sprawled over their great expanse. Like at the Holi party, he seemed bigger and darker outside Junglee.

  He was in a lighter mood than he’d been in at the gym, but watchful. A look of delight entered his eyes as they scanned the flat.

  ‘You live here alone?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Man, what peacefulness! I have never, not even for a minute, been alone in the place where we live. Not once, not for a minute. Do you get scared sleeping here at night?’

  ‘No, I sleep at Sanyogita’s. Do you live with your family?’

  ‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘My father’s an auditor in the defence ministry and so we have a flat in the Air Force Colony in Sectorpur.’

  ‘Do you have any siblings?’

  ‘Two brothers,’ he replied, then seeming to read a question in my eyes, added, ‘We’re very close, but,’ and now in English, ‘they are very differ from me. My whole family are very differ from me.’

  The kitchen door swung open and Shakti appeared with a glass of water on a tray. Once fresh from the village, the city and the job had turned him cynical. But though he’d never met Aakash before, his dull eyes brightened at seeing him. Aakash took the water and registered the interest in his face. Shakti watched him as he drank, the dull look returning to his eyes. Just as his gaze had drifted away, Aakash clamped Shakti’s vast stomach between two fingers. Like a huge toy, Shakti exploded in laughter and surprise. Aakash smiled, holding on to his stomach while wiping his lips, then said, ‘That wife of yours must treat you really well. What’s this stomach hanging out? Too much rice?’ Looking to me for approval, he added, ‘Give me two months with this guy and I’ll whip him into shape.’

  ‘Shakti, Aakash,’ I said, and for coming so late, the introduction made Aakash laugh out loud.

  He was handing back the glass when his gaze landed on Shakti’s feet. His face filled with concern. ‘Why are you wearing those blue chappals?’ he asked. ‘They make you look bad, man, these cheap chappals.’

  Shakti stared in amazement at his feet, as if the rubber chappals were the work of some conjuror. Bata’s blue and white chappals were like a symbol of domestic servitude in India. I must have seen them smooth and worn on Shakti’s feet all my life. But they never struck me as strange on him. I had not seen Shakti grow from being a slim man into a fat man. It had happened while I was away; and in a sense, no one was better placed than me to notice the change. But I had seen nothing. Aakash, without a trace of piety, looked as I couldn’t. He didn’t restore Shakti’s dignity; he flung it at him as if forced to defend something that wasn’t his. And Shakti was star-struck. He stood there, disturbed and intrigued, like an old woman who’s just been whistled at in the street.

  In his morose way, he said, ‘Aakash bhai…’ (He never referred to me that way; he called me sir.) ‘How did you make such a good body?’

  ‘With a lot of effort,’ Aakash snapped, and sent him off to get him beer and sandwiches.

  ‘Beer?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, man, feeling thirsty. You’ll have too, no?’

  I looked at my watch, then outside. Afternoon sun poured into the flat.

  ‘No. Not yet.’

  Aakash was offended. ‘Our first beer and you won’t join me?’

  ‘It’s a little early.’

  He said, ‘I’m the kind of person who can wake up in the morning and brush my teeth with beer.’

  A level of comfort entered his manner, as though, after surveying the flat, he had found it suitable and now wanted to settle down for a session. When Shakti returned with a cold Cobra and two glasses, I felt as if I were being drawn into an unfamiliar drinking culture: of hotel rooms, curtains drawn, a bottle on a plywood table with some nuts, an ashtray filling up quickly. Seeming to read my thoughts, Aakash asked if I had any cigarettes. I didn’t but knew that there were some in the house. Chamunda insisted a packet of Dunhills be kept for her in the bar. I brought these out. Aakash looked at them admiringly, then pulled one out and lit it with cupped hands. He inhaled, inflating one cheek, then with the cigarette at arm’s length, blew on to it, watching the end brighten through the smoke.

  The Cobra was amber-coloured. Its pretty colour in the glass, catching the light in the room filling with smoke, made me want to have some. Aakash poured me one with great aplomb, exaggerating the tilt of the glass. I asked him how he’d come.

  ‘Motorbike,’ he said, letting out smoke from the corner of his mouth.

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘Hero Honda,’ he replied, now inhaling strenuously, making a pained face as if it were difficult to talk.

  ‘Nice.’

  He smiled ironically, ‘What to do, saab? I’m not a rich man. But this I can say, the bike was bought with my own hard-earned money.’

  I feared some conversation about privilege when he surprised me. In English, he said, ‘I’ve never sucking dick,’ and laughed.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yes, man. You know Sunil, he’s the other trainer at the gym…’

  ‘The big beefy guy?’

  ‘No, no. Someone else; I think he comes after you leave. Anyway, he was called for a personal training to the house of a gay. They took him there blindfolded and brought him into the gay’s office. The gay puts sixty thousand down on the table and says, “Sucking.” Sunil ran out from there, but they had bodyguards and Alsatians and Dobermanns, and they say if you don’t sucking, we’ll let them out and they’ll make keema out of you.’

  ‘What did he do?’ I said, now more horrified at the recounting of this wild story in the middle of the afternoon than at its bizarre, filmy details.

  ‘He’s sucking, man,’ Aakash said matter of factly. ‘He’s sucking, sucking, for one hour, sucking…’ He screwed up his dark lips so that their pink interior was more visible than ever.

  ‘Aakash, come on, this is not true.’

  ‘It’s true, man,’ Aakash insisted. ‘It’s true.’

  ‘Did he take the money?’

  ‘Why not, after he’s sucking…’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, please.’

  Aakash laughed. ‘He bought a Hero Honda.’

  I was sure the story was a lie, but I couldn’t gauge his motive in telling it. Was he trying to suss me out, see how appalled I would be? I was surprised at his own indifference; the story seemed hardly to make a dent in his notions of morality, as if all vice, no matter what its nature, was a luxury item.

  He drank the beer quickly and yelled for Shakti, who appeared with another one. Aakash was enjoying this mid-afternoon revelry in the little-used flat. He poured me another glass without my asking for it. I had been under the impression that Aakash worked from five a.m. till late at night. I wondered how he’d found this block of free time in the middle of the day; I also didn’t expect a trainer to have these habits. Most of all, I was surprised at how his earlier urgency had given way to such complete repose. I asked if drinking beer damaged his physique. After taking a large gulp, he put down his glass, stood up and walked to the middle of the room. Then he removed his grey and black striped T-shirt, and standing in a grey vest, flexed his chest and triceps. His skin now seemed lighter and his physique more proportionate. Where the muscles had been expanded near the chest and the arms, there were stretch marks, pale and hairless, like knife wounds. A fine layer of hair ran over his shoulders and back, culminating in a thick chasm between the pectorals. Red and black religious threads, entwined with a single silver chain, disappeared into the chest hair.

  ‘I know,’ he said, ‘tha
t if you were a businessman, you would take no interest in me.’ He glazed his eyes and made a snooty face. ‘You’d think this guy lives in Sectorpur, he drives a Hero Honda, he’s not someone I can sit down with. But because you’re a writer, you look at me and you want to dig inside, to discover what there is in this guy. Aren’t I right?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I replied, embarrassed.

  ‘Don’t worry. You don’t have to tell me, I know. And in my lifetime itself, I’ve seen a lot of change. I’ve upgraded myself. When I was seventeen, eighteen, we were a group of three best friends. Our shoes were torn, soles coming off, we walked in the street in the heat, we took buses, we sometimes ate nothing more than a few toffees in a whole day. I remember you got two for fifty paise. The vest I worked out in had holes in it.’

  He put his index finger to his thumb, indicating holes the size of one-rupee coins.

  ‘I wanted to be a mechanical engineer,’ he continued, ‘I got the marks for it, but my father couldn’t pay the bribe for the admission. You know, it was some seventy, eighty thousand. He said, “I’ll borrow it from somewhere. You go, just go and get your degree.” But I told him no; I’m going into fitness. I started working in one gym in Panchsheel Park, earning fifteen thousand. And slowly by slowly,’ he said, ‘I started picking up personal trainings, people liked my work, they liked that I got results, and so when Junglee opened I was hired there. I started on thirty thousand and in a year I doubled my income with personal trainings. I bought a bike, started buying good clothes. I upgraded myself. Man, and I know now for sure that if I get this one golden opportunity, I’ll never look back. There’s something in me, I know it. When I was born, our astrologer looked at my eyes and said to my mother, there’s something in his eyes. He’ll either soar or he’ll destroy himself.’

  It was strange to think of the eyes, which I had thought of only in terms of beauty, as signs of providence. His ambition had also blurred into an idea of religious duty and what I thought of as vanity seemed almost like a homage to the work of fate.

  ‘But, you know,’ he said, ‘you might look at me and think, this guy, he’s a trainer, his father’s an auditor and that’s all: they’re low-grade people. But that’s not all we are.’

  He spoke in a mixture of Hindi and English. The speed with which he recounted his personal history was startling. It was ready on his lips. He carried it around like one of the dented and blackened silver amulets he wore round his neck. He changed lenses effortlessly. One moment he was himself, striving, feeling the heat of the day and the fear of failure, the next he imagined himself as me, considering his achievement, wondering if it was something I could write about. It was as if he wanted to show me his making, show me a measure of worth different from the one that had humiliated him at the Holi party a few days before.

  When he said, ‘That’s not all we are,’ I had thought he was referring to some intrinsic human worth, but he meant something entirely different.

  ‘My great-grandfather was a famous priest in a village in Haryana,’ he began. ‘When he was very old, he was faced with a scandal. It led to him renouncing his life and drifting down a river. He disappeared and wasn’t heard of till years later, when someone saw him in Kanyakumari.’

  Kanyakumari, once Cape Comorin, was on the southernmost tip of India. It was some three thousand kilometres away.

  Hoping to ground the story, I asked, ‘What form did the scandal take?’

  Aakash’s eyes shone. ‘There was an army officer’s wife. She used to regard my great-grandfather very highly. She would work for him in the temple, help him with the prayers, clean the idols. Even before serving her husband, she would serve my great-grandfather. And so people in the village began talking.

  ‘Then one day, her husband died. But despite this she went that morning to the temple. So you can imagine, the village went wild with talk. A crowd gathered outside the temple, chanting, “Abolish these corrupt priests.” My great-grandfather heard their cries and appeared outside. Though he was heartbroken, he didn’t say anything. He just told the woman to make sure that the following day her husband’s funeral procession should pass by the temple before it went to the cremation grounds. Then he went back into the temple. The crowd was enraged, but they agreed to wait until the next day before acting.

  ‘The following day, as he had asked, the dead army officer’s funeral procession passed in front of the temple.’

  ‘Aakash, when did all of this happen?’

  He looked blank, as if I had asked him a childish question. ‘Fifty to a hundred years, maybe two hundred,’ he replied, ‘maybe more.’

  ‘More? But he’s your great-grandfather, right? Your father’s grandfather? Were the British here?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Aakash said, ‘it was definitely the time of the British Raj. So anyway. When the procession comes by the temple, my great-grandfather appears outside, and addressing the corpse of the dead army officer, says, “Your death has disgraced your village and your community. And so I, as your priest, give you my remaining years. Rise now. I have renounced my life.” ’

  The light in the flat had diminished. Aakash had smoked and drunk continuously. I stood up and turned on a few lamps. Aakash looked sombre, too moved by his own story to speak. I avoided his gaze, unsure of what to make of this afternoon visit. His conversation had included tales of forced blow jobs, social mobility and now magic. And though he himself had a hazy idea of time, his family’s history in roughly three generations mapped perfectly on to the country’s transitions: from its old religious life and priesthood, to socialism and his father’s work as an auditor, to now and Aakash.

  He lay back on the sofa, still in his grey vest, his wide arms sprawling behind him.

  ‘Did he come back to life?’ I said in the lamp-lit softness of the room.

  ‘That evening!’ Aakash replied. ‘That evening he rose as if from a deep sleep, and when the people went to the temple, they found that my great-grandfather was gone.’

  I wanted to ask any number of questions that would expose the story as untrue, but before I could he abruptly said, ‘You know I’m telling you all this for a reason?’

  ‘What reason?’

  ‘I want you to come somewhere with me. My family go every year to the village where all this happened. We take food and offerings. People come from all over. I want you to come with us.’

  ‘Why me?’ I asked.

  Aakash smiled, and draining his glass, said, ‘Because I think it’ll be good for you.’

  And those words felt like reason enough. Aakash had broken into my afternoon with a gesture of friendship, made possible by its spontaneity; and from its success seemed to come this second invitation, now given rather than taken. Like the first, it was an acknowledgement of the mutual appeal our lives held for each other. But because it was instinctive, and inarticulate, and because behind that appeal I sensed some vague contest for power, it had to be taken for now – like certain childhood friendships – on trust.

  I accepted his invitation and he gave me a date a few weeks later on which to be ready. Then looking round for his T-shirt, he rose to leave.

  He had put his arms in as far as the sleeves when he stopped. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘It’s been so peaceful here this afternoon. I really needed it.’

  When he had gone, I felt that he had come with one intention and realized another. I went home smelling of beer and cigarettes. And that night, on Sanyogita’s garden terrace, I noticed that the potted frangipani had died.

  7

  When I came back to Jorbagh, Sanyogita was in the drawing room. She wore her faded T-shirt and tattered tracksuit bottoms. Her legs were up on the sofa and the room was filled with pools of lamplight. They reached to the far corners of the high ceilings and emphasized the evening darkness. Sanyogita’s small, squat toes gnawed the edge of the sofa. She had her computer in her lap and was tapping away thoughtfully.

  ‘Baby!’ she said when I came in. She observed me carefully and seemed to
sense something strange in my manner, smelt something perhaps, but said nothing directly. ‘Where have you been? I must have tried you half a dozen times.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I ran into my grandmother. I must have left the phone upstairs. What are you doing?’

  ‘Oh, nothing.’ She smiled. ‘Vanity Fair has an annual world bazaar issue and I know this girl who’s doing it. She wants me to handle India. I may get a byline.’

  ‘That’s great. Do you want to have a bath?’

  ‘Yes! It’s just what they need,’ she said, wiggling her toes.

  ‘They?’

  ‘Baby, them!’ She gestured to her toes; they wiggled happily.

  We had an ongoing joke where we ascribed human characteristics to her toes.

  ‘Oh, them!’

  ‘Yes, they would hate to be left out!’ They fanned from side to side as if they were about to get up and follow me into the bathroom.

  ‘OK, but come quickly.’

  ‘Baby, don’t make it too hot.’

  I walked towards Sanyogita’s room, past my study with its red carpet and the garden terrace with its dahlias. There was no moon and the night filled the little terrace. I was about to enter Sanyogita’s room when, from the light of a naked bulb, I made out the shape of a potted frangipani. From where I stood, its leaves seemed to droop and its trunk and branches had an unhealthy, pulpy texture. I pushed open the door to the terrace to take a better look.

  Even before my eyes had fully adjusted to the darkness I could see that the tree was dead. Its trunk and branches had begun to soften and their ends were shrivelled. The large broad leaves hung on like the open eyes of a corpse. We hadn’t planted the garden ourselves; we had inherited it. And the death of the slim-limbed frangipani only weeks before it was meant to flower gave me a terrible intimation of the whole garden dying on our watch.

  In the time between leaving the terrace and opening the bath taps, I came to blame Sanyogita for the tree’s death. It was not because she was in charge of the garden – I was – but because I had noticed and I knew she never would have. I worked myself into thinking that her not noticing was an aspect of a deeper complacency: how almost two years after finishing college she had no more idea of what she wanted to do than when she graduated; how she preferred cities like London and New York, with their cinemas, restaurants and Sunday papers, to all that India had to offer; how she was always late for everything; and how she now sat in her drawing room, wasting her time doing someone else’s work.