The Temple-goers

by Aatish Taseer

  I got into the bath, full of irrational rage. I knew that Sanyogita, in her mulish way, would carry on doing her work till the bath went cold. But I didn’t want to call her because I enjoyed letting my anger grow. The water was hot and burned my skin. I sat there until it became tepid and seemed to cling to me. I felt a sick excitement when Sanyogita came in at last. I said nothing about the bath’s temperature. I just lay there looking up at the saucer-shaped ceiling light.

  When Sanyogita took off her clothes, I watched her. I saw her pale skin, her big bones, the caterpillar scar that ran across her hip from the skiing accident and her low-slung breasts. She saw me looking at them and became shy about the way her nipples had expanded. She dipped her hand into the bath so that she could harden them. It was then that her frank smile turned to confusion. Why was I lying in a bath that had gone cold? She could see that all wasn’t well with me, but she was happy to get in the bath anyway, happy just to add some hot water and bear it for my sake, happy just to be in the bath with me. But as soon as she put one foot in and then the other, letting her large, smooth body sink into the few feet of soapy water, I got out of the bath and left the room without a word.

  I saw her face as I left the bathroom, the smile, the confusion and at last the hurt.

  When Sanyogita came out of the bathroom a few moments later, she was crying. She always cried silently, but her face was wet with tears, a different wetness from the glisten of her body. She lay down on the bed, just as she was, and wept.

  I lay down next to her, noticing the things I found beautiful about her: the straight, strong bones of her shoulders and the paleness of the skin that collected over them now that her arms were raised; her smooth shiny black hair that dropped in steps down her back; the single skin-covered mole on her back which, if I ever touched, she asked me to be kind to as it was the only one.

  Sanyogita, as if acknowledging the seriousness of the fight, didn’t push me away when I lay down next to her. She seemed to be considering what the real problem might be. With the side of her face pressed against the bed, she said, ‘Baby, is it necessary that you revise your novel here?’

  ‘In Delhi or India?’ I asked.

  ‘Both,’ she said, the conversation calming her down.

  ‘No, I suppose not.’

  ‘Because I’d like to go away for a while. And I want you to come with me.’

  She seemed at once to warn me and to bring me in. The fact that she had already read into the deeper vibrations of our fight, and felt no need to state them but had moved on to a solution, gave her an authority over me.

  ‘How long?’ I asked.

  ‘The summer.’

  ‘Where do you want to go?’

  ‘Europe, America, anywhere. This place gets to me after a while, that’s all. I need to be reminded that there’s another world out there, a world where I feel better about myself.’

  I didn’t want to, but I gave in. I felt paralysed by the onset of the heat. I wanted to drink lime waters all summer, wear white salwar kameez and finish my revisions in my new study. My life in Delhi had acquired a serenity beyond all my expectations. The revised version of the novel was seeming much better to me. I wrote early in the mornings. Vatsala had learned to make coffee in the Italian percolator. It spat out a thick dark liquid. She mixed it with hot milk and brought me two mugs a morning. The effect of the coffee and the quiet work made me restless for Junglee. I’d spend an hour there and come back to a light vegetarian lunch with Sanyogita. Zafar came every afternoon. After he was gone, I’d walk three rounds of Lodhi Gardens. The park at that hour was filled with overweight women in salwar kameez and sneakers, slim-bodied young men hanging on each other, couples canoodling and old men in white shorts. There were also faces from the area: the Sikh gentleman who owned a bookshop called The Bookshop; the feuding brothers who owned The Music Shop in Khan Market; and an Australian woman who wore pink turbans and flowery dresses and bred beagles. After the walk, I’d read over my writing, drink a glass of wine and resist efforts to make me go out. I didn’t want the slog of life in the West; I didn’t want cosmopolitan life. I was tired of subtitled movies and Sunday supplements.

  But almost as soon as I agreed to the time abroad, our relationship revived. The days that had seemed to run into each other now led up to a final date of departure. The heat that had seemed like a preparation for June’s deathly white skies was now only enervating, somebody else’s problem: Zafar’s, who struggled under it every day, his elegant white umbrella providing hardly any protection from its exquisite blaze. It had made his dark red sores bloom and brighten so that he seemed to sweat blood. The heat was Aakash’s problem, who left home even earlier now to avoid the worst of it. And though he was too vain to ever smell bad, his clothes now emitted the odour of cotton fibres baking in the sun.

  Zafar took the news of my departure with gloomy resignation. He would feel the hole my five thousand rupees would leave in his monthly income. He feared that without practice, the Urdu I had learned would slip away from me. Aakash didn’t even entertain the idea that I might be able to stay in shape without him. ‘We’ll have to start again,’ he said, ‘from scratch.’ He was at first curious about my going off to the West and he liked telling the other trainers, but soon his supreme belief that anywhere he wasn’t was of no interest took over. A look of pity entered his eyes every time the subject was brought up. He now spoke of our trip to his village, which was only days away, as if it were a send-off, a final celebration before my months of obscurity began.

  I had told Sanyogita about the trip and feared she might react badly. But in her excitement about the summer away, she took it well and in fact became curious herself to meet Aakash again. He in turn said that I wasn’t his client any more, I was his friend, and that it was wrong for me to keep him away from his bhabi. They both seemed in their own ways to be digging at an unspoken desire in me for them not to know each other.

  Then, one morning in May, the day before I was to go with Aakash to Haryana, Sanyogita rang while I was in Junglee. Aakash, who always held on to my phone while I worked out, answered it: ‘Hello, bhabi. This is Aakash, sir’s personal trainer…’

  This was all I heard. I was unable to move and could only see Aakash drift off to the far end of the room. He stood under the dark plywood cornices, red light falling on him, chatting away happily. When he returned, he said, ‘Plan is set. We’re all going, you, me and bhabi, to Hookah. Man, you’ll love this place. It’s my favourite restaurant. It’s just like in Ali Baba’s time, with tents and platters and apple-flavoured tobacco.’

  ‘But aren’t we going to the village tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes, so? We’ll take bhabi’s blessings before going, no?’

  I knew the plaza where the restaurant was; I had come to the cinema there many times as a teenager. Fifteen years later, change had not so much come to the plaza as grown over it. It still had its same two- and three-storey pale yellow buildings, with their exposed drainpipes and black water tanks. There was still the cinema’s original structure, low and wide. The plaza was still surfaced with uneven squares of red sandstone. At the centre was a large banyan with a circular cemented base; in the tree’s shade, there were still food sellers, amidst mountains of leaf plates and sprinklings of flies; just near it, a ‘Keep Delhi Green’ dustbin still stained red with pan spittle. And still present among the groups of young men, apparently pulling off a miracle of inconspicuity, were a family of cows. But over this scene, over a portion of the pale yellow buildings, had grown the silver and red façade of a Puma shop with large glass windows. A new company, with gold-lettered branding and multiplexes all over the city, had taken over the old cinema. Its baggy shell had been carved up into smaller, more compact cinemas. The attendants all wore purple and gold uniforms. And where there were slim-limbed, moustached men in dull-coloured polyester trousers, eating from the leaf plates, there were now also groups of young boys, with headphones, gelled hair, black T-shirts and low jeans. It was
this group, overweight and dull-eyed, that slipped into the apple-scented shade of Hookah.

  The restaurant was arranged on two floors. The street level was virtually empty and the bright afternoon light disturbed its dim ambience. In the windowless basement, lit by spotlight, tents had been set up in alcoves by draping red satiny material over four-legged metal frames whose joints still showed their welding. The floors were of linoleum, the walls brushed gold, and in each alcove there was a gem-encrusted mirror. Boys sprawled on red and gold satin mattresses and bolsters, smoking water pipes and welcoming large brass platters of Middle Eastern food. The girls, their hair blow-dried and their faces made-up, sat primly on chairs. Some sipped bright-coloured drinks, others smoked joylessly. Only their handbags vibrating against their legs quickened their movements, causing them to reach hurriedly for their phones and make fresh plans.

  Aakash sat alone at a table. His colour, his physique, his carefully picked clothes, his decorum, made him seem of a race apart from the people around him. And yet he was nothing like the moustached men under the banyan outside. Seeing him in this new environment, selected by him, I had a sense of how much more marginal he was than I had first realized. He had said the restaurant was his favourite, but I had a feeling he hadn’t been there more than a few times.

  His eyes brightened when he saw me, then became quiet and respectful at seeing Sanyogita. He seemed nervous, as if welcoming us to his own house. He asked if we’d like to sit in an alcove and yelled ‘excuse me’ in a loud voice; Sanyogita thought it would be better to stay at the table.

  ‘I thinking the same thing,’ he said in English.

  I was worried our conversation would continue in English, but Sanyogita switched to her precise genteel Hindi and Aakash responded with characteristic fluency.

  ‘Who wants to sit with that tribe of assholes anyway, right?’

  Sanyogita laughed with surprise at the use of the word in the context and I sensed her relax. Aakash, as if the formality of the foreign word freed him from all other constraints, yelled for the waiter with another loud ‘excuse me’. The man came over and Aakash ordered beers, hummus, salad, kibbeh. He treated the man with a rudeness that felt experimental, on its way to becoming habitual. The waiter was impervious; when he brought us only two glasses, Aakash said, ‘And my bhabi here? Has she come all the way to look at your face?’

  Sanyogita didn’t like this, but tolerated it, as she did the restaurant, perhaps unsure of who should be the true beneficiary of her noblesse oblige.

  As is so often the case when two people meet through a third, they inaugurate their new acquaintance by making light fun of the person who brought them together. It was in this vein that Aakash began to mock my gym clothes.

  ‘Bhabi, I tell him to change those long-sleeved baggy shirts, you know those blue Lacoste or God knows which company’s, but he says he can’t because bhabi likes them.’

  We had never had this conversation, but Aakash winked at me to play along. It turned out this was one of Sanyogita’s favourite subjects and the two launched into a happy repartee about my sartorial missteps.

  ‘I tell him keep them for the house then,’ Aakash said, ‘where bhabi can see them. Please don’t wear them to the gym, where they conceal my hard work.’

  ‘I hate those T-shirts,’ Sanyogita said disloyally.

  ‘But bhabi, you have to confess, he is looking better, no?’

  ‘So much better, unrecognizably better. All this is gone,’ Sanyogita added, pinching my sides.

  Aakash noted the physical tenderness between us, and for an instant I saw a cold, unreadable expression on his face. When Sanyogita looked up he was smiling again.

  Sanyogita was not a beer drinker and after the first glass she stopped. Aakash looked at me urgently.

  ‘Bhabi’s stopped,’ he said, ‘but that doesn’t mean you will too, no? You’ll drink with me tonight, won’t you?’

  Sanyogita laughed at his filmy language. Aakash glanced at her, then turned back to me, and as if making light of his own intensity, said, ‘But what does it matter! Tomorrow you’re going to see my village. No friend of mine from Delhi has ever come with me to my village. It makes you like my brother. You don’t understand. We’ll have so much fun – people will come from all over. Truck-loads of people will come, women with their dupattas down to here.’ He held his hand to just below his chest. I looked over at Sanyogita, something I found myself doing less and less, and saw that her face had become small. Aakash’s passion for the outing seemed designed to exclude her. But then, turning to her, he said, ‘Bhabi, why don’t you come as well?’

  A smile brightened on her face. She had felt Aakash’s subtle exclusion, then the excitement of unexpectedly being included. But his invitation – whether intended to do so or not – produced an ugly reaction in me. I didn’t want Sanyogita to come. Whatever world Aakash was taking me into, I wanted my responses to it to come up spontaneously. I didn’t want to have to think about how Sanyogita was responding. I said nothing at the time, but noticed Aakash watching me intently. Then his face cleared and he smiled. I thought he knew she wouldn’t come.

  I hadn’t considered that Sanyogita, who knew me better than anyone else, would also have made something of my silence.

  On the way back, a dirty orange sun slipped smoothly behind low sprawl and satellite dishes. A long straight road took us out of the city of colonies. Its small houses and patches of garden appeared in flashes. It seemed without centre and featureless. The bland stretch of road was interrupted by snarls of new flyover with orange railings. They dwarfed the city below, exposing the meanness of its proportions.

  Uttam was driving. I leaned forward and said to him, ‘We have to go very early to Haryana tomorrow. It’s not far. Be ready by six. We’ll go first to Aakash’s and then they’ll tell us where to go from there.’

  He nodded and reconfirmed the time. From the corner of my eye, I was aware of Sanyogita listening carefully. Just before I sat back, she turned away.

  A moment later, she said, her eyes dully focused on two boys with painted moustaches who, after doing cartwheels and bridges, had approached the car for money, ‘I didn’t know it was tomorrow. I can’t come anyway. I’m having lunch with Ra.’

  When we drove down Amrita Shergill Marg, the trees in the darkness seemed to burn with a strange, cold fire. At first I thought it was the effect of the yellow street light. But looking closer, I saw that the texture of their canopies had changed. They were featherlight and ablaze. Sanyogita’s mood alchemized.

  ‘Baby, look. The laburnum’s out!’

  8

  Aakash’s house! I knew he left it at four thirty a.m. after eating some ‘brad butter’. Then from five till two thirty, he was in Junglee. From two thirty to eleven, he covered the city on his Hero Honda for his lucrative personal trainings. After eleven, he returned home, perhaps only to sleep. I knew he lived there with his father, mother, two brothers, sister-in-law and year-old nephew. I imagined him picking his way through the darkness so as not to wake anyone. It was where his steel tiffin wrapped in blue polythene came from. Most of all, it was where I imagined Aakash on Sundays, the day we didn’t meet, the day he had an old-fashioned regard for: of curtains drawn, of not waking till noon and of eating unhealthy amounts of greasy food. And though I knew the points of this routine exactly, I couldn’t imagine the kind of place he lived in or even what the streets looked like. And without an image of this other place, this counterpoint to Junglee, Aakash’s existence seemed fictitious, a figment of the Delhi sprawl.

  It was a city with a fragmented geography: a baggy centre of bungalows and tree-lined avenues, the British city; a walled and decaying slum to the north, the last Muslim city of both Zafar the emperor and Zafar my teacher; a post-independence city of gated colonies, with low houses and little gardens, stretching out in all directions; and beyond, new unseen cities, sometimes past city lines. But the sprawl was being slowly sewn together by new roads, buses and metros; the
road to Sectorpur was part of a network of new, elevated roads, shooting out from a central stem, connecting city with airport and the construction sites and coloured glass of Gurgaon. These slab-like roads, with their orange railings, leaning white lights and marked, numbered exits, a concept until recently unknown to the Indian road system, performed infrastructural stunts, now splitting, now swooping down on unsuspecting neighbourhoods. Sectorpur was such a neighbourhood, a place to which the good road had brought life in the form of a property boom. And signs of this life, dull and bright, appeared close to its periphery: grey metal sheets concealing a metro station under construction; red highway tollbooths with newspaper still covering the windows; a city of concrete towers, dotted with the bright figures of Rajasthani women labourers.

  The road swung right for Sectorpur, overshooting the turning for Aakash’s house. It was necessary to get off the elevated section at a further exit, make a U-turn past families sleeping and cooking under the flyover and drive back at ground level. In this short drive, the city beneath the highway returned with force in the form of cattle, fenced-in plots of overgrown land and roadside fruit sellers behind bright walls of produce. ‘Make a left just after the fruit sellers,’ Aakash had said.

  The road took on the distinct aspect of an army neighbourhood. High walls on both sides with rusty iron spikes held back pink bougainvillea; girls in navy-blue and white salwar kameez waited for the bus to the Air Force School; and blue and white signs with the colours of the Indian flag in concentric circles like a dartboard, read: ‘16 Base Repair Depot’ and ‘Photography Prohibited’. Where the high walls retreated, there were keekar trees with thorn-filled canopies and gnarled black branches. They reached out into the road like a sinister, vegetal extension of the dawn mist.