The Temple-goers

by Aatish Taseer

  The thin, bumpy road ended abruptly at a sky-blue metal gate. Uttam turned the car right and drove into a colony of three- and four-storey government flats.

  I had seen these blocks of flats, with their little balconies and drainpipes on the outside, all over Delhi. In a country which couldn’t even standardize nuts and bolts, they were a rare achievement. Their squalor lay in their homogeneity and was not the Indian squalor, which was various and surprising. Small signs of that sunniness competed with the Sovietized scene. Coloured lights hung over the cemented verandas, a faded film poster could be seen through the iron bars of a window, and in the little patches of garden grew the Hindu sacred plants: banana, tulsi, a red hibiscus, its petals resting limply on the rusted points of a barbed-wire fence.

  I stood outside for some moments, taking in the place. I noticed the yellow and black sign of a self-service convenience store, the clutter of motorbikes outside each little block of flats, the clothes drying on nylon ropes. I noticed these things because I thought this perhaps was where Aakash bought his ‘brad butter’, that one of these several bikes was possibly his and that on one of those nylon ropes I might see his fashionable clothes. It was this awareness of particularity, of feeling invested in Aakash, that broke the colony’s drab uniformity.

  I had thought I was alone, but Aakash’s sudden appearance on the landing made me wonder whether he might have observed my arrival. Since we were visiting temples, I wore Indian clothes, an off-white kurta and a white pajama. Aakash now appeared in faded jeans and a striped beige and white knit T-shirt. My embarrassment was not easily explained. All I knew was that Aakash wore the Western clothes because he could. It was like so much else about him.

  ‘Hi, man,’ he said, reaching in to give me a hug. ‘Looking fit.’ Then, laughing and switching to Hindi, he added, ‘Yaar, my house is very scattered. Please don’t take it badly. I’m ashamed that you’re seeing it like this.’

  But I realized as we climbed the cement steps that the embarrassment would be all mine and none his. Aakash didn’t know embarrassment; it was an aspect of his confidence. My embarrassment, which he would draw out, did not offend him as much as it aroused his curiosity. It was as if he wanted to know every detail of how his world would look once he’d left it behind.

  The room we entered past a wire-mesh door and then a full metal door had powdery pink walls. Immediately in front of us was a large cloth hanging of Radha and Krishna and a blue sequined cow against a black background. The room was small and full of people. I couldn’t take it in at once. There were some men, a large woman in a bright yellow and orange sari, someone held a baby. As soon as I entered, everyone quickly greeted me and dispersed. They did it with such alacrity that I had the feeling this was a standard courtesy extended to anyone who brought guests to the little flat.

  These men were also in trousers and shirts, and seeing them, I began feeling unprotected in the loose, light clothes I wore. Once the room emptied, only Aakash and his father, a man with a youthful face and heavily dyed hair, white at the roots, remained. I looked for Aakash’s face in his, but it lacked the fineness of his features, and though lighter in tone, was a flatter colour. For some moments no one spoke.

  ‘Will you have tea and biscuits?’ Mr Sharma asked.

  ‘Sir, you’ll have to ask my trainer,’ I said, trying a joke. ‘I never eat or drink anything without his permission.’

  Aakash’s father smiled proudly. Aakash swelled with laughter, which, at once self-deprecating and vain, filled the room.

  The noise drew out a large toddler from behind a curtain, separating the sitting room from the rest of the flat. He came charging in, breaching the unspoken barrier between guest and family, and threw himself into Aakash’s arms. His mother, the daughter-in-law, ran in after him, holding a bottle of milk. She was short and quite wide, with dark skin and silvery red lipstick. The gold jewellery she wore on her wrists, neck, nose and ears stood out against the colour of her skin. Dark blue flowers grew over her pale blue and white chiffon sari. Greeting me with an embarrassed smile, she tried to retrieve the child, who had already crawled on to his uncle’s shoulders. Aakash reached behind him, and exactly as though performing a two-arm dumb-bell extension, lifted the child from his shoulders and swung him in front of the Krishna–Radha hanging. He pointed at the blue cow; the toddler’s face shone with delight. It extended an unsteady finger in the direction of the animal and said, ‘Tawoo’. Aakash guffawed, and turning to me, whispered, ‘Cow,’ the English word more magical to him than to the boy.

  His mother reached again for him. Aakash ignored her, swinging the child back into his lap. Without looking up, he took the bottle from his sister-in-law’s hand. She looked to me and said, ‘He’s very attached to his uncle.’ Mr Sharma who was silent until now said, ‘Yes, watch this.’ He called to the child, who craned its neck to see him, then hit Aakash on the shoulder. An expression of fury came over the child’s face. He did it again and the child jumped up, then held by Aakash, advanced on his grandfather, gnashing two tough little teeth and swinging his arms and legs. When Mr Sharma hit Aakash again, the child let out a piercing scream.

  Aakash calmed him by rubbing the boy’s face against his. Then lowering him on to his back, he put the bottle in his mouth. His ease with the child and the sight of it drinking contentedly from Aakash’s heavy, dark arms riveted everyone in the room. Aakash, aware of the unsettling beauty of the scene, turned to me and said, ‘I’m a trainer, but I can do these things as well.’

  I watched in silence. This brief, physical scene in the small room, with the hidden flat beyond, made me feel that certain boundaries were being preserved on my account. A tension built on their edges, while the thought of their loosening unnerved me.

  The child’s mother, as if forever dismissed in this way, showed her guile as a daughter-in-law. She feigned a huff, making it seem that Aakash instead of showing her up before a guest was doing her a favour. ‘Then you feed him, nah?’ she said, and flounced off.

  It was this child, who wore a neon-green T-shirt with a string of unconnected words on the back – ‘Yo, yo graffiti’ and ‘Come out, let’s play’ – whose long curls, I discovered, were to be offered up that morning at a village temple.

  Until now, my heightened awareness and inward concentration had made it difficult for me to take in the situation around me. But now I wondered what the delay was. Why were we sitting here in the first place? Some preparation seemed to be under way in the flat, but I couldn’t tell what.

  Aakash yelled at the curtain, ‘Ma, come on, hurry up. We should leave quickly. Papa, please tell them to hurry.’

  Mr Sharma nodded, rose and disappeared behind the curtain. I wanted to see the rest of the flat, but was somehow unable to ask to be shown it.

  When we were alone, I said, ‘Aakash, can I use the bathroom?’

  A look of dismay ran over his face. He seemed caught between his host’s willingness to satisfy any request of mine and an opposing desire to keep me in the visiting room. He said, ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ and then, as if submitting to the inevitable, added, ‘I may as well show you the rest of the house.’

  He flicked aside the curtain. I was faced suddenly with a short, dim length of corridor. It ended so abruptly that it was almost as if there was no flat behind the curtain. On my left, there was a tiny strip of kitchen crowded with three busy women in bright clothes. It had a purple fridge and a gas stove. A faint light came in from a frosted-glass transom over an exhaust fan caked in grime. A few steps further, there was a darkened bedroom with a single red bulb and a low bed.

  ‘This is one room,’ Aakash said. ‘We’ve given it to my brother and his wife.’

  The door of the other room was also open. A tube light with a black underbelly glowed brightly. Every inch of the room was covered in mattresses. It answered my questions: three in one room, four in the other.

  Maybe feeling we’d come too quickly to the end of the flat, Aakash pushed open a further doo
r to reveal a small terrace. It was cluttered with the skeletal remains of an old cooler and stacks of bedding, perhaps for when relations came to stay. Beyond a spiked wall, there was a large field of parched, uncultivated land, where a village of blue plastic tents had sprung up. The haze was burning away, the sky blanching fast.

  We withdrew into the passage. Aakash pulled aside another curtain, revealing a sink and a cemented area with a tap, a plastic bucket and a metal door.

  He opened the door for me. I stepped inside and slid the cold iron bolt into place. Only then, in the damp, dark confines of this cement strongroom, did the full force of my reaction break violently over me. I wished with all my heart that Aakash didn’t have to live here. It was too ugly to think of someone with his charisma and ambition, and yes, physical beauty too, spending those treasured Sundays on a mattress on the floor. Was this where he crept in late at night to find a space among the sleeping bodies?

  These thoughts had prevented me from focusing on the stained ceramic basin and the squalid circle of water I stood over. I wondered if, while holding my breath, I’d kept my eyes closed as well. I knew now that I stood at the source of the smell that pervaded – and always would, no matter what incense was lit or food cooked – the air in the flat. And just before I pulled the flush, a detail impressed itself on me. On a narrow cement windowsill below the paint-splattered glass, there was a thick accumulation of a hard yellow and red substance. Its colour and appearance made me curious enough to touch it. It was smooth and layered. When I dug my nail into it, a little flake came off easily. Wax! The remains of candles, red and yellow candles that had burned to their base. Their blackened wicks were embedded in the pat of wax. No sooner had I realized what the coloured substance was than a looming feature of life in the flat occurred to me: blackouts. It was to long hot nights dotted with red and yellow candles, burning into the morning, that Aakash returned.

  I opened the door and found him waiting. He turned the tap in the little sink for me with one hand and held a towel in the other.

  In the room outside, the family was ready to go. Five bags of food, offerings and water had been brought out. There were three women, Aakash’s mother, aunt and sister-in-law; and three men, his two brothers, one younger, one older, and his father. And there was the toddler, whose hair was to be offered up, sitting heavily in his father’s arms. I waited for the room to empty. Besides the religious hanging, there was a painting of a Chinese scene, fluorescent green palms, pagodas and bridges on a black felt background. The only other decoration on the pink powdery walls was a narrow framed picture of a red rose, which for all its shabby sentimentality, was somehow affecting.

  9

  Aakash’s father, as a testament to its importance, knew every stage of the fifty-kilometre journey from town to temple. He knew the last of the city’s satellite towns with their single-storey constructions gathered close to the road and their multitude of chemists, automechanics and call booths. He knew when the land would become fields dotted for as far as anyone could see with the clay minarets of brick furnaces. He knew the Air Force base with its high walls of bougainvillea that came just before the Haryana border. He knew the flat green fields and pale blue sky of Haryana, once bare save for the odd red-brick construction, but now covered with uncooked bricks drying in the sun and chimneys evenly emitting black smoke. As if in homage to his destination, he spoke of magic on the way.

  He spoke at Aakash’s prompting. Since we’d left Delhi, Aakash had become protective of me. He put his elder brother, mother, aunt and sister-in-law in one car, and in my van-like car he put himself in the front next to Uttam, his little brother Anil far in the back and his father and me near each other in the middle row so we could talk. He would turn back every few moments, facilitating the easy flow of conversation and checking that I wasn’t getting bored of the stories. When, occasionally, I looked ahead, I saw the side of his face pressed intently against the seat, his bright, arched eyes ready to wink.

  The stories were not simply religious. At the heart of them was not just a reward or a moral intervention from the gods, but rather an emphasis on the powers of Brahmins, the Siddhis, continuing to this day despite the decay of modern times. They seemed designed to expand on what Aakash had said a few days before at Junglee: ‘There’s something in us.’ The message, beyond proving the existence of these powers, was not always clear. In one story, Aakash’s grandfather, killed in war, went to his father before leaving on his fatal mission. The father was old and perhaps sensed something. He asked his son to ask whatever he would of him. The man said, ‘I have so many daughters and only one son. I am not rich. How can I be expected to marry them off?’

  ‘Over the next six months,’ Aakash’s father said grimly, then chuckled, ‘one of my sisters died every month.’

  ‘My aunts?’ Aakash asked not with horror but simple curiosity. ‘I have an aunt in Rohtak…’

  ‘The only one!’ his father said, chuckling again. Then turning to me, he added in Hindi, and cryptically, ‘Sometimes the truth of things has come out of my mouth as well.’ He described the predictions he’d made of transfers in his office, of purses stolen and found where he said they’d be found, and of investments made at opportune times. ‘The place we’re going to today honours the memory of my grandfather, who renounced his remaining years for the sake of his family and community. It’s a story from the last days of the faith. If it were not for him, people would have stopped believing.’

  To hear Aakash’s father recall the story made it even stranger than when Aakash had spoken of it in my mother’s flat. Only two generations apart from him was this magical ending to a life.

  Aakash knew all the stories. He prompted his father to tell more. Soon Anil, thinner and fairer than Aakash, with uneven teeth clambering over each other, was also prompting stories. I imagined them first told in the small bedroom covered in mattresses, the long nights of summer darkness, the smell of the bathroom, and yet the resilience of people to these things, the stories told anyway, the family life carrying on, the making of Aakash continuing unstopped.

  He seemed to have an intimation that beyond the brief new friendship that had arisen between us, my interest in him had other depths. If ever he saw me watching him or I asked him a question about his personal life, his face would brighten as if from the amusement of a private joke between us. ‘You’re writing a book on me, aren’t you?’ he’d laugh, using the English word for book as if a book of that sort could only have been possible in English.

  Before arriving at the village temple where the offering of hair was to be made, we stopped at a small town. While his family bought snacks, rearranged their offerings and went to the bathroom, Aakash pulled me into the shade of a teashop. The man, who always made a point of smoking Marlboro Lights, now asked the teashop owner for a single Gold Flake. He spoke in the Haryana dialect, with its threatening inflections, to make me laugh. His eyes blazed mockingly, his manner became at once aggressive and comic. The owner didn’t catch the city joke and handed him the cigarette. Aakash lit it from the roaring blue flame that cradled the steel urn’s blackened base, keeping its contents forever close to a boil. He put it in too far and half its short, cylindrical body blackened, with scattered orange points burning through. Its paper fell from it like dead skin. Aakash handed the cigarette to me after a few drags and slipped his arm around my shoulders. He seemed to take great pleasure in watching his family one by one load into the cars as he smoked with me in the gloom of the teashop. Then he bought one of the many silver packets of pan masala hanging in front of the shop, tore open a corner, and after blowing into it, emptied its contents into his palm. He gave half to me before slapping the rest into his mouth. After a short lull, the brown liquid in the urn seethed.

  Our closeness in the teashop faded as the day wore on. It was replaced by a kind of aggression, as if a fault line formed between the recent fact of our friendship and the acknowledgement of difference. And though we forged the common ground
on which a friendship might grow, neither of us yielded any easily.

  The change in mood began on the way to the village temple, or perhaps even some minutes before, when Aakash’s nephew discovered us in the teashop. He ran in like a hound following a scent, then looked around in confusion, his eyes adjusting to the darkness. Aakash caught him and swung him into the light; the child let out a screech of delight; I winced, reminded of babies on planes and indulgent mothers. Aakash indulged the child too, letting him gnaw at the side of his face.

  Sensing my discomfort, he archly said, ‘With us, children are everything.’

  The child now travelled in our blue van, being passed through all three sections of it depending on his fancy, his long, soon to be cut locks flying this way and that.

  Before leaving the small town, we hit traffic. Orange-faced trucks with large loads crowded the narrow street. On the petrol tank of one, there was a drawing of a palm and dune. Below, white letters read: ‘Iraqi water. Drink frugally, my queen.’ For many minutes, the line of trucks didn’t move. Aakash admired a new house: ‘Look at the kind of houses people are building.’ I had thought at first the remark was a sneer, but I was wrong; it was a compliment. The house was narrow, four storeys high, in beige sandstone, with red grilles, balconies and silvered windows.

  When the traffic didn’t move, Uttam tried to slip ahead of the queue. The minute the van nosed out of its lane, it was honked at angrily by oncoming traffic. The queue had closed behind us and Uttam was left with no choice but to take the car to the right, across the oncoming lane, as far off the road as he could. As soon as he did, the tyres caught in deep black mud. One by one, they confessed the futility of their revolutions.