The Temple-goers

by Aatish Taseer

  Aakash jumped out to push, as did Anil; I hesitated, then got out too. At first they thought putting bricks under the tyres would be enough for them to catch, but soon it was clear that they would have to push the car on to the bricks. My position on the left was not ideal; the patch widened where I stood, I was wearing sandals. Despite my uncomfortable angle to the car, I pushed. The car broke its inertia, but just as the wheels left the deep grooves they had made, they splattered black mud on to my white pajama. My right leg was covered from my sandals to the hem of my kurta. Aakash roared with laughter, not now that self-deprecating laugh, but a harsh, instinctive cackle. Uttam appeared and began to wipe furiously at the mud, making things worse. I buried the anger I would normally have shown him for fear of being singled out as soft and privileged.

  ‘You should have left it,’ Aakash said, when his laughter subsided. ‘There’s a technique in pushing.’

  I wanted to hit him. Uttam saw this and brought out a bottle of water from the back. Aakash took it from him and poured it down my leg, squeezing mud and water out of my pajama. Then he washed my feet, looking up at me the entire time. It was a difficult gesture to read. I couldn’t tell if it was like the tenderness he’d shown me in the teashop or whether, by tending to me so thoroughly, he was further asserting his power as a man who could do anything.

  After a short drive on a country road, past flat fields of ripened wheat, their arrows hard and golden like wasps, heralding better than any number of flowering trees the approach of summer, we arrived at a small open-air temple in the shade of a peepal tree. A pool of green water lay some metres below, surrounded by pale land.

  ‘This first temple,’ Aakash’s father said as we got out of the car, ‘honours an even older ancestor than the one I spoke of in the car. It is from him that we derive our caste.’

  ‘How old?’

  ‘Oh, I can’t say!’ Aakash’s father said. ‘Three, five, seven hundred years old. All I know is that it was even before the British time in India. It was during the Mughal time when Akbar was emperor.’

  ‘So, in the sixteenth century?’

  ‘Yes, maybe. Anyway, in that time, this ancestor did paltiyans from here to Jagannath Puri. When he arrived, the temple doors were closed. So he says, “If I have shakti in me, these doors will open.” The priest there said, “These doors will never open. Jagannath, Lord of the World, will not see you now.” My ancestor said, “Move aside. You’re just a priest; I speak directly to my god.” And, phataak, the doors of the temple swung open, Jagannath himself appearing. He said, “Ask, if you ever meant to ask.” My ancestor fell to his feet and asked the great Lord of the World that no one in his family or subsequent line should ever suffer from, how do you say, kodha…’

  ‘Leprosy,’ Anil inserted.

  ‘Yes, no one should suffer from leprosy.’

  After this explanation, Aakash and Anil disappeared, followed by their older brother, Amit.

  Men and women of Aakash’s caste had come from all over the area. Some arrived in open-backed trucks, the women’s faces covered by the long fall of their saris; others arrived in low sedans. The temple was so small and basic that it was hard to imagine people coming from a distance to visit it. It was long and tiled and open on three sides, through which the tranquillity of the green pool and the heavy shade of the tree entered freely. Below a brass bell were Aakash’s ancestor’s feet in white marble. Directly in front of them, also in white marble, was a large pineapple-shaped structure, draped in lavender muslin. A wet temple clutter of rose petals, grain, coins, blue polythene and yellow laddus with smoking incense sticks lay at its base.

  A mad toothless country cousin, with thick spectacles and a long white plait, ran towards the women in Aakash’s family as soon as they entered the temple. The two women met and instantly began to dance around the pineapple. The daughter-in-law waited to be invited and when she wasn’t, put a foot forward and joined in. Other women in pink, maroon and rose-coloured saris smashed cymbals.

  I was watching the scene when from behind me the men in Aakash’s family appeared, carrying between them a white and gold muslin cloth. The sight of them, dressed in nothing but long, ceremonial dhotis, produced a kind of panic in me. It was the culmination of weeks of anxiety that had been building since I stepped on to the Jet Airways flight to Delhi. Seeing Aakash now effortlessly assume his caste robes made me, in a mud-splattered kurta, feel all the horror of my removal. He hadn’t meant to intimidate me, but he had terribly. He’d shed his wide jeans and close-fitting shirt and the effects of Junglee were on display. His sprawling shoulders and large arms were taut. The black religious strings entwined with red bounced lightly against his chest. They struck an unlikely harmony with Aakash’s colour, the dark gums, the blackish-pink lips, the still-darker nipples and the fine coat of hair that covered his arms and shoulders. A beauty spot was faintly visible on his stomach muscles.

  This darkness, like that of a charcoal sketch, made Aakash’s body more than an object for aesthetic consideration; it seemed to have a kind of aboriginal power, as if issuing from the deepest origins of caste and class in India. But his brothers and father, with their paler, flabbier frames, did not unsettle. There was no regeneration visible in them: their gaze was placid; they were not gym Brahmins.

  The men each held a corner of the white and gold muslin cloth, which they lowered over the marble pineapple, already draped in lavender muslin. It was filled in seconds with a shower of petals, money and garlands of rose, jasmine and marigold. Then the little boy was brought forward, and as a barber priest shaved a first inch with his blade, the boy began to wail. Soon long, dark hair was added to the moist mess of petals, polythene and money. The Brahmin men sat solemnly around the pineapple as the boy’s large head was shorn. When his scalp was raw and cleanly shaved, cut dark red in places, the priest smeared it with sandalwood paste. It was only then that his mother appeared to ease the day’s trauma.

  I wanted to go back to Delhi, but there was lunch organized under the peepal tree and a second temple to visit.

  ‘Eat as much as you like,’ Aakash said warmly after returning from washing in the green pool with his entire family. ‘Today I’m not your trainer.’ He had changed back into his jeans and T-shirt and had a fresh, turmeric mark on his forehead. He slipped his little finger into mine and led me to a place where a priest was putting these marks on other people’s foreheads. He exchanged some words with the priest as if negotiating a special rate. The priest asked him a question I didn’t catch, but Aakash replied, ‘He’s my brother.’ The priest smiled, and slipping one hand behind my head, drew me closer, grinding the mark firmly into my forehead with his other hand. Under the tree, young and old men were coming around with metal buckets, serving warm puris and potatoes. I felt my exhaustion mirrored in the long afternoon light pouring on to the green pool and in my mud-splattered pajama, which had dried and become a dull brown colour.

  That second temple, given to Aakash’s family by the old Nawab of Jhajjar, was no more than a house. It faced a Jhajjar backstreet split down the middle by an open drain in which black bead-like bubbles rose in even intervals. Still, strong sunlight fell on an afternoon scene composed of a fly-covered dog, half in sun, half in shade, the street’s blue doors and shutters, and a man on a stool, reading the paper behind half-filled toffee jars. The one sound was the jingling of a passing woman, in black, silver and red; the one smell, as powerful as the sunlight, as pervasive as the languor of the street, the stench of the drain. It eased its way past a PCO booth, through the blue grille gate and into the temple’s cemented sanctum.

  But no one held their nose, the ladies did not worry about their saris getting dirty, no one minded taking off their shoes some metres before the temple’s freshly washed floors. We tumbled into its courtyard, fifteen of us, opening shutters and unlocking doors as if returning to a house that had been closed up for a season. Everyone headed straight for the sanctum and lay down, men, women and children, on an old c
arpet on the floor. Just ahead, half-buried in garlands of plastic flowers,were a black, beady-eyed Krishna and a white Radha in gold clothes.

  Aakash took me aside and pointed to the painting of a sage in a glass case. In slow, broken English, he said, ‘He is my great-grandfather.’

  Mr Sharma already stood next to the glass case, leaning lightly against its orange frame. The statue inside was of a large man with a paunch showing through his saffron robes. There were three turmeric streaks across his pale forehead; and his fierce, jowly face, in permanent afternoon shadow, bore a distinct expression of irritation.

  ‘I used to massage his legs,’ Aakash’s father said. ‘He was a great man. If not for him, faith in this part of the country might have disappeared altogether.’ Then an unexpressed sorrow, like that of the red rose against the black background in his flat, passed over his face.

  I sat down on a low stool, despite the family’s appeals to join them on the carpet. I realized now that it was not so much the smallness of the Sharma flat or the smell but its communal quality that had unsettled me. And Aakash, as if responding to that, as if reaffirming that he didn’t want to live that way either, that he had meant what he had said about the peacefulness and privacy of my mother’s flat, got up after a few minutes and came to sit next to me, his head resting against my knees. The undeclared power I had had over him until now, gained in part from his being my trainer and in part from Holi, dwindled. I felt that there had been a reversal.

  The toothless country cousin was taking orders, hardly an hour after lunch, for tea and samosas.

  ‘I don’t have the courage for a samosa,’ Aakash’s sister-in-law said from the place where she sprawled on the floor.

  Aakash looked at her, then up at me with a contemptuous smile.

  ‘Kachori?’ the old woman asked with a smack of her lips.

  ‘No,’ Aakash’s sister-in-law moaned, rubbing her broad, dark stomach.

  ‘Then khir?’ the old woman shot back.

  ‘Yes, khir would be lovely!’ Aakash’s sister-in-law smiled, feigning childlike mischief.

  ‘Khir would be lovely,’ Aakash imitated and guffawed, looking up again at me for approval.

  ‘What?’ the sister-in-law snapped. ‘What’s wrong with khir? I can’t be like you, eating boiled food, boiled vegetables and protein milkshakes.’

  ‘That’s fine, but then don’t come running to me: “Aakash, make me thin; Aakash, tell me what to eat; Aakash, your body…” ’

  ‘Let her eat, yaar. What is it to you?’ Aakash’s elder brother, her husband, intervened.

  His remark made me wonder about the tensions between them.

  Aakash said to me in English, ‘See what I told you? She is very sharp.’

  Then turning back to the family, he said, ‘Why don’t you stop thinking about eating for a second and pay attention to your son, who’s become a sweeper?’

  The entire family, as if in an abs class, rose six inches to see what the child was doing. He was at the far end of the little courtyard, brandishing a short broom made of fine sticks.

  ‘Come here, you little jamadar,’ Aakash yelled.

  The word he used was a caste word no longer in politically correct usage for cleaners and sweepers. A ripple of laughter went through the family of reposing Brahmins. The child, seeing he had the attention of his family, began splashing water in a metal bucket no bigger than him.

  ‘That water is dirty,’ Aakash said pointedly to his sister-in-law and walked across the courtyard to recover the boy.

  ‘Chee,’ he said, as he picked him up, ‘he’s smelling.’

  His mother, now clearly humiliated in front of the family, rose with irritation. ‘It doesn’t matter. He’s wearing a nappy. We’ll deal with it when we get back.’

  Aakash shrugged his shoulders and handed her the child. But as soon as he did, the child slipped away and clung to Aakash’s leg. He began touching his feet, saying, ‘Tey,’ every time he did. ‘He’s saying, “Jai”,’ Aakash said with delight.

  Aakash’s father looked up at me and said, ‘See, unlike the Sikhs and the Muslims, we don’t have to teach them the religion. They learn on their own. For instance, no one taught him to say Jai. He just heard us saying it when we pray and picked it up.’

  The boy, now in Aakash’s arms, was pointing unsteadily at the Nandi near the Shiva linga and saying, ‘Tawoo. Tawoo.’

  ‘He’s calling Nandi “Tawoo”,’ Aakash laughed, then, addressing the boy, said, ‘Not cow; “Nandi”.’

  Tea and samosas arrived, along with a bowl of khir. Aakash put the boy down and rejoined the others.

  We had all barely had a few sips of tea, Aakash’s sister-in-law had not touched her khir, when cries of ‘Chee, chee’, ‘Look what’s he’s doing’, ‘The little sweeper’ rose from the sanctum.

  I had been facing the idols and turned round to see that the boy had removed his shorts, and now holding on to a tap as high as his arms could reach, was taking a happy pistachio-green shit in the courtyard.

  ‘His T-shirt will be ruined!’ Aakash yelled.

  ‘Let it be ruined,’ the boy’s father said with hollow aggression.

  Within seconds, the family’s women, his mother and the old cousin, had pounced on him, while his grandmother looked on with a bitter smile. He eluded his mother and ran to Aakash, leaving a green trail behind him for his mother to clean up. Aakash grabbed him under the arms, swung him stomach down on to his lap and cleaned his bottom without any sign of squeamishness. Then along with his mother he inspected the child’s bottom closely.

  ‘Hai, look!’ Aakash’s mother said. ‘He’s got these big red dots there.’

  ‘Not cleaning him properly,’ her younger sister added slyly. ‘Have to put Soframycin.’

  ‘Have you seen the spots in his privates,’ Aakash exploded at the child’s mother, who was still sweeping up the mess.

  She looked up, haggard. ‘I’m just coming,’ she managed.

  Her husband, who had now taken the boy, was betraying her to the group. ‘I’ve told her time and time again that she’s not paying enough attention.’

  Then Anil produced a wooden drum from within the sanctum. He started beating on it, and hearing this, the little bald child, who had been face down all this time, rose furiously and began to dance, shaking a small, angry foot unsteadily into the circle.

  ‘Put your right foot in, put your left foot…’ his grandmother sang, and the little boy danced as the group clapped and his mother swept away the last of the green trail.

  We went home through flat land dotted with smoking minarets. The sky that had been pale in the morning was a pinkish brown on the way back. The thin, bumpy road that led past high, spiked walls, the ‘16 Base Repair Depot’ and keekar trees, as malevolent in the evening haze as in the dawn mist, finished at a sky-blue metal gate.

  ‘You know what’s behind that gate?’ Aakash said, putting his hand lightly on my shoulder.

  ‘No.’

  ‘The airport. We used to go there at night as children and see the planes and lights. It’s better than take-off point. You’re literally right there in the grass when the planes go by. Mind-blowing.’

  I thought of my own arrival there a few months before on the Jet Airways flight. Then I thought of Aakash and his childhood memory of the airport. And even though a mood of inadequacy hung over the day’s outing, with this thought my great tenderness for him flooded back.

  10

  Aakash insisted the day needed its ‘super set’. I said, thinking of his bald nephew in the temple, that I was sure it had already had one. Then he wanted to know when and I had no answer for him. He searched my face for a moment and turned back to the task at hand. He was looking for a ‘pardy’ shirt. We stood in his mattress-covered room with its pink walls and fetid air. A green metal cupboard was open; many unsuitable options lay strewn on the mattress below. Presently he found it, a black shirt with silver pinstripes. Its thick shiny material glowed in the white light.


  A few minutes later, we were on his bike, driving through the smoky Delhi night. It was my first time riding pillion on a motorbike and I felt exposed, embarrassed to be gripping on so tightly. We drove through areas I didn’t know existed. Broken, keekar-lined roads, open fields and a hyacinth-choked canal, with the red lights of a power station reflected in its dark water, appeared on our way.

  ‘Where are we?’ I yelled.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘In Sectorpur,’ Aakash yelled back, ‘just across the Jhaatkebaal border.’

  We came some minutes later to an arrangement of tall four-square buildings surrounded by flat agricultural land. Though the buildings were new, marks of decay had already begun to appear on them. Pan spittle festooned their chalky-white walls, metal slats along their side had begun to rust and sacks of cement, plastic buckets and brooms cluttered their corridors. A white wooden bathroom door was open and from the grey marble interior toilet smells filled the lobby. We waited for the lift. Outside, a group of young boys chased a squirrel with an air gun. It ran up a tree and the boys stood below, firing aimlessly into the street-lit canopy.

  ‘Fucking it,’ Aakash said, when after many minutes the fat red number indicating which floor the lift was on didn’t move. ‘Let’s take the stairs.’

  ‘Listen, Aakash, are you going to tell me now who this friend of yours is?’

  His eyes gleamed. ‘What, man? Don’t trust me, man? I told you, this is my very old friend. The Begum of Sectorpur. Now, come on.’

  We ran up seven flights of stairs. The banister shook; there were broken panes on every landing, with sharp points of glass clinging on; below, rejoicing boys carried away the body of a squirrel; the land around was bare and dark, streaked with amber stretches of empty road. Halfway up, we were met by a thin young man with glassy eyes. He wore pedal pushers and a black vest. His small, dense armpits were exposed and emitted a wet, poisonous smell. He was overjoyed to see Aakash, and showing blackened teeth, kept monotonously asking how long it had been. Though Aakash paid him no attention, he jogged up alongside us, laughing and slurring. At every landing he looked back at me, his glassy eyes catching the light, and said, ‘Any friend of Aakash’s is a friend of mine.’