The Temple-goers

by Aatish Taseer

  He seemed to measure me up before revealing what was on his mind. Then, as if resigned to the risk of being misunderstood, he said, ‘There’s a vehshat deep within this country. It comes, I think, from the religion. Or, perhaps, because the socially conscious religions, Christianity and Islam, never gained a firm enough footing. They could never close over the history of animalism and sacrifice. The land and people of this country retain this memory. And it gives them this capacity, a capacity for vehshat.’

  Zafar treated me like a Muslim. The hunted-minority expression widened his eyes and stilled his lips. ‘The land is stained,’ he muttered. ‘It has seen terrible things: girl children sacrificed, widows burned, the worship of idols. The people in their hearts do not fear God. Their law is not theirs, you see. It was first the Muslim law and then it was the English. And because the law is alien, they can always shrug it off and the vehshat returns.’

  I turned absent-mindedly to the paper and was leafing through its greasy pages when I saw a picture of Chamunda. It was a grainy image of her in red and green astride a lion. If not for the distinctiveness of her features, her comic-book lips, her vast eyes, I might not have recognized her. She wore a gold crown and carried a trident. At her ankleted feet, a priest knelt over a Shiva linga, smearing it orange. Garlands of jasmine, roses and marigolds were tied tightly around its base. I couldn’t read the caption and asked Zafar for help.

  ‘They have made the BJP Chief Minister of Jhaatkebaal, Chamunda Devi, into the goddess Durga and are worshipping her in temples,’ Zafar sneered.

  I laughed, and before I could check myself I’d said, ‘I know her. She’s Sanyogita’s aunt.’

  Zafar looked sadly at me, as if I’d let him down by this admission of closeness to the Hindu nationalist party. Though it was well before the usual time, he asked that we take a cigarette break. I was suddenly aware of how frail he was. This awareness, alongside the fineness of his manners, the umbrella, the little cap, the pen always in place, the safari suit impeccable, made me feel that I hadn’t so much offended him as manhandled him.

  On the balcony, he took out his blue packet of Wins and offered me one. From inside the packet came a black windproof lighter with a near-invisible flame. He liked to tell me that the cigarettes were Italian and had travelled via the east, Burma in particular, to India. But today he just smoked quietly, looking out at the large trees shielding us from the sun.

  Long black pods hung like many walking sticks from the branches of a laburnum. On the edge of the canopy, yellow blossoms pushed reluctantly through like paint squeezed from a sponge. Their bright colour against the black of the pods and the dull green of the canopy made them seem of a different material from the rest of the tree, more like points of sunlight than flowers.

  ‘Amaltas,’ Zafar said, ‘the true beginning of the heat.’

  And as if retreating from its glare, he put out his cigarette and went inside. I was studying his tufts of dyed black hair, dotted with maroon sores, when my eye trailed along his neck to a point between its base and the shoulder blade. There, off to the right, and seeming to catch a different light, was a small but distinct swelling. I reached forward and touched it. Zafar winced in pain. It was hard and knobby, somewhere between bone and cartilage.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I’m becoming a camel,’ Zafar chuckled, his eyes betraying his fear.

  ‘This isn’t a joke. What is that? Have you shown it to a doctor?’

  He took out a soiled and folded piece of paper from his pocket. It read:

  Biopsy report: gross appearance, irregular greyish-white tissue along with dirty brown debris received, total measuring 1 x 1.5 cm

  Histopathological report: microsection shows features of sebaceous cyst no e/o tb or malignancy seen

  Diagnosis: sebaceous cyst

  Dr Lipike Lipi, pathologist

  ‘They say it’s benign, but I’ll need an operation. I’ll have it while you’re away.’

  ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘Only when touched. The problem is it makes my reading and writing work, which I do on the floor, quite difficult. You can say that it’s just part of old age.’

  ‘You’re not so old, Zafar. You’re younger than my mother.’

  ‘Yes, but life…’

  ‘… has made you old,’ I completed for him.

  He laughed. Then as if wishing neither to alarm me nor to let me make light of what he had said, he added, ‘The place I live has made me old.’

  The place he lived! How embarrassing that I hadn’t seen it. This attitude was a remnant of my childhood in Delhi, not so much a lack of curiosity as blindness. I resolved to go. Then a shudder went through me at the thought of this place that gave Zafar his sores, and now this new deformity. It was one other thing, like the heat, that he would bear while I was away.

  The vehshat, the vehshat!

  Sanyogita was part of a circle of creative-writing professionals called Emigrés at Home. Their weekly meeting coincided with our last night in Delhi. They met at a different group member’s house each week, and as Sanyogita had not offered hers so far, she decided to host this last meeting in the Jorbagh flat. Her friends Mandira and Ra were part of the group and so the meeting was also a farewell party of sorts. When I went to have a shower after my lesson with Zafar, Vatsala and Sanyogita were preparing the flat. Lamps were coming on; aubergine dips were being laid out; some light Brazilian music had begun to play. I knew that this kind of activity, reminiscent of her London life, meant a lot to Sanyogita. We had been through a difficult period that hadn’t been resolved as much as it had been presumed to end with our departure; I told myself in the shower that this would be the first active night of repair. It would start with my showing support for the creative writers. Her meetings with them were an assertion of her life in Delhi as separate from mine; but Sanyogita, who encouraged me in everything I did, would have liked nothing more than my endorsement for her ‘thing’.

  When I came out of the shower the heat was breaking in a dust storm. It had stopped the day’s natural decline and cast a greenish-purple twilight hour over the city. After raging in the canopies of big Delhi trees, the storm entered the garden terrace, sweeping up fine dust off the floor, roughing up dahlias and denuding the dead frangipani of its last leaves.

  In the lamp-lit room the meeting had begun. The people assembled were mostly older women in ethnic and tribal-print saris, with hair greying in buns for political reasons. There were also a handful of very tall, very thin young men with bad posture, as well as one or two older men in cotton kurtas and jeans. One dark, lightly bearded, young writer with sharp features sat at the feet of a woman with a red oversized bindi. She rested a wrist, heavy with silver bangles, on his shoulder as he stared morosely at the pages in his lap. His uncut toenails were visible in the blue rubber chappals he wore. The intensity of his stare, and a feeling that I knew him from somewhere, prevented me at first from listening to what the woman introducing him was saying.

  In a far corner of the room, Sanyogita beamed at me, patting the empty space next to her. As I walked across the room, I heard the older woman, with her hand beating lightly against the young writer’s collarbone, say that he had attended a creative-writing programme in America; he was among the group’s most significant talents, best representing its theme, ‘Children of a post-colonial god: Indians feeling foreign in India’.

  He was to read his story ‘The Assignation’.

  The young man looked up at the room with dim, sad eyes. Prognathous, his smile, and later soft words, were almost lost in the cavity between his projecting lower jaw and face.

  ‘ “The Assignation”,’ he repeated in a south Delhi American accent.

  ‘Where’s your story?’ I whispered to Sanyogita.

  ‘I’m not reading today,’ she said, clutching my hand. ‘This is the last one.’

  ‘There’ve already been a few?’

  ‘Yes, a story and a poem. Now listen.’

  Ma
ndira and Ra, who were sitting next to each other, looked over. Mandira smiled; Ra clenched a fist into the air in a gesture of affection, then mouthed, ‘Pay attention to this. It’ll be really good. He’s a new voice out of Sectorpur.’

  ‘Has everyone read it already?’ I said to Sanyogita. ‘Shh, baby. No. Listen.’

  The creative writer began: ‘Winter in Delhi. The street was enveloped in a stagy mist, harbouring pink bougainvillea. Men outside the teashop acted their parts, wrapping scarves around their faces and rubbing their hands. The hard-bellied owner, looking down at them over a roaring blue flame, handed out cups of tea as though moving chess pieces. An astrologically auspicious window to marry had opened and in many houses fairy lights hung from the trees, white shamianas sprang up and tinny music tore out of concealed speakers. I had lived unseasonably since my return, forgetting what the winter meant. But as the city awoke inevitably to the season, these reminders of my own long history there pierced the haze of the past several months.

  ‘I entered Lodhi Gardens through the park’s old entrance. Its British name, Lady Willingdon Gardens, was engraved on stone pillars flanking the locked iron gate. An unsteady, bright green turnstile had been installed next to it. White cars belonging to politicians, with red sirens and black cat commandos, were parked boldly outside where some variety of municipal work was forever under way. To enter the park, I had to sidestep thin ladies in bright colours, carrying shallow dishes of cement to and from a mound of mud half-filled with water, and men, despite the cold, in fraying vests, digging soft earth out of the pavement.

  ‘A path of concrete discs led down an avenue of white-trunked palms. On the left, the rough, red, crenellated walls of a tomb ran along a strip of clumpy grass. The tombs were bare, scarred and not beautiful, but faultless as ornaments for a park. One emerged now, with the remains of glazed turquoise tiles hanging like dead skin from its rough surface, evoking a Turkic memory deep within the Indian plain.

  ‘There were new faces in Lodhi Gardens, less serious walkers whom the summer heat had kept away. Among the usual women in salwar kurtas and sneakers, couples canoodling under trees and idle youth walking hand in hand, there were tourists crossing the paths of fast walkers, social ladies in velvety tracksuits and Delhi queens.

  ‘My walk was just beginning to gather pace, when passing one of the darker peripheries of the park, I noticed a slender young man watching me. I was struck by the fineness of his features and, despite his obvious poverty, his vanity and attention to style. He wore flared jeans and a close-fitting off-white shirt. He smiled first, not a bitter, gay smile, but a dark, malevolent smile. I returned it with a macho smirk saved only for bold advances from unlikely people. This seemed to register with the young man because he laughed out loud and approached in a dainty swagger. As he came out of the shadows, I marvelled at his physical beauty. His face had a Nepalese cast; he had dark smooth skin, a clean hairless neck and a small, precise mouth. His poverty though, was visible in his stained teeth and the murky whites of his light eyes.

  ‘As soon as he came near, I felt acute social embarrassment. Lodhi Gardens was full of fashionable people whom I knew, or knew a little, and I didn’t wish to be seen speaking to a man who was hardly better than a servant, especially a man as attractive as this one. He seemed to read my embarrassment and prolonged it. When I asked him for his telephone number, he responded with mock confusion: why would I want his telephone number?

  ‘ “Please, quickly,” I said, as if speaking to a servant. “I have to finish my walk.”

  ‘ “But first, tell me…”

  ‘ “Listen, I have to go. Do you have a mobile or not?”

  ‘The mention of that magic status symbol stopped the man’s playful delays. He whipped out his phone and held it insolently before me.

  ‘ “Give me your number,” he said.

  ‘I hurriedly gave him my number.

  ‘ “Name?”

  ‘ “Krishna,” I answered.’

  Krishna! The moment I heard the name, though he went by Kris and not Krishna, I remembered where I had seen the creative writer. He also worked out at Junglee, but with Pradeep, the other trainer. He was a friend of Aakash’s top lawyer-client, Sparky Punj, and I had seen them many times, having a protein shake together after their workout. Aakash had taken an irrational dislike to him – linked no doubt to his choice of trainer – and called him Lul, literally dick, but more like limp dick.

  ‘He’s a gay!’ he would say every time Kris walked past, oblivious to Aakash’s hatred of him.

  ‘So what, Aakash?’

  ‘So what, Aakash?’ he would imitate in a girly voice and fall back into a sullen silence.

  The thought of Aakash gave me a pang. I had hardly seen him since the night with the Begum of Sectorpur. He had cancelled trainings without notice, didn’t return missed calls and messages; he became moody at Junglee. His coldness, after the intimacy and excess of that day, affected me badly. I suspected that it was related to our episode with the begum. It was as if Aakash had rightly judged the unease it had left me with, but in a strange inversion, he pre-empted the possibility of my withdrawing by withdrawing himself. And in this way he had not only erased all discomfort I might have had from that day but also left me mourning his sudden absence in my life. I would find myself waiting for his text messages and phone calls. I’d reach for my phone first thing in the morning to see if something had come through. I thought up banal reasons to call him. If he didn’t show up at the gym, I wouldn’t work out, coming away feeling that not only had the hour been wasted but the day too. I cancelled plans made weeks in advance to see him, knowing full well that should something come up in his life, he would cancel me without a word. When I confronted him about his behaviour, he lied effortlessly. He had called, but my number was engaged; my text messages hadn’t reached him; his brother had borrowed his phone. If I questioned him further, he became upset and conversation shut down. His lying was also an aspect of his confidence, a supreme belief that even if the details of what he was saying were wrong, he couldn’t ever be wrong himself. His aloofness in that last week in Delhi put an added strain on my relationship with Sanyogita. She noticed that I was irritable and distracted and she sensed why. I couldn’t explain my exact condition because I didn’t fully understand it myself. I only knew that the euphoria I had felt on that Jet Airways flight back to Delhi, that cautious euphoria that reduced me to tears, had become tied up with Aakash and the world he opened up to me. But in the end, after many gestures of friendship, I’d stopped trying too; my last communication with him, to which I received no reply, had been a text message, reminding him of my departure and inviting him to Sanyogita’s party.

  Caught up in these considerations, I found I’d missed some of the conversation in the creative writer’s story. The mention of his name drew me in again.

  ‘ “OK, Krishna,” the man said doubtfully. “I’ll give you a missed call.”

  ‘ “OK, OK,” I replied, in a voice that sounded as if I was instructing him to do some work for me, and moved on quickly. When I looked back, I saw that the man stood where he was and a smile played on his dark lips as he finished entering my number into his phone. He must have seen me because he looked up and waved his arm at me. “OK, Krishna. Remember me. I’m Jai. I’ll call you tonight.”

  ‘A few moments later, my phone vibrated in my pocket. I saved Jai’s number and carried on with my walk.

  ‘An assignation! I thought. I had made so many abroad, sometimes just walking past a man in the street: a suggestive look, a follow-up glance thrown over the shoulder a few paces later and an exchanged number. That was all. But now, despite being in my own country, exchanging numbers with another Indian, I felt on more unfamiliar ground than I had ever been on in the West, felt I couldn’t judge the man’s motives. This was what happened when everyone had a phone! It was amazing to think of the technology, available even to men like Jai, that brought us together and made possible the assignation, at on
ce real but also indefinite and avoidable: the ingredients of anonymity.

  ‘I finished my rounds of the park. The winter brought clearer days and the sky, still blue on my first round and barnacled with scaly clouds, burned with scattered orange fires on my second. The subsequent rounds of the park, the dimness of evening and the drama of the second sky erased my memory of the encounter with Jai. I arrived back at my flat to tea and heaters. By the time I came out of the shower, a mild dusk had submitted to the curfew of a smoky night.

  ‘I ate dinner from a trolley in front of the television. The servants had gone to bed and I was checking my mail when Jai’s name flashed on my phone. His beauty had faded from my mind; the night seemed deep and inaccessible; I answered the phone reluctantly.

  ‘ “Krishna?” the voice said.

  ‘ “Sorry?”

  ‘ “Is that Krishna speaking?”

  ‘ “Oh yes, yes.”

  ‘ “Should we meet? Where do you live? I can come to you.”

  ‘ “No,” I said, asserting myself against the forcefulness of the voice on the other end. “We can’t meet here.”

  ‘ “Why?”

  ‘ “Because the servants are here.”

  ‘ “So? You can’t have guests in front of your servants?”

  ‘I realized the offence I caused. It was true: Jai was too much like a servant himself for me to have him over at the house as a guest. I felt my Hindi fail me.