The Temple-goers

by Aatish Taseer

  I was caught between a feeling of tenderness at the confidence made only to me and deep irritation at Aakash’s willingness to burden me with his problems. In just a few seconds, it had altered not only the way I saw his and Megha’s relationship, but the way I saw ours. I felt it shed for the first time some of the strange intensity, as of a childhood friendship, that had defined it since its conception. And reckless though I felt he’d been, marriage made Aakash seem like a man.

  Downstairs, the rain had gone and the sun was burning its way through. Whole sections of the street dried before our eyes. In the car, heading to Connaught Place, Megha knew of Aakash’s disclosure. I thought she displayed something of the satisfaction of a daughter-in-law who’s just won her first battle against her husband’s family. She would have jangled the house keys in her palm if she had any. Aakash was visibly relieved. The weight of their dangerous secret had shifted for that moment on to me.

  The car, picking its way from roundabout to roundabout, swung on to Janpath for the last time. The off-white colonnaded façades of the Eastern and Western courts, the Imperial Hotel and Delhi’s few tall buildings lined the road, at the end of which the roar of Connaught Place could be heard. Its whitewashed façade was damp and streaked black. Its crumbling columns, poster-covered and pan-stained, seemed to revolve slowly around us that morning like a carousel.

  ‘Van Hussein!’ Megha said, pointing at the billboards that dotted the circular sweep of Connaught Place. Aakash and Megha knew them all – Nike, Reebok, Puma and Benetton. Though prime real estate, Connaught Place was still rent-controlled. And among the new showrooms there were ancient shops of my childhood: bookshops, coffee houses, sari centres, high-ceilinged games shops selling carom boards. In the gloom of their colonnaded passages, black wires ran like creepers along the high walls and fine heaps of dust collected under splashes of red pan spittle, rising so far up from the base of the white columns that the mind was forced to think of the chewer’s technique. Fire extinguishers, thick coir doormats and plastic buckets cluttered the entrances of shops, and sleazy flights of stairs led up to the offices of reputable news magazines.

  We hit every important shop with great precision. Aakash didn’t shop for himself, but for me. He marched through each glass door, chest out, arms dangling at his side, like a man looking for a fight. He glowered at the doormen if he sensed even the slightest hesitation in their manner towards him. Once inside, he tore through the neatly folded displays, ruffling them up at will. He had me try on slinky black exercise shirts with many little holes, lime-green T-shirts with American road signs on them, and capris. Aakash and Megha were both wild about capris. I said I couldn’t do it, but they insisted I try them on. Megha had a hunger for bold colours. But what might have been bold and still simple in Indian clothes got lost in the Western showrooms. It manifested itself in busyness and clutter, in pointless buttons, stripes and straps, in decorative pockets and zips that led nowhere.

  Megha was very keen for Aakash to buy a pair of sports sandals. They were expensive and I could see Aakash recoil from them. He made excuses that were unrelated to money: that he had so many already, that they were better elsewhere. Seeing him in the showroom, unshaven and vulnerable about money, I felt again, as I had in Hookah, the fragility of his ‘upgrading’ of himself. It was possible to see him in the showroom, but it was also possible to see him in the street in blue rubber chappals and polyester shirts. And sometimes when he’d eaten pan masala and his skin was looking darker than usual, or his stubble too thick, he seemed even physically like a man about to slip. And how soundless that fall would be, muffled by millions below…

  It was not a fear either Megha or I could have known. Even to imagine what constituted our security would have been strange. There were so many impermeable barriers unrelated to money, barriers of English and education and the people one knew. But now, thinking of them as married, their fortunes clubbed together so to speak, I felt I couldn’t call the outcome. Could Megha, disowned by her family, fall with Aakash if he were to fall? Or was his upward momentum too great to be broken, so that she wouldn’t fall far before he would take her fleshy hand in his and they would begin moving up again?

  To witness some of this tension in the shape of the fat wife, still sure of her riches, gently taunting her husband over a pair of rubber sport sandals, was to imagine many future scenarios of this kind. And Aakash, giving an indication of how he might behave, became suddenly irritable. His heavy eyelashes sank, a look of boredom crept over his face; only the mud-coloured eyes, smouldering with contempt, revealed that he felt neither fatigue nor boredom, but irritation. Megha, who had pushed her way up to the shelves and shown another bit of pink panty as she took down the rubber sandals, now contained her talk about wanting to buy the sandals as a present for Aakash.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she said, seeing the expression on her husband’s face darken.

  ‘Nothing, appu,’ he replied, using a term of endearment I had not heard so far. ‘I’m just hungry.’

  ‘Pizza Hut?’ she offered.

  ‘I’m sick of Pizza Hut,’ he answered, and headed for the door.

  When we were outside in the car park, waiting for Uttam, she produced a garlic stick from her handbag. At the sight of it, Aakash’s eyes became two bitter slits of disgust.

  ‘Mantra,’ she announced urgently. ‘Mantra. He gets very hungry on Saturdays,’ she added apologetically to me. ‘It’s because of the fasting.’

  On the way to Mantra, Aakash seemed really to wilt. His eyes, now yellow, receded into their sockets. Megha, like a nurse, turned back and forth between him and me. ‘Let his hunger go,’ she said optimistically in English, ‘then he’ll for sure want to pick up those sandals before going.’ And tenderly to him, ‘We’ll get them, no?’ He was too faint to reply. ‘Do you want us to give you shoes for your birthday?’ she said in Hindi, then laughingly added, ‘Or do you want us to give you chappals?’

  The car pulled up outside Mantra. It was a dimly lit restaurant with maroon leather seats, red chandeliers and gold-leaf walls and mirrors. It was owned by the same designer that Aakash had had his run-in with on Holi, the Holi that now seemed an age away. I mentioned this as we sat down.

  ‘Really?’ Aakash asked, mustering up some energy for the subject of wealth and fame, the only subject for which he always had time. He listened for a while, then spat, ‘They’re all creeps.’

  Megha, who took in every word, said, ‘No. I heard he only decorated it.’ Her manner seemed to hide irritation that Aakash’s restoration had happened before plan and by other means.

  ‘He owns it,’ I said. ‘I’ve been here when he’s had parties.’

  Aakash liked this. He impressed upon her that I knew what I was talking about. But she was not to be put down; the two large diamonds in her ears gleamed like teeth. And when the waiter came around, the first thing she asked him, despite Aakash’s hunger, was who owned the restaurant. Even when he had said, ‘Mateen Butt,’ she was undeterred. ‘But I saw on Zoom,’ she said, cross-questioning the man, ‘that he only decorated it.’

  Before he could answer, she ordered malai koftas, dal, paneer and butter naan, which she insisted on.

  Because Aakash was not in the mood to talk, I began to ask Megha about her family’s attitude. It turned out that, apart from her brother, her other siblings had also had their suspicions about Aakash. She said, ‘The whole issue had died down. My siblings thought that I had given up Aakash because I’d stopped going to the gym. But twenty days back, when I started going again, they thought, ah, now she’s started to go to the gym again. Aakash must be pressurizing her into marrying him so that he can get our money. That’s when the trouble started again.’

  ‘Surely their attitude would be different if they knew you were already married?’

  She liked this, and as if tickled by the logic of it, laughed out loud.

  The food arrived and Aakash revived further. Apart from his mood, there seemed to be a genuine p
hysical change in his condition as if related to blood sugar. He said he was going to get a doctor to look at it. ‘Ask Megha how much I ate yesterday,’ he said. ‘I ate some five-six times.’

  This talk of Aakash’s health and hunger, as it had with the Begum of Sectorpur, brought out affection in Megha and excited a story. ‘One time, I went out with him,’ she said, ‘and he began to feel so hungry he couldn’t walk. He drank a milkshake that if you drank one sip of… so havy, and even then he wasn’t satisfied. He went home, and with his hands trembling, asked his mother for food. She brought out ghee on brad.’

  At the mention of his mother Aakash took over the story in Hindi. ‘Then I dug in and ate,’ he said, ‘and only then did I feel behtar. But before that, man, you won’t believe. I was riding the bike and my hands were sliding off the handles.’

  Seeing that Aakash was feeling stronger, I raised the subject of his marriage again. I said, more as joke, and because he had mentioned needing the help of the press before, that there should be a reality show on Indian TV in which couples that were in love, or secretly married, could confront their parents and in-laws on television.

  Aakash looked scornfully at me. ‘Are you serious, man?’ he said mockingly.

  ‘Half serious.’

  ‘Half serious,’ he spat. ‘I know about television. I know what people will say. They’ll say he could have done it quietly but he wanted the fame.’ He slipped into role-playing, becoming many people at once. ‘For months,’ he said, transforming into the neighbours, ‘they’ll point to us and say, “Oh, there they go, the ones who went on TV to get the fame.” ’ A second later, he was the TV journalist: ‘ “Oh, you’re marrying for love, are you? So many girls in the world, how come you found this one from a rich family? Oh, and a healthy girl too? And you’re from a poor family? Could it be that you’re just marrying her for the money?” ’ His tongue flickered, scraping over his lips as he spoke. We watched in fascination.

  I said, ‘Don’t get so worked up. There’s no reality show like this; it was just a joke.’

  ‘I know there isn’t,’ he replied, his words bristling. ‘That’s why I just touched on it and quickly dismissed it.’

  I said, ‘TV should only be called in if there’s a threat to your or Megha’s life.’

  ‘Yes, but if I go to meet Megha’s family, there will be a threat to my life.’

  ‘Were you planning to? This is the first I’ve heard of it. If you go alone, you really are mad.’

  Megha nodded sadly in agreement.

  ‘Take it from me now in writing,’ Aakash said. ‘The way it’s going to happen is this: in a month, there’ll be another suitor for Megha; her mother will try taking her to meet him; and then I will pressurize Megha to tell them and she will.’

  Megha bit her lip nervously and looked at me. I shrugged my shoulders. Aakash looked viciously at us both.

  ‘Is your stomach full?’ Megha asked.

  ‘Isn’t it clear I’m full?’ Aakash answered without a trace of humour. ‘That’s why I’m talking like this now. My energy has returned.’

  ‘And aggression,’ I said.

  He smiled and became gentler.

  ‘What can I do, man?’ he confessed. ‘Taking a lot of tension. This thing is constantly on my mind. I used to sleep till eleven on Sundays but now I wake up at five from worry. Thinking, thinking. I have many problems. It’s not just this thing. I have to think of my career. How I’m going to upgrade myself. I have to think of how I’ll take care of Megha. Fine, I can rent a flat in Sectorpur; she will stay there in the days when I’m working or she could be with my mother so that she won’t get bored on her own.’

  Listening to this description, tender that it was, I felt sure that it would never become a reality. Something about Megha, her boisterousness, or perhaps her sheer size, defied any notion of her sitting alone at home in Sectorpur, or milling about Aakash’s tiny flat with her mother-in-law. And this mention of boredom, linked somehow to the solitude of the modern apartment, seemed to bring alive Megha’s resistance to any quiet sequestering in Sectorpur. As if also sensing the impossibility of living with Aakash’s family, she said snidely of his brother Amit, ‘And we know all about your brother and his wife.’

  A tense moment passed between them.

  ‘Everyone has faults,’ Aakash snapped. ‘You do, sir probably does too, and so does he.’

  Turning to me, Aakash said in English, ‘My sis-in-law is very sharp.’

  ‘And very money-minded,’ Megha added.

  Aakash relaxed and said in English, ‘My brother sometimes says me, “Why are you worried? You have Megha.” Can you believe, man?’ Aakash exploded, and switching to Hindi, said, ‘ “And we count every little paisa, thinking, can we afford this, can we not? Let’s not buy it now; we’ll buy it next time.” ’

  It was becoming afternoon when we left Mantra. The sun now shone on a different segment of Connaught Place. It showed me what I had not seen earlier: a single block, renovated, whitewashed, looking for the first time since independence how it was built to look. It was as hopeful a thing as I had ever seen, almost impossible to imagine, impossible to think of in the surrounding decay as the work of a brush and fresh paint. If it was so easy, why had it not been done before? Aakash explained that it was the first block to have been released from rent control. As soon as it had been, fresh life had poured into it.

  We put Megha into a taxi headed for Sectorpur. Before waving her off, Aakash told her to be careful when driving into Sectorpur.

  ‘Why for?’ she asked.

  ‘There’s been an encounter,’ Aakash said, ‘with Muhammadans.’

  ‘Not Muhammadans, Aakash, terrorists. Not all Muhammadans are terrorists,’ I added prissily.

  ‘Fine,’ he replied, ‘but all the terrorists are Muhammadans.’

  ‘Same difference,’ Megha said from within the taxi. ‘Tell what happened, no?’

  ‘The policeman killed was a Sectorpur man. All I’m saying is just be careful in case there’s trouble.’

  ‘Tch, that’s nothing,’ Megha said jauntily. ‘Do I look like a Muhammadan to you?’

  ‘No, appu! Now hurry up, you’re causing a traffic jam.’

  She was still laughing when the taxi drove away.

  When she’d gone, Aakash asked me to drop him at Junglee. Driving back through the avenues, the canopies flaring and fading overhead, we passed the Human Rights Commission, the silver letters on its façade blazing in the light. Aakash pointed at it and smiled ironically. Then looking back into the boot of the car, he said with pride, ‘We got things from all the brands. Puma, Nike, Reebok.’

  As I was dropping him off, he asked for eleven hundred rupees.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s for a jagran we’re organizing in my colony. I want you to come.’

  ‘A jagran?’

  ‘Tch, you really don’t know anything,’ Aakash said. Then looking at Uttam, he added, ‘Tell him what a jagran is. I don’t have the time right now.’

  I took out eleven hundred rupees, including a red thousand-rupee note, and gave them to Aakash. He put them in his back pocket and vanished behind Junglee’s brushed-steel door.

  On the way home, Uttam explained that a jagran was an all-night wake of sorts, with devotional singing, pageants and prayers.

  ‘It’s all rubbish,’ Uttam said bitterly, having seen Aakash extract a third of his monthly salary from me. ‘Just a way for the Brahmins to make money.’

  17

  When that evening she was disappeared, the news came as a matter of course. Aakash especially, expecting it for so long, was the least surprised. He felt also that this was not the disappearance we had been waiting for: that she would return, and that then there would be some attempt at a forced marriage or a period of captivity designed to make her give up Aakash, for which we had to be prepared. He seemed almost irritated with me when I stressed that Shabby Singh was coming to dinner that night, and if there was a time to act, it wa
s now. The drama with which he had opened the conversation, saying only, ‘They’ve taken her,’ drained from his voice. ‘Tch! Take it easy. The ball is now in play,’ he said. ‘We have to think before we act. This is not the time when they’ll find a boy for her.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘They’ll have to have the lipo done first, no? The recovery period from that itself takes a few weeks. Now, obviously they won’t show her to a boy in that period when she has scars and bandages all over her.’

  ‘They’re going to forcibly lipo –’ I grasped for the verb – ‘lipo-suck her?’

  ‘Yes, man.’

  ‘Surely you can’t do that.’

  ‘Whaddyou saying, man? With money, in this country, you can do anything you like. The Aggarwals even have their own clinics. Who’s going to stop them?’ Then his cynicism vanished and some mixture of regret and self-absorption took its place. ‘Man, I feel so bad. She kept saying, “Don’t make me thin. Don’t make me thin, otherwise they’ll marry me off.” If I had wanted, I could have shown results in a few weeks. I’m a professional person, you know? But I listened to her, and now look, because of me she is going to get lipo.’

  ‘Get lipo’: ah! I thought, that’s the verb.

  ‘So you want me to say anything tonight?’

  ‘Nothing. Not a single word.’

  Delhi drawing rooms. They were what I remembered of the city from my childhood. Perhaps it was Delhi’s fragmented geography, or that it had no real restaurants the way Bombay had – restaurants that were not attached to five-star hotels – or just that it was an old city, closely bound, with people who all seemed to know each other, but there was no setting, no cityscape more evocative of the city I grew up in than a lamp-lit drawing room with a scattering of politicians, journalists, broken-down royals, and perhaps an old Etonian, lying fatly on a deep sofa. And it was a dinner like this, with two blue and red glass fanooses burning in a corner, jasmine floating in a porcelain dish on a dining table draped in a chikan tablecloth, ornamented with white-on-white flowers, that my mother gave for the writer.