The Temple-goers

by Aatish Taseer

  A few minutes later we were both in the car on our way to Sectorpur. Keekar trees raced alongside the tunnel our headlights made; veils of white fog were cast aside; and the backs of trucks, with signs saying, ‘Use Dipper Please’, zoomed close and fell away. Sanyogita fought tears in the darkness of the car, her face turned away.

  Taking refuge in banalities, I said aloud, ‘Shit, I didn’t bring anything.’

  ‘Like what?’ I was surprised to hear quietly asked a moment later.

  ‘You know, clothes, a toothbrush, my phone charger.’

  ‘I’ve packed them,’ Sanyogita replied sadly, leaving me more wretched than ever.

  23

  My suspicion that Chamunda was more nervous about Aakash’s botched detention than she was letting on was confirmed when I saw the ‘safe house’. The driver had been on the phone throughout the drive with someone at the house and just as the road became more residential he turned the car left and stopped in front of a large black gate. Two or three security men waved us through with a quick glance at the licence plate. We drove down a long private drive lined with bunkers, sandbags and pre-fab government offices, each, despite the hour, with white lights flickering in aluminium windows. At the end of the drive was a double-storey bungalow with a curved, colonnaded veranda overlooking a large lawn. From the porch and garden lights, it was possible to see that it was painted in the local Jhaatkebaal style, rust, with chalky-white borders running along its pediments, arches and balustrades. Fountains of bougainvillea hung from its many terraces. And Indian blinds, marble floors and screened doors brought a colonial aspect to the bungalow.

  Aakash, arch-Brahmin that he was, was not unaware of the significance of his accommodation. He sat like a dacoit on a planters chair in front of a coal fire on the veranda, wrapped in a shawl. He didn’t get up when he saw the car approach, but instead leaned forward and stoked the coals, causing sparks to leap up. Then sitting back, he took a long drag on a cigarette held in a fist and rested his drink on the chair’s long arms. He would have been expecting me, but the appearance of Sanyogita from the car must have come as a surprise, because he rose suddenly.

  ‘Bhabi,’ he said as she jogged up the veranda’s shallow steps, ‘welcome. I mean, welcome to your house. I must say, your aunty knows how to take care of her guests.’

  Sanyogita ignored him, saying only, ‘It’s freezing. Let’s go inside.’

  ‘Of course, of course, bhabi, let’s go inside.’

  Sanyogita opened the screened door and hurried in. Aakash put his arm round me, then pinched my waist as he always did, and said with some sarcasm in his voice, ‘Looking good, man. Looking like me, man.’

  The front of the house was in darkness and seemed to have an administrative function of sorts. A servant with a dishcloth over his shoulder had appeared from nowhere and led us in, unlocking and relocking doors behind us. There seemed to be a sharp division between its public and private sections. We passed through dim corridors and a large room with picture lights over portraits of moustached men in turbans and pearls.

  We came up to a final locked double door, through which shafts of bright light escaped. Aakash, who must already have seen beyond it, grinned broadly.

  The room we entered had high ceilings, large carpets and a burnt-red recess containing a bar, and along its mouldings and fireplace there were blue-painted parakeets with gold necks and feet. It was not the splendour of the room but its familiarity that left Sanyogita and me in silent wonder. That familiarity was to be found in its white sofas, its chandeliers and crystal coffee tables, and especially in the black and white pictures of thirties beauties in silver frames. It could be seen in the large number of Nepalese maids, in bright, traditional Jhaatkebaal saris, now setting the dinner table; it was there in the brood of pugs that came running in on our arrival; and traces of it were even visible in the large moustache, gold earrings and kohled eyes of a uniformed butler carrying a crested silver tray. It was the familiarity of Chamunda’s palace at Ayatlochanapur and Sanyogita recognized it immediately. ‘She’s brought the whole place here!’ she gasped. It was then that I realized that this was no guest house. Jhaatkebaal’s official capital was a remote, desert town with a lively handicrafts industry. The state’s real centres were its satellite towns, Sectorpur and Phasenagar, and the house we had arrived in was already seeming like Chamunda’s own base in Sectorpur, the place where she could be at once in Delhi and in her state.

  Aakash, never slow to settle in, was eager to show us the rest of the house.

  ‘You see it,’ Sanyogita said, addressing me. Then more gently, ‘I’ll settle in and join you.’

  When she’d left us, Aakash stared at me in amazement. ‘Don’t tell me…’

  ‘No, nothing like that. She’s just upset by everything that’s happened. And trust me, more with me than anyone else.’

  Aakash nodded his head slowly, then his face clearing, said with a lambent smile, ‘How’s you doing, man?’

  ‘How am I? How are you?’

  ‘Fine. Just my head is confused after the test.’

  ‘Test?’

  ‘Narco test.’

  ‘I’m so sorry… About everything. I can’t even imagine…’

  ‘Don’t say anything. This is what life is after all. All our scriptures, our plays, our stories… What, it’s for a moment like this that they prepare us, no? Let’s not get lost in these things now; let’s see the house, your girlfriend’s house.’

  Aakash began to lead me through room upon room, in whose coloured walls, each coated in a silver hue and Tanjore glass paintings, I recognized Ra’s distinctive hand. He showed me a moonlit courtyard with a rectangular fountain, containing flat, fish-eaten lotus pads and pink flowers. He threw open the door of a modern gym with a rubber floor, dumb-bells, a power plate and treadmill. Finally, he led me down a long corridor, at the end of which, visible through a cloud of incense, was a brightly lit temple room. It was dedicated to a black and silver Kali with a red tongue. Her shadows filled the little room and she had under her – just where she wanted him – a demon, into whose throat she plunged a trident. From somewhere behind her fierce form, a hidden music system played ‘Om’, chanted in a steady drone, again and again. And past a mesh door, off from the temple room, was a garden containing holy plants.

  ‘This,’ Aakash said, as if completing an estate agent’s tour, ‘is what I would like my house to be.’

  We were still staring into the room, with its lesser gods and silver vessels huddled under Chamunda, when the servant who had showed us in reappeared, followed by Sanyogita.

  Confused that she was behind him, he began by addressing us. Then perhaps aware of her rank in the house, he turned around and told her that dinner was served. At the sight of Sanyogita a sudden solemnity entered Aakash’s manner. He said we should carry on; he wasn’t eating.

  ‘Why?’ Sanyogita asked blandly.

  ‘I’m keeping a fast,’ he replied, ‘for my wife.’

  ‘Well, we’re inside,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll join you in a few minutes,’ Aakash answered, and using the same tone in which he had once said to me, ‘With us, children are everything,’ added, ‘I want to be alone with her memory.’

  Sanyogita turned around and walked out without a word. I followed her into the dining room, where a feast of lamb shank cooked with ginger and green chillies, lentils, pickled white radish and okra was being served. Aakash appeared a few minutes later, was seen lingering by the bar, then came and sat down.

  That night, despite everyone’s best efforts, a lightness prevailed. We were like people arriving at a house in the country for a weekend, children at a sleepover, three unlikely friends holed up after a blackout or a terrorist attack. The house, combining an unfriendly exterior with familiarity within, seemed at least to Sanyogita and me like houses from our childhood. Sanyogita, though still quiet and fierce, was temporarily consoled by her surroundings. And I, taking my lead from her, too guilty to do otherwi
se, sought shelter in this brief peace. Aakash’s mood fluctuated: he was restless, one moment grieving and cast down, the next alert and attentive. Though there was not much conversation between us, we spoke at cross-purposes. An idea of Aakash’s new fame had settled in his mind, and in between whisky sodas, he would stop to ask me how he had looked that day on television. ‘Not too black, I hope?’ Then he remembered that it was Megha who used to say that of him and a moment of sadness returned.

  ‘She did it for our love,’ he said, ‘gave her life for our love.’

  ‘She didn’t give her life,’ Sanyogita snapped. ‘She was murdered.’

  ‘Yes,’ Aakash mumbled unsurely, and then animated again, said, ‘Did you see, on the television, they showed the colony and the jagran tent? They interviewed Mama, Papa, Amit. Anil too, I think. Strange, no? One minute you’re there; the next minute it’s on TV.’

  Sanyogita’s face soured. Aakash saw and became serious.

  ‘How’s the investigation going?’ she asked.

  Once again he mistook her meaning. ‘Fine,’ he replied. ‘Sparky, sir, says that it shouldn’t be too long now.’

  ‘For what?’ Sanyogita asked pointedly.

  But Aakash, now wise to her, mechanically replied, ‘For justice to be done.’

  ‘And do you have any idea –’

  He cut her short: ‘Can’t say, bhabi, just can’t say, but maybe Sparky, sir, is right. Maybe it is Nepalis.’ Then after a solemn pause, he said, as he once had of Muslims, ‘I think they’ll all have to go,’ and looked around the table for confirmation. ‘No?’

  The next morning, after showers and breakfasts eaten separately, Sanyogita, Aakash and I gathered in a study upstairs in front of a flat-screen television. It was a windowless room with green walls, slim glass bookshelves, lit from below, and an orange and yellow chandelier. We sat in a row on a deep Oliver Musker sofa, white with large white woollen flowers. Chamunda was on the screen.

  She wore a dark blue printed Kashmiri silk sari and an uncoloured pashmina decorated with tiny pink flowers. She had just come out from addressing the Chamber of Indian Builders and the old socialist building, with its generous use of patterned concrete screens, hung in the background. A journalist had stopped her on the way out to ask about the Megha case.

  Chamunda looked sternly at the camera, then out at the misty winter day, and said, ‘I have already suspended two officers. Let it be an assurance of my commitment to solving this case that I will suspend the SSP Sectorpur if we don’t see satisfactory results in the very near future. That is all I have to say.’ With this, Raunak Singh swept her away in a white Ambassador.

  I thought it wasn’t much, but Aakash, who knew more about these things than both Sanyogita and I, was impressed. Nodding his head, he cryptically repeated, ‘No empty threat, no empty threat.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said finally. ‘What’s the big deal if she suspends the SSP Sectorpur?’

  ‘The Senior Superintendent of Police, Sectorpur,’ Aakash said with sudden fluency, ‘is the most important police post in Jhaatkebaal. This man oversees every extortion and kidnapping case there is, taking his cut and where necessary even acting as a guarantor so that money actually changes hands under his supervision. He would have paid five crores of rupees just to get the post, which he is probably still paying back. To lose his position at this stage would ruin him. It’s a lot of pressure. Something’s going to burst very soon.’

  By mid-morning, Chamunda’s office had leaked the information of Aakash’s secret marriage to the press. We sat together in front of the television when one of the Hindi channels began running pictures of the red and blue Arya Samaj certificate, with its pictures of Aakash in a blazer and tie and Megha with an inky stamp over her face. They had even got hold of a picture of the newly married couple, garlanded and in bright sunlight. I was worried about a bad reaction from Aakash, but it never came. He smiled at me knowingly and continued to watch. It was as if he was seeing a bigger game come into play, and far from being nervous of riding its currents, he was riveted, keen to know where to get on. And though it was not said, I sensed that, as the wronged man in the right position, Aakash felt the nearness of a golden opportunity.

  As Chamunda would have predicted, the complexion of the story began to change with the revelation about the marriage. The re-enactments of the murder, or at least the ones in which an actor modelled on Aakash chased Megha through a midnight keekar forest, stopped running. Apart from Shabby’s channel, all the other channels began portraying Aakash and Megha as being on one side, co-victims, with the forces of the world against them. The murderer once again became someone in the world beyond, and no longer a specific man against whom the right evidence had only to be found.

  But Chamunda had miscalculated. In putting pressure on her police force as well as shifting the focus of the case away from Aakash, she had opened the way for the police to hastily turn their attention elsewhere. And it showed that she didn’t know the men who made up her police force; that she thought them no different from Delhi police. It was an easy mistake to make, easy to think of the border between Sectorpur and Delhi as only administrative. But it had a significance deeper than she knew. It was the border between town and country, between old ways and new, city ways, between rural poor and urban middle class, between the mall-goers and the wild men of Jhaatkebaal. And across that border on all sides, where women in brightly coloured clothes worked in fields and men lazed on charpoys drinking tea, young girls did not wear capris, or send text messages, or have boyfriends; and they certainly did not marry out of turn. Just miles into that country of truck drivers and dangerous moustaches, with Delhi still visible, people thought nothing of killing a girl who had dishonoured their name. It was from this world that the bulk of Jhaatkebaal’s police force was recruited.

  And so when revelations broke about Aakash and Megha’s secret marriage, and romantic text messages sent through the night saying ‘Appu this’ and ‘Aakash that’ came to light, and Airtel’s call register revealed late-night phone calls made from Megha’s phone, not only to Aakash but to ‘other strange persons’, it was with some sympathy for a brother, understandably forced to silence so loose a sister, that the police arrested Kris, the creative writer. They would just as happily have arrested his father, but Mr Aggarwal was over seventy and out of town at the time of the murder.

  Chamunda’s SSP, a dark-skinned Sikh gentleman with a face as fierce as a grease wrestler and a purple police band across his olive-green turban, addressed the press conference himself. Facing a room full of Delhi journalists, he managed in broken English, a little pleased with himself at the formulation, to say, ‘Krishna found Megha and Aakash in an objectionable but not compromising position. Incensed, enraged, infuriated, he took matters into hand.’ The room fired back angry questions. ‘Did he have any real evidence against the boy or was this all conjecture? How could he offer this as a motive for murder? Did he not know that Kris had been to USA – to Hampshire College, Massachusetts – for his university, that he didn’t possess these backward values?’ At first the SSP came out fighting. He pointed to Megha’s frequent communications with strange men; he gave the room an idea of the clothes she liked to wear; he said that she sometimes drank; and on the night in question she had left her house, without her parents’ permission, to meet her secret husband; she had even driven herself. But gradually, as the distaste in the room grew, and cries of ‘character assassination’ rose from the press corps, the SSP became sadly subdued. He realized that he was among a strange lot, modern and valueless.

  Even before the press conference was over, the city was on the boil. Megha’s mother, also a large woman, was shown standing among a crowd of people. Her daughter’s face was visible in hers; she wore a brown printed kurta. ‘Would a brother kill his own sister?’ she said, weeping and on the verge of breaking her bangles. ‘Today I have lost not only a daughter but a son as well. And Megha’s murderer is still roaming free. The police are
lying through their teeth.’ Kris was shown next, being silently led away by the Sectorpur police, his protruding lower jaw hanging open. Within hours, vigils of university students, with flowers and posters of Megha, had formed in the street, standing up against ‘character assassination’. Bloggers went like flesh-eating fish through the SSP’s remarks.

  By the time Chamunda’s convoy of white Ambassadors and Jeeps had driven into the safe house, Shabby had already interviewed Megha’s mother in her newsroom and, via satellite, some of Kris’s American friends, who spoke of how gentle and artistic he had been in university. She had also launched a full investigation into the political pressure police officers were forced to operate under in Sectorpur. In our own small group in the upstairs TV room, deep tensions had arisen. Sanyogita’s eyes, so recently dry, had begun to flow again at the sight of her friend Kris being led away. And when Aakash whispered, ‘Lul,’ to me, causing me to laugh out loud, she rose and left the room.

  Chamunda’s arrival brought the house together for a late lunch. It was Aakash who saw her first. He had gone to the bathroom, leaving the door of the television room half-open. A few moments later I saw him on the balcony, looking at the courtyard below. He didn’t hear me come up behind him. Downstairs, Chamunda in her dark blue sari and shawl, her sunglasses on her head, was standing by the lily pond instructing a servant on how to lay the table for lunch. When he put a clear globe-like vase of violet dahlias on the edge of the table, she rushed ahead and moved it to the centre. Aakash watched mesmerized as she told the servant where to put the wine glasses, corrected the arrangement of cutlery, then stood back and looked from a distance at the table that was now nearly ready. Watching Aakash watch Chamunda, I felt I knew what held his attention. I was willing to bet that until that moment the privileged women Aakash had met were too good for housework; they would have worn black Western clothes, led idle lives and required Aakash to keep them slim so that their husbands didn’t stray. That kind of woman would have had her attractions, but Aakash could not really have respected someone like that. In Chamunda, however, he would have seen traces of the traditional Indian woman that he could never have done without, as well as new and seductive things, like money, independence and power. The combination would have been beguiling.