The Temple-goers

by Aatish Taseer

  Interrupting him, I said, ‘You loved her a lot, didn’t you, Ash-man?’

  ‘Yes, man,’ he said warmly. ‘She would have been a great wife. You know, when you’re upgrading yourself, many people try to make you feel small, make you feel you’re nothing. But with her by my side, I would have felt strong.’

  I was won over. His calm, the preternatural strength of his nerve didn’t seem out of place. It was as if it flowed from his unshakeable belief in the preordained. And his own gritty modern story, with its amorality and sudden reversals, didn’t seem so far away from the stories I had heard around him, like those of his ancestor and of Tara and Rukmani. In fact those stories were like a fount for his own. And when things were at their worst, I felt sure they gave him his power to switch off, taking consolation on the one hand in the disinterested work of fate and on the other in the always auspicious light of his star.

  We had made our way through half the red wine; we were both drained from the heat, lying back in the vast bath, our penises bobbing limply to the surface.

  That was where I should have left things. But in that deep moment of relaxation it suddenly occurred to me to ask, ‘So then what was the solution you gave Chamunda?’

  Aakash half raised his head, his dark face flushed, and said, ‘It was simple, really. I told Chamunda about the threat Megha’s brother made a few nights before. Yes, she told me about it in the end,’ he added seeing the surprise form in my face. ‘Oh, and also I drew her attention to a certain short story – what was it called? – “The Ass –”… “The Ass –”… you know the one?’ he said, and laughed.

  Seconds later, there was a great banging on the door outside.

  Epilogue

  The sea changed from green to brown; oily, rainbow patterns ran over its surface. Red-bottomed, rusting freighters, some with Russian and Arab names, came into view. Then tall white buildings and the pale red domes of the Taj Hotel. A terrorist attack had left its façade blackened, its windows boarded up. There was now heavy security outside. Bombay’s mud-coloured water sloshed around us, bringing up plastic bottles and rose petals. A businessman’s yacht prevented us from docking. The passengers on the ferry stared in wonder at its white body, darkened windows and European crew. We rocked in the brown water for a few minutes more, then gingerly disembarked. I was on the three p.m. flight to Delhi.

  Uttam was there to pick me up at the other end. There was new weather in Delhi. The winter had dried out, and though the silk cotton’s fleshy flowers were yet to fill with their coral colour, the months of flowering trees yet to come, there was an unruly wind blowing, carrying in its wilfulness, rather than in its temperature, hints of summer. Delhi was my city. I knew its every mood, its every colour; it could only surprise me now on hidden levels when, like a spy agency, it would unseal from some shade-filled crescent, dark as a forest, a new memory.

  But I couldn’t think of that Delhi. It was another casualty of the ending romance. And Sanyogita, as if claiming it as part of her settlement, chose to meet in Lodhi Gardens. We came to it now from different directions: I, from the Lutyens’s Delhi end; she, from the Jorbagh end. I had walked there every day when I lived in Delhi. Her suggesting we meet there felt like an appropriation. Trying to gauge the fine meanings in these messages – her new assertiveness, her calm – I became aware before entering the park that our relationship was over.

  In the days that followed the night at the safe house, I took my mother up on a long-standing offer to visit her in Alibaug, at my stepfather’s and her house by the sea. I wanted both to be in India but to hold it at bay. I found myself wishing for the oblivion of my childhood, for the inevitability of my surroundings.

  I might have stayed indefinitely at that house by the sea, with its dim view of Bombay and its blackened beach, on to which the carcasses of turtles and dolphins occasionally washed up, had Sanyogita, some eight weeks after my arrival, not called. All that had happened over the past year must have clarified for her too. And released from a cycle with me, she decided to be released for good.

  She always wore a fig-scented perfume. But not that day. And other small things were different too. She dressed warmly, and for comfort, though it was not cold. Normally she would have worn her light, pretty clothes as soon as it was warm. Her longish black hair was twisted into a single plait and pulled over her left shoulder. Her smile with its tinge of sadness seemed now in sadness to be cheerful. It also had a humorous or ironic colour, as if projecting some fairy-tale notion that this inversion was the greatest sadness of all. It was as if she had dismantled the person she had been before. And it felt both like a defence and a renewal. I thought I saw in her face relief that it was over.

  It prevented me from making any kind of case. It felt too much to overturn the serenity of the evening. We met as we’d met many times before; the only difference was that we wouldn’t meet again. It was a small park, but intricate, and we walked many times around it. We walked past the bare tombs with their line of glazed turquoise tiles hanging on over the centuries. There was bougainvillea, the avenue of white-trunked palms and an old bridge of high pointed arches. We stood there over a mossy pond.

  Thinking only of her words from the night before, obsessed with them now, I said at last, ‘Is it because of what you said last night, about not being able to compete with the other intimacies in my life?’

  ‘Not only,’ she replied, ‘not only,’ making me feel that the passion from the night before had gone out of her. ‘My feelings have changed,’ she said again.

  ‘Overnight?’

  ‘No, not overnight. Over many months.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

  ‘I didn’t want to believe that they had.’

  It was so beguiling an answer. I felt our emotional equivalency evaporate.

  ‘Have you heard from Aakash?’ she asked with no rancour.

  ‘Come on. I hope this is not about –’

  ‘No, no, really, no. I’m just curious.’

  I could see she was not lying.

  After Aakash revealed the secret of Kris’s homosexuality to Chamunda, and Chamunda, with his short story in hand, revealed it to the press, a new motive had arisen for the murder. ‘Brother kills sister,’ the Hindustan Times said, ‘after she discovered he was a gay.’ Another paper wrote, ‘Sister dies for threatening to expose homosexual ring’. Lurid extracts from the story had appeared in all the papers. And though this was not enough to incriminate Kris, it was enough to check the public support that had grown after his arrest. Shabby still fought on, but the energy behind the cause drained away. Aakash, who understood the sensibilities of the newly prying society better than anyone else – knew its values had not caught up with its new degree of self-knowledge – would also have known the contempt such a revelation would arouse in people’s hearts.

  ‘He always lands on his feet,’ Sanyogita said, smiling. ‘Look what I saw today, driving through Sectorpur.’

  She took out a folded piece of paper from her pocket and handed it to me. It was thin, crinkly and glue-stained. I opened it and saw that it was an election poster. On a green background were, as in a family tree, oval-shaped pictures of the party leaders. Chamunda, once again in saffron chiffon, towered in the foreground. And at her feet, a lotus seeming to form a mane round his head, was a picture of Aakash, looking blacker than usual. It made me think of Megha and the little sweeper. ‘Loin! loin! What does a loin do?’ Poor Megha. Her jovial memory seemed so distant now.

  ‘Did you know he was contesting?’

  ‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘What as?’

  ‘Oh, just as an MLA, but still. Chamunda gave him a ticket as repayment for what he did for her.’

  ‘Didn’t the press hassle her about that, giving a ticket to a man who was almost charged with murder?’

  ‘Are you joking? It’s virtually a credential.’

  We had come to the green turnstile leading out of the park.

  ‘And Kris?’ I asked.

/>   ‘Kris is free,’ Sanyogita replied. ‘The CBI got him out. After Aakash no longer needed him, Sparky Punj became Kris’s lawyer; they were friends anyway. But the case will go on. I doubt they’ll ever find the real guy. It’s easier that way.’

  ‘But won’t it hurt Chamunda in the election?’

  ‘It could. And so maybe they will find someone to pin it on.’

  Politicians’ white cars were parked outside the garden’s gates. Thin ladies in bright colours carried shallow dishes of cement to and from a mound of mud half-filled with water. Sanyogita, picking her way past a column of men in fraying vests digging up the pavement, walked towards a chauffeur-driven car.

  ‘Sanyogita?’ I called out.

  She turned round.

  ‘How’s the garden?’

  ‘Oh!’ she said, stopping herself from saying ‘baby’, ‘it’s fine. Flourishing.’

  ‘And my study?’

  She smiled sadly at me, seeing now where this line of conversation was headed.

  ‘It’s fine too,’ she said quickly, as if worried I was going to ask next about her toes or the family of porcelain elephants.

  Through the tinted window of the chauffer-driven car I could make out the profiles of Ra and Mandira. They had come to pick her up. They saw me and waved, but didn’t get out. Nothing like one’s girlfriend’s friends to bring home the pain of a break-up. Sanyogita turned round once more, smiled apologetically, then got into the car and drove way.

  It was Eid that night and I finally made it to Zafar’s house. I was glad not to have seen it before. It would have destabilized me. Zafar lived in the Sui Valan section of the old city of Delhi. He picked me up outside Delite cinema, admonishing me for bringing him flowers and sweets. As we entered the old city, some men from the abattoir were unloading a truck of meat. Our rickshaw splashed through a pale brownish-red puddle, its smell and the frenzy of flies giving it away as blood. Narrow streets, crowded that night with bright kerosene lights and people in their new clothes, led us to Zafar’s house. We arrived in front of a darkened entrance. Near an open drain, a bitch tended to her family of fluffy grey puppies. A flight of steep stone stairs, chipped at the edges, led up to a pale green door and a landing lit by a single light.

  Zafar had warned me many times on the way how small his house was. ‘But the hearts of the people in it are big,’ he now added. I had imagined his house as a small flat with a kitchen, a bathroom, two rooms perhaps, with at least room enough to stand up and walk around. But Zafar’s house was just a single room, no bigger than a carpet, covered with sheets of checked cloth. Its greasy blue walls were high and there were shelves all around, stacked to the ceiling with hard suitcases and trunks, so that it felt almost like a godown. Everything was neatly in its place: a sewing machine with a pink satin cover; a little shelf with holy Zam Zam water, oils and a pair of scissors; green-covered copies of Zafar’s new book. Zafar’s family of five couldn’t physically fit in the room. That was why he slept on the floor of the magazine office where I had visited him on the day of the demonstration.

  ‘I once had enough money to buy a better place,’ he said as we sat down, ‘but in 1997, the year when the accounts became computerized, my wife fell from the stairs and all my savings were spent on her treatment.’

  She was there now, a fat woman with curly hair and pale skin. She got on her haunches and tried rolling out an oilcloth with roses on it, matching the large red flowers on her black kameez. Then wincing, she stopped and sat back down.

  ‘My back,’ she said to her husband, who watched her closely. She was smiling, her face was made up, but her eyes suggested damage, almost as if unused to emotions other than distress.

  Zafar looked over at his wife, around the room and then at me. ‘I’m thinking of a complete renovation,’ he said with his wheezing laugh, ‘thinking of replacing everything.’

  ‘We’ll replace you before we replace ammi,’ an offended daughter said from the kitchen area, which was a three-foot ledge with pulses and grains stacked high on one side. Its stone surface was used for washing, the water disappearing through an opening in the floor.

  Zafar laughed again. The daughter crawled over and finished unrolling the oilcloth. Another brought out warm bread and meat curry. Zafar gestured to his young son, Atif, who sat slumped in one corner watching cartoons on a twelve-inch television, to come over.

  ‘All he does is watch these cartoons,’ Zafar said to me as he joined us in our circle. The boy had a thin face, a squint and thick glasses. ‘Speak to him in English; he’s got to learn. He’s meant to be learning in school, but the teachers are very bad. They can hardly speak it themselves. I don’t want another generation to grow up without English. Look at how I’ve lost out.’

  I tried speaking to him in English, but he became quiet and ashamed. He replied softly a few seconds later in perfect Urdu.

  The men ate, the women watched. I felt embarrassed and asked them why they weren’t eating; they said they already had. Zafar turned gently to me and said, ‘Between Aatish and Atif, I make no difference, you’re both like my sons. Where have you been all these days? You could have at least called your old teacher to say you were OK.’

  I used the only excuse I knew would work with him. ‘I’ve been trying to write.’

  His face brightened. ‘Writing something modern, I hope,’ he said, ‘something fresh and original. Don’t hark back to the past. Look forward.’ Then using the English words ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’ in both instances to mean fiction, good and bad, he said, ‘In the way men live today, the pressures upon them – and there are great strains and injustices – you’ll find fiction. The past is all non-fiction.’

  ‘And write in English?’

  ‘In English,’ he answered firmly. ‘The Indian languages are finished; or, at least, literature in them is finished. When I began there were magazines, poetry meetings, the progressive writers were still around, poets could write for the screen, there were readers, libraries, critics – all gone, swept away in one generation. It’s a very fragile thing, you know, literature; it needs an infrastructure. You can’t spend your life writing into the dark like me.’ The thought of his own writing evoked a memory. ‘I once wrote a string of couplets,’ he said, ‘that all ended in “turned to water”. Very hard to do, you can imagine, to make each couplet finish that way. “In the end I stayed loyal, my friends, to the ways of the age. But in this effort my blood turned to water.” One more,’ he said eagerly, feeling perhaps that I had not gauged his meaning, ‘ “In the toil of a lifetime, each strand flowed away, all moorings were lost, Zafar, when the road turned to water.” ’

  He had finished eating and was sitting back against the wall, smoking a Win cigarette. One daughter was clearing away our steel plates and wrapping up the oilcloth; another was making tea on a tiny stove. I asked to wash my hands. Atif rose and opened what I thought was a cupboard door. The bathroom was a single metal sheet, three feet by three feet, leading to a drain. Its fetid air filled the room. Everything was hanging – towels, toothbrushes, clothes, including a green bra, all heaped over a nylon rope. Atif poured out the water from a red plastic urn, then handed me a rag to dry my hands. Its strange colour made me look more closely at it: it was grey, but in a frayed bottom corner, where a button and a pleat still remained, there was a deep indigo stain.

  Back in the little room porcelain cups of frothy tea were being passed around. Zafar looked at me expectantly, as if hoping to have generated a response of some sort.

  ‘So,’ he said finally, ‘is it coming along well?’

  ‘No, not really,’ I replied. ‘I keep coming up against barriers.’

  ‘What kind of barriers?’

  ‘Of language, of class, of having my material in one place, my readership in another. I can’t seem to string it all together.’

  Zafar nodded, and putting out the Win in a wooden ashtray, said, ‘Can I offer you a suggestion?’

  ‘Please.’

 
; ‘Write in the first person.’

  ‘Really? Why?’ I asked, surprised at his specificity.

  ‘When the terrain is unfamiliar,’ he said, ‘the world new and freshly uncovered, which at this present moment in India it has to be, the first-person narrator plays the guide. He eases the reader’s journey through this uncharted territory; his development becomes part of the narrative. Look at Manto; he even had a narrator called Manto.

  ‘This, at least,’ he said, shaking with laughter, ‘is the humble opinion of a man who’s never written a line of prose in his life.’ Then serious once more, he added, ‘And lastly there’s the secret ingredient for which no one, no matter how experienced, can help you.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Luck.’ He smiled and offered me a Win.

  *

  It was ten p.m. when I came back to my mother’s flat. I had left it and returned to it so many times that I felt like a stranger there now. Still, there was something about seeing the lights on in my mother’s study, the room unchanged from my childhood, that gave me the special pleasure of anonymity in a familiar place, something like what a late-night traveller might feel at entering a service flat he has used before. It was quiet but for the occasional swinging of the kitchen door: Shakti closing up for the night, switching off the drawing-room lights, leaving water at my bedside.