Maya's New Husband

by Neil D'Silva

  “Are you scared of him?”

  “Do you know why he is called Stone Man?” Akram asked. “Let me tell you a story. There was this hijra here once who used to beg on the streets. He used to pester everyone with his lewd gestures and abuses. One day, he asked Bhaskar for money. When Bhaskar refused, he showered some choice abuse on him and mouthed that typical curse thing these eunuchs do. That ticked your husband off. He picked a stone lying by the roadside and hit it repeatedly on the unfortunate fool’s skull till he was within one inch of his life. The poor half-man was hospitalized. That’s the reason everyone springs out of his path when he passes by.”

  Maya stayed silent. Bhaskar had never hit her, but she knew he was quite capable of that. If he saw her with another man, it would not bode well for either of them.

  “I will leave now,” said Akram, “but I will give you the directions to the police station if you want.” Maya nodded in understanding, and Akram sketched a map on a page of his writing pad and gave it to her. “Good luck in finding your friend,” he said, “and sorry for not being able to help. I like you, but I like me better.”

  ***

  Maya deliberated on going to the police station. She didn’t have any companion, and she had never interacted with the police before. She had a phobia of the police—of authority figures in general—and she could not imagine how she would react when faced with a building full of khaki-clad law-keepers.

  On the other hand, Padma’s husband must have already told the police what he had come to know from her. This would be enough to set them into action. What further good could her going to the station achieve?

  But, again, she thought she should go. She owed that much to her dear friend.

  Her preoccupation with these contrary thoughts would have gone on for a long time had she not been distracted by a sudden cry that snapped her back into her senses.

  “Bam Bholenath!”

  She turned sharply towards the source of the sound—her own door. She had forgotten to close it after Akram had left, and now she saw the hermit standing right at her doorstep.

  The tantric—for that’s what Maya assumed him to be—cut an imposing figure, standing there with a human bone in his hand and with eight rings on his fingers, each containing motifs of human skulls in their various forms. But, what really paralyzed Maya was that the bowl he held in his hand was not just a bowl. Her innate knowledge of human anatomy told her it was an upturned cranium cut neatly out of a human skull.

  “Bam Bholenath,” he repeated and Maya looked up at his face. From this proximity, his face looked more intimidating.

  “There is danger in this house,” he said in a voice that resonated in the confines. “Serious danger! Mortal danger!”

  “My husband is not at home,” Maya said impulsively and retracted to the furthest corner of the room.

  “It is not your husband I have come to meet,” the man boomed, spittle flying out of his mouth as he spoke.

  “Who… who are you?” Maya asked.

  “They call me Baba Triloknath,” he replied. “Trilok because I have knowledge of all the three worlds—earth, heaven and hell. That knowledge tells me there is a very dark cloud going round this house.”

  “What danger is that, sadhu maharaj?” Maya asked, trying to keep hold on her fear. In addition, there was a curiosity in her mind to hear what this Baba would say.

  “I am no mere sadhu!” he bellowed out so loud that the rickety walls of the room shook. “I am an aghori, much more devout than any sadhu. Lord Shiva is our progenitor and we bow to no one other than to him. It is because of our staunch devotion that we come to know of things.”

  “What brings you here, aghori baba?”

  “It’s the smell of another aghori,” the sage said. “I can smell him in this neighborhood but cannot see him. Something is wrong with him, for he has not moved since ages. I want to see that. Why is the aghori immobile?”

  “In this house?”

  “This house, this street, this vicinity… I cannot tell. But there is a strong focal point in this house, like sunrays converging from a lens.”

  “Only my husband and I live in this house,” Maya said, slowly siding away from the wandering mendicant who was now trying to enter the house.

  “Your husband is a fool!” he yelled out and Maya almost fell. “I know your husband. The aghori I sense is not your husband. Your husband is not an aghori at all. He has absolutely no knowledge of the divine; that much I tell you. He thinks he is many things but he is only a misguided fool. He is playing with things he shouldn’t.”

  “My husband thinks he is an aghori?” said Maya in puzzlement. “Why do you say that?”

  “He is not an aghori!” the ascetic thundered again. “He cannot be. He is the seed of the shamed, and the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree. He might try our holy practices, but he will never reach our level of divinity.”

  “What practices?”

  “None that he can do in the right way. They will be the destruction of him one day, you shall see. Just like the one I sense here was destroyed.”

  “Whom do you sense, baba?”

  “It seems to me…” Baba Triloknath said, “It seems he is here. The aghori who ran away. The shamed one.”

  “Who?”

  “His name was Baba Bhutachari. The one who brought infinite shame upon our community. The one who fathered a child with a simple girl, and thus polluted his celibate purity. Him. He is somewhere here.”

  “Whom are you speaking about?”

  Baba Triloknath looked at Maya with bloodshot eyes, but then sensing the innocence in her face, mellowed down. “You seem to be a good girl,” he said. “You are your husband’s wife, but you do not know much about him, do you? Baba Bhutachari, the blot on the name of the Aghora, was the father of your husband, Bhaskar.”

  Maya heard the aghori’s words and was blinded as though by lightning, deafened as though by thunder.

  “Bhaskar is the son of an aghori?” she repeated.

  Baba Triloknath turned towards the door. “I must leave now,” he said. “My work here is done. I have warned you. Be careful of your husband; be careful of his father, wherever he is. Because I know. He is here somewhere, in some form. Something tells me you will now seek him out for us, for the betterment of the entire Aghora. But remember—you are not going to like him when you see him. Bam Bholenath!”

  As the mendicant left, Maya decided that she would not tell Bhaskar anything of this. She could not even imagine herself asking him the truth of any of these questions. In their barely month-old marriage, several secrets had already put a wedge between them.

  But one thing stayed with her.

  The man she chose as her husband was not what he seemed to be. She shuddered wondering what other secrets he might be hiding under his steely exterior.

  PART THREE

  An Unburied Past

  ~ 16 ~

  A Changed Man

  The little snot-nosed boy had never known a father. In a nondescript village by the banks of the River Ganga, close to the holy city of Hardwar, he lived with his mother—a slightly dimwitted and impractical woman—who was finding it progressively difficult to answer his ever-increasing questions about his paternity.

  “Who is my father?” he used to ask.

  “You will know in time,” she would say.

  “Why don’t you tell it now?” Letting go of anything didn’t come easily to him.

  “It is not the right time,” she would say and press her lips tightly shut.

  He grew up with the pains of not knowing his father. There was never another male member in his house. His mother slept on the floor near the utensils and he slept on the frayed charpoy that they had always owned. They ate chapattis with whatever vegetable his mother could pull out from the small garden she had outside the house. Once they had a farm, she told her sometimes, but that had been long, long ago.

  His mother did not like it much when he went out of the house.
“Be careful of the boys you play with,” she would say. “You are different from them. They might trouble you.”

  He never played with the other boys. He sat at a distance, watching them play games he did not understand, which they called cricket and kabaddi and football, and never once asked them to include him. They did not look at him either. At times, when the ball would roll by his feet, they would shout at him to throw the ball as far as he could, but no one ever came near him.

  He had no memory of celebrating festivals. His mother told him they were Hindus, and that his unknown father was also a Hindu—that was the only thing he knew of him—and so they lit an earthen lamp with ghee and placed it at their window sill every Diwali. On Holi, he would sit at his doorstep and be happy with the stray drops of colored water that would fall on him. He would laugh to himself and enjoy the festival all by himself.

  Then one Holi, when he was 14 years old, he found a discarded packet of balloons on the street. His mother used to shut herself in the house most of the time those days, and he found the right opportunity to sneak out of the house with the packet of balloons. He was at that age when even the smallest temptation can defeat one’s conscience; and he went right to the municipal tap outside his house and filled the balloons. Then he got back into his house, put the filled balloons in a bucket, and sat at the doorstep waiting for some victim to come by.

  In a few minutes, he found his prey, and he thanked his lucky stars because this was the exact person he had wished for. She was Mini, the daughter of the grocer Lala Ram Charan Lal. Lately, he had found himself being curiously drawn to this fair girl with long black hair, who would play with her friends in the park near his house. She was almost his age, but a wide gulf of societal status separated them. Even now, she didn’t look in his direction, but played Holi with her brothers and their friends and her friends, right outside his street.

  He wondered—Why mustn’t I join in?

  And so, armed with a red balloon, he aimed right and hard. The girl was facing the other way; the balloon hit her full force on the back. She turned, still laughing, but the moment she saw who had hit her, her face took on a most disgusting expression.

  “He hit me!” she bawled out to her brothers.

  The brothers, wet and unrecognizable with the various colors of Holi on their faces, came up to him and began pushing and shoving. He was strong too, but he had no strength against four boys, who though smaller than him had more collective strength. They beat him till they were sure he ached; and then lifting him by a limb each, threw him into the nearest ditch. He fell in a pool of tears and muck, more embarrassed that the girl laughed at his plight too. Matters really worsened when his mother came out and looked apologetically at the spoiled brats of the Lala.

  That evening, drunk on bhang, the Lala himself came up to the door with his brother. He had to park his car a few meters away for the street was so narrow, but it was clear that he had a chauffeur and at least one bodyguard waiting in the car.

  “Keep your scum away from our girls, you whore!” the Lala yelled at the doorstep.

  “The next time he even looks at her, he will find his cock torn off and floating in the Ganga,” the Lala’s brother said.

  He did not understand this outburst. He did not understand why his mother did not fight back. He did not understand why she dissuaded him from picking the lathi kept in the corner and crushing the Lala’s head. That would have been so simple and so much more satisfying.

  Moreover, he did not understand why his mother packed all their measly belongings in a tiny bag and left the house that very night, with him in tow, and boarded a train bound for Mumbai.

  For two days he sat in a corner of a train, trying to make sense of all that had happened with him. He thought of the ostracism, of his mother’s humiliation, and of his inability to do anything. When he alighted at the Kurla Railway Station of Mumbai the next morning, the boy, who had been optimistically named Bhaskar Sadachari by his mother, was a changed man.

  ***

  Bhaskar’s mother died after struggling for several years in the big city. She survived for two decades in Mumbai, trying to make ends meet by cleaning people’s utensils and mopping their floors. She could never adjust to the unhygienic city life though, and her pennilessness forced her to live in the most abject of conditions. Back in the village, they had owned a small garden where they grew cluster beans and tomatoes and gherkins, but here she had to buy vegetables from vendors. She existed somehow, even managing to send her son to a night school.

  The night school did not help Bhaskar with his education, but it helped him in other ways. He learned that he could shut people up by bashing their faces in. This he learned when he broke the jaw of Nathu, the school bully, who constantly ribbed him about his paternity. The schoolmaster responded to his violence with more violence—he caned him several times on his palms, almost peeling the skin off. The caning didn’t teach Bhaskar anything, but the way Nathu cowered in his presence after that episode did teach him a lot. So, when his mother lamented his poor marks in school, Bhaskar reassured her. He told her he was learning something more that could deliver them from their state of penury.

  However, the harsh living was taking its toll on the frail woman. Living in that perilously unhygienic environment, she did not realize when she contracted dengue fever, and by the time Bhaskar could take her to the municipal hospital, it was already too late. She did not spend even a day at the hospital, and Bhaskar consigned her to the flames with the help of a few acquaintances he had made in the city.

  That was the first time he saw the crematorium. It wasn’t like the burning grounds near the Ganga. There, pyres would be lit on the banks of the holy river itself, with hundreds of people in attendance, which included not just family but anyone even remotely related. Here, in the city, the crematorium consisted of one pithy burning area under a closed shed. The irony of it wasn’t lost on Bhaskar. He wondered whether these cubbyholes were enough for the hundreds who died each day in the city.

  When he lit the pyre, the handful of people who had accompanied him began to leave as well. But Bhaskar stood till the last ember was extinguished. Then he got an urn and collected the ashes. He wondered why he didn’t weep, perhaps he had become so hardened he wasn’t moved even by the death of his mother.

  It was only after he had collected the ashes that he realized that almost everyone had deserted him. He was alone in the crematorium now, and it was nearing dusk. Far in a corner a hermit sat, a dog by his heels, looking at him keenly, but Bhaskar avoided his gaze and strode out of the place.

  ***

  Bhaskar continued living in the little shanty his mother had acquired through her meager savings from back in the village. But a roof over the head was not enough; sustenance in the big city was the bigger issue. Poorly educated that he was, he found it near impossible to find something worthwhile that could bring in the money.

  Then, one day he took a trip to the better part of the city. He boarded a local train that took him to the Churchgate Station and there he roamed around for a whole day, pausing in the evening at an intriguing place named Kala Ghoda, which literally means Black Horse. He sat there for close to an hour, smoking beedis and watching people walking about, engrossed in their busy lives, everyone chasing something or the other. But, what really fascinated him was the motley group of artists that sat on the pavements, drawing portraits of people. He saw the deft pavement artists at work. With just a sheet of paper clipped on a board and a few pencils, they created works of art. And, after handing over these artworks to satisfied customers, he saw how the miserly patrons bargained over the artists’ wages.

  The artists created a sense of awe in him. His mother had been right about the city. There was something for everyone to do. Right here, right in front of his smoke-tinted eyes, masterpieces were being created and sold at a pittance to these rich beggars masquerading as art aficionados. He looked at these roadside da Vincis and van Goghs and Kahlos and wondered how
many masterpieces the world might have lost because this city did not know how to treat its artists.

  However, he now knew what he wanted to do, divine calling if one may call it. He was good at drawing. He had the knack of taking an empty sheet of paper and enhancing its value manifold with his artistic lines and curves. That was what he did in those lonely hours back in Hardwar. The few people who had seen his works back then had appreciated it. No one had ever visited his mother’s house in Hardwar, but they did stop and marvel at the chalk art he drew on the walls of his little shanty. Elephants and snakes and horses adorned the brown mud walls, the only decoration they could afford. Even at the night school, it was only the drawing classes that had held his interest. So, the next day itself, he found himself sitting with a writing pad and several pencils on the pavement early in the morning.

  It wasn’t easy though. The other pavement artists did not take too kindly to this new entrant. Nobody wants any competition in the city, and these poorly paid artists were no different. For the first few days, they kicked him out even before he could get his first patron. It was his resilience that won them over. He did not mind their verbal abuses and their punches. He sat next to them, he said he wouldn’t draw but just learn from them, and thus he pandered to their artistic egos. He brought water for them from the nearby taps. He ran their errands when they asked. He even solicited customers for them. And, one day, when one of the older artists died in a daze of vomit and charas, they did not mind him occupying his spot.

  The money wasn’t enough—no amount of money is ever enough in Mumbai—but it helped him keep a roof over his head, bread in his mouth and a shirt on his back. His clientele was growing too and more people began to flock to him. They mostly included young girls accompanied by their hormonally-driven boyfriends. He drew them all, without discrimination, ensuring that he highlighted every freckle and every mole on their faces.