Priya

by Namita Gokhale

  I remember that Luv and Suresh sat in vigil, and later, Geeta, who had arrived in the chief minister’s plane. Somebody must indeed have taken charge of the flowers, of the bier, of moving Lenin to the floor and bathing him. I was breaking down, cracking up, and I came home and took a sedative and tried to sleep. I didn’t go for the funeral. Women didn’t go to the cremation grounds when I was young. Suresh and the twins handled that. As Lenin didn’t have a son, Geeta and Paromita attended to the last rites, and Paromita lit her father’s pyre. They returned, drained and exhausted, but with a sort of exalted nervous energy surrounding them.

  The sedatives didn’t help; I couldn’t sleep. I had to say my personal farewell to Lenin. Ghafoor drove me to Nigambodh ghat. We lost our way, at first. Ghafoor stopped to ask cyclists, autorickshaw wallahs, motorists, but all in vain. They pointed out Rajghat, and Vijayghat, and all the rest, but nobody seemed to know or care where the burning ghat was. At last an ancient paan and beedi seller with long matted hair, who looked like an out-of- work ascetic, guided us to the funeral ground. ‘Past Inter State Bus Terminus, after U-turn, beneath Peepal-tree,’ he explained.

  I walked amid the burning fires, searching. There were six pyres alight in a row, some in first flame, others reduced to ash and embers. Luv was seated on a collapsed concrete bench, staring at the river. He led me to Lenin’s pyre. The smouldering fire had already eaten away the piled-up wood. I sat with Luv on the broken bench, as the dirty waters of the Yamuna flowed swiftly, silently, by. A light breeze ruffled my son’s hair. I could feel my blood, my flesh, in him. It’s not so easy to die; we live on in others, in those around us. And so it would be with Lenin and his daughter Paromita, my daughter-in-law-to-be, and the grandchildren she would bear. I thought again of Paro and all that she had meant to me. I had come here with Lenin the night that Paro died. A spark from an unknown pyre had burnt a hole in my sari pallav. It was that night that the twins were conceived. She had lived on in my mind, all these years, her spirit and her fierce, spiteful will. Even in death, I had defined myself by her absence. With Lenin gone, I felt a sense of the gates closing. Paro’s ghost was finally laid to rest.

  Across the river, a boat halted before a small shrine by the waters. I could hear the bells tolling, and the sharp hoot of a train, as it crossed the bridge across the river. Generations on the move.

  LENIN’S GONE. I CAN’T COME TO TERMS WITH HIS DEATH. IT’S ROBBED me of my personal history, of the past we shared, of our youth, all the good and the bad times. With his departure I am older, nearer my own end. Today, Paromita came to see me. She’s been weeping, her eyes are red and swollen with tears, but she tries hard to stay in control, even managing a heart-wrenching smile.

  ‘Can we sit in the garden?’ she asked. ‘Under the sky. I have something to give you.’

  So we sat in the lawn, with the black crows and green parrots and the enormous drooping roses. Paromita handed me a transparent cellophane bag. ‘Some books . . .’ she explained. ‘And some photographs. I don’t want my mother to have them. They don’t belong to her. He would have wanted you to keep them. They are safe with you.’

  Lenin’s notebook. He had left it behind, that day, with his jhola. I understand how it is with diaries, with old letters and photographs. Why we keep them, why we lock them up from the world—and why we leave them behind where someone will find them after us.

  ‘I really miss him,’ Paromita said, hot tears dropping from her eyes. ‘I don’t think I want to live any more.’ She sobbed for a bit. Then she reached for her capacious pink handbag and fished out a bottle of bright red nailpolish. Bending over, she began painting her toenails. ‘I have to go with Luv to an art show,’ she explained.

  What do the young know of death? There were still some tears clinging to her long lashes. I cried too, and my tears had an edge of sweetness to them. We had a nimbu-soda each, with salt and sugar and chaat masala in it. We talked of other things, pointless conversation that cheered us up. Then she left in search of Luv.

  I sat in the garden, leafing through the sheaf of photographs, mostly of a young woman. In one, Banwari wore a flower in her hair. Another had her sitting on a rock beneath a tree, smiling broadly. She was posing in a khaki uniform in the next one, but there was no gun. The pictures had been laminated, but were grubby under the coating. A photograph of Paro, a seductive studio portrait with pouty lips and a knowing smile. And another blurred, faded Polaroid picture of her getting into a car, a blue Fiat.

  There was a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, dog-eared and heavily underlined. A book of poems without a cover on it. And a little red book.

  I squinted at the poems, which were printed in exceptionally small type on yellowed decaying paper. It was ‘Leaves of Grass’ by Walt Whitman.

  Agonies are one of my changes of garments.

  I do not ask the wounded person how he feels

  I myself become the wounded person . . .

  The little red book was just that—the Little Red Book. It was the size of my palm, and had a mottled red plastic cover with ‘The quotations of Chairman Mao Tse Tung’ imprinted on it, and some squiggles of Chinese calligraphy. It was published by the Peking Foreign Languages Press, I couldn’t tell in what year. I flipped it open randomly: On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People: Two types of social contradictions, those between ourselves and the enemy and those among the people themselves, confront us. The two are totally different in their nature.

  Lenin’s other life. Or maybe what we saw had been the other one. I thought of Banwari. And Paro. Agonies are one of my changes of garments. I liked that. Lenin was like that.

  I continued to sit, brooding, in the darkening garden. Ramdhan, the Bihari help, brought me a pot of tea and some hot samosas. There is a kindness about Ramdhan that expreses itself in unsaid ways. The samosas were his way of expressing affection. ‘Madame, Ghafoor driver is needing to speak to you,’ he said. In English.

  I am used to Ramdhan’s sing-song Bhojpuri accented Hindi. ‘Hindi bhool gaye kya?’ I asked sharply. What would happen if every Bihari in Delhi were to begin babbling away in English?

  ‘Dhobiji and I are doing Guruji Rapidest English Course together,’ he replied sheepishly. ‘But why you are not liking?

  ‘I am liking . . .’ I replied, sounding a little apologetic. ‘And please to bring Ghafoorji here.’

  Ghafoor was in tears. He stood before me, hunched and very still. A line of black kohl had crawled down his cheeks, from his lined eyes. ‘They have taken him away,’ he said. ‘The police have taken my son away. You have to do something, Madam ji.’

  ‘Police! Oh shit!’ Ramdhan exclaimed.

  ‘Please speak to me only in Hindi, in future,’ I said. ‘No more shit.’ Then I turned my attention to Ghafoor.

  It was the same old story, encountered in the papers every morning. Ghafoor’s son Afzal grew up with his grandparents, his nana and nani, in Ahmednagar. He studied for B.Com in Pune, and had a job there, working as an animator in a software firm. He had a group of Muslim friends, whom he met at a biryani lunch home every day. One of the friends, who was from Azamgarh, had borrowed Afzal’s phone one afternoon and disappeared with it. The friend was detained, for questioning, after a bomb blast in Satara. And now Ghafoor’s son was in custody too.

  Ghafoor has five sons. One is in Dubai, and one in Batla, with his in-laws. Two live in the staff quarters here with Ghafoor. Afzal is the oldest, from his first wife. Ghafoor handed me a piece of paper with Afzal’s full name and date of birth, and the address and phone number of the police chowki where he had been detained. What are called the ‘particulars’.

  ‘It’s all in Allah’s hands,’ he said, ‘but I know that you will help me.’ He spoke with such simplicity and with so much dignity that I was shamed.

  ‘Of course I will,’ I reassured Ghafoor. ‘I promise I will help you. Whatever Sahib and I can do, will be done.’ But it wasn’t going to be so easy. I knew that. Wrong religion, wrong time. />
  When I told Suresh about what had happened he got extremely agitated. ‘Terrorism is terrorism, Priya,’ he said. ‘It’s not for me to interfere in these matters. What do you expect me to do? Call up the Home Minister?’

  ‘Ghafoor’s son is not a terrorist,’ I said stubbornly. ‘We’ll find him a civil-rights lawyer. I’m sure there is a way out.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ Suresh said resignedly. I could see that the prospect made him uncomfortable.

  Kush reacted differently. He got really upset. ‘It’s not right,’ he insisted, ‘it’s simply not right. I’m going to make sure something is done.’ There was anger in his voice, a quiet anger that surprised me.

  I hadn’t realized this about Kush—he isn’t a coward, like his father. There is a sense of justice hidden away somewhere behind that load of ambition. And I was puzzled and a little hurt again by how much of my sons’ lives were a mystery to me. We lose our children in many ways. I understood some of Ghafoor’s pain.

  After Lenin’s death, the process of winding up. All the things that need to be done: the half-page advertisements in Hindi and English papers, the crowded prayer meeting, the daily ritual prayers by their family priests. Geeta and her large and resilient family are firmly in charge, on top of things.

  My heart goes out to Geeta. It couldn’t have been easy to be married to Lenin, however adorable he was from a distance. I’m sure she had loved him too, in her way. As much as Banwari. She looks sadly fetching as a widow, white suits her, and she has lost weight. There are slight shadows around her eyes, but sorrow has pushed her into beauty. She wears no jewellery except for yellow sapphire pendants in her ears, and a man’s Rolex watch on her wrist.

  ‘It used to be Lenin’s,’ she said, holding out her slim wrist to show the watch to me. ‘My father gave him this watch when we got married. So it has memories of both of them . . .’

  Loyal at last! I’ve begun to respect Geeta, even more than I did before. Behind her deceptive Indian-woman persona, she has lived on her own terms in what is still a man’s world. She has handled her life well; better than Paro. I’ve been thinking about Paro a lot, she’s been on my mind after Lenin’s death. I even dreamt of her last night. She had been stepping into a car, as in the blurred snapshot in Lenin’s notebook. What would Paro be like if she were alive today? She would have rebranded herself, that’s for sure. The new India may even have suited her, but I couldn’t help feeling she wouldn’t have dazzled us as much now as she did then. Maybe she was lucky, dying young, and living on as a legend in the minds of her friends

  Paro and Pooonam: so different from each other, like nylon and silk. Where I was obsessed by Paro, Pooonam is in insistent pursuit of me. Paro was beautiful, always. Pooonam is merely pretty, a glam-sham construct. Unfazed by the world, our Paro had cared for nobody and nothing except herself—or perhaps not even for herself. Pooo is the very opposite, needy, seeking approval. They are completely different, I’ve decided. Paro had been a triumphant original; Pooonam UmaChand a clever wannabe.

  But she’s unstoppable. She’s been ceaselessly phoning, texting, emailing me, hounding me on Facebook. Finally, I relented and returned her call this morning. ‘Darling—I can’t live another moment without seeing you!’ she declared, moving straight away to the next level of encroachment. ‘I must meet you. Straight away. Khan Market in half an hour? Choko-la? Ple-eeze?’

  I agreed, partly out of curiosity. I want to check out her black eye, witness her humiliation first hand. A base sentiment and one I wasn’t proud of.

  Pooonam was dressed, predictably, in pastels—a flimsy chiffon creation accessorized by long strings of pearls and outsize dark glasses. How fortunate for her that big shades were in, I thought to myself.

  ‘You awright?’ Pooonam said, looking at me perceptively. ‘You look sorta saddened. Your eyes look sad.’

  ‘I lost a dear and old friend,’ I replied sombrely.

  ‘Who? Somebody I knew? No time to check the obits recently.’

  Pooonam hadn’t met Lenin, or Geeta. I hadn’t told her about the engagement, even though she had gone off her ‘Marry Suki’ campaign. ‘You didn’t know him,’ I said. ‘My son Luv is engaged to his daughter.’

  ‘Oh rreallly?!!!’ she exclaimed, in a sort of horsey little-girl neigh that startled the waiter who was approaching us with a carefully balanced tray. He almost dropped it.

  I stared at her in surprise. I had resolved to be kind and sympathetic, but Pooonam’s behaviour left no scope for my well- meaning interventions.

  ‘What fun!’ she tinkled. ‘What fun! Two weddings in a row. We can do all our shopping together!’

  ‘And how’s your eye, Pooonam?’ I asked, my curiosity rising again. ‘What bastards these men can be.’ I don’t usually feel comfortable using swear words, but I felt the circumstances allowed for strong language.

  ‘My eye?’ she replied, sounding surprised. ‘My eye is fine— there’s nothing wrong with it. I went to the surgeon to have my eyelid fixed, and then I got this allergy! My system is so sensitive, you know.’ She tilted her head and gave me an inscrutable look from behind her massive Bulgari shades. ‘And I wouldn’t say all men are bastards! Speak for yourself, if you please, my dear. But I think most men are just little boys. One just has to handle them right.’

  Her lips curved into a knowing smile, and she played dreamily with her long strings of pearls, so large and flawless that they couldn’t possibly have been real. Or were they?

  ‘I’m getting married next week,’ she announced, ‘to the man of my dreams—the one and only man I’ve ever loved!’

  ‘Who’s that?’ I wondered aloud. The encounter with Pooonam was not turning out to be as satisfying as I had anticipated. She looked much too pleased with herself.

  ‘Manoviraj, of course,’ she replied. ‘Manoviraj Sethia. Who else?’

  My jaw fell open. I stared at her with goggle-eyed surprise. ‘He landed you with a black eye!’ I exclaimed. ‘You despise him, Pooonam! You want to destroy him!’

  ‘Priya, Priya, Priya’ she said amiably. ‘How can you say such things? It’s true we had a lovers’ tiff. It’s true. Then one of his girlfriends—that slut who is after his money—that gold-digger Jayanti—sent out those nasty emails and SMS messages, supposedly from me. So that Manoviraj Sethia and I would break up! As if!!’

  ‘But I got the message from your number! And from your email ID . . . pooo@pooonam.com!’

  ‘Jayanti hacked my email. And she stole my phone.’

  ‘But you called me from that very same number today, Pooonam,’ I persisted, sticking to logic and reason.

  ‘I got it back,’ she replied dismissively. ‘Just why are you getting into pointless details, Priya? Aren’t you excited about my getting married? We’ll do all our shopping together, for our two weddings. You will be the most beautiful mother-in-law in Delhi. What fun it’ll all be! And then Kush can marry Suki, afterwards.’

  She leaned across the table to give me a kiss on my cheek. I couldn’t help but feel happy for her. We women have to stand together. And in love, the end justifies the means. Maybe.

  Pooonam was in shopping mode now. ‘Life is just a big sale, Priya,’ she said, dragging me across the other side of Khan Market to a boutique jeweller on the first floor. She tried on the latest style in outsize diamond danglers, all astronomically priced, completely out of range as far as I am concerned. Her hair got into her eyes, and she had to take off her Bulgari shades to readjust it. There was an ugly swelling in her perfectly made-up face, the blue and black bruises blending in perfectly with her shimmering green shadow. I turned away, pretending not to have noticed.

  Still no news of Ghafoor’s son. He’s gone on leave, in search of Afzal. Another driver has been assigned on duty to me. But Ghafoor turns up every evening, grave reproach in his eyes. ‘Kuchh pata chala?’ he asks, in the same resigned tone. ‘Could you find out anything, Madam ji?’

  Kush has been working on it overtime. He even visited
Pune last week, on his way back from Mumbai. The police records are a mess, he says, but he’ll crack it.

  The lawyer friend, now state counsel, whom Suresh had put on the case, has also said there is no such name in the records in the police chowki where Ghafoor’s son is supposed to be detained. He’s talking about invoking habeas corpus, if need be. Suresh has told him not to take that route, he’ll try another channel.

  My husband is a lawyer by profession; he believes in the Constitution, and in Civil Rights—unlike some of the other politicians we know. I can see that Afzal’s disappearance is bothering him, too. He’s trying to do what he can, even though he’s under so much pressure.

  Suresh is having trouble at work. Food processing is an innocuous portfolio, it keeps my kitchen stocked in huge abundance with sample packs and gift hampers, jams and pickles and squashes, even after distribution through the platoons of peons and chaprasis and PAs and assorted office staff. But the despair on the agricultural front can’t really be denied. Drought and debt are driving farmers to suicide. The Minister for Agiculture was asked about this on television today. The script went like this:

  Interviewer: ‘Sir, there have been five farmer suicides in the drought-ridden —— district in the last week. What immediate steps is the government contemplating to alleviate this?’

  Agriculture Minister (scratching his head): ‘Suno ji— Pharmers are human beings only and all are suffering naarmal human problems—love, break up, deepression. They have deadened themselves, which is offence—but government has decided not to take any action against expired farmers. We will provide free pranayam deep breathing course for deepression.’

  This guileless reply has upset sensibilities in the Party high command, and outraged the farmers and development agencies. There was a sensitization meeting today, for bureaucrats and politicians, about development issues. Suresh has fared well at that, but I knew that he doesn’t feel on top of things. And then, contentious new issues like Tesco supermarkets and BT crops keep coming up, or old ones such as minimum support prices, and grassroots marketing strategies, continue to stubbornly resurface.