In Times of Siege

by Githa Hariharan

  Shiv hesitates, wondering if he should cover her, or get her something to eat or drink. He waits, but her eyes remain shut. Shiv notices two little holes side by side on her faded gray T-shirt. Her face, a smooth brown mask, looks young and weary, a combination he has not seen before.

  On an impulse, Shiv leaves the room and goes looking for Rekha’s brass bell, a bell his mother used at her endless pujas to call the deaf gods to attention. The bell, having failed to perform its real function, now sits polished and gleaming, an object on exhibit in the living room of a nonpraying household. Its magic may have failed, but it does well as an arty object. Shiv returns with the bell, places it by the water bottle on the table. He puts away the ancient crutches in a corner and keeps a walking stick instead by her bed.

  He takes one more look at her, willing her to open her eyes and say something. But she remains still, oblivious of his presence. Suddenly Shiv feels like an intruder in his own house. He switches off the lamp on the table and leaves the room, half-shutting the door behind him.

  TWO

  AUGUST 24

  When Shiv opens his eyes, he immediately feels something out of place in the silence. He has not set the alarm, but he has woken up as always, at the stroke of six.

  The house sits silent, but he can hear—or sense—its brooding on the day to come.

  The girl must be asleep. Should he ask her if she drinks tea, coffee? Or does she still drink milk? His daughter hated milk when she was a child and they had to disguise it with all kinds of synthetic chocolatey powders. Energy drinks, they are called. Should he go ask the girl if she would like an energy drink?

  He still thinks of her as the girl, she has not yet become a person with a name.

  Shiv stirs the sugar in his tea and takes the cup to his mouth when he hears the bell. Then he hears her call. She calls him professor; it is as if she has heard him thinking of her as the girl.

  The girl’s voice, high-pitched and desperate, repeats, “Professor!”

  He puts down the cup clumsily, splashes tea on Rekha’s off-white tablecloth, and hurries downstairs.

  The girl doesn’t look grateful to see him. If anything, she has an impatient look on her face as if to say, Where were you? Didn’t you hear me call?

  “Did you want something?” Shiv asks her.

  She has pulled the sheets aside and is sitting up, frowning at her leg. “Of course,” she snaps, then adds plaintively, “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  He helps her up, gives her the walking stick by the chair, his father’s old walking stick. She gasps with pain; it’s impossible to use the stick without putting some weight on her broken leg. Shiv takes the stick from her and hands her the decrepit crutches. He walks at her snail’s pace, taking her weight on his arm and shoulder.

  Once they are in the bathroom, he is not sure what to do. But she has apparently thought it out. She leans the crutches against the wall, tests her balance on the good leg. “Shut the door,” she says. “Please wait outside for me.”

  As he shuts the door, he hears her groan with the effort of easing herself down to a sitting position. Then he hears a steady, trickling sound. He feels like an eavesdropper, but he continues to stand by the door. “I’ll buy a pair of crutches today,” he says.

  She doesn’t reply. Or if she does, the sudden sound of tap water filling the bucket drowns out her words.

  Shiv goes up the winding stairs to the landing outside the servants’ quarters. “Quarters” is a grand way to describe the room Kamla, her husband and their daughter live in. The husband is out all day working as an office peon. Shiv and Rekha rarely see him. The family lives here on condition that Kamla comes in twice a day, once to clean, once to cook. She is finicky about following this spoken contract to the letter, lest Shiv and Rekha think the quarters entitle them to her services any time of the day or night.

  The radio in Kamla’s room blares a film song but the door remains shut despite Shiv’s knocking. He calls aloud, for good measure, both mother and daughter: “Kamla! Babli!”

  No response.

  He thinks he hears Meena call.

  Flustered, he pushes the door open. Inside, lit by the beam of sunlight the open door has let in, he sees an idyllic domestic scene. Kamla is in the corner of the room that serves as a kitchen, sitting on her haunches before the stove. Babli, dressed and ready in her blue and white school uniform, extravagant white ribbons in her hair, is on the floor, studying. The whirring of the table fan, the smoky kitchen corner and the music are a heady combination. Shiv has to make an effort to recall his sense of irritation and urgency.

  “Kamla, you will have to come down and help the girl,” he says. “In the bathroom,” he adds, to make it clear that this is women’s business.

  Kamla looks pained. Kamla has a special look, a look of virtuous suffering that invariably makes Shiv feel guilty about asking her to do something. Not that he ever has to. Usually meals and teas appear on the dining table as if by magic even when Rekha is at the office. Shiv has never seen Kamla clean his study, so he assumes it is done when he is not there. Rekha has shopped for the ten or twelve weeks she will be away. She has left detailed instructions with Kamla; the freezer is full despite the unreliable power situation. But even Rekha, with all her efficiency and foresight, could not have anticipated Meena’s unexpected arrival.

  Now Kamla hastily puts away rotis in a box and gets up. “Babli, shut the door when you go,” she says. “And don’t forget your tiffin box.”

  Babli ignores her and asks Shiv, “What happened to the didi downstairs?”

  Later he asks Meena Babli’s question.

  Meena has changed her clothes. She now wears a bright red T-shirt and a long crinkled and flowery skirt. She looks well-scrubbed though she has only had a pretend-bath. Before Kamla left with the wet towel and empty basin, she must have combed Meena’s hair and plaited it tightly. The result is a slightly older (and larger) version of Babli sitting up in bed, considering Shiv’s question.

  “So what happened? How did you manage to fall off the bus?”

  “I don’t know how I slipped. I still can’t believe it—it wasn’t as if anyone was pushing me. That’s happened hundreds of times and I’ve never fallen.”

  “But was the bus moving?” This frightening possibility has just occurred to Shiv. It’s been at least twenty years since he was squeezed into a Delhi bus.

  “No, of course not. Otherwise you would have been arranging my funeral now.” She smiles shrewdly at the alarm on his face. “What a waste,” she then sighs. “If only it had been at a rally or something. You know, if it had been the fault of the police, breaking a leg would have been of some use.”

  Shiv is taken aback by this sample of her wishful thinking but also engaged by it. So the cause—whatever hers is—is worth a broken leg? Why has he never seen this Meena before?

  “Look, I know you plan to call my parents.” She slips this in casually, though she is watching him carefully. “I’d rather you didn’t. That you didn’t worry them. I’ll be all right here. You don’t mind, do you?”

  Shiv is completely unprepared for this. But she is waiting for him to decide, holding back eagerness and anxiety. The worldly-wise smile and all other hints of shrewdness have left her face.

  “Of course, if you want to stay here …” Shiv finds himself saying to her. “I think we should speak to your parents, you would be more comfortable with your mother here. Kamla can be quite elusive if Rekha is not here. But let’s see. Let’s see how it goes for a few days.”

  “I don’t need Kamla, she’s too slow and clumsy. But you’re here, aren’t you? Since you don’t have to meet your students, can’t you bring your work home? I mean—if you don’t mind?”

  At the Department, Shiv unlocks his room and finds several notes that have been pushed under the door. He picks up the dusty bits of paper and sees that one is a reminder to attend a meeting at noon. Another is a long list of Items for Discussion. If he had remembered the m
eeting, maybe he wouldn’t have left Meena to Kamla’s mercy. When Rekha is not in town, Kamla develops a host of handicaps, beginning with deafness.

  As usual Shiv is the last one at the meeting. The Department Head, his four colleagues, and a secretary armed with pad and pen are already there. The Head sits with his secretary next to him like a handmaiden; facing them are his colleagues, Lal, Arya, Menon, and Amita Sen. The core faculty, processors of historical resources for their unseen students.

  The ubiquitous beverage, a creative fusion of tea and coffee, has already arrived in chipped white cups and saucers. Everyone waits as always for the secretary to play mother and pass the cups around. Though Shiv gives her a sympathetic smile she hands him a particularly loathsome cup. Not only is it chipped, it is also stained on the edge. Some of the lukewarm brown liquid has splashed on to the saucer. What is left in the cup has a circle of wrinkled skin floating on its surface. The secretary too looks at Shiv’s cup, then looks apologetic. He takes the cup and saucer from her and puts them back on the table. Then he sits down next to Amita (who gives him a quick conspiratorial grin) and he unfolds the slip of paper with the items for discussion. Out of twelve, seven are marked with asterisks to illustrate their importance.

  “Shall we begin?” asks the Head, clearing his throat.

  The tubelight flickers.

  The Head frowns at the light and it obediently settles down. A small triumph in a small life. The Head, Dr. Sharma, is a timid man whose head is just a little too big for his slight, finely sculpted body. His idea of paradise would be a place where the inmates proceed solemnly from one meeting to another. He is now practicing for his role in his own corner of paradise: presiding, unbearably grave and pompous.

  “Our biggest problem at this juncture is maintenance of the computers and printers. You are all aware that this is expensive, state-of-the-art equipment.” (Shiv wonders if this is what Administration told him and if he really believes it.) “But in the past week one printer was left working all night with a month’s supply of paper completely twisted out of shape. There is also the problem of outsiders using the computer facilities. What I put to you today is one possible solution: should we appoint a Vigilance Officer from among us to check all the equipment first thing in the morning and last thing at night?”

  Everyone looks at his or her papers with firm concentration, waiting for the inevitable volunteer. Dr. Kishan Lal obliges. “I will need a set of keys,” he tells the Head, who in turn asks the furiously writing secretary to make a note of it.

  “Then there is the business of the coolers,” says the Head. “Administration has sent a memo which the Dean has forwarded to me—let me see, here it is—All Department Heads may kindly fill in particulars re. the condition of the Department coolers. This is to ensure that repairs are carried out in good time for the summer season.”

  The Head pauses; he is the only one of them with air-conditioning in his room, and the poor man is always nervous about a mutiny among his coolerwalla colleagues.

  Dr. Lal now feels compelled to observe with a profound air, “It is almost September …”

  “A little late for this year, but maybe for next summer?” says the Head, slipping the memo under his pile of papers.

  On cue, the power goes. Everyone stirs restlessly while the secretary opens curtains, windows, door.

  Shaded by semidarkness, his sheaf of papers doubling as a hand-fan, Shiv yawns luxuriously as they proceed through the other items.

  Lesson and module deadlines. The fax machine is misbehaving again. Three hundred and seventy-six assignments have been lost in the post. Stationery sanctions once again: they were short of pens in last week’s National Movements course writers’ meeting.

  By the time the power comes back and the fans and cooler stir into frenetic, whirling life, they are down to the last item. An innocent catchall heading minus asterisk, Any Other Matters for Discussion.

  The Head looks down modestly at his papers and says, “I am aware of the fact that this is a general administrative meeting, not a course team meeting. But with your permission, Dr. Menon, as In-Charge of the Modern India course, and yours, Dr. Murthy, as In-Charge of the B.A. History program—we have a rather delicate item to take up now. Dr. Arya has brought it to my notice that some faculty members may be overstepping their bounds. Or should I say, overusing their editorial pencils.”

  Shiv can see Arya steal a look at Menon.

  It’s only recently that Arya has been promoted to being addressed as Doctor. Though Shiv still doesn’t know where the man got a doctorate from, or even if he has one in the first place. Arya was a mousy dogsbody for years—Kishan Lal’s predecessor in the volunteering hotseat. But over the last year or two, he has been revealing a more aggressive face, unveiling one tantalizing feature at a time. Shiv has heard rumors of the weekly meetings in Arya’s house on campus; he has heard that the guests have been seen leaving the house in khaki gear. Certainly Arya has acquired a new look. His face, once hangdog and apologetic, now seems devoid of flab. Leaner, meaner.

  But whatever his new look and connections, it is difficult to take Arya seriously. To see Arya as academic. Or Arya as the enemy-in-training. To believe in Arya the historian. (Though many of them only edit what other historians write, the word historian—something of a touchstone, an ideal—is never absent from their minds.)

  Arya is now trying out his new persona in public. He has actually taken the trouble to read a lesson, part of one of the modules on Modern India; and he claims that it has been unfairly edited. “Cut and slashed,” he says, glowering in the general direction of Menon, Amita and Shiv. His open mouth reveals illicitly large teeth, long like those of a hungry wolf. “Why ask an eminent historian to write a lesson if we are going to do whatever we like with it?”

  Like Arya, the eminent historian is a pamphleteer who has recently turned into a scholar.

  The Head, his eyes carefully neutral, turns to Menon. Menon is a thin, taciturn man with a heap of curls on his head and a lush beard. All this hair and the clothes he wears—always a couple of sizes too big for him—are part of his camouflage system. “Dr. Menon?” the Head now says, trying not to be irritated by the fact that Menon is looking up into space and not at him. “Maybe you could tell us what the problem was?”

  Menon tears himself away from the ceiling. He makes a quick calculation or two though his face remains unreadable. “I thought it best to steer clear of controversial statements,” he says. (Menon knows this will appeal to the Head.) “The author had made one or two questionable statements on minority communities and I excised those. I don’t recall actually rewriting anything.”

  But Arya pipes in angrily, “Maybe Dr. Menon needs to refresh his memory. I have the material right here. A whole paragraph, a key paragraph, has been dropped from an important section: ‘Problems of the Country and Their Solutions.’ ”

  He proceeds to read every jewel-encrusted word of the paragraph. “Our land has always been a temptation to greedy marauders, barbarous invaders and oppressive rulers. This story of invasion and resistance is three thousand years old. Hundreds of thousands of foreigners found their way to India during these thousands of years, but they all suffered humiliating defeat. Some of them we digested. When we were disunited, we failed to recognize who were our own and who were foreigners, and we were unable to digest them. Today, apart from Muslims, even Christians, Parsis and other foreigners are also recognized as minority communities. But in many of the states the Hindus have been reduced to a minority, and the Muslims, Christians or Sikhs are in a majority.”

  There is an uncomfortable silence.

  The secretary, Mrs. Khan, is a Muslim. Arya must remember this too, though each time he says the words “foreigner” or “Muslim” he spits them out like something sour in his mouth. Shiv can see that all of them are looking at Mrs. Khan with some sort of fascinated horror. The secretary’s face is impassive, bent over her pad. She seems to be writing down every word as if her life
depends on it.

  The Head’s face is pinched with anxiety; meetings in paradise do not slip out of control. “Mrs. Khan,” he says to the bent head, “I don’t think we need keep you any longer. I know you have work piled up on your table—oh, I have also asked Administration to send the temp we asked for. She will come in today so you can familiarize her with the office work.”

  The secretary is out of the room in a flash; she does not stop to pick up the empty cups and saucers from the table.

  The Head sighs; even he sees that this meeting must be brought to an end. “I think we will sort out this little matter more easily if—if Dr. Menon and Dr. Arya have a healthy dialogue. In my room, say in about half an hour?”

  Back in his room, Shiv discovers a nice coincidence: a notice in his In-tray tells him Mrs. Khan is going on casual leave from the next day. Obviously the leave was planned many days back. But now she has about a week to recover from the new status thrust on her—Muslim Mrs. Khan, Foreign Mrs. Khan. Mrs. Khan, a woman who has travelled leagues from her grandmother’s and mother’s lives to work in an office and make a modest contribution to the family income. Now she is being pushed back to square one, to the old diminishing religious identity. She has a few days to examine her new status and, hopefully, shed it. To come back the same sweet, helpful secretary they know, incorrigible only when it comes to telling n’s and u’s apart on her typewriter.

  Shiv frowns at his In-tray. Suddenly he wants to get away from the Department. He does have to leave early anyway to buy Meena’s crutches. He should go home and see how she is managing. And he has to decide what to do about ringing up her mother. Decide about Meena staying on.

  Amita Sen walks in, catches his frown. “Faculty meeting blues?” she asks in mock sympathy, though Shiv knows she is here to exorcise her own disgust at the combination of coolers and Arya’s idiocies taking up a whole morning of her life.