Legal Fiction

by Chandan Pandey

  Dadda may or may not have found my reply unsavoury, but his followers certainly took great offence. They all tried to teach me a thing or two about image. Dadda also made an attempt. He asked, ‘What if a shadow falls upon the image?’

  ‘A shadow can dissipate. Perhaps you mean to say – what if the image gets tainted?’

  ‘Stains can be removed as well,’ Dadda shot back. Then, he found a middle path: ‘It’s possible that self-image has less importance in literature, but the business of life runs on it.’ He began to narrate a story about Rolls-Royce.

  The young woman had been busy on her phone all this while, but she immediately sat upright upon hearing these words.

  ‘Some hundred years ago, the queen of England sent a Rolls-Royce car as a gift to the king of Tamkuhi. It was an expensive and exquisite gift, and people came from all over just to get a glimpse of it. Forget the vehicle, people would be ecstatic even if they got to touch the tarp that covered it. So many people came to see it that they imposed a fee of one anna as ticket. There is no better car than a Rolls- Royce even now, so imagine the situation back then. You were talking about “brand image” – consider this its origin. What happened next? The car broke down after a week. All attempts were made to fix it. The king and queen had to get on a palanquin from the place where the car had stopped. A mechanic from England was sent for. When the mechanic opened it up, he found there was no engine inside. He was brought in front of the king, who asked him, “I can understand that there is no engine in the car. But what I can’t understand is, how did it run for a week?” The mechanic answered, bowing his head low in deference, “The name Rolls-Royce itself was enough, my lord.”’

  A silence descended upon us all once the story ended. After a while, Dadda added, ‘That Raja Sahib was none other than my own late grandfather.’

  There is nothing one can say after such ‘facts’. Once you wrap a fable around yourself, the fable becomes fact and gets registered as history.

  Whatever time I could get to think in the interim, I spent it convincing myself that perhaps it was true that life ran on images. Why squabble over this?

  EVERYBODY BEGAN TO DISPERSE AT around 11 p.m. The first to leave was Shyam Kishore Jaiswal, who owned a printing press and was editor of Agniban, an evening tabloid. His wife walked over to me and said, ‘Do come over to our place as well.’ Folding her hands in a namaskar, she said, ‘I have not seen any writer before today.’ She may have thought it was a nice thing to say, so she repeated it.

  Then Malviya-ji – Dadda – departed. He blessed me once again before leaving and said, ‘Your presence has graced this town of ours.’ He assured me that we would spend more time together at the function day after tomorrow.

  There are precious few moments as a writer, and these are far between, when you feel that people adore you.

  Others touched Dadda’s feet repeatedly right until he got into the car. Amit Jain had taken his leave after touching Dadda’s feet, but when he saw that the car door was still open and the vehicle had just started, he raced to touch them once more.

  It was decided that I should return to the hotel. Shalabh insisted I stay over, but I excused myself saying I had some work to finish.

  Two things happened while I was leaving. First, Sunita handed me one of her paintings as a parting gift. She had signed it at the bottom, with every letter a little drawing in itself.

  Then, when I reached the car, Amit Garg came over along with Amit Jain. Both were cordial, and Amit Garg held my hand for a long while. Meanwhile, ten or twelve people gathered around us. It felt to me like the smaller gathering that follows after the dispersal of a big one.

  Amit Garg kept repeatedly asking if he could make a request, and I kept saying, ‘Yes, of course.’

  Finally, he said softly, ‘Sir, your Facebook post is bringing disrepute to this town.’

  I hadn’t looked at my Facebook or Twitter since morning. I had written about coming to Noma, but I wanted to know how exactly it had tarnished the town’s image. On the other hand, it was rare for my Facebook posts to get any attention. My lack of popularity was such that I would often ‘like’ my own posts, and sometimes that would be the only reaction to them. My presence on social media platforms was very limited.

  I asked him how my post had brought disrepute to Noma. He remained polite as he replied. Three distinct sentences, one by one, but they all added up to the same thing – that the Dol Mela was just three days away and I was attempting to malign the city at such a time: ‘The man has absconded with his student, anyone at the college will tell you about their affair.’ ‘More than two hundred people have written rubbish about the town because of your post.’ ‘People are writing nonsense about the Mangal Morcha on Twitter.’

  His argument didn’t win me over, but it was not right that my actions became a reason to insult someone else. So, I pulled out my phone right there to delete the post. But my phone was old, so the comments on my post appeared very slowly on the screen. Several people had given me their or their friends’ phone numbers and said that I could reach out to them at any time.

  I was drunk, but not drunk enough to not object to his suggestion that Rafique had ‘absconded’ with Janaki. I protested, and they immediately apologized, but they remained adamant that Rafique and Janaki had left their homes to live together. I began to worry about how Anasuya would feel if Rafique had really done so. And what if it fell upon me to tell her?

  Someone’s voice rang out: ‘Are you here to look for Rafique?’

  This question was akin to asking a guest why he had come. ‘What do you think?’ I replied in the same manner.

  The response to that, however, was hurled at me like a stone, and those present there too felt the pain. ‘Everybody is saying you’ve come to Noma to meet your ex-girlfriend.’ The others began to reprimand the person who had asked the question. In the ensuing furore, Shalabh and others came around to the car. I should have answered the question, but I didn’t. Why? First, because his own people had pounced upon him. And second, I continued to grapple with his first question.

  Thinking aloud, I told myself and the others, ‘I haven’t come here to find Rafique. He is not a lost tune or a memory that needs to be found. He is a living, breathing person, his wife is pregnant, and – now listen to this carefully – not a single person, not one person from this garbage town must have come forward to help her. That’s why she thought of me.’

  I kept thinking about the voice that had asked me whether I had come to Noma to meet my ex-girlfriend. This meant I was being watched closely, and a false narrative about me was being created and propagated.

  I’m not sure if I was asleep or not, but I thought of Anasuya.

  Was I thinking of her or imagining her?

  If I could, I would have postponed today’s sleep to tomorrow and gone to see Anasuya right away. I would have familiarized myself with her situation. I would have asked her in clear terms, ‘What do you know about Rafique and Janaki? If you already knew about them, why did you ask me to come?’

  But I was exhausted. I somehow reached the hotel. The boy at the reception had fallen asleep. I dragged myself up the stairs. The pages were spread out all over the room to dry, and because the fan would have blown them away, I went to bed without turning it on. I heard a few pages crinkle under my back and realized that I was only supposed to sleep on the left side of the bed. Just before I fell asleep, I thought of calling Anasuya or Archana. I remembered I had received a call from an unknown number. It was hard to make out anything from the screen, which was worse than blurry. My call was answered right away. ‘This is Amandeep speaking. I saw you at the station. I wanted to meet you regarding the matter of Rafique and Janaki.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Whenever you say. Now?’

  How was I to respond? What can one say on the phone anyway? I simply said, ‘Tomorrow,’ and before I could even hear my own words, I had dozed off.

  DAY TWO

  I WOKE UP TO
THE SOUND of a bird knocking its beak against the window. Perhaps it wanted to come inside the room. I could have opened the window, but this would have undone the makeshift rope I had made, and the pages of Rafique’s diary and notebook were still drying on it. I turned on the bulb, but the light seemed insufficient.

  I looked at the phone groggily. There were two messages:

  ‘Talk to me.’

  ‘Have you left?’

  I sensed fear, or maybe disbelief, in the second message. The first message was just a call to have a chat.

  I replied to the first one: ‘Yes, sir.’

  It took me a while to reply to the second: ‘Still here.’

  I remembered the phone call from late last night saying something about Rafique and Janaki. I called that number again. It was answered right away, as if the man was sitting next to his phone.

  ‘This is Amandeep.’

  ‘You were telling me something yesterday. Do you know Rafique and Janaki?’

  ‘I am being watched.’

  His mention of ‘being watched’ shook away any remaining slumber. ‘Who is watching you?’

  ‘Not over the phone. Can we meet and talk?’

  ‘Where do we meet? Come to Adarsh Hotel. Or I can come to your house.’

  ‘My house.’

  I was annoyed but I also chuckled at the drama unfolding in this tiny town which, in size, couldn’t even compete with a Delhi neighbourhood. Or was it that the people here harboured all sorts of fantasies about themselves?

  I had a long conversation with Archana. When you live with someone, you speak to them four or five times a day when they’re away at work, and this can go on for several years. And yet, here I was, speaking to her after a full twenty-four hours. Hearing her voice, I felt as if she was nearby and would come as soon as I asked her to. I could not see her reaction when I told her about Rafique and Janaki. What I mean is that Archana is someone who usually reacts more through her expressions and not so much through her words. But I couldn’t tell from her words whether she believed anything I said or not.

  She told me that she spoke with Anasuya after I didn’t respond to her call the previous night. ‘Anasuya is seven months along. Send for someone from her parents’ home or bring her with you to Delhi,’ she repeated several times. She also said Anasuya had prepared dinner for me. I told her all about the events of last night, barring the allegation that I had come to Noma to see my ex-girlfriend. I would have told her that too, but it would have been an irritant, especially after the talk of the alleged affair between Rafique and Janaki. When I told her I had a headache, I knew what her next question would be: ‘Did you drink?’

  ‘What do you think?’ I replied.

  I began looking at the pages of the diary while on the phone. Perhaps I could read the ones that were dry. But the air was so humid because of the monsoons that despite lying spread out an entire day and night, the pages had not dried. I did find a couple of damp pages near the window that could be read against the light trickling in from outside:

  24/8/15

  Jagdish does not like his character. We have performed the play four times, and only now has he come to realize he does not like his character. He wants to break away from us. But why? Because of the mounting pressure from those people. His older brother Suryabali was reluctant to send the report about our performance on 15 August to Dainik Surya. That news was bound to remain unpublished, and so it did.

  A second page had an entry for 20 June 2015. There were two addresses on it. In the first instance, the name of the addressee had melted away, and only the last lines were visible – ‘Flat No. 302, Vikram Marg, Police Lines’. It would be an exaggeration to call the next entry an address. There were simply two words: ‘Suhag Studio’.

  ‘I can’t understand anything,’ I said, expressing my frustration to Archana before cutting the call.

  A bus stand lay to the west of Radha Chitra Mandir. That was where the tea stall was to be found. All the shops along the way were closed. Some were in the process of opening up, with water being sprinkled on their yards to be swept, but the dust was not settling. The sun hadn’t fully risen in the sky, so the foul smells that engulfed the street during the nights still hung in the air. The tea stall was crowded, with tea of different tastes and kinds being ordered one after another.

  I didn’t expect Amandeep or anyone else to explain the situation any differently. But a question that had not occurred to me until yesterday now rose up in my mind. What if the news about Rafique and Janaki having an affair was incorrect? How could it be that first a man went missing, then a young woman disappeared, and yet barely anybody knew about it in such a small and peaceful town? I couldn’t think beyond this. I couldn’t think about what would happen even if people were aware about Rafique and Janaki’s disappearance. What then? Does the system allow us to participate in the grief of others by offering them legal help? Can we fight institutions on behalf of our friends with the same conviction as we do for our family?

  Let’s assume that I went missing one day – the thought itself terrified me. What if I actually went missing? What would Archana do? But how could I disappear unless someone deliberately made me disappear? How was Rafique’s mental health? Did he talk to himself? If he did, since when had he done so? And even if he didn’t, it was important to know his mental state. From what I had read so far, his diary was not some glorious outpouring of emotions, so it seemed unlikely that I’d find any clues there.

  A signboard for ‘Furkan Vastralaya’ hung right across from the tea stall. The clothes shop was closed, but the name stayed on in my mind because the papers Anasuya had handed me were in a plastic bag from this very store.

  I wanted to reconstruct an entire sequence of events in my mind that I had not witnessed at all. Had Rafique and Anasuya visited this shop? What time was it? Had the dust settled, or did it fly all around? What did they buy? How did a plastic bag from this shop enter their lives after all?

  By the time the sun was up in the sky, I had already gulped down three cups of tea.

  When I got poori-sabzi packed for Anasuya and me, I had absolutely no idea that I would find Kushalpal, Mukesh, Jagdish and a fourth, Neeraj, at her place. I was astonished by the support Anasuya received through their continued presence and assistance. Were Rafique’s students really so attached to him? Without wasting a moment, I sent Kushal to fetch breakfast for everyone.

  The morning sunlight came down into her balcony as if it had slipped and fallen there. It remained in one spot, not moving an inch. All of us stood under its canopy except Anasuya. She sat on a chair with broken arms, wearing a polka-dotted maxi dress and a longish dupatta that covered her belly. She had wrapped another dupatta around her ears and throat. Her face was taut and glowing.

  Everybody was drinking their tea silently. When I realized that the sun would not leave us alone, I talked about the previous night, telling them everything, even the Rolls-Royce story. As I spoke, I remembered other things that had been lost during the gathering. I told Anasuya that Archana had invited her to Delhi, and that the daroga had said he would soon find Rafique.

  Kushal had not returned with breakfast yet, and I tried calling him. The opening lines of Ellie Goulding’s song ‘Love me like you do…’ played as the caller tune on his phone, which ended with the line, ‘I will let you set the pace.’ This town continued to baffle me. For the first time ever, I was hearing this song as someone’s caller tune.

  We then decided Anasuya would eat the pooris while the rest of us would go over to the shop. Then, we were to visit Janaki’s village.

  Every time Kushal’s companions called him, I asked them to put the phone on speaker so that I could listen to the song until the end. They called him several times before we reached Janaki’s village, so we heard the song several times too.

  I WOULD TURN THIRTY-THREE IN A few months, but this was the first time I was visiting a village. Whenever I wrote a short story in which a village figured, I would rely o
n facts I had read in books and other stories, I would recall movies, talk to numerous people who came from villages and, most importantly, to those who still remained in touch with their villages and visited regularly.

  Janaki’s village, called Sujja, had mostly Brahmins with the surname Dubey living in it. A left turn three kilometres after Noma towards Lar Road would lead you to a semi-pucca road that cut right through Sujja, and there onwards to Bhagalpur. The three students, who sat in the back, expressed their regret at not knowing the address of a girl who not only studied with them in the same college but was also part of their theatre group. But we didn’t have to ask around too much. We stopped near a man holding a lathi and wearing a loincloth, who looked like a shepherd. Before I could say anything, he asked, ‘You want to go to Ramkripal Dubey’s house?’

  We said no. Then he asked again, ‘Arey, the house of the girl who has gone missing, no?’

  This time, we said yes.

  He patiently gave us the directions.

  A police jeep was already parked outside the house.

  There was silence all around.

  This was an entirely different world.

  Despite such terrible circumstances, the family still remained hospitable. Wooden stools had been placed on the veranda. No sooner had we taken our seats than two young men emerged from inside with a jug full of water, clean steel tumblers, and a tray filled with light-yellow laddus.

  We met Janaki’s father, Ramkripal Dubey. Mukesh introduced us to him. Ramkripal told us that three constables had been going through Rukkhi’s room over and over for the last couple of hours. Janaki was addressed as ‘Rukkhi’ at home – another name for a squirrel. The pet name spoke volumes about how much they loved their daughter. Ramkripal told us a lot of things. How he regretted that, despite Rukkhi getting a seat in Gorakhpur University, he could not let her study away from home. He didn’t have much money and was already paying for Rukkhi’s brother Roshan’s engineering degree, which was why Gorakhpur was beyond his means.