Notes from the Hinterland: Stories and Essays 9789388292559

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One of the meanings of the word ‘olio’ is ‘a miscellany’. The books in the Aleph Olio series contain a selection of the finest writing to be had on a variety of Indian themes—the great cities, aspects of culture and civilization, and other uniquely Indian phenomena. Filled with insights and haunting evocations of a country of unrivalled complexity, beauty, tragedy and mystery, each Aleph Olio book presents India in ways that it has seldom been seen before.

Also in Aleph Olio The Essence of Delhi In a Violent Land Love and Lust Forthcoming in Aleph Olio Ways of Dying The Book of Kings

ALEPH BOOK COMPANY An independent publishing firm promoted by Rupa Publications India First published in India in 2019 by Aleph Book Company 7/16 Ansari Road, Daryaganj New Delhi 110 002 Anthology copyright © Aleph Book Company 2019 Cover image copyright © designer_an/Shutterstock p. 139 (Acknowledgements) is an extension of the copyright page. Copyright for the individual pieces and translations vests in the respective authors and translators. All rights reserved. While every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain permission, this has not been possible in all cases; any omissions brought to our attention will be remedied in future editions. In the works of fiction in this anthology, names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. In the works of non-fiction, the views and opinions expressed in this book are the authors’ own and the facts are as reported by them, which have been verified to the extent possible, and the publishers are in no way liable for the same. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from Aleph Book Company. ISBN: 978-93-88292-55-9 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 For sale in the Indian subcontinent only. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.

Small towns always remind me of death. My hometown lies calmly amidst the trees, it is always the same, in the summer or winter, with the dust flying, or the wind howling down the gorge. —From ‘Small Towns and the River’ by Mamang Dai

A NOTE ON STYLE As the various stories and essays in this book have been excerpted from books that have their own styles of spelling Indian words and proper nouns, no attempt has been made to standardize the text according to the Aleph house style. The only stylistic rules that have been observed throughout the book are that British spellings have been used and Indian words have not been italicized.

CONTENTS 1. SHASHI THAROOR Scheduled Castes, Unscheduled Change 2. RUSKIN BOND The Night Train at Deoli 3. R. K. NARAYAN An Astrologer’s Day 4. D. B. G. TILAK The Man Who Saw God Translated from the Telugu by Ranga Rao 5. RAHI MASOOM REZA A Village Divided Translated from the Hindi by Gillian Wright 6. SHRILAL SHUKLA Raag Darbari Translated from the Hindi by Gillian Wright 7. MADHURI VIJAY Lorry Raja 8. ABHIMANYU KUMAR The Lynching That Changed India 9. SNIGDHA POONAM The Man Who Lived 10. P. SAINATH Ganpati Yadav’s Gripping Life Cycle Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors

one

~ SCHEDULED CASTES, UNSCHEDULED CHANGE*

SHASHI THAROOR

I

was about eight or nine when I first came across Charlis. A few of us children were kicking a ball around the dusty courtyard of my grandmother’s house in rural Kerala, where my parents took me annually on what they called a holiday and I regarded as a cross between a penance and a pilgrimage. (Their pilgrimage, my penance.) Balettan, my oldest cousin, who was all of thirteen and had a bobbing Adam’s apple to prove it, had just streaked across me and kicked the ball with more force than he realized he possessed. It soared upwards like a startled bird, curved perversely away from us, and disappeared over our high brick wall into the rubbish heap at the back of the neighbour’s house. ‘Damn,’ I said. I had grown up in Bombay where one said things like that. ‘Go and get it, da,’ Balettan commanded one of the younger cousins. Da was a term of great familiarity, used especially when ordering young boys around. A couple of the kids, stifling groans, dutifully set off toward the wall. But before they could reach it the ball came sailing back over their heads towards us, soon followed over the wall by a skinny, sallow youth with a pockmarked face and an anxious grin. He seemed vaguely familiar, someone I’d seen in the background on previous holidays but not really noticed, though I wasn’t sure why. ‘Charlis!’ a couple of the kids called out. ‘Charlis got the ball!’

Charlis sat on the wall, managing to look both unsure and pleased with himself. Bits of muck from the rubbish heap clung to his shirt and skin. ‘Can I play?’ he asked diffidently. Balettan gave him a look that would have desiccated a coconut. ‘No, you can’t, Charlis,’ he said shortly, kicking the ball towards me, away from the interloper who’d rescued it. Charlis’s face lost its grin, leaving only the look of anxiety across it like a shadow. He remained seated on the wall, his legs—bare and thin below the grubby mundu he tied around his waist—dangling nervously. The game resumed, and Charlis watched, his eyes liquid with wistfulness. He would kick the brick wall aimlessly with his foot, then catch himself doing it and stop, looking furtively at us to see whether anyone had noticed. But no one paid any attention to him, except me, and I was the curious outsider. ‘Why can’t he play?’ I finally found the courage to ask Balettan. ‘Because he can’t, that’s all,’ replied my eldest cousin. ‘But why? We can always use another player,’ I protested. ‘We can’t use him,’ Balettan said curtly. ‘Don’t you understand anything, stupid?’ That was enough to silence me, because I had learned early on that there was a great deal about the village I didn’t understand. A city upbringing didn’t prepare you for your parents’ annual return to their roots, to the world they’d left behind and failed to equip you for. Everything, pretty much, was different in my grandmother’s house: there were hurricane lamps instead of electric lights, breezes instead of ceiling fans, a cow in the barn rather than a car in the garage. Water didn’t come out of taps but from a well, in buckets laboriously raised by rope pulleys; you poured it over yourself out of metal vessels, hoping the maidservant who’d heated the bathwater over a charcoal fire had not made it so hot you’d scald yourself. There were the obscure indignities of having to be accompanied to the outhouse by an adult with a gleaming stainless-steel flashlight and of needing to hold his hand while you squatted in the privy, because the chairlike commodes of the city had made you unfit to discharge your waste as an Indian should, on his haunches. But it wasn’t just a question of these inconveniences; there was the sense of being in a

different world. Bombay was busy, bustling, unpredictable; there were children of every imaginable appearance, colour, language, and religion in my school; it was a city of strangers jostling one another all the time. In my grandmother’s village everyone I met seemed to know one another and be related. They dressed alike, did the same things day after day, shared the same concerns, celebrated the same festivals. Their lives were ordered, predictable; things were either done or not done, according to rules and assumptions I’d never been taught in the city. Some of the rules were easier than others to grasp. There were, for instance, complicated hierarchies that everyone seemed to take for granted. The ones I first understood were those relating to age. This was absolute, like an unspoken commandment: everyone older had to be respected and obeyed, even if they sent you off on trivial errands they should really have done themselves. Then there was gender: the women existed to serve the men, fetching and carrying and stitching and hurrying for them, eating only after they had fed the men first. Even my mother, who could hold her own at a Bombay party with a cocktail in her hand, was transformed in Kerala into a dutiful drudge, blowing into the wood fire to make the endless stacks of thin, soft, crisp-edged dosas we all wolfed down. None of this had to be spelled out, no explicit orders given; people simply seemed to adjust naturally to an immutable pattern of expectations, where everyone knew his place and understood what he had to do. As someone who came from Bombay for a month’s vacation every year, spoke the language badly, hated the bathrooms, and swelled up with insect bites, I adjusted less than most. I sensed dimly that the problem with Charlis, too, had something to do with hierarchy, but since he was neither female nor particularly young, I couldn’t fit him into what I thought I already knew of Kerala village life. We finished the game soon enough, and everyone began heading indoors. Charlis jumped off the wall. Instinctively, but acting with the casual hospitability I usually saw around me, I went up to him and said, ‘My mother’ll be making dosas for tea. Want some?’ I was puzzled by the look of near panic that flooded his face. ‘No, no, that’s all right,’ he said, practically backing away from me. I could

see Balettan advancing towards us. ‘I’ve got to go,’ Charlis added, casting me a strange look as he fled. ‘What’s the matter with him?’ I asked Balettan. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he retorted. ‘What were you saying to him?’ ‘I just asked him to join us for some dosas, that’s all,’ I replied. Seeing his expression, I added lamely, ‘you know, with all the other kids.’ Balettan shook his head in a combination of disgust and dismay, as if he didn’t know whether to be angry or sad. ‘You know what this little foreigner did?’ he announced loudly as soon as we entered the house. ‘He asked Charlis to come and have dosas with us!’ This was greeted with guffaws by some and clucks of disapproval by others. ‘Poor little boy, what does he know?’ said my favorite aunt, the widowed Rani-valiamma, gathering me to her ample bosom to offer a consolation I hadn’t realized I needed. ‘It’s not his fault.’ ‘What’s not my fault?’ I asked, struggling free of her embrace. The Cuticura talcum powder in her cleavage tickled my nose, and the effort not to sneeze made me sound even more incoherent than usual. ‘Why shouldn’t I invite him? He got our ball back for us. And you invite half the village anyway if they happen to pass by.’ ‘Yes, but which half?’ chortled Kunjunni-mama, a local layabout and distant relative who was a constant presence at our dining table and considered himself a great wit. ‘Which half, I say?’ He laughed heartily at his own question, his eyes rolling, a honking sound emerging from the back of his nose. I couldn’t see why anyone else found this funny, but I was soon sent off to wash my hands. I sat down to my dosas feeling as frustrated as a vegetarian at a kebab-shop. ‘Who is Charlis, anyway?’ I asked as my mother served me the mild chutney she made specially since I couldn’t handle the fiery spiced version everyone else ate. ‘I don’t know, dear, just a boy from the village,’ she responded. ‘Now finish your dosas, the adults have to eat.’ ‘Charlis is the Prince of Wales, didn’t you know?’ honked Kunjunnimama, enjoying himself hugely. ‘I thought you went to a convent

school, Neel.’ ‘First of all, only girls go to convent schools,’ I responded hotly. ‘And anyway the Prince of Wales is called Charles, not Charlis.’ I shot him a look of pure hatred, but he was completely unfazed. He soaked it in as a paddy field would a rainstorm, and honked some more. ‘Charlis, Charles, what’s the difference to an illiterate Untouchable with airs above his station? Anyway, that’s how it sounded in Malayalam, and that’s how he wrote it. Charlis. So you see how the Prince of Wales was born in Vanganassery.’ He exploded into selfsatisfied mirth, his honks suggesting he was inhaling his own pencilline moustache. I hadn’t understood what he meant, but I vowed not to seek any further clarification from him. My mother came to my rescue. I could see that her interest was piqued. ‘But why Charles?’ she paused in her serving and asked Kunjunni-mama. ‘Are they Christians?’ ‘Christians?’ Kunjunni-mama honked again. ‘My dear chechi, what do these people know of religion? Do they have any culture, any traditions? One of them, that cobbler fellow, Mandan, named his sons Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Can you imagine? The fellow didn’t even know that “Mahatma” was a title and “Nehru” a family surname. His brats were actually registered in school as M. Mahatma Gandhi and M. Jawaharlal Nehru. So of course when this upstart scavenger shopkeeper has to name his offspring, he went one better. Forget nationalism, he turned to the British royal family. So what if they had Christian names? So what if he couldn’t pronounce them? You think Charlis is bad enough? He has two sisters, Elizabeth and Anne. Of course everyone in the village calls them Eli and Ana.’ This time even I joined in the laughter: I had enough Malayalam to know that Eli meant ‘rat’ and Ana meant ‘elephant.’ But a Bombayite sense of fairness asserted itself. ‘lt doesn’t matter what his name is,’ I said firmly. ‘Charlis seems a nice boy. He went into the rubbish heap to get our ball. I liked him.’ ‘Nice boy!’ Kunjunni-mama’s tone was dismissive, and this time there was no laughter in his honk. ‘Rubbish heaps are where they

belong. They’re not clean. They don’t wash. They have dirty habits.’ ‘What dirty habits?’ I asked, shaking off my mother’s restraining hand. ‘Who’s they?’ ‘Eat your food,’ Kunjunni-mama said to me, adding, to no one in particular, ‘and now this Communist government wants to put them in our schools. With our children.’ He snorted. ‘They’ll be drinking out of our wells next.’

X A few days later, the kids at home all decided to go to the local stream for a dip. On earlier Kerala holidays my mother had firmly denied me permission to go along, sure that if I didn’t drown I’d catch a cold; but now I was older, I’d learned to swim, and I was capable of toweling myself dry, so I was allowed the choice. It seemed a fun idea, and in any case there was nothing better to do at home: I’d long since finished reading the couple of Biggles books I’d brought along. I set out with a sense of adventure. We walked through dusty, narrow lanes, through the village, Balettan in the lead, half a dozen of the cousins following. For a while the houses we passed seemed to be those of relatives and friends; the kids waved cheerful greetings to women hanging up their washing, girls plaiting or picking lice out of each other’s hair, barechested men in white mundus sitting magisterially in easy chairs, perusing the day’s Mathrubhumi. Then the lane narrowed and the whitewashed, tile-roofed houses with verdant backyards gave way to thatched huts squeezed tightly together, their interiors shrouded in a darkness from which wizened crones emerged stooping through lowceilinged doorways, the holes in their alarmingly stretched earlobes gaping like open mouths. The ground beneath our feet, uneven and stony, hurt to walk on, and a stale odour hung in the air, a compound of rotting vegetation and decaying flesh. Despair choked my breath like smoke. I began to wish I hadn’t come along. At last we left the village behind, and picked our way down a rocky, moss-covered slope to the stream. I didn’t know what I’d expected, but it wasn’t this, a meandering rivulet that flowed muddily through the fields. At the water’s edge, on a large rock nearby, women were

beating the dirt out of their saris; in the distance, a man squatted at a bend in the stream, picking his teeth and defecating. My cousins peeled off their shirts and ran into the water. ‘Come on, Neel,’ Balettan exhorted me with a peremptory wave of the hand. ‘Don’t be a sissy. It’s not cold.’ ‘Just don’t feel like it,’ I mumbled. ‘It’s okay. You go ahead. I’ll watch.’ They tried briefly to persuade me to change my mind, then left me to my own devices. I stood on the shore looking at them, heard their squeals of laughter, then looked away at the man who had completed his ablutions and was scooping water from the river to wash himself. Downstream from him, my cousins ducked their heads underwater. I quickly averted my gaze. That was when I saw him. Charlis was sitting on a rocky overhang, a clean shirt over his mundu, a book in his hand. But his eyes weren’t on it. He was looking down at the stream, where my cousins were playing. I clambered over the rocks to him. When he spotted me he seemed to smile in recognition, then look around anxiously. But there was no one else about, and he relaxed visibly. ‘Neel,’ he said, smiling. ‘Aren’t you swimming today?’ I shook my head. ‘Water’s dirty,’ I said. ‘Not dirty,’ he replied in Malayalam. ‘The stream comes from a sacred river. Removes all pollution.’ I started to retort, then changed my mind. ‘So why don’t you swim?’ I asked. ‘Ah, I do,’ he said. ‘But not here.’ His eyes avoided mine, but seemed to take in the stream, the washerwomen, my cousins. ‘Not now.’ Bits of the half-understood conversation from the dining table floated awkwardly back into my mind. I changed the subject. ‘It was nice of you to get our ball back for us that day,’ I said. ‘Ah, it was nothing.’ He smiled unexpectedly, his pockmarks creasing across his face. ‘My father beat me for it when I got home, though. I had ruined a clean shirt. Just after my bath.’

‘But I thought you people didn’t—’ I found myself saying. ‘I’m sorry,’ I finished lamely. ‘Didn’t what?’ he asked evenly, but without looking at me. He was clearly some years older than me, but not much bigger. I wondered whether he was scared of me, and why. ‘Nothing,’ I replied. ‘I’m really sorry your father beat you.’ ‘Ah, that’s all right. He does it all the time. It’s for my own good.’ ‘What does your father do?’ Charlis became animated by my interest. ‘He has a shop,’ he said, a light in his eyes. ‘In our part of the village. The Nair families don’t come there, but he sells all sorts of nice things. Provisions and things. And on Thursdays, you know what he has? The best halwa in Vanganassery.’ ‘Really? I like halwa.’ It was, in fact, the only Indian dessert I liked; Bombay had given me a taste for ice cream and chocolate rather than the deep-fried laddoos and bricklike Mysoor-paak that were the Kerala favourites. ‘You like halwa?’ Charlis clambered to his feet. ‘Come on, I’ll get you some.’ This time it was my turn to hesitate. ‘No, thanks,’ I said, looking at my cousins cavorting in the water. ‘I don’t think I should. They’ll worry about me. And besides, I don’t know my way about the village.’ ‘That’s okay,’ Charlis said. ‘I’ll take you home. Come on.’ He saw the expression on my face. ‘It’s really good halwa,’ he added. That was enough for a nine-year-old. ‘Wait for me,’ I said, and ran down to the water’s edge. ‘See you at home!’ I called out to the others. Balettan was the only one who noticed me. ‘Sure you can find your way back?’ he asked, as my cousins splashed around him, one leaping onto his shoulders. ‘I’ll be okay,’ I replied, and ran back up the slope as Balettan went under.

X

Charlis left me at the bend in our lane, where all I had to do was to walk through a relative’s yard to reach my grandmother’s house. He would not come any farther, and I knew better than to insist. I walked slowly to the house, my mind full of the astonishment with which his father had greeted my presence in his shop, the taste of his sugary, milky tea still lingering on my palate, my hands full of the orangecoloured wobbling slabs of halwa he had thrust upon me. ‘Neel, my darling!’ my mother exclaimed as I walked in. ‘Where have you been? I’ve been so worried about you.’ ‘Look what I’ve got!’ I said proudly, holding out the halwa. ‘And there’s enough for everyone.’ ‘Where did you get that?’ Balettan asked, a white thorthumundu, a thin Kerala towel, in his hand, his hair still wet from his recent swim. ‘Charlis gave it to me,’ I said. ‘I went to his father’s shop. They—’ ‘You did what?’ Balettan’s rage was frightening. He advanced towards me. ‘I—I—’ ‘Went to Charlis’s shop?’ He loomed over me, the towel draped over his shoulder making him look even older and more threatening. ‘Took food from Untouchables?’ I began to shrink back from him. ‘Give that to me!’ ‘I won’t!’ I snatched the halwa away from his hands, and as he lunged, I turned and ran, the precious sweet sticky in my grasp. But he was too fast for me; I had barely reached the yard when he caught up, seized me roughly by the shoulders, and turned me around to face him. ‘We don’t do this here, understand?’ he breathed fiercely. ‘This isn’t Bombay.’ He pried my hands apart. The halwa gleamed in my palms. ‘Drop it,’ he commanded. ‘No,’ I wanted to say, but the word would not emerge. I wanted to cry out for my mother, but she did not come out of the house. ‘Drop it,’ Balettan repeated, his voice a whiplash across what remained of my resistance. Slowly I opened my hands outwards in a gesture of submission. The orange slabs slid reluctantly off them. It seemed to me they took an age to fall, their gelatinous surfaces clinging to the soft skin of my

palms until the last possible moment. Then they were gone, fallen, into the dust. Balettan looked at them on the ground for a moment, then at me, and spat upon them where they lay. ‘The dogs can have them,’ he barked. He kicked more dust over them, then pulled me by the arm back towards the house. ‘Don’t you ever do this again.’ I burst into tears then, and at last the words came, tripping over themselves as I stumbled back into the house. ‘I hate you! All of you! You’re horrible and mean and cruel and I’ll never come back here as long as I live!’

X But of course I was back the next year; I hardly had any choice in the matter. For my parents, first-generation migrants to the big city, this was the vital visit home, to their own parents and siblings, to the friends and family they had left behind; it renewed them, it returned them to a sense of themselves, it maintained their connection to the past. I just came along because I was too young to be left behind, indeed too young to be allowed the choice. In the year that had passed since my last visit, there had been much ferment in Kerala. Education was now universal and compulsory and free, so all sorts of children were flocking to school who had never been able to go before. There was talk of land reform, and giving title to tenant farmers; I understood nothing of this, but saw the throngs around men with microphones on the roadside, declaiming angry harangues I could not comprehend. None of this seemed, however, to have much to do with us, or to affect the unchanging rhythms of life at my grandmother’s house. My cousins were numerous and varied, the children of my mother’s brothers and sisters and also of her cousins, who lived in the neighbouring houses; sometimes the relationship was less clear than that, but as they all ran about together and slept side by side like a camping army on mats on the floor of my grandmother’s thalam, it was difficult to tell who was a first cousin and who an uncle’s fatherin-law’s sister’s grandson. After all, it was also their holiday season, and my parents’ return was an occasion for everyone to congregate

in the big house. On any given day, with my cousins joined by other children from the village, there could be as many as a dozen kids playing in the courtyard or going to the stream or breaking up for cards on the back porch. Sometimes I joined them, but sometimes, taking advantage of the general confusion, I would slip away unnoticed, declining to make the effort to scale the barriers of language and education and attitude that separated us, and sit alone with a book. Occasionally someone would come and look for me. Most often, that someone was my aunt, Rani-valiamma. As a young widow, she didn’t have much of a life. Deprived of the status that a husband would have given her, she seemed to walk on the fringes of the house; it had been whispered by her late husband’s family that only the bad luck her stars had brought into his life could account for his fatal heart attack at the age of thirty-six, and a whiff of stigma clung to her like a cloying perfume she could never quite wash off. Remarriage was out of the question, nor could the family allow her to make her own way in the world; so she returned to the village house she had left as a bride, and tried to lose herself in the routines of my grandmother’s household. She sublimated her misfortune in random and frequent acts of kindness, of which I was a favoured beneficiary. She would bring me well-sugared lime-andwater from the kitchen without being asked, and whenever one of us brought down a green mango from the ancient tree with a lucky throw of a stone, she could be counted upon to return with it chopped up and marinated in just the right combination of salt and red chilli powder to drive my taste buds to ecstasy. One day Rani-valiamma and I were upstairs, eating deviled raw mango and looking out on the kids playing soccer below, when I saw something and nearly choked. ‘Isn’t that Charlis?’ I asked, pointing to the skinny boy who had just failed to save a goal. ‘Could be,’ she replied indifferently. ‘Let me see—yes, that’s Charlis.’ ‘But he’s playing in our yard! I remember last year—’ ‘That was last year,’ Rani-valiamma said, and I knew that change had come to the village.

But not enough of it. When the game was over, the Nair kids trooped in as usual to eat, without Charlis. When I asked innocently where he was, it was Balettan, inevitably, who replied. ‘We play with him at school, and we play with him outside,’ he said. ‘But playing stops at the front door.’ I didn’t pursue the matter. I had learned that whenever any of the Untouchable tradespeople came to the house, they were dealt with outside. With each passing vacation, though, the changes became more and more apparent. For years my grandmother, continuing a tradition handed down over generations, had dispensed free medication (mainly aspirins and cough syrup) once a week to the poor villagers who queued for it; then a real clinic was established in the village by the government, and her amateur charity was no longer needed. Electricity came to Vanganassery: my uncle strung up a brilliant neon light above the dining table, and the hurricane lamps began to disappear, along with the tin cans of kerosene from which they were fuelled. The metal vessels in the bathroom were replaced by shiny red plastic mugs. A toilet was installed in the outhouse for my father’s, and my, convenience. And one year, one day, quite naturally, Charlis stepped into the house with the other kids after a game. No one skipped a beat; it was as if everyone had agreed to pretend there was nothing unusual. Charlis stood around casually, laughing and chatting; some of the kids sat to eat, others awaited their turn. No one invited Charlis to sit or to eat, and he made no move himself to do either. Then those who had eaten rose and washed their hands and joined the chatter, while those who had been with Charlis took their places at the table. Still Charlis stood and talked, his manner modest and respectful, until everyone but he had finished eating, and then they all strolled out again to continue their game. ‘Charlis hasn’t eaten,’ I pointed out to the womenfolk. ‘I know, child, but what can we do?’ Rani-valiamma asked. ‘He can’t sit at our table or be fed on our plates. Even you know that.’ ‘It isn’t fair,’ I said, but without belligerence. What she had stated was, I knew, like a law of nature. Even the servants would not wash

a plate off which an Untouchable had eaten. ‘You know,’ honked Kunjunni-mama, tucking into his third helping, ‘they say that boy is doing quite well at school. Very well, in fact.’ ‘He stood first in class last term,’ a younger cousin chimed in. ‘First!’ I exclaimed. ‘And Balettan failed the year, didn’t he?’ ‘Now, why would you be asking that?’ chortled Kunjunni-mama meaningfully, slapping his thigh with his free hand. I ignored the question and turned to my aunt. ‘He’s smarter than all of us, and we can’t even give him something to eat?’ Rani-valiamma saw the expression on my face and squeezed my hand. ‘Don’t worry,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll think of something.’ She did; and the next time Charlis walked in, he was served food on a plantain leaf on the floor, near the back door. I was too embarrassed to hover near him as I had intended to, but he seemed to eat willingly enough on his own. ‘It’s just not right!’ I whispered to her as we watched him from a discreet distance. ‘He doesn’t mind,’ she whispered back. ‘Why should you?’ And it was true that Charlis probably ate on the floor in his own home. When he had finished, a mug of water was given to him on the back porch, so that he could wash his hands without stepping into our bathroom. And the plantain leaf was thrown away: no plate to wash. We returned to the game, and now it was my turn to miskick. The ball cleared the low wall at one end of the courtyard, hit the side of the well, teetered briefly on the edge, and fell in with a splash. It had happened before. ‘Go and get it, da,’ Balettan languidly commanded one of the kids. The well was designed to be climbed into: bricks jutted out from the inside wall at regular intervals, and others had been removed to provide strategic footholds. But this was a slippery business: since the water levels in the well rose and fell, the inside surface was pretty slimy, and many of those who’d gone in to retrieve a floating object, or a bucket that had slipped its rope, had ended up taking an unplanned dip. The young cousin who had

received Balettan’s instruction hesitated, staring apprehensively into the depths of the well. ‘Don’t worry,’ Charlis said quietly. ‘I’ll get it.’ He moved towards the edge of the well. ‘No!’ There was nothing languid now about Balettan’s tone; we could all hear the alarm in his voice. ‘I’ll do it myself.’ And Charlis, one half-raised foot poised to climb onto the well, looked at him, his face drained of expression, comprehension slowly burning into his cheeks. Balettan ran forward, roughly pushing aside the boy who had been afraid to go, and vaulted into the well. I looked at Rani-valiamma, who had been watching the game. ‘Balettan’s right,’ she said. ‘Do you think anyone would have drunk water at our house again if Charlis had gone into our well?’

X Years passed; school holidays, and trips to Kerala, came and went. Governments fell and were replaced in Kerala, farm labourers were earning the highest daily wage in the country, and my almost toothless grandmother was sporting a chalk-white set of new dentures under her smile. Yet the house seemed much the same as before. A pair of ceiling fans had been installed, in the two rooms where family members congregated; a radio crackled with the news from Delhi; a tap made its appearance in the bathroom, though the pipe attached to it led from the same old well. These improvements, and the familiarity that came from repeated visits, made the old privations bearable. Kerala seemed less of a penance with each passing year. Charlis was a regular member of the group now, admitted to our cardplaying sessions on the porch outside, joining us on our expeditions to the cinema in the nearest town. But fun and games seemed to hold a decreasing attraction for Charlis. He was developing a reputation as something of an intellectual. He would ask me, in painstaking textbook English, about something he had read about the great wide world outside, and listen attentively to my reply. I was, in the quaint vocabulary of the villagers, ‘conventeducated’, a label they applied to anyone who emerged from the

elite schools in which Christian missionaries served their foreign Lord by teaching the children of the Indian lordly. It was assumed that I knew more about practically everything than anyone in the village; but all I knew was what I had been taught from books, whereas they had learned from life. Even as I wallowed in their admiration, I couldn’t help feeling their lessons were the more difficult, and the more valuable. Balettan dropped out of school and began turning his attention to what remained of the family lands. It seemed to me that his rough edges became rougher as the calluses grew hard on his hands and feet. He had less time for us now; in his late teens he was already a full-fledged farmer, sitting sucking a straw between his teeth and watching the boys kick a ball around. If he disapproved of Charlis’s growing familiarity with all of us, though, he did not show it—not even when Charlis asked me one day to go into town with him to see the latest Bombay blockbuster. I thought Charlis might have hoped I could explain the Hindi dialogues to him, since Keralites learned Hindi only as a third language from teachers who knew it, at best, as a second. But when we got to the movie theatre, Charlis was not disappointed to discover the next two screenings were fully sold out. ‘I am really wanting to talk,’ he said in English, leading me to an eatery across the street. The Star of India, as the board outside proclaimed, was a ‘military hotel’; in other words, it served meat, which my grandmother did not. ‘I am thinking you might be missing it,’ Charlis said, ushering me to a chair. It was only when the main dish arrived that I realized that I was actually sitting and eating at the same table with Charlis for the first time. If he was conscious of this, Charlis didn’t show it. He began talking, hesitantly at first, then with growing fluency and determination, about his life and his ambitions. His face shone when he talked of his father, who beat him with a belt whenever he showed signs of neglecting his books. ‘You can do better than I did,’ he would say before bringing the whip down on Charlis. ‘You will do better.’ And now Charlis was aiming higher than anyone in his family, in his entire community, had ever done before. He was planning to go to

university. ‘Listen, Charlis,’ I said gently, not wanting to discourage him. ‘You know it’s not going to be easy. I know you’re first in class and everything, but that’s in the village. Don’t forget you’ll be competing for places with kids from the big cities. From the—convents.’ ‘I am knowing that,’ Charlis replied simply. Then, from the front pocket of his shirt, he drew out a battered notebook filled with small, tightly packed curlicues of Malayalam lettering in blue ink, interspersed with phrases and sentences in English in the same precise hand. ‘Look,’ he said, jabbing at a page. ‘The miserable hath no other medicine / But only hope. — Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, III.i.2,’ I read. And a little lower down, ‘Men at some time are masters of their fates; / The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.’ Charlis had underlined these words. ‘Whenever I am reading something that inspires me, I am writing it down in this book,’ Charlis said proudly. ‘Shakespeare is great man, isn’t it?’ His Malayalam was of course much better, but in English Charlis seemed to cast off an invisible burden that had less to do with the language than with its social assumptions. In speaking it, in quoting it, Charlis seemed to be entering another world, a heady place of foreign ideas and unfamiliar expressions, a strange land in which the old rules no longer applied. ‘For the Colonel’s Lady an’ Judy O’Grady,’ he declaimed at one point, ‘“are sisters under their skins!”’—Rudyard Kipling,’ he added. ‘Is that how you are pronouncing it?’ ‘Rudyard, Roodyard, I haven’t a clue,’ I confessed. ‘But who cares, Charlis? He’s just an old imperialist fart. What does anything he ever wrote have to do with any of us today, in independent India?’ Charlis looked surprised, then slightly averted his eyes. ‘But are we not,’ he asked softly, ‘are we not brothers under our skins?’ ‘Of course,’ I replied, too quickly. And it was I who couldn’t meet his gaze. The following summer, I was sitting down to my first meal of the holiday at my grandmother’s dining table when Rani-valiamma said,

‘Charlis was looking for you.’ ‘Really?’ I was genuinely pleased, as much by Charlis’s effort as by the fact that it could be mentioned so casually. ‘What did he want?’ ‘He came to give you the news personally,’ Rani-valiamma said. ‘He’s been admitted to Trivandrum University.’ ‘Wow!’ I exclaimed. ‘That’s something, isn’t it?’ ‘Untouchable quota,’ honked the ever-present Kunjunni-mama, whose pencil-line mustache had gone from bold black to sleek silver without his ever having done a stroke of work in his life. ‘Reserved seats for the Children of God. Why, Chandrasekhara Menon’s son couldn’t get in after all the money they spent on sending him to boarding school, and here Charlis is on his way to University.’ ‘The village panchayat council is organizing a felicitation for him tomorrow,’ Rani-valiamma said. ‘Charlis wanted you to come, Neel.’ ‘Of course I will,’ I responded. ‘We must all go.’ ‘All?’ snorted Kunjunni-mama, who was incapable of any action that could be called affirmative. ‘To felicitate Charlis? Speak for yourself, boy. If you want to attend an Untouchable love-in organized by the Communists who claim to represent our village, more’s the pity. But don’t expect to drag any members of the Nair community with you.’ ‘I’ll come with you, Neel,’ said a quiet voice by my side. It was Rani-valiamma, her ever-obliging manner transformed into something approaching determination. ‘And me,’ chirped a younger cousin, emboldened. ‘May I go too, Amma?’ asked another. And by the next evening I had assembled a sizable delegation from our extended family to attend the celebration for Charlis. Kunjunni-mama and Balettan sat at the table, nursing their cups of tea, and watched us all troop out. Balettan was silent, his manner distant rather than disapproving. As I passed them, I heard the familiar honk: ‘Felicitation, my foot.’ The speeches had begun when we arrived, and our entry sparked something of a commotion in the meeting hall, as Charlis’s relatives and the throng of well-wishers from his community made way for us, whispers of excitement and consternation rippling like a current

through the room. I thought I saw a look of sheer delight shine like a sunburst on Charlis’s face, but that may merely have been a reaction to hearing the panchayat president say, ‘The presence of all of you here today proves that Charlis’s achievement is one of which the entire village is proud.’ We applauded that, knowing our arrival had given some meaning to that trite declaration. After the speeches, and the garlanding, and Charlis’s modest reply, the meeting broke up. I wanted to congratulate Charlis myself, but he was surrounded by his own people, all proud and happy and laughing. We made our way towards the door, and then I heard his voice. ‘Neel! Wait!’ he called out. I turned, to see him pulling himself away from the crush and advancing toward me with a packet in his hands. ‘You mustn’t leave without this.’ He stretched out the packet towards me, beaming. I opened it and peered in. Orange slabs of halwa quivered inside. ‘It’s the last bag,’ Charlis said, the smile never fading from his face. ‘My father sold the shop to pay for me to go to university. We’re all moving to Trivandrum.’ I looked at him, finding no words. He pushed the halwa at me. ‘I wanted you to have it.’ I took the bag from him without a word. We finished the halwa before we got home.

X Years passed. Men landed on the moon, a woman became prime minister, wars were fought; in other countries, coups and revolutions brought change (or attempted to), while in India elections were won and lost and things changed (or didn’t). I couldn’t go down to Kerala every time my parents did; my college holidays didn’t always coincide with Dad’s leave from the office. When I did manage a visit, it wasn’t the same as before. I would come for a few days, be indulged by Rani-valiamma, and move on. There was not that much to do. Rani-valiamma had started studying for a teacher’s training diploma. My grandmother spent most of her time reading the scriptures and chewing areca, usually simultaneously. Balettan, tough and taciturn, was the man of the house; now that agriculture

was his entire life, we had even less to say to each other than ever. My cousins were scattered in several directions; a new generation of kids played football in the yard. No one had news of Charlis. I began working in an advertising agency in Bombay, circulating in a brittle, showy world that could not have had less in common with Vanganassery. When I went to the village the talk was of pesticides and irrigation, of the old rice-levy and the new, governmentsubsidized fertilizer, and, inevitably, of the relentless pace of land reform, which was taking away the holdings of traditional landlords and giving them to their tenants. It was clear that Balettan did not understand much of this, and that he had not paid a great deal of attention to what was happening. ‘Haven’t you received any notification from the authorities, Balettan?’ I asked him one day, when his usual reticence seemed only to mask ineffectually the mounting level of anxiety in his eyes. ‘Some papers came,’ he said in a tone whose aggressiveness betrayed his deep shame at his own inadequacy. ‘But do I have time to read them? I’m a busy man. Do I run a farm or push papers like a clerk?’ ‘Show them to Neel,’ Kunjunni-mama suggested, and as soon as I opened the first envelope I realized Balettan, high-school dropout and traditionalist, had left it too late. ‘What are these lands here, near Kollengode?’ ‘They’re ours, of course.’ ‘Not anymore, Balettan. Who’s T. Krishnan Nair, son of Kandath Narayananunni Nair?’ ‘He farms them for us, ever since Grandfather died. I farm here at Vanganassery, and Krishnan Nair takes care of Kollengode, giving us his dues after each harvest. It’s the only way. I can’t be at both places at the same time, can I?’ ‘Well, it says here he’s just been registered as the owner of those lands. You were given fourteen days to show cause as to why his claim should not have been admitted. Why didn’t you file an objection, Balettan?’ We were all looking at him. ‘How can they say Krishnan Nair owns our land? Why, everybody knows it’s our land. It’s been ours ever

since anyone can remember. It was ours before Grandmother was born.’ ‘It’s not ours anymore, Balettan. The government has just taken it away.’ Balettan shifted uneasily in his chair, a haunted, uncomprehending look on his face. ‘But they can’t do that,’ he said. ‘Can they?’ ‘They can, Balettan,’ I told him sadly. ‘You know they can.’ ‘We’ve got to do something,’ honked Kunjunni-mama with uncharacteristic urgency. ‘Neel, you’ve got to do something.’ ‘Me? What can I do? I’m a Bombay-wallah. I know less about all this than any of you.’ ‘Perhaps,’ admitted Kunjunni-mama. ‘but you’re an educated man. You can read and understand these documents. You can speak to the Collector. He’s the top IAS man in the district, probably another city type like you, convent-educated. You can speak to him in English and explain what has happened. Come on, Neel. You’ve got to do it.’ ‘I don’t know,’ I said dubiously. The advertising life had not brought me into contact with any senior Indian Administrative Service officers. I hadn’t the slightest idea what I would say to the Collector when I met him. And then I saw the look in Balettan’s eyes. He had grown up knowing instinctively the rules and rituals of village society, the cycles of the harvest, how to do the right thing and what was never done. He could, without a second thought, climb trees that would make most of us dizzy, descend into wells, stand knee-deep in the slushy water of a paddy field to sprout grain into the world. But all these were skills he was born with, rhythms that sang in his blood like the whisper of his mother’s breath. He wore a mundu around his waist, coaxed his buffalo across the fields, and treated his labourers and his family as his ancestors had done for thousands of years. He was good at the timeless realities of village India; but India, even village India, was no longer a timeless place. ‘Don’t you understand anything, stupid?’ he had asked me all those years ago; and in his eyes I saw what I imagined he must have seen, at that time, in mine.

‘I’ll go,’ I said, as Balettan averted his eyes. In relief, perhaps, or in gratitude. It didn’t matter which.

X The Collector’s office in Palghat, the district capital, was already besieged by supplicants when I arrived. Two greasy clerks presided over his antechamber, their desks overflowing with papers loosely bound in crumbling files held together with string. Three phones rang intermittently, and were answered in a wide variety of tones, ranging from the uncooperative to the unctuous, depending on who was calling. People crowded round the desks, seeking attention, thrusting slips of paper forward, folding hands in entreaty, shouting to be heard. Occasionally a paper was dealt with and a khaki-uniformed peon sent for to carry it somewhere; sometimes, people were sent away, though most seemed to be waved towards the walls where dozens were already waiting, weary resignation on their faces, for their problems to be dealt with. All eyes were on the closed teak door at the corner, bearing the brass nameplate M. C. THEKKOTE, I.A.S., behind which their destinies were no doubt being determined. ‘It’s hopeless,’ I said to Balettan, who had accompanied me. ‘I told you we should have tried to get an appointment. We’ll be here all day.’ ‘How would we have got an appointment?’ Balettan asked, reasonably, since we did not yet have a phone in the village. ‘No, this is the only way. You go and give them your card.’ I did not share Balettan’s faith in the magical properties of this small rectangular advertisement of my status, but I battled my way to the front of one of the desks and thrust it at an indifferent clerk. ‘Please take this to the Collector-saare,’ I said, trying to look both important and imploring. ‘I must see him.’ The clerk seemed unimpressed by the colourful swirls and curlicues that proclaimed my employment by AdAge, Bombay’s smartest new agency. ‘You and everyone else,’ he said sceptically, putting the card aside. ‘Collector-saare very busy today. You come back tomorrow, we will see.’

At this point Balettan’s native wisdom asserted itself. He insinuated a five-rupee note into the clerk’s palm. ‘Send the card in,’ he said. ‘It’s important.’ The clerk was instantly responsive. ‘I am doing as you wish,’ he said grudgingly, ‘but you will still have to wait. Collector-saare is so so very busy today.’ ‘You’ve told us that already,’ I replied. ‘We’ll wait.’ A peon wandered in, bearing tea for the clerks. Once the man at the desk had satisfied himself that his tea was sugared to his taste, he added my card to the pile of papers he gave the peon to take in to the Collector. ‘It will take some time,’ he added curtly. It didn’t. Soon after the door had closed behind the peon, the black phone on the clerk’s desk jangled peremptorily. ‘Yes, saar. Yes, saar,’ he said, perspiring. ‘No, saar. Not long. Yes, saar. At once, saar.’ He had stood up to attention during this exchange, and when he replaced the receiver there was a new look of respect in his eyes. ‘Collector-saar will be seeing you now, saar,’ he said, with a salaam. ‘You didn’t explain who you were, saar.’ The five-rupee note reemerged in his hand. ‘You seem to have dropped this by mistake, saar,’ he said shamefacedly, handing it to Balettan. ‘Keep it,’ Balettan said, as mystified as I by the transformation in the man’s attitude. But the clerk begged him to take it back, and bowed and scraped us towards the imposing doorway. ‘Obviously Bombay’s ad world counts for more than I thought with these government-wallahs,’ I whispered to Balettan. ‘He’s just happy to be able to speak English with someone,’ Balettan suggested. The clerk opened the door into a high-ceilinged office. The Collector rose from behind a mahogany desk the size of a Ping-Pong table, and stretched out a hand. ‘It’s so good to see you again, Neel,’ he said. It was Charlis. ‘Charlis!’ I exclaimed, astonishment overcoming delight. ‘B—but— the name—the IAS—’ ‘You never did know my family name, did you? After all these years.’ Charlis spoke without reproach. ‘And yes, I’ve been in the

IAS for some time now.’ The Administrative Service, too, I found myself thinking unworthily, offered one more of the quotas Kunjunnimama liked to complain about. ‘But this is the first time I’ve been posted so close to Vanganassery. I’ve barely got here, but once I’ve settled in, I’m planning to visit the village again soon.’ He added casually, ‘It’s part of my district, after all. That’d make it an official visit, you see.’ He seemed to enjoy the thought, and I found myself looking at Balettan. I didn’t know what I expected to find in his expression, but it certainly wasn’t the combination of hope, respect, and, yes, admiration with which he now regarded the man across the desk. Charlis seemed to catch it, too. ‘But what is this? We haven’t even asked Balettan to sit down.’ He waved us to chairs, as tea appeared. ‘Tell me, what can I do for you?’ We explained the problem, and Charlis was sympathetic but grave. The law was the law; it was also just, undoing centuries of absentee landlordism. In our case, though, thanks to Balettan’s inattention (though Charlis didn’t even imply that), it had been applied unfairly, leaving Balettan with less land than his former tenant. Some of this could be undone, and Charlis would help, but we would not be able to get back all the land that had been confiscated. Charlis explained all this carefully, patiently, speaking principally to Balettan rather than to me. ‘Some changes are good, some are bad,’ he concluded, ‘but very few changes can be reversed.’ ‘Shakespeare or Rudyard Kipling?’ I asked, only half in jest, remembering his little notebook. ‘Neither,’ he replied quite seriously. ‘Charlis Thekkote. But you can quote me if you like.’ Charlis was as good as his word. He helped Balettan file the necessary papers to reclaim some of his land, and made sure the files were not lost in the bureaucratic maze. And the week after our visit, knowing I would not be staying in Vanganassery long, Charlis came to the village. I will never forget the sight of Charlis seated at our dining table with the entire family bustling attentively around him: Rani-valiamma, on leave from the school where she was now vice-principal, serving him

her soft, crisp-edged dosas on Grandmother’s best stainless-steel thali; Kunjunni-mama, honking gregariously, pouring him more tea; and half the neighbours, standing at a respectful distance, gawking at the dignitary. But the image that will linger longest in my memory is from even before that, from the moment of Charlis’s arrival at the village. His official car cannot drive the last half-mile to our house, on the narrow paths across the paddy fields, so Charlis steps down, in his off-white safari suit and open-toed sandals, and walks to our front door, through the dust. We greet him there and begin to usher him into the house, but Balettan stops us outside. For a minute all the old fears come flooding back into my mind and Charlis’s, but it is only for a minute, because Balettan is shouting out to the servant, ‘Can’t you see the Collector-saare is waiting? Hurry up!’ I catch Charlis’s eye; he smiles. The servant pulls a bucketful of water out of the well to wash Charlis’s feet. *Extracted from India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond

two

~ THE NIGHT TRAIN AT DEOLI

RUSKIN BOND

W

hen I was at college I used to spend my summer vacations in Dehra, at my grandmother’s place. I would leave the plains early in May and return late in July. Deoli was a small station about thirty miles from Dehra. It marked the beginning of the heavy jungles of the Indian Terai. The train would reach Deoli at about five in the morning when the station would be dimly lit with electric bulbs and oil lamps, and the jungle across the railway tracks would just be visible in the faint light of dawn. Deoli had only one platform, an office for the stationmaster and a waiting room. The platform boasted a tea stall, a fruit vendor and a few stray dogs; not much else because the train stopped there for only ten minutes before rushing on into the forests. Why it stopped at Deoli, I don’t know. Nothing ever happened there. Nobody got off the train and nobody got on. There were never any coolies on the platform. But the train would halt there a full ten minutes and then a bell would sound, the guard would blow his whistle, and presently Deoli would be left behind and forgotten. I used to wonder what happened in Deoli behind the station walls. I always felt sorry for that lonely little platform and for the place that nobody wanted to visit. I decided that one day I would get off the train at Deoli and spend the day there just to please the town. I was eighteen, visiting my grandmother, and the night train stopped at Deoli. A girl came down the platform selling baskets.

It was a cold morning and the girl had a shawl thrown across her shoulders. Her feet were bare and her clothes were old but she was a young girl, walking gracefully and with dignity. When she came to my window, she stopped. She saw that I was looking at her intently, but at first she pretended not to notice. She had pale skin, set off by shiny black hair and dark, troubled eyes. And then those eyes, searching and eloquent, met mine. She stood by my window for some time and neither of us said anything. But when she moved on, I found myself leaving my seat and going to the carriage door. I stood waiting on the platform looking the other way. I walked across to the tea stall. A kettle was boiling over a small fire, but the owner of the stall was busy serving tea somewhere on the train. The girl followed me behind the stall. ‘Do you want to buy a basket?’ she asked. ‘They are very strong, made of the finest cane…’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t want a basket.’ We stood looking at each other for what seemed a very long time, and she said, ‘Are you sure you don’t want a basket?’ ‘All right, give me one,’ I said, and took the one on top and gave her a rupee, hardly daring to touch her fingers. As she was about to speak, the guard blew his whistle. She said something, but it was lost in the clanging of the bell and the hissing of the engine. I had to run back to my compartment. The carriage shuddered and jolted forward. I watched her as the platform slipped away. She was alone on the platform and she did not move, but she was looking at me and smiling. I watched her until the signal box came in the way and then the jungle hid the station. But I could still see her standing there alone… I stayed awake for the rest of the journey. I could not rid my mind of the picture of the girl’s face and her dark, smouldering eyes. But when I reached Dehra the incident became blurred and distant, for there were other things to occupy my mind. It was only when I was making the return journey, two months later, that I remembered the girl.

I was looking out for her as the train drew into the station, and I felt an unexpected thrill when I saw her walking up the platform. I sprang off the footboard and waved to her. When she saw me, she smiled. She was pleased that I remembered her. I was pleased that she remembered me. We were both pleased and it was almost like a meeting of old friends. She did not go down the length of the train selling baskets but came straight to the tea stall. Her dark eyes were suddenly filled with light. We said nothing for some time but we couldn’t have been more eloquent. I felt the impulse to put her on the train there and then, and take her away with me. I could not bear the thought of having to watch her recede into the distance of Deoli station. I took the baskets from her hand and put them down on the ground. She put out her hand for one of them, but I caught her hand and held it. ‘I have to go to Delhi,’ I said. She nodded. ‘I do not have to go anywhere.’ The guard blew his whistle for the train to leave, and how I hated the guard for doing that. ‘I will come again,’ I said. ‘Will you be here?’ She nodded again and, as she nodded, the bell clanged and the train slid forward. I had to wrench my hand away from the girl and run for the moving train. This time I did not forget her. She was with me for the remainder of the journey and for long after. All that year she was a bright, living thing. And when the college term finished, I packed in haste and left for Dehra earlier than usual. My grandmother would be pleased at my eagerness to see her. I was nervous and anxious as the train drew into Deoli, because I was wondering what I should say to the girl and what I should do. I was determined that I wouldn’t stand helplessly before her, hardly able to speak or do anything about my feelings. The train came to Deoli, and I looked up and down the platform but I could not see the girl anywhere. I opened the door and stepped off the footboard. I was deeply disappointed and overcome by a sense of foreboding. I felt I had to

do something and so I ran up to the stationmaster and said, ‘Do you know the girl who used to sell baskets here?’ ‘No, I don’t,’ said the stationmaster. ‘And you’d better get on the train if you don’t want to be left behind.’ But I paced up and down the platform and stared over the railings at the station yard. All I saw was a mango tree and a dusty road leading into the jungle. Where did the road go? The train was moving out of the station and I had to run up the platform and jump for the door of my compartment. Then, as the train gathered speed and rushed through the forests, I sat brooding in front of the window. What could I do about finding a girl I had seen only twice, who had hardly spoken to me, and about whom I knew nothing—absolutely nothing—but for whom I felt a tenderness and responsibility that I had never felt before? My grandmother was not pleased with my visit after all, because I didn’t stay at her place more than a couple of weeks. I felt restless and ill at ease. So I took the train back to the plains, meaning to ask further questions of the stationmaster at Deoli. But at Deoli there was a new stationmaster. The previous man had been transferred to another post within the past week. The new man didn’t know anything about the girl who sold baskets. I found the owner of the tea stall, a small, shrivelled-up man, wearing greasy clothes, and asked him if he knew anything about the girl with the baskets. ‘Yes, there was such a girl here. I remember quite well,’ he said. ‘But she has stopped coming now.’ ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘What happened to her?’ ‘How should I know?’ said the man. ‘She was nothing to me.’ And once again I had to run for the train. As Deoli platform receded, I decided that one day I would have to break journey there, spend a day in the town, make inquiries, and find the girl who had stolen my heart with nothing but a look from her dark, impatient eyes. With this thought I consoled myself throughout my last term in college. I went to Dehra again in the summer and when, in the early hours of the morning, the night train drew into Deoli station, I looked

up and down the platform for signs of the girl, knowing I wouldn’t find her but hoping just the same. Somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to break journey at Deoli and spend a day there. (If it was all fiction or a film, I reflected, I would have got down and cleared up the mystery and reached a suitable ending to the whole thing.) I think I was afraid to do this. I was afraid of discovering what really happened to the girl. Perhaps she was no longer in Deoli, perhaps she was married, perhaps she had fallen ill… In the last few years I have passed through Deoli many times, and I always look out of the carriage window, half expecting to see the same unchanged face smiling up at me. I wonder what happens in Deoli, behind the station walls. But I will never break my journey there. I prefer to keep hoping and dreaming and looking out of the window up and down that lonely platform, waiting for the girl with the baskets. I never break my journey at Deoli but I pass through as often as I can.

three

~ AN ASTROLOGER’S DAY

R. K. NARAYAN

P

unctually at midday he opened his bag and spread out his professional equipment, which consisted of a dozen cowrie shells, a square piece of cloth with obscure, mystic charts on it, a notebook and a bundle of palmyra writing. His forehead was resplendent with sacred ash and vermilion, and his eyes sparkled with a sharp abnormal gleam which was really an outcome of a continual searching look for customers, but which his simple clients took to be a prophetic light and felt comforted. The power of his eyes was considerably enhanced by their position—placed as they were between the painted forehead and the dark whiskers which streamed down his cheeks: even a half-wit’s eyes would sparkle in such a setting. To crown the effect he wound a saffron-coloured turban around his head. This colour scheme never failed. People were attracted to him as bees are attracted to cosmos or dahlia stalks. He sat under the boughs of a spreading tamarind tree which flanked a path running through the Town Hall Park. It was a remarkable place in many ways: a surging crowd was always moving up and down this narrow road morning till night. A variety of trades and occupations was represented all along its way: medicine-sellers, sellers of stolen hardware and junk, magicians and, above all, an auctioneer of cheap cloth, who created enough din all day to attract the whole town. Next to him in vociferousness came a vendor of fried groundnuts, who gave his ware a fancy name each day, calling it Bombay Ice-Cream

one day, and on the next Delhi Almond, and on the third Raja’s Delicacy, and so on and so forth, and people flocked to him. A considerable portion of this crowd dallied before the astrologer too. The astrologer transacted his business by the light of a flare which crackled and smoked up above the groundnut heap nearby. Half the enchantment of the place was due to the fact that it did not have the benefit of municipal lighting. The place was lit up by shop lights. One or two had hissing gaslights, some had naked flares stuck on poles, some were lit up by old cycle lamps and one or two, like the astrologer’s, managed without lights of their own. It was a bewildering criss-cross of light rays and moving shadows. This suited the astrologer very well, for the simple reason that he had not in the least intended to be an astrologer when he began life; and he knew no more of what was going to happen to others than he knew what was going to happen to himself next minute. He was as much a stranger to the stars as were his innocent customers. Yet he said things which pleased and astonished everyone: that was more a matter of study, practice and shrewd guesswork. All the same, it was as much an honest man’s labour as any other, and he deserved the wages he carried home at the end of a day. He had left his village without any previous thought or plan. If he had continued there he would have carried on the work of his forefathers—namely, tilling the land, living, marrying, and ripening in his cornfield and ancestral home. But that was not to be. He had to leave home without telling anyone, and he could not rest till he left it behind a couple of hundred miles. To a villager it is a great deal, as if an ocean flowed between. He had a working analysis of mankind’s troubles: marriage, money and the tangles of human ties. Long practice had sharpened his perception. Within five minutes he understood what was wrong. He charged three pies per question and never opened his mouth till the other had spoken for at least ten minutes, which provided him enough stuff for a dozen answers and advices. When he told the person before him, gazing at his palm, ‘In many ways you are not getting the fullest results for your efforts,’ nine out of ten were disposed to agree with him. Or he questioned: ‘Is there any woman

in your family, maybe even a distant relative, who is not well disposed towards you?’ Or he gave an analysis of character: ‘Most of your troubles are due to your nature. How can you be otherwise with Saturn where he is? You have an impetuous nature and a rough exterior.’ This endeared him to their hearts immediately, for even the mildest of us loves to think that he has a forbidding exterior. The nuts-vendor blew out his flare and rose to go home. This was a signal for the astrologer to bundle up too, since it left him in darkness except for a little shaft of green light which strayed in from somewhere and touched the ground before him. He picked up his cowrie shells and paraphernalia and was putting them back into his bag when the green shaft of light was blotted out; he looked up and saw a man standing before him. He sensed a possible client and said: ‘You look so careworn. It will do you good to sit down for a while and chat with me.’ The other grumbled some vague reply. The astrologer pressed his invitation; whereupon the other thrust his palm under his nose, saying: ‘You call yourself an astrologer?’ The astrologer felt challenged and said, tilting the other’s palm towards the green shaft of light: ‘Yours is a nature…’ ‘Oh, stop that,’ the other said. ‘Tell me something worthwhile…’ Our friend felt piqued. ‘I charge only three pies per question, and what you get ought to be good enough for your money…’ At this the other withdrew his arm, took out an anna and flung it out to him, saying, ‘I have some questions to ask. If I prove you are bluffing, you must return that anna to me with interest.’ ‘If you find my answers satisfactory, will you give me five rupees?’ ‘No.’ ‘Or will you give me eight annas?’ ‘All right, provided you give me twice as much if you are wrong,’ said the stranger. This pact was accepted after a little further argument. The astrologer sent up a prayer to heaven as the other lit a cheroot. The astrologer caught a glimpse of his face by the matchlight. There was a pause as cars hooted on the road, jutka drivers swore at their horses and the babble of the crowd agitated the semi-darkness of the park. The other sat down, sucking his cheroot, puffing out, sat there ruthlessly. The astrologer felt very

uncomfortable. ‘Here, take your anna back. I am not used to such challenges. It is late for me today…’ He made preparations to bundle up. The other held his wrist and said, ‘You can’t get out of it now. You dragged me in while I was passing.’ The astrologer shivered in his grip; and his voice shook and became faint. ‘Leave me today. I will speak to you tomorrow.’ The other thrust his palm in his face and said, ‘Challenge is challenge. Go on.’ The astrologer proceeded with his throat drying up. ‘There is a woman…’ ‘Stop,’ said the other. ‘I don’t want all that. Shall I succeed in my present search or not? Answer this and go. Otherwise I will not let you go till you disgorge all your coins.’ The astrologer muttered a few incantations and replied, ‘All right. I will speak. But will you give me a rupee if what I say is convincing? Otherwise I will not open my mouth, and you may do what you like.’ After a good deal of haggling the other agreed. The astrologer said, ‘You were left for dead. Am I right?’ ‘Ah, tell me more.’ ‘A knife has passed through you once?’ said the astrologer. ‘Good fellow!’ He bared his chest to show the scar. ‘What else?’ ‘And then you were pushed into a well nearby in the field. You were left for dead.’ ‘I should have been dead if some passer-by had not chanced to peep into the well,’ exclaimed the other, overwhelmed by enthusiasm. ‘When shall I get at him?’ he asked, clenching his fist. ‘In the next world,’ answered the astrologer. ‘He died four months ago in a far-off town. You will never see any more of him.’ The other groaned on hearing it. The astrologer proceeded. ‘Guru Nayak—’ ‘You know my name!’ the other said, taken aback. ‘As I know all other things. Guru Nayak, listen carefully to what I have to say. Your village is two days’ journey due north of this town. Take the next train and be gone. I see once again great danger to your life if you go from home.’ He took out a pinch of sacred ash and held it out to him. ‘Rub it on your forehead and go home. Never travel southward, again, and you will live to be a hundred.’

‘Why should I leave home again?’ the other said reflectively. ‘I was only going away now and then to look for him and to choke out his life if I met him.’ He shook his head regretfully. ‘He has escaped my hands. I hope at least he died as he deserved.’ ‘Yes,’ said the astrologer. ‘He was crushed under a lorry.’ The other looked gratified to hear it. The place was deserted by the time the astrologer picked up his articles and put them into his bag. The green shaft was also gone, leaving the place in darkness and silence. The stranger had gone off into the night, after giving the astrologer a handful of coins. It was nearly midnight when the astrologer reached home. His wife was waiting for him at the door and demanded an explanation. He flung the coins at her and said, ‘Count them. One man gave all that.’ ‘Twelve and a half annas,’ she said, counting. She was overjoyed. ‘I can buy some jaggery and coconut tomorrow. The child has been asking for sweets for so many days now. I will prepare some nice stuff for her.’ ‘The swine has cheated me! He promised me a rupee,’ said the astrologer. She looked up at him. ‘You look worried. What is wrong?’ ‘Nothing.’ After dinner, sitting on the pyol, he told her, ‘Do you know a great load is gone from me today? I thought I had the blood of a man on my hands all these years. That was the reason why I ran away from home, settled here and married you. He is alive.’ She gasped. ‘You tried to kill!’ ‘Yes, in our village, when I was a silly youngster. We drank, gambled and quarrelled badly one day—why think of it now? Time to sleep,’ he said, yawning, and stretched himself on the pyol.

four

~ THE MAN WHO SAW GOD

D. B. G. TILAK Translated from the Telugu by Ranga Rao I he news that Gavarayya’s wife had eloped was spread gleefully through the entire village. That only the day before China had violated the borders of India and that the war was still on suddenly became unimportant. Some even forgot about it. It seemed that in the entire Telugu country only the people of this village recognized or appreciated the special significance of a woman eloping! At street junctions, in the coffee shack (there was only one in that village), on the low ridges of agricultural fields and near the panchayat building, the men; near the compound walls of their homes, at the wells, and on the steps of the public pond, the women: everyone was talking about this most wonderful development. A simple elopement may not have created such a sensation; specifically, it was the fact that the woman had eloped with a useless tailor working on a sewing machine on a pyol opposite the house that made the incident so unusual and so worthy of gossip. It would have been less damaging to the husband’s reputation, in the opinion of experienced village elders, if she had eloped with someone else, a gentleman. Many young men felt hurt that Gavarayya’s wife had unnecessarily insulted and wronged them.

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‘What did she see in that man to elope with him?’ asked a young woman of her mother-in-law for the third time, unable to curb her curiosity. ‘Mind your own business. Why didn’t you yourself elope with him, you would have found out,’ said the mother-in-law, irritably. The consensus among the villagers was that Gavarayya got what he deserved.

X Everyone in the village hated Gavarayya. Physically, he was dark and ungainly. Face pitted with pockmarks. Lips thick and coarse. Brows bushy, as though caterpillars had been stuck there. Gavarayya lived on the outskirts of the village in an old-fashioned house with rooms opening off a central courtyard. ‘I knew something like this was going to happen,’ said Avadhani, with his eyes half-closed. Avadhani was the trustee of the village temple. Chalapati, the munsif, who was in charge of law and order, and Narasimham, the karanam or revenue officer, nodded their heads. Seeing he had their attention, the temple trustee annotated the Upanishad-like statement he had just made. ‘Will the Lord Venugopala overlook such lapses? The first spouse had died anyway. Now this second wife has perpetrated something worse than death. Yet, has he done one charitable act? Has he accepted one word of good counsel?’ The munsif, Chalapati, tapped his walking stick on the floor and said, ‘Has he allowed anyone to get close to him? A wicked man, this Gavarayya, sir. Too much ego, too much arrogance...’ ‘Sinful wealth, sinfully earned, sir! Won’t the consequences follow? The other day all the young fellows went and asked him to donate one rupee for the bhajan, just one rupee, and he chased them away, it seems…’ said the karanam.

X Twenty years ago, at the age of twenty, Gavarayya had arrived in the village. A paternal aunt lived here. He had neither a father nor

mother. When he landed up he had some cash with him. There was a town about two miles from the village. Every day he would go to the town early in the morning and return after sunset. When the villagers came to know that he was engaged in the hides business everyone uttered God’s name, ‘Hari, Hari’, with their hands over their ears. They made it clear to the paternal aunt that Gavarayya’s business was utterly sinful; no good could come of it. But the aunt didn’t do anything about it. Some even took the liberty of trying to persuade Gavarayya that trading in the hides of animals was not ethical. ‘Why only the hides of animals, I would even sell human skins, only they are too thin and useless,’ was apparently what Gavarayya said in response. He was a stubborn, headstrong fellow. Wouldn’t talk to anyone; wouldn’t socialize with anyone. Why, no one had even seen Gavarayya laughing. Worse, it appears Gavarayya did not distinguish between ‘Sin’ and ‘Virtue’. It was generally believed that during the last twenty years he had made more than a lakh of rupees. The elders of the village— because they were generous people and righteous—forgave his sinful ways of making money and in the interest of his welfare, with a desire to ensure his pleasant tenure in the next world, advised him— patiently and ceaselessly—to make donations and endow charities, construct the temple pavilion, pick up the bill for the construction of the school building, perform week-long religious ceremonies. Narrowing his round, deep-set eyes, pressing his cheroot tightly between his lips, Gavarayya would say sharply, ‘I won’t give a single copper. Go and complain to whoever you want.’ He has no sense of decency or proportion, they all said behind his back. Because he had a cash balance of one lakh rupees they did not say it openly to him, for by birth they were wise. A few days after he arrived at his aunt’s house, Gavarayya brought his first wife across. He wouldn’t let her go anywhere. She wasn’t even allowed to go to the neighbours’ houses. The paternal aunt, the wife and Gavarayya—the three of them were like three ghosts. A rumour circulated in the village that Gavarayya’s wife was possessed from time to time by some spirit, and that without anyone’s

knowledge, at midnight, while everyone slept, an exorcist would come and perform mysterious rites and offer fumigations to try and cure her.

X How they survived in such isolation no one could understand. A little while later, a bangle seller visited the village to sell his wares. He claimed to have come from Gavarayya’s native place. He supplied more details about Gavarayya’s past. Gavarayya’s father had been a very wicked man, it appeared. He gambled and drank. His wife, a sick woman, was perpetually confined to her bed. As a result Gavarayya’s father had a mistress in the neighbouring town. As a child Gavarayya did not know anything of a mother’s care and attention. Because of his father’s evil reputation, no one made friends with Gavarayya. He was not even allowed to join the village school. The founder of the school was a renowned landlord of the area. Gavarayya’s father fought endlessly with that man. The landlord was a man of considerable standing in the community; every year he would organize the religious celebrations of Lord Subbarayudu, and feed the public. Ganging up with a bunch of rowdies, Gavarayya’s father would create trouble at these celebrations. Gavarayya’s father alleged that once, during a life-and-death crisis, the landlord had made him sign a mortgage for twice the amount that he had actually lent him and then unjustly seized the little land he owned. But of course the elders in the village were not so foolish as to believe the words of a rowdy. Besides they themselves were clandestinely engaged in usury on the same principles as the landlord’s. As for the general public, not even in its dreams would it believe that such a gentleman and a great devotee of the Lord like the landlord would commit such an atrocity. Distressed by Gavarayya’s loneliness and isolation, his father brought him a puppy and two kittens and told him to play with them. ‘These are better than humans,’ he would remark to his sick wife. Gavarayya spent his entire childhood playing with dogs, trees and walls. After some time his sick mother passed away. With her death, the wrongdoings of Gavarayya’s father increased greatly.

Gavarayya’s father had loved his wife very much. He had spent a lot of money on her treatment. Now, when in her last days, he could not find the money for her medical treatment, he blamed it all on the landlord’s perfidy and went crazy. One evening when a labourer of the landlord was returning from the fields, someone broke his head with an iron rod. The landlord said that his suspicion centred entirely on Gavarayya’s father. They arrested Gavarayya’s father and charge-sheeted him. All the villagers gave irrefutable evidence. Though they may or may not have witnessed the murder, they honoured the orders of the pious landlord as divine commands. Gavarayya’s father was sentenced to life. He pointedly told Gavarayya: ‘Don’t trust anyone. Stand on your own feet. All humans are traitorous wretches, venomous serpents.’ He was then taken away by the police. Without a mother or father, Gavarayya survived in that house in a state of pure terror. Pining for them, without food or water for two whole days, sitting in a corner of that house, the fourteen-year-old boy wept disconsolately. No one came anywhere near him, didn’t even greet him. All those good souls in the village probably thought that the father being a rowdy and a murderer, the child had inherited his traits and that the farther they kept away from him the better it would be for them. Gavarayya fell ill. No question of medical treatment or anything remotely like it. The fever turned out to be smallpox. The entire village could hear pitiful, terror-stricken cries coming from that house: ‘Amma, I am dying.’ The moment they came to know that it was smallpox, people stopped going anywhere near the house. ‘If the son too were to die, it would be good riddance for the village,’ some said. One day in the evening a jutka stopped before Gavarayya’s house. A forty-year-old woman climbed out of the horse-drawn carriage. She was covered in jewellery from top to toe. She was tall, well-built. Not even the hair at the temples had greyed. The whole street came out and stood gawking at her. She didn’t glance this way or that, but went straight into the house. A servant followed with boxes and luggage and the door shut behind him.

Through the servant it transpired that she had had a liaison with Gavarayya’s father. She had been on pilgrimage for the past six months to various religious centres, and had only returned two days earlier. Having come to know that Gavarayya’s father had been sentenced to life imprisonment and that this had effectively made the son an orphan, she had left at once for the village. That marked a turning point. Though Gavarayya looked uglier than ever after his recovery from his illness, she did not flinch from him. One or two women took the liberty of trying to convince her of the folly of taking over the responsibility of bringing up the ugly son simply because she had had a liaison with the father. But as was her nature she didn’t bother about anyone’s opinion. After some time she found a bride for Gavarayya and married him off. Just before she died, when Gavarayya was twenty, she passed on to him her jewellery and cash of ten thousand rupees.

X Everyone in the village was familiar with the next few phases of Gavarayya’s life: his arrival at his paternal aunt’s house in this village, his starting the hides business, and after seven or eight years, the loss of his wife. However, now that they knew about his origins courtesy the bangle seller, their hatred of Gavarayya began to seem entirely justified. His father was a wicked man, a murderer; this fellow, playing since his childhood with cats and dogs, had himself acquired animal traits. Moreover he had been brought up by a fallen woman. That such an inhuman fellow had landed in their village of all places made them feel deeply anguished. But then elders like Avadhani did not despair at first. True, Gavarayya was a wicked man. A picture of ugliness—that too was true; a miser who wouldn’t part with a copper—agreed; mulish fellow, uncultured—everyone knew that. All the same, a rich man. If his riches could be made to support good acts he, and his elders, would find salvation. With that altruistic intention they approached Gavarayya frequently, counselled him on the numerous ways in which he could become a virtuous man. Support the celebrations of the Lord Venugopala’s festival, they said. Construct a pavilion in the

temple, they said. Must repair the temple compound wall which had tilted, they said. Gavarayya did not bite once at any of the suggestions being made. At least come to the temple, have the Lord’s darshan and take His prasadam, they said. They hoped that because it wouldn’t cost him anything he might consider at least this suggestion sympathetically, and that over time his visits to the temple would lead to the seed of piety sprouting in his stony heart. But not once did Gavarayya go anywhere near the temple. Unable to stand the sight of a fellow creature turning an atheist and a sinner, prompted by their own good nature and devotion to duty, the village elders employed the weapon of boycott. But this didn’t work either. Because Gavarayya had boycotted the village from the beginning. And besides, the washerman, the trader and the barber kept serving him clandestinely. As he paid their dues promptly, not one of them wanted to lose him as a customer. When Gavarayya’s first wife slipped and fell into the well and drowned, Avadhani and the others called on him and condoled with him. All this was the result of his karma, he should wake up now at least, they exhorted him. But Gavarayya did not care. Not just that, within a year he married a girl who was fifteen years younger than him and brought her home. Though she wasn’t much of a beauty, she decked herself out fashionably. Gavarayya took care of her with great love and affection, people used to say. But she too, for her part, never stepped outside her house. If out of curiosity anyone called on her, she chatted with them pleasantly. If anyone made fun or spoke sarcastically of either Gavarayya’s looks or his age, she would say, ‘He is a very good man.’ Often she went by cart to the neighbouring town to watch a movie. That Gavarayya relaxed all his rules for his wife came as a surprise to everyone. But then even that relaxation was within certain limits: the residents of the house had to stay away from the villagers and from the happenings in the village of course. How she had developed enough intimacy with the sewing machine man on the pyol of the opposite house as to elope with him, nobody knew. But this mishap gave the munsif, the karanam and others

great joy. In the absolute darkness around them they now saw a ray of hope. Take advantage of the situation, they said to themselves. All four of them together called on Gavarayya one day. It was a very big house. An old-style house, large and spacious, with rooms on all four sides opening out to a central courtyard: a manduva house. At the rear, the haystack, the cattle-shed, trees and the like. And beyond there were no more houses; it was all fields. Gavarayya had steadily expanded the small dwelling of his paternal aunt till it had reached these proportions. This house would never be like any of the others. The buzz and stir of life was missing and a terrifying loneliness had accumulated within it, it appeared. As if at night ghosts with reversed feet roamed all over the house and then at daybreak climbed up and hid in the attic or in the corners of the eaves. Even those four, enjoying authority, status and an inborn courage, felt, it is true, a little dread as they stepped into that house. His eyes closed, Gavarayya sat leaning against the wall. Through the banian he wore, his powerful chest and muscles, pock-marked all over, looked like dented babul timbers. Hearing their steps, he opened his eyes and looked at them. With streaks of red, his eyes looked like the eyes of a drunk. Avadhani, the munsif, the karanam and another village elder sat down on the bench next to Gavarayya. Gavarayya gave them a questioning look. The karanam began to speak: ‘You didn’t deserve this calamity, Gavarayya. You are quiet and peaceable by nature, you never bother others or interfere in their lives. When the news came, believe me, we thought, ‘O, what a pity!’ Our minds were convulsed with compassion.’ Gavarayya did not react. He just kept looking at them. The munsif said: ‘Whether it be in the matter of payment of taxes or of salaries to the field hands—he always punctually fulfilled his duty. He never kept with him money due to others. To that fellow, that field hand Subbayya, even before the year was over Gavarayya measured out his grain. That fellow has been singing his praises, “Our landlord is an extremely large-hearted man…”’

Gavarayya still did not respond. Whether he had heard them or not, they had no clue. He just kept looking at them. ‘But then there is one small matter, Gavarayya babu,’ said Avadhani. Greatly skilled at speech, he said whatever it was that he was expressing softly, smoothly, solemnly, blending it all with a special pity and tenderness. As the temple trustee, his words had even greater authority. ‘Take it for granted that no one can cross this worldly ocean happily without support from God. You are an excellent man, a straightforward man—even if, as far as your business is concerned, it is totally against the laws; this is unambiguously asserted by our shastras. But then in the age of Kali, certain exceptions have been made by men. Therefore, it can be overlooked. Even then they insisted on one thing—whatever it is, if you don’t stop thinking of God, all your hardships will evaporate like the mist. ‘With fruit, flower, leaf or even water’—ancestors said —‘God is easy to please…’ Gradually, a smile of triumph appeared on the faces of all four men. The normally snarling and growling Gavarayya was keeping quiet today. What everyone believed was that an impregnable fort wall was now showing a crack. They felt that Gavarayya could be reformed slowly. They rose, took their leave. Gavarayya still said nothing, just kept staring at them. II A year passed. Off and on, the karanam, the munsif and others would call on Gavarayya at his house. They would invite him to have a darshan of the deity, or for a harikatha recital, or for something else, and would personally escort him to the event in question. Now, even the villagers would raise their hands in namaskaram when they passed him on the street. But Gavarayya would not speak a word. Like a man enchanted he would sit in the temple or through the harikatha. Sometimes he would get up abruptly and walk away. The elders would shake their heads. ‘Rakshasa, son of a whore! Is he going to change easily?’ they would say. Avadhani would respond, ‘Does he have a choice in the matter? Defying society and dharmam where can this fellow go?’

X The compound wall of Lord Venugopala’s temple was on the verge of collapse. They couldn’t put off repairs any longer, the elders decided. Not less than twenty-five thousand it would cost. Nobody could come up with such a huge sum except Gavarayya, they said. During the year Gavarayya had made huge profits. Even if you ignored the hides business, he had bought a three-quarters share in the oil mill in the town. In wonder, the villagers all told each other that in just this one oil business he had made a lakh of rupees. They thought that the reason for this prosperity was the newly sprung piety in him, but, lest he forgot, made it a point to tell him this again and again. On an auspicious day, the munsif, the karanam, the trustee of the temple and the wealthy people in the village together called on Gavarayya and explained the need to repair the temple compound wall. They were unanimous in their opinion that he alone should take it up. ‘Your name will become immortal, Gavarayya. In your name we will have puja and religious rites performed,’ they added. ‘Why does God need a temple? And where is the need for a compound wall around the temple?’ asked Gavarayya, chewing the end of the cheroot in his mouth. They were all dumbstruck. ‘Blasphemy! Blasphemy!’ said the karanam and slapped his own cheeks in a gesture of expiation. The temple trustee winked at the karanam. ‘The question which Gavarayya has posed is not an ordinary one. Even philosophers and maharishis have been given no end of trouble by this knotty question. But then, even without our knowledge, inside Gavarayya there is saadhana at work, a spiritual process. If we can be patient for a few more days, a great man like Gavarayya will himself find an answer to his question. The favour of the Lord will not come directly and fully at one go. Comes in gradual stages, let me tell you. When that day of Grace comes, our Gavarayya himself will, I assure you, say, ‘Here, Avadhani garu, take this ten thousand—get the compound wall constructed.’ Won’t he?’

Gavarayya, who had never done it before, now raised his hands and made a namaskaram to Avadhani. ‘I have to go now, so please show yourselves out. I have a job to do in town.’ Saying this, he strode out. Avadhani was taken aback. They looked at each other. ‘Avadhani, you have conquered. He bowed his head and made a namaskaram to you! Curse him! He is changing. Surely changing,’ said the karanam with glee. ‘By the time the rainy season is over—take my word for it—he will drop the twenty-five thousand before us. Along with the compound wall we will build parapet walls for our houses,’ said the munsif, chuckling into his moustache.

X The rainy season came. The rain poured down heavily, angrily, powerfully. With thick clouds, darkened sky, lightning and thunder, nature was all hustle and bustle like a wedding pandal. Though the streets were slushy, womenfolk, among them newly married girls, held the pleats of their saris above their ankles, and with much gaiety and merriment took part in auspicious ceremonies at various houses. The farming community was busy in the fields. Though the munsif’s wife suffered from arthritis and Avadhani’s daughter retched from the nausea of pregnancy, these problems did not in any way affect the collective happiness of the village. Though the karanam’s widowed sister kept staring through the window at the young man who had come to visit his relatives, and kept waving her hand to him ceaselessly, because of his short-sightedness and the shadows cast by the clouds he missed her signals. The coolies and others such continued to live on the outskirts of the village; besides the village’s inhabitants, the gutters, the gulleys, the diseases—everything was in proper order. In the library building, constructed by the panchayat, the card players continued their games round the clock. All was right with the world, until an unexpected development shattered the village’s sense of peace and equilibrium. The munsif and a couple of others were sitting on the munsif’s pyol, covered in shawls, puffing happily at their cheroots, absorbed in a spiritual discussion. Paanakaalu came running up to them. He looked

distraught. From his appearance it appeared that right behind him followed some catastrophe—an earthquake or a deluge. ‘Hey you. What’s happened?’ asked the munsif. ‘She has come sir. She has returned, sir,’ said Paanakaalu. Two months earlier, the munsif’s bull calf had slipped its tether and run away. The munsif said with a smile, ‘Then there’s nothing to be worried about? I shall come and see. Tie it up in the cattleshed.’ ‘Not the young bull, babu! It’s Gavarayya’s wife!’ said Paanakaalu. His announcement made them all straighten up. ‘What, what, what did you say?’ they all said simultaneously. In a hushed voice Paanakaalu gave them his version of what had happened. The night before, very late, after watching the late-night movie in the town, as Narasimham from the cloth shop approached the village, he noticed someone moving in the dark of the trees by the roadside. It struck him that it might be a ghost and he was scared, his heart beat fast. He ran and hurriedly woke up Paanakaalu sleeping in a hut a little distance away. Both returned to investigate. They found a young woman, in dirty clothes, her hair in disarray, plodding along laboriously. She was carrying a small bundle. They went up to her to see who she was, but failed to recognize her. They accosted her; she did not respond. She quickened her pace. The two followed her at a distance. She cut across the fields and entered the thatched shed that lay between Gavarayya’s backyard and the fields. It was overflowing with firewood, old tin cans and odds and ends. For a moment they thought of waking up Gavarayya and informing him of his uninvited visitor but were afraid he might react violently and beat them up. In the morning Paanakaalu remembered the incident and went to look inside the shed. The visitor of the night was none other than Gavarayya’s wife! Her belly bulged considerably; she must be due any time now. She lay on the straw, groaning. ‘Do you think Gavarayya knows about this…?’ asked the munsif. ‘No, babu. He leaves for town early in the morning, as you know,’ said Paanakaalu. The munsif rose quickly. Put on his chappals and started for Avadhani’s house. On the way everyone greeted him and enquired

of him, ‘What, munsif, it seems Gavarayya’s wife has returned. What is happening to this village and the people, babu? Right and Wrong, Merit and Sin, all things are trampled into the dust! If those who elope and conceive are allowed to come back and are accepted by their husbands, won’t the young in the village too go out of control! What has happened to this village, babu, and to these elders!’ said an old woman past sixty seated on a pyol. Even before he reached Avadhani’s house the munsif realized that the whole village was discussing Gavarayya’s wife. Avadhani looked testy, angry. ‘Do you know?’ asked the munsif, climbing the steps. ‘Every child and adult knows! Only you, supposed to be performing the munsif’s duties, don’t know. With what audacity has this sinful female returned to this village? Doesn’t she have any respect for dharmam? Doesn’t she fear God?’ In no time at all the karanam, the munsif and the elders of the village, were seated in conference. They said they needed to ascertain unambiguously if Gavarayya was going to drive away the fallen woman immediately or leave the village himself. That very morning someone in the Untouchable quarter had contracted cholera and the reason for that was the sinful woman’s stepping into the village, said one elder. Avadhani’s elder sister pushed the door slightly ajar and said, ‘We are all dying of shame. If these violators of our laws remain in the village what will be the fate of householders, annayya? Please think about this. Please tell us if you want us to remain in the village or jump into the pond.’ ‘Gavarayya is not at home. As soon as he returns, you elders go and tell him what you think of all this. How can he not respect your views? Whatever you may say, Avadhani garu, this man is not the old Gavarayya. He has now learned to discriminate between Sin and Virtue. He has developed respect for God, and more than that, respect for you,’ said Seshagiri, the biggest landowner of the village. ‘How many hopes we pinned on Gavarayya!’ said the munsif with a sigh, remembering the compound wall of the temple, and the twentyfive thousand. ‘Doesn’t Gavarayya’s aunt still live in that house? What is she doing? Keeping quiet?’ asked the karanam.

‘What aunt, babu? She has fallen ill and is now bedridden, poor woman. She has grown really old,’ said someone.

X At dusk Gavarayya got off his cycle. The moment he stepped into his house, he found Avadhani, the karanam and the munsif waiting for him. When he raised his eyebrows quizzically at them, Avadhani told him the whole story. Gavarayya’s eyes became red. His thick lips shook. He rushed to pick up a crowbar from the corner of the room. ‘I shall kill that whore,’ he shouted. Avadhani hurriedly said, ‘No, don’t! No need for such a drastic act. Gavarayya babu, your devotion to morality is well known, why get into a murder case now? It will create trouble for you, and create trouble for us as well…throw her out of the house, that’s all.’ Gavarayya did not listen to him. He rushed out of the house. His visitors, realizing that in his present state there was no telling what he might do to them, slipped quickly out of the house and returned to their own homes. Gavarayya went into the thatched shed. It was all cluttered and gloomy inside. Gavarayya strained his eyes to see. He saw his wife lying supine on the ground in the corner. He went over to her and raised the crowbar. Then he paused. Unsure as to whether she was dead or alive, he knelt down and peered at her face. It was pale and emaciated. Her hair was dirty and knotted. Pitiful, paralysed by fear of death, her face looked awful. He called her name, ‘Chitti.’ Shook her by the shoulders. Chitti opened her eyes. Recognized Gavarayya. Tears trickled from her eyes. She lifted her shaking hands and made a namaskaram to him. ‘Don’t do anything to me, I shall go away,’ she said in a feeble voice. Gavarayya recalled that his mother had, just before her death, done exactly this—raised her hands and made a namaskaram to his father and looked as pitiful. Chitti’s hands slid down and lay helplessly at her sides. He sat there for a while, lost in thought. Then, he went in and brought back water in a chembu and a bowl full of rice. ‘Chitti,’ he said softly. Chitti opened her eyes. ‘Get up, eat this rice and go away

at first light. Don’t show me your face again, is that clear?’ he said. Chitti nodded her head. Gavarayya stood up and said, ‘If you are seen in this shed in the morning, you won’t escape death.’ He returned to the house.

X That night Gavarayya had no appetite. The food was tasteless. He felt as though fires had been lit underneath his feet. Outside in the sky thick clouds gathered. The wind screamed through the leaves of the trees, crashed into the eaves of the roof and ricocheted off with a terrible moaning sound. After tossing and turning for a while, Gavarayya fell into a restless sleep. In his sleep, he had a horrifying nightmare. His father and his mother had been tied to a stake and fires had been started all around them. The people who had started the fire appeared to be Avadhani, the karanam and the munsif. Both his father and his mother were screaming in agony and terror, ‘Babui, babu-i.’ In a while they were reduced to red and black ashes. Out of the ashes rose somebody. He quickly strode towards the thatched hut in Gavarayya’s backyard. That person had a conch in one hand, and the divine discus in the other, and Vaishnava marks on his forehead. He looked like the image of Lord Venugopala that he had seen in the temple. Tears were flowing out of the eyes of Lord Venugopala. God was crying. He took the infant from Chitti’s bed into his arms and began consoling Chitti, ‘Don’t be afraid. I am with you.’ Meanwhile, armed with burning torches, a mob of furious villagers came and set the thatched shed on fire. The blaze enveloped the shed. The flames were reaching the sky. God was burning. Chitti was burning. The innocent little infant was burning. Gavarayya woke up with a start. His forehead was dripping with perspiration. The casement shutters were flapping in the wind. The wind roared, thunder and lightning crashed—it was terrifying. Gavarayya wiped his face. He gulped down a glass of water and looked out into the darkness. The dark outside blended with the rain, like black poison sliding down from the heavens, black sin surging like a rising sea. In that terrifying darkness, these men, houses and homes, fears, desires, everything appeared unreal. Out of the furious

tandava of Nature, the awe-inspiring dance of the elements, a singular truth emerged, and struck him like a whiplash. There was a huge flash of lightning. The tip of the gopuram of Lord Venugopala’s temple was starkly outlined by the light. Something flashed in the depths of Gavarayya’s mind. Gavarayya coughed. Lantern in hand he went into the backyard. It was a huge yard. Shrill, loud moans came from the thatched shed. He went in. Chitti was writhing in labour. Unable to watch the sight, he left the lantern there and came out and stood in the cold, wind and rain. He didn’t know how long he stood there. Suddenly, there was a flash of lightning, followed by a dreadful sound. It seemed like lightning had struck somewhere close by. Chitti screamed aloud, ‘Babu-i.’ Gavarayya froze for a minute. Presently, he heard an infant puling—‘kayre, kayre.’ A smile spread across Gavarayya’s hard-bitten, ugly face. In that downpour, in that darkness, finding his way by the lightning flashes, Gavarayya ran to fetch the village midwife.

X It was eight in the morning. Avadhani, the karanam, Seshagiri, the munsif, were all seated in the verandah of Gavarayya’s house. The storm had cleared away and everything was washed by soft sunlight. In that sunlight everything—the trees, leaves, grass and the black wings of the crow on Gavarayya’s house—shimmered. Only the faces of Avadhani, the munsif and the others didn’t shine. Anger swirled in their frustrated eyes. Outside the house, the village servant and a couple of servants who had come with their masters stood as if ready to carry out their slightest bidding, their arms deferentially crossed across their chests, embodiments of obedience and resolve. After a while Gavarayya came out of his house. He looked like an iron girder on the move. Narrowing his little eyes, he looked directly, disdainfully at them. Avadhani said fiercely, ‘I didn’t expect you would do this, Gavarayya! Thought you were more of a gentleman than this. Would you let a fallen woman live in your house? Would you bring up a baby boy fathered by some stranger? You have not only

lost both shame and self-respect, but committed a sin, a horrible sin. Do you think that God will forgive and tolerate you?’ Gavarayya sat relaxed, leaning against the wall. From the waistfolds of his dhoti he took out a leaf of tobacco and rolling it, said, ‘I have been advised by God himself.’ ‘What did He tell you?’ asked Avadhani. ‘I am going to adopt that boy. That girl will stay put in my house,’ said Gavarayya. ‘You will play husband to a woman who eloped?’ blustered Seshagiri, unable to believe his own ears. ‘If I marry a girl half my age what else will she do? If I throw her out, where will she go? Give her food and clothes and she will stay here and take care of the boy,’ said Gavarayya. Avadhani guffawed contemptuously. ‘Did you say God had told you? Which God, I ask? The God of adultery? Those who have engaged in great penance have not been rewarded, but…’ ‘God appeared before me. I have seen God,’ said Gavarayya stubbornly. His eyes shone when he said this. ‘You had better send her and her child packing. We are not going to accept such a blatant act of immorality,’ said the karanam. ‘We won’t allow you to come anywhere near the temple,’ said Avadhani. ‘The village as a whole will unite against you, Gavarayya! We are telling you calmly and respectfully what your next course of action should be, but you are not accepting our advice. We are not going to sit idle, I warn you,’ said the munsif. Suddenly Gavarayya rose, picked up the crowbar lying by the wall and thundered, ‘Who dares challenge me, let me see? Who can challenge me? Have I stolen someone else’s money? Did I ask any of you to come here? Who are you to come and preach to me? Whoever interferes in my affairs I shall cut in half with a single blow —let whoever wishes to come, come forward.’ He was shaking with rage. He was like a volcano erupting. His appearance, his fury terrified the village servant who stood gaping in fear. Avadhani stood up. The others too stood up.

‘Then you say you will not abandon her,’ said Avadhani. ‘I won’t leave her,’ said Gavarayya. ‘Then we are ostracizing you. The washerman and the barber won’t come to you. What’s more, I’d like to see which labourer will dare to work in your fields!’ said Avadhani. The munsif looked at the village servant and said, ‘Make sure the whole village knows what has been decided. Announce it everywhere on your tabor.’ Gavarayya gave them a thunderous look, and said, ‘Get away from me, you so-called village elders! I wouldn’t live in this godforsaken village even if you asked me to. I won’t allow my child to be brought up in the midst of such wretched people, thoo!’ He hawked and spat, and glared at the departing Avadhani and the rest of the delegation. Before seven days, a week passed, Gavarayya’s house was locked up. It transpired that Gavarayya had bought a house in the town and had put his house and land in the village up for sale.

five

~ A VILLAGE DIVIDED*

RAHI MASOOM REZA Translated from the Hindi by Gillian Wright THE DOZING TOWN ithin the old fort of Ghazipur there’s now a school, where the sound of the Ganga’s waves reaches, but where the murmuring or cold sighs of history do not. No sentry now patrols the walls; nor even do schoolboys come to them to speak to, or hear from, the river shimmering in the light of the setting sun. No one can guess how many stories the muddy waters of this great river must know. But mothers are absorbed in tales of jinn, fairies, ghosts and thieves, and for goodness knows how long this sleepy town on the banks of the Ganga has never even thought of sitting in the river’s school to hear stories of its forefathers. If anyone were to come and sit on these walls, and close his eyes, it’s still not impossible for the villages and fields on the far shore to be transformed into dense jungle, for the huts of the rishis of the tapovan to appear, and for the young princes of Ayodhya, Ram and Lakshman, to emerge, bows slung over their shoulders, defending the sacred solitude of the forest. But no one does sit on these walls because, when the age comes for them to do so, the young men of Ghazipur, their chests a yard wide, are yoked to the mill of unemployment to squeeze out the oil of their dreams, to drink that poisonous oil and quietly die.

W

A nudge of my bridal nosering sent My love as far as Calcutta. In the jute mills of Calcutta the dreams of this town are woven into the warp and woof of gunny cloth and sent to distant lands, leaving behind only empty eyes, desolate hearts and weary bodies, which lie in some small, dark room, constantly longing for footpaths, village ponds, and fields of paddy, barley and peas. Calcutta! Calcutta is not the name of a city. For the sons and daughters of Ghazipur it is another name for the yearning that comes of separation. This yearning is a whole story in itself, in which the kajal lining the eyes of countless women has been washed away by tears, and then dried. Every year thousands upon thousands of men far from home send back thousands upon thousands of messages with the monsoon clouds. Perhaps that’s why clouds burst over Ghazipur and, in these rains, seeds of yearning sprout in new and old walls, in the roofs of mosques and temples, in the cracks of school windows and doors, and the pain of separation awakes and begins to sing: No one stirs out in the monsoon rains, Only you would leave for a distant land. Calcutta, Bombay, Kanpur and Dacca are the boundaries of this town. Far-flung boundaries. The people from here remain of here even after they leave. No matter how far balloons rise into the sky their link with the ground, where some child holds a fine thread, does not break. But here for some time the threads in many children’s hands have broken. If the truth be told, this is the story of those balloons, or perhaps of those children who hold the ends of the limp threads in their hands and who are searching for their balloons, unaware of what befell them when the threads broke.

X The Ganga constantly strokes the head and cheeks of this town like a mother caring for her sick child but when she senses no response

to her love she begins to sob inconsolably, and the town is drowned in her tears. People say there’s a flood. Muslims begin to sound the call to prayer. Hindus begin to make offerings to appease the offended Mother Ganga. The Ganga frets at this insult to her love and begins to strike her head against the walls of the fort and her bright, white tresses tangle and spread far and wide. We call it foam. When the Ganga sees that no one comprehends her pain, she wipes her eyes and then we say that the water is receding. Muslims say that the call to prayer is never without effect; Hindus say that the Ganga has accepted their offerings. No one says that the tears of the Mother have made the land even more fertile—for miles around a coverlet of soft earth has been drawn over the land. But what can the Ganga do? The bullocks here don’t have strength enough to bear the weight of the plough. This town is heedless of its past. It doesn’t even have the time occasionally to lie in the cool shade of a banyan tree and think about its history, which spreads from the time of the Ramayan to the present. As for the future, it doesn’t have the courage even to consider it. There is a tiny hole in the pot of time, from which moments fall drop by drop. This town lives in moments, dies in moments, and then is reborn in moments. Who knows when this great penance will end? Ghazipur is not on the caravan route of life. Sometimes, if the wind blows past here, it brings the dust of the caravans, and Ghazipur can find happiness in rubbing that dust into its clothes and body like attar of roses. This is my town. Whenever I pass through its narrow lanes, it puts its hand on my shoulder. It meets me here and there on the roads of all my various stories. But I have not yet been able to grasp its whole reality; that’s why I want to see it one more time. This novel is in fact my journey. I have set out in search of Ghazipur, but first I will stop at my Gangauli. If I can capture the truth of Gangauli I will have the courage to write the epic of Ghazipur. This novel is really the prologue to that epic. But I must say one thing more. This is not the story either of a few individuals or a few families. This is not even the story of the village in which the characters, good and bad, are attempting to fulfil

themselves. This story is neither religious nor political, because time is neither religious nor political...and this story is actually about time. It is the story of time passing through Gangauli. Some old people die, some young men grow old, some children grow up and some are born. This is the story of the dreams and courage trapped in these changing ages of man. It is the story of the ruins where houses stood and of the houses built on those ruins. And this story is as true as it is false. I know the art of mixing truth with falsehood and falsehood with truth. Here and there I use the first person so that the story cannot go far from me, and I can touch it when I wish—to summon the courage to convince myself and you that I am like the story I am telling. Therefore, this is both an autobiography and a tale of others’ experiences. This age is like an unbound book lying in an open plain. Even the slightest gust of breeze sets its pages fluttering back and forth. In the pages the paragraphs advance and recede before the reader, sometimes he finds himself ten pages ahead, and sometimes is left ten pages behind. That is why I am making unreserved use of the first person—so that the pages do not turn by themselves, so that order remains and I can see what was, what is and what is to be.

X They say that on a dark night in the month of Asharh, at the start of the monsoon, a chieftain of Tughlaq, Saiyid Masood Ghazi, crossed the swollen Ganga and attacked Gadipuri. Accordingly, the town changed its name from Gadipuri to Ghazipur. The roads were the same, the lanes too, and the houses—just the name changed. Perhaps names are outer shells which can be changed. There is no unbreakable bond between names and identity, because if there were then Gadipuri too should have changed when it became Ghazipur, or at least the defeated Thakurs, Brahmins, Kayasths, Ahirs, Bhars and Chamars should have called themselves Gadipuris, and the victorious Saiyids, Sheikhs and Pathans should have called themselves Ghazipuris. But they didn’t. They are all Ghazipuris and

if the town’s name had not been changed then they would all have been Gadipuris. These new names are fascinating. When the Arabic ‘fateh’ or ‘victory’ is joined to the Hindi ‘garh’ or ‘fort’ it makes one unit—the town of Fatehgarh. That is why even after the creation of Pakistan I cannot comprehend its reality. If you take the ‘Ali’ from Aligarh, ‘Ghazi’ from Ghazipur and ‘Dildar’ from Dildarnagar, then whole towns will become desolate and nameless and if you take the ‘Imam’ from imambaras—the houses of the Imam—then how can you have Moharram? The Ganga still holds Ghazipur to her breast, as she did Gadipuri. That is why it makes no difference whether it’s called Ghazipur or Gadipur. Masood Ghazi’s family would have been certain to seize the surrounding countryside in any case. This family, which chanced here from Delhi, would still have been sure to have split into several landowning families and I would still have written this story. One son of Masood Ghazi, Nuruddin the Martyr (how and why he became a martyr I, and probably no one, knows) forded two rivers and conquered Gangauli, a village about a dozen miles from Ghazipur. They say that the name of the raja of this village was Gang and the village was named Gangauli after him. But even after Nuruddin Saiyid’s family established its hold over the village, Gangauli did not become Nurpur or Nuruddinagar—and my Gangauli’s name is no worse than my Ghazipur’s. But the amusing thing is that the tomb of Nuruddin the Martyr, which is newer than Gangauli, looks much older... This small brick structure must certainly once have had a roof but for the last thirtyfive years or more I have seen it in ruins. Only on the tenth day of Moharram, when processions from both ends of the village come here, is there some kind of gathering. The men who learn lathi-work together congregate a short distance from the tomb, fencing with leather-covered wooden truncheons and shields, whirling long sticks, displaying how to fend off attack with a knife, and performing feats of swordsmanship. Then suddenly one man shouts, ‘Bol Muhammadi!’ and the whole village replies, ‘Ya Husain!’

For some time now the residents of Gangauli have been dwindling in numbers and the percentage of Sunnis, Shias and Hindus has been growing. Perhaps this is the reason that there’s no longer such a large crowd at the tomb of Nuruddin the Martyr and the air of Gangauli no longer resounds with the cry ‘Bol Muhammadi!—Ya Husain!’ as it did formerly. Perhaps this is the reason that today the tomb looks so forlorn and keeps searching with its blind eyes and asking, ‘Where has my Gangauli gone?’ But the foundations of this tomb are in the soil of Gangauli and that is why it stands alone, exactly where it always has. Great trees do not move from their places unless they are felled or their roots grow hollow. Abul Qasim-cha, Baddan-bhai, Tannu-bhai, Tassan, Qaisar, Akhtar and Gigge are in Pakistan. But the tomb of Nuruddin the Martyr is still here in Gangauli and not even the Custodian of Refugee Property has laid a hand on it because he knows the tomb of Nuruddin the Martyr belongs not to the refugee Saiyids of Gangauli, but to Gangauli itself. The life of the banyan tree is rather long, and then several generations have enriched this memorial with their bones. Apart from the tomb, the Saiyids of Gangauli also made a Karbala. This Karbala was to the south of the tomb and the tomb itself to the east of Gangauli. The Saiyids had also dug a tank on the western edge of the village. This tank must have been built by the heirs of Nuruddin the Martyr because there is no sign of any temple nearby. On the mounds of earth excavated from the tank are mango and jamun trees and on the tenth of Moharram the Saiyid gentlemen of Gangauli come to say their prayers here. West of this tank is a deserted three-doored indigo factory made of brick and lime which we, for some unaccountable reason, call a godown. This is a memorial to John Gilchrist, in other words a monument of yet another age. Now it comes in useful for the cowherds who sit here to suck sugarcane, or for lovers. In between a decrepit tomb and a ruined factory lives this village. At two ends of the village are the homes of the Saiyids. All in all there must be ten houses. The ones to the south are called the Dakkhin Patti, or southern side, and those to the north the Uttar

Patti, or northern side. In between are the homes of the weavers. From Sibtu-da’s house the quarters of the Raqias, or Muslim traders start, and then a dirty mud lane leads into Gangauli bazaar and, pressed beneath low shops and mangy, scratching dogs, passes into the open area around the tomb of Nuruddin the Martyr, and draws a breath of relief. Around the village are several settlements of thatched huts. In one live the Chamars, in another the Bhars and in another the Ahirs. There are three main gates to Gangauli. One is in Uttar Patti and is called the Gate Under the Pakkar Tree. This has a large, wooden door. Opposite is a pakkar tree. Just as you step down from the gate, on the right are several whitewashed platforms, on which beautiful wooden tazias are placed on the ninth day of Moharram, and then there is a large courtyard. These courtyards are of great social importance to the zamindars. Marriage processions from the grooms’ side come here. Feasts of birth and death are held here. Subjects of the zamindars’ domains are punished here. Land disputes are complicated and resolved here. Police officers, deputy collectors and collectors are entertained with dance and song here. If there were no such courtyards there could be no zamindars. So there is one Great Gate in Uttar Patti and two in Dakkhin Patti. Of the latter one was built by my grandmother’s family. This is called the Barka or Great Gate, and the other Great Gate, which is called Abbu Miyan’s Gate belongs to Abbu-da’s forefathers. MY VILLAGE, MY PEOPLE I ran through Gori-dadi’s courtyard and slipped into the Dakkhin Patti’s room with three archways. I tripped and fell. My elder brother was running after me. The fact was that my sister had made some roast coriander mixture and hidden it in a chest. We saw her do it. The coriander mixture disappeared. My sister complained to my mother. Mother chased us—that’s why we were running. My brother had just rushed over and picked me up when I saw Mother’s hand over my head. I wriggled like a girai fish and freed myself. Mother had caught hold of my brother’s hair. I crept away

quietly. Just opposite was the small door of Naima-dadi’s private apartment. I slipped through it. There was hardly room for anything besides the guava tree in the small courtyard of her apartment, two small string beds just managing to fit into the remaining space. On one lay Naima-dadi, telling her prayer-beads; two black kurtas, two pairs of black, closefitting pajamas and two black dupattas were hanging out to dry on a clothesline passing near her head. Black dye was dripping from the corners of one dupatta and soaking the string of her small bed. I don’t know what Manjhale-dada’s father ever saw in this Naimadadi that he left a good and fair Gori-dadi, and took in marriage this doll of black earth, and built for her these private quarters. In any case, Naima-dadi was a common weaver woman, and could not live in the same house with Saiyid ladies, descendants of the Prophet. People of the old school used to pay great attention to who could sit where and with whom. I didn’t understand these things, but then there were many other things I couldn’t understand either. I couldn’t even work out why Manjhale-dada’s only son, Gujjan Miyan, called more properly Saiyid Ghaznafar Husain Zaidi, and known to me as Chote-da, left a good, fat, round, soft and smooth Hussan-dadi and kept a prostitute called Zumurrad, or Emerald. I’ve never seen Zumurrad, but I’ve seen Hussan-dadi from the time I opened my eyes to the time she closed hers. She was very tightfisted, but very beautiful. Not one woman of Gangauli had ever seen Zumurrad, but they all thought that she’d cast some spell on Gujjan Miyan. As this was considered a Bengali art, all the women of Gangauli were absolutely certain that Zumurrad was a Bengali. In fact, she was from Barabanki. The women of the village had no complaint against Gujjan Miyan for taking up with a whore. There was no harm in keeping a prostitute. However, it was a sin to leave a beautiful wife like Hussan. After all, didn’t Athar Miyan manage to get along with his one-eyed bride, that is Rabban-bi? And Athar Miyan was considered a handsome man. But, God bless him at every turn, he never let his one-eyed bride’s heart be soiled, even though in those days that wretched Jinti, the barber’s daughter, had so blossomed that the

Saiyid men were going mad for her, and every wife dreaded the day a private apartment would be added to her courtyard. But Athar Miyan didn’t give Jinti a glance because it would have hurt his bride’s heart—that wretched Jinti was melting for him, but still... In the same way that I didn’t understand Naima-dadi and Zumurrad’s stories, I couldn’t fathom why, when Rabban-bi was oneeyed, and Athar Miyan was a real piece of the moon and sun, and Jinti, the barber’s daughter, was melting for him too, he didn’t take her in. It wasn’t considered wrong to marry a second time or put some common woman in your house, and perhaps there wasn’t a single Saiyid family which didn’t have its bastard boys and girls. Even in houses where there was nothing to eat, the menfolk managed to indulge their fancies for grafted mangoes and grafted families. *Extracted from A Village Divided

six

~ RAAG DARBARI*

SHRILAL SHUKLA Translated from the Hindi by Gillian Wright

T

he edge of a town. Beyond it, the ocean of the Indian countryside. And there, on the edge of the town, stood a truck. As soon as you saw it you could tell that the sole purpose of its creation had been to rape the roads of India. Like reality, the truck had many aspects. From one point of view, the police could say that it was standing in the middle of the road. Looked at another way, the driver could say that it was on the side of the road. According to the dictates of current fashion, the driver had opened the right-hand door so that it hung out like a bird’s wing. This enhanced the truck’s dimensions and made it impossible for any other vehicle to pass. On one side of the road there was a petrol station; on the other, shops constructed of bits of rotting thatch, wood, local know-how and various items of assorted junk. At first sight it was clear that the shops were too numerous to count. Nearly all of them offered one of the favourite drinks of the Indian masses which is made from dust, dirt, tea leaves which have already been used several times, boiling water and so forth. The shops also stocked sweets, which battled valiantly day and night against the onslaughts of rain, dust storms, flies and mosquitoes. The sweets demonstrated the manual dexterity and scientific

expertise of our local working men. They showed that even if we don’t know how to make a decent razor blade, we’re still the only people in the world who can turn rubbish into the tastiest of snacks. The truck driver and the cleaner were standing in front of a shop, drinking tea. Rangnath spotted the truck from a distance and immediately hastened his step. Today, the railway had deceived him. He had left home thinking the local passenger train would be two hours late as usual, but it was only an hour and a half late and had left without him. Having contributed to the literature of the complaints book, and made himself a laughing stock in the eyes of the railway staff, he left the station. Now, as he walked down the road towards the truck, he began to smile. When he reached it, the driver and the cleaner were still sipping their tea. Glancing around aimlessly and containing his smile, Rangnath asked the driver in an uninterested way, ‘Driver sahib, is this truck going in the direction of Shivpalganj?’ The driver had his tea to drink and the woman shopkeeper to look at. Paying little attention to Rangnath, he said, ‘It is.’ ‘Will you take me with you? I’ll get out at the fifteenth mile. I have to go to Shivpalganj.’ The driver assessed all the possibilities of the woman shopkeeper in one glance and then turned his gaze upon Rangnath. Oho! What a sight! Like the great God Vishnu who stands like a pure lotus flower from head to toe, so stood Rangnath head to toe, a vision in white khadi cotton, the homespun cloth popularized by Mahatma Gandhi. He wore a khadi cap, shirt and pyjamas, and over his shoulder hung a bag of the kind used by the Gandhian Bhoodan Movement. In his hand was a leather attaché case. The driver saw him and was amazed. Then he thought for a moment and said, ‘Please take your seat, sir. We’ll leave right away.’

X The truck shuddered into life and set off. Freeing themselves after a while from the twisting, chaotic grasp of the town, they came upon a

clear and empty road. Here, the driver was able to get into top gear for the first time, but the gear lever kept slipping into neutral every hundred yards, and since the driver had his foot on the accelerator, the shuddering increased as the speed of the truck decreased. Rangnath said, ‘Driver sahib, your gearbox is exactly like our government.’ The driver accepted this citation of merit with a smile. Rangnath tried to make his statement more intelligible. ‘No matter how often you put it into top gear, it slips every few yards and goes back into its old rut.’ The driver laughed. ‘You’ve said something very deep, sir.’ Next time he went into top gear, he lifted his leg to an angle of about ninety degrees and held the gear pressed under his thigh. Rangnath wanted to say that the same technique was needed to run the country but, thinking that this would be a still deeper statement, he remained silent. Meanwhile, the driver returned his thigh to its proper place, put a long stick against the gear and wedged the other end under the dashboard. The truck kept up speed. Terrified at the sight of it, cyclists, pedestrians, horse-drawn carts and all other vehicles for several furlongs ahead drove off the road; judging from the speed at which the vehicles fled, it seemed as if they thought the truck was no truck, but a flame of fire, a typhoon from the Bay of Bengal, some foul-mouthed official unleashed on the public or a gang of wild Pindaris. Rangnath thought that they should have had an announcement made in advance, warning people to keep all their livestock and children at home as a truck had just left the town. The driver asked, ‘Tell me, sir, how are you? It’s a long time, is it, since you’ve been into the country?’ Rangnath smiled, encouraging this attempt at civility. ‘What are you doing these days, sir?’ ‘Digging up grass.’ The driver laughed. He nearly ran over a naked ten-year-old boy. Safe, the boy dropped down on to a small bridge like a wounded house lizard falling from the ceiling.

This had no effect on the driver. Pushing his foot even farther down on the accelerator and laughing, he said, ‘What a thing to say! Go on, sir, tell me what you mean.’ ‘I told you. I’m digging up grass. In English, you call it research. Last year I did my MA. This year I’ve started research.’ The driver was smiling as if he were listening to Tales from the Thousand and One Nights. ‘So, sir, why are you going to Shivpalganj?’ ‘My mother’s brother lives there. I’ve been ill and I’m going to stay in the country for a while to recover.’ The driver laughed for a rather long time. ‘What a tale you’ve made up, sir!’ Rangnath gave him a doubtful look and asked, ‘ What’s made up about it?’ At this innocent question, the driver rocked with mirth. ‘What things you’re saying! Very well then, forget it. Tell me, how is Mittal sahib? What happened to the murder case in the police lockup?’ Rangnath was completely unnerved. Choking, he said, ‘But how would I know who this Mittal sahib is?’ The driver put a brake on his laughter. The truck too slowed down. He took a close look at Rangnath. ‘You don’t know Mittal sahib?’ ‘No.’ Jain sahib?’ ‘No.’ ‘The driver spat out of the window and asked in a clear voice, ‘You don’t work for the CID, then?’ Irritated, Rangnath said, ‘CID? What on earth do you mean?’ The driver let out a long sigh and began to examine intently the road ahead. Some bullock carts were travelling along it. In accordance with the popular principle of stretching your legs wherever and whenever you get the chance, the drivers lay on top of their carts, asleep and with their faces covered. The bullocks, not on their own initiative but as a result of long practice, quietly pulled the carts down the road. The scene merited comparison with the bovine

public and its lethargic leaders, but Rangnath hadn’t the courage to say anything. He had been upset by the remark about the CID. The driver blew, first his rubber horn and then another horn which, despite its three musical tones, was truly terrifying. The bullock carts proceeded on their way. The driver was pushing the truck on at a good speed and seemed to be about to fly over the carts. But as he got closer, he suddenly seemed to realize that he was in a truck, not a helicopter. He braked, the stick which had been wedged against the dashboard fell down, the gear changed and the truck squeezed past the carts, almost touching them. Further on, the driver spoke to Rangnath with contempt, ‘If you’re not CID, then how come you’re wearing khadi?’ Rangnath had been put in low spirits by these aggressive questions but he treated this one as a normal inquiry and answered simply, ‘Everyone wears khadi these days.’ ‘Come off it, no sensible man does. Only politicians, plain-clothes men and fools.’ He opened the window, spat and changed into top gear. The personality cult surrounding Rangnath had come to an end. For a while he sat quietly. Then he began to whistle. The driver nudged him with his elbow and said, ‘Look here, sit quiet. This is no place for hymn singing and such things.’ Rangnath shut up. The driver was annoyed, ‘This gear keeps on slipping. It goes into neutral. What are you staring at? Grab hold of it and keep it in place!’ A few minutes later, he said in the same tone, ‘Not like that! Like this. Keep the pressure up and hold it properly!’ For some time a horn had been blowing behind the truck. Rangnath had heard it but the driver was paying no attention. After a while, the cleaner, who was travelling in the back, hung round the side of the truck and began to tap on the window by the driver’s head. In the language of the truck-wallahs, this action obviously had some dreadful import because the driver slowed down immediately and pulled the truck over to the left-hand side of the road. The horn belonged to a station wagon—the sort of station wagon which, thanks to foreign aid, is used in the hundreds for the progress

of the country and which can be seen on any road at any time. The station wagon passed the truck on the right, slowed down, and a khaki-coloured arm stretched out to signal the truck to stop. Both vehicles drew to a halt. An officer-like peon and a peon-like officer stepped down from the station wagon. Two constables in khaki uniforms also got out. Immediately they began to rob and loot in the style of the old Pindari dacoits. Someone seized the driver’s licence; someone else, the registration card; someone began to tap the rear-view mirror; someone else blew the horn. They wobbled the running board, switched on the headlights and rang the bell at the back of the truck. Whatever they looked at was defective. Whatever they touched, they found something wrong with it. In this way, in four minutes those four men had found forty faults with the truck and, standing beneath a tree, they began to discuss the treatment which was to be meted out to the enemy. Rangnath could only make out that the stories of the principles of karma and poetic justice were true. The truck was being checked and God was taking His revenge on the driver for his insult to Rangnath. He remained where he was. But in the middle of all this discussion, the driver found the opportunity to say, ‘Sir, please get down. Where is the need to sit there holding the gear now?’ Rangnath got down and went and stood under another tree. Under the first one, the driver and the checking party were discussing every single point of the truck in detail. As he watched, the discussion shifted from the parts of the truck to the general condition of and the economic chaos facing the country and, in a short time, the individuals present had broken up into small subcommittees. Standing under separate trees, they began to ponder each issue in their capacity as experts. After a lot of discussion, a sort of open session began under one tree and soon it became apparent that the seminar was coming to an end. Finally, Rangnath heard the nasal voice of the officer. ‘Well, Ashfaq miyan, what’s your opinion? Should we let him off?’ The peon said, ‘What else can you do, sir? How long can we go on drawing up charges? If there were only a couple of faults, we could

charge him.’ A constable said, ‘It would be tomorrow morning by the time we finish making out the charge sheet.’ After talking around the point, the officer said, ‘OK, Banta Singh, you can go. We’ve let you off.’ The officer had been standing under a tree, watching Rangnath for some time. Lighting a cigarette, he came towards him. When he was close, he asked, ‘You too were in the truck?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘He didn’t take any fare off you, did he?’ ‘No.’ The officer said, ‘I guessed as much by looking at your clothes. But it’s my duty to check.’ To annoy him, Rangnath said, ‘This isn’t real homespun khadi. It’s mill cloth.’ The officer replied deferentially, ‘Ah, sahib, khadi is khadi. What’s the difference between the real and the imitation?’ After the officer left, the driver came up to him with the peon. The driver said, ‘Just give us two rupees, will you, sir?’ Turning his face away, Rangnath answered harshly, ‘What do you mean? Why should I give you money?’ The driver took the peon’s hand and said, ‘Please come. Please come with me.’ As he moved off, he said to Rangnath, ‘l got checked just because of you. And you speak to me like this when I’m in trouble. Is this how you’ve been educated?’ The present education system is like a pariah bitch lying in the road, whom anyone can kick. The driver, as he went on his way, attacked it with a sentence and headed towards the truck with the peon. Rangnath saw that evening was closing in, his attaché case was in the truck, Shivpalganj was still five miles away and he needed people’s goodwill. He approached the truck slowly. The driver of the station wagon was blowing his horn repeatedly to call back the peon. Rangnath tried to give the driver two rupees. The driver said, ‘If you’re giving now, then give to the Orderly sahib. What will I do with your money?’

As he spoke, he began to sound like those religious ascetics who never touch money themselves and tell others that their money is nothing but the dirt of their hands. The peon pocketed the money, took a last puff at his beedi, threw its half-lit stub more or less on to Rangnath’s pyjamas and set off towards the station wagon. After he left, the driver started the truck, went into top gear just as before, and gave Rangnath the lever to hold. Then suddenly and without any reason, he puckered up his lips and began to whistle a song from a Hindi film. Rangnath listened in silence. A little later, he began to distinguish bundle-like objects in the twilight on both sides of the road. They were women sitting in rows, talking contentedly and at the same time relieving themselves. Below the road, there were heaps of rubbish and their stench was making the evening breeze blow with the sluggishness of a pregnant woman. From some distance away came the sound of barking dogs. A curtain of smoke drifted in front of Rangnath’s eyes. All this meant there was no denying that they had come to a village. Shivpalganj. *Extracted from Raag Darbari

seven

~ LORRY RAJA

MADHURI VIJAY

W

hat happened was that my older brother, Siju, got a job as a lorry driver at the mine and started acting like a big shot. He stopped playing with Munna the way he used to, tossing him into the air like a sack of sand, making him sputter with laughter. When Amma asked him anything, he would give her a pitying look and not answer. He stopped speaking to his girlfriend, Manju, altogether. He taunted me about playing in the mud, as he called it, breaking chunks of iron ore with my hammer. With Appa especially he was reckless, not bothering to conceal his disdain, until he said something about failed drivers who are only good for digging and drinking, and Appa wrestled him to the ground and forced him to eat a handful of the red, iron-rich earth, shouting that this was our living now and he should bloody learn to respect it. Siju complained to the mine’s labour officer, Mr Subbu, but Mr Subbu dismissed it as a domestic matter and refused to interfere. After that, Siju maintained a glowering silence in Appa’s presence. When Appa wasn’t around, Siju sneered at our tent, a swatch of blue plastic stretched over a bamboo skeleton. Never mind that he was being paid half a regular driver’s salary by the owner of the lorry, a paan-chewing Andhra fellow called Rajappa, because Siju was only fourteen and could not bargain for more. Never mind that Rajappa’s lorry permit was fake, a flimsy transparent chit of paper with no expiry date and half the words

illegible, which meant that Siju was allowed to transport the ore only to the railway station in Hospet and not, like the other drivers, all the way to port cities like Mangalore and Chennai, where he’d run the risk of arrest by border authorities. Never mind that the mine’s lorry cleaners, most of whom were boys my age, called him Lorry Raja behind his back and imitated his high-stepping walk. None of it seemed to matter to him. And, as little as I wanted to admit it, he was a raja in the cab of that lorry and moreover, he looked it. His hair was thick and black, and a long tuft descended at the back of his neck, like a crow’s glossy tail feathers. His nose was straight, and his eyeballs were untouched by yellow. His teeth remained white in spite of breathing the iron-laden air. He seemed, when he was in the cab of that lorry, like someone impossible and important, someone I didn’t know at all.

X The ore went to the port cities, and then it went onto ships the size of buildings. I hadn’t seen them, but the labour officer, Mr Subbu, had told us about them. He said the ships crossed the ocean, and the journey took weeks. The ships went to Australia and Japan, but mostly they went to China. They were building a stadium in China for something called the Lympic Games. Mr Subbu explained that the Lympic Games were like the World Cup, except for all sports instead of just cricket. Swimming, tennis, shooting, running. If you won you got a gold medal, Mr Subbu said. India had won a gold medal in boxing the last time the games were held. The stadium in China would be round like a cricket stadium, except ten times bigger. Mr Subbu spread his arms out wide when he said this, and we could see patches of sweat under the arms of his nice ironed shirt.

X The whole world worked in the mines. At least that is what it seemed like then. There was a drought in Karnataka and neighbouring Andhra Pradesh, and things were so bad people were starting to eye the mangy street dogs. Our neighbour poured kerosene on himself

and three daughters and lit them ablaze; his wife burned her face but escaped. Then came the news of the mines, hundreds of them opening in Bellary, needing workers. And people went. It seemed to happen overnight. They asked their brothers-in-law or their uncles to look after their plots and their houses, or simply sold them. They pulled their children out of school. Whole villages were suddenly abandoned, cropless fields left to wither. Families waited near bus depots plastered with faded film signs, carrying big bundles stuffed with steel pots and plastic shoes and flimsy clothes. The buses were so full they tilted to one side. There wasn’t enough space for everyone. The people who were left behind tried running alongside the buses, and some of the more foolish ones tried to jump in as the bus was moving. They would invariably fall, lie in the dust for a while, staring up at the rainless sky. Then they would get up, brush off their clothes, and go back to wait for the next bus. For months my family watched this happen. We didn’t worry, not at first. Appa had a job as a driver for a sub-inspector of the Raichur Thermal Power Plant, and we thought we were fine. Then there was the accident, and Appa lost the job. He spent the next few weeks at the rum shop, coming home long enough to belt me or my brother Siju or Amma. After that was over he cried for a long time. Then he announced that we were going to work in the mines. All of us. Siju, who was in the seventh standard at the time, tried to protest, but Appa twisted a bruise into his arm and Siju stopped complaining. I was in the fifth standard, and to me it seemed like a grand adventure. Amma said nothing. She was pregnant with Munna then, and her feet had swollen to the size of papayas. She hobbled into the hut to pack our things. Within a week, we squeezed onto a bus that was leaking black droplets of oil from its heavy bottom, and Appa bought us each a newspaper cone of hot peanuts for the journey. I flicked the burnt peanuts into my mouth and watched as the land slowly got dryer and redder, until the buildings in the huddled villages we passed were red too, and so was the bark of the trees, and so were the fingers of the ticket collector who checked the stub in Appa’s hand and said, ‘Next stop.’ We lurched into a teeming bus station with a cracked floor, and I asked Appa why the ground was red, and he told me this was

because of the iron in it. While Appa was busy asking directions to the nearest mine that was hiring, and Amma was searching in her blouse for money to buy a packet of Tiger biscuits and a bottle of 7Up for our lunch, Siju came up to me and whispered that, really, the ground was red because there was blood in it, seeping up to the surface from the miners’ bodies buried underneath. For months I believed him, and every step I took was in fear, bracing for the sticky wetness of blood, the crunch of bone, the squelch of an organ. When I realized the truth I tried to hit him, but he held my wrists so hard they hurt, and he bared his teeth close to my face, laughing.

X That afternoon, just about a year after we had come to the mine, I was working an open pit beside the highway, along with a few other children and a handful of women. I squatted by the edge of the road, close enough that the warm exhaust from the vehicles billowed my faded T-shirt and seeped under my shorts. The pinch of tobacco Amma had given me that morning to stave off my hunger had long since lost its flavour. It was now a bland, warm glob tucked in my cheek. Heat pressed down on my skin, and there was a sharp, metallic tinge to the air that made me uneasy. The women, who usually laughed and teased each other, curved their backs into shells and hammered in silence. The children seemed more careless than usual because I kept hearing small cries whenever one of them brought a hammer down on a thumb by accident. The horizon to the west was congested with a dark breast of clouds, but above me the sun blazed white through a gauze sky. The monsoons were late, too late for crops, but I knew they would hit anytime now. Over the past week, furious little rainstorms had begun to tear up the red earth, flooding various pits, making them almost impossible to mine. I remembered that during the last monsoon, a drunk man had wandered away one night and fallen into a flooded pit. His body, by the time it was discovered, was bloated and black. Lorries crawled in sluggish streams in both directions on the highway. The ones heading away from Bellary were weighed down with ore, great mounds wrapped in grey and green tarpaulin and

lashed with lengths of rope as thick as my ankle. The empty ones returning from the port cities rattled with stray pebbles jumping in the back. The faces of the lorry drivers were glistening with sweat, and they blared their horns as if it might make the nearly immobile line of traffic speed up. Now and then a foreign car, belonging to one of the mine owners, slipped noiselessly through the stalled traffic. I recited the names of the cars, tonguing the tobacco in my mouth: Maserati. Jaguar. Mercedes. Jaguar. Their shimmering bodies caught the sun and played with it, light sliding across their hoods, winking in their tail lights. The mine owners lived in huge pink and white houses on the highway, houses with fountains and the grim heads of stone lions staring from the balconies. I looked up as a sleek black Maserati went by, and in its tinted window I saw myself, a boy in shorts and a baggy T-shirt, crouching close to the dirt. And standing behind me, the distorted shape of a girl. I stood up quickly, hammer in hand, and whirled around. Manju flinched, as if I might attack her with it. A few days before, I had seen two kids get into a hammer fight over a Titan watch they had found together. One of them smashed the other’s hand. Later I found a small square fingernail stamped into the ground where they fought. ‘I’m not going to hit you,’ I said. Her slow smile pulled her cheeks into small brown hills sunk with shadowy dimples. She smoothed down the front of her dress, which was actually a school uniform. It had once been white but was now tinged with red iron dust. It wrapped around her thin body, ending below her knees and buttoning high at her throat. Her hair spilled in knotted waves down her back. She and her mother had arrived at the mine around the same time as we had. Her mother was sick and never came out of their tent. I didn’t know what was wrong with her. For a while Manju had been Siju’s girlfriend, saving up her extra tobacco for him, nodding seriously when he spoke, following him everywhere. Then he had stopped speaking to her. The one time I asked him about it, Siju leaned to one side, curled his lip, and spat delicately into the mud.

‘Hi, Manju,’ I said. We were the same height, though she was a few years older, maybe fifteen. ‘Hi, Guna,’ she said, and squatted at my feet. I squatted too and waited for her to do something. She picked up the piece of ore I had been working on and gave it two halfhearted taps with her hammer. Then she seemed to lose interest. She let it fall and said, ‘He came by already?’ ‘No,’ I said. I liked Manju. Whenever journalists or NGO workers came to tour the mines, Manju and I would drop our hammers and prance in circles, shouting, ‘No child-y labour here!’ According to the mine owners, it was our parents who were supposed to be working. We simply lived with them and played around the mine. The hammers and basins were our toys. The journalists would scribble in their notepads, and the NGO workers would whisper to one another, and Manju would grin widely at me. Then, after we found out about the Lympic Games, we had contests of our own. Running contests, stone-throwing contests, rock-piling contests. The winner got the gold medal, the runner-up clapped and stomped the dirt in applause. I liked playing with Manju because I almost always won, and she never got angry when she lost, like the boys sometimes did. ‘Manju,’ I said now. ‘Want to race? Bet I’ll get the gold medal.’ But she just shook her head. She stared up at the lorries. She was thin, and the bones at the top of her spine pushed like pebbles against her uniform. I wanted to reach out and tap them gently with my hammer. One of the lorry drivers, a man with a thick moustache, saw her watching and made a wet kissing sound with his lips, like he was sucking an invisible straw. His tongue came out, fleshy and purple. He shouted, ‘Hi, sexy girl! Sexy-fun girl!’ My cheeks burned for her, and I could feel the weight of the women’s gazes, but Manju looked at him as if he had told her that rain was on the way. I busied myself with filling my puttu with lumps of ore. Each full basin I took to the weighing station would earn me five and a half rupees. On a good day I could fill seven or eight puttus, if I ignored the blisters at the base of my thumb.

I felt the other workers looking at us, the frank stares of the children. I carefully shifted the glob of tobacco from my right cheek to my left. ‘You shouldn’t be playing those dumb-stupid games anyway,’ Manju said. ‘No?’ I said cautiously. ‘Why not?’ Manju said, ‘You should be in school.’ I didn’t know what to say. It had been two years since I sat in a classroom. I had only vague recollections of it. The cold mud floor. Sitting next to a boy called Dheeraj, who smelled of castor oil. Slates with cracked plastic frames. The maths teacher who called us human head lice when we couldn’t solve the sum on the board. All of us chanting in unison an English poem we didn’t understand. The boy stood on the burning deck. The antiseptic smell of the girls’ toilet covering another, mustier, smell. Dheeraj giggling outside. Then three, four, five whacks on the fleshy part of my palm with a wooden ruler, and trying not to show that it hurt. The boy stood on the burning deck whence all but he had fled. ‘You used to come first in class, no?’ Manju said. A grey gust of exhaust blew a wisp of hair between her teeth. She chewed on it. Her face was whiskered with red dust. ‘How do you know?’ ‘Siju told me,’ she said, which surprised me. ‘Siju said you got a hundred in every subject, even the difficult ones like maths. He said you shouldn’t be wasting your potential here.’ I had never heard him say anything like that. It sounded like something an NGO worker might say. I wondered where he had heard the phrase. ‘But, Manju,’ I said, ‘I like it here.’ ‘Why?’ I was about to tell her why—because I could play with her every day and because the mine was vast and open and I was free to go where I liked, and, yes, the work was hard but there was an excitement to the way the lorries rumbled past, straining under their heavy cargo—but right then Manju dropped her hammer. In a strained voice she said, ‘He’s coming.’

Siju’s lorry looked no different than any of the others, except that it had been freshly cleaned. It had an orange cab, and the outer sides of the long bed were painted brown. The bed bulged with ore, like the belly of a fat man. Siju was clearly on his way to the Hospet railway station. The back panel of the lorry was decorated with painted animals—a lion and two deer. The lion, its thick mane rippling, stood in a lush forest, and the two deer flanked it, their delicate orange heads raised and looking off to the sides. Siju was especially proud of the painting, and I knew he stood over his lorry cleaner each morning, breathing down the boy’s neck to make sure that all the red dust was properly wiped off the faces of the animals. His insistence on keeping the lorry spick-and-span was part of why the lorry cleaners made fun of him. He must have seen us squatting there by the highway, but he kept his eyes on the road. I raised my hand and waved. When he didn’t respond, I said, ‘Oy, Siju! Look this way!’ He swivelled his head toward us briefly. Manju’s big eyes followed him. Then one of the women working nearby, a woman with a missing eye whose eyelid drooped over the empty socket, spat out her tobacco with a harsh smack and said to Manju, ‘Enough of your nonsense. Go sit somewhere else. Leave those boys to do their work.’ Manju didn’t answer, so the woman said more loudly, ‘You! Heard me? Go sit—’ Manju picked up a pebble and flung it at her. It hit the woman on the shoulder, and she yelped. ‘Soole!’ the woman hissed. Manju turned her thin face to the woman. ‘Soole?’ Manju’s voice trembled. ‘You’re calling me a soole? You old, dirty, one-eyed monkey.’ I looked at Manju, afraid to speak. She picked up my ore and began hammering at it. ‘Manju—’ I began. I thought she was going to cry, but then she looked up. ‘I wish you had a lorry,’ she said. ‘Then you and me could drive to China.’

X Later I took my full puttu to the weighing station. On my way I passed Amma working with a group of women at the base of a slope. I stopped to watch her. She was shaking a sieve, holding it away from her body, a red cloud billowing around her. Dark pebbles of ore danced and shivered in the wide, shallow basin. A few feet away Munna, naked except for an old shirt of mine, crawled in aimless circles. If he got too far or tried to stuff a fistful of dirt into his mouth, Amma or one of the women would reach out an arm or a leg and hook him back in. When Munna saw me, he stretched out his short arms, ridiculous in their baggy sleeves, and screamed with delight. Amma looked up. She put down the sieve and straightened her back. She was as small as a child, her hands barely bigger than mine. The other women glanced at me and continued working. The muscles in their forearms were laid like train tracks. ‘How many?’ Amma called up. ‘Three,’ I said. I held up the puttu. ‘This is the fourth one.’ There were still a few hours of daylight left. A few hours before the red hills of Bellary turned black and the day’s totals were tallied and announced by the sweating labour officer, Mr Subbu, and no matter the numbers, how high or how low, the workers would be expected to cheer. With her eyes on me, she put a hand inside her blouse to touch the small velvet jewellery pouch she kept there. Whatever jewellery had been in there was pawned long ago. I knew that now it contained a few hundred rupees, two or maybe three. This was what she had saved, in secrecy, for months, money that Appa overlooked or was too drunk to account for. It was for me, my school fees, and she liked to remind me it was there. She eyed me, her lower lip hanging open. I knew she was debating whether to speak. ‘Guna,’ she said finally. ‘Tonight, when Appa comes—’ ‘Have to go,’ I said. ‘Lots of work. It’s going to rain later.’ She sighed. ‘You don’t want to go back to school?’ she asked. ‘You don’t want to study hard and get a proper job?’ She lowered her voice. ‘Such a clever boy you are, Guna. Such good marks you used

to get. You want to waste your brains, fill your head with iron like a puttu?’ I made no reply. I remembered what Manju had said about my potential, and I saw myself flinging the entire contents of the puttu in Amma’s face, iron flying everywhere, scattershot. Amma was keeping half an eye on Munna, who was trying to climb into the sieve. ‘Did Siju get a trip today?’ she asked. ‘You’re asking about Lorry Raja?’ I said. ‘Don’t act like those lorry-cleaner boys. He drives well.’ I hopped from one foot to the other, balancing the puttu like a tray. ‘Lorry Raja tries to turn on his indicators and turns on the windshield wipers instead.’ ‘Guna!’ Amma said. ‘Lorry Raja is always combing his hair in the rearview mirror.’ One of the women working next to Amma laughed. She had large yellow teeth and a gold stud in her flared nostril. Amma glanced at her, then at the ground. Encouraged by the woman’s laugh, I added, ‘Lorry Raja’s lorry doesn’t even go in a straight line.’ I waggled my palm to show the route Siju’s lorry took. Amma scooped up Munna before he overturned the sieve. She sucked the edge of her sari’s pallu and scrubbed his cheek, which was, like her own, like mine, red with iron dust. The dust mixed with our sweat and formed a gummy red paste, which stuck to our skin and was almost impossible to get off without soap and water, of which we had little, except for whatever dank rain gathered in stray pits and puddles. It was easy to tell who the mine workers were. We all looked like we were bleeding. Amma put Munna down, and he began to try to crawl up the slope to me. She held her small body very straight and looked at the other women. ‘Siju is the youngest driver on-site,’ she announced loudly. The other women, even the one who laughed earlier, took no notice. ‘Only fourteen and already driving a lorry.’ Amma was breathing heavily, and under her red mask she was flushed.

Munna slid back down the slope and landed on his bottom. He began to wail, his toothless mouth open in protest and outrage. ‘He’s your brother,’ Amma said. We looked at Munna. Neither of us moved to pick him up. ‘I know,’ I said.

X I registered my fourth load at the weighing station and emptied my puttu into the first of a line of lorries waiting there. The weighing station was marked off from the neighbouring permit yard by a low wall of scrap metal: short iron pipes and rusted carburetors and hubcaps that sometimes dislodged and rolled of their own accord across the yard, stopping with a clang when they hit Mr Subbu’s aluminum-walled shed. This shed, a square, burnished structure three times as big as the tent we lived in, was the labour office. Complaints were lodged there, and labour records were written down in a big book. How many labourers worked per day; how many puttus they filled; how many labourers were residents at the mine camp; how many were floaters, men and women who arrived by the busload in the mornings and stood in a ragged line, waiting to be given work. Mr Subbu would come out of his office and point at random, and those who were not chosen would shuffle back to the bus depot on the highway, where they would take a bus to the next mine to try their luck. Those who stayed were given a hammer and puttu. Most of them, used to this routine, brought their own. During the day Mr Subbu’s shed could be seen from anywhere at the mine. All you had to do was look up from your hammering, and there it was, a sparkle on the rust-coloured hillside. His maroon Esteem was parked outside, a green tree-shaped air freshener twirling slowly from the rearview mirror. I noticed the greenness of the air freshener because there was not a single green tree near the mine; they all bore red leaves. Mr Subbu stood in the shade thrown by a backhoe loader, drinking a bottle of Pepsi. He was wearing a full-sleeved shirt with the top button undone, and I could see the triangle of a white undershirt and a few black tangles of hair peeping from the top. He sweated

profusely, and there were large damp patches on his chest and lower back, and two damp crescents in his armpits, which swelled to full moons when he raised his arms. I stood there, watching him. One of the workers, a young woman with two long braids, came up to him to say something. Mr Subbu listened with his head bent. Then he put his hand on the girl’s shoulder and replied. The girl stood so still that her braids did not even swish. When he finished speaking, he let his hand fall, then she turned and walked away. There had been a rumour in the mine camp about one of the new babies, and how it had Mr Subbu’s nose, and the mother, a rail-thin woman called Savithri, had been forced to sneak away from the camp at night before her husband came for her with the metal end of a belt. I had heard Appa call Mr Subbu shameless and a soole magane, but something about the way he stood all alone in his nice clothes seemed lonely and promising. And as I stood there watching him, it occurred to me suddenly that he might be able to help me. My heart beat faster, and I pictured myself standing in the shade with him, talking, he smiling and nodding. I went over to stand by him, my empty puttu thudding against my thighs. He finished the Pepsi and threw the bottle under the backhoe loader, all without paying attention to me. Then he wiped his mouth with a handkerchief. ‘Taking rest?’ he said. He had seen me around the mine, but he didn’t know my name, of course. There were hundreds of children running everywhere, and under that coat of red we must have all looked the same to him. ‘Yes, sir,’ I said. ‘Only five minutes,’ I added, lest he think I was shirking. ‘Very good,’ said Mr Subbu. His eyelids drooped, and he nodded his head slowly. I waited for him to offer me a Pepsi, and when he didn’t, I kept standing there. I wondered what a man like that thought about. I looked out over the mine, the land cut open in wide red swatches. Compared to the mine, the plain beyond seemed colourless, the trees sitting low to the ground, hardly different from the bushes, whose woody stems bore patches of dry leaves. In the distance there were hills that had

not yet been mined, and they looked impossibly lush, rising and falling in deep, green waves against the sky. And the sun, the sun was a white ball that tore into everything, into the blistered skin on the backs of my hands, into the body of the backhoe loader, into the yawning red mouth of the mine. I cleared my throat. Mr Subbu’s mouth parted and closed, parted and closed. Long strings of spit stretched and contracted between his lips. ‘Sir,’ I said. Mr Subbu’s eyes snapped open. ‘Hm?’ ‘Sir, I want to ask something.’ He looked at me. I took a deep breath and held his eyes. They were not unkind eyes, only a little distant, a little distracted. ‘I want to become a driver, sir. Lorry driver,’ I said, speaking quickly. Mr Subbu seemed to be waiting for more, so I continued, ‘I know driving, sir. My father taught me. He was the driver for the subinspector of the Raichur Thermal Station, sir. He drove an Esteem, sir, just like yours.’ And I pointed to the maroon car that was parked outside his shed. I didn’t think of it as a lie. When Appa had driven for the subinspector, I had sat in his lap whenever the sub-inspector was in a meeting or on an inspection tour or at the flat of a woman who was not his wife. I would hold the Esteem’s steering wheel, dizzy from the musky odour of the leather upholstery, while Appa drove us slowly around the streets of Raichur, his foot barely touching the accelerator, whispering in my ear, ‘Left, now. Get ready. Turn the wheel slowly.’ And his hands would close over mine, swallowing them, and I would feel the pressure of his fingers and respond to them, pulling as he pulled, inhaling the spice of the cheap, homebrewed daru that was always on his breath, waiting for those moments when his lips brushed the back of my head, and we would guide the car together, the big maroon bird making a graceful swoop and coming straight again. ‘Expert,’ Appa would whisper warm and rich into my hair as I frowned at the road to hide my pleasure. ‘So young and already driving like an expert.’

I said nothing about the accident, about how Appa had been drunker than usual, how he had shattered the knee of the woman, how he had cried later because of the noise the woman made—a resigned sigh, oh—before she fell. Mr Subbu’s fingers kneaded one another. ‘Please, sir,’ I said. ‘How old are you?’ he asked. I paused. ‘Thirteen,’ I said, rounding up. ‘Thirteen,’ Mr Subbu said. He squinted out into the sun, and then he pointed to one of the workers moving over the surface of the red, undulating plain. The sun shrank him into a black dot, no bigger than one of the pebbles I filled my puttu with. ‘See him?’ he asked. ‘Yes, sir,’ I said. And together we watched him for a while. Then Mr Subbu said, as if posing a maths problem, ‘What is he doing?’ ‘Working,’ I said. ‘Exactly,’ said Mr Subbu. ‘Smart boy. He’s working.’ I watched a lorry wind its way to the bottom of a hill, heading to the highway, on an uneven road sawn into the hillside. Behind it trailed a hazy red cloud. ‘Work hard, and you will get whatever you want,’ Mr Subbu said, his voice louder than necessary, as if many people had gathered to hear him. ‘That’s the best advice I can give you, my boy. Your father would tell you the same thing.’ And he touched me on the shoulder, a fatherly touch, at the same time pushing me lightly so that I found myself back in the sun again.

X Instead of going back to the site beside the highway, I went to find Appa. Half-hidden behind a mound of earth, I watched him being lowered into a pit, a rope tied under his arms and passing across his bare chest. He had taken off his pants and wore only a pair of frayed striped boxer shorts. He carried a long-handled hammer like an extension of his arm. The loose end of the rope was held by three men, who braced their feet to hold the weight of Appa’s body. Then the earth swallowed him, feet first.

I often came to watch him work like this, when he didn’t know I was there. I would count the seconds he was down in the pit, listening for the steady crash of his hammer, muffled thunder. I would wait, alert to the slightest sound of panic, the faintest jerking of the rope. I knew that no matter how many times one did a job, the worst could happen the next time. And just as the waiting became unbearable, and I was about to run into the open, to give myself away, he emerged, red-faced, dangling, gasping like a man being pulled from water. They untied him, and he began rubbing his skin where the rope had cut into him. One of the men said, ‘Nice weather down there?’ and Appa said, ‘Sunny like your wife’s thullu.’ The man laughed. Appa said, ‘One day I want to tie up that bastard Subbu and send him down there.’ The other man said, ‘He’d get stuck, first of all. Second thing is he’s too busy putting his fat hands all over girls. What else you think he does in that office all day?’ ‘Fat bastard,’ Appa said. He raised his hammer and brought it down once, hard. Then he lifted it again and let it crash down, and then he did it again, the rise and fall of the hammer all part of the same smooth motion. I could feel the impact of each blow travel through the ground between our bodies, from the muscles in his arms to the muscles in my legs, connecting us. ‘Thank god I have only sons,’ Appa said, and the man laughed again.

X When I returned to the site beside the highway, Manju had disappeared. The ground where she had been squatting was scuffed. I crouched over it and tried to make out the marks of her bare feet. A few women were still hunched over, their hammers clinking in rhythm. The woman with the missing eye pulled a pinch of tobacco from a large grey wad and handed it to me. I took it and chewed on it slowly. The bitter tobacco juice flooded my mouth. The woman watched me chew. ‘Want to know where that girl went?’ she asked.

I tried to imagine what could have happened to her eye. I wanted to apologize for Manju throwing a stone at her, but I was angry at the woman for calling Manju a soole. ‘She probably went back to her tent,’ I said. ‘Take another guess,’ the woman said. ‘Shall I tell you?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Smart boy,’ she said. Then she leaned forward and lowered her voice. ‘Listen to me. That girl is not nice. Okay? Not nice. You should stay away from her.’ ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘I have to work.’ For the next few hours I worked without stopping. I pounded the ore with my hammer, the blows precise, never faltering, the ring of metal against metal filling my head. Sweat poured down my wrists, and I had to keep wiping my hands on my shorts. Lorries ticked by on the highway, marking time. Siju’s lorry did not drive past again. After a while the women stood up and stretched their backs. They flexed their fingers and curled their toes in the dirt. The one who had given me the tobacco smiled, but with just one eye her smile looked insincere. They took up their full puttus and their hammers and walked off in the direction of the weighing station. As they walked, I noted their square backs, their strong thigh muscles showing through their saris, their strange bowlegged gait, their gnarled feet caked with dirt. None of them owned shoes except for the odd pair of rubber or plastic sandals. Manju had been right, I thought. They looked less like women and more like monkeys, the muscular brown monkeys that would swarm our village outside Raichur. They were fearless and feral, those monkeys, grabbing peanuts from children’s hands, attacking people with their small, sharp teeth. A pack of them would sit on top of a low, crumbling wall, chattering and picking lice from each other’s fur, in the way that these women scratched their armpits and laughed in low, coarse voices.

X The day ripened into purple and then rotted into black, the air sagging with the smells I never noticed when the sun was there to burn it all away, the stench from pools filled with stagnant water and

buzzing with mosquitoes, the sweet whiff of shit drifting from the field we all used, furtively or defiantly, even the women and girls. I registered my last load of iron and returned to our tent, where Amma was preparing the coals for dinner. Clouds pressed down on the camp, our city of plastic tents, and we could hear the voices of the men coming down from the top of the rise where they gathered to drink after work every evening. I could hear Appa’s voice above the others, his laugh the loudest. Amma glanced up every now and again, her face a shining red circle of worry in the light of the coals. I held Munna on my lap, and he blinked sleepily into the coals. When we heard Appa’s singing, the notes warbling as he came down the rise towards us, Amma glanced quickly at me and began blowing at the coals. I pressed my nose into Munna’s neck and smelled his sour baby smell. The coals pulsed brightly every time Amma blew, her cheeks puffed with the effort. ‘Guna, the paan,’ Amma hissed, and I rummaged in a plastic bag for the battered shoe-polish tin in which we kept a stock of crumbled areca nut and a small stack of betel leaves. ‘Wipe Munna’s nose,’ she ordered, and I used Munna’s sleeve to wipe away the shining thread of mucus that trickled out of one nostril. ‘Guna—’ and that was all she had time to say before Appa ducked his head under the tent and collapsed among us, creating a confused tangle of arms and legs. Amma smoothly moved out of his way and began pressing balls of dough between her palms and pinching the edges until the dough became round and flat, and she laid them over the coals to bake. She stared at them intently, as if they might fly away. Appa leaned on his elbow. He was no longer stripped down but was wearing his torn T-shirt that said Calvin Kline and his faded pants rolled up to his knees. In January he had smashed his hammer into the large toe of his left foot, and it had healed crooked, like a bird’s beak. ‘Supriya,’ Appa said, drawing her name out. Shoopreeya. Amma said nothing. ‘So serious you look,’ Appa said. His face seemed to contract and expand, and his daru-scented breath filled the tent. ‘Not happy to

see me? Not even one smile for your husband? Your poor husband who has been working like a dog all day?’ Amma bit her lip so hard the bottom of her face twisted. She picked a baked roti off the coals with her bare fingers and laid it on a sheet of newspaper. Appa hiccupped. I held out the shoe-polish tin. Appa took it, popped it open, and sprinkled some areca nut on a betel leaf. He folded the leaf into a neat square and began chewing it. Red juice came out of the side of his mouth. I watched it trickle down his chin. ‘Guna,’ he said then, his mouth red and wet. ‘How many puttus today, Guna?’ I was about to say eight when I caught sight of Amma’s face, looking engorged and pleading in the light from the coals. Without taking her eyes off the rotis, she slipped a hand into her blouse and touched her breast where the velvet pouch was. I said, ‘Six.’ ‘Six,’ Appa repeated. ‘That’s all?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Sorry, Appa.’ I waited for the sting of the slap. But instead he reached out and slowly caressed the side of my face. He ran his hand from the top of my head down my cheek, over my chin, and to the soft spot on my neck, where my pulse had begun to race. His hand was like sandpaper, covered in scabs and blisters, some that had burst and scarred, some that were still ripe. I felt every bump and welt against my skin, every dip and hollow. It was as if he were leaving the living imprint of his hand on my face. ‘No, no,’ he said in a rich voice, his singing voice. ‘Don’t say sorry. I should be sorry. I should be the one saying sorry. It’s because of me you are here. All of you. It is all my fault.’ His voice trembled on the edge of a cliff, and his eyes were so dark. I felt a pricking behind my eyes. My face was humming. There was a heaviness to my limbs. I wondered if this was what he felt like when he was drunk. ‘My fault,’ Appa said. ‘I’m a bad father.’ Appa held out his hand, and I dropped my wages into it. All of it, even the eleven rupees I had just lied to him about. Appa’s palm

closed around the money, and he dropped it into his pocket. I tightened my arms around Munna. I didn’t dare look at Amma. I heard her body shift. She let out a breath she’d been holding. ‘That is his school money,’ she said. Appa didn’t turn to look at her. ‘That is his school money,’ she said again. ‘We said this year he would go back. You have to keep some of that for tuition fees.’ He said, ‘You’re telling me what to do? In my own house you’re telling me?’ Black spots appeared on the rotis, each accompanied by a small hiss. ‘You’re just one man,’ Amma said, staring at the spots. ‘How much daru will you drink?’ She paused. ‘I should have had a daughter.’ ‘What bloody daughter?’ said Appa. ‘Why you want a daughter? You want for me to pay dowry? Some snot-nosed fellow comes and says, I want to marry her, and I have to go into my own pocket and lick his bum? No, thank you.’ ‘Daughters help their mothers. And you’d drink all of her dowry anyway,’ muttered Amma. I thought he was going to caress her too, the way his hand went out, but then I saw he was pinching her, clamping down on the fleshiest part of her waist, right above her hipbone, the strip of bare skin between the top of her petticoat and the bottom of her blouse. She flailed, her mouth open without screaming. One of her hands caught Munna on the side of the head, and she kicked a stray coal so close to my foot that I could feel it scorch my toe. I drew my foot back and waited for Munna to cry, but he didn’t. When Appa let go, there were two semicircles of bright red on Amma’s hip, the skin slightly puckered. She was moaning softly but did not let the rotis burn. She picked them off and put them on the newspaper. She was breathing hard through her teeth. ‘Supriya, you know what problem you have? You don’t smile enough,’ Appa told her. ‘You should smile more. A woman who doesn’t smile is ugly.’

X

Then Amma’s gaze travelled beyond the coals, beyond Appa’s prone form, and I turned to see Siju standing at the entrance of the tent. He looked fresh. His hair was combed, of all things. He stood there, watching us, and suddenly I could see us through his eyes, the picture we presented, me with my toes curled in, Munna swaying with sleep in my arms, Appa reclining on his elbow, Amma hunched over the coals. I saw what he saw, and then I wished I hadn’t seen it. ‘What you think you’re staring at?’ Appa said. ‘Sit down.’ Siju picked his way to an empty spot between Appa and me. As soon as he sat down, the tent felt full, too full. We were too close together, fear and anger flying around like rockets. ‘Where did you go today?’ Amma asked Siju. To my surprise, he didn’t turn away like he usually did but looked at her with a distant sort of sympathy, as if she were a stranger he had made up his mind to be kind to. ‘Hospet,’ he said. ‘Hospet,’ Amma repeated gratefully. ‘Is it a nice place?’ With the same careful kindness he said, ‘Actually, I’ve never seen a dirtier place.’ ‘What the hell you were expecting?’ Appa said, trying to provoke him. ‘All cities are dirty. You want to eat your food off the street, or what?’ Siju ignored him, and I could sense Appa stiffening. ‘How many trips did you get?’ Amma asked. ‘Trips!’ Appa snorted. ‘He drives that bloody lorry ten kilometres to the railway station. Ten kilometres! How do you call that a trip?’ Siju began to massage his feet. Amma put another roti on the coals. Appa glared at them both, their exclusion of him causing the pressure inside to build and build. ‘So? How many?’ Appa said. His head swiveled slowly in Siju’s direction. ‘How many trips? Your mother asked a question, can’t you hear? You’re deaf or something?’ ‘Three,’ said Siju curtly. ‘Don’t talk like I’m some peon who cleans your shit. Say it properly.’ ‘Three,’ repeated Siju.

‘You’re listening, Supriya?’ drawled Appa with exaggerated awe. ‘You want something to smile about? Your son got three trips to the bloody railway station in a bloody lorry. Three trips! What you want a daughter for? With a son like this?’ His glassy gaze never left Siju’s face. Amma laid the last roti over the coals. ‘Bloody lorry driver thinks he’s a bloody raja,’ muttered Appa. I pinched Munna under the arm, hoping to make him cry, hoping to create a distraction, but he wouldn’t. I pinched again harder, but he sat still, a soft, surprisingly heavy weight on my lap. One of the coals popped, and my heart jumped. I remembered the way the manager of the thermal station had come to our house after Appa’s accident. Spit flew from the manager’s mouth as he screamed, landing lightly on Appa’s face, and I remembered how Appa didn’t wipe it off. I remembered the way Appa had said, ‘No, sir. Sorry, sir. No, sir. Sorry, sir,’ like he didn’t understand the words. Like they were a poem he had memorized. That night he went and lay down on the road, and when Amma went to bring him back in, he said, ‘Supriya, leave me alone! I deserve this.’ And I remembered the way she held his head, speaking to him softly until he dragged himself up and followed her back inside. Now he waited to see what Siju would do. For a second I thought he would hit Appa. Then he shrugged. ‘Being a bloody lorry driver is better than hammering bloody pieces of iron all day.’ He looked at me as he said this, and I looked away.

X Amma used her finger to smear the rotis with lime pickle, rolled them into tubes, and handed them to us. She held her arms out for Munna, slipping her blouse down her shoulder, baring her slack breast with its wine-coloured nipple. Munna latched on, his black eyes shining in the semidarkness, unblinking, gazing at us. The roti was warm and tasted of smoke, and the pickle was tart, the lime stringy and tough. I thought only about the food, about how it was filling my mouth, sliding tight down my throat, unlocking something. It was always this way. The food loosened something in all of us, a

tightly wound spring uncoiling. I felt myself starting to relax. Food could do this, and warmth, and the approach of sleep. There were these moments of calm, when no one spoke, and there were only the coals and the insistent flapping of the plastic tent and the mumble of other families and the sky hanging low. Then Siju, leaning towards me, spoiled it all by saying, ‘I have something to say to you.’ I swallowed quickly. ‘I don’t want to hear anything,’ I said. We kept our voices down because Appa seemed to have fallen asleep. He was snoring lightly. ‘Listen just one second.’ ‘Oh-ho, Lorry Raja wants to say something,’ I said. ‘Don’t—’ I put my fingers in my ears and chanted, ‘Lorry Raja! Lorry Raja!’ I knew it was silly, but I wanted to keep this fragile peace, to clutch it tightly in my fist like a precious stone. ‘Guna, listen!’ Siju said, louder than he had intended. ‘What’s the racket?’ said Appa, coming out of his doze. ‘Nothing,’ said Siju. ‘Nothing,’ I repeated. Appa closed his eyes again. Amma was still breast-feeding Munna, her head bent in contemplation of his placid sucking. ‘That monkey woman called Manju a soole,’ I said quietly. Siju picked at a scab on his knee. ‘What are you two talking about?’ Amma asked. Before Siju could reply, I said, ‘Manju. His girlfriend.’ ‘The girl whose mother is sick?’ I nodded. ‘Poor thing,’ Amma said. ‘Maybe I should go see if I can do something.’ But then Munna fell asleep, still making halfhearted sucks at her nipple, and her eyes went soft. She brushed her hand against the tuft of hair sticking up from his red-stained forehead. ‘Don’t bother,’ Siju spat. ‘She knows how to get what she wants.’ ‘I’m going to see if she’s okay,’ I said, standing up. To my surprise, Siju stood up too.

‘I’ll come with you,’ he said. ‘No!’ I shouted. ‘Yes,’ said Amma. ‘Both of you go.’ ‘Siju,’ Appa said. He was still in that reclining position. His calves under the rolled-up pants were like polished cannonballs. I remembered the way I had seen him earlier that day, bare chested, bent at the waist, his long-handled hammer making smooth strokes, crashing against the ground. He was not a big man or a tall one, but he was a man who broke iron for ten hours every day. Siju looked at him for a long moment, then nodded and reached into his pocket. He brought out a set of folded notes and pressed it into Appa’s outstretched palm. Appa tucked it into his pocket, where my own wages nestled. He hummed something tuneless and closed his eyes. Amma was watching us both. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Take something for them.’ She made me wrap two rotis in newspaper. ‘Come back before it rains.’

X ‘You don’t have to come if you don’t want to,’ I told Siju as we picked our way through the maze of tents. ‘I won’t tell.’ Instead of answering he was quiet, which made me nervous. A rat the size of my foot ran across our path and disappeared into the blackness to our right. The rats were a problem in the camp. They got into our food, chewed holes in our blankets, bit babies as they slept. Last year a baby had died from a rat bite. I thought of Munna asleep, of the whole camp silent, a ship of blue plastic afloat on these hairy black bodies that moved and rustled under it, restless and hungry as the ocean. Manju wasn’t in her tent. From inside came the loud, ragged breathing of her mother. Siju raised his eyebrows at me and jerked his chin in the direction of the tent’s opening. I shook my head; I could just make out the shadowy figure wrapped in a blanket, smaller than a person should be. Then Manju’s mother coughed, a colourless wheezing cough, like wind passing through a narrow, lonely corridor. I took an unconscious step backwards.

‘She’s not there,’ I whispered. ‘Smart fellow,’ Siju whispered back. ‘So now what?’ ‘We go back to our tent.’ ‘You go back,’ I said. ‘I’ll wait for her here. She must have gone to the toilet.’ Siju gave me a long, searching look. ‘Guna,’ he said. ‘Just forget her.’ ‘No!’ I almost shouted. I felt the start of tears, burning in the ridge of my nose. Before I could stop myself, I said, ‘She wants me to take her to China.’ ‘What?’ His voice was flat. ‘In my lorry,’ I said. I knew I was babbling. I squeezed the rotis and felt the warmth seep through the newspaper. ‘She said if I could drive a lorry, I could take her to China. To see the Lympic Games. I asked Mr Subbu, but he said no. He said if I work hard I’ll get what I want.’ Siju let out a long breath. ‘You asked Subbu?’ he said. ‘That fat bastard? You asked him?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘My god.’ My brother shook his head. ‘Come with me,’ he said.

X Mr Subbu’s Esteem was still parked outside his aluminum-walled shed. The shed was directly under a single lamp post, whose light cast it in a liquid, silver glow. The lamp post was connected to a generator, which growled like a sleeping dog. We crept up to the backhoe loader, which was just outside the shoreline of light. Siju put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Not too close,’ he said. ‘Why are we here?’ I asked. He put a finger on his lips. We waited, partly hidden by the massive machine. I leaned against it, and the cold of its metal body was a shock. Siju was standing behind me, very close. There was a strange calmness to the whole scene, the glowing shed, the purring of the generator, the still air. And then, with a movement so smooth and natural that I forgot to be surprised, Manju stepped from Mr Subbu’s shed. She stood there

for a moment, her uniform and thin legs perfectly outlined in the light of the lamp, her face lifted like one of the deer on the back panel of Siju’s lorry. Then she turned and looked straight at us. I jumped, but Siju’s hand was on my shoulder again. ‘Be still,’ he whispered. But Manju had seen us. Her uniform seemed even bigger on her frame than it had earlier in the day. She was floating in it as she came over to us. Her feet were soundless in the dirt. As soon as she was level with the backhoe loader, Siju stepped out and pulled her behind it. She put her hands on her hips and looked at us for a long time without speaking. Behind her, the lamp snapped off, plunging everything into darkness. Then the headlights of Mr Subbu’s Esteem came on, and the car floated away, as if borne on an invisible river. ‘So,’ Manju said. As my eyes adjusted slowly, I noticed that her eyes were swollen. She had been crying. I thought of the shed, of Mr Subbu’s hands kneading each other, of the cold bottle of Pepsi, of the way he’d put his hand on the shoulder of the girl with the braids. I thought of the woman with one eye saying, That girl is not nice. ‘How long have you been standing here?’ Manju asked. ‘Relax,’ said Siju coolly. ‘Guna felt like taking a walk.’ ‘A walk,’ Manju repeated. She looked at me quickly, accusingly, and I felt a spike of guilt. ‘And you just walked this way,’ she said. Siju shrugged. ‘That’s how it happened.’ I said, ‘We came to give you these rotis.’ I pressed the newspaperwrapped rotis into her hand. She looked at them as if I had done something meaningless. ‘Let’s go back to the tent,’ I told Siju. I wanted to get away from Manju’s raw, swollen face. Her tears had made clear channels in the red paste on her cheeks. ‘Just one minute,’ Siju said. He leaned in close to Manju so that his face was barely inches from hers. He smiled. It was not a nice smile. ‘Guna told me you want to go to China,’ he said. Manju looked at me, puzzled. I closed my eyes. ‘What?’ she said uncertainly. ‘Still want to go?’

X He had made a copy of the lorry key. In Hospet. He had waited in the lorry while a shopkeeper fashioned a new one, which was raw and shining and silver. It made me uncomfortable to look at it. In the lorry yard, the smell of grease and diesel strong in my nose, I whispered, ‘Mr Subbu will throw you out if he finds out. Appa will kill you.’ ‘Shut up,’ Siju said in a normal voice. ‘Mr Subbu! Appa! You think I care? Come with us or stay here and shut up. Your decision.’ He climbed into the high cab of the lorry. He reached over and held a hand out for Manju, who held it indifferently, as if she were being asked to hold a piece of wood. He let me struggle in by myself. When I had shut the door, he inserted the shining key into the ignition. ‘They’re going to hear us,’ I said. ‘No, they’re not,’ he said grimly. He turned the key and started the engine. It sounded like thunder rolling across the plain. I closed my eyes and waited for a shout, a light shining in our faces, the relief of discovery. But no one came. The city of tents stayed dark, except for the glimmer of burning coals. The sky answered with thunder of its own. Siju did not turn on the headlights, and the lorry drifted out of the yard, past the weighing station, past the permit yard, rounding the perimeter, the camp turning silently on its axis like a black globe, the dirt road invisible. ‘On your marks,’ I heard Siju say. He sounded calm. ‘Get set. Go.’ And then I felt the pressure release, the lorry pick up speed, and we were driving downhill, and there was wind rushing in through the windows, filling my lungs. I could feel Manju’s shoulder against mine, and there were Siju’s hands curled on the wheel, and the floorboard thrummed under my feet, and I was suddenly awake, wide awake, filled with the cold night air. Siju flipped on the headlights, and I saw that we were no longer within the boundaries of the mine, we had left it behind, and trees

flashed by, their lowest branches scraping the sides of the lorry. There was no time to feel anything. All I could do was keep my balance, keep my shoulder from slamming against the door. We hurtled past rocks that were big enough to jump off. Siju drove leaning forward, without slowing for anything, and the lorry bounced and jostled, and its springs screeched, and in the yellow beam of the headlights I saw the ground jump sharply into focus for an instant before we swallowed it. The hills in the distance were getting closer, and I wondered if Siju intended to drive to the top of them, or even beyond. I wanted him to. I wanted him to drive forever. As long as he kept driving, we would be safe. But then he stopped, let the engine idle fall into silence. We were in the middle of the plains, far enough away from the mine to seem like a different country. The ground stretched away on every side. The trees provided no orientation. They simply carved out darker shapes in the darkness. Siju took his hands off the wheel and ran them through his hair. Manju’s chest rose and fell under the uniform. She stared straight ahead, through the grimy windshield, even after we had been sitting there in silence for minutes. ‘Gold medal,’ I heard Siju whisper. I opened and closed my mouth, each time to say something that crumbled and became a confused tangle of words. ‘You shouldn’t have brought Guna,’ Manju said. The sound of my name made me shiver, as if by naming me she had made me responsible. For this, for the three of us, here. As if whatever happened here would be because of me. ‘Why not?’ Siju said. ‘He deserves to come, no? You know, he even went to Subbu today and asked if he could be a lorry driver. All because of you. Sweet, no? Bastard said no, of course. I could have told him not to waste his time; Subbu has his fat hands filled with your—’ ‘You think I like this?’ she said. She spoke to the windshield, to the open plain. ‘Begging for money? Sir, please give money for medicine. Sir, please give money for surgery. Sir, Mummy’s coughing again. Doctor says her lungs are weak. Sir, please give money for doctor’s fees. You think it’s nice to stand still and let him do whatever

he wants? And he gives too little money, so every time I have to go back. You think it’s a big game?’ I could tell that Siju was taken aback. ‘You could work—’ ‘Fifty rupees per day!’ Manju said. ‘Even if I work all day and night, it would not even be enough for food. Sometimes you’re so stupid. Even Guna is smarter than you.’ After she said this, she seemed to collapse. I could feel her shoulder sag against mine. ‘Manju,’ I said. For no reason other than to say her name. Siju sat in silence for a while. Then he made a strangled sound in his throat, like he was coming to a decision he already hated himself for. He opened his door and jumped out. ‘Come on,’ he said to Manju. I made a move to get out. ‘No, you stay here,’ Siju said. ‘But—’ I started to say. ‘Guna, just stay here,’ Manju said. She sounded tired. I bit down on my lip. Manju put her arm around my shoulders and pulled me close. I could smell metal in her hair. It was the most vivid thing I had ever smelled. It was a smell that had a shape, edges as solid as a building. And then for no reason I thought of our neighbour’s wife, the one who survived after her husband tried to burn them all. She lived in the temple courtyard after that, and the priests fed her. Sometime she would take dried pats of cow dung and put them on her head like a hat and stare at passers-by, the skin of her cheek rippled pink. I don’t know why I thought of that woman just then, but I did. And while I was remembering her, Manju was sliding away from me, into the driver’s seat, her legs stretching to the ground. She dropped with a little grunt. I heard them walk around the lorry, heard the clink of the chain and the rusted creak as the back panel was lowered. I felt the vibrations of their movements come to me through the empty lorry bed. A scraping noise, and I knew Siju was spreading a tarpaulin sheet across the back. Through the metal, through the fake leather of the seat, through the cogs and gears and machinery, I could feel their movements, the positioning of one body over another. I heard Siju say something in a low voice. I don’t remember hearing Manju reply.

And then I didn’t want to hear any more, so I listened instead to the whirring of insects in the bushes, the nighttime howls of dogs from the villages whose fires hung suspended in the distance, the wind that traveled close to the ground, scraping dry leaves into piles. The darkness made it vast, vaster than the mine, which in the daytime seemed so large to me. It was different in every way from the camp, where the sounds were either machine sounds, lifting and loading and dumping and digging, or people sounds, eating or snoring or crying or swearing at someone to shut up so they could sleep. A light wind brushed my face, carried the smell of rain. Tomorrow the work would be impossible, the ground too wet to dig, the ore slippery and slick, the puddles swollen to ponds. The men would slide around, knee-deep, and curse. The children would push each other, making it into a rough game. The lorries would get stuck, their wheels spinning, flinging mud in all directions, and we would have to spend an extra hour digging them out. There would be red mud in the crooks of our elbows, in our fingernails, in our ears. The coals, in the evening, would refuse to light. For a second I couldn’t move, as if the coming days and weeks and months and years were piling on top of me like a load of ore, pinning me against the darkness, and then I found myself slipping into the driver’s seat and taking hold of the shining key, which stuck out of the ignition like a small cold hand asking to be grasped. I tried to remember what to do, what I had seen others do. I carefully pressed the clutch. I needed to slide forward to the edge of the seat to do it. I turned the key, and the lorry rumbled to life. I waited for a second, holding my breath, and then in a rush I released the clutch and stomped on the accelerator. The lorry bucked, then jumped a couple of feet, and my temple hit the half-rolled driver’s-door window. I put my finger to my skin, and it came away wet with blood. The engine stammered and died, and everything went back to silence. Siju wrenched open the door and dragged me out of the cab. He grasped two handfuls of my shirt and shook me. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ he said. ‘What kind of idiot are you?’ When I didn’t answer, he let go of my shirt. His pants were unzipped, and I looked at the V-shaped flap that was hanging open.

He saw me looking and said, ‘What?’ ‘Nothing.’ ‘Just say it, Guna.’ ‘Nothing,’ I said. He zipped his pants. ‘Then get inside,’ he said. ‘We’re going home.’ ‘What about Manju?’ I asked. ‘She wants to sit in the back.’ ‘It’s going to rain,’ I said. ‘She’ll get wet.’ ‘Just get inside the bloody lorry, Guna,’ Siju said. ‘Don’t argue.’

X Inside the cab I hugged my body and tried to stay awake. The cold air was still coming in, and I wanted to roll up my window, but Siju had his open, his elbow resting on it, head leaning on that hand, the other guiding the lorry. He was driving slowly now, taking care to avoid the bumps and dips in the uneven ground. We passed a rock, ghostly white, that I didn’t remember from the journey out. From the corner of my eye, I looked at him, my sullen brother. Not a raja but a fourteen-year-old lorry driver in a Bellary mine. ‘What’s going to happen now?’ I asked. He drew his hand inside. ‘What’s going to happen to what?’ To everything, I wanted to say. But I said, ‘Manju’s mother.’ He let a few moments go by before answering. And when he did, what he said was, ‘Come on, Guna. You’re smart. You know.’ ‘We could have given her the money from my school fees,’ I said. ‘For what?’ He sounded like an old man. ‘So she can die in three months instead of two?’ After that we didn’t talk. The trees fell away, and the ground became smoother. The camp came into view, almost completely dark, just a few remaining fires that would burn throughout the night. Siju parked in the lorry yard and jumped out. I stayed sitting in the cab. A few drops of rain fell on the windshield and created long glossy streaks as they travelled down. The camp would wake to find itself afloat. The rats would come looking for dry ground. Munna would need to be nursed. Amma would put her hand behind his soft

downy head to soothe him. Appa would bail out the water that pooled in the roof of our tent. Amma would tie an old lungi of Appa’s to two of the bamboo poles to create a hammock for Munna that would keep him above the reach of the rats. Manju’s mother would shift to a more comfortable position and wait for the rain to stop. There didn’t seem to be a reason for any of it, a logic that I could see. There was repetition and routine and the inevitability of accident. Tomorrow Mr Subbu would drink a Pepsi, and we would dig for iron. I heard Siju say my name, and I heard the panic in his voice. It was raining in earnest now, the windshield a silver wash. I pushed open the door and nearly fell out. My feet sank into the soft mud. Siju was standing at the back of the truck, the back panel open. His hair hung draggled around his face, and drops of water clung to the tips. He pointed wordlessly to the lorry bed. I forced my eyes to scan the entire space for Manju, but she wasn’t there. We stood there for what seemed like an hour, though I knew it was less than a minute. I pictured her walking across the plains, her face directed to some anonymous town. She would walk for hours, I knew, and when she got tired, she would sleep exactly where she stopped walking, her arms shielding her face from the rain. I imagined her curled up on the ground. I imagined that her hair would plaster her cheek. I imagined that her uniform would be washed back into white, a beacon for anyone watching, except no one would be.

X Over the following months Siju began sucking diesel out of the lorries and selling it back to the drivers at 20 per cent below pump prices, and by the time the monsoons ended, he had earned enough money for one year of school fees for me. He gave it to Amma without telling me, and I never thanked him directly. We had spoken very little since the night of the lorry ride. I watched him closely for a while, worried that he would disappear too, but he came back night after night, sometimes after we had all fallen asleep, never smiling, never saying much. I knew he took the lorry out sometimes, but he never took me with him again. He stopped swaggering, and the lorry

cleaners seemed disappointed. I went to school in the mornings and returned to the mine afterwards. The next August, after the flooded pits were starting to dry out again, Mr Subbu arrived at the mine late one afternoon and announced that he was giving everyone the rest of the day off. He smiled at the responding cheer. Then from his Esteem he brought out a small colour television and a white satellite dish and hooked them up to the generator, setting them on a rickety table with the help of one of the labourers. He fiddled with the antenna until a picture flickered on the screen. We all gathered around to watch the magnificent round stadium in China fill with colour and light and music and movement. We watched graceful acrobats and women with feathers and children with brightly painted faces. We watched glittering fireworks and slender athletes in shiny tracksuits and flapping flags with all the shades of the world. We watched as the stadium slowly filled with red light, and thousands of people arranged themselves into gracious, shifting shapes in the centre. Thousands more gathered in the seats, their faces reflecting the same awe we felt. We watched, all of us, in silence, stunned by the beauty of what we had created.

eight

~ THE LYNCHING THAT CHANGED INDIA

ABHIMANYU KUMAR PART 1: ‘OPEN WOUNDS’—THE LYNCHED Jan Mohammad is worried. It has been two years since his brother, Mohammad Akhlaq, was lynched, and the 18 men who stand accused of killing him have been released on bail. On 28 September 2015, the 52-year-old ironsmith was dragged from his house in the village of Bishara, in the district of Dadri in Uttar Pradesh, after a local Hindu temple announced that a cow, considered sacred by many Hindus, had been slaughtered. He was beaten to death and his son was severely wounded. Nine months later, the police filed a First Information Report (FIR) charging 44-year-old Jan and several other members of his family, including his murdered brother, with cow slaughter. They deny the charge. The Allahabad High Court later put a stay on the arrest of all the family members except Jan. Although no charge sheet has yet been filed against him, he fears he could be arrested. According to the FIR, Prem Singh, Mohammad’s neighbour, saw him slaughter a calf with the help of Jan and other members of the family three days before the lynching. He was the only witness to the alleged slaughter. But Jan says he wasn’t even in the village on that day.

Arrest isn’t all Jan fears. At his house, not far from the village where his brother was killed and to which he says his family can never return, he explains his concerns. ‘Since the accused are out of jail, they have been emboldened. From the way they speak to the media, I can sense their aggression.’ ‘I do fear they might attack me or my wife or children any time. They live nearby. They might just see me at the market and attack,’ he says. Jan has a resigned air about him as he smokes and drinks sweet tea served by his son. He has been provided with a 24/7 armed police guard, but this does little to reassure him. ‘One gunman won’t be able to save me from an angry mob,’ he reflects. He also worries that the regional government, which since March has been led by Yogi Adityanath of the ruling Hindu-nationalist BJP party, could remove his police guard. ‘I have been outspoken to the media about this case. They might not like that,’ he says. ‘And the accused are close to the ruling party. They might put pressure [on them].’ A 24-hour news channel is on mute in the background as Jan explains that the meat that ‘was recovered and forms the basis for this case was found by the police at the lynching spot three hours after the lynching took place’. ‘This makes it quite possible that they planted it to frame us,’ he says. His lawyer, Yusuf Saifi, says the same thing. A preliminary report by the government’s District Veterinary Officer in Dadri, which was made public in December 2015, said that based on a physical examination, the meat looked like mutton. It recommended that a forensic examination be carried out. That subsequent examination by the University of Veterinary Science and Animal Husbandry in Mathura concluded, in a report made public in May 2016, that the meat was ‘of cow or its progeny’. Nevertheless, by September 2016 the police had found no evidence that a cow had been slaughtered by Jan and his relatives, and The Hindu newspaper reported that the case was going to be closed.

But Mohammad Ali, who reports on western Uttar Pradesh for The Hindu and has been writing a book on Mohammad’s lynching, says: ‘With the change in government, no closure report has been filed. They are sitting on the case, using it as a stick to beat the family with.’ Jan says the open case is like a ‘sword hanging above’ him and compounds the pain he feels over losing his brother. ‘He was brutally lynched by people who knew him, who used to break bread with him, neighbours…and every lynching that has come after his has refreshed our pain. Every few months, we see a video [of a lynching] in the news. This keeps our wounds open.’ PART 2: ‘PROTECTING THE MOTHER COW’—THE ACCUSED At a village close to Bishara, four young men—Vishal Rana, Sri Om, Puneet Sharma and Rohit—have gathered in the home of Ved Nagar, a local Hindutva leader—the form of Hindu nationalism to which the BJP subscribes. The four are among the 18 accused of lynching Mohammad Akhlaq. The opulent living room has a huge flat-screen TV, high ceilings and white walls. Vishal Rana sits in the middle, leaning forward as he speaks. The others sit around him, fiddling with their smartphones. They are all in their early 20s, except for Rohit who says he was only 15 when the alleged crime was committed. Vishal appears to be the leader of this small group. ‘Now that we are all out on bail, we want to pursue the case against the family for cow slaughter,’ he says. ‘We did everything to protect the mother cow.’ Vishal is the son of a local BJP leader. The four maintain that Mohammad died of a ‘heart attack’ and not as a result of the injuries he suffered. Vishal gestures angrily as he says: ‘We went to jail because of the media and its misreporting.’ The post-mortem report says something different. ‘Shock and haemorrhage due to ante-mortem injuries…This is the cause and

manner of death,’ it states, noting that Mohammad had 18 wounds, mostly to his skull. It makes no mention of a heart attack. Ved Nagar, who is in his 30s, dressed entirely in black, sits sprawled on a sofa as he listens to the conversation. His demeanour is forceful, but his smile and polite tone help to soften it—most of the time. Outside his home, a life-size poster features his photo, the name of his organization of voluntary cow protectors, Gau Raksha Hindu Dal, and a warning: ‘We will slaughter anyone who slaughters a cow.’ ‘I regret the death,’ Ved says calmly. ‘He died without even suffering heavy blows. He was a physically weak man. He died due to the pushing and shoving.’ The younger men say Ved ‘has done a lot’ for them and that ‘we will go wherever he asks us to come’. As far as they are concerned, they are the victims. ‘Our families have been financially ruined,’ says Sri, who had been working for a contractor at a power plant in the village before he was arrested. His father died several years ago and his mother is paralysed, so his job was an important source of income for his family. They suffered without it during the year and a half he was in prison, he says. Lawyer’s fees of at least $600 a month have also placed a heavy financial burden on each of their families, they say. ‘I am looking for a job now,’ says Sri, adding that this isn’t easy when charged with murder. Mohammad’s family, on the other hand, received a ‘lot of money, a house and high security’, argues Vishal, who continues to work at his brother-in-law’s advertising boards business in New Delhi. Mohammad’s mother, wife, children and brothers have received 45,00,000 rupees (about $70,000) in compensation. They have also been given three apartments at highly subsidized rental rates, but Jan says none of the family dares to live in them as they are located along a remote highway on the outskirts of a nearby city. The men say they were tortured in jail and that one of their fellow accused, 21-year-old Ravin Sisodia, died as a result. The jailers have denied this and the police have not filed any charges. Officials

at the jail and the New Delhi-based hospital where Ravin died say dengue or chikungunya, along with kidney disease, was the cause of death. Now that they are all out on bail, the accused and their lawyer are trying to get their murder charges changed to charges of culpable homicide not amounting to murder. The charge sheet filed by police at the end of 2015 may help them in this, says The Hindu journalist Mohammad. ‘What happened, according to the cops, is that Vishal Rana and his cousin Shivam discovered a plastic packet with meat in it, after [Mohammad] Akhlaq had allegedly disposed of it. A local doctor confirmed to them that it was beef. Following this, they forced the temple priest to make an announcement that a cow had been slaughtered and that everyone should gather near the transformer, the main meeting place in the village. This is how the public spectacle of the lynching started,’ Mohammad explains. In the charge sheet, however, there is no conspiracy charge. ‘This was a spontaneous reaction of an emotional crowd,’ says Ram Sharan Nagar, lawyer to 10 of the accused. ‘Even the police mention no conspiracy or planning. So it would be unfair for the police to push for murder charges.’ Sitting in a South Delhi cafe, 33-year-old journalist Mohammad reflects: ‘If the charges are changed, they will be let off very lightly or they will be acquitted. It will set the template for what is going to happen in other cases.’ PART 3: ‘WE ARE HELPING THE POLICE’— AT THE COW SHELTER About 200 kilometres from Bishara, in the village of Dahmi in the state of Rajasthan, Suresh Yadav is angry. The volunteer with the right-wing Hindu nationalist paramilitary organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is wearing a spotless dhoti kurta—a traditional Indian form of dress—and sitting on a plastic chair in the poorly lit lobby of the Sri Rath Gaushala cow shelter.

The focus of his anger is the Supreme Court of India, which recently ruled that district administrations should be responsible for stopping cow-related violence in their localities. ‘Does cattle smuggling take place or not?’ the 50-something-yearold asks combatively. ‘They are calling gau rakshaks (cow protectors) murderers. You tell me, do the police have the capacity to catch all the cattle smugglers? We are only helping them,’ he says, before launching into a tirade against Muslims. I am at the cow shelter to meet Jagmal Singh Yadav, but he hasn’t turned up. Suresh appears to be here in his place. Jagmal, who is in his seventies, was one of those accused of murdering Pehlu Khan, a 55-year-old Muslim dairy farmer, in the nearby town of Behror on April 1. Despite being among six people named by Khan before he died, Jagmal has since been absolved, along with the five others, by the police. The mob that attacked Pehlu allegedly suspected that the milk cows he was transporting were being smuggled to a slaughterhouse. A video of the attack went viral. Suresh says he knows all of the accused—who mostly belong to the dominant Yadav and Ahir castes, who traditionally work in the dairy business—and can, therefore, speak on their behalves. When I tell Suresh that Arif Khan, Pehlu’s son who was with him that day and was also beaten up, had shown me the papers to prove that the milk cows were purchased at a government-sanctioned cattle fair, he scoffs. ‘They are not beyond killing even [milk] cows for meat. Once you acquire a taste for cow meat, like they have, you cannot resist it,’ he says. Pehlu’s cows are now being kept at the Sri Rath Gaushala, which according to local media reports used to be run by Jagmal. It is one of the biggest cow shelters in the area, with 350 cows. Some people say it is 100 years old, others that it is 200. ‘These are cows which have become old and the villagers cannot take care of them any more. We get abandoned cows, too,’ explains Rajendra Yadav, an administrator at the shelter.

Suresh insists that Pehlu and his sons were facing charges of cattle smuggling. When I tell him that according to media reports, they had been exonerated, Suresh refuses to believe it. He is livid at the media for ‘misreporting’ the case. ‘Not one of the papers or channels have written in our favour,’ he says. PART 4: ‘THEY ARE AGAINST MUSLIMS AND DALITS’—THE SEARCH FOR JUSTICE Suresh might be upset about the media coverage, but it is the authorities’ reactions that concern others. In April, Human Rights Watch noted: ‘Instead of taking prompt legal action against the vigilantes, many linked to extremist Hindu groups affiliated with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the police, too often, have filed complaints against the assault victims, their relatives, and associates under laws banning cow slaughter.’ A recent report by the website IndiaSpend revealed that ٩٧ per cent of the cow-related violence that has taken place in India since ٢٠١٠ happened after the BJP government of Narendra Modi came to power in May ٢٠١٤. According to the same report, 28 people have been killed in 63 incidents of cow-related violence in the past seven years. Of those, 24—86 per cent—were Muslim. After failing to arrest the eight people who were initially accused in the Pehlu Khan case, the police have arrested seven other people. Five of them have already been released on bail. ‘Our dairy business is finished,’ says Pehlu’s 20-year-old son, Arif, as he sits on the porch of his family’s farm in Jaisinghpur, two hours’ drive from Dahmi. ‘We have no other source of livelihood. Even our relatives are poor, so we cannot turn to them for help.’ He says nobody from the local government has come to see them and they haven’t received any compensation. ‘Only Imran Pratapgarhi, the poet, has given us some money. We have to borrow money to go to Jantar-Mantar [the governmentdesignated protest spot in New Delhi],’ Arif explains.

His family is worried, he says, that they will not get justice under the current state and central government. ‘They are against Muslims and Dalits [the least privileged in the caste system]. Only they have died in the incidents of lynching over cows,’ he reflects. PART 5: ‘A SCAPEGOAT IS NEEDED’—AT THE COURT It is 9.30 a.m., the scheduled time for the bail plea of Rameshwar Dayal, one of those accused of lynching a 16-year-old Muslim student called Junaid Khan. But the judge, Y. S. Rathor, is yet to arrive at the court in Faridabad, an industrial town in the southern part of the National Capital Region. ‘He is a good judge for criminal cases. So was his father,’ I overhear Rameshwar’s lawyer, Mahinder Bharadwaj, tell one of his assistants. The police arrested six people for the lynching, which took place on a train heading south from New Delhi on June 22. Junaid died after being stabbed eight times. His older brothers, Hashim and Shakir, were wounded. According to Hashim, the brothers were called ‘beef eaters’ and ‘Pakistanis’ by a mob of at least 25 men. Four of the accused have been given bail. The main accused, Naresh Kumar, who confessed to stabbing Junaid with a kitchen knife, remains in jail. In his statement to the police, Rameshwar admitted to using religious slurs and participating in a fight with the brothers, but said he did not play any part in the killing. Subhas Chand, Rameshwar’s brother, is sitting on a bench in the corner of the courtroom. When questioned about the case, he says he is an ‘illiterate farmer’ and doesn’t know the details. ‘Ask me in yes or no, and I will answer,’ he says. I ask if he thinks his brother, a New Delhi government employee, is guilty of the alleged crime. ‘No,’ he says promptly. Then he stops talking. Mohit Bharadwaj and Dev Dutt, two young men from the same village have accompanied Subhas Chand to the court. They, too, say

they believe Rameshwar is innocent of murder. ‘We are here in solidarity,’ says Mohit as Dev nods. ‘There was a lot of pressure on the police to show some arrests, so they picked up the boys from our village at random.’ The village is Khambi, in Palwal district, not far from Faridabad. It is mostly inhabited by members of the most advantaged castes. The main accused, Naresh Kumar, is from a neighbouring village called Bhimrola. The judge arrives at around 10 a.m. and, in a matter of minutes, adjourns the hearing until September 15. Rameshwar’s lawyer, Mahinder Bharadwaj, says that his plea is based on the premise of parity. ‘His offences are bailable, just like those of the four others who have received bail,’ he explains as he walks down the court stairs flanked by file-carrying assistants. Asked why he thinks the judge didn’t grant bail, he replies: ‘[Because] there is too much media pressure and a scapegoat is needed.’ Nibrash Ahmad, the lawyer representing Junaid’s family, had earlier told me that the police had removed the charge of murder from the charge sheets of five of the accused, which had helped four of them get bail. ‘They never informed us that they were doing so. We have protested this and have complained to the higher courts, Human Rights Commission and Minority Commission about this. We want the investigating officer to be changed,’ he explained in his chamber as several other younger lawyers sat on wooden benches, listening to him intently. Rameshwar’s bail please was eventually rejected on September 20. PART 6: ‘CRIES FOR HELP’—A LYNCHING ON A TRAIN Junaid’s brother, Shakir, is at his family’s home in Khandawali village, just south of Faridabad. He was stabbed five times during the attack and, while recuperating, hasn’t been able to do his work as a commercial driver.

Shakir hadn’t accompanied Junaid and Hashim that day. But he had entered the train in Ballabgarh, the nearest station to their village, after receiving phone calls from his brothers asking for help. On their way back from New Delhi, the brothers had gotten into a fight after an elderly man had asked Junaid to give up his seat for him. According to Hashim, Junaid immediately did so, but several men started to abuse them. Junaid’s father, Jalalluddin, says his sons were stopped from leaving the train at Ballabgarh. ‘When Shakir entered the train, he heard cries for help,’ he says. ‘They were fighting when I entered,’ Shakir explains. ‘We could not stop the train as we could not find any chain to pull.’ Junaid died from his stab wounds, after being left at the station after Ballabgarh. Shakir remained in bed for days, unable to walk. Hashim has made a complete recovery from the two stab wounds he received. The family has been awarded a total of about $30,000 in compensation from the government, NGOs and local politicians. One MP from Kerala gave them a small car. ‘Brinda Karat of the CPI(M) (Communist Party of India (Marxist)) keeps in touch with us,’ says Jalalluddin. But the family is worried about four of the accused getting bail. ‘We learnt they got bail only through the media. The police kept us in the dark,’ says Shakir. PART 7: ‘NOT IN MY NAME’—THE POLITICIAN The recent Supreme Court directive that angered Suresh Yadav came after a petition was filed by Congress party politician Tehseen Poonawala. He is one of those behind the ‘Not In My Name’ protests against cow-related lynching and is also pushing for a new law. Standing on the lawn of Congress MP Digvijay Singh’s bungalow in New Delhi, as a press conference he had organised on behalf of Pehlu Khan’s family winds up, Tehseen explains that the details of 11 cases were included in their petition to the Supreme Court. ‘The problem is that the central government or the state governments we listed in our petition are yet to respond. In fact, this

is the third time the Court has reacted on the issue but the response of the said governments has been the same,’ he says. If it was up to Tehseen, the case against the six accused who were cleared of murdering Pehlu Khan would not be over. He is now urging the Supreme Court to transfer the case outside of the state of Rajasthan. His brother Shehzad Poonawala, a lawyer, is arguing the petition. The politician is currently organizing protests against lynching in Uttar Pradesh, after which he plans to visit Jharkhand where such incidents have also occurred. ‘We will go all over the country to mobilise people in favour of the new law,’ he explains, as he negotiates a cab ride back to his house. The new law, which has been drafted by his team of lawyers, has provisions for several measures, including the immediate suspension of police officers under whose watch such incidents occur, having the district magistrate investigate cases instead of the police, ensuring the protection of witnesses and having the cases heard by a judge with no less than seven years of experience. ‘It also allows for the rehabilitation of the families of the victims and provides adequate compensation,’ he explains. But many legal experts say it is a lack of political will, rather than a lack of laws, that is the main obstacle to bringing justice to the victims of mob violence. Meanwhile, as the judicial battle continues, the victims say the stakes are high. ‘The cow is just an excuse,’ says Jan Mohammad. ‘Muslims of the country are under siege and an attempt is being made to turn them into second-class citizens.’

nine

~ THE MAN WHO LIVED

SNIGDHA POONAM

A

t 8.30 a.m. on 27 January 2018, Rahul Upadhyay was having his morning tea on the outskirts of Kasganj, in northern India. He then received a phone call telling him that he was dead. ‘It was a friend of mine and he was saying that messages about my death had been circulating on social media since the previous day. I thought he was joking, but he sounded very serious.’ Upadhyay asked his friend to forward these posts to him on WhatsApp. All of them carried a photograph lifted from his Facebook page in which a marigold garland hung from his neck—the flowers were a symbol that marked him as dead as any other long-departed ancestor. What panicked him were the comments: ‘Rahul Upadhyay martyr’ ‘one more life lost to jihadis’ ‘blood for blood’ By 10 a.m., Upadhyay was convinced something terrible was going to happen if he didn’t immediately prove to the world that he was living. He tried logging onto his Facebook account, but his phone was no longer connected to the Internet. He called up another friend and learnt that they were cut off too. The fury over the ‘news’ of his death had spread so quickly that the local administration had taken emergency action, and cut off all access to the Internet in the city.

X

At 10 a.m. on 27 January, Kasganj was burning. The public buses were the first to be set on fire. Even without the internet, the rumours of religious violence had done their work. Most of them about Upadhyay’s death. Thousands of people were convinced that he had been killed by a bullet fired by a Muslim on the previous day, Republic Day, which marks the anniversary of the adoption of India’s Constitution in 1950. Kasganj, like many other towns across India, commemorates it every year. But the 2018 edition of Republic Day was going to be special. In March 2017, the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party had seized power in the state of Uttar Pradesh after 26 years of defeats and coalitions with political parties they accused of ‘appeasing’ Muslims. Relations between the Hindus and Muslims of Kasganj had been tense ever since. Many Hindus wanted to assert their new status in the city; Muslims intended to defend their rights. Both sides chose Republic Day as the time to stake out their positions. At 9 a.m. on 26 January, a large group of Hindu boys arrived in a public park for their Republic Day rally, riding motorbikes and carrying flags—India’s tricolour and Hinduism’s saffron. In the ‘enemy’ neighbourhood they wanted to drive through, Muslim boys had finished decorating the thoroughfare for their Republic Day celebration: rangoli, chairs, balloons and a flagpole holding up the tricolour. Just over an hour later, Kasganj was on the brink of war. The Hindu motorcycle parade had charged into the narrow lane that traversed the Muslim-majority neighbourhood of Baddu Nagar. Muslim boys flooded the streets and blocked their way. The Hindus had demanded passage; the Muslims had refused to back off. The Hindus later claimed the Muslims had shouted slogans of ‘long live Pakistan’; the Baddu Nagar residents claimed the Hindus were chanting ‘say “Vande Mataram” (“Praise to Mother India”) if you wish to live in India’. At some point, the Hindu men realized they were losing the verbal and physical confrontation; they left their motorbikes behind and ran away, only to return for their revenge in forty-five minutes—which they exacted in another Muslim-majority neighbourhood, Tehsil Nagar. Residents later claimed the Hindus

had charged in carrying guns and revolvers; the Hindus claimed the Muslims were waiting for them on rooftops waving guns and revolvers. The two sides faced off; someone in the crowd opened fire and a bullet hit a 22-year-old Hindu man called Chandan Gupta. Gupta died immediately. In seconds, photos of him, digitally framed and garlanded with marigolds, were circulating through Kasganj via Facebook and WhatsApp. Local Hindus were calling him a martyr and calling out for revenge. By the afternoon of 26 January, another photo went viral. This one announced the murder of ‘another of our boys’ by ‘Muslim mobs’ and demanded Hindu blood boil. The face of the murdered man was Rahul Upadhyay’s. Hindu mobs formed and rampaged through the city, attacking Muslims and destroying their property. Rahul Upadhyay never even left his home on Republic Day. The 24-year-old journalist spent the day in his house on the outskirts of town, hoping to file a regular Republic Day report based on press releases. ‘I have never attended a protest or a rally in my life,’ he later told me. The Internet shutdown in Kasganj continued over the next two days, and without it he didn’t know how to respond to the rumours of his death, which had continued to spread. They had already crossed the official boundaries of the district through WhatsApp to areas which still had access to the web, and from there the fake news continued to travel far and fast. ‘My family received nearly 400 phone calls in those two days asking about my death and offering condolences. Imagine the pain of parents being consoled about the death of a son who was sitting in front of them!’ As the family confirmed the fact of his ‘good health’ on one phone call after another, news channels flashed live coverage of the outrage over his death. In Gorakhpur, posters of his garlanded photo were being pasted on walls. In Agra, a candle march was organized in his name. In Bareilly, a prayer meeting was held. People in places as far away as Delhi and Mumbai swore revenge in his name. ‘I was feeling sad and scared. People were using my name to provoke violence,’ Upadhyay said. He had no idea why he had been

chosen to be the face of this anti-Muslim campaign. ‘I suppose as a local journalist I am a known name,’ he speculated. Some of the WhatsApp posts mourning his death didn’t even carry a photo of him. Instead, they included photographs of a man who had actually died on Republic Day—though he’d died in a road accident in Mumbai, more than a thousand kilometres away. Things were turning truly bizarre. Rahul Upadhyay decided he should drive into town to show people he was alive, but by this time the district administration, panicking about the ongoing violence, had shut down the roads as well. By the morning of 29 January, when the curfew was lifted and the Internet was back on, the Muslim areas of Kasganj looked like disaster sites. First the houses had been destroyed, then the shops, and finally the mosques. Hundreds of people had been injured. At 10 a.m., Rahul Upadhyay showed up at the police station, presented himself to the deputy inspector general, and made the most noteworthy statement of his life: ‘I am Rahul Upadhyay and I am not dead.’ At a press conference called by the district administration, Upadhyay, a tall, lean man dressed in a striped shirt and a sweater vest, stood stiff and unsmiling as he was asked again to confirm that he was indeed alive. Speaking into the mikes, he repeated two lines from what had become his favourite ghazal, ‘There had been a rumour about my poor health / but it is endless questions from people that made me actually ill.’ Later that day, the town’s police announced that they had arrested four people for spreading rumours over social media. One had been arrested for being the admin of a WhatsApp group that had sent out provocative posts, and the others for circulating it. A hunt was launched to ‘nab’ other people guilty of forwarding rumours.

X These four aren’t the first culprits to be arrested for spreading rumours through social media. In May 2017, two people were arrested in rural Jharkhand for spreading rumours that led to the lynching of seven people. The posts were generated on Facebook

and circulated over WhatsApp; the murderous crowds later explained to the police that the posts looked too ‘real’ not to respond to. The messages, sent to parents in remote areas dominated by tribal communities, claimed that outsiders were kidnapping kids from schools in order to sell off their body parts. Hundreds of children go missing in Jharkhand, a hub for human trafficking, every year. Every tip, real or fake, provokes paranoia. These posts had photographs of dead children as well as various objects—syringes and handkerchiefs—purportedly used in the kidnappings. The text, written in Hindi, read: ‘Suspected child lifters are carrying sedatives, injections, spray, cotton and small towels. They speak Hindi, Bangla and Malayalam.’ Parents were told to watch out for the movement of suspicious-looking people in their neighbourhoods, especially people who dressed in black and spoke a mysterious language. None of the people who were beaten to death on the suspicion of being child lifters wore black. Four of them were Bangla-speaking Muslims who were driving through the area with cattle they intended to sell back home, in the neighbouring state of West Bengal. Ten days after these attacks, two people were arrested for starting the rumours—a businessman for creating the post on Facebook and a journalist for releasing it into local WhatsApp groups. Their motives remain unknown. There was nothing vague about the target of the next rumour that went viral in Jharkhand. One morning in June 2017, someone in the Ramgarh district sent out a WhatsApp message saying that a local Muslim trader was driving out of town carrying beef in his car. It was forwarded hundreds of times within an hour, and soon a mob surrounded his vehicle, dragged him out, bludgeoned him to death, and set the car on fire. Two days later, the town’s police arrested the local representative of the Bharatiya Janata Party for ‘instigating the mob’. This wasn’t the first time an Indian politician has egged on a mob in the name of religion, but now they no longer have to gather a crowd and make a speech to incite that hatred. One click is all it takes.

X In March 2018, large-scale Hindu-Muslim riots broke out in Bihar after a Hindu procession passing through a Muslim area was hit by a slipper. Following a pattern set over the past few years, hateful messages calling on Hindus for an urgent reprisal showed up on WhatsApp groups in Samastipur, where the incident took place, and shot through the state in a matter of hours. Blazing through Bihar for a whole fortnight, the violence burnt down thirty-eight districts and left hundreds wounded. Among the 200 people arrested were two leaders of the BJP who had ‘disturbed communal harmony’. In a society as divided as India—which segments according to caste, class, religion, region and language—clashes have always been common. And they have often started with rumours. But these are no longer circulating through tea shops and fish markets. Instead, they are regularly going viral on WhatsApp, the Facebookowned instant messaging service. The speed with which communities can now respond to these rumours has left officials at a loss, and challenge the very existence of India’s many minority groups. Of the country’s 300 million smartphone users, 200 million use WhatsApp, making India the messaging platform’s biggest market. It is easy to see why WhatsApp is India’s favourite social network. It is free. It is easy to use—you don’t have to sign up or log in. The app consumes less data than Facebook or Twitter. And it allows you to send a private message to 256 people at the same time, a feature that enables old communities—family groups, village groups, caste groups—to go online and new communities to form, from school mom groups to condo groups. Indians produce the majority of the 55 billion WhatsApp messages sent every day, from simple and repetitive ‘good morning’ texts to scanned pages of school homework, baby photos and political propaganda. WhatsApp is fast emerging as the primary source of news for Indians, except most of what circulates as news over these private groups isn’t based on facts at all. The consequences can be deadly. Rumours spread over the service are killing people in India.

X Most people don’t think first of India when they think of fake news. They think of America, where fake news influenced the result of the last presidential elections; of Russia, which may have used fake news to influence those elections; even of Macedonia, where most of this fake news was generated on demand. In India, however, fake news is not just a threat to democracy, but to people’s lives. Fake news looks more legitimate when shared over WhatsApp. It’s sent directly to you, it’s sent by someone you know, and it shows up not as a non-committal link but a personalised package of text, images and videos. It’s far more difficult to identify fake news in a wellpackaged WhatsApp message than it is to tell a fake news website from an authentic one. Fake news is also the hardest to fight in India because these messages can only be read by those to whom they are sent. The fake news travelling through India’s WhatsApp groups is often meant to provoke sectarian tensions, which has never been more of an issue than today. The BJP now rules over two-thirds of India— under their sway, a platform with as much reach as WhatsApp is a tempting weapon to use against religious minorities. Often all that’s needed for violence to break out is a photograph of a dead cow. According to an analysis of media reports by India Spend, a data journalism website, 86 per cent of the 124 Indians killed in cowrelated violence since 2010 have been Muslims, and half of these attacks were based on rumours. 97 per cent of them happened after the BJP won central elections in May 2014. How do you fight rumours circulating through a network to which you have no access? I asked Pratik Sinha, who runs a website called Alt News that fact-checks fake news in India. ‘We are talking about millions of people circulating a rumour—of the kind we saw at the time of India–Pakistan Champions’ trophy cricket match, when someone sent out a fake video showing that Indian Muslims were cheering for Pakistan. Usually these rumours oscillate between Facebook and WhatsApp. Those who want to start a rumour prefer to do that on WhatsApp, because it’s hard to trace

the origin. You get a post on a WhatsApp group, you share it to your Facebook page, it goes viral. How do you know that’s how it works? Look at what happened in the case of protests over the film Padmaavat in Gurgaon, where someone circulated a post naming five Muslim men who attacked a school bus.’ Released in January, the period film from Bollywood told the story of a fourteenth-century Muslim emperor’s obsession with a Hindu Rajput queen and caused a militant group of Rajputs to riot through north India in outrage. ‘The post was going viral on Facebook. How did you know the people posting it had received it on WhatsApp? Because the people posting this identical status update on Facebook had no connection with each other. We contacted Gurgaon police about the claims made in the post and they said there was no truth in it. The next morning, Gurgaon police tweeted out asking people not to believe the rumour.’ WhatsApp is one of the biggest law-and-order challenges before Indian police and administrative officers today. As a young superintendent of police in Jharkhand asked me, ‘How can we stop a riot or lynching from happening until we know a rumour is circulating and can plan action accordingly?’ They have no option but to find a way. In Jamshedpur, where seven people were lynched because of rumours of child abduction, the local officers have been planting trusted people in popular WhatsApp groups to keep track of ‘public chatter’. In Rajasthan, where a Hindu man recently shared on WhatsApp a video of him killing a Muslim man he suspected of ‘love jihad’—the notion that Muslim men are seducing Hindu women in order to convert them—police officers have also begun embedding themselves covertly in local WhatsApp groups. In Varanasi, the police have been circulating a list of legal punishments people are liable to face for starting or sharing any ‘statement that can cause religious disharmony’ through WhatsApp. In Vadodara, where another viral rumour about love jihad forced the police to shut down the Internet in 2016, the police are creating

videos about the ethical and legal dangers of spreading rumours and trying to make these go viral as well. A large part of modern Indian policework is about finding ways to counter rumours. Uttar Pradesh, where additional superintendent of police Rahul Srivastav is posted, isn’t only India’s most populous state but also its most fractious. Every day throws up a new challenge, Srivastav tells me. Most rumours travelling through WhatsApp groups in Uttar Pradesh are meant to create sectarian trouble. In March 2017, the police in Lakhimpur Kheri imposed a curfew in response to the circulation of a video of a cow being slaughtered; in May 2017, the police in Saharanpur shut down Internet services after they failed to control clashes between uppercaste Hindus and outcaste Dalits that left two dead and 20 injured; in July 2017, the police in Shamli had to counter a rumour that Muslims had set the local police station on fire, stripped a group of Dalits and paraded them through town. ‘There is no such incident,’ they said on their official Twitter account. ‘Don’t spread rumours.’ And yet the rumours flew. In October 2017, Srivastav led the launch of a special Twitter account to fight the rumour-mongers. One of its fact-checking initiatives has been to challenge the widely reported story that the Uttar Pradesh state police in the Jalaun district had imprisoned donkeys accused of trampling through jail premises and ‘eating expensive plants’. The Twitter handle of the local police pointed out the next day that the donkeys had been incarcerated by the prison department: ‘The police had nothing to do with it.’ But it is also through this handle that the Kasganj police declared to the nation on 29 January that Rahul Upadhyay was not dead: ‘Contrary to rumours spread on social media, Rahul Upadhyay is alive. We have arrested 4 people for spreading false rumours.’ By the end of that day, Upadhyay had become famous for being the man who had not died in the Kasganj riots. Leaving the police station after the press conference, he ran into a friend who congratulated him on his new-found celebrity. ‘He asked me how it feels to be famous,’ Upadhyay said. ‘I told him no one wants to be famous for just being alive.’

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~ GANPATI YADAV’S GRIPPING LIFE CYCLE

P. SAINATH

W

e were late. ‘Ganpati Bala Yadav has already come across from his village twice, looking for you,’ said Sampat More, our journalist friend in Shirgaon. ‘He returned both times to his own village in Ramapur. He’ll be back a third time when we tell him you’ve reached.’ The two villages are five kilometres apart and Ganpati Yadav covers the distance on a bicycle. But three round trips would mean 30 kilometres, on a summer’s day in mid-May, on a ‘road’ that was mostly dirt track, with a cycle a quarter of a century old. And a cyclist aged 97. As we readied for lunch at the house of More’s grandfather in Shirgaon, a village in Kadegaon block of Maharashtra’s Sangli district, Ganpati Bala Yadav rode up nonchalantly on his bike. He was puzzled when I apologized profusely for having him cover such distances in the sun. ‘Hardly matters,’ he said with his mild tone and gentle smile. ‘I went to Vita yesterday afternoon for a wedding. There too, on my cycle. That’s how I get about.’ A round trip from Ramapur to Vita would have meant 40 kilometres. And the previous day was much hotter, with the temperature in the mid-40s Celsius. ‘A year or two ago, he rode up to Pandharpur and back, nearly 150 kilometres,’ says Sampat More. ‘Now he is not doing that kind of distance.’ Ganpati Yadav, born in 1920, was a freedom fighter in the ranks of the Toofan Sena (Whirlwind Army), the armed wing of the prati

sarkar or provisional, underground government of Satara, Maharashtra, that declared independence from British rule in 1943. The prati sarkar had nearly ٦٠٠ (or more) villages under its control. He participated in the Toofan Sena’s rebellions against the Raj. ‘I was mostly a courier, taking messages and meals to revolutionaries hiding in the forests,’ he says. Several of those long, dangerous journeys were on foot; later, came those on a cycle. Ganpati Yadav was and remains an active farmer. In the recent rabi season, he raised 45 tonnes of sugarcane on his half acre. He had close to 20 acres once, but divided that up amongst his children long ago. His sons have nice homes on the same property where he resides. But Ganpati Yadav and his 85-year-old wife Vatsala—a stillactive homemaker who cooks and cleans daily—prefer to live in a spartan dwelling, essentially consisting of one central room. Vatsala was away from the village when we visited. Ganpati Yadav’s modesty meant that his children learned late of his role as a freedom fighter. His older son, Nivrutti, grew up on the farm but left at age 13 to train as a goldsmith in Erode and then Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu. ‘I knew nothing of his role in the freedom struggle,’ he says. ‘I only got to know when G. D. Bapu Lad [a legendary leader of the prati sarkar] asked me if I knew of my father’s courage.’ Bapu Lad, says Ganpati Yadav, was his mentor and guide. ‘He found me a bride, arranged our marriage,’ he recalls. ‘Later, I followed him in the Shetkari Kamgar Paksha [Peasants and Workers Party of India]. We were connected to the end of his days.’ ‘When I was in Class 7, my friend’s father told me of his bravery,’ says Mahadeo, another son of his. ‘At that time, my attitude was—it was no big deal. He hadn’t killed any British soldiers or police. Only later did I learn the importance of his role.’ His regular role was that of a courier. But Ganpati Bala Yadav was also part of the team that pulled off the great train robbery at Shenoli in Satara in June 1943, led by Bapu Lad and Toofan Sena founder ‘Captain Bhau’. ‘Four days before the attack on the train, we came to know that we had to pile up rocks on the tracks.’

Did the attack party know this was a train carrying a British (Bombay Presidency) payroll? ‘Our leaders were aware of this. People who were working [in the railways and government] had tipped them off. We came to know when we started looting the train.’ And how many attackers were there? ‘Who counted at that time? Within minutes, we had made piles of rocks and stones that we dumped on the tracks. Then we encircled the train when it stopped. Those inside didn’t move or resist as we looted the train. Please know we did this to damage the Raj, not for the money.’ Outside of such militant operations, Ganpati Bala Yadav’s role as a courier was also complicated. ‘I delivered food to our leaders [hiding in the forest]. I would go to meet them at night. Usually, there were 10-20 people with the leader. The British Raj had declared a shootat-sight order against these underground fighters. We had to travel by hidden ways and long, circuitous routes to reach them. Otherwise, we could have been shot by police.’ ‘We also punished police informers within our villages,’ says Ganpati Yadav. And goes on to explain how the prati sarkar, or provisional government, came to also be called the ‘patri sarkar’. The Marathi word patri, in that context, refers to a wooden stick. ‘When we discovered one of these police agents, we encircled his home at night. We would take the informer and an associate of his outside the village. ‘We would tie up the ankles of the informer after placing a wooden stick between them. He was then held upside down and beaten on the soles of his feet with sticks. We touched no other part of his body. Just the soles. He couldn’t walk normally for many days.’ A powerful disincentive. And so came the name patri sarkar. ‘After that we would load him on the back of his associate who would carry him home.’ ‘We meted out punishments in villages such as Belavade, Nevari and Tadsar. One informer called Nanasaheb stayed in Tadsar village in a big bungalow, which we broke into at night. We found only women sleeping. But then we saw one woman in a corner, covering

herself with a sheet. Why was this woman sleeping separately? Of course it was him, and we carried him away in that very sheet.’ Nana Patil (head of the provisional government) and Bapu Lad were his heroes. ‘What a man Nana Patil was, tall, huge, fearless. What inspiring speeches he used to give! He was often invited by the big people around here, but only went to smaller homes. Some of those bigger people were British agents.’ The leaders ‘told us not to be scared of the government; that if we united and joined the struggle in large numbers, we could free ourselves of the Raj.’ Ganpati Yadav and about 100-150 others in this village joined the Toofan Sena. Even then, he had heard of Mahatma Gandhi though ‘I never got to see him. I once saw Jawaharlal Nehru, when [the industrialist] S. L. Kirloskar brought him to this region. And, of course, we had all heard of Bhagat Singh.’ Ganpati Bala Yadav was born into a farm family and had only one sibling, a sister. His parents died when he was very young and the children moved to a relative’s house. ‘I attended maybe the first 2-4 years of school and then dropped out to work in the fields.’ After his marriage, he shifted back to his parents’ dilapidated house and their tiny farm. He has no photographs from his early life and couldn’t afford to have any taken. However, he worked extremely hard—and at 97, still does. ‘I learned how to make gur (jaggery) and sold it across the district. We spent our money on educating the children. Once educated, they left for Mumbai and started earning and even sending us money. Then I shut down the jaggery business and invested in more farmland. Eventually our farm prospered.’ But Ganpati Yadav is unhappy with how today’s farmers are sinking under the burden of debt. ‘We got swarajya (independence), but things are not what we were expecting.’ He feels the current national and state governments are worse than the previous ones, which were also bad. ‘No telling what they’ll do next,’ he says. Though most of his courier work for the Toofan Sena was done on foot, Ganpati Yadav ‘learned cycling around age 20-22’. That became a mode of transport in the latter part of his underground

work. ‘The cycle was a novelty in our times.’ There were long discussions in the village, he says, on this fascinating new technology. ‘I learned how to ride it on my own, falling innumerable times.’ It’s late afternoon and the 97-year-old has been up since before 5 a.m. But he seems to have enjoyed speaking to us for hours and shows no tiredness. The one time he frowns is when I ask him how old his cycle is. ‘This one? About 25 years. The last one I had for about 50 years, but somebody stole it,’ he says sadly. As we leave, he clasps my hands tightly and, asking me to wait a moment as he wants to give me something, disappears into his little abode. There he picks up a small vessel, opens a pot and dips it in. Then he steps out and gives me a cup of fresh milk. When I’ve had that, he clasps my hands again, tightly, his eyes moist with tears. My own are welling up, too. No further words are needed or spoken. We depart knowing we were privileged to be, however briefly, part of Ganpati Bala Yadav’s wonderful cycle of life.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Grateful acknowledgement is made to these copyright holders for permission to reprint copyrighted material in this volume: ‘Small Towns and the River’ by Mamang Dai is extracted from Fulcrum: An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics (Cambridge, 2005), reprinted by permission of the author; ‘Scheduled Castes, Unscheduled Change’ is extracted from India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond by Shashi Tharoor (Penguin Books India, 1997), reprinted by permission of the author; ‘The Night Train at Deoli’ is extracted from Small Towns, Big Stories: New and Selected Fiction by Ruskin Bond (Aleph, 2017), reprinted by permission of the author; ‘An Astrologer’s Day’ is extracted from The Very Best of R. K. Narayan: Timeless Malgudi by R. K. Narayan (Rupa, 2013), reprinted by permission of Bhuvaneshwari Srinivasamurthy; ‘The Man Who Saw God’ by D. B. G. Tilak (1961) translated by Ranga Rao, reprinted by permission of Satyanarayana Murthy; ‘A Village Divided’ is extracted from A Village Divided by Rahi Masoom Reza translated by Gillian Wright (Penguin Books India, 2003), reprinted by permission of the publisher; ‘Raag Darbari’ is extracted from Raag Darbari by Shrilal Shukla translated by Gillian Wright (Penguin Books India, 1992), reprinted by permission of the publisher; ‘Lorry Raja’ by Madhuri Vijay (Narrative Magazine, 2011), reprinted by permission of the author; ‘The Lynching That Changed India’ by Abhimanyu Kumar first appeared in Al Jazeera, 2017, reprinted by permission of the author; ‘The Man Who Lived’ by Snigdha Poonam (Granta, 2018), reprinted by permission of the author; and ‘Ganpati Yadav’s Gripping Life Cycle’ by P. Sainath (PARI, 2018), reprinted by permission of the author.

NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS Ruskin Bond (born 1934) has been writing for over sixty years, and now has over 120 titles in print—novels, collections of stories, poetry, essays and books for children. He has won several awards for his work, including the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1992 and Padma Shri in 1999. Abhimanyu Kumar is a freelance journalist with The Hindu, the Sunday Guardian and Youth Ki Awaaz. R. K. Narayan (1906–2001) was one of the country’s greatest writers, illuminating the human condition through small-town life. He created the fictional town of Malgudi, which he introduced in his first work of fiction, Swami and Friends; it was the setting for many of his works. In 1958 Narayan’s work The Guide won the Sahitya Akademi Award and was adapted for film and Broadway. He won numerous awards, including the Padma Vibhushan, and was nominated to the Rajya Sabha. Snigdha Poonam is the author of Dreamers: How Young Indians are Changing Their World, which won the Crossword Non-Fiction Book Award, 2018. She reports on national affairs at the Hindustan Times. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, the New York Times, Caravan, Granta and other publications. Ranga Rao was the author of three novels, Fowl-Filcher, The Drunk Tantra and The River is Three Quarters Full; and the short story collection, An Indian Idyll and Other Stories. He has also edited and translated into English two anthologies of Telugu stories, Classic Telugu Short Stories and That Man on the Road.

Rahi Masoom Reza (1927–1992) was a novelist, poet, scriptwriter for TV shows and movies and lyricist. He wrote screenplays for over 300 films and shows, including B. R. Chopra’s popular television series, Mahabharat. Several of his works depict the agony caused by Partition. His novel Adha Gaon depicts feudal life at the time of Indian independence and focuses on the lives of ordinary people. P. Sainath (born 1957) is the founder editor of People’s Archive of Rural India. He is a professor and a photojournalist who focuses on poverty, social and economic inequality and rural affairs. He is the recipient of over forty national and global awards for his reporting, including the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2007 for Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts and the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in its inaugural year in 2000. Sainath’s book Everybody Loves a Good Drought remains a bestseller and is considered a classic on rural poverty. Shrilal Shukla (1925–2011) wrote over twenty-five books, most famously Raag Darbari, a satirical take on village life in India, which received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1970. He was awarded the Jnanpith Award in 2011. Shashi Tharoor (born 1962) is the bestselling author of eighteen books, both fiction and non-fiction, besides being a noted critic and columnist. His books include the path-breaking satire The Great Indian Novel, the classic India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond and the No. 1 bestsellers, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India, for which he won a Ramnath Goenka Award, and Why I Am a Hindu. His latest book is The Paradoxical Prime Minister: Narendra Modi and His India. He has won numerous literary awards for his work, including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. D. B. G. Tilak (1921–1966) was an influential Telugu poet, novelist and short-story writer. He is best known for his collection of poems Amrutham Kurisina Ratri (The Night When Nectar Rained) published in 1969.

Madhuri Vijay is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, and her writing has appeared in Best American Non-Required Reading, Narrative Magazine and Salon, among other publications. The Far Field, published in 2019, is her first book. Gillian Wright is a journalist, author and translator. She has translated classics of modern Hindi literature such as Raag Darbari, Adha Gaon and Middle India: Selected Short Stories of Bhisham Sahni. She co-authored India in Slow Motion with Mark Tully and has collaborated on various books with him.