‘All right.’
‘I can’t even keep my motorcycle safe from them. I have to keep it in an open courtyard, and they damage it out of spite. Now Brahmpur, there’s a city!’
‘You’ve been to Brahmpur then?’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Netaji impatiently. ‘You know what I like about Brahmpur?’
‘What?’ asked Maan.
‘You can eat out in hotels.’
‘In hotels?’ Maan frowned.
‘In small hotels.’
‘Oh.’
‘Now this is a bad patch. Hold on tight. I’ll go slow. That way, if we slip, we’ll be all right.’
‘Fine.’
‘Can you hear me?’
‘Perfectly.’
‘How about the flies?’
‘No, you’re my shield.’
After a pause, Netaji said, ‘You must have a lot of contacts.’
‘Contacts?’
‘Yes, contacts, contacts, you know what I mean.’
‘But—’
‘You should use your contacts to help us,’ said Netaji bluntly. ‘I’m sure you could get me a kerosene dealer’s licence. That should be easy enough for the Revenue Minister’s son.’
‘Actually, all that is under a different ministry,’ said Maan, unoffended. ‘Civil Supplies, I think.’
‘Come on, come on, that doesn’t matter. I know how it works.’
‘I really can’t,’ said Maan. ‘My father would kill me if I suggested it.’
‘No harm in asking. Anyway, your father is very well respected here. . Why doesn’t he find you a comfortable job?’
‘A job. . er, why do people respect my father here? After all, he’ll take away your land, won’t he?’
‘Well. .’ began Netaji, then stopped. He wondered whether he should confide in Maan that the village record-keeper had cooked the records to suit the family interests. Neither Netaji nor anyone else in the family had so far come to know of Rasheed’s visit to the patwari. It was unimaginable that he could have asked him to uncook them on Kachheru’s behalf.
‘Was that your son who saw us off?’ asked Maan.
‘Yes. He’s just over two, and he’s in a bad mood these days.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh, he’s returned from his grandmother’s place, where he was spoilt. Now nothing we do pleases him, and he’s acting as contrary as possible.’
‘Maybe it’s the heat.’
‘Maybe,’ Netaji agreed. ‘Have you ever been in love?’
‘What was that?’
‘I said, have you ever been in love?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Maan. ‘Tell me, what’s that building we just passed?’
In a while they reached Salimpur. They had agreed to meet the others at a cloth and general merchandise shop. But the narrow, crowded streets of Salimpur were completely packed. It was the day of the weekly market. Hawkers, peddlers, vendors of every kind, snake charmers with their torpid cobras, quacks, tinkers, fruit sellers with baskets of mangoes and lichis on their heads, sweetsellers, their barfis and laddus and jalebis encrusted with flies, and a great part of the population not only of Salimpur but of many of the surrounding villages, had managed to squeeze into the centre of the town.
There was a tremendous din. Above the babble of the customers and the shouts of the hawkers came the conflicting sounds of two screeching loudspeakers, one blaring out the current broadcast from All India Radio Brahmpur, the other interspersing its medley of film songs with advertisements for Raahat-e-Rooh or Ease-for-the-Soul Hair Oil.
Electricity! thought Maan, with a sudden leap of joy. Maybe there’ll even be a fan around somewhere.
Netaji, with impatient curses and prolonged beeps of his horn, was hardly able to move a hundred yards in fifteen minutes.
‘They’ll miss their train,’ he said of the others, who were coming by rickshaw and were half an hour behind them. But since the train was already three hours late, this was in fact unlikely.
By the time Netaji got to his friend’s shop (which, sadly, was not equipped with a fan) he had such a bad headache that, after introducing Maan, he immediately lay down on a bench and closed his eyes. The shopkeeper ordered a few cups of tea. Several other friends had gathered in the shop, which was a sort of den for political and other gossip. One of them was reading an Urdu newspaper, another — the goldsmith from next door — was picking his nose thoroughly and thoughtfully. Soon the Bear and guppi arrived.
Since it was in part a cloth shop, Maan was mildly interested to see how it was run. He noticed that there were no customers.
‘Why is there so little business here today?’ asked Maan.
‘Market day — very little activity in any of the shops,’ said the goldsmith. ‘Just the occasional yokel from out of town. That’s why I’ve deserted my own. Anyway, I can keep an eye on it from here.’
To the shopkeeper he remarked: ‘What is the SDO from Rudhia subdivision doing here in Salimpur today?’
Netaji, who had been lying as still as a corpse, suddenly perked up when he heard ‘SDO’. Salimpur had its own SDO, who was in effect administrative prince of this fief. A visit from a Sub-Divisional Officer of a different subdivision was news indeed.
‘It must be the archives,’ said the shopkeeper. ‘I heard someone saying that someone was being sent over from somewhere to look at them.’
‘You donkey,’ said Netaji, before falling back exhausted on to the bench, ‘it’s nothing to do with the archives. It has to do with coordinating the process of notification in the various subdivisions once the Zamindari Act comes into force.’
In fact Netaji had no idea why the SDO was in town. But he decided immediately to make it his business to meet him.
A spindly schoolteacher also dropped in for a few minutes, made the sarcastic comment that he did not have the whole day to spend in idle chatter like some people he knew, looked at the prone figure of Netaji with contempt, frowned slightly and quizzically at Maan, and left.
‘Where’s the guppi?’ the Bear asked suddenly. No one knew. He had disappeared. He was found a few minutes later, staring in slack-jawed fascination at a display of bottles and pills that an aged quack doctor had arranged in a semicircle in the middle of the street. A crowd had gathered, and was listening to the quack’s patter as he held up a bottle containing an opaque and viscous lime-green liquid:
‘And this amazing medicine, truly a panacea, was given to me by Tajuddin, a great baba, and very close to God. He spent twelve years in the jungles of Nagpur, eating nothing — he just chewed leaves for their moisture, and kept a stone against his stomach for food. His muscles rotted, his blood dried, his flesh wasted away. He was mere bone and black skin. Then Allah said to two angels, “Go down and give him my salaams”—’
The guppi, who was staring open-mouthed and listening with absolute conviction to this nonsense, almost had to be dragged away from the scene and back into the shop by the Bear.
10.2
As the tea, paan and newspaper went around, the conversation turned to politics at the state level, especially the recent communal troubles in Brahmpur. The prime object of hatred was the Home Minister, L.N. Agarwal, whose defence of the police firing on the Muslim mob near the Alamgiri Masjid had been widely reported in the newspapers — and who was known to be a strong supporter of the construction — or, as he would have had it, reconstruction — of the Shiva Temple. Rhymed slogans such as the following, which were popular in Brahmpur among the Muslims, had found their way to Salimpur and were repeated with relish:
Saanp ka zahar, insaan ki khaaclass="underline"
Yeh hai L.N. Agarwal!