Zorawar Singh looked as if he was concentrating hard on some faraway problem. His eyes were closed. From time to time Madam would turn her face away from the pillow and look back and call “Oye” as if she was hailing someone from the balcony. She too was concentrating hard it seemed. After five minutes of this, Zorawar Singh suddenly opened his eyes and shouted, “Jai mata di!” From the bed Jishnu da commented, “Game over.” Now his eyes were closed. With a loud plop, Zorawar withdrew his dark, rapidly shrinking cock that a donkey would be proud of, and Madam slumped to the bed with a last feeble “Oye.” A thin watery stream of semen trickled out of her anus.
Zorawar Singh Shokeen, mid-level political broker and property dealer, was our landlord. A strapping six-foot-two half-Jat half-Gujjar from Chandrawal, full-bearded with a dandy’s taste in clothes. He usually wore deep pink or lemon-yellow silk shirts with gold cufflinks that brought out his peaches-and-cream complexion. His eyes were light brown and matched his beard. He was forty years old and for the last ten years had been the terror of Chandrawal, Shakti Nagar, Roop Nagar, Kamala Nagar, Vijay Nagar, Mukherjee Nagar, and other areas adjoining Delhi University. He was rumored to be close to H.K.L Bhagat, still then the undisputed New Delhi Congress boss and whom Zorawar called “Kaana” with the proud contempt that only close familiarity breeds, an obvious reference to the vain Bhagat’s damaged eye.
Sometimes Zorawar would be picked up from Shokeen Niwas in a white Ambassador car with a red flashing light on the top, tinted windows, and a Black Cat commando in the front seat. Zorawar would quickly slide in back beside a small gnomelike silhouette and then the Ambassador would reverse at full speed and turn toward Bungalow Road.
Jishnu da was the de facto caretaker of Shokeen Niwas. In his first year he had endeared himself to Zorawar Singh, showing great presence of mind one evening when an enraged Sikh husband of a woman Zorawar was screwing arrived at the doorstep of the hostel with a Matador van full of sword-wielding Sardars. Zorawar was at the time doing his thing to the lady, who was on her knees at the edge of the bed with a mouthful of pillow. In Jishnu da’s room, of course. Hearing the commotion, Jishnu da peeked out from the balcony and, gauging the situation correctly, promptly locked his room from the outside. He then gathered a couple of boys from the other rooms and headed downstairs to meet the Sardars who were trying to break open the front gates.
After instructing the boys, young kids from Chapra who had arrived only a week earlier, to just stand behind him coolly and not say a word, Jishnu da draped his cotton check-towel over his shoulders like a warrior’s mail. With enormous pluck, he then opened the front gate, yawned, rubbed his eyes, and demanded quietly, “Madarchod, what the fuck do you want?” or something to that effect, to the Sardar who was banging on the door with the steel hilt of his sword. Taken aback at the sight of this emaciated five-foot-five rangbaz in a sandow ganji of indiscriminate color and Tweety Pie Bermudas, not to mention the towel over his back, the Sardar replied, “Where is Zorawar Singh Shokeen? He has kidnapped my wife.”
“Is that the problem?” Jishnu da replied indifferently. “Rest assured he isn’t here. Haven’t seen him here for weeks. Actually, no, come to think of it, he did come here with a Sardarni a couple of weeks back but she was very friendly with him. Couldn’t have kidnapped her. Probably some other Sardarni, not your wife.” He rubbed his eyes and yawned.
Unable to contain his rage, the Sardar slapped Jishnu da, who in turn latched onto the Sardar’s luxuriant beard with all his strength. Farid Ashraf and Ramanuj Ghosh, who had been standing behind Jishnu da, joined the fray along with the other Sardars. There was a lot of wild shouting and murderous threats but very little actual violence.
“I’m telling you,” Jishnu da shouted, still hanging onto the Sardar, “Uncle is not here screwing your wife! If you don’t go away, all twenty-five boys I have upstairs will come down and break your asses.” He then called to the only boy upstairs, looking down from a balcony, “Tell Panday and Mumtaz to get the kattas.”
The Sardars, confused by all the bluster, slowly retreated. After the van had backed out of the lane, Farid and Ramanuj almost collapsed with relief at the doorway. Jishnu da wiped sweat from his armpits with his towel and then dramatically tied it around his head like a peasant and lit a Navy Cut.
“Boss, what were you trying to do, get us killed?” Farid Ashraf inquired after a while.
“Never under any circumstance back down in a fight or have a dialogue or compromise. No fight lasts more than five minutes. Remember that always. Never try to have a rational conversation with anyone who is trying to fuck you. He will then fuck you. But if you call him a motherfucker and offer to cut his throat, he will respect you. When you say those words you must mean them from the bottom of your heart. Just like in the song.”
Farid and Ramanuj looked at Jishnu da with profound incomprehension but nodded their heads in agreement.
“Both of you did good.” Jishnu da passed the Navy Cut to Ramanuj. He then went upstairs and opened his locked room. Just as he triumphantly pushed open the door, a deafening roar erupted from inside the room. Zorawar Singh had opened fire from the Mauser 80 that he always carried in his trouser pocket. Though the bullet just grazed his hair, Jishnu da fainted and collapsed to the floor.
A close bond was forged that day between Zorawar Singh and Jishnu da, which continues unabated to the present times. From that day onwards, Jishnu da had lived rent-free at Shokeen Niwas and was given carte blanche as to the running of the place, the vetting of tenants, the collection of rents. He was the hostel president for life, so to say.
“Uncle has just one condition. The boys should be primarily Biharis. He seems to think that we are just like Gujjars. Tough and callous. No need to contradict him. So never under any circumstance prove yourself to be otherwise. Be tough, stupid, and callous always. Once in a while a Matador will come and you two will have to accompany the rest of us to some colony somewhere in Delhi where you just stand outside the van for an hour or so, smoking cigarettes or whatever. Usually a property dispute somewhere. Nothing major. It’s just a show of strength, then you can go home.”
This was one of many things that Jishnu da had told Pranjal and me during our first week at Shokeen Niwas, and I had solemnly promised him that we would do him proud.
After he finished his story about the Sardars and their swords, Jishnu da took us out to the balcony, where a hideous framed painting was hanging on the wall that showed Hanumanji on one knee baring his heart with both hands to reveal embedded images of Lord Ram and Sita. Pranjal and I both thought that Jishnu da was going to ask us to seek Hanumanji’s blessing as another rite of initiation into the rarefied world of Shokeen Niwas. But no.
Jisnhu da simply removed the painting from the wall and showed us the round smooth hole made by that Mauser bullet. The bullet itself could be touched by wriggling in one’s little finger.
“It is just like a chut, it gets bigger as you go deeper,” Jishnu da said philosophically as he filled ganja into an empty Navy Cut cylinder.
It was whispered among the boys of Shokeen Niwas, usually the senior ones like Jishnu da, that at the age of twenty-five Zorawar had committed his first murder. He was then a student of Satyawati College in Ashok Vihar and in the evenings he would visit Kamala Nagar from Chandrawal, where he lived with his widowed mother.
One day while having tea near Hans Raj College, he saw a very pretty girl come out of the mandir across the street. (It was the same mandir where every Tuesday Jishnu da and Ramanuj Ghosh would go to offer their prayers. Ramanuj always carried a large cotton check-towel draped around his neck and the joke was that after offering prayers at the mandir, he would come outside, wrap the towel like a shroud around himself, and sit with the beggars lining the boundary walls. Come to think of it, he always did pay for his share of the Old Monk khamba with twenty-five and fifty-paise coins.) Zorawar, totally smitten, left his friends and followed the girl home. I like to imagine that Zorawar was perhaps intrigued by her bare feet, the delicate arch of her ankle partly uncovered at the bottom of her petticoat. He did this every day for fifteen days. The girl had noticed him and once or twice while coming out of the mandir had smiled at him. On the sixteenth day, just as she unlocked the latch of the front gate, Zorawar caught hold of her from behind and, slowly tilting her head, kissed her full on the lips.