“I am married,” she is said to have whispered to him. “I know,” Zorawar replied before parting her lips with his tongue again. The girl’s name was Sunita Khandelwal and her husband worked as a lower division clerk in the Shakti Nagar branch of the Punjab National Bank.
I visualize Sunita as short and delicately built, in American georgette and leheriya-print sarees, with straight hair and the pallu wrapped tight around both shoulders, like many bania girls before the fat finally catches up with them.
Each afternoon after lunch, when Suresh Khandelwal returned to his bank, Zorawar would join Sunita in her marital bed. After a couple of months of this, Suresh comes home early one evening and his fourteen-year-old saali, Lado, lets him in and leads him straight to the bedroom, where he catches his wife sucking Zorawar’s cock. Such is their passion that they continue with their lovemaking even though poor Suresh is right there, one foot on the wooden choukhat, poised to enter his own bedroom, watching his young wife’s mouth fill with semen. Zorawar takes a hand towel and wipes the edges of Sunita’s mouth, all the time smiling at Suresh Khandelwal. A mild-mannered man, Suresh then turns, retraces his steps to the front door, and carrying his rexine-lined briefcase walks off into the sunset. The next afternoon his body, cut in half by a freight train, is found near the Sarai Rohilla station. Suresh’s father and younger brother arrive from Sikar to arrange his funeral. Within a month Zorawar moves in with Sunita. A couple of neighbors who object have their faces rearranged and their windows broken. No one complains to the police. Zorawar Singh Shokeen settles in. He loves the house. Sure beats his narrow two-room heat-trap of a hovel in Chandrawal. He enjoys the old-style expansiveness of the courtyard and the high-ceilinged rooms on three floors that surround it. He especially loves the dark-red flooring from which intricate patterns made with bits of broken china float up.
A true bhumihar if ever there was one, Jishnu da described Zorawar’s love for his new acquisition, his joy at being finally a man of property, with great detail. From the top of the terrace Zorawar can see all of North Campus and the areas adjoining it. Kirori Mal and Hans Raj College at a stone’s throw; beyond looms the dense kikar-encrusted Delhi Ridge, Bara Hindu Rao, Hindu College, St. Stephen’s, and the back gate of Miranda House. The teeming Bungalow Road is just outside the lane, with its bookshops, cafés, juice corners, and glittering shops catering to all the needs of students who come to the university from faraway places and bring to it their own tribal customs and rituals. If Zorawar turns his head he can see Roop Nagar, Shakti Nagar, Amba Cinema Hall, and, finally, Malka Ganj, where Mrs. Midha, his future paramour, lives with her homeopath husband and thirteen-year-old daughter who bears a striking resemblance to the Bollywood starlet Divya Bharti, complete with round apple-fed cheeks and rounder tits. If he strains his eyes he can also see the vast spread of Chandrawal. But try as he might, he can’t locate his own house where his mother still lives. It is too small. Too insignificant.
Six months pass. For Sunita it is a blissful time. A period of full sexual awakening. She never realized the amount of pleasure that can be had from the male body, to say nothing of her own. She constantly surprises herself. She forever wants to keep looking at Zorawar, keep touching him, have him three or four times a day, anywhere, anytime, if he is willing. “Uncle is a heavy choder,” Jishnu da explained. Sunita can’t have enough of her Zorawar. She doesn’t care for household chores anymore, nor for the views of her neighbors. She realizes that Zorawar is a criminal of some kind but she can’t care less. She would gladly give up a hundred Suresh Khandelwals for one Zorawar Singh Shokeen, every time. Meanwhile, it is Lado who cooks and takes up housekeeping. She stops going to school and Sunita and Zorawar do not force her to. Lado has always hated school and for her, too, this is a time of liberation. Sunita and Lado have money of their own, provided by their father, who was a prosperous Kamala Nagar cloth merchant before his death. Their mother had died during Lado’s birth. It is Sunita who has brought Lado up like a daughter, and now Lado at fourteen has finally come of age.
One night around 3 a.m. Sunita wakes up languorously, wants to curl up into her gorgeous Zorawar, but there is no Zorawar anywhere. Her bed is empty. Mildly alarmed, she pulls on her black kaftan and leaves her bedroom to look for him.
“Black kaftan? How do you know it was black?” I interrupted Jishnu da’s narrative flow but he didn’t mind.
“Would you rather it was pink, Hriday?” Jishnu da lit a Navy Cut spiked with prime Bhagalpuri ganja and carried on. Stepping outside her room in her black kaftan, Sunita finds the door to Lado’s room ajar. Even before she enters the room she knows in her heart what she will find there. Her fate is sealed. She can turn back, return to her room, pull off her black kaftan, and wait for Zorawar to slip back beside her and all will be fine. But she does not do that. Mesmerized by fear and loathing, Sunita walks into her sister’s bedroom and is assailed by the very scene that led Suresh Khandelwal to kill himself. With a slight role reversaclass="underline" This time, Zorawar is between the girl’s legs.
Sunita screams, rants, and tells Zorawar to clear out of her house. Right then, in the middle of the night. Then, with tears streaming down her face, she runs to her bedroom and bolts the door.
Her charred-to-the-bone body, to which flesh still clings in spots like sludge, is recovered by the police the next morning. The entire room reeks of kerosene for years afterwards.
“If you inhale deeply, you can still smell Sunita off the walls,” Jishnu da said, and took a deep breath.
It is true, the room had a funny smell that no amount of distemper and room freshener could do away with. The room which was once the pride and joy of Sunita Khandelwal was now mine and Pranjal’s for the rent of 900 rupees a month.
Within a month of Sunita’s death, Zorawar married the fourteen-year-old Lado and the house was finally his. He named it quite expectedly Shokeen Niwas. He was finally a man of property. Full and proper.
About seven years back, Zorawar moved out of Shokeen Niwas with Lado and his two daughters, Goldy and Shiny, to a plusher house in West Patel Nagar that he had captured from a Sikh major in the aftermath of the 1984 riots. He then converted Shokeen Niwas into a student lodge. There were twelve rooms, four on each floor. Usually two or three boys in each room. On weekends more, as friends would join in for drunken revelries from Ramjas, Stephen’s, Hindu, Hans Raj, SRCC, and KMC hostels. Across the street there was a small grocery store run by a man called Mehendiratta who also lived there with his family. Mehendiratta catered to all our needs.
Even though Zorawar had left Shokeen Niwas, he still liked it for his romantic trysts, about once every fortnight. He often used Jishnu da’s room, as it had been Lado’s bedroom in the early days.