Fit of rage
by Palash Krishna Mehrotra
Defence Colony
I sit on a blue plastic stool outside the Mother Dairy booth in Def Col Market and do nothing. It’s the end of another gray and cloudy August day. The monsoon has yielded little rain. Even though it’s evening, I’m sweating. The humidity makes me feel like a squeezed sponge.
I should be at home. I really don’t know what makes me leave my room. These days I am pushed along by forces not in my control. One day slips into another. Every night is a silent dark space that swallows me whole. I squat inside her belly until she spits me out at dawn, covered in phlegm and bile.
Something happened a year ago. Arpita and I were living in Bombay then. We were locked in the missionary position when, suddenly, she pushed me off. She said, “Manik, I feel hemmed in. Every day it is the same damn thing. We’ve been together for five whole years and every night it’s the same old shit. No new positions. No nothing. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life like this. I feel my youth slipping away from me, Manik.” She sat on the floor and glared at her toes. I smoked a cigarette. I felt deeply humiliated.
Then I did something terrible.
It’s not very clear to me what exactly happened. I did what I did in a fit of rage. I remember a kitchen knife, I remember being seized by an uncontrollable urge and doing what had to be done. I recall a pair of dangling headphones playing tinny music.
Defence Colony isn’t a completely new place for me. I lived here many years ago, when I was a techie with a dot-com. It was my first job.
In Bombay, I thought to myself: It’s all over now, let me return to where I started my adult life. From twenty to thirty has been one long journey. I suppose you could say my life never really took off. Many strange things happened in those ten years. I try not to remember them but very often memories force themselves on my consciousness; they are like stubborn relatives who invite themselves over even when you’ve made it clear that they are unwelcome.
I have a room on the first floor, directly above the garage. The house faces a school. In the mornings I can hear the bell go off every forty minutes, signalling the end of one period and the start of another. Midmorning, at around 11, a drum starts its heavy pounding, probably a P.T. class. From my window I can see only a small part of the playground. The lot is dusty and shorn of grass. During the break the girls play a game where they run around holding each other’s hands, forming a chain. When the girls stray into the corner of the field visible from my window, I back away or hide behind the curtain. I wouldn’t want them to see me.
Defence Colony is a posh Delhi neighborhood, but in the afternoons it has the air of a small, well-planned town. The roads are narrow and quiet. Guards nap in their plastic chairs, their bottoms squeezed in at odd angles. Mongrel dogs give chase to each other, or join the guards in their siesta. A dirty open drain divides the neighborhood in two halves. Cows graze peacefully on the grass on both sides of the nullah. Abandoned bulls forage in overflowing garbage dumps.
And cycle-rickshaws weave in and out of the lanes, obediently slowing down and pulling to the side in order to give way to passing SUVs.
When I arrived here four months ago in May, it was very hot. I would stay in my room all day long. When the landlady, Mrs. Bindra, asked what I did, I told her I was an online journalist. Delhi is a big city. People do all kinds of things. My landlady didn’t ask me any more questions.
In the evenings I would go to the C-block market and walk around in circles. Sometimes I would hire a cycle-rickshaw and ask to be peddled around the various blocks of the neighborhood. That’s how I met Sadiq. It didn’t take me long to befriend him. He was a Bihari migrant to Delhi. He rented his rickshaw from a rich man who owned an entire fleet. He was also a smackhead.
Every other day he’d take a bus to Connaught Place and come back with small, innocuous-looking paper pellets. The pudiyas contained the deadly brown powder. He would do it all the time, in all sorts of places. Sadiq had a friend who lived in the Jungpura slums, near the railway tracks. He’d head over there often. I’d go along, not for the smack but for the ganja which his smack buddy also dealt.
When no one was looking, I’d get Sadiq to come up to my room. He always expressed amazement at the fact I lived on my own. “Don’t you get lonely all by yourself? I just wouldn’t be able to handle it...” Sadiq lived in a one-room tenement in Kotla, a poor neighborhood just around the corner from Def Col. His four children, wife, and younger brother all slept in the same room. And he alone wouldn’t have been able to afford even that. His younger brother had been lucky to get a job in an electrical repair shop. When he rented the room he had felt obligated to ask his older brother if he and his family wanted to move in.
I am sitting in my room with Sadiq and Chotu. Chotu is the newest member of our two-person gang. Now we are a trio.
Chotu works at Mrs. Bindra’s. He lives in a room on the terrace, surrounded by black Sintex water tanks. His room has a tin roof which heats up during the daytime. He has few possessions, all of which he keeps locked in his gray tin trunk. For furniture he has a bed, a mattress, a surahi, a small rectangular mirror, a noisy table fan. To liven up the walls he’s cut out glamorous pictures from Delhi Times. Seminaked Bollywood actresses and foreign models smile and pout at Chotu. At night they go a step further. Some pop out of their frames and climb into bed with him. He says he has felt them touching him in all the right places.
Chotu is from Garhwal. He is fair-skinned, has shiny black eyes and big hands. He is moody and irritable when with us. In front of Mrs. Bindra he is subservient and self-effacing, always ready to please. He misses the rain and the mountains, the company of his friends. He’s fond of his drink. We do a lot of that sitting in the park opposite the main market or in Sadiq’s rickshaw while he peddles us around. Chotu stares at all the fancy women with their oversized sunglasses and opulent cars. He finds it strange that I remain indifferent to the sensual world around us.
We have another hangout — the first floor. The golf-playing Mrs. Bindra, wife of the dead Rear Admiral Bindra, owns C-47, Defence Colony. She lives on the ground floor. Between Mrs. Bindra’s plush, dark home and the terrace lies a vacant first-floor apartment. A young woman committed suicide here several weeks before I moved in. No one has been bold enough to rent the place after that incident. Chotu feels her ghost is still around. He describes her as being very sexy, very aloof.
She worked for a bank and lived on her own. At night she had boyfriends over. Chotu used to clean her apartment on Sundays. He had a key to the flat. He was the one who found her dead body dangling from an Orient ceiling fan.
The three of us go there sometimes, either in the mornings when Mrs. Bindra is playing golf or when she’s out-of-station, visiting her only daughter in Bombay.
It’s one of those weekends. Mrs. Bindra is in Worli, visiting her daughter who works for Hewlett-Packard. We have taken over the first floor. The curtains are drawn. The rooms are empty so our voices echo, bounce off the walls. In the vacant space our low voices acquire a rumbling, basslike quality.