‘Hand ‘em over to the police! Sharmaji, call the police, dial 1-0-0 on your mobile!’
Nobody was listening to Mohandas; he was just being pushed around in a shower of slaps, fists, and elbows raining on his head, back, shoulders, and face. Mohandas covered his head with his hands to protect his eyes, ‘Please! Just hear me out, hey, stop hitting me, hey!’
Meanwhile, a small group of guards had come running. One was carrying a twelve gauge double-barrelled shotgun, the kind bank guards carry. The rest had batons. Shivers went up Mohandas’s spine; stars from the new moon night on the banks of the Kathina flashed before his eyes, the celestial bodies screaming and groaning, then falling like shooting stars, breaking into pieces. A hard blow struck him unannounced and he let out a scream that sounded like a bound pig getting its throat slit. The sound reached the coal miners, who came out and gathered to watch the show.
(Pay attention, this story takes place at the same time as when that all-seeing Hindi guru was doing you-know-what to a woman in his ascetic quarters, and, thousands of miles and a few oceans away, the US president was sitting in a chair in the White House doing the same thing. When latter-day sea pirates dragged a descendant of Gilgamesh out from a hole near the Tigris and Euphrates where he’d hidden for his life, shining a flashlight in his mouth, counting his teeth, looking for a cyanide pill.
It was the time when the amount of power someone had was, by the law of a kind of backward ratio, equalled by the same degree to which that person had become out of control, violent, barbarous, hellishly immoral. And the same force applied to states, political organisations, castes, religious organisations, and individuals.)
Mohandas stood outside the main gate of the Oriental Coal Mines in the middle of the road. He’d simply stopped thinking. A frightful near-silence buzzed all around. He didn’t realise he was standing in the middle of the street with trucks, Tempos, and cars honking their horns and whizzing by. He still had that thirty-rupee wallet in his pocket that he’d bought when he thought the job was his. In it was one hundred and seventy rupees, all from his labour and toil — this is what he had left, minus the sixty-five for his bus fare. Finding his wallet still there when he reached into his pocket, his mind eased a bit. He suddenly felt the sun’s heat and moved quickly to the side of the road. He was hungry.
While eating at the Fatso’s Vaishnava Pure Vegetarian Food Stall he found out that although there were two state transport buses only one private line had an evening service to the area near his village, Purbanra. He decided to take a look around Lenin Nagar, the coal miners’ colony. He might see someone he knew, maybe someone he studied with at college, maybe someone else.
He lost his way in Lenin Nagar. It was afternoon, all of the apartment buildings looked alike, and everyone was at work in the mines. Only women and children were at home. A school bus was making stops and unloading schoolchildren who were walking on ahead. Lenin Nagar was an enormous residential colony. If I hadn’t had the wool pulled over my eyes and been played for a fool, Mohandas thought, I would have been living in one of these flats with my family, bringing home a pay cheque; Devdas and Sharda would have been going to school wearing little uniforms and shoes and socks and getting off the school bus. We’d have a fan or cooler to help us sleep at night. But how totally ludicrous that in order to find out where Bisnath’s flat was, he’d have to ask for his own name.
‘Hi there friend, can you tell me where Mohandas lives?’
‘Who? You mean supervisor sahib?’
‘That’s the one!’
‘Go straight ahead, make a left at the fourth bylane, it’s the third house, A/11, next to Dr Janardan Singh’s flat.
The door to the apartment was closed. The brass plate affixed to the wall outside read, ‘Mohandas Viswakarma, Deputy Depot Supervisor, Oriental Coal Mines.’
He stood reading that for a little while before ringing the doorbell below the brass plate. The sound gave him a start since the hard ring was identical to the clerk’s desk buzzer, the one that caused calamity.
A fourteen-or fifteen-year-old boy answered the door.
‘Sahib’s not at home, he just left for the market to go drink a lassi,’ the boy said in one breath.
‘Could I have a glass of water?’
Mohandas was very thirsty, the hot sun had been beating down on him, and the wind blew like a furnace. He was wilting. He’d been nicked and bruised on his face, arm, and back during his beating and subsequent ejection from the office compound, and the dried sweat was coagulating the blood in the cuts.
The boy looked him over head to toe.
‘Wait here, I’ll be right back.’ He went inside.
Mohandas gulped down three glasses; the boy’d brought a cold bottle of water from the fridge. The water rejuvenated his body, brought the light back to his eyes, and calmed him. He noticed the boy’s sympathetic look as he took the glass back.
‘Who else is at home?’ Mohandas asked.
‘Nobody. Just Kasturi madamji. But she’s sleeping. Come back after five.’ When the boy started back in with the empty bottle, Mohandas said, ‘When sahib comes back tell him that Mohandas from Purbanra village stopped by. I’ll come back this evening.’
The boy stopped. He looked quizzically at Mohandas. ‘Who? Who should I say stopped by?’
‘Mohandas!’ Mohandas said a little louder, before slowly returning to the May inferno and the nearly melting pavement.
There wasn’t much to Lenin Nagar market, though it ached for a modern makeover. There were a handful of dry-goods stores, a few convenience shops with some groceries. A Kaveri Fast Food that served dosas-idlis-vadas. Two food shacks with the usual tandoori, dhal makhini, kadhai paneer, butter chicken, aloo paratha. A liquor shop with whisky and local toddy with a sign outside that read, ‘Cold Beer Available.’ Two cigarette and paan stalls, and two stores with proper glass window displays that carried all sorts of plastic stuff, small electric appliances and electronics. Then another cavernous apparel store with a show window featuring crude foam mannequins modeling lacy bras and underwear that showed off everything.
Mohandas saw a police Tata Sumo parked in front of Lakshmi Vaishnav Restaurant, and among the handful of police inside drinking lassis was Vijay Tiwari from Mohandas’s village, son of Pandit Chatradhari Tiwari, who’d been fixed up with a police inspector position by his in-laws.
Bisnath, too, was there.
Bisnath was having a good laugh at something as he finished his lassi; walking back toward the Sumo, Mohandas caught his eye. Bisnath did a double take, and for a moment the colour drained from his face. The laugh evaporated. Vijay Tiwari saw the panic on Bisnath’s face and turned around to look; he was sitting in the driver’s seat in full uniform.
Mohandas stood about fifteen yards away, beneath the lamppost, dressed in rags, scorched by the scalding wind.
A tense silence settled over the hot, sunny afternoon.
Bisnath climbed into the SUV. Vijay Tiwari started the engine and floored it, right at a terrified Mohandas, who stumbled to take cover behind a lamppost. Vijay Tiwari hit the brakes hard and the car ground to a halt right beside Mohandas; if it hadn’t, the car would have smashed into Mohandas and the lamppost. He was in a daze.
‘Get over here!’ Vijay Tiwari called him over.
Not even eight years had passed since the very same Vijay Tiwari had studied with Mohandas at the M.G. Degree College. They had a class together and saw each other there every day. He’d been a bit slow in his studies. His father Pandit Chatradhari had held out Mohandas as a role model, since every year he was at the top of the class. Now the same Vijay Tiwari wore a police uniform, rode in a Tata Sumo fitted with cop sirens and a bullhorn, and put on a show: more than simply pretending he didn’t know Mohandas, he put on a show of hostility and scorn. And why? Just because Mohandas was poor, low-caste? Or because he didn’t have a job and was labouring quietly to support his family? Or maybe because these people had swindled him, walked all over what was rightfully his. But now, his presence threw a wrench into their freedom and carousing.