‘You are the god Vitthoba, coming as you did just as I was singing the abhang…!’ Chandrakant said, brimming with feeling. He assumed from my clothes and looks that I was a wealthy, connected, worldly man, capable of raising him out of the dark place where he was stuck. Chandrakant, Shobha, and the rest of the residents of bylane number seven for the most part came from one community. And I came from a different one. But my position in that community was no different from that of Chandrakant and others like him. There was no place for me in mine: I was nothing more than a mere writer. Many others came masquerading as writers, but I was the one shown the door.
We then met regularly. Chandrkant accompanied me to the Hasarat Nizamuddin Auliya shrine and sat on the marble floor where we quietly listened to the penniless qawwali singers sing their songs.
Mother! Let me go today!
Today is a day filled with colour
Festival of Colour, please let me go!
and
The path to the drinking well is very difficult
How can I fill my pot with nectar-water?
And I was amazed when one night after we’d had a little bit to drink in their Jahangipuri half flat, Chandrakant reprised the qawwalis. Shobha was busy cooking mutton dopyaza, and the sweet smell of her cooking filling the flat. He was drumming out the beat on empty plastic water bottles using two one-rupee coins; his rhythm was flawless. He was as mesmerised with his own music making as the qawwali singers had been with theirs. I began tapping out the rhythm on the empty stainless steel cup that I was drinking whisky from. Along with the exquisite smell of the mutton dopyaza and, combined with the qawwali music, our meditation on Hazart Nizzamuddin, mehboob-e ilahi — l’amoureux de la divinité — and the words of Amir Khusrau, we felt the darkness dissipate. The whisky, too, had lifted our spirits to the point that we were dipping and diving in a pool of enchantment. Tears streamed from Chandrakant’s eyes. He didn’t know that the writer of the qawwalis was the master of the dargah where the two of us had gone several times, and where Chandrakant, head covered by chador, prayed little prayers that his life might improve. He prayed at the tomb of a man he thought was a pir — a holy man — not a poet. It’s true that he was also a pir, the disciple of Auliya. We were there one night when, once again, it was nighttime in the world all around, and darkness blanketed us. The dawn of tomorrow was drowned out in the dark like doused candles. We were returning to our homes along the footpath with Amir Khusrau’s stick as our guide, groping in search of our life. Shobha, too, was with us, perhaps trying to find her own, silently. I couldn’t stop wondering, who are these people present in the language of Khusrau — the man who first gave birth to poetry — and how did so many of them suddenly get there?
I wasn’t able to see Chandrakant or Shobha for about a year after that night. Another book of mine came out during that time that chipped away further what tranquility I had left. Well-connected and high caste writers from Delhi, Bhopal, Lucknow and other major cities began calling me a rabid dog, fascist, copycat, thief, Naxalite, communalist, feudal, affluent. My newspaper column was dropped, payments cancelled, and the rumour mill spun out such awful stuff that I nearly went mad. They were dark days. My sleep was racked with nightmares. I felt as if my body, now skin-and-bones, was pushed up against the wall waiting for death in a solitary confinement cell in some labour camp, like Osip Mandelstam. Or sitting quietly on a chair in front of the Sharda mental hospitaclass="underline" a single grain of rice gets stuck in my windpipe, my breath grows erratic and I cast my eyes wildly around as my death approaches. Like the Hindi writer Shailesh Matiyani, who died in that hospital. Fascism was right in front of us with a new look. The power of illegal capital and criminal violence was hiding behind the veil of the great ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, until it consumed and reduced to ash the great philosophies of the past two centuries in the irrepressible fire of its base ambitions and desires.
Sometime during that year I went for six months to Bombay and Pune in connection with a film I was writing. And even after I got back, I wasn’t able to see Chandrakant for another seven or eight months: that’s when I was busy editing a couple of small documentaries. The day-to-day struggles of getting by had, in some sense, led me to begin to forget about Chandrakant. And then one day I went to the Auliya shrine, thinking about going back to the village, a place where everyone escapes to run off to the big city, and where the fearful jaws of hunger, joblessness, and penury await every man who returns — when I sat down, alone, and saw that my friend Naim Nizami was sitting next to me with a smile.
‘It’s been forever since I’ve seen you here,’ he said. ‘Your friend who came with you, Chandrakant, he was here two months ago and arranged a twelve-thousand-rupee feast. And we were thinking of you. The biriyani was delicious.’
‘Really?’ I asked. Could Gulshan Arora, his seventy-yearold boss from the Kwality Departmental Stores have died and left him with two hundred thousand rupees? But Naim Nizami said that it was because his prayer had been fulfilled: he had become a father, even at his age. All on account of the mercy of Hazart Nizzamuddin, mehboob-e ilahi — l’amoureux de la divinité.
What else could I do that day but head straight for Jahangirpuri and Chandrakant’s half flat? I arrived at dusk, sometime after five. Two planks of wood were bolted across the door, and a fat lock was fastened on the door chain. A board covered the ‘balcony.’ The woman who lived next door told me, ‘They’ve gone to Saharanpur and will be back by Saturday. The baby’s sick.’
I went again on Sunday, and this time found them. Worry lined Chandrakant’s face, but what I thought had happened hadn’t. Shobha was weeping. They told me that four months ago, Shobha had given birth to a baby boy in the nearby Kalpana Health Centre. The doctor was quite surprised that this middle aged woman, nearly an old woman, and who hadn’t given birth in many years, could give birth to a baby whose vitals were perfectly normal. Shobha only needed a little stitching up. The baby was a fat eight-and-a-half pounds, and was rosy red. He was born on the fifth day of the tenth month. Chandrakant and Shobha’s joy knew no bounds, and they returned home from the hospital. Shobha, having lost seven children before, was apprehensive. This time they wouldn’t even let the most minor suspicion go unchecked, but the doctor told them every time they brought him in that the baby was healthier than health itself. There wasn’t the slightest cause for alarm. Still, mother and child went in for the free checkup every week for two months. This time they wanted to take every precaution possible.
Some ten weeks passed like this. Chandrakant donated twelve thousand at Auliya’s shrine for meals for the destitute. Shobha made a deal with Balaji of Tirupati: if the baby made it past twelve months without any problems, she would travel to Tirupati to perform the ceremonial head-shaving ceremony for the boy when he turned one, and would give the shorn hair to Balaji as an offering.
But one night Shobha heard the baby crying out as if in mysterious pain. Every breath he took was accompanied by a strange whistling-wheezing sound.
When she looked at the boy’s face, she was amazed: she felt the baby was hiding his pain. He wasn’t crying in the least, but silently fighting the pain on his own. Little furrows appeared on his forehead as if he were giving all he had in order to breathe each troubled breath.