Suri, three years and a few months old, sat for hours watching the TV, leaning against the wall, his massive, heavy head supported by his feeble shoulders, remote in hand. Shobha also liked watching some of the soap operas and channels that played Hindi film music. She finished her work and plopped down and was taken off guard in the beginning when Suri turned on the TV with the remote to exactly the channel she wanted to watch. The grey matter inside his malformed, diseased, ill-proportioned head was developed far beyond that of a typical three-year-old. He was able to read his mother’s mind: all her wishes, all her thoughts. Like a spy he would look into the minds of those before him, and immediately know all their thoughts. Is this really the symptom of a disease, and one that the doctors say is incurable and puts Suri’s life in danger?
Or is it something else entirely?
Chandrakant called me again one day. He told me that the night before he and Shobha had awoken with a start and found Suri wasn’t in bed with them. He was in the corner against the wall watching TV at a very low volume — so low that it hadn’t disturbed their sleep. It must have been after one in the morning. Chandrakant said what was unusual was that he wasn’t watching cartoons or music videos, but had the news on. And that night, the reports of the nuclear tests at Pokhran were just coming in. He sat transfixed, his heavy, odd head sitting atop his little, weak body, as motionless as a statue of iron or stone. His twinkling red eyes were glued to the TV.
Chandrakant said that he felt fearful, and all sorts of notions about Suri popped up in his head. He was much older than his biological age. He was an oddity, this impossibly strange child. He knew things and kept thinking about things that we couldn’t even guess. He couldn’t be distracted like other kids with birds, toys, candy, kitty cats.
A few more months passed without my seeing Chandrakant or getting a call from him. I was getting tangled up with my own problems and stresses during that time. But then, out of the blue, he called at around three in the afternoon. His voice trembled with excitement.
Shobha had given birth to another baby boy. Normal, nothing out of the ordinary, healthy. Even though she was fifty Shobha didn’t have any trouble in labor. The delivery was without incident. Chandrakant couldn’t believe it when he was sitting outside in the waiting room and the nurse told him the news and asked for baksheesh. Maybe Auliya or Balaji had heard their prayers.
He then choked up a little bit. ‘We decided a name right away. Amar — Amarkant. The invincible. Shobha is out of her mind with joy. Suri hasn’t left his side for a second. You absolutely have to come and see the baby. Shobha’s dying to see you. The day after Amar was born Gulshan Arora gave me fifty thousand to set aside for buying our own place, and I’ve talked to a bank about getting two hundred thousand as a loan. Maybe by next month we’ll be able to move to the Janta Flats in Ashok Vihar.
I was stunned by this miracle of nature. By now Shobha was pushing fifty. Kids? At her age? Chandrakant kept talking over the phone. ‘We won’t be able to relax until you’ve come. Shobha insists and insists. Remember the first time we met and I was singing those abhang songs? Vithal had sent you, and everything changed once you came into our lives. Suryakant was also born after we met. I must have done terrible things in my last life that he’s paying the price to free me from. Shobha says that if you don’t come, Amarkant won’t turn out right, either. So get here as soon as you can!’
Those were my toughest days, as tough as writers’ lives often are. Days filled with panic, a feeling that everything was slipping away; nothing was stable, only stress after stress. I had no work at all, nothing saved for the future, no pension. Delhi was changing at an unbelievable pace. Every day new products would appear everywhere that no one could have ever dreamed of. The twentieth century had passed, and the new one was before us. And the dawns of the new one were unlike the dawns before. Only recently one of the greatest Hindi writers died in the Sharda mental hospital, mad and broke. A poet disappeared from home without a trace, and another had taken his own life. There was no place left for writers like me who wrote in this Hindi language. It was now an age of riches, power, violence, criminality, and looting, and it wasn’t any less frightening than the worst nightmare you could imagine. Labour had no more value, and capital was no longer tied to labour — it was now totally free, untethered. My life was reduced to the struggle of how to get by. People like Chandrakant and me were more-or-less given a swift kick in the pants by society, who had no use for them under current circumstances.
No matter how bad things were, they could be worse. The shacks and makeshift houses of hundreds of thousands of people living in Delhi were very quietly, very secretively being set ablaze, their whole life reduced to ash. Or bulldozers were sent to destroy the houses, running them over until nothing was left but rubble. The people who lived there, poor and without work, were chased away. All ‘revolutionary organisations’ or cultural institutions were packed with developers, real estate agents, gentrifiers, high-ranking police officers, professors, intellectuals, commission men, all of whom banded together as one to starve to death anyone who dared describe what was going on.
I had been without a real job for fifteen years. I had degrees, important awards, job experience, good qualifications, but no matter what I applied for, I got turned down. The person they hired would be less educated, less experienced, but with good connections, ones in high places. A corrupt force had been spawned, and people like me could get nowhere near it.
I was down, very down, and sinking into despair.
I think another week must have gone until I was able to see them in Jahangirpuri. The road to get to house number E-3/1, bylane number seven, had changed. New buildings were under construction. Everything around was being torn down. Chandrakant told me that lots of people from the area were being evicted and sent to Bhilswa. They heard that a water theme park was going to be built in Jahangirpuri where all the rich kids in Delhi could enjoy their vacations swimming, splashing, snacking, horsing around, having a good time. He told me that he had put down one hundred thousand and taken out a loan for another two hundred for a third-floor public housing flat under construction in phase four of Ashok Vihar. It was a block of four-story apartment buildings for low-income residents. Chandrakant held the utmost gratitude towards his boss, Gulshan Arora, without whom this wouldn’t have been possible. I thought to myself that Arora had probably also given him the money because it would be nearly impossible to find as honest and reliable a worker as Chandrakant. If he were forced to leave the half flat and move to another part of Delhi altogether, it would be impossible for him to continue working at Arora’s shop.
My eyes lit on Suri. He had given me a big smile upon my arrival, sitting next to his newborn brother Amarkant, his heavy head wobbling up and down, planting little kisses on his brother and waving a torn rag in the air to chase off the flies. Shobha did not light the little coal stove: she made my tea on her new electric hot plate, my favourite kind of chai, steeped for a long time and very strong, with cardamom and ginger. And with so much sugar a diabetic wouldn’t get near it with a ten foot pole. EXPLODING COLOURS IN THE DARK AND THE MAGIC OF THE CARPET
It was only because I came to visit that Chandrakant had taken the day off. It was getting close to five, and it wouldn’t be long before night covered everything. The shadows of tall buildings slowly engulfed the little houses and bylanes of Jahangirpuri. The dark shadows from outside fell no less heavily on Chandrakant’s family and me. I wanted to return home as soon as possible, but there was no way Chandrakant or Shobha were going to let me leave. It had been a long time — many years — since they spent days like these. It was the first time they were able to buy a place, their own home; at the ripe age of fifty, Shobha’s giving birth to Amarkant, and, proving wrong the all-but-certain prognosis, was like the impossible made possible, as was the continuous, still-in-progress life of their firstborn, Suryakant.