***
Chandrakant came back with fish pakoras, peanut snack mix, and a handful of other goodies. Suri was slurping on an icypole. He ambled over to me, hopped in my lap, and rested his heavy head on my shoulder; the same spot his mother had wet with her tears a few moments ago. The weight of his head sent a shiver through my body. The great pain he must suffer, and the endless torment!
I gently tickled his forehead for a little while, then gave him a kiss. Straining, he lifted his neck, smiled at me for a moment, then hopped off, grabbed the remote, and sat again in the corner, back propped against the wall.
Chandrakant filled our glasses and spread out the pakoras, peanuts, and onions in front of us on newspaper. Shobha joined us after turning off the stove.
It was the kind of night when the three of us understood that our lives were interwoven as one by fate and other forces beyond our control. The same road led to our liberation and our mortality.
Chandrakant alternately sang abhang songs and Khusrau songs.
I noticed Suri had changed the channel. He put on the BBC, and Bill Clinton was on. I think this was an evening in 1998 — could it have been during the impeachment proceedings? THE ‘MANGOSIL’ VIRUS AND AN ANT
That night of December, 1998, had receded into the past. Days were racing by, and the world outside was changing at the same fast pace. The streets of Delhi were getting widened. Little bylanes and narrow backways were vanishing. Who could keep track of all the flyovers being built? Hundreds of thousands of cars of all shapes, sizes, and models flooded the streets. Everywhere you went it was the same: four wheel drives, honking horns, exhaust fumes. And speed. It was impossible to walk anywhere, and cyclists and scooterists were getting run over every day. These fatal accidents didn’t even make the TV news, or get in the paper. Hundreds of villages like Jahangirpuri, Mangolpur, Loni, Nazafgarh, Harinagar, Ziyasrai, Bersarai, Karkarduma, Prahaladgarhi simply ceased to exist and were erased from the map. And where they once were? Malls, multiplex cinemas, hotels, markets, more stores, parks, banks, gated communities, gas stations. You couldn’t go a month without a neighbourhood changing so utterly that you wondered if you were remembering it right.
The residents of the makeshift house built in Jahangirpuri’s bylane number seven had disappeared, and no one knew where. Thousands of poor, lower-class families living in the neighbourhood had been displaced. The police, local authorities, powers-that-be — all were gung-ho to build buildings and make markets with their bulldozers, teargas, and politics. Modest houses and the less well-off were wiped out of neighbourhoods all over the capital city. Violence, crime, and power — sinister, inhuman — spread everywhere. The population of Delhi had crossed the twelve million mark. Of those, some ten million had neither a secure livelihood nor any savings for the future. The homes they lived in weren’t their own. A bank, either private or foreign, held the mortgage and deed. Countless people worked like indentured labourers just to be able to pay off loans or mortgages.
***
Chandrakant, Shobha and family moved to the public housing flat they bought at C-7/3, Ambedkar Nagar Colony, Phase Four, Ashok Vihar. I was enlisted to help move them from Jahangirpuri. They had amassed so much stuff over the years that it took four trips in a Tata 407 to move it all.
In the meantime, I had been diagnosed with bone tuberculosis, and several of my vertebrae had fused. I was confined to bed for ten months, and the treatment cost a small fortune. We had to sell the old house and move to a new one. During this time, I also wrote a book in a kind of frenzy, one that took each and every last moment of free time. The language I wrote in and read, spoke and thought had turned into a kind of torturous cage. I felt the fascist nails and menacing claws of in-your-face corruption, violent casteism, and stalking injustice everywhere in my life. I was turned down for every job I applied for. My degrees, experience, and body of work no longer had any meaning. All of the great ideas and ideals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had become tools to play with in the hands of power brokers, base hypocrites, arse kissers, high-class schemers. Those who killed, killed in the open. Thugs committed their thuggery in the public eye, with a spring in their step. Bribes and kickbacks were counted out continuously, in front of the camera or behind. Cultural institutions had been taken over by gangs of plunderers, who let themselves be feted on the dais, gave speeches, and laughed all the way to the bank. A dark, frightening cloud of reality had descended, one that no one had expected.
Reports of what was really happening were so obscene, so rotten, that bringing them into a poem or short story would simply ruin the poem or the short story. So most poets and writers avoided writing about what went on — but they kept on writing, and kept on winning awards.
So, please come with me, and we’ll desist for now with these accounts of what’s going on, and instead travel to Ambedkar Nagar public housing flat C-7/3, Ashok Vihar, where Shobha and her family now reside.
***
Amarkant was five by now, and had started attending Blue Bells school. Shobha had purchased a sewing machine. She sewed for friends and neighbours, and took home fabric from a few shops in the bazaar to stitch — the mortgage payment and school fees were due at the beginning of each month. Gulshan Arora died in the meantime, and his son Kishan had sold the shop in Vijaynagar. Chandrakant found work in another shop in Deep Market in Ashok Vihar. Every day he walked to and from work.
I had moved right outside Delhi with my family, to Ghaziabad. Chandrakant had my new address and number.
***
I had a premonition that at any moment Chandrakant might call me with news of Suri’s death. He was by now eight years old. Not only was he still alive, having improbably fought and confounded his date with death, but the mind inside his malformed, ill-proportioned, misshapen head was so remarkable and strangely curious that anyone who heard him talk was stunned, confounded, flabbergasted.
For example, one day he said to Shobha, ‘Ma, you’re spending your eyesight so you can make Amar’s school fees. If you would only sell your eyes, you could put him in a cheaper school.’
One night Shobha awoke to find Suri on the balcony wrapping twine around his head. His lips were shut tight, and his face was wrinkled up in pain. His lungs were making that whistling sound while he tried with all his might to breathe in the outside air. His eyes were red and bulging. When Shobha came to him and placed her hand on his back he said in his hoarse voice, ‘Doctors only know how to cure diseases that would cure themselves anyway, without any treatment.’ He struggled to take a breath, and then let out a deep sigh. ‘Hospitals are built for the same people that cars, hotels, airplanes, and big buildings are built for.’
One day he announced, ‘The disease inside of me is because of that dirty drainage ditch in front of our half flat.’ He looked off into the distance for a bit before adding gravely, ‘“Mangosil” is the name of the disease, and the virus that causes it is called, do you know? Poverty.’
One day when Amar was going to school, Suri said, ‘No matter how much kids study in school, they could learn more without school. People who send their kids to school are those who want to get rid of them.’ Again a vacant look came over his face for a bit and then he added, in the manner of a philosopher, ‘What is true is that those who are more well-educated inevitably work as underlings or servants for those less well-educated. School is a servant factory. The most powerful, richest, and best-off people in the world are always less well-educated.’