The Temple-goers (9 page)

We had never had this conversation, but Aakash winked at me to play along. It turned out this was one of Sanyogita’s favourite subjects and the two launched into a happy repartee about my sartorial missteps.

‘I tell him keep them for the house then,’ Aakash said, ‘where bhabi can see them. Please don’t wear them to the gym, where they conceal my hard work.’

‘I hate those T-shirts,’ Sanyogita said disloyally.

‘But bhabi, you have to confess, he is looking better, no?’

‘So much better, unrecognizably better. All this is gone,’ Sanyogita added, pinching my sides.

Aakash noted the physical tenderness between us, and for an instant I saw a cold, unreadable expression on his face. When Sanyogita looked up he was smiling again.

Sanyogita was not a beer drinker and after the first glass she stopped. Aakash looked at me urgently.

‘Bhabi’s stopped,’ he said, ‘but that doesn’t mean you will too, no? You’ll drink with me tonight, won’t you?’

Sanyogita laughed at his filmy language. Aakash glanced at her, then turned back to me, and as if making light of his own intensity, said, ‘But what does it matter! Tomorrow you’re going to see my village. No friend of mine from Delhi has ever come with me to my village. It makes you like my brother. You don’t understand. We’ll have so much fun – people will come from all over. Truck-loads of people will come, women with their dupattas down to here.’ He held his hand to just below his chest. I looked over at Sanyogita, something I found myself doing less and less, and saw that her face had become small. Aakash’s passion for the outing seemed designed to exclude her. But then, turning to her, he said, ‘Bhabi, why don’t you come as well?’

A smile brightened on her face. She had felt Aakash’s subtle exclusion, then the excitement of unexpectedly being included. But his invitation – whether intended to do so or not – produced an ugly reaction in me. I didn’t want Sanyogita to come. Whatever world Aakash was taking me into, I wanted my responses to it to come up spontaneously. I didn’t want to have to think about how Sanyogita was responding. I said nothing at the time, but noticed Aakash watching me intently. Then his face cleared and he smiled. I thought he knew she wouldn’t come.

I hadn’t considered that Sanyogita, who knew me better than anyone else, would also have made something of my silence.

On the way back, a dirty orange sun slipped smoothly behind low sprawl and satellite dishes. A long straight road took us out of the city of colonies. Its small houses and patches of garden appeared in flashes. It seemed without centre and featureless. The bland stretch of road was interrupted by snarls of new flyover with orange railings. They dwarfed the city below, exposing the meanness of its proportions.

Uttam was driving. I leaned forward and said to him, ‘We have to go very early to Haryana tomorrow. It’s not far. Be ready by six. We’ll go first to Aakash’s and then they’ll tell us where to go from there.’

He nodded and reconfirmed the time. From the corner of my eye, I was aware of Sanyogita listening carefully. Just before I sat back, she turned away.

A moment later, she said, her eyes dully focused on two boys with painted moustaches who, after doing cartwheels and bridges, had approached the car for money, ‘I didn’t know it was tomorrow. I can’t come anyway. I’m having lunch with Ra.’

When we drove down Amrita Shergill Marg, the trees in the darkness seemed to burn with a strange, cold fire. At first I thought it was the effect of the yellow street light. But looking closer, I saw that the texture of their canopies had changed. They were featherlight and ablaze. Sanyogita’s mood alchemized.

‘Baby, look. The laburnum’s out!’

8

Aakash’s house! I knew he left it at four thirty a.m. after eating some ‘brad butter’. Then from five till two thirty, he was in Junglee. From two thirty to eleven, he covered the city on his Hero Honda for his lucrative personal trainings. After eleven, he returned home, perhaps only to sleep. I knew he lived there with his father, mother, two brothers, sister-in-law and year-old nephew. I imagined him picking his way through the darkness so as not to wake anyone. It was where his steel tiffin wrapped in blue polythene came from. Most of all, it was where I imagined Aakash on Sundays, the day we didn’t meet, the day he had an old-fashioned regard for: of curtains drawn, of not waking till noon and of eating unhealthy amounts of greasy food. And though I knew the points of this routine exactly, I couldn’t imagine the kind of place he lived in or even what the streets looked like. And without an image of this other place, this counterpoint to Junglee, Aakash’s existence seemed fictitious, a figment of the Delhi sprawl.

It was a city with a fragmented geography: a baggy centre of bungalows and tree-lined avenues, the British city; a walled and decaying slum to the north, the last Muslim city of both Zafar the emperor and Zafar my teacher; a post-independence city of gated colonies, with low houses and little gardens, stretching out in all directions; and beyond, new unseen cities, sometimes past city lines. But the sprawl was being slowly sewn together by new roads, buses and metros; the road to Sectorpur was part of a network of new, elevated roads, shooting out from a central stem, connecting city with airport and the construction sites and coloured glass of Gurgaon. These slab-like roads, with their orange railings, leaning white lights and marked, numbered exits, a concept until recently unknown to the Indian road system, performed infrastructural stunts, now splitting, now swooping down on unsuspecting neighbourhoods. Sectorpur was such a neighbourhood, a place to which the good road had brought life in the form of a property boom. And signs of this life, dull and bright, appeared close to its periphery: grey metal sheets concealing a metro station under construction; red highway tollbooths with newspaper still covering the windows; a city of concrete towers, dotted with the bright figures of Rajasthani women labourers.

The road swung right for Sectorpur, overshooting the turning for Aakash’s house. It was necessary to get off the elevated section at a further exit, make a U-turn past families sleeping and cooking under the flyover and drive back at ground level. In this short drive, the city beneath the highway returned with force in the form of cattle, fenced-in plots of overgrown land and roadside fruit sellers behind bright walls of produce. ‘Make a left just after the fruit sellers,’ Aakash had said.

The road took on the distinct aspect of an army neighbourhood. High walls on both sides with rusty iron spikes held back pink bougainvillea; girls in navy-blue and white salwar kameez waited for the bus to the Air Force School; and blue and white signs with the colours of the Indian flag in concentric circles like a dartboard, read: ‘16 Base Repair Depot’ and ‘Photography Prohibited’. Where the high walls retreated, there were keekar trees with thorn-filled canopies and gnarled black branches. They reached out into the road like a sinister, vegetal extension of the dawn mist.

The thin, bumpy road ended abruptly at a sky-blue metal gate. Uttam turned the car right and drove into a colony of three- and four-storey government flats.

I had seen these blocks of flats, with their little balconies and drainpipes on the outside, all over Delhi. In a country which couldn’t even standardize nuts and bolts, they were a rare achievement. Their squalor lay in their homogeneity and was not the Indian squalor, which was various and surprising. Small signs of that sunniness competed with the Sovietized scene. Coloured lights hung over the cemented verandas, a faded film poster could be seen through the iron bars of a window, and in the little patches of garden grew the Hindu sacred plants: banana, tulsi, a red hibiscus, its petals resting limply on the rusted points of a barbed-wire fence.

I stood outside for some moments, taking in the place. I noticed the yellow and black sign of a self-service convenience store, the clutter of motorbikes outside each little block of flats, the clothes drying on nylon ropes. I noticed these things because I thought this perhaps was where Aakash bought his ‘brad butter’, that one of these several bikes was possibly his and that on one of those nylon ropes I might see his fashionable clothes. It was this awareness of particularity, of feeling invested in Aakash, that broke the colony’s drab uniformity.

I had thought I was alone, but Aakash’s sudden appearance on the landing made me wonder whether he might have observed my arrival. Since we were visiting temples, I wore Indian clothes, an off-white kurta and a white pajama. Aakash now appeared in faded jeans and a striped beige and white knit T-shirt. My embarrassment was not easily explained. All I knew was that Aakash wore the Western clothes because he could. It was like so much else about him.

‘Hi, man,’ he said, reaching in to give me a hug. ‘Looking fit.’ Then, laughing and switching to Hindi, he added, ‘Yaar, my house is very scattered. Please don’t take it badly. I’m ashamed that you’re seeing it like this.’

But I realized as we climbed the cement steps that the embarrassment would be all mine and none his. Aakash didn’t know embarrassment; it was an aspect of his confidence. My embarrassment, which he would draw out, did not offend him as much as it aroused his curiosity. It was as if he wanted to know every detail of how his world would look once he’d left it behind.

The room we entered past a wire-mesh door and then a full metal door had powdery pink walls. Immediately in front of us was a large cloth hanging of Radha and Krishna and a blue sequined cow against a black background. The room was small and full of people. I couldn’t take it in at once. There were some men, a large woman in a bright yellow and orange sari, someone held a baby. As soon as I entered, everyone quickly greeted me and dispersed. They did it with such alacrity that I had the feeling this was a standard courtesy extended to anyone who brought guests to the little flat.

These men were also in trousers and shirts, and seeing them, I began feeling unprotected in the loose, light clothes I wore. Once the room emptied, only Aakash and his father, a man with a youthful face and heavily dyed hair, white at the roots, remained. I looked for Aakash’s face in his, but it lacked the fineness of his features, and though lighter in tone, was a flatter colour. For some moments no one spoke.

‘Will you have tea and biscuits?’ Mr Sharma asked.

‘Sir, you’ll have to ask my trainer,’ I said, trying a joke. ‘I never eat or drink anything without his permission.’

Aakash’s father smiled proudly. Aakash swelled with laughter, which, at once self-deprecating and vain, filled the room.

The noise drew out a large toddler from behind a curtain, separating the sitting room from the rest of the flat. He came charging in, breaching the unspoken barrier between guest and family, and threw himself into Aakash’s arms. His mother, the daughter-in-law, ran in after him, holding a bottle of milk. She was short and quite wide, with dark skin and silvery red lipstick. The gold jewellery she wore on her wrists, neck, nose and ears stood out against the colour of her skin. Dark blue flowers grew over her pale blue and white chiffon sari. Greeting me with an embarrassed smile, she tried to retrieve the child, who had already crawled on to his uncle’s shoulders. Aakash reached behind him, and exactly as though performing a two-arm dumb-bell extension, lifted the child from his shoulders and swung him in front of the Krishna–Radha hanging. He pointed at the blue cow; the toddler’s face shone with delight. It extended an unsteady finger in the direction of the animal and said, ‘Tawoo’. Aakash guffawed, and turning to me, whispered, ‘Cow,’ the English word more magical to him than to the boy.

His mother reached again for him. Aakash ignored her, swinging the child back into his lap. Without looking up, he took the bottle from his sister-in-law’s hand. She looked to me and said, ‘He’s very attached to his uncle.’ Mr Sharma who was silent until now said, ‘Yes, watch this.’ He called to the child, who craned its neck to see him, then hit Aakash on the shoulder. An expression of fury came over the child’s face. He did it again and the child jumped up, then held by Aakash, advanced on his grandfather, gnashing two tough little teeth and swinging his arms and legs. When Mr Sharma hit Aakash again, the child let out a piercing scream.

Aakash calmed him by rubbing the boy’s face against his. Then lowering him on to his back, he put the bottle in his mouth. His ease with the child and the sight of it drinking contentedly from Aakash’s heavy, dark arms riveted everyone in the room. Aakash, aware of the unsettling beauty of the scene, turned to me and said, ‘I’m a trainer, but I can do these things as well.’

I watched in silence. This brief, physical scene in the small room, with the hidden flat beyond, made me feel that certain boundaries were being preserved on my account. A tension built on their edges, while the thought of their loosening unnerved me.

The child’s mother, as if forever dismissed in this way, showed her guile as a daughter-in-law. She feigned a huff, making it seem that Aakash instead of showing her up before a guest was doing her a favour. ‘Then you feed him, nah?’ she said, and flounced off.

It was this child, who wore a neon-green T-shirt with a string of unconnected words on the back – ‘Yo, yo graffiti’ and ‘Come out, let’s play’ – whose long curls, I discovered, were to be offered up that morning at a village temple.

Until now, my heightened awareness and inward concentration had made it difficult for me to take in the situation around me. But now I wondered what the delay was. Why were we sitting here in the first place? Some preparation seemed to be under way in the flat, but I couldn’t tell what.

Aakash yelled at the curtain, ‘Ma, come on, hurry up. We should leave quickly. Papa, please tell them to hurry.’

Mr Sharma nodded, rose and disappeared behind the curtain. I wanted to see the rest of the flat, but was somehow unable to ask to be shown it.

When we were alone, I said, ‘Aakash, can I use the bathroom?’

A look of dismay ran over his face. He seemed caught between his host’s willingness to satisfy any request of mine and an opposing desire to keep me in the visiting room. He said, ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ and then, as if submitting to the inevitable, added, ‘I may as well show you the rest of the house.’

He flicked aside the curtain. I was faced suddenly with a short, dim length of corridor. It ended so abruptly that it was almost as if there was no flat behind the curtain. On my left, there was a tiny strip of kitchen crowded with three busy women in bright clothes. It had a purple fridge and a gas stove. A faint light came in from a frosted-glass transom over an exhaust fan caked in grime. A few steps further, there was a darkened bedroom with a single red bulb and a low bed.

‘This is one room,’ Aakash said. ‘We’ve given it to my brother and his wife.’

The door of the other room was also open. A tube light with a black underbelly glowed brightly. Every inch of the room was covered in mattresses. It answered my questions: three in one room, four in the other.

Maybe feeling we’d come too quickly to the end of the flat, Aakash pushed open a further door to reveal a small terrace. It was cluttered with the skeletal remains of an old cooler and stacks of bedding, perhaps for when relations came to stay. Beyond a spiked wall, there was a large field of parched, uncultivated land, where a village of blue plastic tents had sprung up. The haze was burning away, the sky blanching fast.

We withdrew into the passage. Aakash pulled aside another curtain, revealing a sink and a cemented area with a tap, a plastic bucket and a metal door.

He opened the door for me. I stepped inside and slid the cold iron bolt into place. Only then, in the damp, dark confines of this cement strongroom, did the full force of my reaction break violently over me. I wished with all my heart that Aakash didn’t have to live here. It was too ugly to think of someone with his charisma and ambition, and yes, physical beauty too, spending those treasured Sundays on a mattress on the floor. Was this where he crept in late at night to find a space among the sleeping bodies?

These thoughts had prevented me from focusing on the stained ceramic basin and the squalid circle of water I stood over. I wondered if, while holding my breath, I’d kept my eyes closed as well. I knew now that I stood at the source of the smell that pervaded – and always would, no matter what incense was lit or food cooked – the air in the flat. And just before I pulled the flush, a detail impressed itself on me. On a narrow cement windowsill below the paint-splattered glass, there was a thick accumulation of a hard yellow and red substance. Its colour and appearance made me curious enough to touch it. It was smooth and layered. When I dug my nail into it, a little flake came off easily. Wax! The remains of candles, red and yellow candles that had burned to their base. Their blackened wicks were embedded in the pat of wax. No sooner had I realized what the coloured substance was than a looming feature of life in the flat occurred to me: blackouts. It was to long hot nights dotted with red and yellow candles, burning into the morning, that Aakash returned.

I opened the door and found him waiting. He turned the tap in the little sink for me with one hand and held a towel in the other.

In the room outside, the family was ready to go. Five bags of food, offerings and water had been brought out. There were three women, Aakash’s mother, aunt and sister-in-law; and three men, his two brothers, one younger, one older, and his father. And there was the toddler, whose hair was to be offered up, sitting heavily in his father’s arms. I waited for the room to empty. Besides the religious hanging, there was a painting of a Chinese scene, fluorescent green palms, pagodas and bridges on a black felt background. The only other decoration on the pink powdery walls was a narrow framed picture of a red rose, which for all its shabby sentimentality, was somehow affecting.