Half a Rupee: Stories (10 page)

But I did not pay heed to his words. I patched up something to tell the aunt and left the house on my own. The house was not far away from Dal Lake. Walking by its shore, I soon found myself in front of the Oberoi Palace. The gates were pulled shut, and barbed wire fenced its boundary as far as I could see. I pulled through the barbed-wire fence and entered the complex. A few roosting birds fluttered their wings, cooed something to each other. A few flapped their way up the trees and perched on the branches. They were very alert. I slowly made my way towards the palace.

From the roof of the main building hung huge sheets of tarpaulin that reached the ground. The hotel was closed to the public. Part of the complex had been taken over by army troops, who had started their army kitchen. The veranda was overridden by mildew. A stench invaded my nostrils; I covered my nose with a handkerchief. The annexe was shut. The lawns were covered with rubble and rubbish. And the two chinars stood with their heads bowed, hands tied—like slaves. There was a pronounced
droop in their shoulders. They looked old. I began to feel suffocated.

I returned to Bua with my breath stifled; she fixed me a bed in the mezzanine.

I got up early in the morning with the chirping of children. It was the first time that I had heard a happy sound since my arrival. I got up and threw the window open. It looked onto a graveyard where children were playing hide-and-seek. Amongst old chipped tombstones were numerous fresh graves—the mud on some still seemed moist. Perhaps this was the safest place for the children to play. When I came down Bua was nowhere to be seen. But she had laid out a bucket of water for my bath. A cake of soap and a fresh towel were kept at one side. I was not used to bathing with cold water—but then this wasn’t a hotel. I cupped the ice-cold water in my hands and slowly began to rinse myself. I tried to get my body acclimatized to the chilly water slowly; it was pretty cold. Then I began to wash myself. After I had poured a few mugs of water over my body, I got used to it. I only felt cold when I stopped pouring the water over my body. As I kept bathing, slowly, all the pain, all the complaints got washed away.

Bua had a young son, Aziz Ali. He was learning computers, till the police came and hauled him away from the shop. It was rumoured that he had met up with some Pakistani—it was the Pakistani who had given him away. Nine years had passed and still there was no news of him. Whenever someone was killed in a police encounter, Bua would go and have a look—sometimes at police stations,
sometimes at the morgue. Whichever jail she could get the address of, she would go looking there for her son. She had been to all the jails in Kashmir. Her hand still hovered over the fame of hope; she kept burning; she refused to believe the worst. Her tears had all dried up but she still kept crying. I told her, ‘Bua, maybe he’s gone over to Pakistan, or maybe he’s in Tihar Jail.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘In Delhi.’

Her face turned ashen. But I could not bring myself to tell her that maybe he was not alive any more, maybe he was dead.

One day, much before daybreak, the police cordoned off the entire area. Military trucks parked on all four sides. Searchlights were sprung atop two trucks. A megaphone boomed. People were ordered to get out of their houses and assemble in the graveyard. The military was to search all the houses. People hurried out of their houses within minutes, as if they had rehearsed for this event a number of times. The sun came out and climbed halfway across the sky. Hungry and thirsty, people stayed put in the graveyard for hours without protest, without any complaints. The search of their houses continued.

At midday, I gathered some courage and spoke to the army colonel in English. He permitted me to take Bua home. She had become feeble with hunger and thirst. When I returned to the graveyard after leaving Bua at her home, there was suspicion in the eyes of the people: a sort of hatred and a kind of strangeness. I went and sat in a corner of the graveyard, a little unsure of myself.

Just before nightfall the military police pulled the curtain down on its own drama. People began to return to their houses. When I returned to Bua’s house, I found the door locked and my suitcase and belongings kept at the door. I dragged my suitcase after me and came to the main road and sat down against the wall around the lake’s shore. I had lost all hope when a stranger stopped and accosted me, ‘Where do you want to go, memsaab?’

I tried to affect a smile.

‘I want to stay in a houseboat for a night.’

There are no guests any more in the houseboats, memsaab. There are no houseboats any more. But there’s a man … he lives on one … it’s his home.’

‘Where?’

He pointed into the distance.

There … that’s Wazira’s houseboat.’

‘Whose?’ I sprung up on my feet.

‘Wazir Ali is his name. He’s an old man.’

‘Will you take me there? I will request him, plead with him; maybe he will let me stay … for just one night.’

A little taken aback by my request, he half-heartedly picked up my suitcase. ‘Come then … but he does not accept guests … actually, nobody comes any more.’ He kept talking as he walked. ‘Forget the guests, memsaab, even the birds from Roos … and from where not … they used to come … now even they no longer come over to the lake.’

I did not know why but I was sure that this Wazir Ali must be the same man: the one who had stolen me when I
was an infant, rather who I wished had stolen me. But as it turned out, this Wazir Ali was someone else. Even then he agreed to let me stay in his houseboat for the night. He even spread out a bed for me—on the floor. There weren’t any engraved, chiselled walnut beds.

The next day I returned to the airport. Three times, at three different places, they opened all my luggage and rifled through my belongings. They poked through my bras and panties. A pain shot up through my chest, again. Everywhere there were two queues, two separate enclosures, for body searches. The way these women felt me up, it seemed they were lesbians, all of them. In the third enclosure they made me take off even my shoes and socks and felt me up all over again. And then they paused in their search and asked me, ‘What’s that?’

I had to say, ‘A sanitary pad. I am chumming.’

It was then that I heard a voice rise from the adjoining enclosure. A little choked but familiar.

‘Who’s in there?’ I asked, and nearly pushed my way into the enclosure. Right in front of me stood Bua. A ticket to Delhi flapped in her hand. The drawstrings of her salwar were untied and they had fallen around her ankles; she had pulled her shirt up and was screaming in a string-thin voice, ‘This is the only place left to search … have a look … take a proper look!’

She clamped up when she saw me.

‘What kind of a country have I come to? Is this really my country?’

And then she flopped down on her salwar gathered at her ankles, all life draining out of her.

Khalil’s scream began to ring into my ears. ‘What do you people want, enh? What do you want from us? Why don’t you just let us be, leave us on our own? Now even our green has turned red … the grass growing on our earth has become red … enh …’

For Humra Quraishi

There was neither a name nor an address, just a simple note—scrawled in a running hand—in a simple envelope. Had Guru not picked up the doormat on opening the door, the envelope would have stayed unnoticed. He was afraid of the doormat being stolen. So he would pick the mat up from inside the door and drop it on the other side of the threshold when he came back to the room. Whoever had pushed the envelope under the door was not aware of this and the letter had slipped underneath the doormat.

Scrawled on the piece of paper were the words:

Yang Sui has come from Vietnam. Wants to meet up with you. We will be at Shyamal’s place. Do come and bring your newly written poems.

Poems? Try as hard as he could, Gorakh Pandey could not fathom any meaning out of this. Poems? What
poems? He wasn’t a poet. Nor did he know of any poets in the hostel. Who was this letter for? He scanned it again, inspected the envelope: there were no giveaway greetings, no tell-tale salutations; no, not even a name on the envelope. He folded the letter and slipped it into the pocket of his trackpants. He groped under the bed for his sneakers, slipped them on and left for his run. That’s what he did every morning—walked out of the hostel, cut through the college maidan, crossed the highway and ran two laps of the park on the other side and then back to the hostel. It was a matter of habit with him. And this kept Guru—a name his friends had fondly taken to calling him after the nickname of his namesake, the infamous Naxalite Gorakh Pandey—ft as a fiddle.

A couple of days later, the same thing happened again. Guru came back from his run and began to clean his room. He picked up the doormat to dust it and found another letter. It was just like the earlier one: a simple note in a simple envelope. This time too, the letter betrayed neither a name nor an address, not even a date. There was a salutation though, perhaps a lingering whiff of a relationship:

Dada, we missed you a lot. Yang Sui is off to Calcutta today and she is flying out from Calcutta itself. The other day she kept waiting for you. Her train will leave this evening. Come by 4.30, if you can. We will wait for you outside the station.

–
P

The handwriting looked feminine at first sight. But then
he glanced over the initial again—the P was too bold, too firm to be either a Pushpa or a Preeti. Looked more like a P some man called Parthiv would sign off with. And it was then that he remembered the first letter he had forgotten in the pocket of his track pants. The track pants were now in the laundry. He pulled open the drawer of his writing table and dropped the letter into it.

For the next few moments the letter occupied his thoughts. He thought about it while sipping his tea, dwelt on it while devouring his breakfast. A small little explanation found an expression: somebody’s having an affair … a romance maybe … with a girl from Vietnam … and he did not go to meet her … either the two lovers had had a spat or perhaps he was no longer interested in her and was simply bluffing. He kept nurturing the thought, embellishing it a little here, pruning it a little there, and by the time he reached the college for his classes, the small little explanation had sprung itself into a full-fledged story.

No more letters arrived after that. Every few days, whenever Guru would remember he would pick the doormat up and look underneath it. It became a sort of a habit. No, not exactly a habit—a curiosity perhaps. Or maybe the search for an answer—who was that letter for? But the answer always eluded him. And he finally gave up on it. There were far too many things happening in the city. The Naxalite movement was picking up speed. There would be some incident of violence every day—a bomb going off somewhere, an explosion ripping out the innards of the city someplace else. The attendance of students
began to thin. Now, even the professors were absenting themselves from the classes. Most of Guru’s time would now be spent either in the library or the canteen.

Something was afoot in the canteen, brewing in the hushed silence of his friends. Guru let it be. But when their conspiratorial silence began to cause him discomfort, he asked a friend. The friend took him outside the canteen into the college maidan, leaned into his ears and said, ‘A meeting’s scheduled to take place in the city. In Rajpur … perhaps …’

‘What kind of a meeting?’

‘Cultural … but who knows,’ a surreptitious shrug of the shoulder, ‘it may turn a different shade … maybe political.’ He cast a furtive glance around and spoke again into Guru’s ears, ‘It is believed that Guru is coming for the meeting.’

‘Who?’

‘Your namesake, Gorakh Pandey!’

The other Gorakh Pandey was from Bihar as well, but during the Naxalite movement he had become really popular in Bengal. There was something about him, something about the way he wrote that could whip up a frenzy amongst the youth of his generation. The moment Gorakh Pandey wrote a new poem a current would ripple through the city, and boys and girls alike would regroup themselves and right under the nose of the vigilant police, would paste copies of his poems on every available surface. The youth would read his fiery poems in anti-establishment newspapers, off posters on trams and buses, and work themselves up into a hysteria.
And yet, nobody knew what Gorakh Pandey looked like. Nobody had seen him. The police would forever be on a lookout for him and would publish his photographs in newspapers at regular intervals, but never ever would two photographs be the same, and of the same man. Because the police was on a lookout, Gorakh would forever keep changing his guise. Some believed that none of the published photographs were his.

The Naxalbari movement was now spilling over the Bengal border into Bihar. Our Guru was an undergraduate student. He had nothing to do with any political movement, he had no affiliations whatsoever. No, not even by a far stretch. But being a student of literature he did peruse a few of his namesake’s poems and if truth be told, he did find a suppressed anger pulsate through his spine.

Not so long ago, a friend of his had said while they were sitting in the canteen, ‘Guru, you have to listen to him once … his words will put your soul on fire.’

‘Have you?’

‘God … if I was fortunate enough to have heard him do you think I would have been sitting here in front of you? His words would have set me afire, burnt me to cinders; my ashes would have been here in my place … on that plate …’

Guru left for the tryst with the infamous, incendiary Gorakh Pandey with that very friend. Nothing was ascertained though: Where would the meeting take place? How would it take place? Who all would be there? Nothing was certain. Not as yet.

They were only halfway to the venue when the traffic began to be diverted. And when they reached Badal Chowk it seemed as if the entire city had come to a standstill. Station Road was blockaded, off limits. A bomb had exploded at A.N. Chowk and the jeep of the police commissioner had been blown away. Fortunately the police commissioner had survived—a close shave. Guru and his friend got off the bus and walked back all the way to the hostel. It took them a few hours.

That night Guru was about to roll off to sleep when his eyes came to rest on the doormat. He shot out of bed and picked the mat off the floor. A letter! Yes there was a letter. Similar to the ones that he had found earlier: a simple note in a simple envelope. But this one was scrawled in a hurry:

You will find S behind St Agnes’ Church. The car will be ready to take you straight to Kohima. There’s not a moment to waste. Hurry!

–
P

Guru kept looking at the letter, spinning off numerous threads to the story in his head. He entangled himself inextricably, and fell asleep, exhausted. In the wee hours of the morning, a hullaballoo woke him up. The police had cordoned the hostel off and everybody was being roused from their sleep and lined up outside. Every single room was being searched.

Suddenly a constable came running, ‘Sir, we have found him, sir … he has swallowed cyanide.’

He looked to be twenty-six, certainly not more than twenty-seven. There was a well-trimmed beard on his face, it looked freshly groomed. Rimless glasses were still perched atop the bridge of his nose.

‘In which room did you find him?’ somebody asked.

‘Room number fifty-one.’

That was the room next to Guru’s.

‘But who is he?’ Guru asked.

‘Don’t you know him! The infamous Naxalite Gorakh Pandey!’

Guru stood rooted to the spot, stunned into silence.

‘There were rumours that he was hiding somewhere in our city …’

‘Gawd! Think of it … hiding in our very hostel and we had absolutely no idea!’

Guru’s hand was in the pocket of his trackpants, his fingers clutching at the remnants of that first letter which had now been laundered clean along with his trousers.

While the investigating police officer tried to prepare a first listing of the evidence and findings at the scene of the crime, he showed the hostel warden a letter that he had found on the body of the deceased. A simple note without the simple envelope. Written in Bangla were the words:

Ek baar biday de Ma, ghoorey aashi!

Bid me farewell now, O Mother, I promise I will be back …
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