No God in Sight (11 page)

‘Just a few hours ago, in a brave encounter, the Mumbai Police shot down X alleged militants holed up in Sanjay Gandhi Park. Assistant Commissioner of Police Balbir Pasha claims…’

‘Enough,’ Punita croaked. She was sick of this, all of this: driving around this shitty city for hours from riots to
accidents, from one political briefing to another, one murder to the next, scampering around for news, breaking her head over link-up failures and studio screwups and asshole news presenters like GK who thought they were stars.

The van had entered the park spread over hundreds of acres of prime suburban land. The driver stopped to ask several people, who looked like they lived in the park, the location of the police–terrorist encounter. No one had heard a shootout, or anything about it.

Eventually, two policemen riding past on a motorcycle directed the Breaking News team to the scene of the encounter. ‘See that forest?’ the officer on the pillion seat pointed to a profusion of trees in the distance. ‘Go in, drive toward your…your right, and you’ll come across a small pond. Drive around it, and right behind a hillock you’ll find… the, you know…’

Punita glanced at GK making last-ditch efforts to improve his appearance in the handheld mirror. The two would have about ten minutes to gather information on the encounter, jot down a script, and broadcast the breaking news for the nation’s indifferent viewing. She ordered Girish, the cameraman-cum-technician seated beside the driver, to activate the satellite linkup.

GK looked to his producer. ‘Fine?’

‘Gorgeous,’ Punita said without looking up from her laptop.

*

Fifteen. When GK learned how many terrorists Balbir Pasha’s unit had cornered and shot in the ambush, he smiled in spite of himself. Fifteen was a good number—not low enough to be ignored, not high enough to shock.

The Breaking News team, after walking past the barricade of police vans, arrived at the scene of the encounter.

Balbir Pasha was sitting on a stool, like a shikari, some yards from the corpses, all fifteen of which were laid out in a tight, neat row.

‘Finally!’ he cried out on seeing Girish, Punita, and GK. He stood up and began pacing about. ‘Come on, let’s do this quickly. We have to take the bodies to the morgue.’

A gang of policemen converged behind Pasha, all of them staring goggle-eyed at the Breaking News team. ‘These are the heroes of the day!’ Balbir Pasha pointed to the policemen. ‘My fearless team. Are we going live?’

‘Uh… ya…’ GK managed to answer. He, Punita, and the cameraman were transfixed by the row of bodies.

‘We were tipped off by an anonymous caller this morning. I gathered my unit and we combed the entire park for two hours before we came upon this clearing where this bunch was sitting in a circle planning their attack on the prime minister. You know he’s in the city for a week. My unit surrounded these jehadis from all sides. We wanted to capture them but they reached for their guns so we fired and
finished the whole lot. It’s a proud day for the Mumbai police force and a proud day for the country.’

Punita visualized the angle. Long shot? Overhead? Something zany or something still? She glanced at the bodies. Fly-infested. Mud-spattered. They were all dressed in shirts and trousers. Some had beards, some didn’t. There were no pools of blood drooling from the carcasses. No remnants of gore. For men who had been shot just a few hours ago, these fifteen looked rather comfortable in their deadness.

Balbir Pasha pointed to an open trunk strewn with stick-like sten guns. ‘AK-somethings,’ he said. ‘Our experts are still trying to figure out the make.’

And then Balbir Pasha went and stood by the head of the first corpse. ‘We have their names,’ he announced, referring to a clipboard. ‘This first one is Sohail Tambawala.’

And then he walked past each corpse and read out its name: ‘Farid Khan, Rizwan Mohammad, Altaf Hussein Sheikh, Salim Itmadi, Irfan Shah, Rizwan Khambati, Munna Ismail…’

Punita’s cell phone rang, interrupting Pasha’s morbid name-calling.

‘Really? Shut up! No
way!
This is
great!’

Punita clicked her cell phone shut.

‘We have to go.’ She tapped Girish on his shoulder. ‘Come on, we have to get to Santacruz.’

‘What? But…’ Balbir Pasha stuttered.

‘What but, but! Prime minister slapped chief minister! We have to be there!’

The Breaking News trio returned to the van, slammed the doors shut and begged the driver to get them to Santacruz as fast as possible.

The sight of the Breaking News van escaping at top speed stunned the Assistant Commissioner of Police.

Balbir Pasha imagined what it would be like if all nineteen news channels refused to report this police–terrorist encounter. There would be no media clamor for exclusive interviews, no public approval or disapproval, and no commission reports or judicial inquiries to divert himself with.

Like the director of a failed stage show, he would be left alone in this stinking park with his cast of twenty brain-dead officers and their gruesome props of fifteen rotting corpses.

The vision so terrified Balbir Pasha that he crumpled and fell to the ground, weeping like a motherfucking newborn.

The sight of the Breaking News van escaping at top speed stunned the Assistant Commissioner of Police.

With expletives ricocheting inside his skull, Balbir Pasha dialed the first news channel that came to mind.

Studio staff at MCBC News were rather amused by the Assistant Commissioner of Police’s desperate call for coverage. All field personnel had converged at Santacruz; would a rookie news team do?

‘Send them! Send them!’

The MCBC News van arrived at the park.

In a matter of minutes the country’s TV-owning population—the only one that really mattered—was regaled with a badly scripted, eighty-second report on Balbir Pasha’s heroics as well as his unit’s stealth and precision. The names of the fifteen dead jehadis were ticker-taped.

As planned, the slap-happy prime minister incorporated the police–terrorist encounter into his rally speech.

Troublesome activists raised uncomfortable questions in comfortable living rooms.

Poll analysts predicted a second run for the ruling party.

Balbir Pasha was upgraded, like a desktop computer, to Joint Commissioner.

And in the same city, for the first time in their lives, several ordinary men grew conscious of their name, for they shared it with a dead terrorist—Sohail Tambawala.

The death of a namesake is startling, like fate urging one to take note of a life, and death, that could have been one’s own. And while one is incapable of empathy for anybody, leave alone anti-nationals, one finds oneself, in spite of oneself, reciting Surah Fatiyah for what could have been the soul of oneself.

Tamby is what they call me at Light of Asia restaurant. I am a waiter there. There, the TV is on loud all day, placed on a stand facing the counter for the boss’s exclusive viewing.

‘Fifteen terrorists killed in an encounter…’ the lady on TV announced one evening. When my name was broadcast, I was carrying a glass of tea to a man at table 3. ‘… Salim Itmadi, Sohail Tambawala, Altaf…’ My gait staggered, my hand lurched and some tea spilled on the customer’s little finger.

That night, with a face sore from being slapped, I stole
Dainik Saptah
from a newsstand. After the eleven other Tambys I share a room with had gone to sleep, I crept out to the stairs, spread the newspaper on the grimy floor, and searched. I found my name on page 2. Sohail Tambawala. He was dead as I am barely alive. A half-living terrorist waiter runaway small-town boy with stars in his eyes and bullets in his stomach. He, I, me, we—we were in the papers.
You’re famous,
I whispered, striking a karate-chop pose on the rat-infested landing.

Cosmopolitan hell demands that I reserve my cool, dress in my best, and attend the club party with my wife Zabia, where, as I am networking with three other businessmen as wealthy and disaffected as I am, Mrs. D. will swish by, offer her cheeks to our eager lips and coo, ‘Sohail-bhai, did you read, that terrorist…?’ ‘Yes,’ I will say. And she will say, ‘Must be so embarrassing, to share a name with a terrorist!’ And the air-conditioning will turn warm and my linen shirt will feel like wool and I will want, most of all, to stuff my goblet down Mrs. D.’s gullet. ‘Hey, hey, no bombs in here, okay!’ Mr. N. will say, and he will exploit the bonhomie to touch Mrs. D.’s desirable waist. ‘I am not embarrassed,’ I will say, pulling Mrs. D. against my body. ‘I am happy. I think all those low-class butchers and bhais and stinking bearded bastards must be shot dead for giving the community a bad name.’ Mrs. D. will stroke, unseen, the back of my neck. ‘Waawaaaah!’ Mr. T. will lampoon the azaan and we will all laugh, a tad too loudly, till we choke on our whiskeys.

Lying on this hospital bed, with my smoker’s lungs festering with cancer and a wife and family and reunited in-laws holding me back with their love—
you’re too young to go,
Avantika says;
but one is never old enough to suffer like this,
I say—I read the papers and watch the news and wonder, will I be next? In the grand sweepstakes of death, will all Sohail Tambawalas be unlucky?

Today it is a terrorist. Tomorrow it will be some enemy country’s dictator. In the future, when a ‘Sohail-dada’ makes headlines, where will I hide my barrister face?

I want to become a lawyer, you see. I intend to apply to the Government Law College when the forms are distributed two months from now. My Business Communication professor says I am very good at presenting arguments. I said, ‘Sir, aren’t we all presenting arguments? Isn’t every man a side of a debate?’ Mr. Solanki said not many people see things that way. You will do good, he said.

Not with a name like ‘Sohail Tambawala.’ With a name like mine I can only
hope
to do good. Who would have imagined a man’s name to be his biggest enemy? Fed up, that’s what I am. I want to do more in life than stand up for ‘Sohail Tambawala’ and the cultural maelstrom it implies.

‘Sohail Tambawala’ must go.

Tomorrow morning, on my way to the library, I will stop
by at the Government Press office on Marine Drive. I will submit my Change of Name form, pay the necessary fees, and initiate the process of undoing history.

But change it to what? What will my new name be? I don’t know yet. I am afraid of involving my parents or brothers in the decision.
Your roots aren’t good enough for you,
they will say.
Go ahead, piss all over your ancestry! Get drunk, eat pork!

For fuck’s sake, it’s just a name.

Isn’t it?

I am in the bedroom, at my desk, practicing future signatures in my notebook.

Rahul Vora.

Palash Roy.

Brij Desai.

I realize such things are rarely done—and rightly so—for they alter something fundamental, something untouchable. Already I can feel the shifting, like the preamble to an earthquake. I will not be Sohail Tambawala. Someday soon I will not be called Sohail Tambawala. How much more will I have to change? My laughter, too? And my taste in books and food, and pet fantasies of women with insanely large breasts? The pen slips; my palms have grown sweaty. This will be too much! Too disruptive! And apt, too, for the ethos I belong to, where there is no limit to the violence one may wreak upon oneself or on others—the chest beating at Moharram, the
rigid observation of prayer time, the slicing of goatnecks by five-year-olds, the slicing of day-old penises.

You can’t hear it; I can—the five o’clock azaan blaring from the mosque two buildings away; the grating of a tile-cutter from the shop across the street; and, till last Monday, deepening this daily cacophony were goats, eighteen of them, tethered to trees on the street, now dead and eaten and shat out by the collective arses of a people who have made life so much more difficult than it need be.

Jiten Mehra.

Yes, I think my new name will be
Jiten Mehra. Advocate Jiten Mehra. Jiten Mehra (LLB).
I bring out the Change of Name form from my backpack. I have even acquired the form. I couldn’t believe a thin porous sheet is all it takes to switch sides, to alter one’s destiny. For the better? I would hope so. I am so excited I want to go to the Government Press right now and sentence ‘Sohail Tambawala’ to death. How many people know such delight! Or such anguish! To obliterate oneself. To birth a new self. Jiten Mehra will travel around the country freely; he will check into obscure hotels and not lie that he is Jayesh or Nimesh. One day, when he has become rich, he will move out of Yasin Baag to a cosmopolitan area. He will not see eyebrows rising (at police stations) or lips pursing (at railway counters) at the mention of his name. And when the electricity fails, Jiten Mehra will not wonder whether it’s because of who he is or where he lives.

I practice my new signature.
Ji
merging into
ten
rising up to
Meh
breaking free with
ra
, a line back, a line forward. Astounding!

I’m ignoring much, I know. My address will still remain 32 Isaq Chambers. My father’s name will still remain Barkatali. ‘Sohail Tambawala’ will always find ways to resurrect himself. How unfair to have to reduce one’s existence to a political statement! Could I do it any other way? Probably. A wrong name here isn’t as lethal as a wrong skin tone elsewhere. Or isn’t it?

I place my head on the desk. What am I doing? At least some things in life must remain inviolate. I am a coward. I am being wise. I must stand by my roots. Must I sacrifice myself for my roots? And if ‘Jiten Mehra’ becomes a liability, will I obliterate him too?

I just want to be successful. I am too young to be ashamed of my ambitions. In the court, I want only my talent to matter—not my name, not the hair on my face—just my ability to wrench justice from a system grown lethargic and rusty. There are two joys I foresee for myself: the winning of cases and the acquisition of comforts. And if ‘Ngyn Mbuthe’ would get me what I want, that’s who I would become, that’s how bad I want what I want.