The Temple-goers (7 page)

She took some colour from her pouch and streaked his face yellow. ‘Nice to meet you. Happy Holi.’

The intervention of two English-speaking guests broke the tension. Mateen and the model greeted and kissed Sanyogita. Ra had appeared among them. The head of security slipped off. Only Aakash stood where he was. He shuddered and came out of one of his trances, as if he’d just been planning my workout.

‘Ash-man!’

‘Yes, man,’ he replied, pinching my sides as he did in the gym. ‘Looking good, man.
Looking like me
, man.’

His confidence returned, but his face gleamed unnaturally.

We drove home through empty streets. Every now and then we encountered a car full of people like us, coloured, crowded, satiated. Only Aakash was in black clothes, with a single yellow streak. I had asked if we could give him a lift; Sanyogita pointed out that we ourselves were taking a lift with Ra; Ra happily agreed to have him dropped off.

‘Where do you live?’

‘Sectorpur,’ Aakash replied.

Ra’s face went blank. ‘I’m sure my driver knows where it is.’

The car was quiet. The avenues swung past us like the spokes of a wheel. A kind of evening static, hushed and colourless, settled over the city. The trees acquired a violet tint. Weak outdoor lights came on in Doric-columned verandas.

‘So quiet, no? Can’t believe it’s already over. I’ll sing a song.’

Mandira sang a film song about Holi. It was spirited but sounded like a dirge for coming at the wrong time of the day. We were dropped off first.

‘Ash-man.’

‘Yes, man,’ Aakash smiled, half-closing his eyes.

‘See you, tomorrow.’

They drove off.

Sanyogita bathed me that night. I sat on her fifties marble-chipped bathroom floor under a naked yellow bulb. She sat on a red plastic stool, using a bucket and mug. The colour ran in stages from my body, leaving areas of uncoloured flesh ringed blue and pink. The bucket bath, the dim bulb, the colour running from my body to vanish in a vortex over a stainless-steel drain cover – these things, coming now at the end of festival in a new and altered city, each conspired in dredging up the Holis of my childhood. And it felt as though Sanyogita had put together this ritual knowing the effect it would have.

6

A few days later, Aakash was restless throughout our workout. We were exercising my legs, ‘doing squats,’ he said, rhyming it with bats. The exercise made me nervous. I didn’t like the bar resting painfully on the back of my neck. I didn’t like unhooking it and suddenly feeling the weight on my legs and lowering myself from the hips. The muscles in my thighs trembled and swelled. They had to fight to bring me up again. Thinking of them failing was terrifying: the bar with its pink and orange plates pushing me into the ground. Aakash, like a syce with a reluctant horse, belted a broad back support around my waist. Then pressing two corners of a white hand towel against the centre of the bar, he whipped it into a tube-shaped cushion. When it rested on the back of my neck, he gripped me under the arms, his short-fingered hands softening the surprise of the weight.

He remained quiet and intense throughout. There was no screaming, ‘Come on, you’ll give me two more,’ no ‘Done done-a-done done.’ And when I was leaving the cold, incense-filled room, he said, almost threateningly, ‘What are you doing later?’

‘Nothing, I’m around,’ I replied, surprised at the urgency in his voice.

‘Good. I’m coming over. I’ll call you to get the address.’

I went back to my mother’s flat that afternoon. I was embarrassed to be meeting Aakash outside the gym. But the plan, coming so spontaneously and arousing my curiosity, felt part of the ease of Aakash’s manners, his endearing overfamiliarity; to resist, I felt, would be to hold on to an imported idea of propriety. On the drive home the streets were filled with the forerunners of the May flowering: the silk cotton’s coral corresponding to the gulmohar’s burnt orange; kachnar’s purple to the jarul’s wispy mauve; and the oleander’s yellow trumpet-shaped flowers, a deceptive but poor imitation of the laburnum. Just before South End Lane, a giant pilkhan towered over these slender flowering trees. Its dense canopy fanned black against the spring sky, now whitening with every degree of approaching heat.

I lied to Sanyogita about needing books in my mother’s library, ate lunch on a trolley alone and sat down to wait for Aakash. At about three thirty, his name flashed on my phone. A few minutes later he was at my door.

I had only ever seen him in uniforms. Now in his own clothes, his attention to style was apparent. He wore low, loose jeans and a striped grey and black T-shirt. Its long sleeves were pulled up to the elbow. A small black backpack hung from his shoulders and a hands-free wire sprawled over their great expanse. Like at the Holi party, he seemed bigger and darker outside Junglee.

He was in a lighter mood than he’d been in at the gym, but watchful. A look of delight entered his eyes as they scanned the flat.

‘You live here alone?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Man, what peacefulness! I have never, not even for a minute, been alone in the place where we live. Not once, not for a minute. Do you get scared sleeping here at night?’

‘No, I sleep at Sanyogita’s. Do you live with your family?’

‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘My father’s an auditor in the defence ministry and so we have a flat in the Air Force Colony in Sectorpur.’

‘Do you have any siblings?’

‘Two brothers,’ he replied, then seeming to read a question in my eyes, added, ‘We’re very close, but,’ and now in English, ‘they are very differ from me. My whole family are very differ from me.’

The kitchen door swung open and Shakti appeared with a glass of water on a tray. Once fresh from the village, the city and the job had turned him cynical. But though he’d never met Aakash before, his dull eyes brightened at seeing him. Aakash took the water and registered the interest in his face. Shakti watched him as he drank, the dull look returning to his eyes. Just as his gaze had drifted away, Aakash clamped Shakti’s vast stomach between two fingers. Like a huge toy, Shakti exploded in laughter and surprise. Aakash smiled, holding on to his stomach while wiping his lips, then said, ‘That wife of yours must treat you really well. What’s this stomach hanging out? Too much rice?’ Looking to me for approval, he added, ‘Give me two months with this guy and I’ll whip him into shape.’

‘Shakti, Aakash,’ I said, and for coming so late, the introduction made Aakash laugh out loud.

He was handing back the glass when his gaze landed on Shakti’s feet. His face filled with concern. ‘Why are you wearing those blue chappals?’ he asked. ‘They make you look bad, man, these cheap chappals.’

Shakti stared in amazement at his feet, as if the rubber chappals were the work of some conjuror. Bata’s blue and white chappals were like a symbol of domestic servitude in India. I must have seen them smooth and worn on Shakti’s feet all my life. But they never struck me as strange on him. I had not seen Shakti grow from being a slim man into a fat man. It had happened while I was away; and in a sense, no one was better placed than me to notice the change. But I had seen nothing. Aakash, without a trace of piety, looked as I couldn’t. He didn’t restore Shakti’s dignity; he flung it at him as if forced to defend something that wasn’t his. And Shakti was star-struck. He stood there, disturbed and intrigued, like an old woman who’s just been whistled at in the street.

In his morose way, he said, ‘Aakash bhai…’ (He never referred to me that way; he called me sir.) ‘How did you make such a good body?’

‘With a lot of effort,’ Aakash snapped, and sent him off to get him beer and sandwiches.

‘Beer?’ I asked.

‘Yes, man, feeling thirsty. You’ll have too, no?’

I looked at my watch, then outside. Afternoon sun poured into the flat.

‘No. Not yet.’

Aakash was offended. ‘Our first beer and you won’t join me?’

‘It’s a little early.’

He said, ‘I’m the kind of person who can wake up in the morning and brush my teeth with beer.’

A level of comfort entered his manner, as though, after surveying the flat, he had found it suitable and now wanted to settle down for a session. When Shakti returned with a cold Cobra and two glasses, I felt as if I were being drawn into an unfamiliar drinking culture: of hotel rooms, curtains drawn, a bottle on a plywood table with some nuts, an ashtray filling up quickly. Seeming to read my thoughts, Aakash asked if I had any cigarettes. I didn’t but knew that there were some in the house. Chamunda insisted a packet of Dunhills be kept for her in the bar. I brought these out. Aakash looked at them admiringly, then pulled one out and lit it with cupped hands. He inhaled, inflating one cheek, then with the cigarette at arm’s length, blew on to it, watching the end brighten through the smoke.

The Cobra was amber-coloured. Its pretty colour in the glass, catching the light in the room filling with smoke, made me want to have some. Aakash poured me one with great aplomb, exaggerating the tilt of the glass. I asked him how he’d come.

‘Motorbike,’ he said, letting out smoke from the corner of his mouth.

‘What kind?’

‘Hero Honda,’ he replied, now inhaling strenuously, making a pained face as if it were difficult to talk.

‘Nice.’

He smiled ironically, ‘What to do, saab? I’m not a rich man. But this I can say, the bike was bought with my own hard-earned money.’

I feared some conversation about privilege when he surprised me. In English, he said, ‘I’ve never sucking dick,’ and laughed.

‘What?’

‘Yes, man. You know Sunil, he’s the other trainer at the gym…’

‘The big beefy guy?’

‘No, no. Someone else; I think he comes after you leave. Anyway,
he
was called for a personal training to the house of a gay. They took him there blindfolded and brought him into the gay’s office. The gay puts sixty thousand down on the table and says, “Sucking.” Sunil ran out from there, but they had bodyguards and Alsatians and Dobermanns, and they say if you don’t sucking, we’ll let them out and they’ll make keema out of you.’

‘What did he do?’ I said, now more horrified at the recounting of this wild story in the middle of the afternoon than at its bizarre, filmy details.

‘He’s sucking, man,’ Aakash said matter of factly. ‘He’s sucking, sucking, for one hour, sucking…’ He screwed up his dark lips so that their pink interior was more visible than ever.

‘Aakash, come on, this is not true.’

‘It’s true, man,’ Aakash insisted. ‘It’s true.’

‘Did he take the money?’

‘Why not, after he’s sucking…’

‘Yeah, yeah, please.’

Aakash laughed. ‘He bought a Hero Honda.’

I was sure the story was a lie, but I couldn’t gauge his motive in telling it. Was he trying to suss me out, see how appalled I would be? I was surprised at his own indifference; the story seemed hardly to make a dent in his notions of morality, as if all vice, no matter what its nature, was a luxury item.

He drank the beer quickly and yelled for Shakti, who appeared with another one. Aakash was enjoying this mid-afternoon revelry in the little-used flat. He poured me another glass without my asking for it. I had been under the impression that Aakash worked from five a.m. till late at night. I wondered how he’d found this block of free time in the middle of the day; I also didn’t expect a trainer to have these habits. Most of all, I was surprised at how his earlier urgency had given way to such complete repose. I asked if drinking beer damaged his physique. After taking a large gulp, he put down his glass, stood up and walked to the middle of the room. Then he removed his grey and black striped T-shirt, and standing in a grey vest, flexed his chest and triceps. His skin now seemed lighter and his physique more proportionate. Where the muscles had been expanded near the chest and the arms, there were stretch marks, pale and hairless, like knife wounds. A fine layer of hair ran over his shoulders and back, culminating in a thick chasm between the pectorals. Red and black religious threads, entwined with a single silver chain, disappeared into the chest hair.

‘I know,’ he said, ‘that if you were a businessman, you would take no interest in me.’ He glazed his eyes and made a snooty face. ‘You’d think this guy lives in Sectorpur, he drives a Hero Honda, he’s not someone I can sit down with. But because you’re a writer, you look at me and you want to dig inside, to discover what there is in this guy. Aren’t I right?’

‘Perhaps,’ I replied, embarrassed.

‘Don’t worry. You don’t have to tell me, I know. And in my lifetime itself, I’ve seen a lot of change. I’ve upgraded myself. When I was seventeen, eighteen, we were a group of three best friends. Our shoes were torn, soles coming off, we walked in the street in the heat, we took buses, we sometimes ate nothing more than a few toffees in a whole day. I remember you got two for fifty paise. The vest I worked out in had holes in it.’

He put his index finger to his thumb, indicating holes the size of one-rupee coins.

‘I wanted to be a mechanical engineer,’ he continued, ‘I got the marks for it, but my father couldn’t pay the bribe for the admission. You know, it was some seventy, eighty thousand. He said, “I’ll borrow it from somewhere. You go, just go and get your degree.” But I told him no; I’m going into fitness. I started working in one gym in Panchsheel Park, earning fifteen thousand. And slowly by slowly,’ he said, ‘I started picking up personal trainings, people liked my work, they liked that I got results, and so when Junglee opened I was hired there. I started on thirty thousand and in a year I doubled my income with personal trainings. I bought a bike, started buying good clothes. I upgraded myself. Man, and I know now for sure that if I get this one golden opportunity, I’ll never look back. There’s something in me, I know it. When I was born, our astrologer looked at my eyes and said to my mother, there’s something in his eyes. He’ll either soar or he’ll destroy himself.’

It was strange to think of the eyes, which I had thought of only in terms of beauty, as signs of providence. His ambition had also blurred into an idea of religious duty and what I thought of as vanity seemed almost like a homage to the work of fate.

‘But, you know,’ he said, ‘you might look at me and think, this guy, he’s a trainer, his father’s an auditor and that’s all: they’re low-grade people. But that’s not all we are.’

He spoke in a mixture of Hindi and English. The speed with which he recounted his personal history was startling. It was ready on his lips. He carried it around like one of the dented and blackened silver amulets he wore round his neck. He changed lenses effortlessly. One moment he was himself, striving, feeling the heat of the day and the fear of failure, the next he imagined himself as me, considering his achievement, wondering if it was something I could write about. It was as if he wanted to show me his making, show me a measure of worth different from the one that had humiliated him at the Holi party a few days before.

When he said, ‘That’s not all we are,’ I had thought he was referring to some intrinsic human worth, but he meant something entirely different.

‘My great-grandfather was a famous priest in a village in Haryana,’ he began. ‘When he was very old, he was faced with a scandal. It led to him renouncing his life and drifting down a river. He disappeared and wasn’t heard of till years later, when someone saw him in Kanyakumari.’

Kanyakumari, once Cape Comorin, was on the southernmost tip of India. It was some three thousand kilometres away.

Hoping to ground the story, I asked, ‘What form did the scandal take?’

Aakash’s eyes shone. ‘There was an army officer’s wife. She used to regard my great-grandfather very highly. She would work for him in the temple, help him with the prayers, clean the idols. Even before serving her husband, she would serve my great-grandfather. And so people in the village began talking.

‘Then one day, her husband died. But despite this she went that morning to the temple. So you can imagine, the village went wild with talk. A crowd gathered outside the temple, chanting, “Abolish these corrupt priests.” My great-grandfather heard their cries and appeared outside. Though he was heartbroken, he didn’t say anything. He just told the woman to make sure that the following day her husband’s funeral procession should pass by the temple before it went to the cremation grounds. Then he went back into the temple. The crowd was enraged, but they agreed to wait until the next day before acting.