The Walls of Delhi (11 page)

That night for the first time in years Mohandas went over to his childhood mate Biran Baiga's house; they got some stiff mahua brew and made a pork curry. Gopaldas also came. The group of four or five began drinking at seven. They'd also got hold of a dholak and a pair of manjira. That day Mohandas had got paid by the Seth from Vindhyachal Handicrafts for the bamboo ware he'd made: twelve hundred rupees. Gopaldas also had a bulging wallet. Biran Baiga was hosting, but the money for the liquor and meat had come from Mohandas. The stuff that Biran's wife and sister brewed was so strong, it'd burst into flames if you rubbed it against the wall.

In the soulful music, Mohandas and his friends forgot
about their sorrows for a little while. Bihari played the dholak, Parmode the manjira. Mohandas, buzzed and feeling good, sang:

It was two in the morning by the time the women served dinner. Everyone was ravenous. Biran's sister had used mustard oil to prepare the pork with spices, garlic, onions; the smell filled the entire courtyard. Everyone helped themselves to a roti and dug in. There was also a big pot of rice. Mohandas, however, was silent. It was as if the singing had stuck a little needle in him; he felt a stitch in his chest that he tried to suppress and forget about by drinking more than the rest.

With a handful of food he was about to scoop into his mouth, Mohandas stopped, looked over everyone, and then looked at them once more; a sob then emerged, followed by uncontrollable weeping. Gopaldas, Biran, Bihari and Paramodi were so hungry and it'd been so long since they'd had such a good meal that they were a little bit offended at Mohandas's outburst. Taking bite after bite of food, they asked while chewing,
What's the matter? Why don't you eat first?

Mohandas wiped away his tears and asked Biran Baiga, ‘Who are you? What's your name?'

‘Biran. Biran Baiga,' Biran said with a laugh.

‘And your father? What's his name?' Mohandas continued.

‘My father's name is Dind-wa Baiga,' he responded, still laughing. ‘And you're drunk on the ma-hoo-wa.'

Everyone thought that was funny. Mohandas's eyes were bloodshot. He plonked his fingerful of food down on the tin thali and raised his voice:

‘Biran, Parmodi – tell me if you can, who am I? And don't just feed me lines or treat me like an idiot. I want all of you to swear on Malihamai!'

‘You are Mohandas, your father is Kaba, and your mother is Putli,' Biran said firmly, poking Mohandas in the chest with the finger he'd been eating with. The group began laughing. Mohandas didn't respond but regarded Biran for a moment before staring down the rest of the group. He wanted to put a stop to his fears about whether these people were who they said they were, or some other people. Then the feeling crept in that they were to a man quite real people who'd been, like him, cheated out of something and, they too, had had the rug pulled out from under them. The only difference was that he'd found out the secret, whereas the rest of them were still in the dark.

Mohandas wanted to instruct his childhood friends to go to government offices, go to skyscrapers and mansions and coal mines and factories in the cities, and to Lenin Nagar, Gandhi Nagar, Ambedkar Nagar, Shastri Nagar, and other residential colonies like them and ask around to see if some imposter has deprived them of their rights and is living there saying that they
are them, their father is his father, and they're from where he is from. But even though he was buzzed he felt that if he told them this they'd just say he was drunk.

His four friends were busy eating. Biran's wife Sitiya and his sister Ramoli joined them. The two had also been drinking the mahua, and it was all frolic and fun with them, laughing and joking and eating. Mohandas, however, had by then separated from the group, and sat in the corner alone where he'd taken the bottle with him, letting out little sobs between singing verses of Kabir and taking swigs from the bottle.

It was four in the morning when his mates slung Mohandas over their shoulders and took him home. It was the first time Kasturi had seen her husband in this kind of shape. She began castigating Gopaldas and Biran until Gopaldas handed her a thousand rupees and said sorrowfully, ‘I kept saying you've had enough, you've had enough, but he wouldn't listen. Take this, it's the money that fell out of his pocket.' That quieted her.

It was seven in the morning when Kabadas started with a fierce coughing fit, as if a tornado were stuck in his throat. It showed no sign of abating. Blind Putlibai ran around crazed, like a cow broken loose from its tether. Her cries echoed through the neighbourhood; Kasturi awoke, and tried to shake Mohandas awake. But he was still drunk with mahua and showed no signs of consciousness. She poured a bucket of water over him, causing him to open his eyes. They were as red as if soaked in blood. He was still intoxicated. She screamed, ‘Get up! Go run get a doctor! His cough is deathly!'

Men, women, and children from the village began coming over. Devdas and Sharda stood panicked beside their grandfather's bed. It was as if his insides had exploded; each cough
came with spit full of blood and flesh. Lines of ants began forming on the ground; horseflies began swarming.

Everyone tried to shake the drunken sleep out of Mohandas. It was no easy task, but he finally began steadying himself with his hands and lifting himself up; everything looked terrifying through those bloodshot eyes. He didn't recognise a soul, and he couldn't focus. Then suddenly a big grin came over his face. He struggled with all his might to look directly at the man he recognised, Ramai Kaku. Mohandas's voice came out like gravel: ‘Kaku, who am I, what's my name, Kaku, tell me, tell me!' Mohandas then collapsed on the spot into a lifeless heap.

The wails and cries of the village women rose, and Putlibai's were the loudest. Soon it was a kind of harmony of women's lament.

Kabadas died. The flies covered the bamboo and cutter under his cot. He'd been up half the night shucking bamboo and it was only yesterday they'd received an order from Vindhyachal Handicrafts to make thirty baskets and fifty winnows.

That morning around seven thirty the cat had pounced on and gobbled up the pair of myna birds out in the open of Kasturi's room. Mama myna was carrying two eggs in her belly; crushed feathers and drops of blood still littered the earthen floor of the room; the day before Kasturi had covered it with cow dung.

Mohandas, who had been left passed out in the courtyard, wasn't conscious enough to be aware of how his father's funeral rites were conducted; he wasn't there to witness how village and caste elders took Kaba's body to the cremation ground, how Mohandas's mother Putlibai kept rapping her forehead on his cot and how she cried while she cleaned his blood and
spit from the mattress, basket, and water jug; how little Devdas took the place of his father and lit his grandfather's cremation pyre, and how his childhood friend Biran Baiga performed the kapal-kriya, the ceremonial breaking of the skull. Mohandas knew nothing of this. The low-caste gosain priest shook Kasturi down for five hundred rupees, and the forest guard took another five hundred for himself; the wood he used from Patera for Kaba's pyre wasn't even dry. All the money Gopaldas had given Kasturi was gone.

Mohandas snored with vigour. He opened his eyes a couple of times, looked around as if he had been brought someplace he didn't recognise, then went back to sleep. Maybe it was the deep sleep, or maybe the mahua had been adulterated with lentina or besharm leaves, or maybe it was the pork curry that'd been bad. But if any of these had been the case, Biran, Parmodi, Bihari, Kitiya, and Ramoli would've have come down with something. But they'd all been fine, and what was more, as soon as Kaba died, they all busied themselves arranging for wood, going to Khanda village to tell the gosain what had happened, and making sure all the funerary arrangements were made properly. Mohandas's drunkedness wasn't an ordinary one.

‘The mahua's flooded his brain. Mix jeera and ajwain with yogurt and spoon it in his mouth!' Biran Baiga advised.

Kasturi mixed the jeera and ajwain in a little cup and brought it over to Mohandas; Gopaldas took Mohandas's head in his lap. Mohandas's eyes and mouth opened, and he regarded the two as if he had no idea who they were. In a weak and barely audible voice he asked Kasturi, ‘Who are you, sister? And who am I, tell me!' He then smiled at Kasturi and began humming:

This was too much for Kasturi, and she began to break down. Sharda also began to cry at her father's condition. Gopaldas patted Kasturi on the shoulder, took the little cup from her hand and told Mohandas, ‘Here, take your medicine.'

Mohandas looked at him sheepishly, as if he himself were a little child, drew the cup to his mouth, and drank it in one gulp. Maybe somewhere in his mind stirred the wish to get better. Kasturi and Gopaldas were relieved; maybe it would make a difference – otherwise, they'd have to call the doctor.

Mohandas fell back asleep.

Mohandas slept in the same spot in the same corner of his house for five days and four nights nonstop. The word had spread in the village that he'd completely lost his mind and he didn't recognise a soul anymore, not even his wife and kids. Some had it that the mahua he'd drunk had been diluted with urea, while others insisted that his summer-heat-induced faint at the Oriental Coal Mines that day had erased his memory. Vijay Tiwari spread a rumour that his spotted dog had bitten Mohandas by accident,
and now you'll see, as sure as the sun will shine, Mohandas will start barking like a doggie.
Everyone had his own rumour. It was tough for Devdas and Sharda; they went to school and were asked by the teacher and kids,
Is your papa a loony toon? Does he even know who you are anymore? Is it true he only sleeps and sleeps – and if so, how does he bathe and pee and poo?

A rumour even spread that one night Mohandas got up in the middle of the night, grabbed his father's machete, and ran
around trying to slash and kill everyone in the house. Kasturi tackled him and blind old Putlibai tied him up with a rope, otherwise god knows what might have happened!

(All of this was happening at exactly the same time as when the ‘India Shines' campaign was in full force, and the finance minister and World Bank promised that as long as the five point eight per cent rate of economic growth that started in 1990 continued for the same number of years, India would become the United States, given the fact that the US became the US in fifty years with half that rate of growth.

...it was the time when I was diagnosed with bone tuberculosis, two of my lumbar discs in a state of advanced degeneration. I was confined to bed for nine months and the smiling heads of the Buddhas carved from the Bamiyan mountains in Kandahar were being destroyed by rocket fired missiles...

...it was the time when four years' worth of the sweat of destitute workers, nineteen thousand tons of steel, and four hundred and fifty seven thousand cubic metres of earth were moved during the construction of Asia's biggest, and the world's most expensive and modern, metro rail system ... At the time when the houses and homes and fields and yards of more than fifty million adivasis and dalits and aboriginals were submerged under water for the construction of thirty five hundred dams ... At the time when twenty million people living in India didn't have drinking water ... and seven hundred million didn't have a place to wash, bathe, piss, or shit.

...it was the time when the parties in the Left coalition raised hell in the streets of Delhi to protest against a rise in gas prices, when some ninety percent – nine hundred and twenty million Indians – never bought a drop of gas in their lives...

...it was the time when the police fired on and killed a dozen starving farmers in Ganganagar and Tonk in Rajasthan because they'd thrown rocks demanding water to irrigate their withering crops...

...it was the time when Abdul Karim Telgi ran a counterfeit postage stamp operation worth billions of rupees, with several high-ranking politicians and officials working in cahoots. It was the time when an elderly critic of Hindi letters proclaimed that a bureaucrat-turned-writer was the new Muktibodh, and a second old corrupt critic insisted that some paper pusher was Premchand and Phanishvarnath Renu reincarnate and rolled into one. It was the time when the atom bomb blew up at Pokhran and the Goodwill Bus was running between India and Pakistan after the Kargil war.

And it was the time when the waters of the Kathina river were exacting revenge in Purbanra for the paper mill and the rotting wood at the dam by inundating the land where Mohandas had planted his cucumbers and watermelon and honeydew...

The land where Mohandas, crying ‘hu tu tu!' had played with Kasturi in the strong current of the Kathina, the memory of their hot passion under the glow of the starry night was the birth, nine months later, of Sharda...)

The truth was that Mohandas wasn't crazy, and nothing was wrong with his memory. The blow to his psyche had silently festered during the week of unbroken sleep, stupor, and drunkenness. When he awoke, he was again the same Mohandas: a person who knew full well that he and only he was the real Mohandas, son of Kaba, resident of Purbanra, district Anuppur, Madhya Pradesh, who had, some ten years ago, earned a BA from
M.G. Degree College, and was second in his class. He was the Mohandas who'd been denied a job because he had no connections, no pull, and no money to use for bribes. He wasn't a member of any gang or group or mafia because he didn't belong to a caste that had any power. He knew full well that he and countless others like him had been cheated and lied to and tricked for many, many years, but he had no means to do anything about it.