The Walls of Delhi (12 page)

And one other thing that he knew full well was that Bisnath from Bichiya Tola, son of Nagendranath, who'd assumed the guise of Mohandas Vishwakarma, son of Kabadas, and who was pulling in ten thousand a month as a depot supervisor at the Oriental Coal Mines, was in no way, shape, or form Mohandas. No, he was a soulless bastard, a dyed-in-the-wool caste fascist, and a fraud who wielded so much power that Mohandas, compared to him, was nothing more than a sick, whimpering little mouse.

Mohandas knew that his father – the real Kabadas – had died of TB, after coughing up bloody phlegm while making bamboo baskets, mats, and winnows; but he didn't have the capability to prove this, since Bisnath's father Nagendranath was still living as Kabadas in Lenin Nagar and Bichiya Tola – and he was the one who had the papers to prove it.

Mohandas's silence grew every day. The dam on the Kathina had taken away one of his livelihoods, so he began working at Imran's Star Computer Centre as a typist, and making printouts and copies. His son Devdas began working at the roadside Durga Auto Repairing Works, helping repair flat tires and fix whatever car problems he could with a screwdriver and wrench. He made one or two hundred rupees a month, enough to cover his
school costs. It'd been two years since Sharda had quit working as a nanny for Bisnath's kids and doing their household chores; Renukadevi had gone to Lenin Nagar to live with her husband. A year ago, Sharda got work in town at the Aishwarya Beauty Parlor. Shikha Madam was crazy about Sharda and helped her out with school. She said, ‘Sharda, one day you'll become a model and then Miss World and you'll be on TV!' Sharda, who was eight, dreamed every night that this would come true.

Kasturi kept an eye on people's crops in addition to working in the fields of neighbours and villagers. Putlibai's knees had turned to stone after Kabadas's death, and she could no longer walk. In order to relieve herself, she had to crawl on all fours out back, and then come back to her corner where she sat on her burlap-like mat. Her blindness had grown even more severe.

It was in the Star Computer Centre that Mohandas met Harshvarddhan Soni. He'd come there to have some photocopies made for his legal practice, and to have some letters typed. By then, Mohandas was a fast typist and made few mistakes. He told his whole story to Harshvarddhan right then and there.

Toward the latter part of the twentieth century, I'd spent a couple of decades as an active member of a particular ideological political party; Harshvarddhan Soni had been in the same party. His life had also been full of the same struggles and sorrows, victories and defeats. The son of a woman who was a middle school teacher, Harshvarddhan was, from the beginning, independent-minded and quite perceptive. His older brother, Srivarddhan Soni, had come in first in his BA class for engineering; despite the degree, however and after the joblessness got worse and worse, one night, five years ago, he'd tied a rope to the ceiling fan and hanged himself. The tragedy of his brother's suicide
made such a deep impact on Harshvarddhan, son of a shopkeeper and middle school teacher, that even during his studies he began participating in the student wings of political organisations. He married outside of his caste, and was punished for doing so by being expelled from it.

Harshvarddhan Soni then earned an LLB and made his living working alongside his party in the local court on legal matters. When Mohandas told him the story that day at the Star Computer Centre – it wasn't really a story, but a real account of a living life – he decided to take his case and seek redress in court.

‘How much money do you have at the moment?' Harshvarddhan asked, looking at Mohandas's patched-up shirt and washed out jeans. ‘I'll take your case, and you will receive justice.'

Mohandas's eyes lit up, and his frail body began trembling. For an instant he didn't believe that it was possible someone would aid him like this.

‘Right now I have eighty rupees,' he answered. ‘In a few days I'm supposed to get forty more. And Imran pays me a couple of hundred in wages.'

Harshvarddhan calculated that Mohandas at most could be counted on for five hundred a month, while it took in the vicinity of five thousand in court fees just to have the case heard. The economic policies of one government after the next transformed India's big cities into little Americas, while putting people who lived in the same country into the poorhouse, but in tiny villages and undeveloped places, and creating countless Ethiopias, Ghanas, and Rwandas. A professor who toed the ideological line of a connected political party made around
fifty thousand a month in Delhi-Lucknow, Mumbai-Bhopal, Kolkata-Patna, and a no-name freelancer could expect five hundred to a thousand rupees for a two page piece; but the hardworking, industrious Mohandas, from the wrong side of the tracks from a forgotten village, and those like him, took a whole month to scrape together four hundred.

Harshvarddhan realised that he himself would have to find the funds if Mohandas were to have his day in court. He put in a thousand of his own money, asked friends for another two thousand, and got the rest from the charity fund of the Lions Club – in other words, he was able to get the cash.

Slowly but surely, one way or another, judge (first class) Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh, who preferred his bidis to smoking cigarettes, who was thin as a stick, whose bony cheeks jutted out, whose brow was scored with countless wrinkles, agreed to hear the case of Mohandas in his court of law.

Mohandas, s/o Kabadas, caste Vishwakarma, r/o Purbanra, district Anuppur, M.P. versus Vishwanath, s/o Nagendranath, caste Brahmin, r/o Bichiya Tola, currently r/o A/11 Lenin Nagar, Oriental Coal Mines, district Durg, Chhattisgarh.

The moment the court went into session, S.K. Singh, the chief executive of the Oriental Coal Mines, along with welfare officer A.K. Srivastav, along with other senior executives, were summoned before the court to testify and explain how and why it was that the man who had been working for five years as deputy depot supervisor known as Mohandas Vishwakarma was, in fact, Vishwanath (s/o Nagendranath, r/o Bichiya Tola).

Judge Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh ordered the district magistrates of Anuppur and Durg to launch an official enquiry
into the matter and instructed them to report their findings to the court within two weeks' time.

The court order and summons by bidi-smoking judge G.M. Muktibodh created chaos in the Oriental Coal Mines. The local newspapers ran the headline:

Anil Yadav and Khalid Rashid – local reporters for NDTV and Aajtak national news channels – sent clips of the story to Delhi and Bhopal, but it didn't fit into the ‘National Scene' or ‘Indian Panorama' segments, and didn't even made the ‘Regional News' because the story didn't include any big politicians or bigwigs from the big cities of Delhi-Bhopal-Lucknow.

(This is a story from the time when Vidhu Vinod Chopra's ‘Munna Bhai MBBS' was making a killing at the box office. George Bush and Tony Blair had both been re-elected and were returned to power, and Saddam Hussein, his beard giving him the look of a crazed fakir, face covered with wrinkles, was writing poetry in an American prison, and former Indian Prime Minister V.P. Singh, who instituted the recommendations of the controversial Mandal Commission that set aside job and school slots for the lower-castes, was diagnosed with cancer, his kidneys were failing, he was on dialysis – just like J.P. had been – and was quietly painting oil canvases in a corner of Delhi.

It was the time when the district collector from Patna, Bihar – Gautam Goswami – whose photo was on the cover of
Time
as a hero when the big floods hit that year, later made off with tens of millions of rupees from the flood fund; and it was the time
when the new government constituted a new film censor board, and placed at its helm a nawab from a royal family, former captain of the Indian cricket team, but who was unable to delete a scene in a film where he was caught red-handed hunting the endangered black buck and other animals...

It was the time when for fifteen years running each and every vacant position connected with a Hindi language post was filled with a son, a son-in-law, a daughter, a father-in-law, an arse kisser, or a right-hand man of a search committee member, right out in the open, without shame, without any CBI inquiry or any questions asked in the Rajya Sabha or Lok Sabha.

It was a time when the Human Resources Minister had transformed the public sector into a machine for corruption that churned out thinkers, pedagogues, sociologists, novelists, historians, intellectuals, artists, teachers ... and the political battle to capture the minds and hearts of the youngsters was on, by endlessly re-writing and re-re-writing history texts and schoolbooks.

It was the time when India ranked seventh among the world's most corrupt countries, sixth among nuclear-armed nations, second in population, while in poverty Bangladesh was at the top.)

Both Harshvarddhan Soni and Mohandas were confident that the court of the judge G.M. Muktibodh would separate milk from water and sort out right from wrong. They were confident for two reasons. The first was based on the fact that the magistrate smoked bidis and drank strong chai from the streets, and there was no sign at all he was looking to have his palms greased. The man was not corrupt.

The second reason was that truth was in Mohandas's corner: he was the real Mohandas, BA.

‘These lies will come crashing down like a house of cards! Like the light of dawn, all will be revealed! Victory to Malihamai! Please let it be so, Kabirguru!' Kasturi's gloomy life was once again sprouting shoots of hope. Though Putlibai's blindness had grown even more severe since Kabadas's death, she still sat on an old mat in the corner, like an ancient hawk with clipped wings, her ear forever trained toward the inner rooms of the house.

And so one morning at the crack of dawn, while Mohandas was eating his breakfast of leftover rice and potatoes and getting ready for his appearance in court, the rapturous voice of Putlibai suddenly echoed throughout the house. She chirped like a merrymaking bird,

‘Little one! Devdas! Come quick and take a peek in the living room! I think the myna bird's made herself a new nest, what do you think? Come quick!'

Mohandas was trying to finish his food as fast as he could so that he could get to court early; people had warned him that the judge who puffed mightily on his bidis was a stickler for starting on time. Five minutes late and he'd bump the case being heard to the following day and start straightaway on the next.

As he wolfed down his breakfast of stale rice and potatoes that'd have to last him the whole day, his blind old, bird-like mother sang out in a rapturous voice:

The chief executive of the Oriental Coal Mines, S.K. Singh, was not present in court. His lawyer was there to plead
on his behalf. The company welfare officer A.K. Srivastav had brought his complete enquiry file with him, and gave it to the judge for his perusal, along with all supporting documents. Harshvarddhan Soni was deflated: of the three witnesses from Bichiya Tola he'd called to testify that the man who had been working at the Oriental Coal Mines for several years as a junior depot manager was their childhood friend Vishwanath, not Mohandas, two of them didn't show up, and the third, Dinesh Kumar Sahu turned into a hostile witness and testified in front of the packed courtroom that Vishwanath was the real Mohandas. Then he pointed his finger at Harshvarddhan Soni and Mohandas and claimed that the two of them had one month ago come to his house and told him that they'd give him five thousand rupees for telling the court what they told him to say.

Judge Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh set the next hearing for one month's time; Harshvarddhan and Mohandas were stunned.

They now pinned all their hopes on the report of the district magistrates. If Mohandas was going to get justice, it could only be when the truth came forward.

Harshvarddhan and Mohandas were speechless when, during the following court session, the reports of the district magistrates of Durg and Anuppur were presented. The investigations found that charges regarding the name and identity of Mohandas s/o Kabadas, deputy depot collector at the Oriental Coal Mines, were baseless. According to reliable testimony, circumstantial evidence, and after questioning several members of the grameen and panchayats, it was indisputably proven that Mohandas was Mohandas, and not Vishwanath.

Later they found out that Vishwanath had dropped ten thousand on the patwaris of the two districts, Durg and Anuppur,
plus some hard liquor and spicy chicken. None other than Vijay Tiwari had picked up Bisnath in his police vehicle and helped him deliver the bribes to the patwaris. In any case, that was the real meaning of an inquiry headed by the collector, aka district magistrate, aka zilla adhikari: in the fine tradition of the administrative services, the inquiry was pawned off onto the lowly patwari. Whenever a court ordered a collector to make an inquiry, the collector would take note of the order, then send it to his subordinate, the SDM. The SDM would entrust the task to the tehsildar, who would order the sub-tehsildar to take care of it. That's how it went, from the revenue inspector, aka IR, aka qanungo, until it finally landed in the lap of the patwari, who, finally, was the collector's eyes and ears.

Bisnath and Vijay Tiwari handed over the stack of hundreds to Kamal Kishore, patwari of Bichiya Tola and Purbanra, plus a bottle of Macdowell's No. 1 whisky, and butter chicken, and mutton seekh kabab – Kamal Kishore fell at the men's feet in gratitude.

‘Have I ever let you down before? All this cash – Jesus and Krishna! With all this money I'll turn a mouse into a moose, a club into a spade, a farm into a freeway!' the patwari said all dreamy, jumping for joy while stuffing the money into his bag. He downed a triple of the Macdowell's No. 1 in one shot, and just like that, right then and there, without moving an inch, the problem had been thoroughly investigated; the one-page white paper – a most official report – was readied, and the inquiry conducted by the district collector into the matter of Mohandas versus Vishwanath was completed in under fifteen minutes.