The Walls of Delhi (13 page)

To put it another way, this rust-eaten steel frame of bureaucracy that had been readied for power by the English over
subservient India had just transformed Bisnath, s/o Nagendranath, into Mohandas, s/o Kabadas.

Mohandas again broke down. He incanted the name of Kabir non-stop. He sat for hours in front of the little shrine to Malihamai. She only took the thickest, sweetest cream as an offering. And only from goat's milk at that. High casters didn't frequent her shrine. The thakurs, baniyas, babhnan, and lalas had their own gods and goddesses. Gosains, rather than brahmins, conducted her puja. It was said that brahmins who had shared food with dalits or adivasis, or who married them were called gosains in their own caste community.

Mohandas went to Khanra village and found Siu Narayan Gosain, and gave him twenty rupees and an uncooked mixture of dhal, rice, turmeric, and gur, with which he performed a puja to Malihamai; he also made an offering of a full half pound of fresh goat's milk cream to the goddess.

Something else happened in the meantime. One morning at dawn, Kasturi was out in the fields doing her morning toilet with a couple of other women from the village. There was some commotion behind the bushes, as if someone was hiding.

For her own safety, Kasturi had taken to tucking a little scythe into her the waist of her trousers; she knew all too well that even after giving birth to two kids she was still the loveliest woman of the village. As long as she could remember she'd been subjected to the vulture-like stares of the local Brahmin slimeballs.

Kasturi stood up from her squat and removed the scythe from the cloth at her midriff. Holding it in her hand she approached the bush carefully; Ramoli, Sitiya, Chandna and Savitri followed.

‘Hey, now's who's that hiding behind the bush? Come on out, I'll cool you down, you cunt wipe! What are you scared of, arse breath!' screamed Kasturi. The rest of the women surrounded the bush, each with a lota in hand for washing their potties.

Chatradhari's son Vijay Tiwari dashed out from behind the bush and ran off. His flabby body looked like a chubby watermelon as he scampered away in his boxers and undershirt.

Kasturi chased him for a bit, knife in hand. Ramoli, Sitiya and Savitri hurled their potty lotas after him. Inspector Vijay Tiwari ran as fast as he could, stumbling and tripping. The women screamed after him:

‘Call the TV station! They'll get some great clips!'

‘Run away, run away! Big boy inspector is making fudge in his pants!'

Vijay Tiwari was now scared through and through. Who knows what kind of nonsense Mohandas and his lawyer Harshvarddhan Soni might cook up and publish in the papers or get shown on TV?

(All of this was happening at the time when, for the first time in Asian political history, an Indian woman was made member of the communist party politburo, while another woman kicked away the chair of the prime minster's post.

It was the time when three non-stop giggling women were appointed members of the jury of the most important film festival where Ritwik Ghatak's
Subarnarekha
or
Kamol Gandhar
or Shailandra's
Teesri Kasam
were never even shown.

It was the time when a female US soldier working at Abu Ghraib prison stripped Iraqi prisoners naked and made them climb on top of one another to form some kind of pyramid, and then draped them with the American flag.

It was the time when power was defining gender.

It was the time when a girl from the north-east of India was kidnapped into a car near Dhaula Kuan in Delhi and raped for two-and-a-half hours nonstop by five men while travelling on every VIP road in Delhi. And it was when in Imphal, after the rape and murder of Manorama, hundreds of Krishna-devotee women stripped naked in front of the army headquarters to protest.

It was the time when two women failed in their struggle against the Sardar Sarovar dam, and so four thousand dalit and adivasi homes and fields and yards were submerged, and in the flood, forest animals and plants and trees and so much more was swept away.

The sad faces of those tired women were shown on TV, nonstop, in tears, defeated.

It was the time when I left Delhi and moved to Vaishali and from my rooftop could see that very same Jhandapur in Ghaziabad where exactly fifteen years earlier the revolutionary artist and performer named Safdar Hashmi was murdered.)

In the court of Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh, judge (first class), all the witnesses and evidence – and even the two investigative reports of the two district magistrates' inquiries – corroborated that Bisnath was indeed Mohandas. So, then: this pauper who's in a bad way and who swears and swears he's Mohandas – who is he? This court didn't have any direct judicial authority over this question. It possibly could be another case altogether, if some lawyer submitted a petition on behalf of the plaintiff.

Harshvarddhan Soni couldn't sleep for three days and three nights. He positively knew that Mohandas was Mohandas – but
it wasn't just that this was difficult to prove, it was becoming impossible. He sent me an email:

‘This is too much. I can't eat, I can't sleep. Neither can Mohandas. Everybody knows he's the real Mohandas, but it's impossible to prove. I'm at my wits' end. I don't know what to do. The two of us are receiving threats:
shut up or else.
In the meantime I found out that Bisnath has taken on Ras Bihari Rai as his attorney. You know him as well as I do – big shot in the ruling party. His wife's a member of the city council and is the head of a few government organisations and NGOs. There are half-a-dozen people ready to testify on behalf of Mohandas: Biran Baiga, Gopaldas, Biharidas, Ramoli, Sitiya ... but their appearance will make it seem like they're witnesses we just bought off ... each one of them looks like a homeless person.

‘What I'm thinking is that I'll go straight to the judge and have a word with him. He smokes bidis and looks a little, well – off. His name is G.M. Muktibodh. He's Marathi, but he speaks Hindi like you wouldn't believe. After court lets out he sits outside drinking chai at Ramdeen's little tea shack on the side of the road.

‘And I've noticed that in court when he looks at Mohandas, there's something in his eyes that stirs a little bit and makes him nervous. The veins on his forehead get bulgy and they look like they're going to pop out of his head. I'm actually a little scared that they might one day burst. There's something in his eyes that reminds me of a spy or secret agent who can very quietly see deeply into anyone's soul, like he can probe and pierce anything. The word is that his house is filled with books and he reads and reads every night until three in the morning.

‘I've also heard something else that's a little disturbing, that
even though G.N. Muktibodh is a judge of the first class, the government's got the CID watching his every move...'

With no other option he could think of, Harshvarddhan Soni took what amounted to a gamble. Any time a lawyer decided to meet a judge about an ongoing case, and on top of this with a judge with an air of mystery – it's a decision fraught with danger. If G.M. Muktibodh got angry, Harshvarddhan could jeopardise his entire career. His past had been full of every possible struggle, strain, and sorrow; the memory of the suicide of his despondent brother who couldn't find work never left his mind for a moment. ‘The practice of law' was just a bunch of words. Most of the people who came to him didn't have enough money for a fancy lawyer. He wasn't going to see a cent from Mohandas's trial, and had even put in five thousand of his own money on the case. And yet – he decided to take the risk and go and meet the judge.

Harshvarddhan felt a little hopeful when he arrived at the door of Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh's flat and saw on his face an expression as if he'd already known he was coming, that he knew absolutely positively that Harshvarddhan was planning on paying him a visit. He pulled up a rickety old wooden stool and said, ‘Have a seat! I'll go make some tea,' and disappeared into the kitchen.

Harshvarddhan glanced around the room. Everything was scattered everywhere. Piles of books lay all around, some of them kept open with pencils, cards, or leaves stuck in the spine. Maybe he was fond of those particular pages and had to read them over and over. The condition of the room suggested that he lived alone. Harshvarddhan had found out that the judge had been transferred frequently from one undeveloped area to
another, ones with many adivasis, where cases like this were rare: cases where big shots or rich businessmen or people at that level might see any grief. Harshvarddhan saw portraits of Gandhi and Marx on the wall. A small Ganesh statue was kept in the corner. Bookshelves against the left wall were filled with law books that looked as if they hadn't been opened in years.

G.M. Muktibodh returned with the chai along with a little dish with simple snacks. He set down the tray on a makeshift coffee table, and sat down on his cushion. It was good, strong street chai, boiled like hell.

A silence hung over the room. Harshvarddhan didn't have the courage to begin the conversation. An ancient clock that probably needed a key to be wound stood against the wall in front of them. It was stopped. Next to it was a calendar with a drawing on its upper flap of Bal Gangadhar Tilak with his pagri turban wrapped around his head; the year on the calendar, Harshvarddhan noted, was 1964.

‘I do realise that,' (the judge said after an endless sigh that had come from the very depths of his being) ‘Mohandas is the real Mohandas.' His voice sounded as if it were coming from the bottom of a well; it was a quiet, peeping voice. He took a big sip of chai. The strain on his face loosened up a bit with the gulp and the taste of the hot drink.

‘And that other man's a fraud. From start to finish, he's impersonating someone else. I know this, I know that his name is actually Bisnath, son of Nagendranath, and that he's stolen the identity of Mohandas and has been illegally living at A/11 Lenin Nagar working as deputy depot supervisor. He's a fraud, a crook, a sleaze!' he said, sometimes switching to English. Though he didn't speak loudly, there was a kind of sharp, steely resolve in
his voice. He took a packet of bidis out of his pocket, picked one out, first blew on the fat end, lit it with a match and took a long, hard drag.

Harshvarddhan felt as if he'd been transported to another time and place.

‘This is what I came here to tell you,' he said. ‘But how do you know who is the real Mohandas?'

‘It's not hard to figure out. If you're at all perceptive and have a little wits about you,' Muktibodh said, then began to look worried and got lost in thought. He took another long drag on the bidi. ‘I've been up for three nights in a row, I can't sleep. This experience is absurd and very tense.' The bidi scissored between his fingers and was on the verge of going out. His gaze looked as if it were trained on himself.

‘The system has collapsed, just like the twin towers. Now what's left for the subject of the state and the poor is anarchy and calamity. As far as I'm concerned, we are facing totally new forms of capital and power. Mohandas is being denied simple justice because it's something he can't buy. Oh!'

The veins of Muktibodh's forehead were throbbing and his hands were shaking. He seemed uneasy and stood up, and seeing that his bidi had gone out he took a pack of matches from his pocket and lit it up again.

‘All ideas have their end. When intellectual and philosophical systems that at one time created a lot of change are transplanted into another, what happens is sometimes they can be transformed into totally hollow jargon, senseless bullshit, the ramblings of rogues. It's happened time and again throughout history. And yet...'

He puffed on his bidi and held the smoke in his lungs for a
long time. Maybe he wanted the nicotine to quiet the restlessness in his breathing. He began to cough. He pressed his left hand to his chest, and then said in a scratchy voice, ‘But there's something in man, this strange thing, that no matter when, no matter what kind of power is trying to come down on him, it will never destroy him. And that thing's the quest for justice. The desire for justice is indestructible and timeless.'

He tossed the bidi he'd stuck between his index and middle fingers out the window. It had gone out.

Harshvarddhan Soni was confused. What kind of a person was this? To meet this kind of person disguised as a judge in this day and age seemed like an impossibility, a fantasy with a one-in-a-million chance of being real.

The judge was nervously pacing the room, but stopped suddenly – a bright, shining, mischievous twinkle now gleamed in his eyes that glowed like hot lead.

‘It's OK, Harshvarddhan, don't feel like you need to stay, and please, don't worry. I know you haven't been able to sleep for the past few nights, just like me.' A huge smile spread over his face. ‘Partner, you can sleep without worrying about a thing. Sleep like a dead horse. Now I've got to work on a little something.
'

He approached Harshvarddhan and placed his hand on his shoulder; Harshvarddhan felt as if the hand had no weight at all. It was a hand made of paper, flowers, a dream, or language.

Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh, judge (first class), quietly whispered into Harshvarddhan's ear: ‘There is one power that I have, one and only one power. That is ... “secret judicial inquiry.” I can myself make inquiries. Just leave it to me.'

When Harshvarddhan walked out of Muktibodh's flat it was
as if he was emerging from a cave of dreams and returning to his own time and reality: the one with Mohandas, Bisnath, himself, and the realities of today.

A short four days later, Viswanath and his father Nagendranath were arrested and sent to jail by order of G.M. Muktibodh, judge (first class), and, in accordance with sections 419, 420, 468, 467, and 403, were charged with counterfeiting, fraud, racketeering, theft, and embezzlement. The court ordered S.K. Singh, CEO of Oriental Coal Mines, to immediately begin official proceedings against Mohandas Vishwakarma, aka Vishwanath, deputy depot supervisor, and to report the findings of the proceedings to the court in two months' time. On top of this, proceedings and investigations should be launched in all concerned departments and divisions of the company against all managers and workers affiliated and connected with the matter either directly or indirectly. If the Oriental Coal Mines wanted to pursue the cases separately under criminal law, then this court would support such actions.