The Walls of Delhi (18 page)

It was then he showed the palm of his hand to Chandrakant. ‘The astrologer told me that I've got at least thirty-five more years. Then, after I turn one hundred and five, I'm gonna get me on that morning train, loud and high right up to the sky! But don't you worry, Chandu. Your job's even more secure than a government one.

‘Wrap up the rest of this chicken for your wife and be on your way,' he said to Chandrakant in a hushed voice. ‘I've got a working girl on her way, and she'll be here any second. You get to work over there in Jahangirpuri, and I'll get to work over here in Model Town.'

But the children of Chandrakant and Shobha never got as old as Gulshan Arora's. One after the other, the babies born to them in that half flat in bylane number seven kept dying. None lived longer than four months.

Not one or two, but seven babies in a row.

It happened perhaps some winter's evening in 1995, some ten years ago. I went to the Kwality Departmental Stores in Vijaynagar. I had quit my day job five years prior and was then as I am now a freelance Hindi writer.

I had my mortgage and other expenses to pay. Winter was around the corner, and I still hadn't managed to buy warm clothing for the kids. I myself had been wearing the very same sweater twenty winters in a row. My wife hadn't been able to treat herself to a nice sari or buy any jewellery since the day we married. We avoided weddings since we lacked proper attire, and couldn't afford a present for the bride and groom in any case. We cut each piece of mango pickle into quarters, and rinsed whatever slices of onion were left on the thali, saving them for next time. We horded five rupee coins during the year, saving them up to give away on Divali. I thought a few times about ending it all, or running away, but then my kids always brought me back. They were still in school. Books came into my life like a curse, and took everything I had. Sometimes it was the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, or else Orwell's
Down and Out in Paris and London,
or Gorky's autobiography – reading them brought me some respite. Maybe every writer's fate is to live on the street, in the gutter. Or maybe I just worried more than most because I wasn't famous and wasn't important.

Whenever I sat down and opened a book or tried to write something in those days, the full terror of my reality at home cast a long shadow. I saw strange, sinister hues on the faces of my wife and children that I couldn't pinpoint or understand. Death,
illness, penury, hearsay, and sorrow skulked through the house with heavy feet. At night sobbing sounds permeated the rooms and corridors. A cat screeched on the rooftop. The plaster was falling off the walls, and the doors opened and closed with a strange, sad groan.

It was also a time rife with illness: dengue fever, food poisoning, the flu. My wife had a thyroid problem, and our younger son was so thin, so frail, so shy and introverted, that we were racked with doubt about whether he would be able to take care of himself in the future. Ginsberg's ‘Howl' and Muktibodh's ‘In Darkness' echoed in my head. I woke up ten times a night. I considered the possibility that I had been duped and driven onto a surreal landscape of terror and nightmares, where each work of the honest writer puts his family in a condition more critical, makes them more unsafe – reality substituted by the awful surrealism of a poem.

The twentieth century was turning into the twenty-first, and with each new work I wrote, my life was plunged more deeply into the abyss. Delhi, along with the rest of the world, was changing fast, other capitals even faster. Here, only one beacon remained that still had any power, and it attracted cruelty, barbarity, greed, injustice, money – no other options were possible. When I tried explaining my troubles to Delhi's influential writers and thinkers, I felt as if I were a snail that had surfaced to the world above, telling the divine bipeds patting their fat bellies about his wild, weird, othercaste experiences from his home at the bottom of the sea. My language was incomprehensible. They viewed my utterances born of sorrow, vulnerability, and nerves with indifference, curiosity, wonder. They were of a totally different class. Their scraps were my meal. A poet had
written something to that effect a few years ago, perhaps coping in similar circumstances.

In the middle of all this, I went one late afternoon to the general store in Vijaynagar where Chandrakant worked. The store was empty when I arrived, apart from Chandrakant, who I found lounging in the chair behind the counter singing an abhang devotional song. But there was a heartbreaking loneliness in his voice, as if he weren't singing for others, but as a crutch to steady himself. The previous July when I had gone to Pandharpur in Maharashtra on a film project I was shooting, I had seen the Gyaneshwar and Namdev pilgrim and chariot processions coming from Alandi. While sitting on the steps of the Vithoba temple I heard the abhang songs. The rain had just stopped a few moments earlier, but dark, menacing clouds still covered the sky. The voices of the singers in the shade, drenched from the monsoon humidity, were like a salve soothing my loneliness and vulnerability. Like a cure that fills vessels with a new blood of life. That day standing in the doorway at the store in Vijaynagar, I felt as if I was on the steps of the Vithoba temple rather than in Delhi.

Chandrakant didn't see me. His feet were stretched out on a stool in front of the chair, eyes closed, lost in the music.

‘What a voice! Are you Marathi?' This was the first sentence I said to Chandrakant Thorat. He blushed.

‘Are you looking for something?' This was the first sentence he said to me.

We introduced ourselves, and soon became friends. The two of us were trapped in our own respective hells. That first day I found out that he still hadn't become a father, despite having been married for so many years, and that one after the next his
children had died from mysterious illnesses, as if cursed. None lived longer than four months. His wife Shobha was shattered.

The next week I went to his home: the half flat in bylane number seven, Jahangirpuri. Some of Shobha's hair had turned grey, and there was a hardness to her face, but she was still a beautiful woman. When she laughed, a softness sometimes peeked through. This, however, was rare. That night I listened to the whole story of their lives.

‘You are the god Vitthoba, coming as you did just as I was singing the abhang...!' Chandrakant said, brimming with feeling. He assumed from my clothes and looks that I was a wealthy, connected, worldly man, capable of raising him out of the dark place where he was stuck. Chandrakant, Shobha, and the rest of the residents of bylane number seven for the most part came from one community. And I came from a different one. But my position in that community was no different from that of Chandrakant and others like him. There was no place for me in mine: I was nothing more than a mere writer. Many others came masquerading as writers, but I was the one shown the door.

We then met regularly. Chandrkant accompanied me to the Hasarat Nizamuddin Auliya shrine and sat on the marble floor where we quietly listened to the penniless qawwali singers sing their songs.

And I was amazed when one night after we'd had a little bit to drink in their Jahangipuri half flat, Chandrakant reprised the qawwalis. Shobha was busy cooking mutton dopyaza, and the sweet smell of her cooking filling the flat. He was drumming out the beat on empty plastic water bottles using two one-rupee coins; his rhythm was flawless. He was as mesmerised with his own music making as the qawwali singers had been with theirs. I began tapping out the rhythm on the empty stainless steel cup that I was drinking whisky from. Along with the exquisite smell of the mutton dopyaza and, combined with the qawwali music, our meditation on Hazart Nizzamuddin,
mehboob-e ilahi –
l'amoureux de la divinité – and the words of Amir Khusrau, we felt the darkness dissipate. The whisky, too, had lifted our spirits to the point that we were dipping and diving in a pool of enchantment. Tears streamed from Chandrakant's eyes. He didn't know that the writer of the qawwalis was the master of the dargah where the two of us had gone several times, and where Chandrakant, head covered by chador, prayed little prayers that his life might improve. He prayed at the tomb of a man he thought was a pir – a holy man – not a poet. It's true that he was also a pir, the disciple of Auliya. We were there one night when, once again, it was nighttime in the world all around, and darkness blanketed us. The dawn of tomorrow was drowned out in the dark like doused candles. We were returning to our homes along the footpath with Amir Khusrau's stick as our guide, groping in search of our life. Shobha, too, was with us, perhaps trying to find her own, silently. I couldn't
stop wondering, who are these people present in the language of Khusrau – the man who first gave birth to poetry – and how did so many of them suddenly get there?

I wasn't able to see Chandrakant or Shobha for about a year after that night. Another book of mine came out during that time that chipped away further what tranquility I had left. Well-connected and high caste writers from Delhi, Bhopal, Lucknow and other major cities began calling me a rabid dog, fascist, copycat, thief, Naxalite, communalist, feudal, affluent. My newspaper column was dropped, payments cancelled, and the rumour mill spun out such awful stuff that I nearly went mad. They were dark days. My sleep was racked with nightmares. I felt as if my body, now skin-and-bones, was pushed up against the wall waiting for death in a solitary confinement cell in some labour camp, like Osip Mandelstam. Or sitting quietly on a chair in front of the Sharda mental hospital: a single grain of rice gets stuck in my windpipe, my breath grows erratic and I cast my eyes wildly around as my death approaches. Like the Hindi writer Shailesh Matiyani, who died in that hospital. Fascism was right in front of us with a new look. The power of illegal capital and criminal violence was hiding behind the veil of the great ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, until it consumed and reduced to ash the great philosophies of the past two centuries in the irrepressible fire of its base ambitions and desires.

Sometime during that year I went for six months to Bombay and Pune in connection with a film I was writing. And even after I got back, I wasn't able to see Chandrakant for another seven or eight months: that's when I was busy editing a couple of small documentaries. The day-to-day struggles of getting by
had, in some sense, led me to begin to forget about Chandrakant. And then one day I went to the Auliya shrine, thinking about going back to the village, a place where everyone escapes to run off to the big city, and where the fearful jaws of hunger, joblessness, and penury await every man who returns – when I sat down, alone, and saw that my friend Naim Nizami was sitting next to me with a smile.

‘It's been forever since I've seen you here,' he said. ‘Your friend who came with you, Chandrakant, he was here two months ago and arranged a twelve-thousand-rupee feast. And we were thinking of you. The biriyani was delicious.'

‘Really?' I asked. Could Gulshan Arora, his seventy-yearold boss from the Kwality Departmental Stores have died and left him with two hundred thousand rupees? But Naim Nizami said that it was because his prayer had been fulfilled: he had become a father, even at his age. All on account of the mercy of Hazart Nizzamuddin,
mehboob-e ilahi –
l'amoureux de la divinité.

What else could I do that day but head straight for Jahangirpuri and Chandrakant's half flat? I arrived at dusk, sometime after five. Two planks of wood were bolted across the door, and a fat lock was fastened on the door chain. A board covered the ‘balcony.' The woman who lived next door told me, ‘They've gone to Saharanpur and will be back by Saturday. The baby's sick.'

I went again on Sunday, and this time found them. Worry lined Chandrakant's face, but what I thought had happened hadn't. Shobha was weeping. They told me that four months ago, Shobha had given birth to a baby boy in the nearby Kalpana Health Centre. The doctor was quite surprised that this middle
aged woman, nearly an old woman, and who hadn't given birth in many years, could give birth to a baby whose vitals were perfectly normal. Shobha only needed a little stitching up. The baby was a fat eight-and-a-half pounds, and was rosy red. He was born on the fifth day of the tenth month. Chandrakant and Shobha's joy knew no bounds, and they returned home from the hospital. Shobha, having lost seven children before, was apprehensive. This time they wouldn't even let the most minor suspicion go unchecked, but the doctor told them every time they brought him in that the baby was healthier than health itself. There wasn't the slightest cause for alarm. Still, mother and child went in for the free checkup every week for two months. This time they wanted to take every precaution possible.

Some ten weeks passed like this. Chandrakant donated twelve thousand at Auliya's shrine for meals for the destitute. Shobha made a deal with Balaji of Tirupati: if the baby made it past twelve months without any problems, she would travel to Tirupati to perform the ceremonial head-shaving ceremony for the boy when he turned one, and would give the shorn hair to Balaji as an offering.

But one night Shobha heard the baby crying out as if in mysterious pain. Every breath he took was accompanied by a strange whistling-wheezing sound.

When she looked at the boy's face, she was amazed: she felt the baby was hiding his pain. He wasn't crying in the least, but silently fighting the pain on his own. Little furrows appeared on his forehead as if he were giving all he had in order to breathe each troubled breath.

It was two or three in the morning, and, now worried, Shobha woke up Chandrakant, who himself examined the
infant. After another hour or two, the baby was again sleeping soundly, breathing deeply and regularly.