The Walls of Delhi (22 page)

Reports of what was really happening were so obscene, so rotten, that bringing them into a poem or short story would simply ruin the poem or the short story. So most poets and writers avoided writing about what went on – but they kept on writing, and kept on winning awards.

So, please come with me, and we'll desist for now with these accounts of what's going on, and instead travel to Ambedkar
Nagar public housing flat C-7/3, Ashok Vihar, where Shobha and her family now reside.

Amarkant was five by now, and had started attending Blue Bells school. Shobha had purchased a sewing machine. She sewed for friends and neighbours, and took home fabric from a few shops in the bazaar to stitch – the mortgage payment and school fees were due at the beginning of each month. Gulshan Arora died in the meantime, and his son Kishan had sold the shop in Vijaynagar. Chandrakant found work in another shop in Deep Market in Ashok Vihar. Every day he walked to and from work.

I had moved right outside Delhi with my family, to Ghaziabad. Chandrakant had my new address and number.

I had a premonition that at any moment Chandrakant might call me with news of Suri's death. He was by now eight years old. Not only was he still alive, having improbably fought and confounded his date with death, but the mind inside his malformed, ill-proportioned, misshapen head was so remarkable and strangely curious that anyone who heard him talk was stunned, confounded, flabbergasted.

For example, one day he said to Shobha, ‘Ma, you're spending your eyesight so you can make Amar's school fees. If you would only sell your eyes, you could put him in a cheaper school.'

One night Shobha awoke to find Suri on the balcony wrapping twine around his head. His lips were shut tight, and his face was wrinkled up in pain. His lungs were making that whistling sound while he tried with all his might to breathe in the outside air. His eyes were red and bulging. When Shobha came to him and placed her hand on his back he said in his hoarse voice, ‘Doctors only know how to cure diseases that would cure themselves anyway, without any treatment.' He struggled to take a breath, and then let out a deep sigh. ‘Hospitals are built for the same people that cars, hotels, airplanes, and big buildings are built for.'

One day he announced, ‘The disease inside of me is because of that dirty drainage ditch in front of our half flat.' He looked off into the distance for a bit before adding gravely, ‘“Mangosil” is the name of the disease, and the virus that causes it is called, do you know? Poverty.'

One day when Amar was going to school, Suri said, ‘No matter how much kids study in school, they could learn more without school. People who send their kids to school are those who want to get rid of them.' Again a vacant look came over his face for a bit and then he added, in the manner of a philosopher, ‘What is true is that those who are more well-educated inevitably work as underlings or servants for those less well-educated. School is a servant factory. The most powerful, richest, and best-off people in the world are always less well-educated.'

Suri, because of his illness, studied at home. He read the paper, watched TV, listened to the radio, and began going to the Jupiter Network cyber café in nearby Neemri market. Everyone in the area began to recognise him: the shape of his body, with the skinny trunk, oversized head, and funny way of walking.

One day Suri said, ‘The reason that people stare at me is that they've never seen an ant, with its big head, dressed in man's clothing.' He said this without laughing, but with eyes red, lips parched, and trembling a little. He continued, ‘Only ten to twenty per cent of people in this world are human. The rest are ants, cockroaches, dogs, pigs, or oxen.' He flashed an ironic smile. ‘I mean, look at this family. Papa's an ox, Mummy is a machine, and Amar's a cockroach. And I'm just a little worm that crawled out of the gutter one night and snuck into Mummy's belly.'

In the middle of the night one night, Suri's hands were pressing against the sides of his head, struggling to take each breath. ‘My head keeps getting bigger because it keeps knowing things little heads can't know, or don't want to. If they tried knowing them, their heads would grow as big as mine.'

Red flashed from his eyes like sparks. ‘I know full well that the US invaded Iraq only for the oil. But they'll be able to buy in oil whatever they've spent to hide this fact. The US would invade India, too, if they extracted that much oil. Just wait, one day either the whole world will equal the US, or it'll be the whole world minus the US.'

One night Suri, who was almost eight-and-a-half, was writhing in pain, crying like any other kid his age. It was the first time he acted like this. Normally when in pain he went out quietly and fought the pain on his own. He lay down and put his head in his mother's lap. ‘Mummy, just find me some poison,' he whimpered. ‘I can't take it anymore.' His tears wouldn't stop. In between sobs he said, ‘I just don't understand why people are born whose lives are filled with so much hurt.' A little while later his pain subsided. ‘Mummy, I need a pill the size of the sun
to make the pain go away.' Then, still in tears, ‘Tell Papa I want to live, Mummy. I don't want to die yet. Not this soon. There's no way we might be able to find the money to be able to afford to cure me?'

Suri's voice was full of such hopelessness and longing. Shobha caressed her son's head in her lap and herself started to weep. What could she possibly do to save the life of her son? Ideas failed her.

That night Shobha had a deep change of heart. She calculated that even if they sold the house and everything they owned, and recovered their mortgage, they would still be short of the one-and-a-half or two million they needed to have Suri treated properly, or even cured. Their only recourse was to offer their prayers, which they did anyway. And it was only due to the grace of god that Suri was still alive. She decided that from that day forward, she would try to focus less attention on Suri's eventual death and create space for him where he didn't have to be continuously traumatised by his ‘fixed mortality.' She told Chandrakant her idea.

Suri started watching movies on the VCR like
Qayamat se Qayamat Tak, Lagaan, Devdas, Main Hoon Na, Kaun.
Shobha and Chandrakant took him to out to the movies a couple of times. Both of them were acutely aware that Suri was only going to live as long as he was going to live. So they wanted him to give him as many experiences as they could, within their means. Sweets, chaat, pizza, hamburgers, Pepsi, Coca Cola, amusement parks like Appu Ghar, the zoo, the Qutub Minar.

Chandrakant told me about a truck that had run off the road and hit a tree. The driver was killed, and his passenger was taken to the hospital. Chandrakant, Shobha and Suri were on
their way home in a rickshaw. Suri too saw the tree and almost ran to it; its trunk was damaged in several places. Suri kept quiet for a while before saying, ‘The tree is always silent, sitting in its own spot. Even if it wanted to fight someone, like that tree, it would only be to save itself.'

Even though Suri's strange, tangled thoughts deeply vexed people, Chandrakant and Shohba felt sometimes the real kid inside would emerge, the one that was simply and straightforwardly a child his own age, with the same wishes, desires, obstinacy, tantrums. He was often quite stubborn about getting to eat the foods he liked. Like besin sweets, red amaranth, fried moong.

Sometimes when people paid more attention to Amar, they saw the envy and jealousy in Suri's eyes. It was true that fiveyear-old Amar had more stuff than his older brother, Suri. The main reason was that he went to school. He had a cute little vinyl backpack with Donald Duck and Roger Rabbit on it. Plus notebooks and lots of books with all sorts of pretty pictures. Amar also had more clothes. He had two changes of his school uniform, two pairs of socks, one pair of shoes, two ties. He had a nice little blue square tiffin lunchbox that held another little compartment inside. Shobha packed parathas in the tiffin and put a few cookies in the compartment inside. He also had a red water bottle in the shape of an elephant and if you lifted up its trunk it sprayed blue water.

Seven was the time Amar normally left home for school, and Shobha and Chandrakant spent an hour getting him ready. They were totally focused on Amar, who had begun to try getting out of going to school. While getting him ready they had no time to pay attention to Suri.

The Blue Bells school bus stopped right out front; the bus was packed with other schoolboys and girls. Sometimes Shobha, but mostly Chandrakant, would go out to put Amar on the bus. After he got on and said ‘ta ta' and the bus pulled away they went back inside.

Every once in awhile Suri too tagged along to see Amar off, ambling far behind the others with his hunched shoulders bearing the load of his heavy, misshapen head. The boys and girls lit on Amar as he approached, giggling and calling out to him, waving and telling him to hurry up. Suri watched this silently, breaking into a happy smile. But then he felt that some of the kids and the girls in particular were looking at his weird head – the kids got a little scared, they began pointing at him and whispering things to each other, and this frightened Suri. After that, he didn't come back for a few days and just stayed home. Then, after a little while, he would try again.

In the morning Shobha sometimes noticed Suri looking covetously at his brother when he was getting dressed for school, putting on his crisp, white, freshly washed shirt, blue shorts and red tie, with matching white socks and shiny black shoes. She was assailed by ugly thoughts. After all, Suri was not well. There was no question that he was not healthy or normal. What would happen if he did something to himself because he felt frustrated, or deprived? Or what if he got angry and jealous of his brother and went and did something stupid. It was true, though, that compared to Amar, Suri didn't have much stuff. A couple of t-shirts, two pairs of shorts, a pair of sweatpants. And all cheap stuff at that. His shoes, too, were nothing special, just some dull grey no-name sneakers she had bought on the street. Every morning, Shobha nagged and nagged Amar to brush his teeth,
and even had to squeeze the Colgate herself onto the toothbrush. Then there was Suri, who did everything on his own. He liked the cool minty taste and smell so much that one time he squeezed a little extra onto his brush; Shobha saw, and yelled at him. ‘Hey, do you think that's candy? Easy does it!'

Suri froze. He never did it again. Then there was the time Amar had got ready for school and set off with Chandrakant, leaving Suri alone with her, and he said, ‘Mummy, you're right to think the way that you do. Why waste good money for no reason buying clothes and shoes for someone whose life you don't put any stock in? I think you should do something similar with that someone's food. Who knows when he might die? Until then who knows if he's properly digesting the food he eats?'

Shobha couldn't believe what she heard. ‘Have you lost your mind again? Always thinking crazy thoughts?' She ran her hand along Suri's head. His eyes welled with tears. ‘Son, as far as life and death go, nobody knows when and where you go forwards or backwards. The doctors only gave you until two or two-and-a-half, but you're still with us, thanks to the grace of Auliya and Vitthal. And look at your papa's boss, Gulshan Arora, who said that after he turn one hundred and five, he would ride that morning train, loud and high into the sky. He didn't even make it to eighty. He folded long before.'

Suri found this hysterical. ‘Mummy, if I live to be one hundred and five, can you imagine how big my head would be? And where would I live? And who would come to lift that head of mine?'

Amar didn't go to school on Sundays. Suri stomped his feet like a little kid: he wanted to take Amar's tiffin, packed with parathas, go to the park, and sit on a bench under the neem tree and eat them. For his outing, Shobha packed two parathas, potato curry, and two cookies. Suri also brought a water bottle along. The crisis began when Amar noticed his brother making off with his tiffin and his water bottle; weeping and wailing ensued. The brothers began pushing and shoving each other. Suri would have strangled Amar if Shobha hadn't come swiftly to remove his hands from his throat. That day, Shobha saw a wildness in Suri's eyes, as in a writhing, wounded animal that suddenly exhibits savagery.

Suri looked right at Shobha and said in a cold, unwavering voice, ‘I want a tiffin box of my own. And you, all you living people, will buy one for me. From now on, I won't be eating lunch inside this house.'

From then on Suri took his lunch box and tottered down the steps.

The truth was, however, that these kinds of incidents were few and far between. Most of the time Suryakant was nothing but loving and affectionate with his younger brother, Amarkant. And after he started going to the Jupiter Network cyber café, he began bringing back toffees, magic pop ups, and chocolate bars for his brother; it turned out that the owner, Rohan Chawla, gave him money. Chandrakant told me that Rohan told him his son Suri had a ‘genius mind.' He added that if he didn't have any work to do at home, he could go spend time at the café, and
he'd be happy to pay him seven or eight hundred a month. Suri was a quick learner on the computer, and picked up Photoshop, learned how to blog, and do some graphic design work. He started learning 3-D animation on his own, without help from others; Rahul Chawla was awestruck.

Suri helped Amar when he had homework. When he had drawing assignments, Suri would draw them or colour them in with crayons or coloured pencils so vividly that Amar inevitably got ‘very good' or ‘excellent' marks. But one time Shobha yelled at him, ‘If you do all of your brother's work, what's he gonna learn? Let him do his own work!' Suri stopped what he was doing and stood up.

‘Mummy, I want you to know that the drawing of the little shack and tree and sunset I've just made is the last picture I'll ever draw.' He staggered over the balcony and quietly went outside.