The Walls of Delhi (24 page)

Her face was covered in tears and she was choking on her sobs. ‘Your eldest committed suicide! You and I said one little thing, and look how he took it to heart.'

The women said Amar came back to the roof with his cap gun, and as soon as he fired the first shot, Suri began to have trouble breathing. He grabbed his head with his hands, and tottered over to the edge.

And from there he jumped quietly.

On Nigambodh ghat, Chandrakant set fire to his son Suri's body. After the flames rose and began engulfing the body, I turned away.

An old fakir was sitting a little distance behind us, wrapped up tight under a dirty, old, torn, bed sheet. It had been a cold December, and all of North India was under a cold snap that
had already killed a handful of poor people. The old fakir was shivering.

It was the same old fakir Chandrakant and I had met years earlier in the Hazarat Nizammuddin dargah near the shrine to the first Hindi poet, Amir Khusrau, a fakir whose eyes were red like an ant's, whom the almighty did not bless with the ability to sleep, who carried thirty times its own weight its whole life.

He noticed me staring at him and got up to leave. I saw that his head was proportionally much larger than his body – something he was always trying to hide with that torn old bedsheet.

Suri – Suryakant – was born sometime in September, 1995, and died on 25 December, 2004, at 12:04. He was born in a private hospital called Kalpana Health Centre between Model Town and Adarsh Nagar, but determining the exact date is no easy task, because a restaurant, day spa, and massage parlour now stand where the hospital used to be. Nobody has any idea what happened to Kalpana Health Centre. People had of course heard of the big scandal and police raid a couple years ago that had made the TV news after the kidney of an indigent man had been removed and sold.

I couldn't be sure whether nine months before his birth in that hospital when Suryakant came into his mother's womb was the time of the magic carpet, the one Chandrakant and Shobha had brought with them to the half flat of house number E-3/1, bylane number seven, Jahangirpuri, Delhi, after fleeing Sarini,
and had put on the floor, and played the game they played for years to put out the fire; or whether it was true that one night he crawled like a turtle out of the dirty drainage sewer and silently entered his mother's womb that way. And the disease that made his head grow and grow, day by day, the disease the doctors said would give him a life span of two years max, the disease that had no trace in any of the medical literature, the disease Chandrakant and Shobha called ‘Mangosil' but it was really only Suri who knew about the virus that caused it – it wasn't the disease that caused his death.

He himself chose when to end his life.

Suri's notebook lies open in front me at page fifty-six. He had copied down some lines of a poem in his beautiful handwriting:

I did the translation in a rush because in front of me are this year's findings from a World Health Organization report. It contains alarming statistics about millions of children in the developing countries who will fall victim to deadly diseases because of malnutrition, poverty, and squalor.

The report also included startling information about children who have been falling victim to an illness for the past several years that causes the head to grow significantly faster than the rest of the body, causing unnatural behavior. According to doctors, the virus or causes of the disease have yet to be identified, but children who suffer from this disease usually only live to two. According to the WHO, this disease, like AIDS, is spreading rapidly.

But the strangest part of the report came from the Pentagon. A total of sixty seven countries including Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Bangladesh, Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Palestine, Kosovo, Sri Lanka, Namibia, Nicaragua, and Brazil were home to children who had been born with heads that so quickly got bigger.

And they were even being born in wealthy, developed countries like the US, France, and the UK.

The brains of these children knew everything. They weren't innocent and wide-eyed like most kids.

The brains of these children were several times bigger than normal for their biological age. And several centuries of living memories were present inside these brains – you could call it a mini flash drive with all history up to the present day. Their DNA was eerily alike.

The Pentagon urged all governments of all countries to keep a close eye on these big-headed kids.

This is how they can be identified:

‘They are in squalor to poor families. Their eyes are red like the eyes of ants. They more or less never sleep. And it is possible they know everything.'

Life was getting better for Uday Prakash when I first met him face-to-face in August, 2005. His ‘Mohandas' had just been published by the leading Hindi literary magazine
Hans,
and it was clear that the novella, to steal a phrase from Bollywood, was a superhit. The mobile numbers and postal addresses of Hindi writers are a standard part of back-flap bios in India, just in case readers would like to call and compliment the author on a job well done. And so in the car on the way back from New Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport to his home in nearby Ghaziabad, Prakash received call after call and SMS after SMS from happy fans who wanted to tell him how much they'd enjoyed reading the story. He continually pulled the car over to receive felicitations from a local colleague, or a stranger from elsewhere. Things were changing quickly in India, as Prakash
often points out in his stories – and one advantage of mass mobile-phone ownership, if nothing else, has been that lonely poets and writers are able to receive at least a little boost now and again from their readers.

When he and I had first emailed a couple of years earlier about my translating his novel
The Girl with the Golden Parasol
(Penguin India, 2008), I had little idea about the ‘dark days,' as Prakash puts it, he was passing through – a period in his life he alludes to at least once in all three stories of this volume. Prakash has always been a popular writer with a huge base of readers: before mobiles, and even in 2005, he received stacks of one-rupee postcards every day from admirers spread across the most forgotten corners of India. (After the publication of ‘Mohandas,' many postcards simply read, ‘I am Mohandas.')

Despite his huge, grass-roots fan base, Prakash has always had an uneasy relationship with the Hindi establishment, or any other (in a phrase he likes to use) ‘power centre.' For most of his professional life, he has worked as a freelance writer, journalist, poet, critic, film maker and producer: anything to provide for his family, at the mercy of the kindness of assignments, rarely able to enjoy the stability that an academic job or government post would have provided. Accused of stirring up caste unrest, called a ‘rabid dog,' Prakash sustained many attacks from both left and right after the publication of
The Girl with the Golden Parasol
in 2001 (the novel tells the story of a non-Brahmin boy who falls in love with a Brahmin girl). The plug was pulled overnight on nearly all his freelance jobs. The dark days had begun – and only began to lift years later after the publication of ‘Mohandas' and the winning of a PEN American Center Translation Fund Award for
The Girl with the Golden Parasol
in translation.

Uday Prakash was born on New Year's Day, 1951, in Sitapur, a village on the Son river in the state of Madhya Pradesh.
Hindi is his second language: he grew up speaking Chhattisgarhi, a regional language of north India now with its own state, Chhattisgarh. His family were thakurs, or landlords of the village, in a system that was, and is, quite feudal. I have seen Prakash regale a wide-eyed five-year-old in San Francisco with the true tale of the pet elephant he called his companion as a child – and how the elephant used to assist in bathing the young writer with its trunk. Prakash's own childhood is filled with astonishingly detailed memories of close friends from the village, and the surrounding forest he used to explore – much of which has been decimated after years of deforestation, development, and the forcing off the land of indigenous inhabitants.

Prakash's mother, Ganga Devi, had come from a Bhojpuri-speaking area near Mirzapur, and had brought with her not only many Bhojpuri songs she often sang at home, but also a facility and abiding love for traditional drawings and illustrations from her region. She painted on the walls and sketched in a notebook she'd kept since she was a teenager. She was skillful, and her art made a deep impression on Prakash, the youngest of her four children, to whom she was very close. After suffering from tracheal cancer, she died two days before Prakash's thirteenth birthday.

Prakash's father was an avid reader, had a good education for the time, subscribed to many Hindi magazines, and wrote poetry – all of which spurred Prakash's own reading and writing habits. After the death of Prakash's mother, his father began drinking heavily, and it soon became difficult for Prakash to stay at home. Prakash was taken in by a teacher at a nearby
town, Shahdol, sixty kilometres away: a tiny hamlet by Indian standards, but as big and strange as a foreign country to Prakash. In an age with bad roads and few bridges, it was quite far from home. He considers the teacher who looked after him a second father, and credits him for helping to guide his studies.

Prakash's father later developed carcinomas on his cheek and mouth, and Prakash travelled and stayed with him in the city of Indore as he underwent treatment. Before slipping into a coma, his father wrote a letter to a relative, kept by Prakash's youngest sister, about his fears of what would happen to Prakash. His father was worried that his son lacked sensibility in the ways of the world, and would face terrible problems in the future.

When Prakash's father died in September 1969, he left to study at the university in Sagar, Madhya Pradesh, and later, in 1975, just after the Emergency period began, moved to New Delhi where he soon began teaching comparative literature and Hindi at Jawaharlal Nehru University. For the next thirty years, he rarely travelled back home. Only recently has Prakash begun returning to Sitapur for longer periods in order spend time with his relatives and childhood friends.

‘The Walls of Delhi' and ‘Mangosil' – the two ‘city stories' in this collection – are clearly the work of a writer who has trod extensively through the bylanes of India's sprawling capital. Still, Prakash shines greatly in his village stories. His poem
Tibet,
which earned him a prestigious poetry prize at a young age, was inspired by the chanting of Tibetan monks resettled near his village after fleeing the Chinese invasion. ‘Heeralal's Ghost,' expertly translated by Robert Hueckstedt, is a fable of a low-caste servant of the village landowner who dies from overwork, then
returns as a ghost to terrorise his former employer's family in episodes both hysterical and tragic. And here, in ‘Mohandas,' Prakash provides a harrowing portrayal of the caste dynamics and corruption that are still a powerful force in India.

After Prakash picked me up from the airport on that sticky monsoon night in 2005, we spent a week in New Delhi discussing the translation of
The Girl with the Golden Parasol.
We also spent half a day with his longtime Hindi publisher drinking some twenty cups of tea while in tense negotiations over a decade's worth of unpaid book royalties. Prakash and I then packed up the car for the three-day trip to Sitapur. From there, we had been invited to the inauguration of a museum in the capital of Chhattisgarh, Rajnandgaon, to be dedicated in part to one of the most important twentieth-century Hindi poets, Muktibodh – a favourite of Prakash's, and a fellow struggler. At first, Prakash was reluctant to accept the invitation, since the museum and ceremony and publicity all fell under the auspices of the right-wing BJP state government of Chhattisgarh; the Chief Minister of the state – by coincidence, a distant relation of Prakash's – would be cutting the ribbon. In the end, Prakash decided that it was more important to support recognition of Muktibodh, a man marginalised in his own time, than to keep away from politics he disagreed with.

Muktibodh is the name of the independent-minded judge in ‘Mohandas,' and we were joined on the trip to Rajnandgaon by Virendra Soni, to whom the story is dedicated. So I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised that as we were leaving town, Prakash, seeing a man on the road walking toward us, said, ‘Oh, there's Mohandas.' And so it was: the man who he had based his character on, looking just as haggard and resilient as described
in the story. We stopped, spoke at length, took some photos and went on.

Our host for the festivities was the district collector of Rajnandgaon, who put us up in VIP accommodations at a local chicken magnate's bungalow. The next day Prakash and other guests read from their work. I will never forget the hundreds of Prakash's young fans who, hearing he would be in attendance, had travelled long distances and made huge sacrifices to see him in person. In particular, I remember one young man who was unable to walk being carried by four of his friends into the hall. ‘These are my readers,' Prakash told me.

Though we had assumed that we would attend the museum dedication as spectators, an assistant the next day informed us we would share a dais with the Chief Minister, and that we would be flower-garlanded on stage. In one of the more terrifying moments of my life, once on stage I was instructed to give a speech in Hindi to the thousands assembled. The Chief Minister, speaking last, wasted no time in transforming the oddity of a Hindi-speaking American into political gain: ‘The Congress party may have Sonia Gandhi,' he told the crowd. ‘But we have Jason! And his Hindi is better than hers.' ‘We're here for Muktibodh,' Prakash whispered to me by way of reassurance after the ribbon-cutting.

In many of his stories, Uday Prakash shows how those who dare to dissent against a suffocating system are punished. But with his biting satire and delightful narrative detours he also demonstrates how humor and compassion ultimately provide the best means to fight back and escape. These two elements combine in stories that are like a mix of Milan Kundera blended with
Tristram Shandy
– and told by one of the most naturally
gifted storytellers writing in any language. Among Hindi writers, Prakash has broken from a strict model of social realism that dominated Hindi fiction for much of the twentieth-century, though he maintains many satirical elements of writers like Manohar Shyam Joshi, while inventing a humor that is all his own. As one prominent Hindi literary critic recently told me, ‘Uday Prakash is knocking on the canon.' As he continues to knock, he has already spawned a cottage industry of young imitators.

After the publication of ‘Mohandas' and
The Girl with the Golden Parasol,
and later, when the Indian national literary body, the Sahitya Akademi, awarded Uday Prakash its highest honour in Hindi for ‘Mohandas,' and
Kindle
magazine named him a top South Asian youth icon, the dark days began to recede. Life for Uday Prakash as an independent Hindi writer continues to be difficult and uncertain, but less so. It is his hope to spend much of his time writing in relative peace possibly in Berlin, where his son, daughter-in-law, and grandson live. He is currently at work on several projects, among them a novel entitled
Cheena Baba
about a Chinese soldier who deserts during the 1962 Indo-China war and makes his home in a tree near the Indian border with Nepal.

I have followed a couple of basic strategies in translating these three stories. First, I have tried to make Prakash's prose sound as contemporary and relevant in English as it does in Hindi without, I hope, sounding over colloquial or slangy. Second, I have attempted to render his prose into an English that is both
readable and comprehensible by English speakers not only from the Indian subcontinent, but also from Australia, the US, the UK, and elsewhere. Translators from Hindi and other South Asian languages into English face a problem that translators from, say, French or Spanish don't have to grapple with. South Asian English can differ in many meaningful ways from the way English is spoken and written in other parts of the world. In addition, English speakers from the Indian subcontinent can usually be expected to understand the cultural context of the stories more readily than someone from Oklahoma or Alice Springs might. Hindi and Indian words, too, from
adivasi
(a tribal or aboriginal) to
zamindar
(landowner) would probably need no explanation: if I had been translating exclusively for an Indian audience, the temptation would have been to leave Hindi words like this ‘as is,' even in the English. But one of the goals of translating is to enlarge the conversation, and conversations don't work if someone feels left out. Therefore, keeping in mind that the readers of this book will come from a variety of English backgrounds, I have assumed little or no prior knowledge of India or Hindi. In the few instances I have decided to retain words like
adivasi
or
zamindar,
I have inserted a brief gloss within the text that should provide readers with sufficient clues as to the meaning. Or, I've concluded that enough context already exists for the reader to understand the meaning, if not the gist, of the word or phrase. (I prefer this solution to footnotes or glossaries, which I avoid, since they are not found in the Hindi, and I believe they can give the story an unwanted and unnecessary air of academic writing.) At the same time, I have tried to avoid ‘pre-chewing' the text too much for South Asians who may be, at least culturally, closer to the Hindi. My greatest hope is that at
least some of the enormous pleasure I took in translating these wonderful stories, and the important voice of Uday Prakash, is evident in the English.