The Girl with the Golden Parasol

FIFTEEN

Some sort of predetermined rule dictated that Rahul’s first, and best, friends would be Shailendra George and Shaligaram. The three of them, instinctively, of their own accord, began to sit together. They talked among themselves and discovered that each of the other students had some sort of connection, either with one another, or with the teachers, or some family connection, or they had some other basis for rapport. These were confident boys who didn’t have to worry about their future. They were chiefly foot soldiers in the political machinations of the department. Less interested in books and literature, they took greater interest in the tricks of the trade that would help get their hands on degrees, positions, promotions, and fellowships. And they were very quick to master their training. There was some gene in their DNA that allowed them to learn this knowledge with the same ease a squirrel learns to scramble up a tree or a fish how to swim in the water or a kingfisher how to dive or a bandicoot how to make a hole in a wall and sneak in the house.

Shailendra George said that when his family had still been Hindu, his father had been an untouchable in charge of the cremation grounds. He’d converted from Hinduism thirty years ago.

Shaligaram was a weaver by caste. He said that upper-caste people, particularly Brahmins, made up jokes and sayings as proof of the idiotic ways weavers act. One joke goes that once upon a time a weaver had a dream that five two-hundred-pound jute sacks, normally filled with grain, were lying behind the house stuffed with rupees next to a pile of firewood. The weaver awoke and, remembering his dream, immediately marched out back. When he arrived, you can’t imagine his surprise when he found five sacks, as real as can be, lying next to the pile of wood. He shouted for all his neighbors to come, and once they were gathered, he told them all about the dream.

The weaver’s neighbors saw that millions of rupee notes and coins stuffed the five sacks. First they conferred among themselves. They then turned to the weaver to explain that, yes, the gunnysacks indeed contained a great harvest of wealth. But there was a lot of chaff and only a bit of grain. So they instructed him to separate and get rid of the worthless chaff and keep only the valuable grain.

The joke continues that the weaver’s womenfolk sifted out the chaff: the paper bills in denominations of 500, 100, 10, and 20, which, like chaff, is carried off by the wind. The weaver’s womenfolk kept only the grain. With five full bags, they managed to collect the quarter-, half-rupee coins, pennies, and cowries totaling something like 2,500 rupees.

Divvying up the spoils, the neighbors all became millionaires, while the dreaming weaver became a “pennyaire” and hero of this caste joke. It’s interesting that countless such jokes have gone around about lower-caste people; the punch line is always followed by the sound of a belly laugh, a dark echo that has rung through the centuries.

Goondas have a long tradition of these kinds of jokes about simple, honest castes, communities, or men who get tricked. Each joke ends with the same kind of mass laughter: cruel, dripping, self-satisfied, uncivilized, full of power.

The same sort of group guffaw could be heard in the Hindi department during the break between classes, when Balram Pandey, who served as cook for Dr. Loknath Tripathi, told a new weaver joke. The girls, as a group, had already slipped outside to eat apart from the rest, carrying their little tiffin food cylinders filled with parathas they’d brought from home.

Balram Pandey’s weaver joke went like this: Once upon a time a weaver got married. The next day his upper-caste friends from the neighborhood asked him, “So, did you feed your new bride a little snack at night?” The weaver had, in fact, fed his wife all sorts of sweet desserts like laddus, motichurs, and a whole string of jelabis, and said so to his friends.

The weaver’s friends started to laugh to themselves that this idiot doesn’t know a thing, and this imbecile hasn’t even the good sense to feed a snack to his new bride’s other mouth. The poor girl must still be hungry. And he doesn’t even realize that women’s other mouth must be fed with something else entirely, not just with jelabis and motichur.

The weaver pleaded with his friends to tell him what kind of sweet dessert he should feed his new bride. His friends felt sorry for the weaver’s ignorance and gave him some advice: first take a toothbrush and toothpaste, clean and rinse out your bride’s other mouth, and then give us a call. We’ll come and bring her the snack ourselves. After all, what are friends for?

The joke continues that meanwhile the weaver went to ask his new bride about her other mouth and other stomach. Even though the wife was simple and uneducated like the weaver, she put two and two together and, blushing, showed her second mouth to her new husband. He proceeded to use the toothbrush and toothpaste given by his friends to thoroughly clean his wife’s other mouth. Then he let them know he’d done as he was told.

His friends came over and, one after another, they took turns serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner to the weaver’s new bride.

The joke produced a great outburst of laughter among the first-year MA Hindi students in class. A fiery, seething, base, inhuman laugh that had prevailed for centuries.

Rahul looked at Shailendra George and Shaligaram. Of the twelve students, the three of them sat off to one side, the other nine to the other. The laughing came from that side. Imagine a furnace in a steel plant in Bokaro or Bhilai, with temperatures of thousands of degrees, glowing bright red, liquid pig iron flowing so hot that it would vaporize a man into thin air — this laughter flashed even hotter than that. It wasn’t even the sound of laughter; it was the sound of a medieval fire disgorging caste abhorrence like lava from the Vedic furnace poured right into their ears.

Rahul watched all their laughing faces. Vimal Shukla, Vinod Vajpayi, Balram Pandey, Vijay Pachauri, Kamal Tripathi, Ram Narayan Chaturvedi, Sudip Pant, Vibhuti Prasad Mishra. All of them were “critters,” like from the movie. Ball-like, rolling, frightening, omnivorous critters sent from another world or demon realm to this bit of earth. Or else they arrived in a mysterious pod dropped from the skies, which then exploded. The creatures emerged on their own and over time established their own system of rule. They were everywhere. In language, in politics, in temples, in Parliament, in civil service, in places of worship, in birth, at death; from food and water to clothing and medicine to all media of information — newspapers, books, universities, TV channels; from finance to poetry, from art to letters.

These were the critters. When they came to this part of the world, the first thing they did was gobble up the sun in order to project a darkness into history, so dark that inside it no one could see the advance of their ever-hungry jaws and glimmering, razor-sharp teeth. They devoured the Buddha, the tales about his life, the sublime philosophies of the Upanishads, and all manner of folktales. They gnawed Jesus, Moses, Pirs, prophets, and Sufi saints down to the bones, crushed the bones into fertilizer, threw the fertilizer into a pit where a poisonous tree took root, and bore fruit — fruit that’s been hanging in the psyche of millions of innocent inhabitants of this part of the world for centuries.

Insult and disgust stained Shaligaram’s face first the color of mud, then to black. Fear shone from the eyes of Shailendra George.

“Shut up! Hold your filthy tongue! Bastards!” Rahul stood up. “Hindi literature and Hindu dharma have taught you this? Demon sons of Ravana! When will you stop eating? How much of this world will you destroy? You’re like weevils, leeches, gnats — parasites sucking on the broken body of this great country. Don’t forget that Ravana was one of you, living on the golden island of Lanka. It was still the treta-yug, when the dharma bull still had three legs, when you abducted the wife of the exiled Ram from their household, and then tore her up from the inside. It was a senseless life of never-ending wandering! And you bastards pretend to be devotees of Ram? Now in this kali-yug of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, when the dharma bull has but one leg, you are fashioning Ram into your very own barbaric, violent, murderous, fundamentalist, misanthropic, fascist image! Because you need the votes. Because you have to cling to power. Because now you need more to eat.

“How many thousands of years do you need power? If you want to know the truth, you bastards, here it is. The Huns never really held power in this country. Neither did the Scythians, the Kushans, the Greeks, the Mughals, or the English. Each of these regimes was just a cover for your Raj. The machete blade that’s come down for centuries on the neck of every honest, meek man who stands for justice is really just a symbol of your political power. If you have been so ennobled, then tell me: why wasn’t god ever born a Brahmin?”

Rahul was shaking with rage. But the dark stain had been wiped from Shaligaram’s face, and Shailendra George didn’t seem frightened anymore.

Just then, Dr. Loknath Tripathi entered the room. “Is there some kind of meeting going on here? Oh, right, of course, you’re all getting ready for the Union Council elections. But which candidate was giving the speech?”

The group of girls also returned. Now the medieval devotional literature lesson would begin, given by Dr. Loknath Tripathi, at whose house Balram Pandey worked as a cook, and who would one day become head of this Hindi department.

The three o’clock class was over. Thick tension suddenly cast its shadow throughout the entire classroom. Rahul felt as if he was suffocating. He stepped outside into the corridor. From there he could see the library. Next to it were two leafy neem trees; the shade beneath them must be deliciously cool.

As Rahul stood there, Kartikeya, O.P., Pratap, and a few others came running over.

“Sapam committed suicide. He’s dead.” Kartikeya’s face trembled. Everyone was out of breath.

“They found his body in the old well behind the hostel.”

There was a deep silence, screaming and ringing even in the absence of sound. Like after a falling meteor breaks up, or after a big explosion, or after a horrific death.

Rahul’s mind went still. No sound reached his ears. He fell in step behind his friends like a robot.

In the cool shade of the neem tree near the library stood Chaitanya — Chaitanya, the great master. But there was no singing of kirtans; the man was silent. His body was covered with scratches. His brow was disfigured. A bullet may have pierced a hole right between his eyes, sending a steady stream of blood flowing over his eyes.

A broken dholak lay on the ground, with a kartal and tiny set of cymbals next to the drum. And next to them, corpses. The police, Border Security Force, Central Reserve Police Force, a band of terrorists, a gang of Mafiosos, a fundamentalist, the Taliban or Hizbul or the Ranbir Sena, some Naxalites, Acchan Guru, Dawood, and the secret service detail of some government minister — all combined in a joint operation, and, after some wild firing, had shot them dead.

Behind the neem tree stood Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse, smoke coming from his gun.

Chaitanya’s mouth was still moving to sing the next line of the devotional kirtan song, but the only sound coming out was a near-silent bhaanya bhaanya bhaanya.

Rahul realized that on the grass next to his feet and the broken dholak was Sapam’s body.

“I’ll kill myself someday, I really will. Mark my words! How can I go on? Tell me? My brother sent me money for my studies. Now I’ll fight for my freedom. Do you know what they did to me. .?”

White ducks ran everywhere; drops of blood stained their feathers. A wind blew through the dry bamboo grove playing thousands of bamboo trees like the bansuri. They’d learned how to play the flute from Krishna, whom Rukmini came there to meet.

Sapam’s brother stared silently at him with his dead eyes. His father played the dholak and sang.

Rahul burst into tears. O.P. and Kartikeya tried to calm him down. “Try to pull yourself together, Rahul!”

Anjali Joshi stood silently in the corridor, watching.