The Girl with the Golden Parasol

TWENTY-ONE

The night of September the twelfth. Ten thirteen and twenty-three seconds.

Kartikeya Kajle’s voice echoed over the speakers in the rooms in the four boys’ hostels where the core committee members of the SMTF lived. “Hello! Hello! Get ready. Quick. The jeep’s in the gate of C. V. Raman Hostel. Get hold of everything you have! Okay — wait for the next call. Okay. Over and out.”

As fast as they could, Niketan, Praveen, Masood, Madhusudan, Kannan, O.P., Ravi, Dinesh, Imroz, Parvez, Hemant Barua, Dinamani, Ramesh Ataluri, Gulab Kesavani, and the rest of the twenty-five boys from the four hostels armed themselves with hockey sticks, iron rods, knives, dandas, Rampuri knives, switchblades, chains, and homemade pistols. Other students ran back and forth as fast as they could from one end of the hostel to the other to spread the information to the other students. Some scaled to the roof of C. V. Raman Hostel carrying Molotov cocktails, bricks, stones, and hand grenades. The goondas’ jeep was idling below.

D. Gopal Rajulu: Room 112. Naukant Jha: Room 148. These two students, from Andhra Pradesh and Bihar, living in C. V. Raman Hostel, were on the top of the hit list. Rajulu had received a money order for 20,000 rupees and Naukant Jha one for 8,500.

The bald, shrewd, decrepit postman, growing old, had spied again, greedy for commission. But the difference this time was the students had intercepted his information and were ready before the criminals could make their move.

Twenty minutes later, the SMTF swung into action.

Bang, bang, bang!

The door of Room 112 was kicked in and a group of boys barged into Rajulu’s room like a whirlwind. At that very instant, the main circuit breaker was thrown and all four hostels were plunged into darkness.

Biff! Bam! Whiz!

In the dark, billy clubs, rods, and hockey sticks went into motion. A sudden crashing sound from somewhere. Someone fired a pistol. Glass was breaking.

Lacchu Guru, the notorious town goonda with a police record a mile long, lay writhing on the ground of Room 112 with his four underlings, covered in blood. He had been relieved of his pistol. He’d sustained fifty blows in under a minute.

The five goondas were in a state of shock. They were being dragged into the hallway.

“Be careful. We don’t want them to die. Take them downstairs. .” Rahul was issuing instructions. His beefed-up arms were pulsating. The six-foot-three skinny skeleton O.P., center forward on the field, was using his hockey stick to score a few more goals on Lacchu Guru’s skull. Pratap and Kartikeya looked dead serious.

Eighteen-year-old first-year Niketan, who hardly had a trace of facial hair, had transformed into Bruce Lee and was in the middle of the goondas lashing them with his belt like a whip.

The main circuit breaker was switched back on. A simultaneous chorus ushered from all four hostels. “Ho! Ho! Hurray! The electricity’s back!”

It had been a first-rate success. In their eagerness, some of the students wanted to torch the goondas’ jeep, and had even poured gasoline on it. It came so close they were ready to toss a Molotov cocktail down from the roof, or light a match. But Pratap and Masood talked them out of it. Nevertheless, this didn’t mean that the goondas would be able to make a getaway in their jeep; to make sure they didn’t, the air had been let out of all four tires.

The goondas were marched down the steps down to the field in front of Raman Hostel. More than three hundred students had materialized in a flash. Their faces beamed with the pride of the victorious and delight in their success.

“Hip, hip, hooray!”

Hip hip hip hip.

“Down with goondas!”

“No more goondas!”

Ajay Devgan took a giant leap from somewhere in the crowd and landed both his boots on the goondas’ backs, just like Bruce Lee, shouting “ho, shu, shu,” showing off his karate-judo moves, whipping his belt around in the air. He removed his shirt with the bloodthirsty look of Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator and, grabbing the bewildered goondas by the scruff of their necks, hoisted them in the air, just as a massive monkey arrived on the scene and used his bare fist to rain blow after blow on the goondas’ ugly mugs. The chant of victory echoed from the crowd—“Victory to Hanuman!”

Rahul, as Pierce Brosnan of James Bond fame, pretended to help Lacchu Ustad to his feet while simultaneously kicking his legs out from under him, then laughed deeply.

And in the middle of the chaos emerged Johnny Lever and Jim Carrey from Mask, as the two clowning jokers flashed their teeth and began leaping around in song—

Shall I kill you, or let you go — speak. .

and

I am the Don, I am the Don. .

The six-foot-three ostrich became the superstar Amitabh Bachan, dancing away, kicking his sticklike legs into the air.

“Ab tera kya hoga re, Kaliyaa? Looks like the end of the line!” Gabbar Singh and Sambha said to the cowering, blood-soaked goondas.

Someone placed his hand on Rahul’s shoulder. It was Dinamani. He’d come from Manipur to do a postgraduate degree in geology. “He’s the one! Now I can make it out. He’s the one who beat Sapam. I recognize him. It’s 100 percent confirmed, I tell you!”

O.P. and Kartikeya had to restrain Rahul. He resisted like a wounded leopard, trying to break free. “I’ll kill him!”

“Control! Control yourself, Rahul! Rahul!” Kartikeya screamed.

The goondas were loaded into the back of the jeep. Students took up every inch of remaining space, from the hood in front to the spare tire in the back. The jeep, with no air in its tires, set off very slowly toward the residence of Vice-Chancellor Ashok Kumar Agnihotri, trailed by the throng of students.

Rahul noticed that amid the crowd of hooting and hollering students following the jeep were Sapam and his brother, walking silently. Rahul’s eyes met Sapam’s for an instant, and he saw Sapam’s brother. Blood still flowed from his temple. It was the spot on his head where the police, thinking him a terrorist, had shot him dead while he was on his way to school to teach.

“Every civilization absolutely needs to have a big collective dream, a utopian ideal, one without self-interest. History has shown us that there hasn’t been any civilization without some sort of craze or madness,” Kinnu Da had once said.

“Have you read Michel Foucault? The fear and avarice in the West toward lepers and nonwhite indigenous peoples in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was nothing more than a craze, a frenzy, a collective neurotic disorder. The notion that ideas, religions, philosophies, and political theories are great ones, or worthless ones, depends on the kind of utopia or frenzy or dream they manage to create in the minds of the individuals of that civilization, and to what extent they contain a minimal degree of violence, hatred, fear, and destruction. Buddha and Gandhi were so remarkable because there was no place in their dreams for violence or hatred. Meanwhile, most of the ‘constructs’ that have issued forth from the West have not been fully devoid of violence or hatred.”

Kinnu Da’s voice echoed in Rahul’s ears. “Rahul, the West has beaten Gandhi for good. My fear is that soon we’ll have a bloodbath and everything will be broken up into tiny pieces.”

Rahul looked at Sapam and his brother. Then he saw the great master, Chaitanya, mortally wounded, standing beneath the neem tree along with his broken drum and cymbals. Then he saw that a map of the country he loved with all his heart was breaking into tiny pieces, scattering, and disappearing into a black hole.

“I’m not opposed to the market. But the market is no ‘collective dream,’ no utopia. No dream can be seen in the marketplace. There is nothing in it that is great, moral, or lofty. All its ingredients — gains, losses, profit, cash — are tiny and base. The market is operated by the science of exploitation, greed, gambling, thuggery, and self-interest.” Kinnu Da’s voice was grave and sad. “Can’t you see with your own eyes that wherever a market comes to a country, the place is torn to bits and handed over to violence and bloodshed.”

The great countries and united republics — those that had been eaten away by market forces — flashed before Rahul’s eyes: Kosovo, Serbia, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union.

America and some rich European countries had become countries of commerce, and then transformed third world societies into their wholesale markets, turning them on their heads, bringing destruction and violence, flooding them with their brokers. The limbs were dismembered and organs ripped from one society after another, from one once-sovereign country to another, and then brought into conflict. Scattered, wasted, spoiled.

It’s interesting that television and newspapers only report the daily ups and downs of the stock market index, but not the nonstop destruction, disintegration, violence, and conflict happening everywhere, from all sides, twenty-four hours a day.

Now is it our turn? Who is the agent representing this market? Who is the real enemy of the country? Is it the offspring of the demon Ravana, cast across the ocean by Pulastya? Have they returned, the English having, in fact, handed over power to them?

Rahul, O.P., Kartikeya, Parvez, Imroz, and Hemant were standing together on the back of the jeep. Their hands were clasped together and they sang:

Let the time come, O heavens, and we’ll tell

But for now in our hearts — what can we say?

Sacrifice, sacrifice — the longing for sacrifice

Vice-Chancellor Ashok Kumar Agnihotri, after a long period of slogan chanting by the students, finally emerged from his residence. He’d called the police. Soon they arrived and took away Lacchu Guru and his four wounded associates.

He promised that the university would beef up security in the student hostels. The students shouldn’t take the law into their own hands. He had information that weapons had been stockpiled in some students’ rooms. This was illegal. He’d used his influence to dissuade the superintendent of police, who otherwise would have already raided and searched several rooms in the hostel.

The VC added he’d also received information about the indecent conduct of a few students. Students should focus their entire concentration on building their futures. If you asked him, he was against the type of higher education that was unrelated to the question of job salary or earning potential. We are living through such wonderful times, with endless career opportunities. Short-term courses were now offered. Why waste your time with dead-end pursuits? Take a diploma and fly to America, the vice-chancellor advised with a laugh.

“Sir, the criminals that were just now apprehended were exactly those ones who beat Sapam Tomba within an inch of his life. .”

“They tried to sodomize him. . and they made him urinate on the heater and it was the shock from that which. .”

Rahul and Dinamani tried to interrupt the VC. “Sir, the Sapam Tomba who committed suicide!”

“Oh!” Ashok Agnihotri exclaimed, his tone turning serious. “I will look into it. What a tragedy. I have a lot of sympathy for his father. Poor chap. . I called the governor and chief secretary of Manipur. They had his father informed. You know, that’s why the fashion show and cultural program of September 10 was postponed. Because of it, the university took an 800,000-rupee loss. We’ve talked with the sponsors. It would have been an excellent source of revenue. I had made such grand plans. I realized we need to generate extra funds on our own. What does the UGC give us? Everything goes to staff salaries. I want to develop a park here. I want to computerize the entire administration. I want to provide twenty-four-hour net-surfing access in all student hostels, for a nominal and reasonable fee.”

“Your security officers are mixed up with the local goondas and criminals, sir!”

“And the postman tells all of them which students are getting how much money sent. .”

“The hostel warden is bungling the job terribly, sir!”

“There’s rampant cheating in the admission process, sir!”

“The dining hall food’s not even fit for a dog, sir!”

“There’s no doctor and no medicine in the dispensary. .”

“The Hindi department’s a den of Brahmanists, sir.”

“Teachers don’t teach classes and are always on strike. It’s a big loss for students, sir!”

Everyone watched as the smile from Agnihotri’s face suddenly disappeared, replaced by anger and annoyance. He marched back inside his bungalow with his four security guards.

Back in the Max Cyber Cafe, information about Vice-Chancellor Ashok Agnihotri was fed into the de facto file and came out like this:

The Vice-Chancellor is so technically dexterous and cunning in constructing a web of fiscal duplicity and abusing monetary funds to suit his purposes that there is no chance he’ll be caught for his corruption. During his tenure as VC he’s promoted only his yes-men, family members, and love interests. Ignoring wholesale the rules and regulations of the University Grants Commission, and without advertising the positions, Mr. Ashok Agnihotri appointed his flunkeys and in-laws, who had no proper academic qualifications, to various posts, totally at his whim, and then put them in charge of various projects, awarded them grants and fellowships, and sent them abroad. The person whom Agnihotri appointed as editor of the English list of the university press had a degree in Hindi, and couldn’t write a complete sentence in English. An individual made professor of psychology had received his degree from Pantnagar Technical Community College in horticulture. The new professor of mathematics had been in the bottom third of his graduating class in botany. But despite all this, no one dared open their mouths to speak against Agnihotri because most of them were greedy, cunning cohorts who’d been pressed into compliance by Agnihotri’s favors. Another main power base of his derived from the deep connections and caste ties he maintained inside the range of educational institutions and cultural foundations. To mark the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, a local institution used university money to publish a special commemorative volume on Agnihotri in which testimonials from twenty-eight writers — twenty-one Brahmins, three Baniyas, one Kayastha, two Thakurs, and one foreigner — proved that his fame had spread more widely throughout the world than even that of Emperor Ashoka, Akbar the Great, or Alexander.

According to the de facto file, he’d received a nice commission from a secret deal to lease a few hundred acres of university land to some local real estate developers and businessmen. He considers university funds to be his own private bank account, and to drink a glass of water he goes to London, and to piss he goes to America. This corrupt vice-chancellor is allowed to be so powerful because the system itself is corrupt through and through.

Kartikeya Kajle said, “Look, if nothing is done, this country will turn into another Haiti, Panama, Colombia, or Dubai. The Mafia Raj will take over, and come Gandhi’s birthday on October 2, they’ll be the only ones permitted at Rajghat. All other citizens will not be allowed to enter.”

“Why are you talking about this in the future tense?” Pratap said, laughing. “It’s already happened, or about to.” Pratap may have been joking, but a sense of real distress hid behind the laughter. The darkness of the days to come flashed before his eyes.

“I’ve been thinking,” O.P. said. “Maybe I should throw myself at the feet of the vice-chancellor, wrap my arms around his ankles, and say, ‘O invincible Satan of our times, I rub my nose on the soles of your feet and beseech you to find a place for me just as you’ve found a place for your lapdogs and concubines.’ I’m scared, Rahul!” he said. He was always laughing and garrulous. But the dark shadow of despair and defeat crept into his voice.

Rahul, Hemant, O.P., Kartikeya, Praveen, Niketan, Parvez, Imroz, Masood, Ramesh Ataluri, Dinamani, Ravi, Madhusudan — all of these young men, age eighteen to twenty-four, had come here to study from various states, towns, and villages all over the country. Their parents weren’t the big businessmen, real estate developers, property agents, middlemen, or corrupt bureaucrats who trafficked in undeclared black money and lived in big metropolitan cities like Delhi-Bangalore-Chennai-Calcutta, but rather came from honest, hardworking families of farmers, small businessmen, and low-grade civil servants. Every month they’d cut corners and borrow money from somewhere so they could send money to their children, money steeped in their families’ tears, sweat, and dreams.

These weren’t the people seen with great regularity on TV and in newspapers. When they watched the colorful, well-off Indian Middle Class on TV, with their living room, dining room, terrace, car in garage, cell phone in hand — their eyes nearly popped out of their sockets. Meanwhile, the plaster is peeling off the walls, the roof is cracked, the doors creak, the dal needs to be cleaned and cooked and flour kneaded into roti for lunch or dinner, all the while calculating the ever-rising cost of living, and interest on the money they’ve borrowed. Without dowry, their daughters remain at home, unmarried, and their sons, unemployed, are so ashamed they stay away from the house all day long. These sons can be found in groups hanging around railway platforms, standing on the side of the road, sitting near cramped workmen’s quarters or in a storefront with a public payphone or in some vacant, empty place, lost in wait for a miracle.

These young men numbered tens of millions. They were not defective in either body or mind. They were young men full of limitless capability, talent, and hard work. But worry had made their cheekbones protrude.

“I’ll make a million somehow and really show those sister-fuckers. .”

“I haven’t gone home in three days. The old man’s started counting the roti I eat. Got any money? Can you fix us up with some chai. .”

“You know that big finance guy, T. D. Gupta. The fat, macho bastard’s looking to settle down and he’s got his eyes on my sister. Last month she got a job, 800 rupees a month.”

“Kundanani was saying, one trip to Singapore means 10,000 for me.”

“And he’ll fuck you if you get caught. Is his papa gonna pay your bail?”

“Yaar, if I could just get my hands on Rajan or Ibrahim’s phone number. .”

“5,000, that’s all I’m asking for, and I swear, I’d kill anyone.”

“Ramashankar took himself a trip to Nepal and made out like a bandit. He was talking about taking me along next time.”

“That Deepa, you know, the Khaddus Bakery daughter? Ever since she opened that beauty parlor, her parents’ luck totally turned around. .”

“Beauty parlor my ass. That’s just a cover for another hobby of hers. Junior engineer Sharma and builder Satvinder are both in on it, and in on her. .”

“Don’t let her brother hear that. He’ll fix your clock.”

“Let him hear, the little bastard. He’s just a commission man. Give me 2,000 and I can take you over to see her right now.”

“Hey, Kishore, didn’t you do an MSc in Physics?”

“Yeah, but I’ve forgotten fucking everything. Now I think I’ll get into politics. Listen, I’ve got a plan. I’ll get some fake papers to make it look like I have a job, show them to some lucky parents, get married with a big dowry, have a humping week-long honeymoon, sell the wife, and take off for Dubai. God knows, I’m sick of this kind of life.”

The Indian markets were crammed full of every kind of perfume, cosmetic, soft drink, electronic gadget, washing machine, cell phone, digital TV, and handicam. Every week half a dozen new car models were coming out. In Delhi, hundreds of fast-food joints like McDonalds, KFC, and Nirulas were opening their doors. Nightclubs were sprouting up in the capital and in other big cities, where half-naked models served whiskey and wine, and the children of ministers, government bureaucrats, and criminals were having great fun. Indian and non-Indian lottery games operated openly, addicting people to them and dangling dreams of becoming millionaires and billionaires in front of their faces. The amount of money that ministers and government bureaucrats of this country spend on lunch in one day could bring drinking water, schoolteachers, and blackboards to all the villages in India, bring electricity to fields and homes, and be used to install proper toilets for slum dwellers.

But every person who thinks along those lines is considered to be a backward, out-of-step, old-fashioned stuffed ape in a museum. Every person with such ideas will be given a swift kick by the system, which will then shove him into the junkyard or label him a dangerous lunatic, and try to destroy him by any and all means.

The Parliament of India has been filled with killers, smugglers, lackeys of foreign companies, profiteers, black marketeers — all dishonest. Five-star hotels bloomed like flowers. Rivers of booze flowed through them. Mountains, forests, rivers, fields, minerals, ore, women, children, historical moments, conscience, religion, air, water, oceans: everything was being auctioned off. The prime minister was going to jail. Embezzlement, corruption, and thuggery cases were pending against multiple state chief ministers. The judge was on the take. Police were in cahoots with criminals, and each day of the turn of the century was smeared with the blood of innocent, honest, justice-seeking Indians.

One Jallianwallah Bagh massacre occurred at the hands of the English; now, dozens of Jallianwallah Baghs happen every day. The bastard offspring of Ravana have hoisted the flag of Ram and consolidated their control over every facet of reality.

Not a moment of peace, my friend

Not a moment of rest, my friend

And no end in sight

The boys waiting for a miracle were singing. Their faces sank into a dark shadow that grew more thick and dense with each passing moment. The night was so late, the darkness so dark, the silence so silent that it was terrifying.

Yet, on some leaf in this time of desolation and waste fell drops of cool dew, clear and uncorrupted, whose moistness still, occasionally, greened life.