The Girl with the Golden Parasol

TWENTY-SEVEN

O.P. grabbed Rahul by the collar from behind. Rahul had seen the yellow butterfly through the window, fluttering up from the valley below, had thrown on his pants and a T-shirt in a hurry, and was dashing out the door. “Do you really believe I think you’re going ‘jogging’ so early in the morning? Am I that stupid?”

“So where am I going, then?” Rahul asked like a good boy.

O.P. landed his fist on Rahul’s back. “Go, go to your paracetamol. But just remember that one of these days, it’ll be me who saves your behind. Now get outta here!”

Rahul leapt down the stairs three at a time. The fever had sapped his energy — who knows where all this energy and enthusiasm had come from.

You are my power Anji, my shakti!

But as soon as he saw her, he knew something was wrong. She was looking all around and said, “Don’t come running like that, Rahul! Things have changed now. Let’s go over there, quick!”

They came to the area behind the storeroom, a safe little corner surrounded by two big rocks and lentinas. Anjali closed the parasol and hid it under a bush. She needed to get something off her chest in one big breath. Rahul saw the worry in her face. She took hold of Rahul’s arm as if she were holding onto a thing about to get away, as if she were a boatman making one last attempt to seize his oar being swept away by a strong current. Rahul trembled, she held his arm with such force!

Tears filled Anjali’s eyes. “Everything’s okay for now, but we have to stay alert,” she said.

“What happened? Tell me,” Rahul said, smoothing back the hair that had fallen in her face.

“Someone said something to my brother about us. And some crazy things were said about you, like you take drugs, like you’re a questionable character, like you’re a Naxalite.”

Rahul was shaking. “Who said all of this?”

“They also said that before coming here you were mixed up in some criminal case and expelled from another university. .”

“Bastards!” Rahul’s blood was boiling. “Everything’s a lie.”

“You think I don’t know that, Rahul?” Anjali said, taking his hand in her lap. “Anyone who knows you believes you, Rahul,” she continued. “But how many people know you? And if they don’t know you, they’ll believe whatever they hear. Right? That’s why lies are always more potent.”

“Jesus!” Rahul was in agony. “Kartikeya’d said that they’d started operations at their factory.”

“Factory?” Anjali didn’t understand.

“Never mind,” Rahul said. “Tell me what you think about me.”

“What I think about you?” Anjali said as if he’d set off a storm. She looked at him with knowing eyes. By the time Rahul could move his face into position, she’d already pounced. “This is what I think! And this! And. . and. .”

In an abandoned place between two walls of rock, a synchronized ecstasy, a madness, welled up with equal force inside the two bodies, spilling over until they were crashing together, flying together.

Their faces were wet and sticky. Their clothing had gotten wrinkled, covered in little dried blades of grass and leaves.

“The girls have really supported me. Sharmishtha, Lata, Chandra. Anima, Abha, and Neera Didi, from your anthropology department, all of them came to visit me at home,” Anjali said, taking a deep breath. “While you were having a grand old time enjoying your fever.”

“I kept looking out the window for you. Why did you start coming to campus by car?”

“What could I have done? My brother got a driver so he could spy on me.” Then Anjali smiled. “But now everything’s okay. All we have to do is be a little careful.”

“But who’s behind all of this?” Rahul asked.

“All of them. All the Brahmins,” Anjali said. She thought silently, then added, as if scolding, “But don’t forget, Rahul, you won the election because of Brahmins, and they saved your skin this time, too.”

That startled Rahul. What confusion! He thought for a moment. Then he pulled her toward him.

So, her too! Dear god, what does all this mean?

Kinnu Da once said, “In the history of this country no caste has ever maintained a fixed position. In one area they’re high on the ladder. In another, lower. In some other field, they’re in the middle. These castes have fascinating mobility, downward and upward. The caste that has risen to the top of any field, in any place, is simply the one that’s seized power. These castes are capable of exceptional dynamism! That’s why they’re not so fanatical, or orthodox, since more dynamism and more variety equals greater liberality and greater openness.

“But there is one group that has carved out a static place for itself. Totally immovable. Right at the top. For thousands of years. This is the Brahmin caste. Free from physical labor. Illustrious representatives of a culture reaping pleasure from others’ work, struggle, and sacrifice. With its leave from labor, this caste created a kingdom of heaven it inhabited for centuries; during this time, it gave birth to another kingdom, one of illusion, and filled it with language, superstition, schemes, codes of law, false consciousness — all of which it used to control the lives and minds of those from other castes, and to rule all of society.

“Rahul, you must have read the Israeli poet Amichai, ‘A Very Active Head on a Very Pensive Trunk.’ A cunning, conspiracy-filled, racing head on top of a good-for-nothing, vagrant body. The kind of head you could drive the straightest of nails into, and it would come out a screw or spring.”

Kinnu Da turned serious and said, “They are the greatest and deadliest power manipulators for centuries! Nowhere in all of world history will you find a caste of clever magicians so bent on cinching power into the grip of their vise. A well-organized nexus of power manipulators. This group is capable of doing anything for power and money. And it’s the great misfortune of this country that they’ve always been successful. Even today!”

Oh, so that’s what it means! Chaos reigned in Rahul’s mind. That’s the reason the world of Hindi literature produced such lovely poetic odes for Queen Victoria. Songs were written to sing the glory of King George V upon his visit to India. Poems and articles were written during the Raj in praise of the British: you have saved us from untouchables, heretics, barbarians, and the butchers, also known as Muslims. During the Mughal Raj, they wrote couplets and quatrains and dactylic poems in Braj and Awadhi to flatter their rulers. Thank you, thank you a thousand times over for saving us from those insolent, wild, base, boorish villagers, and from the fallen castes.

Now at the turn of the twenty-first century, these everlasting upper casters of Hindi literature have started their sycophancy in flattery of corrupt bureaucrats and politicians. Rahul’s soul was crisscrossed with shame, disgust, and dejection.

Am I working toward an MA in Hindi literature or Brahmin literature? In order to get across his revolutionary message, Buddha had to abandon Sanskrit, seeking refuge in Pali. So now, must Hindi be dropped in favor of using some other language to formulate ideas to provoke change? This means that now neither Buddha nor Gandhi would be a possibility in Hindi. Only Acharya Tribhuvan Narayan Mishra and the Padmashree Tiwari will survive!

“Oh, shit, shit, shit!” came out of Rahul’s mouth.

Anjali was looking at him with bewilderment. “What happened? You seem a little frazzled.”

“I’m okay,” Rahul said, kissing her forehead. “I love you too much! I love you like I’m some kind of madman.” He stopped for a moment and gazed at her with a look of anguish, nearly imperceptible. Anjali recognized it, and knew herself what it was. Rahul’s face was now showing signs of swoon.

“Believe me, please! I really truly love you, Miss Joshi!” Rahul said in a weak voice.

“Tsk!” Anjali said, slapping Rahul’s cheek. But the slap she had lovingly placed on Rahul’s cheek at the “Miss Joshi” joke wasn’t a joking matter. It was a matter of deep suffering.

From all sides at once a windstorm suddenly sprang up, gusts crashing and cutting into one another. Anjali grabbed her parasol and clutched it tightly. Luckily it wasn’t open, otherwise it would have been carried away in the wind like all the dried leaves, grass, and plastic bags swirling in the air.

“We call this kind of storm a ‘dammon’ in my village — a ‘demon’ of wind. People say that if you chase down the first leaf blown in the storm and press it between your teeth, you’ll disappear, become completely invisible. Then no one will be able to see you,” Rahul said.

“I see!” Anjali said. “Should we try to find the first leaf?”

“We’ll never find that leaf with all that trash flying around, and even if we did, how can one leaf make two people disappear?” Rahul said, his mood lightening.

“Of course two people can disappear!” Anjali countered.

“From one leaf?” Rahul asked, uncertain.

“Sure!” Anjali was smiling.

“How?” It was perplexing to Rahul.

“No, really, they can disappear. I said they could, didn’t I? So what do you mean, ‘how’?” Anjali said, pushing her point.

“But. .” Rahul still wasn’t getting the logistics. “How?”

“Like this!” Anjali said, and wrapped herself around Rahul with all her might. Rahul felt that the two of them really had disappeared. No one could see them now. But they could see everyone — the entire world, the whole town, from one end of the sky to the other.

At one end of the field, behind a makeshift storeroom, at the foot of the hill, in a secret, deserted place between two big gray walls of rock, Anjali and Rahul had become invisible. All that remained was Anjali’s yellow parasol. That too was shut closed, hidden under a lentina bush.

And what about the other parasol? That was a butterfly, which had one day transformed its very form, playing a trick on the whole world. In front of everyone’s eyes and in broad daylight.