The Girl with the Golden Parasol

SIX

Around two thirty that afternoon, it happened to Rahul: the event that takes place for some only once in a lifetime.

There were a few clouds in the sky; it had rained two days before. All the trees and buildings on campus, freshly washed by the rain, sparkled in the midday sun.

The color of August is a lush, deep green, and the days are filled with the earthy fragrance of wet grass. Going for a walk in August means having your shoes muddied with blades of grass or tender shoots. It’s the season for eating roasted corn on the cob.

After the stone-throwing incident, Rahul and his friends went on alert. The day when Rahul’s life changed forever, he sat with his friends in the department common room: Abha, Seema Philip, Manmohan, Rana, Anima, Raju, Renu, Neera Didi, and Bhagvat. They ate their corn on the cob, started playing Hindi film song games, then argued about cricket and TV series, and wound up playing the table like a tabla and taking turns singing songs. They’d bolted the windows and doors from the inside to be sure none of the local goondas would barge in and cause trouble. It was two days until the holiday of Rakshabandhan, when sisters tie colorful threads of affection — the rakhi — around the wrists of their brothers, or those they consider like brothers. Talk was thick about which girls, by dint of tying the rakhi around the wrist of a boy or a teacher, would cancel once and for all the one-sided soap opera and recast the once-aspiring lover as esteemed brother. Raju and Neera Didi had in their possession a bona fide treasure trove of juicy information.

Neera Didi began. “So Aggrawal Sir is always coming to campus these days wearing this cap. The other day it started raining and the cap got totally soaked. Water ran through it like an old rag. But he still refused to take it off. He didn’t want Rita Saxena to see his bald head and go run off with someone else.”

“If a girl sits on Aggrawal’s head, she’ll slip and she’ll fall and she might wind up dead!” Raju rhymed along with his tabla-like drumming on the table.

“And then there’s that Hindi poet, Tiwari Sir. I heard the other day that the librarian told him off in front of everyone. She asked him, ‘Do you come to the library to look at the books, or to ogle the girls?”’

“He’s a Peeping Tom and a voyeur! They say he even called the parents of girls to tattle on them. He got beaten up for it once.”

“The jerk even won the Padmashree award. He’s a great big slimy leech. Now he’s in London at the behest of the World Hindi Conference.”

That day Anima was wearing a plum-colored sleeveless blouse and a sea-blue silk sari. It went with her dusky complexion and gave her some pizzazz. Her pimply, flat face had a mischievous twinkle like a kid’s, but her eyes were big and innocent. She sang:

Oh love of my youth, please don’t leave my heart

When you think of me, please pray we’ll never part

and then

Our love is perfect, lover, so strong it will not break

He who puts me to the test should come with ring and cake

Anima’s voice was like a sorrowful flute whose notes didn’t project outward but rather inward, descending somewhere deep inside. Her voice affected Raju, who nearly fell into a trance with his drumming. What sadness must there be inside of this dark girl to make her voice well up so?

Abha sang a rap song she’d written herself. It was a riot. Rahul pitched in with a Panjabi pop song of Hansraj: Hey, pretty girl, don’t walk alone, come on with me, let’s leave this world behind.

The song was so catchy that soon Rana, Neera Didi, Abha, Anima, and the rest joined in.

“How about some Daler Mendhi?” Raju requested. Everyone sang along.

Just then someone knocked on the door.

The tabla reverted once again to a mute, wooden table as silence spread through the room. At this hour? Who could it be? All the teachers were off at the vice-chancellor’s residence and wouldn’t be back until five in the evening.

Could it be some gang member? In their singing reverie they’d forgotten that their voices probably carried into the corridor.

Rahul went to the door and unlatched it.

And there she was, standing at the door. She, whom Rahul saw for the first time in his whole life.

Here were her two big eyes brimming with surprise. On the brink of laughter, her lips and cute little nose suddenly frozen. She wore a Jaipuri tie-dyed green, yellow-and-red-spotted chunni. Her kurta was the yellow of spring flowers and her salwar was white. She was very fair skinned, with a drop of honey brown.

“Hi, Anjali!” Seema Philip and Anima called out.

“What are you guys up to? I didn’t disturb anything, did I?’ Anjali asked, sitting down next to Anima.

“No, yaar, you just logged on to www.time-pass-musical.com,” Seema said.

“Do you want some corn on the cob? I’ve got half of mine left,” offered Renu.

“Heaven forbid! She’s a strict Brahmin,” Seema said in jest. “She’ll become an outcaste if she eats your defiled piece of food.”

Anjali began to munch on the corn. Rahul watched her. How could a girl look so beautiful, so innocent, so vulnerable?

Rahul felt as if a cool, peaceful breeze had entered the room with Anjali.

Chappa, chappa charkha chale, awni bawni bereyon tale. .

Raju picked up the tempo on the table. Then, in a soft, slow voice, Rana began singing again. Rahul joined in here and there.

It turned out that Anjali was the daughter of Joshi, a cabinet minister at the state level. L. K. Joshi, minister of the Public Works Department. The family must have come from the hills once upon a time, but they’d been living in town for generations. Joshi had started as a forest contractor and then became a real-estate developer. He’d made millions. During this round of elections, his first time running for office, Joshi got on the ticket for the state legislature, won, and then finagled a state ministerial appointment. Behind him was the full weight of the businessmen, contractors, and real-estate dealers. He could also count on such criminal characters as Acchan, Bablu, and Lakhan Pandey.

Joshi was considered one better than the Machiavellian political sage Chanakya, or so was common belief in the area. People said one day he’d go far in national politics. Astrologers clearly saw that it was in the stars.

And Anjali? That girl munching merrily away on her corn on the cob?

Anjali was the girlfriend of Seema Philip and Anima. The three of them had gone to the same inter-college for girls and had been inseparable. Anima said that Anjali was doing her MA in Hindi.

An MA in Hindi?

Rahul did a double take. An image of the Hindi department flashed before his eyes: the dull, gray, sick-looking walls, the red stains from paan juice spat out, garbage strewn in the corners, filth everywhere. It was as if the most isolated part of the university had been plunged into a blighted darkness. The mysterious building was serving a life sentence in solitary confinement.

And the people who went in and out of the department! They didn’t look like they were living in today’s world. From the clothes they wore to the way they walked and talked, they were completely other. The males often traveled around campus together in a pack. Girls would see them and take fright. They spoke in high-pitched voices, screeching loudly, clapping their hands, having a coughing fit, all the while laughing at their own jokes in a sound like that of a mirthful primal man who’d jumped the fence into civilization. Ha-ha, hee-hee, hoo-hoo.

They were at once ridiculous and frightful, inspiring both pity and fear. They spoke in a peculiar language among themselves, some spirit tongue of a dead culture.

Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit: nobody really knew for sure why these three departments existed at all. What kind of future would their graduates have? No one had a clue. Those boys were ragged, misfits, backward, isolated from the real world, and their teachers made for the same caricature. One student would shamelessly scratch his crotch in public, while another shaved-head dhoti-clad type would ogle some girl like a chimpanzee.

Students on campus jokingly referred to the department as “leftover land.” Any girl with brains and talent took admission in any of the other departments that were part of the university mainstream. Only the leftovers enrolled in the Hindi department. One look at them and you knew: dropouts.

Could this Anjali Joshi really be part of that same Hindi department? What if next week she turns into a mother gorilla? She’ll look like some forest-dwelling rishi chick, speaking in middle Indo-Aryan or Pali, smeared with turmeric paste, drinking boiled cow or yak’s milk. Rahul heard from Anima that Anjali had been quite ill around the time of her graduation. She’d come down with jaundice, and was in a miserable state when she took her exams. Her grades, understandably, were simply awful, and she barely passed. So her father had a word with S. N. Mishra, the head of the Hindi department, who took care of matters, and so she was admitted.

Kinnu Da once said, “Take any language. As long as there is some group of people, somewhere, using it to communicate, it won’t vanish. In spite of the massive spread of European languages, centuries of colonialism and imperialist subjugation, the itsy-bitsy indigenous languages of Africa and Asia still haven’t been eradicated. Living languages still exist today, like Ho, which is spoken by only a few adivasis.”

So, they are the tribals! They are the adivasis of today.

“No, those aren’t the adivasis,” Kartikeya countered. “They’re the Muslim mullahs and the Hindu purohits. Don’t forget, an adivasi is never retrogressive. He adapts to the times.”

I’ll become a gorilla, too. A homo sapiens. A purohit. I’ll chew paan and gutkha, run around in a pack and laugh and laugh: Haha, hee-hee, hoo-hoo.

Rahul watched from the corridor. In between Anima and Seema Philip was Anjali Joshi, walking away. In her right hand she held a parasol. A yellow parasol.

He had no doubt it was the same back that deflected the sun’s rays from Room 252. “If I had a slingshot,” Rahul thought, “I’d pull the rubber band all the way back to my ear and let loose a shot.”

A voice drenched in song, gratitude, and bittersweet pain would moan “Oooooooh,” and she would turn around with stunned, eager, inviting eyes.

And she would freeze in that pose.

That day was truly the first time in Rahul’s life that a real, living, breathing, flesh-and-blood girl had been captured in a freeze-frame, and her name was Anjali Joshi.