The Girl with the Golden Parasol

EIGHT

The SMTF — Special Militant Task Force — consisted of twenty-five young men. Pratap Parihar had not only procured iron rods, khurkhuri blades, Rampuri knives, hockey sticks, tiger’s claws, cycle chains, billy clubs, and lathi sticks, but also arranged for three makeshift pistols.

Rahul and Madhusudan lifted the recipe for Molotov cocktails from Che Guevara’s Venceremos and filled ten soda bottles with gasoline, caustic soda, and miscellaneous shrapnel. Sapam and Kartikeya crafted homemade hand grenades from gunpowder, potash, lead shot, shards of glass, and nails that, when thrown, would burst open and cause all hell to break loose. These were the weapons for tossing into jeeps from the roof of the hostel, should the goondas happen to come at night.

“Venceremos! Venceremos! We shall overcome — we shall overcome! Our hearts are filled with faith!”

After that night, hostel warden Chandramani Upadhyay would seem like a scared, worried little mouse. Just over the last few days, he’d noticed a clear change in the boys’ behavior. The Namaste Index had fallen off sharply, went into a downward spiral, and nearly crashed. Even the rare “namaste” delivered like a blood-sucking protégé, reminiscent of the golden age and good old days, came from the lips of either a student from his department or a real ass kisser. Upadhyay had an eagle eye, infallible, for spotting boys of his own caste; so how was it he was now being fooled by not recognizing his own kind? Before, when he walked the halls, students made way and greeted him with a “namaste” or “adab” as he went by. Now they stood in groups, looked at him like he was some weird insect, and walked past talking among themselves, ignoring him. So now he stuck to the edge of the hallway. He was scared. Who knew if one of those bastards might take a cheap shot?

It’s been said the age of information and technology had descended upon India, and on Delhi, and then somehow even got dragged all the way to this university. Students had in their possession reams of information about each and every person. Only a short distance from the hostel complex a “Max Cyber Cafe” opened where a few boys made what they called “de facto” files on professors and administrators. Hemant Barua, a student from Assam studying in the Department of Mathematics (and simultaneously working on an e-commerce degree from the private IT school NIIT), led the information-gathering effort. Hemant was a chess master and his number-crunching skills were dumbfounding. He was short and dark, his hair curly, his eyes tiny, smiling, and blinking. Every day Hemant and Rahul played chess for an hour or so. When Rahul confessed his crush on Anjali, Hemant said, “Hold on a little while. First I’ll put together a full profile on the girl.”

Meanwhile, at the Max Cyber Cafe, the de facto file on hostel warden Dr. Chandramani Upadhyay looked something like this:

Name: Dr. Chandramani Upadhyay.

Age: Fifty-five years, seven months, four days.

Marital Status: Married, but left the Mrs. Brahmin back in the village in Uttar Pradesh with six kids. Now lives with his mistress, who writes about women’s issues.

Property: Bought two flats and three plots of land in town, but stays in the apartment reserved for the hostel warden. Besides his salary and retirement benefits, he holds several other private insurance policies. Has credit card. He gambles and plays the stock market.

Comment: A classic schemer. A loyal lacquered lackey of Vice-Chancellor Mr. Ashok Agnihotri.

Following this, some student added additional commentary.

Special Edition: Upadhyay-ji pays for all his food with money taken from the hostel fund. He siphons off everything he needs from the bank account of the hostel, buying everything, from his fruits and vegetables to paper and pens to paying for his taxi fare. He’s gotten jobs at the university for a couple of nieces and nephews. Upadhyay made some dirt-poor untouchable Dalit student ghostwrite the thesis for his live-in lover, and with it got her conferred a PhD. He’s a regularly attending supplicant and darbari at the court held by L. K. Joshi, state minister of the Public Works Department. He claims he’s a Marxist but in actuality he’s a die-hard Brahminist.