The Walls of Delhi

A PREFACE TO THE END OF TIME

(Reading this preface is mandatory)

This is the story of Chandrakant Thorat. It’s also my story.

And it’s a story that takes place in the present day, in our own time, a tale with the sights and sounds of this day and age. A few of the characters have been cast out of their own space and time, and now stand in wait for the destruction at the end. I am one of them, living outside of my proper space and time, in a filthy quarter far from the finery and culture of the city. The efforts of human beings to lead lives in the shanty towns that circle the city on grabbed land eventually take shape, one unfortunate day, on the maps of a town planner, or property dealer, or urban coloniser. Then, the engineers of the empire of money send out the bulldozers — they fan out, non-stop — until even a dirty sprawl of shacks is transformed into a Metro Rail, a flyover, a shopping mall, a dam, a quarry, a factory, or a five-star-plus hotel. And when it happens, lives like Chandrakant Thorat’s are gone for good.

***

Chandrakant Thorat is a friend of mine, and he’s one of the characters of this story. My life is bound to his as if by decree or fate. Even if I didn’t want it to be so, it would be.

You ought to know the truth: there are only two reasons lives like ours are stamped out. One: our lives are left over as proof of past and present sins and crimes against castes, races, cultures; they always want to keep this as hidden as they can. Two: our lives get in the way of the enterprising city, or act as a road bump in the master plan of a country that thinks of itself as a big player on the world stage. Our very humanity threatens to reveal the wicked culture of money and means as something suspect and unlovely. That’s why whenever civilizations once developing, now on the brink of prosperity, decide to embark on a program of ‘beautification’, they try to root out such lives, the same way the mess on the floor is swept outside.

Suppose we fled these megalopolises to an exurb, or to the mountains, or into the forest, or to a small town? There, too, lives like ours would one day be inundated and swept away, just as the Harappan or Babylonian civilizations you must have read about in archeology books were also wiped out.

The memory of the destruction at the end of time lies in the psyche of every community of every people, including ours.

There is something else you should know. Whenever our lives are steamrolled in the name of cultural progress and cultural beauty to profit the rich city or state; or when lives drown for power and energy: it’s not just us. The deer, butterflies, birds, elephants, pipal and teak trees, the flora (divine beings all) are also washed away from this earth. Beings that descended from heaven, thousands of years ago, in the ancient treta or dwapar epochs; beings that settled into rocks and books so that our suffering might be eased. To allow us to endure our pain and desolation. To light our way like a candle or firefly or light bulb in the darkness. When violence permeates everything, and reality has become a nightmare, these creatures carry us into a dream.

You know the truth: none of it is meant for us. Not the medicine of rich, developed nations that give relief from suffering, or the energy that creates the illusion of light and wind and words and dazzle — none is meant for us. Top-tier hospitals, banks, institutions, parliaments, courts, airports, and wide boulevards aren’t for us. We’re chased away from these places, or crushed underfoot.

Only they may inhabit the buildings and institutions built by civilizations of wealth. Their constitutions only serve to protect their interests. Their language of poetry and legend is covered with our blood, sweat, sorrow, and tears.

Their poems and epics aren’t ours. They want to keep us out of everything: poetry, prose, music, cities, work, industry, the marketplace. We’re the drudging, untouchable, poor, unemployed, dissatisfied, anxious, and hungry people who, to them, are utterly unknown. They despise us each and every moment; each and every moment, they wish to do away with us.

***

What do you think? In 2003, could what’s happened in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, or what happened in the middle of the twentieth century in Hiroshima-Nagasaki, Korea-Vietnam, or what happened two-and a half thousand years before Christ in Mohanjodaro, Harappa or Mesopotamia, or what’s happening right now, as I’m writing these lines, in Karbala, Baghdad, Fallujah, Najaf, Nasiriyah or in the Gaza strip — is it so different from what’s happening in Delhi’s Gurgaon, Noida, Silampur, Bhilasava, Rohini, Jiyasaray, Mahrauli? Or different from what’s happening on the banks and shores of the rivers Narmada, Son, Betava, Krishna-Cauveri, Dajla, Yangtzee, Amazon, Volga, Mississisppi, Jambeji, Thames, Nil, Sindhu, Ganga, Tungbhadra, and Kosi?

Read this preface to the end of time very carefully! Pore over each and every word and sentence, sift through the blank spaces and the silences in between. Close your eyes, focus all your concentration on our time, our age, and take a deep breath, a very deep breath. Breathe in the sun, the radiant, fiery ball that’s fixed in the sky. Take it all into your lungs: after all, the sun’s the only thing that connects us into harmony with time and space. Lie down on your back and relax. Forget the here and now and ponder the immortal Lord of Time, Shiva. The present moment is ephemeral, a mirage. Now place your right thumb between your two eyebrows and place your index finger on your forehead. Yes, good! Very good! Remain still, very still. And as soon as you do this — pop! — a little burst rushes forth, and the mystery of all life and creation and the universe will appear in front of you in the dim light of your own consciousness.

And after being liberated by your deep encounter with time, you too, like Chankrakant Thorat and me, will begin to wait for the great flood, the inescapable and omnivorous fire.

To anticipate the apocalypse.

To await Armageddon.

To hold on for a great new revolution, the likes of which has never been seen before.

The massive destruction that’s essential for anything new to rise up.

The mad volley of an age, of which a new epoch is born. A new civilization comes into existence. After the present fades into oblivion, everything can begin anew. A revolutionary moment marking the end of now and the beginning of to be.

Ah! And on that day, on a tiny, green leaf of a pipal or banyan or wishing tree, swims a little baby, screaming and swimming on top of the gigantic waves in a vast, fearsome ocean that’s swallowing all the earth and all creation into its belly. The sound of the baby’s weeping and wailing echoes throughout the whole universe.

Waaaah! Waaaah!

On a primitive wooden boat, without rudder or paddle… atop the churning tide, silently floating… flickering in the distance.

Ah! That wooden boat is very old… slowly floating off into the distance…

Oh, yes, I forgot to tell you something about Chandrakant and me… it’s that our head — yes, the round head that every living man has on his shoulders — it’s become big, and is continuously getting bigger. Doctors say it’s an incurable disease…

And the disease is called — ‘Mangosil.’

And it’s a disease for which medical scientists know no cure. Neither allopathic doctors, homoeopathic doctors, nor ayurvedic doctors. And nothing in Baba Ramdev’s Yoga and Pranayama Breathing Exercises to Tackle All Diseases. It’s true, an old fakir (you can find him at the shrine of Amir Khusrau, ‘the other master’) once said that there is a book in which its cure does indeed exist. But with a heavy sigh, he added that the problem was that this book is yet to be written.

For the past several years, both Chandrakant Thorat and I have carried the burden of our big heads on our shoulders, ever in search of that book. The fakir, whose eyes were red like the eyes of fire ants, creatures the creator did not give the capacity for sleep, animals that do not slumber once in their entire lives, insects that continuously carry thirty times their own body weight, or more; this fakir said, ‘A curse of rain and ruin on those who pen books of wickedness by their own hand and claim it the writ of Allah. And on those who claim that these books will bring an end to the sorrows and trials of man. Ruin will come to those who write these books, and ruin will befall those who profit from them.’

The fakir added, as he was leaving, ‘Look at your own life, and at the lives all around you. One day, on your own, you will stumble upon that book. But remember this: in it, you will find fire and water. And you will find a leaf or a boat above the tip of a flame, or the top of a wave, somehow swimming, somehow surviving. And you will hear a voice — a voice that will give birth to all other voices in the world that comes after.’

Chandrakant and I, carrying the burden of our heavy heads of bottomless sorrow on our shoulders, have been in constant search for that book.

You can see for yourselves: our eyes are red like the eyes of fire ants. We aren’t blessed with the capacity to sleep, and, in our life, we’re carrying thirty times our own weight. Are you watching? Can you see the blood that pours forth beyond the bounds of our speech? The same words that bring nothing but punishment without pause! Time and again, we’re forced to leave town. Place after place, they’re kicking us out.

Words that, one day, will give rise to all the world’s languages. Because the old fakir with eyes as red as a fire ant, sitting that day in front of the minor court of Hazarat Nizzumaddin — the shrine of Amir Khusrau, the first poet of the language we now call Hindi, said so. JAHANGIRPURI BYLANE NUMBER SEVEN

Buttressed by what is said to be the largest fruit and vegetable market in Asia lies a neighbourhood in Northwest Delhi — Jahangirpuri. If you’re travelling between India and Pakistan on the Goodwill Bus, you’ll see what looks like a residential area right before the bypass road on the left hand side — rising up from the mud and the muck, that’s Jahangirpuri. But from a distance the land between the highway and the settlement doesn’t seem to be made of simple blackened ooze, dirt and water, but instead from a chemical mix consisting of a molten solution of motor oil, grease, gasoline, and plastic. Might as well throw in the rotting organic matter from the fruit and vegetables as well.

Jagangirpuri was most assuredly settled without a planning map. Over many years, people showed up, built a house wherever they found some space, and settled down. In the surrounding area you’ll find what looks like ancient ruins, giving the impression that this area has been gradually inhabited over a period of centuries. If you’re flying overhead and glance down, you’ll see a mishmash of half-built houses. It’s as if someone took the waste material from wealthy Delhi’s architectural finest, and swept it clean out here into a pile: a trash heap of higgeldy-piggeldy brick houses tossed in the middle of a black chemical slime bog that exudes the stench of rotting fruit and vegetables. There are exceptions — a few multi-storied, modern houses. But this is like what Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Bombay look like from way up in the sky compared to the rest of India: incongruous tokens of priceless, shining marble stuck in the mire and mud of the subcontinent’s swamp of chilling poverty.

Narrow alleys or bylanes, no more than ten to twelve feet wide, wind through the rows of houses that are built right on top of one another in Jahangirpuri. In some places, they are as narrow as eight to ten feet from one side to the other. You can traverse these bylanes, without fear of collision, only on foot or by cycle. During the hot season, people bring their cots outside and sleep; settlements like these are the hardest hit by the capital city’s frequent power and water cuts. Gossip, STDs, dengue fever, black magic, criminality, and disease spread most vigorously in places like Jahangirpuri. This summer, the channels built for water drainage were all running open, and every morning, the young and the old and infirm squatted above them and did their business. The smell rising from the ditches after the water is turned off gives the neighbourhood its unmistakable stamp.

It’s half past ten at night right now in bylane number seven, where a fat, dark-complexioned man of forty-five or fifty tiptoes down the alley loosely clasping a bag in his right hand. It’s dark; all five lampposts in the streets are without bulbs. The bright light shining in the eyes of the people sleeping outside bothered them, so they unscrewed the bulbs. At the end of the bylane was (until just a few months ago) a working light, but Gurpreet and Somu from bylane three broke it because they were running around with Deepti and Shalini from E-7/2 of bylane seven, and liked it dark when they brought the girls back late at night on the back of their Hero Honda motorbikes. Deepti and Shalini were C-list models; aside from appearing in cheap ads for underwear and hair removal products, they were also available at nights in five-star hotels, or for private parties. An older lady of the night lived in house E-6/3. Her husband had been run over by a bus in front of the Liberty Cinema three years before. Since then, she has been supporting her three kids and elderly mother-in-law with the help of the kind-hearted men who visit her after hours. She has full sympathy from the residents of bylane seven, and even if the bulb at the far end hadn’t been removed, no one would have batted an eye.

The man with the bag in his hand walks ten steps down the darkness of bylane seven and, halting in front of the ditch, removes a pint bottle of Bonnie Scot, and downs it in one go, before tossing away the empty bottle and pissing in the ditch. The man is Chandrakant Thorat.

Even though he was middle-aged, Chandrakant enjoyed new Indy Pop like ‘Jhanjar wali hoke matvali’ and ‘Channave ghar aa jaave. ’ It was funny that the favourite music of Chandrakant, who spoke pidgin Marathi and just passable Hindi, was Panjabi pop music. And whenever love stirred in his heart for Shobha, his wife, the emotion found expression in Panjabi: Baby, baby, what can I do? My heart’s horn honks when I see your pretty face! You oughta hear it, baby! You gotta hear it, baby! Shobha responded, chiding him, ‘Coming home drunk again? How many times have I told you, drink as much as you’d like, but do it at home. If anything ever happened to you, I’d end up like our lady of the night! Then what?’

These words sobered him up instantly. He certainly didn’t want to die and force his wife to rely on kind-hearted men.

‘You just doused my Bonnie Scot with bitter herbs. Make me some food. I’ve got to go to work early tomorrow.’ Then Chandrakant was silent. He hung his head low as he ate, stretched and yawned, then lay down to sleep on the mat on the floor. She ate afterwards, then did household chores late into the night, washing dishes, chopping vegetables for the morning, ironing Chandrakant’s pants and shirt, until finally, at midnight, she sat by the outdoor tap and bathed. By the time she finished her work, humming some old song while she adjusted the fan on top of the trunk, Chandrakant was already snoring. RUNNING OFF WITH SHOBHA

Shobha and Chandrakant had been living together for some thirty years. Chandrakant had fled with her from Sarani where she had been living with her husband, Ramakant.

Ramakant had no job and no skills: he ran around wherever he could to try and get a small piece of the action. He was addicted to playing the market, and also worked part-time for the police as a false witness. Those days, the eyes of a certain police inspector had fallen on Shobha; every night, the inspector came over to their house to drink and eat. Every night for three months, the middle-aged inspector’s lust fell on Shobha. Those three tortuous months in Shobha’s life were worse than hell. He arrived at the house around nine at night; as soon as he stepped in the door he took off his uniform and hung it on a peg. Now down to his sweaty, smelly, dirty undershirt and brown, greasy shorts, he took a seat on the little mat on the floor, and forbade the outside door to be closed because then there would be no breeze to cool him down. Ramakant served the inspector as if he were his butler, running back and forth to the kitchen and market for salty namkeen snacks, hard-boiled eggs, and, whenever the need arose, another bottle of hooch. Ramakant also kept his glass nearby, so whenever he had a free moment after running around fetching things for the inspector, he sat down next to the inspector and joined him for a shot. He was proud of those moments; they were a real honour and treat. He laughed and joked with the inspector, and chided his wife Shobha — ‘Hurry up, squeeze the lemon, bring the snacks! Inspector sahib likes green chilies. Thinly, cut them thinly!’ Or, ‘Don’t just toss the dish on the floor! Place it in the man’s hand, nicely, gently, that’s it. And what happened to the coriander? Didn’t I just buy two bunches for inspector sahib to enjoy?’

‘Ramakant, how about one more?’ the inspector said. ‘And give your better half something to drink, too. Tomorrow a friend of mine is coming. We’ll have a party!’ the inspector said.

Ramakant’s face lit up at the mention of a party. A party meant he would get to eat mutton or chicken, with plenty of snacks, too, plus more good booze. On top of that, he was always able to ferret away a few rupees from the money the inspector gave him for the food and drink.

‘Consider it done, sahib! So will it be mutton or chicken? Should I have her make fish or pakoras to go with the drinks? She’s a fantastic cook. How much meat, four pounds or five? And how much whisky d’you think’ll be necessary?’ He grinned shamelessly and added, ‘See, if there’s any food left over it’ll be a big help the next day. After a big party Shobha’s in no shape at all until two or three in the afternoon.’

After getting drunk, the inspector might launch into song, or start hurling vile curses. He had convinced himself that Shobha was thrilled to have found such a robust specimen of a man as he, and one with money, too — particularly after playing long-suffering wife to the penniless, shiftless, good-for-nothing Ramakant. The inspector also came to accept that in her heart of hearts, Shobha fancied him indeed. And once the inspector understood this, he stepped up his abuse of Ramakant, chastising and reprimanding him at every word, pausing to fasten his gaze on Shobha, to whom he started sweet-talking. It transpired that since she was little she had a soft spot for dark gulab jamun, not to mention her other favourite sweet: rabri-ilichi kulfi. How was this loser going to procure such sweetmeats for Shobha? The inspector at once sent Ramakant out to fetch the delicacies. As soon as he was out the door, the inspector drew her near.

His hairy potbelly poked out from a filthy, stinking undershirt, underneath which he grabbed Shobha’s head and brought it to his sweaty, soiled crotch. Her every breath caught a second stench of the raw sewage rivulets that crisscrossed the neighbourhood. She nearly retched on the spot. The inspector stroked her hair as he swigged from the bottle. Sounds issued from her mouth as if she were getting the sour taste of a lemon and the hot part of a chili both at once. The door to the outside was left open, a fact that late-night passers-by often noticed. Moreover, the little vacant patch of land in front of the house was a popular spot for people to stop and answer the call of nature. Here, in perfect darkness, a crush of young nogoodniks, out for a midnight stroll, gathered by the house of police flunky Ramakant to watch live porn.

‘Party night’ meant that the inspector brought a buddy. Those nights, Shobha endured inhuman torment and suffering. After getting well drunk, the men let loose the beast within. And in that room, Shobha fell victim to the violence of the wild animals and the frenzy they unleashed. Once they got going, they sang, drank more, praised the fish pakoras to high heaven, laughed and giggled, groped and fondled Shobha, squeezed and pinched. Ramakant encouraged them in all this.

A fat and flabby fair-skinned contractor was brought to one such party by the inspector. He was in his late fifties, early sixties. That night they had even set up a VCR to watch porn; back then, VCRs had just come out and could be rented in the bazaar. Leering at the stunning Shobha, he casually let slip that this year he was going to be elected as municipal councillor, having locked up all the votes from this neighbourhood and the surrounding ones.

That night Shobha was taken to the gates of hell. The contractor and inspector committed unnatural acts, including the contractor inserting a beer bottle in her rectum. The inspector laughed, ‘What the heck are you doing!?’

‘What am I doing?’ The contractor overflowed with delight. ‘Just a little drilling from the back side to bore a big hole so that the motor’ll hum from the under side! I’ve got a twenty-horsepower tractor!’ Shobha gasped for breath, blood dripping on the rug and floor, while porn flashed on the TV. Unconsciousness relieved her from the torments. It was nearly four in the morning when the inspector and contractor finally made their way home. Shobha was greeted with splitting pain when she came to; she wanted to get up and get dressed and wash off the blood and semen. She found Ramakant mounting her. She gave him a kick. Then, in fits and groans, she found the bucket of water kept just outside the front door and began washing herself, not a stitch of clothing covering her body.

As she sat groaning and washing off her blood and the spit and semen of the contractor, inspector, and Ramakant, she had the feeling that at four in the morning she had been ogled by the eyes of many men in the darkness from across the bylane. Bloodletting, blood-soaked, bestial violence: these people stayed up all night to watch this? Not a wink of sleep, smelling the shit from the sewage all night long? This was their idea of fun?

Almost a week later, the contractor showed up one afternoon in his car. The inspector was with him. They brought all sorts of goodies for Shobha: saris with matching tops, lingerie, teddies, lace panties, salwar-kurta, bangles, jewellery, and more. The contractor seemed very pleased and, between sips of chai, informed her that he had appointed her Director of the All-Women’s Welfare Association, meaning that now he would take her with him on tour to Mumbai, Nagpur, Pune, Kolhapur, and other cities.

That day, Chandrakant, a servant in the contractor’s employ, was introduced to Shobha.

Six weeks later, at a government rest house in Jalgaon, the contractor took her to the VIP room. There, party underway, Shobha slipped out under the pretext of needing to change her clothes and, bag packed with everything she had, ran off with Chandrakant to Delhi, where they rented a ground floor flat for five hundred rupees a month at house number E-3/1, bylane number seven, Jahangirpuri. He found part-time work as a helper at a department store in Vijaynagar and she began making food and snacks and pickle and preserves for neighbouring households.

Fleeing from Jalgaon with Chandrakant that night had rescued Shobha from a terrible crime; Chandrakant had masterminded the escape. Fifteen days had passed since the last party, when the contractor had announced they were going to Jalgaon. He had been busy with some construction project. Only the inspector had come in the meantime, two or three times. Shobha waited quietly for the next party, for which she had purchased thirteen rupees worth of rat poison kept hidden in her secret bundle. She mixed it into the goatmeat dish, and was ready to serve it to the inspector, contractor, and her husband, Ramakant. After she did, Shobha faced a dilemma: eat it and herself perish, or don’t eat it and run off with Chandrakant? She kept her plan hidden from Chandrakant; he seemed so guileless and honest that she was sure he would never allow her to go through with it. Chandrakant finally acceded to them running away together from Jalgaon, though he was clearly scared. SHOBHBA IN THE HALF FLAT

E-3/1 was a four-story house. There was space underneath the stairs that, with a little imagination, formed something like a room. Ten feet long, seven feet wide, not exactly a room, but a half flat, and thus with no proper front door. Chandrakant and Shobha fastened two planks of wood over the opening. The first they nailed to the top with scrap metal and hung a blue plastic curtain. The second served as a sliding door leaf. On cold winter days when both Chandrakant and Shobha went out, they kept the door closed. In front of the door, or wall, or board, or whatever you want to call it, was an additional space that measured about four-and-a-half feet. On the left side was a little tap where Shobha and Chandrakant did all their bathing, laundry, and dishes. They called it ‘the balcony’; two feet below was an open sewer. A strong, sour smell continuously wafted upwards along with a buzzing swarm of flies. A few days ago Chandrakant had found another board to cover it up.

They slept on a coarse little mat spread on the floor of their half flat, which they called, in English, the ‘room.’ Chandrakant and Shobha also owned a banged-up tin trunk in which they kept items used infrequently. Also kept in the trunk were the bangles, jewellery, saris, and salwars from the inspector and contractor; stainless steel and glass pots and plates from her parents when she got married; a pair of silver anklets; her mangalsutra wedding thread; a toe ring; armlet; a sari of silver thread. A half-inch strip of plywood was fastened above the trunk, on top of which perched the household’s most valuable and necessary item, a fan. It was because of the fan they were able to sleep in the heat, without harassment from flies and mosquitoes. When it went on the blink, the despondent pair would go out to fetch the electrician and wouldn’t rest until he’d fixed it. But it rarely stopped working. Flip the switch and it purred to life with a loud whoosh. The strong flow of cool air made Chandrakant and Shobha very happy.

In the corner of the room was a little stove that ran on wood scraps. That’s where Shobha cooked, and no food was more delicious than Shobha’s. He had been hooked on Shobha’s cooking since the days of Sarni when he went in the big car to the parties at Ramakant’s with his boss, the contractor. He used to pull right up to the door, making it a little difficult for the passersby who liked to peer inside the house. The contractor would turn up the tape deck as loud as it would go, drowning out both the noise of the ‘party’ and the shrieks of Shobha. Chandrakant was right there, stretched out in the back of the car, listening to the music issuing from its sound system. He had no idea what was going on inside. He never even peeked.

His eyes opened to find Shobha banging on the car window. She brought him food, a thali with roti, meat curry, onions, and more, sometimes a bit of rice. He liked her meat curry so much that it seemed there was never enough. This happened two or three times; Shobha began to sense his fondness, maybe because the two were around the same age. This was thirty years ago, when Shobha was nineteen or twenty, and villagers didn’t pay attention to age differences between bride and groom. Ramakant was between thirty and thirty-five. The inspector who those days raped Shobha daily couldn’t have been younger than forty-five, and the contractor, boss of servant Chandrakant, must have been nearing sixty.

Chandrakant, a young man of nineteen, was utterly different from these middle-aged, savage, stinking men; he stretched out in the back of the car, eyes closed, quietly listening to music, never asking for seconds, never taking a peek inside the house to see what went on during the ‘party.’

That night she quietly crept to the car door window and, peering inside, saw Chandrakant mopping up the last of meat sauce with a roti, two more still on his thali.

‘Do you want some more meat and sauce?’ she asked, startling Chandrakant.

‘No, no, this is plenty!’

Shobha met his reply with a smile. ‘Then what’s the use of the other roti?’

Chandrakant didn’t have an answer.

She brought another katori dish full of meat and sauce, and two more roti as well. It pleased her as Chandrakant silently took the bread and lowered his head to begin eating. She watched him as he ate. He suddenly lifted up his head: his hair was a mess, his mouth full of food. He stared at Shobha and blushed as he broke into a kind of giggle.

It was like the end of a lifesaving rope that dangled in front of the black hole of her hellish life. She decided to grab it and run away, not knowing whether it was out of love or from an intense desire to be free.

The next party, Shobha informed the inspector, contractor, and Ramakant, who were busy eating fish pakoras and drinking, that she was going outside to serve Chandrakant his food. Once there, she got in the car and told him everything. She showed him her legs, back, chest, and neck for him to examine. ‘Someone might come, I can’t show you the rest here,’ Shobha began. ‘But mark my words, one day I’ll be dead and they’ll throw my body away. Save me however you can. Take me anywhere. I’ll do your laundry, clean and dust, cook for you every day, wash the dishes. You like my meat curry, right? I can cook better. I can put a masala into the dish that’ll fill the whole house with the most unbelievable fragrance you’ve ever smelled. If you want me to sleep outside, in the courtyard, on the stoop, I will. I don’t need sheets or blankets. I can live with the clothes on my back. When you’re not making money, I’ll make it for you.’

The tape deck was still blaring music; twenty-year-old Shobha hiccupped between her little sobs. ‘You can do to me what the inspector and builder do to me and I won’t say a word. If it hurts, I won’t cry, I won’t scream. I’ll stop the blood, I won’t allow myself to bleed. I’ll clean everything up without a fuss, no one will know. I’ll just keep smiling. You can tear me to bits and I’ll keep smiling. I’ll stay by your side and serve your every need. I’ll nurse you when you get sick, soothe your body with massage. Do with me whatever you want, your heart’s desire — I won’t stop you. If you bring someone else I’ll serve her too. Just get me out of this trap.’ Shobha had gripped Chandrakant’s shirtsleeve as if she would never let go, as if it were a root on a riverbank she suddenly found, and clung to, like life itself, in spite of being swept under by the current.

Listening to twenty-year-old Shobha, nineteen-year-old Chandrakant felt for the first time he wasn’t just a servant in the contractor’s employ. He could be more, and this thought gave rise to a kind of self-confidence he’d never had. Just then, Ramakant appeared. He saw Shobha attached to Chandrakant’s sleeve, sitting close in the back seat of the car, telling him things, crying. In one fell swoop he opened the door, seized Shobha, and dragged her out. ‘Did you come out here to feed him or fuck him, you whore. Haven’t had enough yet?’

This was that same violent night when the contractor shredded Shobha’s rectum with a beer bottle and she passed out from the bleeding. That night was also the first time Chandrakant heard her scream. A scream that carried so much pain it pierced the closed car window and even Chandrakant’s eardrum. He panicked, sat up, and switched off the music. And for the first time he rolled down the window and stuck his head outside.

Inside, they had switched off the light; all there was to see was shifting shadows in the dark. He listened, but the only thing he could make out was the fearsome growling of wild animals issuing from inside the house, and it sounded as if they had found their prey and were tearing it to bits in a frenzy. For the first time, he despaired of Shobha’s fate, she who had just a few minutes ago clung to his shirtsleeve, whose tears still moistened the same sleeve, whose curry and roti he had just finished eating. The image of her tearful face flashed before his eyes, and he felt as if she were still there with him. Chandrakant thought, I will absolutely help her out of that trap and lift her out of the pit.

Fear, however, reared its head inside of nineteen-year-old Chandrakant. The inspector and contractor were very powerful. He had seen their acts of barbarity with his own eyes. He knew from conversations with them and by the way they talked about places like Lucknow, Bhopal, Bombay, Delhi, and Calcutta that their influence stretched far and wide. They could get to wherever they wanted to go. And they would get to wherever he took this girl: the inspector, the contractor, their flunkeys — they would find them, there was nowhere to hide.

Chandrakant was in a tangle of fear and nerves and worry. That’s why when he fled the house in Jalgaon with Shobha, he had wrapped a towel around his face and covered his body with a sheet. Shobha, however, beamed non-stop with a joy that bordered on rapture. As the train left Sarani station with the two safely inside their compartment, Shobha stowed her trunk and bundle and Chandrakant’s bag underneath the berth with such delicacy and care it was as if she would make her new home right there on the train with Chandrakant — as if she was going to light a little cooking stove on the floor of the train and start a household. The carriage in which the two passengers rode rumbling along the iron rails wasn’t made of wood, glass, and steel, but was transformed into a simple courtyard of fragrant adobe, where sweet spicy smells mixed with the rising smoke of the cooking stove, where a twenty-year-old girl, leisurely humming a song, rolled out the roti, fully absorbed in her work.

Something in this was quite pleasing to Chandrakant; time and again he wanted to break into song. What that pleasing something was, however, he wasn’t able to fully comprehend. THE NEST AND EGGS OF A BIRD

Ah ha! So this is what had been so pleasing to Chandrakant that day on the moving train, the thing he wasn’t able to fully understand.

It was some ten days after they found the half flat in the Jahangirpuri neighbourhood of Delhi at E-3/1, lane seven. The two of them had spent the first few days purchasing household goods for their mini-place, cleaning and setting up house. Chandrakant had found work as a shop assistant in a department store in Vijaynagar, which is also known as Kingsway Camp. Vijaynagar was no more than six kilometres from Jahangirpuri, with plenty of buses at the Aazadpur bus stand headed that way. He set off for work at six in the morning, came back at two in the afternoon for lunch, and returned to work at three thirty. It was nearly nine at night by the time he came back for good. Shobha had no idea how much money she had run off with from Sarani — it had easily covered the stove, fan, curtains, tarp, tin trunk, sheets and blankets, cup and saucer sets, pressure cooker, thali dishes, glasses, food staples, tea and sugar, and all other household necessities. Smiling, she plunged her hand into her rainbow flower vinyl purse (a treasure-chest as bountiful as Tutankhamen’s), and withdrew as much money as she pleased.

Day three after their arrival in Delhi Shobha began calling Chandakant ‘Chandu’ while he continued calling Shobha Shobha. Chandrakant began to get a little worried watching Shobha buy so much stuff, but she just scooped her hand into the flowered purse and said, ‘Don’t worry, Chandu! No worries at all! I hit the big one with Ramakant and inspector and contractor’s cash.’

It was a Monday, when the bazaar at Vijaynagar was closed and Chandrakant had the day off.

He stretched out on the ground in the little room and began listening to the radio. Oh don’t shake down the apples from my tree! A little thorn will break the skin in a flash! Every once in awhile he joined in. As he sang along, Shobha’s voice rang in from outside, ‘Nice voice, Chandu, it’s like you’re Kishore Kumar singing along with Lata Mangeshkar! Today’s a singing kind of day!’

Chandrakant gazed outside, transfixed. Shobha was sitting next to the tap on the ‘balcony’ bathing, rubbing the soles of her feet with a little pumice stone, her sari bunched up to her thighs. As she poured water over her head with the red plastic mug, it was as if her sari was dissolving in the water, the sari turning to liquid and washing over her skin in glistening colours, clinging tightly to her body, revealing more and more of her wet form.

Chandrakant felt a lump in his throat, his voice began to crack, and so he stopped singing along with the radio and started staring at Shobha. His gaze must have burned into her backside; she turned around suddenly. ‘What happened, Mr. Mohammed Rafi crooner man?’ she teased. ‘Lose your voice? Cat got your tongue, Chandu? Feeling shy?’

He didn’t say a word, but just kept staring. Lather ran down her face, little white soap bubbles popped on her closed eyelids, she couldn’t see a thing. This was the first time Chandrakant could observe her the way he wanted for as long as he wanted to. Beneath the folds of her sari, she lathered her chest, bar of soap in hand.

Chandrakant realised for the first time how huge her eyes were, just like the actress Hema Malini’s, but bigger, even bigger.

They had been living together in the half flat for ten days, and he had known her even longer, from before, in Sarani, but he had never really looked at her body and her eyes as he did now. Chandrakant felt embarrassed for having spent so much time with Shobha — for having lived so long — without ever having been as close as he was now to the kind of body and shape of eyes that this girl had.

And how this girl looked though the soap lather that glittered like dewdrops, how it took his breath away, this was a new sensation.

Shobha stood up in her dripping wet sari and began drying her hair with a towel.

The magnetic field that originated from the water tap and enveloped him was also something new. It was like a zap from inside inducing him toward her with full force. His mind was in a bad way. He could see only colours swimming in front of his eyes, like the soap bubbles that floated in the air.

He walked up behind Shobha and clasped her around the waist, then lifted her back into the half flat, the ten-by-seven ‘room’ that, for the moment, was the Delhi home of these two winged creatures.

Shobha said nothing. She was still wet; her hair too, eyes closed, face flushed with a flame that slowly let its heat seep over her body, and into her blood, until heat rose from her skin and met Chandrakant’s lips. Not a drop of dew escaped his waiting mouth while hands explored every place on Shobha’s body, tracing her wet skin.

The little mat on the floor beside the trunk, in the cramped half flat, was wringing wet. And atop that wet rug Chandu and Shobha seized one another as if at the epicentre of a consuming blaze. Soap bubbles of all hues seeped through the room, while outside on the balcony it wasn’t water that gushed from the tap and noisily filled the bucket, but a rainbow of colour.

Shobha felt as if she was sinking into a deep dream on a magic carpet, not just lying on a rug. Her wet sari lay to the side, while atop her body was a blushing nineteen-year-old boy, smiling nervously, rather than the old, savage inspector, or contractor, or the husband she had been made to marry. That night in Sarani, she had grabbed hold of the edge of the rope that sprang from the smile of the boy born while eating her homemade curry and roti. And now it looked as if she might make it out alive.

It was as if the mouth of nineteen-year-old Chandrakant, whom she had begun to call Chandu, was still stuffed with the bits of her food, hungry and blushing as he smiled. Overcome with love for Shobha, he gathered her tangled hair in his hands and kissed her feverishly.

After that Monday, some thirty years ago, and a mere ten days after the two of them had moved to their half flat at E-3/1, bylane number seven, Jahangirpuri, Shobha had begun referring to the covering on the floor as the carpet rather than a rug. She hummed while she worked, and after Chandrakant left for work in Vijaynagar, she sang duets with Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle on the radio.

Shobha prepared food for the two of them, peeled and chopped and sliced the vegetables, did their laundry, took naps, while Chandrakant swept her up and onto the magic carpet where the two of them would make love in a blaze of heat. Like this, years passed, Shobha grew plump, Chandrakant’s hair thinned and turned grey, both of them sometimes fell ill, then got better, all the while and for thirty years playing the nonstop game of fanning the flames atop their magic carpet.

Shobha got pregnant seven times. She registered with the government hospital in Aadarsh Nagar, stitched and sewed clothes and booties and a bed for the baby, and ate and drank with great precaution. But either she miscarried, or the baby succumbed to an illness a few months after birth — each and every time. Chandrakant and Shobha were devastated. They decided that the mosquitoes and bacteria from the sewage gutter in front of their house had infected the babies with some illness; a thick, damp, and often strong stench came through their windows from the gutter. During the monsoon season, earthworms, centipedes, millipedes, snails, and frogs would crawl or hop from the gutter into their flat. One time when Shobha and Chandrakant were deep in the middle of playing their favourite game on the magic carpet, Shobha screamed when she saw a baby snake slithering on the ground off to her left. Another time it was a boa constrictor that sprang out from behind a box. Things got even worst during the rainy season — spiders were everywhere.

Both of them wished to move somewhere else, somewhere clean and tidy. But as time went on, rents began to soar. Chandrakant had always been on the lookout for another job or additional income, but nothing ever materialised. His boss at the shop, Gulshan Arora, was a good man, and no other shopkeeper would have paid a better salary. Over the thirty years, Arora had become an elderly seventy-year-old. Both his daughters had been married off, and he had one son who ran a small travel agency in Paharganj. Father and son didn’t get along, and the son didn’t care about the father’s shop. The son, too, was already married, and had for the past several years waited for his father to die so he could sell the Kwality Departmental Stores. Gulshan Arora seemed to have an inkling of his son’s wishes: time and again after a serious illness he returned from the brink of death, as if to dash his son’s hopes. Gulshan Arora placed great faith in Chandrakant, since he didn’t have any other option. The store limped along, but Arora still had to pay expenses.

Gulshan Arora was by then totally alone; his wife had died a dozen or so years ago. He had detained Chandrakant at his house on several occasions for late-night rum-drinking and chicken-eating sessions. He told Chandrakant not to worry about his inevitable death: he had left the store to his younger daughter, and had made a provision in his will for Chandrakant to the amount of 200,000 rupees. After the third or fourth drink, Gulshan Arora got animated and waxed philosophical. Chandrakant was aware that his boss, in spite of his age, brought home call girls, and was continuously taking herbal supplements and vitamin boosters called ‘Lion Life,’ ‘Shot Gun,’ and ‘Hard Rock Candy Man’ — these were the days before anyone had heard of Viagra or 40–60 Plus.

Chandrakant, while listening to his seventy-year-old boss’s elaborate stories, would often begin to long for the man’s death — and just then, Gulshan Arora by some means sensed his thoughts, smiled from ear to ear, and said, ‘Chandu! Enough with your dreaming of my death. My father was eighty-two when he came here from Lahore in ’47, and when he died in ’74, he was over a hundred and ten. The neighbourhood had a huge celebration for his funeral procession, and we even hired the Daulatram Band and gave away endless sweets.’

It was then he showed the palm of his hand to Chandrakant. ‘The astrologer told me that I’ve got at least thirty-five more years. Then, after I turn one hundred and five, I’m gonna get me on that morning train, loud and high right up to the sky! But don’t you worry, Chandu. Your job’s even more secure than a government one.

‘Wrap up the rest of this chicken for your wife and be on your way,’ he said to Chandrakant in a hushed voice. ‘I’ve got a working girl on her way, and she’ll be here any second. You get to work over there in Jahangirpuri, and I’ll get to work over here in Model Town.’

But the children of Chandrakant and Shobha never got as old as Gulshan Arora’s. One after the other, the babies born to them in that half flat in bylane number seven kept dying. None lived longer than four months.

Not one or two, but seven babies in a row. ABHANG SONGS, KHUSRAU, THE DARGAH, AND THE FIRST SURVIVING CHILD

It happened perhaps some winter’s evening in 1995, some ten years ago. I went to the Kwality Departmental Stores in Vijaynagar. I had quit my day job five years prior and was then as I am now a freelance Hindi writer.

I had my mortgage and other expenses to pay. Winter was around the corner, and I still hadn’t managed to buy warm clothing for the kids. I myself had been wearing the very same sweater twenty winters in a row. My wife hadn’t been able to treat herself to a nice sari or buy any jewellery since the day we married. We avoided weddings since we lacked proper attire, and couldn’t afford a present for the bride and groom in any case. We cut each piece of mango pickle into quarters, and rinsed whatever slices of onion were left on the thali, saving them for next time. We horded five rupee coins during the year, saving them up to give away on Divali. I thought a few times about ending it all, or running away, but then my kids always brought me back. They were still in school. Books came into my life like a curse, and took everything I had. Sometimes it was the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, or else Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, or Gorky’s autobiography — reading them brought me some respite. Maybe every writer’s fate is to live on the street, in the gutter. Or maybe I just worried more than most because I wasn’t famous and wasn’t important.

Whenever I sat down and opened a book or tried to write something in those days, the full terror of my reality at home cast a long shadow. I saw strange, sinister hues on the faces of my wife and children that I couldn’t pinpoint or understand. Death, illness, penury, hearsay, and sorrow skulked through the house with heavy feet. At night sobbing sounds permeated the rooms and corridors. A cat screeched on the rooftop. The plaster was falling off the walls, and the doors opened and closed with a strange, sad groan.

It was also a time rife with illness: dengue fever, food poisoning, the flu. My wife had a thyroid problem, and our younger son was so thin, so frail, so shy and introverted, that we were racked with doubt about whether he would be able to take care of himself in the future. Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and Muktibodh’s ‘In Darkness’ echoed in my head. I woke up ten times a night. I considered the possibility that I had been duped and driven onto a surreal landscape of terror and nightmares, where each work of the honest writer puts his family in a condition more critical, makes them more unsafe — reality substituted by the awful surrealism of a poem.

The twentieth century was turning into the twenty-first, and with each new work I wrote, my life was plunged more deeply into the abyss. Delhi, along with the rest of the world, was changing fast, other capitals even faster. Here, only one beacon remained that still had any power, and it attracted cruelty, barbarity, greed, injustice, money — no other options were possible. When I tried explaining my troubles to Delhi’s influential writers and thinkers, I felt as if I were a snail that had surfaced to the world above, telling the divine bipeds patting their fat bellies about his wild, weird, othercaste experiences from his home at the bottom of the sea. My language was incomprehensible. They viewed my utterances born of sorrow, vulnerability, and nerves with indifference, curiosity, wonder. They were of a totally different class. Their scraps were my meal. A poet had written something to that effect a few years ago, perhaps coping in similar circumstances.

In the middle of all this, I went one late afternoon to the general store in Vijaynagar where Chandrakant worked. The store was empty when I arrived, apart from Chandrakant, who I found lounging in the chair behind the counter singing an abhang devotional song. But there was a heartbreaking loneliness in his voice, as if he weren’t singing for others, but as a crutch to steady himself. The previous July when I had gone to Pandharpur in Maharashtra on a film project I was shooting, I had seen the Gyaneshwar and Namdev pilgrim and chariot processions coming from Alandi. While sitting on the steps of the Vithoba temple I heard the abhang songs. The rain had just stopped a few moments earlier, but dark, menacing clouds still covered the sky. The voices of the singers in the shade, drenched from the monsoon humidity, were like a salve soothing my loneliness and vulnerability. Like a cure that fills vessels with a new blood of life. That day standing in the doorway at the store in Vijaynagar, I felt as if I was on the steps of the Vithoba temple rather than in Delhi.

Chandrakant didn’t see me. His feet were stretched out on a stool in front of the chair, eyes closed, lost in the music.

‘What a voice! Are you Marathi?’ This was the first sentence I said to Chandrakant Thorat. He blushed.

‘Are you looking for something?’ This was the first sentence he said to me.

We introduced ourselves, and soon became friends. The two of us were trapped in our own respective hells. That first day I found out that he still hadn’t become a father, despite having been married for so many years, and that one after the next his children had died from mysterious illnesses, as if cursed. None lived longer than four months. His wife Shobha was shattered.

The next week I went to his home: the half flat in bylane number seven, Jahangirpuri. Some of Shobha’s hair had turned grey, and there was a hardness to her face, but she was still a beautiful woman. When she laughed, a softness sometimes peeked through. This, however, was rare. That night I listened to the whole story of their lives.

‘You are the god Vitthoba, coming as you did just as I was singing the abhang…!’ Chandrakant said, brimming with feeling. He assumed from my clothes and looks that I was a wealthy, connected, worldly man, capable of raising him out of the dark place where he was stuck. Chandrakant, Shobha, and the rest of the residents of bylane number seven for the most part came from one community. And I came from a different one. But my position in that community was no different from that of Chandrakant and others like him. There was no place for me in mine: I was nothing more than a mere writer. Many others came masquerading as writers, but I was the one shown the door.

We then met regularly. Chandrkant accompanied me to the Hasarat Nizamuddin Auliya shrine and sat on the marble floor where we quietly listened to the penniless qawwali singers sing their songs.

Mother! Let me go today!

Today is a day filled with colour

Festival of Colour, please let me go!

and

The path to the drinking well is very difficult

How can I fill my pot with nectar-water?

And I was amazed when one night after we’d had a little bit to drink in their Jahangipuri half flat, Chandrakant reprised the qawwalis. Shobha was busy cooking mutton dopyaza, and the sweet smell of her cooking filling the flat. He was drumming out the beat on empty plastic water bottles using two one-rupee coins; his rhythm was flawless. He was as mesmerised with his own music making as the qawwali singers had been with theirs. I began tapping out the rhythm on the empty stainless steel cup that I was drinking whisky from. Along with the exquisite smell of the mutton dopyaza and, combined with the qawwali music, our meditation on Hazart Nizzamuddin, mehboob-e ilahi — l’amoureux de la divinité — and the words of Amir Khusrau, we felt the darkness dissipate. The whisky, too, had lifted our spirits to the point that we were dipping and diving in a pool of enchantment. Tears streamed from Chandrakant’s eyes. He didn’t know that the writer of the qawwalis was the master of the dargah where the two of us had gone several times, and where Chandrakant, head covered by chador, prayed little prayers that his life might improve. He prayed at the tomb of a man he thought was a pir — a holy man — not a poet. It’s true that he was also a pir, the disciple of Auliya. We were there one night when, once again, it was nighttime in the world all around, and darkness blanketed us. The dawn of tomorrow was drowned out in the dark like doused candles. We were returning to our homes along the footpath with Amir Khusrau’s stick as our guide, groping in search of our life. Shobha, too, was with us, perhaps trying to find her own, silently. I couldn’t stop wondering, who are these people present in the language of Khusrau — the man who first gave birth to poetry — and how did so many of them suddenly get there?

I wasn’t able to see Chandrakant or Shobha for about a year after that night. Another book of mine came out during that time that chipped away further what tranquility I had left. Well-connected and high caste writers from Delhi, Bhopal, Lucknow and other major cities began calling me a rabid dog, fascist, copycat, thief, Naxalite, communalist, feudal, affluent. My newspaper column was dropped, payments cancelled, and the rumour mill spun out such awful stuff that I nearly went mad. They were dark days. My sleep was racked with nightmares. I felt as if my body, now skin-and-bones, was pushed up against the wall waiting for death in a solitary confinement cell in some labour camp, like Osip Mandelstam. Or sitting quietly on a chair in front of the Sharda mental hospital: a single grain of rice gets stuck in my windpipe, my breath grows erratic and I cast my eyes wildly around as my death approaches. Like the Hindi writer Shailesh Matiyani, who died in that hospital. Fascism was right in front of us with a new look. The power of illegal capital and criminal violence was hiding behind the veil of the great ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, until it consumed and reduced to ash the great philosophies of the past two centuries in the irrepressible fire of its base ambitions and desires.

Sometime during that year I went for six months to Bombay and Pune in connection with a film I was writing. And even after I got back, I wasn’t able to see Chandrakant for another seven or eight months: that’s when I was busy editing a couple of small documentaries. The day-to-day struggles of getting by had, in some sense, led me to begin to forget about Chandrakant. And then one day I went to the Auliya shrine, thinking about going back to the village, a place where everyone escapes to run off to the big city, and where the fearful jaws of hunger, joblessness, and penury await every man who returns — when I sat down, alone, and saw that my friend Naim Nizami was sitting next to me with a smile.

‘It’s been forever since I’ve seen you here,’ he said. ‘Your friend who came with you, Chandrakant, he was here two months ago and arranged a twelve-thousand-rupee feast. And we were thinking of you. The biriyani was delicious.’

‘Really?’ I asked. Could Gulshan Arora, his seventy-yearold boss from the Kwality Departmental Stores have died and left him with two hundred thousand rupees? But Naim Nizami said that it was because his prayer had been fulfilled: he had become a father, even at his age. All on account of the mercy of Hazart Nizzamuddin, mehboob-e ilahi — l’amoureux de la divinité.

What else could I do that day but head straight for Jahangirpuri and Chandrakant’s half flat? I arrived at dusk, sometime after five. Two planks of wood were bolted across the door, and a fat lock was fastened on the door chain. A board covered the ‘balcony.’ The woman who lived next door told me, ‘They’ve gone to Saharanpur and will be back by Saturday. The baby’s sick.’

I went again on Sunday, and this time found them. Worry lined Chandrakant’s face, but what I thought had happened hadn’t. Shobha was weeping. They told me that four months ago, Shobha had given birth to a baby boy in the nearby Kalpana Health Centre. The doctor was quite surprised that this middle aged woman, nearly an old woman, and who hadn’t given birth in many years, could give birth to a baby whose vitals were perfectly normal. Shobha only needed a little stitching up. The baby was a fat eight-and-a-half pounds, and was rosy red. He was born on the fifth day of the tenth month. Chandrakant and Shobha’s joy knew no bounds, and they returned home from the hospital. Shobha, having lost seven children before, was apprehensive. This time they wouldn’t even let the most minor suspicion go unchecked, but the doctor told them every time they brought him in that the baby was healthier than health itself. There wasn’t the slightest cause for alarm. Still, mother and child went in for the free checkup every week for two months. This time they wanted to take every precaution possible.

Some ten weeks passed like this. Chandrakant donated twelve thousand at Auliya’s shrine for meals for the destitute. Shobha made a deal with Balaji of Tirupati: if the baby made it past twelve months without any problems, she would travel to Tirupati to perform the ceremonial head-shaving ceremony for the boy when he turned one, and would give the shorn hair to Balaji as an offering.

But one night Shobha heard the baby crying out as if in mysterious pain. Every breath he took was accompanied by a strange whistling-wheezing sound.

When she looked at the boy’s face, she was amazed: she felt the baby was hiding his pain. He wasn’t crying in the least, but silently fighting the pain on his own. Little furrows appeared on his forehead as if he were giving all he had in order to breathe each troubled breath.

It was two or three in the morning, and, now worried, Shobha woke up Chandrakant, who himself examined the infant. After another hour or two, the baby was again sleeping soundly, breathing deeply and regularly.

And the next morning, he was absolutely fine, drinking milk hungrily from Shobha’s breasts until sated. Placing a finger beneath his lips caused him to burst into laughter, and he flashed his toothless gums. He began to recognise both mother and father, and Chandrakant’s mind eased a bit. He said to Shobha, ‘He probably had some mucus caught in his throat last night, and that’s why he sounded like he had a whistle stuck in there. It’s also been a lot colder lately, but I don’t think it’s something we need to worry about, it was probably just a mild cold. I’ll mix a little bit of brandy in with his milk.’ The hospital had given them a bottle full of brandy.

Shobha organised a small coal stove that would keep the baby warm from the damp chill outside. She hung a couple of old sheets and a rug from the top of the outside door frame to keep drafts out. Chandrakant sprinkled DDT powder and poured kerosene into the drainage ditch in front of their house in order to make sure mosquitoes and bacteria wouldn’t breed. The two of them did everything that they could think of in order to be conscientious.

They named the boy Suryakant, and affectionately called him Suri.

This continued for a couple of weeks, until one night Shobha woke with a start to find Suri whimpering. Once again, his forehead bore the traces of intense pain, little wrinkles that ebbed and flowed as he silently struggled against deep discomfort, enduring the hurt, all alone. Any other child would have cried its eyes out.

She noticed that Suri kept trying to grab hold of his head.

Was his head in pain? She touched her palm to his forehead and it was like placing it over hot coals. He had a high fever and was burning up. Shobha shivered. Not again! Not the eighth!

She got up and turned on the light. The bulb was directly in front of the door and the light shone right into her eyes. Chandrakant woke up; he had been out late drinking with Gulshan Arora at his house.

Three months passed: Suri didn’t utter a peep, let alone cry. His languishing face grew crimson, clay-coloured, expressionless, lost in pain. He wheezed like a whistle with each breath, and continually tried to grab hold of his head with his tiny hands.

In the light, Chandrakant and Shobha noticed that despite the severe chill, Suri kept kicking the blanket off his body, and drops of sweat glistened on his forehead.

Suri suddenly gave Chandrakant a look that gave him a start. The three-month-old boy who was quietly struggling with his suffering, looked at his father with a gaze that held both heartbreak and dignity — fathomless pain, but not begging for help. His own boy wore a face that told the story of a solitary struggle with hurt, a tiny, innocent face suggesting exhaustion at having lost a battle, or being stuck in a worry. So this one too? He nearly broke down.

‘He’s burning up,’ Shobha said, taking Suri into her lap to try and soothe the boy. She froze. The boy’s head dangled down as if his neck were lifeless, as if his head and torso were independent parts with no stable connection. Frightened, she placed her hand behind his head to steady it, unbuttoned her top, and placed his mouth flush to her breast. She was flustered and the only thing she could think of at the moment was to nurse him — it seemed like the most important thing in the world, and she hiccupped, on the verge of tears.

The baby’s head on her chest felt like a pot out of the kiln. She nervously pressed her nipple into his mouth — it seemed he was hungry, or had at least found relief from his misery in her breast. Charged with great urgency, he alternately sucked on each breast in a nervous frenzy. Shobha was flush with a riot of maternal feeling for her boy, a sharp sensation that caused her nipples to swell and the blood in her body to rush in an urgent biochemical manufacture of milk to get it to the place where three-month-old Suri — in spite of his mysterious fever, inescapable pain and hunger — drank quietly and without crying. That night the sound of his gulping down his mother’s milk could be heard echoing through the half flat. Shobha felt every vessel in her body had transformed into countless rivers of milk that served her swollen breasts. Her body quivered with a faint thrill. A primal, otherworldly, inscrutable music shot through the millions of cells and vessels in her body that transformed blood into baby’s milk. Here in this world, only women can sense this music and understands its meaning.

A bit later Shobha was taken aback when she again put her hand on the forehead of Suryakant, still engrossed in nursing.

‘Chandu… Chandu!’ she called, her expression fixed between smile and surprise.

Suri’s fever had gone down with astonishing speed — his forehead was growing cooler as if a painkiller had quickly taken effect.

Soon Suri’s eyes were closed as he wandered peacefully through a dreamy sleep. Even in sleep his mouth again searched around for his mother’s breasts.

And so he slept; it was four-thirty in the morning, with daybreak an hour or two away. Little licks of dawn fluttered in the air. Chandrakant had been watching the two for a long time without saying a word. Shobha came and lay next to Chandrakant, gently stroking Suri in her lap, who was deeply sleeping.

‘I don’t know why, but I feel a little scared,’ she said, top still undone, weak voice filled with apprehension. She laid his hand across her chest, perhaps hoping for support from him.

‘Let’s take Suri to the doctor today no matter what kind of shape he’s in,’ Chandrakant said resolutely to comfort his wife. His hand found her breasts and touched them lovingly, excitedly, in deep gratitude. Sleep was now out of the question.

The first time he noticed her breasts was in Sarani, in the contractor’s car, many years ago, when twenty-year-old Shobha, crying, had clutched his shirtsleeves, and in some frenzy had exposed her breasts to the nineteen-year-old Chandrakant, who had been looking at them with the bloodthirsty stare of a fanged, vicious beast.

And then that other day, that afternoon: they had only been in Delhi and in this neighbourhood for a little over a week when Shobha had been bathing on the balcony, under the tap, showering herself with the red plastic mug, covering herself not with water, but with a flowing screen of colour, and he saw her breasts. Chandrakant was drawn to her as if in the clutches of a magic magnet, simultaneously holding himself back while being drawn toward her.

And today! He still couldn’t get over what he saw just a few moments ago: that otherworldly magic of hers. He still couldn’t fathom what had happened. In the blink of an eye, these full, beautiful breasts had bestowed deep, carefree, blissful sleep on the three-month-old boy, now snatched away from the jaws of death, who had moments earlier writhed with high fever and endless torment, who had struggled with each breath. Goodness, what was in them? A healing potion? Nectar? Blessed offerings from Vithoba? A safe refuge for man or child, impoverished and alone, overpowered and helpless, worn down to the point of defeat in the struggle of life. He placed his lips there, reached up and began running his fingers through Shobha’s tangled hair with warmth and affection.

And what happened then, again, was still a kind of magic. The blood in her countless veins and vessels that until a moment ago had transformed into milk and ran like a river into the mouth of little baby Suryakant now flowed like a hot, mad torrent. Mind and body were submerged into an irresistible music of primal excitement and irresistible titillation. The same blood was running like a river, this time where Chandrakant had placed his mouth.

‘Chandu… Chandu,’ she whispered as she pulled him on top of her with everything she had. Shobha’s lust enveloped Chandrakant’s mind, body, breath, eyes, skin. And her body, her scent, her weight, and the two of them. Chandrakant was breathing heavily but that was just the start of an otherworldly, magical, exceptional female game.

In that tiny half flat in Jahangirpuri bylane number seven, atop a magic carpet, the two of them rolled around, scorched by unseen flames of a fire that burned of itself in wordless play and that paradoxically also extinguished itself.

Suri lay an arm’s length away, his little lips making little smiles that appeared and then disappeared, perhaps dreaming something in his carefree sleep.

Just over a half an hour later, when the millions-of-years-old sun began rising above the walls of the Galgotia English Public School in front of their house and the Shangra-La Hotel under construction behind it, and when the traffic began to grow thick on the National Highway, Chandrakant and Shobha, on top of the magic carpet, which wasn’t really a carpet, just a cheap rug they had bought on the sidewalk bazaar at Vijaynagar, went limp and collapsed. A HEAD THAT WON’T STOP GROWING

‘Take this child to AIIMS,’ said Dr. Anil Kumar Matta, the pediatric infectious disease specialist at Kalpana Health and Diagnostic Centre. ‘They’ll do a CT scan or an MRI. We could do it here, too, but since it’s a private clinic, you’ll have to pay out of your own pocket in a imaging facility in the market, and you don’t have that kind of money.’

‘Can you tell what the problem is, doctor?’ Chandrakant asked, anxious.

‘I don’t know. His head is getting bigger and heavier. It’s still in proportion to the rest of his body, but there’s some abnormality, some imbalance. Don’t wait, take him there as soon as you can, his life is in danger.’

Shobha and Chandrakant were distraught. Sometimes she snapped awake in the middle of the night to find Suri awake, too, in an odd silence, trying to press his palms against his heavy, hurting head. His innocent little face was crisscrossed with wrinkles of anguish. Every breath was a struggle, and she thought with each one, this is it: his delicate, immature lungs won’t be able to draw in air next time. Meanwhile, Suri tried with all his might, his body twisting and turning. The baby’s whistling, wheezing sound that had rent Chandrakant and Shobha’s sleep, piercing them to their core, was Suri’s will to live made manifest. But what if he gets tired trying? They couldn’t bear the thought. What are we supposed to do? Where are we going to get that kind of money?

Shobha, anxious and feeling vulnerable, lifted Suri up, clasped his heavy head, and placed him in her lap. There was no doubt about it: his head was growing bigger and heavier every second of every day. She felt that a hot bag of lead and sand and iron were resting on her thighs, not a baby’s head. She was getting sore, but there was nothing else for her to do but guide his mouth to her breast, and gently stroke his forehead. Chandrakant woke intermittently and helplessly watched the two of them, Shobha choking back her tears.

Chandrakant made enough money from working at Gulshan Arora’s shop to scrape by each month. He was just able to pay for rent, bus fares, essentials, the electric bill. Shobha make a few rupees helping out with neighbours’ wedding preparations, or making chutney, pickle, papadum. After Suri was born, their expenses went up, but she was no longer able to go out. I gave Chandrakant some money, and Gulshan Arora helped as well, adding that if he needed more he should just ask — after all, he had worked there for so long — and worry about paying it back later.

AIIMS — All India Institute of Medical Science — was a considerable distance from Jahangirpuri. And because it was government-run, treatment depended on who you knew and what connections you had. It was the ministers, high-ranking government officers, or the rich and powerful who had access to treatment at AIIMS. Chandrakant and Shobha stood hours waiting in the OPD with Suri in their lap. Either the number they had taken was never called, or perhaps it had been — but, amid the crowd, the doctor had seen Suryakant, looked at him indifferently, and told them to come back another day. After a huge runaround that lasted months, the doctor finally referred them for an MRI — only to discover that the ‘machine wasn’t working’ at the hospital, and they would have to get it done privately. By then Chandrakant had understood: the doctors and staff were in cahoots and received a kickback for every patient sent to a private clinic. But it didn’t matter. In the end, Shobha gathered all the jewellery from her mother, plus what she had taken from the contractor and inspector at Ramakant’s, sold it all, and had the tests done.

By then, Suri was more than a year old, and his head had grown to a substantial size. It was true that his neck was stronger than before, and he could now use it to lift up his head. Either it would wobble for a bit before plopping back down, or he would slide on his knees and try to crawl. But pretty soon he tired and began fighting for breath. Whatever energy he had left over was spent trying to catch his breath, and he soon grew listless and collapsed in a heap wherever he happened to be.

But Chandrakant and Shobha had also recently begun to sense that it wasn’t just his head that was growing, but that his mind, too, was developing more quickly than babies the same age.

Every day he seemed less and less like a baby.

Then I wasn’t able to see Chandrakant for a few months. He did call once, and was at his wit’s end. The doctors had more or less made their pronouncement. According to them, Suri would live at most one-and-a-half or two years. His disease was incurable. Of course, if they had two, two-and-a-half million rupees, something might be done. But to say that this was a sum beyond Shobha and Chandrakant’s wildest dreams would be a gross understatement.

According to him, the doctors said that Suryakant was an abnormal baby and that the cells in his head were reproducing more quickly than the rest of his body, and that this was due to some unknown reason: a neurological disorder was possible, viral or bio-genetic factors could not be ruled out, a poisonous effect of strong environmental pollution could have played a part. Whatever the cause, if this disproportionate development wasn’t stopped, in two-and-a-half-years max, Suri would surely meet his end.

But more than one year has already passed! Only six months left…?

I felt deep sympathy for Shobha and Chandrakant. They’d had a child together on the cusp of old age. But the child had a head like a time bomb sitting atop its own body. Tick, tick, tick, stuck in a countdown that would end its life with an explosion, always busy with plotting not its own life, but its death.

I couldn’t bear looking at Suryakant. He began to recognise me, and when I arrived he smiled and tried to crawl over. I wondered how they did it, spending every second of the day with him. How they managed putting him to bed and waking him up, knowing that each new day brought his life one day closer to the end. What went through Shobha’s mind when she breastfed him? Was the milk nourishing his life or was it fueling the flames of his impending death?

Shobha often wondered if the problem might lie with her, and she cast doubts on herself. Thirty years ago, she was gang-raped by the contractor, inspector, and Ramakant, her betrothed, as the men drank and drank, ate and ate, and watched porn. Her rectum had been shredded by the bottle inserted while on their savage spree. Maybe this had caused permanent strictures in her uterus? Could this be the cause of the seven deaths of her seven children? She couldn’t talk openly with Chandrakant about these suspicions. It was only after her third child had died that she asked a nurse whether something in her womb might be spoiled?

The nurse looked Panjabi. She was plump, middle-aged, and clearly had an eye for making money. She gave Shobha a sharp look.

‘I’m guessing you had an abortion before you got married? How many? You had your fun in bed. But now the bed’s been made. You’ll have to lie in it! Get an ultrasound done of your empty womb. Come see me tomorrow, I’ll get it done for you. It’ll cost seven fifty. Don’t tell your husband. Otherwise forget it.’

But in those days Shobha had no way to scrape together seven hundred and fifty rupees. A LIVING PUPPET OF STONE, STEEL, CLOTH, AND MUD

She breastfed little Suri. She tickled his chin and his underarms — coochie coochie coo! She clapped her hands merrily and snapped her fingers, and made little bird whistles or cat sounds. But Suri remained unmoved and showed almost no signs of life. She felt that death’s shadow was gaining ground on the two of them, creeping up step by step. She saw in her mind’s eye little Suri wheezing in her lap uncontrollably, then seizing up, going cold, his oversized head plopping down on her lap, lifeless.

She had a dream one night that while trying to lift Suri’s head, it suddenly slipped from her hands, fell on the floor, and burst open. But instead of blood emptying from the head was every colour imaginable, flooding the floor and soaking the carpet — the one that was no ordinary rug, but the one they had called a magic carpet for thirty years, where she and Chandrakant had played their hot, primal games.

The still puzzling thing was that unlike other babies, Suri didn’t cry at all. When he was hungry or needed something, he crawled over to Shobha. Whenever he fell down or got hurt, instead of bursting into tears he closed his eyes and pursed his lips as the pain disappeared inside. Then he touched the place on his body where he had been hurt, and then the thing he had bumped into. And once he got hurt and absorbed the shock, he wouldn’t make the same mistake again. He learned from his experiences very quickly — so quickly that Shobha and Chandrakant couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t just the size of his head that kept getting bigger, but his brain was growing at a rate much faster than babies his age. It looked as if he was constantly thinking, absorbed in his silence, alone inside a secret darkness.

Suri not only didn’t cry anymore, but he also stopped laughing. His expressionless face was like a marionette made of wood, cloth, stone, rusty iron. A weak, misshapen animated little puppet. It had to be a something out of the ordinary to make him laugh. Like one day when Shobha was looking for the knife to cut the veggies. Just a little while before she had taken the knife and placed it in the thali with the potatoes. But now the knife was no longer there; she searched high and low. Suri was in the corner, sitting up against the wall, silently observing her. Shobha, giving up finding the knife anywhere nearby, stood still. When she saw the knife along with a half-peeled potato hidden right where Suri was sitting, he was instantly filled with glee. At first she wasn’t sure what to think, but then joined him in laughter.

One morning he crawled out onto the balcony and stared for a long time out at the houses around and the street below, all the while steadying his heavy head on his shoulders. It was exactly the time when all the kids were on their way to school, and the old folks were out buying bread and milk. Eighteen-month-old Suri seemed to be watching the hustle and bustle with great focus. A schoolboy of eight or nine came running carrying his knapsack, waiting on the side of the road for his school bus. He suddenly remembered something and ran off back where he had come from; the hustle and bustle of the street continued in the five or so minutes the boy was gone. Then the boy appeared again carrying a kids’ water thermos. Suri thought this was hysterical. The boy looked up to see Suri laughing, and realised he was laughing at him because he knew he had forgotten his water bottle at home. The boy looked over to Shobha and shouted, ‘Hey auntie! Your little boy is sooo cute. What’s his name?’

‘Suri!’ she replied, smiling.

‘Suri,’ he repeated, waving and smiling as he walked toward the boy. But he stopped short when he saw the huge misshapen head. Shobha looked and saw Suri barely managing to wave with one hand, his face twitching, losing strength as he struggled. His lips formed the faint outline of a smile, but it was the strange expression of someone losing control.

Shobha was sure that Suri listened attentively whenever she and Chandrakant talked to each other. He stared at them, never blinking, as if he could understand each and every word.

That day, doctor Parvathi Nambiar of the Neurology Department at Jaipur Golden Hospital called Chandrakant and Shobha in private and told them with visible distress that Suri’s continued survival had been a miracle of miracles, but that he could go at any moment, there was no telling. As far as she was concerned, his time was already up. Somehow, to them, this was the final word from a medical perspective about Suri.

The two were devastated. They avoided looking at one another, knowing that they wouldn’t be able to endure the pain on the other’s face. A kind of inner weeping inside them both kept them on edge. That night, the two of them sat at home in the half flat and spoke in such hushed whispers that it would have been nearly impossible for someone to listen in. Suddenly something in the corner of the room caught Shobha’s eye. They had already turned off the light, and the room was dark except for a faint light from outside that cast diffuse light in the corner. She saw little Suri, sitting quietly leaning against the wall, watching them with stony, worried eyes that twinkled and flamed like little red marbles in the dark.

Shobha and Chandrakant believed that little Suri had both heard and understood everything they said.

His eyes peered at them from that dim corner of the room as if he had just been run over by a truck on the road, watching the living passersby as he lay dying: a last, lonely look. At that moment their son Suri’s eyes had the cold, blank, hard stare of a corpse that had emerged from a sunken ship at the bottom of the ocean, and was suddenly standing on the beach, in the sun, gazing at the living.

Once I asked a doctor I knew if he had heard of this mysterious ‘mangosil’ disease. He said he’d never heard of it. Yes, there was a disease called ‘meningocele,’ but that had more to do with the spinal cord and lower back. It can cause hydrocephalus where the head can’t drain the spinal fluid, and some swelling can occur. But there’s a cure, and it’s not fatal. The doctor continued, ‘I can’t find a disease with the symptoms you’re describing in any of the medical literature. If a disease like that had been detected, it definitely would have been described in the literature — like when AIDS was first found in humans.’ A DEATH DEFERRED, LIFE IN THE HALF FLAT

Three years passed and more. Suri continued to live, putting paid to the predictions and prognostications of the doctors. Not only that, he grew more intelligent, focused, remarkable, and healthier than before. He even began to speak, with a lisp, and picked things up very quickly. He asked his mother about the letters he saw printed in books or on newspapers, and then tried copying them down with whatever paper was at hand. He tried to sketch whatever caught his eye: a bike, Shobha, a cat, dog, radio, fan, bus, cars, motorcycle, TV, tree, house — anything and everything.

Another development occurred during this time in the form of a twenty-one inch black and white Beltek TV that sat on a wooden board fastened with nails to the front wall. It had a remote, which, for the most part, remained in the hands of none other than the misshapen three-and-a-half year old with the big head and little body. Chandrakant’s boss, Gulshan Arora, had given him the TV set for free after he had bought himself a colour Onida in the meantime. Chandrakant got a cable hookup for the cheap price of sixty rupees, and then the TV had loads of channels.

Suri, three years and a few months old, sat for hours watching the TV, leaning against the wall, his massive, heavy head supported by his feeble shoulders, remote in hand. Shobha also liked watching some of the soap operas and channels that played Hindi film music. She finished her work and plopped down and was taken off guard in the beginning when Suri turned on the TV with the remote to exactly the channel she wanted to watch. The grey matter inside his malformed, diseased, ill-proportioned head was developed far beyond that of a typical three-year-old. He was able to read his mother’s mind: all her wishes, all her thoughts. Like a spy he would look into the minds of those before him, and immediately know all their thoughts. Is this really the symptom of a disease, and one that the doctors say is incurable and puts Suri’s life in danger?

Or is it something else entirely?

Chandrakant called me again one day. He told me that the night before he and Shobha had awoken with a start and found Suri wasn’t in bed with them. He was in the corner against the wall watching TV at a very low volume — so low that it hadn’t disturbed their sleep. It must have been after one in the morning. Chandrakant said what was unusual was that he wasn’t watching cartoons or music videos, but had the news on. And that night, the reports of the nuclear tests at Pokhran were just coming in. He sat transfixed, his heavy, odd head sitting atop his little, weak body, as motionless as a statue of iron or stone. His twinkling red eyes were glued to the TV.

Chandrakant said that he felt fearful, and all sorts of notions about Suri popped up in his head. He was much older than his biological age. He was an oddity, this impossibly strange child. He knew things and kept thinking about things that we couldn’t even guess. He couldn’t be distracted like other kids with birds, toys, candy, kitty cats.

A few more months passed without my seeing Chandrakant or getting a call from him. I was getting tangled up with my own problems and stresses during that time. But then, out of the blue, he called at around three in the afternoon. His voice trembled with excitement.

Shobha had given birth to another baby boy. Normal, nothing out of the ordinary, healthy. Even though she was fifty Shobha didn’t have any trouble in labor. The delivery was without incident. Chandrakant couldn’t believe it when he was sitting outside in the waiting room and the nurse told him the news and asked for baksheesh. Maybe Auliya or Balaji had heard their prayers.

He then choked up a little bit. ‘We decided a name right away. Amar — Amarkant. The invincible. Shobha is out of her mind with joy. Suri hasn’t left his side for a second. You absolutely have to come and see the baby. Shobha’s dying to see you. The day after Amar was born Gulshan Arora gave me fifty thousand to set aside for buying our own place, and I’ve talked to a bank about getting two hundred thousand as a loan. Maybe by next month we’ll be able to move to the Janta Flats in Ashok Vihar.

I was stunned by this miracle of nature. By now Shobha was pushing fifty. Kids? At her age? Chandrakant kept talking over the phone. ‘We won’t be able to relax until you’ve come. Shobha insists and insists. Remember the first time we met and I was singing those abhang songs? Vithal had sent you, and everything changed once you came into our lives. Suryakant was also born after we met. I must have done terrible things in my last life that he’s paying the price to free me from. Shobha says that if you don’t come, Amarkant won’t turn out right, either. So get here as soon as you can!’

Those were my toughest days, as tough as writers’ lives often are. Days filled with panic, a feeling that everything was slipping away; nothing was stable, only stress after stress. I had no work at all, nothing saved for the future, no pension. Delhi was changing at an unbelievable pace. Every day new products would appear everywhere that no one could have ever dreamed of. The twentieth century had passed, and the new one was before us. And the dawns of the new one were unlike the dawns before. Only recently one of the greatest Hindi writers died in the Sharda mental hospital, mad and broke. A poet disappeared from home without a trace, and another had taken his own life. There was no place left for writers like me who wrote in this Hindi language. It was now an age of riches, power, violence, criminality, and looting, and it wasn’t any less frightening than the worst nightmare you could imagine. Labour had no more value, and capital was no longer tied to labour — it was now totally free, untethered. My life was reduced to the struggle of how to get by. People like Chandrakant and me were more-or-less given a swift kick in the pants by society, who had no use for them under current circumstances.

No matter how bad things were, they could be worse. The shacks and makeshift houses of hundreds of thousands of people living in Delhi were very quietly, very secretively being set ablaze, their whole life reduced to ash. Or bulldozers were sent to destroy the houses, running them over until nothing was left but rubble. The people who lived there, poor and without work, were chased away. All ‘revolutionary organisations’ or cultural institutions were packed with developers, real estate agents, gentrifiers, high-ranking police officers, professors, intellectuals, commission men, all of whom banded together as one to starve to death anyone who dared describe what was going on.

I had been without a real job for fifteen years. I had degrees, important awards, job experience, good qualifications, but no matter what I applied for, I got turned down. The person they hired would be less educated, less experienced, but with good connections, ones in high places. A corrupt force had been spawned, and people like me could get nowhere near it.

I was down, very down, and sinking into despair.

I think another week must have gone until I was able to see them in Jahangirpuri. The road to get to house number E-3/1, bylane number seven, had changed. New buildings were under construction. Everything around was being torn down. Chandrakant told me that lots of people from the area were being evicted and sent to Bhilswa. They heard that a water theme park was going to be built in Jahangirpuri where all the rich kids in Delhi could enjoy their vacations swimming, splashing, snacking, horsing around, having a good time. He told me that he had put down one hundred thousand and taken out a loan for another two hundred for a third-floor public housing flat under construction in phase four of Ashok Vihar. It was a block of four-story apartment buildings for low-income residents. Chandrakant held the utmost gratitude towards his boss, Gulshan Arora, without whom this wouldn’t have been possible. I thought to myself that Arora had probably also given him the money because it would be nearly impossible to find as honest and reliable a worker as Chandrakant. If he were forced to leave the half flat and move to another part of Delhi altogether, it would be impossible for him to continue working at Arora’s shop.

My eyes lit on Suri. He had given me a big smile upon my arrival, sitting next to his newborn brother Amarkant, his heavy head wobbling up and down, planting little kisses on his brother and waving a torn rag in the air to chase off the flies. Shobha did not light the little coal stove: she made my tea on her new electric hot plate, my favourite kind of chai, steeped for a long time and very strong, with cardamom and ginger. And with so much sugar a diabetic wouldn’t get near it with a ten foot pole. EXPLODING COLOURS IN THE DARK AND THE MAGIC OF THE CARPET

It was only because I came to visit that Chandrakant had taken the day off. It was getting close to five, and it wouldn’t be long before night covered everything. The shadows of tall buildings slowly engulfed the little houses and bylanes of Jahangirpuri. The dark shadows from outside fell no less heavily on Chandrakant’s family and me. I wanted to return home as soon as possible, but there was no way Chandrakant or Shobha were going to let me leave. It had been a long time — many years — since they spent days like these. It was the first time they were able to buy a place, their own home; at the ripe age of fifty, Shobha’s giving birth to Amarkant, and, proving wrong the all-but-certain prognosis, was like the impossible made possible, as was the continuous, still-in-progress life of their firstborn, Suryakant.

Chandrakant took out a bottle of rum he had bought — Old Monk. He’d also bought a kilo of mutton he had chosen himself and had wrapped up from the Indian Halal Meat Shop: chops, thighs, rump, and legs, along with a container of fried-boiled spicy channa with green chilies, lemon juice, coriander, haripatti, covered with thinly sliced onion.

‘Tonight we’re making mutton Kohalpuri for you. If it’s too spicy you can wipe your face with a handkerchief,’ Shobha chirped from beside her little stove, where the spices were browning in the pressure cooker. ‘You’ll never forget that once in your life you ate food cooked by Shobha!’ She understood completely my darkness and despair. They wanted to share a little shining sliver of the good fortune and happiness they had found after so many years with me. And I was truly grateful.

‘Hey Chandu, don’t forget to pour a glass for me. As soon as I put the lid on this I’ll come over and sit with you two,’ Shobha said, then began to hum.

Giving birth to Amarkant, it was as if Shobha had sloughed off ten years off her body. Joy and hope had erased the lines on her face, the ones that years of struggle, deprivation, sorrow, poverty, and Suryakant’s imminent death had carved in her face. Her eyes shone with the brilliance of a whole, free woman, and she radiated with every step. In the light of the forty watt bulb and glow from the stove, Shobha looked in that cramped little half flat like a young girl who had come directly from bathing in a cheery mountain waterfall. Her radiance and beauty right then gave off an energy that pulled my heartache and despair out of me, while pulling me toward her at an extremely high velocity.

I don’t feel bashful and I’m not afraid to say that that night, I wanted to drown myself in Shobha’s beauty and elation. Maybe some dormant animal lay inside me that had been lying ill in a corner, drowsy, tired and defeated, and was now suddenly aroused from sleep, glaring with hungry, greedy eyes at humming Shobha, who stood next to the cooker browning the spices. The fifty-year-old was transformed into a blissful girl.

Shobha turned with a start and caught my gaze, which drew her in. Her eyes locked on me for a moment before a twinkle of a smile again appeared. There was no anger, no reproach. Just the look of a woman who knew quite well how to coddle and tame the beast inside a man. The bold eyes of a relaxed, self-confident woman.

I noticed her looking at Chandrakant. They communicated wordlessly. He was spreading newspaper out over the carpet and setting down the plates and glasses. Suri was leaning up against the wall, heavy head propped up by his tired shoulders, channel surfing with the remote. One-month-old Amarkant was sleeping deeply in his little bedding.

Chandrakant slowly began to sing. The colours today, the flowers today, O Ma the colours I see, my sweet one’s home, the colours! It was a colourful scene indeed inside that cramped little half flat that had for years mostly been under the dark shadow of want, disease, sorrow and anxiety. Technicolour bubbles, like the hues of Holi, coloured my mind and body, in and out, and ignited my desire. The three of us drank, the three of us sang. To the birth of Amarkant, to the life of Suryakant, to the joy of moving to a new house, and to the radiance and festivity of the new mother Shobha. Chandrakant, embracing the fun of his drunkenness, put his arm around my shoulders and sang and sang.

Just then, Shobha looked at me — I hadn’t moved my gaze from her — and then at Chandrakant. The two smiled from ear to ear, and then two things happened simultaneously: the steam valve on the pressure cooker gave out a long whistle, filling the room with a spicy aroma, and Shobha, taking a chiliful bite of the hot channa, leapt up. ‘Ooh, ooh, hot! How many peppers did they put in this?’ she said, puffing through the hot food in her mouth, before downing the glass of rum in one gulp. ‘Chandu, how can we eat it like this? We need something to munch on if we want to finish the bottle, no?’

Chandrakant emptied his glass in a flash and stood up. ‘I’ll get some pakoras from around the corner, fish pakoras.’ Looking at me, he said, ‘You keep Shobha company and keep on drinking, I’ll be right back.’

Then the TV channel changed and the volume got loud. It was a music video channel. I turned around to look and saw Suri propped up against the wall, remote in hand. He regarded me with a piercing gaze, and quietly stood as his x-ray-like stare penetrated my body, and I gave a little start. Suri took his father’s finger, and, wobbling, accompanied him out the door of the half flat, his disproportionally large and heavy head resting like a time bomb atop his weak little body: every moment counting down — tick, tick, tick — to the moment (it could happen anytime) when it might explode, smashing this boy’s life into smithereens. What hour and minute the timer is set for is anyone’s guess.

Suri stopped on the balcony and turned that big head around to look at me. It was as if he was laughing with that strange twinkle in his eyes, an animated look of his very own, peering from beyond his impending death. Suri looked at Shobha again, gave a little wave with his right hand, then again took his father’s hand before disappearing down the road and into the darkness.

***

Shobha was lost in her thoughts for a bit, then finished off her glass of rum in one big swig. It was her fourth glass. She wiped her mouth with her hands, took a bite of the spicy chili-lemon channa, and said between chews, ‘Don’t think of Suri as just a kid. He’s a real imp. Nothing gets by him.’ There was a devilish look in her eyes. I was a little rattled.

‘Does he also know what goes through my head?’ The buzz from the rum and magic carpet made my speech sparkle.

She came over beside me. ‘Both Suri and Chandu know exactly what’s on your mind and on my mind right at this very moment. Can you hide something like this? At this age?’ She poured herself another little shot, and again downed it. ‘What have we got in this life anyway? And if we do have something, someone else’ll take it away. But whatever we might have left over, we can give to anyone we like. Don’t you think so?’ It came out slowly, deliberately. She leaned her head against my shoulder. ‘Look how old I am, look how old Chandu is, and we just had a baby, we’ve just bought a house. A fifteen-year mortgage. Do you think we’ll even be around to see it paid off? I look behind me and I’m tired. I look behind and I’m scared. I’m exhausted. And Suri — how long can he keep gasping for breath? He was in bad shape again the other night. His head hurts like hell, but he never says anything, he just keeps fighting, all night, him versus death. Sometimes I think that the almighty should either just cure him once and for all, or he should…’

She began to shake. I consolingly stroked her hair as her tears streamed down onto my shoulders.

‘And now Amarkant! See the kinds of games he plays. You know how old I was when I gave birth to him? But how long will Chandu and I be able to live with him? It’s frightening. How will he manage after we’re gone? How will he pay off the rest of the mortgage?

We were sitting on the carpet that used to ignite the flames that Shobha and Chandu put out with their games spanning many years. That day, too, the flames grew more aroused, the light of the fire giving off sorrowful hues for a few moments in the darkness of that half flat. Then the flames caught and bloomed into resplendent colour; two of us were shocked and delighted. And then our fever grew even hotter, until the pressure cooker blew its whistle for the fourth or fifth time.

***

Chandrakant came back with fish pakoras, peanut snack mix, and a handful of other goodies. Suri was slurping on an icypole. He ambled over to me, hopped in my lap, and rested his heavy head on my shoulder; the same spot his mother had wet with her tears a few moments ago. The weight of his head sent a shiver through my body. The great pain he must suffer, and the endless torment!

I gently tickled his forehead for a little while, then gave him a kiss. Straining, he lifted his neck, smiled at me for a moment, then hopped off, grabbed the remote, and sat again in the corner, back propped against the wall.

Chandrakant filled our glasses and spread out the pakoras, peanuts, and onions in front of us on newspaper. Shobha joined us after turning off the stove.

It was the kind of night when the three of us understood that our lives were interwoven as one by fate and other forces beyond our control. The same road led to our liberation and our mortality.

Chandrakant alternately sang abhang songs and Khusrau songs.

I noticed Suri had changed the channel. He put on the BBC, and Bill Clinton was on. I think this was an evening in 1998 — could it have been during the impeachment proceedings? THE ‘MANGOSIL’ VIRUS AND AN ANT

That night of December, 1998, had receded into the past. Days were racing by, and the world outside was changing at the same fast pace. The streets of Delhi were getting widened. Little bylanes and narrow backways were vanishing. Who could keep track of all the flyovers being built? Hundreds of thousands of cars of all shapes, sizes, and models flooded the streets. Everywhere you went it was the same: four wheel drives, honking horns, exhaust fumes. And speed. It was impossible to walk anywhere, and cyclists and scooterists were getting run over every day. These fatal accidents didn’t even make the TV news, or get in the paper. Hundreds of villages like Jahangirpuri, Mangolpur, Loni, Nazafgarh, Harinagar, Ziyasrai, Bersarai, Karkarduma, Prahaladgarhi simply ceased to exist and were erased from the map. And where they once were? Malls, multiplex cinemas, hotels, markets, more stores, parks, banks, gated communities, gas stations. You couldn’t go a month without a neighbourhood changing so utterly that you wondered if you were remembering it right.

The residents of the makeshift house built in Jahangirpuri’s bylane number seven had disappeared, and no one knew where. Thousands of poor, lower-class families living in the neighbourhood had been displaced. The police, local authorities, powers-that-be — all were gung-ho to build buildings and make markets with their bulldozers, teargas, and politics. Modest houses and the less well-off were wiped out of neighbourhoods all over the capital city. Violence, crime, and power — sinister, inhuman — spread everywhere. The population of Delhi had crossed the twelve million mark. Of those, some ten million had neither a secure livelihood nor any savings for the future. The homes they lived in weren’t their own. A bank, either private or foreign, held the mortgage and deed. Countless people worked like indentured labourers just to be able to pay off loans or mortgages.

***

Chandrakant, Shobha and family moved to the public housing flat they bought at C-7/3, Ambedkar Nagar Colony, Phase Four, Ashok Vihar. I was enlisted to help move them from Jahangirpuri. They had amassed so much stuff over the years that it took four trips in a Tata 407 to move it all.

In the meantime, I had been diagnosed with bone tuberculosis, and several of my vertebrae had fused. I was confined to bed for ten months, and the treatment cost a small fortune. We had to sell the old house and move to a new one. During this time, I also wrote a book in a kind of frenzy, one that took each and every last moment of free time. The language I wrote in and read, spoke and thought had turned into a kind of torturous cage. I felt the fascist nails and menacing claws of in-your-face corruption, violent casteism, and stalking injustice everywhere in my life. I was turned down for every job I applied for. My degrees, experience, and body of work no longer had any meaning. All of the great ideas and ideals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had become tools to play with in the hands of power brokers, base hypocrites, arse kissers, high-class schemers. Those who killed, killed in the open. Thugs committed their thuggery in the public eye, with a spring in their step. Bribes and kickbacks were counted out continuously, in front of the camera or behind. Cultural institutions had been taken over by gangs of plunderers, who let themselves be feted on the dais, gave speeches, and laughed all the way to the bank. A dark, frightening cloud of reality had descended, one that no one had expected.

Reports of what was really happening were so obscene, so rotten, that bringing them into a poem or short story would simply ruin the poem or the short story. So most poets and writers avoided writing about what went on — but they kept on writing, and kept on winning awards.

So, please come with me, and we’ll desist for now with these accounts of what’s going on, and instead travel to Ambedkar Nagar public housing flat C-7/3, Ashok Vihar, where Shobha and her family now reside.

***

Amarkant was five by now, and had started attending Blue Bells school. Shobha had purchased a sewing machine. She sewed for friends and neighbours, and took home fabric from a few shops in the bazaar to stitch — the mortgage payment and school fees were due at the beginning of each month. Gulshan Arora died in the meantime, and his son Kishan had sold the shop in Vijaynagar. Chandrakant found work in another shop in Deep Market in Ashok Vihar. Every day he walked to and from work.

I had moved right outside Delhi with my family, to Ghaziabad. Chandrakant had my new address and number.

***

I had a premonition that at any moment Chandrakant might call me with news of Suri’s death. He was by now eight years old. Not only was he still alive, having improbably fought and confounded his date with death, but the mind inside his malformed, ill-proportioned, misshapen head was so remarkable and strangely curious that anyone who heard him talk was stunned, confounded, flabbergasted.

For example, one day he said to Shobha, ‘Ma, you’re spending your eyesight so you can make Amar’s school fees. If you would only sell your eyes, you could put him in a cheaper school.’

One night Shobha awoke to find Suri on the balcony wrapping twine around his head. His lips were shut tight, and his face was wrinkled up in pain. His lungs were making that whistling sound while he tried with all his might to breathe in the outside air. His eyes were red and bulging. When Shobha came to him and placed her hand on his back he said in his hoarse voice, ‘Doctors only know how to cure diseases that would cure themselves anyway, without any treatment.’ He struggled to take a breath, and then let out a deep sigh. ‘Hospitals are built for the same people that cars, hotels, airplanes, and big buildings are built for.’

One day he announced, ‘The disease inside of me is because of that dirty drainage ditch in front of our half flat.’ He looked off into the distance for a bit before adding gravely, ‘“Mangosil” is the name of the disease, and the virus that causes it is called, do you know? Poverty.’

One day when Amar was going to school, Suri said, ‘No matter how much kids study in school, they could learn more without school. People who send their kids to school are those who want to get rid of them.’ Again a vacant look came over his face for a bit and then he added, in the manner of a philosopher, ‘What is true is that those who are more well-educated inevitably work as underlings or servants for those less well-educated. School is a servant factory. The most powerful, richest, and best-off people in the world are always less well-educated.’

Suri, because of his illness, studied at home. He read the paper, watched TV, listened to the radio, and began going to the Jupiter Network cyber café in nearby Neemri market. Everyone in the area began to recognise him: the shape of his body, with the skinny trunk, oversized head, and funny way of walking.

One day Suri said, ‘The reason that people stare at me is that they’ve never seen an ant, with its big head, dressed in man’s clothing.’ He said this without laughing, but with eyes red, lips parched, and trembling a little. He continued, ‘Only ten to twenty per cent of people in this world are human. The rest are ants, cockroaches, dogs, pigs, or oxen.’ He flashed an ironic smile. ‘I mean, look at this family. Papa’s an ox, Mummy is a machine, and Amar’s a cockroach. And I’m just a little worm that crawled out of the gutter one night and snuck into Mummy’s belly.’

In the middle of the night one night, Suri’s hands were pressing against the sides of his head, struggling to take each breath. ‘My head keeps getting bigger because it keeps knowing things little heads can’t know, or don’t want to. If they tried knowing them, their heads would grow as big as mine.’

Red flashed from his eyes like sparks. ‘I know full well that the US invaded Iraq only for the oil. But they’ll be able to buy in oil whatever they’ve spent to hide this fact. The US would invade India, too, if they extracted that much oil. Just wait, one day either the whole world will equal the US, or it’ll be the whole world minus the US.’

One night Suri, who was almost eight-and-a-half, was writhing in pain, crying like any other kid his age. It was the first time he acted like this. Normally when in pain he went out quietly and fought the pain on his own. He lay down and put his head in his mother’s lap. ‘Mummy, just find me some poison,’ he whimpered. ‘I can’t take it anymore.’ His tears wouldn’t stop. In between sobs he said, ‘I just don’t understand why people are born whose lives are filled with so much hurt.’ A little while later his pain subsided. ‘Mummy, I need a pill the size of the sun to make the pain go away.’ Then, still in tears, ‘Tell Papa I want to live, Mummy. I don’t want to die yet. Not this soon. There’s no way we might be able to find the money to be able to afford to cure me?’

Suri’s voice was full of such hopelessness and longing. Shobha caressed her son’s head in her lap and herself started to weep. What could she possibly do to save the life of her son? Ideas failed her.

That night Shobha had a deep change of heart. She calculated that even if they sold the house and everything they owned, and recovered their mortgage, they would still be short of the one-and-a-half or two million they needed to have Suri treated properly, or even cured. Their only recourse was to offer their prayers, which they did anyway. And it was only due to the grace of god that Suri was still alive. She decided that from that day forward, she would try to focus less attention on Suri’s eventual death and create space for him where he didn’t have to be continuously traumatised by his ‘fixed mortality.’ She told Chandrakant her idea.

Suri started watching movies on the VCR like Qayamat se Qayamat Tak, Lagaan, Devdas, Main Hoon Na, Kaun. Shobha and Chandrakant took him to out to the movies a couple of times. Both of them were acutely aware that Suri was only going to live as long as he was going to live. So they wanted him to give him as many experiences as they could, within their means. Sweets, chaat, pizza, hamburgers, Pepsi, Coca Cola, amusement parks like Appu Ghar, the zoo, the Qutub Minar.

Chandrakant told me about a truck that had run off the road and hit a tree. The driver was killed, and his passenger was taken to the hospital. Chandrakant, Shobha and Suri were on their way home in a rickshaw. Suri too saw the tree and almost ran to it; its trunk was damaged in several places. Suri kept quiet for a while before saying, ‘The tree is always silent, sitting in its own spot. Even if it wanted to fight someone, like that tree, it would only be to save itself.’

Even though Suri’s strange, tangled thoughts deeply vexed people, Chandrakant and Shohba felt sometimes the real kid inside would emerge, the one that was simply and straightforwardly a child his own age, with the same wishes, desires, obstinacy, tantrums. He was often quite stubborn about getting to eat the foods he liked. Like besin sweets, red amaranth, fried moong.

Sometimes when people paid more attention to Amar, they saw the envy and jealousy in Suri’s eyes. It was true that fiveyear-old Amar had more stuff than his older brother, Suri. The main reason was that he went to school. He had a cute little vinyl backpack with Donald Duck and Roger Rabbit on it. Plus notebooks and lots of books with all sorts of pretty pictures. Amar also had more clothes. He had two changes of his school uniform, two pairs of socks, one pair of shoes, two ties. He had a nice little blue square tiffin lunchbox that held another little compartment inside. Shobha packed parathas in the tiffin and put a few cookies in the compartment inside. He also had a red water bottle in the shape of an elephant and if you lifted up its trunk it sprayed blue water.

Seven was the time Amar normally left home for school, and Shobha and Chandrakant spent an hour getting him ready. They were totally focused on Amar, who had begun to try getting out of going to school. While getting him ready they had no time to pay attention to Suri.

The Blue Bells school bus stopped right out front; the bus was packed with other schoolboys and girls. Sometimes Shobha, but mostly Chandrakant, would go out to put Amar on the bus. After he got on and said ‘ta ta’ and the bus pulled away they went back inside.

Every once in awhile Suri too tagged along to see Amar off, ambling far behind the others with his hunched shoulders bearing the load of his heavy, misshapen head. The boys and girls lit on Amar as he approached, giggling and calling out to him, waving and telling him to hurry up. Suri watched this silently, breaking into a happy smile. But then he felt that some of the kids and the girls in particular were looking at his weird head — the kids got a little scared, they began pointing at him and whispering things to each other, and this frightened Suri. After that, he didn’t come back for a few days and just stayed home. Then, after a little while, he would try again.

In the morning Shobha sometimes noticed Suri looking covetously at his brother when he was getting dressed for school, putting on his crisp, white, freshly washed shirt, blue shorts and red tie, with matching white socks and shiny black shoes. She was assailed by ugly thoughts. After all, Suri was not well. There was no question that he was not healthy or normal. What would happen if he did something to himself because he felt frustrated, or deprived? Or what if he got angry and jealous of his brother and went and did something stupid. It was true, though, that compared to Amar, Suri didn’t have much stuff. A couple of t-shirts, two pairs of shorts, a pair of sweatpants. And all cheap stuff at that. His shoes, too, were nothing special, just some dull grey no-name sneakers she had bought on the street. Every morning, Shobha nagged and nagged Amar to brush his teeth, and even had to squeeze the Colgate herself onto the toothbrush. Then there was Suri, who did everything on his own. He liked the cool minty taste and smell so much that one time he squeezed a little extra onto his brush; Shobha saw, and yelled at him. ‘Hey, do you think that’s candy? Easy does it!’

Suri froze. He never did it again. Then there was the time Amar had got ready for school and set off with Chandrakant, leaving Suri alone with her, and he said, ‘Mummy, you’re right to think the way that you do. Why waste good money for no reason buying clothes and shoes for someone whose life you don’t put any stock in? I think you should do something similar with that someone’s food. Who knows when he might die? Until then who knows if he’s properly digesting the food he eats?’

Shobha couldn’t believe what she heard. ‘Have you lost your mind again? Always thinking crazy thoughts?’ She ran her hand along Suri’s head. His eyes welled with tears. ‘Son, as far as life and death go, nobody knows when and where you go forwards or backwards. The doctors only gave you until two or two-and-a-half, but you’re still with us, thanks to the grace of Auliya and Vitthal. And look at your papa’s boss, Gulshan Arora, who said that after he turn one hundred and five, he would ride that morning train, loud and high into the sky. He didn’t even make it to eighty. He folded long before.’

Suri found this hysterical. ‘Mummy, if I live to be one hundred and five, can you imagine how big my head would be? And where would I live? And who would come to lift that head of mine?’

***

Amar didn’t go to school on Sundays. Suri stomped his feet like a little kid: he wanted to take Amar’s tiffin, packed with parathas, go to the park, and sit on a bench under the neem tree and eat them. For his outing, Shobha packed two parathas, potato curry, and two cookies. Suri also brought a water bottle along. The crisis began when Amar noticed his brother making off with his tiffin and his water bottle; weeping and wailing ensued. The brothers began pushing and shoving each other. Suri would have strangled Amar if Shobha hadn’t come swiftly to remove his hands from his throat. That day, Shobha saw a wildness in Suri’s eyes, as in a writhing, wounded animal that suddenly exhibits savagery.

Suri looked right at Shobha and said in a cold, unwavering voice, ‘I want a tiffin box of my own. And you, all you living people, will buy one for me. From now on, I won’t be eating lunch inside this house.’

From then on Suri took his lunch box and tottered down the steps.

***

The truth was, however, that these kinds of incidents were few and far between. Most of the time Suryakant was nothing but loving and affectionate with his younger brother, Amarkant. And after he started going to the Jupiter Network cyber café, he began bringing back toffees, magic pop ups, and chocolate bars for his brother; it turned out that the owner, Rohan Chawla, gave him money. Chandrakant told me that Rohan told him his son Suri had a ‘genius mind.’ He added that if he didn’t have any work to do at home, he could go spend time at the café, and he’d be happy to pay him seven or eight hundred a month. Suri was a quick learner on the computer, and picked up Photoshop, learned how to blog, and do some graphic design work. He started learning 3-D animation on his own, without help from others; Rahul Chawla was awestruck.

Suri helped Amar when he had homework. When he had drawing assignments, Suri would draw them or colour them in with crayons or coloured pencils so vividly that Amar inevitably got ‘very good’ or ‘excellent’ marks. But one time Shobha yelled at him, ‘If you do all of your brother’s work, what’s he gonna learn? Let him do his own work!’ Suri stopped what he was doing and stood up.

‘Mummy, I want you to know that the drawing of the little shack and tree and sunset I’ve just made is the last picture I’ll ever draw.’ He staggered over the balcony and quietly went outside.

Shobha took a deep breath.

***

There are two other important facts about Suryakant. One is that he began sleeping less and less. It may have been that he did what ever he could to put off going to sleep — reading, watching TV — since the headaches and breathing problems were at their worst after he got up. One good thing about the new place was that the TV was in the living room.

The other key fact was that Suri was studying English and learning fast. He began watching English-language channels and reading books and newspapers in English. Sometimes he called me and we had long talks; Rohan Chawla let him use the phone at Jupiter Networks as much as he wanted. Suri surfed the internet and did a lot of instant messaging.

He called me one day. ‘Uncle, I’ve got the idea that before Independence, it made more sense to study Hindi. Now it’s better to be able to speak English.’ He paused to think about what he just said. ‘When the English were here, it was English that made us into slaves. Now that the English are gone, it’s Hindi that’s turned us into slaves.’

This is how he talked. Another time he told me, ‘Uncle, there’s no such thing as the Third World. There are only two worlds, and both of them exist everywhere. In one live those who create injustice, and all the rest, the ones who have to put up with the injustice, live in the other.

Much later I found out that Suryakant had kept a diary. He wrote all sorts of stuff in both Hindi and English. It looks like he wrote down his thoughts in the notebook, or what he was reading. The notebook was pretty thick, and mostly filled up with, it can be surmised, what he read and thought.

He had lovely handwriting, in both English and Hindi. From page twenty-seven of his notebook:

(in English)

Everything is looted, spoiled, despoiled,

Death flickering his black wing,

Anguish, hunger — then why this lightness overlaying everything…

(in Hindi)

I am trying to remember who these lines belong to. Are they

Anna Akhmatova’s?

From page thirty-two:

They’ve erased all my words from everywhere, and now I have died, absolutely died, my huge huge head, with its pain inside that can’t be cured, bullet marks and blood stains all around, and everywhere people are eating, people are laughing, didn’t they get the gruesome news, or are they part of the crime? They’re counting the money on camera and off and I am wondering whether my head is India that’s slowly dying…?

Shobha and Chandrakant didn’t really understand the writings of their sick child, Suryakant. The two of them couldn’t read and write very well, and didn’t know English at all. They only spoke Hindi and Marathi, and lived a very meek existence. Chandrakant once said to me, ‘You’ve definitely left your mark on Suri. He’s always reading your books, and he’s always marking up the pages.’

Shobha told me in tears that just about a week ago he said that there was something he had read in one of uncle’s books he wanted to come over and ask about.

But I’ll never find out what it was in which book of mine he wanted to find out about. He died before he could ask.

It was the death that for the past six years everyone had feared might happen at any moment. Suryakant had fought mightily on his own behalf to stay alive and stave death off.

Every night Suri held back the clock hands of the time bomb in his head, buying himself a day or two more. He was unwavering in his efforts. It was a desire to live shared by tens of millions of others who suffer injustice and live inordinately difficult lives.

But one day Suri decided he was done and gave up.

How? Why? This is what Chandrakant and Shobha told me as we were coming back from Nigambodh Ghat, where Suri’s last rites were performed. A HAWKER, SUN ON THE ROOF TOP, THE PRESSURE COOKER’S WHISTLE THAT WHISTLES AND WHISTLES, AND A CHINESE CAP GUN

The date was 25 December, 2004.

The high temperature in Delhi on that day was sixteen degrees centigrade, and the low was three point four.

Even at nine thirty in the morning, fog was so thick that that there still was no trace of the sun. Cars on the road at eight still had their headlights on, and were crawling along like ants. Visibility was almost zero; you couldn’t see more than a few metres ahead.

Chandrakant, after waiting forty-five minutes outside with Amar for the Blue Bells bus that never came, returned home.

Suddenly around ten the fog lifted, and the bright, shining sun revealed itself. Shobha was making channa dhal in the pressure cooker that day. As soon as the sun came out, all the women who lived in the C-block apartment building scurried up to the rooftop. Shobha took her sewing machine and carpet and went to the roof, too — not the same carpet as the magic carpet from Jahangirpuri, but one she bought after they had moved to Ashok Vihar. She was up sewing until two-thirty the night before. She had been wearing glasses for the past five years. She had until three that day to finish sewing fabric for a store called Kalpana Boutique and Design Garments in Deep Market. With the deadline, she was stressed out and in a rush.

She spread out the rug and sat with her sewing machine. She was half listening for the sound of the steam whistle on the pressure cooker with the channa dhal she had put on. It could blow at any moment. She would count how many times the whistle blew, and run down and turn off the stove when it went off for the eighth time.

Suri and Amar were sitting with her on the rug. Suri was writing something in Amar’s notebook, and Amar was leaning over, watching quietly. That’s when Bimla Sahu, who was sitting just a little distance away, said, ‘Your oldest one has been spitting off the balcony and ripping up paper into little bits and throwing them off like confetti. Tell him to stop. I’ve also found peanut shells and candy wrappers outside my door a few times.’

Bimla Sahu had announced this deliberately loud enough so that all the other women sitting on the rooftop would hear.

Suri, who had been hunched over Amar’s notebook writing something, also listened. He lifted his giant head and said hoarsely, ‘That’s not true, Auntie! I’ve never thrown anything off the balcony. And I’ve definitely never spat off it. Do you really think I’m that uncouth and stupid?’

That was enough to make Bimla Sahu, who had such a sturdy frame the women of the Janta Flats called her ‘the wrestler’ or ‘toughie,’ turned several shades darker. Then she let loose.

‘Oh, look who’s using his big mouth! Everything I said you do — you know you do! You yellow cowardly little kid!’

Suri’s breathing quickened. ‘You’re lying, Auntie. And you don’t know how to do anything except make drama. When’s the last time you had your blood pressure checked?’

No sooner had he said this than Bimla Sahu clanged down the thali from which she was picking out pebbles from the rice. She screamed and gestured with her hands, ‘Oh, are you gonna check my blood pressure? Why don’t you fix that jug of a head of yours first? You probably don’t even realize you’re drooling off the balcony. If you have to go out on the balcony, stand on the right side. D’you have to stand right over my head?’

Pain was written all over Suri’s face. His lips began to tremble and he was having difficulty breathing; all of this frightened Shobha. She hoped this wasn’t the start of one of Suri’s massive headaches. He was an extremely sensitive boy, and Bimla Sahu had really got to him.

Shobha made sure the other women could hear as she shot back. ‘Hey little miss tough stuff, why do you have to pick fights with little kids? If you need someone to fight with, don’t forget you can count on me!’

The emphasis she put on you can count on me, the title of a popular film those days, was so good that the women on the roof top broke into hysterics. The tide of laughter was so powerful that it swept up Amar and Suri, too.

And, finally, tough-stuff-wrestler Bimla Sahu herself wasn’t immune to its force. ‘Not bad. If Shah Rukh sees your moves he’ll cart you off to elope.’ She then returned to picking pebbles out of her rice.

Just then — it must have been five or six minutes after eleven — the shout of the street hawker came from below. The C-block apartment building was five stories tall. All of the apartments’ roofs were connected; Amar, along with the other kids, ran over to the railing.

Suri also lumbered over to the edge, with his heavy, misshapen head.

Pickle-pee! Pickle-pee! Pickle-pee! The street hawker played his little plastic flute below. A lengthy bamboo stick was tied vertically to the handlebars of his bike; fastened to the stick was a cardboard sheet at least four-feet- by-four-feet. All sorts of fabulous items hung from it: balloons, toys, assorted colours of plastic combs, lighters, scissors, berets, drawstrings for skirts, ribbons of rainbow colours, hair bands, hair brushes, little mirrors, bangles, and all sorts of other merchandise.

But at the very top of the board sat a row of Chinese cap guns. You could get them in any bazaar those days for fifteen rupees, and they were unbelievably popular with the kids of Delhi. Chinese goods were threatening to flood the marketplace — wondrous electronics at startlingly low prices. The Chinese cap gun shot little plastic coloured bullets, and as soon as you pulled the trigger, rat-a-tat, ping! ping! Utterly realistic. And if you aimed right, the plastic bullet would hit the target spot on.

‘I want a Chinese cap gun so I can kill the bad guy!’ Amar pleaded.

Shobha had earlier said no. But, number one, just yesterday, she received 2,200 rupees from the Kalpana Boutique Garments Centre, part in advance, the rest on receipt. And, number two, Bimla Sahu and her yelling and screaming had put her and the kids in a really foul mood, and she thought the kids might feel better if they got to play around. Therefore, she decided to purchase a cap gun. She went up to the railing, leaned over, and shouted to the hawker. ‘Hey mister! Don’t move, I’m coming right down.’

Shobha was just about to go down the stairs when she heard Suri’s cold, hard, machine-like voice.

‘Mummy, I want a cap gun, too. My own.’

Shobha turned around to find Suri pressed against the railing, standing and looking at her with the big head held up by his shoulders.

‘Are you just a little kid who likes to play guns?’ she said with a sweet smile.

She reached their flat (C-7/3) on the third floor, unlocked it, went in, took money from the pouch inside the cabinet drawer, and took the stairs down to the ground floor.

When she got there, she bought the Chinese pistol from the hawker for fifteen rupees. She tried and tried to bargain, but he wouldn’t even drop the price one rupee. Shobha thought, they’re not going to drop the price of these things that are selling like hotcakes. She took the gun, went up the stairs, and, when she got to their flat, found Amar who had come down from the roof. You could see on his face how happy and excited he was. He grabbed the cap gun at once and rushed back upstairs. Shobha shouted after him.

‘Be sure to let your brother play with it, too! Don’t play on your own.’

‘It’s mine, mine!’ Amar shot back while running.

Shobha went into the kitchen. The pressure cooker with the channa dhal sat atop the gas burner. They purchased a gas burner after moving to Ambedkar Nagar from Jahangirpuri, retiring the old coal stove, though there were still plenty of families in the Janta Flats who still cooked with coal or kerosene.

Today for lunch she was planning to serve the channa dhal and ghiya dish that she, Suri, Amar, and Chandu all really liked. She learned the recipe in Jahangirpuri from Natho Chaudhuri, who had left her alcoholic husband in Bijnor and run away with her lover to Delhi. She called the dish ‘luckdala.’ Maybe she got ‘luck’ from the vegetable ‘loki’ and ‘dala’ from ‘dhal,’ and combined the two to come up with this cute name. She thought she would wait until the pressure cooker had let off all its steam so she could go back to her sewing on the roof without worrying. There were still ten or so minutes before noon. She turned the gas up on the burner.

One minute later the cooker gave off its first steam whistle — a long, throaty blast. There was probably still plenty of steam bottled up inside. The strong burst of vapor carried spicy, delicious smells throughout the kitchen, smells that made Shobha’s mouth water. But still five more whistles to go.

Just as the second whistle was about to blow, she heard a loud commotion outside. Women and children, screaming and shrieking, the sounds of people running downstairs.

Shobha froze. Something terrible had happened. She first thought of Amar and was seized by fear.

She turned off the burner and started fast for the roof. She thought about what Suri said just after she called after the hawker, Mummy, I want a cap gun, too. My own, in that cold, hard, machine-like voice, eyes red, head trembling, that look of wildness on his face, just like when he took Amar’s tiffin box to eat in the park, and got in a fight with Amar, and if she hadn’t broken it up Suri would have strangled his little brother.

And now if Suri had pushed Amar off the roof?

‘Amar! Amar!’ she shouted, arriving on the roof in bad shape.

Amar clung to the railing as if he were made of stone, sobbing quietly, holding the Chinese cap gun in one hand.

The women still on the roof leaned over the railing and stared down.

Shobha looked. There was a crowd of people gathered around the spot where just moments earlier the hawker had stood with his bike. More people came running from adjacent apartment buildings.

Bimla Sahu, the one who everyone called ‘toughie’ or ‘the wrestler’ since she was big and strong and always picking fights came up behind Shobha, put her hand on her shoulder, and she was in tears.

‘He went up to the railing himself and just jumped. It happened so quickly.’

Her face was covered in tears and she was choking on her sobs. ‘Your eldest committed suicide! You and I said one little thing, and look how he took it to heart.’

***

The women said Amar came back to the roof with his cap gun, and as soon as he fired the first shot, Suri began to have trouble breathing. He grabbed his head with his hands, and tottered over to the edge.

And from there he jumped quietly.

***

On Nigambodh ghat, Chandrakant set fire to his son Suri’s body. After the flames rose and began engulfing the body, I turned away.

An old fakir was sitting a little distance behind us, wrapped up tight under a dirty, old, torn, bed sheet. It had been a cold December, and all of North India was under a cold snap that had already killed a handful of poor people. The old fakir was shivering.

It was the same old fakir Chandrakant and I had met years earlier in the Hazarat Nizammuddin dargah near the shrine to the first Hindi poet, Amir Khusrau, a fakir whose eyes were red like an ant’s, whom the almighty did not bless with the ability to sleep, who carried thirty times its own weight its whole life.

He noticed me staring at him and got up to leave. I saw that his head was proportionally much larger than his body — something he was always trying to hide with that torn old bedsheet. FINALLY AN ASSESSMENT BY THE WHO; A PAGE FROM SURYAKANT’S DIARY; THE PENTAGON

Suri — Suryakant — was born sometime in September, 1995, and died on 25 December, 2004, at 12:04. He was born in a private hospital called Kalpana Health Centre between Model Town and Adarsh Nagar, but determining the exact date is no easy task, because a restaurant, day spa, and massage parlour now stand where the hospital used to be. Nobody has any idea what happened to Kalpana Health Centre. People had of course heard of the big scandal and police raid a couple years ago that had made the TV news after the kidney of an indigent man had been removed and sold.

I couldn’t be sure whether nine months before his birth in that hospital when Suryakant came into his mother’s womb was the time of the magic carpet, the one Chandrakant and Shobha had brought with them to the half flat of house number E-3/1, bylane number seven, Jahangirpuri, Delhi, after fleeing Sarini, and had put on the floor, and played the game they played for years to put out the fire; or whether it was true that one night he crawled like a turtle out of the dirty drainage sewer and silently entered his mother’s womb that way. And the disease that made his head grow and grow, day by day, the disease the doctors said would give him a life span of two years max, the disease that had no trace in any of the medical literature, the disease Chandrakant and Shobha called ‘Mangosil’ but it was really only Suri who knew about the virus that caused it — it wasn’t the disease that caused his death.

He himself chose when to end his life.

***

Suri’s notebook lies open in front me at page fifty-six. He had copied down some lines of a poem in his beautiful handwriting:

You are still alive, you are not alone yet —

She is still beside you, with her empty hands,

And joy reaches you both across immense places,

Through mists and hunger and flying snow,

Miserable is the man who runs from a dog in his darkness…

And pitiful is the one who holds out his rag of life

To beg mercy of the darkness.

I did the translation in a rush because in front of me are this year’s findings from a World Health Organization report. It contains alarming statistics about millions of children in the developing countries who will fall victim to deadly diseases because of malnutrition, poverty, and squalor.

The report also included startling information about children who have been falling victim to an illness for the past several years that causes the head to grow significantly faster than the rest of the body, causing unnatural behavior. According to doctors, the virus or causes of the disease have yet to be identified, but children who suffer from this disease usually only live to two. According to the WHO, this disease, like AIDS, is spreading rapidly.

But the strangest part of the report came from the Pentagon. A total of sixty seven countries including Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Bangladesh, Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Palestine, Kosovo, Sri Lanka, Namibia, Nicaragua, and Brazil were home to children who had been born with heads that so quickly got bigger.

And they were even being born in wealthy, developed countries like the US, France, and the UK.

The brains of these children knew everything. They weren’t innocent and wide-eyed like most kids.

The brains of these children were several times bigger than normal for their biological age. And several centuries of living memories were present inside these brains — you could call it a mini flash drive with all history up to the present day. Their DNA was eerily alike.

The Pentagon urged all governments of all countries to keep a close eye on these big-headed kids.

This is how they can be identified:

‘They are in squalor to poor families. Their eyes are red like the eyes of ants. They more or less never sleep. And it is possible they know everything.’