A Suitable Boy, Page 28

  But these are the hostages of love, he said to himself, and it is meaningless to ask myself whether I would exchange a head of unworried hair for my wife and child.

  4.3

  They emerged on to a yet broader alley, and then on to a hot, dusty street not far from the high ground of the Chowk. One of the two great landmarks of this crowded area was a huge, pink three-storey building. This was the kotwali or city police station, the largest in Purva Pradesh. The other landmark, a hundred yards away, was the beautiful and austere Alamgiri Mosque, ordered by the Emperor Aurangzeb to be built in the heart of the city upon the ruins of a great temple.

  Late Mughal and British records attest to a series of Hindu-Muslim riots around this spot. It is not clear what exactly incurred the wrath of the emperor. He was the least tolerant of the great emperors of his dynasty, true, but the area around Brahmpur had been spared his worst excesses. The reimposition of the poll-tax on unbelievers, a tax rescinded by his great-grandfather Akbar, affected the citizens of Brahmpur as it did those throughout the empire. But the razing of temples usually required some extraordinary impetus, such as the indication that it was being used as a centre for armed or political resistance. Apologists for Aurangzeb were apt to claim that he had a worse reputation for intolerance than he deserved and that he was as harsh with Shias as he was with Hindus. But for the more orthodox Hindu citizenry of Brahmpur, the previous 250 years of history had not dimmed their loathing for a man who had dared to destroy one of the holiest temples of the great destroyer Shiva himself.

  The great Shiva-linga of the inner sanctum of the temple was rumoured to have been preserved by the priests of the so-called Chandrachur Temple on the night before it was reduced to rubble. They sank it not in a deep well as was often the case in those days, but in the shallows and sands near the cremation ground by the Ganga. How the huge stone object was carried there is not known. Apparently the knowledge of its location was secretly maintained and passed on for more than ten generations from head-priest to head-priest in hereditary succession. Of all the common images of Hindu worship it was probably the sacred phallus, the Shiva-linga, which was most despised by the orthodox theologians of Islam. Where they could destroy it, they did so with a particular sense of righteous disgust. While there was any chance that the Muslim peril might resurface, the priests did not act upon their family knowledge. But after Independence and the Partition of Pakistan and India, the priest of the long-since-destroyed Chandrachur Temple—who lived in poverty in a shack near the cremation ghat—felt that it was safe to emerge and identify himself. He tried to get his temple rebuilt and the Shiva-linga excavated and reinstalled. At first the Archaeological Survey had refused to believe the particulars he gave of the location of the linga. The rumour of its preservation was unsupported by other records. And even if it were true, the Ganga had changed course, the sands and shallows had shifted, and the unwritten verses or mantras describing its location could themselves have grown inaccurate through repeated transmission. It is also possible that officers of the Archaeological Survey were aware or had been apprised of the possible effects of unearthing the linga and had decided that for the sake of public peace it was safer horizontal under the sand than vertical in a sanctum. At any rate, the priest obtained no help from them.

  As they passed below the red walls of the mosque, Haresh, not being a native of Brahmpur, asked why black flags were hanging at the outer gates. Kedarnath replied in an indifferent voice that they had come up just the previous week when the ground had been broken for a temple in the neighbouring plot of land. For one who had lost his house, his land and his livelihood in Lahore, he did not appear to be embittered against Muslims so much as exhausted by religious zealots in general. His mother was very upset at his evenhandedness.

  ‘Some local pujari located a Shiva-linga in the Ganga,’ said Kedarnath. ‘It is supposed to have come from the Chandrachur Temple, the great Shiva temple that they say Aurangzeb destroyed. The pillars of the mosque do have bits of Hindu carving, so it must have been made out of some ruined temple, God knows how long ago. Mind your step!’

  Haresh narrowly avoided stepping into some dog-shit. He was wearing a rather smart pair of maroon brogues, and was very glad to have been warned.

  ‘Anyway,’ continued Kedarnath, smiling at Haresh’s agility, ‘the Raja of Marh has title to the house that stands—stood, rather—beyond the western wall of the mosque. He has had it broken down and is building a temple there. A new Chandrachur Temple. He’s a real lunatic. Since he can’t destroy the mosque and build on the original site, he’s decided to build to the immediate west and install the linga in the sanctum there. For him it’s a great joke to think that the Muslims will be bowing down in the direction of his Shiva-linga five times a day.’

  Noticing an unoccupied cycle rickshaw, Kedarnath hailed it, and they got in. ‘To Ravidaspur,’ he said, and then continued: ‘You know, for a supposedly gentle, spiritual people, we seem to delight in rubbing other people’s noses in dog-shit, don’t you think? Certainly I cannot understand people like the Raja of Marh. He imagines himself to be a new Ganesh whose divine mission in life is to lead the armies of Shiva to victory over the demons. And yet he’s besotted with half the Muslim courtesans of the city. When he laid the foundation stone of the temple two people died. Not that this meant anything to him, he’s probably had twenty times that number murdered in his own time in his own state. Anyway, one of the two was a Muslim and that’s when the mullahs put the black flags up on the gate of the mosque. And if you look carefully, you’ll see that there are even some smaller ones on the minarets.’

  Haresh turned back to look, but suddenly the cycle rickshaw, which had been gathering speed downhill, collided with a slowly moving car, and they came to a sudden halt. The car had been crawling along the crowded road, and there was no damage to anyone, but a couple of the bicycle’s spokes had got bent. The rickshaw-wallah, who looked thin and unassertive, jumped off the cycle, glanced quickly at his front wheel, and banged aggressively on the window of the car.

  ‘Give me money! Phataphat! Immediately!’ he yelled.

  The liveried driver and the passengers, who were two middle-aged women, looked surprised at this sudden demand. The driver half-recovered, and put his head out of the window

  ‘Why?’ he shouted. ‘You were coming down the slope without control. We weren’t even moving. If you want to commit suicide do I have to pay for your funeral?’

  ‘Money! Quickly! Three spokes—three rupees!’ said the rickshaw-wallah, as brusquely as a highwayman.

  The driver turned his face away. The rickshaw-wallah grew angrier:

  ‘You daughter-fucker! I don’t have all day. If you don’t pay for my damages, I’ll give your car some of its own.’

  The driver would probably have responded with some insults in kind, but since he was with his employers, who were getting nervous, he remained tight-lipped.

  Another rickshaw-wallah passed, and shouted in encouragement: ‘That’s right, brother, don’t be afraid.’ By now about twenty people had gathered round to watch the sport.

  ‘Oh, pay him and let’s go on,’ said one of the ladies at the back. ‘It’s too hot to argue.’

  ‘Three rupees!’ repeated the rickshaw-wallah.

  Haresh was about to leap out of the rickshaw to put an end to this extortion when the driver of the car suddenly flung an eight-anna coin at the rickshaw-wallah. ‘Take this—and fuck off!’ the driver said, stung to rage by his helplessness.

  When the car had gone and the crowd had cleared, the rickshaw-wallah started singing with delight. He bent down and straightened the two bent spokes in twenty seconds, and they were on their way again.

  4.4

  ‘I’ve only been a couple of times to Jagat Ram’s place, so I’ll have to make inquiries once we get to Ravidaspur,’ said Kedarnath.

  ‘Jagat Ram?’ asked Haresh, still thinking of the incident of the spokes and angry with the rickshaw-wallah.

&
nbsp; ‘The shoemaker whose workshop we’re going to see. He’s a shoemaker, a jatav. He was originally one of those basket-wallahs I told you about who bring their shoes to Misri Mandi to sell to any trader who’ll buy them.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now he has his own workshop. He’s reliable, unlike most of these shoemakers who, once they have a bit of money in their pockets, don’t care about deadlines or promises. And he’s skilled. And he doesn’t drink—not much. I began by giving him a small order for a few dozen pairs, and he did a good job. Soon I was ordering from him regularly. Now he’s able to hire two or three people in addition to his own family. It’s helped both him and me. And perhaps you might want to see if the quality of his work comes up to the standard that your people at CLFC need. If so . . .’ Kedarnath left the rest of the sentence in the air.

  Haresh nodded, and gave him a comforting smile. After a pause, Haresh said, ‘It’s hot now that we’re out of the alleys. And it smells worse than a tannery. Where are we now? In Ravidaspur?’

  ‘Not yet. That’s on the other side of the railway line. It doesn’t smell quite so bad there. Yes, there’s an area here where they prepare the leather, but it isn’t a proper tannery like the one on the Ganga—’

  ‘Perhaps we should get down and see it,’ said Haresh with interest.

  ‘But there’s nothing to see,’ protested Kedarnath, covering his nose.

  ‘Have you been here before?’ asked Haresh.

  ‘No!’

  Haresh laughed. ‘Stop here!’ he shouted at the rickshaw-wallah. Over Kedarnath’s protests, he got him to dismount, and the two of them entered the warren of stinking paths and low huts, led by their noses towards the tanning pits.

  The dirt paths stopped suddenly at a large open area surrounded by shacks and pockmarked by circular pits which had been dug into the ground and lined with hardened clay. A fearsome stench rose from the entire zone. Haresh felt sick; Kedarnath almost vomited with disgust. The sun shone harshly down, and the heat made the stench worse still. Some of the pits were filled with a white liquid, others with a brown tannic brew. Dark, scrawny men dressed only in lungis stood to one side of the pits, scraping off fat and hair from a pile of hides. One of them stood in a pit and seemed to be wrestling with a large hide. A pig was drinking at a ditch filled with stagnant black water. Two children with filthy matted hair were playing in the dust near the pits. When they saw the strangers they stopped abruptly and stared at them.

  ‘If you had wanted to see the whole process from the beginning I could have taken you to see the ground where dead buffaloes are stripped and left to the vultures,’ said Kedarnath wryly. ‘It’s near the unfinished bypass.’

  Haresh, slightly regretful for having forced his companion into accompanying him here, shook his head. He looked at the nearest shack, which was empty except for a rudimentary fleshing machine. Haresh went up and examined it. In the next shack was an ancient splitting machine and a wattle pit. Three young men were rubbing a black paste on to a buffalo hide lying on the ground. Next to them was a white pile of salted sheepskins. When they saw the strangers they stopped working and looked at them.

  No one said a word, neither the children, nor the three young men, nor the two strangers.

  Eventually Kedarnath broke the silence. ‘Bhai,’ he said, addressing one of the three young men. ‘We have just come to see how the leather is prepared. Would you show us around?’

  The man looked at him closely, and then stared at Haresh, taking in his off-white silk shirt, his brogues, his briefcase, his businesslike air.

  ‘Where are you from?’ he asked Kedarnath.

  ‘We’re from the town. We’re on our way to Ravidaspur. There’s a local man there whom I work with.’

  Ravidaspur was almost entirely a shoemaker’s neighbourhood. But if Kedarnath imagined that by implying that another leatherworker was a colleague of his he would win acceptance here among the tanners, he was mistaken. Even among the leatherworkers or chamars, there was a hierarchy. The shoemakers—like the man they were going to visit—looked down upon the flayers and tanners. In turn, those who were looked down upon expressed their dislike of the shoemakers.

  ‘That is a neighbourhood we do not like to go to,’ said one of the young men shortly.

  ‘Where does the paste come from?’ asked Haresh, after a pause.

  ‘From Brahmpur,’ said the young man, refusing to be specific.

  There was another long silence.

  Then an old man appeared with his hands wet and dripping with some dark sticky liquid. He stood at the entrance of the shack and observed them.

  ‘You! This wattle water—pani!’ he said in English before lapsing into crude Hindi again. His voice was cracked, and he was drunk. He picked up a piece of rough, red-dyed leather from the ground and said, ‘This is better than cherry leather from Japan! Have you heard of Japan? I had a fight with them, and I made them fail. Patent leather from China? I can match them all. I am sixty years old and I have a full knowledge of all pastes, all masalas, all techniques.’

  Kedarnath began to get worried, and tried to move out of the shack. The old man barred his way by stretching his hands out sideways in a servile gesture of aggression. ‘You cannot see the pits. You are a spy from the CID, from the police, from the bank—’ He held his ears in a gesture of shame, then lapsed into English: ‘No, no, no, bilkul no!’

  By now the stench and the tension had made Kedarnath somewhat desperate. His face was drawn, he was sweating with anxiety as much as heat. ‘Let us go, we have to get to Ravidaspur,’ he said.

  The old man moved towards him and held out his stained and dripping hand: ‘Money!’ he said. ‘Fees! To drink—otherwise you cannot see the pits. You go to Ravidaspur. We don’t like the jatavs, we are not like them, they eat the meat of buffaloes. Chhhi!’ He spat out a syllable of disgust. ‘We only eat goats and sheep.’

  Kedarnath shrank back. Haresh began to get annoyed.

  The old man sensed that he had got under his skin. This gave him a perverse sense of encouragement. Mercenary, suspicious and boastful by turn, he now led them towards the pits. ‘We get no money from the government,’ he whispered. ‘We need money, each family, for buying materials, chemicals. The government gives us too little money. You are my Hindu brother,’ he said mockingly. ‘Bring me a bottle—I will give you samples of the best dyes, the best liquor, the best medicine!’ He laughed at his joke. ‘Look!’ He pointed at a reddish liquid in a pit.

  One of the young men, a short man who was blind in one eye, said, ‘They stop us from moving raw materials, stop us from getting chemicals. We have to have supporting documents and registration. We are harassed in transit. You tell your government department to exempt us from duty and give us money. Look at our children. Look—’ He gestured towards a child who was defecating on a rubbish heap.

  To Kedarnath the whole slum was unbearably vile. He said in a low voice: ‘We are not from a government department.’

  The young man suddenly got annoyed. His lips tightened and he said: ‘Where are you from then?’ The eyelid over his blind eye began to twitch. ‘Where are you from? Why have you come here? What do you want from this place?’

  Kedarnath could tell that Haresh was about to flare up. He sensed that Haresh was abrupt and quite fearless, but believed that it was pointless being fearless when there was something to fear. He knew how things could suddenly explode from acrimony into violence. He put one arm around Haresh’s shoulder and led him back between the pits. The ground oozed, and the lower part of Haresh’s brogues was splattered with black filth.

  The young man followed them, and at one point it seemed that he was about to lay his hands on Kedarnath. ‘I’ll recognize you,’ he said. ‘You don’t come back. You want to make money from our blood. There is more money in leather than in silver and gold—or you wouldn’t come to this stinking place.’

  ‘No—no—’ said the drunken old man aggressively, ‘bilkul no!’

  K
edarnath and Haresh re-entered the neighbouring lanes; the stench was hardly better. Just at the opening of a lane, at the periphery of the open, pit-riddled ground, Haresh noticed a large red stone, flat on the top. On it a boy of about seventeen had laid a piece of sheepskin, largely cleaned of wool and fat. With a fleshing knife he was removing the remaining pieces of flesh off the skin. He was utterly intent upon what he was doing. The skins piled up nearby were cleaner than they could have been if they had been fleshed by a machine. Despite what had happened before, Haresh was fascinated. Normally he would have stopped to ask a few questions, but Kedarnath hurried him on.

  The tanners had left them. Haresh and Kedarnath, dust-covered and sweating, made their way back through the dirt paths. When they got to their rickshaw on the street they gratefully breathed in the air that had seemed at first unbearably foul. And indeed, compared to what they had taken in for the last half hour, it was the breath of paradise.

  4.5

  After waiting in the heat for fifteen minutes for a late, long and very slow goods train to pass a level crossing, they finally got to Ravidaspur. It was somewhat less crowded in the lanes of this outlying neighbourhood than in the old heart of Brahmpur where Kedarnath lived, but far more insanitary, with sluggish sewage trickling along and across the lanes. Picking their way between flea-ridden dogs, grunting filth-spattered pigs and various unpleasant static objects, and crossing an open sewer on a rickety wooden bridge, they found their way to Jagat Ram’s small, rectangular, windowless brick-and-mud workshop. At night after the work was cleared away, this was where his six children slept; he and his wife usually slept in a brick-walled room with a corrugated iron roof which he had built on top of the flat roof of the workshop.