Pankaj Mishra - The Romantics

But then one evening, not long after I arrived in Benares, as I was coming out of the library, I saw a boy among a group of students whip out a crude pistol from under his long, grimy kurta and fire it into the air. He couldn’t have been more than seventeen years old, and he was indulging only in a bit of macho posturing. The boys accompanying him slapped him on the back and burst into laughter. But he made the rest of us jump out of our skins: the birds on the massive banyan trees outside took off with a loud flapping of wings; a rickshaw coming into the library compound braked abruptly and swerved into a hedge.

The boys had laughed afterwards. But for that one brief moment, I had known real fear, and now the campus had different associations for me. As I returned home at dusk it appeared an ominous place; the possibility of violence seemed to lurk amid every group of students I encountered. I didn’t know anyone at the university and was conscious more than ever of my vulnerability.

The university’s recent troubled past only further increased my fear. For some months, the campus had been the setting for pitched battles between the police and students. Things were quieter now. But the peace was temporary; it could be broken by one carefully lobbed stone. A few hundred metres from the main gates to the campus was the office of the vice-chancellor, a much-hated figure among the students for his iron-handed methods, which were a frequent pretext for violent agitation. Here, the droves of policemen, nervous khaki-clad rookies, lay in wait. Sunk one moment on string cots before tents of grey weather-beaten tarpaulin, playing cards, their lathis and rifles and riot shields resting on the ground, at the first sign of trouble — that carefully pitched stone, the sound of shattering glass, the explosion of a crude hand grenade — they could turn into a rampaging horde within seconds.

Not far away on the same road lived their antagonists, the students, in a row of hostels, built in the Indo-Saracenic style. The rage that had undermined the university had found its easiest victim here; after years of arson and vandalism these hostels wore a look of extreme decrepitude. The aggressive graffiti in black on the walls were a premonition of the damaged furniture and shattered window panes and broken balustrades inside; the lines of white underclothing hung out to dry in the arcaded two-storey blocks made the hostels resemble the old havelis outside Benares that had been overrun by squatters.

But the hostels were inhabited not only by students. They were actually sought after by outsiders. To young men from the region around Benares, they represented an important stage in their attempt to lift themselves out of conditions of extreme poverty. Rents were very low and sometimes didn’t have to be paid at all. You could live in these hostels for many years while waiting for that miracle, a government job, and not spend more than a few hundred rupees.

*

Rajesh lived in one of the more run-down hostels. Wild grass grew in the quad and ran right up to the two long wings of the hostel. Soggy cigarette packs lay over a film of scum in the open stagnant drain that ran parallel to the wings. There were large light green scars on the walls where rain and damp had seeped through; the plaster had peeled off in many places, leaving the brickwork exposed underneath. The lower half of the pillars had on them block-red batik-like patterns made by students spitting betel juice. Piles of legless tables and chairs lay under the dark staircase, which smelled faintly of urine. Scraps of yellowing newspaper were scattered on the steps.

Most of the rooms were closed, heavy padlocks hanging on the doors. There was hardly anyone around: along the large quad from where Rajesh’s room was, a bare-torsoed man once emerged from his room to drape a wet towel around the balustrade and then went straight back in.

Rajesh’s room was at the end of a long corridor on the first floor; the door was open when I arrived. It was close to dusk and it was dark inside, where he was lying on a cot, wearing a polo-neck jumper and cheap polyester pants of the kind sold outside the university in the rows of tiny shops. He was reading a Hindi paperback edition of poems by Faiz, the Pakistani exile, the poet of heartbreak and loss. He seemed completely absorbed.

He peered at me from behind the book as I knocked on the door. I introduced myself; I told him that Vijay had asked me to see him.

He seemed to know at once why I had come. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said and got up and held out his hand to me.

He was a tall, good-looking man with a slim supple frame and a slight glint of uncertainty in his probing dark brown eyes. There was something buttoned-up, inscrutable, in his expression, in the way his thin lips clamped shut above a strong jaw. Thick black hair fell down from one side of his head; unlike most students at the university, he did not have a moustache. He had shaved badly that morning and tiny patches of stubble lay under his throat, just above where the polo-neck collar touched his skin.

He spoke slowly, with a great deal of deliberation — his Hindi had a faint regional accent — and his normally vigilant eyes lost their intensity and seemed to turn inward when he did so.

‘Where are you staying in Benares?’ he asked. I told him. He paused for an instant, and said, ‘Do you know Arjun?’

I said he was the son of my landlord. If he was surprised, he did not show it. He silently mulled over that piece of information while gazing out of the room and running his hand through his hair.

And then, abruptly, he asked, ‘Have you read Faiz?’

I said I had.

He didn’t appear to have been listening. He picked up his book from where it was lying face down on the cot and recited a few lines from it in a low, sombre voice:

Ye dagh dagh ujala, ye shab-gazida sahar

Vo intizar tha jis ka, ye vo sahar to nahin,

Ye vo sahar to nahin jis ki arzu lekar

Chale the yar ke mil-jaegi kahin na kahin

Falak ke dasht men taron ki akhiri manzil

Kahin to hoga shab-e sust mauj ka sahil

Kahin to jake rukega safina-e-gham-e-dil.

This leprous daybreak, dawn night’s fangs have mangled –

This is not that long-looked-for break of day,

Not that clear dawn in quest of which those comrades

Set out, believing that in heaven’s wide void

Somewhere must be the stars’ last halting-place

Somewhere the verge of night’s slow-washing tide,

Somewhere an anchorage for the ship of heartache.

A strange disquietude came over his face as he recited. After he finished, he sat still for a moment, eyes fixed on the open book in his hand. He then abruptly got up and offered to get me some water; his eyes when they met my face were again full of uncertainty.

The earthen pot he picked up from under his bed turned out to be empty. He said he would refill it in the communal bathroom at the end of the corridor and went out.

The room felt less small and congested without him. Besides the strong cot there was a rough study table, a wooden chair and a jute-and-bamboo bookstand, its thin legs askew under the weight of dust-laden old books and papers. Cobwebs clung to the high ceiling and even to the broad sooty blades of the old-style fan overhead. From a solitary nail in the dark blue wall hung a pair of cheap denim jeans. Muddy tennis shoes lay on the stone floor. Under the cot sat a black metal trunk, a familiar object that almost invariably accompanied a student on his first journey to college, on his passage to responsible adulthood. It was a common sight in the hostels of Allahabad; I had one when I first came to the university. But it was oddly distracting to see it here, Rajesh’s name painted on it in stylish white Roman letters above the word ‘University’, wrongly spelled ‘Universty’.