Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

But now he wanted to attend intermediate and college, and it was going to take more than anger to get him there. The fees were manageable, but there was a lot more to be paid for. He knew something now about education, and he understood that it required a lot of ready cash. You had to buy books, pens, application forms, you had to pay special fees for exams and graduations, you had to have a bicycle to go to the Lala Chandan Lal Memorial College on Jawaharlal Nehru Road, which was on the far side of Rajpur from the Tola. You had to pay for clothes, for two pairs of pants and two shirts, so that you could sit on the benches alongside boys who wore jackets and shiny shoes. And still there were all the other things you couldn't pay for, for kachoris from Makhania the chat-wallah who set up his stall across the road from the college gate, for films at Parvati, for camaraderie and carefree laughter. The intangibles that were never named, but were education also, these you could never pay for. Aadil knew all this, and yet he wanted to go to college. He refused marriage and insisted on intermediate and then college. No argument by the elders in the Tola could sway him in the slightest. Aadil had told them that fees and books and exams alone would require seven hundred rupees, maybe more, every six months. They asked, where will that come from? But Aadil was adamant. He was not rude, but he put his head down and repeated one single sentence: 'I want to go to college.' Finally Noor Mohammed took him to see the Raja.

Aadil had never been to the haveli before. He had seen the surrounding brick wall on top of the hill, and he had seen the Raja's children in their sparkling-clean clothes. He was surprised now by the headless statue in front of the house and the rows of broken windows, the splintered railings on the balconies. Still, it took his breath away, the haveli with its sheer size and expanse, the overgrown gardens that must have once needed a staff of fifty gardeners, the empty stables tall enough to have harboured elephants. The Raja met them on a patio behind the house. He took a long draw on his hookah and gazed out at the distant glint of the river. He was wearing a white shirt and a blue lungi, and seen up close he looked most unlike the pictures of royalty that Aadil had seen in his history books. Even the hookah was quite threadbare, with a cracked cup. Noor Mohammed squatted next to the Raja's armchair, and tugged at Aadil's sleeve until he lowered himself also. The Raja listened to Noor Mohammed, and said, 'Noora, the boy is quite right. He should be educated. These are times for education. But my condition is very bad. Now those bastards have taken my land up to the orchard.' He made a gesture over his shoulder.

The bastards he was referring to were the Gangotiyas, who had lived near the confluence of the Milani and the Boorhi Gandak until last year, when they had been dispossessed in one disastrous week by changes in the course of the waters. They had shown up in Rajpur en masse, some six hundred and fifty ragged men, women and children, and a settlement had appeared overnight on the Raja's land. They had occupied some thirty bighas, around two large ponds, and proclaimed it their own. They said they had been given the land by the Raja's deceased father, who–according to them – had been transformed by a meeting with Acharya Vinobha Bhave, and had converted instantly to the Acharya's idealistic ideology of land redistribution. The proof of this was a bequest on a ragged-edged sheet of paper, supposedly signed by the Raja's father and dated two weeks before his death. The Gangotiyas were supported by the opposition politicians, and all the declining influence and contacts of the current Raja were not enough to get them off his land. He was in court, of course, but a ruling might take ten years, or twenty. Meanwhile the Gangotiyas planted crops, had built many huts and seven pucca houses, a school and a temple.

'Raja-ji, the times are very bad,' Noor Mohammed said. 'But our family has been yours for generations. You have looked after us.'

This was true. By tradition, men from the Ansari Tola had worked in the stables at the haveli, but the horses and elephants had disappeared after independence. Once, all the land from the haveli to the river, including the shifting soils of the diara closest to the water, had belonged to the Rajas. But the haveli no longer had hundreds of lathis to wield, so the Yadavs had taken the fertile diara fields, and the Gangotiyas had taken the fields near the ponds. The Raja was pressed from both sides. He took a pensive draw of his hookah, and squinted into the distance. Aadil noticed that his rubber chappals, under the armchair, were both splitting at the toes. Aadil's father then said the same thing again, 'Raja-ji, our family has been yours for generations.' They sat with the Raja through the afternoon, watching him puff and sigh and look out over the fields. When it grew dark he gave Noor Mohammed fifty-one rupees, and told Aadil to work hard. And they came back to the Tola.

The next morning they went to Maqbool Khan's house. 'Mir saab,' Noor Mohammed said to him, 'our family has been yours for generations.' Maqbool Khan was sitting at a desk, talking on three phones simultaneously. His land holdings were much reduced, but he now owned seven trucks and three tempos, and had interests in the dusty trades of gravel quarrying and brick-making. He wore a spotless white kurta, though, and sported a luxuriant, up-curling moustache worthy of his lordliest ancestor. Noor Mohammed had taken up his squat next to the desk, and Aadil hunched beside him and listened to Maqbool Khan make deals. Other men came in and sat on chairs and talked to Maqbool Khan and left.

After an hour Maqbool Khan leaned back in his chair, smoothed back his hair, and looked down at Aadil and said, 'Boy, so you want to study? What will you read?'

'Biology.'

For some reason Maqbool Khan found that very funny. He burst out laughing, showing red-stained teeth. 'Horses and cows?' he said. 'Noora, your son will go to college to learn chickens. Why don't you teach him at home?'

Noor Mohammed stayed quiet. After a few minutes, when Maqbool Khan seemed to have forgotten them, he whispered out his old refrain, 'Mir saab, our family has always been with you.' They stayed until Maqbool Khan got up for his lunch. As he walked past them, without looking, he put some notes into Noor Mohammed's cupped hands. Noor Mohammed thanked him with many a 'Mir saab', and tucked the money inside his shirt, and did not count it until they were out on the road, shaken by the turbulence of passing lorries. Maqbool Khan had given eighty-one rupees.

The next day they went to Kurkoo Kothi. Nandan Prasad Yadav was too busy to see them. In fact, Noor Mohammed and Aadil didn't even get inside the house. They waited with a herd of supplicants at the freshly painted rear gate. Workmen had erected scaffolding to repair the tops of the walls, and put new coats of blue and white on the brick. Four guards armed with fearsome rifles lounged by the gate and spat occasionally into the grass. After Noor Mohammed and Aadil had waited for three hours, a secretary emerged from inside the house and sat on a chair in the shade and took requests. When Noor Mohammed and Aadil got up to him, he listened to what Noor Mohammed had to say, and interrupted him brusquely: 'Write a request.' That was all. Father and son retreated to the back of the queue. Aadil had a pen, and a small notebook, but Noor Mohammed thought that such a request should be written on a grander paper. The next morning, he delayed going to the fields, and watched Aadil write a letter on a clean sheet of foolscap paper. Of course Noor Mohammed couldn't read what was being written, but he made Aadil read the whole letter to him three times. Then he told Aadil to take it immediately to Kurkoo Kothi, and give it to secretary saab. Aadil set out, past the nullah and on to the road. The sun burnt his shoulders and thighs. He squinted, and plodded on, fighting against the reluctance that weighed him down. He went past the left turn that led up to the haveli, and now there was a beat inside his head that matched his feet, a steady pulsation of self-loathing. Aadil walked through the bazaar, and down to the right, near the railway station, he could see Maqbool Khan's office. His stomach heaved, and he wanted to stop, to vomit. But he made himself go on. He exercised his will again, this instrument he had honed since childhood, and conquered his body. He went all the way to Kurkoo Kothi, and sat in the crowd until early evening, and handed the letter to the secretary, and came back.