Akhil Sharma - An Obedient Father

on each cheek, so loudly it was like a paper bag bursting. The young man stepped back. His eyes began tearing. I realized that the manager had not come himself because he had guessed there might be blows. 'Listen to what I say, son,' Mr. Bajwa said. The assistant manager nodded and left. 'The assistant manager in charge of being hit,' someone said. The wines came. Everybody tasted some. Including me."

"You said you didn't finish one drink."

"It was just a taste."

There was silence, and that's how this confession ended.

I would become nervous as soon as they ended and so I sometimes babbled apologies. "I am ashamed of what we did."

Anita rarely got angry instantly at what I revealed. "I wish I knew more ways to hate you," she might say. Asha would nod, as she often did at enigmatic statements. Then Anita tried working herself from abstraction into specific anger. "The bad schools Asha goes to. The children in her classes who cannot buy schoolbooks and so share with her. We get water five hours a day, and that in drops, and the Oberoi has a pool as large as our compound."

Once the anger was released, it might lunge about for an hour and a half or two, and might include in its ambit everything in the newspaper, from cow-feed prices, which the Iraq war had pushed up, to Nehru's socialism, which had bound us to Russian aid. I never pointed out to her that Rajinder had been corrupt, and that when she was married Anita had been able to live quite easily with the watches and the saris that bribery brought her gift-wrapped every New Year.

Sometimes her anger did not stop, and she and I would be awake until one or two because I did not want to leave her whirling mind alone in such a state. Asha would go to the roof to sleep. Once, during such a rage, after Asha had gone upstairs, I went to the latrine. Almost immediately Anita knocked on the door, and when I asked what she wanted, she said, "Nothing," but I knew she had panicked at the possibility of my following Asha.

Occasionally the open rage lasted into the next day, and if it did, I gave Anita money. I might take a hundred or two hundred rupees, fold them, and put them beside her, and soon her anger would be replaced by exhaustion.

Money always worked. By the end of June I knew Anita was stealing from me. She had stopped giving me accounts for the household expenses. If I left my wallet anywhere other than locked in my closet, I discovered that some of the money was gone. I found these thefts comforting, because they diminished Anita's moral weight.

Perhaps because Anita felt more confident financially or perhaps because she was allowed to confront me, she began challenging other people as well. An electricity repairman came to the flat and before doing any repairs demanded a bribe. Anita refused, and when he persisted, saying, "A little tea money," Anita went out onto the gallery and began shouting "Thief" A crowd gathered in the flat and in front of it; Anita harangued the repairman until he did his job.

There was often an odd jocularity to her hatred. Anita had started calling me a snake, and sometimes she would hiss at me, holding up a hand bent into the shape of a hooded cobra.

It was obvious from Anita's sometimes being too angry to sleep that she could not control her feelings and that, like lightning in the air, her anger required only something standing upright to strike. I realized that if my plan to use up her anger was to work, I must persist. Anita's voice remained a screech, brakes scraping metal.

I never lost faith in the power of confession. Probably this was because I needed to confess.

Also, Anita occasionally gave good advice. Although she hated me, she was the one person in the world whose interests were most parallel to mine. If I went to jail, the government would probably also seize the flat and all my money. Anita, therefore, thought a great deal about what I should do to protect myself

One night, because I was afraid of becoming unimportant to Mr.

Gupta, I mentioned the possibility of telling newspaper reporters about the corruption charges against Mr. Bajwa.

Anita responded that it wouldn't help. "You think they don't know already? Your problem is you are such a bad moneyman, like when you arranged the tax benefit and miscalculated the value of what you'd given. What a failure you are to spend a whole life being corrupt and still be incompetent at it."

If I wanted advice from Anita I almost had to seek insult. "I know my problem is I'm no good."

"Don't give all the money you collect immediately to Mr. Gupta. Give him a lakh or two at a time. He can't keep the money, or the bankbooks, because of the possibility of a tax raid. Tell him you'll give him the money when he needs it. He won't fight this, because he'll be afraid of angering you. Stupid people are unpredictable and you are stupid. This way, you get some power of your own instead of just being the one everyone can identify to the CBI as the bribe collector."

The boldness of simply not turning over the money was breathtaking, and when I attempted this, it worked so well that it felt as if Mr. Gupta and Mr. Bajwa had been expecting it. Mr. Bajwa only said, "Don't think we don't know every paisa you are getting."

After the confessions started and Anita could be angry with me, the idea of suggesting that we all go to Kamla Nagar and buy Asha her school uniforms did not feel as ridiculous as it would have earlier. Sometimes we went to dinner or a movie, and because I was the one who always proposed these things, Asha would occasionally ask me to recommend such a plan to Anita. I tried not to be alone with Asha in the flat, and the implied confidentiality of Asha requesting something from me made me nervous. The first time she came to me, I told Anita, and she became angry at Asha, accusing her of ingratitude. After this, I always acted as if the suggested venture was solely my idea.

I confessed everything except that I was visiting Asha in her school. When Asha told stories of her schoolday, I would act surprised.

Confessing became as important as sleep for me. If I did not confess for several nights, I grew confused and walked around looking at the ground.

The talking I was doing during Asha's lunch hour and at night became as important as sleep to me. If I did not have an extended conversation with Anita or Asha for several days I began to feel dazed. My talking and explaining gave my world order.

EIGHT

o

ne evening, Anita, Asha, and I went to see Rajesh Khanna speak at the Ram Lila Ground at Red Fort. Seventy or eighty thousand people stretched around the stage and up to the enormous crenellated walls of the fort. The stage was about fifteen meters long and had cords of geraniums dangling from its front. It took almost an hour for us, with Anita and me holding Asha's hands, to push our way near the VIP section so that from where we stood we could actually see the speakers. The section was distinguished by a dhurrie on the ground, plastic folding chairs, and waiters that kept bringing glasses of water. The crowd grew till it appeared unbelievable that this dark mass with its roar and smell was gathering under the thin blue sky only to listen.

I attended from curiosity about Mr. Gupta's competition. The size of the crowd didn't worry me, because over the last month I had

given up trying to predict whether Mr. Gupta would win or lose, since all this did was rush me from one emotion to another.

Anita came because Asha had never seen a celebrity and demanded that she must. Anita was trying to compensate for the rage that could still cause her to wake Asha from the middle of a sleep and demand that Asha reveal what she had been dreaming.

There were about twenty people onstage. Some were candidates; each was invited to speak. Their words—"This nation is ours and will remain ours" — spoken about foreign lenders, were similar enough to the BJP speeches I had heard that I could assume the crowd was there for Rajesh Khanna, not to support Congress. Many people appeared so indifferent to the candidates that instead of looking toward the stage, they watched the bell-shaped speakers, tied to bamboo poles along the field, from which the candidates' words echoed out.