Aatish Taseer - The Temple-Goers

A final arc of sunlight slipped away. The designer, his suit still mostly white, left the dance floor with a female model. She was in velvety tracksuit bottoms, and he drunkenly clutched her long, slim body. They staggered towards us, the designer speaking rapidly and the model responding with languid, filmy replies. I watched them vanish past the wall of our cane pavilion, their voices still audible.

‘How do you do it, Mattu? Tell us your secret, no?’ the model said.

‘Nothing to it, Oozma,’ the designer replied. ‘I just keep my eyes open and when I see a hot little country boy, like this one here, I say, “Oh gawd, you have such a hard life. Why are you slogging! Come on, tell me, where is aunty? We’re going to go and take her blessings. You are going to be the face of my new collection, Sher-e-Punjab.” ’

‘And then,’ Oozma asked, ‘what do they say?’

‘They come panting.’ And I heard an imitation of a dog panting, followed by raucous laughter. ‘Now, take this fellow,’ the designer continued, ‘short, pretty dark, hairy. But sexy eyes, great features and hot body. We give him a little stubble, mess up his hair, have it coming over the forehead, do up the eyes and wa-lah those black pink lips will…’

‘No, Mattu, stop. He can hear everything.’

‘Oozma, if he could understand, what use would he be to me?’

At this point I heard a third voice. ‘Ey-ey,’ it said in dialect, ‘we’ll see what aunty does when you bring this langur into my house.’

The voice made me sit up.

‘Oh no,’ the model moaned, ‘I told you! He understood everything. Now he’s going to bash you up.’ Then laughing, she added, ‘Dishoom, dishoom.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ the third voice answered, now in English. ‘Whaddyou think? I am an ad -ucated person.’

‘Oh gawd,’ the designer said, ‘and I thought you were a villager. Sorry. Ta-ta.’

I swung my head round. The designer was staggering away when a small, calloused hand pulled him back.

Through the cane lattice, I saw Aakash in a black T-shirt bedaubed pink and green. His lips were dry and his pointed tongue scraped over them as he spoke. He was standing close to the designer, his mud-coloured eyes burning with contempt.

They were in a grove of trees that had been wrapped in white satin. Where the Holi colour had stained the satin red, they looked like bandages. The shrill voice of a female playback singer broke through the afternoon.

The men in their pre-splashed T-shirts had stood out for their facelessness. It was what had struck me about them. Seeing Aakash reduced to this factory line jolted me. I hadn’t thought of his world beyond Junglee. I hadn’t thought it could include moonlighting at a security agency. The designer’s assumption about the security had hardly been different from mine, but seeing it now misfire, I felt some shame at my blindness. The designer had been wrong, and though he could see his mistake, he wasn’t willing to hear too much about it.

His little blue eyes flamed. ‘I beg your pardon,’ he screamed. ‘How dare you, you two-bit little man?’

‘Leave it, Mattu, no big deal,’ the model said in her languid way.

A few people turned around and looked. A man carrying a tray of Bloody Marys stopped and watched. Aakash saw them, and though his face didn’t show fear, a passivity crept into it. The designer yelled for the head of security; people were gathering round him, nodding obediently; and even as the head of security walked over, Aakash seemed to know he would be forsaken.

Outside Junglee he was bigger and his skin somehow darker. He seemed to be fighting to remain the person I knew. He had a hunted look in his heavy eyes. It was as if he needed to be reminded of who he was. And this was all that I did for him. I left the pavilion and appeared in the grove of bandaged trees.

In a few short moments, the situation had deteriorated. The fashion designer’s anger had grown into a performance; the head of security listened sympathetically; Aakash, every line in his face inflamed, couldn’t say a word. My appearance, but more importantly Sanyogita’s behind me, shifted the balance and rescued him from the worst of all Delhi fates: being a man with no connections.

I slipped my hand through the tangle of people and prodded Aakash’s pectoral. He fell back slightly and smiled with relief and fatigue. ‘This, Sanyogita, is my trainer at Junglee. The man I wanted you to meet.’

She took some colour from her pouch and streaked his face yellow. ‘Nice to meet you. Happy Holi.’

The intervention of two English-speaking guests broke the tension. Mateen and the model greeted and kissed Sanyogita. Ra had appeared among them. The head of security slipped off. Only Aakash stood where he was. He shuddered and came out of one of his trances, as if he’d just been planning my workout.

‘Ash-man!’

‘Yes, man,’ he replied, pinching my sides as he did in the gym. ‘Looking good, man. Looking like me , man.’

His confidence returned, but his face gleamed unnaturally.

We drove home through empty streets. Every now and then we encountered a car full of people like us, coloured, crowded, satiated. Only Aakash was in black clothes, with a single yellow streak. I had asked if we could give him a lift; Sanyogita pointed out that we ourselves were taking a lift with Ra; Ra happily agreed to have him dropped off.

‘Where do you live?’

‘Sectorpur,’ Aakash replied.

Ra’s face went blank. ‘I’m sure my driver knows where it is.’

The car was quiet. The avenues swung past us like the spokes of a wheel. A kind of evening static, hushed and colourless, settled over the city. The trees acquired a violet tint. Weak outdoor lights came on in Doric-columned verandas.

‘So quiet, no? Can’t believe it’s already over. I’ll sing a song.’

Mandira sang a film song about Holi. It was spirited but sounded like a dirge for coming at the wrong time of the day. We were dropped off first.

‘Ash-man.’

‘Yes, man,’ Aakash smiled, half-closing his eyes.

‘See you, tomorrow.’

They drove off.

Sanyogita bathed me that night. I sat on her fifties marble-chipped bathroom floor under a naked yellow bulb. She sat on a red plastic stool, using a bucket and mug. The colour ran in stages from my body, leaving areas of uncoloured flesh ringed blue and pink. The bucket bath, the dim bulb, the colour running from my body to vanish in a vortex over a stainless-steel drain cover – these things, coming now at the end of festival in a new and altered city, each conspired in dredging up the Holis of my childhood. And it felt as though Sanyogita had put together this ritual knowing the effect it would have.

A few days later, Aakash was restless throughout our workout. We were exercising my legs, ‘doing squats,’ he said, rhyming it with bats. The exercise made me nervous. I didn’t like the bar resting painfully on the back of my neck. I didn’t like unhooking it and suddenly feeling the weight on my legs and lowering myself from the hips. The muscles in my thighs trembled and swelled. They had to fight to bring me up again. Thinking of them failing was terrifying: the bar with its pink and orange plates pushing me into the ground. Aakash, like a syce with a reluctant horse, belted a broad back support around my waist. Then pressing two corners of a white hand towel against the centre of the bar, he whipped it into a tube-shaped cushion. When it rested on the back of my neck, he gripped me under the arms, his short-fingered hands softening the surprise of the weight.

He remained quiet and intense throughout. There was no screaming, ‘Come on, you’ll give me two more,’ no ‘Done done-a-done done.’ And when I was leaving the cold, incense-filled room, he said, almost threateningly, ‘What are you doing later?’