Aatish Taseer - The Temple-Goers

‘Ash-man.’

‘Yes, man.’

‘Let’s meet tomorrow and discuss this thing properly,’ I said, putting away the question of his deception.

‘OK, man,’ he said with disappointment. The time to tell me about Megha’s brother had no doubt been carefully chosen; I thought he would have liked to have better relished the surprise it produced in me. ‘I’ll tell you,’ he said, suddenly excited, ‘tomorrow’s Saturday, no?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why don’t you come with me to the Shani temple? Megha and I go every Saturday; after that, we’ll talk as well.’

‘Done.’

‘Done-a-done done. Oh, and sir, one more thing, bring a briefcase of money.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m going to take you shopping after the temple, and when I shop I like to…’ He made a sucking noise to indicate, I thought, a credit card swiping.

I stood for a moment by the glass panels in the lobby, looking down at the pool, still bright blue in the darkness, then went back into the restaurant.

My mother and Sanyogita were talking like women do after a man has behaved badly, conciliatory, making a show of having a good time, but wounded somehow. I told them what had happened with Megha and her brother, but didn’t mention who he was.

‘Well, that’s no big deal,’ my mother said. ‘Even politicians can’t disappear a girl these days. Not with television the way it is. One word to Shabby aunty and we’ll have TVDelhi’s cameras surround Sectorpur.’

‘Shabby aunty?’ I asked, uncertain where I had heard the name before.

‘Don’t you remember,’ Sanyogita said, ‘she’s part of Emigrés at Home. She was there that night when…’

‘Yes, yes.’ I didn’t want to be reminded of that night again. The scars, smooth and pink from her grazes, still remained on Sanyogita’s elbows and knees, and if anything, the entire episode was more painful with time.

‘She’ll be there tomorrow night,’ my mother said, ‘Shabby. And Chamunda. You two have to sit between them. They can’t stand each other.’

‘Why?’ Sanyogita asked.

‘Your aunt thinks Shabby’s channel is prejudiced against her because she’s BJP. It’s all that Hindu nationalist/liberal secular nonsense. Just don’t let Chamunda get carried away.’

As we waited for our bill, the man in white returned with a silver brush and pan, sweeping away the crumbs from the table.

My mother looked irritated. ‘You don’t have to…’ she began.

‘Yes, I know, ma’am. I tell him, the manager, that in Europe people put their bread on the tablecloth, but he doesn’t listen. He says, “Here is here.” ’ Sweeping away the last of the crumbs, and leaving my mother struck dumb for once, the man said, ‘Sorry if it was any inconvenience.’

When Aakash was ‘taking tension’, he liked either to go to the temple or to shop. As the day before he had taken tension in unusually high quantities, he wanted the next day to do both. He was astrologically under the influence of Shani or Saturn. Shani, lame and malevolent, could, once installed in your planetary house, move slowly through it for seven years, bringing luck that was not so much bad or good as it was patchy. And it was to lessen the effect of this roller coaster that Aakash, on Saturdays, went to Shani’s temple on a main road in Sectorpur and stayed away from alcohol and ‘non-veg’. He asked that we meet after the flyover. He had spoken separately to Uttam the night before, explaining where it was.

We set out the next morning at six fifteen. A cold, persistent drizzle, coming on the back of three days of rain, followed us the entire way. The traffic was terrible even at that hour and Uttam suggested we take ‘the jungle route’. He swung off the main thoroughfare on to a thinly surfaced road overgrown with keekar. Their long, spiny branches reaching out to the car, like many frail arms, made a sound of nails on glass. On our left was a wide canal choked with hyacinth. And on our right, seeming almost desolate save for the bush that encroached on it, was a power station. Its iron men rose high above the foliage, their power lines slung wide between them, like a tug-of-war team. The foliage had grown so thick after the monsoon that it took me some minutes to realize that I had seen this canal once before. It was with Aakash, on the way to the Begum of Sectorpur, when I had glimpsed the power station’s red lights reflected in the canal. Its dark water had seemed foreboding then; and now, too, for other reasons, there was a strange menace about it. It came in part from the thick clumps of hyacinth that grew on its edges and appeared like islands in its centre, so that they seemed not so much to be separate clumps as a single net of hyacinth strangling the canal. It came also from the factory drains, forming great mountains of white chemical foam where they deposited their refuse. And it was the plant life that grew so furiously from this poisoned river that unnerved me.

There had been a police encounter the day before in the old city in which one policeman and two alleged terrorists had been killed. The images that had flashed on everyone’s screens for the past twenty-four hours had shown the dead policeman being carried away, but they had also shown a Muslim crowd enraged for being the target of the police encounter. There was talk of it having been staged. ‘Just answer me one simple question, Aatish saab,’ Uttam asked, full of political feeling that morning, ‘if the encounter was fake, then how come one policeman is dead and another injured? Now, obviously they didn’t shoot themselves, which must mean that the people they were having the encounter with had weapons too, no?’

‘Yes.’

‘So fine, even if they weren’t the bombers, they would have been some kind of criminal. I tell you, saab, we suffer from the worst traitors in this country. And I don’t mean Muslims; I mean Hindus. You put two Muslims next to ten Hindus and they will somehow subdue them. I hear it’s written in their religion that if a man rapes my wife, she has to live with him and can only come back to me after she has divorced him.’

‘I’m really not sure about that, Uttam.’

‘And how is it that the Muslim guard in our building will say, “Namaste,” but he’ll never say, “Ram, ram”? I don’t mind saying, “Allah.” Sometimes I say, “Salaam alaikum,” to him, then he’s happy.’ Uttam choked with wet, throaty laughter. ‘And what about that driver that came around the other day? We gave him dinner, but he wouldn’t touch the meat. I asked him what the matter was, and you know what he told me?’

‘What?’

‘He said he was vegetarian. A Muslim who doesn’t eat meat? I said to myself, Can’t be! That’s one thing that couldn’t have been written in their Book, because we know there were no vegetables in the desert. I thought, he’s definitely hiding something. So I take the cook aside and ask him if he still has the receipt from the butcher. He did. I show it to the man; he sees that the butcher’s a Muslim butcher and the bastard’s face lights up. And he eats the meat! Now, why couldn’t he have just said, “I don’t eat meat that’s not halal.”?’

‘Maybe he was being accommodating.’

‘Yes, but why lie about being vegetarian? There’s the slyness.’

Uttam’s talk was making me think about Zafar, and perhaps misinterpreting my silence, he said, ‘But I will say this, my father saved one once.’

‘Saved what?’

‘A Muslim. It was 1947 and the riots were going on. They were killing Muslims everywhere. My father hid one inside a barrel with holes in it and saved his life.’

‘Good.’

‘But,’ Uttam said, already roaring with laughter at his own joke, ‘we kept the barrel outside the house.’