Aatish Taseer: The Temple-Goers

But a few days into the routine, I realized there was a flaw. The exercise was too late and too little. By lunchtime I was longing for release. Sanyogita was doing errands and Vatsala buying vegetables when I stepped out from the study into the noon emptiness of the flat and decided to call Mandira about a gym.

Junglee was in Sundar Nagar, and like Jorbagh, an early post-independence colony. I had known it as a child for its antique shops where I had also come with my mother. I called Uttam, my mother’s driver of many years, a gap-toothed Inspector Clouseau lookalike. He was downstairs a few minutes later.

We took a busy road past one edge of Lodhi Gardens, then another along the edge of the Delhi Golf Club, also with tombs dotting its putting greens and bunkers. We passed the Oberoi Hotel, the Blind School and a purple domed tomb marooned in traffic before Sundar Nagar appeared.

Its two- and three-storey houses were ranged, like Jorbagh’s, round gardens with pale thin grass. A warm breeze made scraps of paper and heaps of dust race over the surface of the road. Uttam turned right and went down a grimy alley. Blackened cauldrons from a restaurant lay in the middle of the road along with groceries in white polythene bags. A man stacked cold Cobra beers into a fridge.

Uttam was staring longingly at them when I indicated to him to stop.

‘Here?’

‘Yes. I shouldn’t be more than an hour. Have lunch and come back.’

I got out in front of a brushed-steel door. Painted on it was a pair of angry red eyes, scowling at the chaos of the little alley. A Nepalese security man in a light and dark blue uniform stood outside, holding open the door. Cold, incense-filled air tumbled out.

The light inside was dim but white. When my eyes adjusted, I saw dark plywood steps leading up. On the first landing a terracotta Ganesh basked in a fluorescent alcove. On my right, there were large framed pictures of shirtless movie stars.

At the next landing, a priest in white and gold prepared offerings in a steel tray. He stood between a line of red bulbs in clear plastic orbs and a temple on the reception desk with an orange porcelain Ganesh. There were fresh flowers and burning sticks of incense.

The priest rang a little bell and muttered prayers rapidly. He waved a brass lamp in a circular movement, its smoky yellow flame cowering in the blast from the air-conditioner, before the deity. Then he raced across the gym’s rubber floor and tied a charm of chillies and lemons to a cross-trainer. He had returned to his silver tray and begun another cycle of chanting and tying when, on the way to a treadmill, a trainer in black stopped him. He gave the trainer a cautioning look. Loud music played in the background; the trainer, bobbing lightly, irreverently mouthed the words of a Jay-Z song.

My appearance at the top of the stairs gave the trainer his chance. He moved the priest aside and came up to greet me.

‘Hello, sir. Welcome to Junglee. How may I help you?’

I assumed from his welcome that he spoke English. But when I asked him to show me the gym in English, his fluency vanished. A cold formality entered his manner. It was as if the English song and the greeting were part of a rehearsed role, creating the illusion of affability. In Hindi, he was intense and restless.

His skin was dark, dark to his gums. His colour was what Manto describes as blackish wheat. It meant that a paler second skin ran under a dark patina. The fineness of his bones, his large, mud-coloured eyes and small, slightly hooked nose, along with the fullness of his dark, faintly pinkish lips, gave me an intuitive sense of high caste.

He noticed me looking at him, but focusing at once on me, on the priest, on the other trainers, on a half-dozen people exercising in Junglee, he filed away the observation without a word.

The priest in the meantime made his way back to the reception desk. The trainer watched him as though about to strike a fly. And just as he was skittering towards the preacher curls machine, armed with a charm, the trainer grabbed him. The priest made a show of his arrest, contorting and shaking his fine-fingered hand. He ignored the trainer, appealing instead to the deity, then to the gym’s ponytailed owner. The trainer draped his short, powerful arm over the priest’s frail shoulders with mock affection.

‘You see this?’ he said, lifting up the thick rope of red and black religious threads, entwined with silver chains, round his neck. ‘You see these?’ he said, flashing a pearl, a meanly cut ruby and a diamanté band on his wrist. ‘And you see this?’ He took out a single white thread from deep within his black T-shirt. The priest looked at all of these things like a child shown treasure. ‘So you understand then. I’m a Brahmin too. Now, go and do your dramas elsewhere and let those of us who are really working work.’ The ponytailed owner had disappeared, and the priest, perhaps taking this as a sign of disfavour, began putting his devotional equipment away into a black and neon green bag.

The trainer gazed intently at a Hindi newspaper. A smile ran over his face. He seemed to arrange his thoughts. His dark, pinkish lips flowered with amusement.

‘Pandit ji, there’s a photo of one of my clients in today’s paper. Would you like to see?’

The priest looked bitterly at him.

The trainer held up the paper for everyone to see. Below its red masthead was a painting of Shiva. It was a popular rendering of the god astride a white bull with matted hair and a trident, a tiger skin covering his loins. But in place of his once soft, gently protruding stomach, there was a blue six-pack. His sprawling chest showed firm but discrete pecs. And a bulging vein, like the trainer’s, coiled down from his bicep over his forearm.

‘And all without supplements.’ The trainer laughed. ‘Protein yes, but no anabolics.’

A few trainers guffawed, some clients laughed openly, the ponytailed owner reappeared on the stairs, smiling indulgently at the scene. The trainer, his joke successful, now warmed to the priest, putting his arm round him again. The priest smiled weakly. Junglee resounded with happy laughter.

Shiva’s new body focused my attention more closely on the trainer’s. Its proportions, the small of the back pulled up as if by a hook, the narrowness of the waist next to the prominence of the chest and thighs, the large arms but fashionable slimness, a shaped body and yet so clearly not one of a bodybuilder, seemed somehow to imply a knowledge of the world: of the Internet and TV serials; of protein milkshakes and supplements; of Shakira and Beyoncé; of drinking perhaps and sex before marriage. It set him apart, in the values it contained, from millions of thin-waisted figures in baggy polyester trousers and smoothly worn chappals who roamed Delhi’s streets. It gave him a solidity and weight that could not easily be dismissed.

Lost in these thoughts, I heard his voice through a fog of white fluorescent light tinged red.

‘Sir, sir,’ he said, as if I had been holding things up, ‘would you like to see the gym now?’

I nodded absent-mindedly and we began making our way through weight machines with their pink, yellow and orange plates. On the back of the trainer’s T-shirt were Junglee’s red glowering eyes. His tracksuit bottoms were of a slippery, black material with silver piping running down the side. Before going upstairs, the trainer looked at himself in the mirror. He had looked every few seconds so far. It was more than a look of vanity. He looked with such depth that he seemed really to be facing his reflection. It was hard not to look for what he looked for.

Junglee turned out to be a small gym with two floors, mirrored walls and dark plywood cornices, from which red light escaped. At this hour the main clientele were housewives and out-of-shape male models.