Aatish Taseer - The Temple-Goers

A few minutes later we were both in the car on our way to Sectorpur. Keekar trees raced alongside the tunnel our headlights made; veils of white fog were cast aside; and the backs of trucks, with signs saying, ‘Use Dipper Please’, zoomed close and fell away. Sanyogita fought tears in the darkness of the car, her face turned away.

Taking refuge in banalities, I said aloud, ‘Shit, I didn’t bring anything.’

‘Like what?’ I was surprised to hear quietly asked a moment later.

‘You know, clothes, a toothbrush, my phone charger.’

‘I’ve packed them,’ Sanyogita replied sadly, leaving me more wretched than ever.

My suspicion that Chamunda was more nervous about Aakash’s botched detention than she was letting on was confirmed when I saw the ‘safe house’. The driver had been on the phone throughout the drive with someone at the house and just as the road became more residential he turned the car left and stopped in front of a large black gate. Two or three security men waved us through with a quick glance at the licence plate. We drove down a long private drive lined with bunkers, sandbags and pre-fab government offices, each, despite the hour, with white lights flickering in aluminium windows. At the end of the drive was a double-storey bungalow with a curved, colonnaded veranda overlooking a large lawn. From the porch and garden lights, it was possible to see that it was painted in the local Jhaatkebaal style, rust, with chalky-white borders running along its pediments, arches and balustrades. Fountains of bougainvillea hung from its many terraces. And Indian blinds, marble floors and screened doors brought a colonial aspect to the bungalow.

Aakash, arch-Brahmin that he was, was not unaware of the significance of his accommodation. He sat like a dacoit on a planters chair in front of a coal fire on the veranda, wrapped in a shawl. He didn’t get up when he saw the car approach, but instead leaned forward and stoked the coals, causing sparks to leap up. Then sitting back, he took a long drag on a cigarette held in a fist and rested his drink on the chair’s long arms. He would have been expecting me, but the appearance of Sanyogita from the car must have come as a surprise, because he rose suddenly.

‘Bhabi,’ he said as she jogged up the veranda’s shallow steps, ‘welcome. I mean, welcome to your house. I must say, your aunty knows how to take care of her guests.’

Sanyogita ignored him, saying only, ‘It’s freezing. Let’s go inside.’

‘Of course, of course, bhabi, let’s go inside.’

Sanyogita opened the screened door and hurried in. Aakash put his arm round me, then pinched my waist as he always did, and said with some sarcasm in his voice, ‘Looking good, man. Looking like me , man.’

The front of the house was in darkness and seemed to have an administrative function of sorts. A servant with a dishcloth over his shoulder had appeared from nowhere and led us in, unlocking and relocking doors behind us. There seemed to be a sharp division between its public and private sections. We passed through dim corridors and a large room with picture lights over portraits of moustached men in turbans and pearls.

We came up to a final locked double door, through which shafts of bright light escaped. Aakash, who must already have seen beyond it, grinned broadly.

The room we entered had high ceilings, large carpets and a burnt-red recess containing a bar, and along its mouldings and fireplace there were blue-painted parakeets with gold necks and feet. It was not the splendour of the room but its familiarity that left Sanyogita and me in silent wonder. That familiarity was to be found in its white sofas, its chandeliers and crystal coffee tables, and especially in the black and white pictures of thirties beauties in silver frames. It could be seen in the large number of Nepalese maids, in bright, traditional Jhaatkebaal saris, now setting the dinner table; it was there in the brood of pugs that came running in on our arrival; and traces of it were even visible in the large moustache, gold earrings and kohled eyes of a uniformed butler carrying a crested silver tray. It was the familiarity of Chamunda’s palace at Ayatlochanapur and Sanyogita recognized it immediately. ‘She’s brought the whole place here!’ she gasped. It was then that I realized that this was no guest house. Jhaatkebaal’s official capital was a remote, desert town with a lively handicrafts industry. The state’s real centres were its satellite towns, Sectorpur and Phasenagar, and the house we had arrived in was already seeming like Chamunda’s own base in Sectorpur, the place where she could be at once in Delhi and in her state.

Aakash, never slow to settle in, was eager to show us the rest of the house.

‘You see it,’ Sanyogita said, addressing me. Then more gently, ‘I’ll settle in and join you.’

When she’d left us, Aakash stared at me in amazement. ‘Don’t tell me…’

‘No, nothing like that. She’s just upset by everything that’s happened. And trust me, more with me than anyone else.’

Aakash nodded his head slowly, then his face clearing, said with a lambent smile, ‘How’s you doing, man?’

‘How am I? How are you?’

‘Fine. Just my head is confused after the test.’

‘Test?’

‘Narco test.’

‘I’m so sorry… About everything. I can’t even imagine…’

‘Don’t say anything. This is what life is after all. All our scriptures, our plays, our stories… What, it’s for a moment like this that they prepare us, no? Let’s not get lost in these things now; let’s see the house, your girlfriend’s house.’

Aakash began to lead me through room upon room, in whose coloured walls, each coated in a silver hue and Tanjore glass paintings, I recognized Ra’s distinctive hand. He showed me a moonlit courtyard with a rectangular fountain, containing flat, fish-eaten lotus pads and pink flowers. He threw open the door of a modern gym with a rubber floor, dumb-bells, a power plate and treadmill. Finally, he led me down a long corridor, at the end of which, visible through a cloud of incense, was a brightly lit temple room. It was dedicated to a black and silver Kali with a red tongue. Her shadows filled the little room and she had under her – just where she wanted him – a demon, into whose throat she plunged a trident. From somewhere behind her fierce form, a hidden music system played ‘Om’, chanted in a steady drone, again and again. And past a mesh door, off from the temple room, was a garden containing holy plants.

‘This,’ Aakash said, as if completing an estate agent’s tour, ‘is what I would like my house to be.’

We were still staring into the room, with its lesser gods and silver vessels huddled under Chamunda, when the servant who had showed us in reappeared, followed by Sanyogita.

Confused that she was behind him, he began by addressing us. Then perhaps aware of her rank in the house, he turned around and told her that dinner was served. At the sight of Sanyogita a sudden solemnity entered Aakash’s manner. He said we should carry on; he wasn’t eating.

‘Why?’ Sanyogita asked blandly.

‘I’m keeping a fast,’ he replied, ‘for my wife.’

‘Well, we’re inside,’ I said.

‘I’ll join you in a few minutes,’ Aakash answered, and using the same tone in which he had once said to me, ‘With us, children are everything,’ added, ‘I want to be alone with her memory.’

Sanyogita turned around and walked out without a word. I followed her into the dining room, where a feast of lamb shank cooked with ginger and green chillies, lentils, pickled white radish and okra was being served. Aakash appeared a few minutes later, was seen lingering by the bar, then came and sat down.