Aatish Taseer: The Temple-Goers

‘Better not, ma’am,’ Aakash replied quickly. ‘I was hoping to repay your hospitality by giving you a session after lunch.’

‘A gym session?’ Chamunda said with wonder, then looked at me as if I’d brought a lunatic into her house.

‘Yes, ma’am. I’m a professional person,’ Aakash said in English, and let out a short laugh.

Chamunda fell silent, her eyes wandered and for a moment it seemed as though she didn’t approve of this over-familiarity. Then looking up, she breathed, ‘Why not!’

Aakash laughed at the success of his overture and looked to me for approval.

Chamunda in the meantime had stood up. ‘All right, then,’ she said, as if convincing herself that she was truly about to work out in the middle of the afternoon on a day when her government was close to falling. ‘I’ll get dressed. Raunak Singh! Raunak Singh! Get my exercise things ready.’

‘Very good, ma’am,’ a voice returned from some hollow section of the house.

‘Aakash, in the gym in five minutes?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

With this, Chamunda gave me a little kiss on the head and disappeared behind one of the rust-painted courtyard’s many blue doors. I turned in amazement to Aakash, who at that moment had submerged his entire hand into a silver finger bowl.

‘What now?’

‘Nothing now. We’ll see.’

‘Well, what’s the solution?’

I thought he relished saying that he couldn’t tell me; that he wanted to but couldn’t; that his future was at stake.

Chamunda appeared a moment later in her exercise clothes. She wore denim shorts, exposing her brown, faintly dimpled legs, New Balance trainers and a T-shirt. It was a simple white T-shirt, with a cartoon image of a Hollywood blonde in grey sunglasses, the lenses each mapping perfectly on to Chamunda’s large breasts. Hanging from the cartoon blonde’s neck, and stretching over our chief minister’s soft, slightly protruding midriff, was a pair of binoculars. Giving me a little wave, she trotted up the couple of steps that led from the courtyard into the gym.

Aakash followed her a moment later, leaving me in the courtyard alone.

Oppressed by the solitude, I went upstairs to get a book. Sanyogita was checking her emails in an involved, distancing way. The house, which had been driven since the morning by a jolting, uneven energy, was at last quiet.

It would have been an hour, an hour and a half later, once the late-afternoon light had almost left the courtyard, that Chamunda emerged from the gym, sweating heavily, her long hair in a bun, visibly exhilarated.

‘He’s very good, your friend,’ she said, ‘much better than my fellow. I think I might get him to come and give me trainings. He had me do ten to fifteen minutes inclined walking, then very light weights and finished me off on floor exercises. My body is breaking.’ She rested a hand heavy with rings on my shoulder, and becoming quieter, said, ‘Baba, he’ll probably tell you what we spoke of. Please, not a word to Sanyogita. Not till tomorrow.’

At that moment a band of fairy lights coiled around one of the trees in the courtyard came on. They followed a cycle: one strip at a time, they worked their way up the trunk, then all the lights glowed at once and burst into rhythmic flashes. Chamunda wiped her hands and lit a Dunhill cigarette. She offered me one, but I declined. We sat in silence for some minutes. The rising smoke moved sideways over a ruled page of fine, slatted light coming in past the green bamboo fence.

‘So listen, baba,’ Chamunda said, ‘it looks like no one will have to stay here after tomorrow. I mean, you can stay on, of course, if you want to, this is your house. But what I mean to say is that you don’t have to stay here. You don’t know how grateful I am that you came, though. These have been trying times, really. But you watch, we’ll win the election and then we’ll have some fun. We’ll get your mother here as well. You know, I love her like a sister. Much more than a sister.’ Chamunda laughed wickedly, thinking perhaps of Sanyogita’s mother, with whom she had strained relations. Then as an extension of that thought, she added, beetling her eyebrows, ‘Try and make Sanyogita understand that her aunt is not such an evil person. You don’t know how she wounds me. I have no children, so she’s like my own, but she’s always edgy around me. I want her to get in touch with India. We’ll need someone from the family at some point. Already there’s no one to contest the parliamentary seat from Ayatlochanapur. Get her to sort herself out. Creative writing! Emigrés at Home! What is this nonsense!’

At the time, it didn’t occur to me to ask how Chamunda would have known the name of Sanyogita’s creative writing group. Nor did I think she was purging her guilt as she spoke. I thought she was acting with her niece’s best interests at heart.

Raunak Singh appeared a moment later with a cordless telephone.

‘Right, baba. I must go. I’ll see you in Delhi.’

I sat in the courtyard a while longer, looking at the flashing tree, and got up only when I saw Chamunda, now in a turquoise sari adorned with reflective, gold-rimmed flowers, go out of the house for the last time, followed by a small entourage.

Aakash had not emerged from the gym. When I went in a few minutes later, he was working out himself, barefooted, bare-chested, in just his jeans.

‘Hi, man. How’s you doing, man?’ he said, swinging his arms up in bicep curls.

‘Fine,’ I said, and sat down on a workout bench.

‘It feels so good. I can’t tell you. It feels like I haven’t worked out in weeks. Everything’s gone. Look, look,’ he said, flexing a tricep, which emerged obediently like a great vein in his arm.

‘Aakash, it’s fine, really.’

‘And chest,’ he said, shrinking his face and pushing out his pectorals.

‘Also fine.’

‘But abs are really gone, no?’ He pulled down the skin from his stomach and the faint outline of a six-pack emerged, the beauty spot on it, reminding me that I had seen it before.

Then he looked hard at my reflection, and seeing perhaps some fatigue, some sorrow in my face, he stopped and turned round. ‘You’re all right? No?’ he asked with concern. ‘Not angry with me, I hope. Chamunda Devi told you what happened between us?’

‘No.’

His face cleared.

‘You’re upset this is our last night.’ He laughed. ‘You were getting comfortable. Come on, I’m going to cheer you up. We’re going to do something I used to do with my brother when we were children.’

‘Aakash, I’m fine.’

‘No, no, no. I can see there’s a problem. Come on.’

With this, he pulled me out of the gym. The house was in half-light. It was caught in that special Indian hour when the day has gone and the servants are still to turn on the lights. Under the cover of this dusk hour, Aakash stole into the dimly lit pantry, past a few Nepalese maids, and hunted round for something. Not finding what he wanted, he stuck his head out and said, ‘Sister, where is the wine kept?’ She pointed him to another area of the kitchen, and not wishing to break momentum, he rushed over there. The sight of many bottles of wine of varying quality confused him.

‘Aatish, help me out,’ he whispered.

‘Choose something from the top.’

He stood on his tiptoes and pulled out a bottle of wine. It looked Californian and expensive. It had a single red drop falling against an off-white label. Around the drop, as if it had broken the surface of the label, were faint ripples, also in off-white.

‘Mod… mod…’

‘Modicum.’

‘Good?’ Aakash asked.

‘Probably.’

‘Great. Let’s go,’ he said, taking two glasses from a shelf.