Aatish Taseer: The Temple-Goers

We made our way up the internal staircase to the first floor. When we reached the landing, Aakash whispered, ‘Now, really quiet.’

We tiptoed past an open doorway, in which Sanyogita, now in darkness, could be seen still in front of the computer. Two or three doors down, Aakash gently slid back the bolt of a room I hadn’t seen so far. The light outside had become so dim that I could barely make it out. A kind of purple gloom spread through the room and only the silver of a mirror at the far end was visible.

‘Fuck,’ Aakash said, a moment after we entered, ‘I forgot the screw thing. I’ll go back. You wait here.’

Before I could protest, he had slipped out, leaving me in the empty room. As my eyes slowly adjusted, I could make out a crystal dressing table in one corner, a dark wooden cupboard from the fifties and an old four-poster Calcutta bed with a white bedspread. I wandered ahead absent-mindedly, opened a wide, heavy door with a long brass handle, and found myself in a dressing room. Past a further door, there was a high-ceilinged bathroom, with an art-deco floor of black, white and beige stone arranged in a large rhombus shape. Great panels of mirror, screwed into the wall, whose silver had rusted and fallen away, stood over a black bathtub, and steel capsule-shaped lights threw low-voltage shadows over the room.

I was still taking in the bathroom when I heard Aakash enter behind me.

‘So you’ve found it,’ he said. ‘Good boy.’

He pushed me into the room and locked the door. The bottle of wine was open. He poured me a glass and sat me down on a cane chair against the wall. Then, still only in his jeans, he leaned across the vast bathtub and opened the taps. There were some bath salts on the edge, which he smelt suspiciously before scattering them in large handfuls into the bath, turning the few inches of water cloudy.

As the bath began to fill, he sat down on the edge of it and took a large sip of wine.

‘It’s good, man!’ he said.

It was very good – heavy and smooth.

The moment overcame him, and as if wondering how it was that life had brought him into such varied situations, had shown him both poverty and luxury, he said, always with that special ability to explain complicated problems in simple material terms, ‘Now Chamunda Devi, she smokes Dunhills, right?’

‘Right.’

He nodded. ‘On Marlboro packets the price is shown, on Benson the price is shown, but on Dunhill there is no price.’ He took out a packet from his pocket, and twirling it in his hand, showed me it had no price. ‘What does that mean?’

I thought it was a rhetorical question and didn’t answer, but he pressed me for a response.

‘I don’t know.’

‘That it’s imported! Now people might say,’ he said, taking on the voice of an impressed observer, ‘ “Right, so she smokes Dunhills, she must be very rich.” They don’t stop to think, why does this person smoke Dunhills?’

Again, I thought I was not meant to give an answer, but Aakash waited for one.

‘Because of the length, the quality of the tobacco?’ I offered.

‘Right,’ he replied, a little disappointed. ‘But those people will say, “Such and such person smokes Marlboro, that’s all right, not bad.” My brother smokes Benson, but Benson you can buy loose. Dunhill, you have to buy a whole packet at a time. “So, good, this person must be pretty rich.” What they don’t see,’ Aakash said, seeing perhaps some confusion in my face, ‘is that the person who smokes Dunhills might also smoke Gold Flake should the need arise.’

At this point the bath was more than half-full and the clouded water was steaming up the mirror.

‘Let’s get in,’ Aakash said abruptly. ‘I’ll explain in a minute.’

I didn’t question him, but undressed to my underwear. Aakash watched me the entire time. When I took a step towards the bath, he said, ‘Come on, man. You insulting me? I’m not a fucking gay. Take your underwear off. This is like something I would do with my brother.’

I took my underwear off and put one foot into the bath. It was still very hot and I could keep only one foot in at a time, even as they began to tingle from the heat. I was able slowly to manage both, then to lower myself in. Aakash watched, smiled with satisfaction, then seeing I had left my wine by the chair, went over and brought it to me. When I was up to my neck, he took off his jeans and stood for a minute on the edge of the bath, looking at himself in the browning mirror. He watched himself take a sip of wine, rubbed his body with his other hand, pulled at his foreskin, which had become small and shrunken, then let himself sink into the bath.

‘So I was saying,’ he said, once we were both in the cloudy water, our knees sometimes touching, our bodies mostly submerged but occasionally floating to the top like refuse, ‘that everyone is in their correct place and working accordingly.’

In the suspense of the filling bath, I had missed the importance of his words. I hadn’t seen that behind the rambling about tobacco and brands was a philosophical, almost Hindu, way of dealing with the problem of inequality. The world to Aakash was not illusion; it was real and material, and he was hungry for it. But it was impossible to live in India, especially the new and shaken-up India, without having a way of coping with its inequalities. Zafar had his idea of the poet, and though Aakash had a corresponding idea, a new idea, of himself as a trainer, to which he was willing to ascribe Hindu notions of duty, he also had something else. He had his high idea of himself as a Brahmin. With it came an innate acceptance of fate and the inequality of men. And even though, in the new scheme, Aakash’s caste was not on top, he saw this more as a practical problem than a philosophical one. He said, ‘So now what am I to do, if I don’t have money? Perhaps the day won’t be far off when I’ll have more money than the people who were to be my in-laws, perhaps even more than you. And what will they say then? “Fine, you can marry my daughter”?’

Interrupting him, I said, ‘You loved her a lot, didn’t you, Ash-man?’

‘Yes, man,’ he said warmly. ‘She would have been a great wife. You know, when you’re upgrading yourself, many people try to make you feel small, make you feel you’re nothing. But with her by my side, I would have felt strong.’

I was won over. His calm, the preternatural strength of his nerve didn’t seem out of place. It was as if it flowed from his unshakeable belief in the preordained. And his own gritty modern story, with its amorality and sudden reversals, didn’t seem so far away from the stories I had heard around him, like those of his ancestor and of Tara and Rukmani. In fact those stories were like a fount for his own. And when things were at their worst, I felt sure they gave him his power to switch off, taking consolation on the one hand in the disinterested work of fate and on the other in the always auspicious light of his star.

We had made our way through half the red wine; we were both drained from the heat, lying back in the vast bath, our penises bobbing limply to the surface.

That was where I should have left things. But in that deep moment of relaxation it suddenly occurred to me to ask, ‘So then what was the solution you gave Chamunda?’

Aakash half raised his head, his dark face flushed, and said, ‘It was simple, really. I told Chamunda about the threat Megha’s brother made a few nights before. Yes, she told me about it in the end,’ he added seeing the surprise form in my face. ‘Oh, and also I drew her attention to a certain short story – what was it called? – “The Ass -”… “The Ass -”… you know the one?’ he said, and laughed.

Seconds later, there was a great banging on the door outside.