Aatish Taseer: The Temple-Goers

My senses, in part from the emotions of the day, in part from being assailed in the old city, still smarted. I was at the end of a cycle, but full of the energy of beginnings. It felt suffocating to suddenly be home early, with no outlet, with no plans, with no one to call. After pacing around the flat, feeling cramped by Shakti’s nocturnal rituals, I settled down in the study and mirthlessly re-read old emails.

I had had one that day from the writer and his wife. I had written to him regularly since our meeting five months before. He never wrote back, but his wife often did, communicating his responses to my emails, and even something of his style, using words like decay and debase. That morning she had written, ‘We are laughing so hard that we will write after we digest your FABULOUS emails slowly by reading them again. Vijaipal says you have a flair for the comic! He thinks you should write comedy; India has no real comedians.’

This, I must confess, came as something of a shock. I hadn’t meant for the emails to be comic. The emails they had found so funny were weekly supplements of the Aakash story, told to them complete, with details of his secret marriage to Megha, the jagran, the murder and his now steady rise.

In the year I had been back, I had barely got used to seeing India on TV. I don’t mean the state-run channels of my childhood, but real India and real TV. Drunken mobs of shiny-faced men in saffron, like men after festival, at once satiated and hungry. Fires, black smoke, garbage in the streets, meanly built houses, cement and pale land. All known to be there before, but for the first time on twenty-four-hour networks with handsome presenters and millennial music.

And now, my dark friend, in a striped T-shirt and faded jeans, as TVDelhi’s red and gold fires burned below him. Watching him, his ease, his instinctive gestures, his raised pectorals, his language, I felt once again the removal that had made me want to be near him in the first place. He spoke in his local Haryana dialect with which he had so often made me laugh. He judged perfectly how his eloquence in this rough dialect would sound. Behind him, a littered maidan showed the end of an election rally. I felt burdened by the secret that I had known him when he was just a trainer in Junglee gym.

Soon after, he rang. I hadn’t heard from him in weeks. He must have guessed I’d be watching.

‘Did you see it?’ he said, his voice full of adrenalin.

‘Yes.’

‘You’ll come, no?’

‘Come to what?’

‘To help, to see it, to give me support.’

‘No,’ I answered, mustering up all my courage.

‘Man, whaddyou saying?’ Then switching to Hindi, he said, ‘Whatever problems we’ve had recently, it doesn’t mean that you won’t come now.’ He switched back and said, laughing, ‘This is the golden opportunity.’

I asserted myself again, said goodbye and hung up the phone. I was sure I wouldn’t hear from him for a while now, not unless he thought he could weaken me again. I continued to flick joylessly through the hundreds of channels in dozens of languages that Tata Sky had made available. For many weeks now, Aakash’s friend, former client and lawyer, Sparky Punj, had also been on television. He had become something of an expert on the case. I had seen him so many times from my stepfather’s study in Alibaug that I almost didn’t stop flicking channels when I saw him, all in white, with his handlebar moustache and his collapsible spectacles. He spoke in his usual self-assured way. ‘Definitely a Maoist connection. Hundred per cent,’ he said. ‘Do you know that Jai used to drive a scooter in Delhi, which meant he was earning some thirteen to fourteen grand a month easily, right? Now, tell me, why would he give that up for two thousand, seven hundred a month at the Aggarwals’ residence unless he was using their house to lie low in?’

The young reporter, in a white salwar kurta with a purple dupatta, said, ‘But Sparky, sir, what do you ascribe as a motive?’

‘Motive? What motive? The girl comes home late night, catches Jai and his associates drinking, plotting, getting up to God knows what. That’s it, that’s the motive. There might be a molestation angle, of course, but it could just be the straightforward rage of a young man.’ Then by alluding to the curved Nepalese knife, he hinted at his views on the Nepalese. ‘You know, a general tendency to settle a dispute with a khukri rather than with a discussion.’

The journalist was impressed.

The camera turned to a weeping woman. She was large, with warm brown skin, waxy hair and slightly jowly cheeks. I didn’t know her immediately, in her sari and bindi, but when she took the mike from the reporter and I saw her nails with their white tips and tiger print I nearly shouted out loud. The Begum of Sectorpur! ‘My son is innocent,’ she cried. ‘This is all the scheme of the girl’s family to get their son off. They know they can target us because we’re foreigners in this country.’

It was moving that even now, even when it would have been clear to her who had found her son his job with the Aggarwals, and who in all likelihood had now helped incriminate him, she didn’t blame Aakash. The channel showed images of the day’s headlines. The Times of India ’s read: ‘The Butler Did It, After All!’

‘Shakti!’ I yelled. ‘Shakti!’

He came in a moment later.

‘Please bring me the Times of India .’

He nodded moodily, disappeared and came back with the paper.

I stared for many moments at its front page. It always had a single colour picture in the top half. And there, at the centre of it, was the slim, dark man, with a Nepalese cast of face, seeming to me at once faceless and like a figure from fable. I looked closer. His skin was soft, with bronze lustre, his face, finely made and feminine, and his prominent lips curled into a smile as mean as an incision. There was something victorious about him. Even as Jhaatkebaal policemen manhandled him, his laughter seemed to ring out. Under his tattered denim jacket, he wore a purple shirt on which, like patriotic explosions on a night sky, were daubs of pink.

And seeing that face smile out at me from its rectangle of newsprint, I yelled once again to Shakti, this time to bring me some milky coffee, and after a year of paralysis and stagnation, of not knowing how I would digest India, I sat down to write of my arrival in Delhi, in those months before summer, the months of flowering trees, when in the icy-white cabin of a Jet Airways flight I had wept tears of fear and joy.

March-November 2008

Aatish Taseer was born in Delhi in 1980. He has worked as a reporter for Time magazine and has written for the Sunday Times, Prospect and India Today . He has also written a travel memoir, Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey through Islamic Lands (2009), and a highly acclaimed translation, Manto: Selected Stories (2008). He lives in Delhi and London.