Aatish Taseer: The Temple-Goers

We saw the ‘men’s wet area’: lockers, ‘loos’, a changing room and a small slimy steam room. We passed the women’s. The trainer said with a short laugh that he couldn’t show me that wet area.

The second floor was fuller than the first. Young women on treadmills held mobile phones in their jewelled fingers.

The trainer’s arrival spread tension through the floor. The women trainers, small, slim girls in tracksuits, scattered to their stations, whispering cautiously.

‘Cardio,’ the trainer said, with a wave of his hand.

‘What’s got into all of them?’ I asked.

‘They don’t like me,’ he replied in English, almost with pity in his voice.

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, switching back to Hindi. ‘They’re always talking behind my back, carrying tales to the bosses. I’ve never said one word to them.’

Our tour over, we walked past a group of men in T-shirts like the trainer’s, but grey to mark their being sous-trainers of some sort. They were small men, very dark, with bad teeth. To see them was to be made aware of what the trainer might have been without his good, clean teeth, his attentiveness to fashion, his rehabilitated body, and the confidence that came with these things. He spoke to them like an officer inspecting a regiment. They beamed as he went past and for some the thrill of being spoken to left them dumbstruck. I had a feeling the trainer wanted me to see his popularity among them.

Only Moses the Christian – Mojij, as I later discovered, to his friends – a tall, slim sub-trainer with longish hair, had the courage to make conversation. We were standing near the gym’s tinted windows. Below were the antique shops round the pale grass square. A myna sat fatly, unmoving, on the tin ledge. Moses smiled at us and without a word pointed at the bird. The trainer looked puzzled, then smiled back. With great difficulty, he managed to say in English, ‘She is pregnant.’ Moses choked with laughter. The trainer, again in English, said, ‘That is the labour room.’ Moses bent double. He lacked the trainer’s good looks but had a Christian’s comfort with English. ‘I’ll inform the father,’ he said. The trainer, now really feeling the pressure of so much English, said, ‘Who is name is Praful.’ The two exploded with laughter. They looked at a tall, reedy sub-trainer, who smiled frailly back as though used to being the butt of their jokes.

Then the trainer suddenly became serious.

‘Sir, would you like to try out the gym before you make up your mind?’

I decided I would and thanked him for the tour.

‘I’m downstairs if you need anything.’

This line, delivered in English like the first, sounded rehearsed.

I finished a short cardio warm-up and went down to the weights floor.

I watched the trainer with one eye and felt myself similarly watched. His jokes continued as if one of the duties of charisma. Two or three young men had come into the gym. The trainer moved rapidly between all three of them, muttering numbers to himself. As the sets advanced, inspiration seized him. His eyes seemed to fix on some distant goal. Like a painter reaching for new colours, he ordered the men who worked below him to bring him plates. When the clients’ muscles failed under him, he threw off the coloured plates in levels, imploring them to continue, even if only with a bare iron bar. And with repetitions, he pushed them to the heights he had wished them to attain with weight. If left untended too long, the clients called to him, their voices filled with urgency. The trainer ran back with encouragement: ‘Come on, man. You’ll give me two more.’ Then suddenly, he withdrew support. The clients, now feeling narcotic levels of fatigue, asked for more. But the trainer, by then aware of satisfactions beyond theirs, said, ‘No. Done done-a-done done.’

After the sets, he rested on the edge of a red exercise bench, dropping his arms forward. It made his shoulders seem long and expansive. His eyes rolled back and his eyelashes sank under their own weight. The gym had a large flat-screen television. It played a loop of half-a-minute-long programmes, horoscopes and fashion shows. At present, two animated girls called Kitty and Witty were on. The trainer watched with half-closed eyes. Witty, a blonde in pink, said to Kitty, the brunette, ‘What is the laziest mountain in the world?’

‘I don’t know,’ Kitty replied.

The trainer watched with one eye.

‘Mount Ever-rest!’

He was mystified, then a moment later his laughter rang through the gym.

I was doing some light weights on my own. I didn’t really know anything about them, but someone had once taught me to do sets of fifteen, twelve and ten repetitions. I felt the trainer watch me as I walked over to the bench press. It was not the brief, suspicious look from before, but a frank, open gaze. It reminded me of the way he looked at himself in the mirror. Then the music changed. A Hindi pop song came on with a single English line: ‘I will always love you, all my life.’ The trainer, still looking at me, sang with great feeling, forming every word carefully. He seemed to take pleasure in the illusion of fluency, in the long first line and the rapid ‘all my life’. He was totally absorbed in his role, but when the song ended, he was no longer a romantic hero; he was Shah Rukh Khan belting out the words of a super hit song. The trainer pressed his forearms between his legs, moved his upper body forward, bobbing on the balls of his feet. As the music quickened, he twisted his forearm in a downward movement, uncoiling a dark vein.

When I reached twelve repetitions, my arms began to fail. I looked up in time to see the trainer swing one leg over the bench and yell, ‘Thirdeen, fordeen…’ He had been counting through the songs. ‘We’ll do it slowly,’ he ordered, adding with triumph, ‘Fifdeen.’

I expressed my surprise that he had been counting my set.

‘Man, whaddyou saying? I’m a professional person,’ he said in English, and switching to Hindi, added, ‘And anyway, us Brahmins, we look out for everyone. You see that man there?’

He pointed to a tall fair man, with a handlebar moustache and a white towel round his neck.

‘That’s Sparky Punj, one of the country’s top lawyers. All the biggest industrialists and politicians turn to him for advice. But who does he turn to?’

‘Who?’

‘Who do you think?’

‘You? Really? Why?’

The trainer smiled sadly at me, then said, ‘Never mind. Come sit down.’

We sat at the desk from where the trainer had seen off the priest over an hour ago. In that short time, I had decided to become a member of Junglee. I now watched the trainer fill in the form in careful, rounded handwriting. He did it like a schoolboy with a fountain pen, waiting for every word to dry. Seeing the English letters appear, his large, athletic form poring incongruously over the page, a tongue flickering out in concentration, I felt about the trainer as I had with the Jet Airways attendants: he struck me as someone who couldn’t have existed ten years ago. Not just that; his world, complete as it now seemed, could not have existed either.

‘Three months or six months?’ he asked, looking up.

I couldn’t make up my mind; it was a question with deeper implications than he knew.

‘Take three. Why should we bind ourselves to these fuckers? Right?’

I nodded unsurely. He gave me his small calloused hand, with its many religious rings, to shake.

‘Name?’

‘Aatish, A-A.’

He put down his pen and looked at me in amazement. ‘Sir! Whaddyou saying? Double A like me!’

He slowly repeated, ‘My name is Aakash, A-A-K-A-S-H. Aakash Sharma.’

At Junglee, the Hinglish-speaking trainers began referring to me as ‘writer saab’. It was Aakash who coined the hybrid and it stuck. He quickly wanted to know what my likely advance would be. He put it to me as concern for my survival in the city. But really he wanted to know what to charge me for personal ‘trainings’.