Aatish Taseer - The Temple-Goers

These trainings began without my knowledge. The day after becoming a member I arrived in the gym at noon. I was drifting about when he caught my eye and flashed ten short fingers at me. I went up to him in confusion. He was overseeing the recovery of an out-of-shape male model. ‘Cardio,’ he whispered, making the form of a running man, ‘ten minutes.’ I went upstairs and did as I was told. When I came down, he ignored me. He sat on the edge of his red bench, muttering numbers to himself like a Yemeni contractor. For some moments I stood over him, his face knitted up with concentration. Then theatrically, it cleared.

For the next hour he was in a fever. His mud-coloured eyes narrowed; his darkish pink lips tightened; his small, powerful body hovered over mine, the rope of black religious strings hanging down like a noose. ‘No support, no support,’ he began. ‘Very good no support.’ Then, ‘Fix your balance, fix your balance, bring it all the way down. Don’t worry, I’m here.’ And at last, ‘Thirdeen, fordeen, we’ll do it slowly, fifdeen.’ He sprang back with the end of the set. His face remained closed, lips moving, calloused fingers calculating, the eyes with their heavy lashes sometimes shooting around the room for inspiration.

And for that one hour of the day, Aakash’s world became mine. Far from feeling that he was employed to help me attain something, I felt I was an accessory to whatever hunger was driving him. He would run his axioms for success by me. The most basic were: ‘Whaddyou saying, man? I’m a professional’ and ‘I’m an ad -ucated person.’ Then in Hinglish, ‘Getting a person fit, what greater dharma could there be!’ Sometimes the hard materialistic world would prevail. Then he would say, ‘Man, I just need that one golden opportunity, then I’ll put this idea I have in me into effect.’

‘What idea?’

‘Ash’s! One place where a man can get his whole image set, his hair, his clothes, his body. Right now a person has to wander from place to place, getting this, getting that. He might trust one element, but how can he trust all? At Ash’s, he’ll get everything, a whole image.’

‘What will you need to set it up?’

He looked at me as if we were about to do the set of a lifetime. ‘Sixty lakhs!’

I nodded weakly, considering the enormity of the sum. The intensity of his gaze trailed away. Before I could say anything, he snapped, ‘Come on. There’ll be a gap. The whole workout will be ruined.’

And almost as if they were necessary to offset the brightness of his star, there were detractors: people who wished to see him fail.

He quickly drew me into the politics of Junglee. Everyone was his enemy. The ponytailed owners were drunks. They had made the gym with forty lakhs of their father’s money. The female trainers were screwing the owners and were against him. The male trainers wanted his job. Montu especially, he muttered, was a chooda, and damning him for the highest form of amorality, said, ‘Man, he is someone who will eat pork, beef, whatever you give him. That is the kind of chooda he is.’ He looked irritated at my indifference to his food neurosis. ‘Man,’ he pressed me, making an allowance for the possibility that one of the two might be permitted me, ‘would you eat both pork and beef?’ ‘No, never,’ I lied. He nodded gravely. But his main rival, the Iceman to his Maverick, was Pradeep, a fair, bulky, mild-mannered man and Junglee’s only other full trainer. ‘He looks like bouncer,’ Aakash would say with disgust. ‘He has bouncer’s body.’ Then switching to Hindi, he would add, ‘They’re all together against me.’

Pradeep supplied Junglee with its protein shakes. This was a long-standing arrangement. Aakash advised I buy the protein powder and told me to ask Pradeep. But when Pradeep approached me on the treadmill, Aakash glowered at us. As soon as Pradeep was gone, he trotted up.

‘What was he saying?’

‘Nothing. Just telling me that I should take two scoops…’

‘One scoop.’

‘OK. He said two scoops twice a day.’

‘Once a day.’

‘I’m just telling you what he told me. And to mix a banana in.’

‘No banana.’

‘Fine.’

‘What else?’

‘You know, just that he was married, used to live in Bombay, has two kids, that he liked Bombay.’

‘Fucker,’ Aakash spat, ‘trying to cut my clients.’

I laughed. Aakash imitated my laugh, then laughed himself and walked away.

Soon I was paying him four thousand rupees a month on the side. Junglee itself for three months was twelve thousand. He justified it to me as a personal training hour. I justified it to myself as still less than what I paid in London. Besides, I wouldn’t have gone without it. I felt that his passion for what he did strengthened mine. I had very few people like that in Delhi.

A few days later than the Ghalib Academy had promised, Zafar Moradabadi called.

Himself a poet, his name twice echoed the names of poets before him: Zafar, like the poet-king, Bahadur Shah Zafar; Moradabadi, like Jigar Moradabadi, the other, more famous product of the brass-manufacturing town of Moradabad.

Zafar didn’t like coming to me through the academy. I felt he was embarrassed at having to teach. Even on the telephone, he seemed to want to establish a reason other than financial need for teaching me.

‘Aatish? Aatish Taseer?’ he asked in his papery voice. ‘But that’s a poet’s name.’

‘Yes, sir. My grandfather was a poet. I want to learn to read his poetry.’

‘Your grandfather was M. D. Taseer, the poet, and you don’t know Urdu?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then it appears I have something of a duty to teach you.’

He came to see me a few days later in Jorbagh. He had a light, gliding step. He wore a safari suit, a white woollen cap and finely made spectacles. He was of medium height with a slight stoop. His eyes were yellow, his skin dark, he had a pencil-thin moustache and sores, black and bleeding, ate away at his scalp.

I saw them when I asked if he would like to take his cap off.

‘I wear it because the wool from my head has come off,’ he said, and laughed throatily. Then he folded away his cap and revealed his bald head.

‘I can’t take the heat,’ he apologized when he saw me notice the sores. ‘And in the conveyance I’m forced to use, auto-rickshaws, it’s very bad.’

He sat there with his hands discreetly by his side. He didn’t ask any prying Indian questions about how much money I earned and spent. He didn’t look around the flat. I asked him if he would like tea.

‘I don’t normally. My constitution is quite sensitive.’

We started badly. I said I didn’t want to learn to write, only to read.

‘You can’t take a language, break it into pieces, keep what you like and leave the rest for the Pakistanis. What if you find you need to write?’

‘But I always write on my computer.’

‘Yes, but what if you’re in a poetry reading and you want to scribble down a couplet.’

‘I can write it in Devanagari.’

His face filled with placid disgust.

‘Then perhaps you should learn Hindi.’

‘My grandfather’s poetry…’

‘I could have it transcribed for you in Devanagari. Problem solved.’

‘Listen, please, I want to read Faiz, Manto, Chughtai…’

‘All available in Devanagari.’

‘I’ll learn to write.’

His face bloomed with affection and concern. ‘You know you have a responsibility. You’re a poet’s grandson; your great-uncle was Faiz; you have a tradition to uphold. I’m not saying that you should write poetry. I would never send you into poetry. It’s finished. Look at how I’ve suffered. I tell my children all the time that poetry is finished. But what’s been done is still there for you to read and know. You say you want just to read, but even that will only come easily when you can write.’