Uday Prakash - The Girl with the Golden Parasol

His friends came over and, one after another, they took turns serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner to the weaver’s new bride.

The joke produced a great outburst of laughter among the first-year MA Hindi students in class. A fiery, seething, base, inhuman laugh that had prevailed for centuries.

Rahul looked at Shailendra George and Shaligaram. Of the twelve students, the three of them sat off to one side, the other nine to the other. The laughing came from that side. Imagine a furnace in a steel plant in Bokaro or Bhilai, with temperatures of thousands of degrees, glowing bright red, liquid pig iron flowing so hot that it would vaporize a man into thin air — this laughter flashed even hotter than that. It wasn’t even the sound of laughter; it was the sound of a medieval fire disgorging caste abhorrence like lava from the Vedic furnace poured right into their ears.

Rahul watched all their laughing faces. Vimal Shukla, Vinod Vajpayi, Balram Pandey, Vijay Pachauri, Kamal Tripathi, Ram Narayan Chaturvedi, Sudip Pant, Vibhuti Prasad Mishra. All of them were “critters,” like from the movie. Ball-like, rolling, frightening, omnivorous critters sent from another world or demon realm to this bit of earth. Or else they arrived in a mysterious pod dropped from the skies, which then exploded. The creatures emerged on their own and over time established their own system of rule. They were everywhere. In language, in politics, in temples, in Parliament, in civil service, in places of worship, in birth, at death; from food and water to clothing and medicine to all media of information — newspapers, books, universities, TV channels; from finance to poetry, from art to letters.

These were the critters. When they came to this part of the world, the first thing they did was gobble up the sun in order to project a darkness into history, so dark that inside it no one could see the advance of their ever-hungry jaws and glimmering, razor-sharp teeth. They devoured the Buddha, the tales about his life, the sublime philosophies of the Upanishads, and all manner of folktales. They gnawed Jesus, Moses, Pirs, prophets, and Sufi saints down to the bones, crushed the bones into fertilizer, threw the fertilizer into a pit where a poisonous tree took root, and bore fruit — fruit that’s been hanging in the psyche of millions of innocent inhabitants of this part of the world for centuries.

Insult and disgust stained Shaligaram’s face first the color of mud, then to black. Fear shone from the eyes of Shailendra George.

“Shut up! Hold your filthy tongue! Bastards!” Rahul stood up. “Hindi literature and Hindu dharma have taught you this? Demon sons of Ravana! When will you stop eating? How much of this world will you destroy? You’re like weevils, leeches, gnats — parasites sucking on the broken body of this great country. Don’t forget that Ravana was one of you, living on the golden island of Lanka. It was still the treta-yug, when the dharma bull still had three legs, when you abducted the wife of the exiled Ram from their household, and then tore her up from the inside. It was a senseless life of never-ending wandering! And you bastards pretend to be devotees of Ram? Now in this kali-yug of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, when the dharma bull has but one leg, you are fashioning Ram into your very own barbaric, violent, murderous, fundamentalist, misanthropic, fascist image! Because you need the votes. Because you have to cling to power. Because now you need more to eat.

“How many thousands of years do you need power? If you want to know the truth, you bastards, here it is. The Huns never really held power in this country. Neither did the Scythians, the Kushans, the Greeks, the Mughals, or the English. Each of these regimes was just a cover for your Raj. The machete blade that’s come down for centuries on the neck of every honest, meek man who stands for justice is really just a symbol of your political power. If you have been so ennobled, then tell me: why wasn’t god ever born a Brahmin?”

Rahul was shaking with rage. But the dark stain had been wiped from Shaligaram’s face, and Shailendra George didn’t seem frightened anymore.

Just then, Dr. Loknath Tripathi entered the room. “Is there some kind of meeting going on here? Oh, right, of course, you’re all getting ready for the Union Council elections. But which candidate was giving the speech?”

The group of girls also returned. Now the medieval devotional literature lesson would begin, given by Dr. Loknath Tripathi, at whose house Balram Pandey worked as a cook, and who would one day become head of this Hindi department.

The three o’clock class was over. Thick tension suddenly cast its shadow throughout the entire classroom. Rahul felt as if he was suffocating. He stepped outside into the corridor. From there he could see the library. Next to it were two leafy neem trees; the shade beneath them must be deliciously cool.

As Rahul stood there, Kartikeya, O.P., Pratap, and a few others came running over.

“Sapam committed suicide. He’s dead.” Kartikeya’s face trembled. Everyone was out of breath.

“They found his body in the old well behind the hostel.”

There was a deep silence, screaming and ringing even in the absence of sound. Like after a falling meteor breaks up, or after a big explosion, or after a horrific death.

Rahul’s mind went still. No sound reached his ears. He fell in step behind his friends like a robot.

In the cool shade of the neem tree near the library stood Chaitanya — Chaitanya, the great master. But there was no singing of kirtans; the man was silent. His body was covered with scratches. His brow was disfigured. A bullet may have pierced a hole right between his eyes, sending a steady stream of blood flowing over his eyes.

A broken dholak lay on the ground, with a kartal and tiny set of cymbals next to the drum. And next to them, corpses. The police, Border Security Force, Central Reserve Police Force, a band of terrorists, a gang of Mafiosos, a fundamentalist, the Taliban or Hizbul or the Ranbir Sena, some Naxalites, Acchan Guru, Dawood, and the secret service detail of some government minister — all combined in a joint operation, and, after some wild firing, had shot them dead.

Behind the neem tree stood Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse, smoke coming from his gun.

Chaitanya’s mouth was still moving to sing the next line of the devotional kirtan song, but the only sound coming out was a near-silent bhaanya bhaanya bhaanya.

Rahul realized that on the grass next to his feet and the broken dholak was Sapam’s body.

“I’ll kill myself someday, I really will. Mark my words! How can I go on? Tell me? My brother sent me money for my studies. Now I’ll fight for my freedom. Do you know what they did to me. .?”

White ducks ran everywhere; drops of blood stained their feathers. A wind blew through the dry bamboo grove playing thousands of bamboo trees like the bansuri. They’d learned how to play the flute from Krishna, whom Rukmini came there to meet.

Sapam’s brother stared silently at him with his dead eyes. His father played the dholak and sang.

Rahul burst into tears. O.P. and Kartikeya tried to calm him down. “Try to pull yourself together, Rahul!”

Anjali Joshi stood silently in the corridor, watching.

It was nine thirty at night. Dinner hadn’t been served in the hostel. A unanimous decision was reached by all of the students of Tagore Hostel as part of the mourning for Sapam. Notices were tacked up in front of the dining hall that students wishing to eat could go to B. B. Desai Hostel.

Later it turned out that aside from a few dining hall staff and a stray student, nobody had eaten dinner that night.