Uday Prakash - The Walls of Delhi

Biran Baiga hosted another all-nighter of feast and song and wine. Sitiya cooked a juicy pork dish made with mustard seed oil, garlic and onions, and garam masala. Three jugs of mahua were produced. This time, in addition to the dholak and manjira, Ram Karan brought a harmonium. Gopaldas, Biran, Bihari, Parmodi, and Mohandas all drank. Sitiya, Ramole, Kasturi, and Savitri also all took part in the libations. They sang and danced. Mohandas couldn’t figure out how he managed to remember each song, one after the next; time simply came to a standstill.

This time Kasturi was the one who drank a little too much. Every few minutes she’d pull Mohandas over into her arms. ‘Hu Hu Tu Tu! Wanna play kabbadi with me? Hu Hu Tu Tu!’ she said each time, tickling Mohandas.

‘Eh, scram, go back to Inspector Tiwari’s cowshed!’ Mohandas said, teasing her, and everybody thought this was the funniest thing.

Savitri chimed in. ‘Hey, check out Tiwari! The police inspector’s shit his underwear!’ This set off a bomb of hysteria that echoed around Purbanra the rest of the night.

Mohandas and Biran Baiga stood up together in the middle of the courtyard as if they were in a courtroom. The questioning commenced.

Mohandas: ‘You! What’s your name? WHAT IS YOUR NAME? C’mon, tell the court, we don’t have all day!’

Biran Baiga: ‘My name is Biran Baiga. And my father’s name is Dindua Baiga! Dindua Baiga!’

Mohandas: ‘You! And What Is My Name? MY name? What IS it?’

Biran Baiga (driving his finger into his chest) ‘You sonofa-bitch bum! Your name is Mohandas! MOHANDAS! Mohandas Kabirpanthi Bansor!’

Mohandas: ‘And my father’s name?’

Biran Baiga: ‘You father’s dead! His name was Kabadas.’

Mohandas: ‘You! So if Mohandas is here, and my father Kabadas is up there, in heaven, then, Mr. Smartypants, who’s the cuntworm sitting over there in jail in Anuppur?’

Birandas: (jumping up and down and clapping his hands) ‘That’s fryface depot supervisor Bisnath! Fraudster! And his father’s a two-time fraudster. His wife? Fraudster! And the bigwigs in Lenin Nagar who run the coal mine? All fraudsters!’

Parmodi, Sitiya, Bihari, Ramkaran, Ramoli, Savitri, and Gopaldas’s laughter rang anew as they picked up the tempo on the dholak, manjira, and harmonium.

(Don’t you think that amid all the pain and sorrow and bleak colours of this story little drops of joy have been interspersed? Don’t you think so? Well, you’re right. In the rough reality of the lives of the poor and victims of injustice, sometimes little bright colours flash. Like when combined forces of power and capital suddenly swoop down in a surprise attach on the myna bird, utterly destroying her nest, and then all you can see are the feathers and drops of blood of the little chicks. These drops are never visible in the history book that’s been written by the lackeys of a human resource minister of some political party. This is the job of a historian: to cover up the stains and spots at the edges of the clothing of his own time.)

The month was full of the unexpected. You won’t find an account or news about what was happening 1050 kilometres from Delhi anywhere else outside this story. Here’s a short summary of the circumstances that Mohandas’s life passed through:

Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh, judge, first class, was all of a sudden transferred to Rajnandgaon, and he left Anuppur.

Ras Bihari Rai, Bisnath’s lawyer, who was a well-known leader of the party in power and whose wife was a member of the city council, got both Bisnath and his father Nagendranath bailed out of prison with a single court hearing. Ras Bihari Rai was a skilled player of the politics of the day. As they were releasing Vishwanath aka Mohandas from prison after making bail, they cleverly wrote ‘Mohandas’ and nothing else into the Police Record. Because the final sentence had yet to be delivered, Mohandas aka Vishwanath was not a convinced criminal in the eyes of a law, but just a suspect. In other words, in the official police documents, the two men who were released on bail from the prison at Anuppur were let out under the names Mohandas (aka Vishwanath) and Kabadas (aka Nagendranath). The names that were written after this on the release orders were scribbled so they weren’t legible.

And then all of a sudden one day the news came from Rajnandgaon that judge G.M. Muktibodh had had a brain haemorrhage and was taken in a coma to the Apollo Hospital in Bilaspur. At the hospital, Congress party stalwart Srikant Verma, and his dear old friend, Nemichand Jain, were there with him. But after seventy-two hours of a tough fight between life and death, Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh, judge, first class, breathed his last breath. And with it he said, ‘Hé Ram!’

With Harshvarddhan Soni, when he got the news of his death, was the inconsolable Mohandas Kabirpanthi Bansor of Purbanra village. With the judge’s life had gone out his lone hope.

The most recent news is that Bisnath and his wife Renuka have been making a lot of money from their side businesses related to the coal mine. Bisnath and Vijay Tiwari are still in cahoots. These days he’s openly come into politics and is running for a seat on the district council. And his caste brothers are also in positions of high power. They help him out in every way possible. He’ll say, ‘Who is the real Mohandas? Who is the fraud? That’s something that I and I alone will decide! That two-bit piggy shithead cast aspersions on my honour, and took the job I had fair and square. So now I’ll show him what true force is!’

When I went back to my village last week I saw that the look on Harshvarddhan’s face was of numbness. His eyes were red. He said, ‘I haven’t slept the last three nights. I have no idea what I’m going to do. The people in Purbanra are telling the truth about Bisnath. The worst poisonous snake. A viper’s viper.’

He let out a deep sigh. ‘Every couple of days Bisnath creates some kind of catastrophic criminal act in Lenin Nagar. Sometimes he’ll grab a gold chain off someone, or else he’ll beat someone senseless. And when someone owes money to the chitfund his wife runs, she’ll have them beat up, walk right into their house, and take whatever stuff she pleases. And then when a criminal complaint is lodged at the police station, it’s done so in the name of Mohandas, since most of the people still know Bisnath as Mohandas. Then it’s poor Mohandas, the real one, who gets arrested and dragged off by the Purbanra police.’

Harshvarddhan’s eyes filled with tears of helplessness. ‘Bisnath colluded with police inspector Vijary Tiwari and bought off the guards at the station with food and wine, and now they’ve beaten Mohandas within an inch of his life. They broke his hands and feet and he can’t walk. And four days ago his mother Putlibai fell into a well and died. Kasturi is cobbling together whatever she can to put bread on the table.’

I looked up; Mohandas was approaching, limping heavily. He was not wearing the washed-out, patched up pants and torn checked shirt, but only a loin-cloth. His hair had fallen out, and he wore cheap round eyeglasses. He walked slowly, using a walking stick, shuffling along like an old man.

‘Ram Ram, uncle!’ he said upon seeing me, joining his palms together in greeting. The deep wrinkles on his face were a monument to his suffering and defeats. He looked like a very old man, maybe eighty or ninety. He sat down on the ground, using his walking stick as a support. But the gruff voice that came out of his mouth with a groan wasn’t our local tongue, but Hindi, the ‘national language.’ He said:

‘I take your hands and beg: please find a way to get me out of this. I am ready to go to any court and swear that I am not Mohandas. My father’s name is not Kabadas, and he is not dead, he is alive. They really beat the hell out of me, the police did, on Bisnath’s order. They broke my bones. It hurts to breathe it’s so bad.’