An Obedient Father (9 page)

When I was fifteen my father joined the Arya Samaj, a forerunner of the BJP, and sent me to an Arya Samaj school. The principal told us students to think of ourselves as being in God Ram's army. We were to live a life of simplicity, deprived, as much as possible, of the objects of vanity which might keep us from ourselves and our responsibilities. The lives of all eighty or so students were to be contained by the row of four perfectly square classrooms at the center of the school compound and, behind it, the enormous barracks-style room where we slept. Each student's bed had to be made before breakfast, and no bed could be unmade before nine at night. All personal belongings had to be kept beneath your cot or on the single small table which stood by the bed. In the back of the compound, the part farthest from the town's only road, was a series of latrines. On Sundays the students had to clean each building with ammonia.

I soon realized that all the discipline was to cover uncertainty and I lost interest. I found what I thought was my destiny in the town's wrestUng school. I knew instinctively when an opponent's foot was unsteady, where to push and where to hold. More than this, though, I was one of those athletes who need to win and so are capable of intense concentration and surprising recklessness. By the end of the first school year, I was the best wrestler in town and one of the best in the district. Like the pious men and women who rise early each morning to sweep their local temple, I woke before sunrise to rake the dirt of the wrestling yard so that it would be smooth under my feet. I became district champion in my second year and went to the All-Punjab Tournament. I lost there, but I didn't mind, because I knew that the date for Independence was upon us and I would change with the rest of the world.

The first of the corpses was in an alley, curled on its side in the shade of a mud wall. It was late afternoon. Classes were over and I was going down a dirt path between some houses to the wrestling yard. I saw the man in the shade and thought he had passed out drunk. Alcoholism was common. He had an arm tucked under his head as a pillow and the other lay on his thigh. I walked up to him to get a better look. From a few meters away I saw a Muslim's skullcap in the dust. This surprised me, because I knew that none of the dozen or so Muslim families in the town touched alcohol. Then I understood that the darkness on the ground beside him was blood. The path was on a slope and the body was below me. The blood frightened me so much I thought the road's slope would drag me toward him. One of the man's legs stretched out of the shadow as if to trip me.

For a week after the first murdered man, Muslim corpses began appearing everywhere. At the edge of town I found a young woman and a boy of about eight lying a few feet apart next to a thorn fence. Both were naked and slashed all over. One of the blows had parted the skin and meat on the boy's shoulder and I could see white, clean bone beneath. The woman's pubic hair woke me periodically for years, because I imagined ants feeding on her. Scattered along the side of the only road which led out of town I saw the bodies of several men and one very old woman. The corpse of the midget who ran the town's general store showed up in the back yard of an acquaintance. The yard was surrounded by a high wall, its top studded with nails and broken bottles.

That week made me think of a winter afternoon in my childhood when thousands of small, shiny, black-and-green birds suddenly appeared and settled in Beri's trees. As evening drifted in over the hills and lingered into night, the birds began dying. They fell to the ground all night long. Those birds, these corpses, felt wondrous, as if from a fairy tale.

Every Hindu in the school and town, the only people I might have had a conversation with, must have known that the murders were occurring, because we hardly discussed them. India's partition into Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India was only months away and most days the newspapers carried stories of massacres.

When we did speak of the murders, it was usually with one or at most two people. I think this was because, although the partition turned even reasonable people into fanatics, nearly all of us were horrified by the details of death, like the clean bone of the boy's shoulder. Rumors identified a few people as having taken part in the killings, a few students, a few teachers, a man who delivered milk to the school in large tin tanks, but even these people did not talk about what they had done.

Because we did not talk, the horror became intolerable. Each morning we woke with the day before us like some frightening and hopeless task. At night, we boys yelled in our dreams. There was one teacher who cried in class for two days in a row, till the principal scolded him in front of us.

Not a single member of the Muslim families survived. One Hindu lost a hand in an attack on a Muslim home.

The principal decided to shut the school and send all the students home, "in case of more violence." But we knew that he sent us away because he did not know how else to release the pressure under which we lived.

When I returned home, my mother had pneumonia. She had been sick for several weeks and had even broken two of her ribs because of a cough which could lift her upright in a single violent exhalation.

She died one night not long after I came back to Beri. I had gone to a farm a kilometer away to buy her biscuits, which she had asked for in her fever. The sky was bright, even though the sun had set and a bit of the moon showed. In the air there was the dry, almost sweet smell of dung burning. As I walked back from the farm, I wondered whether Ma had died while I was gone. I thought this whenever I was away from her for longer than ten minutes. Ever since the week of the corpses, my mind had fixed on the idea that God was going to punish me in some way. I did not know whether he would be punishing me for seeing the corpses, or for not doing anything to help the Muslims, or because the world had passed into Kali Yug and everyone must suffer for being born in this era. I was seventeen and there was no possibility of happiness in the future. My imagination kept conjuring terrible things that might happen. I could lose my sight; my father and brothers might drink poisonous water; Ma could die.

From the recently plowed field outside our yard I heard women crying. In my head I immediately saw my mother dead, with the village women crouched around her on the floor. But I did not really believe this until I entered the house and saw my mother's body. Then I gasped.

I gasped and, still gasping, started doing the things which must be done when someone dies. I brought the jeweler, who pried the stud out of my mother's nose with tweezers and clipped the silver ring off her toe. I helped carry my mother to the crematorium. Nothing made me cry. Not even the unbearably foul smell of hair and flesh on fire, and the way my mother twitched in the flames when her muscles contracted. In fact, everything caused my grief to burrow inward. Collecting her ashes and bones to pour into the Ganges only made the gasp more solid. I became so quiet that I could not even answer people's questions.

The madness came later. I welcomed it because it brought relief from the bang I kept hearing, which was my mother's stomach exploding in the funeral pyre, and from the image of my father shattering my mother's skull with a staff and chunks of sizzling flesh heaving out of the fire and onto the ground. For months after Ma's death, I woke at sunrise and immediately felt the hole her absence had created in the world and began to cry. The more I cried, the more I needed to cry. The first tears of the day would be from sorrow and despair, but these excavated a greater anguish. By wishing for my punishment to occur, by thinking on my way home that Ma had died, I had incited God to kill my mother. I could not say these words, even though I knew them, because saying them would make the guilt ridiculous and so end it, and therefore perhaps end the hole which kept my mother with me. I wept and wept. It was as if the tears were my flesh's attempt to grow and cover the neat, round hole my mother's death had punched in me. But every time the hole was camouflaged, the skin twitched and broke and the hole revealed itself Sometimes my brothers grew tired of my weeping. "Go cry in the fields and scare away some crows with your noise," one said. The indifference they had shown to our mother's death (neither had wept) made my unhappiness denser and made me think sometimes that I was the one good person in the world. I would walk crying through the fields and hills until I passed into hysteria. Then I became so exhausted that I lay down wherever I was, next to a well, in the middle of some farmer's crops, and slept.

During this period, India became independent. One afternoon everyone in Beri was gathered on a flat field by the local Congress worker. Someone from a nearby town was there and gave a speech. Then the children lined up and the Congress worker passed out balloons and copper coins with Mahatma Gandhi's face stamped on them. People began to eat. The village women had prepared sweets and filled large clay pots with sweet drinks. After a little while, the larger children tried to steal the smaller children's coins and balloons. As the balloons were knocked out of hands and went floating up, I thought of my mother not seeing this day and not receiving the saris that she had imagined the government would give. I wandered away sobbing.

When I returned to higher secondary, the town was nearly as it had been before the violence. Hindu families were living in the houses the Muslims had owned. Classes started and I took up wrestling once more. But it was as if I had been sick a long time and had become easy to confuse. I had also developed a fear of pain. The idea of being slammed into the ground and maybe cracking my head panicked me, and so, when I was in a difficult position, I found myself giving in, hoping to make my fall easier.

The only thing that took me out of myself was my first woman. Two friends and I hired a prostitute. I paid fifty paisas and they paid ten each to watch through a window. The idea of being watched did not bother me, since my entire family had lived in one room and I had often seen my parents having sex. We didn't tell the woman about the watching, because then she might have wanted to charge extra. I met her outside the school one Sunday afternoon and led her around the back to a hut used by the groundskeeper. The prostitute wore a sari, which I had asked her to wear, and men's thick rubber slippers. I found their inappropriateness erotic, but her feet were cracked and yellow. I was anxious and sad as I led her to the hut. Whatever excitement I had felt in arranging for the woman had been replaced by the sense that I was being forced to admit some deep wrongness in myself I began to apologize to the prostitute.

Once she was in the hut, I told the woman to remove her clothes. I took off mine and sat on a cot. After she finished stripping, she stood before me. The only light was from the small barred window. She was short and deep brown, with long black hair and large breasts. Her waist and thighs were in the dark. I made her walk back and forth in the narrow aisle between the cot and the sacks of cement which were leaning against the wall. I weighed her breasts in my hands. My shame vanished. No matter what I felt about myself, this was the actual world. We were only bodies and I had more power than this woman. I put my fingers inside her.

"Do you like this?" I asked, wanting to know the range of my strength.

"Whatever you like," she answered. To have power after so much unhappiness and confusion made me feel as if the world could be mine.

I laid her on the cot and got on top. As I started moving, I saw my friends standing outside at the window beneath which they had been hiding. Their watching excited me.

The orgasm didn't feel like much right then. My penis trembled and spurted and that was it. But for the next few days, I was crazy with happiness. I would run and slide down the shaded gallery outside the classrooms. I kept finding myself talking loudly or humming. I had discovered a way to happiness which sidestepped all the demands life made of me.

I went to the prostitute several times after this, paying with a five-rupee wrestling award. Soon I couldn't feel my guilt. I think my mother's death had distended the elastic cord which ties our actions to our conscience and the cord hung slack. The prostitute was eighteen and named Rohini. After I gave the money to her husband, he would sit outside their cottage smoking bidis while I visited. As we had sex, I could hear their children in the courtyard. But I soon began to love Rohini in secret. She had a slow walk that made me think she was heavy with sweetness. Once, Rohini told me I had very handsome eyes, and when I looked in a mirror I noticed that indeed my eyes were quite large. Rohini's husband thought I came from a well-off family and I went along with this. But when he began asking me for cigarettes, I realized that his demands might increase and I stopped going. Once after this, I saw her on a path outside town, but I hid myself in a cane field before she could notice me. My falling in love and then quickly abandoning her felt like a working-out of my destiny.

I failed eleventh standard. Nearly half the students with whom I had entered higher secondary had failed at least one year by then. There would have been no shame in repeating the year. But failing eliminated what little confidence I had remaining, and I decided to leave school.

We were at war with Pakistan and I wanted to fight for my country. I also thought joining the army would provide me with the opportunity to rise quickly in the world. I began imagining myself a general and grew a thick mustache such as I imagined a general might wear. But I had flat feet and ended up in the navy. As soon as I learned I was going to be in the navy, I became happy with the choice that had been forced on me. I saw myself traveling all around the world. I shaved my mustache.

Compared to farm work, the three years in the navy were like a long holiday. This is because a farm is yours, and since it is the only thing that is yours, you are always worried. I did not mind the constant work in the navy, because it was just work. Locks had to be greased regularly, chains and cables carefully examined and repaired or replaced. Equipment, radios, generators, parts of the engines often all of a sudden stopped working. In return for doing this, I saw the ocean for the first time. I visited cities where people spoke strange languages. More than these things, though, leaving Punjab freed me from the sadness I had been feeling for the last year and a half I again began to believe that my life could be lived purposefully.

If we had ever gone into battle, I might not have considered myself lucky. But my years in the navy were a series of marvels. Once, while we were far from land, enormous dark clouds began pacing back and forth several miles away on one side of the ship. On the other side, also several miles away, were similar clouds, which looked like gigantic jellyfish dragging their million rain legs beneath them.

But directly above us was the sun, a clear sky, bored gulls. It was like being in one of those zoos where the people travel in buses while the animals roam free.

I visited Calcutta, which in my memory is only boxy jute mills and the wonderful green stretch of the Maidan. Madras had strange intricate temples which were so different from any I had ever seen that I doubted whether their Ram and Vishnu could be the same as mine.

The navy was also a time of debauchery. There was so little shame about prostitution that at brothels sailors got lower prices than any but the most frequent customers.

In Bombay I slept with a child. An acquaintance told me about the girl, that she was thirteen. I went looking for her the evening of the same day I heard of her. I imagine this means something. But at that point I was not actually interested in children. What I found exciting was the idea of doing something altogether different from what had become banal to me. When I heard about the girl, my heart began to flutter in a way it had not since several months earlier, when I had had sex with a vastly pregnant prostitute.

The red-light district was several blocks along a narrow road. The brothels were old two- and three-story houses pressed together on either side of the street. I cannot recall whether I went to the girl on a holiday night, but the road was crowded and noisy with voices and radios playing. There were no streetlights, and the only illumination was what spilled out of windows and doors. People came right up to each other before they stepped aside. Most of the houses did not have numbers written out front, and as I walked around looking for the one I had been told about, I kept patting my breast pocket to see if my purse was still there.

Many of the brothels had long balconies, galleries almost, attached to the front of each story. That night I noticed for the first time that some of the men, women, and children on the balconies wore village clothes and some wore city clothes. This made me realize that neither customers nor prostitutes would sit around chatting or listening to music on the radio. The people on the balconies were probably visiting someone who worked there. I had never before thought of brothels as places where people lived for years at a time.

I overcame my embarrassment and asked a man working at a betel-leaf stall for directions.

I walked down the street. A fat woman with an enormous bindi painted on her forehead was sitting sideways on a bicycle before the brothel's narrow door. I asked her if she had a "young girl," because I could not say child.

She immediately said, "Twenty rupees."

I was so shocked by the price that I thought the woman had misunderstood me. "I don't want a virgin," I said.

The woman eyed me. "For twenty rupees you get firewood, not a forest." Probably because I did not say anything, she added, "You'll get your own room and can enjoy yourself with respect. With respect." I gave her the money and she tied it inside a handkerchief and tucked it between her breasts.

Usually I became hard as soon as I entered a brothel, but as I followed the woman up a dimly lighted stairway and down a narrow hall, I stayed soft. We were on the second story. Small waist-high windows lined one side of the wall. Voices from the street rose to us. I looked down and could tell where people were, because they were even darker than the streets. I wondered whether I would actually have sex with the girl. I believed that if she looked truly young, something at the last moment would deflect me. I did not think I, myself, could do much about what would happen.

The fat woman brought me to a small blue room, where a girl was sitting on a cot reading a comic. The girl looked up at me. I had not remembered that thirteen was so young. She had an oval face, a broad hooked nose, and round bulging eyes which, because she appeared to blink only rarely, gave her an unchanging, startled expression. Her legs were no thicker than her arms, and her breasts were just beginning to grow. She looked so young in her pale green salwar kameez that I felt the enormity of her helplessness. "Half an hour," the woman said as she left the room. She did not close the door but drew a curtain with a weighted bottom across the doorway.

The girl continued staring at me. I sat down beside her. I won-

dered if she thought the same things each time a man was brought to her room. I told myself I should leave, that twenty rupees was not so much and maybe the woman would let me have another prostitute for the money. "What's your name?" I asked. She did not answer and her eyes did not change. I wondered if she was drugged.

"Chandni," she suddenly said, as if I had only just asked my question.

I knew that prostitutes renamed themselves when they joined the trade, often using the name of a flower or a precious stone, and I felt rebuffed by the pseudonym she had given. "Is that your real name?"

"Stop asking questions," she said.

The girl stood, in the same sudden way that she had given her name. She pulled her shirt over her head and unhooked her skirt. Her pubic hair was sparse. Her waist was no wider than my thigh. She looked almost sexless. I was still not hard. But I stood also and gathered a breast in one hand. That breast was the softest thing I have ever touched. It was like water. I kissed her nipples and laid her on the bed. Her nipples had wide areolae and, like her eyes, appeared astonished. As I took off my clothes, the girl spat into her hands and rubbed the spit into her vagina. This disgusted and excited me simultaneously. I finished becoming hard.

"How long have you been doing this?"

"For twenty rupees you only get to fuck."

I was embarrassed, for the questions were a way to own her more completely. The embarrassment made me protest, "Twenty rupees is alot of money."

She grimaced, as if she was disgusted by my poverty. "All you get is fucking."

Sex with her was not much different from that with an older woman, except the vagina was shallower.

"Do you like this?" I asked when I was in her. I often asked this.

"No," she said, and then a little later added, "I hate men like you, sweating and talking, talking. Wanting things for free."

"Is it ever good?"

"Never with men who pay."

I had been insulted by prostitutes before, but never this much. As I rode a rickshaw back to the ship, I felt shame. Thirteen was so young that she and I might as well have been different species. I swore out loud: "I will never go to a whore again. For the next three months I will give a tenth of my salary to charity." But there was no solace in words. After a while memories of my mother began coming to me, the way she always walked around barefoot, her taste for sweets, how I moved my cot next to hers when she was sick and dying. I began to cry, because it seemed to me then that being good was, for me, one of those impossible tasks which are given to the heroes of fairy tales.

After I had sex with the girl, I began discovering so many brothels with children that I thought it was a new fad, in the same way that Raj Kapoor's Charlie Chaplin walk would become popular. When I went to a brothel and learned I could have a child, I was always tempted. Occasionally while masturbating, I conjured the little girl spitting into her hands and rubbing the spit into her vagina. But I never again went to a child prostitute.

I left the navy when I was twenty-two. After the first year and a half, all the problems of being trapped on a ship with people I disliked had become unbearable. Thievery was so common that even my undershirts and socks were stolen. A man who slept in the bunk above me masturbated every night by mounting his pillow and rubbing against it until he came.

I left the navy in late June and immediately took a job as a physical education teacher in a boys-only school in Delhi. Teaching exercise did not take much time or effort. Most of any day I could be found drinking tea on a cot near the gate at the school compound. Five months after I started my new job, I married Radha.

K year or two after our marriage, Radha told me that she /X. and her sisters were so frightened of their father that since he did not like to see dry laundry still hanging on the clothesline, they took down the laundry while it was moist.

Radha was nineteen when we married. She was thin, with slightly jutting teeth which kept her mouth open and brittle hair that could never grow beyond shoulder length no matter how she took care of it. But Radha soon became beautiful to me.

Despite everything I had done in the navy, I believed that once I married I would be a faithful husband. Since marriage is so important a part of anyone's life, I thought I would be desolate if I was faithless.

And Radha had a capacity to watch and pay attention which made me feel safe. We spent the first week of our marriage in Beri. Radha had brought a bag of toffees to hand out to the children of all her new relatives. I asked her if her mother had suggested the sweets as a way to charm the relatives.

"No," she said, and then paused. It was night and summer, but because we had just gotten married, we were in the house instead of outside in the wind. Radha was sitting on our cot as I undressed. She was looking away from me. We had not made love yet because Radha was still anxious with me. "When I was a child, a neighbor got married and his wife gave out candies. I thought she was smart."

I was amazed Radha had carried this fact for years. I felt glad to be with someone this intelligent, because it meant she could take care of me. "You're smart, too."

"Not smart. I am understanding," Radha said, and became silent as if she had revealed too much.

Getting Radha to tell me a joke was as thrilling as teaching a wild rabbit to lick sugar from my palm. I took great pleasure in serving her and in furnishing our future together. The ritual of purchasing bedsheets and stainless-steel pots, a poster of a fat pink baby, a clock with hands that glowed in the dark soothed whatever concerns I had about the shape of my life, which seemed increasingly dominated by the silliness of my job, supervising children while they did jumping jacks or making them turn out their pockets after they finished playing table tennis so that no balls were stolen. Buying mangoes for Radha on my way home from work and telling her that she was my mango tree, my wish-granting tree, was a way of replacing the rest of my day. Once, early on, I saw her with her fingertips wrinkled from bathing and I felt lucky to be able to age with her.