She Will Build Him a City (20 page)

These days, you cannot believe what you read in the papers or watch on TV, he needs to find out for himself.

CHILD

The Mall

F
rom the website of The Mall, the largest mall in India:

The Mall is an apogee of lifestyle distinction, it offers not only unprecedented scale in terms of its size but also an experience of unparalleled retail mix combined with entertainment and leisure attractions that have changed the concept of shopping mall experience. With the best location, a flat ‘0’ km from south Delhi and a 16-lane approach on the national express highway. The Mall offers a wide range of facilities including premium international and domestic retail brands, anchor stores, hypermarket, seven-screen multiplex cinema, restaurants and coffee shops, food court, car showroom, fitness and meditation centre, beer garden, bowling alley, ice-skating rink, simulated golf course, kids’ play zone and recreational zone.

The Mall is the largest operational shopping mall in India, with 1 kilometre of shopping experience on every floor.

~

One kilometre of shopping experience on every floor translates into 208 stores. Their break-up by type and number:        

Anchor stores (one brand name but selling several kinds of goods including Debenhams, Next, Big Bazaar, Reliance, Timeout, Marks & Spencer): 11

Books, Toys, Cards and Gifts: 7

Entertainment and Services/Speciality Stores: 16

Footwear/Leather/Luggage: 18

Kids’ Wear and Infant Care: 3

Men’s Apparel and Accessories: 19

Spa and Salon: 4

Sunglasses and Optician: 2

Women’s Apparel and Accessories: 21

Apparel Unisex: 33

Electronics: 12

Food, Grocery and Confectionery: 26

Home Furnishing and Accessories: 12

Lingerie/Inner Wear: 1

Personal Care: 6

Sports Wear: 6

Watches and Jewellery: 11

~

With state-of-the-art facilities for shopping, entertainment, food, fitness and luxury-brand shopping, it is a true Destination Mall that remains open for most of the day and night.

With three basement levels, The Mall has more than 2,500 car-parking spaces and offers amenities such as wide atrium spaces, high-speed elevators and escalators, multiple entry/exits.

~

It is through one of these multiple entry/exits that they will slip into The Mall tonight. Men, women and children from under the highway. They will enter a few hours after the last movie show, after all the bars and the restaurants have shut, lights and escalators are switched off except the emergency lights, of course, and when most of the security guards have gone to sleep. Exactly how many of them no one knows but there will be Aunty with her fake-blood Bandaged Baby, Uncle without his arms and legs, there will be Bhow’s kith and kin, dogs big and small, quick and slow, dogs who know how to squeeze themselves through narrow openings in the door, babies who can walk through glass. There will be street vendors, adept at using their ten fingers to display at least twenty items, there will be Windshield Wiper Boy and the Cartwheel Dancer Girl, he with his mop, she with bright red ribbons in her hair.

And, of course, there will be Orphan, the youngest and the newest member of this family.

~

What will they do in The Mall?

Two hundred and eight stores, there’s so much to do.

WOMAN

Lecture Notes

I will read aloud your father’s college lecture notes, I will keep my voice low. If his ghost is here, he will listen. I think he will be pleased because I never did this when he was around. I will read a few paragraphs to give you a sense of what he loves, what he teaches.

~

Language, says Joseph Vendryes in his 1921 classic
Le Langage
, does not exist apart from the people who think and speak it. Its roots go deep into the consciousness of each one of us. It’s from there that it draws sustenance enabling it to blossom into speech. Language exists on the lips of common people. Spontaneity is its life, it has a sort of elasticity natural to life. But this isn’t the case with literary language. It develops from spoken language but grammar imposes a certain invariable order.

~

Your father’s notes are in three exercise books.

I smell the paper and ink, the touch of his hands, his fingers, the years.

He uses blue ink. Every night when he sits down for dinner, there is a blue smudge below his nail on the side of the middle finger of his right hand. The pages, though, are spotless: there’s no scratch, no streak, no smudge. No sign of any faltering.

~

Spoken dialect may be compared to a flowing stream constantly changing and literary language to a canal that issues out of it. In the latter, the flow of currents is checked by dams in the form of grammatical and other formal conventions, causing the water to stagnate. Vendryes compares literary language to the formation of a film of ice on the surface of a river. ‘The stream which still flows under the ice that imprisons it is the popular and natural language; the cold which produces the ice and would fain restrain the flood is the stabilising action exerted by the grammarians and pedagogues; and the sunbeam which gives language its liberty is the indomitable force of life, triumphing over rules and breaking the fetters of tradition.’

~

I find the exercise books years after your father’s death when I am cleaning up one day, brushing away dust mites in the cupboard, chasing out the silverfish from his books, watching them dart across the pages. On one page of his notes, in the margins, there is a pen sketch, very neat and elegant, of a tiny house by the banks of a river on which is a boat with its reflection. There are mountains behind the house between which a sun sets and birds fly. Does he draw that for you?

~

A time comes when a literary language, because of its highly conventionalised structure, becomes lifeless, artificial and colourless. It ceases to be intelligible to the people and then it is discarded and becomes dead. The need, then, is felt for the creation of a new language. One may naturally ask when and at what moment the course of linguistic evolution takes shape as to warrant the creation of a new language.

Marcel Cohen is of the opinion that the transformation of a language can be rapid. A period of a thousand years suffices for the accomplishment of the thrust from one language to the other. The history of the origin of Sanskrit, Prakrit and the Modern Indo-Aryan languages illustrates the law of birth and death of literary languages.

~

Is your father’s ghost listening? He must be because he is so quiet, I can’t hear him move as I do on certain nights when I cannot sleep.

The curtains are still, I cannot hear the windows creak.

Is he in your room? If he is, I hope he lets you know that. Maybe it’s easier for you to tell him stuff that you cannot tell me. So look for new creases in your bedspread.

If they appear and if they move, that means he is there. You may switch off the air conditioner for a while because he may be cold, he’s not used to it.

~

Magadhi is a Prakrit language which evolved from Sanskrit. To understand the relationship between these two, let’s look at a simple parallel. Indo-Aryan speech comes before us in the shape of three portraits. Sanskrit is a portrait of a boy of ten years; Prakrit of the same boy who has turned fourteen while Modern Indo-Aryan is one who has turned into a man of nineteen. In the life of language, our one year is almost equal to a century.

~

I press the notebook’s pages against my face. Each word your father writes crawls into me through my eyes and my mouth, I swallow your father’s words, I feel them inside me, next to my heart. The notes get progressively difficult, I cannot read them out loud to you since there are mathematical symbols, technical terms that describe the formation of the language, its verbs, adjectives and tenses, the thousand-and-one rules of its grammar.

Of course, there is someone who can help me understand all this.

You know who I am talking about but I can tell you more about him only when your father’s ghost leaves the house because I don’t want him to hear, I want this to be our secret.

MAN

Train Fear

Will he find Balloon Girl in the AIIMS mortuary?

Instead of an answer in his head, all he feels is fear. Like he has never felt before.

No, that’s wrong, he has felt fear like this only once. Long ago, at a railway station.

He sits in a train, next to a window. He is a boy, he has both parents.

~

He is nine years ten years old. His father, his mother and he are on a train to where he doesn’t remember. What he remembers is that his father cannot pay for air-conditioned or first class so they are in the general compartment, all windows open, his nose pressed against the bars, the iron-red paint peeling off in flakes, the heat from the engine and the fierce noonday sun floating inside, into his hair and his eyes.

The train has stopped at a station. They have run out of drinking water. Father gets off the train to fill the pitcher with water from the station’s tap. Through the window, if he leans his head, he can see a row of taps and a very large crowd, passengers waiting, jostling, to fill their pitchers, bottles. His mother tell his father to hurry up because the train stops for just one or two minutes.

His heart begins to race, what if the mighty train with twenty, thirty coaches, two giant black engines, drivers with oil smeared on their faces and hands, as they lean out of their cabins, begins to move? The guard will wave his green flag, blow the whistle, there will be no one to stop the train.

His father has disappeared in the crowd at the tap.

He will lose his father.

Mother, I don’t want water, he says, I will go thirsty, please tell him we do not need water, please tell him he should return soon, the train will start to move.

Mother laughs, you are not a baby any more, she says, you are a big boy now, why are you worried?

He cannot see his father, the vendors are pushing their trolleys away from the train, he hears the piercing whistle, that’s the guard, he must be waving the flag. The train begins to pull out.

The sun blazing in the sky disappears, falls off the edge of the earth, day turns into night, blackness enters the coach through the window, cold and dark, he will never see his father again.

The train is gathering speed, the platform is now a living thing, pitch black, spread out all the way to where the sky meets the trees and the earth, heaving, rising until it curls up from the ground to the clouds, looks at him with many eyes blazing, many tongues in a mouth which is now as big as the night sky itself, opening wide as it descends, moving along with the train, as fast, until it’s right in front, it snaps, bites off the bars of the window, enters the coach, swallows him and while he is travelling inside this monster, the only sound he can hear is of the train moving and his mother saying, you are not a baby any more, you are a big boy now.

~

That boy who is not a baby wants to kill his mother although he doesn’t know what killing means. He wants to push her out of the running train, he wants to watch her head roll down the tracks, her body get cut by the iron wheels, into two, three, four pieces, each piece tumbling, falling, and then speeding away like the trees and the ponds and the dirt-tracks that thunder past him, backwards, like in a stampede in reverse.

Why are you crying, Father asks, sitting next to him, the pitcher at his feet, full of water, and he turns, buries his head in his father’s chest.

~

That fear is back as the car moves towards the hospital, that same cold blackness in the middle of the white-hot day.

This time it’s the road that has become a living thing curling up into the sky, then coming down to break his car window and swallow him. He can hear his mother’s laughter in his ears, her words, you are not a baby any more, you are a big boy now.

‘We are almost there,’ says Driver. ‘Do you want me to stop at the hospital?’

CHILD

Neel Chatterjee

‘Step on the bricks,’ says Kalyani, ‘one by one, don’t worry, they won’t move, you won’t trip.’

‘I know that,’ says Dr Chatterjee as he stands at the edge of a puddle of dirty water outside her house, unsure how to cross. It is afternoon when the slum is deserted except for the very young and the very old, those who cannot work and those who can only play. Bhai, Ma, Pinki and Baba are all out at work, Kalyani is at home.

She has a fever, not high enough to worry but it makes her body ache, in the knees, in her head and heels. She is lying down when she hears his voice call out her name.

~

‘What happened to your phone? I try calling but it’s dead.’

‘I had to give the phone back when I left Little House, I will get one soon.’