Guddan sprang out of the car and opened the back door. Loknath Tripathi emerged with a toothy smile. The professors and instructors standing in wait flashed their teeth in return. The commotion and clamor began. The department chair came around from the other side, folded his hands in supplication, and exhibited a very weak smile. Rahul made a mental note that Drs. Srivastav and Singh managed only half smiles, and that with great effort. It was clearly like pulling teeth for them.
Acharya Tribhuvan Narayan Mishra was seated in the car near the stairs leading up to the department. Then the back door of the Ambassador opened. Out came the former academic from Banaras Hindu University, eminent mannerist Hindi scholar, and current professor emeritus, Acharya Mishra, now ready to scale the steps of the Hindi department.
That’s when the scene took shape.
First one real, worldly human foot emerged out of the open door of the black Ambassador, then another. He wore a white dhoti made of homespun and matching black natural-fiber sandals. His fingers were spread. He had dark, shiny legs. Greasy, as if he’d been rubbing them with ghee. As soon as those feet touched the ground, the uneasy, half-closed eyes on Dr. Loknath Tripathi’s round, pudgy face gave the signal. It was as if his eyebrows danced for a moment on his forehead.
Padmashree Dr. Rajendra Tiwari was the first to reverentially touch the esteemed feet. After him, it was Dr. Shukla’s turn, followed by Jha sahib, Pandey-ji, and Dr. Pant. Dr. Vajpeyi polished those dark hooves with his excited forehead. Dr. Aggrawal scoured the feet with his nose and cheeks. Dr. Dangwal combed his hair with those holy toes. Then came the turn of the students, who put on a surrealistic scene.
At the turn of the twenty-first century, this was an extremely authentic and original postmodern view of Hindi literature.
Rahul, Shailendra George, and Shaligaram stood off to one side, at a distance from this sacred ritual, as if they were sweepers or untouchables. Dogs and the fallen were prohibited from the ceremonial site by precepts of holy writ.
As the flabby, squat body of Acharya Tribhuvan Narayan Mishra began ascending the stairs, adorned with a light yellow kosa-silk kurta, his shoulder draped with a white, neatly folded, starched angocha sprinkled with arrowroot, first-year MA student Vijay Pachauri Anand, beside himself, began to dance rapturously like Mirabai. “Hooray for our Derrida! Hooray for our Derrida!
“Hooray for our Bow-dree-la! Hooray for our Misra!
“Hooray for our Misra! Hooray for our Misra!”
It was difficult to say whether Pachauri was in fact singing like some ecstatic Baul, but when Rahul asked Shailendra George, “Did you hear that?” Shailendra George and Shaligaram answered in unison, “Sure, we caught something. It might have been Pachauri singing.”
“Just watch! He’ll get a faculty appointment very soon. Mark my words!” Who was it who’d said that?
Rahul sat in the very last row. The singing of the welcome song and the flower garlanding had concluded. Padmashree Tiwari gave the introduction for the acharya. There was a dire need for the department chair’s speech to be translated into Hindi from whatever language he was speaking. He used countless words like clerihew, zenzizenzizenzic, eleemosynary, sferics, wrixle, infundibulum, haruspex, etaoin shrdlu, wrele, therianthrope, bathykolpian, mithridate, and xenization. In the middle of the introduction he stopped to recite something that sounded like a mantra. When at the end of the speech he declared, “It is through the grace and blessing of our eternal creator that the most highly esteemed Acharya Tribhuvan Narayan Mishra has today awoken each and every fiber of our bodies with feelings of joyful ecstasy by virtue of the intercourse he is having with us,” some of the boys in the audience could barely suppress their laughter.
Acharya Tribhuvan Mishra recited what amounted to a tome detailing his participation in the World Hindi Conference in London, the Kabir Centenary Celebration in Germany, and, in New York, the Hindi conference to welcome the prime minister. Then he mentioned the new treatise on Kabir he was writing, according to which Kabir had renounced Islam and become a Brahmin. He offered his crystal-clear proof: Kabir was opposed to conversion and circumcision. In support of this supposition he recited one line of a Kabir poem and gave his interpretation of it: “Therefore he lived Hindu.”
VC Agnihotri gave the closing remarks. He was overwhelmed by the acharya’s erudition. He implored the acharya to convey his request to the central minister for Human Resources that practical subjects like journalism, media, internet, translation, etc. be added to the curriculum of the Hindi department. The acharya stood up right in the middle of Agnihotri’s speech, asked to have the university budget prepared immediately and, amid the thundering applause, gave his assurance he could secure its approval in under a month.
. . Sure, they’ll teach those subjects here. Medieval gorilla, parasitical Pandey, and purohit. They’ll start a website dedicated to horoscopes, palmistry, wizardry, and astrology. Hindi journalism will become a medium of hocus-pocus, fire ritual, and mantra chanting, and a place to learn how to become a clever ass-kisser to the powers that be. And translation will be nothing more than to Sanskritize English words. .
What a bind. On the one side the Western powers, on the other side Brahmin pandits. Is freedom of language any less of a question than political freedom? Rahul thought. “Western power and Brahmin pandits are just two sides of the same coin!”
“What!? Did you say something, Rahul?” Shailandra George said, taken aback.
“No, I was just wondering if the samosas and gulab jamun were ever going to make their way over here,” Rahul answered.
His eyes continuously scanned the crowd for Anjali. She was sitting somewhere in the front row. Rahul noticed that Abha, Anima, Renu, and Seema had entered the room during the acharya’s speech. Anjali was the daughter of a state minister, after all. If she hadn’t been sitting in the front would she really come to the back row where he was? Feelings of simultaneous want and defeat closed in on Rahul. Just then the underling Kailash Yadav thrust a paper plate in front of Rahul’s face. The warm smell of hot samosas rushed into Rahul’s nose. In the front rows, the snacks were being served by Sharmistha, Lata, and Chandra.
As people milled about in front of the department building, and the VC and the acharya readied themselves to set off for the guesthouse in the black Ambassador, a Tata Safari pulled up. A six-foot-tall, white-kurta-pajama-clad, smiling, mustachioed man got out. Behind him were three more dressed in pants and shirts. The smiling moustache man had a cell phone in one hand and a bouquet of flowers in the other. He came forward, touched the feet of the acharya, and gave him the bouquet. Then he shook the hand of the VC.
“That’s Lakhan Lal Pandey, aka Lakkhu Bhaiya,” Shaligaram whispered into Rahul’s ear. “Head of the town council.”
Then Shailendra squeezed Rahul’s hand. “That’s Lacchu Guru, aka Lakshpati Lal Pandey’s older brother.”
Rahul was stunned.
Right then S. N. Mishra and Dr. Loknath Tripathi glanced at the three boys whispering among themselves. Balram Pandey’s eagle eye was also trained on them.
Something like a frightening little black moth rested like a moustache below his nose, below those eyes.
Rahul, Shailendra, and Shaligaram all shuddered.
As Rahul lay in his bed in Room 252 that night, he said to O.P., “Today I saw those eyes. I’m really scared, yaar.”
“What are you talking about? Are you having a dream?” O.P. switched off the light in the room. Now in the darkness, those two eyes looked down on him right above his head.