Or was it because he was of indeterminate lineage, but not a Brahmin, who, by accident, crawled into the medieval cave of Hindi literature while pursing a girl? Or was he some African slave who’d arrived in the middle of a Roman city? Or an outcaste with a gong tied around his neck so he can sound the alarm on his own, and give warning: “Please, kind Brahmin sir, keep your distance, as a vile untouchable is now passing! Kindly save yourself from contaminating your lordship’s self and have the good grace to avoid contact with the shadow of this base creature! Come, see how some Shabuk-like untouchable is again doing penance in your glorious Vedic language, and off with his head! At the hands of a Kshatriya. Then cut up the severed head with Parashuram’s blade. Throw his wife into the fire, kidnap her, and if that still hasn’t done the trick, call her a whore, a loose woman, and banish her from town.
“But keep in mind that this time, somewhere beyond the city limits of your capital, she’ll find refuge in a little hut inhabited by an outcaste. And this time too, that very outcaste, who you’ll call a bandit, will write another enduring epic poem.
“And now, dear bastards, once again I give you — the great poet Valmiki!”
Woo whee! Woo whee!
At eleven o’clock at night there was an uproar in the hostel. O.P. came rushing in with the news that Niketan and Masood had gone to see the film Satya at the Ganesh Talkies, where Lacchu Guru and his lackeys caught sight of them. They goondas surrounded the two boys and beat them senseless. They drew blood from Masood’s left eye and fractured a rib, his right wrist, and left thumb. Niketan had also been injured.
In next morning’s edition of Janvani on page three, which promised “All India” but gave only local news, ran the headline, “Lust-Crazed Hostel Student Beaten for Harassing Girl.” According to the story, a male member of a certain minority community was physically harassing a girl of a certain other community in front of the Ganesh Talkies when an agitated crowd formed and beat the living daylights out of him and his associate. Police officer in charge Vijay Narayan Sharma told Janvani that charges have been filed against the two students.
According to the de facto file at the Max Cyber Cafe, the publisher of Janvani was a regularly attending darbari at VC Agnihotri’s court. Monthly installments were paid to conceal news about corruption and chicanery connected with the university. Puff pieces on VC Agnihotri were continually printed in the newspaper along with regular reports commending his activities. Most evenings the publisher could be seen with VC Agnihotri, drinking whiskey and burping loudly in curtained cabin no. 2 in the family section of the only bar in town, the Asiana. He was that breed of animal who in political terms is a “socialist” and in cultural terms a “fascist.” In other words, a true Brahminist.
Hemant Barua and Kartikeya were sharing a joke. Hemant said, “I’ve changed the spelling of ‘globalization’ by changing the ‘b’ to a ‘c.”’
“What do you mean?” asked O.P.
“Here we don’t have ‘globalization’ but rather ‘glocalization.’ In other words ‘g’ plus localization.” It wasn’t clear from Hemant’s tone of voice if he was angry or being sarcastic.
“Tell us, Hindi literature recruit, how do you translate that into Hindi?” Kartikeya Kajle asked Rahul. He was from Pune and his mother tongue was Marathi.
“Well, the ‘g’ gives us ‘grisly,’ and localization stays the same, so, ‘grisly localization,”’ Rahul said in a weary voice.
“That’s the true reality,” said Kartikeya.
The reality was also that the centuries-old factory of falsehood and rumors had begun clanging and banging away, ready to take on Rahul and the others, whose only crime was to be neither immoral nor corrupt. That and — in this age of profiteers, conmen, and vice — they were poor, their pockets were empty, and they were guided by conscience.
TWENTY-SIX
Shaligaram and Shailendra came with news that neither O.P. nor Rahul could believe. But once the six-foot-three skeleton accepted that the information was true, he did a dance worthy of Michael Jackson and ran off as fast as the queen of Indian track and field, P. T. Usha, to inform the others.
What happened was this: that day, each class from every department elected their counselors to the student union. Balram Pandey stood as a candidate for the first-year students of the Hindi department. Everyone knew he was the hopeful of Dr. Loknath Tripathi, since Balram even cooked for the professor at his home. Vijay Pachauri had nominated Balram, and Ram Narayan Chaturvedi had seconded the motion. It seemed as if he’d win, unopposed.
Shailendra George continued the story with a smile on his face. “So I just stood up and nominated Rahul for the fun of it. I thought even if he only gets two votes, Pandey shouldn’t be handed the election unopposed. Shaligaram was just about to stand up to second the nomination, when. .”
“Anjali Joshi,” Shaligaram cut in excitedly, “stood up from the girls’ side and said, ‘I second Rahul’s name.”’
“We did a quick count and figured if all the girls voted for our side, that would still leave Rahul with only eight votes, compared to Balram Pandey’s nine Brahmin votes, which would cinch it for him,” Shailendra said.
“We readied ourselves for defeat. But when the counting was done, Rahul had gotten nine votes and Balram Pandey, eight. He lost by one vote,” Shaligaram said, clapping his hands. “Someone defected from their side.”
“And I know who it was!” Shailendra George declared as if he were a spy. “It was Sudip Pant. Sharmistha brought him over to our side. Those two have a thing going on.”
O.P. had returned with the others. He’d brought a pound of roasted peanuts. They extracted Balbir from the mess hall and ordered ten cups of pauper’s chai.
It was with roasted peanuts and chai that the unexpected election victory was celebrated.
Ten days had passed. During his fever, Rahul had sped through Hazariprasad Dwivedi’s novel Anamdas ka Potha, enjoying it tremendously. After the news from Shaligaram and Shailendra about his election as councillor, Rahul stayed awake long after O.P. had gone to sleep.
The novel tells the story of a celibate monk, dwelling in a hut in the forest, who sees a woman for the first time in his life and experiences a sweet shiver up his spine, impossible to articulate. That night, Rahul experienced the same sweet, unexplainable shiver time and again. All over his body, and all over his soul — everywhere Anjali had touched.
“Why did you second my name? Why, Anji?” he whispered that night, all alone, like a bird might. Crouching in a nest hanging from a branch, suddenly stung by a blast of wind at night, the bird might mutter to itself, to the wind, or to the branch.
That night, Rahul had forgotten how his life, and the lives of countless others like him, was like a boat with weak sails, trapped inside a typhoon, in a decisive battle for its very existence, struggling desperately against the deranged and omnivorous waves churned up by the violent and crazed ocean of today’s world. Each time, the imperative of the waves wagered with their lives, his and the others’. And each time their lives were spared, by chance, by some unexpected miracle.
That night Rahul felt he was sleeping safe and sound on deck of some ship, as if he’d just been saved by the skin of his teeth from a Titanic-like disaster, and was now on a carefree cruise in calm and peaceful waters, sailing on an imponderable, loving ocean. A full autumn moon was in the sky, really nothing more than Anjali’s presence. She was silently composing a new life story, written on his forehead with her moonbeams.