An MA in Hindi?
Rahul did a double take. An image of the Hindi department flashed before his eyes: the dull, gray, sick-looking walls, the red stains from paan juice spat out, garbage strewn in the corners, filth everywhere. It was as if the most isolated part of the university had been plunged into a blighted darkness. The mysterious building was serving a life sentence in solitary confinement.
And the people who went in and out of the department! They didn’t look like they were living in today’s world. From the clothes they wore to the way they walked and talked, they were completely other. The males often traveled around campus together in a pack. Girls would see them and take fright. They spoke in high-pitched voices, screeching loudly, clapping their hands, having a coughing fit, all the while laughing at their own jokes in a sound like that of a mirthful primal man who’d jumped the fence into civilization. Ha-ha, hee-hee, hoo-hoo.
They were at once ridiculous and frightful, inspiring both pity and fear. They spoke in a peculiar language among themselves, some spirit tongue of a dead culture.
Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit: nobody really knew for sure why these three departments existed at all. What kind of future would their graduates have? No one had a clue. Those boys were ragged, misfits, backward, isolated from the real world, and their teachers made for the same caricature. One student would shamelessly scratch his crotch in public, while another shaved-head dhoti-clad type would ogle some girl like a chimpanzee.
Students on campus jokingly referred to the department as “leftover land.” Any girl with brains and talent took admission in any of the other departments that were part of the university mainstream. Only the leftovers enrolled in the Hindi department. One look at them and you knew: dropouts.
Could this Anjali Joshi really be part of that same Hindi department? What if next week she turns into a mother gorilla? She’ll look like some forest-dwelling rishi chick, speaking in middle Indo-Aryan or Pali, smeared with turmeric paste, drinking boiled cow or yak’s milk. Rahul heard from Anima that Anjali had been quite ill around the time of her graduation. She’d come down with jaundice, and was in a miserable state when she took her exams. Her grades, understandably, were simply awful, and she barely passed. So her father had a word with S. N. Mishra, the head of the Hindi department, who took care of matters, and so she was admitted.
Kinnu Da once said, “Take any language. As long as there is some group of people, somewhere, using it to communicate, it won’t vanish. In spite of the massive spread of European languages, centuries of colonialism and imperialist subjugation, the itsy-bitsy indigenous languages of Africa and Asia still haven’t been eradicated. Living languages still exist today, like Ho, which is spoken by only a few adivasis.”
So, they are the tribals! They are the adivasis of today.
“No, those aren’t the adivasis,” Kartikeya countered. “They’re the Muslim mullahs and the Hindu purohits. Don’t forget, an adivasi is never retrogressive. He adapts to the times.”
I’ll become a gorilla, too. A homo sapiens. A purohit. I’ll chew paan and gutkha, run around in a pack and laugh and laugh: Haha, hee-hee, hoo-hoo.
Rahul watched from the corridor. In between Anima and Seema Philip was Anjali Joshi, walking away. In her right hand she held a parasol. A yellow parasol.
He had no doubt it was the same back that deflected the sun’s rays from Room 252. “If I had a slingshot,” Rahul thought, “I’d pull the rubber band all the way back to my ear and let loose a shot.”
A voice drenched in song, gratitude, and bittersweet pain would moan “Oooooooh,” and she would turn around with stunned, eager, inviting eyes.
And she would freeze in that pose.
That day was truly the first time in Rahul’s life that a real, living, breathing, flesh-and-blood girl had been captured in a freeze-frame, and her name was Anjali Joshi.
SEVEN
The emergency session took place at nine o’clock p.m., after dinner, on the field below Tagore Hostel. Nearly all of the boys from Maharshi Arvind, CV Raman, and Bhulabhai Desai hostels came out. There were also two other hostels: MLB (Maharani Laxmibai) and Sarojini Naidu Girls’ Hostel. Parvez and Kannan had sent the word over to them, and soon enough forty-five girls showed up.
“Death to Vice-Chancellor Agnihotri!”
“Shame on Chaturvedi!”
“Warden Upadhyay: come out, come out, wherever you are!”
“Comrades! Today we have come together as one to sort out some very serious business. If we don’t rise up today, we’re finished. This university’s become a haven for goondas and antisocial criminal elements. They do whatever they feel like and right out in the open. Your fellow students who stand among you now will tell you what the goondas did to them. I’ll start with the resident of Tagore Hostel, Room 212, Sapam Tomba, who came here to study from Manipur and is in his first-year MSc.”
Sapam made his way to the dais and in broken Hindi and English began to tell the story of the calamity that befell him. In the middle, he choked up and began to weep right on stage. Maybe it was the sight of so many students, or his state of raw emotion, or his anxiety — but it was the first time he’d told the story to anyone. He’d even kept it hidden from the university administration.
In the middle of his jerky sobs, as Sapam described the excesses he suffered at the hands of the goondas, he stopped for an instant, eyes seeming to stray off into space and fix on nothing in particular, and then, covering his eyes, he let it all out in one big breath. “Before forcing me to piss on the electric heater, they tried to sodomize me.” This was too much; he utterly fell apart. A new flood of tears breached his hands and drenched his face.
It was as if a majestic bird, flapping its wounded wings, had fallen suddenly into the middle of the crowd. A frightful silence spread, and everyone stood still. The faces of the students gathered on the field below Tagore Hostel were covered with the grit of sorrow, disgust, defeat, and shame. An unbearable, soul-raking silence filled the ears of everyone present. And from the stage came Sapam Tomba’s sobbing voice.
“I am not a gay,” he said in English. “Tell me, how can I go on? Why should I even try?” Sapam’s crying was now like a typhoon, once held back, now let loose. His delicate, lovely body trembled like a frail plant in a swiftly moving storm. Only a few days ago his brother, a primary school teacher, had been gunned down in Manipur, while here, Sapam had endured this.
“Every day I think about suicide. And. . I’ll definitely do it! Mark my words. If not today, then tomorrow. Why go on living? My brother sent me money so I could study. Now who will pay the bills? Tell me. Tell me!”
Everyone’s eyes were moist with tears. You could hear the sound of girls’ sobbing.
Rahul went up to Sapam and placed a hand on his shoulder. He himself was having a hard time holding it together. With great difficulty, he cleared his throat and said, “Come, come. Come down here, Sapam. It’s enough. You can hold it together.” Sapam’s red, swollen eyes glanced at Rahul, and, slowly balancing himself on him for support, Sapam began to descend the steps of the platform.
The meeting lasted until midnight. It was concluded that either the security arrangements at the university were insufficient or, because of the presence of certain locals, no steps had been taken to fight the criminals. The administration acted this way maybe out of fear, or maybe an ulterior motive lurked behind. Who could say? Aside from Sapam, a few others came forward to speak — Madhusudan, Praveen, Niketan, and Masood — who’d also been beaten and had money and belongings stolen this term at the hands of the goondas. Pratap Parihar, whose uncle was a police officer, said these goondas had secured protection from police, university officials, and politicians. Last year, a senior named Jay Prakash Bhuiyan filed a complaint with the police against the goondas, naming them by name. A few months later, as he was waiting at the train station to go back home to his village, the goondas caught up with him on the platform and beat him up in front of the railway police, breaking both his hands. Afterward, he was forced to drop out of school.