teashop or whether, by tending to me so thoroughly, he was further asserting his power as a man who could do anything.
After a short drive on a country road, past flat fields of ripened wheat, their arrows hard and golden like wasps, heralding better than any number of flowering trees the approach of summer, we arrived at a small open-air temple in the shade of a peepal tree. A pool of green water lay some metres below, surrounded by pale land.
‘This first temple,’ Aakash’s father said as we got out of the car, ‘honours an even older ancestor than the one I spoke of in the car. It is from him that we derive our caste.’
‘How old?’
‘Oh, I can’t say!’ Aakash’s father said. ‘Three, five, seven hundred years old. All I know is that it was even before the British time in India. It was during the Mughal time when Akbar was emperor.’
‘So, in the sixteenth century?’
‘Yes, maybe. Anyway, in that time, this ancestor did paltiyans from here to Jagannath Puri. When he arrived, the temple doors were closed. So he says, “If I have shakti in me, these doors will open.” The priest there said, “These doors will never open. Jagannath, Lord of the World, will not see you now.” My ancestor said, “Move aside. You’re just a priest; I speak directly to my god.” And, phataak, the doors of the temple swung open, Jagannath himself appearing. He said, “Ask, if you ever meant to ask.” My ancestor fell to his feet and asked the great Lord of the World that no one in his family or subsequent line should ever suffer from, how do you say, kodha…’
‘Leprosy,’ Anil inserted.
‘Yes, no one should suffer from leprosy.’
After this explanation, Aakash and Anil disappeared, followed by their older brother, Amit.
Men and women of Aakash’s caste had come from all over the area. Some arrived in open-backed trucks, the women’s faces covered by the long fall of their saris; others arrived in low sedans. The temple was so small and basic that it was hard to imagine people coming from a distance to visit it. It was long and tiled and open on three sides, through which the tranquillity of the green pool and the heavy shade of the tree entered freely. Below a brass bell were Aakash’s ancestor’s feet in white marble. Directly in front of them, also in white marble, was a large pineapple-shaped structure, draped in lavender muslin. A wet temple clutter of rose petals, grain, coins, blue polythene and yellow laddus with smoking incense sticks lay at its base.
A mad toothless country cousin, with thick spectacles and a long white plait, ran towards the women in Aakash’s family as soon as they entered the temple. The two women met and instantly began to dance around the pineapple. The daughter-in-law waited to be invited and when she wasn’t, put a foot forward and joined in. Other women in pink, maroon and rose-coloured saris smashed cymbals.
I was watching the scene when from behind me the men in Aakash’s family appeared, carrying between them a white and gold muslin cloth. The sight of them, dressed in nothing but long, ceremonial dhotis, produced a kind of panic in me. It was the culmination of weeks of anxiety that had been building since I stepped on to the Jet Airways flight to Delhi. Seeing Aakash now effortlessly assume his caste robes made me, in a mud-splattered kurta, feel all the horror of my removal. He hadn’t meant to intimidate me, but he had terribly. He’d shed his wide jeans and close-fitting shirt and the effects of Junglee were on display. His sprawling shoulders and large arms were taut. The black religious strings entwined with red bounced lightly against his chest. They struck an unlikely harmony with Aakash’s colour, the dark gums, the blackish-pink lips, the still-darker nipples and the fine coat of hair that covered his arms and shoulders. A beauty spot was faintly visible on his stomach muscles.
This darkness, like that of a charcoal sketch, made Aakash’s body more than an object for aesthetic consideration; it seemed to have a kind of aboriginal power, as if issuing from the deepest origins of caste and class in India. But his brothers and father, with their paler, flabbier frames, did not unsettle. There was no regeneration visible in them: their gaze was placid; they were not gym Brahmins.
The men each held a corner of the white and gold muslin cloth, which they lowered over the marble pineapple, already draped in lavender muslin. It was filled in seconds with a shower of petals, money and garlands of rose, jasmine and marigold. Then the little boy was brought forward, and as a barber priest shaved a first inch with his blade, the boy began to wail. Soon long, dark hair was added to the moist mess of petals, polythene and money. The Brahmin men sat solemnly around the pineapple as the boy’s large head was shorn. When his scalp was raw and cleanly shaved, cut dark red in places, the priest smeared it with sandalwood paste. It was only then that his mother appeared to ease the day’s trauma.
I wanted to go back to Delhi, but there was lunch organized under the peepal tree and a second temple to visit.
‘Eat as much as you like,’ Aakash said warmly after returning from washing in the green pool with his entire family. ‘Today I’m not your trainer.’ He had changed back into his jeans and T-shirt and had a fresh, turmeric mark on his forehead. He slipped his little finger into mine and led me to a place where a priest was putting these marks on other people’s foreheads. He exchanged some words with the priest as if negotiating a special rate. The priest asked him a question I didn’t catch, but Aakash replied, ‘He’s my brother.’ The priest smiled, and slipping one hand behind my head, drew me closer, grinding the mark firmly into my forehead with his other hand. Under the tree, young and old men were coming around with metal buckets, serving warm puris and potatoes. I felt my exhaustion mirrored in the long afternoon light pouring on to the green pool and in my mud-splattered pajama, which had dried and become a dull brown colour.
That second temple, given to Aakash’s family by the old Nawab of Jhajjar, was no more than a house. It faced a Jhajjar backstreet split down the middle by an open drain in which black bead-like bubbles rose in even intervals. Still, strong sunlight fell on an afternoon scene composed of a fly-covered dog, half in sun, half in shade, the street’s blue doors and shutters, and a man on a stool, reading the paper behind half-filled toffee jars. The one sound was the jingling of a passing woman, in black, silver and red; the one smell, as powerful as the sunlight, as pervasive as the languor of the street, the stench of the drain. It eased its way past a PCO booth, through the blue grille gate and into the temple’s cemented sanctum.
But no one held their nose, the ladies did not worry about their saris getting dirty, no one minded taking off their shoes some metres before the temple’s freshly washed floors. We tumbled into its courtyard, fifteen of us, opening shutters and unlocking doors as if returning to a house that had been closed up for a season. Everyone headed straight for the sanctum and lay down, men, women and children, on an old carpet on the floor. Just ahead, half-buried in garlands of plastic flowers,were a black, beady-eyed Krishna and a white Radha in gold clothes.
Aakash took me aside and pointed to the painting of a sage in a glass case. In slow, broken English, he said, ‘He is my great-grandfather.’
Mr Sharma already stood next to the glass case, leaning lightly against its orange frame. The statue inside was of a large man with a paunch showing through his saffron robes. There were three turmeric streaks across his pale forehead; and his fierce, jowly face, in permanent afternoon shadow, bore a distinct expression of irritation.
‘I used to massage his legs,’ Aakash’s father said. ‘He was a great man. If not for him, faith in this part of the country might have disappeared altogether.’ Then an unexpressed sorrow, like that of the red rose against the black background in his flat, passed over his face.
I sat down on a low stool, despite the family’s appeals to join them on the carpet. I realized now that it was not so much the smallness of the Sharma flat or the smell but its communal quality that had unsettled me. And Aakash, as if responding to that, as if reaffirming that he didn’t want to live that way either, that he had meant what he had said about the peacefulness and privacy of my mother’s flat, got up after a few minutes and came to sit next to me, his head resting against my knees. The undeclared power I had had over him until now, gained in part from his being my trainer and in part from Holi, dwindled. I felt that there had been a reversal.
The toothless country cousin was taking orders, hardly an hour after lunch, for tea and samosas.
‘I don’t have the courage for a samosa,’ Aakash’s sister-in-law said from the place where she sprawled on the floor.
Aakash looked at her, then up at me with a contemptuous smile.
‘Kachori?’ the old woman asked with a smack of her lips.
‘No,’ Aakash’s sister-in-law moaned, rubbing her broad, dark stomach.
‘Then khir?’ the old woman shot back.
‘Yes, khir would be lovely!’ Aakash’s sister-in-law smiled, feigning childlike mischief.
‘Khir would be lovely,’ Aakash imitated and guffawed, looking up again at me for approval.
‘What?’ the sister-in-law snapped. ‘What’s wrong with khir? I can’t be like you, eating boiled food, boiled vegetables and protein milkshakes.’
