‘That’s fine, but then don’t come running to me: “Aakash, make me thin; Aakash, tell me what to eat; Aakash, your body…” ’
‘Let her eat, yaar. What is it to you?’ Aakash’s elder brother, her husband, intervened.
His remark made me wonder about the tensions between them.
Aakash said to me in English, ‘See what I told you? She is very sharp.’
Then turning back to the family, he said, ‘Why don’t you stop thinking about eating for a second and pay attention to your son, who’s become a sweeper?’
The entire family, as if in an abs class, rose six inches to see what the child was doing. He was at the far end of the little courtyard, brandishing a short broom made of fine sticks.
‘Come here, you little jamadar,’ Aakash yelled.
The word he used was a caste word no longer in politically correct usage for cleaners and sweepers. A ripple of laughter went through the family of reposing Brahmins. The child, seeing he had the attention of his family, began splashing water in a metal bucket no bigger than him.
‘That water is dirty,’ Aakash said pointedly to his sister-in-law and walked across the courtyard to recover the boy.
‘Chee,’ he said, as he picked him up, ‘he’s smelling.’
His mother, now clearly humiliated in front of the family, rose with irritation. ‘It doesn’t matter. He’s wearing a nappy. We’ll deal with it when we get back.’
Aakash shrugged his shoulders and handed her the child. But as soon as he did, the child slipped away and clung to Aakash’s leg. He began touching his feet, saying, ‘Tey,’ every time he did. ‘He’s saying, “Jai”,’ Aakash said with delight.
Aakash’s father looked up at me and said, ‘See, unlike the Sikhs and the Muslims, we don’t have to teach them the religion. They learn on their own. For instance, no one taught him to say Jai. He just heard us saying it when we pray and picked it up.’
The boy, now in Aakash’s arms, was pointing unsteadily at the Nandi near the Shiva linga and saying, ‘Tawoo. Tawoo.’
‘He’s calling Nandi “Tawoo”,’ Aakash laughed, then, addressing the boy, said, ‘Not cow; “Nandi”.’
Tea and samosas arrived, along with a bowl of khir. Aakash put the boy down and rejoined the others.
We had all barely had a few sips of tea, Aakash’s sister-in-law had not touched her khir, when cries of ‘Chee, chee’, ‘Look what’s he’s doing’, ‘The little sweeper’ rose from the sanctum.
I had been facing the idols and turned round to see that the boy had removed his shorts, and now holding on to a tap as high as his arms could reach, was taking a happy pistachio-green shit in the courtyard.
‘His T-shirt will be ruined!’ Aakash yelled.
‘Let it be ruined,’ the boy’s father said with hollow aggression.
Within seconds, the family’s women, his mother and the old cousin, had pounced on him, while his grandmother looked on with a bitter smile. He eluded his mother and ran to Aakash, leaving a green trail behind him for his mother to clean up. Aakash grabbed him under the arms, swung him stomach down on to his lap and cleaned his bottom without any sign of squeamishness. Then along with his mother he inspected the child’s bottom closely.
‘Hai, look!’ Aakash’s mother said. ‘He’s got these big red dots there.’
‘Not cleaning him properly,’ her younger sister added slyly. ‘Have to put Soframycin.’
‘Have you seen the spots in his privates,’ Aakash exploded at the child’s mother, who was still sweeping up the mess.
She looked up, haggard. ‘I’m just coming,’ she managed.
Her husband, who had now taken the boy, was betraying her to the group. ‘I’ve told her time and time again that she’s not paying enough attention.’
Then Anil produced a wooden drum from within the sanctum. He started beating on it, and hearing this, the little bald child, who had been face down all this time, rose furiously and began to dance, shaking a small, angry foot unsteadily into the circle.
‘Put your right foot in, put your left foot…’ his grandmother sang, and the little boy danced as the group clapped and his mother swept away the last of the green trail.
We went home through flat land dotted with smoking minarets. The sky that had been pale in the morning was a pinkish brown on the way back. The thin, bumpy road that led past high, spiked walls, the ‘16 Base Repair Depot’ and keekar trees, as malevolent in the evening haze as in the dawn mist, finished at a sky-blue metal gate.
‘You know what’s behind that gate?’ Aakash said, putting his hand lightly on my shoulder.
‘No.’
‘The airport. We used to go there at night as children and see the planes and lights. It’s better than take-off point. You’re literally right there in the grass when the planes go by. Mind-blowing.’
I thought of my own arrival there a few months before on the Jet Airways flight. Then I thought of Aakash and his childhood memory of the airport. And even though a mood of inadequacy hung over the day’s outing, with this thought my great tenderness for him flooded back.
10
Aakash insisted the day needed its ‘super set’. I said, thinking of his bald nephew in the temple, that I was sure it had already had one. Then he wanted to know when and I had no answer for him. He searched my face for a moment and turned back to the task at hand. He was looking for a ‘pardy’ shirt. We stood in his mattress-covered room with its pink walls and fetid air. A green metal cupboard was open; many unsuitable options lay strewn on the mattress below. Presently he found it, a black shirt with silver pinstripes. Its thick shiny material glowed in the white light.
A few minutes later, we were on his bike, driving through the smoky Delhi night. It was my first time riding pillion on a motorbike and I felt exposed, embarrassed to be gripping on so tightly. We drove through areas I didn’t know existed. Broken, keekar-lined roads, open fields and a hyacinth-choked canal, with the red lights of a power station reflected in its dark water, appeared on our way.
‘Where are we?’ I yelled.
‘What?’
‘Where are we?’
‘In Sectorpur,’ Aakash yelled back, ‘just across the Jhaatkebaal border.’
We came some minutes later to an arrangement of tall four-square buildings surrounded by flat agricultural land. Though the buildings were new, marks of decay had already begun to appear on them. Pan spittle festooned their chalky-white walls, metal slats along their side had begun to rust and sacks of cement, plastic buckets and brooms cluttered their corridors. A white wooden bathroom door was open and from the grey marble interior toilet smells filled the lobby. We waited for the lift. Outside, a group of young boys chased a squirrel with an air gun. It ran up a tree and the boys stood below, firing aimlessly into the street-lit canopy.
‘Fucking it,’ Aakash said, when after many minutes the fat red number indicating which floor the lift was on didn’t move. ‘Let’s take the stairs.’
‘Listen, Aakash, are you going to tell me now who this friend of yours is?’
His eyes gleamed. ‘What, man? Don’t trust me, man? I told you, this is my very old friend. The Begum of Sectorpur. Now, come on.’
We ran up seven flights of stairs. The banister shook; there were broken panes on every landing, with sharp points of glass clinging on; below, rejoicing boys carried away the body of a squirrel; the land around was bare and dark, streaked with amber stretches of empty road. Halfway up, we were met by a thin young man with glassy eyes. He wore pedal pushers and a black vest. His small, dense armpits were exposed and emitted a wet, poisonous smell. He was overjoyed to see Aakash, and showing blackened teeth, kept monotonously asking how long it had been. Though Aakash paid him no attention, he jogged up alongside us, laughing and slurring. At every landing he looked back at me, his glassy eyes catching the light, and said, ‘Any friend of Aakash’s is a friend of mine.’
