natural suspect threw their investigation into disarray. A day later, the girl’s father was arrested. He was said to have killed her for threatening to expose a wife-swapping arrangement with his best friend. The TV channels fed the public each detail in hourly intervals; the city was mesmerized. There was in the details an inexplicable…
‘… vehshat,’ Zafar offered.
‘What?’
‘Vehshat,’ he repeated.
The sound that gave the word its ring was ‘ehsh’. It had the same casual violence of words like lash and stash, but the ‘eh’ sound was less direct, less open, oblique somehow. It was a word that seemed to convey meaning before I knew what it meant; it rhymed with dehshat, terror, and began almost like vaishya, whore. But Zafar was stuck; he looked through three dictionaries without finding a synonym I could understand. The badly printed Urdu- English dictionary offered ‘wild’ and ‘savage’, but when I translated that back into Urdu for Zafar, he said that was wrong. We often ended up in these hopeless circles. I didn’t understand his Urdu explanations and he didn’t understand the dictionary enough to confirm or reject its synonym. So vehshat lingered, full of suggestiveness but without clear meaning. And yet it seemed so right, detonating from Zafar’s lips as soon as he read the newspaper. The power of its effect on both him and me, and the lack of a synonym to describe that effect, made Zafar say more.
He seemed to measure me up before revealing what was on his mind. Then, as if resigned to the risk of being misunderstood, he said, ‘There’s a vehshat deep within this country. It comes, I think, from the religion. Or, perhaps, because the socially conscious religions, Christianity and Islam, never gained a firm enough footing. They could never close over the history of animalism and sacrifice. The land and people of this country retain this memory. And it gives them this capacity, a capacity for vehshat.’
Zafar treated me like a Muslim. The hunted-minority expression widened his eyes and stilled his lips. ‘The land is stained,’ he muttered. ‘It has seen terrible things: girl children sacrificed, widows burned, the worship of idols. The people in their hearts do not fear God. Their law is not theirs, you see. It was first the Muslim law and then it was the English. And because the law is alien, they can always shrug it off and the vehshat returns.’
I turned absent-mindedly to the paper and was leafing through its greasy pages when I saw a picture of Chamunda. It was a grainy image of her in red and green astride a lion. If not for the distinctiveness of her features, her comic-book lips, her vast eyes, I might not have recognized her. She wore a gold crown and carried a trident. At her ankleted feet, a priest knelt over a Shiva linga, smearing it orange. Garlands of jasmine, roses and marigolds were tied tightly around its base. I couldn’t read the caption and asked Zafar for help.
‘They have made the BJP Chief Minister of Jhaatkebaal, Chamunda Devi, into the goddess Durga and are worshipping her in temples,’ Zafar sneered.
I laughed, and before I could check myself I’d said, ‘I know her. She’s Sanyogita’s aunt.’
Zafar looked sadly at me, as if I’d let him down by this admission of closeness to the Hindu nationalist party. Though it was well before the usual time, he asked that we take a cigarette break. I was suddenly aware of how frail he was. This awareness, alongside the fineness of his manners, the umbrella, the little cap, the pen always in place, the safari suit impeccable, made me feel that I hadn’t so much offended him as manhandled him.
On the balcony, he took out his blue packet of Wins and offered me one. From inside the packet came a black windproof lighter with a near-invisible flame. He liked to tell me that the cigarettes were Italian and had travelled via the east, Burma in particular, to India. But today he just smoked quietly, looking out at the large trees shielding us from the sun.
Long black pods hung like many walking sticks from the branches of a laburnum. On the edge of the canopy, yellow blossoms pushed reluctantly through like paint squeezed from a sponge. Their bright colour against the black of the pods and the dull green of the canopy made them seem of a different material from the rest of the tree, more like points of sunlight than flowers.
‘Amaltas,’ Zafar said, ‘the true beginning of the heat.’
And as if retreating from its glare, he put out his cigarette and went inside. I was studying his tufts of dyed black hair, dotted with maroon sores, when my eye trailed along his neck to a point between its base and the shoulder blade. There, off to the right, and seeming to catch a different light, was a small but distinct swelling. I reached forward and touched it. Zafar winced in pain. It was hard and knobby, somewhere between bone and cartilage.
‘What’s that?’
‘I’m becoming a camel,’ Zafar chuckled, his eyes betraying his fear.
‘This isn’t a joke. What is that? Have you shown it to a doctor?’
He took out a soiled and folded piece of paper from his pocket. It read:
Biopsy report: gross appearance, irregular greyish-white tissue along with dirty brown debris received, total measuring 1 x 1.5 cm
Histopathological report: microsection shows features of sebaceous cyst no e/o tb or malignancy seen
Diagnosis: sebaceous cyst
Dr Lipike Lipi, pathologist
‘They say it’s benign, but I’ll need an operation. I’ll have it while you’re away.’
‘Does it hurt?’
‘Only when touched. The problem is it makes my reading and writing work, which I do on the floor, quite difficult. You can say that it’s just part of old age.’
‘You’re not so old, Zafar. You’re younger than my mother.’
‘Yes, but life…’
‘… has made you old,’ I completed for him.
He laughed. Then as if wishing neither to alarm me nor to let me make light of what he had said, he added, ‘The place I live has made me old.’
The place he lived! How embarrassing that I hadn’t seen it. This attitude was a remnant of my childhood in Delhi, not so much a lack of curiosity as blindness. I resolved to go. Then a shudder went through me at the thought of this place that gave Zafar his sores, and now this new deformity. It was one other thing, like the heat, that he would bear while I was away.
The vehshat, the vehshat!
Sanyogita was part of a circle of creative-writing professionals called Emigres at Home. Their weekly meeting coincided with our last night in Delhi. They met at a different group member’s house each week, and as Sanyogita had not offered hers so far, she decided to host this last meeting in the Jorbagh flat. Her friends Mandira and Ra were part of the group and so the meeting was also a farewell party of sorts. When I went to have a shower after my lesson with Zafar, Vatsala and Sanyogita were preparing the flat. Lamps were coming on; aubergine dips were being laid out; some light Brazilian music had begun to play. I knew that this kind of activity, reminiscent of her London life, meant a lot to Sanyogita. We had been through a difficult period that hadn’t been resolved as much as it had been presumed to end with our departure; I told myself in the shower that this would be the first active night of repair. It would start with my showing support for the creative writers. Her meetings with them were an assertion of her life in Delhi as separate from mine; but Sanyogita, who encouraged me in everything I did, would have liked nothing more than my endorsement for her ‘thing’.
When I came out of the shower the heat was breaking in a dust storm. It had stopped the day’s natural decline and cast a greenish-purple twilight hour over the city. After raging in the canopies of big Delhi trees, the storm entered the garden terrace, sweeping up fine dust off the floor, roughing up dahlias and denuding the dead frangipani of its last leaves.
In the lamp-lit room the meeting had begun. The people assembled were mostly older women in ethnic and tribal-print saris, with hair greying in buns for political reasons. There were also a handful of very tall, very thin young men with bad posture, as well as one or two older men in cotton kurtas and jeans. One dark, lightly bearded, young writer with sharp features sat at the feet of a woman with a red oversized bindi. She rested a wrist, heavy with silver bangles, on his shoulder as he stared morosely at the pages in his lap. His uncut toenails were visible in the blue rubber chappals he wore. The intensity of his stare, and a feeling that I knew him from somewhere, prevented me at first from listening to what the woman introducing him was saying.
In a far corner of the room, Sanyogita beamed at me, patting the empty space next to her. As I walked across the room, I heard the older woman, with her hand beating lightly against the young writer’s collarbone, say that he had attended a creative-writing programme in America; he was among the group’s most significant talents, best
