colours. The foliage on the sides of the road was dense, and along with the fields, seemed to mock the new city that had sprung up. Long, grid-like streets with giant stooping street lights finished in fields. On some stretches of undeveloped road, headless lamp standards had rusted before ever being installed. I couldn’t tell which building would have been the begum’s.
The flyover that had brought life to Sectorpur had also swept away its older sections. A low city of half-painted buildings, black water tanks, orange and white mobile phone towers and the occasional gurdwara dome or temple steeple lay huddled under the flyover. Dotting the mismatched landscape were signs for medical centres, computer courses, cricket academies and foreign travel. And at the foot of the flyover was Aakash on his bike, indicator lights flashing, Megha riding pillion. Aakash wore a black faux-leather jacket; Megha, a now drenched purple T-shirt and a shawl. Uttam blew his horn. Aakash raised his arm without looking back and drove on.
We followed him for many minutes until we came on to a roaring street. I knew it well; not only was it the road to the airport, but a friend of mine lived not more than a hundred metres away. So when Aakash pulled over to the side of the road, I couldn’t understand why he had stopped. Then stepping out on to the pavement in the rain, I saw, and for some moments stood wondering at how I had failed to see before, a large temple in pink stone with a tall steeple and a crowd at the entrance. Only a damaged eye could have missed it.
There were green and blue tarpaulins outside the temple, under which a man distributed steel platters containing a garland of marigolds, a clay lamp, a black cloth, a litre bottle of sunflower oil and a newspaper sachet of black lentils and asafoetida. Aakash bought one platter for himself and Megha and one for me. We lined up behind a frail old woman in a black and red sari. She was trying to garland the god’s brass figure. Moustached and fierce in aspect, he was deep within a dark stone recess, covered in marigolds and black seeds. A steady stream of oil dripped from his foot. Around the feet of his brass elephant, several oil lamps cast their smoky light into the corners of the recess and over the god’s dull metallic body. The combination of black offerings, the dim light from the lamps and the orange of the marigolds suggested a carefully worked-out harmony, playing on the idea of Shani as a dark god, a cousin of Yama, god of death.
The tiny old woman ahead of us missed the god with her garlands the first few times, then threw a garland clean over his head and was forced to retrieve it from between the elephant’s legs. When at last she hit her mark, she brought down a small avalanche of marigolds on to the lamps below. As we waited, I asked Megha if only people suffering from the maleficence of Saturn needed to appease the god.
‘No,’ she said. ‘He’s good to me. I’m saying, “Good, you’re good to me; now be very good to me.” ’
With this, she leaned forward, showing a long, pink band of Jockey underwear, and after dressing the deity in marigolds and black starched cotton she drenched him in half a litre of oil. Aakash, unshaven, his face intent, guided her hand in offering the lamp, then slipped an iron nail into the wire coiled around the god’s ankle; iron was Shani’s metal. With the enactment of each rite, which took us from Shani’s brass form to offering clay lamps at the base of a peepal tree, to entering the main sanctum with its Shiva linga beneath a silver serpent, Aakash’s mood softened. The sensual power of the rites, the feeling of oil, metal and pulses early in the morning, and their supposed relevance to the turmoil in his life, seemed to provide a reminder of enduring materials that would help him face the world beyond, all the more illusory that morning thanks to Shani’s antics. And when at last we stood in the main sanctum, the linga in a bed of papaya leaves, surrounded by many little lingas in a white marble tank in the floor, and Aakash smashed the temple bell three times, I felt all the force of his restoration.
And then we shopped.
Aakash parked his bike outside the temple and he and Megha came in the car with me to Connaught Place. Uttam watched Megha intently as she got in. It was a high van, and when she put one foot on the step, her short, splayed fingers reaching into its cavernous interior for a grab handle, Uttam wheezed with laughter. Aakash saw, and as he had with Shakti, encouraged him by shooting up his eyebrows in quick succession. There was in this joking, this light humiliation of the woman in public, an element of Indian male pride and control. And Megha, as if it were a testament to their love for each other, increasing both their statures, only pretended to mind. She glowered at us all, then seated comfortably, smiled.
On the way, Aakash wanted to stop at Junglee. His mood had lightened. He hummed the tune of an advertisement jingle, adding a modified Hindi movie line to the ending. Where the hero says, ‘Which sod drinks to stay in control? I drink to lose control,’ he said, ‘I drink because the cheetah drinks.’ ‘Do the dew, mountain dew!’ he said vacantly to himself, as we drove into the grimy alley which housed Junglee.
He wanted me to come upstairs.
‘Are you sure? Why?’
‘Just trust me.’
The Nepali doorman pushed open the brushed-steel door and Junglee’s incense-filled air tumbled out. Upstairs, the other trainers eyed Aakash come in, both in civilian clothes and with a member. Aakash ignored them, taking me straight to the locker room and the men’s ‘wet area’. He opened his dark green locker with a pair of tiny brass keys. Then, rummaging about among exercise clothes and a tiffin in blue polythene, he took out something thin and rectangular, wrapped in the
How these scattered impressions came together to form a single, horrible realization of what had occurred, I can’t say. Perhaps it was the pictures Aakash handed me of him and Megha, garlanded and in bright sunlight, that helped focus my swimming mind. Or it was his words, ‘You see now why I can’t back off?’ reaching me from some distant place. But none of the finality of the deed lessened the dread it awoke in me. ‘Ash-man, what have you done?’ I wanted to say. ‘What have you done?’
Scanning the certificate’s smooth, laminated surface, my eye fell on the date.
‘The 25th of July?’ I gasped.
‘Yes, man. You don’t know what it was like. They were sending her to Bombay to meet a suitor. I was here on my own; you weren’t here. I felt I had no one. I felt this was the only thing that would give me some protection. After that, they could do whatever they wanted to do, but at least we could say, “Look, here, we’re married. Now do what you want to do.” ’
‘Whose idea was it?’
‘Hers. She came to me just before she was being sent to Bombay and said, “We have to do it now.” She went straight to the airport from the temple. We even had to make the priest hurry up because otherwise she would have missed her flight.’ He laughed. ‘Can you imagine, some people go on honeymoon after their wedding, she went to meet a suitor!’
‘What happened?’
‘It didn’t work. The guy thought she was too healthy. Can you imagine?’ He smiled sadly. ‘All these guys rejecting her because she’s too healthy, then there’s me who wants to marry her the way she is and they won’t let me. You know, they’re even considering sending her for lipo.’
‘Lipo?’
‘They suck out the fat…’
‘Yes, yes, I know,’ I said, looking up, then the thought of his marriage returned. ‘Who else knows about this?’
‘Nobody, man. Just you. You know, I don’t have much of a friend circle. And I haven’t told anyone in my family.’
I was caught between a feeling of tenderness at the confidence made only to me and deep irritation at Aakash’s willingness to burden me with his problems. In just a few seconds, it had altered not only the way I saw his and Megha’s relationship, but the way I saw ours. I felt it shed for the first time some of the strange intensity, as of a childhood friendship, that had defined it since its conception. And reckless though I felt he’d been, marriage made Aakash seem like a man.
Downstairs, the rain had gone and the sun was burning its way through. Whole sections of the street dried before our eyes. In the car, heading to Connaught Place, Megha knew of Aakash’s disclosure. I thought she displayed something of the satisfaction of a daughter-in-law who’s just won her first battle against her husband’s family. She would have jangled the house keys in her palm if she had any. Aakash was visibly relieved. The weight of their dangerous secret had shifted for that moment on to me.
