hand, revealed it to the press, a new motive had arisen for the murder. ‘Brother kills sister,’ the
‘He always lands on his feet,’ Sanyogita said, smiling. ‘Look what I saw today, driving through Sectorpur.’
She took out a folded piece of paper from her pocket and handed it to me. It was thin, crinkly and glue-stained. I opened it and saw that it was an election poster. On a green background were, as in a family tree, oval-shaped pictures of the party leaders. Chamunda, once again in saffron chiffon, towered in the foreground. And at her feet, a lotus seeming to form a mane round his head, was a picture of Aakash, looking blacker than usual. It made me think of Megha and the little sweeper. ‘Loin! loin! What does a loin do?’ Poor Megha. Her jovial memory seemed so distant now.
‘Did you know he was contesting?’
‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘What as?’
‘Oh, just as an MLA, but still. Chamunda gave him a ticket as repayment for what he did for her.’
‘Didn’t the press hassle her about that, giving a ticket to a man who was almost charged with murder?’
‘Are you joking? It’s virtually a credential.’
We had come to the green turnstile leading out of the park.
‘And Kris?’ I asked.
‘Kris is free,’ Sanyogita replied. ‘The CBI got him out. After Aakash no longer needed him, Sparky Punj became Kris’s lawyer; they were friends anyway. But the case will go on. I doubt they’ll ever find the real guy. It’s easier that way.’
‘But won’t it hurt Chamunda in the election?’
‘It could. And so maybe they will find someone to pin it on.’
Politicians’ white cars were parked outside the garden’s gates. Thin ladies in bright colours carried shallow dishes of cement to and from a mound of mud half-filled with water. Sanyogita, picking her way past a column of men in fraying vests digging up the pavement, walked towards a chauffeur-driven car.
‘Sanyogita?’ I called out.
She turned round.
‘How’s the garden?’
‘Oh!’ she said, stopping herself from saying ‘baby’, ‘it’s fine. Flourishing.’
‘And my study?’
She smiled sadly at me, seeing now where this line of conversation was headed.
‘It’s fine too,’ she said quickly, as if worried I was going to ask next about her toes or the family of porcelain elephants.
Through the tinted window of the chauffer-driven car I could make out the profiles of Ra and Mandira. They had come to pick her up. They saw me and waved, but didn’t get out. Nothing like one’s girlfriend’s friends to bring home the pain of a break-up. Sanyogita turned round once more, smiled apologetically, then got into the car and drove way.
It was Eid that night and I finally made it to Zafar’s house. I was glad not to have seen it before. It would have destabilized me. Zafar lived in the Sui Valan section of the old city of Delhi. He picked me up outside Delite cinema, admonishing me for bringing him flowers and sweets. As we entered the old city, some men from the abattoir were unloading a truck of meat. Our rickshaw splashed through a pale brownish-red puddle, its smell and the frenzy of flies giving it away as blood. Narrow streets, crowded that night with bright kerosene lights and people in their new clothes, led us to Zafar’s house. We arrived in front of a darkened entrance. Near an open drain, a bitch tended to her family of fluffy grey puppies. A flight of steep stone stairs, chipped at the edges, led up to a pale green door and a landing lit by a single light.
Zafar had warned me many times on the way how small his house was. ‘But the hearts of the people in it are big,’ he now added. I had imagined his house as a small flat with a kitchen, a bathroom, two rooms perhaps, with at least room enough to stand up and walk around. But Zafar’s house was just a single room, no bigger than a carpet, covered with sheets of checked cloth. Its greasy blue walls were high and there were shelves all around, stacked to the ceiling with hard suitcases and trunks, so that it felt almost like a godown. Everything was neatly in its place: a sewing machine with a pink satin cover; a little shelf with holy Zam Zam water, oils and a pair of scissors; green-covered copies of Zafar’s new book. Zafar’s family of five couldn’t physically fit in the room. That was why he slept on the floor of the magazine office where I had visited him on the day of the demonstration.
‘I once had enough money to buy a better place,’ he said as we sat down, ‘but in 1997, the year when the accounts became computerized, my wife fell from the stairs and all my savings were spent on her treatment.’
She was there now, a fat woman with curly hair and pale skin. She got on her haunches and tried rolling out an oilcloth with roses on it, matching the large red flowers on her black kameez. Then wincing, she stopped and sat back down.
‘My back,’ she said to her husband, who watched her closely. She was smiling, her face was made up, but her eyes suggested damage, almost as if unused to emotions other than distress.
Zafar looked over at his wife, around the room and then at me. ‘I’m thinking of a complete renovation,’ he said with his wheezing laugh, ‘thinking of replacing everything.’
‘We’ll replace you before we replace ammi,’ an offended daughter said from the kitchen area, which was a three-foot ledge with pulses and grains stacked high on one side. Its stone surface was used for washing, the water disappearing through an opening in the floor.
Zafar laughed again. The daughter crawled over and finished unrolling the oilcloth. Another brought out warm bread and meat curry. Zafar gestured to his young son, Atif, who sat slumped in one corner watching cartoons on a twelve-inch television, to come over.
‘All he does is watch these cartoons,’ Zafar said to me as he joined us in our circle. The boy had a thin face, a squint and thick glasses. ‘Speak to him in English; he’s got to learn. He’s meant to be learning in school, but the teachers are very bad. They can hardly speak it themselves. I don’t want another generation to grow up without English. Look at how I’ve lost out.’
I tried speaking to him in English, but he became quiet and ashamed. He replied softly a few seconds later in perfect Urdu.
The men ate, the women watched. I felt embarrassed and asked them why they weren’t eating; they said they already had. Zafar turned gently to me and said, ‘Between Aatish and Atif, I make no difference, you’re both like my sons. Where have you been all these days? You could have at least called your old teacher to say you were OK.’
I used the only excuse I knew would work with him. ‘I’ve been trying to write.’
His face brightened. ‘Writing something modern, I hope,’ he said, ‘something fresh and original. Don’t hark back to the past. Look forward.’ Then using the English words ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’ in both instances to mean fiction, good and bad, he said, ‘In the way men live today, the pressures upon them – and there are great strains and injustices – you’ll find fiction. The past is all non-fiction.’
‘And write in English?’
‘In English,’ he answered firmly. ‘The Indian languages are finished; or, at least, literature in them is finished. When I began there were magazines, poetry meetings, the progressive writers were still around, poets could write for the screen, there were readers, libraries, critics – all gone, swept away in one generation. It’s a very fragile thing, you know, literature; it needs an infrastructure. You can’t spend your life writing into the dark like me.’ The thought of his own writing evoked a memory. ‘I once wrote a string of couplets,’ he said, ‘that all ended in “turned to water”. Very hard to do, you can imagine, to make each couplet finish that way. “In the end I stayed loyal, my friends, to the ways of the age. But in this effort my blood turned to water.” One more,’ he said eagerly, feeling perhaps that I had not gauged his meaning, ‘ “In the toil of a lifetime, each strand flowed away, all moorings were lost, Zafar, when the road turned to water.” ’
He had finished eating and was sitting back against the wall, smoking a Win cigarette. One daughter was
