SECTION III

16 November to 22 November 1992

Secret History

O Hindus,

On 6 December, you the Hindus, the only true people of this holy land, the only legitimate children of your Mother, will get another chance to prove your manhood, and reclaim that which was taken away forcibly by the barbarians, who came here centuries ago and defiled the purity of your motherland, plundered and raped her with a cruelty your history had never witnessed before. There are now only twenty days left for the brave sons of the land to assemble in the town of Ayodhya and remove the last vestige of slavery, obliterate the symbol of your humiliation, and raze to the ground the mosque whose domes have mocked you for centuries.

Are you willing to countenance the might of the state? Are you prepared to battle the descendants of Babar the Barbarian? Are you capable of demolishing the mosque built from the rubble of your temple? You tremble at these questions. Images of violence flash before you. There is blood in your dream. Your teeth begin to chatter. We understand your dilemma. We can fathom your silence. You, after all, belong to the land which demonstrated to the world the power of non-violence. It was here that Gautam Buddha preached the virtues of non-violence. It was here that Bhagwan Mahavir forbade the killing of even animals. In spurring you to violence, do you think we are guilty of transgressing our culture? Wise sons, before levelling such grave charges against us, listen to us patiently. Reflect over our stories, pass your verdict later.

Let us begin with Lord Ram, and the hardships He endured. Wasn’t He a man of peace? Wasn’t He an obedient son? Yet, didn’t He take up arms to undo the wrong done to Him? Wise sons, you know the story too well. Lord Ram took to the forest to enable his father, King Dasrath, fulfil a boon granted to one of his queens, Kaikeyi. A wish of hers, King Dasrath had promised, was to be granted at any cost, at any time. The wily queen waited until her own son Bharat was of age. Reminding King Dasrath of the boon, Kaikeyi demanded the banishment of Ram for fourteen years and the installation of Bharat as heir apparent.

Into the forest, Lord Ram, wife Sita and brother Lakshman willingly went. For fourteen long years He lived the life of exile. There He destroyed demons who harassed ascetics and forest-dwellers. To avenge his fallen brethren, the demon-king, Ravan abducted Sita. Tell us, noble sons, didn’t Lord Ram go to war against Ravan? Didn’t He kill the enemy to free His wife from confinement? Should we condemn Lord Ram just because Sita wasn’t liberated through non-violent means?

In another era, yet another man encountered a stark choice: should he fight or surrender to evil to avoid bloodshed? Remember the dilemma of Arjun, as armies of the Pandavas and their cousins, the Kauravas faced each other in Kurukshetra? Remember the perfidy of Duryodhan, the eldest of the Kauravas, who had duplicitously deprived the Pandavas of their kingdom? Attempts at negotiations were stonewalled. Even Lord Krishna’s mediations ended in failure. It was clear to all: either the Pandavas accepted their deprivation or went to war against their cousins.

In Lord Krishna’s chariot was Arjun, the third of the five Pandava brothers. He requested the Lord to stop between the two armies, to see who were those against whom he was to battle. Arjun saw that in the line-up of warriors were his relatives and friends and teachers. He lamented, ‘O Lord Krishna, what pleasure shall we find in killing our cousin brothers? Upon killing these felons we shall incur only sin.’ After pointing to the horrors of wars, he declared, ‘It would be far better for me if my cousins kill me with their weapons in battle while I am unarmed and unresisting.’

Arjun then threw away his weapon.

Wise sons, surely you have read the Bhagavad Gita. In it you will read Lord Krishna telling Arjun, ‘But if you do not fight this battle which is enjoined by dharma (religion), then you will have given up your own dharma as well as glory, and you will incur sin.’ The Lord then argued, ‘Either, being slain, you will attain heaven; or being victorious, you will enjoy the earth. Therefore arise, O son of Kunti, intent on battle.’

In the Gita you will read what we believe in. Every man is enjoined to follow the path of non-violence. Every man is also enjoined to wage the battle of righteousness. Do not believe those who say Gita expounds non-violence. Do not heed those who claim Gita underlines the futility of violence. Indeed, they have created tales about your past to lead you astray. Haven’t you heard their prattle about Emperor Ashoka the Great? Haven’t they tailored his story to their agenda? They praise him because they claim he was opposed to violence. They hail him for his desire to promote righteousness. Wise sons, we do not lie, we accept Ashoka possessed these admirable qualities. Yet we also assert: Ashoka’s nonviolence was the nonviolence of the brave – and not of the weak.

From the time Ashoka ascended the throne of Magadh around 269 bc, he did not rest until he had brought under his control, much of north India as it exists currently. Only the kingdom of Kalinga stood as a bulwark against his imperial design. In the eighth year of his accession, Ashoka waged a fierce battle against Kalinga – 1,00,000 soldiers were killed, and another 1,50,000 were taken captive. The scale of devastation filled Ashoka with remorse. He eschewed military conquest and announced his intention to annex new territory only through love and piety. In the Thirteenth Rock Edict, the great emperor described his metamorphosis: ‘After the conquest of Kalinga, the Beloved of the gods (a title of Ashoka) began to follow righteousness, to love righteousness, and to give instruction in righteousness. Now, the Beloved of the gods regrets the conquest of Kalinga, for when an independent kingdom is conquered, people die, or are deported, and that, the Beloved of the gods finds very painful and grievous.’

You read all this and wonder about our criticism of those storytellers. You say, we too agree Ashoka abjured violence. Wise sons, bear with us, let us tell you a few facts to expose their hypocrisy. Never did Ashoka disband his army, nor did he abolish capital punishment. Now read these lines from the Thirteenth Rock Edict from which we have already quoted above: ‘The Beloved of the gods will forgive as far as he can, and he even conciliates the forest tribes of his dominions; but he warns them that there is power even in the remorse of the Beloved of the gods, and he tells them to reform, lest they be killed.’

For your benefit we have italicized the quotation. Ponder over the words of the world’s first nonviolent emperor. See him flaunt his formidable power to the recalcitrant. Ashoka’s nonviolence was the nonviolence of the victorious. Ashoka’s nonviolence was the nonviolence of the powerful. Ashoka’s nonviolence did not emanate from weakness. O wise sons, hanker after the peace of the conqueror, desire the restraint of the strong, and yearn for the kindness of the warrior. Listen to no one but your own conscience. Follow the path of Arjun and wage the battle of righteousness. So now inform the Muslims, you will be present in Ayodhya on 6 December. Warn them, either they surrender the mosque in Ayodhya or encounter your will to power. Rise and raise your arm, rise and say, Lord Ram.

Rasheed Halim was finally home, away from the world of action and torment. He pushed open the door of his flat. On the floor lay an envelope. He stooped, picking it up and lifting the black suitcase. Uma. Uma. He had to talk to her and experience again the magic of her voice. She had coaxed him out of isolation. And he was now returning to it. His decision was irrevocable: he was opting out of the world he had been part of.

He walked past the dining table. In the bedroom, he placed the suitcase near the cupboard and sat down on the bed. His eyes strayed to the calendar on the wall. His holiday had ended. He was to report to office today. But he no longer wanted to engage with the inanity of office routine. Mughalabad had convinced him about the implausibility of living the way he had. Better to live behind closed doors, in isolation; it was preferable to die at this moment. He did not want to breathe, and yet he could not kill himself. Now he did not know how he was to live.

Kind Uma, caring Uma, will she heed the request he planned to make to her?

Rasheed opened the envelope. Inside it was a letter, a photocopy of the original. He began to read it.

Dear friends,

The time has come to counter the author of Secret History, who, through his propaganda threatens our cherished ideals of brotherhood, citizenship and nationhood. With the purpose of evolving a strategy to counter the author of Secret History, we have organized a discussion at the Centre for Gandhian Studies, Rajpur Marg, on 23 November. Please ensure your participation.

Rasheed read the name of the signatory: Prof. Utpal Chatterjee. At the bottom of the page was scribbled: Rasheed, I haven’t met you for a long time. Do come on the 23rd. I have also invited your boss, Ashok Kumar Bajpai, and your colleague and friend, Kris.

Rasheed turned over the envelope. It didn’t have a postage stamp. Someone had visited the flat in his absence. Who could it have been? It couldn’t have been the professor himself. Rasheed shook his head. He must not allow the outside world to claim him.

Rasheed’s body ached; he had barely slept from the night of the imaginary rioting in Mughalabad. Yet more compelling than sleep was his desperation to speak to Uma, to tell her he had been unable to find a new way of living in Mughalabad. He couldn’t find the slip of paper on which he had written Uma’s private number. It was too early to call the Hope helplines. Rasheed had no choice but to wait for the clock to strike nine. Once he had talked to her, he would pull the telephone plug from the socket, pop a tranquilizer and sleep.

A voice, mature and deep, seemingly of a man in his sixties, took the call at HOPE. He shouted Uma’s name thrice, at a second’s interval. She was presumably at a distance from the phone, engaged in an activity she did not want interrupted. The voice shouted, ‘Rasheed’, perhaps in response to Uma’s question, ‘Who is it?’

Rasheed was slouched in the cane chair, holding the handset close to his ear. The exchange between the old man and Uma was typical of most homes in the morning. Perhaps she didn’t work out of office, he thought; perhaps hers wasn’t a nine-to-five schedule. He heard a door open and shut; he heard the sound of slippers get louder every moment. Uma was now near the phone. He shifted in the chair to sit up straight.

‘Rasheeeed,’ Uma exclaimed. She didn’t wait for his response. ‘How was Mughalabad? Good na?’

There was boundless enthusiasm and expectation in her voice. It shamed him into silence. Because he hadn’t spoken, Uma continued, ‘Did Wasim Khan’s project take off?’

‘Well,’ he muttered, in the tentative tone people adopt to disclose disappointing news. That was how she interpreted his voice. ‘Is he all right? Hasn’t he returned to Delhi?’

‘He is fine, curfew in Mughalabad,’ Rasheed replied. He rephrased his sentence to make it coherent. ‘The city is tense, under curfew,’ he said. ‘He couldn’t meet the financier and therefore stayed back.’

Several cities in north India were under curfew, Uma had read in the newspaper. What astonished her was that he took a train in such circumstances to return to Delhi, without Wasim Khan.

‘And Wasim Khan allowed you to leave?’

It was Rasheed who had insisted on returning to Delhi, telling them he had to resume office as soon as possible. They had relented and arranged for a police escort to accompany him to the railway station the previous evening. But he didn’t know how to explain this to Uma in as few words as possible.

Instead, he muttered, ‘Shouldn’t have gone to Mughalabad. I tried. I failed.’

Uma understood what Rasheed had attempted in Mughalabad: he had tried to live normally.

‘You know,’ Rasheed gasped. ‘Everything seemed unreal, imagined. It was like watching a movie – people, events, action … I couldn’t become a part of it. And then …’

He began to describe the incident which had brought about the regression, the precise moment he had slipped into the mire of his imagination. Rasheed sought to confine himself to what was necessary. But now and then, she asked for clarifications to prolong the narration, hoping to grasp better what tormented him, and thinking that by reliving his experience he could be made to confront his fears.

It was true Rasheed had failed her. In fleeing Mughalabad (that he was scheduled to return today was irrelevant for her) he had demonstrated to her that she wasn’t capable of conjuring a salve for every broken spirit. Uma had believed she had reconciled Rasheed to his inability to kill himself as well to the absurdity of his existence. Beyond it was life and living, and she had thought the trip to Mughalabad was as good a point as any to begin that journey. In the years of working at HOPE she had mastered the skill of enticing the tormented into the web of hope. Once inside it, they perceived their future as different from the present. This, then, became their impulse to live.

She heard Rasheed say, ‘Wasim and I saw them. They had the loudspeaker, a cassette player. They were playing the recorded sound of a police raid, tormenting the locality and the Khans. On seeing us they ran away, and Wasim Khan laughed all the way to Khan Manzil.’ He paused for a few seconds and sighed. ‘Those shadows.’

Later in the night, Rasheed said, he had retired to his room. The familiar doubts about living had begun to assail him. ‘Do you know the cause of it?’ he asked. ‘The cassette player, the recorded sound.’

‘Cassette player?’ she repeated, confused.

‘Yes, cassette player,’ he said, louder this time. ‘Uma, tell me, would the Khans have panicked had they known that the sound of police operations was just a tape-recorder playing? Obviously not. And there I was, certain of my future, its bleakness, its pain, and still trying to live the way I had, believing, and hoping, my life could turn out different from what is medically pre-determined. The tape-recorded sound was a metaphor in reverse. Voices arose to mock me. They clamoured, how long, Rasheed; how long will you continue with the deception? It seemed my head would burst. There wasn’t a phone in my room. Otherwise I would have woken you that night.’

‘Then?’ Uma asked.

‘I saw shadowy figures,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Shadows with voices. At the window of the room, near the bed. Human shapes in black. I wanted to shout. I could not. The shadows said in unison, you can’t deceive us. I began to shiver. I did not sleep the entire night.’

‘When did you discover the shadows were not there?’

‘When there was light,’ he said. ‘I did not sleep the entire night.’

‘Were shadows the reason why you left the city?’ Uma asked.

‘The following day, yesterday, they imposed a curfew in the city,’ Rasheed said. ‘I felt trapped inside Khan Manzil. I could not converse with people. I was disoriented. I wanted to be alone. The shadows haunted me. I had the feeling that I’d get better if I stopped feigning normalcy. Leave Khan Manzil, leave the city. Wasim Khan claimed the curfew was to be relaxed from Monday, that we could then meet the financier of the journal. But you know …’

From her experience of working at HOPE, Uma knew these shadows were apparitions created by the tormented minds, stilling them into inaction, at times depriving their eyes of life. Their pain arose from their peculiar circumstance: they were conscious of their descent into darkness and yet were unable to prevent the slide. Obviously, Rasheed had emerged from regression, this she could tell from his voice. But it was impossible to predict when he would have a relapse or how it would manifest itself. At times the slide into darkness occurred at the first hint of normalcy. It was her hunch that this was what had happened to Rasheed in Mughalabad. There was one fact, though, Uma was reasonably certain of– the voice called Rasheed Halim was to now return to her repeatedly, until multiple myeloma claimed him or he turned to others for succour. Till then, he was to be her responsibility.

There was silence over the telephone line. Rasheed had completed the narration. She hadn’t spoken at once, as was her habit.

He construed her silence as a tacit acceptance of the complexity of his case. Not willing to forego the opportunity, Rasheed said, ‘Uma, do me a favour. Ring up Mirror. Ask for Ashok Kumar Bajpai and tell him I am extending my leave for another week, maybe more.’

‘No,’ she instinctively responded.

She must, he said. Couldn’t she understand that he had become incapable of relating to office and work? He needed time, he said, to get a grip on himself. To also discover what he now wanted to do. He could not live the way he had been living. No way. He could, on his own, dial Ashok Kumar Bajpai, his boss in office. But the idea of talking to people known to him repelled him. Did she understand why? Partly he wasn’t sure of Bajpai’s reaction. But also because he did not want the world he had renounced to reclaim him; yes, he wanted to sever the past from the present. Neatly, completely.

Uma listened to him patiently. He was not shamming, for his outpouring was devoid of dignity. Yet she found in it a reason to hope. Rasheed hadn’t talked of suicide; it was as if he had foreclosed that option. Perhaps his inability to kill himself had been such a profoundly painful experience that he had decided to strike it out as an option. She hoped this was indeed the case, though aware that in his isolation, he could begin contemplating suicide, even attempt it in his desperation. But Uma did not want to worry over that. There was little she could prevent or will. What she was capable of was nurturing her own link to him and becoming a means through which he could have respite from his torment. Thereafter, life would seek him. Its ripples would reach him from under closed doors; in its eddies he would be caught.

She was glad he hadn’t talked of suicide. This was one of the two signs of life rising to reclaim him, Uma thought.

The second sign?

Uma saw the second sign in a chance access to Rasheed’s past she had been fortunate to have. She hadn’t earlier interpreted it as a sign. She had thought of it as a coincidence, an aspect routine to the city of Delhi, where from all parts of the country, people came to work and live. At times, individual orbits crossed each other, bringing face-to-face two people known to each other in their barely-remembered past. It was indeed the second sign – how else could she explain that among the patrons of HOPE was a person who had studied with Rasheed for a year?

Edayathu Pochiah Krishnamurthy was his name, and he and Rasheed had been students in a town she had never been to. Just for a year in school.

Krishnamurthy was sure Rasheed would remember him.

She hoped he did. It could make her task of handling Rasheed simpler

‘Okay,’ she said, ‘what do you want me to do?’

There was relief in his voice as he spoke. ‘Ring up Mirror,’ he said. ‘Talk to Ashok Kumar Bajpai. Tell him you received a call from me, that I am stuck in Mughalabad with malaria or whatever. That I’m extending my leave by a week.’

‘On one condition,’ she said. ‘Write me something.’

‘Write what?’

‘Your feelings, for instance,’ she suggested.

‘You mean a diary of sorts?’ he asked. ‘Tomorrow. I am too sleepy today. I’ll call you in the evening then. To find out what Bajpai said.’

She was about to say yes. Uma checked herself. The longer Rasheed waited, the greater the chance he would write. It could provide her a better glimpse into his mind.

‘Not today. I am busy,’ she said. ‘Call tomorrow afternoon.’ Changing her tone, she added, ‘But you must first write me something. Try it. Your deadline is tomorrow afternoon.’

She could be funny, he thought. ‘You speak the editor’s language,’ he said.

It pleased her to hear his voice bereft of tension. ‘Yes, don’t forget who the boss is,’ she simpered. As she heard him laugh, she said, ‘Deadline mister, don’t forget it.’

A little later, Rasheed went to the bedroom and lay in bed, after disconnecting the phone and popping a pill. He thought of Uma and her voice, and the invitation he had received from Professor Utpal Chatterjee. As he waited for his body to turn numb, he recalled the first lecture he had attended of Prof. Chatterjee. In those days he and others in his class were, subconsciously, in search of heroes who could replace those from childhood whose accomplishments seemed too trivial to inspire them at their age.

On a sultry day in July 1982, five minutes before 10 a.m., a batch of fifty college students in Delhi was already seated in the classroom. They had their notebooks open and pens ready. This was the class they had been waiting a year for, to listen and judge for themselves, Prof. Utpal Chatterjee. They had heard stories about his radical college days – the torrid interlude during which he had gone underground to liberate the peasants from an unjust system. Land to the tiller, power flows from the barrel of the gun, these were the slogans at the time Utpal Chatterjee had been a student in Delhi University.

Did he see violence, did he kill? Yes, no?

On the ambiguity of the answer rested his reputation.

They were sure Utpal Chatterjee had seen action in his youth. How else could the scar on his face be explained? From the left edge of the lower lip it carved a half circle to taper off into a thin perpendicular line, resembling every millimetre the sickle on the communist flag. No? Damn well scrutinize it minutely, the seniors’ seniors had told the story and its veracity had never been doubted through the years.

Back in those days, when villages were burning and the landless were forcibly occupying land, Utpal Chatterjee was nabbed in a hut where he had been hiding. The police could have shot him dead, buried him in an unmarked grave there and then.

So why did they spare Utpal Chatterjee?

They knew all the twists and turns in his story. For every question, the seniors’ seniors had the answer.

An hour before the raiding party was to slither through the darkness and surround the hut of the young revolutionary, the superintendent of police had summoned the havaldar and told him the truth: Utpal Chatterjee was no fucking revolutionary, just a pampered son of the chief secretary of the state, who had flipped his head on a full stomach and had been brainwashed into making bombs by men who had had the misfortune of having read too much. The havaldar and his men should nab the boy; they could even slap and kick him around. But remember, the superintendent had warned, the Chatterjee chhokra wasn’t to be killed. No false encounter please, no cock-and-bull stories about suicide or accident. The son had to be returned to his father, to whom, the superintendent said, he had given his commitment.

At the time of the raid, Utpal Chatterjee was asleep in the hut. Since the hut didn’t have a door, the havaldar and his men walked in to arrest the revolutionary in bed. Poor boy Utpal, what could he do with guns pointing at him from all directions?

In the darkness they marched him, in handcuffs, to the house of the village’s biggest landlord. Assembled there were the class enemies. They jeered at him. They said they must have their revenge. So what if he was a boy from Delhi who had abandoned his studies in the impetuosity of his youth? So what even if it can’t be proved he had killed anyone? He must be made an example to his comrades who needed to know that revolution was no chutiya business.

The havaldar raised his hand to silence the clamour. He walked and felt Utpal’s biceps. Yes, he said, the boss had been right; a few tight slaps were all that was required to shake the boy out of his reverie.

The havaldar spat and muttered disdainfully, ‘Sookha chutiya.’

The landlord repeated what he had heard and smirked.

‘Sookha chutiya, sookha chutiya,’ they chanted in unison and laughed uproariously.

Utpal did not raise his eyes even once, until he could take it no more. He suddenly turned around and spat on the face of the havaldar, squirting out a mouthful of defeat and helplessness. The havaldar swung his arm around. Utpal was sent sprawling on the ground.

Then the havaldar whipped out the revolver from the holster and placed the muzzle on Utpal’s temple. In the courtyard, the laughter died out.

No, he said, straightening up, death was too light a punishment for his insolence and ingratitude. The havaldar touched the prisoner’s left cheek. He let his finger slide down till the lower lip. Here, he said, at this point, a sickle-scar to remind the chhokra of his impertinence.

That night, in the courtyard of the landlord’s house, they branded him.

But the boy did return to his father, didn’t he? To the world of privileges and comforts and connections?

At such questions, the seniors would click their tongues in disapproval. Who were they to sit in judgement on a boy who at least had the courage to dream? Could they abandon college to live in squalor, with the police in hot pursuit? And anyway, in just a year or two of the uprising, it became obvious that the Indian state could not be defeated through countrymade guns that often blew up in the hands of those pulling the triggers.

The seniors would then switch to narrating the story of his rehabilitation at home.

For a year, he stayed with his parents and siblings who were certain their love could deliver him from what they thought was madness camouflaged as commitment to an ideology. Under their care he soon put on weight. He even began to harbour dreams of returning to university. But Utpal Chatterjee could not find peace. Violence without victory had robbed his past of its justification. It haunted him during his rehabilitation. At night he would wake up to hear knocks on the door and footsteps in the corridor; at times the wail of women and children would pierce his sleep and make him perspire. A recurring nightmare had him running through paddy fields, with bullets whistling over his head. He remembered comrades who had walked into the night, never to return; he could not forget those still engaged in the losing revolutionary battle. Memory was the last obstacle to Utpal Chatterjee’s desire to live life normally.

Guess who showed the Chatterjees a way around the obstacle, the seniors would tease.

It was a psychiatrist who advised Papa Chatterjee to send Utpal away from the land of defeat and memories. But before he was to leave for England, the psychiatrist added, get the sickle-scar concealed. The stranglehold of the past could not be loosened until the sickle-scar was obliterated, until the mirror no longer reminded Utpal every morning of the havaldar who had branded his face more out of pique than conviction. And so, Papa Chatterjee stepped behind Utpal one morning, at the time he was standing before the mirror combing his hair, and said, ‘Beta, in the West learn to forget, I still believe you are the family’s best bet. But for the sickle-scar there is nothing to suggest you once roamed the countryside. And even the sickle-scar can be surgically removed. You have to only say yes.’

What did Utpal tell his father?

The son touched the scar and said thoughtfully, ‘To have been saved because of you, because of the office you hold, well, to tell the truth, the sickle-scar keeps me from going mad.’

The next chapter in the story of Utpal Chatterjee saw him pursue his studies in England. He found respite from memory in books and introspection. He studied and discovered Gandhi; he did his doctorate on the theme of Dissent and Opposition. His thesis secured him a teaching assignment in, of all places, Australia. There he toiled, lecturing students and writing research papers and touring the Outback.

In anonymity Utpal Chatterjee lived and worked until his name began to appear in newspapers. No stupid, he wasn’t part of a subversive plot to assassinate the Australian prime minister. Newspaper reports claimed Utpal was the brain behind the first court case that had been filed challenging the Australian government’s right to lease Aboriginal land to mining companies.

At this point in the narration, the seniors would exclaim, terra nullius, terra nullius. They would repeat the two words and guffaw.

Terra nullius, terra nullius.

Did anyone know the meaning of the two words? Okay, forget the meaning, at least identify the language? Greek. No. Spanish. Shut up. Aboriginal language then? Forget it. Latin? Yes, right.

Into English terra nullius could be translated to mean, ‘No one’s land.’ And what was no one’s land had to be virginal. A land waiting for human settlement.

Australia had been terra nullius at the time the white man arrived on its shores. Nobody lived here, the land consequently, and justifiably, belonged to the Crown, which had colonized it.

Prof. Utpal Chatterjee and his band of twelve white students challenged the fiction of terra nullius in an Australian court. They didn’t do it directly; they helped the Yolgna people prepare a petition against the government’s decision to grant lease to a company for mining bauxite in their territory. The case required ample documentation. It was because of Prof. Chatterjee and his students the plaintiff’s barristers quoted anthropologists and historians to tear apart the concept of terra nullius: there were indeed people who had been living in Australia centuries before the arrival of the English. They explained to the court the Aboriginal system of collective ownership of land. So what if it was different from the system of individual ownership the white man had conceived? The State could not appropriate the land without the consent of those who owned it collectively.

The court case took a few years. Every time Utpal Chatterjee read the newspaper stories about the case, he would touch the sickle-scar and sigh deeply. An impotent past, he knew, could be redeemed only in the future.

So the Yolgna people did win relief, didn’t they? No sir, no way, the court dismissed their petition.

A month after the judgement, Prof. Utpal Chatterjee took a plane to Delhi, to teach in the university where he had studied. The band of twelve students had come down to the airport to see him off.

‘Justice,’ he said, before taking leave of the students. ‘How to get justice? That’s the question.’

So then, did the revolutionary become a Gandhian?

Forget the answer, the seniors would say. Prof. Chatterjee was no namby-pamby intellectual, laying bare esoteric political theories so that these could be regurgitated in a three-hour written test. The seniors’ verdict, at the end of their graduation, was that Prof. Chatterjee had been their only education in the damn university.

The class of 1982 watched Prof. Utpal Chatterjee saunter into the classroom, ten minutes past 10 a.m. He was dressed in faded jeans and a white, half-sleeve shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest. He had gelled and combed back his shoulder-length hair in a way that not even a strand fell on the ears. Swarthy and stocky, wearing polished shoes and thin gold-rimmed spectacles, Prof. Utpal Chatterjee seemed more an eccentric who had got bored of dressing midway than a former revolutionary unable to master bourgeois sartorial elegance.

The fifty pairs of eyes saw the sickle-scar glisten below the lips. The seniors’ story was before them, in flesh and blood.

They watched him sit on the table and rub his neck with the right hand. His short legs, dangling in the air, were in perpetual motion. In his left hand were stubs of white and yellow chalk. Prof. Utpal Chatterjee began to smile; the sickle-scar gradually disappeared into the folds of the skin. His smile became broader as his eyes darted from one student to another, twinkling behind the lenses each time they rested on a face. Soon his body began to shake, as if in convulsion. It was funny because it was downright absurd. To have heard those stories about the man and now find him demented, the students struggled to stifle their laughter.

He suddenly stopped rubbing his neck, took a chalk from the left hand, and flung it at the boy sitting in the middle of the last row.

‘Your name,’ Prof. Chatterjee asked.

‘Rasheed Halim,’ he replied.

‘Mr Halim, never suppress your laughter.’

It was just the remark the students needed to burst out laughing.

Prof. Chatterjee waited for the cackle to die before he said, ‘Laugh. It’s good to laugh.’ He was back to rubbing his neck. The sickle-scar had emerged from the folds to glisten on his skin.

‘All fifty of you,’ he continued. ‘You are my captive audience for a year.’ There was warmth and mischief in his voice. ‘Utpal Chatterjee is my name; friends call me UC.’

He blinked rapidly as he took the class in one sweep of his gaze. ‘Power always generates opposition,’ he intoned. ‘Opposition and dissent exist in all societies. In some it remains below the surface, in others it has structured channels of articulation. Once dissent becomes public and rejects the existing social and legal channels for arbitration, it takes the form of, or is described as, rebellion.’

A few students scribbled in their notebooks.

‘Don’t write,’ he said. ‘Just listen. Understand. Fall in love with the subject. A lot of what I will teach isn’t there in the university syllabus, which, I must tell you, hasn’t been revised for over fifteen to twenty years.’

Prof. Utpal Chatterjee, UC to one and all, radical and irreverent, perpetually locked in a solitary battle against the ennui of the system.

His right hand was back around the neck as he asked, ‘Tell me, why do people crave power?’

Many hands went up in the air. They took turns to answer the question. Power can change, it helps establish equality, distribute resources; it’s a means to gather wealth; it commands respect and awe; it provides status and prestige – one after another the students rattled out what they thought was the appropriate answer. Then a voice boomed: ‘People acquire power for asserting themselves against the will of others.’

‘Your name,’ Prof. Chatterjee asked the boy.

‘Krishna Kumar.’

‘They call you Kris, don’t they?’

The class tittered.

‘The assertion of wills, the clash of wills, who bows down and who refuses to break,’ Prof. Chatterjee said. ‘Yes, my dear, in the conflict of wills, you see, lies the human story.’

His gaze panned from one end of the class to the other. They hadn’t quite understood what he had said.

Prof. Chatterjee tried again, ‘All stories are stories of wills. God created Adam and Eve and then asked the angels to bow before them. Satan refused. Look at them, he said mockingly to God, look at your creation.’

He paused to rub his neck. A faint smile played on his lips. ‘And how is Satan’s refusal described?’

A girl’s voice replied, ‘Sin of pride.’

‘Sin of pride, yes. Absolutely,’ the professor agreed. ‘But Satan’s refusal has been also hailed as the first act of rebellion against whimsical exercise of power, against a command arbitrary in nature. Satan was superior to Adam; he thought it was unjust for him to bow. Do you understand me?’

They were deeply engrossed in his lecture, not only because of the subject he was talking on, but also because of the passion and excitement he had brought to it.

‘That’s it,’ he continued, ‘God symbolizes power, and Satan, dissent and disobedience. But Satan is also devil, shaitan, badmaash. He leads people astray. So what’s the equation? Don’t you get it? Those who disobey are dubbed to have the spirit of the devil in them. That’s the technique the powerful adopt to neutralize opposition.’

His hand dropped from the neck. With the right index finger he touched the sickle-scar. ‘So Kris,’ Prof. Chatterjee asked, ‘Was Mahatma Gandhi to the British what Satan was to God?’

‘In a way, yes,’ Kris said.

‘No boy, no,’ the professor said seriously. ‘Gandhi succeeded because he changed the equation between power and rebellion, you see. Unlike Satan, who tempted Adam to taste the forbidden apple, Gandhi turned to the British-God and said, I will disobey and I will suffer punishment and I will not become like you. And how was Gandhi to not become like them?’

Prof. Chatterjee paused and said, ‘He wasn’t to violently retaliate against the British for their arbitrary exercise of power. And, unlike Satan, he wanted people to follow the path of righteousness. Gandhi sought to convince the British-God about the immorality of his action, shame him for the power he possessed. Gandhi wanted to transform power, make it what it ought to be: Just. That’s why he won, disobedience triumphed under him.’

Prof. Chatterjee began to rub his neck; the sickle-scar segued into an expansive smile. There were still five minutes left for the class to end. He jumped from the table and said, ‘That’s it. Write an essay on the topic: Can power be truly just?’

They filed out of the classroom, dazed, mesmerized, experiencing the appeal of Utpal Chatterjee their seniors had talked of, and finding in him a person who was to soon blow away the assumptions and beliefs they had inherited.

During those days Rasheed and Kris had their separate circle of friends; Rasheed was in the college hostel and Kris was what they called a day-scholar. They barely knew each other; their relationship was confined to nods and smiles. That they had been to the same college, in the same class, brought them closer in the few months of their joining the Mirror. At times they would, over drinks, talk about their shared past.

On one such occasion, Kris had confessed, ‘Remember that opening lecture of UC? It changed me, somehow.’

Secret History

O Hindus,

On 6 December, you the Hindus, the only true people of this holy land, the only legitimate children of your Mother, will get another chance to prove your manhood, and reclaim that which was taken away forcibly by the barbarians, who came here centuries ago and defiled the purity of your motherland, plundered and raped her with a cruelty your history had never witnessed before. There are now only nineteen days left for the brave sons of the land to assemble in the town of Ayodhya and remove the last vestige of slavery, obliterate the symbol of your humiliation, and raze to the ground the mosque whose domes have mocked you for centuries.

Woe to those storytellers, deftly have they created romance about the Mughal dynasty. Woe to them, they are masters of dissimulation. Look at their perfidy: just because we have Ashoka the Great, they had to create a Muslim ruler of matching eminence. On the third Mughal emperor, Akbar, they have chosen to bestow the honorific of great. They say Akbar welded together an empire nearly the size of modern India. They claim Hindus and Muslims lived in perfect harmony in his reign. At a show of surprise, those storytellers haughtily ask: What? Don’t you know Akbar’s empire was the joint project of Rajputs and Muslims? You consequently want to know whether the Rajputs – the bravest of Hindus – did indeed offer their services to the Mughals voluntarily.

In 1561, five years after accession, Akbar turned to subjugate the Rajput princes of Rajasthan. The first to be vanquished was Rao Maldeo of Marwar. At his defeat, other Rajput princes were faced with the dreadful dilemma: should they fight the Muslims to destruction? Or should they surrender to Akbar and save themselves from annihilation? In 1562, Raja Bihari Mal of Amber, his son Bhagwan Das and grandson Man Singh visited the Mughal emperor. Besmirched were the annals of the Rajputs on the day Raja Bihari Mal gave his daughter in marriage to Akbar. Sullied was the purity of Rajputs at the time Bhagwan Das married his daughter to Akbar’s son, Salim. The rulers of Bikaner and Jaisalmer followed suit, establishing matrimonial alliances with the Mughals.

Those storytellers cite these alliances to illustrate the religious tolerance of Akbar. Go ask them: Was this cooperation based on equality? Did the Mughal emperor marry any of his daughters to Rajput princes? At our questions you say, the duplicity of those storytellers is well known, it makes no sense to debate with them. Instead, you ask, wasn’t there even one Rajput ruler who chose to defy Akbar the Great?

In a voice quivering with pride, we utter the name of Rana Pratap.

You exclaim, wasn’t he the Rajput ruler who fled from the battlefield of Haldighati?

Shame on those who have forgotten the valour of Rana Pratap. Heartless are those who do not find the story of his life inspiring. At the time he ascended the throne of Mewar, its capital, Chittor, had been already lost to the Mughals. Astute was Rana Pratap, he made the relatively inaccessible Kumbhalmer his capital. He also shifted to the hills, those who lived in the plains of his kingdom. Thus was rendered useless the territory which the Rana could not hope to defend against the superior strength of the Mughal ruler.

In 1576, a large Mughal army under Prince Salim invaded Mewar. Towards Kumbhalmer the Mughals began to march. In the mountains waited the Rana and his band of 22,000 soldiers. On June 18, 1576, they attacked the Mughals in the pass of Haldighat. On his steed, Chetak, the brave Rana cut through a column of the Mughal army. Before him was the elephant on which was astride Prince Salim. Pratap threw a lance at the Mughal commander, the steel plates around the howdah saved his life. With renewed vigour, Muslim soldiers now fell upon the Hindu army. The royal insignia of Mewar, mounted on to Chetak, enabled them to identify Rana Pratap, and direct their attack against him.

Into this adverse situation stepped the Jhala chief, Mana. He snatched the royal insignia and raised it over his own head. In the ferocity of the battle, the Muslim soldiers mistook the Jhala chief for Pratap. They followed Mana as he voluntarily drew upon himself the might of the imperial army. Loyal was Mana, he sacrificed his life so that the Rana could escape from the battlefield.

Perchance a posse of Muslim soldiers sighted Pratap. In the pursuit of their foe they at once set upon. Ahead was the wounded Rana on his wounded Chetak, behind him the Muslims on their thoroughbreds. Suddenly the vale turned silent, a voice called out for Pratap. He turned to look behind, and lo and behold the sight he beheld. On the ground lay dead the Muslim soldiers. Waving at the Rana was his brother, Sakta, who was employed in the service of Prince Salim. O, noble sons, it was Sakta who had slain the pursuers of Rana Pratap. There and then, the brothers embraced each other; at that very spot Chetak gasped and succumbed to his wounds. To the Rana, Sakta offered his own horse, and watched his brother escape into the forest. And yet they say that Rajput princes joined the Mughals voluntarily, and yet they claim the Mughal empire was the joint project of Hindus and Muslims.

Kumbhalmer was besieged and taken. Yet, from one hill to another, the Rana and his band fought the Muslims. Through surprise attacks and raids, they inflicted heavy casualties on the army of Akbar. In caves did the Rana and his family live, under the care and protection of forest-dwellers. Courageously, they endured hardship and did not surrender to the Mughal emperor.

Yet fortitude has its limits, every warrior has his foibles. One day, a girl’s scream aroused the Rana from slumber. There was his daughter, wailing inconsolably. In the distance was the cat devouring the half-eaten lunch she had kept aside for dinner. At this the Rana broke down, and sent a letter to Akbar offering his submission. A wave of jubilation swept through the imperial court. At long last, the last flickering candle of resistance was extinguished. In his excitement the Mughal emperor showed the letter to Prithiraj, of the royal family of Bikaner. One look at the letter, and Prithiraj said the letter seemed to have been forged. He offered to write to Pratap, asking him to authenticate the letter of surrender.

Clever was Prithiraj, he wanted to dissuade the Rana from submitting to the Mughal emperor. He wrote, ‘The hopes of the Hindu rest on the Hindu; yet the Rana forsakes them. But for Pratap, all would be placed on the same level by Akbar; for our chiefs have lost their valour and our females their honour.’ Prithiraj said every Rajput had been bought except for the brave Rana. Then he added despairingly, ‘This broker in the market of men will be overreached; he cannot live forever: then will our race come to Rana Pratap …’ Wise sons, read again and again what we have quoted. Remember, this is the letter of one who had submitted to the Mughal emperor. Yet they say Rajput princes supported the Mughals voluntarily, and yet they claim the empire of Akbar was the joint project of Hindus and Muslims.

At the receipt of the letter, the Rana was inspired. Fresh resources were tapped, and a large band of Rajput soldiers was quickly raised. The guerrilla war against the Mughals was renewed. In a short span, Rana Pratap recovered much of Mewar, barring Chittor, Mandalgarh and Ajmer.

In 1597, Rana Pratap took seriously ill. Suspended between life and death, he asked the nobles gathered around him: would they, at his death, surrender to the Mughals? Solemnly the nobles took the vow to restore to Mewar its former capital. Only then did Rana Pratap close his eyes. Only then did he breathe his last. And yet they claim the Mughal empire was the joint project of Hindus and Muslims, and yet they insist on calling Akbar great.

Tomorrow we will come again, tomorrow we will discuss other aspects of Akbar’s reign. Till then, chant the name of Lord Ram, imbibe in yourself the spirit of Rana Pratap. Come to Ayodhya on 6 December, you must fight the battle of righteousness. Rise and raise your arm, rise and say, Lord Ram.

Sheela pressed the doorbell of Flat No. 700. Saat sau ka sahib, that was what Rasheed was to her. She didn’t know his name, nor what his profession was. He was just sahib, as were all those who lived in Hemant Kunj, distinguished from each other by their flat numbers. But the saat sau ka sahib was different because he was Muslim and didn’t keep images of gods and goddesses at home.

Sheela smoothened her crumpled floral-printed bottle-green salwar kameez. She didn’t look tired as most other maids usually did at 1.30 p.m. From the adjoining village of Vijaygarh these women came to Hemant Kunj early every morning. They were called part-timers; they worked in three or four houses for one or two hours daily – cooking, or sweeping and mopping the floor, cleaning the dishes and washing the clothes, each job charged piecemeal.

Why hadn’t this saat sau ka sahib summoned her through the maid who worked in the flat across the landing, at the end of his holiday, as he always did? No, she couldn’t let go of this Muslim bachelor who never deducted wages for the days she was absent, nor towards repayment of the small loans she periodically took. She liked the Muslim boy; the work at his place was light, and he didn’t have a wife to nag her. That is why she, at times, chopped the vegetables and sliced the onions for him gratis. And yet he had chosen, now, to dismiss her! She pressed the doorbell again.

Rasheed Halim was at the writing table, sitting still, in the hope of convincing the visitor he wasn’t at home. But the ring did not stop; a momentary pause and the bell began to trill under the desperate jabs of the person outside. Rasheed walked barefoot to the door, and placed his eye at the peephole. There was Sheela: horse-faced and broad-shouldered, of medium height, the premature wrinkles making her appear far older than her thirty-four years. In the misery of the last fourteen days, he had forgotten all about her. He should have conveyed to her that her services were no longer required. Rasheed stood there hoping she would soon tire of ringing the bell and walk away.

But Sheela gritted her teeth and began to thump the door. Perhaps she was about to give up. But she would be back again, tomorrow and the day after, Rasheed was sure.

He opened the door and stared at her blankly.

Sheela remarked, ‘Bimaar kya? Kitna dubla ho gya.’ She expressed shock at the pallor of his face and the weight he had lost in the past fortnight.

Rasheed did not respond to her remark.

She realized the Muslim boy wasn’t listening to her. Sheela glared at him, her hands on her hips.

‘Kya kharabi thi hum mein, kisko loge mere badle mein?’ she asked defiantly.

No, he hadn’t decided to dispense with her and appoint another.

Then?

Rasheed pointed to himself. He would clean the house and wash the clothes and the dishes. She looked confused. So he told her he had taken long leave to complete a personal project, that he had time on his hands, that the Rs 225 he paid to her was an expenditure he could avoid.

She simpered: Rs 225 was nothing for sahibs in Hemant Kunj. But for those in the slums, in the jhuggi-jhopri, it was a fortune; she needed every paisa to buy sweaters for the children; winter was approaching, after all.

Okay, Rasheed said, she should fetch him hot-and-sour soup from the Chinese food van parked by the side-gate of Sector XIII. He would, in the meantime, ferret out sweaters she could take for her family.

But work? No.

Sheela flashed her stained teeth in relief. In this bad city, she knew, no one, not even those in bungalows, ever gifted clothes to a servant about to be shown the door.

As Rasheed turned around to fetch money for the soup, Sheela thought her Muslim boy had been transformed beyond her comprehension. So reserved, so sadly silent; his eyes resembled those of a dead fish.

Sheela lifted a sweater from the heap on the dining table and admired the perfect condition it was in. Five sweaters, smelling of mothballs? It was a cruel joke the Muslim boy was playing on her, she thought, stepping back and staring suspiciously at Rasheed.

He was oblivious of her, slurping the soup she had fetched for him.

She frowned at the sight of him. There was something strange about the Muslim boy: the steaming soup didn’t seem to bother him. This whatever-his-name was barely conscious of his action. Otherwise, he would have smiled patronisingly as sahibs and their wives always did at the time of donating what was worthless for them.

Rasheed hadn’t spoken a word, and she felt uneasy.

Just what the hell was wrong with the Muslim boy? He seemed out of sorts. Strange, what fourteen days of holiday could do to a person. To discard the sweaters, in such perfect condition, he had become either silly in the head or a saint overnight.

‘Yeh kapde to ek dum naye hain,’ she said, hoping her question would prompt him to explain his generosity.

He pushed the soup bowl away. His large eyes directed her attention to the two green blankets on the table – yes, she could take those too, he said.

Sheela glanced at the table and decided she would take the sweaters and leave the blankets behind. She thought she shouldn’t exploit his febrility; even necessities must have their limits.

‘Sweater hi bahut hai,’ she said.

In response, he absent-mindedly wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his kurta.

Sheela was anxious about his mental stability. He seemed lost in a world she couldn’t breach into with her senseless chatter. And to think she had wanted to discuss her new job with the Muslim boy, confide in him her fears and seek his advice. It was impossible, she thought, to engage him in conversation.

He glanced at her and frowned. Why couldn’t she take the sweaters and blankets and leave him alone? These needless intrusions – he decided he must put an end to them somehow.

She was trapped in conflicting emotions – there were the sweaters and blankets and a severe winter ahead. There was the Muslim boy who didn’t seem capable of taking a rational decision. Wasn’t it wrong of her to take advantage of his unstable mental condition? Could she reconcile guilt with greed? Sheela shook her head, and because she thought it was impolite of her to express her doubts about his ability to behave rationally, she repeated what she had already told him: she wouldn’t accept the gift of blankets from him.

Sheela stood there expectantly, waiting, and hoping, for him to cajole her into revising her decision. His insistence would silence the murmur of reproach in her. And because Rasheed wanted to be alone, he concocted an explanation for his generosity.

Really, he told her, in a voice soft but insistent, she shouldn’t think he was doing ehsaan on her, obliging her. He didn’t have much choice in the matter. The sweaters and blankets belonged to a friend of his, and the night he was packing before flying abroad, he realized the luggage weighed more than the permissible limit. He took out the blankets and sweaters and instructed him to hand these over to the needy. Could she tell him who deserved the donation more than her?

She smiled and stooped to pull the sweaters and the green blankets towards her. She looked at him and said earnestly, yes, she had always considered him an honourable man; that was why she wished to share a secret with him and seek his advice.

‘Kya main bharosa kar sakti hoon aap pe?’ she asked.

Obviously, she could trust him, Rasheed replied irritably.

She began to speak haltingly. To begin with, he should know she had, at the beginning of the month, secured a lucrative job. She had consequently quit all the houses where she worked part-time in favour of the place where the money was more and the work quite simple. Could he even imagine what her salary was? Rs 4,000, she gushed, payable in four weekly instalments. But who could tell anything about the new employer? He could boot her out without notice. That was why she was keen to retain the Muslim boy’s house as an insurance against mishaps in the future.

Rasheed looked at her impassively.

She said she was grateful to the leader of the jhuggi-jhopri who had procured the new job for her. Perhaps the leader had taken pity on her because of her misfortune of having to look after three children and a husband hooked on drugs and liquor. The job, didn’t he want to know about it?

‘Batao,’ he said.

Some days ago, she had been taken to the new sahib’s flat for introduction. It seemed he had recently shifted to the colony; the house barely had any furniture.

‘Sun rahe ho?’ she asked.

He nodded.

The sahib had taken her to a room where there were machines. He had switched on one machine and the TV-like thing, what they had said was kompter, cumpter …

‘Computer,’ he said.

The computer, she corrected herself, sprang to life instantaneously. On the screen were words and words, from top to down, and then the sahib pressed one or two more buttons. Quite magically, another machine adjacent to the TV-like thing began to spit out papers, crisp and warm, and smothered with words, like pages of a magazine. It was sheer jadoo. She had never seen such an operation before.

The sahib had taken a page that had come out of the machine and opened a large cardboard box full of thin strips. Each of these was brown in colour on one side with perforations and square patterns. On its other side were two plastic slips of equal length that met in the middle, with their ends sticking out. The sahib removed one plastic slip to reveal a gluey surface and stuck it to the top left corner of the page, in a way the other plastic slip, the one that hadn’t been removed, jutted out of the page. He did the same for other corners as well.

Look, the sahib had said, the paper could be stuck on, say, a wall by peeling away the other white plastic slip, the one that hadn’t been removed, from each of the four corners.

Imagine, she sighed, dishing out Rs 4,000 for a job even a child from her jhuggi-jhopri could perform. It was true there were hundreds and hundreds of pages, and to each of these she had to stick the four sticky brown strips. No doubt, the work took hours, but, really, the salary of Rs 4,000 made her feel that the task she had been hired to perform was fishy.

‘Koi galat kaam to hum se nahin kara rahein hain?’ she asked.

There was nothing to worry about, he said. This sahib was most probably a political activist whose task it was to organize the sticking of posters on walls.

‘Haan,’ agreed Sheela.

She too had seen such papers stuck on walls in Hemant Kunj, held by precisely those brown strips she handled daily. But because she couldn’t read Hindi, let alone decipher the English language, she could not tell whether the papers she saw stuck to the walls were those that passed through her hands every morning. Yet, now and then, a murmur would arise in her bosom to warn that perhaps the new sahib was exploiting her illiteracy to involve her in a crime.

There was nothing to fear, he told her.

Sheela nodded vigorously. But on the day the new sahib had taught her to stick those brown strips to papers, he had warned her against telling anyone about the nature of her job. Now why would anyone want to keep anything secret unless he was involved in a dubious operation? Really, why would anyone pay her so handsomely unless the money was a bribe for keeping her mouth shut?

Rasheed was miffed. Look, he said in a firm voice, nothing to get worked up about.

She smiled, pleased at the verdict. Scooping up in her arms the sweaters and blankets, she briskly walked into the kitchen, only to emerge a few seconds later. The sweaters and blankets had been packed into plastic carry-bags; in her other hand was the duplicate house-key which she had taken off from a nail in the kitchen wall. It was too late now, but tomorrow, after sticking those brown strips to papers, she would, irrespective of whether or not he was present, enter the house, sweep and swab the floor and dust the furniture. He trusted her, didn’t he? She said she would keep the key with herself and every three-four days, in her spare time, she would slip into the Muslim bachelor’s house and do the household work, as she always had, free, in token of her appreciation for the gift of five new sweaters and blankets. He would take her back, wouldn’t he, should she lose the Rs 4,000 job? Sheela asked.

He nodded, yes, he would.

Rasheed Halim’s hand was suspended over the page, the pen pointed downward, before he brought it down to scribble A Dying Man’s Diary. The letters sloped at an angle, in perfect curves.

‘What should I write about,’ he wondered.

Perhaps he could write about Sheela and the sweaters and blankets he had gifted her. Poor Sheela, slogging all day and yet watching her children shiver in winter.

Why don’t the poor kill themselves, instead of choosing to sleep on the pavement?

Why don’t Sheela and her friends murder those for whom they work and run away with their money?

Why do people struggle against their misfortunes, to live?

These thoughts could be woven in 400 words, he thought. But first, he must talk to Uma. In his eagerness to know Bajpai’s response, he had already dialled HOPE several times, over the last one hour. All the numbers had been busy.

Unable to concentrate on writing, Rasheed got up from the table and walked into the drawing room. He plugged the telephone into the socket, dialled the number and disconnected. He tried again; then the second number. Why couldn’t he get through to Uma today?

I should leave instructions to transfer the phone to HOPE, after my death.

Just the way I have gifted my sweaters and blankets to Sheela.

Perhaps I should prepare an inventory of what should go to whom.

At the eighth attempt, Rasheed got through. A voice asked for his name. Rasheed was told Uma had left a number where he could reach her. He promptly dialled the new number.

‘Edayathu Pochiah Krishnamurthy,’ Rasheed muttered.

As he waited for Uma to come on the line, he repeated the name, Edayathu Pochiah Krishnamurthy. The inordinately difficult name came quite easily to him. He had heard the name before; obviously, he had. But before he could link the name to a fragment from his past, Uma came on the line, ‘Mr Rasheed Halim, where have you been? Tried and tried your number. But Mr Halim, there was no response.’

He thought it was uncharacteristic of her to repeat his name, to also prefix it with Mr, to not even inquire about the diary and his mood.

‘I had unplugged the telephone,’ he said.

‘Oh,’ she mumbled.

‘But I also called you up many times,’ Rasheed said. ‘I couldn’t get through.’

His voice was steady, conveying to her that the apparitions of his mind hadn’t returned to torment him. From this, she thought that he had called her up repeatedly – either to read out what he had written, or he was eager to know about her conversation with Bajpai. But Uma did not indulge him. She wanted to utilize the opportunity to bring Edayathu Pochiah Krishnamurthy into the conversation.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘today, after a long time, we advertised in the Mirror. The phone lines were jammed with calls. And then I had to meet Edayathu Pochiah Krishnamurthy.’

He took the bait as she had hoped. ‘Who’s he?’ Rasheed asked.

‘One of HOPE’s patrons. Why do you ask?’

He ignored her question.

‘Did you talk to Bajpai?’

Uma began to laugh. She started to speak, but burst out again. ‘Rasheed, you know,’ she said, giggling, ‘your boss is too nosey.’

He found it strange she should utter his name repeatedly.

‘I tell him you are in Mughalabad, that you are running a high temperature,’ she said. ‘I tell him you have to extend your leave. This Bajpai of yours suddenly asks my name. Uma, I say. He asks me whether I live in Delhi. Yes, I say. He then wants to know whether I am in Mughalabad with you. I say no. He asks whether I’m a good friend of yours. The way he says good …’ She giggled and completed the sentence, ‘I suppose he thinks I am your girlfriend. He asks me for the number where you can be reached. I tell him I forgot to take it from you. He just goes on and on.’

‘He’s like that,’ Rasheed said.

‘Not just that,’ she said. ‘He says he needs a piece of information: the name of the Egyptian writer whose book on emancipation of women caused a furore there early in the century. He says you had once told him about it. He requests that if I happen to talk to you again, could I ask you about the Egyptian writer’s name and call him back? What kind of boss do you have, Rasheed?’

He didn’t answer her.

‘And who’s this Egyptian writer,’ she asked.

‘Qasim Amin. I read about him in Albert Hourani’s Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age.’

‘Wow,’ she exclaimed. ‘You remember the name.’ She laughed lightly, and continued, ‘I’ll call Bajpai.’

He remained silent.

‘I’ll be here for an hour at most,’ she said. ‘Call me in the evening to read out what you have written. Bye.’

Rasheed kept holding the handset to his ear, disappointed at Uma’s attitude. She had not been what he had known her to be – patient, solicitous, inclined to listening instead of talking, in the hope of drawing him out to articulate his worries. Not only had she been inattentive and distracted, engrossed in her own world, she had tittered compulsively in the manner of a schoolgirl, amused by her conversation with Ashok Kumar Bajpai. Perhaps she was already tired of him, believing his was a hopeless cause to battle for. It was strange that she wanted to communicate the name of the Egyptian writer to Bajpai, particularly as she had seemed disapproving of his intrusive curiosity.

Rasheed was reminded of the evening Bajpai had hosted Kris and him to drinks at the Press Club. That evening had come to define Ashok Kumar Bajpai for him as one who could simultaneously be charming and overbearing.

Forty-five-plus, cynical, authoritarian, boasting a memory that could choose at random a date and match it with a historical event, or quote a passage verbatim and demand the author’s name, Ashok Kumar Bajpai was the genius who presided over the Mirror newsroom. There were few in Delhi who could rival his nose for news, his penchant for the sensational, his ability to sense what could be sold in a saturated market.

‘Bloody hell, I say,’ he’d drone at those who disagreed with him over the display of news, ‘you think you can influence the reader’s taste …’ Folding his arms over a belly distended due to the gallons of alcohol consumed over the years, he’d blink from behind his reading glasses and tell all those around him, ‘Remember, you budding editors, a newspaper succeeds when its pages carry stories which read like fiction.’

‘Hunt, I say,’ he’d say to the reporters, his puffy, oval face crinkling into a smile, ‘hunt me something unusual, extraordinary, magical.’ They’d know what he had in mind – stories like the one he had insisted on carrying on the front-page, top right corner.

It had been a bizarre crime: a tale of three brothers, married, with children, punishing a youth who had eloped with their nubile sister. They didn’t beat or maim him; instead, they sodomized him, one after the other through a night and a day, until their anger dissipated and the youngster’s rectum ruptured and began to bleed profusely. After the youth had been hospitalized, and the culprits taken into custody, the eldest of the three brothers confessed during police interrogation, ‘Sir, we wanted him to live the rest of his life in horror of his erection.’

At the evening editorial meeting, it was said, Bajpai had guffawed and exclaimed, ‘Superb, page one material, I say.’ The story was ultimately allocated the space he had insisted upon, under the headline: Married brothers sodomize sister’s lover.

Other newspapers predictably followed the story twenty-four hours later.

They all knew Bajpai could have become editor had he not begun to conspire against his own destiny, had he not suddenly taken to the bottle, drinking himself to rapid destruction. He became the hare who began to lag behind the tortoises. By the time Bajpai emerged from the alcoholic haze, and taught himself to drink tea during the day and stop at peg number three after sunset, he had been overtaken in the newspaper hierarchy by a few of his contemporaries. One among them had become the Mirror’s editor. He rescued Bajpai from oblivion and imminent unemployment, appointed him as his news editor and also placed rookie reporters under his tutelage.

‘Count, I say. Loud and slowly,’ Bajpai would order the reporter on probation.

‘One, two, three, four …’

‘Don’t breathe,’ he’d bark at the reporter counting the number of words in the opening sentence of his story.

‘Eight, nine, ten, eleven …’

‘Slowly, in one breath, I say,’ the news editor’s voice would thunder.

‘Eighteen, nineteen, twenty …’ The probationer would stop again to catch his breath.

‘Keep counting.’

Once the words in the opening sentence had been counted Bajpai would reel out, in a biting tone, the number of times the probationer had stopped to breathe. ‘When people read newspapers they don’t want to pant like they do after a swim.’

Seeing the probationer had been taunted into submission, Bajpai would advise, ‘A sentence for every pause, I say.’

The boy would be on his feet.

‘Have you read Hemingway?’ Bajpai would bellow. ‘Follow his style – staccato, phat, phat, phat, like rapid gunfire. A sentence is like life: the shorter its length, the lesser the chances of making mistakes and clearer its meaning.’

The youngsters gradually learnt what the older hands at the Mirror knew well: in Bajpai’s perception, a mistake was that which could be improved upon. There was rarely an edition in which he had not picked a fault. Either the headline was inappropriate or the selection of news items lopsided or the stories verbose. He would mark every edition in red ink and write acerbic comments. Miserly with praise, carping at anything less than extraordinary, tearing apart those who committed errors, Bajpai was someone who inspired awe rather than love.

Only once, in the last one year, did an edition of the Mirror measure up to Bajpai’s notion of excellence. It was the day the Mirror carried on its front page, over four columns, a photograph under the headline: Marlboro man dies of cancer. The picture was of the rugged horseman who had enticed, from the pages of international magazines, a generation of smokers. The caption carried his statement, issued a week before he succumbed to lung cancer, about the harmful effects of smoking.

The decision to feature the photo-story was taken impromptu, without Bajpai’s approval. That evening, Kris had been entrusted, in the absence of the chief sub-editor, with the task of supervising the late night edition. An hour before the newspaper was to go to bed, Rasheed had glanced at the agency copies. He motioned Kris to come to his side and said, ‘Read it.’

Kris read the first take, and beamed. ‘Let’s spread the Marlboro story across page one.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘I’m the behan chod boss today,’ he chuckled. His voice had echoed in the room: ‘Tear out the Marlboro ad, take the new plan for the front page.’

The following day, they opened the newspaper lying on Bajpai’s desk. To the Marlboro story was tagged the comment: ‘Excellent. Those responsible for the display are invited to the press club today.’

Kris and Rasheed arrived at the club a little after 10.30 p.m. The bell to place the last order had already gone; people were shuffling around fetching their drinks. In the far corner, facing the door was Ashok Kumar Bajpai, with glasses holding large pegs of rum on the table. Bajpai waved at them. His smile was warm and winsome; his oval, puffy face glowed. He got up to shake their hands. It was obvious to them he had had more than his daily quota of three pegs.

‘When I saw the newspaper, I knew it had to be you,’ Bajpai said, tapping Kris’s muscular shoulders. ‘Simply superb, I say.’

It was rare to see the boss so effusive; it touched them deeply. ‘The idea was Rasheed’s,’ Kris remarked.

‘The two of you did a fine job, I say.’

They poured water into the glasses, dropped cubes of ice into the drink. Bajpai took three huge gulps to empty his out.

‘This is what I call perfection,’ Bajpai said, swaying forward and back in the chair. ‘The desks in all other newspapers too saw the same news item but they failed to recognize the gem in it. Superb, I say. This is the trait I want to instill in everyone – see a story, react differently. Attempt something unique.’

Bajpai poured water into another glass of rum. He was critical of the disinterest younger journalists displayed towards their work, and the absence of the desire in them to surpass themselves. He spoke of the stench of mediocrity that assaulted him as soon as he stepped into office. It was shocking to see young people replicate their work mindlessly, not even daring to commit a fresh mistake, if not for anything else but to at least break the monotony.

The liquor had started affecting him. His eyes were glassy and voice, unsteady. They listened to him in awe, like pupils in thrall to the master musician.

Did they know he had once trekked in the Himalayas to reach the spot where in summer, it was said, a band of Mughal soldiers could be seen buried under a sheet of ice, with their accoutrements lying around? His editor had laughed off the story, believing it was rustic balderdash. And so Bajpai had packed a rucksack, taken leave from office, and headed for the mountains. There he had stayed for a fortnight, with a villager for company and guidance, waiting for the glacier to reveal his story. And when he had returned to the plains his front page story, under banner headline, and the photographs accompanying it, confirmed his reputation as the most enterprising in the profession. It even inspired the National Geographic to do a special feature on the medieval corpses.

Bajpai took a peg from their quota, and after taking a sip of the iced drink, his eyes shining like the light of a cinema projector, he said, ‘These crime reporters are lazy idiots. They should read my story: Twenty-three minutes to a rape.’

Bajpai had once bribed his way into a police station to interview a rapist who had been arrested the night before. He had quizzed the criminal about the crime, from the moment the idea of rape had taken hold of him and the twenty-three minutes he had taken to silence the reproachful murmur of his conscience before committing the crime. Obviously, the identity of the rapist had to be changed; it could have gone against him in court. But the story should be read to understand the possibilities waiting to be exploited, he said.

His repertoire was vast, just in case the examples he had cited were to mislead them into believing he was obsessed with death and crime. The list of stories was indeed so long that he could go on through the night. To think he had written his stories on the rickety typewriter, and never had, unlike the current crop of journalists, the computer on which it was so simple to rework copies. On the computer the words and sentences could be rewritten, with no trace left of the past effort.

By this time, Bajpai’s eyes had turned a deep red. He dropped a cube of ice into the glass and watched it disappear slowly in the warmth of the rum, like the present gradually dissolving into the past.

‘Computers … Sometimes I wish our mind was like the computer,’ he said softly, slouching over the glass. ‘I could arrange the past into separate files and erase a few of them.’

Suddenly he straightened up. ‘Rasheed,’ he said, ‘didn’t the cancer transform you?’

Rasheed nodded and said, ‘I was taught early in my illness not to ask, why me?’

‘And to bear it with a smile?’ Bajpai shot back. ‘Why me? Why me?’ He mimicked Rasheed.

Kris pressed Rasheed’s foot under the table, signalling him not to react.

Their silence irritated Bajpai. ‘Why me? Why me? I will tell you why I am justified in asking the question,’ Bajpai said, banging the glass down on the table.

‘Do you see this person sitting across from you? He was the star whom every editor wanted. Honest and sincere, the kind who would stand through the night in a train rather than bribe and buy a seat; he was never malicious, never hurt anyone. And then he gets married, his wife becomes pregnant. And what does she deliver? Spastic twins, doomed to remain helpless all their lives.’

He was choking with emotion. Memory seemed to be strangulating him.

‘He takes to drinking. He drinks and drinks. And you say this man should not ask: Why me? And you want him to accept his fate?’

He paused and focussed his eyes on Rasheed. ‘You fool,’ Bajpai said slowly and emphatically. ‘You believe in the notion of immanent justice, don’t you?’

Bajpai didn’t wait to hear the reply. He got up and walked out of the club.

A dying man’s diary

In the end, the only possession you can’t gift away is your memory: who you were and what you did and what happened to you. These images from the past cling to you as flesh does to bone. They remind you of the world you have forsaken. Memory serenades you, through a letter, a telephonic conversation, even a name.

I don’t make sense, do I? That’s understandable. These days I often have thoughts to which I think only I can relate. Let me try to explain.

As I sit to write, a voice rises to tease and torment and to ask the question: how many hours are there in six months?

I have always detested arithmetic; even simple calculations create panic of paralytic proportions. Perhaps this phobia of numbers can be traced to the arithmetic teacher who supervised us in Class V. At every incorrect answer he would use the hockey stick to whack us, imprinting the bitterness of his soul on our tender skins and inculcating in us a deep fear of numbers. It isn’t the first occasion in the day I have remembered the teacher. I had thought of him at the time I tried to place a name I had heard in a telephonic conversation. Do you now understand the power of memory, its irritating capacity to insinuate into the present thoughts long forgotten?

It is because of the persistent interference of memory in my daily existence I chose to rephrase the acronym of ROLT from the Return of Last Thoughts, framed in another context, to the Return of Lost Thoughts. What is ROLT, you will ask. It is another story, from another time.

But I turn away from memory, to calculate the number of hours there are in a month. I multiply thirty with twenty-four. The answer: 720; it is 744 hours for a month of thirty-one days. Incredible, I can’t believe it. Why does a month seem so long and 720, or 744, hours so short?

A peculiar kind of sensation runs through the body – beginning 1 November, I speak aloud the name of the next six months … December, January, February … and calculate that these together have 181days. I multiply this by twenty-four to find the number of hours left for the relapse I’m bound to suffer. The answer: 4,344 hours. Since I have already spent seventeen days, or 408 hours, my life account has a credit of 3,936 hours. True, the relapse could happen earlier, or it could get delayed, still the calculation deters me from hoping for a longer stay in this world.

I have spent thirty-two years, or 2,80,320 hours, and should we presume eight leap years, you might as well add another eight days, or 192 hours, bringing the grand total to 2,80,512 hours. Why can I not endure the 3,936 hours now? Why does time’s blink seem interminable?

We move through the invisible passage of time: we lumber along from minute to minute, breath by breath, until the moment our hearts sputter to a stop. Rasheed, Rasheed, the mind demands to know, will the death of your body be before its time?

I tackle the issue through the notion of life expectancy. Since in 1992, an Indian is expected to live an average of sixty-one years, I have been deprived, at least theoretically, of as many hours as I have already spent. Perhaps, 150 years ago, a life of 2,80,512 hours could have been closer to the national average.

It’s perhaps apt to conclude: the one distinguishing feature of progress is that it prolongs life. Its joy, though, I am certain I will be deprived of.

When Rasheed began to read out from the spiral notebook, Uma, listening at the other end thought his was a voice born to touch the soul of the listener. It seemed to control her being, turning and twisting her from inside, making her aware of the pain gnawing her. And what the recitation did not mirror directly, the sadness tucked between words was expressed through pauses and sighs. As his voice rose and fell, she could experience his pain as her own.

Just why was she so keen to keep alive a person whom she had never seen? There was the knot that connected HOPE to the seeker; but there was also the knot that tied his fate to hers: in him she sensed her own chance of deliverance. A mystical force seemed to bind her to him.

In Uma was born the desire to meet him, to put a face to the voice.

She listened to Rasheed describe the arithmetic teacher. Class V, she heard him say. Didn’t Edayathu Pochiah Krishnamurthy say Rasheed had studied with him in Class V?

‘It isn’t the first occasion in the day I have remembered the arithmetic teacher. I had thought of him at the time I tried to place a name I had heard in a telephonic conversation,’ he read out. Uma smiled: who else could have Rasheed talked to other than her? Edayathu Pochiah Krishnamurthy was sure Rasheed would remember him. Now Uma understood why. Theirs was the bond of victims, forged against the terror they had encountered in childhood.

Rasheed began to calculate the hours in a month.

She began to think out her response to his recitation. She could harness the surge of nostalgia in him to her own cause. Between the terrifying present and a lamentable future, memory was Rasheed’s only certitude. It was the only reality acceptable to him. This nostalgia wasn’t just an act of remembrance. It was something deep and profound, a form of love. It was a love for himself, for what he had been and what had happened to him, or even what should have happened. It was a love for life, instinctive and irrational. But Rasheed had to first recognize this love, accept it. Something durable and hopeful could then be built upon it.

‘It’s perhaps apt to conclude: the one distinguishing feature of progress is that it prolongs life,’ Rasheed’s voice echoed over the phone.

‘Yes,’ she responded, as soon as he ended his recitation. ‘The ultimate test of any action is to judge whether it promotes or curtails life.’

She believed every word of what she’d said. But she realized it was insensitive of her to tell it to a person who had attempted suicide. Uma promptly asked him, ‘The name over the phone? Was it … .’ Her voice trailed off.

He took the cue. ‘Your Edayathu Pochiah Krishnamurthy. Was he …’

‘Don’t tell me,’ she exclaimed. ‘Oh my god! It’s incredible. I talk to you and put the phone down and Krishnamurthy asks, “Rasheed Halim of the Mirror, no?” Astonishing!’

She paused to gauge his reaction. There was silence. She continued, ‘I tell myself, hell, he knows you, I shouldn’t have talked to you before him. You know HOPE is particular about adhering to its confidentiality clause. Krishnamurthy smiles and says you and he were in Class V together, that the two of you haven’t met since then. And I’m like, what, what, what, I can’t believe it.’

Rasheed thought she sounded more relieved than astonished. He understood her reaction: she probably viewed him as a burden which she could now share with Krishnamurthy.

‘I ask Krishnamurthy … You know I have abbreviated him to EPK. I mean, can you pronounce Edayathu Pochiah Krishnamurthy in one go?’ Uma took his name again and laughed heartily. ‘I can never get it right, I can never pronounce it the way he does.’

Rasheed felt a twitch in his heart because of the persistent tugging of memory.

‘Anyway,’ she said, laughing. ‘I ask EPK, how the hell does he know that Rasheed is with Mirror, and he says another boy from the same class had told him about you. It’s crazy for the two of you to remember each other.’

He remembered Edayathu Pochiah Krishnamurthy because of his opposition to the arithmetic teacher. His defiance, quite remarkable for his age, had been stamped indelibly on Rasheed’s mind.‘What does EPK do now?’ he asked.

‘He owns and runs a software company with branches in Bangalore and Bombay,’ she replied.

‘Software company?’ His voice was tinged with surprise.

‘Why,’ she asked, still laughing, ‘was he a buddhu in Class V?’

‘He was a remarkable boy,’ he replied.

‘Remarkable? EPK?’ she asked, mischievously.

Images from the past buffeted him. His curiosity had been aroused. ‘He didn’t seem a bright boy then,’ Rasheed said. And he narrated what he remembered of the past. Edayathu Pochiah Krishnamurthy had joined them in Class V. Dark, taller than most other boys but surprisingly timid. They made fun of him because of his name.

‘That was the year we had that arithmetic teacher take our class. He was stocky and bald and had a face like a bulldog’s. He wore thick spectacles,’ Rasheed spoke softly. ‘On the very third day, he used the hockey stick on boys who had more than two sums wrong in the first homework assigned to us.’

His voice was deadpan. Would he want to meet EPK, she wondered.

‘In the second week,’ he continued, ‘the teacher was livid with Edayathu: he hadn’t done his homework, not a sum. That day, he was hit with the hockey stick.’

It soon became a regular feature in Class V. The teacher would, for one reason or another, thrash Edayathu. Either he had his sums wrong or couldn’t reply to a question posed to him or had forgotten to bring his workbook. Edayathu was, it seemed, too eager to provide provocation to the teacher.

‘He wouldn’t, unlike others, gasp during the beating until …’ Rasheed continued in his deadpan voice. ‘One day Edayathu was caught sleeping in class. He was summoned to the front row and his head was pushed under the table. And then the beating began, one stroke after another. I remember the sickening sound of wood on his bum. On the tenth stroke he screamed. Only then he was let off.’

For Uma, EPK’s present had been explained, why he had decided to fund HOPE’s special programme for school children.

‘Was he terrible at studies?’

‘That day, I asked Edayathu how he could have dared to sleep in class,’ Rasheed continued, ignoring her question. ‘You know what he told me? He said he hadn’t dropped off to sleep, that, that … he had closed his eyes to provoke the teacher, tire out the bully.’

Rasheed paused and asked, ‘Does he hate the Christian missionaries?’

She was surprised at the question. ‘Was the arithmetic teacher one of them?’

‘No,’ Rasheed said. ‘The school was run by them.’

He lapsed into silence, trying to make sense of the past.

‘A curious incident happened two weeks later,’ he said. The teacher had to suddenly leave for his hometown to attend to his father who had suffered a heart attack.

‘That day,’ Rasheed said. ‘Edayathu stood at the teacher’s table. He started posing questions like, you know: should the teacher beat students with the hockey stick? Don’t they teach us, during the morning assembly, to love every human being as our own brother and sister? Do you want the teacher to return? To the last question the class responded, No, never.

‘Edayathu then asked us to fold our hands, as we did every day in the assembly. He led the prayer, “God, save us from the cruel teacher, kill his father slowly so that he can be away from us as long as possible.” Every student joined in.’

‘He did that!’ she said.

‘Three weeks later, the teacher’s father died. It made some students feel extremely guilty. One of the boys squealed on Edayathu to the school principal, a foreign padree. All hell broke loose. Krishnamurthy was expelled. The horrified principal held special classes for us. They told us we had sinned, that it was wrong to pray for someone’s death. But Krishnamurthy was my hero. Before he left for south India to live with his grandparents, I bought him a farewell gift. A hockey stick.’

‘Hockey stick,’ Uma said, laughing, at the same time recognizing it was the moment to execute the next step of her plan.

‘EPK wants to meet you,’ she said.

He did not reply to her. Instead, he began to read out the address of HOPE. ‘This is your office?’Rasheed asked.

‘I live here as well,’ she replied, perplexed. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘I want to send some stuff for you,’ he replied.

‘What?’

‘You will see,’ he said in a deadpan voice. ‘Okay, you will get it tomorrow.’

Uma tried to cajole him into revealing what he planned to send across to her. But he refused to provide her a clue, whetting her curiosity even further. There was a delightful playfulness in their engagement, as she tried to guess what the gift was. Each of her guesses, wide of the mark as they were, he rejected. Through their animated conversation Rasheed thought he had been wrong in believing that Uma had become tired of him, that he was a tiresome case she could not handle on her own. Later in the evening, he explained to her what the ROLT test was, and why and how he had subsequently substituted ‘last’ in the Return of last thoughts with ‘lost’. On being told about the circumstances in which the test had been devised, Uma decided to talk to Dr Vikram Rathore to understand better the psychology of Rasheed Halim.

Secret History

O Hindus,

On 6 December, you the Hindus, the only true people of this holy land, the only legitimate children of your Mother, will get another chance to prove your manhood, and reclaim that which was taken away forcibly by the barbarians, who came here centuries ago and defiled the purity of your motherland, plundered and raped her with a cruelty your history had never witnessed before. There are now only eighteen days left for the brave sons of the land to assemble in the town of Ayodhya and remove the last vestige of slavery, obliterate the symbol of your humiliation, and raze to the ground the mosque whose domes have mocked you for centuries.

We lack the cunning of those storytellers. We do not believe in whitewashing aspects of history inconvenient to us. Do you wish to have proof of our honesty? Then hear what we say: Mughal emperor Akbar was not as vile as the rest of his dynasty. To him we do not bestow the honorific great. About him, we assert he was just about tolerable to your ancestors. Instead of Akbar the Great, call him Akbar the Tolerable – and we promise we will not object.

You are shocked, you demand proof for our claims. Know it then, it was Akbar who abolished the imposition of jizya on your ancestors. Yes, you are right, jizya was the tax imposed on your ancestors because they did not convert to Islam. It was the money every adult Hindu paid to live under the protection of a Muslim ruler. Wicked were the Muslim jurists, they said those who neither paid jizya nor embraced Islam had no choice but to face death.

In the eighth year of Akbar’s reign an order was issued abolishing jizya. In 1562, the detested pilgrim tax had been already abolished. Yes, it was the money Hindus were required to pay for visiting their holy places. For the first time in over three centuries of Islamic rule, the state did not seem to discriminate between Hindus and Muslims. Fair was Akbar, he appointed Hindus to coveted posts in the imperial service. Tolerant was Akbar, he openly celebrated non-Islamic festivals in his capital. Honourable was Akbar, he forbade the slaughter of the cow because he realized Hindus worship the animal. Such changes were not cosmetic. Stringently were the royal decrees implemented. Thus, for instance, was exiled a well-known Muslim divine who had been found guilty of cow-slaughter.

You are not impressed, you ask the question: was not Akbar’s motive aimed at co-opting the Hindus and blunting their opposition? What you say is tenable. A foreign ruler, however noble and wise, can never become indigenous. To us, such a ruler is always a reminder of our enslavement. O wise sons, yet we must add, it is better to grant religious freedom to win over a people than terrorize them into submission. You smile and say: so there is at least one ruler about whose qualities the storytellers and the author of Secret History are in agreement. You smile and add, call him great, call him tolerable, yet both formulations show Akbar had gained acceptance across the religious divide.

Let us tell you: wrong are those who feel Akbar is dear to Muslims. Misguided are those who believe Muslims consider him as their greatest emperor. O wise sons, we know Muslims well. Simple are the yardsticks by which they judge a ruler. For them it always comes down to a few questions: did the ruler under scrutiny create conditions conducive for spreading Islam? Did the community of the faithful swell in numbers under his command? For Muslims, only those rulers are worthy who either slay non-believers or convert them to Islam.

Among themselves they say Akbar was no slayer of Hindus. Should you press them further, they will declare, Akbar was no Muslim, Akbar did not believe in Allah. You are stunned. You ask, why should they not consider the most successful emperor of medieval India Muslim? O wise sons, in Islam there is no room for independent inquiry. Surely you have heard about Akbar’s experiments with Truth. In 1575, Akbar constructed Ibadat Khana, or the House of Worship, in Fatehpur Sikri. To it were first invited learned men of different Muslim sects to discuss matters of religion. Each argued his point, each fought for his own Truth. Disappointed was Akbar as Muslim theologians called each other names.

Horrified at the disagreement among Muslim holy men, Akbar invited others to introduce their religion to him. Purushottama and Devi represented the Hindus, Hari Vijaya Suri and Bhanuchandra Upadhyay came from the side of Jains; also invited to Ibadat Khana were the priests from Parsi and Christian communities. Each illuminated the emperor on the metaphysical aspects of his religion. Each placed before the emperor the tenets of his religion. Gradually, it dawned upon the emperor that Truth was not the monopoly of Islam.

Impressed by the religion of Zarathustra, Akbar ordered a sacred fire to blaze perpetually in his palace. Never was the fire to extinguish, Akbar declared, for he saw in it a Divine symbol. For Muslims, this was an act as terrible as idol worship. Then Prince Murad was asked to take instructions in Christianity, Abu Fazal was ordered to translate the Gospel into Persian. Akbar began to worship the Sun, undertake yogic exercise, and patronize a philosopher who openly declared, ‘The greatest injury comprehended in a prophetic mission is the obligation to submit to one like us of the human species.’

In 1582, Akbar etched out the contours of what historians think was a new religion. Called Din-i-Illahi, or the Divine Faith, it was Sufi in conception and Zoroastrian in its rituals. It was a combination of practical and rational principles culled from all religions. Strictly monotheistic as it was, the Divine Faith of Akbar owed more to Islam than Hinduism. In Din-i-Illahi we see an attempt of the Mughal emperor to win the allegiance of Hindu nobles. Through Din-i-Illahi, Akbar sought to place himself above religious affiliations. His religion was not preached to the masses, it won just about seventeen followers in his lifetime. It is for you to ask: why didn’t Akbar preach the religion to his people? Why didn’t he popularize the so-called religion he had himself established? Akbar was neither vain nor foolish. For him, Din-i-Illahi had only political symbolism, for him the Divine Faith was an instrument to blur the civilizational divide between the Hindus and Muslims of his court.

Yet this simple fact is beyond the comprehension of Muslims. In their fury they ask: what kind of believer was Akbar who did not slay the philosopher who slandered the Prophet? What kind of Muslim was he who turned his face to the Sun and paid obeisance to the Fire? What kind of Muslim emperor was Akbar who did not exert in the path of Allah?

In the eyes of Muslims, Akbar is a terrible example to their children. To praise the emperor who questioned the Quran is to encourage the children to emulate him. To hail the emperor who did not punish the slanderer of the Prophet is to sow the seeds of heresy in the community. In the story of Akbar, as narrated by those storytellers, Muslims read a subtle message: only those among them will be praised in modern India who turn away from their religion. This is the reason why Muslims deride Akbar the Tolerable, this is the reason why they tell their children, Akbar was no Muslim, Akbar did not believe in Allah.

O wise sons, compare yourself to the Muslims. They disown their greatest emperor because they love their Prophet more; you adhere to non-violence even though Lord Ram is homeless. They kill the man who derides the Prophet, you cannot lift the sword against those who evicted Lord Ram from his birthplace. Overcome your weaknesses, hear your voice, and follow what is right. Come to Ayodhya on 6 December, rise and raise your arms, rise and say, Lord Ram.

It was late afternoon when Sheela emerged from Rasheed Halim’s flat. She looked pale and exhausted and her bottle-green kameez was soaked in sweat. She stood on the threshold, admiring the transformation she had brought about: the floor glistened, and the earlier mustiness of the flat had diminished because of the light and the draught coming through the windows, opened wide now.

Sheela whirled around as she heard footsteps approach the landing. ‘Arrey sahib, idhar kaise,’ she exclaimed, pulling the door shut.

Dr Vikram Rathore frowned, and pointed his thumb at the flat, to tell her he had come to meet Rasheed.

Sheela started to descend the staircase. Strange were these sahibs, she thought, reluctant to meet their neighbours, and yet driving miles through bheed-bhad to meet their friends. But these two were obviously jigri-dosts, friends for a long time, for the new sahib couldn’t have befriended the Muslim boy within three weeks of shifting to Hemant Kunj.

She stopped before Dr Rathore, who was standing three steps below. Her supple body loomed over him. In her eyes anxiety was tinged with amusement. ‘Sahib, mind phail,’ she whispered softly.

Sheela touched her temple with the index finger, which she turned around mimicking the action of tightening a screw. ‘Sahib, mind phail, screw dheela,’ she said.

It was obvious she was talking about Rasheed. His forehead furrowed in dismay.

‘Kuchh nahin, khaali.’

Sheela said she had opened the front door with the duplicate key an hour or two ago. It had been a sight – no cane chairs, no dining table, not even the wall hangings. She had promptly concluded the Muslim boy had shifted out without telling her. A series of questions had dogged her: why did he lie to her? Why did he have to keep his departure a secret? At each question, she had trembled in anger, feeling slighted that her Muslim boy too had chosen to treat her as just another part-timer who wasn’t worthy of a good-bye. That was why in the jhuggi-jhopri they were cautioned never to trust the sahibs and memsahibs beyond their monthly wages.

Suddenly noticing the telephone on the stool, she had quickly walked inside, closing the door behind her. The intensity of her rage had crashed against her incomprehension, as she also became aware of the curtains drawn across the windows of the drawing room. Why had he left these behind? Unable to find an appropriate answer, Sheela had sauntered into the kitchen to find the refrigerator missing. Cockroaches had scurried around as she opened the cupboards, which were stripped bare but for a few plates, glasses, a knife and two steel utensils. The frying pan had been left on the gas stove. A vague premonitory feeling had begun to claw her. Could he have, in his madness, donated the furniture and the crockery, as he had the five new sweaters and the two blankets to her?

‘Na, na, na,’ she had muttered, in an attempt to stifle the reproachful murmur of her conscience.

Dr Rathore glanced at his watch.

‘Uske baad …’ she said.

Sheela had walked into the bedroom. No bed, no TV; just two mattresses on the floor, with pillows and sheets strewn over them. She had opened the wardrobe to find his clothes intact. The Muslim boy was bound to return, of this she had been sure, for he wouldn’t have otherwise left behind his clothes and the gas connection that was so difficult to procure through official channels. But to whom could he have donated the furniture and the fridge, the crockery and the cutlery, and why? And where was he?

She had pondered over these questions standing outside the other room of the flat. Gently, she had pushed the door open and peeped inside.

‘Dekho, dekho,’ Sheela had exclaimed at the sight of Rasheed sitting in the easy chair, his head tilted to the side. He had drifted into a deep sleep, in the manner of those men of the jhuggi-jhopri who chase the white powder or drink an entire bottle to enter the world of blissful forgetfulness. Sheela had surveyed the room. No cassette player, no book-case, no writing table and chair; just the steel box in the corner, with an assortment of things on it.

‘Utho, Utho,’ she had shouted. She had clicked her tongue and clapped her hands to wake up the Muslim boy, reluctant to touch a man other than her mard. Unable to stir the Muslim boy with the noise she was making, she had squatted on the floor to hold the legs of the easy chair and pushed it hard with all her strength.

A minute later, he had opened his eyes. He had seemed utterly lonely and broken.

‘Sheela.’ His voice had been barely audible.

‘Table, kursi, fridge?’

In many ways it had been the most natural question to ask. The bare rooms had an anarchic reality deeply disturbing. Instead of answering her question, all that the Muslim boy had done was take out a few crumpled currency notes and order her to fetch two bowls of chicken soup from the Chinese food van. Sheela had smiled in relief: his hunger was proof that he hadn’t keeled over.

And then?

‘Mind phail, screw dheela,’ Sheela said. After she had taken the money from him, the Muslim boy promptly got up from the chair to go and sleep in the bedroom, on the mattress lying on the floor. No instructions about cleaning the house, no explanation about what had happened to the furniture. It could not be denied, she said, that his world had shrunk to the circumference of his mind, and the rivets of his personality had become dangerously loose.

Sheela held out the duplicate key before Dr Vikram Rathore. She could open the door and let him inside; all that he had to do on his departure was pull the door behind him, to activate the spring lock. Climbing the stairs to the door, she turned to the doctor and wondered what the Muslim boy’s problem was, how he could have been transformed overnight.

Dr Rathore smiled at her expansively. She didn’t have to worry about the Muslim boy, in another few days he would recover from the infirmity afflicting him: he had taken ill on holiday and the doctor had prescribed him sedatives, the neend ki golis.

Dr Rathore looked confident. Sheela smiled, opening the door and standing aside.

But what he had told her must not be disclosed to anyone, he continued. And should the neighbours inquire from her about the furniture, which they must have seen getting loaded on the pickup van, she should concoct a story about the Muslim boy’s plan to refurnish his house. But no screw-dheela story, no description about his queer behaviour. Did she understand that?

She nodded.

And yes, he added in the same stern tone, as she began to go down the staircase, since he didn’t plan to wake the Muslim boy, she wasn’t to tell him about his visit either. The doctor said he would tell him about it himself.

‘Samjhi?’ the doctor asked.

It was an order, and he expected obedience.

Dr Rathore stepped into the flat. The smell of phenol hung in the air. There was an order to the emptiness of the flat; it seemed the past had been swept off to prepare for a new beginning.

He peeped into the bedroom. Rasheed was asleep.

‘Rasheed,’ Dr Rathore called out softly.

In the utility room, the sun wove the pattern of the window grill on the floor. He walked to the steel box in the corner. There was a strip of pills there. He read the name; it wasn’t what he had prescribed. He cursed the chemists for selling sleeping pills without prescription.

On the box he saw the notebook. Between its pages was an envelope. He took it out and opened the flap. Inside it was the invite from Prof. Utpal Chatterjee. For a few seconds he looked through the glass door of the balcony, before tearing out a page from the notebook and writing, Centre for Gandhian Studies, Rajpur Marg, Prof. Utpal Chatterjee. Folding the paper to put in his pocket, he briskly walked out to the drawing room. He stopped to glance at the bedroom door. It was safe to make a call from here, he concluded.

Dr Rathore squatted next to the telephone. He dialled the number of HOPE.

‘Uma,’ he said.

‘How’s he?’ she asked.

‘He’s sleeping,’ Dr Rathore replied.

‘You talked to him?’

‘He was asleep when I came in.’

‘Meaning?’ Uma asked. ‘How did you enter the flat?’

Dr Rathore told her about Sheela, the part-time maid who had let him in.

‘What a jam I’m in,’ Uma said. She sounded harassed.

‘I understand,’ Dr Rathore said. ‘But you have gone too far. Have patience. We will succeed.’

‘It was so embarrassing,’ she said. ‘I mean, there’s a pickup van with household stuff. The driver hands me a letter. It’s from Rasheed. And what does it say? “Uma, accept my donation for HOPE. I don’t need the stuff anymore.” Cane chairs, dining table, TV, bed, cutlery, books, a cassette deck … What am I supposed to do with them?’

Dr Rathore didn’t quite know what to tell her.

‘You must convince Rasheed to take back the stuff,’ Uma continued. ‘Suppose he does something silly, and they start investigating where the furniture is, imagine the mess I’d be in.’

‘Relax,’ Dr Rathore said. ‘I think you will be more effective if you were to meet him. Come over to my flat tomorrow. We can talk things over and you can go to meet him.’

There was silence. And because she hadn’t spoken, Dr Rathore believed he had persuaded her into meeting Rasheed. ‘Once you meet him,’ the doctor continued, ‘we should try to get him to attend the meeting at the Centre for Gandhian Studies scheduled for Monday. There’s an invite for him lying here.’

‘Meeting?’ she snapped. ‘You think he’d go? What’s this meeting about?’

‘Against the author of Secret History,’ he said, glancing at his watch.

‘Really?’

‘His colleagues would be there at the meeting,’ the doctor continued. ‘The principal organizer, someone called Prof. Utpal Chatterjee, is known to Rasheed. I’m sure he will go if you were to accompany him.’

‘No,’ Uma responded. ‘You don’t expect me to give up everything and …’

‘I’ll attend the meeting. So can your friend Krishnamurthy,’ the doctor suggested. ‘We can take it from there.’

‘Rasheed didn’t even express a desire to meet Krishnamurthy.’

‘You have to try, you can’t give up.’

There was silence as she considered his suggestion.

‘Let me think,’ she said.

Dr Rathore hung up and unplugged the phone once again. He closed the entrance door as Sheela had instructed and bounded down the stairs. As he drove out from Sector XIII of Hemant Kunj, he saw Wasim Khan among a knot of mothers and domestic helps, standing at the side of the road that bisected the sprawling residential colony. It was the spot where Junior Model School’s bus picked up children every morning and dropped them off in the afternoon. It was Wasim Khan’s responsibility to fetch his grandchildren, Waris and Waqar, from the bus stop. And though he had arrived from Mughalabad only two hours ago, he decided he’d surprise them by taking them from the bus-stop to the shopping complex of Sector XIII for a treat of chocolates and cold drinks.

Dr Rathore knew Wasim Khan had been away to Mughalabad. Had he not been running late for his OPD, had Sheela not delayed him, he would have stopped to tell him about Rasheed’s donation to HOPE. Dr Rathore decided he’d visit him in the evening instead.

But other, more pressing worries arising from a game of soccer, in which his grandchildren participated, were to soon buffet the old man.

Sanjay Khanna, the star striker of Junior Model School, rolled the ball to Mohammed Hashamuddin, who was watching the selection of two teams of matching strength. Standing around were Waris Khan and Atul Sinha, mates from Class V, competitors for the top rank, brilliant at studies and poor at games, yet nominated to select the teams because they could be expected to be fair at what was of little interest to them. The school had dispersed ten minutes ago, but the vice-principal sent the children to the playground with a football as Bus No. 6 had been sent to the neighbourhood workshop for repairs.

There was unanimity over Sanjay and Hashamuddin leading the two teams. Hashamuddin was to the junior school’s defence what Sanjay was to its attack, each indispensable to the team’s fortunes. They were the subject of passionate discussions, their skills compared to determine who was better among the two. The comparison was unfair: Sanjay’s ability to dribble and swiftness were reflected in the goals he scored; Hashamuddin’s menacing tackles were not amenable to statistical conversion.

The comparison had sparked rivalry between the two. It had been accentuated because of the inter-house competition: the only match in which the star striker had failed to score was against Hashamuddin’s team. It had stoked speculation that perhaps Sanjay’s impressive goal tally in the junior school league was because none of the rival teams boasted a Hashamuddin. Soon, exaggerated accounts started doing the rounds, of how at the end of the inter-house match, the sturdy defender had mimicked the tumble Sanjay had repeatedly taken outside the penalty box. Sissy, Hashamuddin had been quoted saying, incapable of withstanding even a light shoulder push.

From a distance, Sanjay saw Hashamuddin intently watching the selection of the two teams. He saw in Hashamuddin’s enthusiasm the opportunity to needle him, to settle scores for his reported derision. Sanjay sauntered over to Hashamuddin, grinning.

The selectors were to choose the team they wanted to play in through a toss of the coin. Waris won, and opted for Sanjay’s.

‘Your team is weak,’ Atul Sinha teased Waris. ‘We have Hasha and Vijay.’

‘Ha,’ Sanjay promptly countered. ‘Hasha can’t score goals.’

Hashamuddin took the bait. ‘I’ll show you,’ he remarked.

‘Defenders don’t win matches, Hasha,’ Sanjay persisted.

A titter passed through the boys. Hashamuddin rolled the ball under his instep. ‘You have forgotten the inter-house match?’ he asked, smirking.

‘Let’s start the game,’ Vijay Sarin interjected. A student in fourth grade, Sarin was tipped to win the junior school colours next year.

‘Sarin, just see, one match I didn’t score and he brags about it all the time,’ Sanjay hissed. ‘You are jealous of me, Hasha. You foul. And you cheat.’

‘Saala, rascal … What did you say?’ Hasha threatened, moving forward.

Vijay Sarin clutched the forearm of Hashamuddin, restraining him.

‘Saala …’ Hasha repeated again.

‘He speaks the way he plays. Like a loafer,’ Sanjay taunted.

Hasha scowled; another sarcastic remark and he’d assault his tormentor. Someone needed to step in to defuse the tension, a role usually reserved for the academically brilliant because their grades in examinations were inexplicably considered a reflection of their moral superiority.

‘Sanjay, stop teasing him,’ Waris said.

‘He started it. Hasha is a loafer.’

‘No,’ Waris contradicted. ‘Sanjay, you started it.’

‘You are supporting Hasha because the two of you are Muslim.’

Waris was stunned into silence.

In the months preceding November, the debate over the mosque in Ayodhya had gradually seeped through the insulated precincts of the school. It had found its echo in the awkward questions repeatedly asked of Waris: about the practice of circumcision among Muslims and the gods he worshipped. But, today, Sanjay had undermined his individuality and moral authority. Waris couldn’t take that.

‘You began the fight. Ask others,’ Waris retorted.

‘I didn’t. He did,’ Sanjay said, pointing to Hashamuddin. ‘Waris, you have to change Hasha. You did not go on a school trip last year. We were shocked when Hasha and Afzal refused to enter the historic temple the teacher had taken us to.’

The others were embarrassed at the sudden change in the topic of the conversation.

Gesturing at Atul Sinha, the star forward asked, ‘What was the word you used for Muslims?’

‘What?’ Atul looked puzzled.

Rajiv Malhotra, a fifth-grade student, took the cue. ‘Fanatics. My uncle says Muslims are fanatics.’

‘Why are you talking like that?’ Waris protested.

‘You all hate us,’ Rajiv Malhotra said. ‘I have read in the pages of Secret History how you Muslims destroyed our temples.’

‘Yes, it is true. I have read it too,’ said another boy.

‘In our colony a new page of Secret History appears every morning. Muslim kings forced many to change their religion,’ remarked a third.

‘It’s true, it is true,’ three or four boys exclaimed in unison.

Sanjay and Hasha and their rivalry were forgotten. Their focus was Waris Khan. As the most brilliant Muslim student, it was assumed he would speak for his community and spring to its defence. Exasperated, he remarked, ‘It’s a lie. We didn’t destroy temples.’

‘No,’ Rajiv Malhotra countered. ‘Babri Masjid was built at the spot where the Ram temple was. Secret History says so.’

‘Stop it, Rajiv,’ Atul admonished. ‘Waris is our classmate.’

‘Why didn’t Hasha enter the temple?’ Rajiv demanded.

With the ball firmly under the right foot, Hasha burst out, ‘Rajiv, ask me. We Muslims don’t worship stones, you fool.’

The ferocity of his rage shocked the boys into silence.

The star striker saw his opening. ‘Hasha,’ he smirked. ‘You should live in Pakistan.’

‘Muslims favour Pakistan in cricket matches,’ Rajiv added.

‘It is not true,’ Waris shouted. ‘I always support India.’

‘You will see what will happen on 6 December,’ Sanjay taunted, finding a new victim. ‘You are so few. We are such large numbers.’

Waris kept quiet, fearing he’d begin to cry.

For Hashamuddin, Waris’s silence demeaned the entire community. He lashed out, ‘What few? One Muslim can take on ten Hindus.’

‘My father is in police. We also have guns,’ Afzal spoke for the first time.

The debate had drawn an invisible line through the group, separating the Muslims from the Hindus. Vijay Sarin was standing at a distance; he wasn’t willing to participate in the debate because Hashamuddin was his role model in soccer. Atul was silent. He and Waris hung out together during lunch-break.

‘We have more guns,’ Rajiv shot back.

‘One Muslim equals ten Hindus,’ Hasha repeated. ‘You eat vegetables, we have meat.’

‘Why don’t you prove it?’ Sanjay countered.

‘Why, you want to fight?’ Hasha bristled.

‘No. Let us play a match between Muslims and Hindus. Now.’

The proposal evoked a murmur of approval.

‘Yes, yes,’ chanted a few. Another taunted, ‘Will you play, Hasha?’

Hashamuddin sensed in their enthusiasm the confidence that accrues from superior numerical strength. Defeat was inevitable. Yet he couldn’t retreat, as it would invite greater derision than the humiliation inevitable on the field.

‘Saala Sanjay,’ he barked back. ‘We will show you what Muslims are.’

Hashamuddin surveyed the bunch of six boys huddled together. Waris and he took the number of Muslims to eight. Like a general he assessed their football skills. Waris: ordinary; Afzal: ditto; Baig: good. The others were fourth-grade students – Ali, Imran; thank god for Iqbal: he was the goalkeeper from the same batch. Waqar was the youngest, in third grade; he was at least swift on his feet.

Hasha signalled them to come to him.

The other group moved towards Sanjay. Facing them was Waris. To his right were Vijay Sarin and Atul Sinha and a boy on crutches.

Waris beseeched them, ‘You can’t play a match between Hindus and Muslims.’

‘Ask Hasha to say sorry,’ Rajiv responded.

‘The vice-principal will punish us,’ Atul said.

‘I will complain to the vice-principal right now,’ Waris threatened.

‘Hasha, your Muslim friend is scared of us,’ Sanjay mocked.

‘They took away his guts when they nipped his sushu,’ Rajiv added.

They guffawed. Their faces were devoid of sympathy and love and respect. Waris helplessly quivered with the desire to pulverize his tormentors. He walked over to Hasha.

‘It’s unfair. They are so few,’ Vijay Sarin protested.

‘Become a Muslim,’ someone responded.

The two teams began moving to their ends. The headcount – Muslims: eight; Hindus: seventeen. Atul Sinha walked to the sideline, joining the boy on crutches. Hasha prevailed upon Vijay Sarin to referee the game, in the hope of a fair supervision from a footballer who knew the rules.

The ball was placed at the centre. The match was to last till the bus returned from the mechanic’s garage.

The strategy of the Muslims was to bolster the defence against an opposition double in number. Waqar was to play forward; the rest were to stay behind. Hasha positioned himself midfield, hoping to fall back in a jiffy and yet save on the few extra yards in an unlikely assault on the opposition. The defender turned to them and said, ‘Most of them can’t play. Try to pass the ball to me. I will clear the field, send the ball as far as possible. Retrieve the ball slowly. It will kill time.’

Hasha turned to Waqar and said, ‘You stay beyond the centre-line, in their half. Because we are so few most of them will stray into our side. Even the idiots among them will think they can easily score a goal against us. Once that happens, I will kick the ball to you. Run fast with it, as far as you can.’

Waqar nodded and moved to the centre.

‘Waris,’ said Hasha, ‘Don’t tackle Sanjay. Stay a few feet away from him, face him and keep falling back. It will slow him down.’

‘Yes captain,’ Waris said.

Hasha smiled, ‘Let’s give it to them, show them what we are.’

‘Yes boss,’ Waris said.

Vijay Sarin blew the whistle to begin the match.

Soon the Hindus were all over the Muslim half. But for Waqar, they had all fallen back. Behind him were the two Hindu defenders: Ashutosh Kothari, bespectacled, was in Waris’s class. The other was Ramesh Ahuja from third grade. The babe of the Muslim team was confident he could take them on, if the ball were to somehow come to him.

But the ball was in Sanjay’s possession, ten yards away from the penalty box at the other end. His movement was languid. The ball seemed glued to his bootlaces. His eyes darted around; the problem was his team didn’t have regular football players. They couldn’t kick hard. And Iqbal, the Muslim goalkeeper wasn’t a rookie. Sanjay surveyed the retreating defenders – the shot definitely had to be his.

Suddenly, Afzal darted across from the right, surprising the star forward. The ball slipped out of Sanjay’s control. It rolled down to Waris.

‘Waris,’ shouted Hasha. A back pass and the junior school team defender sent the ball sailing over the sideline.

‘Good show, Afzal,’ Hasha complimented.

Sanjay was keen to put his team in the lead. An early goal was always an insurance against a freak accident on the field.

The Hindu left winger’s throw was misdirected. Hasha swooped on it, and sent the ball soaring over the sideline again.

Further up, Waqar teased Ramesh Ahuja, ‘Can you kick as far as our captain?’

‘I don’t have to,’ replied Ashutosh. ‘The ball won’t come to our side.’

Back on the sideline, Raghuvendra was bouncing the ball, waiting for the players to settle down. Waris and Afzal were marking Sanjay. He gestured at Raghuvendra and quickly dashed to the right, hoping to scoop the ball on the run and dribble his way out of the bottleneck. But the toss was tame. It failed to reach Sanjay. Hasha intercepted the ball and kicked it out again.

‘Raghu, get the ball fast,’ Sanjay shouted. He turned to Vijay Sarin, the referee, and complained, ‘He is wasting time. It’s unfair.’

‘It is unfair to play against a team of eight,’ Vijay Sarin replied.

Seven minutes gone. Not a goal scored.

The Hindus quickly changed their strategy, to take advantage of their superior numerical strength. The move had been discussed at the time Raghuvendra had run to fetch the ball. Their players now crowded the left flank, outnumbering the Muslims.

As soon as Raghuvendra was about to release the ball, Rajiv dashed toward him. Even a novice couldn’t have thrown it elsewhere. Rajiv flicked the ball in the air. Waris rushed forward to meet it, misjudging the trajectory. It ricocheted off his shoulders and landed behind. Sanjay pounced on the ball and pirouetted on his heels. He began to move forward at a tremendous speed. Ali darted from the right and jumped at Sanjay. He swerved deftly to evade a clash.

Between the goal and Sanjay were Hasha and Iqbal. The speed of the raider was awesome. Hasha let his arch rival come forward, not attempting to intercept the ball, nor giving him room to take a shot at the goal. They were only two feet away from the penalty box. Sanjay swayed from right to left and then back again, in search of the elusive angle to kick the ball. He needed help, someone who could divide Hasha’s attention. His speed had been his undoing, he had left others behind. There was no option but for him to take a shot at the goal. He moved the ball to the right, Hasha followed suit; he kicked. Lacking the requisite space he couldn’t power it adequately. Iqbal collected it neatly.

Eleven minutes gone. The score was still 0-0.

Bouncing the ball, Iqbal surveyed the field. Could his kick cross the centre-line and reach Waqar? The chance had to be taken. The ball swirled high and bounced where Rajiv was. He took the ball in possession and rushed forward, the arc of his movement gradually shifting left, breaching the central phalanx. Sanjay had joined him. Challenging them was Waris. Rajiv passed the ball to Sanjay; it was relayed back. Back and forth again, Waris couldn’t concentrate. Sanjay pushed the ball to take a kick. Waris turned his back involuntarily. The ball grazed his hand. The referee blew the whistle.

The free kick was taken immediately, five yards from the penalty box.

There was a mad scamper for the ball. Hasha struggled to break the siege. All he could see were scrawny legs trying to wrest the ball out of his control. Rajiv found Sanjay, who deftly tapped the ball into the goal.

Fifteen minutes gone. A goal had been scored.

Morose, the Muslims walked slowly to take their positions.

‘Don’t think you have lost the match,’ Hasha egged them on. ‘Otherwise they will score a goal every minute.’

The Hindus were now coming in waves, pounding their way through a dispirited defence. Sanjay led the onslaught. Adrenaline flooded his blood. He sent the ball soaring across to the left flank. Raghuvendra collected it. He now had a free run to the goal. But his lack of ball control showed. He was tapping the ball a few feet ahead and running after it and, then, on reaching it, tapping it away again. The Hindus, in their enthusiasm, had rushed to where the ball was, exposing their right flank. It didn’t matter as Raghuvendra had now reached fifteen yards from the penalty box. He had the option of passing the ball. But a solo effort was to turn him into a hero, help the team attain an unbeatable lead. He fumbled; Hasha stole the ball from him.

The Muslim captain darted through his left flank, a graceful flash of muscles fleeting across, like a Dobermann on the chase. The Hindus hadn’t expected the Muslims to attack. And now they were vulnerable, watching Hasha cover the ground – ten, fifteen, twenty yards. This was the Muslims’ first foray into the rival camp. Ashutosh meekly came forward to tackle Hasha. The captain dribbled past him. Ahead was Ramesh Ahuja. Near him was Waqar.

Hasha scooped the ball over Ahuja’s head. The babe of the Muslim team rushed forward, the ball in his possession. The goalkeeper came forward tentatively. Waqar dribbled past him, tapped the ball into the goal and ran back into Hasha’s arms.

Twenty-two minutes gone. The two teams were level now.

Sanjay was crestfallen. He had misjudged the game. The strategy of attack had backfired. The defence needed bolstering; he couldn’t afford another surprise intrusion into his territory. Sanjay asked four players to stay behind. Two others were not to venture beyond ten to twelve yards of the centre. He was to lead the attack with a pack of eight. It would open up the field and create ample maneuvering space for him.

Hasha, too, had gone into a huddle with his team. The pace of the game had flushed Waris; there were bruises on his legs.

‘Waris, pray the bus comes fast,’ Hasha said.

‘I can’t lift my leg. They are mean and stupid.’

‘You can’t give up now,’ Hasha said. ‘I will now mark Sanjay. Waqar, remain in their half. Others stay behind and concentrate. Foul them if you can’t stop them. The defenders should push the ball to the goalkeeper. Iqbal, kick the ball over the sidelines.’ He smiled and added, ‘No rules against it.’

Twenty-five minutes gone. The score still read 1-1.

Sanjay was exasperated. A goal must be scored as soon as possible. The bus could come anytime now. A draw was as good as a defeat, as it would vindicate Hasha’s theory of one Muslim being equal to ten Hindus. The star forward was scampering around, running over to where the ball would go. Shadowing him was Hasha. Sanjay was below par, hampered by the poor passes of others. In the last five minutes, Hasha had snatched the ball twice, and sent it over the sideline.

Thirty minutes. A draw seemed inevitable.

‘Cheater-cock,’ Sanjay remarked. ‘You are killing time.’

The captain summoned Ashutosh and Ahuja. They were to stand outside the sideline, on either side. ‘Fetch the ball as quickly as possible,’ he snapped.

The Hindus were now a team of fifteen.

Raghuvendra was on the sideline, ready for the throw. Sanjay was jogging up and sideways with Hasha shadowing him. It was better to undertake an initiative independent of the captain. Suddenly, Raghuvendra twisted his torso and tossed the ball to Rajiv, unmarked and waiting.

Rajiv raced ahead for ten yards, unhindered. Afzal was first to recover ground. On seeing him approach, Rajiv passed the ball to Raghuvendra, who had joined him from the left flank. Afzal turned towards him, the ball was relayed back to Rajiv. Baig rushed to assist Afzal. The two Hindu forwards were running out of steam. Where was the captain?

Sanjay sprinted to where the ball was. In dogged pursuit was Hasha, shoulder to shoulder, stride to stride, straining every muscle to match the star striker reputed for his speed. Suddenly, Sanjay stopped; the Muslim captain stumbled and fell. Sanjay established a lead over his rival.

‘Here,’ Sanjay shouted.

He sliced his way through Afzal and Baig. His movement was a delight, his control exquisite. Ali rushed to block him. Sanjay deftly spun him around, fifteen yards away from the goal. Ali gasped in disbelief: Sanjay was nonpareil, arguably better than Hashamuddin. The goal was inevitable. There was only Waris to breeze past and then a shot at the goal manned by a nervous Iqbal.

The school bus entered the school compound.

Sanjay saw Waris crouch and move towards him. The star striker was amazed at the class topper’s audacity. Sanjay deftly dribbled past Waris, skipping over his stretched right leg. He was four yards from the penalty box. At the goal Iqbal moved forward to confront the striker.

They heard the bus honk twice.

‘The bus has come. The game is over,’ Waris shouted.

But the referee hadn’t blown the whistle. It was fair to stop the game only after an attempt at the goal, Vijay Sarin thought.

Something came over Waris. He leapt from behind; his foot slammed into Sanjay’s calf and sent him crashing to the ground.

‘Sorry,’ Waris moaned, watching Sanjay pick himself up.

The star striker flung his hand at the class topper and connected his right jaw. The next two blows landed on his nose and mouth. It sent him careening.

Hasha rushed forward to help Waris. Sanjay swung his arm. The sturdy defender blocked the blow, and took a swipe at Sanjay, hitting him on the shoulder. He stumbled. Others too had moved in. Rajiv pushed Hasha from behind. He fell on the ground. Raghuvendra and Rajiv were now upon him, kicking him in the stomach.

Vijay Sarin tried to intervene, but was rendered ineffective as Sanjay landed a blow on him. Waqar was trying to stem the blood oozing from his brother’s nose. The two were sobbing.

Down the field they saw the vice-principal come running towards them. Following him was the boy on crutches.

‘Stop fighting,’ the vice-principal shouted.

At 10.30 p.m., in the drawing room of Flat No. 1, Wasim Khan was drafting a letter to the school principal protesting against the football match between Hindus and Muslims. He had decided to mention only in passing the beating Waris had received: the cut lips, the bleeding nose, the bruised body were to be underplayed. What was to be emphasized was the child’s trauma at the realization that some of his classmates considered him as their enemy because of his religion.

Across the room was Wahid, son of Wasim and father of Waris and Waqar. He looked distraught. The evening had been spent in consoling the children, in rationalizing the world they had been introduced to. He doubted the efficacy of writing a letter to the school principal. What could it possibly achieve? Perhaps the school would organize counselling for the students who participated in the football game, or punish, even expel, those guilty of attacking his child. Could such steps repair the cracks in their world, insulate them from the outpouring of hatred expected in the days before 6 December?

Perhaps Dr Vikram Rathore had been right in suggesting they should go to the press with the football story, Wahid thought.

The doctor had come late that evening to tell them about Rasheed’s decision to gift away his possessions. They had been distracted; they had heard the doctor out of politeness. In the end, Wasim Khan had told the doctor about the crisis at home, the football match Waris and Waqar had been tricked into playing.

Dr Rathore had promptly advised them to go to the press with their story. The doctor said he had been to Rasheed’s flat in the afternoon, and had seen there an invite for a meeting a professor had convened. Against the author of Secret History; yes, whose writing, in a way, had inspired the children to play the match between Hindus and Muslims. Since Rasheed’s mental condition was such that they couldn’t talk to him about the match, the doctor had suggested they should turn to his friend, Kris.

‘Kris is with the Mirror,’ Dr Rathore had said, ‘Why don’t you talk to him about the match?’ The doctor had offered to be present at the time Kris called on them, and they could together discuss ways of doing a story, without compromising the Khans.

After the doctor had left, they had discussed whether or not to approach the press with the story. Wasim Khan and the children’s mother, Naseema, had been opposed to the idea. No point blowing up the incident, taking the controversy beyond the confines of the school; it could complicate the situation, they had argued. They could have trusted Rasheed; he was known to them. But Kris? Suppose he goofed up or betrayed their confidence and divulged the source of the story? It could even lead to the expulsion of their children from Junior Model School.

But Wahid had differed. What could the letter to the principal achieve? What was the nature of justice they were looking for? Punishment for Sanjay Khanna? The incident at the school had its origin in the big bad world of adults and their politics. The wounds of their children were the wounds of the community. Their display could demonstrate to others the poison politics had injected even into an elite school, which ought to be shamed for charging such high fees and yet failing to create an atmosphere of harmony. It was time, he had argued, for every Muslim to take a position against the politics of hate. Perhaps a newspaper story on the soccer game could bolster opposition to Secret History, and prompt the city authorities into taking action against its publication and circulation.

‘The middle path,’ Wasim Khan had remarked. ‘Take the middle path. Extreme positions sharpen divisions.’ His eyes had twinkled behind the thick lens as he said, ‘Waris and Waqar should have refused to play the match. They too are at fault.’ Yet he was writing the letter, he said, because to ignore the incident would be tantamount to telling Waris and Waqar that the soccer game symbolized how their adult life would be in their own country.

Wasim Khan completed drafting the letter, and passed it to Wahid for his approval. ‘Okay,’ Wahid said. ‘Send the letter. But we will also go to the press.’

Secret History

O Hindus,

On 6 December, you the Hindus, the only true people of this holy land, the only legitimate children of your Mother, will get another chance to prove your manhood, and reclaim that which was taken away forcibly by the barbarians, who came here centuries ago and defiled the purity of your motherland, plundered and raped her with a cruelty your history had never witnessed before. There are now only seventeen days left for the brave sons of the land to assemble in the town of Ayodhya and remove the last vestige of slavery, obliterate the symbol of your humiliation, and raze to the ground the mosque whose domes have mocked you for centuries.

Obstinate are those storytellers, they still insist on describing the Mughal empire as a joint project of Hindus and Muslims. Against us they were heard arguing, ignore the example of Rana Pratap, he was the only Rajput prince who did not submit to the Mughal emperor. They then declared gravely, an exception cannot be invoked to propound a theory in history. Shame on them, they don’t know about the different stages through which resistance of any kind always passes. In the beginning, opposition is universal. Defeat begins to breed pessimism. The weak are first co-opted to service Power. Then follow others who see in submission their hope of preservation. O wise sons, only the exceptional keeps aloft the banner of freedom, only he keeps alight the flame of freedom.

To this category belong the Gurus of the Sikhs, ten in number, who lived over two centuries and a half. Immense are your debts to Guru Nanak, who founded the Sikh religion. Immeasurable was his contribution in ensuring Islam did not overwhelm your motherland. Wise sons, as we have already told you, through a combination of the sword and the patronage system, the Muslims brought Hindus into their fold. The other method they adopted was to exploit the weakness of your religion. Hinduism, they pointed out, divides its people into four hierarchical groups. At the top sits the Brahmin who perpetuates his hegemony through rigid rules: none can go up the social ladder, none can come down it; it is birth that determines a person’s status. Now, the mullah would clamour, hear what the Quran teaches, all are equal before Allah.

We know you cannot help but laugh at their silly ideas. We all know human society has never been equal, there is always the ruler and the ruled, the employer and his workers. In the medieval era, though, Islam’s notion of equality enticed the illiterate into leaving our fold. To counter the Muslim propaganda, from village to village Guru Nanak roamed, preaching against the evils of an unequal social system. To the plebeian, Guru Nanak held out the vision of a society based on equality and brotherhood. Those taught to detest the system of Brahmins began to flock to Guru Nanak. Believe us, noble sons, every Hindu whom the Guru won over to his idea was an Indian saved from diabolical ideas.

At the death of Guru Nanak, the spiritual leadership passed to Guru Angad. Then came Guru Amar Das and Guru Ram Das; in 1581 the mantle of Sikh leadership fell upon Guru Arjun Dev. The hymns of the Gurus had been compiled together in the Adi Granth, which constituted the scriptures of the new religion. From strength to strength the Sikh religion grew, inciting the jealousy of mullahs. Into the emerging conflict of religions entered the Mughal emperor with his immense power.

In October 1605, Akbar’s son Jahangir ascended the Mughal throne. Soon, Jahangir’s son, Prince Khusru ran to Punjab and raised the banner of rebellion. The imperial army was dispatched to crush the revolt of the pretender. At Jalandhar the two armies clashed, the prince was defeated and imprisoned. A terrible witch-hunt began against those who to the prince had provided assistance. Among those whom the Mughal emperor targeted was Guru Arjun Dev. O noble sons, saints, as we all know, have a code of life different from us ordinary folks. When the fugitive had come asking for a sum of money, the Guru acceded to his request. Those storytellers will say, for emperors of the past, Muslim or Hindu, a friend of the rival was an enemy too.

Wicked are those storytellers, they conceal the real purpose behind Jahangir’s decision to punish Guru Arjun Dev. Open Jahangir’s autobiography, in it you will read, ‘So many had been fascinated by the Guru’s ways and teachings … Many times the thought had been presenting itself to my mind that either I put an end to this false traffic, or that he be brought into the fold of Islam.’

To Lahore was the Guru summoned. Stark was the choice before him: endure torture till death or expunge references to Islam in the Adi Granth. On a hot iron sheet he was made to sit. Into a cauldron of boiling water he was thrown. Blisters covered his body, yet his spirit remained firm. On Day Five, the Guru asked to take a bath in the river Ravi. Into the depths of the river did the Guru disappear. At that moment was born a militant religion.

On the death of Guru Arjun Dev, his son Hargobind became the spiritual head of the Sikh community. Eleven-year-old was he, yet he initiated the militarization of his followers. Years rolled on, the Sikh community continued to grow. In 1664, Tegh Bahadur became the ninth Guru of the Sikhs. Meanwhile, a bloody war of succession had brought Aurangzeb Alamgir to the Mughal throne. About him we will write at length later. For today, it is sufficient for you to know about the firmaan Aurangzeb issued on 8 April, 1669. Through this firmaan, Aurangzeb ordered the provincial governors to demolish temples and religious schools of the infidels.

Most of the governors implemented the order stringently and went even a step ahead. Among them was the governor of Kashmir, Iftikhar Khan, who began to compel the Hindu Pandits to embrace Islam. Learned were these Pandits, deeply religious were they. The bigotry of Aurangzeb Alamgir prompted the community leaders to retreat to the Amarnath caves. There they prayed to Lord Shiva for deliverance from religious persecution. Lo and behold, one among the pious Pandits had a dream. In it he heard Lord Shiva advise him to visit Guru Tegh Bahadur.

To Anandpur a batch of 500 Pandits came. To Guru Tegh Bahadur they narrated their woes. They were advised to inform Aurangzeb about their readiness to accept Islam, should the emperor first succeed in apostatizing Guru Tegh Bahadur. Livid was the Mughal emperor, to Delhi was Guru Tegh Bahadur brought on 5 November, 1675. For the next five days, the Mughal menials alternated between torturing the Guru and persuading him to embrace Islam. Steadfast remained the Guru, he said he neither converted others by force nor submitted to force.

To break his resolve, the Mughals turned their ire against his three followers – Bhai Mati Das, Bhai Dayal Das and Bhai Sati Das. Between two pillars was Bhai Mati Das tied, into two parts he was sawn alive. Into a cauldron of water was Bhai Dayal Das thrown, to death he was boiled. In cotton wool was Bhai Sati Das wrapped, to death he was burned. Unable to break Guru Tegh Bahadur’s will, a royal order was issued for his execution. On 11 November, to a public spot in Delhi’s Chandni Chowk was the Guru taken. These were the lines he composed before he was beheaded.

The truly enlightened ones

Are those who neither incite fear in others

Nor fear anyone themselves.

Guru Tegh Bahadur adopted a cause which was not his. Guru Tegh Bahadur sacrificed his life to uphold what he believed in. And you brave sons, passively you accept the injustices of the past, unwilling you are to fight for your rights. Fear not death, lust not for life. We don’t want bloodshed, we don’t hanker after violence, the best way to foster peace is to have Muslims surrender the Babri Masjid. Tell them, you are open to reconciliation. Tell them, you are also prepared to fight on 6 December. Till then, rise and raise your arms, rise and say Lord Ram.

Through the peephole of the entrance door, the bony face of the woman standing outside appeared bewitching. Her skin was the colour of dust, taut and smooth. Her thick black hair, shoulder length, curled around the ears. The nose was sharp, the lips thin, and eyes dark and smoky. Of medium height, an inch or two shorter than him, her body, in a black shalwar-kameez, was innocent of excess or austerity. Rasheed couldn’t guess her age: she could be anywhere between thirty and forty.

Rasheed espied her bring the bunch of roses close to her face. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply and held her breath before her breasts came down, exhaling.

The vision was hallucinatory, dream-like. Who was she, and where had she come from? And what was she doing at his door?

He stood at the peephole, enthralled by the vision. She seemed to belong to him in a way he failed to comprehend, like a fragment of memory suddenly floating into his consciousness. He thought he had seen and known her before, but had forgotten her name and couldn’t recall the place and the time of their last meeting. It was confounding for him to feel an affinity for the woman outside. He was filled with a sense of loss. Who could tell what aspects of his being his suffering had effaced.

She stretched her hand and pressed the doorbell, jolting him out of the reverie.

Rasheed pulled away from the door and leaned against the wall. Who was she, and for whom were the roses? It seemed her name was about to be squeezed out of his memory. He peered at the woman, again. A faint smile lingered on her light lips. No, he had been mistaken in believing she belonged to his past, to his memory. She was a stranger who had strayed to his house.

Rasheed opened the door.

She looked at him and smiled tentatively. On the floor was a cane basket. In it were small ceramic pots with plants, green and fresh. Next to it was a hamper; white napkins lay on the top. The air was suffused with the fragrance of roses. And the sunlight was warm.

He stared at her impassively. His kurta-pajamas were crumpled, his hair dishevelled and the stubble on his cheeks more than a week old. His body odour suggested he hadn’t bathed for days.

She thought his body seemed an extension of his voice, sick and in need of rest. His eyes were a surprise, though. They, even in their puffiness, glowed with the intensity she had never seen in any person before. She looked into his eyes and smiled expansively, revealing coffee-brown gums.

‘Rasheed?’ she asked.

He nodded. So he had been right: the woman was indeed known to him.

The woman asked playfully, ‘Do you recognize me?’

Perhaps he knew her from his school or college days, and time had transformed her beyond recognition. He looked at her and said nothing, apprehensive of the past reclaiming him.

The woman took her right hand to the ear, mimicking the action of holding a telephone handset. ‘Hello,’ she said, ‘Did you have your breakfast? How could you? The utensils and the refrigerator have been carted away.’ She smiled and said, ‘You still can’t recognize me. Could my voice have changed overnight?’

‘Uma,’ he whispered.

She held out the bouquet and kissed him on his left cheek. Her body smelt fresh, and the hair felt smooth as it brushed against his neck. She was standing close to him now, smiling effusively. Uma compared his face to the image she had conceived on the basis of his voice, like old friends acquainting themselves to physical changes in each other over time. The odour of his body, the fact that he resembled a derelict, did not repel her. Now that she was here, she thought she would take care of him.

‘So this is Uma,’ Rasheed thought, the woman from HOPE who always sounded sanguine and ebullient and passionate about life. Uma, the enemy of death, whose task it was to provide solace to tormented souls and listen for hours to their angst and confusion. So this was Uma; HOPE’s Uma, his Uma. He had tried to imagine her in the past, and now here she stood, providing a face to the voice he knew so well. He should have recognized her at the time he saw her through the peephole. She was indeed an extension of her voice, he thought.

Rasheed took the hand she held out.

‘Am I not invited inside?’ Uma said softly.

They were now inside the flat, still holding hands. He held the bouquet of roses, she the cane baskets. Uma’s eyes darted around. The house was bare and the light was muted. To her, it seemed they were a pair who had sneaked into an abandoned house to snatch moments of privacy.

Pointing to the telephone, Uma said, ‘Always wondered where it was kept.’

Rasheed didn’t say anything. He took the cane baskets from her and moved away, keeping these and the roses on the floor, next to the phone.

She walked over to the phone and inserted the plug into the socket and lifted the handset to check the dial tone. ‘Okay,’ Uma said. ‘What happened yesterday? You didn’t call.’

Rasheed looked at her, glum.

No, this won’t do, she thought. No probing or asking questions. Talking to a stranger over the telephone was akin to talking to yourself. In flesh and blood, face to face, it was different: inhibition was bound to creep in. Why couldn’t she be herself?

Perhaps it was because of the house; its darkness.

Uma pulled the curtains away and opened the windows. The room was bathed in light. She summoned him to fetch the basket of pots. Choosing two, she placed them on the window sill, twirling the tendrils around the vertical bar. She took a few steps back, and clicked her tongue in approval. These were money plants, she said. In a few months they would grow and cover the window-grill with their foliage. Obviously, he will have to prune them, water them periodically, and ensure the tendrils have a support to entwine around.

Did he have vases, or something to put the roses in? Yes, she said, even empty liquor bottles would do. She was in the kitchen, rinsing the bottles in the sink, filling them up with water; he was standing at the door, listening to her chatter incessantly.

Uma untied the bouquet and placed two rose stems in each of the two bottles. He shouldn’t think she had plucked the roses or paid for them, she said. Around her house was a florist who would dump into the garbage bin the flowers he could not sell during the day. He and she had entered into an arrangement: every night he sent to her the flowers that were to be discarded. And what was to die in the bin overnight survived at her home for three-four days.

They were back in the drawing room; she went and placed a bottle with two roses at the centre. Rasheed stood next to the phone. Uma moved gracefully towards him.

Yes, she did think it was selfish to pluck roses, to hasten their death before time, to deny others their beauty. But what could be said about city life and its perversions: the closest people ever came to Nature was through flowers bought from shops.

Uma sauntered into the dining room. She placed a bottle of roses there, as well.

‘Get me the basket,’ Uma told Rasheed.

She was on her knees, watching him bring the basket to her. Uma took out the pots and placed them on the floor, against the wall, in a row. In a few weeks the saplings would need to be transplanted to bigger pots, in the same way as children grew out of shorts into trousers. She got up and opened the balcony door and saw the barren land stretch to the horizon. Once the plants grew to a size he could shift them outside. He needn’t worry; he could expect them to endure the sun. In the mountains, on seeing the grass peep through the melting snow, she had understood how difficult it was to snuff out life. She said she had once known a family whose patriarch possessed a bottle of trumpet-shaped flowers. The bottle was sealed and it contained a liquid preservative. For more than a quarter of a century, the flowers hadn’t wilted. In the corked bottle death – actually life – had been defied. To the patriarch, Uma said, she had once asked, didn’t he ever have the desire to smell the flowers, feel their tenderness on his skin? What joy could he derive in bottling up their fragrance?

Uma glanced at Rasheed. He had sat down on the floor, next to the phone, and stared blankly at the roses in the drawing room. Perhaps she had been too harsh, too direct in her allusions to life and death. This is why he seemed to have withdrawn into himself. She found his pride touching; his pride had deterred him from confiding in another person the medical truth he had stumbled upon. Anyone else in his place would have simply broken down. Poor Rasheed Halim; why was he so reluctant to accept love and care?

Kneeling on the floor, she took out a cactus with a small pink flower on its head. Didn’t he have a study with a table? Sorry, Uma said, how could she forget he had gifted to HOPE all his possessions? She smiled and said it had been quite embarrassing to receive the household goods yesterday. Did he really want her to get rid of his things? It was a noble, thoughtful gesture. HOPE was always strapped for cash, and she would indeed sell his stuff if he were to give her a written authorization.

Rasheed turned his face away from her.

Uma looked at the cactus. Couldn’t he suggest a place for it? It was the only plant she had purchased from the nursery, the rest were cuttings from the collection at home. Imagine paying for cactus. City life could put a price tag on anything, even plants growing wild in the desert; it could twist relationships, taint dreams and emotions. Even he and she were under its influence, inclined to measuring love and life in terms of money.

She said she knew the reason why he hadn’t turned to his mother and father. Okay, they were abroad; but she was sure he could have reached them had he wanted. Why didn’t he want to undergo treatment? What was the idea of denying himself the chance to live? Uma paused and said, ‘It is because you think they will have to sell property, raise money for treatment. Really, this is what urban life does to people, this is what …’

The ring of the telephone interrupted her. She watched him turn still and stare at the phone before taking the call. He would not have had she not been present, thought Uma, aware who the caller was.

‘Hello,’ he said.

Uma couldn’t see Rasheed’s face; his back was to her. She felt sad for him, in a deep, intimate way.

He was silent, not even muttering monosyllabic replies to convey to the caller that he was listening.

Suddenly, he slammed the phone down and buried his face in his palms.

‘Rasheed, what happened?’ she exclaimed, moving on her knees to him. In her hand was the cactus pot.

Uma touched his shoulder lightly. ‘What has happened?’ she said, ‘Tell me.’

‘Please,’ he moaned.

She gently brought his head to rest on her shoulder. ‘Easy,’ she said.

He told her what had happened: his friend Kris had been told what had happened to him over the last fortnight. By Wahid.

‘Wahid?’

‘Wasim Khan’s son,’ he mumbled.

She held him lightly, not saying anything. The house was bright with light, and the cactus was on the floor.

‘Have a wash, I have some eats,’ Uma said.

‘Why should my friend die and the author of Secret History live?’

Yet again the question arose in Kris’s mind as he stared blankly at the cursor blink on the computer screen. There were still twenty minutes left for his deadline to expire. He wanted to think out the conclusion, and give the story a once-over before routing it to Ashok Kumar Bajpai, who had, quite uncharacteristically, delayed his departure to vet the copy on the football match involving the children of Junior Model School.

Kris was alone in the Mirror’s Sunday section, whose members had returned home as their work did not entail reporting or editing for the daily edition. At 9.30 p.m. the journos were preparing yet another day’s newspaper and creating the sounds typical of the hour – the hammering of computer keys; a voice asking for suggestions; another demanding a photograph; a third corroborating a fact from a colleague; the click of the lighter followed by the smell of cigarette smoke. The peon announced the office vehicle for South Delhi was to leave in another ten minutes, and declared the next trip, the last one, was scheduled two hours later.

Tonight the vehicle wasn’t to drive down to Hemant Kunj. Rasheed hadn’t reported to work, and there wasn’t anyone on the evening or late night shift who lived there. Once again, the question underscoring the absurdity of life came back to Kris. Why should my friend die and the author of Secret History live?

Kris buried his rugged face in his palms, his elbows resting on the table. He wanted to quiet down his mind, turn away from thinking about Rasheed and the question assailing him. The process of writing had been laborious. Every few lines, he had paused to revive the flow of words; at each paragraph, in the interlude between the end of one and beginning of another, his mind had careened away to grapple with the tragedy of Rasheed Halim.

Kris leaned back in the chair. Mechanically he twice pressed the Pg Up key and then Pg Down key.

They should not have told him about Rasheed. Of what use was the news now that he had been disallowed to act upon it? He wished today had been yesterday, beautiful in ordinary ways, and that he hadn’t had a story to write on the football match or think of Rasheed and his fate.

The news about Rasheed hadn’t been an inadvertent slip on their part. At 10 a.m., Kris had been in the drawing room of Flat No. 1 in Hemant Kunj. To his left had been Wasim Khan. Across the room were seated Wahid and Dr Vikram Rathore. Initially, it was the doctor who had done most of the talking, pre-empting the question Kris would have asked them anyway – did he know why the Khans had chosen him over the other bylines they read regularly in the Mirror? Since Kris was Rasheed’s friend, Dr Rathore had answered, they thought they could trust him.

Rasheed?

No, no, he was not in Saat Tal or Mughalabad; he was at this moment in his flat, alone and depressed.

Depressed?

Dr Rathore had loosened his tie and explained to Kris the truth about multiple myeloma that Rasheed had stumbled upon in the library. He had cocooned himself in the flat; he did not want to meet anyone; he had decided to forsake the option of treatment. They were trying to persuade him to give himself yet another chance. Till Kris heard from them, he wasn’t to tell anyone about Rasheed, nor try to meet or talk to him.

The question came back to him: Why should Rasheed die and the author of Secret History live?

Poor Rasheed, why was he so adamant about not turning to anyone for succour? Kris thought. His decision to gift away his possessions was ominous – it suggested a yearning for death; he had persuaded himself into believing the end was near. No, he didn’t have to die; it was still possible to cure the madness of his body. A lot could still be done. Kris thought he and other colleagues could raise funds for Rasheed’s treatment. Perhaps they could persuade the hospital to waive its fees. Rasheed must hope; he couldn’t quit now. It was absurd of him to assume he had to die, six months from now.

What about the author?

The cursor blinked on the computer screen. Kris pressed Ctrl Home. He quickly read what he had written, deleting a word or two as he scrolled down the computer page. Doubts crept in: had he exaggerated the connection between Secret History and the football game? Could he blame the author of Secret History for the children’s behaviour?

He recalled the responses of those whom he had talked to through the day. The parents of Sanjay Khanna had unequivocally linked Secret History to his conduct, claiming the poison doled out daily through the roadside reading of the past had seeped into the cosmopolitan upbringing they had given to their child. It was a different Sanjay, not their son, who had played the match. Hadn’t Secret History surfaced repeatedly in Vijay Sarin’s recapitulation of the argument that had preceded the match? The damn author, that behan chod’s maniacal shadow seemed to loom everywhere. It had been there at the residence of the Khans; it had crept into the room where Kris and Hashamuddin had conversed; its presence had been pointed to at the time the principal had waved the pages of Secret History, ripped off from the school wall.

‘See these, read these,’ the principal had said. She had read out aloud passages from Secret History, underlining its power to seduce the innocent. Aghast that her school should feature in a newspaper story, she had remarked in a tremulous voice, ‘What happened at my school was a dress rehearsal for 6 December.’

Kris thought it was appropriate to end the story with the principal’s quote. He wrote the line, routed the story to Ashok Kumar Bajpai, and got up to stand at the window that opened onto the road below. The evening traffic had thinned out; the tall buildings were spots of light in the darkness. The city was gradually retreating indoors. His friend was alone, in darkness, traumatized. And, at this moment, the author of Secret History was perhaps sitting at his computer, conjuring words of hatred.

No, Kris muttered emphatically; his friend cannot die; he should not die.

And the author?

He should not live. Kris wanted the author dead, philosophically, theoretically, in principle.

Kris turned around from the window as he heard the shuffling of feet behind him. Ashok Kumar Bajpai’s face had a smile. In his left hand were his reading glasses. He pulled down his blue bush shirt which he hadn’t tucked into his trousers, patted his belly and exclaimed, ‘Great story, I say.’

Kris smiled and said, ‘You liked it?’

‘Liked it,’ Bajpai repeated. ‘Marvellous stuff, I say.’ He pulled a chair and sat down. Crossing his legs, he asked softly, ‘Who gave you the story? Among all the reporters in this city, the person chose you, a desk hand.’

His smile had changed into an expression of bewilderment.

‘Do you know any of the parents?’ he asked.

‘Well,’ Kris mumbled.

‘Do you personally know any of the Muslims quoted in the story?’ Bajpai continued. ‘The story is from the Muslim perspective, I say.’ He laughed self-consciously.

‘So,’ Kris said, standing at the window.

A sardonic smile appeared on Bajpai’s lips. ‘It could have been a smarter thing to do the story from the perspective of boys who refused to participate in the match, I say.’

Kris clenched his jaw at the criticism.

‘It isn’t to say what you have written is bad. The story is good, I say.’ Bajpai’s face had turned deadpan. Kris couldn’t make out what he was driving at.

‘Why did some students refuse to play?’ he asked. ‘All of them Hindus. Not a single Muslim refused to play. I find it strange.’

‘Strange?’

‘To be in such small numbers and yet not chicken out. That’s interesting, I say,’ Bajpai said.

Kris looked out the window, wondering whether Bajpai was being critical or merely curious about a fact he believed was odd.

‘Kris,’ Bajpai said, getting to his feet and walking over to him. ‘Do you think Secret History could have had such an impact?’

‘What do you mean?’ Kris responded. To him it seemed Bajpai doubted the credibility of his story.

‘Have you read Secret History?’ His tone was sharp.

‘I have,’ Bajpai remarked, in an incredulous tone. ‘But never thought the Secret History papers could have had such an impact.’

Kris remained silent.

‘I talked to Prof. Chatterjee the other day, after receiving his invite to attend a meeting against the author of Secret History. He too said its impact on students has been terrible. Man of action, this Chatterjee. You know how I came to know your professor? I had profiled him on his return from Australia, for fighting for the rights of indigenous people there.’

Bajpai’s gaze shifted from Kris to the window and then back again. ‘Are you going to his meeting on Monday?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ Kris replied. ‘At the meeting I intend to propose that we find out who’s behind Secret History, and pursue him. We shouldn’t dissipate our anger by expressing our opposition through such ineffective measures as issuing a statement, or petitioning the government to prohibit the circulation of Secret History in the city.’

‘We all know who’s behind it,’ Bajpai said. Shifting his weight from one leg to another, and putting his reading glasses in the shirt pocket, he continued, ‘It’s the Organization, with a capital O. It’s nameless and it’s faceless and no one knows who its members are. It’s a secret society, its members work in a clandestine manner. They have death squads and bomb experts and spies. They are in state institutions, in private enterprises, in slums, in the army, in …’

‘Newspapers?’ asked Kris.

‘They are everywhere. Yet you don’t know who they are. For me, it could be you; for you, it could be me.’ Bajpai lowered his voice and continued, ‘You only suspect, you have doubts about some individuals. But you can never prove conclusively, at least it hasn’t happened till date, that they belong to the Organization.’

He patted Kris and added, ‘But I agree, we should try to identify the author of Secret History. Yes, we should, I say.’

In the light creeping from under the bathroom door, Uma watched Rasheed Halim, whose back was turned towards her as he lay asleep on the mattress placed against the wall, in the corner. It was past midnight and Hemant Kunj had already slipped into a slumber.

She was sitting on the floor, with her legs stretched out and pointing in the same direction as his. She watched his silhouette, with relief and satisfaction. Languor seemed to seep out of every pore of her body. Uma lit a cigarette. She smoked in the morning and at night, before retiring to bed; two cigarettes a day was her daily intake of nicotine. In her hand was an empty cigarette packet into which she flicked the ash.

It felt strange to spend a night away from home, to sit quietly in the bare room and hear him snore. What a day it had been, she thought. They had gone out for lunch to the coffee shop overlooking the fifteenth century tomb of Firoz Shah Tughlaq. Then they had loitered in its ruins where grass peeped through cracks in walls and pigeons nested in the domes and lovers stole quick kisses and embraces in secluded corners. They had remained there until the evening veiled from sight what hadn’t been lit and the breeze turned nippy as it rushed through acres of trees surrounding the complex.

In his personality, Uma found an aspect she felt drawn to. She had sensed this at the time of their first conversation over the phone. She hadn’t earlier tried to analyze her feelings. But today, after meeting him, she had understood what she found compelling about Rasheed Halim: through him she was connected to a fragment of her past.

The cigarette glowed in the darkness, as did the fragment of her memory brought alive through Rasheed. She hadn’t been conscious of the resemblance between her present and past until late evening, after dinner, when she had driven him down to Hemant Kunj. They had been sitting in the car below his block of flats, and Rasheed had suddenly slipped his hand into hers and whispered, ‘Stay over tonight. Please.’

They had sat quietly in the car, holding hands – he waiting for her reply, and she was reminded of a day in the past. Perhaps it had been because of his voice, trembling with diffidence. It had scratched open the scar buried in her memory, intense and disorienting in the feelings it generated. And because she had not spoken, he had slipped his hand out of hers, to open the door of the car and return to his cocoon. In that moment, she had known she could not allow this night to fail her. Uma had silently reverse parked the car.

She pulled hard on the cigarette. Her drags were longer, at intervals shorter than before. Images from the past were as fresh as a recent laceration. That night had been bitterly cold, and the moon had been behind the clouds. And she, just as it was tonight, had been in a room with another person. There wasn’t any physical resemblance between Rasheed and the other person of her memory – he had been taller, a little boyish in appearance. That was understandable because he had belonged to her youth.

She could now understand what was similar between Rasheed and that person: it was the desperation in their voices.

In the car, in that moment he had requested her to stay behind, the past had suddenly returned to Uma. On that night, too, the person sitting opposite her had believed he could not face the future without her. Then there had been a bang, and the room had been splattered with blood. God, there had been so much blood on that moonless night, even her clothes had been drenched in it.

She got up from the floor, and glanced at Rasheed as she left the room. Uma thought her feelings towards him were a manifestation of her fears about the dark night revisiting her. To save Rasheed from self-destruction was to triumph over her own past. Did she love him? Obviously not. Emotions experienced mostly through telephonic conversations couldn’t be called love.

Before entering the utility room, she stubbed the cigarette into the empty packet and kept it on the sill of the balcony window. She sat on the bed he had made for her on the floor. Unhooking her bra and slipping it out from under her kameez, she cupped her breasts and muttered to herself, ‘Perhaps love is choosing a person through whom you try to redeem yourself.’

Secret History

O Hindus,

On 6 December, you the Hindus, the only true people of this holy land, the only legitimate children of your Mother, will get another chance to prove your manhood, and reclaim that which was taken away forcibly by the barbarians, who came here centuries ago and defiled the purity of your motherland, plundered and raped her with a cruelty your history had never witnessed before. There are now only sixteen days left for the brave sons of the land to assemble in the town of Ayodhya and remove the last vestige of slavery, obliterate the symbol of your humiliation, and raze to the ground the mosque whose domes have mocked you for centuries.

Let us bring to you today the story of Aurangzeb the Terrible. Yes, the same Aurangzeb whose treatment of Guru Tegh Bahadur shocked you yesterday. In 1657, the Mughal monarch, Shah Jahan, suddenly took ill. It encouraged his four sons to initiate a war of succession. From different corners of the empire, the sons set out with their armies for Agra, where lay Shah Jahan in the care of his eldest son, Dara. Hopeful were the three brothers of their success, they were sure Dara could never muster the support of the clergy. Threatened did the three brothers feel by Dara, they knew the Hindus wanted him as their emperor.

We know the questions you wish to ask: is it possible for barbarians to sire a progeny popular among the Hindus? O wise sons, in Dara was missing the thirst for the blood of infidels, in him was absent the hatred for worshippers of idols. What Akbar learnt through political expediency, Dara knew from his youth: no religion enjoys a monopoly over Truth. He took to the study of Hindu philosophy and learnt the Vedas and the Upanishads. Liberal was Dara, he negated the Quranic wisdom of distinguishing the Creator from the created. In Risala-i-Haqq-Numa, Dara wrote:

O you, in quest of God, you seek Him everywhere,

You verily are the God, not apart from Him!

Already in the midst of the boundless ocean,

Your quest resembles the search of a drop for the ocean!

Wise was Dara, sample his contempt for the ulema:

Paradise is there where no mulla exists –

Where the noise of his discussions and debate is not heard.

May the world become free from the noise of mulla,

And none should pay any heed to his decrees!

Dara’s liberal outlook was the reason why the Muslim clergy rallied against him. In contrast to Dara was Shah Jahan’s third son, Aurangzeb, whom the clergy wanted on the throne. He prayed five times daily, he took as his salary what he earned through copying the Quran and selling the facsimile in the market. In the war of succession Aurangzeb first defeated his two other brothers, Shuja and Murad. In two successive battles he then vanquished Dara. On 23 August 1659 Dara was brought in fetters to Delhi. Six days later he was paraded through the city. At his humiliation a riot broke out. It convinced Aurangzeb to put his brother to death immediately. The ulema were summoned to the royal durbar, their consent was sought to legitimize the emperor’s plan. Simple, they chanted, Dara had blasphemed Allah, Dara had undermined Islam. Death can be the only punishment for him. On the night of 30 August, Dara was executed. Thus was shattered the possibility of uniting the Hindus and Muslims. From then began an era of oppression unprecedented in your history.

In 1659 were appointed muhtasaibs, or censors of public morals. Empowered were they to ensure people adhered to laws aimed at regulating morality. This was not an experiment in puritanism, this was a ruse to impose Islamic norms on your society. Thus was discontinued the practice of jharoka-darshan. It was an ancient custom requiring kings to appear every morning on the palace balcony for taking the salute of his people. To Aurangzeb the Terrible, though, this quaint practice resembled idol worship.

Then a royal firmaan was issued banning the inscription of Kalma on coins in circulation. Kalma is a holy verse, the pronouncement of which turns a non-Muslim into Muslim. Kalma in English reads thus: ‘There is no god but God and Muhammad is His prophet.’ Don’t you wish to know the reason behind this imperial decision? Hear this then: Aurangzeb the bigot believed Islam was defiled every time the coins fell into the hands of infidels. And yet, those storytellers say Hindus and Muslims are the children of the same Mother.

Ask those storytellers, why did Aurangzeb ban music in his court? Know the answer: the ulema considered music un-Islamic. Ask them, why did Aurangzeb ban astrology? Hear the answer: Islam forbids fortune telling, because the plan of Allah is supposed to be inscrutable. O wise sons, tell us honestly, does God of any other community suffer from such terrible complexes? O noble sons, isn’t it true, a religion whose God is so insecure can only produce paranoid followers?

Initiated also were policies discriminatory in nature. From the year 1665, Hindu merchants were required to pay double the customs fees on goods than their Muslim counterparts. Implicit in this policy was the message: convert to Islam to take advantage of unfair competition. In 1669 a royal edict prohibited construction of Hindu temples as well as repair of old ones. In the same year a general order was issued to provincial governors to demolish temples and religious schools of infidels.

In 1679, came the cruellest cut: jizya was re-imposed on all non-Muslim adults. Yes, it was the same tax Akbar the Tolerable had abolished earlier. Livid were the Hindus at the imposition of jizya. In the vicinity of Delhi’s Red Fort they refused to submit to the jizya-collector. To crush their resistance, the Mughal emperor deployed elephants. Do you know the title the Muslims bestowed upon the emperor? O wise sons, they called him zinda pir, or living saint, in praise of his bigotry.

With the royal order empowering governors to demolish non-Muslim places of worship, innumerable temples in north India were reduced to rubble. Among them were also the two most dear to your ancestors. In Varanasi was demolished the Kashi Vishvanath temple, in Mathura they tore down the Keshava Rai temple. At the two sites were then constructed mosques to herald the supremacy of Islam.

Wicked are those storytellers, they say the temple of Varanasi was the fount of conspiracy against Aurangzeb. They say the mahant of the temple was in league with Sufi rebels who wanted to overthrow Aurangzeb the Terrible. They then conclude: the temple was destroyed to nip the conspiracy and set an example to others. Ask those storytellers for evidence, they will argue: don’t you know Aurangzeb gave land grants to a few temples? Why then should he have targeted the Kashi Vishvanath temple other than to crush the rebellion?

O noble sons, the storytellers similarly say the temple in Mathura was destroyed as a reprisal against those Hindus who had rebelled against the Mughals. They claim the temple had accumulated great wealth, so Aurangzeb wanted to economically weaken the Hindu insurgents. Then they add in a whisper, perhaps Aurangzeb’s motive in destroying the Mathura temple was to augment the depleted exchequer. Go ask them: why didn’t Aurangzeb destroy mosques in those places where Muslim princes rose in rebellion? Go ask them: why didn’t he destroy the mausoleums of Sufi saints whose caretakers too had accumulated immense wealth?

O wise sons, forget the storytellers, listen to what we say: a book such as the Quran can only spawn Babar the Barbarian and Aurangzeb the Terrible. O noble sons, Muslims still dream of the centuries when they ruled over your motherland. It is time for you to awaken them from slumber and show them who is more powerful. Come to Ayodhya on 6 December. Rise and raise your arms, rise and say Lord Ram.

Long before the sky was to slip out of darkness and turn scarlet, Uma stirred restlessly for a few seconds before opening her eyes. She hadn’t heard someone call out her name, nor had the breeze blowing through the window turned uncomfortably cold, nor had an aeroplane flown too low on its descent to the airport to arouse her from sleep. The reason why Uma woke up before dawn was because she was lying in the middle of the room, parallel to its length, with her face turned towards the door. Every time the curtain swayed in the draught, the light from the dining room fell across her face.

‘Cha,’ she muttered. It took her a few seconds to realize she wasn’t at home, in her own bed. Obviously Rasheed had switched on the light, perhaps to go to the kitchen, she thought.

Uma tried to pick up a noise. She did not hear any of those reassuring nocturnal sounds, like the water flowing from the tap or being poured into the glass. Uma decided to check on Rasheed. And because the mattress was on the floor, and she couldn’t swing to her feet in one swift movement, Uma propped herself up on the knees and was automatically swivelled around to face the wall behind her.

‘Rasheed,’ she cried out.

He was in the corner, on the floor. His head was sunk between his knees that were held close to the chest, with the hands clasped together over the shins. ‘Rasheed,’ Uma said softly, ‘what’s wrong?’

Uma moved on her knees towards him, along the mattress and the floor. She sat to his left, and crossed her legs. But she did not persist with her effort to make him respond. Words had begun to tire her. She found them deceptive; words suffered from limitations. They, for instance, lacked the silence of death. There was nothing Uma could do but feel the body whose soul writhed in agony and terror. Silently, she ran her fingers through his hair.

He didn’t lift his head to look at her.

She slipped her hand to his nape. Her thumb and the index finger moved towards each other to massage and relax the taut muscles in his neck. Rasheed didn’t give any indication that he was aware of what she was doing to him. His tactile sense, it seemed, was incapable of recognizing the touch of another human being.

She persisted in rubbing his neck, as if trying to understand him through the pores of his skin.

It was too breezy for a November night. Windows and doors squeaked on their hinges. She heard curtains flap in protest. The night seemed delirious. It seemed to sigh in a hundred different ways. It spoke through loose sheets of paper that fluttered in the breeze, a tin container that slid and scraped against the pavement below the flat. As his body came alive under her touch, Rasheed jerked his head up. She shifted her hand from his nape to the left shoulder.

He muttered, ‘The light.’

‘Why did you switch the light on?’ She leaned forward as she spoke, and her breasts grazed his left forearm.

‘The light … I saw the light,’ he said, adding, ‘The light of death.’

She unfolded her legs and swung her body to sit leaning against the wall, as he was, next to him. Uma curled her right arm around his neck, conveying to him the warmth of her camaraderie.

His voice quivered as he said, ‘I opened my eyes. I saw a ball of light …’ He stopped and looked away.

With her right hand she turned his face towards her. On his jawbone her fingertips rose and fell. She did not want to hear him recapitulate his nightmare. As the night chattered incoherently, there arose in her the urge to clutch him and weep until their hearts became lighter. But she fought the impulse to let herself collapse. Uma shifted her legs that were touching his; her hand dropped off his face.

A little later, in a tremulous voice, he started to speak again. About the ball of light, the light of death – incandescent light, the size of a cricket ball suspended six feet above the bed. It had been luminous, radiant, of orange colour, a pulsating ball of heat that could singe the skin without contact.

Initially, Rasheed hadn’t seen the light. He had woken up perspiring. As he turned to lie on his back, the effulgent light had sloughed off the numbness of his sleep.

What is it, he had asked himself.

The ball of light, in answer, had started to orbit around the bed. The angel of death had arrived to spirit him away.

‘Just forty days, Uma. I have another forty days,’ Rasheed moaned.

She brought his face closer and said, ‘You won’t die.’ She wanted to convey to him, without telling him explicitly, the ridiculousness of his experience.

‘What made you think the ball of light was the angel of death?’

Forty days, he repeated. Did she know the basis of his calculation?

When the ball of light had started to move around the bed, he had been reminded of the conversation at the funeral of his uncle. The elders of the family had whispered among themselves, how Rasheed’s uncle had predicted precisely the day of his death, from what he had seen forty days earlier, six feet over the bed: a searing ball of light rotating on its axis.

‘Forty days, Uma, not a minute more.’ Rasheed sounded possessed.

She remained silent, trying to fathom his experience. The incandescent glow radiating heat: was that his instinct for life undergoing mutation, or was it the rebellion of his body, its final, ultimate quest for survival? It was life fighting death to claim the body as its own; it was the light of flesh struggling against the darkness of the mind. What the mind had identified as angel of death, his body recognized as energy, fire. There was hope. His body could be the saviour; it could be taught to respond to the future. His instinct for life could still flower.

On his jawbone her fingertips, again, began to rise and fall. How was she to liberate the present from the past, body from mind?

‘Forty days, Uma, not a minute more,’ Rasheed said and lapsed into silence.

Uma could have harped upon the implausibility of his experience. But in his narration she had glimpsed the truth: it was futile battling his mind, its memory and knowledge. These were beyond her power to transform. So she sat quietly next to him, her arm around his shoulder, listening to the breeze echo the night’s tumult. At times he sighed deeply. It seemed to her the night was gasping for breath. What was required of her now, she wondered.

Rasheed clasped her hand and whispered hoarsely, ‘Had you not stayed behind …’

Uma couldn’t hold herself back. Turning his face, she kissed him on the mouth, lingering on his lips a little beyond what the feeling of compassion inspires.

He remained inert. He didn’t open his lips. Rasheed was cold and remote.

Uma brought his head to rest on her shoulder. Her breasts rose and fell. With her left hand she caressed his face. She traced the bridge of his nose and curled her fingers around his mouth.

The incandescent glow, what had it done to him? She wanted to kindle the fire of his body – perhaps then he could be saved from his torment.

Did she desire him? Did she love him?

In him she saw her chance of liberation. But she also desired him; yes, she did.

Rasheed turned his face to bury it in her neck. He had stirred, he was responding to her. She lowered her face to rest her cheek against his forehead. The shifting of positions brought their bodies closer. Her right breast was squeezed against his arm. She thought she could hold him for the next forty days, until the incandescent glow had lost its terror.

Uma was conscious of every sensation in her body. She wanted to transmit her warmth to him. She slid her hand under his kurta. Perhaps she ought not to rush him. Rasheed was not what she had been prepared for. Habituated to waiting and never initiating, responding rather than seeking, at least till a point, Uma found their coming together a challenge to her being.

His body now felt different. Something was happening to him. She could feel this through the pores of his body. His skin seemed to rise to meet hers. Her left hand dropped from his face to hold his right shoulder, and her right arm gripped hard his back. Uma touched his cheek with her lips. Without opening them she moved slowly, in a circular motion, on his face, gliding down to reach his mouth. She held her lips against his, and waited.

He took her lower lip between his, and she pressed against him. It was a toothy kiss, and he too responded. Their faces moved away to gasp for breath.

But Rasheed did not return to her. Instead, he leaned against the wall and mumbled. She couldn’t catch what he had said. It was as if in the moment their mouths had separated, his mind had snared the body in its darkled web.

Uma clasped his hand; she wanted him to caress her bra-less breasts straining against her kameez. But his flesh was cold; icy. And his eyes were closed. The column of light darted in and out. His senses were beyond arousal; it was as if he could understand only pain. His body couldn’t experience pleasure because it was manacled to the past and the future – of what he had experienced and what could still come, the ball of light and death itself.

Uma was disappointed. Her pride in her femininity had been pricked. Her flesh, her odour, the throbbing desire of her body: couldn’t these lull his mind into silence? Uma let go of his hand.

In the last three weeks Rasheed hadn’t desired the sniff of pleasure. Until now, during his surrender to her magical touch and the crush of her lips. In that brief moment he had forgotten his past and his future.

But death had returned to reclaim him.

He wasn’t embarrassed. He felt sad for her. She had wanted him, and he had given her the affliction of his soul. What was that ball of light? He wished he could disregard death on this breezy night – for her, and also for himself.

Uma got up and said, ‘Come to bed.’ She didn’t mean to encourage him to make another attempt at arousing his instinct. She simply found the floor too cold to sit on.

He followed her. His kurta-pajama flapped in the breeze. He was silent. He sat on the mattress, crossing his legs. And she did the same, opposite him.

He didn’t want to sleep, Uma could sense that. She didn’t know what to tell him. She wanted him to forget about what had, or rather hadn’t happened between them. And she didn’t want him to think about the light of death.

His own inclination was to tell Uma how sorry he was, that his failing was a new experience for him. But he didn’t tell her that. Rasheed no longer wanted to talk or think about himself, on this night of a hundred sighs.

Yet Rasheed gasped, ‘I want to.’ He added, ‘Forget.’

Uma clasped her hands and responded, ‘Forget the forgetting.’ She looked at him and moaned, ‘Give me pleasure.’

Uma pulled his hands to her breasts. He began to caress and stroke her lightly. Yet she held his hands, afraid they could turn limp and fall away from her.

Rasheed was no longer bothered about what could or should happen to him. He was not focussed on himself; he wanted to provide pleasure to her. He cupped her breasts and straddled his legs around her waist. And Uma slid her hands up his elbows to clasp him around the neck. He arched towards her and she moved forward to meet him. They kissed, moving away a little to catch breath – and then kissing again. His tongue darted into her mouth. They rocked gently as they kissed. Their bodies wanted to come closer. The breeze rose to create new sounds. She didn’t want to hasten him; she was afraid his death-infested infirmity could return to tear him away from her.

Thoughts did not rise to bother him. It did not matter what could happen to him, in the next few minutes or the months to come. Instead, his hands slid down her body. Rasheed lifted the hem of her kameez. Uma helped him take it off.

He gazed at her breasts. They were lighter than her skin. He touched her firm, erect nipples. She brought his mouth to her breasts. He felt the warmth of her body seep into his skin. There was light and joy in her body, he thought.

She lifted his head by the hair and whispered, ‘I want to see you.’

Uma lifted his kurta to the chest, and he took on from there, taking it off. She stared at him, his whitish skin, and kissed him on the neck and chest. She got up, with her hands on the string of her shalwar. There was the rustle of the fabric as it fell on the floor in a crumpled heap.

He saw her from where he was. And he saw her in the light from the dining room. Hers was a body aware of time and its truths, and yet not ravaged by it. As she stepped back on the mattress, and he watched the body called Uma, he experienced the stiffness in his pajamas. Rasheed leaned forward, with his arms stretched out. She took a step forward, knowing where he wanted to go. Resting his hands on her buttocks, he pushed his mouth into her mound of hair, and inhaled the strong smell of her sex and sweat and desire.

She knew this night wasn’t destined to resemble that moon-less night.

With this realization, she sank to her knees to be face to face with him. She said she wanted to be kissed all over, slowly, and lay on her belly.

He shifted his gaze down the length of her body, to her buttocks sloping down to her thighs. Her back was smooth. Rasheed lowered his mouth on her nape, and opening his lips and closing them, he moved down her body, as he caressed her buttocks with his right hand. It seemed to her there were many mouths kissing her simultaneously. His hand drifted between her thighs.

She turned to lie on her back. ‘Kiss her,’ she whispered, folding her legs and holding them apart.

Holding her knees, he lovingly began to kiss her on his way to the throbbing centre of her desire.

Uma clasped his hair to pull him to where she wanted him to be. He pushed her thighs back and let his tongue slip through the burning lips of her desire. She was moist; her body shook.

Everything was forgotten. Rasheed was a body of desire without thought. He stood up and slipped out of the pajamas.

She raised herself up and held his penis in her hand.

Slowly, she began to fall back towards the mattress. And he pushed her down to lie on her.

As he entered her, he became aware of that light. At each thrust into her the glow turned deeper. The light was orange in colour; it soon began to expand; a haze of orange spread in the room, as their bodies moved up and down.

Rasheed knew he had glimpsed life in the light of death – and he must protect what he loved beyond reason.

Uma was on the floor, next to the telephone. She had completed reading the story on the football game between Hindu and Muslim schoolchildren that was featured on the front page of the Mirror. She kept aside the newspaper and dialled Dr Vikram Rathore’s office. The late morning sunlight flooded into the room, and the roses in the bottle hadn’t wilted yet.

‘Dr Rathore.’

‘Hope you didn’t keep waiting for my call last night,’ she said.

‘Wait?’

‘Sorry. You know …’ She trailed off.

Dr Rathore laughed and said, ‘I waited till eight in the evening. Since you hadn’t called, I assumed you were over at his flat, or he had come over to yours, and you couldn’t obviously talk to me in his presence.’

Uma laughed self-consciously.

‘But now that you are talking to me, it can be assumed he isn’t around. So where are you? And where’s he?’

‘Guess?’

‘It’s a challenge, is it?’ he asked, in mock belligerence.

She hummed mischievously.

‘From your mood I conclude you have been successful in your mission,’ the doctor said. ‘But what precisely was your mission? Can you spell it out?’

Uma was tickled. ‘You are funny,’ she said.

But the doctor continued to analyze with pretended solemnity. ‘Where are you, that’s our question, isn’t it?’ He paused and continued, ‘It is simple, Uma. Rasheed in his condition couldn’t have let go of a person who had been of relief to him. You spent the day with him. The two of you went out. Now don’t ask me how I know that. You insist. Well, to be honest, I rang up Rasheed in the afternoon, out of curiosity, because I was impatient, and his phone kept ringing.’

She laughed lightly.

The doctor began to speak rapidly, ‘Sometime late in the evening, Rasheed must have confessed to his fear of the night. Precisely when? I think at the time you drove down to his flat to drop him. He realized he was to no longer enjoy the security of your company. He sought you. Uma, you are at his place.’

‘Do you run a spy ring?’ she asked, laughing.

‘In that case I would have known where Rasheed is at this moment.’

‘He has gone out to fetch eggs, bread, milk, and …’ she trilled.

‘Great,’ he interjected. ‘Finally, he has stepped out.’

‘I had to persuade him,’ she said.

‘What was his reaction to Kris having been told of his illness?’

‘Had I not been there …’ Uma paused to choose appropriate words.

‘But I knew you were there,’ Dr Rathore said. ‘I was worried you might forget to plug in the telephone.’ He chuckled and added, ‘I told you it would work. By timing Wahid’s call when you were there at his flat, I helped, didn’t I? Made things easier for you?’

Uma sensed the note of triumph in his voice. ‘What precisely did Wahid tell Rasheed, I mean, how did he explain the disclosure to Kris?’

‘Only doctors are debarred from talking about their patients to a third person,’ Dr Rathore responded. ‘Wahid called Rasheed, said they had Kris over because of the story they wanted him to do, and that Kris remarked a close friend of his, Rasheed, stayed in the same sector, and they assumed Kris knew why he hadn’t gone to Saat Tal, and so they, out of politeness, expressed their sympathy for his condition and in that process …’

‘It didn’t happen that way, obviously. You told Kris about Rasheed’s depression, didn’t you?’

Dr Rathore laughed and said, ‘Clever woman. Forget that. Anyway, I talked to Prof. Chatterjee about the meeting. It’s an open house. I’ll be going there. So will your friend Krishnamurthy, right? What about Rasheed?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

‘He should. I have already told you why,’ the doctor insisted. ‘Besides, as you said, you can’t devote all your time to him.’

‘I know,’ she continued. ‘But he doesn’t want to meet anyone from his past.’

‘It’s important for him to be there.’

‘I’ll try,’ Uma said.

‘Perhaps I should send Kris to persuade Rasheed. What do you think?’

‘I wonder,’ Uma replied. ‘There’s another thing, doctor. Shouldn’t I tell him about us, that it was you who led me to him?’

‘Why, what’s the point?’ the doctor asked.

‘I find it strange, you know. The fact I shouldn’t tell him …’ she trailed off.

There was a moment’s pause, as if the doctor was thinking over her suggestion. He said, ‘It’s been two weeks, and he hasn’t even called me up. It’s quite unusual for a patient. I think he still blames me for his situation. And if that’s true, he won’t take kindly to your confession. I don’t want him to lose faith in the only person he trusts.’

‘I know but …’

‘Let me meet him at Prof. Chatterjee’s meeting, let me judge.’

Uma was in the easy chair that Rasheed had fetched from the utility room. Every time she took the cigarette to her lips, she opened her eyes slightly as she exhaled the smoke, savouring the taste of tobacco. She was in a baggy yellow T-shirt and pajamas. Her hair was wet. Atop the suitcase, in the corner, lay the black dress she had been wearing.

Rasheed was on the mattress, with his back resting against the wall, his legs stretched out. He watched her intently. What had Uma left behind to come down to stay at his place? She had moved in with him; in the evening she had gone home to bring over a suitcase of clothes. In choosing to live with him she had embraced the consequences of starting a relationship with a person whose body was likely to wither away in another six months.

Rasheed watched her slim mouth open to exhale the smoke. What she had done to him was extraordinary, beyond imagination. And yet he couldn’t fathom her. To care deeply for a stranger, to abandon for his sake the world she had existed in till yesterday, untrammelled by obligations, completely free and answerable to herself, Uma was a mystery he loved, and was enamoured of, without understanding.

Who is Uma, he thought.

She worked the lines at HOPE, comforting desperate souls. He knew her through what he had seen of her body, and what he had felt and tasted of her. But there was also her past, what she had been – and because of which she had become who she was.

She stubbed the cigarette in the pink translucent ashtray she had brought with her. Turning the chair so that she could sit facing him, she asked, ‘Did you visit Wasim Khan?’ That was what he had said he would do during the time she went to fetch her stuff from home.

Rasheed nodded, pulling a sheet over himself. He gazed at her. She seemed serene and content. Yet, he wanted to understand Uma, her past: who she had been and what had brought her to HOPE.

And because his eyes seemed to bore into her, she remarked, ‘Stop looking at me that way.’ Then she added, ‘Did Wasim Khan like the story on the football game?’

‘Yes.’

‘It was excellent,’ she responded. Emotions reflected easily on her face; she could change her expression with theatrical skill. Her eyes narrowed in concern as she asked, ‘What’s the name of his grandchild … Waris, isn’t it? How’s he?’

‘Better,’ he said.

His taciturnity perplexed her. Something seemed to be bothering him. It was as if, in their hours of separation, he had slid back a little into his dark mood, the mire from which he had crawled out to discover her body in the early hours of the morning. She did not ask him what his problem was. From the time she had stepped into the flat with the suitcase and their dinner, Rasheed had been mostly lost in thoughts. In the last seven minutes, since the time she had lit a cigarette, his eyes, large and dark and shining, had become penetrative in their gaze.

‘You know, Rasheed,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I want to meet Wasim Khan.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘you have time till tomorrow afternoon.’

She raised her eyebrows.

‘He’s returning to Mughalabad,’ Rasheed said. He pulled a pillow to his lap. ‘The football game has convinced him that every individual must fight for peace. He wants to fight for Mughalabad, where he grew up.’

‘And you?’ she asked. ‘What do you think about these things?’

‘Nothing,’ he muttered, looking away, out the window.

She gazed at him, with concern. What was troubling him, she wondered. Why had he withdrawn into himself?

‘Funny,’ he remarked, still looking out the window. ‘Here I had given up on everything, on life. But in the last thirty-six hours …’ He left the sentence incomplete.

Moments later, he turned to her. ‘You know Kris, right?’

‘Your friend who wrote on the football match,’ Uma replied.

‘Kris called up,’ Rasheed said. ‘He was emotional, perhaps a little hurt that I hadn’t turned to him for support, confided in him. But he said he could understand my feelings, my rejection of the world and …’

‘Who broke the news to him about you?’ She asked the question hoping to fathom whether or not he was still angry with Dr Rathore.

‘I didn’t ask him that, Uma,’ he said. ‘I didn’t see the point of it. It must have been Wahid or Wasim Khan. Anyway, what difference does it make now?’

‘True,’ Uma said.

Rasheed continued, ‘Kris is garrulous, flits from one topic to another. He was lecturing me on how I should not stop hoping, that he and others were there for me. He said a lot could still be done. And he said it was the first and last time he and I were going to converse on my condition. The idea, he said, was to not focus on what hadn’t happened yet. He talked of persuading the hospital to waive medical fees, of getting the office to bear my medical expenses, of the office staff contributing a day’s salary … He just went on and on and on. But even before his call, you know, I had started to think of possibilities.’

Through the day they hadn’t talked of his future. They had spent the day in bed, mostly in silence, in that half-awake half-asleep condition but for an hour or so during which he had gone to purchase provisions for the brunch which she had insisted on making. They had talked about those small things like the winter sunlight, the extraordinary breezy night they had been through, and their feelings at the time they had conversed for the first time.

Possibilities? Uma smiled at him. She understood what he meant. Rasheed Halim had started to hope, to think of a future even though it was to be spent under death’s shadow.

He shook his head.

‘Come on,’ she said.

‘Do what then?’

Uma understood what Rasheed hadn’t explained: he could not live the way he had been living. And he didn’t know how to live now. He was in search of a new principle to organize his life around. Couldn’t their love, the relentless desire to share umpteen hours, become his impetus?

‘Extend your leave,’ she suggested. ‘I am going to the hills next week, come along.’

‘Then what?’

She wanted to tell him she could gratify his senses, and he hers, and they could together marvel at the enchanting beauty of the Himalayas. And there, in solitude, he could ponder over existential matters.

Rasheed had returned to gazing out. ‘Have you read any of those Secret History pages?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ Uma said. ‘It’s horrible.’

‘Kris feels the same, so does Wasim Khan,’ he said.

‘You should read it,’ she said. ‘You will be appalled.’

‘Kris says it is a blueprint for genocide.’

‘True,’ Uma added.

He turned to look at her as he talked. ‘You know about Prof. Chatterjee’s meeting?’ he said. ‘Kris is going to attend it. He wants me to join him.’

‘Great. You should,’ she said.

‘I don’t want to,’ he replied. ‘But that’s not the issue.’

She could not fathom him. He had been so easy to understand last night, in his anguish and fear and desperation.

‘At the meeting,’ Rasheed continued, ‘Kris wants to propose a plan to identify the author of Secret History, to ensure criminal cases are filed against him. You know what inspired him to think of the plan? My illness.’

‘Your condition, you mean,’ she said, correcting him.

‘It all started when he asked: why should I die at my age and the author of Secret History live?’

‘What kind of question is that,’ she said, disapprovingly.

‘There’s a connection there,’ he said.

‘It’s absurd,’ she countered. Uma got up from the chair and sat on the mattress, facing him. She looked into his bewitchingly mad eyes.

‘Think about it,’ he insisted.

‘There’s no connection,’ she said.

‘Here I am dying …’

She placed her hands on his chest and said, ‘You are not dying. Hear that.’

‘I could die; and the author is planning genocide. There’s a connection.’

Tenderly, she ran her hands on his chest.

‘Uma,’ he said, softly. ‘Who can understand the need to protect life better than the person who understands its value best? A dying man, obviously.’

She understood his thought process, his logic. Perhaps Rasheed hadn’t ever believed in anything other than gratifying himself, and now after his experience of the last three weeks, he perceived in Kris’s proposal the possibility of redeeming himself. It wasn’t as if he had decided on attending Prof. Chatterjee’s meeting. Nor that he had decided to embrace Kris’s proposal as his mission. But an idea of the future, however nebulous, had begun to incubate in him.

Uma lay down on her belly, and peered at his face. ‘You should attend the meeting,’ she said. ‘But remember, there is no such thing as a meaningful death.’

He glanced at her, and saw her staring at him. Who is she, he thought, beyond her body and its fragrance.

Rasheed suddenly turned Uma over and lay on top of her. He pinned her wrists to the mattress. His eyes shone brilliantly, his face was a foot away, arched over hers.

‘Who are you?’

She was startled by his aggression, and the pressure of his body upon hers. Fear and confusion mingled together in her eyes.

‘Tell me, right now,’ he said.

‘What do you want to know?’ she asked.

He loosened his grip on her wrists. ‘Anything,’ he replied.

‘Like what,’ she said. His behaviour had disoriented her.

‘Like why did you join HOPE?’

She found the question ridiculous. Uma burst out laughing.

‘It’s a long story,’ she said. ‘Kiss me, instead of asking silly questions.’

Secret History

O Hindus,

On 6 December, you the Hindus, the only true people of this holy land, the only legitimate children of your Mother, will get another chance to prove your manhood, and reclaim that which was taken away forcibly by the barbarians, who came here centuries ago and defiled the purity of your motherland, plundered and raped her with a cruelty your history had never witnessed before. There are now only fifteen days left for the brave sons of the land to assemble in the town of Ayodhya and remove the last vestige of slavery, obliterate the symbol of your humiliation, and raze to the ground the mosque whose domes have mocked you for centuries.

To you we now report the response of Muslims to yesterday’s edition of Secret History. Our men who live amidst them report complete absence of introspection in the community. They were not ashamed to read about the discrimination the Hindus suffered under Aurangzeb. They were not dismayed at the imposition of jizya on your ancestors. They said to each other, Aurangzeb was a devout Muslim, Aurangzeb believed in Allah and His commands. Praise be to the Mughal emperor, he tried to spread Islam. O noble sons, inform them: mend they must their ways or else they should prepare to face the chastisement of changing times. Soon, you and I are to witness the culmination of the resistance your ancestors mounted against Muslim rulers. Soon, you and I are to witness the reversal of past injustices.

At this you ask, O writer of true history, narrate the stories of those who resisted Aurangzeb Alamgir. O writer of true history, bring to us what the storytellers have concealed.

Impossible it is for us to describe each and every rebellion against Aurangzeb Alamgir. Suffice it to say that the entire nation revolted against him. In peninsular India the Hindu challenge was mounted by Chhatrapati Shivaji. Brave was Shivaji, he carved out an independent Hindu kingdom from the Muslim empire. Great was Shivaji, he taught the Hindus the virtue of battling the foreigners.

In the early seventeenth century, your ancestors in south India were crushed between the Mughals and the sultan of Bijapur. Battered and fettered, the Hindus awaited the arrival of a saviour. In 1627 was their prayer answered. In the small fort of Shivner was Shivaji born. At the age of sixteen, he set upon a career of military conquests. The first fort to fall to him was Torna. He promptly ordered its fortification. During the digging for construction inestimable treasures were unearthed. Utilized was the wealth by Shivaji to fight the war of independence. In it is a lesson for you to learn: life never fails those whose goal it is to serve the motherland.

Over the next few years, Shivaji captured several forts of Bijapur. Against him, in 1659, the sultan of Bijapur dispatched Afzal Khan with a huge army. Clear was the brief to the Bijapuri general: get Shivaji, dead or alive. Towards the fort of Pratapgarh Afzal Khan and his soldiers began their march. Deep inside the Javali forest was the fort of Pratapgarh, in it waited Shivaji for the Muslim army to attack. Cunning was Afzal Khan, he realized the perils of entering the forest to fight the Hindu army. He consequently decided to open negotiations with his adversary.

To Pratapgarh then was a Maratha Brahmin, Krishnaji Bhaskar, sent. To Shivaji, Bhaskar said, come down from Pratapgarh for a conference with Afzal. There can then be settled amicably all outstanding disputes between you and the Bijapuri sultan. Blessed is the rebel, he sniffs danger in advance. To Bhaskar, Shivaji asked: why should the Muslim general suddenly want a peace conference? Why should the hater of idols suddenly want to court their worshipper? Overcome with emotions, Bhaskar hinted at the evil design of Afzal Khan. Thus warned, Shivaji began his preparations to meet the Muslim general.

From the fort of Pratapgarh, Shivaji stepped out on the day of the conference. To it, he went wearing a protective armour under his imperial dress. Concealed on his body were also steel gloves with claws. During the welcome embrace, Afzal Khan suddenly gripped Shivaji’s neck and plunged a knife into him. But for the armour, Shivaji would have been killed. Swift was Shivaji’s retaliation: he slew the Muslim general there and then. From the forest suddenly emerged the Hindu army. Ruthlessly were the Muslims killed, spectacular was the victory of Shivaji.

Wicked are those storytellers, they say Shivaji attacked Afzal first. They accuse Shivaji of treachery and bluff. Ignore these claims; forget the quibble over who attacked whom first. Tell us, what was wrong in slaying a man who wanted to humiliate him publicly? Tell us, what was wrong in killing a Muslim general in cold blood?

The rise of Shivaji became a threat to the Mughal empire. To check his rise, Aurangzeb Alamgir sent Shaista Khan as governor to the Deccan. Poona fell, so did Kalyan district. Shivaji retreated to lull the enemy into complacency. On 15 April 1663, the brave Hindu warrior secretly entered Shaista Khan’s camp and fell upon the sleeping soldiers. Shrieks from the harem echoed in Poona city. Cries of despair rent the air. It was the night of bloody revenge. Shaista Khan managed to escape, but his son was nabbed and slain. A Muslim general, for once, experienced the pain of watching his child gasp for breath. Courageous was Shivaji, he cut off Shaista Khan’s thumb to demonstrate his defiance of Aurangzeb Alamgir.

Exasperated, the Mughal emperor sent Jay Singh as Shaista Khan’s successor. The new governor persuaded Shivaji to visit the court of Aurangzeb Alamgir. Wise sons, have patience, we know the question you wish to ask: why did Shivaji agree to pay obeisance to the Muslim ruler? Wasn’t he tacitly accepting the suzerainty of the Mughal emperor? Crooked indeed is the path of rebellion, innumerable are the ways by which the goal of independence is won. Judge your hero once you hear the story of his daredevilry.

On 9 May 1666, Shivaji and his son Sambhaji arrived in Agra. They hoped to be treated as equals by the host who had failed to vanquish them in the battlefield. Instead, the father and son were asked to sit among nobles low in the royal hierarchy. His ego hurt, Shivaji feigned illness; he fainted and fell. As soon as he recovered, the Mughal emperor placed the Hindu ruler under house arrest. It was in gross violation of the promise of safety Jay Singh had given to Shivaji.

Great was Shivaji, he countered deceit with deceit. Understand his ruse, draw your lessons from it. From his captivity, Shivaji sent baskets of fruits and sweets to priests and mendicants. It was, he explained to the Mughals, a thanksgiving gesture for recovering quickly from his illness. Every day, at the appointed hour, baskets were taken out of the royal palace. So accustomed did the guards become to this routine they stopped checking what they thought were offerings to holy men. One day the Hindu ruler and his son concealed themselves in the baskets. They were quickly whisked out of Agra city. Through a circuitous route, and in disguise, the great Hindu warrior entered his kingdom.

Over the next three years, Shivaji reorganized his army. In 1670, he sacked Surat and looted its immense wealth. He demanded from the richest port of India, money in return for protection. The arrogant Mughals watched helplessly as Shivaji, till his death in 1680, conquered vast tracts of their territories. In temples conch shells blew again. In his kingdom, none was afraid to proclaim he was Hindu. We know you will take the path Shivaji showed you in the seventeenth century. We know you will be there in Ayodhya on 6 December. We know you will fight to reclaim the site where Lord Ram was born. Rise and raise your arms, rise and say Lord Ram.

The night was cold and the moon was behind the clouds. Inside the house, Uma was dancing to the music. Joy Michael was at the door, complaining to a group of guests for breaking up the party. Imagine leaving at this time of the night. Pass out or stagger to sleep at dawn: hadn’t this been their norm for an evening of revelry during their student days?

The boys laughed and embraced Joy Michael and the girls pecked his cheek. They were in the early twenties, mostly single, mates from college who had been brought together because of the party Joy had thrown mid-week. Their speech was slurred; they were taking their time to say farewell.

Joy beamed at them and shook hands.

They had noticed the change in him: smartly dressed, he looked healthy, in contrast to the emaciated and shabby appearance and blank expression of his university days. Joy had looked a creep then. He had missed classes to score on the streets of Delhi. Drugs had gradually bent his mind; he had taken to talking stuff no one could relate to, about religion and esoteric theories on life, discerning humour in moments of sobriety, and interrupting discussions and gossip sessions in the college canteen to recite poetry others had thought was weird. They had called him Joy the Sorrow behind his back.

But Uma had taken Joy seriously.

What did she see in him? What meaning did she read in his nonsensical outpourings of verse and philosophy? They would see Uma engrossed in animated discussions with Joy. This Uma had been strange even then, wasting time on the wastrel, believing she could wean him off drugs.

In the last year of post-graduation, Uma had lost the battle for Joy Michael.

At 11 p.m. on a cold January night, a professor had found Joy roaming the campus in just pants and a shirt, shivering and jabbering aloud, like those crazy fakirs at mausoleums and railway stations. On seeing the professor approach, Joy had begun to howl. What a night it had been. They had sat up till morning discussing Joy Michael, his addiction to drugs and his breakdown.

That had been a little less than two years ago.

But what they had heard second-hand was confirmed today: the de-addiction clinic had indeed succeeded at inculcating in Joy the art of enlivening life through work. Their good old Joy the Sorrow was now working in a top-notch firm. Look at him, they had whispered earlier in the evening, as normal as all of them – his pleasing demeanour, his smart clothes, his sense of humour; these had been the attributes of his personality before he was lost to the world of soporific haze.

As they smiled and shook his hand at the door, they marvelled at his transformation. All that he needed now was a girl to marry and settle down, they told him.

Uma was at the far end of the room. Her hair swayed wildly as she danced to the music. In another six months, she was to fly to England to do her Ph.D. Joy Michael watched her from the door.

He was now ready for her. He was now worthy of her.

Did she love him? Would she say yes to him?

Uma announced the next number was to be the last. With her on the floor was another couple. Uma beckoned Joy. He smiled and moved towards her, on the way turning up the volume.

You know that it would be untrue,

You know that I would be a liar

The voice of Jim Morrison filled the room. She was close to him, shaking her arms and swinging her hips. ‘Lower the volume,’ she shouted. ‘Your parents will wake up.’

‘They are upstairs ,’ he said.

If I was to say you

Girl, we couldn’t get much higher

‘Lovely evening,’ she said, coming closer to him. ‘You don’t have to drop me. Rupali and Anirudh will.’ The two, engaged to marry soon, were the other couple on the floor.

‘I thought … Well, I thought … We could have a chat.’

But she joined Rupali and Anirudh as they sang in unison with Morrison:

Come on baby, light my fire

Come on baby, light my fire, Try to set the night on fire

‘Why drive in the cold,’ she said, her hair swirling as she turned around.

Joy stepped closer to her. ‘There’s something important I want to discuss with you,’ he said.

Uma looked into his eyes. She nodded. The music had them in frenzy. Uma glided to the centre of the room.

Joy moved away from the floor to gather the glasses. He was in a good mood. What an evening it had been. There couldn’t have been a better way to commemorate the night, he thought. They didn’t know about it, and he hadn’t told them: it was on this night, a little less than two years ago, he had broken down.

The time to hesitate is through

No time to wallow in the mire

Joy smiled at the idea of consciously creating overlapping memories. He wanted to break away from the past. From now on, he wanted to celebrate this night as the night he proposed to Uma.

Try now we can only lose

And our love become a funeral pyre

Uma watched Joy Michael clear the table. Her spirit drooped in apprehension of what was to follow. Damn it, she thought, it was painful to discover a friend wanting to become a lover, to choke friendship in definitions. She shouldn’t have visited him so often during his recovery from illness at home and at the de-addiction clinic where he had been subsequently admitted. A person as lonely as Joy Michael was bound to misconstrue her affection. But what could she have done? He had sought her, and it would have been selfish of her to deny him her time, her company.

It had taken him inordinately long to accept his feelings, and now he was going to get hurt deeply. Perhaps, initially, had he been steadier, had he conveyed his feelings to her, she might have loved him the way a woman loves a man. Initially, more than four years ago, she might have; not now; it simply wasn’t possible.

Might?

Uma had never been sure of her feelings for him. Joy was dear to her, intelligent, different, and caring. Yet that hadn’t been enough for her.

In Joy’s junkie days she would occasionally sense his feelings for her. At that point she would distance herself from him, in an attempt to restore to their relationship the platonic equilibrium. Her withdrawal would be subtle, lasting a few days. And because Joy would never ask her for an explanation, and because she was fond of him, Uma would believe he was reconciled to the nature of their relationship.

What had remained unsaid between them was to be articulated now. He hadn’t told her what he wanted to talk to her about. But she could guess: he would propose to her tonight. In the past few weeks, Uma had sensed a new confidence in him – about himself, about her, about his future. Uma hadn’t given it much thought: she was to leave the country in another six months, anyway.

Come on baby, light my fire

Come on baby, light my fire

Try to set the night on fire, yeah

Why couldn’t he suppress his feelings for another six months? His silence could save their relationship from being tinged with bitterness. Poor Joy Michael, there wasn’t to be another man who could love her as selflessly as him. And now, on this night, she would have to turn him down. She couldn’t say yes to him and fly away in six months, and then write a letter from there withdrawing her consent. She couldn’t feign love for six months, could she?

Try to set the night on fire

Try to set the night on fire

Try to set the night on fire

Try to set the night on fire

The music stopped and Uma switched off the system. Rupali and Anirudh began to put on their jackets and gloves.

‘Aren’t you coming with us?’ Rupali asked.

‘Joy will drop me,’ Uma replied.

‘Come, I’ll see you to the gate,’ Joy quickly added.

The door clicked shut. Uma turned to look at him.

‘Coffee?’ Joy asked.

Uma nodded.

He looked calm and serene. She followed him into the kitchen. He put water and milk to boil. Uma leaned against the wall, listening to Joy Michael talk – what a freak out evening it had been, so much liquor consumed in just four-five hours. But, boy, the guests couldn’t figure out why he had hosted the party midweek. Did she know why?

‘No? On this night, a little less than two years ago … Come on Uma,’ Joy smiled and said.

Uma stiffened, understanding the reference.

He was laughing at the joke. Obviously, he hadn’t disclosed the reason to anyone but her. And anyway, it wouldn’t have mattered to them.

‘Here,’ he said, offering the coffee to her.

Yes, it was true, he said, it wouldn’t have mattered to them, just the way he hadn’t meant much to them in college. They had come to his party only because he had become like them, normal and respectable and straight. Through the evening he could see they were deriving perverse pleasure at the sight of him, interpreting the change in him as a vindication of their lifestyle.

‘You are harsh,’ she said.

‘It’s so difficult to control memory,’ he said. He tried to desist from analyzing his break down, the possible causes behind it. But over the past few months, he knew the ultimate cause of his illness hadn’t been drugs. It had been his loneliness, his rejection, being spurned because he was different from the others.

‘Had it not been for you, Uma, I don’t know,’ he said.

She took the hand Joy Michael held out towards her. He was smiling and looking into her eyes and saying, ‘I love you. Marry me.’

Uma lowered her eyes. She held the cup of coffee in one hand. Her other hand had turned inert in his. It was sad listening to him talk. Poor Joy Michael had it all wrong, as she had feared.

‘Uma,’ Joy gasped. Didn’t she see the change in him? He was responsible now, he took life seriously. He loved her the way she was. He loved her even in her sullen moods during which she would turn away from him. She didn’t have to explain. He knew the reason. She hadn’t wanted to become intimate with him because of who he was. Who wouldn’t have in her place? Really, what was there to expect from a junkie? But now it was different. Her plan to go to England wasn’t a problem, either. He could get a transfer there, or she could do her Ph.D. here. They could sort out such mundane matters later. The important thing was the love between them, he said.

Because she hadn’t replied, and had remained deadpan through his confession of love and plan for the future, Joy suddenly shook her. The cup fell on the floor, shattering into several pieces.

‘Damn you, why aren’t you listening?’

‘Softly,’ she said, ‘Your parents will wake up.’

Uma looked up at him. Her eyes were moist. ‘I can’t,’ she said.

‘Why? You don’t love me?’

She clutched his shoulders and her voice quivered with emotion. She was speaking slowly, choosing her words to ensure he wasn’t hurt more than necessary, admiring him for what he was and yet rejecting him. There couldn’t be a better friend than him, considerate and intelligent and refreshingly different from others. He deserved someone as intense and sensitive as he was. It was impossible for her to forget the time they had spent together, their conversations over endless cups of coffee. His influence on her was permanent; he had made her rethink aspects of life she wouldn’t have otherwise. But love? It wasn’t possible between them. Perhaps it was because they were such good buddies, alter egos, bound to each other beyond time and space and descriptions. Perhaps she …

‘I will get the car keys,’ he said, his voice hoarse but firm. He walked out of the kitchen.

‘I am sorry, please … Joy,’ Uma walked a few steps after him.

He turned around and tried to smile. He looked forlorn, as he began to climb the stairs.

Uma picked up the broken pieces of the cup and put them into the bin. She wished the night would end quickly. Restless, Uma walked into the corridor from where the staircase led up to the first floor. She saw the keys to the car and the house hanging from wooden pegs nailed into the wall. What was he doing upstairs? Obviously, Joy was disoriented.

When Uma saw him come down the stairs, she pointed out, ‘Here, the keys are here.’

Joy remained silent. He took the keys and put them in the jacket pocket. She noticed the pocket bulge. He stepped out of the house, and took out the house keys. But the bulge of the jacket pocket did not subside.

‘Please, I’m sorry.’ Uma moved towards him.

Joy didn’t say anything. Silently, he locked the front door.

The cold air hit her face. The night was dark and the moon was behind the clouds. He opened the door of the car, and she entered from the other side to sit next to him. Joy turned on the ignition and reversed out of the compound gate.

‘Joy, we value our friendship, don’t we?’ She could see he was struggling to suppress his emotions. God, he must speak, say something. This was what she didn’t like about him – he loved her to an abnormal degree.

It was nearly 2 a.m. and the roads of Delhi were deserted. Joy Michael stepped on the accelerator. He turned sharply out of the colony to take the Ring Road. In the distance, about 300 feet away, the fog had started to form a wall of white haze. Joy was driving fast – and he hadn’t uttered a word yet.

‘Slow down,’ Uma said.

He remained silent.

‘You are very angry with me,’ she said, touching his shoulder lightly.

They were now coming down the flyover. Visibility was deteriorating rapidly. Wisps of fog drifted across. But he hadn’t cut down the speed at which he was driving.

She looked at him, then away. Uma was sad. She wished they could rediscover the charming ambiguity of their relationship. This white wintry night was to overshadow their memories of all that they had shared – and relished. Her heart ached at what she had done to him. He couldn’t understand what she was undergoing, or what she had been through other nights. Joy Michael didn’t know she had tried coaxing herself into loving him the way a woman loves a man. It was pointless telling him that it was painful to hurt someone you cared for, and who you still wanted as a friend.

The fog had slowed him a bit. Patches of white haze swirled around them, like cotton balls. But it wasn’t a problem for Joy to negotiate his way through it – he had dropped her home many a time in the past. He was silent not only because Uma had turned him down. A part of him had always feared she would. But what had stunned him was the promptness of her response. It was as if she had never been confused about her feelings for him; she hadn’t even asked for time to think over his proposal.

The car suddenly swayed toward the divider separating the dual carriageway. He swung the wheel just as the car was about to collide against it.

‘Joy,’ she said.

He braked lightly to cut the speed and straightened the wheel and muttered, ‘Shit.’

‘It’s a terrible night,’ she said. Touching his shoulder again, she said, ‘Forgive me.’

He shrugged his shoulder, and she withdrew her hand.

The fog was thicker in this part of the city. It had curtained the streetlights, the buildings, the road signs. Driving through it was like burrowing through gigantic rolls of cotton. Joy was now crawling close to the divider, letting the headlights bounce off it. As long as the divider was visible he couldn’t get lost. It was a thumb rule every driver followed in Delhi’s foggy nights.

They were fifty meters away from the turn into the colony where she lived. Even at the speed at which Joy was driving, they were about twenty minutes away from her home. These twenty minutes would be the last twenty minutes of what they had shared – and what was to change forever. This he could sense already, in their awkward silence. Her reiteration of commitment to their friendship was just about as enduring as the fog.

But his mind rebelled against the truth. On their drive to her home, with every kilometer they traversed, he found it increasingly incredible she could have turned him down, without a thought, so damn quickly. What was their intimacy all about? Why had she nursed him through his illness? Why had she courted him even at the time others kept away from him? These were the questions he had grappled with before, to convince himself of her love for him. And now, because Uma had turned him down unequivocally, and because there were barely ten or twelve minutes left of the relationship as he had known it, Joy Michael wanted to hear her answer the questions he had about their relationship.

He turned right, through the gap in the divider. He crawled across the road, honking and passing through the colony gate, barely visible at five meters. Uma realized she was now nearly home.

‘We are there,’ she said.

‘You are relieved,’ he remarked.

‘Joy,’ she moaned, burying her face in her hands.

‘You know what you are to me, you know that,’ she said.

Joy couldn’t understand her.

‘I am closer to you than I am to anybody,’ she said. ‘It’s true, you know that.’

He couldn’t comprehend what she was saying, unable to reconcile the two contradictory facts – she had turned him down, without a thought, and yet she considered him her special friend, to whom she could relate in a manner she couldn’t to any other person. Either she was trying to console him or was confused about her feelings, as he had suspected on many nights in the past.

She should be persuaded, he thought; assisted in recognizing her feelings for what they really were.

He braked at the gate of her house; the engine hummed in the silence of the night. The double-storey house was barely visible. It was with her uncle she stayed; her parents lived in the hills.

‘You are not going back,’ she said. ‘Look Joy, if we are friends, you would come inside. You can’t drive back on a night like this.’

He wanted to persuade her into rethinking her decision, into recognizing that she had to love the person who she thought was special and closer to her than anyone.

Joy Michael switched off the ignition and opened the door, and she got out from the other side. They walked through the milky white night to the gate. The walkway to the entrance of the house was wet, and they felt their clothes turn damp.

She inserted the key into the door.

Joy’s hand touched his jacket pocket. In it was his father’s revolver.

At the time Joy had gone upstairs to fetch the car key, he had slipped into his father’s study, where behind a particular row of books was kept a revolver and cartridges. Joy had picked and loaded the revolver on impulse, without any concrete intention.

But the drive, and the concentration it had required to negotiate the fog, had resulted in the ebbing away of his disappointment just a bit, making him conscious of his momentary slip into irrationality during which he had pocketed the firearm. He put his hand into the pocket, and followed her into the drawing room.

Uma switched on the blower, its hot air directed to where they almost always sat: he in the sofa, and she on the bean-bag. Joy looked at her and thought she was as beautiful and difficult to tackle as the night swathed in white, visible to him through the window behind her.

She said, ‘Joy, you know how much I care for you.’

He felt awkward arguing and beseeching someone’s love. He remained silent.

‘Joy,’ she said, ‘Joy, you know I am being honest. I can talk to you the way I can’t to any other person.’

‘But you don’t call that love?’ Joy asked. His voice was strained.

His response stunned her.

‘What’s your idea of love?’ he demanded.

‘You deserve someone better,’ she said. ‘You need someone
who …’

‘Don’t pity me,’ he snapped.

There was silence in the room.

‘Didn’t you say in the car, you relate to me in a way you can’t with anyone?’

She nodded.

‘Didn’t you say I’m special to you?’

She was silent and still.

‘Don’t you enjoy spending time with me?’

And because she hadn’t said anything, he coaxed her, ‘Answer me.’

Uma buried her face in her palms. She then looked up at him and mumbled, ‘Joy, I don’t have to tell you what you mean to me.’

‘Christ, Uma,’ he said laughing, ‘If that isn’t love, then what is it?’ He leaned towards her and continued, ‘That’s love. That’s what is called love.’

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

‘Don’t tell me you subscribe to those stupid notions of love – weak knees and the heart beating fast and love at first sight.’

She too didn’t think these were necessary manifestations of love. And yet, Uma thought, it was also true that there was always a little of the inexplicable in love, what couldn’t be defined. She began to talk, but was unable to express her feelings in neat sentences. This was because she had never tried to reason out to herself why she couldn’t love Joy. Her heart told her she didn’t love him, and she believed that was reason enough.

‘I know I have been selfish,’ she said. ‘I can’t keep away from you because, well, I enjoy your company.’

‘But isn’t that love? It is love; to want to spend time together is love.’

‘You are, how do I explain, you are my battery charger,’ she continued. ‘Like I talk to you for a day or two and can keep going for the next four-five days without meeting you, until the time I begin to feel low and need to recharge my batteries.’

‘And you wouldn’t call that love,’ he said, smiling.

‘Yet, whenever I realized I meant more to you than a friend, I kept away, in the hope of conveying to you that it wasn’t possible for me to reciprocate the way you wanted me to. But I also needed you, so I would return to you, and believed you had understood that your love couldn’t be reciprocated.’

‘So what is it?’ he asked somberly.

Now that Uma had started talking, telescoping her amorphous feelings into words and sentences, she could sense why she had been unable to reciprocate Joy’s love. She had never tried earlier to understand why her heart would swing from intimacy to indifference.

‘Your intensity, yes, it always did scare me,’ she said. Joy Michael’s love ran too deep to understand non-love. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know how to explain,’ she mumbled.

Perhaps it was because of the tone of embarrassment in her voice. Joy understood finally why she didn’t consider what he thought was love, love. It was the reason – and he had, in his love, never understood that.

Uma was looking down at the carpet. She didn’t see his expression change.

‘I tried to love you, I tried to coax myself.’ Uma paused, trying to think of words to communicate, without stating explicitly, the essence of her non-love for him.

He wanted to be sure of what he thought was the reason for her non-love, and he wanted to hear it from her.

‘Basically,’ he said, ‘you don’t feel sexually attracted to me.’

Uma remained silent, with her eyes fixed to the carpet.

Joy Michael leaned back in the sofa, and looked at her. How he loved her, how desperately he wanted her. He ran his hand over the jacket pocket, feeling the bulge, and stood up.

When Uma looked up at him, she saw in his hand the revolver he had taken out from the jacket pocket.

He stood up and pushed the muzzle in his mouth and pulled the trigger. He fell on the glass table, toppling it over, the shattered pieces piercing his face with the sharpness he could not now feel. There was blood on the floor, on the wall, and on her clothes. Outside the drawing room windows, the white wintry night, utterly quiet, was luminescent.

The pain congealed in her memory was scratched open. Her eyelids fluttered: drops of tears trickled down her cheeks. They were sitting in the balcony, on the counterpane she had spread on the floor, facing the barren land that stretched from the perimeter wall of Sector XIII to the horizon.

‘Uma,’ he said.

But when her eyes welled up again, in utter helplessness, Rasheed put his arm around her. He felt her wet cheek on his shoulder, and when he kissed her below the eyes, his lips tasted salt.

In a muffled voice, she said, ‘I did not speak for days. I returned to the hills, to my parents.’

‘It’s all right,’ Rasheed said. ‘You don’t have to talk.’

‘Joy was an only child,’ she sighed. ‘I could have handled that night better.’ She sniffed. ‘I never went to England. Instead, I stayed with my parents and helped them look after the guests who rented rooms on our farm in the hills.’

In the coming and going of seasons, with the salubrious summer breeze replacing the icy winds of winter, switching between living in the hills and the plains, through aborted attempts to return to scholarly pursuit, what did not change was her memory. It snarled and chased her at odd moments, during conversations, at celebrations, in sleep; it bayed during moonlight picnics, on dark and cloudy nights, in moments of solitude; it had emerged suddenly even on her nuptial night.

‘Husband?’ asked Rasheed.

‘I married, you know,’ she said. ‘It didn’t last long.’

‘And when did HOPE happen?’

‘Once I came down to Delhi for a cousin’s marriage. It was a few months after my divorce. We were staying at the uncle’s place where Joy had committed suicide. Suddenly one afternoon, without telling anyone, I took a cab to where it had all started. I rang the bell. An old man opened the door. It was Joy’s father. There were tears in my eyes. He hugged me and exclaimed, “Uma, my dear child!” I began to howl, I don’t think I have ever cried like that before.

‘As he led me inside the house, I heard the phone ring. HOPE, a woman’s voice said. It was Joy’s mother. HOPE is their creation. I stayed the night there, and I have been there since. HOPE was what was waiting to happen to me.’

Her voice was steady now. She wiped her face as she narrated the story of her struggle to overcome the past.

‘It was difficult, initially. Those desperate, anonymous voices over the phone would get to me. But I had decided HOPE was to be my last stop, which I wouldn’t abandon.’

She looked at him and smiled. ‘HOPE has come a long way. We have funds, we are involved in research, we counsel schoolchildren; we are in the process of providing visiting services.’

Rasheed tried to imagine Uma in her younger days. He understood her, finally: she lived joyously because she had overcome her fear of pain and sorrow.

‘I was transformed,’ she said. ‘Transformed from within.’

‘And Joy’s parents, what about them?’ he asked.

‘We stay upstairs; HOPE works from the ground floor,’ she said. There was pride in her voice. ‘They are not directly involved in its functioning now. HOPE has grown beyond their capacity. I’m their companion. I’m their son who has come alive.’

Her voice turned soft, its robust lilt, though, remained. ‘The last two nights,’ she said, clutching his hand. ‘It is the only time I stayed away from them, you know, apart from my trips to meet my parents.’

‘You feel bad about it?’ he asked.

‘It’s not that they need me round the clock, you know,’ Uma said. She leaned on him and continued, ‘But from tomorrow till Tuesday night, I must be with them. Joy’s father is to be admitted to a hospital on Monday, for angiography of his heart. They might insert a stent into his artery, in case blockage is detected. He will have to stay there overnight and come home on Tuesday. He’s nervous and so is Joy’s mom. I think I should be with them.’

‘You should,’ he said. ‘Don’t bother about me.’

Uma looked at him tentatively.

‘Kris will be here tomorrow. He wanted to spend the night,’ he said. Looking away from her, he added, ‘On Monday, there’s the meeting at the Centre for Gandhian Studies.’

‘Are you going?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he replied, glancing at her.

She smiled and said, ‘There you will meet EPK, your mate from fifth grade.’ She giggled and took his full name, ‘Edayathu Pochiah Krishnamurthy.’ Her eyes, though, were still wet.

‘He knows why I sought HOPE, doesn’t he?’

Uma didn’t want to conceal the truth from him: it was one thing to not voluntarily offer information; but now that he had asked her, well, ‘Yes,’ she said.

She raised her head to look at him. He didn’t seem upset.

‘I couldn’t help it,’ she continued steadily. ‘I mean, how could I have known that EPK and you had been friends in school? On the very first day of your call, he had come to the office. He heard your name and said he knew you; the coincidence was amazing.’

Rasheed didn’t say anything.

‘I had you call at his place, I had to script the coincidence to ensure you didn’t stop trusting me. I had thought it might help to bring EPK into picture. I couldn’t possibly have told you, look, I know this guy who was with you in school and he wants to meet you.’

The way she had spoken tickled him. Rasheed smiled and said, ‘It doesn’t matter now.’

They sat silently on the floor, with her head on his shoulder.

A little later, she said, ‘On Thursday I’ve to go to the hills, there are some property papers I need to sign there. Friday is the day of signing. You and I, we will go there together.’

Gently, he squeezed her body against his.

Secret History

O Hindus,

On 6 December, you the Hindus, the only true people of this holy land, the only legitimate children of your Mother, will get another chance to prove your manhood, and reclaim that which was taken away forcibly by the barbarians, who came here centuries ago and defiled the purity of your motherland, plundered and raped her with a cruelty your history had never witnessed before. There are now only fourteen days left for the brave sons of the land to assemble in the town of Ayodhya and remove the last vestige of slavery, obliterate the symbol of your humiliation, and raze to the ground the mosque whose domes have mocked you for centuries.

O noble sons, do not think we relish the acrimony between Hindus and Muslims. Exasperated we too are by the perpetual hostility between the two communities. Weary is our soul, deep runs our disappointment. Diseased is your nation, fated it is to suffer in the manner of a cancer patient. Your society begins to malfunction periodically. Its pain springs from the riots between Hindus and Muslims. Its suffering arises from the terrorism Muslims sponsor with impunity.

O wise sons, tell us, what is the response of your elected leaders to the ailment? O noble sons, tell us, what is the prescription of those who are the doctors of society? Their chemotherapy entails hunting down mischief-makers. They irradiate the diseased part through stringent laws and court cases. They undertake surgery through arrests of those who are killers and looters. Through such shock treatment, they guide society back into remission. In this condition, you and I then begin to live normally. And then, suddenly, there are headlines in newspapers: Twenty killed in a grenade attack in Srinagar; Jhumri Telaiya tense over cow slaughter. Recurred has the cancer treated earlier. It is back to the treatment tried before. It is back, once again, to remission until the Hindu-Muslim problem arises again.

Let us be frank with you, the doctors of society must adopt the method of modern cancer research to treat the Hindu-Muslim problem. To understand the cause of cancer the researchers ask: why do human cells multiply beyond control? Could the origin of the disease lie in our genes? So must the doctors of society ask: why are Muslims disloyal to your nation? Why do Muslims refuse to join the mainstream? Why do Muslims become terrorists and kill innocent people?

O wise sons, the genesis of the Muslim problem lies in the message of the Quran, in the tradition of Prophet Muhammad. No religion stands as much in sharp contrast to modern politics as Islam. No religion is as antithetical to nationalism as Islam. In their hierarchy of allegiances, Islam takes precedence over the motherland. Between his community and your motherland, the choice of a Muslim is clear. Vile are those storytellers, they ignore the treachery of Muslims. Liars are those storytellers; they say all those born in this land are the children of the motherland. Know it, a true citizen of India is one whose holy land is also his motherland. He whose religion is born in an alien land, cannot drink from your great civilization. He who considers another land holy, can scarcely be loyal to the motherland. A person’s religion determines whether he will stifle an idea or kill another human being in disagreement.

You are perplexed as to why we haven’t yet narrated a story from the past. You can perhaps feel the anxiety of the author of Secret History today. O noble sons, we know you love us, we know you wait impatiently to read us every morning. Even those storytellers can’t deny our popularity. As proof of our growing readership, we recommend you read the story in the Mirror about a football match. In a junior school, Hindu students rallied against their Muslim mates in the match. It is said the inspiration of Hindu students came from the lessons of Secret History. O wise sons, beware of the storytellers, they know you are turning away from them. In them, we have discerned anxiety and anger at the changes we have introduced in their stories. Among them, Secret History is discussed daily. Every word is weighed and every sentence analyzed, and all the events we portray are debunked as false.

In you a voice has risen to say, ‘We, the children of the motherland, know what our duty is. We, the children of the motherland, will never be led astray.’

Yet we warn you, beware of the storytellers, in them there’s much wickedness and deception. Their power of seduction matches feminine charm. Their souls will not rest in peace until they have exhausted all tricks to lure you back. We can hear you murmur: what’s come over the writer of history, why does he sound so circumspect?

Hear this then, tomorrow those storytellers will assemble together to discuss methods of countering us. Before me is the invitation card summoning all those who feel it’s time to challenge the author of Secret History. They accuse us of preaching hatred and death. They allege we are turning brothers against brothers. Wise sons, we laugh at their inability to understand our motive. Don’t they know it is not the Muslims we are against? Don’t they know we treat Muslims as our brethren who have gone astray? From our faith, they were coerced into embracing Islam. From our faith the poor were lured into embracing Islam. O wise sons, don’t we all know the fault is not of Muslims but their Allah and His Book. Haven’t we told you before, Muslims must be defeated to weaken the stranglehold of the idea over them?

We have been among those storytellers, we know their type well. We know what they will attempt tomorrow. Over endless cups of tea and cigarettes, they will deride the author of Secret History. Among them will be men, young and passionate, full of sound and fury. To this meeting will also come women who have read too much for their own good, who are too liberated for Indian society. They are those who know all about the latest social science theories propounded abroad, they are those who spin yarns about issues you and I rarely bother with.

After each of them has pilloried us, they will draft petitions to send to government officials and newspapers. They will in words chosen carefully demand immediate steps to stop the sticking of Secret History on public walls. They will write articles in newspapers debunking what we have said. They will hold seminars on the composite culture we have supposedly inherited. They will organize protest marches which only 200 people will attend.

We do not fear them. They are pampered and spoilt, they only drink coffee and criticize. We know you will not forsake us. We know you will, every morning, visit the site where Secret History appears. You will read and propagate among others what we have already told you. Who knows what’s in store for you and I. We might have to be cautious, stick Secret History papers at fewer places than before. Copy what you read, distribute these among friends and relatives. Let it be known all around: in destroying the Babri Masjid, we hope to defeat the idea born in the dunes of Arabia. So rise and raise your arms, rise and say, Lord Ram.

Sitting in the easy chair, Rasheed was bent over the sheaf of Secret History papers lying on the mattress. He lifted one on the top and examined the strips sticking from its four corners. He ran his finger over each of them: brown in colour, these had perforations and square patterns.

Kris was on the mattress, with his back against the wall, a pillow in his lap. He did not notice the curiosity with which Rasheed was examining the Secret History papers, keeping one aside to scrutinize the next. Kris was engrossed in talking about the proposal he planned to present at the meeting convened at the Centre for Gandhian Studies.

‘Behan chod,’ he said, thumping his fist on the pillow. ‘They paste such fucking stuff on walls, and all that we want to do is condemn the text. I mean we behan chods don’t have to hold a meeting for that.’

Rasheed turned over the paper in his hand. The obverse side of the brown strip must have been gluey, over which the two plastic strips would have been; one removed earlier, the other at the time of sticking the paper to the wall. Exactly the way Sheela had described her new job, a few days ago.

‘Rasheed,’ Kris continued. ‘What are we going to do to stop the author from his diabolic plan to kill people? I mean, he isn’t even embarrassed. He gloats over what he is doing.’

But Rasheed was absorbed in examining the Secret History papers. It was because of the brown strips that the papers had seemed familiar as soon as Kris had showed them to him. Every morning, Kris would rip off the paper from the walls of the colony in which he lived, denying those who woke late the chance of reading it. He claimed it was his method of countering the author. From each edition of the Secret History, though, he had kept one copy for himself and these he had brought for Rasheed to read.

‘Tell me, Kris,’ Rasheed said, ‘Are these papers from your colony similar to what appears in Hemant Kunj?’

‘Exactly like them,’ Kris replied. ‘Same text. Same paper. The same brown strips by which they are stuck to walls. Tell me, Rasheed, will we attend the meeting tomorrow, pass a resolution, and return home? Even the author has predicted that in today’s edition of Secret History.’

Rasheed did not respond. He recalled his conversation with Sheela on the afternoon he had gifted the sweaters and blankets to her. In a hesitant voice, she had described her new job.

Rasheed heard Kris say, ‘I’m going to shame those foggy bastards into action. You don’t want these things on walls, well then do something about it, behan chods. I’ll stand up and say, I have a plan of action. Rasheed, are you listening?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Continue.’

‘I have a plan of action,’ Kris repeated.

‘What is it?’

‘Hunt the author.’

‘Hunt the author,’ Rasheed repeated and smiled.

Kris thought his friend was critical of the idea. ‘You think it is impossible? Actually, it’s quite simple. Obviously, someone comes to stick these papers on the walls. We get him first, work our way from there, step by step, to the author.’

‘There’s a simpler way, perhaps,’ Rasheed said. He held the Secret History paper by a brown strip and added, ‘Exactly as she had described.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Kris asked.

Rasheed began to pace the room. ‘The paper matches her description. Brown strips with perforations and square patterns. That’s what Sheela had said.’

‘Have you gone mad,’ Kris said and laughed. ‘Who’s Sheela? In these two weeks, you seem to have been lucky as far as chicks go. First Uma, and now Sheela.’

Rasheed, too, laughed and added, ‘You have it wrong. She is my part-time maid.’ He told Kris about Sheela and her TV-like machine which hissed out papers smothered with words, from top to bottom; the four brown strips she was required to stick to each of those papers; and the Rs 4,000 she received for what she thought was a job even a child from the jhuggi-jhopri could perform.

Kris had been silent through Rasheed’s recapitulation of the job that Sheela performed. ‘It isn’t possible,’ he said.

‘She sticks brown strips to papers. She told me. I remember it clearly,’ Rasheed said.

‘Any idea about the number of papers she handles?’ Kris asked.

‘No figures,’ Rasheed said. ‘But the number is enough for her to spend hours doing that.’

‘They won’t hire her,’ Kris declared. ‘They are supposed to work as a secret society.’

‘They?’

‘I mean that Organization,’ Kris replied.

‘True,’ Rasheed said. ‘But her description; I mean why would anyone hire a maid to stick brown strips to computer print-outs? Think about it?’

‘That’s true,’ he said, adding, ‘Perhaps you are mixing things up.’

‘No, I remember her description of the job because she kept irritating me with her silly questions. She was a bit scared; she thought her illiteracy was being exploited to trap her in a criminal activity.’

They remained silent for a few minutes.

‘No harm checking it with her,’ Kris said.

‘True,’ Rasheed said.

Kris said, ‘Do you know where she stays? Can’t we, like, go there right now?’

‘I don’t know where she stays,’ Rasheed replied. ‘We will have to wait till Tuesday.’

‘Why Tuesday? Can’t you summon her to come before we leave for the meeting tomorrow?’

‘The maid in the flat across the landing comes to work in the morning and goes back by noon. It’s too late to send for her now. I’ll ask her to send Sheela over on Tuesday. By the time she goes home and tells Sheela we would have gone for the meeting. Besides, we must not appear overly curious. It could alarm her.’

‘Alarm her?’ Kris asked.

‘She said her new sahib had warned her against telling anyone about her job.’

‘Why would anyone do that?’

‘Exactly,’ Rasheed said.

‘I wish we could talk to her now, at this moment,’ said Kris, pulling out a bottle of rum from the bag.