AFTER THE FALL

It would be dreary Mama, to tell you all that happened after her sycophants and psychophants, the ones who disliked her more than they feared her, convinced Mrs G that she would win the election. That’s what people say. I think there was the seed of a democrat in her, left behind by years with her father’s teaching. And she was a watcher of the entire freedom movement. The IB bumbled and how! No one had the guts to tell her she’d lose or worse, the sleuths didn’t know. I had dragged Nishant to the Ram Leela grounds—didn’t take much effort, JP is his idol, or was till he died. It was an experience seeing all of them on the stage, from JP and Morarji to Charan Singh and Bahuguna. Jagjiwan Ram was there also. Nishant thought Indira would put up a fight at the hustings, though she’d lose. I ferried voters in our car on the day of polling, one of the great days in Indian history. And as the results came out, people danced in front of the Hindustan Times office score board. And I am not going into detail—the fight for the office of the prime minister. Suffice to say the caustic, ascetic Morarji Desai took over. After that how the press and the radio and the TV went to town on excesses of Emergency. Heady stuff.

But life is where home is, Mama. Well, news came that a roof of one of our outhouses had caved in. Rabia phoned and said it would cost at least a thousand. I wanted an excuse to go to Lucknow. He was going to be thrown out any day, after all the entire bureaucracy was being shuffled around. Nishant would be shunted back to the state, probably to Lucknow, of that I was certain. I told him I would see to the repairs and come back, at the most, within a week. I went back to my city.

The outhouse was really in a mess, half a roof caving in. Rabia helped out, got me a repair man and a roofer. Emergency was off and so one had to pay for the cement in the black market, I was told. I flogged my connections, asked Nishant over the phone to contact his colleagues in the service and help out. He wasn’t eager at all—hadn’t kept in touch (where was the bloody time!) with his UP colleagues—would be embarrassing, he said. Well, face the embarrassment or shell out money which we don’t have, I barked over the phone. (The phone bill in Lucknow hadn’t been paid and it was a wonder the telephone guys had not cut the line). They weren’t helpful, the officers. A district supply officer told me, ‘Madam for a special permit you will have to write an application and fill many forms.’ I walked off in a huff, but had forgotten my goggles on his table, and as I re-entered I heard him ask his clerk, ‘Who eggjactly does she think she is?’I just picked up my shades and walked off quietly.

Later when I returned to Delhi and told this to Nishant, he was dejected rather than enraged. He said, ‘I don’t wish to say what I feel, don’t want you to hear such words.’But when I persisted he said, ‘They think I have been reduced from cat’s whiskers to dog’s jhants. They don’t know how wrong they are.’

You come home or your earlier home and find things have changed imperceptibly. You can’t put a finger on it, though. I pulled a book out and found things had changed in the book. I know that sounds weird. A part of the platform wasn’t there, not Charbagh Mama, where I got down sleepy-eyed and dream-befogged, not sure if this platform means anything to you, it does to me; the guards were there though they were half-eaten, but who bothers about guards Mama, you know your daughter is feudal even if born of a communist mother— feudalism is genes, a part of ancestry; but I was bloody sorry that the ghost had gone, poor ghost ‘unhoused, unanointed’, along with his beard ‘sable silverd’. Mama, the silver fish had got to the ghost, Hamlet’s father’s. It was my BA(Hons) book, marked with red and blue pencils. We performed the first act at Isabela Thoburn, I was Bernardo, and the hall lights were switched off for we had a gaslight on the stage—after all, the scene was ‘In the dead vast and middle of the night’. I don’t know what to do with the book now, just as Bernardo didn’t know what to do with the ghost. And when we change guard I ask Francisco, ‘Have you had a quiet guard?’ and he answers ‘not a mouse stirring.’

Yes and that brings me to the other thing, I noticed rat leavings in the house. I thought of dear old Khalil Gibran.

‘If there is rat shit in the house;

Verily there is a rat in the house.’

I was not going to sit idle—dusted the rat trap and next morning got the mouse. He knew he was trapped, and never touched the bread crust or the cheese on it. If you are trapped, first thing that goes out of the window is appetite. I felt for him and asked the maali to take the trap far into the wilds and release the fellow. Those who know they are boxed in deserve another chance. It is only those who are unaware of being trapped who don’t deserve a thing.

There were other chores. I got the gate repaired, the iron had rusted, got the maali to bring a welder who added a few bars at the top. The very next morning Mama, a cat had got hold of a pigeon, obviously climbed the gate and eaten the bird fairly close to the veranda. I think it was a message the fates had sent through the feline kill—the cat will get you no matter how high and strong the gate you put up.

Within a day of my landing, the second-in-command of Inspector Ambika Singh came calling, the same fellow who had indulged in filmy dialogue with me, and had later caught me by the wrist after I had slapped the constable. I didn’t want to see him but he just sat in the veranda on a cane chair and waited. He kept sitting as I walked up to him and asked what had brought him here. ‘Have to ask you a few questions.’ Go on, I said.

‘This is a serious matter, I must warn you. Please choose your words with care. I am taking down a statement under 161 CrPC.’ My temper was fast rising but I kept it in check. ‘What is this about? I thought the old case about slapping someone had been filed long ago.’

‘You are right. But I will ask the questions. I would like to know from you the whereabouts of accused Shambhu Nath?’

‘Shambhu whoooo?’

‘Shambhu Nath Pande, the one who owned the hardware shop which we were sealing and which you showed such interest in.’

I was losing my temper. ‘I don’t know any bloody Shambhu Nath. My interest in the shop which you all were sealing was purely out of curiosity. Why you were sealing and locking up a shop which was already locked.’

‘Think and answer and don’t act smart. We could have summoned you to the police station and interrogated you. We have converted this case under section 302—murder—you understand?’ I didn’t.

‘He murdered his wife. We are firstly looking for Shambhu Nath and secondly for the woman he was in love with, or why should he kill wife? No one kills his wife if there is no other woman. Think carefully. I am noting down your statement. You look worried, first sign of guilt.’

This was too much. Did he think I was the other woman? I stood up. ‘Get out of my house,’ I said. ‘Out!’ He didn’t budge. ‘Inspector Ambika Singh will soon be coming. You are in deep trouble madam, and this time Nishant Singh Sahib will not be able to pull strings. He will himself be in dock. Emergency is over!’

It got worse when he left and Ambika Singh came in, tall and gaunt as ever, and looking serious. He went over the case, Shambhu Nath’s wife had died of burns. What they had to find out was whether it could be an accident. Ambika Singh found broken bangles on the stairs leading to the landing where the body was found. Even as the investigation proceeded, the Emergency warrant was out for him, he was a political opponent with some clout, a diehard Jana Sanghi. Ambika Singh reasoned with me. ‘We have found the auto driver who took you to Faizabad Road. He doesn’t know your name but we can put you up for an identification parade.’ So that was it. I could curse Alfie. The police had not got to the woman in her forties who spoke to me in her Bombay Hindi accent. And did they know his connection to Alfie? I kept a straight face, lied through my teeth, said I had no idea who this Shambhu Nath was, had never seen him (which at least was true). And I was damned if I was taking any help from Nishant. Yet I felt terrible. I had actually carried a package of money for a man who may have murdered his wife so that he could live with a forty-year-old good-looker! Life couldn’t have been simpler.

‘I know nothing of what you are talking about, Ambika Singhji.’

‘So, you will not cooperate with us?’

‘I never cooperated then, remember? And I have nothing to give now either.’

‘Do you know the whereabouts of Alfred, the reporter for Christian Science Monitor?’

‘I have no idea, must be in England’.

The interrogation ended there. You can’t avoid a filmy backdrop in India. My transistor was playing Begum Akhtar—

Diwana banana hai tho diwana banade

varna kahin taqdeer tamasha na banade.

Yes, one never knew when one could be turned into vaudeville, a joke.

I booked a ticket and came back to Delhi by train. I wouldn’t be caught dead going by air—only wives of the corrupt flew. I have fluked upon a metaphor, Mama. In India you fly high mostly if you are corrupt. I told him about the repairs to the outhouse, and put him wise about what my editor had told me, a literary page all to myself in the Lucknow Chronicle. But how does one fill a page sitting here?The Delhi literati wouldn’t waste a bad poem (they can’t write a good one to save their lives) on a Lucknow paper. They will gas at the IIC and talk of Octavio Paz and Ageya and Sartre (they haven’t heard of Camus fortunately) and drink rum by the gallon at the bar and end up doing nothing except scratching their privates. Moreover Lucknow was three hundred miles distant, letters were slow and trunk calls expensive. And the Lucknow literati, still in their oriental daze, would go promenading on Hazratganj pretending it was Cannes or the Rialto in Venice with grumpy gondoliers looking on and tourists fixing their binoculars on Murano.

‘That outhouse, was it necessary to go all the way to have it repaired? You could have asked Rabia or Shilpa to get it done, and we could have sent a cheque. Simple.’

‘Not so simple, they are friends, not caretakers, each with her own problems—Shilpa is involved with Alfie, Rabia doesn’t want to marry and the pressure on her is immense, the family comes up with one proposal after another of some lackadaisical, paan-chewing feudal who does nothing and survives on money left behind by ancestors. She doesn’t want to enter a tunnel with talaq written at the end of it.’

‘How much did it cost?’

‘Over a thousand.’ This offered me a good opening to tell him about some of his cynical colleagues. I also told him that I wanted the house in order, because sometime or the other we’d have to move.’

‘Seema I have been meaning to tell you for sometime, but couldn’t get a chance. If we move from Delhi, it isn’t Lucknow we’ll be going to.’

‘Then where?’

‘Patna.’

So he’s had his cadre changed. Am not so dull Mama, the thought came to my mind instantly. ‘So your cadre has changed?’ He nodded. ‘You got it changed since you were with the PM, isn’t it?’

‘Where would I get a chance like this, don’t you understand!’

‘And it never crossed your mind that I should be consulted! We just say goodbye to my state, and I am not asked, as if I don’t matter. I went to Lucknow just now to spruce up the house for you. And when did all this happen, this change of cadre?’

‘Just forget it.’

We weren’t shunted to Patna or Bhagalpur—he had not spent five years in Delhi and the best thing about Delhi is there are strings hanging like aerial roots from a Banyan tree, you just have to get hold of one. Then your benefactor and you have to wriggle past rules—panels, cooling off period— quote precedents of earlier wrong doings (which you get from DOPT, that’s Department of Personnel and Training) and you get through. Nishant had the Bihari lobby behind him. Nothing to worry.

Yet I had plenty to worry, would get distraught each time I thought of the Shambu Nath episode. I had actually passed money to a murderer, or at least an alleged murderer. So what if I didn’t know he was a murderer. And someone who had killed his wife, if that Ambika Singh was to be believed! Thought of twisting the phrase, how about ‘carrying kerosene to wife-burner’. There was a saving grace—this guy had done it for love or lust, not for dowry. Don’t know what you’d have said Mama, you would have probably reached for a stick. And there’s always the intriguing possibility that he is innocent.

Meanwhile I got hold of a seedy room in Amar Colony and opened an ‘office’. The Lucknow Chronicle sat cheek by jowl with the Amar Colony Post office. One had to go about twenty steps down from the road to reach it. The Krishna Consciousness Temple was coming up half a mile away and it was spreading and spreading. Word soon got around we were looking for poems and stories and amazingly people started trooping in.