18 September 1999
Things have been a little busy. The preparations to welcome Dada are in full swing. Baba has been working tirelessly to get the flat ready in time for Dada’s arrival. He has maintained a serious, almost-angry countenance all through to prove he isn’t happy with the proceedings. He walks out whenever Maa mentions Zubeida Boudi’s name—who he still calls that Musalman girl—and then calls Dada ungrateful every time he offers to pay for incidentals. The frenzied activity at my house has helped me sneak out without being asked too many questions. Their rising concern and obsession around Dada would have rankled had I still been a child.
For the sixth day in a row I prepared myself to climb up and jump; it has become easier with time. I rubbed my hands and stretched and I looked up and saw Brahmi on the ledge. My first instinct was to run below the scaffolding and spread out my hands to break her fall, and I was still staring agape at her when she hopped, almost merrily, from the edge to the scaffolding. Of course, why shouldn’t she? She was the athlete between the two of us. She clambered down easily.
‘I could have come up,’ I said.
‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to let my attention waiver from you.’
‘I never said that.’
‘But you thought it. I know because I did too,’ she said. ‘Now come.’ She led me to Tauji’s Bajaj Chetak whose key she had flicked and we climbed on. ‘Hold me,’ she said.
I rode pillion all the way to India Gate. Twice we came across police checkpoints and she dodged and sped through both. Her acute knowledge of the little lanes criss-crossing central Delhi left the policemen scratching their heads. She had taken me there for the kaala khatta chuski but we spent a few minutes gazing at the arched gate.
‘It takes at least 82,000 men to die to have a memorial made after them,’ said Brahmi later while sucking on her chuski. ‘I can’t believe you haven’t been here.’
‘I’ve been here only once, on a school trip. Not with family. Baba says the men whose names are scribbled served the British army and died for their cause in the First World War, so what’s the point? He calls for a bigger India Gate with names of the men of Netaji’s army or the Gandhians, even the revolutionaries.’
‘And what do you think?’ she asked.
‘I love the lighting here.’
Our lips slowly turned beetroot red from the chuski and we argued about whose were redder.
‘How are things at home?’
‘It’s like a room filled with LPG with the windows thrown open. I don’t know what’s going to happen if a match is struck.’
‘Your Dada’s lucky that they came around.’
‘Dada always thought they would. Didn’t he say Maa–Baba would regret not being there the day he got married?’
‘Your Dada knows your Maa–Baba better than you do,’ she said.
‘That’s quite shocking. I hadn’t expected them to give in.’
‘I know what you mean. My father’s side of the family would have never accepted this. They disowned a cousin of mine who married a Dalit. When he had a child, my aunts in Delhi prophesized it would be an ugly, demonic baby. My aunts still calls her names even after so many years. No one visits them any more.’
‘That’s so not right,’ I said, with a right conferred upon me by my Dada’s marriage to someone outside our religion.
‘My cousin converted to Buddhism. He had got tired of everyone referring to his wife as a lower-caste untouchable.’
I wanted to correct her, tell her that you never stop being a Hindu, or convert to Hinduism through a magic ritual. You’re just born into this religion, this way of life, and it’s always there with you, like a birthmark or a congenital defect, unlike Islam or Christianity. But, of course, like every organization, to sustain itself Hinduism adapted too and you could now convert to Hinduism or shed it like a snakeskin.
We finished our chuskis and walked hand in hand for an hour, after which she had to leave. She refuelled the scooter, drove us back and climbed to her room with the same ease.
At the breakfast table, I asked if Bengalis too have their versions of churis and chamars.
‘Yes, we do,’ Maa said. ‘But all that doesn’t matter any more. No one cares about caste except the politicians. For them every division is a vote bank.’
‘So you will have no problem if someone in our family gets married to someone who’s an SC, ST, a Dalit or something?’
Maa–Baba looked at me, horrified.
‘We would mind,’ grumbled Baba.
‘Between a Muslim and a Dalit? Who would you choose?’
I was asked to finish my breakfast instead of asking them silly questions. Whatever division Maa was talking about is a vote bank for a reason. Because those divisions exist. At least in my house they do.
Now while I am writing this, I am thinking about Brahmi’s niece and Dada’s unborn child, children of unholy alliances. If this were 1994, we would have known what the sex of the child was. Now it’s illegal.
‘It’s because of the Haryanavis,’ my maternal uncle had said a few years ago. ‘They do these tests and if it’s a girl, they go home and plunge knives into the wombs of their pregnant women and kill their daughters.’
I had asked Maa once, ‘Do Bengalis do that too?’
‘We are not brutes like the northerners.’
Dada had laughed and said, ‘What about the Great Calcutta Killings of 1946?’
‘That’s ancient history,’ Baba had butted in.
Dada had laughed again and said, ‘You teach him about Ghor and Ghazni and Aurangzeb. That’s not ancient history?’
‘What had happened?’ I asked.
‘Thousands of Bengalis massacred each other. Men were cut up, burnt alive, women raped.’
Baba had argued, ‘The Muslims did it. They wanted Pakistan. We didn’t do anything.’
‘We?’
‘We! The Hindus. We never attack first. That’s our weakness,’ Baba had said.