Gandhi Colony

I had no interest in helping Lakshmi Stores thrive or in fobbing off greedy accountants. It was the word Delhi that exploded in my head. Delhi. I was going to Delhi. I spent the rest of the day salivating at the prospect.

Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Books

People leave home for many reasons. Mine, perhaps, is one of the oldest. It was the desire to reinvent myself that brought me to Delhi in the summer of 1990. I’d been nowhere near a big city, let alone one that was the nation’s capital, and knew nothing about living anywhere except in my hometown of Ashaghar. And I didn’t care. All I wanted was to leave Ashaghar.

Ashaghar means the home of hope in Hindi. In the eighteen years I lived there, I didn’t know whether to think of that as a travesty or a cruel joke. The place would’ve been situated right in the middle of one of India’s poorest states, Bihar, if it had shown up on a map. It never did. The administrators shoved us even more firmly into insignificance by placing the nearest bus stand almost thirty kilometres away and the nearest railway station almost a hundred. There were no television signals or newspapers. No one had home phones. The outside world came in through the post office or the radio and our news went out through letters and telegrams.

We existed in a warren of lanes spread out over a few square kilometres. Within that space was a crumbling school, a ramshackle hospital, a stinky cinema, a dilapidated post office, a run-down bank, and lines of old shops and houses jammed shoulder to shoulder. We were a bicycle town, with a bicycle rickshaw being the only means of public transport. Some people had jeeps or scooters. The hospital had one broken-down ambulance that took forever to get anywhere. The school and bank had a van each. Nobody owned a car and if they had they wouldn’t have known where to drive it since all the roads were unpaved. When the rains failed, which they did most of the time, all that was green and moist fled and a dusty haze settled in the sky. The heat was remorseless. It left you addled, scratchy, fly-bitten, ill-humoured. What it never did was leave you in peace.

So, if Ashaghar was what the home of hope looked like, then hope was in a truly hopeless situation. It was languishing in a place that was thirsty, decrepit, and had been banished so irrevocably to the back of beyond that even the rains had trouble remembering it. Surely hope couldn’t survive in such a place. It had to flee.

And then there was my father.

Papa had waited a long time for a son. (Mummy miscarried twice before me.) Once he had me, he wasted no time. The day after I was born in 1972, he consulted an astrologer on the most opportune time for me to start working in his general merchants’ shop. The astrologer spent a week with my horoscope before declaring the twentieth day after my thirteenth birthday as the most auspicious. I wasn’t there, but I can well imagine how the revelation would have struck Papa.

“What?” he would have gone in his tinny voice. “Surely he can start earlier. I began in my father’s shop when I was eleven.” Only to become silent when the astrologer countered, “He can, but it won’t be the most auspicious day.”

Maybe the astrologer didn’t say it in so many words. But that is the import of what he told Papa. Papa would have loved to call his bluff. But he had good reason not to tempt fate. Mummy was unlikely to get pregnant again. He swallowed his outrage and accepted the astrologer’s recommendation.

No sooner had I returned from school on the appointed day than a bicycle rickshaw announced itself in the alley outside our house to ferry me to the shop. Lakshmi Stores was named after the Hindu goddess of wealth and located right in the heart of Ashaghar. Papa raised its shutter promptly at nine in the morning. He didn’t down it before nine at night. If he had thought he could get customers, he would have kept it open all night. “I did not close the shop even on the days my parents died,” he’d tell anyone who suggested he take a break.

Lakshmi Stores was a hole-in-the-wall carved out in a narrow alley filled with holes-in-the-wall jostling for customers. A battered glass display case stretched like a barricade towards the front. It bulged with packets of biscuits and sagged under the weight of jars crammed with sweets. Papa’s chair stood right behind the display case. An ageing table fan blew air in Papa’s face. Another table fan even more ancient than the first one fought a losing battle against the heat crowding the back of the shop. My stool was placed in its path. I could squat there and do my homework when I was not fetching and carrying. Papa was clear about which duty had precedence. “The shop is your life,” he told me right after I settled on the stool.

Shelves packed with provisions loomed behind me and contemplated me from both sides. The ceiling hung a few feet above my head. The back of Papa’s chair and his head, bald except for a silvery patch of hair at the base of the skull, met my gaze whenever I looked straight ahead. The only light came from a bulb attached to the ceiling.

After thirty minutes in the back of the shop, my mouth was full of the musty air that had been trapped there since god knows when. A stale smell ran up my nose and I was gulping down a mouthful of water every few minutes; I was afraid I’d choke otherwise. My face was hot and sweaty no matter how often I scrubbed it with my handkerchief. When Papa yelled “Vai-bhav” I scrambled to get what he wanted. He didn’t need to yell. I was no more than eight feet behind him. But he had spent a lifetime yelling at his assistants. His voice knew no other pitch.

Things were no different the next day. Or the day after that…It was as if I was caught in a loop. Soon the shop was following me everywhere. “What’s that smell?” my classmates would wonder in school. They dragged their desks further away from me in the classroom. Even the teachers wrinkled their noses while handing back homework. I scrubbed myself as hard as I could in the bathroom. But the mustiness from the back of the shop stuck to me as if it had been grafted on to my skin.

And then the shop infiltrated my dreams. First, the packed shelves would appear, edging closer by the second, until they were so close that I felt as if I was about to be smothered to death by the likes of Tata Salt, Liril Soap and Lal Qilla basmati rice. The ceiling would start to crumble as if it was about to cave in and I’d cry out “Help” to the back of Papa’s head. “Please help me.” Papa’s head would refuse to budge. Instead, his voice would go “Vai-bhav” and add with a mocking laugh “The shop is your life.” I’d wake up with cold sweat on my face and beg every deity I knew to deliver me from such a fate.

Strange as it sounds, it was Papa who helped me plot my escape from Ashaghar.

When I reached my last year of high school, graduation was looming like the day of execution might for a convict on death row. Until now, I’d worked at the shop after school. After graduating, I was supposed to go to work fulltime. I beseeched the deities for a way out of that as frantically as a dead man walking might for a reprieve. My prayers were answered in the most unexpected manner.

Papa had whinged for years about the money he had to dish out to accountants to do the shop’s books. Every year he was forced to squeeze out more. By the time I was in my last year of high school, the amount had bloated so much that he felt he had to do more than merely complain about it.

Every night after dinner, he’d sink in a chair in the drawing room to sit with his jaw loose and his small mouth and beady eyes closed. His gaze seemed to draw itself to his third eye and he resembled a meditating monk who has retreated with his senses into an inner chamber to get to the heart of the matter. Behind the stillness, his mind was hard at work. Weighing options, mulling the cost of this, the benefit of that…It was a few days before he was satisfied. One morning, he informed me that I wasn’t going to be working at Lakshmi Stores after graduation. I was to go to Delhi University to study economics. In three years, I’d come back knowing everything there was to know about accounting and taxes. Then he wouldn’t have to fork out any money to greedy accountants. A knowledge of economics would also be good for the family’s finances. Help make the right decisions. Lakshmi Stores could only prosper as a result.

I had as much desire to study economics as to return to the shop in three years. My heart was set on becoming a writer. The next day, I spoke to my English teacher, Arnab Sir, about the best colleges in Delhi University for English literature. He handed me a list. I wrote to get the relevant application forms and filled out as many applications for English literature as I did for economics without informing Papa. The acceptance letters arrived on the same day. I shared the one that said I’d been accepted for economics with Papa. I retained the other one that indicated that I’d been admitted to Arnab Sir’s alma mater St Paul’s for English literature. Within a couple of months, I was on my way to Delhi without Papa knowing my real purpose for going there.

It was very much a deception of its time. Today Papa wouldn’t need to send me to Delhi; he’d have universities closer to home to choose from. In 1990, things were different. Given the pitiful state of higher education in Bihar, Bihari families felt obliged to send their wards to Delhi despite the two-day train journey. Furthermore, college fees were paid in person. Papa would send me a money order for my fees and living expenses in Delhi. He had no idea what I was paying for. Today he’d know exactly, because he’d pay the fees through a website. I was reasonably sure that he’d never visit or call the university. Travelling to Delhi meant leaving his beloved Lakshmi Stores for an unacceptable amount of time. Calling Delhi was cumbersome. There were no mobile phones then. The two landlines in Ashaghar—the one in the hospital and the other in the post-office—had been dead for as long as I could remember. No one had bothered to repair the telephone lines in years. In order to ring Delhi, Papa would have to travel down a pot-holed road for eighty kilometres to get to a town with STD phone booths. Even then he couldn’t be sure the call would go through. If we’d had a relative or a family friend in Delhi, he might still have learnt of what I was actually studying. But we had no one.

Sometimes a voice in my head would wonder if I was doing the right thing. I’d silence it by envisioning the life I’d have if I did what Papa wanted. The only place where I could hope to go in that life was from the back of the shop to the front. Even that would take years; Papa wasn’t planning to retire anytime soon. In the meantime, I’d stay put on a stool in the back of Lakshmi Stores and grow older contemplating the back of his head.

I spent my first night in Delhi in a cheap hostel near the railway station. My room had paint flaking off walls, a bed that groaned each time I turned, and a mildewy stench that refused to die no matter how much air freshener was sprayed to subdue it. The noise of the street batted away late into the night. There were horns blaring in choked traffic, people yelling at each other, stray dogs howling at the moon…I was glad when the morning finally arrived.

After a quick breakfast, I sought out a real estate broker to enquire about a room to rent. The brokerage was down the street from the hostel. A sole proprietorship run by a chunky, bespectacled man, with a handlebar moustache, who worked from behind a scarred desk. When I said I was looking to rent a room, he asked me my name. Once I told him, he fished out a list from a dusty drawer. After slapping away the dust, he studied the list by holding it close to his nose. He crossed out some of the options with a blue ballpoint pen before handing it to me. These are not for you, he said. I was in too much of a hurry to enquire how he’d come to such a conclusion on the basis of my name. Later, I learned those rooms were located in Muslim neighbourhoods. No city comes without its walls. That day I carried one of Delhi’s in my trouser pocket.

Such was the anticipation surging through me that this could very well have been my first real date. I’d landed in a new city, had little money, and had never lived on my own. Yet I was euphoric. Not so long ago, I’d been staring at a life of stasis. Now I had an exciting future to behold. But that wasn’t the only source of my giddiness. I was feeling Delhi in a way I’d never felt Ashaghar.

Delhi, in the 1990s, was a city of transplants. If you went back two generations, hardly anybody was from Delhi. First came the waves of Hindus and Sikhs fleeing ethnic cleansing in Pakistan during Partition. Then refugees of every stripe from all over India—the ones escaping poverty, the ones hungry for opportunity, the ones driven out by political violence…Flight was deeply embedded in Delhi’s soul and had turned it into a place where people re-made lives. I was a small-town boy eager to re-imagine himself as a city sophisticate. I embraced this restless urge for reinvention in a way I could never embrace Ashaghar’s yearning for continuity.

On that first day, I stayed away from auto rickshaws and taxis in a bid to save money. Instead, I squeezed myself in and out of DTC buses that were yet to be air-conditioned and were packed with sweaty bodies crushed against each other. The mop of black hair on my head was soon drenched with sweat. The searing breeze stung my face, and my throat parched no matter how much water I downed. Yet I flowed with an enthusiasm as irrepressible as the Delhi dust that refuses to settle even on a still day.

By that afternoon, I needed every bit of that enthusiasm. I’d been told that my potential lodgings were within my budget of five hundred rupees a month. I quickly discovered that wasn’t the case. When I tried to talk the rent down, I was informed that this was Delhi not the ‘back of beyond’. Where the rent wasn’t an issue, the fact that I was a college student was. College students didn’t make for desirable tenants. They partied too much, went out at odd hours of the night—they were trouble.

Round mid-afternoon, I encountered a home owner who inspected me with hooded eyes. “Are you a Sikh?” he asked.

I was surprised. I didn’t have a turban or a beard. “Do I look like a Sikh?”

“These days many of them are pretending to be normal people, cutting off their hair, shaving off their beards. One must be careful. The last thing I want in my house is a terrorist.”

That was my first inkling of how much Delhi had come to resent its Sikhs. There wasn’t a single Sikh in Ashaghar. There the Sikh militancy existed as a remote news item that sounded on the radio when a bomb went off or someone important was gunned down. In Delhi, it was as palpable as a gun held to your head. Less than a decade had passed since Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had been assassinated by two Sikh bodyguards in the heart of Delhi. A day after the assassination, an army of vengeful goons took to the streets to teach the Sikhs a lesson. Within a few days, they massacred thousands and burned down their homes and businesses. Delhi had borne the brunt of militant anger since then. Gun-toting policemen prowled its streets. Metal detectors frisked outside its buildings. Police barricades sprang up after dark.

“I’m not a Sikh,” I said.

But the man had made up his mind. He said no with a shake of his head.

Evening was gathering in the sky by the time I reached Gandhi Colony. The place wasn’t on my list. I was directed there by a maid in the last house where I was rejected in Jawahar Nagar. She must have seen a day’s worth of disappointment bearing down on my shoulders and taken pity. “The place is not high class like this neighbourhood,” she said. “But you will get a room there.”

By then I didn’t give a damn about how classy the neighbourhood was. I simply wanted to find a place to live. I asked her if it was far. She shook her head. “Go there and ask for Jogi,” she told me.

A narrow dirt track, no more than twenty metres long, separated Gandhi Colony from Jawahar Nagar. I crossed it with weary legs to find myself in the colony’s main alley.

The colony was shaped like a comb whose teeth stick out on both sides from a spine in the middle. The main alley was that spine. From there alleys branched out to the right and left.

The main alley was dusty and unpaved like every other alley in Gandhi Colony. Over the years, it had morphed into a market. Two lines of shops faced each other across a path running between them. The shops were housed in squat wooden sheds or shelters of tarpaulin supported by bamboo sticks. The path that ran between them was chewed up on both sides by street vendors selling produce from wooden carts shored up by bicycle tyres. When I arrived, the heat was receding, with evening settling in, and the market was filling with people. I had to jump out of the way of jangling bicycles and belching scooters squeezing through the crowd. One driver swung around to admonish me. “Do you have eyes or buttons? If you want to die, go die somewhere else.” I held up a hand in apology and edged forward the best I could.

Halfway down the alley was a skeletal arjun tree shorn of leaves. A low concrete platform encircled the tree trunk. A picture of the god Ram was propped up against the trunk. The image resembled the actor who had played him in the television show based on The Ramayana. Fresh marigold garlands swathed the picture and diyas flickered in front of it. People were pausing to fold their hands before going round the tree. It felt strange to see a tree named after a character in The Mahabharata housing a temple dedicated to a god from The Ramayana. I wondered if someone had got their epics mixed up. I didn’t get to wonder for long. A prod in the back told me to get going.

A man with an emphatic tilak on his forehead accosted me right after I passed the arjun tree. He was dressed in the saffron robe of a sadhu and was waving an orange pamphlet in my face. Another man dressed in white—kurta, pyjama and skull cap—arrived to thrust a green pamphlet at me. Both men were rakishly thin with pointy heads, long noses and beady eyes. Even their unsuccessful attempts at growing a beard were identical right down to the wispiness of the fuzz. It would’ve been hard to tell them apart if they didn’t dress so differently.

The white-clad man’s pamphlets came from the Mosque Preservation League and had to do with preserving the mosques that the saffron-robed man’s organisation, the Temple Reclamation Front, wanted torn down and replaced with Hindu temples. The saffron-robed man’s pamphlets explained that these mosques needed to be removed so that the temples, on whose ruins they had been constructed, could be restored.

Normally, I would have waved them away. The hard look in their eyes convinced me otherwise. I accepted the pamphlets, thinking I’d throw them away later. The two men glared at each other before stalking off in opposite directions. I let out a sigh after they were gone.

I tucked the pamphlets in my trouser pockets and pushed on through the crowd. A stone bust of the Mahatma stood a few feet ahead. I’d never seen him without his bamboo stave. Its absence seemed to rob him of his authority. The ragged marigold garland he was wearing did not help. His mouth looked as if it had eaten a lot of dust over the years and the rest of his face was chipping away and littered with bird droppings, most noticeably on the glasses. Later, I learned that at one time the people of Gandhi Colony would stop to fold their hands to the Mahatma. Now the folded hands were reserved for Ram. No wonder the Mahatma looked forlorn.

The fans in the shops suddenly ground to a halt. The generators stuttered to life. Gandhi Colony might have been electrified, but the supply was so erratic that most shops had bought diesel generators. The rattle from those second-hand contraptions added a nagging backbeat to the noise. Radios were playing everywhere you could imagine—on shop counters, in people’s hands, in shirt and trouser pockets. For some radios the reception was so patchy that they’d cough like old men chockfull of phlegm before spewing out something intelligible. Others had to be tapped, patted or shaken out of their stubborn silence. And then there were some whose volume knob had frozen on maximum to leave them hollering. I still have no idea how they were coaxed into silence every night.

A short man with a pointed face and a mouth left red by chewing betel sidled over from a vendor’s cart. The smell wafting from him reminded me of a rotting garbage bin. Later, I got to know that he was a rubbish collector. He was known as A.I.R. or All India Radio because he loved spreading gossip.

He asked after my business with a betel-stained smile. Up close his stench was so pervasive that I had the urge to hold my nose. Somehow, I stopped myself.

“I’m looking for Jogi,” I told him.

“Which Jogi?”

I was confused. “What?”

“There is Jogi the Rajput, Jogi the Sikh, Jogi the carpenter and Jogi the electrician. Which Jogi?”

“I-I came about a room to rent.”

“Ohh,” he drew out the oh as he examined me from head to foot. “Why, you don’t have a home?”

The question caught me off guard. It was a few seconds before I said, “I’m a college student from…” The memory of what happened the last time I mentioned I was from Bihar punched me in the head. I told him that I was from out of town.

His eyes narrowed. “No relatives in Delhi that you can stay with? Or did you run away from home?”

What kind of question was that?

A.I.R. laughed at my bemused face. “The room belongs to Jogi the Rajput. You’ll find him there.”

He gestured in the direction of the dhaba at the end of the main alley. I could feel his eyes boring into my back as I walked away. But when I glanced over my shoulder, he was striding in the opposite direction.

In a place where space was gold dust, Jogi’s dhaba hogged an area as big as a penalty box on a soccer field. It had no walls, simply a roof of tarpaulin sheets held up by bamboo sticks. The seating area was stuffed with as many rickety tables and wobbly straight-backed chairs as could be crowded in. Jogi was laid out on a rope charpai placed prominently in the middle. A cash box squatted beside him with a garlanded picture of Lakshmi propped on it. An incense stick smoked at the feet of the goddess of wealth.

The rope charpai was sagging under Jogi’s weight. His white kurta rose and fell in tune with the rattle of his snoring. He was oblivious to the flies crawling over his face and shaven head, or buzzing about the wiry hair poking out of his ears. The looseness of the kurta didn’t hide his massive shoulders. With his luxuriant moustache he could pass for a subedar-major in one of the Rajput regiments in the army.

I hovered in front of the rope charpai, wondering how to rouse him from his slumber. An adventurous fly did the job for me. It slid through the hair coming out of his ears to settle on his eardrum. Jogi emerged from his nap with a curse. He slapped away the fly and started muttering to himself. Amidst all that, he caught sight of me. Still scratching his ear, he roused himself to sit cross-legged on the rope charpai and enquired after my business with a movement of his hand. I told him I’d come about the room he had to rent out. The fluster on his face vanished to be replaced by a big smile. He quit scratching his ear. “Hey, Chhotte,” he shouted.

A small, dark boy who worked in the dhaba as a server came running.

“Bring a chair.”

Chhotte arrived with a white plastic chair that looked so flimsy I wondered if it would collapse under my weight. I sat down and winced as it sank under me.

“What are you standing for?” Jogi said to Chhotte. “Go get a chai.” He turned to me with a smile. “What work do you do?”

He was sizing me up even as he was speaking. When I mentioned that I was a student at Delhi University, his smile froze before coming back to life. It wasn’t as wide as before but somehow seemed more genuine.

“Make the chai special,” he called over his shoulder. To me he said, “I’m honoured to meet you, sir.”

I was far too surprised to say anything.

“One of the great regrets of my life is that I didn’t study much.” He paused as my chai came. His face darkened when he saw it had been served in a glass.

“Didn’t I tell you the chai was special?” he barked at Chhotte.

“It’s okay,” I cut in. I was used to having chai in a glass in Ashaghar.

Jogi ignored me. Wagging a thick finger at the boy he said, “When sir comes he is to be served chai in a cup with milk and sugar on the side. Do you understand?”

The frightened boy nodded before rushing off to find a cup. Jogi turned to me with a shake of his head. “He is a mochi by caste, so naturally his head is empty. Back in the village he’d be a true mochi and spend his day working on shoes. But here in the city…” He stopped suddenly, his face tightening. “What is your full name?”

“Vaibhav Kumar Agrawal.”

“Agrawal,” his face relaxed. He was clearly relieved that I was upper caste like him.

“Consider the room yours, sir,” he smiled.

But…what about the rent? Jogi seemed to read my mind. “Don’t worry about the rent, sir.” He glanced to his right and left before leaning forward. “You see, sir, my bitia,” a smile bigger than any I had seen creased his face when he mentioned his young daughter, “I want her to study, do something with her life. But there is very little I can do to help her and my wife is even more uneducated than me. If you could come by in the evenings and help her with her lessons…”

The money Papa had given had seemed princely in Ashaghar. One day in Delhi was enough for me to realise that it made for a hand-to-mouth existence. Even more so if you threw in the rent. The arrangement Jogi was proposing was nothing short of manna from heaven. It wasn’t hard to say yes. Only after we shook hands, I realised that I hadn’t even seen the room.

Vikram Kapur has published three novels in his native India. His short stories and essays have appeared in World Literature Today, Litro, Beloit Fiction Journal, The Hong Kong Review, Mekong Review, Ambit, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Berlin Quarterly, Huffington Post, The Hindu Literary Review, The Times of India, Himal Southasian, and other publications. His short stories have been recognised in several international competitions which include, among others, Britain’s Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, and Ireland’s Fish International Short Story Prize. He has held writing residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, the Canserrat Arts Center, and Under the Volcano. He has a PhD in creative and critical writing from the University of East Anglia where he received the India-Africa bursary. He currently works as a professor of English at the Shiv Nadar Institute of Eminence in India. His website is www.vikramkapur.com.