Avenue Of Kings

By Sudeep Chakravarti

A Sikh boy is set aflame in the chaotic aftermath of Indira Gandhi's assassination; a house party rages in Calcutta while the country mourns the fading dream of Rajiv Gandhi; a young Muslim boy contemplates answering the call of militant fundamentalism in the wake of the demolition of the Babri Masjid. But somewhere in the debris of recent history lies a resolute hope. Through this journeys Brandy Ray, wanderer, cynic, journalist-and incurable romantic. As 'New India' delights and disappoints in turn, Brandy grapples with his own life-his deeply passionate and tumultuous relationship with the lovely yet slipping-away Suya, his conflicts with his father, the joy of travels with friends and the trauma of them losing their way. In these three edgy, touching novellas-The Avenue of Kings, The Cradle of Innocents and The Well of Three Wishes-that form interlinked narratives, Sudeep Chakravarti takes the reader on a rollercoaster ride, a journey of aspiration, longing, betrayal... and the sheer joy of being alive. Imbued with wry wit and keen insight, The Avenue of Kings, the long-awaited sequel to Tin Fish, is a brilliant portrait of a country dealing with change.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Dec 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9789350293065

Sudeep Chakravarti

Sudeep Chakravarti is a leading commentator on matters of business and human rights, and socio-political and security issues in India and South Asia. Sudeep's non-fiction narratives - Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country, on India's ongoing Maoist rebellion; and Highway 39: Journeys through a Fractured Land (4th Estate, HarperCollins), set in north-east India - are critically feted bestsellers. His essays on conflict are contained in several collections, including Non-State Armed Groups in South Asia; andMore than Maoism: Politics, Policies and Insurgencies in South Asia.Sudeep began his career with The Asian Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones & Company. He subsequently held senior positions at Sunday, India Today, HT Media and India Today Group. Sudeep's media writing is extensively published in numerous Indian and global publications.Sudeep is a professional member of World Future Society, Washington D.C. He was earlier invited to the Club of Asia by Strategic Intelligence. He is invited to comment on aspects of internal security on network television; social, digital and print media platforms; at academic institutions and think-tanks, including India's Army War College, the Naval War College, and Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad; various CEO and investment forums; and for similar engagements in North America, Europe and Asia.

Book preview

The Avenue of Kings

One

Bliss, my friends: blue skies.

I sensed the sky before I saw it. Smelt it.

It was okay to open the door and not be screwed by eddies of muck that floated through the city like determined thugs, depositing grit on eyes, like perverse snowflakes, and tasting of fuel-metal.

Summer suggested haze from the dust that crept in with the oppressive air. Rain brought damp; rot meant enduring rain. In early winter, it was fleeting mist with a hint of seductive clear before chemical fog claimed the day.

But this was pure, worshipful November clear.

It had slipped in like a sneaky angel through the space under the peeling door, the same space that sluiced rainwater and rude messages from my landlord whenever I jammed the rent, which was nearly every month. Fucking twinkle toes, Dipi had called me, after watching a somewhat creative journey up the steps, past my landlord’s flat, up to my solo grotto on the top floor, feet bare, stooping to avoid his line of sight through the peephole, holding my sandals with one hand and clutching the room keys with the other so they wouldn’t jangle and shade my scene.

His wife was more understanding. Sometimes, she wanted to help let me breeze the rent for a couple of months, but that came at a price. She would want to screw a little in the SQ when her bureaucrat husband travelled and reduce rental obligation. Duress can be damaging and vaguely insulting, even with a plump but otherwise very attractive and odour-free middle-aged aunty type, who seemed to believe in my verve and spirit of innovation but never enough to erase more than a month’s rent. If Bimla became edgy, she would demand in the ratio of 2:1. It seemed like a weird karmic loop, and somehow I never gathered the balls to reverse her threat of blackmail and break out, to whisper in her diamond-studded ear that I would tell her husband about her need for collateral hanky-panky.

Break it, you stupid bastard, I would tell myself.

No matter how much I tried, sexual tension won over politics each time.

I dozed like a happy gecko for longer than I knew, the air finally giving me courage to wake fully, roll off the ageing mattress on the floor and open the set of tiny windows within their prison-grille frame. I looked across the chasm at the other SQs.

They were blank—mostly closed. A couple of doors were open, one showed nothing but dark insides and the other neon-lit whitewash, as harsh as the walls that enveloped me in my rented kingdom, SQ 29. Some windows winked at me, their curtains partly drawn. Crows were doing what crows do, being noisy bloody pains in the arse, fighting over scraps with other winged chaps and random quadrupeds and bipeds, and if that was done, fighting with each other. I freaked a bit because the crows were ruining my day. So I started yelling at them to bugger off. Some chap from an SQ out of sight to my left—it sounded like that fashion design student who told some of us SQ chaps over a Diwali binge that he was so relieved to finally discover he was gay—yelled at me to shut up, you moron. I did. But he couldn’t shut up the dozens of radios and TVs that played mournful music alternating with heavy-voiced announcers across the huge piss-yellow housing complex; the sounds of official calamity in lunatic symphony.

Just about a day since IG died. End of an empress, but not the empire. Democracy as we knew it, but what the fuck.

Suprabhat, Delhi.

A thousand salaams, India.

Greetings and felicitations, O ancient and wizened civilization.

Hello, new day. This is Brandy Ray.

I lit a smoke, then tiptoed down three floors and walked the five minutes or so to Hauz Khas Market to call Suya from Arora’s second-hand bookstore. Arora’s was the closest. The two public phones between the Delhi Development Authority warren where I lived and Arora’s were buggered; either the dials wouldn’t turn or they’d eat coins like greedy bastards without offering a connection, like those government types. Even when the phones worked, the ether would howl and scream with netherworldly fervour, kind of like Vivaldi on acid. Dipi and I called it ‘Concerto Telefono in Paininthearssimo Major’.

Arora’s was open, surprisingly, along with the chai shop and one grocery that had people like flies. It seemed everybody wanted to stock up.

I tried Suya first. I hadn’t met her for a couple of days and it was more than a week since we had made love and, anyway, I thought we could give each other some emotional succour, with IG dead and all. Maybe wonder if we had any future in India or, tail between legs, would we need to bugger off to Disney’s Land. Suya’s father barked at me to get off the bloody phone, you useless chap; he was expecting calls from his office.

I called Dipi next. No pressure of love, sex or sour pater with him. We went back to faded years in boarding school, a time when all ambitions were equal. At twenty-one, this was already ancient history, but it meant we could talk without overhang. We looked out for each other, though he more for me because he had more money as he stayed with his elder brother and, anyway, his father was quite liberal with the stuff. To compensate, I tried to provide the emotional number, like being there when he was coming out of a hangover or pretending to like the Beatles when I’d rather be listening to the Rolling Stones. But it was his brother’s fancy Sanyo tape deck and, so, he had unfair advantage.

The sky was squeaky clean, I told him.

‘Hmmm,’ he said, mulling it over. ‘Squeaky.’

He sounded hungover. Maybe rum and grass; later, some rum and aspirin that backfired. A fight with Mira, maybe; she tired of his sodden nihilism. One of these days, he was going to leak his brains and have his sense of humour fly out of his arse. I told him as much.

‘Then what?’ Dipi agreed.

I absently flicked a small cockroach, shiny and brown, off the counter. It carromed into video tapes of Hindi soft porn before flying a short hop to the next lot of shelves, then scurried between a couple of fat, much-thumbed Ayn Rands, leaving some translucent wing behind as a statement of indestructibility.

‘Brandy, fuck you doing up so early?’ Dipi was at my ear again. ‘Everything’s shut today because of IG.’

The papers on Arora’s counter were full of it, I saw as I tried to pay attention to Dipi. They used words like ‘assassinated’ as if it would make people take her death more seriously. It made the papers sound grand and suggested that chaps who brought out these papers had a decent education and they told the whole truth. But they lied lily-white like the government, hiding truth behind words. Killed, shot full of holes, machine-gunned to death by her guards representing a people majorly pissed off for a festering political cock-up in Punjab that she and her thug son helped create. It happened more and more. The masters would create some backhanded hero to leverage and protect their arses in some region, let the guy fly with guns, money, anything. Soon, he would be out of control. The masters would then have to annihilate the guy to square the issue and pretend to be self-righteous fucking angels while doing so.

We all had to be well-mannered after the fact, or it would ruin the façade of a wholesome nation. It was like karma wearing a leaky condom.

More shit would follow.

You didn’t just bump off someone like IG and go home to smoke some superior Manali while listening to the Doors or the Mahavishnu Orchestra. You would first need to be dragged through the conscience of the country, cursed and butchered with those of your kind, in multiples of a thousand, before the masters decided enough bad blood had been leached out of the system and stepped in. India knew how to do it well, could do so blindfolded, Father had told me in the days we still spoke to each other.

Anyway, it was a bad scene, and it seemed my day was jammed even before it had quite begun. I had to get to work by noon at the trade fair grounds and hang around playing gofer for an industrial exhibition for a couple of weeks. That would earn me five hundred chips, enough for half a month’s rent, food for a week, some cigs, condoms and a bottle of Old Monk.

‘I need to get to work’ was all I could think of telling Dipi, wondering if they would cut pay on account of IG, but that wouldn’t be fair. She had messed up, she sent in the army to the Golden Temple and freaked what seemed like all the Sikhs on the planet, and some other chaps had killed her. It had nothing whatsoever to do with me, and fuck the Small World experiment.

Mrs Arora made faces at me. She was wearing a nightdress that made her look like a blimp covered in a block-print tablecloth. There would be trouble, she shouted at me while her husband watched. She needed to close the store. Why did you open in the first place, I shouted back.

‘Who are you talking to?’ Dipi started to lose it.

‘Mrs Arora, man, the second-hand book joint,’ I said in a low tone, turning away, slightly embarrassed to be talking about her in third person while she stood with her mouth to my ear. ‘She wants to shut the shop.’

‘Speak up. Save that low-voiced shit for Suya.’

‘The corner shop guys in the market. Where I rent books.’

Logic hit Dipi. ‘Fuck did they open in the first place?’

‘That’s what I asked her.’

‘Fucking brainchod.’

Mrs Arora thumped my shoulder.

‘The blimp is freaking. I might drop by in the evening if there’s no curfew. Okay?’

‘Hokay.’ Dipi giggled. He knew what I meant. ‘There are enough leftovers from yesterday.’ Then he went senti on me. ‘Be careful. Don’t get killed or something.’

I promised him I wouldn’t. A man had to eat.

I put the dirty receiver down, the farewell crackle and whine of the phone nearly deafening me. I squared shoulders, brushed hair out of my eyes and turned to face the Aroras. I lined up my nose at Mrs Arora, whose face was tit-high for me.

‘You want to lose your customers?’ I thought a dead-on nose would look best—and hoped the tip didn’t glisten as it did on some mornings. I raised my left eyebrow and curled my right upper lip, trying to be cool, hoping I didn’t look like a nutcase.

‘Who are you, the PM?’ She ignored the show. ‘Six rupees.’

I glared at Mr Arora for support, but he pretended to look at some second-hand books piled on the counter, his right hand absently stroking the potbelly that stuck out from his toothpick body. ‘Avoid, man,’ I pleaded, my balls melting. I switched back to Hindi. ‘Six rupees? I just made two calls.’

‘Then talk less.’ She smirked. Her lips were exaggerated with bright maroon lipstick. She should have been in mourning for IG, I thought as I counted out the money, worn something lighter. I couldn’t take my eyes off Mrs Arora’s lips. She must wear that colour even when she brushed her teeth at night, drawing back her lips and then pursing them in an ‘O’ to spit out the gunk. All along, Mr Arora must stand at attention, cranking his dick like a gramophone to make sweet music for Milady Arora.

I started to laugh. She called me a chootiya. Mr Arora just kept stroking his belly, strings trailing over the greying fabric of his pajamas. His eyes were screwed shut.

Two

It was the kind of blue that made you raise your eyes from the world of the pavement. Really blue. Neat and honest, like the palette of childhood. It made it easier to see, pampered the illusion of making things appear closer than they were.

There was smoke here and there: thin, urgent viper-twisters and lazy, fat pythons. Some were a little bent, like a gust of wind had elbowed them in passing, but most were still, black columns holding up the sky.

‘Dilli is burning,’ the rickshaw-wallah told me and stopped the contraption with its leftover baskets of vegetables.

From the Hindi he spoke, he couldn’t have been from Delhi. Somewhere in Uttar Pradesh, maybe Varanasi or Allahabad. His speech was almost formal, but it sounded more real than the marionettes who read unreal, fantastic news on Doordarshan. They looked like cardboard cutouts and spoke as though they were speech therapists out to teach Hindi by decree to a patchwork country. At DD, truth was spoken by pols and their fellow travellers. But DD was all we had.

I sat with my back towards Veggie Man, perched between some onion and stout pumpkin, feet dangling over the side. Buses were off the roads and there weren’t too many cars about either, except official-looking tubby, white Ambassadors that could dent a tank in battle, with blue and red flashing lights, zipping here and there, making a racket like their arses were on fire.

Veggie Man was the only one who stopped for me after I had walked north four kay from Hauz Khas to the crossing of Andrews Ganj and South Extension; I would probably have had to walk another eight or so to the trade fair grounds beyond the zoo. He switched off the pedal cart powered by a tiny motor. People did that a lot, using ingenuity to work and upgrade stuff, like saying I may not have money, but fuck you if I can’t do what I need to do. We got off and stood on the Defence Colony flyover—Def Col in Lingua Urbana. Those outside the pale called it Defance Caloni, but mostly just Defance.

There were a handful of others around, all men, and a police jeep with a bunch of cops just sitting inside, smoking. A wireless set deep inside the bowels of the dented thing was saying something in urgent bursts of garble. The cop nearest to me absently stroked his crotch.

Near the flyover was the huge stadium named after IG’s pater, old Jawaharlal, what they made for the Asian Games a couple of years earlier. The soaring tiers of seats and the four massive floodlight units dwarfed everything. Between them, the Nehru-Gandhis appeared to have got the naming of any impressive real estate down to an art form. Of course, MKG—Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi—wasn’t part of the family, though he appeared on every currency note and his likenesses were everywhere. Just about every town in India had a road named after him, so you sometimes wondered whether the man was the road or the road was the man. Even some Indians, let alone firangs, mistook MKG as being somehow related to them, but the N-Gs never took out an ad in the papers to officially declare they had nothing to with MKG. The Father of the Nation was cool collateral.

Gandhi, Gandhy, Ghandi, Ghandy. Take your pick.

I erased my reverie scene to look at the columns. They were now everywhere. To the south, near Hauz Khas, a tentative new column rose towards the sky. Then a few more to the left, towards Panchsheel Enclave, Masjid Moth and beyond. There wasn’t much to the north from what we could see. Directly ahead lay government housing zones, quiet residential districts, office joints and then the Old City, a concentration of Muslims, but Hindus and Muslims did not immediately have a reason to kill each other. So that part, while tense, would be among the safest in the city. My parents never taught my sister and me these things. We knew from watching and hearing and living. It was imprinted in our double helix, part of our right to exist. Only fools took India for the land of MKG—as in, because a man had died for peace, his land must be peaceful.

To the northeast, the smoke columns were so far away they had to be in places across the Yamuna, which was a gutter of a river in November, too weak to flush Delhi’s bowels. Across this mythical goddess-river lay another world within Delhi—TransYam in Lingua Urbana—housing migrants and the dispossessed alongside planets of government housing. Trans-Yam had lots of tinder.

Some vipers had become pythons and some pythons had become great billowing columns, bigger than even a fantasy-species of snake. Like I had seen soldiers do in a movie, I stuck a thumb in my mouth and yanked it out to hold in the open. Whichever side cooled first would provide the direction of wind. Nothing.

‘What happened, have you hurt your thumb?’ Veggie Man asked, and I self-consciously dried the digit on the side of my khakis.

He watched me with a smile, nodded his head a few times and spoke in a low tone, like he was sharing a state secret: ‘Maarna shuru ho gaya.’

Yes, I agreed knowledgeably. The killing had begun. Then I asked him, with what I hoped was no evident loss of confidence,