Exile

By Akhilesh

Suryakant's life begins to unravel as he is forced to quit his government job. To get temporary financial relief, he decides to work for a Ramjoar Pandey and trace his lineage. The journey takes Suryakant back to Sultanpur, his hometown and his estranged family. The past slips in and out, as in a dream, and the future congeals into a mass of anxiety and fear. Set in the badlands of Uttar Pradesh, the men and women in the book are faced with ruthlessness, depravity and an intense loneliness, rising from the overwhelming assault of capitalism and consumerism. Akhilesh's inventive prose, treads the ground between memory and moment, the states of being and not being, as it follows the lives of ordinary people who discover the thin line that separates freedom from exile. Exile portrays the mortal wounds inflicted by the modern civilization on our soul.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperPerennial
• Release date: Dec 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9789352778980

Akhilesh

Akhilesh is an acclaimed short-story writer. He edits the reputed literary magazine Tadbhav for which he has received the Katha Award and the Ayodhya Prasad Khatri Sammaan

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

In the 1980s, with the rise of little magazines, novellas and long short stories also started to become popular in Hindi. In this context, the short stories of Uday Prakash and Shivmurti are particularly important. Akhilesh’s short stories are, in a way, an extension of those narratives which established the Hindi short story as the equal of the Hindi novel. These narratives were woven around characters or incidents in which an individual appears dwarfed by the system, which reflected how the political, economic and social realms of India were changing. More than the novel, it was the short story that was better able to analyze these changes.

But there’s a difference in Akhilesh’s stories that make them stand out. He is primarily a writer of disillusionment. In the 1990s, the Mandal Commission, the Babri Masjid demolition, as well as the policy of economic liberalization caused a great deal of disillusionment among the youth, especially in the Hindi belt. Suddenly a new kind of education was required. The demand for management graduates grew. The youth of the Hindi belt began to see their futures becoming dim. In an era where English language communication became the very basis for employment or social mobility, they felt themselves getting left behind. They could not see possibilities anywhere. It is against this backdrop that Akhilesh’s most famous story, ‘Chitthi’ published in Hans in 1989, is remembered. It became the representative story of its time, in the way it turned the era’s unemployment into a larger metaphor. The friends in the story promise one another that whoever finds happiness first will write the others a letter. No one ends up writing to anyone.

Whereas Uday Prakash’s stories have characters falling victim to sprawling metropolises, and Shivmurti’s stories touch upon the changing social texture of the village, caste issues and strong women characters emerging amidst them – Akhilesh’s stories depict the struggle of small-town life. In them, he established the small town in opposition to both the metropolis and the village. Set amidst the socio-political struggle of small-town India in the 1990s, his stories gave the Hindi short story a new idiom. ‘Biodata’, ‘Oosar’, ‘Yakshagana’ and ‘Grahan’, among others, served to establish this new language and Akhilesh as one of the foremost storytellers of the decade.

All the major magazines and journals of the time published Akhilesh’s short stories very prominently, and as a writer of Hindi fiction he won many awards. But since 2000, he has been known more as an editor. From Lucknow, he started publishing the journal Tadbhav which soon became one of the most active creative spaces for new Hindi writing. No discussion of the Hindi short story could be complete without Akhilesh’s work being mentioned, nor could any discussion about new creative work be complete without mentioning Tadbhav.

Nirvasan (Exile) is Akhilesh’s second novel. His first, Anveshan, was published in the 1990s and should be read in juxtaposition with his story ‘Chitthi’. Like the story, the focus of the novel is also unemployment. In the era of capitalism, while one generation had to face a huge problem of unemployment, the next became terribly careerist. Using the story of an unemployed young man, Akhilesh also comments upon the education system which suddenly begins to seem inconsequential. Although ‘Chitthi’, an affecting story about unemployment, still ends on a slightly hopeful note of the letter coming, in the novel Anveshan, the theme of disillusionment reaches its peak.

Nirvasan, published in 2014, can broadly be said to deal with the theme of displacement. It is interesting to note that several folk songs of the Purbiya community of India remember people who left their homes to go to foreign lands in search of livelihood. For instance, one song curses the railway train which the man of the family boards to leave for distant lands, it curses the city of Calcutta where he has gone and forgotten all about his home. Coincidentally, one of the main characters of the novel, Pandeyji is obsessed with his ancestral roots and his Baba, who had gone to Calcutta in search of employment and disappeared. After that, no news of him was heard. It is evident that, for the Purbiya community, displacement for employment is a very old pattern. In the polyphonic structure of Nirvasan, this theme runs like a river – leaving home to earn a livelihood.

In Hindi and English literatures, the story of the Girmitiyas in the nineteenth century has been written about extensively. The Mauritian Hindi writer Abhimanyu Anant has written a sprawling historical novel, Laal Paseena (Red Sweat), and more recently, the English novelist Amitav Ghosh has written the Ibis Trilogy. Giriraj Kishore’s novel Pehla Girmitiya (The First Girmitiya) should also be mentioned here, which is set against the backdrop of Mahatma Gandhi and the Girmitiya community in South Africa. At first, Akhilesh’s Nirvasan gives the impression that it will follow the plot about Pandeyji’s search for his roots in the Girmitiya community from Surinam. But that is not all that the novel is about. Instead, as a reader progresses through Nirvasan, it seems as if this is a text about the displacement of even those roots. Meaning, one doesn’t want to be wherever one is.

Akhilesh’s short stories dealt primarily with disillusionment that was spreading amongst young Indians in the 1990s, but the theme of displacement is also a recurring one. After the 1990s, there was a big migration from the east for employment and education. Akhilesh’s story ‘Jaldamrumadhya’ talks about that. In the story, Sahayji’s son settles down in Delhi and wants to sell the land in their hometown, whereas Sahayji wants to hold on to his land. But ultimately, the house gets sold and he cannot do anything. Throughout the story, there’s a struggle between reality and idealism. Reality is displacement, idealism is the stubbornness to not let go of one’s roots, one’s soil.

This struggle between the real and the ideal continues in Nirvasan, as does the theme of displacement. The blurring of identities is taking place in a consumerist society on the one hand, and on the other, the struggle for identity is becoming more intense. In the novel, the theme of displacement unravels on two parallel narrative strands. From Surinam there comes Ramajor Pandey whose Baba, Bhagelu Pandey, in the year of the Great Famine, leaves his village Gosainganj and goes to Faizabad then to Calcutta and from there boards a ship to some unknown land to earn a livelihood. After going to Surinam, he settles down there and never seeks news of those he’d left behind – his home, wife and children. He changes his surname Pandey and forever leaves behind his past identity. With this new surname and caste, he remarries and starts a lineage of Pandeys. He doesn’t reveal to his family members anything about himself beyond the name of his village, Gosainganj. This faint thread is all that Ramajor Pandey had as he began to search for his ancestors’ village when he comes down from the United States and decides to get in touch with his long-lost relatives in Lucknow.

The question begs to be asked: why would someone independent and successful travel back to the land of their ancestors, generations later, in search of their past? Why would they begin to hunger for a soil that they have never even lived on? The writer Manohar Shyam Joshi had raised these very questions in a letter to the writer Vishwanath Prasad Tiwari. Tiwari had sent Joshi a letter in relation to the latter’s novel Kasap. And in response, Joshi had said, ‘While writing Kasap I was searching not for a sense of self but for a sense of belonging. Why does belonging have to be, in the end, only in the same old and limited ways? Why do Ukrainian people, settled in the US for generations, send back money to build a memorial for their poet Taras Shevchenko? Why do they go to Ukraine and bring back the soil of their village?’ It is not easy to understand the psychology of the displaced.

The protagonist of Nirvasan, Suryakant, is struggling with both interior and exterior displacements. He feels insecure in his government job with the tourism directorate of Uttar Pradesh. He is from Sultanpur, but lives 130 kilometres away from it in Lucknow, and is displaced from his home and hometown, not just physically but internally as well. He has resolved to break all ties with his family. He only feels connected to his uncle (his father’s younger brother, who is referred to as Chacha throughout the novel), but the uncle feels uprooted, too, even though he lives in his own home. In Sultanpur, there’s also Suryakant’s grandmother, who has lived a long life, and feels displaced in her present. She is surrounded by the memories of the past and talks to long-dead people. As the novel progresses, we find out that no one is really where they are. Meaning, everyone is exiled from themselves.

When Suryakant starts searching for Gosainganj, he finds out that there are a number of villages by the name of Gosainganj in different districts of Uttar Pradesh. Going by the clues left in Pandeyji’s descriptions, Suryakant thinks that Pandeyji’s Gosainganj might be the one near his own hometown. Akhilesh has tried to use Gosainganj as a metaphor to illuminate the similar ways in which all villages have suffered from being abandoned by its people. Seen in this light, Nirvasan is an elegy of displacement, of saying goodbye to belonging. The novel also tries to answer if we have reached such a point in civilization where every human being feels displaced within themselves. As the life of each character is unravelled with the progression of the plot, we find that no one feels connected to their roots nor has any sense of belonging. When, with great difficulty, Suryakant finds Gosainganj and reaches there, he experiences only disappointment. When the villagers realize that he has come in search of the ancestors of a wealthy Non-Resident Indian, all the villagers gather in front of Suryakant and, with their tall tales, try to prove that they are related to Ramajor Pandey. First in that line of fabricators is the village headman himself. At this point in the narrative, readers know that Bhagelu Pandey had changed his caste more than a hundred years ago. He left behind his old identity and assumed a new one in Surinam. But out of greed for property and money, the people of Gosainganj have no hesitation in changing their identity. Each of them want, in one way or another, to escape from a life which has somehow been left behind in the nation’s race towards development.

Although Nirvasan follows the life of Ramajor Pandey, we never lose sight of the intricate inner life of its protagonist Suryakant. After he gets married, Suryakant begins to live in Lucknow, away from his family, after feeling betrayed by his father who insults his wife’s uncertain lineage. But when Suryakant, in search of Ramajor Pandey’s Gosainganj, reaches Sultanpur and goes to his family home, his family members see him in new light. From his brothers-in-law to his sisters, whoever finds out that he is working for a wealthy NRI falls upon him to get them opportunities of employment in the US. On one hand is the businessman living abroad searching for his roots after three generations, on the other are those who are fighting to free themselves of their roots. In other words, a person at the peak of success is trying to find his lost soul, whereas a large population wants to lose its soul in search of success.

In all this, the character that stands out is Chacha. First, he sells off his village property and procures all the modern amenities of life for his family. Then, when Suryakant meets him after several years, he has renounced that very modern life and lives a simple one. He cooks his meals over firewood, drinks water from a clay pot and writes letters by hand. Suryakant finds out that Chacha’s wife and children do not understand him and his eccentricities annoy them no end. Initially, Suryakant too is confused and asks his uncle, ‘What makes you despise everything that is new?’ In reply, his uncle says, ‘Now, this is incorrect. Who dislikes children, green buds or fresh blossoms? However, if a child starts abusing his elders, is he a decent human being or a subject of pity? I’m familiar with the law of nature – the old must decay, and the new will take on the old. But not even nature rules that a tree will be populated only by new leaves. Autumn does not pluck away all the old leaves at once. If you adhere to this ideology of power of the new, there will be no space for the backward in society or for those who are on the margins, their interests, their customs, their cultures. Suryakant, I do not detest every new thing. You know very well that I have always welcomed new ideas. But I find the haughtiness and coldness associated with novelty intolerable – I hate it. My most ardent desire was to exist in a time where the beauty of the new and the old would complement each other, but I have failed to locate such a period or a space in time. And so, I have reverted to a time long gone. It was impossible to travel to the future because no person can alone attain the future of his dreams. So, I travelled to the past. I acknowledge this past has been manufactured by me. It’s not natural, but what choice did I have? I could not mould the future!’

So, we have two characters who are nostalgic for the past in their own ways: there is Suryakant’s uncle who wants to go back to the old way of living, and there is Ramajor Pandey who has all the wealth in the world but no sense of belonging, which is why he wants to embrace the past and do something for it. He often wishes he could sit somewhere and drink country liquor the way his great-grandfather used to. Like Suryakant’s uncle, Pandey has also gathered all the amenities of the present, made all arrangements for the future, and then left everything to try and go back to the past. Leaving his entire business in someone else’s hands, he wanders around the Uttar Pradesh of his ancestors.

Chacha’s character is one that raises questions about the blind spots of post-liberalization India’s development. The way cities were being expanded without long-term plans, the way an entire generation seemed to be losing its collective memory – these thoughts are at the centre of Chacha’s concerns. Through the characters of Chacha and Ramajor Pandey, Akhilesh tries to critique globalization. Perhaps referring to this undercurrent of the novel, the writer Kashinath Singh called Nirvasan an ultrasound of the Indian development model – meaning a deep, internal examination.

Steeped as the narrative is in the internal landscape of a disillusioned protagonist, one wonders what is being made of the results from the examination. Only one person answers to the identifying features that Ramajor Pandey gives Suryakant about his family – Jagdamba Prajapati. But the problem is that he was not a Brahmin but a Kumhar. Pandey refuses to accept this because Sampoornanand ‘Brihaspati’ has told him that, ‘There are numerous legends, folktales, songs, tomes, opinions, magic, fantasy and miracles but none of them have the Shudra and the Brahmin interchanged. A Brahmin can transform into a tree or in a rock, he has become an animal, demon, mountain, river – everything – but it never happened that he became a Shudra. Such a marvel has never occurred.’

When Pandey asks Suryakant what he has to say to this, he has no answer. The lack of answers is ultimately the only truth of this novel, which the author has tried to look at in juxtaposition with the modern history of Awadh. In 1857, the people of Awadh too had revolted against the British Company Government. In the twentieth century, a Girmitiya, Baba Ramachandra, came back from foreign lands to start a farmers’ revolt in which Dhobi and Nai castes boycotted the landlords and feudal masters. And now, on that same soil, so much is changing but no one anywhere is revolting. Everyone is in a race to become part of it.

Sampoornanand Brihaspati appears at the start of the novel. He is very old but is the head of the state’s tourism directorate. He is shown to be a protector of Indian culture. At the end of the novel he appears as Pandey’s friend and mentor, as if he is a ‘yajamana’, or ritual patron, who starts the tale and comes back to end it. Through him, the novelist tries to depict the kinds of people who are trying to promote fanatic Hinduism.

Nirvasan is, of course, not the first novel to deal with the dreams of Indian society and its destiny in a post-globalization world. In the novels of the well-known writer Alka Saraogi, this tussle between the new and the old has appeared many times. Her novel Ek Break ke Baad looks at emerging corporations in a positive light in context of India’s development. Akhilesh’s Nirvasan picks up new themes in its narrative, follows characters as they search for their lost souls in a new era of rampant consumerism, but ultimately, its perspective is realist.

Nirvasan’s mode is primarily one of the traditional qissagoi, a form of oral storytelling in Urdu, although the author has tried to experiment with it. Akhilesh is known for his descriptive style. The strength of his stories lies in their powerful content. A good part of Nirvasan consists of Suryakant’s research notes. From his college days, Suryakant has been putting down his thoughts in Mayfair notebooks. Sections of the diaries are included in the novel, as interruptions to the main narrative voice. A number of characters seem to be represented through their long monologues, which is a post-modern technique for the ‘democratization’ of storytelling. If we take the progression of the plot, there are a number of digressive subplots. Akhilesh, who in his early writing career was known for making political statements with his stories, weaves a lot of political incidents into the novel, but in a subtler way. For instance, in the final part of the novel, Ramajor Pandey is shown as staying in a huge mansion in place of the Taj Hotel, about which the novelist says:

The newly constructed house made a lot of people curious and they had similar questions – who had constructed it, who owned it? But no definite information had emerged, only gossip, opinions and differences of opinions. Someone claimed it belonged to a reputed builder and according to another, the owner was a Haryana industrialist, a prominent name in the steel industry. There were also talks that the most corrupt IAS officer in the state was the owner.

A corollary to the story was that when the chief minister had inquired about its value at the house warming ceremony, lauding its architecture, the IAS officer replied it had cost only a crore of rupees instead of the real two billion. The chief minister had handed him a cheque for a 1.25 crores and acquired the property outright. There is a canard that the cheque bounced…

These instances bring some levity to the novel and disrupt the tragic tone that the novel seems to be reaching for. Nirvasan’s story takes place in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Readers will not fail to notice that the novel itself is full of upper caste characters. The one character from a backward caste is Jagdamba who is a Kumhar and whose defining characteristic is that he farts so loud it sounds like a bomb has exploded. Even if we consider the plot, the various identifying features of his family that Ramajor Pandey had provided did not include this. Apart from that, in his Brahmin arrogance, Pandey does not even try to form any connection with Jagdamba.

Likewise, there seems to be no role for women in the novel either. Gauri, whose being insulted precipitates Suryakant’s departure from his home to Lucknow, is also educated like Suryakant – they were classmates at university. The time the novel is set in, women are very much a part of the workforce. And yet, Gauri’s only function in the novel is to read Suryakant’s Mayfair notebooks, to make him tea as he ponders over his existence, or to worry about their son Gaurav. Suryakant’s uncle renounces material comforts because his wife is shown to be an avid consumer of them. All she wants to do is go to the mall after driving all the way down from Sultanpur.

Nirvasan’s biggest quality is that it is interesting and readable. The author has focussed on keeping the narrative engaging more than on research and contemporaneity. Readers understand that the centre stage is industrialization against tradition. With the publication of Nirvasan in 2014, its publisher awarded it the Kriti Samman. The descriptions of small-town life and the persistent everyday struggles in villages that one finds in this novel are perspectives that English readers can only gain through translated texts. The novel’s appeal to English readers might be to give them an insight into the attitude of the Hindi belt towards the newly developing society, the new generation, technology, modern amenities and the effects they have on individuals and erstwhile closely-knit communities.

Prabhat Ranjan

1

THE DEATH GAG

At first, it was a just a teeny-weeny blister on his right gill.

It fondled his right gill once and then vanished. Visible for a couple of days and then clean gone. However, even its exodus had such an elephantine punch, bluster and subterfuge that Suryakant often lurched and toppled over in his struggle to move back into shape.

In this state of being and not being, he jotted down a few lines; his maiden attempt at poetry:

O stranger, you have alighted on my right gill

O indomitable baby blister

Steamrolling pleasure as well as life

With a single macerating step of yours

O indomitable petite blister

You vanquished me, knocking me down

Ruining my life and its crown

And I am neither fish

Nor fowl

No bore

No shore

And you delivered me thus

To land me in a crush

Before stepping into Bahuguna’s office he decided he would recite the poem first, and then ask: ‘What about my job?’ The reason behind the hunt for a new job at his age was not the pallid, trivial blister, but the newest octogenarian chairman.

The creature was called Sampoornanand Brihaspati. Nobody had an inkling why he had picked ‘Brihaspati’ as his nom de plume. He looked so dodderingly ancient and was so terribly influential that nobody had the nerve to ask him why he preferred Brihaspati. Still, if someone dared ask, the creature would be more than willing to gratify their curiosity. It was a different matter that his reply each time he was questioned would be so fantastic that the fog surrounding his name would grow murkier instead of splitting up.

One story making rounds was that it was his father’s name. In deference to his father, he had started appending ‘Brihaspati’ to his own name. Another legend mentioned that he had adopted it after the educator of the gods. Sometimes, he would enlighten us, saying he had been born during the Brihaspati lagna, and occasionally it was because he had been delivered to this earth on a Thursday (Brihaspativaar). Once, he said to a snooping soul, ‘I didn’t choose the sobriquet. In fact, Prabhu Swami Karpatriji Maharaj was so impressed by my erudition that he began calling me The educator of the gods, Brihaspati, and then it caught on.’

He had been writing books for six decades, siring thirty-three tomes and booklets so far. Most of them focused on research about the fundamental edifices of antiquated buildings. He had hit upon the ingenious idea that five hundred and one mosques in the country had originally been temples. Sampoornanand Brihaspati had declared that Lord Rama’s bow, Lord Krishna’s Sudarshan Chakra and Goddess Kali’s dagger were still concealed in a secret spot somewhere in the country, and that he would reveal them to the whole wide world one fine morning. The book that contained this assertion also stated that he was willing to embark upon the holy quest of locating Lord Hanuman’s mace as well but it wasn’t worth the trouble now. There was a simple explanation for this – Lord Ram and Lord Krishna had already departed from this mortal world in their chariots, while Lord Hanuman still roamed the expanses of the earth, never letting go of his mace even for a single moment.

According to Sampoornanand Brihaspati, it was not a product of wool-gathering ingenuity; he had arrived at that well-informed conclusion only after poring over recorded history during the course of his soul-consuming research. It was nothing but humility on his part that he kept renouncing the credit of the grand discovery, saying that he had achieved enlightenment after pleasing the goddess Bhawani by observing fasts on 1440 holy navratra days – right from his birth year to his current, ninetieth year – without a single breach. He had let it slip in an interview that his father and grandfather were awestruck when he had refused to suckle his mother because her mammillae had been profaned by her perspiration and tasted saline, a lowly salt, nowhere in the league of rock salt.

There are some facts to which only a few are privy, the most outstanding of which was his singular role in the demolition of the Babri Masjid. When several renowned male and female leaders – who were later taken on as ministers in the Indian Union government – were screeching slogans on the mike from the stage to incite the mob, Sampoornanand had not dawdled. He had lodged himself on the spot with abundant pouches of paan masala since daybreak. One of the journalists there had passed on to his friends that when the Babri Masjid was pulverized, Sampoornanand, who was around seventy then, had leaped up in ecstatic delirium and started cutting capers.

He was so fired up with emotion that in blissful fervour, he had started bestowing paan masala pouches upon illustrious leaders like L.K. Advaniji and Murali Manohar Joshi. The journalist also added that Advaniji had flung away the pouch indignantly, while Joshiji had put the string of pouches around his neck, complementing the ochre towel adorning the space between his head and shoulders. Uma Bharati and Sadhvi Ritambhara had accepted the pouches modestly. The two women leaders told the journalist that although they did not relish chewing gutkha, they were unable to refuse an honourable person like Brihaspatiji. The journalist also revealed that he had seen Ritambhara bowing her head reverentially to the gutkha pouches.

And now, the bum had managed to grab a spot as chairman in the Directorate of Tourism. This, in spite of the fact that the government had been formed by the former opposition party. He was also appointed advisor to the chief minister. Nobody knew how he managed to cop the posts in spite of the opposition coming to power. There were two or three lines of speculation. First, he had virtually adopted the present chief minister as his protégé, and had calculated his predictions for the next ten years on the basis of the latter’s horoscope, announcing that he would snap up the prime minister’s job within the next five years.

Another assumption was that the chief minister never indulged anyone without a reason, one must compensate him for his benignity. Sampoornanandji had landed the post because one of his followers, a reputed industrialist, had donated seven crore rupees to the chief minister’s personal coffers. A daily news analysis settled that the industrialist had been able to corner such favours with Sampoornanandji’s help in all the states like Madhya Pradesh where the chairman had followers in power.

However, the real reasons were known only to certain journalists, politicians and bureaucrats. A curious issue for the nosy employees in the tourism directorate was that Sampoornanand Brihaspati spent precious little time in his chambers in the secretariat and instead preferred the ones in the directorate. He would bob up on the stroke of ten every morning and remain fixed to his chair. This disconcerted everyone in the office, right from the director general to the humble peon, and unable to thwart it, they kept trying to divine the logic behind the pickle. Most of them were convinced there were cabalistic grounds behind the move. There then appeared a theory that it was due to his habit of masticating gutkha. Since chewing gutkha and smoking was officially frowned upon in the Vidhan Sabha, it had put him into a bind. It was a different matter that those who were in the habit of chewing gutkha did it in the Vidhan Sabha without batting an eyelid. However, such overt defiance could not be accepted as conclusive evidence. Whatever the case, the truth was that Mr Chairman Tourism Directorate cum Advisor to the chief minister, Shri Sampoornanand Brihaspati, made it a habit to blow in and plonk down in his chair in the tourism directorate every working day.

The rendezvous of Sampoornanand Brihaspati and Suryakant in his office passed in the following manner:

Suryakant entered the office accompanied by a file following the director’s request. Sampoornanand Brihaspati was lolling in his cathedra. His eyes were closed and his muzzle was open. Suryakant grew angst-ridden instantly, assuming that the gentleman had given up the ghost. But he was very much alive and soon oped his blinkers. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Sir, I’m Suryakant, deputy director.’

‘Who’re you?’ His face twisted and his ears cocked.

‘Suryakant!’ he almost yelled back.

‘Are you a non-vegetarian? Speak louder!’

‘No sir, I am a committed vegetarian,’ he shouted again.

‘Do you drink or smoke?’

‘Not at all.’ He smoked at least three cigarettes every day and drank some five to six times a month.

‘Why are you here?’

‘This file, sir.’ He parked the file in front of the chairman. ‘You made a query concerning the Mukti Path project, this is the one.’

It was the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the 1857 War of Independence. It had been proposed that the route the freedom fighters had taken be developed into a tourist trail, hailed as Mukti Path. Museums on the theme of liberty should be erected at all principal spots like Lucknow and Bithoor, where pitched battles had been fought and grand, sprawling parks should be laid in the sacrosanct memory of the freedom fighters. There were umpteen other plans and projects enclosed within the loquacious confines of the file.

Sampooranand Brihaspati opened the file and started reading loudly. With each word he uttered, mixed particles of tobacco, cloves and paan masala showered profusely on the pages of the file. He picked up the pen to write something but tarried. ‘I ought to go to the crapper first.’ He got up and paddled towards the cupboard.

Suryakant’s angst went up a notch – what if he crashes into the cupboard? ‘Sir, that’s the cupboard. The toilet is the other way.’

His eyes bore a hole into Suryakant. ‘I know. I am not blind.’ He shoved his hand inside his vest to yank out one end of his janeu. A key was tied to the sacred thread; he held it with wobbling hands and unlocked the cupboard. Several sets of clothes were stacked inside. Beaming, he pulled out a kurta pyjama set. ‘Every time I go to the toilet, I take a bath. Even in the bitterest cold,’ he announced proudly, ‘and change my clothes.’ He strung the janeu over his ear and marched into the bathroom.

Suryakant waited for him to re-materialize.

In the bathroom, Sampoornanand Brihaspati’s brain hummed like a mainframe. All the vital decisions of his life, stratagems, diplomatic moves, visions and programmes and conspiracies had all burgeoned into life in some corner of a bathroom. All his schemes concerning Lord Hanuman’s mace, prayer sites and architecture were impromptu gifts of his bathroom sessions, not of study and research. Whenever he would be hit by an epiphany, he would take a divine bath and donning fresh clothes, dedicate himself to executing his bathroom visions. The moment he came out of the bathroom, his brain and tongue grew incredibly facile.

He materialized. He planted himself in the chair. Suryakant was sitting across him.

‘I am of the view that the project was conceived by the previous government. It was an absolutely corrupt government; the project was a means to cover the aforesaid corruption. How can we let our government pursue it?’

‘Sir! The freedom struggle is quite a sensitive issue.’ Suryakant was speaking loudly again so Brihaspatiji followed him without a hitch. ‘It wouldn’t be wise to abandon or interfere with this project.’

‘How about constructing monumental temples with idols of freedom fighters like Rana Pratap, Shivaji and others at every district headquarters? We would use the finest architecture in them, of the order of the temples of Meenakshipuram and Vijaynagaram; the figures would be carved by the most outstanding sculptors in the world.’

‘Sir, my modest opinion is that there are multiple spanners in the works. The first is that the illustrious fighters you have just mentioned belong to the medieval age, not to the 1857 battle. The second is that the Hindus and the Muslims had joined forces on the soil of Awadh in our UP. The construction of temples would go against the sentiments of the minorities, against the sacrifices they made. If, instead of the temples …’

‘These are facetious arguments furnished by sceptics who do not have the least understanding of the sentiments, beliefs and pride of the majority community of the nation. Wait and see, people won’t tolerate this attitude for long. If this persists, the tourism directorate will face such celestial wrath that it would sink eternally!’

‘Sure, sir.’ Suryakant was at a loss for words. He sat there for a little while, and then returned to his chamber and started poring over the files.

Every file that arrived from Sampoornand’s office was suffused with the gravelly powder of tobacco, paan masala and cloves on its pages. His hands would be soiled. In desperation, he started using a duster. Soon, he would open the pages by pinching the corner and brush them first. He was so consumed by the habit that the duster would often fly into his hand even before he touched the file.

One afternoon, the 1857 file came back from Chairman Brihaspati’s den. Suryakant opened it, dusted it robustly and leafed through it:

‘The Mukti Path project to commemorate the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the 1857 War of Independence would surely be the highest tribute to the valiant warriors who sacrificed their lives. However, it should be taken up by the Culture Department. The job of the Tourism Department is to develop spots and projects within the ambit of tourism to attract visitors and generate maximum revenue for the state through the tourism industry. From this viewpoint, it can be stated conclusively that the construction and development of Mukti Path is of no use to the Tourism Department. The grounds are as follows:

The real foundations of tourism are children, youth and women. It is well known that these sections have lost interest in the history of the nation. Children are engrossed in cartoons and science, the youth are absorbed in merriment and their careers, and women are occupied with fashion and entertainment. None of the aforementioned components has been a constituent of the 1857 War of Independence.

The chief source of revenue generation through tourism is foreign tourists. What interest would they find in the 1857 battle? It might prove counterproductive and deter them because the exhibition would entail numerous legends on the massacre of the whites. It is also well known that the whites spend the most among the foreign tourists.

The enthusiasm that exists in 2007 to commemorate 1857 will not be the same in 2008 – it would diminish. It will lessen further in 2009 and will almost vanish in 2010. The pace at which our society is hurtling towards this amnesia, it would not be misplaced here to envisage that there will come a time when people will consign this history to oblivion. Therefore, merely for the sake of commemorating the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary, it would not be proper for the Tourism Department to work on a project costing four hundred and twenty-five crores. Hence, the proposal for the project should be sent back to the government with the note that if deemed necessary, it should be implemented by the Culture or Education Department.

Additionally, it is proposed that the Tourism Department will draft a new scheme at the earliest to take the tourism industry to its acme. In this regard, a meeting has been scheduled in my chamber on Friday, the sixteenth, which must be attended by the director and all other officers of the department.’

The blister rattled the door-shackle of Suryakant’s gill to make an entry at this precise moment. He felt something awful was happening inside his mouth. Instantly, he got the heebie-jeebies. He had a tendency of growing skittish at the most piddling discomfort and being overwhelmed by anxiety and ominous thoughts. The panic thickened by nightfall. But his safety valve mechanism was that sleep erased or lightened his fears considerably. He went to bed in the hope that his jitters would have vanished by morning, and the blister too would have forsaken him.

When he woke up and called out to his wife, Gauri, his jaw writhed in pain. He was unable to open his mouth wide. He was unable to pronounce all the words. For example, instead of saying ‘Gauri’, he had said ‘Auri’, and instead of ‘newspaper’, he said something like ‘ewspaer’ or ‘ewsaer’.

Gauri was busy readying Gaurav for school, so she did not notice Suryakant’s altered mode of expression. She heard ‘Auri’ as ‘Gauri’ and ‘ewspaper’ as ‘newspaper’. She came to him with some tea after Gaurav boarded the school bus.

Suryakant released his mouth like the beak of a bird to sip the tea – rather, he was able to open it like a beak only. The sip flowed inside.

‘See, this is something about your office.’ Gauri held out the newspaper to him.

The news under the caption ‘Sacrifices of 1857 Martyrs Consigned to Cold Box’ reported that the Tourism Department was going to drop the previous government’s Mukti Path project due to the pressure exerted by Sampoornanand Brihaspati. The reporter had also included the reactions of the public: most of them had dubbed it a slur and insult upon the memory of the revolutionaries. One social worker had called it ‘supremely intolerable’. The leader of the main opposition party demanded that the chief minister resign immediately, while a drunkard bard called Sampoornanand Brihaspati a ‘lethal idiot’.

The news gladdened him but the pain inside his mouth choked the gladness. The rest of his gladness vanished when he tried to use the toothbrush. His mouth opened hardly a whisker. He called out to Gauri. The call held a flood of pathos.

‘What’s your problem?’ the doctor asked him.

‘Dotor sab, e can’t oen mou, ee ees vei ainul.’ He meant: ‘Doctor Sahib, I can’t open my mouth, it is very painful.’

The doctor pulled out an instrument to measure the angle Suryakant was able to open his mouth to. Then he shoved in another instrument to widen the opening and examined with a flashlight. It was like peering down a long, dark tunnel. Meanwhile, he noted down something on Suryakant’s prescription.

‘Do you chew tobacco?’

He shook his head vigorously in a ‘no’.

‘Paan masala or something like that?’

‘NO.’

‘Smoking?’

Silence.

‘It’s better if you consult a specialist like Dr R.S. Sahgal or someone else.’ He then scribbled down the names of medicines and ointments.

Suryakant trembled in fear. He asked, ‘Is it cancer?’

‘No, no! It’s nothing like that, but you should see Dr R.S. Sahgal.’

When he stepped out of the clinic, he was unable to decide whether he should be chirpy or mourn that he was in the grip of a killer disease. When he thought of being spared, he also thought another thought: if everything is fine, why is this fellow sending me to Dr Sahgal? Simply to confirm the diagnosis?

His face was covered in perspiration and his legs turned leaden. The firmament appeared to be shaking. He flopped down and used an aside, ‘Am I going to die? The world will go on, but I will be there no more.’ He remembered Gaurav and Gauri and felt himself sliding into a bottomless pit. ‘I won’t be with them.’ He was unable to decide. He could not spend the rest of his life at this spot, but he had neither the desire to get up nor the will power to move. Feeling weak, he pulled out the mobile from his pocket. But he recalled no one he could talk to. Does one feel severed with the world before leaving it? He decided to replace the mobile in the pocket when it started ringing. It was Bahuguna. ‘Brother, if you wanted to leak the chairman’s news, why did you shy away from our newspaper?’

He tried to say, ‘I didn’t’, but all that came out was a howl. Bahuguna grew anxious at the other end.

The visit to Dr Sahgal’s calmed his nerves. He was euphoric. Joy made him garrulous. Sahgal was a jolly sort of fellow. After going through the test report, he said, ‘The sort of person you are, I can say that even if you don’t have