Remember to Forget

By Neel Kamal Puri

In Ludhiana in the 1990s, everyone is waiting for life to be normal again. The Punjab insurgency has ended, and the city is trying to emerge from the shadow of the gun. Tejpal hopes to outrun the murderous mob that began chasing him in his dreams in the winter of 1984. Mr Bakshi is, once more, throwing over-the-top parties at his palatial home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books
• Release date: Jan 8, 2016
• ISBN: 9789385288111

Neel Kamal Puri

Neel Kamal Puri was born in Ludhiana, Punjab. She now lives in Chandigarh, where she teaches English literature and media studies at the Post Graduate Government College for Girls. She is the author of two novels: The 'Patiala Quartet' and 'Remember to Forget'.

Book preview

1

he iced whisky in the glass had numbed Tejpal’s hand into a talon. He transferred the glass to his left hand and blew hard on the right one. The fingers gradually woke to life when his foggy breath touched them.

As the evening shivered on, the air above the nearby Sirhind Canal condensed into water droplets. They gathered in a puddle on top of the tent that had been pitched for the party. When the tent could take no more, it slowly started letting down its burden. A number of drops squeezed through the canvas and suspended themselves there, waiting to gather strength. Then one droplet took a tentative plunge into the plush seating underneath, and others, sure of finding a soft landing, quickly followed suit. The pearly procession began to make a joyous descent.

There was a noisy rout underneath. The women went ‘Eeeee’ and jumped up; the men went straight to the point with a series of ‘sisterfuckers’ and ‘motherfuckers’ muttered under their breaths. Guests scattered looking for cover, or at least a place near the numerous coal fires placed for the women to warm their hands and the men their frozen posteriors.

It was not a great time to party, since November is a cold month. The sunshine is only a decoy. At night, the cold is real, becoming gooseflesh on naked arms in party clothes on garden chairs. Most people had forgotten the cold of last November and the November before that and the one even before that. ‘It was not so cold last November,’ they told each other, even though it had been just as cold if not colder. However, it was important to forget, to move on.

And one way of doing that was to run a party relay, a series of parties, each edging the previous one out of the frame with the spectacle that it offered. Insurgency in the state was in its dying throes and what better time than this, to celebrate? They had just lived through ten years of police clampdowns and curfews. Men with long beards and equally long names—names that carried their addresses, following the nineteenth-century edict on using the name of the village of birth as the surname—and an even longer list of dos and don’ts, had curbed the natural excesses of the Punjabi spirit. Their dos had included carving Khālistān out of the Indian state. And their don’ts had forbidden liquor, among a lot of other things. In fact, there were a hundred and twenty-two ‘thou shalt nots’, proclaimed from mikes at religious congregations, posters on gurdwara walls, press notes that landed on the newspaper editor’s table with a warning—print or else…

They proscribed make-up and nose rings and earrings and bangles for brides. They proscribed salwars for boys because boys must be boys and wear the pants in the family.

They prescribed veils for the women to cover their heads with.

They proscribed shedding tears for the dead. Or bowing before the dead.

They prescribed telling on those who were telling on them to the police. They also prescribed food and shelter for themselves if they were to visit villages in the dead of the night.

They proscribed girls dancing on stage.

They proscribed Hindi and the national anthem.

They prescribed death for policemen, informers, dogs that barked in the night, stubborn newspaper editors, men who did not wear turbans… It was a long list.

In these ten years people had been dying of fear rather than in the appropriate Punjabi way—of high cholesterol induced by a desi ghee diet… Until the long-bearded ones themselves began to party and decay. Some of them were discovered living under false identities, in houses equipped with twenty-four televisions and video players, twelve mixies, ten air conditioners, thirty-two cameras and on and on, a long list of gratuitous greed.

However, the state police kept suggesting that it might be wiser to wait a while before celebrating. They said so to the industrialists of Ludhiana specifically, one of them being Mr Bakshi, owner of a hosiery factory. But Mr Bakshi’s event managers had suggested ‘Snow’ as a party theme. This idea would have been a bit incongruous in summer. Of necessity it had to be done in winter, and then, better November than December when it would become even colder.

The venue was Mr Bakshi’s home, which had been modelled on a house that he had seen in Europe. Reigning local architectural taste had been added to it—Gothic columns and Roman domes, modernist angularity and Georgian windows, Islamic minarets and English roofs. One dish of everything on your menu, please.

This evening, very little of the house was visible, with the rising fog clouding it out of existence. The fog had risen from the fields drenched in irrigation. It usually hung above the experimental fields of the Punjab Agricultural University before slyly spreading its reach in whispered movements. Mr Bakshi’s house had been swallowed whole.

Lights, with their outlines untidily rubbed out by the fog, lit the way. Pebbled pieces of thermocol formed a snowy carpet all along the driveway from the gate to the doorstep. Rectangular strips of cotton wool hung like limp bandages from the branches of trees and plants, which were otherwise bare of foliage. Attempts had been made at providing the sloping English roof with a thermocol and cotton cover, but most of it had just roller-coasted its way down to the ground.

‘Enjoying?’ Mr Bakshi asked Tejpal when he spotted him standing alone, flexing his fingers.

It was a usage Mr Bakshi had picked up from a prostitute he had visited in his youth. He had been reluctant to give her his name for fear of having it sullied and had introduced himself as Pappu, a name that gave away absolutely nothing, a name that had neither prefix nor suffix. He was just one pappu amongst thousands of other anonymous pappus out there—who were anything from waiters in dhabas to insurance agents to big industrialists to politicians.

‘Enjoying, Pappu?’ she had asked at the height of his ecstasy.

And since then it had seemed such a well-worded question, so fulsome. Now he omitted the Pappu, though.

‘Enjoying?’ he asked Tejpal again. ‘Have a drink-shrink,’ he added. At other times, or earlier in the evening, it would have been ‘tea-shee’. The doggerel came from effusive heartiness, from a hospitality that pinned you down and forced food down your throat. Just the offer of a drink was an inadequate, pale statement of intent.

Tejpal was not ‘enjoying’, because November was that one month of the year which he did not like. He did not like most months, but this one in particular was where his nightmares were temporally located. It was always November when he was startled awake from his sleep and had to wipe a film of perspiration from his forehead.

‘Yes, enjoying,’ he said, though his tongue involuntarily, yet again, sought and probed the cavity in his molar, and his senses waited for the familiar pain that would jangle through his head. I really must go to a dentist, he thought; but that required concerted action and he had, in any case, got used to the pain. It was only occasionally that the pain became loud enough for him to think of the dentist. It was a bad moment to be asked if he was ‘enjoying’.

Perhaps it was also Mr Bakshi’s attitude and his distracted, disinterested air that prickled under Tejpal’s skin. But then these moments don’t have a single trigger. They come from an accumulated backlog of resentments and memories, from the last word you never got in during an argument, from the up-yours sign that the speeding motorist left with you before he became dust in the distance. One of those moments may choose, maybe, 10.20 p.m. on the first of November to erupt.

‘Good, good,’ said Mr Bakshi, rubbing his hands together in the certainty of a thing going well, already on his way to the stage to catch some of the limelight.

‘You could not find any other day to have this party?’ Tejpal said, grabbing Mr Bakshi’s retreating shoulder just a shade roughly.

‘Is there something wrong with today?’

‘You have forgotten the riots of November 1984, when so many Sikhs were slaughtered?’

‘That was ten years ago, Tej beta.’

‘They split open our skulls, they gouged out our eyes, they poured kerosene on us and burnt us alive. Thousands of Sikhs died that day. Just because it was ten years ago does not mean you…’ Language was beginning to desert Tejpal. The sentence completed itself in a number of popping sounds that must have approximated a sentiment.

‘You have to learn to go on with your life,’ Mr Bakshi advised him. This was his favourite counsel, the one that allowed him to go back to the miracle of his own rejuvenation. Once upon a time, his mother had always apologized for having to entertain without carpets. ‘All ours have gone for dry cleaning, you see.’ The sorrow of not having any carpets killed her. How happy she would have been today to see all the carpets in his house. Even in the bathrooms! Carpets with foam lining underneath, like padded bras. She might have been happier still with the swathes of marble that formed white vistas in his house, with the pearl and satin-finished woodwork and the golden cornices.

He was about to say more. ‘To be very frank…’ was going to be his next line, as it so often was. But Tejpal’s brow was much too thunderous and his eyes too raw red for any ‘frankly’ friendly chats. He was not in the mood to hear any preaching. He was in the mood to sock someone in the jaw. He made a wild figure just now. His open beard was flowing down to his chest, his saffron turban looked like it would ignite from the spark of his anger. This had been his new look after November 1984, when he had begun to see himself as the keeper of his religion, and the groomed corporate image had given way to the Punjabi Wild West.

There was a time when he had sported a close-cropped beard and short hair, quite against the tenets of his religion. But that was long before everyone became jumpy about matters of religion; before they lost their sense of humour. Before the capers of the comedian in Sikh garb in a Hindi film evoked not laughter, but indignation. Travelling by train, he had happened to be sharing his compartment with a lumdarrhiya, a longbeard, an irreverent reference to a very devout Sikh. The lumdarrhiya had quizzed him about his religion.

‘Beta, you must not trim your beard or cut your hair. The guru had created the Khalsa, the Sikh, in his own image. Khalsa mero rup hae, he had said.’ The lumdarrhiya had quoted him scriptures. ‘You have committed a grave sin. A very grave sin.’ He shook his admonishing finger at Tejpal, then topped it up with some wisdom. ‘You know that each hair of the head, each pore that houses that hair, receives signals from the guru. When you cut off that hair, you cut off your direct connection with the guru,’ he said, stroking his own beard with a flourish that was designed to provoke envy of his high connectivity with the heavens. He then leaned over and whispered to him that women who shave their underarms similarly destroy these celestial transmitters.

Tejpal had punctured the pompousness with a strategically told untruth.

‘Singhji, I was born a Hindu and was in the process of converting to Sikhism out of a belief in its tolerance and modernity, but listening to you today has convinced me that I might as well go back to the faith of my ancestors.’

That had deflated Singhji, who had then practically prostrated himself at Tejpal’s feet, asking to be forgiven for his unbidden tirade and begging him not to revoke his decision to convert to Sikhism.

The Singhji would be happy to see him today, with his flowing beard, each hair receiving godly messages, though reason had become bits of flying debris from the fiery explosion inside his head.

Tejpal made a lunge for Mr Bakshi, saying, ‘Doesn’t matter to you, does it? You are a mona, a Hindu.’

These days everyone was trying to negotiate the narrow spaces between religious identities, talking about the weather instead of counting the number of Hindus killed by the long-bearded Sikhs through the years of insurgency, or the number of Sikhs killed by Hindu hooligans in the riots of November 1984. There were official statistics for each of these categories. Statistics to prove that the terrorists had killed as many Sikhs as Hindus; others to prove that the riots were as much an expression of the distance between those who were flush with effete and those who would like nothing better than to be that way. Interpretations could absolve one side and indict the other or vice versa. Statistics were putty but life was not.

To give the acrimony a voice and form was luring the snake out of its hole. And maybe sticking one’s own finger in it too, for good measure.

Tejpal had clearly crossed a boundary.

An irked Mr Bakshi said, ‘What is this Hindu-Hindu? You are not the only one to have been in the middle of riots. I have seen enough riots in my time.’ He said it as though it were a well-cultivated virtue.

Mr Bakshi knew, though he did not know how to say it, that you could not feed off God. No matter what the promises of the afterlife, God was not going to get up and cook dal makhni and top it up with a desi ghee tadka when your stomach growled. These Sikhs, he thought, they really could be a bit dense sometimes. It was from the perpetual weight of the turban maybe. But he did not want to be caught with that thought and quickly shook it out of his head.

By now Tejpal’s voice had risen many uncomfortable decibels while various pairs of hands tried to restrain him. He bellowed a series of sputtering incomprehensibles about discrimination against the Sikhs, about Punjab’s river waters flowing into other states, about Sikh jokes.

The male half of the gathering congealed around this sudden sore, rushing in emergency measures.

Tejpal’s wife, Harpreet, was sitting with the women at the far end of the lawn, on chairs that ringed a coal fire like a voodoo circle, heads straining inwards, the shadow of a conspiracy rising out of the fire as they measured against each other for all the things that their spouses did or did not do. They tapped into the passing spirits. A white-gloved waiter with his battered tray, both veterans of many a raucous party, was summoned quietly, with an inaudible psst. Double pegs of whisky sat in each of the glasses that trellised the tray. A quick spike in the cola, like a propitiation rite.

‘He fights his sleep,’ said Harpreet, ‘like a baby.’

She had no idea why she was offering these confidences. She did