| | CHAPTER ONE
1.1
A country is not a country if it cannot stand up for what it rightly is, Gopal Mama often said. This country does not have balls, he would go on like a stuck record. It is like its women, beautiful but pinned down, downtrodden. She looks for notice in the eyes of her husband, the one who tastes her breasts, rapes her and asks her to go back to cooking dal fry for him, unseeing of her true beauty.
In Nallagunta Police station, Zaheera Begum lay pinned down on the sub inspector’s desk. A tear welled and, overflowing the bucket of her eye, trailed down the side her face as the faces of the three policemen, standing around her, blurred in her vision. She heard one of them laugh as he put his heavy wooden lathi between her knees and parted them. The steel end of the lathi traced the entire length of her legs, lifting her salwar over her knees, the hair on her legs standing up. The lathi moved over to her belly, lingering in her navel, cold and torturous. With one whiff, her shimmering butterfly-laced dupatta went flying off her bosom, landing on the inspector’s chair. She felt her kameez being lifted over her breasts. Two men grabbed her hands as she resisted. A palm clapped over her mouth and she only heard her own muffled voice, echoing in the corners of her brain. The knot that held her salwar, tight and secure, around her waist was pulled open with two quick fingers. The same fingers scratched bloody lines across her thighs as they hurried to yank the cloth from her midriff.
A song from some old Hindi movie played on the radio, muffling Zaheera Begum’s painful groans and the jeers of her captors. She closed her eyes. Only the image of Lord Krishna remained on the back of her eyelids, the god calendar that hung on the wall across from her. Lord Krishna eating butter from a pot. Lord Krishna, who saved Draupadi as Kauravas stripped her.
1.2
"Ninety nine, hundred," Krishna counted, feeling proud in his nine-year-old mind that he could count that far without stopping. He lifted the cloth Nafisa had wrapped around his eyes and turned around, the sun entering his eyes with blinding vengeance. Where could she be? He would find her soon enough. She wasn’t good at playing police-robbers. She was a girl, after all. Girls didn’t know how to climb onto the tops of houses, leave alone jump cross from one roof to another, an art he had perfected. He could jump like the mighty Hanuman, the monkey god, who jumped across to Ceylon to save Sita. Why did he even agree to play with a girl when he knew it was not much of a challenge?
Through the small door in the large wooden gate, he saw the smoke rising in curly wisps. He heard the explosion moments later and he remembered, vividly, the separation between the sound of the bomb going off and the cries of Nafisa. He ran to the gate and put his head out through the opening.
Nafisa, he shouted. Nafisa lay on the ground, her clothes torn, her skin burnt. Smoke curled around her like a hooded serpent. He ran to her, not seeing a mob of men, dressed in saffron, emerge. Nafisa must have been hiding there when the petrol bomb went off in the burning auto-rickshaw.
Just as he reached her and took her lifeless body into his hands, Sajid, Nafisa’s elder brother came out of his hiding place, galloping towards his sister. What happened to Nafisa, he asked Krishna.
As Krishna looked up, a tear in his eye, he saw someone grab Sajid by his hair and drag him away, the boy crying from the pain of his hair being torn by their roots. Someone yanked him from behind, too, jerking his head back with a popping noise. Blood went to his nose. He looked up and saw a head wrapped in a saffron towel, the eyes angry and bloodshot - the color of Nafisa’s blood that was now streaming from her ears, purple on the dark road, the color of the tar. Three men pinned him down on the road. He heard Sajid’s screams ruffled by hands, as a fourth man drew his mouth open with two strong palms, tearing his lips at the ends. He heard a can being opened, the smell of fresh petrol rushing to his nose. The can was lifted over his head. The petrol gurgled down his mouth like it was an open funnel, flowing down his face. He spat out in distaste. A hand slapped him across the face and pulled his mouth open wider. Open your filthy mouth, motherfucker, hissed the man. More petrol came pouring down, this time spilling down his throat, into his guts. In between splashes, he whispered the words, "I am Hindu"
The man stepped back, startled. There was a shunned silence but for the sound of the auto-rickshaw going up in a final burst of flames, throwing soot and sparks in the air. "Leave him. He is a Hindu. Let’s go."
The men dropped Krishna down on the road like a rag cloth and took off, petrol bombs in hand. Nafisa lay dead next to Krishna, the pungent smell of her burnt flesh was in the air, like burnt rubber, reminding him of the smell of his cycle tire. Sajid cried in pain, his leg twisted, his knee broken. Krishna’s last words saved him and Sajid.
Krishna got up and hobbled to the street corner, to the main road. He saw a mob rush into a wine shop across the road, and set it on fire. At the nearby bus stop, a bus exploded in flames, the fire bellowing out of its broken windowpanes. People ran helter-skelter for their lives. From one side, groups of mobsters, shouting holy slogans, marched out from the by-lanes onto the main road, carrying swords, lathis and iron rods. The other side, a bastion of policemen waited, their rifles trained on the mob.
Krishna cried to the police for help, his friend lay dying on the road. But they didn’t hear him. They just fired their guns in the air to dispel the crowds. The guns echoed in Krishna’s ears, Put Put Put, broken by intermittent deafening silence. Krishna covered his ears and ran back to Nafisa and Sajid.
He took the lifeless body of Nafisa in his little hands and carried her into the house, past the high wooden gate. As he stepped out to get Sajid, a crowd of men wearing white caps turned the corner and came marching towards him, iron rods and granite stones in hand. He dragged Sajid past the small opening in the gate, just in time, before the mob reached him. He locked the high gate and shut it from inside, ramming the large wooden rod through its bolt.
The mob beat their hands against the gate, clattering against the steel exterior, shouting something in Urdu. Then, having better business to take care of than spilling the blood of some kids, they left.
Krishna closed his eyes and clapped two hands across his ears so he could not hear the noise outside. What Krishna did not see that day, as he sat there, was the desecration of the tiny temple that stood next to their compound wall. The idle of goddess Kali, uprooted with crowbars and smashed to the ground. The temple doused in petrol and set on fire. He did not see a woman being stabbed in the muhalla because she was wearing a bindi on her forehead. An auto-driver stopped and bludgeoned with granite stones just because his vehicle displayed the holy Hindu symbol, the swastika. Mobs who bolted a house from outside and set it on fire, leaving two children to die inside.
All he saw was his best friend Nafisa being killed by Hindus. They say that when a mind sees only the one side, conflict is born. Without this, no conflict is possible. All that would remain in Krishna’s mind, that day, was the fact that some Hindu men had raped some Muslim woman. And his best friend, killed. He was too young to understand what rape was but he knew it was a bad thing to do to a woman. Was this conflict, burning in the bowers of his little heart, significant enough to alter the course of his life. The decisions he would make on religion. The woman he would love. The destiny he would be a master of. Only his life would tell, as three-fourths of the city came under curfew following the large-scale violence. Zaheera Begum was raped by policemen in Nallakunta police station, the headlines read in the Times the next morning. No curfew could contain the mob of the fifty teenagers who rampaged the Charminar Bus Terminus with petrol cans, seeking vengeance for Zaheera Begum. Life in the old city was paralyzed. The Union Home Ministry received a SOS from the state government of Andhra. The night passed peacefully, but tense.
1.3
Gopal Mama lay sprawled on his stomach in one of the dark rooms, the one that had the old paneled door open to the living room. His face was turned to one side. His feet shook nervously, trying to wriggle out a lifetime of disappointments and letdowns through those trunk-like legs that stuck out through the bottom of his white lungi.
The Avva was late today. She had been on time for thirty years, but that was back then, when his father, the great writer Tripuraneni Gopichand, was alive. And when all the children lived in the house. Now, who was left? Just him, filling all those dark rooms that were once filled with cries of running children, playing with bows and arrows made from wet, algae-ridden stalks from a broom that the Avva used to clean the cesspool. Or sticks pulled out from wicker curtains that hung from the windows, the act leaving gaping holes in them. One dark room for each one of them. Dark rooms painted in light blue limestone, floors of deep wine colored red-oxide, more like curdled blood.
A courtyard opened to the skies, and the cries of the upstairs people who yelled their water problems from the balcony. In the kitchen, a huge grinding stone sat with a teak-colored wooden pound in it, unmoved for ages since their mother last used it, poised like a dancer that had been stilled for life.
Who would make his lunch, today? For three hours, he had been thinking of one thing. Like anyone could think for that long about one thing. What would he eat? Leftovers from two nights before, a bitter gourd fry that only he, in his whole family, liked. And some butter milk he bought from the Reddy Bros. Stores.
He watched a thick lizard on the wall, just above the ceiling fan, which creaked at a pace slow enough for him to be able to look through its wings. He wondered when the lizard would fall, whether the fan would catch it in its orbit, splattering the lizard all over the ceiling. What color was a lizard’s blood? Red? Probably white. It sat stuck to the same place on the ceiling wall for two nights, moving only its tongue to catch unassuming prey. How similar their lives were, he thought. Or were they just playing a game of how would make the first move.
He should get up now, he thinks. Food will not come to him - he would have to walk to the Mitai Bandar down the main road, and get himself some Son Papdi. That is, if the curfew was lifted soon. He should get out of these dark rooms. Each dark room was an undying reminder of a failed generation. Three boys and three girls grew up in them, running and playing around their great father, while he sat reciting poetry to a young woman who came at five each morning, sat at his feet and wrote down his work, word for word. Baby, the oldest, learning Bharatnatyam in the front room, turning her head and hips around like a top on a table. Gopal and Sai, the younger ones, chasing each other with bows and arrows, pretending to be Ram and Ravan while Prameela, the middle one, pretended to be Sita. Gopal, held her by her pigtails as she tried to hide behind a hanger of clothes.
Then, one day it happened. Like a cyclone that came out of the Bay of Bengal, turning their colorful house into a still black-and-white photo. They were sitting in the living room when Ramesh, the oldest boy, onto whose shoulders the onus of their failed generation would fall, rushed into the room from his father’s study. "Some thing is wrong with father!" His expression would remain riveted in all their memories, but for little Puppy’s, who was too young to have memories, only two years of age, but who also cried not because of anything else but the fact that her mother left her bare-bottomed on the cold floor.
They all rushed to see what it was. Their father lay on the floor, his head on the rosewood desk, an inkpot dripping dark blue ink over the tableside, onto the floor. A gramophone tugged relentlessly on the last track of the record.
That single incident changed all their lives, at a time when they did not believe that any single event in their lives could have such an altering effect. The study was closed and locked after that. The rooms fell dark and silent. Their mother, in the midst of six children, gave up living, sat by the window fanning herself in the summer heat, looking out of the meshed windows at the rotting Moris Miner that her husband used to drive, six children in the back, to Gandipet Lake each weekend.
For two generations, their house had been a famous one where artists came and went at will, like moths drawn to a kerosene lamp. Then, with one swish of the hand, all that was gone and all that was left were six children, and a mother who willed not to live.
And a new generation was doomed to fail.
1.4
"You are not going to work today, Gopal Mama?" Krishna asked his uncle.
Gopal Mama lay below Krishna, covered in oil, enjoying the caress of nine-year-old feet as Krishna walked up and down, trying not to slip on the oily back.
"How to go - with this curfew," he said, grunting between Krishna’s steps, "Anyway, I have stopped going to the radio station. I have another job, a secret job. And you keep your mouth shut about this, understand. Don’t go around telling everyone that Gopal Mama has a secret job. Or I will make you do two hours of massage, next time."
"Secret job?" Krishna liked secrets, like all young boys, living in a world between mysterious secrets and raw truths.
"Higher up, higher up. That’s it, that feels good," Gopal Mama said, moaning. "It is a private job. I do it for time-pass. I work on my own. I am my own boss, no big man sitting behind a desk, screaming on top of his lungs at me because I come half an hour late."
Krishna turned and walked back toward the ends of his uncle’s thick legs – the curly hair of the man’s calves providing a better grip than a smooth oiled back.
"You know, Krishna, I did my B.A. in History. Of course, what use is a degree in history, these days? They all want people who know computers. You should learn computers when you grow up, Krishna. They are so much in fashion, these days."
"I will, Gopal Mama," Krishna said, his promise prematurely confident for someone his age. He watched his uncles protruding buttocks, the lungi slipping lower and lower down the crack in his ass, wondering how he would cross over to the man’s back without tripping over and unraveling the cloth. The last thing he wanted to see was his uncle’s backside.
"I am trying to solve an ancient riddle. There is a lot of money in this, I heard. If I solve it, I will be rich. I will never have to go to the radio station again. And I will be famous, like your grandfather."
Krishna nearly tripped, but regained his balance by moving his hands up and down like a tightrope walker. "Careful, you rascal. You will break my spine," he heard his uncle’s scolding.
"Sorry, Gopal Mama."
"If I solve this, it will answer a lot of questions. Mainly, it will explain the differences amongst the people of this country. There have to be differences, right? Look at the Hindus and the Muslims, fighting on the streets. Can one human kill another human if there were no differences?" Gopal Mama shook his head and clicked his tongue, answering his own question. "Look at the people from the North and look at us South Indians. We all have come from different places, don’t you think, Krishna?"
Krishna was too young to know what his uncle was asking him, too young to understand what the differences between people were. All he knew was that some Hindus killed his best friend Nafisa. She died on the streets, her blood on the road. How will he play on the streets now, where he would constantly see her blood?
But his uncle’s questions were not wasted on him. Questions are like seeds, and that day, a seed was planted in Krishna’s head. A seed remains unseen in a pot, till it blooms in its season, and turns into a flower.
As Krishna turned around for the umpteenth time to head back to the other end of his uncles back, he lost his balance and fell on the bed, his eyes wide open.
"You rascal, why are you bent on breaking my back, today," his uncle yelled, turning his head halfway. "Don’t stop now. Finish my legs, as well."
Lying on the bed, only the sound of a subdued shock escaping his mouth, Krishna watched a dark red spot spread across the back of Gopal Mama’s lungi, like ink on blotting paper, just below the buttocks. He never saw so much blood, not since he saw his mother’s blood fill the bathroom floor while she gave him a bath. She told him that all women bled when they were older, that it was nothing to worry about. Why would a man bleed between his legs? Did he really break his uncle’s back? Maybe he punctured his uncle back, like he had his cycle tire. He did not dare open his mouth. If his uncle found out, he would skin him alive. He stood up on his uncle’s back an started walking again, up and down the oily back.
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