Diwali in Muzaffarnagar

  To my father

  Contents

  The Sad Unknowability of Dilip Singh

  My Friend Daanish

  B’s First Solo Trip

  Diwali in Muzaffarnagar

  Reasonable Limits

  Good People

  The Mechanics of Silence

  Compassionate Grounds

  Acknowledgements

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Advance Praise for Diwali in Muzaffarnagar

  Copyright

  The Sad Unknowability of

  Dilip Singh

  The never-to-be-famous writer Dilip Singh died of his own hand in the winter of 2006. He was twenty-nine. His mother returned from her grocery rounds on the unfortunate day of his death and found him hanging from the ceiling fan, one of her plain widow’s saris wrapped tightly around his strained neck. In the hope that her son still had some life in him, she drew a chair (the same chair that Dilip had toppled some time back) beneath his feet and mounted another to untie the noose. Failing to do that, she noticed the loosened plaster around the hook that held the ceiling fan and, in her panic, began to pull the body downward. Some plaster and cement fell on her face, but the body could not be set free. It never occurred to her that had she managed to free it, the heavy ceiling fan, which was from an era when a lot of iron went into those things, would have crushed them both anyway.

  Dilip’s choice wasn’t something that the circumstances, or my understanding of them, added up to. To say that he was a writer is not to say much, for the label is a problematic one. By the time of his suicide, Dilip had written a lot in both English and Hindi, although none of it was published.

  He had started writing when he was twenty-three. His initial outpourings were in the form of poems, and the only people who ever read or heard those were his close friends, who did so only reluctantly, for the verses spoke of a coming apocalypse or a love long lost or the inescapable misery of life, and Dilip’s friends, all as young as him, could not find in them anything to connect with. The more sensitive ones among them liked to point out that Dilip’s poems were dishonest, for he had himself never experienced anything traumatic, and so when he talked of ‘grey skies that gave out a grey piss’, or of ‘love’s half-life’, or of ‘a beggar’s prayers for no rains that season’, he sounded phony. I was a friend of Dilip’s, probably closer to him than the others, and I too had similar feelings about his early poetry. In our private conversations, I would ask him where he was getting his ideas from. His answers were never satisfactory. He would say that a poet’s primary condition is to be ever-sentient of death, or that a poet who doesn’t know love’s loss is not a true poet, or that misery is the automobile that rams us into the wall of death, et cetera. With hindsight, I have come to understand that phase as one where he was struggling to find his feet in the quagmire that is literature. I also suspect that all of it was under the agony of a broken love affair that none of his friends had been aware of.

  But Dilip and his work changed. Between 2001 and 2004, he was excited about writing prose poems, of the sort where a collection of seemingly disparate paragraphs hint at an elusive core (these might be his words), and although he continued to write of death and misery and betrayals, his work now exuded a sense of privacy too. The prose poems registered in one’s heart as having been written by a suffering individual. They had in them the scratches of defeat – a defeat not felt or read or imagined, but one experienced in the real. Perhaps this is a mere effect that he created by simply turning to a first-person voice that was more nuanced than his earlier voices. For example, ‘the grey sky gave out a grey piss’ now went like this: ‘After it rained, I walked on the road, looking down, but the vision didn’t change even if I looked up to the sky. Everything was the colour of my mind.’

  The reasons for this apparent melancholy still escaped me. I tried to talk about it, which was easier now as Dilip was far less obnoxious than he had been earlier. We often sat on the sea front at Marine Drive, where he would read his latest work to me. Even though the subject of his writing was almost always too serious, I assumed he was happy, for he did give off a certain confidence that stemmed from the improvement in his writing. Conversely, he told me that the grim nature of what he wrote about surprised him as well, and might just be a by-product of the grave voices of the writers he was reading in those days. I remember how this statement had relaxed me, and also how honest it had seemed to me, simply because it had in it the hints of a confession. In effect, Dilip was copying the writers he admired, but at least he had the courage to accept that. Whether his work of that time could be called original or not, I do not know, although I do feel sad that no one will ever be able to give an authoritative answer. The little that I have quoted is from what I have retained over the years.

  And then, as if out of a perverse logic, Dilip was struck by real pain: his father died of a massive heart failure. I and other friends went to his house to express our condolences. There I saw Dilip, standing in a corner of the living room where he would eventually end his life. He looked stunned rather than distraught. He did not utter a single word to any of us, and so we all considered it better to leave and allow the family to grieve for their loss.

  Two weeks later, I received a phone call from him. He sounded excited, which confused me. He told me that he had written a long prose poem, which a magazine of national circulation had decided to publish in its upcoming issue. I did not miss the impropriety of such a reaction only two weeks after losing a father; nevertheless, I congratulated Dilip wholeheartedly. He wanted to meet me at Marine Drive the next day, so that he could read this poem to me. I agreed.

  The poem was about a ten-year-old boy who had a world of his own – a lush, strange world full of esoteric notions. The poem was difficult to understand, not merely because of the complexities of its language. Then there came a revelatory passage, in which the child watches his father hit his mother with a rod, and then a sequence where the mother shows the mark of that violence to the child. The details of the mother baring her thigh to the child to show him the mark were unnerving. I realized then that this was a personal experience, although the end, where the child buries the rod under a peach tree, might have been fabricated.

  After Dilip was done reading, I was hesitant to provide any reaction at all. But then I told him that what he had written seemed to me like something that had happened to him. Dilip grew silent and stared at the horizon for what seemed a long time. When we resumed talking, it was about an entirely different topic, and then we got up and went to a nearby café to have some cold coffee. The poem was deliberately forgotten. Although I remember how, in the taxi ride back home that day, I had thought of it as a veritable masterpiece.

  Dilip called me a couple of days later. It was quite late in the night, and I could only hear an incoherent blabbering from the other side. It was as if he was heavily intoxicated, which was strange because I knew that Dilip never drank. I could think of nothing better than to cut the call and reach out to him later. Next morning, when I visited his house on my way to work, his mother told me that he had left the previous night. He has gone to the Himalayas for some time, she said, and added something about how disturbed he had been since his father’s demise. I was confused, but then I shrugged and got on with my life. What else could I do?

  I did, of course, retain some interest in my friend, and so the next month I got a copy of the magazine in which his work should have been published. It was not there! My confusion regarding him was now mixed with guilt, for I thought that maybe he chose not to publish the poem because I had found it to be too personal. I rang his house, but his mother told me that he had still not returned. She had no contact number or
address to locate him, and had no clue about the poem due to be published in the magazine. For a while I wondered if Dilip had lied to me about being accepted for publication. But why would he do that? To make me listen to his poem with respect, with approval? It made me ask questions of myself: had I thought of the poem as a masterpiece because it was due for publication? This would mean that Dilip had conned me, and that I had conned myself too. Now I wasn’t even sure if his father had really hit his mother with an iron rod. And if that wasn’t true, was the poem then a masterpiece because it had appeared so real and personal?

  It was six more months before Dilip finally returned to Bombay – with a large beard and webby eyes. He had decided to be jobless; apparently, his father had left behind a considerable amount in insurance money. We got into the habit of meeting at Marine Drive every Saturday evening, where he would read some of his writings to me. I kept my distance emotionally and never broached the topic of the unpublished poem. He was writing short stories now – stories that seldom had more than two characters who met each other for the first and the last time in them. He either never sought publication or was never accepted by anyone. I felt that he didn’t have anything substantial to write about, and was therefore writing about the transitory nature of human encounters – how we grow intimate with strangers and then part without much ado. While this template persisted in general, the settings and the tones and the timelines changed dramatically from story to story, and the intensity of the connection that the two characters felt for each other also varied substantially. Sometimes there would be a third party or an object or an idea that was important to both the characters. As weeks passed, as those weeks became months, September-October-November, as life settled into a routine for me and probably for Dilip too, I began to enjoy these weekly rendezvous and came to be excited about knowing the identities of the two strangers that my friend would set in a story next.

  And then that Friday morning in late December, I was at work, probably toiling over a presentation or a spreadsheet. There was a tiny suicide note, in which he blamed himself and nobody else. In the days to follow, I took it upon myself to comfort his mother as much as I could. I would visit her every other day. It was in one of these meetings that she narrated her struggle with her son’s lifeless body. She eventually came to tell me that Dilip had burnt all his writings before hanging himself. She had noticed flakes of ash drifting on the living room floor before she had looked up to find her son. Then she cried, and then I cried, and the crying went on till it exhausted itself, at which point the silence became so oppressive that I ran out of the house.

  My Friend Daanish

  Four months after my sixteenth birthday, Papa bought me a Honda Activa. I didn’t know anything about it till the moment he drove it in and parked it in our front yard. For the first few minutes, I believed that he had bought the scooter for himself, and that was happiness enough, for I imagined that I would get to use it every once a while. Then he called me closer and demo-ed the electric-start mechanism. The scooter settled into a low hum. Meanwhile, Mummy had started the process of finger-painting an orange swastika just above the headlight. She smiled at Papa once, and since a smile was something rare between them, I knew immediately that the moment was special. Then the two of them looked at me and laughed together, and I understood that the Activa was for me.

  The swastika would be an eyesore, I knew, but I didn’t tell Mummy that because, in my assessment, it was she who had made the scooter possible in the first place. Many times over the previous year, she had beleaguered papa with descriptions of how I ploughed the whole town with my bicycle, how I huffed from school to the first tuition class, then on to the second, and then on to the third, how I came home exhausted around 9 p.m. and then failed to put much muscle into my Physics Chemistry Maths. Papa had resisted Mummy’s exhortations by citing how, in his own time, he had had to hang onto the rear ends of buses to reach his school every day, how there had been no tuitions then, how teachers never turned up, and so on. But then I topped eleventh standard and things changed.

  My results had stoked my parents’ dreams of an IIT selection, and the scooter was less a reward and more an investment for the all-important twelfth standard. That it was not the PCM marks that had pushed me to the top spot but a ten-point cushion I had over everyone else in English was not known to them. (Only Bharat Goel had scored more marks than me in English, but he had scored miserably in other subjects, and was anyway better known as the only one who had contributed poems – all signed pretentiously as ‘B’ – to the annual school magazine.) Another thing was that topping the class was not that difficult after tenth, since there wasn’t any relevant competition left. It was common practice among the brighter students in Muzaffarnagar to leave the town for Kota, Meerut or Delhi, where better coaching for competitive exams was available.

  Not everyone grazed the right grass, however, and there were some bad stories, too. Like of Shivang Gupta, once the Holy Angels’ Convent School topper, who had gone to Kota to ace engineering, but had ended up failing the board exams. Rumour was that he had started drinking alcohol and had even begun chewing gutkha. A girl named Khyati Sharma, who had shifted to Delhi after tenth, had eloped with a criminal-type boy. Such stories, of which there was at least one each year, might have had some impact on my parents. ‘You will be with us in Muzaffarnagar, safe and healthy,’ Mummy had said on the question of leaving the city. ‘You’ll just have to develop the habit of self-study,’ Papa had added.

  As for me, I didn’t mind staying one bit. At that time, I didn’t have any concept of living away from parents, and I was happy I would be home for two more years.

  Once Mummy was done with her rituals, Papa and I went for a ride. I drove the scooter in the tiny lanes of Jat Colony. The drive was incident-free, except for the one time when a cow’s tail brushed against the headlight. This happened because some of the houses in the colony had mini-cowsheds built right on the road, and manoeuvring the scooter sometimes required going rather close to a tethered cow’s rear.

  Satisfied with my driving on the tiny lanes, Papa asked me to turn towards Mahavir Chowk. ‘Let’s see if you can deal with traffic,’ he said. I drove around the circle and took one of the roads branching off it – the one going towards Sadar Bazaar. After ten minutes or so, Papa got bored and said, ‘Six years of cycling have trained you well. You can ride the scooter decently enough, I think.’

  ‘It won’t be a problem,’ I agreed.

  We didn’t talk after that for some time. It was when I was parking the scooter in our front yard that Papa said, ‘Just don’t do anything stupid with it.’

  ‘Like riding over bumpy places? Potholed roads? Over sand?’ I asked, just to be funny.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ Papa grunted.

  I guess I knew what Papa meant. Muzaffarnagar was a peaceful town, except when it bared its ugly side. And the exceptions were many. The town had a particularly direct way of dealing with any trouble between teenaged boys and girls. Four years back, when an excited eleventh standard guy had pinched a girl’s bottom outside a tuition class, the violent mayhem that ensued had ultimately led to the imposition of an unsaid rule: separate tuition timings for boys and girls. Rarely did tuition teachers take the risk of calling boys and girls together; if and when that was done, they ensured the two groups sat at a token distance from each other.

  A mandatory change for me after Class X had been the change of school. Till tenth, I had been in Holy Angels’ Convent School, an institution run primarily by middle-aged Malayali sisters affiliated to some big Christian mission (I don’t remember which). Although the sisters allowed boys and girls to mingle without question, the prospect of continued mingling after a certain age was identified by them as an administrative – and even mission-threatening – challenge, which was why the school turned girls-only after tenth. The boys were asked to leave, which wasn’t a great thing for us, because Holy Angels’ was considered the best in the district, and o
ne that gave good competition to the English-medium schools in the neighbouring districts of Meerut and Haridwar. Boys who didn’t move out of the town had to shift to Sanatan Dharm (S.D.) Public School, which was the best option if one wanted to stay English-medium. The shift meant that our girl friends in Holy Angels’, whom we had grown up with since kindergarten, were left behind. Long friendships were broken, as were some fledgling romances. In fact, the last month in Holy Angels’ would turn out to be quite dramatic for every passing batch. Some of the girls, it was rumoured, bestowed kisses upon their boyfriends in the shed behind the basketball court. I remember that Gunjan, the prettiest girl of our batch, had received a lot of proposals (proposals for what, I wondered) from my friends around that time.

  At any rate, the shifting of schools made us boys and girls aware of being boys and girls. That it happened around the time when our own bodies were intent on establishing that difference made it more difficult.

  For migrants from Holy Angels’, things were difficult in S.D. Public. We were all crammed together in a single section, and since there were no girls around us anymore, we didn’t really know how to be with each other. Friendships were shaken even among us, as it slowly became apparent that a lot of our equations with each other were in fact mediated by the girls. My friendship with Apoorv, Ankush, and Tarun, all of whom had been great friends, altered. It was in this new environment that I came closer to Daanish, with whom my relationship had only been cordial in the years at Holy Angels’. It won’t be wrong to say that I had mostly watched him from a distance then.

  Daanish had a cool carelessness about the studies business – something that I admired. He was cool in other little things as well – in how he took haphazard notes for all subjects in a single notebook; how he played with his ball pen, making it rotate endlessly on his thumb; how he ran his fingers through his hair every now and then; how he played with his cell phone inside the class (this was a time when only two or three students in the entire class had a cell phone; I didn’t). He was extremely handsome when the rest of us had at best been cute, and some of my girl friends in Holy Angels’ used to call him Dadonis. Gunjan was no doubt attracted to him, and must have been disappointed when it turned out that Daanish wasn’t part of the crowd that had its heart set on her. He always put on a lot of deodorant, and it was because of him that I started using deodorant in Class XI myself, after convincing my parents that the cycling was making me sweat a lot and that other students complained about my body odour. Of course, the use of deodorants continued even after I had acquired the scooter.