Diwali in Muzaffarnagar Page 4

  In the evening, I found the newspaper on the living room table. I cut out the news item and kept it inside my organic chemistry textbook. I read it again and again, as if it could provide some clue regarding Daanish’s well-being.

  The next day, my involvement in the incident became clear to my parents. Anjana’s father called mine and asked him to discipline me. I don’t know what else was shared between them.

  My confrontation with my parents was not very dramatic. As a child, I’d been hit only occasionally, that too only by my mother. For some time now, I’d not even given my parents a chance to scold me. I hadn’t been a bad child, or even an unruly teenager. So I guess they were at a loss to find a way to be cross with me.

  We were in the living room, all seated on different sofas. A tense silence reigned till Mummy began: ‘I knew from the beginning that that Daniyal was a bad influence.’

  I suspected that Mummy had deliberately used the wrong name this time. ‘Daanish,’ I corrected her again. There was a silence following this correction, this utterance of the right name. She looked at Papa, who looked down towards the floor, as if it was a mistake made by him. There was a rigid expression on his face that I had never seen before, and in those mute seconds I realized that it was disappointment, disappointment with me and probably also with Mummy, or with the tiny world around him; his expression conveyed an intensity that I had never before seen on that face. I got up from the sofa and went to my room, to study.

  That night, at around eleven, Papa entered my room and lay down on the bed. I was sitting at my study desk, with my back towards him. I heard the clink of ice on glass from behind me. He was drinking.

  ‘Are you able to study?’ he asked me. His slow speech told me that he had already had a couple.

  ‘Yes,’ I responded immediately.

  He didn’t ask another question, and I felt him take a swig of his drink. In the minute that followed, I somehow gained the courage to speak the truth. ‘Actually, no,’ I said.

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘I’m finding it difficult to study.’

  ‘You are worried about your friend?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It could have been you.’

  ‘It couldn’t have been me, Papa,’ I said, turning towards him. It was a truth that I realized only as I spoke it.

  He didn’t bother to respond to that. He shifted his posture and took a sip of his whiskey. He looked straight ahead, at the wall before him. I looked down to the floor, getting lost in the patternless granite.

  ‘You have deviated from your path,’ he said.

  It hurt me to hear that. My gaze fastened on the floor. I did feel guilty for not fighting with my friend in Nai Mandi. But did I have to feel guilty just for being there? Was being there a deviation? Was my friendship with Daanish itself a wrong thing?

  ‘Your tuitions have been off for more than a month,’ Papa said then. ‘You lied to us.’

  A heat rose up from my chest and suffused my face and my ears. I couldn’t continue facing him; so I turned my chair towards my desk and starting peering into my books. Behind my back, Papa burped and shifted his position again. I heard a sniffle. I feared that he was crying. It made my throat tighten.

  ‘Saransh beta,’ he addressed me, his baritone creaking. ‘There was a time … when you were a kid … there was a time when my salary was four thousand rupees and Holy Angels’ fees was twelve hundred rupees. You were the only kid in our neighbourhood to study there.’

  I buried my eyes in the text on the book, but the formulas became blurry. Then, fat tears fell on the page. Papa didn’t comfort me. After five minutes, when I turned to look at him, I found him asleep with his mouth open and a wetness around his eyes.

  From the next day, Papa started using the Activa for his tasks and errands. When Saturday came, he offered to drop me to the tuitions. ‘I don’t need to go any more,’ I told him, ‘they’re only taking tests.’ He nodded slowly, as if taking it in. ‘It’s better to practise at home,’ I added to convince him.

  The board exams were approaching. Mummy had Papa buy a heater and placed it in my room. But when they realized that the warmth made me sleepy, the heater was promptly removed. Mummy was nicer to me than usual, and cooked my favourite dishes. On Papa’s side, the frequency with which he came into my room at night increased, though he never again carried a drink with him. Often, he came with a Hindi book in his hand, and made every effort – including making late-night tea for both of us – to stay awake as long as possible. This was to make sure that I too stayed awake and studied till at least an hour after midnight.

  During this period, I was never explicitly barred from venturing out of the house, but I accepted what was effectively a curfew without any rebellion. My mind, however, wandered towards Daanish and his well-being every now and then. As the day of the first board exam came closer, I grew positive that I would see him there. I would say sorry to him then, and if he hated me for running away, I would accept that hate – this was my resolve.

  Two days before the first board exam, Mummy asked me to go to the nearby shop to buy some curd. I rode on my bicycle, taking in the crisp, late-February air. The short cycle ride took me back a few months, and I even allowed the thought that, all things considered, the scooter had not been a great thing for me.

  Then came the day of the first exam. It was maths. Papa used my scooter to drop me to M.G. Public School, which was the exam centre for the students of S.D. Public School. Before the exam began, the students were made to assemble in the lawns in front of the main building. I looked around for Daanish but couldn’t find him. I saw Anjana and said ‘Hi’ to her, but she receded from me as if I were someone who would bring bad luck. I went up to Gunjan then.

  ‘Daanish isn’t here,’ she said, without looking at me. Her eyes were scanning the area for him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘You are sorry? For what?’

  ‘I ran away. I didn’t help him.’

  Gunjan looked at me with concern. ‘What happened to Daanish?’ she asked. Before I could attempt an answer, a bell rang and we were ushered in for the exam.

  For the next three hours, I struggled with nothing except a four-mark probability problem. The right approach to attack it just wouldn’t come to me and, as I grappled with it for more than ten minutes, my mind flashed the Nai Mandi incident a couple of times. Finally, I manoeuvred to get at an answer, but I sensed (with some irony) that there was more than half a chance that I was wrong. As the exam ended and we all spilled out into the lawns, the right solution dawned on me in a flash, leaving a bitter taste in my mouth. I had got 100/100 in maths in the pre-boards; it would only be 96/100 in the main exam now. Then, applying a perverse logic, I accepted this four-mark loss as part of the penance I had to pay for betraying Daanish.

  In the lawns, I didn’t get a chance to talk to Gunjan again. So I went to the gate, where Papa was waiting. ‘How did it go?’ he asked me. ‘Perfect,’ I answered.

  Later at home, the exam and the probability problem receded from my thoughts, and I began to worry about Daanish. I could imagine no reason for anyone being absent from a board exam other than that they were completely incapacitated. It had been almost two weeks since the incident, and if Daanish had not recovered from his injuries, it only meant that he had been gravely harmed.

  There was a week between the maths exam and the next one, English. Day after day, my worries about Daanish accreted. I feared that he was dead. And what I feared even more was the possibility that I might never come to know of his fate. There was a chance that further news about him had been published in the local newspaper. Papa was the only one who read it in our house, and if there had been any news about Daanish, I knew that he would hide it from me. It wasn’t possible for me to go through the pile and look for the news myself: I was never alone in the house.

  Two days before the English exam, my anxiety about what had happened to Daanish was at its peak. Fortunately, Papa was not
in the house that day, and so when Mummy asked me if I could go and buy some curd, my desperation made me hatch a quick plan to find out about Daanish. Taking the scooter would make Mummy suspicious; so I told her that I wanted to exercise my legs a bit and would take the cycle through a longer route. She agreed reluctantly. Once on my way, I rushed through Jat Colony and reached Mahavir Chowk, from where I took a turn towards Meenakshi Chowk. I was pedalling the hardest I could. From Meenakshi Chowk, I went straight into Khalapaar. By then, I had been at top speed for ten minutes and my breath needed catching up. So I slowed the cycle down.

  Hundred metres into Khalapaar, a mosque appeared to my left. I’d only ever seen this mosque’s light-green minarets from one side of Meenakshi Chowk, where Daanish and I would stand after the tuitions. Up close, the structure was unremarkable, but I wondered if it was the one that Daanish’s family had been going to with their fervent prayers.

  On either side of the mosque were workshops where Muslim men welded big iron strips. The road turned to the left and, at the turn, I saw a meat shop. Just outside it were live chicken inside cuboidal cages. The shopfront had a poster of Shahrukh Khan – probably from a scene in a film that I knew to be at least four–five years old. The whole place seemed, in fact, different from the kind of shops and markets from where we bought our curd, milk, soaps, et cetera.

  The road narrowed ahead of me and turned right, with a little lane branching off the left. As I passed that lane, I saw four burqa-clad figures – the smallest among them a child of not more than ten years – inside. It was not as if I had seen such a sight for the first time – Muslim women were not an uncommon sight in the markets of Muzaffarnagar – but I nevertheless felt queer. Was it the added context of Khalapaar? Was it the simple fact of looking at the women (or girls) inside their domain, as one who had come from outside?

  As I moved on, I realized that my heartbeat was picking up. I was feeling vulnerable, fearing that at any moment someone could accost me and demand to know my identity – the way it had happened with Daanish in Nai Mandi. My conspicuousness on that road, in that milieu, might have been my own construction, but its mild terror was undeniable. It was as if I was moving about in a disguise that could slither off any moment. There was something at once common, exceptional and inexplicable about this. And I wondered – just as I was blinking with trepidation at the Urdu lettering on shop boards, or at the crescent-moon finials on small domes, or at the bearded men going about their business – did Daanish too find the swastika, which was a common sight in Jat Colony, or the om sign, or the red thread wound around people’s wrists, discomfiting? Why had we never talked about this?

  Nisar Hospital was a simple three-storey structure, looking less like a hospital and more like a cheap lodge. From the road, one could see the common balconies to which the patient rooms opened, their railings nearly covered with all the clothes that had been left there to dry. I entered through the broad entrance and found myself in a large room, which had about thirty people waiting. It wasn’t difficult to make out that everyone there was a Muslim.

  I walked to the reception in the middle of the room. ‘I want to make an enquiry about a patient who was admitted here,’ I said to the man at the desk.

  He directed me to another person sitting at the far end of the reception area. ‘Yes?’ the man there asked me.

  ‘I want to know about a patient. Whether he’s been discharged? What’s his health like?’

  ‘What is the name of the patient?’ the man asked me. He was probably in his early thirties, had a Muslim beard, and seemed to be wearing kajal in his eyes. There were tobacco stains on his teeth.

  ‘Daanish Alam. He was admitted on the evening of February 14th.’

  The man eyed me, and he saw a nervous teenager, sweaty, clean-shaven, a bit red in the ears. Then he checked a fat register. ‘Yes, Daanish Alam,’ he said, still looking at the register.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m a friend of his.’

  ‘Your name?’

  I had the inexplicable urge to say Ankush again. I resisted it. ‘Saransh Malik,’ I said.

  The man looked up from the register, paused, then looked down again.

  ‘We are … we were … school friends.’

  ‘He was badly hurt. Broken right arm, broken ribs,’ the man said. ‘And … head injury.’

  ‘So, what’s happened to him?’

  ‘He was referred to Meerut on the 19th of February.’

  This only meant that the injuries were severe. People were referred to Meerut only when the Muzaffarnagar doctors couldn’t help them.

  ‘Do you know how he is? Is there any way I can know?’ I asked the man. I could hear my own voice quavering.

  ‘Were you with him when it happened?’

  I couldn’t answer in yes or no. I had an absurd vision of Daanish being insensate and receiving electric shocks. Tears welled up in my eyes.

  ‘He must be alive,’ the man said, almost in sympathy. ‘If he was dead, someone would have told you.’

  I wiped my tears, thanked the man, and walked out of the hospital. I sat on my bicycle. In the journey out of Khalapaar, I didn’t notice its peculiarities so much. My friend Daanish, that’s all I could think.

  Back home, I found Mummy in a fit of rage. I had taken an hour and a half for something that never took more than ten minutes. It didn’t help that I had forgotten to buy the curd. To her inquiries about where I had been, I responded by hiding my face so firmly in my palms that no amount of her strength could make me show it.

  Although I couldn’t make it to the IITs, I still got admitted to a government-run engineering college. My parents expressed mild disappointment at first, but their happiness at not having to finance a private school education became apparent with time. Years, as they are wont to, passed. I emerged from tech school not knowing much about computer engineering, my chosen stream. I was lucky, however, to immediately make it to a prestigious management school, from where I eased out, after two years, into the real world. I settled in Mumbai with a high-paying job and had a couple of serious relationships (one of them was with a Catholic girl, and that had nothing to do with why we broke up). I started forgetting about the scarcities that had seemed eternal during my growing-up years in Muzaffarnagar. I was becoming a different person: I discarded expensive phones after every six months, drove around in a Honda City, stayed away from political bickering on Facebook, learnt to eat things that I could not have imagined as edible only a few years back (beef, pork, oysters, crab, prawns – you name it), spoke with excitement about technologies that could change the world, reviewed restaurants as a hobby, made a trip to Europe and planned one to the Americas, etc.

  My parents were happy with the palatable parts of all this progress, which were the only parts that I bared before them. Any positive nostalgia that I held with regards to Muzaffarnagar diminished after every visit, as I began to see it as a place that had stagnated, a place that was keeping dear its faulty notions of the world – basically a place unable to accommodate the expansions of my character.

  Many of my school friends had had journeys similar to mine, settling into comfortable lives in big cities in India or abroad. Perhaps we all didn’t want to remember Muzaffarnagar much, which must partly explain why my contact with my school friends was non-existent, although some of them had found me on Facebook and added me. It was due to those courtesies that, on a boring office day when I had all the time to scroll through Facebook, I noticed one Daanish Alam in my ‘Suggested Friends’ list. The profile picture was all black, so I checked our mutual friends and realized that it was my Daanish. I went to his timeline and saw that the profile picture had been changed that very day. It was December 6. It took me a few seconds to comprehend the gesture: it was the anniversary (if it can be called that) of the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. As I scrolled down, I gathered that he still lived in Muzaffarnagar, which was a surprise to me, for I had always tho
ught that Daanish would join his brother in Dubai. Had his brother ever really been in Dubai? There were many posts on his timeline that could be called religious in nature. There was one in which he ranted – with much anger, it seemed – against the recent beef ban by the Maharashtra government. Seeing some of those posts unsettled me, for it was difficult to imagine the free-spirited Daanish I knew bothering to associate with such heavy things. But there was no doubt that it was him, for I then checked his photos and saw him. He was still handsome, although he had gained a few kilos (not unlike myself) and had also lost some hair. He was into taking selfies, and was clearly still fond of maintaining a good appearance. This made me smile warmly. But as I clicked to see another album, the very first photograph made me pause.

  There was a woman in the photo, handing a child – about two years old – to Daanish, who was sitting on a sofa. The woman might be Daanish’s wife, I thought, and the child might be his, too. But this possibility wasn’t what had most piqued my curiosity in the photo. It was the awkward, one-handed way in which Daanish was preparing to receive the child’s weight – his left hand was outstretched, while his right was stuck firmly to his chest. I clicked on to the next photo. It didn’t show the woman, only Daanish holding the child on his left arm, his right hand stuck to the chest in exactly the same way as in the previous photograph. I moved further in the album. A photo showed Daanish sitting pillion on a Bullet, his left hand on the shoulder of a man who was preparing to start the vehicle. The photo had been taken from a side, and Daanish’s right hand wasn’t visible in it. I then went to the album that contained his selfies, and gave them a second look. Now I noticed that they had all been taken from a similar angle, with the phone held in the left hand. In some of the selfies, the right hand could be seen in the lower left corner, transfixed in the same position, like a dead thing that had been dead for a long time.