Diwali in Muzaffarnagar Read online

  I shut my laptop and tried to remember how to breathe.

  B’s First Solo Trip

  B notices a lot.

  He is walking down a narrow, dusty lane, one of the many branching off from the busier main road. The morning is bright, almost too bright, pushing Diu into an early siesta. On either side are two-storey houses silenced by the sunlight. Here and there on the roads lie fresh splotches of cow-dung, though he does not see a cow anywhere.

  He takes a turn and his chosen hotel appears before him. Recommended by his Ahmedabad friends as Diu’s best budget hotel, Hotel Herança Buesa, one-time Portuguese church, does deliver a good first impression. Its attractions: an ornate façade towards the east, topped by a spire, a clear sea-view from the southern edge of the property, and a barbeque on alternate evenings. One let-down is the white paint on the overall structure, which has peeled off in patches, creating archipelagos of brown on each wall.

  In the vestibule, he is greeted by an obese woman dressed in a nightgown. Her face seems swollen. She has dishevelled hair, as if the result of some terrible dream that she has just woken up from. ‘We are the family owning the hotel,’ she informs B.

  He enquires about the rate of the smallest accommodation and, upon receiving the answer, accepts it. ‘I was a student in Ahmedabad,’ he says. ‘Just finished studying architecture there,’ he adds.

  ‘Hmm,’ the woman says, entering his name into the ledger. She then offers to show him his first-floor room and leads him outside, towards a helicoid staircase leaning on the north wall of the building.

  ‘I am little scared rooming Indian backpacker,’ she declares on the staircase.

  ‘Why?’

  She skips the question. ‘My name is Miranda,’ she says.

  The room is basic. The walls, painted a sickly green, are mildewed. He walks into the attached bathroom, sensing its inspection to be an expected step in the evaluation of hotel rooms. The shower is kaput, and the green paint on the wall behind is peeling like snakeskin. He returns to the room with no intention of complaining about anything. He doesn’t know if he should have expected better.

  ‘Barbeque in the evening today,’ Miranda says. ‘Winston, my husband? Super fish he makes. You must come. Very cheap too. All the foreign people come there, even from other hotels.’

  He nods in acknowledgement and Miranda leaves the room, her heavy feet thumping the staircase. He sits on the bed, which squeaks in greeting. On a wall, he notices a large painting with plain scenery, composed of a mountain range and a river and some huts – all anomalous with Diu.

  He will rent a bicycle and go to the beaches, he decides. But for now, he will take a nap.

  At Nagoa Beach, under the uplifting sounds of the sea meeting the land, he congratulates himself on the solo trip. A scrappy poem begins to form in his mind: The cotton at the fringes of the sea caressing toe-nails / The shore damasked with lozenges tracing the recessions of the waves / Waves, please stop, don’t fill the hollows of feet too soon, let there be a mark / Wet sand, what makes you breathe? / The horizon, that straight line far far away, what meets what there?

  But he soon realizes that because he does not know how to swim, the setting is – to him – interesting only in sight and sound, not in terms of the fun that it can provide. The views of the waves, the horizon and the sand are all fine, the music of the waves is fine, the poetry that swerves inside him is fine too, and he will try to write it down in his journal in the hotel, but as he gapes at the tourists taking on the sea with confidence, swimming distances into the water, or looks far towards his right and notices the abandon with which the children of the fisherfolk gambol in the sea, their spontaneity with the elements, a bout of ill-feeling rises within him. Things become clearer: strands demand that he be poetic in their appreciation, look at them and marvel at the calmness with which they meet the noisy sea, but beyond letting his feet sink in the sand, or looking at a translucent crab walking diagonally and briskly on it, or watching the slow process of the setting up of fishing nets, there isn’t much involvement that he can have with the scene. In fact, he is scared to go even knee-deep into the water, for he is alone and unsure if anyone will care to save him if he were sucked in by a deviant current.

  He decides to turn back and wait at the hotel till Miranda’s evening barbeque is fired. He cycles for a while, and then takes to dragging the bike beside him. White tourists cross him in either direction on scooters and bicycles. To his right appears a hillock on top of which, as is mentioned on a nearby board, is a ‘Sunset Point’. He props the cycle against the thickets beside the road. Then he climbs the hill. At the top, the sight of the descending sun greets him. Looking at the marvellous view, he cannot help but think that the only good way for the sun to set is to set over a grey–blue sea.

  There are benches at the Sunset Point and he sits on one. He tries to absorb the entire scene. How far can he see to the left? How far to the right? He lauds his decision of allowing himself the freedom to see the world. He grew up in tiny, land-locked Muzaffarnagar, a rough place where no one ever understood him. Education took him outside Muzaffarnagar, but there was never enough time to explore anything. All his excursions into the world till now had been guided – by parents, teachers, or friends. Now he’s gone out alone – something he has always wanted to do.

  Just then he hears some noise from behind his bench. A couple scrambling up the last stretch of the hill. They look newly married, here in Diu for the honeymoon. The man has a round belly fitted into a tight T-shirt whose strained fabric suffers a considerable depression at the area of the navel. He is belching repeatedly, perchance due to the alcohol. The woman, not drunk, is gaudily dressed in a red sari with excessively glittery borders. Her anklets make a low clinking sound each time she moves.

  The couple, giggling, sit on a bench not far from his. He tries to ignore them and go back to his thoughts. But then they start talking:

  ‘Look at the beauty, jaanu,’ the man says.

  ‘Oho, it is the sun only,’ the woman says.

  ‘Let’s go to the hotel,’ the man says, snuggling up to the woman.

  ‘What will we do?’ the woman asks.

  The man replies in a badly modulated whisper, one that is clearly audible at B’s bench. ‘Arre, what will we do? We will do the same.’

  ‘I’m tired. No,’ the woman replies. Her protest is weak, almost like an invitation.

  ‘Come on, yaar. We have come here to have fun only.’

  Drunk and sexed-up, the man is oblivious to B’s presence on the next bench. The woman, he realizes, doesn’t care either. The couple has encroached upon his moment. He stands up. Only half of the sun-sphere has submerged as of now, but he cannot stay to watch the complete drowning. The couple, now aware of him, shift slightly from their cuddle. He turns and starts climbing down the hill. Halfway down, out of sight of the duo, he retches in a feigned jest, as if there is an audience to laugh at his expression. But there is no fun in it. He realizes that such an incident could have appeared comic in company, but now, in solitude, it only evokes a viscous ill-feeling difficult to ascribe to anything.

  He reaches his bicycle and lifts it up. He jumps on the seat and pedals towards the hotel. For some reason, he thinks of the only girl he has had anything akin to sex with. She used to come to his hostel room in Ahmedabad and let him do everything except the final act. He eventually got bored of her and cut her off.

  There are nine foreign tourists at the barbeque, deftly attaching a considerable amount of fish flesh to their forks each time they want a mouthful. B, the only Indian there, is struggling with that. He is, in fact, thrusting thorns down with beer. Brawny, hirsute Winston manages the barbeque, attired in a vest and Bermudas. Miranda does the serving, helped by her two adolescent sons who look like they would rather be elsewhere. Miranda is still in the morning gown, still with the stunned hair. She does not approach B for re-servings as frequently as the others, and he has mixed feelings about that.

&nb
sp; It is for the first time that he is eating a barbequed fish whole, with spine and skin and other fishy paraphernalia. He has only had soft fillets a couple of times before, as served by the campus mess once a fortnight. Here, the almost-alive eyes of the fish and its open mouth with tiny sharp teeth are for him a bit too lively. Things might have been different, he reasons with himself, if he had been eating non-veg food since childhood, like everyone around him now. How vehemently his mother had refused to wash the utensils when his father had brought butter chicken home once. Daal and roti, sabzi and roti, daal and chawal, daal and chawal and sabzi and roti – these were the stock meals at home, and at hostels. All vegetarian, Indian style. He remembers the day when he first ate chicken in his college days, tentatively biting into a leg piece just to shed the veg tag, just to feel a queer sense of liberation.

  He was never initiated into the art of forks and knives. To eat with his hands would be practical now, and would save him from swallowing thorns, but it is unimaginable, considering the people around. On some occasions, his knife makes a screeching sound on his plate, a noise that makes him clench his jaws. Whenever he senses someone looking in his direction, he ceases his efforts at the fish, looks in the person’s direction and smiles, while his mind worries about the clearly messy contents of his plate.

  There are conversations all around. Though there is no single group, B is the only one sitting alone. Some time back, a guy from Denmark asked him where he was from and he answered India, as if India was a country outside of Diu. The guy did not ask him a second question.

  He finally decides to dump the plate, gulp down a beer, and force himself to sleep. He looks around to ensure that no one will notice him when he places his quite-full plate in the dish-bin that Miranda has placed in a corner of the lawn.

  ‘Don’t like it, eh?’ speaks a voice from behind him. Startled, he turns around to see a white girl standing just behind his seat with a pint of Foster’s in her hand.

  ‘Yeah, I don’t,’ he replies.

  ‘Well it’s bad. Too thorny, actually.’

  ‘Yes … actually, yes,’ he says.

  The girl’s comment is a relief. He rids himself of the plate, throwing it into the bin.

  ‘So … what do you do? You are Indian?’ the girl asks.

  ‘Yes. Just travelling after graduation,’ he shrugs.

  ‘Good. Me too. You want more beer? I am going to ask Miranda for a Foster’s.’

  ‘Sure. One for me too.’

  The beer soon makes them chatty. Katy is twenty-three, Australian, blue-eyed, attractive despite excessive freckles; she has a model’s body with shapely hips and a slender waist; she has muscular calves that suggest sportiness; she is wearing a beige top and white shorts, and green Crocs in the feet, which look particularly awesome to him; she laughs heartily with her beautiful teeth; and she is very interested in India. They talk about ‘the family owning the hotel’, their ‘crummy’ (she says) idea of painting the place in white, and the nuisance created by the alcohol-starved Gujaratis who flock to Diu on weekends. He explains things to her: that Diu is hot and maybe the family wants to keep the hotel cool with the white paint on it; that Gujarat is a prohibitionist state because it is the homeland of the father of the nation, Mahatma Gandhi, who was indeed a very saintly man. Then she talks: of how Sydney, her hometown, is a cosmopolitan city with all races of people; how not all Australians can be thought of as descendants of the left-over prisoners of the British (in response to an ‘awkward’ question by him); how alligators are different from crocodiles; and how dangerous and difficult bushfires are.

  Soon they are tipsy and their talk becomes sparse and stuttering, and she yawns, and faint sexual hope twinges somewhere inside him.

  ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ he asks.

  ‘No. Had one. But now I’m here. So no boyfriend.’

  By now, most of the other tourists have dispersed. Winston and Miranda and their sons are nowhere to be seen. And B is hoping. Hoping that Katy will stay with him; that she will stay with him longer to maximize his chances of saying something that will effectively and finally seduce her and bring her to his room of squeaking bed and dirty green walls and an absurd hanging with grotesque mountains.

  ‘Do you see those girls?’ she says, interrupting his inchoate fantasies.

  ‘The ones sitting there? In the corner?’

  ‘Yes. Them. They are Iranians.’

  ‘Really?’ he feigns surprise.

  ‘And lesbians. Iranian lesbian … Fuck, it even rhymes.’

  Is she is thinking of sex, too? ‘How do you know?’ he says.

  ‘They hold hands sometimes and … I mean … they are just comfy, right? Too comfy. And what the fuck are two Iranian girls doing in fucking India?’

  Two fucks in a single sentence. He follows it up with a fuck of his own: ‘How the fuck do you know they are Iranian?’ and reruns the sound of the word, as he has said it, in his head, to check if his pronunciation has been casual enough.

  ‘I was talking to them before you,’ Katy says.

  The conversation halts. He doesn’t know what to say next. His thoughts are melting, flowing down too many inclines. He looks towards the Iranian girls. Katy is right. They don’t look like sisters or relatives. They look like touring lesbians, far away from their iron cage, using India’s vastness to express their sexuality.

  ‘So what are you fucking tonight?’ the words come out of his mouth.

  It cuts short another one of Katy’s yawns. ‘Eh, excuse me?’

  ‘I mean … sorry … What are you doing now, I mean tonight? After this.’

  ‘Sleeping?’

  He feels the thorns in his throat beginning to prick again. Katy stands up from the cemented slab they have been sitting on and pats away the dust on her shorts. He, sitting, finds his gaze fixated on her ass, on how puffs of dust glow for a second or two in the yellow halogen light.

  Katy turns, bending her knees and leaning forward to be at the same level as him. Her top dangles to form an elliptical opening into which he now leers. Her breasts are his focus – pale ovals held well by the scaffold of a pink bra, they seem cooler than the heat around them; and although he is aware that he should not be staring at what he is staring at, he does not look away, using drunkenness as a pretext.

  ‘You want to go for a swim tomorrow?’ Katy asks. He doesn’t reply. She rests her palms on his knees, and his hazy eyes finally venture upward to meet her blue, curious ones. She shakes his knees and asks again: ‘You want to go for a swim in the morning?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good.’ She smiles, then she stands up and goes inside the Herança Buesa building.

  Lying on the bed in his room, B allows imaginary correlations between race and sexuality to convince him that a white girl is better than girls of all other colours. He nurtures admiration for the unabridged sexual confidence of the white girl. How puerile the diffidence of the Indian girl appears before it. And how incomprehensible.

  Katy, he imagines, is away from all encumbrances to the expression of one’s sexuality in the name of tradition, any unnaturalness with impulses. He tells himself that tonight she was tired and just didn’t want to have sex, and if she wanted to, she would have simply asked for it and they would actually have been doing it right now, possibly on this very bed. She is on a six-month-long India trip, he recalls from their talk. Isn’t this, the tenure of the trip itself, guarantee that, given that she is white and free, she will fornicate with a few men along the road? Surely she will not remain sexless for six months. Whenever she wants it badly, whenever the itch comes to her in its strength, she will jump at a decent-looking man and devour him. Will she only be interested in white men? Plenty of white young men touring all around India, all taller and fitter and more handsome and more experienced at sex than Indians. But then, wouldn’t Katy have accomplished this by just travelling in Australia, or England, or America? Here she is in India, interested in the damned country. Of course, during th
ese months in India, she will want to sleep with Indian men in all shades of brown, and let India happen to her. Physically.

  In his head, the possibilities keep repeating … that if Katy is in India for six months, she definitely wants to have sex with some Indians … and that one of those lucky Indians could be him … and that it didn’t happen on their first night, tonight, only because she had grown too tipsy … and that maybe it will happen tomorrow morning after the swim.

  After the swim!

  He jolts upright on the bed. He has said yes to Katy. To her plan of swimming. What will he do tomorrow morning? He cannot even bloody paddle.

  His agitation grows. And added to the beer inside his belly, it makes him feel dizzy.

  He rises from the bed and switches on the light in the room. In an instant, the pallid, depressive green of the room’s walls surrounds him. He paces from end to end, feeling squeamish. His slanting shadow follows him. Brooding without answers as much as he is, the shadow irritates him, even scares him. But after a while, the beer makes peace with his digestion. He then switches off the lights and returns to the bed.

  Deviously, his mind wanders into other areas, concocting other worries. It starts with a series of axioms around the concept of Australia: Australia is an island where everyone lives on the coast and everyone has to know how to swim; Australia is a land where people are generally sporty and adventurous, and love water sports like surfing. And through such axioms, there emerges a single theorem – that Katy is an expert swimmer, perhaps an expert surfer, and she will not understand, let alone like a man so artless and without skill, ignorant even of the basest practicality of staying alive in water.

  But how could he have learnt how to swim? He was born and raised in land-locked Muzaffarnagar, and the only swimming he had seen as a child was when, travelling with his parents to his grandparents’ town during summer holidays, the bus would cross a canal and he would see some village boys bathing buffaloes and some others thrashing against the water’s flow for fun. Later, when he was fifteen, his family visited a relative in Mumbai, and he saw the sea for the first time at Juhu Beach. It was a sea overwhelmed by the crowd assembled along its shores, a sea almost in the background. The elders with him were more interested in the snacks they could have at the food stalls. It was then that he told himself that he would one day travel alone. And now here he is, eager to engage but also incapable; his small-town self an accumulation of scarcities in experience.