ISSUE 41

Why?! This is the custom of the village,’ the shopkeeper shouted for any bystander to hear. ‘A rise in status does not put an end to custom.’
-Ajay Navaria, ‘New Custom’, Unclaimed Terrain, translated by Laura Brueck, Navayana, 2013.

‘Hiding one aspect of your identity is like leading a double life.

You don’t feel like you belong anywhere.
You create masks to wear in each of your lives, and switch artfully between the two.
Eventually, the two blur together and you no longer remember who you were.’
–Yashica Dutt, Coming Out as Dalit, Aleph, 2019.

Quotations selected by translator, Hemang Desai, and included with the approval of the author, Dalpat Chauhan, in order to draw attention to the intertextuality or inter-literary solidarity amongst Dalit Literatures across languages.

His expensive pen danced on the artistic letterhead forming stark patterns against the deadly white of thick glossy paper. Dr Parikh, the letters that stood brilliantly embossed on the corner of the prescription paper, and Dr Parikh, the man, who was scribbling hieroglyphic medication for his personal ailment, were two different entities today, two different identities. Was this ailment a spreading canker or a terminal disease which was beyond treatment, let alone cure? In a moment, everything before his eyes turned hazy and hard, opaque and obscene.

‘Can Bhala’s Dayo morph himself into Devendra? Or is he doomed forever to the life and identity of Dayo? What the hell,’ Dr Parikh mumbled, and lifted his head that was buried in his prescription pad, to look at the wall clock. The second hand of the classy electronic clock steadily jerked its way ahead, even the minute hand moved with an intermittent jolt, but the hour hand was frozen, stark naked and still. Rigid as the time itself. The doctor could not help but smile at the odd semantics he was indulging in at this unearthly hour. The minute hand shuddered again, this time causing the five o’clock alarm to go off.

‘O my God! It’s five already.’

He got up at five o’clock every day. He struggled to remember the day when this unwritten rule of his life had been breached, even accidentally. Never did he need an alarm clock to wake up. But was ‘wake-up’ the right word to use today when he had not slept the whole night, not a wink? With the thought of sleep, the words of Hemraj, the Chaudhary Patel of his village, rumbled in his mind.

‘No … we are not thirsty … yes, not thirsty.’

‘Salu … the world dreams of going to the moon. And just look where these louts are stuck. Ridiculous!’

The doctor wrenched his mind away from the bog it was getting sucked into and heaved himself out of his comfortable chair. For a while, he kept keenly gazing at the pad, at the crisscrossing, intersecting lines, caste lines – creating barriers, defining separations, flying over and sneaking under one another. What a tangled mess it was! As tangled as….

He craned his neck, ran a glance over himself from bottom up and was startled. He had not changed out of his office clothes since last night. Walking up to the wash basin, he took out his toothbrush from the plastic basket nailed on the wall. He ran his thumb over its bristles that, it seemed, had hardened unusually overnight. He stretched out his hand for the toothpaste when his eyes caught sight of his image in the mirror. He leaned forward a bit to look more closely at himself, eye to eye with his mirror image. Several squiggly red lines, as if straight from the doodles he had drawn on his letterhead, had appeared on the sclera of his eyes. He felt as if they were on fire. A thin moist film oozed up and blurred his vision as he kept staring at himself without batting his eyelids.

‘Oh god, a night without sleeping for a second, my bad luck.’

Why this toothbrush then? The question cropped up in his mind and died down as quickly when he thought, ‘But the mouth has to be cleaned, anyway.’ He squeezed out a line of paste onto the bristles and began to stare pointedly at his face: round face with pink-hewed puffy cheeks; big round reddish eyes; aquiline, symmetrical nose; slim pinkish pair of lips and fair complexion. He screwed up his eyes and began to look clinically at his face as if in search of something that he had not noticed earlier or that had gone missing. He kept blinking for a while.

‘Hmm, nothing is amiss here. What’s wrong with this face? Then why this: the same old vulgarity after all these years?’ Shaking his head in disbelief, he moved away from the mirror, sat back in the chair and began to look mockingly at the refrigerator stationed on its left. A hazy flash in his head made him squirm uncomfortably. Getting up, he practically rushed to open the door to his room and came out into the lobby which was enclosed by a waist-high, parapet wall and a star-studded sky. Down below, in the verandah, burned an electric bulb. Standing on the second floor of the PG hostel holding the doorframe of room number forty with one hand was the most mundane thing to do, he thought. Nothing was ethereal about his existence at this moment except for the tenderly breaking dawn. He took a couple of steps forward, soaked in the beauty of the dissipating night and turned around. His eyes fell on the nameplate fixed next to the doorframe.

‘Dr D B Parikh’ Yes, Dr D B Parikh. Not an iota of doubt about it. The name stood out on its own. ‘Then?’ he wondered. He turned around in a fluster and stood holding the parapet wall. The verandah below, awash with the light of the bulb, glowed gently. At the far end of the verandah was a door that led out on the road. In a corner adjacent to it stood a water tap mounted on an iron pipe. The tap, though turned off, leaked a bit and drops of water fell hesitantly from its mouth at regular intervals. The doctor looked lost as he kept staring at the tap quite long, unusually long. Just then, a bumblebee buzzed in from nowhere and began to fly around the mouth of the tap, bringing his reverie to an end. He went into his room and slumped on the chair once again.

‘Parikh saheb! Why are the doors of your room open?’ The Brahmin cook of the hostel peeped in holding a tray, carrying tea and breakfast, in his hands. ‘You are still sitting with toothbrush in hand. Or is it that you have washed and are ready? Saheb, it’s half past five already.’ The garrulous cook’s mention of time startled the doctor.

‘Five thirty, My luck! Too late, isn’t it?’

The doctor looked blankly at the cook who nodded uncomprehendingly.

‘Oh, maharaj! It’s you. Where is that boy?’

‘One can’t bank on these tribal boys. Today they are here, god knows where tomorrow. But I am always there to look after you.’ The maharaj smiled obsequiously. The doctor smiled back, but it was a rather drab, half-hearted smile.

‘You got ready early today, ha? Going somewhere? You had some guests last night, didn’t you? They must have kept you awake until late.’

‘Yes, some guests had come visiting. I haven’t washed yet. Just that I couldn’t change into my sleeping clothes last night.’

‘Oh, that’s how it is. Well, where were the guests from?’

The question was pure poison. A streak of irritation rasped his voice as the doctor snapped, ‘Leave the tea and snacks on table. I’ll have it after I’m done with brushing.’

‘From their appearance, they looked like villagers. I saw them in the verandah below.’

A sharp pang lacerated the doctor’s heart as he heard the last sentence that, he felt, moved with the finesse of a lancet. He winced and felt blood shooting from his eyes. In a gruff voice, informed with fresh bitterness, he almost snarled, ‘From my village. Go now and close the door behind you.’

Taken aback by this unusual exasperation in the doctor’s voice, the maharaj quietly left. The doctor quickly finished with brushing, launched into loud gargles, as if to give vent to the screams smothered within him, and splashed water angrily all over his face, specifically at his eyes. Then, he sat down in the chair, holding his head and massaging his temples with his fingers. The uneven throbbing of the veins there seemed to keep pace with his heartbeats. His mind was in a whirl as he kept staring at the tea and snacks.

The words ‘From my village, my own village’ seemed to hammer disturbing home truths into his head. ‘This maharaj is also a Brahmin, he came all the way up, to my room, to serve me breakfast and those bloody crooks, bloody Ozhas, no better than oxen,’ he grumbled and lifted the teacup. The tea, untouched for long, had turned cold. He removed the gossamer wrinkled skin of tea with his finger and kept gazing at what looked like ice-cold, frozen tea. It had gradually taken on the deepest hue of the evening sky. Crimson red, blood red. He blinked several times in astonishment but the adamant red in front of his eyes persisted. Under his baffled gaze, a curious finger dipped into the cup. Stone-cold blood, utterly dark, congealed, frigid. Blood that had coagulated round an invisible wound. Frozen stiff, immobile. Why the hell does it not flow? He felt a maddening urge to hurl the cup. Oh, oh, what’s happening to me since yesterday? Suppressing his urge, he tightened his grip on the cup as everything around began to reel. Behind his closed eyes he reasoned, maybe because of the sleepless night.

No, that couldn’t be. He had spent many a night like this, reading, treating patients and so on. He gently opened his eyes and looked straight into the teacup. The tea quivered slightly and then began to undulate, wave after wave, and then whirled turbulently threatening to flood the room, the hospital and everything around. He put the lid of his palm onto the mouth of the cup, closed his eyes and saw himself standing at the doors of the surgical ward.

‘Hemrajbhai! Velo has gone to summon the doctor.’

‘Which doctor?’

‘There is one in the village. That Dayo, Bhala’s son.’

‘Which Bhala?’

‘That Miyor, the one who stays at the end of Miyor street? His son is a bigwig here.’

‘Oh, yes, yes. Don’t know how it slipped my mind.’

The doctor shuddered and tried to shoot up from his chair, but his body had gone languid to the point of numbness.

‘Dayo, Bhala’s son? I am Bhala’s Dayo. A doctor, of course. But still Bhala’s Dayo. The whole village knows me by that name. Little does it matter to them that I am a doctor.’ He mumbled and smiled bitterly. Gnashing his teeth, he thrashed his head violently about as if to save it from a behemoth about to step over him. His eyes were glued to the ceiling, his body was colder than ice.

‘I am Devendra Parikh. Bhalabhai’s Devendra. Everybody knows, respects that name. To them, I am Dr Parikh, even to that maharaj. And these bloody uncivilised, ignorant Chaudharis…’ A flurry of abuses rose to his mouth, but he clenched his jaw and stopped their flow.

‘What a bloody shame that I changed my surname from Parmar to Parikh. Bapa had not liked it a bit and rightly so.’

Some unacknowledged string in his heart had chosen to twang today. He wouldn’t have known the ordeal his father was made to undergo on this account but for his mother who had opened her heart to him once when he visited his village home.

‘Bhai, this change of name didn’t go down well with the village and your father had a lot to endure in that damned village head.’

‘Why? What happened?’

‘Your becoming Parikh from Parmar has made them resentful. And who can put a filter in the mouth of the village? One day your father ran into the village head right in the middle of market. And what happened then? He started off, “Hey Bhala, you have become a full-fledged, I hear.” Your father asked, “Why do you say so, sir?” “What else is left to say? Your son has become a doctor, right? And what’s his new surname? Parikh. Okay. Parikhsaheb? So, you people have turned Brahmin or Bania, have you? No more a Dhedh now, eh? Come over and sit with us in the village square sometime. I will spread out a special cot for you, sir.”’

The squirming shadow of his father, insulted right in the middle of the bustling chowk, lengthened and hung ominously over his mind. His face flushed with embarrassment. What inhumanity! How piteously the same village head, his brother Hemraj by his side, had pleaded with him standing at the door of his house with folded hands when his son was serious!

‘Doctor saheb, please save my Parathi. I don’t know what plagues him. But he has been going into convulsions. Where would I carry him at this unearthly hour? Please come over and see him.’

The vision of the village head’s entreaties and his pathetic, distraught face disappeared in a flash. Thanks to his treatment, Parathi had turned hale and hearty in a couple of days. The village head had admitted his mistake, then, with unusual candour.

‘Parikhsaheb, I had misbehaved with Bhalabhai. My mistake, I know what a gem of a man you are, how mature and expansive is your heart. Won’t you forgive me?’

The same Dayo!

At least, he realised his error, he had thought. The trace of repentance in his voice had absolved him of his sins, however reprehensible they might have appeared to his father and the community. He had also felt like giving the benefit of the doubt to the old fox, thinking he might not have insulted his father so much out of malice as out of mindless allegiance to tradition. A wry smile flickered over his face. The tea in the cup had turned the colour of a blood clot. How surreptitiously it shifted shades! Just as this blood did, furtive but calculated. Only yesterday, the boy was back, and he had instructed Dr Desai, ‘Doctor, this is my case. From my village. Take special care. It’s a road accident.’

‘Don’t worry, doctor. An urgent operation is required. Severe blood loss, we’ll have to go for transfusion and several bottles at that.’

‘We have arranged for two bottles of blood!’ a worried Hemraj butted in.

‘Not enough, just not enough!’

A deathly pallor swept over Hemraj’s face as he heard Dr Desai’s words.

‘No problem, Dr Desai. I will donate a bottle and some can be borrowed from the blood bank.’

‘You’ll give blood, saheb?’

‘Why not? You are my people, from my village.’

‘Very well, Doctor Parikh.’ The tears, streaming down Hemraj’s cheeks now mocked him for his naivete, his gullibility. Derisive laughter resounded all around him. Dayo’s blood is not repugnant to Hemraj’s son. Of course, not. How would something as life-sustaining as blood know caste apartheid? So Hemraj didn’t object to a Miyor’s blood saving the life of a Chaudhary. Tears welled up in his eyes that were burning with the fire of revenge. The lump in this throat, the congestion in his chest would make his heart go phut, he felt. Clenching his fists, he closed his eyes and broke out in profuse sweat all over. Agitated and dehydrated, he began to pace about in the room completely at a loss about how to diagnose, let alone, treat this complex case, this terminal disease. His throat went dry, so shuffling his way to the refrigerator, he started drinking water in large, loud swigs, straight from the water pot held over his mouth.

As he thirstily drank the water, his eyes fell on the glass on the top of refrigerator, standing there since last night, untouched. He froze and stood gaping at the apparition for a moment.

‘The same glass, with water from the same water pot that he had offered to Hemraj, the same Hemraj.’ He almost moaned.

‘Have some chilled water. You must be tired after all this running around. The operation has been successful. Nothing to worry now. He has been taken to the surgical ward and is conscious.’

‘All credit goes to you, Doctor saheb.’

‘Of what use is my doctory if I can’t come to the aid of my friends from my own village? What do you say Hemraj uncle?’

‘Very true, bhai. Cent percent true.’

‘It’s been seven to eight hours. Shall I ask the cook to prepare food for you.’

‘No, no … don’t feel like eating anything.’

‘Have this water then…’ he held out his hand.

‘No, we are not thirsty, yes, not thirsty.’ Awkward refusals burst out spontaneously. Hemraj and the duo accompanying him almost jumped up in unison, their identical anxieties perfectly in tune with their fumbling tongues.

Aghast at this unexpected encounter with reality that, of late, had only appeared very far back in time, the doctor’s stunned gaze kept licking the glass with its ghoulish tongue. How could their collective denial, apparently so spontaneous, be so pitch-perfect, so synchronous and so unanimous? It couldn’t have been unless it was rehearsed endlessly, planned with military astuteness and perfected for nothing less than centuries. The cold-bloodedness of the chorus began to scald him. Returning echoes of ‘not thirsty, not thirsty’ filled all directions as he placed the water pot back into the fridge, his eyes still glued to the glass. Tottering back to the chair on unsure, shuddering steps, he sat down with a thud and closed his eyes. The silhouettes of the threesome began to dance obscenely in front of him. A horrible dance of death to the jarring rhythm of ear-blasting scoffing. The huddle of silhouettes swam out of the room number forty into the lobby, down the stairs in front of his eyes. Reaching the verandah, their thirsty cat-eyes began to scurry around for the tap, poised like a mouse on the steel pipe. The plague-ridden mouse vomiting blood from its mouth. The lengthening shadows of the cats swooped down one after another on the mouse.

Loud swigs and deafening gulps reverberated in the deepest recesses of darkness.

The echoes grew louder and louder and ear-splitting waves of sound erupted from the veins throbbing in his head. Splashes of red and green appeared under his puffy, hooded eyes. He felt as if an unsterilised needle had been hurled into the central vessel of his heart and streams of cold blood were spraying out. Scared that his heart would collapse, the doctor rose and rushed out into the lobby, gasping and panting. Holding the parapet wall with both his hands to find balance, his parched, popping-out eyes settled on the tap that was still dripping – not water, not anymore. What he saw dripping there was chilled blood, congealed blobs of blood trickling straight from his heart. He whirled around in a daze and saw the letters of his surname on the nameplate dissolve.