ISSUE 35

The old man who has been my neighbour for the past three years had some visitors last week. I had just returned from school. My lunch-box was on the stairs beside the grill next to the veranda. Taking the lid off, I peeped in. The contents were still hot. I was unruffled by the grumpy red chillies in the dal and the fried potatoes, no longer bright. Once again, the dry fish chutney would have to save the day. I duly took an onion from the small basket and some red chillies, and opened the cabinet to reach the carefully wrapped pungent delicacy in a Horlicks jar. I decided to smoke it over the fire. Now, I only had to change my clothes.

It was then that I saw, through the unclean window pane, a woman with two men standing on the stairs outside the old man’s home. True I am not a local, but I could quickly tell from her clothes that she did not belong to these parts.

Most young men and women from the middle-class homes in the area, convent-educated breeds, had left the city. The only middle-class people with a good education visible were the government job types with a house, fixed deposits and two cars to their name. So, cramped into the parking space would be an old Maruti 800 and a more contemporary hatchback or sedan, preening in the morning sun. A finished product like her was rare. She was wearing a pair of white trousers and a grey kurta and was quite clearly accustomed to the luxuries of life.

*

When I moved into this area about three years ago, I had just been appointed postgraduate teacher in Mathematics in Delhi Public School, Guwahati, having spent all my life in Sambalpur. The only time I had ventured out was in school when I had been chosen for the Republic Day Parade in Delhi. That was in 1998, when a glowing girl from this very city who was in the same camp as I, had taught me about loving and losing. But, I digress.

So, the pay was good and enough for a bachelor to take up residence in a tier-3 kind of place. My colleagues informed me that most of the house-owners in this area of Nijanbaat were retired government employees of two types. The first and more influential category were those who had amassed fortunes disproportionate to their known sources of income. The other were middle-ranking government servants who had risen from clerical positions and had been careful with their money. They had either been too cautious, or unwilling to take bribes. Meticulous planning and restraint had made it possible for them to avoid the demeaning experience of looking for a place on rent after so many years of service. Such people, unlike Mr Roy, my neighbour in question, had kept guests at bay with Thin Arrowroot biscuits and half-hearted teas. NijerBari, they were absorbed in themselves, and one after another, these pensioners ended up with greying hair, diabetes and hypertension. I realised after moving in that quite a few were Bengali speaking Hindus. Mr Roy had, on one sunny Sunday morning last year, invited me to have lunch with him and enlightened me on the subject.

‘Vikash, don’t expect much. Only rice and mutton.’

‘Who will cook? You, Uncle?’

He grinned. ‘No, no. I don’t have that kind of confidence. Still, I remember how I had burnt the mutton one Sunday morning and the disappointment on my daughters’ faces. And … Maya, Maya … the girl…’

After lunch, we settled down to the match between Australia and India. I had hoped to become a regular on Sundays at his dining table. But he was quite canny that way.

Full of bonhomie post lunch, he proudly informed me how he had devised a test to sift the honest from the dishonest. For instance, if a certain Mr Dey was constructing a house, he would ask him, ‘How is the construction going Mr Dey?’

‘Very slow. Running short of money. Building materials have become so expensive.’

‘How deep is the foundation?’

‘Four storeys. Plus the ground.’

‘Now you know, it is common practice among these employed thieves to whine about money. Especially in front of a man like me. Can you believe the ambition of his future plans? Five storeys and he was only an under-secretary. His father was a refugee, so it isn’t as if he inherited wealth. Most of them are sons and daughters of refugees. Our family has been here for almost a century now.’

It was clear that Mr Roy believed that any one who made plans for their future well-being in material terms had either had an easy life or compromised their morals. My father, when I told him about this, coolly replied that the likes of Mr Roy had never taken a risk in their lives. The most he would have done was probably buy a lottery ticket. I had become pretty used, by now, to my father’s insights. He was right. Mr Roy did tell me that the only luxury he had ever allowed himself was a weekly purchase of lottery tickets. He had won Rs 100 once in 1990 and promptly bought four chicken rolls for rupees sixty-four.

In the old man’s vocabulary, ‘practical’ was a word on to which he projected the bitterness of his failures. Laced with sarcasm, it allowed him to make sense of the world and its inhabitants by dividing them into two broad sections: practical and foolish. A man like him refused to buy a geyser, a washing machine, a water purifier, an AC or even a new mixer grinder saying that not only was there no one to look after this equipment but what if he had to move again? Already he had moved twice since his retirement.

‘I can’t carry all this stuff on my head.’

‘You don’t have to, Baba.’

‘Will you carry it then? In any case you come only once a year!’

This anxiety about having to leave had pretty much immobilised Mr Dipankar Roy. In fact, every time he came close to buying a house, he got cold feet. Or so I guessed from what he said. He had put his savings in NSCs, Life Insurance and a recent SIP investment which brought in regular returns that his daughter had forced him to make; he hadn’t made any provision for medical requirements. That evening, after I had left him dozing on the sofa, I realised how we try to immunise ourselves against wounds inflicted by history by weaving stories of resolve and strength inherited from our ancestors.

‘My father had quit his railway job on Gandhi’s call. His colleague had slept on a bed of currency notes.’ So, the son inoculated himself against indignities suffered by his own heroic refusal to compromise on his principles.

*

A thing as simple as his daughter’s decision to study in Delhi had unnerved him. That was ten years ago. ‘Life abhors security.’ It was Vivekananda or the Paramahansa who had said that. He remembered his daughter reading that line out to him to give him courage.

There are good colleges in Guwahati.

Will you guarantee I will get a job without paying money?

Do you think everyone pays money?

Maybe not. Let me not be just another child of melancholy, unknown to fortune and fame in Guwahati all my life.

Patience – and things will fall in place. Just work hard and pray to Ramakrishna.

I have just quoted him. You want me to be stuck? All my friends left three years back.

Their circumstances are not like yours. Ok go. Only I might not be there when you return.

If it is to happen, it will Baba. Dont we know that?

Was this cold ruthless girl his daughter? In the end nothing could dissuade her and she left. He had put her in a train with his nephew as an escort. The North East Express had left from Platform Number 5. So many years and he still hadn’t forgotten the twist of fear in his heart as the train’s whistle had sounded.

So, lived Mr Roy, eating and sleeping on time, swinging between love and suspicion for his servants, love and bitterness towards his sons-in-law who had taken his place in his daughters’ lives, engaging in very little conversation and growing old. In a rented house with four rooms and without a rent agreement he lived, grudgingly calling a mechanic to fix his television, grudgingly paying his phone bills on time, grudgingly recalling the PIN at the ATM and blaming providence for this incessant engagement with the world.

Mr Roy had already been dreading the day when the Aadhaar Card procedure would take off in Assam. The voter’s list was safely done last year. And now this! The NRC … National Register of Citizens. He read further. Legacy data was a mandatory requirement. A passport would also do. He read on. The only document he had was the Intermediate marksheet. What if they asked for more? His parents hadn’t thought of getting a birth certificate and the legacy data would be in Lumding. Was he breaking out in sweat? Who would go to Lumding now? Again, he would have to run after someone for help.

Today, sitting on the chair in the veranda he felt the threat all over again. Load shedding of the soul! The future is a dark place and Mr Roy had always disliked looking for candles and matchboxes. He never found them where he kept them. The legacy data wasn’t in the locker. Yet he kept looking for it, just in case. After an hour’s impassioned search when he felt his blood pressure rising, he put the papers back. He would have to call his nephew, Dilu’s son. He hadn’t called them in a year. Last year Dilu had died in his sleep leaving behind five sons and a wife. That was when he had last spoken to them. ‘I can’t take the strain of the journey. Sending money through Moni.’

*

Mr Roy never called anyone except his daughters and Maya. The latter had become the most important person in his life. She cooked, cleaned and reminded him of his medicines. When his feet appeared swollen, she massaged them. Last year after his heart surgery, she was the only person he would trust to give him a bath. His daughters were not allowed to meddle with his things. Mr Roy would wait eagerly for Maya to come. She would arrive two to three hours after the appointed time and walk into the house like she owned it. Indeed, for the past ten years since his daughters left it was as if they had made a home together. His daughters, visiting him for the surgery watched with envy and relief.

She is like a daughter to him now

Yes, yes.

Look at how relaxed he is. He likes someone to be in charge and save him the trouble.

I wonder if he smells the alcohol on her. Can’t stand close to her these days.

Yes. Maya is addicted now. The driver believes she drinks every night.

She does come very late. Who will give him breakfast when we leave? Baba knows she drinks. This dependence has created a strange kind of love. He is quite sharp with her when she is around but, in her absence, he forgives everything. Accuses her of cooking more food than is required and taking it home for her sons. Scolds her for coming late and keeping her phone switched off. I think its her cooking that melts his heart. Gives him the only sense of well-being. It is clear isn’t it? When he goes to your place, he is warm and happy because the food is hospitable. When he’s at my place, he finds fault with the maid and is unhappy with the comfort … I tell you it’s food.

He no longer goes to the market alone. Remember how much he used to love to get the fish and the meat, vegetables and oily snacks. She goes with him now. When his knees give way, she shops like he would in his better days.

Didi, we both know that is not the real reason. It is the NRC. Dilu Kaku’s son may have procured the legacy data from Lumding but it is she who has gone with him to the NRC office to submit his citizenship papers. All the photocopying, the checking of phone messages, the multiple visits. You know how he refuses to go anywhere before lunch. His Assamese is still broken. Maya is able to make enquiries with the confidence of a local. I still remember how he called me and asked me to read the Assamese newspapers online.

Don’t think it doesn’t matter because you don’t live here anymore.

Two years back she did all his paperwork for the voter’s list. Now it’s the NRC.

We are also locals.

But we are from Lumding…

Can we disown that our great-grandfather lived in Sylhet? The Referendum sealed it. I had always thought referendum was a Sylheti word. REFERENDUM … sufficiently full-mouthed and goes well with those soggy, guttural sounds, doesn’t it? Baba was ten in ’47. It finished our grandfather. We don’t even know the old man’s name. He must have seen the pain of knowing that you can continue to live in a place that you love only by giving up your claim to the land of your ancestors. You and I are not traumatised by that loss. But it set us back didn’t it? Dadu left some land but it was of no real use except for your wedding expenses. Baba had no house or money to his name. It was like being born again and thrown into the ring too early. Till today he doesn’t have a house in his name.

He sometimes says he is a destitute. Though destitutes don’t live on a 12,000 per month four-room rented house. Destitutes don’t keep maids!

He feels he can’t afford to slip. It’s the guilt. It’s as if you have no right to be here. That sly Jethamoshai  in ‘Shadow Lines’ got it right. The moment you leave your roots, you are a wandering soul. In this case, where are the roots, really?

There you are … getting sentimental. He has been a State Government employee and Dadu was in the Railways. 100 years is not enough? Don’t keep saying roots, roots. Roots are where we grow them.

For you and me, yes. We don’t feel it anymore. For his generation, still bound by the memories of communal ties, it isn’t so easy.

How many times has he backed out of buying a house? It can’t only be the money!

Don’t you see he is scared? One part of him says that he needs to live in his own house to be a master. Another part says that what has happened once may happen again. Did you see the newspapers? The djinn is coming out of the bottles. The falconer will soon  be hunting his own falcons.

Maya is necessary.

Indispensable.

She has too much power over him.

He needs to see that power around him. It keeps him sane. Not easy being a diabetic, hypertensive eighty-year-old with arthritis and an NRC final list to worry about.

We know his citizenship is safe whichever year is applied.

We know. But for him, imagine reading everyday in the papers that people you know are under the scanner. Alone in the mornings, the sink full of last night’s utensils, the dustbin stinking, Maya’s phone switched off … enough to scorch a hole into your faith. Nights become long. What if by some error the name goes missing?

*

To their credit, the daughters did try to convince their father to move in with them. But he wouldn’t move till the final draft of the NRC was out. Already there were stories of relatives and friends, Bengalis, Assamese and Bodos, Hindus and Muslims out of the list. Then there were rumours: bona fide citizens who found their names missing in the first draft. Illegal immigrants who were sitting pretty. Then there were those that came between 1951 and 25th March 1971. Medusa was laughing. One columnist yelled: ‘Assam sitting on a time bomb’.

The first draft had Mr Roy’s name on it. But he still couldn’t sleep well.

Maya’s eyes shone with a pitiful mirth as she said, ‘Khura has all the papers but look at him! In the past year he has changed so much. Every time we go to the office, he asks the agents if everything is fine. They reassure him but he is never happy. I told him we should get mutton and celebrate when his name came in the first draft. Do you know, Baideu, what he said? “Wait, wait. Let the final one come out. Otherwise they will send me off. You will be free. Khura will be gone.”  He was born here. Why is he so nervous? He says his father came here in 1913. And the year after there was a Great War.

*

The day the final list was released, I was a bystander as my neighbours flocked around wondering if their names would be intact this time as well. A collective nervousness brought them together. Mr Roy called his daughter and asked her to check online for his name. Then he quietly went inside. I had taken the day off. All week we had been inundated with assessment work and the kitchen was a mess. When my mother called, I had been washing my underwear. They had been lying in the little bucket. Every morning I would resolve to wash them, then postpone the task for the evening. I think it was the cooking that was getting on my nerves. I started missing home badly. After years of living on my own I have realised that fussy eaters like me can only be chastened by a few years of having to fend for ourselves. I had already started envying men with wives.

Mr Roy didn’t come out to the veranda till evening. I had heard Maya telling the houseowner how worried he was about the NRC. It had become a joke in the building. No one had the cheek to pull his leg though. His caustic replies were pretty well known.

Watching him come out to the veranda, I felt a stab of pain. His face appeared very dark. Or was it the advancing twilight that gave me such an impression? The birds had taken flight. His gaze settled on the houses across the wall. What was he thinking? He kept staring for what seemed an unceasing length of time and sat down on his wooden chair. The chair had been freshly painted by his grandson on his last vacation. I thought that made him sit on it more gingerly and carefully than he used to. I listened for Maya who usually came in at 5 in the evening, wondering whether to go to him and ask if he needed anything. But the whole scene made me nauseous. The darkening sky made me seek the warmth of the house. A familiar switching on of the lights, a smoothening of the bedcovers and prospect of a cup of Darjeeling tea made me realise that I had been in the building for three years and I never invited the old man, my closest neighbour, for a cup of tea. It was plain that I had avoided talking to him afraid of the strong smell of loneliness that threatened to enter through the open windows. I hurriedly shut those and turned on the television.

*

That was three days ago. Whether it was my fear of his vulnerability or the overwhelming nausea brought on by the sinking sun that evening, I hadn’t bothered to step into his house to enquire if he was alright. So, the conference on the steps today made me curious. I gathered courage to step out and walked towards the three of them. ‘What is the matter, madam? Is Khura fine?’

She hesitated. The two men turned towards me ‘You are?’

‘His neighbour.’

‘Well, I am his son-in-law and this is his nephew. She is his daughter, my wife.’ There was a stiff silence and some tense glances. ‘He fell in the bathroom three days back. The maid, Maya, was away.’

‘He somehow managed to get up and call us. There is a wound on his head and a hairline fracture on his shoulder.’

‘When did this happen?’

‘Just after dinner.’

Hesitantly, I ventured, since that was the first thought that came to my mind, ‘What about the NRC?’

The daughter looked at me, this time with thinly disguised curiosity. I saw that her eyes were not as untouched by cares, as I had assumed. ‘His name is on the list.’

‘When did he get to know about it?’

‘Yesterday. We weren’t able to check before that. The accident was so sudden.’

Seized suddenly with compassion for his daughter, I enquired. ‘Where is Maya? I haven’t seen her.’

‘It appears her name is missing from the NRC and she has to go to her village now.’

‘Where is she from?’

‘Dima Hasao. Though she has lived in Guwahati all her life.’

The husband clarified, ‘Maya is a Hajong.’

They told me that the old man was sleeping. He was still reluctant to leave this house, telling his daughter that with Maya and a night nurse he would manage.
Little did he know that Maya couldn’t report for work. This time it wasn’t the pork and rice beer or the Dionysian rituals she was rumoured to be attending. The question was how to tell the old man why Maya was missing when he needed her. He had apparently been pretty restless the night before, repeatedly telling his daughter to call her, delirious one moment, angry the other.

Give a warning. Tell her Khura will not pay her last month’s salary if she doesn’t show up. Call her now

Okay, Baba.

She looked at the clock, chipped on one side.

Baba, let us try to sleep now.