We that are young Page 12

  —Where is she? he says. After that night, where did she go?

  —She told me I should leave her alone. She didn’t think twice about what she was leaving me to reckon with. That’s my fault, no? Her attitude.

  —She must be traceable, he says. If you really want her to get back here.

  —Of course I do. But then, there’s the rest.

  —What do you mean?

  —Don’t you want to know what we won?

  He waits.

  From a pocket she pulls an envelope, Company headed. The same creamy grain as the ones Jeet used to send him so many years ago. Gargi hands it to him. Unfans the letter. The script is handwritten in dark blue ink, wide looping rounds and squirls. Jivan has to squint through the cinema’s backlit glow to read it.

  LETTER OF INTENT (POSTDATED)—

  I, Chairman of The Devraj Group

  (holding company of The Devraj Company)

  Hearby divide my 60 per cent holding

  Between my two sons-in-law and my three daughters

  And divest of all interest in subsidiaries for which I am also Chair

  For Surendra, in lieu my eldest daughter, Shares

  of Materials, listed overleaf.

  Transport – going forward.

  From my private holdings: the Farm. With the expectation of due care to my

  person, the 100 Programme and said property—

  In perpetuity.

  In tender name of my future generations.

  For such is my stage of life.

  Yeh hai:

  Mann ki baat.

  Bapuji.

  Jivan turns over the paper. More dark blue scrawl; he cannot make sense of it. Gargi takes it from him.

  — Materials listed: bricks and steel, she reads. The car production. All the bits I like least, all that need the most work.

  —What about Bubu and Radha?

  —Some of Services: the malls. Some of Engineering. The rest of Consumer Products. As if Radha gives a shit about bathrooms.

  She holds up her hands, counts down her fingers:

  —And for Sita, twenty percent of the Devraj Group. From the subsidiaries, Directorships of Services, which includes the deeds for most of the hotels. From Consumer Products, the best parts – i.e, the shawls. And from Materials (and now she takes a breath), Bapuji wanted Sita, my baby sister, to have the Concrete plants. My plants. In her own name.

  Voice low, she tells Jivan that Bapuji has promised to divide Sita’s share between Surendra and Bubu, but has not told them the lines he will draw. She says they will finish with thirty percent each of The Devraj Group, with Ranjit still holding twelve percent (Jivan thought he had some, but never knew how much). The final twenty-eight percent is split. Half ringfenced in performance related shares for A–E level employees, the other half held by private individuals who invested way back in the beginning, when Bapuji was raising the capital for his first batch plant. Crorepatis all.

  —Between us, Gargi says. I’m having the concrete, whatever happens. And Radha is the shawls. If Sita doesn’t come home, she’ll officially forfeit every once and future brick and thread.

  Jivan looks at the screen. The three girls framed by red curtains, in the heart of their family home.

  —Maybe it’s fairer this way, he says. A slice for each of you… but honestly I can’t see Radha running a huge company. With Bubu.

  —My Dad isn’t doing it to be fair, Gargi says. Her voice cracks again. Fear, sorrow, Jivan cannot tell.

  —He’s doing it so we can’t ever hold a match to him.

  —Candle, Jivan says, gently.

  —Gargi Madam, Uppal says.

  —So much for, Gargi, Queen of all you see, Jivan says.

  She sighs.

  —Will you settle for, Queen of half you see? Bubu and I have agreed. I’m going to take the lead on things for now. Business as usual, till after the Kashmir opening.

  —Gargi Madam, Uppal says again.

  —Ask Ranjit Uncle if you don’t believe me. I’m surprised you haven’t heard it all from him already.

  —He hasn’t said a word. I promise. Hope to die, Jivan says.

  She shifts away.

  —My Dad, behaving as if he’s on a permanent holiday, won’t speak, except to berate me. I am 33-years-old. The Company, my dreams – Surendra doesn’t know the first thing about it, nor does he care.

  Her hands, clasping and unclasping, now clutch Jivan’s arm. Behind them, he hears a small sound: Uppal getting up, slipping out of the room.

  —Jivan, Gargi says. I am going to take legal counsel. Sita will come home. Anyway, it’s more complex than this. Constructed for confusion, to hide and keep safe. What if Bubu decided to build Company malls without Company concrete? It doesn’t make sense. The Kashmir hotel was meant to go to Sita. That’s one thing, but Bapuji marked the Delhi townhouse to Radha and Bubu. That was my maternal grandfather’s town palace. It is worth at least as much as this Farm, if not more. By crores.

  —Is that so? Jivan says.

  Gargi slumps in her seat.

  —After all, blood matters. It’s on me.

  She looks up at Jivan, full in the face. Her eyes glitter.

  —Jivan?

  —Yes, Gargi Madam?

  —Don’t. Please. We cannot let a soul outside know what is going on. Not a whisper, not a single sound. Until I can fix it. Or it is done.

  All these days of shopping, eating, talking, learning, shooting. The hours of smiling chat and the end of Slumdog on repeat. Not Radha or Bubu or Ranjit has told him any of this. Not even Punj. All this time they’ve let him tourist around, believing this was just about Sita.

  It’s not about her. It’s about money.

  —OK, he says. Soft, so she might only catch a light sense of hurt, hear no hint of his rage.

  —I could not tell you until now, she says. I had to wait. And see.

  On the screen, the pause times out. They are left in the half dark, staring at each other, faces cast against a storm of digital snow.

  Jivan escorts his father back to the bungalow. As with each night since the party, he sits with Ranjit on the porch. Nursing drinks, spearing cocktail olives with toothpicks, spitting the stones into the grass. As with each night, he watches Ranjit perform his rituals, walking around the square in front of the bungalow, seven times forwards, seven times backwards to ward off the evil eye, reading his online horoscope, checking Ambika Gupta for his lucky numbers on his phone.

  He listens as Ranjit starts blubbing after Sita, after Kritik, and finally, for Jeet. He comforts his father, promising that whatever trouble Jeet is in, he, Jivan will not allow the family name to be soiled. With this new word in his mouth, he also declares that Jeet has wounded him deeply, with his disappearance, his lying, his ways.

  Unhearing, downing whisky after beer, Ranjit blames not Jeet, but the blood red moon that rose over India for a hundred minutes in June.

  —An eclipse so long and so deep, Jivan Beta, that it was talked about across the world as a record, of course it was visible here.

  Ranjit produces his iPad. He uses it to compare maps of the country against star charts from his astrologers in Amritsar. Jivan learns that on June 15, two weeks before he came home, the red moon rose. The sun, the earth, the moon aligned straight, exactly straight, as should not be.

  —When our shadow eclipses the heavens, the body cannot but be harmed, Ranjit says. We fasted here; all stayed inside except of course Bubu, naughty boy. The Parliament closed and Sonia Gandhiji and her Ministers continued to work from home; even Gargi did this thing. The moon’s face turned red with shame; no wonder Gargi after all these years of marriage is still not yet a mother.

  —Now the monsoon is late, strikes are choking us, the tax inspectors are baying for our records and the Company Srinagar hotel, Bapuji’s dream, is running too high over cost.

  Jivan learns that the eclipse before this was ten years ago, the week that Radha got married. But it could not be seen
in India – or they never would have taken that date. After the wedding, the astrologer himself was in a car accident. He was left unable to use his arms. The eclipse before that was in ’71. And then, for the love of God, Ranjit starts on the subject of war and atrocities and the looting of land and the repeated fracturing of humare apne India to give birth to Bangladesh. So much land lost, so much potential for growth cut short. For what?

  —Cloth mills, textiles, cheap labour. This we benefitted from. But Jivan, Ranjit warns. When the shadow of the chandra graham descends gently, we are all inside it. And now, the worst, the darkness that came from that moment, the longest eclipse we have known, what happens? People disappear. When earth’s triumphant shadow thinks it can cross the moon, no wonder that the world has gone fruit salad. This Gargi with her women’s projects, what does she really know of business? Oh, for the star charts that were prepared when she was a babe!

  He jabs his stick like a snooker cue, trying to pocket all the problems away.

  —But these charts are in storage in the Napurthala Palace, where Gargi was born. Only those charts, Ranjit says, could possibly explain what has transpired with no transparency here.

  Jivan himself was made under Rahu and Ketu, a two-headed demon who can swallow the sun and whose body can swallow the moon. His chart, stored somewhere in Nizamuddin, Ranjit thinks, shows he was born under the shadow planet. The stain of his conception, the astrologers had said, cast his skin darker than his brother’s, though his mother was fair.

  So now what should Jivan do?

  His father orders him to track all incoming video, to use his name and call in favours with police he does not know, to marshal the spies, to look for Sita and Jeet – which he of course promises to (but doesn’t). His brain feels smoked by cigarillos, he rolls his eyes then reminds himself who he is becoming and how fast. He remembers Gargi’s tears, and agrees that the red moon in June is a sign of chaos coming soon, a phrase, he thinks, that Barun J. Bharat would envy. He agrees that they must beware, and he promises on Ma’s ashes, because seriously, that is what Ranjit asks of him with his eyes; that he, Jivan will work to make it all right.

  After all of this, when the goddamn burning day is done, Jivan stands out on his porch while the whole Farm is asleep. He has a smoke of his own, and a last Company beer. The night is a bowl of planets, satellites tipped up, pouring to earth. He takes position, ready for his inaugural address.

  —Jai ho, he whistles. OK, Rahu and Ketu: it’s just you, me, us. I have a hunger for the moon and the sun. I’m going to eat it all.

  §

  I WAS GIVEN THE NAME ‘Devraj Bapuji’ the day I shot my first gun. It was ten o’clock in the morning, and I was nine-years-old. My target was a tilewala who decorated my Palace at Napurthala. He refused to complete the mosaic, he demanded his payment. It was in the spring of 1947, I have not forgotten that time. The tilewala was a dissenter. I missed my shot. Just. Went limping to Pakistan. The other. Side of the line is. Remembering?

  Now the evening is approaching, and after that the night will freeze us. If I had matches, I could spark the fire – we had one before, started by that young manservant before he fell down the hole. It has gone out now and no one has come to see to it. And I am hungry, I wish someone would bring me something to eat. It must be almost six o’clock. I like to have my dinner at this hour. Starting with a teaspoon of turmeric, dissolved in hot water. My doctor says that this will allow me to live until I am 120-years-old at least.

  Sita always found this funny. She asked me what I thought I was going to do if I lived that long – go to the moon? She said that turmeric was an overrated plant. She said that its overharvesting was contributing to the falling earth, the rising sea levels.

  I wanted to prove her wrong. I took her on a trip with me to celebrate my seventy-fifth birthday. I asked her where she wanted to go, and she said the Sunderbans, in the tiger infested mangrove forests and mudflats of west Bengal. We took much security, for pirates operate there. I told her we would eat nothing that did not contain haldi, then no mosquito would bite or plague us, we would not get upset by the food. I was right – although our tongues turned orange, we did not get sick. I showed her that we are not sinking, by putting pressure on a surface that will hold.

  Still, she refused to wave, or take part in the press shots. She spent all of her time collecting samples of weeds, and telling me off with her eyes for my clothes, my shoes, the amount of kit and the number of media and crew. And that I brought Tipu my tiger cub along for the ride. Why not? I thought the beast would like to see its origins and natural habitat. When we returned to Delhi, Sita didn’t speak to me for days as she worked on the tiny plant samples she brought back. And who financed for that trip?

  —Do you know that this particular plant is unique to our Indian ecosystem? she asked me. She stated these opinions from time to time. I indulged her earnest assertions, while she pressed my feet. Then she traced a shape in the dust: bulbous leaves; spiked tongues, drooping petals.

  —This plant, she said, is perfectly balanced to survive both flood and drought. Its roots grow part on soil and part on water. Not marsh. Just exactly divided, a genetic mix of male and female in one. Or, a child with one Indian parent and one other. Isn’t it beautiful? It’s hardy too. Even though the world is heating from the core, upsetting its doshas and the balance of its food, it adapts with such passion for survival. And these flowers bloom emerald green, sapphire blue and pure white. All the peacock colours. Its name is Githalonius Androgynata. Meeraka, in Sanskrit.

  —So what? I asked. Can you eat it?

  She smiled her mother’s smile. She told me that the little plant holds the secrets to eternal life. Then she blew on the dust, and the drawing was gone. She looked sad, she said something romantic, like the earth is getting too old, too tired to fight.

  —Look, I said. Look up! I went to her and fell on my knees and put my head in her lap, pressing into her. I turned onto my back and put my hand to her mouth. Through the broken roof, pockmarked with bullets and stars, we watched flocks of birds go racing across the sky. I could feel the pulse in her thighs as she inhaled, exhaled. Sita was always convinced the world was ending, breath by human breath.

  Can you sing? Sita is full of songs. So many songs. I cannot make her focus on my hands, though she knows I want her to. A line of red breasted sparrows is perched on the beams: tiny bodies and inquisitive eyes. Still they come to rest here, where there should be a roof and a ceiling fan. There are other birds. I know their names. Black Throated Accenture. European Bee Eater. The staring, long tailed Eurasian Cuckoo. The Lesser Cuckoo, hides behind. They come and perch in the beams. And if I should see a Kashmiri Flycatcher, that will be the day. They chittered for joy and trilled in the sunset. I along with them. For what else could I do? Shoot them?

  II

  Gargi

  i

  She is glad to get out, though it is already so hot that the air has turned liquid and the earth seems to waver, as if the world cannot decide what to be.

  She is Gargi Devraj Grover, granddaughter, daughter, wife, sister. She is Gargi Devraj Grover, Acting Chairman of the Devraj Company, custodian of the key to her father’s office. A polygonal space on the eighteenth floor of a gleaming obsidian shard-like building, a space to which she, this bright, early morning, is going, alone, and for the first time, with the key in her hand. She is custodian – the word fits – for though Company Headquarters was built in the 1970s, the key is satisfyingly long, heavy, ornate; it might have fallen straight out of one of the classics Gargi read as a girl. David Copperfield. Vanity Fair. Under the covers with a torch at night, in the morning when she should have been going for a bath, she stole time for herself, disguised by the sound of water splashing from the nalka onto the tiles. Sitting on the pot, she would read; her smell – a slight tang from between her legs, the overripe sweetness of her sweat – rising around her while she put off the shame of touching her body to clean it, of allowing her dirtine
ss to wash down the drain to the street, spewing into the poor, stinking Yamuna, mixing with the dirt of millions. Back then, she had wanted to be the heroine of those books, what pretty names they had, evoking their bodies so fresh and clean. Dora. Amelia. Like flowers, she had thought – and asked her grandmother and sisters to only call her Rosa – since Barnaby Rudge was her favourite book, once.

  She reflects on that time as she stands on the steps of the Farmhouse, conscious of what she is leaving inside, alive to the early morning rush hour of sparrows chittering above her. Her eye falls on the sleepy gardener at the far end of the lawn. He is wheeling a barrow to pick up – what is he picking up? She cannot tell – in any case, as she waits for Satwant, her driver to bring around the car – he is late, he is new, it is not his fault – she thinks about those heroines of her girlhood books, the straight lines of their lives from birth, through school, to some stumble of fate and finally fortune in finding love and marriage. Only Rosa did not have that – her story remained unfinished – and this mystery suited Gargi, for although her reading had given her, as a girl, a trust in the turning of pages, the sense that someone – possibly Nanu – might be writing her story, too, with a sure hand towards the promised end – she had never been sure she wanted that end at all.

  As Gargi’s birthdays had come around each year, as her desires had swirled inside her – simple things, like wearing jeans, leading her school debate team, winning her father’s set tasks – her body grew soft, and she moved through crowds with eyes downcast, smiling in a way that Nanu approved of. Around her the talk was always of love-marriage-children, the excited, pre-wedding – how many do you want? – became, after Surendra – are you eating right, are you pleasing him, are you trying every month? – then – something is wrong. Here is the doctor – and finally – you should see the Ayurved, herbal remedies are best. Gargi had listened, nodding, answering; her thoughts escape artists she did not control. The memorising of ratios – water: gravel: sand, for the different kinds of concrete the Company makes. The nurturing of her cacti: how to make them bloom. As she grew, she retreated into her plans for a free-shoe scheme, at X–Z staff level, Company wide. For a crèche for the women of P–Z levels (in the hotels, offices, the cloth factories,) caste-no-bar. And from B–Z a women’s management training programme inclusive of a college bursary, again, caste-no-bar. How to get this done despite Bapuji’s echoing dictates – the natural order of the world sustains itself – workers hungry in body in mind do a better job overall – the smell of stagnation is a full belly of food – was the problem that vexed her most. How to get this done, through her puberty and into her marriage, the cyclical weeks of the month when Nanu inspected her bed sheets? Her clothes, her bras, her panties, each size change mulled over and measured. Ayurvedic remedies offered, bitterly taken. Every pimple on her face considered a sign. Years pass, duty undone, never, never, no.