Run and Hide Read online

  Siva turned out to be overly fond of the ritual he had conceived; and our ordeal continued in his room for a few more nights. I came to know well the poster of Cindy Crawford, how the drawing pins holding it in place had grown rusty, and how its edges curled inwards morosely, revealing the abraded plaster of the wall. I came to recognise Siva’s handkerchiefs, all daintily lace-edged. I can recall today the smell of cheap rum, and the sight of a rusty electric hotplate with naked wires and a plastic tea-strainer languishing in a dented saucepan in one corner; and I could not forget for a long time the ant that once kept scurrying about my knees before Virendra, quietly hectic behind me, mashed it into the floor and flicked the corpse off his fingers.

  * * *

  The skin on my knees and elbows broke; my eyes stung with cigarette smoke and lack of sleep; and for weeks afterwards my buttocks kept clenching and unclenching at their memory of Virendra’s tongue. Aseem complained that his penis was sore for weeks afterwards, and that his foreskin bled.

  Much more damage was inflicted on Virendra’s frail body.

  Occasionally, I heard stifled sobs on the other side of the room. And I once heard Aseem say, referring to Siva, ‘What a rakshas.’ Any expressions of fellow feeling or sympathy would have been superfluous, and none ever passed between us.

  This would shock you, but then nothing in our lives had made us expect kindness from strangers. In Aseem’s novel, the atrocity inflicted on Dalit students catalyses their radical political consciousness. In reality, none of us wished to or could break out of our assigned positions in the pecking order.

  After all, those in Virendra’s caste cluster had their own untouchables, people to terrorise and quell. In a year’s time, we would have the opportunity to sit where Siva and his friends had sat, supervising the abasement of a new batch of freshers.

  And then we knew that what awaited us in the future, if we remained imperturbable while both suffering and inflicting atrocity, was membership of the most superior caste: that of people who never have to worry about money.

  Our habits of self-preservation had been forged early in our childhood, soon after starting the long preparation for IIT. We knew that we had no choice but to conserve our efforts; remain indifferent to all personal suffering and dishonour until at least the summit of security seemed within reach; and we knew, too, that four years at IIT would be the most gruelling part of this ascent.

  Still, for months after that first night – long after Siva had ceased to call us to his room and began to appear less a demon than a Computer Science student of genius and an extravagantly generous figure, free with his notes to all and sundry, and the blunt features on his large round head welded into one impression of solidity and warmth – I would open the door to my room, half-anticipating the sight of Virendra’s thin body dangling limply from the ceiling fan.

  Suicides were common at the engineering and medical college. Virendra proved to be among those for whom humiliation was an expensive luxury. Opening the door to his putative corpse, I would mostly find him at his desk, bent over his Manufacturing Process homework, GRE practice tests or a copy of Competition Success Review, underneath the garlanded portrait of open-chested Hanuman on the wall.

  His face seemed tighter, even obstinate, as though the weight of his impersonal will to succeed had settled even deeper into it.

  He had attended coaching classes for the IIT entrance exams for much longer than any of us. Having barely scraped through, he would continue to struggle to raise his grade point average each term; and he held his pen in a clenched fist and drilled it into paper as though it was a weapon in a war with no mercy for the loser, where failure meant expulsion to his home: the room in the basti where young pigs and mangy dogs nuzzle mounds of trash, and bony black sheep rub themselves against a rusty water pump.

  It was with a resolute bearing that he sat cross-legged on the floor, whisking a brush over his shoes, rubbed coconut oil in his scalp, holding in one hand his diamond-shaped mirror (which cracked after a few months, cleaving his head into uneven halves), or scrubbed his torso with Lifebuoy soap in the shower; it was with the agonizing intentness of someone teetering on the edge of non-comprehension that he took notes in one class after another, and read, lying on his side, the Manorama Yearbook, while intermittently rubbing his chilblains in that damp room.

  Indifferent to the small joys of most students – rock bands, carrom and ping-pong contests, debating and quiz competitions, girl-watching at SPIC MACAY concerts and at the Priya cinema – he was diverted only by the old copy of Playboy featuring Kim Basinger on the cover that, troubled by bedbugs one evening, he found Aseem had concealed under his mattress.

  Two

  A year passed. The hostel filled up in the new semester, first with freshers looking disquieted by the initial fruits of their toil, and then with the sounds of their initiation: howls of exaggerated abuse, choruses of self-mockery and shrieks of hilarity and pain.

  Virendra and Aseem had been allotted different rooms, but we were all in the same wing; and one day, passing Virendra’s, and that familiar whiff of coconut oil, I saw a tottering pyramid of naked young men. Virendra in his Sandoz baniyan sprawled on his bed, underneath the print of Hanuman, hands clasped behind his neck and twiddling his toes.

  In all those months, I had never seen Virendra smile, and was now struck by the kind of abandon with which he expressed mirth. He threw his head back while the tips of his glossy black shoes peeped out from under his bed; and he cackled and giggled at every wobble of bare flesh.

  When the lumbering stack of acrobats collapsed in a melee of arms and legs, a surge of glee seemed to choke his throat; holding his neck, he appeared to be gagging.

  Later that afternoon I saw Virendra walk down the corridor, his eyes still glazed from the effort of studying, with Playboy, Kim Basinger rolled up on the inside. I was on my way back from the toilet, and knew that he would have to pursue and achieve rapture before being overwhelmed by the smell of phenyl and the sight of excrement – turds that other students used to the pit latrines of home had, while squatting, aimed at the toilet bowl, and missed.

  * * *

  I had wanted to separate myself from Virendra when he was a victim; I felt distaste for him when he discovered the will to power. To avoid it, I had to learn to ignore his laugh, which revealed in close-up that some of his teeth had been pulled at the back; I had to learn to look at his retro moustache and his oiled hair.

  It wasn’t easy. I was, after all, trying to suppress the self-recognition he stirred.

  When you said last year in London, ‘I am so touched by Virendra. Despite everything. He is the most sympathetic of all the IIT people I write about in my book,’ I remember thinking to myself that, despite your best efforts, you had missed something crucial about our lives: how the degradations inflicted on us had worked themselves out invisibly in our characters, seeding varied passions: a dream of worldly glory as well as a desire to hide from the world.

  You had just returned from interviewing Virendra at his correctional facility in Massachusetts. ‘He told me,’ you said, ‘how horribly he was being treated by his jailors. Still, he was so kind, so patient, so generous with his time. He gave me all these small details that help build up a narrative.’

  You mentioned some of these details you were using in your book, your ‘secret history of globalisation’, and I heard again after many years the name (Brilliant!) of the best correspondence tutorial course for IIT-JEE in the 1980s. After many years I recalled the tiny stationery shop with cracked glass cases in Delhi where most study materials were illegally photocopied by a stout man in a grimy baniyan, his arms slack and bare, and the coaching institute, Agrawal Study Circle, to which anxious parents from all over Bihar and Uttar Pradesh sent their teenaged sons.

  ‘Virendra even told me,’ you said, ‘about all these acronyms he grew up with, and he very patiently spelled out the ones I didn’t know.’

  I shivered inwardly to hear again the abbrev
iations that had tyrannised our youth: IIT-JEE, CGPA, DR, IIM, CAT, IMS, GRE, GMAT. And how strange it was to see S. L. Loney’s Plane Trignometry and The Elements of Coordinate Geometry, and Igor Irodov’s Problems in General Physics, the Bible and Bhagavad Gita of all IIT aspirants, emerge out of an Amazon box one morning in London.

  You laughed when at another unboxing I said, ‘Are you seriously going to read Resnick, Halliday and Walker, Sears and Zemansky?’

  You didn’t, as it turned out, but you did read everything you could find about our god: Rajat Gupta, alumnus of IIT Delhi, first foreign-born MD of McKinsey & Company, and role model to many US-bound students. You interviewed all our teachers at IIT – those wonderful men and women, who, speaking amazingly to us with respect, had allowed us to feel blessed after those first few nights, among the country’s chosen people. You read all the long transcriptions of exchanges between Siva, Virendra and other financial wizards of our generation at IIT; you travelled to all their workplaces and playgrounds, from New York to Tuscany and Kalimantan. You interviewed almost everyone they came across in their pursuit of wealth and sex, filling up Evernote and Dropbox and several cardboard folders with notes of conversations, newspaper reports, scanned statements and downloaded videos.

  Even Aseem, who was always self-regardingly severe while assessing fellow writers, once said, ‘I have no idea if Alia can write, but she is a terrific researcher.’

  You were also aware, from a Twitter feed full every day of ingenious threats of violation, of a larger breakdown. ‘There is a whole generation, maybe two generations, of fucked-up men in India,’ you used to say. ‘People without a moral compass.’

  I now think this is incontestable – freedom for too many men like us had meant profaning values and ideals that guide most human lives. There is so much I have learned since I met you about the cruelties and oppressions of what remains, more insidiously than before, a man’s world.

  But just as my unreflective malehood disallowed the recognition of some vital truths, so your suavely inherited advantages of breeding, class and wealth prevented you from seeing the peculiar panic and incoherence of self-made men; how they spend their lives fearing breakdown and exposure.

  Exploring the conditions that moulded them could have filled out the story you wanted to tell in your book. You were not sure if our pre-IIT experiences had any explanatory value. ‘It’s so American,’ you once said, ‘this obsession with personal history, this idea that it can really explain who you are and what you have done, as though we are always denied the choice to break free of it.’

  Given everything that happened and my own choices, I can’t but share your ambivalence, your unwillingness to discard the principle of free will. I feel, in many ways, as culpable as Aseem and Virendra.

  I must still write about the circumstances and the patterns of our lives today – circuitously, for it is the only way to arrive at the truth. In one sense, this is the memoir you once urged me to write, a continuation of your own struggle to understand men like Virendra. I owe many of its revelations to you, the things I could not see until I met you, and though it comes too late, and you may not want to read it, perhaps I’ll learn, just as I did when I was with you, about the selves that I have ignored or repressed, the things buried deep down in me that I do not understand but have always feared.

  * * *

  You came into our lives long after we had managed to disguise ourselves. ‘Never look back,’ Aseem often said, ‘always forward, and take charge of your life, don’t let it be decided by your past.’

  He would then quote from A Bend in the River on the need to ‘trample on the past’, and the relative ease with which this creative destruction could be accomplished: ‘In the beginning,’ he would recite Naipaul’s lines from heart, ‘it is like trampling on a garden. In the end you are just walking on ground.’

  Very early, then, we became lost, refusing to face fully our experience; even, hiding ourselves from it. Virendra never referred to his early years, and for a long time Aseem avoided the subject for more or less the same reason: the burn marks inflicted then had never properly healed, and only a masochist would have willingly scratched them.

  He started to proclaim his lowly origins only recently, after 2014 when Narendra Modi triumphantly set off his cruel handicaps and deprivations – and that of hundreds of millions of injured and insulted Indians – against the over-entitlements of the English-speaking elite. Aseem learned from Modi that the disgrace of being born weak and ignorant, and growing up ashamed, was now obsolete, and that, in the meritocratic society emerging in India, one could publicise one’s semi-rural, low-caste and low-class beginnings just as profitably as self-made Americans had for their origins in log cabins, peanut farms and East European shtetls.

  Looking back now at our deformities, however, I can identify at least one of their sources: the desperation to escape an ignominious past, which always seemed to wait menacingly at home to reclaim us.

  * * *

  For two years before I got into IIT and left my childhood home for good, I attended coaching classes in Delhi. Like Aseem and Virendra, I always returned home with a growing dread of what I would find there.

  How agonisingly vivid are those scenes from the 1980s, in which I find some clues to our later conduct. The train from Old Delhi station, obstinately fuming and grinding across the plains of Punjab and Haryana, reaches Deoli at about five in the morning. Narrow, roofless platforms hurtle past the windows of my second-class unreserved carriage all night, the wind through the bars blowing coal dust in my hair. When the train stops, I see a dimly lit station platform where coolies prowl, always in twos, ready to rush the rare alighting passenger, ready to roll their scarves into a circular pad on their head and receive a metal trunk on this impromptu cushion before mincingly walking away into the night.

  From somewhere comes the clatter of an iron cart, and the clank-clank and dong-dong of a hammer testing wheels. Shadowy people pass the window, never to be seen again. One of them turns halfway around, but only to squirt a tremendous spit of paan juice on to the floor.

  Then, with several hisses, the coach lurches off, passing the signalman holding up a lantern, his face fiendish in the trembling green glow, and a small low building housing a row of levers. It rocks gently as it switches tracks; the few lights thin and the extensive night outside my window resumes its course – but not for long.

  I sit on a straight-backed wooden bench, wedged in between several people, and facing a similarly tense row on the opposite side, with sinking heads jerking up, and then again starting to slowly sink. In the bunk above me the faint yellowish light of the lamps exposes a jumble of half-slumbering bodies, with mouths agape like fish.

  Sometimes I doze off, but the train whistles with piercing melancholy, stutters over a level crossing, roars into a loud tunnel, the metal window shutter starts clattering in its frame, or the man next to me, sitting hunched over, his big strong nose snoring softly, and giving off a thick smell of sweat, suddenly slumps on to my lap.

  My whole body goes tense. I want so badly to stretch my legs and put my feet up on something; and in that state of immobility I become convinced that happiness will always be beyond my reach.

  * * *

  Deoli has no railway yard worth speaking of, only a few condemned carriages and wagons and locomotives of crumpled iron on a couple of sidings. There is one platform with a small roof, under which stands a stone building, painted with stripes of white and brown; it accommodates the stationmaster’s office and a stall from which my father sells tea, samosas, sliced white bread, biscuits, hard-boiled eggs, paan and cigarettes.

  At daybreak, men and women are sleeping everywhere on the paan-stained floor, draped head to toe in white, the white always shocking, the colour of death and mourning, under urgently spinning low fans.

  Imagine me alighting into this haven for the destitute, walking through the anonymous white bundles, past the dogs that are beginning to wake and moan, through
a muddy forecourt of two-wheeled tongas, cycle rickshaws and bullock carts, and an open refuse-heap which stray cows timidly pillage, shifting a hoof now and then, their skin twitching.

  In a narrow dirt lane stands the barracks for railway workers, their walls plastered with drying cow-dung cakes, and broken furniture spilled across the small yards before every room. Underneath clothes lines laden with washing – crucifixes of shirts with waterlogged sleeves, pythons of crooked, wrung-out saris – scrawny chickens scratch the earth; and only the occasional row of tulsi in old Dalda tins speak of a feeling for order and the vanity of ownership.

  At this time in the morning, cooking fires from angeethis rise in fine columns to the blue sky. In our own little yard, a cow stands nibbling under a rough lean-to roofed with thatch, over fresh ordure humming with garnet-green flies. She is tightly leashed to an iron stake so that she can’t reach either our small cabbage and tomato patch or the black pot over the brazier in which my mother cooks every morning and afternoon, squatting on the tiny veranda made by the overhang of the roof, the aanchal of her sari spilling over into the ground.

  Our home is a small kothri with beige-coloured walls and two high and narrow windows that lashlessly squint out at the yard. There is no furniture apart from an iron chest in one corner and a pile of mattresses of coarse coconut fibre on the red concrete floor. One wall has inset shelves, painted green, and enamel tumblers, steel plates and four china cups.

  The white crockery is monogrammed with a steam engine that proclaims India’s national motto, Satyamev Jayate (Truth alone triumphs); the only item of luxury in the room, it is carefully preserved for it was stolen, early in my father’s career, from Indian Railways.

  Next to the shelves, from a nail, a woven bag hangs against the wall. A copper sink stands in one corner, above a short-handled broom. Dust adheres to all the mouldings of the doors; it has turned stringy the cobwebs dangling from the corners of the naked galvanised roof, and stained grey the blades of the ceiling fan. The walls grow a greener shade of mould after every monsoon season; and the room is as chilly and damp in the winter as it is warm and humid in the summer.