The exhibits, everyday artifacts made of stainless steel—steel cisterns, steel motorcycles, steel weighing scales with steel fruit on one side and steel weights on the other, steel cupboards full of steel clothes, a steel dining table with steel plates and steel food, a steel taxi with steel luggage on its steel luggage rack—extraordinary for their verisimilitude, were beautifully lit and displayed in the many rooms of the gallery, each room guarded by two Safe n’ Sound guards. Even the cheapest exhibit, Saddam said, was the price of a two-bedroom LIG (Lower Income Group) flat. So, all put together, according to his calculations, they cost as much as a whole housing colony. Art First, a cutting-edge contemporary art magazine owned by a leading steel magnate, was the main sponsor of the show.
Saddam (Dayachand) was given sole charge of the signature exhibit in the show—an exquisitely made half-scale, but absolutely life-like, stainless-steel Banyan tree, with stainless-steel aerial roots that hung all the way down to the ground, forming a stainless-steel grove. The tree came in a gigantic wooden crate, shipped in from a gallery in New York. He watched it being un-crated and placed on the lawns of the National Gallery, secured with underground bolts. It had stainless-steel buckets, stainless-steel tiffin carriers and stainless-steel pots and pans hanging from its branches. (Almost as though stainless-steel laborers had hung up their stainless-steel lunches while they plowed stainless-steel fields and sowed stainless-steel seeds.)
“That part I just didn’t understand,” Saddam told Anjum.
“And the rest you did?” Anjum asked, laughing.
The artist, who lived in Berlin, had sent strict instructions that he did not want any kind of protective fence or cordon to be built around the tree. He was keen for viewers to commune with his work directly, without any barriers. They were to be allowed to touch it and to wander through the grove of roots if they wanted to. Most of them did, Saddam said, except when the sun was high and the steel was burning hot to the touch. Saddam’s job was to make sure nobody scratched their names into the steel tree or damaged it in any way. It was also his responsibility to keep the tree clean and to make sure the imprints from the hundreds of hands that touched it were wiped away. For this task he was given a specially designed ladder, a supply of Johnson’s Baby Oil and fragments of old, soft saris. It seemed an improbable method, but it actually worked. Cleaning the tree was not a problem, he said. The problem was keeping an eye on it when the sun reflected off it. It was like being asked to keep an eye on the sun. After the first two days Saddam asked Sangeeta Madam for permission to wear sunglasses. She turned down his request, saying it would look inappropriate and the museum management was bound to take offense. So Saddam developed a technique of looking at the tree for a couple of minutes and then looking away. Still, by the time seven weeks had passed and the tree was recrated and shipped to Amsterdam for the artist’s next show, Saddam’s eyes were singed. They smarted and watered continuously. He found it impossible to keep them open in daylight unless he used sunglasses. He was dismissed from Safe n’ Sound Guard Service because nobody had any use for an ordinary security guard who dressed as though he was a film star’s bodyguard. Sangeeta Madam told him he was a great disappointment to her and had completely belied her expectations. His response was to call her some terrible names. He was physically ejected from her office.
Anjum cackled her appreciation when Saddam told her what those names were. She gave him the room she had built around her sister Bibi Ayesha’s grave.
Saddam built a temporary stable abutting the bathhouse for Payal. She stood there all night, snuffling and harrumphing, a pale night mare in the graveyard. In the daytime she was Saddam’s business partner. Saddam and she did the rounds of the city’s larger hospitals. He stationed himself outside the hospital gates and busied himself with one of her hooves, tapping it worriedly with a small hammer, pretending he was re-shoeing it. Payal went along with the charade. When the anxious relatives of seriously ill patients approached him Saddam would reluctantly agree to part with the old horseshoe to bring them good luck. For a price. He also had a supply of medicines—some commonly prescribed antibiotics, Crocin, cough syrup and a range of herbal remedies—that he sold to the people who flocked to the big government hospitals from the villages around Delhi. Most of them camped in the hospital grounds or on the streets because they were too poor to rent any kind of accommodation in the city. At night Saddam rode Payal home through the empty streets like a prince. In his room he had a sack of horseshoes. He gave Anjum one that she hung on her wall next to her old catapult. Saddam had other business interests too. He sold pigeon-feed at certain spots in the city where motorists stopped to seek quick benediction by feeding God’s creatures. On his non-hospital days Saddam would be there with small packets of grain and ready change. After the motorist sped away, he would, quite often, much to the chagrin of the pigeons, sweep up the grain and put it back into a packet, ready for his next customer. All of it—short-changing pigeons and exploiting sick people’s relatives—was tiring work, especially in summer, and the income was uncertain. But none of it involved having a boss and that was the main thing.
Soon after Saddam moved in, Anjum and he, partnered by Imam Ziauddin, began another initiative. It started by accident and then evolved on its own. One afternoon Anwar Bhai, who ran a brothel nearby on GB Road, arrived in the graveyard with the body of Rubina, one of his girls, who had died suddenly of a burst appendix. He came with eight young women in burqas, trailed by a three-year-old boy, Anwar Bhai’s son by one of them. They were all distressed and agitated, not just by Rubina’s passing, but also because the hospital returned her body with the eyes missing. The hospital said that rats had got to them in the mortuary. But Anwar Bhai and Rubina’s colleagues believed that Rubina’s eyes had been stolen by someone who knew that a bunch of whores and their pimp were unlikely to complain to the police. If that wasn’t bad enough, because of the address given on the death certificate (GB Road), Anwar Bhai could not find a bathhouse to bathe Rubina’s body, a graveyard to bury her in, or an imam to say the prayers.
Saddam told them they had come to the right place. He asked them to sit down and got them something cold to drink while he created an enclosure behind the guest house with some of Anjum’s old dupattas wrapped around four bamboo poles. Inside the enclosure he put out a piece of plywood raised off the ground on a few bricks, covered it with a plastic sheet and asked the women to lay Rubina’s corpse on it. He and Anwar Bhai collected water from the handpump in buckets and a couple of old paint cans and ferried them to the improvised bathhouse. The corpse was already stiff, so Rubina’s clothes had to be cut open. (Saddam produced a razor blade.) Lovingly, flapping over her body like a drove of ravens, the women bathed her, soaping her neck, her ears, her toes. Equally lovingly they kept a sharp eye out for anyone among them who might be tempted to slip off and pocket a bangle, a toe-ring or her pretty pendant. (All jewelry—fake as well as real—was to be handed over to Anwar Bhai.) Mehrunissa worried that the water might be too cold. Sulekha insisted Rubina had opened her eyes and closed them again (and that shafts of divine light shone out from where her eyes had been). Zeenat went off to buy a shroud. While Rubina was being prepared for her final journey, Anwar Bhai’s little son, dressed in denim dungarees and a prayer cap, paraded up and down, goose-stepping like a Kremlin guard, in order to show off his new (fake) mauve Crocs with flowers on them. He made a great production of noisily crunching Kurkure from the packet Anjum had given him. Occasionally he tried to peep into the shed to see what his mother and his aunties (whom he had never seen in burqas in all his short life) were up to.