In a while the breeze picked up and the kites soared, but then the mandatory Independence Day drizzle began. Anjum roared at it as though it was an uninvited guest—Ai Hai! Motherfucking whore rain! Saddam laughed but neither of them moved, waiting to see if it was a major or a minor. It was a minor, and soon stopped. Absent-mindedly, Anjum began to rub down Biroo’s coat, wiping off the delicate frost of raindrops on it. Getting wet in the rain reminded her of Zainab and she smiled to herself. Uncharacteristically, she began to tell Saddam about the Flyover Story (the edited version) and how much the Bandicoot had loved it when she was a little girl. She went on sunnily, describing Zainab’s pranks, her love of animals, and how quickly she had picked up English at school. All of a sudden, when her reminiscence was at its most cheerful, Anjum’s voice(s) broke and her eyes filled with tears.
“I was born to be a mother,” she sobbed. “Just watch. One day Allah Mian will give me my own child. That much I know.”
“How is that possible?” Saddam said, reasonably, entirely unaware that he was entering treacherous territory. “Haqeeqat bhi koi cheez hoti hai.” There is, after all, such a thing as Reality.
“Why not? Why the hell not?” Anjum sat up and looked him in the eye.
“I’m just saying…I meant realistically…”
“If you can be Saddam Hussain, I can be a mother.” Anjum didn’t say it nastily, she said it smilingly, coquettishly, sucking on her white tusk and her dark red teeth. But there was something steely about the coquetry.
Alert, but not worried, Saddam looked back at her, wondering what she knew.
“Once you have fallen off the edge like all of us have, including our Biroo,” Anjum said, “you will never stop falling. And as you fall you will hold on to other falling people. The sooner you understand that the better. This place where we live, where we have made our home, is the place of falling people. Here there is no haqeeqat. Arre, even we aren’t real. We don’t really exist.”
Saddam said nothing. He had grown to love Anjum more than he loved anyone else in the world. He loved the way she spoke, the words she chose, the way she moved her mouth, the way her red, paan-stained lips moved over her rotten teeth. He loved her ridiculous front tooth and the way she could recite whole verses of Urdu poetry, most—or all—of which he didn’t understand. Saddam knew no poetry and very little Urdu. But then, he knew other things. He knew the quickest way to skin a cow or buffalo without damaging the hide. He knew how to wet-salt the skin and marinate it with lime and tannin until it began to stretch and stiffen into leather. He knew how to calibrate the sourness of the marinade by tasting it, how to scud the leather and strip it of hair and fat, how to soap it, bleach it, buff, grease and wax it till it shone. He also knew that the average human body contains between four and five liters of blood. He had watched it spill and spread slowly across the road outside the Dulina police post, just off the Delhi-Gurgaon highway. Strangely, the thing he remembered most clearly about all that was the long line-up of expensive cars and the insects that flitted in the beams of their headlights. And the fact that nobody got out to help.
He knew it was neither plan nor coincidence that had brought him to the Place of Falling People. It was the tide.
“Who are you trying to fool?” Anjum asked him.
“Only God.” Saddam smiled. “Not you.”
“Recite the Kalima…” Anjum said imperiously, as though she were Emperor Aurangzeb himself.
“La ilaha…” Saddam said. And then, like Hazrat Sarmad, he stopped. “I don’t know the rest. I’m still learning it.”
“You’re a Chamar like all those other boys you worked with in the mortuary. You weren’t lying to that Sangeeta Madam Haramzaadi Bitch about your name, you were lying to me and I don’t know why, because I don’t care what you are…Muslim, Hindu, man, woman, this caste, that caste, or a camel’s arsehole. But why call yourself Saddam Hussain? He was a bastard, you know.”
Anjum used the word Chamar and not Dalit, the more modern and accepted term for those that Hindus considered to be “untouchable,” in the same spirit in which she refused to refer to herself as anything other than Hijra. She didn’t see the problem with either Hijras or Chamars.
For a while they lay side by side, in silence. And then Saddam decided to trust Anjum with the story he had not told anybody before—a story about saffron parakeets and a dead cow. His too was a story about luck, not butchers’ luck perhaps, but some similar strain.
She was right, he told Anjum. He had lied to her and told the truth to Sangeeta Madam Haramzaadi Bitch. Saddam Hussain was his chosen name, not his real name. His real name was Dayachand. He was born into a family of Chamars—skinners—in a village called Badshahpur in the state of Haryana, only a couple of hours away by bus from Delhi.
One day, in answer to a phone call, he and his father, along with three other men, hired a Tempo to drive out to a nearby village to collect the carcass of a cow that had died on someone’s farm.
“This was what our people did,” Saddam said. “When cows died, upper-caste farmers would call us to collect the carcasses—because they couldn’t pollute themselves by touching them.”
“Yes, yes, I know,” Anjum said, in a tone that sounded suspiciously like admiration. “Some of them are very neat and clean. They don’t eat onions, garlic, meat…”
Saddam ignored that intervention.
“So we would go and collect the carcasses, skin them, and turn the hides into leather…I’m talking about the year 2002. I was still in school. You know better than me what was going on then…what it was like…Yours happened in February, mine in November. It was the day of Dussehra. On our way to pick up the cow we passed a Ramlila maidan where they had built huge effigies of the demons…Ravan, Meghnad and Kumbhakaran, as high as three-storeyed buildings—all ready to be blown up in the evening.”
No Old Delhi Muslim needed a lesson about the Hindu festival of Dussehra. It was celebrated every year in the Ramlila grounds, just outside Turkman Gate. Every year the effigies of Ravan, the ten-headed “demon” King of Lanka, his brother Kumbhakaran and his son Meghnad grew taller and were packed with more and more explosives. Every year the Ramlila, the story of how Lord Ram, King of Ayodhya, vanquished Ravan in the battle of Lanka, which Hindus believed was the story of the triumph of Good over Evil, was enacted with greater aggression and ever-more generous sponsorship. A few audacious scholars had begun to suggest that the Ramlila was really history turned into mythology, and that the evil demons were really dark-skinned Dravidians—indigenous rulers—and the Hindu gods who vanquished them (and turned them into Untouchables and other oppressed castes who would spend their lives in service of the new rulers) were the Aryan invaders. They pointed to village rituals in which people worshipped deities, including Ravan, that in Hinduism were considered to be demons. In the new dispensation however, ordinary people did not need to be scholars to know, even if they could not openly say so, that in the rise and rise of the Parakeet Reich, regardless of what may or may not have been meant in the scriptures, in saffron parakeetspeak, the evil demons had come to mean not just indigenous people, but everybody who was not Hindu. Which included of course the citizenry of Shahjahanabad.
When the giant effigies were blown up, the sound of the explosions would boom through the narrow lanes of the old city. And few were in doubt about what that was meant to mean.
Every year, the morning after Good had vanquished Evil, Ahlam Baji, the midwife-turned-wandering-queen with filthy hair, would go to the Ramlila grounds, sift through the debris, and return with bows and arrows, sometimes a whole handlebar mustache, or a staring eye, an arm, or a sword that stuck out of her fertilizer bag.