All he had left from his old life now were his memories, his flute and his earrings (which he was not allowed to wear to work).
Unlike the irresponsible Gulabiya Vechania, who had failed in his duty to protect the silver Honda City, Janak Lal Sharma, the toilet “in-charge,” was wide awake and working hard. His dog-eared logbook was updated. The money in his wallet was organized carefully, by denomination. He had a separate pouch for coins. He supplemented his salary by allowing activists, journalists and TV cameramen to recharge their mobile phones, laptops and camera batteries from the power point in the toilet for the price of six showers and a shit (i.e., twenty rupees). Sometimes he allowed people to shit for the price of a piss and didn’t enter it in the logbook. At first he was a little careful with the anti-corruption activists. (They were not hard to identify—they were less poor and more aggressive than everybody else. Though they were fashionably dressed in jeans and T-shirts, most of them wore white Gandhi caps stamped with a solarized print of the old man–baby smiling his Farex-baby smile.) Janak Lal Sharma took care to charge them the proper rates and log the nature of each one’s ablution correctly and carefully. But some of them, especially the second batch of new arrivals, who were even more aggressive than the first, grew resentful that they were being charged more than the others. Soon, with them too, it became business as usual. With his extra income he subcontracted his toilet-cleaning duties, which were unthinkable for a man of his caste and background to perform (he was a Brahmin), to Suresh Balmiki who, as his name makes clear, belonged to what most Hindus overtly, and the government covertly, thought of as the shit-cleaning caste. With the increasing unrest in the country, the endless stream of protesters arriving on the pavement, and all the TV coverage, even after setting aside what he paid Suresh Balmiki, Janak Lal had earned enough to make a down payment on an LIG flat.
Opposite the toilet, back on the TV-crew side of the road (but some serious ideological distance away), was what people on the pavement called the Border: Manipuri Nationalists asking for the revocation of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which made it legal for the Indian Army to kill on “suspicion”; Tibetan refugees calling for a free Tibet; and, most unusually (and most dangerously, for them), the Association of Mothers of the Disappeared, whose sons had gone missing, in their thousands, in the war for freedom in Kashmir. (Spooky, then, to have a soundtrack that went “Hi Mom! Hi Mom! Hi Mom!” However, the Mothers of the Disappeared did not register this eeriness because they thought of themselves as Moj—“Mother” in Kashmiri—and not “Mom.”)
It was the Association’s first visit to the Super Capital. They weren’t all mothers; the wives, sisters and a few young children of the Disappeared had come too. Each of them carried a picture of their missing son, brother or husband. Their banner said:
The Story of Kashmir
DEAD = 68,000
DISAPPEARED = 10,000
Is this Democracy or Demon Crazy?
No TV camera pointed at that banner, not even by mistake. Most of those engaged in India’s Second Freedom Struggle felt nothing less than outrage at the idea of freedom for Kashmir and the Kashmiri women’s audacity.
Some of the Mothers, like some of the Bhopal gas leak victims, had become a little jaded. They had told their stories at endless meetings and tribunals in the international supermarkets of grief, along with other victims of other wars in other countries. They had wept publicly and often, and nothing had come of it. The horror they were going through had grown a hard, bitter shell.
The trip to Delhi had turned out to be an unhappy experience for the Association. The women were heckled and threatened at their roadside press conference in the afternoon and eventually the police had had to intervene and throw a cordon around the Mothers. “Muslim Terrorists do not deserve Human Rights!” shouted Gujarat ka Lalla’s undercover janissaries. “We have seen your genocide! We have faced your ethnic cleansing! Our people have been living in refugee camps for twenty years now!” Some young men spat at photographs of the dead and missing Kashmiri men. The “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” they referred to was the mass exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from the Kashmir Valley when the freedom struggle had turned militant in the 1990s and some Muslim militants had turned on the tiny Hindu population. Several hundred Hindus had been massacred in macabre ways and when the government announced that it could not ensure their safety, almost the entire population of Kashmiri Hindus, almost two hundred thousand people, had fled the Valley and moved into refugee camps in the plains of Jammu where many of them still lived. A few of Lalla’s janissaries on the pavement that day were Kashmiri Hindus who had lost their homes and families and all they had ever known.
Perhaps even more hurtful to the Mothers than the Spitters were the three beautifully groomed, pencil-thin college girls who walked past that morning on their way to shop at Connaught Place. “Oh wow! Kashmir! What funnn! Apparently it’s completely normal now, ya, safe for tourists. Let’s go? It’s supposed to be stunning.”
The Association of Mothers had decided to get through the night somehow and never come back to Delhi. Sleeping out on the street was a new experience for them. Back home they all had pretty houses and kitchen gardens. That night they had a meager meal (that was a new experience too), rolled up their banner and tried to sleep, waiting for day to break, longing to begin their journey back to their beautiful, war-torn valley.
—
It was there, right next to the Mothers of the Disappeared, that our quiet baby appeared. It took the Mothers a while to notice her, because she was the color of night. A sharply outlined absence in the shadows under the street light. More than twenty years of living with crackdowns, cordon-and-search operations and the midnight knock (Operation Tiger, Operation Serpent Destruction, Operation Catch and Kill) had taught the Mothers to read the darkness. But when it came to babies, the only ones they were used to looked like almond blossoms with apple cheeks. The Mothers of the Disappeared did not know what to do with a baby that had Appeared.
Especially not a black one
Kruhun kaal
Especially not a black girl
Kruhun kaal hish
Especially not one that was swaddled in litter
Shikas ladh
—
The whisper was passed around the pavement like a parcel. The question grew into an announcement: “Bhai baccha kiska hai?” Whose baby is this?
—
Silence.
—
Then someone said they had seen the mother vomiting in the park in the afternoon. Someone else said, “Oh no, that wasn’t her.”
Someone said she was a beggar. Someone else said she was a rapevictim (which was a word in every language).
Someone said she had come with the group that had been there earlier in the day organizing a signature campaign for the release of political prisoners. It was rumored to be a Front organization for the banned Maoist Party that was fighting a guerrilla war in the forests of Central India. Someone else said, “Oh no, that wasn’t her. She was alone. She’s been here for some days.”
Someone said she was the former lover of a politician who had thrown her out after she got pregnant.
Everybody agreed that politicians were all bastards. That didn’t help address the problem:
What to do with the baby?