The Rice Maker

Himesh is fussy about the order in which ingredients should go into vegetable pulao. Butter, followed by an equal amount of mustard oil, cumin seeds, chopped chillies and onions, crushed ginger and garlic, minced mint and coriander leaves, a handful of shelled peas, diced tomatoes, soaked rice, and all the rest. It is a weekly ritual, and like a musical piece, each note falls into place at the precise moment as the condiments and vegetables tumble into the cooking pot, dancing to the cue of his wooden ladle. He seems to pause and focus on each slice of vegetable, caressing and caramelising it till it’s the right colour and shape. Aroma wafts about and lingers in the entire wing of the hostel long after the feast is over, and the utensils are piled in a corner for me to clean them up, which is part of the agreement. And yet, the legend of Platinum Jubilee Hostel has it that the day Himesh produces a truly delectable dish, a curse will descend upon the neighbourhood.

It is remarkable how one part of his brain loves to babble while he is engrossed in cooking. I suspect it is in no way connected to the soul that revels in slicing, squishing, sautéing and stir-frying vegetables and spices. He has drifted back to the trip his family took to Colombo, much of which is a cock-and-bull ballad. The story is repetitive and boring; it also varies in content each time.

As Himesh dices tomatoes with almost ceremonial care, the aroma carries me back to another lunch, another year. Shipra used to bring lunch in a round stainless-steel carrier, invariably insisting that whoever happened to be nearby share it with her. I haven’t thought about that old tiffin in years.

Looking out of the window, I catch a glimpse of Professor Bhadoria fidgeting around his Gypsy. He is about to begin his journey to the hostel, also a weekly ritual, by driving through the rear gate of his bungalow straight to University Road and taking three left turns, which takes him about seven minutes, instead of taking the unkempt lane and arriving here within a minute.

Himesh is about to pour the soaked rice into the pot, and I know the clanging will get hectic for the next few minutes, when he will squeeze half a lime, inspect the vent tube and weight of the lid, and fix it firmly on the cooker. I excuse myself for a trip to the communal washroom, but he is busy blathering about Colombo. He is still telling the story to the cooker when I return and reoccupy the folding chair. He finally turns and is a tad surprised.

“You didn’t go?”

“Um —no,” I say.

“When will our warden stop firing blank shots in the hostel? It is not scaring even the frogs in the banyan tree, let alone Chauhan,” He chuckles at his own joke.

“Frogs don’t live in banyan trees,” I say.

“Some of them do.” He beams.

The truth about the blank shots is equally bland. The warden, Professor Bhadoria, could not expel Chauhan from the hostel, for all his authority. Chauhan is armed and dangerous, with deep political ties. Professor Bhadoria is no saint himself. He lives in the bungalow with a woman who is not his wife, much to the secret admiration of many, and he owns a double-barrelled gun that he carries to the hostel each Sunday, then cleans with great ceremony in the park. He fires two shots into the sky before he leaves. Chauhan is not regular in his replies. His shots vary in count and time, and at times are fired at midnight. At times, he gives the whole thing a skip.

Someone is hollering downstairs. It is common for hostellers to get angry with rickshaw pullers or canteen folk. We can make out the shrill voice of Sanjivan Bose, Chauhan’s neighbour in Room No 29. But the voices are rising at an unusual tempo. The punk guy who loves to ape George Michael, hairstyle and all, six rooms to our right, pokes in his face and barks, “Chauhan has shot the delivery boy of the video parlour store!”

Chauhan naturally greets hawkers and washermen with kicks and slaps and waves his revolver at them. The dispute over video cassette rentals is also frequent and usually flares up at weekends when Chauhan is presented with the bill. He had threatened to spill the guts of the delivery boy all over the floor a few months back for a steep bill of premium-rented movies.

“Clear off! Clear off the hostel! Police will barge in at any moment and cane all of us to death.” A wise guy is yelling along the length of the wing.

There is more wisdom in those words than there are stars in the universe. Himesh hurls one of his smelly pullovers at me since I have nothing on my back except a baggy shirt. “Time to run,” he says with an indulgent smile. This is going to get a lot more interesting than cooking vegetable pulao.

There is a semi-stampede on the circular stairwell. Number 30, Chauhan’s room, is to the left as we hurry to the portico, but none of us stops to take a peek. Any compunction I have is dispelled by a firm push from Himesh, who advises me to forget philanthropy for the day. A pale green scooter is lying on its belly, and a bag full of video cassettes is lying in the grass nearby. Someone exhorts us to leave in groups of two or three rather than in hordes. We do not stop walking as we exit the hostel and then the college gates, and as we ascend the Hanuman Bridge, a police jeep with a naked, dangling pair of legs folded over the tailgate races past us. The sickly colour of the legs leaves me in no doubt about the state of the owner of the limbs.

We run into another batch of fugitives near the Mayfair cinema. One of them is from the ground floor and left the hostel much later than we did. He is breathless with the news he has to break to us—it was not the delivery boy whom Chauhan murdered. It was Chauhan himself who was shot dead by the delivery boy! There was a deep hole between his eyebrows, and the backside of his skull resembled a burst melon.

Himesh’s mouth opens and closes with nothing more than air escaping his vocal cords. His grip tightens on my wrists, and I realise he is sweating.

“His time had finally come,” Someone, I don’t recollect who, offers.

Himesh tries to say something, but all he manages is a squeak. Then he chuckles mirthlessly. We talk about other students who were murdered in the hostel. Himesh recounts how he had run into headless Sanjay Singh near the washrooms last year. Sanjay Singh was slain with daggers many years ago, and many students claim to have spotted him at about two o’clock in the night. But Himesh is certainly lying. We all know our lily-livered friend can’t live to tell the tale of sighting a monkey in the dark, let alone a ghost.

Like a flash flood, our group has swelled, and we go to an eatery that serves unlimited food for a fixed cost with little bowls of desi ghee for ‘free’. Squabbling over extra servings of vegetable curry, various enemies of Chauhan are discovered and invented. Our warden is featured high on the list of vermin and is discussed threadbare, as is his private life, which includes his estranged wife and the other woman he is staying with in the official residence. Various aspects of the video-parlour owner are also brought to light, including his links with the mafia, politicians, and even the police, to whom he arranges far more than just sleazy video cassettes. It seems Chauhan had run up a huge credit bill on the stuff he had hired over months, but was dithering about paying back his dues. No wonder the messenger was a shooter too and was now being hotly searched by the police. Chauhan should have been careful.

In the middle of the meals and speculations, someone walks in with the news that the locks of the hostel rooms are being broken and room-to-room searches are being conducted by the police for weapons and illegal stuff. It shifts the focus to the students’ common enemies: the police and the university’s vice-chancellor. As expected, the students’ union is quick to seize the opportunity to blow its bugle. An emergency meeting is called, and all students are summoned to assemble at the university canteen.

As we alight from a tempo near the steep flight of stairs just before Gate No. 1, Sanjivan Bose, the guy in whose throat God forgot to put a volume control, pipes in, “Do you know Chauhan gang-raped a girl this past September with the help of another inmate of our hostel? She committed suicide later on and donated her body to the Anatomy Department of the medical college in her suicide note. I am told her brother is in the army, who has just returned from an assignment in Sri Lanka, and it is his turn to donate Chauhan’s body to the same people.”

Apart from his perturbing vocal artillery, Sanjivan Bose is also the ace conspiracy theorist of the university.

“How can you be so cocksure?”

“Because Chauhan also took a photo in which someone in a monkey cap was holding her naked in a vicious grip from behind. Her mouth was taped up, and there was a huge cut near her right eye.”

“How did she end up in the hostel?”

“She was drugged and smuggled in unconscious.”

“How do you know all that?” Himesh is incredulous.

“Everyone knows all that!”

“You saw the photo?” Himesh asks.

“Everyone has seen the photo,” says Sanjivan Bose.

At least a part of what Bose says is true. I, too, have seen the photo. I wonder how many people have noticed the slanting cut-mark just where the captor’s eyebrows nearly meet in the middle, apart from the disrobed bust of Shipra. Chauhan, it seemed, was busy with the camera.

Sanjeevan Bose loses himself in the crowd of students soon after that.

The students’ union meeting is marked by fiery speeches and lasts over an hour. Froth and venom fly freely from the mouths of the leaders. Puppets of the warden and the vice-chancellor are quickly created, beaten up and burnt. The meeting ends with the appeal to march to the medical college, where Chauhan’s lifeless body is awaiting post-mortem in a morgue.

The procession begins the three-kilometre-long march in a grim mood, hoarse with crying slogans of immortality for the departed soul. Some of the boys have sticks in their hands, and they begin yelling at the shopkeepers to pull down the shutters. As we reach the bridge, Himesh starts picking up stones from the road undergoing repairs and hurls them at the tall streetlights. I am amazed at the power and precision of his throws as the projectiles bore neat holes in the glass covers of the lamps and burst the sodium lamps inside. I creep closer and closer to him, even as I keep looking out for the police vans that are expected any moment. Himesh spent his childhood in the hills, where endless running up and down steep paths to school and the market was an inseparable part of living. I am no slouch myself, jogging five to six kilometres and knocking out fifty push-ups every day. We would rather stick together.

Immediately after the rail overbridge, the road is fenced for over a kilometre on both sides with the medical college on the left and an entertainment park on the right. If the police were to charge upon us now from behind, the only way left to run would be straight down the road like a rocket, assuming no police picket runs into us head-on.

Soon enough, the police do appear as expected, choosing the very stretch of the road strategically. They close in upon us with the headlights switched off, bearing down on us from the rear. “Stop, everyone!” a stern voice rings out behind us. I make out a flashing blue light on top of a car with the barest turn of my neck. Himesh is already running straight ahead. I burst into a mad run too, my strides growing longer and longer, faster and faster. The wind is whooshing against my ears, and it takes me about a minute to catch up with Himesh. There are many sounds at my back, of banging boots, canes, and abuses hurled, someone being caught and overpowered. We are not slowing down, even if we are going to be shot at. After a while, the voices behind us recede, but we are still hurtling ahead.

Perhaps the police have their hands full with the excitable mob of protestors. After running for about a kilometre, we dive left into the small entrance to the medical college and run up a steep incline that leads to various departments of the university township. By now, I am ready to fall flat on the ground, and my lone companion in the flight looks no better than I. As we approach a darkened building, I point to the crevice under the broad stairs of its elevated entrance. Both of us squirm in and creep as far back to the base as is possible in the dark and try to hold ourselves still. My heart is hammering all over my rib cage and into my throat. I cover my mouth to muffle the sound of my breathing. A motorcycle whooshes past the road ahead, barely a minute after we have ducked in. We keep listening to its sputtering till it fades into the faint voice of the traffic on the roads beyond the precincts.

“Some folks from the plains, too, are great runners.” Himesh’s voice cracks in the darkness to appreciate my spunk.

“You bet,” I say.

“You should have joined our club,” he chuckles, but stops abruptly.

“Who do you think killed Chauhan?” I ask after a while.

“Someone related to that bitch.” He growls.

“You had fun all night, didn’t you?”

He doesn’t answer this one for a while. Then his round face turns towards me. I cannot make out the slanting cut-mark between his brows in the darkness, but I know it is there. I have been watching it for months.

“I prefer it slow, long and hot, like the vegetable pulao.” He speaks in a thick voice I have never heard him use before.

I had taken up a job teaching mathematics in a small town about three hours from the city. The packet with sixty thousand odd rupees in currency notes came by post a week after she killed herself, with a small message: “Buy that bike and drive it to Lake Tso Moriri in Ladakh as you always wanted to. And when the wind caresses your hair, know that it will be me in some parts.” I returned to the university instead and bought something more useful than the bike. It had required the best influences I could muster to have me allotted a room in the hostel on the strength of a diploma course in the French language alone. Then, over months, in the darkness of nights, I had perfected the feat of leaping onto the coconut tree from the opening near the washroom, landing near the hedge and darting about a hundred feet to room number 30 and tracing my way back again till I could do it within two minutes.

I have always hated the heroes in the movies who, when they have the villains at gunpoint, launch into an endless speech to remind the killers of their unpardonable sins. It goes on and on till the killer somehow snatches back the weapon, or hits him with a rock or a beer bottle and overpowers the nice man momentarily, sometimes even fatally, as per the convenience of the director. Chauhan was leaning into his video cassette player as I entered his semi-darkened room. I walked right up to him, and before he could figure out what was happening, I put the muzzle of the handgun between his eyes and fired.

In the darkness reigning under the arch of stairs, there is not much I can see of the expressions ruling Himesh’s face, but the whites of his eyes are good enough pointers to where I should press the muzzle of the handgun again. The noise under the concrete slab is deafening.

As I set foot on the Red Bridge over the quiet stream below, I have a feeling I have crossed more than a river. I hurl the gun in the brooding river and realise there is something else in my pocket. It is the ignition key of the video-parlour guy’s scooter. Chauhan’s room was just behind the portico and could be accessed from both left and right. As I was exiting his room, the video-parlour guy had just parked his scooter and was proceeding to Chauhan’s room the other way. I saw the key dangling from the ignition and snatched it before I dashed to the coconut tree. It worked out the way I had imagined. After finding out what had happened in Chauhan’s room, the poor fellow raced to his scooter, but, unable to kick-start it because of the lost key, he ran helter-skelter towards the gate and vanished.

It will be a while before I can set out for Tso Moriri on a bike of my own.