The Scent of God Read online

  Anirvan had started out okay but sank quickly in the midst of this pointless explosion of brilliance. The boys were nice but studies were a mean football field where people hid brute force under a smile. One could tell from the textbooks and notebooks bound in silken brown paper, the name-labels with name, class and section number sketched with love, the pencils sharpened pointy-perfect and the shiny geometry tools with no shadow of dust on them.

  Then there were the heavy walking subjects. Books which needed to be memorized, and memorizing never happened unless you walked up and down the corridors. History, geography, literature, subjects which no one really cared about but they couldn’t let them drag their averages down. Even biology and chemistry, which were important but needed a lot of mugging. So every month, the week before the monthly tests, a silent procession appeared on the block-corridors, quiet, lost figures walking with copies of Our Living Planet, The History of India, and Life Science pressed against the chest, eyes closed, muttering darkly.

  Wednesday morning before the half-yearly exam was the time for home study. Anirvan sat in the corridor with the life science textbook on his lap. It was a sign that he had given up. The maze of scientific names and the mating habits of salmon. Did they live in the sea and come up to the river to spawn? Or did they live in the ocean or swim to the river to breed? It was all slipping away. If a boy wanted to learn, he walked. The monks knew that and stared at the boys from the distance when they passed. If a boy looked sleepy and crouched on the block or went into his room to sit on his bed, they came in and rapped his head.

  But it was impossible to walk with the salmon as they moved back and forth between salt and sweet water. Anirvan sat down and stared at the shawls trailing past him, the rubber flip-flops that dragged along slowly. That was when he first sensed Kajol pass him. His black shawl went past Anirvan like a dark, warm film with fur that looked alive and silvery at places. Kajol was a quiet boy, small and dark like kohl, but with a delicate face that looked like it had been carefully sculpted. He looked younger than most students in their class.

  He walked slowly. It looked like the large shawl was almost weighing him down. He was lost in a book. He was a good student, quiet and hardworking, and his handwriting was dreamlike. When he finished equations on the blank sheets of the mathematics exercise book it looked like calligraphy. He wrote slowly, like he was painting a picture.

  Anirvan looked up as he passed, and Kajol glanced down at him. The air was heavy with the gloom of the examination, and they didn’t know each other well. Kajol wasn’t really friendly with anyone. But he seemed to like Anirvan; his eyes often hovered around him. Every now and then Anirvan looked up to feel the stillness of his stare. Kajol always sat to his right in class, a row ahead of him, and while looking at the back of his neck Anirvan felt Kajol knew that his eyes were there. Strangely, Anirvan wanted him to know. There was no shame of getting caught; Kajol couldn’t actually see him. But every now and then, if someone said something at the back, Kajol turned and stared at Anirvan. Anirvan quickly looked away but always longed to look back. When he did, Kajol was still staring, as if he was talking to him in silence.

  A few minutes passed and Anirvan floated along with the spawning salmon. Kajol passed again. Anirvan knew it from the smooth black shawl and the blue rubber flip-flops. He looked up and Kajol glanced at him but quickly looked into his book again. His flip-flops made a lazy, squishy kind of noise on the floor. He dragged his feet as he walked, very slowly, as if he would much rather be still but had been pushed into an inertia of motion by the rhythm of the walking flock. He had lean legs. There was a small scar under his right knee. Was it fresh or old? Anirvan wanted to reach out and trace it with his finger.

  Did he slow down a little more when he passed Anirvan? Perhaps just a little? Anirvan wondered. Kajol was now on the other side of the corridor, walking back towards him. Anirvan glanced at him; he was looking at Anirvan. Their eyes touched for a while and suddenly Anirvan felt his heart pound. Kajol walked past him, dragging his flip-flops. It was a delicious kind of lethargy. He didn’t look at Anirvan while passing by him but walked all the way to the end of the block. But the moment he turned, he glanced at Anirvan again. This time, Anirvan looked away. He’d been looking at him for too long.

  His eyelashes were beautiful and he had an intense way of looking at you, almost a savage way, which felt uncanny because he was such a quiet boy with dreamy handwriting and high scores in every subject. He could explain crop rotation on the Deccan Plateau without batting an eyelash so you never noticed how beautiful they were till he looked at you.

  But it was as if it never happened, as if nothing was happening even as they looked into each other’s eyes, staring, staring, as he walked away, drawing Anirvan’s gaze as if by invisible strings, gazing at him over the blue cover of Our Living Planet, vanishing at the end of the block and looking up the moment he turned around. He was such a serious boy with delicate lips. It was a secret impossible to bear. Anirvan sensed a flush of heat swim through his body. What were they doing? Was it wrong?

  Ageless

  ‘You have trained your grandson beautifully,’ Kamal Swami told Anirvan’s grandmother, suddenly brightening the afternoon. She had put on a new white sari that made her look more like a wife than a widow, and she had pulled the aanchal of the sari low over her head.

  You have trained your grandson beautifully! That’s the very first thing Maharaj told her. She would repeat it for months afterwards! Maharaj, the King; the saffron men were kings because they owned nothing, because they had given up this world.

  ‘If a boy becomes a monk,’ she had told Anirvan since he was a child, ‘seven generations before him, and seven generations after attain nirvana.’

  Her eyes glistened.

  ‘Seven before and seven after, fourteen in all. Free from the cycle of life and death and rebirth!’

  ‘Saffron is the true absence of colour,’ she said. ‘It comes after white.’

  Smiling, she would tell Anirvan, ‘Become a monk. Then our spirits will be free. Mine when I die. Your grandfather’s spirit remains trapped in the cycle of karma. He will be free.’

  She would tell him again later. And later again.

  ‘He has your touch,’ Kamal Swami told her, smiling. ‘Made in the same mould.’

  ‘My touch?’ She smiled back, ‘What do you know about my touch?’

  ‘I know,’ he smiled again. ‘All there is to know.’

  The seventy-two-year-old woman had put on a new sari that had sat untouched in her cupboard for decades, to make her feel clean enough to visit the ashram where her grandson lived. She only needed a little help from Anirvan and his father to walk into Kamal Swami’s office in Bliss Hall—just a little—because she was so eager. She had gone around the table and touched the Swami’s feet, bringing the dust of his feet back to her head. It was strange to see her do that to a man younger than her, by many years. How old was Kamal Swami? Thirty, maybe? The monk with shiny cheeks and lean and fast legs that shot through loose saffron robes on the cricket field. The man who could move like lightning without breaking a sweat?

  But anybody could touch the feet of a saffron-clad monk, perform pranaam like you did to an elder, even if they were younger than you. ‘They have no age, the monks,’ people said. They did not belong to this world.

  In his smooth saffron robe, he was ageless. The pure and smooth lotus, just as his name said. Lotus Swami, the Lord Lotus. Smooth and green on the cheeks. Hairy on his pale, sinewy arms that hit the ball outside the cricket stadium with the bald stump of a child’s bat. He would always slouch a bit afterwards, and smile, almost in embarrassment, as if he was ashamed of using his superman force in a children’s game.

  But Anirvan felt his whole body was afloat, in a warm, bubbly fluid that bathed his ears and turned them red. It was such a beautiful smile. Kamal Swami had teeth like specks of a white flower, and suddenly the force left his body and he became a soft and blushing boy who wanted
to hand the bat to another boy and go back to being a monk, hide his agile cricketer body in the billowy saffron robe. Desperately, Anirvan wanted to touch him, become him.

  There was something about the ashram that, Anirvan knew, was like lying on his grandmother’s bed, her fingers parting the curls of his hair.

  The best part of his childhood still lay there, listening to her stories.

  The two gods of the trinity—Vishnu the sustainer of the universe, and Shiva, the destroyer—were opposite characters.

  Shiva is kind of a crazy god, happy and drunk but with a heart of gold. He becomes furious and dances to destroy the world. Then he is kind again, and gives whatever his devotees want.

  ‘Vishnu is a million times craftier, far harder to please,’ she said. ‘The more you love him the more he makes you suffer. Only the greatest of the devotees survive.’ She smiled at Anirvan. ‘When they are on the brink of destruction, Vishnu comes to them, glowing in blue.’

  She told him the stories of two young boys. Dhruva and Prahlad. Dhruva left his royal home at the age of five to sit alone in a forest to seek Lord Vishnu through prayer. He swayed the universe with his devotion and in the end the Lord appeared before him in his blue glory.

  Prahlad was born of bad blood, of a cruel demon father who hated Vishnu and wanted to destroy the gods. Prahlad loved Vishnu and prayed to him all the time. His father tried to kill him, get him burned and bitten by snakes and eaten by fierce animals, but no danger could touch him. He sat in prayer for his dream-god, Vishnu, while the Lord appeared as half-man and half-lion and killed his demon father.

  If you loved Vishnu, you suffered. If you loved Vishnu deeply, you suffered terribly. Vishnu loved to see his devotees suffer, as did his human avatar, Krishna, the mischievous blue lover. You had to love the pain, and sing for him, like Queen Meera, who called herself Krishna’s lover and suffered the rage of her royal husband.

  Anirvan’s grandmother was a widow and she wore the widow’s white but Krishna was her lover and so he gave her a life filled with pain. The world became cruel to her soon after Anirvan’s grandfather passed away and she was left to the care of her uncaring son. But her suffering made her cry and smile and then cry more tears of joy as if she knew it was Krishna’s love for her. Krishna made her his own by making her suffer many years of pain.

  Dhruva’s devotion to Vishnu was so unflinching that it made him into a star. The Dhruva Tara, the North Star, the heavenly body that shone in the night sky in the same spot throughout the year. Lost sailors fixed their masts by looking at the bright white light up in the northern sky.

  Could Anirvan be like them?

  Yes, he could. He was special. He was pure of heart and had a pure mind. He could recite the hymns, and he knew all the stories from the Puranas. In a trembling voice, she told him the stories of the boy-devotees. His eyes became moist.

  Life in the monastery was a fragrant, musical dream. It was a blaze of saffron that raged across the football field, black hair matted on pale, sweaty arms, eyes that laughed and loved you so much that you had nightmares of losing the love.

  A Dreamhole

  Sushant Kane was going to destroy everything. In class he recited poems he’d written, love poems like these:

  The bleating ram of my soul

  Is tied to the lamp-post of your heart

  Such poems caused the boys pain. They did not know whether to laugh or cry. Was it poetry or a joke?

  Sushant Kane looked so hip that it was absurd. He was a skinny man with hollow cheeks covered with acne-marks and a trimmed beard. He was the Class 7 English teacher and the debate coach. He wore tight shirts and trousers that flapped loosely around the ankles. It was easy to imagine him in dark sunglasses even though no one had ever seen him wearing any.

  He spoke about everything outside the ashram—city buses and plays, exhibitions and advertisements, movies and books they didn’t know could exist. He made it all sound real, even though they knew they were stories. Like this play he saw last Saturday in the city, where a lone woman played all the roles. It was the story of The Mahabharata, told by Draupadi, the wife of the five princes, how she was given away as property lost in a wager over a game of dice, fought over, insulted and attacked. There was no one else on stage the whole two hours. She even played an army and battle stallions.

  Sushant Kane was a mathematician of grammar. Everything about him was pointed, his cheekbones, the end of his beard, the rhythm of his poems and the chalk with which he split complex and compound sentences on the board. Complex sentences into a principal and a subordinate clause, compound sentences into two principal clauses with a finite verb each. Nothing else existed.

  He was one of the ashram stories. There were three Marathi brothers—Sushant, Prashant and Ashant—who were adopted by the monks. They were probably orphaned or something like that, nobody really knew how the story began or trailed off. Prashant was a brute with a balding head who ran the early morning PT and late-afternoon naval cadet training drill as if he was following Hitler’s orders. Ashant was popular with the sporty boys; he was a lighthearted loafer who coached the football team and zipped around the ashram on his snazzy yellow Yamaha motorbike. Most of his fans had been won by the bike. Ashant wore sunglasses while riding the bike and usually forgot to take them off while at lunch in the hostel dining hall.

  Sushant Kane was different. He was pale like his brothers but different in every other way. He wasn’t well-built like them. He was too thin; his limbs were long twigs. Prashant and Ashant were ashram boys; they breathed its air. They sang Sanskrit hymns and tortured the students till they got the marching drill exactly right for the Independence Day and Republic Day parades. They were big brawny men who became little boys before the Great Monk—the Secretary of the ashram. Sushant Kane did not change. His acne-marked cheeks wrinkled the same way before the monks as before the boys in his seventh standard English class. Neither the boys nor the monks knew for sure if the trimmed beard hid a kind or a cruel smile. That’s probably why he got the nickname Senior Kane, even though he was the middle brother.

  Senior Kane, SrK.

  SrK belonged to the ashram, like his brothers. And yet, unlike them, he did not belong here. He made the world outside real and fantastic at the same time. For his brothers, there was no world outside.

  He talked a lot. He spoke slowly. Sometimes you felt he was asking you to get out and run.

  The boys’ rooms did not have fans. They spent most of the year in these rooms that had large windows but no electric fan. They went home for summer vacations during the hottest weeks of the year. At home, they could lie on their beds and stare at the electric fans whirring overhead. There were heavy, old-time fans that swallowed the entire ceiling and became a blur; and new, tiny white ones that were like cute, deadly animals swooshing out swirls of air that felt absurd coming out of their little bodies. Even table fans like grim night nurses.

  Sometimes, after the boys came back to their hostels after summer vacation, they stayed up late into the night and chatted dreamily about the different kinds of fans they had seen that vacation. At homes, in doctor’s waiting rooms, even in railway waiting rooms. The night air in their rooms was deadly still. It was still summer. Sometimes they could smell monsoon in the air that crept up from the Bay of Bengal down south, rainy wind on its way to Calcutta further north. Sometimes they dreamt so hard that the cool air entered their rooms and danced softly over their beds.

  Daytime was different. The boys barely spent any time in their rooms. They flew from one hall to another: prayer hall to study hall to dining hall. And school and the football field. Football was sacred as the young saffron prophet had said that you’ll be a lot closer to God if you played football than if you read The Gita. Always in motion, the boys felt wind on their skin. But there was to be no fan in the boys’ rooms. It was the time to build character and the breeze from electric fans was an indulgence. The monks liked the boys sweaty and breathless. That was the true path of Yo
ga.

  Something strange happened to Anirvan every time he walked past Sushant Kane’s room at the end of their block in Bliss Hall. Whenever Sushant Kane was inside, the door was bolted shut. They saw him quietly walk across the block, a white prayer chador flung across his slim-fitting shirt, walk into his room and bolt the door. He went to the prayer hall. Every teacher had to go.

  Anirvan walked up and down the block balcony during Sunday morning room study. He was reading Our Living Planet, their Geography textbook. Ontario, Erie, Michigan… Ontario, Superior… Ontario. The paragraph on agricultural produce. He had to memorize that whole chapter. The trick was to read it once, and then try to repeat it without looking at the book, and then read it again. And repeat the whole thing, and keep repeating the sentences till you could say the whole paragraph without looking at the book. Whoever could remember would go far in life, the monks always said.

  Anirvan hadn’t realized that he had stopped walking. He was remembering furiously. There was corn, and there was…what else was there? Suddenly his feet wouldn’t budge. A blast of cool air hit his face. He looked up and stared at Sushant Kane’s window. It was open. Inside, it was dark, and quiet but for a steady whirring sound. The electric fan spread cool air inside, and every time he came close to the window it blasted his face.

  It was July but they had only a few days of rain. The leaves on the trees had stopped moving and the sun glared everywhere. The boys had to keep the windows of their rooms open or otherwise they would die but the open windows made the rooms hotter and many of the boys just lay with thin wet towels on their faces which dried up in a few minutes. On these weekends, they missed the coolness of the school and study halls. The prayer hall, with its heavy fans and dark curtains, was heaven.