The Scent of God Page 7

  ‘We can get matches from Tridib sir’s cupboard, right?’ Tavi asked. Sharp light shone in his eyes.

  The boys nodded.

  ‘Let’s gather all the waste paper in Lothar’s room.’ Tavi whispered.

  Catching the pigeon was easy. They were probably night-blind. Quite stupid too. Could barely walk, let alone fly. Tavi crept like a snake. Everybody held their breath. Rajeev crept behind Tavi, though it was not clear why he did that.

  Tavi slunk a long arm into the crevice and pulled out the pigeon. It was a large pigeon but it moved very little. It was probably old, or sick. One wing fluttered clumsily but Tavi clamped it hard. A few feathers fluttered to the ground.

  The matchbox and the heap of waste papers were ready in Lothar’s room. It was the middle room of the block and far from the teacher’s. And it belonged to the messiest boy that had ever lived and his room was cluttered with everything that could burn—torn pages of books, old newspapers, lost socks, wrappers of chocolates with brown gooey stuff on them.

  A quiet crowd gathered. Rajeev gathered the heap of paper in the heart of the room. The striking of the match made a ghastly sound. The fire coiled up from the heap like a snake that was slowly getting fat. The lazy pigeon burst into a splatter of wings and feathers when Tavi brought him closer to the fire.

  ‘You can’t put him there alive,’ Rajeev whispered. ‘You need to bump him off.’

  Tavi tried one more time. The pigeon beat hard in his hand. In the silence, the noise shot out like an explosion. Tavi clamped down hard. Beads of sweat on his forehead shone in the fire.

  He looked around.

  Rajeev held out a heavy padlock to him. He could read Tavi’s mind.

  They stared in silence as Tavi bunched up the tail of the pigeon and smashed the padlock on his head and before they had a chance to see anything more he held the bird by the tail and hung it over the fire. The mashed head was safely inside.

  It became much easier when Rajeev brought out the mustard oil that somebody kept handy for bathing. As the wings blackened, things started coming off in flakes. ‘Just like chicken,’ Bora said.

  Asim Chatterjee pushed through the crowd. ‘Salt and chilli.’ He had popped his hand inside the kitchen window to grab a handful of salt. Chilli shrubs, they all knew, were plentiful behind the kitchen. When did he go down? He wasn’t scared of waking up anybody. Kamal Swami, Nitai the caretaker, the teachers. That’s because Chatterjee wasn’t scared of anything. He had taught his roommates to rub their penises while looking at pictures of naked women from magazines.

  Their hunger was shocking. There were no knives but someone got out a pair of scissors and started cutting out chunks of roasted meat. Chillies were split open and oil and salt splattered all over. ‘Chicken night,’ Bora whispered hoarsely and put the scissors with the piece of meat stuck to it in his mouth.

  Anirvan was so disgusted that he couldn’t stop staring. It was as if Lothar’s room had become a butchery. The fire had died but Rajeev lit it again because the tail end of the pigeon was still raw and there was good meat there. Boys were now using their fingers to tear off the meat. Bones were chewed and spat out. They were smaller bones, lighter than those in chicken.

  There were seven or eight boys in the room. More boys came in, rubbing sleep from their eyes. Chatterjee wanted to catch more pigeons. ‘Sami has hot and sour Maggi ketchup in his room.’ Sami was the son of the Chief Justice and he couldn’t eat his lunch without ketchup so he was allowed to take ketchup to the dining hall. ‘Let’s catch a baby pigeon. Tender meat.’ Chatterjee smacked his lips. ‘Will be yummy with ketchup.’

  But that didn’t happen. Tridib was three rooms away and even though he slept like dead wood it was risky climbing over the balcony and walking on the ledge to poke through the nests. But there was nothing left of the pigeon that they had cooked. Even the bones were a chewed mess.

  Anirvan thought of Kajol’s sleeping face. He’d stopped by his room on his way to Lothar’s. The room was dark but faint light from the corridor fell through the mosquito net. Kajol slept like he had left the world for a better place. His long eyelashes were still. He fell asleep the moment the bell rang for lights-off and slept unstirred till the first tingle of the morning bell. Never ruffled by a nightmare. Or the need to leave his bed in the middle of the night to go to another boy’s room.

  Kajol wasn’t here. Kajol would never do something like this.

  Bora offered Anirvan a slice of meat. ‘Better than chicken,’ he said. ‘Eat na.’

  Anirvan liked Bora. He was a wild animal, but if you got him to talk he became a different person. He talked about his father whom he called Dragon as when he lost his temper he didn’t stop till he had flayed some of his son’s skin with his metal-studded leather belt. Of his little sister whom he loved very much.

  Anirvan ate the meat. It was soft and slippery. Very soft. Pungent with smoke and mustard oil and full of chilli seeds. He liked it.

  He thought of the prayer hall, a room made of pure white cotton and saffron and the curling smoke of incense.

  Anirvan went to Sushant Kane’s room the next afternoon. He had to return a book. Tess of the D’Urbervilles. He loved the book even though he didn’t really understand it. He could speak in its language if he tried.

  A liquid bond with language. That’s what SrK called it. Anirvan felt special. Sushant Kane lit up something inside him even though everything about it was wrong—his anger and cigarettes and the bitter words that twisted his mouth. But he lit up before Anirvan—he loved Anirvan’s slippery friendship with words. Anirvan longed to make him proud. One day he would. One day, he would speak to the world. He would.

  ‘The boys ate a pigeon last night,’ he told him. He wanted to tell him everything. All the time. Because no matter what you told him, SrK had something strange to say in response.

  ‘What?’ He frowned. He looked ill when he did that.

  ‘Tavi caught a pigeon from the ledge.’ Anirvan said nervously. ‘They roasted it in Lothar’s room.’

  SrK threw the book down. Disgust seeped off his face like cigarette smoke.

  ‘What the bloody…!’ He couldn’t finish the sentence.

  ‘Everybody was hungry,’ Anirvan said quickly. ‘Of course, Tavi and Lothar didn’t even eat their eggs.’

  ‘Bloody crazy,’ SrK finished his sentence.

  ‘Keep growing boys on meagre food. And then push them to play football all the way to nirvana!’ He said, frowning at the wall. ‘They know very well the body has needs. They know it all.’

  Maniacally, he whispered, like he wanted to talk to Anirvan but couldn’t.

  ‘The brotherhood of monks!’ He hissed. ‘The brotherhood of bodily needs!’

  He looked at his watch. Then he took off his home kurta, put on a shirt, and picked up his wallet and cigarettes.

  Fear rose like a cloud around Anirvan, eating and gulping everything. But he couldn’t leave SrK. Like an iron filling, he was stuck to the madman. He wanted to see it all.

  ‘Come with me,’ SrK said.

  They left the hostel and walked past the lawns, and then past all the hostels toward the main ashram stadium, where the big inter-college and state level cricket and football matches happened. Anirvan wondered why they were going to the stadium but he could not ask him. But Sushant Kane turned right just before the stadium and they walked into this narrow lane that wove past the walls. Anirvan had no idea where this lane went as the boys were not allowed to come here.

  He felt excited. And a little anxious. Where were they going? Would he be back in the hostel before Kajol came back? They showered together every evening, meditating under the rain.

  The lane opened onto the main road. Anirvan’s heart beat wildly. Stepping out was against the rule. If a boy was caught, he could be expelled. Didn’t Sushant Kane know that? Was it okay if you went out with a teacher? There were no guards on this side. This gate was more of a crack in the wall. Would someone tell the monks if they
saw them?

  Sushant Kane hailed an autorickshaw.

  ‘Tejpur,’ he told the driver. He nodded and they hopped in.

  He groped inside his pocket and took out his packet of Gold Flake cigarettes and a box of matches. Anirvan had never actually seen him smoke, only smelled cigarettes on him. He had imagined him smoking many times, especially inside the cool darkness of his room. Did he really smoke in there? Anirvan couldn’t imagine what might happen if one of the monks saw him smoking.

  He opened the packet and Anirvan was shocked. There was a dirty bunch of bidis inside. Why would he smoke these horribly rustic rolled up dry leaves stuffed with tobacco? Only coolies and servants smoked bidis. And what kind of a person hid bidis inside a shiny packet of Gold Flake cigarettes?

  He lit the bidi and puffed at it. Bright red fire sparked at the tip and there was a horrible dusty odour. He held the bidi like a railway station coolie might. The auto chugged over potholes—this was a remote suburb and the roads were barely hewn out of the earth. Clouds of dust flew at their face as they rolled along the unmade path.

  They stopped next to a shop. It was a roadside stall with a thatched roof.

  It was a sleepy kind of an eatery. There were odd-shaped tables inside the smoky darkness of the interior. Spiky straw stuck out at places on the wall and dark men in undershirts moved around silently.

  Half the eatery jutted out on the road, where a group of men sat silently with a pack of cards and small glasses of milky tea. SrK and Anirvan went inside and sat at one of the tables.

  ‘Two plates of meat curry and paratha,’ SrK called out.

  Anirvan was hit by delight. Meat curry and paratha from a street stall was an absurd dream at the ashram.

  And then his delight vanished. He remembered.

  ‘I didn’t really eat the pigeon,’ He whispered. ‘I wasn’t hungry.’

  ‘I just had a tiny piece.’ Anirvan couldn’t lie to him. ‘Bora kept asking.’

  ‘Do they really believe they are producing mini-monks? Young men who can live on roots and water and don’t need hot water or electric fans?’ He stared at Anirvan, but he wasn’t talking to him. ‘They are producing animals.’

  ‘Save the world from designer poverty!’ He looked up and it seemed like he was praying, a praying man crying to the sky. ‘Someday you’re going to see those who have nothing to eat. That day you’ll have something real to say.’

  Anirvan didn’t know what to say. His ears felt warm.

  ‘The world is not just incense and flowers and the loving touch,’ SrK said. ‘Loving and caressing and fondling.’ The words flew like spit from his mouth.

  A small boy came with two plates of paratha and two bowls of curry. Pir? Suddenly, Anirvan felt a punch in his brain. Pir, here?

  Pir placed the food on their table and stood there, grinning. He was in his usual khaki shorts and white t-shirt, an old PT uniform the Mission boys had discarded. He didn’t look surprised at all. Would he tell? The next time he was in the Bliss Hall dining room?

  ‘Eat.’ Sushant Kane gestured toward the plate.

  Yogi sat there, frozen.

  Pir stood there, smiling.

  ‘Pir!’ Sushant Kane laughed. ‘Don’t you worry, he’s smarter than you. Sees much and says little.’

  Anirvan had not washed his hands. How could he eat?

  SrK tore into a paratha. ‘Go ahead, eat,’ he said.

  Anirvan rubbed his hands against his pants. Rubbed them hard. He hadn’t really touched anything that dirty. He tore a piece of paratha and dipped it into the gravy. He could not bear to savour the meat. Yet. It was too precious.

  Sushant Kane wrapped a piece of meat in paratha, drowned it in gravy, and put it in his mouth.

  He did the same. As he bit into the meat he knew it was different. He knew the kind. And that it was not goat.

  He stopped chewing. He stared at Sushant Kane. He frowned. ‘What happened?’

  ‘It’s beef,’ he said and resumed chewing. ‘You eat beef, don’t you?’

  It was easier to say ‘beef’. You didn’t have to say ‘cow meat’.

  He nodded. He had eaten beef before. Tutul Gupta brought pasta and meatballs from home sometimes and Yogi always took a few bites when he was his roommate. Yogi’s father had also taken him to Rahmania in Park Street once to have spicy beef curry. That’s how he knew the taste. The flabbier, leathery feel of the meat as opposed to softer, flakier chunks of goat meat.

  But always beef. Never cow meat.

  Beef disgusted his mother. And his grandmother…he couldn’t imagine a world where she knew that he and his father had eaten cow meat. He imagined her still eyes, heavy with tears.

  He would never be able to tell this to Kamal Swami. He would die of shame if the Swami came to know.

  ‘Sure you have.’ Sushant Kane snorted. ‘Guys who smash a pigeon’s head with a padlock and roast it will eat anything!’

  A tiny shiver ran through Anirvan’s spine. How did he know about the padlock? Anirvan hadn’t told him.

  True, they were savages. They had tried to burn that pigeon alive. It didn’t want to burn. This was a breath of the normal. A dusty roadside restaurant, deep-fried paratha and spicy beef curry. The cheap meat. For the poor people who lived in Mosulgaon and other villages in the area.

  He ate. He was hungry. Not just that moment and hour, but for days and months. When you live with hunger for months and months and fill your stomach with a sea of daal and a forest of spinach, you get hungry for the oily stench of meat in a way that shocks and pleases you.

  ‘Kane!’ A voice called out from the darkness of the hotel.

  The man came closer. He was tall and large. He might have once been an athlete. Now muscle and flab blended to hang loosely on him but he still moved with a sinewy smoothness. He came and sat down next to them. ‘The boy from the ashram?’

  ‘Yes.’ Sushant Kane said. ‘A rather interesting boy from the ashram.’

  ‘How’d you whisk him away? Do the sadhus know?’

  Sushant Kane’s face cracked with disgust. As if the food suddenly nauseated him. ‘They had a riot on their hands.’

  ‘Riot?’ The man frowned. ‘At the ashram?’

  ‘Boys versus pigeons,’ Sushant Kane talked and chewed. ‘Boys setting pigeons on fire.’

  The man laughed, sending swirls of booming music up in the air. ‘The little monks! Early start in the cult of animal slaughter!’

  Anirvan could eat no more. He was chewing a cow and he knew it. The hump on the animal’s back loomed large in front of him. The hump rich with meat now in his mouth.

  ‘Big burly boys.’ Sushant Kane wiped his plate clean with the last scrap of paratha. ‘They just want to drown them in a sea of piss-like daal.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about that.’ Suddenly, the man’s face darkened. ‘Plenty of boys from these villages are in the ashram on scholarships. They like the daal there.’

  ‘You must be from the city.’ He narrowed his eyes at Anirvan. ‘Aren’t you?’

  Anirvan nodded.

  ‘I know the food they give you at the ashram,’ the man said. ‘It’s good stuff. I know many boys who study there. But they are all from the villages.’

  Anirvan didn’t know what to say.

  ‘But you guys miss all the fancy noodles and chilli chicken and biryani and chocolates that you get at home every day. Don’t you? No matter how much your parents stuff you every Sunday?’

  Everything grew warm inside Anirvan. This was true and it wasn’t.

  ‘There are boys who would kill to get the food you throw away.’ The man stared at him with dead eyes. ‘Good sport, isn’t it, to see who can throw away the most rice down the drain?’

  How did he know? They had been blue with rage after the shutdown of the cricket match on TV and had longed to devastate the ashram, loot and plunder. Pretending to eat, they had thrown plates and plates of rice down the gutters behind the sink outside the dining hall. Rice and daal and all the
vegetables they had served, carefully, pretending to walk out when the teachers were not looking. Pir had stared at them in wonder. They had thrown away more rice than he had ever seen in his village. The gutter had been white with rice, like a brown shrine covered with flowers.

  Anirvan thought of Pir’s face. The boy who saw more than he said.

  The half-eaten meat curry grew cold before Anirvan. He glanced at Sushant Kane. He was looking at Anirvan. As if he had a question he didn’t know how to ask.

  Anirvan stared at the man.

  ‘But you’ve never lived in the ashram,’ he said. ‘What do you know?’

  ‘I know more than you’ll ever do,’ the man smiled.

  ‘We get up at 5.30 in the morning every day,’ Anirvan said. ‘We run around the fields and do arches and sit-ups and push-ups for forty-five minutes. We come back to our rooms and change into the white dhotis and chadors and go into the prayer hall and sing and pray for another half an hour and then head to the study hall where we crack algebra and chemistry for an hour and a half. And then we have school all day after which we play football to get closer to god. And then we study all evening because the monthlies are always around the corner and then the half-yearly and the annual where we score so high that our math teachers burst with pride.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I know that,’ the man looked at him with sleepy eyes. ‘Papa and mamma leaning over the little geniuses with pasta and meatballs from five-star hotels and chocolates sent over by uncles and aunts in Europe. Such hardship.’

  He looked at Sushant Kane who was puffing urgently at a smelly bidi. ‘I know these boys. From these villages, some from the Sunderban forests, poor tribal boys. They just go around beating a football in the sun while their classmates, these princes get mommies to stuff them with keema paratha while their daddies solve their geometry problems. Fucking hard life.’

  Sushant Kane said nothing. He just puffed at the bidi and flicked smoke on the yellow stains on his empty plate, the drying gravy of the dead cow they had just eaten.

  But it went away. Melted and gone. The dark, smoky interior of that eatery, the bamboo poles that held up the thatched roof, wooden benches that looked like shed snakeskin. Anirvan was back in the prayer hall where there was no yellow beef-stain but the mild laughter of the Happy Bearded One and the mild memory of oysters which The Bearded One ate as it was good for the heart. Or was it the lungs? It was him, Anirvan. Yogi. He sat on the dark, ribbed carpet and floated in the white, meandering hair of incense smoke and there was song around him, even though the prayer hall was totally empty. But his body didn’t touch the carpet, just a cushion of air above it and when he touched his knees he felt the smoothness of the saffron robes and the memory of Kajol’s long eyebrows like a sliver of pain.