|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready…
|
Delhi Does Not Care
Delhi received them the way Delhi receives everyone: without noticing.
The bus pulled into Kashmiri Gate terminal at four-forty in the afternoon. The terminal was a vast paved area under a partial roof, full of buses that arrived and departed without acknowledgment of each other, surrounded by a crowd performing several hundred different transactions simultaneously: buying, selling, loading, unloading, arguing, embracing, waiting, rushing. The noise was a physical thing. It had layers — the deep bass of diesel engines, the mid-register of raised voices, the sharp treble of horns and the high thin sound of a child crying somewhere in the crowd. The smell was diesel and food and the particular smell of many human bodies in heat, and underneath everything, something else — the smell of the city itself, a mineral human industrial smell that would, over time, become entirely familiar but that on first encounter registered as its own kind of overwhelming.
They stood at the edge of the platform with their bags.
The crowd moved around them and past them and through them. Nobody looked at them. Nobody acknowledged their existence. A porter knocked Arjun’s shoulder with a loaded cart and kept moving without looking back. A woman with three children pushed past Meera. A man on a bicycle threaded through the pedestrians, nearly clipping Meera’s bag.
Arjun had been to Lucknow once, for a school trip. He had thought that prepared him for a city. It had not.
Delhi was not a larger version of anywhere he had been. It was a different category of place entirely — a city that operated by different physics, in which individual people were very small, in which the scale of everything was calibrated to something beyond the human, in which the default assumption was not that you would be helped or noticed but that you would be neither, and that this was not unkind but simply honest, simply the nature of the transaction.
He looked at Meera.
She was looking around with a systematic attention, turning her head slowly in an arc, taking in the whole panorama of the terminal. She was doing what she had always done with new problems: studying the shape of it before attempting anything.
“We need to find the address,”
she said.
“Yes.”
“Do you know how to ask?”
“I will ask.”
He asked three people before one of them stopped long enough to explain. The address Shyam Lal had given him — the coaching institute in Paharganj — was two kilometers away. There was a bus. It cost two rupees each.
They took the bus. Four rupees spent. The journey took forty minutes in traffic. They stood holding the metal poles, their bags between their feet, the city unrolling outside the scratched windows. Delhi in the evening was a city of movement — the great horizontal movement of millions of people going from one place to another, converging on roads that were not designed for this volume and had developed a complex informal protocol of merges and yields that worked by a logic intelligible only to the initiated.
They passed markets and mosques and temples and construction sites and parks and apartment buildings of varying states of maintenance and small shops of every conceivable kind. Through it all, the city gave no indication of caring that they were in it.
~ ~ ~
Ramesh Chand opened the door of the flat on the third floor of the building in Paharganj and looked at them with the measured gaze of someone who had seen many hopeful young people arrive at his door and had learned exactly how many of them had what was needed and how many did not. He was thin, perhaps fifty-five, with reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and a pen behind one ear.
“Shyam Lal sent you,”
he said. Not a question.
“Yes, sir.”
“Your board marks.”
“94.6 percent.”
He looked at Arjun. Then at Meera.
“And you?”
“I am not applying for coaching,”
Meera said.
Something shifted in his expression. Barely.
“Her marks were 96.2,”
Arjun said.
Ramesh Chand held on Meera for a moment.
“First in the district,”
he said.
“Yes,”
Meera said.
A pause. He looked at them both.
“Three hundred rupees per month. Not negotiable. Not installment. First of the month, in full. I have two other students this year. Evening sessions, six to nine. The rest is your own time. You will need accommodation.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ask for Raju, the chai-wala, on the main road, Paharganj crossing. Tell him I sent you. He knows all the rooms in this area.”
He looked at them one more time.
“You are very young,”
he said.
“Yes,”
Arjun said.
“Good. I would rather teach young and wrong than old and fixed. Wrong can be corrected. Fixed cannot.”
He went back inside and closed the door.
~ ~ ~
Raju the chai-wala knew every room in a three-street radius. He walked them — while managing his stall, one eye on the gas ring and the milk pan — to a building around a corner, and introduced them to Mrs. Kapoor, who owned three rooms on her second floor and rented them cheaply because the staircase was difficult and the plumbing was unreliable.
The room was at the end of the corridor. Ten feet by twelve. A single window that looked at a grey cement wall. Walls discolored by old water stains in two corners. Bare cement floor. A wooden platform along one wall that served as a bed. A rusted ceiling fan with one blade slightly warped, which meant it shook when it ran. A single bare light bulb on a cord. No furniture.
The bathroom was shared. At the end of the corridor. Water available six to nine morning, four to six evening. No other times.
Two hundred and fifty rupees per month.
Arjun did the arithmetic in his head. Coaching: three hundred. Room: two hundred and fifty. Food, minimal: one hundred and fifty. Books: two hundred minimum, soon. Total needed immediately: nine hundred.
Total available: one hundred and twenty rupees.
The gap was not a gap. It was a chasm.
Meera said:
“We will have the first month’s payment for you by Wednesday.”
Mrs. Kapoor looked at them both.
“Wednesday,”
she repeated.
“Wednesday,”
Meera confirmed.
They shook hands. When Mrs. Kapoor left, Arjun turned to Meera.
“Wednesday is four days. We have one hundred and twenty rupees.”
“I know the numbers. I will solve the numbers.”
“How?”
She put down her bag on the wooden platform. She sat on it. She looked at the room — the stained walls, the bare floor, the bent fan blade, the window with its grey wall outside.
Then she looked at Arjun.
“Tomorrow I will find work.”
~ ~ ~
That first night in Delhi, they ate rice and salt.
Meera had found a small shop near the building and bought the cheapest white rice, a paper envelope of salt, a handful of jeera — eleven rupees total. She borrowed a small pot and a kerosene stove from their neighbor in the corridor, a young man from Bihar named Dilip who worked in a garment factory and who had looked at them both with the recognition of someone who had arrived in Delhi in similar circumstances two years earlier.
“First night,”
he had said, when she knocked and explained.
“Yes,”
she said.
“Come.”
He handed over the pot and stove with the easy generosity of the genuinely poor, who know both the cost and the importance of what they give.
Meera cooked in the corridor outside their door. She boiled the rice until just soft, added salt and jeera, and carried both portions into the room in the two tin cups they had brought from home.
They sat on the wooden platform. The bent fan turned above them, shuddering on its axis. Outside the window, the grey wall. Through the walls, the sounds of other people’s evenings — someone’s television, a child being scolded, the distant percussion of a cooking pan.
Arjun looked at the rice in the tin cup. He thought of his mother’s kitchen. Of the smell of her cooking. He thought of Durga, who had no idea where he was tonight. Something in his chest constricted.
Meera noticed.
“Here,”
she said, and she touched his arm once, lightly.
“This is the beginning. Not the end. The beginning.”
“It does not feel like a beginning.”
“Beginnings rarely do.”
She ate her rice with the focused efficiency she brought to everything necessary. He watched her.
“Meera.”
“Hmm.”
“I will not waste this.”
She looked at him. Not over the rim of her cup — she set it down and turned and looked at him fully.
“I know you won’t,”
she said.
Then:
“Next week we will have dal.”
“And after that?”
“After that, when you get into AIIMS, we will have everything.”
The bare bulb cast a yellowish circle on the bare cement floor. Outside, Delhi was enormous and indifferent. And in the smallest room of the smallest building on a small street of that enormous city, two people sat on a wooden platform eating rice and salt and deciding, quietly, without ceremony, that they were going to survive it.
They finished eating. They lay down on the wooden platform, their bags as pillows, the single blanket between them.
The fan turned above them, shuddering.
Delhi went on outside.
And they slept.
You May Love to Read
BEHIND HIS WHITE COAT A Story of Love Chapter 1
BEHIND HIS WHITE COAT A Story of Love (Chapter -2)
BEHIND HIS WHITE COAT A Story of Love (Chapter -3)