Vikram Kapur

People leave home for many reasons. Mine, perhaps, is one of the oldest. It was the desire to reinvent myself that brought me to Delhi in the summer of 1990. I’d been nowhere near a big city, let alone one that was the nation’s capital, and knew nothing about living anywhere except in my hometown of Ashaghar. And I didn’t care. All I wanted was to leave Ashaghar.

Ashaghar means the home of hope in Hindi. In the eighteen years I lived there, I didn’t know whether to think of that as a travesty or a cruel joke. The place would’ve been situated right in the middle of one of India’s poorest states, Bihar, if it had shown up on a map. It never did. The administrators shoved us even more firmly into insignificance by placing the nearest bus stand almost thirty kilometres away and the nearest railway station almost a hundred. There were no television signals or newspapers. No one had home phones. The outside world came in through the post office or the radio and our news went out through letters and telegrams.

We existed in a warren of lanes spread out over a few square kilometres. Within that space was a crumbling school, a ramshackle hospital, a stinky cinema, a dilapidated post office, a run-down bank, and lines of old shops and houses jammed shoulder to shoulder. We were a bicycle town, with a bicycle rickshaw being the only means of public transport. Some people had jeeps or scooters. The hospital had one broken-down ambulance that took forever to get anywhere. The school and bank had a van each. Nobody owned a car and if they had they wouldn’t have known where to drive it since all the roads were unpaved. When the rains failed, which they did most of the time, all that was green and moist fled and a dusty haze settled in the sky. The heat was remorseless. It left you addled, scratchy, fly-bitten, ill-humoured…What it never did was leave you in peace.

So, if Ashaghar was what the home of hope looked like, then hope was in a truly hopeless situation. It was languishing in a place that was thirsty, decrepit, and had been banished so irrevocably to the back of beyond that even the rains had trouble remembering it. Surely hope couldn’t survive in such a place. It had to flee.

And then there was my father.

Papa had waited a long time for a son. (Mummy miscarried twice before me.) Once he had me, he wasted no time. The day after I was born in 1972, he consulted an astrologer on the most opportune time for me to start working in his general merchants’ shop. The astrologer spent a week with my horoscope before declaring the twentieth day after my thirteenth birthday as the most auspicious. I wasn’t there, but I can well imagine how the revelation would have struck Papa.

“What?” he would have gone in his tinny voice. “Surely he can start earlier. I began in my father’s shop when I was eleven.” Only to become silent when the astrologer countered, “He can, but it won’t be the most auspicious day.”

Maybe the astrologer didn’t say it in so many words. But that is the import of what he told Papa. Papa would have loved to call his bluff. But he had good reason not to tempt fate. Mummy was unlikely to get pregnant again. He swallowed his outrage and accepted the astrologer’s recommendation.

No sooner had I returned from school on the appointed day than a bicycle rickshaw announced itself in the alley outside our house to ferry me to the shop. Lakshmi Stores was named after the Hindu goddess of wealth and located right in the heart of Ashaghar. Papa raised its shutter promptly at nine in the morning. He didn’t down it before nine at night. If he had thought that he could get customers, he would have kept it open all night. “I did not close the shop even on the days my parents died,” he’d tell anyone who suggested he take a break.

Lakshmi Stores was a hole-in-the-wall carved out in a narrow alley filled with holes-in-the-wall jostling for customers. A battered glass display case loomed like a barricade towards the front. It was stuffed with packets of biscuits and sagged under the weight of jars crammed with sweets. Papa’s chair was right behind the display case. An ageing table fan blew air in Papa’s face. Another table fan, that was even more elderly than the first one, fought a losing battle against the heat crowding the back of the shop. My stool was placed in its path. I could squat there and do my homework when I was not fetching and carrying. Papa was clear about which duty had precedence. “The shop is your life,” he told me.

Shelves packed with provisions loomed behind me, as well as to my right and left. The ceiling was barely a few feet above my head. The back of Papa’s chair and his head, bald except for a silvery patch of hair at the base of the skull, met my gaze whenever I looked straight ahead. The only light came from a bulb attached to the ceiling.

Thirty minutes in the back of the shop, and my mouth was full of the musty air that had been trapped there since god knows when. A stale smell ran up my nose. I gulped down a mouthful of water every few minutes; I was afraid I’d choke otherwise. My face was hot and sweaty no matter how often I scrubbed it with my handkerchief. When Papa yelled “Vai-bhav” I’d scramble to get what he wanted. He didn’t need to yell. I was no more than eight feet behind him. But he had spent a lifetime yelling at his assistants. His voice knew no other pitch.

Soon the shop was following me everywhere. “What’s that smell?” my classmates would wonder in school. They dragged their desks further away from me in the classroom. Even the teachers wrinkled their noses while handing back homework. I scrubbed myself as hard as I could in the bathroom. But the stink from the back of the shop stuck to me as if it had been grafted on to my skin.

And then the shop infiltrated my dreams. First, the packed shelves would appear, edging closer by the second, until they were so close that I felt as if I was about to be smothered to death by the likes of Tata Salt, Liril Soap and Lal Qilla basmati rice. The ceiling would start to crumble as if it was about to cave in and I’d cry out “Help” to the back of Papa’s head. “Please help me.” Papa’s head would refuse to budge. Instead, his voice would go “Vai-bhav” and add with a mocking laugh “The shop is your life.” I’d wake up with cold sweat on my face and beg every deity I knew to deliver me from such a fate.

Strange as it sounds, it was Papa who helped me plot my escape from Ashaghar.

When I reached my last year of high school, graduation was looming like the day of execution might for a convict on death row. I was supposed to go to work, fulltime, for Papa the day after. I beseeched the deities for a way out of that as frantically as a dead man walking might for a reprieve. My prayers were answered in the most unexpected manner.

Papa had whinged for years about the money he had to dish out to accountants to do the shop’s books. Every year he was forced to squeeze out more. By the time I was in my last year of high school, the amount had bloated so much that he felt he had to do more than merely complain about it.

Every night after dinner, he’d sink in a chair in the drawing room to sit with his jaw loose and his small mouth and beady eyes closed. His gaze seemed to draw itself to his third eye and he resembled a meditating monk who has retreated with his senses into an inner chamber to get to the heart of the matter. Behind the stillness, his mind was hard at work. Weighing options, mulling the cost of this, the benefit of that…It was a few days before he was satisfied. One morning, he informed me that I wasn’t going to be working at Lakshmi Stores after graduation. I was to go to Delhi University to study economics. In three years, I’d come back knowing everything there was to know about accounting and taxes. Then he wouldn’t have to fork out any money to greedy accountants. A knowledge of economics would also be good for the family’s finances. Help make the right decisions. Lakshmi Stores could only prosper as a result.

I had no interest in helping Lakshmi Stores thrive or in fobbing off greedy accountants. It was the word Delhi that exploded in my head. Delhi. I was going to Delhi. I spent the rest of the day salivating at the prospect.

I had as much desire to study economics as to return to the shop in three years. My heart was set on becoming a writer. The next day, I spoke to my English teacher, Arnab Sir, about the best colleges in Delhi University for English literature. He handed me a list. I wrote to get the relevant application forms and filled out as many applications for English literature, as I did for economics, without informing Papa. The acceptance letters arrived on the same day. I shared the one that said I’d been accepted for economics with Papa. I retained the other one that indicated that I’d been admitted to Arnab Sir’s alma mater St Paul’s for English literature. Within a couple of months, I was on my way to Delhi without Papa knowing why I was really going there.

It was very much a deception of its time. Today Papa wouldn’t need to send me to Delhi; he’d have universities closer to home to choose from. In 1990, things were different. Given the pitiful state of higher education in Bihar, Bihari families felt obliged to send their wards to Delhi even though it took two days by train to get there. Furthermore, college fees were paid in person. Papa sent me an money order which I used for my fees and living expenses in Delhi. He had no idea what I was paying for. Today he’d know exactly, because he’d pay the fees through a website. I was reasonably sure that he’d never visit or call the university. Travelling to Delhi meant leaving his beloved Lakshmi Stores for an unacceptable amount of time. Calling Delhi was cumbersome. There were no mobile phones then. The two landlines in Ashaghar—the one in the hospital and the other in the post-office—had been dead for as long as I could remember. No one had bothered to repair the telephone lines in years. In order to ring Delhi, Papa would have to travel down a pot-holed road for eighty kilometres to get to a town with STD phone booths. Even then he couldn’t be sure the call would go through. If we’d had a relative or a family friend in Delhi, he might still have learnt of what I was actually doing there. But we had no one.

Sometimes a voice in my head would wonder if I was doing the right thing. I’d silence it by envisioning the life I’d have if I did what Papa wanted. The only place where I could hope to go in that life was from the back of the shop to the front. Even that would take years; Papa wasn’t planning to retire anytime soon. In the meantime, I’d stay put on a stool in the back of Lakshmi Stores and grow older contemplating the back of his head.

I spent my first night in Delhi in a cheap hostel near the railway station. My room had paint flaking off walls, a bed that groaned each time I turned, and a mildewy stench that refused to die no matter how much air freshener was sprayed to subdue it. The noise of the street batted away late into the night. There were horns blaring in choked traffic, people yelling at each other, stray dogs howling at the moon…I was glad when it was finally morning.

After a quick breakfast, I sought out a real estate broker to enquire about a room to rent. The brokerage was down the street from the hostel. A sole proprietorship run by a chunky, bespectacled man, with a handlebar moustache, who worked from behind a scarred desk. When I said I was looking to rent a room, he asked me my name. After I told him, he fished out a list from a dusty drawer. After slapping away the dust, he studied the list by holding it close to his nose. He crossed out some of the options with a blue ballpoint pen before handing it to me. These are not for you, he said. I was in too much of a hurry to enquire how he’d come to such a determination on the basis of my name. Later, I learned those rooms were located in Muslim neighbourhoods. No city comes without its walls. That day I carried one of Delhi’s in my trouser pocket.

Think of the anticipation surging through you when you went on your first real date. That’s how tingly I was that morning. I was in a new city, I had little money, and I’d never lived on my own. Yet I was euphoric. Not so long ago, I’d been staring at a life of stasis. Now I had an exciting future to behold. But that wasn’t the only source of my giddiness. I was feeling Delhi in a way I’d never felt Ashaghar.

Delhi, in the 1990s, was a city of transplants. If you went back two generations, hardly anybody was from Delhi. First came the waves of Hindus and Sikhs fleeing ethnic cleansing in Pakistan during Partition. Then refugees of every stripe from all over India—the ones escaping poverty, the ones hungry for opportunity, the ones driven out by political violence…Flight was deeply embedded in Delhi’s soul and had turned it into a place where people re-made lives. I was a small-town boy eager to re-imagine himself as a city sophisticate. I embraced this restless urge for reinvention in a way I could never embrace Ashaghar’s yearning for continuity.

In a bid to save money, I stayed away from auto rickshaws and taxis. The day was spent squeezing myself in and out of DTC buses that were yet to be air-conditioned and were packed with sweaty bodies crushed against each other. The mop of black hair on my head was soon drenched with sweat. The searing breeze stung my face, and my throat was parching no matter how much water I downed. Yet I flowed with an enthusiasm as irrepressible as the Delhi dust that refuses to settle even on a still day.

By the afternoon, I needed every bit of that enthusiasm. I’d been told that the places I was visiting were within my budget of five hundred rupees a month. When I got there that wasn’t the case. When I tried to talk the rent down, I was informed that this was Delhi not the back of beyond. Where the rent wasn’t an issue, the fact that I was a college student was. College students didn’t make for desirable tenants. They partied too much, went out at odd hours of the night… They were trouble.

Round mid-afternoon, I encountered a home owner who inspected me with hooded eyes. “Are you a Sikh?” he asked.

I was surprised. I didn’t have a turban or a beard. “Do I look like a Sikh?”

“These days many of them are pretending to be normal people, cutting off their hair, shaving off their beards. One must be careful. The last thing I want in my house is a terrorist.”

That was my first inkling of how much Delhi had come to resent its Sikhs. There wasn’t a single Sikh in Ashaghar. There the Sikh militancy existed as a remote news item that sounded on the radio when a bomb went off or someone important was gunned down. In Delhi, it was as palpable as a gun held to your head. Less than a decade had passed since Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had been assassinated by two Sikh bodyguards in the heart of Delhi. A day after the assassination, an army of vengeful goons took to the streets to teach the Sikhs a lesson. Within a few days, they massacred thousands and burned down their homes and businesses. Delhi had borne the brunt of militant anger since then. Gun-toting policemen prowled its streets. Metal detectors frisked outside its buildings. Police barricades sprang up after dark.

“I’m not a Sikh,” I said.

But the man had made up his mind. He said no with a shake of his head.

As I made my way to the next place on my list, I decided to point out that I wasn’t a Sikh upfront by indicating that I didn’t come from Punjab.

“I’m from Bihar,” I told my potential landlord.

He glared at me. “You Biharis are a bunch of thugs. Get going before I have you thrown out.”

As I gawked at him, he mistook my amazement for obstinacy. “Purshottam, Suresh,” he called out.

I beat it before the reinforcements arrived.