India: A Million Mutinies Now

  The leader, telling the story, repeated those words two or three times. He hadn’t made many gestures so far; but now he acted out the small, back-and-forth stabs over the kneeling man’s shoulders.

  It was a big moment for the gang, that moment of revenge, with the slasher embracing the leader’s feet. Vithal and another man seconded what the leader said, and they and others stressed the sequel. The slasher, after that incident, had ceased to be a man. He became ridiculous; no one was afraid of him; he had to be dropped from his gang, and was now a nobody in Bombay, with no one ready to take him in.

  ‘Vithal is all right,’ the leader said. ‘That hand is all right. It can use a knife.’ And then, as though we were colleagues and he was talking to me in an allusive way of things we both knew (and also to explain a gap in his story), he said, ‘I like a knife. It’s surer. You can’t be sure with a gun. You fire, you think the man is dead, but the bullet hits the ribs.’

  He told a story of an attack they had made on a rival gang one Christmas at a funeral. They had gone among them with their knives. They had taken the other people by surprise, and they had done a lot of damage before the other mourners even knew what was happening.

  One of the things that had thrown me at the beginning – apart from the light and the number of people in the room – was the idea I had had, perhaps from a misunderstanding of something Ajit had said, that the people I was among were Muslims. I had begun to talk to them as though they were Muslims, and had then found out that they were Hindus, with their own ways of communal feeling.

  So far, the leader had done most of the talking. But when I asked about the Muslims in the gangs, Vithal said he didn’t trust the Muslims in his own gang and preferred not to work with them. The Muslim gangsters came from poor areas. They, the people in the room, were ‘middle-class people’. They came from this middle-class suburb of Dadar, like the great Indian cricketers, Gavaskar, Patil, Shastri. Vithal, slowly bandaging up his mangled hand again, looking down at it without apparent emotion, said, as though making an old joke, ‘It’s something to do with the water.’

  The Muslims turned to crime, Vithal and the others said, because their values were lower. The Muslims had more than one wife and they had very large families. And, in a curious inversion of pride, the men in the room said that while Muslim gangsters were heroes to the Muslim community, Hindu gangsters like themselves were outcasts.

  Though outcasts, they were religious. They felt protected by the deity of a temple, Santoshi Mata. She was a version of Durga or Kali, the goddess of power.

  The leader said with perfect seriousness, ‘She’s the goddess of the victory of good over bad.’

  They were religious people: they wanted that known. It was their policy, for instance, never to harass the poor.

  The leader said, ‘If you do that, the poor will curse you. And the curse of the poor is a very damaging thing.’

  They slept in different places every night; they had their safe houses, like the one we were in now. No one knew where the other slept. They met in different places every day. They had ways of communicating. Every day when they got up they waited for news, of the gang war, of the way certain jobs had gone. And the leader said he had recently got married. The girl had been dazzled by the glamour of the life.

  Before we left, the leader asked Ajit for 15 copies of a newspaper of a certain date. There was an article about him, or an article in which he was mentioned, in the issue he wanted.

  Publicity like that, recognition like that, was precious to him; it was his link to the world outside. As a Hindu outlaw, still deep in his faith, with his Hindu community still a focus for some of his pride, he was really a lost man. Things were desperate for him and Vithal and many of the others. They couldn’t withdraw from the life; they couldn’t hide. To do so, they would have to go far away, to the other side of India, beyond the reach of the gangs. Everyone among them now had something to answer for. What the leader had prophesied for himself held for them all: they would all die from police bullets.

  It was early evening when Ajit and I went out into the streets again. The street lamps in the residential area fell yellow on trees and cast multiple shadows. The well-stocked shops and stalls in the main roads were brightly lit. From what we had heard, some of the stalls were receiving protection; it gave a new character to the scene.

  The men we had been among had an almost cinematic idea of their roles, and had perhaps modelled themselves on certain film stars. It was hard, while they talked, and while one was in their presence, absolutely to believe in what they said, it was so much like something out of a film or a book about gangs and crime and murder. They had been boasting. But, according to Ajit, much of what they said was true. The men in that room had been responsible for eight killings. Vithal, with the chopped hand, was especially deadly.

  And they were all doomed. The gangsters at the top, the men the newspapers and magazines called the dons, could be famous public figures, could be courted by political parties and film people, could put their money into the making of films, could be absorbed into the glamour of Bombay. But the men below, the men in the middle, like the men we had been among, were doomed.

  They had fallen as children for the life of crime. As children, Ajit said, they would have been attracted by the glamour of the famous criminals in their area, who might have a meal in a restaurant and not pay, who might stop at a fruit stall and choose a fruit and walk away without paying: gestures of style. It was a Bombay-given idea of style for which those men had thrown away their lives: an idea of style with elements of pathos to the outsider, style that was like an expression of the stress and nerves of the city of small spaces: style, a human need, which Anwar felt in his colony, and Mr Ghate’s sister had felt in her chawl.

  *

  The gangsters made offerings to the temple of Santoshi Mata. Mr Ghate’s sister – though expelled from her family for having gone against custom and contracted a love match – had married an ayurvedic doctor, someone, that is, who was full of traditional lore. However much they had to be modified in the city, the rituals of the past adhered to many people, and there was a need in Bombay for men who knew about rituals.

  That was why the pujari, the professional performer of pujas, had come to Bombay. He came from the state to the south of Maharashtra. He belonged to the priestly group of the Chitrapur Saraswat brahmins. More particularly, he belonged to one of the seven priestly families attached to a famous temple where there was a deity that had been revered for more than 300 years.

  It could be said that the pujari had grown up in an ashram. The pujari’s father had been a pujari, and his father before him – that was as far as the pujari could trace his ancestry. The pujari had lost his father at the age of ten, but it had been a joint family, and the ten-year-old boy had been instructed in pujas and rituals and texts by his father’s brothers.

  To belong to a priestly family was to have distinction in the community, but it didn’t mean having money. Very little hard cash came the way of the pujaris attached to the temple, and the boy had never gone away for a holiday. His boyhood had been spent almost completely in the temple, and his studies there had been only of religious matters. Towards the end of his time of study, a secular modern college had been started in the town, but the pujari had gone there for only one year. So he really hadn’t had much modern education; and when the time came for him to start earning a living, there was no modern job he could do.

  Like his father and grandfather, he could only be a pujari. It was hard. The seven priestly families – joint families – had produced a lot of pujaris, and there simply wasn’t the work for all of them locally. Matters were made worse because very many people of the local Saraswat brahmin community had migrated to Bombay.

  The young pujari decided to follow them, to see what might come his way in Bombay. Bombay was an unwelcoming city, but the pujari had some luck. He had an aunt in the city, and he was able to stay with her for a year. That couldn’t be reg
arded as a fixed arrangement, though, because the aunt had a son who was close to the age of marriage; this son would be bringing home his bride when he got married, and the pujari would have to go somewhere else. Still, for the time being, there was a place to stay.

  And there was also work. Since the temple from which the pujari had come was famous in the community, and since, in fact, the pujari’s family was known to people who had made pilgrimages to the temple, and there were people in Bombay who had known the pujari as a child, there was no question – as with a new lawyer, say, waiting for a brief – of the pujari having to hang around and wait for people to come and ask him to do the rites to bless a new flat or cleanse it of its former spirits. He began to do little pujas almost as soon as he arrived in the big city.

  He was a shy young man of twenty-four, still with country ways and temple ways. When he did pujas for people in those early days, and they asked what the fees were, he would brush aside the subject of money and say he left it to them. People took advantage of this, but in the beginning he didn’t know. When he realized what was happening he decided to standardize the fees. When he left it to people to pay what they thought fit, they would give him as little as 350 rupees for a wedding – which meant chanting verses solidly for six hours, and doing complicated things all the while. Nowadays his fixed charge for a wedding was 1000 rupees, and there were no complaints.

  So he settled into Bombay, built up his practice, and when after a year or so his aunt’s son did get married, the pujari was able to move out without suffering hardship. He became a ‘paying guest’. This was a special Bombay condition: it meant he rented sleeping room or space in somebody’s apartment, in a room or loft. It was enough for him.

  He discovered that, as a professional pujari in Bombay, he had certain advantages. There were five pujaris from the community in Bombay. Two were older men; a third had learned the business in Bombay from his father. The young pujari, still fresh from the temple source, as it were, had a certain appeal for the old-fashioned or conservative folk. Only one pujari was younger.

  There was a sixth pujari in Bombay, but he was so famous and established, so grand, his methods so modern, that he could be considered to be in quite another category. This pujari had so adjusted old ritual to the pace of Bombay life that he could recite the complete wedding verses – which normally took six hours – in three and a half hours. This pujari was sixty-three years old, and because of his speed with the verses he was known as The Electric Pujari’. This man had also taped certain pujas – taped the verses connected with the pujas – and marketed them to the community abroad, in various oil states in the Persian Gulf, mainly. He was said to charge 1000 rupees for a wedding tape, and proportionate sums for shorter pujas. He had done so very well that – according to the story – he and his wife (an officer in a bank) had gone on a long holiday trip to London and the United States; and even on this trip – success attracting success – the Electric Pujari had performed three marriages and three thread ceremonies. He was so important in Bombay now, he had become a Shiv Sena leader, and had put money into a Marathi-language film.

  Of the Electric Pujari the young pujari said, ‘He’s an enterprising fellow.’ But the young pujari didn’t want to compete with this old lion. He didn’t want to do puja tapes. He was content doing things in the old-fashioned way he did them. He thought there were people who appreciated this way. Because of the Bombay traffic – he could spend hours every day just getting from place to place – he could do no more than three pujas a day, and that was enough for him.

  He made on an average 1000 rupees a month (on an average: weddings didn’t come every month), and he was content. There were also the food gifts: the rice and coconuts and fruit and pulses, things needed in pujas as consecrated offerings: a portion of the too-abundant store laid out by the devotee used up in the ritual itself, the rest given to the pujari to take away. So, going from house to house every day (living the kind of life the Jain munis lived in traffic-ridden Bombay, finding food at the homes of the faithful), it must have seemed to the pujari that in Bombay the world had been made whole again for him, after the scarcities of the far-away temple.

  He was a small, even dainty man of thirty, not much above five feet. He was sweet-faced, with a little moustache and the pale skin of his community, and he was dressed in white. His dhoti had a light-brown edging. He wore a necklace of sandalwood beads, and he had a white nylon shopping bag for his belongings. His voice was as soft as his smile and his eyes. He was the picture of the serene and gentle brahmin: he looked as content and unfussed as he said he was.

  His talk of pujas and gifts of food – and that nylon bag or sack to take away offerings, no doubt – brought back memories. There had been so many pujas in my grandmother’s family in Trinidad when I was a child, so many ritual readings from the scriptures and the epics. They had given us less the idea of what we were than the idea that in Trinidad we were apart. These readings – sometimes going on for days – had been in a language I didn’t understand. I remembered them as holiday occasions, punctuated – at certain stages of the ritual, when clarified butter and raw brown sugar fed and sweetened the sacrificial fire – by the ringing of bells, the blowing of conches, the play of cymbals.

  These occasions had fixed in me the idea of the privilege of pundits. They were the star performers on these occasions, and everything was done to pamper them. The best blankets or sheets were spread for them to sit on; the best food was kept for them, and served to them in state at the end. Afterwards, when the religious moment had ceased, had turned to ashes, as it were, and the pundits were no longer strictly on show, it remained their privilege discreetly to go and gather up the coins that had been thrown on the sacred fire on the decorated shrine, as well as the coins that had been thrown on the brass plate with burning camphor – emblem of the sacred fire – that had been taken around the people watching the ceremony: you threw your coin on the plate, passed your fingers through the camphor flame and took your fingers to your forehead.

  To me, they were memories from far back, almost from another life. And here they were whole, in an unlikely setting. I met the pujari in Nandini’s apartment. Nandini was a journalist who worked for an advertising magazine. She was of the community of the pujari. She herself had no belief in rituals and no need of them, but the pujari seemed still to be called upon on certain occasions by her family. The apartment was in the neighbourhood of Dadar. It was an apartment in a block – four floors, 10 apartments on each floor – and we were on an upper floor: a respectable middle-class Bombay apartment: verandah, front room, back room.

  With a memory of the excitement I had felt as a child at the idea of money being raked out from the warm ashes of the shrine, and coins being picked up warm from the plate with the burning camphor, I asked the pujari whether people in his community put money on the plate with the burning camphor. He said the custom didn’t exist in his community. But sometimes people from outside the community put money on the plate when the sacred fire was taken round, and then even people in the community, not wishing to be outfaced, followed suit – and all that money was his.

  He told me about the deity of the temple-and-ashram, the math, where he had grown up. The deity there was the Lord Bhavani Shankar. Who was he? The friend of Lord Shiva. What were his attributes? The pujari behaved as though I was testing him. Bhavani Shankar, he said, was a reincarnation of Yama, the Lord of Death.

  He said, ‘You pray to him so that the soul may rest in peace.’

  ‘Isn’t that a Christian idea?’

  It wasn’t the Christian idea; he didn’t seem to know the Christian idea. He talked on in his soft way, with his smile and his bright eyes, and Nandini interpreted.

  ‘Our community believes in the soul, the atma, that merges with the Lord.’ And almost at once – he was a pujari, a performer of ritual, rather than a guru or philosopher or theologian – he outlined, again as though he felt he was being tested, the ritual that had to be pe
rformed after a death. ‘On the 14th day after a person dies you have a ceremony where you have to prepare all kinds of food – certain dishes in addition to the dishes the dead person liked – and there is an elaborate puja. After the puja you put all the dishes on a plantain leaf and you leave it out in the open. The expectation is that a crow will come and peck at what is laid out on the plantain leaf – Indian crows are rapacious and swift and watchful – ‘and we take that as a symbol of the soul merging with the infinite.’

  That was the kind of thing he had studied at the temple. It was an immense course of study. There were rituals at death; there were rituals at birth.

  ‘There is a cradling ceremony. You have then to refer to the Panchang. That’s an ancient text; it’s printed now in various Indian languages. You refer to that text to cast a horoscope and find a name. That’s common Hindu practice. It isn’t restricted to our community. I had to learn that, and I had to learn the details of all the other ceremonies. Let’s suppose you move into a new apartment. You have to exorcize the spirits that are there. The new apartment should be pure. To achieve that, again you have to go through quite an elaborate puja. When a child is eight there is a thread ceremony. And there is the wedding ceremony, of course – six hours, with the pujari chanting all the time.’