Serious Men

Ayyan’s mind, inescapably, went to what was to happen in just a few hours. He felt a bit nervous, and he liked the way his fingers quivered.
    That evening, as Ayyan went in the Institute’s shuttle bus to the Churchgate station, he looked at the moronic city that was in the hysteria of going home. As though everyone here were going home for the first time. In the twilight that was now the colour of dust, in the fury of horns that was a national language because honking had telegraphic properties, cars stood stranded all around the bus like ants carrying the corpse of a caterpillar. Where a bumper ended and another began, in those crevices, people crossed the road and motorbikes wobbled through, honking. There was a caste system even on the roads. The cars, their faces frowning in a superior way through the bonnet grilles, were the Brahmins. They were higher than the motorcycles who were higher than the pedestrians. The cycles were lowest of the low. Even the pedestrians pretended that they didn’t see them. The bus had to be something in this structure, and Ayyan decided it was him. Lowly, but formidable and beyond torment. In any given situation in this country, Ayyan thought with a chuckle that did not surface, someone was the Brahmin and someone was the Untouchable.
    As the bus inched through the evening life, the traffic grew. There was no space on the road any more. A man on a bike was riding on the pavement. When he tried to plunge into the road, a car hit him. He fell down but managed to get up. He looked shocked. That, Ayyan loved. After riding like a moron all over the place, observe the face of an Indian when he crashes. He is stunned.
    This country had become a circus, and that was fair. WhatAyyan’s forefathers were once to the Brahmins, the Brahmins were today to the world. They and the other privileged, all of whom he recognized only as the Brahmins, had become miserable backward clowns in the discreet eyes of the white man. And there lay the revenge of the Dalits. They were the nation now, and they oppressed the Brahmins by erecting an incurable commotion on the streets. The Brahmins had nowhere to go now but to suffer in silence or to flee to nonvegetarian lands. Their women could no longer walk on the streets in peace. Pale boys elbowed their breasts.
    He looked without emotion at the tall unattainable apartment blocks that seemed to rise suddenly. In the pathetic clarity of hope that he once had in his early youth, he used to tell himself that a day would come when he would live in one of those buildings, that he too would get home in a lift. He knew those homes very well, he knew those lives. After all, he was once a door-to-door salesman for Eureka Forbes vacuum cleaners.
    A job at the Eureka Forbes was not only heralded then as the final frontier in marketing but also glorified in underground novels as an assignment that led robust young men to the homes of hungry housewives, whose saris sometimes slipped off their blouses as they innocently enquired in how many colours the vacuum cleaners came, or their nightgowns rose in the tempest of a table fan, or they answered the door in a wet towel that they flung away upon the incandescent sight of the Eureka Forbes salesman. The roadside stalls too, where the odorous salesmen sipped tea, were replete with the legend of insatiable housewives. He never encountered such women, but in those homes he learnt about the charmed lives of the rich. He saw women group together and meditate and even chant, ‘I am beautiful.’ Men who were nothing without their inheritances dedicated to themselves a song called ‘My Way’. And he figured through the many pieces of conversations he overheard in those homes that there were four Beatles, and that you had to clap at the incipient guitar piece of ‘Hotel California’. He also saw men scoop the shit of their babies, and once he even saw a man in an apron take the dishesfrom the dining-table to the kitchen sink. They were the new men. In time, their numbers increased and he saw them everywhere now, standing defeated next to their glowing women. Ayyan often told the peons of the Institute, ‘These days, men live like men only in the homes of the poor.’
    At the Colaba causeway, as the bus stood stranded in a jam, he saw kids beg near the window of a taxi. The young couple inside sat with strong defiant faces. How they would have loved to give a rupee, but they had read investigative stories that appeared at