Battle for Bittora Read online

  Battle for Bittora

  ANUJA CHAUHAN

  HarperCollins Publishers India

  ***

  For my parents,

  Pushpa and Revti Raman.

  Thank you for the roots. Thank you for the wings.

  ***

  1

  'Jinni, I am so not imagining this!' said Gaiman Tagore Rumi earnestly, his sensitive face glowing with boyish zeal. 'The telltale signs are everywhere, you just have to read them! The flashy crotch-hugging costumes, hidden under conventional attire. The butts-encased-in-skintight-latex. The obsession with secrecy, the leading of a double life, the paranoia about being found out. Trust me ya, I know that every superhero is a homosexual struggling to break free from the shackles of society!'

  I stared at him, intensely irritated. I love my superheroes. I mean, I fantasize about them. And I deeply resented the way Gaiman Tagore Rumi was trying to take them away from single girls like me, appropriating them for the LGBT club instead.

  'You're just seeing what you want to see, Rumi!' I said fiercely. 'And anyway, Bruce Wayne is a total playboy. He does tons of chicks. He can't possibly be faking that.'

  A secretive know-it-all expression crossed Rumi's mobile face.

  'Ah, Brute Wayne,' he murmured musingly. 'I've always felt his chemistry with those silly girls was nothing compared to his chemistry with Robin.'

  Gross. He'd just destroyed all of Gotham for me. Trying to shut out the horrid image of Batman and the Boy Wonder in a clinch in the interior of Batmobile, I said, with more assurance than I felt, 'That's just silly. And what about Spidey, huh? He's all man. And he's into a steady scene with MJ - he's loved her all his life!'

  Rumi gave a throaty laugh. 'But that constant fssssskkch fssssskkch spurting of sticky grey stuff into the air is thoda sa phallic, don't you think?'

  I gasped. 'Those are webs!'

  He shrugged his thin shoulders. 'Then they're symbolic of his desire to entrap as many men as possible into the sticky web of his want.'

  'Or women,' I replied doggedly. 'Spurting web goo doesn't mean you're gay. Just that you're, you know, full of the stuff and bursting your seams a little. Anyway, Superman's dead straight.'

  Rumi threw me a quizzical look. 'Yeah, right,' he said. 'That's why Clark Kent always zips into a telephone booth to change. He dives in, wearing a boring pin-striped suit - and emerges resplendent in brightly coloured, skintight, nipple-enhancing lycra, complete with underwear on top! That's clear symbolism for coming out of the closet! Come on ya, it's as plain as the nose on your face.'

  'My nose isn't plain,' I told him crossly.

  He screwed up his face and looked at me critically. 'You're right,' he concurred finally, before hunching over his computer monitor again. Your nose is geometrically quite sound. It's your mouth that's a little, uh, excessive.'

  He was right, of course. My mouth is definitely XXL. In profile, it actually sticks out a little more than my nose. But less than my boobs, thank god. My mouth is also really wide. In fact, it's so wide that I look like one of those stupid, smiling, Disneyland dolphins. You know, the bright-eyed, over-friendly ones who are always leaping out of the water, frantic for fish. And it gets worse when I smile. When I was little, my mother used to have nightmares that I smiled so wide that the two ends of the smile met at the back of my head and made the top half of my head fall off. How scary is that?

  Anyway, how did we get to the subject of my mouth? I spun Rumi's chair around till he faced me.

  'Don't try to change the subject!' I charged him. 'You're just irritated because I said your stupid bathroom potty germs need some work. And it's true. They do need work. They're supposed to strike terror in every housewife's heart, make her jump out of her sofa, go to the kirana and buy a year's supply of Harpic. Right now, they look about as scary as Alok Nath in Hum Aapke Hain Kaun. Which is why I told you to make 'em look slimy and evil - and instead of taking feedback in a constructive, mature way, you're retaliating by launching this completely arbitrary attack on all my favourite superheroes.'

  Rumi leaned back in his chair and surveyed me critically. This was not a good move because the so-called orthopeidically correct swivel chairs at Pixel Animation - where we both work in the 3-D animation division - are highly unpredictable and have a tendency to keel over if you lean back too far.

  'Your problem, Jinni,' he told me in this very superior way, crossing his turquoise corduroy-encased legs, 'is that you have an entirely conventional mind. Your imagination isn't very... original.'

  Hello, just because I don't while away the whole working day downloading gay Avatar porn off the net - thus giving a whole new spin to the phrase blue film - doesn't mean I'm not original!

  'At least my name is original,' I shot back, stung. (This, because Rumi's actually made up his own name, mixing the names of the three creative artists he admires the most - Neil Gaiman, the dude who wrote the Sandman comics, Bengali literateur Rabindranath Tagore and the mystic Sufi poet Rumi. Which makes me positive that his real name is something totally mundane, like Ravi Bhalla.)

  'Unfortunately, so's your haircut,' he murmured, rolling his eyes and twiddling his (tweezed?) eyebrows.

  I touched my hair defensively, scowling. Everyone at work makes fun of my carefully-casual, unruly mop of hair. Just because I pay large sums of money to get it styled every month - by a dark dude with blonde streaks in a Bandra parlour called Percy's Cuts and Blow Jobs. Percy calls my hairstyle the Half-blown Rosebud Cut, claims that it's inspired by Japanese manga comics, and assures me glibly that its short, spontaneous bounciness shows off my long neck, brings out the point of my chin and the rosiness of my skin, and makes my luxuriantly lashed black eyes 'twinkal'. According to the Pixel gang, however, it looks like he randomly attacks me with a set of gardening shears every month.

  'You concentrate on your kitaanus,' I advised Rumi coldly. 'I am ordering pizza. We should be all done by three in the morning, max.'

  I ordered the pizza, tucked my feet under my butt and opened the Harpic Kitaanus file.

  I soon figured out what was wrong. He'd made the eyes too big. That's why they were looking cutesy. The trick is to give them tiny eyes, low idiot foreheads, huge snout-like noses, slavering, downward-sloping mouths and weak chins. I know this because, in the two short years that I've been working at Pixel Animation, the largest animation and special effects studio in Mumbai, I've animated dozens of germs and kitaanus. I have even earned the somewhat dubious distinction of being the best damn animator of germs, khich-khich, mosquitoes, cockroaches, larvae, viruses and bacteria in the city of Mumbai. In companies like Reckitt-Benckiser - the makers of Dettol and Harpic - I am practically a celebrity.

  Jinni Pande, Kitaanu Queen.

  I sighed and rumpled my hair a bit more.

  In the beginning I had loved my job. I'd lapped up all the stuff the senior guys at Pixel had told me: Respect the kitaanus, Jinni. The battle of the kitaanu against the cleaning agent -be it medicated shampoo or nasal decongestant or toilet bowl cleaner - is the battle of Good against Evil. The Light triumphs, the Dark side is vanquished and crawls away to lick its wounds and plan revenge. It's like Spidey's fight for Good on the mean streets of New York. Or like Batman taking on all the Evil guys in Gotham City.

  More like Gotham Shitty, I thought sourly as I added more warts to the kitaanus in the toilet bowl. The truth is less noble. Pixel just has to do a lot of kitaanu animation (instead of, you know, hardcore animation stuff like Inception or 300 or Tim Burton's Alice or whatever) because kitaanus - along with cheesy special effects for mythological TV serials like Mahabharata -are our bread and butter.

  I'd been slaving away for ages, sucking on the foul Hajmola golis that were the only edible thing
in the office, when we finally heard someone shuffling about in the deserted reception area.

  'It's the pizza,' I told Rumi, as my stomach rumbled in anticipation. 'Go sign for it, quick.'

  He came back three minutes later, a slightly stunned expression on his face. 'There's somebody outside,' he said faintly, 'asking for a Sarojini Pande. Uh, dude, is that your real name or something?'

  I nodded, going a little red. Just my luck - somebody from my bank or my mobile phone billing company had wandered into office and ousted my old-fashioned name. It's such a lame name. It was given to me by my grandfather. He was totally into Sarojini Naidu, the famous freedom fighter and poet, the 'Nightingale of India', you know. Bauji loved all these really sappy, tinkling 'lyrical' poems she wrote. Like,

  Bangle sellers are we who bear

  Our shining loads to the temple fair.

  Who will buy these delicate, bright

  Rainbow tinted circles of light?

  Lustrous tokens of radiant lives,

  For happy daughters and happy wives.

  I mean, was that all she could find to write about during the freedom struggle? Bangle sellers? Didn't she want to write rousing, gritty, Britain-bashing poems with plenty of blood and gore and beheadings in them? Really, if I had to be named after some old poetess, I would've preferred Subhadra Kumari Chauhan. Her 'Jhansi ki Rani'is my best poem ever.

  'Yeah, that's my official name,' I told Gaiman Tagore Rumi as breezily as I could. 'Didn't you know?'

  He shook his head, still looking stunned, and I started to feel a little annoyed. Okay, so I have a dumb name, but there was no need to look like he'd just seen a ghost.

  'It means one-who-has-a-lotus,' I told him matter-of-factly. 'Not the car - the flower.'

  Which was true enough - but not entirely. Because in Delhi, where I come from, Sarojini means one thing only. Sarojini Nagar Market.

  Sarojini Nagar Market is this huge noisy market in South Delhi. It's named after the 'Nightingale' and is fully cheap and cheerful. You can buy the coolest Tommy Hilfiger vests for fifty rupees there. And the most happening embroidered jeans for two hundred bucks. Sweat-encrusted auntyjis throng there to buy massive, roomy panties, block-printed kaftans, mountains of sabzi and plastic Hello Kitty slippers. There are cows and garbage dumps. It's also peopled with aggressive beggars and snarling, taloned college girls looking for bargains. Whenever fundamentalists of any denomination want to create terror in Delhi, they plant a bomb and kill some people in Sarojini Nagar Market.

  So being named Sarojini is not quite like being named Paris or Venice. More like being named Mumbai. And who wants that?

  I certainly didn't. I had to spend years at the Loreto Convent, Delhi, surrounded by girls with trendy, short-n-snappy names like Rhea, Pia, Jia, Sia, Ananya, Mehek and Meher, while I had to answer to Sarojini. It had scarred me for life.

  'How nice,' said Rumi in a decidedly weirded-out voice. 'Jinni... err... I mean, Sarojini, out there in the reception, it's not the pizza - it's...'

  I frowned and looked beyond him, towards the door, and beheld a sight that turned my blood to ice.

  A little old lady with her hair in a bun and a dainty gold naakphool in her nose stood framed in the doorway, draped in a light dhakai sari. Her soft white hair had a dramatic pink streak running through it. She had the delicate features of a Mughal miniature painting and the pugnacious stance of a professional boxer.

  'We are looking for Sarojini Pande,' she announced, peering around the room short-sightedly. 'See haj to come home with us, immediately.'

  ***

  Busted.

  That was the first thought that crossed my mind when I saw my maternal grandmother standing in the Pixel Animation lobby. The second was, okay, it's late, most everybody has gone home and Rumi won't recognize her anyway. The third thought, following fast on the heels of the second, was, yeah, right. Because Rumi, eyes alight with the gormless-groupie gleam that Delhi people get around movie stars and Mumbai folks get around politicians, was pouncing on Amma, going: 'Excuse me, ma'am, but aren't you Pushpa Pande? Of PP for Pragati Party, PP for Pavit Pradesh and PP for Pushpa Pande fame?'

  And Amma was nodding graciously and replying in the affirmative.

  'Duuuude!' squealed Rumi, like a housewife spotting kitaanus in her toilet bowl. 'Oh my god! Why didn't you tell us you know Pushpa Pande?'

  This, from a boy who, barely an hour ago, was accusing me of a lack of imagination!

  See, I'll admit that on the face of it, it's great to be politically 'connected'. You can get train reservations whenever you want and park anywhere simply by flashing the MP sticker on your car. You can also charge pretty much every kind of health screwup on your CGHS card. Even if you're one of those humble, in-denial, I'm-just-like-everybody-else type of political progeny, you still know you've got this big trump card in your underwear pocket which you can flash whenever life gets too hairy.

  But think about it a little more, and you'll realize there's a whole social downside to it too. Because once you tell people you're from a political family (or dynasty, like the press types like to call it) they immediately start expecting you to embezzle the nation's entire GDP, buy them lavish dinners in five-star hotels every night with your ill-gotten gains and shoot the bartender dead in the head with your unlicensed revolver if he refuses you a drink.

  And while there may be some classy, 'clean' lady politicians out there - the kind that wears Fabindia and Dastkar saris and big round bindis, speaks flawless English, hangs out in the Upper House and represents India at UN summits - my grandmother is so not one of them. Oh no. She's Pushpa jiji, a hard-core, three-time Lok Sabha MP, an MP3 so to say, hailing from the dusty badlands of Pavit Pradesh, one of north India's most populous states.

  Which is why I've kept her a deep dark secret from all my recently-made Mumbai friends like Gaiman Tagore Rumi. I mean, Rumi's seen Rang De Basanti thrice. He even thinks the ending made sense. And he's still wearing those black armbands in remembrance of the victims of 26/11!

  The last thing I want is for my Mumbai friends to know that my grandmother is the Pushpa. Even though she's now retired and concentrating solely on growing vegetables in her massive garden, they'll instantly start making snide your-nani's-security-costs-the-state-exchequer-three-crores-a-year and why-don't-you-go-marry-Ritesh-Deshmukh cracks. And worst of all, they'll start hitting on me to get them visas or school admissions or sort out pending lawsuits or any of the other million things that only pollies can get done in this country. Because despising me and my tainted bloodline wouldn't stop them from asking me for favours. Oh no.

  'This is my grandmother,' I said gloomily, bowing to the inevitable, 'and Amma, this is my colleague, Gaiman Tagore Rumi.'

  Amma was frowning. I could see she was trying to slot Rumi into a neat caste, creed and votebank pigeonhole and not finding it easy. Finally, 'Gay-man?' she hazarded, hovering closer to the truth than she realized. 'Isaaeeyee ho? Are you Christian?'

  Rumi, hugely delighted to meet this alien from another planet, shook his head and proclaimed reprovingly, 'Ammaji, I am a devotee of Art.'

  She grunted, looking singularly unimpressed.

  'You pray to oil paints?' she asked him, as her face split into a grin of peculiar sweetness that revealed the thick-as-a-five-rupee-coin gap between her top two front teeth. 'Or...' she smirked, 'nude models?'

  My heart sank at this typical Amma crack but Rumi, the fool, looked instantly charmed. It's so irritating; if old people say anything even remotely ribald, everyone ooohs and aaahs and gushes on about how cool, what good sports, what rock stars they are. When all they're doing is just being plain crude.

  'Amma,' I said through gritted teeth. 'What are you doing here?'

  She sat down heavily on a chair and said, a little evasively, 'We have come to meet aawar granddaughter. What's there?'

  Please. It could never be as simple as that. I regarded her suspiciously, warning bells ringing in my head. The general elections
were coming up and, of course, all the parties were out there, their leaders grinning smarmily from every hoarding and television channel in Mumbai. We were constantly being bombarded with their so-called achievements, while hideously remixed versions of soulful Bollywood songs blared in the background. The visuals were all the same - nutritious mid-day meals and loan waivers and right-to-information and happy farmers counting money and smiling ladies administering polio drops to fat babies. There was the standard 'secular' shot of a Muslim guy with surma in his eyes and a white lace cap perched on his head, getting a rakhi tied on his wrist by a simpering Hindu girl with a Ganesha locket around her neck. Fully brother-sister vibes. Of course, no party had the guts to show a couple like that getting married. That would start riots nationwide.

  But all this couldn't have anything to do with Amma. She was retired, right?

  Right?

  I opened my mouth to ask her this, but just then Rumi went, 'Oh, hey! The pizza's here! I'll sign, Jinni. Ammaji, you're in for a treat!'

  He scurried off, reaching into his back pocket for a pen as he went. Amma watched his turquoise butt twinkle away and asked interestedly, 'Who ij this Article 377, Sarojini?'

  'He's my friend,' I told her fiercely. 'And stop calling me Sarojini.'

  'Toh kya Jinni kahen?' she said disdainfully, leaning back in her chair, her eyelids all wrinkled and tissue-papery over her closed eyes. 'Mohammedan sa name hai. You sound like a poor carpenterj fourth wife.'

  And here we go again. For someone who's been in the public eye for most of her life, my grandmother is appallingly prejudiced. She turns up her nose at anybody who isn't a high-caste citizen of Pavit Pradesh. Bengali, Bihari and Gujarati women are man-eaters and husband-stealers. Their menfolk are impotent. Kashmiris are crooks and drug addicts and they don't bathe. Good Nepalis are nightwatchmen, bad ones slit the throats of their employers. Punjabis (of either gender) are permanently randy. Christians are scheduled caste and out to convert everyone they meet. And Musalmaans? They're all dirty, stupid, constantly breeding, Pakistani-cricket-team-cheering rapist-murderers.