One Point Two Billion Read online

  ‘Varied in range, concentrated in power - these stories are a deeply satisfying read.’ Kamila Shamshie

  ‘This is a wonderful collection, slicing and dicing India in thirteen unexpected ways.’ Siddhartha Deb

  ‘One of the finest books to come out of India this year. Rao zooms in on forgotten lives – ordinary, extraordinary, absurd, tragic – spread across diverse, country-sized regions. His writing is subtle, delightfully wry. I loved it.’ Mirza Waheed

  ‘Sometimes a novel is so good that you don’t want it to end. I wanted each story in One Point Two Billion to be expanded into a novel, which I then wouldn’t have wanted to end.’ Sandra Newman

  ‘These are deft, anxious, and haunting stories of a people caught between two chasms, the medieval and the modern.’ Jeet Thayil

  One Point

  Two Billion

  STORIES

  MAHESH RAO

  DAUNT BOOKS

  For my friend,

  K J ORR

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Eternal Bliss

  Drums

  The Agony of Leaves

  The Trouble with Dining Out

  Golden Ladder

  Hero

  The Pool

  The Philanderer

  Suzie Baby

  The Earth is Flat

  Minu Goyari Day

  The Word Thieves

  Fizz Pop Aah

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Mahesh Rao

  Copyright

  One Point Two Billion

  Eternal Bliss

  Bindu worried. She did not discriminate and gave freely of her time to trifling inconveniences as well as insurmountable predicaments. She tended her anxieties well, ready with kindling when their flame died down – an unlikely consequence here, a remote disaster there. Two lines had formed across her forehead in recent months and she worried about them too.

  The biggest worry of all had been whether she would get the job at the Paramasukha International Yoga Centre. Nervousness had upset her stomach the morning of the interview and she had nearly called to cancel. But her savings had dwindled to almost nothing and that thought had been terrifying enough to spur her on to the suburban bus stand, fortified by three different types of antacid.

  At the interview she had lied and said she was a widow. She had felt that her status as a woman separated from her husband would sit uncomfortably in a place of such spirituality, whereas a tragic death in her near past would be embraced. After getting the job she had begun to fret about what would happen if her employers came to know the truth: that her husband had not been borne away by the waters of the Kaveri but was in fact managing a tyre factory in Tumkur.

  The yoga centre was situated fifteen kilometres outside Mysore, amid orchards of coconut and mango trees. Its nearest neighbours were a scooter repair shop and a factory that manufactured water tanks. The centre could accommodate thirty guests in small rooms that were clean but gloomy, even when the daylight outside dazzled like white metal. There were two teachers: Shashi, a tiny man with a voice like a flute, and Gopal, whose T-shirts blazed the letters of his name, as though he were a football star. Alcohol and drugs were strictly prohibited from all parts of the premises. Cigarettes had been included in this ban too, but in the face of falling occupancy numbers the prohibition had been lifted.

  Bindu was the centre manager. Her duties were diverse and caused her a great deal of anxiety, but her previous job had been worse. She had worked in a hotel in Bangalore, wedged into a corner of Majestic, dealing with uncouth businessmen and their mistresses, all boss-eyed with alcohol. The yoga centre was a great improvement. The foreigners’ behaviour was at times incomprehensible but at least they were incredibly polite. They thanked her three times for getting someone to bring them a cup of warm water.

  On her second day a woman from Los Angeles had arrived at the centre, saying that she wanted to become a Brahmin.

  Bindu had creased her brow and said: ‘I am very sorry, madam, but we are not running such classes.’

  ‘Oh sure, I know that. But after the yoga, that’s where I want to be at.’

  Clumps of marigolds lined the pathways that led to the thatched dining room, the residential block and a structure referred to as ‘the spa’. This was a long, low room divided by a sagging wall into male and female treatment areas. Therapeutic massages were provided here by Thomas and Rosa, a married couple whose last civil words to each other were uttered years ago. They kept to their respective areas during the day, meeting only for silent meals, which they took at opposite ends of the staff kitchen. At night they lay on their massage beds, each listening out for the other’s snores behind the partition wall, their jaws tight with repressed rage.

  * * *

  The circular from the Department of Culture arrived late in the afternoon. The officials at the Directorate of Spiritual Affairs (DoSA) would be making their annual inspections in the weeks to come. All licensed institutes of spiritual practice and moral disciplines were required to ensure that their facilities and procedures met the approved government standards. Ample notice was provided to all relevant parties as DoSA seemed to recognise that superintendence by ambush served no one, least of all their inspectors, who had become accustomed to a level of comfort that could seldom be provided at short notice.

  A rush of nausea assailed Bindu. The responsibilities of her job had been taking their toll. At night a stubborn cinder burnt its way through her stomach and in the morning her neck was tense and achy. She had taken to drinking large quantities of milk to cool her insides but had begun to put on weight and was plagued by indigestion. And now important government officials would descend on the centre, piling out of cars with sirens, pens ranged in their pockets. They would peer into files, look under beds, question the guests and sniff the air for signs of degeneracy.

  ‘Don’t worry, madam,’ said Santhosh, the assistant manager, a man in his late twenties, on the cusp of running to fat. ‘They will just stamp this paper, fix that seal, have lunch and go. We have already paid for the licence so what else is there for them to do?’

  ‘It’s an inspection, Santhosh. They will inspect. Have you seen the state of the kitchen today? And the laundry has not been done since Tuesday. And that American lady is being a Brahmin on the grass that we have just planted. Go and do something.’

  Santhosh sighed and made his way towards the kitchen. He saw little value in being overly zealous in his duties – he knew that he was destined for better things. He had overheard snatches of conversation between guests discussing the transformative nature of their spiritual experiences at the centre. Santhosh was unsure what it all meant but had concluded that he had transformative powers too. He was the second in command in a place that attracted people who were much more worldly and educated than him. They must have therefore recognised something special about him. He wondered whether he was the reincarnation of an important historical figure. Unable to decide but keen to distinguish himself, he had taken a loan and bought a new motorbike.

  * * *

  It was easy to spot the guests who were keen to learn. They competed to place their mats in the front row of the hall and were arriving for classes ever earlier. They would stay late after class too, engaging the teachers in conversation, making detailed enquiries as to sequence, breath counts and curvature. Bindu heard one of them ask Gopal about the route to liberating the eternal self. She had no idea what it involved but was quite sure that Gopal, who was known to beat his wife with a chappal, was not the man to ask.

  A few of the guests had been at the centre for months and showed no indication of leaving. Adam was one of them. He owned a s
econd-hand car showroom in Manchester and it was not clear to Bindu who was running it in his absence. Adam’s attendance at classes was commendable and in the afternoons he meditated on the front lawn in a lungi, a frangipani blossom tucked behind his right ear.

  ‘You have a beautiful Indian face,’ he said to Bindu one day.

  She was not sure whether he meant that her face was beautiful in spite of being Indian or that it was so un-Indian, and yet beautiful, that both she and he needed to be reminded of its Indianness.

  She smiled and said: ‘Thank you.’

  Another long-term guest was Mathilde from Switzerland. Her animated conversations over dinner often resulted in her glass bangles breaking as they struck the table, and she would replace them on frequent trips to Mysore. Mathilde enjoyed providing instructions and advice to her fellow guests. On days when her yoga practice had been particularly fulfilling, she was even more garrulous. Her main areas of expertise were temple etiquette, stray dogs and the principles of effective bargaining. She was the only guest who had managed to evoke a troubled antipathy in Bindu. Mathilde had a tendency to appear in the reception area when Bindu was registering new guests, her darting eyes aglow with the urge to facilitate. Bindu was not normally a territorial woman but had recently taken to welcoming new arrivals in a secluded spot under a jackfruit tree.

  Between yoga sessions there seemed to be little to occupy the guests and Bindu sometimes worried that in moments of idleness they would get together and formulate complaints about her work. So when Santhosh suggested that they organise a few day trips, she agreed gladly. Excursions were arranged to the Ranganathittu Bird Sanctuary and to Tipu Sultan’s summer palace in Srirangapatna. Santhosh had also heard that some of the guests were eager to become active in the community by doing some voluntary work. Without consulting Bindu, he arranged for a minibus to transport a few guests to a nearby orphanage. He presumed that the children, some of whom had escaped deeply traumatic situations, would enjoy a bit of novelty in their routine.

  The trip was a disaster. The sight of so many strangers, some of them well over six feet tall with shaved heads and tattoos, unsettled the children and one of them suffered a fit. The foreigners returned to the centre, crestfallen and exhausted. Bindu felt compelled to give Santhosh a formal warning.

  * * *

  A second circular arrived from the Department of Culture, accompanied by a fat annexe of questionnaires seeking details of the centre’s policies on austerity, abstinence, purity, devotion and abstraction.

  Bindu pushed her chair away from the desk as if the letter had the capacity to cause a physical injury. Then she crammed it into a folder, which she then locked in the safe. Her first instinct was to avoid the inspection altogether by pretending to be ill around the time the officials were expected – but she knew if she did that her lies would be discovered and she would lose her job.

  She wondered if she too should try yoga. The centre’s guests all said that it brought them a profound serenity and there was nothing in life that she desired more. She was too embarrassed to join the guests at their classes so she begged Gopal to give her a few private lessons on the kitchen veranda. After squeezing various rota-related concessions out of her, he finally agreed.

  The sessions brought no serenity. Gopal barked intermittent instructions at her while looking at price comparison websites on his phone. Even though he had no intention of purchasing a water purifier or a washing machine, he was the sort of man who liked to be well informed.

  Bindu persevered. Her hips creaked during suryanamaskara, her arms felt feeble, and in the end she lost her balance, nearly toppling on to the veranda steps. In trikonasana the blood rushed to her head and she felt as though it might explode. When she tried to lift her legs into sarvangasana, palpitations rocked her chest. She had seen the contortions of the more experienced practitioners and a fear began to torment her. What if she tore a muscle, what if her spine snapped, what if she hit her head and lost her mind? She had recently read a disturbing article about brain injuries that resulted in patients believing that they were in the process of turning into an animal, most commonly a wolf or a monkey.

  The classes were discontinued and Bindu doubled her dosage of sleeping pills.

  * * *

  There were several maids employed at the centre. Manjula was the longest serving and the most astute. She had a wiry body but a fleshy face, a mouth filled with dark, pitted teeth and sported a bindi the size of a two-rupee coin. Her grey hair was gathered in a loose bun, which always looked on the point of collapse but never succumbed. She spent the majority of her time trying to wring as much as she could out of the centre’s guests. At work she only wore saris the colour of dirt and made sure that the holes in her blouses were visible. She had learnt a handful of words in English: ‘pain’, ‘baby crying’, ‘tired’, ‘sad’ and ‘butter’. Most gave at least twenty rupees, especially newcomers.

  Some years ago a guest from Wisconsin had given Manjula a five-dollar note. Being new to such gifts at the time, she had not known how to have it exchanged. So she had framed the note and propped it up in her shrine among the pictures of gods and saints. Along with Shiva, Ganesha and Sai Baba, her daily rituals came to involve Abraham Lincoln too.

  She now had nearly enough saved to purchase a fridge. She had already gone into the city three times to have a look at the one that she wanted. It was gunmetal grey, had three shelves, a freezer compartment and a total capacity of 165 litres. In the summer she planned to keep handkerchiefs in the freezer and then lay them over her face at night.

  Srinivasa was the day watchman. His main tasks included patrolling the grounds, directing guests to reception and chasing away any local youth who came to ogle foreign women. Srinivasa was civil to the hotel guests but no more. He was suspicious of people who would leave their countries – places where buses left on time, power and water flowed without interruption, and policemen genuinely apprehended criminals –in order to exercise together in a hall. In particular, he had taken exception to Adam and his penchant for ostentatious chanting on the front lawn. He made sure to keep an eye on him.

  Srinivasa and Manjula regularly argued about the foreigners.

  ‘You should be ashamed of yourself,’ he said to her one day, ‘feeding at their scraps like a dog.’

  ‘You are the filthy, diseased dog,’ she responded. ‘If it wasn’t for them, you wouldn’t have a job and your wife would be selling herself fifty times a day. Keep complaining, you wait and see, your children will starve to death and your wife will leave you for a man with a thunne big enough to satisfy her.’

  ‘You leave my family out of this. We all have self-respect. We don’t come to work in rags hoping for a few coins of charity.’

  Manjula smiled sweetly: ‘When your thunne shrivels up completely and drops off, I will help you bury it in a ditch.’

  * * *

  Bindu was unaware of these tensions between the members of her staff. Her focus continued to be the centre’s guests and she did everything that she could to make them comfortable. A recent arrival was Dafna from Tel Aviv. She had decided to travel to India in spite of her mild agoraphobia. Soon after her arrival she had spotted two men defecating in a playground, a sight that had severely aggravated her condition. Since arriving at the yoga centre, she had not left her room. Bindu made sure her breakfast, lunch and dinner were taken to her. The poor woman had paid for them after all.

  A greater concern was Sue from London. She changed into a floral bikini and lay in the sun all afternoon in spite of the numerous signs around the property requesting guests to kindly maintain decorous attire at all times. Bindu did not know what to do. She disliked confrontations of any kind and had never had one with a foreigner. There had been a near miss a few months ago with a mother and daughter from Australia. They had hardly attended any classes and one of the maids had said that she had seen them in their room, drinking Old Monk rum first thing in the morning with the man who worked in the scooter r
epair shop. Bindu had been about to call the owners to ask for their assistance when the mother and daughter had walked into the reception area, asking for their luggage to be stored until further notice. They had left on the back of the repairman’s scooter as Bindu waved them off, instantly worrying about whether they would return.

  Another guest, Mr Anderson, was a thickset gentleman from New York. Bindu noticed three days after his arrival that he was greeting everyone with an ornate bow. She assumed it was something they did where he came from. A couple of days later he approached her at reception.

  ‘You know Bindi,’ he said, ‘everything here is so different, so pure. I don’t know how to explain it.’

  Bindu nodded, wondering if this was a precursor to an official complaint.

  ‘It has really made me think about so many aspects of my life back home and all the places where I was going wrong. I feel like I’m questioning everything. Do you see, Bindi? Everything.’

  Bindu nodded again, still not sure if the things Mr Anderson was questioning included the quality of the service at the centre. ‘You make so many assumptions, you just go on and on, never really thinking, never really searching, and then one day, you’re sixty. Just like that.’

  ‘Is the geyser in your bathroom okay, sir? Are you getting hot water?’

  ‘What? Oh sure, that’s fine. What was I saying? Yes, life just happens to you and you just let it happen, you walk the dog, you watch the game, you get married, you get divorced, you get married again, you get divorced again, your dog dies, you get a new dog, and all the time, like a blind man, just never really seeing anything at all. You know what I mean, Bindi?’