“Descent into Chaos: Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Threat to Global Security”, by Ahmed Rashid – A Few Observations

I recently re-read Ahmed Rashid’s “Descent into Chaos” which was released sometime in the middle of 2008. A masterpiece by an expert who has very peers in his field, Descent into Chaos is relevant and useful for someone who wants to understand the Af-Pak conundrum, even three years after its publication. Rather that write a detailed review of this excellent book which has been reviewed so many times by so many clever writers, I propose to make a few observations:

1. After the caveat that Hamid Karzai is a good friend, Rashid has nothing but praise for Karzai who hasn’t exactly lived up to the expectations created when he took over power. The number of times Rashid criticizes Karzai can be counted on the fingers of one hand. I found the near total absence of criticism of Karzai to be the biggest drawback in this book.

2. Rashid devotes extensive space to explain how the US administration under George Bush flagrantly breached the Geneva Convention as it set up detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay and other places and carried out renditions of suspected Islamic fundamentalists. I wonder if Rashid would continue to feel so strongly about the use of torture in light of the fact that information gleaned from suspects through the use of intensive interrogation techniques helped locate Bin Laden. The fact of the matter is that torture does work at times and those who are against the use of torture should be willing to say that States should not resort to torture even if it may work.

3. Rashid describes Nawaz Sharif thus: ‘A businessman from Lahore whose family had prospered enormously under the Zia regime was a dour, unintelligent politician who had been promoted and patronized by the military.’ I find this description very interesting. I’ve never heard anyone else call Sharif unintelligent. Mind you, I have no reason to think Rashid has got it wrong.

4. Rashid has only praise for Benazir Bhutto, even more than he has for Karzai. There is a vague mention of the corruption charges against Bhutto, but Rashid tells us that ‘There is little doubt that Bhutto and Karzai working together would have formed a team committed to combat extremism.’

5. Asif Zardari is depicted as a wise man who, unfortunately and for no fault of his own, happens to be corrupt.

I guess when one is Pakistani and is close to most of the big players in that region, one is bound to have a few sacred cows in one’s backpack. I realise that my observations above may give the impression that I did not like ‘Descent into Chaos’. Far from it, I really liked the book and Rashid’s pithy style of writing.

Rashid concludes by saying that (remember this is mid-2008): ‘The American people have elected a new President who is largely committed to change and improving the world we live in. Obama has generated enormous expectations in the Muslim world, especially in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In order to live upto those expectations, he has to help deliver a long-lasting peace and stabilization program in the region.’

The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed – A Book Review

'Captain Kadian takes a large swig from his glass tumbler, closes his eyes for a moment, smacks his lips and says, "the job is not that hard you see, you just .....................'

The opening sentence of Mirza Waheed’s novel gave me the feeling that I was reading one of those Soviet era books set in the years following the October revolution and that ‘Kadian’ was possibly the abbreviation of an Armenian name. But no, Captain Kadian is employed by the Indian army, has been deployed in Kashmir for a three-year tour of duty and is responsible for most of the unnamed Protagonist’s nightmares. Though ‘Kadian’ is not a common Indian name, Wikipedia informs me that there exists a Jat clan called Kadian and we are told by the author that Captain Kadian is ‘young, handsome, north Indian. A Punjabi perhaps, a Jat probably.’ A humble Gujjar lad, the Protagonist is a collaborator who runs dirty errands for the cruel Captain Kadian, who the Protagonist hates and fears in equal measure.

I began to hate The Collaborator even before I crossed the first twenty pages. Set against the backdrop of the insurgency in Kashmir in the early 1990s, The Collaborator depicts the Indian army as extremely ruthless and cruel. There are mentions of large scale massacres and mass-rapes where all women in a village are raped. I do know that truth is the first casualty in any war and that there have been human rights abuses by Indian security forces, but I felt that the ‘allegations’ in The Collaborator are over the top. More importantly, it shows the Indian army as overwhelmingly strong, powerful and successful in fighting the insurgency, practically killing insurgents at will. No sooner do a number of Kashmiri boys trained in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir cross over into India than the Indian army crunches into action and kills off most of those crossing over at a time of the army’s choosing. In fact the author goes to the extent of telling us, through Captain Kadian, that the Border Security force (BSF) is even tougher and nastier than the Indian army. There is one instance where the BSF’s intelligence unit, the G-Branch, is shown as giving the army a lesson in mountain warfare when some militants were holed out in a few caves and the army didn’t know how to clear them out!

However, as I progressed, I got to know the Protagonist better, and even his fears and dreams, I started appreciating The Collaborator better. The Protagonist, who remains unnamed till the end, does not appear to support Azadi in any serious manner. True, he is petrified of the Indian army and the black cat commandoes who carry out the occasional cordon and search operation and dawn raids. He admires the Kashmiri insurgents who are always shown as inferior in strength to the Indian army, whose soldiers are very shown to be very fit and strong. He is fearful of the ruthless and cruel Pathans, Afghans, Arabs and Chechens who have contempt for Kashmiris’ fighting abilities. He gets bugged when a militant group broke up video rental shops, torched cinemas, dragged frightened little girls out of school, checked their hands for nail polish and sent them home in knee-length burqas. We hear that Gujjars are not trusted by other Kashmiris, though some of them do become insurgents. Slowly we get to know that the Protagonist’s father, the village sarpanch, had fought the tribal raiders from Pakistan just after independence. The sarpanch is liked by the villagers who saved him from the insurgents’ wrath.

After all his friends cross the Loc and go to Pakistan and he is the only teenager left behind in the village, the Protagonist too tries to follow then over the LoC. As he proceeds towards his rendezvous with the guide who is to take him across, he thinks thus of Pakistan: ‘A place of which I had an obscure vision, an image, as being the country where we boys went to become militants and which supported us and welcomed us with open arms, and where they were all Muslims and were in fact sending their own sons to fight alongside us, but a place I did not really know. It was, now I understand, and still is, a khayal, just an idea.’ The Protagonist does not make it across since he is turned away by the guide, with a gentle reminder of his father’s past fighting tribal raiders and accepting government grants.

Captain Kadian uses the Protagonist for a dirty chore. The chore itself is unrealistic (I would rather not reveal what it is and play spoil sport) and descriptions of Captain Kadian’s operations are equally unrealistic, as explained earlier. The soldiers are there in strength in the Protagonist’s village since it is very close to the LoC. Around there, ‘the Indians kill just about everyone. Who will know and object, leave along protest, in this remote, cut-off wilderness? You know, sometimes I wonder – because for Kashmir, there is always an Indian and a Pakistani version of everything – what if they have their own pasture of dead boys on the other side of the border? Their own stash of the infiltration residue? Young men who lost their lives while learning to walk the perilous path to freedom. Treachery is a word everyone should learn.’ One hears an old man tell the Protagonist of elite Makara soldiers who even eat people, old people mostly. The Protagonist seems to believe every word he hears. Later when the Protagonist’s friends leave him behind and cross the LoC, the village is at the receiving end of the army’s raids. Curfew is imposed for days at a stretch.

Kashmir has a new governor, a man very stern and ruthless, who is described as ‘the former leader of the demolition gangs and their bulldozers (who ran over the one-room tenements and lavatories of the poorest of poor squatters in India’s capital because their haphazard slum-clusters had no storm-water drains), the clinical undertaker of forced, compulsory vasectomies.....’ Though not mentioned by name, it is very obvious that the reference is to Jagmohan Malhotra who was the governor of Jammu & Kashmir from 1984 to 1989 and then for a few months in 1990. I found this implicit reference to Jagmohan a bit confusing since in the beginning of the novel, there is a reference to a dead militant’s watch which keeps ticking and shows the date as ‘16 April 1993’. The blurb on one of the side flaps of this book says ‘It is Kashmir in the early 1990s......’ From May 1990 to March 1993, Girish Chandra Saxena was the Governor of Jammu & Kashmir and not Jagmohan, but hey, this is fiction and one shouldn’t nitpick, right?

Towards the end of the novel, one hears of the insurgents torturing the guide and his family who they (wrongly) suspect of having helped the Indian army. By that time, the villagers have had enough of searches and curfews. They all pack up and leave, all except the Protagonist and his parents. Where do the villagers escape to, with all their cattle and other belongings? Do they cross the LoC in the middle of the winter? I was half-expecting them to, since they had nowhere else to go. But no, to escape from the Indian army, they flee to ‘India’! By this stage, I had started liking the Collaborator.

A lot of the information that is conveyed to the reader by the Protagonist is hearsay. A man is snatched from the Protagonist’s village by black-cat commandoes who turn up in LMG-mounted gypsies. The Protagonist tells us that from a distance, the commandoes looked like a ‘pack of animals’. After the snatched man is returned to the village, theories abound. One theory is that he was not harmed at all since he readily divulged all that he knew. Another theory is that ‘he was tortured day and night by Kashmiri Pandit police officers, bent on revenge after their tragic exodus from the valley...... Another theory was that ‘he was made to pee on an electric heater while they threw ice-cold water over him; they pierced a red-hot knitting needle through his...... Finally the Protagonist goes to visit the victim one afternoon and without being asked, the victim lifts up his kurta and shows the area above his groin which has small, etched black pits all over the pubic area.

Captain Kadian trusts the Protagonist sufficiently enough to give him a pistol. The Protagonist hates Captain Kadian enough to want to use it on Captain Kadian. Does the Protagonist summon enough courage to do so? Do please read this extremely interesting book, written in exquisite prose, to find out. Exaggerations notwithstanding, it is a very good read.

The Author of The Collaborator Mirza Waheed spent his childhood in Srinagar, read English Literature at the University of Delhi and later worked as a journalist in Delhi for four years. Since 2001, he has been living in London where he works for the BBC's Urdu Service as an editor.

Book Review: “Absolute Khushwant”

I am a hardcore fan of Khushwant Singh’s writings and think he is the best Indian writer alive today. I picked up Absolute Khushwant in order to know more about Khushwant the human being. A simple book of 189 pages, it appears to have been dictated by 95 year old Khushwant Singh to Humra Quraishi over a few days. The narration is rambling and there are repetitions, but this book is the closest thing to Khushwant Singh’s autobiography.

Absolute Khushwant doesn’t hold many surprises. Khushwant Singh is not a reticent man and people who follow his writings would be aware of his views of topics ranging from the Emergency to Indira Gandhi to Operation Blue Star to the BJP. Khushwant Singh doesn’t hold back on his personal life either. He talks of his first love, how he visited a prostitute for the first time, his unhappy marriage (which was not an arranged one), how he had courted his wife-to-be etc.

I knew that Khushwant Singh was not a prude and I was not disappointed. “If you ask me what’s more important, sex or romance, it’s sex. Romance is just a gloss, some sort of sheen that wears off, and it loses its lustre very soon. I’ve never really had the time or the inclination for romance. Romantic interludes take up a lot of time and are a sheer waste of energy, for the end result isn’t very much. Sex is definitely more important, though sex with the same person can get boring after a while..... When it comes to sex, I don’t think looks matter much.”

The Partition of India left Khushwant Singh badly wounded. Khushwant Singh feels that Partition was inevitable since Hindus and Muslims had not integrated. They did not inter-marry, did not share food or living quarters. No, Khushwant Singh does not say that they were/are two separate nations, but that would be the logical conclusion to his argument. But Khushwant Singh also suggests that Partition could have been avoided if Jawaharlal Nehru hadn’t been so keen to become independent India’s Prime Minister. According to Khushwant Singh, “having accepted the Cabinet mission plan to hand over power to a united India, he (Nehru) reneged on his undertaking when he (Nehru) realized Jinnah might end up becoming Prime Minister." Khushwant Singh thinks Nehru was the second best Prime Minister India has ever had. He admires Nehru’s secularism and atheism, but doesn’t seem to have liked him much. He tells us that Nehru had vision and charisma, but was instinctively anti-American and pro-Soviet. Nehru was impatient with people and had favourites. Like Indira, Nehru can be accused of nepotism.

Khushwant Singh liked Sanjay Gandhi, despite the damage he did to India’s democracy, something Khushwant Singh acknowledges. However, since “Sanjay was always extremely courteous towards me” Khushwant Singh continues to like him. I found Khushwant Singh’s honesty in this regard extremely refreshing.

Khushwant Singh tells us that Nirad C. Chaudhuri is the most knowledgeable person he has ever known.

Khushwant Singh also believes Manmohan Singh is the best PM we have ever had. To illustrate his point, Khushwant Singh has this anecdote about how Manmohan Singh’s son-in-law came to borrow some money during Manmohan Singh’s election campaign. The amount borrowed was just two lakhs, to hire taxis that were needed for the election campaign. “They didn’t even have that much to spare. I gave the money in cash. Only days after he had lost the election, Manmohan Singh called me himself and asked for an appointment. He came to see me with a packet. ‘I haven’t used the money,’ he said and handed me the packet with all the cash I had given his son-in-law. That kind of thing, no politician would do.” Here I find myself unable to agree with Khushwant Singh. If Manmohan Singh is incapable of effectively utilising for his campaign two lakh rupees given to him legitimately by a supporter, does it suggest a capable politician or a timid bureaucrat who his afraid of taking risks and independent decisions?

I read this rambling account in one go, in around three hours' time. Absolute Khushwant is a must-read for every fan of Khushwant Singh’s writings.

The Other Charlie

On 31 May 2011, I had posted a short story Charlie. For those who liked it and for those who didn’t, I’d like to bring to your notice the existence of another Charlie on Epic India. The other Charlie was written first and has a different plot and ends differently (and has fewer characters too), though the initial few paragraphs are rather similar. Please do take a look and let me know which "Charlie" you like better (or dislike less)

Short Story: Charlie

I met Charlie for the first time inside Kunal’s Hyundai Accent. The three of them, Charlie, Kunal and the car, couldn’t have been more different from each other. The Hyundai Accent was sleek, shiny and snazzy, Kunal was short, stout, and sleazy and Charlie was, well, he was from the bogs. The orange tee-shirt and maroon jeans that he wore might have given Charlie the feeling that he was as good as any other man in Mumbai. The earring clipped to his left lobe did give him an air of dashing, but the half-broken front tooth, surrounded by the decaying, blackened remains of the rest of his teeth, was a dead giveaway.

‘That’s the building Sir. It’s on the fifth floor,’ Kunal told us as he stopped the car in what was evidently a no-parking zone.

‘Come on Sir, let’s go,’ Kunal said.

I hesitated. ‘You car will get towed away,’ I said.

‘No-parking zone. Can’t park here.’ Hitesh added. I sat back. I was just a trainee and I was darned if I moved when my boss was staying put.

‘Charlie will stay in the car Sir. Anyway, we won’t take more than five minutes.’

Charlie stared straight ahead and smiled. It was a nice smile, despite the state of his teeth. We got out of the car and crossed the road. We followed Kunal. How could someone so fat, move so fast?

‘Having Charlie inside the car as I show my clients around is cheaper than paying parking charges. And I save time as well.’

I thought no more about Charlie for a while after that since we had more pressing things to do. A new CEO was taking over in ten days’ time and the admin department was expected to have a home fit for a CEO all spruced up and ready when the new man arrived from Delhi. We had been referred to Kunal, who immediately promised to show us not less than six flats a day. ‘I know all the brokers who work for Landlords in this area,’ he glibly assured me over the phone.

‘How much do you charge? The usual one month’s rent?’

‘No Sir. One and half. I am much better than others, that’s why Sir.’

We had gone along, since we didn’t really have a choice. Kunal was as good as his word and soon Hitesh and I were at Kunal’s office, a small cubby-hole inside a shopping mall, not far from where the new flat was, to collect the keys. I was seeing Charlie outside a car for the first time. Standing behind Kunal’s chair, he looked much smaller than when he was inside the car, not more than five feet three and pencil thin.

‘Sir, thank you for coming here. If you could have told me the precise time you would arrive, I could have met you outside the flat and given you the keys.’ Kunal was as servile as ever.

‘We don’t mind,’ Hitesh spoke for both of us, though I did mind. It didn’t matter. I was just a trainee and wasn’t expected to have a mind of my own. ‘I wasn’t sure when I would be finishing work,’ Hitesh added.

‘Sir, you work Saturdays?’ Kunal sounded shocked.

‘Sometimes, I have to,’ Hitesh admitted, not trying too hard to dispel the hint of martyrdom in his voice.

‘We work on Sundays too,’ Charlie piped in. ‘Sheth works everyday and so do I.’ That was the first time I had heard Charlie speak and his accent was such that you could smell the slum on him.

As far as I could make out, Charlie had nothing much to do in that office, other than maybe clean it everyday. He definitely wasn’t capable of doing any paperwork. Why on earth did Kunal have to have Charlie with him at all times? Maybe so that he could take him in his car if he had to take a client to view flats at short notice. Parking charges in Bandra were pretty high.

‘Sir, this folder has all the documents. Your CEO’s police NoC, a copy of the leave and licence agreement…’

‘And what else?’

‘That’s it Sir. Door-to-door service Sir. You didn’t have to worry about your CEO’s police verification did you Sir?’

‘No, no..’

‘And the registration hardly took any time, did it Sir?’

‘No, no.......’

‘If you had gone on your own Sir, it would have taken you a whole day Sir.’

‘I know, I know..’ Hitesh mumbled. Why doesn’t he give Kunal a piece of his mind? I wondered. Bloody hell, we had paid this bugger three lakh rupees. He might as well fix the police verification and deed registration without blowing his trumpet about it.

‘Sir, Charlie will take you to the flat.’

‘We can go ourselves. Just give me the keys.’

‘Sure Sir. Here are the keys Sir. But…’ At that Kunal stopped and leaned over to Hitesh. ‘Please take Charlie with you Sir. The flat needs cleaning, doesn’t it? Get Charlie to do it for you. Pay him something, but agree on the price first.’

Yes, the flat was dirty and it would take some labour to get it tidy before the furniture arrived on Monday. I couldn’t think of a decent excuse to not take Charlie and get him to do the cleaning, though I could see that Hitesh would rather not utilise Charlie’s labour. I could see that he had for some reason taken a dislike to Charlie though I couldn’t figure out why. I hoped Hitesh wouldn’t turn down Kunal’s offer and ask me to clean the flat myself. For heaven’s sake, I was a trainee in the admin department and not a domestic help. Thankfully Hitesh said, ‘sure, that’s a good idea. When does he finish work? Six?’

‘No Sir No.’ You can take him now. I don’t mind.’

‘Okay. Good. Charlie, come on. Let’s go.’

‘Charlie, do a good job for Sir. Sir, please take these keys. This is for the front door, this here….,’

Hitesh pocketed the keys and walked out. I followed him and Charlie trailed us both. The moment we were out of the shopping mall, Charlie quickened his pace and started to walk by our side.

‘I have been with my Sheth for sixteen years. I started with his father. Sixteen years,’ he added in English.

I nodded my head politely, whilst Hitesh ignored him. ‘Where do you stay Charlie?’ I asked him.

‘Mira Road.’

‘You come to Bandra by train everyday?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is Charlie your real name?’

‘No, it’s Kailash. Sheth’s father gave me the name Charlie.

‘I’ll take a quick look at the flat and push off. You hang around and make sure this boy cleans the flat,’ Hitesh told me. I nodded my head, but Hitesh wasn’t looking at me anymore.

Do you have soap powder and a broom? And a bucket and a mug?’ Charlie asked Hitesh.

‘Look at me,’ Hitesh said giving Charlie an exasperated look. ‘Am I carrying soap powder and a bucket?’

‘Well, we better buy them. There’s that shop over there. It’s got all that we need. We need some wifers also. Wifers clean mast.’ I wanted to ask what a wifer was, but didn’t.

Charlie elbowed his way through the rush of people who crowded around the long formica table that separated the shopkeeper and his goods from the customers. Hitesh and I meekly followed Charlie, ignoring the irritated looks we got.

‘One broom. A bucket. Mug. Soap powder. Cleaning spray. And a wifer. And three of that.’ Charlie’s finger pointed to a pile of rough towels that could be used as mops. I waited for the shopkeeper to ask Charlie what a wifer was, but he didn’t. Instead he said, ‘we have run out of ……….’ Did the shopkeeper too say wifer? I wasn’t sure. Before Charlie could respond, he added, ‘there’s a new cleaning fluid. Take it.’

‘Should we go elsewhere for the, the…. the wifer?’ Hitesh asked Charlie. Slowly it dawned on me that Charlie was talking about a wiper.

‘No, don’t bother. Those cloth mops will do.’ I knew that Hitesh would be irritated because Charlie didn’t call him ‘Sir’ as Kunal did. I was pretty sure that when he agreed to take Charlie along, Hitesh had taken for granted that Charlie would be even more obsequious than Kunal.

Charlie then raised his voice and told the shopkeeper. ‘give us a discount.’ He then turned to Hitesh and said, ‘I always buy cleaning products from here. He’ll give us a discount.’

‘I don’t care about the discount,’ Hitesh muttered to me. ‘We will be able to claim anything that has an invoice.’

I guessed what Hitesh was worried about. Whatever he paid Charlie would not have an invoice. ‘Maybe we can ask Kunal to give us an invoice for the money we pay Charlie,’ I suggested.

‘Like hell we will get an invoice,’ Hitesh’s voice was bitter. ‘This is a nice scheme that Kunal has set up. I am sure he pays Charlie next to nothing, though he uses him to save on parking fees. Instead we end up paying this bastard exorbitant amounts to get some cleaning done.’

Ha! So this was why Hitesh had taken a dislike to Charlie. ‘We don’t know how much Charlie will want us to pay him,’ I whispered.

Hitesh ignored my comment and muttered, ‘I’m sure the prices here are inflated by ten percent for people like us, so that Charlie can get us a discount.’ ‘Maybe he is getting a kickback from the shopkeeper every month for the cleaning products he buys for the people whose houses he cleans.’

As Hitesh paid the shopkeeper, Charlie told the shopkeeper, ‘give me three Frootis.’ He took out his wallet and extracted a fifty-rupee note. ‘This one’s for you,’ Charlie pushed two Frootis towards us.

‘I don’t want one.’ Hitesh’s voice brooked no further entreaties.

‘Go on, have one. I am a bindass chap. I am just treating the three of us.

‘I don’t want one.’

I had no option but to say that I didn’t want one either, though it was very hot and I would have liked to have had a Frooti. ‘Okay. I’ll just take two and give one to my Sheth. No, it won’t be cold when I give it to him. I’ll buy one for him later. I’ll only take one.’ Charlie pushed two Frootis back to the other end of the counter.

We walked to the flat, Charlie carrying the bucket with everything in it. Everything except the broom which was in my hand.

‘Once he finishes the Frooti, make sure you give him the broom,’ Hitesh told me and walked ahead. Charlie and I followed him.

‘Listen, Hitesh is an Assistant Manager in the Admin Department. He is a big guy. You ought to call him Sir,’ I suggested to Charlie in a low monotone.

‘But I never call anyone Sir. Not even my Sheth.’ Charlie’s quick response was loud enough for Hitesh to hear, though Hitesh didn’t turn back. I could however see the back of his neck turn red. Charlie finished the Frooti and threw away the tetra pack, but he didn’t offer to take the broom from me. Here, take this as well, I wanted to tell him, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

The flat was large and airy, supposedly one of the most luxurious two bedroom flats in Bandra. However, it was rather depressing inside. The previous tenants seemed to have played the who-can-sprinkle-more-dust game with mud-splattered feet, followed by who-clogs-the-drain-first. And then replaced all bulbs and tube-lights with ones that didn’t work. Finally they had probably played guess-what-I-just-broke.

Charlie took one look around the flat and asked Hitesh, ‘how much will you pay me?’

‘How much do you want?

‘Thousand rupees.’

‘Can you do it for five hundred?’ Hitesh asked.

Charlie hesitated and said, ‘No. I could go down to nine hundred.’

‘That’s still too high for half-a-day’s work.

Charlie shrugged his shoulders and stood there silently. ‘You will be paying two lakhs per month as rent for this flat. Can’t you pay me nine hundred rupees?’

‘This is not my money my friend. It is the company’s money.’

‘Won’t your company be paying the rent for this flat?’

‘Yes, so what?’

‘And it can’t pay me nine hundred rupees?’

‘It can, but it won’t. You carry on. I’ll get someone else to clean the flat.’

‘No problem. Maybe you can ask one of the neighbours if they can spare a maid.’

Hitesh looked up and down at Charlie as if he were something that should rightfully be inside the expensive but dirty toilet attached to the master bedroom.

“Give me a call, if you don’t find a maid, but I’ll never call you Sir.’ With that Charlie was off. I wished I had half, no, one-fourth, of his guts. I would have happily parted with all the money in my bank account, which wasn’t much, and pledged my salary for the next one year to have acquired Charlie’s guts and devil-may-care attitude.

After Charlie closed the door behind him, Hitesh said, ‘we’ve got to have this place cleaned up by tomorrow evening. We can’t have dirt all over the place when the furniture arrives Monday morning.’

‘We could go out and find someone else. Maybe Kunal can send someone else. Why don’t we...?’

‘Why don’t we ask the neighbours if they can spare a maid for a few hours?’

‘Sure. I hope the neighbours turn out to be helpful.’

I think I sounded hesitant because Hitesh looked at me as if I was being silly. Why on earth wouldn’t the neighbours jump at the opportunity to lend us a maid? his look suggested.

We went out of the flat and paused outside the neighbouring flat. There were only two flats on each floor. A deathly silence prevailed. Hitesh pressed the buzzer and we waited. The deathly silence continued. Hitesh pressed the buzzer yet again. It was a Saturday. Surely someone had to be at home!

Just as we were preparing to turn around and leave, the door opened and a woman in her mid-thirties stood in front of us. Hitesh and I breathed a sigh of relief. From the woman’s attire and her demeanour, it was obvious that she belonged to that endangered species referred to as ‘maids’, without whom day-to-day life would collapse all over the world.

‘Hello!’ I was tongue-tied for a moment. What should I say? That I, a mere trainee had just moved into flat 401, one of the most luxurious flats in Bandra? Hitesh obviously did not suffer from such inhibitions.

‘We have just moved into that flat.’ Hitesh jerked his thumb behind.

‘Yes.’

‘W need someone to clean the flat. It is very dirty.’

We got a mumbled response that I didn’t comprehend. What was she saying? That she would do it right away?

‘Excuse me?’ Hitesh moved forward a bit and that caused the gentle creature in front of us to retreat in fear.

‘I work here full-time.’

‘So what? Can’t you take a couple of hours off and clean our flat? I’ll pay you two hundred rupees. At that, a look of disdain passed over that gentle creature’s features who shouted out for her mistress. ‘Mem-sa’ab!’ The lady of the house materialised from nowhere.

‘We have just moved into flat 401 and I was asking your maid if she could clean my flat. I will pay her of course.’

‘If she goes to clean your flat, who will do my work?’

‘It’s just for a few hours.’ How could you be so unreasonable as to prevent your poor maid from making a little extra? Hitesh seemed to ask.

‘No.’

‘But what’s the big deal?’ The woman turned her head and said something and a big deal appeared in the form of the woman’s husband, tall, well-built and moustachioed.

‘What’s the matter?’ His deep-throated voice was a roar.

‘These men want our bai to clean their flat. I said No, but they won’t listen’

Hello! I did not ask your bai to clean the flat. He did. No, I didn’t say that, though I wanted to.

‘Just for two hours. I only…’

‘Didn’t she say No?’ Was the man a policeman? He certainly sounded like one!

Hitesh mumbled his apologies for having wasted their very, very valuable time and left.

We then took the lift went downstairs to the lobby. The concierge was very courteous.

‘I just moved into Flat 401. I need a a maidservant. Someone who can clean the Flat…’

‘Sir, you are from the company Sir?’

‘What?’ Hitesh was nonplussed.

‘Your CEO will move in on Tuesday right?’

‘I am a Manager in the Admin Department.’ Now Hitesh was angry.

‘Okay Sir. Now what do you want?’

‘I want a maid who can clean the flat. It’s very dirty.’ Hitesh managed to make it sound as if it was the concierge’s fault that the flat was dirty.

‘Okay Sir. I will ask someone to come and meet you Monday morning Sir.’

‘But I want it cleaned today or tomorrow. We have furniture arriving early in the morning on Monday. A regular maid can wait.’

‘I don’t know Sir. Today is Saturday Sir. Saturday afternoon. Let me see Sir.’

We went back to the flat.

‘You know, if I were younger, I would have cleaned it myself. It’s not such a big deal, you know,’ Hitesh told me as he flicked a piece of paper off a window sill. I ignored the remark, pointedly looking at my shoes.

‘Call Charlie!’ Hitesh finally told me, with the air of a bankrupt businessman ordering a fire sale. ‘I am going to make that piece of shit work so hard, that he will remember it for the rest of his life.’

I called up Kunal. ‘Yes, we changed our minds. We want Charlie to do the cleaning. Yes, we will pay him what he had asked.’

Ten minutes later there was a knock on the door. It was Charlie.

As Hitesh and I stood by silently, Charlie picked up the broom and started sweeping the floor in the living room without much ado. Hitesh and I walked around the flat aimlessly.

‘Please don’t go there. I just swept it. Take a look at the hall? Isn’t the floor almost clean? Once I scrub it, it will be mast.’

‘Okay.’ ‘I hate the word mast.’ Hitesh muttered to me.

Soon Charlie was scrubbing the floor with soapy water. ‘Isn’t it looking mast?’ he would ask us every few minutes. ‘Yes, it’s looking better.’ Hitesh would respond. I kept quiet.

‘If I scrub the window panes with a cloth, it won’t look mast. I need a wifer for it. Else, it will have marks all over and the window will look darkish.’

‘Never mind, just clean it with a cloth.’

‘Okay,’ Charlie agreed.

‘Aren’t the floors really mast now?’

I had to admit that Charlie was doing a good job. However, Hitesh wasn’t impressed. ‘Listen, you’ve got to clean the doors and windows, remember.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘I’m going to make this little pipsqueak call me Sir,’ Hitesh muttered to me with a smile on his face.

‘How are you going to do it?’

‘Pay him an extra hundred. I’m sure he will do it. I never call anyone Sir. Not even my Sheth’ I laughed at Hitesh’s falsetto voice.

Watching Charlie clean the place was not unlike watching paint dry. It’s relatively comfortable watching paint dry if you are sitting rather than standing. Since there was not a single piece of furniture inside the house, we had to stand.

‘I’m going to use the loo.’

‘I’ve just cleaned the toilet!’ Charlie protested as he saw Hitesh open the toilet’s door.

‘I know. Does it mean no one can use it hereafter?’

When Hitesh came out he said, ‘there’s no point in hanging around here. I am going to go down and have a bite. You stay here.’

‘Actually, I’m hungry as well. I’ll also come down.’ I could tell that Hitesh didn’t like it all that much, but he said nothing. We went down and walked a bit till we came to a small kiosk by the road. Save for a teenager standing by the counter, munching on something fried and greasy, it had no customers.

‘I’ll have a vada pav,’ Hitesh announced.

‘I’m going to buy a packet of biscuits and eat it on my way back.’

‘You won’t satisfy your hunger with a packet of biscuits. Have a vada pav as well. Go on.’

‘No. No.’ There must have been something about the way I compressed my lips as I spoke that stopped Hitesh from pressing me any further.

Hitesh licked clean his oily thumb and forefinger and then used them to gingerly prise out his wallet from his hip pocket. Holding the brown wallet in the clean palm of his left hand, he gingerly took out a twenty rupee note and paid for his vada pav. However as he tried to put back his wallet, he dropped it. Before I could pick it up, the teenager who was leaving, bent down and picked it up. I grabbed it from him and told Hitesh, ‘turn around. Let me put it back for you.’

Hitesh’s trousers must have been a tad too tight for him and I had to use a bit of force to shove his wallet back inside his hip pocket.

‘Don’t you want to buy a packet of biscuits?’

‘No, I am no longer hungry.’ That got me a strange look, but I ignored it.

We went to the flat and Charlie was still hard at work.

‘Please leave your shoes outside. They are bound to be dirty!’

We stood around for some more time, both Hitesh and I surfing the internet on our mobile phones. I really don’t know how I would have survived those two hours if I didn’t have internet access.

Soon we heard water running from the washbasin and a few minutes later Charlie stood in front of us wiping his wet hands on his trousers. ‘All done!’ But Hitesh wasn’t done yet. ‘There are some stains on the front door. Here, take a look.’

Charlie promptly picked up a wet mop and a bottle of cleaning fluid, sprayed it liberally on the door and started scrubbing it enthusiastically. As soon as he was done, he ran over to the kitchen, put the fluid and wet mop on the kitchen top near the sink and went to the toilet to wash his hands once more. I walked around and looked. Charlie had done a good job.

‘There’s still so much dust and dirt everywhere!’ Hitesh muttered to me, ‘but this is the best this bastard can do.’

‘Now watch this,’ Hitesh told me. ‘Charlie, why won’t you call me Sir, like your Sheth does?’

Charlie looked at Hitesh, at a total loss for words.

‘Not that it matters to me, but I’d like to know why.’ Hitesh spoke very gently, not unlike a school master trying to understand a student’s dyslexia.

‘I just never call anyone....’

‘Charlie, if you call me Sir, I will pay you a hundred rupees more. Call me Sir and I’ll pay you a thousand rupees. If not, I can only pay your nine hundred. What’ll it be? A thousand or a nine hundred?’

Charlie had obviously never been offered a hundred rupees to address someone as “Sir”. He was puzzled, but not angry. ‘Why not? I will call you “Sir”. And you will...’

‘Pay you a hundred extra, a thousand rupees in all.’

‘Sir.’

‘Go on!’

‘I just did.’

‘Did what?’

‘Called you “Sir”.’

‘I didn’t hear it. Come on, once more.’

‘Sir. You are a “Sir”.’

‘Okay. Good lad. Now here’s the money.’ Hitesh took out his wallet and opened it. I looked at Hitesh and not his wallet. I could see his face fall. It was not very difficult to see why. Hitesh’s wallet didn’t have a single rupee inside! His cards were there, but the currency notes were gone.

‘Where’s my money?’ Hitesh demanded of the world at large. ‘That boy at the vada pav shop must have swiped it when he fell. He must have been very quick. How could he.............’

‘Where’s my thousand rupees?’ Charlie demanded of Hitesh.

‘Don’t worry. I have the money. I took out my wallet as Charlie looked on gratefully.

‘Do you have enough?’ Hitesh asked me. ‘If not, we can go to an ATM and get some money.’

‘I have, I have.. I have eight hundred and ninety rupees. And I have some change as well. I took out fifteen rupees in change.

Do you have any change?’ I asked Hitesh.

Hitesh dug into his pockets and came up with a two rupee coin. ‘Never mind, we’ll go to an ATM and get some money. And I want to find that boy who picked up my wallet.’

‘You aren’t going anywhere. I want my money first.’

‘Here’s nine hundred rupees.’ I gave the notes and coins to Charlie who pocketed the money. ‘And we’ll give you the rest soon.’

‘No, I want it now. Or else..’

‘Or else what?’ Hitesh was furious.

‘Or else, I’ll break your nose’ Charlie gripped Hitesh by his arm. I could see the colour drain out of his face. Hitesh was no street fighter! I too drew back frightened.

‘Listen, we have paid you nine hundred rupees. That was the agreed amount!’

‘Yes, but you made me call you “Sir”. Now pay me hundred rupees right away.’

‘That was just a joke!’

‘Was it? Well, it’s your turn now.’

‘What?’

‘Call me “Sir”!’

‘You got to be kidding.’

‘You better call me “Sir” or else...’

Charlie fist was much smaller than Hitesh’s or mine, but it was a lot more menacing.

‘Sir!’ Hitesh spluttered out the words.

Charlie seemed to be shocked as well. He had not expected such an easy capitulation.

‘Once more!’

‘What! I just called you.

‘But I called you "Sir" three or four times.’

‘Sir!’ This time, Hitesh spoke reluctantly, but his words were clear nevertheless.

As we walked to the nearest ATM machine, Hitesh and I didn’t utter a single word, other than Hitesh telling me, ‘make sure you are around when the furniture arrives on Monday.’

Hitesh withdrew a thousand rupees from the ATM after which he caught a prowling auto and quickly disappeared from sight. I slowly walked on to Bandra railway station. As I entered, I saw a rather healthy looking beggar, a man in his early forties. On an impulse, I gave him fifty rupees. I decided that I would be generous with every beggar I saw that evening.