The Purple House

Five hundred in cash and a pouch of rum was what we were each paid upon returning the flags. Yet another rally of the big leader behind us and yet another fruitful day of cheering done, we were desperate to return home. But the special bus fitted with disco lights that had brought us here was nowhere to be found. The speed at which the many faded red buses were getting filled caused us to panic. For answers, we turned to the egg-pakora vendor nearby. He told us the driver had gotten two portions packed and taken the disco-ball bus in the direction it had come from. His boiling oil smelling of fairs back home, we debated biting into our pouches for a minute. But prudence kicked in and we returned to the crowd in search of the party worker who’d picked us up from our village that morning. He was kickstarting a motorcycle when we surrounded him. He claimed helplessness and asked us to spend the night in the capital before boarding a bus he would arrange for us the next day. But we didn’t know anyone here other than our local legislator. The party worker said we were in luck because all the party heads lived on the same street and our legislator’s house was only a fifteen-minute walk away. He led us to a surprisingly low gate and sped off.

The men behind the gate carried guns much smaller than those we’d trained on as teens, but our days of needing to join the militia just for bags of wheat were long gone. So we withered under their stares for an hour before being led behind the horizontally vast house, where we were served puffed rice and milk. After having to share our meal with the house’s servant army of castes above and below ours (the ways of the capital!), we sucked down our rum pouches and went to sleep on the cool floor. We were jolted upright at an unknown hour to join our legislator’s motorcade, which was to set out for an accident site. Packed into a single van, we hurtled through the dark only to stop in the middle of nowhere. Finally we saw our legislator when he stepped out of the car in front to go pee in the forest. Our driver told us that the legislator’s diabetes had been acting up recently. We were discussing his stride, which didn’t look particularly unhealthy, when he emerged from behind the trees, screaming, “Bear! Bear!” The rum steeling our veins, we jumped out of the van and rushed past our convulsing legislator into the forest, our tongues and throats aflame with the “ulululululu” of our mothers’ and wives’ evening prayers, which we knew all animals hated. We navigated spiky tree trunks and sticky undergrowth, till the rays of a flashlight fell on a tall, shuffling black bear, who turned to look at us and promptly tripped and fell with a thud. As we turned back to the road, the bear’s bellows for help ripped down all sense of distance.

Our legislator thanked us in person before ordering the convoy back to his home. We were woken up next morning with the news that, as reward for our bravery, the journey back to our village had been canceled and we were to immediately begin employment as our legislator’s auxiliary security. The promise of a regular supply of rum pouches sealed the deal. After lunch, we got into the van again and followed our legislator’s car to a giant purple house with a fort-like gate. Our legislator walked through the gate alone, and we were told that no one from his retinue was allowed inside. While hanging around a tea stall nearby, we agreed that our village deity would not have approved of the unjust treatment meted out to the possibly misunderstood bear. Our deity was famed for having emerged from the core of the Earth riding the first bear, which had remained her dearest friend till she relinquished her earthly body and bequeathed her bear-friend the gift of immortality. Solitary as a species ever since, the bear that we’d hurt probably didn’t have friends or family to lean on.

Our six-hour wait outside the purple house made it clear what kind of schedule we could expect. So when our legislator disappeared through that same tall gate the next morning, we excused ourselves from the van and rickshawed and bused to the forest on the capital’s outskirts where we just had to find the bear. Intimidated in the absence of rum, we could only guess at the exact spot on the road where the convoy had stopped. We spread out a little before penetrating the foliage. The undergrowth was crunchier than we remembered; we slowed into the forest. Highly visible now, our fear of being discovered kept eroding the thrill of the search. We ducked past snakes that dangled from the branches and stepped around giant frogs. Then our attention turned to a swarm of complaining birds as they set off from a tree—and sure enough, leaning with one paw on the trunk was the bear, its left hind leg slightly raised. The bear quickly got down on threes and hopped away, that favored hind leg dangling useless thanks to our irresponsibility. If we didn’t set this right, we, our children, our children’s children, and so on would definitely be cursed by our village deity. We returned to the road and rushed back to the purple house; our legislator was the only person, other than the big leader, powerful enough to facilitate urgent treatment. Our fear of generational damnation overcame all dos and don’ts: we burst past his security guards (who didn’t follow us through the tall gate) and entered the purple house, which had a single, lathi-bearing watchman too stunned to act. The doorless hall on the ground floor was empty. As we took the stairs and knocked at each of the eight doors on each of the floors above, immaculately dressed women kept popping out and turning ashen on seeing us. When on the third floor one such woman yelled, “You people?”, we realized that this person—clad in a shimmering saffron-and-green sari with borders of gold, ivory bangles, a double-decker gold necklace, a tiered bindi, and a maang tikka flowing from a neatly wound bun—was our legislator.

We trotted out of the purple house to wait in the van as instructed. Within minutes, our legislator emerged through the tall gate in his original avatar—a bald, safari-suit-clad man without a brush of color or refinement. Later, at his home, we were summoned to his chambers for the first time and made to sit on the floor so he could talk down to us, “That’s my refuge, the place you happily entered, dicks in hand. Needing to dress differently is not easy in this world filled with shitheads like you. That house is where I and a few other wealthy citizens find acceptance for a couple of hours, an escape from unhappiness. What I fear most in life is unhappiness. Sadness I don’t mind. Sadness can always coexist with happiness.” Then he crouched down on his haunches, to our eye level, catching, in time, the glasses that spilled out of his bulging shirt pocket. “You have violated what I value most, and for that I’ll bust your asses one day. For now, we continue as we have. You understand you can’t breathe a word about this to anyone, or your families back home will have breathed their last.”

That night we reminisced about Amit, our friend who’d been caught twirling around in his sister’s lehenga choli during our militia training and had been chased out and ridiculed ever since. He’d eventually left our village to come to this alien city, which he hoped wouldn’t notice he was different (the ways of the capital!); if he could have learned how to line his pockets like our leaders, he might have been able to afford temporary acceptance instead of having to choose permanent alienation. We had never contemplated how we might have failed him, but on this day our guilt about the bear weighed heavier. We had to ask around for help since we could no longer turn to our legislator.

The next day, after escorting him to the purple house, we set off towards the city’s Ram temple and found on its steps the baba recommended by most. This dreadlocked and long-bearded figure of poise answered immediately: “The solution thee seek, an instant salve for an injured limb, is in numbers. Write the number 58 directly on the limb and watch celestial magic dissolve the pain away. It’s the number of Hanuman, the staunchest devotee of our Lord Ram.” He asked for fifty-eight kilos of sugar in payment, but we managed to bargain it down to a bit of cash and a rum pouch.

Armed with a piece of chalk, a white crayon, a brush, and a bottle of white fabric paint, we ventured into the forest the next day. But the wind was doing a number, and the rustling of leaves and branches kept us from hearing each other’s footsteps. It was as if the forest-spirit was warning us not to search for the bear. We stepped forward while awaiting clarification of the forest-spirit’s intentions, which came fast. It summoned a giant bat from the heavens that flew down and pelted us with bullets of ice. Bleeding from our heads, with our fingers almost thwacked out of joint, we took cover against tree trunks, and as soon as the bombardment eased up, we rushed back to the open road. Thankfully, our hired rickshaws were still standing, their drivers cowering under the seats. They were delighted to drive us away, even as the giant bat followed beyond the forest, spraying a chalky powder that caked the capital’s roads and the vehicles we passed. We reached the somewhat chalk-whitened purple house just in time to see our legislator emerge from its tall gate. The bat disappeared over the horizon.

While getting patched up, we heard talk of how it had just snowed in the capital for the first time ever. Calls started to come in about electric poles collapsing from the snow and water pipes bursting in the cold. All evening we accompanied our legislator on visits to the affected neighborhoods. By next morning, the news was aflame with reports of citizen marches all over the city protesting the government’s lack of readiness and its disregard for the effects of climate change (the ways of the capital!). Since the party instructed legislators not to leave home, ours was deprived of the purple house and we of our quest to make it up to the bear even as winter set in for good. After three days of this, our legislator snuck out of town with his wife and kids, and a bus was arranged for us to visit our families back in the village. Of course, we would not be paid, but we were seen off at the low gate with a shawl and two rum pouches each.

With all our rum, we bribed a driver to take us to the now-pinpointed spot on the road and wait. We entered the forest stone-sober, with hesitant steps, but the forest-spirit didn’t object this time. Even the usual snakes and frogs were nowhere to be found. Calm sunlight lit up our path, and the leaves and branches released only the faintest crackles as we crept forward. We were aware that we wouldn’t find the bear roaming around in this cold weather, so we focused on searching out earth that had been dug up or disturbed. And it was inside a hole at the base of a partially uprooted tree that we found the bear sleeping. We couldn’t see its face since the animal’s rear was towards us, but there was no mistaking that bulk, almost huddled in its amorphous expanse. The bear’s soft snores emboldened us, and we removed some of the leaves mounded around the hole. Light streamed in, but the bear didn’t move. With a nod to our village deity, we dipped our brush into the white fabric paint, reached in, and wrote a prominent 58 on the fur covering what must have been the ankle of the bear’s left hind leg. It twitched. We pulled back. The snoring went on, so we looked in again. Not a moment later, the bear turned in its sleep, and three cubs latched onto its chest were swung around into the light. The cubs didn’t let go. They were comfortable, unburdened, oblivious to our gaze, oblivious to unhappiness, their tiny mouths suckling incessantly—their mother’s hibernating body their purple house.