Chapter 2: Exodus

Ch 2: exodus
For days after the hearing staying the legislation against the recognition of any form of sexual activity that was not heterosexual, the civil administration watched for reactions with a menacingly raised eyebrow. But there was silence. It was most uncharacteristic. There were no demonstrations, no appeals, no impassioned calls for freedom, no threats of appealing to international courts of human rights. The social organization that had floated the petition whistled their way about their regular day jobs as if embarrassed to be reminded of the attempt. When eager press people thrust their mikes and cameras into their faces, they appeared puzzled, confused, bemused even, and offered no screaming sound bytes worth the replay, and soon faded from public memory. The writers, the musicians, the artists, the designers, the film stars, the politicians, the editors who had chosen to ignore the deadline when the buzz died down, turned the other way, pretended it had never come to pass. Days turned to weeks, and weeks to months, and it seemed as if the turn of events had never quite turned to begin with.
And then it began. The first reports came in from the north eastern hilly states. It was innocuous enough. A girl, and her lesbian lover, had defied the village panchayat’s orders of marriage and run away together. It was presumed they had traveled to one of the big cities. Local news agencies caught the report and ran it for a few weeks.
A missing person’s report was filed, both in their village, and in the Big City. The Big City chief police inspector had tugged at his belt, brandished his lathi and assured the girl’s father that if they were found in this jurisdiction, they would surely be "deposited safely under my own personal assurance I give you." Ha ha, raised eyebrow, wink, wink. "We know how to deal with these types. Don’t worry sir, we will sort it out. You go back, sir, and make preparations for her safe arrival."
That frightened her father a little, and he hoped fervently his daughter would be found closer home, and reluctantly to himself, even more fervently that she would not be found at all.
Months later, it was closer south, in a little district of thatch roof houses where reporters had never yet ventured. A labourer tribal, and his best friend had held hands and walked off into the moonlight. It was suspected that they were under the influence of locally grown weed and had stumbled into a forest trap, to be mauled by its prey instead. The villagers had stopped their half-hearted searching by the weekend, and the collector closed the file and, tying it with fraying flat cotton thread, put it away in the stack of red and white cardboard files in the storage shed.
It was only when Salvatore arrived by flight IC243 for diplomatic work and disappeared mysteriously from a Big City farmhouse that an inquiry was instituted. But investigating officers on the trail were looking at unraveling a potentially career breaking political conspiracy- a theory that would take him to exotic foreign locations and safely off the right mark for quite a few months sniggered Andrea to himself, standing in shabbiest Big City bus depot he had ever stood in, still jetlagged from his turbulent ride over from Italy, but looking forward to ending his dual life.
Over the next few months, the various Big City police chowkis across the country remained oblivious that they were collectedly registering a calculatedly minimal increase in missing people’s reports at systematically periodic intervals – runaway teens, boys, girls, mothers, high ranking professionals, artists, foreign nationals from local ashrams. A local newspaper did a Sunday feature story on how more and more executives were losing interest in high paying jobs, quitting at a days notice, and heading for sabbaticals, years off, solitary retreats. It was termed the quarter-life crisis by a panel of dignified city psychologists on a local chat show and spawned a series of self-help books, a column, and a franchise of yoga classes for a year to come.
And then for some days, those who surreptitiously watched the newspapers warily breathed a sigh of relief, for there was nothing. Their silence was as palpable as their own. There was apparently no one in clickety clack editorial, bureaucratic or regional administrative offices who noticed anything askew.
And one by one, day by day, they folded their papers at breakfast, drained their cups of tea, kissed their wives and mothers and sleeping children goodbye with exceptional warmth, and walked out of doors never to return. They piled into rickety state transport buses, took circuitous train routes switching from meter to broad gauge to toy trains to backtracking cart rides and hitching lifts on the backs of passing trucks.
One by one, they arrived. Some under cover of darkness. Some still in the shirt sleeves they would have presented papers to boards of directors in, some in the clothes they went to bed in the previous night. None had stopped to change, to rest, to eat, to be clean. It didn’t matter anymore. They had to reach before they were found and stopped. Before this moment in time changed. Before their spirits were broken. Before the inevitable story was broken.
One day, it broke. There was a small wire report, in the small one cc block tucked in besides the classified ads of an overbooked glossy travel supplement, in a local vernacular newspaper-a quiet eastern hamlet had been reporting a boom in tourism from all over the world. Three months later, tt was picked up by a foreign news channel looking for exotic stories in third world countries, and soon enough, the first TV news crew sporting a dish on its red roof rumbled its way past the deodhar tree, looking for signs of a tourist boom. It helped that heavy construction, migrant settlements, and lack of infrastructure hid the settlement from prying eyes, making it an unlikely visit for anyone more than a local district farmer going up in life. And the immigrants held their breath, crossed their fingers, blew each other good lucks kisses, and carried their prayers, their deepest desires, their innermost dreams, their hope against hope, deep in their hearts, with candles lighted in their mind’s eye, and the tension taut across their insomnia-furrowed, jet-lagged, bumpy-bus ridden brows.
And from that simultaneous pause in breath, and the common prayer, Mannat was born, and led them, it was said, to it.
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Mannat was one of those almost a small town and not quite a village stops off a not quite a road and not nearly a dirt track leading up from National Highway 54 en route towards a small hill in the distance. The new bits of the village-town had grown up and around its foothills and clung on like a vine to a scraggly old tree.
Anyone could see that it had the makings of a handsome town albeit a higgledy-piggledy one. The bungalows in the center had obviously, though worse for want of qualified architects, been constructed on lavish scales, with no thought to limitations of space or design or time. Some were traditional havelis, or fisher cottages from the coast—clear replicas of the kinds of houses the immigrants once lived in and edifices of their nostalgia; others were shabby rebuilds of English cottages borrowed from magazines and books, or from the scatterings of colonial design that still spotted the countryside in the hills; others were makeshift art deco, with polished wood and a sophisticated pageantry that tuck out oddly in an already hotchpotch town. In between were the simple mud and brick two-storey structures with brick grills for ventilation, painted in candy floss pink, and decorated with gaudy hand murals.
The administrative offices were the same as administrative offices anywhere – plain rectangular boxes of regulation brick and mortar, chipped away at parts where dulling paint had been patched over with whitewash in as short a time as it had taken to construct them- but inside they were gaily decorated with warli art, bandhini curtains, flowers, and a couple of comfy armchairs for the visitor and administrator alike, and most oddly, an antique writing desk cum library sourced from Cochin’s Jewish quarter – all donated by friendly residents, when refurbishing, or when a family member had passed on. It was more a recipient of welfare than one that could dole out any, but yet seeming cheerily confident that it could more than manage to do so.
Mannat had a square and a walkway around it where the watermelon sellers still sat under canopies as if painted into a lithograph of a time gone by. Next to them on the perpendicular axis the walkway was rimmed with hot food sellers who came on stage one by one, greeted each other, exchanged a few pleasantries as they set up their makeshift stalls whose wafts filled and flavoured the already musty evening air--kababs, rolls, boiled eggs, skewered pineapple tandoori, and roasted corn and peanuts.
Couples strolled in the now evening light, arm in arm, as if dressed for fiestas, the men in their formal and stately best, the women, elegant and anything but casual—some in long skirts, full sleeved blouses under their saris, and some in trousers, beneath which their open toed sandals peeped bright splashes of coloured nail or ornate figure sketches of recently filigreed mehendi.
In the twilight, you could barely notice the faces, but you could smell the clash of expensive perfumes, by now in their second notes of the day, and men’s clashing with women’s. Some of the women wore the bright blossoms of the frangipani in their hair, some of the men wore them in their Cambridge shirt pockets, and if one looked closely enough the streetlight bounced off the pancakes off the couples faces where the make up was hastily applied, and some of the lipsticks gleamed glossy in the twilight air. There were black men – tall, hardy, gleaming skin hand in hand with little timid Caucasians. There were fat women, of all sizes, strolling some with each other, some with a male partner, some with castaway runway models, and dandies with moustaches, older women with younger men, sugar daddies with their eye candy on their arms, alabaster queens with pumpkin pies, and two distracted youth, barely out of school.
And they were chattering, prattering, sharing jokes, nodding la politesse to each other, gently touching, watching each other as much as themselves for new signs of expression, giveaways of warmth or discomfort.
Most had returned from mundane jobs they were unqualified for. Jojo Mukherjea, the lawyer, was teaching math in the newly set up school. He was also its administrative officer, and canteen supervisor at this point. And since there was no recognition forthcoming from any sort of external government, he also pondered along with a group of well meaning but ill qualified men for the task, the status of its board and curriculum. Sylvester, his man at arms, was involved in the more arduous task of finding land for the new settlers, for he knew, and pressed it upon everyone else to know, that it was only a matter of time before someone somewhere demand deeds of land holding, rights of occupancy, questioned the legitimacy of his unplanned mass exodus, immigration – the first of its kind in he history of man.
In the corner, already collecting around him a gang of cohorts, was Sunny. He was young, and cheerful, and his smiles hid twinkles of pain, and his jokes hid his longing to see his parents again. And Schauna, the architect, who could not bring herself to mingle, or work, who held her knees and sobbed into her plate at the community mess. She would get herself together, it was just a matter of time. Or Maitri the doctor, who looked as though she was not even here for her freedom, but because the town had forgotten in might need a doctor, for the children, and the aged, and the tired, and the dehydrated. She had come with medicines, with bottles full of colours and textures that spoke only to her, and went from door to door, full of quiet confidence, and simple advice.
Already, the town was grouping, forming, finding its binding elements, and cohering to create its core of strength. Already it seemed as if these people had been here forever. Already, there were seniors and juniors, and leaders and followers. And already, while some took in the scene with pride, others looked upon it with worry.
Durga Soudamini, who had more to worry about than even land, could not stroll, even on a night like this. Alone in her still shack – she put behind her her raw sense of betrayal at a lover who had not found the courage to come, and assuring herself that it was only a matter of time- in her lighted balcony partly up the hill, she paced two for every one the crowd beneath her in the square took.
She had taken upon herself the tasks of commander-in-chief of the army, chief of police, and maintainer of law and order. It was the lesser of the settlement’s priorities – plumbing and drinking water more on the chief’s mind, and finding a perennial source of fresh fruit and vegetables without having to trudge down to the nearest bazaar 5 miles down, on everybody elses, but Durga knew deep down inside of her, everytime someone spoke of finding land or even hoisting a clothesline, that they would come, sooner than later for their land, for their people, for the protection of their institutions – school, law, marriage. They would come angry and unwilling to listen, hurt by the rebuttal of their centuries of authority, thirsting for redressal, and seeking to be justified. Insecure, wounded-the worst kind of enemies to do battle with.
And when they did, and when the new laws, and the constitutions, and the education, and the reason, and the wall of men had all failed, as Durga, silently avowed they would, she would be the one who would have to ready for them. And she looked at the land stretched out beneath her, with its strolling people, and their strolling dreams, for themselves, for their children, for their world, yes, even for the people of the Big City who so wantonly had hurt them, denying them their basic right to be, and she was never more sure that she would die fighting for their right to be free.