The Lesson Page 2

  Just then, the rapist saw what he had been looking for. A clue. He took it out carefully and put it on his palm.

  ‘What’s this?’ asked the moral policeman, frowning.

  ‘A chipped nail. With red nail polish,’ said the rapist. ‘It’s a woman who did this. A very angry woman.’

  The moral policeman’s face was dark as thunder.

  ‘We must find her and punish her,’ he said, his Adam’s apple bobbing.

  ‘I think I have a good idea who she is,’ said the rapist, fingering the photograph that lay inside his pocket. The president of the Adjustment Bureau had given it to him the previous night before leaving. It was a still from the CCTV tape in his office. He’d had it installed the day he took over the bureau.

  Many angry women had entered his office, but only one had left it still fuming.

  Four

  It had felt good to break the damned machine.

  Everything had started with it after all. The second daughter could still remember the day as if it had been yesterday. She had seen the memo in the postbox but had not registered that it would change her life forever. It was not that the second daughter had never seen that ominous brown envelope before. Ten years ago, a similar envelope had come for her elder sister, the first daughter, throwing their father into a frenzy.

  Their mother read the memo with an expressionless face. ‘I told you it would come,’ she told their father. ‘I told you not to wait till the last minute like you always do.’

  The tension in the air had been as thick as an elephant’s hide. The second daughter, who was considerably younger than her sister, did not remember the details but she could never forget the panic in her father’s eyes as he stared at the pink memo in his hands.

  Luckily, the first daughter was beautiful. She was tall, fair-skinned, slim and had absolutely no interests of her own. Her mother (who had perhaps foreseen her husband’s inertia in such issues) had made sure of that. She was brought up to be a bride. She did not even address their parents as Mama and Papa because she was not going to be their daughter forever. Those titles were reserved for her in-laws.

  The second daughter, though, was a strange one. She spent her pocket money on books and gave her opinion on just about everything, though no one was asking or listening. Someday, the first daughter predicted with relish, her pride would come to a fall. And the first daughter, who had lived a life of such virtue and who had always set an example for her younger sibling, would be proved right. That would sadden her, undoubtedly, but the first daughter did not see how the future could be any different.

  The first daughter made a good marriage. She produced three children within the first five years, all of them sons. Her husband was a dupatta regulator at the university, a harmless but well-paying government job that came with sufficient holidays in the calendar year. Their match was made in heaven, as was the popular wedding theme that season. There were clouds, devas, apsaras, peacocks, white horses and a lily pond with a swan. The second daughter said it was all such a waste of money and the first daughter said she was just being jealous. When her turn came, the first daughter said, she could get married in a ditch, atop a pig coated in sewage water.

  The second daughter had not expected the memo so soon because she was enrolled in a PhD programme in anthropology. She had assumed that she would not be of marriageable age till she completed it. However, the memo made a stern observation that since the second daughter showed all signs of rebelling against the Institution, it was better if she was married right away. If it was not done immediately, it would be a miracle if it was done at all, the memo remarked wryly.

  The second daughter’s very birth was a miracle. The sonologist looked at her when she was still in the womb and declared her to be a boy.

  ‘There it is, do you see it?’ the sonologist had asked, pointing at the screen. If he was not very much mistaken (and the sonologist was never mistaken), that was a boy. The family crowded around the small screen like an ancient village that had only one television set and declared that they saw it too. In truth, none of them knew what to look at but nobody was going to be the person who missed seeing the tiger in the safari.

  Nobody quite knew what had happened. The family spent the first ten minutes after her birth searching for the missing organ. When it was nowhere to be found (it wasn’t under the bed, no), they wondered if it was only a genetic defect. Something that could be corrected through an expensive but necessary surgery. If they went abroad, they would be able to get something done about it. Or maybe the doctor who delivered the baby had made a mistake and pulled it out? Could they stick it back with super glue? There must be some explanation, surely.

  The doctor told them that there was: the sonologist had been wrong. The second daughter was hundred per cent female. The family was convinced that some black magic, of the blackest possible variety, had been performed. Nevertheless, they took the second daughter home.

  When the brown envelope came to their house for the second time, her parents began to search for a groom desperately. The second daughter had studied too much and it was hard to find a boy who could match her qualifications. The deadline was nearing and the Moral Police Force’s polite reminders were becoming increasingly not-so-polite. They started off by sending them reminders in the form of well-meaning uncles and aunts who patted her head kindly and asked her when she was getting married and if she knew how to make sabudana vada. She could lose some weight, straighten her hair, go to a good photo studio and take some portrait pictures – had she done any of this? There were websites, too, the uncles and aunts said, where she could register and eligible boys would rush to her like flies to a honey pot. These were modern times and one had to use the technology available or one would become obsolete, said an uncle who was addicted to his iPad.

  But as time went by, the reminders came in the form of anonymous phone calls that asked her parents if they were keeping her home to run a brothel. Or maybe there was something medically wrong with her? Wasn’t she a virgin?

  Finally, unable to take her father’s whimpers and her mother’s stony silence, the second daughter yielded to the first man who would have her. He was a dentist by profession and smelled of fresh mints. In compensation for her ordinary looks, her father gave the dentist a fat dowry and paid for the renovation of his clinic.

  In the beginning, the second daughter did not even realize that she was being abused. A knock on the head. A pinch in the thighs. Rough sex. She found it unpleasant, but it was not until the dentist forcibly extracted one of her front teeth (for smiling too much at the milkman), that it dawned upon her that she was living with a monster in a white coat.

  ‘I want a divorce,’ she told her mother over the phone that day. The wind whistled through her missing tooth, leaving a strange chill in her mouth.

  ‘You are crazy,’ her mother told her through pressed lips.

  ‘I want a divorce,’ the second daughter insisted. ‘What should I do?’

  The silence at the other end of the line went on for so long that the second daughter thought her mother had hung up on her. And then, she heard her say, ‘Go to the Adjustment Bureau. They are the only ones who have the authority to grant a divorce. But they will never do it.’

  ‘How do you know?’ asked the second daughter, dreading the answer. But her mother had hung up.

  She could still hear the baby in the box screaming as she dropped it to the floor. It had the dentist’s eyes, brown as the cold earth, and it had clawed at her breast just like him. It was just as her mother had said. The president simply refused to listen. He had actually yawned when she told him about the beatings.

  The baby was the last straw. Storming out of his office, the second daughter had seen the marriageable age notifier, spawning out its pink memos like a grotesque alien giving birth.

  It was lunch time and there was nobody around. The second daughter shoved her hand into its innards and dragged out the entrails, killing the thing that had destroye
d her life. And then, she left behind a note because she wanted them to know who had done it.

  At the time, it had felt like a good idea.

  Five

  The rapist studied the photograph once again. She was not bad-looking, but he wouldn’t have called her pretty. There was too much chin and too little cheek. And her eyes could have been larger.

  He had told the president that the woman’s lesson was scheduled to take place the following Sunday. The president had given him her address and number, printed tidily on a card. He picked up the telephone and dialled.

  ‘Hello,’ said a female voice.

  ‘Is that you?’ asked the rapist.

  ‘Whom do you want?’ bit back the voice.

  The rapist smiled. It was her all right. He liked her spunk. ‘This is the rapist,’ he said, introducing himself, ‘from the government.’

  There were many rapists in the capital city but there was only one who functioned on behalf of the government. The organized nature of his job lent to it a certain respectability that the others lacked. Every time he walked into the building, the rapist couldn’t help admiring his reflection on the swanky glass doors that opened for him. ‘I’ve made it,’ a small voice would whoop inside him and he would resist the mad urge to throw his hands up in the air and do a merry dance. At heart, he was still a small town boy, given to dancing in public. But in the cities, he’d learnt, one went to a special place after paying an entry ticket to dance clumsily, badly, to music that sounded like rain beating down on asbestos roofs. The moral policeman had taken him to such places to meet many of his initial clients.

  ‘Okay,’ the woman said. The rapist noted that her voice had become cautious.

  ‘You have a lesson scheduled for Sunday,’ he said politely. ‘What time would be convenient for you?’

  ‘A lesson? Why? What have I done?’ she asked, sounding frightened.

  ‘Ask the president of the Adjustment Bureau,’ drawled the rapist. Crying bored him and he sensed that this woman, for all her bravado, was on the verge of tears. She was clearly buying time. Nobody messed with the president and escaped the consequences. There was no use pretending innocence.

  ‘All I asked for was a divorce!’ she shouted. ‘And it’s not illegal to ask for one!’

  ‘I don’t know about all that,’ said the rapist, looking at his watch. ‘I’m just doing my job.’

  ‘I … I …’ her voice faltered. The rapist stifled a yawn. The floodgates were about to open now, he was sure.

  But the woman controlled herself and said, ‘Isn’t there a procedure for this? I don’t know how this works. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Look, I was told that you needed to be taught a lesson. Lessons, actually. Do you have your Conduct Book in front of you? No? I’ll wait till you get it,’ the rapist said, absently doodling on the notepad next to his phone.

  He could hear her searching and cursing on the other end. Then, after what seemed to be an eternity, the woman came back on the line. ‘I can’t find it,’ she said in a small voice.

  The rapist raised his brow. It was mandatory for all citizens to keep a copy of the Conduct Book at home in a ‘prominent place of display’. He wondered if he ought to report her. But that might mean more paperwork and the rapist wasn’t in the mood for it.

  ‘That’s too bad,’ he said sportingly. ‘For what it’s worth, I can tell you what lessons they are. Under Women, Chapter 2: How to talk to a man; Chapter 8: Get Married, Stay Married; Chapter 9: National Adjustment Policy; Chapter 10: Compulsory Maternal Feelings. Four lessons in all.’

  ‘But I was told the Adjustment Bureau can grant divorce! That’s why I went there in the first place! If they can’t, why do they say they can?’ she screamed.

  The rapist shifted the receiver and rubbed his ears. He did not like women who screamed. The best ones just whimpered beneath him while he was on the job. There was a time when he had enjoyed the yelling and the name-calling, but the novelty had worn off pretty quickly. Worst were the ones who bit and clawed at him. Raping could be a dangerous job if one didn’t watch out. Thankfully, his was a government job and all such on-the-job injuries were covered by insurance.

  ‘Well, the president feels you may not want a divorce after your lesson,’ he said slowly, as if he were explaining the alphabet to a particularly stupid child.

  ‘How can that be?’ she shot back, bewildered.

  ‘No decent man will want you after you are raped anyway. So you will have to live with your husband or live without any man at all. Which, as you know, is impossible,’ the rapist rattled on easily. He never discouraged the women from asking questions and he always took the time to clarify the doubts they had. In middle school, he’d been in love with his science teacher, a woman of infinite patience, who delighted in the questions he came up with. She’d told the rapist’s mother, while handing out his report card, that he was one of those students who gave meaning to her life as a teacher. He would go far in life, she

  had said.

  ‘We will, of course, pay your husband a small sum for damaging his property,’ finished the rapist.

  ‘What makes you think I want any man?’ said the woman.

  The rapist sat up suddenly. ‘Are you lesbian?’ he whispered into the phone. He hadn’t come across one in his job yet in the capital city, but he’d heard of such experiences from other rapists at a national-level conference he had attended the previous summer. It had been his first conference and the rapist had received a standing ovation for his presentation.

  ‘No!’ she shouted again. ‘That’s not what I meant!’

  The rapist was growing tired of her. ‘Look, it’s not me you should be arguing with,’ he said. ‘I just called to check on a convenient time for you. If you don’t give me one, I will just drop by whenever I feel like it. Do you think I enjoy working on Sundays?’

  ‘What if I’m not home?’ challenged the woman.

  ‘Then I’ll wait. And if you don’t come back on Sunday, I’ll wait on Monday. Then Tuesday. I will camp at your door if necessary. The government will send out an alert for you. Someone or the other will hunt you down. And when that happens, there will be more lessons for me to teach you than the ones on the list I read out,’ said the rapist.

  ‘What if I never come back?’ whispered the woman. ‘What if I kill myself? End it all?’

  She sounded as if she were talking to herself rather than to him. But the rapist answered anyway. ‘Then we’ll teach your lessons to your sister.’

  There was silence at the other end. And then, the woman said in a resigned voice, ‘Come at eleven thirty a.m.’

  ‘Perfect,’ said the rapist amiably. He hated getting to the job before breakfast. It gave him hunger headaches. ‘And oh,’ he said, just before hanging up, ‘I know about the notifier.’

  Six

  The TRPs of the Good News channel were going down. The media mogul was displeased, as was only to be expected. She was so distracted that she could neither finish the crossword nor solve the Sudoku puzzle in the newspaper. The channel wasn’t just a job for her. It was who she was.

  The media mogul had founded the Good News channel fifteen years ago when television was full of junk and news reporting had sunk to desperate depths. People had stopped watching the news altogether. The government was finding it increasingly hard to disseminate information and important values to the public.

  ‘And why do you think people don’t watch the news any more?’ The media mogul remembered asking this question to an audience full of journalists, young and old. Many in the younger lot were hardly a year or two older than her. They had looked at her insolently, convinced that she was yet another brat trying to best them at their job. When her question received no response, she had said, ‘It’s because all we serve is bad news. What the public needs is a healthy dose of good news. Where it’s happening and to whom.’

  She had practised that line several times before the mirror in her bathroom that morning but it had stil
l come out wobbly. She could see people leaving the auditorium, a couple of audience members doodling and an old cameraman fast asleep in his corner seat, saliva dribbling down his chin.

  Her talk did not go down well with the yuppie crowd that put it down as ‘yellow’ journalism. But in the audience that day was the president of the Adjustment Bureau. She was just what he was looking for. Marriage and divorce were the two subjects under the purview of the Adjustment Bureau, but the president felt that the bureau needed to take a more proactive role in promoting the former and discouraging the latter. His predecessor had been rather lax: one of those crazy liberals with a fancy degree who believed that people should have all kinds of freedom. Even if they were to self-destruct with all that freedom, the predecessor had said, it was their choice. The predecessor and his pack of yes-men believed that choice was the answer to all of life’s problems. Not surprisingly, the predecessor did not last long in office. When the president took over from him, the first thing he did was burn the predecessor’s library.

  Later that evening, the president called up the media mogul (who was just a scabby-kneed girl with thin hair back then) and made her an offer. He would help her set up the Good News channel if she agreed to give the Adjustment Bureau sufficient coverage in its reporting. The media mogul was delighted. She’d had a crush on the president for the longest time and couldn’t believe that she was actually talking to him! She said yes immediately and the Good News channel went live three months later.

  Though the president did not have too much time to watch television, he never went to bed without watching the last segment of the Good News channel. It was called The Storks and featured couples who had been married for at least a year and had still not reproduced. Some of them were medically incompetent to do so, but many were simply defying the guidelines set by the Adjustment Bureau regarding the elements that made a marriage successful. The bureau advised all married couples to get pregnant as soon as they could in order to preserve and revere the Institution. Of course, this was only a guideline (the president was working on a bill to convert this into law pretty soon), but it gave him an understanding of who was likely to disrupt the peace that his organization worked so hard to maintain.