The potato grafting could be done and so it was — under such secrecy that even the rotweillers from the Hindi television channels usually busy carrying sting operations on homosexual college teachers or college girl doubling as call girls didn’t hear a word of it.

Only six people knew about Inder’s face being transformed into that of an older-looking Amitabh Bachchan’s, complete with white beard and orange hair. Inder and Jamshi knew, as did the two (ex?) IAS officers M. Morarji and C. Charan, and the farmer who serendipitiously banged into Jamshi-Inder’s car and happened to be one of the five growers of Bt potato in India, Satyen Dev also known as Satyen Mohan – whose new Nano mysteriously went up in flames two days after the accident. And Inder’s buddy Amar Singh.

Satyen Dev/Mohan’s new Nano going up in flames

[Satyen Dev/Mohan’s new Nano going up in flames]

Amar had been fidgeting ever since he had been thrown out of the party he had been a founder of. So when he saw the transformation in his friend, he realised that this was his moment for payback.

“Inder, come with me to Mumbai tomorrow,” he had said even as Inder was lying down in the secret ‘hospital’ bed.
“Mumbai? Why? I have to talk to Rick. He’s been wondering all these days what’s happened to me. The travel agency will be up and running next month and he hasn’t seen me since I went to Bangkok.”

“Arrey, listen to me. This will not only take care of the travel firm but also what we had planned…”
“Oh, no, no! I’m not doing any meat import any more. It’s too bloody dangerous as you may see!” Inder had sat up, but as soon as Amar started to talk again he didn’t interrupt. The next day, after being discharged from the secret ‘hospital’ somewhere behind an Airtel store in New Friends’ Colony, he was on board a plane hurtling its way towards Mumbai airport.

The penny dropped the moment he had got down from the hired car with Amar at the Delhi terminal. Everyone was looking at him with deference, with a difference. A few foreigners even. He looked like Amitabh Bachchan.

“He’s much shorter than I thought he would be,” said a fat salwar-kurta-clad lady to his fatter salwar-kurta-clad companion.

“And older,” the other woman added.

The same kind of reception was repeated at Mumbai airport, a senior airport authority official even ensuring that he got a tall glass of cold water the moment he passed the iron railing.

And then, not quite figuring what was happening with Amar constantly talking about how Sania Mirza’s scheduled marriage to Pakistani cricketer Shoaib Malik (yet to be announced to the media as Mirza was still feeling a bit bloated) wouldn’t last a year, the car stopped the mouth of a giant bridge overlooking the sea. There were crowds congregrated all around, but as soon as Inder and Amar started walking, they parted as if a comb was drawing two flaps of hair space away on both sides to reveal a strong, clean, straight line.

“Ashok-ji, how are you?” Amar exclaimed to a man wearing dark glasses and could, from certain angles, pass off as a deadringer for Dawood Ibrahim.

The Maharashtra Chief Minister looked up, furrowed his brow and was about to move away when his eyes caught the figure behind Amar. Inder was wearing a jacket that covered his still light pink flesh round his throat and long sleeves that covered his arms barring his heavily ringed fingers.

“Bachchan-ji, please come, please come,” Chavan spouted as if striking oil. “Thank you so much for coming.”

A Dawood Ibrahim-looking Ashok Chavan greeting an Amitabh Bachchan-looking Inderjeet

Inder pitched his voice an octave low and said that he was happy to be here and that the Worli Sea Link was going to be a boon for the people of this great city. It sounded fake so everyone was doubly pleased, especially the armada of media people (no journalist was covering the event) who thrust microphones and cellphones out the way Bipasha Basu, well, never mind.

Far away, Jamshi Narimanpointwalla, original girl from Bombay was witnessing a strange natural phenomenon in her office: a fight between a customer and one of her showroom colleagues over the worth of India’s freedom fighters. Everything was going well with the two, the latter showing the former the extra space in a new model and explaining how the retractable sideview mirrors could be controlled by the press of a button. Even the small difference over whether the door linings should have a colour exactly matching the body of the car was resolved (“Sir, it’s a complimentary colour that enhances the 3D effect of the doors when they’re opened.”).

Then, while going through the special payment scheme, the customer noticed the newspaper next to them on the table. It was folded to a page showing a government advertisement marking Martyrs’ Day. Picking up the paper cursorily, the customer said, “Look at these ! I mean Bhagat Singh was a youngster who we venerate as India’s most famous freedom fighter. But what was he? Just a youngster with nothing else on his hands playing ‘terrorist’. I mean he didn’t even get hanged for killing the person he had targeted.”

Jamshi’s colleague, a cut-Surd with a fiercely shrill voice, looked up.

“What did you say, sir?”

“That Bhagat Singh and all these freedom fighterwallas were incompetent boys. He was supposed to kill the police chief who had launched a fierce lathi-charge in Lahore. And who did Bhagat Singh kill? Some other white guy who had nothing to do with the police chief. Those Bengali freedom fighters were even worse, killing women and children instead of their intended targets.”

Bhagat ‘Che’ Singh

A chair screeched back against the showroom floor and as Jamshi chewed on her nails, no longer with boredom, she heard her colleague shriek, “I heard you the first time, you bastard! Get out you filthy nation-hater. You should be…”

Three people, including the man’s boss, rushed out of the adjoining glass cubicle and chaperoned the freedom-fighter mocking potential customer out.

Back in Mumbai, Amar was exceptionally pleased with himself so decided to take Inder and himself to Zenzi bar, that dim, cool-looking place visited by leggy ladies and gaunt gents, a place that may have once been a stable full of horses but now had a long, narrow bar with cocaine-users taking it easy.

After they had left the Worli Sea Link inauguration ceremony, unknown to both Amar and Inder, Amitabh Bachchan had walked in, said hello to Ashok Chavan who, this time turned, dropped a jaw and told his flunkeys that “This was bad! Bad! He’s embarrassing us and the party now. Take care of it.”

No words were exchanged between the real Amitabh Bachchan and Ashok Chavan. Once Chavan’s flunkeys got the order to give the returning-for-publicity Amitabh, they started telling the gathered media people (there weren’t any journalists around) about how Mr Bachchan had gatecrashed the event as he hadn’t been invited and how now as a brand ambassador to “Narendra Modi’s evil state”, with Modi back in the picture because of the Special Investigative Team investigations in his role during the 2002 Gujarat riots, Big B wanted to reposition himself.

A few hours later the same day, Ashok Chavan with the real Amitabh Bachchan

Amitabh was a bit surprised to be snubbed by Chavan. But he figured that it was because he had come after the ceremony and he shouldn’t make too much of the incident.

Not far away at the Zenji bar, Inder had a stiff expensive whisky and realised that Rick and his travel agency may have just got a brand ambassador to start things off. India’s top brand ambassador at that.

Lying next to the Nizamuddin Bridge that connects New Delhi to its subtler, more expansive outer regions of Mayur Vihar and beyond, there’s a patch of land growing potatoes. The land belongs to a Harmant Sukhia, but he hardly spends his time here. Instead, the man in charge of the field and responsible for growing the potatoes is Satyen with a variable surname of Dev and Mohan.

Some two years ago, two people wearing bush shirts and spectacles and living closeby at the Indian Administrative Service officers-infested housing society of Purvasha Anandlok had dropped by, making more than cursory notes about the fertile farm lands on the banks of the Yamuna under and across the Nizamuddin Bridge.

A year later and after a series of conferences at Vigyan Bhavan near India Gate, the two gentlemen descended again on some specific plots. One of them was the land used for farming potatoes by Satyen Dev/Mohan. A specific sack of potato seeds (batch no. 21A) was handed out free of cost to Satyen Dev/Mohan as part of the classified Operation Spud.

Months later, Satyen Dev/Mohan has been producing an excellent crop of potatoes on the land owned by Harman Sukhia. The output has been twelve times the annual average and with the wages of success, Satyen Dev/Mohan had just bought a Tata Nano, and was driving his new car for the third day in his life on Nizamuddin Bridge when the car in front of him, a Maruti Esteem, screeched to a halt, with the consequence of his yellow Nano’s nose banging into the back of the car in front.

The car being driven by Jamshi Naripointwalla shuddered the way a hand does after it comes crashing on a wobbly corrugated metal sheet with nothing below it. “What tha…?” she exclaimed, the seat belt pressing into her right shoulder.

“What tha…?” the man with his face wrapped up in sheets of white gauge bandage uttered some two seconds after, knowing that not to say it would suggest his willingness to take all kinds of shit in life.

Inder, the rapper in a mystery with a riddle

Only a few minutes ago, as the two of them were rolling down the moderately empty channel of the Nizamuddin Bridge, Inder, to show that he wasn’t all dead serious, had asked Jamshi, “Why is a raven like a writing desk?”

She had looked at his face — well, not at his face, as there was no face visible — and shook her head with a laugh. They were approaching the house of M. Morarji and C. Charan, two bureaucrats whom Jamshi had been told to contact by her source — the same one who gave her free Rs 14 corporate box seats at the IPL match at the Feroze Shah Kotla where Delhi lost to someone – for classified experimental-stage Bt potato skin. Which is when a car banged into them.

“Have you guessed the riddle yet?” Inder said, turning to Jamshi again after she had got out of the car, almost pummelled the moron in a Nano whose damage had been more severe than the Esteem they were in. After buckling up again and hurling the choicest of invectives at the person whom the next day both Jamshi and Inder would be introduced by Morarji and Charan as India’s top grower of Bt potatoes.

“No, I give it up,” Jamshi replied. “What’s the answer?” “I haven’t the slightest idea,” said Inder. Jamshi sighed wearily. “I think you might do something better with the time,” she said, “than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answers.”

A ravenous writing desk

[Next week: CWG Work - - Reconstruction time]

“Your face has melted away and all you’re worried about is losing your job?” Jamshi Narimanpointwalla said with her wholesome, fulsome face shaking in what in the television light could have been mistaken for anger.

“Well, it’s not as if I’m in pain. But it’s pretty much goodbye to going to the clinic. Imagine facing a patient and saying ‘How are you today, Mr Saxena. Let me now take a look at your cornea even though I don’t have any corneas any more,” said Inder in deep defence.

Jamshi had got off the auto and as she got out of the lift on the second floor of Inder’s block of flats, she thought she saw the man whom she had been introduced some months ago and she vaguely remembered as Amar Singh briskly go down the stairs taking probably three steps at a time.

She had entered Inder’s flat and within a few seconds faced his cadaverous face. As a girl she remembered asking her mother after Uncle Mortarjee’s death what would happen to him on the Tower of Silence. She was smart enough to know that there were vultures involved and vultures were not picky meat-eaters. “He will go to heaven, Jamshi.”

“But the vultures? They’ll eat him first, no?”

WHERE MORTARJEE WAS NIT-PICKED: The Tower of Silence, Bombay

Her mother had rolled her eyes — none of which were lazy eyes like one of Jamshi’s — and said something on the lines of the birds carrying Uncle Mortarjee to heaven. But that didn’t stop Jamshi from imagining how her mother’s eldest brother’s body would be picked on, eyes first as if toffied apple from an icecream bowl and then stripped bone clean.

Over the evening at Inder’s, she cleared the piles of half-opened meat products strewn across the room (“Where did all these sausages and salami and bacon come from?” she asked herself.) And suddenly as she was dumping all the packets, some still unopened into the overflowing dustbin in the kitchen, she was awash with a maternal feeling. This, she thought, was what the ongoing debate about the women’s reservation bill in Parliament was all about: the freedom to play mummy-ji to the men.

Even as she was thinking of the sweating-but-never-complaining Nargis in Mother India, a movie she had never seen or intended to see despite the crackling Freudian frisson of the main actress playing the mother of the man whom she’d become the wife of in real life, Jamshi told Inder that she thought that his face could be reconstructed with potato skin.

“Now that’s just a daft idea, Jamshi. I’m doomed. I’ll be one of those beggars at the crossing of Lodhi Road. I don’t think skin grafting will make any sense to this face,” he said pointing one of his scabby fingers with the phalanges showing at his melted face. “I think you better leave. This could be highly contagious.”

The thought had crossed Jamshi’s mind. But she, being a pragmatic Parsi, thought that a flesh-eating virus, if controlled, could help her get rid of much of the extra weight that she had wanted to get rid of for so long but couldn’t.

“I read it in Cosmopolitan. A special variety of genetically modified potato…”

“Bt potato?”

“No, not Bt. Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh apparently told my boss’ boss’ boss over a Green Automobile Expo in Ladakh that everyone’s going on and on about Bt brinjal, but the Ct potato has already quietly entered the market. And the Ct potato has regenerative properties that…”

A classified picture of a reconstructed butt using Ct Potato graft

And Jamshi went on, allowing Inder to take his mind away, not from the horrible tragedy that had befallen his face, but from all the numbing noise being made in the name of World Women’s Day. Instead he let out a loud internal whoop on finally confirming the rumours he had heard (from where? from whom? considering that he had met no one in the early morning let alone seen the proceedings live from Hollywood’s Kodak Theatre) about Kathryn Bigelow busting James Cameron’s ass by trouncing him the Best Director and Best Film Oscars sweepstakes.

Inder was, like the most of humanity he knew, a fervent yet quiet supporter of the mainstream. His idea of a film being good or even great was simple: it had to be successful. So Sholay was the greatest Hindi movie made — although now he was updating that slot with 3 Idiots, Michael Jackson was the greatest musician of all times, and Avatar, well, quite clearly the finest motion picture in history. And yet, and yet, something inside him made him root for Kathyrn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker.

Yeah, got those poofters from Pandora in my sight

No, it wasn’t him supporting the gender-underdog. Strangely for a man of the northern climes, he was inoculated against the view that women needed protection or special treatment to walk about this world. His Jat mother, especially keen with fixing television sets and the antennae on rooftops, gave him no inkling throughout his formative years that women may need to feel special. They were equal. Not more equal, but equal, with variations like men and fish.

It was something else. Unknown to him, the seats reserved for cognition and value-formations in his brain had also changed after his veritable feast of contraband, imported meat from Thailand. It had made him aware — without making him aware that he was aware of a change coming over him — that things like originality, difference, going against the grain were of great value, greater than confirmation of a mass feeling, or tapping into as many people’s tastes as possible. From the rushes he had seen of The Hurt Locker and of Avatar, he realised that he liked Bigelow’s creation more than that of James Cameron.

So when Jamshi, genuinely changing the subject while whipping out her pair of dark glasses and putting it back in her bag again realising that Inder had no nose any more to perch the pair on, said, “I can’t stand that patronising thing! Why can’t these political parties just have more women as members and office bearers who can make their way up on their own steam to Parliament and beyond instead of having things like reservations, fathers, husbands — dead or alive?” Inder looked at her as if for the first time.

'Yes, we hoes need some, so we'll get some…'

Only a day before, he would have translated the joy he felt at looking at this large, beautiful, spunky woman by saying those lines from Titanic: “I’m the king of the world!” (completed with arms a-stretch). But now all he said was, “Jamshi, will you be my partner in crime?”

Next week: High tea with the Haitian

Scientific data show that the amount of colours daubed on your body during Holi is proportionate to the size of your body. Jamshi Narimanpointwalla, scrubbing away the purple patches on her face with soap and pumice in her bathroom mirror certainly seemed to attest that theory. She had been daubed with various hues, not all shampooable coloured gulal, first by her South Delhi neighbours and then by her friends from the workplace who went from one part of town to another spreading menace.

Things can get touchy-feely on Holi

Every Holi, Jamshi realised that Delhi was much less inhibited than the city she had come from and where members of her family continued to speaking in a lilt that ensured that they would always be more comfortable with perfume than with cologne, with quietness than with noise, with Kabir Bedi than to Rishi Kapoor, with English than with Hindi. That day, for the duration she engaged in faux fisticuffs that felt more primal than colourless fisticuffs and when men who never met women’s eyes were allowed via tradition and titters to have a go at ‘having a go’ by smearing powder on women’s faces (and thereby not missing contact with the shoulders, the neck, the fingers, the shadow of breasts moving at incredible speeds), Jamshi forgot about how stressful she was the last 11 days.

Inderjeet had not picked up his phone even once. They had spoken last the day after they came back from Bangkok. Jamshi and Inder both had been in a good mood, on the checkpost of where flirtation moves into a less temperate climate. For Jamshi, it had been a delightful trip. She had had fun with a new friend, her opthalmologist friend, her ticket to finally planting her flag in this city. They had spoken about showing each other what they had bought in Thailand, Inder careful not to underplay his heavy, brimming-with-things suitcase that actually flew in the airplane’s cargo hold as Jamshi’s.

“You better show me the stuff you have there,” she had told him as he picked up the suitcase from the conveyor belt with unadulterated enthusiasm. “Looks like you’ve got a whole lot of goodies. Any sex dolls?” she kidded, even as she saw Inder redden like a Bt tomato.

But as she (unsucessfully) tried to remove the purple map of Maharashtra (with a bit of Gujarat attached on the top) that was there on her face, running down her ample forehead down her button nose to her formidable chin, she decided that after work, she would drop by at Inder’s to see what was up. He had visited the Shroff Eye Centre twice in the last week where the receptionist said that Inder had not yet come back.

A stylized version of the stain on Jamshi's face

“He was supposed to have been back here last week, but he hasn’t.”

“Did he leave any message about when he would be back?” asked Jamshi, whose lazy eye had been acting up again because of the tension.

The lady behind the counter just shrugged, pressed a few buttons on the switchboard in front of her as if a secret gate would open, and shook her head laterally while chewing a non-existent chewing gum just to show that she didn’t really care.

Another person who was concerned about the sudden silence from Inder was the Haitian Rick Frangine. He had got a text message from Inder almost a fortnight ago that he was back in the country and that it was a good meeting with the three travel company guys he had meetings with.
“Wl c u on Wednsday. Gt smthng fr u. ” was the last message on his mobile from Inder.

The one person who was absolutely sure that Inder was in trouble was Amar Singh, his friend who was the only person barring Inder himself who knew what he had really gone to Thailand for. After Inder had failed to turn up at the lobby of the Taj Hotel on Mansingh Road, Amar had called his number more than a dozen times that day. Ultimately, at around 8.15 pm, after packing a sizeable quantity of kakodi kababs and sheermal (with extra packets of that erotically charged green chutney) from Aap ki Khatir on Nizamuddin (that was, a la Bruce Wayne-Batman, a tyre-repair shop by day and a kabab joint by night) he went to Inder’s house.

If there's heaven on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this

Amar avoided the lift and told his driver to come up to the flat (B 213) if he didn’t hear from him in the next ten minutes. Knowing the kind of people that he knew were operating these days, he wasn’t taking any chances. After ringing the door didn’t amount to anything, he looked around to see whether there were any pesky neighbours watching him. Clearly, the door was locked from inside as the metal door that wrapped itself around the wooden one was ajar and no lock hung from the former.

Placing the boxes filled with the delectable in a plastic bag on the floor, Amar gave a banging heave to the door. He didn’t want too much noise. So once again, he focused all his energy on to his left shoulder just as he had been taught by his uncle, a former wrestler, and rammed it on the wood. In between the dull thud, he heard a creak that was really a high-pitched groan. One more time and he was in.

An overwhelming smell hung in the air the moment Amar walked in. He could hear the television. If he wasn’t mistaken, it was the voice of Prannoy Roy of NDTV, that well-scrubbed tone of the mature elocutionist wafting from the other room as the voice mentioned something about how for the special occasion of the 21st anniversary of the new channel A.R. Rehman had composed the tune in five minutes over the phone “with Radhika”. Amar flinched, more at what the TV was saying than the smell getting stronger as he moved towards it.

Providing elocution classes to the nation for 21 years and more

He flipped one of the piano switches to get some light going in the darkness. The colours being thrown on the wall from the TV screen in an adjoining room told Amar that Inder was there. Was he unconscious? There certainly seemed to be some gas that had erupted in the flat. Strange that he hadn’t smelt it from outside the house.

“Inder? You there? It’s Amar,” he said, trying to breathe in as little as possible.

“Yes. I’m here. But…”

Amar walked in to the television room. Shah Rukh Khan and Amitabh Bachchan were both sharing a stage, it seemed with the great Prannoy Roy, and everyone was talking about everyone on the stage was an icon.

Amar saw Inder in the semi-darkness. He seemed to sound perfectly all right, just a tad nervous.

“Where the hell were you? Why haven’t you been picking up my calls?” he asked the seated Inder while flicking on a switch to turn a light on the wall on. He then realised that Inder’s face was what it was not because of a hardcore bout of Holi the previous day. Even with the drama of Inder’s totally disgured face, Amar’s eyes went to a plate on the side table still layered with what clearly were wet, dribbly cold cuts.

“Amar, I have a problem,” said Inder as he looked up to show a face that seemed to have been gnawed away by a gang of rodents and with a bunch of worms emerging from where his right eye should have been.

A bad hair - and face - day for Inder

Amar let out a soundless shout at what he saw before him. But what turned that stream into a full-blown cry of almost physical terror was the fact that despite his condition, Inder was speaking to him as if nothing had happened.

Not too far away, almost across the street below, Jamshi had just stepped out of an auto in which she had been listening to a song whose words went: “All the streets are crammed with things/ Eager to be held/ I know what hands are for/ And I’d like to help myself./ You ask me the time/ But I sense something more/ And I would like to give you/ What I think you’re asking for/ You handsome devil/ Oh, you handsome devil.”

As she entered the lift and pressed the button to the second floor, even in her worry that Inder hadn’t got back all this while, she let out a smile to herself.

Next week: The epidermic epidemic

Inder went missing for a week. His fridge still packed with meat brought hidden in a large suitcase remained stacked away in his fridge. Jamshi Narimanpointwalla had developed a strong fever that made her less delirious and more quiet than she had ever been before. Till next week, the search is on: for the missing Inder and for Jamshi’s temperature to subside.

[Next week: A favourable diagnosis]