The Walls of Delhi by Uday Prakash Read Free Book Online

respect.
    So if you read this story, go and pick up a little pickaxe and trowel and get yourself to Delhi right away. It’s the only way left to make it big. If you would rather live by hard work, the straight-and-narrow, following your dreams, using your talent, believing in yourself, keeping faith – if that’s how you want to lead your life, you’ll die of hunger, and the cops will never leave you alone. You probably don’t know about that judge in Maharashtra who declared that the Indian police and the criminals and goons of the land are one big lawful family.
    In the meantime, I’ll settle down with the beggars, the lepers, the smackheads, the transients, and the other forgotten ones, I’ll stretch out, and sleep among the dismembered statues of the old English rulers that lie scattered in Coronation Park. I’m broken in the same places, with my bad back and bone tuberculosis. Whenever I have free time, I go to the shrine of Hazarat Nizzamuddin, just past the Delhi Zoo, and sit for hours on the marble floor of the dargah, repeating the words that the sufi saint, Auliya – Hazarat Nizzumaddin – once spoke to the then ruler of Delhi, Ghayasuddin Tughluq. Delhi is still far away. Tughluq summoned Auliya to explain why the sufi saint was visited by more people than was Tughluq’s court. Delhi is still far away. Auliya declined the summons, just as he had with all the other kings he’d seen come and go. Delhi is still far away. Tughluqleft on a military campaign in the south to let Auliya think it over. Delhi is still far away. Auliya’s followers warned him to leave Delhi; Tughluq had threatened to behead Auliya if he disobeyed the summons. Delhi is still far away. The night before returning to Delhi, Tughluq and his men set up camp just outside the city. Delhi is still far away. That’s the night Auliya uttered the sentence I keep on repeating. After he spoke it, Tughluq, drinking and carousing, died right at the Delhi border when the tent he was in collapsed. That place is now known as Tughluqabad.
    Amir Khusaro’s tomb is also at Auliya’s shrine – the man who wrote the first lines of poetry in what we now call Hindi – and who, in his own lifetime saw eleven kings, their courts, and their hangers-on, all come and go. If you go and look at the guest book that Sayid Nizami keeps at the shrine, you’ll see my name.
    Believe me when I say that I am praying not only for me, but for the well-being of all of you, and for that of my dear country. Have faith that my prayers will reach all the way to Auliya’s ears.
    So long as the police or other powers-that-be in this city don’t frame me for something, I’ll use my pickaxe and trowel to find the wealth hidden in Delhi’s countless walled hollows.
    And if you want to get lucky, come to Delhi right away – it’s not far at all. Forget about being a millionaire; coming to Delhi is the only way left to scrape by.
    The other ways you read about in the papers, and see on TV, are rumours and lies, nothing more.

MOHANDAS
    For comrade Virendra Soni, with the hope that he will stand with Mohandas ’til the end

    â€˜[T]the most glaring tendency of the British Government system of high class education has been the virtual monopoly of all higher offices under them by the Brahmins.’
    (Mahatma Jotirao Phule, ‘Slavery’)

    â€˜The British ... validated Brahmin authority by employing, almost exclusively, Brahmins as their clerks and assistants.’
    (Arthur Bonner, Democracy in India: a Hollow Shell)

What is the colour of fear? Is it the colour of dirt, or of stone? Is it yellow, charcoal? Or the colour of ash left over from a burning coal – ash that coats the coal still glowing red-hot, that still has its heat! Or a colour that masks a terrifying silence behind it? A small tear that exposes a frightful scream suspended behind.
    Have you ever seen the bloodshot,