'Lord Almighty, Grant Us Riots!': a translated Hindi short-story

Note from the translator:.This story is taken from a short-story collection forthcoming in translation from Penguin India titled Courtesans Don’t Read Newspapers. It tells the tale of a Muslim weavers’ colony in the city of Varanasi. The colony floods every year, and nobody cares for these people and their plight. They are dependent on boats as they wade through raw sewage and are forced to live in deplorable conditions. This time around, though, something different is afoot: the water is talking back to the bereaved boys of the Mominpura Cricket Club..Originally published in 2010, this collection is concerned with people existing on the very margins of Indian society. Although written more than a decade ago, its stories ring true today perhaps more than ever before. A novella included in the collection deals with the lives of sex workers living in the red-light district of Manduadih, with their neighbours and the establishment wishing to throw them out of the city. A photojournalist is caught up in all of this, shuttling between his personal life and everything that is happening around him. The constant search for that perfect photograph keeps him on his toes..Translator:.Vaibhav Sharma is a translator and poet from India. He was mentored by the International Booker Prize-winning translator Daisy Rockwell under the 2023 National Centre for Writing’s Emerging Translator Mentorship Programme. His work has been published in Out of Print, Words Without Borders, Hans, and Modern Poetry in Translation. He was shortlisted for the Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation in 2023. His debut translation, Under the Night Jasmine, came out in February 2024. He is currently working on a translation of Anil Yadav’s story collection Courtesans Don’t Read Newspapers, forthcoming from Penguin India..Support Southasian literature, become a patron of Himal today!.The sun shone harsh and bright that day and a scalding steam rose from the water. Six small new coffins lay in a row atop a heap of garbage in the middle of the sludge. Beyond them, all the way to the edge of Mominpura, a lake of sewage, abuzz with mosquitoes, crashed in waves; the bloated bodies of several cats and a donkey floated in it..A boat rocked in the water opposite the drifting debris and water hyacinths. The phrase will come in riots was clumsily scrawled in white paint on one side of the boat. A small flag woven of shimmering gold threads fluttered at the tip of the boat..The stench was unbearable. Everyone had covered their faces with kaffiyahs or gamchas, except for the children. Behind the men stood the women, bursting into intermittent bouts of sobs and hiccups, their burkas and kurtas hitched up to their knees. Occasionally, a faint tremor of wailing rose from the group, only to be whisked away by the wind..All of them awaited the boat that would take them to the graveyard on the other side of the slum. But the boat with the fluttering flag seemed to mock them, as if to say that it would only cross when there were riots, otherwise it couldn’t be sure if there really were dead bodies in the coffins or something else..A naked teenage boy, exhausted from swimming, sat alone in the boat and stared at them, his mouth agape. Six coffins, some fifty people with covered faces, the blinding sun and a monsoon afternoon quietly hovering above the water. A song blared from a radio on the roof of one of the flooded houses..Suddenly, the irate crowd started hurling abuses at both the boy and the boat..The boy kept trying to listen to the nearly inaudible music filtering through the invisible moisture that hung above him, but when the people started to slap and punch at the air, he hastily jumped from the boat and resumed swimming. This seemed to placate the crowd; they quieted down and stared at his glistening back while waiting for the boat..It was a long time before three boys, Yaseen, Zuaib and Laddan, rowed the boat back and began to transport the coffins to the graveyard on the other side in multiple rounds. The whole day the boat ferried the slum’s grief..As evening fell, the lights of the nearby colonies lit up, embellishing the vast lake of sewage with shimmering reflections. In the middle lay the slum, a beautiful, tranquil island, to which the mourners returned like a fleet of ghosts after burying the six children..Just that morning, four boys and two girls had been playing on the roof of a flooded house. The mud-and-brick house, most of which had been submerged for the last month and a half, had finally crumbled, and the children playing atop it had sunk to their deaths. Shortly, their swollen bodies came to float on the surface, just like the cats. Their food remained untouched on the edge of the only remaining wall, and the dragonflies, which they had tethered to the wall with silken threads from a loom, hovered there..What life these children had left behind could be measured with the stirrings of the colourful wings of these silk-tailed bugs, and that’s what danced above the rotting black lake. The rest of the slum lay still in silence. Kerosene lamps flickered in the submerged houses, like the sobs of grieving mothers who had lost their children..Mominpura, which lay along the banks of the river at the lower reaches of the city, suffered the same ordeal year after year. As soon as the monsoon arrived, all the refuse of the city started floating towards the slum, forcing the weavers to gather their looms and threads and depart. Around the same time, the local vendors would set up a makeshift market in front of the mosque on Fridays, selling lanterns, neem oil, plastic boots and bamboo ladders..The looms in the basements were the first to get waterlogged, the knee-high water drowning the sweet clatter of wood on wood that accompanied weaving. While some of the residents collected their utensils, goats and hens, along with their half-woven lengths of cloth and their children, and migrated to higher altitudes in the city, a large portion of the populace had no place to go. The best they could do was move to the upper storeys of the flooded houses. Make-shift reed huts and tarp tents began to appear on the roofs of the single-storey houses..Mominpura’s electricity supply was cut during this period, as the current could enter the water and turn the whole slum into a graveyard overnight. The power looms fell silent and drowned a little more each day; it wasn’t possible to dig them out and carry them somewhere else at such short notice. At the same time, the flooded river at the other end of the city would force the sewer flow to reverse direction. The covers on the manholes started popping off, and suddenly all the sewage of the twenty lakh residents of the city began to flow with the rainwater towards Mominpura, eventually collecting in the slum..Every year during Chaturmas, when the saints and ascetics started with their sermons, the idols of gods and goddesses in various temples were adorned with new clothes and jewellery, Kajari singing competitions were held all over, and Marwari women stepped out in big processions for the festival of Hartalika Teej, Mominpura turned into a commode for the holy city of Varanasi. The workers at Mominpura’s water pumping station locked up for the season and left as well; after all, Mominpura could start an epidemic in the city due to damaged pipes..The slum dwellers collected some money and rented a dozen boats from the boatmen, and suddenly, life in Mominpura shifted from a lively urban weaver settlement to a dark riverside village. The boatmen did lend them their boats, but refused to row them in Mominpura. It’s not that they were opposed to rowing in shit and piss if it paid a bit more, but they feared that if the Muslims killed them and threw them in the acres-long lake, nobody would even know where to look for their bodies..Bamboo ladders were propped against the walls of all the houses, their bases planted in the mud and their top rungs reaching the roof. People brought household items and groceries from the markets nearby. One boat was assigned the duty of constantly ferrying potable water from the neighbouring colonies. People also travelled to the nearby villages and cities by boat to sell clothes. The children either played in the water the whole day or sat idle for hours, their fishing lines dangling in the water, though they would catch nothing. In the evenings, people sat on their roofs and applied neem oil to their rotting feet and other itchy body parts. They fought with the clusters of ants encroaching on everything, from their caps and lungis to their toilet pitchers, and prayed for the water to recede faster..In a month or so, the black lake would start to recede, and suddenly the colony would be seized by one disease after another. Hundreds of people would die of cholera, gastroenteritis and diarrhoea, the majority of whom would be children. It would only be months after burying the dead that the sweet music of the looms would return to the slum, and life would get back on track..This year, a month and a half had passed already, but the water was yet to recede. Instead, the monstrous black lake grew by the day. Those stuck on their roofs stared at the water with horror. And then, one day, the flood water started speaking some kind of gurgling language. Though the slum-dwellers heard it, they couldn’t understand what it said..Life in Mominpura mimicked the black lake in colour, shape and destiny. Long gone were the days when people used the river water in holy rituals and swore by the harmonious Ganga–Jamuni culture. The city now wanted to be rid of both the water and the slum. In the early hours of dawn, as the residents of Mominpura squatted like crows on the boundary walls of their roofs, avoiding eye contact with each other, and relieved themselves into the water below, a procession would start from the city, led by motorcyclists with cars bringing up the rear. The procession would stop at the highway bridge, which ran alongside the slum, amid a clamour of conches, bells and trumpets. The members of the procession shone torches at the squatting weavers and laughed. Excited men, both old and young, shouted themselves hoarse with inflammatory slogans directed at the weavers. They rang their bells and beat their drums till sun-up, shouting,.“Pakistan mein Eid manai jaa rahi hai!”“Eid is being celebrated in Pakistan!”“Dal jheel mein aatishbazi ho rahi hai!”“Dal Lake is lit up with fireworks!” And the lake water continued to speak in gurgles….Various new ill omens occurred this year: The boatmen refused to lend their boats to the weavers – Lord Rama was ferried across the Ganga in a boat, how then could they row a boat in sewage? The municipality had refused to supply any pumps to help drain the water from the slum. The officers had submitted in writing that none of the pumps were working and there were no funds to fix them: “The water will be drained if the government funding comes through.” In a statement, the Public Works Department said that if the flood water were allowed to drain via the highway bridge this year as well, the bridge might collapse and isolate the city. The Disaster Relief Department had released a declaration contending that this was not a flood but merely a case of waterlogging, hence the question of providing aid didn’t even arise..Hospitals had refused to admit patients from Mominpura because they had no vacancies, and besides, the danger of an epidemic outbreak loomed large. Scrap-collectors had started frequenting the slum to buy the now-defunct power looms and other household items ruined by the water. Prices were being negotiated for the submerged houses. Real-estate agents had told the Muslims that it would be best if they unburdened themselves of these lands that flood every year and took whatever money was offered in return..Yaseen’s aunt had sent for his father. “You’ll neither save the house nor your occupation if you keep sitting in Mominpura,” she said. She advised that it would be best if his whole family were to move to her place instead; food and stay weren’t an issue..Parvez and Iffan’s entire family was dragged away from Mominpura by their uncle. Parvez and Iffan, the two brothers, were known in Mominpura for their spin bowling. Yaseen was the captain of this strange, nameless team. Most of the players were past the age of threading the shuttle and warp. Now they were learning weaving, designing and bargaining tricks, like starting at a price two and a half times greater than the cost and then agreeing to do it for half that. But all this they did only when nagged by their fathers and aunts; they had no interest of their own..Most of their time was spent practising cricket using wooden splinters as wickets in a field marked out by colourful threads. Their players’ kits consisted of lungis, Dhaka-made rubber slippers and round prayer caps. Their diet was made up of red meat and potato stew. They trained by cycling through fifty villages in three days to sell their wares, and their coach was the television. Shoaib Akhtar, Sanath Jayasuriya, Sachin Tendulkar, Jonty Rhodes, Daryl Tuffey and Shane Warne ran through their veins like lifeblood in the day, but at night these same players would appear in their dreams and charm away their girls. And how immodest were the girls of Mominpura, who sent covert signals to these boys by day, clapped and cheered at their games, only to take off with these hunks in their big cars at night, laughing cruelly at the boys?.But now these blasters, swingers and googly throwers lay numb and gloomy on the roofs of their houses, staring at the eagles circling the sky. They heard the azan rise from somewhere inside the mosque as they spoke to the mosquito-infested lake below..The news soon reached them that pumps were being installed in the flooded river and that the water from there would be directed towards Mominpura as well. One day the water, whipped into a frenzy by the wind, asked Yaseen, “Where is your Allah Miyan? Does he still protect you…” Does Allah Miyan need to come down here just to remove all this filth, Yaseen thought with frustration..The slum was handicapped when the boatmen refused to lend their boats, but soon Yaseen and his jobless friends were able to collect enough money to buy an old boat. The team got to work. They painted and fixed the boat, made a flag out of a piece of golden zari cloth, wrote the initials MCC on it, and hoisted it above the boat on a stick. This was how the nameless cricket team from Mominpura came to be called the Mominpura Cricket Club, and the two oars of their boat steered life in the slum back into motion. Then the team stepped out to ask for help..First they went to the politicians, social workers and journalists who had visited the slum and condoled with their elders two years ago, when riots had broken out. Everyone nodded their heads in affirmation, but nobody came to take a peek. Then they approached other political parties, government officials, volunteer groups and the rest of the media..Everywhere the team went, the eleven spoke in unison: “Sir, please come to our slum, for God’s sake, just once. Come and see the dire conditions we’re living in. All of us will die if the water keeps rising like this.”.But nobody would listen to them. As soon as they revealed that they were from Mominpura, they were shooed away before they could even enter the premises. They were a sewage-soaked menace and everybody wanted to be rid of them: Go to that office there, bring that paper, this document. We’ll see… We’re looking into it… It will be looked into… We’ll do such and such or that or this… They were exhausted from hearing all the excuses..When they returned late into the night with their cycles piled on the boat, voices from the darkened terraces called out to them, “Yaseen Miyan, when will they come?”.The boys looked at each other helplessly, and the boat sailed on in silence. They continued to reach out to people, but were ignored by everyone. The residents of the slum kept asking for news. One day, as they were returning home, the flood water spoke to them: Those people won’t come, not yet anyway..“Why?” Yaseen asked..I speak from experience; people from that world come to this world only in two situations: either elections or riots. And do not for a moment delude yourself into believing that upon their arrival they’ll remove the faeces from your body and transform you into gentlemen..The next day, a frustrated Yaseen took some paint and wrote the answer to the question hundreds of people asked every night on the boat: will come in riots. That way, they wouldn’t have to repeat the same thing over and over again..The black water had been trying to tell them this for ages, but they were determined to get help somehow. The number of people in the morning processions shouting Eid Mubarak to Pakistan was growing. The bells, gongs and conches, too, grew louder and louder with each passing day..The MCC boys stopped going home after burying the six children. A few of them stayed in the boat while the rest kept watch atop a tall house. After being underwater for two months, the houses were collapsing one by one. The boys had to stand guard to rescue the people stuck in the collapsed houses..As the days passed, the boat stayed afloat on the lake, rocked by gales of putrid wind; lights from the colonies on the three sides of the slum danced on the black water; and every night, as the water rose, the sky too closed in on the slum, its stars lurking behind the clouds. After living on this boat for the duration of the monsoon, the true nature of the world was finally being revealed to the boys as they sat on this isle of punishment, surrounded by the city, drenched in the rains of the month of Bhado..Everything spoke, everywhere: the water, the air, the bells and gongs, the floating animal corpses, the collapsing houses, the dancing lights, the stars and the swarms of ants. One night, while the team was waiting for the morning procession, the water muttered in a low voice: The riot has already begun..“Where the hell is it happening?” asked Yaseen, and the whole team sat up in a panic. The water continued in a low, hoarse tone: If this isn’t a riot, then what would you call it? The government officials have refused to set foot in this place; the doctors have refused to treat your sick; the pumps that should have been used here are instead being deployed in the river; and that water is also draining into this area. The looms are dead, the houses are crumbling, and children are drowning like rats. This is how everyone will be killed, no one need pick up a single gun or knife. Whoever is left behind, homeless and jobless, will die without treatment..The water was weeping now, slamming its head repeatedly against the side of the boat..“Yaseen Bhai, why will all of us be killed?” Murad, the youngest of the googly-throwers, asked fearfully..“Because we’re Muslims, you idiot. Didn’t you know?” Yaseen was angry..“Won’t any of the people we approached help us?”.“They’ll come. They’ll come when there are actual riots.”.After that night, the team didn’t talk to the water as a group again. Instead, each of them stared at their own solitary wave and spoke to it..The next Friday, when it was time for the morning prayers, all the players of the MCC prostrated themselves in the boat and collectively prayed for a single wish: “Lord Almighty, grant us riots, or we’ll all rot to death in this hell. It’s better we drown in blood than suffer the humiliation of drowning in our own shit and piss.”.The collective din of the bells, gongs and conches had grown intolerable by now..Two days later, the highway bridge collapsed from the pressure of the rising water. The black lake flooded the nearby colonies and villages, destroying roads and ruining fields in its wake..Hordes of people from the neighbouring colonies and villages attacked the slum, led by the morning procession. Hindus and Muslims clashed in the filthy, mosquito-infested sewage. Allah had finally granted the prayers of the desperate boys.