RUNNER-UP, FICTION
The Whistle of a Pressure Cooker ARINJAY SINGH
O
n the eve of his long journey to America, Ronit Lobo — that is, Swami Ronny, as most of Bhopal had come to know him — acquired himself a wife. The Lobos were prominent tobacconists; His bride’s parents, meanwhile, were proud farmhands of decidedly humbler means. Nevertheless, his ammi had begun to experience sleepless nights at the thought of her only child going unpampered in a foreign land, so when the Patel family offered as a parting gift one young goat, twothirds of their life savings and their Asha — a thin, dark-skinned, quiet teenager who they secretly feared was slightly cosmically doomed — the Lobos were willing to engage. Asha, for her part, had been withdrawn from the local convent school at age nine. The day she had been made to swap her pencil-box for a rake and a pail, she had kicked and screamed and cried herself to sleep as torrential afternoon rain battered the Patels’ thatched roof. Now, one misplaced adolescence later, she spent her days ambling around the family fields, daydreaming, ferrying milk to sleazy storemen and occasionally joining games of gully cricket with her younger siblings.
On Asha’s wedding day, the Patel children were midway through the second innings of a particularly riveting affair when their father approached from afar, clutching to his chest the finest clothes and the only earrings that the family owned. Jaldi chalo mere saath, he exhorted in Asha’s direction, sounding animated for the first time since the previous year’s bountiful summer. Emerging some time later from the makeshift bathhouse behind the barn, Asha mounted his scooter wordlessly, wearily, yet still unable to quell her optimistic curiosity as she clutched Mr. Patel’s sweaty midriff and motored toward her first meeting with her new husband — the first person, she convinced herself, who had ever voluntarily agreed to love her. By this time, Swami Ronny, always clad in billowing, sequined orange robes, had built quite a reputation in Bhopal. The Patels could hardly believe their collective fortune. Ronny was rather unlike other Swamis, though, in that he considered the Bhagavad Gita — India’s most seminal spiritual text — to be impractical bullshit, a prized specimen of chutiyapa. In fact, at the time of his self-anointment the previous year, he had only read the
Gita twice, and that too in abridged form. His higher calling, as it were, revealed itself to him through mediums he considered far more sacred. For one, from the stack of Times of India clippings in which his father wrapped and sold paan, he had quickly gathered that the West was far more inclined toward AC/ DC than anything remotely ascetic. Through the rickety radio on the counter, meanwhile, he had been introduced to one Freddie Mercury, a man with skin like Swami Ronny’s own who remarkably appeared to hold the collective Western libido in his vice grip. Impulsive as ever, Swami Ronny quickly perceived an opportunity, a niche. Those fucking firangis, he thought, his thoughts darting away as his family performed its Diwali prayers. Those fucking firangis, they hate chastity but want to feel exotic, enlightened, smart. America, he reasoned, could use a guide, a curator, a real moderate — yes, someone who could deliver sexy South Asian lore in exactly the way people wanted to hear it. Bhopali vernacular, it bears noting, offered no precise translation for the concept of a charlatan, and Swami Ronny’s English vocabulary didn’t
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