Paranoia

Yesterday, he moved into the basement. I have lived there for three years. It was late, around eleven, and I was gently coaxing the aging trio of locks on my front door. They turn more easily if spoken to like children. The door of the empty apartment opened behind me. I turned around and looked at the intruder. He had long dreadlocks and I was frightened. I may have gasped.

He said, “I did not mean to alarm you. I moved in today.”

“Great. Welcome.”

“Can you tell me where the garbage room is?”

“Take a right at the elevator. It’s at the end of the hallway.” This time I tried to be polite. I smiled sweetly. I am a girl, after all.

Today, I am upset. For seven months I have been the lone phantom of this basement. Yabei left in the summer, after she graduated. No one took her place. She was accommodating and I miss her. She would let me play my music loud. Now I play it louder. I use my vacuum cleaner late at night. I laugh and talk carelessly on my telephone. I leave my bicycle and my doormat in the hallway. I dig my nose. I whistle. I fart.

But what now?

I am in my office. It is a tiny room and I share it with Nadeem. He is a bulging Pakistani and, like me, also laboring for a phd. In the morning I held a micro-economics section for my undergrads. I like sections better than lectures. The nicer kids – the kind you want to get to know – talk more in sections. I am grading assignments and Nadeem is day dreaming. There is a faint grin on his face.

I hear my neighbor hammering when I get home. Dull thuds slip out from under his door. I strike it with my fist.

“Stop that! Stop!”

He is at the door, and looks at me uncertainly with a quizzical frown and clear eyes. He is trying to look friendly and sincere. ”I didn’t realize it would be so loud. I am sorry.”

“It’s not the noise.” I walk angrily into to my apartment.

There is no more hammering in the night. But in the morning, he knocks and says, “I wanted to apologize again for last evening. I will put up my blinds while you are away. What time do you get back?”

“Never before seven.”

“Great.” Then he adds, speaking like a student cautiously beginning a classroom discussion, “I was wondering if you had any two inch nails. I have run out.”

Again I frighten him. He is not prepared for my scream.

“Get out! Leave me alone!” I slam the door shut.

I rush to my tiny office and to the distracting effervescence of Nadeem’s humour.

He is hammering when I return in the evening. I turn around and leave – my basement - and go to Karen’s place, and I sleep there.

The nightmare returns. It is my grandfather’s face. I never saw him - he died before I was born. Before my father was born too. There is pain and heat and a long nail. It is recurring, and I have learnt to sleep through it. But the nail! It lingers when I am awake.

I am a Dom. No, said like that I accept that I am. This is better - I am considered a Dom, in India at least. The Doms are a caste. They are a filthy polluting caste, the least touchable of the untouchables. They are the thin creatures that lurk in the cremation grounds and the burning banks of holy rivers. They tend to the dead and live with the stench of charred human flesh. They, at best, are the servants of dead Hindu corpses. They light the pyre. They help the son of the corpse break the skull of his dead parent with the skilled jab of a bamboo stick (else it explodes and the brain creates a mess).

So there, I am a Dom. Every other Hindu considers himself my master. Every other Hindu believes, deep within, in the Laws of Manu, written by a mythological ideologue one thousand five hundred years before Christ, nine hundred before Gautam Buddha.

Chapter eight is the best (I keep a copy on my shelf). Law two hundred and seventy two: “If a Sudra (the lowest caste) arrogantly teaches Brahmins their duty, the king shall cause hot oil to be poured into his mouth and into his ears.” Law two hundred and seventy one: “If he mentions the names and castes of the Brahmins with arrogance, an iron nail, ten fingers long, shall be thrust red-hot into his mouth.” Law two hundred and eighty two: “If out of arrogance a Sudra spits on a superior, the king shall cause both his lips to be cut off; if he urinates, the penis; if he breaks wind, the anus.”

Chapter nine, law one hundred and thirty two: “ Having killed a cat, an ichneumon, a blue jay, a frog, a dog, an iguana, an owl, or a crow, a Brahmin shall perform penance similar to that for the murder of a Sudra."

I should stop. My life, it seems, is as important as that of the ichneumon, an animal I have never seen or heard or heard of. Not that I grudge the ichneumon. For why should I – or anyone - presume that I am more worthy than it?

At home, no one talks about my grandfather, my father’s father. My other grandparents I know and have seen. But there is a silence about my grandfather within which a rumor circulates of a horrible death. I don’t know. I don’t want to know. For what then will I want to know of his father? His mother? Their parents? Were they fed red hot nails, too? Because Manu said so? Three fucking thousand years ago?

My father never talks about his father. He is a bureaucrat in Nagpur, and has a reserved job in the government. I am his daughter. I live in America, and I study economics here.
Dreadlocks in my basement has taken to annoying me every way that he can. He plays his music loudly. He laughs loudly. He speaks on his telephone late at night. He digs his nose with glee. Maybe he farts.

But, if that is all, all that is alright.