All Our Evenings

“Leave him alone,” my f

It was fashionable, back then, to name houses.

And the Red House was an abandoned, partially constructed one that sat on the only dead-end street in the neighborhood.

It was three floors high, had slabs and pillars but no parapet walls beyond the first floor.

The stairway wasn’t cemented, the brick lay exposed, and instead of a handrail there were iron rods jutting out from the sides of each stair at threatening angles.

It was an attempted grand mansion, but had fallen into an inheritance fight.

A litigation building―as it was called; the court case had dragged on for as long as anyone could remember, and it remained in that state of semi-built emptiness.

The wooded land beyond it, almost two acres, was swollen with thornbushes and knee-high grass.

There was a caved-in outhouse with the asbestos roof split exactly in half, you could see it from the gate.

At various times over the years, it acquired various different reputations―whether or not it was a notion held by children that it was a place where the mafia stashed ‘evidence,’ certainly nobody tracked down whoever owned it.

It was childish also to say ‘haunted,’ but all the same a person familiar with the area wouldn’t go inside if you paid him.

The name of the house itself is something of a mystery, it came from the three faded alphabets on the rusted plaque affixed to the gate: R E D, remaining of whatever was supposed to have been the name of the house.

“Do you remember her, Arjun?” my mother said.

“Who?” I said, though I’d heard her well enough.

“Ruhee,” she repeated. “Ru-hee. When you were little, you asked me if you could marry her, so she could come and live with us.”

“I said no such thing,” I said.

“Yes you did! You must have been six or seven.” My mother looked delighted at finding reason to mention this. “I remember it well, it was that day we bought you the BSA cycle, with the lights on the handlebars. You sat on the cycle and asked us. We all laughed about it. Didn’t we?”

“Leave him alone,” my father replied from the living room. The TV was on, and the intro to the evening news was playing.

“Don’t talk about things you don’t understand,” my mother snapped, though loud enough for only me to hear.

I’d just returned home from work. I’d taken my shoes off at the door but, as was my habit, I kept my socks on, even though they were damp.

I picked up a bottle of water from the dozen my mother kept in a neat row on the dining room table, poured myself a glass.

I stood there drinking while my mother talked.

She said that she’d met Ruhee and her parents at the temple.

Run into them and it was so remarkable how they immediately recognized one another despite the many years that have passed.

The family had moved to Udupi where Ruhee’s parents both found jobs in the same telephone company.

Now they were retired. They were here for a visit, a wedding.

To see the old neighborhood. And also to spend time with Ruhee, who had moved back to Hyderabad last year.

“Ruhee is a doctor now,” my mother said, and added, barely able to hide her pleasure, “and she gave me her phone number.”

“Obviously,” she continued, when I did not respond, “she wanted me to give it to you. So that you’d call her―almost said as much. I told her about your job, where you worked. How old you were. Her mother asked me what your birth date was, what your birth star was.”

She said, “Here it is,” and thrust the slip of paper at me.

The two e’s in Ruhee’s name were curled together, the way she’d written it since we were children. Of course, I remembered telling my mother that I wished to marry Ruhee someday. She was the first girl I ever loved. First I ever kissed.

Ruhee used to live down the street from us.

She was an only child, and when we were little, she used to spend every Sunday at my house.

Hello Uncle, is Arjun home? she used to ask in a mellow, endearing voice when my father answered the door.

We used to sit in the veranda together, eating frozen mango puree, playing pachis or chess, waiting for the heat outside to abate.

When it cooled, we rode our bicycles; racing up and down the street, chased by stray dogs and scolded by retirees.

She wore her hair into two silken ponytails which sat on either side of her face and swung around, brushing her cheeks whenever I made her laugh.

She always sat with her back to the papaya tree that grew in our yard and never declined a second helping of mango puree.

I always lost to her, usually on purpose, and when my fingers brushed hers while stacking wooden chess pieces or while passing the cowrie shells for pachis, my heart always beat in my throat.

Then sometime in the eighth grade, her parents caught us kissing in her room.

It was Ruhee’s idea. After that, they put her in a girls-only convent and she stopped coming over to my house.

And every time I went to her house, her mother answered the door but didn’t let me inside, told me that Ruhee wasn’t home.

After a while I stopped going, and didn’t see her again for years.

Then, one summer when we were sixteen, we ran into each other again. That was the summer my father left us.

Left. Eloped. Ran away. Runaways? It is hard to nail down an English translation for the word that was used in those days; it both communicated what had occurred, in the specific, while also assigning the lurid implication―the shame―there is when a married man, father of two children, runs away with his young mistress.

Sex―being the unsaid thing happening just out of sight.

The summer we met again, almost everything went back to how it was when we were children. Almost because this time we didn’t kiss. I never even got the chance to tell Ruhee I loved her, because of Ganesh.

Ganesh, with his long muscly arms and curly brown hair and a fuzzy green tattoo on the inside of his forearm, he was someone I’d met at the gymkhana while playing cricket.

He wasn’t in school, was older than both of us; eighteen, he used to guess.

I introduced them. And soon enough, Ganesh and Ruhee were lovers―which is exactly how they described it to me, separately and together.

It didn’t hurt though. Because Ganesh and Ruhee never left me out, the three of us were always together, and whatever we did that entire summer we did together.

They always wanted me, and I understood why: it was strangely uncomfortable, unnatural even, when one of us wasn’t there.

Together the three of us made something of a family, inseparable from one another, something that none of us had on our own.

My mother was watching me.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. “Are you tired? Did you have a lot to do at the office?”

She liked to pretend that I went to an office.

And that I was ‘a manager’ at the municipal water supply, which was how she described my job to relatives.

For her sake, I dressed in a shirt and trousers and wore shoes and socks―an outfit that the person assigned to train me laughed at, when I showed up on my first day.

What was his name even? I can’t recollect; it’s been twelve years.

But I remember him gawking at me, his own trousers rolled above knees, his collar and sleeves sopping wet, a spanner in his hand.

He said I didn’t need shoes or socks, made me take them off.

Then he took me down into the tunnels, shouted instructions on how to note the water pressure over the thundering sounds of water, the walls gleaming wet, the ground trembling frighteningly beneath us.

He’d given me such curious looks. Then, before he left, he came out with it, asking me why a young man like myself, clearly from a well-to-do family, a proper education, wanted a job that did not require even a twelfth-pass certificate.

When I didn’t answer him, he answered for me. “Circumstances, isn’t it?” he said.

Nowadays, I sat at a desk facing digital monitors; they did away with the analog meters sometime in ’03.

I made a phone call to the engineer if the numbers went below a certain point.

Or answered the phone when an irate housewife called to say that the taps were dry.

After coming home, I left my damp socks in the laundry bucket and bathed using the soap Priya, my sister, favored before she left for college―Lux Rose: luridly pink, sickly sweet, artificially scented.

It was the only soap that could overwhelm the smell of chlorine on my skin.

I put the water glass down and took the slip of paper with the two e’s curled together.

The rice cooker was beeping loudly and my mother went into the kitchen to turn it off.

I sat down at the dining table, put the slip into my phone book.

My father turned the TV volume down but remained in the living room.

I knew what he was thinking. My father was the only one who knew something of the truth about what happened at the end of that summer.

Not the whole truth, of course, but something of it.

I was the one who told him, after Ganesh, bloodied and spreadeagled, was discovered in the woods behind the Red House.

At that age, I thought that seeing someone dying would be something extraordinary.

Shocking. Approaching the fantastical. Frightening.

Like darkness. But it wasn’t. Someone is there and then they aren’t.

Looking closely, peering into the darkness, it needn’t even be a dead person, it could just be a drunk lying amongst the thornbushes behind the Red House.

The bushes flattened from the weight that fell on them.

The sound, a thump, the crumpling of twigs and brambles, then a sudden silence.

The small white fleshy bits scattered all around Ganesh’s broken face needn’t be shattered teeth.

The fluid pooling around his caved-in head needn’t be blood or brains.

It could be something more pedestrian. Sap.

Or something. What did his life matter? Who came asking after him? Nobody. He wasn’t even in school.