I. The Lovers
I
The Lovers
But first, the cricket bat. You see, it is as good a place to start as any.
At the time, it felt like an inconsequential thing that happened, but if it hadn’t, how differently things would have turned out.
I wouldn’t have run into Ruhee or Ganesh that summer, and all our lives would have continued along the same path we’d been put on since we were born.
It was blond willow―the bat―and Kashmiri-willow, no less.
It had a red, rubber-cased grip handle that didn’t yet have the marks that came from being handled with sweaty hands.
It was the single most expensive thing I possessed.
Yet, I made the mistake of leaving it propped against the gate of the apartment building when I went upstairs to my friend Arjun’s flat.
(We shared the same first name, Arjun Wadhwa and I, and it had been a running joke between us―Arjun, pass the bat.
No, not this Arjun, that Arjun, you pass the bat. Ha-ha.)
I rang Arjun Wadhwa’s doorbell once, then twice. Then knocked on the door when there was no answer. The door didn’t open.
“The Wadhwas have gone.”
This was the neighbor. He was an older gentleman, a friendly-looking grandfather.
And like a retired grandfather, he always wore pressed, tailored, going-out clothes even at home; his white hair combed back, a fountain pen in his shirt pocket, a leather-strap watch on his wrist. Smelling gently of coconut oil, he playfully chided us for playing cricket in that narrow space between where the owner’s car was kept and the gate, where the thrill was in the possibility of hitting a sixer and breaking either a windowpane, or even more dangerously, the windshield of the parked Ambassador.
“Old fucker,” Arjun Wadhwa replied under his breath.
Arjun Wadhwa swore freely and frequently.
He and I went to different schools, and such language was never allowed at mine, seldom encountered even.
They were rabidly strict about proper language at my school.
Strict about uniform checks. Manners. Arjun Wadhwa was an outside-school friend and outside-school friends were whom I’d sought out in the summer months of my father’s leaving.
Outside-school friends did not have shared anxieties.
Secrets. The freedoms of games period, library period, film period, the terrors of being found without canvas shoes during PT.
I used to have such dreams regularly, of having forgotten not just the shoes but even the PT uniform, waiting in the uniform line while a disembodied cane made its way down the line.
The snapping noise the cane made on contact with my bare knuckles.
The pain that seared so brilliantly I couldn’t think straight for a few moments.
“They are gone. The place was emptied overnight, the owner said they hadn’t paid rent in three months. What’s your name, son?”
“Arjun.”
“That was the Wadhwa boy’s name too.”
A baby’s wail emanated from the door behind the grandfather. “Coming, sonny boy!” he said over his shoulder, a delighted smile spreading across his face.
When I came back downstairs, my bat was gone. I searched behind the gate, along the interior compound wall, inspected the length of pavement across the street even though I hadn’t crossed the street at all, knew exactly where I’d left it.
I chewed my lip. A rubber practice ball was clenched in my fist. I traced the tips of my fingers over my almost bare scalp, backwards and forwards. The severe, military-like haircut was mandatory at my school.
Satti, the building’s watchman ambled towards me.
“Why are you loitering? What do you want?”
“My bat is missing.”
“What bat?”
“My cricket bat.”
“Why should it be here?” Satti came and stood very close. His breath stank. His shirt pocket was ripped. “Do you think I have nothing better to do? Steal some boy’s bat?”
I took a step back. I wondered, like I was beginning to always wonder whenever anyone looked directly at me, if Satti knew about the circumstances of my father’s leaving.
All the shameful facts. Everyone at school knew of course, our immediate neighbors knew.
My stomach clenched at this thought. Was that the reason Satti, a caretaker, a habitual drunk, felt brave enough to step up to me like this?
If my father had been around, I thought, I would have gone home and returned with him, and he would have terrified Satti into admitting he took it, and if it was really lost and unrecoverable, he would have gotten me a new one at the sports dealers straightaway.
My father was capable of this. Once, when we’d been at a train station, my father had caught a pickpocket red-handed.
He’d dragged the pickpocket by his collar and slapped his face, at least a dozen times, while the crowd looked on.
Until the station master hurried over and said: let the police handle him, why the bother, Sir.
To see such physical, bodily violence, erupt so spontaneously and suddenly, was quite something.
Especially from my position, the lush safety of hanging on to my father’s leather wallet while the beating took place, with no possibility, the full, soothing reassurance that I myself would never come to such harm.
I took a deep breath and backed away from Satti. I waited until that would feeling ceased and ebbed away, until it fled into that brooding, salty place in my mind designed to hold all the things that made my stomach clench.
My father was―had been―a teacher at my school, where Priya and I both attended.
He taught mathematics for the upper classes.
Every day, he returned home later than us, smelling faintly of chalk and tea biscuits, and now, while I sat in the same classroom all day, a cloud of chalk powder always around me as though haunting me, it was a daily test of willpower; to sit still; to not remember the way he walked down the stairs at school with his attendance book and his ruler tucked underneath his arm, watching where his feet landed, carefully, as though stepping into water.
Or the glimpses I used to catch of him and Gita Miss, the red rose she always wore in her hair, near the language rooms.
Gita Miss was my Sanskrit teacher. She was a north-Indian, which to me had always felt like an exotic place, where there was snow, falling like bolls of cotton from the sky.
She was young, a new college graduate who looked more like the students in the twelfth grade than like the other teachers.
She was frightfully pretty. Slender, with a long black braid that fell to her hips, brushing the top of her waist when she turned around.
She had terribly dark, graceful eyes. She didn’t have to do much in the form of discipline in Sanskrit class, she merely had to stand and smile, and we all fell in line.
The boys captive, attentive, receding to the back of the class; the girls diligent, wanting always to sit in the front, as close to her as possible as though wanting to touch her.
Gita Miss did not wear a sari like the rest of the female teachers at our school.
She wore cotton dresses that brushed her shins.
High heels, wide buckle belts. Large hoop earrings.
Once, she wore a sari, and it had caused such a ruckus at school―everyone wanted to catch a glimpse of her walking down the corridor, the kind of thing that happens when the first rain of the monsoon slams down on the school grounds; people pausing everything they did just to Look and Look again―that she never did a second time.
The first time I saw my father with Gita Miss, I didn’t think anything of it.
All the teachers were very polite towards one another, and never addressed each other by their first names, using the appendages of Miss or Sir next to their names, or ji or garu in the case of the language teachers.
I saw them outside the language rooms while coming out of the library.
I’d asked permission to go to the bathroom.
The corridors were empty, and they were standing a little apart from each other, just outside the language room door.
I waved to my father as I passed. My father waved back.
On returning to the library, to the book I’d been assigned to read, it came back to me.
Gita Miss hadn’t said Prashant-sir, or Prashant-ji, or Prashant-garu. She said Prashant. Softly. In a tone that emanated with something mysterious and intensely personal. Beyond my understanding.
There was some snickering whenever they were seen walking down the corridor together.
I’d never paid attention before because this was common, teachers were often linked up for sport.
It was harmless really, a luridly imagined togetherness of the teachers.
Dirty jokes, things scratched on the undersides of benches with the tips of compasses.
But I began to pay attention. I made excuses to leave class during school hours, walk through the deserted corridors, listening to the thrum of voices beyond the concrete walls.
I searched. Then I saw them go into the language room together one afternoon. I followed.
I couldn’t see my father’s face in the language room. From where I hid, I could only see Gita Miss’ face. Her expression. The line of her exposed thigh. Her dress crumpled between them like cake. Ecstatic. That was the expression on her face. A look between lovers.
At school, after it came out, my classmates treated me as though I were something contaminated, to be excluded.
Priya, on the other hand, got treated delicately, with pity and sympathy.
Even after a month had passed, I was only spoken to if it was strictly necessary.
Then summer break came around and I could get away.