I. The Lovers #2
And I took to wandering the neighborhood making outside-school friends.
That was how I’d run into Arjun Wadhwa. Our neighborhood, and specifically our street, was settled by fleeing landlords and their families, those escaping death at the hands of the Naxalites in the countryside.
Upper class. Money. Certainly old money, but missing the landholdings, the opulent gadis and the prestige and the servants.
But holding on to the drivers and the domestic help, the last evidence of that old grandeur in this new world.
It was in their nature to own land, so as soon as they built their homes, they bought up all the land around it, holding on to it for a few years before dividing it into smaller plots and selling it to people like my father, salaried men with young wives and small children.
They called the layouts ‘colonies’ and generally named the ‘colony’ after themselves.
Most of the families built an additional floor on top of the house, divided it into two or three cramped Portions and let them out to tenants, the kind of place in which Arjun Wadhwa and the grandfather lived.
But to an outsider it was a neighborhood with quaint streets.
Tree-lined. Beautiful old tamarinds, ashokas and neems shading the tar road every few feet, single-story cottage homes sitting within compound walls painted in pastels, wrought iron gates, near identical yards, here and there bounded by lone coconut trees.
There was one kirana shop, where I was sent now instead of my father, to stand behind the counter and hand over the list of groceries; waiting while Sugunakar Rao, the shopkeeper, packed up the jute grocery bag, noting the bill in the ledger and telling me to let my mother know, that he’d be happy to send the shop boy over to our house if she needed anything else, since my father wasn’t around.
“It would have been better if he’d died,” my mother said, when I told her what the shopkeeper said.
Also, she never asked me where I went every day, whom I met, why I came back so late.
My bat. Without it, I felt adrift. I ran my fingertips again, through my stubby hair once more, and began walking in the general direction of home.
When I turned the corner into my street, the traffic noise ebbed and the sound of rustling leaves was all I heard.
I passed the Red House. It was a superstitious thing to do, but I turned away from its facade and crossed the street over to the other side.
It was then that Ruhee passed me. I didn’t immediately recognize her, and wouldn’t have turned to look a second time if it wasn’t for a slow motorbike stopping and idling across the street from us, its engine thrumming gently.
“Ruhee?”
Ruhee did not look my way. Those black eyes far too big for her face. I would have recognized them anywhere in the world. On instinct, I grasped her arm lightly. She kept walking and my fingertips grazed the length of her forearm.
When she met my gaze, Ruhee’s face broke into a smile, and it was just as bright and shattering as I remembered. Both her cheeks dimpled. Her teeth were small and even.
“Arjun?” she said, her voice just as mellow as I remembered.
I caught the scent of papaya. The one that grew in our yard.
It came so suddenly, so inexplicably and powerfully that it disoriented me, as though the leaves overhead stopped rustling and all I could see were her eyes, the shape of her face, the color of her skin, like toffee left in the sun.
I had the sudden desire to stand as close to her as possible, rest my cheek against hers, put my palms against her shoulders.
I suppose I was remembering vividly how it felt like to kiss her.
“Aren’t you in the eleventh grade now?” she said, tentatively, when I didn’t respond.
With regret, I let go of her elbow, ran my fingers again through my stubby hair and nodded.
“Are you still doing watercolors?” she said. “You used to be so good!”
When I heard the motorbike again, I turned to look.
The boy astride it had a broad face, looked to be slightly, but not that much older than me. His eyes were fixed on Ruhee, so intensely that it made me want to look away, as if I was intruding on something extremely private.
“Do you know him?”
“No,” she said, without seeming all that sure. “Why is he looking at you like that?”
“He’s looking at you,” I said.
Abruptly the boy turned the motorbike around and sped away.
Ruhee said she was running late for her math tutor near the water tanker place, said goodbye, see you, and walked away in the opposite direction. I watched her walk all the way to the end of the street.
I continued loitering and after a little while, I found myself standing in front of the gates of the gymkhana grounds. I could see people playing cricket inside so I went in.
It seemed like a random assortment, the boys playing.
These were public grounds, not a private club.
It seemed like a section of them was made up of schoolboys around my age―this group seemed to know each other already, so I drifted over to the other section.
The boys in this group were sitting a little apart from one another, consisted of some who looked like the boy on the motorbike I’d just seen, some even shabbier.
I took them to be boys who worked in the area, drawn from tenements around, or those who both worked and lived in small rooms at the back of the house they were employed in.
Servant boys, was how they were addressed.
I felt like I was intruding, but also felt like I was allowed.
The game began. The schoolboys had their own bats.
From their position of bat-owning superiority, they wouldn’t easily accept an out; only acceded the batting position on a clean-bowled or a catch.
We were delegated to the less glamorous positions on the field; bowling, fielding, wicketkeeping.
Both sides seemed unsure where to put me.
When I offered up the practice ball, I was asked to field, but when I caught two outs in a row, I was moved to wicketkeeping―a useless position it seemed, because the schoolboys covered up the wickets and even committed the most blatant LBWs.
Illegal of course, but no one could say otherwise.
Soon, dusk fell. The schoolboys left together.
I fell in with those remaining. Only when the group drifted to the stands did I begin to notice them individually.
There were six of them. All barefoot. Some in jeans, some in trousers.
Some in T-shirts that announced the brand name across the chest in wide, misspelled letters.
One of them asked my name. Arjun, I said.
The boy said his name was Ganesh. The remaining did not volunteer their names, seemed to look me over warily, as though wondering what I was doing with them.
“This is yours, isn’t it?” Ganesh said, throwing my ball at me. “It is very nice. It’s a professional ball isn’t it?”
“It is,” I said, confidently. “My father got it from Bombay. On a trip.”
It was a lie, of course. I’d gotten it at the sports dealers. And it wasn’t a professional cork ball either, with the gleaming red leather whose stitching came at you like little flashes of lightning. Clearly, Ganesh did not know what a professional cricket ball looked like.
“How do you know her?” Ganesh said.
“What?”
“How do you know her? I saw you talking to her.”
This seemed to draw the attention of the rest of the boys.
I stared at Ganesh. Really looked at him, and it was only then that I realized he was the boy on the motorbike staring at Ruhee.
He was stocky, his arms slightly, disproportionately longer.
Thick veins ran up his forearms. He had a tattoo, on his inner forearm, something green and fuzzy.
He was handsome in a rugged way. He didn’t seem to belong with the schoolboys, and although he seemed familiar with them, he did not seem to wholly belong with the servant boys either.
“She’s my friend,” I said, tentatively.
“Do you love her?” he asked.
I laughed.
Ganesh was still looking at me intently, waiting for an answer.
I said I didn’t.
“I love her,” Ganesh volunteered. His voice was oddly deeper when he said this. It seemed to radiate.
“Will you introduce her to me?” Ganesh asked. “Come, sit.”
The boys made room. A welcoming gap opened up in front of me. As if I were being drawn into this other dimension. A place where I had friends.
I told Ganesh I knew Ruhee very well. Would I put in a word for him? would I engineer a meeting between them? Would I know if she might love him too? Would I know if she had an egalitarian character or a high-minded character? Yes, of course. To all of it: Yes. I didn’t even have to think.
I felt so upbeat that I went home straightaway, forgetting to roam the neighborhood like I usually did, until the streetlights came on and the gentle waft of burning mosquito coils rolled in with the evening breeze.
I went into my house through the kitchen door in the back, which could be accessed from the yard so I needn’t ring the doorbell.
I found the door bolted from the inside.
I looked through the window, intending to reach in and unbolt the latch, but stopped.
Priya and my mother were at the dining table having dinner.
Priya was eating a sweet bun with gusto, and our mother was gazing at her with a pleasurable smile on her face.
She reached to ease the bun away from Priya, hurriedly spreading a thick layer of butter over the bun, saying ‘wait a minute sweet thing!’ over Priya’s protestations, then handed the bun back to her.