III. Puli Raja #2
I used to give into fantasies like this in the brief periods Ruhee occupied my life.
I was doing it again, like swimming or cycling it was muscle memory that came right back.
This is why I climbed out of my room’s window yesterday, I realized.
And the thing about stealing condoms for Ruhee, it also came back.
This was before protection and safe sex and STDs and AIDS were things one could say out loud.
The government had just begun an aggressive safe-sex campaign to prevent AIDS around that summer we were all sixteen; on every billboard, hoarding and blank wall there were intriguing and mysterious questions along the lines of Do you think you have only one partner?
Do you think there are only two people in your ‘small’ house?
The phrases were written above countrywide AIDS death counts.
Refutable facts next to irrefutable facts.
Who knew so many people were having sex?
Also on every such poster was the face of the campaign: the fictional everyman Puli Raja; a man drawn in silhouette, looking towards the phrase ‘Does he have AIDS?’ Nobody could look away from Puli Raja, not housewives, not children, not teenagers.
It was the perfect balance between insinuation and threat.
Is it your friend? Is it your father? Is it you?
Anyway, one Sunday afternoon Ganesh and Ruhee and I were sitting on the top floor of the Red House and it came up.
By then, the summer season was on us, and there was absolutely nothing to do all afternoon except to while away our time on idle chatter, find a place to hide from the billowing gusts of heat, try to find ice cubes to chew, wait for rain or wait until dusk before attempting to go to the gymkhana.
The math tuitions Ruhee was taking were over, though Ruhee let her parents think she still had them; we went to pick her up outside her house, and the three of us would head straight to the Red House.
When we asked her why she didn’t come that night, she bent down to adjust the strap of her sandal, and when she stood up it was possible she hadn’t heard, and neither Ganesh nor I asked again.
In the daytime, the Red House had a quaint, almost homely quality in the manner of under-construction homes―the smell of drying cement and wet plaster, pools of water here and there, the ferrous odor of iron bars lying about.
Because the building was so large and empty, whatever sounds entered it―children playing in porticoes nearby, the whine of desert coolers in neighboring homes, hawkers pushing ice-covered palmyra fruits up and down the street―diffused upwards to the top floor, where we hid out, and surrounded us.
It was like entering an alternate world where everything was beautiful.
Ruhee had no reason to suspect we were lying to her about Ganesh being in my school.
But she was so unpredictable that neither of us knew how she’d react if we told her.
What Ruhee also didn’t know, was that Ganesh didn’t have summer holidays in the same way as we did.
He didn’t even have Sundays free. Morning till late afternoon he’d be doing ‘Work’ such as driving their cook to and from the market, keeping watch over the laborers his father hired to build a cottage behind their house, driving his brother to and from summer art class, straightening up the storeroom, driving his mother to her kitty party in Banjara Hills.
That he drove was a surprise to me, and that he was not only allowed, but relied on to drive so much was impressive.
When we were at the Red House, I liked to clamber onto the overhead tank and sit with my feet dangling off the building’s edge.
But Ganesh and Ruhee sat next to each other below me, their backs resting against the tank.
Sometimes, when I glanced their way I’d see some form of contact between them; Ganesh pulling a piece off kite thread away from her ankle, Ruhee saying something in a lowered voice, holding Ganesh’s collar to make him angle his ear towards her lips.
We wondered what a condom would look like, in between the idle chatter.
Each of us saying the taboo word aloud, trying not to cringe away from it.
Afterall, the government said we were allowed to say it.
It was just like when the sanitary napkin campaign came around, and all the girls got free sanitary pads and watched videos on ovulation and puberty.
And all of us started saying ‘sanitary pad’ in class all the time, until the teachers made us stop.
As though following this train of thought Ruhee asked me, “Did they give you samples at your school? No chance at mine.”
I said no, we were probably too young.
Ruhee looked at Ganesh. He glanced at me before shaking his head.
Ruhee fished out a piece of chalk from her pocket, knelt down and began drawing Puli Raja’s face in profile on the water tank’s wall. She seemed obsessed with this new thing now.
“Arjun, there should be some at your house, right?” she said, looking equal parts scared and embarrassed. I glanced at Ganesh, but Ruhee didn’t do the same; she seemed reluctant to make this request of Ganesh for some reason.
The situation in my house; it must have reached Ruhee’s mother, surely, but she didn’t seem to have told Ruhee. And Ganesh didn’t know if his parents knew. In any case, that was not the kind of conversation he’d have with his parents.
I went into my parents’ room later that day.
My mother was at the bank, I think. I opened the almirah, equally divided between my father’s pressed shirts and my mother’s pressed saris.
On the inside door there was a small drawer.
I pulled it out. In it were wedding photos, some crumpled, some shiny.
In one of the crumpled ones they were standing next to each other on a decorated stage, jasmine garlands around their necks.
Despite myself, I sat on the bed to look at the photos; relatives, so many of them, flanking them, crowding out the edges of the photo.
I realized after looking at two or three photos that I was searching for myself, among the sea of faces crowding out the bride and groom.
There were none at all with just the two of them.
What a family affair marriages were. I re-stacked the photos and put them back where I found them.
And there was also a box of condoms. I forgot the name on the box, only that the color of the package was black.
I felt terrified and excited, but I turned it upside down into my palm.
I kept one of the packets and stuffed the rest of them back inside.
I took one last look at the crumpled wedding photos, put back everything just as I found it.
In my room, I hid the shiny square black packet in the center of my chemistry textbook.
In the end, I gave it to Ruhee. And I know that she and Ganesh used it the first time they had sex.
My mother did not know I met Ruhee, I was sure of this, judging by the unhappy expression on her face when she answered the door when I arrived home.
Once in a while she ‘fell into her glooms’ particularly after an intense, excited period when things did not come to fruition―such as her setting me up with Ruhee.
I could sense her glooms coming before anyone else, and I knew the only way to avert them: giving her what she wanted.
Just inside the door, taking off my shoes I said, “Ruhee came to see me. At the office.”
The change was instantaneous. She was thrilled. She was trying and failing to suppress her glee. “I knew it,” she said.
“I knew it. Such a nice girl, didn’t take offense to you running away the way you did! Such a nice girl. No ego at all, isn’t it?”
I nodded.
“Are you tired? Will you eat? Did you have a lot to do at the office?”
I sat down at the dining table, my socks still on my feet.
I heard her turning off the rice cooker.
The clatter of the steel ladle when she drew it out of the drawer.
My father wasn’t home, I realized. That was unusual, it was a weekday evening.
When my mother came to the dining table bearing a plate and a water glass, I didn’t ask her where he was. It was instinct, of course, to not ask.
After dinner, I went back to my room. I crouched underneath my bed and soon enough I spotted the thing that had unconsciously occupied my mind all the way home, all evening. My bat.