VI. Living Things #4
“People go to school so they can go to college,” he snapped.
“And they go to college to get a job and earn money, and buy a house. I already have a house.” As he said the last part, his manner shifted from irritated to earnest, as if he were trying to convince me.
“Isn’t it?” he said. “Why waste all that time and money on school and whatnot. My parents are very happy with me, they tell me all the time, how glad they are to have someone like me to help them.”
“But you want to go,” I said.
“When did I say that?” he snapped again. “I don’t want to go. I don’t want to waste time. Time is everything.”
I didn’t think time was everything. It sounded like something a supercilious older person would say: education is everything, good behavior is everything et cetera, but he seemed so utterly convinced of what he was saying, so much older even, that I felt stupid for not grasping what he was trying so hard to tell me.
“No, it makes sense,” I said.
In the days following my visit to Ganesh’s house, I lost the desire to go to the gymkhana.
Instead I stayed in my room reading comic books, or I loitered in the neighborhood on my own, avoiding Ruhee’s house, Ganesh’s house.
Often I went to the lending library on the main road.
Except that one time when I spotted Gita Miss at our bus stop, trying valiantly not to be seen by anyone, I did not leave the neighborhood.
The longer I avoided Ganesh, the easier it was to despise him.
I despised him. I’d liked him better when he was a boy with a fuzzy green tattoo on his forearm, didn’t know his birth name.
A tribal boy from a burned-down shoe factory who made friends with the servant boys in the neighborhood because the schoolboys rejected him.
I didn’t like him in that big house. My good schooling, where I lived, my father, my cricket bat; the big and small things that gave me position in society, the things that placed me above him with Ruhee.
None of that mattered if Ganesh lived in that big house, for all intents and purposes he owned it, he had rich parents who were living together in the same house, drove a German car, had a brother at Clover.
Handsome. Self-possessed. Jumped in cold water while the sun kissed his skin.
Said in a radiant voice that he loved Ruhee.
This Ganesh? I didn’t stand a chance against him. I could never have Ruhee.
Musing in this way, one of those days I was loitering the neighborhood, I made a mistake.
One afternoon, I found myself outside Ganesh’s big house.
I climbed up the boulder-steps and rang the doorbell before I realized what I was doing.
I tried to make my escape but the door was swiftly answered: Ganesh’s brother-nephew again, but looking more cheerful and personable than the last time.
He was wearing going-out clothes, but wasn’t headed out.
In the room behind him I caught a glimpse of Ganesh, sitting in the invisible way.
There was a plastic chair beside the sofa set.
I didn’t catch who else was in the room, but I caught sight of the person in the plastic chair, a young woman with a baby in her arms.
The baby was sleeping soundly but the woman’s eyes, though downcast, were throwing furtive glances around the room in the manner of servants.
The nephew walked me out, he said Ganesh can’t come right now, he was meeting his wife.
I laughed.
The cottage whose construction Ganesh was overseeing, that was where he was expected to live with his new wife and her child.
I felt sick. I also thought it made sense, that was what the parents would do, isn’t it?
Better be kept close, strung up with a wife who was not allowed to sit on the family sofa set, a small child towards whom he would no doubt feel a responsibility to raise.
Because that was what a marriage was: a union in which fates were linked forever and shared over a lifetime.
Whatever happened inside the marriage was right and just, sacred even.
Besides, where else was Ganesh going to go?
He had no education, no prospects. No way to exercise rights. No society.
I saw the shoe factory once, the splintered plate glass windows, the ruins, the layer of fuzzy green moss covering the burned, soot-blackened walls.
The big house stayed exactly the way it was, even years later, though the family moved away to a newer part of the city.
Only the property acquired bigger gates.
I saw Ganesh’s brother-nephew again, sitting in the back seat of a white Audi, pulling out of the big gates.
Our gazes met for a second. Even when he was in his thirties, Ganesh’s nephew retained the same boyish chubbiness, the sullen skulking expression.
For a moment, I really believed I could hear the eow-eow-eow music from the Game Boy echoing around that giant, ugly room, that terrible home Ganesh had to grow up in.
I waved. But he ignored me. Then the car pulled away.