VII. Train Dreams #3
We were coming up on a bullock cart parked on the street corner where Gita Miss would turn, to head down the smaller road to her apartment building.
I recognized the cart driver; he’d come to my house once, to haul away old newspapers and metal scrap my mother was sending to the junk dealer.
As she approached, the driver lifted up the loose robe covering the bottom half of his body.
He leered and grinned when Gita Miss averted her face.
I was sorry that happened to her. As I approached him, he dropped the robe and covered himself again, giggling like a boy, as though what he committed was only a small mischief.
Perhaps he recognized me. The revolting leer on his face, it was the same when he came to my house, only I didn’t notice, because his manner was also marked by subservience.
Standing in our yard, a hand outstretched to accept the coins my mother was giving him.
I wished Gita Miss dressed more like my mother; it would have covered up her beauty and allowed her safe passage.
I registered this observation for the very first time, watching her upright form bearing the heavy weights, valorously ignoring the cart driver.
The road turned left, and I somehow lost sight of Gita Miss behind a group of vegetable sellers.
I doubled back to the main road and cut through the railway tracks.
I couldn’t understand why Gita Miss didn’t take an autorickshaw, why she was using public transport and walking on that awful road; it would cost sixty rupees or less from the supermarket, the price of a Hero fountain pen; she used to have a forest-green one filled with red ink.
Good effort, Arjun. Double check your grammar next time! 8/10.
I climbed over her apartment building’s compound wall on the rear side and just about managed to arrive at her gate moments before her.
I’d scraped my elbow on the wall and carried the stinging sensation as I waved at her.
Though I was clearly in her view she did not really see me.
I kept waving and said, “Gita Miss, hello.”
Then she saw me. Puzzlement, then delight. “Arjun,” she exclaimed. “What a nice surprise!”
She put the bags down, touched my cheek and smiled with pleasure.
I picked up her jute bags and she let me without resisting.
Her palms were red and sore. I walked ahead of her and she immediately saw my bleeding elbow.
I said it didn’t hurt. It really didn’t.
I don’t even remember where I got it. All the way up in the lift, she was preoccupied by my scraped-up elbow.
She pulled open the lift gate before it came to a complete stop on the fifth floor.
We went down the corridor and she fished for keys in her handbag.
The lock went into the door, unlike the old-fashioned padlock we used at my house; a brass Godrej one that brought to mind my front yard, hibiscus flowers drying in the sun, colorless wiggling earthworms. When we went in, Gita Miss forgot to take the key out of the door, so I put down the grocery bags and took the key out.
It didn’t even have a key chain, just the thin steel ring that came with it.
She brought out a neatly organized first-aid box and dabbled Savlon on my elbow, telling me that Savlon didn’t sting while Dettol did; how they bothered the children with the awful Dettol at school.
Standing so close to her, it wasn’t as if Gita Miss had become less beautiful because of her familiarity.
In fact it was the opposite. There was an alarming goodness on her face that made her more beautiful.
Alarming, precipitous goodness that was also somehow maternal.
I felt like hugging her. I told her she was a good teacher, and she looked up at me and smiled.
When I returned to my own house, I was surprised to find the living room occupied.
My mother was hosting tea. With a jolt I realized she was hosting the other teachers from my school.
On the teapoy were empty cups, snack plates with crumbs, empty cold pastry boxes.
She was so animated and so happy looking that she did not notice me.
I went into my room but kept my ears trained toward the main door.
After some time it was shut, the gate rattling and creaking as the guests exited.
My mother putting the teacups in the sink, taking the tea pan off the stove, banging the sieve against the garbage pail.
In a moment I realized that I was still holding the key I’d taken out of Gita Miss’ door.
I upturned my pen holder and hid it at the bottom.
Somehow I felt happy, cheerful, enjoying the smell of the Savlon that was dabbed on my elbow.
It was nice to be taken care of like that.
There were the love suicides, and then there were the love failures; when only the boy kills himself, and the girl doesn’t.
It didn’t mean she agreed or disagreed, only that the boy loved the girl so much he had to prove it with death―winning―he had to be the winner by dying.
Obviously there was resentment towards the survivor, not only for causing the death but also for not dying themselves.
We did not take death seriously, everyone had to die someday.
There were acid attacks, on girls, for spurning a boy, perhaps resolutely with no room for trying again.
Of course it was not accepted or encouraged, but to a degree it was understood, in the manner of how vengeance was understood.
Zanjeer―shackles―the shackles of vengeance.
Anyway, that was the environment we grew up in. Death and love and acid. One day, I remember, Ruhee and I were walking towards the Red House, going to meet Ganesh there, and an autorickshaw pulled up behind us. Just in time, I heard the boys chanting the word ‘maar.’
Maar, Maar.
I fell back and switched sides with Ruhee abruptly. Ruhee stumbled mid-sentence and said what? And I said nothing. Holding her elbow to steady her so she was facing the road rather than the fence.
The autorickshaw with the boys chanting maar fell quiet, went past, and Ruhee noticed nothing.
She rolled her eyes and kept walking, continuing her tirade against a nun at her school who had it out for her.
Ruhee went to a girls’ school, she did not know how boys her age thought, and so she did not know how men thought.
She was too naive, and I felt it my duty to protect her.
Even if my instincts were absent, or if I was too late to act, and the boys in the autorickshaw did hit Ruhee, or push her into the fence, scrape up her elbow and cheeks for no reason other than that she was walking down the road, it wasn’t like we’d tell anyone.
Even someone as brashly self-possessed as Ruhee would hide it from her parents.
Because the experience of being tormented for girlhood, though not permitted, was understood.
Why should she be understood without her permission?
Like Gita Miss, she did not know to dress conservatively, because the culture of her mind did not match the culture of the society she lived in.
Ruhee wore trainers and jean shorts with fringe borders, or sleeveless cotton blouses, high heels with clear plastic straps, knee-length plaid skirts.
She wore beads in her hair, and chewed pink-colored gum sometimes with her mouth open.
Of course, I went to a school with uniforms so it wasn’t as though I knew how girls my age are supposed to dress, but I knew how women are supposed to dress.
It was the same. They were both fragile, women and girls, and in a moment society could turn against them and attack them.
I had been waiting on my stoop for what felt like eternity, going over things in my head like this confusedly.
I was afraid my mother and Priya would turn up before Ganesh and Ruhee; she wouldn’t stop me from leaving, but I didn’t want my friends to see her not care.
I wondered if Ganesh and Ruhee had forgotten about me.
I felt particularly sad at the second thought.
More time passed. The street hawkers ceased their parade up and down the street.
The first orange rays of sunset were falling into my eyes when a shiny black Lancer came to a screeching halt in front of my gate. Beeped the horn.
I approached the car with some trepidation.
It was a very nice car, a Mitsubishi Lancer with a rear spoiler; a car with strikingly masculine looks, at a time when owning a car, any car, was aspirational.
I remembered the line of ash the priest had swiped across my forehead that morning and wiped it away; I didn’t want to look provincial getting into a Mitsubishi Lancer.
The car had black tinted windows so I immediately did not see who was sitting on the passenger side.
I tried the door on the passenger side but it didn’t open.
Then I spotted Ruhee, in mid-conversation with Ganesh, reaching behind her to pull up the lock on the back door.
I got in and sat quietly. It was air-conditioned, smelled very nice.
In the car with them―Ganesh driving, Ruhee beside him―I wondered again how far their plans to have sex in the Red House had progressed. I was certain it hadn’t already happened. “Where are we going?” I asked.