I. The Lovers #3
I sat for a while on the kitchen stoop, until I heard the sound of the table being cleared, the chairs pushed back in, the lights switching off.
When I heard footsteps in the kitchen, I moved closer to the door and pulled my feet in, so no part of me would be visible through the kitchen window.
I heard the click of the door being unlatched.
I stayed on the stoop until darkness fell, and the mosquitoes chewed my ankles and I had to wave them off by sound alone.
“I love her,” Ganesh said again, this time in a more contemplative way.
It was how it used to be in those days. You saw someone and felt inexplicably drawn to them; a sudden heat crept over your body and mind and soon, crossing paths with them again and again you were utterly in love with that person, without ever having spoken to them.
It was a binding choice, to love a person, and you couldn’t ever take it back.
That was the idea of love passed down to us, and the world was limited to what was passed down.
Ganesh wanted me to meet him outside Ruhee’s house. “At five,” he said, “that’s when she goes to her tutor’s.” He knew where she lived, which surprised me, but I said Okay.
I went to Ruhee’s house at a quarter to, and loitered. Her house was a one-story cottage with a green gate. Rosebushes across the borders. It didn’t have a flat roof, the way most people poured the slab, with the expectation of Portions. It was pitched and tiled. I could spot sparrow nests in it.
I made a turn at the end of the street and came back up again, just as Ganesh arrived on his motorbike. I went up to where he was parked.
Ganesh was wearing a black T-shirt, blue jeans, and sneakers.
The T-shirt had a small tick at the pocket that I recognized as the Nike tick.
If I squinted a little, the white spots on his cheeks could easily be dismissed as the side effects of a summer tan.
His hair was thick, curly and short. He could pass as someone from my school, easily.
“They belong to my parents’ son,” he said. “Took them out of the washing.”
The way he phrased it was so odd. Not just that he didn’t say, ‘they belong to my brother.’ But it was the way he said ‘my parents’―his tone was as if they owned him; as if he was a car.
“What school do you go to?” I asked.
He shrugged and looked sideways as if I were making fun of him. I waited and he said, “I don’t.”
“What do you mean you don’t?”
“I have work,” he said.
“What work?”
Ruhee came out. Ganesh nudged me, briefly, with only the tips of his fingers grazing my elbow. “Arjun!” Ruhee said, smiling widely. She was surprised to see me.
“This is my friend,” I said, “his name is Ganesh.”
Ruhee said Hi, and asked which school he went to. I said he went to mine, before Ganesh could answer. Ganesh looked at me quizzically but did not contradict me.
We began walking together. First Ruhee and I talked, while Ganesh wheeled his motorbike behind. I glanced back. He met my eyes. Only then did it occur to us the complication of the motorbike’s presence.
We were coming up to the Red House, and I began to automatically cross the street, going over to the other side. But Ruhee stayed where she was. She laughed at me.
“You are being so silly, Arjun,” she said, pushing her hair behind her ears.
I shrugged. I loved how she said my name, playfully. The mild pressure on the R.
“Do you really believe the ghost stories?” she said.
I made a noncommittal head motion. I assumed that everyone did.
“Ganesh,” she said, turning around, walking sideways so that her hair fell into her eyes and she had to hold it behind her ears with both hands. “Do you believe in ghosts?”
“No,” he said, holding her gaze. “I’m not afraid.”
Ganesh was doing his best, wheeling the motorbike as fast as he could to keep pace with Ruhee, who seemed intent on telling him all she heard about the Red House.
She asked if he grew up around here. He said yes.
He gave her the location of his house. It was already beginning to feel as if I’d served my purpose.
But then Ganesh stopped, and said that he and I played cricket at the gymkhana.
And he praised my fielding abilities. Ganesh and I were the same height, I noticed for the first time. Standing side by side.
If I was being honest, I thought that Ruhee would see through Ganesh. See through him as if he were invisible, and see only me. But I was wrong.
“I’m not bringing the bike tomorrow,” Ganesh said, after we saw Ruhee off at her tutor’s.
“She said that she goes back at seven-thirty or eight.”
“Oh?”
“Let’s go to the gymkhana and then come back, walk her home again.”
Maybe because of the black T-shirt with the Nike tick, the schoolboys allowed Ganesh a batting position.
Perhaps they did not even recognize him.
That he strode up to them and asked with so much confidence was surprising to me.
I was kept in my usual position mid-field.
Ganesh could have been more cautious and held the batting position for longer, hitting mid-wicket or a single runner, but at every ball he went for a sixer, and he hit three in a row, the clop of the ball against the bat echoing in what felt like absolute silence.
On the fourth ball, despite it being a spin, Ganesh left the crease line and came forwards and swung madly. He missed and the ball hit the wicket.
“Howzzat!!” the schoolboys jeered in unison. The bowler made that Punjabi dance movement made famous in the World Cup.
Instead of ceding the bat with an upset, thrusting motion at the next batter, Ganesh laughed jovially. He mimed the exact movement of the losing shot, squaring his elbows and raising and lowering the bat, repeating the wrist position and the shoulder position like a professional batsman.
After the game, his friends left, and we sat together in the stands.
I was sweating and thirsty. The ground was baked, and even in the semi-darkness it seemed to radiate heat.
The groundskeeper was making his way towards us, likely to ask us to get lost, but on seeing Ganesh he said, “Do you want to lock up? Drop the keys off at my room later.”
“Where are you from?” I asked, after the groundskeeper left.
“Here,” Ganesh said, and shrugged.
“No,” I said, “where are you really from?”
He met my gaze. He said nothing but did not break away. His eyes were the same color as his hair, neither brown nor black. We were close enough that I could see his pupils dilate. I looked away.
It was a hot day, everything felt too warm.
“My people are Gonds. From Adilabad.”
It was Adivasi, the tribe called Gond. It was a major one, even listed in the Scheduled Tribes of India, according to my social studies textbook, which I checked after going home.
Ganesh was tribal, and Ganesh couldn’t even be his real name; he didn’t know his birth name.
Sold first into child labor at a shoe factory, then rescued, placed in an orphanage after a fire killed most of the children who slept alongside him in the makeshift dormitory.
“Been here since I was this high,” Ganesh said, wiping sweat from his forehead with his sleeve and placing an open palm level with his waist. “Worked for the old man first. But he died, so his son and his wife took over the house. Been with the same parents ever since.”
Again, the strange phrasing. How does one be with their parents? But I didn’t press him.
“How old are you?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Eighteen, maybe.” Absently, he touched his tattoo. The spot on his forearm.
“What does it say?” I asked, looking at the tattoo.
“I don’t know.”
When it was nearly seven, Ganesh and I made our way out of the gymkhana.
I watched him lock up the gate and slip the key into his pocket.
He started the motorbike, and waited. It occurred to me that he was waiting for me to get on.
I got on, holding the sides of the seat for support rather than his shoulders.
How normal all of it felt, to get on a friend’s motorbike, to go and see about a girl I liked.
And this was going to be our story―mine and Ruhee’s―how it all started, today.
There always was an interloper in love stories, and Ganesh―he was our interloper, we’d laugh about him in later years.
The back of Ganesh’s neck was drenched in sweat, his shirt was sticking to him, his hair was dripping.
He ran a hand through his hair, and a few drops of his sweat sprayed across my face.
I wanted to wipe them away, but it was curious how I let the drops sit.
Thinking it needn’t be sweat, what fell on my lips could simply be water. Ganesh started the motorbike.