II. The Hospital #2
When I arrived outside the Red House, Ganesh was already there.
He was sitting on the pavement opposite.
I watched him touch his breast pocket in the manner of grown adults.
He looked tense, expectant. He was wearing the jeans and the Nike shirt he’d worn the day I’d introduced him to Ruhee.
I was wearing my pyjamas and the slippers I reserved to fetch the paper or the milk from the stoop.
“Why hasn’t she come yet?” he asked, when he saw me.
Another twenty minutes later he said, “I don’t think she’s coming.” He stood up, and his manner shifted, the stiffness he carried with him whenever Ruhee was around fell away. Perhaps it fell away from my manner as well.
“What shall we do?” I said, feeling both relieved and disappointed.
“Let’s still go in,” he replied.
We crossed the street. The gate was locked. There were large patches of rust on the gate, and climbing down the other side I scraped my ankle. It was too dark to see, but I could tell by the dampness on my pyjama cuff that my ankle was bleeding.
“Show me,” Ganesh said. He knelt down and lifted the cuff of my pyjama.
He raised my foot and balanced it on his knee. He drew close and pinched the skin close around the gash. He said it looked bad. “Do you want to go home?”
I looked down at him and said that it didn’t hurt. I pulled my foot away at the same time that he let go. He stood up.
We made our way to the staircase. Going up, I was careful not to look down, or be stabbed by the iron stakes.
Arriving on the top floor, it became obvious to me that it was a place Ganesh frequented. It wasn’t a first-time thrill like he’d let on.
Ganesh led me to the edge of the building, to a spot behind the overhead water tank where a section of the parapet wall was missing. He sat down and dangled his feet over the edge of the building.
Very carefully, I followed him. Edging closer to the roof, I copied him, lowering myself onto the ledge next to him, dangling my feet off the roof like him.
I could see nothing but darkness below us.
It felt tactile, the darkness, like something I could touch, brush my fingers through and sift like flour.
In the distance, I could spot the highway lights, the occasional rushing noise of a sand lorry going by.
I felt breathless, my heart was pounding.
I couldn’t see well, but I could sense Ganesh sitting a few inches away from me.
I was so scared I did not even turn to look at him.
After a minute or so passed, I began to relax.
The solidity of the overhead tank behind me was reassuring.
My eyes adjusted to the darkness and I could see Ganesh, his tightly curled hair, the distant highway lights reflected in his eyes.
He touched that spot in his pocket again, from it he fished out a box of matches and a pack of cigarettes.
My father did not smoke, and I had never been in close proximity to cigarettes.
Ganesh slit the top of the gold foil. “I took it from my parents’ room,” he said.
The way he said took meant he stole. He lit the cigarette, puckered his lips, inhaled deeply, and blew the smoke out.
He handed it to me as though a matter of course.
When I didn’t take it, he turned to look at me.
“Between these two fingers,” he said, grasping my index and middle finger firmly.
I took the cigarette, shifted it between my fingers like he said, put it between my lips and inhaled.
The first sensation I felt, was an intense, burning feeling at the back of my throat.
I coughed. Ganesh pulled the cigarette from my hands. “Like this,” he said, taking a puff and holding it in. “Watch me,” he said, letting the white smoke stream out of his lips gently. “Not too much.”
He handed it back to me. This time, I got better at not coughing. The tip of the cigarette grew damper with each turn we took. We passed it back and forth until only the yellow stub remained. I waited to see if Ganesh would bring out another. He didn’t. And I was too shy to ask.
“What does your father do?” he asked.
“Schoolteacher.”
“Does he beat you?” he asked, in the tone of asking me whether he watered the lawn. A matter of daily course.
I shook my head, letting an expression of something like disgust escape me.
“That’s nice,” he said. He drew the pack of cigarettes out again, fished one out but did not light it.
I felt the need to remedy my mistake. “He doesn’t live with us,” I said.
“Why not?”
“He lives with his mistress,” I said. But I substituted ‘mistress’ with the crassest word I knew.
Something like kept woman, loose woman? Something that abutted prostitute, whore.
The things my mother said about Gita Miss when Priya wasn’t around.
But as soon as I said it, I felt regret.
Gita Miss was not a kept woman. Not a prostitute.
She was my Sanskrit teacher. I suppose he saw it all on my face, plain as day. Ganesh always could.
“Is that really true?” he said.
I shook my head.
I thought Ganesh would ask me to tell the truth then. But instead he asked, “Have you ever been with a girl?”
They saw me. Gita Miss did, first. I tried to leave, but I couldn’t.
I heard the clink of my father’s belt, a sound I overheard every day when he changed after coming home from school, now displaced into the empty language room.
“Say good afternoon to Miss,” my father said.
I said good afternoon. Then he walked me back to the library, a hand on my shoulder.
“Yes,” I said.
“You have?” Ganesh looked amazed.
“There are these language rooms in my school,” I said. “All day they remain empty, you know, used only during language period; an hour a day. No one sees what’s going on otherwise.”
Ganesh leaned forward, he seemed like he was holding back a question, or questions. I could see them sitting on the tip of his tongue.
“She was wearing a skirt,” I said.
“But how,” he said. He looked confused, excited.
“Just pressed it inside,” I said.
“Does it hurt?” he asked.
“It didn’t hurt,” I said. I looked at the highway lights, the sand lorries passing.
“Is that really true?” he said.
I shook my head. I drew my legs back in, and slowly, bracing my palm against the overhead tank I stood up. Ganesh watched me but did not react. A moment later, he put the pack of cigarettes back into his pocket and stood also.
We did not speak, on the way downstairs. Even at the gate outside, I said nothing, I simply nodded in his direction before walking towards home.
At the Hospital, I walked past the general admission ward on the second floor with the dark green curtain separators and white metal beds and its fracture-patients and eye-injury patients and laboring women.
The staff knew me here, and strictly speaking I did not need to go through the general ward at all; I could reach the staircase for the long-term care ward from the ground floor.
But once in a while there would be a new supervisory nurse who’d glance at me inquiringly, and I could tell she wanted to ask me who I was, who I was visiting, what I was to them, to tell me off, catch me out.
But then she’d notice my clothes and my manner and let me pass. Today nobody noticed me pass.
At the entrance to the long-term ward, Raja, the compounder, was sitting on his stool. He was waiting for me.
I didn’t need anything from Raja, but I tipped him every week. The tip was to not do the job he was supposed to do. I didn’t like that Raja used the same razor blade on all the patients. I hated the very thought of it. It made me sick.
“Busy day today, Arjun-sir?” Raja asked politely in Hindi, glancing at my clothes, but nevertheless putting out his hand.
“Not at all,” I said, tucking my shaving kit under my arm and fishing my wallet out of my pocket.