IX. The Red House
IX
The Red House
It hadn’t been Ganesh’s idea to have sex in the Red House. I knew that.
It had been Ruhee’s. But that didn’t make me feel any better.
And what did it matter? They had both kept it a secret from me.
Excluded me. And the manner in which I found out made everything so much worse.
Ruhee still had the condom I’d stolen from my parents’ almirah, I knew.
That had been the thing that made them both sure they wanted to do it.
It was the last week of the summer holidays.
An end to these days of grace, before the return to school, the absence of my father from it, all the unhappy things.
I went to the gymkhana, Ganesh was there.
After the game ended and everyone else went home, we sat in the stands.
The evenings weren’t murderously hot anymore, the monsoon was coming.
The sun was brilliantly red, quickly turning blue.
Flocks of birds, like panes in the sky, were heading home.
The habitual evening silence was falling on the neighborhood.
“How’s your brother?” I asked Ganesh, looking his way.
Ganesh shrugged.
“How’s the cottage coming along?”
He didn’t answer immediately. “It is done, Arjun.”
It was curious how good that made me feel. Hearing him say my name, hearing where his home, the rest of his life, was going to be. I might’ve even smiled involuntarily.
When Ruhee arrived, my heart leapt in my throat the way it always did when I saw her. The three of us sat in the stands without talking for a little while.
Then Ruhee said, “Let’s go to the Red House.”
I shrugged. Why not? I could stay out as late as I wanted, who was there to ask after me?
She and Ganesh looked at each other for the briefest moment, but I didn’t pay that exchange any special attention. I picked up my bat and led the way―this, I was used to doing: trailing them, or leading them, because nowadays Ruhee and Ganesh always walked side by side.
“Give me the bat,” Ruhee said, when we arrived. It was sweet, seeing her hold my bat. It was as if she was wearing my clothes. I tried not to smile too much.
We went up to the roof, sat near the overhead tank like we always did. We spent a few minutes throwing pebbles off the roof, until it got too dark to see where they landed in the overgrown woods behind. “Oh!” Ruhee said.
“What is it?” I said.
“I think I left your bat downstairs, near the gate. Shall I go and get it?”
“I’ll get it, don’t worry,” I said, standing up.
Downstairs, I spotted the bat leaning against the gate. “Is it there?” I heard Ruhee call from the roof. I looked up, Ruhee was kneeling over the parapet wall, holding the iron stakes that jutted out of the exposed pillars. “It’s here,” I called back.
“Good,” she said. But when I made to walk toward the stairs she called my name again.
I looked up. “You go home now,” she said. “We will see you tomorrow.”
Then she said, “Bye.”
She said it meaningfully, as if I understood. I must have looked puzzled, because she smiled and waved and said Bye in that same meaningful tone again. I realized that Ruhee wanted me to leave, and she was going to keep waving until I left.
It did not occur to me to defy Ruhee. To tell her what a bad idea it was.
That Ganesh wasn’t who she thought he was.
I lied to her when I brought him into her life.
Or that this―what was going to happen on the roof of the Red House―it had been Ganesh’s plan all along.
Remember? He asked me if I’d been with a girl before. Why else would he ask me that?
I left. Kept walking towards home but I couldn’t go inside. I sat on the pavement for a little while, then came all the way back. I don’t know, I might have cried.
Sometime later, perhaps an hour later, I watched Ruhee leave the Red House. I remember each and every gesture she made, the way she pulled her hair out of her hairband, gathered the strands and tied them up again. She walked past me sitting there in the darkness. She did not even notice me.
What was my plan? I only remember the ringing, burning silence in my ears.
And one word: family. Family, family―I kept thinking.
And there was that white hot hatred in the pit of my stomach, in the pit of what felt like my very soul.
The ringing silence in both ears. I couldn’t bear that hatred, the ringing, it wanted me to do something, anything.
Family, family― I kept thinking. Ganesh, Ruhee and I.
We were a family. All I wanted to do was to protect my family.
I had to, because it was my responsibility.
It was all so terrible.
I had my bat with me. I went up. I threatened to tell Ruhee’s parents. What do you think is going to happen to you? You think you can keep up this pretense? They will skin you alive, I said. They will put you in jail, I said. It won’t matter that it was Ruhee’s idea. No one would listen to her.
Does she know about the cottage? I yelled.
What about the cottage?
That you are going to marry that servant girl and live in it!
On his face there was shock. As if I were bringing home news he hadn’t yet fully registered.
I should have stopped there. But I didn’t. And you? I said. What are you? A servant. A driver. Worse than a pickpocket, I said. At least pickpockets weren’t sold and bought. That’s what you are, I said. A tribal that was sold and bought. You have no position in society.
He looked livid. Rageful. The way he looked when he beat up that boy at the Exhibition.
He said something about my father. Something about my position in society, that I was the son of somebody who fucked a teacher while his son watched.
Then he spat on me.
I remember the wetness on my cheek, his spit.
Something happened to me. We grappled. I can’t remember exactly what came next.
Was there a point when we stopped grappling, and he stood and simply stared at me, and was that my opportunity, to push Ganesh off the third floor of the Red House?
See his eyes widen in shock? I don’t know.
But no. I didn’t push him.
I picked up my cricket bat and bashed it against his head with all the force I could muster.
When I think back to that time, I wonder who that person―the boy―who was he?
That Arjun, I don’t know him. He is utterly unrecognizable.
He might have thought that seeing someone die; or even to see a simple dead body would be something extraordinary.
Shocking. Approaching the fantastical. Frightening. Like darkness.
But it wasn’t. I know it wasn’t.
Someone is there and then they aren’t. Someone is alive.
Then they aren’t. One might try to wake them up again.
Scream, shout, say they’re sorry. They didn’t mean it.
Beg them to wake up. One might even carry them downstairs because they said your name.
Said, “Arjun, Arjun. What did you do? Arjun, Arjun. Don’t let anyone see. ”
Then, after carrying them downstairs, they might stop speaking altogether.
Then you may lay on top of them, cover their body with yours, ask them to wake up, forgive you.
Kiss their lips and say you’re sorry. But looking closely, it needn’t even be a dead person, it could just be a drunk lying in the street, or behind the Red House, amongst the thornbushes where you left them when you ran home and called your father.
Yes, a drunk. Simply a drunk in the thornbushes.
And the sound, a thump, the crumpling of twigs and brambles underneath them, you didn’t hear it.
You only heard the sudden silence afterward.
And if it wasn’t that day, Ganesh would have died on another unremarkable day.
The small white fleshy bits scattered all around his broken face needn’t be shattered teeth.
The fluid pooling around his caved-in head needn’t be blood or brains.
It could be something more pedestrian. Sap.
Or something. What did his life matter? Who came asking after him?
His death had no price. He had no position in society.