The Boy Who Loved

  ‘You should be in school,’ she said.

  ‘So should you.’

  ‘Taiji has gone to her mother’s. I had to cook. Were you worried?’ she asked.

  ‘Why would I be worried?’

  ‘Is that why you were outside for the last few days?’

  ‘I was absolutely not here. I hope you can sense the sarcasm in my voice.’

  ‘From a mile away,’ she said and asked me to wait till she dropped off the clothes. We found a secluded spot where her neighbours couldn’t spot us. ‘I called Vedant. He told me he might find me a job. I will leave this house and never look back!’ she said and clutched my hand.

  ‘Your parents? School?’

  ‘Mummy–Papa will have to understand. I will see when it comes to that,’ she said, eyes brimming with hope and recklessness.

  ‘Can’t you ask for money from them?’

  ‘Tauji–Taiji won’t allow it. If I ask for help, they will drag me by my hair back to the house. I don’t want to depend on them for my happiness. They should have helped me when there was still time,’ she said, and for the first time I noticed a tinge of disappointment in her voice for her parents whom I absolutely hated.

  ‘You have thought this through?’ I asked, my cowardice bubbling forth. Would I be willing to leave the security of a household—no matter how abusive—and venture out alone in the world? Find a job? Earn to eat, to survive, to stare at a future which is hardly so? Every class I had attended till now, every test I had taken had been geared towards success not survival. Jobs were a means to a career not sustenance. And here she was, talking in a language so brave that it was scary.

  ‘Hmmm.’

  ‘You’re frowning.’

  ‘You won’t be in school. You can’t expect me to be 100 per cent happy.’

  ‘But I will finally be able to leave this house.’

  ‘And that’s why I’m about 80 per cent happy. How’s this Vedant person? I want to meet him,’ I said.

  She laughed and said, ‘What are you going to do exactly? Charge at him with a rod?’

  ‘This time I won’t miss.’

  ‘You’re sweet,’ she said. ‘Now go back home and start going to school. Both of us can’t be illiterate, can we?’

  ‘So has the school seen the last of you?’

  ‘Believe you me, it’s only you who will miss me.’

  I came back home to find Maa–Baba shouting at each other, their voices carrying to the ground floor. I was asked to go to my room and I couldn’t make out what they were saying but it went on for an hour. Baba left for his tuition centre in the evening and Maa started packing her bags.

  ‘Maa? Where are you going?’

  ‘To see Dada. I can’t keep up with your Baba’s madness. If he wants to keep away from his son, it’s his choice, but I won’t!’

  ‘It was your choice too, Maa.’

  ‘But I’m a mother. How long does he expect me to stay away from him?’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I can’t stay away from my son,’ she said. ‘Get out of my way. I’m going to miss my train to Bangalore.’

  I was sitting on a pile of Maa’s clothes, a little dazed to be honest, to see Maa’s quivering lips, trembling fingers, and her sudden change of heart.

  She said, ‘What happened has happened. Your Dada broke our hearts but what kind of parents will we be if we don’t forgive him?’

  ‘Are you going to get him back?’

  It was I who wanted to squeal with joy. In that split second, I imagined a future—like I always do—of Dada, Boudi, that little kid, and Brahmi, who in my version chooses to shift to our house rather than Vedant’s.

  ‘Stop asking questions! I’m late! Move!’ She slapped me on the back. Before I could react, she pulled me close. She held my face and apologized.

  ‘Will you let Boudi come here too?’

  ‘I don’t know if Baba will ever allow him in this house but how long can a mother stay away from her son? But till the time I’m not here you need to listen to Baba, okay? You need to do everything that he tells you. Now help me close this suitcase. Yes, like that. I will be back soon.’

  I revelled in seeing Baba’s stricken face when I told him that Maa had left. He stood there dumbstruck, like the cat got his tongue. He disappeared inside the kitchen and cooked dinner for himself and for me. We ate early, after which Bhattacharya Uncle came over. They both drank from the bottle Bhattacharya Uncle had got. Later Baba slept on the couch, quite restless without his partner in crime.

  14 August 1999

  Brahmi was back in school but not for long if her plan was to work out. I could tell she was getting a little put off by my incessant questions about Vedant when she seemed to be in a jolly mood. Brahmi and I had stayed back in the school and were waiting for Vedant. He was already an hour late which tells a lot about a person. He could be Mother Teresa and I would still hate him for wresting away from me the opportunity to be her hero.

  ‘He ran away from his house a year ago,’ she explained about Vedant. ‘He has not been in touch with his family ever since. He now lives alone.’

  We had been waiting for him at the reception for an hour when he walked in. Brahmi smiled brightly when she saw him. He scooped Brahmi up in his arms with a flourish and kissed her on the cheek. There was something overwhelmingly positive about him.

  ‘Who’s he?’ asked Vedant the second he saw me.

  ‘Raghu. We are in the same class,’ explained Brahmi.

  He sized me up. I didn’t hold his interest for long. He turned back to her and said, ‘How have you been? Sorry, I couldn’t be in touch. I wanted to but you know how it has been . . .’

  ‘I know,’ said Brahmi.

  ‘It’s been a year since I have seen anyone from my family. It’s so good to see you. And how tall you’ve grown. Look at you!’ Vedant said and held her hand. He looked at me and told me what I already knew. ‘I failed my twelfth grade and Papa would have wanted me to sit at his stupid little paint shop. Who wants to do that shit, right?’

  Vedant, with his nice shirt and shiny sunglasses, would have been a misfit in any paint shop, little or big, stupid or not. Who wants to do that shit, right? There was a way he said it, with a sense of danger and style. I can still hear it my ears; I am murmuring it right now. He said it with the slight accent of someone who only talks in English.

  ‘I’m working at a call centre in Gurgaon. It’s a shit place to live in but the job is good, pays me Rs 8000. They pick me up in a cab at night and drop me home in the morning. I sell insurance to the Americans. It’s an easy job. Once you’ve sold an extra litre of paint to a Marwari businessman, there’s nothing you can’t sell. It’s the next big thing.’ He lit a cigarette. The guard asked him to put it out. He continued, ‘I got in early. I could be a lead soon. I will show my stupid family what I can do. They didn’t even ask me for my tenth certificate. I’m going to be really big.’

  Brahmi and I stared at him, dumbfounded, a little appalled at his optimism.

  ‘They train you for a month. You will be as good as me,’ he told Brahmi.

  We sat and listened attentively to his stories of achievement, debauchery and how he was successfully beating the system. Seeing him, the years of engineering seemed pointless.

  ‘Keep your bags ready,’ he said before leaving.

  Brahmi hugged him and her eyes were little pools of tears.

  ‘It’s a good plan,’ I told her later, not wanting to dull her smile. ‘But your parents?’

  ‘They will understand,’ she said.

  With that, I gave up that line of questioning her escape plan.

  Baba came back home with a big ilish fish.

  ‘I used to cut fish myself when I was your age. That’s the key to how it tastes later. Come, I will teach you. It will be the best fish you have ever tasted,’ said Baba.

  I had about ten comebacks for him, each more biting than the last, making up for all they had made me endure in the past few weeks.


  Instead I instantly forgave him and prepared the fish with him. Every once in a while he would call out Maa’s name. The empty echoes would remind him of Maa’s absence and he would turn pale. The fish preparation turned out to be bland, nothing like what he had initially bragged about. The two of sat us in the living room and watched TV. Maa’s absence and our swift reconciliation hung in the air. I was not sure I had completely forgiven Baba so I put him to the test.

  ‘Baba? My friend Brahmi needs some money. Could we spare some?’ I asked.

  He stared at me for an odd ten seconds, and told me things were a little tight right now. Then he raised the volume of the TV, hoping it would fill our lives.

  My last-ditch attempt to scrape enough money to help Brahmi entirely on my own and become her hero had failed. I tried and was unsuccessful in asking Sahil for the PowerBook. He had been getting quite good at coding and his face shrunk to a raisin when I asked. Rishab is another option but we are talking about a lot of money and a stupid idea, or rather the lack of one.

  15 August 1999

  I’m just back from Rishab’s house and it hurts to write this. My fingers are cut and bleeding from four different places and I’m hurting not only because of them but also from the losses.

  Brahmi had insisted we celebrate Independence Day the way it was meant to be celebrated—by flying kites. Before long we realized why. Brahmi was a kite-warrior if there’s ever been such a thing. She decimated Sahil, Rishab, Arundhati and me with consummate ease, her manja, the thread used for flying kites, cutting through our combined ranks like a hot knife through butter. Sahil and Rishab had dressed in their finest combinations of orange, white and green to impress Arundhati whom they were meeting for the first time and, from what I could gather, found attractive. The first few losses were put down as fluke, the next few were attributed to Brahmi having a good day, and the last few were spent grunting angrily.

  It took us two hours and sixteen kites to accept Brahmi’s superiority.

  ‘All this just to humiliate us?’ asked Sahil.

  ‘Why not?’ said Brahmi.

  Later we sat in Rishab’s room and he showed us his impressive VCR cassette collection. We watched the movie Border on TV in tune with today’s date and shouted in joy when Suniel Shetty, Sunny Deol and Jackie Shroff won us the war.

  ‘I thought you boys must smoke,’ said Arundhati later. ‘I have never seen three boys hang out on a terrace and not smoke.’

  ‘If my mom finds out, she will gut me!’ said Rishab.

  Arundhati laughed. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘He’s cute.’

  ‘You said that?’ Rishab asked me.

  ‘Brahmi did,’ I said.

  ‘Brahmi said that?’ he said, his chest filling up with pride.

  ‘Do you want to smoke?’ asked Sahil. ‘I can get a packet from the corner shop.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ said Arundhati

  ‘Have you smoked before?’ asked Brahmi.

  ‘Umm . . . I am not a loser, of course I have. Have you?’ asked Arundhati.

  Brahmi shook her head.

  A few minutes later, we were at Rishab’s terrace again. We ran through a pack in an hour.

  ‘What?’ asked Arundhati when she saw Rishab gaping at her, smiling stupidly.

  Rishab said, ‘If you put that to your lips, it would be like you are kissing me.’

  ‘Like the four of us just kissed each other?’ asked Arundhati and put the cigarette to her lips, took a drag and passed it on to Brahmi.

  Brahmi took a long, deliberate puff. The smoke dribbled out of her lips, her chest heaved, the burning cigarette dangled from her fingers carelessly. I took the cigarette from her before anyone could lay claim to the kiss that rested on the bud. On our way back home, Arundhati told me of her intention to date Rishab, which Brahmi wholly supported.

  ‘You do know you have to ask him too, don’t you?’

  Arundhati laughed. ‘What do you think he will say?’

  Fair point.

  22 August 1999

  Maa held me for fifteen minutes and bawled like someone had died.

  ‘My shona, my shona, what would I do without you? You’re my everything! You told me you were eating but look how thin you have become!’ she wailed, holding up my gangly arms. She threw an accusatory look at Baba who shrugged. She waved down a coolie. Before the coolie could reach us Baba had already picked up the suitcase.

  ‘I’m not senile yet,’ Baba said drily.

  Maa–baba didn’t talk at all during the taxi ride home. Maa kept her hands firmly wrapped around me, kissing me and ruffling my hair from time to time as if surprised I still existed. Our house soon began to be filled with the deliciously rich aromas of ilish cooked in mustard paste, and red mutton curry. Baba pretended like it was no big deal. We ate and watched TV like we always did. Like Dada was away at the college hostel and not in Bangalore, married to a Musalman woman who was carrying his child. While I completed my schoolwork, Maa scrubbed my room clean, reorganized my clothes and my books, washed my clothes, and changed the bedding.

  We were making a new start.

  In the evening, no one questioned me when I left the house to go to the temple. For the past week, Brahmi and I had been meeting in the evening to buy little knick-knacks she would need when she started her new life in Vedant’s house. Both of us would steal a little from our family members’ wallets and buy detergent one day, a deodorant roll-on stick another, or even packets of rajma and Maggi.

  ‘I don’t want to be a burden,’ she would tell me.

  Today we were scouting for undergarments, which was as embarrassing as it sounds. For the most part I loitered at least a hundred yards away from her when she entered a shop, most of which had posters of half-naked women stuck on their shopfronts, staring at me, labelling me a pervert for staring back. She laughed when I refused to carry the black polythene bags containing what to me was contraband.

  ‘Are you happy?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s a wide question.’

  ‘With your parents’ turnaround?’

  ‘I’m not sure how I feel. I have seen the worst in them and it’s hard just to overlook that.’

  ‘Do you like idli–sambar?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I love idli and that’s what we are going to have right now. But you have to dip the entire idli into the sambar because that’s the only way to have it,’ she said.

  I was pretty full by the time I got back in time for dinner. I was asked innocuous questions about school, practical files, teachers, etc. The conversation veered while Maa–Baba washed the utensils and I hung around finding one pretext after another. They would fall silent every time they would see me around.

  Maa said, ‘We could call them here for a few days if you don’t want to go. It’s too much pressure for them. Zubeida’s parents aren’t reaching out to her. Leaving that poor girl to live alone. She gets so sick in the mornings. They haven’t even found a maid yet.’

  ‘I’m not letting that girl inside my house,’ said Baba roughly.

  ‘I am not losing my son,’ snapped Maa.

  Baba strode out of the kitchen and stood smoking in the balcony for a good hour.

  When he came inside, Baba said, in the tone of a defeated man, ‘Even if she does come here where will they stay?’

  Baba’s resolve to hate Dada was wearing thin.

  ‘We will sleep in the living room. We can’t make her sleep outside,’ said Maa.

  5 September 1999

  I changed her bandages again today. We lied to Sahil and Rishab.

  ‘It’s a mathematics project we are working on. No, no one else is allowed in the team,’ we told them.

  We were in the basement and she took off her shirt and wore it from the front while I faced the other way. Unlike that day, there was no blanket hiding her. Pain trumped any shame for both of us. I saw her naked back with gnawing embarrassment and rage.

  ‘Did it pain?’ I asked when
I was done. I turned away and she wore the shirt.

  ‘Lesser than last time,’ she said.

  Her Tauji had noticed the missing money. Brahmi hadn’t admitted to the theft and yet she got slapped around with belts. Years later I would look at these scars as wounds I helped heal. But she didn’t seem bothered by it at all. She was just smiling morbidly.

  ‘It’s just a few more days,’ she said.

  ‘It was a few more days a few more days ago. Your parents aren’t back yet?’

  ‘No. I hope they don’t come back before I go. It will only make things tougher,’ she said.

  ‘Won’t they come looking for you?’

  ‘They will. By the time they find me, they would understand,’ she said.

  ‘I will miss seeing you outside your window.’

  ‘And I will miss you,’ she said.

  ‘You know what I was thinking yesterday? I was imagining a situation where Maa–Baba don’t warm up to Dada and things only get worse. Then even I could run away from home and we could stay together.’

  ‘What if I’m a really difficult person to live with?’

  ‘It can’t be more difficult than living without you.’

  ‘Aren’t you the sweetest?’

  ‘No, I’m not. Okay, probably only to you because it’s easy to be.’

  ‘I will miss you, Raghu. I wish I hadn’t had to leave.’

  Later we jumped the school walls and took a bus to Delhi University. She had heard from someone about an old uncle who sat outside Miranda House and made magic Maggi. It wasn’t far from the truth—a Pied Piper with masala noodles. We splurged on three plates of Maggi, travelled without tickets on the way back to school, and wondered if we were already addicted.

  As time’s passing, I find myself more in love with Brahmi, it’s harder to see her go in the afternoon, tougher to not see her in the night, and impossible to survive without her.

  Baba was home when I got back from school. He was poring over some papers and was on the landline, shouting. I didn’t think of it much till Baba shifted to Bengali. Dada was on the other side of the phone. I went to my room and eavesdropped. Though tempers ran high, they weren’t talking about Boudi but about money. Dada was called careless, a fool and a retard.