Like It Happened Yesterday

  That was too much to bear!

  ‘No need. Leave it. All the best!’ I said and ran inside. I heard Amit shouting ‘All the best’ to me behind my back. Did it matter now?

  We were seated in our respective classrooms to take the exam. But then, all of a sudden, things changed—some Morarji Desai had passed away. And one of our teachers, who was the invigilator for my class, broadcast the news that the history exam had been postponed to the next day.

  I didn’t know who Morarji Desai was and what his death had to do with our history exam. My best guess was that he must have been on our school committee. There were a few more like me in the crowd, but some intelligent soul updated all of us that he was the fourth prime minister of India! I am sure, on hearing that, Amit would have added that date to the calendar in his memory!

  Anyway, the conclusion was that now we had time on our hands. Mature human beings mourn someone’s death. Immature ones like us go out for a movie.

  And that’s what we did!

  Everyone realized that it was pointless to reread history. What difference would it make? And, anyhow, we had the whole night and the entire morning of the next day to revise the syllabus.

  Laxmi Talkies was playing Karan Arjun. I had never watched a movie in a theatre till then. My hometown, Burla, didn’t have any theatre—the only one in the town had shut down long back. I wondered if I had enough money to watch the show. Sushil told me that Laxmi Talkies was the cheapest of all the theatres in Sambalpur and the ticket price per show was only five rupees. The matinee show suited us all, and we joyfully discovered that each of us had five rupees to spare. So we left for the theatre. While everyone had their own bicycle, I adjusted myself on the front bar of Nandu’s bicycle. After he’d pedalled half the way, we exchanged our seats.

  Before leaving for the movie, I had called my neighbours from the school phone. They lived next door to our house and were the only ones who possessed a landline telephone in the vicinity. Everyone who knew about their phone used to treat them as their messengers. It probably irritated them, which was why, half the time, they didn’t pass on the messages. But I made sure that they would inform my mother.

  That was my first visit to a place like Laxmi Talkies, an experience still etched in my mind. It was dark inside the hall, with dilapidated seats and the coir wool coming out of the covers in places. A few men whistled, but I couldn’t see them. All of us sat in the second row from the front. The dialogues echoed in the hall and it was an experience in itself to see the big heroes, the big villains and the big heroines on that screen.

  Time and again, someone or other kept opening the door under the Exit display, which used to illuminate the front few rows and blur the picture. Every time in those split seconds of light, I noticed a few familiar faces in the initial rows. They were the rickshaw pullers who used to drop off a few primary-class students to our school. It felt good to see them and I mentioned them to my classmates. Sushil told me to shut up and concentrate on the movie.

  ‘Amrish Puri will rape someone now!’ he told me without looking at me, his eyes glued to the screen.

  I wanted to wave at the rickshaw pullers. But they, too, were just concentrating on the screen. So I had no choice but to resume looking at Amrish Puri. I loved the fighting scenes of the movie and the double roles of the heroes made it extremely interesting. At interval, the yellow light bulbs were turned on and doors of the theatre were opened. Suddenly, everyone got up from their seats and left the hall. I looked around to see how many people had turned up to watch the movie. They were all men, and I found that it was just the few of us who were neatly dressed. The rest of the crowd looked as if they had come from the slums.

  Sushil looked at my expression and said, ‘Paanch rupaye ki ticket mein yehi jugaadd milega.’ [This is all you can expect for a five-rupee ticket.]

  All of us ignored Sushil’s comment and went to the toilet. A long queue welcomed us in front of those eight or ten urinals. I was appalled at the condition of the place. Water was leaking everywhere and the stench of urine filled my nostrils! Cigarette butts and bidis—the locally rolled cigarettes—floated in the water on the floor. There were a few dumped in the urinals as well. The red stain of paan spit had painted every nook and corner of the toilet. Most of the people took a leak first, and then went out to have a quick tea. I felt sick to my guts and could not bear to think of eating or drinking anything at that time. Had it not been for the exciting film, I would probably have left. The film was good and it made me forget the surroundings.

  It started from where it had stopped, and soon we were all absorbed in watching. The heroes were able to beat the villain in their new avatars after rebirth!

  Dusk had fallen by the time we all came out of the movie theatre. We ate a few samosas and drank a cup of tea each from a nearby restaurant, after which my friends dropped me off at the bus stop. I was the only one who had to catch a bus to get back home. They left when I was able to find the bus that I was supposed to board.

  It had been a great day for me—my first outing with my friends in Sambalpur! I was happy and excited. However, unlike other days, on that evening, I was boarding a late bus. Usually, by that time, I would be at home. This evening I expected to reach home only by dinner time.

  There were only a handful of people inside the bus. Most of the seats were empty. As the first few rows were not so good for long-distance travel, I found myself a seat at the rear of the bus. It was on the right side of the aisle, next to the window. I slid open the window pane to let the fresh air in, and started to look outside.

  The street lights were on and so were the lights in the small shops. Inside the bus, it was close to dark. There were lights installed on the roof of the bus, but since the insides of the lamp shades were full of dirt and dead insects, most of the light was getting blocked, creating a faint glimmer. The driver ignited the engine, and the bus started up with a vibration, followed by a creaky sound that became a part and parcel of the journey.

  An old man sat diagonally behind me, towards my left. I saw him staring at me. He appeared strange. He was chewing paan. He was bald apart from a patch of hair behind his ears, and wore a thick pair of glasses. I could faintly see that he was dressed in a shirt and a dhoti. Every time I looked at him, he felt uncomfortable and tried not to make any eye contact with me.

  But from the left corner of my eye, I watched him observing me. I tried to recall if I had ever seen him earlier, but I didn’t recall any such moment. Soon, I decided to ignore him and tilted my head towards the window and got absorbed in looking outside. I thought about the scenes from the movie and then remembered I still had the history exam the next day. I kept thinking about a lot of things. Then tiredness took over me, and I don’t recall when I fell asleep. I woke up with a start when I suddenly felt someone’s hand on my shoulder. It was the conductor pulling at the collar of my shirt.

  ‘Ticket! Ticket!’ he asked when he saw me awake.

  I blinked and looked here and there to make sense of where I was. I realized I had been in a deep sleep. The bus had travelled a lot of distance in this time. At present, it was halted at one of the bus stops. I looked outside to see which stop it was and found that I was halfway home. Almost everyone else from the bus had gotten down at that stop.

  ‘Ticket! Ticket!’ the conductor reminded me again in his typical style.

  ‘Yeh lo. Aur soney do usey,’ [Take this. And let him sleep] a voice from behind me said.

  It was the same strange old man. In his right hand, extended towards the conductor, he held a two-rupee note. I looked at him and then at the conductor, who looked at both of us. Just out of the sleep, I couldn’t make a lot of sense of this reaction from the old man. I slipped my hand in my pocket to pull out my change, but the old man stopped me.

  ‘Nahi, nahi, Uncle. I have money.’ I insisted on paying on my own.

  ‘Don’t worry, I will take it from your father. I know him,’ he responded.

  The conduct
or took the money from him and left us to go and sit next to the driver on the bonnet of the engine in the cabin area.

  At the back of the bus, that old man and I were the only passengers.

  ‘You know my father?’ I inquired with a lot of interest.

  ‘Yes.’ He smiled and came to sit next to me.

  I felt nice that someone knew my father and had paid my bus fare.

  I squeezed in towards the window, giving him more space to sit. He made himself comfortable and put his arm over my shoulder. I kept my two-rupee note back in my pocket. I had saved two rupees and, at the back of my mind, I was planning to treat myself to either a samosa or a jalebi from the Ram Bharose snacks shop under the huge banyan tree in the Kaccha Market.

  ‘So where do you study?’ the old man asked me.

  ‘Guru Nanak Public School.’

  ‘Oh, very nice, very nice!’ he said.

  I smiled back and turned my head to look outside.

  ‘Come to our home tonight. There is a kid of your age in my house too. You can play with him. And my house is close to yours,’ he offered politely.

  ‘No, no, Uncle, I have to go back to my home,’ I excused myself.

  ‘You know, I have gifted him a video game. It’s called Mario. Have you ever played it?’ he persisted, and then pushed me back to stretch himself to the window in order to spit.

  The name of the video game made me very curious. I had heard about it from a few of my classmates. I had even asked my father to buy me one, but he had refused, saying it was too expensive, as usual.

  ‘Where is your house, Uncle?’ I asked the moment he settled back in his place.

  ‘Quite close to yours, I can drop you back to your house. You want to come?’ he asked, looking straight into my eyes.

  ‘No, Uncle. I have my history exam tomorrow,’ I said sadly.

  ‘Oh! Poor boy!’ he said. Then he put his hand over my shoulder and started rubbing the back of my neck. I felt a little awkward.

  ‘Where did you meet my father?’ I asked him.

  He rolled his eyes, and then said, ‘Hmm … Beta, I met him at his office.’

  Now, that was odd! My father had never worked at an office!

  I clarified, ‘But mere Daddy toh office mein kaam nahi karte. He is a priest at the gurdwara.’

  ‘Oh, no … no,’ he immediately corrected himself. ‘I meant, I met him at my office. He’d come for some work. He is a good friend of mine.’ I noticed that he stammered when he said that.

  My brain registered something suspicious, but I didn’t do anything about it.

  As he was talking to me he slid his hand down my shirt and rubbed his palm against my back. I felt uncomfortable and looked back at him, wondering—What was he up to? I immediately tried to grab his hand and was about to ask him to stop, when, all of a sudden, he clutched me tightly. I couldn’t move—not a single inch!

  His eyes widened, as he stared at me. I was shit scared! I froze. I was unable to understand what he was doing to me. My head was still, only my eyes moved.

  It was dark outside the bus and it was dark inside it. Without any other passenger left, there was no one who could see us. The sound of the bus and the engine had muffled every other sound.

  The moment I felt his other hand on my cheek, I knew I was in trouble. I looked at him. He could probably sense the fear deep down in my eyes. When I didn’t move for a while and kept staring back, the anger on his face transformed into a wicked smile. His face looked very animal-like. His mouth was all red. His teeth were soiled black. Inside his dirty mouth was his red-black tongue, and the sight of it made me shut my eyes in horror.

  For the next few minutes, I was his toy. He rolled his finger around my face. Some kind of petrifying fear didn’t let me revolt. I was scared of shouting. I thought, even if I shouted, the conductor was too far away to hear me. And even if he heard me, that old man would have done something to me before he arrived. He could have hit me or choked me to death. I was not in a position to think what exactly he would have done to me.

  I felt vulnerable and helpless. My fear had surged to such a level that I wasn’t even able to pray to God. The old man slipped his fingers inside my shirt’s collar and ran them across my neck. My body shivered under his hands. I felt suffocated. My mind was losing its grip. I felt my heart beating really fast. In panic, the visuals flashed behind my closed eyes—of the dark movie theatre, of villains in the movie … I imagined his rough hands as they touched my body. Then I imagined how the villains had killed the two heroes in the first half of the movie. They must’ve felt just as helpless as me. I panted. I was running out of breath and my fear was reflected in my pleas to the man, ‘Please … please … mat karo, Uncle [Don’t do this, Uncle] … please!’

  I thought of my mother the same way as I had done on the first day of school. I wanted to run to the safety of her embrace. I thought of my father. I wanted him to beat up this old man. The faces of my parents raced through my mind. In a strange way, they gave me strength. And, therefore, I kept thinking hard about them.

  As the minutes passed, I came to some sort of terms with what was happening. I knew I had to open my eyes—if not right at that moment, then eventually.

  Just then, I felt the old man’s thumb on my lips. He rubbed my lower lip, and I was overpowered by a strong aroma of paan. His face must have been close to mine—very close. I felt he was going to do something ugly with me. I struggled to open my eyes. Something within me was changing. It must have been my fear, turning into anger. I started taking deep breaths now. I realized that every moment I was turning optimistic. I was secretly telling myself that this had to end and I needed to be strong, because my parents wanted me to be strong.

  And then, a strange thing happened. The visuals in my mind changed. Scenes from the second half of the movie came flooding into my mind. The heroes whom the villain had killed in the first half had come back to life. They fought back and killed the villain. I, too, wanted to fight back and kill my villain!

  The old man had just moved his hand to my pants, when I opened my eyes. The fear in them had been replaced with anger. I screamed and, in no time, pulled out the pen from my pocket, removed the cap and stabbed him on his head with it. I narrowly missed his eye. The nib of the pen made a forceful contact with his face, close to the ear.

  He lost his grip over me and almost slid down from his seat. He leapt to grab the seat in front in order to stop himself from falling down. He was taken aback by my rebellion. He obviously hadn’t expected me to do what I had done.

  For me, there was no looking back. Some kind of madness had taken over my head. I continued to scream. With every scream, the spit from my mouth spilled out on to my lips and my chin. I was breathing heavily again. I attempted to hit him again, but he held my hands in his large palms. Then he covered my mouth tightly with his other palm and pulled me into his lap. He was obviously experienced at this game, because he had managed to overpower me. Nevertheless, I kept struggling hard to release myself from his grip. I even tried to bite his hand—that was my last resort! He managed to evade that as well.

  Soon, I felt drained of all my strength. I lay back, completely spent. But my eyes were wide open and there was still hope in them.

  Right then I heard a voice that revived me further.

  ‘Yeh kya kar rahe ho!’ [What are you doing!] someone shouted.

  I looked ahead in the distance. It was the conductor. He leapt up on the old man and pulled him away from me. He snatched me out of his grip. At the same time, he shouted at the driver to stop the bus and turn on all the lights.

  The bus came to a dead stop as the driver applied the brakes, and the three of us were propelled ahead. The conductor held my shoulder against the thrust. The alarmed old man grabbed the roof bar for support. This time, I finally saw fear in his eyes. And there was anger in mine. The driver came running to the back of the bus, unaware of what was happening. The conductor shouted at the old man and asked him to get out
of the bus.

  The old man attempted to explain that I was like his grandchild, and that he was only showing his affection towards me. He said that that’s why he’d paid for my ticket as well. He cunningly tried to take this matter up with the driver, who was unaware of what had followed, but not with the conductor. So the conductor cut him short and asked him to leave. All this while, I kept looking at that man in rage.

  When he stepped out through the front door of the bus, I slipped my hand into my pocket. I looked at him as he walked back alongside the bus. When he was close to the rear of the bus, where I sat, I took my hand out of the window and dropped a two-rupee note into the street, the ticket fare that he had paid for me. He looked at me. I shut the window pane in response and looked away. The conductor was still holding on to my shoulder.

  I hadn’t realized it, but I was shaking.

  The driver started the bus. The conductor asked me a few questions, most of which I responded with a simple yes or no. He asked me not to worry and that he was there for me. I heard and unheard it. Inside, I was feeling a surge of emotions. As time passed by, I realized the anger within me was transforming into a sense of guilt and sorrow. It didn’t matter if I should have felt that way or not, but I wasn’t able to avoid it.

  I looked at my watch. It was 7.45 p.m. when the bus finally stopped at the Burla bus stand. I got down and started walking towards my home. It was only when I was away from the crowd and the noise of the busy bus stand, and on the silent road to my house, that I realized I had been crying. I allowed myself to cry hard. I continued to walk, and the silent tears continued to roll down my cheeks. Through my wet eyelashes, the yellow light of the vehicles approaching me glittered. A lump kept forming in my throat and, time and again, I swallowed it.

  I tried to console myself. I tried to tell myself that the old man had just touched me here and there, and nothing else had happened that I should cry for. I tried to pacify my rage with the thought that I had taken my revenge by hitting him hard on his face with my pen. But, for some reason, my own reasons felt unreasonable to me.