by Rahul Raina
“I knew from the moment I saw you that you could do it,” she said. She held me to her tight, her hands crossing my back as if she was scared to lose me.
She had changed my life. I had had nothing to do with it. All I had to do was work hard. Any idiot can do that.
For the rest of the afternoon, and the night, I bit my tongue. I clenched my fists tight and shook with joy. I looked around at the room, and knew, I just knew, that my life really would change from that day on.
When she told him, Papa exploded with rage. He could not hold his tongue any longer against this woman with these ideas, whoever she was, whoever she knew.
“You . . . Ma’am, this boy, this is not our life, you are . . . filling his head with such . . .” His child was being taken away, a child he owned. He had fed me and clothed me and wasted money on me that could have been spent elsewhere. Why else had he raised me? I could have been left to an orphanage, or on some rubbish heap to die, like a girl. I was his property, he wailed, I was being corrupted, I was being stolen and made white. He kept going until he had nothing else to say.
Claire stayed silent. She was an All India champion at that. “I’ll be here for him tomorrow,” she said.
The next day, when I woke, my father gave me an unpleasant smile as I started to pack my things, the pencil box, the nice smart shoes, the hopes and the dreams.
I knew that smile.
I never raised my voice to him, ever. I tried to avoid speaking against him at all costs, if I could. And yet that day, I did.
“No,” I said, “No, Papa. No, you can’t.” I thumped my little fists against his chest.
You know what I got. He screamed. He raved. He beat me. And this time, a lecture too. I shall not bore you with the details. It was very histrionic.
“We will leave. She will never find us. If this white woman thinks she can steal my lifeblood, then she is mistaken. Pack up your things! No child of mine will ever be taken from me.”
I wept throughout. My belongings must have been stained with tears by the end of it. Papa made sure to break my pencil case, just because he could. He marched me upstairs, knocked on the door, and made me donate the toys and exercise books to the family that lived there.
I kept the shoes. They would help me with cycling, and so I wheeled the stall that day, with eyes blood red, out past Paharganj, my father smiling all the while as he walked alongside. His smug expression held for three long days, just until the police jeep rolled up to him, and an assistant commissioner of police asked for his license.
My father almost laughed. The policeman pulled out his baton, raised it high, and gave him a crack across the face.
My father fell to the floor.
The policeman bent down close by his face, and said, “Don’t go annoying the white woman again. That’s a message from my boss. Understand?”
My father’s previous enemies had been small. He had not known that. They had been men of violence, men of fists and blades, who would consider an opponent broken when he could no longer get up and fight. This enemy knew that the best weapon was the law.
I remember the first time I set foot inside Sacred Heart.
It was paradise. Grass as far as you could see. An army of groundskeepers. Red tiled roofs. A chapel. Trees, growing tall and strong. I had never seen anything like it. It did not even feel like the same country.
The only sign that I was still in India was the girls, the daughters of our elite, getting their nice Western civilized education so that they could leave and never, ever look back.
That day, and every other day that followed, they never looked at me unless it was to sneer. I was invisible. I had to get out of their way in the corridors, duck into classrooms and onto grass verges to avoid being pushed aside. Claire took me on a tour of the classrooms, and the teachers gave me their too-tight smiles, and as we turned to leave, I could see them sneering as well.
Some of the girls did look at me, though—the charity cases, the Dalit girls whose families had converted to get free places, and merely moved from the bottom of one caste system to the bottom of another.
You noticed little things. No concrete. Everything was wooden, but not our Indian wood, not cheap, not built to last for a summer or two. This was something different, nineteenth century, Claire told me, built by French businessmen trading calico and ivory, wood for the daughters of Europeans.
The staff watched me, the gardeners and the sweepers, not bothering to be secretive. They knew there was something wrong about me being there, my hand being held by one of the nuns, being spoiled, being coddled, being educated. They knew I was one of them.
In my second week, I didn’t have Claire with me. I marched, proud and stupid, toward the gate.
A hand barred my way.
A tall man with beady eyes pulled me back, just inside the school gates.
“Inspection!” he laughed. “No dirt!”
I didn’t know what to do. My lip began to quiver.
He shook his head at my uselessness and pulled my arms out in front of me.
I stood traffic-still while the sun cooked my neck red, my hands out, my back prickling with heat, men and boys passing me on the street, watching this strange ritual at the white man’s gates.
The watchman rubbed my skin hard, until it turned red. He laughed. “Thought you were white under the brown, boy.”
I hadn’t known it then, but that was the start of it.
The whispering campaign. The solidification of hate.
“What’s that urchin doing here?” a gardener said.
“He’s going to make this whole place low class,” a butt-scratching cook chimed in.
“These crazy goras, thinking they can change India,” said an electrician.
The orchestrator of the whispering campaign against me was a man named Dharam Lal, the bursar’s assistant.
The bursar himself was a septuagenarian father who spent his time gardening, handing out caramel sweets, and doing crosswords. But Dharam Lal controlled the purse strings; it was he who hired and fired. He was the most powerful Indian in the school, and he hated me. Isn’t that always the way, friends?
I get nightmares about his thin, moustachioed hacksaw face even now.
The first time I saw him, I knew that Dharam Lal had bled. He had crawled up from the dirt, to a world where he could wear white shirts and sit in air-conditioned comfort and work with his mind. He had made it. I knew this in an instant. No one had to explain it to me. I did not have to deduce it. I just fucking knew.
About a month after I started studying at Sacred Heart, he visited Claire’s little cell as my lesson was coming to an end. He knocked on the door, hard, then barged in without being asked, and glared at us without saying anything. Rather than reacting, Claire simply ignored him, and I could do nothing but continue to mouth out English even though my eyes itched to land on him.
“So this is the boy?” he said finally. I let myself look him up and down. His hands had marks on them, like my father’s: rough, blistered, damaged skin. He had worked hard with those hands, as I had worked with mine. Nowadays my hands are soft. I have nearly forgotten myself.
“Say hello, Ramesh,” Claire said.
“Hello, sir,” I said, because it was important to be pleasant to everyone when you were educated, even when you could see they hated you. These Europeans and their morals!
Lal walked around the room, giving it an inspection: his gaze traveled across the little lace-lined pillows, the gauze curtains, the small pictures of St. Bernadette and Gandhi and Princess Diana. I could tell he disapproved of every detail.
“Do you think this is wise, Sister?”
“What are you referring to?” she replied.
“People are talking.”
“Maybe you should stop them,” Claire said, and turned back to the English grammar book in her hands.
She ignored his pacing, his desperate need to say something else. Many men in our culture want to be men of few words, men wh
o are listened to without argument, and so Dharam Lal fought his need to get another word in, trying to remain quiet, lethal, deadly, which is not quite the same as having gravitas. He gave me a dirty look, ran his eyes over the white walls of the room to make sure I was not rubbing off on them, and left.
Those three years of daily lessons, from eleven to fourteen, were the happiest of my life. For other children in the neighborhood, fun was jumping in refuse puddles and being run over by trains. For me? History, English, mathematics, science, poetry. Claire and me, in her room, the one that smelled of sandalwood and vetiver and camphor, her attention focused solely on me, as if I was her whole world.
At the tea stall, my father beat me less and less. His hands stayed firmly on the copper pot. He started taking women more frequently to our room, the shy, penniless curvaceous women who queued up outside taxi ranks, their boyfriends-cum-pimps watching like hawks at every note that passed into their hands—this being the only work the men seemed to do in a day. My father spent his time with women who wore bright multicolored saris with easily unfastened hooks, women with ruby-red lips, large waists, faces that changed from seductive smiles to grimaces when the men weren’t looking, and who could blame them.
On most nights, he took great pleasure in locking me out on the roof, whether or not he had a woman over. “Go and study,” he would say, watching me scramble for ten seconds for books and paper before physically kicking me out.
Papa talked ever more to our customers. Usually, tea sellers do not have to ask after cousins and children and mistresses and every little detail of people’s lives. They only have to make hot, strong, sweet tea quickly, and maybe talk a little about sport and how all politicians are corrupt. But something had changed: he had memorized entire biographies of his customers. Every second cousin’s dog trainer would be remembered. Then the customer would leave and the light would go out of my father’s eyes, like a temple statue that had turned into a real goddess for just a single moment, then back to lifeless stone. Seeing him take an interest in other people made me suddenly feel sorrow.
But he wouldn’t even look at me. Maybe Claire had opened the floodgates. How I wished my father would give me even a quick look out of the side of his eye, just some acknowledgment, even if it was to show how little I meant to him, or how he had so much more to him than being my father, or how I was a worthless speck in his life and he didn’t miss me. Anything was better than nothing. But for once, he was the model of self-control.
He had started treating his pots and burners and cups with such delicacy, with utmost care. Even they seemed to get more attention than me. Perhaps, somehow, my good example had inspired him to take better control of his own future, to expand his business, to look into the bright new horizon that the twenty-first century—Oh, of course he was doing it to show everyone that he was just as good as his boy with the fancy new convent education.
One day, a man, one of those newspaper-reading fellows fond of his own booming voice, took notice of my new shirt and shoes.
“Look at this man, this selfless chaiwallah,” he said to everyone at the stall, letting out the poetry that had been strangled by a life of triplicate invoices, “who has saved up to give his son the life he never had. Look at his poverty, but look too at his son, who will never know want or hunger.”
My father was enjoying himself. A crowd had gathered. How fortunate I was that high-data phone plans had not yet reached our land, for someone in that crowed could have posted the commotion to Instagram, preserving my image online forever, and my career of impersonation and examination consultancy would have been built on very unstable ground.
My father started to behave strangely. He started to bow and bat away the compliments from the crowd. He actually looked at me, for the first time in weeks. He took my hand in his and raised it to the skies. I was amazed he could touch me without beating or pushing or shoving me.
A few days later, he produced a black-and-white photo of a woman, to which he fixed plastic marigold flowers, and displayed it ostentatiously by the awning of the stall.
It was meant to be my mother, obviously. He would raise her specter at any opportune moment—her short, tragic existence—a reminder of the sacrifices we all make for the next generation.
The stall got a fresh coat of paint. The bicycle began to sparkle with polish. He was showing them all that his miserable life hadn’t beaten him. Our stall finally got its name. The One Where the Man Gave His Son a Convent Education.
Of course, he did not actually talk to me in any meaningful way. We still went on for weeks without saying a single word to each other. His orders were impatient taps, half shouts, jerks of his head, never eye contact, never. He built a wall between us, thick and strong and invisible, like the one between poor countries and rich. We both knew that it was his fear of Claire that made him beat me less. I had some power over him, for the first time in my life, and he never forgot it.
Despite Sister Claire’s love and attention, I had twin antagonists at that time: my father at home and Dharam Lal at school. The bursar’s assistant watched and waited; his army of admin secretaries and dogsbodies always pretended they didn’t know me at the gate when I came in. They made me sweat outside the entrance, never a glass of water given when I asked.
Aggressive cleaners passed me in the corridors, pushing dust onto the smart brown trousers Claire had bought me from Raymond, another of the Indian brands that our middle classes have abandoned recently, like multi-faith democracy.
Dharam Lal, he of the thin, long face, realized soon enough that the parents would have to get rid of me. A campaign would have to be started. He wrote the checks. He hired and fired the Indian workers, but to put pressure on a nun? He would have to work much harder to do that.
The other administrators were nuns and fathers, white and studious and useless, adrift in a country they didn’t understand. They spent whole days smiling weakly. Dharam Lal understood what power was and how he could use it. But none of it mattered. Not to Claire. Not to me, in that light, cool room. She pushed me to breaking point. She took pride in my progress, smiled as my writing grew more confident, as I started to say English words like they belonged on my tongue, as I became more polished, my confidence growing by the day.
We worked hard. Claire came from her lessons covered in a light sheen of sweat, strands of hair sticking out from under her habit, fresh from educating the daughters of the Indian elite, from teaching them tenses and directing them through yet another year of The Sound of Music, having to keep the peace when some crorepati’s offspring wasn’t cast as Maria.
Sometimes she took me along while she taught the girls, and I would watch from the back of the class as the students mastered bharatnatyam, or elocution, or Latin.
It was strange watching this white woman serving the needs of the brown. She was making these girls into her, so that they could escape their city and their country. She was doing the same to me. One time a girl turned around to look at me, then turned back to her desk and scribbled something on a piece of paper. She handed it to her friend, who passed it around, until eventually someone scrunched it up and threw it at me. I put it in my bag in order to prevent further drama, and only unraveled it later, when I discovered it said, Are you her bastard? I didn’t understand the message entirely, but after that, I never looked at them again.
I didn’t have friends. I didn’t go out and play. I didn’t talk to girls, either at the school or anywhere else. Claire worked me hard. If I did poorly, she gave me harsh words. “If you don’t do as well as you can, you’ll never leave here. You’ll never have the life you should.”
When I had failed her, her words would come out dull, and she would not look at me with love. She could keep this up for weeks. Then, the only words she would say to me, away from our lessons, were those over lunch, where she taught me manners and how to eat. “Back straight! Pepper mill! Elbows! Napkin!”
I was improving rapidly, devouring work, and “to support my
development,” as she wrote on the application form, she arranged for me to go to a charity school in New Delhi, an initiative that had been announced by the government—an initiative that had somehow been miraculously fulfilled. At the same time, my father replaced me with an electric spice grinder, and took great pleasure in it. Business was up. He would no doubt mention his absent son whose convent education was being paid for at every opportunity. Soon he would be a stop on the tourist trail. He no longer needed me. I had served my purpose. Twelve years old, and I had served my purpose.
Each day, Claire would look over every piece of work I completed, and every report I received from the new school. She would harangue my teachers when she disagreed. She knew every little detail about my education. She bought me books and clothes from her own salary, which was increasingly subject to delays by holdups in the bursary.
It was hard. When she thought I was being lazy, she wouldn’t talk or look at me for days, and I would cry at night, when my father was safely tired out by female company; cry over the idea that she would abandon me, that I would go back to nothing, that I was nothing without her.
I worked like I was always going to fall backward and slide into sin, like there was something inside me that was corrupt and black that I needed to always keep under control.
I learned. My life got better.
And then, when I was fourteen, everything went to shit.
Five
Rudraksh Saxena’s family was going to pay. If they were going to get rich, I wanted my cut too.
I did not do things delicately. I did not leave cryptic messages. I did not post letters through their door. I waited two days, put on my pizza delivery uniform, and marched straight in. Caught them unawares, no polite messages, no greeting card emblazoned with Congratulations on the fraud!
The Saxenas’ flat was a beehive of activity. Journalists of all types—fat columnists and whisper-thin bloggers—neighbors giving jealous looks, several dozen school and tutorial college owners desperately trying to get Rudi’s face on their billboards, advertisers, shop owners, brown-nosers from the People’s Party, all of them crawling in the corridors and the stairwells, and me, skipping through like a film star in a Kashmiri meadow. Even a bunch of fucking priests had turned up, doing their Kali Pujas or whatever to wash away the sins of the world. The hijras would be here soon, cursing Rudi’s unborn children to live with the blight of androgyny, but only if they weren’t given a few thousand.
