by Rahul Raina
I had never been the future of anything.
I would have sacrificed myself for her willingly. My life would be like it had been before the never-ending lawns, before books read lazily under banyan trees while girls played tennis, before the wonderful words, the history, and the poetry.
As I left, mad with thirst, I tried to drink at the water fountain just inside the school gates. A little drink after a long, dusty day. Not such a revolutionary act.
One second I was drinking water, and the next I was on the ground, and a gang of teenage boys stood over me, Dharam Lal’s lackeys, workmen, lean, muscled, with growths of slug-like facial hair.
“Hey, look at this little prick,” one of them shouted. I couldn’t tell which one through my tears, and my pathetic scrambling to get up. “What is he carrying? Books?” They pushed me to the floor as I got up, kicked me, held me down, beat me, spat at me. They didn’t have to urinate on the books. That was a new one.
As I ran from the school, I heard abuse, screams. I heard car horns. A motorbike screeched to a halt beside me, nearly running me over.
Actually, that may just have been Delhi.
I got home and was greeted with my father’s laughter at my pretensions, my books, my big Western ideas. He would hound me for it until the day he died of alcoholism, probably, or, more likely, being shot by some unpaid gold-toothed pimp.
Usually he didn’t say anything, but maybe my particularly pathetic condition that day spurred him to words.
He was lying in bed when I came back. He watched my face and weighed his words.
“She’ll dump you one day, and find some other child to corrupt. See what she does when you have a moustache,” he said. Maybe drink had made him loose-tongued, or losing some bet had made him shortchanged.
I did what I usually did. I picked up my books and went up to the roof.
Though that day, I almost believed him. I thought of what Claire had said, that I would not be the last. Would she look at some other child the same way she looked at me? What if I didn’t do well enough, what if I failed her? Would I be the prototype, the failed first experiment? What was my future? No name, no connections, no money, wrong caste, wrong everything. I cursed her then, cursed her for her kindness, cursed her for all those countless afternoons when I had been taught to dream.
I would go back to making tea, ten rupees a cup (1.3 million rupees would be ten years of work, Papa, you prick). I would have a stall of my own. Maybe three or four generations in the future, someone would go to university and turn their nose up at the dirt and the grime. We would make it then.
I stopped my dreaming.
In the meantime, the stall was making more money than ever before. Of course none of it filtered through to me. Papa finally bought a television, which he hooked up to a noisy diesel generator. While he watched cricket matches and belched his way through kebabs, I curled in a ball and wept silently. At school, Claire was a woman on a mission. Papa was right, she wasn’t happy with just me. She wanted to change things.
Claire started to bake. She appealed to the Indian sweet tooth. She made pastries, cakes, anything she could. She procured a table and sheets and cloths, and stood outside the gates every Friday and sold her cakes, and as the parents ate, she started, “Have you met Ramesh? Ramesh, tell them about your life, tell them where you came from, tell them what you have been learning.” Slowly but surely, she thought, we would win the parents of the school around. Maybe there could be one child a year, maybe more, given an education, a new life.
I was charming. I told the parents everything. I let my brown eyes twinkle. I saw their spines soften and their smiles grow.
Dharam Lal did not like this development at all.
Always there was Dharam Lal, just out of sight, or his spies, everywhere, telling stories, trying to destroy my life before it had even started.
I would sit at the back of her class, and he would send a nightwatchman to remove me. I would be heaved out with maximum drama, under her eyes. The girls laughed. Their minds had been poisoned against her by their parents. Crazy Claire, mad Claire, unclean Claire. There had always been something wrong with her, but no one had said anything, and now it was too late.
I fucking hated them, I fucking hated them, I fucking hated them all.
One day, Claire had been baking, cursing our Indian butter all the while in long streams of French, its taste, its texture, the accursed heat. I had been helping her as I usually did when Dharam Lal had suddenly appeared. I saw Claire turn gray, her hands shake.
“Who are you making these for?” he had asked. “The boy? Whose money are you spending on him?”
She had stood there, this woman of grand ideas and strong ideals, and taken it.
“Leave him, Sister. Leave him.” Dharam Lal’s words grew soft and dripped like honey. “He is not one of us. He never will be. Give me the word and he will be gone. Look what he has done to us, to you, to this school. He has infected you.”
She stood and shook her head, first slowly, and then faster, as if to banish every word, every accusation.
“So be it,” he said, watching us.
“Ramesh, come,” Claire said. She started to leave the kitchen quietly. I began to follow, but a great hand grabbed me from behind. “Just leave,” he said, his moustache so close I could feel it, his voice low and dark. “We don’t want you here. See what you’re doing to her. You must go. You must end this.” I tried to run. I could not. I was useless, weak.
I tried to shout, “Claire!” but nothing came out. I could see her a few steps ahead of me. I turned. Dharam Lal was blazing with hatred, not only at me, but at what I stood for. I might be the first of many, and then what would happen to the world he had built?
Or maybe he did it because he could.
He slapped me hard, across the face.
He would have done more, he would have beaten me, but Claire, she stopped him. She pushed him away. She stood over me and picked me up.
Dharam Lal watched us both. That thin, thin face. That smile of triumph.
“The boy is cursed,” he said. “He destroys everything. This is my world. No one gave it to me, not that the goras ever would. I took it. And no little boy is coming in here and turning it into a fucking charity school. I was nothing. Now I am something. No one is taking that away from me.” He left as quickly as he had come.
He was a faceless man. He was a demon. He could have had any of a hundred different names. He wanted to destroy me, her, us, what we were building together.
He was every person I’ve ever hated, in one. He was history, he was culture, he was custom. I wanted to kill him.
There’s always someone to drag you down in this country.
In the summer of my fourteenth year, it all ended.
They fired her. It was dressed up in the way the Westerners love. She was being promoted to head up a moth-eaten convent a mile or two away. She had further decided to dedicate her life to Jesus, it was announced. I moved her belongings one afternoon, small as they were, linens and pictures and books. No one helped.
That last day there was no hand inspection. They let me straight through.
I walked past Dharam Lal’s office, my eyes blazing hatred. He saw me pass, skipped out into the cloistered hallway. He grabbed my shoulder and turned me around. “You must have been one hell of a fuck,” he said, and smiled and barged past me. I had been disposed of. He had won. That was the last I ever saw of him.
I finished collecting up her belongings. Books, bedsheets, and pictures. So many pictures. Her family, her home, her early years in India, and a child. A brown-haired child. A white child. I never asked who it was. I packed them all away.
We caught a taxi, and that was the end of Claire’s time at Sacred Heart.
Her new home was the Convent of the Blessed Mary, a small brick place built by a penitent Italian businessman who had reignited a speck of childhood faith on his deathbed. It was a retirement home for the forgotten, the crumbling, the
dust-ridden, a small brick prison with a small brick courtyard where elderly sisters sat on three-legged plastic chairs and died their slow deaths.
She gave me a new life in exchange for hers.
I would lose her. I suppose it had nothing to do with being forced out. The cancer would have claimed her anyway. But it didn’t feel like that back then. It felt like one long thread of misery, like Dharam Lal himself had poisoned her. I used to press parts of myself red looking for lumps of my own.
She didn’t tell me until it was too far along. But I saw how she disappeared into herself, how her room became slowly darker as her inner light faded, how she started to lose her way in sentences, how her voice became cracked, like a smashed pot, how her eyes saw straight through me, how her past slowly, slowly became more real than her present, how the fainting spells she started to suffer were blamed on heat exhaustion, how she spent days in bed, weak in body and spirit.
I was sitting my All Indias two years early, not because I was clever, but for the usual reason the poor gave: desperation. I wanted my new life to begin—a scholarship at a college, a future, a life free from my father, as quickly as I could. All I did for a year was study. No friends to share japes with—not that I had any before, but perhaps I could have made some—no carefree childhood moments to recall when I was fat and arthritic. I helped at the stall, even though Papa didn’t give a shit. Claire had told me that fathers and sons should be close.
I did well in the exams.
Oh, how I tore at the envelope when it came. I was about to go up in the world. My life was about to change.
I read the result.
Top Ten Thousand.
I gave Claire a smile. I pressed the paper into her hands.
Good.
Not good enough.
She hugged me tight. I started to cry.
No scholarships for me. They always go to the people who never need them, to people who don’t know the fear of hunger, the fear of looking around at every adult you have ever known and seeing your every possible future, and every one of them being shit.
No college. It had been my dream for so many long years.
Every day with my father was a stinging rebuke. “Still here, Mr. Professor?” he would say. He would bring up my ridiculous notions of self-improvement to the lower-caste customers, mocking my pretensions and my intellectualism, and they would laugh their corpulent laughs at my temerity. To everyone else, the middle classes with their newly bought camera phones, he would hold up his educated boy. He had almost been annoyed by my failing to get a scholarship to college. What a story that would have made! The little prick had bought a phone. Old Delhi was entering the modern world. The white guidebooks say all the magic has gone. What they mean is that we have 4G data connections.
Sister Claire got me a job behind my back. One avenue had been barred to me. She would find another, by wearing out her shoes and the last stores of goodwill she had with her old girls and their husbands before the stories could spread to her former students of what she had supposedly done.
It was at a newspaper. I would be the stringer, slaloming around Delhi doing the investigative legwork for journalists, taking photos, getting coffees (a new Indian custom this, a modern form of libation for my elders and betters), running paperwork and legal releases, doing interviews with junior policemen and elderly neighbors who claimed to have seen wanted men. A good job, on my own for most of the day, a small salary, but plenty of opportunity.
I would work in the day, and at night I would study. Claire hadn’t given up on the All Indias. I had one more chance, the next year, for a retake. I would spend the year working and studying, working and studying.
The boss, Mr. Prem, was a good man. A rotund man, with a gurgling, resonant chuckle that filled the room when he was happy. When he had caught some minister fucking his secretary, or a movie star cheating on his wife, his whole body vibrated with pleasure at another powerful man taken down. He would buy sweets for the office on Fridays, laddoos and besan and peda, and walk around tables pressing it into our mouths. His wife, one of Claire’s old colleagues, would come and deliver his lunch, and she would always leave a little tiffin for me too, “Anything for Claire’s young man,” she’d say in a lilting laugh, and sometimes I’d only find it when I came back from long days out, and devour it even though it was long cold by then. That was what I had. Cold food and relentless studying. That’s India for you.
Every Saturday, I went to the temple and offered my thanks. Thanks for what? For being born with nothing? For having to work every minute of every day? For having no life of my own?
Claire laughed when I told her about my temple visits. “Should go to church, young man!” Her face would be cloaked in the darkness of her room, beneath layers of swaddling, her voice leaking out of that shapeless white mass. She never sat in the courtyard—too much smoke, too many complaints, too many memories.
“I did my smoking when I was a young girl, cigarettes and all sorts of other things besides. And look where that led me. Here!” She would try to ruffle my hair and press a crinkled hundred-rupee note in my hand, and just like the Indian grandmother you’d see in films, we would fight and fight about which sin was worse, taking the money or rejecting it, and I would exhaust her finally, and give it back, and would somehow find it in my pocket after I’d left.
She had wanted to change the world when she was younger. Revolution, anger, blood in the streets, paving stones thrown at police and politicians. She still could, with the little time she had left, but it would have to be through me. So that was what she did.
How long did I work in the normal world that people know? Six months? Six months of study and work, work and study, knowing that if I failed, this was it, but also living free of worry, having Claire to talk to, having some freedom of my own, for the first time in my life.
I went into the office, back out to make some C-grade actress pout into a camera, took metro rides to law offices, did interviews with computer millionaires, heard Mr. Prem’s fatherly advice and devoured his wife’s turmeric-laced daal while I suffered through my studying. How many months of happiness—well, near happiness—did I have before the cancer came in full force, before we understood why she was fading, feeling weak, and everything went wrong?
It was nice in the beginning. Papa looked like shit when I moved out, just him in that dark nothing room, just him and the plastic mattress I had slept on every day of my life, and the leak from upstairs that had turned the concrete soft. He would have no one to abuse, no one to brag to, no one to make jokes about, while I would be living the high life of the new metropolitan man in a grimy, windowless flat reeking of vegetable oil that I’d found in the back of a newspaper.
At first I thought he would let me go without saying anything, to show me how little I meant, but just as I went, out came the shiny hand to catch my wrist.
“Education will get you nowhere. I used to dream, don’t you think I didn’t? Fucking big man, you think you’re the only person in this family who ever wanted to do better? Always thought I was an idiot, didn’t you? You know where dreaming got me? It got me here, with you, in this hole, with a dead wife. She gave me an idiot child, and then he killed her.” His eyes drilled into mine, his grip was iron hard, and you could tell it was hurting him to flex his fingers, the tendons straining the other way back to their natural curve.
“Your mother had such dreams. And I was a fool for believing in them. I did my school. I worked my government job. All I got for that was this hand. I should have left you to die. But instead I worked. I fed you. I clothed you. I made sure you lived.”
So, he was playing the mother card. Was that all he had left? I let him have it, after all the years of resentment and frustration. I was never coming back. I would never go back to that room again. I’d make sure of it.
“She died because of you,” I said. “She couldn’t bear to be in the same world as you.” I fell quiet. I had nothing else. I hated him too much to put
into words. I could never have said anything near enough.
“All this education,” he laughed, “and that is the worst you can do? You killed her. You destroy everything you touch. I heard about your nun. She must be so happy with her life, no money, no job, but at least she has her precious Ram—”
I hit him.
That was what he had taught me after all. I went for his rib, the one he’d almost broken before.
When he stopped moving, I knew I was done.
When you hit them, make sure they never get up. That was his gift to me.
So that was all he had, a nice little story with a nice little moral about knowing your place, all wrapped up in a bow after years of suffering in silence.
What a prick.
That was something I had already learned about in books, in all that useless studying about German architecture and Roman history.
I took my belongings, my books, my papers, and I left. That was all there was.
I turned a corner, and another. I looked at the people around me, sweeping the street outside their stalls, lying drunk in the corners of doors, watching the world go by through cigarette smoke. Their lives would never change.
I went to my new apartment, rent paid promptly at the end of every month, and I never looked back.
Finally I had money! I bought a motorbike. I could have gone to bars and clubs in five-star hotels, ordered a water just for show and stolen the branded napkins. I could have shoved my media badge in people’s faces. I could have blackmailed junior politicians. But I didn’t. I worked. I had a stupid dream of paying Claire back, of giving her a small something per month.
Hubris.
They could operate, I was told. But in a government hospital? Everyone had heard about those places. Uninterested nurses, overworked doctors, corridors full of angry relatives holding skeletal hands wasting away, everyone sitting on and in rags, broken tube lights that went ping! every five seconds, the smell of socialist promises turned to shit.
She was in a private room when I arrived. That was what being white got you. I spent a few minutes watching her sleep. A few weeks ago she had finally gone in for a test, had to wait a fortnight, and called me when she had heard, her voice far away and weak, her breath shallow between her sentences.
