by Sakiv Koch
"First day at school," said the Apple, bobbing like a puppet, "and already raising all manner of hullabaloo! You know what I can’t stand?"
I didn’t know, so I said nothing. "Speak up!" Another twirl of my ear to underscore the command.
"I don-don-don’t know—."
"Silence, imbecile lad!" he thundered, cutting me off. "Audacity is what’s intolerable to me. Insolence is what I can’t bear." My ear experienced new tortures with each emphasis.
I felt something quiver and hum against my leg and looked down at a thing I first took to be a living snake. But it was a cane suspended from the schoolmaster’s hand, a long, thin instrument, filling me with as much horror as a venomous viper would.
"Show me your palms!" said the teacher. "I’ll imprint delible but unforgettable lessons on them, lessons designed specifically for reining in imbecile lads like you!" He then relinquished my ear, grabbed my quaking hand, and stretched it forward by force, raising his stick in the air simultaneously.
Rachna raised her hand and called out "Sir!" before the viper could strike me. "The new boy was not doing anything wrong, sir," she said. "He was just deciding where to sit."
"Hmm, what was all that noise about then?" mused the master. “I can see this boy is a mischief-monger," he added, glaring at me, still holding my hand like a sacrificial offering.
"Sir, I have a question about yesterday’s lesson on forgiveness and compassion," Rachna said masterfully, disarming the master and defeating me summarily in our little skirmish.
I had not only lost my newfound heroic status but also gotten indebted to her. She had literally saved my skin even though I’d played such a mean (at least in the eyes of the girl-populace) trick on her. She was the hero now, irrespective of whether I got away from the Apple’s imminent thrashing or not.
The master stood still for a moment. I didn’t dare look up in his face, but I think if I had, I would have found surprise and confusion there. "Yes, yes, forgiveness," he mumbled after a moment. "As you know, I strive to teach not just by lecture, but by example," he said, letting go of my hand and lowering the stick. "I shall forgive this brat, even though he deserves punishment. Besides, forewarned is forearmed. No mischief in my class, do you hear?" he said to me. "Now go sit with Lallu Lal at the back!"
I surveyed the faces of my new classmates as I plowed through the aisle to sit with Lallu, the fattest and the most cheerful-looking child I had ever seen.
All the faces I saw were wearing identical ‘tit for tat’ smiles, confirming my belief that my reign over the class was over almost as soon as it had begun. Rachna wasn’t looking at me, somehow managing to render her expression attentive to the master and impassive to me.
I spent the rest of the morning properly subdued, speaking only when I was spoken to, and trembling whenever a new teacher entered the class. More often than not, they looked at me as though I were a hawk in a nest of sparrows.
Most of the teachers carried canes with them—cobras, coral snakes, pit vipers, black mambas.
Rachna had both surprised me (greatly) and awed me (just a little) by coming to my rescue in the morning. I went to her before the beginning of the next period.
“You are a good girl,” I said magnanimously.
She laughed without raising her head from a book she was reading. Her right hand, lying in her lap beneath the desk, moved a little. The hand came out suddenly and a wooden duster came flying at me. I bent sideways in time and the missile fell to the floor with a loud clatter after thumping the blackboard.
"Rachna never gives up," said the girl sitting next to her. "She’ll get you ultimately."
"She’s just a little girl," I said with a complacent shrug and wandered away.
A free run of the field in the lunch recess, followed by a sports period in which I managed to fill my classmates with admiration and wonder again, helped me come back at least partially into my element.
As the school day drew to an end, I was already scheming how I could use my father’s invisible wire to trip the Apple to teach him a lesson. But I kept my guard for Rachna up, as she had circled around me two or three times like an eagle on hunt.
All animals are most vulnerable while drinking, their heads lowered at the watering hole. It was at the end of the school day, as I drank at the common tap, with my head bent and my senses abandoned to the taste of cool water, that my left hand was grabbed, raised, and bitten.
The bite was more of a scratch, a scrape, which formed only shallow, temporary craters in my hand. It was an almost perfunctory act of vengeance. As soon as her teeth met my palm, Rachna’s anger turned into guilt – as though some ‘emotion-transformer’ enzyme had been plucked off my skin and introduced into her bloodstream.
It was this guilt, she told me years later, that first impelled her to invite me over for her birthday party the next day. She also told me, even later, how she wished she had let the impulse pass, that she had gone home and slept away the little atmospheric disturbances in her conscience. For then, she claimed, no structure would have been erected on that foundation of remorse. Because the craters I left in her heart were neither shallow nor temporary.
I went to Rachna’s party with my mother. My father would have come too, but he was feverish that evening. Not with sickness, but with excitement. Ma said he had just succeeded at something he had been working upon for the past ten years. She told me it was a secret improvisation of his, and that I was not to mention it to anyone.
Father had invented a special type of cord by treating bast fibers of Indian hemp with a concoction of various resins, chemicals, rubber, beeswax, and I don’t know what else.
When dyed, it looked very much like ordinary rope and had similar tensile strength, but with the important difference that it was significantly more elastic. It was somewhat like a rubber band in that an application of certain pressure at certain points would stretch it slightly, almost imperceptibly. Remove the force acting on it, and it would slowly regain its original shape and size.
"He couldn’t escape his work," my mother would say—pun fully intended—with a perfunctory, wilted smile on her lips whenever her husband couldn’t accompany her to social events. But that didn’t happen often, and being bitter towards each other about anything was almost a physical impossibility for both of them.
Rachna’s house was at a distance of about eight miles from my home. I rode pillion on my mother’s bicycle wherever the terrain allowed cycling. She walked her machine up and down roads too steep to maneuver on wheels. We ate groundnuts and deposited their shells in a bag that hung from the handlebars especially for this purpose. Ma would make me run and pick up any other litter lying around and put it in her mobile garbage bin.
On the previous day, after I had told her the full story of what had taken place at school, she had taken my ear—the one the Apple had tormented—between her fingers and given it a mock tug. "Don’t play any more tricks on little girls," she had said. "Or boys, for that matter. I’d appreciate it if you actually learn something at school, besides how to plot against schoolmasters."
It was another of my mother’s hopes—that I grow up a greatly learned man—which was never fulfilled. Or so the world thought. For my part, I believe I did become what you could term an erudite man (unless you’d rather consider me conceited and delusional instead).
At school, they taught by prying open a child’s mouth with wrenches of fear (those sticks the masters wielded), set it agape with clamps of ignorance, and then rammed down coarse lumps of fact. Force-feeding; learning by rote.
What’s there to understand? Memorize it, that’s the way. That’s the way our rulers have given us to serve the empire. Become the British Raj’s mules, become their clerks. You are slaves anyway.
Gobble everything down, swallow it whole, eyes screwed tight, tongue folded upon itself. Don’t taste, don’t comprehend, just dump it into your alimentary canal. And then regurgitate it all on a piece of paper. Learn to vomit, to throw up well
. That’s what will make you a man of the world.
I never learned to swallow things whole and to vomit them back out. And so, I never became a man of the world. I became a man of the night instead.
The only books I ever had any affinity with were storybooks. As a boy, I dreamed of writing stories. But then the night enveloped me, swallowed my days also, and my wish for storytelling transmuted into daydreaming. I could daydream during the night, too, accumulating a treasure of dreams, to expend them by living them later, on some unspecified date.
You create a wealth of desire first; you build a nest in your mind, as a conception, as a blueprint, before picking that first material straw in your beak, because you’re still young and life stretches on and on, out of your sight.
Time is on your side. But then something comes so abruptly at you that you don’t see it; you can’t duck or dodge it, no matter how agile you are. It hits you where it hurts most, and the next thing you know is that you don’t know anything, except for the pain that fills you and overwhelms you.
You have been looted, from inside. Mind and heart scoured clean. Dreams stolen, hopes murdered, aspirations aborted. You don’t hold time in your wings now. It is the end.
And so, after the end, I’ve become what I hoped to become in the beginning—a storyteller.
◆◆◆
Mother and I rode and walked to Rachna’s house, our little garbage bag filling with the shells of the red pearls that we ate along the way. I had earlier asked Ma what gift will we take for Rachna. "A living gift," she had said.
"A puppy?" I asked enthusiastically.
"No. You," she said and tied a knot of red ribbon over the small finger of my left hand. I felt both a little awkward and a little important at becoming a living gift for someone’s birthday party.
The season was poised on the cusp between summer and autumn. The hills were brides attired in green saris with dots of vermilion on their heads. The sun had declined out of sight, but its last rays lingered behind like a lover reluctant to part. And the moon peeped from behind the tops of trees like a zealous rival awaiting an all-clear signal before venturing out into the open.
Ma sang as we traveled. Her soulful lyrics filled the air like a swarm of butterflies, and melodies dribbled from her sweet voice like little streams of honey.
The town lay in an oblong valley shaped like an electric bulb. When we started our descent into the bazaar where Rachna lived, Ma asked me to recount the names of the performances she had planned for the entertainment of my new friends.
"Put your heart into your performances, Neel. Prove yourself the best gift she has ever had!" she said.
"But she can’t keep me long," I replied, not realizing I was prophesying.
"One generally can’t keep the best things of life for long," Ma said. "Their magic is in their happening, not in their duration."
I let that splash of grown-up philosophy slide off me and thought of ways to have her strike at least two items off the list of acts she had prepared for me. Though this list chiefly consisted of an amalgam of skills from my parents’ respective trades—basic postures of contortion, escape from four lengths of cord that the children could bind me with in any way they pleased, and a series of somersaults and balancing acts—she had also thrown in a solo-song number for me to do on my own, which was to be immediately followed by the recital of a poem.
I had inhibitions about singing, but my real gripe was with the poem, as it would express:
1) my gratitude (Ma wrote the poem) to Rachna for:
a) saving me from our schoolmaster and
b) inviting me to her party,
2) my apology for having given her cause to bite me and feel guilty for it afterward.
"Can I just skip the girly stuff at the end, Ma?" I asked candidly, for the tenth time that evening, not being able to come up with any brighter idea. And for this stale inspiration, too, I had to thank my father, who had said to my mother, "Don’t make my lion do all that girly stuff at the party, Runa."
Ma had responded to him with another splash from the fountain of her life-philosophy (again, my father’s terminology), saying something to the effect that sensitivity and large-heartedness made a man more manly than made-up brawn and affected toughness ever could.
To me, she responded only with a laugh and a ring from the bell of her bicycle, and the two somehow mixed for me, because her laughter had a ring of finality and I finally shut up. I lost the hope of evading the recital, just as I’d lost the hope of escaping the stick at school the day before.
We entered the same cobbled street you saw when I first brought you to Jalgarh. The same signboard gave the same lie—Shyam & Sons—in a different color and style from his shop front, although he wasn’t a professional photographer back then.
The entrance door to the place stood open. Ma parked her precious bicycle on its stand, knocked on Rachna’s door, and looked at me in her ‘a-splash-is-imminent’ way.
“Please come upstairs,” a voice called out from somewhere above. Ma’s head jerked back, as though she would recapture the receding sound waves to answer some question in her mind. That particular splash about to gush out of her mind never materialized as a consequence.
We climbed the staircase and entered a spacious hall (yes, the same one where I would nearly die years later). It was lit only with oil-lamps, candles, and wooden torches bracketed high on the walls, all so placed behind screens of varying transparencies that rays and shades fell in the room in successive zones of dark brightness and light darkness.
Twelve or fifteen children sat on rush chairs arranged to make the figure eight, with a table at the conjunction of the two small circles. A locomotive (really a man, but that was my first impression of him—a locomotive) stood in a lane of shade, with his back to us, balancing three laughing children each on his outstretched arms. The man, too, was laughing.
As we approached, he began to turn, slowly and carefully, still laughing. He pivoted on his waist, his left arm coming round first and then the right one, swinging the excited-scared children in the air.
He bent a little forward, preparing to get the children off his body, and his face came into a column of light. My mother saw it and froze. The man saw her seeing him. He gasped and froze, too.
A girl dangled from his hand, a boy grasped his collar to keep from falling. The laughter ceased all around. One of those uncanny herd-hushes fell in the room, silencing even the two or three mothers who stood at the other end of the hall, with their backs to us.
But Ma grabbed Time and tore off that moment of awkwardness and shock from His infinite body. She erased it so naturally and completely as though it had never been. She looked around her, taking in the room, its lighting, and its decor.
"So much like life," she said cryptically, just as she would have said if nothing had petrified her senses a minute ago. She bent to say hello to little girls and boys and smiled at their mothers.
I was a child. I didn’t sense the wrongness of things. I can’t say how the more mature people present perceived the situation, but I doubt if anyone attributed the sudden and short-lived stillness to anything other than a new arrival.
The man, too, had recovered his composure to a more or less (less is my guess) degree. He came forward to shake my hand.
"I’m Shyam, Rachna’s father," he said, speaking to me, but looking at Ma furtively. She met his gaze squarely, sternly.
"Go wish Rachna a very happy birthday," she said to me, "and then we’ll leave".
"Leave?" I asked, not sure if I’d heard her right.
She nodded and I blinked. I was confused. Her lack of a smile for our host befuddled me. Her declaring we’d leave immediately puzzled me. But there was something that stupefied me.
My mother had gone stiff—she, suppleness was as much a part of whose being as her head, had become inflexible. She stood as though she couldn’t bend her elbow or tilt her head without snapping a few bones. The power of ease with which she had
mastered her shock just a minute ago had left her altogether now.
I stood still, staring at her as though I’d never seen her before. She clutched my arm and shook me—her first act toward me whose chief ingredients were not love and gentleness. "Didn’t you hear me?"
"I don’t see Rachna anywhere," I said, almost starting to cry. Everyone in the room —including small children—was now staring at us. Whispers scurried around in the mothers’ corner. Ma steered me by my arm and drove me toward the staircase.
"Ra-Rachna is just changing her clothes," Shyam spoke out urgently. "She will be here in a minute." His face was blanched, eyes lowered, and he pressed the palm of his left hand between the thumb and fingers of the right one.
"She spilled tea on herself," he added, speaking rapidly and turning toward Ma edgewise. Then his words began coming thick, in a torrent, faster and faster. He squinched his enormously broad shoulders tighter and tighter at the same time, as though attempting to shrink and hide behind the flow of his words.
"The tea was steaming hot. Scalded her arm. She didn’t cry. My brave little girl. Brave daughter of a coward father. Never cried much even when she was an infant. I don’t know how she’s so much like you, Runa. I didn’t know you were coming. Please don’t leave just yet. Please don’t leave like that."
"I didn’t expect to see you again," Ma replied calmly. "I did not wish to see you ever again. But it’s not your fault—not this time. I’m here and I’ll wait for your daughter."
Another long silence pervaded the room. Even the mothers’ rumoring became wordless, fermenting in their minds for a while. The first thing to make any sound was a door with dry hinges.
It groaned as it swung open and spewed Rachna into the hall. She rushed out with excitement, but the unnatural stillness hit her like a disembodied slap. She stopped and looked about to see what was happening, or rather, why nothing was happening.
Ma saw her and went toward her, still holding me by my arm so that I trailed behind her.
