The eunuchs soon realized that the youngsters were from a well-to-do background because of their well-kempt appearance, deportment and manner of speech. Raisa thanked them in English and cooked up an explanation that they were siblings who had been evicted by a mercenary uncle upon the demise of their parents. Nirmaan remained silent, awed at Raisa’s fertile imagination.
As soon as they reached Bhubaneswar, the kind-hearted eunuchs took them to their home, a ramshackle building that was a few miles from the station. That night, after a simple dinner of pokhaal, Raisa and Nirmaan were allocated a corner in the house where a tattered sleeping mat lay on the floor. As they lay down, Raisa fished out two small glittering objects from the pocket of her skirt and slipped them into Nirmaan’s hand.
‘Earrings!’ he whispered.
‘They’re pure gold and belong to Ma. I stole them because I knew we couldn’t carry cash.’
Nirmaan returned the earrings to her wordlessly. Silence reigned for a while and then she whispered, ‘Are you missing Affu?’ She waited but no answer came. Nirmaan was fast asleep. She closed her eyes as well, clutching the earrings in her fist.
Early the next morning, the head eunuch decided that they should take the youngsters to Manoj Ranjan Panigrahi, the school principal of the only public school in the area. Panigrahi was a benevolent philanthropist who had received an award from the state government for his selfless work to educate underprivileged children.
A large speed breaker jerked Nirmaan back to the present. He parked Babloo’s bike in the shade of a tree, outside a freshly painted bungalow in Jayadev Vihar. He opened the main gate gingerly because that had also been given a new lick of paint. He made his way past the main house and into a small courtyard that had a picturesque well as its central feature, beyond which was the small house that Nirmaan had rented. The door stood ajar.
‘Raisa! I’ve got good news. In fact two of them.’
Standing in the shower, Raisa could hear him. She had a fairly good idea what the bits of good news were.
VOICE NOTE 37
The first piece of good news was that Nirmaan’s graduation certificate had arrived earlier that day. Raisa was delighted to see a certificate that read:
Nirmaan Bose
Bachelor of Commerce from Utkal University
‘What’s up?’ Nirmaan asked expecting a spontaneous hug. She took the certificate and reverently placed it on the feet of a small idol of Lord Shiva that had been installed on a wooden platform over the kitchen counter. She shut her eyes and murmured a fervent and grateful prayer.
Nirmaan sighed at Raisa’s piety. All along he had thought she was an atheist because she had found every ritual silly and every religion pseudo. However, their adventures and experiences over the last few years had wrought a lot of changes in her, her newfound religious bent one of them. There was no change in their relationship though and he was thankful for that.
His mind once again went back to the time when they had just arrived in Bhubaneswar, thanks to the kind and helpful eunuch, Jaya.
* * *
After the head eunuch had left the two runaways with Manoj Ranjan Panigrahi, both Raisa and Nirmaan were given a room to stay within the premises of Sarvodaya Shiksha Niketan. Although Raisa had fabricated a more viable reason for their flight from their parental homes, there was no need to use this revised version because their benefactor didn’t subject them to an inquisition. For the next few days all Raisa and Nirmaan did was eat and sleep. The food, packed in a stainless steel lunchbox, would arrive like clockwork from the principal’s home. A week later, Manoj Ranjan invited the teenagers to dine at his house.
‘Would you like to study?’ Manoj Ranjan asked.
‘We do,’ Nirmaan replied without hesitation.
‘He does,’ Raisa corrected. Although Nirmaan gave her a surprised look, she didn’t return it.
‘You two don’t want to go back to—’
‘Not any more,’ Raisa cut in.
‘Hmm. You said you had passed your senior secondary. If you can give me your mark sheet, I can get you admission into Utkal University, but only if your marks are good. Merit is everything.’
‘He is our school topper,’ said Raisa proudly.
‘Good. Get me the mark sheet as soon as you can. Also, I’m afraid both of you will have to start working.’
Nirmaan and Raisa exchanged anxious glances.
‘Look, children, only when you start working will you realize and appreciate the worth of everything. The one who understands the worth of sweat, understands a lot. And mind you, any activity that makes you perspire without harming anyone is productive labour.’
There was silence until Manoj Ranjan finished his dinner. ‘What do you want to study?’
‘Commerce,’ Nirmaan replied immediately and caught Raisa’s eye. Only she could decipher that look. She was happy for him.
The next day, Nirmaan telephoned his school in Kolkata and requested them to post his senior secondary mark sheet to the school in Bhubaneswar. The request was granted. He enlisted in Sarvodaya Shiksha Niketan School as a peon, running errands for the staff. A month later, he joined Utkal University to attend classes designed for working people—the classes were held in the evenings.
Raisa was also granted an opportunity to pursue her senior secondary in the same school, but she deferred.
‘But, why?’ Nirmaan asked.
‘I have other important things to do.’
‘What “important things”?’ Raisa didn’t reply.
Her actions in the days to follow were answer enough. She would rise at the crack of dawn to fix breakfast and lunch for Nirmaan and herself, spend the day working as an assistant to the school principal and return to make dinner and wait for Nirmaan to come home. Nirmaan was amazed at this transformation. He had never imagined that she could be so consistent and committed to anything in life. As time passed, he deeply appreciated the mantle of domesticity that she had donned, although he pretended not to notice her great attention to every detail. She maintained a list of their expenses, checked the grocery inventory and ensured that he always wore clean, freshly laundered clothes. As they hadn’t brought any of their clothes with them, the first thing Raisa had done when they moved into the spare room in the school, was sell one of her earrings and buy two sets of new clothes for each of them, wisely setting aside the rest of the money for a rainy day. When she cooked, she ensured that she never repeated a dish twice in the same week. Nirmaan was astonished at her magical culinary expertise, which could have given any top chef a run for his or her money.
‘When and where did you learn to cook?’ he asked one day, sitting cross-legged on the floor of their room, having dinner.
‘Cooking is mostly instinct and a little bit of experience, and good cooking is one of those things that just happens to you. No one can explain it much,’ she remarked with a wry smile.
When observed closely, Nirmaan thought, Raisa was actually reverse-flowering. Every day since they arrived in Bhubaneswar, he could feel her curl back into a shell, whorl by whorl, in order to become the bud that she had never been. Ironically enough, from being his best friend, Raisa had suddenly taken on the role of a mother, a role in which no responsibility seemed too much to handle—only a woman was capable of transforming into so magnificent an avatar, he felt. The gentler sex, he concluded, was therefore far more adaptable than men could ever be. Although Nirmaan was still her friend, she was so much more. In the eyes of the rest of the world, they were siblings, but only he knew that there wasn’t a single cubbyhole into which he could slot his relationship with Raisa.
Nirmaan worked in the school for two years along with Raisa before quitting to take up the job of a cashier in Shree Jagannath Sarees. When he told Manoj Ranjan about it, the kind gentleman readily understood Nirmaan’s quandary with his yearning for greater responsibility with larger goals and let the lad go with his blessings.
Raisa, who also aspired to do something more challenging
, decided to launch a cost-effective canteen in the school for the children, whose lower-income group parents were hard-pressed with overwork as well as financial constraints to provide nutritious food for their offspring. She charged a nominal amount from the school’s management. Nirmaan wasn’t very happy about this because he felt she was burning the candle at both ends: it was a lot of work for paltry returns. However, Raisa was adamant and Nirmaan couldn’t argue because Manoj Ranjan instantly green-lighted her plan, appreciating the underlying altruism. It was months later that he heard Babloo, in the saree shop, praise the school canteen’s special dahi vada with alu dum.
‘How do you know about that? Isn’t it exclusively for the school students?’ Nirmaan was perplexed.
‘The school watchman is my friend. When he told me about the dahi vadas, I asked him to bring me some. Oh man, I’ve never had such tasty vadas before.’
Nirmaan swelled with pride. However, at that juncture, he didn’t know the effect that this one simple incident was going to have on their lives many years down the line.
* * *
After brushing the mark sheet on the idol’s feet, Raisa said, ‘I’ll get it laminated tomorrow.’
‘There’s more good news,’ he said, snapping out of his reverie.
Raisa stopped in the doorway of the bedroom. She had briefly forgotten that there were two pieces of good news.
‘The loan has been approved. Your dahi vada–alu dum is going public soon,’ Nirmaan’s smile bore the essence of her joy.
VOICE NOTE 38
A dog barked on a deserted street in the distance and a small table clock ticked loudly, punctuating the night’s silence. Raisa and Nirmaan were fast asleep on their separate beds in the shared bedroom.
Raisa sat up sleepily and gulped some water from the half-full water bottle beside her bed. As she replaced the bottle on the floor, she glanced at Nirmaan who was snoring softly. Raisa noticed and realized something to which she had been wholly oblivious before. The space between their respective beds—a few inches at most. Neither of them had ever traversed those inches in the darkness of the night or in the darkness of their desires. That gap, Raisa realized, was mute testimony to the platonic nature of their relationship and their implicit trust in each other.
On an impulse she was about to caress his forehead when she noticed his face contort and his lips move.
‘Affu . . .’ he muttered in his sleep.
Raisa withdrew her hand and sprang back into her bed in a flash.
She wept that night, with the sudden realization that deep in her heart, the relationship was perhaps not quite so platonic and that her heart had unexpectedly been torn apart at that moment more than any other; she hoped that her tears would mend her half-torn heart, even though she was also aware that half-torn hearts tended to bleed as long as one drew breath.
The initial business plan devised by Nirmaan, with the promised loan amount from the owner of Shri Jagannath Sarees, was to set up a stall outside the saree shop.
‘Are you sure the location will attract people?’ Raisa asked. She was fixing lunch in the kitchen while Nirmaan quickly and efficiently did the dishes in the adjoining space that had a tap.
‘Whatever the location, your dahi vada, alu dum will bring in the crowds, so don’t worry about it,’ he said with supreme confidence.
‘And how are we going to repay the loan?’ Raisa was concerned because most of what they earned together, both from the school and the shop, went towards paying their rent. They had been able to move out of the school dorm and into the single-room house in Shahid Nagar using the funds that Raisa had raised by selling off the remaining gold earring. The cash surplus after this sale had been deposited into the joint bank account that they had set up shortly afterwards.
‘A percentage of our earnings will go to Shree Jagannath Sarees on a monthly basis until the loan is paid off,’ Nirmaan explained, turning off the faucet. He went into the bedroom to change into his work clothes.
‘Any interest we need to pay?’ Raisa raised her voice a bit.
‘If we don’t repay the loan in six months’ time, we will have to pay interest on the remaining loan amount.’
‘What’s the interest rate?’
‘Fifteen per cent.’
‘That’s far too much.’
‘I know. But if I had protested, they would have assumed that I wasn’t confident about my plan. This loan has been given without insisting on any surety. We won’t get such a deal from anywhere else.’
‘Hmm. Have you thought of a name for the stall?’
‘How about Dhai Kiri Kiri Vada Corner?’
‘What does that even mean?’
Nirmaan came to the kitchen door.
‘Dhai Kiri Kiri,’ he explained smiling, ‘in colloquial Oriya means hurry up, or something along those lines. So in our vada corner, service will be quick, efficient and very fresh.’
‘Not bad. It could work.’
Nirmaan set up Dhai Kiri Kiri Vada Corner beside the entrance to the saree shop. He employed an assistant for Raisa, a youth recommended by one of his colleagues at the shop. The lad was from the colleague’s hometown, a small village in the area. He helped Raisa prepare the food and doubled as the waiter. Operating only in the evenings for a few weeks, it soon became obvious that Raisa would have to leave her school job to pay full attention to the fledgling business if they were to have any chance at repaying the loan before the moratorium on interest ended. Nirmaan continued to work in the saree shop to ensure at least one steady income.
Nirmaan had ordered special uniforms for both Raisa and her waiter. Hygiene-conscious, they used plastic gloves and hair caps and adhered to standards that no other food stall in the vicinity did. Price-wise, they were only slightly higher than the rest. Nirmaan’s argument was that every business needed a unique selling point: he was confident that people would notice their ultra-hygienic food and service, which would attract families. Raisa was happy to let him have his way.
It didn’t go very well, as was hoped. Six months into the business, they had not even made a quarter of the money needed to repay the loan.
VOICE NOTE 39
Nirmaan started smoking as a stress-buster when the sales from Raisa’s stall took a sharp downward curve. As it sometimes happens with small businesses, the novelty wore off and the rush for Raisa’s meticulously produced wares dwindled to a trickle. The income was inversely proportional to the build-up of pressure for the loan repayment.
Although Raisa knew that he had started smoking, she didn’t say anything until one Sunday when she noticed him chain-smoke his way through an entire packet within a few hours. And she noticed the brand he was smoking. She understood what Nirmaan could never confess.
‘That’s it. No smoking from tomorrow,’ she said decisively. Her voice startled him.
‘What’s your problem?’ Raisa was truculent. She knew that the last three or four months hadn’t quite panned out the way they had expected or hoped but she wanted him to talk to her about it and not subject her to this silent treatment. There was no response from Nirmaan.
‘Isn’t this the same brand Affu used to smoke?’ she asked.
Nirmaan glanced at her furtively. After a pregnant pause he said, ‘Please don’t ask me to stop smoking. There are times when I crave to touch Affu and convince myself she wasn’t a dream. This is the only way I can tell myself that.’
Grounding out the glowing stub with his foot, Nirmaan quietly went past Raisa and vanished into the house. He didn’t notice her eyes were moist.
They had a quiet dinner. Although his hopes for the food-stall business project had waned into nothingness by this time, he felt that articulating this would only puncture Raisa’s faith in him. Raisa had let go of her school job, which she loved immensely, without demur only because of her implicit faith in him. A woman’s faith, he’d come to understand, was one of the most powerful things he had known.
‘Are you running away from the truth?’
Raisa said that night as they lay on their respective beds. She was frowning at the ceiling when he had stood up to switch off the fan.
‘Leave it on,’ she snapped and added, ‘This can’t go on,’
‘I know. But I don’t know what to do,’ Nirmaan retorted, realizing that she was referring to their business.
‘Do you think it would help if we expanded our menu? Perhaps that would attract more people.’
‘I did think about that as well, but diversification will involve a further cost and we aren’t ready for that. Moreover, we will also need to employ more people in order to expand. How will we pay them when we haven’t paid our one employee for the last two months?’
‘Why aren’t we selling more? Aren’t my dahi vadas good enough?’
‘No! Your dahi vadas are perfect.’
‘Then what is it? There has to be something. Did you ask around?’
Nirmaan nodded. ‘Most of them said that they were intimidated by the uniforms, our sophistication and the standards of hygiene at our stall.’
‘Intimidated?’
‘I was surprised as well. I later learnt that the locals feel that our stall is considered an eatery for the hep and the affluent, therefore our target group, the lower-income group, stay away from the stall. The same items, although not quite as tasty but cheaper, are available in other places as well. Also, this city doesn’t inherently have an eating-out culture. Not yet anyway.’
‘But aren’t they concerned about their health? We take so much care that our food is germ-free.’
Half Torn Hearts Page 13
