by Antani, Jay
I arrived in Pradeep’s room to find Devasia seated at the desk, recording his notes into the tape recorder. Pradeep sat at the edge of his cot, his back straight, head bowed, listening attentively. After a few more minutes of dictation, Devasia hit “stop” on the recorder. That was it, he said, that was all the notes he had. Between Devasia and me, Pradeep now had on cassette all the notes he would need ahead of the exams.
The three of us spent the rest of the afternoon going over notes, quizzing each other, making sure every last scrap of information was stuffed into our heads. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I shut my notebook and lay back on Pradeep’s cot. I had a headache. I realized I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. A sour feeling found its way into my stomach.
Pradeep said he had medicines that might help. “I always keep stomach pills handy here,” he announced, feeling his way from the cot to the metal cabinet on the opposite wall.
“Is the hostel food that bad?” I joked.
Devasia chuckled knowingly, patting his stomach. “You need guts of steel here.”
“Not only that,” Pradeep said, “but the tension over these exams too can give indigestion or like that.” Pradeep ran his hands along the bottles and packets of toiletries on one of the cabinet shelves, feeling for the stomach pills. On the floor of the cabinet, I noticed Pradeep’s padlocked red velvet box in which he kept his Diwali money.
“You still have that money, Pradeep?” I asked. “I thought your cousin was taking it.”
Pradeep slapped his palms together, “Hut-teriki! You know my cousin’s visit was postponed so now he is coming after finals only. But about studio and all, he has arranged. He has spoken to his music contacts, and they are even interested to hear my recording, so it’s good news, I think so.”
“Next stop Bollywood?” Devasia smiled, turning the chair toward us.
Pradeep shut the cabinet door, and I took from him the antacids encased in a sheet of plastic and foil.
“What Bollywood?” Pradeep countered with mock outrage, a satisfied grin on his face, and he leaned on cupped hands on his walking stick, cutting the figure of an impresario. “I am aiming for Ravi Shankar, bhai, Zakir Hussain. Not Bollywood songs.”
“Wah! Pandit Pradeep Prabhakar,” Devasia said jovially, with a playful flourish of his hand. “Very good!” He rose from the chair, stretched, and yawned. “I’m going to take nap,” he said, “then I can continue.”
I stubbed out two pills from the sheet, turned them over in my mouth, letting the metallic grit dissolve. “No matter what, you guys are all set and on your way,” I said, lying back and staring up at the ceiling.
“But you are also, Vikram bhai,” Pradeep said. “You are also on your way.”
I swallowed the last gritty bits of the antacids.
“Because—” Pradeep tapped his stick on the floor, his head turning from side to side, searching for the words. “Because … where there is intention, there is action, and action means change.”
“Please,” I said, sitting up. “Intention means zilch. Now and then, you need a lot of luck. That action and change stuff. I’ve tried it. It doesn’t work. You need luck. And I’ve always, always come up short.” I stared at my shoes. “The more you fight life, the tighter it gets its grip on you.”
Pradeep and Devasia said not a word. What could they say? What could do they do?
“I admire you guys, I really do,” I said and got to my feet. “Pradeep, you’ll do great, and Devasia, you’re going to be an awesome priest.”
“But luck is the result of our actions, don’t you think so?” Pradeep offered.
“No,” I said and made for the door.
I didn’t want to drag them down with me, and I didn’t want empty words to cheer me up either. All I could think to do was walk out of there. There was nothing left to say. I needed to get home, eat something, and crash. And no, I wasn’t going to even look at the mailbox.
* *
Classes let out the last week of April to make way for study week after which the finals kicked off. I felt ill much of that time, time itself in suspension, a source of churning pain, and I studied till my eyes were bleary and my mind fogged. I slept. Awoke. Ate little. And I studied with Pradeep and Devasia at the hostel in the afternoons.
One day, coming back from a study session, I discovered our cleaning girl in close conversation with a young man I had never seen before. They lingered downstairs as I dragged my Luna into the entrance hall to stand it up under the staircase. The man stood almost touching her, his elbow propped casually against the wall. He spoke in intimate murmurs to the girl, her back to the wall, her hands crossed behind her. They smiled surreptitiously at me. I got the feeling I’d interrupted something, smiled hello, and hurried up the two flights to our place.
“What’s going on down there?” I asked my mother.
“She is meeting her fiancé, that’s all,” she replied, serving Anand and me our rotis and vegetables. “She asked if they could meet downstairs.”
“Hmm,” I intoned suggestively. I was glad someone was having fun around here.
* *
The finals lasted a week. Six exams, one or two each day. I needed the marks. Without the marks, the future receded, like a mountain climber losing his grip and sliding helplessly. Climb. Just keep climbing.
For the finals, every student at the university got a seat number at various sites around the city, regardless of which college you happened to be attending. My seat assignment took me across Nehru Bridge into a huddle of low-slung office blocks and tea stalls, to C.U. Arts College, a whitewashed, moldering structure of many floors. Scooters lined up along an unpaved alleyway where students lingered aimlessly, looking dazed, toting their notebooks and ballpoint pens, none of whom I recognized. I made my way through, climbed up several flights of stairs in a dusty stairwell, joined in with the drift of other test takers.
It was like a mental asylum here: wide, murky hallways shrieking with echoes. The walls were stained; the corners needed sweeping. Stray dogs could have been wandering here, and I wouldn’t have been surprised. I found my lecture hall—a cruel white room where sullen-faced students filled the rows of benches beneath a cloud of tense whispers. A hot wind blew through the windows, which looked out on a cement wall opposite the alleyway, a drainage pipe, and a shard of daylight.
The test administrator was a stern-faced woman, fifty-ish, with a frump of black-dyed hair, protruding teeth, and a squat sari-clad torso. Her watchful eyes, seeped of all love, scanned the lot of us as she passed out exam booklets, the question papers. She snapped at a girl, telling her to shut her notebook, then at a boy for talking. I did not recognize her, knew nothing of her but that she was a university bureaucrat.
The finals were administered by the university’s central testing bureaucracy, not by the teachers at your particular college. They were administered, enforced, and graded by strangers. To me they made up an anonymous and pitiless committee. I wondered where Pradeep and Devasia were assigned to take their exams, how they were doing today, when I would see them next. That’s when I realized I missed them. I missed being at Xavier’s, even pined for the familiar faces and the shady lecture halls, the teachers who knew my work. I took a deep breath and turned my attention to the question paper and got ready to write. A deluge of writing lay ahead. A glance at the questions would hint at my fate.
* *
When it was over, it was like I’d survived a week of artillery. I came home, sank in my bed, groaned with exhaustion. My mother asked me how I thought the exams went. I shrugged my shoulders and shook my head. Something felt off. I felt relief, of course, that it was over but little sense of accomplishment. You want that feeling of connection between the ball and the sweet spot on the bat. In that instant, the batter knows. Even before he drops the bat to round the bases, he knows he’s knocked it out of the park. I closed my eyes. I knew I had not knocked this out of the park.
One morning a couple of weeks later, there was an ann
ouncement in the newspaper that Gujarat University’s exam results would be posted that afternoon. With trepidation, I got on the Luna and made for the university’s main administration building, an enormous utilitarian cement block in a barren field. Students had already gathered at a kiosk just outside the building, looking up their marks. I managed to wedge myself in and found my seat number on the list.
I ran my finger from my number to the cumulative score next to it. I did it again, to double-check. No doubt about it. I’d scored two points below the first class cutoff. Just as I suspected: second class.
I turned away and, in a daze, returned to my Luna. I revved the motor and started back for Navarangpura. I felt numb. Questions swirled in my head. Could I have done better? I didn’t know how. Did I study hard enough? I thought I had, just short of going blind and frying my brain. Yet a wave of self-loathing came over me, and I tried to figure it out. There was finesse to these things that Pradeep and Devasia had mastered after a lifetime of Indian schooling. They knew how to decode the questions, dance with them, phrasing their answers in the way the graders wanted them phrased. It was more exhausting than it was worth. It didn’t seem fair to me, but there was no budging from the sheer and naked fact: I was second class.
The marks weren’t high enough for me to continue pressing my case with the consulate because Wisconsin would surely reject them. I imagined the pall of disappointment that would cling to me like a foul odor once everyone knew. Because they would ask how the exams had gone, and I would tell them, “Second class.” I wasn’t good enough. Brand my forehead with it, why don’t you? Mr. Second Class.
I arrived back at the bungalow. As I got off the Luna, I heard soft voices behind the entrance doors. The doors opened, and the cleaning girl appeared, giggling. Seeing me, she covered her mouth, embarrassed, and swished away on bare feet and jingling anklets. Her boyfriend—fiancé, lover, whatever—followed close behind, swinging open the doors. He almost ran into me.
“Sorry,” he uttered, then, laughing, called to the girl to come back. He ran after her, disappearing around the corner.
I hoisted the Luna through the doors and pulled it up onto its stand under the staircase. From behind me, I heard the trilling of a bicycle bell. It was the postman, who made his rounds on his bicycle with his canvas sack of mail slung at his shoulder. He came to a stop and sorted through the contents of the mail sack. Finally, he pulled out a parcel and a clipboard. Glancing at the parcel, he called out, “Vikram Mistry?”
“What is it?” I asked him in Gujarati.
“Sign please.”
I signed a sheet on the clipboard, and he handed me the parcel. Replacing the clipboard inside the sack, he peddled away, as noiselessly as he’d come.
The parcel was from the U.S. Consulate.
23
My heart pounded—a stampede of hooves in my chest—all the way up the stairs and back into my room. It pounded as I opened the parcel. My passport dropped out, fell to the floor. Inside the envelope, a letter.
I searched the opening words. They said they had contacted the university. Made mention of a scholarship. I knew of no scholarship. I was baffled. They said after reviewing all my information, they determined that I showed “sufficient proof of financial support” and were granting me a student visa. I flipped through my passport. No lie. There it was. The visa stamp. Bearing the insignia of the United States Government.
Euphoria. A lightness. A floating feeling. I flung the letter and passport into the air, didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, and slumped into my chair. I pounded my fist on my desk.
My mother rushed to the door. “My god! What’s all that noise?”
I showed her the letter. She read it over; her eyes went wide. “Wow,” she said, and immediately she went to the phone in the dining room and dialed up my father at the institute. Her tone on the phone with him was businesslike, low-key—I knew she was trying to contain her excitement. She told him I had news for him and handed me the phone.
It still seemed unreal to me. Things like this were supposed to happen only in movies or to other people. And that bit in the letter about the scholarship? “What was that about?” I asked my father.
“Maybe your department tried to contact you about it, but the letter never arrived,” he said. “That portfolio you sent might have done the job.”
I laughed to myself: the one windfall to come out of this whole scenario never actually arrived. My father suggested sending a telegram to Wisconsin’s admissions office to verify the scholarship, and I told him I’d head over to the post office right away.
“Get on it,” he said. “And congratulations.”
I hung up and sat in a daze on a dining-room chair as Anand and my mother set up the table for lunch. As we ate, I was aware of the others asking me questions, pressing me for details. When would I go? Where would I stay? What would I study?
“Can I come?” Anand asked.
“How are you going? In suitcase?” my mother asked. She turned to me, began laughing, “Yeah, do that. Put Anand in suitcase.” She continued laughing. “House will be nice and quiet.”
Anand didn’t laugh, though, and his face grew sullen. He poured some of the khaddhi from his steel bowl over the rice on his plate, keeping his eyes lowered.
“Did you find out,” my mother turned to me, “about your marks?”
“Hm? What marks? Oh,” I remembered. “Yeah, they were all up,” and the thought was an anchor weighing me down.
My mother must’ve noticed the sudden drop in my tone. “But you are not happy with them.”
“Let’s just say this couldn’t have come at a better time.”
* *
Pradeep, you nailed it. That’s what I wanted to tell him when I saw him. What you said about intention, action, and change. And yes, luck. I knew he was still at the hostel, along with Devasia, and that he wouldn’t be leaving for Bombay for another week.
The next day I decided to drop by, pay him and Devasia a visit, so I slung my camera across my shoulder and rode down on the Luna. I had to be at Xavier’s anyway, to pick up a Leaving Certificate from Rajkumar.
I wondered if, after today, I would ever see Pradeep or Devasia again. Devasia would soon be leaving, back to Madras for summer break. Thinking about it, I began to feel the first stirrings of the sadness that leaving brings. It was like that moment when, taking my finals in that grimy college across the bridge, I began to miss Xavier’s. In spite of ourselves, we put down roots. When we’re least aware of it, we form kinships.
The college grounds were quiet except for the cawing of crows. The shed under which all the scooters were usually parked was largely empty. I parked the Luna inside the gate, next to a couple of scooters, and headed up the gravel walkway that led to the front entryway. The lobby was airy and vacant; the bulletins posted inside the glass cases looked neglected. They seemed like relics from another life, a long-turned chapter. I went up the stairway to the second floor and into the college office.
As always, the table fans oscillated, and the sashes on the far wall, thrown open, gave on the eucalyptus and neem trees that fronted the college. They hung there, barely swaying in the hot afternoon, reluctant to move at all. A clerk at the other end of the room muttered something, and I heard the clink of a chai cup behind a stack of folders. Stacks of files fluttered in the drafts of oscillating air. Rajkumar sat at the counter, eyes closed behind his glasses, chin resting in one hand. His other hand, holding a ballpoint pen, rested on the table. Gradually, as I stood there, his head began to tilt in his hand. He began snoring. I cleared my throat. Rajkumar shot awake, grumbling to himself, and adjusted his glasses on his ferret nose.
“Sorry,” I said, “didn’t mean to wake you.”
“No one is sleeping.” Rajkumar darted quick glances behind him and to the side. He took a look at me and blinked, his beady eyes popped out at me behind his glasses, and he said, “Oh-ho, you are Mistry’s boy, no?”
“I came here about a
Leaving Certificate.”
Rajkumar’s mouth became an “O” and he tsked a few times, shaking his small ferret head. “Where are you leaving? No troubles here, I hope?” There was a false tone of alarm in his voice, then he smiled in the way you would imagine a snake smiling.
I explained there were “no troubles.” I was transferring to a school in the States. I asked if he could make up a Certificate for me. I could come back that afternoon, pay whatever fee the college charged.
“But it is not enough you get Leaving Certificate. You must also see Father, he must approve, then sign it.”
“Fine,” I said. “Is he in?”
Rajkumar bobbed his head, that bell-like signal for “yes.” “Summer vacation for students only, not for staff.” He wagged his index finger. “We keep on here.”
Rajkumar’s self-righteousness was entertaining, but I wanted to hurry things up. I told him I’d stop by later, pick up the Certificate and get Father’s signature.
But Rajkumar held out his palm in a gesture for me to settle down. “It will take some time to prepare Certificate, bhai.”
Time? If there was one thing in abundance in the college office, it was time.
In the back, a clerk hocked up phlegm then leaned over and spat out the window. Rajkumar dug around in a drawer, finally came up with a pen and paper, asked for my name and student number.
“You know m—Sorry, Vikram Mistry.”
Rajkumar scratched it out with his pen.
“So I can pick it up this afternoon?”
Rajkumar twisted in his chair, peered up at the clock. “Now it is too late,” he announced. “Come back tomorrow noon.”
I sighed. “Do I need to make an appointment with the principal to get his signature?” I wanted to be sure he wasn’t hiding another bureaucratic loophole from me. But he said no, I ought to be able to go in and see him. He lifted his head and squinted at me. “You could not adjust to Xavier’s, is it?” He sneered. “This is tough college. Not everyone can handle.”
