Nikhil and Riya

by Ira Trivedi

  Later, in biology class I learned that there was a word for this kind of relationship: symbiosis, the interaction between two different organisms from different species living in close physical association – like sea anemones hitchhiking on the backs of hermit crabs, or lactobacillus bacteria living inside human bodies. Vikram and I were like that, two creatures at this school, mutually dependent on one another in order to flourish. He had power over me. But I, in my way, had power over him as well. Little did I know that the minute Riya stepped into our lives everything between us would change.

  12

  AT RESIDENCY SCHOOL, our schedule was as regimented as a military drill. From Monday through Friday, the first bell went off at 5.00 a.m., then mandatory PT, followed by a hasty breakfast, line-up and morning assembly. Classes began at 8.45 a.m. and went on till 3.30 p.m., after which we had two hours of games. We had evening prep from 6-7.30 p.m., then line-up and dinner. We were meant to ‘read quietly’ from 8.30 p.m. till lights out at 10.00 p.m. but this was when most boys goofed around or sat glued in front of the TV.

  Though Saturdays were only half-days, they seemed to last the longest, and even I, who enjoyed being in class, would find myself watching the clock, the seconds moving like minutes, the minutes like hours. The classrooms would fill with the irritation and impatience that radiated from us like fumes, the boys wanting to run onto their respective fields, the girls I wasn’t sure what they did, but I knew that Riya, like the boys, went straight to the tracks.

  One Saturday stands out in my memory as the most important Saturday in my life. We were playing Daly College in the finals of the IPSC cup, and even I knew this was an important match. Everyone was more wound up than usual, particularly during the last period, Rao Ma’am’s maths class.

  Rao Ma’am was indisputably my least favourite teacher. She was small and wicked and always wore high, pointed heels. Even though I loved maths, her class was boring – I was studying calculus, while the rest of the class was still on trigonometry and all throughout her class I had to feign interest.

  Exam season was when Rao Ma’am came into her own. She was a notoriously difficult marker, and had a cruel style of announcing our results to the class – but only at the end of the lesson.

  This particular Saturday signified the return of our first mid-term examination. Throughout the class she wistfully cradled and stroked the stack of white examination papers as though it were a beloved pet, while all of us sat on tenterhooks. It wasn’t uncommon for students, especially the girls, to cry or to faint during the announcement of these marks. Even I, who hardly ever got below a 90 per cent, was experiencing great stress. I could not imagine what it must be like for the others, especially Riya, who often had amongst the lowest marks in class.

  As Rao Ma’am started her charade, I held my breath and closed my eyes.

  ‘Nikhil, ninety-five. Very good,’ she said in a bored drawl. I exhaled in relief.

  Vikram had a fifty-six. ‘Scope for improvement,’ commented Rao Ma’am wryly.

  Vikram sauntered to the front of the class, retrieved his paper and patted me heartily on the shoulder as he slipped back to his desk. I hoped Rao Ma’am hadn’t noticed – I had passed him chits throughout the exam.

  Mrinalini had scored a ninety-five as well. She was the only one in class who posed any sort of real competition to me.

  ‘Wonderful,’ said Rao Ma’am with a smile.

  The simpering Mrinalini walked back to her desk, a smug grin on her face. Most teachers loved the goody-two-shoes Mrinalini, but I found her annoying and conniving. She always copied my notes; when I had asked her only once to give me hers she had refused.

  I waited for Riya’s results, holding my breath for so long that I started seeing stars. The truth was that I was more nervous for her than I had been for myself. I stole a glance at her; she was doodling on the back of her mathematics notebook, she didn’t seem concerned at all.

  Rao Ma’am’s voice cracked like a rime of ice. ‘Riya. Thirty-five. The lowest in the class.’

  Riya walked up to the front of the class in her usual confident lope, her heavy blue skirt swinging around her knees, a slightly embarrassed look on her face.

  ‘Sorry, Ma’am,’ she said, though she didn’t seem sorry at all, and turned around to walk back to her seat.

  Just when Riya was about to sit down, Rao Ma’am said, ‘Riya, come outside with me.’

  The bell rang just then, signalling the end of the week.

  Riya didn’t know that I was still in the classroom when she returned. I was sitting at the back, behind a tangle of desks and chairs, completing my homework so I could spend my Sunday reading Ruskin Bond’s new book. Everyone else had left to watch the football and I could already hear the cheers erupting like war cries.

  She walked to her desk, but instead of carelessly throwing a few books into her bag like she usually did, she remained standing. After a moment, she sat down heavily on the hard wooden chair and put her head in her arms on the table, her ponytail spilling messily everywhere.

  At first, I didn’t hear her, but then the throaty, painful sounds became apparent. I had been in boarding school long enough to decipher the sound of a concealed sob. I sat very still, aware that I was intruding on her and her tears.

  Finally she got up, sniffled twice, and brushed her hair out of her face. She opened her desk, grabbed her empty backpack and stalked out of the classroom. I don’t know why I did it, but I followed her out.

  Despite my bad leg, I walked pretty fast, and I saw that she was heading in the direction of the tracks. I followed her past the academic block, past the main building, and across the vast cricket field, till finally I reached the red-sand tracks at the edge of the campus next to Scindia Pavilion.

  By the time I arrived, she had already changed, and she was in her sports uniform: a white-collared sports shirt and a navy divided skirt. She sat on the track, putting her spikes on, while I stood a safe distance away, concealed by a large rhododendron bush.

  She got up, brushed the sand off her legs, and went to the chalked starting line. She crouched low, the tips of her fingers on the ground, her knees slightly bent. She lowered her head, paused for a moment, and suddenly pushed off.

  I had watched people running my whole life, but I had never seen anything like this. Most people, even the fast ones, pound with their feet, turning red in their face, sweating like pigs, making running look like hard work. But not Riya. She ran so swiftly, so gracefully, that she seemed to be gliding on air. She ran like a dancer, every part of her body – her arms, her legs, her head, her chest – moved separately, yet they seemed to be one. Lost in her rhythm, she seemed transformed. No longer the haughty girl with the cold, blank stare in her eyes who didn’t speak with anyone. That was some sort of a pretence to fool people like me. She seemed now to be someone else, someone happy and content and free.

  13

  RIYA WAS SO bad at mathematics that Rao Ma’am was making us study partners with immediate effect. This essentially meant that she would study while I would explain things to her; I was more or less an unpaid tutor. The strict Rao Ma’am only appointed co-ed study partners in the most dire circumstances. This situation qualified because Riya had failed the last three maths exams.

  And so Riya and I finally spoke for the first time three months after she had walked into my life.

  I waited for her in an empty classroom in the ninth-standard building in the academic block. It was evening and the smells of winter lingered in the air: wood smoke and pine and damp leaves. Dusk was falling now, earlier than usual, and by the time she arrived, ten minutes late, it was already dark. She sauntered in wearing her sports uniform with an oversize dark blue sweater that covered half of her blue skirt. Her face was tinged with pink and her knees were streaked with dirt. She smelled of iron and grass, her hair was tied into a loose, messy bun that threatened to come tumbling down with the smallest shake of her head. It appeared that she had come straight from the track
.

  I was relieved when I saw her. I had set up thirty minutes in advance and had been staring at the hands of the clock, convinced that she would never come. But now that she was here, I was so nervous I could hardly speak. I had watched her and learned about her and worshipped her. But I had never actually spoken with her, not once in the three months she had been at the school. She, on the other hand, just looked annoyed. I saw that she had brought nothing with her but her spikes.

  ‘You’re my tutor,’ she said sceptically.

  I looked up at her and then quickly dropped my gaze. ‘Nikhil,’ I said, muttering into my book.

  ‘I know,’ she said, leaning forward to tie her shoe. ‘We’re in the same class.’

  We sat in silence for a long moment and I suddenly realized I had no idea what I was supposed to do. Algebra, arithmetic, nothing seemed to add up. Worst of all, I couldn’t even speak, so we just sat there in an uncomfortable silence, the shrill cries of an animal somewhere wafting in through the windows.

  She finally broke the tension. ‘Where do we start?’ she asked in a bored drawl.

  I flipped the pages of my notebook, cleared my throat and stuttered, ‘Where, uh, do you want to start?’

  ‘I thought you were the smart one.’

  My voice seemed stuck in my throat. I made a small choking nose. She looked at me in a strange way. Then she spoke again, but gently this time, ‘I guess we should start from the beginning.’

  ‘The beginning,’ I said, ‘would be good.’

  14

  IN THE BEGINNING, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get her attention. I didn’t blame her completely. I too was an absolute mess; my lessons were wildly disorganized, I stuttered and stammered stupidly forgetting even the most basic of concepts and then I would go off on nonsensical rants as she stared at me without any clue or interest. Once, I was so nervous that I clutched my pencil so tightly it broke in my hand. Now she probably thought that I was not only a geek, but also very strange. She, I remembered, had been looking especially pretty that day.

  The truth was that she was really not very good at mathematics. She was hopeless in geometry, and could not find X to save her life. She could not be bothered about probabilities, and my carefully constructed rate questions – posed always in running terms to generate her interest – always fell flat.

  Gradually though things improved when I realized that instead of trying to teach her what I knew, I had to find some sort of common mathematical ground. So I began with the basics and the more I taught, the more confident I became. Finally, a breakthrough came during a class on polynomials when I realized with a start that she was actually paying attention.

  After my explanation I gave her a sum to try her hand at.

  ‘This one is easy.’

  ‘It is?’ I said, thrilled that she thought so and even happier when I saw that that she had got the simple sum correct.

  ‘Give me another,’ she said, sitting up a little straighter, a hint of a challenge now in her voice.

  ‘Really?’ I said, surprised. Normally she made me solve all the sums that I gave her.

  ‘Yeah, this is kind of fun.’

  ‘All right then.’ I quickly jotted down another sum before she changed her mind.

  She pondered over the equation for a few minutes and then scribbled her answer on the page.

  ‘I got this,’ she said brightly.

  ‘Let’s take a look,’ I said in my authoritative best.

  I looked at the chequered page of her mathematic notebook and there in her messy handwriting she had solved the sum perfectly in just three steps, while I, her teacher, had taken five.

  And then looking at me, smiling fondly, she said, ‘This one was too easy, give me the next.’

  It was the first time Riya surprised me. It would not be the last.

  Despite her poor marks, I realized that Riya was very intelligent. When she focused, she grasped concepts quickly, and sometimes she asked questions so pointed that they confused even me. Riya’s moods, I discovered, depended on her running. When she ran well, she worked hard in class, applying herself, trying to understand why sinA=cosA=1. When she hadn’t run well, she was dark, staring stormily at sums, sighing, chewing her pen to bits.

  I also discovered that she had almost no fundamentals. This was the reason she looked blankly at the blackboard so often: she had no clue what was going on in class. She admitted that over the past few years, she had missed a lot of school. She was often away for long stretches of time for district, state or national track meets, and in her previous school they had passed her even when she got very poor marks because she was a star athlete. At Residency School, although sports were all-important, you couldn’t just fail or miss school. You had to pass with decent marks, or cheat effectively like Vikram and his friends. When I had hinted at this option, she had just looked at me as if I were a fool.

  It was uncommon for kids to switch schools in the tenth standard, the year of the board exams, and I had a strong feeling that if Riya hadn’t come to Residency School, she would have just failed the national board exam.

  But now that I had come into her life, I was determined to change all of that.

  And though we didn’t have much in common – I liked books, she liked to run, I liked maths, she liked to run. I liked studying, and she … she liked to run, but somehow with numbers, formulae and equations egging us on, Riya and I slowly became friends.

  15

  RIYA MADE A face, squinting at her notes. ‘Specs, your sum is wrong.’

  She called me Specs, short for the spectacles I wore.

  ‘My name is Nikhil,’ I replied. ‘The sum is right, your answer is not. And I can’t understand your handwriting.’

  I always thought that neat, flowery handwriting came naturally to girls. But Riya scribbled like a boy, her handwriting as messy as mine was neat. I was convinced that teachers just sloshed red ink on her notebooks because they couldn’t understand a thing she wrote.

  I had suggested, very seriously, that maybe she should go back to those cursive writing books of our childhood, but she had just cocked one eyebrow and laughed out loud.

  ‘You’re crazy, Specs! My handwriting is fine. You just need to get your eyes checked.’

  So often, I just did not have an answer to the things she said.

  ‘You know that I am doing you a favour by teaching you, right?’ I managed to retort, after a pause that went on slightly too long.

  ‘You’re a teacher’s pet, aren’t you, Specs?’ she teased.

  Sometimes I had to remind her who was in charge.

  ‘No, Riya, I’m just trying to help you out. Rao Ma’am sometimes asks me to help weak students out.’

  ‘I’m not a weak student,’ she said loftily.

  ‘You got a two in your last maths exam. Out of hundred.’

  That seemed to shut her up and we got down to work.

  And in the weeks that followed, from two she went to twelve, then twenty-four, then thirty-six and then finally fifty marks, where she staked her claim and stayed solidly put.

  16

  OVER TUITIONS SHE slowly opened up to me. Riya was B.P.’s only child, her mother had passed away when she was young. She had not much liked her last school in New Delhi, but she said she had tolerated it mostly because she was hardly ever there. The more I got to know her, the more I realized how little she liked it at Residency School. It was the small things … the way she sat listlessly through classes. The way she ignored most people. The way, after the final bell rang, she never spent even an extra second after class, but ran away straight to the tracks.

  It seemed to me that Riya genuinely didn’t care what people thought. To her it was a matter of complete indifference that the girls didn’t accept her, or that the boys thought her bold. While I found this refreshing, others did not. Mrinalini, the insufferable busybody, snubbed by Riya, rallied the girls against her, till even the most benign girls wouldn’t say a word to her. When it b
ecame known that I was Riya’s tutor, and her friend, boys approached me to put in a good word for them. Regrettably, the matter even came to Vikram’s attention, despite my efforts to keep it quiet, and, by extension, protect her.

  Vikram was a skilled bully, as deft with cruelty as he was with his hockey stick. Like most predators, he always selected the most vulnerable of the herd. Thanks to our arrangement, he generally let me be. I liked to think that perhaps I was his weakness, a reminder of the way he used to be, so long ago. As a matter of principle, Vikram typically left girls alone, maybe because they were too easy, not enough sport. This changed, however, when he met Riya. I do not know what set them off, but they despised one another, right away. I figured it was because she, unlike most people, wasn’t afraid of him.

  Vikram would slouch in the back of the classroom and make snide remarks. Riya would snap back. Most of the girls complied with the Residency School’s unspoken rules: you tolerate a boy’s teasing and, if need be, you cry silently into your handkerchief. But not her. She would whirl around, letting loose a barrage of curses, which would impress even the boys.

  The war continued in the halls, at breaks, in the dorms, becoming a famous contest of wills. The whole class eagerly followed each episode, Vikram’s latest atrocity, Riya’s most recent defiance. I hated it the whole time, hinting to her during our tuitions to make peace with him. But she just looked at me with fiery eyes. I had known Vikram for many years, and I knew that when he wanted to win, it was impossible for anyone, even for Riya, to beat him. The worst of it was when Vikram got his friends involved. They would whistle and hiss when she walked into class, make comments on the length of her skirt, about her ponytail and about how she wore shorts while she ran.