Nikhil and Riya

by Ira Trivedi

  He spoke sharply, it sounded like a ruler cracking and I flinched. ‘Physics copy up to date?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I bleated like a lamb.

  ‘Drop it off after dinner then.’

  Teachers often asked me for my impeccable notebooks, which were sometimes even better than their own. I stood there in silence, closing my eyes, waiting for him to drop the bomb. A couple of seconds later and all I heard was the unsteady scratching of his pen. I opened my eyes and he looked up sharply at me.

  ‘That will be all,’ he said irritably, and waved me out with his hand.

  I turned around, utterly confused. And just as I was about to shut his heavy oak door, he spoke again:

  ‘And about that matter.’

  For a moment, I felt as if I may have a heart attack. ‘Sir.’

  ‘Miss Pratap said that nothing was amiss. I suggest you have your eyes checked and glasses changed in time for the boards.’

  21

  THE HAND-OFF WENT better than I had expected, she accepted the notes I had made for her without a word, and then just walked away. If she had known that I had done this or wondered why I had, she did not say and she did not ask. I thought about it for years afterwards. What and how much did she really know? It seemed impossible to me that she could not have suspected what had passed, but if she had, why hadn’t she ever asked?

  Luckily, there wasn’t much time for me to dwell on the incident, because the tenth-grade board exams had arrived and for the first time in many lives, academics took centre stage. All the cricketers, footballers and hockey players were forced to dig up their half-empty notebooks and desperately try to learn a year’s worth of studies in a matter of days. I, of course, was very well prepared.

  Cheating was an important aspect of academic life at Residency School. Peons were bribed to smuggle out papers from teachers’ offices, questions were leaked, and rich boys like Vikram took paid tuitions from junior teachers, tipping them generously to give them some of the questions that would appear on the exams. All sorts of tactics were employed – chits were snuck into all parts of the body, and then swallowed like a piece of chewing gum once the cheater had seen what he had to see, to erase all trace of his crime. Boys devised complex codes and signals to communicate during the exams. I often thought that if this much effort was applied to studying, students would pass with flying colours. Despite all these creative efforts, so many failed and the teachers had to pass them by giving them grace marks, especially if they were athletes. This just went to show the glorious standards of our school.

  But the board exams were a national examination, and the Residency School’s code of conduct did not hold. There would be external exam papers, external examiners and external markers, and our school’s most experienced cheaters knew that there was little they could do. It was close to impossible to ‘manage’ these exams, even for those whose connections ran far and deep.

  I usually became popular during exam time, but during the boards, I experienced popularity like never before. My perfect notebooks were hugely in demand and some of the athletes, whom I had boarded with for years, had learned that I had tutored Riya successfully; as a consequence, many came looking for me, their big heads hanging from their thick necks, gruffly requesting my help.

  It began with a few cricketers. Then the word spread, and soon I had a full classroom of sportsmen and athletes staring dumbly at the blackboard. I was shocked to discover that many of my tutees could not even manage eighth-standard material. They had trouble balancing a simple equation, let alone solve a quadratic equation. Some of them couldn’t even do long division, let alone trigonometry. One poor boy couldn’t even tell the x-axis from the y.

  At first I was hesitant to tutor them. I had my own studying – and Riya – to think about. But could I really say no? Everyone in the hostel was so high strung that I feared that they would beat me up if I refused. Also, I learnt from my experience with Riya that the best way of mastering the subject was to teach someone else.

  So I began teaching group classes. And just like my experience with Riya, at first I was nervous, but then I got in the groove. I had never had so many people who actually listened to me, and now here were the most celebrated boys in school, struggling to hold on to my every word, staring at me wide-eyed, copying every word that I wrote on the board. All of this stirred feelings of vanity and pride in me that I had never known.

  I cannot lie. It felt really good and I got wrapped up in it, planning lessons, even giving mini-exams. Maybe this is what boys felt when they were leading teams or shouting out commands; why so many boys competed to become captain of this or that, to feel like the way I was feeling right now.

  This was the first time that I had so many friends, if you could call them that. I knew enough about the Residency School boys to realize that they were only ‘friends’ with me because they needed something – but still it was nice to have people sitting down next to me during meals, not because it was the only free seat, but because I was sitting there. It was pleasant to have boys thumping your back, though sometimes they did it so hard that I tripped. It felt good to be part of frivolous, jokey conversations during showers and before bed, even though I hardly cared about what they said.

  I became so well-liked during this time that even if Vikram had wanted to bully me, he wouldn’t have been able to touch me. I had my own personal army of muscle-head tutees, whose tenure at Residency School depended on me.

  Despite all this, Riya remained my priority, far more than even my own studies. I was terrified at the prospect of her failing. I had recurring nightmares about it: exam sheets drenched in vermillion, report cards splattered with red ink. Worst of all was one particular scene that ran through my head – Riya taking an exam, her pen in her mouth, staring out of the window in that blank way of hers because she knew nothing at all.

  The situation at our school became frenzied as the board exams approached. Cartons of sugary soft-drinks were shipped in to help boys stay awake, and the hospital became packed with students who had consumed too much coffee or tea and developed gastritis. Irritable athletes, used to endorphin kicks but now chained to their desks, kept on getting into brawls. Two boys ended up with broken ribcages, another two with broken noses. The girls, it was believed, were handling the exam stress better than the boys, although I heard a rumour that Mrinalini and her main rival were caught in a fight so bad that both ended up with bald spots where they had pulled out each other’s hair.

  What made it all worse is that we were having the coldest winter ever in the hundred-and two-year history of the school. It was so cold that it would not even snow and the lawns glittered with frost every morning. The distant mountain ranges, always shrouded by warm clouds, became jagged and crystalline, rising up like the sharp graphs that gave my unfortunate students such a difficult time. Athletes who had no trouble playing sports in sub-zero winters – often in heaps of snow – bleated miserably that they found it impossible to study in the cold and often made huge fires of used rough notebooks to keep themselves warm. The few heaters that our house owned became the subject of so much fighting that eventually all of them broke.

  The cold made it harder for me too, simply because my leg hurt a lot more. Except for my daily trip to tutor Riya, I generally stayed in the hostel, studying or teaching. That said, I didn’t mind the long hours in the hostel, because people were so nice to me. Seeing me limping around, the muscle heads offered up their vast repertoire of hot packs, unguents and ointments, and so like this I got through the winter better than ever before.

  22

  THREE DAYS BEFORE our first board exam, which to my greatest fear was maths, I tutored Riya well past our daily hour.

  She was distracted and nervous these days. While it was normal for her to be distracted, it wasn’t at all like her to be nervous about anything. But the board exams were important, and she knew the consequences would be dire if she failed. It didn’t help that every time she made a mistake I became v
isibly distraught, so much so that I had to take off my glasses and rub my eyes. I was glad at least that she couldn’t look inside my head and see what was happening there.

  But today had been a better day. She had walked in looking so pretty, wisps of her hair flying in the air, her eyes round and bright, a small smile playing on her lips and even though there was nothing different about her than any other day, she seemed to be lighter, happier, like she was somewhere else in her mind. I guessed on a track somewhere. This also meant that she wasn’t listening to a single word that I said.

  As I derived Pythagoras’s theorem vigorously, Riya just sat there, dreamily masticating the end of her pen with her mouth, her dimpled chin resting in the cup of her hand, not even pretending to pay attention to what was a sure-shot board exam question.

  I couldn’t help but be annoyed at her.

  I looked at her with what I considered a fierce look, which I had tested on the muscle heads to great effect.

  ‘The maths exam is only three days away. You should know how to do this.’

  Riya just looked at me, smiled and swivelled her head away. That girl, she knew exactly how to get under my skin. Then she got up, pirouetted on her feet and skipped to the blackboard.

  She drew a triangle on the board and set out to prove the theorem. Hawk-like I followed each step with my eyes.

  ‘Is this what I should know?’ she asked, stopping mid-theorem, turning around and studying me for a moment, looking me straight in the eye.

  I frowned. ‘It’s not finished yet.’

  ‘And how do I finish it?’

  I sat down on the edge of a desk, looked at the board and then at her.

  I had taught her this a hundred times. How did she not know the next step?

  I tried to keep my voice from shaking. I was angry at her, nervous for her, sacred that she would fail.

  I pushed my glasses up my nose.

  ‘Take it step by step,’ I said slowly.

  Instead of solving the problem on the board, she turned around and then out of nowhere, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, in the sweetest, gentlest tone that I had ever heard from her, she said, ‘You know, Specs, I like you more than I ever thought I would.’

  I sat there unblinking, my heart doing a somersault in my chest. And then the unthinkable happened. I stared at the board, mixing up all the angles and lines till Pythagoras’s theorem, which I could derive in the deepest of my sleep, made no sense at all.

  ‘Is that … uh … a compliment?’ I blurted out the only thing that came to me, though so many thoughts were swirling through my head.

  She sighed, gave me a sideways look and then turned back to the blackboard.

  ‘Specs, for how smart you are at your books, sometimes I think you are really dumb.’

  With that, her heavy skirt flying in the air, she turned her back on me and walked away, taking my jittery heart with her wherever she went.

  I sat there for some time in the empty classroom, my heart beating abnormally fast, feeling warm though it was very cold. After a while, I got up, gathered my things and walked towards the door. That’s when I noticed the hasty scribbling on the board. Now that I had my senses back I saw that every step of her messily derived Pythagoras’s theorem was perfectly correct.

  23

  DRIVING UP THE circuitous mountain road, I cross a village and stop for a moment to check my email. But my phone has no reception, so I stand by my car, watching some bedraggled, dirt-smeared children playing a game with twigs and a plastic ball. I can’t help but smile, they seem to be thoroughly enjoying themselves. There is absolute freedom in their screams, their movements, in their laughter, even in this game that they are playing with seemingly no rules.

  I think then of my life which is so full of rules. I live by a rigid schedule, up at dawn, a daily workout, always the first one to office and the last to leave. And then there is my job – which involves regulating financial discrepancies, so all I did all day was enforce other people’s rules. But it wasn’t always this way. I think back to a time in my life when I, like these children, was absolutely free.

  Following my tenth-standard exams, I went back to my grandmother’s for the summer break like I did every year. Here each day passed by painfully slowly, one long dosa-filled lunch stretching out into a chai-filled evening as I was dragged from one distant relative to the next. These relatives always spoke to me about how brave and handsome my father had been, and how beautiful and fashionable my mother, and told me anecdotes about my parents which I had heard so many times before.

  ‘Your father was such a strong man, who served the country in many dangerous zones.’ It seemed to me like my father would have been a perfect fit for Residency School, much more than I. My mother, they said, looked just like an actress and that she was the apple of my father’s eye. I couldn’t imagine how I, of all people, could be the son of such a lady.

  Earlier, these relatives had seemed kind and sweet, and their stories interesting, but now they just seemed boring and their stories, repetitive.

  I also began noticing how different I was from any of them. I dressed differently than my cousins or young boys, always tucking in my shirts, never leaving my house without a collared shirt or with dirty shoes; I ate differently too, never using my fingers even with rotis and rice, because it was not allowed at our school. The most noticeable thing though was the way I spoke. My English and even Hindi was distinctly different from everyone around me. All of my cousins spoke in what the junior school matrons called pigeon English, rapping us on the knuckles if we even used one word. As for my grandmother, she began sounding more and more like the administrative staff at school.

  There were other discoveries too. I had always thought all schools were like Residency School, but I began realizing that the school I went to wasn’t a normal sort of school. I remember my grandmother telling a distant aunt that I was a student of Residency School; she dropped her samosa and her eyes became as round as a tea cup. I began noticing more and more how people treated me differently when they found out that I went to Residency School and that too on a scholarship – my grandmother always mentioned this fact – and also my stellar marks, as if she were the one responsible for all of it. They asked me annoying questions. Residency School had featured in a few films and they asked me, star-struck, if that was how the school really looked. They made me speak to their children, who usually did not have an iota of interest and then they always made me promise to tutor them to pass the entrance exam of the school. I usually took one look at these dull-eyed children, thought of my muscle-head tutees and immediately missed Residency School, even the nerve-wracking times of the board exams.

  Looking back, I realize I was coming to understand for the first time that not only was I different, but that in some way I was privileged, which was the strangest thing for me to digest because I had never felt like this, not once in my life. This truth became further more evident when I noticed the other schools in town, the untidy uniforms, the dried-up lawns, and the buildings, smaller than our smallest junior school boarding house.

  Why were we different? It wasn’t that the children who came to Residency School were that rich, many were sons and daughters of erstwhile maharajahs who had lost much of their fortune over the years, and were studying on subsidized fees. But where they came from, they were important, and they brought that importance to the school. It wasn’t anything blatant; we all wore the same shoes, socks and even underwear, but it was the way they walked, the way they wielded their bats, the way they flipped their hair. It was privilege from beginning to end, and this is the culture I soaked up like a sponge without even realizing it. It was also this privilege that now made me realize how banal everyone I came across in my grandmother’s town was.

  As the days went by in this small dreary place, with nothing to look forward to at all, I realized what an integral part of me Riya had become. She was the first thing that I thought of when I woke up, the last thing t
hat I thought of when I fell asleep, she was always there somewhere in my thoughts and now being away from her, it caused me almost physical pain. It was the strangest thing I had experienced. Thinking about the fact that I had 73 days, 1,752 hours and 105,120 minutes before I could see her again, my heart would swell and tremble and lurch, leaving behind pain worse than anything in my leg. When this heartache of mine was especially bad, I tried to sit down to write a letter to her, but then when I held my pen, no words came to me and I couldn’t think of anything to write to her that wouldn’t be really dumb. Plus, I knew that she wouldn’t want to read anything beyond two to three lines.

  Thinking about her so much, Residency School became to me a fantasy land; a verdant world of sparkling jade fields and its ruby red track with Riya like a vision loping around; the grand marble building with its sculpted dome, even my odiferous, noisy dorm seemed to be some sort of haven.

  Earlier I felt that being here, being there, it was all the same, but for the first time I felt that Residency School was more my home than anywhere else and I wished very, very badly that I could be there.

  After a while, I simply couldn’t stand it any more and I feared that if I had to stay at my grandmother’s for any longer, I would end up like my cousins – eating noisily, dressing untidily and watching pointless shows on TV. So I took the drastic step of writing fervent letters to the school saying that I had to come back to campus to study and prepare for engineering entrance exams. The authorities agreed to let me return – only because a student getting into IIT would be as good for them as it would for me – and twenty-one days after I had arrived, I departed from my grandmother’s home and came back to my own. Yes: after ten years, Residency School had finally become my home.