by Ira Trivedi
As for Vikram, without the prefecture to compete for, his behaviour was even worse than before. He bunked curfew and smoked openly. He bullied boys with a viciousness like never before. More than anything, he began challenging my authority deliberately, trying to make my life as difficult as possible.
I felt a growing sense of unease. This house belonged to me as much as any other boy – maybe even more than other boys because I was prefect. But after he had returned, everything felt different; or rather, it felt the same, the way it used to be. I felt that he was always watching me with those beady eyes like ominous stars, always thinking about the badge that I was wearing that should have been his. I began looking over my shoulder, keeping my head low and even though I was the highest authority in this house, I began feeling like some new junior school boy.
But no matter how much I avoided him, seeing him was inevitable. At evening line-up when I did attendance, he would call in a shrill voice pretending to be a girl, ‘Check me, Oily, check me.’ This caused a gale of laughter and I looked like a fool. And then he hissed at me through clenched teeth as I ignored him and went through the line. I pretended not to hear him but the truth was that I, a prefect, was quaking with fear.
Throughout all this, I wished desperately that she were here, and every evening I cycled over to her house, hoping that, by some stroke of luck, she may just be back. But the little house lay abandoned, and only Jeevan Singh’s rusty bike stood parked outside the gate.
47
SUNDAY EVENING BEGAN uneventfully with the usual sundry problems – boys who had left campus and hadn’t reported back, someone sneaking in chicken which he was eating in bed, boys trying to get out of duties as weekly schedules were made.
I went to bed late and though I was bone-tired, I simply couldn’t sleep. I kept turning fitfully in bed, thinking of random things, straining my ears to catch the ring of a phone call that I knew would not come. The discomfort chewed into my stomach till the wee hours of the morning, when finally I fell into a restless slumber, yearning for her to come.
But that night she did not. Instead, I was jolted awake when I felt cold, rough fingers tighten around my neck. He grabbed my collar hard and I heard the painful rip. It was pitch dark and I couldn’t see a thing, but I could feel them – so many of them – crowded into my little room.
‘My glasses,’ was the only thing I said, my voice scarcely a whisper, and then a piece of cloth – I later discovered that it was my own collar – was shoved into my mouth.
They dragged me into the toilets, a herd of muscled arms and legs, talking in loud whispers, their voices hard with hate. They tied my arms and my feet, and all I could do was squirm like a soundless worm, the piece of cloth still stuffed into my mouth. I heard one zip open and then the next and then they all took turns urinating onto my face. In my worst nightmare, they came after me with hockey sticks and cricket bats, but they did none of that tonight. They just kicked me and pissed on me, and someone joked that he wished he had to shit.
I heard him over all of them, that cruel voice, that muffled laugh. The others, I couldn’t be entirely sure of who they were, but I was pretty sure that amongst them were boys who had invited me to eat with them, whom I had tutored, whose friendship I thought I had won.
They left me locked up in a bathroom and I lay there, my face at the bottom of a dirty toilet, thinking one thing throughout it all. Riya. Riya. Why had she not come? Many hours later – I couldn’t be sure exactly how long – I heard sounds that moved briskly, but I couldn’t understand anything, the pain in my head had become a loud drum. I tried hitting the door with my feet, though I was so weak that I barely made a sound.
I felt an arm on my leg and a spark of pain in my head as a boy lifted my head out of the toilet. I finally opened my eyes. He stood there staring at me, his mouth a horrified ‘o’. He didn’t immediately help me or even say anything; instead he ran away as I lay on the floor of the toilet, fighting the pain and moaning like a girl. The boy returned with three other boys, who whispered amongst themselves and dragged me out, untied my hands and my feet and took my collar out of my mouth.
By this time, boys were streaming into the toilet and I got up, slowly, painfully, unsteadily. My head was throbbing, my leg was on fire and my chest hurt like a beast. So much for the nightmares that were filled with gore and blood. This, what they had done to me, was so much worse. Without saying a word, without looking at any of them I limped back to my room and slowly shut the door. I lay down on the scarred wood floor, covered with blood and piss, listening to the steady sound of the rain.
48
TYPICALLY, AFTER HER long trips, Riya would come back and chatter nonstop – about the races she had won, the people she had met, the places she had been to, her gold medals on display. But today she just sat there on the steps of the verandah, staring absentmindedly into space.
I remember I was telling her about Vikram’s return when in the midst of a sentence, I looked at her and she was gazing at the sinking sun. She didn’t even notice that I had stopped talking until I tapped her lightly on her shoulder, bringing her back from wherever she had gone.
‘What’s wrong?’ I knew that something clearly was.
‘Nothing, Specs,’ she murmured. ‘I’m a bit tired. It’s been a long trip.’
I wanted to say something, but I did not. When she was tired, she got easily annoyed and she had just come back after so many days. So we sat there, in silence, on the steps of her house, the dimming light hiding her face like a shroud. A light bulb came on in the garden and the light on her body shifted subtly, seeming now as if a spell was radiating from her. I was filled with an unexpected, soaring joy – here she was, finally in front of me in real human form. She was paler than usual, and there were dark circles under her eyes, but to me she was still the most beautiful girl in the world. Seeing her, all the wounds I had inside and out seemed to magically heal.
In the distance, I heard the bells toll. It was 6.30 p.m., time for evening prep that I had to supervise. Reluctantly, I heaved myself to my feet, and once again, for the thousandth time, I missed the old days when all I had to care about was Riya and me.
But Riya caught hold of my hand and looked up at me, a strange clear look in her eyes.
‘I have something to tell you,’ she said, in an unusual tone.
I looked at her, now uncomfortable, waiting for her to break the silence. All sorts of unpleasant thoughts were beginning to run through my mind. I pictured Vikram gloating as he stood so close to her, like the day he had when I had cycled past. I remembered the way he had smiled at her and how she had laughed and flipped her hair.
My mind was now a tornado of thoughts. Vikram and Riya. Could it possibly be? I felt my head go light and spin around and I was back in the bathroom again, my head in the toilet and piss in my mouth. I was back again, standing by the window, looking through the grills, and Abdul was bending towards Riya. Feeling faint, the clouds moving like waves, I sat down, almost missing the step. I held my head in my hands, fragments of a prayer that I had once learnt as a little boy coming to my lips.
‘I’m sick,’ she said in a hoarse whisper.
I looked up and blinked.
She just stared at the ground in front of her. She was going to tell me that something had happened between them. That she loved Vikram. I continued staring dumbly at her.
‘I’m really sick, Nikhil,’ she whispered again.
‘Will you stop saying that? And just tell me the truth? If you like Vikram and not me…’
I could feel the tears welling up now in my leaky eyes. Thank god I wore glasses that could hide my stupid tears.
‘I’m about to die,’ she said without looking me in the eye.
The wind was up and a gentle rain pattered on the roof of the porch. The smell of the sodden, decaying forest was so thick it almost suffocated me. But I didn’t move. I just sat there outside her house on the damp steps until Jeevan Singh hobbled out with a cup of hot tea
. Riya had gone inside some time ago, but I just sat there with the chipped blue glass in my hand until it got cold.
Part 3
49
IT WAS JUST like Riya to tell me exactly the way that it was. No comforting words, no gentle lies, nothing at all to cover the sores. She had cancer and not just any ordinary cancer, but a rare small cell lung cancer. There had been signs – stomach aches, headaches and no periods for six months. It turned out that her biggest strength had been her biggest downfall. She was an athlete, and athletes were used to pain and she hadn’t paid attention to the symptoms until it was too late. She hadn’t thought to tell anyone: not her coach, not her father, not even me. She had fought through it, thinking that it would eventually get better, like her pain always did. But this pain didn’t get any better. It only grew worse till she was forced to take attention during the athletic meet.
The fact was that Riya had won races and medals with tumours growing in both lungs. I wondered how much she must have suffered: her lungs could apparently do only half of what a normal person’s could. But I supposed I shouldn’t have been surprised, because that was Riya for you. I thought of my own leg and how much the pain bothered me. Just went to show what she really was, and what I really was.
By the time she found out, the doctors said that there was nothing that they could do. The cancer had already spread to her bones, her spine, her brain, to her blood. There was no cure, no operation; chemotherapy, apparently, would do more harm than good. They said the cancer was terminal, which meant that Riya was going to die. Apparently, she had anywhere from a month to three months to live. They said that the only thing left to do now was to pray. I knew that Riya had never said a prayer in her life.
I was no stranger to death. My parents, after all, were dead. But Riya? Dying? I simply could not imagine it, couldn’t believe it, couldn’t fathom it. It had to be a lie or a mistake. Riya was the most alive person I knew.
In the days that followed, I simply checked out. I couldn’t absorb her words. I couldn’t absorb anything, not even math. I felt like I was stuck in a bad dream, a zombie at the end of the world, the final survivor in a global apocalypse, stumbling around the verdant little world of Residency School, wondering when I would wake up and when this whole nightmare would end.
She stopped coming to school almost immediately. If people wondered where she was, no one asked me. I went to see her every day, shirking all the prefect responsibilities that were once so important to me. I would finish school and go to her house, where I would always find her sitting out on the steps. Though she no longer came to school, she always wore the Residency School games uniform – blue track pants, white sports T-shirt and a thick blue jacket which hung loosely around her body, hiding every one of her curves.
Our meetings were filled with awkward silences, not the lightness and laughter of the past. I didn’t believe that she had cancer, but she insisted that it was true. The results could have been someone else’s – mistakes happened all the time. Exams marks were often mixed up, all it took was the teacher entering the wrong marks in the register, so why couldn’t this happen with cancer test results? When I told her my theory, she just denied it, staring into the distance, absently rubbing one foot behind her calf, an old runner’s trick to loosen the feet.
Although I knew she needed me, I suddenly felt very distant from her. I felt like I was transported back to the tenth standard, where I sat next to her, so nervous that I could barely speak. But at least back then we had numbers and formulae and theorems to fill up the silence, which now became worse every day. I wished so hard, squinting my eyes so tight that I thought they would burst, that we could go back to those days, to the beginning, and start all over again. But when I opened my eyes, everything remained exactly the same.
To make things worse, with Vikram back, my briefly peaceful dorm life had come to an end. It transpired that Vikram blamed me – and not the drugs – for being stripped of his badge, and all sorts of rumours began floating about. Some said that I had snitched him out to Ansari Sir; others said I had led the search party; someone even said I had given him the drugs. I ignored it all as best as I could – after all, there was little else that I could do – but the rest of the house didn’t, and everyone in my house, even those whom I had considered my quasi-friends, began ignoring me or passing snide remarks. Even my former roommate couldn’t look me in the eye.
I didn’t talk to Riya about what was going on at school, because the last thing I wanted to do was to dump my problems on her. It was only later that I realized that this is exactly what I should have done. When I eventually did start talking to her about my problems, I realized how inconsequential they were when you only had thirty days to live.
50
A NEW HIGHWAY has been built on the foothills, but the precarious journey remains unchanged, the same hairpin bends, the same blind turns, the same uphill climb on fourth gear. As a kid, I had always had a hard time with this part. It was almost a ritual: throwing up at Milestone 63 and then spending the rest of the trip sucking on a lemon, clutching my pounding head.
Even though I am nauseous, I am as enchanted as I had always been by how beautiful this part of the journey was. The landscape changes suddenly and the tall skinny trees are replaced with thick, fragrant pines, the rounded hills sharpening into majestic mountains which merge into the steel-blue clouds.
Looking at the misty mountains, veiled by their cloak of clouds, I realize that however much I hate my memories, I love this dramatic windswept vista. The mountains, I realize, will always be a part of me, and I tell myself that I will bring Meeta and my son here this year. I purposely do not reflect on how empty my promises have been of late.
I stop now next to a small tea stall made of tarpaulin and steel sheets, where, right on mark, I throw up my frugal lunch. I smile when I see the lemons and bags of salt on sale and I buy some, remembering how hard the climb was that began from here.
51
SCARED NOW OF death, I was no longer scared of him. I needed to talk to someone, to understand what was happening to me – understand what was happening to her – and he was the only option I had.
‘Sir, do you have a minute?’ I asked B.P.
B.P. was home, sitting in his summer chair. There was no book of poems in his hand. Instead, he looked out of the window with little interest in his eyes. I figured this is where Riya got that habit of hers.
He looked at me confused – I rarely spoke to B.P., let alone looked him in the eye. He was sports master and Riya’s father; he was not an ordinary man to me, but a giant, an immortal, and I was astonished to see how tired and haggard he looked.
‘Yes,’ he said after a second. ‘Come. Come sit down.’
I didn’t hesitate or filter myself. The words just burst from me.
‘Is it true? How is this possible?’ I asked even before I reached the chair.
‘I’m afraid that it is,’ he said, his face a rock, not displaying a thing.
I suddenly felt very unbalanced and though I hadn’t earlier wanted to sit down, now I needed to.
‘You mean…’
‘Yes,’ he said, cutting me off and I was thankful that he had stopped me from saying the word.
‘But it makes no sense.’
He took a deep breath and closed his eyes.
We sat there in strained silence, and from far away I heard the echoes of students at play. It was games time, and I knew that B.P. ought to be out on the field with his team. Instead, he sat here, his grief hanging around the house like a dense fog.
I wanted to get up and leave, but where could I possibly go? The thought of going back to the house and dealing with mundane problems of boarding school life – detention, homework, exit passes – filled me with dread. I never thought that this could happen, but at this point in time, B.P. was the only person on campus I wished to speak to.
I heard a distance bell ring and tentatively I rose to leave, but B.P. held his arm out, motioning
for me to sit down.
‘You know…’ he said finally, his voice trailing off. ‘Her mother, she died of the same thing.’
I sat there looking at him, the expression on my face full of silent questions.
‘The doctors had warned us twelve years ago that this disease was genetic and that there was a high chance that Riya would get it. We ran all the tests, but there was no sign at all, not at that time, and not in the years following her mother’s death. The funny thing is,’ he continued with the faintest quiver in his voice, ‘they also told us that she had weak lungs and that she would never be able to run. After she became a runner, and such good one too, I never worried about what the doctor’s had said … not even once.’
B.P. had never said so much to me at one time, or ever. I sat there, unblinking, listening to him. Only one strange thought seemed to swirl around my mind. Her mother – she must have died the same year as mine.
‘Now, they say she has a month, maybe three…’
I swallowed. ‘Maybe more?’
‘Maybe,’ said B.P. with a strange look on his face, which I only later realized was extreme fear.
‘Is there anything I can do?’ I asked stupidly.
B.P. looked at me sadly. He looked at me for a long time. His eyes seemed to focus slightly. ‘No. No, son. There is nothing anyone of us can do.’
I wanted to ask him so many questions, to talk to him some more, but I said nothing. He said nothing and both of us just sat there for ages, saying nothing at all.
Finally, when the light had faded and the crickets had replaced the evening birds and I had missed evening line and maybe even prep, he sighed heavily and waved me out of the door.
