Nikhil and Riya

by Ira Trivedi

  ‘Some people have much less time than me, you know,’ she said, looking up into the powdery sky. ‘Ma had less. She had two weeks to live after she found out.’

  I hitched myself up on one elbow, wanting to look her in the face, but she had turned over, looking away from me and at the mountains instead.

  ‘She had been sick for a while, but no one knew. They thought it was jaundice. I remember her going to the hospital and then never coming back.’

  Riya never spoke about her mom, like I never spoke about mine. Only once had she shown me a photo: a hazy photo of a young woman, her sari blowing in the wind, her most striking feature, her wild curly hair.

  ‘Even though I don’t remember her, I know I loved her,’ she said quietly.

  Riya looked uncomfortable. It wasn’t like her to talk about feelings. That was mostly my role; and when I did, she would laugh and say, ‘You think too much, Specs. It must be all that chess.’

  ‘I’m luckier than her at least, aren’t I, Specs?’ she said stiffly, turning around, looking me in the eyes, hers very serious and round.

  ‘I … I don’t want you speaking like this. I don't like it,’ I muttered, blinking and turning my head away.

  ‘But it’s the truth,’ she insisted.

  ‘It’s not the truth, Riya,’ I said, angry now – angry at her, angry at her cancer, angry at the world, angry at her mother for giving this to her. ‘You’re not going to die. You’re only sixteen. People our age don’t die.’

  ‘But I am going to die. I have a terminal disease,’ she said, not a trace of emotion in her voice. ‘That’s a fact.’

  ‘Shut up!’ I shouted. ‘Shut up, Riya! Just shut up!’ I scrambled to my feet, grabbing her wrists, surprising Riya and myself even more. ‘You’re not going to die! Just shut up!’

  I felt her squirming in pain. I wanted to slap her, but before I could raise my arm, all those stupid tears came running down my eyes, down my nose, everywhere down my face.

  She couldn’t see me like this. So I got up and left, walking with my limp, faster than I knew I should. At the gate, I ran headlong into B.P., who stumbled and dropped his briefcase, its contents spilling everywhere. I didn’t pause or apologize or help him pick anything up. I just limp-ran as fast as my scrawny legs could take me, past the teachers’ colony, past the principal’s house, through the girls’ hockey field, in the direction of a safe haven, the library. I could feel the wind frosting my face, the blood singing in my ears and, for the first time in my life, I understood just why Riya loved running so much.

  56

  TO APOLOGIZE FOR my outburst, I surprised her at her house the next day, clutching a bunch of wild roses. I hadn’t ever given her flowers before but I supposed vaguely that girls were supposed to like things like these.

  ‘Are those from Principal Sir’s garden?’ she asked me, peering at my ragged blooms.

  ‘Well…’

  She broke into a laugh. ‘You know how angry Principal Sir’s wife will be if she finds out?’

  I looked down at the pink roses, smelling of mud and grass, which had already started to wilt. I should have known that Riya wasn’t a typical sort of a girl. Just a few years ago, in my fear, I would have gone back to re-plant the blooms but not any more. Now I simply grinned.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to shout at you earlier. I was just…’

  She cut me off before I could finish.

  ‘It’s okay, Specs.’

  This made me pause. I hadn’t expected for her to give in to me so kindly, she usually gave me such a hard time.

  ‘It is?’ I said, surprised.

  And then she looked embarrassed. ‘I’m so tired of everyone treating me like this patient all the time. No one ever gets angry at me any more. I … I just want things to be normal.’

  I took her hand. I couldn’t help but laugh. ‘Normal is one thing you’re not.’

  ‘No,’ she reflected. ‘Maybe not, but I want things to be like before.’

  ‘Then come back to school, Mrinalini and co. are desperately missing you,’ I joked.

  She shrugged and moved her hand away.

  ‘Specs, don’t joke. I’m serious. I want you to treat me normally. And I want things to be the way they used to be.’

  ‘Okay, I won’t bring you chocolates any more.’

  Now she threw the roses at me.

  I picked the petals slowly off my blazer and then looked up at her. For the first time I saw fear brimming in her eyes and for the first time I did something that I had never done with her.

  ‘Everything is normal, Riya,’ I said, knowing that I was telling her a big fat lie.

  57

  IT RAINED ON my birthday – a cold, hard, grey rain which clattered against the windows and soaked everything. I felt as grim as the weather, my heart as cold as my soggy feet. It seemed like the worst punishment to have lived seventeen full years and to live god knows how many more if Riya were not there.

  I did not care about my birthday. If anything, I tried to make sure no one knew about it. We had a tradition of birthday bumps at Residency School where boys would throw you in the air and catch you as you came down, as many times as you were years old. But they did not always catch you, and this process was often repeated far more times than it was technically supposed to be. People were occasionally injured quite badly. On his fifteenth birthday one surd was so badly abused that he got permanent vertigo.

  The other, less violent Residency School birthday ritual consisted of planting a tree and tending it for the rest of the year. This was mandatory, but wildly unpopular. So while every student planted the tree no one tended it (our school did not exactly produce many nurturers), so in one barren corner of the campus, by the junior school playground, were rows of dead trees.

  I personally enjoyed looking after my trees, and I had eleven healthy trees – pine, cedar and deodar – distributed all across campus of Residency School. I enjoyed the rituals of tree growing, and the oldest tree was now three times as tall as me. This year though was different. This year I didn’t feel like planting a tree – I didn’t feel like giving life when it was being taken away from me.

  So my seventeenth birthday passed like any other day. The day went on as usual – classes, prefect duties and then my daily visit to Riya which always moored my day. When I reached her house at 5.00 p.m., the doctor was over, she had a thermometer in her mouth, and a blood pressure machine strapped around her arm, and she couldn’t talk to me. She looked small and somewhat irritated; she submitted to these medical examinations with less than perfect grace. I watched for a while from the doorway; then I felt a tap on my arm.

  It was Jeevan Singh. She had written me a note. Jeevan had not forgotten my birthday, and was grinning, widely revealing several missing teeth, holding an extra-sweet cold coffee which meant that after the sugar high I would get a headache. Ever since I had become a prefect, I had changed even in Jeevan Singh’s eyes, and now he was trying to make up for all of his previous bullying.

  I unfolded the note and read in Riya’s ant-like handwriting that she wanted me to meet her after evening prep in the library.

  The library?

  I was a little confused. The Residency School library lay at the end of the campus, next to the waste processing plant, a mostly empty building, full of books, ancient computers and dust. I, of course, had spent a lot of time there but I could only say that for myself. I suspected that Riya had probably only been there a few times on mandatory visits. The library was not a place that anyone at Residency School went to out of choice.

  I couldn’t say no to her though I was angry at her. For what I couldn’t quite comprehend. Was it her fault that she was sick and with the doctor when I came? So after supervising prep, I slipped out of the side door and made my way across campus to the library, which, as I expected, was bolted and locked. I wondered why they even bothered to lock it up – who would possibly want to steal anything from here? But then again Residency S
chool boys sometimes vandalized property for fun.

  It was cold after the downpour and I shivered under my coat, listening to the screaming crickets that had replaced the birds. Footsteps broke into the night and Riya appeared, her eyes huge in her face now and her skin so pale that it shone.

  ‘Specs?’

  She stood there so thin, her clothes hanging on her.

  I stepped forward. ‘I’m here.’

  ‘Happy birthday, Specs,’ she shyly said.

  ‘Thanks,’ I murmured, my anger evaporating into the air.

  ‘Let’s go inside.’

  ‘Inside? It’s locked.’

  ‘I have the key.’

  ‘How?’

  She winked at me and then fiddled with the lock. It took her a while to unbolt the big iron lock, but she did it finally, and we slipped in.

  At night, the library was more monstrous and gloomy than in the day and now the smell of damp things filled the air.

  ‘Why are we here?’ I said in a whisper, out of habit, though there was clearly no one here.

  ‘I guess because it’s the library, and you love books.’

  She produced a small torch, took my hand and led me to a corner. I followed her, our footsteps echoing in the dark. Then I saw on the table, a small black forest cake and two spoons.

  I didn’t know to react – I wasn’t used to gestures of this sort from anyone, let alone her. I turned to her.

  ‘Do you like it?’ she asked, looking at me intently in the torchlight.

  I tried to speak, but I felt choked.

  ‘Yes … yes, I do,’ I croaked. ‘That cake, it looks really good.’

  ‘Let’s try?’ she asked and lit the candle on top of the cake. ‘Make a wish, Specs.’

  I closed my eyes and without thinking even for a second, I blew out the candle. I opened my eyes and caught her looking at me. We both knew what my birthday wish would be this year, and every other year. She had forgotten a knife and so I cut the cake with a spoon, and then before I put a piece into my mouth, I put a piece in hers.

  ‘Delicious,’ I said.

  ‘I made it,’ she said with a grin.

  ‘You did not.’

  Riya cooking? I couldn’t imagine it. There was nothing, not in the least bit, domesticated about her.

  ‘Okay fine,’ she admitted. ‘I didn’t, but I watched while Jeevan did.’

  She now pulled out a present wrapped in red paper from the pocket of her coat and handed it shyly to me. ‘Your present.’

  I could not remember the last time I had received a birthday present. Last year, she had wished me and given me a card, and that card had meant everything to me. I still had it, tucked inside my maths book because it brought me good luck.

  Now I was at a loss of words.

  ‘What … what is it?’

  ‘Open it,’ she urged gently.

  I tried to spread the paper neatly so I could preserve it – preserve it like I tried to preserve everything at that time, every image, every memory, every keepsake, like the specimens in our biology lab suspended in formaldehyde, but patience was not one of Riya’s virtues.

  ‘Just open it, Specs.’

  I tore it open and folded the pieces into my pocket – I would tape them back together – and then inspected my gift. It was a book: The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan. I turned it over and read the blurb.

  ‘It’s a good book,’ she said quietly.

  ‘It looks like it.’

  ‘I read it … twice.’

  ‘You did?’

  Riya had never been one for reading. She had often asked me why I read so much and what I got out of it. I had never properly answered that question until finally one day when we were on the track, she running, me reading, and I had forgotten to time her because I was so absorbed in the book.

  ‘What’s in that book that you can’t put it down?’ she had asked, kicking sand all around.

  I had thought about it for a second and then told her, ‘It takes me to the same place that you go to when you run.’

  She had never asked me that question again.

  Now I felt the book, breathed the smell of the new pages, rubbed the sharp corners. And as I did so I looked at her, her face lit by the candle, framed in the tiny pulsing glow.

  ‘I couldn’t give you a book for your birthday that I hadn’t even read.’

  I was stunned. Buying a book was one thing, but reading it twice, for someone who struggled with reading more than five- or six-letter words? I knew how hard it must have been.

  This gesture wasn’t like her. Riya was not of this world; her mind never focused on mundane details like birthdays.

  ‘Thank you,’ I finally muttered, too embarrassed now to look up at her. When I did look up though, she smiled at me and pushed a strand of hair out of her face which was like an angel’s in the light of the torch.

  ‘You’re a genius you know, Specs. Like him,’ she said, pointing to the cover of the book.

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘You are, Specs – never forget that.’

  Then she gathered the remains of the cake, the box of candles and the spoons and though I could have stayed here all night, I knew that we had to leave.

  Outside, the rain was falling again and in the inky darkness, we both stood there letting the raindrops run like tears down our cheeks, letting it soak our hair and spread like stains on our uniforms. Suddenly, the rain stopped, and the silver-white moon burst through the clouds. Then she took my damp hand in hers and pressed it once against her cheek.

  58

  ZUGZWANG IS DEFINED as a situation in chess where any move will result in an immediate and certain loss. Step one way, checkmate, step the other, checkmate. I was a master of this move, but little did I know that this move, my move, would be played so skilfully against me.

  Even now, after all these years, I still remember him perfectly. Rajat Sinha. A tenth-standard boy who looked like a pretty girl. His skin was very pale and his eyes were topped by curled eyelashes so long that they seemed to touch his brows. I remember he had very red lips that turned purple in the cold.

  Joining Residency School in the tenth standard was never an advisable move in the best of circumstances, and Rajat certainly did not present the best circumstances. Almost immediately, he became the butt of every joke and the centre of every prank. It was rumoured that they had found gay porn magazines underneath his mattress. He was a bully’s dream – pale and skinny, reading expensive imported comicbooks that inevitably got snatched away, walking to prep alone, eating dinner with the juniors, being on the walk and run squad.

  It wasn’t often that the boys had such a perfect target. In some ways, he was more vulnerable than I had ever been: at least I had grown up at Residency School; at least I had my studies. I wondered why his parents had sent him here in the first place, because there wasn’t a sporty bone in his body. But then, who was I to ask that question? I figured there were other guardians who had been as clueless as mine.

  I knew Rajat had it hard. In a strange way, I felt close to him because I understood his humiliation, so I cut him as much slack as I could – not penalizing him for being late because someone had probably locked him in the dorm, not reprimanding him when he came to line-up wearing the wrong uniform because someone had probably thrown the right one away. I never reported him to Ansari Sir because I knew he would have beaten him, and Rajat already got beaten up every other day. Despite having been bullied in the worst way myself, I was shocked by the brutality and cruelty of the boys with whom I lived, with whom I had grown up. I never could have imagined that they would resort to such violence.

  They found Rajat Sinha lying in a field next to Dhobi Ghat, three fractured ribs, a broken arm and a badly shattered thigh. He had lost close to a litre of blood from a wound in his head that they later found out had damaged his brain.

  The school authorities never found out who did it, or what the reasons were. All anyone knew was th
at it happened in the middle of the night, and there was no visible clue to who the perpetrators were. That was the miserable irony of our boys – they would devour the weak in seconds, but they would also protect the pack. Residency School emphasized brotherhood and loyalty and being a sneak was the worst thing that a boy could ever be, except for maybe being gay, which appeared was possibly Rajat Sinha’s crime.

  Despite its gruesome violence, the incident may have slipped past unnoticed, as so many crimes at Residency School had in the past. But Rajat Sinha’s father owned a local media channel, and the news of the attack spread like wildfire. Much to the horror of the school, the incident made the front page of local papers, and pictures of Rajat Sinha, his family, the principal, the board of governors, and even Ansari Sir were in the press every day for close to a week. Funnily enough, the episode had the strange consequence of causing the normally insular and apathetic students at Residency School to take a keen interest in the outside world, running to the library to get their hands on newspapers, tracking every bit of coverage.

  The days that followed Rajat’s attack were out of a movie – journalists lurked around in dark corners, the police swarmed in and out of the school, a team of cops set up base in our house to investigate the case. Under immense pressure to find the culprits, every single Ashok House boy was finger-printed and every single teacher too.

  Our esteemed school even made national news as the ‘Residency School scandal’ broke and a big ‘exposé’ was run on the cloistered world of elite Indian boarding schools – the bullying, the beatings, the brutality. The reality was that this breaking ‘news’ was information any student learned in his first two weeks.

  The school hadn’t received this kind of bad press in many years. The board of our school was an illustrious one, consisting of many national luminaries, and we were known as one of the nation’s finest and oldest schools. On the inside, we knew what the school was really like, but to the outside world, the impression was of bonhomie and building bonds for a lifetime. Now a boy had been almost beaten to death just because some boys were having fun. The board tried to cover it up, but when that failed, they resorted to the oldest Residency School ethos: blame and break the weak. The board was at the principal’s throat, who in turn was at Ansari Sir’s throat, who was so angry and frustrated that he beat up so many boys that his steel ruler finally snapped in two.