The Boy Who Loved

by Durjoy Datta

  And so, here they were. While Bhattacharya Uncle and Baba argued about Jayalalithaa, I stole glances at Arundhati, who had carried a thick book with her. Maa’s eyes had lit up seeing Arundhati when she walked in. She is a studious-looking, bite-sized, feet-touching, nice Bengali girl—a Bengali mother’s prize.

  ‘Dada, you tell me?’ Baba continued, addressing Mr Bhattacharya. ‘Does it make any sense? If only Atalji had one more vote, we wouldn’t have elections again. Does Jayalalithaa not know how much it costs the country to hold elections again? What a leader! Bringing a no-confidence motion against the government when the country is already so weak.’

  Bhattacharya Aunty butted in, ‘She topped the tenth board examinations in Tamil Nadu. So—’

  ‘I know, Boudi. But what did she do with it? She went into the movies!’

  ‘She was a big hit,’ Aunty said.

  ‘I know! That only shows how much these politicians want fame and money!’

  ‘Take Arundhati inside. Show her your books,’ said Maa to me and her. ‘Go, now! Don’t be shy.’

  ‘I’m not being shy,’ I said. ‘I just . . . Do you want to?’

  ‘Okay,’ said Arundhati and smiled.

  Maa–Baba have the knack of making the most mundane things awkward. Do they not sense our shame or our consent? No, Maa, I don’t want to recite a poem to these strangers. No, I don’t want to dance in front of them. Don’t you know they are not interested? Why are you so obsessed with your sons, Maa?

  Arundhati Bhattacharya put her book aside and followed me to my room.

  ‘These are the books,’ I said, pointing at them.

  ‘Hmm. I thought there will be more.’ She flipped through the books, opening them, going through them and then telling me, ‘I have them all.’

  ‘Do you have The God of Small Things? The author shares—’

  ‘I know. She’s the best, isn’t she? Like me,’ said Arundhati with a bright smile. ‘You can borrow a few books from me if you want. I have a nice collection. But do return them and don’t dog-ear them.’

  ‘I have my course books to finish. Baba ordered the IIT material so I need to do that too in my free time.’

  ‘IIT material, already? Isn’t that a little early?’

  ‘The exam is in two years. They think there is not much time.’

  ‘Is that what you want to do? Engineering?’ she asked.

  ‘No one will approve of what I really want to do.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  Yeah, right. As if I could tell her.

  ‘I am not sure if I want to do what I really want to do. So I think engineering it is for now.’

  ‘My parents would love to adopt you and your brother. They were devastated when I took humanities. They think I am ruining my life. But I won’t know until I try, will I?’

  ‘Which school have you joined?’

  ‘Model School. I have not seen the school yet. What’s the school like? Is it good? Are there cute boys there?’

  From what I have heard, it’s a school of geniuses or children who find drugs rather easily. Our conversation was cut short when Uncle entered and told Arundhati that it was time to leave.

  ‘It was nice to meet you.’ She shook my hand firmly, smiled warmly and left.

  I polished off the samosas and the namkeen left behind by our guests. By now Maa’s opinion of her had changed. There was no longer a glint in her eyes. I chose not to tell her about Arundhati’s query about cute boys.

  ‘She was beautiful, wasn’t she?’ she asked me.

  ‘She was okay.’

  ‘She must be bad in studies though. She’s taken humanities like Paula Aunty’s son. Remember Paula Aunty? Her son did English honours and is now working in advertising for 5000 rupees. He’s twenty-eight. Chee chee. And look at your Dada, already doing so well.’

  ‘Maa?’

  ‘Yes, shona?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Is there something you want to tell me, Raghu?’

  ‘No, Maa.’

  As I write this, I am thinking if I am eligible to be a cute boy. Does Brahmi think so? But what if I am really a cute boy? How long can you stare at a cute boy?

  26 April 1999

  Today was simultaneously the happiest and the saddest day of my entire life.

  During the lunch break, it took me everything to coax out the words from a crying, shattered Brahmi.

  ‘She is d . . . dying. She’s . . . just lying . . . lying there . . . Shahrazad. She is dying . . . she i . . . is . . .’

  Seeing her cry, face smeared with tears and lips trembling in fear, a strange overwhelming sense of heroism gripped me. Which was weird because the last time death was around me, I had run like a coward and held my silence for four days. Back then I was hoping that shutting my eyes and lips hard enough would make what had happened not real.

  I held Brahmi’s hand and ran to the classroom. My sense of heroism and bravery fizzled out in a loud gasp when I saw Shahrazad, our friend and lunch-sharer from the last few days. Her big brown eyes were trained at us as if asking why we were so late. Her two pups nuzzled their noses into her belly, trying to go back to their safe place. There was more blood than I could stomach. Brahmi and I tiptoed towards her. Neither asked whether we could run to the principal, take her to the vet, save her life. We knew her death was certain. It hung around in the basement, waiting to whisk her away. I recognize the presence of death because I have felt it around Brahmi and had not known what it was until today. For the past few weeks I wasn’t sure why I was waking up anxious every morning. Now I know. Because somewhere in my subconscious a flash forward played in a loop. Just another morning. Tuesday maybe. I am my usual moping self, standing at the end of the line in the morning assembly, searching for Brahmi in the girl’s line. The principal tells us the reason of the emergency assembly. ‘Our beloved student, Brahmi Sharma, passed away last night. Let’s all pray for her and observe a minute of silence.’ Two more brush strokes of red on the art on her wrists.

  We rested Shahrazad’s head on our sweaters. While I ran my hand over her head, Brahmi sang a lullaby in her ears. Shahrazad matched the lullaby with her soft moans. Half an hour later, she fell asleep with her eyes open, still looking at us.

  Two pups, eyes closed, tiny as my fist, now writhed aggressively in their mother’s blood, mewing at their dead mother, nudging her, willing her to wake up. Shahrazad, one who had shared our lunches and our sweaters, was now just flesh and bones, much like Sami.

  ‘We need to bury her,’ I said. ‘I will pick her up. We can go to the football ground.’

  ‘I will do it.’

  ‘Brahmi, you pick—’

  ‘I said I will do it!’ snapped Brahmi.

  The tears had given way to a sense of purpose.

  I picked the puppies up, cleaned them with scraps of newspaper, put them in a little cardboard box and punched holes in it. Brahmi wrapped our queen in the old soaked sweaters and lifted her up. She looked sad now that she had stopped crying. Carrying Shahrazad and the whimpering puppies, we walked to the far end of the football field. While I dug a shallow ditch, Brahmi used dead leaves to clean Shahrazad. Then she took the puppies out of the box who rushed to lick their mother’s face. We buried her and said prayers on her grave.

  In her death we gave her a religion.

  We were called to Amarjeet ma’am’s room when news got around that we had missed our class.

  ‘Where were you two—’

  ‘Ma’am.’

  ‘God! What happened to you, Brahmi? All this blood! Are you hurt? What happened— ’

  ‘It’s not mine,’ said Brahmi and told Ma’am about Shahrazad and her pups.

  ‘The school can’t take responsibility for the puppies. You should have come to us when you found her. This was highly careless of you two. What if the dog bit you?’

  ‘It was our friend. It wouldn’t have,’ said Brahmi.

  ‘You would have turned it out to the streets. We had
no choice,’ I said.

  ‘How long were you two feeding her?’

  ‘A couple of weeks I think,’ I said.

  ‘I won’t report it to the principal. I will write in the attendance register that both of you were in the sick bay because of food poisoning. If someone asks, you will have to tell them the same, okay?’

  ‘Okay, ma’am.’

  ‘I will try calling a few adoption agencies. Till that time you will have to take care of the puppies. Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ we echoed.

  After school, Brahmi and I emptied our school bags and put in one puppy each inside. We took a Blueline bus home, the rickety fleet of buses driven by overworked drivers with expired licences who routinely have to wash the blood of passengers off the tyres.

  Brahmi was quiet so I spoke.

  ‘Shahrazad must be in a happy place right now,’ I said.

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘It was the best way for her to go. By the time her puppies grow up, they wouldn’t remember their mother. And as for Shahrazad the last thing she saw in the world was something beautiful. Her puppies.’

  ‘She also saw us. Her friends. You made that possible,’ she said and looked at me.

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘You did well today, Raghu. We both did. I think we were . . .’

  ‘Brave?’

  She smiled like she meant it. In that split second I was tempted to tell her everything. I wanted to break down in her arms and tell her what really happened in that pool with Sami and me. But we hit a road bump and the moment passed. It was for the best.

  Also, I didn’t think Shahrazad was in a happy place or that the last thing she saw was beautiful. What she saw was that she was abandoning her newborn puppies, entrusting them in the hands of two little humans, and that’s not a happy thought to die with.

  My heroism at school and delay in reaching home was met with a tight slap by Maa. She was home from work already and had panicked when she didn’t find me at home.

  ‘Where were you? I went to the bus stop. Everyone had got down but not you! The conductor said you hadn’t taken the bus! Where had you gone? I was going mad here! I called your school and they said you had left!’

  ‘I took a Blueline bus.’

  ‘What! Why? You have started smoking? Is that why you’re late?’

  ‘No, Maa. I was—’

  ‘Ishh! You have you started smoking. Show me your lips!’

  ‘No, Maa. I was—’

  She snatched my bag to look for a cigarette box or matches. As if on cue, the pup started to mew. Stunned, she dropped the bag and the little puppy crawled out. She sat down and picked up the little one, and ran her fingers on its tiny head. Her eyes flooded with instinctive maternal love. She looked at me for an explanation. When I told her, she patted my head.

  ‘Khul bhalo korechhis. Ki darun! You did a good thing! He’s so sweet! Look at it sucking on my finger. I should get some milk for it. Look up the Yellow Pages. We need to go to a vet to get it checked. Quickly!’ she said and disappeared into the kitchen, cradling the puppy with one hand.

  Maa named the puppy Mina.

  When Dada came home, we all went to the veterinarian. We bought a little bed, a blanket and a collar for her. When we got home with our new family member being passed from one set of hands to another, a special delivery awaited us—a 25-inch state-of-the-art Videocon television. It was probably another attempt from Dada to make up for his betrayal.

  ‘We will watch the World Cup here,’ Dada announced as it flickered to life. Baba was impressed.

  ‘You don’t like it, Raghu?’ asked Maa.

  ‘We didn’t need a new TV,’ I said obstinately.

  ‘What’s going on between the two of you?’ asked Baba.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Dada.

  A little later, Bhattacharya Uncle and Aunty dropped in and saw the new TV. The picture quality was crisp and unlike the last TV, the screen was flat. It looked like NASA had built it. Arundhati came too but not once did she look at the television. She brought books for me to read instead and didn’t let anyone take Mina from her hands. She pestered her parents to get her one too but they shot her down.

  ‘This is just like A Game of Thrones,’ she said to me. ‘She’s so ADORABLE! I LOVE HER!’

  ‘What’s A Game of Thrones?’

  ‘A book in what’s supposed to be a series. No one I know knows about the book and I don’t think the writer will come around to finishing it. But anyway the story starts with a group of princes finding the exact same number of dire wolf puppies as there were siblings.’

  ‘Brahmi and I are not siblings,’ I said.

  She laughed. ‘Of course, you’re not. But nice name—Brahmi. All this while she was “that girl”. Is she cute?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  What’s with Arundhati and people being cute?

  1 May 1999

  There’s a common wall between the Bhattacharyas’ flat and ours. Arundhati has taken the room on the other side of the wall, and now every morning I wake up listening to Arundhati’s renditions of English pop songs I have never heard before. Both our rooms are illegal encroachments, two-bedroom flats turned to three. My room was almost broken down twice by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi; Maa–Baba have no doubt that it was the Mittals who had complained about the extra room we had constructed. It took the greasing of quite some palms before the authorities turned a deaf ear towards the complaints. Mina likes Arundhati’s songs. She whines and scratches at the common wall whenever Arundhati sings. I don’t mind them either. Mina’s tiny paws and Arundhati’s songs help me with my morning anxiety.

  Arundhati stops by every morning to play with Mina and that hasn’t gone down well with Richa Mittal who’s forbidden to touch the puppy—the Mittals think it’s being brought up on raw meat.

  ‘Ram jaane what they feed the dog,’ Mittal Uncle had shouted at the weekly residents’ welfare meeting. ‘I’m warning all the members of the society that she will grow up to be a menace. What if she bites my daughters? Your sons? Who will pay for the injections, haan? Bolo Datta saab.’

  But there was no beating the theatrics of Maa–Baba. Baba shouted, screamed, gesticulated wildly and even went as far as saying Mina was his dead daughter incarnate. At which Maa started to cry and so did a few other women. What works is not Maa–Baba’s actions but how genuine they are in what they do, no matter how implausible their cause.

  The Mittals were soundly humiliated.

  Now every time Richa sees Mina, Arundhati and I, her eyes burn with an anger I thought she was incapable of. She doesn’t blink till the time she walks out of sight. As the love of her life, I had broken her heart by not stopping Baba from demeaning her father publicly.

  Just as I was leaving for school in the morning, Bhattacharya Aunty came to Maa to enquire if there was a temple nearby and if I could accompany Arundhati to one after school. ‘Arundhati used to go to a Hanuman temple every Tuesday,’ Bhattacharya Aunty told Maa.

  So in the afternoon after school I rang their bell. Arundhati locked her house and followed after me. She was still in her school uniform, her shirt carelessly untucked, socks bunched up at her ankles and her shoes muddy. Her school seemed even more lax than mine.

  ‘Don’t your teachers say anything to you?’ I said, pointing to the shoes.

  ‘Everyone in my school dresses like this. There are seven hundred students in my batch so no one cares. Many of them come wearing sneakers. Back in Kolkata they used to slap our knuckles with wooden scales,’ she said.

  At the temple she sat down on her knees, folded her hands and said silent prayers to Hanuman’s idol. She knew none of the Sanskrit chants Baba had taught me. She talked to her god in English.

  ‘Teach me a chant!’ she exclaimed when the pundit told Arundhati that I was one of the learned bhakts.

  While we distributed our prasad to the beggars outside, Arundhati chanted the verse I taught her. Sounded much better coming from her.


  ‘Manojavam Maruta Tulya Vegam, Jitendriyam Buddhi Mataam Varishtham, Vaataatmajam Vaanara Yooth Mukhyam, Shree Raama Dootam Sharnam Prapadye. I got it right this time, didn’t I? What does this mean by the way?’

  ‘Let me pray to the one who is swift as thought, the one who is more powerful than the wind, the one who has conquered his senses, the supreme among all intelligent beings, the son of the wind-god, the commander of the army of forest creatures, give me refuge, the messenger of Lord Ram, the incomparable Lord Hanuman. Please accept me and my prayers at your feet.’

  ‘That’s so cool!’ squealed Arundhati.

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘You use it to impress the girls in your class, don’t you? This is how you made Brahmi like you? Isn’t it?’ asked Arundhati.

  ‘She doesn’t like me.’

  ‘If you say so. What did she name her puppy?’

  ‘Adolf.’

  ‘Nice!’

  She made me chant some more and clapped like a little child every time. To thank me she gave me a mixtape of her All Time Favourites English songs. When the cassette player gave up, I had to eat my pride and ask Dada for his Walkman.

  ‘That’s it? You don’t want to tell me why you need it?’ asked Dada.

  ‘I will tell you when there’s need to tell you.’

  ‘Raghu? Zubeida is coming to Delhi tomorrow. Would you want to meet her? I told her you would,’ he said.

  ‘I would rather cut off my tongue. Why would I want to meet that Musalman—’

  ‘Raghu! That’s really—’

  I stormed out. Back in the room I listened to the songs whose words remained a mystery to me. Maa made biryani today but it tasted like ash.

  ‘You don’t like it?’ asked Maa.

  ‘Why don’t you ask Dada if he likes it? He seems to have developed a taste for biryani, haven’t you, Dada?’

  ‘Shut up, Raghu.’

  ‘Yes, you seem to be pretty good at shutting up these days.’

  ‘Whatever it is between the two of you,’ interrupted Maa, ‘don’t get it to my dinner table.’

  P.S. Have noticed a building from the bus back from school. It is a good twenty minutes away by a bus or car from home. I intend to check it out soon. It must be at least twelve-storeys high. It’s also new so I am thinking the security might be a little bit of an issue. But let’s see.