by Abha Dawesar
I lived only ten minutes away from Sheela. I asked the driver to stop just at the beginning of the lane that led to my house and paid him off. I could not decide if I was going to tell Rani about the bus incident. I didn’t want her to think such things could happen to me. I wanted to be strong and invulnerable in her mind. Moreover, I could not tell Rani we’d stayed back to fool around.
Rani proffered me a glass of cold water when she opened the door for me.
“Are you feeling better?” I asked her, seeing the blue marks on her arms.
“Dr. Sahib’s medicine did magic,” she said.
We had only half an hour before my mother came back home from the office.
“Rani, will you massage my legs?” I asked.
“Of course, Babyji, I’ll do anything for you.”
She looked down, suddenly shy.
I removed the belt from my school skirt, letting it fall to the floor, and flopped on my bed. Rani leaned forward to remove my shoes. I lurched back instinctively, unused to anyone touching my feet. I’d let her touch me in other places that were far less polite. They are just feet, I said to myself. The only time someone had touched my feet was when I was invited by the neighbors to a pooja for virgins. The lady of the house had asked me to stand in a steel plate while she washed my feet. I was eight years old then. Feet were heavy with symbolic meaning. I only touched the feet of my grandparents and the icons of some of the gods in temples. I only touched the feet of the gods I liked. Rama had thrown Sita out of his house even though she was virtuous, so I never touched the feet of his idol. But I touched Krishna’s feet because even in his moments of youthful dishonesty there was a transparency. I had never touched my parents’ feet.
Rani’s touching my feet was a gift of love. A gift so enormous I didn’t know what to do. It was also a responsibility. Women touched their husbands’ feet at the end of the seven pheras. She was now removing my socks and rubbing my feet. I had never known what it felt like to have my feet rubbed. My entire body felt relaxed and seemed to melt. Feet were just another part of the body, the lowest part because they touched the earth, I told myself. Her fingers expertly cracked every bone on each toe. Then she kneaded my thighs. She touched me gently, feeling out all the knots in my legs. I remembered the way the man’s fingernail had felt on my leg. It was sharp and had almost cut my skin. The incident came back with an intense vividness. I started to cry.
“Babyji, Anamikaji, Didiji,” Rani said, unable to address me suitably.
I continued sobbing. She immediately came closer to me and pulled my head onto her lap.
“What happened to my child, tell me,” she said soothingly in Hindi as she stroked my hair.
I felt a hot stream of tears roll down my cheeks. My body was quivering.
“What happened to my jaan, my star, my moon,” she cooed.
I pulled myself up and buried my face in her blouse. She put her arm around me.
“I missed the bus and another friend did, too,” I said.
“How did you come back?”
“We had to take a DTC bus back from school. On the way two dirty men climbed up and started touching us,” I said. My tears were still uncontrollable, and there was as much fluid coming out of my nose as from my eyes.
“Where did they touch you?” she asked. Her voice was hard and low. It was the other side of Rani. The defiant side I rarely got to see.
I pointed to the upper parts of my thigh.
“Kameene, haramzade, behnchod, maderchod,” she cursed.
She was sitting upright now. She held my face in her hands and kissed my eyes.
“They didn’t even spare a little child like you,” she said, her voice raised.
I wasn’t a child. She was sleeping with me, she was my lover. The men were dogs, but they weren’t much older than she was.
“Rani, they weren’t that old, only in their twenties. They were your age.”
“So what? Couldn’t they see you’re young, a child,” she said.
My tears stopped as if a tap had just been turned shut. My head was hurting.
“I’m not a child.”
I wanted to argue, but I felt as if my vocabulary had dried up. “We are together, I am not a child,” I said. I was scared as I spoke that she would stop sleeping with me now because she saw me as a child.
I felt savage all of a sudden.
“I’m not a child,” I screamed and pulled myself into a sitting position. I threw her on the bed and started ripping open her blouse. She closed her eyes as if she didn’t want to see me. As soon as I had finished unhooking her blouse I pulled her sari down and lifted up her petticoat. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I touched her and slid my finger wherever it would slide in. She was hugging me hard. Her arms were tight, almost vice-like, around my back. In my frenzy I grabbed her foot in my hand. The sole of her foot was callused and hard. I gripped it firmly. I had an image of the two men from the bus again, but this time it did not leave me cold. It made me angry, and I started pushing into Rani more vigorously. The German guy from the porn magazine, but with Chakra Dev’s face, the brahmin from the movies with his servant, positions from the Kamasutra all mixed up in my head till I could no longer think. I felt rapacious and greedy for her. These feelings drove out everything. After some time her body rocked and then went still. I stopped, a little short of breath, my back entirely slick with sweat, and remembered that I had read about this moment in books.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
She opened her eyes and smiled. She seemed like a different person. I was at the edges of my experience again. It was like being in a room where very little is visible. Once your eyes adjust you realize some parts are still in the dark, but you can’t turn the light up to see everything.
“Memsahib will be coming soon, I should get dressed,” Rani said, getting up.
I got out of bed and removed the rest of my school uniform and put on civvies. I shut the door to my bedroom and pulled out my books. I had a Monday test in chemistry coming up. I had avoided the subject all term and was sure it would show on my report card. Writing equations was distracting. Equivalence signs between different entities made me compare the people in my life.
I thought about the afternoon with Rani. Up until now we’d been very gentle with each other, but I had turned violent today, and she’d seemed to like it. I had never seen India in that state. Would she be like Rani or different? I would only understand the true elements and equivalencies of life’s chemistry if I experienced how similar and different Rani, Sheela, and India were.
My mother sent Rani to my room before dinner with some peeled almonds. Mom believed that if one soaked almonds overnight and ate them they improved one’s memory. I didn’t think I needed to remember any better than I did. Sometimes I couldn’t sleep at night because I would remember things. Today’s incident was already burnt in my mind. I asked Rani to shut the door. I fed her the almonds.
“So you still think I am a child?” I asked.
“No,” she said, blushing.
“No, I’m not a child,” I said, pinching her through her blouse.
“Babyji,” she said, looking scandalized.
There were so many positions from the Kamasutra that were cluttering my head, I could not keep one apart from the other. I imagined posing all sorts of inappropriate questions to the doctor who would address us at school. Ma’am, what is the difference between making love and having sex? Ma’am, is it true that some ladies like violence? Ma’am, is it all right for a woman who is having her period to have sex? Ma’am, could you please tell Sheela that I am a great lover? By the time Rani returned to my room to call me to dinner, my stomach was hurting from laughing at the questions I was going to ask. I wished I could call Vidur and discuss my private thoughts with him.
At night I forgot to set my alarm. In the morning my mother brought me my bed tea. Rani was still in my bed. We both woke up to my mother’s knock.
“Open,” she demanded from
the other side.
Rani jumped out of bed and onto the mattress on the floor. She tried to wear her blouse. We had been naked. I pulled on sweats and a T-shirt. I put my underwear under my pillow.
“Hmmm,” I made a sleepy noise.
I pushed Rani into a lying down position on the floor mattress and indicated that she should just pull her sari over her without wearing it properly. I threw a sheet over her. She was terrified. I pretended like everything would be fine. Then I let my mother in.
She walked in and looked disapprovingly at Rani, whose eyes were closed. Rani had taken over all the morning tasks like bed tea and breakfast. She would also pack my father’s three-tier steel carrier with lunch as well as my tiffin box.
“Mom, I’m hungry. Let’s get some biscuits from the kitchen,” I said. I linked my arm through hers and walked out of my bedroom. I pulled the door as far shut as I could behind me. My hands were unsteady.
“Why was the door bolted?” my mother asked.
“We saw a mouse running around last night, and I got scared,” I said. It was the first thing I could think of.
“But you shut the door every day anyway. Why did you have to bolt it?”
“She bolted it to assure me the mouse couldn’t come in.”
“Silly child. You’re such a baby sometimes.”
My mother got out a jar with some tea biscuits and put them on a plate. I heard my bedroom door open. Rani had put on her clothes with lightning speed. She joined us in the kitchen and got to work. I went back to my room and got out my school uniform. My Head Prefect badge typically filled me with a rush of importance, but today it felt childish, inconsequential.
viii
Sex-Ed
On the school bus in the morning I opened my backpack to retrieve my school diary and felt the glossy texture of the German magazine. I had carried it home, forgetting altogether that Vidur had to return it to Mohit. Indian magazines were not printed on such thick paper, and our textbooks were like rags in comparison. I ran my hand over the magazine, feeling its cold, shiny surface. I was sitting in a window seat at the front. My stop was one of the first in the morning, and I had sat in the same seat for years. I could see the back of the bus driver’s head and the somewhat empty Delhi roads. Our bus passed through two large slum colonies on the way. One was situated on the top slopes of a gandha nalla, where all the sewage from the neighboring colonies collected. In the morning, children from the jhuggis would be sitting on the main road with little mugs of water, doing their daily thing. The adults usually chose spots that were less conspicuous. I rarely looked at this ritual of mass defecation, but today all aspects of life seemed strangely distant and equal: the illustrations in the German magazine, the mathematical operations of integrals, young starlets with breasts and alabaster complexions like Sheela, characters like Lulu from the Sartre book I had just read, and cheapads who molested girls on the bus. Everything had suddenly collapsed like a black hole into itself, and the only word that described it all was Life.
After school assembly I found my mind drifting toward a more pleasant state, one involving the smell and saltiness of Rani’s skin. I could practically feel her presence. I spent the first half of the school day dreaming about her. Vidur looked at me a few times but we didn’t have a moment between classes to gossip.
“You have to return that thing. Mohit called me at home and was furious,” Vidur whispered as soon as the break bell rang.
We waited for a few minutes till most people had left the class, and then I put my hand in my backpack and rolled the magazine inside the bag. I wanted to be sure the front was completely hidden before pulling it out into the open. As I was almost ready to pull it out, I saw Chakra Dev walk toward Sheela’s desk. A scene from the porn came into my head, except now it featured Chakra Dev and Sheela. I felt panic mount and immediately ran to where Sheela was seated.
“Hey hey,” I heard Vidur say.
It was too late. I had walked toward Sheela with the porn unrolled, its cover fully exposed. Vidur’s loud “hey” had caught both Chakra Dev’s and Sheela’s attention. Sheela gasped. Chakra Dev had caught me red-handed. I felt shame in every vein in my body.
Vidur snatched the magazine from me and rolled it again.
“I could tell the class teacher about this,” Chakra said.
“You, the biggest cheapad in the class,” Sheela retorted.
“Watch it,” he said, looking at her. Then he turned to me and said, “The Head Prefect, caught with Playboy magazine. Ha! It’ll be a scandal.”
“Don’t you try to blackmail us,” Sheela said as if she had been caught, too.
“What do you want?” Vidur demanded.
After a few tense seconds Chakra Dev said, “I’ll let it go for your sake,” and looked pointedly at Sheela. Then he turned away and stalked out of the classroom.
Vidur walked rapidly to Mohit’s desk and stuffed the pornography in Mohit’s satchel.
“I better warn him as soon as he gets here. Better to throw it away,” Vidur said.
“I want to see it,” Sheela butted in. Vidur looked at me with concern.
“You can’t,” I said.
“Why?” she demanded, her hands on her hips.
“It’s disgusting. It’s not for girls,” Vidur said.
“If Anamika can see it, then so can I.”
“Please, Sheela, for my sake.” I didn’t want her to have those images in her head.
“There will be no one worse than me if you see it,” Vidur said dramatically in Hindi. A line straight from a movie, in fact from every Hindi movie ever made. Even though I barely watched films I was usually able to predict the dialogue ahead of time. The stories were all similar, and they worked, each time, just like a chemical reaction in the lab.
In the afternoon the class teacher announced that doctors would be speaking to the boys and girls about sex-ed the next day. When school let out, everyone was talking about it with great excitement but in a hush. I told people about the discussion in the princi’s office, about whether it would be coed or separate. The boys were all disappointed with Mrs. Shah’s position. But the girls were happy they would have a female doctor speaking just to the girls.
As soon as I got home I told Rani that I had to pick up some books from a classmate’s house and left for India’s. She was not expecting me, and I noticed that the dining table had not been cleared. There were two plates on the table.
“Is someone here?”
“My son is visiting. Unless he gets admission to your school he will have to stay at his father’s. There’s no school bus from his current school to my house,” she said. She seemed worried.
“When will you find out about the admission?” I asked.
“Your primary school headmistress, Mrs. Nyaya Singh, is considering the case, ” India said, looking past me. I turned around.
He walked into the room right then wearing gray knickers and a bright yellow T-shirt. He was thin and tiny. Tiny. I hadn’t really visualized India as a mother. I knew that he was five years old, but he looked even younger. I smiled at him. He didn’t smile. Or acknowledge my presence at all.
“Hello,” I said, bending down toward him. I put out my hand to shake his.
He didn’t take it.
“What is your name?” I asked.
No answer.
“Tell Didi your name, Jeet,” India said.
Finally there was a sign of life. He looked at me perplexed.
“Are you a Didi or a Bhaiyya?” he asked. He had actually confused me for a boy! I wanted to laugh, but my mother had told me that it was important not to laugh at little children when they asked questions.
“I’m a Didi,” I said, seriously. In the silence that followed I felt the full awareness of being a Didi. A Didi who was here to make love to his mother. A Didi who maybe really should have been a Bhaiyya. Or, rather, an Uncle. Nothing about my life was typical of a sixteen-year-old’s. No matter what sex-ed the doctor imparted, it was alrea
dy too late. I had educated myself not just about sex, but about love. A singular and powerful force that had swept aside all convention and was stronger than everyone involved. A geometrical figure with greater strength in the lines joining each point than in the points themselves. Rani, India, and I, all of us, had reached a place from which we could never come back. It was impossible for me to be less of a Bhaiyya and to become a real Didi.
“Are you sleepy, my sweetheart?” India asked, lifting her son to her lap. Her tenderness with him was no different from her tenderness with me. Was it possible that my love for her was the same as my love for my mother? I sat down on a chair at the full import of that thought.
“Come, let me take you to bed,” she said, kissing him. I followed them around as India carried him to his bedroom and put him in his bed. He seemed to fall asleep in seconds. Only eleven years ago I was his age; in eleven years he would be as old as I was now. I could never imagine him having an affair with a married woman, or with any woman, or even with a girl his own age. Even Chakra Dev must have been five years old at some point. Had he been like Jeet as a child and then just turned into a hoodlum? At what age had he changed?
India closed his bedroom door and led me by my hand to her room. She shut her door, and we sat down on her bed. She immediately reached out to kiss me. I moved away.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“Your son is in the other room,” I said.
“So?”
So? So? What was I going to say to that? I shook my head.
“It’s okay. He’s sleeping.”
“It’s not that,” I said.
“Then what is it?” she asked.
“It feels wrong. He’s innocent,” I said.
“How do you think he was born?” she said.
Sex, I thought. You had sex with your husband. And how was I born? The same way. She was right. So what was the problem? I started laughing.
But I couldn’t get myself to do anything to her of the kind I had done with Rani the previous afternoon. So I talked to her instead about the German Playboy and the cheapads on the bus. I had to edit facts so that she didn’t know why I had stayed back with Sheela. When I described the molestation she hugged me like Rani had, but she didn’t say I was a child.
