Babyji

by Abha Dawesar

  The phone rang and startled both of us.

  As soon as I said “hello” Sheela asked, “Anamika, did you mean it about the birds of paradise?”

  “Yes,” I said. I had to be careful—I didn’t want Vidur to know it was her.

  “Can we meet? I can come over if it’s difficult for you. Bhaiyya is going that side. He’ll bring me,” she said.

  “Maybe,” I said, not wanting to say too much.

  “You don’t want to see me?” she said.

  “Of course I do,” I said, alarmed.

  “Then?”

  “There’s something else I have to do,” I said.

  “Are you seeing that India Aunty from your letter?” she asked. I couldn’t tell if there was a sharpness in her voice, a hint of jealousy.

  “No. Not at all,” I said.

  “Then?”

  “Something else,” I said.

  “Why is it such a secret? Why won’t you tell me?”

  “My mother wanted me to take care of something,” I said, relieved at having come up with a lie in the nick of time.

  “When will you be free?” she asked.

  “I’ll call you,” I said and hung up.

  Rani had walked into the room on hearing the phone ring.

  “Tell your Babyji to help me with Sheela,” Vidur said to her in Hindi.

  Rani looked at me questioningly, not sure whether she should make the request on Vidur’s behalf. I could see she was happy that he had asked her.

  “I am,” I muttered to her and shrugged. I watched her as she left the room.

  Vidur was gazing at the wall when I went back to the dining table. I peered at the paper. He had written, “You smell like a rose.” I wanted to laugh. No one smelt like a rose. Not India, not Rani, not Sheela, not me, not my mother. Why couldn’t he grow up?

  “Do you think it’s good?” he asked.

  “You have to write the full thing,” I said.

  “I think we should just call Sheela,” he said.

  “What for?”

  “Let’s see if she’s free. We can meet.”

  “I have to do some things. I can’t meet her.”

  “Can I use your phone? She’s not far from here. I can go meet her.”

  My heart sank. There was no way to refuse. And since I’d just turned her down she was sure to be free and say yes to him.

  “Go ahead,” I said, looking over at the phone and hoping that in the seconds it would take him to pick up the receiver the electricity generator in the DESU office would malfunction.

  “Sheela, it’s me, Vidur,” he said. His eyes were animated, sparkling. He nervously tapped the phone table with his long fingers. I felt bad for him. For myself.

  After a short silence from his side he nodded into the receiver and said, “I’ll be there.”

  He replaced the handset and looked at me triumphantly.

  “At least I can see her,” he said enthusiastically, coming back to hug me.

  I shrugged and moved away.

  “I thought you were my friend,” he said.

  “I wanted her to be my mistress. I wanted a house with her,” I blurted out.

  “What do you mean?” he said, shaking his head. He sat down in front of the poem he had started.

  “You know what I mean,” I said.

  “I thought you were a sweet girl,” he said.

  “I’m not sweet. In fact, I’m rather sour,” I said, regaining my humor.

  “I thought you were normal,” he said.

  “Fuck off with your normalcy,” I said, getting irritated. He wasn’t going to sit around in my house telling me I wasn’t normal. No one was going to accuse me of being abnormal. Though abnormal I was, and not in the way he thought. I was abnormal because of that dream I had had and because Chakra Dev had successfully gotten under my skin. Vidur would have had a nervous breakdown if he had ever had a dream as abnormal as mine, and here I was going about my life, riding my bicycle, making love, eating, studying, and talking to my parents about politics as if I were normal.

  “Okay, then I’ll fuck off,” he said, angrily marching toward the door. I followed close behind and heard it ring in my ears as he slammed it shut in my face. I went back to the drawing room and sat on the couch. I stared at the wall. A few minutes later Rani came in.

  “Where did Vidur baba go?” she asked.

  “I have to go somewhere,” I said in response.

  I walked out the front door, also slamming it shut. I walked in the middle of the street rather than in the shade, hoping that the burning sun would cause a fatality to end the corrosion of my insides. But no such thing happened. I found myself at India’s door, ringing her bell.

  “Hello, World,” Jeet said as he opened the door. I was suddenly worried that he was an idiot child with a vocabulary of just those two words and no memory for human faces.

  “Is your mother home?”

  “Whoosh,” he said, as if taking flight. He spread out his arms and ran inside the house, leaving me at the door.

  India came out wearing her sheer nightie. She obviously liked to work in her nightclothes. My mother would have disapproved. I had been taught from the time I could use the bathroom on my own to brush my teeth, shower, and change into day clothes before starting my day.

  “What a surprise!” she said.

  “You shouldn’t have let him answer. He just let me in.”

  “But he knows you,” she said.

  “What did he tell you?”

  “He said it was the Bhaiyya who was a Didi.”

  “Great!” I said sardonically.

  “What’s the matter?” she said.

  “Hello, World! Hello, World!” Jeet said, jumping up and down.

  “Darling, go to your room and play. I have to talk to Anamika,” India said.

  “Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!” he said, taking flight once more.

  She led me to her bedroom and closed the door behind us.

  “I wasn’t expecting to see you so soon, especially after we talked on the phone the other day,” she said.

  “Why do you say that? Because I didn’t say I’d come by?”

  “I thought you might need some time after the trip. We had some tough moments.”

  I wondered if this meant she didn’t want me there. I couldn’t blame her. I had acted difficult and moody. Moreover, her time with Jeet was precious.

  “I’m sorry. I should have called before coming,” I said.

  “You look so bare, so open,” she said, embracing me. I felt the tension that had been pulsing in my body dissipate. For a second I had a desire to unburden myself to her about Vidur, Sheela, Chakra Dev, Adit, and Rani, but as she pushed me down onto her bed and unbuttoned my shirt, it gave way to the desire to live.

  Since the very first time I had fumbled around with India I had become much surer of myself. I wondered if India knew that I had not learned all my lessons at her feet. The nights with Rani had made the world of sex familiar. I understood the grammar of its pauses, its punctuations. I could claim its language of transgressions as my own. Intimacy felt like a flight into an extraordinary world, and that morning, with India, entirely unexpected and spontaneous, it felt like a blessed escape. I walked home an hour later with no greater clarity about my imperiled friendship but with a distance from it that only the act of love could have provided.

  “Will you eat lunch, Babyji?” Rani asked when I returned home. I could sense she had been waiting for me, but she didn’t ask where I had gone.

  “Sure,” I said.

  She told me that Sheela had called, saying it was urgent.

  I called Sheela back immediately.

  “Anamika, can you come over please?” She sounded terrible.

  “What’s the matter? Are you okay?”

  “I need to see you. I can come if you can’t.”

  It was out of the question for Sheela and me to sit in my room tracing circles on our bodies with Rani waiting outside. I went to the kitchen
and apologized to Rani, who was humming away as she peeled potatoes. I told her I couldn’t eat lunch. She looked highly upset.

  “Make them for dinner,” I said, walking out of the house once again, banging the door shut and suffocating from her unspoken claim on me. I knew I was hurting her, but I was unable to help myself. Easing my own life was my sole concern.

  I wondered if Vidur had told Sheela that he had called her from my house. I wondered what he’d said or done that had got her so upset. Sheela opened the door for me, her male servant nowhere to be seen.

  “Vidur’s gone mad. You shouldn’t have told him.”

  “What?”

  “That you want me for a mistress.”

  “Did he tell you he’s in love with you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “He didn’t?”

  “I mean, he isn’t. Why would he?”

  I told her about the poem and Vidur’s visit.

  “Is he crazy? He comes here, and I talk my head off about you, telling him I love you.”

  “The poor fellow doesn’t manage to get a word in with you,” I said.

  “Rubbish.”

  “Ask his father. Even he knows,” I said.

  “Adit Uncle knows that Vidur likes me?” Sheela said, her eyes widening. For a second she looked like Rani.

  “He’s probably told his mother, too.”

  “These boys . . .” she trailed off.

  “Which boys?”

  “I mean, Chakra Dev and Vidur can tell their parents they like girls, and their parents even try to help them. We can’t tell our parents anything,” Sheela said.

  “What do your parents do?” I asked. I had never met them.

  “They run a business. My mother didn’t work till three years ago, but then she joined my father’s business.”

  “Are they busy people?”

  “Yes. I see them only at dinner and on the weekends. I have so much more freedom than when my mother used to sit at home.”

  “What did you say to Vidur?” I asked, remembering that I myself, his best friend, had told him to F-off. I could still hear my own door slamming in my face when he left.

  “I told him not to worry about you, that we’re too young to know what we want when we grow up,” Sheela said. I realized she really believed it.

  “So you think our interest in being together is just juvenile?” I asked. I closed my eyes for a second and thought of the morning with India. If she could take me seriously, why couldn’t Sheela?

  “No, but we’re young. We don’t know what’s written in our futures,” she said, looking at the lines on her palm. I frowned in response.

  “Your future,” she said flirtatiously, touching the lines on my forehead.

  “We write it ourselves,” I said.

  “He writes it,” she said, pointing her finger up to the ceiling, to heaven.

  “He definitely wrote this down,” I said, pressing my finger to her lips, which yielded to take it in.

  After a few seconds she pulled away and said, “I think Vidur likes you.”

  “What rubbish!”

  “When he visits he says the things I want to say about you. It’s like having a release. All the things that are pent up in me come out of his mouth.”

  “What do you talk about?”

  “Your Adam’s apple, your smile, how you look when you are thinking and speaking, how cute you look when you stand onstage and tell the whole school to line up, Miss Head Prefect.”

  Vidur liking me was much more disturbing than him liking Sheela. I felt confused and derailed. I could see Vidur and me spinning in a vortex.

  “I need to make a call,” I said. My head was pounding.

  “Go ahead,” she said, leaning forward to kiss me before releasing me to the phone.

  “Can you leave and go to your room? Shut the door,” I said.

  “Okay. Will you call him?” she asked, her face innocent, trusting, as if I were incapable of hurting her or doing anything she would disapprove of.

  “No, someone else. A friend,” I said.

  I waited till I heard her footsteps reach the top of the stairs and then the click of her door. I called Adit in his office.

  “He’s nuts. Your son, my best friend, he’s nutty,” I said, feeling hysterical, forgetting that Adit had kissed me in the morning, that he too was now a node, a part of the asymmetric geometric figure that was no longer a love triangle but a pentagon.

  “Calm down, calm down,” he said.

  “I am calm.”

  “First things first. When can I see you next?”

  “Never. Why didn’t you tell me about Vidur?”

  “Tell you what?”

  “That he likes me.”

  “Of course he likes you.”

  “Do you think he is in love with me?”

  “He’s in love with Sheela,” Adit said.

  “She says he’s in love with me.”

  “He probably doesn’t know himself,” Adit said, laughing.

  “How can you laugh?”

  “What do you want me to do?” Adit asked.

  “I don’t know. Make him read Lolita, tell him the world is disturbing and that human beings are not pure. Slap him till he wakes up. Make him say ‘Hello, World,’” I yelled.

  “Hello, World?”

  “I mean hello to the world,” I said.

  “Just let him be for a few days, he’ll be fine,” Adit said coolly.

  “You’re his father. Don’t you care?” I asked.

  Adit sighed. “Listen, I can’t do a thing. At his age all I wanted was sex. Wherever I could get it and whenever, for whatever price. This boy is like his mother. Always the good thing, the right thing. Always heavy and serious.”

  “What am I going to do?” I asked.

  “I’ll have a talk with him. Can I see you again?”

  “No, Uncleji. No. Don’t you get it, Colonel? Don’t you understand NO? I don’t want a hexagon, a heptagon, an octagon, a nonagon. I’ve had it,” I shouted, then tensed up. I was afraid Sheela would hear me and come running down.

  “Ha! Ha!” Adit laughed, then hung up.

  I went to Sheela’s kitchen and poured myself some water from the fridge. I imagined the shapes I had mentioned and thought about studying them with a cool head. The sum of the angles of each and the properties that might be used to determine their unknown angles. I chuckled.

  I heard Sheela gingerly open her door and come down the steps.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “I heard you shouting. I had to turn up the music because I know you didn’t want me to hear what you were saying.”

  “Let’s go up to your room, mistress,” I said.

  xxiii

  Chemistry Lesson

  After I got home from Sheela’s I took a close look at the structure of the benzene ring and confirmed my detestation of chemistry. I was imprisoned in my own ring. My fantastic journey into freedom had turned out to be a fantasy, my acts of free will serving only to bind me.

  At dinner I despondently mulled over everything. If only there were a way to sweep my brain like Rani swept the house. A thorough disinfecting, a dry-cleaning. And then I would fold everything properly and keep it pristine. I managed to avoid a conversation with my parents over dinner, pretending to read my chemistry book. Without having to pretend, I looked perplexed.

  The phone rang after we had finished eating. My parents had retired to their bedroom, and Rani was cleaning up. It was Vidur.

  “I am sorry,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “For calling you abnormal.” I didn’t believe him.

  “Did your father talk to you?” I asked. As soon as I had asked the question I recognized my folly. Vidur had no idea I spoke to Adit as often as I did.

  “He did. How did you know?” he asked.

  “Just a guess,” I said as nonchalantly as possible.

  “Smart guess. He’s my best fri
end,” Vidur said, as if officially declaring that I was no longer his best friend.

  “I don’t have one. You’re lucky,” I said.

  “Listen, I don’t want to fight,” he said.

  “Then don’t.”

  “Did you know Chakra Dev gives Sheela blank calls?” he asked, changing the topic.

  “Yes. So what?”

  “I think you should speak to the principal about him when school reopens,” Vidur said.

  “I called Chakra Dev again,” I said. Despite everything that had happened, I still felt open with Vidur. It felt natural to tell him the truth.

  “What did you say to him?” he asked.

  “I asked him what he wanted, and he said he wanted to have a conversation with Sheela.”

  “He’s such a bastard.”

  “What’s wrong with him wanting to talk to her? I’m going to try to convince her to talk to him once. Maybe he will improve,” I said.

  “Are you crazy? He’s such a cheapad.”

  “Listen, he’s a human being like us. He has crushes, just like you and I do. And on the same person, if I might point out,” I said, whispering into the phone.

  “I can’t believe you’re so mean,” Vidur accused.

  “Mean? It’s only fair he should have a chance.”

  “A chance! I can’t believe my ears, Anamika. You wouldn’t help me write a poem for Sheela, but you want her to talk to Chakra Dev?” I let him rant. It was best he let off some steam.

  “Vidur, I think she could make him turn over a new leaf,” I said evenly.

  “Is this some political statement?”

  “What does politics have to do with Sheela?”

  “Is this your brahmin guilt, trying to be nice to a yadav?”

  “You know it isn’t. He’s just disturbed. I feel bad for him,” I said.

  “I’m disturbed, too,” Vidur grumbled.

  “Not the same way.”

  “Well, you were a nice best friend to have. I’d have done anything for you. I can’t believe you favor Chakra Dev over me,” he said, disappointed.

  “Vidur, please, it’s not that,” I said, sighing. I regretted having told him about it.

  “I knew I shouldn’t have listened to my father and called you. He just thinks you’re the cat’s whiskers. But I should have known how selfish you are,” he said bitterly, then hung up.