And where did Shekhar come from? How did he get here? He remembers those days leading up to Chandra’s birth. He had asked his mother, ‘Mother, where did he come from?’ And Mother had said, ‘The midwife brought him.’ And when he had asked the midwife why she had brought one that was so small, couldn’t she have brought a bigger one, she said, ‘I didn’t bring him. The doctor that was here, he brought him in his bag. And that bag can’t hold one that’s any bigger than him.’ Shekhar didn’t believe either of them, but he kept quiet about it. Many days later, when he saw a baby bird hatch from an egg for the first time, he knew that Mother had lied to him. And to test his mother, he went to her and asked, ‘Mother, does the doctor visit the birds, too?’
Mother didn’t understand his question. She said, ‘No, why?’
‘Then where do baby birds come from?’
‘They hatch from the eggs.’
Mother was telling the truth up to this point! Shekhar pressed on with a renewed hope, ‘And where do eggs come from?’
‘God sends them.’
That same wall—the biggest obstacle in the way of knowledge—God! Then he asked his sister, ‘How does God send eggs?’
‘They probably come down when it rains.’
A few days later Shekhar realized that was a lie, too. Rain falls the same way everywhere, but how did eggs end up in specific nests, all different from each other? Then one day he found a nest that was empty, and the next day there was an egg in it, though it hadn’t rained the night before . . .
Shekhar knew that everyone was lying to him. And this fuelled his desire to know the truth . . .
*
A special room was sequestered from the rest of the house. It was cleaned, swept with dung patties and its windows were locked. Mother went there to live. A midwife came to stay with her and everyone was prohibited from going there. Remembering what it was like when Chandra was born, Shekhar knew that the midwife, the doctor or some other power was going to grace their household again with another favour. And so he began awaiting the arrival of the doctor.
In the middle of the night, Shekhar awoke with a start. He didn’t know why he had woken up, but he knew something had happened; the air was heavy with muffled quiet . . .
He sat up and looked around. He saw that the cot next to his was empty and that Saraswati was gone. He got down from his cot and went to the other room where his father slept.
Father wasn’t there. A light was on downstairs.
For some reason, Shekhar didn’t have the courage to go downstairs and see what was going on. Any other time, he would have definitely gone downstairs to investigate, but not this time. He wanted to be snuffed out, this time, he didn’t want to be seen. If someone had asked him what he was doing there—no, he hadn’t the courage to bear the question, let alone give an answer. He no longer had any confidence in himself.
But curiosity . . . He stood there like a drawn bowstring, taut and twitchy . . .
Then a sharp, piercing, but weak, and slightly agitated scream . . .
Shekhar realized that whatever power had been responsible for this had evaded him. And he still didn’t have an answer to his question . . .
The staircase creaked from Saraswati’s steps. He wasn’t afraid of her, but still his heart began racing, and he ran to his cot and lay back down.
Saraswati entered. She sat down on the cot, lifted her feet, wrapped her arms around her shins and leaned her chin on her knees.
Shekhar couldn’t keep still. He asked, ‘What happened?’, as if he had just woken up.
Saraswati was startled. Then she said, ‘Shekhar, it happened—you have another sister.’
Sister? Were sisters things that ‘happened’? Shekhar asked, ‘Like you?’
‘Don’t be silly. She’s tiny at the moment, like a baby bird. When she grows up—’
Gravely, Shekhar said, ‘Saraswati!’
Taken aback, Saraswati asked, ‘What is it?’ Shekhar never called her by her name.
‘If I ask you a question will you answer it? You don’t have to answer it; just don’t lie to me.’
Suspiciously, Saraswati asked, ‘What?’
Shekhar steeled himself to ask, ‘Where do babies come from?’
Saraswati didn’t respond immediately.
As he watched and waited, a flood of words welled up inside him. He said, ‘The midwife brings them, the doctors bring them, God gives them—I’ve heard all of these things, so don’t tell me that! I know those are all lies. So tell me, if that was how they came, then why did it have to happen so secretly? Why don’t either of us get them? And she said that she didn’t want any more children, so why did she get one? Why didn’t she send it back? Why does God send them? When I kept asking for a sister, why did he send me a brother? I’ve seen it with my own eyes how baby birds are hatched from eggs. The mother has to crack the eggs to get them out. Where do the eggs come from? And now we have a sister. But why did she have to come in the middle of the night? Why couldn’t she come during the day? And why can’t we go over there? Why does everyone lie about it? Tell me, I know you know.’ And then suddenly, out of embarrassment, he stopped. He had, perhaps, never given a monologue of that length . . .
Saraswati tried to be evasive. She said, ‘Wait, doesn’t God send them?’
‘Don’t lie to me, sister.’
Somehow, Saraswati managed to say, ‘They come from a mother’s body.’
Shekhar sat up.
‘From where? How?’
‘I don’t know!’ She wrapped her head and face in the blanket and lay down. Shekhar called to her repeatedly, even went to her and shook her, but she didn’t speak, didn’t say a word.
Shekhar lay back down and stared at the ceiling. It was as if he were willing himself up to the ceiling, hanging from it, so that he could speak to himself, ‘Think, Shekhar. Don’t ask anyone else, just think. You tell me, where did you come from? How did you get here?’
It was morning and Shekhar was still interrogating that double hanging from the ceiling whom he had pinned there with his eyes.
‘Children come from a mother’s body.’
Saraswati hadn’t lied to him. Otherwise she wouldn’t have been so embarrassed. After so much pain and strife, he had finally got hold of one thing that was true, that was and simply was—that couldn’t be changed.
‘Children come from a mother’s body.’
But then what?
Beyond that there is a wall, and for its bricks it has God and society, and family, and mother and father, and tradition, and the substance which binds them all together and gives it significance is fear.
Shekhar looks at every woman who walks in front of that wall and thinks, there must be one hiding in her body somewhere, too. But where?
*
Shekhar has started stealing.
Earlier, it hadn’t been possible for him to sneak around doing mischievous things. Because when he was by himself, the principles of his soul, more than others, restrained his actions. But now he was respectable, cultured and noble on the surface—who was described as ‘a son who is like a daughter’—while on the inside he was falling.
Increasingly, he was being asked to take on more responsibilities. When he was younger he would be so excited to take on even small tasks and would do them so enthusiastically that more often than not he would make a mess of it, but now he schemed at each opportunity, trying to find ways of spoiling things secretly.
Sometimes he was given the keys to the trunk, and he’d take a few coins for himself. Not because he wanted them, but only because he had the key, and he could abuse the privilege. In the evenings, he was tasked with bringing milk for Ishwardutt and Prabhudutt’s teacher (they were currently studying for their exams), and he would drink a few gulps of it along the way. Not because he didn’t get milk at home, but because he could do something wrong without anyone seeing him. It got so bad that whenever he’d go into the storeroom, he would spill some ghee behind a box. Every time he
did such things it was as if he were thinking, ‘You all think that I am good, but I am still rotten. You are fools to call me good, as if it were a boost to my ego.’
No one got wind of any of the things he was doing and his reputation kept improving at home, and with every increase in his reputation, he slid a little closer to his downfall . . .
He was given the keys to the cupboard with the books in it because he had been asked to get almonds or some such thing from it.
He opened the cupboard, took out a few books and hid them under the cupboard, took out the almonds and returned the key.
Later, when he had a chance, he picked up the books and read them in secret.
Shekhar looked over these books printed on cheap yellowed and pink paper with big Lucknow typeface, but he couldn’t figure out what was so important about them that they had to be kept hidden away.
The Gardener’s Daughter; The Husband with Two Wives; The Widow of Baghdad; Three and a Half Lovers; Seven and a Half Murders; The Beautiful Robber; The Twenty-Five Tales of Baital; The Tale of the Parrot and the Mynah; Thirty Stories of the Throne; The Magic Ring; The Mysteries of Egypt.
He put them into piles of twos and threes as he inspected them all. They were so cheap, filthy and crude that he felt nauseated and couldn’t read them, but because he knew that they were forbidden and that by reading them he would be doing something wrong, he forced himself to read until he finished the last one. And it made him so happy when he could address his mother in his mind and say, ‘You think that I am good and decent, don’t you? But I’m a scoundrel, corrupted, and I read all of these novels that you were keeping from me . . .’
Shekhar began tattling.
If ever one of his brothers did the slightest of things they weren’t supposed to, Shekhar would run to his mother and say, ‘Mother, Mother, look at what so-and-so did!’ Sometimes he would complain even when no one had done anything and then when that person was getting slapped or beaten Shekhar would think to himself, ‘That’s right. Good, he deserves a beating. I’m bad but everyone respects me, thinks highly of me. Why are you being good?’
And when his brothers looked at him with apprehension or suspicion he would feel that he was something, too . . .
One step higher.
Shekhar became a rhymester. Nothing vulgar—Shekhar hadn’t learned what vulgarity was yet—just crude and cruel. He could never read them to anyone, but when he was by himself he would read them out loudly. And on such occasions he would even curse into the air—curses whose meaning he didn’t even know, but which he had overheard and which he knew were bad things to say . . .
Being good or bad held absolutely no meaning for Shekhar. It only mattered to him that he was something—and that he could feel that he was something. This feeling became a very important crutch for him.
*
Chandra had thrown stones and broken the flowerpots outside the house. He ran innocently to his mother and said, breathlessly, ‘Mother, Mother, I didn’t break the flowerpots.’
Mother asked, ‘What flowerpots?’
‘I didn’t break them.’
That’s when Shekhar got there. ‘Mother, you know those flowerpots outside, the ones with the blue flowers in them, the ones that Father ordered from the office? Chandra broke them by throwing stones at them.’
Chandra said, ‘Mother, I already told you I didn’t break them,’ as if by saying it first it made his point more credible.
Shekhar turned to leave as if he were content at having finished his obligations and had nothing more to do with the matter.
Mother asked Chandra, ‘Are you lying to me? Let me see which flowerpots you broke.’
She took him by the hand and dragged him outside with her.
Chandra was beaten repeatedly. Who knows what kind of things Mother threatened him with to get him to admit that he had broken those flowerpots, but he wouldn’t confess. It was intolerable to Mother that someone would flout her authority; in her order of things, he should have confessed even if he hadn’t broken the flowerpots because she had determined that he had broken them . . .
For a while Shekhar sat with a book open in front of him and watched the spectacle. He was amazed at his mother who didn’t appear angry or sound enraged, but still kept beating the boy, for whom this was a matter of pride, that a child should say what she wanted him to say . . .
When children are beaten by angry parents, they bear the beatings because their spirits aren’t wounded by them. But when they are beaten without anger, dispassionately, righteously, a crack opens up in their psyches. Shekhar didn’t know this at the time, nor did his mother know it, but this didn’t make it any less true.
Mother called out, ‘Saraswati! Bring me a live coal with the pincers.’
Saraswati brought it.
Mother took the pincers in her hand and said, ‘Tell the truth or else I’ll put this on your tongue.’
‘I am telling the truth.’
Shekhar thought to himself, ‘Will Mother really put the live coal in his mouth?’ He couldn’t believe it, but that anger-free, expressionless face . . .
‘Confess that you broke the flowerpots.’
‘I didn’t break them.’
Mother pressed Chandra’s cheeks together with one hand and forced his mouth open and she brought the coal very close and said, ‘Confess!’
Saraswati was standing right there, but she wasn’t looking. The coal was so close to Chandra’s face that he could feel the heat and his head was shaking like an epileptic’s. Mother was still pressing his cheeks together and his mouth was still open, waiting for the coal.
Only children believe completely. Adults have the privilege of distinguishing between pretence and truth. Shekhar, all of a sudden, believed . . .
‘Confess!’
Shekhar got up with a jolt, pushed his mother with one hand and slapped the pincers away with the other, and roughly said to Chandra, ‘Get away from here.’
And to himself he thought, ‘Well done, Chandra. Drown yourself, Shekhar.’
Perhaps something came over Mother. She didn’t say anything, not even to Shekhar. She just went inside. The matter was over.
Half an hour later.
Shekhar was trying to concentrate on his studies. He had his pen in his hand. He stared at a line he had written in his notebook and was trying to copy that very same line a second time. But words were echoing in his head, and all he could see was that open mouth, sometimes it was Chandra’s, sometimes it was Shekhar’s, sometimes it was Mother’s, and right next to them was a burning coal . . . Every time Shekhar thought, ‘That’s Chandra’s mouth,’ it would suddenly turn into Mother’s, and when he thought, ‘Mother,’ it would turn into Shekhar’s. Saraswati was standing there, facing away from him, trying not to look at him . . . And in his ears, ‘Confess’, ‘Well done, Chandra!’, ‘Drown yourself, Shekhar!’, ‘I’m telling the truth’. Without any order or connection, they kept coming and going and coming back . . .
Still, Shekhar was trying to write . . .
Chandra came to him and said, ‘Give me the pen.’
Shekhar came back to reality and said, ‘I’m writing.’
‘Give it. I need to write.’
‘Take another one.’
‘No, I want this one. Give it.’
‘Give me a little while and then you can have it. Let me finish writing.’
Chandra went to Saraswati to complain, ‘Sister, brother won’t give me the pen.’
Saraswati was reading. Without looking up from her book, she said, ‘Shekhar, give him the pen!’
Chandra came back and said, ‘Give it.’
Shekhar got a little annoyed and said, ‘I already told you, let me finish writing.’
Chandra screamed at him from right there, ‘Look at him, sister, he won’t give it.’
Saraswati responded just as before, ‘Give it to him, Shekhar! Don’t give me a headache.’
‘I’ve already told him that I’ll give it
to him once I’m done writing. He won’t listen to me. And on top of it, you’re scolding me!’
But Saraswati was engrossed in her book, and Chandra had already gone to complain to Mother. No one heard Shekhar’s reply.
Mother screamed from somewhere inside the house, ‘Shekhar, just give him the pen!’
Shekhar started to say, ‘Mother, I’ve explained to him—’
Mother darted into the room. ‘What?’
‘I’ve explained to him—’
‘I don’t care. First give him the pen.’
‘Mother—’
Mother slapped him across the face and said, ‘Are you going to give it to him or not?’
‘Mother—’
Mother emphasized each word in her sentence this time, ‘I said, first give him the pen. Then I’ll listen to what you have to say.’
Shekhar, too, emphasized each word in his response, ‘I’m not giving it to him.’
Mother gave him three or four slaps across the face in quick succession and said, ‘Came just now to save him, didn’t you? And now—’
Shekhar felt as if this last argument made his action even more justified, but who would listen to him?
‘Where is the pen?’
Chandra quickly chimed in, ‘Brother is hiding it in his fist.’
Mother started trying to pry his fist open. She was unsuccessful so she put his hand on the table and began hitting it, first with her fists and then with the edge of a ruler. He didn’t give up.
Shekhar couldn’t bear the pain or his frustration at his own helplessness.
He said, ‘I’m not going to give it to him. I told you I wouldn’t, even if you try and kill me!’
Mother let go of his hand all at once, and stared at him, flabbergasted. There was something about his voice, in the way he said ‘try’, that embarrassed her. She took Chandra by the arm, led him outside and said, ‘Come with me. I’ll get you a new pen.’
Shekhar Page 16
