Amiya paused for a sip of water. A few drops dribbled down his chin. Orko handed him a napkin. Amiya raised it to his lips, his fingers trembling as he struggled to wipe off the drops of water.
‘But there are thousands and thousands of people in the world,’ Orko said, after his grandfather put the napkin away. ‘They all think different things. Aren’t those thousands of sides to the same story?’
‘Well…they don’t know that Orko here thinks his father is in cahoots with bombers, do they? So they don’t even know this story. The story is entirely yours.’ Amiya smiled at Orko. ‘So, there’s your side, and your father’s side. The third side, my dear Orko, is the truth.’
Orko mulled it over for a moment. It still didn’t make sense. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘This story has three sides. What about something that has nothing to do with me? Does that story have three sides too?’
‘Let’s see,’ his grandfather said, the smile reappearing on his lips. ‘For instance, your father says there are no gods, no afterlife, and that nothing willed the universe into existence. It’s all down to time and physics. Right?’
Orko nodded.
‘Your mother, on the other hand, was of a different persuasion. She didn’t deny the physics – but she didn’t think it told the whole story. She found it fascinating that the entire universe had to work together, in perfect harmony, to make life possible. There had to be something that kept it all in tune. A truth-keeper. A curator, responsible for the beauty that surrounds us.’
Orko interrupted his grandfather: ‘Do gods exist, or don’t they?’
‘Well. I haven’t seen any gods. Do you know the story of Ramakrishna Paramhansa?’
Orko nodded. Sudeshna had read to him from an anthology that chronicled the saint’s life.
‘He had visions of the goddess Kali. He had conversations with her. His life is well documented. There doesn’t seem to be any motive for him to have lied. He’s not the only one. There are people all over the world who have had supernatural experiences of some sort. There’s no way for us to climb into their skin and judge for ourselves, but in an overwhelming majority of cases there wasn’t anything to be gained from lying about the experience.’ Amiya paused. ‘But I have to admit – I don’t know if gods exist. I think they do, but I don’t know.’
Orko felt let down. He had hoped for a firm answer from his grandfather. He remembered that this had been a mere digression; they had been talking about his father and the aeroplane. He could always return to this later.
‘So what’s the third side of this story?’ he asked.
‘The third side…is, as usual, the truth,’ Amiya said. ‘The gods either are or they are not. It doesn’t matter one jot what either of us believes. Some claim to have seen gods of various kinds. Others dismiss these claims as delusions. None of that really matters. Time marches on. The planets go around the sun. You and I sit here discussing gods and aeroplanes, and we don’t know the first thing about either.’
They sat quietly for a while. Orko felt dejected. He shuffled the puzzle around in his mind. He had missed something. It was as clear as day to him. How could his grandfather dismiss the whole thing out of hand?
Then he remembered.
‘Don’t you see – he could do this only because he thinks that he won’t be punished in his next life,’ he said triumphantly.
His grandfather had fallen asleep.
The next day, Sudeshna picked Orko up from the bus stop, as usual. He had lunch with his grandfather, their napkins tucked into their collars. Orko did his homework while Amiya napped in his chair.
Amiya woke at four-thirty. Sudeshna served him his tea, with his quota of two thin arrowroot biscuits. It was cloudy, and the TV reception was incredibly clear. The ThunderCats went about their business, in pursuit of the villain of the week. Just when it was becoming really interesting, the TV fell silent and the ceiling fan began to run out of steam.
‘This is so unfair!’ Orko exclaimed.
His grandfather was quiet. Orko looked towards him, to see if he had fallen asleep. Amiya’s eyes were open, but he didn’t respond when Orko called out to him. His body seemed completely still. He nudged his grandfather, but Amiya didn’t react. Orko ran to fetch his aunt. She felt for her father’s pulse and, without a trace of emotion, rang for the doctor. ‘Please come,’ was all he heard her say. She ushered Orko out of the room. She told him that her father was very sick, and Orko should go and play outside. There was no urgency in her manner. Instinctively, Orko knew that his grandfather had died.
The first thoughts that came to Orko revolved around the unfinished conversation of the day before. He wondered if Amiya could still read his mind. His father had told him that when people died, they just stopped existing. There were no spirits, and there certainly was no afterlife. The body was just an agglomeration of organic matter that could no longer process food or oxygen, and if left alone, it began to decompose.
Sudeshna, on the other hand, told him that when people died, the spirit lingered among their loved ones until it had been convinced, by way of various rituals and appeasements of the gods, that it must depart. A virtuous life meant that the spirit would be reborn in a good family, and would prosper in the next innings. A life of sin would result in rebirth as a dog, or a jackal, or even a cockroach.
Orko didn’t really know if he believed his father’s version or his aunt’s. Complete annihilation on one hand, and an endless cycle of reincarnations on the other. He was desperate for a sign of some sort, to help him decide one way or the other. Surely the power cut was no coincidence? His grandfather had smiled at him just a few moments before he died. Was the power cut of his design, to draw Orko’s attention away from the television screen? Orko wanted to believe that his grandfather still existed, in some form, and that he would come back. He had been the best human being Orko had ever known. It seemed unjust that he would simply cease to exist. He was convinced his grandfather would not be reborn as a dog or a cockroach. If Orko led a virtuous life, maybe he would be reborn as Amiya’s granddaughter the next time around. He wondered how much time he had before the rituals were carried out. He made a mental list of all the things that he wanted to say, of all the questions he wanted answers to. It occurred to him that he could ask away all he wanted; his grandfather would no longer be able to reply. That was when he began to cry.
After Amiya died, Orko remained alert, hoping to meet his grandfather’s ghost. He wondered if the ghost would recognise him. Would it remember their conversations? Would he be frightened, if, in fact, he did come face to face with it? He was prepared for every scenario he had come across in the myriad ghost stories his father had told him, but there was no ghost to be found.
Was it possible that his grandfather had forgotten him? There was no one in the world that Orko loved more than he did his grandfather, but he couldn’t assume that he was the most important person in his grandfather’s life. Amiya had turned seventy-two on his last birthday. Seventy-two years was a very long time – longer than Orko could imagine. Surely, in his long life, his grandfather had made many friends. Perhaps he was visiting them first. He was sure Amiya would come back to him to say goodbye. He just had to be patient.
Because of their last conversation, Orko’s memories of his grandfather became inextricably entangled with the horror of the bombed aircraft. He kept replaying that truncated conversation in his mind. The indictment that had seemed so compelling at the time now seemed like a jumble of facts that didn’t really belong together.
Orko tried to form a mental picture of the people who planted the bomb on the aircraft, but he failed to fit his father into that mould. It didn’t add up. He imagined the bombers as really angry people. They had to be, to plan the deaths of so many people. His father, on the other hand, was a kind, gentle man. Orko had never seen him cry, or become violently angry. Someone like his father could never sympathise with people who blew up aeroplanes. He felt silly for having tortured himself for so many months.
He wished he hadn’t troubled his grandfather with his fantastic conjecture. He knew he had caused his grandfather anguish. Maybe he had even hastened Amiya’s demise.
The truth was that he had been angry with his father for refusing to talk about the Kanishka. He didn’t understand how his father could be stoic about something so horrific. When his father shooed him away just as he was about to have a conversation with Kundan, he felt belittled.
He still was angry with his father. He didn’t feel like he owed his father an apology. If Nandan hadn’t been so devoid of emotion, Orko would never have imagined that he was in cahoots with bombers. It had been horribly unpleasant; he could barely speak to his classmates or his teachers, lest he inadvertently betray his father.
He thought about the war movies he had watched with Kundan, and he wished the wars that gave birth to the movies had never happened. He wished everyone was like his grandfather: capable of seeing three sides of every story.
A few months after Amiya’s passing, Sudeshna announced that she was going away to Dehradun, to tend to unfinished business. Before she left, she handed Orko a large box wrapped in old newspaper, sealed with sticky tape. The box had his name on it, written in a familiar shaky hand. In the box, Orko found a stack of notebooks, tied together with twine.
In the top right corner of the first page of each notebook was his mother’s name, and the year. The years were long ago, markers of time that had passed before he was born.
Some of the early notebooks had the words ‘Private’ or ‘Keep Out’ written in the centre of the first page. Orko had notebooks like these. In them, he wrote things that he wouldn’t tell anyone. They were private. He would be aghast if his father, or Urmi, or even his grandfather knew the things he had written in them. He couldn’t possibly read his mother’s notebooks. He wondered if his grandfather had read them.
With the notebooks was a faded black-and-white picture of his mother, dressed in a saree. She was sitting on a bench. The bench was probably somewhere in the park by the side of the lake, but the picture had too little detail to suggest exactly where it was.
At the bottom of the box was a little black volume. It was hardbound, a little smaller and thicker than his mother’s notebooks. The front cover had no title – just a heart, engraved in silver. The title page had an inscription in his mother’s writing. His mother’s name and his grandfather’s surname. He imagined his name followed by his grandfather’s surname. He liked his mother’s name more than he liked his own.
Over the next few days Orko read the book many times, never tiring of it. The Happy Prince. The Nightingale and the Rose. The Remarkable Rocket. The Devoted Friend. The stories cast a spell over him, and he felt as if he knew the author intimately, and that the stories were written especially for him. He put the book away only because he didn’t want to wear out the yellowing pages.
When Urmi’s mother learned that Sudeshna was going away, she convinced Nandan that Orko was too young to spend all that time alone in an empty flat. He could have lunch with Urmi, and they could finish their homework together. Afterwards, they could go out and play.
‘Thank you very much, Ketakidi,’ his father said, as they stood to take their leave. ‘You’ve taken a great weight off my shoulders.’
Orko should have been happy; after all, Urmi was his best friend. By then, though, he had begun to envy her, for things that would seem frivolous to most people. The earrings. The pretty clothes. The dance classes. Sometimes the envy drowned out every other emotion, and left him feeling unworthy, friendless and desolate.
Three
Gariahat literally means ‘the market of Garia’. Tens of thousands of people shop here every day, for vegetables, fish, fruits, mutton, stationery, tea, underwear. The footpaths that lead to the market are lined with shops that sell books and toys, sweetmeats and shoes and kitchen utensils. There are jeweller’s shops, where quiet old men sit behind iron bars with their magnifying glasses and their tiny scales, and there are hole-in-the-wall shops that repair broken food processors and wristwatches. At the junction is a megastore that sells television sets, refrigerators, stereo systems, toasters and ovens.
The most abundant, though, are the shops that sell clothing, costume jewellery and cosmetics. They do a brisk business all year round, but in the festive season they go into overdrive. There are throngs of people on the footpaths – women, mostly, walking at a leisurely pace. The shopkeepers vie for their attention.
‘Mashima!’ they call out to the older, matronly women. Orko’s mother would probably qualify as boudi. Girls Orko’s age, or a little older, are didimoni. In this sea of humanity, Orko is less than human. No one calls out to him. No one ever tries to sell him anything. They hurry him along if he stops in his tracks.
He dawdles by a newsstand, carelessly thumbing through a sports weekly. Across the footpath, perched precariously on the curb, is a shanty, fashioned out of salvaged asbestos siding and discarded packing crates. The makeshift counter is covered by a blue tarpaulin. Spread out on the counter are cardboard boxes containing lipstick, eyeliner, hairclips and bottles of nail polish. Above the counter, strung out on lengths of twine, are earrings. They’re mounted, like a lepidopterist’s butterflies, on white cardboard squares about half the size of a business card. There are simple studs, gold and silver, set with rubies and emeralds and topaz. Some are elaborate, shaped like tiny chandeliers, designed to dangle tantalisingly by the jawbone. The ones Orko likes best are the long, simple earrings, made of wooden beads dyed crimson and ochre and green.
A few weeks ago, Orko and Urmi had stopped at this stall on their way home. They had a tutorial after school, so Urmi couldn’t take the school bus. They left school together, Urmi and Orko. He wanted to take Fern Road, but she insisted they come this way.
As they passed the shanty, the man in charge called out to Urmi. ‘Didimoni! Here! Two pairs, for just thirty rupees!’
Urmi bought a pair fashioned out of colourful beads, and another, made from oxidised metal, with tiny dragonflies dangling at the tips. Orko was breathless. Memories rushed in, like a gust of wind before a rainstorm. The bustle of Gariahat faded away, and they were seven years old again. Urmi had just had her ears pierced, and she wore a pair of gold earrings that were just large enough to go around the bottom of her earlobe and back again to the perforation.
‘Can I have earrings like Urmi’s?’ Orko remembers asking his mother.
‘Earrings? But you’re a boy, and boys don’t wear earrings,’ his mother said.
‘I’m not a boy,’ he said. That was the first time he remembers saying it.
‘Of course you’re a boy,’ his mother replied.
‘Please?’ he persisted. ‘I just want one pair, like Urmi’s.’
‘You should make friends with other boys,’ his mother said to him. ‘Playing with Urmi all the time isn’t doing you any good. Let me see if I can get you into that football camp during the summer holidays.’
Orko let the matter go, because he didn’t want to play football. He thought it was silly, kicking a ball from one end of the field to the other. It wasn’t fair. Urmi didn’t have to play football.
That night, he prayed to Ma Lokkhi, to turn him into a girl, just like Urmi. As he fell asleep, he imagined the two of them playing in her room. He was wearing a frock that belonged to him, and earrings just like hers. He was going to need a new name. Maybe his mother could help him with that.
When he awoke the next morning, he ran his fingers through his hair, even before he was fully awake. He was disappointed when it felt familiar: short, rough, bristly near the back of his neck. He felt his earlobes, but there were no holes. He ran to the mirror, and was heartbroken. Ma Lokkhi hadn’t granted his wish. He wondered if it was because everyone thought he was a boy; if Ma Lokkhi turned him into a girl, she would then have to secretly meddle with other people’s memories.
That was when he began to fear that he was stuck being a boy. He wasn’t going to grow up and be like his mo
ther. He was never going to wear a dress, or a saree. He would never have earrings. The despair he felt was tinged with envy, and that envy has remained with him, rearing its ugly head when he least expects it. Sometimes it’s bigger than him, and it wraps itself around him until he can’t breathe. It even has a colour, and it isn’t green; it’s burnt sienna.
‘Why don’t you take up football?’ Orko’s father said to him out of the blue one day. ‘You’ll make new friends. Besides, a boy your age should play a team sport. It builds character.’
The sports club in their neighbourhood ran a coaching program at the club grounds. It was just a few minutes from their flat. ‘I’ve made enquiries,’ his father said. ‘The coach is excellent. He’s agreed to take you, even though you’re already fourteen. He says you should be able to catch up if you make the effort.’
Orko and Urmi passed the club sometimes, when they went cycling in the afternoon. They never stopped there, for there was always a game or two of football going on. The boys on the field looked older than them. They were all bigger than them. They were loud, and they were muddy from the tumbles they took on the field.
‘What fun,’ Urmi said when she heard about the football camp. Orko knew she wasn’t being sincere, because they had talked about football before, and they both thought it was violent and silly.
In the end he agreed to go, because the football camp was only for boys. Urmi took dance lessons, and when he asked her if he could come too, she laughed. ‘You’d look really silly,’ she said. ‘Besides, there are no boys in the class.’ This was Orko’s chance to get even with her. He was going to pretend that he had changed his mind about football. He would tell Urmi how much he enjoyed it, and he would brag about his footballing prowess. When she expressed interest, he would taunt her. He would laugh at her, and tell her that girls could never play football as well as boys, and she shouldn’t bother trying.
Fern Road Page 5
