‘Come here,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you how to walk like a man.’
Orko walked towards Bishu, more self-conscious than ever. His left foot felt heavier than his right, and the faster he tried to walk, the more off-balance he felt. Bishu had a look in his eyes that made Orko very uncomfortable. He felt as if his every move was being scrutinised – that he was being evaluated, and the prognosis wasn’t good.
Bishu took him by the shoulders and turned him around. He stooped, placing Orko’s left foot to the left of the lines, and his right foot to the right. ‘Now, walk to the other end. Don’t let your feet cross the lines,’ he said.
Orko walked, slowly, awkwardly, to the other end of the terrace. It was harder than he had imagined. He was reminded of the time when his father bought him his first pair of jeans. After the first day of wearing them, his inner thighs were chafed, and they smarted when they brushed together. He had walked about awkwardly, with a sense of imbalance and sprawl, for days.
‘There, wasn’t that easy?’ Bishu said with a smile.
Orko nodded, although he wasn’t sure if he agreed.
‘Do you have a terrace at home?’ Bishu asked.
‘Yes, sir, I do,’ said Orko.
‘Draw lines like these on your terrace. Practise walking every day, like you practise taking shots at the goal,’ Bishu said. ‘When you get the walk right, everything will fall into place.’ He patted Orko on the back. ‘And stop playing with Urmila, and all the other girls. Start behaving like a man and no one will dare bully you. You’ll find that they’re nice boys after all.’
Orko wanted to tell Bishu that the name was Urmi, but he didn’t. It was very unlikely that Bishu and Urmi would ever meet.
On his way home, he imagined a pair of parallel lines drawn in blue tailor’s chalk, all the way from Bishu’s doorstep to his own. He walked slowly, deliberately, his feet straddling the imaginary lines. When he neared the football field, he began to feel silly walking like that. It would be really embarrassing if Urmi saw him. He ran, as fast as he could, until he reached home.
The blue lines drawn in tailor’s chalk are everywhere now, a reminder of the fact that Orko isn’t merely a boy who’d rather be a girl. He has a grave disease, and it makes boys hate him and call him names. It is the reason why no one takes him seriously. Finally, it all makes sense. It is as if he had these tiny pieces of a puzzle and they’ve suddenly come together to reveal a picture that fills Orko with despair.
In the beginning, Orko didn’t want to believe that he had a disease. He was healthy, and he was reasonably intelligent. He did well in school, and he had friends that he liked being with. Before he went to that football camp, no one had ever told him he was sick. On the other hand, Bishu was a famous footballer, and he had shelves full of medals and trophies. He seemed to know what he was talking about. Orko couldn’t dismiss Bishu’s hypothesis, and it was proven when, one day, he showed up for a football game during his lunch break at school. The boys laughed at him. ‘Go play hopscotch with the girls,’ said Kaushik, and the boys laughed some more.
Orko slunk away to the guava tree behind the school buildings. He sat on the parapet, the world turning circles around him. ‘I don’t feel too well,’ he said when his friends came looking for him. They asked him what was wrong, but Orko couldn’t say. ‘Let’s all sit here today,’ Nilanjana said, and they sat with him on the parapet, but Orko didn’t hear a word they were saying. He wanted to cry but he couldn’t. He looked around him. These were his friends, and they were all girls. Bishu was right. He was sick. He stood up and, as he walked away, Urmi called after him; Orko didn’t stop, and he didn’t look back.
Now, Orko is an island. At school, he still shares his tiffin with his friends, but he doesn’t join them when they go for a walk afterwards. He barely speaks to his classmates, and his teachers often call him out for seeming distracted. His schoolwork isn’t what it used to be, because he no longer does his homework with Urmi.
At the football camp he can’t concentrate anymore, and Bishu seldom picks him for the team. He watches the game through the nylon netting strung between the goalposts, and feels as though he’s in a cage. Sometimes, when he’s really angry, he’s outside the cage: the football game is a science experiment and the players are all mice, running after a ball of cheese.
After the game, Bishu takes him home, and although he’s numb with dread, he quietly climbs onto the crossbar of Bishu’s bicycle. On Bishu’s terrace, he learns how to be a man. He knows now that he should be proud of his penis, and he shouldn’t sit with his knees pressed together. He knows that he shouldn’t carry his books clasped to his chest. Girls do that, because they don’t want boys to gawk at their breasts. Girls are nothing. They don’t have to be strong, because when they grow up, they’ll be married and their husbands will look after them. They have to be pretty, to attract good husbands.
From the terrace, they go inside, to the bedroom. Orko is still too girly, and he must be punished. The room is grey. His body is grey, and it doesn’t belong to him. There’s coconut oil, but it does little for the piercing pain that he now knows intimately. He lies still, but that just adds to Bishu’s rage. When the rage subsides, Bishu leaves the room, and comes back with a roshogolla, or a bar of chocolate. Orko’s reward, for having endured the punishment like a man.
His life seems a charade now. It’s exhausting to keep up this charade, because most of the time it seems futile. The boys at the football camp no longer tease him, but they aren’t his friends. He can never be friends with them. Bishu has warned him that he mustn’t tell anyone about the disease, and he can’t talk to Urmi or Nilanjana because he’s scared that he’ll end up telling them everything. He’s in a deep, dark hole, all alone, screaming a silent scream. The hole grows deeper every time he goes to Bishu’s house, but he can’t bring himself to stop going, because Bishu is his only hope. He knows that he isn’t cured yet, because he still hates football, and he burns with envy at the sight of pretty earrings dangling from the earlobes of strangers.
Four
The tail-lights of the taxi recede into the distance. They flicker as the decrepit contraption slows to a halt near the mouth of the lane. Four quick flashes of yellow and it’s gone, leaving behind only a whiff of burnt diesel in the air.
The one-legged signpost maintains its solitary vigil by the entrance. Orko pushes the gate open; it’s so quiet that he can hear flakes of rust coming off the hinges. The cluster of flats is a patchwork of dark and light – fluorescent white, incandescent yellow, shadowy grey. A cricket chirps in the distance.
The stairwell is dark, but Orko knows each of the forty-two steps, each crack in the concrete banister. He can’t see the nameplate on the door as he feels his way around the padlock. The key turns with a click. He quietly slips off the padlock, but when he undoes the deadbolt it clatters against the door panel. He closes the door behind him, quietly, as if he were an intruder in his own home. When he switches on the light, the sight of his hand on the switch is strange and unfamiliar.
‘Hello,’ he says to no one, because tonight he’s alone. ‘Hello,’ he says again, and again, varying the pitch of his voice, but it still doesn’t sound right.
This night of being alone came about suddenly. He fretted about the board examinations as he meandered through Fern Road after school. On the bus, he revisited the practice test they were given, and he knew immediately that he had done poorly. When he was at the mouth of the lane, the thought of the stack of melamine bowls in the fridge killed his appetite. At the front door, he fished out his keys from his pocket but the padlock was gone. Confused, he rang the bell.
‘I have to leave for Hazaribagh tonight,’ Nandan said as he opened the door. ‘Kabul-kaka has had a heart attack.’
Kabul is Orko’s great-uncle; Orko calls him Kabul-dadu. He’s a doctor, and he once worked for the government of Bihar. Orko doesn’t remember the specifics of how they’re related – only that Kabul-dadu was born in Kabul. He’
s a little embarrassed by this, because when they were on the train to Hazaribagh a few years ago, his father drew their family tree on a scrap of paper and marked the relevant branches. As the train pulled into the station, Nandan was at the door, restless, searching for a face in the crowd on the platform. ‘Tenia!’ he called out, his face alight with a boyish smile that Orko had never seen before. He waved, and a man in the crowd waved back. The man ran alongside the train, boarding their compartment even before the train had come to a halt. Orko was surprised when Nandan embraced the man, because he had never seen his father embrace anyone.
‘This is Tenia-kaka,’ Nandan said. ‘We’ve been friends for the longest time.’
‘The last time I saw you, you were a little baby,’ the man said to Orko.
They drove for what seemed like hours, until they came to a tall gate set in a boundary wall that looked like a giant mouse had nibbled off portions of it. Kabul-dadu was at the gate when they arrived. He looked older than Orko’s father, but not quite as old as his grandfather. He lived by himself in a house that was the largest Orko had ever seen, and it looked like it was hundreds of years old. Much of the house was closed off – windows were nailed shut, doors boarded over, and across their frames were cobwebs that looked like they had hung there for decades. Kabul-dadu told Orko that the house had once been a palace. The stables had been converted into a garage, and by the stables was a small outhouse. Tenia lived there, with his daughter, Lali.
Lali was a few years older than Orko. The first hour they spent together was awkward, because Lali’s Bangla wasn’t very good, and Orko had just started Hindi lessons at school. Before the day was over, though, they were playing together by the defunct fountain in the garden. They pretended that the headless cherub at its centre was a castle, and the pool around it was a moat. Tenia’s goat had recently given birth to a kid, and the tiny creature was a dragon that liked to set things on fire.
‘What’s a dragon?’ Lali asked him.
‘It’s a giant flying creature. It breathes fire, and it eats up everyone in sight,’ said Orko.
Lali laughed, and Orko thought it was because of his poor Hindi.
‘There’s no such thing,’ she said.
The kid kept trying to climb out of the fountain. It bleated frantically when it lost its footing. After a while, Lali gathered it up in her arms and took it back to its mother.
Now, Lali is a mother, and she no longer lives in the outhouse by the stables. Kabul-dadu is gravely ill, and Orko’s father is on his way to the house that had once been a palace. Orko is home alone, and this flat in which he has lived all his life seems strange and unfamiliar.
He can’t fathom why he feels this way. Everything is where it should be. The dining table is in the corner, by the kitchen door, with the three mismatched chairs around it. The sofa set is exactly where it has been for as long as he can remember. The calendar on the wall shows November, with the jagged edge of October still showing near the crimp. The refrigerator is by the door to his room, with his mother’s photograph on it, just like it had been in the morning.
In the picture, his mother’s cheeks are less filled out than he remembers. She’s looking at him, mildly amused, and not for the first time Orko is annoyed with her. The last words she wrote to him are inscribed on the title page of an abridged version of Moby-Dick. ‘Dearest Orko,’ she wrote, ‘this is one of my favourite stories. You must read the grown-up version when you’re older.’ She had bought the book for his eighth birthday, but it was his grandfather who handed it to him, after he came home from the hospital. He didn’t read much into the inscription at the time, but now it seems that she knew she wouldn’t be around when he was old enough to read the unabridged Moby-Dick. He wishes he could tell her that he loved the story too, but the truth is that every time he reads the book, it seems a little more revolting.
In Orko’s wardrobe, hidden behind his winter clothes, is the old cardboard box with his mother’s notebooks. When they came into his possession, he couldn’t imagine that he would read them one day. Tonight, he pushes aside the stack of sweaters and scarves and cradles the box in his arms. It smells of mothballs.
There are seven notebooks in all. He lays them out on his bed. When he was little, he often played with his mother’s things, and she always knew exactly what he had been up to. Now, of course, he isn’t little anymore, and he’s much better at keeping secrets.
One of the notebooks is emerald-green and larger than the others. On the first page is his mother’s maiden name and a date. His mother was seventeen when she started this notebook. At twenty, she was married, and she no longer went by the name inscribed on this page. Near the centre of the page, in large block letters, is the word ‘PRIVATE’.
Orko dwells on the meaning of that word, and he decides that it means entirely different things to different people. Urmi marked her diaries that way when they were young children, but she often let him read them anyway. In her notebooks she wrote stories, inspired by the Famous Five. She would change the names of the characters to Bodhi, Urmi and Orko, but when he read the stories he knew Orko was really George, because in the Famous Five stories, George was a girl who dressed like a boy.
The notebook has no margins or lines. It starts with a pencil sketch of a butterfly, with stripes like a zebra’s. There are a few pages of song lyrics in English and in Bangla, interspersed with sketches of a young girl. In one of the sketches, she’s looking straight into his eyes, and Orko is a little rattled because she looks like she could be his sister. In another, she’s looking away. She’s naked, and her left shoulder is obscured by a butterfly’s wing.
The next notebook is smaller, and thicker. The cover is nondescript, and the first page doesn’t have any markings on it. The sketches are fewer, in blue ink. The writing is dense; the colour of the ink changes from page to page. In the first few pages, his mother is exasperated because her father won’t let her go to Shantiniketan to study fine arts. She rants, and she writes terrible poems about birds in cages. About halfway through the notebook her father relents, and she writes that she always knew he would. Orko is confused, because as far as he knows, his mother never went to Shantiniketan to study fine arts. He becomes distracted and flips through the rest of the pages, but there are just sketches with illegible scribbles near the margins.
In the notebook dated two years before his birth, his mother does, in fact, go to Shantiniketan. Orko feels a little unhinged, because all his life he has been given to believe that his mother studied English literature, and that she graduated from a college in the city, two years after he was born. On the page before him, the ink is black. His mother is overwhelmed by her august surroundings, and she’s in awe of her brilliant classmates. She worries that she’s an impostor, and that she’s never going to be any good. When her despair is at its worst, a man appears, in green ink. His name is Indrajit, and at first his mother finds him annoying. She complains that he smells of cheap cigarettes, and that he writes pretentious poetry about poverty and about revolution, while making it known that he comes from a family of means. He plays the guitar and sings folk songs in Bangla, but he secretly listens to opera. A few pages later, she worries that her father won’t like Indrajit, and she contemplates running away with him to the badlands of Bihar. The notebook ends there, and Orko feverishly opens the next one. On the first page is his mother’s married name. The rest of the notebook is empty.
Orko lies in bed with the stack of notebooks by his side. Through his childhood, he had always known that he wanted to be like his mother, and now, alone in this flat that she once inhabited, he realises that when she was a young girl, she was much like he is now. She daydreamed, like him, and she wrote down song lyrics in her notebooks. Like him, she didn’t understand why she wanted the things that she did. She was wracked by self-doubt and, like him, felt like an impostor among her peers.
He remembers how she laughed until she was out of breath, and he laughed with her, even when he didn’t know why
she was laughing. He remembers her, in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette. When she saw him at the door, she quickly threw the cigarette out of the window, and her manner was much like his own when she caught him playing with her lipstick. She wiped her face with her saree, but Orko knew she had been crying. He has never seen his father cry, or laugh until he was short of breath and there were tears at the corners of his eyes.
Outside, the night is nearly gone. The sky is a greyish pink, and Orko wishes he didn’t have to go to school in a few hours.
In Orko’s father’s bedroom are two identical steel wardrobes, side by side. The one on the right belongs to his father; a bunch of keys hangs from the keyhole. It’s a beautiful silver keyring, with an ornamental clasp. The wardrobe on the left is his mother’s; it hasn’t been opened in years. Orko can picture his mother standing right here, in front of the mirror, as she wrapped her saree around her. He watched her countless times, enthralled by her intricate, fluid movements as she put on her saree. The wrap, the pleat, the tuck and the drape. It was a dance, and at the end of this dance she looked at herself in the mirror, sideways, as she clipped the silver keyring at her waist. It hung there, by his cheek, when he wrapped his arms around her. The saree was moss-green, and she smelt of lavender.
It was winter then. His mother was in the kitchen, and Orko was by himself, in front of this very mirror. He pretended that his mother’s shawl was a saree. He fumbled through the steps – the wrap, the pleat, the tuck, the drape. The pleats came out wrong, because the shawl was too thick, too wide and not nearly long enough. As he ran to the kitchen, his saree unravelled behind him.
‘Show me how to wear it,’ he said to his mother.
That was when she told him that sarees were for girls, and he wasn’t a girl.
‘How do you know that I’m not a girl?’ he asked her.
Fern Road Page 7
