Fern Road

by Angshu Dasgupta

  Most of their classmates are in the compound when they arrive. There is animated conversation but Orko hears none of it. One of their teachers tells them that their marks have been posted outside the staffroom. Urmi forges ahead, threading her way through the huddles in the compound. Orko wants to be anywhere but here.

  Outside the staffroom, about a dozen of their classmates jostle for a better view of the sheets plastered on the noticeboard. Ten years of school, carved into capsules of time, precisely fifty minutes long; ink stains on his fingertips; notebooks covered in blue scribbles; annotations in red, from his teachers. None of it matters now. All that matters is on the noticeboard. There are nine lists – one for each subject. Each list has forty-nine names, in alphabetical order. Urmi is in the thick of things, notebook in hand. Orko is close enough to read the headers on the lists. English. Bengali. Mathematics. He looks away, at another board that says something about fees and deadlines.

  ‘Here,’ says Urmi, handing him a piece of paper as she emerges from the crowd. ‘I wrote down your marks too.’

  Orko folds the sheet and slips it into his pocket without looking at it.

  Urmi gives him a surprised look. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ she exclaims.

  ‘Have I passed chemistry?’ Orko asks.

  ‘Why don’t you see for yourself?’ Urmi says. She doesn’t sound exasperated anymore, and Orko finds this alarming. He feverishly digs the scrap of paper out of his trouser pocket. It’s crumpled. Urmi reaches for Orko’s hand just as he finishes straightening out the creases. ‘I think you have the top score in English and in history,’ she says.

  Orko can barely hear her voice over the ringing in his ears. He only has forty-one out of a hundred marks in chemistry. He needed at least fifty in each of the science subjects to be in the science section. He has barely made the grade in mathematics and in physics, but that doesn’t matter either. He’s going to be in the humanities section.

  In an instant, he remembers everything that anybody has ever said to him about studying humanities.

  ‘It’s going to get you nowhere,’ said his chemistry teacher. ‘You won’t get a job. You’ll spend the rest of your life teaching a bunch of losers how to make sentences and write essays.’

  ‘They’re all dolts,’ Bodhi said dismissively of the girls in the humanities section. ‘They can afford to study humanities because they’re going to grow up and get married.’

  Orko’s head spins. He wishes he could sit down, but there aren’t any chairs in the corridors. He realises that he hasn’t asked Urmi about her results. ‘Show me yours,’ he says.

  She brings out a neatly folded sheet of paper from her sling bag. She hands it to him reluctantly. Just a glance tells him that she probably has the highest aggregate in their class. There have been many occasions when Orko has been envious of Urmi, but now he feels happy for her. It’s almost as if they’re different kinds of creature, their destinies disjointed. He hugs her, without thinking. She’s taken aback, but her arms tighten around him for a fraction of a second. He’s surprised at himself. This is the first time he has hugged Urmi at school. At school, boys don’t hug girls. It just doesn’t happen.

  ‘I’m so happy for you,’ he says.

  ‘These scores don’t mean a thing,’ Urmi says, after an awkward silence. ‘I know that you have something special; something that I don’t have. I’ve known this forever.’

  Urmi’s words ring in Orko’s ears. It’s true that they have known each other forever. He can’t remember a time when he didn’t know Urmi. He wishes she wouldn’t bring up his scores, or their childhood. This is her moment, and she ought to be happy. She isn’t, and that’s only because his scores are so dismal. He wishes he hadn’t come to school with her.

  ‘It isn’t as bad as all that,’ he says. ‘At least I won’t make a fool of myself, trying to be an engineer.’ He contrives a laugh that sounds terrible, and Urmi doesn’t laugh with him. They walk, without really intending to, to the guava tree behind the main block. They sit on the parapet under the tree. They don’t talk about the times when they were in that tree, just the two of them. They don’t talk about the fact that Urmi is moving to a different school. They sit there quietly until they see Kaushik and Paromita come around the corner.

  They exchange perfunctory greetings. Kaushik volunteers his scores. The rest of them congratulate him on doing so well, and Kaushik beams at them. Orko knows that Urmi’s aggregate is higher, but he doesn’t want to rain on Kaushik’s parade.

  Urmi and Orko make their way across the yard to the back gate. Kaushik and Paromita take their place under the guava tree. As they pass beneath the archway and out through the gate, Orko feels as if everything that is precious and familiar is slipping away from him.

  ‘There’s nothing to be dejected about,’ Nandan says when Orko shows him the sheet of paper torn out of Urmi’s notebook. ‘It’s not the end of the world. I see that you’ve done very well in English. I’ve been telling you all along that you should study literature.’

  Orko had been steeling himself for the moment when he would have to tell his father how poorly he had done, and now that moment has come and gone. He remembers the time when Bodhi’s results were declared. ‘He could have done much better,’ Bodhi’s father lamented for weeks afterward. Every lost mark was analysed, every failing dissected, even though Bodhi, like Urmi, had the highest aggregate in his class. Orko’s father, on the other hand, is laconically picking out bones from a portion of fish. Orko wishes that, for once, his father would say something. Anything would do. Anything at all.

  ‘Everything happens for the best,’ Nandan says as they’re finishing dinner. ‘Now you know what your strengths are.’

  After dinner, for the first time in weeks, Orko clears the table without being asked. Just as he finishes wiping down the surface of the table, he notices a tiny speck of dal where his plate had been. He is so overcome by exhaustion that he can’t bring himself to wipe it away. He leaves the dishcloth on the table and retreats to his room. He doesn’t change into his pyjamas, and he doesn’t brush his teeth. Although it is January, he’s sweating under his collar. He switches on the fan before falling into bed.

  He lies in the dark, staring at the faint disc of the ceiling fan as it whirrs overhead. He wishes there was music, but he hasn’t the will to choose. He feels like throwing away all his cassettes, all his books, all his clothes, everything in his room. All through the school year, his teachers had gone on about how important these examinations were. Now the results are out; he has done poorly, and his father doesn’t care enough to be angry with him. He wonders if it is because his father didn’t expect any better from him.

  He remembers the first time he felt this way. It was a holiday, and Orko was in the parking lot of their enclave, playing cricket. A stack of bricks served as the wicket, and another solitary brick, a few metres away, marked the bowler’s crease. They were using a neon-green tennis ball that day, and Orko was last at the crease. He remembers the ball – fuzzy, bouncing unpredictably, darting at him. He faced just one delivery that day. Shubho lobbed it at him as he stood in front of the makeshift wicket, bat in hand. Just as the ball bounced, Orko saw his father out of the corner of his eye, watching them from a distance. He remembers the handle of the bat, with its textured rubber grip. He remembers the heft of it in his hands, just as it slid from his grasp and crashed into the stack of bricks. There was laughter all around. Shubho came up to him and said that the same thing had happened to him too, and that Orko mustn’t cry.

  He remembers searching for his father and realising he was gone. He remembers feeling relieved, and thinking for days that his father hadn’t seen him make a fool of himself. He can’t remember if it was the very next Sunday when he overheard his father and his uncle, in the living room of their father’s house. They were talking about him. ‘The boy has absolutely no hand-eye coordination,’ his father said, and the twelve-year-old Orko ran away, up flights of stairs that seemed
to go on forever, to the terrace of his grandfather’s house.

  It’s morning, and for a few moments Orko isn’t sure what day of the week it is. He hopes it isn’t Saturday. On Saturdays, Orko goes to Gariahat market with his father, to shop for provisions. Today Orko wants to stay in bed.

  It turns out that it is, in fact, Saturday, but today they aren’t going to Gariahat.

  ‘Wear a good shirt,’ Nandan says to Orko at breakfast. ‘We’re going to meet an old acquaintance of mine.’

  At the back of the bottom shelf of Orko’s wardrobe is a blue shirt. It is full-sleeved, and there’s a pocket sewn onto the left breast. The shirt looks clean, but it is creased, like a crumpled old newspaper. Someone had gifted this shirt to his father a few years ago, but it was too small for Nandan. Orko irons it, and when he slides his arms into the sleeves, they’re still warm. He doesn’t like wearing shirts like these. They make him feel as if he’s walking about in a cardboard box, or in someone else’s skin. He avoids looking in the mirror as he tucks the shirt into his trousers.

  ‘You’re looking civilised for a change,’ says Nandan when Orko walks out of his room. ‘Let’s go.’

  Orko has no idea where they’re going. They walk to the rickshaw stand near the playground. When Nandan negotiates the fare with the driver, Orko doesn’t recognise the destination. They ride in silence for a distance, until Orko asks his father who they are meeting, not because he’s curious but because the silence is making him uncomfortable.

  This is when his father tells him that he’s going to enrol Orko for typing lessons.

  ‘I’m worried about you,’ Nandan says. ‘I won’t be able to support you forever. I’m going to grow old, and then I’m going to retire. Eventually, I’m going to die, and they’ll stop my pension. You need to have a vocation in order to be able to fend for yourself.’

  Orko can’t think of anything to say. Everyone he knew went to college after they finished school. His father must think that no college would have him. He can’t bring himself to say that he is going to do well from now on, and that the chemistry test is an aberration.

  When Orko was younger, his father sometimes took Orko to his office. Mrs Barman, the typist, would save her dessert for him and bring it to him on a saucer, with a spoon that looked like it was a hundred years old. As he sat there, in one of the two chairs across the desk from his father, she would take sheafs of foolscap paper with his father’s handwriting from the blue tray on the desk. Orko would do his homework to the clacking of the typewriter in the distance. Sometimes he would race the typewriter, rushing to complete a line of longhand in the interval between two rings of the carriage return. When it was time for them to leave, Mrs Barman would return with a neat stack of typed sheets. She would smile at Orko, waving a silent goodbye as she left the room. His father would continue working, without so much as a glance to acknowledge her presence.

  ‘I want to be a professional typist,’ Orko imagines himself saying the next time one of his teachers asks their class if they have given any thought to what they want to do when they grow up. He wonders if the teacher would join his classmates in laughing at him.

  They come to a halt outside a two-storey house on a narrow, unfamiliar lane. There are clothes hung out to dry on the first-floor balcony. A weathered sign, affixed above the cornice, reads ‘Regent Commercial Institute’. The front door is open; inside, there’s an overpowering smell of fish frying. The room looks like it was once a drawing room. There are bookshelves built into the walls, and behind their sliding glass doors are compendia of the works of Tagore, Sarat Chandra, Shakespeare. There are books by Robert Ludlum and by Alistair MacLean. There are no sofas or armchairs, and there’s no coffee table. The floor space is almost entirely given over to three writing desks crammed together, each sporting an ancient Remington typewriter, like the one Mrs Barman had before she got her computer. The accompanying chairs look like they belong around a dining table. Against the far wall are four green chairs made of plastic. On the table closest to the front door is a stack of newspapers. The paperweight is actually a mechanical bell, with a plunger that effects a half-hearted tinkle when pushed. Orko’s father has one of those on his table. He uses it to summon Mrs Barman when he wants something typed, or when he can’t find some papers he had left on his desk.

  Nandan rings the bell twice, just like he does in his own office. ‘Sit,’ he says to Orko, motioning towards the chairs lined up against the wall. He picks up a newspaper and sits in the chair beside Orko. Orko tries to picture the person they’re waiting for. He tries to deduce if his father has been here before, but he can’t conclude one way or another. He wishes his father would put down the newspaper and tell him that this is a charade, designed to scare him into studying harder.

  They wait there in the strange room for ten minutes before a man enters through the door at the back, clearing his throat as he glances in their direction. By the sound of it, it doesn’t seem like his throat actually needs clearing. When his father greets the man, Orko gathers that his surname is Mukherjee, and his father knows him only in passing.

  They follow Mukherjee-babu through a door that leads into another room lined with more tables that have typewriters on them, then through another door into a tiny windowless room lit by a bare fluorescent tube. The light is harsh and excessive, and Orko squints until his eyes stop hurting. In this room is an oversized writing table. Mukherjee-babu motions at the two chairs nearest them. As they take their seats, he squeezes through the narrow gap between the table and the wall and takes his place in the stuffed chair opposite them. He smiles at Orko, then clears his throat again.

  ‘Orko,’ he says, to no one in particular. ‘I like the name.’ He turns to Orko, although he should have actually addressed Orko’s father, because Orko had no part in choosing that name. He asks Nandan if he would like some tea, and Nandan nods. Mukherjee-babu calls for three cups of tea, without asking Orko if he would like some.

  Orko gathers from the conversation that they’re living in difficult times. Offices and factories are shutting down because the communist government is encouraging workers to strike, and jobs are hard to come by, especially for students who haven’t done well in school. Mukherjee-babu commends Orko’s father for his foresight, emphasising that Orko is the youngest student he has ever had; people usually came to him after they have finished college and failed to find a job, or failed the civil services examinations. From all of this, Orko gathers that his father had called ahead and given Mukherjee-babu some background about why he wanted Orko to take typing lessons. He is sure that he wouldn’t be sitting here in this dank, windowless room if he had done well in the board examinations, like Bodhi, or like Urmi. He is here because his father has already decided that the best he can do is spend a lifetime typing out other people’s words onto reams of letter paper.

  On his first day back at the football field, Orko is apprehensive. It is too early for Bishu to be here, but some of the boys from the camp are on the field, aimlessly kicking a ball about. Orko is wearing a new pair of sneakers. He didn’t ask his father to buy them for him; he emptied out the biscuit tin in which he keeps the savings from his pocket money. He thinks about all the cassettes he could have bought instead of the ill-fitting sneakers.

  Soon after he begins to run, one of the boys notices him and lets out a hoot. A voice that’s vaguely familiar calls out his name. Another calls him a cow, then a bitch. He keeps on running; they’re less likely to accost him if he ignores them, he reasons. By the fifth lap, his mind latches onto the steady pounding of his feet on the earthen track. He becomes acutely aware of the building stress in his muscles, of the sweat that runs into the small of his back. The back of his neck is hot, and he feels the occasional chill down his spine. The catcalls fade away. By the tenth lap, he is tired enough that he has to watch his loosely clenched fists and imagine they are little pistons propelling him forward. His mind is bare now; it is almost as if he’s in a trance, waking only to advance
the counter as he goes past the flagpole at the corner of the field, then falling back into the trance again.

  He remains in the trance as he walks back home and up the stairs to the flat. He switches on the fan in the living room and lies on his back on the cold mosaic floor. He feels invincible as he lies there, his arms spread out like the wings of a kite, tracing lazy spirals against an azure sky.

  The call to prayer from a faraway mosque reminds him that it will soon be time for typing school. He wishes he didn’t have to go, but he hasn’t worked up the courage to tell his father that he doesn’t want the lessons. He picks himself off the floor and makes his way to the bathroom.

  He takes his clothes off. As he steps out of his briefs, he forgets to look away, and sees the penis between his legs. He has the distinct sensation that his body is not really his own. When this happens, he usually pinches his forearm to reassure himself that he is alive, and real. Today, his fingertips have no sensation, and he feels as if somebody else’s fingers just brushed against his forearm.

  On his haunches, he pours a mug of cold water on his head. It rolls past the back of his neck, down his spine and over the small of his back, before glancing off his tailbone. There’s no mistaking that it is, indeed, his neck, his spine, the small of his back and his tailbone. The penis, on the other hand, doesn’t belong. It’s ugly, and it’s inconvenient. When the first drops of water trickle down to his groin, he feels nothing at all.

  At the typing school, Mukherjee-babu greets him and sets him an assignment. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The soft bell of the carriage return. Then the fox jumps again. The cycle repeats, like a Buddhist monk fingering his prayer beads. The spell is broken when he inadvertently presses down on two keys at the same time. The type bars become entangled; they remind him of a frightened crab, tripping over its own legs as it scurries across the sand.