Eight
On the first day of the new school year, Orko discovers that he is the only boy in his class. As they queue up for assembly, Kaushik shouts out to him: ‘Hey, Orko, why are you standing there with the girls?’ Orko pretends not to hear any of it, but Kaushik won’t give up. He suggests that Orko change his name to Orkie. The name sounds so ridiculous that Orko begins to laugh. This seems to throw Kaushik off, and he turns his attention to Sugato’s oily hair. The bell rings and the voices die down. The principal addresses them and, after the usual exhortations and a few announcements, they all sing the school anthem.
Afterwards, as Orko makes his way to his new classroom, two of his former classmates overtake him on the stairs. They lower their voices as they approach, and one of them scoffs as they pass him. Orko slows down momentarily, to put some distance between himself and the two boys. He tells himself that they can’t possibly be talking about him, but he isn’t convinced.
The classroom seems larger than usual, but that’s only because it has been provisioned for fewer students than Orko is used to. There are six desks, arranged in two rows. Each desk seats two, so there are twelve seats in all. At the threshold of his new classroom, Orko misses Urmi desperately. In the ten years that he has been in school, Urmi has always been in his class. They’ve shared a desk for nine of those years. With her gone, he feels unhinged.
Nilanjana is in the seat closest to the door. Orko would probably choose to sit with her, but she is sharing her desk with Paromita. They smile at Orko as he walks in. Orko smiles back. Strangely enough, the front row is fully occupied. Shreya and Nandini are at the desk in the centre. Farah and Ishani are in the far corner. Behind them, in the seat by the window, is a girl he has never seen before.
The new girl is paler than anyone Orko has met. She’s wearing steel-rimmed glasses, like John Lennon’s. Her hair is almost as short as his own, and she isn’t wearing earrings. Orko doesn’t want to sit by himself, but he can’t bring himself to ask the new girl if he can sit beside her. What if she’d rather sit alone, and is too polite to turn him down? He sets his schoolbag down on the desk beside hers, and just as he’s about to sit down she looks up at him.
‘Hi,’ she says. ‘I’m Brishti.’
There’s something unfamiliar about the way she says the words. He knew another Brishti, and he remembers that she pronounced her name differently. She holds out her hand, and Orko shakes it.
‘My name is Orko,’ he says tentatively. Her grip is firm, and he, in turn, clasps her hand tightly before letting go.
‘This seat’s free,’ she says, pointing, with her eyes, to the chair beside her. Orko sits down, forgetting that his schoolbag is on the neighbouring desk.
Mrs Sanyal (they address her as Nandita-di) walks into their classroom. She announces that she’s going to be their class teacher this year. Orko likes Nandita-di. Last year, Orko had used a fragment of a song in an essay; she told him that she too liked the song, but it was lazy of him to use other people’s words to express himself.
Nandita-di starts by welcoming them to their new class. She ticks off their names in the attendance register. She asks Brishti to introduce herself, and Orko learns that Brishti grew up in Canada, that she lives with her father, who is a pilot, and that her favourite book is The Catcher in the Rye.
Orko is more than a little amused when Nandita-di announces that the first book they’re going to read this year is Lord of the Flies.
As days go by, Orko begins to enjoy school again. The awkwardness of being the only boy in his class fades away, and he’s relieved that he no longer has to study mathematics or chemistry. Kaushik tried to rile him up a few times during the first week. Orko ignored him, and now he doesn’t bother Orko anymore.
Orko quite likes sitting next to Brishti. On most days they’re the only ones in the classroom during the lunch break, and he knows now that her parents are divorced, that she lives close by, with her father, and that her mother, whom she misses terribly, lives in Montreal. Orko wishes that he, too, could talk about himself, but he doesn’t know how. He has managed to tell her that he lives with his father, and that his mother died when he was eight. He hasn’t told her about Urmi. He hasn’t told her about his favourite books, because he’s scared that he’ll end up talking about how he dwells in their pages, because in those pages he’s Emma, or Geraldine, or Anne. He’s so afraid of giving himself away that he lies for no reason at all. Although he no longer plays football, he tells Brishti that he enjoys the game, and that he’s very good at it. He finds a copy of The Catcher in the Rye in a dusty old bookshop on the boulevard. He doesn’t really like the book, but he tells her that he read it four times over a weekend, and that it is now one of his favourite books.
Orko doesn’t think of Bishu often, but when he does he feels angry, and stupid for having distanced himself from his friends on Bishu’s advice. He occasionally visits Urmi, but she’s usually busy and they don’t really talk anymore. Nilanjana seems to have forgiven him, but Paromita still looks at him askance when he tries to talk to her.
Brishti is wearing earrings today, and Orko is surprised because she never wears earrings. He tries to persuade himself that it doesn’t matter, and that earrings are frivolous, but he can’t get over the fact that he’s the only one in the class who isn’t wearing any. It’s almost as if they’re the emblems of a secret club that will never accept him. As soon as the long bell signals the lunch break, Brishti takes out a book from her bag. It’s a hardbound volume, covered in brown paper.
‘What are you reading?’ Orko asks.
‘A book,’ she replies as she opens the book about a quarter of the way from the end. She leafs through a few pages before beginning to read.
Orko walks over to Nilanjana’s desk with his tiffin box.
‘Hey, stranger!’ she says. Orko smiles. ‘Why don’t you pull up a chair?’
‘So you’re back,’ Paromita says, arching an eyebrow. They arrange their tiffin boxes on the desk, like an ersatz lunch buffet. There’s a pear, cut into four, crackers, cheese sandwiches, and noodles. Soon, they’re chatting away, like they used to, and Orko wishes Urmi was with them. They talk about the subjects they have to study, as if they’re household chores assigned them. They talk about the students in the science section, and about their teachers. Their class teacher, who teaches them English literature; their history teacher, who always looks like she’s just been woken from a siesta and isn’t too happy about it; their young economics teacher, Debashish. His beard, just like George Michael’s. His motorcycle. His beautifully tailored clothes.
‘He’s so cute,’ says Paromita.
‘Oh yes, he is, isn’t he?’ says Orko, blushing. Every time Debashish walks into their classroom, there’s a flutter in Orko’s heart.
‘Maybe he’ll ask you to marry him,’ Paromita retorts.
The girls giggle, and this irritates Orko.
‘Is that all you ever talk about, kissing and getting married and having babies?’ The words come out of him in a rush.
Paromita is quick to come up with a rejoinder. ‘Orko wants to kiss Debashish-da,’ she says in a singsong voice and bursts out laughing. ‘He wants to have a baby!’ Nilanjana seems embarrassed, but Paromita continues to laugh.
Orko quickly looks around the classroom. He’s relieved that there’s just the three of them here, besides Brishti, who seems completely absorbed in her book. He walks back to his seat, leaving his empty tiffin box on the desk.
Brishti looks up from her book. ‘You okay?’ she asks. Orko nods, even as he senses his cheeks turning crimson.
Nilanjana brings Orko his tiffin box. ‘She was just joking, you silly boy,’ she says affectionately.
Orko doesn’t respond. He focuses his attention on a whorl in the wooden surface of his desk. The bell signals the end of the interval, and the rest of the class trickles in. Orko is convinced that, before the end of the school day, Paromita is going to tell every one of them about their exchange. Sh
e’s probably going to tell Kaushik too, and soon the whole school is going to think that he has a crush on Debashish.
Orko can’t fathom his classmates’ new-found obsession with romance and with relationships. All he had done was say that Debashish was cute. Anyone might have said that. It was a harmless, generic observation. Why did Paromita have to twist it around like that?
Among his classmates, Paromita is the only one who actually has a boyfriend. She and Kaushik usually leave school together. When they’re a safe distance away, their hands come together and their pace becomes leisurely. As they walk down the footpath, Kaushik seems larger than life, and Paromita more diminutive. Kaushik’s collar looks a little sharper than usual, his shoulders pulled back. His left hand finds its way to his trouser pocket as his right encircles Paromita’s waist. Paromita seems slender, her upper arms pressed firmly against her sides, her fingers playing with the end of her long plait, as if it were the hand fan from the Japanese painting that hangs in Nandan’s bedroom. Kaushik’s glance falls on the side of Paromita’s face, while Paromita’s is cast downwards, at the ground that lies a few feet ahead of her. From time to time she steals a furtive glance at him, as if she can’t bear to look at him for too long.
Orko has seen them at the tea stall near Golpark, sitting side by side on the makeshift bench. Kaushik sips his tea from a glass tumbler, Paromita from an earthen cup. He has always wondered what they talk about. They have nothing in common. When she’s with her friends, Paromita is always talking about the latest movies from Bollywood, about how gorgeous Aamir Khan is, and about Madhuri Dixit’s outfit in that lurid song in which she heaves about in the hay as the hairy Anil Kapoor gazes into her eyes, his fingers planted in the small of her back. Kaushik and his friends talk about football, about Jackie Chan, and about the new Sherlock Holmes show on television. Kaushik’s friends refer to Paromita as Kaushik’s wife, and Paromita doesn’t protest. Orko wonders if they kiss. He’s more or less certain they don’t have sex, because Paromita’s parents are very strict. If they knew that she spent time alone with Kaushik, even if it was just to walk hand in hand from their school to Golpark, they would probably ground her for the rest of her life.
Orko imagines Kaushik and Paromita as grown-ups, and he remembers the times when he spent the night at Urmi’s. Her father went to the market in the morning, with two large nylon shopping bags. When he returned, the bags were bulging with vegetables and fish. Then he went for his bath, while Urmi’s mother hurriedly prepared his breakfast and his tiffin. While she was in the kitchen, he sometimes called out to her from their bedroom. A misplaced shirt; a loose button; a pair of trousers that needed ironing. She rushed to his rescue, dropping whatever it was that she had been doing, returning in a mad frenzy after the crisis had been resolved. By the time Urmi’s father walked out of the bedroom in a crisply ironed shirt and dark trousers, there was a placemat at the head of the table, a steel plate with a mound of rice in the shape of the dome of the planetarium, stainless-steel bowls with dal, two kinds of vegetables and fish curry, potato fritters near the edge of the plate, a stainless-steel tumbler full of water to the left of the plate, and a glass jug within easy reach from the seat at the head of the table, but not close enough that it got in the way. Urmi’s father never touched the jug. When he wanted his glass refilled, he looked to his wife and she filled it for him.
Perhaps Kaushik and Paromita would grow up to be like Urmi’s parents. They would get married and have two children – a boy and a girl. Kaushik would go to work every morning, and Paromita would stay home and look after their children.
When his mother was alive, Orko imagined that he was going to grow up to be exactly like her. He would have a husband – a bearded man, with curly hair. It would be nice if the man wore spectacles, but it wouldn’t be terrible if he didn’t. They would have two daughters, and Orko would take them swimming every day. Now, of course, he knows that he’s not going to grow up to be a woman – he has a penis. If he didn’t have one, maybe he would like to kiss Debashish, and then lie with him in bed, naked.
Sometimes, when Orko wakes in the morning, the penis is hard, and it pulses in time with his heart. He curls up, turning on his side, pressing his thighs around the penis until it doesn’t ache anymore. When he looks at his groin (and he does this every time), the penis is gone. It’s almost as if Ma Lokkhi had finally answered his prayer from the time when he still believed in her. Everything is possible now, and he can be anybody he wants to be – a dancer, or an astronaut, or a champion swimmer. He can play the flute and he can play the piano. In an exhilarating moment, Orko becomes Priya. She’s not a boy anymore – she never was.
A bearded man appears by the window. He’s naked, his skin taut against his slender frame, his clavicle and the contour of his ribcage plainly visible. There’s a tuft of hair on his chest, and another, denser, just below his abdomen. His penis is strident, majestic even; Priya can’t imagine that she ever thought it an ugly, useless appendage. When the man removes his spectacles and places them on the bookshelf, Priya’s pulse begins to race. She studies each movement of his body as he takes the few strides that bring him to her bedside.
When he lies down beside her, she can barely breathe. He begins tentatively, kissing her lips, teasing her nipple with his fingertips, and she can tell, by the way he touches her, that the man is nothing like Bishu. He isn’t as heavy as Bishu, and when he moves against her body, she moves with him. He doesn’t grunt like a pig, even when his thrusts are at their most urgent and his eyes have glazed over. She doesn’t recoil in disgust when his semen spills onto her thighs. Afterwards, they lie together; the man on his back, Priya on her side, an arm and a leg thrown over his torso. She doesn’t know the man’s name. They never speak, because Priya can’t imagine what they would talk about. She doesn’t even like the man very much. He has hairy arms and, like Bishu, he smells of stale underwear.
Orko was ten years old when their neighbour, Mr Sen, brought home a parrot in a rusty old cage from the fairground near Sealdah station. He called her Benazir. She was green, with a bright red beak. The first few times that Orko met Benazir, she sat sullenly in her cage.
Sometime after she arrived (maybe it was a week, or maybe it was two – Orko can’t remember), Mr Sen bought her a new cage. This was a grand affair that looked like a teepee glued onto the top of a bucket. The bars were of a golden hue. Inside was a swing that hung from two lengths of silver chain. The cage had two doors: one for Benazir, and another, smaller, for her food.
Orko would ring his neighbours’ doorbell every afternoon. ‘Has she learned to speak yet?’ he would ask.
‘She’s still young,’ Mrs Sen would say. ‘She’ll learn.’
Mrs Sen told Orko how his mother worried when he was a baby. ‘You didn’t speak until you were almost two,’ she said. ‘All babies are different, I would tell your mother.’ She looked at Orko and smiled. ‘Look at you now!’
Orko would sit by the cage, watching Benazir intently. Mrs Sen would bring two plates on a tray – biscuits for Orko, and chillies, red and green, for Benazir. Orko would hold a chilli out for Benazir, but she would never bite it until he let it fall to the floor of the cage. She would approach it one step at a time, then cock her head, as if to make sure no one was looking, before partaking of it.
At the time, Orko had just finished reading a Tintin adventure, The Broken Ear – a birthday present from Kundan, his father’s friend. One afternoon, Mrs Sen was away in the kitchen, and Orko didn’t think she would hear him over the clatter of pots and pans. He walked up to the cage, and in a squeaky voice said, ‘Great greedy guts,’ just like the parrot from the Tintin book. Benazir didn’t pay him any mind. She sulked. She opened and closed her beak noiselessly. Orko looked on with fascination at the bulge in her throat that moved up and down, like a live creature.
Orko went to see Benazir every day. Every day he would stand by her cage, feeding her chillies, red and green, and squawking ‘Great greedy guts’
at the mystified bird. Crows and sparrows would come sit at the window, like humans lined up to see an exotic creature at the zoo. Orko felt an urge to undo the clasp that kept Benazir. He wondered if she remembered how to fly.
‘We’ve tried teaching her the names of the gods and goddesses,’ Mrs Sen said one day, as Orko renewed his endeavour to teach Benazir that phrase which he thought must come naturally to a parrot. It was true that Benazir was green and the parrot in the comic book was red, blue and grey – but surely there must be something all parrots shared, irrespective of their colour?
‘He’s so gullible,’ Mrs Sen said of her husband, when Benazir refused to speak in spite of all their efforts.
One day, as Orko sat on a stool by Benazir’s cage, absent-mindedly passing red chillies to Benazir through the grille, she made a noise that was not her usual squawk. It sounded like an unremarkable twitter, different in tone and texture from the cuckoo’s call, or the pigeon’s, or the sparrow’s, but bird-speak nevertheless. Then, she did it again, a little more spaced out this time.
‘Great greedy guts,’ she said, in a conspiratorial undertone.
‘Great greedy guts,’ Orko replied, barely containing his delight.
‘Great greedy guts,’ said Benazir again, rising to a fever pitch this time. ‘Great greedy guts,’ she said again and again, until Mrs Sen rushed in from the kitchen, staring at them in obvious glee. She clapped her hands. She brought Orko a cheese sandwich and said, ‘Now teach her to say “Hare Krishna” and “Lokkhi Lokkhi”.’
One afternoon a week or so later, Orko went to visit Benazir, only to find that the cage was empty. ‘She’s flown away,’ Mrs Sen said to him. At the time Orko had been surprised, but now he feels positive that Benazir hadn’t flown away. She had died in her golden cage, of heartbreak probably. He remembers how she would, in the first days that he knew her, look past the grille of her cage, as if she didn’t quite understand that it was there. He wonders if it is possible for a creature to learn the language of another kind of creature. When he was a young child he would bark at dogs, mew at cats, moo at cows. There were no thoughts accompanying the sounds he made. He didn’t feel like a cat when he mewed. The cows didn’t pay him any mind as he mooed at them. The dogs sometimes barked back, but it sounded more like they had caught him out as an impostor than a response.
Fern Road Page 12
