Fern Road

by Angshu Dasgupta

  ‘I just hate being so alone,’ he begins. ‘I can’t hang around with the boys. They’re horrid, except for maybe one or two of them. I don’t want to talk about cricket, or kung-fu, or Bollywood actresses. It’s completely inane.’

  ‘So you don’t have to,’ Brishti says. ‘You can choose your friends. There aren’t any boys in our class.’

  Orko struggles to respond. It is easier said than done. He thinks about the sleepovers he’s never invited to, and the conversations that die the moment he appears. ‘It’s so hard,’ he begins.

  Brishti cuts him short. ‘Have you ever wondered why I haven’t been to your house yet? It’s because I’m not allowed to. I have to come straight home from school. I can’t be out after dark. I can’t wear the skirt my mother wore when she was my age. It’s all for my own safety – that’s what I’m told. I was eight years old when my mother told me that I should be wary of strange men, because of what they might do to me.’ Orko has never seen Brishti become as angry as she seems now.

  ‘So are you saying you’d rather be a boy?’ he asks, tentatively.

  ‘Of course not,’ she says. ‘I don’t like boys either. You’re my friend only because you’re not like the rest of them.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They act as if they’re the kings of the world. They’re constantly sizing you up, assigning you a score based on how pretty you are.’

  Orko knows this is true, from conversations he’s overheard at the football field, in the boys’ bathrooms at school and in other places where there are no girls within earshot. He wonders what Brishti would say if she knew that the boys also talk about breast sizes of naked women in magazines, and that they squabble about who among them has the biggest penis.

  ‘Ever since I moved here it’s been horrible,’ she goes on. ‘On the street, men my father’s age leer at me. Boys follow me, telling each other crude jokes, loudly, so I can hear them. The one time that I tried taking the bus, a man kept brushing his arm against my breast as I stood by the door trying to elbow my way in.’

  Orko knows every word Brishti is saying is true, because some of it has happened to him too, only it didn’t happen to him because he was a girl. It happened to him because he was weird. When he remembered to walk like Bishu taught him, the boys didn’t laugh at him or pass lewd comments. When he stuck his elbows out in the bus, taking up more space than he needed, no one made a grab for his crotch. When he grows up, grows a beard and dresses like his father, no one will harass him in buses and on footpaths and at bus stops. Brishti – and Urmi, and Nilanjana, and even Paromita – will have to put up with it for as long as they live. He feels numb. ‘It has stopped raining,’ he says. ‘I had better get home before it starts up again.’

  He’s a few metres from the bus stop when he hears the familiar booming voice calling his name. At first he thinks his mind is playing tricks on him, and he hurries on. Then he hears the voice again. He resists the urge to whirl around and ascertain that it really is Bishu, here, at the bus stop that he waits at every day. He breaks into a run.

  He leaves the bus stop behind, picking up his pace as a visceral terror threatens to paralyse him. He ducks into a lane, just past the foot of the bridge, taking turns at random until he begins to suspect that he’s going around in circles. Completely out of breath, he sits on the edge of the footpath, hugging his knees to keep his insides from heaving. When the terror begins to subside, he realises he is hopelessly lost.

  Twelve

  On the way to school, the bus is more crowded than usual – it’s standing room only. Orko hangs on to the overhead rail with both hands. The man seated directly in front of him offers to hold Orko’s schoolbag. Orko slips it off his shoulders and smiles at the man, to thank him for his kindness. The ride seems interminably long. When they’re at a traffic signal, Orko takes one hand off the rail to check his trouser pocket. The money’s still there.

  It is a lot of money. When Orko retrieved the biscuit tin from the back of his cupboard yesterday, he was surprised; there was seven hundred rupees in the box. When he was counting the money it had merely been an idle exercise; he wasn’t thinking about the things that he could do with it. Now he speculates about the prices of train tickets to destinations as far away as he dares to imagine. Cochin. Trivandrum. Madras. He finally settles on Dehradun, because his aunt used to live there, and she once told him that there was a hill station close by, where the snow came down like wisps of cotton.

  They move in fits and starts, and the going is so slow that Orko wonders if he would be better off walking the rest of the way. A woman steps off the footpath and hails an auto-rickshaw. She has two large shopping bags on her arm. She pulls the straps up to her shoulder with a quick flick of her wrist. Orko surmises that she’s on her way to Gariahat market. When he went to the market with his father, they usually spent more than three hundred rupees on the fish and the vegetables they bought for the week. When Nandan bought hilsa, or prawns, or mutton, it was closer to five hundred rupees. He fingers the notes in his pocket, growing anxious that it isn’t enough money. Perhaps he can avoid buying a ticket altogether. He could find a seat in an unreserved compartment and hide in the toilet when the ticket examiner came. Or maybe he could just say that he had no ticket, and no money. He would be forced to disembark at a completely random place where nobody knew him. Even if he didn’t buy a ticket, though, the money was unlikely to last him more than a few weeks.

  When they come to the foot of the bridge, the conductor informs them that they’ll be at Golpark soon. Orko takes his bag back from the man and disembarks at his usual stop, but he doesn’t cross the street. Instead, he ducks into the lane that skirts the Institute of Culture and comes out on Southern Avenue. A little girl, no more than seven or eight years old, fills an aluminium pot from the tubewell by the side of the road. She’s wearing only a pair of tattered, filthy shorts. Her matted hair is bronzed from exposure and neglect. It is fairly obvious that she doesn’t go to school. The pot looks too big for her to be able to carry, but she hoists it up to her hips and snakes an arm around it. Would this little girl be willing to trade places with Orko? Would he trade places with her? Who would choose a life on the street, if the choice were theirs to make?

  Orko walks along the periphery of the lake, worrying that he’s going to run into someone he knows. They will probably ask him what he is doing here at this hour, in his school uniform, and he won’t have a satisfactory explanation. He ducks through a gate in the fence and cuts across the green until he comes to the narrow footpath that leads to the water’s edge. He follows the path as it merges with a wider, paved road and reappears on the far side. The noise from the street is barely a murmur now, with an occasional spike from a horn.

  He passes the Anderson Club, where his grandfather sometimes brought him to swim. To his left is a gate that leads to Southend Park. He remembers going that way with his grandmother, back when he still thought he was a little girl. They would go to the Buddhist temple and sit on one of the benches outside. Inside, the monks chanted somnolently as they beat the prayer drum in that slow, meditative rhythm.

  He stays on the path as it curves sharply to the right. It passes beneath a canopy formed by the dense foliage of trees on either side, transforming into a magical lattice of shadows and light. His father would bring him here on winter afternoons, and would point at the trees they passed, calling out their names in Latin and in Bangla. Orko listened, wide-eyed, thinking that his father was omniscient. Now, surrounded by these trees that are older than he is, he can’t remember their names in either language.

  He can see water now. There are people here – a middle-aged man, in shorts and a sweaty T-shirt that is stretched over his pendulous belly; a woman in a saree, struggling to keep up with the man. In sneakers, both of them, with sparkling rivulets of sweat running down the sides of their necks. They hurry past him. Behind them is a younger man, with a large dog on a leash. Orko had always wanted a dog. A dog that walke
d by his side, wherever he went, and slept in his bed at night. He doesn’t want one anymore. He has even stopped bringing biscuits to the old dog that lives in their enclave. He once thought that he cared for the creature. Now he’s not sure if he actually did, or if he was kind to her in order to feel superior, benevolent, godlike.

  He comes to a bench at the edge of the lake, made familiar by the stout gulmohur alongside it. This is the bench his father sought out every time they came here. He shrugs off his schoolbag and drops it carelessly on the bench. He sits down beside the bag and hugs it to his side, as if it were a dear friend. The bag feels damp to the touch. It hasn’t been opened since he left Brishti’s house. It doesn’t contain the books and the homework for the classes he has today; he can’t really claim that his truancy wasn’t premeditated.

  The banks of the lake are deserted. Even the straggling morning walkers have now gone home. His father is probably on his way to work now, as are countless men all over the city. Their wives are probably clearing away the table after their husbands’ breakfasts. The children are all in school. The buses are crowded, the markets thick with retired men and older, matronly women carrying nylon shopping bags full of vegetables and fish. It’s almost as if all of it is happening in another world – a world in which he does not belong.

  A woman washes clothes on the far side of the lake. She probably lives in one of the shanties by the suburban railway tracks. Orko doesn’t know anyone who washes their own clothes. His father washes his own underwear, and Orko does too, but that doesn’t really count. The woman beats a large garment (a bed sheet? a saree?) on the steps of the ghat. He tries to imagine her day-to-day existence, but he can’t get past wondering how she makes her living. There are countless people like her in this city. They live in slums and in refugee colonies. They work in factories and as lorry drivers, as cooks and as housemaids. There are so many of them that if they all had to live in cosy flats like the one in which he lived, there probably wouldn’t be enough land in the city to build the flats on.

  It occurs to Orko that his particular circumstances are nothing more than an accident. He could easily have been born as the woman on the far side of the lake. A sense of despair overwhelms him. He feels like a spoilt, petulant wastrel, strung out over impossibilities and wild imaginings. He wishes he could be normal, like other boys – horsing around during the lunch break, playing football with his buddies after school, never having to worry about men like Bishu. He can’t imagine spending decades like this, growing old, pretending to be happy the whole time, burning with jealousy whenever he passes a girl his age on the street, and having the wind knocked out of him whenever his thoughts turn to Bishu and the room on the terrace.

  At the ghat on the far side of the lake, the woman gathers her washing in a metal bucket. Two young boys appear. They loiter about, pelting each other with pebbles. After the woman leaves the ghat, the boys strip down to their underwear. One of them appears a little bigger than the other. Orko wonders if they’re brothers.

  The bigger boy descends the steps of the ghat until he is waist-deep in the waters of the lake. He disappears beneath the surface, then reappears. The smaller boy throws something at him. He catches, crisply, with his right hand. Orko wonders what it is, until the boy lathers up his face and his arms, and reaches to soap his back. He throws the bar of soap back to the smaller boy, who tries to catch it, but it falls to the grass. The bigger boy yells something to him. The smaller boy yells back. He walks down to the edge of the lake and jumps in. They frolic in the water.

  Orko considers going over and asking to join them, but they’re far away, their simple pleasures beyond Orko’s reach. They probably live in a shanty by the railway line, like the woman who came before them. The bigger boy begins ascending the steps of the ghat. The smaller one follows.

  Orko absent-mindedly casts a pebble into the water. It strikes the surface with a muted pop, then disappears completely, forever. Over the years, he has cast many pebbles into these waters. In billions of years, when the sun grows into a giant star and boils off the waters of this lake, everything will die. The trees, the birds, the insects. The pebbles that he has casually thrown into the lake will still be there, mute witnesses to the end of the world. No one but he knows where they are, and if someone were to find them, they wouldn’t know that it was he, Orko, who cast them into the lake. It would be as if he had never existed.

  Orko senses something cold and wet on the back of his hand – it’s a dog, nuzzling his palm. He casts about in his schoolbag for his tiffin box. Then he remembers that he hasn’t brought tiffin. He strokes the fur on the dog’s neck. The dog appears pleased. Its golden-brown fur shimmers in the sunlight. Orko begins to wonder what time it is. He wishes he had worn the watch his father gave him when he passed his board examinations. It’s a large wristwatch, and it sits heavy on his arm. He wore it for a few days, but every time he looked at it, it reminded him that he was growing up to be just like his father. He put it away in the drawer of his grandfather’s writing bureau. He winds it every morning before leaving for school. He forgot to wind it today.

  Orko’s toes feel as if they’ve been set upon by a thousand locusts. He wiggles them inside his shoes, but he can’t tell if they’re actually moving. His calves feel numb. He raises the leg of his trousers and pinches himself. Nothing. He stretches his legs out in front of him. The dog, startled, takes a few steps backwards. He wonders what his classmates are doing now. Is it time for the economics class? Has anyone noticed that his seat is empty? His class teacher must have, when she called out their names from the register. Brishti. Nilanjana, maybe. Paromita, when she looked across the classroom to smirk at him. He realises that he doesn’t care anymore.

  In the past, when Orko imagined running away from home, his thoughts were never backed by intent; he merely wondered how he would feel to be all by himself, in a place where nobody knew him. He had never considered the real consequences of running away. He would never see his father or his aunt again. He would be friendless and alone, making a living as a waiter or a busboy. He would never again sit here, on this bench by the lake. He would probably sleep at a deserted bus stop, on sheets of old newspaper.

  He begins to feel angry again. Bishu had no business being at his bus stop. He had no business calling out his name like that, in public, where everyone could hear him. What if he went to Orko’s school and talked to his teachers, or to Brishti? Would they think he was a filthy deviant, and that he was an equal participant in the goings-on in the room on Bishu’s terrace?

  Orko imagines a sharp machete – the biggest one he can find. Bishu was bigger than him, and stronger than him. He would carry it with him to the room on Bishu’s terrace. When Bishu took off his pants again, he would chop off Bishu’s penis. After that, he would run away. Of course, he couldn’t do it right away. He would have to wait until he finished school, maybe even college. No one would give him a job if he didn’t. Maybe, by the time he finished college, the anger would have gone away. Then he wouldn’t have to chop off Bishu’s penis after all.

  He can wait. He has all the time in the world. What he can no longer bear, though, is not knowing his position on the balance of blame. He remembers the evening with his aunt, in the dimly lit Chinese restaurant. He knows she would never disown him. If he tells her everything, maybe she will tell him, again, that he is blameless.

  There was a time when Orko took the school bus down this road every afternoon. This was before his aunt left for Dehradun, and when he passed the traffic signal before the cinema, his eyes would dart outwards, looking for the familiar figure of his aunt in her crisply starched saree, her horn-rimmed glasses too large for her face. He would leave his seat long before his stop, and wait by the door. When the bus began to slow down, he would climb down to the footboard, jumping off as soon as the conductor opened the door.

  Sudeshna would transfer the polka-dotted umbrella to her right hand and take his hand in her left. They would walk down the short le
ngth of road, past the cinema, to his grandfather’s house. She would ask him what he had done in school, and he would always omit the arithmetic, in the hope that she wouldn’t ask him to recite tables again. She would find out, of course, when she went through his exercise books with the hawkish eye of an accountant.

  As Orko walks past the cinema, he begins to have second thoughts about confiding in his aunt. He comes to a halt by a handcart laden with sugarcane. The man asks him if he’d like some juice. Orko shakes his head. He considers going back home. He would tiptoe up the stairs and lock himself in the flat. He wouldn’t answer the doorbell. He wouldn’t make any noise. He wouldn’t turn on the stereo. No one would know he was there. When his father came back home, he would act as if it had been a normal day, and pretend that everything was all right.

  Everything is not all right, though. He is tired of keeping it all to himself. He decides to press on, braving the scolding that he is sure his aunt is going to give him. He knows what he must do. He must tell his aunt everything. All his secrets. Every little detail. Even the bit about the pebbles he cast into the waters of the lake. Then, maybe, Bishu will have no power over him.

  He has always thought of this as his grandfather’s house. But his grandfather has been dead for a long time; this is now his aunt’s house. He presses the doorbell, expecting to hear the familiar metallic clang, but the house is silent. A power outage, perhaps. He hesitates before sounding three sharp raps on the door panel with the palm of his hand.

  The door opens almost immediately. Sudeshna looks him up and down and asks him to come in, as if she was expecting him. The fact that it’s a school day and he is wearing his school uniform seems to have escaped her. Orko shuts the door behind him and follows her into the dark living room. Sudeshna is still in her nightgown, and Orko finds this strange. When he spent the night in this house as a child, Sudeshna would be bathed and dressed by the time he awoke. Sometimes he would wake early enough that her hair would still be wrapped in a light towel. Today, it seems to Orko that she hasn’t been awake for too long.