Nikhil and Riya Read online

  Riya’s eyes flashed. ‘So? Is something wrong with that?’

  ‘I get it,’ I gabbled, fighting to keep my voice steady. ‘It makes sense. A lot more sense than you and I do, I know that.’

  She stopped and, with a sigh, turned towards me. ‘Really, Specs,’ she said, a little gently now, ‘why are you asking me all this?’

  This conversation wasn’t going how I had planned.

  ‘Uh…’ I murmured, rubbing my nose.

  She started walking fast now, I struggled to keep up. ‘I always knew you had a funny imagination,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘But this, this is too much.’

  ‘You can tell me,’ I said to her, now a little breathless from trying to keep the pace that she had set.

  ‘Tell you what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Anything you want,’ I said, my voice coming out like a strangle.

  She stopped now in the middle of the road and walked up to me. She put her hand to my face. It was freezing and the cold stung my cheek.

  I wasn’t cutting the dignified picture I had planned. ‘I thought you were mine,’ I sputtered, my glasses misting. ‘But you’re not. And that’s fine.’

  ‘Specs,’ she said slowly, her breath coming in threads of mist. ‘People don’t belong to each other. They belong with each other. I thought you of all people would understand that.’

  And with that she began walking away, much too fast for me to keep up. I realized that the conversation was over and also how silly I had been. Even though I felt a little hurt that she had left me behind, a woozy relief dawned upon me. Heart of hearts, I knew that she was right and that there was nothing for me to worry about. Riya, I knew, was my girl and we were the only two people who belonged together in this world.

  As Riya disappeared into the mist, her shadow far taller than she, a belligerent thought suddenly struck me so hard that I almost fell. She was mine, I knew, for the rest of our days at Residency School. But what would happen after that? Would a day come when Riya wasn’t mine? And when that day came, what would happen to me?

  38

  ONE OF THE best things about being in the twelfth standard was that I could skip morning PT, which was always held at 6.00 a.m. when my leg was as heavy as a rock. Now I could stay up late, delving into my beloved books and then sleep in, rising just a few minutes before morning attendance.

  I had big plans for my final year at Residency School. I hoped to find a clue to what my future – now less than a year away – ultimately held for me. For Riya, the answer was clear – she loved running, and that was the only thing that she wanted to do. But what was it that I was best suited for? How should I spend the life given to me? I loved mathematics more than any other subject, but what kind of future did a mathematician have? Was I better off studying medicine, engineering or economics? I devoured books, hoping to find some answers: Great Expectations about an orphan like me, Catcher in the Rye about a school that somehow seemed like mine, and A Farewell to Arms about a man who loved a woman as much as I did.

  But so far, no book had given me the answers I was looking for and I was mired in uncertainty, trapped by the very options I had worked so hard to attain. Until now, I could sink my head into my books like an ostrich and carry on from one class to the next, but now I had to take decisions and I wasn’t sure I knew how. While I was eager to learn and explore, the only place I knew was Residency School and I didn’t want to step outside this ivy-clad, red-bricked world.

  It was nearly two in the morning and I was halfway through Ira Trivedi’s There is No Love on Wall Street, reading about a girl was seemed to be as confused as I was. The night was very cold and clear, and, through my window, the stars shimmered like sequins in the velvety sky. I had just opened a pack of biscuits when I heard a knock on my door. I could tell it was Ansari Sir from the two quick raps. What was he doing awake so late at night? I quickly tousled my hair and rubbed my eyes, hoping to look like I’d been just woken.

  He walked into my room, smelling of the strange smells of old age, dressed in a ragged set of pyjamas. His snow-white hair stood on his head as if he had just received an electric shock.

  He trained his watery, red-rimmed eyes on me, looking surprisingly helpless and vulnerable. But I knew that even at this late hour, he was as sharp as a hawk.

  ‘Yes, sir?’ I said politely, trying not to disturb my roommate.

  ‘Have you seen Vikram?’ he leaned, forward clearing his throat and peering through the glasses perched on his nose.

  Vikram? Why would he think I had seen Vikram?

  ‘Uh, no, sir.’

  He continued peering at me for a second, as if distrusting my answer, suspecting I was hiding him in my tiny double room; but I knew even he could not be daft enough to think Vikram and I were friends.

  He continued looking at me for a second and frowned, and then said a little vaguely, ‘I can’t locate him. Three others are missing too.’

  ‘I’m very sorry, sir,’ I said, not quite sure what else to say.

  ‘Put your shoes on and get a sweater,’ he said before shuffling out of my room.

  I didn’t have a choice but to follow him. Within moments, I found myself squeezed into the back of Ansari Sir’s small Maruti car, feeling an overwhelming sense of unease. I wasn’t at all worried about Vikram; I simply didn’t want to be caught in the middle of unpleasantness.

  Ansari Sir had also wrangled an unlucky peon and a miserable junior, who had made the mistake of staying up late to watch TV in the common room. It was this unlikely foursome that set off on what appeared to be a midnight campus hunt for Vikram and his friends.

  We drove slowly around the campus, stopping at several places – the art block, the main building, a construction site where students often played hooky. The cold air was causing the windows to fog and condense, which made Ansari Sir snap and swear at the peon. This was very shocking to me: I had never in my life heard the strict and highly proper Ansari Sir utter so much as a mild curse. This, I figured, was an indication of his stress levels, which were now steadily on the rise. At each stop, the hapless junior and I tumbled out of the car, and were sent to poke futilely in the dark, while Ansari Sir yelled out instructions and the peon scrubbed at the windows.

  I could understand Ansari Sir’s tension. It wasn’t uncommon for boys to come back late, but it was nearly 2.00 a.m. and the middle of the week. If Vikram and his compatriots were injured, this could cast a serious blemish on Ansari Sir’s record – permanently spoiling his chance for the headmastership, which he was said to dearly covet.

  After thirty minutes, we reached the far end of campus, until we were beside Dhobi Ghat that survived on the largesse of the school. I was convinced that this had become a wild goose chase, and was almost on the verge of saying something to Ansari Sir – or, more likely, forcing my junior to – when we finally saw it lying there, a shimmering clue, illuminated in the moonlight.

  Ansari Sir, old and weak as he was, spotted it first. He barked a command, and the peon ran to pick up the bottle and then handed it over to him. Ansari Sir sniffed at it and threw it into the bushes. We couldn’t take the car inside the narrow lane, so he barked another command, and we all followed on foot. And with those few steps, it was as if the whole world had changed, and instead of grand brick buildings, cobbled streets and manicured lawns, we were now surrounded by rickety huts, dust roads and the smell of urine and cow dung.

  Even though we were so close, we would never have found them in the darkness if it hadn’t been for Vikram’s trumpeting laugh. The sound caused me to grimace; Ansari Sir cursed softly, then beckoned us forward. We found all four of them, behind a washerman’s hut, the smell of which was abominable.

  Vikram lay on a ratty cot, drunk as a fish, while the other three – along with whom I guessed was the washerman – sat on the floor next to a dying fire, attempting to play a game of cards, a bunch of crumpled-up rupee notes by their side.

  Ansari Sir’s voice cracked like a whip and he
approached them silently, picking his way through the bottles and cigarette ends, his face as still and expressionless as a corpse. The boys looked up, startled as animals caught in a steel-tooth trap. Ansari Sir instructed Vikram to get up off the cot. A senseless Vikram, saliva dripping from his mouth and down the sides of his face, clutched a bottle in his hand that contained a milky-white liquid, which I later found out was a crude form of a dangerous drug, Metalime. Despite Ansari Sir’s orders, Vikram would not or could not move, and the other boys swayed badly, slurring incomprehensible words.

  I had always thought Ansari Sir a faintly ridiculous figure, with his British affections and Einstein hair; a dangerous man, to be sure, but one largely to be avoided and privately derided. This night changed all that. What could have been a dangerous and unpredictable confrontation – four drunk athletes, against an ancient teacher, a tiny peon, a terrified junior and me – ended up being an orderly affair. Ansari Sir, through force of his will alone, got all boys in his car and shooed the washerman away.

  For me, the sight of them drunk and drugged was so disturbing that I ended up fleeing the scene, walking back to the house in the bitter cold of this thankless night as fast as my good leg could carry me. When I reached the hostel, I realized that I was breathing very hard. My head spun with the blank faces of those boys; Ansari Sir’s hard, cold incomprehensible stare; Vikram’s drugged eyes rolling deep into his skull, his drunken laughter wailing like sirens in my ears. I collapsed on my bed, holding my aching leg, hoping desperately to fall asleep and to wake up and discover that this night had never happened.

  39

  THE FALLOUT OF Vikram’s adventure in Dhobi Ghat was immediate and far-reaching. They didn’t realize that I had been there, not Vikram nor the other three boys. Of course, the junior told the whole house about it, and even the peon had his two seconds of fame, fingering his moustaches and whispering furtively into boys’ ears. They left my name out of it though. I suspected it was because the junior wanted all the glory for himself. I wanted to thank him for doing so, but I did not, because if he had forgotten that I had been there, I did not want to remind him now.

  Ansari Sir was too preoccupied with the situation to say a word to me. He was, in fact, facing a serious dilemma. All four boys were from prominent families; all four had fathers who were alumni, who donated heavily to the school. It wouldn’t be as easy to kick them out as it would have been if someone like me had been caught; and yet, were Ansari Sir to go light on them, he would face a permanent and irreparable loss of credibility. Vikram and the other boys had committed a grave crime – drinking was serious enough, but drugs, and especially a drug as serious as Metalime, was grounds for expulsion. Boys had been expelled for lesser crimes and it was almost certain that Vikram would have to leave.

  Expulsion was serious for everyone, but it was an especially important event for a successful sportsman like Vikram. Expulsion meant he would be blacklisted from any state or national event, which meant that his sports career was over, not just in this school, but in any school that he ever wanted to attend.

  As expected, Vikram’s fall from grace caused a mad frenzy at school. Boys frantically discussed their theories about what had happened that night – it didn’t help matters that after the night at Dhobi Ghat, Vikram simply disappeared. No one knew where he had gone, even the closest of his friends. Allegedly, he went straight to the infirmary, and from there to the local hospital; someone else said that he had been smuggled out in the morning, lying doped out at the back of a big black car.

  Even though I usually did not care to indulge in gossip, this time even I was curious. Over the years, I had seen Vikram do plenty – cheating, drinking and smoking – on multiple occasions. But a serious drug, in the middle of the night, in his final year at school a few days before he was to be crowned prefect and bestowed the biggest honour of his life? When he had been odds-on favourite to be named head boy? To implode so spectacularly, to self-sabotage? This I did not understand. Was there something about him that I hadn’t known? Something to do with his parents or their divorce? Vikram’s father had remarried, and he even had a half-brother in the junior school – maybe that had caused him pain? But no matter how hard I thought about it, it was hopeless. I couldn’t find the answer to this question. I suspected I was missing a crucial piece of information, something that would explain the whole thing. I was right, but it was only much later that I found out that Riya was at the heart of it all.

  40

  THERE ARE PERIODS in life when you earn your advancement; and there are periods when luck smiles on you. Often, these two forces are at least somewhat correlated, but you usually don’t realize it at the time. So, just like that, Vikram’s gravest mistake ended up being my biggest triumph, and two days after his disappearance, when the prefects were announced, Vikram, who had been a sure-shot Ashok House prefect and even a possible head boy candidate, was not on the list.

  With Vikram and three other likely Ashok House prefect candidates all expelled, the impossible happened and I, Nikhil Sharma, was conferred the biggest honour of the school. A house prefect badge was bestowed upon me and with it I pledged unfaltering loyalty to Residency School.

  Over the course of my life, I had mastered the ability to make myself so small that I could almost disappear. As a young boy, I would practise this, closing my eyes, shutting off the world, becoming one with the darkness. But the second I had that gilded badge pinned to my lapel, it was as if I had stepped out of the shadows and become visible to the world.

  Suddenly, I was famous. The older boys in the house treated me with a cautious – if disdainful – respect; the younger ones looked at me with stars in their eyes. Even Jeevan Singh treated me differently; I would say that it was with respect. It felt very strange to be the object of attention; all my life I had been on the sidelines, and now I was meant to be leading the squad.

  And with the badge, the quiet days that I had known over my eleven years at Residency School ended as quickly as one of my dreams. The gold badge was a mark of supreme importance: many of my fellow prefects, like Mrinalini, had worked towards this honour their whole lives, but it also bore a hefty weight. Right away I was put in charge of so many things – organizing school competitions, house schedules, assemblies and attendance, writing reports for the teachers, the principal and the board, monitoring boys and supervising prep. Gone were the days of reading novels under a tree; gone were the days of bunking classes to watch Riya run; gone were the days of studying just for fun.

  That said, there were certain perks. We were allowed to use the prefects’ common room, which had much more comfortable sofas, and an abundance of tea biscuits. I also got my own room – for the first time in my life, my own room, all for me with a single bed, a small wooden desk and a window which looked onto the garden full of purple and magenta bougainvillaea and through which the sun poured in.

  The twelve of us prefects even got to wear different uniforms than the rest of the school – blue shirts that matched the pale mountain sky, instead of the basic white-and-blue; silver-striped silk scarves with our formal uniform, instead of the standard-issue tie. The most glorious of all were the badges – enchanting golden orbs embossed with the school insignia that we proudly pinned to our chests, some boys even keeping them on while they slept. It was said that these badges were so venerated that men wore them on the lapels of their coats for the rest of their lives.

  It was strange how quickly I got used to my new role as prefect. Strange, because I had never held any leadership position in this school except for chess captain. In part it was because of the respect – it came with the badge – and boys who had never noticed my existence now moved aside as I walked down the halls and looked at me with wide eyes. As for the work, I did that easily, I was after all pretty organized. I did struggle with disciplining the boys, so I tried as much as I could to avoid that job and pass it on to my fellow prefect, the football captain, to whom yelling at boys and beating them came much m
ore naturally.

  The best part of the prefectship was that Riya and I no longer had to hide our relationship. We were seniors, and fairly prominent – she a sports captain and I a prefect. The teachers simply couldn’t say anything to us, and the students wouldn’t dare. We could walk freely on campus, side by side, have tea together during break, share a samosa after school with nothing at all to worry about.

  Looking back, I can’t believe our recklessness, my recklessness. Rules meant nothing to us. Sometimes we bunked one, two or three classes together, hanging around the art block or even leaving campus through Dhobi Ghat to have a cup of tea or eat a roasted bhutta.

  And we weren’t the only ones. In the twelfth standard, romance seemed to bloom. Romance seemed to blood all around and boys and girls inhabited hidden corners of the school. Lovers budded and spread like wild roses and for the first time in my twelve years, Residency School began feeling like an actual co-ed school instead of an all-boys school. Shy science students finally shared their chemical bonds, sporty athletes began playing couples tennis and Mrinalini fell in love with Vikram. Many boys I knew were in love with Riya but she was only mine, and most girls, however unattractive, had at least two boys in love with her.

  There was one fly in the ointment. In the few free moments I had during my busy days, I often found myself thinking about Vikram. For better or worse, Vikram’s presence had been an important one in my life and now I simply could not believe that he was no longer here. I walked down the hallways of the dorm bracing myself to hear his trumpeting laugh, preparing to duck away and then as I stepped into a shadow I would remember that he wasn’t there any more. During assembly I would imagine his hard grip on my shoulder as he snuck up on me from the back of the line, but then I would remember that I was a prefect now and I didn’t even stand in line.

  Boarding school makes you a creature of habit. Everything is orderly: your life, your schedule, your mind and when something or someone goes missing, the repercussions are magnified. And that’s what it felt like with Vikram, who, despite his faults, had occupied a particular place in the Residency School system, a more prominent place than most. With him gone, many boys felt confused and lost. There was no one to take orders from, no one to adulate, no one to avoid. His spot at morning assembly – a coveted spot, by the south door – lay empty for weeks after, no one daring to step in. His ‘areas’, even though they occupied prime dorm real estate, were left alone – his bed by the window, with its eight shelves of storage space; the desk he had declared his own by chiselling in his name; his bathroom cubbyhole, which still contained his expensive imported gels.