Nikhil and Riya Read online

  Within the house, chaos ensued but the guilty remained cloaked. Questions floated about in an atmosphere of tension and suspense. Would the culprits be found? Would Ansari Sir be kicked out? Would Principal Sir resign? Who would the new housemaster be?

  Being prefect of Ashok House and technically in charge, I found myself in the centre of it all. I was taken to a small room where the police had set up headquarters and I was questioned for hours. I gave all the right answers to the questions asked of me. Who were his friends (all), who were his enemies (none), was bullying common in the house (no), and did the teachers beat the kids (never).

  I went through all the motions and toed the school line, doing what a boy in my position had to do. But there were times when I saw Rajat’s pictures in the papers, or when the boys whom I suspected were wolfishly lurking around, that I felt so wretched that I was almost ill. I asked myself again and again if there was anything that I could have done to save Rajat. Maybe, if all those months ago, I wasn’t such a coward and I had reported Vikram and his gang? Maybe if I had snitched on the ones I suspected? Instead, I had deleted the shameful incident from my mind. I had shut my eyes to all signs of torture. I was in charge of a place where a boy had nearly died.

  And with that, I fell permanently out of love with Residency School. It had never been my place but it had always been my home. With this one incident it was as though I’d slipped on a pair of spectacles after a long time of deliberate fuzziness and I was seeing clearly now the corrupt hell that my school had slowly become.

  I was so absorbed in the frenzy – and Riya’s gradually deteriorating condition – that I didn’t even notice the signs of my own downfall. I didn’t see the cold stares I got from the assistant housemaster, I didn’t notice how the boys no longer paid heed to me and I didn’t notice the number of boys who didn’t show up when I took assembly. I didn’t even notice that I sometimes walked into an empty classroom during prep.

  Had I noticed something was amiss, I could have spoken to Ansari Sir or some of the other teachers who would have been on my side. I could have taken some precautionary political measures, made a paper trail, guarded my rear flank. But none of this struck me, and I remained clueless until it was much too late.

  Vikram, on the other hand, was slowly and resolutely marshalling his forces. He was, unequivocally, back to being the golden boy. This, no matter how much of an ostrich I was, I could not have missed. No matter what his transgressions, he had a certain inborn charm that drew people to him and made them want to follow him. When the principal or the senior teachers came to the house, he was always around, taking charge, giving instructions, effectively solving problems, making others run around.

  Even Ansari Sir, who I knew for a fact hated Vikram, seemed to be falling for his charm. As Ansari Sir walked around in a daze, fearful that he may lose his job, Vikram was at his sycophantic best. He was at Ansari’s Sir’s beck and call, running to get him a glass of water or the cane that he had left behind, carrying his notebooks for him and completing his unfinished tasks. He even joked around with him and jollied him, reassuring him that no one could have known about Rajat, insisting that the perpetrators would be caught and expelled quickly, assuring Ansari Sir that his rightful place as leading faculty at Residency School would soon be restored. It helped, of course, that Vikram had led Residency School to victory at the hockey nationals for the first time in ten years and that since he had been back he had won so many medals that I had simply lost count.

  Steadily, Vikram rallied his troops against me, even as I remained utterly and absolutely oblivious. First, it was the boys, and then the house staff. Then even ancient Ansari Sir was brainwashed and was heard muttering about Vikram being a tower of strength in a trying time. Systematically, all my allies were replaced or removed, a pitiless pressing sweep. Vikram made sure that they all saw how inept I was, how I couldn’t silence the boys or make them walk in line, how disorganized I was that things under my charge – the attendance registrar, exit slips, dorm records and even petty cash – were disappearing.

  I didn’t notice any of it, not because I was stupid, but mostly because I was living in some sort of hallucinogenic daze. I was hardly sleeping, surviving on less than three hours of sleep a night and studying well into the night because I had fallen desperately behind. And then I would read nonstop about cancer till the morning birds sang.

  59

  THE TRAP WAS finally sprung on a Friday night. I had visited Riya after supper, and half-heartedly studied for a chemistry test. Now I was staring out of my window, towards her house – which I found myself doing more and more.

  Without warning, my door burst open. It was Ansari Sir who stormed into my tiny room and slapped me so hard that he knocked the glasses off my face.

  ‘Sir…’ I said, aghast.

  ‘Where are the attendance registers?’ Ansari Sir raged.

  ‘Sir, I gave them to you…’ I muttered, but he was in such a frenzy that he didn’t hear a word.

  Ansari Sir had gone purple in the face. ‘Principal Sir has asked me three times. This disgusting behaviour can’t go on. We cannot have prefects like this at Residency School,’ he screamed, saliva dripping down his chin.

  I was confused. I had placed the registers on his desk this morning. The police had asked for them, something to do with the case.

  Ansari Sir continued pitilessly. ‘You don’t take prep, you’re late for assembly. The teachers are complaining about your marks. If we had proper people in charge, people who could control these boys, none of this would have ever happened.’

  ‘Sir…’ I started, trying to explain myself, but when I saw the fury on his face, I stopped. He wouldn’t listen, no matter what I said.

  He drew himself up to his full height of just over five feet. He quivered, as though fighting to free himself from his tiny frame. ‘You are a disgrace to the school. You should be ashamed of yourself,’ he growled

  For an instant, he raised his arm, and I braced for another slap. But then he thought otherwise. He walked out of my room, slamming the door hard, my face burning from the slap and with shame.

  60

  THE NEXT MORNING, I was formally removed from my prefecture, and Ansari Sir took my badge away – actually, both mine and my co-prefects’, though I suspected that it was really mine they were after. The ceremony was simple and desultory. Before Principal Sir, Ansari Sir and a few peons as audience – in the gloom of Ansari Sir’s office – I unclipped the badge and placed it on the desk. Everyone, even the peons, glowered at us. And then it was done.

  This, evidently, was the school’s way of taking ‘action’ for what happened to Rajat Singh. Instead of investigating the crime or actually capturing the perpetrators, they decided to make an example of the prefects, the senior boys who were meant to lead the house but had instead taken it completely off track. It was our lack of control, which had led to the violence; we had failed to do our duties to the school.

  Apparently, no prefect badge had ever been taken away mid-term in the history of Residency School. Extenuating circumstances called for extreme action, the school authorities said. It looked like I had made some sort of permanent dent in the school’s reputation, as its biggest disgrace.

  In an ironic turn of events, Vikram, the biggest and most vicious bully of them all, was given my badge. Ansari Sir suddenly turned, thumped his back and crowed with delight. He announced at assembly that Vikram was a natural leader, and would bring back discipline to the school.

  It was then, seeing Vikram’s smug grin, that the pieces fell together, and like the moment of clarity when you have arrived at the solution of a difficult integration in the simplest of ways, I grasped it all for what it really was: a set-up from start to finish.

  Vikram’s father, a hard-faced man with a beak nose and recently elected MLA, turned up in the papers vouching for the school. According to him, the ‘scandal’ was just the media playing up an incident that had never actually taken place. The R
esidency School was the best school in the country, with the highest ethical and pastoral standards. It was impossible this had really happened: it was faked, falsified and fictional. And just like that – because a powerful person said so – the pictures of Rajat in the press, with the Residency School tie tied like a noose around his neck, went away as quickly as they had appeared. It was as if none of it had ever happened: not Rajat’s beating, not Vikram’s expulsion, not my prefectship. And so I was once again just an obscure school boy, no immortalizing badge, nothing that made me different any more.

  61

  IT WAS JUST a badge, just a stupid, fake-gold badge. But yet, I felt like broken glass, shattered into a million little pieces that would never again rejoin. But I had to pick up the pieces and I had to move on. I couldn’t let them get to me – Riya was the only one who deserved my tears. Yet, no matter what I told myself, I felt myself spiralling down. What would everyone think of me? What would they be talking about? How I was once so clever, so powerful, maybe even well-liked, but now how I was so pathetic and so dumb.

  Riya helped me keep it in perspective. ‘It’s just a badge – a pin really,’ she said to me,

  ‘I know,’ I said, holding my head in my hands, an empty feeling in my heart and a hole where the heavy badge had been pinned.

  How could I explain what I was feeling when I didn’t quite understand it myself? I knew that I had never really deserved this badge – it had been a wild stroke of luck. Or more than luck, it had been Riya, her luck, her faith. And now I wasn’t just losing the badge. I was losing what I had accomplished because of her.

  Riya tugged at my sleeve and then when I wouldn’t look up, she pinched my ear, forcing me to look up at her.

  ‘Tell me, Specs, what did he look like when he went up the stage to collect his badge?’

  ‘Like a pig,’ I grumbled, rubbing my stinging ear.

  ‘And Ansari Sir?

  ‘He just stood there, drool dripping down his chin.’

  ‘And Vikram smiled like a greasy fool,’ she said with a laugh. ‘That rhymes, you know, your poetry is finally rubbing off on me. Is he still putting that shiny gel in his hair?’

  ‘His hair shines almost as much as his badge,’ I glumly said.

  She laughed so loudly that she broke out into a terrifying cough. For several seconds, she held her mouth in her handkerchief.

  I looked at her with concern, but then she looked up, eyes smiling bright.

  ‘Riya, this isn’t funny, you know.’

  ‘But it is,’ she said with a grin.

  ‘Maybe to you,’ I mumbled, sulking and staring at my shoes.

  She threw her hanky at me, a crumpled pink thing which landed near my shoe. I picked it up and snuck it in my pocket.

  ‘Comes on, Specs! It’s just a silly badge.’

  ‘It’s just, you know … demeaning,’ I said in an embarrassed voice.

  ‘No, I don’t know. I don’t think anyone but you really cares.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ I said, taking off my glasses and rubbing my eyes. ‘I even have to wear the same uniform as everyone else.’

  Now she was laughing again. I was aware how silly I sounded: me, who owned only two shirts and a single pair of trousers, complaining about my clothes. But it still stung.

  ‘It’s not funny,’ I complained.

  ‘You never cared about all this stuff before – badges and uniforms. And now seeing you all torn up over this, it’s just … funny. Plus, it’s winter now. Everyone wears the same sweaters, even prefects.’

  When she saw that I hadn’t cheered up, she tried again in a gentler tone. ‘Look, take mine. I don’t need them any more.’

  She reached into a drawer and put four glimmering orbs in the palm of my hands. Riya had more badges than anyone else in school. She had been athletics captain and girls’ sports captain for two years in a row. She had four badges when most people had one and very rarely two.

  At Residency School, your badges were your identity, your most prized possessions, and looking at her badges lying like jewels in my palm, the depth of her compassion struck me like a hard slap. Here she was losing her life, yet trying to make me feel better about a ludicrous badge. And in that instant, I saw it all from her eyes. The pettiness, the drama, the politics. The change happened in a matter of seconds, my frown twisted into a smile and suddenly, unexpectedly, we started to laugh.

  We laughed the kind of laugher that borders on hysteria, the kind that makes your tummy hurt and every time I would almost calm down, just looking at her would set me off again. I hadn’t laughed like this in months and now I felt my problems floating away like helium balloons. That was the thing with her, she could make me laugh, even when I wanted to cry.

  When we finally managed to stop, she asked me, still red in the face, ‘Now that you’re not a prefect any more, Specs, can I ask you for something?’

  ‘Anything,’ I said, gathering my breath.

  ‘Will you take a trip with me?’

  ‘A trip?’ I gasped.

  ‘I’m serious,’ she said, though she didn’t sound serious at all.

  ‘I’ll go wherever you want to go.’

  ‘Okay, then apply for leave and finish all your schoolwork. We’ll leave day after tomorrow.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, not giving it a second thought. ‘Your wish is my command.’

  I heard the final night bell toll. I didn’t want to leave but it was time to go. I got up from the steps and walked back to my bike, looking at the badge that I had taken from her. It was her Athletic Captain batch from this year, the one that she had worn so close to her heart. I wouldn’t wear it right now while I was at school, but I knew then and there that I would always keep it in my breast pocket where it would be even closer to my heart. And I always have.

  62

  TWILIGHT FALLS, STEEPING the mountains in shades of blue that spread upwards like a dye. The moon rises, touching each peak until the long horizon glitters against an electric-blue sky. In the distance immediately ahead of me, I see the faint outline of a particular mountain, a geometric cone, just like my little son would have drawn. It looks so perfect, so radiant that I wonder for a moment if any of it is real.

  I swerve off my path, off the route that will lead me to the school. Instead, I go down a broken road in the direction of that perfect mountain, taking a journey that I had with her so many years ago.

  By the time I reach my destination, the night is wrapped in rich velvety darkness, but the moon is so bright that I don’t need to switch on my headlights. I have been driving for almost ten hours but I am not tired; instead, I am charged with a sort of a nervous energy.

  My car bumps and jostles on the pitted road as I drive towards the settlement which looks eerie and mysterious at this hour, colourful prayer flags fluttering in the cool breeze. I stop at a cigarette stall where a group of people are huddled around a small crackling TV, sipping cups of steaming tea. I want a cup of the salty-sweet butter tea, but I know it is getting late, and I don’t have much time.

  ‘The master?’ I ask.

  They nod and point to a dark road on the right.

  I drive down the street guided only by the light of the moon and arrive outside a simple one-storey house, the only sounds, the crunching of the gravel underneath the tyres of my car.

  The lights are on, but the little house seems deserted. I knock nervously on the door and within seconds, a red-faced young man wearing a maroon robe opens the door.

  ‘Are you here to see the master?’ he asks, without preamble.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, more to myself than to the young man. ‘I’m here to see the master.’

  I am ushered into a small lamp-lit room, where I wait for a few minutes. I am sitting on a bamboo rug that covers a dark wooden floor. It is cold and I shiver in my thin T-shirt. A few minutes later, the young man brings me a cup of steaming butter tea, which I gladly take. As I wait for it to cool, I wonder for the millionth time what I am doing her
e. I am on the verge of leaving when he finally returns and beckons me to follow.

  The young man shepherds me into a little room and there he is, exactly as I remembered him – brown, wrinkled and round, with a smile that engulfs his face and small eyes which disappear when he laughs. My eyes stray for a moment to the photos on the walls, pictures of an old man with groups of people, and I realize that this laughing man sitting in front of me isn’t the one I had seen all those years ago.

  He catches my surprise and says with a sad smile, ‘My master, he left his body last year.’

  ‘Oh…’ I sit down, taking a seat in the same room that I had sixteen long years ago. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  I introduce myself and out of habit, I hand over my card. I tell him that I came to see his master many years ago with a close friend. It is strangely hard to talk; I suspect it is the incense choking my throat. ‘Your master, he helped her … and me as well. I will always remember him.’

  ‘My master was a great man, he was very, very wise.’

  I can only clear my throat. He looks at me for a moment, then asks me gently, ‘What can I do for you?’

  I stare at him blankly, thinking that I didn’t really know myself.

  The spiritual calm that radiates from him is so potent that for a dizzying moment I am glad that I have come.

  Finally I say, ‘It’s for my friend, the one with whom I came to see your master. I’m seeking blessings for her.’

  He smiles widely, displaying his toothless gums. ‘You, young man, have a habit of worrying, don’t you?’ he says in a scolding tone. ‘I can see in your eyes that you are very worried. But there is nothing for you to worry about. She is safe, your friend, and she is home. The soul is very wise, wiser than you or me. When it leaves, it knows exactly how to find its way back.’