Nikhil and Riya Read online

  I know and I can recite this information verbatim because every Residency student was made to memorize this. I am not sure how many of our boys went on to ‘serve India’ but many of them became star sportsmen and athletes.

  As we got older, everything about being a boy at Residency School became about sports. Growing up meant progressing from the under-14s, to the under-16s, to the under-18s. I loved books, drawing and multiplication. They loved cricket, football and drills. Sportsmen were heroes and I couldn’t even run.

  But I did train myself. I trained myself to feel little or nothing at all when I couldn’t play with others, when they laughed at me or teased me about my limp, I turned inward, tuning out their jibes. If they were cruel, I would simply walk away; if they were playing a game, I made the best of it by watching quietly from the sidelines. When I got lonely, I found refuge in a book.

  I had my own havens. I loved the library, and I loved mathematics. I discovered early on that I had a knack for numbers. I could visualize numbers in my head, solve in seconds sums that nobody else could. So while the other boys played football, cricket and squash, I played with formulae and from my early days, I was the best student in Residency School.

  And so over the years, I found my role within the complex school ecosystem. I was the boy people could come to for completing their homework, the boy who could always be counted on to pass chits during the exams. I wasn’t at the bottom of the pyramid, but somewhere in the shadows, so much a part of the landscape that I almost merged in with the red brick walls.

  8

  OBJECTIVELY, RIYA WASN’T beautiful – at least not the way actresses were, or the sort of way the women in the magazines stashed under hostel beds were. Even though I was hardly an expert on the fairer sex, none of the tenth-standard girls struck me as being particularly pretty – they weren’t girls, nor women, but stuck somewhere in an uncomfortable place in between. They all looked the same to me. Most had angry pimples and walked awkwardly, hunched, to hide their budding chests.

  Not Riya. She was tall and straight, her heart-shaped face bright and clear, a small nose perched above her perfect rose-shaped lips. And those eyes, those maddening eyes. Not quite black, but the deepest shade of brown, like the wet leaves that piled up under the deodar trees in the monsoon. And her hair. Most of the girls wore tight braids, but Riya almost always had a loose ponytail, which looked copper in the sun.

  The first time I saw her, I was drawn like a magnet, hopelessly and shamelessly ensnared. From then on no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t help but stare at her – as she walked in and out of the classroom, her blue skirt swishing around her long brown legs; as she gazed, utterly bored, out of the window during class, her dimpled chin in her palms. She had a haughty, glorious smile. She spoke slowly, in a sing-song sort of a way. Her eyebrows moved around her face like the wings of a beautiful bird.

  Day and night she danced about my brain – from the moment I woke up, as I sat through class, when I did my homework, as I walked around campus during games period. Thinking about her wasn’t enough, so eventually I began dreaming about her, and I had dreams so vivid that sometimes I thought that she was actually there. I would cling to these dreams even when I woke up, confused and upset to be back in my clapboard bed in the dormitory, surrounded by the sighs and snuffles of so many boys.

  I had never ever felt like this before. I had begun finding girls attractive a few years ago, but not like this. This feeling, it was something else. Something that I did not understand, something that I could not rationalize, something that drove me totally out of my mind. I started doing things that shocked even me, but I couldn’t help it – it was as if there was another force that controlled me. I pocketed pens she had left behind, picked up the scraps of paper she had written on and thrown away. I spied on her on every occasion that I could, lurking around the classroom when she was there, doing unnecessary things just so I could be around her. Once I even contemplated, but did not execute, retrieving the chewing gum from the dustbin that she had been ordered to spit out. That piece of gum had touched her lips, had swirled in her mouth, had sat on her tongue.

  Although Riya and I were in the same class, she barely registered my presence and I never, not once, had the nerve to talk to her. I usually sat in the middle of the classroom – the closest that boys could safely be to the front of the classroom, without getting teased. She was all the way at the front, under the nose of the teachers because she was always getting into trouble for falling asleep, for daydreaming, for being late, for being the poor student that she was.

  Somehow I didn’t mind watching her from afar. I’d always been on the sidelines at this school and I happily fell into the same habit with her, the thought of actually stepping onto the playing field completely foreign to me.

  9

  RIYA’S FATHER WAS Bhanu Pratap, popularly known as B.P., the sports director and cricket coach on campus. This was an important position in a school that had been the IPSC (Indian Public School Competition) champion for ten straight years. B.P. was a well-known cricket player, a Ranji Trophy winner and at one time even a backup for the Indian team.

  I tended to keep my distance from the sporty types, especially sports coaches; their hauteur and their height always frightened me. B.P., in particular, was intimidating. He was tall like his daughter, broad and very strong, tanned reddish-brown from the sun, a human brick in a navy blue blazer who strolled about campus with a slow, stately gait, leaving us all bobbing in his wake. Everyone was frightened of him, even the headmaster, even Vikram.

  I doubt it was easy for Riya to come to Residency School. I knew she had difficulty making friends, although she didn’t really seem to care. When the girls did try to befriend her – especially that teacher’s pet Mrinalini, the headmistress’ daughter – she was distant and cool, and rarely said much to them beyond a few words. I admired her for what at the time I thought was her independence and self-sufficiency.

  The boys were a different matter altogether. I discovered that I wasn’t the only one who had fallen for her. This was a problem of supply and demand. Residency School went co-educational in 1980. This was considered progressive by many. Apparently, not by many girls though because for every five boys, we only had one girl. And then there was Riya. The boys talked about her all the time: how short her school skirt was, how she sometimes ran wearing shorts, how when she walked she revealed her thighs, how she sometimes forgot to wear a slip underneath her translucent white shirt. Many boys, especially the seniors, the eleventh- and twelfth-standard boys had a crush on her. They made the juniors from our class slip her notes asking her to meet them after school at the art block, and sent her flowers and boxes of chocolates. But Riya didn’t seem to respond to any of it. She only ever glanced at the chits tucked into her desk, and then threw everything into the dustbin, except the chocolates, which she slipped into her bag.

  I saw it all and listened to it, feeling funny on the inside. I didn’t want them talking about her, I didn’t want anyone but me thinking about her, but I also knew that there was absolutely nothing for me to do except burn silently and invisibly.

  10

  I WOULD RATHER forget the first encounter I had with her. We had senior school assemblies every day at 8.00 a.m., six days a week, in the damp echoing main hall. The walls were lined with grim portraits of headmasters old and new and the floors with hard wooden benches, only a few with back rests reserved for the seniors. The students – uniformed in white and blue, with a red-and-silver striped tie on every neck – sat in segregated rows of benches, ordered by age. Our small population of orderly clone-like girls, neatly plaited and pleated, occupied the front rows, always staring awkwardly into space, avoiding eye contact with the teachers, keeping their knees tightly joined together, trying to be discreet. The teachers sat lined up on a wooden stage, the women with their tight buns and long-sleeved blouses, the men with their thin moustaches and striped ties; they stared down at us with suspicion and dislike.<
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  I remember being late that day, a few toilets in the dorm had broken down and I had had to wait my turn even as the final bell had rang. The prefect, of course, was not pleased. Sometimes these prefects were scarier than the teachers – like feral animals, hungry for boys to sharpen their fangs on. This one certainly frightened me. He was fierce and muscled, freshly shaven and strongly cologned, and had taken to calling me Oily, referring to the oil that I always put in my hair, a habit hammered into me by my junior school matrons.

  And then he shoved me towards my seat amongst the tenth-standard Ashok House boys.

  I moved as quickly as I could, which was very slow. I tripped over many legs, whispering apologies to the boys who were softly swearing at me for treading on their feet and bags. Then the prefects hissed at us to be silent as the teachers walked in one by one. I was always struck by how much their hierarchy resembled ours: the senior teachers proudly taking their place in the front rows, the cringing junior teachers wriggling at the back.

  ‘Quiet!’ roared Ansari Sir, house master, to no one in particular and the hall suddenly went very still. Though not the most senior, he was the oldest teacher at school and always sat at the coveted spot to the right of the principal.

  Just as I reached my seat, everyone rose to their feet. Our mousey, grey-haired principal walked on to the stage, floating in the vermillion Residency School robe which dragged on the ground. The head boy, a very tall muscled sardar who towered over the principal, carried his notes, trailing him.

  We all sat down when the principal reached the podium, and he began his morning rant with a prayer. As I settled in for thirty minutes of monotony, I suddenly found myself staring at a head of hair that I knew better than any other in the world.

  Riya.

  I had previously looked for her in morning assembly, pretending to stretch my back and grabbing quick glances to my left and right. Usually she sat so far away from me that I couldn’t see her. But now I found myself right behind her, so close that I could count the wisps of hair on her neck, I could see the outline of her slip under her white shirt, I could reach out and touch her neck.

  ‘Your skirt,’ whispered the girl next to her, who had more oil in her hair than I put in mine all week. Riya irritably yanked at the end of her skirt which had ridden up her legs.

  I don’t know why I did it. I was so close to her I could faintly smell her scent – soap and flowers – but I reached up and gently touched her ponytail, so softly that she did not feel a thing. It felt like the cotton candy I had on the beach one time long ago.

  A loud hiss interrupted my thought. Startled, I turned to my right and saw Vikram sitting two boys away, grinning widely and motioning to me. I did not understand what he was saying, until I realized that he wanted me to pull her long hair. I quickly jerked my hand away. It was not my intention to disturb her in any way.

  Vikram rolled his eyes, and then bent forward and yanked her ponytail so hard that she yelped loudly right in the middle of the principal’s quote of the day. Her voice echoed in the hall, and all three hundred pairs of eyes turned to her. Our principal stopped speaking and trained his small eyes on her. He seemed confused at this unprecedented disruption and his eyes fluttered like dragonflies. Her house prefect, a girl with a hawk nose and thick glasses, gave Riya a furious scowl. There was no doubt that if Riya were a boy, she would have been caned, but I heard that they were not so hard on the girls. Or so I hoped, as I saw the sunken eyes of Deshpande Ma’am – her shrivelled, raisin-like housemistress – bore into her.

  I couldn’t tell what Riya was thinking or feeling, but she remained as still as a statue, not even turning around to see who had played the dirty trick. Vikram, of course, was grinning like a fool while the boys around him sniggered and patted him on the back.

  Suddenly, the boy next to me kicked me hard, and I felt a vice-like grip on my arm. The prefect was staring at me looking very angry.

  ‘On stage, Oily,’ he hissed.

  There were now three hundred pairs of eyes on me.

  I got up as quickly as I could and stumbled towards the stage as the principal droned on. In my daze, I understood that I had won a poetry contest that had been held weeks ago, and now I had to go up on stage and accept the certificate. I remembered vaguely writing a poem called ‘A Creature in Love’.

  As I came to my senses, I looked in horror at the steps that led up to the stage.

  I had accepted awards before, but never here, in this hall. Till the ninth standard the morning assemblies had been held in the sports hall, which doubled as a basketball court. But now I had to face going up at least ten very steep stairs.

  As I struggled up the stage as best as I could, taking one step with my good leg, dragging my bad leg behind me, I felt their eyes boring into my back. The whole time though I only thought of her. We were in the same class, but she had never seen me like this, not with my defect on display.

  I duly received the award and stumbled off the stage. I walked back to my bench, holding the certificate to my chest, trying my best to disguise my limp. Just before I sat down for just a fraction of a second, I caught her looking at me curiously, and then she gave me what I thought was a faint smile, or maybe it was just a smirk.

  I slid back onto the bench wishing I could disappear, and for the rest of the assembly – the morning news and the national anthem – I wondered what she had thought when she had looked at me.

  The feeling of embarrassment lasted all day and I berated myself terribly. Why had I let Vikram pull her hair? What had she thought when she saw me climbing up those stairs like an invalid? Why had she smiled at me?

  My leg had been crippled for a long time, it was stubby and weak but it had always been as much a part of me as my head and my heart. I never even remembered feeling particularly bad about it – until now. For the first time, I felt utterly short-changed by the universe. Why me? Why was I the only boy with a bad leg? Why couldn’t I be like Vikram? Not a champion, I didn’t need that, but wasn’t it only fair that I should be able to walk and run like other boys.

  I skipped games in the afternoon, something I rarely did. Instead, I went back to my dorm and lay down on my small bed. While the rest of the school sprinted and swarmed and galloped across fields, I scalded and burned wishing very hard that I could tear off my dead leg.

  11

  I HAVE BEEN driving for five hours now. The donkey brown plains have given way to verdant rolling hills. My leg hurts which it rarely does these days. Years of physiotherapy and the country’s best doctors had sorted out my problem – or so I had thought.

  I pull over, take a sip of water and clean my glasses. I don’t know what destructive impulse comes over me, but I take out my phone and Google him. And there he is, on my screen, in my face, an adult Vikram, centre stage even now.

  His Facebook page is an ode to himself with a multitude of comments and likes. I zoom into the photograph and he looks curiously the same, the old cosy grin, the puffed-up chest, the full petulant mouth and a newly receding chin. He has lost his thick mane and he is almost bald now, but the baldness suits him somehow.

  In one picture, he stands next to a big car; in another, he poses pompously with his father by a large wooden desk, in a third, he shows off a too-thin wife. I scroll down and see articles on his business, on his successes, on his IPO. I see then the obsequious comments of names familiar and new. And then I fall back thirty years.

  I wasn’t the only one whose circumstances had brought them to Residency School at the age of five. It’s strange to think of it now, but Vikram was one of these boys – a teary, sad little mite whose parents had divorced and who kept the rest of us awake at night with his noisy sobs.

  In those early years he was undersized, smaller than even me, and had big round eyes that were often full of tears. He and I were best friends, inseparable, our house matron called us two peas in a pod.

  Back then, things were different. I helped him with his schoolwork, and he helped me c
ope, helping me up stairs, up hills, up ropes in gym class. We spent hours playing marbles, the only game I could enjoy. He shared the imported snacks he always had sent from home. In the third standard, after his father remarried, Vikram told me that he was going home and never coming back. I remember that I begged him to stay, and when he finally left, I cried so much that I was sent to the infirmary for two days.

  Four years later, Vikram returned. He was no longer the small sad-eyed boy who played hide-and-seek with me. Now he was tall and arrogant, with long hair he slicked back with gels and white sneakers that looked like rocket launchers compared to the flat-soled canvas shoes that the rest of us wore. When he came back he didn’t remember me – or anyone else for that matter. It was as if he had erased the years that he had previously spent at Residency School in the same way I had erased the first five years of my life.

  This time around, we did not become friends. His friends were boys on the football team, hockey team and track team. To him, I was just a nerdy guy whose notes he borrowed and who always knew what the right answers were.

  There was however one advantageous consequence to our one-time friendship. With so much sweat and testosterone flying around Residency School, there was naturally a lot of bullying, and I presented an almost perfect target: small, weak, crippled. But Vikram – who had very quickly become the unanimous gang leader of our class – and I had an unspoken agreement. He protected me, made sure no one hit or bullied me, and just like in the old days, I helped him with his schoolwork, completing his notebooks, doing his homework, helping him cheat in exams. I don’t know why he did this for me. Maybe it was because of those brief years that we had been friends or maybe it was because he realized that he could not survive in this school, just like I could not survive without him.