Nikhil and Riya Page 6

  24

  WHEN I RETURNED to campus, it was as quiet as a stone. The pattering of small feet, the hoots of rowdy students, the shrill cries of bells and whistles, the organized chaos of our school, all gone, replaced now with a campus so silent that I could hear the warm whisper of the summer winds on the tracks and the rustle of the summer leaves on the deserted roads. The playing fields stretched green, empty and wide, the deserted buildings seemed to sigh in relief and the animals and birds of our school seemed to run uninhibited, as if they too were momentarily free of all the rules.

  When I first arrived, used to a campus life full of rules, I felt confused and paralysed but I devised a tactic of thinking of my grandmother’s stifling house and my relatives, after which I would immediately feel relief. So like this I quickly settled in.

  It was to be one of the best summers of my life – just me, my books and her. Boarding school life had programmed me to operate on a schedule, to live by the bell, but for the first time since I could remember, time, which had always held me in thrall, did not matter at all. I woke up when I wanted to, no matron, no prefect, no grandmother jostling me out of bed. There were no bells going off, there were no classes to go to, no teachers to be afraid of, no prying eyes, no bullies to avoid. I didn’t have to report to PT at 6.00 a.m., I didn’t have to wait in line for the bathroom, or warm up the pot for a senior, I didn’t have to wait in dread for the sting of the bell. For the first time in my life, I didn’t even have to make my bed.

  I was meant to be studying for the IIT exams, but since there was no one supervising me, I spent most my day time lying around under the deodar and chinar trees, taking in the scent of the wild roses and the buddleia, reading books from the library, gazing for hours at night at the stars that I loved, living in some sort of a glorious reverie, floating about, letting my hair grow out, not even bothering to put oil in it sometimes.

  Riya trained with her coach in the morning, spent all afternoon sleeping, and then every evening, after dinner in the near-empty mess, I would meet her by the running track, and I would point out the stars to her in the indigo sky. There was the Great Bear lying on his back, and then the Swan, winging out of the Milky Way, then the Pegasus, like Riya, soaring above them all, and then my favourite, the gentle Shepard fading slowly with the dimming light of the moon.

  The best part of the summer though was watching her run – this is when Riya was at her glorious best. Riya always said what was on her mind, never mincing words like other girls, but it was only through running that she really expressed herself. Through movement. Through the joy of kinetic energy. This was the essential truth of her: she was a body in motion; she could never be held or contained. Sometimes before a meet, on what was meant to be her day of rest, she would do some casual practice on the tracks. She invited me to these practices and I would be at the tracks at 4.00 p.m. sharp, stopwatch in hand, standing under the pavilion by the scoreboard, with a notebook to record her times. The heat was often oppressive, and I almost never had anyone to talk to, but I never got bored, no matter how many laps she took around that track. She ran slightly tilted forward, weight lowered, chin up, it almost looked like she was falling over, step by step, the ground catching her every time. She ran on her toes, and kept me on mine as well.

  ‘Specs, you aren’t paying attention,’ she grumbled one afternoon, rubbing her hand across her sweaty face, leaving a trail of mud behind.

  ‘I am,’ I said, fumbling with the stopwatch that lay switched off in my palm. I had been distracted for a moment by a buzzard wheeling lazily in the azure sky.

  ‘Every second matters, you know. The timing has to be exact,’ she said crossly, placing her hands on her tiny waist, her face flustered and pink as she walked towards me catching her breath.

  ‘I’m the one who’s good with numbers, remember?’ I joked.

  ‘Those are your kind of numbers, Specs, and these are mine. Last time you stopped the stopwatch five seconds too late.’

  ‘That wasn’t me. It was you who was slow,’ I said with a grin; nothing could get me in a bad mood these days.

  She glowered and before I knew it she had taken off, kicking a cloud of dirt into my face.

  And that is how I remember her, dancing and dazzling, disappearing into a dramatic sun.

  And in this manner, one dreamlike day passed into the next.

  25

  I SAW A lot of B.P. that summer. It had its pluses and its minuses. Mostly it was a matter of convenience.

  After a freezing winter, Residency School was experiencing its warmest summer in twenty years, the mountain sun so strong that it sometimes burnt our skins. Riya often insisted that we go over to her house rather than sit smouldering underneath the drying trees. I squeaked my protests and tried to stay away, preferring to keep my distance from all sports-related people, and B.P was the head of all sports and I was awfully scared of him; but I always relented, because we had no other place to go and it wasn’t possible for me to deny Riya anything.

  Her house was located on the far end of campus, bordering the dense coniferous forests that stretched out for hundreds of miles, where sometimes boys would venture out on a trek. From her garden, you could see the dome of the main school building and the spire of the chapel. If I strained my eyes I could see the roof of the red brick Ashok House, which was a fifteen-minute walk away.

  The bungalow itself was old and spacious with high ceilings, scarred wooden floors and peeling white walls. The drawing room was sparsely furnished with only a few old chairs and a khaki sofa – nothing like the upholstered, colourful mess of my grandmother’s home. In this bare room in a glass case were enclosed at least two dozen glittering trophies, B.P.’s large ones and Riya’s small ones.

  Riya’s bedroom, like the rest of the house, was bare, almost like a dorm room, except that it was very untidy, strewn with pieces of clothing, hair ties and notebooks. If I had made a mess like this, Ansari Sir would surely have beat me with his cane. The most eye-catching thing in the room was a large blue plastic globe, sitting brightly in the middle of a small wooden desk. I wondered what it was doing there. It was only later that I found out about Riya’s keen interest in the world.

  B.P. was different from what I had expected, not the angry cricket coach who blew his shrieking whistle, or the strict man whose orders not even Vikram could disobey. I discovered that at home he had a surprisingly gentle demeanour, and I would often find him sitting in a chair, wearing cricket whites, reading Rumi or Ghalib.

  In this house also lived Jeevan Singh, a wrinkled manservant who had been with B.P. even before Riya was born. He was the cook, the housekeeper and also Riya’s nanny, ironing her uniforms, mending her socks, plaiting her hair and cutting it when it got too long.

  Jeevan Singh was enormously and indeterminately old, somewhere between seventy and ninety. He was like an oak tree, a being whose existence defied time and epoch: it didn’t matter when he began; it only mattered that he was, only ever wearing B.P.’s discarded cricket whites, or in this case yellows, which hung loosely around his hunched, shrivelled frame.

  While B.P. didn’t seem to mind my presence in the house – I felt that most of the time he didn’t even notice when I came and went – Jeevan Singh seemed to detest me, giving me ice-cold stares and making vicious comments under his breath, never even offering me a glass of water or cold coffee, though he supplied Riya with both of these. During our meetings, Riya and I usually sat on the verandah under the fan; but even here Jeevan Singh would totter out and make such unfriendly faces that I often thought it best to leave. Riya noticed it, of course. It was impossible to miss Jeevan Singh’s dislike. But she just shrugged it off.

  ‘Ignore him,’ she advised. ‘He’s just old.’

  I followed Riya’s advice as far as I could. I tried being more respectful, leaping to my feet whenever he entered the room, smiling widely at him, and carrying trays of used utensils back to the kitchen to save him the trouble. Nothing worked, in fact it j
ust made it worse, and Jeevan Singh started playing pranks on me, hiding my shoes, spilling a cup of hot water on me ‘by mistake’, telling me that Riya wasn’t around even when I could clearly hear her voice. Once, he even locked me in the bathroom where I remained for thirty minutes, too meek to create a fuss, politely knocking until Riya let me out.

  Jeevan Singh, I realized, was a bigger bully than most boys at my school, but if his jibes were the price to pay for her friendship, Vikram had trained me well, and I was well prepared.

  Plus, I hoped that when school started in a few weeks, I would have to see a lot less of the ancient grouch.

  26

  ASINGLE THOUGHT burdened us, gaining weight as the summer days passed us by. The day of our board exam results was approaching. Mostly, I tried my best to ignore it. Mostly, this didn’t work. These exam results were all-important. My tenth-grade board results would determine if I was eligible for the scholarship which would allow me to stay at Residency School. I was confident that I had done well, but I knew that any number of slip-ups were possible – the examiner could mark a correct answer incorrect, copies could go amiss, marks could be miscalculated.

  But I was more nervous about her than I was about myself. She had said she had done ‘okay’. This could mean anything. She treated exams like one of her races, not looking back once she crossed the finish line. But as D-day approached, she grew very nervous. I could tell by the way she chewed her nails, by her increased fidgeting. Most of all, I could tell because her timings were totally off.

  Seeing Riya like this – always so cool and confident – filled me with doubt. She had alluded to failing once or twice, but I had not taken her seriously. Until now. If she failed, the consequences would be dire. She would be held back, she would not be allowed to run, and she would not be able to go to another school in the area, because there was no other school within several hundred miles of where we were.

  I realized with a lurch that if she failed, she would have to move to another town and repeat tenth grade. I knew there was nothing as embarrassing as having your classmates move up while you stayed in the same grade. I had seen it happen with a few students at school, and I didn’t want it to happen to her.

  And what would happen to me if she went away? I thought once again of those dire days I had spent at my grandmother’s without her and what they had done to me. No, life without Riya was unimaginable. She simply had to pass.

  That year the Central Board of Secondary Education had put the board marks on the internet, so both of us went to the Residency School’s computer lab to check our marks online.

  I entered my roll number – which I still knew by heart – on the keyboard and the numbers appeared slowly, line by line, less due to suspense, more due to the age of the computer and the speed of the internet. I looked down at my feet and closed my eyes and held my breath for so long that I began feeling dizzy.

  She tapped me on the shoulder.

  ‘Specs?’

  Her face said it all, her glowing eyes, her ecstatic smile. I immediately felt relief. Then I saw the screen– a row of high 90s, even one 100 per cent. High marks, difficult for anyone to beat. Even Mrinalini.

  She stared at the screen wordlessly, her eyes very still, I like to think it was awe; or maybe she was just very nervous because her marks were up next.

  The computer lab was quiet except for the occasional hiss and hum of the machines and we were the only two people here. She fumbled around for the scrap of paper with her roll number and then dictated it to me as I punched the numbers in. As we waited, the internet now excruciatingly slow, she held my hand for the first time in my life.

  So many things it seemed were happening all at once. Her hands, like her handwriting, were rough and hard like a boy’s, her fingernails short and sharp, bitten at several places with bits of cuticles flying about. Mine, I thought embarrassed, were soft as cotton wool, a little too soft for a boy, even if he like me couldn’t play sports.

  In theory, holding hands should have been romantic, but she gripped my hand so tight that I thought something would break, then the server crashed, and we both let out a sigh of relief.

  With a gulp and a deep breath, my palms now clammy as a frog, I re-clicked the mouse and now her marks popped up on screen.

  Mathematics: 68 (68!)

  English: 70

  Social Science: 72

  Science: 69

  Hindi: 56

  They were the highest marks she had ever scored in her life. She had never crossed a 50 in mathematics; here she was at a 68. She let go of my hand and stared at the screen, her eyes blinking very fast and her mouth a little ‘o’. Neither of us said a word.

  ‘I passed, Specs, I passed,’ she finally whispered.

  I really wished that at moments like this, she would call me Nikhil.

  ‘You didn’t just pass, you did well,’ I said slowly, stunned by the results.

  ‘Are you so surprised?’ she said, turning sideways and looking at me with merry eyes.

  ‘No! I … I…’ I stuttered back.

  That was Riya: at any time, in any circumstance, she knew how to get me in a bind.

  And with that she threw her head back and she laughed, for almost a minute. She laughed until tears ran down her face.

  Over the years I have developed a kaleidoscope of Riya, visions of that face that brought me so much joy. Riya laughing, the way she did with her mouth wide open, her little white teeth on display; Riya angry, when her eyebrows would curl into sharp little Vs; Riya sad, her face blank as a chalk board; Riya thinking, three creases in her forehead. Riya on the brink of victory, her nose scrunched up into a tiny ball. But this one moment, this moment, of Riya laughing, happily, freely, joyfully; this memory has been so much a part of me over the years that though I might try to forget everything about her, I know I will never forget this. It is my after-image of Riya, the way you see bright spots after the flash of a camera. And I still hear it ringing, dancing, always free.

  27

  ALL THINGS COME to an end, the good ones with surprising, manipulative haste. Our summer had reached its last act, the first chill of the northern breeze already in the air. The glorious blooms of summer – the scarlet rhododendrons and the sapphire delphiniums – were starting to fade.

  Though I had not attended any classes, it was the most instructive summer of my life because for the first time, I felt like I learned what it means to live.

  I learnt how to laugh openly, how to feel freely, and how to break the rules. And I had Riya to thank for all of that. Around her I did not feel like a shadow, a ghost; she challenged me to assert myself, to say what I really felt. Because of her, I was beginning to feel like a person I never thought I could be – someone confident and funny and strong, someone who had the courage to act for himself.

  But, before the summer finally ended once and for all, there was one more thing that had yet to be learnt.

  ‘Try it, Specs,’ she pleaded with me, brandishing an old bicycle, lovingly polished, nothing like the multi-gear monstrosity that Vikram sometimes rode around school. ‘You’ll love it. I swear.’

  Our campus was over a hundred acres from the tip of the south cricket field to the beginning of Dhobi Ghat. Many students rode bicycles. I, with my bad leg, had never considered cycling because it had always seemed like an impossible act. She was asking so nicely but I did not want to look like a fool: I pictured myself toppling face-first off that old bicycle and landing hard on the tarmac.

  ‘I can’t Riya,’ I said more harshly than I meant to.

  ‘Specs,’ she pressed. ‘I know you’re worried. But it’s not as hard as it looks. I spoke to Papa about it too.’

  I was startled. ‘Spoke about what?’

  ‘About you riding a bike. Papa said that you could do it, you can use mostly your right leg, and once you gain momentum…’

  Riya trailed off when she saw the look on my face. ‘You spoke about me to B.P.?’

  I stared at her
for a second, infuriated. My weakness had been a topic of conversation? How could she do that when he probably already thought I was a wimp?

  I don’t know what madness came over me, but with my good leg I kicked the bike hard. My good leg was stronger than people thought and the bike flew through the air, and landed close to Riya, who gingerly stepped away. For a second she was angry, and was about to say something rude to me but she shut up when she saw my face.

  Her face had fallen, her smile had dimmed and she said to me, ‘I’m sorry, it’s just that I thought it would be fun.’

  She called out to Jeevan Singh to take the bike away.

  I saw her looking with disappointment at the bike and then just as I reached the crest of my rage, I suddenly calmed down. I bent down and picked up the bike from the ground, its spokes still swirling wildly around. Holding my breath, and with quite some effort, I swung my good leg over the seat, settled my weight and used my arms to haul my bad leg to the pedal. Then I pushed off, wobbly, shaking to and fro, but still very much on the bike. I picked up speed and watched as the asphalt became a blur. Triumphant, I made the mistake of turning around to find Riya; and, just for a few seconds, before I came tumbling off, exactly as I imagined I would, I knew what it felt like to fly.

  So this is how she feels, I remember thinking, as I soared delicately into a flowering shrub.

  28

  THE ELEVENTH STANDARD was a chance for a new beginning, and I was determined to take it.

  For most of my life at Residency School, I had been left to my devices. Teachers liked me but did not love me (unlike Mrinalini); most students tolerated me but did not hate me. I had my place in this ecosystem, carved geologically, over a vast expanse of time. I’d never had the courage to disrupt the system – nor, truthfully, the inclination. So I accepted it as it was. That is, till Riya came along.