Nikhil and Riya Read online

  I had so many sleepless nights that I contracted a fever and was sent to the infirmary. Even then, sleep eluded me. My bones felt like they were breaking, my joints felt like they were snapping, I ached in places I hadn’t known could ache. I writhed and turned and tossed. Often, I was sure that I could never get up ever again.

  Some part of my brain told me – still tells me – that I didn’t have a right to be angry. Riya wasn’t mine. She may have liked boys before. She may even have kissed them. But the thought of Riya with anyone else, made me feel small and helpless and miserable so I just held my head in my hands, too sick and tired to shed another tear.

  How strange loss is, how permanent and implacable. I was an orphan, I didn’t really have a home. Of all people in the world, I thought I knew the real meaning of loss. Now I knew how very arrogant I had been.

  Days went by and I stayed in the infirmary till finally the fever dropped and I began sleeping in fitful bursts. I was sent back to my room, where my fretful roommate tended to me diligently: I think he was frightened I would breakdown, go berserk, ruin his carefully written notebooks. I did no such thing. I was tired, weak and could do nothing but think about her. I simply shut down and went into hibernation, tapping into the ways of my childhood when I hardened myself till nothing could affect me any more.

  Then, one afternoon, as I walked slowly, zombie-like, to chess practice – it felt like it took superhuman strength to simply get through the motions of the day – I heard a familiar gait behind me and suddenly I felt I would faint.

  ‘Specs,’ she called. ‘Wait.’

  She was almost behind me, but I didn’t say a thing and continued on my way.

  She sped up till she was right by my side. Even now, even after everything, having her right next to me, did something crazy to me.

  ‘I tried to come see you so many times,’ she explained, laughing. ‘But those nurses … they are worse than Ansari Sir.’

  I stopped now, but didn’t say a word, little things going off in my brain.

  We stood there for a while till at last she announced in a small trembling voice, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘You know for what.’

  What could I possibly say?

  ‘Specs, I didn’t meant to … I…’ she trailed off.

  I stared fiercely at the rubble by her feet, cutting her off abruptly. ‘But you did.’

  I had a sudden image of her, of them, looking at the window, his gaze furious, hers very pained.

  We were silent for a moment. I took a breath, trying to quell the sudden buzzing in my ears.

  ‘It was a mistake,’ she said slowly. ‘I don’t know what got into me.’

  I didn’t say a word, but a hard knot of air was forming in my chest.

  ‘Specs…’

  I locked my eyes with hers. She nodded and turned her face away.

  ‘But how could you do that with him?’

  She took a deep breath.

  ‘I don’t know, Specs … everything just got to my head.’

  The questions were bitter, ripped from me, a torrent I had been swimming in day and night.

  ‘Why did you go with him? Why did you drink that? Why did you, Riya?’

  I went on like a broken record, asking the questions which had been whirring in my head night and day.

  She said nothing for a moment and then finally spoke. ‘I don’t know, Specs. You know I can be stupid sometimes.’

  I didn’t open my mouth but I kept repeating the questions in my head over and over again.

  She kicked the ground. ‘I wasn’t sure how you felt.’

  ‘How I felt?’ I said. I was now so angry at her that I spat out my words, ‘Isn’t it obvious that I’ve fallen in love with you?’

  She looked at me strangely and now something flickered across her face.

  ‘Specs…’

  I looked away, burning, so embarrassed that I had finally said the words.

  ‘You’re being silly.’

  Suddenly, something inside of me dropped away, very, very low. She was going to tell me that she didn’t love me, that she didn’t feel the same way.

  But then she swung her hair out of her face, stepped towards me and whispered in my ear. ‘You don’t fall in love, Specs, you only rise.’

  And then she came closer, my body touched hers, and her fingers touched mine and then she put her arms around my neck and for that single moment I felt totally complete.

  And that is how we started, Riya and me.

  31

  IN THOSE DAYS, it wasn’t common for boys and girls at Residency School to spend time together, and it was particularly strange for a boy like me. Co-ed friendships were the sole territory of the twelfth standard. Vikram, renowned ladies’ man, was a notable eleventh-standard exception. I was not a renowned ladies’ man. If my relationship with Riya came to be known, I would just be teased relentlessly, and even worse, Riya would be too.

  So we kept it under wraps and we met secretly in places where there would be few students around, like the tracks after games time, the art block, or sometimes at her house.

  We didn’t even have tutoring any more because we had different subjects, though if I could have had the opportunity, I would have gladly learnt her new subjects to teach them to her. In all fairness to Riya, she didn’t particularly need me, or anyone else. Her board results had boosted her confidence in an unexpected way, and she had permanently improved her academic standing across the board. She wasn’t topping the batch, but she was average and that was more than she had ever been before.

  Her running, however, was anything but average. She seemed to be continually improving, shaving micro-seconds off her personal bests, discovering hidden efficiencies within each footfall. The better Riya got – the more races she ran and won – the more she was away for competitions, winning medals in different parts of the state. That autumn, she was gone a lot, days at a stretch, sometimes even a week. Occasionally, I would get a postcard with some messy, brief scrawl – ‘Specs, I won! Coming home now’ – never signed with her name, in case someone in my house decided to go through my mail.

  These postcards came to mean a lot to me, and I looked forward to them enormously. I knew that these postcards were the extent of what I could expect from Riya by way of romance because Riya wasn’t a romantic sort of a girl. I, unfortunately, realized that I was a romantic kind of guy and I did little things, sometimes more for myself than for her. I penned poems for her and sappy notes. Often, I was so embarrassed by these that I never even gave them to her. I bought her chocolates (these she seemed to like) and after her spectacular board results, I got her a little pink teddy bear, with black beaded eyes. It was not exactly cute in the classic way, but it was the only thing that I could find in the one gift store in our small town.

  She looked at it curiously and then put it in her bag. I was pleased to see it in her bedroom, propped on her bed, on a future visit. But then on another I happened to see it under her bed, brown instead of pink, gathering dust.

  And so like that eleventh grade passed by as quickly as my girl ran around the track. I was engulfed by my studies, with complex numbers, trigonometric functions, laws of motion and chemical bonding.

  And then there was another sort of bonding. Riya and I spent every free minute we had together, laughing, talking, walking. We got to know each other better than I would have thought possible. And the most amazing thing was, the minute I was sure I knew everything about her, she would surprise me with something more. Like the time I discovered that she could read French, or another time when I saw a trophy in her name for being on the Indian basketball team, and then another when she ate ten samosas and could have gone for more, but we had run out of money. I wanted to plumb her depths and just when I thought I had hit rock bottom, I realized that she was infinite.

  32

  THAT SUMMER, I had yet again managed to finagle my way back to Residency School for another bout of ‘studying’ f
or my engineering exams. This time, I hadn’t even bothered to go to my grandmother’s house. Judging by her silence, she wasn’t too perturbed.

  It was a funny feeling, watching the dorms vacate, the peons and drivers loading bags and trunks into their cars. I remember eating an apple picked straight off the tree and feeling very peaceful as the school slowly drained of all noise and dirt and chaos.

  Life had a rhythm that Riya and I composed. I’d wake early and meet her at her house for breakfast. Then she would go train, I would slip off and read. In June and July, advised by the librarian, I worked my way through the classics. In August, I gave way to guilty pleasures and read only P.G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie.

  It’s funny how time eludes our memories, blurs them, swirls them in fog. I remember very little of that summer except a sense of deep contentment. One day though stands out in particular. As I lay stretched out underneath a deodar tree, listening to the gentle whisper of the grass, watching the saffron and red marigolds splash colour everywhere, she sat next to me twirling the blue globe she had fetched from her desk, ‘Do you know the capital of Bhutan?’ she asked.

  ‘Thimpu,’ I said with my eyes closed.

  ‘How did you know that?’ she asked curiously.

  ‘Ninth-standard geography. Unit 3, Chapter 2.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yup,’ I said with a smile and heard her scramble to her feet.

  ‘So many places to go and here we are, stuck on this stupid mountain.’

  ‘I like this mountain,’ I murmured, half asleep, the heat of the sun seeping into my skin.

  Impossibly restless, she paced the ground.

  ‘Specs, wake up,’ she urged.

  I cocked one eye open and then shut it again. She stood by me impatiently, tapping her foot, hands on her tiny waist.

  ‘Fine,’ she grumbled. ‘I wanted to show you the magazine Papa got about the country’s best colleges.’

  I froze underneath the glorious sun. College. Here, on this mountain, college seemed so far away. ‘College is a long way away,’ I mumbled.

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘Not that long.’

  College. The thought depressed me. Residency School wasn’t a perfect place – I knew that better than anyone else. But I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else. It was the only world I knew, the only world I had. And with Riya in this world, the thought of leaving seemed so terrible I could scarcely face it.

  All I wanted to do was to stay. All she wanted to do was to leave. There was a lightness and excitement in her voice whenever she talked about places far away. She spoke continuously of the future; of Delhi, of Mumbai, of Bengaluru, sometimes of London and the United States, all big places, all so far away. She spoke of her dreams too, the nationals, the Asian Games, sometimes even the Olympics and all the races in between.

  I had not been anywhere significant other than the school. I had not travelled much, except for the occasional school trip. I remember how she looked at me when I told her that I had never been to Delhi. When I asked her why she was surprised, she just wrinkled her nose and shrugged.

  ‘You just seem to know so much about so many places and so many things. I guess I assumed you had been everywhere.’

  And then, after a pause, she added sagely: ‘It must be all those books that you read.’

  The irony of all of this was that the world truly was my oyster. With my marks, I could go anywhere and do anything that I wanted to. The teachers were beginning to ask me about my plans for the future, about the engineering exams that I had come back two summers to study for but really had no intention of taking at all. They were all very curious, especially Ansari Sir. This was expected – anything I achieved, I’m sure he would take credit for.

  Riya, seeing that she wasn’t getting anywhere with me, plonked down with a sigh and lay down next to me.

  And then there we were, next to each other, but also so far apart. And all I could say to her was, ‘Let’s think about today.’

  33

  THE YEAR OPENED with its typical rituals. Sports teams were named, sections were assigned, new students were ragged and so many more, only one of which mattered to me – the handing out of new books, crisp notebooks and items of stationery – the one ritual I treasured over everything else.

  There was one tradition though which loomed above the rest. At the beginning of every school year, twelve of the ‘best’ twelfth-standard students – two from each of the six houses – were crowned prefects, the pinnacle of Residency School success.

  All my life, I had always watched these demigods from afar. They seemed set apart, like figures from a Greek allegory, halos crowning their heads, gold badges pinned to their chests. Prefects wielded more power and influence than all students, sometimes even teachers, controlling the student body, taking charge of their house, even wearing different uniforms which set them apart from the herd. They had their own common room, their own studies, even their own set of school rules. It seemed strange to me that this year these venerated beings would be appointed from amongst my own batchmates, boys I had seen cry, burp and sneeze their way through adolescence, right by my side.

  As the annual naming approached, the school went into its normal frenzy and speculations were rife about who would be made prefect and thus control our lives. Boys placed bets on their favoured candidates, factions were formed, allegiances were pledged and boys were beaten up – a usual consequence of most situations at our school. I, as usual, remained in the shadows, a bystander of events that I neither cared to understand nor particularly wanted to be a part of – until in the strangest turn of events, I found myself not just involved but also in the eye of the storm.

  ‘Papa thinks you have a chance at being a prefect,’ said Riya as casually as if she was talking about clouds in the sky.

  I stumbled and dropped the book I was holding in my hands. It fell in a puddle and I cursed silently. The librarian had warned me about my mistreatment of books.

  I thought about what she had said for a moment and then decided that there was absolutely no chance.

  ‘Maybe if all the other twelfth graders die. Which may not be a bad thing at all.’

  ‘I’m serious,’ she said.

  Me? A prefect? It seemed preposterous. I had never once held a leadership position of any sort in this school.

  However, B.P.’s endorsement was no small thing – he was on the selection committee, after all. Still, it made little sense to me. If I were unimpressive to anyone, wouldn’t it be B.P.? Wouldn’t he, of all people, want the cricket captain, or the hockey captain, or any of these sporty types to be prefect instead of a crippled, studious boy?

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ I finally said. ‘Anyone has a better chance than me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Sports,’ I slowly said. ‘I don’t play sports.’

  Riya sniffed derisively. ‘Papa says that sportsmen never make good prefects.’

  ‘They’re always prefects here.’

  ‘Not always good ones.’

  I had never questioned the quality of our prefects, but B.P. did have a point.

  ‘He says they’re selfish and too self-absorbed. Kinda like me,’ she said with a characteristically honest shrug.

  ‘You’re not like that!’ I exclaimed in protest. ‘You’re the most … the most…’

  ‘The most what?’ she said, looking at me, a shadow of a smile on her face.

  ‘You’re the most amazing person I know.’ No more eloquent words coming to my mind.

  ‘Oh Specs,’ she said, rolling her eyes.

  ‘I’m just an ordinary person. There’s nothing, not in the least bit, special about me.’

  Her face was turned slightly away from me and her hair, after practice, was all over the place. But underneath her smugness and her hair, I thought I may have seen her blush, but it may have just been me.

  34

  RIYA LAID IT all out for me. Every teacher liked me and I was the best student in the twelf
th standard. The chess team I captained had won a few state awards. Viswanathan Anand had just won the World Chess Championship for the first time and suddenly, it was the golden age of chess. Even in a sports-crazy school like Residency School, our team was getting some respect.

  The prefecture, it seemed, was closer than I had ever thought. Once I realized this important fact, what had at first seemed impossible now began coalescing in my mind. Looking back, I realize that this was the beginning of a new me. For the longest time, I’d been content to simply occupy space. I was okay being Specs, the clumps of cells that studied science and lived on the second floor of Ashok House. No longer, not any more. Now I wanted to make a difference, I wanted to matter. For the first time in my life I wanted a proper place in this school.

  So I began to plan. My academics, obviously, were outstanding. My extracurricular activities were less so. Except for the occasional writing and poetry competition, I had participated in very little. I thought of the possibilities – debate, elocution and anything that involved public speaking was out. The thought of going up on stage and speaking in front of so many people made me want to throw up. It was mandatory for every student to go on stage and read the news at least once a year. Many students enjoyed this – boys like Vikram loved the sound of their voice. I, on the other hand, dreaded my turn all year long.

  My only possible hope was the general knowledge quiz. I had a knack for GK, and it was also something that I could prepare for. There was a pragmatic aspect to this decision: I’d been studying for tests my whole life; it was, in a real way, the only thing I was good at. The only problem was that the few times I had been on a GK team, I had gotten so nervous when our turn came around to answer the questions, even if I knew the answer, I usually froze. This time, though, I knew it would be different, it had to be different – I had to do it not only for myself but for her.

  The annual GK quiz was coming up and it was a big deal in our school, almost as important as some of the sports competitions. I found it vaguely ironic that the only time people studied diligently was when there was a prize to be won: but this was Residency School. The competition was held over three days in the main auditorium and every house had to enter two two-person teams; after a few elimination rounds, the six best teams would compete for the cup.