Left from the Nameless Shop

by Adithi Rao

  The third pillar in the row.

  ‘Wake up,’ urged the boy softly. ‘Wake up.’ His voice was gentle, as when addressing an old friend. It took the headmaster a few moments to realize that the boy was talking to the pillar.

  ‘Why are you tapping it with that stone?’ whispered the tallest boy among the three. The priest vaguely recalled that his name was Thimappa or something similar.

  ‘I learnt it from Raaganna. He does this when he comes into the temple every morning. This is how he wakes up his Parvati.’

  ‘Do they go to sleep, then?’ asked the second boy, wide-eyed.

  ‘Of course,’ replied the third. ‘They are just like us.’

  His companions looked at each other and nodded wisely.

  The third boy stroked the pillar once with a loving hand, then turned to his mates. ‘You may ask what you want to, now,’ he said. He was clearly on an important mission, and he carried it out with an earnestness utterly devoid of self-importance.

  ‘What will happen to my maths exam results?’

  The young oracle turned to his pillar. ‘Will Timmanna pass his maths exam?’

  Then he pressed his ear to it, listening. Inside the dilapidated classroom, hiding beneath the window ledge, Bother Abranches’s eyebrows shot up. Does he really expect it to answer?

  As the third boy listened, Timmanna stepped forward nervously, leaning in closer without realizing it. He raised his right hand to his mouth and bit off a fingernail, never taking his anxious eyes off the soothsayer’s face. At that moment, the headmaster understood this was not a game. It was very, very serious.

  At last, the third boy took his ear from the pillar and said solemnly, ‘You will pass. But not with very good marks.’ A murmur of relief from the asker of the query, and on this side of the wall, Brother Abe shook his head to clear the spell that the happenings in the corridor had unconsciously cast over him.

  What rubbish! he thought angrily.

  ‘Your second answer is wrong,’ went on the soothsayer, unaware of the headmaster’s presence. ‘And your fifth, eight, ninth and—’

  ‘Brother Saa…b! Brother Saa…b!’ erupted the voice of Ebenezer at precisely this thrilling moment. ‘Father Gomex phone calling you! You coming urgent!’

  Brother Abranches started violently and banged the top of his head on the edge of the open window. Stifling a cry of pain, he clutched his head and peeked out through the window. The boys had evaporated without a trace.

  Ebenezer strolled into the classroom and stood watching the skulking priest from the doorway with mild curiosity. Rubbing his throbbing pate, Brother Abranches looked around and snapped, ‘Why did you yell like that? Now I will never know what those boys were up to!’

  ‘Oh, that?’ said Ebenezer unrepentantly, as he began walking back towards the main building. ‘Don’t worry, Brother Saab, you can be finding out tomorrow.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Every day they are coming here, those babas,’ came the casual reply.

  Brother Abe stopped in his tracks. ‘Every day? And you don’t stop them? You know it’s against the rules!’

  Ebenezer’s cheerful smile dimmed not at all. ‘Father Gomex waiting on phone, Brother Saab.’

  The man in the habit took a deep breath to calm himself.

  ‘Ask Ramana Iyer sir to send me the maths answer paper from the recent mid-term exam of a boy called Timmanna,’ he said through slightly gritted teeth. ‘Standard VII or VIII, I think.’

  ‘Jolly good, Brother Saab,’ shrugged Ebenezer.

  ‘And don’t call me Brother Saab,’ grumbled the priest, turning away. ‘I’ve told you a hundred times, just Brother is enough.’

  ‘Okay, Brother Saab!’

  Hurrying into his office, Brother Abe picked up the receiver that was lying on the table beside the black phone. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting, Father,’ he said in politer tones. But the telephone line had gone dead.

  It was 5.30 in the evening. The school was quiet. It was a tired sort of stillness, the kind one feels after an arduous day’s work. As Brother Abe emerged from his office and headed out to the other side of the campus where the new charity wing was under construction, he thought about Timmanna’s maths answer sheet that Ebenezer had fetched for him from Raman Iyer. The boy had passed, but just barely. His second answer had been wrong. And the fifth, the eight, the ninth…

  It’s a coincidence, thought the priest, quickly cutting across his own thought and shaking his head as if to clear it. Just a coincidence.

  Brushing aside the unsettling speculations, he turned his attention to the present. As he walked past the swings, he thought they looked exhausted. How strange it would be if one could have a conversation with a swing or a slide and hear their story. He always knew, without needing to be told, that the teachers went home utterly spent each day after seven hours of talking, lecturing, scolding and trying (unsuccessfully) to curb the ardour of their energetic pupils. But nobody ever thought of, say, the schoolyard or the playground or the swings or the desks. They were the ones being constantly pummelled and dragged and jumped on. Besides, surely, they too must feel the heat?

  What strange things I come up with, thought Br Abe, smiling slightly to himself as he walked. In fact, he felt more hopeful now than he had the whole of that wretched day. Not because the benefactors had decided to give them the money after all, or because Father Gomez had agreed to release it from their own funds. It was only that the sun had started to sink in the sky, and a breeze had set in to ease the fiery afternoon into a balmy evening.

  Brother Abe was not the only one in improved spirits. A koel high up in the branches of a eucalyptus tree was, at this moment, calling unabashedly to its mate. The priest looked up but couldn’t see the bird. It was well-concealed among the profusion of slim, fragrant leaves. But its cry was unmistakeably joyous and seemed to speak directly to his heart. He sensed the presence of god in the simple birdsong more than in all of Father Gomez’s sermons and insincere god-bless-yous.

  The site engineer was waiting for him when he reached the under-construction wing. Ahmad Bhai greeted the priest and took him inside to show him the latest developments. The labourers had worked fast and efficiently that day, it seemed. Brother Abranches’s heart smote him, for he brought with him the news that he would not be able to pay them for it.

  After the tour, the two men returned to stand out in the open, the musty smell of cement fresh in their nostrils. The engineer looked at Abranches expectantly, and in answer to his unspoken query, the priest let his silence and his regret speak for themselves.

  ‘Then …’ hesitated Ahmad Bhai, his smile faltering, ‘they haven’t?’

  ‘It is not just a delay in the payment any more, Ahmad,’ the priest said. ‘Our benefactors have withdrawn sponsorship of this building entirely. They have suffered huge losses in business these past couple of days and their own financial situation looks grave. There is little hope of them recovering from it in the near future. This construction, of course, was among the first of their expenditures to be cut by their auditors.’

  Ahmad Bhai was a good man. He had put his heart into the construction of this new wing because he knew how important it was. He had told Brother Abranches right at the beginning that he would not be charging a fee. But the labourers were poor and could not be asked to forgo their wages. Now Ahmad Bhai looked at the priest sadly, acknowledging without words that this was the end of Brother Abranches’s dream of taking in orphaned and underprivileged boys at Christos Convent and providing them the two essentials they didn’t have: a home and an education.

  The site engineer nodded slowly and walked away, his head bowed. As he reached the entrance of the half-finished building, he turned: ‘If I could, Brother…’

  ‘I know,’ said the priest simply. ‘I know.’

  After Ahmad Bhai left, Brother Abranches lingered a few minutes more, watching the labourers. Some of the men were changing out of their soiled work clothes. One h
ad stripped himself down to his briefs and was scrubbing himself vigorously with a cake of Hamam soap under a gushing hose pipe. Nearby, two naked children – a boy of three and his older sister – were jumping gleefully into the soapy puddles made by the bath water, causing the fluffy white foam to splash everywhere. Their mother, as she cooked dinner over a kerosene stove, watched them and laughed. The little girl caught Brother Abranches’s eye and grinned. Her two front teeth were missing. In spite of himself, the priest smiled back. Then he turned and walked back to the school.

  The maths teacher, Ramana Iyer, sent his son with a note to Christos Convent early the following morning excusing himself from school that day on grounds of ill health.

  ‘It’s alright, son; tell your father to take rest. Not serious, I hope?’

  The boy’s eyes opened wide. ‘Very serious, sir!’ he protested.

  Slightly alarmed, the priest asked, ‘Your father is seriously ill?’

  The boy frowned now and put his head to one side as he considered the question. ‘No! Seriously telling he is ill. Not joking, sir!’

  Now, as Brother Abe went to take the substitution class for VI-B (Ramana Iyer’s maths lesson), he played over this conversation in his head and sighed. It had been one of those weeks.

  The previous night, when Brother Abe had called to reason with Father Gomez one last time, the exchange had come down to a reiteration of the usual things – that there was little Father Gomez could do except pray (which he was doing with all his might), and that Brother Abranches should do the same (with all his might). His parting suggestion had been that they should divert funds from the Christos Home for the Aged – a place already surviving on nothing but ingenuity and frugality – towards the construction of the school building.

  Now there’s a solution! If we just don’t give our old people food for a year, we might be able to complete the second floor of the new building. Father Gomex, what we would be doing without your advices? thought Br Abranches (à la Ebenezer) wryly as he crossed the courtyard.

  Inside the VI-B classroom, all hell had broken loose. The boys were indulging in a chalk fight, and someone was proclaiming the ‘recipe’ for the perfect paper rocket in a loud voice to anybody who would listen. Nobody was listening. Only one fellow was sitting apart by himself, looking silently out of the window. When Brother Abe entered the classroom, the duster sailed past his face, missing his nose by an inch and causing him to step back hurriedly.

  ‘Stop it!’ cried the priest, banging loudly on the table. ‘All of you, stop it!’ A sudden hush fell over the class. One boy turned his head halfway through a laugh and stared at the intruder.

  ‘Pardon?’ he inquired in polite perplexity.

  Abranches glared. The boy quickly subsided into his chair.

  ‘Is this the way you behave in a classroom?’ demanded the headmaster.

  Pin-drop silence.

  A naughty-looking chap, who had raised his hand in a frantic attempt to catch Brother Abe’s attention, popped up like a jack-in-the-box. ‘Where is Ramana sir?’

  For a moment, it appeared as if Abranches would explode. Nobody moved. The boy cowered slightly. Then, taking a deep breath to control himself, Brother Abranches answered in a low voice: ‘Your maths teacher is on leave. I’ll be supervising his classes till he returns. He told me that he has set you problems in geometry. You can open your books and begin. No talking.’

  The priest took his place behind the teacher’s desk and the boys began to work. The next twenty minutes passed in silence. Luckily for Brother Abe, who had little flair for numbers, nobody raised any doubts. Ramana sir, it seemed, had taught them well.

  A gentle breeze wafted into the room and, instinctively, the class glanced at the window before dropping its head back to its work. Brother Abe, the only one there who enjoyed the privilege of mobility, rose to stand by the window and take in the breeze while it lasted. Warm though it was, it felt like heaven after the dense stillness of the burning afternoon.

  From his position by the class VI-B window, the half-constructed wing was immediately visible. It looked forlorn and deserted without labourers scurrying around it, its incompleteness the starker for it having been permanently abandoned. The old worry clouded the priest’s heart again, bringing with it that hollow, helpless feeling.

  ‘Brother! Brother!’

  Jerking out of his reverie, Brother Abranches looked around.

  ‘Kulla is passing notes to Manju.’

  The speaker assumed an air of pious innocence as he pointed first to a short boy Kulla, and then to another. With a start, Abranches realized that Manju was the boy whom he’d seen communing with the pillar. He glanced around the room at the others. Some looked shocked by the unexpected betrayal from one among their own ranks. Others were glaring at the sneak angrily. The sneak kept his eyes studiously on his shoes. If looks could kill, he would be boiling in hell fires by now.

  Brother Abranches crossed the room to tower over Manju. The boy got to his feet but made no move to whisk away the tell-tale slip of paper on his desk. The priest picked it up and read the words: Will my dog Chikoo’s leg become okay? He glared at the boy, who looked back at him with clear, luminous eyes. Unexpectedly, and because he was already besieged by problems of his own, he slapped the boy across the face. The fellow next to Manju cried out in fright. Manju continued to look up at Brother Abranches quietly, and the priest immediately felt terrible. Not wanting to admit it, though, he glared at the rest of the class.

  ‘Get on with your work!’

  But as he turned away, the regret was apparent in his face.

  A few minutes before Ebenezer rang the lunch bell, Brother Abranches sneaked into the same ramshackle classroom of the old school building. He could hardly believe he was doing this, but to not do so was beyond him. He looked at the faint chalk markings on the chipped blackboard – a maths sum and a thought for the day in chalk that nobody had bothered to wipe off, from all those years ago. ‘The opposite of love,’ it read faintly, ‘is love.’

  Brother Abranches smiled at the words. If his memory of his own student days in Goa served him correctly, the maths sum that followed those words was not a sum at all, but the Pythagoras theorem. ‘The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides’, he and his classmates had once chanted, over and over again, until now, more than twenty years later, he could still recall the words at will. High above him, the solid rosewood beams still held up the roof, miraculously supported by what remained of the walls. ‘It’s funny when the walls fall down and the roof is still standing,’ he thought. ‘As if the building had been built by two different architects, one of whom got it right and the other one wrong.’ He reached up and traced the writing with his finger.

  The opposite of love is love.

  The lunch bell rang. Turning his head, Brother Abranches watched the main school building. Within seconds, boys came pouring out of every exit. Manju came out too, walking quietly by himself. Running behind him was Kulla. Both the boys now approached the dilapidated section, and the headmaster quickly ducked under the window.

  The boys strode down the corridor and stopped by the third pillar. Checking frequently to make sure that nobody was about, Manju placed his hand on it. Then he explained, as if to a sentient being, ‘Kulla’s puppy Chikoo has had a broken leg for a long time now. Will it recover?’

  He put his arms around the pillar and pressed his ear to it, listening intently. Brother Abranches could see that, standing beside Manju, Kulla was literally holding his breath in anticipation.

  Manju took his ear away from the pillar and smiled. ‘It will.’

  Kulla beamed. ‘When Manju, when?’ he asked eagerly.

  Manju put the question to the pillar and listened again. Brother Abe shook his head slightly in exasperation, wondering what nonsense the boy would make up to satisfy Kulla this time.

  ‘The vet’s no good. Doctor Bhaskara. Show Chikoo to Doctor Bhaskara. He’ll recover q
uickly.’

  Brother Abranches was taken aback by so definite an answer.

  Kulla looked perplexed. ‘But Doctor Bhaskara is a people’s doctor. What will he know about a dog’s leg?’

  Manju shrugged. ‘That’s what my pillar says.’

  Kulla nodded, still processing the commandment, and walked back to the school building.

  After he had left, Manju slowly strolled up the corridor and came to a stop below a hole in the tiled roof. He was looking up at a bird’s nest that was visible from where he stood. Through the hole in the roof, a shaft of sunlight poured in, bathing the boy in a haze of light, giving him a soft, magical quality as he stood there in its glow. The sight of the child left the priest in the next room shaken.

  Brother Abranches, raised strictly Catholic, had no room in his mental make-up to accommodate such occurrences as the one he had just witnessed. Yet he could think of no logic to argue it away. Quietly, so as not to give away his presence, he started to leave by the route he had come. But he stumbled on a stone, and Manju turned his head quickly. Their eyes met and held for a long moment. Then the priest quietly walked away.

  The next day, Brother Abranches was back in Ramana sir’s chair, supervising the maths hour in VI-B. The boys were working in complete silence, the memory of the previous day’s slap still ringing in their ears. With forty-five minutes remaining and nothing to do, Brother Abranches was at leisure to think thoughts that drove him to near desperation. It wasn’t just the question of the completion of the new wing any more. It was also that he hadn’t paid the labourers’ wages for their last two days of work, and this was eating away at him. In his mind’s eye, he kept seeing the woman cooking gruel over the kerosene stove for her children who played in soapy waters; and he knew that to not pay these people would be a sin in the eyes of god. If he could sell something, some family heirloom, land, anything at all … But he had followed the rule of poverty strictly. Everything he had inherited from his family he had donated to the church a long time ago.