Half Torn Hearts

by Novoneel Chakraborty

  ‘It is. But we’ll break in tomorrow. Game?’

  A twinkle appeared in Raisa’s eyes as she grinned mischievously.

  ‘Game!’

  ‘I’m Afsana Agarwal. Friends,’ the girl agreed raising her hand for a high-five.

  ‘By the way, you didn’t say why you brought a dryer to school?’

  Afsana smiled mysteriously, ‘I’ll tell you tomorrow. Just wait for me by the chemistry lab.’

  VOICE NOTE 12

  In the evening, Raisa called out to Nirmaan while he was out playing cricket with the boys in the colony.

  ‘I’ve made a friend in school,’ Raisa said. She was sitting with Nirmaan by the stairs of the community hall during a break in his game.

  ‘Thank god! Now I’ll get a breather, phew!’ Nirmaan said, pretending to wipe sweat off his brow.

  Raisa pinched his arm hard. He yelped.

  ‘You’ve got no idea about the ribbing I have to put up with in school when they see us together. I have an image to maintain in school.’

  ‘Image?’

  ‘I’m this studious, master-of-all, popular boy who doesn’t talk to girls much,’ Nirmaan said.

  ‘A gay image,’ she nodded sagely.

  ‘Shut up, Raisa!’

  ‘Ever since we’ve met again, I have this feeling that you’re ashamed to be seen with me. What is it with this what-will-they-think attitude all the time?’ Raisa stood up, truculent, arms akimbo.

  Nirmaan looked up at her and then, with a rueful grin, pulled her down beside him.

  ‘I’m sorry. But you’ve got to understand, it’s no longer the way it used to be.’

  ‘What? Don’t you want to be my best friend any more?’

  ‘It’s not that. I don’t know how to explain this to you. From the time I got here, I’ve encountered immense competition. I understood that not everyone is a well-wisher. Not everyone wants you to be happy. One has to be on guard always. My parents, especially Baba, expect a lot from me. He has high hopes from me. You won’t believe it, but last year, when I ranked second in the half-yearly exams, he didn’t let me eat for two days.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Yeah. Ma was distraught, but he assured her that the fasting would never let me stand second ever again.’

  ‘Mothers are all like that. They can’t stand up to our dads,’ Raisa said, thinking of her mother.

  ‘Baba can’t bear to see me come second in anything. Especially academics. It’s his dream that I top Class X, then XII, and then get into an IIT. That’s why I always feel this pressure of being someone who I’m probably not on the inside. But to retain that other persona, I often do things that I don’t really want to. Like I don’t really want to stay away from you, but this person that I am in the eyes of my batch mates wants to avoid you. Are you getting what I’m saying?’

  Raisa looked pensive. She gazed into the stairwell and said quietly, ‘We’re growing up, Nirmaan.’

  He could have hugged her at that moment. She had succinctly summed up his rambling roundaboutation. Yes, they were growing up. They had grown up since their Guwahati days. On the face of it, it was less than a decade, but the change that the few years had wrought within, Nirmaan knew, was of such magnitude that it was beyond estimation.

  ‘I really want to talk to you, but you see, a few minutes from now, I’ll have to go to my social studies tuition class. And then after dinner, I have to study for the maths class test tomorrow. Do you know what I’ve realized?’

  Raisa looked at him expectantly.

  ‘The most frustrating thing in this goddamn world is to live up to someone else’s expectation of you. Especially if that someone is your own father.’

  Neither spoke for a while. Then Raisa stood up.

  ‘Hmm, I too have expectations from you, Nirmaan beta,’ she said in a deep voice. And giggled.

  ‘Shut up, kameeni!’ retorted Nirmaan.

  ‘Wow! That’s the first time you called me a name.’

  ‘I’m sorry. It was a slip.’

  ‘I loved it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think you calling me a kameeni is cute. May I call you kutta? Kutta–kameeni. Best friends for life.’

  Nirmaan was in splits. ‘You’re absolutely mad!’

  ‘Anyway,’ he grew serious again, ‘who is this new friend of yours? Is it a boy?’

  ‘No. Boys don’t talk to me. Her name is Afsana. She is so much like me. And tomorrow we’re going to do something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know what exactly. That’s what is so exciting, isn’t it?’

  Nirmaan gaped at her for a few moments and then said, ‘Yeah, sure.’

  The next morning as Afsana stepped on to the landing of the school’s third storey, which, being the laboratory floor for the senior students, remained deserted during the morning session, she noticed Raisa was already there, leaning against the wall. Afsana walked up to her briskly.

  ‘How are we going to deal with this?’ Raisa asked, indicating the rusty padlock on the lab door with a jerk of her thumb.

  She watched in awed admiration as Afsana quickly and efficiently jimmied the lock with her hairpin, pushed open the door and slipped in. Before Raisa even knew it, Afsana was already out of the room, a small vial in her hand.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘It’s game over for those bitches!’

  Afsana extracted two ski masks from her satchel and handed one to Raisa.

  ‘Those bitches always spend some time in the ground floor washroom as soon as they come to school. That’s our point of ambush. Hurry up now,’ Afsana said.

  Both scurried down the stairs to their classroom. After a few minutes, the three girls came into the room together. They dropped their school bags on their seats and walked out. Afsana and Raisa followed them.

  As the trio entered the washroom, the duo stood guard outside. After half a minute, Raisa and Afsana slipped in and locked the door stealthily. Two of their adversaries were in front of the large mirror by the washbasins while their leader, the tall, hefty one, was missing. Raisa and Afsana wore their ski-masks. The latter soaked both their handkerchiefs with drops from the chloroform vial. They snuck up behind the two girls and pressed the handkerchiefs on their mouths. The swiftness of the attack took their victims by surprise and muted their shouts. Before they knew it, the chloroform had rendered them unconscious. Satisfied with a job well done, the masked duo stood up just as one of the toilets was flushed. They silently flanked the cubicle door. The moment the tall girl emerged, Afsana and Raisa pounced on her. She struggled for a moment, but by the time the assembly bell rang, she too was unconscious. Afsana and Raisa stood still, listening for a few minutes as the sound of the students stampeding to the assembly hall receded. Afsana delved into her bag and extracted a make-up kit. In the washroom, the two girls quietly and quickly applied foundation, lipstick, eyeliner, mascara and

  whatnot on the faces of the three sleeping girls. As soon as they were done, they took off their masks, unlocked the washroom door and peered out to make sure the coast was clear. They dragged out the three girls one by one and left them propped upright on the bench by the washroom door. The two girls then slipped into the assembly hall. Before the assembly came to a close, they returned to their classroom feigning illness and sat well away from each other so nobody could tell that they were together.

  There wasn’t a single student in the school who didn’t laugh at the sight of the three sleeping beauties with their kitschy make-up, dark-red lipstick on garish-white faces, hair poofed-up with hairspray and red ribbons tied into bowknots around their necks. The news spread like wildfire until a teacher arranged for one of the school staff to take the girls away to the sick bay and summoned their parents. All three regained consciousness a good two hours later. Their parents demanded that strict disciplinary action be taken against the ones who had perpetrated this mischief. However, the identities of the miscreants remained a mystery be
cause the two girls had been wearing masks. The principal ordered the teachers to search every student’s bag. Nothing was found.

  Afsana and Raisa stayed behind in the campus after school. A worried Nirmaan asked Raisa how she planned to get home if she missed the school bus. Raisa asked him to tell her mother that there was an extra class and that her friend would drop her home. Nirmaan didn’t want to lie, but with a little wheedling from Raisa, he agreed to collude in their little charade. He glowered at Afsana who, he now knew, was his best friend’s new friend.

  As soon as he left, Afsana took Raisa to the decommissioned washroom beside the chemistry lab. Raisa was amazed to see that Afsana had the keys to the lock.

  ‘How did you manage that?’ she asked.

  ‘I broke the original lock a long time ago and replaced it with one that I brought from home. Nobody knows because nobody opens it,’ Afsana grinned.

  When they entered the old washroom and locked the door from inside, the overpowering smell of jasmine startled Raisa. But that was not the only surprising thing there. It was a small, unkempt and clearly neglected place, predominantly dirty, but in a corner she saw a canister of a room-freshener, some fashion magazines, a book of Hindi poetry, a discoloured Walkman, a lighter and couple of cigarette packets.

  ‘What’s all this?’

  ‘Welcome to my time-pass zone. I read magazines here, smoke and listen to songs, mostly after school. Now you are allowed here as well.’

  An astonished Raisa picked up the cigarette packet.

  ‘I’ve dreamt of smoking ever since I saw my father smoke,’ she confessed.

  Afsana took the packet, extracted two cigarettes, lit both and retaining one, she gave the other to Raisa.

  ‘Suck gently,’ she suggested.

  Raisa did as told. A sense of forbidden pleasure invaded her as she exhaled the smoke. The girls smiled at each other and puffed again.

  ‘Thanks for avenging my insult,’ Raisa said blowing smoke into the air.

  ‘Not only yours. They have been harassing a lot of girls of late. I wanted to get back at them earlier, but I needed the right partner,’ Afsana said, leaning against the washroom window.

  ‘Now you’ve got one,’ Raisa chuckled and winked at her. As they exhaled together, the smoke coalesced in the air and became one.

  VOICE NOTE 13

  Nirmaan had a natural flair for event management: budgeting for an event and spearheading a team to execute the plan. He was unanimously chosen, therefore, as the head of the student committee to arrange the upcoming Teacher’s Day celebration across all classes in the school.

  After planning everything in minute detail with the monitors of all the sections, Nirmaan was strolling with Raisa towards their school bus, which was parked outside the school campus, when a car came to a halt beside them. The rear passenger window was rolled down and someone screamed out gleefully, ‘Rice!’

  Nirmaan looked at the girl quizzically and said, ‘What?’

  ‘Affu!’ Raisa exclaimed and added, ‘Nirmaan, don’t tell me you have forgotten my friend!’

  Nirmaan had not. But he didn’t want to remember Afsana either. He didn’t like her for some reason that he couldn’t quite pinpoint. She was rash, impulsive and a brat: everything Nirmaan hated. She gave off a vibe that signalled that if given a responsibility, she would deliberately screw it up. Moreover, he was fairly sure that she was the main reason for Raisa’s poor academic performance. He was also confident that all Raisa’s lately learnt Hindi and Bengali profanities that instantaneously afflicted him with hiccups, came from Afsana. He had even recommended that she stay away from this girl, but all he got in return was an earful of even filthier swear words from Raisa.

  ‘Coming?’ Afsana asked, looking pointedly at Raisa.

  The latter threw a pleading glance at Nirmaan. He understood what he had to do.

  ‘Okay, I’ll tell aunty you have an extra class. But this is not right!’

  ‘Right and wrong are subjective notions,’ Afsana quipped, opening the car door for Raisa. Nirmaan glared at her. Raisa gave him a quick hug.

  ‘Thanks!’ she said and climbed into the car. It soon sped away.

  Inside the car, Afsana seemed excited about something. Having been her only friend for the last three months, Raisa knew very well that whenever Afsana felt excited, someone somewhere paid a price big time.

  On Teacher’s Day, as the teachers wandered around visiting various classrooms, they were pleasantly surprised by the gala preparations. This day had never seemed this grand before. A student presented them with a red rose as they entered the classroom. After this was done, they were led to a corner where a solitary candle burned, above which hung multicoloured balloons. The teacher held the flame below the balloons till one of them burst. A fortune cookie would fall out, containing a line or two praising the teacher, written by the students themselves. After this, the teachers were given small gifts and a helping of roshogollas from one of the five big bowls. After all the teachers had visited the classrooms, the last two bowls were taken to the staff room to be distributed amongst the remaining teachers and staff. It was towards the end of the day that some of the teachers started having strange headaches, others felt dizzy while some felt an uncontrollable bubble of mirth rising up from within them. Some sat still on their chairs, too afraid to stand up and others chuckled insanely. The principal, Mrs Dasgupta, on the other hand was weeping copiously, alone in her room. Only the vice principal, Mrs Gujral, who had been late to school that day, seemed normal.

  It was eventually discovered that the only common food item that everyone had had was the roshogolla. A quick test of the remaining few roshogollas revealed that the syrup had been laced with a large amount of cannabis (bhang).

  ‘Where did the roshogollas come from?’ Mrs Gujral howled at the teachers the next day.

  After a shocked silence, one of the teachers replied, ‘Class IX, ma’am.’

  ‘Who is the batch head in Class IX?’ asked Mrs Gujral.

  ‘Nirmaan Bose.’

  VOICE NOTE 14

  The next day in school, just before the recess, Nirmaan was standing by the water purifier, lost in a reverie. His plastic tumbler was overflowing, when someone reached past him and turned off the faucet. He turned to see Raisa.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked, her eyes flicking to his chest a few inches right of his tie where his ‘Batch-Head’ badge was always pinned to his shirt. That space was empty.

  ‘Where’s your badge?’ she frowned.

  He ignored Raisa and walked away.

  ‘Hey, Nirmaan, what happened? Did someone beat you? Tell me, I’ll squash his balls.’

  Nirmaan stopped. He turned to face Raisa.

  ‘I’ve been suspended for a week. Someone injected cannabis into the roshogollas on Teacher’s Day,’ he said shortly. He looked so miserable that Raisa’s heart sank. Next came the guilt punch on her conscience.

  ‘Who?’ Raisa choked. She cleared her throat and repeated, ‘Who injected cannabis into those roshogollas?’

  ‘Don’t know and don’t care. How the hell am I going to get the suspension letter signed by my parents? Baba is going to kill me.’

  ‘I—’ Raisa was just about to confess when the recess bell rang and students poured out into the corridor from all directions. Watching Nirmaan walk morosely back to his classroom, Raisa hated herself like never before.

  ‘We shouldn’t have done that, Affu,’ Raisa said. Both girls were playing table tennis in the sports room after playing hooky from their maths class, citing severe headaches.

  ‘Hmm. But we didn’t know that this would be the outcome when we did it, right? I mean we didn’t deliberately do it to get your friend suspended, did we?’ Afsana justified their mischief.

  ‘That’s true but—’

  ‘But we can’t undo the damage. We can be sorry, but we can’t undo it.’

  Raisa knew Afsana was right and that made her feel worse. She hit a fast forehand. Afsana
missed it.

  ‘Did you apologize?’ she asked, picking up the ping-pong ball.

  Raisa threw her TT bat on the table and went to sit on one of the plastic chairs in the room.

  ‘Should I?’

  Afsana dragged another chair over to Raisa and straddled it to look straight into Raisa’s eyes.

  ‘You once told me that he is your best friend. In that case, you should answer the question yourself,’ Afsana said.

  ‘Affu, what if he starts to hate me? I don’t want Nirmaan to hate me ever. I mean I wouldn’t shed a single tear if the rest of the world loathed me, but Nirmaan . . .’ Raisa stretched her legs and looked up at the ceiling, weighing her options. Afsana bounced the ping-pong ball on her TT bat.

  ‘Although both of us are responsible for it, you’re right: I, being his best friend, should be the one to apologize,’ Raisa reasoned. ‘But before that, I have to make sure he doesn’t suffer for this screw-up.’

  That day, Raisa was in time to catch the school bus along with Nirmaan. He sat in the front of the bus, on the first seat, far away from his friends and was quiet for the entire journey. It was only when they entered the RBI housing colony that Raisa broke the silence and asked Nirmaan when he would show the suspension letter to his parents.

  ‘I have maths tuition now. I’ll show them the letter after dinner,’ he said and walked towards his building. Raisa ran to hers and got busy preparing an official looking table on a sheet of paper. When this was done to her satisfaction, she took an empty milk-powder tin can, hammered out a tidy slot into its lid and then sat by her window to keep an eye on the entrance of Nirmaan’s building. Fifteen minutes later, she saw Nirmaan leaving for his coaching class. She immediately went to his apartment.

  ‘Hello, Aunty!’ Raisa greeted Mrs Bose.

  ‘Hello, Raisa! How are you?’

  ‘I’m good. Hello, Uncle,’ Raisa noticed Mr Bose dressed in formal clothes, sitting on the sofa, sipping tea. He nodded at her.

  ‘Nirmaan just left for his tuitions,’ Mrs Bose opened the door wide to usher Raisa inside.