‘Excuse me sir, may I have a minute?’
‘Cut to the chase. I don’t have much time right now.’
So I gave him the spiel I’d give any other stranger.
‘Do you know what just happened? They’ve given us dates for our student show. Oh yes, we have dates. After one year. And you’re rabbitting on about the environment?’
I said, ‘And what about the social responsibility of the artist?’
‘Let us become artists first; then we’ll see. But I can see my way to buying you a coffee,’ he said.
‘On one condition,’ I replied. ‘I pay for my own coffee. I cannot accept so much as a glass of water from someone who doesn’t care about the environment.’
He laughed and shrugged.
I dropped my bag at a table in a corner and went to the counter to place my order. Behind the counter, I saw Shamim, an arts student. I must have looked surprised because he said, ‘Summer job’ as if in explanation. When I came back, he had picked up the guitar that the coffee shop had hanging on a wall and was playing. As always, I found myself staring at him. If someone stares into one’s eyes for a long time, it makes one uncomfortable. So I tried to distract myself with the traffic, with the old lady, reading her book and drinking cold coffee. Halfway through playing the chords of ‘Hotel California’ he began to sing along. He had a nice throaty voice. Soon, he seemed lost in the song. And then my order was called out, my name attached. He stopped abruptly. Muttering, I went to get my order.
‘You sing well,’ I said when I got back to the table. ‘Did you take lessons?’
‘What a lot of questions you ask,’ he said.
‘I do, don’t I?’
‘Why?’ he asked.
‘I’m always curious about guys who can cook and play the guitar and have hairy chests and beautiful eyes,’ I said.
I couldn’t swear to it but I think he blushed.
The next day, I appeared in the newspapers with the columnist. I looked like a PT teacher. Overnight, I had become a star. Green Earth called to thank me. Other people called too. Anubhav came over with a cake. Aai marched into the kitchen and made shira.
‘Have you all gone mad?’ I asked. ‘I just happened to be in the way.’
I went to take up my post outside the gallery. He came out of the gate of the arts school.
I could see the newspaper sticking out of his bag. He came up and chatted about something else. He didn’t mention the photograph.
‘What are your plans for lunch? I thought I’d go to Baghdadi for a kheema pao,’ he said. I left the forms with the paanwalla and went with him. I waited until we had eaten and were on the paan course. Wiping my reddened fingers on his shirt, I said, ‘Saw the paper?’
‘Which one?’
‘The one in your bag.’
‘Yes. Your photo’s in the supplement. Have you seen it?’
I was startled, then angry. But he had already started talking about art school politics. That’s when I realized he was different. And that I liked him.
The next morning, I was cleaning my toenails. Then I cleaned my ears. Tanay’s cupboard had all sorts of interesting stuff . . . ear buds, deodorants, cream with orange peel in it. I studied each one of the bottles and the pictures on them and then closed the door quickly. As I did so, I saw myself in the mirror. I took four steps back and looked again, carefully this time. There didn’t seem to be much wrong but I thought: I must take care of myself. Tanay was out. So I opened his cupboard again. I took out some of the bottles and tubes but this was rocket science. I couldn’t figure out what could be applied and where, how it was to be applied and to which part of the body, so I put everything back and shut the cupboard again. Never mind. I’m not that bad. I have what it takes in the proportions required. That will have to do.
I decided that I wasn’t coming home for lunch; I’d eat with him. The only problem was that his school closed in a fortnight or so. He wouldn’t turn up at the gallery then. It didn’t work out quite like that. One day, he turned up at the gallery with four or five boys, all of whom also seemed to be bumbling about in a trance. His classmates, he said, and introduced me. Strange names they had: Vishwang, Orayan, Bahaar, Sahadev. Sahadev got to the point: ‘We need a model to pose for us. Figure work. Would you?’
‘Nude?’ I asked.
‘No, no,’ Orayan said. ‘We just like something in your face, something about your spirit.’
I thought about the face I had examined in the mirror earlier that day. Spirit, eh? Why not?
‘What do I have to do?’
I’d just have to sit there. My shift at Green Earth ended at three o’ clock. I agreed to sit for them between three and six.
‘We can’t pay you. Do you mind?’
I hadn’t even thought there’d be money involved.
While this was going on, he was looking at one of the pictures of the pavement artists. ‘In return, lunch will be on me,’ he said. ‘My company thrown in free.’
I began to laugh. I realized that I was overreacting when even the doped out types began to look puzzled. I controlled myself and threw in a demand.
‘And guitar lessons. You were going to teach me, remember?’
2 August
Today, I woke up early as usual. At seven o’clock, Sakhubai, who does the floors, was dragging a rusty table along the floor. The ugly sound brought on the goosebumps and total wakefulness.
I ran into the passage and shouted, ‘Can’t you lift that damned thing?’
Her face fell and I felt ashamed. I took one end of the table and helped her lift it.
Aai and Maushi came back from their morning walk. When Aai goes visiting, she wears only salwar kameez. Maushi’s kameez flapped around Aai like a tent. She was wearing Maushi’s canvas shoes too but still, the effect was rather pleasing. To top it all, she had a big fat kunku and a shiny mangalsutra on.
I got dressed and left and then was forced to return. I had no money. I hadn’t needed any for a while. Aai took out some money and said, ‘On your way back, can you get some shengdaana and sabudaana? It’s Tuesday tomorrow and this Sharayu has nothing I can eat. Here’s three hundred more. You don’t have anything left, do you?’
It took me nearly an hour to get to the city. I walked around with no purpose, no intention, no direction. The shops were only just beginning to open. The chaiwalla was surrounded by college students. Traffic began to increase. Old men, sweaty from badminton, were chatting with their friends as they kick-started their recalcitrant bikes. My feet took me to the gallery. I thought I shouldn’t linger, it might set me back. But then I felt: I’m tired of this fear. Let’s see what happens.
I stopped at the chowk and looked around.
Within a few minutes, a young man arrived, wearing the familiar green T-shirt and cap of the Green Earth volunteers. He pulled out his forms and began to arrange them.
My stomach hollowed out. Only my life was on hold. Everyone else was going about their business. The honking of the cars started to worry me. I wanted to go home. He was gone. I turned quickly towards the terminal from where a bus could take me back to Sharayu Maushi’s home. Every spot on the road began to remind me of him. The traffic roared past. The exhaust made me feel dizzy. I began to rush along, pushing past women shopping from the roadside vendors. I got into a bus that was as hot as a stove and returned home. I rushed to the bathroom and splashed my face with cold water, again and again, as if that would cool the heat inside my head.
When Aai came to call me for lunch, I was outside, watching the summer rain. I know now that I’m still not well. I should have listened to Aai. I asked her to cancel my afternoon appointment with Dr Khanvilkar.
In the middle of all this, Anubhav called. He had seen me that morning, walking past the tennis courts. He couldn’t believe his eyes. Then he was upset that I hadn’t gone to visit him. What could I say? He said, ‘If you’re coming into the city, just tell me. Why bump around in a bus?’ This is the boy I taught how to ride
a motorcycle. Has he forgotten that? Have I? I don’t understand anything. This town seems like a big city sometimes and sometimes it’s a village. You step out and bump into a dozen people you know.
I have started to feel that the friends you make in school, the ones you’ve known forever, begin to turn into fossils. They merge into their families, losing all identity. You don’t know the new ones as much as you should. They can fool you.
Why can’t Anubhav walk into my life as a new friend?
3 August
Orayan’s father had a riverside bungalow. It was empty and it stood in for a studio through the vacations. It had glass windows six feet high. Evening light streamed slantwise through these windows. The walls were painted in different colours, courtesy Orayan. The floor was wood; it echoed under your feet if you had shoes on.
My twelfth standard holidays were spent in this room. Now, I didn’t mind being banned from the upstairs room; after all, I was meeting him every day.
In the middle of the room, I sat on a variety of objects: on chairs, on stools, on paatis, on the floor and once on a ladder laid on its side. Around me, the trance team worked on their easels. He was right in front of me, all the time. His eyes swung from me to the canvas and back, barely resting for seconds before shifting again. No one let me peek. Nor could I get up in between. After lunch, I would sometimes begin to drowse. I would fall asleep sometimes, quick catnaps, but since I didn’t drop out of the pose, no one stopped working. I would wait for four to strike.
That was a break for tea, brewed on an electric stove. There was a coal stove outside. Sahadev would cook corn on the cob, spicing them and salting them and we would devour those too. Twenty minutes later, everyone would get back to work because they knew that on the dot, at six, I would be up and out of there.
At the end of the first week, they looked at each other’s work. (They had decided this before starting.) I could not recognize myself in any of their paintings, except in Bahaar’s. I told Bahaar, ‘You’re the only painter here. That looks like a photograph of me.’ Wrong thing to say apparently. Bahaar’s face fell and Sahadev started to smile but tried to cover it up. Then they started talking shop, the gobbledygook of art students.
The next day, I said, ‘What’s all this, sitting in a room and painting? Go out, enjoy nature, paint some trees and flowers and stuff.’ The next Sunday, I was to take the children of the Zilla Parishad school on a river clean-up. At least, we’d clear up the banks of plastic. I told them, ‘Take your boards and let’s go. Draw me as I clear up the river.’ And right enough, they all appeared on the banks of the river with their paraphernalia. They sketched for a bit and then began to help too.
By the time the vacation had ended, the trance bunch could have had an exhibition of portraits of me. I don’t know what they learned or what they got out of it. They were practising.
I never saw those paintings again.
By the end of the holidays, I knew I was in love with him. It wasn’t just a body thing. I’m not a halfway person. Either I love or I detest. Him, I loved. I loved his quietness, his understated way with words, his independence, his ability to respect your space. I had not fallen in love before so I couldn’t even be sure that this was the real thing. As the vacations drew to a close, I began to think about this. Finally, I decided that there was nothing to be gained by putting a name to what I was feeling. Instead, I’d just get to know him better in my own way.
I asked him out to the movies a few times. But he said he didn’t like the way Hollywood seemed hung up on a few themes: alien attacks, dinosaurs, violence, marriage. I didn’t want to see Hindi or Marathi movies and that put paid to that.
One day, I popped him on the back of my bike and we blazed out of the city. We came off the ghats and hit the highway and coasted along. A mango tree, large and old, loomed up along the edge of the road. Next to it, a path led to some little village. It was about four in the afternoon. I parked the bike in the shade of the tree and we leaned against it. A little boy was playing in the mud. His mother was standing next to him, in brilliant colours, nail-enamel bright. Gradually, some more people arrived. An old granny type in a nine-yard sari, two or three men who looked like Warkaris in their huge turbans, that kind. And then the State Transport bus arrived and they got in. Only he and I were left.
We hadn’t said much to each other after we’d left the city. I hadn’t climbed a tree in ages, so I clambered up until I was astride a branch. He grinned as I climbed swiftly. ‘Come up,’ I beckoned. ‘No,’ he shook his head.
I sat there, looking at the fields, the trees, the wells. After a while, he said, over a yawn: ‘You want to say something? Why did you bring me here?’ I had been waiting for this very question, I realized. If he asked me, I could tell him.
I told him everything. About myself, about Anubhav, about my feelings for him.
The sun was almost at the horizon by the time I finished. I sat on the tree and spoke and he sat by the road and listened. At first, I could see his expressions as I spoke but it grew dark and then I could only hear some vaguely encouraging grunts. I rambled on for nearly an hour or an hour and a half before I tired. That he could listen without speaking for such a length of time did not surprise me.
He only said, ‘This is like something out of Jim Corbett. Evening and the hunter up a tree and the tiger waiting below. Only this tiger doesn’t bite. Come on down.’ I came down and started the bike. When he climbed on, he put both his arms around my waist and rested his chin on my shoulder. I said, ‘Hello! I talked for hours and you’re not going to say anything?’ He began to sing, in French, I think. As we rode along the highway, now lit by headlights, he sang on. He sang into the breeze, he sang as we came into the city. He ignored the way people stared at him when we stopped for signals and he continued to sing. He ignored their mockery.
What had I gone and done? Had I proposed to him, as the girls in college would say, or what?
4 August
I refused to go back to the doctor. This talking isn’t helping me at all. In the last month I’ve been for ten or more sessions. That should be enough. I don’t want to be treated like a patient. I enjoy writing and for that, I have Dr Khanvilkar to thank.
Staying here annoyed me at the beginning; then it became a routine; now I’ve begun to like it. Maushi and Kaka had wanted to adopt me. If they had, this house with its artefacts from across the world, this room in which I am now, all this would have been mine, no?
This morning I asked Maushi, ‘If I had been your daughter and I had done something like this, would you have sent me somewhere else for a change of scene?’
Aai was having her bath. Maushi looked at the bathroom door, took a deep breath and said, ‘I would not have sent you away. Not even if it meant keeping you in a house where everything would remind you of a man. But the decision was your parents’; they asked me if I would have you and I agreed because I knew, at some level, you were also tired of your home. Otherwise why would you have left with that boy?’
I interrupted: ‘Okay, the truth please. Does the doctor report back on what I tell her?’
‘Not everything. Just what we need to know and what is related to the treatment. And it isn’t as if we know nothing about you. You’re not someone we met yesterday, you know.’
At this point, Aai came out of the door, a prayer on her lips, her wet hair wrapped in a towel. I left the room.
It would have been well-nigh impossible for me to tell my parents that I was in love with the paying guest. Perhaps they would have been able to listen without getting angry but they would have asked: why had I felt the need for secrecy? And then why had I left home?
That afternoon, Maushi and I looked at her wedding album. I couldn’t recognize Aai and Baba. Aseem was in some of the photographs, asleep on Aai’s shoulder. Tanay and I hadn’t been born. Aaji and Ajoba were smiling in the photographs. It was as if they were sighing with relief. Anil Kaka sported a moustache and was wearing bell-bottoms and a shirt of
a hectic floral pattern, Sharayu Maushi looked just the same. Perhaps it’s because she never had kids, never had to raise them. That seems to keep a woman young. You could tell what had happened to Aai and Baba in the process of bringing us into the world and raising us.
That might be why I didn’t tell my parents. They would have taken charge of everything and we would have lost control of our lives. They would have accelerated straight to the marriage hall. He would have been sat down and they would have demanded all kinds of confidences from him. They would have read me a sermon about the importance of education and how I should finish my degree before marriage. Then they would have hired a hall, called five hundred or six hundred relatives that no one had ever heard of and fed them and declared us married.
This is why I concealed even my friendship with him. Even when we went out together, I’d make him get off the bike at a traffic signal before the house. I did not visit him in the upstairs room. Anubhav saw all this happening; he knew. How could he not? His face was heavy and helpless with knowledge but I didn’t have the words to explain. When these answers surfaced, I fell into a deep and lovely sleep.
The results came out. I got 89 per cent. I was delighted. I had planned on an MSc in the same college, after which I planned a master’s degree in zoo management. I had no worries, no cares. When the holidays ended, I returned the Green Earth forms and my report. That year, they had decided to pay volunteers a stipend. Two thousand five hundred rupees! My first cheque! I was over the moon. I thought I’d take everyone out to dinner.
‘Can I ask him too?’ I asked my parents. ‘It won’t look nice, leaving him out.’
‘Okay,’ said Aai. I bounced off to ask him. Once again, he surprised me. ‘I’m not coming. We can go out on our own.’
After the family treat, I had four hundred rupees left. I said to Anubhav, ‘I’ve decided that I want to taste beer and see. I’ve also decided that I can’t do it alone. And I want to pay for it from my own earnings.’ He was more than ready to come with me. On the way home from the beer bar, I felt light and happy. It seemed a wonder that I’d never drunk such a great thing before. I felt a great liquid love for the world surge through me.
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