Babyji

by Abha Dawesar

  “Take out your textbook and let’s go over the first chapter,” I said.

  “You’re really going to teach me? I just wanted to sit around and talk.”

  “Let’s get some work done, then we can talk as much as you want,” I said.

  Physics was like making love. You couldn’t just plunge into it. One had to start slowly and from the beginning. Sheela had not followed even the first chapter. There was no way I could start teaching her about quantum mechanics. We sat and labored away at the introduction. I made sure she had understood last year’s course and recapped everything she should know so far.

  “Enough, now I’m bored,” she said after an hour.

  “Did you understand everything?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said, nodding, but I wasn’t sure.

  “Good.”

  “Maybe I should pay you?” she said.

  “Pay me? I did it because you’re my friend,” I said, offended. She was smiling.

  “Well, how would you pay me?” I asked, warming up.

  “In the currency of kisses,” she said.

  I shrugged my shoulders. Sheela thought this was some sort of game. I didn’t want to play it like a game. I wanted the real thing, like I had with Rani and India. I wanted an affair.

  “Please, I’ve never kissed before,” she said.

  “Why me?”

  “Because I trust you. You won’t tell anyone.”

  “There are others who won’t tell. Vidur won’t tell,” I said. If I gave in easily she wouldn’t appreciate it. Moreover, I wanted Sheela to love me.

  “But I’m not attracted to Vidur,” she argued.

  I suppressed a smile.

  “Well, I don’t know about kissing,” I said and put my index finger in the pocket of her white school shirt. The shirt was thin.

  “Anamika, what are you doing?” she asked, her voice almost panic-stricken.

  I looked her straight in the eye as if my finger was not connected to me.

  “Look, we’re either going to do it or not,” I said.

  “Do what?” she asked, biting her lower lip nervously.

  “Everything.”

  “I’m not going to do that. Anyway, two women can’t do it.”

  Then she grabbed my wrist and lifted my finger out from her breast pocket. She let go of my wrist with a jerk. My hand fell to my side.

  “Right, then,” I said, getting angry. What did it matter that some sixteen-year-old brat was rejecting me? I had India and Rani.

  “You’re angry,” she said.

  “Not at all,” I said calmly. I wasn’t going to share my true feelings with her after that. It was time to go home to someone who was waiting.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” I said, then added, “let’s get going.”

  We walked in silence to the front gates of the school to take a DTC home. My parents had told me I could not ride in one till I was old enough to go to college. I wasn’t familiar with the bus system. I had figured we’d just queue up at the nearest bus stop and ask someone.

  Delhi is the kind of city it is—slow, dead, undercover, and polluted—because it does not have decent public transportation. At any time of day one can see buses so overpacked that they practically tip over when they turn the corner. People hang from the front and rear entrances since the doors have usually fallen off. The Delhi Transportation Corporation has been a loss-making operation since its inception and complains that the majority of riders travel ticketless.

  As we walked to the DTC bus stop, an uncomfortable silence smoldered between us. I felt silly and immature for having gotten upset. There were two men, of the construction worker class, waiting at the bus stop. They looked Sheela up and down. They stared at her legs. Not that many women exposed their legs to begin with, but Sheela’s skirt was particularly high. I saw the leer in their eyes. My blood boiled. Sheela had taken on a completely different personality. Her face had shrunk, and she stared at the ground; she knew the guys were looking at her. I wished I was a guy and could protect her, but I was shorter, thinner, and weaker than Sheela.

  “Where can we get buses to South Delhi?” I asked the guys in Hindi.

  They lifted their eyes from her legs and let them settle upon me. The same lasciviousness hung heavy from their stares. I wore glasses and was relatively dark. I had short hair. I was average looking and flat-chested. I wondered what on earth they were looking at.

  “Depends how south you want to go,” one of the men replied with a smirk.

  I gave him a dumb look and said, “We are trying to go to the Chirag Delhi area.” I didn’t want to reveal exact details of which colony we were going to.

  “You can take seventy-seven from here.”

  “Thank you,” I said and turned my back to them.

  “Let’s go off to the side and sit,” I said, whispering to Sheela. It was a relief to know she was there, that I wasn’t alone with the two cheapads at the bus stop.

  We walked a few steps and sat on a concrete projection that was part of the school’s outside boundary. It reeked of urine.

  “You’re not used to this, are you?” Sheela said.

  “Used to what?” I asked. She couldn’t possibly be used to acrid stench either.

  “All these men on the street hassling you,” she said.

  “No.”

  “I get followed everywhere. I used to think I was doing something wrong. But now I am used to it. I got my period five years ago. So I guess I developed faster than the rest of you.”

  I looked at her chest. She was fairly well-endowed. And had been for as long as I could remember. It was strange to think that Sheela had developed faster than I had in any department.

  A bus was coming our way. I got up to take a look at the number. It was not ours. The two guys got on the bus. As it pulled away they yelled out of the window, “Bye, sexy.”

  As soon as they were gone I got up to move away from the smell. The afternoon had been a disappointment. Since the moment I had put my finger in Sheela’s shirt pocket everything had gone steadily downhill. Nothing was beautiful anymore, and the exquisite, bittersweet pain of longing that I had become used to feeling several times a day eluded me altogether.

  After a while we saw seventy-seven approach. It showed no signs of slowing down. Sheela and I had to wave at it frantically. I was practically standing in the middle of the road to flag it down. We had to run alongside it and climb aboard because it did not come to a full stop. The bus was packed. We could not inch our way in to buy a ticket or ask the conductor where exactly it was going. Yelling to no one in particular, I asked if the bus was headed to South Delhi. A man said “yes” without turning around. We had to hold the railings with a lot of strength because the bus was swaying back and forth. Every time the surface of the road was uneven we flew a few inches off the steps. I saw Sheela’s forearms pulled taut. Her hands gripped the railing so hard that her knuckles jutted out.

  A few minutes later the bus slowed a little, and three men climbed on behind us. They pushed into us as if we didn’t exist. I couldn’t see Sheela anymore. I couldn’t see anyone since my whole body including my head was pressing into the guy in front of me. I could hardly breathe. The smell of sweat filled the bus. My backpack was sliding off my shoulders, and I had to keep lifting my right shoulder all the way up to my ear to keep the strap from slipping.

  “Are you okay?” I shouted, hoping Sheela would hear. My head twisted at a peculiar angle.

  “Barely,” I heard her shout back.

  I tried to turn around to look at her. I could only turn my head by twenty degrees or so. My body was locked in at an angle. There were too many people around us, and my backpack made it impossible for me to maneuver. I felt a harsh pointed thing graze the back of my thigh. I couldn’t imagine what it was. I tried to move. Then suddenly I felt human flesh. It was a guy’s hand. My heart gave a start. I wanted to scream but my voice had seized up. I tried to turn a little more to see if I co
uld make eye contact with Sheela, but I couldn’t even glimpse her from the corner of my eye.

  The hand had now firmly gripped my upper thigh and was making its way higher. I turned my feet and legs by an inch in the tiny space I had, and the hand relaxed its grip for a second. When I had finished turning it slipped under my skirt again, this time making its way up the front of my thigh. I could feel my face boiling. As the bus swerved, Sheela came back slightly into my field of vision. Her face was buried into a small bit of space between the metal railing and the back of a seat. Something seemed wrong. I could see her right hand clutch her backpack so hard that its veins were popping. My eyes traveled lower. Her skirt was all the way up, and there was a hand on her bum. I could see the man’s face. No one else on the bus could have seen what was going on. His right hand was in his fly. The hand under my skirt was yanking the elastic of my underwear. It broke my trance. I let out a blood-curdling howl. The people standing right in front of us shifted. Sheela turned her face when she heard my cry, and I could see that it was wet with tears. The guy with his hand under my skirt let go. I could see the forearm of the guy who was touching Sheela. His hand was rubbing her underwear very fast. His eyes were shut, and his face was all screwed up. I let go of the railing that I had been clutching and brought my right hand down on his head with all the strength I could muster. He jerked backward and clutched at the railing. His eyes opened. He looked vicious and dirty. He was a bit off balance, so I lifted my foot a few inches off the ground and kicked it in his direction. It missed him. The guy behind me was standing with one leg on the same step as me, and my foot hit his shin. He tumbled closer to me. The other guy had now regained a firm hold on Sheela and was continuing to do what he had been doing. He gave me an ugly look, as if I’d interrupted something. I screamed “Bastard!” in English and this time managed to kick him.

  I had got him on the side of his leg. It hadn’t done much damage, but it threw him off-kilter again for a second. His right hand was still in his pants, but his left hand had flown off Sheela and was trying to clutch the railing. I brought my foot up to the level of his fly and kicked with all my might. Sheela had turned her face and was watching me.

  The man let go of the hand railing and was swaying, his left hand having flown protectively in front of his crotch. There was no door on the bus, and he was dangerously close to the entrance. I turned around fully and pushed him as hard as I could. Sheela stared. He fell off the bus and onto the road with a scream. I saw him roll on the tar and dust.

  “What did you do?” she said.

  The bus slowed a little. It was too packed for the driver to have seen in the rearview mirror what was going on, but one of the passengers in the front must have seen it and told the driver. The guy who had been standing behind me jumped off when the bus slowed down. I turned to see the guys. They knew each other. The guy who had been behind me was helping up the one I had thrown off the bus. He didn’t seem too hurt. No one could fall off a crawling DTC bus and get hurt. A man standing nearby congratulated me, saying, “Shabash, Beta.” I thought I saw a lascivious look on his face and stared back with contempt.

  Sheela’s tears had dried, leaving streak marks on her face.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “It was miserable,” she said.

  I noticed her hands were trembling.

  “Let’s get off this bus right now,” I said.

  When the bus reached the next stop I tugged her hand and pulled her off. We were in Green Park near the market. I decided we should stop for a few minutes to recover. “Let’s just stabilize ourselves a little. Let’s go to Evergreen and eat something,” I said.

  “Thank you for saving my life,” Sheela said dramatically as we walked toward the market.

  “I didn’t save your life. He was such a creep you should have shouted,” I said.

  “Men are such behnchods. The bus was packed, and no one said a thing when you screamed.” I had never heard Sheela use mother- or sister-abuses or even the F word.

  “There must have been women, too, on that bus. They didn’t say a thing.”

  “All the women were probably being eve-teased like us,” Sheela said.

  “Eve-teased” was such a coy word to use. I felt enraged that Sheela was using the same term the newspapers used to describe such incidents. It made the act sound routine, acceptable.

  “Sheela, that was borderline rape,” I said.

  “No, it was not rape,” Sheela said. Her face hardened.

  “Well, the next thing, his whole dirty finger would have been inside you,” I said angrily.

  “Stop it.” She started shaking again.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” I said, coming closer and hugging her.

  “We can’t do this again. We can’t go on a bus,” she said.

  “What are we going to do? This is where we were born, this is where we grew up. Are we not going to take public transportation to go from one part of our city to another because we’re afraid of goons on a packed bus?”

  “I don’t want to get raped,” she said.

  We had reached Green Park Market. The shops were all well maintained, and there weren’t too many people on the sidewalk squatting and selling goods. But there was a cobbler, around thirty years old, sitting under a tree, polishing shoes. I touched Sheela’s arm to stop her from walking on.

  “How much will you charge to polish these?” I asked, pointing to my school shoes.

  “Two rupees,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said, bringing my foot close to the jute bag on which he was sitting.

  “Why don’t you remove your shoes, Babyji,” he said.

  “No, I’ll put my feet here,” I said, pointing to the small wooden stand in front of him. I saw men getting their shoes polished all the time with one foot placed on the stand and the other on the ground. I was wearing a skirt, and he would probably be able to see under it. But standing like that while having a man polish my shoes made me feel like a grown-up man. My society allowed the molestation of young girls in public, but if you had money then people always bowed down to you. Sheela stood near me looking at the guy bending over my right foot and then my left, applying shoe cream and buffing the leather with a cloth.

  “How many shoes do you polish a day?” I asked.

  He looked up at me and said, “Babyji, sometimes ten, on a good day twenty.”

  I was searching for a mocking grin on his face, but there was none. The way he said “Babyji” was convincing, clean. At twenty pairs of shoes a day he was making only forty rupees. Even if he got a few shoe repair jobs he was probably making no more than fifty rupees a day tops.

  “How big is your family?” I asked.

  “Babyji, I am the only one who works. I have my mother, sister, wife, and two children.”

  That was less than three rupees a head. It wasn’t possible, this poverty. How did he manage?

  “Here, Babyji, your shoes are shining,” he said.

  Then he looked at Sheela and asked her if she wanted her shoes done. She didn’t. I paid him, and we walked to Evergreen.

  “How do you think they live on so little money?” I asked her.

  “Very frugally,” she said.

  “Our national priorities are upside down. We just spent crores to build a stadium in Delhi that we keep lit all night long. Just the lighting costs us two lakhs a year,” I said.

  “If you want to make a change you should go into politics.”

  “I might,” I replied.

  “Physics isn’t going to teach you a thing,” she said.

  “I think it’s good to know what makes the world go round, why objects fall to the earth. If we can split atoms, understand thermodynamics, maybe we’ll make electricity out of nothing, save the two lakhs on the lighting. Create food where there is none to be found.”

  “Science is not the answer to everything, Anamika. God is.”

  “God is a radiation,” I said. I had spoken without thinking, but I liked th
e way it sounded. “God is just a radiation,” I repeated.

  She looked at me, startled. After a few steps she said, “You’re brilliant.”

  I felt a lot older than Sheela. She was so easily impressed.

  We had reached Evergreen. The restaurant extended all the way past the pedestrian path of the market to the tar road. There was proper seating inside, but one could also get chaat and golgappa on the street and eat it standing. It cost less. There was a guy with a big cauldron of hot oil frying golgappas and aloo tikkis right in the middle of the pedestrian pathway. We ordered two plates of golgappas. The incident on the bus seemed a little more distant now. These things happened all the time. But there were millions of people worse off than we were. People to feel more sorry for. One couldn’t focus on one’s own problems.

  The golgappa man was filling the small round shells with masala water and passing them to Sheela. She put entire golgappas in her mouth without any juice trickling out. When he gave them to me I found that harder to do. I wasn’t allowed to eat off the street. My parents said one caught infections that way. I found the golgappa juice much too spicy and the pieces too big. The fluid dribbled from my lips as I tried to bite them whole. I wiped my face with the back of my hand.

  “Sheela, we’ll take an autorikshaw. I’ll drop you off first.”

  “If my servant sees me coming in a three-wheeler, he’ll tell my parents, and they’ll scold me.”

  “We’ll stop a little distance from your house.”

  “How much will a three-wheeler cost?” Sheela asked.

  “I’m not sure, but I have all my pocket money. Don’t worry,” I said.

  We hailed a three-wheeler and got in. It rattled and shook, causing us to fly an inch from our seats at every speed-breaker on the road. The driver sat on the edge of his seat, leaning precariously to one side as he coughed and spat every few seconds. Since we were fully exposed on both sides, the wind blew Sheela’s hair all over her face. It made her look older, like a college girl. I found it sexy. We sat in silence. When we came near her house she gave me a kiss on the cheek and stepped out. I was surprised. I was not used to people kissing each other on the cheek. Westernized people did it, but in my family it was not usually done.