by Farahad Zama
His face was miserable and tears streaked down his dusty cheeks in wet channels.
“Boy,” Usha called out. “Have you lost a marble?”
The boy looked around in surprise and didn’t notice her at first. She called out again before he saw her at the window.
“Yes,” he said. “It fell into the gutter and I can’t find it. I’ve only got one marble now. I’ll have to play with a pebble but it won’t be as good and the other boys will make fun of me.”
His eyes welled up again, though he swallowed and manfully tried to hold back the tears.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “You can buy one more.”
“No,” he said. “I’ll have to wait until Granny comes back from the village before I get any more money. She won’t be back for at least two months.”
He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, smearing more dust on his wet face.
“Would you like to earn enough money to buy ten marbles?” she asked.
“Ten! That’s more than even Siva’s got.”
“You’ll have to do something for me first.”
“What?” he said.
“Not a lot. I’ll give you a letter and some money. You need to buy a stamp at the post office, stick it on the letter and post it in the postbox. You will have enough money left over to buy more than ten marbles.”
“Really?”
“Yes. So, will you do it?”
The boy thought for a moment. “Why can’t you do it yourself?”
“Never you mind that. You are the boy who lives opposite, aren’t you? What’s your name?” she asked.
“My name is Balu and yes, we live on the footpath under the tree,” he said. “I know you. You are the lady who drives the red car.”
She nodded and suddenly had an inspiration to make sure that he carried out her instructions. “I will know in a few days whether you posted the letter or not. If you do as I say and post the letter properly, I will give you a ride in my car.”
“All the way to the end of the road?” Balu asked.
“Even further. I will take you all the way round the block.”
“Can I sit in the front?” the boy asked.
“Yes. Hang on a moment.”
She wedged the envelope and a ten-rupee note tightly in the spine of a book. She put her arm carefully past the elbow through the bars on the window. She bent her hand and straightened it forcefully. The book sailed through the air but her throw had not been powerful enough. Her heart almost stopped as the book reached its zenith far too early and swooped down.
“Oh!” she cried in disappointment as it hit the wall and seemingly stayed there, poised on the top.
But luckily, it had hit a piece of thick blue soda-bottle glass on the far edge and, after a split second, it slowly slid down the other side. Balu disappeared from view as he dived towards it. Moments later, he came back into view, jumping like a monkey, waving the book in one hand and the envelope and money in the other. Usha sagged against the window in relief.
“Don’t show the money to anyone, including your mother. They might take it away and you won’t get the marbles and the car ride,” she said, feeling guilty at manipulating the boy so shamelessly.
Balu just nodded and ran off down the lane. Usha went back to her bed. Now, she would just have to wait for the letter to do what she hoped it would.
♦
Rehman was waiting for Pari outside her office with his bike that afternoon to take her to the beach. He nodded to her and she rode the pillion side-saddle all the way.
Rehman bought them two corn on the cobs from an old woman sitting on the pavement outside the beach with a small charcoal brazier. They moved to the low wall overlooking the sand and Pari turned to Rehman.
“What did you want to talk about?” she asked. “Why couldn’t you tell me on the phone?”
Rehman sighed and said, “I need your advice. Do you remember that yesterday I came home late for dinner?”
“Yes, so?”
He looked straight ahead, concentrating on the far horizon where the dark blue of the sea met the lighter blue of the sky. “I had gone out to meet a girl. I proposed to her and she accepted.”
Paris face lit up with surprise. “Wow! You’ve turned out to be a chuppa Rustom, a hidden hero. Who is it? Do I know her? How long have you been meeting up? What – ”
“Whoa…Hold your horses. Her name is Usha and you don’t know her.”
“Usha?” said Pari.
Rehman turned to Pari and found her staring at him – her eyes wide. A small, yellow piece of corn kernel was on a corner of her upper lip.
“Usha?” repeated Pari. “She’s not…Muslim…”
“No, she’s not. Is that an issue?” asked Rehman. His voice was loud and his jaw jutted forward.
“No, not for me. But what about your parents? What will they say if you tell them you want to marry a Hindu girl?” said Pari.
When he didn’t say anything for a moment, she shook her head. “Oh, no. I am not getting into the firing line with chaacha and chaachi. I’m not telling them about you and Usha. They have been very good to me and I am not going to repay them by giving them bad news.”
Rehman waved the corn in his hand dismissively. “I don’t expect you to do that. I will tell them myself. Ammi and abba will be unhappy but that’s my burden. I won’t push it on to anybody else.”
“Right,” said Pari. “So what’s the problem?” She looked at him and covered her mouth with her hand. “Have you changed your mind after sleeping on it overnight?”
“No!” said Rehman. “Stop jumping to conclusions and let me finish talking.”
“Sorry,” said Pari. “Carry on.”
Rehman took a deep breath. “Last night, I came home all ready to tell ammi and abba the news. But Nafisa and her loudmouthed husband were there, so I didn’t say anything. Then this morning, I called Usha and she cut the phone on me as soon as I started to talk. I’ve been ringing every few minutes after that but the phone is switched off. I don’t know what to think. Does she regret what she agreed to yesterday? Does Usha not want to marry me any more?”
Pari looked at him for a moment and then took his hand in hers. “Oh, Rehman,” she said. “I am sure there’s a simple explanation for it. She said yes last night, didn’t she?”
Rehman nodded.
Pari continued, “Go to her house and ask her in person. She cannot have changed her mind so quickly.”
“I’ve thought about it,” said Rehman. “But I don’t know where she lives.”
“What?”
“I’ve never met her at home. We just talk on our mobile phones and meet up somewhere in town or at the beach. She lives in MVP colony but I am not sure exactly where. I didn’t want to tell ammi and abba without being sure, but I needed to talk to somebody, so I called you.”
She pressed his hand and said, “Thank you, Rehman. It means a lot that you’ve decided to confide in me.”
Rehman said, “What do I do?”
Pari thought for a moment. Then she said, “Where does she work?”
Rehman’s face broke into a smile. “You are a genius! She’s a journalist with a TV channel.” He looked at his watch. “It’s too late now. I’ll go over there first thing tomorrow and find out where she lives from them.”
“Love may be blind, but it also seems to turn one into a simpleton,” said Pari. “I cannot believe you didn’t think of such a simple thing yourself.”
Rehman shrugged, too happy to take offence. They were silent for a little while and then Pari said, “What kind of wedding will you have? Will you ask Usha to convert and become a Muslim?”
“I haven’t thought about it,” said Rehman. “But I don’t think so.”
“It will be quite important for your mother that you have a religious wedding.”
“No,” said Rehman. “We’ll probably have a civil ceremony.”
“Civil? Oh, you mean a registered wedding,” said Pari.
“That’s right.”
Pari shook her head and looked away. Rehman sighed, some of his happiness dissipating. It looked as if life was going to be a lot more complicated than he thought.
Eleven
“You are fine. You can go back to work tomorrow,” said the older doctor, closing his bag.
“Thank you, sir,” said Ramanujam and looked at Aruna with a frown on his face. “And sorry to have troubled you.”
Aruna refused to be intimidated and looked steadily back at her husband.
“No problem, my boy. It’s always good to see old students,” said the older man. “Ravi tells me that you are presenting a paper at a neurology conference in AIIMS.”
“Yes, sir,” said Ramanujam. “At the Indo-German Neurosurgical conference – about post-operative recovery after removing brain tumours.”
“Oh,” said his old professor. “Are these tumours involving intrinsic effects?”
“Both intrinsic and mass effect, sir. The study is about tumours bigger than…”
The men looked as if they could talk about the topic a lot longer than Aruna could listen to it, so she left them and went into the living room. Her sister-in-law’s son Sanjay was sitting on his own, watching television. Aruna sat next to him and watched the children’s programme along with him. The characters in the cartoon looked oriental and were drawn in a particular way that she could not quite define – they had spiky hair and the girls wore very short skirts. There seemed to be a lot of fantastic beasts and violence as well. She couldn’t follow head nor tail of the story but when she looked at Sanjay’s face, he was engrossed. Finally, one character beat up another on the screen and Sanjay jumped up on the sofa, his arm raised. “Yay!” he shouted.
“Do you want to play outside with me?” she asked the boy, wanting a truce after the previous day’s trouble.
“OK,” he said. “The next programme is for girls anyway – it’s stupid.”
They went out into the garden and found an old tennis ball.
“Let’s play catch,” she suggested.
They took their places and started throwing the ball to each other. “What outdoor games do you play with your friends?” she asked.
“We play cricket and sometimes football,” he said.
“Don’t you play seven-stones tag or kabbadi?”
“Those are boring native games. Anyway, we don’t know how to play them. What is seven-stones tag?” he asked.
Aruna felt sad, but not surprised, that Sanjay and his friends didn’t play traditional games.
“You need more kids to play the game,” she said. “Seven flat stones are placed on each other in a pile in the centre. The children are divided into two teams and each side takes turns to hit the pile from a distance with a ball. As soon as the stones come tumbling down, all the members of the team that hit the stones scatter. The other team tries to hit any one of the first team with the ball while they try to pile the stones back. If the pile of stones is made, the first team wins; if a team member is hit with the ball before that, the second team wins.”
Sanjay threw the ball towards her but the aim was wrong and it went into the bushes. Aruna found the ball and pulled it out of the bushes with a stick.
“Of course, we didn’t always have a ball with us. So we played with marbles.”
“I played a couple of times with marbles,” said Sanjay. “Thaatha bought a bag of one hundred marbles for me.”
“Oh,” said Aruna.
She never had more than three or four marbles. She remembered the time when she had been thirteen years old. They had been living in a village and her mother had forbidden her going to the river with the boys because she had reached puberty and her body was developing. One day she had ignored her mother and was discovered on the way back by her sister Vani, who had threatened to inform on her. After pleading for several minutes, Aruna had finally bribed her – she offered to give Vani all her marbles. Aruna had been pleased with the deal because she was no longer interested in playing with marbles while Vani still liked them. Those few marbles had been the price of her sister’s silence, but what possible value could they have when they were available by the bagful?
“Come on,” said Sanjay. Dismissing her memories, she threw the ball to him.
“We also played tag,” she said.
“We play tag and hide-and-seek too,” he said, running after the ball as it rolled away.
“I bet you don’t play monkey tag,” she said.
“What’s monkey tag?” he asked.
“It’s just like tag,” she said, “but it’s played in the trees. We used to chase each other in the branches of trees like monkeys.”
“I don’t believe that you actually climbed trees,” he said.
“When I was a girl, I could climb trees as well as any boy. It was great fun,” she said. She laughed at the expression on his face – he was obviously trying to imagine his staid aunty as a young girl, swinging from branch to branch like a langur monkey. She threw the ball up in the air and a hand caught it before it came down to Sanjay’s height.
He turned to see Ramanujam and the old doctor behind him. “Aww, maava. I was about to catch it.”
Ramanujam handed the ball to the boy. Aruna said, “Let’s take a break.”
She walked with the two men to the gate. They bade farewell to the doctor with many thanks and asked their driver to drop the doctor off.
“No problem,” the older man said. “I’ll walk.”
“Please allow us to do this much for you at least,” said Ramanujam and the doctor acquiesced.
They stood by the gate after the car drove off. “Are you going back to work tomorrow?” she asked.
“Yes, I will. I wonder what’s happening with the patients. There was one tricky case before I fell ill.”
“In that case, I’ll go back to work too. Sir was going to get a computer and he must be struggling with it.”
They heard a thud behind them and a scream. They turned back and saw Sanjay on the ground, holding his hand and crying loudly. They ran over to him and everybody in the house came out as well. Ramanujam reached the boy first.
“What happened? Are you all right?” he asked.
Sanjay held out his left hand. “It hurts here,” he said, pointing to his wrist.
Ramanujam felt it gently with his fingers. When he poked one particular spot on his wrist Sanjay cried out, “Aww.”
By this time, Ramanujam’s parents and his sister, Mani, had come over.
“I don’t think it’s a fracture,” said Ramanujam. Aruna exhaled in relief.
“Fracture?” screamed Mani. “What did you do, son?”
“I was climbing the mango tree and I slipped and fell,” he said.
“Climbing a tree? Whatever made you do such a silly thing?” said his mother.
“Aruna-atta said it is fun to climb trees.”
Mani turned to Aruna, her face red and chest heaving above her big belly. “You,” she said. She then turned to Sanjay and smacked him on the back of his head, sending him into a fresh paroxysm of wailing. She twisted his ear and dragged him back into the house. “I don’t want you ever talking to her, you fool.”
Ramanujam’s parents went after their daughter. “Leave him be. Boys will be boys, after all. It’s just a simple fall,” said her father. They disappeared into the house.
Aruna turned to Ramanujam. “I – ” she began.
“Why do you provoke the boy? Stay away from him. It’s obvious that you don’t know how to look after children,” he said and followed his parents into the house.
Not know how to care for children? She had been a teenager when her sister Vani was just seven years old. She had nephews and nieces who adored her. The unfairness of her husband’s comments brought tears to her eyes. She just stood there and it was a long time before she noticed that it had grown dark, the birds had gone to their roosts and thirsty mosquitoes had come out for their nightly feast.
♦
The next day Aruna reached Mr Ali’s house by nine in the morning. She was surprised to see the typewriter still taking pride of place on the table.
“It won’t be staying here for long now that you are here,” said Mr Ali, picking up the phone to ring the computer dealer. “Venkatesh? Mr Ali here. When can you deliver the computer?” They talked for a few moments and Mr Ali hung up. He turned to Aruna. “They are bringing the computer now. I think he is in a hurry for his money. He’s already had to wait a week.”
Gopal, the postman, came over with the morning delivery. “Sir told me that your husband was not well. Is he all right now?” he said, handing over a bundle of letters.
“He had a viral fever, but he’s recovered, thank you,” she said, smiling at him, touched that he was enquiring after her family when he must be worried sick about his widowed daughter and the uncleared debts that he had run up to get her married off.
Gopal nodded to both of them, hefted his heavy bag and left. The ad agent came next and Mr Ali handed over the weekend’s advertisements to him. Aruna started going through the post, sorting the letters into different piles depending on what action needed to be taken. The corner shopkeeper’s son came over with copies of a reminder letter that Mr Ali had drafted. Aruna got into the rhythm of the office day and soon felt as if she had never been away. Mrs Ali came out from inside the house with a pan of freshly rolled poppadums and spread them out to dry in the sun in the front yard. She came back onto the verandah and sat in her usual chair by the door.
“How is Ramanujam? Has he fully recovered?” she said.
“Yes, madam,” said Aruna. “He has even gone to the hospital today.”
“Thank goodness,” said Mrs Ali. “So it wasn’t malaria. I told you not to worry, didn’t I? After all, he is a young, healthy man.”