by Anosh Irani
“But what’s the use now?”
“I will stop thinking about them. Some nights I wonder if they lost me by accident and are still searching for me.”
“Chamdi, it’s harmful to keep dreaming like this.”
“Then tell me the truth.”
There is a long silence. Chamdi expects that Mrs. Sadiq will break the silence by telling him for the hundredth time that she knows nothing about his mother and father.
“Mrs. Sadiq, you kept silent for three months about the letter, and you did not tell us we were going to lose our home, and now see the end result.”
“Chamdi …”
“I know why you’re sending us to Pune.”
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t want to look after us anymore.”
Chamdi looks directly at Mrs. Sadiq when he says this. There is disbelief on her face. Chamdi has never spoken to her in this manner before.
“Chamdi … there’s nothing I can do. It’s not up to me. The trustees are in charge. I’ve told you the truth. I promise.”
“Then tell me the truth about my parents also.”
“You might not like what you hear.”
“Tell me.”
“Think hard about what you ask.”
Chamdi wants to tell Mrs. Sadiq that he has spent his whole life thinking about this. On some nights he stands by the open window of the orphanage and begs his parents to come back for him, but he does it only on nights when there is a strong wind so that the wind can carry his words to them. Sometimes he stares at himself in the mirror and wonders what part of his face his parents did not like. He wants to tell Mrs. Sadiq why he stands in the courtyard all day. It is because he had a dream once that he was standing in the courtyard and a man and woman walked towards him, and he suddenly started running to them because his heart recognized who they were, and he was in their arms within seconds, and the whole courtyard was happy for him, especially the bougainvilleas …
“Your father left you here, Chamdi,” Mrs. Sadiq says sharply. “He’s never coming back. I thought it was better for you not to know.”
Chamdi is shocked at the manner in which Mrs. Sadiq’s words jump out. She takes a few steps to the window and looks out into the courtyard. She takes her glasses off and clasps her hands behind her back. She continues slowly.
“I saw your father,” she says. “I saw your father the day he left you. It was in the afternoon and I had just finished eating. We had a dog called Rani, who is gone now. Rani was a very gentle dog. But Rani started barking, and she would bark only if someone was running. For some reason Rani never liked people running. She never ran herself. Even though dogs love to run and chase things, my Rani never ran. She was like a queen, always walking.”
“What did you see?” asks Chamdi.
“I walked to the window and saw a man running. He was running away from the orphanage.”
“What did he look like?”
“He was running away from the orphanage and I had a sick feeling in my heart. The same sick feeling I get every time someone leaves a child here. It’s a feeling that never goes away.”
“What did the man look like, Mrs. Sadiq?”
“I looked at the man and then back at Rani, who was barking loudly. She was near the well and next to her was a white bundle. That white bundle was you.”
“What did the man look like?” This is what I want to know, thinks Chamdi. Tell me what he looks like.
“He looked scared. I never saw his face. I could only see his back, but even from his back I could tell that he was scared.”
“Was that my father?”
“Yes.”
“But how do you know?”
“I could tell by the way he ran.”
“What do you mean, Mrs. Sadiq?”
Mrs. Sadiq sighs. “The way he ran, Chamdi. It could mean anything. It could mean that he loved you very much but was forced to leave you alone and was running from you because it would be impossible for him to simply walk. Or it could mean that he ran because he was afraid of being caught. You must decide what it means.”
“Did you see his face?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“No.”
“You mean you saw his face?”
“The thing is, Chamdi … I saw his back so clearly that over the years his face slowly started forming, and in my mind he had the same face that every man in this world has. His face was the same face as that of my husband, it was the same face as that of the man who sells vegetables around the corner, it was the same face … and the face does not matter at all.”
“Mrs. Sadiq, I don’t understand what you are saying.”
“I’m saying that I did not see his face. I’m sorry.”
Why did she not see his face? Chamdi asks himself. That was the most important part.
“But there’s something else,” Mrs. Sadiq says. “I still have the white cloth that you came in. Do you want it?”
“The white cloth?”
“You should have it. See it once and for all. I’ll be right back.”
As Chamdi waits, he caresses the nails in Jesus’ feet. He looks at Jesus’ face for a sign of life, but there is nothing.
Mrs. Sadiq stands in front of Chamdi again. She holds in her hand a white cloth. There is nothing special about it at all, thinks Chamdi. It is just a white cloth crumpled in an old woman’s hand.
“This is what you came in,” she says.
“Why did you keep it?”
“Because of the blood.”
She thrusts the cloth into his hand, avoiding looking into his eyes.
Chamdi takes the cloth from her hands and sees three large drops of blood. It looks as though the blood has been preserved on the cloth especially for him.
“What’s this blood?” he asks, surprised.
“I don’t know, but I have thought about it a hundred times.”
“Is this my blood?”
“No, you were clean.”
“Is this my father’s blood?”
“If that man was your father. That’s why I kept it.”
Chamdi listens to her breathe. It is as if he can suddenly hear every sound in the room, even the softest.
“Chamdi, how old are you now?” asks Mrs. Sadiq gently.
“Ten.”
“You are no longer ten.”
“What?”
“You are no longer ten. Age does not matter anymore. You are a man now, and it is my fault that I have made you the man you are. Forgive me.”
Mrs. Sadiq leaves the room. Chamdi stands frozen, like a dumb animal.
He has thoughts, so many of them, that they do not resemble thoughts at all. Some are just words like blood and running, and he imagines himself as a white bundle near the well, a bundle that made a grown man run in fear.
THREE.
It is the middle of the night and all the children are sleeping. Chamdi is hungry and he regrets that he refused to eat dinner. But he did not feel like eating earlier.
He now knows he has to leave the orphanage before it leaves him. He rises from his bed and looks around. In the dimness of the small light bulb that hangs in a corner of the sleeping room, he tiptoes to the foyer, stepping on the children’s rubber chappals, until he reaches the main door of the orphanage. He carefully slides the latch open so that no one else wakes up. The latch creaks a little, but he tells himself that on a night such as this a creak makes no difference at all.
He opens the door, steps into the night, and walks straight towards the row of bougainvilleas. In the dark, he cannot see colours. But he uses his mind to light the petals up, and after a moment he begins to see shades of pink and red. He likes this, how the colours stand apart from the darkness.
Then a horrible thought strikes. What if they tear apart the bougainvilleas when they break down the orphanage? He has loved them his whole life. No, he thinks, somehow they will survive. Buildings might come, but branches will break throu
gh the cement and continue to grow upwards, such is the power of bougainvillea.
Now he understands why he is watching the bougainvilleas in the darkness. He is saying goodbye. If he had to leave during the day, it would be too much for him. He thanks them for the colours they have given him, then rushes towards them and puts his mouth to the red papery petals, not caring if thorns prick him. They love me too, he thinks, as they rustle against his skin. They do not mind being woken from their sleep. He tells them he has one favour to ask. He will pluck a few petals to take with him, and he hopes that it will not hurt them too much. He stuffs his pockets.
There is one last thing he must do too.
Chamdi goes back into the orphanage. He does not need to pack, for he owns nothing at all. He has been given a white cloth with three drops of blood on it, and whether it bodes well or not, he will carry that cloth and nothing else. He ties it around his neck like a scarf. Then he takes a few red petals in his fist and walks down the short corridor into Mrs. Sadiq’s office. She is asleep on the ground and he can hear her breathe lightly. He will not wake her up because there is nothing to be said. “Thank you” would be a stupid thing to say. In her heart, she must know that Chamdi is grateful for everything she has done.
He places a few petals on Mrs. Sadiq’s desk and then changes his mind—he places them by her feet. Chamdi stands above her and thanks her with his mind and heart. He has never hugged her in his life and wishes he could do it now, but he does not want to wake her.
He runs into the corridor, out the main door and into the courtyard.
He does not stop to look back. He is not sure if he is crying and he does not care. He runs faster and faster. Soon he is only a few feet away from the walls of the orphanage, and he knows that he is entering another world.
If my father ran from me, then I will run after him. This is the thought in Chamdi’s head as he runs. He is running because he knows that his father has had a head start. His father is miles and years ahead of him.
But there is another reason Chamdi is running. He is scared that if he walks, if he does not shoot through the narrow streets right now, Mrs. Sadiq might wake up and call him a traitor for deserting her and the children. So even though bits of glass from the street stick in his feet, he does not care. He runs faster and faster in order to catch the truck ahead of him.
The truck’s heavy iron chain bangs against its dark green back. Chamdi has never chased a truck before, but he has seen other children do it. A white lotus is painted on the back of the truck underneath the words INDIA IS GREAT. He knows that if he jumps and falls, the concrete road will scrape his skin and break his bones, and it will not be the best way to start his new life, so he hangs on to the chain with all his might and uses the road to push off.
He has jumped into a garbage truck, and is surrounded by rotting food. As the truck takes a corner, a rat is jolted out of its meal, and it runs over Chamdi’s chest. He tries to get up but then thinks that if the driver sees him, he might get angry and stop the truck. So Chamdi stays in the pile of garbage. The rat has gone back to its piece of mouldy bread. There is a crack in the side of the truck, more like a large hole, and Chamdi crawls towards it. The truck has gathered speed now, and the breeze blows bits of garbage out onto the street.
The city passes by, but Chamdi cannot see it in its entirety. He sees it in pieces, through the hole. He sees small shops, the steel shutters down, beggars sleeping under them. Stray dogs walk towards a tree and some of the dogs limp, but the others seem happy. A fair distance later, the road is dug up. A small fire burns in a brown drum as workers smoke beedis nearby, and a line of slum dwellers walk with buckets in their hands. So far, there is nothing out of the ordinary. There is no sign of the violence that Mrs. Sadiq spoke of and Chamdi is thankful for that.
As the truck takes another corner, Chamdi loses his balance once again and the garbage slides towards him. He lands on his back and is forced to stare at the sky. The sky is the same everywhere, he reassures himself. No matter how strange the city might look, or become, he can always look up at the sky and see something familiar. It is the same open space everywhere and it belongs to him as much as it does to anyone else in this world.
He feels he is quite a distance from the orphanage now. He wants to get off the truck, mainly to avoid the smell, but it would be foolish to attempt a landing at this speed. If it were daytime, the truck would be crawling through traffic. He is surprised at how empty the streets are at night. The truck goes over a bridge, and Chamdi can see tall chimneys around him, so tall that they must be friends with the clouds. Apartment buildings are so close to the bridge that he can see right into people’s rooms—an old man is shaving himself in front of a mirror. Why is he doing that in the middle of the night? As the truck descends the bridge, the roads become narrower, and to his right, two policemen sit on stools outside a police chowki. One policeman has a beedi in his mouth while the other seems to be dozing.
As the truck smokes its way through the streets, the policemen become smaller and smaller, until they are out of sight. A group of four or five black motorcycles overtakes the truck. Young men ride the motorcycles and their shirts balloon as they speed past the truck and swerve dangerously close to each other.
Then Chamdi hears music. It blares from loudspeakers, and he likes how even though it is night, a song is playing. The truck slows down. Maybe the driver wants to listen to the music. Chamdi takes his chance. He hoists himself over the side of the truck and lands on the street. But he is not used to jumping off a running truck, no matter how slow, and he loses his balance and falls backwards. He stays on the ground for a few seconds. Nothing is broken, he tells himself. Nothing is broken.
The building in front of him is lit up. It is an old building, only three floors, but all of them have red and green lights, tiny bulbs that flicker on and off, travel in a line and even change directions. Loudspeakers on the balcony spill the best Hindi music he has ever heard. He feels he has chosen the right place. Where there is music, there is happiness.
He sees a man lying on a cot with one arm covering his eyes. The cot makes Chamdi ask himself where he will sleep tonight. Perhaps some kind person will take him in and offer him a meal. He wipes the sweat off his face with his hand. The smell of the garbage has stayed with him.
The music stops. The lights on the building remain, although they no longer change direction. They look like green and red stars stuck on the building. He wishes the orphanage could have had lights like these. At least there would have been something to look at.
Chamdi is worried about getting food. He has not eaten all day. He missed dinner because he was in the prayer room and not hungry at all. He wonders what time it is, but then tells himself that it makes no difference. Ahead of him, a few people sit in a circle, on chairs and stools, and all of them are smoking. There are loud shouts once in a while, and the old man amongst them keeps coughing. Chamdi prefers not to go near them because he does not like the way they raise their heads each time they blow cigarette smoke, as if they have no respect for the sky at all.
An apartment window opens and a blue plastic bag slowly floats to the ground. It lands on an auto rickshaw. Chamdi notices that the rickshaw has no tires. It seems old and abandoned. Its rusted metal body is rooted into the ground so firmly that it looks as though the rickshaw has grown from the road itself.
A neat pile of cement tiles lay beside the auto rickshaw. The pile is quite high, and Chamdi sees two bodies asleep on the pile. They look like boys his age. It surprises him how comfortable they seem to be even though they are sleeping on a bed of stone.
The cough of a car engine makes Chamdi turn. On the main road, a taxi has stalled. The driver is pushing the car with one hand, and has the other hand through the window on the steering wheel. The passenger, a man, is straining to push the taxi from behind, while a woman sits in the back seat. Part of her green sari is trapped in the door.
Two of the men who were smoking notice the
struggling taxi. They throw their cigarettes to the ground and walk towards the road. When they reach the taxi, the driver gets into the car and the two men push hard along with the passenger.
Chamdi tells himself that he would surely help too if he were strong enough, if he had eaten. He limps a little as he walks, and lifts the sole of his foot to see that it is bleeding. He remembers that as he ran from the orphanage, he stepped on bits of glass. He hops towards a patch of light that spills from one of the rooms in the building. He sits on the ground in that light and examines his sole. There are a few cuts, and he can see the glass. He carefully removes the first shard, then counts the remaining ones—there are four more to go, and he has all the time in the world, but he is tired and hungry. He tries not to think of food. The glass distracts him from his hunger, but he knows that the moment he finishes extracting every piece, the hunger will speak to him again.
He tells himself that he must be strong. He is ten years old, and he needs to find his father. It is a difficult task, so he will not let something as trivial as hunger discourage him.
The building looks different in the morning, without the blinking green and red lights. Chamdi can see the wires that join the tiny bulbs together and loop from one apartment to another. The gouges in the building are visible, as if it has been repeatedly pierced. A few wild plants have grown over the sewage pipes.
Chamdi has hardly slept all night. The hunger has not gone. To distract himself, he walks to a white wall that displays a movie poster—it shows a photograph of a police officer who wears black sunglasses and holds a gun by his face. The gun shines like it is the hero of the movie. There is also a sticker of a tiger on the wall.
He takes his eyes off the tiger and notices a tap attached to the wall. The tap makes a squeaky sound as he opens it, and the water that comes out of it is cool. He looks around to see if anyone is watching, but it is still early and most of the shops are not open yet. The street is quiet. He cups the water in his hand and drinks from his palm, but this process is too slow, so he bends lower, puts his mouth under the tap itself and swallows as much water as his body can hold. He stops only because he has drunk too much too fast and for a moment he pauses, watching a bullock cart on the main road as it carries a massive block of ice covered by sawdust. Then he drinks once again, and after he has had his fill, he puts his head under the tap and wets his hair, scrubs his face, and finally washes his feet by rubbing the sole of one foot over the instep of the other so that any glass pieces that are left will be washed away.