Fern Road

by Angshu Dasgupta

  When Orko imagines himself as an adult, living and working in a world run by his schoolmates and by the boys at the football field, he wonders how long it will be before he is found out, and if it is worth the effort to continue pretending that he is like everyone else. In his most hopeful moments, he imagines that everyone is as weird as he is, keeping up this charade of sameness, terrified of revealing their true selves.

  ‘Nobody wants war,’ his grandfather had said to him once as they watched the Republic Day parade on television. ‘But there will always be armies, because no one has the courage to be the first to throw away their weapons.’

  Nine

  It is afternoon, and the sky is a hazy shade of grey. The sounds of the street blend into a diffused hum. Everything seems blurry and faraway – the people on the footpath; the shanties with makeshift awnings fashioned out of tarpaulin, blue and yellow; the trams and the buses waiting impatiently at the traffic signal; the woman flagging down an auto-rickshaw.

  Orko struggles to pay attention to the traffic as he crosses the busy street. His shoes are more scuffed than usual, from kicking at pebbles, paper cups and other detritus left behind on the streets by the people who walked them before him. The horn of a scooter buzzes behind him. He steps sideways onto the narrow footpath, startled. The scooter whizzes past, disappearing around a corner. Orko is disoriented – the street seems familiar, but not quite. He has never been here before.

  The footpath curves into an unfamiliar lane. At the corner is a tubewell. Orko lets his fingers graze against its rusty handle as he passes it. There’s a shop across the street, its shutters pulled down halfway to indicate that the minder is having a siesta. A man sleeps by his rickshaw on a makeshift bed fashioned out of sheets of old newspaper. The houses look alive, towering over him, watching his every move through their slatted eyes, casting barely discernible shadows on the pavement. A tabby cat crosses the lane and steps onto the footpath. It doesn’t look like the strays Orko usually encounters when he’s walking these lanes. It reminds him of an illustration in a book of nonsense rhymes that he read as a child, only the illustration was done in black and white, so he has no way of knowing what colour that cat had been.

  The cat looks up at Orko, unafraid. It waits until Orko is just a few paces away, and Orko sees that its eyes are grey. It heads down the footpath, in no particular hurry. Orko decides to follow the cat; it doesn’t seem to be out wandering – there’s an unmistakable sense of purpose in its manner. The cat heads into an alley, where the air is hauntingly still. Orko realises that he is now completely lost.

  The cat crosses the alley and comes to a halt in front of a closed door, flanked by a window on either side. There’s a concrete bench to the left of the door. The cat leaps silently onto the bench, then up to the ledge of the window, before disappearing into the house through a missing windowpane.

  Under normal circumstances, Orko wouldn’t dream of looking in the window of someone’s home, but these aren’t normal circumstances. The windowpanes are dusty, some of them papered over. On the sill is a blue ceramic pot with a cactus in it. There’s a table in the far corner, loose sheets of paper scattered on its surface. The walls look like they haven’t been painted in a century. There doesn’t seem to be a way out of the room; the cat seems to have vanished into thin air.

  Outside, everything is disconcertingly unfamiliar. While he was following the cat, the street had seemed narrower, the light softer. Now the house on the other side of the street looks further away than it did a few moments ago. It casts a sharp shadow on the street, as if it was high summer and an early-afternoon sun was behind the house. The sky, though, is grey, like it has been all afternoon. Orko blinks, and the shadows are gone.

  He thrusts his hands into his pockets and empties their contents. There’s a handkerchief, a few coins, a ten-rupee note and a stick of gum. Orko counts the money, but it’s nowhere near enough. He couldn’t possibly leave home, forever, with just thirteen rupees on him. The contents of his schoolbag would probably fetch him a tidy sum at the second-hand shops along the boulevard, but the bag is still at his desk. His tiffin box, its contents untouched, is lying by the guava tree in the schoolyard. He thinks about the events that led him to leave school without his belongings, bringing him to the threshold of this mysterious house. He sits down on the bench, exhausted. He feels incapable of forming the intent to get back on his feet.

  It all began to go wrong yesterday, when Debashish walked into their class. He was rather handsome, Orko thought, as Debashish proceeded to clean the blackboard, slowly, methodically, wiping down a quarter of the board with the chalk duster, pausing to tap the dust onto the shelf beneath, then turning his attention to the next quarter. Orko glanced at Paromita out of the corner of his eye, and when their glances met Orko thought she smirked at him.

  From there it was all downhill. Every time Debashish looked in his direction during the class, Orko’s muscles tensed, and he involuntarily looked towards the door. By the end of the class his ears were ringing and his head hurt.

  After Debashish left their classroom, Orko tried to strike up a conversation with Brishti, but the words seemed contrived, and soon they were quiet again. He sat at his desk, staring at an open textbook, pretending to study. Brishti spent the lunch break reading The Silmarillion. Orko had read the book many times, but he didn’t make any attempt to start a conversation about it.

  Today, during the assembly, Orko felt as if everyone was staring at him, quietly mocking him, smirking at him behind his back. He forgot the words of the school anthem, and as the whole school joined in the cacophonous chorus, Orko looked straight ahead, his gaze burning a hole in the back of Farah’s head. He glanced about furtively, and it seemed that many of his schoolmates were, in fact, watching him. He spoke to no one all morning, and he avoided making eye contact with anybody.

  He seriously considered feigning illness and asking to be excused, but he didn’t, because he felt sure they wouldn’t let him go home by himself if he said he was ill. They would call his father at the university, and Nandan would have to come to the school to take him home. What was the matter with him, his father would ask. When did he start feeling unwell? Was it something he ate? Should they be seeing a doctor? Orko would have to spin yet another web of lies, and he didn’t feel up to it.

  During the break, he couldn’t bear to sit in the classroom. He took his tiffin box out of his bag, and when he was halfway down the stairs he realised that he had forgotten his napkin. He instinctively began to turn back, but couldn’t bring himself to go and fetch it. He continued down the stairs, past the staffroom, through the hall and out into the schoolyard. He spotted some of his former classmates bouncing a football. They had their backs to him. He quickly turned around and made his way to the back of the building, where the swings were.

  Kaushik and Pratik were on the swings, but they weren’t swinging. They had something in their hands, something they hid away the moment they saw him approach. From the acrid smell in the air he guessed that it was a cigarette they had just put out. He felt embarrassed for having walked in on their secret moment. As he turned to leave, Kaushik called out to him. Orko, without thinking, broke into a run.

  ‘Hey!’ Kaushik yelled. ‘Come back here!’

  ‘We aren’t going to eat you up,’ Pratik taunted.

  Orko stopped in his tracks. He walked back towards the swings, slowly, with an air of calm confidence. He didn’t want the boys to know how terrified he actually felt. He can’t imagine that he will ever forget what happened next. He will remember the exact spot where it happened, the position of the shadow cast by the guava tree, the patch between his hairline and his collar where the sun warmed his skin.

  ‘Why did you come here, homo boy?’

  Kaushik’s slur didn’t really register at first. More than anything else, Orko felt indignant. He turned to leave but they called after him, asking him to come back. He ought to have run back to the safety of his classroom, pretendin
g that he hadn’t heard them.

  ‘You like sucking dick, eh!’ Kaushik spat when Orko wouldn’t respond.

  Orko was flabbergasted. For a moment he didn’t understand why this was happening. Just as he thought of protesting, images of the room on the terrace flashed before his eyes. He was naked, with Bishu. They could see him in his nakedness, doing exactly the thing that they were accusing him of.

  The rest of it unfurled in a blur of grey sky, a barrage of kicks and punches, flesh on grey flesh, black boots on grey trousers. He was face-down in the dirt. There were whoops. There was fading laughter.

  Orko didn’t return to his classroom after lunch. He sat in the guava tree, thinking about the time he had spent on its boughs with Urmi. He missed those times, and he missed her – the careless laughter, the bickering about the boy detective, the dolls’ houses, the make-believe. It was all gone, forever. All that remained was self-loathing, shame and crushing loneliness.

  Deep in the bowels of the mysterious house, a cuckoo announces that it is now four o’clock. Somehow, that doesn’t seem right. Orko has no watch, so he can’t be sure what time it really is. In all this time, he hasn’t seen a soul. He feels as though he has stumbled through a secret passageway into a world of dark magic, where he is completely alone. For a moment, he considers ringing the doorbell. He could always say that he was lost, and ask for directions. He looks through the window but there’s nobody in the room. The cat is fast asleep on the desk in the far corner. It looks smaller than it did on the street.

  Orko is a little unnerved now. He walks away as fast as he can. Without thinking, he turns right at the end of the alley. He follows the lane for a few minutes, but it ends in a cul-de-sac. He retraces his steps, blundering mindlessly through the lanes until, incredibly, he finds himself at Golpark.

  The bus pulls up just as he is about to reach the stop. He runs the last few metres. Getting on is a struggle. There are no seats available; there’s barely room to stand. Riding with him in the rickety old minibus are clerks, bank managers, salesmen, all on their way home from their jobs at government offices, banks and shops. A mother is with her son, probably heading home from a tutorial. Orko can’t imagine himself growing up to be like any of them.

  Many years ago he had asked his grandmother, indignantly, why everyone had to go to school, then to college, only to get a job, get married and have children. She answered him with a quote from Shakespeare – it was all an act, she said, and his part had been written long before his parents had even met one another. All he had to do was follow the script. Orko still nurses a deep loathing for Shakespeare; when they read him at school, he tries to concentrate on the cadence of the words rather than their meaning.

  Orko hates fish. He hates picking out the bones with his fingers, and he hates it even more when a tiny bone makes its way into his mouth. The smell nauseates him. When his father cooks fish the whole house stinks, and the stench bleeds into his clothes, his skin, his hair. It hangs about him as he peels away the skin from the slice on his plate. He breaks off a morsel with his fingers, mashing down the flesh, gingerly picking out the bones and laying them by the side of his plate before gathering up the shreds of flesh and bringing them to his mouth. His father takes his time. Charm, chew, masticate, swallow. Lick fingertips and repeat. Orko protests strenuously when he is offered a second helping. He imagines lying in bed after dinner, the smell leaching into the sheets and seeping into the mattress as he struggles to escape from its clutches.

  There was a time, not so long ago, when Orko loved fish. He was driven to distraction when his father fried fish on a school night, the aroma wafting through their tiny flat. When fish was being cooked, Orko’s homework was sketchy, full of little mistakes that his teacher would later mark in red ink scrawled over his own handwriting. They ate the curry with little rice – the whole point of the meal was the fish. When they finished, there were mounds of fish bones by the sides of their plates. They sat there long after they had finished eating, the flavour of the fish seeping into them through their tongues, their nostrils, the tips of their fingers. Back when Orko loved fish, he told his father everything – the mischief that he got up to with his friends; the colour of his history teacher’s saree; the contents of Urmi’s tiffin box, and the fact that Urmi herself got to eat very little of it. Nandan interjected at times, with a comment or a question.

  Now they sit silently at the table with the three chairs around it. Just as Orko is about to excuse himself, his father clears his throat as if he’s going to say something. The curry is drying on Orko’s fingers, and he knows that the smell is going to linger through the night, even if he rinses his mouth with toothpaste and washes his hands with detergent.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ Nandan asks tentatively.

  The words trigger a series of sensations in Orko’s body. At first it’s just between his eyes, at the top of the bridge of his nose. At this point, he still can taste the fish curry on his palate. Then it grows to fill the region between his ears, until they’re burning. It flows down his gullet and fills his windpipe. He finds it difficult to breathe. It reaches his fingertips, and he feels them shake. It fills his stomach until he feels like he might vomit, right here, at the dining table. It travels to his loins, and down his femurs. He wants to go to the bathroom but his muscles won’t obey. He feels like throwing his plate against the wall but he can’t move a muscle. He can’t do anything at all.

  He doesn’t want to cry, but the twitch in his stomach grows into sobs, and soon, in spite of himself, he is weeping, retching, banging his head on the table. He hears his father’s chair fall over. He can’t stand being touched, but he doesn’t want to hurt his father’s feelings.

  ‘Tell me what’s wrong. You can tell me anything. Anything at all.’

  This is when Orko realises that he is angry. He wishes his father had said these words months ago, when he came home after afternoons with Bishu and ate his dinner in silence. Now they’re just words. Impotent. Hollow. Sentences devoid of import.

  He walks past his father to the sink in the kitchen. He remembers the plates, with the little hillocks of fish bones by their sides. His father is still standing by the dining table, dumbstruck. Orko gathers the plates and carries them off to the kitchen. His fingers tremble as he brushes the fish bones into the garbage can. He rinses the plates and stacks them under the sink. He reaches for the bar of soap on the shelf by the sink, but it has reduced to a disgusting puddle of green goo that he doesn’t want to touch.

  In the living room he finds Nandan in his armchair, lost in thought. Orko hurries past, eyes downcast.

  ‘You can talk to me, you know,’ says his father. ‘I’m not a stranger, after all. I’ve also been through adolescence. I have, perhaps, felt many of the things you’re feeling now. Maybe it’ll help to just talk.’

  ‘You’re the one who said that I should never speak when I’m angry,’ Orko replies from the threshold of his bedroom. ‘Besides, it’s late.’

  He shuts the door behind him. Inside, it’s dark. The grille on his window, with its unimaginative pattern of rectangles, is reborn in the fluorescent light from the neighbouring block of flats. He switches on the fan and lies down, staring as the blades slice through the shadows, ripping them to shreds.

  There’s a knock on his door.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ he says.

  His father comes in anyway.

  ‘Go away, please!’ Orko begs.

  Nandan does not go away. He sits, silently, by Orko’s side. Orko turns over to lie on his stomach, burying his face in his pillow. His body begins to tremble. He bites his pillow, willing himself to be still.

  ‘It isn’t easy,’ his father says. ‘It is perfectly okay to feel the way you’re feeling.’

  ‘You don’t know how I’m feeling,’ Orko retorts. ‘You couldn’t possibly…’

  Nandan runs his fingers through Orko’s hair. ‘When I was your age, I would become angry about a lot of things. Angry about all the
rules I had to follow. Angry that I had to study engineering. Angry that I couldn’t go to the movies like my friends did. Angry at the stupidity of the people around me. Angry, just because.’

  This is impossible for Orko to imagine. He suspects that his father is just saying all of this to make him feel better.

  ‘It’s important, after the anger dies down, to figure out exactly what it was that made you angry,’ Nandan continues.

  ‘You don’t actually understand how I feel,’ says Orko. ‘You just want to lecture me.’

  Nandan lets out a chuckle. ‘You remind me of your mother. She would become angry for no apparent reason. She would throw things, shout at me, call me names. When she calmed down she would be remorseful, but she wouldn’t be able to say why she had been angry.’

  ‘Please go away,’ says Orko. This time he’s not pleading. The tone of his own voice frightens him.

  Nandan sighs, and takes Orko’s hand in his. ‘Know that I am here for you. You can tell me anything at all. When you feel better, let’s try to understand what it is that is bothering you.’

  He sets a book down by Orko’s pillow.

  ‘You haven’t been reading much these past few weeks. Read this book. I read it when I was your age, and I now realise that it was one of the most instructive books I read as a boy.’