Fern Road

by Angshu Dasgupta

  After his father leaves the room, Orko holds up the book so the light from the window falls on its jacket. It’s Maugham. His anger is now unbearable, and it isn’t because his father doesn’t know that he has already read this book. It is because Orko didn’t find it instructive at all.

  Ten

  Orko is late for school. The last time he was late, it was because there had been an accident at the foot of the Dhakuria bridge, and the traffic had come to a standstill. He had walked the rest of the way to school, getting there just as assembly was coming to an end. He had to go to the administrator’s office and explain why he was late.

  Today he’s late because he waited outside the school gates, out of sight of the guard, until he heard the chorus of the school anthem. The guard waves him through. Orko runs past the playground and catches up with his classmates at the foot of the stairs that lead up to the classrooms. Brishti greets him; Orko merely nods an acknowledgement. Nilanjana asks him why he wasn’t at assembly, and he tells her that he overslept. When they reach their floor, Orko inserts himself between Brishti and Nilanjana. He is hyper-alert as they walk past Kaushik’s classroom, although he doesn’t really know what he would do if Kaushik and Pratik were to accost him again.

  The hours are unendingly long, and his teachers seem to be speaking a language that he’s only vaguely familiar with. He understands the individual sentences, but not how they go together. He doesn’t speak with anyone. Brishti glances towards him more than a few times, but he avoids making eye contact. He studies Paromita out of the corner of his eye, but he can’t tell if she knows what happened by the guava tree. He wonders if she would be upset with Kaushik if she found out.

  When the lunch bell rings, he remembers that he left his tiffin box in the schoolyard, by the guava tree. It would probably be at the lost property office downstairs, but to get there he would have to go past Kaushik’s classroom. He sits quietly at his desk as his classmates disperse for their walks around the playground. He really needs to go to the bathroom, and now seems like a good time to go. Kaushik is probably downstairs by the swings, but Orko can’t be sure that he hasn’t told the other boys. He doesn’t want to run into somebody else who’s going to call him names. Just as he’s on the verge of going anyway, Brishti thrusts her open tiffin box to his side of their desk.

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ he says.

  ‘Come over to my place after school, then? We’ll have lunch together?’

  ‘I have to go home,’ Orko replies, although that isn’t strictly true.

  ‘Please? I hate having lunch by myself.’

  Orko doesn’t know what to think. They’ve shared a desk for months now, and this is the first time she has asked him to lunch.

  ‘Okay,’ he says, before rushing off to the toilet. His lower abdomen hurts, and he’s afraid he is going to wet his pants if he waits any longer.

  ‘Here we are,’ Brishti says as they come to a two-storey house in a cul-de-sac about half a kilometre from their school. It is a large house, lime-green, with purple bougainvillea running along the boundary wall. The windows and the front gate are also green, although a shade darker. Brishti unlatches the gate and walks up the steps to the front balcony. She presses a white button by the door. The doorbell sounds like the horn of a scooter, far away. They wait at the doorstep in an awkward silence.

  The woman who answers the door is dressed in a red saree that has seen neither starch nor iron. Her hair is in a neat, shiny bun.

  ‘Komola-mashi, this is Orko. He’s going to have lunch with me today,’ Brishti tells the woman as she shuts and latches the door behind them. This is the first time Orko has heard Brishti speak Bangla; she speaks it as if it were a foreign language.

  Komola-mashi smiles at Orko. ‘Would you like something to drink before lunch?’ she asks them. ‘Lemonade? A glass of cold water?’

  ‘I’d like some water, please,’ Orko says after some hesitation. His throat is parched.

  The room is sparsely furnished. There is a bookshelf along the wall to their right. On the bookshelf is a telephone. It’s a black rotary instrument, like the one in his grandfather’s house. He remembers trying to lift it as a child, and finding it too heavy. ‘Bakelite,’ his grandfather had said when Orko asked him what it was made of. Orko found the name very odd, because the phone was not light at all.

  There’s a set of rattan chairs around a low, round table, with the newspaper and a few periodicals arranged neatly on its glass surface. The newspaper is weighed down by a brass ashtray in the shape of a goblin’s shoe. At the centre of the table is a glass cup, filled halfway with marbles – blue, green, cat’s eye.

  ‘Sit down, sit down,’ says Brishti. She turns on the ceiling fan. It is a vintage model, with four blades around an ornate hub. It stirs to life with surprising alacrity, gathering speed with the grace of a dervish.

  Komola-mashi returns with two glasses of water on a wooden tray. ‘Don’t you want to shower before lunch?’ she asks Brishti.

  Brishti glances at Orko. ‘A quick one today,’ she says. ‘We’re both very hungry.’

  Orko wonders how Brishti knows he’s hungry. He wishes he could shower too, but he hasn’t brought a change of clothes with him.

  ‘Do you want to freshen up?’ Brishti asks him.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he says. ‘Maybe I’ll just wash my face and hands.’

  ‘Come with me,’ Brishti says, and Orko sets his empty glass down on the coffee table.

  They pass through a doorway and into a large room. There’s a six-seat dining table to their left. They go past it, into a narrow passageway. At the end is an iron grille of indeterminate colour, with a patch of grass beyond it. To their left is a staircase, and to their right a large door, its varnished surface polished to a shine.

  ‘Here,’ says Brishti, pushing the door open. ‘I think the towel’s fresh. I’ll be back in a jiffy.’ Orko waits until she is halfway up the stairs before he enters the bathroom and shuts the door behind him.

  The bathroom is about half the size of his bedroom, with a fan hanging from the ceiling. Orko has never been in a bathroom with a ceiling fan. The commode, the cistern and the washbasin are brilliant white porcelain. The washbasin has separate taps for hot and cold water.

  Orko undoes his trousers and lets them drop to his ankles. He sits on the commode, and continues to sit there long after he has relieved himself. If he had a bathroom like this, he would put in a bookshelf and a stereo, and he would spend hours in there reading, the ceiling fan whirring overhead. He has spent many hours of his life in bathrooms. His grandmother once took him to a homeopathic doctor because he went so often, spending close to an hour each time. He took the newspaper with him, or a magazine, or, if he was lucky enough to find one lying around, a book of short stories. He never took novels to the bathroom. Orko didn’t tell the doctor that he spent so much time in the bathroom because he liked to be alone, because surely that couldn’t be a disease. Besides, he really liked homeopathic medicines – those tiny white globules, sickly sweet, moistened with alcohol. Dr Sinha concluded that Orko had an irritable bowel and wrote out a prescription in his indecipherable hand.

  A lizard clicks, four times, and it sounds like it is right behind Orko. He whirls around, but there’s no lizard to be found. He stands reluctantly and pulls his trousers up from around his ankles. He looks at his reflection in the large mirror over the washbasin. His shirt is surprisingly clean, with just a faint hint of perspiration around the armpits. There’s a soap dispenser by the tap. Orko squeezes out a puddle into the cup of his right hand. He works up a lather and scrubs his face. He lathers his hands and his arms, right up to the elbows. He washes his face and his arms until they no longer feel soapy. He wipes himself dry with the towel that hangs by the washbasin. The towel smells of an unfamiliar detergent.

  When he emerges from the bathroom, Brishti is at the foot of the stairs. She is dressed in light cotton trousers with a floral print, and a faded shirt that’s just a shade
lighter than peach. Orko wishes he had clothes like Brishti’s. A familiar envy comes over him; he tries to shake it off, and is embarrassed when he realises that he is actually shaking his head from side to side.

  ‘What is it?’ Brishti asks.

  ‘Nothing,’ says Orko.

  ‘I’m starving,’ she says. ‘Shall we eat?’

  ‘Well, I’m a little hungry myself,’ Orko says. He can feel his stomach rumble.

  The table has already been laid, with two places set side by side. Brishti switches on the ceiling fan. Orko looks up just as it swishes to life. This one is a utilitarian model: white, three blades.

  Brishti pulls out the chair that’s closest to the head of the table. Orko sits to her right. Opposite them is a sideboard, polished to a shine. It has a stack of drawers to the left and a glass door to the right. Behind the glass door are china plates, a large teapot with matching cups and saucers, and an assortment of glasses. Some of the glasses are ordinary. Some look like cups sitting on long stalks. Orko has seen glasses like them in old black-and-white movies.

  Komola-mashi serves Orko first, heaping on ladles of rice until he holds out his hand over the plate.

  ‘What’s that?’ she says with a smile. ‘You’re a growing boy. It won’t do to eat so little!’ She moves to Brishti’s plate, and when she’s done, Orko notices that the heap of rice is smaller than the one on his own.

  ‘It’s nothing special,’ says Brishti. ‘Just everyday stuff.’

  They eat quickly, silently, and before long their plates are empty, the curry drying on their fingers. Orko waits for Brishti to finish washing her hands before rising from his seat. He wonders if he should rinse his plate, like he does at home. He decides against it; when he had lunch with Urmi, her mother forbade him to rinse his plate.

  The staircase is wide, the steps yellow mosaic. The banister is black, its concrete surface cold to the touch. At the top of the stairs is a hall, bathed in sunlight streaming through two sets of skylights in the ceiling. They pass beneath the skylights and through a door at the far end of the hall, into a room that’s a little larger than Orko’s. The walls look like they’ve been painted recently. They’re peach, a few shades darker than Brishti’s shirt. To the left is a bunk bed that reminds Orko of an illustration from a book he read as a child. Along the wall adjoining the bed is an armoire and a chest of drawers, the varnish on them so fresh he can smell it. Beside the chest is a bookshelf, but most of the shelf space is taken up by records. There’s a stereo on a shelf halfway from the top. Opposite the bed is a set of French windows, opening onto a balcony. In the corner by the window is an upright piano, with a stool that looks much older than the piano.

  ‘You play the piano?’ Orko asks, surprised. They’ve had many conversations about music, and Brishti hasn’t mentioned that she plays an instrument.

  ‘Sort of,’ she says. ‘My mother has a piano. I missed it after we moved here. I’ve only had this one for a few weeks.’

  There isn’t a desk in the room, and there aren’t any chairs. Orko turns his attention to the bunk bed. The lower berth is unremarkable. A pillow; a neatly folded duvet by the footboard; a paperback book, face-down, by the pillow. A ladder with five rungs is affixed to the lip of the upper berth. Upstairs is a table, about a foot and a half in height. On the table is a pencil stand, a history textbook and a couple of notebooks. There are three cushions along the wall, and a duvet, moss green, in a heap by the headboard.

  ‘Sit,’ says Brishti, and Orko is reminded of a song in which a girl asks the singer to sit, but there’s no chair in her room. There’s a rug in the song, but there isn’t one here. Orko sits gingerly on the edge of the bed. Brishti chuckles. ‘It’s not a toy bed, you know,’ she says, handing him a cushion. ‘Sit comfortably. It won’t break.’

  Orko props the cushion up against the wall. He lifts his feet onto the surface of the bed. His heels look filthy and cracked. He quickly puts his feet back on the ground.

  ‘Have you read this?’ Brishti asks as she hands him a book. The History of Middle-earth, it says on the cover. She throws a pillow against the headboard. She sits cross-legged, an arm’s distance from Orko. Her heels are smooth and clean.

  Orko hasn’t read the book. ‘You can take it home with you,’ Brishti says. They talk about the world of J.R.R. Tolkien, about Lothlórien, about Tinúviel and Aragorn, and soon the state of Orko’s heels seems insignificant. He leans against the wall and stretches his legs out in front of him. There’s a lull in the conversation. A radio plays in the distance. Orko catches the chief minister’s name. It’s a newscast.

  Sitting here, on the lower berth of the bunk bed, Orko feels as if he’s in a room within a room, like Urmi’s doll’s house, the one whose roof came off so they could arrange the furniture inside. As a child, he would often lie in bed, daydreaming, imagining himself inside that house, with the kitchen all around him, life-size. The blue three-legged table at the centre, the stove by the window, the saucepan on the stove, the giant teapot on the floor.

  ‘Something happened to you yesterday,’ says Brishti, drawing Orko out of his reverie.

  ‘What?’ Orko asks, startled. ‘What happened? How do you know?’

  ‘You didn’t come back after lunch,’ says Brishti, ‘and you’ve been preoccupied all day. I saw you doodling in your notebooks instead of taking notes.’

  Orko hadn’t imagined that he would tell anyone about his encounter with Kaushik. He tries to piece together the narrative in a series of short, coherent sentences, but he doesn’t know where to begin, so he skips right to the end. ‘Kaushik and Pratik jumped me in the schoolyard,’ he says.

  ‘Just like that?’ Brishti asks, incredulous.

  Orko shrugs. He wants to tell Brishti everything, but he dithers, worrying that she too will think he is a pervert. He doesn’t think that she would, but he can’t be sure.

  ‘Do you think I’m weird?’ he asks, in a manner that suggests that he doesn’t really care either way.

  Brishti looks at him intently, as if she’s trying to decide how to answer his question. ‘Yes, you’re a little weird,’ she says, just as Orko is beginning to think she isn’t going to respond. ‘I had a friend who was a lot like you.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Orko asks.

  ‘Well, he was a very sweet boy, for one,’ says Brishti. ‘And he didn’t really get along with the rest of the boys.’

  ‘I have no problem with boys,’ Orko retorts. ‘I used to play football with a whole bunch of them.’

  ‘He had a crush on Tom Cruise,’ Brishti says. She has a faraway look in her eyes, and Orko gathers, from the tone of her voice, that the story did not end very well for this friend.

  ‘I don’t have a crush on anyone,’ he says defiantly.

  ‘I overheard your conversation the other day,’ Brishti says. ‘You were talking about one of our teachers.’ She’s smiling, and she doesn’t look like she thinks Orko is a deviant.

  ‘I just said he was cute,’ Orko says. ‘I don’t have a crush on him or anything like that.’

  ‘Have you ever wanted to kiss a boy?’ she asks casually, as if she were asking him if he liked strawberries, or if he had ever seen a vulture.

  Orko’s first instinct is to feign disgust, but he’s tired of lying, hiding, pretending. Her question is simple enough, but the answer is less so. He thinks about Priya and the bearded man kissing, but that image is quickly replaced by another: Bishu’s moustache brushing against his upper lip; Bishu’s fingers pressing so hard against his cheeks that his jaws came unclenched; Bishu’s tongue, like sandpaper, thrusting into his mouth; a sensation not unlike drowning as Bishu’s breath, all garlic and cigarettes, mingled with his own. ‘This is what you do before you fuck a woman,’ Bishu had said by way of explanation.

  ‘What happened to your friend?’ he asks, in an effort to change the topic.

  ‘They said he had an accident,’ says Brishti. ‘I don’t believe it for a moment, though.’

 
‘What, then?’

  ‘I think he took his own life.’

  When a new acquaintance asks Orko about his parents, he tells them that he lives with his father, and that his mother is dead, and they usually express regret. If anybody other than Brishti had told him about a friend who died, Orko would probably say that he was sorry it happened. With Brishti, though, that doesn’t seem necessary, or appropriate, because when he told her that his mother had died, she merely said that she missed her mother too, and she wished she could speak to her more often.

  ‘What was his name?’ he asks.

  ‘Joshua,’ says Brishti. ‘Josh.’

  ‘Do you have a picture?’

  Brishti fetches a photo album, mustard-yellow, from the top drawer of the chest. She sits down beside him, their shoulders so close that they’re almost touching. She opens the album near its middle. She flips a page, then another. ‘That’s him,’ she says.

  The picture seems to have been taken on a basketball court, although none of the people in it is dressed for basketball. Brishti looks very different in the photograph. Her hair is longer, and she isn’t wearing spectacles. The girl to her left is shorter than her, her hair so fair that it’s almost white. Josh is to Brishti’s right. He is about as tall as Brishti, which would make him an inch or two shorter than Orko. They’re all smiling at the camera.

  From the picture, Orko would never have imagined that Josh would take his own life. His wispy brown hair ends at his collar. He has sharp features, and wide, almond eyes. Orko struggles to find an adjective to describe him. He would settle on ‘pretty’, but he knows that when a boy is called pretty, it isn’t a compliment.

  When Orko reaches home, dusk is beginning to fall. He switches on the lights in the stairwell. The weariness of the past few days seems to have left him, and he takes the steps two, three at a time. He can hear his neighbour’s television set as he fumbles with his keys. He leaves the door ajar and makes his way to the light switch by the refrigerator. He toggles the switch but nothing happens. He tries the ceiling fan, with the same result.