Pluton's Pyre

by Gyandeep Kaushal

  ‘Reshma, I’m sorry, but would you pause for a while?’ She had barely completed a paragraph, when Ms Suman butted in. ‘Class, it just occurred to me that I have something to share with you.’

  Everyone, especially the male half, retired from their textbooks and fixed their eyes on her. ‘We are all here to read and learn together,’ she told us. ‘Now that the midterm tests are approaching, I had an idea. We should do something innovative together.’

  Seriously, I have no idea why teachers sometimes talk as if we are in a weekly meeting of the council of ministers of the Spartans—so much zest and all.

  ‘So, I was thinking, may be we could divide the class into groups and perform plays. May be we could reserve some marks for that. Does that sound good?’ she asked like an English marm.

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ said that girl Reshma, waggling her head up and down, and guess what, she just got five marks.

  ‘Okay, and what do the rest of you say?’she persisted.A few idiots nodded in agreement. ‘Right then,’ she continued, ‘we’ll divide the class into—let’s say...’ and she very quickly did a rough count of the number of heads in the class, ‘... eight groups of seven members. Each group will have at least two girls and at least three boys.You are free to make your own groups. Every group will choose a subject and write a play on it. Every group will enact their plays onstage, in a month’s time from now. I’ll go discuss it with the vice-principal. I’m sure we can have the auditorium for a day or so.The best play will fetch its playwrights an extra five marks in the mid-term exams, followed by four marks for the second best play and so on. I’d appreciate it if all of you submitted the details of the groups by tomorrow, so we can start early. Only after that will I help those struggling to adjust in any group.

  ‘Okay, then,’ she said with a girlish clap, ‘like it’s said—the chalice of spirit should always be full up to its brim, I hope you’ll all partake in this activity with enthusiasm and will relish learning together.’

  God knows from where teachers get their quotes to air at random.

  ‘Okay, Reshma you may continue.’

  And that robotic sheep started blabbering text from the book again, ‘It’s clear you don’t know a thing about history. Haven’t been to Mahabalipuram, have you?’ he said mysteriously... And she read for an eternity, or what seemed like it.

  During the third break the next day, I saw Malvika waving carelessly at Aditya. Aditya got to her in an instant, as if some rocket engine propelled his arse. They talked. Malvika even smiled every now and then.

  God, I know you want to know. So I’ll talk turkey: yes, I was jealous, burning close to cinders from head to toe. If I had an extra pair of eyes situated behind my head, I could draw you a picture of the smoke that pumped out of my ears.

  In fact,Aditya was the only boy who Malvika would talk to. For hours, I tried to solve the riddle, the million dollar question—what was it about Aditya that made him lucky? Did she actually love him? Were they in a relationship? But then, lovers don’t talk to each other once in twenty days, that too only when in the same classroom. What was it, if not it? Why him, just him? Did he have a secret gold mine? Was it possible she found him good-looking? Well, spiky hairstyle is just another piece of overhyped debatable shit. That’s not me, ask any girl. Did she then think his sagging body shimmered in the sunlight? Well, his body wasn’t actually that saggy. What was it, then?

  Aditya maintained she was just an acquaintance. But when he’d left after class, I managed to extract from Abhineet and Swayam that they were actually kind of more than acquaintances.That they were bench partners for about a month when they were in fifth grade, thanks to their then eloquent, dreamy, to-be-bombed class teacher that’d made them sit together in an attempt to change seats. After that, however, she never had another male bench partner (good for me!). And it did relieve me a little when they told me he had a fixation on another lassie in the seventh grade that nobody knew about.

  The rest went routinely.

  ***

  As we sat together for lunch during the second break the next day, four pairs of eyeballs slipped right and left, as we looked at each other from the corners of our eyes. It was as though we were all ready for the war.What the four of us waited for was the correct moment, when someone among us would pull the sword from somewhere behind to mark the inception. Rest, we knew about the skirmish that’d follow. I wondered for a second if Abhineet and Swayam had puked out to Aditya about the last-minute enquiry by me the day before. Or perhaps, it was just some random event heightened by scepticism and stupidity to superfluous proportions.

  ‘Guys,’ Aditya began. I sighed, for surely there were no swords in the scene. ‘Did you think about the group for the play?’

  ‘We here, are four. We need three more,’ said Abhineet.

  ‘I could talk to Ratul, the guy that sits behind me,’ Swayam added.

  ‘But we’ll still require two more, and we need girls,’ said Abhineet.

  ‘Man, I don’t know why we have this never-ending circle of assignments. God knows they are the most anti-productive thing crammed down our throats and they come to nothing. Above all, there’s so much fuss for five or six marks!’ Swayam said with outright disgust.

  ‘I second you, man,’ Abhineet replied, nodding with feeling.

  ‘Guys, let’s put that aside for a while. Do we have an actual solution? Suraj, you got something?’Aditya looked at me and asked. I shook my head. He continued, ‘Every group will feed Ma’am with the names of the members during the seventh lecture. I really don’t want us to be there looking disorganized and embarrassed, as though nobody took us bunch of guys in.’

  ‘Yeah, man,’ said Abhineet, feeling the tension.

  ‘Now that it’s evident that we don’t have the capacity to form a group, I have something to say,’Aditya said.

  ‘I knew this bastard had something in mind,’ Swayam said, smirking at him.

  ‘I actually did,’Aditya replied.

  ‘What is it? What were you throwing hints at us blindly for, huh?’Abhineet asked.

  ‘I didn’t want you guys to pull my leg for suggesting we bring in the girls, even though that’s a certainty.’ Girls! I knew who he was talking about, that son of a bitch. ‘Actually, Malvika came to me.’

  No! That bragging jackass was lying. She hadn’t gone to him; she’d called him. Even though it made absolutely no difference, it was a misappropriation of fact.

  He continued, ‘And she told me that there is no other group she can join. Like you guys know, she doesn’t talk to many boys.’ How could she, when SRK himself was in our class?

  ‘So she requested me to ask you guys, if it’s okay with you, if her two friends and she join our group. See, we are four, they’re three, that’ll be a perfect seven.’

  ‘I’m fine with that,’ said Abhineet.

  ‘Me too,’ Swayam concurred.

  I did the same thing, though I had pending some calculations to perform. I left everything to the higher powers.

  ***

  ‘Now that I hope everyone has formed their groups, I’m going to have to ask you to please hand over the names of the members,’ Ms Suman announced during the English lecture.

  Aditya tore a page from his notebook and pulled out his pen. I could see him write:

  Group Members

  Aditya Raj

  Suraj Deoria

  Swayam Devang

  Abhineet Datta

  Malvika Sinha

  Shraddha Jaiswal

  Anita Sahai

  I didn’t know what was coming.When you stand by the seashore, you don’t know if the next wave will tickle your feet, or benignly crash at you. It could fall in love with you and take you away, home.

  ***

  The next day, we had English in the sixth lecture, just before the third break. For the next three days, Ms Suman said, she’d take us to the big field, where she would like all the groups to sit together and report to her with at least a quarter of t
he work done.

  We were all casually introduced to one another, as we sat down in a circle.

  ‘So, what are we going to do?’ Anita initiated the discussion. ‘I haven’t done anything like this before. Plays? God, I have never been onstage. I’m pretty nervous,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t think there’s anything to be nervous about,’

  Swayam said. ‘That’s the spirit,’Abhineet approved, patting his back. ‘Yeah, I think if we work together productively and efficiently, we can even wind this up before time.And if we forget about the marks and think about making this only fun, it’ll be much easier,’ I said, in order to take a leading stand. I didn’t want to sound dorky in front of everyone.

  ‘Woah! Someone sounds pretty geared up, good for us,’ Aditya observed. ‘In that case, you must be having an idea about the subject on which we’re going to base this play.’

  I had no idea why he put that question to me.

  ‘I have something in mind, yes,’ I said. ‘It’s the story of a youngster, who gets into bad company and commits a crime.After he gets caught and sentenced, his mother goes to see him in jail one day, hoping to console and sympathize with him. But she is devastated when the son says it’s all her fault because she never tried to correct him and let him become what he became.’

  That was good enough for a start.

  Malvika sat right in front of me.

  ‘But what message will that play convey?’ Aditya argued.

  ‘I think it’s quite okay. It does talk about the role of a good parent and how it affects the development of a child,’ Shraddha said.

  I was glad she liked it.

  ‘But I think I’ve heard it before,’Aditya said.

  ‘It’s an old story, but I say we can always have it as a reference and bring about modifications in our own ways.’

  ‘How about a story set in the corporate world?’Aditya threw in his idea.

  ‘I don’t know if we can handle it. I guess Suraj’s idea is something we can all do. Even I feel I’d be comfortable with it,’Anita rescued me.

  It’s funny when I think how Anita and Shraddha had backed me. For a second, I thought they liked me. I now know it was a stupid idea, though.

  ‘Well enough, then,’ Aditya said, realizing he was checkmated.

  Corporate world? I bet ten chickens half the group didn’t know a thing about companies, shares, and stuff. Just because Aditya thought he was the only boy in the class who Malvika talked to, it didn’t make him the wittiest one.

  Fine, he was a friend and had introduced me to Swayam and Abhineet, and he wasn’t bad and all. But I’m sure he must’ve pondered over things when I’d called him up from the station that day.

  Why else would he try to make me look bad in front of her? Had his friends lied to me? Was that tale about a girl in the seventh grade a made-up story they’d narrated to me, so I’d lay off Malvika and let Aditya take the advantage? Maybe? They were his friends before they were mine. As for Aditya, who knows? They say everything’s fair in love and war.

  ‘I just hope I don’t get to become the mother of that man,’ Malvika said and laughed.

  I wondered if she was being sarcastic or whether she literally meant it. I noticed how she didn’t make any comments about the idea of the play. ‘Do you think the plot is good?’ I blurted the question.

  ‘Yeah, it’s okay I think,’ she answered very casually and smiled politely.

  I was sitting right next to her. I could only stare at her dimples that popped up when she smiled. Oh, she was something. To be honest, I did admire her other features, too. I’d actually ogled her—I wasn’t the most impeccable example of innocence.Those assholes at Don Bosco (mainly Dhiren) had made me watch some porn, on a video cassette once (okay, twice), during the last months of my seventh-grade academic year. I’d even seen some magazines that contained nude pictures of girls. Some jugaadu cousin of Dhiren had made him take them with him. I had seen nude girls and I knew about fantasizing about them. I even knew how babies are conceived. But with Malvika, it was so very different.

  Every inch of her body spoke perfection. I wouldn’t think twice before conceding that she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. I would’ve imagined kissing her once or twice, but for the rest, my mind was free from all carnal fantasies when it was about her. I’d only be awestruck all the time, amazed at how fabulously cute she was.

  The words she spoke—however few, maybe only five—echoed in my mind all the time. In some European superstitions, five is the luckiest number of words when the person you like is speaking to you for the first time. I could make a toast to that. God, she was beautiful.

  The bell rang for the third break. By the end of the lecture, we had managed to decide who’d play whom. Abhineet was chosen to play the son, the protagonist. Shraddha voluntarily stepped in to play the mother. Swayam and I would play the bad company Abhineet would fall into. Aditya was the jailer. Anita, very bravely, chose to be the female judge, because she knew she’d barely have to say two or three lines, delivering the judgement and sentencing the protagonist. And Malvika took up the only character that was left, sister to Abhineet.

  That wasn’t too bad for the first day. We managed to do some quality writing the next day.After about half an hour’s hard work, we had to vacate the field.

  ‘Hey,’Abhineet panted, as he came running to me when I was about to enter the classroom.

  ‘Hi,’ I replied.

  ‘Those were some pretty good ideas with the play out there. I hope we’ll do great.’ He sounded positive, trying to catch his breath. ‘I’m pretty excited about the protagonist stuff myself.’

  ‘I’m sure we’ll do great and thanks for the remarks about the play,’ I said and smiled, as I proceeded towards my seat.

  ‘Suraj,’ he spoke again, ‘I need to tell you something.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I know you’ve got a thing for Malvika,’ he said suddenly.

  ‘Come on, it’s nothing like that.’

  ‘Hey, we’re brothers.That’s what we are.You need not say a word.’ He smiled compatibly and continued, ‘I just wanted to tell you something I think you’ll be delighted to know.’

  ‘What is it?’ I humbly asked.

  ‘Today, in the English lecture when we all sat together, I saw Malvika smiling at you. She wouldn’t do it in front of you, but I saw it. She was looking at you time and again, when you weren’t looking at her. Maybe I also noticed her smiling at intervals. I think the stars are in your favour.’ Having said that, he continued, ‘I’ll get going now.’And he winked and walked out of the class.

  Shame me for me not writing a poem about that moment, but I sure was happy. But before I could make a toast to it, I had to know whether what Abhineet had said was authentic, or whether it was just a misleading piece of crap.

  So after practising eye-ping-pong a thousand times, I decided to test the nature of truth. English was in the second lecture the next day. When we sat together in the field, I would steal frequent glances at her, then look away. But every minute that passed, hope took a step further away from me. Only after I had tried a few hundred times did our eyes meet. She was looking at me; I saw it, yes. But as soon as she found me looking at her, she turned her face towards her notebook. Perhaps she was a bit shy that she’d been caught, but I didn’t want her to feel bad about it. So I waited. I waited for the next instant when she’d look at me. And in about a minute’s time, she in fact did. This time, as soon as she raised her head towards me, I beamed a reassuring smile.

  ‘Malvika, how is your role in the play working out?’ I asked by way of opening a conversation. I wanted to assure her that there was nothing to be embarrassed about.

  ‘I’m working on it,’ she said, smiled, and went back to looking at her notebook. She used her left hand to pull that strand of hair behind her ear that was occasionally brushing her cheek.

  ‘If you’re not too busy, do you mind going through my piece once? I’m not
so sure if I’m doing it right,’ I said, offering her my notebook.

  ‘Sure,’ she said softly and took it from me.

  Her eyes flit across the pages of my notebook, before she said, ‘I think it’s pretty good.’ She smiled and handed back the notebook to me.

  You wanna know how happy I was? If it so happened that lightning had struck me then my corpse might have fried, but you would still see a smile on my face.

  After school was over, I went home the happiest man in the world. The only thing I did—until dad came home, that is—was feel good and happy. The day had been eventful, but it wasn’t over yet.

  He entered the house, around seven in the evening, and freshened himself up. As usual, I had a book open on my study table and had my eyes glued to it.

  ‘Suraj,’ dad half-opened the door of my room and entered. He sat on the bed and asked, ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I was studying, have been doing it for the last half an hour.’ I could’ve said I’d been with my books for four hours, but why risk a lie unnecessarily, when you know it’s your baap you’re talking to?

  ‘That’s a good thing. I hope you’ll do better at your studies in future.’

  ‘I’ll try, dad,’ I said politely.

  ‘How’s the new school treating you?’

  ‘It’s nice.’

  ‘Made new friends?’

  ‘One or two, yes.’

  ‘What do their dads do?’ I had no clue why he asked that.

  ‘Aditya’s dad is in real estate. Abhineet’s dad has a big grocery shop and Swayam’s dad doesn’t do a serious job. He’s running some NGO, but his mother is at some bank.’

  ‘Which bank?’ Again, I didn’t know why he asked that one.

  ‘I’d asked him. He’d told me. I don’t remember the name, but it wasn’t the bank you work in.’

  ‘Not bad, three friendships in three months,’ he said. ‘So you eat lunch with them?’

  ‘Yes, since the last two-three days.’

  ‘Oh, that’s nice. Hey, why don’t you buy some samosas and share it with your friends? Here, have these,’ he spoke to me, extending a wad of twenty, five-rupee notes. ‘I hope this will be enough for a month or so.’