by Keya Ghosh
I loved it the most when the two of us sang together. Aman loved experimenting with fusion, mixing western jazz and Indian classical. He sang in English and I sang in Hindi. Yet, when our two voices came together, it always sounded amazing. The rest of the band began to get excited about it as well. We had to start locking the doors of the auditorium because so many people wanted to hear what we were doing.
One day, we were rehearsing when someone began hammering on the door. Aman hated the rehearsals being disturbed, but the knocking wouldn’t stop. An extremely angry Aman finally flung open the door. His friends swarmed in and began singing ‘Happy Birthday’, laughing when he tried to throw them out. They wanted to carry Aman off with them, but he refused to go. ‘Rehearsals first,’ he said. ‘We’re working hard here.’ They left reluctantly, demanding a treat. We went back to practising. But when we were packing up, Aman held back.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked him.
‘I really don’t want to celebrate,’ he said. ‘I don’t like the fuss that’s made over a birthday.’
‘Why not? It’s nice to have a birthday celebration.’
He looked at me with sadness in his eyes. ‘It’s not just my birthday. It’s also the day my mother died.’
I was stunned into silence. ‘What would you like to do?’ I asked.
‘Run away,’ he said.
‘Come on,’ I said on an impulse. ‘Let’s do that. Let’s run away.’
We ducked out of the hall from the backstage entrance. ‘Come, I’ll show you my secret place,’ said Aman.
I was surprised when he led me to the little chapel that stood in one corner of the campus. There were wooden steps that led up into a belfry. Below the dusty bells, there was a wooden platform and a small window with a view of the campus.
We weren’t the first to discover the place. The platform was covered with names of couples carved deep into the wood. Some of them had carved dates. Lovers had been coming here for eighty years.
The space was tiny, and our knees touched as we settled down.
‘Now what do we do?’ I asked.
He laughed, ‘Did you really have to ask? You know me.’ He pulled a book out of his backpack. ‘I’ve got a new book of love poems.’
He read to me, and lovers down the ages spoke to us of their joy and their pain. Then we just sat there in silence, content to be with each other, reading the names on the floor.
‘I didn’t know it was your birthday. I don’t have a present to give you,’ I said.
He smiled at me. ‘You could give me your hand.’
I didn’t know how to react. In a moment of blind panic, I decided to pretend I hadn’t heard him. He waited for a moment. Then he found a new page and continued reading. I looked at his hand, lying there casually, within reach.
I pretended to move and brushed against it. Then, trying my hardest to make it look casual, I sort of slipped my hand into his very warm one. For a second or two, he didn’t respond, and I really thought he was too busy reading to notice. Then his hand tightened on mine, and he looked into my eyes.
‘Best present ever,’ he said softly.
Kabir
Have you even held a girl’s hand?’
I refused to admit I hadn’t, but it was written all over my face. Aman didn’t laugh. ‘It’s beautiful. You reach out. You don’t know if she is going to give you her hand. You wait, heart beating. Then her hand nudges yours. Her fingers brush lightly, so lightly, against yours. And suddenly your hand is filled with warmth. You are holding her hand. Girls have hands that are so soft.’
He smiled at my rapt expression. ‘It’s beautiful, because it’s not her hand she’s giving you. It is her trust.’
I had never let myself think too far ahead. I never let myself actually think of a future. But now I began to wistfully wish that one day I could hold somebody’s hand.
‘Have you ever kissed a girl? I mean . . . did you . . . with her?’
Aman grinned at me. ‘If I refuse to tell you, it’s going to drive you crazy, isn’t it?’
‘No, I’m cool.’ I said, practising how to talk like a college kid.
Aman gave a chuckle. ‘Sure.’
‘Oh, come on!’ I said. ‘Just tell me.’
But he wouldn’t. He really made me sweat for the story. He only told it to me late at night when sadness came upon him.
Diya
We would sit in the bell tower almost every day. It had become our own special space. Hidden away from the world, we sat and talked. Sometimes we sang. One day, we were holding hands and I was humming to him. When I stopped, he protested.
‘Don’t stop singing. I love to hear you.’
‘Sing along,’ I said. ‘I like it best when we both sing.’
‘But I am,’ he said. ‘My heart sings every time it sees you. It’s singing right this moment. Can’t you hear it?’
‘No,’ I said, laughing.
‘I bet I can make you hear it,’ he said with a wicked twinkle in his eye.
‘I’m not coming any closer.’
‘No, no. Stay where you are. But close your eyes. And listen.’
I closed my eyes, laughing, and waited. Then the most extraordinary sound filled the tiny space. It was a hum that grew and grew and vibrated through the air. I opened my eyes in surprise. Aman had knocked on the bell and was running a pencil around the rim. It made the bell hum. He began to hum along with it. Just a simple hum, but it was magical.
‘Do that again,’ I said, entranced. And he did. As the hum wove around us, he smiled at me and whispered a poem.
Who knows what the sound
of a heart song is?
Only your God
And your beloved.
He slid closer to me. And closer. The hum died away, and there was silence. We were less than an inch apart. We stayed that way, suspended in silence. Then I leaned forward and put my lips on his.
His lips were soft and warm and stroked gently along mine. Slowly, so slowly, he taught me to kiss, one gentle nuzzle at a time. Then we were really kissing. Deep and slow and long.
Kabir
I woke up to the sound of something clattering in the kitchen. Aman was making us breakfast. There weren’t any vegetables left. We were living on dal and chapattis. He fried the chapattis and sprinkled them with salt. We ate them with pickle, and they were delicious.
We were entirely cut off from the world. I would later learn that across those six days Kashmir got the heaviest snowfall it had seen in sixty years. Even the little radio I had was dead. The batteries were gone, and I didn’t have any extra ones. The electricity had gone on the first day, when wires snapped under the weight of snow. I had been unable to charge my mobile. A curtain of snow had descended between us and the rest of the world. There was just Aman and me. It was actually the happiest time I had spent in the last five years.
We spent the morning playing antakshari. He beat me completely. He knew about a million songs more than me. Then I tried to get the topic back to him and her. I needed to know. I really needed to know.
‘So, what happened, Amanbhai? Why is she in Mumbai and you in Kashmir? What happened? Why aren’t you together?’
‘Real life isn’t a film. Girl meets boy. Comedy. Tragedy. Remedy. Happy ending.’ He shook his head.
‘You didn’t have a happy ending?’
He grinned, ‘Picture abhi baaki hai, yaar. We got to the bit where the families object.’
Diya
We wrote each other letters. While everyone else sent emails and text messages, Aman wrote beautifully on thick paper. He wanted us to have something that we could hold on to for all our lives. ‘I want this to be forever. I want us to have every minute, always,’ he said.
Passing the letters to each other was a game. Sometimes they reached me under a bench. Sometimes he passed them as he brushed past me in the corridor. Sometimes I followed the direction of his eyes and saw a letter tucked in an unexpected place.
I would
fold a letter up tight and tuck it into my hairband. I would casually drop it on his table as I walked past him in the canteen. I would fan myself with it elaborately and then leave it lying around for him to claim.
I would carry his letters all day long, not opening them. Savouring them, waiting till I was alone in bed at night. Then, after reading them, I would breathe the words to myself, repeating them in the darkness. He wrote me poetry. He took all that he felt and put it into words on the page. And I took them and sang them back to him. At the rehearsals, they marvelled at the stuff he was coming up with. And he and I looked at each other and smiled.
Until my father took all the letters. I never saw them again. I think he must have burnt them. Happiness makes us careless. I forgot that my father watched me carefully. Forgot that he notices things.
The last night of the college festival, I asked him for permission to stay over at a girlfriend’s house. It was likely to be late. All the girls had planned this. There would be many of us, and no boys. He agreed. I should have known it was too easy. I was just too happy to realize it.
Kabir
I made a really large fire. I didn’t want to have to get up for wood before the story was over. We sat in front of it, draped in blankets. Aman told me of the night it all changed for them.
‘Our college festival is famous. It’s really big. Three days of events across fifteen different areas. Everything, from debates to art to fashion shows. But the biggest day is the last day, when all the bands take to the stage. The concert lasts the whole night. Last year it went on till 4 a.m. and the cops had to come and shut it down.
‘We’d been rehearsing a long time. And we were good. We were going to do a song that I had written, and it made me really nervous. I had written the song for her, and I would be telling a crowd of thousands about my love.
‘Before we went on stage, I was ambushed. My friends got together and grabbed me. Then they threw me into the air three times. They said it was for luck. I was breathless and laughing as I flew into the air and landed in their arms again and again. As I was flung above their heads, I could see the crowd. There were four thousand teenagers packed into the auditorium. I could hear them roaring. This was going to be incredible.’
Diya
I was almost light-headed with tension. My hands were cold. Putting on my make-up, I looked in the mirror and wondered who this girl was who was suddenly ready to rebel. I was defying my father. Singing in public. Lying about where I was. And I was going to spend the night with my boyfriend.
I can’t tell you how terrifying it was to think that after this night, I would have crossed a line my father would never ever forgive me going past. But I was ready. Happiness had come to me, and it had made me think of freedom. I would not be my father’s pawn, married to whomever he chose. I would not do my duty. I was in love, and I would do what my heart wanted.
‘Happiness is hard to come by. Don’t give up on it so easily,’ Aman had said. And I had learnt that you could make your own happiness, hold on to it. You just had to be ready to pay the price. I was. On that night, I was.
My girlfriends surrounded me. I had made so many friends since I started rehearsals. They helped me do my hair. Fixed my lipstick. We were all laughing and chattering.
Moniya squeezed my hand tight. ‘I won’t tell a soul,’ she said. She was the girl who had volunteered to pretend that I was at her house that night. ‘Where are you going?’ she asked.
I had no idea. I had left it all to Aman. There was a knock on the dressing room door. Aman was standing there. ‘Come on, sunshine,’ he said. ‘It’s time to light up the night.’
He held out his hand. Mine was cold. His was warm. He was holding my hand as we walked on to the stage.
So many people. I was suddenly hit by the reality of it. So many people. And me in front of them. I felt my throat close up.
Kabir
The fire crackled and sputtered. But I wasn’t in a small wooden house in the middle of nowhere. I was far away in a crowd, watching a stage bathed in bright lights. Watching as a boy and girl walked on to it.
‘And then?’ I said to Aman.
His eyes were shining. He shook his head. ‘It was almost a disaster. I saw her freeze. Saw her hear the opening music, look at the crowd and just freeze. I stepped forward and gently touched her shoulder. She began to breathe again. Then she started singing.
‘You should have seen that crowd. Huge. Noisy. Uncontrollable. And then she began to sing, and all the noise slowly began to die down. Her voice did that. I think the whole hall was holding its breath. By the time I joined her in singing, they were listening to us. Really listening. We had them.
‘We sang a song that I had written. I wrote it for her.’
The stars you named,
Became ours forever,
They watch in a still dark sky.
The love you named,
Can leave me never,
It can never die.
I will count the stars as I wait for you,
And make the whole sky ours.
This world is not enough to hold
Our love, so we reach for stars.
Diya
The hall erupted. They yelled and screamed and clapped. They wouldn’t let us get off the stage. We had to sing three more songs before they would let us go.
We didn’t even wait for the results. Aman said, ‘We’ve won. Let the others collect the trophy. We have something more important to do.’ He grabbed my hand, and we dodged all our friends who were screaming in excitement, and ran for the exit. We had to fight our way out of there.
Aman had borrowed a motorcycle from a friend. I began to tie up my hair, but he pulled the rubber band from me. ‘Never tie your hair up,’ he said. My hair blew behind us as we rode that bike. I put my arms around his waist and leaned into him. He smelt so good. Only the two of us, warm against each other, and the speeding bike.
They caught us just off Peddar Road. A car full of men. They forced us to the side of the road and then jumped out, sticks in hand. Two of them grabbed me. The others grabbed Aman. He tried to fight free, but they held him easily. He yelled to me, ‘Run away! Run away, Diya!’
I didn’t move. I had recognized them, and there was no place to run. My father’s secretary was with them. He smiled at me as the goons held Aman and me.
‘I know them,’ I said to Aman.
‘You know them?!’
‘Yes. They’re my father’s men.’
‘Don’t touch her!’ shouted Aman. ‘Don’t you dare hurt her!’ His only concern was for me. But I was terrified for him. I knew my father.
The secretary said politely, ‘Don’t worry about her. We aren’t going to touch her. We’re here to beat a lesson into you.’
‘You want to beat me up?’ said Aman. ‘You’re not going to harm her?’
‘No. Our orders are that we don’t touch her. She is like a daughter to us. You, however . . .’ The secretary smiled. His politeness was chilling.
‘All right,’ said Aman. And then he just stood there. The lead thug smashed his fist into Aman’s face. Aman just took the blow and stood there waiting. He didn’t do a thing.
Kabir
There was only one thing wrong with Aman. Gandhi.
I never knew anyone who had a worse case of Gandhi than Aman. He had read every single book the man had written. He could quote him, analyse him, memorize him. I put it down to his father being in the business of violence. He told me the story.
Aman’s earliest memory was of his father returning from a lathi charge. The front of his uniform was splattered with blood. Aman began crying, thinking that his father was hurt. But it was the blood of other people.
Aman stumbled upon Gandhi accidentally when his father was transferred to Moradabad. His mother was dead by then. The city was in the middle of riots, so his father kept him at the police station during the day to keep him safe.
Tired of waiting through the day for his father to return fro
m riot duty, he began reading the books in the police outpost. There were twelve volumes of Gandhi’s writings on one small shelf. They were covered with dust and a couple had been eaten by termites. No one had ever read them. But Aman read them with fascination, asking the policemen for help with the big words.
His father would come back late at night after dealing with the riots all day. He never talked about what he did. The next morning, Aman would read about it in the papers. The fatalities. The blood that flowed in the gutters. How many bullets the police had fired. Sometimes there were pictures of those who had been gunned down.
He began to dread sitting down with his father. He watched him wash his hands before dinner and wondered whose blood was on those hands. He tried to talk about Gandhi to his father, tried to tell him about the strange, exciting ideas that were flooding his head.
His father laughed. ‘Gandhi. We salute him twice a year. And every day we do everything he told us not to, just to keep this country going.’
His father had become a man whose only answer was violence. That was all his life had come down to. He was paid to be a last stand. A butt against the head. A bullet through the brain.
It was not his father’s choices, but Gandhi’s principles which began to make sense to Aman. By the time the riots ended, Aman had that man inside his head for good.
How we argued, Aman and I.
I could understand hating violence. But worshipping Gandhi? Well, okay, he got us freedom and all that. But what did his non-violence get him? Three bullets in the chest from someone who disagreed with him. Bullets beat bhajans every time.
But try telling that to Aman. Gandhi was his God. How we fought.