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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Fiction & Poetry |
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Fiction |
Day After Day
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Published : 1 October 2010 |
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| L |
INE UP. LINE UP, NOW. ONE ARM'S DISTANCE. |
Nikhil did a sketchy Hitler salute to make sure
he was an arm’s length away from the boy in front
of him.
Huhten-shun!
The boy behind him either didn’t hear Rawson’s command
or he heard him and didn’t care because Nikhil
could sense him shuffling. Shah was from Jaipur. He was
new. Nikhil wanted to warn him about shuffling but Bale
and Rawson, the two PT sirs, were walking the lines and it
wasn’t a good time to turn around.
At Ease.
The school was lined up for the Loyola Day speech. Three
cassocks at the lectern waited for quiet. A white padre stood
a little apart from them; he seemed to be watching Bale and
Rawson make order. When Bale hit Shah on the ear to stop
him from moving, the foreign father flinched. He closed in
on the other padres, looking urgent. Nikhil could see Shah’s
head now. It was at the same level as his right knee because
Shah had fallen sideways, out of line. Nikhil could feel
Shah’s dumb pain, hear the ringing in his slapped ear. At
Ease, said Bale. At Ease already, Nikhil stopped breathing
the better to be still, kept his shoulders squared, his hands
linked behind his back and his thumbs crossed till Bale
moved past him towards the head of the line. Shah began
crying in shallow, strangled sniffs. He’d been the new boy
for a term; he was older now.
School always had a white padre for Loyola Day who
always made his speech in All India Radio-style Hindi. It
wasn’t the same one every year either; the school must have
trained a batch of foreign fathers in twenty four karat Hindi.
As Father Mobilio began speaking—Respected teachers
and dear students, which came out in Hindi as Mananiya
adhyapakgun aur priya vidyarthiyon—Tandon, standing to
Nikhil’s left, started slurring in High Hindi without moving
his lips.
Avum hetu samudra setu shauchalaya mein linga varsha.
Kiya vachanbaddh stri nein pati ke mal ka sevan
Garbh nirodhak yawn sambandh ke viruddh tha Harsha
Atuhuh choda usne Edgar Allan Poe ka raven
Tandon could keep this up. It wasn’t particularly funny,
but he always got someone to laugh. If nonsense didn’t work,
his live commentary in strict Hindi describing Hippo and
Home-Made having sex in the Staff Room generally did.
The padre speech followed a plan. First Ignatius Loyola,
then Francis Xavier, then a long bit about the Society of Jesus
and a shorter passage about the founding of the school.
This fellow had reached the Francis Xavier bit and sainthood.
Nikhil had read somewhere that the last time Xavier’s
mummy had been shown to the public in Goa, someone
had bitten off his toe - but catch the padres telling you that
in any language. A mouthful of holy toe. Nikhil could feel
its shrivelled pad pressing down on his tongue. Issh! He
licked his lips to rub out the feeling.
He became caught up in the speech, hypnotised by the
hyper-correct Hindi and the horribly fucked pronunciation.
The brayed As, the brutally rolled Rs… he sounded like
an early model speaking robot hurried into service. Nobody
knew why the padres bothered. Tandon had a theory. Padres
convert people in their own languages, he said. And
hetu-kintu is what they think we speak.
At the lectern the foreign padre was struggling with the
story of the school’s foundation. This school, he said, isn’t
just the fruit of great labour. This school is the proving
ground for the sacrifice and singlemindedness of St. Ignatius
Loyola and St. Francis Xavier. Yeh vidyalaya keval shram
ka phal nahin hai. Yeh Sant Ignatius Loyola avum Sant
Francis Xavier ke tyaag aur tapasya ki karmabhoomi hai.
He brought his palms together for emphasis.
In the middle row, Shah collapsed again, this time into
Nikhil’s back - who staggered and grabbed a handful of
someone’s shirt to stay on his feet. Shah, bhenchod! swore
Nikhil. The drilled line broke and rippled into a whorl of interested
boys, looking down at Bale’s victim. Nikhil squatted
next to Shah who had fallen face first and was lying
scarily still, like someone trying to look through grass and
earth. He tried to roll him onto his back but it was hard;
Shah’s shoulders turned but his waist and crotch stayed
face down, sort of.
Bale walked up, tight and dangerous in his snug suit and narrow tie, looking unworried, non-guilty. Nikhil stood up
and stepped back, silent. Sir, he fell, said Tandon. Flat, said
someone at the back, fell from his feet, sir. Tandon mimed
keeling over. Like a tree, sir.
Later, in the dispensary, Tandon claimed that Bale’s mask
had slipped when he saw Shah looking dead, lying on the
ground. He looked shit-scared. Like this. Tandon turned his
lips down in cartoon dismay, keeping his teeth bared in a
reasonable imitation of Bale’s brutal buck teeth which were
always on show like a yellow radiator grille. Nikhil didn’t
believe him. Bale was an animal. Nothing scared him.
They had half-carried Shah to the sick-room on the instructions
of Bale, who didn’t accompany them. He’d have
come with us if he was worried, said Nikhil. Tandon shook
his head. That’s all show. He’s puking inside.
Sister Titus had Shah lying on his back on the high hospital
bed. His eyes were open and she was getting him to
count her fingers as she held up one, four, two, three, randomly.
Shah came up with the correct answers. Was his
head hurting? No. Was he feeling sick? No. Could he sit up?
Shah sat up. He looked normal. Nikhil checked to see if one
ear was redder than the other, or thicker. It wasn’t.
All right, lie down again, said Sister. No moving. You can
go back to class for the tiffin break. Shah shut his eyes at
once.
| S |
HAH DIDN'T RETURN TO CLASS until well after the
break, when Mrs Cowasjee had just finished dictating
a problem for maths homework. Nikhil had copied
it down approximately. It was a bathtub problem.
Water poured into it at one rate and poured out of it at
another. How long would it take to fill? This was the gist of
it. Nikhil had written that down. The gist he |
understood. But in maths, unlike history or English comprehension, the gist wasn’t enough. It was nothing.
Mrs Cowasjee was an old woman who wore big blue
beads around her withered neck like a foreigner and a large
watch on her right wrist lashed on with a big black strap.
She wore spectacles with strings dangling off their corners.
She was sexless. She wore frilly front-opening shirts and
knee-length skirts but no one ever tried to peek.
Nikhil stared at his notebook, thinking that the friendliness
of a certain sort of maths question made it harder
to understand. With stuff that went a2 - b2 = (a+b) (a-b), he
knew where he stood. He had to mug up the steps; if two
squared letters equalled four unsquared letters, it wasn’t
for him to reason why. But the bathtub problem (or the one
about two trains rushing at each other and a bell ringing,
that was another killer), because it told a story in English, made him wonder why anyone would try to fill a bathtub
with a hole in it.
This was a reasonable question in the real world but
mathsworld was peopled by loons who bathed in stopperless
tubs, fed by taps connected to waterfalls that delivered
water at such a rate that no one bothered to plug anything.
In mathsworld this was a normal problem about everyday
bathing, not an arbit question for madmen. His father, who
had been to New York, said that if you filled a glass under
an American tap, it foamed like beer. New York was part
of mathsworld; in Nikhil’s normal life there was running
water between 6 and 11 and then between 4 and 9. A thin
string of water, braided by the feebleness of its flow, would
unravel, slowly, into the bucket and pool till it filled.
When Shah came to the door of the classroom and
knocked, Cowasjee smiled and nodded him in. Tandon began
clapping. Shah grinned and rubbed the ear that Bale
had slapped as if to explain his absence. Shah was new and
he wasn’t successfully new; he hadn’t made a friend yet and
no one with any sense would have given Bale a reason to
hit him, but he had one reliable talent: he could do maths.
And he sat next to Nikhil. For the last month, class tests
had been a walkover. Nikhil had had to work in mistakes to
keep his test marks from improving too abruptly. He hadn’t asked Shah for his homework to copy yet, though. For that
he needed to be friends with Shah and he didn’t know if he
could make friends with someone who sweated a lot and
wore rings.
Bale didn’t like rings either. The class met Bale again
at the end of the school day because Friday ended with a
double period for swimming. Bale didn’t like anything that
wasn’t skin or uniform.
| ECHOSTREAM |
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I DON’T LIKE ANYTHING THAT ISN’T SKIN OR UNIFORM,
Bale bellowed in his hup-two-three voice when he
had them lined up for inspection after the shower. He was
rubbing his thumb on Madhukar’s collarbone to test for
dirt. There was none. Madhukar was white and delicate
and perma-clean. Bale rubbed him more than he did the
others. The rubbing frightened Madhukar so much that the
moment he entered the pool he walked a few steps along the
wall till he reached the end of the shallow end and pissed
into his trunks. For minutes, or so Tandon claimed.
Venkatesan stuck his tongue out when Bale got to him.
He was nervous because he was wearing his sacred thread
and Bale didn’t like anything that wasn’t skin or uniform.
Bale picked it off his shoulder with his finger and thumb
and held it like an unclean thing.
This was white once, he said in a hoarse stage whisper.
Now its yellow, you bugguh, because you’ve been sweating
into it for years. Years. Non-stop! And now you’re going to
dirty my pool with its juices, Venkatesan?
No sir.
Bale grinned.
Oh. So you’re going to take it off?
Can’t sir, whispered Venkatesan.
Bale shook his head.
Then it’s the deep end, Venkatesan. I can’t let you filthy
the shallows, can I? There’s so little water there, Venkatesan,
and so many boys. Go stand on the diving board.
Venkatesan stuck his tongue out again and stayed where
he was. Bale waited.
I can’t swim sir, please.
You have your holy lifebelt on, no? The diving board, Venkatesan.
The diving board Bale was pointing to wasn’t the flexible
plank that hung low over the pool but the new five metre
high platform that Bale had pushed the padres into building,
to help the school compete in inter-school diving competitions.
The pool was small, which made the frame structure
loom ominously. Students weren’t even allowed to use it yet
because Rawson, the other PT master, who hated Bale, had
written to Father Noel complaining that it was too high for
the pool’s deep end.
Venkatesan smeared his hands over his face and tried to
smile at Bale.
I’ll take it off sir.
Bale nodded towards the changing rooms, pretend-casual,
but Nikhil knew that the bastard was honking inside.
Still smiling his terrified, trembly smile, Venkatesan retreated.
The class got into the pool with more than half the alotted
time left, which was was good. When Bale was being
really military, double period swimming could end without
anyone getting wet. After defeating Venkatesan, he spent
another five minutes halfheartedly picking on Shah, who
had a chit from Nurse Titus excusing him from entering
the pool because—though this isn’t what the excuse letter
said—Bale had half-killed him.
He first made him shower and change into trunks. Then
he noticed that Shah was wearing an amulet on his left arm.
What’s this? he asked, fingering the little rectangle of black
cloth laced tight round the boy’s bicep. Shah, in his dim way,
said that it was a taveez, which gave Bale the opportunity to
say ‘tar-wheeze?’ Nikhil was beginning to get fed up when
Bale livened things up by asking Shah what he was doing
wearing an amulet when it wasn’t part of the uniform and
he (Shah) wasn’t a cutcock.
Cutcock was Bale’s private term for katua, which, in turn,
was a rude word for Muslim. Nikhil knew that Bale traded
on being a crazy man, but saying something as unsayable as
cutcock was pushing his loony license to its limits. He must
have thought so too because he let the class file into the pool
and spent the rest of the period showing off, diving from
the high board and doing running lengths underwater.
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