12 January 1999
Today was my first day at the new school, just two months before the start of the tenth-standard board exams. Why Maa–Baba chose to change my school in what’s said to be one of the most crucial year in anyone’s academic life is amusing to say the least—my friendlessness.
‘If you don’t make friends now, then when will you?’ Maa said.
They thought the lack of friends in my life was my school’s problem and had nothing to do with the fact that my friend had been mysteriously found dead, his body floating in the still waters of the school swimming pool. He was last seen with me. At least that’s what my classmates believe and say.
Only I know the truth.
When Dada woke me up this morning, hair parted and sculpted to perfection with Brylcreem, teeth sparkling, talcum splotches on his neck, he was grinning from ear to ear. Unlike me he doesn’t have to pretend to be happy. Isn’t smiling too much a sign of madness? He had shown the first symptoms when he picked a private-sector software job over a government position in a Public Sector Undertaking which would have guaranteed a lifetime of unaccountability. Dada may be an IITian but he’s not the smarter one of us.
‘Are you excited about the new school, Raghu? New uniform, new people, new everything? Of course you’re excited! I never quite liked your old school. You will make new friends here,’ said Dada with a sense of happiness I didn’t feel.
‘Sure. If they don’t smell the stench of death on me.’
‘Oh, stop it. It’s been what? Over two years? You know how upset Maa–Baba get,’ said Dada. ‘Trust me, you will love your new school! And don’t talk about Sami at the breakfast table.’
‘I was joking, Dada. Of course I am excited!’ I said, mimicking his happiness.
Dada falls for these lies easily because he wants to believe them. Like I believed Maa–Baba when they once told me, ‘We really liked Sami. He’s a nice boy.’
Sami, the dead boy, was never liked by Maa–Baba. For Baba it was enough that his parents had chosen to give the boy a Muslim name. Maa had more valid concerns like his poor academic performance, him getting caught with cigarettes in his bag, and Sami’s brother being a school dropout. Despite all the love they showered on me in the first few months after Sami’s death, I thought I saw what could only be described as relief that Sami, the bad influence, was no longer around. Now they use his name to their advantage. ‘Sami would want you to make new friends,’ they would say.
I let Maa feed me in the morning. It started a few days after Sami’s death and has stuck ever since.
Maa’s love for me on any given day is easily discernible from the size of the morsels she shoves into my mouth. Today the rice balls and mashed potatoes were humungous. She watched me chew like I was living art.
And I ate because I believe the easiest way to fool anyone into not looking inside and finding that throbbing mass of sadness is to ingest food. A person who eats well is not truly sad.
While we ate, Baba lamented the pathetic fielding placement of the Indian team and India’s questionable foreign policy simultaneously, ‘These bloody Pakistanis! They shoot our soldiers at the border and have the gall to send their cricketers for a friendly cricket series. Terrorists should have bombed the hotel the cricketers were staying in. At least we wouldn’t lose cricket matches to these brutes,’ said Baba in anger and frustration.
‘It’s a step in the right direction, Baba. If you have a problem with them, might I remind you that our captain is a Muslim as well?’ said Dada.
‘That’s what I’m saying, Anirban. We were supposed to be a Hindu version of Pakistan, the holy land for all Hindus, and look what we are now! Secular! Bah! A nation of hypocrites. They might be . . .’ said Baba, his voice trailing, eating up the abuses that bubbled at the back of his throat. ‘. . . But they respect and preserve their religious identity unlike us who bow down to the whims of the minorities here. I’m sure they laugh at us!’
‘Not again, you two,’ Maa interrupted, stuffing Dada’s mouth with a comparatively smaller rice ball, cutting off the oft-repeated religiously charged conversation midway.
Baba left to mutter prayers to our Hindu gods, for our floundering cricket team to be led by Saurav Ganguly, a Bengali Hindu brahmin.
‘Do well in school,’ said Dada before he left.
Maa came to drop me to the bus stop and cried when the bus drove away with her favourite son. I waved to her till the bus turned the corner.
It makes her happy. Maa’s obsession and deep love for me is now old news. Maa had no choice in the matter. Dada grew up too early. When I was twelve, Dada went off to the hostel and found friends and happiness outside our family and carved a son-shaped void in Maa’s heart. That’s when Maa turned to me for succour, the apple of her eye, and loved me with the power of a thousand suns. Even now, she clutches my old clothes and mourns that I’m no longer the child who used to need her for everything.
When I sat back in my seat, the other students in the bus looked at me strangely for they had seen me looking at Maa like a puppy left behind at a shelter. I don’t blame them and neither do I care. I will be her best son till the time I can . . . but I also wonder how long that will be.
As Dada told me, I tried to do well in school. Since my shift of school was sudden and unexplained for, a lot of schools had turned me down. My new school isn’t as good as the last one; it is lenient, the teachers are a little slow, and the students are rowdier.
I didn’t talk to anyone, didn’t make any new friends. I picked the empty first bench, sat there alone, stared at the blackboard and waited for the day to end. Just 700-odd days in my new school, 1200 days in whichever college I go to and then some more days and then some more and then some more . . . and then I die. Finally.
One day at a time. Unless I find the courage to . . .