29 January 1999
I have turned sixteen. It’s my birthday today. Yay. So exciting. Wow. Whatever. Congratulations and celebrations and blah blah blah blah. What’s so great about being born? You have no choice or control over the date or the birth. Life’s literally forced on you. Where’s the fun in celebrating that? At least with death, you have the option to choose, push the eject button when you feel like the cockpit’s getting too hot. And a birthday doesn’t change anything. Except probably my thirteenth birthday when my throat and my body exploded and, believe you me, it was no reason to celebrate. I grew taller and my voice broke, I was thrown out of the choir and relegated to the back of the line of the march-past.
‘You’re lucky. Look how tall you are!’ said Maa.
Being tall’s not lucky, you just run out of places to hide.
Maa gave me the best gift of all, a Parker fountain pen, the one I’m writing this with. She also took a day off and made mutton biryani, kosha mangsho and muri ghonto. Baba made paesh with jaggery and gave me a book, The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy, wrapped in an old newspaper. He told me the writer, a Bengali, was given 3.5 crore rupees as advance for the book. He was adamant about its greatness though he was a little disappointed in the writer who had chosen to write about Keralite Syrian Christians and not Bengali Hindus. But ah! What coincidence. The book starts with the death of a little child, drowned in a river, left behind by friends. If only Baba had read it.
Unfortunately, my birthday wasn’t a secret in school either. My new school had an ancient birthday rule wherein even older students were supposed to break the monotony of uniform and wear anything that was not a part of it—a pair of shoes, a different shirt or miss out the tie. I, of course, was dressed more properly than a Head Boy leading a march. My hideout, the perfect uniform, and my silence, were broken into at lunch.
‘Take off your tie and give it to me,’ said Brahmi Sharma without missing a beat. She smelt of coconut oil and Pond’s Dreamflower talc.
‘Why?’
‘Happy birthday, Raghu Ganguly. Try to have a good day. Now can I have the tie please?’
I took off my tie.
‘How did you know it is my birthday?’
‘It’s my job to know. I am the class monitor,’ she said.
‘There’s something on your nose,’ I said.
‘What?’
She touched her nose and soiled her fingers with blood and pus. The pimple at the tip of her nose that had ballooned with white pus last week had finally burst. I touched my tie, which I was holding to give her, to her nose to staunch the flow. She took the tie from me and held it against the nose.
‘I will return it to you tomorrow. Don’t worry, I will ask Mumma to wash it.’
‘You can keep it.’
‘Why would I want to keep it?’
‘Umm . . . I don’t know why I said that. It just felt like a thing to say.’
‘It’s not a handkerchief,’ said Brahmi.
‘It’s a tie.’
‘Yes, it’s a tie. Also, the next time you try to hide from your birthday, be less conspicuously dressed. A well-dressed student is an anomaly not the rule,’ she said and smiled.
I nodded.
‘Enjoy your birthday,’ she said as if she knew I wouldn’t.
For the rest of the day even though my eyes followed Brahmi Sharma I couldn’t see her anywhere during the chemistry double-period practical. If she had bunked the class, she had done it well because no one asked for her. How could people overlook her absence?
Coming back to Dada, he gave me what he thought was a special gift. He told me it was an Apple PowerBook he’d borrowed from his boss. Inside it was a CD with a media file he wanted me to watch and I should have guessed what it was. It was supposedly a rite of passage for every teenager. The media file wasn’t just Kate Winslet lying down naked from the movie Titanic that came out a couple of years ago whose pirated cassette Dada got hold of. This was much more. Dada was surprised I didn’t enjoy the two naked girls touching each other.
‘You have to grow up,’ said Dada.
‘I was kidding, Dada! I loved it!’
I lied and he smiled. I can’t have Dada being miffed with me. After all he’s my insurance policy against Maa–Baba’s grief. God forbid if anything happens to me, self-inflicted or otherwise, there should be someone to hold Maa–Baba’s hand. Isn’t that the only reason why people have the second kid? To have a spare part if one’s broken? In our case the spare’s broken.
‘I knew it, you bastard. Why do you play these games with me?’ asked Dada and slapped my back.
How could I have enjoyed when I knew the two women on screen were play-acting? They weren’t enjoying kissing each other or caressing each other’s bodies. They weren’t in love with each other. I could see that. If they hadn’t promised to live their lives together, to die together if they could synchronize it, then how the hell was I supposed to enjoy what they did on screen?
Now that the day has ended, I have successfully fooled Maa–Baba and Dada that I had fun turning seventeen.
But it wasn’t all that bad. I have a tendency to focus on the morose and miserable. I am ignoring that Brahmi Sharma, the girl with the bleeding nose, the girl who went missing in the middle of the day, knew exactly how I felt about my birthday.