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| Photo credit: A. Peter |
How hard could it be to get a phone number?
After our sugiyan-eating-crimewatching-spree the previous night, we spent the
next day plotting how to get Johnny's phone number. First, we went over
everything we planned to say to him, practiced and changed dialogue and went
over and over and over it.
When we did decide to look
for Johnny's phone number, it seemed even harder than plotting our still
unfinessed conversation with him.
First, we cased the George family's room, I from my bedroom’s doorway, and Rita
from outside the house. For some reason, Sarah and her mother wouldn't get out
of the room. Frustrated and finally discovered by Ammachi, I was made
to scrape a couple of coconuts on the quick – while Rita continued to watch the
Georges from the backyard.
She returned nearer lunch,
a shade darker than before her surveillance activities, looking dejected, with a
strong odour of sweat emanating. She used the small once-white dish cloth,
tucked into the handle of the fridge, to wipe her neck and face, while I looked
on in disbelief… and disgust. I was going to have to remind myself never
to touch them or wipe my plate with any of the dishtowels.
She took out a bottle of cold water from the fridge and put it to her mouth.
From nowhere, Ammachi appeared, launching into an angry lecture.
When Ammachi advanced menacingly with a raised ladle, Rita screwed the cap back
on the bottle, skipped into the study, and threw her arms around our surprised
grandfather’s neck. His smile twisted into shock momentarily as her body odour
hit his senses.
His face righted instantly, his arm coming around her shoulder and she sat on
his lap. Ammachi watched from the doorway, her lips tightly squeezed over each
other, and then marched back to the kitchen. After a while, Rita got off
Appachan’s lap, opened all the drawers of his table, which were now unlocked,
and picked up a ten rupee note and waved it into his face excitedly. Appachan
laughed at something she said and waved his hand at her. She kissed his cheek,
and skipped back towards me. She grabbed my arm and we disappeared out of the
house.
I took the note from her and examined it. This was a so-so sum – it could get
us a packet of chips, a bar of Amul chocolate or a smaller bar of Cadbury
chocolate. Alternatively, we could get two veg puffs, but who wanted to eat veg
puffs. We could split one meat puff instead. In the middle of my thoughts Rita
plucked the note out of my hand, folded it into a thin length and put it
into her pocket. She put her arm in mine and we stood under my guava tree.
I felt deflated – my cousin
was not going to share. I was surprised Appachan gave in so easily and handed
over a higher low-denomination note. I swallowed the saliva that had gathered
in my mouth in anticipation of a meat puff.
One more time.
“Er, maybe we can get a meat puff with that.”
Rita’s thin shoulders lifted and sagged, and she clicked her tongue to
signal a negative.
“What are you going to do with the money?”
“Hmmm… I’m going to put it in my piggy bank.”
“The church box one?”
Children sometimes got a coin box in our church. Our church in Mumbai gave out wooden ones, with a small inscription indicating the purpose of the boxes. But our village church in Kerala gave out nice tin boxes with either Jesus staring into the heavens or St George spearing a dragon or Mother Mary holding baby Jesus painted on them in vivid blues and reds. At some point Roma and I realised the key to the hatch at the bottom of the conical tin box would stay with our parents and the money was meant to be handed to the church, eventually finding its way to the poor. Then we began to drop only low-denomination coins into the tins and hid the cash. Of course, we never spoke about it – we were acting sinfully. Our thoughts about money showed greed. Clandestine greedy thoughts were still a sin. Cash was meant for other things – sinfully ‘good’ things. One needed to be adroit in managing sin and ourselves.
Rita shook her head.
“Then what?”
“I want to buy some hair bands.”
My eyes roamed over her sparse head. We girls had to keep our hair long.
It was a family thing. Something about femininity and knowing our place etc,
etc, etc. Despite begging her parents for a boycut, like her
best friend’s, Rita was not allowed one. A month ago, while visiting her
mother’s brother’s family – recently visiting from the US – Rita had found her
uncle’s shaver. After watching him use it for a while, she used it on herself.
She sobbed at the inroads she had made on her head and a local barber
was called in to rectify the hairy issue. As Roma told me, it was extremely
funny and the family had had a hard time keeping straight faces. While she didn’t
quite get the chic pixie haircut she wanted, the sailor’s crew cut was now
growing out charmingly.
“You don’t have long hair,” I said, trying to be patient.
“Yes, but it will grow soon.”
“Are you sure?”
Rita looked alarmed. “Yes!”
“What if you want to keep it short again?”
“No. Want it long,” she said, her outer lip jutting and a fierce look
creeping into her face. I was suddenly nervous of her.
“How are we going to get Johnnycha’s phone number? I don’t think we can
enter Georgiechyan’s room – where would we look?” I gave up hopes of eating 10
rupees worth of anything.
“Maybe Appachan has the number in his phone book. I can check later,
when no one is looking.”
***
It was while Rita and I were standing near the tall long-suffering mango
tree, that we spotted the Mathan sisters – Eenya and Tara. “Let’s see if we can
get it from Thomachan,” I said.
Rita frowned. She didn’t like Thomachan – he was an oily character and
it was surprising he was friends with Johnny. But I knew they weren’t as
thick as Rasool and Johnny. For sure Rasool would have Johnny’s phone number,
but where did he live?
“Let’s go to Thomachan’s house and see if he’s got a phone book,” I
said.
“What if we get caught?”
“We’ll have to take that risk.”
“He doesn’t like people entering his room,” Rita said.
“We don’t have a choice. Maybe we could ask him for Rasool’s number.”
Even as I said it, I knew such a request would send a shock wave around the
family – Thomachan’s and ours –why was I asking for an older man’s phone
number, someone no one quite knew except for the fact that Johhny was great
friends with him. The few times I had met Johnny, Rasool had been around –
either buying cigarettes, reading a newspaper or sitting some way off and
watching us with narrowed eyes and no expression.
I shivered. I didn’t have a good feeling about all this. What was I
doing getting into more mischief. I had to accept that Sarah and Johnny were
not going to get together. “Maybe we shouldn’t do this.”
“Okay.”
I looked at Rita in surprise. I hadn’t expected it. “You’re okay with
it?”
“No. But if you want to give up, it is fine. I’ll get his number.”
“H-how?”
Her shoulders moved up a fraction and she turned towards the mango tree.
“Can you get that one?” She pointed at a ripe mango, that couldn’t be reached
with the pole.
I sighed and looked around. Many people didn’t know about my new slingshot (FC75, FC72, FC73). Every time I used it I had an illicit feeling, a high, like I was using contraband. My eyes focused on the windows along the side of the house facing us. Sarayumama and Mathanchyan were watching us from their window. I waved to them and they turned around and disappeared. I waited a while to see if they would return. Then I looked at our neighbours’ houses. It took several tries to bring down the mango with the slighshot – bruised, with some pulp hanging out. Sweet success.
I had a thought. “Do you know who moved my old slingshot to Sarayumama’s
room (FC73)?”
Rita hesitated. “You know?!”
“Er, no. No, I don’t.”
“You’re lying!”
“No. No. I don’t know!”
I stared at Rita in disbelief. All this time she knew, but now she
wasn’t going to tell. What was going on? “How would you know? You were with me
the whole time that day.”
A shrug and bland expression. I grabbed her. “Tell me!”
“I don’t know!” She pinched my upper arm viciously and I let her go. She
began running to the house, and I watched feeling confused. And I wondered
whether she was still interested in getting Johnychyan’s number.
***
I needn’t have worried.
While everyone was having their afternoon siesta, I saw Miss Pincher
rummaging through Appachan’s address book on his desk – a fat book that
Appachan sometimes forgot to lock up. She saw me watching from across the
dining room and shook her head.
I pointed at my chest with my thumb and my head with my forefinger and
mouthed ‘I have a plan’. I was not sure what, but it would come to me.
Rita had located Johnny’s parents’ home number, but Johnny’s wasn’t there.
“How can we ask his parents for Johnnycha’s number? They’ll want to know who we
are and why we want it,” Rita voiced my concern.
When we were sure no one was watching, we left the house. First we went
over to Kunjappachan’s house. We decided that asking our great uncle for the
phone number might be easier than asking our grandfather. But when we entered
the house, the side door was always unlocked for relatives, friends or workers,
we found Kunjappachan snoring on his bed. We looked at his table, but lost our
nerve. Unlike our grandfather’s table, this was piled high with newspapers,
magazines, papers, official looking papers in Malayalam, files, etc. There was
even a bowl of something edible resting precariously on one corner of the
table, and ants climbing the sides of the table to reach it. My great aunt was fast
asleep on a settee in the sitting room, all the curtains drawn.
We left Kunjappachan’s house without rifling through anything. In
hindsight, he would have asked us a lot of questions.
We crossed the road and went to Thomachan’s house. A quick look through
his window indicated my cousin was asleep. We scanned his room but saw nothing
that resembled a phone book.
“What if he hasn’t written it down anywhere?” Rita said. We hadn’t ever had
the need to be in Thomachan’s room. It looked dirty, and his table rivalled
Kunjappachyan’s. Fat books pinned down loose long note paper. A brown banana
peel rotted away on the edge of the plastic dust bin – not quite in or out.
“Maybe he remembers the phone number and doesn’t need to write it down,” Rita
whispered hoarsely in my ear. I shivered. That whisper tickled.
“Don’t think so. He’s failing in college.”
“Whattt? Who told you?”
“I heard Eapachyan tell Roychyan.” Eapachyan was Thomachan’s father and
my father’s first cousin and Roy was Kunjappachan’s brilliant grandson. “He
wanted Roychyan to give Thomachan a pep talk on studying harder.”
“B-But Thomachan is studying engineering!”
“I know.” To get into an engineering course one had to be good in maths
and science and thus had to have a brain. Thomachan had also got into a good
college. My grandmother suspected college girls were ruining Thomachan’s
concentration. Of course, I didn’t tell Rita that. The only person ruining
Thomachan was Thomachan.
The longer we kept our faces pressed into the bars of the window,
watching Thomachan scratch his crotch, cough and roll around his bed, the more
it dawned on us how futile it was to get Johnny’s phone number. He was out of
bounds to us – out of bounds to Sarah – the family didn’t want anything to do
with him, they had stopped talking about his family altogether, and here we two
girls were trying to keep a wound open. We weren’t letting Sarah heal.
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Rita said.
“I don’t either.”
We jumped off the ledge and walked slowly towards our house. At the gate,
we hesitated. The sun seemed to be in a hurry to leave and it was cool, the
sounds of silence enticing. Rita said it first. “We don’t need to go home… no
one will notice.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Let’s go to the junction.”
“Okay.”
We moved to the opposite side of the road so that our cousins would not
see us. We had second, third and fourth cousins living in the houses dotting both
sides of the road to the junction about a kilometre away. Most were likely to
be asleep now, but there was always the stray relative who liked the afternoon
quiet as much as we did. Rita and I enjoyed the sight of the river gushing
under the bridge, slowly letting our spit fall into the spray below us. We
walked towards the junction, but everything was closed, including the bakery
shop. I glanced at Rita and felt glad. She was looking at the closed shutters
glumly.
We walked past shuttered shops, only the medical store was open, which
we ran past because an uncle ran the place. But then we spotted Rasool’s Padmini
Premier parked on the road further along the road. He was wiping the windshield.
Rita started running towards him. “Achacha, can I have Johnnychyan’s phone number?” Rita poked Rasool in the midriff, causing the cigarette in his mouth to fall. Rita picked it up and held it up to him. He reached for it and wiped the butt against his white shirt, all the while looking at us speculatively.
“Why?”
“I want to talk to him.”
“About what?”
“Er, about stuff.”
“He may not want to talk to you.”
That stumped us. Why had we assumed Rasool would give us Johnny’s phone
number or that Johnny would want to talk to us.
“He told you that?” Rita’s voice squeaked.
“Eh…”
Rita’s back straightened and she gave Rasool the coldest look I have
ever seen her give anyone. She wasn’t a bit intimidated by Rasool, who was a beefy
six-footer. Rasool’s jaw slackened and he moved back slightly.
“Did he tell you he didn’t want to speak to me?” Rita repeated.
“No. No. Er. Who are you?”
“I want his number.”
Rasool’s jaw clenched. He took a deep puff of his cigarette, threw it and crushed it into the ground, both Rita and he eye duelling.
“You have a pen?”
“No.”
He located a piece of paper and a pen in the glove compartment of his
car and wrote down a number. “There are only seven numbers here. Bombay phone
numbers have eight numbers.” Rita waved the piece of paper at his chest. Rasool
took it and scanned the numbers. He leaned the paper against the car’s window,
struck out the old number and wrote it afresh. He was trying hard not to laugh,
which was easy to hide considering his enormous moustache.
Rita grabbed the paper, counted the numbers one more time, her eyes
moving from the first set of numbers to the next.
“Thank you, Uncle,” Rita smiled sweetly, though Rasool’s smile suddenly
died for some reason. Rita tugged my skirt and turned. We ran all the way back,
just in time for tea, getting in through the back.
***
When I went to the sitting room at 12.50am, Rita was already there,
happily waving a packet of chips.
“How did you get this?”
“The 10 rupees Appachan gave me.”
“You mean the 10 rupees you took.”
She shrugged. “Do you want some?”
“Let’s wait till the serial starts.”
A door opened. “Hide behind that curtain. Quick! Quiiiickkk!”
I lunged at the TV, switched it off and ran to the curtain nearest the door. I
held my breath. I could feel Rita panting beside me. I bent towards her ear,
“Shhhh.” She put her hand on her mouth and held her breath.
Through the curtain we saw a light growing brighter. It flashed around the
sitting room and then disappeared. I counted to five and then tiptoed to the
corridor, and saw the light disappear into Sarayumama’s room. Damn. Was Mobby
lurking again? I went into the storeroom and stood near Sonimol chechi’s room.
Not a noise. There was no light coming through the cracks in the wooden door.
I went back to find Rita. The phone started to ring. I shushed it involuntarily
and then picked it up to silence it.
I held it to my ear nervously, not speaking. Rita got out from behind
the curtain and stood next to me, listening.
We held our breath and waited for what seemed an eternity. Finally, the
person on the other side said, “How are you?”
******
This series is fictional and follows the narrator who is remembering events related
to a family vacation gone wrong in Kerala.
In this episode Rita and the narrator look for a way to contact Johnny, Sarah's fiancé, to ask him why he's decided to end his engagement to their cousin. But getting his phone number isn't as easy as the girls think.
Read the entire The Webs We Weave series here FC69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80,81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94
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