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| Joys of school (Photo credit: A. Peter) |
“Hey!” Jimmy pushed Mobby with both hands. Mobby
jumped off – too shocked to be his usual rude self. Jimmy shook me, and I took
in a deep quavering breath and the room stopped looking grey. Unfortunately,
the incident only excited more looks of annoyance among some of the elders,
notably my mother, grandmother and father’s sisters. I ignored them. A little
body pressed into my side, and I groaned. Rita and Eva, Sarojmama’s daughter –
a pestilential 11-year-old, sat beside me. But in the next instant, Roma hauled
Rita off her chair and flopped into it. Rita protested and tried to pull Roma
off, but it looked like she was trying to budge a massive bull. In the end, Eva
scooted to the next chair and Rita sat next to her sister. This was awful, like
a silent inquisition, a surveillance in progress – I felt like a fly knowing a
swatter was over its head.
I couldn’t ask my questions. Despite Roma disliking
Jimmy she wanted to know all that we were doing. Anjali had once suggested that
Jimmy might be interested in Roma and so never looked at her because he felt
shy. But he talked and joked with other girls – so bashfulness wasn’t the reason
for his disinterest.
Then Anjali suggested that Roma might be interested in
Jimmy and was miffed by his inattention. That was an interesting point of view,
so I watched the two at Sunday School, until I felt cock-eyed and decided to
stop. Stopping had to do with the realization that I was overanalysing
everything and clearly barking up the wrong tree.
“Masticate your food,” Jimmy muttered.
“Eh?”
“Eat! You’re attracting attention.”
I wanted to tell Jimmy that cows masticated their
food, not humans, but he was probably learning a new word with all the
livestock at his grandparents’ home. I could see what he meant when I looked
up, so I mixed the sambar into the rice, my mouth watering with the aroma, and
waited till his mouth was full. “Who’s C?” I whispered in his ear.
I acted innocent until Ashok stopped slapping Jimmy’s
back. He had choked on a piece of fish and was red in the face. He blew his
nose into his brother’s handkerchief, because of course he hadn’t carried one
or had lost his, and gave me a filthy look. That day in the church courtyard
(FC95), when Nidhi whacked me on the head, I knew who had written the love
letter that dear ‘love pigeon’ Nidhi ferried about the church and school
courtyards. I just could not figure out who ‘C’ was or why Jimmy was calling
himself a humongous lover T and writing such rot. Anjali’s theory was that
Jimmy was fronting for someone else.
I didn’t think so. Could it be the impossible had
happened and Jimmy had fallen in love with someone in school?
He was grim all through his meal, though it did not
affect his appetite. But I was forced to keep quiet because all the adults’
radars were trained on me now.
I used the ensuing quiet to work on my strategy.
Jimmy was going to fob off every question I had. I had lost the advantage of
surprise by asking him at lunch – where there was no privacy. Now he would
build his defenses in anticipation of my next set of questions.
Whenever I glanced at him, he was eating stiffly, and
his brother Paul’s eyes darted from Jimmy to me, forcing me to stay quiet.
Maybe I could use the telephone tonight. I had finally
discovered the code – Appachan had been making a call and I was standing nearby.
I had spent the rest of that day memorising it and celebrating the discovery.
******
Anjali and I couldn’t figure out why Jimmy was using
the initial ‘T’. Was he using an
alphabet from his surname. Was he writing
the notes to throw off anyone who’d intercept them? It was all farfetched. Why
would someone make Jimmy write a note that his girlfriend might not be able to
read? Jimmy’s handwriting was worse than a doctor’s.
Plus, it was too elaborate for Jimmy, who liked to
charge ahead first and then think. He wasn’t middle-man material.
And then the letter explained Paul’s interest in it.
Did he think his baby brother had a love interest? Paul should never know.
Jimmy would tell me. In his own time. Maybe. Maybe later. Maybe never.
At the gate, while bidding them goodbye, I told Jimmy,
“So you’re going to act as if there are no C and T and that you don’t know what
the note is about?”
“Shhhh!”
“Why? I have nothing to hide!”
“Shhh!”
“Don’t shhh me! Anyway, Paul’s been asking me
about the note.”
Before he could reply, his father grabbed his arm and
hustled him into a rickshaw. As the yellow and black rickshaw hurtled down the uneven road, he looked dismayed and
did not wave goodbye.
“What did you say to Jimmy?” Roma said softly, her
breath tickling my neck.
I turned and walked back to the house. A few steps
from the doorway, a sharp pain shot through my shoulder – Roma’s fingers were
digging into my flesh. She pulled me away from the door and slammed me against
the wall, her arm jamming my throat.
“You idiot. You dare fool around with me!” Roma thundered in my face, her breath smelling of sambar and pickle. There was a bit of curry leaf stuck between her bared teeth.
There was nothing for it… I pinched her breast hard.
She screamed and let me go, grabbing her chest but feeling embarrassed to rub
it. I darted into the house, and looked for a hiding place. None was available,
so I sat near Pilipochyan, and pretended to be interested in a Malayalam
magazine. Roma rushed in and stopped. I looked up nervously. She gave me a
dirty look, but seemed intimidated by Pilipochyan’s presence, especially when I
held out the magazine and pointed at an article. Roma marched off. She would be
waiting for me, sometime and somewhere, probably with her minions.
******
“I tell you, Anjali, he’s hiding something! He’s
probably T!”
“No way! There’s no girl in school who could make him
interested in her.”
“What rubbish. There are hundreds of pretty girls in
school. It’s a paradise for boys.”
“But you know Jimmy, na. He doesn’t like ordinary
girls.”
“Kuch bhi. He talks only to ordinary girls.”
“Why are you whispering? And why are you calling me so
late at night?”
“Everyone’s sleeping and I’m not supposed to be using
the telephone here. They’d skin me if they knew I was making a long-distance
call. Why haven’t you been replying to my letters?” My cries of desperation in
longhand, I wanted to add.
“Er, I was busy.”
“Doing what?”
“You know Trevor?”
“Trevor Mascarenhas, your brother’s friend?” And
Anjali’s latest crush.
“Yes. He’s got a new girlfriend.”
“What! Who’s your source?”
“It’s not important.”
“Of course it is.” It was the difference between
reliable and unreliable gossip.
There was silence on the other side, so I asked, “How
is Anita taking it?” Anita was Trevor’s erstwhile girlfriend. She was a year
our senior in school and only became our focus because she and Trevor had
become close walking up and down the shady corners of the school during recess.
Their break-up had been a hot topic for days in our class, because many girls
had a crush on Trevor. And, unfortunately for Anita, she was in our school bus.
Not that she spoke about Trevor, although when she did speak to her friends
about him it was in whispers. We tried to catch every word despite the sounds
of whooshing air and Mumbai traffic coming in through the bus’s open windows.
We closed the window next to us, and suffocated in the heat while listening to
the whispered conversations going on in the seat in front of us. We heard
snatches, mostly cuss words and expressions of sympathy from Anita’s friends.
For this privilege, we had to dislodge the kids that
were already in the seat behind Anita, which led to a one-sided scuffle. One
sided because we were bigger than the younger kids, although we had to get
through some loud wailing and the occasional well-aimed kicks to our ankles.
Things settled down soon, when the children couldn’t get a rise out of us – our
efforts at eavesdropping meant we stayed hunched unresponsively in our seats
for most of the long ride home.
“I think Anita has taken the breakup very well. She’s
hooked up with Benny Wong.”
“What!”
“And Trevor took Sarita Kumar to Juhu Beach.”
There were too many things going on. Suddenly Jimmy
was unimportant. Trevor-Sarita, Benny-Anita – the mind boggled. All the girls
wanted to be friends with Benny, because he was clearly a foreigner, though his
family – originally from China – had been in Mumbai for over 60 years. He was
very cute and a flirt. A charmer, a girl’s boy. Anita was the unattainable
hottie, and Trevor’s ex.
“So where are we on ‘T’…?” I spotted the bunch of keys
dangling from Appachan’s drawer. He rarely forgot them at his desk. At night he
dropped the keys into the top drawer of the chest of drawers in his bedroom.
But tonight they were innocently stuck in a keyhole. I pulled the drawer’s
handle – it was open. I moved the lamp closer to the edge of the desk – papers,
envelopes, official-looking letters, printed pamphlets.
“You’ll have to try harder with Jimmy,” Anjali said,
startling me. This was easier said than done. Anyway, I had probably run up a
large telephone bill for Appachan. Would he ask the telephone exchange for a
bill with all the telephone numbers listed, like the cops did in American TV
serials? Or maybe he’d call all the telephone numbers and verify them for
himself. “Will ring you another day, Anjali.” I hung up before she could
reply.
Anjali would be annoyed, but there was Appachan’s desk to be explored. I listened for a sound around the house, then used the keys to open the other drawers – files, bundles of cash – 100s and 500s and smaller ones of lower-denomination notes, a little filigreed silver bowl containing small change, a pair of spectacles. In the lowest one, I found some dried flowers sticking out of a dictionary, big fat books that seemed to be encyclopedias but were ancient telephone books, some smooth white stones that I suspected were the ones that were found in the flower pot in Sarayumama’s room and had likely been in my jhola the day I damaged Bobby (FC72, FC73), and irrevocably spoilt relations with my eldest aunt at the start of my vacation here. In the lowest drawer, there were some albums, yellowing documents and leaves of loose paper, and… I gasped, feeling the adrenaline rush through me faster, the photographs from the loft – the ones of the handsome Sardar and Sarojmama (FC69, FC70). How had Appachan been able get up into the loft and retrieve them?
I pulled out the envelop and looked at the photos.
They were a handsome couple. The colours in the photos were fading. There were
some photos taken in a garden against a large flower bush. Sarojmama had a
large red rose behind one ear and her long plaited hair rested on one shoulder.
There was a photo of them holding hands with the Taj Mahal in the background,
just one photo – a polaroid snap. I had a strange sad feeling looking at the
pictures. I looked at them over and over, wondering what had happened to their
romance, why they hadn’t stayed together. I put the pictures back into their
cover reluctantly and then saw the letters addressed to Sarojmama, tied in a
bundle, right at the bottom. I tugged one out from the side, but it was
likely to tear. I knelt on the ground and reached in. My heart jerked at the
sound of a door opening.
I shoved the envelop and its photos back on top of the
bundle of letters and moved the rest of Appachan’s papers over them and locked
the drawer as quietly as I could. I stayed under the table, switched off the
lamplight hurriedly, and gently slipped the key back into the top right-hand
drawer of Appachan’s desk. I wanted to come back and read the letters, but I
didn’t want to risk taking Appachan’s keys – he would raise hell if he couldn't find them. But it was
unlikely this opportunity would come again. I wondered if I should have kept
one of the photographs, if I needed them. For purposes of blackmail or to put my aunt in her place in an argument.
The door to the bathroom in the corridor opened, and
closed noisily. I keyed the locking code back into the telephone and ran back
to my bedroom.
******The narrator makes a long distance call to her best friend and is apprised of new developments.
******
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******
