Chapter 2

Every lower middle class two-room home in Mumbai has a cot that has four to six thin cotton mattresses on it, which more likely than not, are not made to fit the size of the cot. In a family of four, every night three of these mattresses come off the cot and the family sleeps on them and the head of the family sleeps on the surviving mattress. Every morning the three mattresses go back on the cot and make carpet area, sans the carpet, available for the day. My home was no different. My mother, brother and I slept on the floor, and my father, after calculating salaries and wages for the railways, slept on the remainder mattresses on the cot. I had never seen it any other way for the past twenty years. Each night of my youth on the mattress was a wish to make a lot of money so that my mother could also get a good night sleep on a comfortable mattress. My father could rest in an armchair and read all the news papers that he wanted to. My brother, well he could take care of himself. I cared less

I often went to Koutuk’s house to study. I often stayed back and we watched the beautiful girls in his building. Koutuk’s father used to work for an advertising agency. He had everything that I wish my father had. They lived in a plush housing complex in a flat on the twelfth floor, overlooking a well manicured garden. He had enough beds in his house for eight people. They even had eight cots! Koutuk’s father was a person I looked up to. He spoke like he knew everything in this world and seemed like a man who was capable of doing anything. He even travelled to London and New York. He knew so much. His mother was like a mother that we all know; loving, caring, affectionate, and a disciplinarian. I thought this was how all mothers in the world were. Most of my friends had mothers like this. Most celluloid mothers were like this. I wished my mother was like this. Koutuk’s mother was the mother I never had. Koutuk was an only child. He had everything he could wish for but Koutuk didn’t wish for much. He was a happy person – by default. Most things never hurt him or caused him anguish. He never felt the need for things. Maybe this happens when you know things are available and possible.

In school, Koutuk somehow managed to get a rank, ace his tests, answer all questions. He understood integration and differentiation like it was simple division. I could barely do the first step of integration. I could barely spell calculus. I managed to pass my class however, always, and get promoted. Koutuk and I were last-benchers. For eight years we sat together. Our school was a like home to us, more than what we actually called home. It was the best place in the world. We had our nooks and corners. In the school ground we displayed our prowess at athletics, to appreciating looks from the girls. For eight years we ate from each others’ lunch boxes. We did a whole lot of things other than studying. We decorated our desks for all the grateful juniors to see. We inscribed the euglena on the desk, labelled the euglena, all its excretion points and the nucleus. We participated in debates. We were house captains, rivals, in good spirit. I was the geography teacher’s blue eyed boy, Koutuk, obviously was the Math teacher’s. Whatever we did, we did together. We ruled. In the last year of our school, academically the most critical year of all, we fell in love. Both fell in love together, unfortunately with the same girl.

Anita Ulall was God’s gift to our otherwise insipid life. She made life, and all the things that parents kept telling us, seem so much worthwhile. She had come from a place in South India that I didn’t care to pronounce. She was a fairly reserved person, when she joined class. In a class where every girl looked either like your sister, mother or a teacher, she evoked newfangled feelings in our pubescent minds.

I have read many books, by many authors. It seems that the protagonist always looks at the eyes of a character and describes the entire personality. To save my life, I have never been able to do it. I get to know people when I work with them. The authors say, “They were beautiful and clear eyes, yet they had a hint of pain in them, a pain almost forgotten, yet they sparkled to look at the future that awaited them.” Bullshit. I have never seen pain in eyes. I have seen it on bodies or contorted faces. Eyes, when I see them are big or small, coloured or not. Anita had brown eyes, small, pretty, and perfect for the longish face that she had. She had lips as if Arjun had stencilled them out of his bow. I still won’t be able to explain it to you like most authors do, I am not an author myself; it was just her – in her entirety, that made you want her – forever – by your side.

That entire year I slept a content person. I said to myself, “Sleep tight, think of what the stars might.” The sentence rhymed; didn’t make much sense, but it didn’t matter. Anita was a part of my life, she was mine. Short of reading Mills & Boon, I was a hopeless romantic. Anita did strange things to us. Koutuk’s grades started falling, mine started looking better. Back home, my father was gloating at his upbringing. My brother thought I was cheating in my unit tests. My mother just nodded with a hint of a smile. I didn’t care.

That entire year went by, full of love. Neither of us ever expressed our love. We just became more distant. I studied alone; I didn’t go to his house. The community building that we lived in, had a well lit staircase. Rich people paid tax for the electricity on my staircase. Koutuk studied at home, at a desk, with more stationery than he required. The text in the textbooks was not making sense for him. None of our overtures towards Anita were obvious. With Anita, we exchanged biology journals, worked on a science project together, met after school, joked, and laughed, hands in pockets and feet drawing imaginary geometrical shapes on the floor. Koutuk and I employed every skill to get her attention. Everyday was pregnant with the hope that the next day would be the day that we could claim our love from God himself, or herself – in this politically correct age. Those days, God was a guy; he made sure Anita was a part of our lives. He was the best.

The last few months of school year bought the pangs of the final exams, dread of the future seeped slowly. Marks and an admission to engineering or medical wasn’t so much the issue. I was more concerned what I would tell Anita’s father. Engineer or Doctor? I hated biology. Couldn’t do anything worthwhile in Math. What if I became an actor? Film stars make a lot of money. Her father would ask me about my future and how I would keep his darling daughter happy. Ignore the fact that I had no idea what her father looked like, what he thought, or what he believed. I didn’t even know if her father was alive or not. I just assumed that he was. These were the days of getting influenced by feature films – our ethos, in fact our life itself, was shaped by how a boy and girl in love would break the barriers of the world and live in some forest or a village that even Arundati Roy wouldn’t know. The potential father-in-law was always a moustache wielding, 303- toting, ex-defence person who killed people in war. He smoked a pipe or a cigar. The children would rebel, the boy would work in a quarry or cut wood, never mind that the boy was a management graduate from some godforsaken city in America.

Koutuk was a true romantic; I guess he would have become a lumberjack, if the situation called for it. His father could even afford him a management degree from that godforsaken city in America. When I think back, I think he could’ve become a lumberjack, I could not. He had that edge over me. I hated hard labour. Why was it so that true love and reality were always enemies? I would rather study hard and clear my medical entrance. In fact, I would rather be an accountant or a bank officer and have half the year off in holidays and paid leave, even get loans at low interest rates. If my father pulled a few strings I could become a Travel Ticket Examiner. A TTE career had great potential; imagine the amount of bribes from ticket less travellers. The second largest railway network in the second most populated country, summed up to a good earning. Forget calculus, my basic mathematics was good.

For all these dreams and plans, not much happened, except that Koutuk and I slowly parted ways. Anita of course moved on after the exams, without a trace – her family moved to Mizoram. Is that a place where anybody goes? The only thing that we knew about Mizoram was Aizwal – its capital. That too because our geography teacher made us remember by heart, the capitals of all twenty-two states. That’s how many we had then, before every individual in the country felt like having one for himself, or herself. They gave it the reason of good governance and regional focus, good governance is not slave to size, all it requires is the will.

Our love for Anita remained as unexpressed as the draft of a novel in a publishers trash can. There were no shrieks, no groans, no wailing, not even contorted faces, just a silent death. No grievance, no tears, life went on as usual.