Page 23 of All Our Evenings

I fell back and switched sides with Ruhee abruptly. Ruhee stumbled mid-sentence and said what? And I said nothing. Holding her elbow to steady her so she was facing the road rather than the fence.

The autorickshaw with the boys chanting maar fell quiet, went past, and Ruhee noticed nothing. She rolled her eyes and kept walking, continuing her tirade against a nun at her school who had it out for her. Ruhee went to a girls’ school, she did not know how boys her age thought, and so she did not know how men thought. She was too naive, and I felt it my duty to protect her. Even if my instincts were absent, or if I was too late to act, and the boys in the autorickshaw did hit Ruhee, or push her into the fence, scrape up her elbow and cheeks for no reason other than that she was walking down the road, it wasn’t like we’d tell anyone. Even someone as brashly self-possessed as Ruhee would hide it from her parents. Because the experience of being tormented for girlhood, though not permitted, was understood. Why should she be understood without her permission? Like Gita Miss, she did not know to dress conservatively, because the culture of her mind did not match the culture of the society she lived in. Ruhee wore trainers and jean shorts with fringe borders, or sleeveless cotton blouses, high heels with clear plastic straps, knee-length plaid skirts. She wore beads in her hair, and chewed pink-colored gum sometimes with her mouth open. Of course, I went to a school with uniforms so it wasn’t as though I knew how girls my age are supposed to dress, but I knew how women are supposed to dress. It was the same. They were both fragile, women and girls, and in a moment society could turn against them and attack them.

I had been waiting on my stoop for what felt like eternity, going over things in my head like this confusedly. I was afraid my mother and Priya would turn up before Ganesh and Ruhee; she wouldn’t stop me from leaving, but I didn’t want my friends to see her not care. I wondered if Ganesh and Ruhee had forgotten about me. I felt particularly sad at the second thought. More time passed. The street hawkers ceased their parade up and down the street.

The first orange rays of sunset were falling into my eyes when a shiny black Lancer came to a screeching halt in front of my gate. Beeped the horn.

I approached the car with some trepidation. It was a very nice car, a Mitsubishi Lancer with a rear spoiler; a car with strikingly masculine looks, at a time when owning a car, any car, was aspirational. I remembered the line of ash the priest had swiped across my forehead that morning and wiped it away; I didn’t want to look provincial getting into a Mitsubishi Lancer.

The car had black tinted windows so I immediately did not see who was sitting on the passenger side. I tried the door on the passenger side but it didn’t open. Then I spotted Ruhee, in mid-conversation with Ganesh, reaching behind her to pull up the lock on the back door. I got in and sat quietly. It was air-conditioned, smelled very nice.

In the car with them―Ganesh driving, Ruhee beside him―I wondered again how far their plans to have sex in the Red House had progressed. I was certain it hadn’t already happened. “Where are we going?” I asked.

Ruhee was in the middle of putting a cassette in the stereo and she didn’t answer. I observed with discomfort, how comfortable she was with handling things in Ganesh’s car. The familiarity bothered me. I didn’t ask again and sat back quietly. Ganesh, with one hand on the steering wheel and another on the back of Ruhee’s seat, looked in the rear windshield and expertly U-turned the car. He didn’t even meet my eyes, as if his presence at my home this morning had never happened. Who did he think he was? This imported car with the rear spoiler belonged to his parents who were not his parents. Who was he? Adopted, sold, bought, soon going to be married to a servant girl.

After we got on the main road, we stopped at the kirana shop. Ganesh lowered the window on the passenger side, leaned over Ruhee and asked the shop boy to come over. He told him to get three packets of chips and three Coca-Colas. Cans not bottles. Chilled. From behind the counter in the shop, I made out the expression on Sugunakar Rao’s face. Pure astonishment. I thought it irresponsible of Ganesh to let Ruhee be sighted in a car with boys, wearing jean shorts and listening to music, asking for chips and Coca-Cola with the window lowered; it was the worst place in the neighborhood to be seen, the kirana shop. What a terrible gossip that man was, it was why my mother hated him.

We got back on the main road and again stopped at the petrol bunk. When Ganesh got out, Ruhee turned and smiled at me and took a deep, loud breath as if looking at me for the first time. Her smile was so sweet, her cheeks dimpling like that. She said she’d missed me, and said how many days had it been; but she kept starting her sentences with “it feels like…” Before I could repeat my question on where we were going she said, “We’re going to the Exhibition.” That she’d heard me before but was answering me only now felt much worse than if she’d never answered me at all. I could have pretended she hadn’t heard me. I glanced out of the window and saw Ganesh take out his wallet, hand a hundred-rupee note to the petrol bunk attendant. He watched the meter click and turn as the petrol sloshed into the tank. Suddenly I had the sense of how Ganesh would look like as an adult.

From their conversation after we got back on the road, I gathered that they’d been to a movie together. Dil Se. They talked about the train song Chaiyya Chaiyya. They talked about the tragic ending. I realized that, in the past weeks, they’d been meeting without me. They’d even gone to a movie. Why didn’t they ask me? And they weren’t even trying to hide it from me; if they did, it would’ve meant I was a person.

We arrived at the Exhibition grounds and went straight to the place with the carousels and the giant wheel. There was a long queue at the giant wheel so we joined it first. Though I hadn’t eaten a meal since the morning, because of the chips and the Coca-Cola I wasn’t hungry. Ganesh and I were standing beside each other, Ruhee was between us; resting her elbows on each of our shoulders she was laughing so much, with so much lightness about her, telling us about the gardener they used to have, who loved their plants so much he drowned them in water all the time until all the plants died. Then the gardener had to leave because he didn’t have a job anymore and they only kept a small lawn with a few rosebushes. I remember this part because this conversation was immediately preceding a commotion at the front of the queue, some argument about cutting the line, as people are wont to do, and as expected everyone else wanted to see what was going on. There was some pushing and jostling and after everyone settled down again, Ruhee grew very quiet and asked if she could stand ahead of me. I moved to make room and glanced at the group of boys standing directly behind us, guffawing amongst themselves. Ganesh noticed nothing.

When the giant wheel cart went up, I held Ruhee’s hand. She returned the pressure, her lips stretched over the shape of her mouth, but she was no longer smiling.

After we came back down, Ruhee stayed close to me. Ganesh wanted to join the queue again, have another go on the giant wheel. Ruhee said no, and Ganesh looked annoyed. “Fine,” he said, as if Ruhee was an inconvenience.

“Let’s get something to eat,” he said.

no.

“Popcorn?”

no.

“Cotton candy?”

no.

“What’s the matter?” he said roughly.

Tears ran down Ruhee’s cheeks but she turned away, wiped her face against her sleeve. She said she wanted to go home.

There was a fuming, irritated silence all the way to the parking lot. Ganesh didn’t want to go home, obviously, all that trouble, the stops, the petrol, the planning, the air-conditioned Lancer, all to arrive here and leave immediately; she was being difficult. I didn’t say anything because it was Ruhee’s wish to say or not say. But I sensed that whatever Ganesh was going to say in the car on the way home, whatever he might say later, was going to hurt Ruhee even more, and Ganesh would be ignorant of why she was being so difficult.

Ruhee sat in the car but I loitered. Ganesh came over. He fished out his cigarettes and lit one as if to calm down. He leaned against the driver side window. So I told him what happened in the queue near the giant wheel. I was sorry to have violated Ruhee’s confidence, but I didn’t want Ganesh to be mean to her on the way home.

His face was expressionless when I told him. He finished his cigarette and stubbed it under his shoe. With no explanation to Ruhee―he had the car keys, she was going to wait―he took me back into the grounds. We searched near the giant wheel, and the length and breadth of the entertainment area. Ganesh didn’t give up, didn’t care that Ruhee had been waiting for thirty minutes or so by herself, with no explanation.

Finally we found them near the eating area, jovially sharing a table and laughing over plates of pav bhaji or pani puri. I said I didn’t know who exactly, but they were all laughing. Ganesh did not care that I couldn’t pick out the person. He grabbed one of them from the table at random. They were only boys, around school age like us, but probably went to respectable schools like mine; I thought this because the rest of them did not come forward to defend the one that Ganesh picked to beat on.

Ganesh was strong and tall, and most of all, his face was frightening.

It is untranslatable, the things he said while he beat on the boy, kicking him in the gut. Untranslatable not because there aren’t literal, English equivalents, but because I am ashamed to say them. It was possible that the boy getting the beating at Ganesh’s hands was innocent of direct crime; just like the pickpocket who had the misfortune of crossing paths with my father might’ve been innocent. The misfortune being visited upon them could be horribly scarring, lifelong experiences, and they might be unearned, might be unjust.

Ganesh used expletives that made the hair on my arms stand on end. He called the boy’s mother something foul, said he’d pay a visit to his sister. It was all of it so unseemly in a way my father’s beating of the pickpocket was not. I didn’t know such language. Ganesh did, because that was who he was; that was his society, the society of servant boys who screamed ‘maar’ as they dove by Ruhee in an autorickshaw. Yes, I recognized those boys as Ganesh’s friends from the gymkhana. Ganesh, with his long gangly arms and fuzzy tattoo, who cared what language he used? Whom he beat up, how he behaved? Who came asking after him? He wasn’t even in school.

Now it wasn’t just Sugunakar Rao, it was a whole lot of people who witnessed this sight of Ganesh claiming Ruhee. And Ruhee, what would she say if I told her what Ganesh did? She was waiting in the car for us. How would she prefer him to act? What would she want? She was so unpredictable, she might even be okay with it. But she wasn’t asked.