Page 29 of All Our Evenings

“Oh, Ruhee!” my mother had said, “Why aren’t you at school?”

Ruhee said. “I wanted to see if Arjun was home.”

“Oh … no dear. His chicken pox is almost over, thank god. But we sent him to his grandaunt’s place in the village. Some greenery and clean air will do him good. He missed so much school we thought what’s a few more days. Anyhow Uncle is a teacher, Arjun will catch up, and anyhow he is so bright.”

Ruhee stayed at the door as if to say something.

“Do you want to come in and have some buttermilk, beta?”

Then Ruhee asked about Ganesh―Our friend Ganesh was how she put it―“Oh,” my mother replied. “I don’t know, dear. Arjun never mentioned him. Ganesh, you said? Is it that boy who used to live at the big house? He came here once, to cut down the papaya tree for us.” Ruhee said something I couldn’t hear. “Oh, everyone thought he was one of the sons but no, he was some tribal kid they kept, to help around the house. He was even going to be married soon … I can’t think of why Arjun would know him well. Those tribal louts … who knows? Drunks, all of them. Uneducated. Runaways. Exploiting schoolgirls up and down the street.”

I watched her go, close the gate behind her. She looked so forlorn. I wished she dressed more conservatively, it would have been protection against what my mother was about to do to her.

After all, it was a small, insular neighborhood. The same maids were employed up and down the street. People talked.

When my mother sent me to Sugunakar Rao’s to bring home groceries, he actually said to me: “Glad to see you aren’t roaming around with that girl anymore, Arjun. You’re a good boy. Tell your mother Hello.”

Ganesh was assumed to have committed love suicide at the Red House because of Ruhee. It became neighborhood lore. And like the lore around the Red House, the truth of the thing did not matter, something real could be made from part-truths. For their part, Ganesh’s parents did not participate in confirming or denying the neighborhood gossip; for their part, they thought he’d run away from home. In any case, they were not in the habit of talking to their neighbors. They did not try to find him, and for every reason, his disappearance suited them.

In her opinion, Ruhee said, it was her own fault. She thought the rumors about the love suicide began because she’d asked one too many people, one too many times; his friends at the gymkhana; the groundskeeper; the maid who worked at Ganesh’s house. One too many times she’d said, “My friend Ganesh.”

“It was so awful,” Ruhee said. “They used to wait outside my house, Arjun, his friends. For what? What did they want from me? Take revenge on me? They followed me everywhere. At first I pretended as if they didn’t exist, but then they’d throw things at me. Pebbles. Crumpled paper they’d pick up from the street…” She touched the heel of her hand to her forehead. “One of the boys used to walk right behind me, always too close, and once, when I went to the shop to get milk … he followed me, and opened a bottle of something. I ran but he splashed it across my face. I screamed, because I thought it was acid. I still remember him laughing.”

I tried to draw her close but she said no.

“I could never go anywhere without being given dirty looks. Even at my math tutor’s place, it was as if I was contaminated. None of the other girls would talk to me. And one of my classmates from school went to the same tutor … and word reached my school. I couldn’t escape it anywhere.”

“My mother did this to you Ruhee,” I wanted to say. “She thought this was how my name would never come up, this was how she was protecting her family.”

Ruhee said: “One day, I came out of my house―remember my old house, Arjun? With the tiled roof and the little green gate?―I came out of my house and on our compound wall they’d written Slut. Big blocky letters, in chalk, like they do on the notice board at school. I washed it off the wall with the hose before my parents saw it. But the next morning, it was there again. Slut.”

Why should I be allowed to look away from Ruhee’s anguished face?

Ruhee’s voice shook. When I tried to touch her, she nudged my hand away.

“It’s so stupid,” she said, sounding angry and distressed. “Why should I feel ashamed, Arjun? What did I do wrong? Nothing. What did anyone gain by tormenting me like that? I’m older now, I know better, I know that is not how you treat a sixteen-year-old girl, what was done to me was despicable, but why do I still feel so horribly ashamed of myself?”

Tears ran down her cheeks.

Never once did she think that Ganesh left her because something terrible happened to him. That he left her on his own volition was easier for her to believe. And she wasn’t one to go around begging for anyone’s affection, no she wasn’t. She mourned herself, the girl―sweet, trusting, unmarked―that she had been before she met him.

Her parents found jobs in Udupi and moved. A fresh start. In Udupi, every morning for months and months, she would be covered in cold sweat leaving her house, her heart beating in her throat she’d check the compound wall to make sure nothing was written on it. It was how the summer ended for her, an end to the days of grace and joy in both our lives.

“He did that to me, Arjun,” she said. “We thought we knew him. But he did that to me. Left me to the mercy of his friends.”

Ruhee put her arms around me and rested her cheek against my shoulder. When she spoke again I felt her lips move against my skin. She said, “But you make me feel free of it, Arjun. I’m still there, but so what? I’m also here.”

Why should I allow the horrific clenching sensation around my heart to rise into my throat? Why should I be allowed to cry? I won’t tell her because I was my father’s son. So I listened to her tell me all this and never once did I look away. Never once did I betray my family. I had to protect them, it was my duty.

On my own first day of school, long after that summer ended, my mother came into my room with my ironed uniform and my polished black shoes. I had the chicken pox you see. And now that it has passed, I was going to be out of doors for the first time in months.

She laid the uniform on my bed, put the shoes on the floor and told me to hurry up, my breakfast was getting cold. Then she said, in the tone of realizing something, “You are your father’s only son. For you alone he will do anything.”

I didn’t fully grasp what she meant until I got dressed and went into the dining room.

I was aware of my father being in and out of the house these months. But seeing him at the dining table, also dressed for school, reading the newspaper, I realized that he’d moved back in. He wasn’t living with Gita Miss anymore. He’d left her. I made that happen.

My mother handed him a cup of coffee and he took it without looking at her, just like when he lived here before, as if he’d never left. My mother met my gaze, and I felt a rush of sympathy and understanding. This was how I was meant to live my life―in the lush, soothing reassurance that I would never come to harm. I had him, and because of me, my mother did too.