Page 4 of All Our Evenings

I laughed.

Ganesh was still looking at me intently, waiting for an answer.

I said I didn’t.

“I love her,” Ganesh volunteered. His voice was oddly deeper when he said this. It seemed to radiate.

“Will you introduce her to me?” Ganesh asked. “Come, sit.”

The boys made room. A welcoming gap opened up in front of me. As if I were being drawn into this other dimension. A place where I had friends.

I told Ganesh I knew Ruhee very well. Would I put in a word for him? would I engineer a meeting between them? Would I know if she might love him too? Would I know if she had an egalitarian character or a high-minded character? Yes, of course. To all of it: Yes. I didn’t even have to think.

I felt so upbeat that I went home straightaway, forgetting to roam the neighborhood like I usually did, until the streetlights came on and the gentle waft of burning mosquito coils rolled in with the evening breeze. I went into my house through the kitchen door in the back, which could be accessed from the yard so I needn’t ring the doorbell.

I found the door bolted from the inside. I looked through the window, intending to reach in and unbolt the latch, but stopped. Priya and my mother were at the dining table having dinner. Priya was eating a sweet bun with gusto, and our mother was gazing at her with a pleasurable smile on her face. She reached to ease the bun away from Priya, hurriedly spreading a thick layer of butter over the bun, saying ‘wait a minute sweet thing!’ over Priya’s protestations, then handed the bun back to her.

I sat for a while on the kitchen stoop, until I heard the sound of the table being cleared, the chairs pushed back in, the lights switching off. When I heard footsteps in the kitchen, I moved closer to the door and pulled my feet in, so no part of me would be visible through the kitchen window. I heard the click of the door being unlatched.

I stayed on the stoop until darkness fell, and the mosquitoes chewed my ankles and I had to wave them off by sound alone.

“I love her,” Ganesh said again, this time in a more contemplative way.

It was how it used to be in those days. You saw someone and felt inexplicably drawn to them; a sudden heat crept over your body and mind and soon, crossing paths with them again and again you were utterly in love with that person, without ever having spoken to them. It was a binding choice, to love a person, and you couldn’t ever take it back. That was the idea of love passed down to us, and the world was limited to what was passed down.

Ganesh wanted me to meet him outside Ruhee’s house. “At five,” he said, “that’s when she goes to her tutor’s.” He knew where she lived, which surprised me, but I said Okay.

I went to Ruhee’s house at a quarter to, and loitered. Her house was a one-story cottage with a green gate. Rosebushes across the borders. It didn’t have a flat roof, the way most people poured the slab, with the expectation of Portions. It was pitched and tiled. I could spot sparrow nests in it.

I made a turn at the end of the street and came back up again, just as Ganesh arrived on his motorbike. I went up to where he was parked.

Ganesh was wearing a black T-shirt, blue jeans, and sneakers. The T-shirt had a small tick at the pocket that I recognized as the Nike tick. If I squinted a little, the white spots on his cheeks could easily be dismissed as the side effects of a summer tan. His hair was thick, curly and short. He could pass as someone from my school, easily.

“They belong to my parents’ son,” he said. “Took them out of the washing.”

The way he phrased it was so odd. Not just that he didn’t say, ‘they belong to my brother.’ But it was the way he said ‘my parents’―his tone was as if they owned him; as if he was a car.

“What school do you go to?” I asked.

He shrugged and looked sideways as if I were making fun of him. I waited and he said, “I don’t.”

“What do you mean you don’t?”

“I have work,” he said.

“What work?”

Ruhee came out. Ganesh nudged me, briefly, with only the tips of his fingers grazing my elbow. “Arjun!” Ruhee said, smiling widely. She was surprised to see me.

“This is my friend,” I said, “his name is Ganesh.”

Ruhee said Hi, and asked which school he went to. I said he went to mine, before Ganesh could answer. Ganesh looked at me quizzically but did not contradict me.

We began walking together. First Ruhee and I talked, while Ganesh wheeled his motorbike behind. I glanced back. He met my eyes. Only then did it occur to us the complication of the motorbike’s presence.

We were coming up to the Red House, and I began to automatically cross the street, going over to the other side. But Ruhee stayed where she was. She laughed at me.

“You are being so silly, Arjun,” she said, pushing her hair behind her ears.