Page 8 of All Our Evenings

“Does he beat you?” he asked, in the tone of asking me whether he watered the lawn. A matter of daily course.

I shook my head, letting an expression of something like disgust escape me.

“That’s nice,” he said. He drew the pack of cigarettes out again, fished one out but did not light it.

I felt the need to remedy my mistake. “He doesn’t live with us,” I said.

“Why not?”

“He lives with his mistress,” I said. But I substituted ‘mistress’ with the crassest word I knew. Something like kept woman, loose woman? Something that abutted prostitute, whore. The things my mother said about Gita Miss when Priya wasn’t around. But as soon as I said it, I felt regret. Gita Miss was not a kept woman. Not a prostitute. She was my Sanskrit teacher. I suppose he saw it all on my face, plain as day. Ganesh always could.

“Is that really true?” he said.

I shook my head.

I thought Ganesh would ask me to tell the truth then. But instead he asked, “Have you ever been with a girl?”

They saw me. Gita Miss did, first. I tried to leave, but I couldn’t. I heard the clink of my father’s belt, a sound I overheard every day when he changed after coming home from school, now displaced into the empty language room. “Say good afternoon to Miss,” my father said. I said good afternoon. Then he walked me back to the library, a hand on my shoulder.

“Yes,” I said.

“You have?” Ganesh looked amazed.

“There are these language rooms in my school,” I said. “All day they remain empty, you know, used only during language period; an hour a day. No one sees what’s going on otherwise.”

Ganesh leaned forward, he seemed like he was holding back a question, or questions. I could see them sitting on the tip of his tongue.

“She was wearing a skirt,” I said.

“But how,” he said. He looked confused, excited.

“Just pressed it inside,” I said.

“Does it hurt?” he asked.

“It didn’t hurt,” I said. I looked at the highway lights, the sand lorries passing.

“Is that really true?” he said.

I shook my head. I drew my legs back in, and slowly, bracing my palm against the overhead tank I stood up. Ganesh watched me but did not react. A moment later, he put the pack of cigarettes back into his pocket and stood also.

We did not speak, on the way downstairs. Even at the gate outside, I said nothing, I simply nodded in his direction before walking towards home.

At the Hospital, I walked past the general admission ward on the second floor with the dark green curtain separators and white metal beds and its fracture-patients and eye-injury patients and laboring women. The staff knew me here, and strictly speaking I did not need to go through the general ward at all; I could reach the staircase for the long-term care ward from the ground floor. But once in a while there would be a new supervisory nurse who’d glance at me inquiringly, and I could tell she wanted to ask me who I was, who I was visiting, what I was to them, to tell me off, catch me out. But then she’d notice my clothes and my manner and let me pass. Today nobody noticed me pass.

At the entrance to the long-term ward, Raja, the compounder, was sitting on his stool. He was waiting for me.

I didn’t need anything from Raja, but I tipped him every week. The tip was to not do the job he was supposed to do. I didn’t like that Raja used the same razor blade on all the patients. I hated the very thought of it. It made me sick.

“Busy day today, Arjun-sir?” Raja asked politely in Hindi, glancing at my clothes, but nevertheless putting out his hand.

“Not at all,” I said, tucking my shaving kit under my arm and fishing my wallet out of my pocket.

III

Puli Raja

The next day around noon my desk phone rang.