Seven years old. Amma helps me train for all the competitions in school, and I win four prizes. Two prizes, really, because second place doesn’t count. There are a lot of certificates to show off when I get out of the crowded autorickshaw that ferries me between school and home. Nanna takes pictures at every noteworthy event. A pop from the flash. A pull on the right cheek. A rictus smile in the living room. I crawl into the box the air cooler came in – I turned it into a fortress by cutting a door into one side. At the end of the school year, my grade sheets are full of A-pluses. The second-grade classroom is full of friends and adoring teachers. I am whatever they want me to be – I just want them to like me. I blush at a look from Disha, who sends a flying kiss my way. No, I think. Love is too much to feel.
Amma and Nanna are in the front of our second-hand grey Maruti Zen. We are on our way back from a wedding. I have never seen the streets after midnight, the warm yellow of the lights reflecting off Amma’s pallu. Nanna’s yells are punctuated by his left hand, which is moving about with a life of its own, its movements teaching me the language of rage as it finds itself caught in Amma’s pearl necklace. I watch the hand try to make its way back to its owner, pulling the necklace to pieces as my heart palpitates with fear and the adrenaline of wanting to do something – but not knowing what. Do they know I am still in the back seat, a mute spectator following the traditional tenets with exactitude? Which child has been allowed to mediate? Their ego is my cloak of invisibility. Their response to my skittish pleas for reconciliation is anubhavinchu, a Telugu word that I translate to ‘experiencing what must be lived’, whether it be suffering or other forms of fate. In the morning, I accompany Nanna to the car and search for pearls underneath the seats, collecting them in the steel cup Amma gave me. A decade later I realize the pearls were probably fakes, as real strings of pearls tend to have knots between them to prevent abrasion. In Hindu marriages, it is the other way around. The knot of the mangalasutram is abrasive, hanging heavily from the bride’s neck as a golden reminder of her bondage. The tenets say it is never to be taken off.
The Good Boy is created when the worshipful child sees his Gods cry. Isn’t that why Ganesha walked around his parents seven times? His world, his gods? How many meals would Parvati have cooked if Amma had already hit 12,045 – 3 meals a day on average, for eleven years of marriage? Did Parvati have a kitchen to be confined to as well, serving a hot plate of rice, curry, chutney, and curd as Shiva came back from his celestial duties?
I start talking to my books as Valmiki incarnate, knowing nothing about relationships and love – thereby knowing more than all the adults on Earth. My mission is to write my secrets in eternity codes that safeguard them from discovery. The truths are hidden really well. They are lost. I am Bhishma, the sufferer who cares for the Wrongdoers. But there is no mantra that will banish the portents of screaming contests from his home, those uneasy ghouls that wring his throat to the opera in the background. Amma and Nanna are simply acting out their roles, each trying to turn the other into a mirror before they choke on the noose society calls marriage. And why not? They both have valid points. Or is that confirmation bias? All in all, the Good Boy must ask himself why he is happy when the Gods are not.
Topper is Thirteen years old. All the relatives love Topper, who reads books cutely in the corner at their weddings. Topper’s smugly arrogant pictures appeared in the newspapers yesterday, much to the awe of his neighbours. Topper is also Kurma, the tortoise that holds the helplessness of mute spectators on its back. His little heart is a brittle and weary organ, determined to pump itself into a gut-twisting frenzy when it sees the omens of a fight write electric prophecies on the walls. Nanna has Amma in the bedroom. She is calling for Topper. Her flushed-red nose is visible for a second before the door slams shut. Nanna has had one of his rare fits, but Topper knows he will not hit her. Screams and spittle go hand-in-hand. Amma and Nanna will be fine in the morning, a kutumbam consisting of two individuals with individual histories Topper knows nothing about. They have always been wife and husband, never needing to lay bare their pasts to each other. Or to him. Topper resolves not to either. Kutumbam is inseparable. The Good Boy must make the Gods happy first and then distract them forever – a social chameleon who defuses tension with humour.
The lectures about how to be a good boy while he is the Good Boy are the ones that almost make him lose control. Topper’s proclivity towards English is a baby turtle running to the ocean – the best vocabulary in the school an attempt to drown neurodivergence. Thousands of books checked out of and read from school and British libraries. Three rows of four-foot student desks, a blend of silver-coated hollow pig iron blended with plywood, walls of lockers in the same beige fake-wood pattern laminate on both sides. The front of the class a blackboard on the right, smartboard on the left, and windows that started at the roof and came down to the same level as the bottoms of the boards. Air conditioners set in them, the window units cooling the grey granite and beige walls and fighting the sudor of thirty-five teenagers. A primly dressed south Indian brahmin boy on the last bench. Benchmates with the son of a biology teacher. The non-mischievous teacher’s pet. Class prefect. Librarian’s pet. Vice-captain. Pet. Head boy. Pet. One of the rare students that’s cool with all the factions. One of the dregs of advantage given to an outsider looking in. The speeches, elocutions, debates, JAMs won sated them yes but they were training sessions to tell Amma that the meanings of their arguments were hiding – hiding between her cries and his cowardly silence like romances from old movies. The innermost thoughts of the hero and heroine decoded by a paranormal wordless glance between them. Amma, the clever one, does not understand his language. She does not want to. The stalemate continues. Nanna is in a lungi and a banian, Amma in a flowery nightie. The floor of the boxing ring is made from tiles similar to those in the living room. Only one parent can win the belt of Defining the Perfect Marriage. Maamma is the perfect mother-in-law, the hunchbacked announcer holding the mic. Topper is catching glimpses of the fight through the crowd of married couples in the audience. Topper cannot scream at them or with them. He heats the tongs in the kitchen over the stove and burns his forearm, vowing to never be the cause of their distress. Kutumbam is reconciliation.
But the Good Boy must also see the Gods smile and laugh, doesn’t he? “Why can’t you just be that one percent better?” Amma asks after seeing his almost-perfect marks, slapping him silly. Topper licks the tears off his face. Despair is deliciously salty. He wonders what hope tastes like. Every night, a spectre with no responsibilities rings the bell, only to be welcomed in and offered a glass of water. The dimensions of work and home are indistinguishable for it. “How was your day at the office?” Topper asks. Shriya sends through a fellow classmate a love letter sealed with starry stickers. It is sent back with grammatical corrections. This story is to become a party favourite in the future. Kutumbam is.
Golden Son is Seventeen years old and making a speech on television. Everyone who knows him is thunderstruck, glued to their screens. He is coloured from the same gold as all the cheap trophies in his home. Dusty, fading testaments to a dead set of skills. Maamma asks Amma to leave the house if she finds it so oppressive. Amma goes back to chopping onions. Which one is responsible for the tears streaming down her quivering red nose? Golden Son looks to his sides, away from the camera, a person caught between two mirrors staring at the children from an infinite number of realities. They are the superheroes of hearing. All their ears are elfin-like, supernaturally attuned and pricked for sounds of discord. They are all looking at Golden Son’s acne-riddled face, at the baggy clothes which hide sedentary fat accumulated in coaching classes. They look familiar. Stoically distant, willingly dropping into lucid hyperaggressive fantasies before dawn arrives – Golden Son wavers between suicide, matricide, and patricide. He wishes desperately for the zombie apocalypse, knowing civilization can be shed to become one of its Shivas. His thoughts are directed towards the universal embodiment of the Parent in every waking moment, imploring it to not let this kind of behaviour go unchecked. The Good Boy must know that what brings pride one day brings a nod on the other, right?
Who is the best liar in town? This model student-son. Groomed to succeed. Succeed at what? Succeed to what? Golden Son is the mindfully ill third mirror, the chimeric compromise Amma and Nanna willed not to find manifesting in all its glory. They maintain magnificently the illusion of marital bliss, aiming it right back at the other couples. The ideal Indian nuclear family, their detonations are always contained within the apartment walls. He cannot help Amma and Nanna. Ergo, he can help no one. The only unbiased observer of their vulnerabilities in the entire world, he viewed them as the androgynous unit they were supposed to be. As a Seventeen-year-old masquerading as a Seven-year-old at home, Golden Son knows not what he is. Whatever Golden Son is, is unacceptable to the guardians. He is the untrusting ungrateful host, an accidentally sophisticated beast bereft of trust. The leeches feed on the positive end of his emotional spectrum, replacing their happiness with his. All that remains is praying to the Hindu pantheon – to the last vestige of belief in elderly authority.
What was my name? I am Nineteen, burnt out, a comet crashing back to Earth. The calendar proclaims Twenty is coming tomorrow. I content myself with maintaining a stasis in which Amma and Nanna eventually lose the bark and bite they tormented each other with. Accept the fact that I cannot help people who do not want to be helped. I keep trying because the rush of being a Good Boy is too addictive. Pet.
The ghost of Maamma walks the astral plane, accepting the praise sung by Nanna to all that hear. Amma, the friendless princess, sees the mother-in-law’s unmistakable traits in the spectre. She holds Nanna’s hand at the next event, only for his Oedipal complex to cause him to flinch. The Vedas smile in proud acknowledgment. Aarav’s mouth observes monastic silence for most of the day. He wishes for every fallen eyelash to tell him that Amma and Nanna are good people willing to live the loving life society envisions for them. The perennial question asks whether the mirror-forcers ever had a functional relationship.
Amma and Nanna live their lives for him. Do they care, or do they care for his care for them? The role in the play given to him is that of the emotional repository, the never-snitching confidante. He is aware that his existence justifies their being together all these years. The only option for arbiter, judge, jury – everything but the executioner. Because a verdict in this case would kill the Good Boy. There can be no winner. Only an impotent stalemate. The status quo. I remember the time when that burden meant nothing, not knowing that that readiness would lead to a decade of tense shoulders. I try to mend the relationships he severed for the eternal series of competitions.
I look at the numbers on the page of the diary Nanna hands over at the dining table, the sole remnant of the coded truths I used to manufacture. Remembering now how my childhood used to behave, I struggle to recall the key to the cipher. What happened to all the good boys out there? What happened to all the children in the mirrors?
I retreat to my room, sitting down at my desk and pulling a notebook close. Pausing to think for a moment, I write –
“I came across some numbers in an old diary my father handed to me at the dining table today. He looked at my mother, grinning, and recalled how secretive I had been as a child – and my mother laughed at his remark, pausing her chopping in the kitchen to shoot me an indulgent look. Those numbers are in the title above, and they invoked a specific set of memories that forced me to recall behaviours I had forgotten all about until I saw my untidy scrawl on that page. In that instant, I understood some part of why I have become what I have today.
If you manage to break the code my childhood came up with, then revel in the naiveté of it. But keep what it contains to yourself. It has passed on the message my younger self tried so zealously to conceal. It has told me more than I wanted to know. I have a sneaking suspicion that it might be a product code I got off some toy. So be it. In the end, what is important is that you’re doing a good job as a Good Boy, just like I a-”
I shake my head. Simply justifying the experienced emotional damage is not enough. Crossing it all out, I start writing on a fresh page. “I am Seven years old.
Photo by Frames For Your Heart on Unsplash
