“So, which all swear words has your Baba taught you?”
You are not half the man he is.
In our house, we have an entire wall built of books. The English is so hard that even I cannot get through more than a cupboard or two. Baba knows all of those words. Can you even read English?
He grew braver by the minute, egged on by my shame-filled silence.
“Come on, don’t be shy now, we could hear the shouting from all the way over here last night.”
I felt like one of those blood-red Hibiscus flowers that Didi stripped carefully with a blade before observing the torn pieces under a microscope. We didn’t have a microscope at home, so she practiced only the cutting part. But at school I had peeped into the biology laboratory many times on my way to the washroom and seen them bent over the glass, twisting and turning the knobs till the light hit just right. “It takes patience.” The curly-haired pot-bellied teacher would keep saying while he waddled around the students like a mother hen, adjusting a screw here and an angle there. The 10 by 8 feet mud room brimmed with patience now as they waited for me to say something.
“What pissed him off yesterday?”
“Ah, nothing major. Didi was not studying. Should we go play seven-stones?”
They were not going to let me off so easily. After all, even I went and gawked at the commotion when a fight broke out in one of their houses. Why should the rules be different for me?
“He gets very angry no?” My best friend Rani chirped.
I thought back to last night, when Baba flung away his plate of rice and daal and fish curry because Ma said we are wasting money on the music lessons Didi barely goes to. His wide steel glass, the biggest one in the house, followed his plate through the air before hitting Ma squarely under an eye. I watched in wordless horror as her wheatish skin went through an array of fascinating colours, brown to purple to dark blue before finally settling on an angry black. But then later, after Ma had locked herself in the bedroom and Didi had fled somewhere to escape the torrent of blows, he came crying to me and started beating his chest.
“No one has ever understood me.”
He sounded like the baby sparrow who had fallen off its nest from the ventilator in our verandah and hurt its wings. So I replied to Rani now.
“He gets very sad also.”
Bored with my non-committal answers, my playmates finally agreed to start playing. The hot 4 o’ clock sun roasted us like the peanuts Ma always bought for me from hawkers on the Sealdah local. I did not mind the sun as much as my friends from school, whose mothers always made them sleep promptly after lunch to avoid getting tanned. I quite liked getting my skin charred, eating the peanuts and other tidbits Ma brought home with her when she returned from the hospital at dusk. “So many years left for you to grow up.” She would sigh, her pearl black eyes welling up with despair.
“Don’t worry Ma, when I am old enough I will earn a lot of money and solve all our problems.”
“Silly girl, who asked you to think about money? You study well and become a big person so that everyone knows your name.”
“But that’s all you guys ever fight about.” My voice was hesitant with confusion.
“You don’t need to worry about us. Focus on your studies.”
Who shall worry if not me? Last week when Baba threatened to kill himself and went off to God knows where, I stayed awake way past my bedtime sick with thoughts. This time, his rage stemmed from Ma earning more than him. I kept imagining his moustache floating on his bloated face in some dark alley and the thought filled me with shame. The wife of one of his childhood friends had killed herself a few weeks back. They thought I didn’t know, but I had heard them whispering one night after they thought I was asleep. “She must have been pregnant. I don’t know why Rajdeep foolishly chose to run.” I thought of their pink-faced son who liked racing cars with me and wondered what he’s been telling his friends. Maybe he could tell them they have gone away on a long trip together. He’s younger than me, he might get away with that.
After Baba finally returned that night and started snoring in bed beside me, I slithered away to the dining room to count his sleeping pills. Why does he have to keep them on top of the fridge? I nearly woke up everyone trying to balance myself precariously on the grey plastic stool to reach the Christmas Cake tin box on the top. I could not fall asleep even after making sure that the little pink tablets were still bound inside the silver packet. There are, after all, so many different ways in which one can kill themselves. They can quietly lie down on the unguarded railway tracks one morning instead of boarding the local train from the station to go to office. They can slip away unnoticed after dark and make their way to the murky green depths of the pond at the back of the house. They can steal a little bit of Harpic or Phenyl or one of the dozen other dubious cleaning agents in the house and savour it slowly in the silence of their room. How careful couldI be? I do not have eyes everywhere, but Gopal has, or so Baba says. I managed to sleep only after making a hurried deal with Him. “Don’t let my Baba kill himself and I will study really hard for my annual examination and get full marks in all subjects.” “Well, most.” I added as an afterthought, remembering that I couldn’t possibly get a full score in Drawing or English.
Of course I could never tell Ma about my fears. Some secrets were between Gopal and me.
“How rich do you want to be when you grow up?” Piya asked. We had been playing for two hours straight, and the heat was making us feel soft in our bones. “Not as rich as Tim here.” Rani sneered. “Too much money makes too much trouble. Not poor like we are now either. I want to be somewhere in the middle, like Sonali Di.” Sonali Di lived in a three-roomed house with a cement roof with her parents and brother. Baba called her mother “Hashi Boudi”, the smiling sister-in-law. Whenever she smiled, her two rabbit teeth would gape at you uncomfortably till you were forced to smile back. “I want to be in the middle too.” I echoed. Too much money makes too much trouble. Too less money also makes trouble. I remembered the porcelain cup sticking out awkwardly in between the jumble of old clothes under Rani’s cot. I had turned all two and a half floors of our house upside down yesterday trying to find the missing piece of my favourite kitchen set.
“Tiiiiiim.” I could hear Ma call out. “Got to go, see you tomorrow.” I went back home with drooping feet and without the usual skip in my steps.
Ma’s maternal uncle had turned up for dinner. I gazed on sadly as she tried to explain away her black eye as an insect bite. “You know the problem with living near a pond. There’s too many annoying bugs all the time.” She slapped at an invisible bee in the air. Dinner was a subdued affair, and I could eat my chicken leg without feeling like there was something stuck in my throat. Silence filled up the cracks lies could not. As he was leaving, I touched Dadu’s feet like Ma had taught me. He shoved a crisp green 100 rupees note in my hand, asking me to buy chocolates. Long after he had left and Ma had gone away to arrange the dishes, I kept staring at the paper in my hand. I tried making an aeroplane with it like a boy in my class had taught me. But it was too small so I decided to tear it into a square and make a tiny boat instead. It looked fragile and wobbly and wouldn’t sit straight on the floor. I picked it up and hid it in my school bag for a rainy day.
Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
