The prickly-cold water of the river Damodar hurt my feet. I sat at the edge of the bank, my frock carefully rolled up my knees, so as not to let it get wet. My mother would not like it. She liked things to be in order. I clutched my heart-printed socks in my clammy hands. My mind was a whirlpool. On the horizon, under the Sal trees, our picnic party was kicking up a boisterous celebration. The art school that I went to organised the picnic, but the teacher who taught me had not come to the picnic. I was not surprised. Half the people at the gathering today were strangers to me. I carefully sat behind the scant bushes on the bank of the river, out of everyone’s line of sight.
My mother thought I was playing hide and seek with my friends for the last hour, which meant they would not seek me before lunchtime. Our game had got a bit too adventurous. One of my playmates hid himself in an empty barrel that the cooks brought. He was in plain sight and yet so well concealed that no one could guess. Inspired by him, in this round, I stealthily crawled under a large table covered with a tablecloth and waited with bated breath. Three teenage boys sat by the long edge of the table away from the river, resting after kicking the football for a long time. They were unaware of my presence. Two of them took off their shoes. Their feet smelled of rotten fish. I gagged under the table.
‘Heard the teacher forces crayons inside Lipi’s mouth,’ a smelly-feet-guy said. His voice teetered with the mirth of revealing a scandal. My heart sank. I knew that voice; it was a friend’s elder brother.
‘Really? I heard, but didn’t know if they exaggerated. Maybe Lipi doesn’t mind it. Have you seen how she has grown?’ the other smelly-feet-guy chuckled. My cheeks felt hot. I crossed my arms across my chest, which had suddenly started growing like swollen wounds since last summer, much against my will. Guilt and disgust for the two of them filled me at the same time.
‘Apparently, she runs around the table, but the art teacher chases her. He even asks the other kids to chase her, pin her down so that he can force the crayons into her mouth.’
‘Fuck! Why am I not in that class?’ the first guy said.
‘For heaven’s sake, guys, the girl is only ten! I wonder if Lipi’s parents know about this,’ the third guy said. He sounded outraged.
Lipi. Lipi. Lipi. My name. The sound of it forced me to shake off the incidents as pretend games in which this happened to someone else, not me. Their words hammered at my suspicion – something very wrong was happening to me every time I attended my weekly art class after school. I always felt queasy after those episodes. Like I had gone to the toilet, forgotten to wash my hands, and remembered later. That feeling. But everyone in my class seemed to enjoy the teacher’s shenanigans with me. In the spirit of being a good sport, I did not tell my parents. Who wanted to be a silly girl? Not me. Now I sat with my head between my knees under the picnic table. A quiet place away from these people would be good. I stealthily crept out and scurried towards the river, looking over my shoulder now and then to make sure that I was not spotted.
Cutting through the morning haze, the cooks and their helpers moved around like ghosts from another world. They collected fallen dried branches of the many trees lining the bank. The twigs would be used to light the fire in the portable coal and wood-fired mud stove, a staple in picnics of India in the nineties.
Lunch was as far away as the thought of divulging anything about my disgrace to my mother. The bone-chilling wind cutting through my sweater made me shiver. What would my mother say? I had tried to tell her that the teacher bothered me, but she shook her head and said ‘Are you overthinking again?’. I had a history. I was too sensitive. One time, I had sobbed for an entire evening because I thought my mother loved my brother more than me, because he was a boy. I still believed the same, but I didn’t cry any more. Because my mother told our relatives about my complaint. They all laughed. I felt ashamed of seeing and feeling things that were seemingly for older children or young adults. As if my body and mind did not match.
The incidents from the art classes played in my head. The slithering touch of my teacher’s fingers on my neck and cheeks, when they would force me down on the floor, made my back tingle with fear. There used to be at least ten kids in that large batch when this happened.
When I think back today, the setting of the class seems like the perfect excuse for my teacher to do what he did to me. It was easy for everybody to ignore the sly back rubs, the accidental brushing of his hand when he inspected my paintings or the extra attention that he showered me with. None of it was in private. Everything was in plain sight, yet camouflaged. I was the only recipient of this special treatment.
I loved painting. It was my way of expressing all that I otherwise could not put into words. I could control the colours, proportions, and images and create something that pleased me. They pleased others, too. In winter, my father liked to take me to art competitions that were often organised at the humongous Kumara Mangalam Park near our home by different cultural organisations. The prizes that I received proudly stood on my study table. My heart swelled every time my father looked at those prizes with a glint in his eyes. I was scared to lose my art class. Good art teachers were hard to come by in a small industrial township like ours.
After what felt like an eternity at the river, Tia’s voice jolted me back from my thoughts. I considered telling her; she was my best friend after all. We had known each other since birth, if that was possible. She was the queen of rescuing stray dogs, so we would hide from her mother for as long as possible. During the library period in school, I would choose books for both of us when my turn came, so that I could grab them after class. She didn’t care much for books and called me a nerd, which I didn’t mind. I considered telling her, but couldn’t find the words. She was in my art class too. What new could I tell her? Obviously, she did not see anything wrong. Telling her anything could make me a ‘paka meye’- an overripe girl acting all grown up and dirty.
It was an era when teaching children about good and bad touch had not become popular with parents and schools. Any kind of deviation from the scripted normal life of children invited awkwardness. None of my classmates probably had awareness of this kind. Tia leapt in front of me from the uneven high ground. Her face was red from play, and her thin, straight hair stuck to her scalp.
‘Where were you all this time?’ she demanded between her pants of breath. She squinted at the sun that was peeking through cauliflower-shaped clouds. Most kids were sitting in the first batch for lunch, she reported. My mother had sent her to look for me. I pictured my mother fuming at my disappearance. The unsaid rule of picnics dictated that kids would eat first, followed by the adults and then concluded by the drivers, cooks, and their helpers. I had lost my appetite, but did not have the heart to put up a fight with her or my mother. My mother scowled the moment she saw me emerge from the woods. I scampered past her, robbing her of the opportunity to lash at me.
Long lines of shataranchi mats waited under the casuarina trees with freshly placed Sal leaf plates in front of them. Tia and I plopped ourselves on one of the few unoccupied seats. Soon, steaming hot khichdi[1] hit our plates, its slurpy consistency spreading between the gaps of the loosely stitched Sal leaves.I gulped down the predictable picnic menu of rice and lentil khichdi, tomato chutney, fried lentil papad and vegetable curry like everyone else. Some of the adults were busy organising games for the children. A few teenage boys danced to Choli ke peeche kya hai – what’s behind the blouse, blasting over the stereo. The two boys from the table earlier were among them. I recognised their shoes. I felt nauseous.
I gazed at the afternoon sky, praying to the weather gods for an early nightfall, which would signal our departure from the picnic. The place was a good couple of hours away from our town. Much before it was time for Damodar to reflect orange flecks of the sky in its water, untimely dark clouds threatened us with a downpour. The party gathered everything, and we left in our picnic buses that were parked at a distance. The bus drivers grumbled about having to miss their siesta.
When the bus broke down in the middle of nowhere in torrential rain, I took it as a sign. My father was an atheist, and my mother was a believer. I wasn’t sure what I was, but the sign from someone felt real. Mobile phones did not exist. I missed my father who had stayed back in town due to a breakdown at the steel plant where he worked. He would have known what to do with a broken-down bus. He was the solver for everything related to engineering and machines: electric wiring, mechanical bearings, garages, and machines. As we painfully waited for a mechanic to arrive, I counted the number of lightning streaks in the tumultuous sky.
Hours later, the bus dropped us off near our home. The silhouette of my father paced on the dark terrace of our building, his gaze towards the main road. He waved as soon as he noticed us. It was past midnight. He had cooked for the first time since the time my mother had gone to my grandmother’s place to give birth to my brother. We ate the odd lumps of rice with ghee as my mother narrated the details of the bus breakdown to him.
When my art teacher tried to play the same game in my next art class, I ran out of the main door and went looking for my mother. I had to take my chances, I told myself. Luckily, I heard her voice from the flat next door. She was chatting with her friends. I stormed into their gathering and declared that the teacher was ‘beating’ me, a word that I thought was permissible to say. Upon insistence from the group, I described the incident. The room broke into exclamations and high-pitched interjections from the ladies, matched by the redness on my mother’s face. Her full lips had the same contortions that she had before giving me a good thrashing or yelling.
My teacher’s face froze when I emerged into the class with my mother. The air felt heavy. Her eyes picked out the boy whom I complained had helped the teacher overpower me. Then she lambasted him, threatening to go to his mother if he ever did this again. My jaw dropped as I waited for her to address the real culprit. She never did. The games stopped after that day.
My parents put me in another art class. Even though I had to settle for a mediocre teacher, I was relieved. Though my teacher wasn’t punished, I survived, leaving me with the hope that all was not lost. But also drilling into me that justice was not easy. Not a given. It left me with a realisation that where I was born, I would have to fight for each bit of it if I wanted it, without counting on my closest ones. Not just for myself but for my peers and the unborn little girls of the future. In a way, it prepared me for the lifelong battle that women in the subcontinent has to engage in.
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[1] Khichdi – A South Asian dish made of boiled lentils and rice, flavoured with spices
