Sundays were holidays for Oxford Coaching Academy too, so when my mobile rang that morning, I was in my room, slicing onions on an inverted steel plate. Sandeep, my roommate, had finished cleaning the chicken and was setting up a makeshift kitchen in our only room. An induction cooktop, two pots, a box of spices, a spoon and two plates were all the kitchen we had.
The call was from Rajesh, another loser like me from my village. We used to be best friends at school, going fishing together and everything else, but I didn’t feel like talking to him today. The last couple of times he had called, it was for money. Just a hundred or two each time, no more than that. Perhaps he, too, had grown sick of asking his parents for money, just like me. I had sent him the money then, but now I was running on a low budget myself. Even the chicken today was sponsored by Sandeep.
I fixed my eyes on the mobile, waiting for it to ring out, but at the last second, I picked it up with a determination to say no if he was calling for money.
‘How’s your prep going?’ he asked.
‘Well, getting along somehow…’
At this time, Sandeep and I were waiting for the results of a bank exam due the following week. Over the last three years that I had been attending the OCA, this was probably my hundredth exam for a govt job.
‘You tell me,’ I said. ‘How’s life?’
‘Good enough.’
Silence. Then a horn blared on his side, piercing my eardrums.
‘I’m on my way there.’
‘Huh? What do you mean?’
I was confused. It was a three-hour journey from our village to this city.
‘I’m on the bus. I’ll be there in an hour.’
I cooked extra rice for Rajesh and waited for him, but Sandeep’s study time was nearing, so he had his lunch and sat down to study. He was such an asshole sometimes. Anyway, Sandeep wasn’t acquainted with Rajesh. In fact, I myself had only known Sandeep for less than a year. He had just joined the OCA and was looking for a room, and I needed a roommate to share the expenses.
Rajesh and I ate in silence so as not to disturb Sandeep in his study. After lunch, we got out for a walk. We chewed the fat for a while, then I said, ‘How about you? What are you doing these days?’
I considered both of us practically on the same sinking boat. The only difference was, over the three years I’d been slogging here at the OCA, Rajesh took an extra year to finish his B-Tech, tried his hand at the entrance exams as an Indian Army officer with no success, drove a car for a year out of sheer disgust for all this studying business and was really proud of his profession until he rammed the car into a wall one fine day and got a hairline fracture on his left arm. The last time we’d talked, he had taken a complete U-turn by sitting for an English test for a student visa, his aspirations having taken a shift towards an MS in the US. I’d never thought this sudden burst of inspiration would last much longer.
But now, he said with an added cheerfulness, ‘Well, I got the visa.’
‘What?’
‘I’m leaving for the US.’
Stunned as I was, I hugged him and told him I was so happy for him. I really was. Then I punched him on his arm for not giving me the good news sooner.
He gave a short laugh and said, ‘Well, I wanted to give you a little treat, but you already had the lunch prepared, so let’s go eat something sweet. A pastry?’
‘Sure.’
We ate Black Forest, and Rajesh got a piece packed for Sandeep. We spent some time in a park just opposite the road from the bakery, talking about this and that. I wanted to ask him how he’d managed to pass the English test but thought the better of it. I presumed there might’ve been a way around it.
On the way back to my room, I asked him when he was leaving.
‘Next Monday.’
‘Monday! You mean tomorrow?’
‘No, the next one.’
‘Oh.’
I asked him to stay, but he said he was in a hurry. He had so many things to do before leaving for the US.
When I placed the little box of pastry before Sandeep, he shook his head and said he’d eat it after his study time. I placed it aside and sat down on the mat next to him to study.
Later that evening, a WhatsApp message popped up on my mobile, which read, I’ll remember to bring you chocolates… followed by a smiley.
I had asked Rajesh to bring me chocolates if he ever managed to go to the US. I was surprised he still remembered it. I sent him a smiley in reply.
On the morning of the result day, the website got so overcrowded that it wouldn’t open on our mobiles. The internet cafes wouldn’t generally open before 9 o’clock, but anxiety kept us on edge, making us run from street to street, café to café, before the eleventh or twentieth café gave us our results.
I felt a little sad at my results. A lot, actually. Sandeep’s eyes, however, twinkled like stars. He gave a huge cry of cheerfulness and jumped about in sheer joy, startling the people around him. The cafe owner frowned at this but said nothing. If he had tried to interfere, I am pretty sure Sandeep would’ve lifted him into his arms and given him a little peck on his cheeks.
He made a joke of himself on the street too and didn’t care a paisa about it.
The day before he vacated the room, he went out early in the morning and stayed out all day. Though I tried to be as indifferent as I could, I couldn’t help having visions of him pulling some antics in public and getting beaten up somewhere in the city.
He came back at night with beers and dinner for both of us. Nodding at the beers, he said, ‘One for you, two for me.’
He didn’t insist when I said I didn’t drink. He ignored my warning to slow it down and chugged all three bottles, one right after another.
Then he began to talk. He talked about his school days, his family, his future plans, his approach to cracking competitive exams, his favourite cricket players, his favourite food… Words just flowed out of him like never before.
I took the opportunity to remind him of his share of the month’s rent, to which he made a face and said, ‘Oh, Anna, do you think I forgot about it? No, no, Anna, I’m not the kind to forget such things.’
To prove himself right, he pulled out his mobile and sent me the rent right away.
‘Now, am I forgetting anything else?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘We’re good, then?’
‘Hm.’
Soon he complained of some discomfort in his belly and threw up everything he’d drunk. The room reeked of vomit even after we had cleaned everything and mopped the floor, which killed my appetite and sleep and left me gagging the whole night.
The next morning, the smell of vomit persisted. Sandeep pulled an apologetic face and almost emptied his deodorant around the room as a final attempt to get rid of the smell. He packed his things up, including the induction cooktop, which had been bought with his money after mine broke down.
The bus to his village was ready at the bus stop.
#
I thought about Sandeep on the way back. To be honest, I’d been genuinely happy when Rajesh said he got the visa. Not for Sandeep. Sandeep was a year and a half younger than me. He hadn’t failed as many times as I had. Jealousy, I won’t lie.
The deodorant had mingled with the stench of vomit, making it worse. I pushed open the windows to let in some fresh air and left the fan on at full speed for quite some time, but the stench wouldn’t go away. Or was it actually in my nostrils?
Now that Sandeep took away his induction cooktop, I saw I had to buy either a rice cooker or an induction cooktop if I were to eat, or go see some messes and join one of them. I didn’t have money for either of these options. For a long time, I lay on the mat and thought about packing up and going home, where I’d have to face my father’s piercing looks and answer his unasked questions.
I didn’t feel like going to the classes, either. Nor did I have any inclination to go out. The whole afternoon, I lay on the mat breathing the stale air, waiting for hunger to rumble in my belly. At four, I was still not feeling hungry, but I felt a little drowsy. At first, I tried to resist sleep because if I slept now, I’d have to stay awake like an owl that night. But my eyes got so heavy that I eventually gave in.
It was dark outside when I woke up. A dull, throbbing pain began at the back of my head, as if somebody had hit me there while I was asleep.
When it was past eight o’clock and I still didn’t feel hungry, I went out and bought a pack of cigarettes and two packets of chips. The chips were good. I felt a little better when I smoked. The headache went away, only to return after a while.
I hadn’t called my mother the day before. If I didn’t call her now, she was sure to send my father here to see if everything was all right. So I called her and spoke a few words with a fake cheerfulness and hung up, saying I had a lot to study. Should I have talked to her more? Would that have helped?
Anyway, I hung up, and that was it.
The headache wouldn’t go away. Not too bad a headache, yet annoying enough to shoo away sleep. Any thought of food nauseated me. That’s when my eyes fell on a novel wedged between all the academic books on the shelf. It had been there for a long time, but I wasn’t sure whose book it was. It could’ve been my previous roommate, Abdul, who had been selected as a Sub-Inspector. Anyway, it was a Telugu detective novel titled Watch Out, Old Man! It was about a young detective named Vinay who had been waiting for a solid chance to prove his mettle. I read the novel until my eyes began to water up. Then I put it away, turned off the light and tried to get some sleep, but I had already turned myself into an owl earlier that day. I tossed and turned for about an hour without success, turned the lights back on and sat down to read the novel.
Detective Vinay came across a curious case. Old men in his village had been disappearing without a trace. Just old men, with the youngest being sixty-eight years old. He waited for the victims’ kith and kin to approach and beg him for help. When they went to the police station instead, he took it upon himself to solve the case…
I could hardly catch a couple of hours of sleep throughout the night. When the sun came up I was both sleepy and tired. Feeling sleepy and yet unable to sleep… What kind of a joke was this?
I went out and bought a sheet of aspirin and two packets of chips, at which point I ran out of my money. Any purchase from here on would mean dipping into Sandeep’s rent.
The chips were allowed in, but any thought about proper food still nauseated me. I popped in an aspirin and lay down to rest my eyes. The aspirin seemed to have worked. The headache went away, and I began yawning. I curled myself up like a prawn and fell asleep.
I woke up to find I had been asleep for a little more than four hours. But I still felt tired, as if I had only slept for ten or fifteen minutes. The headache had gotten worse now, probably due to aspirin. I decided to stay away from it from now on.
I resumed reading the novel. A couple of hours in, Detective Vinay still hadn’t found the first lead to the mysterious case. The plot kept meandering, and I lost interest. I threw it back on the shelf and went out for a walk, inhaling deeply, determined to keep walking until I felt hungry, or the headache went away, or I fell unconscious.
#
By the time my shirt got drenched in sweat, the sun had turned a deep orange and was sinking behind the buildings. Street lights were getting on, casting an amber tint on the shopfronts and the vehicles passing under them.
Walking along the main road, I saw a small tea stall next to the NTR statue at the junction, and I instantly felt like tea, for which I was extremely grateful to my belly. I accepted this as the first step towards my improvement, although my headache hadn’t shown any mercy yet.
The handful of chairs under the awning of the tea stall were already occupied. People stood around in clusters with steaming paper cups poised before their faces.
Finding a solitary spot for myself, I sipped my tea watching the traffic around the NTR statue without much interest until, at the pedestal of the statue, I spotted an old man wrapped in a perforated shawl with a battered silver bowl placed before him. Very few people took notice of him, and fewer still stopped to drop a coin into his bowl. The old beggar himself didn’t seem to take it too seriously. He just sat there watching the people milling about him with an air of detachment, his thin fingers caressing his long white beard.
I bought another cup of tea and walked over to him. He took the cup in his shaking hand, exposing his long, unclipped nails that had blackened with dirt.
I got back to my solitary spot, and as I watched the old man sip his tea, I found myself more envious of this old beggar than I had been of Sandeep. Those blackened fingernails, far from disgusting me, filled me with an odd sense of fascination. I thought of them as proof of the old man’s freedom from the tyranny of societal expectations. Not a care in this world: no exam tension, no job pressure, nothing!
After a few sips, the old man placed his cup on the ground and, reaching into the cloth bag slung over his shoulder, fished out a packet of biscuits.
Just then, a strange but interesting thought occurred to me. How would Detective Vinay see the old man? I could sense a vague plotline building up in my head, in the form of a newspaper headline: Anonymous thief knocks beggar unconscious and makes off with his money. But then, how were the few coins in that battered bowl enough to justify a theft? I had to dismiss this plotline for its obvious lack of any logic or sense.
Our eyes met for a moment, and I looked away almost immediately, fearing my inquisitive eyes would create a ripple in his present state of near-invisibility.
I left the tea stall and let my legs lead my way, on and on, left, right, until the night came and sprinkled the sky with stars and hung a smile of a moon among them. I avoided the busy roads as much as possible for the noise the traffic made and stuck to the quiet streets where the semi-darkness and the screeching crickets gave me a strange comfort. At one point, I saw a tiffin stall on a street and looked down at my belly pleadingly. They served idlis, bondas, dosas… but I only felt nauseous. For a moment, I considered ignoring the nausea and going ahead. But what if it grew worse? What if I threw up right before the stall? This was sure to disgust others at the stall.
What about another cup of tea, then? Well, tea sounded fine to me. Tea reminded me of the old beggar, his cloth bag and the lousy plotline. Anonymous thief knocks beggar unconscious and makes off with his money…
I retraced my steps to the tea stall near the NTR statue, which I found to be a little less crowded than earlier. The old man was still sitting there under the statue in the same squatting position. I bought an extra cup for the old man, too, which he accepted with the same shaking hands.
After he had finished with his tea, the old man decided to call it a day. He poured the contents of the battered bowl into his cloth bag and, rising with the help of his walking stick, crossed the road to get to the footpath on the other side and waddled away.
I could feel a keen sense of loneliness develop inside of me as I saw him walk away, as if I was on the verge of losing one of the most precious things in my life. I had no idea what to do, but my heart was beating at a really fast rate.
It Is at this point that I remembered my lousy plotline. And then, I was seized with an irresistible urge to check the contents of that cloth bag. This might seem a little crazy now, but that’s what I thought at that moment — almost like an invisible force was bulldozing me into doing something about it…
I began to think like Detective Vinay would think and drew some diversion from it. If the bag was even half-filled with coins and notes, this man as a character was definitely vulnerable to being robbed.
‘It’s not like I’m going to steal it,’ I told myself. I had bought him tea, and he knew I was not a thief. I would just go chat with him a little, get to know where and how he lived, and maybe do something really good for him In the future, but now, all I wanted was to check the contents of that cloth bag and decide whether he was vulnerable enough to authenticate my plotline.
I paid for the tea, hurried onto the footpath and, jolting and shoving the pedestrians that came my way, caught sight of the old man and began to follow him from a distance.
The cacophony of the puttering, blaring, beeping vehicles went straight into my head, intensifying my headache. Fast-food stalls occupied the footpath at intervals of every few metres. Some of them were so packed that it was difficult to pass through. Soon, I was wishing for the old man to turn onto a relatively calmer road, where I could catch up with him and strike up a conversation.
The old man suddenly stopped at a point to examine something he found lying on the ground. Whatever it was, he picked it up, examined it by bringing it closer to his eyes, and threw it away when he got sure of its worthlessness. A little further, he stopped once more to buy a couple of buns from a small shop, which he deposited into his cloth bag.
I was greatly relieved when he finally left the footpath and turned onto a small road that branched off on the left. He stuck to the edge of the road. With very few streetlights glowing, this road was as shadowy as the footpath had been bright. The alleys appearing on either side of the road were much darker, as they had no street lights at all.
Expecting the old man to turn into one of those dark alleys anytime now, I quickened my steps to catch up with him.
The road now came to a dead-end, a brick wall at least twenty feet high looming over us. The old man stopped here and looked back for the first time. I hardly expected his old eyes to recognise me in the dimness of the road, but I gave a smile and raised my hand anyway. As expected, he didn’t wait for me until I reached him; instead, he slipped into the dark alley almost right away. I lengthened my strides so as not to lose sight of him and broke into a trot as I approached the corner.
I was stunned to see the old man waiting for me at the corner, holding the walking stick aloft, ready to strike. Now, I was not in the least prepared for this. He hit me on the legs so hard I lost my footing and toppled over, hitting my head on the ground. A sharp pain shot through my head and pushed me to the edge of consciousness. As if this wasn’t enough, blow after blow kept landing on just any part of my body as I writhed, grunted and yowled in pain, my arms coiled around my head. There was no one around to save me from his attack. Nor did the old man spare me a moment of reprieve. Every time I tried to raise myself, the old man was quick to react. He abandoned other parts and directed his blows to my limbs. I’m not sure whether it was the old man’s brute strength or my own weakness, but I blacked out waiting for him to grow tired.
#
It was late morning when I came to and found myself lying on the bed of the govt hospital, a saline bottle dripping its contents into me.
I had a bandage wrapped around my head. I was riddled with dark brown welts all over myself, and my body ached like anything. The part of my head that had hit the ground ached when I touched it, but otherwise my head felt perfectly light for the first time in the past couple of days.
Very soon, a faint rumble began in my belly, which rapidly turned into such a deafening roar that I almost ran out of the hospital looking for something to eat. Luckily, there was a tiffin stall right before the hospital, where I ate a couple of idlis, though I felt like eating up the whole stall.
‘Poor man was so out of breath when he brought you here…’ the duty nurse said, talking of the white-bearded old man who had deposited me at the hospital the previous night.
I got so furious when I remembered him that I vowed to myself to seek him out and make him pay for what he did to me.
However, as the initial bout of fury abated, I realised, not without some reluctance, that I should actually be thankful to him for saving me in more ways than one. In any case, I was glad I had at least got him panting for breath one way or the other.
