Maa looked at Baba. ‘Look at what he’s saying.’
Dada’s words felt strange, as if out of a movie. How could he say things like these? Where did he get the courage?
‘No Musalman will ever be a part of my family,’ said Baba.
‘Tell him he can’t get married. Tell him I will kill myself if he does that,’ said Maa to Baba.
‘No, Maa, you won’t do that. Don’t talk like that. No one will do anything. I want to be married to her. I have to spend a life with her, not you. Maa, I have decided.’
‘Then, so have we,’ said Baba. ‘If you won’t listen to us, we don’t have anything to say to you. You can go get married to any whore you want to. But we will never talk to you. We will be dead to you.’
Maa started to cry.
Dada said, ‘Maa, Baba is over—’
Maa got up and ran to her room, crying. Dada got up too, running after her but Maa slammed the door on his face. She shouted, ‘GET OUT, ANIRBAN! GET OUT! I DON’T WANT TO SEE YOU! YOU’RE NOT MY SON!’
Dada turned to look at us. Baba said, ‘You heard your mother. Get out of this house. We don’t want to see you till you come to your senses and leave that Muslim girl. If you can’t respect all that we had done for you, there’s no meaning for this relationship to carry on.’
There’s a certain power in things that are said in a calm, impassioned voice.
Baba strode towards Dada, held him with the force of a much younger man, and led him outside the house. For the first time this morning, Dada looked weak. His body loosened as if betraying his mind, wanting to stay back. Baba shoved him out and locked the iron grill door we only locked at night while sleeping to keep the thieves out. Dada rang the bell for a good half an hour after which I was asked to take the batteries out. I don’t know for how much longer he stayed out there. I was asked not to peep through the eyehole.
Later I was instructed to fill two suitcases with all of Dada’s clothes and leave them outside the door. Maa protested feebly. Baba stood his ground. I filled the suitcases up. I realized how sparse or monotonous Dada’s clothes were—white shirts, blue denims, a few check shirts, and a few grey T-shirts. When I was dragging the suitcases out, Maa stopped me. In the side pockets, she stuffed two of Baba’s handkerchiefs filled with jewellery she had acquired over the last two decades for Dada’s future wife and her first daughter-in-law, the daughter-in-law she had often vowed to treat like her own daughter, whose nickname she had decided long ago—Mina, after the daughter she had lost.
Just before I took this journal out, I saw Maa staring at Dada’s empty cupboard.
Sahil called in the evening.
I am not proud of it but I told him everything. I had to or I would have exploded. What I hate even more is that Sahil’s charm worked on me as well. Those ten minutes were the calmest of the day.
14 June 1999
Maa–Baba, who had stopped talking to me for keeping Dada’s secret, thought it was best I started going to school again to divert my attention. I know they sent me so they could mourn in peace. The thin walls of our house can barely contain Maa’s wails.
Back in school, Brahmi and Sahil enthusiastically welcomed me. No one mentioned how Brahmi walked out on both of us a few days ago. Sahil must have told her about the situation at my home. She was being extra sweet, which was highly uncharacteristic and slightly irritating.
Sahil and Brahmi were much better friends now, a fact that I would have been envious of earlier. Brahmi was supposed to dissect the rat because it was she who caught it in a trap outside her house but Sahil ironically named the gigantic rat Chhotu, the little one, as soon as he saw it. Brahmi couldn’t kill it after that since it had been baptized.
‘Why would you name it!’ she complained.
‘Why wouldn’t I?’ he argued. ‘If you’re killing something the least you can do is give it a name.’
‘Do you name the mosquitoes before you burn a coil?’
‘Apple, and oranges. Might I introduce you to malaria and dengue?’ said Sahil.
‘And might I introduce you to the plague?’
‘Fine, you win,’ said Sahil.
While I pinned the drugged rat on the dissection table, Brahmi and Sahil argued about India’s position on the Kargil matter.
‘Bombing Pakistan out of existence is not the solution to get the US and other Western powers on our side in the future. A lot of people will die unnecessarily,’ asserted Brahmi.
‘But soldiers are dying anyway, aren’t they? Who cares if a few Pakistani civilians die? It’s the public who elected a fascist, authoritarian government. It’s not a great loss if they die instead of Indian soldiers.’
‘It’s not the same!’ said Brahmi. ‘Every person in the armed forces must know that this day could come. That he or she could possibly die, no? But civilians dying is just . . . collateral damage.’
