Brahmi deals with pain much better than I do.
I had dodged Brahmi’s outstretched fingers for a good thirty seconds before the Dettol-drenched cotton ball found the open gash on my forehead. I ground my teeth while she cleaned and dressed up my wounds.
‘You’re so stupid.’
‘Your Tauji needed to be taught a lesson.’
‘If I wanted him to be beaten up I could have done that myself. I’m stronger, taller and fitter than you,’ she said.
Fair point but where’s the heroism in that?
Redemption was in my reconnaissance and strike mission against her tyrant Tauji that I had planned and that had failed splendidly. Today morning I charged at her Tauji with a steel rod when he drove past me in his Bajaj Chetak. I had counted on him losing balance and being pinned beneath the scooter. I would have then beat the shit out of him, aiming at soft tissue and legs, and asked him to not lay a finger on Brahmi from there on. I’m not stupid, I had covered my face with a crêpe bandage. Her Tauji was bigger, smarter and quicker than I had anticipated. He swayed out of the first blow and it all swiftly went downhill from there. He shouted a war cry, parked his scooter with surprising deftness, scrambled for a rod which he found readily and charged at me. I was prepared for a fight unto death but people had heard Tauji’s hoarse screams. I turned and ran and fell. Her Tauji caught up and got two blows in till I managed to run away, the crêpe bandage coming off my face, soaked in blood.
‘What were you trying to achieve?’ she asked.
‘I hadn’t thought long-term.’
‘Raghu, if I need help I will ask,’ she said.
‘But you can’t live there any longer.’
‘You say the most obvious things sometimes,’ she said.
‘Can’t you tell your Mumma–Papa to shift elsewhere?’
‘Tauji is like a father to Papa. Papa owes everything to him. Moving out would be partitioning the house. And for what? Me?’
‘Why not you?’
‘You’re sweet,’ she said. ‘I’m trying to find a way to leave the house.’
‘How?’ I said, wondering what she meant by find-a-way-to-leave.
‘There’s a cousin who lives in Gurgaon, Vedant. He might take me in.’
‘That sounds far away.’
‘I’m hoping it works out,’ she said.
‘Why didn’t you do it before?’
‘There was no reason to.’
‘What reason do you have now?’
‘Don’t you miss the most obvious things too? You, of course,’ she said.
Between then and now, I have rewound and replayed the conversation in my head abajilliontimes. The more I did the worse I felt about not being the knight in shining armour for her. I was more like a jester in bandages.
In continuance of the dramatic events of today, Maa noticed the sullied bandage on my head. And just like that, the wall of her indifference crumbled and she forced me to see a doctor, and held my hand in the auto, in front of waiting patients, and the doctor, and while my bandages were changed, and on the way back, and when I ate dinner.
Baba maintained his cold indifference.
12 August 1999
Brahmi hasn’t been coming to school since the day she bandaged me. For the first two days I called her phone and it was constantly engaged. Ma was keeping strict vigil so I could not sneak out at night either. By the third day I thought I would lose my mind so I went to her house during school hours. I walked around the house, passing it every ten minutes, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. I made several such rounds. I managed to spot her a couple of times but could not make eye contact. She came to the balcony around 11.30 a.m. to wring and put clothes on the clothes line, and then again at 3.00 p.m. to take the clothes off. She seemed fine, which only begged the question, why hadn’t she been coming to school. Yesterday I knocked on the flat above and below hers, pretending to sell tickets, and asked the people at the door questions about the people staying below/above them. They would look at me strangely and slam the door on my face. Today, to my relief, she was sent to drop clothes at the dry-cleaners’ and I caught up with her. We walked a few yards away from each other to not raise eyebrows in her neighbourhood.
‘You should be in school,’ she said.
