‘It was a few more days a few more days ago. Your parents aren’t back yet?’
‘No. I hope they don’t come back before I go. It will only make things tougher,’ she said.
‘Won’t they come looking for you?’
‘They will. By the time they find me, they would understand,’ she said.
‘I will miss seeing you outside your window.’
‘And I will miss you,’ she said.
‘You know what I was thinking yesterday? I was imagining a situation where Maa–Baba don’t warm up to Dada and things only get worse. Then even I could run away from home and we could stay together.’
‘What if I’m a really difficult person to live with?’
‘It can’t be more difficult than living without you.’
‘Aren’t you the sweetest?’
‘No, I’m not. Okay, probably only to you because it’s easy to be.’
‘I will miss you, Raghu. I wish I hadn’t had to leave.’
Later we jumped the school walls and took a bus to Delhi University. She had heard from someone about an old uncle who sat outside Miranda House and made magic Maggi. It wasn’t far from the truth—a Pied Piper with masala noodles. We splurged on three plates of Maggi, travelled without tickets on the way back to school, and wondered if we were already addicted.
As time’s passing, I find myself more in love with Brahmi, it’s harder to see her go in the afternoon, tougher to not see her in the night, and impossible to survive without her.
Baba was home when I got back from school. He was poring over some papers and was on the landline, shouting. I didn’t think of it much till Baba shifted to Bengali. Dada was on the other side of the phone. I went to my room and eavesdropped. Though tempers ran high, they weren’t talking about Boudi but about money. Dada was called careless, a fool and a retard.
When he disconnected an hour later, Baba told me about the discrepancies in Dada’s tax filings, and how an inquiry could have landed Dada in jail. I have no doubt about Baba’s exaggerations.
Baba grumbled for an hour afterwards, marking out transactions on Dada’s bank statements.
‘Walking out of the house like he knows everything! Now see what he is doing. Making his father file his tax reports and his mother run around town scouring for doctors for his pregnant wife,’ said Baba.
‘You threw him out,’ I said.
‘Same thing,’ said Baba and got back to Dada’s papers.
Baba worked tirelessly through the afternoon till late in the night. He clutched on to the papers as if they were a raft still keeping him afloat in his relationship with Dada. He told Maa and me that he needed to talk to Dada again to get some clarifications. I wondered if he missed his voice.
12 September 1999
My exams are going well and yet it means nothing. I sit on the row adjacent to Brahmi’s. In the last three exams she has been unusually fidgety. She used to write with three pens. Blue to write, black to underline and red to mark indents. I had picked up the habit from her. Now, she was using just one for her exams. Her question papers have an alarming number of circles for the ones she couldn’t solve. Most of them easy pickings. After every exam, she would tear the question paper and throw it in the dustbin. I would fetch the papers from the dustbin, tape them together and estimate her marks. She wouldn’t make it to even the top ten in class, not that it mattered any more.
I had decided I would put an end to this. She had to do well. It was her last set of exams after all.
It was mathematics. I took extra sheets thrice, two of which I didn’t need. I stole glances at Brahmi’s exam sheet which was sparsely filled. Instead of her god-like handwriting, the paper was filled with squiggles, scratched-out answers and big circles, as if her fingers had gone crooked overnight. With an eye on the clock, I copied the solutions of the toughest questions in the exam on to the two empty extra sheets in a tiny handwriting. On my way out to the washroom, I dropped the two sheets on Brahmi’s table. She picked them up and read through hurriedly. She cancelled out her solutions and attached the two sheets to her exam sheet.
‘You could have done that for me too,’ complained Rishab after the exam. ‘I’m definitely failing this one.’
‘You sit too far,’ I offered as an explanation.
Brahmi was too embarrassed to say anything. Later on, on the bus, she thanked me as if she was doing a chore.
‘Something troubling you?’
‘Don’t help me in the next exam.’
