He had to concentrate on sciences, spending his time in the laboratories where the microscopes slept like hawks under their dust covers. The science teachers advised him to simplify the diagrams that accompanied his essays, concerned that it would become a habit and he would lose valuable time during exams. But the diagrams were the only sketching he could do without furtiveness and guilt at home.
Everyone at home was, of course, aware of his talent. Kaukab sometimes brought him a bar of perfumed soap so he could sketch the vignette indented at its centre for her to embroider it in rows on her own or Mah-Jabin’s kameezs. And she asked him to convert the vines and geometric designs from the borders of the paper kitchen-towels so that they could be traced on the hands in henna, reducing it to fit the fingers, enlarging it for the palms. She saved the sketches in a folder that lived in her sewing hamper and they were often lent to other women around the neighbourhood. Whenever she couldn’t find her tailor’s chalk she asked to borrow one of his colouring pencils.
His grades at A-level were not high enough to get into medical school. Putting aside the feeling of guilt and disgrace and failure, he told his parents he would not be retaking the exams next year to improve his grades for medical school, nor would he go to university this year to read the many other science subjects for which his grades were good enough.
He planned to go to art college.
But he changed his mind when from the dark staircase he heard his mother slap the thirteen-year-old Mah-Jabin in the kitchen and say, “Who would marry you now?”
The year he went back to repeat his A-levels was a year enclosed on all sides by loneliness. Everyone he knew had gone away to university. He sat alone on the bus on the way to the school that was a low long building among the hills, made of gleaming glass and greyness and as windy as a harmonica, and in the classrooms he found himself unwilling to make contact with the new batch of students. Things had changed at home also: his failure had been a cruel dashing of his parents’ hopes, and a cloud of something anaesthetizing hung over his brother and sister who had witnessed his commitment to his studies all their lives — and, having failed despite all the hard work, he had made them afraid of their own books and schoolwork; the event had injured their confidence in their own abilities.
Early in October a pain opened in his back and legs, and the doctor— after checking his reflexes by trailing and wafting a tissue paper along his naked body — had wondered if he would like to be referred to a psychiatrist since there seemed no organic cause for the severe ache. His mother said it was out of the question: a young girl in the neighbourhood had been sent to a psychiatrist by the doctor and had within months rebelled against her parents and left home.
The months passed. He lost the pain somewhere along the way, working hard on his studies, but again did not make the required grades. He went away to university in London to do a BSc in Chemistry: there was one last path open to medical school still — if he managed to do well in his degree finals he could apply for entry then, in three years’ time.
But during his second year in London, everything changed: one night, drunk, he found the courage to speak to Stella. “I am never wrong about colour,” was one of the first things he said to her.
“Are you wearing contact lenses?” he shouted over the music. “No one with hair that colour has such blue eyes. I am never wrong about colour.”
She looked at him. “My eyes are that colour naturally. How do you know my hair isn’t dyed?” It fell onto her shoulders from beneath a large black hat the rim of which had been turned up above the face, the slice pinned to the crown with a pointy rose made of folded ribbon, also black. His hands were shaking. During the year in which he had tried to improve his grades, he saw many Pakistani and Indian boys and girls— who had been waiting since the beginning of puberty to leave home and find lovers at university — make desperate, clumsy and foolish attempts to pair up now that freedom had been delayed by one more unbearable year. But he had kept his distance and reserve. And upon arrival in London, the sadness was of a different kind: there was no fear of discovery or repercussions here but he was inhibited by incompetence and inexperience, by a profound sense of shame regarding his virginal state.
“Well?” she had now turned her back squarely on the boy she had been talking to when he approached her, and — in the privacy which included him — made a quick male-masturbatory gesture with the looped thumb and first finger of her left hand, to convey to him what she thought of the boy. Shunned, the boy stood behind her for a while and then miserably walked away.
Her confidence filled him with terror. Would she dismiss and denounce him similarly upon meeting the next person? Her lips were red and syrupy like glacé cherries.
“Well, young man, how do you know my hair isn’t dyed?”
“It just isn’t. I would know if it were. As I said I am never wrong about colour.”
She shrugged and smiled: “Hey, listen, I have seen you around the campus. And at the weekend you work at that bar in Soho, don’t you. I have wanted to talk to you for weeks now.”
“My name is Charag.”
“I know. I am Stella.”
“I know.”
They had to lean very close to each other to be heard and as a result could hear each other’s breath. They were in the cellar of a student house in Notting Hill, the space packed with people, and, softly, she took his hand and led him to the edge of the room, the walls that had been stencilled with giant capsules and pills in acidic colours, tumbling and floating, a brightly glowing mural celebrating their milieu’s fetish. There was to be a performance by a band — some friends of the party-givers who had travelled down from Scotland — but the party dispersed when the police arrived, summoned by the neighbours whose extreme dislike of the stu dents and the young they themselves were unable to comprehend, thinking their high-decibel drinking sprees and benders went unheard just as their intense internal storms of confusion did. Charag and Stella lost each other in the crowd that spilled onto the street like a nest of termites broken into.
She came to Soho the following Friday, then again the next night, and asked her friends to leave without her, waiting for the staff to finish the after-work duties. And just before dawn — when the red dots on her bed covers were juxtaposed on the windowpane as though berries hung on the tree outside — he left her room to go back to his own house, burning with longing and humiliation, kicking in murderous rage at the dry plane leaves that littered the footpaths.
He had watched the cigarette in her hands: tiny pink eyes opening and closing, breathing, where the paper burned and sent into the air a brown thread parallel to and distinct from the blue wisp of smoke rising out of the live tobacco.