Yet he found himself saying, “That afternoon. . by the boat. . you ran off. . did you take my scooter away and then put it back near my house? Did you take the scooter keys from my pocket?”
Inevitably, it came out wrong. Still, he tried to look as if he was amused by the keys and missing scooter. He attempted a smile.
“You think I’m a thief as well? First they say I stole a phone, then. . What’s got into all these old buggers? What’s there to grin about anyway with all your thirty-two teeth? You couldn’t pay me to steal that pile of junk.”
“Don’t shout,” Badal begged. “That’s not what I meant, not what I meant. I thought you were playing a prank. . just fooling around.” He had not intended asking the question in that way. All he wanted was to remind Raghu of that afternoon, of what had happened before the scooter was lost. Maybe he had actually wanted to ask about the monk in sunglasses and the night when he had seen Raghu with those foreigners.
No, he had not wanted to ask about that, there was no need to.
Raghu went back to the stall and crouched over his pail again. Badal sat on his haunches next to him. Raghu turned his face away and started with single-minded zeal on the pile of clay cups in the water. He picked up another four and swilled them out. “Get lost,” he said, “I’ve no time for this now.” Hunched over the cups, his hair a dry, sun-bleached nest, he looked so childish and vulnerable that Badal wanted to put his arms around those thin shoulders and tell him, you never have to work again, I’ll look after you.
“I thought you were just fooling around with the scooter,” Badal said in an urgent whisper. “What else would I think? Why else would I buy you a gift? I got you that phone to. .”
“That phone got me a beating, that’s what it did.”
“Can’t you see. .?” Badal begged.
“What? What can’t I see?” Raghu spoke slowly, biting off each syllable. His voice had a belligerent edge. It was raised — too much. Badal looked around hoping nobody was listening.
“Can’t you see how things are between us?” he whispered. “You can see as well as I can what has happened between us. That’s why I bought you that phone. So that, any time. .”
Even as he spoke, he felt his voice drying up, his hands go clammy. A suffocating darkness rose from inside him, yet he could see everything now with agonising clarity.
The crowds shielded them. They were in the eye of their own private storm. Around them was the roar of other people. This was not how he had meant it to be, but this was how it was. This was always how it was with important things, the things that made or shattered your life.
Johnny Toppo shouted, “Arre Raghu, hurry up with the cups. I’ve got people here waiting.”
Raghu gave Badal a twisted smile and said, “So that’s how things are, is it? You don’t say!”
Johnny Toppo hobbled towards them. “I’ve had enough of you, you punk. I told you I was sacking you,” he said. “You begged to stay. Either you work or I get someone else. I haven’t signed a bond to feed you for free.”
Raghu stood up saying, “Take it easy, Uncle, I’m just entertaining one of your customers. That’s work, or isn’t that work?”
He threw another half smile towards Badal before going back to the stove. The scent of the tea came out from the pan in a cloud when he pushed aside the lid: thick, brown, boiling, sweet, gingery tea. He poured a cupful, imitating Johnny Toppo’s technique of filling half the cup with froth, then held it out to Badal. There was something malicious in the way he held it just out of reach over the boiling pan for a second or two before handing it over. The cup felt too hot and Badal could not understand why he had been given it. He never drank this kind of tea and Raghu knew that. He had known it all these months when he had served Badal unsweetened lemon tea, unasked. He stared at the boy through the cloud of steam. He wanted no kind of tea. When Raghu did not look at him again, he walked away from the stall and tilted the cup over a grey crab that looked as prehistoric and lifeless as a stone, watching it skitter for cover under the sand which drank up the tea.
He crushed the cup underfoot. Sharp-edged waves puckered the surface of the granite sea as far as his eyes could reach. He thought he could walk into its measureless sweep until he became a barely visible speck going further and further away. Holiday-makers milled around him, everyone with friends or relatives, shopping, laughing, chatting, finding things, running into the water. Nearby were a young man and woman. Badal could see they were in a world that contained nothing but themselves — no work, no family, no yesterday or tomorrow. They did not look at each other or speak or hold hands, but they stood very close, their bodies touching at the hips and at the shoulders, as if a moment’s break in contact might snap a fragile spell.
It took Badal no more than ten minutes to get home on his scooter. Nobody expected him at that hour. They knew him to stay out as long as he possibly could. He heard his uncle’s hoarse shout from the balcony, “Who’s that downstairs? Jadu? Jadua!” Badal didn’t answer, nor did he go to the tap to wash his face. He went to his room and fell into his string cot. His bones ached with fatigue, a pain that filled the room and drained him with every breath.
He tried to sleep. After a while he realised he was staring at a nail in the wall above the door. It was an iron nail of the largest possible size. A deep, cold shudder shook him. His head hurt as if that nail were going through the centre of his forehead, the way it had hurt watching a relative hammer it into the wall after his father’s cremation. He could not remember the relative’s face, but he had a hazy memory of another man, shrunken and stooped, who had come for the funeral. “It’s what people do,” the man had explained, stroking Badal’s nine-year-old head as the nail was being banged in. “To protect the room against evil spirits when someone dies in it.” Badal did not know who that man was, but after he had held the ritual flaming torch to his father’s head on the funeral pyre, he and the man had stood together, a child and a wizened ancient, watching the body burn. The man had held his shoulder and tried to console him saying the body that turns into a handful of ashes is nothing but meaningless flesh. The soul is eternal, he had said, you have not lost him, he will always be with you, only you can’t see him.
A dry sob burst from Badal like a gasp. The solid, reassuring bulk of a body. The body that we embrace, hold, stroke — what is left when the body is gone? Nobody else would sleep in the room where his father had been found dead. Badal would sleep nowhere else.
He thought of his only friend at the time — a boy who lived down the alley. They walked together to school, studied and played together. Once, crawling through an unused sewer pipe by the road for fun, they had come face to face with the head of a just-slaughtered goat that someone was holding at the other end. Its teeth were big. Its eyes bulged. Its pelt was lathered to its neck with blood. The head shook because the person holding it was laughing so hard he couldn’t keep it still. When the two boys had tried crawling away from it, backward through the pipe, fright had made them do all the wrong things and they had got stuck inside. He no longer remembered how they came unstuck, how they got out. But he remembered how gently his friend’s mother had washed his face that afternoon, then sat him on her lap and fed him soft, warm parathas and sugar before sending him home.
He felt starved thinking of those parathas. He had not eaten since morning. He hauled himself out of his cot and went to the kitchen on the other side of the courtyard. He opened the latch on the kitchen door and saw a row of shin ing, upturned pots. In the basket where his aunt stored vegetables were three potatoes and an onion. The room smelled of overripe guava. He tracked down the smell to a single fruit, soft as a banana now, and blackened in patches. He swallowed it in two bites before its putrid smell could invade him. He looked around the kitchen. Through the mesh on the cupboard in a corner he could see three covered bowls of food. The cupboard was locked. He yanked the lock to check if it would give. That hammer began driving the burning nail through his forehead again. The lock would not budge. He went to the line of tins on the kitchen shelf and opened them one by one — rice, flour, dal — weevils crawling among the grains of rice. A bottle of oil.