He could hear miscellaneous sounds of sizzling and frying and clanking of metal pots and pans coming from the kitchen. And the occasional tremor of her tread as she moved around. Once or twice, there would be a sudden shout from her, ‘Why can’t I hear you? Why has your voice gone low?’ He’d nearly jump out of his skin and increase the volume ‘. . He endowed us with free will so that we can choose between good and bad. .’
Some of the answers were quite long, nearly five or six lines; he hated them. Others were short and easy and these he learnt first, leaving the involved ones till later. His attention kept wandering off — he was tempted to look at the final few chapters of his Geography and Biology books, such virgin pages, so far away in the school year. They would do those much later on, in winter, the chapters on tea-growing in Darjeeling and Assam; the north-eastern hill states and union territories; the digestive system; a chapter called ‘Coal’. And what was that one about the man being swallowed whole by a huge whale and staying alive in its belly? He couldn’t wait to read it all in one quick go. They were new lands waiting to be discovered in the vast sea of this boredom of lessons done to death. He kept sneaking looks at those untouched pages; they were almost forbidden and delicious.
Dida, limping around the flat, came by, stopped at the door and said, ‘You’ll be put through the wringer if you don’t do your work; will serve you right,’ and hobbled off. It came out of thin air; no encouragement, no motive, nothing. Did this add some sense of drama to the dead sameness of her days?
Suddenly Bidisha was in the room where Ritwik sat on the floor, amidst the untidy strew of his schoolbooks, pencils, and dirty satchel.
‘Are you ready then?’ she demanded.
Ritwik froze. ‘Nnno. . I mean yes. . but. .’ he stammered weakly.
Ritwik desperately wanted his father to come back: in his presence, she shouted and went as far as giving him a slap or two but never let herself go fully. That transformation into a column of fire had to be repressed till he was out of the house.
‘Give me the book.’ She settled down on the floor opposite him and picked out the wooden ruler. So this was going to be her weapon this evening. It had happened so many times before that Ritwik didn’t even flinch but he was scared. Fear was forever new, like spring; nothing ever robbed it of its edge and thisness. She fired quick volleys — ‘Which chapter? Which page?’ — and then began asking him the questions at the end of each chapter. He was going to have to give her the answer printed after each question verbatim.
‘Why did God make us in His image and likeness?’
‘God make. . God make. .’ he whispered, his eyes focused on the slow, irregular brandishing of the ruler gripped in her hand, and almost immediately knew he had made a mistake because she looked up at him with a dull gleam in her eyes and interrupted him.
‘God?’ she asked in that interrogative tone of hers, which meant that he had got the next word wrong and she wanted to confirm that, or maybe give him a chance to correct it before she brought down the ruler on his exposed arms or legs, he was never sure which.
‘God. . God. . make,’ he murmured, his voice a trembling leaf to the approach of storm. He knew he was getting it wrong but the right word had dried up inside him, gone into hiding.
‘God?’ That menacing brush of a chance given again, aware that it wasn’t going to be availed of.
‘God make. .’
Crack: the ruler on his thigh.
‘God?’ She was going to carry on the questioning halt at that word till he cleared up the blockage and let the words flow clean and correct.
‘God make. .’
This time there was not one but a whole choir of cracks, neat sharp sounds, syncopated and random, played out on his bare skin everywhere — arms, legs, thighs, a couple on his face and on the knuckles. He tried to dodge and duck but this infuriated her even more. As he half-crawled half-dragged himself to a corner, any corner, she stepped over his books and satchel and wielded the ruler with such abandon that anyone watching this would have thought that it had released something dammed up in her. Whenever she punished him physically, she came into a new being. It could only be called blossoming, as though all the forces in her, concentrated so far in a tight bud, had suddenly unfurled in a terrible beauty.
Ritwik could only feel the rectangles of burn the ruler imprinted on his skin. He noticed that where the thin edge of the ruler had caught one of his knuckles the skin had split in a tiny red gash. Only a tiny one. And there was the torrent of her words, some shouted, some hissed with the spitting anger of an attacking snake, which kept up the continuous bass line to the slap of wood against skin: ‘No God MADE God MADE how many times do you need to be told that if you’re asked a question containing the word “did” the answer is in the simple past tense so MADE MADE MADE not “make” will you ever make that mistake will you will you say MADE say God MADE.’
‘God made, God made,’ Ritwik obediently sobbed.
‘Stop crying. Stop crying now,’ she shrieked. ‘I don’t want a single sound to escape your lips. I’ll throttle you if I hear another sob. Is that clear?’
Ritwik choked and nodded. He was aware of the open wooden shutters of the adjacent house and the squares of fluorescent light visible through their own open windows. He sensed there were people standing near those windows, listening to everything that was going on here. He knew that his mother was aware of the neighbours soaking up the details of this little exemplary drama as well. The theatre inside her head broke into a tumultous applause.
There was an indeterminate gap between the Moral Science and the spelling test. Bidisha strode off to the kitchen after this corrective act, warning her silently crying son, ‘I’m going to the kitchen to cook some rice. I want all the difficult words in “The Cook and the Crane” mastered by the time I’m done. Otherwise, what you’ve just had is going to seem like a picnic compared with what’s coming.’
Ritwik had reached the plateau stage of terror. It was only its first installment that rattled and jarred him; after that, it was the physical pain that took front seat while the fear diminished. If there was to be more after a while, he was more or less prepared for it. He took a pencil and started underlining the difficult words in “The Cook and the Crane”: witty, receive, humorous, kitchen, shoo. . The words drew him in and his voice slowly faded until he was reading the whole story silently.
Her appearance at the door took him by surprise; she had come to conclude unfinished business.
‘Why can’t I hear your voice? Why? Didn’t I tell you I wanted to hear every word? Didn’t I?’
She advanced on him with huge strides, shouting, ‘I can’t hear you. Who’s taken your tongue?’ In the space of an eyelash-flicker she was upon him.
Then she did something she’d never done to him before: she picked him up by his shirt collar, lifted him clean off the floor and flung him, as one would a rag doll or a bag of rubbish, to one corner of the room. She had just extended her repertoire; the audience was on its feet, throwing coins and flowers. The applause was deafening.
Ritwik hit the low bed and the big metal trunk and landed on the little square of space made by the two walls, one edge of the trunk and one side of the bed. She rushed to him, dragged him out of the space and then threw him, again, in the opposite direction. This time he skidded on his school books lying on the floor and fell with his face down, his nose, teeth and tongue somehow hitting the concrete floor, with its patchwork of mismatching loud tiles, all at the same time. It put an end to his scared whimpering, the pain was too much for that. He let out a wail and some torn words, unintelligible, ineffectual, which were like bellows to her fire. While he lay curled on the floor trying instictively to reduce the surface area of contact, she kicked and punched him in between straightening him out so that she could have greater access to his body.