He could see the old Bengali teacher too, sitting on his string cot by the gate with his typewriter. He typed loudly and when the little bell went off at the end of each line, he paused and read it aloud.
Mr and Mrs Raipur, who lived in the little room at the edge of the big, crumbling Raipur family home, emerged to walk their baby up and down among the canna lilies in their garden.
‘Such a beautiful baby,’ said Mr Raipur. ‘Oh, what a beautiful baby. Look, it has a face just like mine.’
‘Not at all like yours,’ said Mrs Raipur. And she sang: ‘Small nose.’ She sang: ‘Small nose, pretty rose, tiny mung bean, little little queen.’
Far away, a generator began to roar.
xy = 0 and x ≠ 0, then y = 0. If there is x and y and the result is zero. If x is not zero, y is.
Sampath remembered how he had not at any time ever managed to solve a problem put to him by Father Matthew Mathematics, never managed to rake and weed those forests of numbers and letters upon the board into tidy rows following an orderly progression of arrows to a solution that matched the one in the list of answers at the back of the textbook.
Eating jackfruit in the summer causes anxiety and, in some individuals, ill-temper.
‘Little star,’ sang Mrs Raipur, ‘pretty flower. Rose and jasmine and moonflower.’
‘And cauliflower,’ said Mr Raipur.
‘Radishes. Are those radishes? No, potatoes. Potatoes? No, radishes.’
Somewhere a pressure cooker hissed. Kulfi Chawla climbed the stairs that led from the balcony to the rooftop with a guava. Sorry for her son, she crept up behind him. ‘Would you like a guava?’ she asked. She had been unable to resist buying it, even though it was the first of the season and still a little hard. She pulled his ear affectionately.
He thought of the post office.
‘No,’ he wanted to shout. ‘No, I do not want any guava,’ he wanted to say. But his stomach growled and he took the fruit into his hands. He was cross and grumpy. The guava was cool and green and calm-looking.
The post office. The post office. The post office. It made him want to throw up. He decided not to think of it again.
Guavas are tasty and refreshing and should be eaten whenever possible.
He stared at the fruit, wished he could absorb all its coolness, all its quiet and stillness into him.
‘Oh, what should I do?’ he asked out loud, all of a sudden. ‘What, what, what?’ He stared at the guava intently, ferociously, with a fevered gaze, and gave it a shake. He felt it expand in response, rising under his fingertips.
‘What should I do?’ he said, giving it another desperate shake. ‘I do not want a job. I do not like to live like this,’ he wailed … And suddenly, before his amazed eyes, the surface of the guava rose even more … and exploded in a vast Boom! creamy flesh flying, droplets showering high into the sky, seeds scattering and hitting people on the balconies and rooftops, and down on the street.
‘Ho!’ shouted Lakshmiji, who had been hit in the eye. ‘What is going on there? All kinds of bizarre happenings in that household always.’
But she received no answer. Up on the rooftop, Sampath felt his body fill with a cool greenness, his heart swell with a mysterious wild sweetness. He felt an awake clear sap flowing through him, something quite unlike human blood. How do such things happen? He could have sworn a strange force had entered him, that something new was circulating within him. He shuddered in a peculiar manner and then he began to smile.
‘Oh dear,’ said Kulfi. ‘I will complain to the fruit seller, Sampath, beta. Would you like an egg instead?’
Sampath’s bare feet were cold against the floor. A breeze lifted the hair off his forehead. Goose bumps covered his arms. He thought of Public Transport, of the Bureau of Statistics, of head massages, of socks and shoes, of interview strategies. Of never ever being left alone, of being unable to sleep and of his father talking and lecturing in the room below.
‘No,’ Sampath answered. His heart was big inside his chest. ‘No, I do not want an egg,’ he said. ‘I want my freedom.’
6
The afternoon of the next day, the family departed to attend another wedding (for it was the wedding season, you remember), but they left Sampath at home so as to be sure he would not pull down his pants at yet another important event. As soon as they had rounded the corner of the lane on which they lived, Sampath let himself out of the house. Propelled by a great buoyancy of feeling, he made his way down to the bazaar. Here, he caught the first bus he saw.
The bus thundered along on the road leaving Shahkot, the roar of its dirty engine filling the air. Sampath thought of snakes that leave the withered rags of their old skins behind and disappear into grass, their presence unbetrayed by even a buckle in the foliage; of insects that crack pods and clay shells, that struggle from the warm blindness of silk and membrane to be lost in enormous skies. He thought of how he was leaving the world, a world that made its endless revolutions towards nothing. Now it did not matter any more. His heart was caught in a thrall of joy and fear. Somehow, somewhere, he had found a crack. Bus stations and people passed by in a blur.
He had taken the bus that took the milk sellers home after they had brought their milk to be sold in town. Squashed between dozens of cold, empty canisters, he continued all the way to the outskirts of town, until the buildings began to thin and patches of scrub and bedraggled trees appeared. He rode until no buildings could be seen at all, until they climbed up into the undulations of the foothills, so Sampath could feel the air thin about him and the freshness of greenery bloom within his tired frame. They climbed higher and higher.
An old crone moved to sit closer to him. She had so many canisters, he was forced to lean right out of the window and to hang on for dear life. What is more, she was one of those old women who despise a silence. Especially irritated by Sampath’s face in its cocoon-like veil, she used her voice like a needle to reach and poke. ‘Where do you come from and what is your family name? What does your father do and how much does your uncle earn? How many relatives do you have in your house and how many cupboards? And the way to really good health is to drink a litre of buffalo milk first thing in the morning before the sun rises.’
Sampath felt the marvellous emotion that had overtaken him begin to sag. The bus groaned its way up the slope of the hill. For a brief moment, the engine hiccuped and the bus stopped. In this moment, before the driver changed gears and proceeded up the hillside, Sampath leapt from the window of the stalling bus, spurred by his annoyance at the old crone’s voice. Amazed passengers who happened to be looking out at the view as they continued their journey saw Sampath racing into the wilderness towards an old orchard visible far up the slope. He ran with a feeling of great urgency. Over bushes, through weeds. Before him he saw a tree, an ancient tree, silence held between its branches like a prayer. He reached its base and feverishly, without pausing, he began to climb. He clawed his way from branch to branch. Hoisting himself up, he disturbed dead leaves and insect carcasses and all the bits of dried-up debris that collect in a tree. It rained down about him as he clambered all the way to the top. When he settled among the leaves the very moment he did so — the burgeoning of spirits that had carried him so far away and so high up fell from him like a gust of wind that comes out of nowhere, rustles through the trees and melts into nothing like a ghost.