Hand in hand, the two continued down the stairs.
But the moment they reached the foot of the stairs, Javed found himself alone again. Amidst stacks of cargo jeans, shoes, and T-shirts, Manju had seen a man who was selling green mechanical frogs that crawled over the floor. Javed watched as Manju turned the noisy frog toy over and over with his shoe. ‘Complex boy,’ Javed said.
Manju let go of the frog, which crawled in circles until the vendor of clothes repossessed it.
‘If you go back, your father will marry you off, Manju. That simple.’
‘No,’ Manju said, and with greater emphasis each time, ‘No. No. No.’
‘Yes. And one more thing, Manju: you’ll have to marry your father, too, and look after him like a wife. You know all this, and you’re still thinking of going back?’
Manju shrugged, as if he didn’t care.
‘My life is not limited by your imagination,’ Manju said.
‘Good,’ Javed said. ‘Good. Tell them that.’
Instead, moving away from Javed, Manju narrowed his eyes and searched again for the Nethravati Express, which he spied among the trains behind him. But when he turned around to view it better, he found that the roof of the train had suddenly turned into glass; and Manju saw its compartments filled with familiar faces of relatives, cousins, and neighbours from his village: all of them, like his uncle Revanna, dressed in their cotton shirts and white dhotis, chit-chatting in their loud dialect, and smelling of rural curry, as if the entire village had arrived in Mumbai. Now everyone sitting in the glass train went quiet and gazed at Manju, as if they had come here just to ask him a question.
The hallucination ended — the roof of the train turned into metal again; something was tickling Manju’s ankle. He looked down to find that another of the noisy mechanical frogs had found him out, and had propped itself against his shoe, as if it meant to crawl up his leg; turning it round with his shoe, he kicked it back in the direction of its vendor.
‘Javed,’ he said. ‘Javed.’
But when he looked around, Javed had disappeared.
Manju ran into the crowd looking for him. He ran up and down steps, and came out of the station, yelling, ‘I’m not going to leave you! I’m not going back to them!’
‘Manju.’
He turned around to see Javed waving at him.
‘You’re mad. I just came outside to get a coconut. You are completely mad. You know this?’
‘I thought you had left me.’
Javed shook his head. ‘Why would I leave you?’
The coconut-seller was watching, but Manju put his arm around Javed.
They took turns drinking from the tender coconut.
Before Javed was done, Manju knocked the nut out of his hand. ‘Kambli!’
‘You’re Kambli!’
‘You! You!’
The two chased each other down the road.
From behind, they heard the coconut-seller yelling; the boys stopped.
‘Shit. We didn’t pay.’
‘We should go back, no?’
‘No! Just run. He can’t come after us.’
‘He is coming after us! He is coming!’
Manju held on to Javed’s shirt, and they ran, and then he went ahead and Javed held on to his shirt; in this way, one holding on to the other, shrieking and laughing, they charged down the mud road that led into Panvel city.
•
One morning when she was about ten years old, Manju’s mother had discovered that the man she loved more than anyone else in the world, her father, had left a toy on her younger sister Prema’s bed. He had never placed anything there for her. She went out to the courtyard, and found the rusty saw that her mother used to cut jackfruit: tiptoeing back in, she went to the bedroom, and slapped Prema awake. Twice. Thrice. When her younger sister woke up, she held the saw right at her throat. ‘If you take his love away from me … if you even think of taking his love away from me …’ Her sister Prema wailed at the top of her voice and her father came running into the bedroom: dropping the saw at once, she tried to explain, but that was the only time he had ever struck her in the face.
•
Manju opened his eyes: someone had clapped his hands right in front of them.
‘How much do you dream every day?’
Manju took stock of his situation; he was lying on the golden bed and had been dreaming once again of his mother’s childhood.
Showered and fragrant and back from the hot day’s running around, Javed stood wiping his hair with a thin cotton towel.
‘Your turn now.’ Javed threw the wet cotton towel at him.
Manju tied the wet cotton across his face, tucking it behind his ears like an armed robber’s mask, making his friend laugh. Inhaling the scent of freshly shampooed hair, Manju spoke through the mask.
‘Javed, when do you have to go back to your father’s place?’
Javed shrugged. ‘Before it’s dark. That’s when my father thinks I might get up to something with you.’
Tearing away the wet towel from his face, throwing it to the bed, Manju pursed his lips, licking them from inside his mouth, before he said: ‘Javed.’
‘Yes?’
‘Go down and get some condoms,’ he said. ‘We have three hours left.’
Javed looked at him with a frown.
‘What? Condoms?’
‘Yes. Go get some. It’s time,’ Manju said. ‘I’ll take a shower while you’re gone.’
‘You want me to go get condoms?’ Javed asked, trying to figure this out.
‘Yes. I’m shy. You go down and get them from the chemist’s shop,’ Manju said.
This was it: it was going to happen now.
When Javed left, to make sure of his resolution, Manju went to the wardrobe and opened it again. The helmet was there, waiting for him. Then he leaned forward, picked up the helmet, and brought it, with its metal visor, to his eye-level; he peeped into the three round holes that had been bored into the top to make it lighter, before turning the helmet over. He smelled Javed’s head-sweat, and recognized the indentations made in the foam padding by Javed’s skull; from the padding, his eye was led down into the black bowl of the helmet; and that curved darkness, along with the cold touch of the metal visor, reminded him of the well with the rusty grille in Dahisar, where the turtles with glints of gold swam, and as he brought his nose closer and closer to the smell of Javed’s head, he felt himself fall through the rusty grid and down through the well’s darkness into something deeper — into fear, all the fear that had ever been born on earth, his brother’s fears, his runaway mother’s fears, Mohan Kumar’s fears, the fears of his village, fears of the time before he was born — and then, instead of turtles, Manju saw the faces of Mohan Kumar, Radha, Tommy Sir and Anand Mehta merge into one collective animal — and this animal bellowed at him: ‘Do you know what name we’ll give you if you stay with Javed?’
Yes. I know.
Manju was sick in the stomach; he dropped the helmet, and kicked the wardrobe door shut.
He was sweating: it had begun, and it would recur throughout his life. Confusion in Manjunath would lead to fury in Manjunath: and this fury — against the way things are — would grow and grow until it destroyed every single alternative to the way things were.