He came in and lay down on his bed in Room 252 even before the sun had set. Just that morning he had scrubbed the windowpane clear with his handkerchief. He got up a few times to look out the window. The green and brown vegetation and trees in the valley stood quietly in the evening light. The normally dull rock outcroppings scattered here and there now shone with a golden hue. On the broad, flat field, the shadows of the trees elongated with every passing moment.
Rahul’s eyes scanned the distance for any sign of that spot of yellow, which just might be returning to the residential development. Anjali’s face flashed through his mind again and again like a bolt of lightning. In his mind she was even now on her way to see him. He held his eyes shut and froze her image in his imagination.
There was no anger in those eyes, but rather the ache from being stung by the slingshot pellet, and her eagerness.
When did Rahul finally doze off? He wasn’t sure. O.P. shook him awake. “No dinner? It’s been dinnertime for awhile. You’re not sick, are you?”
Stumbling, Rahul managed to pull himself out of bed. He stumbled to the bathroom, turned on the tap, and put his head under the rush of water. It was as if the water were an entirely new sensation, cool and fresh. He’d fallen asleep sometime around six o’clock and now it was eight thirty. A long period of time had elapsed during this two-and-a-half-hour nap. Everything before had been part of a former existence; this was like a new life entirely, a feeling of a light fever and intoxication.
Rahul splashed cold water on his eyes. I’m slowly waking up, aren’t I?
“I’ll meet you down in the dining hall, I’m heading out,” O.P.’s voice sounded from outside.
Rahul later bumped into Hemant Barua in the dining hall, who sometimes stopped by after beating Professor Aggrawal in a game of chess. Hemant had two items of news. One was that he hadn’t seen Sapam Tomba, whose door was locked, for two days.
The second was the announcement that Rahul had made a terrifying mistake in taking admission to the Hindi department because every last individual in the department, from the sweeper to the chair, was a Brahmin. Save for Rahul, Shaligaram, and Shailendra George, the rest of the first-year Hindi students were all Brahmins.
Hemant Barua, the wondrous number-crunching genius from Dibrugarh, Assam, and MSc in the Department of Mathematics, combined statistics, information, and facts into a single process. He declared that on the basis of caste, the Brahmin to non-Brahmin ratio was approximately 88 percent to 12 percent. What’s more, those who left with their PhDs and later found work reflected the same statistic. Barua said, “Rahul, you have entered a labyrinth where they will lynch you one day. Beware. It’s not too late.”
Both pieces of information worried Rahul. Where had Sapam gone? The image of the handsome, roly-poly boy from Imphal flashed before his eyes.
The night passed, somehow, though Rahul was not conscious.
But in that state of unconsciousness a yellow parasol quietly fluttered like a butterfly coming up the hills from the valley below on the semicircular road, and each moment stretched out for such an eternity that his sleep was encircled from below him. Rahul, deep inside, slept without a care in the world, like an innocent, orphaned baby.
It was something like after the apocalypse that ends creation, when a tiny god resting on a tiny leaf rides the waves of a fathomless sea, asleep, engrossed in the redreaming of his next creation.
FIFTEEN
Some sort of predetermined rule dictated that Rahul’s first, and best, friends would be Shailendra George and Shaligaram. The three of them, instinctively, of their own accord, began to sit together. They talked among themselves and discovered that each of the other students had some sort of connection, either with one another, or with the teachers, or some family connection, or they had some other basis for rapport. These were confident boys who didn’t have to worry about their future. They were chiefly foot soldiers in the political machinations of the department. Less interested in books and literature, they took greater interest in the tricks of the trade that would help get their hands on degrees, positions, promotions, and fellowships. And they were very quick to master their training. There was some gene in their DNA that allowed them to learn this knowledge with the same ease a squirrel learns to scramble up a tree or a fish how to swim in the water or a kingfisher how to dive or a bandicoot how to make a hole in a wall and sneak in the house.
Shailendra George said that when his family had still been Hindu, his father had been an untouchable in charge of the cremation grounds. He’d converted from Hinduism thirty years ago.
Shaligaram was a weaver by caste. He said that upper-caste people, particularly Brahmins, made up jokes and sayings as proof of the idiotic ways weavers act. One joke goes that once upon a time a weaver had a dream that five two-hundred-pound jute sacks, normally filled with grain, were lying behind the house stuffed with rupees next to a pile of firewood. The weaver awoke and, remembering his dream, immediately marched out back. When he arrived, you can’t imagine his surprise when he found five sacks, as real as can be, lying next to the pile of wood. He shouted for all his neighbors to come, and once they were gathered, he told them all about the dream.
The weaver’s neighbors saw that millions of rupee notes and coins stuffed the five sacks. First they conferred among themselves. They then turned to the weaver to explain that, yes, the gunnysacks indeed contained a great harvest of wealth. But there was a lot of chaff and only a bit of grain. So they instructed him to separate and get rid of the worthless chaff and keep only the valuable grain.
The joke continues that the weaver’s womenfolk sifted out the chaff: the paper bills in denominations of 500, 100, 10, and 20, which, like chaff, is carried off by the wind. The weaver’s womenfolk kept only the grain. With five full bags, they managed to collect the quarter-, half-rupee coins, pennies, and cowries totaling something like 2,500 rupees.
Divvying up the spoils, the neighbors all became millionaires, while the dreaming weaver became a “pennyaire” and hero of this caste joke. It’s interesting that countless such jokes have gone around about lower-caste people; the punch line is always followed by the sound of a belly laugh, a dark echo that has rung through the centuries.
Goondas have a long tradition of these kinds of jokes about simple, honest castes, communities, or men who get tricked. Each joke ends with the same kind of mass laughter: cruel, dripping, self-satisfied, uncivilized, full of power.
The same sort of group guffaw could be heard in the Hindi department during the break between classes, when Balram Pandey, who served as cook for Dr. Loknath Tripathi, told a new weaver joke. The girls, as a group, had already slipped outside to eat apart from the rest, carrying their little tiffin food cylinders filled with parathas they’d brought from home.
Balram Pandey’s weaver joke went like this: Once upon a time a weaver got married. The next day his upper-caste friends from the neighborhood asked him, “So, did you feed your new bride a little snack at night?” The weaver had, in fact, fed his wife all sorts of sweet desserts like laddus, motichurs, and a whole string of jelabis, and said so to his friends.
The weaver’s friends started to laugh to themselves that this idiot doesn’t know a thing, and this imbecile hasn’t even the good sense to feed a snack to his new bride’s other mouth. The poor girl must still be hungry. And he doesn’t even realize that women’s other mouth must be fed with something else entirely, not just with jelabis and motichur.
The weaver pleaded with his friends to tell him what kind of sweet dessert he should feed his new bride. His friends felt sorry for the weaver’s ignorance and gave him some advice: first take a toothbrush and toothpaste, clean and rinse out your bride’s other mouth, and then give us a call. We’ll come and bring her the snack ourselves. After all, what are friends for?