What You Call Winter, Page 21

  Naresh was Hindu, and he found the schoolboys far more interesting. He squatted in his corner and tried to make out what was happening in the front room. His English had improved a great deal since coming to the household; memsahib continued to drill him with words she considered useful. “You might as well learn something, until your father comes,” she told him. Father. Learn.

  Scandal, expense, he heard now. Memsahib described the damage to her property in elaborate detail, her voice rising as she recalled each grievance. The schoolmaster passed his hand over his carefully oiled hair and met each charge with regret or satiny protest. The priests said little, although one had a dry cough and peppered the discussion with throat clearing.

  Then Naresh heard the clear, high voices of the boys. “Don’t be angry with us, Aunty.”

  Memsahib made a dubious clucking noise.

  “We will do our utmost to catch the balls, Aunty!” another proposed.

  Naresh, moved by this response and overcome with curiosity, slipped to the doorway just in time to see the smallest boy present memsahib with a thick packet. “These are letters we have written telling Aunty we are sorry.”

  “Most sorry, madam,” the schoolmaster added. “Most regretful. Only see how hard they have worked at these letters! In their English class, they’ve written them. In English, for you.” To the boys, in a tone of great respect, “Aunty studied in England when she was a student. In Oxford. If you study hard, maybe you can win a scholarship to England too.”

  “That is neither here nor there,” memsahib said, shaking her head. But her voice had a new conciliatory softness and she grasped the letters tightly. “It is a serious thing, you know, the upkeep of property.”

  “Highly serious,” offered the healthy priest.

  “What could be more serious?” The schoolmaster nodded, beaming. With that, the matter seemed settled. The boys were given a biscuit apiece, the men slices of plum cake, and the council soon departed with suitable expressions of thanks and best wishes, and frequent coughs from the afflicted priest.

  The packet of letters from the Hindu boys became memsahib’s triumph. For the next several days, she took to reading them aloud in the spare hour after tea. She sat at the front room table with the letters spread before her and read one after another with relish, repeating certain phrases as if to impress an audience with their significance. In fact, there was no one but Naresh to witness these sessions. At dusk, when the crows began wheeling through the yellow skies, he found it pleasant to sit on the balcony and listen to her reading. At that distance he could not quite understand her, but he let the English words float past him, faint and blurred and musical. His grandfather rested at that time of day. Jude-sahib was still in town, badasahib still hiding at his gymkhana. There was no one to interrupt the flow of apologies.

  But this reprieve did not last long. Three weeks later, a ball crashed through the front-room window, upsetting a bowl of rice memsahib had left to soak on the sill. From that day forward, memsahib sent Naresh running whenever she heard a smack and a shout. “It’s mine to keep. It’s come on my property,” she shouted when the boys hooted in protest. Property, she taught Naresh. Hoodlum. Naresh repeated the words back to her, strange sounds that had nothing to do with the feel of the ball in his hands as he began the slow climb up the stairs. Lesson, she called down to him from the landing. Respect. The smaller balls fit neatly in his hands; the big ones were heavy as jackfruit. Enough, she taught him. He offered them up to her, one by one, and watched as she held each scuffed hostage aloft for the Hindu boys to see. Then she tucked them all away inside the house — Con-fis-cate—where Naresh was not permitted to follow. By the time Naresh had collected three dozen balls for memsahib, she had stopped asking when his father would come from Juhu to take him away.

  On a hazy day in January, five months after Naresh had come to the Almeidas, he lingered near the garden wall and listened to the progress of a game overhead. He could hear a ringing whenever the ball bounced off the rim, a jarring sound in the sleepy afternoon. It was after four o’clock. Classes had ended, the teachers had gone, the throng of autoricks and buses and bicycles and carts had all but cleared from the road. Only a few boys still hung about the grounds, dusty-legged, shirts pulled loose from their shorts.

  At that time of day, the Almeidas napped through the afternoon heat. They closed their doors and windows against the din of the games court and ran all the overhead fans to drown out the boys’ shouting. Ashok sat beneath the shade of the bamboo trees, staring through the gate to the light-glazed road until his head drooped and he dozed.

  But Naresh enjoyed the sound of the game too much to sleep. When he backed away from the wall he could catch a glimpse of the ball, falling into a thicket of brown hands, popping free, and falling again. Suddenly a wild throw sent the ball well beyond the fingertips of the tallest Hindu boys. It smacked against the side of the house, bounced sharply, and disappeared behind a pile of earth.

  “Oho!”

  “Into the hornets’ nest!”

  Naresh ran to retrieve the lost ball, pretending that he was a part of their game. He knew what the ball’s fate would be. But he longed for the chance to return one ball, if only to see whether he could clear the second-story wall.

  “Were you aiming for the chimney?”

  “It’s gone into the back! Go and see. We’ll wait.”

  “Why should I get it? I was throwing to you!”

  By the time Naresh found the ball, nine or ten heads had lined up against the school wall, staring down at him from one side. Memsahib stared down from the other. She had just emerged from her afternoon nap, looking tired and cross. Her braid was a long frayed rope down her back.

  “What have they broken today?” she asked loudly in Hindi for the boys to hear.

  “Nothing broken.”

  “Nothing this time, you mean!”

  The boys struck up their usual clamor, trying to appease her. Some called to her in English: “Aunty, Aunty, excuse!”

  “I give it back and ten minutes later the same thing again. I can hardly close my eyes to sleep!” She leaned over the railing and pointed. “See the marks you’ve made on my house? See that crack there? It’s like living opposite a cannon gun!” She directed her gaze back to Naresh. “Bring that ball to me.”

  At once the boys surged forward, leaning over the wall and shouting.

  “Is this the way to treat a neighbor?” she demanded. “Pelting my house, day in, day out? Is this the way to behave?”

  “Don’t take our ball, Aunty!”

  “We’re playing only!”

  But one boy turned his attention to Naresh, who stood beneath the commotion with the ball in his hands. “Kutta! Ganda kutta!”

  The other boys soon took up his cry, calling Naresh a dog, a rat, a thief for hire. This had never happened before. Memsahib threw her arms in the air, shouting, objecting, threatening a campaign of letter writing. “See how you behave when your teachers aren’t here? Stop it. Stop it!”

  Naresh did not much mind the names. He did not know these boys; he tried to think instead of Jude-sahib, who tugged his ear playfully now and then. He thought of memsahib and the letters he felt they had shared; he thought of his mother, who could not write him letters. He thought of his grandfather, who could sleep in the afternoons with Naresh to watch the gate. “See the blessing God has sent me,” Ashok had taken to saying. “Cuha! Cor!” called the student.

  “You need a good slap, all of you!” memsahib said shrilly.

  Naresh gazed up at the schoolboy who had started the attack. He was perhaps a year or two older than Naresh and wore a white button-down shirt. He had shoes, Naresh knew without being able to see them.

  Something passed between the two boys as they watched each other. It was not that the student had a house somewhere with a toilet or that he came to school in an autorick each morning. Naresh enjoyed his smoky evenings in the shelter at the back of the Almeida compound. He had a mat on the
floor and two good pairs of slippers. He was not bothered by the boy’s tie, by his shirt or his shoes. But there was something.

  “Ganda kutta!”

  It was not even the names the boy shouted. Naresh felt only a single part of the distance between them: that it was so easy for this boy to drop balls down and let them bounce away. Standing beneath the games court, testing the weight of the ball in one hand, Naresh was filled with a deep wistfulness. He wondered what it would be like to hold a ball out into the air and watch it plummet from his hands. It would fall so quickly, bounce so high! And then he imagined throwing the ball from his spot in the garden, a perfect arc, sailing up, up, just over the boy’s fingertips, just out of reach.

  Instead Naresh surrendered the ball to memsahib. She put her hand on his shoulder, quivering with anger as she faced the row of boys. “I will write to your teachers! Do you hear? I will write to your parents!”

  “Tilcatta!” the boy called merrily to Naresh. Already someone had found another ball. The faces vanished from the top of the wall as the boys resumed their game.

  “What’s happening here? What is all this?”

  Naresh turned, still hugging the ball to his chest. Badasahib had awakened. He had no hair left on the top of his head, but the tufts around his ears were stiff and wild.

  “These boys are up to their tricks again, that’s what!”

  “Tcha! They are boys, only boys. High-spirited,” said badasahib. He looked up to the games court, but all the schoolboys were clustered beneath the basketball hoop. He chuckled and said, “When I was a boy, I could throw a ball like a shot, from one corner of a field to another. Every day we used to go and practice —”

  “When you were a boy! When you were a boy you were a hooligan just like these ones here! And they go on with this behavior, totally unchecked. See what they’ve done.” She pointed to chalky marks on the wall and a dented gutter. “Francis, you must go and see the head. This was a quiet neighborhood until that school came in. Now I can hardly shut my eyes for five minutes’ peace!”

  Badasahib squinted in the direction of the damaged tree. “Why do you interfere in these things? Just leave them be. You only make matters worse.”

  “I? What have I done? I put up with their noise and their games and their I don’t know what, all day long, and I’m the one interfering, is it? Interfering!” Naresh saw tears spring to memsahib’s eyes. “I’m left to manage everything on my own. No one lifts a finger to help me …”

  Naresh slid against the railing, letting one foot drop to the step below. He thought of his grandfather, sitting quietly near the gate, far below whatever happened on the landing. Could Ashok hear them? Did he wonder where Naresh had gone? For a moment the boy considered slipping away with the ball in his hand but memsahib suddenly turned to him, her eyes bird-sharp again.

  “Let them do what they like, then. Let them pummel my house and abuse this boy. I won’t bother to stop them!”

  “What abuse? What’s happened?”

  Naresh glanced quickly to the foot of the stairs, wishing Ashok would appear.

  “They’ve insulted him. Right to my face. Such things they’ve called him —” She glanced at Naresh and set her lips firmly. “But the point is that all this business has gone too far. That I should stand on my own landing and be pelted at, that this child — come here, son — should suffer only for trying to help me.” (Son, thought Naresh. Suffer) Her fingers bit into the flesh of his shoulders.

  “He looks well enough.”

  “Oh, what’s the use, Francis—you might as well stay shut up in your room all day. What do you care about anything that happens?”

  “Enough!” badasahib growled.

  “Oh, enough, enough!” scoffed memsahib. Her arm looped around the boy’s chest, pulling him closer to her. Naresh felt hot and cramped against her bulk, but he dared not move.

  “It’s time for my tea,” badasahib added in a loftier tone. “I’ll be late.”

  “Late to the gym! What’s wrong with you, Francis? What’s more important?”

  Badasahib glared. His hair stood up from his ears more violently than ever, it seemed to Naresh, and his face was small and hard. Memsahib was strong and stout, but badasahib had shrunken to bone, to hip joints and chin, the plate of his forehead and the knobs of his knees. Wrinkles bit into the pouches of his cheeks, and his eyes were yellow at the corners. Naresh shrank away from his gaze.

  “Well,” badasahib demanded. Then in Hindi, “Is anything the matter with you?”

  Naresh felt his face grow hot. He sensed that he had gone from the guard to the guarded and that badasahib had caught him in his shame. “Nothing is wrong.” His voice piped, higher than he liked. “This ball came over and I found it for memsahib.”

  Memsahib shook him. “Tell the truth, son. What did they say to you? I heard as well as you.”

  Truth, thought Naresh, relishing the sound. He did not see the point of any of this. Only the ball, still in his hands, seemed solid enough to speak of. “This is the ball, here.”

  She sniffed, letting go of Naresh with a little push.

  “That’s an end to it, then,” said badasahib. Naresh stood uncertainly between them, and at that moment a ball sailed over the wall and crashed into a guava tree, bringing down a scattering of leaves. Memsahib crowed, “You see! You see!” and badasahib shuffled forward, the bottoms of his trousers flapping against his ankles.

  “You there!” He straightened, lifting a bony arm to the games court. His fist was tight and small as a child’s. “You boys, there! How can a tree grow when it is battered like this?” He glanced toward memsahib, then turned back to the wall, speaking more gently. “I know you are only young boys playing. But you must take better care!”

  “Sorry, Uncle,” one boy chirped, but he was jostled away and three others appeared, older and taller.

  “They’ll keep our ball!” one of them shouted. “Thieves! Throw it back!”

  “He can’t throw it back! Look at him, with his arm in the air like a scarecrow.” His friends took up the cry, some in English, others in Hindi. “Scarecrow, old scarecrow!”

  Badasahib stood at the railing. His lips moved as if of their own accord; Naresh heard small smacking noises but no words. The old man’s fist swayed gently overhead, nearly still, until a car horn sounded and the boys turned to go. Only when they had disappeared did badasahib let his arm drop to his side, as if he suddenly felt the weight of it.

  The next day, the schoolmaster came to the gate, pressing his hands together in appeal. Ashok jerked up, stiff-hipped, to open the gate, but memsahib ordered him to leave the schoolmaster standing in the road. “What good does sorry do?” she said loudly, for the teacher to hear.

  Sorry, Naresh heard. Good. Ashok dropped a hand to his shoulder and led him away before the schoolmaster answered.

  “Leave them be,” advised Ashok. “They have their own troubles. We have ours.”

  But Naresh turned back to see memsahib accept a fresh packet of letters through the bars of the gate. When the schoolmaster turned to go, she marched straight back toward the house.

  “Memsahib?” Naresh broke away from his grandfather’s hold and ran after her. He had been waiting in the garden in case she needed help. She had so many balls now that surely the schoolmaster had come to claim them. He thought he could carry them down for her.

  But memsahib stopped only for a moment. “I am disappointed in you,” she told Naresh in a low voice. “Disappointed,” she repeated in Hindi, and he put his hands behind his back, scratching a toe in the dirt. “You did not tell the truth.” She did not return any of the lost balls.

  In the evening, when Jude-sahib came home from the city and memsahib had spoken to him, he called Naresh aside. Naresh told him of the first ball and the second, then he stared at his slippers. When he looked up again, Jude-sahib was still watching him.

  “Then they spoke badly to badasahib,” Naresh said softly.

  “To him only? Not to
you?”

  Naresh said nothing.

  “You can tell me. You’ve done nothing wrong.”

  It had not occurred to Naresh that he could do something wrong. He did what the Almeidas asked him, whatever each of them asked him. The idea of right and wrong beyond that made him puzzled and uneasy; he did not know how to answer. He wished his grandfather would come, but Ashok was in his shelter in the back of the garden. Naresh was alone. Again he said nothing.

  A few minutes later, Jude-sahib rode away on his motorcycle. When he returned, twenty minutes later, he beckoned to Naresh and from behind his back produced a small bouncing ball. It was new, not dingy—red rubber, flecked with yellow. Naresh had seen balls like this one piled into baskets in front of the small, squashed shops on the Linking Road. He stared at it in surprise.

  “You are a good guardsman.” Jude-sahib had crouched before him. He offered the ball, then pulled it out of reach as if they were playing a game together. Naresh did not know whether to take the ball or let Jude-sahib snatch it away, but as suddenly as the game began, it ended. Jude-sahib tucked the ball into Naresh’s hands and smiled at him. “Acha, acha. It’s yours.” He had not released the ball yet. “This is your home also,” he said. “Don’t let anyone upset you.” Naresh did not know if he meant the schoolboys or memsahib or badasahib with his shaking fist.

  That night, long past the hour when he usually slept, he sat with his legs spread wide and bounced his new ball in the patch of dirt before him. He was trying to keep time to his grandfather’s snores, which rose and broke so loudly that the boy had grown accustomed to pulling his mat outside their shelter to sleep.