Unclean

edited by Anjasi

1

I was never good with names. I can describe people in great detail, taking immense pain upon myself in recollecting how they would look when they laughed or cried. There is more to people than just their names. I cannot tell you their names. I know how people feel, or so I think.

 

When I was a boy I was raped and I think that made me aloof. I told no one about it till I entered my early twenties. I was afraid and timid, but never satisfied with anything my good-natured parents gave me, I’d roar before them like a lion. Many children in this world have nothing and still go on to achieve great things. I whiled away life; it must have been the child in me developing a bizarre sense of perceiving the world.

 

Like every other kid I spent my summer holidays at my grandmother’s house. It was my mother, sister and me. My mother would pack our bags and my father would come to see us off at the railway station. Once the train was moving mother would crack open the boxes and give us bhindi-poori and achaar to eat and then send us on our berths to sleep. I carry this memory very fondly but I do not know why. The next morning I would wake up needing to use a toilet but the long and bumpy rickshaw ride from the station to the old house, where my mother spent her childhood, proved to be a rough one. I would feel pain because of being unable to relieve myself. Empty streets veiled in the clear light of the morning sun looked hazy to my groggy eyes, but those awful bumps sure woke me up.

 

Those summer days had a kind of waking life that I couldn’t find elsewhere. Back home I would live absent-mindedly and attend school with the assurance that I did not have to use up all my brain studying. The brain of a child is best employed while coming up with ideas to pass the time. Those early thoughts are full of idealism. We make the most of what little we have when we are true to the child within us.

 

At my grandmother’s house, things were different. My mother and she loved to cook and so I would have to disappear from their sight till it was time to eat. I wondered why my mother would take us to a different house and then just leave us there, all on our own. Although they never complained that I was a nuisance, I now understand that children can be exceptionally infuriating.

 

The house was huge — nearly twenty rooms! —  and I had the freedom to do whatever I liked. I found myself playing on the stairs, going to the balconies while the sun was beating down and staring at the waves of heat rising from the stony floor hopelessly. Outside, the roads had been abandoned. Everyone was scattered under the shade of some tree or roof. When the warmth of the earth would burn my feet I would hurry back inside, dodging the fractured corners of the old tiles collaged on the floor. I am thankful for the wisdom of my mother, who would scold me to wash my feet before entering the kitchen. A splash would cool them down right away.

 

Playing makes a child hungry and there is no mystery about it. Not being able to communicate hunger is perhaps worst suffered by children. Every year, I would look forward to the summer vacation because that was when I could fall back in the midst of a sweet serenade. I was happy because it was an escape, but what was I escaping from? I was possessed by a lust for escaping into another world when I was at home and in school. The idea of a life different from the one forced upon me seduced me, occupying my thoughts. I was a bad student but a keen learner.

 

School did not make much sense because it could not offer me the same passion that the discovery of the world did. I wanted something which could vigorously move me and instill in me a deep, soothing satisfaction. I hadn’t yet picked up the knack for reasoning. School was very demanding. It did not want me to keep all of the parts of my life safely in my head and without each one of them, it did not make much sense to live.

 

2

It feels unfair to blame my lack of a good memory on school but it did make me spend a lot of time trying to mug-up predetermined thoughts. I was a lover of exploration, I had many questions.

 

I remember making friends in school out of a need for love and affection. I had a friend when I was a boy; his name was S. This story will not have any names. I will use only the first letter of every name and disguise the rest with the unknown. I hope what remains of the story is good enough on its own.

 

S was born in Bengal. He was shorter and heavier than me. He did not like the medicine room in school because that’s where the weighing machine was. Everyone made fun of him. He was perhaps my best friend. He had a black spot in his eye. I’d often ask him how he had gotten it and he would say that a cricket ball had once struck his eye. I’d still ask him again, and again, and again — maybe because I easily forgot. The thing about noticing the black spot was that I recall myself staring into his eye quite often, maybe because I was so curious. I think, while growing up, we pick up the differences among people and begin searching for who we are.

 

I remember I once introduced a girl of our class to the black spot in his eye. She would stare into his small round face too and the three of us would spend our day like that joking around with each other. Smiling through his crooked teeth, S would feel happy upon being eyed by a smart, pretty little girl. Her name was N.

 

N’s arms and legs were so thin they could hardly keep her weight. She would shake a lot. At first, I took it to be her excitement for being around S and me but I quickly understood she would tire easily of our company. Often, she would return to her own friends after some time and just sit with them. She kept quiet around us because we were boys and all of her other friends were girls.

 

I was fond of girls even when I was a little boy. I was in awe of the idea of love between two people. I found them to be so much more beautiful than boys.

 

I always thought N was really pretty. She made my heart skip a beat. But that was that. We were just friends, I suppose. She would shoot a sweet, kind smile at me whenever I made a mistake in class. And I made a lot of mistakes. She must have found me hilarious. I remember N’s lips were thin just like her but she had a wide smile and it stretched from ear to ear across her face.

 

No one noticed noses back then because they sit on our faces with subtlety but S’s was like a button. N once said that S was like a little bear. They would smile at each other like crazies and I remember standing near them just lost, busy being the third wheel. That’s what I thought of myself — someone who did not fit well. I was slender and had a middle parting in my hair. I always looked constipated and had difficulty explaining how I felt because I would try explaining everything to everyone.

 

We were good friends, the three of us. N never approached us on her own. S and I would have to go to bother her otherwise she would just look at us with those big, sad, teary eyes from a distance. S never noticed her looking at him but I think I was always looking at her and never missed any of her glances.

 

3

At home I was mostly absent. I remember nothing. I never did any homework. I never went out in the evening to play, not for a few years till my sister took me to play with her friends.  My sister and I were in the same school but we never seemed to talk. My father was a theatre actor and my mother a house maker. I couldn’t say I liked eating anything at home because dal-chawal-roti-sabji was all my mother ever cooked. When I saw what the other kids were eating, I realized that lunch could be so many things. I thought my mother’s cooking was not very good when the reality was that I did not have an appetite. I would go on for days without knowing when and what to eat. She often complained to my father that I had not had any lunch. My father, opposed to speaking with me about it, would end up arguing with her.

 

The only thing children learn in school in those early years is how to sit straight and sit quietly. I remember feeling like I had hit a wall when I saw the backs of those sitting in front of me and thinking it was impossible to see what was hidden beyond them. It was a distraction and I failed to pay attention to what was being taught in class. It might have been that I was more interested in something else, like I was always hungry yet never ate.

 

It felt like the teachers taught me nothing and I learnt nothing. Sitting next to S was still a better feeling than spacing out because he was quite interested in studies. Nothing would distract him, not even N. My friendship with him is a memorable one, partly because his mother packed the best tiffin in the world — parathas made of maida, cooked to perfection. There would always only be two parathas and S would always give me one. He would eat it dry but it was delicious.  Although his lunch was not very filling, eating it felt like the mind was hard at work. It fit my thoughts. It wasn’t easy to chew and took a lot more effort. Chewing it was like chewing on useless thoughts. When I ate with him, I forgot misery and what remained in my head were thoughts about friendship. I will never be able to thank him enough for sharing his lunch with me. I am yet to have a taste of someone else’s food that makes me feel happy the way his did. It was bliss.

 

I should have given him some of my lunch too but I never did because I wasn’t very proud of the roti-sabji I took to school. S and I eventually had a falling out.

I felt shattered. It felt like the end of an era. The sad part is I don’t remember what I did that he left me alone. I cannot tell where my mind had been leading up to this day of divergence. I did not know what it meant to go unnoticed by a friend day after day. Memories of the blue sky spanning forever and life whizzing past me appears vividly now but I cannot remember why we stopped talking. I must have been in need of company because I immediately latched onto a different group of boys. None of them had lunch as satisfying as S and I missed that. After S and I drifted apart, I stopped speaking to N too. All I remember is that her hair always smelt like oil and I was glad to see less of her because I could never be as happy as her. From that point on, I would only get sad stares from her. I was on my way to accepting that much had been suffocating me and had brought me pain. Was there a way to level this feeling?

 

I had new friends but something was different. Suddenly, my time in school involved a lot more running. Fists and sweat, and falling short of breath.

 

Nothing could make me feel worse than I already did all the time. S was having a better time without me. He disappeared completely like he was the wind. I was too busy running and hiding from the strong boys to notice he wasn’t around as much. The boys would call me kallu (blackie) and kauwa (a crow) because of my color. I was thin, really thin, and some of the other boys had very strong bones. Was I not eating anything at home? It would hurt me whenever I played sports with them or when I was being ragged on by them. They did not bring tiffins, instead they bought their lunch from the canteen. Watching them eat was tempting and I wanted to eat from the school canteen too. So I stole money from my father’s wallet. School life went on, hiding and fighting. I earned many scars, both inside and outside. I used to deliberately fall behind their group pretending to be doing my laces and then run off in the opposite direction when they had walked further ahead. They walked like a herd of elephants. They were the ones making all that noise that would echo through the building. I finally understood why I would escape in search of peace and quiet and find myself lost in the middle of nowhere.

 

4

I think my parents must have taken note of those injuries, they began showing interest in my life and started talking to my teachers more seriously. The teachers were awful. They would always complain about me. They would say that I was friends with all the wrong kids. They never told my parents how I had lost that one good friend I had, because they hadn’t noticed it happening. No one knew what went on. No one ever knows.

 

S must have been doing better in studies without me. He had fewer distractions ofcourse. Maybe his mother spoke to the teachers too and had asked them to separate the two of us so that her child was not dragged into any mess. Was it the pain in my eyes or was it that I looked unclean that made her do that, I don’t know. I felt unclean. The last thing S had told me was that his house was far from mine and that I should visit him there one day. Maybe he was more comfortable at home. I had never imagined being without a friend would be like losing my way in a forest. Life after S was filled with barbaric animals who would claw till blood came out. The girls were not interested in boys like me, who fought and later cried for their mothers.

 

The school organized a fair. On that one day, students were allowed to ditch their uniforms and dress as they would outside of school. The girls looked like they had graduated three grades in a day while the boys still looked like that same immature, unruly bunch. The fair was full of food and color and games, and the smell of deep-fried food wafted through the school grounds. We had to pay to play games and eat at the stalls. My parents gave me enough money for me to return home feeling full and tired. I ate some Maggi and drank something cool at the fair but I had no one to share it with. At the fair, there was a game called ‘The Treasure Hunt’. We had to find clues and reach the prize. Everyone was playing in groups. I found a clue myself but I did not know how to solve it so I took it to the teacher who had complained about me to my parents.

 

She was a big, fair-skinned woman who was unusually made-up for school. Her teeth were broad like tic-tacs and yellow like lemon. Her eye liner stretched all the way to the sides of her face and made me identify the color black with cosmetics. I would come back home and riffle through my mother’s cupboard to sniff what lip-stick and eye liner smelt like. It smelled just like my teacher — awful. Her face appeared small because her sideburns were long and reached the lower ends of her face. Well, I took the clue to her and asked her where it wanted to lead me and she slapped me across my face. That was the first time I felt hurt upon being hit. I could not cry. I was furious. It wasn’t the only time someone had hit me. My father would hit me when he was angry, my mother would hit me when I annoyed her too much and the bullies used to hit me. Over the years many teachers had taken the liberty to slap me. This instance, for some reason, was different. Perhaps my parents had said something to her she had not liked. The boys who used to bully me saw it happen. She caught them looking at her. No one else found out. I just froze.

 

The next day, I saw S again. He was sitting in the middle of the school park. It was lunch time and he was tucking into his parathas as usual. I saw him through a crowd of children running and playing. These bodies that were otherwise walls to me in the classroom, I now saw them moving in unison yet somehow, still in chaos. When I went near S it did not occur to me why he was alone. Perhaps in a pair, when one leaves the other is immediately lonely too.

 

I was angry with him for suddenly leaving my life and not telling me why he wouldn’t be my friend anymore. I went to him and said hello. He was happy to see me, I could tell. We looked at each other as if we had just woken up from a deep sleep. I asked him how he had been. He was sitting on the grass and when I tried to sit next to him the grass poked my skin like razor. Even the softest touch hurt like hell and I felt like taking it out on him. Something was irritating me. I couldn’t bear to look at him. I called him fat and said some more hurtful things after that. I remember making fun of him and laughing. At first he thought I was just kidding and he laughed with me but soon he did not find anything funny about the things I had to say. I stood up and he got scared. I could see it in his eyes. I went behind him so that I did not have to look him in the eye when I hit him. It was cowardly of me. I hated the empty feeling of kicking S on his back several times while he was on the ground, curved in pain. I wish that I had never done that. I had become one of the bullies. I ran and hid myself under the shade of the stairs. I felt like I might faint.

 

That year my parents decided to get me the hell out of there. My sister and I joined a new school. It was my first day and I found out that S had joined the same school. He was in a different section. I went to meet him but there was a strange reluctance in him to talk. I wanted us to be friends again but I did not know how to tell it to him in words. I couldn’t let fixations come in the way of restarting my once failed school life so I awkwardly left our conversation unfinished. I wondered if what we had was ever even friendship. I wondered if I only liked him because of his tiffin. I was always hungry and I loved eating with him.

 

If I ever met him again I would ask him if his mother still makes those parathas for him. I hope he is okay. I would not be able to look him in the eye because for him I was nothing but an arrogant bully.

 

5

In my first week at this new school, I realized that the atmosphere here was the same as it was in the last one. There were bullies here and discriminators all around. I was immediately drawn to the field because there one could live measured by their own strengths and weaknesses.

 

I couldn’t speak English well and was made fun of because of it. There were others like me, the unclean ones, who got called many names every day. I wanted myself to be seen differently and began lying about who I was. Every time I stood in front of the mirror I felt unclean. It was miserable.  

 

When that year came to an end, S was surrounded with numerous friends. After three years in that school I smoked my first cigarette inside a small room by the lobby of the auditorium. By then, S was friends with the most popular girl in school, H. She was someone who was genuinely a good human being. I saw the other kids be mean to her but she would stay unimaginably strong. She looked out for S. She was kind even to those mean kids, but she was also fierce when she had no other choice. All the teachers liked her and supported her. H didn’t mind having friends who were unclean. I got to know that when she chose to befriend me.

 

For the last year of school, my family had planned a trip to Bengal for the summer vacation. I was overjoyed at the thought of that. Spending lonesome days at my grandmother’s house was now a tale of the lost days. All of its charm had vanished with my coming of age.

 

I had seen pictures of Bengal and seen it in cinema. I was drawn to it. The Sunderbans and the state’s art sparked my interest. I read, before setting off on holiday, that Bengal was a state of football fanatics. Hours on the ground had made me completely fall in love with the sport and I was looking forward to seeing it being played there. I might have also been fascinated with Bengal because I thought that a majority of Bengali boys looked exactly like me, dark and thin. I took on that journey with respect for the place. On reaching the railway station at Kolkata, we sat in a taxi and left for our hotel. I saw policemen on horseback and slums on the sides of the road. Through a mirage of rich culture, Kolkata showed its misery in flashes if one looked closely. Every now and then the air would smell foul, on enquiry I was told that fish was being sold in the open.

 

Old cities have old trees. They stood tall majestically. I was so excited to be there that I forgot all about my friend S. Not once did I wonder if he knew these streets. People usually keep these things in mind and sometimes they even buy souvenirs for their friends. I took home only nostalgia. The burning scent of smoke from the temples and the memory of couples giving each other French kisses at the Victoria Memorial. I saw footballs being kicked around no matter where I went in Kolkata.

 

Once, upon returning from my journey, I was sitting on the floor in the music room, distractedly plucking a thread out of the carpet, when S entered alongside H. He was about to turn around and leave when H held his hand and made him stay.

 

The music teacher had called us all there because she needed singers for the choir group. We learned some hymn devoted to the Hindu goddess of knowledge Saraswati. On the day of the performance, we were made to stand in a semi circle. Half way through the song I looked around and found only unclean kids in sight. It was just us in the choir. We, the miserable ones, stood in front of the whole assembly, drawn out of the crowd, singing. The teacher stood next to us pumping air in her harmonium, singing with us, encouraging us to express ourselves. I was anxious. I tried hiding myself behind the singer in front of me. Everyone gathered there before me knew my weaknesses. It was going to take them just a look, just one conversation to sum me up. But they were all so utterly consumed in singing this made up song which had no real meaning. Their eyes were shut in devotion to this one god that loved everyone equally. No one actually cared about me.

 

This crowd looked different now that I was drawn out of it. I too closed my eyes, if only for a mere second, and searched for goodness. My affliction was all I found, still. I wondered if these people would ever want to understand the pain I felt, but it did not matter at all what others thought about me in the end. The truth was that life stopped for absolutely nobody.      

 

I have always looked at people through the lens of their weaknesses. But people are more than just that. We learn a lot about life when we begin looking at people not for who we see in them but for who they want us to see. I quit smoking and have lived my recent years learning how to cook. I cherish being able to share my food with my friends.

 

If I met S now I am not sure how I would feel. I would like to know what he thinks about life, about mistakes, about himself and perhaps even about politics. I would hang my head in shame for the first few minutes I suppose. Then I would ask him what he has been up to. I would ask him for a meal at a restaurant or a café and insist on paying the bill. If he was looking for a conversation, I would say to him that I have learnt a lot about life over these years and still continue to know very little about it. I might also tell him that my life has so far been one of worry and regret. I think he would still have a kind heart within him and he would smile at me through his crooked teeth with acceptance. I would not hold back one bit and try to reignite the flame of a dead friendship between two good friends. I will tell him I don’t know whether my glass is half empty or half full, all I know is how the world looks through the bottom of the glass once I’ve had my drink.