Dreamt Lives
Anirudh Deshpande
III
The Gentleman
The last few days had sapped Ravi’s energy and increased his anxiety. He wondered what he would do with his father’s illness.The prolonged illness had exhausted him but he could not fall sleep.
He had taken his father four times to the hospital in the last one month. The doctors with bored expressions had revived him with copious doses of oxygen and saline.They sent him back home after this.In the meantime the Patriarch cursed the hospital staff in words which would have embarrassed a Punjabi sergeant-major.
“I will fuck you” he shouted at the smiling maids. “Randi, chinaal…” he went on and the ward boys laughed aloud. Ravi looked on with a poker face. “Ravi, these men are haraami. They cause me pain. Take them to task!” the suffering Patriarch said to his immobile son.
The dying man stank of urine, stale blood and shit and the medical attendants disliked touching him. Ravi, who lent them a hand and soiled his own clothes, marveled at the inefficiency of human beings. He would return home, bathe and got back to the hospital in fresh clothes. So frequent and long were his visits to the hospital that he imagined his clothes were filled with an eternal stench of disease and death. Watching the attendants hang back from their task Ravi thought of their homes. He imagined the words they would exchange later. They came from slums which mushroomed in the NCR during the 1980s and 1990s. They were lower caste men and women expected to do the dirty work of the patients. They did it for the money with little compassion for the rich. Would they describe his father with pity? Would they have a good laugh at the expense of his helplessness? He saw them smirk and enjoy the drama from the sidelines as the old man flew into an impotent rage and told the female attendants and nurses what he would have done to them as a young man.
“Beware of uncle! Don’t go too close to him!” the boys would say to the nurses making them laugh aloud.
Ravi often saw them flirting with the South Indian nurses and the young female attendants who spent their spare time gossiping and attracting the attention of the young men. There was money and sex between these hospital workers. Many females earned extra cash by giving known or unknown men access to their slim dark bodies.
Ravi heard the giggles and sighs behind closed doors. He saw used condoms thrown carelessly in the corners of the hospital toilets. Always alert to the possibility of sex in his vicinity Ravi observedsecret rendezvous in the empty rooms of the hospital or the neglected terrace.
Was fornication fundamental to human existence he thought his mind full of visions real and imaginary.
Ravi knew the dangerous manager of the hospital. The man was a relative of the owners. It was rumored he had terrorized some localities in Kanpur as a college drop out in the 1980s. People whispered behind his broad back that he had escaped the law in that cityand gone underground for a few years.He surfaced later and was given charge of the hospital.From the hospital underlings Ravi learned that the manager had murdered a man who had slept with his wife.The wife had turned away from the future manager because of his quirky sexual habits. One day the ruffiandiscovered his wife with her lover cavorting nude on the bed on which he had deflowered the woman violently some yearsago.
The lovers froze before the cuckold who whipped out his unlicensed pistol and shot the man on the spot. The woman escaped because the pistol jammed when he fired it at her. Throwing the pistol on the ground he rushed to the kitchen for a knife.He would have stabbed her to death but for the gazelle like escape she managed from the two room house.
He ran for a distance after the nude woman shouting profanities before the effects of alcohol and tobacco made him give up the chase. It was then that the murder dawned upon him. He escaped to a safe haven in Nepal before the police registered a report of the murder. Some years later hereached Gurgaon to work under a false name and identityunder the protection of the rich corrupt hospital owners. The felon consumed a quart of cheap whiskey every evening after seven and had sex with the low class maids once a week in the solitary room on the third floor he inhabited. Fucking maids and female sweepers gave him great satisfaction and he was in the habit of waxing his thick moustaches. While they giggled, he felt powerful mounting them like a stud mounts a mare. After the humping his victims cleaned his dick and disposed the used condom. Humiliating these women was his revenge upon the one who had escaped his anger running nude in the markets of Kanpur. The murder remained an open secret in the market and soon after it thelocal gossip mongers stopped speaking of the dead body in a blood stained sheet which was dragged out of the house by the paan chewing potbellied policemen.
The manager liked Ravi and secretly felt jealous of him when he saw Smita in the hospital. Ravi found the soft spoken man with his hair and whiskers dyed jet black intriguing. Ravi did not feel the compulsion to the judge the murderer. This feeling he kept to himself knowing the general opinion of the man who appeared similar in many ways to Ravi’s father except, of course, the cuckold bit. Ravi never imagined his drab mother, a dutiful Hindu wife, contemplating an affair.
Ravi craved for company in those days. Later when he had company he craved solitude to indulge in literature and music.
One day the manager struck when Ravi appeared particularly lonely.
“Don’t worry so much. You will grow old fast swiftly and nothing comes of losing virility in young age. Learn to relax. Come upstairs one of these evenings for a drink. I will organize something nice for you” the swarthy thick set man said to him.
He imagined Ravi mounted on one of the several coquettish maids. “Some of them” he said with his eyes caressing the maids walking around in the ward, “are experts in massaging techniques.”
Sometimes when the manager’s confidence was high he surveyed the young females on the ground floor ward, raised an eyebrow and directeda visual proposal at Ravi. One evening Ravi went up for a drink.He was surprised to see the tidiness of the manager’s den. The man was neat and tidy. He bathed and shaved every day.He paid attention to his thick moustache but rare was the nurse or a young attendant whose buttocks or breasts he had not held in his thick hairy hands. On certain days, to impress Ravi, the manager pinched the buttocks of a shapely nurse in his chamber after tricking her into the small room on some pretext or the other.
One day the manager called a shapely attendant to his room while Ravi was present to discuss a financial detail pertinent to his father’s admission. The attendant walked in smiling and swaying her hips artificially for Ravi’s pleasure. Ravi was unlike his fatherand lower class women did not excite him.
Ravi watched her with a poker face and the manager, with mischief lurking in a smile spread across his thick lips, said, “Rani I am unhappy with you these days. See this gentleman here. I am sure you have not given an educated man a massage so far. When will you do it? Can you not see how much he needs it?”
Rani and Ravi exchanged a gance before Ravi looked away in embarrassment. She stood there with her breasts straining against a tight bodice and her flat belly rising and falling slowly with each long breath. A drop of sweat slowly vanished into her clean navel pierced with a small white silver ring. The room was full of her smell. Her saree was slung low to reveal the down which drove the young male attendants crazy.
“Do you think everyone is like you?” she said to the manager who scowled.
“Am I right Ravi Bhaisaheb?” she looked at Ravi. Ravi was surprised that she knew his name because she did not tend to his father.
Ravi walked out of the room.
Ravi met the manager again when his second daughter was born in the same hospital four years after his father died. The debauch had aged and appeared morose. He roamed around the ward more like a saint than a sexual predator. His blood shot eyes had turned yellowish.
“The motherfucker’s liver has failed” a ward boy told Ravi with relish outside the hospital later.
Themanager’s pleasure den had reminded Raviofthe night when he had seen his father thrusting himself repeatedly between the thighs of ayoung maid.Ravi had woken up to urinate. His mother had a night duty and only his father and the maid were home. The sound of a bed creaking in his parents’ bedroom had attracted him.
Later the lower caste Maharashtrianmaid came to his room to sleep on a mattress spread on the floor next to his bed filling the room with the smell of cheap sex. Ravi remembered the disgust he had felt at the time.
When Ravi’s father’s condition worsened his mother urged him to call the doctor home to assess his condition. A week ago the doctor had obliged after several phone calls made by his mother.He examined the patient from a distance and shook his head. He said nothing in front of the dying man’s crippled wife but as he was shown out he said to Ravi, “Let him go. No point in torturing him any further.” The doctor sat in his new hatchback, lit an expensive cigarette and drove away without looking back. Decades ago, addicted to risqué novels and pornography, he had been a medical student in the nation’s sex-starved capital. Ravi’s mother had taught him general medicine and gynecology. In a warm classroom suffused with the scent of female perfume Ravi imagined him leering at the jutting breasts of his female classmates.His ears were silent to the lecture delivered in a high pitched hoarse voice by a short ungainly woman.The teacher spoke and he imagined fucking one of his classmates in his hostel room.
He paid for those unheard lectures by not charging a fee for the couple of visits made to the old man.He tried his best to behave differently in a world where medical ethics were debased to the level of doctors charging doctors for treatment. His former teacher recognized him and wanted to share a few memories with him but he had politely cut her short.Ravi and Smita looked upon this spectacle unable to restrain the old woman or persuade the physician to speak to her for a few minutes. The smell of death in the house deterred the visiting doctor from accepting the refreshments prepared especially for him in the kitchen by a strange Nepali servant. After the doctor left, Ravi looked at the mirror and thought of the doctor describing the scene of his house to his wife, also a doctor with an inferior degree.Ravi imagined how both looked in bed, undressed, lying sideways with their paunches touching each other discussing the day’s earnings. Thinking of the positions they managed in bed, and what Vatsyayana would have appreciated, made Ravi laugh aloud.
Years later when Ravi joined a college, his malecolleagues made fun of a particularly large lady colleague in words and physical expressions. While they laughed and smoked he thought of the days when his father lay dying in a house people rarely visited. He could not partake of their merriment and his silence sometimes cut short the parking lot sex discussion. Did people in the service of money have the passion to make love Ravi thought? That is why he found Bollywood films absurd. Can the rich love? Did such people think of money before an orgasm? Could these men and women ever experience the climax of togetherness? You never knew when an unfulfilled monetary expectation or a botched operation, followed by the threats of disgruntled violent cheated relatives, would render the act of marital fornication devoid of meaning. What, Ravi often wondered, did a shopkeeper say to his wife or mistress during a sexual union!
His family memories kept Ravi awake during the night his father died.
Impending death is a time for mourning and remembering. His wife slept next to him with their daughter in a tight embrace. He thought of the man whose death had been expected by the family for years. “I shall not live for more than five years” the man had declared several times in the last twenty years, as his children exchanged glances.The last five years of his rolling plan would soon be over. As the wall clock counted his insomnia and the dogs in the streets barked mixed feelings overwhelmed him. All the memories of his father were not unpleasant. There had been a distance between his father and himself. Ravi had disapproved of his father's personal habits and public conduct but this disapproval did not cause hatred to rise in the son’s heart for his father.
Sundays had been special in the1970s. The family had grown affluent over years and went out for a non vegetarian lunch in Darya Ganj or Connaught Place on Sundays. The originalMoti Mahal served delicious tandoori chicken and onions pickled in vinegar, was the favorite. His father fell on the food like a hungry dog, abusing his father at the same moment, quashing the chicken in the curry with a large piece of naan in a fit of vengeance only he understood. The amused waiters, scurrying between tables, exchanged glances.They looked at the odd dark skinned family while Ravi and Nandadid their best to give fellow diners the impression that the man-beast who sat at their table was a distant relative.The Doctor was immune to this canine like behavior. She tucked into her vagetarianpalakpaneer casting an occasional disapproving glance at her husband.
It was natural that Ravi sought role models elsewhere in life and literature.To escape the banality of life he turned to fiction. Fiction saved him from an unfeeling world. His mother, who generally used books as a sleeping pill, got him a membership of the B.C. Roy library near ITO in Delhi when he was in class five. He rode to this library on a red bicycle which he imagined to be his charger.He went twice or even thrice a week to borrow two books at a time and to return them in exchange for two more as soon as possible. The librarian Mr. Matthews, a neatly dressed man from Kerala, became fond of Ravi who spent hours in the library reading at the table waiting for the sun to go down. Later Ravi became a member of the British Council Library on Rafi Marg which gave him four books to borrow and read. The librarian or assistant librarian of this library was a frail, fair, young, delicate, soft spoken and mild mannered Parsi lady who treated him to delicious chicken sandwiches and a glass of coke. She grew fond him and enquired after his family. She loved books herself and these two incongruous friends spent hours in the library looking up books, browsing magazines and eating sandwiches.Years later he met this old friend as the melancholy ridden wife of his emotionally unstable thesis supervisor in the university. She had no children and, he imagined, little happiness in a marriage to a cold reclusive academic. Her father had been a famous civil servant with a long distinguished career in Delhi. In fact she belonged to a distinguished Parsi family of letters and social eminence.
The third library which he accessed was the well stocked unused school library in his Punjabi dominated school presided over by Mr. Rajiv Johnson, the burly gentle librarian who pampered Ravi no end. In fact a few students like him gave that Malayali Christian a reason to feel that life was still worth living in a dusty dry city he disliked.The library was Johnson’s life. He spent hours personally supervising the staff and keeping the books clean. At night he hit the bottle and, in Ravi’s perverted adolescent imagination, dutifully made love to his dusky wife in the prescribed missionary position.Immediately after ejaculation, he fell asleep dreaming of Kerala and the coconut plantation on his family estate. Johnson was fond of the dark sprightly boy who visited the library regularly to devour the books on the shelves. The librarian did not fail to notice that during the occasional free period Ravi examined the several atlases and dictionaries kept on a table in the library. Sometimes he saw the boy use a magnifying glass to scour the finer points in an Atlas. Johnson confided this in another teacher who taught Political Science in the school. The Political Science teacher told Ravi about Johnson’s feelings during the latter’s high school days.
Ravi rushed to the library with tears welling up in his eyes. He wanted to thank the gentle soul who had opened several new worlds to him. In haste Ravi forgot that Johnson had retired the previous year and a much startled stranger occupied his chair. With the aid of three librarians who loved him he travelled the world across centuries. He devoured the atlases and dictionaries kept largely untouched in the library. He fell in love with geography and languages. He sailed with Drake and rode with Changez.He fought beside Marlborough.He traversed the Gobi with Marco Polo.He survived the bandits. Much of his imagination was occupied by Babur and Shivaji and, as a class nine student, he relished the Baburnama borrowed from the school library. He never injured himself and never came to grief in these experiences which made him a lifelong pupil of historical fiction.
His heroes affected him. In their pursuit he kept his hair tidy. His shoes were always polished and he paid special attention to his physique. Sailing with Drake in the tropical Atlantic or fighting the Japanese in Burma was not child’s play. He developed a reputation for his habit of punctuality and other traits of the occidental man among his friends.As a result he would be the first to arrive for functions and soon feel foolish because his friends always came late. They admired, envied and, sometimes, ridiculed him. All the while he thought becoming a gentleman in India was difficultbecause chivalry was little known in the boorish country.Honor and fair play, imagined the young Ravi, had departed India with the British. Decades later he earned the sobriquet Colonelfrom his colleagues, one of whom believed that he kept a man servant to polish his shoes and iron his clothes. It was his habit, since childhood, to polish everyone’s shoes at home after dinner. Polishing shoes and later shaving his face made him think up stories and gave him mental peace. He first cleaned the shoes with a soft cotton cloth. He enjoyed spreading the black semi solid polish on the leather shoes and seeing the leather absorb the polish. After this he burnished them into virtual mirrors.
When he turned twelve his father, an admirer of conscription and the Fuehrer, gifted him a 0.1 air gun bought from the Khyber Gun House in Kashmiri Gate. It was a surprise on a hot summer afternoon. Ravi squealed in delight at the sight of the weapon. He was allowed to use it after his father, a smoulderingCharminar cigarette between his fingers, spent the best part of two hours teaching him three positions of using a rifle: standing, kneeling and supine. The gun came with a small card board box of ammunition filled with lead pellets. In three days Ravi ran out of ammunition shooting two hundred pellets at imaginary Japanese soldiers on the Burma Front. Pages of several Commando Comics, which showed Japanese and Germans caricatures, were used for practice. After a week he “took out” the metal cap of a Coca Cola bottle from a distance of fifteen yards.His awe struck friends stood behind him in those days following every move he made with the weapon. They too were given a few chances with the gun.
More ammunition was procured from a sports shop in Connaught Place. With ammunition restored, he began providing his favorite family in the neighborhood a steady supply of fat pigeons for dinner. Lara Jacob was the dusky adolescent girl with pearly while teeth, curly hair and a sharp nose in that large Syrian Christian joint family with a house teeming with cousins and uncles. Unknown to them, Ravi had married, deflowered and impregnatedher in his dreams. Two years older than him she had hairless arms and legs. Mostly dressed in sleeveless tops and short skirts she was the fantasy of the lower middle class boys in the locality. Many confessed to having wet dreams thinking of her.
He never lost an opportunity to show off his shooting skills to her and she reciprocated this gallantry by showering physical endearments on the Sir Walter Raleigh of New Delhi in private. She hugged him and kissed him on his mouth when the two hid behind bushes or in a deserted ‘haunted’ house from their friends in a game of ‘I Spy” pronounced ‘Ice Pice’ by the kids in that conservative community sandwiched between Connaught Place and the Ramlila Ground. He loved the smell of her breath and the spicy taste of her tongue. She was adept at thrusting her pelvis onto his hardness which delighted, surprised and embarrassed him. On occasions both undressed and explored each other when there was no one in his house. She laughed softly as the explorations aroused him. Once, maddened by her nudity, he clumsily mounted her in the fashion of imagined adult sex. At that point her Catholic upbringing made her press her wet thighs together.She denied him the pleasure of penetration.
“This only after marriage” she said teasing him. After she left Ravi would resort to a schoolboy’s relief in the privacy of his bed. His ejaculations were about to begin.
Much of thatfondling and kissing continued for some time. Given time, it might have led to a premature consummation of this adolescent love and, possibly, trouble with the doctors. But that was not destined to happen.Lara’s grandfather retired from the Government of India Press as a machine man and the family left for Kerala.Twenty acres of land, dozens of coconut trees and a general merchant shop set up by Mr. Jacob awaited the family’s return.
Lara’s departure left little Ravi heartbroken.
“Can I visit you in Kerala” Ravi said to her imagining the lagoons and islands which he saw Lara running around in her favorite frock.
“I will have to ask Papa. If he agrees then maybe you can come during the summer vacations” she replied. She was excited about Kerala. The reply depressed Ravi because he knew that thickset Papa would never consent to this request.
Ravi never heard from Lara. He wrote her a couple of silly letters telling her how he missed her and what exactly happened in the locality in her absence. He got no reply. He did not know whether the letters were delivered or carried the correct address. Gradually Lara first became a memory and, later, a myth in the recounting of his past to himself. The consummation of their brief infatuation happened in his dreams some months later.He woke up having soiled his pyjamas with the first ejaculation of his life. He felt no shame. He felt like a man having done with her in his dream something which he would have, he consoled himself, in any case. For a while she had sustainedthe illusions which gave him strength to face a world he refused to identify with.
In a dream, with gun in hand in a far way rugged province teeming with robbers, he married and lived happily ever with her. A ranch with half a dozen children, horses and dogs popped up in his nocturnal hallucinations stoked by days dedicated to fiction. In truth she probably ended up with a well built handsomeMalyali who wore white pants in the morning and a check Madras lungi at night. The couple made torrid love in humid Kerala and she received from himthe orgasm of a lifetime! Maybe she became a nurse and migrated to the Gulf with a man, trapped in a marriage of convenience without much happiness. Probably nothing like this happened and, unable to overcome his sweet painful memories, she became lovesick and entered a convent choosing to live the rest of her life in a grey habit.She turned to religion after disembarking from a train to Delhi at the last moment. These fantasies consoled Ravi who missed Lara for a number of weeks.He also waited for at least a postcard to arrive from Kerala.
While all this went on in his mind, Ravi’s friends were up to mischief. They had been jealous of his intimacy with Lara.
“Now that the Madrasi is gone who will you rub yourself against and jerk off” his friend Dinesh Mathur sneered to him one day soon after the pigeon eating Christians left. He always called Lara a Madrasi. Nitu, Nikhil, Nitin and Ashim stood around him and laughed. “Dinesh is right, what will you do?” they chorused “maybe use your hand?”
“Anyway Jyoti is still around. This fucker will go after her” rejoined Dinesh in reference to another neighborhood female companion. The epithet he used was chodu. Jyoti was a fair complexioned long haired Punjabi girl. She enjoyed playing staapoo with a stupid expression in her eyes. Fond of Ravi, she often came to his house to share his bread and jam sandwiches.
“Is Ravi home?” she had the habit of calling in her shrill voice from outside Ravi’s house. She was the object of mirth in his family. His sister Nanda and the Doctor teased him about her. “You must marry her when both of you grow up” they taunted him and broke out in smiles.
His fondness for Lara and her preference for him had earned him the immortal jealousy of his comrades. Some of them remained his lifelong friends and never missed an opportunity to tease him in this regard.
They knew he had explored her.
Maybe one of them had spied on their shared nudity from a ventilator placed just below the ceiling by the great architect Lutyens to give the residents of those barrack like houses some respite from the Delhi heat.
Dinesh, an older frustrated boy was the local peeping Tom. He never lost an opportunity to show his large erect member to his awe struck companions. He also useda lot of time and ingenuityto spy on the young wife of his father’s tenant as she bathed nude. His father had sub-let a room to a young couple which had arrived from a small town in Uttar Pradesh. The husband worked in a private firm, left early and returned late.
The couple was given a creaking bed by the miserly landlord. This bed was brought to the point of collapse every other night as the young husband exertedhimself in the missionary position. On Saturday nights the well endowed woman cooked mutton. The husband drank a little whiskey in anticipation of increased pleasure feasting his eyes on his young wife. On occasion Dinesh, whose father was a strict vegetarian AryaSamaji and an amateur Homeopath, joined him for a secret drink in a steel glass.
The wife’s ample cleavageattracted Dinesh more than the drink. Her breasts were practically visible as she cooked mutton on a primus stove kept on the floor. He sipped the drink deaf to the husband’s voice. His catlike eyes roved across the young bride’s breasts, thighs and waist. On Saturday nights the bed creaked longer than usual and threatening to collapse with a crash. This open celebration of marital fornication, the grunts of the man and the jingling of gold bangles drove Dinesh mad. Night after night he lay awake his body and soul tortured. He wasted his seed on the toilet floor or a bed sheet washed once a month. Thanks to the British architects, the house had one bathroom with a window which opened in the courtyard. The two bottom glass panes on this window were missing.This assisted Dinesh. On days when the efforts of the crouching Peeping Tom were successfulhis friends gathered together after the evening games behind the concrete slide in the playground to relishhis verbal pornography. The boys, focused on his descriptions,experienced their own erections. Only that, and the best method of getting relief, mattered to them. Consequently the bushes in the garden derived some nutrition from this story telling. At times the raconteur’s fantasies caused a riot of communal masturbation. Ravi witnessed all this but kept aloof. Nonetheless he enjoyed the amusement and remembered the various shades of facial distortions created by the individual acts of masturbation in that group. One went into a crouch, another fell flat on his back soiling his clothes with a thin squirt of watery semen.Another ran away from the group dripping liquid on the grass.
Ravi remembered the scene later in life and laughed.
Dinesh had soiled the memory of his friendship with Lara by referring to his having rubbed himself against the Madrasi. Ravidecided to counter this slander. He held himself straight and rose to the occasion to defend the Christian girl’s honor.
“Don’t talk nonsense! You cannot imagine how much she liked me and how pure my feelings towards her were” he said to disown his private memory of their mutual explorations. He knew Dinesh was not wrong.
He remembered her feeling his erection and him caressing the hairy softness between her thighs. He knew she enjoyed it. He was the only boy who conversed with her in English. All his friends to went to the locality government school where the sons of peons and clerks were educated in Hindi.He had felt special in her company and different from the north Indian boys in the area who could only speak broken English.Was it not true that she had chosen him because he was special? Hewas notashamedof his infatuation but he tried his best to deny lustbefore his incredulous friends. Scenes of mutual explorations in which a hairless Lara lay nude beside him on the cot in his study filled his mind as he stood up to Dinesh, a stocky boy with thick legs. The memory of her nubile breasts, shapely legs and the fresh fuzz between them had made him crazy. The memory of the smell of musk in her armpits stiffened his defiance.
The pervert Dinesh read his feelings. Deliberately he began caressing his crotch with his hand in his loose shorts pocket. Within seconds a bulge was visible inside the shorts. It was time, Dinesh decided, to put this pretentious public school upstart in his place. It was obvious that Dinesh was looking for some fun.
“Don’t tell lies. Nitu saw both of you kissing each other’s mouth in the abandoned house. He told me he even saw your tongues mingling. You rascal, did you think of your friend even once while licking all that cream alone. I am sure you wet your pants Now look at your face. Did you really fuck her?Have you sent away that hot Madrasi with your child in her belly! What a tamasha will happen in Madras when her parents discover your dirty deed. One never knows with the English speaking ones like you. Fuckers! God save the shareef women of this locality from deceptivefuckers like you!”
“She’s gone to Kerala, not Tamil Nadu” Ravi retorted. But his knowledge of geography failed to impress his friends.They were in no mood to become distractedfrom the carnal topic of the day. It was enough for them to imagine Ravi humping the pigeon eating Madrasi hard.
The friends laughed. They came forward and slapped Ravi on his back. They shook his hands and said “who is the next lucky one?”
A couple of jokers called himGuruji. They touched his feet mockingly.In loud voices they declaimed “please impart some lessons.At least teach us how to shoot pigeons with that air gun of yours.” Then turning away they said to each other, “you sister fuckers, first learn English. Otherwise make do with your hands till you get married.”
Peals of laughter were heard. Some friends laughed so hard that they fell in the dry storm water drain bent in mirth. Ravi rewound the scene at night alone.Heinserted some impossible heroics in it. Dinesh received an uppercut which knocked him out. Babli got a kick in the crotch which sent him straight to the hospital.In a dream he wrote a letter to Lara narrating how he had kept the standard of her honor raised high. In reality he stood in front of his friendstrying in vain to appear solemn.Ultimately he grinned. He enjoyed the jealousy aroused in his friends by the passionate association with a girl none of them would ever meet.
Within three years Lara was replaced with other growing up girls in the locality in the boys’ fantasy. The fair Kusum called Miss Good Morning by his friends. The dusky Fulta, a Bengali girl much desired by college boys, was called Miss Good Evening. Then there was Neeru, the dark skinned thin Kayastha girl, named Miss Good Night!
Ravi used the air gun not only to supply the Christians with pigeons for dinner but he also shot pigeons and other birds for his sister and her classmates studying medicine in Sonipat. They needed the birds for dissection sometimes.
One day the pigeon shooting came to an end.
Ravi returned from school and saw a fat pigeon perched on the courtyard wall of his house. The breast of this bird was particularly broad. “What a prize” he thought.He loaded the freshly oiled gun, took aim at the handsome creature from the dining area hidden in the shade.He saw the furry chest in the sight. He gently pressed the trigger. A depression appeared in the pigeon’s chest and the bird sank on the wall. Itsneck hung downwards. Ravi noticed the streak of blood after he put down the gun and moved to inspect the kill.
The eyes of the bird were open as if it had been shot in the middle of a dream. Its beak was slightly ajar and blood tricked down from its mouth forming a long maroon streak on the cream colored wall. The blood staintortured Ravi’s conscience. He would look at it, and look away his eyes moist. Later, even the monsoon did not remove the stain. The pigeon was eaten by the cats at night and its feathers remained visible in the storm drain for days after the hunt. This senseless murder tormented Ravi’s dreams. He saw his action and hated himself. In dreams the chest of the pigeon loomed large pulsing with life. In others the streak became a pigeon which stared at Ravi before flying away. In one dream Lara refused the dead bird and turned away from him. After that day the pigeons, doves and sparrows in the locality flew and chirped without the fear being shot at.In atonement, Ravi developed the habit of feeding grain to a swarm of assorted birds which arrived in his courtyard promptly at four every afternoon.
*****
