(32 page)

College: Coming close,this close, to doing my bit
to shut my college down to protest the tuition hikes and then
watching the tide turn, watching it fall out of my grasp like sand
out of a fist, watching them pull away from me, as relentlessly, as
remorselessly, as the ocean pulling away from the sand. It's
one thing, at age eighteen, to talk about how we will work for the
revolution even though ‘we won't see it during our own
lifetime'. It's another thing to experience the truth of
that.

The tuition hike went through. Our predictions
about the number of students who wouldn't be able to afford
college came true. Nobody seemed to notice. Thus hope yellows into
cynicism.

But that's not the full story either. There
are other disillusionments.

There is the day in my final year of college when
the whole gang is sitting on the marble steps and Abbas says he needs
to go home to study.

We protest but Abbas is already on his way. ‘Okay,
see you, then, John Travolta,' Hanif yells after him.

We call Abbas John Travolta, because several years
ago he had walked into the theatre to seeSaturday Night Fever as
plain old Abbas Hakim and strutted out as John Travolta, swinging his
hips and walking on his toes, the way the Tony Manero character does
in the movie. He also began to talk in a faux New York accent,
pronouncing coffee askofee instead ofcawfee , as we did.

Now, Abbas swings around. ‘You all should be
studying too, yaar. Final exams are less than two weeks away.'

‘Yah, okay,' I say dismissively. ‘Two
weeks, my foot.'

Hanif turns to me. ‘No, he's right
about that. Imagine, two more weeks and we'll never meet again
like this. All of us will be out in the world.'

My brain freezes. I realize that college life is
drawing to a close. I suddenly feel woefully inadequate to tackle the
working world. My lifelong dream to work atThe Times of India , slips
off my shoulders like an ill-fitting cape. I am nowhere close to
being ready to be anything but a college student. The world suddenly
feels too big a place for me to navigate.

Also, there is this…

Reluctantly, hesitantly, at first in a whisper and
then a little louder, is this voice that points out to me that our
Utopian vision of what the world should look like does not match up
with the personalities of the people trying to build that world.

I want to ignore that disconnect, that gap that
looms between the purity of our dreams and the narrowness of our
daily lives.

I have already lost so much—my faith in
religion, the escapism that my druggie friends once offered, my faith
in my ability to make things right between my parents—that
giving up my belief in politics seems too unbearable a loss.

But I am growing up. Dreams that used to once
thrill me—like Natasha's vision of a world that was a
good place not just for humans but for animals too, which meant
nobody would eat meat in a socialist paradise, or Shekhar's
imagined world where every person could afford to drive a
Ca-dillac—have lost their hold on me. I notice instead the
self-aggrandizing poses struck by the student leaders and the way
activists from upper-caste, affluent Hindu families scorn the label
‘intellectual' and instead refer to themselves as the
working class; I notice that all the lefty kids dress and speak the
same way, until we all have the same intonations when we speak about
‘the people', and ‘the masses'. I notice how
we write off former comrades whose politics differ even slightly from
ours, I remember how, once when we were planning a women's
rights event, Suresh yelled at his girlfriend for forgetting to add
sugar in his tea and how nobody commented on the irony.

And then there is the fatigue. I am tired of
sitting in endless meetings and study groups, discussing whether
Lenin or Trotsky was correct. I am tired of constantly fighting
everybody, from the police to the thirty-year-old thugs who
masquerade as student leaders, to my own father, who is petrified
that my political views are going to land me in jail.

It is draining to sneak around behind his back, to
constantly look over my shoulders, to always feel as if I am going to
get caught. Also, I have the kind of personality that needs at least
occasional successes to keep going. And in this line of work, there
is no instant gratification, no tangible success. With every new
student whom I talk into attending one of our meetings, joining our
organization, it seems as if someone else has dropped out.

The sour taste of disillusionment rises in my
throat. I try to force it back down. But it keeps popping back up,
like a tag-along younger sister who shows up at the wrong times and
places.

I also try to block my ears to an unmistakable
sound. It is the sound of another door closing.

I
HAVE TO GET OUT of here no matter what it
takes to do so.

The thought is so clear in my head that it takes
my breath away, so that I feel as if I have to sit down on the wooden
steps that I am climbing. I am at the bottom of the stairs leading up
to our second-floor apartment but even from here I can hear mummy's
voice, loud, hysterical, and thick with rage. It is this thickness
that makes my stomach collapse, because it is the sound of madness
and this is how she sounds when she is totally out of control. I have
grown up hearing the same harshness in her younger sister's
voice, the sister who has fought her own lifelong demons. And now
mummy has inherited this bellow and the ugliness of it makes my hair
stand up on end.

I know that mummy is having one of her daily
fights with Mehroo. I stand at the bottom of the stairs, my head
light with nervousness, my legs suddenly feeling as if they are made
of hay and unable to carry me another step to the apartment.

Occasionally, I can hear Mehroo's voice,
quivering and thin with frustration and emotion. Then, mummy's
voice rises again, covering up Mehroo's in a torrent of words.
Even from this distance I can make out the curses that she is hurling
at Mehroo, cruel, poisonous words that land like darts in my heart. I
automatically do what I've done all my life when mummy curses
Mehroo.
Please God
, I say,
whatever bad thingshe wishes for
Mehroo, let it happen to me instead twice as strong
.

Now I am at the first floor landing and I stand
there debating what to do next. I know that I am here on borrowed
time because any minute now the first-floor apartment door will be
flung open and one of the neighbours will join me on the landing,
watching me with eyes made narrow with inquisitiveness, trying to
gauge my reaction, storing up the information so that a nugget of
gossip can be dropped at the appropriate time into the jaws of
salivating, news-hungry neighbours.

Worse, the woman may say something to me, either
something flippant and snarky about the daily fights, or worse,
something meant to be kind and understanding that might bring a tear
to my eye, which in turn will also be duly reported to the other
neighbours.

I suddenly feel claustrophobic, as if I am trapped
on this tiny strip of space where I am standing, unable to continue
standing here and reluctant to climb the flight of stairs that will
take me into my apartment and face-to-face with the hysterical,
raging woman who has given birth to me. I feel a hatred that rises
from my stomach into my mouth and tastes like sour milk. For a
moment, I flirt with the idea of turning around and racing down the
stairs and into the freedom of the streets, of walking around Bombay
until dusk gives way to night and my feet grow heavy and tired from
walking. I want to run away from the misery of prying neighbours and
the red-hot embarrassment that flows through my limbs like lava, at
the thought of everybody around us knowing every intimate detail of
what goes on within our apartment because of my mother's
bullhorn voice. But while I am fantasizing about flight, I also
fantasize about rushing into the house and cupping my mother's
open mouth with my hand and pushing her torrent of hateful words back
down her throat, my hands rougher on her mouth than they need to be.
I feel a blinding fury then, at the thought of this reception that I
am receiving at the end of a long day in college.

I continue standing on the landing, unable to
move, paralysed with indecision. Part of me wants to rush out without
a look back and never return again, to lose myself in the crowds of
Bombay. Part of me wants to rush upstairs and throttle my mother,
silence her, cause the buffalo sounds coming from her throat to stop.
And all this time, while I debate what to do next, I am aware that
any minute now the first floor apartment door will fly open and then
I will have a third dilemma to deal with.

I want to lay myself down on the cold stone floor
of the landing, curl up within myself, cover myself with a warm
blanket knitted from silence, and fall asleep. This, of course, is
not an option. There is a decision to be made.

When I was nine years old I stood in the bathroom
one day with the sharp, pointed edge of a steel compass in my inner
ear. I had learned that a punctured eardrum could cause deafness and
it was deafness that I craved, the white, snowy silence that would
block off my mother's voice. I wanted to lose myself in
silence, wanted to occupy a world where adults did not scream their
hate at each other, where mothers did not dissolve in gut-wrenching,
soul-searing sobs, where beloved aunts did not cry to the heavens for
help.

The compass was part of a geometry set that my
aunt Freny had bought for me that year. The pale yellow metal box
also contained a six-inch plastic ruler and a protractor.

I stood in the bathroom for the longest time that
day, trying to picture what a world of silence would feel like,
trying to imagine the pain that would invariably follow a pierced
eardrum. Would there be blood? If so, how much? Would it trickle out
of my ear in a thin stream or would it gush out?

What explanation would I give the adults when they
asked what I was doing with a compass in the bathroom? Would I be
able to fool them into believing that it was an accident? And most
important, once I felt the pain and saw the blood, would I have the
guts to follow through by piercing the second eardrum, also? What if
I chickened out?

What good would one deaf ear do?

In the end, I didn't have the guts to go
through with it. Because just as my fingers tightened around the cold
metal of the compass I realized that deafness would mean more than
escaping from the sound of my mother's shrieks and curses.

It would also mean never hearing music again or
the sound of the birds or the roar of the ocean or my father's
humming as we drove along Marine Drive. Indeed, I would be losing an
entire world in order to gain the escape from angry words that I was
seeking and bad as I was at math, even I could figure out that the
gain was not greater than the loss.

But this craving for oblivion did not end on that
day. For years, I fantasized about killing myself and leaving behind
a note that simply said, ‘Let there be peace at home.' I
was sure that this was the only way to make the adults end their
daily bickering. A few years after the compass incident, when I was
fourteen, I snuck into the medicine cabinet and stole the bottle of
iodine that stood next to the bottle of mercurochrome. Each time
Mehroo applied iodine on my bruised knees or scraped elbows, I'd
noticed the line on the bottle's label that said the product
was poisonous if consumed orally. It was not that I planned on
killing myself on this day—I just wanted to taste the bitter
iodine to see if I could go through with drinking the entire bottle
if I ever needed to. I wanted to test how foul the taste would be in
case I ever needed to down it in a hurry, to know if I needed to come
up with a better plan. I screwed open the black plastic top to the
small, thin glass bottle and touched the opening of the bottle to my
tongue, which immediately went numb from where the drop of iodine
landed on it.

I was satisfied. It tasted awful but if things
ever got so bad at home that I needed to kill myself, I knew that I
could force myself to consume the entire bottle.

I climb the last flight of stairs and ring the
doorbell to the apartment. Nothing happens. Mummy continues to scream
at Mehroo, who is doing her best to respond in between coughing fits.
I hear Mehroo coughing from where I stand outside the front door and
as always, I fight the urge to beat on my ears with the open palm of
my hands so that the sound of her cough gets fragmented and chopped
up. I have been doing this since I was a child, whenever the house
erupted in fighting and yelling and swearing. By beating on my ears I
could manipulate sound, slice up words until they sounded funny and
meaningless, could drain the poison out of them. Mehroo's
coughing scares me, reminds me of how terribly frail and sick she is,
and produces in me a rush of protectiveness that I want to wrap like
a woollen coat around her. I ring the doorbell again, more
insistently this time. The indecisiveness of a few minutes ago, the
desire to run away and never return, is gone now, replaced by the
urge to pull Mehroo away from the fighting that is surely sapping her
strength and numbering her days.

Mehroo's health has declined a lot these
past few years. The treatments for TB that she received in her
childhood have damaged her lungs, so that her cough has become a part
of her now, a feature every bit as much her as her voice or her
laugh. But no matter how much Mehroo coughs, I can't get used
to it. Her painful coughing has a visceral effect on me, just as the
old cowherd's wailing did when I was an infant.

When Mehroo has one of her long coughing fits, I
want to cover my ears, run out of the room, smash something. My
violent reaction stems from my inability to see her suffer and her
coughing brings me face-to-face with the realization that all the
love in my heart cannot help her even the tiniest bit. Of course, I
don't say any of this to Mehroo because she is already so
ashamed of her coughing, haunted as she is by childhood memories of
being shunned when she had TB. She will no longer kiss me and when I
try to grab her face and forcibly kiss her cheek, she turns her head
away so that the kiss misfires and lands on her head. She acts as if
she has TB again, although she doesn't.