Versione Italiana | Nota biografica | Versione lettura |
My first day at Arundales. Masud Sheikh, elegant as ever with silver
hair slicked back and leather patches at tweedy elbows, is waiting at
the doors when my taxi pulls up. I’m wearing uniform: light blue
shirt and dark blue blazer, navy pants with pleats and blunt-toed
shoes. I feel like a freak, a leftover from some other decade.
Morning, sir. (I know I have to call him that, or Mr Masud; no
familiarities allowed here.)
You’re sloppy, Murad, Mr M tells me, your shirt collar should
be in or out and instead it’s half in and half out. Didn’t your father
teach you to dress?
It’s May. I turned thirteen a month ago; I’ve been in the hilltop
town a week. I came here with my father, from Bombay by airconditioned
train to Madras, then a plane to Coimbatore and a car
from there, driving up the winding hill roads through a forest
reserve. Looked at monkeys pick lice from each other’s fur, sneezed
at the medicinal odour of eucalyptus.
Even at home in Karachi, when I was seven or eight, my father
would sit me on the arm of his chair and show me pictures of his
dream houses in faraway places, Hertfordshire, Hampshire, the
Nilgiris. We’re city people, but he’s always longed for green places,
waterfalls, lakes, great gardens. And now, eight years later, he’s made
his dream come true: rented a villa beside a lake, for a year in this
Blue Mountain town.
It’s cool even in May, but there are things happening: flower
shows, dog shows, boat races, horse races. I don’t even have time to
adjust. The matter of school arose early: I’ve been missing classes for
six months, so it’s urgent that I start again. My father wants to send
me to Lovedale, halfway down the mountain, where most of the
students are the sons and daughters of white planters and expats who
live in big towns hundreds of miles away. But my mother sends a
telegram from Bombay, to tell us I’m to start right away at
Arundales, the Theosophist school where Mr Masud is vice principal.
I’m to be a boarder, she says. I refuse, because I hate the idea;
I’ve never been to an all-male school before, and the thought of
sleeping in a dorm with smelly boys is enough to make me rebel.
My father intervenes. I’ll be driven to classes each morning, he
promises, and picked up each evening.
So, here I am, on the porch of my new school. Ready for my first
day. Carrying my blue-and-black-striped tie in my pocket, because I
never wear one.
I’m led to a wooden hall, where boys sit in rows on wooden
benches, listening to recorded music. It’s Carnatic music, which I
enjoy, though I’ve only recently heard it for the first time. When
Subbulakshmi’s voice begins its throaty undulations—‘oooo, rangaaa
shaaayeee’—the boys nudge each other and titter, in an obviously
familiar ritual.
The boy who’d been sitting next to me leads me to our
classroom. His name’s Akash; he’s pink-cheeked, pleasant, Punjabi.
You speak Hindi?
I pause before I answer.
Hmmm.
(I still think of the language I know as Urdu. I left Karachi only
five months ago.)
At lunch, Akash takes me to the refectory, where we’re fed sticky
brown rice that smells odd, a thin lentil broth speckled with mixed
vegetables, steel bowls of sour curd. The southern boys are eating
with their fingers. I’ve never tasted food like this; Akash can see my
surprise.
Good for your soul. He nudges me, winks.
In the afternoon, we’re in the lab, dissecting frogs, mixing
chemicals in vials. I’ve never been in a lab before; I hate it. But there
are art classes, and English and history which I’m good at; Hindi,
too, which I’ve learnt, in my few months in the north, to read and
write quite well, though I have no Sanskrit vocabulary.
During the break, Akash tells me he likes Biggles and Billy
Bunter, neither of whom I’ve ever heard of; I only read grown-up
novels. He offers to lend me one of his books.
I’m back at school in August. I’m used to the town by now; to its
toy buildings with their red and green imitation Gothic roofs, its
English church and graveyard, its tribal Todas.
During the holiday I made friends with the art teacher, and spent
many summer afternoons at her house, trying, unsuccessfully, to
paint. I discovered the library in the centre of town, with its newish
English novels on the ground floor, and its antique volumes upstairs.
Enough to keep me busy, even when it rains, and when it rains in the
mountains it’s a performance: shrieking winds, falling branches, greyblack
days. At home, we light log fires.
Akash no longer shares my desk, or my tuck on tutorial trips to
the Botanical Gardens. All through the summer I’d thought I had a
friend, but then another boy told me that Akash had said he only
looked after me, in those first few days, at someone’s behest. Since
everyone calls Akash ‘Teacher’s Pet’, I can guess who told him to
keep an eye on me. Our parting’s mutual: maybe he withdraws
because his duty’s done, or maybe I do, because I’m insulted and
unsure.
I’m afraid to make friends. I’m bookish, bad at making overtures;
I’ve been allowed to give up physics and chemistry, but have to do
maths and take physical geography, at which I’m just as bad. The
boys I talk to are the two Rameshes. One’s a Malayali science genius
and inveterate Biggles and Bunter reader from Singapore. The other,
a Gujarati Jain from Calicut, is jovial and obese. Singapore Ramesh
tolerates Fat Ramesh because he sees him as an incarnation of
Bunter. I don’t inhabit Bunterland; I probably attract them only
because I’m an outsider, too, and awkward. Many of the boys here
come from Africa, Asia, the Gulf, and my being from Karachi just
seems to be a variation on a common theme: they’re too young to
care about a three-year-old war, and really I’m just like any other
northern Muslim boy, except for my slightly foreign looks, and what
they call my fancy English accent.
The two Rameshes mean little to me when I’m away from them.
But I like my maths teacher, Miss Rajalakshmi. She’s young, pretty;
my second-best friend at school. My best friend’s my history teacher;
most of the teachers here are girls, but Mrs Pratap Singh is a plump
older woman from Bhopal, who tells me my essays about Mughal
emperors and empresses are as enchanting as fairytales. I should write
more, she says, and publishes something of mine in the school
magazine. But when I’m home in the evenings, I never write unless
I have to. I read, novels and biographies and nineteenth-century plays
I bring home from the library, and the Illustrated Weekly which Aunt
Annie, my mother’s writer-friend, sends from Bombay. At weekends
I go to every new movie at the only English cinema in town. On dry
days I lie in the sunny grass on my stomach, listening to songs,
Hindi film songs on the radio, Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood on
my portable, battery-operated Italian record player, singing along
with them.
November. Often the car breaks down halfway, or the driver doesn’t
show up; I have to walk three miles to school, through rain, slush,
sludge.
The last day of term, there’s frost. Glinting on grass, luminous
on tarmac. There’s a party that night. The girl teachers sing syrupy
tunes: ‘Somewhere my love’, ‘Those were the days’. The lead singer’s
Saramma, the biology teacher. (She’s very pretty, played tennis in a
hipster sari with palla tucked in at waist throughout the term, and
we all stared at her flat beige belly and her neat navel until Mrs
Pratap told her to cover up.)
The lights go off. There’s a hush, then a roll of drums and the
wail of an electric guitar. A few notes of the piano, and a rough, high
male voice, singing the first lines of ‘Lucy in the sky with diamonds’. The
group’s behind a white screen; we see their projected shadows. The
lead singer’s in profile: hawk nose, curly hair. It’s Jayasurya, known
to all as Singapore Jay, Ramesh’s maternal uncle. I’ve never really
noticed him before. I don’t like the song; even less, the nasal, throaty
way they sing it.
(1968 is dying, dying.)
We’re on our way to Bombay. I’ll be in a big city again; I’ll see
the sea, the Arabian Sea that brings ships all the way from Karachi.
I’ll see my mother after six months. She’s coming back with us to the
Blue Mountains, in January.
We’ve been rehearsing a play since the new year began, and I’m in it.
I’ve been given a double role, prince and beggar: the beggar’s really
the Diamond Prince in disguise. I am not the hero, Jay is. Elviro, the
ship’s captain, goes off to find a precious pearl for his gipsy love
(played by Saramma). Diamond, in pauper’s disguise, steals it from
him. Jay wears boots and breeches; I am in a gold Grecian tunic.
I’ve grown; at fourteen I’m 5 feet 10, as tall as a man, nearly as
tall as Jay. I’m popular, too, with my record collection, the daring
books I read, the polo necks and bell bottoms my mother’s brought
for me from a cousin’s boutique in Karachi. The best boys in class
keep my company; the Rameshes, from an admiring distance, enjoy
my new-found confidence, as if they’d groomed me for success. I
walk around with Sirish the cricketer and Jitendra the tennis player,
the class heroes, though I have no particular friend.
But since rehearsals began Jay, and three other boys, have been
thrown out of school for breaking rules. They jumped over the walls
at night and went into town: saw films, ate chicken biryani. Dark
rumours have it that they’d been seen with the town’s local slut, the
Chinese restaurant owner’s wife, smoking and drinking beer, eating
beef and pork.
I’ve been offered Jay’s role, and his songs. His voice is big and
mine’s quite small, but I can carry a tune.
Now, after the Easter break, before I have time to fit into his
breeches and boots—he’s taller than me, but my build is bigger, and
my feet—Jay’s back. I’m scared. Since Rajam, on whom I had a crush
last term, left to get married, I’ve been friendly with Saramma; she
got me to admit I’d seen the boys in town, at the Regal cinema and
at the Three Kings Dosa Palace. She told Mrs Pratap. They were
reported, followed and expelled. But something’s made Mr M change
his mind; he’s summoned Jay back. Under curfew, I gather.
So he’s the hero again. And I’m the villain.
My second cousin Adeila’s come to stay. She’s in trouble because
she’s been seeing the wrong kind of boy in her home town,
Secunderabad. Her mother thinks a month in the Nilgiris will
distract her. Adeila looks and dresses like a Vogue model: white op
art earrings and huge white-framed glasses, mascaraed lashes, geometric
Vidal Sassoon haircut, white bell-bottomed pants. Almost as smart as
a Karachi girl.
She’s forward, too. She knows I look at her. Though I’m two
years younger, she’s flattered. She’s let me hold her hand and taught
me to French kiss, but for the last few days she’s been aloof.
I don’t know how to deal with her.
I’ve been without female company for more than a year. My
mouth dries when Adeila’s around, my groin tightens; when I lie in
bed I smell her scent, not the Chant d’Arome she uses but something
headier, hair and skin and female otherness. In my dreams I press my
heart against her breasts, taste the insides of her lips. I wake up, with
silvery slime on my belly or between my thighs. I sluice myself clean
with a whole bucket of cold water I have to fill for myself from an
outside tap; there’s no running water and the mornings are cold, even
in summer.
Adeila’s on my mind the day there’s a fire alarm and we have to leave
the music room. Beyond the tennis court, by the well, I find myself
looking straight into Jay’s eyes. I flinch.
How’s it going, man.
Oh, you know. And how about you.
You were really good today. When you asked me to forgive
you …
Oh, I had something else on my mind …
Like?
Girls. A girl.
I find myself telling him about Adeila.
Let’s go up to the playing field, he says.
(Later I realize he noticed others, staring at us.)
We’ve been at the boat club, Adeila and I. It’s Saturday. A fine sky,
and the lake’s lime green before sunset, with boaters still out on the
water, trailing their fingers in its ripples. We’ve walked to the cinema,
to see Vanessa Redgrave in Camelot. We stop to buy cokes and chips
before we take our seats.
Come and sit with us.
(It’s Singapore Ramesh. Of course, it’s their evening at the
movies—I should have remembered.)
It’s OK. We’ve got a box.
No, come on.
We follow, sit down.
Five minutes later, I see Jay in shadow, overlong legs, familiar
stoop, curly hair. He drops into the seat near mine.
Hi.
I feel his shoulder touch mine, the length of his arm, his knee.
(He isn’t handsome, Adeila tells me later. He’s dark and his lips
are thick. She isn’t pretty, Jay says. Flat-chested; looks like Barbra
Streisand.)
Monday evening. I come home from rehearsal to find my parents
waiting for me.
We’ve heard you’ve been mixing with the wrong sort of boy. You
were with him at the cinema. (Mother.)
Who?
Don’t be rude. You know who. (Father.)
He’s my friend. And I’m in the play with him. Can’t avoid him.
Well, your teachers don’t like it. They say it’s furtive. (Mother.)
And it distracts the other boys. (Father.)
Masud Bhai doesn’t like it. (Mother.)
In the dressing room we’ve been given to share, I don’t talk to him.
He doesn’t get my silent message. He keeps on talking. On stage I
give the greatest performance, particularly when Diamond betrays
Elviro.
Mr M tells me I showed too much hairy, muscular thigh. Mrs
Pratap’s summoned to drop the hem of my tunic in time for the next
performance.
The second night, Jay doesn’t talk while we dress. When Diamond
asks for forgiveness and Elviro’s meant to take my hand, he forgets
his lines.
Silence takes centre stage for a moment.
(I wish I’d die. Suicide’s a sin. I can’t jump into the lake or hang
myself; I’d be too afraid, so I pray God will just take me away in my
sleep.)
Before the end of term I tell the Rameshes what happened.
The rainy summer passes. Adeila’s gone home to Secunderabad;
I’ve driven my parents to desperation with my lost appetite and my
surly moods, and Mr M can’t bear to look at me. My father sets off
for England; he’d said when we came he’d stay just one year. He’s
promised to send for me, if only I’ll wait till the next term’s over.
Even my mother agrees; she’d never wanted to move away from
Karachi and she hates this town, the rain and the wind and the cold
mountain loneliness. So I’ll soon be leaving this strange place, this
foreign land, for a faraway country I’ve never seen, a country still
more foreign and more strange.
I come back to school.
Singapore Ramesh tells me:
My uncle understands. He’ll wait.
Then I know what I must do.
I write to Jay. He writes back.
For weeks we exchange letters, conceal them in books left in
appointed corners. We learn to break rules that were made to be
broken.
Sometimes I have to wait for his replies, two days, three, a week.
I write to him and tear up the messages, swear I’ll never write again.
And then, as if he knows what I’m thinking, he writes another
message. Sometimes his letters are long, at other they’re just notes,
a line or two. He signs himself ‘Your loving friend’.
Sometimes we meet, in secret, in the lab or in the playing field on
the hill. Furtive meetings, as if guilt’s what we were destined for. I’m
afraid to be with him now. I feel as if we’re on stage again, rehearsing
without a script to read from. When we part, I remember things I
didn’t say; it’s easier, much easier, to write.
I’m defiant when we talk, but I see him chastened. He has to
finish school this year; he’s been loyal to me, but I know at what cost.
Me, I’ve ceased to care: I upset everyone. Saramma hasn’t talked to
me since I confronted her with what I found out from Mrs Pratap—
she was the one who spread stories, complained to Mr M. Most of
my casual friends dropped me when I was declared dangerous
company.
Singapore Ramesh keeps faith, and Mrs Pratap.
You’ve got to get away from here, bachche, she tells me. This
place is too small for you. It’ll smash all your dreams.
Even when Saramma finds one of our notes in the library I’m not
afraid. I’ll leave here in a week or two, and Jay a few weeks after me;
it’s not worth anyone’s while, this time, to make a scene about us.
Mr Masud tells me I can take the last few days off, I needn’t bother
to come back before I travel north, on my way to England. Still, when
we leave, he’s at the station to say goodbye. He’ll be glad to rid
himself of me, the wayward, dreamy, stubborn boy I am. It’s
November, purple-grey and wet again.
Jay writes just once. We’re in Secunderabad. My mother finds
the letter, and tears it up. Anyway, I can’t reply: he sent no return
address. Our story’s over, except when I trace it between the lines of
books I read.
There’s little left to tell. I reach London in May, a year after that first exchange with Jay. Mr Masud comes to visit, a month or two after I reach England. We live on Bayswater Road, facing Hyde Park. I’m fifteen now, and six feet tall; already at high school, making new friends, buying cheap tickets to see films and plays with a girl from Venezuela, necking in the park. I see Mr M a few times; I call him Mamunsaheb again. He’d known me as a rebel: when I left Arundales he must have marked me off as his only failure, made excuses for my ways and my defection. But he never once alludes to my stay in the Nilgiris. It was a slip in time, an aberration, best forgotten. I am, at the story’s conclusion, one of the forgiven: a member of the family, his younger sister’s only son.