A Fine Balance

V. Mountains

WHEN MANECK KOHLAH FINISHED moving his belongings from the college hostel to Dinas flat, he was soaking with sweat. Fine strong arms, she thought, watching him carry his suitcase and boxes noiselessly, setting things down with care.

“It’s so humid,” he said, wiping his forehead. “I’ll take a bath now, Mrs. Dalai.”

“At this time of the evening? You must be joking. There’s no water, you have to wait till morning. And what’s this Mrs. Dalai again?”

“Sorry — Dina Aunty.”

Such a good-looking boy, she thought, and dimples when he smiles. But she felt he should get rid of the few hairs at his upper lip that were trying so hard to be a moustache. “Shall I call you Mac?”

“I hate that name.”

He unpacked, changed his shirt, and they had dinner. He looked up from his plate once, meeting her eye and smiling sadly. He ate little; she asked if the food was all right.

“Oh yes, very tasty, thank you, Aunty.”

“If Nusswan — my brother — saw your plate, he would say that even his pet sparrow would go hungry with that quantity.”

“It’s too hot to eat more,” he murmured apologetically.

“Yes, I suppose compared to your healthy mountain air it’s boiling here.” She decided he needed putting at ease. “And how is college?”

“Fine, thank you.”

“But you didn’t like the hostel?”

“No, it’s a very rowdy place. Impossible to study.”

There was silence again through several morsels, the next attempt at conversation coming from him. “Those two tailors I met last month — they still work for you?”

“Yes,” she said. “They’ll be here in the morning.”

“Oh good, it will be nice to see them again.”

“Will it?”

He didn’t hear the edge in it, and tried to nod pleasantly while she began clearing the table. “Let me help,” he said, pushing back his chair.

“No, it’s okay.”

She soaked the dishes in the kitchen for the morning, and he watched. The flat depressed him, the way it had when he had come to inspect the room. He would be gone in less than a year, he thought, thank God for that. But for Dina Aunty this was home. Everywhere there was evidence of her struggle to stay ahead of squalor, to mitigate with neatness and order the shabbiness of poverty. He saw it in the chicken wire on the broken windowpanes, in the blackened kitchen wall and ceiling, in the flaking plaster, in the repairs on her blouse collar and sleeves.

“If you are tired you can go to bed, dont wait for me,” she said.

Taking it to be a polite dismissal, he withdrew to his room — her room, he thought guiltily — and sat listening to the noises from the back, trying to guess what she was doing.

Before going to bed herself, Dina remembered to turn on the kitchen tap in order to be roused by its patter at first flow. She lay awake for a long while, thinking about her boarder. The first impression was good. He didn’t seem fussy at all, polite, with fine manners, and so quiet. But maybe he was just tired today, might be more talkative tomorrow.

Maneck did not sleep well. A window kept banging in the wind, and he felt unsure about rising to investigate, afraid of stumbling in the dark, disturbing Mrs. Dalai. He tossed and turned, haunted by the college hostel. Finally escaped, he thought. But it would have been much better to go straight home…

He was up early; the open tap turned out to be his alarm clock as well. After cleaning his teeth he returned to his room and did pushups in his underwear, unaware that Dina, having finished in the kitchen, was watching through the half-open door.

She admired the horseshoe of his triceps as they formed and dissolved with his ascent and descent. I was right last night, she thought, nice strong arms. And such a handsome body. Then she blushed confusedly — Aban in school with me… young enough to be my son. She turned away from the door.

“Good morning, Aunty.”

She turned around cautiously, relieved to see he was wearing his clothes. “Good morning, Maneck. Did you sleep well?”

“Yes, thank you.”

She acquainted him with the bathroom and the working of the immersion water heater, then left. He shut the door to undress, moving carefully in the small, unfamiliar space. Hot water steamed, ebullient in the bucket. He tested it with the fingertips, then plunged his hand past the wrist, exulting in the warmth. He realized it was only the dank monsoon day making the steam threaten and cloud so thick, no more scalding than the dreamy mist that would be hugging the mountains at home now.

If he shut his eyes he could picture it: at this hour it would be swirling fancifully, encircling the snow-covered peaks. Just after dawn was the best time to observe the slow dance, before the sun was strong enough to snatch away the veil. And he would stand at the window, watch the pink and orange of sunrise, imagine the mist tickling the mountain’s ear or chucking it under the chin or weaving a cap for it.

Soon he would hear the familiar sounds from downstairs as his father opened up the store and stepped outside to sweep the porch. First, his father would greet the dogs who had spent the night on the porch. There was never any trouble with the strays; Daddy had an arrangement with them: they could sleep here and feed on scraps so long as they left in the morning. And they always went obediently at first light, albeit with reluctance, after nuzzling his ankles. In the kitchen Mummy would stoke the boiler with shiny black coal, fill the tea kettle, slice the bread, and keep an eye on the stove.

At this hour, as the pan hissed and sputtered, the aroma of fried eggs would begin to travel upstairs and to the porch. The appetizing emissary would deliver wordless messages to Maneck and his father. Then Maneck would leave the moving-mist panorama and hurry to breakfast, hugging his parents, whispering good morning to each before sitting down at his place. His father had a special big cup, from which he took great gulps of tea while still standing. He always drank his first cup standing, moving around the kitchen, gazing out the window at the early-morning valley. When Maneck was sick with a cold or had exams at school, he was allowed to drink from his father’s cup, with its bowl so huge that Maneck thought he would never finish, never drain its depths, and yet he had to keep drinking if he was to triumph and reveal the star-shaped design at the bottom, changing colour through the final trace of liquid, appearing and disappearing as he sloshed it around…

Shaking water off his wet forearm, Maneck tried to shut the leaking tap — a bad washer — and gazed abstractedly at the steamy swirls haloing his bucket of hot water. His homesick imagination made him see the hills float through the fog again, passing from nimbus to nothing. He sighed, stood on the high step enclosing the bathing area, and hung his clothes on the empty nail next to his towel. The third nail was occupied by a brassière, with something else behind it — knitted from strong, rough yarn, like a thumbless glove. Curious, he pulled it out to examine. A bath mitt, he decided, and stepped off the ledge, picking up the mug to splash himself with water from the bucket.

Then he saw the worms. Phylum Annelida, he remembered from biology class. They were crawling out of the drain in formidable numbers, stringy and dark red, glistening on the grey stone floor, advancing with their mesmeric glide. Maneck froze for an instant before leaping back to the safety of the ledge.

Weeks earlier, when Dina had first heard that the boarder found for her by Zenobia was the son of a girl who had gone to school with them, her memory could not leap back across the years to pluck out the face in question.

“She had a beauty spot on her chin,” reminded Zenobia, “and her nose was slightly crooked. Though I think it made her look quite cute.”

Dina shook her head, still unable to remember.

“Do you have the class photo for… let’s see,” and Zenobia counted on her fingers, “1946, ‘47, ‘48, ‘49 — that’s it, 1949.”

“Nusswan would not give me the money to buy it. Have you forgotten how my brother was, after Daddy died?”

“Yes, I know. Such a wretch. Making you wear those ridiculous long uniforms and those heavy, ugly shoes. You poor thing. Makes me mad even after all these years.”

“And because of him I lost touch with everyone. Except you.”

“Yes, I know. He didn’t allow you to stay for choir or dramatics or ballet or anything.”

All that evening they enjoyed the pleasures of reminiscing, laughing at the follies and tragedies of their pasts. Very often there was a little sadness in their laughter, for these memories were of their youth. They remembered their favourite teachers, and Miss Lamb, the principal, who was called Lambretta because she was always scooting up and down the halls. They calculated how old they would have been in the sixth standard, when they had started French, and the French teacher, who they had nicknamed Mademoiselle Bouledogue, began terrorizing their lives three times a week. Everyone assumed the name was an example of the cruelty of schoolgirls, but it had been bestowed as much for her heavy jowls as for her pugnacious approach to irregular verbs and conjugations.

After Zenobia left, Dina measured out half a cup of rice, picked out the pebbles from the grain, and boiled the water. The last drop of daylight was used up, and the kitchen light had to be switched on. Through the open window she heard a mother calling her children in from play. Then the smell of frying onions swooped in. Everywhere the cooking hour had begun.

As the rice cooked, she thought how pleasant it had been to remember her school-days — better than the brooding and daydreaming she had been doing lately about Nusswan and Ruby; her father’s house; her nephews, Xerxes and Zarir, grown men now at twenty-two and nineteen, whom she seldom met more than once a year.

After dinner, she sat at the window, watching the balloonman across the road tempt the passing children. Somewhere, a radio began blaring the signature tune for “Choice of the People.” Eight o’clock, thought Dina, as Vijay Correas voice introduced the first song. She worked on her quilt for an hour or so. Before going to bed she soaped her clothes and left them in the bucket, ready for the morning wash.

Zenobia stopped by again the next evening on her way home from the Venus Beauty Salon and took a large envelope out of her purse. “Go on, open it,” she said.

“Oh, it’s the class photograph,” Dina exclaimed with delight.

“Look at us all,” said Zenobia wistfully. “We must have been about fifteen.” She pointed out the girl in the second row.

“Yes, I remember her now. Aban Sodawalla. Though you can’t see her beauty spot in this picture.”

“How the girls teased her about it. And that mean poem someone made up, remember? Aban Sodawalla has no grace, needs a soda to clean her face.”

“See the spot upon her chin, pick it out with a pointy pin,” completed Dina. “How stupid we were then, chanting such nonsense.”

“I know. And by sixteen, the whole jing-bang lot of us was trying to copy the beauty spot. Weren’t we silly, trying to paint it on.”

Dina studied the photograph again for a moment. “I remember her most clearly in the fourth standard. Eight or nine years old. The three of us were always together then. She was the one very good at skipping rope, wasn’t she?”

“Yes, exactly.” Zenobia was pleased that at last a firm connection was made. “Trouble with a capital t, the teacher called us, remember?”

They picked up the trail of nostalgia where they had left it the day before: the games they had played during the short and long recess, and the fun of plaiting one another’s hair, comparing ribbons, exchanging hairclips. And when their breasts began to grow, how they would stoop their shoulders to try to reduce the embarrassing protuberances, or wear cardigans to disguise them, even in sweltering heat, and discuss their first periods, walking oddly while they got used to sanitary pads. And then the teasing about imagined boyfriends and kisses, and fantasies of moonlight walks in romantic gardens.

Most of all, Dina and Zenobia marvelled at how, during those years of their terrible innocence, all the girls had known practically everything about one another’s lives. “Then your father passed away,” said Zenobia. “And that brother of yours wouldn’t allow you to have any friends. But you know, you didn’t miss that much — after the final year most of us lost contact with the gang anyway.”

With high school completed, some of their companions had had to go to work because their families were poor; others went on to college, and some were not allowed to, because college could be harmful to the lives of soon-to-be wives and mothers — they were kept home to help in the kitchen. If there were no younger sisters to wear the blouse and pinafore of the school uniform, it was cut into kitchen cloths, to wipe the stoves or carry hot pots and pans. Then the ex-schoolgirls were vague, even secretive, when they chanced to meet. There was an air of embarrassment about how they were spending their days, as though they had colluded in a collective betrayal of their youth and childhood. Most of them knew practically nothing about one another’s lives.

“You were the only one I kept in touch with — you and Aban Sodawalla, of course,” said Zenobia.

She continued with the rest of their schoolmate’s story: soon after matriculation, Aban had been introduced by family friends to a certain Farokh Kohlah, who was visiting the city, and who had a business in the north, far away, in a hill-station. The Sodawalla family immediately approved of him. How tall and straight stood the young Parsi gentleman, Mr. Sodawalla had said, such a fine bearing, thanks to the healthy life in the mountains. Mrs. Sodawalla was most impressed by the young gentleman’s light pigmentation. Not white like a European ghost, she told her friends, but fair and golden.

In view of the possibilities, the Sodawalla family took a tactical vacation the following year at the hill-station. And, in time, the strategy produced the desired results. Aban fell in love with Farokh Kohlah and the natural beauty of the place. Then she married and settled there.

“She still writes to me once a year, without fail,” said Zenobia. “That’s how I knew she was looking for a room for her son.”

“Which was very lucky for me,” said Dina. “Thanks for all your help.”

“Don’t mention it. But God only knows how Aban has managed to live all these years in some tiny hill town. Especially after being born and brought up in our lovely city. To be honest, I would go crazy.”

“If they have their own business, they must be rich people,” said Dina.

Zenobia was doubtful. “How wealthy can you get these days, with a small shop in some little hill place?”

Once, though, Maneck’s family had been extremely wealthy. Fields of grain, orchards of apple and peach, a lucrative contract to supply provisions to cantonments along the frontier — all this was among the inheritance of Farokh Kohlah, and he tended it well, making it increase and multiply for the wife he was to marry and the son who would be born.

But long before that eagerly awaited birth, there was another, gorier parturition, when two nations incarnated out of one. A foreigner drew a magic line on a map and called it the new border; it became a river of blood upon the earth. And the orchards, fields, factories, businesses, all on the wrong side of that line, vanished with a wave of the pale conjuror’s wand.

Ten years later, when Maneck was born, Farokh Kohlah, trapped by history, was still travelling regularly to courthouses in the capital, snared in the coils of the government’s compensation scheme, while files were shuffled and diplomats shuttled from this country to the other. Between journeys he helped his wife to run their old-fashioned general store in town. The shop was all that remained from his vast fortune, having escaped the cartographic changes by being located on the right side of that magic line.

For years the shop had languished, more a hobby or a social club than a business. The real income had come from those other, lost, sources. Now it needed to be nurtured for all it was worth.

Aban Kohlah turned out to be a natural manager in the General Store. “I can easily handle all this,” she said to her husband. “You have more important things to do.”

A cradle was set up behind the counter to ensure that she was not separated from her child. She ordered the goods, kept accounts, stocked shelves, served customers, and, in her free moments, revelled in the magnificent view of the valley from the back of the shop. Life in the hills suited her perfectly.

Farokh Kohlah had worried at first that his wife would miss the city and her relatives. He feared that once the novelty of the exotic locale had worn off, the complaining would begin. His worries turned out to be needless; her love for the place only increased with the passage of time.

The cradle was soon outgrown, and Maneck was crawling round and about the counter, then toddling among the shelves. Mrs. Kohlah’s vigilance was now strained to the limit. She was afraid that the boy might bring things crashing down on his head. But whenever her back had to be turned, the customers took over, helping to keep him safely busy, playing with him, amusing him with coins and keyrings, or the brilliant hues of their handmade scarves and shawls. “Hello, baba! Ting-ting! Baba, ak-koo!”

By the time he was five, Maneck was proudly assisting his parents in the shop. He stood behind the counter, his black hair barely visible over the edge, waiting to hear the customer’s request. “I know where it is! I’ll get it!” he would say, and run to fetch the item under the fond glances of Mrs. Kohlah and the customer.

After starting school the following year, he continued to help out in the evening. He devised his own system for the regulars, keeping their everyday purchases — three eggs, loaf of bread, small butter packet, biscuits — ready and waiting on the counter at their expected time.

“Look at that son of mine,” said Mr. Kohlah proudly. “Just six, and what initiative, what organizational skill.” He savoured the pleasure of watching Maneck greet the shoppers and chat with them, describe the aggressive pack of langurs he had seen from the schoolbus that morning, or join in the discussion about a dried-up waterfall. The easygoing manner of the townspeople came naturally to Maneck, having been born and brought up here, and it delighted his father that he mixed so well with everyone.

Sometimes, at dusk, in the bustle of the shop, Mr. Kohlah, surrounded by his wife and son and the customers, who were also friends and neighbours, almost forgot the losses he had suffered. Yes, he would think then, yes, life was still good.

The Kohlahs sold newspapers, several varieties of tea, sugar, bread and butter; also candles and pickles, torches and lightbulbs, biscuits and blankets, brooms and chocolates, scarves and umbrellas; then there were toys, walking-sticks, soap, rope, and more. There was no grand system of inventory selection — just basic groceries, household necessities, and a few luxuries.

The shop’s casual approach to commerce made it the favourite with locals as well as with the neighbouring settlements. If someone could not afford a full packet of, say, biscuits, Mrs. Kohlah would think nothing of tearing it open and selling half; she had faith that someone else would come along for the other half. If an item was not in stock, Mr. Kohlah would gladly order it as long as the customer was not particular about the delivery date. Even if the delivery date was crucial, there was not much to be done because deliveries depended on the roads, and roads depended on the weather, and everyone knew weather depended on the One Up Above. The morning newspaper usually arrived by early evening, when the regulars gathered on the porch to smoke or sip tea and discuss the news as they read it, calling out the headlines to Mr. Kohlah if he was pottering around inside the shop.

For all the vast inventory it carried, the shop’s backbone, ultimately, was a secret soft-drink formula handed down in the Kohlah family for four generations. There was a little factory in the cellar where the soft drinks were mixed, aerated, and bottled. An assistant washed and prepared the empties, and loaded the crates for delivery. To maintain the formula’s secret, Mr. Kohlah did the actual mixing and manufacturing himself; his eyepatch testified to that, covering the hole created by a defective bottle exploding under the pressure of carbonation.

With a handkerchief covering the mess on his face, he had gone upstairs to his wife. Barely a year had passed since their marriage, and it was their first crisis. Would she weep and wail, or faint, or stay composed? He was as curious about her reaction as he was concerned about his eye.

Seven months pregnant, Aban Kohlah was quite in control. “Farokh, would you first like a peg of brandy?” He said yes. She had a tiny sip herself, then drove him to the hospital down in the valley. The doctor said he was lucky to be alive — his spectacles had broken the impact of the glass projectile, keeping it from reaching his brain. But it was impossible to save the eye.

Mr. Kohlah said that was all right. “One eye is sufficient for the things I am looking forward to seeing,” he smiled, touching his wife’s swollen belly. Whereas, he added, the ugliness of the world would now trouble him only half as much.

He refused to have a glass eye fitted after the socket had healed. An eyepatch became part of his daily attire. He wore it while working in the store, and at social occasions. On his long evening walks through the hillside forest, however, the patch occupied his pocket while he admired for the umpteenth time the beauty of the place and munched on a carrot.

The loss of his eye allowed him to indulge his fondness for carrots. It had been kept in check by Mrs. Kohlah, who said that though carrots were a good thing, any kind of mania was a bad thing. But now she had to allow his passion full play: carrot juice, carrot salad, carrot-ma-gose, carrots in his pocket as walking companions.

“I need carrots,” insisted Mr. Kohlah. “My one remaining eye must stay fitter than ever, it has to do double duty.”

Their little son, growing quickly, soon learned about his father’s craze. When he was scolded for misbehaving, he would steal a carrot from the kitchen and carry it to his father as a peace offering, risking a second scolding from his mother.

After the accident Mr. Kohlah was extra careful in the cellar. He allowed no one in the area while the tired old machines rattled and hissed, filling bottles with the fizz of Kohlah’s Cola and the till with the tinkle of much-needed money.

His friends, fearing for his safety, showed their concern by joking about it. “Careful, Farokh, it can be dangerous when you go underground. Cola mining is as risky as coal mining.” But he laughed with them and ignored their hints.

Sacrificing subtlety, they suggested he should seriously consider replacing the ancient equipment, give some thought to modernizing and expanding the operation. “Listen, Farokh, look at it rationally,” they urged. “Kohlah’s Cola is so good, it deserves to be known throughout the country, not just in our little corner.”

But modernization and expansion were foreign ideas, incomprehensible to someone who refused even to advertise. Kohlah’s Cola (or Kaycee, as it was known) was famous through all the little settlements perched on hillsides for miles around. Word of mouth had been good enough for his forefathers, he said, and it was good enough for him.

From time to time contenders emerged with fanfare, touting rival brands, but soon went out of business, unable to compete with the Kohlah family’s product. Nothing could approach Kaycee, claimed the faithful patrons — its delicious flavour was as unique as the air in the mountains. The soft drink and the General Store flourished.

And so, by the time Maneck started school, the business was on a sound footing. Mr. Kohlah carefully guarded the formula that had salvaged their livelihood, waiting for the day when he would reveal it to Maneck, as his father had revealed it to him. An air of contentment surrounded his life, a quiet pride at having survived the ordeal by fire. It surfaced when neighbours gathered in the evening and the talk shifted gently to times gone by, to the stories of their lives; and when Mr. Kohlah’s turn came he told of his family’s glory days, not from self-pity or notions of false grandeur, nor to sing his own achievement in the present, but as a lesson in living life on the borderline — modern maps could ruin him, but they could not displace his dreams for his family.

Of course, the stories had all been heard before, many times over, yet there was always room for one more telling. And Mr. Kohlah was not the only one guilty of repetition.

Most of his and Mrs. Kohlah’s friends were army men and their wives, who, grown used to a lifetime of British-style cantonment living, had chosen to retire here in the hills, unable to countenance a return to dusty plains and smelly cities. They too had oft-told tales to tell, of bygone days, when discipline was discipline and not some watered-down version unworthy of the name. When leaders could lead, when everyone knew their place in the scheme of things, and life proceeded in an orderly fashion, without daily being threatened by chaos.

When these retired brigadiers, majors, and colonels came to tea at the Kohlahs’, they arrived suited and booted, as they called it, with watches in their fobs and ties around their necks. These trappings might have seemed comical to a nationalist bent of mind but had talismanic value for their wearers. It was all that stood between them and the disorder knocking at the door. Mr. Kohlah himself was partial to bow ties. Mrs. Kohlah served the tea on Aynsley bone china; the cutlery was Sheffield. If it was a special dinner at Navroze or Khordad Sal, she used the Wedgwood set.

“Such a lovely pattern,” said Mrs. Grewal. “When will they learn to make such beautiful things in this country?”

Brigadier and Mrs. Grewal were the Kohlahs’ closest neighbours, and dropped in fairly often. Mrs. Grewal was also the unchallenged leader of the army wives. Taking the cue from her, someone lightly struck a crystal glass to test the purity of its music; another inverted a plate to gaze lovingly at the manufacturer’s monogram. Praise was lavished in equal portions on the food and on the bowls and platters that held it. Chaos was successfully kept at bay for yet another day.

Later, the talk turned, as it had countless times before, to the nightmare that would haunt them to the end of their days — they anatomized the Partition, recited the chronology of events, and mourned the senseless slaughter. Brigadier Grewal wondered if the sundered parts would some day be sewn together again. Mr. Kohlah fingered his patch and said anything was possible. Consolation, as always, was found in muddled criticism of the colonizers who, lacking the stomach for proper conclusions, had departed in a hurry, though the post-mortem was tempered by nostalgia for the old days.

After such evenings, Mr. Kohlah wondered why his air of contentment felt ruffled — not undermined, but as though someone or something was trying to tamper with it. He enjoyed the dinners and tea parties greatly, and would not have absented himself for anything; yet there was a sense of unease, like a smell which should not have been there, of something rotten.

It took a day or two for his equilibrium to return. Then he began to feel again that yes, it had been the right decision not to leave his home in the hills, it was still a good place for his family. “The air and water is so pure, the mountains so beautiful, and the business is doing very well,” wrote he and Mrs. Kohlah to the relatives who periodically beseeched them to leave. “Nowhere else can Maneck have better expectations for his future.”

If Maneck had been consulted he would have agreed completely; and never mind the future, the present would have been reason enough for him, for his happy childhood universe. His days were rich and full — school in the morning and afternoon, the General Store after that, followed by a walk with his father, late in the evening, when he would stride manfully alongside to keep up, or else Daddy would tease him that slow coaches got left behind.

But Sundays were the best days. On Sundays a gaddi man called Bhanu came to tidy the garden behind the house. Maneck looked forward all week to being outdoors with Bhanu, wandering around the property and doing chores under his direction. The area beyond the first fifty yards, where it began to slope downhill, wild with shrubs and trees and thick undergrowth, was the most interesting. There, Bhanu taught him the names of strange flowers and herbs, things which did not grow near the front of the house with the roses and lilies and marigolds. He pointed out the deadly datura plant and the one that was its antidote, and leaves that mitigated the poison of certain snakes, others which cured stomach ailments, and the stems whose pulp healed cuts and wounds. He showed Maneck how to squeeze a snapdragon to make its jaws open. Late in the year, when the weather turned chilly, they gathered dead twigs and branches as the afternoon drew to a close, and made a small fire.

Sometimes Bhanu brought along his daughter, Suraiya, who was the same age as Maneck. Then Maneck divided his time between chores and play. At noon, Mrs. Kohlah called the children in for lunch. Suraiya was shy about eating at the table; there were no chairs in her house. It was a few visits before she would run in with Maneck and readily take her place. Bhanu continued to eat his food outside.

One afternoon, Suraiya squatted on the far slope among the bushes. Maneck waited out of sight for a moment, then followed her curiously. She smiled as he approached. He heard the soft hiss, and bent over to look. Her little stream had made a frothy puddle.

He unbuttoned his pants beside her and produced a fluid arc. “I can do soo-soo standing,” he said.

Laughing, she finished and pulled up her underpants. “So can my brother, he also has a small soosoti like yours.”

It became a ritual from then on to go in the bushes every time Suraiya came to work with her father. Gradually, their curiosity led them to closer anatomical examinations.

“What is it?” asked Mrs. Kohlah when they came in to tea. “Why are you two giggling all the time?”

Over the next few Sundays she began watching from the kitchen window, and saw them go repeatedly down the slope, where her eyes could not follow. Her attempt to sneak up on them failed. They heard her footsteps before she was anywhere near, and ran out laughing.

Later, she confided her suspicions to Mr. Kohlah. “Farokh, I think you need to keep an eye on Maneck. While Suraiya is here.”

“Why, what has he done?”

“Well, they go in the bushes and — ” she blushed. “I haven’t actually seen anything, but…”

“The little rascal,” smiled Mr. Kohlah. The following Sunday he stayed out in the garden, supervising Bhanu’s work and patrolling the periphery of the slope. It became part of his routine for the rest of that year. The children had to exercise all their cunning to evade the adult’s watchful eye.

When Maneck completed the fourth standard, Mr. Kohlah began to investigate the possibility of sending him to a boarding school. The quality of instruction available in the local day school had become quite appalling, Brigadier Grewal and everyone else agreed. “A good education is the most important thing,” they said.

The boarding school they selected was eight hours away by bus. Maneck detested the decision. The thought of leaving the hill-station — his entire universe — brought him to a state of panic. “I like my school here,” he pleaded. “And how will I work in the shop in the evening if you send me away?”

“Stop worrying about work, you’re only eleven,” laughed Mr. Kohlah. “You have to enjoy your boyhood first. It will be great fun, living with fellows your own age. You will love the school. And the store will still be here when you come home for holidays.”

Maneck learned to tolerate boarding school but not to love it. He felt an ache of betrayal. Not one day passed without his remembering the house, his parents, the shop, the mountains. He found his classmates very different from the boys he had known. They behaved as though they were better than he. The older boys talked about girls, and touched the younger boys. Someone showed him a deck of playing cards that had pictures of naked women. The dark patches between their legs horrified him. It couldn’t be, the pictures had to be fake, he thought, remembering the smooth, sweetly whispering hole of Suraiya.

“That’s hair — that’s the way it’s supposed to be,” said the older boy. “These are genuine photographs. Look, I’ll show you.” He undid his pants to display his pubic hair, also releasing his tumescent penis from its confines.

“But you’re a boy, it doesn’t prove anything about girls,” said Maneck. He wanted a closer look at the cards. The fellow would not let him unless he did him a favour. He held Maneck very close, rubbing against him and moaning. It was a strange sound, thought Maneck, as though he was trying to do kakka. The cards were handed over after the fellow had spurted.

Maneck returned home for the Divali vacation, let two days pass, then tried to convince his parents not to send him back. He kept it up till Mr. Kohlah got annoyed. “There will be no more talk on this subject,” he said.

Maneck went to bed without wishing them good night. The omission tormented him for a long time, leaving a hollow that sleep refused to fill. After midnight had struck, he considered going to his parents’ room and rectifying his foolish defiance. But pride, and the fear of angering Daddy again, kept him in his own bed.

Up at dawn, he hugged his mother by the stove and murmured good morning, then skirted his father at the kitchen window and slipped into his chair. “His little lordship is still sulking,” said Mr. Kohlah, smiling.

Maneck looked down at his cup, frowning into it. He did not want to lose control of his mouth and smile back.

It was Sunday, and Bhanu came as usual to work in the garden. Suraiya was not with him. Maneck tagged along for a while before asking about her.

“She is with her mother,” said Bhanu. “She will be with her from now on.”

Maneck felt another segment of his universe collapse. He did not return to the garden after lunch. Mrs. Kohlah took him aside and said it was not nice to be unkind to Daddy who loved him so much. “What he is doing, sending you to a fine school, is for your own good. You should not think of it as punishment.”

In the evening, Mr. Kohlah bade his son sit beside him on the sofa. “Boarding school is not forever,” he said. “Remember, Mummy and I miss you more than you miss us. But what is the choice? You don’t want to be ignorant, unable to read or write, like these poor gaddi people who go through their whole lives cold and hungry, with a few sheep or goats, struggling to survive. Remember, the slow coach gets left behind. Once you obtain the Secondary School Certificate in another six years, nobody is going to send you away. You will take charge of this business.”

Maneck allowed himself a smile as his father continued, “In fact, the sooner it is, the better for me. I can relax and go hiking all day.”

Next morning at breakfast, Mr. Kohlah gave him the special big cup to drink from. Then he let him sit behind the till to make change for their customers. Maneck cherished that day for the rest of the school year. Whenever the pain of banishment surfaced, he summoned the happy memory to counterbalance his despair, his dark thoughts of rejection and loneliness.

Despite his initial dread of the eternity that was six years, time chipped away three of them at its steady pace. Maneck turned fourteen, and came home for the May vacation.

That year, for the first time, his parents were going to leave him on his own for two days while they attended a wedding. Instead of closing down the place and sending him to a neighbour’s house, Mr. Kohlah decided, as a special treat, to let him run the shop alone.

“Just do things the way we do when I’m here,” he said. “Everything will go smoothly. Don’t forget to count the soft-drink crates taken by the driver. And phone for tomorrow’s milk — very, very important. If there is a problem, call Grewal Uncle. I’ve told him to check on you later on.” Mr. and Mrs. Kohlah went around the shop one more time with Maneck, reminding and pointing, then departed.

The day passed like any other. There were flurries of activity followed by periods of calm during which he wiped the glass cases, dusted the shelves, cleaned the counter. The regulars inquired about his parents’ absence, and praised his ability. “Look at the boy, keeping the barracks shipshape. Deserves a medal.”

“Farokh and Aban could retire tomorrow if they wanted to,” said Brigadier Grewal. “Nothing to worry about, with Field Marshal Maneck in charge of General Store.” Everyone present laughed heartily at that.

Late in the evening, quiet descended upon the square as daylight began to fade. Maneck went to switch on the porch lamp, feeling proud of his day’s work. It was almost time to close the store. All that remained was to empty the till, count the money, and enter the amount in the book. From the porch he saw the shop’s interior, and paused. That big glass case in the centre, with soaps and talcum powders — it would look much nicer in the front. And the old newspaper table near the entrance, scarred and wobbly — wouldn’t it be better off pushed to the side?

The idea pursued Maneck and seized his imagination while he warmed his food. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed like a smart rearrangement of the display. He could easily manage it alone, tonight. What a surprise for Mummy and Daddy when they came back.

After eating his dinner, he returned to the darkened shop, switched on the light, and dragged the old table out of the way. The glass case was more difficult, heavy and cumbersome. He emptied the merchandise and pushed it slowly to its new, prominent spot. Then he replaced the cans and cartons, but not in their boring old stacks — he arranged them in interesting pyramids and spirals. Perfect, he thought, standing back to admire the effect, and went to bed.

The next evening, Mr. Kohlah walked in and saw the alterations. Without pausing to greet Maneck or ask how things were, he told him to shut the door, hang out the Closed sign.

“But there’s still one hour left,” said Maneck, hungry for his father’s praise.

“I know. Shut it anyway.” Then his father ordered him to put everything back the way it was. His voice was barren of emotion.

Maneck would have preferred it if his father had scolded or slapped him, or punished him in any manner he wanted. But this contempt, this refusal to even talk about it, was horrid. The enthusiasm drained from his face, leaving behind a puzzled anguish, and he felt on the verge of tears.

His mother was moved to intervene. “But Farokh, don’t you think it looks nice, what Maneck has done?”

“The looks are irrelevant. What instructions did we give when we trusted him with the shop for two days? This is how he repays the trust. It’s a question of discipline and following orders, not of looking nice.”

Maneck returned the displays to their old places, but for the rest of his school vacation he refused to enter the shop. “Daddy doesn’t need me — I don’t want to be there,” he said bitterly to his mother. “He only wants a servant in the shop.”

In bed at night she conveyed to Mr. Kohlah that Maneck’s feelings were badly hurt. “I am aware of that,” he said, facing away from her on the pillow. “But he must learn to walk before he can run. It’s not good for a boy to think he knows everything before his time.”

She persevered, and was successful just before the vacation came to an end. Peace was restored between father and son one morning when Mr. Kohlah started reorganizing one of the glass cases and called Maneck into the shop to ask his opinion. As school reopening day approached, they began working together again in the soft-drink factory in the cellar, Maneck taking down the cleaned empties, then carrying up the crates of freshly bottled Kaycee.

On the last night, Mr. Kohlah said, while switching off the machine, TU miss you when you leave tomorrow.” The motor’s dying throbs left his words clutching helplessly at the dank subterranean air. He hugged Maneck as they went up the stairs together.

Boarding school was the cause of Maneck’s second unwilling departure from the mountains. The first had come when he was six, when he and his mother went to visit her family in the city, travelling by train for two days. He had been fascinated by the towering buildings and palatial cinema houses, the avalanche of cars and buses and lorries, and the brightness of streets as the lights went on when night had fallen. But after the first few days, he had missed his father terribly. He was thrilled to return home when their holiday was over.

“I am never going to leave the mountains again,” he said. “Never, ever.”

Mrs. Kohlah whispered something in Mr. Kohlah’s ear, who was waiting on the station platform to receive them. He smiled, embraced Maneck, and said neither was he.

But the day soon came when the mountains began to leave them. It started with roads. Engineers in sola topis arrived with their sinister instruments and charted their designs on reams of paper. These were to be modern roads, they promised, roads that would hum with the swift passage of modern traffic. Roads, wide and heavy-duty, to replace scenic mountain paths too narrow for the broad vision of nation-builders and World Bank officials.

One morning, at the worksite, a minister was garlanded as a band played. It was the Bhagatbhai Naankhatai Marching Band: three brass winds, a pair of snares, and a bass drum. Their uniforms were white, with the letters BNMB in gold braid on their backs; on the bass drum, the initials were painted in red. The band’s specialty was wedding processions, and the ministerial programme included the paean of the bride’s mother, the lament of the bride’s mother-in-law, the bridegroom’s triumphal progress, an ode to the matchmaker, and a hymn to fertility. But the BNMB expertly adapted the repertoire for the occasion. The drums tattooed away militarily, heralding the march of progress, while the trombone eschewed its mournful matrimonial glissandi in favour of a sunburst staccato.

The audience of unemployed villagers cheered on cue, anxious to earn their attendance money. Speeches were delivered from a makeshift platform. The minister swung a golden pickaxe that missed its mark. He grinned at the crowd and swung again.

After the dignitaries left, the workers moved in. Progress was slow at first, so slow that Mr. Kohlah and all the inhabitants of the hills harboured an irrational hope: the work would never be completed, their little haven would remain unscathed. Meanwhile, Brigadier Grewal and he organized meetings for the townspeople where they condemned the flawed development policy, the shortsightedness, the greed that was sacrificing the country’s natural beauty to the demon of progress. They signed petitions, lodged their protest with the authorities, and waited.

But the road continued to inch upwards, swallowing everything in its path. The sides of their beautiful hills were becoming gashed and scarred. From high on the slopes, the advancing tracks looked like rivers of mud defying gravity, as though nature had gone mad. The distant thunder of blasting and the roar of earth-moving machines floated up early in the morning, and the dreaminess of the dawn mist turned to nightmare.

Mr. Kohlah watched helplessly as the asphalting began, changing the brown rivers into black, completing the transmogrification of his beloved birthplace where his forefathers had lived as in paradise. He watched powerlessly while, for the second time, lines on paper ruined the life of the Kohlah family. Only this time it was an indigenous surveyor’s cartogram, not a foreigner’s imperial map.

When the work was finished, the minister returned to cut the ribbon. In the years since the ground-breaking ceremony, he had grown more corpulent but not less clumsy. He shuffled up to the ribbon and dropped the golden scissors. Seven eager sycophants leapt to the rescue. A tussle ensued; the scissors were wrested away by the strongest of the seven and restored to the minister. He fixed them all with a fierce glare for calling so much attention to a simple slip, then smiled for the crowd and cut the ribbon with a flourish. The crowd applauded, the Bhagatbhai Naankhatai Marching Band struck up, and in the off-key din of the brass winds no one noticed the minister struggling quietly to extricate his pudgy fingers from the scissors.

Then the promised rewards began rolling up the road into the mountains. Lorries big as houses transported goods from the cities and fouled the air with their exhaust. Service stations and eating places sprouted along the routes to provide for the machines and their men. And developers began to build luxury hotels.

That year, when Maneck came home for the holidays, he was puzzled (and later alarmed) to discover his father perpetually irritable. They found it impossible to get through the day without quarrelling, breaking into argument even in the presence of customers.

“What’s the matter with him?” Maneck asked his mother. “When I’m here, he ignores me or fights with me. When I’m at school, he writes letters saying how much he misses me.”

“You have to understand,” said Mrs. Kohlah, “people change when times change. It does not mean he doesn’t love you.”

For Mrs. Kohlah, this unhappy vacation would also be remembered as the one during which Maneck abandoned his habit of hugging his parents and whispering good morning. The first time that he came down and took his place silently, his mother waited with her back to the table till the pang of rejection had passed, before she would trust her hands with the hot frying pan. His father noticed nothing.

Stomach churning, Mr. Kohlah was absorbed in watching the growth of development in the hills. His friends and he agreed it was a malevolent growth. The possibility of increased business at the General Store was no consolation. All his senses were being assaulted by the invasion. The noxious exhaust from lorries was searing his nostrils, he told Mrs. Kohlah, and the ugly throbbing of their engines was ripping his eardrums to shreds.

Wherever he turned, he began to see the spread of shacks and shanties. It reminded him of the rapidity with which the mange had overtaken his favourite dog. The destitute encampments scratched away at the hillsides, the people drawn from every direction by stories of construction and wealth and employment. But the ranks of the jobless always exponentially outnumbered the jobs, and a hungry army sheltered permanently on the slopes. The forests were being devoured for firewood; bald patches materialized upon the body of the hills.

Then the seasons revolted. The rain, which used to make things grow and ripen, descended torrentially on the denuded hills, causing mudslides and avalanches. Snow, which had provided an ample blanket for the hills, turned skimpy. Even at the height of winter the cover was ragged and patchy.

Mr. Kohlah felt a perverse satisfaction at nature’s rebellion. It was a vindication of sorts: he was not alone in being appalled by the hideous rape. But when the seasonal disorder continued year after year, he could take no comfort in it. The lighter the snow cover, the heavier was his heart.

Maneck said nothing, though he thought his father was being overly dramatic when he declared, “Taking a walk is like going into a war zone.”

Mrs. Kohlah had never been one for walking. “I prefer to enjoy the view from my kitchen,” she said whenever her husband invited her. “It’s less tiring.”

But for Mr. Kohlah, long, solitary rambles were the great pleasure of his life, especially after winter, when every outing was graced by delicious uncertainty — what lay round the next bend? A newborn rivulet, perhaps? Wildflowers he had not noticed yesterday? Among his more awesome memories was a mighty boulder riven by a shrub growing out of it. Sometimes he was the victim of a sweet ambush: a prospect of the valley from a hitherto unseen angle.

Nowadays, every stroll was like a deathwatch, to see what was still standing and what had been felled. Coming upon a favourite tree, he would stop under its branches a while before moving on. He would run his hand along the gnarled trunk, happy that an old friend had survived another day. Many of the rocky ledges that he used to sit on to watch the sunset had been removed by dynamite. When he did find one, he rested for a few minutes and wondered if it would be here for him the next time.

Before long they began talking in town about him. “Mr. Kohlah’s screw is getting a little loose,” they said. “He speaks to trees and rocks, and pats them like they were his dogs.”

When Maneck heard the gossip, he burned with shame, wishing his father would stop this embarrassing behaviour. He also boiled with anger, wishing to slap some sense into the ignorant, insensitive people.

On the fifth anniversary of the new road, the local punchayet, dominated by a new breed of businessmen and entrepreneurs, organized a small celebration, inviting everyone to participate. Repulsed by the very idea, Mr. Kohlah left the shop early that evening. He pulled off his eyepatch and started on his walk. The rented loudspeakers, from their perches on tree branches in the town square, followed him for some distance with tinny music and the babble of empty speeches.

He must have walked about three miles when the light of day turned towards the promise of sunset. Strains of pink and orange were weaving their ephemeral threads through the sky. He stopped to gaze westwards, eager to savour the moment. At times like these he wished for two eyes again, to get a wider sweep of the landscape.

Then his gaze was pulled downwards, across the treeless hillside. From hundreds of shacks there rose the grey, stinging smoke of frugal cooking fires. The gauze obscured the horizon. Facing upwind, he could smell the acrid haze and, behind it, the stench of human waste that it grimly tried to shroud. He shifted his weight uncertainly. A twig snapped under his feet. He stood still, asking himself what he was waiting for. He heard the stark voices of mothers calling, the shrieks of children, the barking of pariah dogs. He imagined the miserable contents of the pots blackening over the fires while hungry mouths waited around.

Suddenly, he noticed that dusk had fallen: the sunset was forfeited behind the pall. And the entire scene was so mean and squalid by twilight, so utterly beyond his ability to accept or comprehend. He felt lost and frightened. Waves of anger, compassion, disgust, sorrow, failure, betrayal, love — surged and crashed, battering and confusing him. For what? Of whom? And why was it? If only he could…

But he could make no sense of his emotions. He felt a tightness in his chest, then his throat constricted as if he were choking. He wept helplessly, silently.

The evening darkened. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his eyes. It was a moment before he realized, dabbing at phantom tears, that only the good eye was wet. Strange, he could have sworn the missing one had cried too.

Returning home through the gloom, he decided there was no meaning in going for walks from now on. If meaning there was, it was too new and terrifying for him to explore.

There was no place of escape. Not for himself, at any rate. His dreams had succumbed, as they must, during their collisions with the passing years. He had struggled, he had won, he had lost. He would keep on struggling — what else was there for him?

But for his son, he began considering other options for the first time.

Between them, relations did not improve when Maneck came home for the two-week break before his final term. Their most frequent arguments concerned the running of the store. Maneck was full of ideas about merchandising and marketing, which his father rejected outright.

“At least let me finish talking,” said Maneck. “Why are you so stubborn? Why not give it a try?”

“This is not a little hobby that we can try and toy with,” said Mr. Kohlah, his face mournful. “It’s our bread and butter.”

“Are you fighting again, you two?” said Mrs. Kohlah. “I’m going crazy listening to it.”

“You have no control over your son,” said Mr. Kohlah, even more mournful. “Can you not do something about his nonstop keech-keech? He contradicts everything I say. He thinks he has a new formula for success — he thinks this is a science experiment.”

He refused to let Maneck order new brands of soap or biscuits which were proving popular elsewhere. Suggestions to improve the lighting in the dingy interior, paint the walls, renovate the shelves and glass cases to make the display more attractive were all received like blasphemy.

Maneck had trouble reconciling this absurdly cautious man with the image that had grown in his head from stories told by his mother, and by his father’s friends: of the fearless individual who had descended a rope into the rain-swollen gorge to rescue a puppy; who had shrugged off the loss of his eye to flying glass as though it was no more than a mosquito bite; and who had once thrashed three thieves that had wandered into the store looking for easy prey, tempted by the sight of the lone woman behind the counter, not reckoning on her husband bottling soft drinks in the cellar — like sacks of rice Mr. Kohlah had tossed them around, said his friends.

And now his father was disintegrating all because of the construction of a silly road. Maneck, too, had lately seen the world being remade around him. But with optimism surging through youthful veins, he was certain that things would sort themselves out. He was fifteen: he was immortal, the hills were eternal. And the General Store? It had been there for generations and would be there for generations more, there was no doubt in his mind.

Secretly, Mr. Kohlah also hoped it would be thus — that a miracle would restore the past. But he had read the signs, and the message was unfavourable. Snuggled amid the goods that the loathsome lorries transported up the mountains was a deadly foe: soft drinks, to stock the new shops and hotels.

In the beginning they dribbled into town in small quantities — a few crates that were easily outnumbered by the ever-popular Kaycee. Out of curiosity, people would occasionally sample the newcomers, then shrug and turn their backs; Kohlah’s Cola was still number one.

But the giant corporations had targeted the hills; they had Kaycee in their sights. They infiltrated Mr. Kohlah’s territory with their boardroom arrogance and advertising campaigns and cut-throat techniques. Representatives approached him with a proposition: “Pack up your machines, sign over all rights to Kohlah’s Cola, and be an agent for our brand. Come grow with us, and prosper.”

Of course Mr. Kohlah refused the offer. For him it was not merely a business decision but a question of family name and honour. Besides, he was certain his good neighbours and the people of these settlements were not fickle, they would stay loyal to Kohlah’s Cola. He was prepared to put up a fair fight against the competition.

But, like bow ties and watch-chains, fair fights had gone out of style while Mr. Kohlah wasn’t looking. The corporations handed out free samples, engaged in price wars, and erected giant billboards showing happy children with smiling parents, or a man and woman tenderly touching foreheads over a bottle out of which two straws penetrated the lovers’ lips. The dribble of new soft drinks turned into a deluge. Brands which had been selling for years in the big cities arrived to saturate the town.

“We must strike back,” said Maneck. “We should also advertise — give out free samples like them. If they want to use hard sell, we do the same.

“Hard sell?” said Mr. Kohlah disdainfully. “What kind of language is that? Sounds absolutely undignified. Like begging. These big companies from the city can behave like barbarians if they want to. Here we are civilized people.” He gave Maneck his mournful gaze, disappointed with him for even suggesting it.

“Look at him,” Maneck appealed to his mother. “He’s making his long face again. Anything I say, he makes that face at me. He doesn’t give my ideas any consideration.”

So Kohlah’s Cola never stood a chance. The General Store’s backbone was broken, and the secret formula’s journey down the generations was nearing its end.

Mr. Kohlah went ahead with the alternate plan for his son, who would soon be obtaining his Secondary School Certificate. He began making inquiries and sending away to various colleges for their prospectuses.

“Are you sure this is necessary, Farokh?” asked Mrs. Kohlah.

“The slow coach gets left behind,” he answered. “And I don’t want the same thing to happen to Maneck.”

“Oh Farokh, how can you say that? Just look at your success — you lost everything during Partition, yet you made such a good life for all of us. How can you call yourself a slow coach?”

“Maybe I’m not — maybe the world is moving too fast. But the end result is the same.”

He would not be distracted from his purpose, and career possibilities were discussed with the faithful family friends. They agreed it was an excellent idea to keep the options open.

“Not that your business is going to fail,” said Brigadier Grewal. “But it’s good to be prepared on all fronts. Nice to have a big gun in reserve.”

“Exactly my thinking,” said Mr. Kohlah.

“Would be so nice if he could be a doctor or lawyer,” said Mrs. Kohlah, plunging straight into the glamour areas.

“Or an engineer.”

“Chartered accountant is also very prestigious,” said Mrs. Grewal.

It was up to the army chaps to steer the discussion into the practical realm. “We have to deal with the reality on the ground. The choice is limited by Maneck’s marks.”

“Which is not to say that he isn’t talented.”

“Not at all. Sharp as a bayonet, like his father.”

“And he is good with his hands,” agreed Mr. Kohlah, taking the compliment in stride.

Something technical for Maneck, that much was certain, they all agreed. Preferably in an industry that would grow with the nation’s prosperity. The answer, in a country where most of the population lived in tropical or subtropical climates, was obvious and unanimous: “Refrigeration and air-conditioning.” And the best college granting diplomas in this field, they discovered, was in Mrs. Kohlah’s native city by the sea, the one she had forsaken to marry Mr. Kohlah.

When the final term ended, Maneck came home to discover what had been decided for him and protested vehemently. The second betrayal was not received with a slow ache, as the first one had been. It exploded inside him.

“You promised that when I got my S.S.C. I could work with you! You said you wanted me to take over the family business!”

“Calm down — you will, you will,” said Mr. Kohlah, mustering more conviction than he felt. “This is just in case. You see, in the past it was easier to plan for the future. Nowadays, things are more complicated, too much uncertainty.”

“It’s a waste of time,” said Maneck. He was sure that his father was doing this to be rid of him — to be rid of his interference in the General Store, as though he were a rival. “If you want me to learn a trade or something, I can become a mechanic at Madanlal’s Garage. In the valley. Why do I have to go so far away?”

Mr. Kohlah made his mournful face. Brigadier Grewal laughed good-humouredly. “Young man, if you are planning a second line of defence, make sure it’s a strong one. Or don’t bother.”

The family friends said Maneck was a very lucky fellow, and should be grateful for the opportunity. “At your age, we would have been thrilled to spend a year in the most modern, most cosmopolitan city in the whole country.”

So Maneck was enrolled in the college, and preparations were made for his departure. A new suitcase was purchased. His clothes were sorted through, and tickets booked for the various legs of the journey.

“Don’t worry,” said his mother. “Everything will be all right when you come back after a year. Daddy is just concerned about your future. All these changes — they have happened too fast for him. He should be calmer in a year’s time.”

She began to assemble the items he would take with him in boxes. Fearful of forgetting something, she frequently consulted the suggested checklist in the college handbook. She kept opening and shutting the suitcase, taking things out and putting them back in, counting and rearranging. The woman who effortlessly managed the General Store’s merchandise began going to pieces over her son’s packing.

Time and again, she asked for her husband’s advice. “Farokh, how many towels shall I include? Do you think Maneck will need his good trousers, the grey gabardine ones? How much soap and toothpaste, Farokh? And which medicines shall I pack?”

His answer was always the same: “Don’t bother me with silly things. You decide.” He refused even to come near the growing pile of clothes and personal effects, as though denying its existence. If he had to pass by the open suitcase on the table in the upstairs passage, he would avert his eye.

Mrs. Kohlah understood perfectly well the meaning of her husband’s behaviour. She had assumed that inviting him to share in the planning and packing might help him, make it easier for him to get through the days that were causing so much pain to all of them.

After his brusque responses, she preferred to leave him alone. In any case, she was the stronger of the two when it came to coping with such matters, though neither of them had experienced this long a separation from Maneck. Distance was a dangerous thing, she knew. Distance changed people. Look at her own case — she could never return now to live with her family in the city. And just going to boarding school had made Maneck shun the good-morning hug that he had never missed, ever, not even on days when he was sick, when he came down so lovingly, put his arms around her, then went back to bed. What else would he shun after this separation? Already he was getting more solitary, harder to talk to and share things with, always looking so depressed. How much more would he change? What things would the city do to her son? Was she losing him now forever?

Musing and worrying, in the midst of serving customers, she wandered absentmindedly from the shop to Maneck’s boxes. Mr. Kohlah sensed something amiss upstairs, shut off the soft-drink machines in midflow and came bounding up the cellar steps to apologize to the lingering clientele.

He curbed his annoyance that morning. The next time it happened, however, he burst out, “Aban! What emergency are you attending to in the bedroom, may I ask?”

Sarcasm was difficult for him, and rare, so it surprised him and hurt her. But she refused to be drawn into an argument, answering mildly, “I remembered something very important. Had to check it right away.”

“Your mania will drive us crazy. Please understand once and for all — if you forget something we can always mail a parcel.”

But the things she was concerned about could not be contained or sent in parcels, and attempts to explain them also went frustratingly awry, the words coming out all wrong. “You don’t take an interest in Maneck’s packing, you don’t want the responsibility. And then you say things like mania and crazy to me? Don’t you fear for him? What has happened to your feelings?”

Despite his own confused anger, Mr. Kohlah understood the meaning of his wife’s behaviour. A week after this exchange, he was awakened in the night by her rising to leave the room. The clock had finished striking twelve a few minutes ago. He pretended to be asleep. He heard the swish and rustle of her feet as she felt about for her slippers. When she had shut the door behind her, he rose softly and followed.

The floorboards felt cold to his bare feet. He padded down the dark passage and, rounding the corner, saw her standing before the suitcase. He retreated a step. She stood motionless, her head bent, her hands immersed in Maneck’s clothes. When the cloud-hidden moon emerged, the silver light illuminated her face. An owl hooted, and he was glad that he had stayed silent, had followed her secretly like this, to see her so beautiful, so absorbed, as she stood there, embodying their years together, their three lives fused in her being, vivid in her face and in her eyes.

The owl hooted again. The moonlight wavered, hesitating, letting a cloud slide across. Her hands stirred within Maneck’s suitcase. The dogs on the porch barked — at what ghost?

Farokh Kohlah heard the ticking of the clock, and then the single bong of twelve-fifteen. He felt grateful to the night for giving him this opportunity, this vision by moonlight. He returned to bed, and did not disturb her when she slid under the sheet minutes later.

The time for last-minute instructions had arrived. More or less repeating the advice given all along, after Maneck’s going away had first become reality, his parents cautioned him against mixing at college with those who gambled or drank or smoked. They told him to be careful with his money, and to cultivate a healthy scepticism, for people were very different in the city. “All your life here, we never once discouraged your friendly nature. Whether your companions were rich or poor, and whatever caste or religion — those differences were not important. But now you are facing the most crucial difference of all, by leaving here for the city. You must be very, very careful.”

Mr. Kohlah was planning to accompany his son on the bus ride into the valley, and then by auto-rickshaw to the railway station. But the part-time assistant who had promised to arrive early to take over the morning chores did not show up. So Maneck started off alone on the long day-and-a-half trip to the city.

“Be sure to get a coolie at the station,” said his father. “Don’t try to carry everything yourself. And fix the amount before he touches the luggage. Three rupees should be enough.”

“Aren’t you going to hug him?” said Mrs. Kohlah, exasperated, as the two shook hands.

“Oh, all right,” said Maneck, and put his arms around his father.

The Frontier Mail was in the station when the shuddering auto-rickshaw drew up at the gate. Maneck paid, then followed the coolie over the footbridge to reach the southbound platform. He paused for a moment at the top, the train stretched long and thin underneath him with people scurrying around it. Like ants trying to carry off a dead worm, he thought.

The coolie had walked on, and he ran to catch up. Near the waiting room a vendor was roasting maize, fanning the crepitating coals. Maneck decided to come back for some after finding his seat.

“Fifty rupees from now on,” he overheard the Stationmaster, who was collecting his weekly tribute of maize and money. “You have the best location. That’s what others are willing to pay for it.”

“All day the burning smoke blinds my eyes and throttles my lungs,” said the vendor. “And just look at my fingers — charred black. Have some pity, sahab.” He turned the corncobs deftly to keep them from scorching. “How to afford fifty rupees? Police also have to be kept happy.”

“Don’t pretend,” said the Stationmaster, tucking the money into a pocket of his starched white uniform. “I know how much you earn.”

Now and again a kernel exploded with a sharp burst. The sound and aroma faithfully nudged Maneck’s memory of his first train journey: his mother and he, going to visit their relations.

Daddy had come to see them off. “You’re getting too heavy,” he had groaned playfully, lifting Maneck to give him a good view of the steam engine. How huge it was, and the train, like a string of bungalows, stretched so far, in a long, long line. Daddy carried him down to the end of the platform, close to the hissing, clanking monster, while Maneck busily tackled his corncob. He bit into it, and milk-white juice spotted Daddy’s spectacles.

Daddy made a yanking gesture, which the engine driver understood; he gave a smart tap to his cap visor and sounded the whistle for Maneck. The piercing shriek, so close it seemed to spring from his own heart, startled him into dropping the cob. “Never mind,” said Daddy. “Mummy will buy you another.”

He bundled Maneck through the window into his seat, next to Mummy, as the final announcement was made. The train moved, and the station began to float past them. Daddy waved his hand, smiling, blowing kisses. He walked beside the compartment, then ran a bit, but was soon left behind to disappear like the fallen corncob lying on the station platform. Everything familiar swept out of sight…

Maneck found his compartment and paid the coolie after the luggage was stowed away. The bungalow on wheels from his childhood had shrunk. Time had turned the magical to mundane. The whistle sounded. No time to buy the maize. He sank into the seat beside his fellow passenger.

The man did not encourage Maneck’s efforts at conversation, answering with nods and grunts, or vague hand movements. He was neatly dressed, his hair parted on the left. His shirt pocket bristled with pens and markers in a special clip-on plastic case. The two seats facing them were occupied by a young woman and her father. She was busy knitting. By the fragment hanging from the needles, Maneck tried to decipher what it might be — scarf, pullover sleeve, sock?

The father rose to go to the lavatory. “Wait, Papaji, I’ll help you,” said the daughter, as he limped into the aisle on one crutch. Good, thought Maneck, she would have to take the upper berth. The view would be better, from his own upper berth.

In the evening, Maneck offered his neatly dressed neighbour a Gluco biscuit. He whispered thank you. “You’re welcome,” Maneck whispered back, assuming the man had a preference for speaking softly. In return for the biscuit he received a banana. Its skin was blackened in the heat, but he ate it all the same.

The attendant began making the rounds with blankets and sheets, readying the berths for sleep. After he left, the neatly dressed man took a chain and padlock from the bag that held his bananas and shackled his trunk to a bracket under the seat. Leaning towards Maneck’s ear, he explained confidentially, “Because of thieves — they enter the compartments when passengers fall asleep.”

“Oh,” said Maneck, a little perturbed. No one had warned him about this. But maybe the chap was just a nervous type. “You know, some years ago my mother and I took this same train, and nothing was stolen.”

“Sadly, now the world is much changed.” The man took off his shirt and hung it neatly on a hook by the window. Then he removed the plastic case from the pocket and clipped it to his vest, careful not to snare his chest hair in the formidable spring. Seeing Maneck watching, he whispered with a smile, “I am very fond of my pens. I don’t like separating from them, not even in sleep.”

Maneck smiled back, whispering, “Yes, I also have a favourite pen. I don’t lend it to anyone — it spoils the angle of the nib.”

The father and daughter did not take kindly to these whispers which excluded them. “What can we do, Papaji, some people are just born rude,” she said, handing him his crutch. They went off again to the bathroom, hurling a frosty glance at the opposite seats.

It went unnoticed, for Maneck had begun to worry about his suitcase. The pen-lover’s soft words about thieves ruined his night, and he forgot all about the woman in the upper berth. By the time he remembered, she was under cover from prying eyes, Papaji having tucked in the sheet around her neck.

Before climbing into his own berth, Maneck positioned his suitcase so that one corner would be visible from above. He lay awake, peering at it every now and then. The young woman’s father caught him looking a few times, and eyed him suspiciously. Towards dawn, slumber overpowered Maneck’s vigilance. The last thing he saw while surrendering to sleep was Papaji balanced on one crutch, curtaining off his daughter with a bedsheet as she descended without exposing so much as a calf or an ankle.

He did not awake till the attendant came to collect the bedclothes. The young woman was already busy with her knitting, the inscrutable woollen segment dancing below her fingers. Tea was served. Now the neatly dressed pen-lover was more talkative. The cluster of pens was back in his shirt pocket. Maneck learned that yesterday’s reticence had been due to a throat ailment.

“Thankfully, it has eased a little this morning,” said the man, as he coughed and threatened to hawk.

Remembering how he had returned the man’s hoarse whispers by whispering back dramatically, Maneck felt a little embarrassed. He wondered if he should apologize or explain, but the pen-lover did not appear to bear any resentment.

“It’s a very serious condition,” he explained. “And I am travelling to seek specialist treatment.” He cleared his throat again. “I could never have imagined, long, long ago, when I started my career, that this was what it would do to me. But how can you fight your destiny?”

Maneck shook his head in sympathy. “Was it a factory job? Toxic fumes?”

The man laughed scornfully at the suggestion. “I’m an LL.B., a fully qualified lawyer.”

“Oh, I see. So the lengthy speeches in dusty courtrooms strained and ruined your vocal cords.”

“Not at all — quite the contrary.” He hesitated, “It’s such a long story.”

“But we have lots of time,” encouraged Maneck. “It’s such a long journey.”

Papaji and daughter had had enough of them exchanging comments in low voices. Papaji was certain that their soft laughter contained a leering note, aimed directly at his innocent daughter. He scowled, picked up his crutch, took his daughter by the hand and stomped one-leggedly down the aisle. “What to do, Papaji,” she said. “Some people just have no manners.”

“I wonder what’s wrong with those two,” said the pen-lover, watching the precise, machinelike movement of the crutch. He uncorked a small green bottle, sipped, and put it aside. Fingering his pens affectionately, he tried out the freshly medicated larynx with the opening sentence of the story of his throat.

“My law career, which was my first, my best-loved career, started a very long time ago. In the year of our independence.”

Maneck counted rapidly. “From 1947 to 1975 — twenty-eight years. That’s a lot of legal experience.”

“Not really. Within two years I changed careers. I couldn’t stand it, performing before a courtroom audience day after day. Too much stress for a shy person like me. I would lie in bed at night, sweating and shivering, scared of the next morning. I needed a job where I would be left to myself. Where I could work in camera.”

“Photography?”

“No, that’s Latin, it means in private.” He scratched his pens as though relieving an itch for them, and looked rueful. “It’s a bad habit I have, because of my law training — using these silly phrases instead of good English words. Anyway, seeking privacy, I became a proofreader for The Times of India.”

How would proofreading ravage the throat? wondered Maneck. But he had already interrupted twice and made a fool of himself. Better to keep quiet and listen.

“I was the best they had, the absolute best. The most difficult and important things were saved for my inspection. The editorial page, court proceedings, legal texts, stockmarket figures. Politicians’ speeches, too — so boring they could make you drowsy, send you to sleep. And drowsiness is the one great enemy of the proofreader. I have seen it destroy several promising reputations.

“But nothing was too tricky for me. The letters sailed before my eyes, line after line, orderly fleets upon an ocean of newsprint. Sometimes I felt like a Lord High Admiral, in supreme command of the printer’s navy. And within months I was promoted to Chief Proofreader.

“My night sweats disappeared, I slept well. For twenty-four years I held the position. I was happy in my little cubicle — my kingdom with my desk, my chair, and my reading light. What more could anyone want?”

“Nothing,” said Maneck.

“Exactly. But kingdoms don’t last for ever — not even modest little cubicle kingdoms. One day it happened, without warning.”

“What?”

“Disaster. I was checking an editorial about a State Assembly member who made a personal fortune out of the Drought Relief Project. My eyes began to itch and water. Thinking nothing of it, I rubbed them, wiped them dry, and resumed my work. Within seconds they were wet again. I dried them once more. But it kept on happening, on and on. And it was no longer a tear or two which could be ignored, but a continuous stream.

“Soon, my concerned colleagues were gathered around me. They crowded my little cubicle, pouring comfort upon what they thought was grief. They presumed that reading about the sorry state of the nation, day after day — about the corruption, the natural calamities, the economic crises — had finally broken me. That I was dissolving in a fit of sorrow and despair.

“They were wrong, of course. I would never let emotions stand in the way of my professional duties. Mind you, I’m not saying a proofreader must be heartless. I’m not denying that I often felt like weeping at what I read — stories of misery, caste violence, government callousness, official arrogance, police brutality. I’m certain many of us felt that way, and an emotional outburst would be quite normal. But too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart, as my favourite poet has written.”

“Who’s that?”

“W.B. Yeats. And I think that sometimes normal behaviour has to be suppressed, in order to carry on.”

“I’m not sure,” said Maneck. “Wouldn’t it be better to respond honestly instead of hiding it? Maybe if everyone in the country was angry or upset, it might change things, force the politicians to behave properly.”

The man’s eyes lit up at the challenge, relishing the opportunity to argue. “In theory, yes, I would agree with you. But in practice, it might lead to the onset of more major disasters. Just try to imagine six hundred million raging, howling, sobbing humans. Everyone in the country — including airline pilots, engine drivers, bus and tram conductors — all losing control of themselves. What a catastrophe. Aeroplanes falling from the skies, trains going off the tracks, boats sinking, buses and lorries and cars crashing. Chaos. Complete chaos.”

He paused to give Maneck’s imagination time to fill in the details of the anarchy he had unleashed. “And please also remember: scientists haven’t done any research on the effects of mass hysteria and mass suicide upon the environment. Not on this subcontinental scale. If a butterfly’s wings can create atmospheric disturbances halfway round the world, who knows what might happen in our case. Storms? Cyclones? Tidal waves? What about the land mass, would it quake in empathy? Would the mountains explode? What about rivers, would the tears from twelve hundred million eyes cause them to rise and flood?”

He took another sip from the green bottle. “No, it’s too dangerous. Better to carry on in the usual way.” He corked the bottle and wiped his lips. “To get back to the facts. There I was with the day’s proofs before me, and my eyes leaking copiously. Not one word was readable. The text, the disciplined rows and columns, were suddenly in mutiny, the letters pitching and tossing, disintegrating in a sea of stormy paper.”

He passed his hand across his eyes, reliving that fateful day, then stroked his pens comfortingly, as though they too might be upset by the evocation of those painful events. Maneck took the opportunity to slip in a bit of praise, to ensure that the story continued. “You know, you’re the first proofreader I’ve met. I would have guessed they’d be very dull people, but you speak so … with such … so differently. Almost like a poet.”

“And why shouldn’t I? For twenty-four years, the triumphs and tragedies of our country quickened my breath, making my pulse sing with joy or quiver with sorrow. In twenty-four years of proofreading, flocks of words flew into my head through the windows of my soul. Some of them stayed on and built nests in there. Why should I not speak like a poet, with a commonwealth of language at my disposal, constantly invigorated by new arrivals?” He gave a mighty sigh. “Until that wet day, of course, when it was all over. When the windows were slammed shut. And the ophthalmologist sentenced me to impotence, saying that my proofreading days were behind me.”

“Couldn’t he give you new spectacles or something?”

“That wouldn’t have helped. The trouble was, my eyes had become virulently allergic to printing ink.” He spread his hands in a gesture of emptiness. “The nectar that nurtured me had turned to poison.”

“Then what did you do?”

“What can anyone do in such circumstances? Accept it, and go on. Please always remember, the secret of survival is to embrace change, and to adapt. To quote: ‘All things fall and are built again, and those that build them again are gay.’“

“Yeats?” guessed Maneck.

The proofreader nodded, “You see, you cannot draw lines and compartments, and refuse to budge beyond them. Sometimes you have to use your failures as stepping-stones to success. You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair.” He paused, considering what he had just said. “Yes,” he repeated. “In the end, it’s all a question of balance.”

Maneck nodded. “All the same, you must have missed your work very much.”

“Well, not really,” he dismissed the sympathy. “Not the work itself. Most of the stuff in the newspaper was pure garbage. A great quantity of that which entered through the windows of my soul was quickly evacuated by the trapdoor.”

This seemed to Maneck to contradict what the man had said earlier. Perhaps the lawyer behind the proofreader was still active, able to argue both sides of the question.

“A few good things I kept, and I still have them.” The proofreader tapped audibly, first on his forehead, then on his plastic pen case. “No rubbish or bats in my belfry — no dried-up pens in my pocket-case.”

The thump of the single crutch signalled the return down the aisle of Papaji and daughter. Maneck and the proofreader greeted them with pleasant smiles. But they were not to be so easily placated. While passing through to his seat, Papaji lunged with his crutch at the proofreader’s foot. He would have successfully speared it had the proofreader not anticipated the attack.

“Sorry,” said Papaji, gruff with disappointment. “What to do, clumsy mistakes happen when you have only one good leg in a world of two legs.”

“Please don’t worry,” said the proofreader. “No harm has been done.”

The daughter resumed knitting, and Papaji concentrated his grim look outside the window, startling the occasional farmer working his field who happened to catch the angry eye. Maneck wanted the proofreader to continue. “So are you retired now?”

He shook his head. “Can’t afford to. No, luckily for me, my editor was very kind, and got me a new job.”

“But what about your throat trouble?” Maneck assumed that the point of the entire narration had somehow been overlooked.

“That happened in the new job. Because of his position, the editor-in-chief was friendly with many politicians and was able to set me up for freelancing, in morcha production.” Seeing the question on Maneck’s face, he explained, “You know, to make up slogans, hire crowds, and produce rallies or demonstrations for different political parties. It seemed simple enough when he presented me with the opportunity.”

“And was it?”

“There was no problem on the creative front. Writing speeches, designing banners — all that was easy. With years of proofreading under my belt, I knew exactly the blather and bluster favoured by professional politicians. My modus operandi was simple. I made up three lists: Candidate’s Accomplishments (real and imaginary), Accusations Against Opponent (including rumours, allegations, innuendoes, and lies), and Empty Promises (the more improbable the better). Then it was merely a matter of taking various combinations of items from the three lists, throwing in some bombast, tossing in a few local references, and there it was — a brand-new speech. I was a real hit with my clients.” A smile played on his face as he remembered his successes.

“My difficulties lay in the final phase, out on the street. You see, I had spent my working life in an office, in silence, and my throat was unexercised. Now suddenly I was yelling instructions, shouting slogans, exhorting the crowds to repeat after me. This was terra incognita for a person of my background. It became too much. Much too much for my underused larynx. My vocal cords suffered such injuries, the doctors tell me they will never fully recover.”

“That’s terrible,” said Maneck. “You should have let the others scream and yell. After all, that’s what the crowds are hired for, aren’t they?”

“Correct. But the habit of my old job — doing everything myself, down to the smallest detail — was a hard habit to break. I could not leave it to the rented crowd to do the shouting. After all, the success of a demonstration is measured in decibels. Clever slogans and smart banners alone will not do it. So I felt I must lead by example, employ my voice enthusiastically, volley and thunder, beseech the heavens, curse the forces of evil, shriek the praises of the benefactor — bellow and clamour and cry and cheer till victory was mine!”

Excited by his remembrances, the proofreader forgot his limitations and began raising his voice. He plucked a pen from his pocket and gesticulated with it like a conductor’s baton. Then his symphonic descriptions were cut short by a violent fit of hacking and choking and gasping.

Papaji and daughter cringed, shrinking backwards into their seats, fearing contagion from the vile-sounding cough. “What to do, Papaji,” sniffed the daughter, covering her nose and mouth with her sari. “Some people just have no concern for those around them. So shamelessly spreading their germs.”

The proofreader caught his breath and said, “You see? You see the extent of my suffering? This is the result of the morcha profession. A second impotence.” He lifted his hands and clutched himself round the neck. “You could say that I have cut my own throat.”

Maneck laughed appreciatively, but the proofreader had not intended to be humorous. “I have learned from my experience,” he said with gravity. “Now I keep a strong-throated assistant at my side, to whom I whisper my instructions. I teach him the phrasing, the cadence, the stressed and unstressed syllables. Then he leads the shouting brigades on my behalf.”

“And his throat is okay, no problems?”

“Yes, quite okay, on the whole. He used to be a sergeant-major before he left the army. Still, I have to keep him supplied with mentholated throat lozenges. In fact, he is meeting me at the station. There is always a lot of demand in the city for morchas. Various groups are in a state of perpetual agitation — for more food, less taxes, higher wages, lower prices. So we will also do some business while I get my medical treatment.”

Towards the end of the story, his voice sank to the feeble whisper that he had struggled to produce last night, and Maneck asked him to please not strain himself any further.

“You’re quite right,” said the proofreader. “I should have stopped talking ages ago. By the way, my name is Vasantrao Valmik,” and he held out his hand.

“Maneck Kohlah,” he replied, shaking it, while Papaji and daughter looked the other way, wanting to take no part in an introduction with these two ill-mannered individuals.

It was thirty-six hours after leaving home that Maneck arrived in the city, clothes covered in dust and eyes smarting. His nose ached, and his throat felt raw. He wondered what additional damage the journey had inflicted on the poor proofreader’s ravaged vocal cords.

“Bye-bye, Mr. Valmik — all the best,” he said, struggling outside with his suitcase and boxes.

Standing woebegone on the platform, looking around for his retired sergeant-major, Vasantrao Valmik was hardly able to croak a reply. He raised a hand in farewell, which stroked his pens on the way down.

Maneck’s taxi from the train station to the college hostel made a small detour around an accident. An old man had been hit by a bus. The conductor flagged down passing buses, transferring his passengers while waiting for the police and ambulance.

“Have to be young and quick to cross the street,” mused the taxi driver.

“True,” said Maneck.

“Bastard bus drivers, they buy their licence with bribes, without passing the test.” The driver took an angrier tone, moving into the opposing lane of traffic to overtake. “Should all be sent to jail.”

“You’re right,” said Maneck, only half-listening. Filtered through his exhaustion, the city seemed to roll past the taxi window like the frames of a film reel. On the pavement, children were pelting pebbles at a dog and bitch joined in copulation. Someone emptied a bucket over the animals to separate them. The taxi narrowly missed hitting the dog as it darted into traffic.

At the next signal light, police were arresting a man who had been beaten up by a gang of six or seven young fellows. The mohulla’s residents had spilled into the road to witness the culmination of the drama. “What happened?” the taxi driver leaned out his window to ask an onlooker.

“Threw acid in his wife’s face.”

The signal changed before they found out why. The driver speculated that maybe she was fooling around with another man; or she may have burnt the husband’s dinner. “Some people are cracked enough to do anything.”

“Could have been a dowry quarrel,” said Maneck.

“Maybe. But in those cases they usually use kerosene, in the kitchen.”

It was late evening when Maneck reached the hostel. At the warden’s office he was given his room number, keys, and a list of rules: Please always keep room locked. Please do not write or scratch on walls with sharp instruments. Please do not bring female visitors of the opposite sex into rooms. Please do not throw rubbish from windows. Please observe silence at night time…

He crumpled the cyclostyled list and tossed it on the little desk. Too enervated to eat or wash, he unpacked a white bedsheet and went to sleep.

Something crawling along his calf woke him. He rose on one elbow to deliver a furious swat below the knee. It was dark outside. He shivered, and his heart thumped wildly with the panic of not being able to remember where he was. Why had his bedroom window shrunk? And where was the valley that should lie beyond it, with pinpoints of light dancing in the night, and the mountains looming darkly in the distance? Why had everything vanished?

Relief covered him like a blanket as his eyes were able to trace the outline of his luggage on the floor. He had travelled. By train. Travelling made everything familiar vanish. How long had he slept — hours or minutes? He peered at his watch to unravel the puzzle, pondering the glowing numbers.

He started, suddenly remembering what it was that had woken him. The crawling thing on his leg. He jumped out of bed, kicked the suitcase, knocked into the chair, and felt around frantically on the wall. The switch. Click. His finger gave life to the naked ceiling bulb, and the bedsheet gleamed like a fresh, dazzling snowfield. Except for the side where he had slept, smudged by the dust from his face and clothes.

Then he saw it on the edge of the white expanse. Under the glare of the light it scuttled towards the gap between bed and wall. He grabbed a shoe and smacked wildly in its general direction.

It was a very poor shot; the cockroach disappeared. Chagrined, he fought off his fatigue and tackled the problem with more determination. He pulled the bed away from the wall, slowly, not to alarm the fugitive, till there was a space for him to squeeze in.

The exposed bit of floor revealed a conference of cockroaches. He crouched stealthily, raised his arm, and unleashed a flurry of blows. Three succumbed to his shoe, the rest disappeared under the bed. He got down on his hands and knees, resolved that they would not escape to haunt him later. Meanwhile, his ankle began to itch, and his scratching fingers felt a red swelling. He discovered similar itchy bumps on his arms.

There was a knock on the door. He hesitated, loath to leave his prey — if they managed to hide, he would be at their mercy for the rest of the night.

A voice called, “Hi! Everything okay?”

Maneck crawled out from under the bed and opened the door. “Hi,” said the visitor. “I’m Avinash. From the next room.” He put out his right hand; the left held a spray pump.

“I’m Maneck.” He dropped the shoe and shook hands, then glanced quickly over his shoulder in case the enemy was trying to flee.

“Heard the banging,” said Avinash. “Cockroaches, right?”

Maneck nodded, picking up his shoe again.

“Relax, I got you some advanced technology.” Grinning, he held up the spray pump.

“Thanks, but it’s okay,” said Maneck, vigorously scratching the red trophies on his arms. “I killed three and — ”

“You don’t know this place. Kill three, and three dozen will arrive marching in single file, to take revenge. It’s like a Hitchcock movie.” He laughed and came closer, lightly touching the red bumps on Maneck’s arms. “Bedbugs.”

His advice was to fumigate the room and wait outside for forty-five minutes. “It’s the only way you’ll be able to sleep tonight, believe me. This is my third year in the hostel.”

They removed the sheet, lifted the mattress, and treated the frame and slats. The rest of the room was also sprayed — along the window ledge, in the corners, inside the cupboard. The suitcase and boxes were moved to Avinash’s room, to keep the bugs and cockroaches from seeking refuge in them.

“I feel bad using up so much of your spray,” said Maneck.

“Don’t worry, you’ll have to buy your own can of Flit. You can do mine later. The rooms need spraying at least once a week.”

They settled down to wait for the insects to die, Maneck on the only chair, Avinash on the bed. “So,” he said, leaning back upon his elbows.

“Thanks for your help.”

“It’s okay, yaar, no big deal.” There was a pause, to see which way the conversation would go. It didn’t. “You want to play chess, or draughts or something, to pass the time?”

“Okay, draughts.” Maneck liked his eyes, the way they looked directly into his.

It was easier to start talking once they began the game, their heads bowed over the board. “So where are you from?” asked Avinash, obtaining his first king.

The account of the hill-station, the settlements, the mountains, the langurs, the snow fascinated Avinash. He confessed, as he won the game and set up the board again, that he had never travelled anywhere.

“The house was built by my great-grandfather, on a hill,” continued Maneck. “And because of the steep slope, we have steel cables to keep it tied in place.”

“Wait a sec — you think I was born yesterday?”

“No, really. There was an earthquake, and the foundation shifted downhill. That’s why the cables were connected.” He explained how the repair work had been done, and described technical details.

His earnestness convinced Avinash. The idea of a house on a leash, tethered to mountain rock, amused him. “Sounds like a house with suicidal tendencies.”

They laughed. Avinash moved up one of his men and said, “Crown me.” A few moves later, he won again. “So what does your father do?”

“We have a shop.”

“Ah, a businessman. Must be making solid money, sending you all the way here to study.”

The slight jeer in his voice offended Maneck. “It’s just a small store, and very hard work for my parents. They sent me to study because the business is going downhill and — ”

They looked up at the same instant, laughing at his chosen word. Maneck decided he had answered enough questions. “What about you? You’re also studying here, your father must be well off to afford it.”

“Sorry to disappoint you. I got a scholarship.”

“Congratulations.” Maneck contemplated his next move. “And what does your father do?”

“Employed in a textile mill.”

“He’s the manager?”

Avinash shook his head.

“Accountant?”

“He operates the machinery. He’s been running a fucking loom for thirty years, okay?” His voice shook on the brink of a rage, then he calmed down.

“I’m sorry,” said Maneck, “I didn’t mean to…”

“Why sorry? I’m not ashamed of the truth. I should be sorry, that I have no more interesting story than this. No mountains, no snow, no runaway houses — just a father who has given his years to the mill, and got TB in exchange.”

They turned their faces to the board again, and Avinash kept talking. After winning the scholarship, he had been looking forward to his own room in the hostel. All his life he had lived with his parents and three sisters in a one room-and-kitchen rented to them by the mill. His father had had tuberculosis for a few years now, but was forced to keep working amid the dust and fibres to support the family. Besides, if he were to quit, they would have to vacate the mill’s quarters, and there was nowhere else to go.

The hostel had been a big disappointment to Avinash when he had arrived, filthy, with rats and cockroaches everywhere. “Our home may be one room and kitchen, but at least we keep it clean.” Then there were the frustrations of being President of the Student Union and Chairman of the Hostel Committee. “I regret getting elected. There is nothing in the college prospectus to prepare you for hostel life.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t want to spoil your first day by describing it. What you’ve seen so far is nothing. But if students took an interest, demanded improvement, the bathrooms and toilets would easily be repaired. The money for maintenance is all going into someone’s pocket. Just like the canteen. The caterer has a fat contract, and provides garbage for the students. But you get to choose your garbage — veg or non-veg.”

“I’m not fussy about food,” said Maneck bravely.

Avinash laughed. “We’ll see. Actually, it’s not much of a choice. I think the veg food is the same as non-veg, but minus the gristle and bone.”

Maneck concentrated; he thought one of his men was at last going to breach the defences.

“The trouble is,” said Avinash, devouring the hopeful piece, “most of the students in the hostel are from poor families. They are afraid to complain, all they want is to finish their studies and find a job so they can look after their parents and brothers and sisters.”

Foiled again, Maneck crowned another king for Avinash and lost the game two moves later. He didn’t mind that he kept losing, because his opponent did not gloat.

“You look sleepy,” said Avinash. “No wonder you can’t focus on the game.”

“It’s okay, let’s play one more. But you know, you are different from the other students.”

Avinash laughed. “How can you tell? You’ve just arrived.”

Maneck considered, running a finger around the concentric grooves that embellished the surface of the draughtsmen. “Because… because of everything you just said. Because you became the president, to improve things.”

Avinash shrugged. “I don’t think so. I’m planning to resign. I should be spending my time and energy on studies. I was the first one ever to finish high school in our family. Everyone’s relying on me. My three young sisters, too. I must collect money for their dowries, or they won’t be able to get married.” He paused, smiling. “When they were small they used to bite my fingers, when I helped my mother to feed them.” He laughed at the memory. “My father says that all the blood he spits will not be in vain if I get my degree and a good job.”

They raised their faces from the board, and Avinash fell silent. It had been easy to keep talking while their eyes were glued to the pieces. The logic of the checkered board had been in control, towing both the game and the conversation. Now the thread was broken. Embarrassment and awkwardness came tumbling out.

“I must unpack.”

“Your room should be fine now. Let’s check.”

They carried back the suitcase and boxes, swept up the dead cockroaches, and made the bed. “Don’t push it to the wall again,” said Avinash. “Safer to leave at least a foot.” He also suggested immersing the bed’s legs in cans of water, to discourage things from climbing up. “We can do that tomorrow. You’ll be okay for tonight.”

Maneck complained to the warden’s office that nothing happened when he pulled the chain in the toilet.

“That’s because there is no water supply for the flush tank,” said the clerk, looking up from scotchtaping some torn documents. “The building contractor did not connect the pipes, to save money. College has taken him to court. But don’t worry, the sweeper who cleans the bathrooms is looking after the problem.”

“How?”

“With buckets of water.”

“What time does the sweeper come?”

“Before the hostel awakes — four a.m., sometimes five a.m.”

Maneck immediately made a firm resolution: to be first in the toilet every morning, no matter how early he had to rise for that privilege.

The next day, hearing him up before dawn, Avinash came to check. “What’s wrong? Are you sick or something?”

“No, I’m fine-why?”

“Do you know what time it is? Five-fifteen.”

“I know. But I hate someone’s shit staring me in the face when I go to the toilet.”

Avinash was annoyed that he had dragged himself out of bed for no reason, then laughed. “You rich boys. When will you get used to reality?”

“I told you I’m not rich. The bathroom at home is plain, just like this. But there’s water in the flush. And not such a stink.”

“The problem with you is, you see too much and smell too much. This is big-city life — no more beautiful snow-covered mountains. You have to learn to curb your sissy eyes and nose. And another thing you better be prepared for is ragging.”

“Oh no,” said Maneck, remembering his boarding school. “Haven’t these fellows grown up yet? What do they do? Pour water in the bed? Salt in the tea?”

“Something like that.”

In his letter home at the end of the week, Maneck was hard-pressed to find things to say that would not be mistaken for whining. He didn’t want Brigadier and Mrs. Grewal, and all the others who would share the letter, to think he was a softie who couldn’t manage by himself.

After the first fortnight, however, when Avinash and he had become good friends, he could almost believe what he had been told before leaving home: that he would have an enjoyable time in college.

One evening, over draughts, Maneck confessed his ignorance of chess. Avinash said he could teach him in three days. “That is, if you’re seriously interested in learning the game.”

Since they were both non-vegetarian and sat in the same section of the dining hall, the chess lesson began during dinner, with paper and pencil. Maneck said the diversion made the canteen swill easier to swallow.

“Now you’re learning,” said Avinash. “That’s the secret — to distract your senses. Have I told you my theory about them? I think that our sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing are all calibrated for the enjoyment of a perfect world. But since the world is imperfect, we must put blinders on the senses.”

“The world of the hostel is more than just imperfect. It’s a gigantic deformity.”

After eating, they adjourned to the common room, where it was still quiet. A few students were gathered around the carrom board. Each time the striker slammed into the ledge and rebounded, the spectators followed with a murmur of approval or commiseration. Another group came in, laughing and boisterous, and started a game of capping-the-fan: tossing a pen cap at the slow ceiling fan and trying to land it on one of the three blades. After several attempts, the game’s originator climbed onto a chair, arrested the fan and placed the pen cap on it. They turned up the speed to raucous cheers as the cap came flying off. Next, they grabbed one among them and raised him towards the fan, threatening to shove him into the blades. He shrieked and howled — out of fear, and also because it was expected of him.

Maneck and Avinash watched their antics for a while, then went upstairs to continue the chess lesson. Avinash’s chessmen were waiting on his desk, in a plywood box with a maroon, high-gloss varnish. Removing the sliding lid, he emptied the box onto the board.

The plastic pieces that tumbled out were crudely moulded; green felt lined their bases. Maneck noticed a sheet of paper face-down in the bottom of the box, and flipped it over.

“Hey, that’s private,” said Avinash.

“Solid,” said Maneck, reading the certificate in admiration: the set had been awarded as first prize in the 1972 Interclass Chess Tournament. “I never knew my teacher was a champion.”

“I didn’t want to make you nervous,” said Avinash. “Come on now, pay attention.”

By the third day Maneck had learned the basics of the game. They were in the dining hall, pondering a problem Avinash had sketched out, with white to play and mate in three moves. Suddenly, there was a commotion in the vegetarian section. Students leapt from their places, tables were overturned, plates and glasses smashed, and chairs flung at the kitchen door. It was not long before the reason for the uproar was learned by the entire dining hall: a vegetarian student had discovered a sliver of meat floating in a supposedly vegetarian gravy of lentils.

The news spread, about the bastard caterer who was toying with their religious sentiments, trampling on their beliefs, polluting their beings, all for the sake of fattening his miserable wallet. Within minutes, every vegetarian living in the hostel had descended on the canteen, raging about the duplicity. Some of them seemed on the verge of a breakdown, screaming incoherently, going into convulsions, poking fingers down their throats to regurgitate the forbidden substance. Several succeeded in vomiting up their dinners.

But there were no fingers long enough to reach the meals digested since the beginning of term. That vile stuff was already absorbed to become part of their own marrow, and the cause of their anguish. They retched and spat and groaned, and spun in circles, holding their heads, crying about the calamity, unwilling to acknowledge that their stomachs were empty, there was nothing left to bring up.

The hysteria found a more satisfying focus when the kitchen workers were dragged out. Smelling of rancid oil and sweat and hot stoves, the six men trembled before their accusers. Their white uniforms carried stains from their labours with the evening’s menu — brown splashes of lentils, dark green streaks of spinach.

The prospect of vengeance acted like an antacid on the violated vegetarian innards. Nausea retreated; the outpouring of bile and vomit and greenish-yellow effluent was replaced by a torrent of verbal violence.

“Smash the fucking rascals!”

“Break their faces!”

“Make them eat meat!”

The threats did not immediately become blows because the six wisely fell to their knees, setting up a loud wailing. Their snivelling and begging for mercy was as hysterically incoherent as the vegetarians’ emetic exertions had been.

Avinash observed the drama unfold for a minute, then pushed back his chair. “I have an idea. Will you look after my chess board?”

“You’ll simply get hurt,” said Maneck. “Why are you interfering?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be okay.”

Maneck returned the chessmen to the box, watching from his corner. The kitchen workers and students were still locked in their respective poses: discovered Crime cowering for clemency at the feet of implacable Retribution. It would have been funny were it not for the real danger of the workers being pounded to a pulp. But so far, the invisible line was holding, separating the potential from its realization. Strange, that invisible lines could be so powerful, thought Maneck — strong as brick walls.

“Stop! Wait a sec!” shouted Avinash, putting himself between the frightened kitchen workers and the students.

“What?” they asked impatiently, recognizing their Hostel Committee Chairman and Student Union President.

“Hang on for a minute. What’s the point of thrashing these guys? The crooked caterer is the one to blame.”

“He’ll get the message if we give his workers a pasting. Won’t dare to show his face here again.”

“You’re wrong. He’ll just come with police protection.”

A great opening gambit, thought Maneck — the invisible line reinforced.

Avinash pleaded with the vegetarians, and everyone else disgusted with the food, to join him in lodging a complaint with the college administration. “Let’s do this democratically, let’s not behave like goondas on the street. It’s bad enough that the bloody politicians do.”

Check, thought Maneck. Cleverly manoeuvred.

Some were in favour and some against the suggestion. There was a fresh volley of vegetarian threats, while the kitchen workers responded with a broadside of grovelling and whimpering. But the intensity was starting to diminish in both camps. More voices were raised in support of Avinash’s appeal. The vegetarian offensive gradually fell silent, and the kitchen workers ceased their salvos of weeping, though they maintained their knees in readiness for a swift descent should the need arise again.

Plans were made to organize a large protest outside the Principal’s office next morning. Enthusiasm for the chosen course of action was general by now. Even the strictest vegetarians stopped puking, composed themselves, and went off to undertake their pollution-cleansing ablutions, promising to gather with the others in the morning.

Checkmate, thought Maneck. The invisible line was impregnable.

“I guess you’re what is called a born leader,” he said to Avinash later that night, half-teasing, half-admiring.

“Not really. A born fool. I should stick to my decision — to give up all this and pay attention to my studies. Come on, let’s go upstairs.”

The canteen agitation’s success astonished Avinash and his followers. The Principal dictated a letter of termination addressed to the caterer. The Hostel Committee was authorized to select a replacement.

Now the jubilant students held a victory celebration and grew more ambitious. Their President promised that, one by one, they would weed out all the evils of the campus: nepotism in staff hiring, bribery for admissions, sale of examination papers, special privileges for politicians’ families, government interference in the syllabus, intimidation of faculty members. The list was long, for the rot went deep.

The mood was euphoric. The students fervently believed their example would inspire universities across the country to undertake radical reforms, which would complement the grass-roots movement of Jay Prakash Narayan that was rousing the nation with a call to return to Gandhian principles. The changes would invigorate all of society, transform it from a corrupt, moribund creature into a healthy organism that would, with its heritage of a rich and ancient civilization, and the wisdom of the Vedas and Upanishads, awaken the world and lead the way towards enlightenment for all humanity.

It was easy to dream noble dreams for those few days after the canteen protest. With so much determination and good intention circulating within the student body, numerous subcommittees were created, agenda adopted, minutes recorded, and resolutions passed. The canteen meals improved. Optimism reigned.

Maneck, however, had had enough of it. He wanted his life, and Avinash’s, to return now to their earlier routine. This business of endless agitation was tiresome. He tried to wean Avinash from his new passion, making what he thought was a crafty move: he invoked his friend’s family. “I think you were right. What you said before, you know, about focusing completely on studies, for the sake of your parents, and for your sisters’ dowries. You really should.”

The reminder troubled Avinash, glooming his brow. “I often feel guilty about that. I’ll give up my chairmanship. Soon as these few remaining problems are fixed.”

“What problems?” Maneck was impatient. “In all your meetings you haven’t once mentioned the filthy toilets and bathrooms. Cockroaches and bedbugs should be on the agenda. Mahatma Gandhi wouldn’t have liked your approach, he believed firmly in cleanliness — physical purity precedes mental purity precedes spiritual purity.”

The objection cheered Avinash, and he laughed, throwing his arm over Maneck’s shoulders as they crossed the quadrangle. “I didn’t know you were an expert in Gandhian philosophy. Tell me, would you like to chair the cockroach subcommittee? I’ll second the motion.”

Maneck attended a few rallies and protests, only in order to support his friend. After a while, even that wasn’t a sufficient reason. The process was so tediously repetitious, he stopped going.

Avinash did not have time for chess in the evenings anymore. They still ate together but were seldom alone, and Maneck resented it. A crowd hung around his friend, discussing and arguing about things he did not understand and was not interested in understanding. Their talk was filled with words like democratization, constitution, alienation, degeneration, decentralization, collectivization, nationalism, capitalism, materialism, feudalism, imperialism, communalism, socialism, fascism, relativism, determinism, proletarianism — ism, ism, ism, ism, the words flying around him like buzzing insects.

Why couldn’t these fellows talk normally? wondered Maneck. To amuse himself he began counting their various isms, and stopped when he reached twenty. Sometimes, dogs came into their debates — imperialist dogs, running dogs of capitalism. Sometimes the dogs were pigs, capitalist pigs. Moneylending hyenas and landowning jackals also put in occasional appearances. And lately, besides the isms, there was this Emergency that they kept going on about, behaving as if the sky had fallen.

Feeling ignored, Maneck went to his room as soon as he finished his meal. He still had the plastic chessmen, and he set them up to play against himself. He made a move, then turned the board around. After a while it became boring. He tried the book Avinash had lent him, containing a series of endgame problems in increasing degrees of difficulty.

Hard though it was, Maneck continued to shun his friend’s company. Then, just as he was weakening after a few days of loneliness, deciding to give him a second chance, Avinash knocked on the door.

“Hi, what’s new?” He slapped Maneck’s back affectionately.

“This game.”

“Playing alone?”

“No, with me.” Maneck toppled his own king.

“Haven’t seen you much lately. Aren’t you curious about what’s been happening?”

“You mean in college?”

“Yes — and everywhere else, since the Emergency was declared.”

“Oh, that.” Maneck made an indifferent face. “I don’t know much about those things.”

“Don’t you read the newspapers?”

“Only the comics. All the political stuff is too boring.”

“Okay, I’ll make it simple and quick for you, so you don’t fall asleep.”

“Good. I’ll time you.” Maneck checked his watch. “Ready, begin.”

Avinash took a deep breath. “Three weeks ago the High Court found the Prime Minister guilty of cheating in the last elections. Which meant she had to step down. But she began stalling. So the opposition parties, student organizations, trade unions — they started mass demonstrations across the country. All calling for her resignation. Then, to hold on to power, she claimed that the country’s security was threatened by internal disturbances, and declared a State of Emergency.”

“Twenty-nine seconds,” said Maneck.

“Wait, there’s a bit more. Under the pretext of Emergency, fundamental rights have been suspended, most of the opposition is under arrest, union leaders are in jail, and even some student leaders.”

“You better be careful.”

“Oh, don’t worry, our college is not that important. But the worst thing is, the press is being censored — ”

“Not much point then in reading newspapers, is there?”

“And she has retroactively changed the election laws, turning her guilt into innocence.”

“And you don’t have time to play chess because of this.”

“I’m playing it all the time. Everything I do is chess. Come on, let’s see how much you’ve learned.” He set up the board, then concealed a white and a black pawn behind his back. Maneck guessed correctly and started the game by advancing the king’s pawn. Half an hour later he had won, much to his surprise.

“Serves me right, for teaching you so well,” said Avinash. “But we’ll have to have a return match soon.”

Now it would be like before, thought Maneck. Once again he would have Avinash to himself. His secret wish was that the Principal would ban the bloody Student Union because of the Emergency, as other universities were doing. Then there would be nothing to distract his friend.

But Maneck remained disappointed; their chess games did not resume. He knocked at Avinash’s door on several evenings, and there was no answer. Twice he slipped a note under the door: “Hi. Where have you been hiding? Afraid to face me over the chessboard or what? See you soon — Maneck.”

After the second note, when he saw him in the dining hall, Avinash only had time for a quick wave. “Got your message,” he said. “Free tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

And next night Maneck waited in his room, but his friend did not turn up. Angry and hurt, he went to bed promising himself this was it. If Avinash wanted to see him, he could chase after him for a change.

He missed Avinash. Strange, he thought, how a friendship could spring up suddenly one evening, facilitated by cockroaches and bedbugs. And then fizzle out just as suddenly, for reasons equally ludicrous. Maybe it was silly to have assumed it was a friendship in the first place.

Everything disgusting about the hostel that Maneck had learned to live with began to nauseate him with a renewed vengeance. As an antidote, he developed a morning waking routine: when his eyes opened, he shut them again and, head still on the pillow, imagined the mountains, swirling mist, birdsong, dogs’ paws pattering on the porch, the cool dawn air on his skin, the excited chatter of langurs, breakfast cooking in the kitchen, toast and fried eggs upon his tongue. When all his senses were thus anointed by home imaginings, he reopened his eyes and got out of bed.

On campus, a new group, Students For Democracy, which had surfaced soon after declaration of the Emergency, was now in the ascendant. Its sister organization, Students Against Fascism, maintained the integrity of both groups by silencing those who spoke against them or criticized the Emergency. Threats and assaults became so commonplace, they might have been part of the university curriculum. The police were now a permanent presence, helping to maintain the new and sinister brand of law and order.

Two professors who chose to denounce the campus goon squads were taken away by plainclothesmen for anti-government activities, under the Maintenance of Internal Security Act. Their colleagues did not interfere on their behalf because MISA allowed imprisonment without trial, and it was a well-known fact that those who questioned MISA sooner or later answered to MISA; it was safer not to tangle with something so pernicious.

Maneck worried about Avinash; as President of the original Student Union, surely he was in grave danger from the new groups on campus. At night, he listened for sounds from the room next to his. The door shutting softly, the clatter of the metal cupboard, the wheeze of the spray pump, the thunk of the bed revealed that his friend was fine, that he had not been assaulted or taken away into secret detention.

Maneck hurried between hostel and college without stopping to watch the daily farces of bullying, toadying, and submission. The office of the campus newspaper was attacked, the writers and editors roughed up and sent packing. The paper used to indulge in light satire and occasionally poke fun at the government or university administration, although satire had become increasingly difficult in recent times, for the government was practising the art in its own reports to the censored media, better than the campus paper had ever done.

After taking over, Students For Democracy released a statement in the next issue that the publication’s new voice would be more representative of the college population. The rest of the paper was filled with a model code of conduct for students and teachers.

One morning, classes were cancelled and a flag-raising ceremony was organized in the quadrangle. Attendance was compulsory, enforced by Students Against Fascism. The president of Students For Democracy took the microphone. He appealed to the figures of authority to come forward, prove their love for the country, set an example of patriotic behaviour.

On cue, lecturers, associate professors, full professors, and department heads approached the dais, en masse, in a feeble show of spontaneity. The organizers tried furtively to slow them down, to make it look like a genuine outpouring of support. But it was too late to improve the choreography. The entire teaching staff had already lined up at the table, like customers at a ration shop. They obediently signed statements saying they were behind the Prime Minister, her declaration of Emergency, and her goal of fighting the anti-democratic forces threatening the country from within.

As much as fear, Maneck felt a loathing for the entire place. But for his teachers he had only pity. They slipped away from the flag-raising ceremony, looking guilty and ashamed.

That night, the hostel room next to his own remained silent. The familiar sounds refused to rise and signal Avinash’s well-being. Maneck lay awake, worrying into the early hours of the morning. Should he report to the warden’s office that his friend was missing? But what if he had gone to visit his family, or something innocent like that? Better to wait a day or two.

At dinnertime he looked about the dining hall for a glimpse of Avinash, in vain. He asked someone at his table, casually, “What’s the Managing Committee of the Student Union up to these days?”

“Those fellows have all split the scene, yaar. Gone underground. It’s too risky for them to hang around here.”

The reply reassured Maneck. He was convinced now that Avinash was just lying low somewhere, hiding in his parents’ flat in the mill tenements, perhaps. And he would return soon — after all, how long could this Emergency and goondaism go on? Besides, he would not be caught easily. Not the way he played chess.

The former canteen caterer was back on the job, wreaking his gastric revenge. Maneck felt vindicated as he remembered the vegetarian incident that had started it all — he had told Avinash not to interfere, that it would end badly.

Nowadays, when the meal was particularly ghastly, he got himself sandwiches or samosas at a stall in the lane outside the college. He was luckier than most because he got a bit of pocket money from home. It was comforting to watch tomatoes being sliced and bread being buttered, and to hear the roar of the stove, the hot hiss of frying in oil.

One evening, as he returned to the hostel from his roadside snack, the cry of Ragging! Ragging! Ragging! went up in the corridor, like a hunting call. He watched in the games room as two first-year automotive students were cornered, surrounded by twelve others. They stripped the pants off one, held him bent over the ping-pong table, and handed an empty soft-drink bottle to the other. He was ordered to demonstrate what had been learnt about pistons and cylinders in the class on internal combustion engines. They overcame his reluctance by threatening to make him the cylinder if he refused to cooperate.

Maneck slunk away in terror. From then on, he went straight to his room after dinner and locked himself in. He made sure that he had whatever he needed — newspaper, library books, glass of water — so he would not have to leave his sanctuary when the raggers were on the prowl.

One night, after he had changed into his pyjamas, his stomach began rumbling in a nasty way. Must be the samosa chutney at the roadside stall, he assumed. Shouldn’t have eaten it, there had been something peculiar about the taste.

He badly needed the toilet, filthy as it would be at this hour. He opened the door cautiously. The corridor was empty. He walked rapidly, looking over his shoulder. Halfway down the hall they pounced out of a storage room and caught him. He fought back. “Please! I have to go to the toilet! Very badly!”

“Later,” they said, twisting his arms behind him to make him stop struggling.

“Ahhhh!” he screamed.

“Listen, it’s just a game,” they reasoned with him. “Why turn it into a fight? You’ll simply get hurt.”

He stopped resisting, and they eased up on his arms. “Good boy. Now tell us, what subject are you taking?”

“Refrigeration and air-conditioning.”

“Okay, we’ll just give you a little test. To see if you’ve been studying like a good boy.”

“Sure. But can I go to the toilet first?”

“Later.” They led him to the workshop where there was a large working model of a freezer, and asked him to take off his clothes. He did not move. They closed in to undress him.

“Please!” he begged, kicking and pulling away. “Please don’t! No, please!” He prayed that Avinash would appear miraculously and save him, as he had saved the kitchen workers from the vegetarians.

The raggers were very efficient, taking less than a minute to hold Maneck down and strip him. “Now listen carefully,” they said. “The first part of the test is simple. We are refrigerating you for ten minutes. Don’t panic.” They tumbled him into the freezer, doubled over to fit the confined space, and heaved the door shut. The darkness of a coffin closed in around him.

They waited to be amused by his reaction. For a while there was nothing. Then a banging commenced, and continued for the next two minutes, followed by a brief silence. His hammering started again — weaker now, and sporadic, faltering, picking up, fading.

The blows became alarmingly feeble before dying out altogether. They looked at their watches; only seven minutes of the promised ten had elapsed. They decided to open the door.

“Aagh! Chhee!” They fell back as the stench hit them. “Bastard shat in the freezer!”

Maneck was stiff and could not emerge. They pulled him out moulded in a stoop and slammed the door to seal away the smell. He looked around dazed, unable to straighten.

They offered mock applause. “Very good. Full marks for the first test. Bonus marks for the shit. Well done. Now comes the second part.”

His blue lips trembled as he tried to speak. His hands reached stiffly for the pyjamas. Someone snatched them away. “Not yet. For the second part, you must demonstrate that your thermostat is working.”

Numb, he gaped uncomprehendingly.

“You said you’re taking refrigeration and air-conditioning. What’s the matter, don’t you know what a thermostat is?”

Maneck shook his head and made another pathetic slow-motion grab for his pyjamas.

“This is your thermostat, you idiot,” said one of them, slapping the frigid penis. “Now show us if it’s working.”

Maneck looked down at himself as if he were seeing it for the first time, and they clapped again. “Very good! Thermostat correctly identified! But is it working?”

He nodded.

“Prove it.” He was not sure what they wanted. “Come on, make it work. Shake it up.” They took up the chant. “Shake-it-up! Shake-it-up! Shake-it-up!”

Maneck understood, and discovered his lips had thawed enough to speak. “Please, I cannot. Please, let me go now?”

“The second part of the test must be completed. Or we’ll have to repeat the first part, freeze you with your shit this time. Thermostat checkup is compulsory.”

Maneck held his penis weakly, moved his hand to and fro a few times and let go.

“It’s not working! Try harder! Shake-it-up! Shake-it-up!”

He started to sniffle, working his foreskin back and forth while they chanted. Desperate to end the humiliation, he laboured hard, his wrist aching, feeling nothing in the penis, worried that something was wrong, that the freezer had damaged it. After much effort he ejaculated without a proper erection.

They broke into cheers, whistling and hooting. Someone returned his pyjamas, and they dispersed. To avoid walking back with them, he stayed in the workshop until it was quiet outside the building.

He washed his thighs and legs where he had soiled himself, then returned to his room. He got into bed and lay on his back in the dark, shivering, staring at the ceiling. He wondered what would happen the next time the instructor opened the freezer.

An hour later the trembling was still in his limbs, and he fetched the blanket from the cupboard. He knew what he was going to do — as soon as he felt warmer, he would get up and pack. In the morning he would take a taxi to the railway station and go home on the Frontier Mail

What would his parents say, though? He could guess Daddy’s reaction — that he had run away like a coward. And Mummy would first take his side, then she would listen to Daddy and change, as always. Change, always. That’s what the proofreader had said on the train — cannot avoid change, have to adapt to it. But surely that did not mean accepting a change for the worse.

For half the night Maneck struggled with his thoughts, slowly packing his boxes and suitcase. The other half of the night he spent unpacking, and writing to his parents. He wrote that so far he had not been truthful with them, and was sorry, but he had wanted to spare them the worry: “The hostel is such a horrible place, I cannot stay here anymore. Not only is it dirty and stinking, which I can tolerate, but the people are disgusting. Many of them are not even students, and I don’t know how these goondas are allowed to live in a student hostel. They take hashish and ganja, get drunk, fight. Gambling goes on openly, and they sell drugs to the students.” He thought a bit, then added, “One of them even tried to sell to me.” That should make them think twice. “It is all absolutely horrible, and I want to return as soon as possible. I’ll work in the shop without interfering, and do as you tell me, I promise.”

Surely this was drastic enough, he felt, to make his parents act. There was no need to reveal the real shame.

Secretly, Mr. and Mrs. Kohlah were both delighted that Maneck wanted to come home. They missed him intensely but had never dared talk about it, not even to each other. They preferred to pretend, especially in company, how proud and happy they were that their son was away getting a worthwhile education.

And Maneck’s urgent letter did nothing to change this. They carefully controlled their responses to keep up appearances. “What a pity if he comes back so soon,” said Mr. Kohlah.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Kohlah. “He will lose his only chance for a good career. What do you think, Farokh? What should we do?”

Mr. Kohlah knew in his heart that if his son was unhappy he should return home immediately. But perhaps there ought to be some effort made, however halfhearted, at finding another solution — it would surely be expected by everyone, including their friends. Or he might be accused of being too soft a father.

“Seems to me there is definitely a problem at the college hostel,” he said cautiously.

“Of course there is! My son does not lie! And he simply cannot be allowed to remain in such a wicked place, full of vice and rogues and ruffians, just for the sake of a college diploma! What kind of parents would we be?”

“Yes, yes, calm down, I am trying to think.” He massaged his forehead. “If the hostel is not suitable, maybe we should find him some other lodging. Privately, in someone’s home. That would solve the problem.”

“That’s a good idea,” said Mrs. Kohlah, playing along. She did not want to carry the lifelong label of the possessive mother who had ruined her son’s future. “What about asking my relatives?”

“No, they live too far from the college, remember?” Besides, who could tell what kind of namby-pamby thoughts they would fill Maneck’s head with. After twenty years they still hadn’t got used to the idea of Aban living away from them.

“If only we can find him a nice safe room somewhere,” she said. “Somewhere that we can afford.” Which was next to impossible, she imagined cheerfully, in a city where millions were living in slums and on the pavements. And not just beggars — even people with jobs who had the money to pay rent. Only, there was nothing to rent. No, there was no chance for Maneck, he would be home soon. And she broke into a smile at that happy thought.

“What are you smiling for when we have such a big problem on our hands?” said Mr. Kohlah.

“Was I smiling? No, nothing, just thinking of Maneck.”

“Hmm,” he grunted, finding it difficult to contain his own pleasure. “You can try writing to that friend of yours. She might know of some place.”

“Yes, good idea. After dinner tonight I’ll write to Zenobia,” agreed Mrs. Kohlah, joyful in the knowledge that it would be a waste of a stamp.

They returned to their chores. The ordeal of masking delight with disappointment was over. Now it was just a question of waiting till their lukewarm efforts failed and their son came home.

In a few days, however, they had to pretend all over again, but in reverse, when, to their bitter surprise, accommodation was swiftly arranged for Maneck. Now they had to force a display of satisfaction that his education was going ahead, and sweep away the remains of their short-lived hopes.

Mrs. Kohlah resentfully wrote a thank-you letter to Mrs. Dalai, at the address Zenobia had sent. “I wonder if Dina is still as beautiful as she was in high school,” she said, relishing the sound as she tore the page from the writing pad. The rip was in harmony with her present mood.

“You can ask Maneck. He will soon be able to give you a full report from her flat,” said Mr. Kohlah. “Even send you an up-to-date photo if you like.” He could not help feeling, as he watched her at the desk, that the busybodies from his wife’s past were interfering in his family life, conniving to keep his son away from him.

Immediately afterwards, he realized he was being silly. He brought out his bank book and wrote a cheque for the first month’s rent. Mrs. Kohlah enclosed it with her letter to Mrs. Dalai.

Dina listened closely for sounds of life from the silent bathroom. What was he up to, why was there no splashing of water? “Maneck! Is everything all right? Is the water hot enough?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“You found the mug? Should be next to the bucket. And you can sit on the wooden stool if you like.”

“Yes, Aunty.” Maneck felt awkward about mentioning the worms, which were advancing in battalions from the drain. He hoped they would soon return to their underground home of their own accord. But maybe I should have returned home on the train, of my own accord, he thought bitterly. How stupid of me to write a letter. Hoping Daddy would allow me to come back.

Dina kept waiting to hear the mug’s clatter and the splash of water. The silence outlasted her patience. “What’s wrong, Maneck? Can you please hurry up? I have to bathe too, before the tailors come.”

She hoped there would be some time today to cash the rent cheque. First, however, she had to see Maneck off to college and start things on the right footing. He wouldn’t be a problem once he became used to her routine. And learned to use modern gadgets, like the immersion heater. Poor boy had no idea what it was. And when she’d asked him what they did at home for hot water, he described the boiler stoked with coal every morning. How primitive. But he had made his own bed, folding everything neatly — that was impressive.

She went to the bathroom door and asked again, “Are you managing all right?”

“Yes, Aunty. But some worms are crawling out of the gutter.”

“Oh, them! Just throw a little water and they will go away.”

There was a splash, and then silence again.

“Well?”

“They’re still coming.”

“Okay, let me take a look.”

He started to put on his clothes, and she knocked. “Come on, please wrap your towel and open the door. I don’t have time to stand here all morning.”

He dressed fully before letting her in.

“Shy boy. I’m as old as your mother. What was I going to see? Now. Where are those worms that frightened you?”

“I was not frightened. They just look so disgusting. And there are so many of them.”

“Naturally. It’s the season for worms. The monsoon always brings them. I thought you would be used to such things, where you live. In the mountains, with wild animals.”

“But certainly not in the bathroom, Aunty.”

“In my bathroom you’ll have to get used to it. All you can do is push the worms back by throwing water. Cold water — don’t use up the hot.” She demonstrated, brushing past him to reach the bucket, hurling mugfuls that sent the creatures sliding towards the drain. “See? There they go, into the gutter.”

The soft lines of her outstretched upper arm did more to reassure him than the water technique. Bent over the parapet, her back pulled the nightgown taut against her hips, revealing the underwear outline. His eyes lingered, turning away when she straightened.

“Well? Are you going to bathe now? Or do you want me to stay with you, stand on guard against the worms?” He blushed, and she, worried about the tailors arriving, said, “Listen, because this is your first morning, I will do something special for you.”

She fetched the bottle of phenol from the shelf outside the wc, uncorked it, and trickled the white fluid onto the worms. It worked instantaneously, transforming them into a writhing red mass, and then into little lifeless coils.

“There. But remember, phenol is very expensive, I cannot waste it every day. You will have to learn to bathe with them.”

He shut the door and undressed again. The picture of her beside him, bending, reaching, pulsated through his limbs. But the antiseptic odour of phenol hanging in the air tugged in the opposite direction.