Selection Day

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I, too, have a secret.

Pebbles and pen-tops; the gold tin-foil wrappers of chocolates; battered coins and the leather handles of cricket bats; cracked green buttons and two-inch needles full of rust: I understand them all.

Pen-tops, you are really lemons. Pebbles are sweeter. Rusty needles are vinegary. The floors of rooms are buttery. Good paper is milky and cheap paper becomes bitter. Orange rinds are tastier than oranges. Only one thing in this world is tasteless.

Plastic!

He was four years old. Every evening at five thirty his father would take Radha Krishna out for cricket practice, and then he would be alone in the room all three of them lived in; he was in Kattale.

Kattale is darkness in Kannada, his mother tongue: and so much darker than any English-language darkness.

In Kattale, his nose pressed against the mirror; he breathed on glass. His tongue grew: and he began understanding and reunderstanding.

You, glass, are just salt. The bindis that go on a woman’s forehead taste like Kissan mixed-fruit jam. Wool is burnt starch. Cotton is cooler than wool, and better at keeping scents.

People came next. When he sniffed Radha Krishna’s white cricket T-shirt, even before he began licking, it smelled of one of the seven kinds of sweat. The kind produced when a boy is scared. Then he knew Radha had been at cricket practice with their father.

This was his secret world. His tongue was a white sail and when it grew big he could go from one end of the world to the other. Alone, in Kattale, like Sindbad, he explored. Then when he was seven or eight years old, the lights came on one evening, and his father caught him licking the mirror. A blow fell on the boy’s back; blow followed blow until his stomach vomited out everything it had tasted, and he became like Radha Krishna, and like everyone else.

No more secrets.

There’s usually no one in the school corridor in the evenings so I go there after practice with my cricket bag on my shoulder, to wash my face and hands with the antiseptic soap. But that evening I saw a boy standing alone in the corridor: he had a nose like a beak. In his left hand he held a little round mirror and he was looking at himself in it. Suddenly I remembered something I’d forgotten for years. That evening when I was still a boy, and pushed open the door to the women’s toilet by mistake, and saw my mother inside, examining the kajol around her eyes in the mirror, I began sweating, and my heart beat faster and faster. That is when he looked up from his mirror and noticed me.

Six years later, Manjunath had just opened the door to another hidden world.