The Girl with the Golden Parasol

FOURTEEN

It was something like a light fever, or a mild buzz, that began to consume Rahul on Wednesday, the sixth of September, at three thirty-five p.m. He couldn’t utter a word. It was such a deep and dizzying silence it seemed as if his very sense of being was lost inside it. It was a totally new and unique experience, the first like it in his life.

He came in and lay down on his bed in Room 252 even before the sun had set. Just that morning he had scrubbed the windowpane clear with his handkerchief. He got up a few times to look out the window. The green and brown vegetation and trees in the valley stood quietly in the evening light. The normally dull rock outcroppings scattered here and there now shone with a golden hue. On the broad, flat field, the shadows of the trees elongated with every passing moment.

Rahul’s eyes scanned the distance for any sign of that spot of yellow, which just might be returning to the residential development. Anjali’s face flashed through his mind again and again like a bolt of lightning. In his mind she was even now on her way to see him. He held his eyes shut and froze her image in his imagination.

There was no anger in those eyes, but rather the ache from being stung by the slingshot pellet, and her eagerness.

When did Rahul finally doze off? He wasn’t sure. O.P. shook him awake. “No dinner? It’s been dinnertime for awhile. You’re not sick, are you?”

Stumbling, Rahul managed to pull himself out of bed. He stumbled to the bathroom, turned on the tap, and put his head under the rush of water. It was as if the water were an entirely new sensation, cool and fresh. He’d fallen asleep sometime around six o’clock and now it was eight thirty. A long period of time had elapsed during this two-and-a-half-hour nap. Everything before had been part of a former existence; this was like a new life entirely, a feeling of a light fever and intoxication.

Rahul splashed cold water on his eyes. I’m slowly waking up, aren’t I?

“I’ll meet you down in the dining hall, I’m heading out,” O.P.’s voice sounded from outside.

Rahul later bumped into Hemant Barua in the dining hall, who sometimes stopped by after beating Professor Aggrawal in a game of chess. Hemant had two items of news. One was that he hadn’t seen Sapam Tomba, whose door was locked, for two days.

The second was the announcement that Rahul had made a terrifying mistake in taking admission to the Hindi department because every last individual in the department, from the sweeper to the chair, was a Brahmin. Save for Rahul, Shaligaram, and Shailendra George, the rest of the first-year Hindi students were all Brahmins.

Hemant Barua, the wondrous number-crunching genius from Dibrugarh, Assam, and MSc in the Department of Mathematics, combined statistics, information, and facts into a single process. He declared that on the basis of caste, the Brahmin to non-Brahmin ratio was approximately 88 percent to 12 percent. What’s more, those who left with their PhDs and later found work reflected the same statistic. Barua said, “Rahul, you have entered a labyrinth where they will lynch you one day. Beware. It’s not too late.”

Both pieces of information worried Rahul. Where had Sapam gone? The image of the handsome, roly-poly boy from Imphal flashed before his eyes.

The night passed, somehow, though Rahul was not conscious.

But in that state of unconsciousness a yellow parasol quietly fluttered like a butterfly coming up the hills from the valley below on the semicircular road, and each moment stretched out for such an eternity that his sleep was encircled from below him. Rahul, deep inside, slept without a care in the world, like an innocent, orphaned baby.

It was something like after the apocalypse that ends creation, when a tiny god resting on a tiny leaf rides the waves of a fathomless sea, asleep, engrossed in the redreaming of his next creation.