The Girl with the Golden Parasol

SIXTEEN

It was nine thirty at night. Dinner hadn’t been served in the hostel. A unanimous decision was reached by all of the students of Tagore Hostel as part of the mourning for Sapam. Notices were tacked up in front of the dining hall that students wishing to eat could go to B. B. Desai Hostel.

Later it turned out that aside from a few dining hall staff and a stray student, nobody had eaten dinner that night.

It revealed a deep sense of sorrow born from Sapam’s suicide. The students spoke very little to one another, and even at that in feeble voices, as if their throats were constricted. Was it merely the sadness over Sapam’s sudden death that had weakened their voices so — or was there also a newfound fear inside each student that had disarmed their voices, rendering them weak and powerless? Even the most argumentative and boisterous among them, those who talked the loudest, today were silent. The sounds of motorcycles were menacing. Someone arriving to pick up a friend would sound the horn on his motorcycle instead of calling out for his friend on the top floor of the hostel. No one called out to anyone.

The bulb in the corridor gave off a grimy, gloomy light. In the hazy darkness, the sound of the boys’ conversation, halting and subdued, was only occasional, like blurry silhouettes traversing a movie screen.

Rahul, Kartikeya, Pratap, Masood, O.P., and Praveen were walking on the rocky pathway covered with shrubs and undergrowth that led from the area behind B. B. Hostel. The police had been at the scene all day long, and aside from a few university staff, no one had been allowed there. The crowd of students had been kept at a distance from where they couldn’t see the place Sapam had committed suicide. Some students wanted to try to climb a tree in order to see better, but there were only bushy acacia. There was a semal tree, but it was full of thorns.

By seven in the evening, the police had completed their investigation of the site and withdrawn. Sapam’s body was transferred to the morgue at Gandhi Hospital. The postmortem was scheduled for the next day. His classmates tried everything they could to have a look at Sapam’s body, but they were refused. Vice-Chancellor Agnihotri had called to inform the chief secretary of Manipur, it was said. Sapam’s father could come from Imphal; otherwise, Sapam’s body would be sent there by train. There was no money to have his body flown home.

Rahul wondered how Sapam’s father would take the news. It hadn’t been long since his oldest son, a primary school teacher in Singjamei, near Imphal, had been shot dead by the police, mistaken for a terrorist. And now all that remained of his youngest son Sapam was a corpse brought to the morgue a few hours ago. He, too, wouldn’t last long after this. Would he come here to perform Sapam’s last rites? Or he’ll get the news and have such a breakdown that he won’t be able to make the long three-day trip — from Imphal to Kohima to Guwahati to Delhi via Bongaigaon to Agra to Gwalior to Jhansi to here.

The bitter truth is that Sapam, his father, and hundreds of millions of their unfortunate countrymen are not among those for whom technology has made the world a smaller place, or has eradicated distance. There are others who consider the U.S., France, and Germany just like their own backyards. Whenever the mood strikes, they mosey over to wash their faces and take a piss.

Kartikeya held a flashlight in his hand. They pushed their way through the motley scrub of thick sirkin, lentina, chakvar, and besharam bushes, until finally they arrived at the well into which Sapam had jumped and taken his life.

There was something about the place — as soon as they arrived, some thick thing covered their consciousness like a blanket. It was like a physical numbing, yet something that radiated a kind of shudder throughout all their bodily channels. They all felt as if suddenly Sapam would appear sitting on the broken rocks that formed a skirt around the edge of the well in the middle of all this undergrowth and declare, “Oh, I get it — you guys came here to get me to come to dinner! You go ahead, I’m on my way. .”

It was a very old well that hadn’t been in use for ten years. It must have been bored by hand. The soil here was rocky and craggy. It had to have been painstaking labor to dig this decent sized a well, inch by inch. The locals call it an indaara. Just think of all the iron that was ground down from the hoes, crowbars, and pickaxes used to dig seventy feet deep. It was constructed when there were no drill bores. It was said that this well used to supply the entire university. Now the main water station is located on another hillock.

Kartikeya shined his flashlight into the well. Roots, shrubs, and dry clumps of grass grew from the inside of the well. This growth encircled a darkness extending to the bottom of the wall, where far beneath lay the water. Supposedly, it was a very deep well. The light from the flashlight just reached the water level in the depth of that darkness. They couldn’t make out anything clearly, just reddish-green hues twinkling in the beam of yellow light. “How did Sapam find this particular well?” Kartikeya asked in a quiet, uneven voice.

“He said something about this once,” Praveen said. “I guess — I guess he’d been thinking about it for quite some time.”

“What other choice did he have? The reality is that even before committing suicide he’d already been done in,” said Masood.

“He should have become a terrorist. Then he could have taken revenge on everyone — the people who killed his brother, the people who stole his money and tried to sodomize him,” said Pratap Parihar.

“That’s not the right way to think about this,” Kartikeya said, suddenly roused. His voice had become more serious and firm, cold and tough like metal. He switched off the flashlight and said in the darkness, “Even after this horror you still can’t grasp the truth of who’s the terrorist and who’s the criminal?”

After this utterance of Kartikeya Kajle from Pune, the only sounds that could be heard were the night insects and the boys’ own breathing, such was the deep silence that spread through the darkness. The stillness, wordless and tense, combined with the tragedy of Sapam, awoke a surge of inner disquietude that made it hard to think straight at all. The calm was hardly peaceful, but rather anxious, disturbed, and suffocating.

Seventy feet below, in the depths of darkness, where the faint yellow light from the flashlight caught the surface of the water in reddish-green sparkle, Rahul sensed something floating. He touched Kartikeya on the shoulder. “I think there’s something down there. A bit to the right. Now up a little more.”

The dim light hardly reached the depths of the well, but there in its beam Rahul could make out one of Sapam’s sandals, floating on the surface. Two months ago, just after he and Rahul had become friends, Sapam had bought a pair of them in town at the Liberty shoe store.

Rahul wished he could somehow climb down deep into the well to retrieve the sandal. What awful irony. This plastic, inanimate, 40-rupee sandal that had come into being in Sapam’s life a short two months ago still exists, floating on the surface, while a real life was no more. Vanished in the shimmering water.

Not a word was spoken as they returned to the hostel. It seemed that Sapam himself had emerged from somewhere amid the bushes and shrubs, trailing behind them in the darkness. Head bowed, from the depth of his death. That must have been why Kartikeya shined the flashlight behind a few times. When he did, there was nothing. Only rocks, shrubs, and thorny, dried-out acacia.

As they passed through the corridor of the hostel they saw Room 212, Sapam Tomba’s room. The police and university administration had sealed off the room. An unfamiliar heavy-duty lock had been fastened to the door. The lock was frightening to behold. Peering out from behind it was Sapam’s death.

Rahul was wide awake late into the night. O.P. was just across the room in his bed against the far wall. He couldn’t fall asleep either, but neither spoke. It was a noiselessness neither had the strength to shatter. A few steps down the hall was Sapam’s room where he’d been living just four days ago.

At that moment, Sapam’s bloated body lay in town at the mortuary of the Mahatma Gandhi Hospital. How must his sweet, round face look now? The mortuary wasn’t even air-conditioned; dead bodies were laid out on ice blocks. The word was that the hospital workers pocketed even the money set aside for the ice.