The Girl with the Golden Parasol

TWENTY-SIX

Shaligaram and Shailendra came with news that neither O.P. nor Rahul could believe. But once the six-foot-three skeleton accepted that the information was true, he did a dance worthy of Michael Jackson and ran off as fast as the queen of Indian track and field, P. T. Usha, to inform the others.

What happened was this: that day, each class from every department elected their counselors to the student union. Balram Pandey stood as a candidate for the first-year students of the Hindi department. Everyone knew he was the hopeful of Dr. Loknath Tripathi, since Balram even cooked for the professor at his home. Vijay Pachauri had nominated Balram, and Ram Narayan Chaturvedi had seconded the motion. It seemed as if he’d win, unopposed.

Shailendra George continued the story with a smile on his face. “So I just stood up and nominated Rahul for the fun of it. I thought even if he only gets two votes, Pandey shouldn’t be handed the election unopposed. Shaligaram was just about to stand up to second the nomination, when. .”

“Anjali Joshi,” Shaligaram cut in excitedly, “stood up from the girls’ side and said, ‘I second Rahul’s name.”’

“We did a quick count and figured if all the girls voted for our side, that would still leave Rahul with only eight votes, compared to Balram Pandey’s nine Brahmin votes, which would cinch it for him,” Shailendra said.

“We readied ourselves for defeat. But when the counting was done, Rahul had gotten nine votes and Balram Pandey, eight. He lost by one vote,” Shaligaram said, clapping his hands. “Someone defected from their side.”

“And I know who it was!” Shailendra George declared as if he were a spy. “It was Sudip Pant. Sharmistha brought him over to our side. Those two have a thing going on.”

O.P. had returned with the others. He’d brought a pound of roasted peanuts. They extracted Balbir from the mess hall and ordered ten cups of pauper’s chai.

It was with roasted peanuts and chai that the unexpected election victory was celebrated.

Ten days had passed. During his fever, Rahul had sped through Hazariprasad Dwivedi’s novel Anamdas ka Potha, enjoying it tremendously. After the news from Shaligaram and Shailendra about his election as councillor, Rahul stayed awake long after O.P. had gone to sleep.

The novel tells the story of a celibate monk, dwelling in a hut in the forest, who sees a woman for the first time in his life and experiences a sweet shiver up his spine, impossible to articulate. That night, Rahul experienced the same sweet, unexplainable shiver time and again. All over his body, and all over his soul — everywhere Anjali had touched.

“Why did you second my name? Why, Anji?” he whispered that night, all alone, like a bird might. Crouching in a nest hanging from a branch, suddenly stung by a blast of wind at night, the bird might mutter to itself, to the wind, or to the branch.

That night, Rahul had forgotten how his life, and the lives of countless others like him, was like a boat with weak sails, trapped inside a typhoon, in a decisive battle for its very existence, struggling desperately against the deranged and omnivorous waves churned up by the violent and crazed ocean of today’s world. Each time, the imperative of the waves wagered with their lives, his and the others’. And each time their lives were spared, by chance, by some unexpected miracle.

That night Rahul felt he was sleeping safe and sound on deck of some ship, as if he’d just been saved by the skin of his teeth from a Titanic-like disaster, and was now on a carefree cruise in calm and peaceful waters, sailing on an imponderable, loving ocean. A full autumn moon was in the sky, really nothing more than Anjali’s presence. She was silently composing a new life story, written on his forehead with her moonbeams.

Just at the point of falling into a deep sleep, Rahul remembered part of a poem of his beloved poet Lorca:

On my forehead

The moon’s immortality

I want to sleep for a short time

An hour, a night, a week, a year

A century, perhaps

I am tired, endlessly tired