FOR MY TENTH birthday, knowing I coveted Dinu’s air gun, my grandfather gave me one too, an imported nickel-plated Daisy. After I had practiced for several days, shooting at mangoes, Dinu came up with the plan that we would try out my new gun away from the house. Shoot at the evening train as it passed. “Moving targets, Myshkin,” he said. “Hitting old tins and fruits in the garden is for babies.”
Dinu now smoked, and he had a bottle of rum—pilfered from his uncle’s stash—hidden away in his room. He claimed he had kissed a girl. He was so far ahead of me in the ways of the world that I deferred to him in all such matters. Accordingly, I put my pellets and gun into my bag late that afternoon, and climbed through tall grass and lantana bushes to the railway line. I was quite a lot shorter than him and had to scramble to keep up with his long-legged lope. Near the railway line, we lay on our stomachs by the cutting to wait for the evening train. We talked in whispers to each other and Dinu put a blade of grass into his mouth to chew as he had seen cowboys do in Westerns. He pushed back an imaginary hat. Not a cloud wrinkled the sky, the world was enormous, I had no parents, I had my own gun. I plucked a blade of grass to chew on as well.
Sometime before sunset, we heard a distant hooting. Dinu turned on his stomach and readied himself. He narrowed his eyes. The thought crossed my mind that it might be a passenger train and not a goods train. I sat up with a jerk. Our bullets might go through the window, they might set the train on fire. I clutched Dinu’s arm to make him stop. He shook me off and aimed again.
The train hooted again and then it was upon us, so close that we felt the wind throw us back. What if my father were on it, coming home from Nepal? What if my mother was in it? The train boomed past us, Dinu pressed the trigger, I jogged his elbow, shouting in blind panic, “No, no! Don’t!”
When the train had gone, the noise receded, there was not another sound to be heard. The dry grass tickled me, I wanted to sneeze, I struggled not to sneeze. I could sense that Dinu was gathering his forces to pummel me half to death, but then I heard him whistle. “My first moving target. Myshkin, I’ve got us a bird for dinner.”
He got up from where he was and edged closer to something in the grass some distance away. The grass was moving. Then came a whimpering sound, followed by a moan and then a man’s voice crying, “My leg! They’ve killed me! Help! They’ve killed me!”
Dinu turned and fled. I did not think or pause, but scrambled to my feet and pelted after him. He bounded over rocks and humps of earth, I struggled to stay close. I caught up with him and clutched his arm. “Who did you hit? What happened?”
Dinu shook off my arm. “Don’t do that, you donkey.”
“But what if he is dead? We should go and check.”
He stopped walking abruptly and turned towards me. His face was very close to mine, his mouth smelled of smoke, he had two red pimples on his cheek, crusted with white. “And if he’s dead, what’s the good of checking? Not a word about this to anyone, understand? Who told you to blab about Lambu to my brother? You’ve got dung between your ears. You grabbed my elbow. You spoilt my aim. The man’s got hurt, he’ll go to your grandpa. That’s all.”
For days after, I stiffened at the sight of any man with a limp. I put my air gun away. Every now and then I asked Dada with elaborate casualness about his patients, hoping he would tell me he had treated a man with a pellet in his leg. Dada raised an eyebrow after a day or two of my questions. “So, Myshkin,” he said. “Do you want to be a doctor after all? Shall we lance a few abscesses together?”
Dinu and I did not talk about what had happened, as if mentioning it would bring forth batteries of wounded men on the warpath from behind the bushes. I did not see him for almost a week except in passing at school, where I avoided him, and although I could not have articulated it then, I think I knew we had begun the slow process of breaking away from each other.
Yet the sheer length of childhood friendship can keep it sputtering along despite every kind of failure. There is safety in the familiar. It is to Dinu that I turn when I have to verify details about my past and our effort to recall one thing takes us to another and in this way with one incident, then a second and a third, there is before us a series of signposts leading back to the ordinary happiness of days unclouded by adult differences. It was Dinu who reminded me about the forbidden films he took me to see on the sly, the booklets with pictures of film stars that we hoarded till they became greasy with handling. How we sat on the floor right in front of the screen and wolf-whistled through the final kiss. I had all but forgotten about our fascination for Fearless Nadia, the heat in our bodies at her length of bare thigh, and our determination to seek her out, whip and all, and free her of her clothing.