Nandini

The very sight of Nandini knocks people over and they compete for her attention, hoping that she’ll notice them. Her gestures, her spirit, and her manner play havoc with common sensibilities. But she has more. She has insouciance and the charge of summer lightning. How could you blame them for falling in love with her?

Karan blamed his peripheral vision. She walked into it one day wearing a floral dress that swirled in the breeze. Things that swirled caught his attention. A faint hint of perfume teased his senses. He saw her and quickly looked away, then had no choice but to return his gaze to her. That was it for a while.

The next time he saw her she was wearing a purple T-shirt and white jeans. The jeans were embroidered with brass studs that glinted in the sun. He stared. Stuff that glinted got his attention. She caught him staring at her legs. That was it for a while.

They finally met. She was smoking a long, thin cigarette in the college canteen. And the smoke made him cough. The cough brought tears. Tears got her attention. She stubbed out the cigarette and walked up to him.

“Speak,” she said.

He coughed again and he glanced around at his friends. They were busy watching him struggle. She sat next to him and wouldn’t go away. He waited for words to form. The canteen emptied.

Karan was tall, good-looking, and a chikna who appeared lost all the time. He didn’t have a bike like the other studs and he didn’t wear brands, not even the cheap rip-offs. He wasn’t part of any of the cliques on A, B, or C Road. The girls were wary but intrigued by his brooding eyes and loner disposition. Here were secrets to be found.

He landed the girl who all the boys chased. She breached his honeycomb. Nandini was the only one to walk up to him and hold his hand. She liked his long fingers, his fair complexion, and the feelings he evoked. When Nandini held his hand his demeanor changed. What was diffident became shy, what was distant became a hesitant proximity. He discovered he liked holding hands and thankfully she led him on; this is why the affair happened. It shocked the class but he wasn’t thinking and she didn’t notice. Their relationship moved rapidly and he had no experience but she knew what she wanted. For the first time in his life heaven was on earth. He shuffled around the city as if in a cocoon that obscured its common nature. Time was elastic and days stretched as weeks flew by.

Nandini was born to a Hindu father and Christian mother. Her father was in the army and his postings flirted with the perimeter of the Indian map. He was a valiant officer who had survived some challenging campaigns. But one morning the neighbors found him slumped over the steering wheel of his jeep, his dead body pushed against the horn.

Nandini took to poetry at a young age to deal with heartache and taking care of her mother after his death. Yes sir, she took control. She had her father’s disposition, his athletic flair, and his ability to kick ass. They lived in a small house on the outskirts of Pune with two bedrooms and a flower bed out front. It had a view of hills till a newly constructed apartment blocked their vista. Clothes fluttered where trees used to sway.

Soon Nandini won a sports scholarship to a college in downtown Mumbai. She packed a bag and took the highway straight there. Life changed when she saw Karan.

“Karan who?” asked Nandini’s mother. “Tell me about him.”

The answer was not forthcoming because Karan was not forthcoming. Nandini had a job at hand. So she decided to learn everything about this fellow she was to marry. Karan who?

One evening she sat him down and tried to get him talking. She chewed a freshly sharpened Nataraj HB pencil and prodded: “Start with school­—everybody starts there.”

“I attended an English middle school,” he said, emphasizing the word English, the study of which was an early obsession for him. “Don Bosco School in Matunga. I was sent there for observation. A father was meant to watch over me, so he did and the children did too.”

“Why? Because you were a strange kid?”

He pretended not to hear that. He had never before known that he was even capable of pretending. “Nobody would come up to me. Nobody would sit next to me,” he said. “But all these nobodies would ask me questions, one after another.”

“Like?”

“Like, Where are you from? Do you have any brothers or sisters? Where do you live? Is that close by? Then why do you walk to school? And how come you always eat in the canteen?” He sat in silence for a moment.

“These are normal questions, Karan.”

“Yes, perhaps,” he replied. “But they always found my answers hard to believe.”

“So let me ask them,” she said, sitting up straight. “Where are you from, Karan?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you have any brothers and sisters?”

“I don’t know.” She stared at him sharply and he repeated it. “I don’t know.”

“Where did you grow up?”

“In a home, a place for homeless kids.”

“Was it close to the school?”

“Close? No.”

“Then why did you walk to school?”

“I had to. I had no choice.”

“Why did you eat every meal in the canteen?”

“Because it was free.”

And then Karan spoke some more, all on his own, for the first time in his life. “After this, the more pointed questions and observations would follow: Your clothes are a size too small. Why don’t you get new ones? Your shoes are torn, have you noticed? Who cut your hair? Your stationery is wrinkled and your compass box is broken; have you noticed? Are you poor? Yes, maybe there was poverty. Not just of the money kind. I had very few answers.”

You could have asked questions too, Karan, wrote the pencil in Nandini’s hand.

“But I never felt sorry for myself,” he continued. “Why would anybody feel sorry for what they are?”

You don’t react, that is your problem, wrote the pencil.

“People kept asking me what I was thinking. They wanted to know what I was feeling.”

And the answer is nothing, wrote the worn-out pencil.

“Nothing. I wasn’t feeling anything, I wasn’t thinking.”

“What subjects were you good at?” asked Nandini to change the topic.

That brightened him up. “I was good at math. I felt I never got tested in math. It was too easy. But I wasn’t good at explaining it to my friends when they would come to me for help.”

“How about sports?”

“I was good at chess. It was one game I could get obsessed with. I remember a grandmaster—a former student—who once played speed chess with ten of us kids. We all sat in a row and he walked to each table making moves at lightning speed. After a few moves he started spending a lot of time at my table. I noticed because people began to gather around us. In the end, the game was a draw. He beat everyone else and I let him draw. You are shaking your head but I’m telling the truth. I did let him draw, and he even acknowledged this afterward. He saw me hesitate over one move and he knew immediately. He asked me why I did it and I said nothing. You see, I didn’t want the attention. Everybody would have stared at me and would have asked me more questions. I hate questions.”

Next our genius will say he can bend a spoon, wrote Nataraj HB.

“What about early childhood?” Nandini tried instead.

He scratched his head. “I have very few memories of early childhood. I remember places and things, but not people.”

“Are you violent?” Nandini slipped in that question; something had compelled her to ask.

“Violent?” He sounded surprised. “You mean, have I gotten into fights? Aside from police training, where we had exercises in combat, no. But I was good in hand-to-hand only—I would often miss, but when I hit it was extremely hard. I could break bones, even when wearing a glove.”

“Did you ever apologize?”

Here he paused. Sorry? Should he have apologized? “No,” he said.

“So you hurt someone and you felt nothing?” She glanced down at his rough, hardened knuckles.

“Well, it hurt, of course,” he replied.

Big, lovable baboon, wrote Nataraj HB.

“But you didn’t feel anything inside?” asked Nandini, only half jokingly.

He nodded and said, “A teacher also once asked me this question. I remember that and I will never forget. She made me stay after school and write on the blackboard hundred times, I have feelings. It was very difficult for me. I took two hours. The teacher saw me struggle and asked me if I’d ever cried. I don’t remember ever crying. But when children would die at the home I’d feel ill sometimes, like I had a fever. Once I even vomited. I think it was because of the food.”

“The vomiting?” asked Nandini.

“No, the deaths,” replied Karan.

“You need to learn how to feel,” she told him sharply. She had broken the point of her pencil and so the interview was over.

He smiled to himself at the end. He wasn’t naive, nor was he dumb. He had analyzed his childhood and understood his hesitancy: the fact was that he had no ethnic identity, and in a country like India where your caste, creed, and religion define you, he had no way of introducing himself.

* * *

Their wedding happened at the Defence Club in Pune. Karan invited Welkinkar, who doubled as photographer. He did not invite Evam. The absence of guests from the groom’s side was noticeable, as just three tall and quiet young men stood in a corner and did not mingle with the rest. Most people thought they were undercover agents, but they were acquaintances from Evam’s Ward who like Karan had managed to outgrow the place.

Karan and Nandini made a striking couple. “You are a handsome bastard,” she had told him. “And you are killing it,” he replied, and they kissed while the guests looked on. Her mother handled the proceedings jovially but shed some tears whenever she remembered her husband. The Defence community had turned up in all their finery, the men with some gray at the temples, the women fully dyed, and they held their glasses tight and traded regiment stories, and when the deed was done they raised a hurrah for the dead father and someone clinked a glass and paid a glowing tribute and then they all retired to the lawns. The army veterans closely scrutinized this young police officer in the making and some raised their eyebrows while others just shrugged their shoulders.

“Does he drink?” asked the mother-in-law, a good Christian. “I could offer him some wine.” She had tried to break the ice with her son-in-law for a week after they first met and almost gave up.

Karan had no idea how to handle a mother-in-law. He was extra polite and the idea of loosening him up with alcohol seemed to work. One evening they had a few glasses of red, treacly wine and Karan, perhaps under the influence, walked up to her abruptly and hugged her, holding her close. He wouldn’t let go. She tried to step back but he held on. She was affected; she found this strange man of good heart.

“Hello, stranger,” she said. It was a phrase she would keep using.

“Hello, Mother,” said Karan. Strange words he thought he would never use.

Wasting no time after their marriage, Nandini soon announced, “I want a house with sloping roofs. Go find one.”

In Mumbai this was a tall order. Karan could find sloping roofs only in chawls. These two-story structures had tiled roofs and a rough disposition. They were intimate dwellings where you walked out of your room into a common corridor and right into your neighbor’s clothes that were hanging to dry. Chawl people borrowed sugar, salt, and each other’s thoughts. You listened to your neighbors’ radio and watched their lives play out like they did yours. Occasionally you fought and then pretended to make up. Everybody finally adjusted, burying their differences beneath a veneer of civility.

They bought three adjoining single-room units. They were in poor shape with cracked floors and exposed brick walls. No matter, said she. She had plans and all these plans worked well till the first rains came and then the flooding left the place in tatters.

“I should have married a damberwala,” she wailed. “I would have had a dry home. If his damber worked we would have made love. If it didn’t he would have held out a bucket.”

Karan held a bucket. And then an open pressure cooker, and finally an oil drum. When the rains paused, the damberwala came and poured black tar on their roof. And after he left they clambered up there and poured buckets of water to test the repairs. Nandini stood below with an umbrella just in case. There was no leak.

When the next rains came Karan and Nandini made love through the monsoons. They were a noisy couple and the neighbors learned to live with the rhythm of their nights.

“What’s happening?” asked someone that first time. They could hear whispers, immodest laughter, and then creaking furniture.

When they discovered that Karan was with the police force the chawl members got wary. All their transgressions stood out like beacons but he seemed to notice nothing. Soon life went back to the messy Indian way. Word of Karan’s exploits in the force began to percolate and a legend would eventually form. The fellow had a third eye. He was incarnate of someone called Karna, didn’t you know? The children wondered where he kept his gun. One boy who claimed to have seen it said it was black as a krait and had two barrels that resembled the exhaust of a car. Karan left for work every day with a trail of curious eyes following his jeep.

Every time he used the weapon in an assignment, Karan would ceremoniously clean it afterward. In the dead of night in the corridor outside his door, he would lay a white cloth on the floor, get down on his knees, and clean it. He was empty of feeling as he examined barrel, chamber, and snout.

* * *

“Can you break a sentence?” asked Nandini, startling Karan. She shook her newspaper and said, “This murderer wants a leave of absence from his jail term. No joke. Can you even do that? Can you break a sentence?”

Karan was back at school. His English teacher, Mrs. Rosario, was waving his test in front of the entire class.

“Broken English,” she admonished. She seemed distraught. Karan tried not to look at her and also ignored his classmates who were staring at him.

Mrs. Rosario started to read from his exam: “I met a man. He asked, ‘Do you remember me?’ I tried to say, ‘I do not forget.’ He shook his head. ‘Do you remember me?’ he asked again. He held my hands. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Try to remember me.’ He had forgotten. Karan,” said the teacher, “what is this? You have broken your sentences.”

Nandini offered Karan some tea and biscuits.

“Parole,” he said. That was the word that broke prison sentences.

She folded the newspaper twice and buttonholed the crossword. She licked a pencil and filled in parole. “What would the victim’s family think?” she asked.

Karan felt he was a victim at school. He could never finish a story.

His teacher was still waving his sheet. “What has he forgotten?” she asked. “What has the man forgotten?”

“His name,” replied Karan.

The class laughed and the teacher tried not to smile.

“Why do you break your sentences?” she asked.

Nandini’s eyes had strayed from the crossword. As Karan feared, she came across the news item. “Where did you go yesterday?” she asked him.

“I was at the Aarey Milk Colony.” There was no point in lying.

“Did you . . . ?” she began. “Were you responsible . . . ?”

“No,” he replied sharply. “No.”

“Did he have a family?” she asked.

“How should I know?”

“What was his name?”

“Panduranga. Vithaldas Panduranga.”