Anjum Hasan

Prasad swivels his head to watch a dragonfly that is moving too fast to allow him to fix its colour in his head. It is dazzling blue, but a moment later, transparent silver.

The September sun is beating down on the heads of the forty-two boys and nineteen girls of KP Kattimani High School. A map painted on the front wall of the school highlights this village in central Karnataka in large concentric rings, the circles radiating out towards the far borders of the state. The students sing one of Basava’s vachanas for the morning assembly, standing on a caked mud yard and facing a peach cement building at whose crown, above the school emblem, sits the sacred bull, Nandi. He is always in profile, always in that restful stone pose regardless of the weather. The vachana, now and then, takes the form of a question: ‘Isn’t one mention of the name of Shiva enough? Isn’t one mention of the name of God enough?’

Prasad has asked these questions many times in his last two years at the high school and for some reason – perhaps because of the enviable freedom of this dragonfly, perhaps because of the narrow, sweating face of the principal, Mr Hosaralli, whose glasses are of the kind that darken in the sun, and who opens his mouth wide to sing – he chooses not to repeat the questions this morning.

When the song is over, Mr Hosaralli says, ‘One of our students was not singing.’ The students know that the silence that follows this is not going to be filled with any subsequent remark. The principal is a man of few words which makes the little he says all the more ominous. His dark glasses add to his sinister aspect because outdoors no one knows who or what he’s looking at. Indoors he looks at no one. He addresses remarks to walls and windows and ceilings when talking to people.

The dragonfly returns and Prasad sees that its wings are really blue. He chases it to the head of his row.

‘Prasad Yelagodu,’ shouts the principal in his weak voice. He turns his back and marches off the platform and the students can finally walk out of the sun, one row at a time. Prasad follows Mr Hosaralli to his office, which is a room with only a few things in it, but things that none of the other rooms have – a table fan, a maroon pin cushion, a latch on the wooden cupboard on which hangs a shiny new lock.

Prasad bends and the principal whacks him on his behind with a thin cane. Once, twice, thrice. Prasad is not sure how many is the correct punishment, for this was a double crime – the crime of not singing compounded by the crime of breaking the line. Once, twice, thrice. Prasad remains bent because he is still not sure. Mr Hosaralli lays his cane down neatly on his desk and Prasad straightens and chants. ‘I am sorry for my bad behaviour and I will reform myself according to the precepts of Basava.’

‘Go and study,’ says Mr Hosaralli to the pin cushion. He has no interest in Prasad as such, even though he is the boy he canes most liberally. If he didn’t call him out by name, Prasad wouldn’t even be sure he recognised him. The principal can choose to cane any student he likes but he has conversations with none. Prasad has come to understand that this is the man’s way of being neutral and powerful.

He goes to class. Usually, canings put him in a good mood. In fact, they are effective. They curb his natural restlessness for a while till something – the way a classmate’s teeth stick out, the longing for a second helping of buttermilk – makes him step out of line again. But today there is an itch in him that was not quelled by the cane. He kicks Srinivas on his bare, dusty ankle as soon as he sits next to him on the bench and Srinivas, displaying a belief in action before words, kicks him back and then asks him what his problem is.

Their teacher is building a wobbly column on the blackboard out of the names of all the Mughals. The column is straight till Akbar, then starts tilting to the right, and the history teacher extends his arm as though the letters have a magnetic force. Behind him the class talks as excitedly as a large family that has just been reunited after a long separation. When the teacher turns to face the class again, the noise subsides somewhat – all the same things are said but in milder tones.

Prasad and Srinivas kick each other discreetly and stab the ends of pencils into each other’s ribs. By the end of class, Prasad is fighting to keep his seat, while his attack on Srinivas has repercussions further down the bench, Srinivas’s jostling irritating the next boy, Kappanna, and Kappanna’s violent response in turn affecting the boy sitting next to him. When the copper bell is rung in the yard by the peon, and the history teacher walks out leaving his leaning tower behind, all the rancour drains away from the faces of the fighting boys as if they were enacting a battle specifically for history and the subject of maths requires completely new tactics.

***

At lunchtime the students sit in the round and are fed rice and rasam on steel plates along with glasses of watery buttermilk. The nineteen girls sit in a regal huddle, separate from the boys. Their presence over the two years has diminished the boys’ reactions from lofty disdain to mere contempt. In Prasad’s class, one or two boys jeer when a girl puts up her hand to speak, but on the whole they ignore the girls. Anything more would be seen as disguised interest.

Prasad is sitting in a corner where the boys end and the girls begin. He doesn’t know the name of the girl sitting near him, but next to her is Savitri from his class; she wears a bright silver nose-ring and is always the first female to walk into the classroom. The other girls follow, all a little shyer than her.

‘That rascal Bhagat,’ says Savitri to Prasad. She masses the watery mix expertly in her cupped palm and eats at great speed. ‘He gave me one and a half cups of rasam only. He pretends he’s giving two but the second cup is always half empty.’

Prasad eats silently for a few moments, stunned by the way the girl has addressed him – exactly like his grumbling neighbour Gangamma talks to her old, handicapped husband when they sit in the evenings on the veranda of their home.

‘What is this rasam and this rice?’ he says then, imitating her tone. He stops eating and gestures at his food scornfully with an open palm. ‘Nothing to bother about. I get enough of it at home.’

‘Don’t talk, Prasad Yelagodu,’ says Savitri. ‘I’ve seen you begging Bhagat for more buttermilk.’

The girl sitting between them makes an assenting sound. The two girls look at each other and snicker. Savitri licks her fingers clean with the thoroughness of a cat.

‘I’m telling you, I can throw away this food. I’m eating it only because I don’t want to eat the cane.’

‘You’re always boasting,’ says Savitri. ‘You’re always saying the cane doesn’t hurt you.’

‘The cane is nothing. It’s that donkey-face I don’t want to see.’

‘If you don’t want the food, feed it to Pinkie,’ the girl in the middle says suddenly, her tone authoritative. Pinkie is the school’s vegetarian dog.

Savitri is one thing but now this nameless scrawny creature with frayed ribbons in her pigtails is heckling him too. Anger makes Prasad shake the rice from his fingers and, in the same instant, lift the plate with his left hand and fling it into the yard.

A moment of respectful silence settles on the students.

‘He can be proud now,’ says Savitri contemptuously to her friend, no longer interested in addressing Prasad directly. ‘Now he can say, I am better than you because I threw away my rice.’

The younger boys say nothing, aware of how Prasad can come close to them and flick his fingernails at the cartilage of their ears in a peculiarly painful way, but Srinivas has scores to settle and calls out to the teachers eating lunch in one of the classrooms.

The maths teacher, Miss Pushpa, is confused about what happened despite the evidence of the rice grains scattered in the yard and the upturned plate. She finds it hard to believe that any of the greedy students of KP Kattimani High School would actually throw away food. Every noon, in fifteen minutes flat, there are sixty-one plates licked clean and sixty-one unsatisfied boys and girls.

‘What happened, Prasad?’ Miss Pushpa asks him with something approaching concern.

‘I didn’t feel like eating,’ he says brazenly.

‘Since when?’ she asks, to which Prasad says nothing. ‘Since when did you not feel like eating?’

‘Miss, I asked him to feed it to the dog,’ says the small but confident girl.

‘Are you not the sons and daughters of farmers? Haven’t you been taught that to waste a single grain of rice is a sin?’

The principal is called out. He shouts, ‘Prasad Yelagodu’ and goes back to his lunch.

Prasad gets up and starts to follow Mr Hosaralli but instead of turning the corner of the veranda, jumps off it and runs away. The throwing of the rice, the hunger that remains in the shape of a circle in his stomach, the glint of Savitri’s nose-ring, all of these are making him think wild things. He is thinking of the dragonfly he couldn’t catch. He is thinking of his cousin, Natesha, who works in a restaurant in Bangalore and sleeps in a backroom with his monthly earnings hidden in his underwear.

Bhagat, the bell-ringer, peon, lunch server and general dogsbody of the school, sits in the shade of the neem tree and indifferently watches Prasad run through the gate as if it’s a sight he sees every day. It’s only when he notices the principal shouting through the window of his office that he gets up and runs theatrically after Prasad.

Prasad sprints home. His parents are out in the fields; this is the time of the year when they harvest the bajra. They are lost among the tall, lush plants and will come home in the evening smelling of cut grass with small gashes from the leaves all over their bare arms.

From a shelf in the kitchen he takes down the rusty tin of Glaxo milk powder in which his mother keeps a few hundred rupees rolled up among the beads and bangles. With the notes still in his fist, he heads to the bus stand.

***

Prasad tries to stand unobtrusively in one corner of the kitchen while Natesha wraps up two idlis and a vada in a square of plastic and then does up the parcel in newspaper and ties it with a piece of string from a spool hanging near his head. As soon as he has finished, he starts to wrap up some lemon rice. Then idlis and a vada again. He is a food wrapping machine. There is a tall, sweaty dosa-making machine in a smoky corner of the kitchen and a noodle-frying machine next to him. Small barefooted boys smelling of the wet rags hanging from their shoulders come into the kitchen with orange tubs loaded with used dishes. They scrape leftover food into a plastic bin. Prasad is mesmerised by what they throw away – sometimes spoonfuls of the thick sludge of sambar, sometimes whole bowls of coconut chutney. Over and above the roar in the kitchen, he can hear the louder ruckus of the tiffin-eaters in the dining hall. That is why they don’t finish their food, he thinks. Because they’re talking so much. He waits for Natesha to offer him something but Natesha has only told him to stand quietly in a corner and wait.

‘Natesha,’ calls out Prasad now and then, but no one hears him. He goes to the toilet, recounts his notes and comes back. He asks a passing boy for a glass of water. Slowly the clamour of the tiffin-eaters dies out and Natesha says, ‘You want to see Bangalore, macha? Then how can you keep standing here all night?’

That is the way Natesha is. He is always implying that Prasad has said things he hasn’t. They go to the backroom where, among sacks of rice and plastic drums full of urad dal, Natesha changes into a pair of stone grey jeans. A grimy bouquet is embroidered in red on the right leg of the jeans, enclosing the word ‘Miracle’. He spits onto his comb and brushes his hair back, holding a speckled pocket mirror before his face.

‘I’ll show you such a place, you won’t believe your eyes. Music, shops, food, girls… everything in one place.’

Prasad hasn’t eaten anything since the small bag of peanuts he bought on the bus. He wouldn’t mind even a cold idli but Natesha hates this food. He eats it morning, noon and night and dreams of bright orange chicken legs hanging on long skewers in the windows of the small eateries in Shivaji Nagar. Prasad watches Natesha silently. He cannot remember exactly how much rice he flung away. He wants it back and he wants something for having thrown it away – some kind of compensation for the tragedy.

‘I ran away from school,’ he tells Natesha. ‘Donkey-face will cane me all morning when I go back.’

‘When did I say you should go back? They need more boys to clean the tables here,’ says Natesha casually.

Prasad considers this while Natesha puts on a pair of scuffed sneakers with ‘Nike’ written falsely in bold letters on their sides.

They go out into the cool night and reach pavements where there are men with ties mumbling into their phones and extremely thin girls in groups of three or four who talk so frantically to each other they have to keep stopping to catch their breaths. Prasad gets even hungrier, seeing these people. But he doesn’t look them in the eye. Natesha is alright but he is still wearing his scruffy blue uniform and rubber slippers in which he goes to school. He stays close to his cousin.

The last time he visited Bangalore, he and Natesha sat in Lal Bagh, listening to music on his phone and smoking cigarettes. Natesha tried to call some girl whose number he had but the girl kept cutting him off. Then they went and ate a whole chicken. Now Natesha is a year older and has more swagger in his stride. He walks into the mall without pausing for the security guard, who rises a little from his seat and then sits down again, readjusting his oversized peaked cap. Prasad knows that he would have liked to stop them but doesn’t have a reason to.

His heart leaps up with pride and the very lights in the enormous mall seem to him to belong in some secret way to Natesha, lights that are reflected a hundred times in shop windows bursting with things, many of which Prasad cannot even find names for. They stand stock still in the middle of this sky-high house of luxuries and laugh out loud. Then they take the escalator up.

After an hour, Prasad can no longer tell mannequins from humans. Everybody seems made of a glossier earth. He has marvelled at the shop just for neckties, the shop just for glittering ink pens, the shop just for biscuits. The cousins have taken pictures of each other against giant movie posters, or posed near make-up booths run by girls in men’s suits who ignore them. They have seen people gathered at an ocean of tables, eating what the cousins could never afford, checked out the kinds of sports shoes boys their age are wearing, and the bare arms and bottoms of girls who stand with their backs to them on the escalators without explanation or apology. It is the girls who bother Natesha the most, while Prasad looks at backlit pictures of burgers and chicken nuggets, and dwells on his hunger as if it were a dirty secret.

‘What macha?’ whispers Prasad finally, as they go for up the third time. ‘You can’t touch anything here.’

Natesha clicks his tongue impatiently. ‘You’re talking like a villager, macha.’

When they reach the top floor, he turns abruptly and walks into a gigantic shop; they cannot see the ends of it. Everywhere are jeans they could fit into and jackets in whose pockets their hands could easily go.

‘Let’s buy something,’ says Prasad before Natesha can suggest it. He actually wants to grab something and run. He’s sure he can run many times faster than that fat man at the door, but what about Natesha? Will he follow him? Will he know what to do?

‘This is not that kind of place, Prasada,’ says Natesha kindly, suddenly the mature elder brother. ‘You won’t get anything for fifty rupees here. We’re going now, ok. We’re going to A1 Biriyani Point.’

Prasad is going to suggest that they filch something but spots, right then, a sign announcing “Rs 35” in large green letters.

They casually walk over to a shelf crowded with cans. Prasad glances at the other people in the store. He is careful to match his expression with theirs. Everyone looks bored or is talking very loudly.

‘Scent,’ he says. ‘Only 35.’

‘Deo. You don’t know what it is.’

Prasad smiles for the first time that day. ‘Scent,’ he repeats, examining the large spray-can with admiring fingers.

‘You got lucky, macha,’ says Natesha. ‘You got an offer price.’

They head to the cash counter. A girl with a big mouth painted the colour of a bad bruise takes the can without looking at either boy and says in a cool voice, ‘Five sixty-five.’

There is silence all around.

‘One second,’ says Natesha.

‘No,’ says Prasad, also in English. ‘Thirty-five.’

‘Five sixty-five,’ says the girl in the same tone. ‘Thirty-five rupees off. Actual price six hundred.’

She’s looking at them now without actually challenging them. They could always return the thing. They could change their minds.

‘I told you, macha. I told you about the price,’ says Natesha and opens his wallet. ‘Take three hundred from me.’

He wants to impress the girl. Prasad can’t believe it. He wants to impress someone he’s never going to see again. At least Savitri, for whom Prasad threw away his rice…

‘Let’s go,’ says Prasad. ‘We have to urgently go.’

‘Give me your cash,’ says Natesha coldly. Nothing in his tone indicates that for him three hundred is probably the savings of a full month.

Prasad slowly brings out the crumpled notes he stole from his mother’s tin. Maybe Natesha is pulling some kind of stunt and in the end they’ll get all their money back. But the money disappears beneath the counter and the girl smiles at them with her purple lips and puts the spray can in a plastic bag that’s far too big for it.

‘The money,’ shouts Prasad.

‘Chicken next time,’ says Natesha.

‘I don’t want this,’ Prasad tells the girl. ‘Give me my money.’

‘You idiot,’ says Natesha and tries to push him away.

Prasad turns to face him and he sees that this is what the whole day’s itch was leading to: he must fight his cousin in the bright lights of this mall with this girl watching – Natesha, who was his only hope when he ran out of the school gate.

He lunges at him headfirst.

Natesha thinks he’s exaggerating. Only when he’s slammed in the chest does he realise what Prasad means and he, the stronger and older of the two, catches the hair at the base of Prasad’s neck and swings his face towards him. He delivers a hard slap on his cheek and then another. All at once, Prasad gives up; he becomes like the weeping child who looks up, for redress, at the face of the very same parent he is trying to resist.

By the time the salesgirl has gone across the huge store and come back with the security guard, by the time the curious people who’d gathered around to watch and comment in an English that Prasad didn’t understand have drifted away, he is sitting on the floor, the heels of his palms pressed into his eyes. Natesha tucks the spray can into the waistband of his jeans.

The guard takes them all the way down and waits till they’ve crossed the asphalt and gone out of the gate.

‘Fighting,’ he says to his colleague at the main door. ‘Fighting over what to buy.’

***

It’s past nine o’clock. Prasad, still sniffing, and Natesha, grim, walk in silence. They pass the huge painted walls of the city, decorated with images of asymmetrical palaces and gap-toothed chimpanzees. There is no one but an auto-rickshaw driver peeing on the pictures, his empty auto parked nearby. Buses speed past, their rumble obscured by a sudden train on the railway bridge. The two boys can see the lighted windows in which other people are more content than them.

They walk for half an hour and, from nothing, go straight into the crowds. Everyone’s steps are more hurried as they approach the intercity bus station, as if to reach faraway destinations faster. But Prasad and Natesha continue at the same slow pace.

Amid the pavement sellers of suitcases and bus timetables and wilting fruit, an old woman is frying bhajjis on a blue pushcart in the light of a hurricane lantern.

Natesha stops and says, ‘When did I say we can’t even eat bhajjis?’

They bring out all the coins and notes they have. After deducting Prasad’s bus fare, there are about twenty-five rupees left.

They stand by the cart and wolf down egg bhajjis. Then they eat baigan bhajjis and chilli bhajjis. After they have used up their money, the woman gives them one just-fried, too-hot-to-hold onion bhajji apiece.

‘Eat,’ she says and laughs, revealing red stubs of betelnut-corroded teeth. They wipe their greasy hands on squares of old newspaper.

Afterwards, as Prasad is boarding the bus, Natesha pulls out the can from his waistband and chucks it over to his cousin who catches it one-handedly with the deftness of a wicketkeeper.

‘What did I say?’ Natesha asks indignantly, then disappears into the crowds in the station.

When the bus starts, Prasad is humming, sleepily, the Basava vachana of that morning. ‘To erase thousands upon thousands of sins, isn’t one mention of the name of Shiva enough? Isn’t one mention of the name of God enough…’

He thinks of donkey-face’s cane and of kicking Srinivas when he isn’t looking and the voice of his mother screaming when she discovers the missing money, and all the other things in his life that are both comforting and irritating for exactly the same reason.

He uncaps the can and wildly sprays his face with so much deodorant, the whole bus smells of it all the way home.

(This story is excerpted from the forthcoming short fiction collection Difficult Pleasures by Anjum Hasan (Penguin Books, 2012).

Anjum Hasan
Anjum Hasan is an Indian poet and novelist. She was born in Shillong (Assam), Meghalaya and currently lives in Bangalore, Karnataka, India. Mostly recently, Hasan has written  The Cosmopolitans (2015), a novel that deals with art and nostalgia.