Post by Arihant on Nov 25, 2008 22:21:15 GMT
At four o’clock on the twenty-ninth of March, 2004, Bhadraksh felt as if his brain had rattled loose in his head. Every time the organ collided with the hard bone of his skull, a wave of pain so strong that it made him nauseous radiated outwards, like the picture he had seen of the earthquake in his Geography textbook last Tuesday. The waves of pain usually started somewhere above his left temple, passing around the back of his head, over and under his hair and across his face, where, along with the regular pain, it set off little resonating jabs and tears at the nerve endings in the eye that, with the help of the cheekbone below it, was currently busy growing a tender purple swelling and the nose that was currently making a whistling noise every time Bhadraksh’s sharp, infuriated breaths passed through it.
“Hey! Hey, sudra boy!”
He sighs and starts simultaneously, weary of the fear that is choking him. He turns.
Coming down the corridor towards him is a boy of his own height, his own age, roughly his size. And a few others. The leader’s hair is black, short, and his brown eyes glint with anticipation.
Predatory though he may be, this isn’t the sort of boy that Bhadraksh should have to be afraid of.
Walking made the earthquake worse. His head didn’t take kindly to being moved at all, even in the slow, gentle rocking motion that was every painstakingly cautious step he took. Moreover, it didn’t help that at least half of the people who looked at him as he passed winced just at the sight of him. The other half of people who saw could be subdivided into three sections: those who tutted disapprovingly, those who stared, wide-eyed and gormlessly, and those who turned, whispered something in their companion’s ear, and brought his battered face to the attention of yet another person.
But their faces were passing in and out of focus, blurring into the landscape and leaping out at him alternately, the orange sunlight of dusk suffusing painfully against his vision and tinting every single moped, every single stall, every single shack with a hideous carrot colour that had him staring at the grey road beneath him as he walked, thankful for the one area of his vision that wasn’t bombarded with glaring Technicolor.
The boy’s name is Dilpreet, and he is flanked by his friends, Jagat, Ibhya and Aiswaran. Jagat is a good five inches shorter than Bhadraksh, who has always been tall for his age. Ibhya has a trick shoulder that dislocates at the slightest provocation – Bhadraksh has seen him display this to his classmates many times before. Aiswaran is heavy, clumsy and slow, and his menace isn’t enough to make him any better at fighting. Dilpreet and Bhadraksh are around even, Bhadraksh thinks.
He’d have, at worst, reasonable odds in his favour if he was fighting any of them one on one. But they aren’t stupid enough to try, and when they’re together, Bhadraksh doesn’t have a hope.
He doesn’t even try to fight back, either, because he knows that nothing good can come of it. If they’re caught fighting, it will be the word of three vaisya against one sudra as to who started it. Bhadraksh has decided that it is better to wait out the storm and pray that it ends soon.
And the storm is coming now. These people don’t talk to Bhadraksh unless the skies are clouding over.
A storm is coming. A fight is coming.
Dilpreet has caught up with him.
His footsteps, for all his attempts at caution, were baby deer footsteps, clumsy and stumbling, but miraculously he managed to keep from falling down until the beautiful vision of his apartment block hit his view. He felt like he would have wept with relief, if he was that sort of person.
As it was, he shuffled quickly to the door, one hand fumbling in his pocket to retrieve his keys. His fingers closed on them quickly, and as he pushed the cold metal into the keyhole his whole body sagged onto the wood – against the door, against his will. In public.
As if he needed to attract any more attention to himself.
He forced himself to stand straight, eyebrows furrowing in irritation at his own weakness, twisted the key roughly and shoved the door open with the palm of his hand; one of the few parts of his body that wasn’t aching. Shutting the door behind him, he rejoiced in the calming gloom of the corridor, something he had never had cause to do before.
“Did you not hear me, sudra boy?” Dilpreet asks, his voice open and friendly, as petulant as if Bhadraksh was a childhood friend who was ignoring him. If it weren’t for the sudra boy comment, an onlooker could easily assume that that was the case.
“I heard you,” Bhadraksh says, his voice very calm and cool, but completely free of all pretensions. The hatred that he feels for these boys stabs through every word, frozen and pointed as an icicle.
Dilpreet looks back at his friends, a horrible little smug smile pinching the corners of his lips. Then back to Bhadraksh: “So they don’t teach little sudra boys to answer when they’re spoken to, then? Did you know that, Aiswaran?”
A dagger laugh. “Nope. But I’m not surprised.”
“Me neither,” added Ibhya, who is incapable of forming his own thoughts.
“Hey, I am,” interjects Jagat, and the other three look around at him. “What?” he asks them, exaggeratedly shrugging off their attention as if they are staring at him, making him uncomfortable. It’s an act. Jagat is a cocky little bástard; everything he does is for show. “It’s not weird, being surprised. Wouldn’t you have thought that that uppity bítch of a mother he has would have taught him better?”
Bhadraksh does not rise to the bait about his mother. He has heard worse. But muscles stand out in his jaw as he clenches his teeth together.
“Aw, yeah, you’re right,” says Aiswaran. “You’d think she’d have let him have the benefit of her experience.”
“Taught her all the manners of Australia,” Dilpreet counters.
“But judging by her behaviour, what sort of manners must Australia have?”
“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? Social climbing.”
“Sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong.”
“Being sent money from the big rich Western relatives when you’re too ignorant to know how to make your own.”
“Yeah! Money from the West. A charity case. Like all the little beggars in the street…”
“And what problem should he have with being a beggar in the street? I’ll bet he has relatives who are beggars in the street. Sudra boy should be proud of his herita-”
“What do you want?” Bhadraksh interrupts, unable to keep his composure any longer. His voice is still very cool and low and calm. He is still not rising to the bait. But he wants the subject changed. It’s all leading the same way, anyway; it doesn’t matter if they’re talking about something else while the storm starts crashing.
Dilpreet stops looking at his friends, turns back to Bhadraksh, and as he does so, his minions follow his example. The friendly façade drops from his pale face – paler than Bhadraksh’s, anyway, physical evidence of his caste’s superiority – and answering hatred to Bhadraksh’s own ripples across his detested features.
It’s starting.
The corridor’s shade wasn’t usually something that Bhadraksh finds comforting. There were no windows in the corridor, and no electrical lighting, either: there was electrical lighting in most of the rest of the building, so there was no expense to waste on lighting the corridor. The perma-darkness of the little hallway generally made Bhadraksh feel claustrophobic and a little ill – it felt like someone had smeared a film of dust over his vision, and he always got out of the place as quickly as possible so he could see properly again.
But just now, he felt better in this place. It was good. Calm. Silent.
So instead of proceeding up the threadbare carpet and up the stairs and up into his family’s rooms, he decided to just lie down for a little while. Just to rest. His head felt like it was melting, and that wasn’t the sort of feeling that he wanted to greet the rest of his family with, and it was even less the feeling he wanted to answer his family’s barrage of questions about the state of his face with. If he just lay down for a little while...
Before his mind made any conscious decision, his body decided for him: his back fell against the door that he had forced himself to stay off outside and he was powerless to stop himself. He slid down the front of the door, limply thudding against the ground without ever leaving the hard support of its surface. It felt like maybe it was acting as a substitute for his spine, at the moment, and that would be fitting, considering just how weak he was to do this.
But he couldn’t force himself to think about his moment of weakness right now; he was too busy being trapped in it. His head tilted forward, and he swam out of his own consciousness.
“What do you mean? Do you mean why did we come to see you, sudra boy?” asks Dilpreet, taking a step closer.
Bhadraksh nods once, standing his ground.
“Isn’t it obvious?” asks Jagat.
Dilpreet smirks. “Maybe not for a sudra,” he said. “Or maybe not for all sudras, maybe just for this one. After all, most sudras know their place. They know if they’ve done something out of line. They know if they’re acting like presumptuous little bàstards in front of thirty other people, don’t they, Ibhya?”
“Should do.”
“Yeah, right, you’re right, they should.”
Bhadraksh knows what they’re talking about now, and he wants to slap himself for being so stupid. It is supposed to be his prerogative in school to keep his head down, keep silent and try to learn as much as he can without making himself obvious, and usually it works, but today, he – He doesn’t know. He guesses that he wasn’t thinking. The teacher was staring out at the rows of nodding heads, looking around for anyone to answer the question he had just put to them, and when he asked it for the third time, adding many colourful terms about the idiocy of this class he had been cursed with, Bhadraksh had, in a moment of insanity, raised his hand and given the correct answer. And the teacher had, after a moment of surprise at his actually speaking, praised him and said – apparently completely unaware of the ramifications that his words would have – asked the rest of the class why they couldn’t apply themselves like this boy did.
But it wasn’t his fault. He shouldn’t have to think about things like this coming up as a mere result of his participating in class. Bhadraksh isn’t going to apologise. The other boys realise this as he thinks it.
He knows that they don’t care. Even if he did apologise, they would still do what they are about to do. But the fact that they realise this means that judgment is going to come a lot faster.
“So what is it, sudra boy?” Dilpreet asks, another step closer to Bhadraksh now, so close that Bhadraksh can smell him. The hatred he feels seems too big to fit inside one person. “Think you’re better than us? Think you’re smarter? Think you can just come in and do whatever the hell you want? Think you can beat us?”
“No,” Bhadraksh says simply. He is lying.
And the aimless cruelty that has been flitting around the faces of his four assailants focuses into a burning rage. And that rage focuses on him. “You’re lying,” Dilpreet says. Clearly he hadn’t even considered the fact that Bhadraksh could actually be guilty of what he was accused with. Dilpreet’s own sense of self-importance probably couldn’t take it.
But it’s not surprising that he could figure it out. Bhadraksh’s denial had been ringing with contempt. He couldn’t stop himself.
He couldn’t stop himself.
He can’t stop them.
“You little lying bástard. You little lying bástard sudra. Think you’re better than us? Well. Good.”
“How is it good?” asks Jagat, fitting in exactly to where he is expected.
“How so, Jagat?” Dilpreet’s voice is also shot through with contrived wit. “Well, think about it. If he thinks something that’s wrong, we need to teach him what’s right. We need to teach him a lesson.”
His eyes glinted. “I don’t know about you boys, but there’s nothing I love better than teaching little lying bástard sudras a lesson.”
Bhadraksh tenses, quelling the little fluttering urgency in his throat that tells him to run fast, run far, do anything to get away from this. If it was a couple of years ago, he would have run, but he’s too proud now. Running is not an option.
The first punch nearly sends him flying.
He didn’t know how much time passed before he swam back into consciousness – a minute, two, an hour, a day, an eternity – it all seemed the same just now. In fact, ‘swam’ was not an accurate term, now, because it was the pain of his pounding head that brought him back to reality, and so he didn’t swim back, he was dragged kicking and screaming, pulled over a bed of nails, over hot blazing coals.
When he was conscious enough to realise the situation he was in, he felt disgusted with himself for letting himself collapse like that, and regardless of the crashing tidal wave of pain that wrenched through his skull when he did, he pushed himself up on his feet and forced himself to walk quickly up the stairs and into his living room. He ignored the stumbling that nearly had him falling down the stairs four times.
The living room, he was pleased to note, did not have the same effect on his eyes as the street outside had, even though the same orange light was still present. It didn’t seem so offensive when it was highlighting his father’s old sofa, the patchy red rug that covered it, his sister’s pile of scraps of paper and random exercise books which were her supposedly ‘organised’ school notes, the faded bejewelled lampshade that dripped from the ceiling, the swords that glinted menacingly in the corner, the books scattered over every available surface, and the wide, horrified eyes of his twelve-year-old brother.
Bhadraksh sighed irritably, and didn’t meet his gaze for more than a second. Rather, he turned and walked to the bathroom, both annoyed with his brother’s reaction, and glad that it was only one reaction he had to deal with. The rest of the family didn’t seem to be in, so Bhadraksh should have been thankful. If he was this irritated with one horrified stare that made him feel like a freak trapped under glaring circus lights, he should have been thankful that he hadn’t been treated to the same multiplied by four.
“Jesus Christ, Bhadraksh!” gasped Mohana, as he got up to follow him. “What on earth happened to you?”
If it was any other time, Bhadraksh would have been irritated afresh by his brother’s habit of swearing in English instead of Hindi, like normal people (his father didn’t know what Mohana was saying, and his mother just didn’t care – in fact, she did the same herself, from time to time), but right now, he was too busy surveying the damage of his face in the bathroom mirror. It looked worse than it probably was, he decided. A huge purple swelling graced his left eye – against his skin tone, it almost looked black. His bottom lip had split, and the resulting cut had dribbled a little trail of blood down his chin. His nose had taken quite the beating, and he felt it gently for a break, but luckily for him, it just seemed to be bruising. He doubted his nose ever would break again, because it had been broken before, when he was five, and the resulting heal, while leaving his nose crooked, had left the bone so strong that it had been able to withstand a further nine years of encounters like today, and like the one that had broken it in the first place.
After having ascertained that his face would live to take another fist, he moved onto the insistent pain in his side that hadn’t been evident until he had woken up from his brief period of unconsciousness, but that was becoming stronger and stronger every second. He lifted up his shirt and bent over to see a huge, black bruise the size of his hand on the right side of his abdomen. For a moment he couldn’t remember how he’d got it, but then he recalled the parting kick in the side that Aiswaran had given him, apparently unable to keep himself from trying to do some serious damage.
Nothing was broken, he was sure. He’d know if it was broken; he knew what it felt like.
But it was sure as hell going to hurt tomorrow.
He dropped the shirt, and as he did, Mohana spoke again. He had been watching quietly through the door for Bhadraksh’s whole inspection, without Bhadraksh’s realising it. This irritated him.
Mohana’s words irritated him even further. “Bhadraksh? Are you going to answer my question?”
He wasn’t.
He walked out of the bathroom, past Mohana, and into the part of the living room that served as the kitchen. While doing so, he asked, “Where is everyone else?”
He pulled a saucepan out of the cupboard, and set it under the tap to fill, but when he turned the handle, he discovered that their water wasn’t working. Again. Nothing more than a pathetic little trickle spurted into the pot. He’d just bet that the electricity wasn’t working, too.
No tea for Bhadraksh, then. He dropped the saucepan into the sink, glad of the loud clatter it made, and turned, leant against it, folded his arms. “Well?” he snapped at Mohana, irritated by the look of concern and pity creasing his eyes. Everything Mohana was doing tonight irritated him, even though they’d only been in the same room for five minutes. This wasn’t uncommon.
“They went out,” said Mohana, very helpfully. Bhadraksh gave him an exasperated look, and so he elaborated. “They have a meeting with Vidya’s teacher, I think, and then they said that they were going to go to the well to get some water, ‘cause of – well, ‘cause of that.” He gestured at the tap that had just failed Bhadraksh. “They think that there’s a break in the pipe, or something. The lights are still working, anyway.”
“Right,” Bhadraksh said, not really caring. Break in the pipe, drought, someone deciding that the sudras on the first floor didn’t deserve running water anymore – whatever it was that caused it, it still meant that he was going to have to go thirsty.
There was a brief silence, which Bhadraksh hoped Mohana would take as his cue to leave him alone, but he knew that that hope was a vain one. Mohana lingered, then offered a pearl of wisdom. “You should get those cuts cleaned. You might get them infected if you don’t.”
Bhadraksh resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “And how does that work if we don’t have any water, runt?”
Mohana’s face fell a little bit, but then he had another flash of inspiration. “Hold on, I have an idea.”
“Stop the presses,” Bhadraksh said.
A wave of irritation over Mohana’s face for a moment, Bhadraksh noted with satisfaction, but it quickly smoothed away. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
And he left, praise Shiva.
Bhadraksh heavily thudded into one of the mismatching chairs that surrounded the kitchen table, leaning his face forward into his hands before realising that that action caused him far too much pain to really be worth it. He didn’t feel good. He felt dizzy, nauseous. The last thing he wanted right now was to have to deal with Mohana.
But his brother clattered back into the kitchen, and Bhadraksh turned to look at him wearily. He’d just have to put up with him for now.
And then he saw what his brother was holding.
“What the hell, Mohana?”
Mohana looked embarrassed. “Alcohol is good for disinfecting things.”
“I know that, runt. But you are not putting that stuff on my face.”
“Look, it’s the best we’ve got – ”
He tried to keep calm. “You are not putting that stuff on my face.”
“You know mum won’t mind. She never drinks it anyway.”
He glared at his brother and spoke through gritted teeth. “I don’t care if mum minds or not. You are not disinfecting my face with fùcking schnapps.”
“Look, but Bhadraksh, listen, I’m sure it would be better than nothing – ”
“Mohana, I swear to Shiva, if you don’t put that bottle away right now…”
“But if it gets infected you’re going to have to – ”
“Mohana, for the love of – ”
“Please, Bhadraksh.”
Bhadraksh looked at his brother and sighed heavily.
Mohana wasn’t going to back down, he could tell that much. His brother, scrawny and runty and stupid as he was, was his brother nonetheless, and no brother of his was ever going to back down on something like this without a fight.
And Bhadraksh really didn’t want another fight today.
“Fine. But be quick.”
Mohana smiled. “Thank you,” he said, and he walked over to grab a cloth from the sink. A couple of silent seconds passed as he wrung the fabric into the sink, presumably trying to get whatever germs as he could out of it without clean water. Then he tipped the bottle of dubiously pink alcohol – peach schnapps, Bhadraksh noted with exasperation, he was going to stink of it for weeks – into the cloth, let a little run out onto it, came up to Bhadraksh, and placed the material on his face.
It stung, but Bhadraksh didn’t flinch.
“This might sting a little,” Mohana added as an afterthought, and Bhadraksh wanted to clip him around the back of the head.
“Really,” he said flatly.
Mohana’s clumsy fingers fast found every ripped nerve ending on Bhadraksh’s face and made it their business to jostle all his wounds as much as possible. There was only so much he could take of this, and before long, he found himself forced to say, “Look, runt, give it here, I’ll do it myself.”
“Oh,” Mohana said, as the cloth was pulled away from him. “Right. Sorry.”
“And you want to be a doctor, bashing at my face like that?” Bhadraksh asked sourly, pressing the cloth gently against his nose and trying to mop up as much of the congealing scarlet liquid as he could. He didn’t want to see the look on his father’s face as it was; it would help if he wasn’t as caked with blood as an extra in a bad horror movie.
“Sorry,” Mohana said again, and Bhadraksh sighed again. Mohana was dreadfully apt at making him do that. “Sorry, I’m not very good at… yeah. Sorry.”
“You apologise one more time and I’m going to have to smack you on principle,” Bhadraksh warned, feeling a little better as the sting of the alcohol on his face roused him. And as he felt better, he settled comfortably back into the familiar apathy he felt when it came to just about everything his younger brother said and did. It wasn’t normal for him to care enough to be irritated by him.
“Sorry – no, wait, sorry, I – right. I’ll stop talking.”
“That would be nice,” Bhadraksh said, passing the cloth over his face one more time before tossing it into the sink. His face felt sticky now, but he didn’t care. He was feeling more like himself, at least.
And feeling more like himself brought back his sense of practicality, which was a bonus.
“Are we going to have to do dinner ourselves, then, if mum and dad aren’t coming back?” he asked Mohana, turning back to face him.
“I think so.”
“Right. I’ll sort that out, then,” he said, slipping back into the bored, monotonous tone that he usually adopted when talking.
“I think there’s some daal in the fridge,” Mohana said. “You could heat that up.”
“Yeah,” Bhadraksh said, opened the fridge and pulled out the chipped, blue ceramic bowl that held the leftovers of last Sunday’s dinner. “I’ll put this on in the oven, then.”
“OK. Thanks.”
Bhadraksh didn’t bother answering, just walked across the kitchen in silence to switch the oven on. He was gratified to see that it was, in fact, working – it was clearly just the water that was down, as Mohana had said.
A full minute must have passed in silence as he placed the food in the oven, which wasn’t unusual for their household, but it was unusual for Mohana when he was in this mood. Bhadraksh waited for him to break it.
“Bhadraksh…”
“Mmm.”
“What… I mean, if you don’t mind me asking – what… what did that to you? Did you fall?”
Bhadraksh didn’t answer for a moment. “I do mind you asking,” he said eventually.
“Oh…”
He wasn’t going to leave it there.
“But it’s just, I... I mean, your face, you’re going to have to explain it to mum and dad anyway, so I figure that there’s probably no harm in your telling me.”
“It’s none of your business, runt, leave it.”
Silence again.
“Something bad happened, didn’t it? It wasn’t an accident?”
“For fùck’s sake, Mohana!” Bhadraksh snapped, turning away from the oven and glaring down at his stupid short nosy childish brother. He just had to keep pushing him, didn’t he? Did the idiot have no idea when to stop?
“I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t ask, but…”
“If you know you shouldn’t, then don’t. It’s not rocket science.”
“I want to know,” he said, twisting his shirt around his hand in agitation. “Bhadraksh, if they did it to you again –”
“Shut up.”
“You need to tell someone! You can’t just let it keep –”
“Shut up, runt.”
“Where does it stop, Bhadraksh? What do they have to do to you before you tell someone? Or will you never tell? Are you just going to let them do it until they… until they kill you?”
“They’re not going to kill me, you moron,” Bhadraksh said, forcing calmness into his voice.
“How do you know?”
“Because they’re not that stupid. And it’s not that bad. And I’m not going to tell anyone.”
“For God’s sake, Bhadraksh,” Mohana said, doing his stupid English swearing again as his eyes creased up with worry, “you’re being stupid. If you don’t tell someone, it’s never going to stop.”
“It doesn’t need to stop. It’s fine. I’m fine.”
“No you’re not!”
Bhadraksh didn’t dignify that with an answer. Instead, he pushed past Mohana into the living room, and as he walked, he said, “Dinner will be ready in fifteen minutes. Mohana, this conversation is over, you hear me?” He used his most final tone, the one that he knew would keep Mohana from going on, the one that would just get him to leave him alone. It was bad enough that he was going to have to talk to his parents later. He wasn’t about to sit and listen to life advice from a goddàmn twelve-year-old.
“No,” said Mohana after a brief pause. “No, it’s not over. Bhadraksh, I want to talk about this.”
Bhadraksh kept the surprise that he felt at Mohana’s persistence off his face, and answered, “I don’t care. I don’t care if you want to talk about it. It’s not your problem.”
“You’re my brother, of course it’s my problem!”
“No, Mohana, it’s not. Just like your problems aren’t mine. We’re not children anymore; we can look after ourselves.”
“I don’t think you can really say that you can look after yourself when your face looks like – ”
“Oh, shut the hell up.”
“Bhadraksh, no!” he said, and his whiny voice shot up about three octaves. Mohana was still young enough that his voice hadn’t broken yet and that he still had an iota of childish dignity about him, whereas Bhadraksh was caught slap bang in the middle of awkward adolescence. “You need to talk to someone about it, you need to – ”
“And that someone should be you,” Bhadraksh said dully, but his eyes were flashing with anger. “Is that right? You think you can fix all my problems?”
“No... No, of course not, but I think I could help.”
“You are such a girl, Moha.”
Mohana rolled his eyes. “Don’t change the subject.”
“There’s no point in discussing the subject. What do you think would happen if I told you about it? Do you really think you could do anything? Do you even think that you could say anything that would be remotely useful?”
Mohana hesitated. “It helps… if you talk about your problems.”
“Yeah, to someone who knows what the hell you’re growing through!” Bhadraksh barked, all his anger and frustration at his situation finally bubbling up through his icy exterior. “For the love of – Mohana, what the hell do you think you understand about this? Do you know what it’s like? Do you know anything?”
Mohana blinked, taken aback, but he stood his ground. “I... I know that you’re my brother, and that people are hurting you, and that – ”
“And that’s going to help me? Tell me this, brother. Has anyone ever done this to you?” He gestured angrily at his face.
“No, but – ”
“But nothing. You don’t understand, Mohana. You can’t know what it’s like. You don’t even notice half the shìt we have to put up with every day, how the hell are you supposed to know what’s happening to me?”
“What stuff is happening to us every day? What are you talking about?”
Bhadraksh’s mouth twisted up into a vicious smile that tore at his cut lip. “You see? You don’t notice any of it, do you? Mohana, people spit at us in the streets.”
Mohana sounded irritated now. “I know that, but still – ”
“No, Mohana, I really don’t think that you do. It’s not even just that. People spit at us in the streets. We’re put in the back of restaurants. And you can’t seriously think that all those power cuts in the building, all the wires that mysteriously get sawed off outside our house – you can’t think that that’s all coincidence, can you?”
Quiet for a moment, then, “I know... I know that, Bhadraksh, but… but that’s not the same. That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about those boys in your school, not a few jerks out in the street – ”
“You idiot, it’s all the same. Why do you think they’re doing this to me? Do you think it’s just because they’re having a bad day?”
And Mohana’s big brown eyes widened, large as saucers, so he looked half his age. “What… Bhadraksh, they’re doing this because we’re sudra?”
“Give the boy a prize.”
“Oh… Oh my God, Bhadraksh,” Mohana said, sounding shaky. “They seriously… That’s why they did that to you? Because of… Oh my God.”
“Right,” he said, breathing heavily. He wasn’t used to outbursts like this. He was supposed to be so good at keeping them all locked up deep inside himself; it was disconcerting when they happened.
“But… But I don’t understand.”
“Like I said you wouldn’t.”
“No, I mean… I don’t – But why doesn’t it happen to me, then?”
Oh, for fu-
“Seriously, runt, you’re jealous?”
“No, I’m not, I just – I’m sudra too. If it… why doesn’t it happen to me? My class are all vaisya…”
Bhadraksh sighed, “You’re not friends with any of the vaisya.”
“What? But I... I am…”
“No, you’re not. You’re friends with Ahmed and Jiti. The Muslim and the cripple. They’re just like you. Like us. Outsiders.”
Mohana couldn’t deny that he had made a valid point, and Bhadraksh could see that he was right from the way his brother’s face fell slightly. And then something occurred to Mohana, and he said, “But they don’t do that to me. They don’t beat me up, they don’t taunt me – I mean, Bhadraksh, they talk to me, just not a lot – Why?”
“Don’t question it, idiot. It’s good.”
“No, but it’s not – if it’s like that for me, it should be like that for you too. Why isn’t it like that for you?”
Bhadraksh’s face became a front of bitterness, and his voice twisted his words accordingly – “Isn’t it obvious? Because you’re Mohana the wonder child.”
“I’m… what?”
Bhadraksh’s laugh was acidic. “What, you haven’t noticed that, either? You’re lucky, runt. You get everything you could ever want. It all just falls right into your lap.”
“…Bhadraksh, I don’t know what you’re talking about…”
“Well, think about it this way. You’re smart. You’re getting some of the top marks in your class, and you’re not even having to try. You don’t have to find friends in your school, you don’t have to make any effort, they find you. You – Shiva’s sake, Mohana. You think I could cope if I got on like you? You think I would survive if I just walked along with my head in the clouds seeing the best in everyone and everything and ignoring every single piece of shìtty reality that comes my way?”
Mohana still didn’t understand. Bhadraksh could tell by looking at him.
“Look – what I’m saying is, I don’t understand you. I don’t understand how life hasn’t come and torn you down yet. I don’t understand how you’re still doing this idealistic crap, this dreamer shìt that you do. Me, I fight for every single opportunity in this godforsaken country, but you, you just drift through and nothing gets in your way. You dream, you idealise, you drift, and I have no idea how you’ve managed to get this far in this place – hell, in life – without that being taken away from you, but you have. And it doesn’t make any sense, so what conclusion do we make? You’re living a charmed life, Mohana. Mohana the wonder child. Everything will just fall into place for you. You’ll probably be president by the time you’re thirty. And for all my fighting and my plans, I’ll probably be dead in the gutter like a pariah within the next two years.”
Bhadraksh stopped suddenly, within full flow, as he saw the look on Mohana’s face. He looked like he was about to cry.
And part of him was happy about that. Part of him was happy that he had upset his idiotic brother, that he had managed to wipe that idiotic content off of his face, that he had managed to make him see just a little bit of the horrible reality of the country they lived in, of the limitations of their caste and their skin tone and their family.
But that wasn’t the part of him who was Mohana’s older brother. The part of Bhadraksh who was Mohana’s older brother didn’t like Mohana any better than the rest of him did, but that didn’t matter. He didn’t need to like Mohana. Mohana had plenty of people to like him as it was – or more than Bhadraksh ever would, at any rate. But the part of him that was an older brother loved Mohana, and that was enough to make him stop talking. Mohana didn’t need to hear anymore.
After all, what difference would it make? If Bhadraksh was right, it wouldn’t matter if he had predicted it. It wouldn’t matter. They would still end up the same way, lonely and angry and isolated and hopeless. And Bhadraksh felt like that already.
It was futile to hurt Mohana now, and so he wouldn’t. He’d be a good brother for once. And so he didn’t say any more.
“Bhadraksh…” Mohana said, filling the silence with his shaky voice. “I – I don’t have a char – you’re not going to die in the gutter, I know it. You’re going to be a success – you work so hard, you’re going to… I’m sorry. I… don’t know what to say; I’m sorry.”
Bhadraksh sighed. “Stop apologising. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“No, no, you should have, it’s good that you – ”
“Yeah, whatever,” Bhadraksh said, shrugging off his brother’s concern. He didn’t want to talk about this anymore, so he decided to change the subject. “I think dinner should be ready now. I’ll go get it out.”
“I… All right,” said Mohana. “I’ll get some plates.”
“Fine.”
Bhadraksh recognised what had just happened, and he was pretty sure that Mohana did too. With the exchange of just a few words, they had made the mutual agreement to retire to their own little spheres of being, their own little worlds that perpetually grated up against each other but never – or almost never – truly touched.
And while Bhadraksh pulled the ceramic dish of daal out of the oven, something occurred to him. It mightn’t always be like this. Some day…If he was wrong, if Mohana didn’t lead a charmed life, if something happened to him that tore him down and made him into a fighter the same way that Bhadraksh was, then, in a way, that would be good. Maybe then, Bhadraksh could respect him. Maybe then they could have a proper conversation. Maybe then they could be friends.
The notion was odd. Friends with Mohana. Friends with anyone. Bhadraksh didn’t have any friends; he didn’t need them. But now he saw that… well, that it could happen.
He didn’t think about it for too long. Speculation was pointless, and if it did happen, he didn’t need to predict it. He didn’t need to know in advance. Whatever happened, it was tomorrow’s problem.
Everything else was still to come.
“Hey! Hey, sudra boy!”
He sighs and starts simultaneously, weary of the fear that is choking him. He turns.
Coming down the corridor towards him is a boy of his own height, his own age, roughly his size. And a few others. The leader’s hair is black, short, and his brown eyes glint with anticipation.
Predatory though he may be, this isn’t the sort of boy that Bhadraksh should have to be afraid of.
Walking made the earthquake worse. His head didn’t take kindly to being moved at all, even in the slow, gentle rocking motion that was every painstakingly cautious step he took. Moreover, it didn’t help that at least half of the people who looked at him as he passed winced just at the sight of him. The other half of people who saw could be subdivided into three sections: those who tutted disapprovingly, those who stared, wide-eyed and gormlessly, and those who turned, whispered something in their companion’s ear, and brought his battered face to the attention of yet another person.
But their faces were passing in and out of focus, blurring into the landscape and leaping out at him alternately, the orange sunlight of dusk suffusing painfully against his vision and tinting every single moped, every single stall, every single shack with a hideous carrot colour that had him staring at the grey road beneath him as he walked, thankful for the one area of his vision that wasn’t bombarded with glaring Technicolor.
The boy’s name is Dilpreet, and he is flanked by his friends, Jagat, Ibhya and Aiswaran. Jagat is a good five inches shorter than Bhadraksh, who has always been tall for his age. Ibhya has a trick shoulder that dislocates at the slightest provocation – Bhadraksh has seen him display this to his classmates many times before. Aiswaran is heavy, clumsy and slow, and his menace isn’t enough to make him any better at fighting. Dilpreet and Bhadraksh are around even, Bhadraksh thinks.
He’d have, at worst, reasonable odds in his favour if he was fighting any of them one on one. But they aren’t stupid enough to try, and when they’re together, Bhadraksh doesn’t have a hope.
He doesn’t even try to fight back, either, because he knows that nothing good can come of it. If they’re caught fighting, it will be the word of three vaisya against one sudra as to who started it. Bhadraksh has decided that it is better to wait out the storm and pray that it ends soon.
And the storm is coming now. These people don’t talk to Bhadraksh unless the skies are clouding over.
A storm is coming. A fight is coming.
Dilpreet has caught up with him.
His footsteps, for all his attempts at caution, were baby deer footsteps, clumsy and stumbling, but miraculously he managed to keep from falling down until the beautiful vision of his apartment block hit his view. He felt like he would have wept with relief, if he was that sort of person.
As it was, he shuffled quickly to the door, one hand fumbling in his pocket to retrieve his keys. His fingers closed on them quickly, and as he pushed the cold metal into the keyhole his whole body sagged onto the wood – against the door, against his will. In public.
As if he needed to attract any more attention to himself.
He forced himself to stand straight, eyebrows furrowing in irritation at his own weakness, twisted the key roughly and shoved the door open with the palm of his hand; one of the few parts of his body that wasn’t aching. Shutting the door behind him, he rejoiced in the calming gloom of the corridor, something he had never had cause to do before.
“Did you not hear me, sudra boy?” Dilpreet asks, his voice open and friendly, as petulant as if Bhadraksh was a childhood friend who was ignoring him. If it weren’t for the sudra boy comment, an onlooker could easily assume that that was the case.
“I heard you,” Bhadraksh says, his voice very calm and cool, but completely free of all pretensions. The hatred that he feels for these boys stabs through every word, frozen and pointed as an icicle.
Dilpreet looks back at his friends, a horrible little smug smile pinching the corners of his lips. Then back to Bhadraksh: “So they don’t teach little sudra boys to answer when they’re spoken to, then? Did you know that, Aiswaran?”
A dagger laugh. “Nope. But I’m not surprised.”
“Me neither,” added Ibhya, who is incapable of forming his own thoughts.
“Hey, I am,” interjects Jagat, and the other three look around at him. “What?” he asks them, exaggeratedly shrugging off their attention as if they are staring at him, making him uncomfortable. It’s an act. Jagat is a cocky little bástard; everything he does is for show. “It’s not weird, being surprised. Wouldn’t you have thought that that uppity bítch of a mother he has would have taught him better?”
Bhadraksh does not rise to the bait about his mother. He has heard worse. But muscles stand out in his jaw as he clenches his teeth together.
“Aw, yeah, you’re right,” says Aiswaran. “You’d think she’d have let him have the benefit of her experience.”
“Taught her all the manners of Australia,” Dilpreet counters.
“But judging by her behaviour, what sort of manners must Australia have?”
“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? Social climbing.”
“Sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong.”
“Being sent money from the big rich Western relatives when you’re too ignorant to know how to make your own.”
“Yeah! Money from the West. A charity case. Like all the little beggars in the street…”
“And what problem should he have with being a beggar in the street? I’ll bet he has relatives who are beggars in the street. Sudra boy should be proud of his herita-”
“What do you want?” Bhadraksh interrupts, unable to keep his composure any longer. His voice is still very cool and low and calm. He is still not rising to the bait. But he wants the subject changed. It’s all leading the same way, anyway; it doesn’t matter if they’re talking about something else while the storm starts crashing.
Dilpreet stops looking at his friends, turns back to Bhadraksh, and as he does so, his minions follow his example. The friendly façade drops from his pale face – paler than Bhadraksh’s, anyway, physical evidence of his caste’s superiority – and answering hatred to Bhadraksh’s own ripples across his detested features.
It’s starting.
The corridor’s shade wasn’t usually something that Bhadraksh finds comforting. There were no windows in the corridor, and no electrical lighting, either: there was electrical lighting in most of the rest of the building, so there was no expense to waste on lighting the corridor. The perma-darkness of the little hallway generally made Bhadraksh feel claustrophobic and a little ill – it felt like someone had smeared a film of dust over his vision, and he always got out of the place as quickly as possible so he could see properly again.
But just now, he felt better in this place. It was good. Calm. Silent.
So instead of proceeding up the threadbare carpet and up the stairs and up into his family’s rooms, he decided to just lie down for a little while. Just to rest. His head felt like it was melting, and that wasn’t the sort of feeling that he wanted to greet the rest of his family with, and it was even less the feeling he wanted to answer his family’s barrage of questions about the state of his face with. If he just lay down for a little while...
Before his mind made any conscious decision, his body decided for him: his back fell against the door that he had forced himself to stay off outside and he was powerless to stop himself. He slid down the front of the door, limply thudding against the ground without ever leaving the hard support of its surface. It felt like maybe it was acting as a substitute for his spine, at the moment, and that would be fitting, considering just how weak he was to do this.
But he couldn’t force himself to think about his moment of weakness right now; he was too busy being trapped in it. His head tilted forward, and he swam out of his own consciousness.
“What do you mean? Do you mean why did we come to see you, sudra boy?” asks Dilpreet, taking a step closer.
Bhadraksh nods once, standing his ground.
“Isn’t it obvious?” asks Jagat.
Dilpreet smirks. “Maybe not for a sudra,” he said. “Or maybe not for all sudras, maybe just for this one. After all, most sudras know their place. They know if they’ve done something out of line. They know if they’re acting like presumptuous little bàstards in front of thirty other people, don’t they, Ibhya?”
“Should do.”
“Yeah, right, you’re right, they should.”
Bhadraksh knows what they’re talking about now, and he wants to slap himself for being so stupid. It is supposed to be his prerogative in school to keep his head down, keep silent and try to learn as much as he can without making himself obvious, and usually it works, but today, he – He doesn’t know. He guesses that he wasn’t thinking. The teacher was staring out at the rows of nodding heads, looking around for anyone to answer the question he had just put to them, and when he asked it for the third time, adding many colourful terms about the idiocy of this class he had been cursed with, Bhadraksh had, in a moment of insanity, raised his hand and given the correct answer. And the teacher had, after a moment of surprise at his actually speaking, praised him and said – apparently completely unaware of the ramifications that his words would have – asked the rest of the class why they couldn’t apply themselves like this boy did.
But it wasn’t his fault. He shouldn’t have to think about things like this coming up as a mere result of his participating in class. Bhadraksh isn’t going to apologise. The other boys realise this as he thinks it.
He knows that they don’t care. Even if he did apologise, they would still do what they are about to do. But the fact that they realise this means that judgment is going to come a lot faster.
“So what is it, sudra boy?” Dilpreet asks, another step closer to Bhadraksh now, so close that Bhadraksh can smell him. The hatred he feels seems too big to fit inside one person. “Think you’re better than us? Think you’re smarter? Think you can just come in and do whatever the hell you want? Think you can beat us?”
“No,” Bhadraksh says simply. He is lying.
And the aimless cruelty that has been flitting around the faces of his four assailants focuses into a burning rage. And that rage focuses on him. “You’re lying,” Dilpreet says. Clearly he hadn’t even considered the fact that Bhadraksh could actually be guilty of what he was accused with. Dilpreet’s own sense of self-importance probably couldn’t take it.
But it’s not surprising that he could figure it out. Bhadraksh’s denial had been ringing with contempt. He couldn’t stop himself.
He couldn’t stop himself.
He can’t stop them.
“You little lying bástard. You little lying bástard sudra. Think you’re better than us? Well. Good.”
“How is it good?” asks Jagat, fitting in exactly to where he is expected.
“How so, Jagat?” Dilpreet’s voice is also shot through with contrived wit. “Well, think about it. If he thinks something that’s wrong, we need to teach him what’s right. We need to teach him a lesson.”
His eyes glinted. “I don’t know about you boys, but there’s nothing I love better than teaching little lying bástard sudras a lesson.”
Bhadraksh tenses, quelling the little fluttering urgency in his throat that tells him to run fast, run far, do anything to get away from this. If it was a couple of years ago, he would have run, but he’s too proud now. Running is not an option.
The first punch nearly sends him flying.
He didn’t know how much time passed before he swam back into consciousness – a minute, two, an hour, a day, an eternity – it all seemed the same just now. In fact, ‘swam’ was not an accurate term, now, because it was the pain of his pounding head that brought him back to reality, and so he didn’t swim back, he was dragged kicking and screaming, pulled over a bed of nails, over hot blazing coals.
When he was conscious enough to realise the situation he was in, he felt disgusted with himself for letting himself collapse like that, and regardless of the crashing tidal wave of pain that wrenched through his skull when he did, he pushed himself up on his feet and forced himself to walk quickly up the stairs and into his living room. He ignored the stumbling that nearly had him falling down the stairs four times.
The living room, he was pleased to note, did not have the same effect on his eyes as the street outside had, even though the same orange light was still present. It didn’t seem so offensive when it was highlighting his father’s old sofa, the patchy red rug that covered it, his sister’s pile of scraps of paper and random exercise books which were her supposedly ‘organised’ school notes, the faded bejewelled lampshade that dripped from the ceiling, the swords that glinted menacingly in the corner, the books scattered over every available surface, and the wide, horrified eyes of his twelve-year-old brother.
Bhadraksh sighed irritably, and didn’t meet his gaze for more than a second. Rather, he turned and walked to the bathroom, both annoyed with his brother’s reaction, and glad that it was only one reaction he had to deal with. The rest of the family didn’t seem to be in, so Bhadraksh should have been thankful. If he was this irritated with one horrified stare that made him feel like a freak trapped under glaring circus lights, he should have been thankful that he hadn’t been treated to the same multiplied by four.
“Jesus Christ, Bhadraksh!” gasped Mohana, as he got up to follow him. “What on earth happened to you?”
If it was any other time, Bhadraksh would have been irritated afresh by his brother’s habit of swearing in English instead of Hindi, like normal people (his father didn’t know what Mohana was saying, and his mother just didn’t care – in fact, she did the same herself, from time to time), but right now, he was too busy surveying the damage of his face in the bathroom mirror. It looked worse than it probably was, he decided. A huge purple swelling graced his left eye – against his skin tone, it almost looked black. His bottom lip had split, and the resulting cut had dribbled a little trail of blood down his chin. His nose had taken quite the beating, and he felt it gently for a break, but luckily for him, it just seemed to be bruising. He doubted his nose ever would break again, because it had been broken before, when he was five, and the resulting heal, while leaving his nose crooked, had left the bone so strong that it had been able to withstand a further nine years of encounters like today, and like the one that had broken it in the first place.
After having ascertained that his face would live to take another fist, he moved onto the insistent pain in his side that hadn’t been evident until he had woken up from his brief period of unconsciousness, but that was becoming stronger and stronger every second. He lifted up his shirt and bent over to see a huge, black bruise the size of his hand on the right side of his abdomen. For a moment he couldn’t remember how he’d got it, but then he recalled the parting kick in the side that Aiswaran had given him, apparently unable to keep himself from trying to do some serious damage.
Nothing was broken, he was sure. He’d know if it was broken; he knew what it felt like.
But it was sure as hell going to hurt tomorrow.
He dropped the shirt, and as he did, Mohana spoke again. He had been watching quietly through the door for Bhadraksh’s whole inspection, without Bhadraksh’s realising it. This irritated him.
Mohana’s words irritated him even further. “Bhadraksh? Are you going to answer my question?”
He wasn’t.
He walked out of the bathroom, past Mohana, and into the part of the living room that served as the kitchen. While doing so, he asked, “Where is everyone else?”
He pulled a saucepan out of the cupboard, and set it under the tap to fill, but when he turned the handle, he discovered that their water wasn’t working. Again. Nothing more than a pathetic little trickle spurted into the pot. He’d just bet that the electricity wasn’t working, too.
No tea for Bhadraksh, then. He dropped the saucepan into the sink, glad of the loud clatter it made, and turned, leant against it, folded his arms. “Well?” he snapped at Mohana, irritated by the look of concern and pity creasing his eyes. Everything Mohana was doing tonight irritated him, even though they’d only been in the same room for five minutes. This wasn’t uncommon.
“They went out,” said Mohana, very helpfully. Bhadraksh gave him an exasperated look, and so he elaborated. “They have a meeting with Vidya’s teacher, I think, and then they said that they were going to go to the well to get some water, ‘cause of – well, ‘cause of that.” He gestured at the tap that had just failed Bhadraksh. “They think that there’s a break in the pipe, or something. The lights are still working, anyway.”
“Right,” Bhadraksh said, not really caring. Break in the pipe, drought, someone deciding that the sudras on the first floor didn’t deserve running water anymore – whatever it was that caused it, it still meant that he was going to have to go thirsty.
There was a brief silence, which Bhadraksh hoped Mohana would take as his cue to leave him alone, but he knew that that hope was a vain one. Mohana lingered, then offered a pearl of wisdom. “You should get those cuts cleaned. You might get them infected if you don’t.”
Bhadraksh resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “And how does that work if we don’t have any water, runt?”
Mohana’s face fell a little bit, but then he had another flash of inspiration. “Hold on, I have an idea.”
“Stop the presses,” Bhadraksh said.
A wave of irritation over Mohana’s face for a moment, Bhadraksh noted with satisfaction, but it quickly smoothed away. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
And he left, praise Shiva.
Bhadraksh heavily thudded into one of the mismatching chairs that surrounded the kitchen table, leaning his face forward into his hands before realising that that action caused him far too much pain to really be worth it. He didn’t feel good. He felt dizzy, nauseous. The last thing he wanted right now was to have to deal with Mohana.
But his brother clattered back into the kitchen, and Bhadraksh turned to look at him wearily. He’d just have to put up with him for now.
And then he saw what his brother was holding.
“What the hell, Mohana?”
Mohana looked embarrassed. “Alcohol is good for disinfecting things.”
“I know that, runt. But you are not putting that stuff on my face.”
“Look, it’s the best we’ve got – ”
He tried to keep calm. “You are not putting that stuff on my face.”
“You know mum won’t mind. She never drinks it anyway.”
He glared at his brother and spoke through gritted teeth. “I don’t care if mum minds or not. You are not disinfecting my face with fùcking schnapps.”
“Look, but Bhadraksh, listen, I’m sure it would be better than nothing – ”
“Mohana, I swear to Shiva, if you don’t put that bottle away right now…”
“But if it gets infected you’re going to have to – ”
“Mohana, for the love of – ”
“Please, Bhadraksh.”
Bhadraksh looked at his brother and sighed heavily.
Mohana wasn’t going to back down, he could tell that much. His brother, scrawny and runty and stupid as he was, was his brother nonetheless, and no brother of his was ever going to back down on something like this without a fight.
And Bhadraksh really didn’t want another fight today.
“Fine. But be quick.”
Mohana smiled. “Thank you,” he said, and he walked over to grab a cloth from the sink. A couple of silent seconds passed as he wrung the fabric into the sink, presumably trying to get whatever germs as he could out of it without clean water. Then he tipped the bottle of dubiously pink alcohol – peach schnapps, Bhadraksh noted with exasperation, he was going to stink of it for weeks – into the cloth, let a little run out onto it, came up to Bhadraksh, and placed the material on his face.
It stung, but Bhadraksh didn’t flinch.
“This might sting a little,” Mohana added as an afterthought, and Bhadraksh wanted to clip him around the back of the head.
“Really,” he said flatly.
Mohana’s clumsy fingers fast found every ripped nerve ending on Bhadraksh’s face and made it their business to jostle all his wounds as much as possible. There was only so much he could take of this, and before long, he found himself forced to say, “Look, runt, give it here, I’ll do it myself.”
“Oh,” Mohana said, as the cloth was pulled away from him. “Right. Sorry.”
“And you want to be a doctor, bashing at my face like that?” Bhadraksh asked sourly, pressing the cloth gently against his nose and trying to mop up as much of the congealing scarlet liquid as he could. He didn’t want to see the look on his father’s face as it was; it would help if he wasn’t as caked with blood as an extra in a bad horror movie.
“Sorry,” Mohana said again, and Bhadraksh sighed again. Mohana was dreadfully apt at making him do that. “Sorry, I’m not very good at… yeah. Sorry.”
“You apologise one more time and I’m going to have to smack you on principle,” Bhadraksh warned, feeling a little better as the sting of the alcohol on his face roused him. And as he felt better, he settled comfortably back into the familiar apathy he felt when it came to just about everything his younger brother said and did. It wasn’t normal for him to care enough to be irritated by him.
“Sorry – no, wait, sorry, I – right. I’ll stop talking.”
“That would be nice,” Bhadraksh said, passing the cloth over his face one more time before tossing it into the sink. His face felt sticky now, but he didn’t care. He was feeling more like himself, at least.
And feeling more like himself brought back his sense of practicality, which was a bonus.
“Are we going to have to do dinner ourselves, then, if mum and dad aren’t coming back?” he asked Mohana, turning back to face him.
“I think so.”
“Right. I’ll sort that out, then,” he said, slipping back into the bored, monotonous tone that he usually adopted when talking.
“I think there’s some daal in the fridge,” Mohana said. “You could heat that up.”
“Yeah,” Bhadraksh said, opened the fridge and pulled out the chipped, blue ceramic bowl that held the leftovers of last Sunday’s dinner. “I’ll put this on in the oven, then.”
“OK. Thanks.”
Bhadraksh didn’t bother answering, just walked across the kitchen in silence to switch the oven on. He was gratified to see that it was, in fact, working – it was clearly just the water that was down, as Mohana had said.
A full minute must have passed in silence as he placed the food in the oven, which wasn’t unusual for their household, but it was unusual for Mohana when he was in this mood. Bhadraksh waited for him to break it.
“Bhadraksh…”
“Mmm.”
“What… I mean, if you don’t mind me asking – what… what did that to you? Did you fall?”
Bhadraksh didn’t answer for a moment. “I do mind you asking,” he said eventually.
“Oh…”
He wasn’t going to leave it there.
“But it’s just, I... I mean, your face, you’re going to have to explain it to mum and dad anyway, so I figure that there’s probably no harm in your telling me.”
“It’s none of your business, runt, leave it.”
Silence again.
“Something bad happened, didn’t it? It wasn’t an accident?”
“For fùck’s sake, Mohana!” Bhadraksh snapped, turning away from the oven and glaring down at his stupid short nosy childish brother. He just had to keep pushing him, didn’t he? Did the idiot have no idea when to stop?
“I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t ask, but…”
“If you know you shouldn’t, then don’t. It’s not rocket science.”
“I want to know,” he said, twisting his shirt around his hand in agitation. “Bhadraksh, if they did it to you again –”
“Shut up.”
“You need to tell someone! You can’t just let it keep –”
“Shut up, runt.”
“Where does it stop, Bhadraksh? What do they have to do to you before you tell someone? Or will you never tell? Are you just going to let them do it until they… until they kill you?”
“They’re not going to kill me, you moron,” Bhadraksh said, forcing calmness into his voice.
“How do you know?”
“Because they’re not that stupid. And it’s not that bad. And I’m not going to tell anyone.”
“For God’s sake, Bhadraksh,” Mohana said, doing his stupid English swearing again as his eyes creased up with worry, “you’re being stupid. If you don’t tell someone, it’s never going to stop.”
“It doesn’t need to stop. It’s fine. I’m fine.”
“No you’re not!”
Bhadraksh didn’t dignify that with an answer. Instead, he pushed past Mohana into the living room, and as he walked, he said, “Dinner will be ready in fifteen minutes. Mohana, this conversation is over, you hear me?” He used his most final tone, the one that he knew would keep Mohana from going on, the one that would just get him to leave him alone. It was bad enough that he was going to have to talk to his parents later. He wasn’t about to sit and listen to life advice from a goddàmn twelve-year-old.
“No,” said Mohana after a brief pause. “No, it’s not over. Bhadraksh, I want to talk about this.”
Bhadraksh kept the surprise that he felt at Mohana’s persistence off his face, and answered, “I don’t care. I don’t care if you want to talk about it. It’s not your problem.”
“You’re my brother, of course it’s my problem!”
“No, Mohana, it’s not. Just like your problems aren’t mine. We’re not children anymore; we can look after ourselves.”
“I don’t think you can really say that you can look after yourself when your face looks like – ”
“Oh, shut the hell up.”
“Bhadraksh, no!” he said, and his whiny voice shot up about three octaves. Mohana was still young enough that his voice hadn’t broken yet and that he still had an iota of childish dignity about him, whereas Bhadraksh was caught slap bang in the middle of awkward adolescence. “You need to talk to someone about it, you need to – ”
“And that someone should be you,” Bhadraksh said dully, but his eyes were flashing with anger. “Is that right? You think you can fix all my problems?”
“No... No, of course not, but I think I could help.”
“You are such a girl, Moha.”
Mohana rolled his eyes. “Don’t change the subject.”
“There’s no point in discussing the subject. What do you think would happen if I told you about it? Do you really think you could do anything? Do you even think that you could say anything that would be remotely useful?”
Mohana hesitated. “It helps… if you talk about your problems.”
“Yeah, to someone who knows what the hell you’re growing through!” Bhadraksh barked, all his anger and frustration at his situation finally bubbling up through his icy exterior. “For the love of – Mohana, what the hell do you think you understand about this? Do you know what it’s like? Do you know anything?”
Mohana blinked, taken aback, but he stood his ground. “I... I know that you’re my brother, and that people are hurting you, and that – ”
“And that’s going to help me? Tell me this, brother. Has anyone ever done this to you?” He gestured angrily at his face.
“No, but – ”
“But nothing. You don’t understand, Mohana. You can’t know what it’s like. You don’t even notice half the shìt we have to put up with every day, how the hell are you supposed to know what’s happening to me?”
“What stuff is happening to us every day? What are you talking about?”
Bhadraksh’s mouth twisted up into a vicious smile that tore at his cut lip. “You see? You don’t notice any of it, do you? Mohana, people spit at us in the streets.”
Mohana sounded irritated now. “I know that, but still – ”
“No, Mohana, I really don’t think that you do. It’s not even just that. People spit at us in the streets. We’re put in the back of restaurants. And you can’t seriously think that all those power cuts in the building, all the wires that mysteriously get sawed off outside our house – you can’t think that that’s all coincidence, can you?”
Quiet for a moment, then, “I know... I know that, Bhadraksh, but… but that’s not the same. That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about those boys in your school, not a few jerks out in the street – ”
“You idiot, it’s all the same. Why do you think they’re doing this to me? Do you think it’s just because they’re having a bad day?”
And Mohana’s big brown eyes widened, large as saucers, so he looked half his age. “What… Bhadraksh, they’re doing this because we’re sudra?”
“Give the boy a prize.”
“Oh… Oh my God, Bhadraksh,” Mohana said, sounding shaky. “They seriously… That’s why they did that to you? Because of… Oh my God.”
“Right,” he said, breathing heavily. He wasn’t used to outbursts like this. He was supposed to be so good at keeping them all locked up deep inside himself; it was disconcerting when they happened.
“But… But I don’t understand.”
“Like I said you wouldn’t.”
“No, I mean… I don’t – But why doesn’t it happen to me, then?”
Oh, for fu-
“Seriously, runt, you’re jealous?”
“No, I’m not, I just – I’m sudra too. If it… why doesn’t it happen to me? My class are all vaisya…”
Bhadraksh sighed, “You’re not friends with any of the vaisya.”
“What? But I... I am…”
“No, you’re not. You’re friends with Ahmed and Jiti. The Muslim and the cripple. They’re just like you. Like us. Outsiders.”
Mohana couldn’t deny that he had made a valid point, and Bhadraksh could see that he was right from the way his brother’s face fell slightly. And then something occurred to Mohana, and he said, “But they don’t do that to me. They don’t beat me up, they don’t taunt me – I mean, Bhadraksh, they talk to me, just not a lot – Why?”
“Don’t question it, idiot. It’s good.”
“No, but it’s not – if it’s like that for me, it should be like that for you too. Why isn’t it like that for you?”
Bhadraksh’s face became a front of bitterness, and his voice twisted his words accordingly – “Isn’t it obvious? Because you’re Mohana the wonder child.”
“I’m… what?”
Bhadraksh’s laugh was acidic. “What, you haven’t noticed that, either? You’re lucky, runt. You get everything you could ever want. It all just falls right into your lap.”
“…Bhadraksh, I don’t know what you’re talking about…”
“Well, think about it this way. You’re smart. You’re getting some of the top marks in your class, and you’re not even having to try. You don’t have to find friends in your school, you don’t have to make any effort, they find you. You – Shiva’s sake, Mohana. You think I could cope if I got on like you? You think I would survive if I just walked along with my head in the clouds seeing the best in everyone and everything and ignoring every single piece of shìtty reality that comes my way?”
Mohana still didn’t understand. Bhadraksh could tell by looking at him.
“Look – what I’m saying is, I don’t understand you. I don’t understand how life hasn’t come and torn you down yet. I don’t understand how you’re still doing this idealistic crap, this dreamer shìt that you do. Me, I fight for every single opportunity in this godforsaken country, but you, you just drift through and nothing gets in your way. You dream, you idealise, you drift, and I have no idea how you’ve managed to get this far in this place – hell, in life – without that being taken away from you, but you have. And it doesn’t make any sense, so what conclusion do we make? You’re living a charmed life, Mohana. Mohana the wonder child. Everything will just fall into place for you. You’ll probably be president by the time you’re thirty. And for all my fighting and my plans, I’ll probably be dead in the gutter like a pariah within the next two years.”
Bhadraksh stopped suddenly, within full flow, as he saw the look on Mohana’s face. He looked like he was about to cry.
And part of him was happy about that. Part of him was happy that he had upset his idiotic brother, that he had managed to wipe that idiotic content off of his face, that he had managed to make him see just a little bit of the horrible reality of the country they lived in, of the limitations of their caste and their skin tone and their family.
But that wasn’t the part of him who was Mohana’s older brother. The part of Bhadraksh who was Mohana’s older brother didn’t like Mohana any better than the rest of him did, but that didn’t matter. He didn’t need to like Mohana. Mohana had plenty of people to like him as it was – or more than Bhadraksh ever would, at any rate. But the part of him that was an older brother loved Mohana, and that was enough to make him stop talking. Mohana didn’t need to hear anymore.
After all, what difference would it make? If Bhadraksh was right, it wouldn’t matter if he had predicted it. It wouldn’t matter. They would still end up the same way, lonely and angry and isolated and hopeless. And Bhadraksh felt like that already.
It was futile to hurt Mohana now, and so he wouldn’t. He’d be a good brother for once. And so he didn’t say any more.
“Bhadraksh…” Mohana said, filling the silence with his shaky voice. “I – I don’t have a char – you’re not going to die in the gutter, I know it. You’re going to be a success – you work so hard, you’re going to… I’m sorry. I… don’t know what to say; I’m sorry.”
Bhadraksh sighed. “Stop apologising. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“No, no, you should have, it’s good that you – ”
“Yeah, whatever,” Bhadraksh said, shrugging off his brother’s concern. He didn’t want to talk about this anymore, so he decided to change the subject. “I think dinner should be ready now. I’ll go get it out.”
“I… All right,” said Mohana. “I’ll get some plates.”
“Fine.”
Bhadraksh recognised what had just happened, and he was pretty sure that Mohana did too. With the exchange of just a few words, they had made the mutual agreement to retire to their own little spheres of being, their own little worlds that perpetually grated up against each other but never – or almost never – truly touched.
And while Bhadraksh pulled the ceramic dish of daal out of the oven, something occurred to him. It mightn’t always be like this. Some day…If he was wrong, if Mohana didn’t lead a charmed life, if something happened to him that tore him down and made him into a fighter the same way that Bhadraksh was, then, in a way, that would be good. Maybe then, Bhadraksh could respect him. Maybe then they could have a proper conversation. Maybe then they could be friends.
The notion was odd. Friends with Mohana. Friends with anyone. Bhadraksh didn’t have any friends; he didn’t need them. But now he saw that… well, that it could happen.
He didn’t think about it for too long. Speculation was pointless, and if it did happen, he didn’t need to predict it. He didn’t need to know in advance. Whatever happened, it was tomorrow’s problem.
Everything else was still to come.
