The New Boy
Renita D’Silva
Laxmi sits, bedecked, bejewelled and on display, opposite the stranger she is to marry. They are in the dining room, which has been cleared and cleaned after the sumptuous lunch laid out for the guests. Nevertheless, the smell of curry lingers, mixed in with the phenyl used to mop the floor – making her slightly nauseous.
The door to the room stands open, the cloth curtain hanging down from it giving the illusion of privacy. Every once in a while, one of her brothers comes to check on her, to make sure she is not getting up to any mischief before the wedding. As if! What can she possibly do? She barely knows this man. And yet, if her parents have their way, she is going to marry him, as early as next month.
The feeling of nausea intensifies, her stomach threatening to regurgitate the meal they’ve just had – although she couldn’t eat much under the collective, assessing gaze of her suitor and his family – the best dishes prepared for the visitors: vegetable bhath and chicken sukka, kori kachpu and fish fry, kori roti and mutton masala, with shyamige payasam for afters.
The glass panels covering the iron bars of the window are open wide to let in the early afternoon breeze, sounds wafting in its wake. The murmur of the two families in the adjacent room, discussing the wedding and the dowry, Mali the cat screeching as she is chased by the dog for stealing from his bowl, the neighbourhood children prattling as they walk past on their way to school after lunch – she should be there too, teaching, but her parents insisted she take the day off. Snatches of the song Somu, Sumitranna’s simple son sings as he bathes his buffalo in the stream below reach her ears, and, very faintly, Nagappa’s screams as his wife whips him with a hibiscus branch for spending the previous day’s earnings on arrack, sleeping in the gutter and staggering home for lunch.
Laxmi closes her eyes, imagining she’s in her light cotton churidar dancing among the fields, the ears of paddy kissing her feet, Ramu’s delighted laughter as he splashes her with water from the stream.
Ramu…
He was the new boy in her class, back when she was a student herself and in the sixth standard. He was huge. Taller than even her brothers. He had bushy eyebrows, an angry scowl, the beginnings of a wispy beard. He had massive shoulders and legs as thick as she was. The new boy is nearly a man, she’d thought, sneaking furtive glances at him from over her shoulder.
He sat hunched at the desk too small for him, not meeting anybody’s gaze. Whispers fluttered around the classroom like bugs on hot summer days looking for fresh flesh to sink their talons into, when Sister Smitha turned to write on the board.
‘He’s failed many times, that’s why he’s in our class,’ Laxmi heard. ‘He’s been expelled from all the neighbouring schools. His mother came and sobbed at Mother Brenda’s feet, and the nuns took him on as a charity case.’ ‘He has no dad. Nobody knows what happened to him.’ And the loudest whisper of all, ‘He’s an untouchable.’
At lunchtime, she’d picked up her bag and umbrella and prepared to walk home through the fields, dodging sharp elbows and bony knees as all her classmates spilled out at once, chattering mightily, the ones taking the rickshaw home rushing out first, so they could bag a seat and not have to sit on top of the other kids. Laxmi was one of the last to leave the classroom and at the door, something made her turn.
The new boy was still at his desk, looking as if he was stuck there, with his knees almost touching his forehead. He had opened a little stainless steel box and was scooping cold red rice with ink stained fingers into his mouth. There didn’t seem to be any curry to go with it, just plain red rice on its own which Laxmi knew for a fact tasted horribly cold: gloopy and glutinous like eating wet cardboard which she did once for a dare.
She made to go back inside and her friend Sharda pinched her hand to try and stop her.
‘He’s dangerous,’ Sharda hissed. ‘Don’t you see how big he is?’
‘But Sharu,’ she whispered back, ‘look at him, he’s eating cold rice without any curry and that too so little. And he’s so big. My youngest brother eats way more than that. Even I do! His stomach will be growling all afternoon.’ She couldn’t bear the thought. She pulled her arm free of Sharda’s fierce grip and strode firmly into the classroom.
He didn’t notice her, not as she approached, not even when she stood in front of his desk. He kept on shovelling the rice into his mouth and swallowing it down, not chewing. For a long moment she was distracted by the way his Adam’s apple poked out and disappeared, playing peekaboo in his throat. Then she remembered what she had come for and cleared her throat.
He looked up, startled. His hair was too long, shaggy, falling into eyes that were a strange colour, almost orange. His thick eyebrows met in the middle giving him a stern look. He didn’t say anything, just stared at her.
Her courage deserted her then. Her eyes travelled to the window where she saw a squashed nose pressed to the glass and huge, frantic eyes, hands waving like drying clothes flapping in the breeze: Sharda urgently trying to communicate to Laxmi to escape when she had the chance. But it had the opposite effect on Laxmi, somehow restoring her flagging courage.
The boy was still perusing her, his gaze curious, intent. She stared back, trying on a smile. She could feel it wobbling at the corners.
‘What do you want?’ His voice was a growl, much deeper than her oldest brother’s.
‘I… I’m Laxmi.’ Her voice was squeaky. ‘Would you like to come to my house for lunch?’
He looked down at his tiffin box with its straggly grains of rice. ‘I’ve already eaten,’ he mumbled.
She saw two spots of colour flood his cheeks, underneath the beginnings of the beard. He was ashamed, she realized. In the quiet classroom, emptied of children, she could hear the thud of rain beating down on the tiles of the roof, the gush of water falling down the sides. It gave her an idea. She looked at the window. Sharda was gone.
She leaned closer to him. He smelled of soap and ink.
‘I have to tell you something,’ she said conspiratorially, ‘promise me you won’t tell anyone?’
He looked at her, eyebrows raised, tawny eyes enquiring.
‘When it rains like this, the stream floods and I hate going in the water. There might be snakes you see. Once, one almost brushed my legs. Please, can you walk me home? You are so big, I’m sure you’re not afraid of anything.’
He smiled at her then and his face transformed. He was not fierce at all when he smiled.
‘Okay,’ he said, shutting his tiffin box and putting it away carefully in his bag, which Laxmi noticed was torn. ‘Is it far?’
And so their friendship began, sealed by a walk in the rain, him holding her umbrella for her and lifting her over the stream, his big hands surprisingly gentle and she bravely taking him home and saying to her ma, ‘Ramu walked me home because I was scared of water snakes, and I promised him your wonderful mackerel masala. Can we have some? We’re starving.’
It was Ramu who motivated her to become a teacher.
‘You rescued me, Laxmi, that rainy day, by extending your hand in friendship. It was what I had been waiting for – someone to show me that I was not completely worthless, that I was needed, even if only to help a girl cross a stream. I want to do the same to others who might need just that little bit of encouragement,’ he had said one day by the stream, when they were discussing what they wanted to be, the reeds rippling in the sugarcane perfumed breeze, his eyes shining with fervour.
‘Me too,’ she’d replied, and thus it was agreed.
Ramu led by example, reaching out to lost boys like he had been once. Children out of place, battered by circumstances, looking for acceptance. He worked tirelessly, campaigning for better education facilities in government schools, urging the slum dwellers to send their children to school, collecting used books and distributing them to street kids, teaching them in the evenings if they hadn’t made it to school for some reason other.
Ramu. Her inspiration. Her best friend. Her love.
She taught her pupils Maths, and English, and Social Studies. But he taught her give of herself. To be generous and selfless with her time. To care. To love.
‘We welcomed him into this house, an untouchable, because you were concerned for him. And this is how you repay us?’ her mother had screamed, hitting her forehead, her chest, when Laxmi said she wanted to marry Ramu. ‘How can you do this to us?’
Her father, tight lipped with rage had said just one word. ‘No.’
Wheels had been set in motion immediately, phone calls made. Her uncle who lived in London had arranged this proposal. A good boy from a good family. Same caste. High paying job in the UK.
The man opposite her coughs and she blinks, coming back into the present.
She looks at his feet, clad in shoes which must have been shiny as oiled hair when he left his air conditioned hotel this morning, now coated in a film of dust. Her eyes sting with unshed tears. It is all happening so fast. In the next room, they are settling the finer points of her wedding to this man.
Images – Ramu wading into the lake to get waterlilies for her because she liked them, even though he didn’t know how to swim. That time they were caught in a sudden shower and she had danced in the rain and he had laughed and then stopped, looking at her, his eyes shimmering with awe and raindrops, ‘Do you know how beautiful you are Laxmi?’
His smile, bursting with pride, when she won the best teacher award, even though he had been one of the contenders. Sitting behind him on his motorbike, her arms around his waist, the wind in her hair, the countryside flying away from them.
Ramu holding her and gently wiping her tears with his handkerchief when Chinna, the kitten she had rescued from Ananthanna’s litter died. His hand in hers squeezing, the comfort, the rightness of it…
She looks up at her suitor’s face, into drowsy eyes, lids drooping after the heavy meal.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I can’t do this.’
Then, she lifts up her sari, the brocade slippery in her sweaty fingers, pushes the cloth curtain aside and walks away from the man she’s been told she should marry, into the other room, to confront her parents and his.
‘I know Ramu is of a lower caste, that he doesn’t earn much teaching at the government school, when he could be making so much more elsewhere. But I admire him for that, Ma, Da. He has the courage of his convictions. He is kind. He cares. He wants to make a difference. And he loves me.’
And then, ignoring the shrieks of incomprehension that erupt in the wake of the heartbeat of stunned silence following her announcement, not paying heed to the shocked gasps, the roiling upset, she runs, through the iridescent, golden fields undulating in the languid breeze, her heart singing and her steps light even though the heavy sari weighs her down like the burden of expectation she has been lugging these past few days. She shrugs off the curtain of duty that had threatened to smother her, revelling in the feel of cool water on her perspiring feet as she squelches across the stream, running from the man she should marry to the man she wants to.
Renita D’Silva loves stories, both reading and creating them. Her short stories have been published in ‘The View from Here’, ‘Bartleby Snopes’, ‘this zine’, ‘Platinum Page’, ‘Paragraph Planet’ among others and have been nominated for the ‘Pushcart’ prize and the ‘Best of the Net’ anthology. She is the author of five novels: ‘Monsoon Memories’, ‘The Forgotten Daughter’, ‘The Stolen Girl’, ‘A Sister’s Promise’ and ‘A Mother’s Secret’. She can be reached at renitadsilvabooks@gmail.com.
