A Burning(30)

PT Sir dares to pick up a stick from the road and swat it at that dog. Only when he throws the stick does the dog retreat, trotting away in the other direction.

PT Sir has sent a dozen men to jail, does anybody know that? So this street dog better beware of him, or he can have it locked up in a snap of his fingers, ha-ha!



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ONE MORNING, DAYLIGHT FAILS. The sky turns so dark that lights are flipped on throughout the neighborhood, lending the dawning of day a mood of dusk. With a storm that thunders and blazes, and whose rain strikes rooftops across the city, the monsoon arrives. PT Sir’s wife draws the windows closed before the slanting rain, and PT Sir emerges from the house with his trousers folded up to his calves, his feet in rubber slippers. His work shoes he carries in a plastic bag.

From his doorstep, PT Sir surveys the terrain. Brown water sloshes this way and that, the street turned into a stream, as office-goers wade. PT Sir spots a rickshaw churning water as it makes its way slowly down the lane. It has high wheels, and a high blue seat sheltered under an accordion roof. When he raises an arm and calls, “Rickshaw!” the driver pedals toward him and comes to a lazy stop. With his shirt unbuttoned and calves muscled, his head dry under an umbrella held upright by the handlebars, the man looks blankly ahead and quotes a fare that is triple what it should be. PT Sir, with some pride, casually agrees to it.

    “Fine,” he says, “fine, let’s go.”



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FOR YEARS, THE SCHOOL has tried to get the drainage in the access lane fixed so that it doesn’t flood. Every monsoon, it floods. So it has today too. Students, in school uniform and Hawaii slippers, hover by the dry mouth of the lane, on high ground. Rainwater has flooded the underground dens of cockroaches, and now the insects emerge from cracks in the pavement. On land they dash, alarming girls who yell and stomp them dead. When a school bus arrives, or a classmate’s car pauses, girls pile into the vehicle to be carried to the gate of the school.

Classes proceed as usual, but whose mind can be on Mongol invasions and trigonometry when the city is flooded? All day rain drips and drops, and when it pauses for a breath, it is replaced by the false rain of fat water from ledges and leaves.

In his class, PT Sir has them do yoga indoors, four students at a time, because it turns out that’s how many yoga mats there are. The others “meditate”—eyes half-open, a giggle spreading now and then. PT Sir says, “Quiet!” but he knows this too: The rules are different on a rainy day.



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AT LUNCHTIME THE PRINCIPAL, in a show of solidarity, leaves her air-conditioned office and sits with the teachers. She too has arrived with feet soaked, the bottom of her sari darkened by water.

“Undignified,” comments an English teacher. “All of us teachers lifting up our saris like that to walk to school. Imagine how it looks to the students!”

“It gives a poor impression to the parents,” agrees the maths teacher.

The principal, before a tiffin box of sandwiches, teases, “PT Sir, we have all seen that you know powerful people.”

PT Sir looks up from his lunch of noodles. He smiles, and makes no protest.

“Any chance,” the principal says, “something can be done for our lane?”



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SO IT IS THAT the following Monday, two laborers appear, wearing city corporation badges, and present themselves to the principal. “Your work order,” they say, offering her a sheet of much-folded paper. “Work has been done. Sign and give back, please.”

The principal cannot believe her eyes. “I noticed,” she says, “that the lane looked dug up.”

    And here it is, indeed, a document detailing what has been done. Over the weekend, men dispatched by the municipal corporation ripped up the asphalt, pumped the old drainage pipes clean of muck and plastic, then sealed the road above.

The next time it rains, students and teachers walk down the school lane, clean and dry, while districts of the city drown.





LOVELY


AT THE END OF a class, Mr. Debnath is sitting in his chair with a puddle of tea on a saucer, and he is blowing phoo phoo. I am analyzing my performance that I was recording on my phone. On the wall, some brown flowers are hanging around the faces of his late parents. High time for Mr. Debnath to buy fresh flowers.

“Lovely, today I am realizing,” he is saying, after the others have left, “that you are growing far beyond this class.”

“Don’t say such things, please,” I am protesting, even though I am secretly thinking that maybe he is right. My performances are always outshining. In fact, I am having the same thought myself. But I am always being humble. “I have to learn a lot more from you,” I am saying to him.

“I have been writing a script, Lovely,” he is saying. “Remember how I was getting a chance to go to Bombay, twenty years back? From that time till now, I have been writing this script. And it is getting to the point where I am thinking about casting and so on and so forth.”

    “Wow!” I am saying with my neck coming out like a goose. “You are directing a film?”

“Writing,” he is saying, “and directing, naturally. Now, I have one question for you.”