Imagine this – a twelve year old boy named Gullu, sitting at the window and soaking in the bustle of bullock carts, cars, pedestrians, and hawkers on the main street that his window opens to. He is wearing a blue t-shirt that his father gifted him on his last birthday, and brown shorts, his mother bought from the local charity store during its annual sale. She had braved a stampede of excited women to procure this pair of shorts, which was part of a collection of six, at a modest, discounted sum. His right hand holds a colouring pencil, while his left holds a gun. Not a gun really, but a country-made assemblage of slender pipes put together to hurl a steel projectile. His friend Madhav, who gave it to him, referred to it as a katta, with emphasis on the [t] sound. He wants to trace its outline on white sheets of paper lying in front of him. These white sheets belong to an old calendar. The precise page in front of him has the month of July on the reverse. It is a coincidence that it is July now, though there is a gap of three years between the July of the calendar and the July now. His mother has taught him to staple together pages of old calendars to make drawing books.
The katta is loaded with a single-pellet. It has been holding this pellet for the last ten days, ever since Madhav, Gullu’s closest friend, lent it to him. Madhav himself had borrowed it from Chotu, the loafer who smokes twenty beedis at seventeen, and does plumbing work in the area. It is early evening. Gullu’s father and mother are at work. While his father is about to return, his mother only comes back at dinner time. His father, when he returns, smells of sweat, traffic, and steel railings, Gullu knows the smell from the times he takes the local bus. He and his friend Madhav often trapeze along the bars and railings of the bus, when they return from school. Tucked in that transitional period between school’s regimented routine, and the desolation of home, this is the best part of his day. Sometimes Madhav and he intentionally board the wrong bus while returning home. Instead of coming home to Chittaranjan Park, via Greater Kailash, Kalkaji and Govind Puri, the bus they are on takes them to Connaught Place. There, they get down, amble along the white, colonnaded corridors, along rows of upmarket shops – Reebok, Nike, Khadim’s, Tjori, Burger Singh, Windsor, Roman Courtyard – names which sound alien and exotic to Gullu. Sometimes they stand outside a Berco’s or Farzi Café and stare at the attractive, happy, faces, talking over foods that seem too outlandish to be true, or peering into mobile phones too large for their hands. Sometimes Gullu and Madhav play word games with these names – both of them have to say one alien name, its last alphabet, or sound, becoming the root for the next word. Each of them has to repeat the entire string of words, while responding. The person who remembers the string, wins. The person who forgets, loses. That’s it. No gift, or trophy, or treat – just the silent, inexplicable satisfaction for having trumped the other.
Gullu, now sitting at the window, thinks about their trip to Connaught Place last week, while staring at the katta, trying to unpack its rugged, uncertain anatomy in his mind. He makes its outline on paper. He also makes a smiley face out of the curve of the trigger. Usually, when he returns home, he takes the house keys from beneath the third potted plant, beside the shoe-rack. Or if his father forgets to leave the keys under the pot, which he does quite a few times in a month, he goes and sits in the little shanty at the gate where the watchmen of the colony take small naps between their duties. There, he waits for the watchman to give him the duplicate keys of their apartment. In the past, he could have gone to the neighbour, Mrs Sharma’s apartment, the one adjacent to theirs. But Mrs Sharma and his mother stopped speaking three years ago over a minor misunderstanding entailing pieces of Mrs Sharma’s lingerie, which Gullu’s mother described later as, ashleel, vulgar, that were found on their balcony. It was possible that this was the result of mediocre, feeble winds, which also covered the flats in thin layers of dust whenever it blew, which was rarely. Mrs Sharma lived alone. Untroubled by her solitude, she was accustomed to having unnamed visitors at odd hours, whom neither the watchmen, nor any of the neighbours had ever spotted. This did not preclude speculation, gossip, and surreptitious sniggers among neighbours, who simultaneously felt envious of Mrs Sharma and flabby confidence about their own safe, respectable, predictable lives.
Gullu’s mother had accused Mrs Sharma of trying to entice her husband, through this vile, clandestine act. Mrs Sharma had retorted that Gullu’s father should ‘donate his face to the zoo, and his emaciated body to the medical college,’ before anyone would even think of enticing him. Gullu’s father was not handsome in the conventional sense. He had an ectomorphic body type. Whatever flesh he’d had, had dissolved in the grind and churn of paying EMIs, buying provisions, working as a junior accountant in a jute firm, and his passion for the chillum – though his wife was not aware of the latter. After returning from school, Gullu went to the kitchen, wondering what would be there for lunch. Usually, there are two cold chapatis and a vegetable dish – cauliflower cooked in cumin seeds, sautéed potatoes and onions, or colocasia made with chillies – none of these particularly appetising. He served himself, and sat beside the window. He would have liked to watch television while having his meal, like they did at Madhav’s home. But the 1BHK has a small, black and white tv, whose output, especially in the rainy season, leaves much to the imagination. So he prefers to sit by the window.
The previous day, he noticed a young couple, standing near their green scooter, having an argument. The girl, wearing a green top and blue jeans, holding a sheaf of papers in one hand and a half-finished bottle of cola in the other, was teary-eyed; the boy, muscled and sporting the hugely popular beard and ‘swag’ cut that Madhav and the other boys aspired to, wore jeans so tight, his crotch seemed to burst out. He was angry. Gullu could not really follow what they were saying to each other, but he was curious, and focussed his eyes on their lips. How adults are mean to each other, he sighed, while polishing off the uninspiring dal with the last morsels of chapati. It is difficult to say who – the boy at the window, or the boy by the scooter – was more shocked when the girl yelled at her partner, before splashing the dark contents of the cola bottle on his face and storming off. For a brief moment, an auto rickshaw driver stopped to gawk at them. He had a knowing snigger on his face, which only Gullu spotted. Gullu’s hand was mid-way between the plate and his mouth, holding the last morsel of chapati. He really wished they would have been kinder to each other, perhaps even embraced in public. The auto-rickshaw driver had in that instant turned to Gullu and caught him staring at the couple – both smiled faintly at this shared, illicit pleasure.
When Madhav had handed him the katta, he had warned him to fire holding it sideways, so that the shooter was not behind the weapon when it went off. Because often, or perhaps less than often, the weapon fired backwards. Madhav’s matter-of-fact instructions had also included the caveat that at times, the pressure created in the muzzle gets too intense, and the katta bursts in the hand of the shooter. ‘Angootha jayega phir,’ he said, you will lose your thumb. This had not alarmed Gullu, given that Madhav was prone to exaggerate things. Like when they had walked past one of the posh Connaught Place eateries, Madhav had informed Gullu, ‘yahan kaua biriyani milta hai.’ They serve biryani made from crow’s meat here. Gullu had only half believed him. But when his father had asked him what he wanted for his birthday, he had casually demanded ‘kaua biriyani’, to two pairs of astonished eyes. Of course, he had to make do with the blue t-shirt he was wearing now. And paneer biryani.
Gullu’s family is vegetarian. Though, he has tasted chicken at Madhav’s home. He liked its rubbery, spongy texture. Madhav had once told him that vegetarians are a weak lot. He then went on to compare their biceps – not with a measuring tape, but with his thumb and index finger – to substantiate his argument. Not surprisingly, Madhav’s biceps had been a quarter centimetre thicker than Gullu’s. ‘Tu bhi strong ho jayega ab,’ Madhav told him, after Gullu took his first bite from a fried chicken leg at Madhav’s home. Gullu never revealed having eaten chicken at home, though, after that, he would flex his biceps often in front of the mirror. After two more shared non-vegetarian meals – chilly chicken and mustard fish curry – Madhav informed Gullu, ‘Ab tu strong ban raha hai.’ Madhav sketches a chicken leg with the grip of the katta. The chicken leg looks tastier, juicer on paper, than in real life, he thinks to himself.
Gullu often thinks of his father and mother during his afternoon window ruminations. But not in the usual sense of what they did, or how they were. Rather, he preferred to imagine his parents in place of the people he saw, and this gave him a perverse pleasure, he could neither articulate, nor knew he was aware of. For instance, at the traffic signal opposite to the window, he sees a black BMW stop at the red light. It is being driven by a fair, fat, shiny-skinned man, who reminds him of a full bag of flour. He wears a red and white floral printed shirt. There are rings on his finger, which catch the sun’s light. He has a device plugged to his ear, presumably a Bluetooth ear-plug. He is laughing, deep in conversation. Gullu can’t see his eyes, as they are covered by a dashing pair of sunglasses. Beside him, sits a woman. From what he can make out, she is wearing a beige saree. She too is peering into her phone. Her hair is in a bun, and her eyes are lined with kohl. Gullu imagines his parents in the car – his father, several kilograms heavier; his mother, with clearer skin, dressed as elegantly as this woman. He tries to place himself beside them, perhaps in the seat behind, but he can’t. What comes to him more easily is to see himself outside the car, prancing from car to car, knocking on their windows and asking for alms like those two beggar-children dressed in rags. He sees himself joining them, playing, laughing, cavorting on the hot asphalt with them. The light turns green. The car drives away. Even though he could not place himself in the car he likes this exercise.
The katta is still on his table. Oddly, in the last few days, when he tried to play this game from any other place – the rooftop, or the watchman’s shanty near the gate – he cannot imagine anything. Something hampers his concentration, impedes his imagination. He feels an odd dread, which tugs at his gut and urges him to run back home, to the living room, to his window, to his chair. He does not think too much about this. But every so often, he does. He does not want to remember the root of this dread. Had he been sitting on that comfortable chair in the school psychologist’s office, she may have helped him recollect the origin of this peculiar dread. But the general view among the children is that the school psychologist is one of those useless appendages that has no particular worth in daily life. Only two obese girls, Minki and Radha, are seen going to her room after school hours. Had he too shown any outward symptoms of pagalpan or enduring sadness, he would have been heralded into that room that almost no one, except Minki and Radha, have seen from inside. There, sitting comfortably on the chair, under the soft gaze of the school psychologist, he would have recollected the afternoon which holds in its stomach the core of unknown dread lodged in Gullu’s heart like a mysterious sea animal. ‘Abey! Jo hua bhoolja. Mard ban,’ Madhav told him, when he narrated to him what had happened in the watchman’s shanty on that afternoon a month ago. So he has been trying to forget. Gullu does not divulge the perpetrator’s name. Perhaps because he doesn’t know it himself. Also because, his cheeks flush and turn red in humiliation, when Madhav asks for it. Madhav doesn’t press him, though he wants to make fun of him, call him a chakka.
Seeing Gullu despondent, Madhav assumes a more compassionate tone, ‘acha mat bol! I will give you something to teach that man a lesson.’ The man in question is Chotu, that raffish, part-plumber, part-hoarder of old, and sleazy sex magazines. He often cools his heels in the watchmen’s shanty. That afternoon, when Gullu, locked out of home, had gone there with his school bag, he had found Chotu sitting on the folding cot, taking in the hot air from the rotating table fan. He was wearing a brown vest which had once been white. It had three holes in the nipple area. Gullu turned his gaze away from what seemed to him the eyes of some dead animal. The watchman on duty was on his rounds. There was no other place to sit so Chotu signalled him to sit at the end of the folding cot where his barnacled heels caressed the dirty mattress like a fossil wrapped in sand. Gullu had taken out his colouring sheets, and busied himself. He waited for the watchman to return, so he could take the duplicate set of keys.
Ten, maybe twelve minutes passed. Somewhere in those minutes, Chotu, who was wearing a grey-chequered lungi, and appeared half-asleep, took out his cock and flashed it at Gullu, signalling him to hold it. When Gullu did not respond, Chotu’s fossil ankles and toes made their way towards Gullu’s crotch, attempting a python grip on him. Gullu resisted, but Chotu was sitting up now, trying to grab his crotch. ‘Arey idhar aa, kahan jar aha hai,’ come here, where are you going, Chotu said. Gullu ran out of the shanty. His cheeks burnt with shame. Chotu’s sea-horse shaped penis swam in his mind. He saw the watchman coming. When the watchman entered the shanty, Chotu appeared to be sleeping again. The sound of traffic overtook the cursory words they exchanged. Gullu looks at the katta. According to Madhav, this is what he should do. ‘Sale ko bata, mard kaun hai.’ Let the bastard know who the man is! Madhav had said while giving him the katta. So each afternoon, Gullu comes home, sits with the katta at the window, waiting for his assailant. He does spot Chotu once in a while – getting groceries for one of the apartments, painting someone’s window, cleaning someone’s car. He walks past Chotu, his heartbeat quickening. But Chotu does not seem to notice him. He continues to do what he is doing. At other times, the katta sits patiently in Gullu’s bag, just as it lies in front of him right now. He has to return it to Madhav by the end of this week. Three more days to go, he tells himself, while gazing at a family of three on a grey scooter, waiting for the light to turn green. The man, presumably the father, has teeth stained by gutkha. The woman at the back wears a salwar-kameez of faded blue, watching something on her phone. A boy, perhaps a little younger than Gullu, stands in the front, turning around at his father, laughing. They seem to be in the middle of a conversation. The boy does not mind that his father has reddened teeth. Gullu instantly likes this – the boy and his father lost in conversation amidst the heat of traffic – and wants to take his place. The traffic lights turn green. The scooter drives away.
*
Ankush Banerjee’s debut volume of poetry, An Essence of Eternity was published by Sahitya Akademi in 2016. His work appears in Indian Literature, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Eclectica, Jaggery Lit, and The Indian Express. He is a three time recipient of the United Services Institution Gold Medal for his essays on Military Leadership and Ethics. He is currently working on his second collection of poetry, as well as pursuing his PhD from BITS, Pilani. He lives in New Delhi with his wife, son and two cats.