Good Indian Girls: Stories (24 page)

I screamed and Howard knocked my head harder against the tiles. Through the sudden pain, I heard footsteps running and a voice, and I could see Mr. Babcock’s feet and legs standing close by.

He said, “Howard,” his voice thin and weak. It was closer to a question than an injunction. Then again, “Howard? Let
Vijay go?” Howard raised and dropped my head once more and Babcock repeated, “Howard, will you let the little chap go now?”

Howard’s breath was hard and fast in my ears.

He eventually stopped, though more from exhaustion than from Babcock’s pathetic entreaties. Babcock crouched beside me. I could smell tobacco and alcohol on his breath and he looked weakly at my face as though I was both there and not there, as though to him I existed in two possible states and he had not yet decided which of those two was real. He fell back a moment, losing his balance, and then he righted himself again. Finally, he seemed to decide. “Vijay?” he said in a voice expressing surprise and recognition. “Why did you make Howard do that?”

I began to cry. I looked down at the tiles. There was a smear of blood there and I raised a hand to my head and felt my wet hair. I brought the fingers to my face. They were red and I showed this to Mr. Babcock as though it was an explanation for everything, and if not an explanation, then at least an expiation, a confession of my guilt and complicity. Howard stood silently behind Mr. Babcock. He did not look at me but instead looked away and out through the door, though from his angle he could see only a few feet down along the hall. Perhaps he was expecting someone else, perhaps this had all been strangely planned. Mr. Babcock studied my hand and shook his head. “You’re cut up,” he said and I was surprised because I thought he must be saying something more than the plainly obvious but that I was too dumb to comprehend it.

“Before I take you to the nurse, will you say sorry to Howard.”

The look I gave him must have shaken him because he did not repeat the request, instead he told me brusquely to stand and walk with him. To Howard he said, “You go clean yourself up, young chap.” Howard nodded but did not move, waiting for us to leave before he followed us out of the library.

I walked with Babcock’s wavering hand on my shoulder, Howard’s steps shadowing mine. I could feel the blood dripping along my face, mingling with tears. I was furious and hated Howard and hated Babcock and hated myself for not fighting, for following Howard for as long as I had. I was ashamed and every step I took battled with that shame, held it up, magnified it, toppled it, recreated it.

That night I slept in the infirmary and in the evening I watched as several boys, fewer than usual, crept from the dormitory and out across the courtyard to the prison. Arjun was among them. They looked like ghosts floating over the ground, gliding in and out of light and dark, the faint sound of their steps disappearing into the swallowing blackness.

The first command Howard delivered from the skull of the Krishnanthropus was that all children must play only those games Howard decided upon. This was not a large demand as Howard already controlled most games played in the courtyard and around the ancient stone pillar. If he wanted to play king of the hill, that’s what we played, and if he wanted to play cricket, that’s also what we played, and for several days there was no outward change from the regular round of games between or after classes. The Krishnanthropus had simply codified a part of the structure of our lives and many of us continued to play as we wanted to, ignoring Howard completely, asking him to join or not join as we
wished, and I, soon after that first pronouncement, forgot it until the afternoon I was sitting in the shade of a tamarind tree playing chess with Arjun. Arjun was winning and we were approaching the game’s end when Howard walked up, shifting from foot to foot as he stood there in the bright sunlight.

Howard didn’t look at me. Since the day in the library he had avoided talking to me or finding himself being left alone with me, and now his face conceded my presence only through the stiffness and withdrawal of his expression. In his hand he held the branch of a tree with two tapered green leaves still attached. Earlier I had seen him playing some game of war, acting the general in command.

When he spoke, he looked directly at Arjun. “You can’t play that anymore. It’s not allowed.” He sputtered this quickly, almost breathlessly.

Arjun looked first at Howard and then toward me and then back to Howard.

“But—” Arjun protested.

“That’s what it said, remember? You agreed. I was to decide.”

I broke in, “You can’t tell us not to play.”

Howard ignored me. “Are you coming?” he demanded of Arjun.

“But the game’s almost over,” Arjun offered. “I’m winning.”

“It’s a forbidden game now.” Howard spoke with a strained authority that didn’t match his voice, making him sound foolish, and I mimicked his anxious command.

“
It’s a forbidden game now
.”

Arjun looked back at me but now his eyes displayed clear unease. He moved his head slowly back and forth along a
compressed arc. Howard raised the stick by an inch and Arjun’s eyes flashed away from mine and across to Howard’s hand.

“Don’t listen to that monkey,” Howard said. His hand was shaking.

“It’s a forbidden game now,” I repeated, raising the pitch of my voice to make the command sound even more comical.

Howard turned to look at me. “We’ll get you,” he said. There was a pathetic violence in his voice. Even on the day in the library I had not detected this tone. He turned back to Arjun. “Come on,” he said. Arjun stood quickly, not looking at me or the chessboard. Within a few moves he would have won, but now his figure angled away from me with Howard behind him. The kids beyond still played war and I watched Arjun walk away from me and felt a hot, suffocating shame spread up along my cheeks until it reached my eyes and I could feel it pressing at my eyelids. I called out in a mocking voice, “Forbidden game, forbidden game,” but neither turned and soon I could see Arjun joining in the game of war, holding high a quickly fashioned weapon, and shrieking as he ran in a pack with his fellow combatants.

From that time on, most of the boys ignored me. I had few close friends among the other children except Arjun and we knew each other the way kids know each other, who play together and sleep together, with a friendship resting at the edges of our common interests: checkers, chess, books of travel, distant lands and times. There was no real closeness between us and I was not wholly surprised when Arjun turned his back on me as easily as the others. Now when one of the kids spoke to me, it was a brief comment or a sentence, only said when we found ourselves alone
together. At night, Arjun slipped notes to me, telling me of the latest commands of Howard and the Krishnanthropus. The notes were brief and cryptic, speaking of another world coalescing at the edges of my own. This was how I learned the Krishnanthropus had ordered no one was to talk or play with me. I was both relieved and disturbed and told myself the skull was stupid and the games and orders that came from it childish. My lonely hours in the library or in the long dormitory now lengthened and when boys would come across me or be startled by my form entering a room, hiding at a desk, playing alone in the courtyard or among the trees, they looked at me with pitying scorn. I hated them for this stare because it was the gaze I wanted to give back to them.

The notes Arjun left for me under my pillow or in the pages of a book I was reading contained brief versions of Howard’s edicts. These were short, impenetrable messages, messages from an unknown god, except we all knew who the god was: Howard. This was now his world, and this was how he would rule it: “K says no more chess,” “Prison tonight. Extra gifts,” “Tell all no skull,” “Talk brings pain,” “Pillar is history says K,” “Play only in yard,” “K the old one,” “Avoid the pillar.” The day after this last note, there were no children to be found on the pillar. It had existed as the center of our activities for so long that its abandonment shocked me. Howard’s power and hold over the children, particularly those who lived inside the school, had clearly grown. When one of the day students approached the pillar during the mid-morning break, I watched Arjun run up to him and violently thrust him away. There were the beginnings of a fight between the two but several boys rallied behind Arjun and soon the one who had approached the pillar stalked off, waving a hand dismissively in the air.

I found Arjun alone in the toilet that same day. He looked at me sheepishly when I spoke to him.

“I don’t know anything anymore,” he said, taking his eyes from mine and looking beyond me to the door. “I think Howard pays the servants. How else does he stop them from talking?”

“But why can’t you play on the pillar?”

“The old one says the pillar is a symbol of a false god.”

“But it’s one of Ashoka’s—”

“The old one says that all history must be destroyed because it’s false. He was here before history. He wants to come back. To start history again.”

“The old one?”

“He speaks through Krishna.”

“Bugger the old one,” I said violently and loudly.

Arjun gave me a look of alarm and then cast his eyes down to the floor. “I don’t know who’s right.”

“Not Howard.”

“But Howard speaks with it. He does. He wants to start everything over, to begin the world again. He says we’re the only ones who can, without parents, without history. That’s what he says.” Arjun’s voice was almost pleading and he seemed very changed from the Arjun I had known.

“I don’t care,” I said. “He’s a bastard.”

Arjun shook his head and when I demanded more, he said nothing. He pressed his lips tightly together and refused to look at me until finally he said, “The old one says you’re part of the false world. The false world will pass.” Then he walked out, not looking back at me. When he was gone I looked around at the stark, brown walls with a single glassless window facing the back wall of the compound. A kid stood
staring at me from that wall. I recognized him as one of the younger dayschoolers who shadowed Howard’s every step.

That night Arjun returned to the bed next to mine and hid his face in his hands, moving stiffly in the dim light cast by candles burning at the far end of the room. He pulled the blanket up with tense motions of his limbs and later whimpered quietly as though troubled by nightmares. When I whispered his name, he stopped making any sound. I lay awake for an hour, watching the slow progress of his breath as it raised and lowered the sheet over his thin frame. In the morning I saw the bruises on his face. He must have seen the look of surprise on my face because he turned immediately away and pulled on his clothes without comment. No one spoke to anyone and we all shuffled out of the dormitory to breakfast in a gaping silence.

All day the children continued like this, hardly speaking to one another, and when they did, it was a hushed sentence, a whisper pressed to an ear. After lunch, when we were allowed out to play, some gathered around the pillar, sitting on it, leaning against it. No one had gathered here for days. I watched them from a window in the library. I was reading a book written by a geologist in the middle of the previous century. It was a journal of his travels around India, and contained information not only about the geology but about bird and animal life, about the landscapes and the people he encountered. In Oudh he discovered several tales of wolf-boys, children stolen from their families at birth by wolves and reared in feral packs. When they were found and captured, they never assimilated back into society: they would eat only raw meat, they tore to shreds any clothes they were given, ran around on all fours, and never talked,
only howled or whimpered, pining for a lost freedom. I was affected by the description of the silence of the boys; I began to see myself like them, lost to the society of the orphanage children. I had been thrown out of its orbit, thrown into a state of feral silence.

Later I approached the pillar in the cool early evening. I didn’t care if anyone saw me. The pillar was covered with the initials of every student, newly inscribed. This is how they had spent the afternoon when they had gathered on it in a pack. Every boy’s initials were there, or all but mine. I felt a curious vertigo on seeing new letters scratched into the old stone, a sickening unease, and later when I found Arjun alone I stopped him with a hand and demanded to know what was going on.

“That’s my stone!” I shouted at him, hitting him in the chest with a fist. “It’s mine! You can’t do anything to it. I’ll tell.”

Arjun looked at me and said nothing. Finally he pulled away and ran from me and I began to cry. I don’t know why I cried except that I felt a sudden and overwhelming isolation. I hated them, every last one.

That night the boys went to bed as usual. It was the cricket instructor, Mr. Ellis’s turn to walk the dorm. He stamped across the floorboards noisily, inspecting every bunk, shaking this child’s foot or peering closely at another’s face. He was a harsh, recalcitrant man who demanded roughly from each one of us whether we were asleep and we were all required to answer in bright voices that yes sir, we were most definitely asleep. When he was gone, I tried to stay awake because I felt sure I knew something would happen that night. But within minutes I was lost and when I woke I looked across to Arjun’s bed and found it empty. The bed on the other side
of me was empty also. I sat up quickly, letting the sheet slide down my body. All the other beds were abandoned and I was left entirely alone. The room was cool and I felt the chilly night air playing over my body.