What comes first: chicken or egg? You don’t know.
What comes first: love or loneliness? You don’t know. Not yet.
You are an eleven-year-old boy who lives on the third floor of a whitewashed, bare-boned apartment building in the outskirts of New Delhi with your maa whose deep dimples you’ve inherited, along with her proclivity to fold clothes in neat squares and her habit of waking up before sunrise, though you never get out of bed until she’s had her morning chai (half a cup of milk, a piece of jaggery, and crushed ginger root) because you know she prefers to have it alone.
Maa is a geography teacher at your school. Haley’s comet, tectonic plates, the Sahara desert—her stories are always about places or phenomena, never about people. No kings, ghosts, thieves ever enter her stories, just like no relatives, friends, neighbors ever enter your home. You like to believe that when your father was alive, Maa hosted Diwali parties wearing sequined sarees and glittery eye shadow, that she danced at New Year bashes holding your father’s hand, that she knew how to laugh.
You don’t have any memories of that time ’cause you were a baby then, but you have plenty of imagimories. Yes, you know it’s not a real word, but if you can imagine memories, can’t you make up a word?
You make stuff up all the time. You excel in subjects that require making stuff up, like English composition and moral science. But your favorite subject is mathematics, especially this year that Ansari Sir teaches your class. He rides a motorcycle to school, wears rimless glasses, and has a cool little goatee on his chin.
“Why was the math book sad?” Ansari Sir writes at the top of the blackboard one day. That’s how he starts every class—with a punny question. Whoever gives the funniest response gets a piece of orange candy and Ansari Sir’s favorite compliment: Behtareen.
You’re about to raise your hand for a chance to answer Sir’s question when someone knocks on the door. It’s your maa. Your classmates eye you as she steps up to Ansari Sir and apologizes for disturbing his class. Her face is tense, her tone brisk. It’s an emergency, she says, then drops her voice; you can’t hear the rest. Something about angry parents, a legal nightmare.
She walks to your seat in the second row and hands you the home keys and a ten-rupee note. “I’ll be late today. Take a rickshaw back. Lunch is in the fridge. Heat it before you eat it, Neelu, okay?”
From the corner of your eyes, you see your classmates grinning. You know they’ll tease you for months with, “Heat it before you eat it, Neeloooo.” The rugged edges of the metal key dig in your soft palms. Maa turns to the door. You sit down and exhale. It’s done.
Before she can step out, though, Ansari Sir says, “Neelima!” Not ma’am. Not Mrs. Upadhyay. Just Neelima. She turns around, one hand on the doorframe. Sir wipes his chalky fingers on his dark brown pants. “Do you want me to come with you?”
She shakes her head. “Principal Sir is driving us there. We’ll be fine.”
“Take care, okay? And let me know if I can do anything to help. Please.”
Your mother’s face relaxes. Her hand comes off the doorframe to tuck a curl behind her ear. She points to the blackboard. “You could tell me why the math book was sad.”
Sir’s eyes flick to the board then back to her face. “Because it had a lot of problems.”
He smiles. She laughs. First with her lips pursed together, then with her teeth glistening. Her head rocks forward, then backward; her eyes stay on Ansari Sir. Her dimples are like two black holes now, bottomless. You try to remember when you’d seen your mother’s dimples glint like that. You can’t. Even in your imagimories, she rarely smiles. She chuckles sometimes, but a laugh like that—even you couldn’t make it up. For a few moments, you forget where you are and who’s watching you. You revel in the rare occurrence that is your mother’s laugh, rarer than Haley’s comet. And more life-changing. At least for you, but you don’t know that yet.
Since that day, you keep seeing her laughing at school. During the morning prayer assembly, in the hallways, at lunch, outside the staff room. It seems that everytime you turn your head, Ansari Sir whispers a joke in her ear. It annoys you, though you know that it shouldn’t. Isn’t this what you always wanted, your mother chatting and laughing like other mothers?
You’re not the only one who notices. Your classmates snigger when Ansari Sir enters the class now. They elbow each other when your mother passes by. Thankfully she doesn’t teach your class, but that doesn’t stop them from passing chits about her, chits that your best friend, Gippy, throws away in the dustbin before you can read them.
One day, a chit lands on your desk before Gippy can intercept.
Neel’s mommy and Ansari, sitting on a tree,
K-I-S-S-I-N-G!
You recognize whose crabbed handwriting it is. After the final bell, you accost the chit-writer in the hallway, grab his collar, ask him to apologize. He throws a punch, breaks your nose. Gippy tries to come in between. Chit-writer’s friends hold him down. Someone takes another jab at your face; your head spins. They run away. Gippy walks you to the nurse’s room. You’re bent forward with your palms clasped over your nose like you’re scared it will fall off. Red, sticky blood drips from between your fingers.
Two days later, Ansari Sir visits you at home. Both you and your mother are on a weeklong leave from school. The bruising around your eyes makes you look like a scary panda. At least that’s what Gippy said when he came to see you earlier that day. Ansari Sir doesn’t say that. He sits in one of the three foldable chairs that your mother has unfolded and set to the left of your bed for visitors and asks her what the doctor said. Maa, standing to your right, near the door, says: “No fracture, but extensive soft tissue damage. And a lot of blood loss.”
“What medications did she give?” Sir asks.
“Antibiotics and painkillers, mainly.”
“Any supplements?”
“Yeah, iron. His hemoglobin was low.”
“Vegetable juice can help with that. Carrot, beetroot, spinach with a dash of lemon.”
“I’ll go buy them tomorrow.”
“I can bring them on my way back from school.”
“You don’t have to. I’ll manage.”
“I have to go to the market to buy some stuff for the Christmas fête, anyway.”
“I forgot you’re in charge of that this year. Sorry I’m not able to help. How’s it going?”
“I’m in over my head, to be honest.”
You watch them talk like one watches a tennis game—eyes darting from one player to the other. And just like the players carry on without paying any heed to the audience, Ansari Sir and your mother seem to have forgotten you. Even when you fake-cough or whimper to show you’re in pain, your mother continues to make suggestions for the fête. Then their conversation moves on to winter vacations and resolutions for 1982. Maa’s declaration to restart her singing practice in the new year triggers a discussion on music and favorite singers and unforgettable songs and songs forgotten, until they reach a point where neither of them asks the next question. They just stare at each other across your bed.
You rub your arms. “Maa, I’m cold.”
Maa shudders visibly, like someone slid an ice cube under her shirt. She covers your already blanketed body with a checkered blue and black quilt. She checks your temperature with the back of her hand. She fusses with your hair.
Ansari Sir stands up. “I should get going.”
“Let me at least make chai for you. You haven’t had anything,” Maa says.
He wriggles his hands and refuses in a weak voice.
“I have to make it for myself, anyway,” she lies. She never has tea in the evenings.
Despite sliding to the edge of the bed and positioning your ear close to the door, you can’t understand what Maa and Ansari Sir are talking about in the kitchen. The honks and screeches of evening traffic drown their words. Their laughs, however, rise above the street din, filter through the kitchen wall, ruffle the curtains of the bedroom door, thunder through your ears, and thud into your heart.
“Maa, I need juice, Maa,” you yell. The laughter stops.
“Okay, Neelu,” she calls from the kitchen. You wait. She doesn’t bring the juice; he does. He also brings a plate of cookies that he leaves on the side stool.
The laughter restarts.
Your friend Rinku also went through this after his mother died. First his father’s secretary started coming home to clean. Then she stayed over to make breakfast. Then his father married her. Then they sent Rinku away to a boarding school. Now he only comes to Delhi during summer vacations and then, too, hardly comes out to play.
In one sweep, you jerk away the stool on which Ansari has placed the juice and cookies.
“What happened?” Maa runs to the room.
“The glass slipped,” you reply, without looking at her.
“You didn’t get hurt, did you?”
“No.”
“I’ll clean this up and get you another glass. You lie down, okay?”
“Sure.”
Ansari Sir is at the door, watching the scattered shards on the floor. He makes an excuse and leaves. Maa gathers the glass bits and wipes the yellow liquid, then switches off the bedroom light so you can sleep. The traffic outside has dwindled; you can hear the comforting jingle of your mother’s glass bangles as she moves around in the kitchen. Your house is at peace again.
Hanky-panky. That’s the buzzword when school reopens in January after winter vacation. The sports teacher of the junior sections, Michael Sir, was caught doing hanky-panky with students. None of your classmates know what it means exactly, but all of you know what it means vaguely. You learn the specifics in the new, very awkward class that Principal Sir teaches the boys and VP Ma’am teaches the girls. They say: “Report immediately if a grown-up kisses you on the lips, touches your groin area, talks about your private parts, takes off your clothes, etcetera.” They say: “If you get a funny feeling about a situation, get out of there and report it.”
You haven’t seen Ansari Sir and your mother together since that day when Sir visited your home. They don’t stand next to each other during the prayer assembly now, nor do they loiter in the hallways, chatting. And yet, you know something is going on. Until the new, awkward class, you didn’t have the words to describe it. A funny feeling. That’s exactly what you have when you see Ansari Sir’s eyes linger on your mother when she passes him. Or when, after his speech in the assembly, she claps louder than the other teachers.
This funny feeling follows you home too. One morning you wake up to what sounds like whispers and muffled laughs coming from the living room. But you think, Who’d come over at 5 a.m.? and sleep again. When you get out of bed at 6:15, your mother is in the kitchen by the sink, washing a teacup. This is where you find her every morning when you step out of the bedroom. But something is different. Instead of reciting a religious hymn, she’s humming a song by Lata Mangeshkar. And the cup in her hand isn’t the yellowing, white one that she has tea in everyday but the one with delicate, gold roses painted along the rim, the one she’s told you are for guests.
“Was someone here, Maa?” you ask.
“Here? No.” She smiles, then places the cup on the maroon drying towel where a second cup sits upside down—just washed.
You dial up your vigilance after that. Lurking outside your mother’s classes, peeping through the staffroom window, dropping in at her office to borrow a pen or to relay some news that just can’t wait. When Maa’s birthday comes in February, you snoop inside her bag and look for a card that has a stupid math joke or the word Behtareen. You never find any concrete proof to legitimize your funny feelings.
In March, your final exam schedule is announced. The panic of preparations is palpable in your school. You put a pin in your sleuthing and funny feelings and make a timetable to complete the syllabus and then revise it. Gippy and you study together after school at either his house or yours. While history is your weak point—all those wars and dead prime minister biographies—math is Gippy’s. He’s glad it’s the last exam on the schedule, though it comes sooner than he expects it to.
The day before the math exam, you decide to stay over at Gippy’s to tutor him. Your mother warns against staying up too late, but you know it’s going to be a long night. On your way to Gippy’s house, you buy pineapple pastries from Lovers’ Cafe for your late-night cravings. Ansari Sir is there, too, buying fruit tarts, which seems like the most ridiculous item on the menu to you because why would one pay twelve rupees for strawberries arranged in a little circle? In Sir’s left hand is a bunch of red dahlias—their red so tangy you can taste their sourness.
“Must be a good omen, no?” you ask Gippy when you reach his house. “To run into your math teacher before the math exam?”
“I’ll show you a better omen. Here.” Gippy hands you a question paper with the next day’s date on it.
“Is this . . . ?” You look at Gippy.
He beams. His face is redder than the dahlias; he’s sweating with excitement. A group of high schoolers bribed the school watchman to unlock Ansari Sir’s office so they could make a copy of their question paper. Gippy tagged along to get your class’s question paper as well. You are by no means a perfect kid, but this is a level of cheating you aren’t ready for. You refuse to look at the questions despite Gippy’s insistence, but you don’t stop him from reading them.
Next morning, you are late for school. The prayer assembly is already underway when you arrive. You and Gippy park your bicycles quickly and rush to join your classmates. Everyone’s eyes are closed, and their hands are folded in prayer position. Ansari Sir’s eyes are open, but he doesn’t notice you. He’s smiling at someone on the other side of the quadrangle over the heads of rows of students. Even before you turn around, you know who it is. Your mother, of course. Wearing a red saree that matches the two, tangy-red dahlias sticking out of her bun.
That’s the last day you see Ansari Sir at school.
The next time you meet him is in 1995 at the Mumbai Airport. A lot has changed by then.
You’re six-feet one-inch tall and have a stooping posture.
You’ve learned that eggs are inside chickens, and chickens are inside eggs. Anywhere they go, they go together. Much like love and loneliness.
You haven’t spoken to Gippy in over a decade. Not since the night his father caught you both in bed together, kissing, and sent Gippy away to their ancestral village in Punjab. You still dream of him, though. Regularly.
You dream of Ansari Sir regularly too. Whenever something good happens in your life, he shows up to remind you that you don’t deserve it.
But the Ansari Sir you see at the airport is very different from the man who haunts you. Instead of cool, rimless glasses, he wears black bifocals. Instead of a triangular goatee, graying stubble. His hairline has receded to his ears, which brings into focus the three parallel lines etched across his forehead.
He’s sitting at the bar, sketching.
The first time you’d seen Ansari Sir’s sketches was after the math exam thirteen years ago. You and Gippy were at the Lovers’ Cafe, celebrating the end of school year with lychee milkshakes, when you told him all about the red dahlias and your funny feelings and fear of being banished to a boarding school.
To cheer you up, Gippy pulled out a little book from his bag. “I stole this from Ansari Sir’s office when I went for the question papers,” he said. The cover read MATH JOKES in black block letters. “This is where he gets all his stupid questions from,” Gippy said, then flipped the book open and read: “How do you stay warm in a cold room?”
“How?” you asked.
“By hanging out in the corners where it’s always ninety degrees.”
You laughed. Gippy rolled his eyes and slid the book across the table. In the margins on most pages were sketches in black ink, of places and things you recognized: the steeple of the church next to your school, the storefront of A-1 Florist, a blackboard duster next to a bowl of chalk. What caught your attention was the balcony of your apartment with the Tulsi plant in front of the iron railing on which you hung your towel to dry every morning. Part of the round table was also visible, on which sat two cups with delicate roses along the rim.
At the airport, you slide onto the barstool next to Ansari Sir and wish him a good afternoon. His pencil hovers over the half-done whiskey bottles in his sketchbook as he studies your face.
You’ve imagined this scenario a thousand times. Running into Ansari Sir, confessing, apologizing. But now that he’s in front of you, your tongue is stuck to your palate. You gulp down the fear, and say: “I’m Neelotkarsh, Sir. Neelotkarsh Upadhyay.”
Recognition softens his eyes, brightens his face. “Of course! Neel—wow, you’ve grown so tall.” His hand comes close to cupping your cheek, but he pulls it back at the last moment. He shuts his sketchbook and asks, “How have you been?”
“I’ve been good, Sir. Graduated a few months ago from Jhansi Medical College.”
“So you’re a doctor now? Behtareen!” Sir tilts his head and smiles. “Do you work here in Mumbai?”
“I came for a friend’s wedding. For two days. Do you live here?”
Sir shakes his head but doesn’t offer an answer. He takes a big gulp of his drink, then asks, “How’s Neelima Ma’am?”
Ma’am.
At the Lovers’ Cafe while flipping through the pages of the joke book to find further evidence that Ansari Sir visited your house and that you mother lied to you, you’d come across these lines:
With your eyes on me
I feel like I can conquer the world.
Imagine what I’d do
With your hand in mine . . .
You turned the page over and found a woman’s face. Almond-shaped eyes. Curly hair. Big smile. Two shaded-in circles on her cheeks. A long neck. And below it—where the shoulders should’ve been—an inscription: neelimaneelimaneelima.
Your stomach had whirled then; a weird bitterness flooded your mouth, crawled down to your fingers. You don’t remember what happened next—perhaps you passed out for a few moments—but when you came to your senses again, Gippy was yelling at you to calm down, to look at him, his face scrunched up, his eyes wide. The book was on the floor, torn up in pieces, its crumpled pages scattered around your feet.
“Maa moved to Jhansi too,” you say to Sir now. “Teaches at a girls’ college.”
Ansari Sir nods. “Must’ve added Bermuda Triangle to their syllabus, I bet.”
For a few years, your mother was obsessed with solving the disappearances in the Triangle. She even went through the archives of local newspapers to find old incidents. She read books about it. You haven’t heard her talk about the Triangle in a while, though. She’s obsessed with gardening now; your balcony looks like a nursery. You don’t tell Ansari Sir that—you let him believe he knows her well. Instead you say: “We have a bookcase full of Bermuda books.”
He chuckles. Only after one has had the nectar of their life sucked away by love, only after one has had loneliness for a companion long enough, does one learn to laugh with such sorrow.
A week after you’d torn up the joke book at Lovers’ Cafe, the high schoolers who broke into Ansari Sir’s office accosted Gippy and you. Sir had noticed the missing book and interrogated the watchman. “Replace the book,” the high schoolers warned Gippy, “or the watchman will point to you.” But there was no book to be replaced. Gippy and you went to the bookstore, the library, his bespectacled neighbor who had piles of books in his living room. Nothing.
You don’t remember who said it first. You can’t say for sure if it came out of Gippy’s mouth or yours, but the moment it was out there, you both agreed it would work. One arrow for two targets. One solution to two problems.
You sat down to write. With your left hand, of course, so no one would recognize the handwriting. “Dear Principal Sir,” you read along as you wrote. Gippy followed on another white sheet. Your letters were in the formal format: everything aligned to the left. You put to use whatever you’d learned in English composition class that year.
And in that other awkward class.
“I had a funny feeling when my math teacher called me to his office after school, but I ignored it.” This part was common in both your letters, the remaining you divided in two. Gippy picked, “kiss on the lips” and “groin touch.” You got “took off my pants” and “touched my private parts.”
In both your letters the teacher uttered “Behtareen” afterward.
“How’ve you been, Sir?” you ask him now.
He says he’s been fine.
You want more. You want to be reassured. You imagine him living in a big house, full of laughter and love and jokes. Silly math jokes. You imagine him teaching geometry to a class full of attentive, curious students. You hope you didn’t snatch these things from him.
On a paper napkin, you jot down your home address and phone number and slide it toward Ansari Sir. “Maa would be happy to hear from you.”
He eyes the napkin but doesn’t touch it, doesn’t put it in his pocket, doesn’t write his contact information down for you.
You wait.
Just like you had waited that summer for your mother to stop sobbing in the bathroom. Just like you had waited for a response to your letter, even though you hadn’t mentioned a return address or even your name.
***
Artwork sourced by public.work
