When I first met her, we still lived in J Block, behind the market with the big flashing sign for Moti Sweets. In those days you could still cut straight through the shopping complex, pet a mangy dog or two at the back side of the buildings, and run home with anda-doodh in less than fifteen minutes. Although, this involved traversing through a kaccha road before clambering over the engineering marvel that was our colony’s barbed-wire-and-bougainvillea boundary wall and into Kachroo Uncle’s back lawn. This was the tricky bit. He was always there with his reedy voice and rolled up copy of The Statesman, ready to hound us out. Luckily, Deepak’s garden bordered his and we had all quickly learned to wiggle our way through the dividing wall of shrubbery and into safety.
It was on one such trip from home to market and back via Kachroo Uncle that I first caught a glimpse of a shaggy fringe and starched cotton frock that would soon become a recurring feature of my life. I didn’t know that then. Now, if you were a good child and went on your mother’s evening errands regularly, you knew to be alert on your shortcut through the kaccha road. It was mostly pleasant in the afternoon when we came back from school except for the odd scrappy cat yowling for food. In the evenings it was different – something changed in the air. We all knew to move fast and purposefully if we meant to get home alright because we all knew Deepak’s story about his Kavita Didi on the kachha road. Whenever she deigned to be in our presence, we watched her carefully with more than a bit of trepidation.
That one evening in late March, I’d postponed my errands as much as I could. Salma Aunty had given me a stash of mystery novels that once belonged to her daughter, and I was loathe to interrupt my reading. I had a nook in the veranda that was exposed enough to enjoy the calm early summer air and protected enough against the almost-April sun. There was a gentle breeze that evening, which in later weeks would turn into the Loo, hot and unyielding. My mother had ceased calling out to me from her study, reminding me to run my errands. She did that sometimes to annoy me into doing what she wanted by maintaining a deafening silence. I must have dragged my feet all the way to the market and back so much so that it was twilight by the time I’d made my slothful way to the kaccha road.
The sole streetlight casting its glow along the length of the kaccha road flickered. That was when I saw her, no more than a flash of movement in the corner of my eye. I was almost sure it was my well-tended imagination, but for a girlish voice calling out from behind me. I turned so fast that I nearly tripped over my own two feet only to see a child, no taller than myself. Her black hair was cut bluntly to her chin with an equally blunt fringe falling into her eyes. She smiled at me pleasantly as she advanced with a grace that should not have been possible for someone who looked about ten years old. I was rooted to the spot, able only to let my plastic bag of eggs and bread hang limply from my clammy fingers as she neared me.
She must have said something to me – because I remember the odd reptilian way her tongue darted out to wet her lips between words – but the sound didn’t reach my ears. I remember wanting to flee and wishing desperately to instead be found trespassing in Kachroo Uncle’s garden. Something cool and dry brushed against my fingers and I looked down to see the child’s hands rummaging through my plastic bag. Before I could force my voice out in protest, she was done: one white egg sat delicately on her upturned palm. “Shame,” she said, “You could have gone home with an even dozen. What will Aunty say?”
Later while my mother was telling me off about the absent egg, it struck me that the child was not mocking me, but was truly concerned about what my mother would say.
***
When I first met her, we still lived in J Block, behind the market with the big flashing sign for Moti Sweets. In those days, the only decent coffee in the city was served at India Coffee House all the way in Connaught Place. But for those who knew where to look, Mrs. Kumar from F Block – who had studied in Paris at Le Cordon Bleu – ran a perfectly nice cafe that she tried desperately to model after the ones she had frequented while in France. One year, she even had cobble stones put in around her quaint little establishment. That lasted only until the monsoon after which only seven stones remained, forming a crooked smile at the door to the cafe. Mrs. Kumar swore up and down that she’d get it fixed, but months came and went, and she never got around to it. I, for one, thought it lent the place some character, like it had perhaps withstood the War and had scars to show for it.
I visited Mrs Kumar’s cafe nearly every week that winter. It was cosy, the coffee was good, the prices moderate, and the company quiet. For all her pretensions to Frenchness, Mrs. Kumar only ever played Kishore Kumar turned down low on a serious looking gramophone. The only other regulars were a group of old men who came in every Tuesday and Thursday around noon. They all wore well cut trousers with creases so sharp they could slice bread. Chortling every now and again, they’d pass a plate of brightly coloured macarons around their group. Mrs. Kumar’s daughters came by occasionally to knit along with their mother. I never saw the girls finish a single item.
It was towards the end of that particularly cold January that there was a newcomer in the cafe, announced by the rich peals of a Swiss cowbell Mrs. Kumar had strung up on the door. It was a child, a girl, about ten years old. She had a thick head of hair, cut short to frame her face, with a heavy fringe peeking out from under her beret. Dressed as she was, in what I later surmised to be a white tweed skirt suit, she looked like a tiny adult. I watched her curiously as she ordered a hot chocolate with great poise and nearly laughed when she seated herself at the table next to me and pulled a pair of black leather gloves off her hands. She had on a most bored expression, not unlike what you would expect to see on the face of an unimpressed fashion editor for a glossy magazine.
I was quite certain that my experience and appearance as a ten year old was fairly different – my hair was always tangled and no hat ever found home on my head for long. I never had any patience for gloves and my mother never dressed me in white – it would only have ended in hours of washing out stains. I spent the winter in scratchy wool sweaters knit by my nani and a lurid orange monkey cap brought back from Calcutta. All I had wanted at that age was to be able to climb trees or to be able to stay in to read. I wouldn’t have seen the appeal of hot chocolate in a cafe where I’d be expected to behave. I must have been watching the girl with some amusement because the next thing I knew, she had slid out of her chair smoothly and slipped into one at my table.
The old men did not seem to notice her, engrossed as they were in what looked like a game of high-stakes Scrabble. I was always nervous about initiating conversation with strangers so I remained silent, expecting her to speak. Instead, the girl busied herself with a small black notepad and fountain pen that materialised from somewhere and looked up only when my plate of macarons arrived at the table. She watched intently as I picked out a green one and bit into it before going back to her notepad. I got the distinct feeling that she was writing down observations on how I ate, as though she were David Attenborough and I an animal in its natural habitat. By the time her hot chocolate arrived, I had polished off all but two of my macarons, shovelling them into my mouth absently. She reached over and picked the purple one, as though we’d ordered the plate together to share, and popped it neatly into her mouth. Open-mouthed, I watched her long enough that she said, “Oh, were you going to eat that?”
Later, as I walked home, I thought she’d looked truly distraught at eating my macaron.
***
When I first met her, we still lived in J Block, behind the market with the big flashing sign for Moti Sweets. In those days I didn’t venture beyond the boundary walls of our colony much. It wasn’t safe. We’d all heard the stories of the feral mutants that had escaped from the big lab over in Gurgaon. We were too close to the metro line to ever really be safe – anything and everything could ride the metro while the police turned a blind eye. Edwin Bhaiya often came to work with scratches on his arms and wild stories of how he’d beaten the creatures off with sticks to allow the little children at the TravelHub get into their school Porters. My mother always shushed him and sent me out of the room and all I heard (despite my best attempts) was the hush of worried adult voices.
By this time I had been taken out of school and instead took classes on the Ether. My parents, like many others, had deemed it unwise to send their children out to school. Whatever little of the news filtered down to us from the Directorates on Raisina Hill was unnerving enough to make us alter our daily activities. My mother stopped her birdwatching altogether. she didn’t even pursue any leads about some rare goose nesting in the ridge. I spent my days staring at screens and evenings too drained to even play in our garden. I missed my basketball team and wished more than anything to be able attend the music classes I had once hated.
It was Diwali break, by then – a week during which the EtherPad wouldn’t wake me up at the crack of dawn to exercise before the government-mandated classes began. Before, Diwali break meant mithai and rangoli and fun. This year there was a pall in the air; I didn’t think even diyas could brighten the mood. We had a couple of boxes of mithai, but my mother told me that there were plenty of families in the city who were going without. I found myself drawn to the far edge of the colony grounds that week, where a low red brick wall encircled the grounds. It came up to my knees and didn’t seem like it could keep much out but I could feel the cold energy of the force field protecting us. Which is why I was startled to find a child sitting casually on the wall the day after Diwali.
With heart in mouth, the first thing I did was toss a pebble into the air above the wall – it disappeared with a sizzling sound which told me that the force field was intact. The girl was of no consequence, then. She could choose to sit on that red brick and dirty her white clothes for as long as she wished, I didn’t care. I proceeded to my favourite green-painted iron bench beyond her to savour the two kaju barfis that I had wrapped up in tissue in my pocket. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d had mithai. I was halfway through nibbling my first barfi when she settled daintily next to me on the bench. Her short black hair was curtain enough to hide the planes of her face. Before I could say anything to her, she was nibbling on my second barfi and I was too shocked to express my displeasure – I’d have no mithai until next year, if then! Oh, by the way,” she said, “Happy Diwali.”
Later that night as I settled down to sleep, it struck me that she genuinely meant for me to have a happy Diwali.
Illustration: Sayantani Dasgupta
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