By Karan Mahajan
This is the first story in this summer’s online Flash Fiction series. Read the entire series, and our Flash Fiction from previous years, here.
“You’re not a doctor,” he said.
The young woman said nothing.
“I thought I was going to see a doctor,” he continued. “I have yellow eyes, there might be some anemia, and I’m suffering from a stomach infection.” He coughed at the end of this string of achievements. He was eighteen, about to commence his first year at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, in Delhi.
The young woman stirred. Then she tossed a bottle across the desk. It came rattling through the air. He caught it. The bottle was brown, translucent, and packed with a hundred tiny white balls. “It’s homeopathic,” she explained. She had a sweet, faraway voice. She thrust her hand under the desk and came out with a fistful of long white tablets, pouring this treasure on the table. “And these are some vitamins for you,” she said.
The boy had no choice but to sweep the tablets toward himself and then push them, two by two, into his outstretched palm. “What is your age?” he asked.
“Why?” she said, and smirked.
“Just curious, yaar,” he said.
“Have you not been taught about women and their ages?” she said, smiling. Then she said, “Seventy-six.”
“You’re older than my boorhee grandmother!” he said.
She couldn’t have been more than twenty-four.
“So you should give me the same respect as your grandmother, no?” she asked.
“She’s unfortunately passed away,” the boy said, and sighed.
“Condolences,” the woman said. “But no one is more respected than the dead.”
“Now you’re saying a very correct thing,” the boy said, solemnly. “Totally correct.”
The woman said, “Professor-sir informed me of what you told him yesterday.”
“I told him many things,” the boy said quickly, straightening up.
“The thing about your father,” she said. Then: “It must have been very tough, isn’t it?”
“People go through much tougher things,” the boy said with a shrug.
“But a dead body,” she went on. “It smells atrocious. How could one keep studying with such a smell?”
“It was one room, but there were windows,” the boy said, almost angrily.
“It was a corpse,” the woman reiterated. “You’re a good student, so you know how decomposition processes work, and how decomposition attracts microorganisms, flies, ants, cockroaches. There’s a reason every culture has a custom for disposing of bodies. The smell is inhuman, it’s unbearable.”
“Well,” the boy said. “If you want to know the truth, Mrs. . . . Counsellor, for me, studying for the I.I.T. entrance exams—that was much more unbearable. It’s not as if I did nothing. After my father stopped breathing, God bless his memory, I covered his body up in blankets—two blankets, five blankets—and then a tarpaulin. My father was a tailor, and he had lots of cloth bundles lying around. But, despite all this, of course, there was a smell. How can there not be? But I kept my nose shut with my fingers, and I washed my eyes continuously. I went outside and sat near the pump and read. I lit mosquito coils. I applied Vicks VapoRub under my nostrils. It was winter, so the body didn’t start smelling for two days. There was no big issue.”
“People in your locality didn’t say anything when they found him like that?”
“What were they going to say?” the boy replied, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “They have their own problems.”
The woman—she was indeed a counsellor—knew that the boy had lived alone with his father in a single room, in a slum, and that his two older brothers were in Kuwait.
“What did you eat during those days?” she asked.
“What I always eat: Maggi.”
“I see,” she said. A register lay on the desk, and she opened it up and flipped through it.
“You want me to cry, is it?” the boy said. “I know what you want. Then you can tell professor-sir, ‘He’s a very sensitive boy. Such a soft heart. He is suffering so much.’ But I can’t make up things. You might think I am mad, but I had only one dream, and that was to gain admission to I.I.T., and I didn’t let anything stand in the way. Yes, I felt sad about my father, but I didn’t believe there was any big problem in postponing his funeral for a few days so I could give the exam. He was a loved and respected man in the community. Everyone got clothes made from him. He was an expert. He had style. My cousins, who worked for him—they’re all heroes with their sewing machines, but they don’t know the shapes of clothes. Now, the thing you’re wearing—where did you get it?”
“From a shop,” the counsellor admitted.
“If he had made it,” the boy said, “he would have advised you not to expose your shoulders in this manner.” The boy smiled up one side of his face. “He was always offering such advice to his clients. He sometimes irritated them, but they always came.” He paused. “I think your kurta is very nice, by the way. It is well cut. He would have approved of the cut, even if he would have questioned your morality. As a tailor’s son, I know.”
“And you didn’t want to become a tailor?” she asked. She was chewing a pencil and looking around the room, as if to find a way to get rid of him.
Emboldened, he said, “No.”
“I don’t believe you,” the counsellor said. “You’re hiding something, and I want you to tell me right now. Otherwise, I can’t give this clearance signature.”
“You want me to make something up, is it?” he asked.
“No, I want you to explain which parts are already made up. This is a serious issue.”
“I refuse to cry,” he said. “You don’t believe me because I’m not crying. But, because I’m brave, you think you can mistreat me?”
“I would have still doubted your story.”
The boy responded, “The truth is that I am in love with you.” He cocked his head to the side and looked at her from beneath raised, flirtatious, thick eyebrows.
“I’m married,” she lied.
“You watch too many films,” she said.
“You should be my girlfriend,” he said.
The counsellor began writing something on a slip of paper.
“You’re going to kick me out of I.I.T.,” the boy said, watching her scratches with the pencil grow into lines of text, a magical process. His eyes watered. “All the hard work I’ve done will be destroyed. You’re going to take my heart and smash it.” His voice was cracking, truly emotional. “God,” he said. “God.”
When she was finished writing, the counsellor folded the paper up and placed it at the center of the table. As the boy was reaching for it, she said, “That’s not for you,” wagging her finger. Then she yawned, stretching her body lazily, so he could see the shaved, mango-shaped scoops of her armpits.
The boy walked out, his stomach cramping again. Why had he acted this way? What if she did kick him out? His father had always encouraged him even as he had mocked him: “He’s the spawn of a tailor, but he has big dreams.” From his tailor’s savings, he had paid for exam coaching; and, when he had fallen sick, he had refused his son’s offers to take him to the hospital. “No, no, you’re meant to study—go on studying,” he had commanded him with his gobby old-man cough, malice and shrewdness and wonder fluctuating in his face. But why had he, the boy, listened? Six days before the exam, his father had not woken up at his normal prayer time of 4:30 A.M. Shaking him, the boy had been enraged. You’re trying to sabotage me, he had thought, you never wanted me to go further, and then his eyes had filled and he had realized that there was nothing to do but go on, that the exam that had created the conditions for his father’s death was also the only way out, it was as if his life had sharpened to a pencil point, as if he were a pencil that had stabbed his father to death, the pencil now hanging from his fingers in the examination room and bearing down on the thin answer sheet, so that it was only when he returned home from the six-hour test that he screamed, “Father has died, Father has died while I was giving the exam,” and, of course, no one in the slum believed the timing, they had been inhaling that suspicious massacred-goat inner-groin smell for days, but then his family had been cut off from the neighbors for a while, the neighbors thinking them proud and uppity, and so now these fellow slum-dwellers took their time to come, and when they did arrive—pinching their noses—they eyed the boy with contemptuous sympathy, and then a woman’s hand was on his back, comforting him, and all the old enmities were frozen, and thereafter he was passed from relative to relative till the news arrived, the impossible news, that he had attained rank twenty-four, the highest rank a boy from the community had achieved in years, and so now, walking through the busily forested I.I.T. campus, he thinks that his father, the master tailor, the master planner, had planned this for him, had cut himself out of his life so that he, a mere boy, could have double the life.
He turned around and hurried back to the counsellor’s office.
“Ma’am, can I come in?” he said, knocking on the closed door.
The boy rained blow after blow on the door. But it did not open again. ♦