The Scent of God Read online

  The window revealed a dreamhole. Dark and cool and full of the steady music of the electric fan. Anirvan could stand there forever. He wanted to thrust his face against the bars and let them leave dents on his cheeks. He stood close and breathed deeply. Cigarettes. He couldn’t see Sushant Kane through the window but could hear the rustle of paper.

  Kamal Swami did not have an electric fan in his room. The monks never did. They smiled through the pain. For them, it was no pain. Though everybody knew that the house of Atal Swami—the secretary of the Mission—was fully air-conditioned and also had a swimming pool because there were many foreign visitors who came and stayed in his house. The boys had never seen that house but they knew, especially about the white women who swam in the huge blue swimming pool. But the teachers all had fans in their rooms. They were not monks. They were human beings.

  The boys had never been inside the room of any of the teachers. Standing before Sushant Kane’s window, Anirvan knew why.

  Room 25, Block 5. The room was there but not really there. It smelled different. Of cool air and cigarette smoke and darkness at noon. Standing in front of the room, Anirvan knew things were scattered and unkempt inside. He peered inside the room. The smoke smell hit him with a coarse sweetness. He felt dazed and knew that he had left the hostel already. He was home.

  Home was the whir of the fan but also the rough sweetness of the cigarette smoke. Sushant Kane was nothing like Anirvan’s father but they smoked the same cigarette. Charminar. His father was not bony like Sushant Kane but smooth and pale and delicate. Everything about him was round and soft and slow, versus Sushant Kane’s clicking pointiness. But they smoked the same cigarette. As Anirvan flattened his nose against the window bars, he caught the silhouette of Sushant Kane’s outstretched legs. He was lying on the bed in his pajamas smoking a cigarette. Anirvan’s father did that too. The smoke twirled around in the dark and quickly got lost in the breeze of the fan.

  He walked along the corridor, remembering the paragraph about grain production in the Great Lakes Region. He hummed the lines as he walked. His feet picked up the rhythm of the song and his flip-flops dragged to the beat on the floor.

  But he slowed down every time he came close to Sushant Kane’s room. He thirsted for the blast of cool air and the bitterness of cigarette smoke. He paused again.

  There was a click at the door.

  ‘What’s up?’ Sushant Kane’s voice floated out. ‘Come in.’

  Anirvan stepped inside. His eyes were riveted on the red spark that glowed in the darkness. As Anirvan walked inside, Sushant Kane stubbed it out on the ashtray. A wisp of blue smoke wafted away.

  Anirvan stared at the ceiling fan. Sushant Kane followed his eyes and looked above, staring for a moment. Quickly, Anirvan’s eyes closed.

  ‘Come, sit,’ Sushant Kane pointed Anirvan to a chair under the fan.

  Then he stepped out of the room.

  The dark room was now faintly lit up by the light from the half-open door. It looked like an old library.

  Books were everywhere. On the shelves and heaped on the table and the bed. And newspapers. Piles and piles of newspapers. Where did he get them? No newspaper ever came to the ashram.

  Sushant Kane came back. His face was wet. Water dripped from his hair.

  ‘It’s burning outside,’ he said.

  He stared blankly in Anirvan’s direction, at his hair being ruffled by the wind of the fan. His voice softened.

  ‘Ah, the exam warrior!’ He looked at Anirvan as if he could finally see him.

  Anirvan smiled a little.

  ‘You were sharp in class this week,’ Sushant Kane said with a mild frown. ‘People rarely see what odd fun language can be.’

  Anirvan nodded. He felt overpowered by the breeze of the fan. He felt if he tried to speak the words would fly away.

  ‘But grammar’s just a game,’ Sushant Kane said. ‘That’s not how you master a language.’

  ‘But you know that.’ He added, staring at Anirvan. ‘You speak beautifully. That’s the most important gift.’

  He did? But he did, indeed he did! Anirvan’s body throbbed.

  ‘I…I,’ he stammered. ‘I really like your class.’

  Sushant Kane nodded. In that half-darkness, he looked like a ghost.

  Sushant Kane’s class was in the afternoon the next day. Afternoons felt sated and sleepy, the right time for his classes. It was not the right time for the important subjects, like mathematics or physics or biology. But Anirvan liked SrK’s English grammar class on Monday afternoons. They were precise and angular, like SrK’s cheekbones. But they were not real math; Anirvan couldn’t have solved them if they were. They were just a game. Being good at English grammar was a useless skill. It had nothing to do with real merit, which was about being good at physics, algebra or biology, real subjects that created success in life.

  But that afternoon Anirvan felt a whir of laughter behind the cracking of clauses. Sushant Kane did not look his usual sharp and angular self. There was something cool about him, like there were ways of beating the afternoon heat that his body knew but he couldn’t tell them. Anirvan felt a smile dance through SrK’s beard. Was it a smile or something else? It was strange as he was not someone who smiled much. But he said things that made the boys smile.

  Anirvan spoke a lot in class that day. Suddenly, his heart beat faster. He tossed the clauses back and forth with SrK as the rest of the class stared at them, looking amused and bored at the same time. But SrK rarely looked at Anirvan. He never looked at anyone, even while talking to them. But Anirvan hoped that he would look at him.

  Rajeev Lochan Sen stared at them for a long time, looking back and forth between Sushant Kane and Anirvan. He was a thin boy with sharp wit and a girlish voice from a hilly town in north Bengal. He had clever things to say in every class, things which had little to do with the subjects being taught. He sang beautifully and had a voice carved with affection.

  ‘Does clause analysis make you clever?’ He sounded lost as he asked the question.

  ‘Not the way chess does,’ said Asim Chatterjee, the big boy who had failed a few classes and dropped down to theirs. Nobody had ever seen him play chess, and he hated clause-analysis. ‘Chess makes you the smartest.’

  Anirvan laughed. Kajol turned and stared at him. He sat across the aisle. Kajol had large eyes that looked moist when he stared at someone, and he looked at Anirvan every now and then, their eyes meeting. Anirvan wanted to look away and look back at the same time.

  ‘Chess.’ Bora, a dark and dangerous boy from Guwahati, whistled. ‘Chess.’ He studied Hindi instead of Bangla and hence had that posh-dumb accent when he spoke Bangla. ‘Not true! Algebra is for the sharpest people.’

  ‘Cracking clauses makes you better at cracking clauses.’ Sushant Kane stared at them. ‘Playing chess makes you a better chess player. If you’re sharp at algebra, that’s what you are sharp at.’

  The boys waited. This could begin another poem about rams and lamp-posts.

  ‘There is no cosmic intelligence,’ he smiled through his sharp beard and Anirvan imagined beautiful smoke-rings curling out of his nose. ‘Every skill is just that. The skill at doing just that thing.’

  ‘No such thing,’ he said, savouring his joke the way he savoured his love poetry. He glanced at Anirvan for the fraction of a second but quickly, his eyes were lost. ‘Nothing cosmic at all.’

  It was a strange thing to say. Strange, and scary.

  Brahmacharya

  That evening, they walked into a knot of confusion in the hostel. It was muddy football season but the boys quickly forgot all about the violence of the field. Stranger things were happening.

  It had started with a puzzle. Why hadn’t anybody from Room 12 gone to the dining hall for the evening snack?

  The four of them were riven with confusion. Bikram Sanyal’s body was the source of pain and disgust. How did the albino end up with red belt marks all over his back and waist?

  He was a pale
boy, as white as Europeans, with golden hair and light eyes. But he was very much homegrown. Such things happened. An illness perhaps?

  He had come back early from the games today, sneaked into the bathroom for a shower. By a twist of fate, his classmate Kushal Roy returned soon enough and had also stepped into the shower. It was a dark and slippery moment, stepping into the shower with just one boy instead of the crowd back from games. But Kushal did not know that he would scream when he saw Bikram.

  Welts of redness foamed across Bikram’s skin and shone in the water. What were those?

  Bikram had cried. It was easy to see why he wanted to shower alone. He told a story that made one cry. Two of his roommates, Asim Chatterjee, the big hairy man-boy and Nath, the football-playing Santal had tortured him for months, making him do things he couldn’t bear to talk about and doing things to him that he would die before he could show anyone. For months he had taken care never to take off his shirt before another boy. And no, he could never, ever take off his pants. Never in his life before anybody. For there were things that would never go away. He cried like he was being crushed under a truck.

  No one had missed Bikram at the football field because he never went to the football field in the afternoon. He was excused. He had special permission from Premen Swami, the assistant headmaster.

  Premen Swami and Bikram spent every afternoon playing table-tennis in the common room of Conscience Hall, when everybody else was away at the football field.

  ‘They did this to me for two months!’ Bikram howled.

  Chatterjee grabbed Bikram’s collar and pulled him like a dog. ‘Lying son of a whore,’ he screamed. ‘Your mom’s tits will burn before you finish lying.’

  ‘Swear on your heart.’ Bikram said with deathly calm. ‘Why do you lock our door after lights off every night?’

  ‘Dead white goat!’ Chatterjee shook the boy’s collar so hard that it felt that his blonde-white head would tear from his neck. ‘That’s your idea! You bitch about the draft nonstop!’

  ‘They are animals.’ Bikram stared at him with dead eyes. ‘The things they can do to another human being.’

  Nath made a face like a monkey and stared at the boys, pointing a figure to his brain. The wimp has lost his nuts. They heard him loud and clear. Nath looked like a black ape and he made a grotesque face, like that of a roasting eggplant curling over a fire. He rarely spoke and he rarely needed to. What the fuck is the albino talking about? What language was this?

  C Block was suddenly a crowded police court. Thronged by a silent mob. Everybody wanted to be there. Nobody said a word. How could you?

  Someone touched Anirvan’s right arm lightly. Anirvan knew who it was. He turned to his right. Kajol was shorter than him. He looked up, met Anirvan’s eyes. Large, speaking eyes that had much to say.

  Lightly, Anirvan squeezed his hand. There was no response.

  ‘What is going on?’ Anirvan whispered. ‘How can a boy do such things to another boy? It’s not like Bikram is a girl.’

  Kajol frowned. He looked bitter.

  Nath was still monkeying around. Some of the boys started laughing. Most were still frozen.

  ‘I hope the monks don’t come to know.’ Anirvan said in a low voice. ‘They would be shocked by this muck.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ Kajol whispered breathlessly. ‘All of them would be thrown out of the school.’

  ‘Don’t ever say such things,’ Kajol’s voice shivered. ‘What if they throw you out of the ashram? Then what?’ Horror twitched through his body like a nerve.

  ‘Especially Premen Swami.’ Anirvan said. ‘There is a halo around him.’ He was a true monk. He played with Bikram every afternoon.

  Kajol frowned. Then he melted into the crowd.

  Anirvan felt like slapping himself. You just didn’t talk to Kajol like that. Not Kajol.

  Kajol was a dream student. Never missed homework and never got under 90 per cent in any subject. He knew what mattered—Physics Chemistry Mathematics, the magic three that one needed to crack the golden gate of the top engineering colleges. With his large eyes and well-oiled hair and beautiful eyelashes, he was a source of knowledge even when he said nothing. He rarely did. But he knew the path. His shawl was supposed to trail it when he walked to memorize, the straight and simple path.

  But his eyes fell on Anirvan as if sucked by gravity. It was as if his mind hovered over Anirvan no matter what he did. Soft and beautiful eyes that knew what they wanted. They wanted to own Anirvan. It turned Anirvan’s heart into a soft, warm mess.

  Kajol walked the path—the path of Brahmacharya— the path where one shunned electric fans and waking up late and tea and coffee and television and hardened their muscles on the jogging tracks. At the end of the road they saw the result sheets of the engineering entrance test, which is where life came to a happy ending.

  The Lotus Position

  Saffron sheathed Kamal Swami like skin. He was a taut bowstring, flashes of energy tossing around the smooth cotton and revealing fair, hairy flesh, patches of sweat that darkened the amber fabric as he breathed faster and faster like a stallion while Anirvan forgot to breathe, staring at muscles that shot out as saffron seawaves. His heart stopped at the glimpse of his fair and lean arm as the Swami rolled up his sleeves on the badminton court. He dreamt of owning such arms one day. These very arms.

  He was a saffron soldier with the eyes of a boy, eyes that sparkled with love and mischief but which never failed to hunt down the heap of dirt the students had swept under their beds or the cricket-magazines hidden under geography textbooks. The boys’ rooms were restless, with blobs of shame hidden in odd cracks like the wet towels and the used underwear they forgot to give their mothers on Sunday.

  The Swami knew everything.

  The boys had marched out of the common room in silence that day. After the TV was killed and they were thrown out of the stadium in Peshawar. The air was thick with war. The firecrackers had gone out in Mosulgaon but anger smoldered at the sudden death of the match.

  Kamal Swami stood at the door while the boys walked out quietly, all eighty of them. His fair face looked red and stormy.

  ‘The two of you wait here,’ he said softly as Anirvan and Kajol stepped out.

  They waited. They were anxious but they didn’t want to look at each other.

  ‘Those boys are a shame,’ Kamal Swami told them after everybody had left. His voice throbbed with passion. ‘Animals, all of them.’

  Anirvan and Kajol stood in silence. They looked down, wilted in shame. They didn’t know what to say.

  ‘You boys stay away from them.’

  His voice was kind. Kind but cruel.

  ‘From now on the two of you will sit at the back of the prayer hall.’ He said softly. ‘I want you to watch if any boy makes trouble. Just tell me if you see anything.’

  What was Kajol thinking? Suddenly, the question screamed inside Anirvan’s heart.

  ‘You will spread out our prayer mats before prayer.’ The Swami said. ‘And put them back after it’s over.’

  Every night after the lights were off the Swami sat on the wooden bench outside his room and spoke about life, death, and life beyond life. When the day was over and their duties done, his voice was softer, kinder, and sometimes almost aimless. The boys could not see his face in the dark but his affectionate hands caressed their shoulders and the backs of their necks and slid along their arms in ways they never would in daylight. It was good to sit right next to him but it was not always possible because many boys crowded the bench after lights-off. But his voice melted in the dark and floated everywhere even if you were not lucky enough to sit next to him that night. He said the most beautiful things. Once Rajeev Lochan Sen had popped a tough question about the point of studying history. It was a scrap of a debate that floated in school for days.

  ‘Is history a dead subject?’ The Swami had laughed. Under the nightly softness, the laughter had a bite, and Anirvan imagined the pointed edges of his crooked te
eth glistening in the dark.

  ‘Go and look at yourself in a mirror,’ he said.

  ‘Mirror?’ Rajeev repeated, full of wonder.

  Kajol had walked into the gathering tentatively. He looked like he had lost his way.

  ‘Move over,’ Kamal Swami said. ‘Kajol, sit next to Anirvan.’

  There was no place next to Anirvan. The slight-framed Kajol came and sat on Anirvan’s lap.

  ‘Take a hard look at yourself,’ the Swami’s voice softened. ‘What you see in that mirror is history.’

  Rajeev was lucky that night. He was seated next to the Lotus.

  ‘This face, this neck, these shoulders,’ the Swami’s voice trailed in the dark. ‘The messy hair and the frown. The clothes you wear.’

  ‘You’ll see all of it in the mirror, won’t you?’ the voice floated, suddenly happy and boyish.

  ‘This is history,’ it said. ‘And you ask whether history is a living being?’

  Rajeev was silent. Anirvan wondered if his doubts were gone. But Anirvan didn’t care anymore; he felt lightheaded. Kajol’s childlike frame rested on him, and he could smell soap and talcum powder on his neck.

  Anirvan knew why the Lotus was so brilliant at carrom. He could handle his mind like the red striker on the board. Anirvan had tried it too. He thought he could do it. Leave your mind, swim out of it, and watch it wander. The Great Saffron One had said a hundred years ago. Watch it like a fish bobbing in the water, a trivial thing of colour that is no longer part of you. Anirvan could lose his mind in the prayer hall, during the meditation time at the end, at least for a minute, two minutes, two minutes and twenty seconds…

  Kajol’s moist eyes were a lie. Anirvan realized that Kajol knew what he wanted. Anirvan belonged to him. Kajol did not speak much but his will was sharp. He would draw Anirvan closer, tie him up, shape his days.