Shreyonti ChakrabortyAnu enjoyed looking out the window whenever she was on the local train. In Navi Mumbai, the view mostly consisted of stout concrete structures with ugly chajjas protruding out of them and the occasional marshy wasteland with a cluster of small huts where the less fortunate had made their home. Nothing worth inspiring a painter’s canvas, and yet, the view, coupled with the rhythmic sways and mechanical song of the train let her mind wander in peace, a state she inhabited even after she disembarked. The city felt too buried in her past now, a memory she could only revisit but never inhabit again.
It was only when she saw her old high school that Anu descended to reality. One couldn’t come out of the station and not spot the school building standing grey and stocky right across the intersection, with yellow buses parked out front. Anu had braced herself for a dramatic response to the black entrance portico, but when she looked past the honking scooters and rickety autorickshaws whizzing past on the road, straight at the brick and plaster that was once so familiar, neither her heart nor her stomach moved in response. It was just brick and plaster, incapable of changing the past even if it went up in flames.
***
This school building was where nine years ago, Anu had met Roza Aziz, the new girl.
The day the new girl arrived, Anu’s best friend, Nandini, had stayed home for some reason, and the seat next to her was vacant. Anu looked up from her Bio textbook when she heard some whispering from the boys’ side in first period Bio. Standing before the rest of the class was a very pretty girl with long, straight hair and cheekbones that could cut through one’s skin. She was wearing eyeliner—a bold choice given that it was a complete violation of dress code and a straight ticket to the embarrassing punishment of running laps on the school grounds after morning assembly—and one could see a necklace around her neck, the locket hidden under her shirt.
“Hi. My name is Roza Aziz and I just moved here from Dubai,” said Roza, giving the class a short wave. Roza hadn’t become the most popular girl in every school her parents had thrust her into without strategy. She wasn’t going to mumble her introduction and she wasn’t going to be confident in the annoying debate-club style that always put boys off. Instead, she was going to stand in the girly posture that she knew worked, her shoulders close to her body, her feet delicately placed together, one heel slightly raised above the ground.
Roza looked at the teacher as if to say, “Okay, can I take a seat, now?” The teacher scanned the room and pointed at an empty bench in the front of the class, next to Anu. What exquisite eyes Anu had, even if she was on the, well, healthier side of things! What a sensible plaited hairstyle too! Roza liked sensible girls; it was the sensible girls that usually didn’t like her.
The whispers from the boys’ side of the room were dying, but Anu felt something inside her burst when Roza smiled at her. Her smile looked routine, sickeningly sweet and fading too fast. For once in her life, all the guys were looking in Anu’s direction, but they weren’t looking at her. Anu readjusted herself in the narrow metal bench and moved her books and pencil case to one side of the desk attached to it, her movements having all the grace of a newborn colt, shoulders slumped and knees and elbows protruding at sharp, unflattering angles. Roza slid into the newly cleared space like a cat, noiseless and fluid.
From the corner of her eye, Anu dared a glance at Kush, the only boy whose opinion she cared about, and the only boy whose opinion of her shouldn’t have mattered to her in the natural scheme of things. As predictable as a sunrise, Kush was eyeing Roza. When his eyes met hers, he started flipping through his Biology book in a way that didn’t match the 5 out of 20 he’d received on his last Biology test.
***
Perhaps it was morbid, but now, standing five hundred yards from the school building, the memory brought a smile to Roza’s face. Hi. My name is Roza Aziz and I just moved here from Dubai. That’s all Roza had said, and even today, when Anu had grown to have everything a young woman could ask for, she knew she couldn’t make the same impact in three sentences. Had somebody told her back then that it would somehow be Roza that would bring Anu back to meet Kush eight years in the future, she would’ve rolled her eyes, but here she was. Anu smirks at the irony of meeting Kush so close to the spot where she’d first spoken to him.
***
Anu and Kush had become friends because miracles sometimes happen. It was the first rain of the season, a year before Roza appeared, and the streets were already flooded. It was a ‘half-day’ of school for eleventh standard students and they were leaving too early for the school buses. Anu, one of the rare students who lived far from the school, had asked her dad to pick her up but he was late. Both Anu and Kush stood under the black tiled portico of the school entrance. Anu knew Kush from a distance because most people did. He looked big and strong, but that wasn’t all. He was just one of those people who at the age of seventeen knew how to act like he was somebody, and it radiated off of him in the classrooms and corridors.
They wouldn’t have talked that day, but a car drove by the entrance portico and the tires cut through the water-logged streets and a gallon of muddy water got splashed onto her chest. This was their ice-breaker.
“Are you okay?” said Kush. A part of him wanted to laugh, but that would lead to a girl not liking him.
“Fantastic,” Anu snapped. Then, detecting some sincerity, she added, “I’ll manage.”
“Sure?” The snapping had caught Kush off guard.
“Yeah.” Anu couldn’t process multi-syllable speech at that moment. She helplessly brushed her blue uniform shirt and grey uniform skirt, but the soaking wetness mocked her efforts.
“You’re the writer girl, right?” He didn’t remember this girl’s name even though she was in the same section of students with him, the ones that took physics, chem, math, and bio in addition to the compulsory English. The combination of subjects didn’t suit Kush, but it was practical according to his father.
“I’m not a writer. I just write for the local paper sometimes.”
Anu expected the conversation to be over, but Kush smiled at her, lifting only one corner of his mouth yet letting the smile reach his eyes. “That sounds like a writer to me,” he said. Anu was a great student and all, but she was still a young girl, which meant that a compliment and a smile from a handsome boy had her sold. Even today, Anu had no idea how the conversation kept rolling from there, what with her being drenched and muddy. Kush told her about his child prodigy brother and his English teacher’s mother and his banker father. Anu told him how she’d had been writing since she was seven, about her first dog bite, how she was a short kid, and had to go under the hurdles during the school race because she could never jump over them. Kush laughed and the sensation was unfamiliar to him. Maybe if Anu existed in the same social orbit as him, he’d like for their paths to cross more often.
God, Anu was so sad when her father finally showed up that day, because Kush was still waiting and she wanted to wait with him, even if it was in her brown, muddy clothes. Under those clothes was skin charged with faint electricity, and the sensation was unfamiliar to her.
As luck would have it, there were lots of half days and lots of waiting together. They became friends in their two-person orbit separate from the rest of their lives. Anu often wondered if he knew what she was thinking when he playfully shoved his elbow into her upper arm or got lost telling her the story of a movie he’d just seen that wasn’t too popular. Kush never let her be sure that yes, he did.
***
Kush still looked big and strong but Anu was engaged to somebody with a slight build which meant her standards for handsomeness had changed. She was the one who had suggested meeting at a very public place, and he’d chosen the plaza in front of the train station. His eyes needed adjusting when he saw her. Anu looked down. She was used to men looking now, and mostly ignored it instead of feigning modesty about it, but to see a living ghost from her past life notice the change in her made her feel exposed.
“Looking good,” said Kush, arms open wide. “How are you?”
“You look the same,” said Anu, cocking her head to one side. “It’s weird.”
“I heard you went to college in Pune,” he said. “I thought you’d do journalism, but psychology, huh? What do you do, exactly?”
“I’m a counselor at a school in Pune,” she said. She didn’t ask him what he did for a living. She didn’t care.
“I’m guessing you get a lot of troubled teenagers, huh?” said Kush, finally putting his arms down.
“You’re about as big as I remember. For some reason, I thought you would’ve gained weight,” mused Anu. “Why don’t you have a Facebook?”
“Well, I try to keep in shape,” said Kush. He turned his head and pointed over his shoulder to the dosa place, and Anu’s heart skipped a beat when for a second, she thought he was pointing towards the Monginis. She sighed in relief, remembering it was two blocks from here.
“I’d like to go home soon,” said Anu. “You said you wanted to meet in person, but this is not a social visit.”
Kush sobered a little. He gestured for her to sit on the concrete steps of the plaza.
“My lawyer needs some people to do character references,” he said. When Anu squinted, he continued, “I have my boss at the bank writing one, an old professor, a friend from college, but I need one from you.”
Anu looked away from him and started to peel the skin around her nails. “Of course,” she said. “I knew you before college.” To spell out the details of this reasoning felt like sacrilege in a place so public.
“You’re the only one who can do this,” he said.
Anu already knew the answer, but she still had to ask. “What about the hundreds of friends you had back then?”
Kush skipped a beat. “Um…they’ve let me know that they would rather never see me again. Well, that’s friendship for you. It’s there and then it isn’t. You’d be surprised how quickly people leave in your time of need. You’re different. You’ve stuck by me.”
“Kush, I haven’t even contacted you in eight years,” said Anu. She could feel reality bending under Kush’s will. An alternate timeline was forming where she’d been his friend for years, and she wanted to remove herself from that narrative.
“Yes, you haven’t,” said Kush. “I was expecting some anger.”
“Some anger?” said Anu, her tone uncertain.
“I got a lot of it from those other friends you talked about. I never understood why. They knew me for years and none of it mattered as compared to one unfortunate day!”
Anu stared at Kush, urging him to change his wording. He shrugged helplessly.
“Kush, I can’t lie,” she said. “I just can’t.” Anu didn’t know why she was already talking about lying. To lie, one must know the truth fully, and Anu didn’t have that privilege. All she had was a mental character she’d drawn up in her adult years and named Kush, one she never spoke of or intentionally recalled, and this wasn’t a character she could write a reference to. After all, references are always understood to be positive.
“Why would you have to?” shrugged Kush. “You knew me back in twelfth standard. You…liked me.”
Anu jumped up to her feet, stung by his mention of her stupid, now deeply buried crush. “I’ll think about it and let you know in a week,” she said, ready to go. The living ghost stood up next to her, nodding vigorously, while Roza’s ghost shook its head disapprovingly in absentia.
“Okay,” said Kush. “I’m glad you’re taking my side on this.”
“I’m not,” said Anu. Even without the whole truth in her possession, she was sure of this.
***
Roza never left Anu, even after Nandini returned to school. She merely shifted one bench behind them and began to share the empty space next to her with a rotating cast of boys who were all shy, soft-spoken, and looked too pleased to be in her company to participate in two-sided conversations with her. Roza’s topics were frivolous which the new boy threw a glance at her, her recent trip to a lingerie store, the hukka bar teenagers could legally go to, and it drove Anu mad, but she couldn’t express her loss of patience. Somehow, Roza liked Anu but never acknowledged the buck-toothed, bespectacled Nandini.
Before Roza came along, Anu and Nandini would talk for ten minutes after school about their frivolous topics, such as their overprotective parents or how the maths teachers’ saris looked like tablecloths. But now, Roza would catch them in the middle of the conversation and say, “Let’s go to Monginis.” She’d angle her body to face Anu, creating a wall between her and Nandini. Even if Anu didn’t want to go, she’d agree. Adult Anu took for granted her ability to put her foot down from time to time, but adults take everything they struggled with as teenagers for granted.
Monginis was the best confectionary store in the neighbourhood within the budget of high school students, and Anu liked the occasional mini pizza after school at the same premises as the cool kids. However, she was mostly bored on their after school hangouts with Roza. She simply couldn’t open herself up to her new ‘friend.’ To be honest, most of what Roza said just confused her. Once she showed her a text on her phone and said, “It’s from my boyfriend. He’s still in Dubai.” She let Anu glimpse it, but not see it. “It’s personal,” she said.
“Then why’d you show it to me in the first place?” asked Anu.
“I just wanted you to see I have a boyfriend.”
Anu’d forgotten Kush was a popular kid too, because that’s not what he was like with her. But one day he showed up to Monginis with a boy she didn’t know. He headed straight for the back of the building. Roza decided to take a walk around the building that very day. She said she wanted to “stretch her legs.”
There was a small open-to-sky space behind Monginis which was bound by a few other buildings, none of which had openable windows looking out onto the space. Anu sniffed the air; it smelled like wet grass burning. Roza waved at Kush who nodded back. The other guy stopped talking and zeroed in on the beautiful girl whose skirt was a couple inches shorter than the school dress code prescribed. Since that day, Anu had tried to picture the face of the other boy, but always failed.
“Let’s go say hi,” said Roza, who knew an alpha when she saw one. She felt that Kush belonged to her tribe, unlike the sweet Anu.
Roza strutted up to Kush and said, “Hi, my name’s Roza, you’ve seen me, and this is-”
“I know her. She’s my friend,” said Kush, but he didn’t dare look at her. Talking to Anu was relaxing and felt like home, but even looking at Roza felt like an amusement park ride. Roza successfully masked her disbelief of this unlikely friendship she’d just discovered.
Anu caught the word and held onto it for a second. Friend. In public. It wasn’t everything Anu’d wanted but it was just enough.
Roza talked to Kush, as animated as a kids’ TV show host. Kush introduced his friend, he lived in his neighbourhood and went to college–and Roza ‘oohed’ and ‘aahed,’ as if living in the neighbourhood and going to college were the most fantastic things ever.
It was bearable till Roza got thirsty and Kush offered to get her a drink.
“Relax, it’s just a drink. It’s probably a milkshake,” Anu said, more to herself than to Roza.
“O.M.G. Don’t tell me you don’t know the significance of getting a drink?” Roza’s eyebrows danced up and down.
Anu shouldn’t have feigned ignorance to assuage her denial, because it made Roza launch into a painful explanation of how boys only offered drinks to girls they liked. “I think I like him too,” she said at the end, as if it needed to be said, completely unobservant the hurt growing on Anu’s face like gnarly roots.
Kush came back with a tall plastic glass of strawberry milkshake in his hands. “I am behind on my Bio lab file. I should go home,” mumbled Anu, heartbroken and defeated. She knew there was more flirtation coming, and she didn’t want to be around for it.
For a couple of months that followed, Roza talked to Anu only in class. They didn’t hang out after school. Roza hung out with Kush behind Monginis instead. Roza had, with or without intention, hurt Anu and in a compartmentalized Pandora’s box of her mind, she hoped Roza’d just die.
***
Roza died at the age of eighteen before her already unmoving body reached the hospital.
That was what brought Anu back to reality. For weeks, she’d been happily hating Roza, because who doesn’t resent the girl that steals your crush? The announcement of Roza’s death a week after she stopped coming to school lit that hate on fire and had it burn down to pitiful ashes. The school principal made all the students do a minute of silence during morning assembly in Roza’s memory, and Anu stood still in silence while invisible hands shook her core. “What have you done? What have you done?” Nobody would believe her, but Anu could swear they were Roza’s long-fingered hands, complete with sparkly pink nail polish that violated school dress code.
Anu’d never wanted Roza to really die. Never! It had just been a stupid thought to have sometimes. Anu was a teenager, barely beginning to know herself, and she suddenly realized that every lesson she ever learnt was accompanied by a ghost that followed her into the future, reminding her of her shameful thoughts and actions. This time, the ghost would be of Roza, and it would haunt her worse than any other ghost she had accrued from her past stupidities because it would be the ghost of a dead girl.
Never again would Anu remember the parts of Roza that annoyed her. Instead, she’d remember her by the last time the two of them had spoken.
It had been just another day when Roza elected to interrupt Anu and Nandini during recess, about a week before her death. “Remember when I said I liked Kush? I think we could really be something but then I think about the other guys who like me and maybe one of them is better for me, you know?” Roza, flushed and bouncy, hadn’t even waited for Anu’s replies.
“Maybe he just likes me because there’s nobody else to crush on, you know? I mean, look at all the girls here and look at him. It’s not like he has a lot of options, right?” Roza had shrugged. She’d understood the workings of high school. People like her had made it work that way.
Her words had broken a dam inside Anu. Before she could stop herself, she’d shot back at Roza. “Actually, I do know. I think you’re so damn obsessed with being popular that you keep hanging out with sweet, shy boys who’d never steal the limelight from you. I think your boyfriend in Dubai is in awe of you somehow, but you don’t really want to be with him. I mean, you’re thinking of cheating! And now you’re acting all conflicted about having the most popular boy in this school, when the only reason you’re not hanging around arm-in-arm with him in the corridors is because you’re afraid everyone will pay more attention to him than you.”
Anu had wanted to pretend that Roza had just annoyed her past her limits, but in all honesty, what had broken the dam was Roza saying Kush didn’t have any other viable options in the school. Why couldn’t she be an option? What was so special about Roza anyways?
Anu’s indignation would have grown had it not been for Roza’s reaction, her eyes filling up and reflecting the autumn afternoon light. Instead, she’d frozen.
“I just don’t want to be irrelevant,” Roza had mumbled. “I want to be interesting and if I’m not, nobody will like me and nobody will care. And I really want Kush to care.”
Anu had once heard on a TV show that the girl dancing on tabletops looks to be having the most fun, but in reality, she’s just dancing alone. She’d written it off as sentimental TV show bullshit, but perhaps it was true for girls like Roza. It had taken so long for her to see that Roza had no real friends. She had watched the Roza she’d come to know melt before her eyes, leaving behind an amorphous blob of a teenaged girl who was just as clueless as the next one.
“Roza, Kush likes you,” Anu had said with a sigh. “Who doesn’t?”
Anu had stopped caring about Kush anymore in an instant. She had just wanted Roza to smile her sugary smile and for herself to become a good person again, if she ever was one.
Roza had looked up and let out a sharp breath. She’d taken a long look at Anu. Her well-oiled, plaited hair. Her long uniform skirt. The ink stain on her left thumb. The scholar badge on her lapel, the privilege only of academic overachievers. Overall, an image that inspired trust. Roza had expected to fall backwards and have Anu catch her every time, even if it was reluctantly. But maybe she’d been wrong. “God, Anu, you act like you’re so sweet, but…”
The ‘but’ had stunned Anu. She’d waited for more words to pierce, but they never came.
Roza had looked up and when the tears retreated, she had walked away, heading down the hallway around the courtyard and into the bathroom.
Anu had started to follow her, but had been stopped by a hand on her shoulder.
“She’s manipulating you,” Nandini had said. “You were just being honest. Nothing wrong with that.”
Anu had put a hand on her stomach to signify the uneasiness she’d felt in that part of the body.
Nandini had sighed. “Anu, she was being mean, too! Who does she think she is? Helen of Troy? Who does she think we are? Handmaidens to her queen who sit around as she entertains her royal suitors?”
There hadn’t been venom in Nandini’s voice, exactly. It had sounded more like a balloon of frustration popped by a needle, its contents seeping out in full force. Anu had known she couldn’t follow Roza now. Nandini was her best friend, and Roza had always treated her like furniture associated with Anu instead of a real person. She’d never even bothered to say ‘hi.’ Anu had also known that this had been one instance where Roza hadn’t been manipulative, but she had needed to be loyal to her best friend.
This was the conversation Anu would remember Roza by, which unfortunately was also the last time Roza had spoken to her.
At the assembly where they announced Roza’s death, Nandini gave Anu a look before she had to bow her head for the minute of silence, a giant apology on her face. But it didn’t matter anymore.
The mood was somber in class after the assembly. The teachers were always complaining about not having enough silence to teach, but now that they had what they’d been asking for, they were uncomfortable with how they’d got it. The collective pall of gloom was so heavy that Anu failed to notice that Kush hadn’t been in school for a few days either. She didn’t think much of it, though. A lot of students took days off in the eleventh and twelfth standard because they wanted to study for college entrance exams in the comfort of their homes. But soon—and Anu wasn’t sure how many days passed when this happened–she heard from someone that Kush had been expelled and would be taking his Board exams as an independent candidate. That was the only time after witnessing Roza’s tears that Anu wondered if she should’ve fought harder to keep Roza away from him. After all, had he never existed, Roza’d still be alive.
***
The back of the Monginis building still smelled of wet grass. Now, there were a few alcohol bottles strewn about as well, some dangerously broken. Nobody had cleaned the spot in a while, Anu guessed because packets of chips and namkeen had also accumulated in one corner. Just as before, no windows looked down on it and the stale air suggested it’s declining popularity.
It had taken strength to revisit the back of the Monginis building, but Anu could see that even places, with their unmoving concrete and solid ground, forgot what people couldn’t. Just like the high school building, the spot where Roza had died stirred nothing in her. The knots remained entangled, and she now understood she would never fully know the truth.
Defeated, she returned home in burdened silence.
***
That night, Anu forced herself to face the facts. Kush had wanted her to write the reference because in the absence of his old friends, she was the only one who could say that Roza had gone to the back of the Monginis building willingly. She’d never asked to have one of Kush’s friends grab her throat so tight it cost her his life, but somehow, Anu believed she’d chosen to make out with the boys. It was the kind of adult activity that was too scandalous for Anu back then, but in her first year of college, she’d realised she had been behind many other girls. The newspaper report said the asphyxiation killed her voice, and she couldn’t scream, and soon it killed her heart.
Kush had watched Roza die. It hadn’t been his hand on Roza’s throat, but he’d done nothing to stop it. The questions returned to Anu. Did he know Roza was dying or had her silence fooled him? Was it just hormonal teenaged experimentation, or was there a sickness behind two boys sharing one girl? Unfortunately, the only person who could tell her the exact events and motives was Kush himself, but if the truth made him look the slightest bit guilty, he would never share it with her, now that Roza’s family had appealed to a higher court.
There was something about the incident that had always told Anu to paint it grey with more black tint than white. Today, she’d finally put her finger on what. Roza’s death had been too traumatic for Anu for her to ever visualize. Until today. Kush was 6’3” and packed with muscle. Big and strong. Not average like his friend. Had he stepped in; his friend would’ve stood no chance. Instead, all he’d done was call the ambulance anonymously from a phone booth a few hours after it happened, or so the papers said, but that was too little too late.
Who was the boy Anu had once liked? Looking back, she could see that it wasn’t the depth of their conversation that had attracted her to Kush, but his charm and his looks, all of which felt so high school now.
Alas, even with her trip to the back of the Monginis building, she couldn’t put concrete blame on Kush. She’d never seen him be a monster, and she couldn’t say she had.
Anu sat up in bed and drew a deep breath. She pulled her laptop towards herself and started writing the character reference.
She wrote that she’d known Kush before Roza died and that she’d witnessed their first meeting. She attested to that Roza had liked Kush and that they used to meet at Monginis after school but made no comment on whether she could’ve consented to anything physical. She made sure to mention that in her limited interactions with Kush, she’d found nothing to trigger her distrust. However, the rest of it was a character reference for Roza because Anu knew there would be people who would be questioning what a young girl noted for wearing a short uniform skirt was doing behind a building, out of sight, with two young boys. Roza had been beautiful, and often entertaining. She had liked the same things as many teenaged girls but very few could match her charm. She had had a vulnerability that rarely showed and Anu wished they could’ve met again. Roza had deserved more than eighteen years to her life. Hanging out with boys behind a building didn’t change that. This was the character reference she would turn in, and it was the truth. Maybe now, Roza’s ghost would look at her with forgiveness.
