Shreyonti Chakraborty“Is that Rohan Bharadwaj?” I gasp, the spoon holding my tomato chicken stew slipping out of my hands.
“Who?” says Amit, my husband. “Be careful. Don’t make a mess.”
“Um… Rohan Bharadwaj. I’m talking about that Russian who just left. Did you see him?”
“You know a Russian guy named Rohan Bharadwaj?”
We’re at a food court in Armenia, barely an hour from Yerevan, on our way in. En route from Tbilisi, Georgia, we’ve learned to assume that most of the tourists around us are disproportionately from Russia. The war restricts Russians’ travel; for reasons I don’t fully understand, their vacations seem mostly confined to parts of the former U.S.S.R.
“Yes. I can’t believe I’ve never told you about him! It’s a wild story!”
Right then, our Georgian driver beckons us back to the van. He speaks Russian too, probably for the benefit of the others we’re traveling with. He walks out of the glass doors and into his van, and the taillights come alive.
“I found this app,” says Amit, showing me his phone, already distracted. “It’s like Google Maps but for former Soviet places. I think we’ll need it once we get to Yerevan.” His eyes stay glued to his screen; I lead him back to the car. By now, we’ve realized how ignorant we are about Russia’s influence in this part of the world. The landscapes and architecture don’t resemble the icy image of Russia we held, and the people seem to darken in complexion from Georgia to Armenia—sometimes enough to pass as North Indian. The buildings, though, display haphazard additions to Soviet-era apartments, their harsh industrial modularity poorly masked by improvised alterations. The language surprises us, too. These people speak Russian the way we Indians speak English, which makes a kind of sense. Still, we don’t fully grasp the logic behind holding on to Russian decades after the Soviet Union dissolved.
Back in the car, it’s late and quiet. The thought of Rohan lingers with me, though, and as we settle into our Airbnb, my mind keeps conjuring his image. I most vividly remember the features that set him apart in our colony, his pale blue eyes and bronze hair. The rest of him is like pieces of a puzzle buried in a chest of childhood toys.
“Rohan Bharadwaj had blue eyes,” I blurt out to Amit the next day as we’re climbing the steps of the Cascade Complex. He wants to stop and take photos at every landing. Impatient, I ache for some chatter.
I wait while Amit fishes the name ‘Rohan Bharadwaj’ out of recent memory. “An Indian with blue eyes?”
“I told you he was Russian.”
We’re nearly at the top now. We turn around and sit on the highest step to take in the bird’s-eye view of Yerevan. The city glows with the color of adobe bricks, framed by pearly white mountains in the distance. White lights twinkle everywhere, dancing over fountains and pools scattered through the city.
“Okay, now I’m interested,” says Amit.
“It was interesting. None of us had ever met someone like Rohan before, and we thought we’d never meet anyone like him again.”
*
I think Rohan Bharadwaj was a year or two older than me, but I can’t be sure because we weren’t close. I don’t think Rohan was close to anybody. My first memory of him is of him sitting next to his grandmother as they glided down our main street on a rickshaw. His grandmother was “beautiful once” as people like to say, with her facial bones still making their presence known underneath crinkled beige skin. But Rohan! You couldn’t describe Rohan as beautiful because he looked too different to us to even be placed higher up on our scale of beauty. The first time I saw him, his bronze hair glistened in the evening sun, and his alabaster skin was still unbothered by the North Indian sun. He looked like a boy made of vanilla ice-cream with a little bit of golden raisins on top. We were in the north, so many of us had light skin and chiseled features, but this was different. His bones seemed bigger and stronger than ours, and like his grandmother, you could see them even through a layer of chub. His eyes were what sealed the deal, though. I had seen hazel or greenish eyes before, but Rohan’s eyes were a sparkling blue that was impossible to find where we lived. I didn’t believe it when I first saw them, but then I heard some people call him the “blue-eyed boy” with mild reverence in their voice.
You have to understand that we didn’t even have Disney channel on cable back then, and his appearance was too rare not to be precious.
“He looks like the cute boy from Titanic,” a girl at my bus stop once said when we were waiting for our schoolbus. Rohan went to a different school, maybe an international school. His school “bus” was a silver van that glided into our colony every morning. Yes, all his means of transportation seemed to glide. His van stop was on the opposite side and about a hundred meters down the road from ours, and we could only see a silhouette of him through the smog as he waited for his van with his grandmother while the rest of us waited in clusters for our big and clunky CNG buses.
He didn’t look like the boy from Titanic. At least I don’t think so. He was merely a close enough approximation for us.
*
“Who did he really look like?” asks Amit. We’re now walking down the steps of the Cascade.
“Maybe a mix of that girl,” I say glancing at an Asian girl. “Kind of Asian, but not Japanese. More like Kazakh or Uzbek or something like that. But big like a Norwegian. But also, a bit like his father. He looked mixed. Frankly, I can’t say for sure if he would grow up to be handsome like Leo. Anyway…”
*
The question was how someone who looked like Rohan ended up in our colony. I wasn’t part of any circle enough to discuss the possibilities in depth, but I had heard whispers on the school bus, on the playground, at my mother’s monthly Ladies’ party.
“…he was there for ten years at least…”
“…he didn’t take a wife from here…”
“…oh no! Those women like Indian men…”
“…have you ever seen the mother?”
“A lot of businessmen moved to those regions after the fall of the Soviet Union,” my father said one day. I don’t remember why he said it, but I don’t think it had anything to do with Rohan. His company worked with Eastern Europe, and he liked to talk about those parts. He’d shown us pictures of himself around his job site, with a sky so grey and background so white with snow that it could be another planet in another galaxy for all we knew. To think Rohan had roots there!
“His parents are divorced,” I overheard one of Rohan’s more nearby neighbors say once. She was one of the teenagers who liked to loiter around the playground with her friends. At the time, the topic of divorce warranted whispers. We knew of divorce mostly as a foreign concept, which existed in practice only amongst progressive Westerners. None of our parents were divorced. My aunt and uncle on my mother’s side fought daily, even coming to blows sometimes, and one of my teenaged cousins had asked my grandmother why they didn’t just get divorced. My grandmother had asserted that marriage couldn’t be reversed, and subsequently given my cousin’s parents a long speech about how he needed to stop watching American people on TV. It was wise to speak of divorce only in whispers.
“My grandmother said his mother was Russian, so it’s a little different,” said another girl. I didn’t hear the rest because I was just passing by.
It wasn’t the Russian part that got me interested in Rohan. It was more that his family wasn’t like ours, but he still wasn’t an outcast. In fact, he was the VIP among the children. He was a regular at the playground but didn’t need to be loyal to any group. He just joined in the games as he pleased and sometimes left midway. Nobody had ever gone to his flat, not even for a birthday party, but he was invited over whenever playtime shifted indoors, or someone had their own birthday party.
My fascination with him persisted. I overheard the colony grandmothers’ tsk-tsk about how his mother had come to the colony once but disappeared again within a month. Rohan’s father had married her in Moscow but had to return to Delhi for some reason. I told my mother about this.
“Oh, yes! I remember that!” said my mother. “That man brought her to the Diwali get-together. We tried to include her, but I don’t know. I don’t think she liked living amongst us ordinary Indians. Did you finish that sum? You’ll get low marks in Maths again.”
With Rohan’s mother gone, there were rumors about his father. There was a maid who worked at a lot of the homes in the colony, including the Bharadwajs. My mother hired her for a week while she recovered from a minor surgery, and she graciously informed us that Rohan’s father was dating another Russian these days, a dancer, no less. I thought she was talking about someone who traveled the world dancing on stage, bowing, catching flower bouquets. But then someone said that Rohan’s father was dating his aunt now, his mother’s sister. They were all probably rumors, all to be expected with a divorced young man and motherless child in town, but it was curious that both versions had Rohan’s father with a new Russian.
Frankly, I envied Rohan at the time. His mother didn’t stick around to scold him about practicing sums. His study schedule was likely nothing like ours, just like everything else about him. So lucky not to have to study every evening like us ordinary Indians.
*
The following day, it’s Amit who brings up the topic of Rohan Bharadwaj. We’re at the Garni Temple, trying to find a spot to take pictures without too many tourists cluttering the background. Eventually, we decide to stand several yards in front of the Greco-Roman temple and ask a man nearby to take a picture of both of us. It’ll look better if the other tourists blend into the background and add context to a more expansive scene. The man has a chubby little kid with blue eyes, and Amit says he looks a bit like how I described Rohan.
“You know what? I don’t know if he did,” I say, surprising myself.
“What do you mean?”
“He’s not fixed in memory, you know? I remember him as a concept, but I couldn’t pick him out of a crowd. He wasn’t my friend. I can count on one hand the number of times we got within five feet of each other.”
“Why think of him now, after all this time?”
We both turn around and take another look at the temple complex. The truth is, neither of us knows much about Armenia. We only decided to visit after a short trip to Germany to watch a football match—Amit’s idea, not mine—because we found some ridiculously cheap tickets to Georgia and figured we might as well include Armenia, too. A mix of football and the honeymoon plans we kept putting off because of work.
We didn’t even learn about this temple until after we reach Tbilisi. I’m glad we did. Being here feels like standing on a historical fault line—you can sense that the break between East and West happens right here. But then people get so fixated on that divide, they forget to pay attention to what exists in between. To see a monument in the Ionic order this far east feels surreal, especially for us—who can now admit we’ve been pretty ignorant about certain parts of the world.
“I’ll tell you how I remember it,” I say, and a laugh escapes me. “Quick! That taxi goes to Geghard. I’ll tell you on the way.”
*
The first time I got anywhere near Rohan Bharadwaj, it ended with a swollen shoulder and lots of tears.
My best friend, Ekta Dutta, and I had fallen into a pattern of hanging around the edges of the playground, peripheral to the other children, except on Republic Day when all of us took center stage at the colony sports competition. We had just won the three-legged race last year, somewhat putting us on the radar of the others, even though we mostly kept making up our games at a safe distance from them. Our favorite spot was under the colony’s oldest banyan tree. It grew midway between the colony gates and the center of the playground, and I liked how its roots came down like tattered curtains. I had just made up a new game using a piece of cardboard torn out of an old notebook cover on which I had drawn circles and squares. It didn’t look like much, but I had taken inspiration from the steering controls for a spaceship. We endlessly pushed our imaginary buttons and fabricated plotlines about how we were flying through space and crashing into planets. We didn’t understand why the other kids liked to run around like stray puppies. Such babies!
It just so happened one day that half the kids in the colony decided not to show up to the playground. It was smoldering that year, and the adults wouldn’t stop complaining about the unusual delays in rainfall. The older uncles, with thick-rimmed glasses and loose cotton pants, discussed crop failures in some parts of the country while their wives helplessly fanned themselves in their usual talk circle. They taught us about climate change in school, which is a complicated matter, but something about the ongoing weather and the fact that it was simply called ‘global warming’ at the time made it easy to understand. Slowly, evening playtime became solely for the brave young souls willing to sacrifice their health in the name of play.
With not enough kids to play with, one of the boys came running over to us while we played under the shade of the banyan tree. Old trees are magical, and we don’t give them enough credit! Even with temperatures soaring, it felt like being in air-conditioning. I thought I was superior to the sweaty little faces glistening in the relentless sunshine.
“Hey, do you want to play Wall Touch with us?” said the boy.
We should have said no. We were better suited for the shade. But we were children, and this was like a birthday invitation.
“Can we play here in the shade?” I asked.
“It’s Wall Touch,” said the boy. “You have to touch a wall or you’re out.”
I stood up and put my had on one of the banyan tree’s gnarly prop roots. “How about we touch these instead?”
“I’ll go first,” said Ekta. “I’ll be a ghost haunting you guys. I’ll catch you if you don’t touch one of these!” She petted the roots.
The other kids probably wanted to play a simple game without ghosts and spaceships, but the shade was too alluring for them to give up on the idea. It was an ordinary game, but the banyan tree made us feel like wood sprites playing in a forest. The game was in full swing before we took stock of who liked it and how much. We took turns being It, and eventually, it was Rohan’s turn.
This new made-up game was a challenge for Rohan. He was less than ten years old but built like a teenaged wrestler in a dairy advertisement. He was clearly on his way to being a physical force, but being light and flexible would not be his strong suit. He kept running into the roots of the banyan tree, huffing and puffing whenever he had to squeeze through them. The setting looked more like an obstacle course than a fun maze for him.
It was Ekta’s fault for provoking him. So far in the game, she’d tickled whoever was It several times only to then run out of their grasp and into the immunity of the banyan roots. When she tickled Rohan, he turned around and caught her by her shoulder. Before I knew it, Ekta was on the ground.
“Ow!” she cried, rubbing her shoulder. “What are you doing?”
“You guys are babies,” said Rohan. “You’re still playing pretend with ghosts.”
“You’re not supposed to hit people,” I said.
“This game is boring,” he said, ignoring me.
I helped Ekta up. Her shoulder looked reddish now. “You should go play in the sun, then!” she said. “This is our spot.”
“Yes, it’s a spot for babies,” said Rohan. Rohan kicked the ground, and sand flew towards Ekta’s face. “It’s too hot to play. I’m going home.”
All the rest of us were frozen in our spots. Ekta, still on the ground, bit her lip to stop her tears from running down. Suddenly, one of the older children said, “He’s right. Let’s go home. We’ll play again when it starts to rain.”
“We don’t know when it will rain,” I said. I had never sought the company of a large group, but there was something about having all the kids on our territory and playing by our rules that made me want to hold on to the experience.
“…we don’t play pretend with ghosts.”
“…ask my mother if we can play after sundown…”
“…it is stupid…”
“…this is not real Wall Touch…”
“…they’re always lingering under this tree…”
“…they never play with us…”
“…where did Rohan go…”
Rohan’s departure had exposed us as outcasts. Listening to those children as they followed Rohan made my eyes sting. I was about to swear off these other children. Before I could be firm in that decision, though, Ekta got up and dusted herself off with a determination best reserved for war.
“We were all having fun till that fat boy got in the middle!” said Ekta. Tears poured down her cheeks, but she held her chin firm with resolve. “What’s so special about him? Why did everyone have to follow him? Is it because he’s Russian? Because he has blue eyes?”
Ekta was oversimplifying, but there was still some truth to her words. Half-white with light hair and eyes made Rohan special in this colony. I mean, I had never heard of him coming first in his exams or anything. If that had been the case, all the mothers would have made sure we found out. And he only came third in the three-legged race, and that could be because his partner was a twelve-year-old. So, what was special about him?
“You know what we have to do,” said Ekta.
“Um…” I hoped she’d second my decision to stay away from the other children.
“We have to take badla.”
Was it our shared penchant for play acting? Was it the embarrassment I had just felt? Was it the fact that revenge sounded so much more exciting in Hindi? Whatever it was, it made me nod vigorously, throwing away any thoughts of a passive response to our humiliation. “Yes,” I agreed. “We must take badla.”
*
The planning phase of our revenge was short, mostly because there was no plan. We imagined a surprise attack on Rohan, which would intimidate him enough to make him respect us. On the first day of our revenge plan, Ekta and I hid behind the banyan tree in our colony. We peeked out from behind the trunk, our eyes glued to the gate. The security guard was taking his afternoon nap in his cabin. He didn’t stir when Rohan sauntered into the colony, swinging his water bottle. In hindsight, hiding behind the banyan tree was a mistake. It took us so long to turn about the trunk to charge at Rohan that it gave him enough time to start swinging his bottle like a nunchuk in front of him in defense.
“We want badla! We want badla!” we cried.
“What?” said Rohan.
“How dare you push us?” said Ekta.
“Yes, how dare you?” Technically, he had only pushed Ekta, but we needed some unity.
At this point, we were circling each other as if playing dog-and-the-bone.
“I never did that!” said Rohan. He stopped swinging his bottle and suddenly slapped his forehead. “Oh, I see what’s happening.”
“What?” I said. There was something about this blue-eyed boy that made him seem endlessly intriguing. I stopped circling and waited as though he was about to reveal the meaning of life.
“That must’ve been Rahul,” said Rohan, nodding.
We stared at him. There were no Rahuls in our colony.
“That’s my twin brother,” said Rohan. “He is the naughty one. We’re thinking of sending him to boarding school because he keeps getting into fights.”
“How come we’ve never seen him?” I asked.
“Well, he looks exactly like me, so you might’ve confused him for me. Plus, we don’t play outside together, so one of us usually stays home to do both of our homeworks while the other one goes out to play.”
Would I have believed him had he looked exactly like us? I think not. But he was so obviously different from us in every way that it was conceivable for him to have a twin he switched places with often enough to never be seen on the playground together.
“You should take this up with Rahul,” said Rohan. “That stupid boy! Always getting into trouble.”
“We will,” declared Ekta, folding her arms over her chest. “Go home and tell him we’re coming for him.”
“I will,” said Rohan. “I should tell our father, too.”
We decided to ambush Rohan again the following day. Or Rahul. Whichever pale-skinned, blue-eyed boy had body-slammed Ekta down to the ground. The minute we saw his robust body cross the colony gate; we charged at him with our fists clenched.
“You started this fight! Now we want badla!” we cried in unison.
He took two steps back and held up his hand in front of him. “That was my twin brother Raghav. I already told you.”
Ekta and I stopped mid-run, our fists still ready for a fight.
“But you said his name was Rahul,” I said.
“That’s just his nickname. His real name is Raghav,” said Rohit.
“What’s your nickname?” said Ekta.
“Raj,” said Rohit.
“Well where is Rah…Rag…” Ekta maintained her warrior-pose through her confusion.
“He has typhoid.”
“For how long?” demanded Ekta.
“He’ll be fine tomorrow.”
“Will he go to school tomorrow?” I asked.
“You people are stupid,” said Rohan, and off he went on his merry way. Ekta and I stared at him till he turned the corner and disappeared.
“We need a new plan!” said Ekta. I swear I could see smoke coming out of her ears.
When I went back home, my mother smacked me on my back. “Do you want to die?” she said. “Walking around in the afternoon in this furnace! People are dropping dead from heat strokes in the papers! But my daughter? Running around the colony when steam’s coming out of the roads!”
I hadn’t started reading the paper at that age, so I took the light beating but otherwise remained focused on our revenge.
*
“All of those names sound familiar,” says Amit.
“It was the early 2000s. Shah Rukh Khan was at his peak. Every character he played had an ‘R’ name, and every one of his movies we watched”
Amit chuckles and shakes his head.
*
Sometime next week, Ekta and I regrouped. Our teacher punished us for talking in class. We had to stand outside the classroom holding our ears for the viewing pleasure of other students passing the corridor, but at least we got some out-of-class time to finesse our plan.
“We need to catch them together!” declared Ekta on the bus ride home. “Even if they go to the playground one-by-one, they must be going to school together.”
I nodded “But let’s do it a few days from now. They might be expecting to see us on their way home from school.”
“They?” said Ekta.
“I mean…it could be…they could be twins.”
We decided on ambushing the possible twins on Thursday. A Thursday felt more randomized than, say, a Monday or a Friday.
“Also, we need to find a new spot to hide so they won’t see us coming,” I said.
That Thursday, we hid ourselves on the porch of one of the ground floor flats in our colony so that Rohan couldn’t see us till the right moment. The aunty living there saw us through her half-open door, but she simply smiled before retreating deeper into her flat, probably for a nap. I think the whole colony was napping. Delhi summers were dry and disorienting, and we could hear the motors of the desert air coolers pumping cool, humified air into every occupied bedroom within a kilometer radius.
“I’m scared,” whispered Ekta.
“Me, too,” I said. It was partly because of how deserted the streets were; the only people on the streets were kids like us between their bus stops and their homes. It was more than that, though. The anticipation of—maybe—seeing Rohan and Rohit together was making me shiver. Regardless of how suspicious I was, I couldn’t dismiss the possibility that there truly were some Russian twins in our colony who were identical to the point of being eerily indistinguishable.
“We still need to catch them,” said Ekta.
I agreed. We were real children, not children in movies. There was no rationale behind why we had to do something that served a larger plot.
In a flash, the sky turned neon purple.
“Lightning!” I said.
“That wasn’t lightning,” said Ekta. But it was. Before we could debate it further, the bright yellow sky turned a sombre grey, with streaks of electricity surging across it.
“My mom will be worried,” I said.
“Let’s go wait under your building,” said Ekta. “That way your mother would see you if she came out to look for you.”
We scuttled like cartoon spies across the street and down a few buildings to occupy an identical spot under my building. My mom did come down looking for me. She was relieved to see me playing with a friend, especially with the temperature dropping rapidly.
We waited and waited. The sky began to roar, the coolers fell silent one by one.
By the time we decided to give up and go home, it was raining, but the Russian twins had still not come. The whole colony came back to life: women waving at each other from the windows and terraces, children on their balconies dancing in the first shower of the year, teenagers running through the streets in wet T-shirts, their mothers calling the girls back in to change into dark colors. The faint smell of fried besan, the main ingredient of fritters, perfect for long-awaited monsoon, mixed with the petrichor. Everybody came together in spirit to celebrate the first rain of the year, but nobody ever saw the Russian boy—or the Russian twins—ever again.
*
“So that’s it,” says Amit. “You just never saw him again.”
“Yes, that’s it.”
“Did you have a little crush on him?” says Avishek.
“Uff. We were in the single digits.”
“Girls mature faster than boys, so I don’t know.”
I shook my head, and he laughs. “Oh, I can just picture you being ‘in the single digits’ and obsessed with some blue-eyed boy.”
“Oh, please.”
“I mean, you are the one thinking about him on our honeymoon.”
“We got married three years ago.”
“I mean, what was so special about his story? I thought there would be more. I was half expecting you were still Facebook friends with him or something.”
“I’m not,” I say. “I did end up becoming friends with the other children we played with that time, though. Not good friends, but friends.”
We are at the Geghard monastery now. We pay our taxi driver and started our hike up to the main complex.
“Was he really lucky? Like you thought?” says Amit. “I mean, I still don’t get it. What was so special about him?”
“Come on,” I say. “You can’t be serious! If someone like him showed up on our street that day and asked to play bat-ball?”
Amit considers it for a moment. “Times have changed. You wouldn’t even recognize him today. You thought some random Russian guy was your childhood friend.”
Amit is right. By now, we’ve hiked up to the main monastery building, and yes, there are Russian tourists who could be Rohan Bharadwaj’s cousins somehow, but they’re just faces in a crowd; none of them catch my attention. All the visitors are busy taking photos, trying to capture the monastic sparseness and striking play between light and dark in the building, but their focus is on their friends and families. They couldn’t be less bothered Rohan-almost-lookalikes in the background, and since I was a child playing under the banyan tree, I’ve learned that’s the right way to be. I don’t think Rohan would’ve been as much of an elusive celebrity if we took up residence in Saroj Vihar, Sector 2, Block B in today’s day and age. Yes, he’d be a novelty for a day or two, but soon people would gather themselves so he wouldn’t think we were lesser than him somehow.
“Do you think he went back to his mother?” asks Amit.
“Huh?”
“When he left the colony. Do you think he went to live with his mother?”
“Nobody knows.”
“Did anybody ask his grandmother?”
“She died soon after. We saw his father after the last rites, but they didn’t invite anyone from the colony.”
“Did nobody ask the father?”
“I don’t think he ever had connections with any of his neighbors. He traveled a lot. I remember his face but…”
“Did any of the maids say anything?”
“Maybe. Nothing memorable, though.”
“Did he go back to Russia?”
“He could’ve gone back to London.”
“He must’ve gone back to his mother.” I can see Amit wanted to believe this.
“He must have,” I say, not believing it. “He must’ve gone back to London. His parents must’ve reconciled. I’m sure his mother agreed to that if she didn’t have to live with us ordinary Indians. He must’ve gone back home.”
*
