| Shritama Bose | January 2025 | Short Story |
I looked harder.
There was no mistaking her, in spite of the dull golden glow of the Tata Auditorium lights and the dark air bangs that had come to frame her honey-brown face. The telltale signs were still there – the round eyes that brought to mind the Harper Perennial logo and the faraway, wistful look in them. The last vestiges of doubt in my mind disappeared, spotting the prominent brown patch, a birthmark, an inch under her right eye, which for a second had me wondering what really reminded me of the publisher’s logo – the eyes or the birthmark?
Malia, my first friend ever, was sitting with a bunch of schoolchildren. They occupied the fifth or sixth row from the front. The children wore uniforms I couldn’t recognise. She was evidently their teacher, sent here to “mind the children” as they attended this highbrow talk.
The city of my childhood had changed a fair bit. The matchbox-style employees’ quarters were vanishing, and apartments with Rs 1.5-crore price tags were taking their place. The walls enclosing the steel plant had risen so high that they seemed to exist for their own sake. Winter resembled the monsoon, sunless and damp, and the monsoon was history. There were three – or was it four? – new malls with their legions of modern trade brands, fish-administered pedicures and weekend pleasure seekers. Thanks to these venues, the city’s lower-income earners had become more visible. ‘Lady’ school teachers were now permitted to sport trousers and air bangs, apparently.
Malia was one of them, and here she was, at this city’s own version of a litfest. Well, not quite a litfest, but maybe a trial balloon for one. It was a conversation between an eminent Kolkata newspaper editor and an even more eminent environmentalist. My company had sent me to manage the event, reasoning that as a former resident of the town, I would be well placed to oversee and present it. That meant I had been busy up to the point when the microphones were checked, the lights were adjusted to an optimum brightness and the guests had pronounced their chairs on stage to be adequate.
We had to bring an edition of the conversation series to Jamshedpur because its chief sponsor wanted that. Exactly at noon, I did my little welcome speech and handed the stage to the speakers. Free for at least the next thirty minutes, I collapsed into a chair in the wings and took a deep breath.
The talk-shop part of my job had started to bore me of late. More often than not, the grind of snagging guests and setting up a venue and audience for them yielded merely a curtain-raiser for a book masquerading as an engaged conversation.
Perhaps your thirties is when nostalgia begins to creep up on you, along with back pain and a dread of new people. That could be why being at these pageants made me long for the book fairs of my growing-up days. Does Jamshedpur still have its book fair? The one where a 20-rupee ticket opened a portal to a limitless world camping for ten days on an enclosed field lined with stalls of white cloth.
It still has Malia.
Malia, who had fleetingly caught my eye when I was reading out introductions. Had she recognised me? Or even seen me? I couldn’t tell, thanks to that faraway look in her eyes. I pulled my chair a little closer to the stage, from where I could get a good view of the audience.
She was listening intently now, never quite letting her glance stray from the stage. I had a feeling she’d recognised me.
I observed her throughout the discussion, breaking away only to watch the time. She was very quiet, looking directly in front. No fiddling with her phone, like the other teachers. Only once did she turn to chide a talkative child. Malia had not changed. In this first non-encounter of ours in twenty-three years, I realised that she had always been like this—restrained, imperturbable and attentive.
When we were in school, she lived right across the street from us. Her house was also two-storeyed like ours and painted off-white with brick red borders. Every evening, we took turns to visit each other’s house. We played for hours, ceasing only when an adult warned us that it was getting dark. We played all the games that we knew, running up and down staircases, employing every inch of space on the terraces, gardens and courtyards. We exchanged stories of real-life miracles, such as that of a tree shooting out of the head of a boy who had swallowed his Boomer. We developed ploys to watch Hum Paanch, which was off limits for both of us, being aired at 8:00 pm.
Our respective sisters accompanied us to the other house when they felt like it. We took care to see that they didn’t fall off the roof or cut themselves with thorns. Sometimes we tweaked our games to include them, but they were still young enough to prefer dolls. Each visit was rounded off with some kind of snack—a ritual that became so entrenched that Malia’s sister once refused to leave our house without its observance, much to Malia’s consternation.
We did have our little fights, often ending in a khattis, sealed with our pinkies brushing against each other. The fights were usually resolved by the next day by a mutual mitthis, a meeting of the thumbs. My reason for getting angry was always pretty simple – my inability to win at a game.
Once, my father taught us one of his favourite games, something like the dog and the bone. Ever the quick learner, Malia understood from my father’s description of the game that you had to be strategic. We must have played two or three times over and I lost each time. I simply kept trying to run away with the ball and Malia struck me each time. I couldn’t make sense of why you had to pick it up and keep leaping away with it on the floor, little by little.
I might have been okay if my father had not made it his mission to keep repeating the point to explain it to me. And then when he applauded Malia for being so sharp, my pride could bear it no more. I absolutely refused to continue playing after this ignominy and sat on the staircase, crying profusely.
Minutes later, I found Malia sitting next to me. I didn’t look up at her. I just stared fixedly at the olive-green frills on her frock. Behind us was the open door to the terrace. The light was failing. Someone would soon come to send Malia home. I felt gratified that Malia had come to make amends before going home.
“Rinku,” she said. I waited a few moments before looking up at her. The setting sun had made her honey-brown face even browner. I was looking at the most earnest face in the world, and she said, “Rinku, I’ll lose the game if you come back to play. God promise, I’ll lose.”
It was too much for a vain child like me to understand the full import of what had happened that day. Now as I peeked at that golden, earnest face, I was haunted by the memory of that evening and so much else.
Nobody knew why Mithilesh Awasthi’s granddaughter was called Malia. For a long time, it was the most fascinating name I knew.
But then, life changed rapidly and imperceptibly. Between preparing for exams and learning to swim, my age-old routine changed over time. I grew distanced from my exotically named friend. We were never in the same school, nor did we travel by the same school van.
Malia’s life also changed beyond recognition. A congenital illness robbed her mother of her sanity. Her father succumbed to a brief bout of malaria. Unhopeful of surviving long enough to fund her matriculation with his pension, Mithilesh Awasthi put her into a Hindi-medium school. The arrangement was inexpensive by itself and also precluded the cost of a private tutor. He died soon after.
From what I heard later, Malia had graduated from a local college, making use of her grandfather’s savings. All this while, she had managed the household and tended to her mother all by herself.
It struck me only now, seated behind the wings, that years ago, in some obscure moment, our lives had started to run parallel to each other along that street, never to meet again. We came from similar backgrounds—the reason our families were so comfortable with our friendship. We were both middle-class, inhabiting two-storeyed houses, forfeiting the best treats for our respective younger sisters and going to school in jam-packed vans. When the landline in our house broke down, I would be sent to check theirs and vice versa. That house across the street and the girl in it was a mirror of my own life.
Playing hopscotch on that house’s ocean-like terrace, I would have never imagined that one day I would forget what the staircase leading up to it looked like. That my playmate would one day be sitting a visible world away from me as I sat peering at her awkwardly, not knowing whether and what to say. That she would never have lived outside of this town by the time I got a second pay raise for being a frequent itinerant. And yet, here we were.
I made up my mind to meet Malia at the end of the talk. There was only a slim possibility that she would not recognise me; the meeting would be worth the risk. I started to make a mental note of what I would ask her – things like where she was working and how her sister was doing. It couldn’t hurt to ask her to join me for lunch, which was to follow the talk.
In another ten minutes, the moment arrived for me to say the thank-yous and lead the guests out. Then, transferring the charge to a colleague, I ran in search of Malia. She had reached the foyer by the time I caught up with her. I called out her name and she turned to face me. Sure enough, she had recognised me. The hint of a smile on her lips and in her eyes expressed joy and surprise in equal measure. She stood there smiling as I walked up to her.
Some of her charges were standing around too, evidently curious about this exchange between their teacher and the hoity-toity outsider. The rest, students in uniform, some of them taller than us, were milling all around us, hurrying past us to make their way home. I took a second to find my footing and catch my breath.
“How are you?” I asked.
“I’m fine,” she said, with a smile.
“Are you working at a school? Where?”
She named one of the newer schools, located on the way to NH 33.
“Oh!”
The crowd around our little two-person nucleus had mostly dispersed. A few dutiful or inquisitive students were still waiting up around my friend. I quickly extended my invitation.
“Will you stay back? You could join me for lunch. Then I could…”
“No, Rinku,” Malia cut me short, “It’s getting late…I have to take the kids back. They could miss their bus. Okay, then.”
“Okay, take care,” I said, feeling disappointed and yet mildly relieved.
I had intended to offer to drop her home, but her interruption was so abrupt that I forgot all about it. I had not managed to ask her any of the other questions I had meant. I watched as she went back to her place, across the street from me.
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Shritama Bose was born and raised in Jamshedpur. She is a financial journalist based in Mumbai. Her short stories and translation have earlier appeared in Gulmohur Quarterly.
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Display image by Kabiur Rahman Riyad via Unsplash
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