| Anushka Bharadwaj | October 2025 | Flash Fiction |
As soon as the first light falls on him, his eyes fold like wrinkled curtains. The grey boy wakes up. His heavy, brown, crusty eyes struggle against sleepiness, the evil sleep lures his limbs into his bed. He fights it, that evil. Always keeping him from staying awake.
“Don’t say such things about Nidra Mata,” his grandmother corrects him, like always. She always witnesses his naive mistakes and always puts up with them. Accepts it like prasad, because he is indeed the fruit of all her prayers (though her son might disagree). The grey boy loves his grandmother, more so when she wipes his nose, buttons his shirt and takes him on a morning walk. On their way, they greet the sweeper Rizwan Kaka, who lets the grey boy play with his broom for laughs. The grey boy straddles the broom, closes his eyes and paints in his head a picture of a tiny house under the blue sky. He imagines a door opening to the riverside where he would keep a chair and sit while a witch cooks curry inside the house. Satisfied with his imagination, the grey boy blows magic into the broom with a hope that he had kicked away from his bed just last night. The hope betrays him again; the broom stays drooped, and petulantly, he throws it aside, continuing his morning odyssey. Rizwan kaka frowns, “Balti badtameez ho gaya hai!”
***
How he got the bizarre name is a funny story. The thing is, his father is a rational man. He is intelligent and hardworking, and always chews food with his mouth closed. He is smart enough to know the ways of the world yet, strangely, misses the point that his son has hardly lived eight years in this world. As for his wife, the world has not allowed her kind to realise that they can find their own ways too. How, under such circumstances, are they to compete with the self-proclaimed Byronic hero of the house? The father (with the help of all the fathers of the world) hypnotized the mother (as is the way of the world). After which she cut and threw her tongue that was supposed to speak for her child. Another umbilical cord, which once nurtured the child, clamped and thrown away. Her tongue lay in a corner like a dead paintbrush, snuffed out of all the lustre that could bring colours in the life of our little grey boy. Anyway, the grey boy is not snuffed out of hope yet. Nor has his father been able to hypnotize him. That is the root of all the problems. The grey boy is a glitch in the ancestral currents of patriarchy – a feeble seed amongst robust fruits. Because of this, his father started calling him a bottle – a tall body, small head, smaller brain. The grey boy, whose small head always floats into big clouds, drew defiance from them and decided to call himself Balti – tall body, deep head, deeper heart, like a bucket. You could either believe this or the other version of the story, which is that Balti chose that name simply because it was different from the name his father chose for him. And that he liked the ring of the word. Personally, I believe he chose it because he loves water. I do not say it with an assumed authority of knowing the little grey boy more than anyone, but because I watch him every day. Closely. From the first step of his morning odyssey to the last step before falling on the bed, I watch him through yellow and white lenses. I hate seeing him grey.
As I was saying, Balti loves water. He stomps off ahead with his grandmother, leaving Rizwan Kaka behind, and stops at a public toilet. Balti needs to pee. Grandma grimaces, covering her nose from the onslaught of odours in the air around the urinals. The devil must have peed here all night with his gang. She waits outside; Balti relieves himself. He hates the smell too, but likes the sound pee makes. It sounds like someone on the other side of the urinal is gargling. Balti, by the faults of his nature, drifts into his dreams and imagines gargling up on a mountain and spewing water down on the valley people below. Nobody would catch him. Nobody would punish him. Nobody would speak over him when he is speaking. For in the mountains, the vapour in the air would hold his words and not let them vanish.
***
Balti loves water, which is why he is a clean boy. He spends an hour in the bath, but nobody knows what he does inside. He has fought for his share of privacy. They let him close the door when he is bathing. Funny, they do not see all the other doors they have closed, but sulk at him for closing the one that is least harmful. Anyhow, I know what he does in the bath. One gets to know stuff if watching closely.. Balti plays with water. He is patient with water. He is gentle with the water. One might wonder where he acquired the traits that no one in his family possessed. It is simple. He learnt it from water. The little boy puts his ears against the tap as it makes struggling sounds, as if the tap is scratching its throat before vomiting. Balti likes that sound. To him, it is the song of water’s arrival. Then, Balti kneels and quietly dips his face just under the top sheet of water in the bucket. Water latches onto his cheeks, hangs on to his lips and rests on his eyelashes. Balti feels one with the water and a silly solidarity with the bucket that holds both water and himself. He cannot breathe, but he still prefers being underwater over the times when he is out and breathing, which is always. Because he is always breathing, he is always expected to be functional. Always expected by his family to be, and to become and to keep becoming. Becoming what, I do not know that. Not even after watching humans closely.
***
Grandma knocks on the door, disrupting his dream number thirteen. This is the one in which Balti is a grown man, swimming so deep in a sea that he cannot hear, not even in his head, the incessant shouts and fights of his old house. He has been swimming for so long that he has come far away from those who hurt him, provoked him, and saw him as nothing but a bottle. Grandma calls him again. Balti comes out of the bathroom, freshly happy with his little spherical friends hanging onto his body. Grandma puts her yellow towel around him and kisses his eyes. Every day, she replaces weak, doubtful hopes in him with new, stronger ones. Balti is once again ready to go out in the world that he resents, much less understands. But his friends are nice. They have come to play outside. Balti walks towards the front door of the house, his ears half listen to the laughter of his friends outside and half to the sneers of the family inside. He is used to it until he would not have to be. From inside, someone shouts at him, “Don’t stay out too late in the evening.” (Good reminder for me to put on my white lenses, I will be right back.) Till then, cover for me if you can? Please watch the grey boy closely.
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Anushka is a postgraduate (English) and a writer based in Delhi. Her works have been published in Blue Cashmere, the magazine of the Creative Society of Dyal Singh College, University of Delhi and Poems India. She has written and presented research papers in colleges of Delhi University. She loves reading books and watching films about food, cultures, women, bodies, dreams and everything about magic realism. She is currently working on a collection of children’s’ stories.
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