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Chapter 1
The House of Wonders
‘It’s been quite some time now,’ said Miss Trent.
‘Five days, seven hours and thirty-two minutes,’ said the Infant Prodigy. ‘That is six breakfasts, six lunches, five dinners and five teas that we’ve missed. I am very hungry.’
The darkness was dense. The belly of the house lay underground. No sunlight reached it, and the passage of days was left to the calculations of the Infant Prodigy. The candles had run out three days ago. They were down to their last bottle of water. The rats had been getting bolder. They could feel sly touches of whiskers, of cold paws as the rats skipped around them in the dark.
There was a sudden flurry in the darkness and a shrill squealing.
‘What on earth is that?’ said Mr Pickwick. ‘What have you got in your hands?’
‘A rat,’ said Skinner.
‘Put it down this minute!’ cried Miss Trent. ‘It’s got disease, plague, death upon it!’
‘It’s got meat upon it,’ said Skinner calmly. ‘We have to eat something.’
There was a shriek from Miss Trent. ‘Don’t you dare put that rat in your mouth! I shall wash your mouth out with soap!’
‘You shouldn’t say dare,’ said the Infant Prodigy. ‘Then he always does it.’
‘Please! I beseech you, dear boy. Oh, I shall faint! You can’t eat rats!’
‘There ain’t anything else is there?’
Mr Pickwick intervened. ‘He will come. He always does.’
‘He hasn’t come for four days,’ said the Infant Prodigy. ‘The organs of the human body sustain permanent damage within six days of starvation. And we haven’t eaten in four. We have to get out.’
‘We’re starving to death, that’s what we are,’ said Skinner. ‘What are we supposed to do?’
‘Pray,’ said Mr Pickwick fervently. ‘Is any amongst you afflicted? Let him pray. Is any merry? Let him sing. Psalms. Chapter Five, Verse Thirteen.’
‘Bah!’ said the Infant Prodigy, squeezing an ocean of scorn into the word. ‘We’re starving to death, and you want us to be merry and sing?’
‘We could break down the door,’ said Skinner, ‘and get out.’
‘Out?’ said Miss Trent.
‘Out?!’ said the Infant Prodigy.
‘Surely you don’t mean out by ourselves?’ said Mr Pickwick.
They hadn’t been out of the cellar in years. The thought of going out into the world startled and upset them. A flicker of memories moved though their minds. Memories of light and wind and green things.
The Boy spoke for the first time. ‘If we stay here, we will die. We have to do something. Let me think.’
No one said a word. They always listened to the Boy.
There was silence for a moment. In that silence, they heard a crash and the sudden thud of footsteps.
‘Blimey! Someone is in the house,’ said Skinner.
‘Someone has come for us!’ said the Infant Prodigy in excitement.
‘Someone has come for us!’ said Miss Trent in dread.
There was a sudden silence into which Mr Pickwick spoke. ‘They might mean us harm. Remember what he said? We were to hide.’
They listened intently in the dark, straining to hear the sounds. The footsteps fumbled and scraped. There was more than one person.
‘Come on! It’s our chance,’ said Skinner. ‘They can open the door. We have to get out.’
‘Uncle said we were never to go out. He said it wasn’t safe,’ whispered the Infant Prodigy.
‘He said we were never to leave the cellar without him,’ said Mr Pickwick. ‘He was most insistent that we were not to reveal ourselves.’
They sat in troubled silence, while the footsteps echoed overhead.
‘We cannot stay here,’ said the Boy, speaking up again. ‘We have no choice.’
Everyone fell silent.
Overhead, there was a sudden thump and a scream.
‘They’ve met Horace,’ said the Infant Prodigy.
‘Aargh!’ yelled Joshua, leaping backwards and stepping heavily on the Serjeant’s toes. ‘It’s a tiger!’
The tiger crouched, eyes glittering, ready to jump. Joshua felt the strength go out of his knees. He opened his mouth to scream again and nothing emerged but a squeak.
‘Geroff!’ yelled the Serjeant, rescuing his aching foot. He peered into the gloom. ‘It’s stuffed, you idiot!’
Joshua shut his mouth hastily and looked more closely through spectacles that were askew. The tiger was still crouched, unnaturally still. But now, Joshua could see that the glitter in its eyes was glass. Bald patches shone amidst the stripes.
‘Oh,’ said Joshua, trying to get his heart out of his mouth and
back into his chest. ‘Sorry.’
‘Blimey!’ said the Serjeant, wiping his watering eyes. ‘This ’ere is a house of wonders!’
Joshua raised his lantern and looked around. A gleam of blue and green showed where a stuffed peacock stood beside the tiger, flaunting its tail, a scatter of feathers fallen on the floor. A glitter of gold marked where a gilded howdah stood propped up against a wall. The light caught on strange statues and flung their twisted shapes on the walls. A collection of swords flamed in a glass case. One of them had a blade that curved like a snake. The room even smelled exotic, with a whiff of jasmine overlaying the general odour of decay.
The Serjeant scratched his head. ‘I guess the old man thought he was a Maharaja.’
The old man in question was missing. The kitchen boy had come into the police station to say that his master had not been seen for four days, and he was afraid that something was wrong. Serjeant Botham and the newest recruit had been sent to the house to take a look.
‘He’s a funny old coot,’ explained the kitchen boy, who had come with them to show them the way. ‘But he always opened the door before. Never goes anywhere. Ever. So it’s strange.’ He volunteered the information that they could get in from the kitchen, ‘easy-like’.
Easy-like meant breaking open the kitchen door to get in, a proceeding that left Joshua with an uneasy feeling of transgression. He had to remind himself that he was the law.
It was his very first day as a policeman. He had reported for duty in the morning and been assigned a truncheon and Serjeant Botham. Now, he clutched the reassuring weight of his truncheon as he edged away from the tiger’s frozen snarl.
‘Ain’t going to find the old man in his stomach,’ said Serjeant Botham, who was as unruffled as if he broke into houses every day. ‘We should go upstairs.’
A narrow curl of stairs led up out of the living room. It was an odd sort of house, added as an afterthought between two other houses. So, though the front door was fifty feet from the back door, it was only thirty feet across. It rose narrowly up three floors, with a spiral staircase connecting the floors. The river ran along the back, and the house was hung with the smells of fish and night soil and all the other nameless things that bobbed on the murky tide.
They went up the narrow stairs, Joshua making sure to stick as close as he could to the Serjeant. As they stepped onto the second floor, Joshua recoiled and cursed.
‘Ow!’ yelled the Serjeant, as Joshua landed heavily on his boot again. ‘Me poor feet!’
A company of men had risen to confront them. Joshua waved his truncheon wildly as he began to back away from them, nearly shoving the Serjeant down the stairs.
‘They ain’t real,’ said the Serjeant. ‘Look!’
Joshua paused. The men paused as well. Joshua realized that he was only looking at his own reflection in a collection of mirrors of every shape and size. They eerily multiplied his every move.
‘You stand away from me,’ ordered the Serjeant, and a hundred Serjeants pointed. ‘Right over there.’
The Serjeant looked around. ‘Mad as a coot, this old man. That’s more mirrors in one place than I’ve seen in my life.’
‘Yes, Sir,’ said Joshua. ‘Er – sorry.’
‘You go that way,’ said the Serjeant authoritatively. ‘Search the place. And if you see anything, don’t come running back to jump on me feet.’ He limped away.
Joshua raised his lantern and moved forward, his mirrored selves slipping after him, every step multiplied to infinity. In the centre of the room, he took a step forward – and
vanished. Every image from every mirror simultaneously disappeared. It so startled Joshua, he looked down to see if he was still there. He was, but the downward glance brought to his notice a pair of boots that stuck out from under a mirror on his left.
The shock made Joshua drop his truncheon. He bent to pick it up, but it rolled away from his scrabbling fingers. Panicked, Joshua reached for the one thing that had stayed with him for the last ten years, lodged firmly in the pocket of every coat, accompanying him everywhere. He produced Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, and, inching carefully around
the mirror, he flung it with all his might.
The book was the size of a brick. Unfortunately, Joshua had terrible aim. It hit the mirror, which rocked and then fell. It exploded into fragments as it fell upon the man who huddled behind it. Joshua watched, horrified, as the man slid sideways and slumped on the floor. He lay there unmoving.
The noise brought Serjeant Botham running.
‘The mirror fell on him! I didn’t mean to kill him!’ said Joshua, aghast. ‘He was hiding behind the mirror.’
Serjeant Botham inspected the man that lay on the floor in front of the fireplace. The broken glass bathed him in a shower of brilliant shards. There was a dent in his forehead.
‘This ’ere gentleman met his death by the collision between ’is head and a very ’eavy object,’ said the Serjeant in his official voice. Then he took pity at seeing the fright engraved on Joshua’s face and added, ‘You didn’t kill this ’ere bloke. He’s been dead several days. I’ve seen enough of them to know.’
Timidly, Joshua bent over the man. The shatter of glass on the floor reflected Joshua’s white face a hundred times.
Despite the kitchen boy calling him ‘old man’, the man who lay dead was not very old. His hair was only touched with grey, but his face was lined with wrinkles, as if he had led a life filled with care. The kitchen boy had also forgotten to tell them that he had only one eye. Its singular bright blue gaze stared blindly up at Joshua. The other eye was hidden under an eyepatch. The trail of a savage scar started at the eyebrow, ran under the eyepatch and emerged to run down the man’s cheek.
‘Look!’ said Joshua, pointing at a scrap of blue held in the man’s right hand. It turned out to be a patch of thin fabric, torn from something.
‘’E pulled this off something before he died,’ said the Serjeant, abstracting it and examining it.
‘That material is too fine for anything but a woman’s dress. It’s Indian muslin,’ said Joshua, peering over the Serjeant’s shoulder.
Serjeant Botham looked at Joshua. ‘Know a lot about ladies’ dresses, do you?’
Joshua blushed a bright red and hastily denied it. They stood there staring down at the dead man. The single bright-blue eye stared back at them.
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Chapter 2
Why Are Teachers Allowed to Torture Us?
Finally, the bell rings and it is almost time to go home.
As I lug my bag and head for the door, Preeti Ma’am asks me to stay back. I think it is to help carry her books. She has some spinal problem or a bad arm or something. So, she employs us students as her slave labour. It’s okay, but sometimes, like today, my bag is already very heavy and the thought of additional baggage weighs me down. But of course, when a teacher asks you to lug for her, you lug. Simple as that.
‘So what is it that you’re thinking of doing?’ she asks, gathering her stuff up.
‘Huh?’ I’m always clueless when it comes to teachers, but this time, I really have no clue as to what she is asking.
She repeats, ‘So, what is it that you’re thinking of doing?’
‘Umm … carry your assignment books for you?’ I hope that’s the right answer, although, of course, I know it’s not. And her face confirms that. She grins. Like a real evil grin. Her evil grin is the only interesting thing about her.
‘For your assignment, have you any ideas of what you could do. You’ve had a little time to think, as you wanted. What have you come up with?’ She is smiling. She knows that she has caught me unawares. But she knows as well as I do that I had not given a single thought to her boring project, so I couldn’t even begin to fake it. I hang my head, which is my best go-to action when confronted by an adult.
She laughs a laugh slightly edged with evil. Like a monstrous mwah-hahaha laugh. Almost. She knows she has me just where she wants. She is the hero and I am the big fat zero. I know it and she sure knows it too and is milking it for all it’s worth. There is nothing for it, I smile and apologise. While in my head, I am already drawing a monstrous teacher in a sari that has a fire print all over it as though it is alive. And a very small, sad zero with stick figure arms hanging loosely by its side. The zero is on its knees in abject defeat. But I know I have to say something.
‘I’m really sorry, I’ve got a lot on my mind.’ That’s the best I can do, hoping she feels sorry enough to take the hook out of my mouth and throw me back into the polluted sea
that is my life. I like that image. Me, a fish, caught, dangling. I just have to wait and see if they take the hook out … ouch, a hook in the roof of your mouth must be something really
painful. I run my tongue over the roof of my mouth, trying to imagine it. I shudder.
‘You know, you’ve got to start concentrating, your mind is so far away that you don’t even know the topic under discussion. You can’t keep up if you are so distracted.’
Hmmm? Oh, concentrate. Yeah, yeah … tell a stressed guy he shouldn’t stress and all of a sudden, he’s all calm. Like where do grown-ups get these ideas from? Telling me to concentrate does not make me concentrate. Why wouldn’t she ask me what was troubling me? I could concentrate on that. Not that I would or even could tell her my troubles. I couldn’t tell anyone.
So, I pick at my pimple and I nod and mumble something remotely appropriate as a response. I know she is right. And there is no way I can tell her that what she is teaching is too boring. And less than that of a chance that I will actually begin to tell her my woes and sorrows.
‘So, the assignment is that you have to try and be Gandhi for a week, or at least a day.’
‘Be who?’
‘Gandhi … you know … Mahatma Gandhi? Father of the Nation?’
‘O-of course, I know Gandhi, but how can I be Gandhi? I mean, there are no British to throw out. Oh, unless you’re thinking of chucking out the foreign exchange students.’
I laugh.
She doesn’t. I thought my joke was quite funny.
She doesn’t.
She gives me one of her famous long, steady stares.
‘Chandrashekhar!’ She pronounces this firmly and sternly. She is really turning the screw on me. For one thing, I hate my name. Old fashioned and fuddy-duddy. It would have been one and the same thing if my parents had just called me fuddy-duddy. But, instead, they named me Chandrashekhar, a mouthful, a loadful and so everything that I am not.
‘Do you know whose name you carry?’
‘Yeah, sorry, yes. Yes, I do know that. He was a freedom fighter. Famous. And he was incredibly brave.’
And then I’m thinking, there, that’s my point. Why can’t we do Bhagat Singh one year, Chandrashekhar the next and stuff. But every single year, we’re stuck with Gandhi.
‘Why do we have to do Gandhi every year?’ The question pops out of me before I can stop it. And my voice is a whine, like a little child.
Of course, that leads to a lecture on respect and remembering how I have so much to be grateful for. And how some of that respect and gratitude should be aimed at Gandhiji because all of it was because of him. Stuff like that. And I am tuning out again. I mean, do we really, really believe that it was all one guy’s doing? Yes, I know, all adults would throw a massive fit if they knew I was referring to Gandhiji as ‘a guy’. But I am not being disrespectful. It’s just
that …
Chapter 9: Worst Fears Come True Sometimes
I’ve always been told that I imagine the worst and worry needlessly. Like, if we are going on a long trip, I worry that I am going to get a stomach upset. Sometimes I worry so much about it that I actually do. Or, if there are tests coming, I worry about blanking out. I worry harder than I
study and sometimes end up blanking out. But most times, I realise, later, that I’ve worried for nothing. I feel like telling my father that. But before I can, the worst starts happening. It is a lot worse than a stomach upset and blanking out in an exam. Much worse.
We see it on television first. The attacks have started. Sikhs are being pulled out of their cars, out of buses, out of their homes, even. I try to see some of it, but my mother wraps her arms around me and turns me around. She buries her face in my hair and I can feel the dampness of her tears. Dad’s worst fears are coming true. And a new fear is being born inside me. I feel helpless. I feel that my own parents are on the brink of their own disasters. Suppose something
happens to them? What would I do? My grandparents are feeling equally bad, my grandma is almost hysterical. I feel as though I am the only sane one left.
I also feel as though I am growing up every second. Aging. Like my own life is on fast forward and my teen years are zooming towards adulthood.
The television volume is turned down finally. But the fire cannot be controlled with the tap of a button. The embers are catching and the flames are fast going out of control.
It is then that the shouting seems to come closer. We all turn to the TV to see if someone has turned the volume up again. But no, no one has. The sounds are not out of a box. They are outside our door. At first the shouts are confusing.
But pretty soon the words separate enough for us to make out what the crowd in our corridor wants. Blood. The crowd is baying for blood.
My own blood runs cold. I freeze. Were they coming for us? We all stand in a frozen tableau of terror. My mother moves first. She runs to make sure the doors are bolted. She gestures to my father to move a sofa to secure the door further. He doesn’t move. He shakes his head.
‘It’s not for us,’ is all he says.
And like in a jigsaw, everything falls in place in that moment. I can see it as if I can see through the door.
They have not come for us. The mob has followed the stranger who had come to Uncle Sarab’s house. And now they want him.
Mum is trying to pull the sofa all by herself. And I can
see that she is crying.
I move closer to help her.
‘Mum, what’ll they do to him?’
But mum’s sobs come tumbling out, making sounds like a small wounded animal.
‘Mum, what about Kiran and Sharan, are they going to be okay? Can we go get them, at least?’
Mum stops trying to pull at the sofa and looks at me, bereft. There is despair in her eyes that I never want to see again.
But in that moment, I know what that despair means. It means that she doesn’t know. Doesn’t know if the children in the next house are going to be safe. If there is anything that we can do.
I have to do something. I leap towards the door, furiously trying to pull back the rusty latch which is always stuck.
‘Stop. Just stop,’ Dad roars.
‘Dad, no, we have to try and stop them. We have to.’
‘I cannot let you go,’ mum holds me tight. ‘It’s not safe, beta.’
‘But then it’s not safe for them either.’ I struggle to escape.
‘Don’t you see? If we try to help them, then we are in trouble as well.’
‘And if we don’t do anything …’
There is no answer to that. But there has to be. Shouldn’t there?
The sounds from across the corridor burst in upon us, wounding us, cutting at us. No, I am not saying it was as bad for us. Our plates and glasses were not smashed. Our furniture was not burnt. Our skin was not cut.
Our bones are whole.
But our lives are not.
And I know that we are not the same. And may never be again.
With every cry for help knocking at our door, we lose a little bit of ourselves. I know now how easy it is to say the right things. To believe the best of oneself and give advice.
I always believed that we were the kind of people who would always step up and help those in need. We had been good neighbours. We were helpful and kind and came to
people’s aid. We stopped if there was an accident, we gave money to the little children doing acrobatics in the streets at traffic signals. We were the good guys.
But are we? Are we really?
I know that as the sounds go mute. As the crowds leave, their blood-lust satisfied, we can’t look each other in the eye. I know now that the prime minister’s violent death did have something to do with me.
The world goes completely quiet. Too shocked to move, to turn on the axis it had known all these years. I don’t know what we did. I don’t know if anyone said anything. There is a silence so thick that it deafens me. Defeats me.
I go to bed, exhausted although I have not moved a muscle. I have not moved. I have not stepped forward when I should have, could have stepped forward. Guilt bitters my tongue.
As I lie there, I try to conjure up my next meeting with my friends across the hall. What would I say? Can I tell them that I wasn’t home when the mob came? That my family and I had gone away somewhere? That would be the easiest. But no, that wouldn’t work. Uncle Sarab had seen us standing there when he pulled the visitor in. He knew we were there. And he knew that we didn’t do anything. Had he told his children, my friends? That we hadn’t been good neighbours, that we had not helped?
My thinking is stupid. Of course, they aren’t thinking about us right now. But I can’t stop thinking about them, wondering if they are hurt. They must be frightened. But I hope it isn’t worse than that. It wouldn’t be. Couldn’t be. Mustn’t be. Maybe this time, I can be the one to make Sharan and Kiran laugh. I’m sure they need a laugh right about now.I want to hear them laugh. Please, let us laugh together again.
Please.
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