Excerpts from Above Average
a novel by Amitabha Bagchi
The following excerpts from Above Average serve as companion pieces to the conversation between Amitabha and Ashima. They illustrate in particular some of the issues of class and language highlighted in the discussion.
It was a late April afternoon in my last year at IIT. In two weeks time I would have to move out of the hostel for the final time. Walking deliberately, I went from one floor to the other, one wing to the next. I trailed my hands along the walls, gently exfoliating their whitewashed skin.
It was almost four thirty when I finally found myself down near the carrom room. It was empty. I turned to see if there was anyone in sight. Through the concrete screen wall that ran from the door of the common room to the stairwell I saw Meena entering the hostel. 'Meena,' I bellowed. 'Meeeeeenaaaa!'
He came into the courtyard looking puzzled.
'Carrom, Meena?' I shouted.
'Not now, yaar,' he said, walking up to me.
'One last time, Meena,' I said, the senti angle had been working well in these last days.
He grimaced, then shrugged his shoulders. I ran into the carrom room, started getting the coins out of the pockets and sprinkling powder on the board. He came and sat across from me, putting down the spiral bound book he was carrying.
I had met Girdhari Lal Meena outside the carrom room the day after the ragging period ended in my first year. Freshers weren't allowed in for the first three weeks. It was only after the elaborate rituals of Freshers' Night were completed that we were free to be full members of the hostel with access to the common room and the carrom room.
There had been four seniors playing carrom my first time in there. I stood and waited for their game to finish. When the last coin was pocketed, they simply reset the board and continued playing as if I didn't exist. When that board finished and they began to get the coins out of the pockets, I spoke up hesitantly. 'Can I play?'
'Where's your partner?'
'Partner?'
They laughed. One of them took the break and the game started.
'What partner?' I asked.
'It's the rule,' one of them said. 'If you have a partner, the two of you are entitled to play. If you don't, you have no rights. These are the carrom room rules.'
The carrom room rules were not written down anywhere but everyone in the hostel learned them sooner or later. In all my time in the hostel I never saw anyone fighting to jump the queue. They tried to slime and prevaricate to get to play, that was second nature to most of us at IIT, but if they were caught at it they withdrew gracefully and took their place in line.
I walked out of the room, walking straight into Girdhari Lal Meena.
He was a short guy with the sort of complexion TV announcements for missing persons would call wheatish. He always wore a synthetic short sleeved shirt, never t-shirts, on brown pants, never jeans. His hair was always oiled and combed down flat across his head. I thought about Meena years later, when, studying in the US. I was e the one dressed unlike everyone else, forced to decide whether I wanted to change my dress, or get my hair cropped and gelled, or whether I bore some kind of loyalty to the style I had adopted as the accepted uniform of college Delhi. Meena too must have had to make a similar decision.
He spoke little. His face reflected an inner calm, admixed, in the early days, with a certain quizzicality. With time the curiosity passed. His expression now seemed to say, like Ghalib, that the world was a children's park to his eyes. In Delhi, far from his village, subdivision and district, he watched indulgently as this skit of urban life was played morning and night.
There were times though when his mask would drop. It would happen if we had beaten some of the hostel's established carrom gods or if we came back from being many coins down and won the game. But most often it would happen when he attempted a shot which required great precision of judgement and execution, and pulled it off. He would look up at me, for a second or two, and he would smile a gloriously mischievous smile.
Most teams formed at the carrom room were temporary ones. You found someone in the common room or the mess and you dragged him along with you. But some teams lasted. Those people searched out their favourite partners and only played with them. If the other guy left for some reason, his partner would play on for a while but his form would wane till he too would quit and spend the rest of his free time lounging in the common room. It was like in cricket when after a long partnership one batsman would get out, the other would often follow. 'A loss of concentration' would be the curt diagnosis. To elaborate any further would be to admit that that man was missing his partner, which would be like saying that he wasn't much of a man after all.
Meena and I became a longstanding team. As soon as I finished lunch I would find him and we would go to the carrom room. After dinner he would come and get me. We spent hours in the carrom room every single day through our first semester, except on the weekends when I went home. I knew his strengths, he knew my preferences. We rarely talked while we played, a nod or look was generally enough to convey whatever was required. He never stopped me from taking a risky or difficult shot, I think we both realized that the delight of pulling off a piece of skill was much more valuable than winning a game. And it was perhaps because winning wasn't important that we won so often. I knew Meena was in IIT on the Scheduled Caste quota. I had learned in my short stay at IIT that his surname was a caste name associated with people who were eligible for reservations. But this was not something he and I talked about.
At IIT it seemed, like in the carrom room, the accepted rule was it wasn't who you were but what you could do that mattered. This rule was not just unwritten, it was unspoken as well. But sometimes it was not observed very closely. There had been a time during the ragging when three seniors had been interrogating me in one of their rooms.
'Does your sister have a boyfriend?'
'Yes, Sir.'
'Does the boyfriend fuck your sister?'
'I don't know, Sir.'
'What if he comes and says, I am going to fuck your sister?'
It was a standard line of questioning. At the point where your sister was being fucked you were supposed to break down and cry. I decided to go a different way.
'It's up to her, Sir.'
They were shocked, and amused.
'You must be a shadda,' one of them said casually. 'They're the only ones who are so shameless.'
continue to excerpt 2