The Blue Bedspread Read Online Free PDF Page B

change, the time on the clock, I give the coins back to my sister, one coin remains in my pocket, the lunch, Chetan, I find the coin and throw it away. It is my fault and Sister doesn’t know.
    But Father is so angry and I am so scared that I can’t tell him all this now. Not once does Sister tell him that it was I who got the change from the conductor today. She remembers everything by heart, she doesn’t remember I could have made a mistake.
    My sister goes to sleep without eating dinner, she always does that when she’s angry and hurt. There are marks on her face where Father hit her. She will now have to stay home for a few days until the marks disappear. I also don’t eat dinner, I say my stomach hurts, that’s the least I can do.
    We are lying in bed, Bhabani has switched off the lights, from the drawing room, we can hear the clock ticking. And when she is alone with me, Sister begins to cry, her face turned towards the wall. Through her tears, she asks me, ‘What happened to the one-rupee coin?’
    I don’t know what to do, I don’t say anything.
    ‘Do you remember how much you gave me?’ she asks. I don’t say anything.
    The night closes in on me, I close my eyes tight, I lie awake as she cries to sleep, hurt and hungry. I keep looking at the wall on which I can see big, scary patterns from the headlights of the trucks outside.
    The next morning came and the next and the next, winter came, my sister never once talked about that evening, that one-rupee coin, the English team arrived, led by Tony Greig, who was so tall his bat didn’t touch the ground, our bowlers dropped several catches, it was the year they had begun showing the matches on TV.
    Geeti began wearing a bra, letting one strap peek from under her top across her shoulder.
    Milestones, landmarks, passed us by.
    Today, almost everything inside me has stopped growing except the guilt of that afternoon. Like a monster which gets its endless supply of food and water from some place we shall never know, it keeps growing and growing inside me every day and all I can do is to wait for it to swallow me whole.

 
G ARDEN C HILD
     
    At a different time, maybe at a different place, I would have told you other stories. Of the two Alsatian dogs in the neighbourhood who bit into our cricket balls until we poisoned them one night. Of the different ways in which our neighbourhood has changed, so many you can’t count them on your fingers: how the road, on either side of the tram tracks, has widened, a twenty-four-hour telephone booth, with glass cubicles, has sprouted at the street corner. How Bhar And Sons, the shop which once sold iron rods, is now the local cable centre, satellite dishes sit atop its asbestos roof, cable wires sag across its sky.
    Plus a lot more, I would have twisted fact, fleshed out fiction, but tonight, looking at the darkness looking at me through the window, there’s only one image that emerges, like a photograph half-processed, in the yellow light of the table lamp in my room.
    It’s the image of a child lying, on his stomach, in a tiny garden, his elbows making two hollows in the damp earth, his fingers pressed like sepals against his face. There’s no one beside him, just a parallelogram of light that falls on the grass from a large window.
    Who is this child, it’s not clear, all I know is that this story will have a happy ending.
    I close my eyes and concentrate; so hard they prise free from the sockets and I let them fly across the room. Dodging below the fan, in between the bookshelves, through the green window, past the red curtains, down into the street. In and out of the traffic, inside a tram, around the passengers, some sitting some standing.
    Across Esplanade, past the beauty salon on Park Street where two Chinese women in black jeans wait for customers; across the Maidan, carried on by the breeze, through the trees cold and quivering.
    I concentrate harder; let the eyes glide over the Hooghly, briskly skim its black