Anuradha Roy: Sleeping On Jupiter

Our ashram school had many students. There were girls and boys who came to it from outside for the day. They kept to themselves and in the classroom their seats were in rows away from ours. They were taller than us, their clothes fitted better, their shoes were less scuffed. They looked at us and then away, as if they had not seen us at all. We regarded them as people from another country, one that we would never go to, not even to visit. Some of the boys stayed at the ashram just as we did, but they came in through another door, they sat on the other side of the room, and when classes finished they left for their dormitories, which were so far away they were taken there in a van. We never saw them outside of school.

The first day at our school we were each given a set of books and a box of crayons. There were twelve crayons arranged in a row, like a rainbow inside a sheath of cardboard. There was also a metal box with a pencil and sharpener and rubber in it. I must have opened the box and shut it many times. I remember how those boxes shut with a click. I am sure I took out the rubber and smelled it, even pressed my teeth into it, as I like to do to this day.

The woman who handed us these things wore her hair in two plaits. Her eyes were painted black around the rims with kajal. “I am your teacher,” she said. “You will call me Didi. Draw a balloon in your drawing book. Colour it with a crayon.”

She turned her back to us and drew a balloon on the blackboard. It flew on the board attached to a long line. I opened my new drawing book and on the first page I copied her flying balloon. I picked out the navy blue from my row of new crayons. I started filling colour into my balloon. I pressed the crayon hard to the paper. The colour coated the page like grease. If I touched it, my fingertip turned blue.

The teacher’s voice, very close to my ears said, “When you colour something, don’t go in every direction, colour in one direction.” She took the crayon from my hand and said, “Like this.” Her strokes with crayon were sure and smooth. She said, “Stay inside the line, never go out. Understand?” This is what we were taught at the ashram: that we were never to go outside. Outside the line was danger. Outside we would be killed or locked up in jail.

The teacher’s face had so much powder it was white like chalk. She had a black moustache. When she was bending over my drawing book, her plaits hung in front of my nose. They had ribbons at the ends. She had a smear of ash on her forehead and a red dot inside the smear. If I think of her the smell of the incense in Guruji’s cottage and of coconut oil and soap comes back to me. She moved her face away, laid the crayon on my desk and walked to the rows ahead. I kept staring at her, the plaits with the ribbons that swung when she took a step.

Before I could stop it, my crayon had rolled off the desk to the floor.

I ducked under the bench to pick it up. Down below there were only legs — boys’ legs, girls’ legs, table and chair legs. It looked much bigger than the room above. It was a maze. I could not find my crayon because the maze made me as dizzy as when I was hunting for my fallen tooth in the van. I crouched there not daring to come back up without the crayon.

I don’t know when it was that a girl came wriggling under the bench and crouched next to me. She had stalk-thin limbs. Her head looked too big for her. She crouched on the ground underneath our desks and she smiled at me. She had crooked buck teeth when she smiled. Where I had a shaggy mop, she had straight thin hair to her shoulders. Her eyes were watery, so big that they seemed to bulge. Later I found out that her name was Piku.

With Piku down below, everything became less strange. The furniture legs became furniture legs again. She crawled between the chairs — I was little myself, but she was even littler. It took her only moments and then she held the crayon up to me. That was how I became friends with Piku.

I don’t remember many other things about my first year at the school, but I remember how one day we were told that our teacher had been taken ill. We made up stories about her. One of the girls said she had run away to get married and another said she had died and become a ghost who lived on top of the neem tree. But our teacher did come back: maybe it was days later, maybe weeks. A hush fell over the room as she entered. Her head and one of her eyes was wrapped in a bandage. Her ribboned plaits were missing. Her lips were like two swollen rubber chillies. We did not know we were staring, but after a while we remembered and stood up, chorusing Good Morning, Didi as we did every day.

She sat in her chair and her head dropped to the desk. The bandage on her head had a round patch of red on it right at the top. Under the bandage her head looked as smooth as a ball.

She pulled her head up after a while and said, “I had an accident.” Then she took a sip of water from the glass on the table and replaced the cover on the glass. She held up the arithmetic textbook and said, “Page five.”

There was shuffling and fluttering as all of us opened our books. From one of the other classrooms we heard a teacher shout, “Siddown!”

“Repeat after me,” Didi said, “two wonza two, twotwoza four, twothreeza six, twofourza eight.”

We repeated the tables. All of us were gaping at her.

Two wonza two, twotwoza four.

She had shut the unbandaged eye and clasped her arms and was swaying to the rhythm of our singsong version of her tables.

Twofivezaten, twosixza twell.

I kept losing track of the numbers. I repeated them without understanding what I was saying.

“Twoeightza sixteen,” Didi said. “I had sixteen stitches in my head.”

All of us repeated, “Twoeightza sixteen, I had sixteen stitches in my head.”

At that she opened her eye. She stopped swaying. I saw that the eye had a cut at the edge. Blood was caked over the cut like a bit of burnt plastic. She said slowly, “My hair had to be shaved off for the stitches. My plaits had to be cut off.”

We did not repeat that. Nobody said anything. The fan made a whirring and squeaking and clacking noise. Didi looked at us, expressionless. “That’s what’s waiting for you all,” she said. “All.” She had a glazed, dazed look. She put a hand to her head and touched the places where her plaits used to be. Without warning she got up. She did not pick up her books and the ruler with which she used to rap our knuckles. She left the room without saying another word.

For some time we waited for her to come back. Then we began murmuring to each other. After some time two of the girls got into a fight, started tugging each other’s hair and scratching and biting. The rest of us watched the fun. The teacher from the next class stormed in and yelled, “What is this madhouse? Where is your Didi?”

“How long will you stare at your cereal and keep muttering to yourself, Nomi?” my foster mother’s voice broke in. “Look what a mess you’ve made with all that torn up tissue.” She cleared my bowl and brushed away the shredded paper, shaking her head to say she had given up all hope of sense from me. As if she had no idea what she was doing, she took a big jar of pasta shells and began to fling handfuls of pasta into a pan on the stove top in which she had put eggs to boil. “I asked at your school here, you know, and they said, What? Doesn’t she talk at home?” Half the pasta missed the pan and fell to the floor, but she kept throwing in fistfuls, uncaring. Her voice sounded too high. She had been told by the teachers that I had friends in school, that I played football and went to kickboxing classes. She had looked in my room, she confessed, found that I had filled drawing books with dead birds, broken weathervanes and barbed wire. She wondered why I didn’t draw some happy pictures. Flowers, the sun, green meadows. She wondered what she was doing wrong. Drops of boiling water splashed out, scalding her. She stopped throwing pasta shells into the pan. She stood there with her hand in the jar and her shoulders slumped.