Amul - A Short Story

Amul – A short Story Its early morning again, I can hear the darned birds chirping outside. With my eyes still closed I can hear the ticking sound of the wall clock like the irritating sound of the water faucet dripping. The water faucet never drips in my house, because I don’t like it dripping, like the way mom’s head was dripping blood, and flooded the floor and spoiled the carpet. I like everything neat and clean. My name is Amul. Mum told me that dad loved the utterly butterly delicious Amul girl. And that’s why he named me Amul. I study in 5th standard. I like my school. My favorite subject is mathematics. I don’t understand why people don’t like mathematics. I love my mathematics teacher, her name is Miss Kakkar, and she is supposed to be a doctor or something, not the kinds who use stethoscopes. She is pretty and funny and she reminds of my mother. I like Miss Kakkar, because she likes me, she thinks am smart. And I like it when she kisses me on my cheek, especially when I solve some of the problems she gives only to me. She always gives me problems to solve and only to me. All her questions to me are named after old men who thought of all these problems and they died trying to solve it, which I find really funny. Today, she gave me some old man’s problem called the Pythagoras Theorem. My mother died when I was 5 years old. My dad hit her when he was in one those not so good drunken moods of his and she fell. And then she died. My dad did not tell me anything and I understood that I was supposed to act like Gandhi’s monkey. Gandhi’s monkeys are so stupid and funny. Old people are funny. And they always seem to cry whenever they come on TV. Everybody cried at the hospital that day when my mother died, even my father. After I come back from school, I go and play till my father comes back home. After he comes back we sit in front of the TV. After dad makes dinner, it’s his turn to watch TV and he asks me to go to my room. On some days dad watches something on the television which I think is something like the funny video Anita’s mum watches. I try to sneak a peek. But I can’t really see anything, except for the blue light. When am in my room, I try and solve the problems which Miss Kakkar gives me. They are usually very simple. I rewrite everything because Miss Kakkar can’t understand my handwriting. And then I go to sleep, hoping that those darned birds don’t wake me up again. Anita told me that she heard her mum tell her dad that my dad goes to see mum sometimes. Anita is such a stupid girl, nobody can meet dead people. But, if dad could go see mum then even I want to go. Mum always smelled nice, she smelled like the food she cooked and the cloths she made me wear. And she always sang songs when dad left for office and her friend John would come home. The songs always went up and then down and then up again. After mum would give me breakfast, she would send me to Anita’s house to go play and then call me back when John left and lunch was ready. John doesn’t come home anymore. After mum died and everybody came home dressed in white, dad tried to sit me down and explain things to me, about how mum won’t be coming back from the hospital and how he was sorry and how helpless he felt when he looked at me and how he did not know what to do with me. Miss Kakkar was the one who explained why mum won’t come back and what happens when people die. I did not know what happened to people when they die. Miss Kakkar told me that death is like dividing anything by zero, it results in infinity, even if you wish to see it or feel it, you can’t. But you can think about it. Mum had become infinity. That’s what Miss Kakkar said. And Miss Kakkar never lies. I can tell when people are lying. I knew mum was lying whenever she kissed dad goodbye and told him “I love you”, when he went to office, and I knew she wasn’t lying when she kissed me goodbye and told me “I love you” when I went to school. Anita’s mum is nice, some days when dad gets late, he asks Latha aunty, Anita’s mum to give me dinner. And after dinner, she plaits Anita’s hair and mine and then she tells us a nice story, sometimes it is about handsome young princes like me and sometimes it is about pretty little princesses like Anita. And then, later in the night when dad comes back, he lifts me and puts me in my own bed. I don’t like waking up anywhere else other than my bed, which is why dad doesn’t allow me to go with grandma to live with her. I think on some days after I pretend to go to sleep, dad comes and sits next to me and whispers, one night when I secretly opened my eyes, I saw him crying like mum. It was funny and weird. I had never seen a man cry before, mum always told me that I should never tell secrets and that I should be brave and never cry over things. Maybe dad is not brave. Dad and I don’t talk much to each other. He makes me breakfast and sometimes dinner. He doesn’t ask me how the food was like Latha aunty does, and I don’t tell him that sometimes he puts too much salt or sometimes no salt at all. I don’t tell him because he doesn’t ask me and I remember that both dad and mum used to fight whenever he used to say something about the salt to mum, and then dad will then proceed to hit mum and she will run and come into my room and lock it from inside. She always used to tell me that this how adults play. Adults can be very confusing sometimes. And like adults, cats are also confusing, sometimes they let you stroke it and sometimes they scratch you. One day when that old lady’s cat scratched Anita when she and I went to play with it, I kicked it real hard and we both ran away from there and hid behind the bushes because we heard the old lady come out hearing the screams of the cat. Anita said that she won’t tell anything to anybody if I don’t tell anything to anybody. And I simply nodded, though I don’t why she made me promise something like that. Lot of people tell me their secrets, maybe because I don’t talk much, like the cable repairman who came home the other day, he told me that he missed my mum, and that he liked her and she was the best he ever had, but I should not tell this to anybody, and in return he gave me some of the soldering wire. I did not understand what he was talking about, but I didn’t care, I was thinking what I could do with the soldering wire, and since I am not allowed to play with the tools which dad has in the garage I decided to put the wire in my special box underneath the bed. The box has all sorts of things. The jaw bone of Raju which I found when I was digging in Anita’s garden, when I showed it to Latha aunty and asked her what it was, she asked me where I found it and then proceeded to throw it in the trash, while telling me that I was not supposed to tell Anita that I found something of Raju’s. And after Latha aunty left, I picked up the bone and put it inside my pocket. I washed it after I went home, it had teeth, so I brushed it after I brushed my teeth, and the teeth were very sharp, but some of them were broken. Then there is the broken edge of the table on which mum’s head hit, it still has some specks of her blood on it. I did not wash it, because if I wash it then the blood will go. Then there is a slightly burnt picture of me as a baby with mum holding me, mum looks really pretty in that, she is wearing her favorite pink robes and her hair is loose and she is wearing those nice bunny flip flops. It is my favorite thing among all the things inside the box. I got the picture from mum’s things when I was helping dad to burn all of mum’s things when dad was not looking. These are the only 2 things which I have of mum. Dad burnt the rest of it, his eyes were watering when he was burning it and my eyes were itching because of all that smoke, though I don’t think dad’s eyes were watering because of the smoke.
I don’t like it when people shout, at me or at other people. I don’t like changes. I don’t take too kindly too them. But according to Miss Kakkar, change is the only constant. It makes sense, especially when things are non – linear which are mostly equations like people or events which don’t make sense are to be balanced by an ever changing variable. If you are not open to accepting the presence of this variable then things get very puzzling. But that still doesn’t mean that I like change. Another couple of hours before dad wakes up and comes to my room to wake me up, sometimes after he goes off to sleep, he wakes up in the middle of the night and comes to check on me if I am still there, and if I am sleeping and I pretend as if I am. I haven’t been able to sleep ever since mum died. Dad took me to the doctor to get me checked and find out why am I not able to sleep. The doctor took a lot of tests. He took my blood test, urine test, it is difficult to pee – pee inside a small cup when you have such a big commode behind it, even took a sample of my poo – poo. And then he sent me home with dad. I don’t think he found out the reason because he told my dad to keep bringing me every fortnight for checkups and he gave a long list of pills for me to take. I am supposed to take them before breakfast, after breakfast and before dinner and after dinner. Sometimes, if dad is in a good mood, he makes silly jokes about these pills and how costly they are. And then he calls out my mum’s name as if she was in the kitchen and then he becomes awfully quiet, he smiles at me and then gives me dinner and pours himself his drink and we sit and watch TV in silence. I like it when it’s quiet with just the voices coming from the television. Dad smiles from time to time, he looks nice when he smiles. He eyes become small and race tracks come out from the corners of his eyes. When I was very little, he used to carry me around and keep smiling and I used to trace the race tracks around his eyes and the finish line would be me poking his eyes and he would close his eyes and laugh. I think these birds are laughing at me. I think Latha aunty told me this story once about birds who used to come and chirp outside the old king’s window before he died. I remember mum was singing along to the birds that day morning when she came and woke me up, the day she died. But the birds have been sitting and chirping all morning for the last couple of days and nobody has died. But they did chirp on the day when mum died, I heard them and I heard mum singing along with them as she gave me milk in my baby bottle.
If I sit next to the window and shoo the birds away maybe they will go away. I better lie down again, my head hurts if I sit up. I knew all this shrill chirping of birds will give me a headache. I better not tell dad about it, otherwise he will rush me to see the doctor who will then do that thing with my blood which he does every time I go there. And all I have to do is just lie there while tubes go in and out of my body with something red in it going in and out of my body. I am assuming it is my blood, considering that a normal human body has about 6 litres of blood, the amount flowing in and out doesn’t look like it’s that much. I miss Raju. If he was there then he would have barked these damn birds away. He always understood what I was thinking. He sometimes even let me ride on his back when I was little. I would pull its ears and he would nuzzle his nose against my neck telling me to stop. His pink tongue was always hanging out as if he just finished running a marathon racer. Anita misses Raju more than me, sometimes when she falls asleep when Latha aunty is telling a story, sometimes he mumbles in her sleep calling out Raju. And you can always tell where Raju has been to by the trail of his hair he left behind. His hair was soft and nice, like Anita’s. But it was golden in color and Anita’s hair was black. But they were soft, shiny and nice. I started losing my hair after the first couple of visits to the doctor, one of the many reasons why I don’t like it when dad takes me to the doctor. And the whole hospital smells so weird. It smells like when dad cleans my bathroom with that orange liquid. Dad usually goes more quiet than usual when we return from the hospital. He doesn’t even play the car radio then. Otherwise he switches it on just to replace the silence with something anything. I keep looking outside the window, and sometimes I see his face in the reflection of the mirror and I can see and feel him staring at me and then he proceeds to look straight ahead and from time to time he wipes his eyes. I wonder what dad thinks about when he is waiting for the doctor in the doctor’s waiting room, everybody thinks something or other always. I know this because I keep thinking of something or the other. Of late, dad has been coming home earlier than usual, I wonder if something is wrong with him. Usually he comes to Anita’s place to pick me up well after Mr. Sharma has had his dinner. But nowadays he is coming home much before Mr. Sharma comes back from office. Though couple of days back he was a bit late, heard him tell Latha aunty that he had gone to collect some reports. Ah! The birds have finally stopped chirping. About time as well if I can say so. I am feeling sleepy. The first time I have felt sleepy in a long time. Think I will finally get some sleep before dad comes and wakes me up again. I can actually feel the sleep coming over my… Raju… Pythagoras… Mum…