Читать книгу The Good Girls - Sonia Faleiro - Страница 16

Nazru Sees It Too

Nazru lived in an elephant-eared taro plot near the orchard. Inside the tiny brick room, his father sat upright on a charpoy, wheezing heavily into his shrivelled chest. Some nights when the asthmatic old man injected himself with medication to clear his passageways, he was knocked senseless. Nazru’s teenaged brother, who was named after an old-time Bollywood star, was ‘weak in the head’ according to their father’s diagnosis and encouraged to keep to himself. An older brother had fled to another state where he had ended up as a moulder in the even more unforgiving world of a brick kiln, with his wife by his side and their five children running around in the beating sun. His mother tried to keep the family from coming apart, but Nazru was forever getting into scrapes.

One night he heard bandits rummaging about in a neighbour’s house and instead of staying away, as others did in such circumstances, he confronted the men. They shot him in the arm. Another time he killed a neighbour’s goat. There was no logic to his actions, as least not any that he articulated to people’s satisfaction. Asked a simple and direct question, he laughed brayingly, hee-haw, hee-haw. The villagers made him apologise to the owner of the dead goat and pay restitution. Time and again they counselled him, ‘apne kaam se kaam rakho.’ Mind your own business.

How could he?

There was nothing for a young man in the village. Sometimes he gathered friends for a drink, sometimes to smoke weed. He’d once gone for a drive in a car, but he didn’t remember very much because it was the time he’d been shot and was being rushed to the hospital. He was too old to hang around the teenagers who stared at their phones, and too immature to socialise with men his own age who were married and had children.

Some people thought they had him pegged. ‘Dar naam ka cheez usko nahin hai.’ He isn’t afraid of anything. Others, who saw him rustling about on one of his evening excursions, knew he was just nosy.

By their early twenties, Katra boys were embedded in that stage of Hindu life known as grihastha, becoming a householder, maintaining a home and raising a family. Nazru was considered odd, but he was hard-working. With one brother gone, another ill and his father bedridden, the burden of feeding everyone – while tending to their only buffalo and all the tobacco – fell to him. He did what was needed. Why then was he still unmarried?

Debating the causes behind twenty-six-year-old Nazru’s bachelorhood became a preoccupation among the villagers who found him annoying. Someone claimed that he was having an affair with a neighbour’s wife. When the neighbour was away, it was said, Nazru slipped into his wife’s bed. Someone else said that he was involved with several men’s wives. A third person claimed that Nazru carried pictures of underage girls in his wallet, making him sound like a pervert.

Close relatives rubbished the rumours. He was not a pervert, the poor boy, he was a hijra, they said. They had come to this conclusion having seen him squat to urinate. The rumours grew and grew, and so the question was put to Nazru’s father. ‘My son,’ said the withered old fellow, ‘is neither a man nor a woman.’

And so Nazru was left to do as he pleased. Every night after dinner, he set off. Animals, squatting women, teenagers being teenagers – no one was safe from the flashing light of Nazru’s Made in China torch.

‘I saw Padma and Pappu,’ he said later. The pair were in his wheat field. ‘They were signalling to each other.’

Nazru saw them together again, and then a third time. ‘I didn’t like it,’ he said. ‘This sort of behaviour could destroy the reputation of our entire family.’