Life for a thirteen-year old boy is extremely excruciating. There are things you begin to understand and desire, but for some reason they are kept just out of your reach. It is a pity that our societal norms do not keep pace with our hormonal development. You do not understand the reasons that adults give. In your mind, you know much beyond your years, and you can handle everything, but there’s never an elder around who believes in the truth of your feelings.
Being a single child growing up with mostly my mother (father used to come home late at nights from work), I developed a vivid imagination. I believe I hit puberty early too; by the time I was in seventh grade, I already had pimples on my face and was much taller than my peers. Stronger too. The sports teachers prided in placing me at the forefront of all athletic events, and I don’t remember a time when I disappointed them.
Those were the days of no electronic distractions. It was the year 1988, when all we had to fuel our imagination were books. Satellite TV hadn’t made inroads yet. I could read one book a day; I read anything and everything, from my mother’s cookbooks and movie magazines to my friends’ novels of detective fiction and fantasy. Everything held my interest till I finished it, and then I was back to feeling bored. Then, one afternoon, when my mother was having her little siesta, I climbed up the stool to reach the upper shelves of my father’s bookcase. And that’s when I began to discover the joys of things that were not meant for me yet.
My father, a man of varied interests, kept a stash of almost all kinds of books in his wooden bookcase. The books I hit upon were more of a medical nature—those that spoke of the human anatomy with the somber intentions of disseminating information. But for my curious mind, even that somber language was enough. I read on, page by page, fascinated by each picture of the human body, grasping each nugget of information, understanding why my body had begun acting the way it did at times.
And then, when my adolescent mind had reached such a peak where it was flooded with fantasies that had no outlets, I became aware of Marlena.
***
Marlena (I never knew her last name) was our next-door neighbor in the three-story apartment building that we lived in.
Our housing society was known as The Seabird because of its closeness to the sea. It was a cluster of 24 houses. We had a little garden outside the building, which was a garden shared by all the children in the building, and there were park benches, where mothers could sit and monitor their children and chat with each other. For that reason, I knew most of the boys and their mothers that I grew up with. I found most of my peers annoying and less-informed. No one knew the stories that I did, and they held me in awe for a while whenever I spoke to them of things I had read in books. But that did not last forever. As my friends grew up, they had other things to interest them than my stories. The aunts were insufferable too. I remember most of them pinching my cheeks even when I was eight, and always chatting about the most ordinary things with the greatest amount of enthusiasm.
Marlena, however, was an enigma. The only thing people knew about her for sure was that she lived in our building. She had just moved in a few months ago that year. People only saw her when she went on her small trips to the market, and she didn’t seem to be interested in the other women’s topics of discussion. Or perhaps she just felt herself to be a stranger. Yet that aloofness was easily interpreted by the other women, and they began to variously label her as Miss Snooty Hotpants and Nose in the Air and Hoity-Toity and Twinkle Toes. I never did understand those names.
I also did not understand, at first, why my older friends acted crazily whenever she passed by. They kept looking at her as she walked out of the gate, making comments and remarks that I thought I understood and even laughed appropriately at them, but wasn’t sure what they meant.
