Things came to such an abrupt end that they didn’t seem to have gone away from my life. In fact, even today when I am alone, I feel her presence around me. I feel that I am breathing in that jasmine scent and touching those petal-soft lips with mine.
I cried a lot the night my grandmother died, and that surprised everyone because no one expected me to have grown close to that senile old woman with whom all I had shared was a few minutes of conversation. Everyone billed me to be a softie and my father and his friends laughed at me for that. But no one knew what the real cause of my sorrow was—the death of my Grandma also spelled the death of my meetings with Marlena. It wasn’t one chapter but two chapters that had been brought to an end.
I didn’t go to Marlena’s house after that; there was no reason to. We crossed each other several times, and though I spoke casually with her now, there wasn’t anything more to it. I moved on to my next grade and I met girls and Marlena somehow receded into the background. I never thought she would, but it happened over a period of time.
Then one day, Johnny called me to his house. I had to convince my mother a lot to be able to go to his place. When I reached there, the usual gang was all there, and then Johnny took something out from under his shirt.
“Looksie,” he said. “Your girlfriend, the whore!”
I kept looking at the jacket of the cassette he clutched. Rachel’s Games, the cover announced. And it featured a picture of a much younger Marlena, bare-breasted, with leather straps all around her body, surrounded by four hunky men.
“Oh, but would this matter to him?” Sam teased. “He must have seen the live performance, right?”
“She made this boy a man!” Rusky said, grabbing my crotch.
It was typical boy banter, not meant to degrade me, but for some reason I felt terribly offended. And I snatched the cassette from Johnny’s hands and flung it on the floor and stamped on it again and again till the blow landed right across my cheek.
Mother asked me several times how I had got the torn lip, and I repeatedly told her that I had tripped over and fallen, but she refused to believe me. She knew that I had been to Johnny’s, of course, and with that annoying motherly instinct, she put two and two together and understood what might have happened. I thought she would go to Johnny’s place and give him a piece of her mind, but she was fresh out of the death of her mother and didn’t want to do anything of that sort.
That kind of saved me.
But the larger punishment of that brawl was yet to come—for that year, when I finished my grade, I was packed off to a hostel where I spent the next three years of my life. “I will have to take a job to make ends meet,” my mother said, “and with your Dad out of the house most of the time, it is best that you are under the supervision of the matrons there.”
***
I never returned home in those three years. My mother came every three months to meet me and once she also brought Dad. She was right—the hostel life did harden me up. The hostel and Marlena, those were the two things that made me a man. Living with my parents, I would dream of an independent life. But here at the hostel when I had to clean my own underwear and shower in the common area, I understood what I had missed. Anyway, it put the edge on me eventually and I was a very different person when I returned home as a sixteen-year old in 1991.
As I walked the corridor to reach my house, most of the aunts came out to welcome me—Aunt Janet was there and so also were Aunts Mercy and Candice, though Candice had become so old that she could not see me properly. “What a strapping young man your son has become, Edith!” Aunt Mercy said, shamelessly feeling my abs. And as I neared my house, my heart started beating faster. Marlena’s door was approaching, and I wondered if she would be standing out there to welcome me too.
